What I've noticed about the union where I work, and I'd imagine its similar elsewhere, is that the aim of the union is to "protect" the "average" employee. This is good for the mediocre employee as they are pretty safe from getting fired for doing mediocre work as long as they meet the minimum acceptable standards. Even if they're below those standards, the union will cry a river for them in their defense and they'll be able to hold onto their job for that much longer.
The bad news is, in their bargaining for better money for the lowest common denominator, they eliminated the possibility for anyone to get a raise based on any factor other than senority. It doesn't matter that one employee works twice as hard as another. He will get paid the exact same amount as the other employee. The raises are also fixed. Its gonna be 50 cents per year. Thats it. No more until the contract is renewed, and even then its not likely to get any better.
Of course, the employees aren't hopeless, but its ironic that the only way they can be truely appreciated for their performance is to move up into management, and therefore OUT of the "protection" of the union.
I hear you about the starwars figures. I collected Transformers too, but I never had THAT many of them. Probably 10-15 total. I eventually sold all of them in a garage sale for a few bucks.
The starwars figures however I never got rid of. I remember the days of collecting them. It was 1983-84 when I started collecting them in bulk, not for collecting them per sae, but so I could play with them.:) I was about 10 at the time and I longed for the weekly trip to K-Mart so I could plop down about $2.50 for another action figure. That was about what I could accumulate during the week, but thats all I ever spent my money on (if I couldn't find any arcade games that is:)
I managed to collect about 90% of the action figures, and a decent number of the ships. While I don't have the original packaging for most of it, and over the years bits and pieces have disappeared, I still have most of the collection. I suppose the only reason I kept all of them was because at the time I had spent my own hard earned money on them. I certainly recieved a few of them as gifts, but for the most part they came out of my own pocket.
For this reason alone, I never had the heart to sell them or give them away, even though it was tempting at times. I know at one time I sat down and tried to figure out exactly how much money I had spent on action figures over time, and the total came up to something like $300 for all the figures and ships. That was a HUGE amount of money to me at the time, and I was almost stunned by it. No way I was gonna sell these off for a few bucks in a garage sale.:)
Of course, right now they're collecting dust out in my garage. Since I don't have the original packaging, and they're in far but mint condition, I can't see myself ever offering them up to some crazed bidder who simply can't live without them. I'm just going to hold on to them as memories of my childhood. I never kept most of the toys I had over the years, so it would be nice to have SOMETHING to look at 40 years from now.
I saw RMS last Tuesday when he gave a speech in Dallas. That man can drink a LOT of tea. Someone in the audience even asked him (after 2 1/2 hours and about 10 glasses of tea) if he needed to go to the bathroom yet.
That was the funniest thing I've read in a long time. I'm still crying from the laughter. I'm not sure why I find the idea of sending strange items through the mail so damn funny, but it is.:)
They need not mangle the story at all. The story is perfect as it is. However, hollywood has a tendancy to try to "improve" a good story by adding in more modern elements in an attempt to draw a larger audience. This is the ultimate failing in a great many movies that are based upon a book. I can see many possible "modifications" that they might attempt to make to the trilogy. First of all, the characters in the books are predominantly male. Certainly, there are female characters, but they don't have much "screen time" as compared to the male characters. This is not all together a bad thing. There is an underlying moral to be gained from this as in Return of the King it is a female (one who was ordered to remain behind for her safety) who ends up slaying the King of the Nazgul. This makes several powerful, if somewhat subliminal statements.
However, someone will probably tamper with the script to add larger roles for female characters and this will ultimately serve to undermine the underlying themes. And this is only one example. I can think of many other ways they could screw it up.
In addition, a big problem with the other LOTR movie was the fact that too much time was spent on scenes that should have been fast and furious (the end of book 1 where Frodo is being chased toward the Ford by all 9 riders). This is a 3 minute scene in the movie, but I can read the entire sequence in the book in less time. Other scenes which explain the history and background of the entire legend that the story is about, will be quickly skimmed over, leaving out a great deal of information which is useful to digest the rest of the story with (the council meeting).
I DO believe a good movie can be made though. I just don't know if hollywood is capable of making it.
When I was in 6th grade (about 15 years ago), for Halloween everyone in class was to write a "scary story" with illustrations, and some of us would read those stories out loud to either a 1st or 2nd grade class on Halloween. Our teacher, apparently not quite expecting the average student's exposure to horror movies of the day, told us to write anything we wanted, no matter how bad it was.
