People probably keep these songs shared because many P2P users have a 56K connection and set up their P2P programs to download songs overnight while they're asleep. If one or more of the songs that they downloaded turns out to be one of these bullshit advertisements, that MP3 will continue to be circulated at least from about 1AM to 3PM/5PM (time the song was downloaded to the time that the person gets home from school/work in the afternoon), and possibly much longer if they don't take a look at every single MP3 that they downloaded until a day or two after that.
Besides that, there's also the fact that my cable connection regularly gets swarmed by people that are looking for the same popular songs. There are at least three people downloading a popular song from me before I can even look at the damn thing, and the situation is probably worse for T1 or T3 users.
I talked to the system's marketing manager. He told me almost all of the people who got extra service were stealing it on purpose, which contradicted the installer's comments. I don't know who to believe, but I am suspicious.
Two of the definite rules of all TV/cable/modem/phone services:
1. The grunt in overalls that comes to your house and installs or fixes your stuff is telling the truth, unless he's an independant contractor that has something to sell you.
2. "Marketing" or "manager" = liar, even worse if the two words are used together.
And pay about 170 times the value of what you stole, which seems pretty excessive to me. If we're going to put people into debt for most of their lives for stealing what probably amounts to less than $1000 worth of merchandise, why don't we just chop their hands off, too?
It's not just email that's insecure. Regular mail passes through the hands of many, many people, and all it takes is a human finger to "circumvent its security measures". Phone lines are the same way. Even the most basic technical knowledge of how phone lines work will show you that phone lines are horribly insecure and that virtually anyone can tap into them. Cell phones are pretty much the same way, too.
But does any of it matter? Front doors to houses in the US, which are required by law to swing inward, are ridiculously easy to kick/bash in. Does that mean that it should be legal for someone to kick down my door and do whatever the Hell they want in my home? Of course it doesn't. It's also ridiculously easy to kill people (a strong hit to the head alone will do the trick sometimes), so should that be legal, too?
Lots of very bad things are easy to do. That's part of the reason why they're illegal (or, in this case, they're supposed to be). They harm others and almost anyone can do them.
It's good to see that Australia is serious about combatting terrorism. The recent terrorist attacks on Australia in which many, many people were killed present a clear need for anti-terrorism legislation in Australia. In the face of such overwhelming horror on their own home soil, can we really blame Australia for jumping to the conclusion that security is more important right now than liberty? Personally, I think the international community should try to be understanding of the situation that Australia has been put in and try to give them some leeway in their knee-jerk reactions to the horrible atrocities that have befallen them.
But on a serious, more blunt note: Should these people wait for terrorists, and by that I mean ANY TERRORISTS AT ALL, to give a rat's ass about them before enacting broad "anti-terrorism" legislation? Are the Australian people really going to swallow this crap?
The freedoms enjoyed by millions of people can be exploited by a few hundred, or even a few thousand malicious people. This is new to someone? Someone ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD? Wow. You must know very, very little about the histories of free countries, as well as very basic things like the wide availability of kitchen knives, which can be used to cut meat and also murder family members in their sleep.
Why do these stories suddenly become new or shocking when the word "terrorist" is connected to them? Are so many people really that ignorant about the basics of how freedoms work and the costs that come with them? This stuff is so simple that it could be taught to first graders and they would fully understand it in less than an hour.
Chris does post a lot, but it seems that most of his posts have at least one error in them. Occasionally it's spelling, but more often it's just inaccurate or obvious statements. You see this as a sign that he truly cares, but I see it as a sign of someone that just doesn't bother to proofread what they write. It seems like he immediately posts whatever comes to his mind before actually thinking it out or even bothering to check the spelling.
But spelling thing was actually just a little joke to attach to my post. The real reason I posted that was because I felt like an idiot for having fallen into the same trap that at least a dozen different/. users fall into each day: wasting time and comment space correcting Chrisd's Small Inaccuracy Of The Day(TM). The joke was just a small addition that wasn't meant as maliciously as you took it.
