If you read the entire article CNet wrote, it questions Googles ability to gather highly detailed information about individuals and then correlate that to other information. This is exactly the kind of thing people need to be worrying about. If you use a credit/debit card for most of your financial transactions, use a gps in your car and use services such as GMail "they" can track everything you buy, where you are and what your interests are. A pretty complete profile of your life can be put together in minutes by connecting these databases.
There will soon be facial recognition scanning done in most metropolitan areas, airports, etc and they will know everything you do, buy and are interested in. Google can change their policies whenever they want and share or sell their information to the highest bidder. There will be huge databases with this information in the next few years and they will know what you are coming to the store to buy before you even walk in the door. Did you see Minority Report? Remember when Tom Cruise walked into the car dealer with the set of eyes he had replaced and the computer system addressed him by name and told him what they had for him? That's what the world will be like very soon. Only they won't tell you they know what you are doing and thinking.
If you haven't read "A World Without Secrets" by Richard Hunter yet, I would suggest you do so. This is just the kind of questioning we need to have happen. Don't you ever wonder WHY they need your information, WHAT they are doing with it and HOW will it affect you when you give it to them? You should be!
July 29, Netcraft (UK) -- Phishers steal trust from eBay sign in pages. Scammers have
exploited a flaw in the eBay Website that allows them to orchestrate phishing attacks using
eBay's own Sign In page. Registered users of eBay's popular online auction Website must sign
in using a username and password in order to participate in bidding and listing of items. A new
style of phishing attack shows scammers exploiting flaws on the Sign In page and on another
ancilliary page which results in victims being redirected to the scammer's phishing site after
they have logged in. This particular attack starts off like many others, by sending thousands of
emails that instruct victims to update their eBay account details by visiting a URL. However,
that is where the similarity ends, because the URL in this case actually takes the victim to the
genuine eBay Sign In page, hosted on signin.ebay.com. By including special parameters at the
end of the URL, the scammer has changed the behavior of the Sign In page so that when a user
successfully logs in, they will then be sent to the scammer's phishing site via an open redirect
hosted on servlet.ebay.com.
Source: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/07/29/phish ers_steal_
trust_from_ebay_sign_in_pages.html
I have a 12 yr. old daughter that loves to game, but you are right when you say that they have left the children behind. That said, here are a few games that we have really enjoyed playing over the past year that have what I, as a conscientious parent, would consider acceptable content.
1. Sid Meier's Pirates! is a great game that appeals to not only kids, but adults as well. We have really enjoyed playing this. Unfortunately, it's not a multiplayer game, so we end up fighting a little over our one copy. Definitely worth checking out for the $29.99 I spent on it at Target. Rated E for everyone.
2. Neverwinter Nights is a Dungeons and Dragons game with lots of replayability due to it having the toolset used to create the game included as part of the package. The original episode and two expansions packs are a blast. The official content is generally acceptable for my daughter. If you are concerned about the violence level, it contains a slider bar to tone it down that can be password protected. We love this one.
3. Magic the Gathering Online is an online version of the popular collectible card game. Since you are an adult with money to burn, you won't have any problem shelling out money for virtual booster packs. Really though, I've got thousands of these cards sitting at home that I never get to play with. By buying the virtual cards, I can at least get a game anytime day or night within seconds. You can trade the cards online in the game with other users or sell them on Ebay if you want. There is a good secondary market. Oh and did I mention that it is an awesome strategic game too. You must use your math, logic and creativity in this one. A great, fun exercise for kids and the game is a heck of a lot of fun too. There is some concern about behavior of other players, but I've generally found the chat during games to be pretty minimal and 99.9% of the players very friendly.
4. The EA sports games are all good for kids. My daughter is not a big sports fan, but the Madden 2004 you can pick up for $15 these days is well worth it. It's light years away from Front Page Sports Football.
OK, so I can't really think of many more. You are absolutely right about ignoring the kid market though. When I go in to Best Buy and my daughter and I look at the shelves, we hardly ever find anything acceptable for her. It's either for 6 year olds or the 18+ crowd. Way too much killing and having played EQ for years, I am not ready to unleash her on the perverts playing online. So maybe they are not all perverts, but there are enough to scare me away from letting her get involved with a MMORPG.
