What I do is I just abandon the account when it gets too clogged. Cuts down on the long-lost acquaintances mailing me to tell me they're pregnant with my love-children.
But consider what would happen to an individual pervert who sent out hundreds of thousands of sick emails talking about penises, and continued to do so even after the recipients told him in no uncertain terms to stop?
He'd be thrown in jail, that's what would happen.
Why are businesses allowed to do things that individuals aren't?
They've entered into relationships with numerous small groups of people, and apparently have reneged. Who knows what's really occurring with regards to artists who paid for distro deals with Mp3.com, but if things are as bad as they look, I can see possible grounds for a lawsuit. I'm not a lawyer, but Vivendi does have deep pockets and there have been settlements over things far more ambiguous than this.
I've had enough of the music industry. It's time we started standing up to these despicable bastards.
Oh, so a corporation making ridiculous claims and flouting numerous laws in doing so is just fine, but when someone replies with empty threats, the judicial system brings down the hammer.
Yeah, this guy is obviously a total moron, but the case shows both how stupid the laws are with regards to spam, and how angry it makes people. It's like the kid on the schoolbus who gets poked and needled every day and nobody notices, but when he finally snaps and slugs one of his tormentors (or worse) it's a terrible thing.
I've done this in the past. Threatened spammers, that is. Nothing so dire nor graphic as this fellow, but I was angry enough that I wanted to get back at them somehow. I know someone who's said that he wants to torture and kill all spammers, and he's a totally meek, mellow guy for the most part. The anger people express about spam is very surprising, even more than telemarketing. It's surprising also that the bastards can make any money at all on a practice so universally reviled.
I used to care, back when I got maybe 20 spams a day. Now that I'm up above ~500, I don't care anymore.
It seems to me that this incident is a window into the true goals of the RIAA and the music industry.
What they're trying to do here is attack a competing distribution chain. This is the whole reason they hate MP3s in the first place.
MP3s represent a method for unknown artists and styles to reach popular recognition. This is a threat to the music industry, because if that were to happen, they would have to find acts that were actually good on their own merits as opposed to mediocre copycats and sexbomb divas who only sound good because of their multi-million dollar production jobs.
I can't express my hatred for the executives and committees who make decisions like these behind closed doors and for obscure reasons.
"Plain talk" is not sufficient to express my hatred and bile for the music racket. I've seen good bands get driven out by tripe for longer than I care to remember, and it keeps happening.
I forget that irony is oftentimes lost on technical types; my bad. Write for the audience and all that.
It's not like any small, unrecognized bands use(d) Mp3.com for a distribution center.
I could see why people would need something like it if the music industry were governed by greed and corporate interests, but the way it is, Sony et cetera are just a bunch of starving artists struggling to make an honest dollar and things like mp3.com just get in the way of that.
I think there is going to be a large net loss of tech jobs in the US.
Think about it. There are a billion Chinese and a billion East Indians who'd be very happy to do the work computer techs do at extremely low wages. Migration of tech jobs has only begun, and it wreaked havoc on the sector as well as negatively affecting the economy in general.
Same thing could happen to biotech, I suppose, but again I think that's unlikely for the reasons I mentioned.
The fact that the job-loss rate has slowed is not necessarily good. It's always pointed to as a sign of economic recovery, when in fact all it means is that the rate of deterioration has decreased.
I think that the layoff rate is going to accelerate again. The fact that the dot-com boom produced hundreds of thousands of 19 year old CIOs means that there are that many people-- young, hungry, flexible-- who are willing to work much cheaper, and perhaps smarter, than old fogeys like me and maybe you. But hey, I'm sure the Bush administration will fix everything...
I'm using this time as an opportunity to go back to school and finish a college degree-- in my case, biotech. I think there's going to be a boom in biotechnology that's going to dwarf the dotcoms, and it'll be a subject that's going to be far more difficult for the average person to learn, both because of subject matter and because of the much greater infrastructure required for learning. It's going to be harder for them to fake knowledge by submitting resumes packed with buzzwords to hundreds of companies knowing that one of the fish is bound to bite.