Forget what I said. Of course it's not surprising to any of us. It was posted by chrisd.
Return of Castle Wolfenstein sounds a great game, Chris! I can't wait for it to come out for Windows. Is it better than Return to Castle Wolfenstein, or is it just more of the same?
How is it interesting that Quake 3 Arena runs faster in Linux than in Windows? I've always been a Windows user (that's another story), but my Linux using friends and many others have always boasted that they could get Quake and Quake 2 to work on PCs with much, much lower specs than the minimum requirements for the game because they were using Linux, and thus didn't have the processor overhead of the "Windows bloat".
Less stuff running while playing the game = faster game. Why is this suddenly supposed to be interesting or surprising to any of us? Even us heathen Windows users know that much.
Look at the countries involved. Twenty years ago this list would have been headed by Russian. For better or worse, it very much reflects (IMHO) the countries currently posing a threat or potential threat to the US.
More importantly, it reflects the people that our soldiers most urgently need to be able to talk to overseas. It also reflects the lack of readily available translators to translate these rare, unique languages for those soldiers.
We still haven't figured out how to live on this planet. Why go wreck more?
Yeah, it'd be horrible if human beings cut down all of the trees on Mars, hunted all of the animals into extinction, and filled the atmosphere with unbreathable crap.;)
So by that same token, you should be executed for criticizing China's laws, and whatever country you are in should immediately agree with China to let them punish you under their laws and their standards, regardless of where you live.
Different countries have different moral bases and aspirations. If the Chinese should not be exempt from your country's laws that based on your country's morality, then you should not be free from China's laws that are based on China's morality. This is why we have multiple countries in the world, and also the reason why most countries don't put up with their citizens being harassed by other nation for "committing a crime" while on their home soil, where that "crime" is perfectly legal. If something that's legal in one country happens to cross the internet and ends up in a country where it's not, then that's just too damn bad. There's nothing that can be done about it, because the only other alternative is to hold absolutely everyone on the internet, regardless of what country they live in, to the combined laws of all of the strictest countries on Earth, which would make it illegal to not only upload kiddie porn, but also to speak for or against democracy, for or against communism, for or against bigotry, for or against any religion, etc. It would put so many people in jail that the entire idea is an impossibility.
Oh, no, we all understand the point of the game. We're all aware that it's just an interactive commercial for the military. What you seem to misunderstand is that's what we're making fun of.
Don't forget number 4: War movies don't look like Captain America taking on the Nazi forces with his bar hands any more. They more like the real thing. The real thing that leaves people with nightmares, flashbacks, and deep psychological scarring.
Oh, and possibly number 5: First Person Shooters. Once you've seen yourself go down in two seconds among a hail of enemy fire, you start to laugh at the idea of entering a similar situation in real life, only with one hit point instead of one hundred.
With the exception of a couple of people here, you military types have been way too sensitive about this. He wasn't even making a joke about the military. He was making a joke about the fact that the game, most likely, will be a glamorized version of military life that's meant to get people to join up. Despite all of its realistic combat, it isn't going to show the inanities of military life that soldiers regularly complain about.
Even "Sim Invading Iraq To Keep Approval Ratings High" counts. You say that it's an issue with the leadership, not the soldiers. That was the entire point of the joke. This game's glamorized version of the military certainly isn't going to give you any situations where you have to fight for what you DON'T believe in. It's just going to show you military conflicts with terrorists that are trying to release biological weapons into the atmosphere or guerrila fighters in South America that are trying to overthrow a democracy. It's not going to show you any of the various military conflicts in the United States' recent history where soldiers were forced to go into battle with very little justification and possibly without any moral basis at all.
The entire point was that this is going to be the recruitment poster or action movie version of the military, not the real thing. And for the most part, it's true.
