And note that all mainstream Democrats distanced themselves from this ad and from any connection to it.
While the Bush / Hitler comparisons are over the top (I'd personally think of Bush / Cheney more in the Mussolini-lite mode, though not quite as competent as Il Duce), there was the war of aggression, wiretapping, torture, illegal detentions, blocking "dissidents" from attending their public rallies, and the exploitation of people's fear for political gain. Even a Republican should have felt uneasy at what was going on.
Compare this to... basically wanting to expand Medicare / Medicaid to all Americans. Which is bringing out the Republican / Conservative pundits in droves to make the Hitler comparisons and express their paranoid fears of death panels. And from their political leaders, there's not an ounce of serious pushback on this rhetoric. Some are actually encouraging people to think this way.
The Republicans are either silent or actively encouraging the crazies. The Democrats, both in and out of power, have done everything they can to run away from the crazies on their side. There's no equivalence here.
For the PC with Mass Effect, any chance you ever run Process Explorer on that machine?
I ran into this issue just today. Was thinking about buying Spore and so I fired up the Creature Creator. Which refused to start, due to Securom. After a bit of research, I found out that Securom hates Process Explorer so much, that its "protected" games won't start if Process Explorer has been used at any time during the current computer session. I had always thought it would barf just when Process Explorer was currently running.
So, in theory, the game will run after a reboot. But why should I reboot my machine just to play a game? Because I used some tool on my machine that had nothing to do with the DRM?
Anyways, this was the first time Securom has bitten me and was enough to make me decide against buying Spore.
Reading all those "versus" links almost makes me want to form a new corporation, calling it Xenu, Inc. And then using the corp for anti-Scientology activities and hoping they would take me to court so that the case would read:
Just wanted to add a quick thought about those bloody midichlorians and how they could be made effective in the story...
In the scenario I described, the midichlorians would work as the first big reveal of how the Jedi aren't quite what they seemed. Anakin would get the sermons about the mystical mumbo-jumbo that would be an exact echo of what Obi-wan said in Episode IV. Anakin could still get scanned but he wouldn't be told what they were scanning for.
Later on, would be a big reveal that his abilities are purely natural in origin and the mysticism was all ultimately just window dressing. This would be the point at which Anakin starts to lose his faith. If there's no truth to the mystical origins, then there's probably no truth to the notions of 'light' and 'dark' sides.
And, again, this makes Obi-wan's later talks with Luke that much more cynical. Obi-wan parrots the old party line because he knows an idealistic young hick like Luke isn't going to be inspired by talks about physiology. Luke will do anything if he is some divinely inspired 'Chosen One' but he used to sleep through the Tatooine Public Schools biology classes, and would rather go back to dirt farming if he knew alien cells in his bloodstream was the reason.
So the midichlorians could have been a great symbol of how the Jedi lie to themselves and to the Republic. I would imagine it would have been a tightly held secret that would have blown everything apart if it was widely known. Even the Sith would have maintained this secret. I think this would have been a great plot point to build on what was established in the first trilogy.
Having the prequels being mostly about the Jedi could have been great, if George had just read a bit of history and actually understood human nature.
All he had to do was show the Jedi at the seeming height of their powers but with extensive internal decay. They have high standards and impossibly strict rules, but depending on who you are, a blind eye could be turned on various rules violations. Show them slowly becoming corrupt with their power and becoming too fond of the respect and privileges of their position.
More importantly, show them as rigid fundamentalists: they think they know what is right for the rest of the galaxy despite being cloistered away from mainstream society for much of their lives. And they tend to jump in feet first in the various causes they intervene in. Would have been nice to see the Jedi take on a noble cause and then somehow leave the situation much worse than it was before. The current crop of neo-cons and fundie Christians would have been a perfect model for the Jedi. Or, for a historical reference, the mindset of the Imperial Japanese military.
A decadent, myopic Jedi, drunk on their own power and trapped in their ancient traditions, would have been a beautiful thing to see. And Anakin should have been initially cast as a teenager who would have then played the classic role of the outsider becoming an insider, and all the bullshit that is entailed in that process. He would have been the eyes of the audience, gradually revealing the sickness within the organization and the deep divide between what the group promised and what they actually delivered.
And this would have made the switch to the dark side much more logical, because there wouldn't be much of a difference between the dark and the light. What is good or evil when both sides are striving relentlessly for power?
Rather than presenting Obi-wan as an idealist, the films should have gradually revealed him to be deeply cynical. His language is full of the promised Jedi ideals, but his actions reveal him to be incredibly ambitious. He is one of the most capable Jedi of his day but he'll do anything to achieve his goals, and he will have only a limited attachment to the truth.
Telling the stories in this light would have made the choices Anakin made very ambiguous. Is he really going over to the dark side or is he just becoming a slightly different shade of dark, since the good guys are corrupt beyond all repair?
And it would offer a new complexity to the original trilogy. Rather than a clear-cut battle of good vs. evil, it becomes all about the return of the old nobility. Obi-wan lies to Luke in order to make Luke into a weapon by which he can accomplish his revenge. He knows the truth about the Jedi but fills Luke's head full of one-dimensional fairy tales and gets away with it because Luke is very lucky but not all that bright. Yoda is old and senile, and comes by his delusions honestly, thinking the past was much better than it ever was. And the end of the Empire only means that the old noble class will return to its former position of power and doesn't mean that power will now reside in the hands of citizenry.
But, I guess that version of the prequels would be too cynical for a mainstream audience.
There's already an ebook application (books.app) for the iPhone/iPod Touch and if you've used jailbreak, you probably already know about it.