That is, until Microsoft comes out with gel-chromatography equipment. That's kind of a disturbing thought.
Lotke-Volterra equations were the equation systems used to describe the population dynamics of elk and wolves on Isle Royal. The poster who said this stuff first surfaced in 1989 is almost 100 years off; as I remember, the original study was done by the Hudson Bay company.A LONG year ago.
Looking at that glider brought back so many memories. I remember reading about Life in Scientific American, many years ago-- I think 19 years. I remember typing in the text version on my Apple II, out of "Basic Computer Games" by Dave Ahl and Creative Computing, sometime in maybe 1983 or thereabouts, and being amazed.
I remembered a program I wrote in the mid 90s where you could evolve rulesets, and all the bright colors and optimism that went along with the "Long Boom." All that came out of hackerdom, you know.
I remembered my personal experience with Wolfram. (Overwhelmingly negative, by the way...)
I think this is an excellent idea, I think it's a simple and graphically effective logo, and I can see it catching on. For me this was an iconically powerful image. Surprising what memories it evoked, taken in the current context.
It's an icon of simplicity and stubborn singleminded progress.
Sometimes, one or another of them is updated sooner with regards to road work. It's good to consult both of them to see if they agree on a route, and if they don't, it's a good idea to find out why-- don't just take the shorter route because you may find out there's a 100 mile detour that you missed, or something of the sort.
Well, not exactly unemployed, more like "self employed." But I know a lot of completely unemployed computer technicians who are where they are because of their videogame addictions.
Oh, and watching flash movies on Newgrounds when they should have been answering tech support calls.
I was kind of suspecting something like this when I heard the other day about the whole "Nvidia Sucks" meme that was passing around with regards to Halflife II.
ATI has never been all that innovative. They've gone for "raw power" rather than finesse, and I think Nvidia's strategy is a little bit farther-thinking. Saying that Nvidia's shader support is behind that of ATI is absolutely ludicrous, and I think ATI's going to be back in its box when Nvidia's investment in Cg comes to fruition.
We'll see.
Oh, and shame on Valve for getting involved. This is no different than the crap that goes on every day in the music industry-- no different than the payola scandal.
Competitive darwinism needs to happen based on rendering muscle, not on marketing muscle. Screw that.
I suppose now Laughing Boy, or Smiling Worm Boy, the blaster worm idiot, is going to blame his despicable, heinous crime on Core War.
When I say heinous crime, I mean it. Did he cause billions of dollars worth of damage, aggregate worldwide? That money could have been spent feeding poor people.
There's a gigantic mass of untapped territory out there. All it takes is creativity. As John Carmack himself mentioned, big companies have trouble breaking away from molds. They produce "lock-in" conditions for themselves, being forced to run the same old games and formulae time and time again.
Games, like anything else, exist on a fitness landscape. Games like the shooters are searching for pinnacles, ever higher, in one very narrow area.
If id software broke away from their formula and tried something new, they'd then be duking it out with smaller developers, or houses with some money but without a huge popular name, like CDV/Fireglow (Divine Divinity, Sudden Strike)
Much of the bottleneck for small developers is art. Textures and models. These are hard to do, even for talented and skilled specialist artists.
I think a solution here is one that's fallen almost totally by the wayside in the last few years, and that's proceduralism. In other words, draw textures and models, as much as possible, procedurally-- as the insightful guy above said, parametric models are starting, and I think that's a way of coding that's going to revolutionize the way things are done.
Also, buildings, dungeons, plants, city maps... all these things can be done as L-systems or as other types of grammars. It's not impossible, it just takes a little bit "more work" right up front, and the things get tons easier. Like so many other programming tasks. And then you have almost endless replay, until you see to the bottom of what the system can do.
Id and Blizzard may not be around forever. They may be the SirTechs and the Broderbunds and the Beagle Brothers of today, to be supplanted tomorrow by hungrier smaller companies.
It's perfectly fine that people have to start from scratch much of the time.
