Although I think the basic problem here is that Konami lacks the "mascot" characters that companies like Nintendo have. Most of Konami's games are more serious and oriented towards an older audience: Solid Snake, Alucard, and the heroes from the Silent Hill series are less given to the sort of caricature that is in some respects essential for games of this ilk.
Am I the only one seeing problems creating characters? I saw they posted that people reported bugs, but they didn't announce what bugs they were. People here seem to be able to play ok. Oddly, I can't get past the save character after selecting a character class. Selecting a race works, then rolling my character works, but then it prompts me to either save the character or cancel. I can only cancel. Hitting return to save doesn't seem to do anything, and cancel just lets me reroll again. Yes, I'm on windows. That's probably it. Argh.
I sat in front of my computer going back and forth through menus in this game for about five to ten minutes making a total jackass out of myself until I noticed something in the character creation. When it says "(RETURN) to Save" (or some such) after you've rolled and chosen a class, you have to choose a name. Any letter that you press will show up at the top as the beginning of a name and you can press Return once you've chosen a name for your character.
In the big picture what SCO is doing is not really wrong, its just business... its bad business... and they will fail... but that's all it is, a very bad (and stupid) business decision made by a half wit and a gaggle of hungry lawyers. What you have is a bunch of fragile knee jerk geeks who think its true evil and get all bent out of shape when faced with confrontation. It isn't evil... and to punish those who just want to feed their kids, save for retirement and do their thing is not only unfair, but is stupid, supremely stupid.
But as others have already mentioned, SCO has been and still is doing all that it can to punish those that just want to feed their kids, save for retirement, and "do their thing". They are hurting many small and medium sized businesses, needlessly degrading the credentials of Linux specialists in the workplace, and generally attacking the IT industry in an attempt to make money for themselves that they haven't earned. That's not just business, it's something far worse than what Chris is doing. Chris is depriving a few people that refused to help their fellow IT workers of a job. Those people that refused to help their fellow IT workers were helping SCO deprive other, innocent IT workers of their jobs and small business managers of their profits.
And besides that, there's the basic principle that if you're willing to give up morality to hold a job, then you lose the perks of being a moral, upstanding member of your community. SCO workers have wronged the IT community, so the IT community is (or at least Chris is) appropriately shunning them. That's the simple dynamic of doing anything for a job without concern for principle and it's been in place for as long as civilization has been. It doesn't matter if you HAVE to make your living stealing money from honest people that earned it, you're still a thief and will be treated like one.
And that's somehow not important? Knowing trends of a group of people with a certain affliction can greatly help in diagnoising it. Especially something like ADHD, which is a title thrown on every kid who ever gets bored. The more things like this that we can use to discover the true problems with people, the better.
Do you know any young boys that don't need to be ripped away from their game consoles to do their homework? I don't. Kids like games. Make a game readily accessible right in their own homes without any need to constantly yell "Car!" and move the net/goal/plate out of the street, and they'll play it. A lot.
Which is even more of a leap than the original story, considering that (A) "religious feelings" are not confined to churches, and (B) many (most?) churches don't have pipe organs.. and quite a few don't use instruments of any kind.
Fear isn't confined to being threatened with a gun, either. Does that mean that when someone threatens me with a gun, I am not scared? Many different stimuli can have the same effect on the human body.
So yes, game developers should act like calm professionals when dealing with public forums. Same as the representative of any business. On the other hand, forum fanboys should realise that posting on public forums is often something developers do because they want to, not because they have to, and that driving them away by being pointlessly abusive is not exactly smart behaviour either.
I think you missed the parent poster's point. He compared the whining of annoying fans to gravity because both are constants in the universe. You're never going to educate 100% of the people in a forum. There will always be a minority that will never, ever understand the basic logic behind civil behavior. Therefore, much like the customer service employees all around the world that just realize that dealing with assholes is their job, suck it up, and learn to deal with it, game developers must realize that there will always be assholes in the world, that they will attract them, and that alienating good customers in order to reduce the number of assholes around them will not solve anything, but rather cause more problems.
In some fields, there are simply universal constants. Farmers deal with the fact that food spoils, pilots deal with the fact that gravity is actively trying to bring their plane down and kill them, and game developers and forum moderators have to deal with the fact that the human race creates assholes, just like the customer service employees, repairmen, and register jockeys of the world have.
I don't think the parent poster made any comments about WHAT the punishment should be, so please don't start citing rather harsh treatments to make your argument look more interesting. You could have just as easily made the statement, "By your rationale, we should start putting graffiti artists in jail for a month because that would be 'something of a deterrent.'".
The beginning of the discussion was about WHAT the punishment will be, specifically the fear that they will give this kid a disproportionate punishment ("throw the book at him") to make up for the fact that they can't catch any of the guys that did the REAL damage, like whoever made the original Blaster worm or the Welchia and SoBig worms. Just click "Parent" a few times and you'll find the original comments about that.
