Re:For Those Who Haven't Played the first....
on
Max Payne 2 Reviewed
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· Score: 1
You, sir, are unstable.
Re:For Those Who Haven't Played the first....
on
Max Payne 2 Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
Gee, thanks, Captain Obvious... I really needed to be told all that.
Saying that one group of artists deserve legal protection, but another don't because their medium is too alien also cheapens human life.
First, no it doesn't. That claim doesn't make any sense. Second, I don't recall "saying" that. In fact I can't remember ever making even a tangential reference to that idea.
Video games don't cheapen human life by letting you kill lots of bad guys and letting you take a lot of bullets.
Actually, I believe they do, for the reasons I previously outlined. And seeing as you've done nothing to address those, I shall continue to.
So no. Video games don't...
Haha, it's almost as if you had actually proved something by this, the third paragraph of your strange little rant. I fail to see what line of reasoning you feel you are capping off, here.
I don't even actually disagree with what you're saying. You'll note that your point and my point are not mutually exclusive. So kindly calm your hormones.
Re:For Those Who Haven't Played the first....
on
Max Payne 2 Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
In Max Payne 1, you slow down time at will, recieve literally tens of gunshot wounds and remain standing, and, oh yeah, murder something on the order of maybe 1000 people, the penalty for which is winning the game. You're conflating that with reality?
It's examples like that that senators and first ladies point to in horror when they speak of the epic of videogame and movie violence infiltrating our culture. For a long time I thought they were full of shit. But now I start to see how the uberviolent videogames coming out really do cheapen the value of human life, even if only subconsciously.
There's also an interview on the LA Times website Jack Valenti did with the editorial board where he talks about witnessing one of these tests at Caltech. "There's even, now researchers at Caltech, now get this, have found a way to send a D-veeee-D quality movie, they can send one in faaave sheconds." I was cracking up imaging that clueless, dumbass cracker staring at some/dev/console and trying to even comprehend what he just saw (who spectates at a bandwidth research test, anyways?)
This is a Slashdot autopost informing you that your message, Re:Dragging their heels., in response to Dragging their heels., by grub, has exceeded the maximum dork level for this system. The specific violation(s) were:
Use of pseudocode.
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If you're reading this, and you want me to send you $20, just say the word
Hrm free money... what to do?! I challenge you to locate a single person on this planet who would say no. Either Rob did think that proposition through very well, or he's bluffing.
Read the article more carefully, Ball is not disputing that: "We won't do business with someone who treats us poorly." That's the crux of the matter. Ball takes issue with the BSA and MS not because he got busted but because they made a point of publicly humiliating his company in the aftermath:
...the BSA, a trade group that helps enforce copyrights and licensing provisions for major business software makers, had put the company on the evening news and featured it in regional ads warning other businesses to monitor their software licenses.
Nowhere does he complain about getting caught for breaking the law. Only that he was treated like shit and is using his power as a consumer to fight back.
You just don't get the whole concept of Bayesian spam filtering. It works on a personal basis; don't forget that, statistically speaking, one man's spam is another man's legitimate personal e-mail. For example, if you send and receive a disproportionately large amount of messages containing cock jokes and talking about tits and sex (which, being a 20-year-old male, I can tell you is about 80% of my friends), under a "typical" or system-wide Bayesian filter that might be installed by some ISP, you're almost certainly going to lose a lot of messages that weren't spam. Which is the worst-case scenario for a spam filter. What's worse, the ISP would have to employ some sort of "spam czar" to monitor (people's private) incoming e-mail and make judgement calls as to what is and is not spam. That's a call I want to make, not one that I want made for me.
The best way to eliminate spam, to me, is a two-part system whereby the ISP (via procmail, etc.) eliminates all mail that is definitely spam, and then passes along anything questionable to the user. Bayesian filter should be implemented in the client, which, thankfully, is becoming more and more common. ISPs should think about bundling clients that already support Bayesian sampling, enabling it by default, explaining in very clear terms how to use it, etc., but that's about all they can do.
Your passport image has a hologram overlayed over it, which makes any attempt to scan or copy it functionally impossible--sure it can be done, but the resulting image is very obviously not original. I know of no hack around this.