The difference is the realism. If you check out some of the news on the game from gaming sites, you'll see that they've included a lot of little points of realism in the game that most military games ignore, such as the use of hand signals, being forced to shake when you snipe without being in the prone position, and losing A LOT of your accuracy when you fire an automatic weapon.
Yeah, but it IS a recruitment game. Isn't anyone afraid the game will be filled with advertisements for the military, such as tons of "Join NOW!" buttons, and pop-ups displaying the US Army website? If the games that are created with corporate advertising in mind are any indication, the final product should be a very good game gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Wouldn't voice recognition be better than a visual system for commands? I'd rather say "Play U2" than have to fetch a U2 CD to wave in front of its face for it to play music. And since you have to train it anyway by showing it various objects, it just seems like voice recognition would've been the smarter route.
He said that THEY are saying it; it was not his opinion. And in that context, he's right. Microsoft has claimed in the past that open source software is harmful to the economy because it is not paid for.
I've never understood this argument. People are willing to pay roughly $40 CND/$30 USD for a DVD that is two hours long, but they think that $80 CND/$60 USD (again, roughly) for a game that's ten to twenty hours long, such as Ico, Devil May Cry, Metal Gear Solid 2, or Resident Evil, is a rip off.
If you're willing to pay $40 CND for two hours of entertainment, why aren't you willing to pay twice as much for five to ten times as much entertainment time?
Yes, game consoles drop in price after a certain amount of time. However, that amount of time is at least a year, or more like three years in Sony's case (since they released the PS2 in Japan in 1999 and have only dropped the price for the first time right now). The GameCube and the X-Box were released SEVEN MONTHS AGO, making this a pretty unprecedented piece of console war history, unless you count the dying consoles that were gasping for air the second they were released.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll take its "sister" (heh heh) site, www.showusyour.bush.
People probably keep these songs shared because many P2P users have a 56K connection and set up their P2P programs to download songs overnight while they're asleep. If one or more of the songs that they downloaded turns out to be one of these bullshit advertisements, that MP3 will continue to be circulated at least from about 1AM to 3PM/5PM (time the song was downloaded to the time that the person gets home from school/work in the afternoon), and possibly much longer if they don't take a look at every single MP3 that they downloaded until a day or two after that.
Besides that, there's also the fact that my cable connection regularly gets swarmed by people that are looking for the same popular songs. There are at least three people downloading a popular song from me before I can even look at the damn thing, and the situation is probably worse for T1 or T3 users.
I talked to the system's marketing manager. He told me almost all of the people who got extra service were stealing it on purpose, which contradicted the installer's comments. I don't know who to believe, but I am suspicious.
Two of the definite rules of all TV/cable/modem/phone services:
1. The grunt in overalls that comes to your house and installs or fixes your stuff is telling the truth, unless he's an independant contractor that has something to sell you.
2. "Marketing" or "manager" = liar, even worse if the two words are used together.
3. Get punished
And pay about 170 times the value of what you stole, which seems pretty excessive to me. If we're going to put people into debt for most of their lives for stealing what probably amounts to less than $1000 worth of merchandise, why don't we just chop their hands off, too?
My mistake. I guess that's just an urban legend.
It's understandable. Sarcasm is difficult to express on the internet. Even when you lay it on really thick, it can still be easily misunderstood.
It's not just email that's insecure. Regular mail passes through the hands of many, many people, and all it takes is a human finger to "circumvent its security measures". Phone lines are the same way. Even the most basic technical knowledge of how phone lines work will show you that phone lines are horribly insecure and that virtually anyone can tap into them. Cell phones are pretty much the same way, too.
But does any of it matter? Front doors to houses in the US, which are required by law to swing inward, are ridiculously easy to kick/bash in. Does that mean that it should be legal for someone to kick down my door and do whatever the Hell they want in my home? Of course it doesn't. It's also ridiculously easy to kill people (a strong hit to the head alone will do the trick sometimes), so should that be legal, too?