I agree with your sentiments. This article is a tongue in cheek social criticism of gamer culture. If previous posters had bothered to read it, (which they don't seem to have, or not very well) they would have noticed this at once, as the entire article has a cheecky and jocular tone to it. One wonders if the person who posted this story also ran to the Humane Society after seeing Bonsai Kitten. (Yes, I have a cat)
The thing is, it's not even a tongue in cheek social criticism. He took vague assumptions that could apply to any medium and applied them to video games. RPG players are geeks, people who play military games are nutjobs in camouflage, people who like anything regarding horror are goths... someone who knows nothing about video games could've written this.
A better tongue in cheek social criticism would have an anime fangirl who's played Final Fantasy X eighteen consecutive times, a bunch of pale, deluded gamers sitting in an arcade dutifully playing 2D fighters as if they were brand new games, and a vast army of Korean kids screaming, "ZERG RUSH KEKEKEKEKEKE!". But he didn't write that. He wrote a vague piece of crap that just as easily could've been "What type of movie-goer are you?" or "What type of reader are you?". Sports fans are obsessed with sports and wear nothing but jerseys, horror fans are goths... someone could've wrote this thirty years ago. But it still wouldn't have been funny.
What speed was used to write the CDs? Were they all stored in the same place? Were they all burned by the same CD burner? Were they all burned from the same source (a single CD, hard drive, network, etc.)?
30 CDs sounds like an epidemic, but since they were all burned at the same time twenty months ago, there could be a lot of other reasons why all of these discs would go bad. If they were all burned at the same time, then they're effectively talking about one batch, regardless of how many different CD-R brands were used in that single batch.
Does the Dutch article cover this or is this just a scare story?
So people that like horror are goths, people that like things dealing with the military are gun-toting right wing nutjobs, and sports fans are obsessed with... sports. Wow, that's some great Comedy By Numbers you've got there, Mr. Taves. Did you pull it out of a "What type of movie-goer are you?" article from 1970 or did you take a trip to the library and find a "What type of reader are you?" article from an 1880 newspaper archive?
I wish I could get a job plagiarizing the same oft-plagiarized hunk of bullshit that's been kicking around the journalism industry for longer than any of us can remember. I bet it's a really fun job, like being a taste tester at a cookie factory, or one of those jackasses that gets their name on TV by calling movies "thrill rides" or "a tour de force".
Or they just don't read anything bad into giving their kids toys. I mean, really, which situation is more likely:
A) "Oh, that looks like a nice toy, I bet Little Johnny would love that!"
B) "This will shut the brat up."
C) "Oh, well... all of the other parents give their kids hundreds of toys, so I guess I should too, even though I think it's ultimately wrong."
I'm thinking "A", since that's the one that I've had the most experience with, both among my parents and other parents. If they see a cool toy and they can buy it for their kids, they buy it. There doesn't have to be a malicious or lazy reason behind every parenting decision that someone else makes that you, personally, would not. There are different ways of bringing kids up and yours is not necessarily the best.
Until large companies start getting the idea that most people prefer control over their privacy, these sorts of technology will be regulated to the military and the police.
Yes, most people prefer control over their privacy to pathetic incentives to give it up. This is why the people of the United States, for instance, boldly boycotted a supermarket program to artificially inflate prices and only lower them back down through the use of "shopper cards" with customers' personal information attached that would not only be sold to other companies, but also used to send them tons of junk mail. This ended the junk mail problem in the United States and we are all now blissfully unaware of the scourge of junk mail flyers.
Eyes have the potential problem of a thief scanning your house to see what you have inside. Slashdotters unite! We must band together to ban optic nerves!
Eyes don't see through walls and blinds. A sufficiently powerful RFID scanner, on the other hand, can.
We keep hearing about the bad uses for RFID technology, but do people know of any good uses that don't invade on our privacy?
Yeah. Embedding it into the tag on my pants, rather than the pants themselves, for inventory management and anti-theft purposes. However, if we allowed that, and there wasn't a law against doing anything more invasive with it, you know that the RFID tag would slip from the tag on the pants to the inside of the fabric in the space of five years. And after that, if surveillance cameras are any indication, the government would find some invasive use for it and it would be protected under the usual argument: "Private businesses do it, so why not the government?"
That's the real problem. There are a lot of great, useful applications for RFID that aid both businesses and consumers, but there are also a lot of malicious/greedy uses for it. Since average citizens usually can't litigate multinational corporations into submission in the same way that the RIAA can sue Kazaa, Grokster, and their users,/. readers suddenly "blame the tool".