In terms of how it looks, the text is incredibly smooth even at small sizes and using the touch interface makes it easy to move forward in the book. For someone who read a few books on my old Palm Vx, this is the perfect size and shape for a reader.
Books, including most of the Gutenberg collection, formatted specifically for the iPhone can already be found at manybooks.
And it includes a backlight. For me, one of the key advantages of an ebook is not worrying about the light source and therefore being able to read in places where the light isn't good or when the person next to you in bed is trying to sleep. I'll never understand why the various e-paper devices don't have some sort of integrated lighting.
I'm wondering if these emails were partially inspired by a Slashdot post. Assuming I'm remembering it correctly, there was a story here about possibly spamming people in China and other internet-restricted places telling them about anonymous proxies, Tor, and other tools to get around gov't censorship.
Thats what I was thinking when I first got one of these emails. I thought that someone went ahead and actually sent out the privacy-oriented spam. Tor is something that your ordinary Pogo-playing, pr0n-surfing user isn't going to know about, so why use Tor in a phishing, bot-infection scenario?
Still strikes me as odd that they would use Tor as the bait. You'd think they would have picked something more appealing to the masses.
We made ESL software, entirely for institutional use. Every now and then the executives would get a wild hair about trying to find a way into the consumer market but all they could think of was just re-marketing the boring school version. So I'd sometimes get invited to their meetings and would try to tell them this wouldn't sell at all.
Their main focus was Japan, and I thought I had a semi-clever idea that would make their product much different than the usual English stuff sold there. I've never designed a game before, but I've wasted too much of my life playing games, and have played a lot of JRPG's. So the basic idea was pretty simple. Create a FF-esque epic, complete with blonde emo boy with a forgotten past, and a blue-haired emo girl with many secrets and they have to save the world from the demons or whatever.
Of course, as the story gets underway, they encounter ancient ruins of a lost race and find fragments of their writing. The writing is in English, very simple English at first. In order to progress in the game, cast spells, find clues, etc., the player has to learn some English. Very simple words at first then, later in the game, they discover the ancient mysterious race isn't entirely dead, and the heroes have to converse in the ancient race's language, and by the time of the final boss battles, they have to have a certain level of English proficiency to win.
I thought it was a good idea. Makes language learning a little more fun than the usual drills and memorization, would take advantage of an otaku's desire to see everything in a game and learn all the secrets and hidden weapons, and was a nice little joke about how some Japanese view gaijin: as something very alien and mysterious. And this sort of game would be easily portable to other languages.
The executives thought this was a great idea but wasted too much money on hookers and blow to actually pursue anything new and risky.
I had a less formed idea vaguely related to GTA. The basic concept was to have the player role-play a tourist in an American city, driving around, and interact with the locals, with the structure of the game being more or less non-linear (and non-violent). There would be overlapping storylines with lots of conversation practice. The whole idea was to give the usual sort of conversation practice you'd find in language learning, but with storylines and game goals to make it less boring than the usual sort of stilted conversations you'd find in textbooks.
That idea was realized, not by my company, but by an Army contractor who created an Arabic trainer designed for the troops. The engine was based on a modified Unread Tournament engine and had the player drive around Iraqi villages, interact with the locals in their language, and make split-second determinations about who to trust, who to arrest, and who to ignore, with in-game problems developing when you made the wrong decisions.
Was actually kinda sad when someone beat our company to market with that concept, when I had laid out the basic groundwork for that idea back in early '02. Oh well.
You can have both math rock and metal in the same package.
Meshuggah would work. I'm not a musician so I don't know what sort of beat they're using but it's something that is far from the norm and does funny things to my brain. Kinda reminds me a little of Autechre but without any electronics.
My idea probably isn't all that original but I haven't seen anyone else do it. I wanted relatively secure passwords without having to remember or write down some terribly arcane phrase.
So I wrote a little windows program, which resides on my usb key, that does the conversion for me. For example, I can easily remember the phrase 'fluffybunnyhops' and want to use it as my pw. Put that phrase into the program and the output is: pHl+0F4pHy@!b08Nn!yH20p@$
So all I have to remember is the thing about the bunny and I get a semi-decent password as a result. And since the program result is dumped onto the clipboard, using this method would defeat simple keyloggers that don't grab the clipboard, since all they would see is the unaltered password, not the correct one. Unless there's something about keyloggers I don't know about. I've never played with one before.
Isn't perfectly secure, obviously, but is probably more useful than coming up with a secure password on your own and then forgetting it later.
With the easy availability of 3G phones, the answer to the problem is pretty obvious. Get a data-enabled cell phone and use it with your company computer, or with your own personal laptop. There's no log on the company side at all this way. Its even better than using an SSL enabled proxy as you won't be seen having a constant connection to a site like that.
Its still not a perfect solution. If you're in a secured workplace with no cell phones allowed, or if they have the corporate desktop completely locked up, then there's not much you can do. But should work wonderfully in the majority of potential situations.
Even better is using your own equipment exclusively: personal laptop or a PDA/Phone combo. This would prevent any internal tracking software from seeing that you're goofing off. At my last corporate job, I helped write what was basically internal spyware which would have detected such usage patterns. I would assume my company wasn't alone in doing this.
Here's a cheerfully colorful map to help get you started on the road to enlightenment or some reasonable facsilime thereof: Botched Paramilitary Police Raids
Not true at all. Not only does Sprint not charge more, but they have a completely open policy towards 3rd party apps. The only thing they'll do is nag you when installing a new app with a warning that this might be dangerous. Other than that, there isn't any impediment.
And there's no attempt to lock down bluetooth. They tried locking it with one of their first BT-capable phones but then they did something very surprising for a cell phone company: they listened to customer complaints and offered a firmware update to unlock it and haven't locked it on any of the current models, as far as I know.