Well, we did. She was not amused. Half the class (mostly the male students) had written stories revolving around axe murderers and the like, complete with gory descriptions. We never got around to the illustrations.....
Anyways. Guess what the consequences of writing these horrific stories were?
*shocker* We were told to rewrite them and leave out the excessive gore. */shocker* Nobody got in trouble. Nobody went to jail. Nobody was sent in for psychiatric evaluation. We just had to redo the assignment. The stories were recognized for what they were. Harmless creative works in poor taste, not setting the stage for a group of lunatics.
All of this was pre-columbine however. We had bullies, cheating, bad grades, talking in class, and the occasional indescretion among some of the students. Every once in a while, some reckless and heartless bastard would throw pencils into the ceiling tiles. But nobody even fathomed the idea that someone might bring a gun to school and start shooting at random because he was distressed. Now everyone is overreacting and jumping on any even potential danger and eliminating them. Its unfortunate, and it has to change. SOON.
Its stuff like this that makes me want to be a parent, just so I can participate in the educational system and tell some those idiots to get their head out of their ass. Of course, I could just social engineer my way to become a school administrator and accomplish the same goals. Judging from what I've seen, I probably exceed the qualifications for the job.
You need to download the threads libraries or source and compile it in with the c libraries. Then your program should compile, or at least come up with another error.
At first look, it appears to be rude. However, consider your average slashdot effect. When you have 10K+ people start complaining that something is wrong with a release you haven't even released yet.... I actually thought it was a pretty funny response. Put a text file where it WON'T be missed, whereas a comment wouldn't be read by half the people even if it was +5 moderated.
Reading that article, I was reminded of reading about the procedure involved with giving a lethal injection to a death row inmate. Almost makes it sound like an execution.
The way I read that article, a company may be 100% willing to uphold their promises to maintain the privacy of their customers, but bankrupcy laws force them to sell off all assets, including their list of customers.
Ok.. fine. They can sell off their list of customers. However, what if their list of customers only includes those customers that have purchased something in the last 30 days.
If I'm a brick&morter operation, sure.. MAYBE I want to send my customers advertisements every once in a while. After all, happy customers will come back for more. For this very reason, there is no need to keep their information on file. THEY WILL RETURN BY THEMSELVES.
If they don't return, well, they probably aren't all that interested anyways, and there's no reason to keep their records on file. All you need is the record of the transaction.
If the computer system automatically deletes the records of any customer who has not purchased something in the last 30 days, then the only customers who will have an open account are the ones that purchase something regularly. When the company plans to go out of business, simply disable the order screen but keep the system online for an extra month. Those customers will automatically be deleted by default, but at no time has the company intentionally destroyed any assets, as the customer list was never considered an asset to begin with.
On the other hand, most likely the companies in question actually WANT to sell it off because thats less money they'll have to come up with later to cover the debts after bankrupcy if any.
You forgot to consider the fact, that while we MIGHT kill ourselves off in a few years, it hasn't actually happened yet. It may never happen. However, even if it does, that doesn't necessarily mean that everything will be over and done with. Humanity may survive on a limited basis and over a few hundred or even thousands of years end up at the same point again (and may proceed to kill themselves all over again) Think Canticle of Leibowitz.
Still, we have no statistical base to work from on this. To make an assumption based on current data, we have 1 civilization that has not managed to kill itself off, and 0 civilizations that have not. This means that there must be an infinite number of civilizations that have survived. (I realize until we have at least ONE civilization that HAS killed itself off, we won't be able to do a real comparison):)
The problem with advertisements is the fact that business are attempting to use them as the sole source of revenue. While this is adaquate for a single artist who is trying to use the web as a supplement to other work, a business who must pay employees for simply maintaining the site simply can't make a profit from it unless the operation is extremely streamlined, gets a lot of visitors, and get a decent rate on bandwidth.
Ads should be paid for by companies that actually draw the majority of their revenue from non-advertising based methods. If I sell a product or service and use ads to promote it, then both I and the seller of the advertising space will benefit.
Do people not pay attention to ads? Well, if you're not advertising something that I require, then probably not. If I have to buy something, and you can sell it to me, then you have a market, and an ad will catch my attention.
Castration probably won't be effective. We've already proven without a doubt that the losers involved here have no balls.