Lots of very bad things are easy to do. That's part of the reason why they're illegal (or, in this case, they're supposed to be). They harm others and almost anyone can do them.
It's good to see that Australia is serious about combatting terrorism. The recent terrorist attacks on Australia in which many, many people were killed present a clear need for anti-terrorism legislation in Australia. In the face of such overwhelming horror on their own home soil, can we really blame Australia for jumping to the conclusion that security is more important right now than liberty? Personally, I think the international community should try to be understanding of the situation that Australia has been put in and try to give them some leeway in their knee-jerk reactions to the horrible atrocities that have befallen them.
But on a serious, more blunt note: Should these people wait for terrorists, and by that I mean ANY TERRORISTS AT ALL, to give a rat's ass about them before enacting broad "anti-terrorism" legislation? Are the Australian people really going to swallow this crap?
The freedoms enjoyed by millions of people can be exploited by a few hundred, or even a few thousand malicious people. This is new to someone? Someone ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD? Wow. You must know very, very little about the histories of free countries, as well as very basic things like the wide availability of kitchen knives, which can be used to cut meat and also murder family members in their sleep.
Why do these stories suddenly become new or shocking when the word "terrorist" is connected to them? Are so many people really that ignorant about the basics of how freedoms work and the costs that come with them? This stuff is so simple that it could be taught to first graders and they would fully understand it in less than an hour.
Chris does post a lot, but it seems that most of his posts have at least one error in them. Occasionally it's spelling, but more often it's just inaccurate or obvious statements. You see this as a sign that he truly cares, but I see it as a sign of someone that just doesn't bother to proofread what they write. It seems like he immediately posts whatever comes to his mind before actually thinking it out or even bothering to check the spelling.
/. users fall into each day: wasting time and comment space correcting Chrisd's Small Inaccuracy Of The Day(TM). The joke was just a small addition that wasn't meant as maliciously as you took it.
But spelling thing was actually just a little joke to attach to my post. The real reason I posted that was because I felt like an idiot for having fallen into the same trap that at least a dozen different
Forget what I said. Of course it's not surprising to any of us. It was posted by chrisd.
Return of Castle Wolfenstein sounds a great game, Chris! I can't wait for it to come out for Windows. Is it better than Return to Castle Wolfenstein, or is it just more of the same?
How is it interesting that Quake 3 Arena runs faster in Linux than in Windows? I've always been a Windows user (that's another story), but my Linux using friends and many others have always boasted that they could get Quake and Quake 2 to work on PCs with much, much lower specs than the minimum requirements for the game because they were using Linux, and thus didn't have the processor overhead of the "Windows bloat".
Less stuff running while playing the game = faster game. Why is this suddenly supposed to be interesting or surprising to any of us? Even us heathen Windows users know that much.
Look at the countries involved. Twenty years ago this list would have been headed by Russian. For better or worse, it very much reflects (IMHO) the countries currently posing a threat or potential threat to the US.
More importantly, it reflects the people that our soldiers most urgently need to be able to talk to overseas. It also reflects the lack of readily available translators to translate these rare, unique languages for those soldiers.
We still haven't figured out how to live on this planet. Why go wreck more?
;)
Yeah, it'd be horrible if human beings cut down all of the trees on Mars, hunted all of the animals into extinction, and filled the atmosphere with unbreathable crap.
So by that same token, you should be executed for criticizing China's laws, and whatever country you are in should immediately agree with China to let them punish you under their laws and their standards, regardless of where you live.