They're pretty flexible with data plans. Since my unlimited data is for a phone, not for one of their wireless cards, I'm not supposed to use it extensively with a computer. But after the DSL went out for three days, I used the 3G phone as a replacement connection and had it connected for almost the entire 3 days. No complaints from them and no extra charges.
So I'm surprised they're not a more popular company with the geek crowd. As far as I can see, they're the least restrictive of any of the major American carriers.
And now that I've said something nice about a cell phone company, they'll probably implement some terrible policy tomorrow.
Just a guess but I would think the major labels told Apple they could not sell drm-free music in any form, because having unprotected songs from one label would make the others look bad and possibly hurt their sales.
This game could be great if the developers make it similar to Eve with elements of a Tale in the Desert and maybe a little of Second Life.
There would be a backstory of what things were like before the apocalypse, but no story forced on the current circumstances of the game. New players would start, either in a shelter or in one of the undestroyed towns, and would face a huge and unknown world. Your character would know what used to be there, before the nuclear war, but wouldn't know the current conditions.
The players that start in the shelters would be generic human. Players who start outside would have the option of various mutations. This would create the basic "races" in the game.
From this point, what happens is entirely up to the players. Be a scavenger and loot what you can find in the devastated cities. Or become a 'Mad Max' raider, driving your death buggies across the desert while wearing a mohawk and assless chaps, looking for what gasoline you can find, raiding towns along the way. Or take a more peaceful path, find a relatively undevastated valley which is easy to defend, and start a town. Or do a mixture of peaceful and violent, by founding a town, loot the ruins to build a stockpile of the necesssary supplies, build structures that help you replenish those supplies, and then start a town militia that raids other towns. After enough conquest, eventually nations would form and there might be some sort of order. Or, what would be more enjoyable, there would be massive wars between the new countries.
This way the players fully control the environment and create the history. If a particular area gets too civilized, the game managers could simply add a new server which expands the land available and the possibilities grow.
Like Eve or Second Life, this would work best if everyone was in the same universe at once.
And, like Second Life, there would need to be a comprehensive building system, which would allow you to take the found materials and create something new. And, like a good RTS, factories and mines could ultimately be built which would replenish those supplies.
In-game entrepeneurship would be encouraged, and all in-game businesses would be player created. From places to buy guns and tanks, to places to buy black leather chaps and mohawk dye, to the creation of banks and probably ultimately a stock market, this would all be player controlled.
This is the sort of game I'd play, not another retread of WoW where nothing really changes or happens.
I was really curious about the success rate of a pump & dump scheme so I took a look into my spam folder recently. Starting on Wednesday, I received three emails advocating TORA.OB. So I started tracking that stock.
Looking at the company's filings showed a rather pathetic operation with a miniscule amount of revenue. However, the volume on the company has skyrocketed in the past few days. Its gone from nearly no trading to 296,000 shares traded yesterday and 31,000 so far today. The price has shown a nice increase too, going from around 0.75 on Wednesday to 1.01 today, with it hitting highs around 1.10.
Have to say I was surprised this spam worked. You don't have to be a financial expert to know this company is full of shit. Just reading the financials was rather amusing.
Wish I had mod points for you as I'm always happy to see a defense of Sinclair. I thought his role was acted perfectly and I preferred the reserved, dignified, haunted Sinclair to the happy-go-lucky Sheridan.
It takes around 3 hours to fly from my city to my family's city. Takes about 14 hours to drive. Considering that I can't afford 1st class, those three hours are spent in a crowded cabin, and with my bad luck, I seem to end up in the middle seat a lot. Being 6'1", those three hours are very cramped. Not to mention the security detail which seems to pick me for extended searching more often than not and the fact I have to drive an hour from my burbclave to the airport, leaving two hours before the flight time to ensure I arrive an hour early and then spend around an hour after landing, waiting for the luggage and picking up the rented car, then driving about an hour from the airport to the parent's house way out in their bfe burb. So thats 7 hours out of my day for flying.
Compare that to the somewhat longer 14 hour drive, but in my big Jeep, I get to stretch out, not breathe in the stale air, free of crowds. No security checks. No rushing from place to place to get things done. No one cares how much luggage I bring and how its stored and what's in it. Can even have a cigar if I feel like it.
Its pretty much a no-brainer to choose driving when faced with those sorts of choices. I sacrifice my time for freedom.
This discussion makes me think of a discussion waaay back in my college days in the early 90's, at the beginning of the Clinton Administration. Things like the clipper chip and Waco were making some of us a bit paranoid (little did we know things would get much much worse..) and we were discussing how the US might actually become a totalitarian state. Most of my friends had variations on the whole 1984 scenario but I kept telling them how the perfect, modern dictatorship would implement freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc.
And apparently I was right. The powers-that-be today know that a centralized Stalinist gov't would be terribly inefficient and undoubtably unsuccessful at whatever it wanted to do. Much better to have a decentralized economy and system which gives the appearance of freedom while control is still maintained at the top. When you think about it, allowing people to bitch as much as they want about the government is really harmless in most cases. You let the citizens blow off a little steam and, in the end, they'll do little to nothing about wanting to dismantle the state or rid themselves of the current government. In fact, by blowing off steam by writing various mean things in their blog, they'll be convinced they're part of the "system" and able to effect change when, in reality, they're about as powerful as any comrade in the old Soviet system.
But there are small steps which can be taken which will be mostly invisible to the public. Allow people to say what they want but cut them out of the government or corporate job system by denying access if what they wrote on their blogs is too incindiary. For the true troublemakers, silence them with actions seemingly unconnected to their actions. For example, in the near future, the regime could "discover" child porn in a hidden directory on Kos's servers, allowing them to shut everything down in a way which would cause probably roughly 50 percent of Kos's supporters to disavow the man and his efforts.