This digital copy, OTOH, will have no such protection. Oh sure, it will be encrypted and scrambled and blah blah blah, but anyone with half a brain and a propensity to scan the tech headlines of the past decade can tell you it's a matter of when, not if, it is defeated (e.g. CSS, Windows Media, "Enhanced CD" copy protection, half a dozen others).
So, to sum up: the photo on your passport now: not hackable. The photo stored in your passport 5 years from now: hackable. You can see why some claim this will degrade our privacy.
Amazing new technology called reading
on
New Linux PVR Box
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· Score: 1
Grreat, just what the world needed: yet another way to record American Gladiator reruns, Springer, and all the other trash that's on television. I find TiVo fetishism and this culture of passive, TV-facilitated vegetation disturbing. Here's an idea: pick up a book. The Penguin classics series runs me 2.41 at my local bookseller. For roughly 1/200th the price of a PVR you'll get a vastly more entertaining and provocative product with all the same features. Pause it wherever you want. Keep a copy for archival purposes when you're finished. Instantly fast forward to any point. No commercials. Accessible from any room of the house over sneakernet. It's ingenious, I say--a must have Christmas present for any geek this season.
Sorta like if White Freightliner started slapping Lamborghini-made bodies on their trucks.
What the hell's wrong with that? Add more beauty to the world. No one loses. My day is considerably brightened when I look in the rearview and see a 360 Modena smiling back. A 6'x6' Mack truck radiator grille, OTOH, is a different story. And workhorses (the animals), by the way, have a beauty of power and form all their own. Compare with the BBBB (big, boring, beige box), which has... nothing pretty about it at all. Any deviation is a positive step.
I think he's the one that introduced the civil union for homosexuals in Vermont. That's not something that a moderate would do, and it's not what independants want. All poles [sic] show that a majority of Americans support a traditional marriage as defined as being between a man and a woman.
Do I even need to point out the glaring contradiction contained within your own words? Civil unions are not marriages! Perhaps that's why they have distinct names. I'm sick of seeing this little rhetorical bait-and-switch used to paint Dean as some far-left, unelectable pinko. In fact, Americans are split down the middle when it comes to legalized civil unions. Much like they are on the issue of whether to elect a Democratic or Republican president. Which tells me that a Dean presidency may not be so farfetched as you homophobes wish. The man's got my vote.
And if you had read my post, you would see that it was in response to this guy and not you at all. Learn how to use Slashdot and learn how to manipulate the comment threshold. Until then, don't you dare bitch at me.
You can say that if you want, fine. But then next time someone offers you a couple hundred million dollars to simply sign your name on a piece of paper, either refuse or you are an unmitigated hypocrite. I know what I would do, and I have a pretty good idea what you would, too.
Pull your head out of your grammatical ass, it captures a subtle shade of meaning that "expensive" doesn't. The rules they taught you in 7th grade english are breakable, sometimes to great effect.
I don't want something for nothing and I'm not full of shit. But I don't want nothing for something either, which is all the record companies offer me currently, what with their ridiculous $20, 13-crap-and-one-good-track CDs. Sharing files and pirating music is a way for me personally to send a message to the record companies that I'm not going to play their game anymore, and they're going to have to come to the table and bargain. My terms are good, easy downloads of reasonably-priced single tracks in open standards with no DRM. iTunes is a start, but not nearly good enough. Given that I haven't purchased a non-gift CD for going on 4 years now, yet I'm listening to more music than ever before in my life, I'd say mine (and everyone like me) is a very strong bargaining position, indeed.
That said, the minute RIAA wakes up and smells the coffee, I'll start paying the piper again. Don't be an idiot, this status quo of wholesale pirating whatever the hell you want for absolutely $0 can't continue without destroying every musical artist out there. Which would suck.
I agree with what you're saying. I don't see this strategy of suing individual users as being very sucessful in the long run, but assume for a moment that it is, and Big Brother successfully clamps down on the huge international P2P nets that are up and running today. That wouldn't make people stop trading, but it would make them smarter about it--people would password protect/encrypt their shares and only give that password out to people they knew. Or, even better, they tell their client to only allows browsing and uploads from a list of their friends' IP addresses. Obviously I'd prefer the selection afforded to me by Kazaa: 6 million users sharing hundreds of millions of files. But I'd be content with sharing stuff with 50 of my friends and my friends' friends; that's really a whole lot of free music and movies when you consider how many gigs the average person nowadays. And leeching would be a much smaller problem too.