-Restil
Re:Linus should have his own action-figure line
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Linus Talks About 2.4
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· Score: 2
The OS is good for the investor. The investors are going to just have to invest in something other than the software package itself. Investing in a product that can be obtained in an unrestricted model for free is a silly concept to begin with. However, the secondary commercial linux interests could and very likely will make a very worthwhile investment, such as support, administration, and custom programming. Support for the operating system itself will boost the secondary investments.
Actually, its not really much of a mystery HOW. The reason these scams are still so prevalant is they work VERY well (for the scammer anyways). There are a lot of people in this world that will do almost anything for an easy buck that they will jump on any scam they are offered, sending in money blindly. Then when it doesn't work out, they'll jump on the next scam, even if it doesn't differ from the first one. This has been going on for years, even before the internet was popular.
Consider the fact though, 12,000 out of 50 million really isn't THAT many. A junk mailer doing this through the postal service wouldn't stand a chance of even recovering his money, let alone making a significant profit. But spam, its all gravy. That is why spam will continue to be prominant.
I do approve of the method of shutting them down though. Many times you don't even have to attack the act of spamming as most spammers are disreputable to begin with, and there is certainly some other legal issue you can snag them on.
I might even do this if I get a bit of free time (meaning...when I get bored enough to bother:).
Draw a chart showing what games or other concepts each game was based on. Something similar to the
unix chart displaying all the different flavors of unix and what they were derived from. Almost every video game in existance is based in one way or another on some previous game, even though it might not be directly derived from a computer based game.
For instance, Myst might have been an influential game, but consider the fact that Myst is really an overglorified Mystery House with a different theme. KQ1 (which influenced most of the Sierra games after it) was influenced from the text based adventure games and had a graphical element added to it.
Wolfenstien 3D was definitely influenced by Castle Wolfenstein and possibly Ultima Underworld, and it in turn influenced Doom, which influenced Hexen, Quake and Duke 3D (influenced by Duke 2D as well)... And so on and so forth.
Like I said.. when I get around to it, it might be a fun project.
If you want to get technical... Mystery house was the first adventure game with graphics, while KQ1 was the first adventure game with solid graphics. MH was all line drawings.
Although the measures restricting sellers from contacting non-winning bidders probably have some profit motive behind them, there ARE potentially good reasons to advise against it. However, I don't feel its Ebay's place to restrict what two different people do offline. If fraud is rampant between non winning bidders and sellers, a warning to all bidders should be sufficient. This can be displayed whenever a bid is placed. I know, people probably won't read it, but when the call comes in to the fraud dept, Ebay can end the conversation quickly, alhtough they're still not liable for offline transactions anyways.
However, there is no reason a losing bidder can't contact the seller offline, especially if the seller is a legitimate business thats just selling for the purpose of drawing in new customers or selling off surplus/older equipment and features newer equipment offline from ebay. Auctions are very much a buyer beware excersize, but if the buyer is the one inititating the contact, thats good for them, good for the seller, and GOOD FOR EBAY as the seller will keep selling products on ebay because now not only do they pick up the top bidder as a customer, they will also drag in a number of potential customers as well.
Ultima III wasn't really the Ultima that kicked off the series. Ultima IV was. Ultima III was just an enhanced version of ultima II. It WAS an improvement, don't get me wrong. But U3 didn't yet have the depth that U4 did.
The ironic thing is U4 and U3 had almost the exact same engine, but U4's subtle yet powerful background theme is what made it such a great game and it set the stage for all the games to follow in that series. It set up the system of virtues and strayed from the old hack&slash mentality of the first 3 games. You HAD to be virtuous or you couldn't win the game. However, nothing in the documentation implied this. You had to discover it for yourself through gameplay.
They managed to maintain this level of gameplay through Ultima VII. After that something went wrong. I'm not exactly sure, but it couldn't be only a coincidence that Origin was bought out by EA at approximately the same time the powerful story in the series took a nosedive and instead arcade gaming style, 3D graphics, and multiplayer revenue streams took priority.
The same goes with automatic bank drafts. For those that were being charged exorbant amounts, you never really know what you're paying for sometimes. At least when what you're purchasing is a one time purchase, if they continue charging you afterwards, its most definitely theft. But when they're allowed to charge you monthly, and there's some fine print buried in a contract somewhere that lets them get away with murder by charging you excessively every month, you will have to go to a lot of trouble to recover the funds.