And they could do things such as create a financial "no-fly" list which would give them the power to arbitrarily freeze the finances of anyone they wish, thus completely locking an individual out of any above-ground commerce. Such lists could also be further extended to all forms of transportation, not just aircraft, meaning an id check for all bus, train, subway tickets and a background check before you're allowed to purchase or license a car, thus severely limiting mobility for any target. This would essentially create an internal passport system in a way that almost no one would really notice.
While we're creating registries, should probably also create one for guns. Of course, such a system won't keep guns out of the hands of criminals but thats not the point. Crime rarely is threatening to the government. Instead, you would want to keep legal, easily-purchased guns out of the hands of anyone who has the potential to be a part of any armed resistance.
Secret detentions could be ramped up a bit. But the key to using all of these new powers is to use them relatively sparingly so that the citizenry never really notices and therefore never really wakes up. The bad things only happen to people who are "terrorist sympathizers", "unpatriotic", "drug dealers", "child pornographers", "tax cheats" and therefore will never happen to me because I'm a good citizen who doesn't complain much and always pays taxes on time. Enemies of the state will never be labeled as such but rather with a label that will easily make the uninformed disavow them.
The jackbooted future will look a lot like the present. Most people, as long as they have the necessities of life and at least a few luxuries, will never protest, never wake up, and will ultimately not stand in the way of whatever the government wants to do. They'll be convinced they're free because they'll face no penalty for looking at that insulting web cartoon of the President. They won't initially like the constant surveillance but eventually they'll get used to it because not on
I like Turtledove and have read many, many of his books though one of his earliest, Guns of the South, remains my favorite.
This was just a gentle dig at the guy, whose characters are, to be kind, rather two dimensional. I think I would enjoy his books much more if they were structured as imaginary histories rather than novels. Though I'm probably the only one who thinks so.
I really hate plots dependent upon idiots. They're so bloody banal and completely unbelievable.
Was reading this alt-history book about a completely useless and improbable war. Apparently there was this relatively evil empire barely beaten in a long war, and then a new, much more evil leader takes over the evil empire and manages to convince the leading powers to just give him entire countries, even when the other powers could have easily crushed him. Then he joins forces with another equally evil leader and surprises these idiots by launching lots of invasions. Then the other evil leader is shocked when the evil empire turns on him too. What a bunch of bloody idiots! Not to mention yet another set of evil idiots who picked a fight with a country twenty times their size, though that country was somehow surprised by the attack even though they could read all the encrypted transmissions. "World War II" was complete drivel and a pointless sequel to that fair-to-middling book called, imaginatively enough, "World War I". Can't remember who wrote it but, with the flatness of the plot and characters, it was probably Turtledove.
So I gave up on that crap and started watching a movie about some imaginary American president who never read the newspapers but somehow managed to start a war against some minor country on the basis of lies even a child could see through, after he was caught napping by a bunch of barely competent terrorists. Of course, to advance the plot, the minor country had nothing to do with the terrorists, and was ruled by some incompetent moustachioed kitten-eating dictator straight out of central casting, circa 1915. I think the director just wanted to draw the audience in with some big explosions with a villain so laughably evil that everyone would just hiss at him and ignore the huge plot holes.
Anyways, there was also this really pointless subplot involving some idiot who used to run some horse organization who, after being fired, was put in charge of emergency systems or something, and then he managed to sit twiddling his thumbs while some city was utterly destroyed. Not sure what the point of showing this idiot was other than maybe the director has some bug up his ass about global warming and wanted to make a point using a sledgehammer.
The film's plot was so completely dependent upon idiots that I left the movie early and have no idea how it ended. Feel free to post spoilers here.
So, yeah, there's no relvance to these idiot plots. Wish writers would stop using them and stop relying on special effects, banal good/evil imagery, and absolutely stupid characters to get their points across.
I started the GTA series with 3 so don't know much about the previous games. 3 and Vice City (as far as I remember) allow you to make your own moral choices without being forced to by the main storyline missions.
Have to disagree. Fido (Claude?) was perfect as is. By being silent, he allowed GTA3 to be a true RPG. You never had his backstory, his personality, or any sort of character development intrude into your imagination of what sort of character he would be.
And the missions were perfect. If you avoided the rampages, you never had to kill innocents. So you could easily be a 'noble' mobster who doesn't endanger the lives of bystanders. You save the gun, baseball bat, grenades, rockets, etc., for the people who are soldiers: other gangsters or the police.
That was what was perfect about GTA3: you could make your own moral choices. Even though the game let you play sniper, run over pedestrians, or kill prostitutes for their money, you didn't have to. You could even be especially moral and only steal parked cars or police cars, thus endangering innocents even less.
I liked Vice City and San Andreas, but the games lost something when the main guy started to talk. San Andreas lost extra points by having missions where you had to kill innocents in order to advance.
Actually they should set up a flexible pricing scheme which would start at 10 to 20 cents, with the price going up based on the bitrate of the file, capping at around 1.00-2.00 if you're downloading a lossless file.
If the DRM wasn't too hefty, then this pricing scheme would severely reduce the number of people using the P2P services.
You gotta wonder how much a site like allofmp3 is making when they price tracks at roughly.10 per song.
The labels could sell via their own sites, and cut out the middleman of Apple, Napster, et al. And convert millions of file sharers into customers again.
Slashdot Mirror
BusHitler Backlash
And note that all mainstream Democrats distanced themselves from this ad and from any connection to it.