All that means is that we're coming up with new approaches for modeling the world.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and all that. Humans are pretty good at telling whether something is "realistic" or not. True, a simulation might fall through some crack in the realism heuristics-- it might appear to be more "realistic" than a better model and might therefore win out over the better model in terms of human observation.
But simulations have to stand up to both the human test and to empirical results if they're going to be taken seriously at all.
Currently, I'm looking into programming a multi-plant simulation. Doesn't have to be perfect, all it has to be is good enough...
Starving artists like Arnie, Spielberg, George Lucas, Harrison Ford?
I'm sure they really care about the small guys whose work would actually be given a boost by cheap publicity.
Where are the dollar theatres? At one time, people were able to make a living running movies, cheap. It was something to do. You could pay a dollar and go see Videodrome or Zardoz or Eraserhead, and they kept theatres running.
Now, the whole market's been taken up by juggernauts like Cineplex Odeon.
When movies no longer cost $8 for 90 minutes of dogshit preceded by 15 minutes of loud obnoxious commercials and military advertisements (and many times, the movies themselves end up being thinly disguised military propaganda) THEN I will consider having a little pity for those poor malnourished souls at the big movie houses.
Had to switch to bottom of the barrel caviar, eh? This is the revenge of GenX against the economy that gave us the shaft... I hope you choke on your watered down, overpriced diet coke.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I know.
What I do is I just abandon the account when it gets too clogged. Cuts down on the long-lost acquaintances mailing me to tell me they're pregnant with my love-children.
All of what you say above is true.
But consider what would happen to an individual pervert who sent out hundreds of thousands of sick emails talking about penises, and continued to do so even after the recipients told him in no uncertain terms to stop?
He'd be thrown in jail, that's what would happen.
Why are businesses allowed to do things that individuals aren't?
Can anyone say "Sue the bastards?"
They've entered into relationships with numerous small groups of people, and apparently have reneged. Who knows what's really occurring with regards to artists who paid for distro deals with Mp3.com, but if things are as bad as they look, I can see possible grounds for a lawsuit. I'm not a lawyer, but Vivendi does have deep pockets and there have been settlements over things far more ambiguous than this.
I've had enough of the music industry. It's time we started standing up to these despicable bastards.
Oh, so a corporation making ridiculous claims and flouting numerous laws in doing so is just fine, but when someone replies with empty threats, the judicial system brings down the hammer.
Yeah, this guy is obviously a total moron, but the case shows both how stupid the laws are with regards to spam, and how angry it makes people. It's like the kid on the schoolbus who gets poked and needled every day and nobody notices, but when he finally snaps and slugs one of his tormentors (or worse) it's a terrible thing.
I've done this in the past. Threatened spammers, that is. Nothing so dire nor graphic as this fellow, but I was angry enough that I wanted to get back at them somehow. I know someone who's said that he wants to torture and kill all spammers, and he's a totally meek, mellow guy for the most part. The anger people express about spam is very surprising, even more than telemarketing. It's surprising also that the bastards can make any money at all on a practice so universally reviled.
I used to care, back when I got maybe 20 spams a day. Now that I'm up above ~500, I don't care anymore.
It seems to me that this incident is a window into the true goals of the RIAA and the music industry.
What they're trying to do here is attack a competing distribution chain. This is the whole reason they hate MP3s in the first place.
MP3s represent a method for unknown artists and styles to reach popular recognition. This is a threat to the music industry, because if that were to happen, they would have to find acts that were actually good on their own merits as opposed to mediocre copycats and sexbomb divas who only sound good because of their multi-million dollar production jobs.
I can't express my hatred for the executives and committees who make decisions like these behind closed doors and for obscure reasons.
Irony bell.
"Plain talk" is not sufficient to express my hatred and bile for the music racket. I've seen good bands get driven out by tripe for longer than I care to remember, and it keeps happening.
I forget that irony is oftentimes lost on technical types; my bad. Write for the audience and all that.
Well, it's all pirate stuff anyway.
It's not like any small, unrecognized bands use(d) Mp3.com for a distribution center.