If you do go out and pick up the new DMG2 and decide to add Saltmarsh to your campaign, it would be worthwhile to go pick up the old module "The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh". It is actually the first of a three part series that leads to some pirate ship adventure and more. The first one actually begins with the exploration of a haunted house (or is it?) just outside of town and proceeds onto the high seas of adventure in the following two modules. Well worth seeking out and fairly easy to run, but you'll have to do some conversion for the new rules.
These are really small transactions in the big scheme of things. It is really not surprising that they are able to get away with it. Try it some time. Take out a $10,000 loan, get a new credit card and transfer the balance. Transfer it again in 25 days and start the process all over again. You really think they would come knocking on your door when it shows you are paying off all of those cards and have a great credit rating?
I've been a long time game geek from the pen and pencil D&D days, what has been most challenging for me is to find games computer and non-computer that I can play with my 12 year old daughter. She is relatively innocent still, so stuff like Doom 3 and Half-Life were relegated to after she went to sleep. I played EQ for four years and finally burnt out on the same old pull-and-kill every night.
So what follows here are the games we've found that I can enjoy with her and are pretty much age appropriate and a lot of fun.
1. Neverwinter Nights - yeah, it's graphics are not state of the art, but what it lacks in graphics it makes up for in replayability, story, game play and ability to customize and create your own adventures. We just finished Hordes of the Underdark and it was a real challenge and a heck of a lot of fun. She loves it. And the ability to play any of the literally 100's of user created modules for free just makes it that much easier on my wallet. She begs me to play most nights and their is a content control to lower the violence level. We both love this one and it doesn't take a massive computer to run. Just be aware that each computer you play on (if doing multiplayer) will require a copy with a license key.
2. Heroes of Might and Magic 3 w/ In The Wake of the Gods free expansion (WOG)
HOMM3 was a great game even before the user created WOG expansion. After 3DO went under, some users out there took the best parts of Heroes 4 and some of their own ideas and created an expansion that gives you a ton of new options and content. If you liked it before, get the WOG download and check out the changes - new monsters, demolish buildings, build new towns, give magic items to your hero's champion, etc. Here's a link to the WOG site - http://www.strategyplanet.com/homm/wog/wog.shtml
3. Magic the Gathering Online (and off)
Again not a great graphics game, but the game play is always awesome and the online version enforces the rules. That eliminates a lot of the quibbling that goes on in real life Magic games. The only drawback here is cost - you have to pay for your online boosters. There is a good aftermarket, however, on Ebay and other sites where you can sell your entire collection or just buy that one card you need to get your deck tuned up. We like playing in real life too as I've been playing 10 years and have lots of cards laying around. Give it a try - free on the demo site. http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=magic/magicon line
4. Neopets
She loves the Neopets site and I have to admit that some of the games are fun for a while. It keeps her interested and I would recommend it for any kid. My sister-in-law spends hours on the site. There is a reason that MTV bought it - you don't want to leave because there is so much to do there. Oh, and it's totally free. www.neopets.com
5. MAME
We've got an old 300MHz box setup with an X-Arcade dual joystick. Nothing like firing up a game of Galaga or Black Tiger. My daughter loves discovering those old games and trying to beat them. Dig out that old PC in your basement, what are you waiting for.
Non-Computer Game All Stars
1. Puerto Rico
This board game has great replayability as every game ends up different. It sounds cheesy trying to become the governor of a little island by growing and selling coffee, sugar, indigo and corn, but the game revolves around tough decision making and its weird turn based system is pretty cool once you get used to it. An all-time favorite at our house.
2. Talisman
If you can find it, pick this one up. Games Workshop made this and a number of expansions some years ago and it went out of print for a long time. The originals sell for huge amounts on Ebay, but I found a recent reprint at a local game store a few months ago for $75. Great g
We already have this DRM scheme in place. It's called Serial Copyright Management System and has been required on all digital recorders since 1992. The manufacturer's of DAT recorders, CD recorders (set top models) and the media labeled for music already pay a tax to the RIAA and consumers who use these technologies cannot be sued.