While the Bush / Hitler comparisons are over the top (I'd personally think of Bush / Cheney more in the Mussolini-lite mode, though not quite as competent as Il Duce), there was the war of aggression, wiretapping, torture, illegal detentions, blocking "dissidents" from attending their public rallies, and the exploitation of people's fear for political gain. Even a Republican should have felt uneasy at what was going on.
Compare this to... basically wanting to expand Medicare / Medicaid to all Americans. Which is bringing out the Republican / Conservative pundits in droves to make the Hitler comparisons and express their paranoid fears of death panels. And from their political leaders, there's not an ounce of serious pushback on this rhetoric. Some are actually encouraging people to think this way.
The Republicans are either silent or actively encouraging the crazies. The Democrats, both in and out of power, have done everything they can to run away from the crazies on their side. There's no equivalence here.
For the PC with Mass Effect, any chance you ever run Process Explorer on that machine?
I ran into this issue just today. Was thinking about buying Spore and so I fired up the Creature Creator. Which refused to start, due to Securom. After a bit of research, I found out that Securom hates Process Explorer so much, that its "protected" games won't start if Process Explorer has been used at any time during the current computer session. I had always thought it would barf just when Process Explorer was currently running.
So, in theory, the game will run after a reboot. But why should I reboot my machine just to play a game? Because I used some tool on my machine that had nothing to do with the DRM?
Anyways, this was the first time Securom has bitten me and was enough to make me decide against buying Spore.
Actually a great way to defeat this would be to embed the link everywhere as the modern paranoid rickroll.
Get it voted up on Reddit and get everyone to click on it as an act of protest.
The FBI system will be so overloaded they'll have to give up and this will be a failure.
Reading all those "versus" links almost makes me want to form a new corporation, calling it Xenu, Inc. And then using the corp for anti-Scientology activities and hoping they would take me to court so that the case would read:
Scientology v. Xenu
That would be a thing of beauty.
Just wanted to add a quick thought about those bloody midichlorians and how they could be made effective in the story...
In the scenario I described, the midichlorians would work as the first big reveal of how the Jedi aren't quite what they seemed. Anakin would get the sermons about the mystical mumbo-jumbo that would be an exact echo of what Obi-wan said in Episode IV. Anakin could still get scanned but he wouldn't be told what they were scanning for.
Later on, would be a big reveal that his abilities are purely natural in origin and the mysticism was all ultimately just window dressing. This would be the point at which Anakin starts to lose his faith. If there's no truth to the mystical origins, then there's probably no truth to the notions of 'light' and 'dark' sides.
And, again, this makes Obi-wan's later talks with Luke that much more cynical. Obi-wan parrots the old party line because he knows an idealistic young hick like Luke isn't going to be inspired by talks about physiology. Luke will do anything if he is some divinely inspired 'Chosen One' but he used to sleep through the Tatooine Public Schools biology classes, and would rather go back to dirt farming if he knew alien cells in his bloodstream was the reason.
So the midichlorians could have been a great symbol of how the Jedi lie to themselves and to the Republic. I would imagine it would have been a tightly held secret that would have blown everything apart if it was widely known. Even the Sith would have maintained this secret. I think this would have been a great plot point to build on what was established in the first trilogy.
Having the prequels being mostly about the Jedi could have been great, if George had just read a bit of history and actually understood human nature.
All he had to do was show the Jedi at the seeming height of their powers but with extensive internal decay. They have high standards and impossibly strict rules, but depending on who you are, a blind eye could be turned on various rules violations. Show them slowly becoming corrupt with their power and becoming too fond of the respect and privileges of their position.
More importantly, show them as rigid fundamentalists: they think they know what is right for the rest of the galaxy despite being cloistered away from mainstream society for much of their lives. And they tend to jump in feet first in the various causes they intervene in. Would have been nice to see the Jedi take on a noble cause and then somehow leave the situation much worse than it was before. The current crop of neo-cons and fundie Christians would have been a perfect model for the Jedi. Or, for a historical reference, the mindset of the Imperial Japanese military.
A decadent, myopic Jedi, drunk on their own power and trapped in their ancient traditions, would have been a beautiful thing to see. And Anakin should have been initially cast as a teenager who would have then played the classic role of the outsider becoming an insider, and all the bullshit that is entailed in that process. He would have been the eyes of the audience, gradually revealing the sickness within the organization and the deep divide between what the group promised and what they actually delivered.
And this would have made the switch to the dark side much more logical, because there wouldn't be much of a difference between the dark and the light. What is good or evil when both sides are striving relentlessly for power?
Rather than presenting Obi-wan as an idealist, the films should have gradually revealed him to be deeply cynical. His language is full of the promised Jedi ideals, but his actions reveal him to be incredibly ambitious. He is one of the most capable Jedi of his day but he'll do anything to achieve his goals, and he will have only a limited attachment to the truth.
Telling the stories in this light would have made the choices Anakin made very ambiguous. Is he really going over to the dark side or is he just becoming a slightly different shade of dark, since the good guys are corrupt beyond all repair?
And it would offer a new complexity to the original trilogy. Rather than a clear-cut battle of good vs. evil, it becomes all about the return of the old nobility. Obi-wan lies to Luke in order to make Luke into a weapon by which he can accomplish his revenge. He knows the truth about the Jedi but fills Luke's head full of one-dimensional fairy tales and gets away with it because Luke is very lucky but not all that bright. Yoda is old and senile, and comes by his delusions honestly, thinking the past was much better than it ever was. And the end of the Empire only means that the old noble class will return to its former position of power and doesn't mean that power will now reside in the hands of citizenry.
But, I guess that version of the prequels would be too cynical for a mainstream audience.