Now you see why I think RIAA is really headed down the wrong path here. Instead of embracing these giant P2P nets as a smart business model, they've chosen to criminalize them. And the users, like any smart criminals, will go underground to avoid the heat. They will get smarter and more organized about what they're doing.
In the process, that phenomenon will metastasize into something much, much harder to root out. Impossible, I believe. If one day the type of informal, "half-sneaker" network like the one I've described above is actually realized, well then RIAA is just totally fucked. Because there's no way you can beat or even gain access to said networks short of a literal Big Brother police-state, which ain't gonna happen. Copyright infringement will pass from being a technological novelty facilitated by this new, cool thing called the Internet, to a cultural mainstay. And I can't think of a clearer doomsday scenario for the record companies than that.
This is a last-ditch deterrence effort by RIAA and as such should be viewed as a good sign. Clearly in terms of cost-benefit filing individual lawsuits against sharers is about as high as it gets. My eMule client says there are 1.13 million users currently logged onto that network, plus another 4.6M on Kazaa. That's a couple of dozen lawsuits out of at least 6 million, to say nothing of Gnutella, BitTorrent, ad infinitum. My guess is people will realize their chances of getting nailed by RIAA are either a) zero, if they live outside the US and b) less than getting struck by lightning otherwise, and keep about their merry way. Once RIAA sees that it's not having any effect, they're one step closer to releasing their antiquated distributional stranglehold, one step closer to coming to the bargaining table and establishing a useful online music sharing service. I view this as a good sign.
Hrm. So if I download a couple dozen songs a day, I'm not going to get sued as long as I move them to a directory that isn't part of the shared list? Interesting...
Exactly right, and if everyone comes to that conclusion then it's bye-bye P2P network because you'll have 10 million leechers and not a single sharer. It's a good strategy they've got.
Stating anything can be patented in a complaining or joking manner.
Commiserating with said statements.
By my calculations, the entire editorial staff of Slashdot and 95% of the readerbase are infringing on my patents (prior art being clearly irrelevant.) I have spoken with my legal team and you have all monetarily damaged me to the tune of $1,200,293,135,129,902,129 plus one monster truck. I accept personal checks and PayPal. Pay up, scofflaws.
I'm not sure if I support this... if you think about it, very few phans have ever heard a live Phish concert in high fidelity. Take me for example: at the last Phish concert I was at, I saw the music emanating from the speakers as green clouds, which then coalesced into a giant steel Beethoven, who proceeded to eat me--all to the tune of "jingle bells", played backwards at a high tempo on the kettle drums. As you can guess it made concentrating on the latter 2/3 of the set very difficult. Hence I download these new high-fi with much trepidation: what has Phish actually been playing for the bulk of all those live shows? No one I know has any idea...
Slashdot Mirror
You, sir, are unstable.
I don't even actually disagree with what you're saying. You'll note that your point and my point are not mutually exclusive. So kindly calm your hormones.
In Max Payne 1, you slow down time at will, recieve literally tens of gunshot wounds and remain standing, and, oh yeah, murder something on the order of maybe 1000 people, the penalty for which is winning the game. You're conflating that with reality?
It's examples like that that senators and first ladies point to in horror when they speak of the epic of videogame and movie violence infiltrating our culture. For a long time I thought they were full of shit. But now I start to see how the uberviolent videogames coming out really do cheapen the value of human life, even if only subconsciously.
That would be a really interesting and damning turn of events, if it were true.
Care to do more than just insinuate?
There's also an interview on the LA Times website Jack Valenti did with the editorial board where he talks about witnessing one of these tests at Caltech. "There's even, now researchers at Caltech, now get this, have found a way to send a D-veeee-D quality movie, they can send one in faaave sheconds." I was cracking up imaging that clueless, dumbass cracker staring at some /dev/console and trying to even comprehend what he just saw (who spectates at a bandwidth research test, anyways?)
Jack Valenti is such a fuck.
- Use of pseudocode.
Please rephrase your post to include less dorkiness. If you have any questions, please contact the admins. Thanks,Management
Obligatory explanatory link
Nowhere does he complain about getting caught for breaking the law. Only that he was treated like shit and is using his power as a consumer to fight back.