If you're going to pay recurring charges, pay them monthly by check or money order or pay a year in advance if its cheaper or more convienent. But don't supply your credit card for automatic debits, and DEFINITELY don't do it with your bank account. Even if the company you're dealing with is honest, that doesnt' mean they can't make mistakes.
This does remind me of the movie Gattica. That movie presented an underlying plot where society is based completely upon genetic predisposition. While the movie presents this brave new world, the underlying theme shows many flaws with such a model.
The olympic athelete with a broken back still is genetically superiour and his genes show no evidence of his disability.
The boy who was too weak to swim out further than his brother and made it back discovered that he could win if he simply didn't save any energy for the trip back.
In a society where your hair, blood, and eyes are used for identification, nobody pays much attention to your face.
True talent will exceed all expectations. There will always be people who recognize that talent and will overlook disadvantages that may not be present at all.
There are two ways you can spend money using your credit card. In meatspace, you hand a cashier your credit card, they run it through a machine, enter the amount to charge, its deducted, and if they're smart, they'll ID you to confirm that it really IS your credit card, or at the very least, you have the same name as the cardholder. Then you sign the receipt.
The other method is calling someone on the phone, or using the internet, reciting the credit card number and expiration date, giving some personal information and the charge goes through, no signiture required, no problem until someone (hopefully YOU) gets the bill.
Well, credit card companies, at the option of the cardholder, should be able to implement some type of confirmation scheme to prevent anyone with your credit card number from actually using it. For instance, if I provide my credit card to a company, I would then have to validate the transaction (by phone or web page) using information not provided to the merchant before the money would actually trade hands. For convienence, this could also be done in advance, or allow a certain merchant to always be authorized, so although that merchant could always charge the card, nobody else would be able to.
Since the service would be an optional one for cardholders, it would not infringe on anyone's convience if they're not willing to go through the extra effort to avoid having their card maxed out by someone ten thousand miles away. We have to assume that credit card numbers will get stolen and distributed. You can't rely on the security of some website or server to keep that information safe, as you have no control over that security.
Perhaps I'm missing something obvious here, but this seems like a good idea to me.
I'm by no means an electronic or mechanical genious, but I've got a decent general knowledge and I've spent quite a bit of time tinkering around inside VCR's and the like. Given adaquate time and motivation, I could figure out how to bypass something as simple as a "do record/don't record" restriction. Its been done on the Playstation without too much difficulty, and a great many consumers were able to mod their systems.
I don't think this will ever come to pass though. VCR's are used primarily for the purpose of recording television shows and movies so they can be viewed at a later time. This is called fair use. Yes, I know that the term is losing ground quickly, but its not the only thing we have working in our favor. People actually LIKE the ability to record their TV shows and movies. They've grown accustomed to it over the years and to suddenly yank that ability away from them will NOT result in a favorable market response.
Those of you in the "industry" better take notice. Television, movies and the like.... they have a long history and are enjoyed by most of the population. But many people are and/or will find other means to entertain themselves as time goes on. Tactics such as these will NOT help draw them back to you every night, but instead will drive them further away. What is it you're trying to protect? You may have a monopoly on your "product" but if nobody wants it anymore, what good will it do you?
This was 8 years ago. The challenge in question related to one of those hardware cards that required a password to boot the system. We were offered 150 points of extra credit if we could tell him what the password was.
Wasn't really all that hard. I rebooted the machine one day, then wrote a program that emulated the login procedure then warmbooted the machine which resembled almost perfectly the legitimate bootup process. Then the next time he left the room, I installed the program on there and waited. He came back, typed in his password, it was saved to the harddrive for later retrieval and me and a friend of mine barely could stay in our chairs because we were laughing so hard.
I'm not sure if I ever got the 150 points of extra credit. I probably wouldn't have noticed it even if I did since I was always at about the maximum grade. I don't recall the word suspension ever thrown around tho.
There IS a BBC radio play of the entire LOTR trilogy. Its 13 hours long, produced sometime in the 70's.
I have no idea where to find it legitamately. I stumbled across the mp3's for it a couple years ago. Its very well done. Although obviously they have to leave out SOME parts as 13 hours is hardly enough to cover everything, they don't drop out anything of extreme importance, and the story doesn't betray the book at all.