I could see why people would need something like it if the music industry were governed by greed and corporate interests, but the way it is, Sony et cetera are just a bunch of starving artists struggling to make an honest dollar and things like mp3.com just get in the way of that.
Right?
I think there is going to be a large net loss of tech jobs in the US.
Think about it. There are a billion Chinese and a billion East Indians who'd be very happy to do the work computer techs do at extremely low wages. Migration of tech jobs has only begun, and it wreaked havoc on the sector as well as negatively affecting the economy in general.
Same thing could happen to biotech, I suppose, but again I think that's unlikely for the reasons I mentioned.
"might there be other metrics that might be important to supercomputing, rather than relying solely on processing speed?"
Sure. How fast Quake can run on a Beowulf cluster of them.
To a lot of people, nothing else matters. Me, I like processing power for its own sake.
The fact that the job-loss rate has slowed is not necessarily good. It's always pointed to as a sign of economic recovery, when in fact all it means is that the rate of deterioration has decreased.
I think that the layoff rate is going to accelerate again. The fact that the dot-com boom produced hundreds of thousands of 19 year old CIOs means that there are that many people-- young, hungry, flexible-- who are willing to work much cheaper, and perhaps smarter, than old fogeys like me and maybe you. But hey, I'm sure the Bush administration will fix everything...
I'm using this time as an opportunity to go back to school and finish a college degree-- in my case, biotech. I think there's going to be a boom in biotechnology that's going to dwarf the dotcoms, and it'll be a subject that's going to be far more difficult for the average person to learn, both because of subject matter and because of the much greater infrastructure required for learning. It's going to be harder for them to fake knowledge by submitting resumes packed with buzzwords to hundreds of companies knowing that one of the fish is bound to bite.
That is, until Microsoft comes out with gel-chromatography equipment. That's kind of a disturbing thought.
just when I was thinking it was already trivialized as much as it could possibly be...
Nobody ever made a fortune overestimating the taste of the american public.
Lotke-Volterra equations were the equation systems used to describe the population dynamics of elk and wolves on Isle Royal. The poster who said this stuff first surfaced in 1989 is almost 100 years off; as I remember, the original study was done by the Hudson Bay company.A LONG year ago.
this looks to cheapen the fine acting, watertight plots and sensitive, deep characterization of both franchises.
When are they going to realize that this type of genre-miscegenation dilutes and fades the work of
Predator I was the only action movie I know of that featured not one but two, TWO future state governors. How can they possibly top that?
I'm bet this doesn't even have any gatling guns in it. Ho hum. Exeunt art, enter the committee.
I love this.
Looking at that glider brought back so many memories. I remember reading about Life in Scientific American, many years ago-- I think 19 years. I remember typing in the text version on my Apple II, out of "Basic Computer Games" by Dave Ahl and Creative Computing, sometime in maybe 1983 or thereabouts, and being amazed.
I remembered a program I wrote in the mid 90s where you could evolve rulesets, and all the bright colors and optimism that went along with the "Long Boom." All that came out of hackerdom, you know.
I remembered my personal experience with Wolfram. (Overwhelmingly negative, by the way...)
I think this is an excellent idea, I think it's a simple and graphically effective logo, and I can see it catching on. For me this was an iconically powerful image. Surprising what memories it evoked, taken in the current context.
It's an icon of simplicity and stubborn singleminded progress.
Sometimes, one or another of them is updated sooner with regards to road work. It's good to consult both of them to see if they agree on a route, and if they don't, it's a good idea to find out why-- don't just take the shorter route because you may find out there's a 100 mile detour that you missed, or something of the sort.
Yes, this has happened to me.
Hmmm, so each one will have as much plot, humor and character development crammed into it as Episode 1 did!
Lucas isn't getting another penny of mine after that sad commercialized ripoff.
Well, not exactly unemployed, more like "self employed." But I know a lot of completely unemployed computer technicians who are where they are because of their videogame addictions.
Oh, and watching flash movies on Newgrounds when they should have been answering tech support calls.