You just don't get the whole concept of Bayesian spam filtering. It works on a personal basis; don't forget that, statistically speaking, one man's spam is another man's legitimate personal e-mail. For example, if you send and receive a disproportionately large amount of messages containing cock jokes and talking about tits and sex (which, being a 20-year-old male, I can tell you is about 80% of my friends), under a "typical" or system-wide Bayesian filter that might be installed by some ISP, you're almost certainly going to lose a lot of messages that weren't spam. Which is the worst-case scenario for a spam filter. What's worse, the ISP would have to employ some sort of "spam czar" to monitor (people's private) incoming e-mail and make judgement calls as to what is and is not spam. That's a call I want to make, not one that I want made for me.
The best way to eliminate spam, to me, is a two-part system whereby the ISP (via procmail, etc.) eliminates all mail that is definitely spam, and then passes along anything questionable to the user. Bayesian filter should be implemented in the client, which, thankfully, is becoming more and more common. ISPs should think about bundling clients that already support Bayesian sampling, enabling it by default, explaining in very clear terms how to use it, etc., but that's about all they can do.
Your passport image has a hologram overlayed over it, which makes any attempt to scan or copy it functionally impossible--sure it can be done, but the resulting image is very obviously not original. I know of no hack around this.
This digital copy, OTOH, will have no such protection. Oh sure, it will be encrypted and scrambled and blah blah blah, but anyone with half a brain and a propensity to scan the tech headlines of the past decade can tell you it's a matter of when, not if, it is defeated (e.g. CSS, Windows Media, "Enhanced CD" copy protection, half a dozen others).
So, to sum up: the photo on your passport now: not hackable. The photo stored in your passport 5 years from now: hackable. You can see why some claim this will degrade our privacy.
Grreat, just what the world needed: yet another way to record American Gladiator reruns, Springer, and all the other trash that's on television. I find TiVo fetishism and this culture of passive, TV-facilitated vegetation disturbing. Here's an idea: pick up a book. The Penguin classics series runs me 2.41 at my local bookseller. For roughly 1/200th the price of a PVR you'll get a vastly more entertaining and provocative product with all the same features. Pause it wherever you want. Keep a copy for archival purposes when you're finished. Instantly fast forward to any point. No commercials. Accessible from any room of the house over sneakernet. It's ingenious, I say--a must have Christmas present for any geek this season.
Sorta like if White Freightliner started slapping Lamborghini-made bodies on their trucks.
What the hell's wrong with that? Add more beauty to the world. No one loses. My day is considerably brightened when I look in the rearview and see a 360 Modena smiling back. A 6'x6' Mack truck radiator grille, OTOH, is a different story. And workhorses (the animals), by the way, have a beauty of power and form all their own. Compare with the BBBB (big, boring, beige box), which has... nothing pretty about it at all. Any deviation is a positive step.
Most Americans probobly [sic] couldn't spell 'conservative' let alone vote that way.
::cackle::
Oooh the irony.
I think he's the one that introduced the civil union for homosexuals in Vermont. That's not something that a moderate would do, and it's not what independants want. All poles [sic] show that a majority of Americans support a traditional marriage as defined as being between a man and a woman.
Do I even need to point out the glaring contradiction contained within your own words? Civil unions are not marriages! Perhaps that's why they have distinct names. I'm sick of seeing this little rhetorical bait-and-switch used to paint Dean as some far-left, unelectable pinko. In fact, Americans are split down the middle when it comes to legalized civil unions. Much like they are on the issue of whether to elect a Democratic or Republican president. Which tells me that a Dean presidency may not be so farfetched as you homophobes wish. The man's got my vote.
I've heard the Cisco Aironet 1400 tastes quite good with a little Tabasco...
And if you had read my post, you would see that it was in response to this guy and not you at all. Learn how to use Slashdot and learn how to manipulate the comment threshold. Until then, don't you dare bitch at me.
You can say that if you want, fine. But then next time someone offers you a couple hundred million dollars to simply sign your name on a piece of paper, either refuse or you are an unmitigated hypocrite. I know what I would do, and I have a pretty good idea what you would, too.
Pull your head out of your grammatical ass, it captures a subtle shade of meaning that "expensive" doesn't. The rules they taught you in 7th grade english are breakable, sometimes to great effect.