Slashdot Mirror
What I've noticed about the union where I work, and I'd imagine its similar elsewhere, is that the aim of the union is to "protect" the "average" employee. This is good for the mediocre employee as they are pretty safe from getting fired for doing mediocre work as long as they meet the minimum acceptable standards. Even if they're below those standards, the union will cry a river for them in their defense and they'll be able to hold onto their job for that much longer.
The bad news is, in their bargaining for better money for the lowest common denominator, they eliminated the possibility for anyone to get a raise based on any factor other than senority. It doesn't matter that one employee works twice as hard as another. He will get paid the exact same amount as the other employee. The raises are also fixed. Its gonna be 50 cents per year. Thats it. No more until the contract is renewed, and even then its not likely to get any better.
Of course, the employees aren't hopeless, but its ironic that the only way they can be truely appreciated for their performance is to move up into management, and therefore OUT of the "protection" of the union.
-Restil
I hear you about the starwars figures. I collected Transformers too, but I never had THAT many of them. Probably 10-15 total. I eventually sold all of them in a garage sale for a few bucks.
:) I was about 10 at the time and I longed for the weekly trip to K-Mart so I could plop down about $2.50 for another action figure. That was about what I could accumulate during the week, but thats all I ever spent my money on (if I couldn't find any arcade games that is :)
:)
The starwars figures however I never got rid of. I remember the days of collecting them. It was 1983-84 when I started collecting them in bulk, not for collecting them per sae, but so I could play with them.
I managed to collect about 90% of the action figures, and a decent number of the ships. While I don't have the original packaging for most of it, and over the years bits and pieces have disappeared, I still have most of the collection. I suppose the only reason I kept all of them was because at the time I had spent my own hard earned money on them. I certainly recieved a few of them as gifts, but for the most part they came out of my own pocket.
For this reason alone, I never had the heart to sell them or give them away, even though it was tempting at times. I know at one time I sat down and tried to figure out exactly how much money I had spent on action figures over time, and the total came up to something like $300 for all the figures and ships. That was a HUGE amount of money to me at the time, and I was almost stunned by it. No way I was gonna sell these off for a few bucks in a garage sale.
Of course, right now they're collecting dust out in my garage. Since I don't have the original packaging, and they're in far but mint condition, I can't see myself ever offering them up to some crazed bidder who simply can't live without them. I'm just going to hold on to them as memories of my childhood. I never kept most of the toys I had over the years, so it would be nice to have SOMETHING to look at 40 years from now.
-Restil
I saw RMS last Tuesday when he gave a speech in Dallas. That man can drink a LOT of tea. Someone in the audience even asked him (after 2 1/2 hours and about 10 glasses of tea) if he needed to go to the bathroom yet.
-Restil
That was the funniest thing I've read in a long time. I'm still crying from the laughter. I'm not sure why I find the idea of sending strange items through the mail so damn funny, but it is. :)
-Restil
They need not mangle the story at all. The story is perfect as it is. However, hollywood has a tendancy to try to "improve" a good story by adding in more modern elements in an attempt to draw a larger audience. This is the ultimate failing in a great many movies that are based upon a book. I can see many possible "modifications" that they might attempt to make to the trilogy. First of all, the characters in the books are predominantly male. Certainly, there are female characters, but they don't have much "screen time" as compared to the male characters. This is not all together a bad thing. There is an underlying moral to be gained from this as in Return of the King it is a female (one who was ordered to remain behind for her safety) who ends up slaying the King of the Nazgul. This makes several powerful, if somewhat subliminal statements.
However, someone will probably tamper with the script to add larger roles for female characters and this will ultimately serve to undermine the underlying themes. And this is only one example. I can think of many other ways they could screw it up.
In addition, a big problem with the other LOTR movie was the fact that too much time was spent on scenes that should have been fast and furious (the end of book 1 where Frodo is being chased toward the Ford by all 9 riders). This is a 3 minute scene in the movie, but I can read the entire sequence in the book in less time. Other scenes which explain the history and background of the entire legend that the story is about, will be quickly skimmed over, leaving out a great deal of information which is useful to digest the rest of the story with (the council meeting).
I DO believe a good movie can be made though. I just don't know if hollywood is capable of making it.
-Restil
When I was in 6th grade (about 15 years ago), for Halloween everyone in class was to write a "scary story" with illustrations, and some of us would read those stories out loud to either a 1st or 2nd grade class on Halloween. Our teacher, apparently not quite expecting the average student's exposure to horror movies of the day, told us to write anything we wanted, no matter how bad it was.