This, unfortunately, is the reason that I have a bad taste in my mouth when I think about this game. I'm going to take a lot of heat for what I'm about to say, but I'm honestly disappointed in the spiritual content of WW. The Great Faeries somewhat resemble the Hindu goddess Shiva. Link gains the ability to "possess" certain objects and even a few specific people. resemble Every few minutes it's "the gods this, and the gods that...", the Windwaker contains "the power of the gods", you get a certain ability from the wind god and the ability to travely quickly through cyclones from the cyclone god, and the Tower of the gods has the G in gods capitalized (yeah I know, it's part of the name but still...), and the two sages when mentioned are said to be praying to the gods. The only redeeming thing from the entire gods issue is in one instance you have to kick the cyclone god's butt (which I really enjoyed). What really did it for me though, was that there is a point in the game where it is required to seek out two sages to pray to the gods for the master sword to be reenergized. The game actually says something along the lines of "your prayers were answered and the master sword regained some of its power!" And for people whom would try to say "oh it's just fantasy" try talking to your pastor about it and see what he says... be sure to tell him about the Temple of the gods and the two wind gods, and the praying sages. But I'm a "thou shalt have no other gods before me" kinda guy, so I took this game back and asked for a refund. Yes, I've already been criticized for this, and surprisingly mostly from Christians. For those that think a 2 is too harsh, I would have given this a 1 except for the fact that I felt this game didn't deserve to be placed in the ranks of Diablo and Grand Theft Auto III. If it weren't for the praying bit, I'd have given this a 3 and would probably still have the game.
I'm glad he finds something "redeeming" in a work produced by a polytheistic culture that features... polytheism, even if he's "honestly disappointed" by it. Thankfully, he doesn't believe that other cultures should be placed in the ranks of GTA3.
I wonder if strict Shinto believers are offended when an American work makes a vague hint toward monotheism, such as Warcraft III's "The Light". I'm guessing not, but I could be wrong.
Facts. I pulled up the story from The Register because the Wall Street Journal is probably a lot harder to wade through, but this should jog your memory. Microsoft was hacked and the hackers supposedly had access to the system for three months before they were detected.
For what it is worth, MS and others should do something like this _EVERY_ time a full root vunerability is exploited by a released worm, virus etc. So it may stop an app from working, etc. At least a virus didn't fdisk your hdd. Minor patches be dammned, vunerabilities that give the attacker root or equivalent access NEED to be taken care of ASAP.
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Now. I understand that ms hotfixes tend (AHAHAHAHAHHAHAAH, tend) to screw stuff up. A simple flag in the registry / file in the filesystem could tell the "viral exploit patch", not to patch the system, but send the administrator a message / put a link on the desktop for the patch. Of course, the next worm could just set that flag after infection, so this idea kinda sucks, and which is why I'd reccomend the radical option of no way of overriding the "viral exploit patch".
The problem with this idea, even in the form of just putting a little message or icon on an infected user's desktop, is that it creates a single point of entry. Microsoft's internal servers have been hacked, and, in fact, utterly 0wn3d, in the past. If that happened again and some new version of Windows allowed them to send information to users' computers and have it automatically downloaded, then someone could annihilate every Windows machine connected to the internet in the entire world with one stroke.
It's like those towns in RPGs and fantasy novels that all get their water from the same river. The bad guys just have to go upstream and poison the river and they can wipe out an entire string of towns. It's the classic problem of a large number of people relying on a single vital resource that can be tainted by enemies.
The other day, I was required to "re-regster" due to some "security enhancements". A long story short: the registration process hick-upped and I was able to pull up some serious information (accidentally) on *other people*. I could have done some damage with this info. Much damage. But instead, I called up, reported the event and switched back to the old mail-it-to-me method of compensation. It is worth it.
Awhile back, I was "camping" in "the woods" near a "town". Long story short: I had a knife on me for cutting rope and boxes and such could have used it to stab *other people*. I could have done some damage with that knife. Much damage. But instead, I didn't. It was worth it.
Every day, people get the chance to commit a crime and victimize others. Often several chances. Whenever I get into my car, I could decide to floor it and mow down some pedestrians. Whenever someone accidentally leaves themselves logged in at a public computer, I could go to town on them and probably get some money out of it. And hey, if you're a man, we're all physically equipped to rape. However, what matters if how often these crimes actually happen, not how often they COULD happen.
Potential crimes are not crimes and they're not something that should be factored into our fear of crime. As someone else mentioned above, there were 86,000 cases of real identity theft committed against the 286 million human beings that live legally in the United States. Potential identity theft, however, probably ranges in the millions, because anyone with a mailbox that isn't a PO Box or similarly locked box can have all of their bills stolen while they're not home.
If there was one, then there would of had to be thousands at the time the species was alive. It's amazing that only a piece of what could of been an entire species is ever found.
Actually, instead of being its own species, this creature could just be the primate equivalent to a Liger, which is the fairly rare offspring of a lion and a tiger that most people aren't even aware of. In the case of the Liger, as is possible in this case, the result of the mating is a sort of super-beast that's larger and stronger than either of the species that it is descended from.
Actually, the Tigon, another form of lion-tiger hybrid that is actually a bit smaller than its parents, might be a better example. The mating of a tiger and a lioness is very rare and if it produces a male, the male will be infertile, which makes the Tigon a real animal, but an incredibly rare one. And once a female Tigon has mated again, it is technically no longer a Tigon, because it can't mate with a male Tigon and be "pure bred". The resulting offspring, regardless of what lion or tiger species it is from, looks quite different than the female Tigon.