I don't want something for nothing and I'm not full of shit. But I don't want nothing for something either, which is all the record companies offer me currently, what with their ridiculous $20, 13-crap-and-one-good-track CDs. Sharing files and pirating music is a way for me personally to send a message to the record companies that I'm not going to play their game anymore, and they're going to have to come to the table and bargain. My terms are good, easy downloads of reasonably-priced single tracks in open standards with no DRM. iTunes is a start, but not nearly good enough. Given that I haven't purchased a non-gift CD for going on 4 years now, yet I'm listening to more music than ever before in my life, I'd say mine (and everyone like me) is a very strong bargaining position, indeed.
That said, the minute RIAA wakes up and smells the coffee, I'll start paying the piper again. Don't be an idiot, this status quo of wholesale pirating whatever the hell you want for absolutely $0 can't continue without destroying every musical artist out there. Which would suck.
I agree with what you're saying. I don't see this strategy of suing individual users as being very sucessful in the long run, but assume for a moment that it is, and Big Brother successfully clamps down on the huge international P2P nets that are up and running today. That wouldn't make people stop trading, but it would make them smarter about it--people would password protect/encrypt their shares and only give that password out to people they knew. Or, even better, they tell their client to only allows browsing and uploads from a list of their friends' IP addresses. Obviously I'd prefer the selection afforded to me by Kazaa: 6 million users sharing hundreds of millions of files. But I'd be content with sharing stuff with 50 of my friends and my friends' friends; that's really a whole lot of free music and movies when you consider how many gigs the average person nowadays. And leeching would be a much smaller problem too.
Now you see why I think RIAA is really headed down the wrong path here. Instead of embracing these giant P2P nets as a smart business model, they've chosen to criminalize them. And the users, like any smart criminals, will go underground to avoid the heat. They will get smarter and more organized about what they're doing.
In the process, that phenomenon will metastasize into something much, much harder to root out. Impossible, I believe. If one day the type of informal, "half-sneaker" network like the one I've described above is actually realized, well then RIAA is just totally fucked. Because there's no way you can beat or even gain access to said networks short of a literal Big Brother police-state, which ain't gonna happen. Copyright infringement will pass from being a technological novelty facilitated by this new, cool thing called the Internet, to a cultural mainstay. And I can't think of a clearer doomsday scenario for the record companies than that.
This is a last-ditch deterrence effort by RIAA and as such should be viewed as a good sign. Clearly in terms of cost-benefit filing individual lawsuits against sharers is about as high as it gets. My eMule client says there are 1.13 million users currently logged onto that network, plus another 4.6M on Kazaa. That's a couple of dozen lawsuits out of at least 6 million, to say nothing of Gnutella, BitTorrent, ad infinitum. My guess is people will realize their chances of getting nailed by RIAA are either a) zero, if they live outside the US and b) less than getting struck by lightning otherwise, and keep about their merry way. Once RIAA sees that it's not having any effect, they're one step closer to releasing their antiquated distributional stranglehold, one step closer to coming to the bargaining table and establishing a useful online music sharing service. I view this as a good sign.
Hrm. So if I download a couple dozen songs a day, I'm not going to get sued as long as I move them to a directory that isn't part of the shared list? Interesting...
Exactly right, and if everyone comes to that conclusion then it's bye-bye P2P network because you'll have 10 million leechers and not a single sharer. It's a good strategy they've got.
- Complaining about ludricous software patents.
- Stating anything can be patented in a complaining or joking manner.
- Commiserating with said statements.
By my calculations, the entire editorial staff of Slashdot and 95% of the readerbase are infringing on my patents (prior art being clearly irrelevant.) I have spoken with my legal team and you have all monetarily damaged me to the tune of $1,200,293,135,129,902,129 plus one monster truck. I accept personal checks and PayPal. Pay up, scofflaws.I'm not sure if I support this... if you think about it, very few phans have ever heard a live Phish concert in high fidelity. Take me for example: at the last Phish concert I was at, I saw the music emanating from the speakers as green clouds, which then coalesced into a giant steel Beethoven, who proceeded to eat me--all to the tune of "jingle bells", played backwards at a high tempo on the kettle drums. As you can guess it made concentrating on the latter 2/3 of the set very difficult. Hence I download these new high-fi with much trepidation: what has Phish actually been playing for the bulk of all those live shows? No one I know has any idea...