Get this she, starbuck, flies a crashed ship that was designed to hookup directly to the nervous system of non-humanoid cyborg pilot, and you though case modding was hard.
Yeah, I had a problem with that too. Given that the cylon fighter/raider was built as an organic unit with the cylon entity that piloted it, it WAS a cylon rather than simply a ride within which a cylon flew.
I was thinking during all that cutting and poking that there was NO WAY it would be possible to pilot such a ship as depicted. It is no different than some alien finding a dead human body laying around, gutting it, crawling inside it and somehow finding levers with which to control the body. Ain't doable babe.
Well, I wasn't expecting to like the show - the original was just soooo frickin' cheesy - but I find that it is very well done. That said, my nitpick is somewhat similar to yours. The water issue bothered me in that with or without filters, as you suggest (their problem was a net loss of water, not inability to filter, by the way) they sure as hell didn't need a planet or moon to find water in virtually ANY solar system. The Kuiper Belt or even more likely the Oort Cloud is just about certain to contain a huge load of water-bearing debris. All they needed to do was pull up to the nearest safe solar system and putt around either the Belt or the Cloud and their water issues would have been over.
Another minor nit...the Prez on the show has cancer. Given their advanced tech, with or without the destruction of home worlds, I would expect that cancer would simply not be a big issue for them to correct.
Minor details, as far as I'm concerned, given the overall quality of the acting and FX.
Pick up a little Spanish and move southward. Starting off, your dollars will go a long way until you can settle in and get going locally. Brazil might be a promising location...learn Portugese.
Hmmm. And yet I don't seem to need any form of TCPA/TCG or DRM. In all the years I've run linux full-time, I have never ever had naughty code or naughty hackers get in. I can't say that about any of the windoze users I know. Beyond that, I certainly don't need any system that can be used as a DRM system.
Nope. Uh-uh. Not on my box. I'll copy my files and CDs as I feel the need and will not have anyone but me control when and how I go on to use such copies. This all looks like what it is, an attempt by corporations to gain control of the most important and useful aspects of your PERSONAL and private property computer. Screw TCPA/TCG (and DRM). Paint it all up with lipstick and rouge all you want but in the end it is about restricting what people are allowed to do with their own computers. Any benefits that come to the individual computer owner are accidental and peripheral to the actual designed and intended purpose.
No. Lyx (and latex) are FAR superior products to Office in any way, shape, or form. Sure, it can be a pain in the ass to work with, particularly at first, but once you get the hang of it, you cannot beat truly professional level typesetting and formatting. Office can't even begin to approach the output (but then, OpenOffice is further from being able to compete with the power of Lyx than Office, mainly because of its pathetic lack of ability to deal with citations and reference page formatting).
The only way Office can deal with citations and reference formatting is via 3rd party apps like EndNote. If you actually need to publish in professional journals, you need to cite references and that means OpenOffice is a nonstarter...unfortunately. Lyx with pybliographic or sixpack is all you need to publish in any hardcore professional journal on planet earth. Office can be forced to deal but in a limited fashion.
Gates is still out to lunch. I do believe that musicians such as Mozart, Shopin, etc, actually made music without any copyright protections at all! Imagine! The greatest music in the world that has lasted through the ages and not a single bit of it had copyright protection nor DRM. These artists didn't starve either. Imagine that Gates, you candyassed greedy snotnosed bastard.
Bullcrap. Executive compensation is a fat-fingered greedy landgrab irregardless of performance. Please explain how execs get shiny big-buck$ golden parachutes even when they run the company into the ground? These criminals who are CEOs and CFOs don't do anything creative or actually beneficial, can actually do great harm, and they only do it to line their pockets while they run the company into the ground and lose every employee their 401(k) and their jobs. But these criminals still get their golden parachute.
Don't begin to try to defend exec salaries based on them actually producing anything of any value. The worker is the one that does this, not the CEO or board of directors.
In closeing, if I was wrong and if he is a soldger at least we can rest assured that Private soap-box here woln't call any shots and the greatest millitary minds in the world will continue to run our operations overseas.
Sorry to disappoint you but I am no longer the little grunt I was during Gulf War I. I am in a position of command now, and as for the "greatest military minds" running the show, you mean like the incompetent Tommy Franks? Good riddance to bad baggage. The best military minds were quickly shushed up and/or early retired because they dared to say the truth...that it would take a shitload more troops and time and money than the Administration was telling the American people. THOSE were the best military minds and they were roundly ignored.
I actually pray for a return of the Draft. I want glib, self-satisfied punks such as yourself to get pressed into service and shoved to the front. I WANT you to experience the real deal first hand. You do so need the education.