There's already an ebook application (books.app) for the iPhone/iPod Touch and if you've used jailbreak, you probably already know about it.
In terms of how it looks, the text is incredibly smooth even at small sizes and using the touch interface makes it easy to move forward in the book. For someone who read a few books on my old Palm Vx, this is the perfect size and shape for a reader.
Books, including most of the Gutenberg collection, formatted specifically for the iPhone can already be found at manybooks.
And it includes a backlight. For me, one of the key advantages of an ebook is not worrying about the light source and therefore being able to read in places where the light isn't good or when the person next to you in bed is trying to sleep. I'll never understand why the various e-paper devices don't have some sort of integrated lighting.
I'm wondering if these emails were partially inspired by a Slashdot post. Assuming I'm remembering it correctly, there was a story here about possibly spamming people in China and other internet-restricted places telling them about anonymous proxies, Tor, and other tools to get around gov't censorship.
Thats what I was thinking when I first got one of these emails. I thought that someone went ahead and actually sent out the privacy-oriented spam. Tor is something that your ordinary Pogo-playing, pr0n-surfing user isn't going to know about, so why use Tor in a phishing, bot-infection scenario?
Still strikes me as odd that they would use Tor as the bait. You'd think they would have picked something more appealing to the masses.
We made ESL software, entirely for institutional use. Every now and then the executives would get a wild hair about trying to find a way into the consumer market but all they could think of was just re-marketing the boring school version. So I'd sometimes get invited to their meetings and would try to tell them this wouldn't sell at all.
Their main focus was Japan, and I thought I had a semi-clever idea that would make their product much different than the usual English stuff sold there. I've never designed a game before, but I've wasted too much of my life playing games, and have played a lot of JRPG's. So the basic idea was pretty simple. Create a FF-esque epic, complete with blonde emo boy with a forgotten past, and a blue-haired emo girl with many secrets and they have to save the world from the demons or whatever.
Of course, as the story gets underway, they encounter ancient ruins of a lost race and find fragments of their writing. The writing is in English, very simple English at first. In order to progress in the game, cast spells, find clues, etc., the player has to learn some English. Very simple words at first then, later in the game, they discover the ancient mysterious race isn't entirely dead, and the heroes have to converse in the ancient race's language, and by the time of the final boss battles, they have to have a certain level of English proficiency to win.
I thought it was a good idea. Makes language learning a little more fun than the usual drills and memorization, would take advantage of an otaku's desire to see everything in a game and learn all the secrets and hidden weapons, and was a nice little joke about how some Japanese view gaijin: as something very alien and mysterious. And this sort of game would be easily portable to other languages.
The executives thought this was a great idea but wasted too much money on hookers and blow to actually pursue anything new and risky.
I had a less formed idea vaguely related to GTA. The basic concept was to have the player role-play a tourist in an American city, driving around, and interact with the locals, with the structure of the game being more or less non-linear (and non-violent). There would be overlapping storylines with lots of conversation practice. The whole idea was to give the usual sort of conversation practice you'd find in language learning, but with storylines and game goals to make it less boring than the usual sort of stilted conversations you'd find in textbooks.
That idea was realized, not by my company, but by an Army contractor who created an Arabic trainer designed for the troops. The engine was based on a modified Unread Tournament engine and had the player drive around Iraqi villages, interact with the locals in their language, and make split-second determinations about who to trust, who to arrest, and who to ignore, with in-game problems developing when you made the wrong decisions.
Was actually kinda sad when someone beat our company to market with that concept, when I had laid out the basic groundwork for that idea back in early '02. Oh well.
You can have both math rock and metal in the same package.
Meshuggah would work. I'm not a musician so I don't know what sort of beat they're using but it's something that is far from the norm and does funny things to my brain. Kinda reminds me a little of Autechre but without any electronics.
My idea probably isn't all that original but I haven't seen anyone else do it. I wanted relatively secure passwords without having to remember or write down some terribly arcane phrase.
So I wrote a little windows program, which resides on my usb key, that does the conversion for me. For example, I can easily remember the phrase 'fluffybunnyhops' and want to use it as my pw. Put that phrase into the program and the output is: pHl+0F4pHy@!b08Nn!yH20p@$
So all I have to remember is the thing about the bunny and I get a semi-decent password as a result. And since the program result is dumped onto the clipboard, using this method would defeat simple keyloggers that don't grab the clipboard, since all they would see is the unaltered password, not the correct one. Unless there's something about keyloggers I don't know about. I've never played with one before.
Isn't perfectly secure, obviously, but is probably more useful than coming up with a secure password on your own and then forgetting it later.
With the easy availability of 3G phones, the answer to the problem is pretty obvious. Get a data-enabled cell phone and use it with your company computer, or with your own personal laptop. There's no log on the company side at all this way. Its even better than using an SSL enabled proxy as you won't be seen having a constant connection to a site like that.
Its still not a perfect solution. If you're in a secured workplace with no cell phones allowed, or if they have the corporate desktop completely locked up, then there's not much you can do. But should work wonderfully in the majority of potential situations.
Even better is using your own equipment exclusively: personal laptop or a PDA/Phone combo. This would prevent any internal tracking software from seeing that you're goofing off. At my last corporate job, I helped write what was basically internal spyware which would have detected such usage patterns. I would assume my company wasn't alone in doing this.
You're not paying attention.
Here's a cheerfully colorful map to help get you started on the road to enlightenment or some reasonable facsilime thereof: Botched Paramilitary Police Raids
Not true at all. Not only does Sprint not charge more, but they have a completely open policy towards 3rd party apps. The only thing they'll do is nag you when installing a new app with a warning that this might be dangerous. Other than that, there isn't any impediment.