So really, they may have found the few living specimens of this creature, and even if it's very rare, it might not be on the verge of extinction, because it might not be a real species.
What's more likely, than the people distributing tons and tons of ebooks view it as some sort of penile extension, or that they, like all pirate sites, are merely trying to distribute as much of what they have as possible because the sites are shut down so fast that making a pirated work available everywhere is the only way to make it available somewhere at all?
Lots of BitTorrent sites have collections of TV shows movies that have nothing do with one another. Dramas, comedies, reality shows, fan-subtitled foreign works... they have everything. This isn't to show off what they have. It's because if they saw two sites that were offering comedies and decided, "Oh well, they've got that handled, I don't have to carry those", then those sites will doubtlessly be shut down in a week and the shows won't be available anywhere else because no one else carries them.
It's about having the works distributed as widely as possible, not having the biggest collection.
Have you ever been to Japan? I never saw any anime on late night TV. Afterschool and primetime, yes. Everyone I talked to regarded anime as strictly for kids and I-don't-want-to-grow-up types.
Berserk, Eat-Man, and I believe also Hellsing were all late night anime, airing some time around midnight to 2AM. However, yes, MOST anime is in the afternoon and evening. There is some late night anime, though.
Yes, clearly, once one gets old enough one has no use for anything but gratuitous violence.:)
The lack of gratuitous violence isn't the only problem that games aimed at younger gamers have. They're also simplistic and easy. I have yet to find anything with a level of difficulty similar to Devil May Cry or Shinobi on the GameCube and as I play more and more GameCube games (I'm currently on a GC renting spree), I'm getting a little fed up with the lack of challenge. Case in point: Wario World, which I'm playing right now. You can't die. Seriously, you can't. You have infinite continues and continuing starts you off with full health in the exact same spot where you died, rather than the beginning of the level. On top of that, you're rarely hit and all you need to do is pick up a fallen enemy and spin the control stick to become invincible for awhile. It's ridiculous, but it seems to be par for the course, because Metroid Prime, Sonic Adventure 2 Battle, and Smash Bros. weren't that much harder.
Lets say, a few months ago, you were on one of those trams at an international airport, and you see some guy standing close to you who happened to look Oriental (or is the PC term Asian?), with luggage tags from Beijing on his luggage. This guy is coughing up a storm and not caring about who's around him. Would you suspect him of having SARS or would that be "racist"?
No, I wouldn't, because I would think logically and realize that SARS, even at its peak, was several hundred or thousand times less common than the common cold in Asia. It's called the "common cold" for a reason. The same reason why SARS was not called "common SARS".
You see two Middle-eastern fellows with a rented U-haul truck pulling up to a farming store and buying dozens of bags of fertilizer. Would you call the FBI, or would that be "racist"?
Why would I call the FBI? Two brown guys buying fertilizer, as well as having easy access to fertilizer, is a daily occurrence. The vast majority of the lawn care guys in my entire state are either dark Hispanics (usually Mexicans), Arabs (which, from my perspective, look a lot like dark Hispanics), or some other form of immigrant trying to find cheap work to support their families. Do you call the FBI every time you see a Middle Eastern man at a gas station, because he has access to large amounts of flammable materials that could be used to set fires all over town? I hope not.
SARS and terrorism are both very rare things that don't happen nearly as often as an Asian man having a cold or a Arab buying some fertilizer. Only through the eyes of media hype, racism, or stupidity does a man buying some fertilizer become an act of terrorism. I also find it somewhat suspect that you assume that two Middle-Eastern men buying dozens of bags of fertilizer is suspect, since the last man to commit a terrorist act in the United States using fertilizer was Timothy McVeigh, a white man who was assisted by other whites. Should we worry whenever ANYONE buys fertilizer, or just calm down and understand that ordinary occurrences like people buying fertilizer don't suddenly become abnormal or terroristic acts just because of September 11th?
Nowadays, everyone is so worried about political correctness and not hurting anyones feelings that they are putting themselves and their country in danger. Teachers are being told what words they can and cannot say because they might "offend" someone.
Instead of being told not to say it, did you ever consider that maybe they just think differently from you? I know that some people would like to think that they're in some sort of oppressed, secret majority that thinks that racism is alright and that the racist answer is always a more logical one than an Asian man just having a cold, but a lot of us really don't think that way. We don't jump to race as the first answer, and instead of not wanting to offend anybody by saying it, we just don't even think about it in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Although I think the basic problem here is that Konami lacks the "mascot" characters that companies like Nintendo have. Most of Konami's games are more serious and oriented towards an older audience: Solid Snake, Alucard, and the heroes from the Silent Hill series are less given to the sort of caricature that is in some respects essential for games of this ilk.
Your prayers were answered before you even knew you had them. The game features Dracula from Castlevania, Grey Fox from Metal Gear Solid, Goemon from Mystical Ninja, Vic Viper from Gradius, and, of course, the ever-present Moai.