Idiot. Oh yes, sure we'll "glass" anyone. NOT. Just as invading Iran is out of the question, nuking anyone is even MORE out of the question. We are screwed and it isn't due to incompetence on any soldier's part, but on the part of the dolts that run the show, you know, the Administration. We are are screwed in Iraq as we were in Vietnam. All the protests to the contrary about how we could have won that war or how we didn't REALLY lose there is bull-fuckin-shit (and again, not because of the incompetence of US troops). We are losing soldiers at a RATE that is equivalent to that in Vietnam. The number of BADLY injured/maimed/crippled soldiers is very high. But for you that's OK and tolerable. Nice of you to think so, sitting fat and happy on your fat ass on a couch watching Big Brother on TV.
In Iraq-debacle, the troops are being ill-used for ill-gain. They serve and went in in good faith by faithless civilian morons (again, just as in Vietnam). Sent in to fight where we never should have started to fight in the first place.
If we had stuck with Afghanistan, where we actually had valid business, then all would be well. We would have actually managed to get Afghanistan into the form of a budding new REAL country. Instead, it is a shadow of a country that is nowhere near a "success". Karzai is president of Kabul and little else. We short-sheeted him after promising and promising that we wouldn't abandon him (or Afghanistan...AGAIN) after we trashed the Taliban and Al Queda. What did we do? We bailed on the Afghanis YET AGAIN to fight in a bullshit war in Iraq that had nothing to do with anything of importance to our security. The soldiers fighting and dying in Iraq in good faith are being screwed becsuse the cause they thought they were fighting was a ghost, a lie, and illegitimate.
Don't. Give. Me. Your. Bush. Talking Point Bullshit. It is a clusterfuck, period, and they were told it would be a mistake from the get-go. They ignored soldiers and relied instead on politicos who never carried a rifle or were EVER on the receiving end of hostile fire even in their dreams. Asshats every one of them.
I have yet to be sent into Iraq II. I fought in the first war (yes, on the receiving end of AAA and SAMs in the first Gulf War). I don't want to go again and not because I am fearful, because I would go for the sake of my fellow ill-used brothers and sisters in arms - THEY deserve the best I could give - but because I did not accept nor believe in the rationale for this current clusterfuck. I KNEW Bush was lying through that asshole he calls a mouth from the beginning.
You love invading countries for no valid reason and killing people so much YOU go nancyboy. Pukes that sit back and pontificate on how necessary this waste of money and lives in Iraq is to our "security" get nothing but my disrespect and my desire to knock your lazy-assed teeth down your fat, cowardly throat.
We military men and women are NOT tools to fight for empire. We are not tools to fight for business interests. We are not tools to fight for political expedience or political theory. We are tasked to protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign or domestic. No where does our oath say "fight for expansion of personal political empires", "wantonly invade sovereign nations that are no threat to our country whatsoever".
Don't even dare to try to tell me a single word about how "good" and "necessary" this shitwad fight in Iraq is. It isn't doing jack for our security and, in fact, is making it worse. Our prestige, our treasure, and our soldiers are being wasted on NOTHING. As a side "benefit" 100s of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians are eating bullets and shrapnel unnecessarily because BushCo STILL doesn't know what the fuck to do. In any case, it is too late. Nothing we do now can save the situation. We do NOT have the troops to control Iraq and I state again, if N. Korea or China decided to make a big move, the ONLY option we'd have is nuclear and that just ain't going to happen Clarence. You play too many video games or take Hollywood action movies too much to heart. You are full of feces.
And yet, even though linux if free as in beer and free as in speech, I STILL PAY $ FOR MY OFFICIAL COPY for convenience and time saving. Imagine that.
I am willing to pay for software or music but...once I buy it, it is MINE to use however and wherever the f*ck I want. If I own 3 computers, then I OWN the software I bought and I OWN the computers. I WILL install said software that I OWN on all the computers I OWN. I will NOT pay for the same friggin bits again and again just so some BS corporate/leech can make money that isn't owed or deserved. Keep making a worthwhile product and selling it but get out of my way of using it when I friggin buy it. Software is NOT the same as a printed book, or a car, or a piece (of shit) designer clothes. It is ephemeral and infinitely reproducible at virtually no cost whatsoever.
The day (not holding my breath) we have molecular replicators, then cars, clothes, wrenches, etc, become as "valuable" as software bits. That wont stop companies that should cease to exist from trying to survive regardless of reality on the ground. Tough titties. REAL Reality trumps DESIRED reality every time. Adapt or die.