Well, we did. She was not amused. Half the class (mostly the male students) had written stories revolving around axe murderers and the like, complete with gory descriptions. We never got around to the illustrations.....
Anyways. Guess what the consequences of writing these horrific stories were?
*shocker* We were told to rewrite them and leave out the excessive gore. */shocker* Nobody got in trouble. Nobody went to jail. Nobody was sent in for psychiatric evaluation. We just had to redo the assignment. The stories were recognized for what they were. Harmless creative works in poor taste, not setting the stage for a group of lunatics.
All of this was pre-columbine however. We had bullies, cheating, bad grades, talking in class, and the occasional indescretion among some of the students. Every once in a while, some reckless and heartless bastard would throw pencils into the ceiling tiles. But nobody even fathomed the idea that someone might bring a gun to school and start shooting at random because he was distressed. Now everyone is overreacting and jumping on any even potential danger and eliminating them. Its unfortunate, and it has to change. SOON.
Its stuff like this that makes me want to be a parent, just so I can participate in the educational system and tell some those idiots to get their head out of their ass. Of course, I could just social engineer my way to become a school administrator and accomplish the same goals. Judging from what I've seen, I probably exceed the qualifications for the job.
-Restil
You need to download the threads libraries or source and compile it in with the c libraries. Then your program should compile, or at least come up with another error.
-Restil
At first look, it appears to be rude. However, consider your average slashdot effect. When you have 10K+ people start complaining that something is wrong with a release you haven't even released yet.... I actually thought it was a pretty funny response. Put a text file where it WON'T be missed, whereas a comment wouldn't be read by half the people even if it was +5 moderated.
-Restil
Reading that article, I was reminded of reading about the procedure involved with giving a lethal injection to a death row inmate. Almost makes it sound like an execution.
-Restil
The way I read that article, a company may be 100% willing to uphold their promises to maintain the privacy of their customers, but bankrupcy laws force them to sell off all assets, including their list of customers.
Ok.. fine. They can sell off their list of customers. However, what if their list of customers only includes those customers that have purchased something in the last 30 days.
If I'm a brick&morter operation, sure.. MAYBE I want to send my customers advertisements every once in a while. After all, happy customers will come back for more. For this very reason, there is no need to keep their information on file. THEY WILL RETURN BY THEMSELVES.
If they don't return, well, they probably aren't all that interested anyways, and there's no reason to keep their records on file. All you need is the record of the transaction.
If the computer system automatically deletes the records of any customer who has not purchased something in the last 30 days, then the only customers who will have an open account are the ones that purchase something regularly. When the company plans to go out of business, simply disable the order screen but keep the system online for an extra month. Those customers will automatically be deleted by default, but at no time has the company intentionally destroyed any assets, as the customer list was never considered an asset to begin with.
On the other hand, most likely the companies in question actually WANT to sell it off because thats less money they'll have to come up with later to cover the debts after bankrupcy if any.
-Restil
You forgot to consider the fact, that while we MIGHT kill ourselves off in a few years, it hasn't actually happened yet. It may never happen. However, even if it does, that doesn't necessarily mean that everything will be over and done with. Humanity may survive on a limited basis and over a few hundred or even thousands of years end up at the same point again (and may proceed to kill themselves all over again) Think Canticle of Leibowitz.
:)
Still, we have no statistical base to work from on this. To make an assumption based on current data, we have 1 civilization that has not managed to kill itself off, and 0 civilizations that have not. This means that there must be an infinite number of civilizations that have survived. (I realize until we have at least ONE civilization that HAS killed itself off, we won't be able to do a real comparison)
-Restil
The problem with advertisements is the fact that business are attempting to use them as the sole source of revenue. While this is adaquate for a single artist who is trying to use the web as a supplement to other work, a business who must pay employees for simply maintaining the site simply can't make a profit from it unless the operation is extremely streamlined, gets a lot of visitors, and get a decent rate on bandwidth.
Ads should be paid for by companies that actually draw the majority of their revenue from non-advertising based methods. If I sell a product or service and use ads to promote it, then both I and the seller of the advertising space will benefit.
Do people not pay attention to ads? Well, if you're not advertising something that I require, then probably not. If I have to buy something, and you can sell it to me, then you have a market, and an ad will catch my attention.
-Restil
Castration probably won't be effective. We've already proven without a doubt that the losers involved here have no balls.