Am I the only one seeing problems creating characters? I saw they posted that people reported bugs, but they didn't announce what bugs they were. People here seem to be able to play ok. Oddly, I can't get past the save character after selecting a character class. Selecting a race works, then rolling my character works, but then it prompts me to either save the character or cancel. I can only cancel. Hitting return to save doesn't seem to do anything, and cancel just lets me reroll again. Yes, I'm on windows. That's probably it. Argh.
I sat in front of my computer going back and forth through menus in this game for about five to ten minutes making a total jackass out of myself until I noticed something in the character creation. When it says "(RETURN) to Save" (or some such) after you've rolled and chosen a class, you have to choose a name. Any letter that you press will show up at the top as the beginning of a name and you can press Return once you've chosen a name for your character.
In the big picture what SCO is doing is not really wrong, its just business... its bad business... and they will fail... but that's all it is, a very bad (and stupid) business decision made by a half wit and a gaggle of hungry lawyers. What you have is a bunch of fragile knee jerk geeks who think its true evil and get all bent out of shape when faced with confrontation. It isn't evil... and to punish those who just want to feed their kids, save for retirement and do their thing is not only unfair, but is stupid, supremely stupid.
But as others have already mentioned, SCO has been and still is doing all that it can to punish those that just want to feed their kids, save for retirement, and "do their thing". They are hurting many small and medium sized businesses, needlessly degrading the credentials of Linux specialists in the workplace, and generally attacking the IT industry in an attempt to make money for themselves that they haven't earned. That's not just business, it's something far worse than what Chris is doing. Chris is depriving a few people that refused to help their fellow IT workers of a job. Those people that refused to help their fellow IT workers were helping SCO deprive other, innocent IT workers of their jobs and small business managers of their profits.
And besides that, there's the basic principle that if you're willing to give up morality to hold a job, then you lose the perks of being a moral, upstanding member of your community. SCO workers have wronged the IT community, so the IT community is (or at least Chris is) appropriately shunning them. That's the simple dynamic of doing anything for a job without concern for principle and it's been in place for as long as civilization has been. It doesn't matter if you HAVE to make your living stealing money from honest people that earned it, you're still a thief and will be treated like one.
And that's somehow not important? Knowing trends of a group of people with a certain affliction can greatly help in diagnoising it. Especially something like ADHD, which is a title thrown on every kid who ever gets bored. The more things like this that we can use to discover the true problems with people, the better.
Do you know any young boys that don't need to be ripped away from their game consoles to do their homework? I don't. Kids like games. Make a game readily accessible right in their own homes without any need to constantly yell "Car!" and move the net/goal/plate out of the street, and they'll play it. A lot.
Which is even more of a leap than the original story, considering that (A) "religious feelings" are not confined to churches, and (B) many (most?) churches don't have pipe organs.. and quite a few don't use instruments of any kind.
Fear isn't confined to being threatened with a gun, either. Does that mean that when someone threatens me with a gun, I am not scared? Many different stimuli can have the same effect on the human body.
So yes, game developers should act like calm professionals when dealing with public forums. Same as the representative of any business. On the other hand, forum fanboys should realise that posting on public forums is often something developers do because they want to, not because they have to, and that driving them away by being pointlessly abusive is not exactly smart behaviour either.
I think you missed the parent poster's point. He compared the whining of annoying fans to gravity because both are constants in the universe. You're never going to educate 100% of the people in a forum. There will always be a minority that will never, ever understand the basic logic behind civil behavior. Therefore, much like the customer service employees all around the world that just realize that dealing with assholes is their job, suck it up, and learn to deal with it, game developers must realize that there will always be assholes in the world, that they will attract them, and that alienating good customers in order to reduce the number of assholes around them will not solve anything, but rather cause more problems.
In some fields, there are simply universal constants. Farmers deal with the fact that food spoils, pilots deal with the fact that gravity is actively trying to bring their plane down and kill them, and game developers and forum moderators have to deal with the fact that the human race creates assholes, just like the customer service employees, repairmen, and register jockeys of the world have.
I don't think the parent poster made any comments about WHAT the punishment should be, so please don't start citing rather harsh treatments to make your argument look more interesting. You could have just as easily made the statement, "By your rationale, we should start putting graffiti artists in jail for a month because that would be 'something of a deterrent.'".
The beginning of the discussion was about WHAT the punishment will be, specifically the fear that they will give this kid a disproportionate punishment ("throw the book at him") to make up for the fact that they can't catch any of the guys that did the REAL damage, like whoever made the original Blaster worm or the Welchia and SoBig worms. Just click "Parent" a few times and you'll find the original comments about that.