Since when did being an "artist" mean you were owed wealth? An "artiste" is NOT owed anything other than an appreciative public is willing to toss in your frickin' hat. Always been that way and that is the way it should remain. You aren't curing diseases here, doing corrective surgery, putting out devestating brushfires, you're prancing around screaming "love me!".
No. But if I like the painting you whipped up, I'll pay for it and then it is MINE to do with as I see fit (even wipe my ass with it when I get tired of it).
My problem with it is windoze and anal IT Nazis. The computers that I use that are most in need of such a tool are windoze computers that don't allow the user to install jack squat. Tor, unfortunately, requires a system installation that isn't available to windoze users behind ridiculously restrictive firewalls and under the aegis of ridiculously fascistic IT SS troops.
I'm looking at either having to crack the admin password to install such a tool (which will quickly be detected) or finding some other way to get around the firewall restrictions.
What a bunch of braindead wankers you all are (mostly, there are a few thinking humans evident in the postings). Too many of you are just soooo willing to send me to fight in wars all over bejesus for yet another regime change.
I, as a soldier, ain't buying. It is neither our right nor our responsibility to force our version of Halliburton "democracy" down ANYONE'S throat. Newsflash: Iraq was and remains a frickin' fiasco. It is a bust. It has made us up to be a joke.
Initially, no doubt the powers that be in the ME were all a quiver over our illegal and unjustfiable invasion of Iraq. Shortly thereafter, when it became obvious that we were and are powerless to actually control the country and are now well and FULLY bogged down, they began laughing. There is jack squat we can do ANYWHERE else. Forget, absolutely, about invading Iran. Iran would be harder by a long shot than Iraq. It is twice as large, twice as mountainous, has a larger and complete working military, and its citizens would NOT in any way welcome us as "liberators for Halliburton".
If N. Korea decided to make a big go for S. Korea, we're screwed. We do NOT have the teeth to deal with any other military goo-gaw. China makes a move on Taiwan? Nothing we can do short of abandoning Iraq to the inevitable chaos and violence that WILL control that country for the foreseeable future (OUR fault) and trying to throw a bunch of tired, overburdened troops into yet a bigger and worse conflict.
Get off your frickin' war wagons. I'm sick of this shit from a bunch of snotnosed ignorant punks who don't serve, never served, and never intend to serve. Shut the fuck up. I SERVED and I STILL serve and I'm tired of you wackjob idiots talking tough by throwing MY life around for nothing. Bite my camouflaged military ass you damn cowards and candyasses. YOU take up arms and invade every country that offends your wackjob Christian belief system or offends your desire to make capitalistic money off other people's resources and countries. YOU do it but leave the legitimate and honorable soldiers to do what they're supposed to do: protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign or domestic. That's our job, not overthrowing every dictator that annoys Exxon or Halliburton.
Easy to defeat. Trivial in fact. Simply code your vote software (or firmware) to check the date/time. If it is a date/time for an election, skim x% votes from Democratic candidates and funnel them to Republican candidates. If the date/time is not correct for an actual election, record votes accurately. You could also code it to do variations on this, such as start skimming votes after 12:00 pm on election day, etc. If the level of skimming is kept low (but significant given voter numbers) then simply doing 50 votes one way and 50 the other is unlikely to give you a hit for a miscount - especially if the test is run a day before election day or even in the hours just before the polls officially open.
Hard, printed vote verification is the only way around this.
If game programmers see no glory in that sacrifice, why on earth did they get into video games?
Oh my, I just couldn't stop laughing there for a while. Glory in sacrifice to create A FRICKIN' COMPUTER GAME?! GLORY?! Hell's bell's, there IS no "glory" in such a sacrifice. This isn't code that will crack some important disease, predict terrorist attacks, predict earthquakes better, improve an operation on the operating table. No lives are at stake (except the idiot programmer's who throw all perspective down the crapper and destroy their social lives and health for the sake of creating an inane copycat game). Glory. Sheesh.
Idiots and fools is anyone who thinks there is glory, honor, or worthy sacrifice to be had in making video games.
This sort of crap and abuse is precisely why labor laws and unions were created (and necessary) in the first place. We need to have MORE unions. Without the collective clout of a big union to back you up as a drone worker, you are nothing but a crap commodity to be abused and tossed away when you collapse. UNIONIZE and simply refuse to work these sorts of hours for prolonged periods of time and NOT without some form of fair compensation.
We are seeing the bad old days of the 19th and early 20th centuries coming back with this crap.