-Restil
The OS is good for the investor. The investors are going to just have to invest in something other than the software package itself. Investing in a product that can be obtained in an unrestricted model for free is a silly concept to begin with. However, the secondary commercial linux interests could and very likely will make a very worthwhile investment, such as support, administration, and custom programming. Support for the operating system itself will boost the secondary investments.
-Restil
Actually, its not really much of a mystery HOW. The reason these scams are still so prevalant is they work VERY well (for the scammer anyways). There are a lot of people in this world that will do almost anything for an easy buck that they will jump on any scam they are offered, sending in money blindly. Then when it doesn't work out, they'll jump on the next scam, even if it doesn't differ from the first one. This has been going on for years, even before the internet was popular.
Consider the fact though, 12,000 out of 50 million really isn't THAT many. A junk mailer doing this through the postal service wouldn't stand a chance of even recovering his money, let alone making a significant profit. But spam, its all gravy. That is why spam will continue to be prominant.
I do approve of the method of shutting them down though. Many times you don't even have to attack the act of spamming as most spammers are disreputable to begin with, and there is certainly some other legal issue you can snag them on.
-Restil
I might even do this if I get a bit of free time (meaning...when I get bored enough to bother :).
Draw a chart showing what games or other concepts each game was based on. Something similar to the
unix chart displaying all the different flavors of unix and what they were derived from. Almost every video game in existance is based in one way or another on some previous game, even though it might not be directly derived from a computer based game.
For instance, Myst might have been an influential game, but consider the fact that Myst is really an overglorified Mystery House with a different theme. KQ1 (which influenced most of the Sierra games after it) was influenced from the text based adventure games and had a graphical element added to it.
Wolfenstien 3D was definitely influenced by Castle Wolfenstein and possibly Ultima Underworld, and it in turn influenced Doom, which influenced Hexen, Quake and Duke 3D (influenced by Duke 2D as well)... And so on and so forth.
Like I said.. when I get around to it, it might be a fun project.
-Restil
If you want to get technical... Mystery house was the first adventure game with graphics, while KQ1 was the first adventure game with solid graphics. MH was all line drawings.
-Restil
Although the measures restricting sellers from contacting non-winning bidders probably have some profit motive behind them, there ARE potentially good reasons to advise against it. However, I don't feel its Ebay's place to restrict what two different people do offline. If fraud is rampant between non winning bidders and sellers, a warning to all bidders should be sufficient. This can be displayed whenever a bid is placed. I know, people probably won't read it, but when the call comes in to the fraud dept, Ebay can end the conversation quickly, alhtough they're still not liable for offline transactions anyways.
However, there is no reason a losing bidder can't contact the seller offline, especially if the seller is a legitimate business thats just selling for the purpose of drawing in new customers or selling off surplus/older equipment and features newer equipment offline from ebay. Auctions are very much a buyer beware excersize, but if the buyer is the one inititating the contact, thats good for them, good for the seller, and GOOD FOR EBAY as the seller will keep selling products on ebay because now not only do they pick up the top bidder as a customer, they will also drag in a number of potential customers as well.
-Restil
Ultima III wasn't really the Ultima that kicked off the series. Ultima IV was. Ultima III was just an enhanced version of ultima II. It WAS an improvement, don't get me wrong. But U3 didn't yet have the depth that U4 did.
The ironic thing is U4 and U3 had almost the exact same engine, but U4's subtle yet powerful background theme is what made it such a great game and it set the stage for all the games to follow in that series. It set up the system of virtues and strayed from the old hack&slash mentality of the first 3 games. You HAD to be virtuous or you couldn't win the game. However, nothing in the documentation implied this. You had to discover it for yourself through gameplay.
They managed to maintain this level of gameplay through Ultima VII. After that something went wrong. I'm not exactly sure, but it couldn't be only a coincidence that Origin was bought out by EA at approximately the same time the powerful story in the series took a nosedive and instead arcade gaming style, 3D graphics, and multiplayer revenue streams took priority.
Pity.
-Restil
The same goes with automatic bank drafts. For those that were being charged exorbant amounts, you never really know what you're paying for sometimes. At least when what you're purchasing is a one time purchase, if they continue charging you afterwards, its most definitely theft. But when they're allowed to charge you monthly, and there's some fine print buried in a contract somewhere that lets them get away with murder by charging you excessively every month, you will have to go to a lot of trouble to recover the funds.