Intel makes processors that are designed to run the vile murder/robbery simulators! Sue them!
Sue the ram manufacturers as well. Without their complicity, children could never have any ideas of larceny.
Ah, so it comes out.
I was kind of suspecting something like this when I heard the other day about the whole "Nvidia Sucks" meme that was passing around with regards to Halflife II.
ATI has never been all that innovative. They've gone for "raw power" rather than finesse, and I think Nvidia's strategy is a little bit farther-thinking. Saying that Nvidia's shader support is behind that of ATI is absolutely ludicrous, and I think ATI's going to be back in its box when Nvidia's investment in Cg comes to fruition.
We'll see.
Oh, and shame on Valve for getting involved. This is no different than the crap that goes on every day in the music industry-- no different than the payola scandal.
Competitive darwinism needs to happen based on rendering muscle, not on marketing muscle. Screw that.
I suppose now Laughing Boy, or Smiling Worm Boy, the blaster worm idiot, is going to blame his despicable, heinous crime on Core War.
When I say heinous crime, I mean it. Did he cause billions of dollars worth of damage, aggregate worldwide? That money could have been spent feeding poor people.
I think garage developers are far from finished.
There's a gigantic mass of untapped territory out there. All it takes is creativity. As John Carmack himself mentioned, big companies have trouble breaking away from molds. They produce "lock-in" conditions for themselves, being forced to run the same old games and formulae time and time again.
Games, like anything else, exist on a fitness landscape. Games like the shooters are searching for pinnacles, ever higher, in one very narrow area.
If id software broke away from their formula and tried something new, they'd then be duking it out with smaller developers, or houses with some money but without a huge popular name, like CDV/Fireglow (Divine Divinity, Sudden Strike)
Much of the bottleneck for small developers is art. Textures and models. These are hard to do, even for talented and skilled specialist artists.
I think a solution here is one that's fallen almost totally by the wayside in the last few years, and that's proceduralism. In other words, draw textures and models, as much as possible, procedurally-- as the insightful guy above said, parametric models are starting, and I think that's a way of coding that's going to revolutionize the way things are done.
Also, buildings, dungeons, plants, city maps... all these things can be done as L-systems or as other types of grammars. It's not impossible, it just takes a little bit "more work" right up front, and the things get tons easier. Like so many other programming tasks. And then you have almost endless replay, until you see to the bottom of what the system can do.
Id and Blizzard may not be around forever. They may be the SirTechs and the Broderbunds and the Beagle Brothers of today, to be supplanted tomorrow by hungrier smaller companies.
It's perfectly fine that people have to start from scratch much of the time.
All that means is that we're coming up with new approaches for modeling the world.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and all that. Humans are pretty good at telling whether something is "realistic" or not. True, a simulation might fall through some crack in the realism heuristics-- it might appear to be more "realistic" than a better model and might therefore win out over the better model in terms of human observation.
But simulations have to stand up to both the human test and to empirical results if they're going to be taken seriously at all.
Currently, I'm looking into programming a multi-plant simulation. Doesn't have to be perfect, all it has to be is good enough...
Every normal shutdown procedure should come complete with billowing clouds of black oily smoke.
Nothing to see here, move along.
That's funny as hell.
Starving artists like Arnie, Spielberg, George Lucas, Harrison Ford?
I'm sure they really care about the small guys whose work would actually be given a boost by cheap publicity.
Where are the dollar theatres? At one time, people were able to make a living running movies, cheap. It was something to do. You could pay a dollar and go see Videodrome or Zardoz or Eraserhead, and they kept theatres running.
Now, the whole market's been taken up by juggernauts like Cineplex Odeon.
When movies no longer cost $8 for 90 minutes of dogshit preceded by 15 minutes of loud obnoxious commercials and military advertisements (and many times, the movies themselves end up being thinly disguised military propaganda) THEN I will consider having a little pity for those poor malnourished souls at the big movie houses.
Had to switch to bottom of the barrel caviar, eh? This is the revenge of GenX against the economy that gave us the shaft... I hope you choke on your watered down, overpriced diet coke.