Did the game promise to NOT test you? Did it promise to be absolutely boring and never ever offensive in any way? That there would NEVER be conflict and that everything would be (boring) fuzzy happy bunnies? Did it promise that, being based on human interaction (in a frickin' ROLEPLAYING game) would be totally neutral and without any color or spice? Did it promise that the universe would be peopled entirely by nothing but sameness and blandness? Did it promise that the roleplaying would actually REALLY be roleplaying and would just be some glorified, graphical, and HEAVILY moderated chat room?
If you don't want to eat simulated shit, don't play roleplaying games because somewhere, sometime you will end up being fed shit, but then...it's just a damn ROLEPLAYING game!
Get into the ROLE and forget your modern sensibilities. Sheesh.
Err, wrong. It may have been that way in Egypt and among Egyptians at that time, but Egypt was not the whole world. There were (gasp!) other countries, many of which didn't share the same mores as the contemporary Egyptions. Thus, it is NOT accurate to imply that a foreign character should share the same mores as the Egyptian he is trading/dealing with. Just didn't happen. Other cultures always bring a risk of conflict and this fantasy example is a nice way to play that.
Only if their responses were "in character" for their role and the time. If it was merely over-sensitive real-world customers expecting the roleplaying world to be the same as the REAL world, then it was inappropriate and NOT part of the process.
If an actor in a stage play or in a movie gets angry because his/her character gets screwed by another character in the production, they do NOT get to respond as if it is real world. They are expected to stick to their lines (roleplay) and act in character.
shoot down all kinds of satellites and spacecraft. By all means, make space inaccessible due to large clouds of high-velocity debris. Screw the enemy but also do a good job of screwing ourselves. Our spacecraft cannot penetrate a cloud of 17,000 mph shards anymore than China can.
Yeah, right. IM. Pa-leeze. IM requires that the person you seek to contact has their fat ass planted 4-square in front of their computer or leaves it on 24/7. Email is very nice. It works no regardless of the type of client you have. It will sit there waiting for you to check it, perhaps after a vacation, after actually getting off your ass and away from the computer to exercise, or whenever you decide to either fire up the computer or turn on your email client. Oh...IM also requires that your contactee be somewhat in the same timezone (besides sitting on their ass forever awaiting IM messages). Try to IM from California to NYC late in the afternoon. Try to IM someone on the opposite side of the globe.
IM is cute, it is a nice way to reduce your productivity at work and waste time "chatting" back and forth about unimportant nonsense (movies, your new pants, the hot chick from apartment A, etc). Email ain't going away, and it most assuredly wont be replaced by IM, Jabber, IRC, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, etc. Email works regardless of software/hardware platform, has not propriatory hooks in it (Microsnot tried with their SenderID scheme to add a proprietory hook into email). Nothing beats email for convenience and easy time-shifing.
Nay. It is irrelevant. The software could easily contain poison code to "flip" a certain percentage of Democratic votes to Republican (the brothers that run Diebold and ES&S are major Repuglicans and big donors). Better yet, it can be (or already could be there) "burned" into the firmware. The ONLY way to prevent this sort of thing is random spot checks. It is an easy thing to have a date check in the poison code that ensures that valid vote results are always produced any time the system is used (in a certification test for instance) on a non-election date/time. After the election date/time starts...boop!...start flipping vote. Even with a paper trail, you could have it set to accurately reflect the vote on the paper ballot but still alter the actual tallied vote. Shift the vote far enough from a squeeker and no recount is called for so the valid paper record would never be checked.
The canvassers are none the wiser because the printout that GEMS gives them contains the modified vote record and shows no suspicious signs of alteration or tampering.
Bah! I don't spend minutes of any day dealing with spam. I use linux, postfix, and a nice little tool called bogofilter. NO spam gets through without getting identified as "SPAM" which causes my filters to pass it neatly into the trash. I never have to look at it and only "deal with it at all" in the manner I deal with messages I manually send to the trash, that is, when I have manually sent defunct messages to the trash, where the spam is automatically sent to, I merely hit the "empty trash" button and all is gone.
An ocassional running of a bogospam script I wrote trains bogofilter on the "UNSURE" messages that get past it (very few). It will only be a few more weeks before I can simply pass the spam directly to/dev/null and not even know it existed in the first place. I don't need, nor want, M$ to step in and become a gatekeeper in any way, shape, or form for open standard email. They don't deserve money for people to simply send/receive email and windoze is in no way required to send/receive email. Screw 'em with a dry splintery dowel.
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Get this she, starbuck, flies a crashed ship that was designed to hookup directly to the nervous system of non-humanoid cyborg pilot, and you though case modding was hard.