Different countries have different moral bases and aspirations. If the Chinese should not be exempt from your country's laws that based on your country's morality, then you should not be free from China's laws that are based on China's morality. This is why we have multiple countries in the world, and also the reason why most countries don't put up with their citizens being harassed by other nation for "committing a crime" while on their home soil, where that "crime" is perfectly legal. If something that's legal in one country happens to cross the internet and ends up in a country where it's not, then that's just too damn bad. There's nothing that can be done about it, because the only other alternative is to hold absolutely everyone on the internet, regardless of what country they live in, to the combined laws of all of the strictest countries on Earth, which would make it illegal to not only upload kiddie porn, but also to speak for or against democracy, for or against communism, for or against bigotry, for or against any religion, etc. It would put so many people in jail that the entire idea is an impossibility.
Oh, no, we all understand the point of the game. We're all aware that it's just an interactive commercial for the military. What you seem to misunderstand is that's what we're making fun of.
Don't forget number 4: War movies don't look like Captain America taking on the Nazi forces with his bar hands any more. They more like the real thing. The real thing that leaves people with nightmares, flashbacks, and deep psychological scarring.
Oh, and possibly number 5: First Person Shooters. Once you've seen yourself go down in two seconds among a hail of enemy fire, you start to laugh at the idea of entering a similar situation in real life, only with one hit point instead of one hundred.
With the exception of a couple of people here, you military types have been way too sensitive about this. He wasn't even making a joke about the military. He was making a joke about the fact that the game, most likely, will be a glamorized version of military life that's meant to get people to join up. Despite all of its realistic combat, it isn't going to show the inanities of military life that soldiers regularly complain about.
Even "Sim Invading Iraq To Keep Approval Ratings High" counts. You say that it's an issue with the leadership, not the soldiers. That was the entire point of the joke. This game's glamorized version of the military certainly isn't going to give you any situations where you have to fight for what you DON'T believe in. It's just going to show you military conflicts with terrorists that are trying to release biological weapons into the atmosphere or guerrila fighters in South America that are trying to overthrow a democracy. It's not going to show you any of the various military conflicts in the United States' recent history where soldiers were forced to go into battle with very little justification and possibly without any moral basis at all.
The entire point was that this is going to be the recruitment poster or action movie version of the military, not the real thing. And for the most part, it's true.
The difference is the realism. If you check out some of the news on the game from gaming sites, you'll see that they've included a lot of little points of realism in the game that most military games ignore, such as the use of hand signals, being forced to shake when you snipe without being in the prone position, and losing A LOT of your accuracy when you fire an automatic weapon.
Yeah, but it IS a recruitment game. Isn't anyone afraid the game will be filled with advertisements for the military, such as tons of "Join NOW!" buttons, and pop-ups displaying the US Army website? If the games that are created with corporate advertising in mind are any indication, the final product should be a very good game gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Wouldn't voice recognition be better than a visual system for commands? I'd rather say "Play U2" than have to fetch a U2 CD to wave in front of its face for it to play music. And since you have to train it anyway by showing it various objects, it just seems like voice recognition would've been the smarter route.
He said that THEY are saying it; it was not his opinion. And in that context, he's right. Microsoft has claimed in the past that open source software is harmful to the economy because it is not paid for.
I can see one (the current) becoming a lowlier, cheaper, seedier, less secure, internet "underground" if you will
With the exception of "cheaper" (in price, that is), isn't the current internet already the pinnacle of those adjectives?
I've never understood this argument. People are willing to pay roughly $40 CND/$30 USD for a DVD that is two hours long, but they think that $80 CND/$60 USD (again, roughly) for a game that's ten to twenty hours long, such as Ico, Devil May Cry, Metal Gear Solid 2, or Resident Evil, is a rip off.
If you're willing to pay $40 CND for two hours of entertainment, why aren't you willing to pay twice as much for five to ten times as much entertainment time?
Yes, game consoles drop in price after a certain amount of time. However, that amount of time is at least a year, or more like three years in Sony's case (since they released the PS2 in Japan in 1999 and have only dropped the price for the first time right now). The GameCube and the X-Box were released SEVEN MONTHS AGO, making this a pretty unprecedented piece of console war history, unless you count the dying consoles that were gasping for air the second they were released.