I agree with your sentiments. This article is a tongue in cheek social criticism of gamer culture. If previous posters had bothered to read it, (which they don't seem to have, or not very well) they would have noticed this at once, as the entire article has a cheecky and jocular tone to it. One wonders if the person who posted this story also ran to the Humane Society after seeing Bonsai Kitten. (Yes, I have a cat)
The thing is, it's not even a tongue in cheek social criticism. He took vague assumptions that could apply to any medium and applied them to video games. RPG players are geeks, people who play military games are nutjobs in camouflage, people who like anything regarding horror are goths... someone who knows nothing about video games could've written this.
A better tongue in cheek social criticism would have an anime fangirl who's played Final Fantasy X eighteen consecutive times, a bunch of pale, deluded gamers sitting in an arcade dutifully playing 2D fighters as if they were brand new games, and a vast army of Korean kids screaming, "ZERG RUSH KEKEKEKEKEKE!". But he didn't write that. He wrote a vague piece of crap that just as easily could've been "What type of movie-goer are you?" or "What type of reader are you?". Sports fans are obsessed with sports and wear nothing but jerseys, horror fans are goths... someone could've wrote this thirty years ago. But it still wouldn't have been funny.
What speed was used to write the CDs?
Were they all stored in the same place?
Were they all burned by the same CD burner?
Were they all burned from the same source (a single CD, hard drive, network, etc.)?
30 CDs sounds like an epidemic, but since they were all burned at the same time twenty months ago, there could be a lot of other reasons why all of these discs would go bad. If they were all burned at the same time, then they're effectively talking about one batch, regardless of how many different CD-R brands were used in that single batch.
Does the Dutch article cover this or is this just a scare story?
So people that like horror are goths, people that like things dealing with the military are gun-toting right wing nutjobs, and sports fans are obsessed with... sports. Wow, that's some great Comedy By Numbers you've got there, Mr. Taves. Did you pull it out of a "What type of movie-goer are you?" article from 1970 or did you take a trip to the library and find a "What type of reader are you?" article from an 1880 newspaper archive?
I wish I could get a job plagiarizing the same oft-plagiarized hunk of bullshit that's been kicking around the journalism industry for longer than any of us can remember. I bet it's a really fun job, like being a taste tester at a cookie factory, or one of those jackasses that gets their name on TV by calling movies "thrill rides" or "a tour de force".
Or they just don't read anything bad into giving their kids toys. I mean, really, which situation is more likely:
A) "Oh, that looks like a nice toy, I bet Little Johnny would love that!"
B) "This will shut the brat up."
C) "Oh, well... all of the other parents give their kids hundreds of toys, so I guess I should too, even though I think it's ultimately wrong."
I'm thinking "A", since that's the one that I've had the most experience with, both among my parents and other parents. If they see a cool toy and they can buy it for their kids, they buy it. There doesn't have to be a malicious or lazy reason behind every parenting decision that someone else makes that you, personally, would not. There are different ways of bringing kids up and yours is not necessarily the best.
Until large companies start getting the idea that most people prefer control over their privacy, these sorts of technology will be regulated to the military and the police.
Yes, most people prefer control over their privacy to pathetic incentives to give it up. This is why the people of the United States, for instance, boldly boycotted a supermarket program to artificially inflate prices and only lower them back down through the use of "shopper cards" with customers' personal information attached that would not only be sold to other companies, but also used to send them tons of junk mail. This ended the junk mail problem in the United States and we are all now blissfully unaware of the scourge of junk mail flyers.
Oh, wait... no.
Eyes have the potential problem of a thief scanning your house to see what you have inside. Slashdotters unite! We must band together to ban optic nerves!
Eyes don't see through walls and blinds. A sufficiently powerful RFID scanner, on the other hand, can.
We keep hearing about the bad uses for RFID technology, but do people know of any good uses that don't invade on our privacy?
/. readers suddenly "blame the tool".
Yeah. Embedding it into the tag on my pants, rather than the pants themselves, for inventory management and anti-theft purposes. However, if we allowed that, and there wasn't a law against doing anything more invasive with it, you know that the RFID tag would slip from the tag on the pants to the inside of the fabric in the space of five years. And after that, if surveillance cameras are any indication, the government would find some invasive use for it and it would be protected under the usual argument: "Private businesses do it, so why not the government?"
That's the real problem. There are a lot of great, useful applications for RFID that aid both businesses and consumers, but there are also a lot of malicious/greedy uses for it. Since average citizens usually can't litigate multinational corporations into submission in the same way that the RIAA can sue Kazaa, Grokster, and their users,
This, unfortunately, is the reason that I have a bad taste in my mouth when I think about this game. I'm going to take a lot of heat for what I'm about to say, but I'm honestly disappointed in the spiritual content of WW. The Great Faeries somewhat resemble the Hindu goddess Shiva. Link gains the ability to "possess" certain objects and even a few specific people. resemble Every few minutes it's "the gods this, and the gods that...", the Windwaker contains "the power of the gods", you get a certain ability from the wind god and the ability to travely quickly through cyclones from the cyclone god, and the Tower of the gods has the G in gods capitalized (yeah I know, it's part of the name but still...), and the two sages when mentioned are said to be praying to the gods. The only redeeming thing from the entire gods issue is in one instance you have to kick the cyclone god's butt (which I really enjoyed). What really did it for me though, was that there is a point in the game where it is required to seek out two sages to pray to the gods for the master sword to be reenergized. The game actually says something along the lines of "your prayers were answered and the master sword regained some of its power!" And for people whom would try to say "oh it's just fantasy" try talking to your pastor about it and see what he says... be sure to tell him about the Temple of the gods and the two wind gods, and the praying sages. But I'm a "thou shalt have no other gods before me" kinda guy, so I took this game back and asked for a refund. Yes, I've already been criticized for this, and surprisingly mostly from Christians. For those that think a 2 is too harsh, I would have given this a 1 except for the fact that I felt this game didn't deserve to be placed in the ranks of Diablo and Grand Theft Auto III. If it weren't for the praying bit, I'd have given this a 3 and would probably still have the game.