Yeah, I had a problem with that too. Given that the cylon fighter/raider was built as an organic unit with the cylon entity that piloted it, it WAS a cylon rather than simply a ride within which a cylon flew.
I was thinking during all that cutting and poking that there was NO WAY it would be possible to pilot such a ship as depicted. It is no different than some alien finding a dead human body laying around, gutting it, crawling inside it and somehow finding levers with which to control the body. Ain't doable babe.
Well, I wasn't expecting to like the show - the original was just soooo frickin' cheesy - but I find that it is very well done. That said, my nitpick is somewhat similar to yours. The water issue bothered me in that with or without filters, as you suggest (their problem was a net loss of water, not inability to filter, by the way) they sure as hell didn't need a planet or moon to find water in virtually ANY solar system. The Kuiper Belt or even more likely the Oort Cloud is just about certain to contain a huge load of water-bearing debris. All they needed to do was pull up to the nearest safe solar system and putt around either the Belt or the Cloud and their water issues would have been over.
Another minor nit...the Prez on the show has cancer. Given their advanced tech, with or without the destruction of home worlds, I would expect that cancer would simply not be a big issue for them to correct.
Minor details, as far as I'm concerned, given the overall quality of the acting and FX.
Michael Crieghton's publisher?
Pick up a little Spanish and move southward. Starting off, your dollars will go a long way until you can settle in and get going locally. Brazil might be a promising location...learn Portugese.
Hmmm. And yet I don't seem to need any form of TCPA/TCG or DRM. In all the years I've run linux full-time, I have never ever had naughty code or naughty hackers get in. I can't say that about any of the windoze users I know. Beyond that, I certainly don't need any system that can be used as a DRM system.
Nope. Uh-uh. Not on my box. I'll copy my files and CDs as I feel the need and will not have anyone but me control when and how I go on to use such copies. This all looks like what it is, an attempt by corporations to gain control of the most important and useful aspects of your PERSONAL and private property computer. Screw TCPA/TCG (and DRM). Paint it all up with lipstick and rouge all you want but in the end it is about restricting what people are allowed to do with their own computers. Any benefits that come to the individual computer owner are accidental and peripheral to the actual designed and intended purpose.
No. Lyx (and latex) are FAR superior products to Office in any way, shape, or form. Sure, it can be a pain in the ass to work with, particularly at first, but once you get the hang of it, you cannot beat truly professional level typesetting and formatting. Office can't even begin to approach the output (but then, OpenOffice is further from being able to compete with the power of Lyx than Office, mainly because of its pathetic lack of ability to deal with citations and reference page formatting).
The only way Office can deal with citations and reference formatting is via 3rd party apps like EndNote. If you actually need to publish in professional journals, you need to cite references and that means OpenOffice is a nonstarter...unfortunately. Lyx with pybliographic or sixpack is all you need to publish in any hardcore professional journal on planet earth. Office can be forced to deal but in a limited fashion.
Gates is still out to lunch. I do believe that musicians such as Mozart, Shopin, etc, actually made music without any copyright protections at all! Imagine! The greatest music in the world that has lasted through the ages and not a single bit of it had copyright protection nor DRM. These artists didn't starve either. Imagine that Gates, you candyassed greedy snotnosed bastard.
Bullcrap. Executive compensation is a fat-fingered greedy landgrab irregardless of performance. Please explain how execs get shiny big-buck$ golden parachutes even when they run the company into the ground? These criminals who are CEOs and CFOs don't do anything creative or actually beneficial, can actually do great harm, and they only do it to line their pockets while they run the company into the ground and lose every employee their 401(k) and their jobs. But these criminals still get their golden parachute.
Don't begin to try to defend exec salaries based on them actually producing anything of any value. The worker is the one that does this, not the CEO or board of directors.
In closeing, if I was wrong and if he is a soldger at least we can rest assured that Private soap-box here woln't call any shots and the greatest millitary minds in the world will continue to run our operations overseas.
Sorry to disappoint you but I am no longer the little grunt I was during Gulf War I. I am in a position of command now, and as for the "greatest military minds" running the show, you mean like the incompetent Tommy Franks? Good riddance to bad baggage. The best military minds were quickly shushed up and/or early retired because they dared to say the truth...that it would take a shitload more troops and time and money than the Administration was telling the American people. THOSE were the best military minds and they were roundly ignored.
I actually pray for a return of the Draft. I want glib, self-satisfied punks such as yourself to get pressed into service and shoved to the front. I WANT you to experience the real deal first hand. You do so need the education.