And there's no attempt to lock down bluetooth. They tried locking it with one of their first BT-capable phones but then they did something very surprising for a cell phone company: they listened to customer complaints and offered a firmware update to unlock it and haven't locked it on any of the current models, as far as I know.
They're pretty flexible with data plans. Since my unlimited data is for a phone, not for one of their wireless cards, I'm not supposed to use it extensively with a computer. But after the DSL went out for three days, I used the 3G phone as a replacement connection and had it connected for almost the entire 3 days. No complaints from them and no extra charges.
So I'm surprised they're not a more popular company with the geek crowd. As far as I can see, they're the least restrictive of any of the major American carriers.
And now that I've said something nice about a cell phone company, they'll probably implement some terrible policy tomorrow.
Just a guess but I would think the major labels told Apple they could not sell drm-free music in any form, because having unprotected songs from one label would make the others look bad and possibly hurt their sales.
This game could be great if the developers make it similar to Eve with elements of a Tale in the Desert and maybe a little of Second Life.
There would be a backstory of what things were like before the apocalypse, but no story forced on the current circumstances of the game. New players would start, either in a shelter or in one of the undestroyed towns, and would face a huge and unknown world. Your character would know what used to be there, before the nuclear war, but wouldn't know the current conditions.
The players that start in the shelters would be generic human. Players who start outside would have the option of various mutations. This would create the basic "races" in the game.
From this point, what happens is entirely up to the players. Be a scavenger and loot what you can find in the devastated cities. Or become a 'Mad Max' raider, driving your death buggies across the desert while wearing a mohawk and assless chaps, looking for what gasoline you can find, raiding towns along the way. Or take a more peaceful path, find a relatively undevastated valley which is easy to defend, and start a town. Or do a mixture of peaceful and violent, by founding a town, loot the ruins to build a stockpile of the necesssary supplies, build structures that help you replenish those supplies, and then start a town militia that raids other towns. After enough conquest, eventually nations would form and there might be some sort of order. Or, what would be more enjoyable, there would be massive wars between the new countries.
This way the players fully control the environment and create the history. If a particular area gets too civilized, the game managers could simply add a new server which expands the land available and the possibilities grow.
Like Eve or Second Life, this would work best if everyone was in the same universe at once.
And, like Second Life, there would need to be a comprehensive building system, which would allow you to take the found materials and create something new. And, like a good RTS, factories and mines could ultimately be built which would replenish those supplies.
In-game entrepeneurship would be encouraged, and all in-game businesses would be player created. From places to buy guns and tanks, to places to buy black leather chaps and mohawk dye, to the creation of banks and probably ultimately a stock market, this would all be player controlled.
This is the sort of game I'd play, not another retread of WoW where nothing really changes or happens.
I was really curious about the success rate of a pump & dump scheme so I took a look into my spam folder recently. Starting on Wednesday, I received three emails advocating TORA.OB. So I started tracking that stock.
Looking at the company's filings showed a rather pathetic operation with a miniscule amount of revenue. However, the volume on the company has skyrocketed in the past few days. Its gone from nearly no trading to 296,000 shares traded yesterday and 31,000 so far today. The price has shown a nice increase too, going from around 0.75 on Wednesday to 1.01 today, with it hitting highs around 1.10.
Have to say I was surprised this spam worked. You don't have to be a financial expert to know this company is full of shit. Just reading the financials was rather amusing.
Wish I had mod points for you as I'm always happy to see a defense of Sinclair. I thought his role was acted perfectly and I preferred the reserved, dignified, haunted Sinclair to the happy-go-lucky Sheridan.
It takes around 3 hours to fly from my city to my family's city. Takes about 14 hours to drive. Considering that I can't afford 1st class, those three hours are spent in a crowded cabin, and with my bad luck, I seem to end up in the middle seat a lot. Being 6'1", those three hours are very cramped. Not to mention the security detail which seems to pick me for extended searching more often than not and the fact I have to drive an hour from my burbclave to the airport, leaving two hours before the flight time to ensure I arrive an hour early and then spend around an hour after landing, waiting for the luggage and picking up the rented car, then driving about an hour from the airport to the parent's house way out in their bfe burb. So thats 7 hours out of my day for flying.
Compare that to the somewhat longer 14 hour drive, but in my big Jeep, I get to stretch out, not breathe in the stale air, free of crowds. No security checks. No rushing from place to place to get things done. No one cares how much luggage I bring and how its stored and what's in it. Can even have a cigar if I feel like it.
Its pretty much a no-brainer to choose driving when faced with those sorts of choices. I sacrifice my time for freedom.
This discussion makes me think of a discussion waaay back in my college days in the early 90's, at the beginning of the Clinton Administration. Things like the clipper chip and Waco were making some of us a bit paranoid (little did we know things would get much much worse..) and we were discussing how the US might actually become a totalitarian state. Most of my friends had variations on the whole 1984 scenario but I kept telling them how the perfect, modern dictatorship would implement freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc.
And apparently I was right. The powers-that-be today know that a centralized Stalinist gov't would be terribly inefficient and undoubtably unsuccessful at whatever it wanted to do. Much better to have a decentralized economy and system which gives the appearance of freedom while control is still maintained at the top. When you think about it, allowing people to bitch as much as they want about the government is really harmless in most cases. You let the citizens blow off a little steam and, in the end, they'll do little to nothing about wanting to dismantle the state or rid themselves of the current government. In fact, by blowing off steam by writing various mean things in their blog, they'll be convinced they're part of the "system" and able to effect change when, in reality, they're about as powerful as any comrade in the old Soviet system.