I'm glad he finds something "redeeming" in a work produced by a polytheistic culture that features... polytheism, even if he's "honestly disappointed" by it. Thankfully, he doesn't believe that other cultures should be placed in the ranks of GTA3.
I wonder if strict Shinto believers are offended when an American work makes a vague hint toward monotheism, such as Warcraft III's "The Light". I'm guessing not, but I could be wrong.
Facts. I pulled up the story from The Register because the Wall Street Journal is probably a lot harder to wade through, but this should jog your memory. Microsoft was hacked and the hackers supposedly had access to the system for three months before they were detected.
For what it is worth, MS and others should do something like this _EVERY_ time a full root vunerability is exploited by a released worm, virus etc. So it may stop an app from working, etc. At least a virus didn't fdisk your hdd. Minor patches be dammned, vunerabilities that give the attacker root or equivalent access NEED to be taken care of ASAP.
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Now. I understand that ms hotfixes tend (AHAHAHAHAHHAHAAH, tend) to screw stuff up. A simple flag in the registry / file in the filesystem could tell the "viral exploit patch", not to patch the system, but send the administrator a message / put a link on the desktop for the patch. Of course, the next worm could just set that flag after infection, so this idea kinda sucks, and which is why I'd reccomend the radical option of no way of overriding the "viral exploit patch".
The problem with this idea, even in the form of just putting a little message or icon on an infected user's desktop, is that it creates a single point of entry. Microsoft's internal servers have been hacked, and, in fact, utterly 0wn3d, in the past. If that happened again and some new version of Windows allowed them to send information to users' computers and have it automatically downloaded, then someone could annihilate every Windows machine connected to the internet in the entire world with one stroke.
It's like those towns in RPGs and fantasy novels that all get their water from the same river. The bad guys just have to go upstream and poison the river and they can wipe out an entire string of towns. It's the classic problem of a large number of people relying on a single vital resource that can be tainted by enemies.
The other day, I was required to "re-regster" due to some "security enhancements". A long story short: the registration process hick-upped and I was able to pull up some serious information (accidentally) on *other people*. I could have done some damage with this info. Much damage. But instead, I called up, reported the event and switched back to the old mail-it-to-me method of compensation. It is worth it.
Awhile back, I was "camping" in "the woods" near a "town". Long story short: I had a knife on me for cutting rope and boxes and such could have used it to stab *other people*. I could have done some damage with that knife. Much damage. But instead, I didn't. It was worth it.
Every day, people get the chance to commit a crime and victimize others. Often several chances. Whenever I get into my car, I could decide to floor it and mow down some pedestrians. Whenever someone accidentally leaves themselves logged in at a public computer, I could go to town on them and probably get some money out of it. And hey, if you're a man, we're all physically equipped to rape. However, what matters if how often these crimes actually happen, not how often they COULD happen.
Potential crimes are not crimes and they're not something that should be factored into our fear of crime. As someone else mentioned above, there were 86,000 cases of real identity theft committed against the 286 million human beings that live legally in the United States. Potential identity theft, however, probably ranges in the millions, because anyone with a mailbox that isn't a PO Box or similarly locked box can have all of their bills stolen while they're not home.
I'm not sure why a search engine would need to "represent an even distribution of wealth."
I know exactly why: because he's joking. Look at his user name.
If there was one, then there would of had to be thousands at the time the species was alive. It's amazing that only a piece of what could of been an entire species is ever found.
Actually, instead of being its own species, this creature could just be the primate equivalent to a Liger, which is the fairly rare offspring of a lion and a tiger that most people aren't even aware of. In the case of the Liger, as is possible in this case, the result of the mating is a sort of super-beast that's larger and stronger than either of the species that it is descended from.
Actually, the Tigon, another form of lion-tiger hybrid that is actually a bit smaller than its parents, might be a better example. The mating of a tiger and a lioness is very rare and if it produces a male, the male will be infertile, which makes the Tigon a real animal, but an incredibly rare one. And once a female Tigon has mated again, it is technically no longer a Tigon, because it can't mate with a male Tigon and be "pure bred". The resulting offspring, regardless of what lion or tiger species it is from, looks quite different than the female Tigon.