Idiot. Oh yes, sure we'll "glass" anyone. NOT. Just as invading Iran is out of the question, nuking anyone is even MORE out of the question. We are screwed and it isn't due to incompetence on any soldier's part, but on the part of the dolts that run the show, you know, the Administration. We are are screwed in Iraq as we were in Vietnam. All the protests to the contrary about how we could have won that war or how we didn't REALLY lose there is bull-fuckin-shit (and again, not because of the incompetence of US troops). We are losing soldiers at a RATE that is equivalent to that in Vietnam. The number of BADLY injured/maimed/crippled soldiers is very high. But for you that's OK and tolerable. Nice of you to think so, sitting fat and happy on your fat ass on a couch watching Big Brother on TV.
In Iraq-debacle, the troops are being ill-used for ill-gain. They serve and went in in good faith by faithless civilian morons (again, just as in Vietnam). Sent in to fight where we never should have started to fight in the first place.
If we had stuck with Afghanistan, where we actually had valid business, then all would be well. We would have actually managed to get Afghanistan into the form of a budding new REAL country. Instead, it is a shadow of a country that is nowhere near a "success". Karzai is president of Kabul and little else. We short-sheeted him after promising and promising that we wouldn't abandon him (or Afghanistan...AGAIN) after we trashed the Taliban and Al Queda. What did we do? We bailed on the Afghanis YET AGAIN to fight in a bullshit war in Iraq that had nothing to do with anything of importance to our security. The soldiers fighting and dying in Iraq in good faith are being screwed becsuse the cause they thought they were fighting was a ghost, a lie, and illegitimate.
Don't. Give. Me. Your. Bush. Talking Point Bullshit. It is a clusterfuck, period, and they were told it would be a mistake from the get-go. They ignored soldiers and relied instead on politicos who never carried a rifle or were EVER on the receiving end of hostile fire even in their dreams. Asshats every one of them.
I have yet to be sent into Iraq II. I fought in the first war (yes, on the receiving end of AAA and SAMs in the first Gulf War). I don't want to go again and not because I am fearful, because I would go for the sake of my fellow ill-used brothers and sisters in arms - THEY deserve the best I could give - but because I did not accept nor believe in the rationale for this current clusterfuck. I KNEW Bush was lying through that asshole he calls a mouth from the beginning.
You love invading countries for no valid reason and killing people so much YOU go nancyboy. Pukes that sit back and pontificate on how necessary this waste of money and lives in Iraq is to our "security" get nothing but my disrespect and my desire to knock your lazy-assed teeth down your fat, cowardly throat.
We military men and women are NOT tools to fight for empire. We are not tools to fight for business interests. We are not tools to fight for political expedience or political theory. We are tasked to protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign or domestic. No where does our oath say "fight for expansion of personal political empires", "wantonly invade sovereign nations that are no threat to our country whatsoever".
Don't even dare to try to tell me a single word about how "good" and "necessary" this shitwad fight in Iraq is. It isn't doing jack for our security and, in fact, is making it worse. Our prestige, our treasure, and our soldiers are being wasted on NOTHING. As a side "benefit" 100s of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians are eating bullets and shrapnel unnecessarily because BushCo STILL doesn't know what the fuck to do. In any case, it is too late. Nothing we do now can save the situation. We do NOT have the troops to control Iraq and I state again, if N. Korea or China decided to make a big move, the ONLY option we'd have is nuclear and that just ain't going to happen Clarence. You play too many video games or take Hollywood action movies too much to heart. You are full of feces.
That is an option (taken) in one case (and I'll be loading TOR on that PC soonest.
In the other case, personal computers are not allowed to be connected to the lan. Only Party-Approved computers allowed.
And yet, even though linux if free as in beer and free as in speech, I STILL PAY $ FOR MY OFFICIAL COPY for convenience and time saving. Imagine that.
I am willing to pay for software or music but...once I buy it, it is MINE to use however and wherever the f*ck I want. If I own 3 computers, then I OWN the software I bought and I OWN the computers. I WILL install said software that I OWN on all the computers I OWN. I will NOT pay for the same friggin bits again and again just so some BS corporate/leech can make money that isn't owed or deserved. Keep making a worthwhile product and selling it but get out of my way of using it when I friggin buy it. Software is NOT the same as a printed book, or a car, or a piece (of shit) designer clothes. It is ephemeral and infinitely reproducible at virtually no cost whatsoever.
The day (not holding my breath) we have molecular replicators, then cars, clothes, wrenches, etc, become as "valuable" as software bits. That wont stop companies that should cease to exist from trying to survive regardless of reality on the ground. Tough titties. REAL Reality trumps DESIRED reality every time. Adapt or die.