But there are small steps which can be taken which will be mostly invisible to the public. Allow people to say what they want but cut them out of the government or corporate job system by denying access if what they wrote on their blogs is too incindiary. For the true troublemakers, silence them with actions seemingly unconnected to their actions. For example, in the near future, the regime could "discover" child porn in a hidden directory on Kos's servers, allowing them to shut everything down in a way which would cause probably roughly 50 percent of Kos's supporters to disavow the man and his efforts.
And they could do things such as create a financial "no-fly" list which would give them the power to arbitrarily freeze the finances of anyone they wish, thus completely locking an individual out of any above-ground commerce. Such lists could also be further extended to all forms of transportation, not just aircraft, meaning an id check for all bus, train, subway tickets and a background check before you're allowed to purchase or license a car, thus severely limiting mobility for any target. This would essentially create an internal passport system in a way that almost no one would really notice.
While we're creating registries, should probably also create one for guns. Of course, such a system won't keep guns out of the hands of criminals but thats not the point. Crime rarely is threatening to the government. Instead, you would want to keep legal, easily-purchased guns out of the hands of anyone who has the potential to be a part of any armed resistance.
Secret detentions could be ramped up a bit. But the key to using all of these new powers is to use them relatively sparingly so that the citizenry never really notices and therefore never really wakes up. The bad things only happen to people who are "terrorist sympathizers", "unpatriotic", "drug dealers", "child pornographers", "tax cheats" and therefore will never happen to me because I'm a good citizen who doesn't complain much and always pays taxes on time. Enemies of the state will never be labeled as such but rather with a label that will easily make the uninformed disavow them.
The jackbooted future will look a lot like the present. Most people, as long as they have the necessities of life and at least a few luxuries, will never protest, never wake up, and will ultimately not stand in the way of whatever the government wants to do. They'll be convinced they're free because they'll face no penalty for looking at that insulting web cartoon of the President. They won't initially like the constant surveillance but eventually they'll get used to it because not on
I like Turtledove and have read many, many of his books though one of his earliest, Guns of the South, remains my favorite.
This was just a gentle dig at the guy, whose characters are, to be kind, rather two dimensional. I think I would enjoy his books much more if they were structured as imaginary histories rather than novels. Though I'm probably the only one who thinks so.
I really hate plots dependent upon idiots. They're so bloody banal and completely unbelievable.
Was reading this alt-history book about a completely useless and improbable war. Apparently there was this relatively evil empire barely beaten in a long war, and then a new, much more evil leader takes over the evil empire and manages to convince the leading powers to just give him entire countries, even when the other powers could have easily crushed him. Then he joins forces with another equally evil leader and surprises these idiots by launching lots of invasions. Then the other evil leader is shocked when the evil empire turns on him too. What a bunch of bloody idiots! Not to mention yet another set of evil idiots who picked a fight with a country twenty times their size, though that country was somehow surprised by the attack even though they could read all the encrypted transmissions. "World War II" was complete drivel and a pointless sequel to that fair-to-middling book called, imaginatively enough, "World War I". Can't remember who wrote it but, with the flatness of the plot and characters, it was probably Turtledove.
So I gave up on that crap and started watching a movie about some imaginary American president who never read the newspapers but somehow managed to start a war against some minor country on the basis of lies even a child could see through, after he was caught napping by a bunch of barely competent terrorists. Of course, to advance the plot, the minor country had nothing to do with the terrorists, and was ruled by some incompetent moustachioed kitten-eating dictator straight out of central casting, circa 1915. I think the director just wanted to draw the audience in with some big explosions with a villain so laughably evil that everyone would just hiss at him and ignore the huge plot holes.
Anyways, there was also this really pointless subplot involving some idiot who used to run some horse organization who, after being fired, was put in charge of emergency systems or something, and then he managed to sit twiddling his thumbs while some city was utterly destroyed. Not sure what the point of showing this idiot was other than maybe the director has some bug up his ass about global warming and wanted to make a point using a sledgehammer.
The film's plot was so completely dependent upon idiots that I left the movie early and have no idea how it ended. Feel free to post spoilers here.
So, yeah, there's no relvance to these idiot plots. Wish writers would stop using them and stop relying on special effects, banal good/evil imagery, and absolutely stupid characters to get their points across.
I started the GTA series with 3 so don't know much about the previous games. 3 and Vice City (as far as I remember) allow you to make your own moral choices without being forced to by the main storyline missions.
Have to disagree. Fido (Claude?) was perfect as is. By being silent, he allowed GTA3 to be a true RPG. You never had his backstory, his personality, or any sort of character development intrude into your imagination of what sort of character he would be.
And the missions were perfect. If you avoided the rampages, you never had to kill innocents. So you could easily be a 'noble' mobster who doesn't endanger the lives of bystanders. You save the gun, baseball bat, grenades, rockets, etc., for the people who are soldiers: other gangsters or the police.
That was what was perfect about GTA3: you could make your own moral choices. Even though the game let you play sniper, run over pedestrians, or kill prostitutes for their money, you didn't have to. You could even be especially moral and only steal parked cars or police cars, thus endangering innocents even less.
I liked Vice City and San Andreas, but the games lost something when the main guy started to talk. San Andreas lost extra points by having missions where you had to kill innocents in order to advance.
Actually they should set up a flexible pricing scheme which would start at 10 to 20 cents, with the price going up based on the bitrate of the file, capping at around 1.00-2.00 if you're downloading a lossless file.
.10 per song.
If the DRM wasn't too hefty, then this pricing scheme would severely reduce the number of people using the P2P services.
You gotta wonder how much a site like allofmp3 is making when they price tracks at roughly
The labels could sell via their own sites, and cut out the middleman of Apple, Napster, et al. And convert millions of file sharers into customers again.