So really, they may have found the few living specimens of this creature, and even if it's very rare, it might not be on the verge of extinction, because it might not be a real species.
What's more likely, than the people distributing tons and tons of ebooks view it as some sort of penile extension, or that they, like all pirate sites, are merely trying to distribute as much of what they have as possible because the sites are shut down so fast that making a pirated work available everywhere is the only way to make it available somewhere at all?
Lots of BitTorrent sites have collections of TV shows movies that have nothing do with one another. Dramas, comedies, reality shows, fan-subtitled foreign works... they have everything. This isn't to show off what they have. It's because if they saw two sites that were offering comedies and decided, "Oh well, they've got that handled, I don't have to carry those", then those sites will doubtlessly be shut down in a week and the shows won't be available anywhere else because no one else carries them.
It's about having the works distributed as widely as possible, not having the biggest collection.
Have you ever been to Japan? I never saw any anime on late night TV. Afterschool and primetime, yes. Everyone I talked to regarded anime as strictly for kids and I-don't-want-to-grow-up types.
Berserk, Eat-Man, and I believe also Hellsing were all late night anime, airing some time around midnight to 2AM. However, yes, MOST anime is in the afternoon and evening. There is some late night anime, though.
Yes, clearly, once one gets old enough one has no use for anything but gratuitous violence. :)
The lack of gratuitous violence isn't the only problem that games aimed at younger gamers have. They're also simplistic and easy. I have yet to find anything with a level of difficulty similar to Devil May Cry or Shinobi on the GameCube and as I play more and more GameCube games (I'm currently on a GC renting spree), I'm getting a little fed up with the lack of challenge. Case in point: Wario World, which I'm playing right now. You can't die. Seriously, you can't. You have infinite continues and continuing starts you off with full health in the exact same spot where you died, rather than the beginning of the level. On top of that, you're rarely hit and all you need to do is pick up a fallen enemy and spin the control stick to become invincible for awhile. It's ridiculous, but it seems to be par for the course, because Metroid Prime, Sonic Adventure 2 Battle, and Smash Bros. weren't that much harder.
1. Insert crappy Matrix joke that we've all heard before here.
2. Add half-assed, fucking stupid attempt to tie crappy Matrix joke into a pseudo-intellectual criticism of the subject.
3. Here, have another crappy Matrix joke for good measure.
4. ????????
5. Lame conclusion of obligatory "1. 2. 3. 4. ?????? 5. Profit!" joke.
6. Shut the fuck up and stop making the same jokes every day. You can do better! This is not Fark.com!
Lets say, a few months ago, you were on one of those trams at an international airport, and you see some guy standing close to you who happened to look Oriental (or is the PC term Asian?), with luggage tags from Beijing on his luggage. This guy is coughing up a storm and not caring about who's around him. Would you suspect him of having SARS or would that be "racist"?
No, I wouldn't, because I would think logically and realize that SARS, even at its peak, was several hundred or thousand times less common than the common cold in Asia. It's called the "common cold" for a reason. The same reason why SARS was not called "common SARS".
You see two Middle-eastern fellows with a rented U-haul truck pulling up to a farming store and buying dozens of bags of fertilizer. Would you call the FBI, or would that be "racist"?
Why would I call the FBI? Two brown guys buying fertilizer, as well as having easy access to fertilizer, is a daily occurrence. The vast majority of the lawn care guys in my entire state are either dark Hispanics (usually Mexicans), Arabs (which, from my perspective, look a lot like dark Hispanics), or some other form of immigrant trying to find cheap work to support their families. Do you call the FBI every time you see a Middle Eastern man at a gas station, because he has access to large amounts of flammable materials that could be used to set fires all over town? I hope not.
SARS and terrorism are both very rare things that don't happen nearly as often as an Asian man having a cold or a Arab buying some fertilizer. Only through the eyes of media hype, racism, or stupidity does a man buying some fertilizer become an act of terrorism. I also find it somewhat suspect that you assume that two Middle-Eastern men buying dozens of bags of fertilizer is suspect, since the last man to commit a terrorist act in the United States using fertilizer was Timothy McVeigh, a white man who was assisted by other whites. Should we worry whenever ANYONE buys fertilizer, or just calm down and understand that ordinary occurrences like people buying fertilizer don't suddenly become abnormal or terroristic acts just because of September 11th?
Nowadays, everyone is so worried about political correctness and not hurting anyones feelings that they are putting themselves and their country in danger. Teachers are being told what words they can and cannot say because they might "offend" someone.
Instead of being told not to say it, did you ever consider that maybe they just think differently from you? I know that some people would like to think that they're in some sort of oppressed, secret majority that thinks that racism is alright and that the racist answer is always a more logical one than an Asian man just having a cold, but a lot of us really don't think that way. We don't jump to race as the first answer, and instead of not wanting to offend anybody by saying it, we just don't even think about it in the first place.