I worked for a year and a half in loss prevention at Best Buy. When I was there, part of my job involved superivising the twice-weekly unloading of the trucks that pulled in late at night to unload "new" products.
I lost all respect for the store the night I happend to unload a few electronics with half-torn Open Box stickers still attached. That's right--some other store's Open Box Items, which were previously used and should have been marked down in price, were being shipped to our store to sell as New. I have no idea of the number of things shipped to us in those two years that had stickers completely removed or were seen and ignored by the folks helping me; my truck work usually came at the end of a 12-hour shift and I was using all my available energy to stay awake enough to not get crushed by falling televisions.
The biggest issue I had with Freenet was not reliability or the fact that I might be sharing kiddy porn, but the fact that THERE WERE NO GOOD KEY INDEXes. Seriously, do a search on Google and the only ones you find are down or haven't been updated in two years. It's the big Catch-22; I won't use it 'til there's something to look at, but there won't be anything to look at until somebody uses it.
It's a shame that this happened now, instead of 5 years ago. I bet if I had spent the last 5 years on a net with Asian characters in their domain names, I would've learned more than a few words in the language just from exposure. (The only real way to learn a language, imo.)
I just thought of the best way to describe the frustration that came with beating this game. Mental blue balls. It was like spending two hours dinking around and then not being able to blow my puzzle-solving load, and boy did it make me upset.
I've only played Myst, but perhaps part of the controversy comes from the fact that after all the puzzle-solving (which is time-consuming even if it's easy) you get nothing but a thinly-disguised ad for the next game? God knows I was ready to break the CD in two. It seems even worse than the 'CONGRATURATIONS' [sic] at the end of the 8-bit Nintendo's 1946, because you know they could have done better.
I think this article is the answer to Ask Slashdot's "Is There an Effective Way to Kill Banner Ads?" question. The answer, it seems, is to disguise them as stories.
Coming Tomorrow on Slashdot:
"Are You GEEK enough to take the PEPSI CHALLENGE?"
(Gazes into the distance.) I can see it now. Maybe html will support basic smells, but all the complex smells will only be discernable with a special Shockwavesque player; they'll all be in a proprietary format. Warez smells will become the next mp3s. Slashdot (A subsidiary of AT&T/Coke) will be 50% filled with stories about lawsuits from the companies holding the smell copyrights. The MicroTimeWarnerPepsiNBCSoft conglomerate (headed by Steve Ballmer's clone) will attack individuals distributing smells vaguely similar to their own unique smell. College students will be expelled for distributing copyrighted smells on the campus network. Windows icons will have associated smells. OnMouseOver the little rotating 3d Slashdot news icons will produce a motherboard smell, or a money smell, or the smell of Coke III (by this time Slashdot will have cleverly disguised sections like 'Coke News' that you won't be able to filter). Linux will have smell support.
You are running Microsoft Pink2 O/S at 8 trillion x 6 trillion polygons with 128-bit resolution and 20/1000 particles smell sensitivity.
Slashdot Mirror
I worked for a year and a half in loss prevention at Best Buy. When I was there, part of my job involved superivising the twice-weekly unloading of the trucks that pulled in late at night to unload "new" products.
I lost all respect for the store the night I happend to unload a few electronics with half-torn Open Box stickers still attached. That's right--some other store's Open Box Items, which were previously used and should have been marked down in price, were being shipped to our store to sell as New. I have no idea of the number of things shipped to us in those two years that had stickers completely removed or were seen and ignored by the folks helping me; my truck work usually came at the end of a 12-hour shift and I was using all my available energy to stay awake enough to not get crushed by falling televisions.
The biggest issue I had with Freenet was not reliability or the fact that I might be sharing kiddy porn, but the fact that THERE WERE NO GOOD KEY INDEXes. Seriously, do a search on Google and the only ones you find are down or haven't been updated in two years. It's the big Catch-22; I won't use it 'til there's something to look at, but there won't be anything to look at until somebody uses it.
It's a shame that this happened now, instead of 5 years ago. I bet if I had spent the last 5 years on a net with Asian characters in their domain names, I would've learned more than a few words in the language just from exposure. (The only real way to learn a language, imo.)
I just thought of the best way to describe the frustration that came with beating this game. Mental blue balls. It was like spending two hours dinking around and then not being able to blow my puzzle-solving load, and boy did it make me upset.
I've only played Myst, but perhaps part of the controversy comes from the fact that after all the puzzle-solving (which is time-consuming even if it's easy) you get nothing but a thinly-disguised ad for the next game? God knows I was ready to break the CD in two. It seems even worse than the 'CONGRATURATIONS' [sic] at the end of the 8-bit Nintendo's 1946, because you know they could have done better.
I think this article is the answer to Ask Slashdot's "Is There an Effective Way to Kill Banner Ads?" question. The answer, it seems, is to disguise them as stories.
Coming Tomorrow on Slashdot:
"Are You GEEK enough to take the PEPSI CHALLENGE?"
(Gazes into the distance.)
I can see it now. Maybe html will support basic smells, but all the complex smells will only be discernable with a special Shockwavesque player; they'll all be in a proprietary format.
Warez smells will become the next mp3s. Slashdot (A subsidiary of AT&T/Coke) will be 50% filled with stories about lawsuits from the companies holding the smell copyrights. The MicroTimeWarnerPepsiNBCSoft conglomerate (headed by Steve Ballmer's clone) will attack individuals distributing smells vaguely similar to their own unique smell. College students will be expelled for distributing copyrighted smells on the campus network.
Windows icons will have associated smells.
OnMouseOver the little rotating 3d Slashdot news icons will produce a motherboard smell, or a money smell, or the smell of Coke III (by this time Slashdot will have cleverly disguised sections like 'Coke News' that you won't be able to filter).
Linux will have smell support.
You are running Microsoft Pink2 O/S at 8 trillion x 6 trillion polygons with 128-bit resolution and 20/1000 particles smell sensitivity.