Since when did being an "artist" mean you were owed wealth? An "artiste" is NOT owed anything other than an appreciative public is willing to toss in your frickin' hat. Always been that way and that is the way it should remain. You aren't curing diseases here, doing corrective surgery, putting out devestating brushfires, you're prancing around screaming "love me!".
No. But if I like the painting you whipped up, I'll pay for it and then it is MINE to do with as I see fit (even wipe my ass with it when I get tired of it).
My problem with it is windoze and anal IT Nazis. The computers that I use that are most in need of such a tool are windoze computers that don't allow the user to install jack squat. Tor, unfortunately, requires a system installation that isn't available to windoze users behind ridiculously restrictive firewalls and under the aegis of ridiculously fascistic IT SS troops.
I'm looking at either having to crack the admin password to install such a tool (which will quickly be detected) or finding some other way to get around the firewall restrictions.
What a bunch of braindead wankers you all are (mostly, there are a few thinking humans evident in the postings). Too many of you are just soooo willing to send me to fight in wars all over bejesus for yet another regime change.
I, as a soldier, ain't buying. It is neither our right nor our responsibility to force our version of Halliburton "democracy" down ANYONE'S throat. Newsflash: Iraq was and remains a frickin' fiasco. It is a bust. It has made us up to be a joke.
Initially, no doubt the powers that be in the ME were all a quiver over our illegal and unjustfiable invasion of Iraq. Shortly thereafter, when it became obvious that we were and are powerless to actually control the country and are now well and FULLY bogged down, they began laughing. There is jack squat we can do ANYWHERE else. Forget, absolutely, about invading Iran. Iran would be harder by a long shot than Iraq. It is twice as large, twice as mountainous, has a larger and complete working military, and its citizens would NOT in any way welcome us as "liberators for Halliburton".
If N. Korea decided to make a big go for S. Korea, we're screwed. We do NOT have the teeth to deal with any other military goo-gaw. China makes a move on Taiwan? Nothing we can do short of abandoning Iraq to the inevitable chaos and violence that WILL control that country for the foreseeable future (OUR fault) and trying to throw a bunch of tired, overburdened troops into yet a bigger and worse conflict.
Get off your frickin' war wagons. I'm sick of this shit from a bunch of snotnosed ignorant punks who don't serve, never served, and never intend to serve. Shut the fuck up. I SERVED and I STILL serve and I'm tired of you wackjob idiots talking tough by throwing MY life around for nothing. Bite my camouflaged military ass you damn cowards and candyasses. YOU take up arms and invade every country that offends your wackjob Christian belief system or offends your desire to make capitalistic money off other people's resources and countries. YOU do it but leave the legitimate and honorable soldiers to do what they're supposed to do: protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign or domestic. That's our job, not overthrowing every dictator that annoys Exxon or Halliburton.
Easy to defeat. Trivial in fact. Simply code your vote software (or firmware) to check the date/time. If it is a date/time for an election, skim x% votes from Democratic candidates and funnel them to Republican candidates. If the date/time is not correct for an actual election, record votes accurately. You could also code it to do variations on this, such as start skimming votes after 12:00 pm on election day, etc. If the level of skimming is kept low (but significant given voter numbers) then simply doing 50 votes one way and 50 the other is unlikely to give you a hit for a miscount - especially if the test is run a day before election day or even in the hours just before the polls officially open.
Hard, printed vote verification is the only way around this.
If game programmers see no glory in that sacrifice, why on earth did they get into video games?
Oh my, I just couldn't stop laughing there for a while. Glory in sacrifice to create A FRICKIN' COMPUTER GAME?! GLORY?! Hell's bell's, there IS no "glory" in such a sacrifice. This isn't code that will crack some important disease, predict terrorist attacks, predict earthquakes better, improve an operation on the operating table. No lives are at stake (except the idiot programmer's who throw all perspective down the crapper and destroy their social lives and health for the sake of creating an inane copycat game). Glory. Sheesh.
Idiots and fools is anyone who thinks there is glory, honor, or worthy sacrifice to be had in making video games.
This sort of crap and abuse is precisely why labor laws and unions were created (and necessary) in the first place. We need to have MORE unions. Without the collective clout of a big union to back you up as a drone worker, you are nothing but a crap commodity to be abused and tossed away when you collapse. UNIONIZE and simply refuse to work these sorts of hours for prolonged periods of time and NOT without some form of fair compensation.