If you're going to pay recurring charges, pay them monthly by check or money order or pay a year in advance if its cheaper or more convienent. But don't supply your credit card for automatic debits, and DEFINITELY don't do it with your bank account. Even if the company you're dealing with is honest, that doesnt' mean they can't make mistakes.
-Restil
This does remind me of the movie Gattica. That movie presented an underlying plot where society is based completely upon genetic predisposition. While the movie presents this brave new world, the underlying theme shows many flaws with such a model.
The olympic athelete with a broken back still is genetically superiour and his genes show no evidence of his disability.
The boy who was too weak to swim out further than his brother and made it back discovered that he could win if he simply didn't save any energy for the trip back.
In a society where your hair, blood, and eyes are used for identification, nobody pays much attention to your face.
True talent will exceed all expectations. There will always be people who recognize that talent and will overlook disadvantages that may not be present at all.
-Restil
There are two ways you can spend money using your credit card. In meatspace, you hand a cashier your credit card, they run it through a machine, enter the amount to charge, its deducted, and if they're smart, they'll ID you to confirm that it really IS your credit card, or at the very least, you have the same name as the cardholder. Then you sign the receipt.
The other method is calling someone on the phone, or using the internet, reciting the credit card number and expiration date, giving some personal information and the charge goes through, no signiture required, no problem until someone (hopefully YOU) gets the bill.
Well, credit card companies, at the option of the cardholder, should be able to implement some type of confirmation scheme to prevent anyone with your credit card number from actually using it. For instance, if I provide my credit card to a company, I would then have to validate the transaction (by phone or web page) using information not provided to the merchant before the money would actually trade hands. For convienence, this could also be done in advance, or allow a certain merchant to always be authorized, so although that merchant could always charge the card, nobody else would be able to.
Since the service would be an optional one for cardholders, it would not infringe on anyone's convience if they're not willing to go through the extra effort to avoid having their card maxed out by someone ten thousand miles away. We have to assume that credit card numbers will get stolen and distributed. You can't rely on the security of some website or server to keep that information safe, as you have no control over that security.
Perhaps I'm missing something obvious here, but this seems like a good idea to me.
-Restil
I'm by no means an electronic or mechanical genious, but I've got a decent general knowledge and I've spent quite a bit of time tinkering around inside VCR's and the like. Given adaquate time and motivation, I could figure out how to bypass something as simple as a "do record/don't record" restriction. Its been done on the Playstation without too much difficulty, and a great many consumers were able to mod their systems.
I don't think this will ever come to pass though. VCR's are used primarily for the purpose of recording television shows and movies so they can be viewed at a later time. This is called fair use. Yes, I know that the term is losing ground quickly, but its not the only thing we have working in our favor. People actually LIKE the ability to record their TV shows and movies. They've grown accustomed to it over the years and to suddenly yank that ability away from them will NOT result in a favorable market response.
Those of you in the "industry" better take notice. Television, movies and the like.... they have a long history and are enjoyed by most of the population. But many people are and/or will find other means to entertain themselves as time goes on. Tactics such as these will NOT help draw them back to you every night, but instead will drive them further away. What is it you're trying to protect? You may have a monopoly on your "product" but if nobody wants it anymore, what good will it do you?
-Restil
This was 8 years ago. The challenge in question related to one of those hardware cards that required a password to boot the system. We were offered 150 points of extra credit if we could tell him what the password was.
Wasn't really all that hard. I rebooted the machine one day, then wrote a program that emulated the login procedure then warmbooted the machine which resembled almost perfectly the legitimate bootup process. Then the next time he left the room, I installed the program on there and waited. He came back, typed in his password, it was saved to the harddrive for later retrieval and me and a friend of mine barely could stay in our chairs because we were laughing so hard.
I'm not sure if I ever got the 150 points of extra credit. I probably wouldn't have noticed it even if I did since I was always at about the maximum grade. I don't recall the word suspension ever thrown around tho.
-Restil
There IS a BBC radio play of the entire LOTR trilogy. Its 13 hours long, produced sometime in the 70's.
I have no idea where to find it legitamately. I stumbled across the mp3's for it a couple years ago. Its very well done. Although obviously they have to leave out SOME parts as 13 hours is hardly enough to cover everything, they don't drop out anything of extreme importance, and the story doesn't betray the book at all.
-Restil