We are seeing the bad old days of the 19th and early 20th centuries coming back with this crap.
Did the game promise to NOT test you? Did it promise to be absolutely boring and never ever offensive in any way? That there would NEVER be conflict and that everything would be (boring) fuzzy happy bunnies? Did it promise that, being based on human interaction (in a frickin' ROLEPLAYING game) would be totally neutral and without any color or spice? Did it promise that the universe would be peopled entirely by nothing but sameness and blandness? Did it promise that the roleplaying would actually REALLY be roleplaying and would just be some glorified, graphical, and HEAVILY moderated chat room?
If you don't want to eat simulated shit, don't play roleplaying games because somewhere, sometime you will end up being fed shit, but then...it's just a damn ROLEPLAYING game!
Get into the ROLE and forget your modern sensibilities. Sheesh.
Err, wrong. It may have been that way in Egypt and among Egyptians at that time, but Egypt was not the whole world. There were (gasp!) other countries, many of which didn't share the same mores as the contemporary Egyptions. Thus, it is NOT accurate to imply that a foreign character should share the same mores as the Egyptian he is trading/dealing with. Just didn't happen. Other cultures always bring a risk of conflict and this fantasy example is a nice way to play that.
Only if their responses were "in character" for their role and the time. If it was merely over-sensitive real-world customers expecting the roleplaying world to be the same as the REAL world, then it was inappropriate and NOT part of the process.
If an actor in a stage play or in a movie gets angry because his/her character gets screwed by another character in the production, they do NOT get to respond as if it is real world. They are expected to stick to their lines (roleplay) and act in character.
shoot down all kinds of satellites and spacecraft. By all means, make space inaccessible due to large clouds of high-velocity debris. Screw the enemy but also do a good job of screwing ourselves. Our spacecraft cannot penetrate a cloud of 17,000 mph shards anymore than China can.
Yeah, right. IM. Pa-leeze. IM requires that the person you seek to contact has their fat ass planted 4-square in front of their computer or leaves it on 24/7. Email is very nice. It works no regardless of the type of client you have. It will sit there waiting for you to check it, perhaps after a vacation, after actually getting off your ass and away from the computer to exercise, or whenever you decide to either fire up the computer or turn on your email client. Oh...IM also requires that your contactee be somewhat in the same timezone (besides sitting on their ass forever awaiting IM messages). Try to IM from California to NYC late in the afternoon. Try to IM someone on the opposite side of the globe.
IM is cute, it is a nice way to reduce your productivity at work and waste time "chatting" back and forth about unimportant nonsense (movies, your new pants, the hot chick from apartment A, etc). Email ain't going away, and it most assuredly wont be replaced by IM, Jabber, IRC, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, etc. Email works regardless of software/hardware platform, has not propriatory hooks in it (Microsnot tried with their SenderID scheme to add a proprietory hook into email). Nothing beats email for convenience and easy time-shifing.
Paranoid hat on.
Nay. It is irrelevant. The software could easily contain poison code to "flip" a certain percentage of Democratic votes to Republican (the brothers that run Diebold and ES&S are major Repuglicans and big donors). Better yet, it can be (or already could be there) "burned" into the firmware. The ONLY way to prevent this sort of thing is random spot checks. It is an easy thing to have a date check in the poison code that ensures that valid vote results are always produced any time the system is used (in a certification test for instance) on a non-election date/time. After the election date/time starts...boop!...start flipping vote. Even with a paper trail, you could have it set to accurately reflect the vote on the paper ballot but still alter the actual tallied vote. Shift the vote far enough from a squeeker and no recount is called for so the valid paper record would never be checked.
The canvassers are none the wiser because the printout that GEMS gives them contains the modified vote record and shows no suspicious signs of alteration or tampering.
Bah! I don't spend minutes of any day dealing with spam. I use linux, postfix, and a nice little tool called bogofilter. NO spam gets through without getting identified as "SPAM" which causes my filters to pass it neatly into the trash. I never have to look at it and only "deal with it at all" in the manner I deal with messages I manually send to the trash, that is, when I have manually sent defunct messages to the trash, where the spam is automatically sent to, I merely hit the "empty trash" button and all is gone.
An ocassional running of a bogospam script I wrote trains bogofilter on the "UNSURE" messages that get past it (very few). It will only be a few more weeks before I can simply pass the spam directly to /dev/null and not even know it existed in the first place. I don't need, nor want, M$ to step in and become a gatekeeper in any way, shape, or form for open standard email. They don't deserve money for people to simply send/receive email and windoze is in no way required to send/receive email. Screw 'em with a dry splintery dowel.