What's so different about this other than it prevents burning on a CD-ROM? If you want to burn CD's to your heart's content without fear from the man, just follow the law http://www.virtualrecordings.com/ahra.htm.
For what purposes? What was your personal experience with using Linux?
Re:What did he really expect would happen?
on
EFF's Logfinder
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Oops, the dreaded mis-click. Thanks.
What did he really expect would happen?
on
EFF's Logfinder
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Why would anyone want to keep an employee around that was creating a forum for dissent? But what I want to know is the truth. Did they pay him off and get rid of him? We'll probably never know.
A new form of employee bribery in the making? Give me a raise or I will start blogging about all this idiotic stuff you do everyday to your customers and employees.
And now that I think about it, wouldn't it have been great to start quoting my boss that used to call his management team "the most ignorant SOB's on the face of the earth." Boy were we motivated by that.
Carlos Castenada would say, "I told you so."
on
Subatomic Darwinism
·
· Score: 1
It appears that the teachings of Don Juan, as passed on to us by Carlos Castenada, are being validated by our quantum mechanics. For example,
He pointed out that because of the predominance of sight in our habitual way of perceiving the world, the shamans of ancient Mexico described the act of directly apprehending energy as seeing. For them to perceive energy as it flowed in the universe meant that energy adopted nonidiosyncratic, specific configurations that repeated themselves consistently, and that those configurations could be perceived in the same terms by anyone who saw.
The most important example don Juan Matus could give of this consistency of energy in adopting specific configurations was the perception of the human body when it was seen directly as energy. As it was already said, shamans like don Juan perceive a human being as a conglomerate of energy fields that gives the total impression of a clear-cut sphere of luminosity. Taken in this sense, energy is described by shamans as a vibration that agglutinates itself into cohesive units. Shamans describe the entire universe as being composed of energy configurations that appear to the seeing eye as filaments, or luminous fibers that are strung in every which way without ever being entangled. This is an incomprehensible proposition for the linear mind. It has a built-in contradiction that can't be resolved: How could those fibers extend themselves every which way and yet not be entangled?
Don Juan emphasized the point that shamans were able only to describe events, and that if their terms of description seemed inadequate and contradictory, it was because of the limitations of syntax. Yet their descriptions were as strict as anything could be.
The shamans of ancient Mexico, according to don Juan, described intent as a perennial force that permeates the entire universe -- a force that is aware of itself to the point of responding to the beckoning or to the command of shamans. By means of intent, those shamans were capable of unleashing not only all the human possibilities of perceiving, but all the human possibilities of action. Through intent, they realized the most far-fetched formulations.
You'll all be crying the blues and downloading the "No-Steam" crack when Valve closes their shop and they all head off to the Caribbean with their millions. What a scam!
Dimnishing marginal returns
on
The Music Man
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem with collecting music in digital format is really a lack of availability. Once you have downloaded all of the Britney Spears, Bruce Springsteen, U2 and Shania Twain songs available you are left to search for much rarer objects of desire.
It probably wasn't too hard to fill several large hard drives with this drivel, but when you begin to look into other realms of music including jazz, classical, old C&W and even punk rock you hit a dead end with services like Kazaa and iTunes.
In fact, I spend much more time converting my old LP's into CD and MP3 using Soundforge 7 (yes, I own a legal copy) than I do looking online because there just isn't that much out there of real value.
If this guy was really interested in preserving music for the rest of us, he'd be out at garage sales every weekend and converting all of the Ventures surf music to MP3 for us. There is so much music out there that is not digitized that the mark he is going to make in his lifetime is like the scratches on my Eddie Cleanhead Vinson "Kidney Stew" CD converted from LP.
Oh, and these sound so much better than the label's crappy offerings once you've removed the clicks, hiss and scratches. If you've got an old record collection, get to converting. You'll be glad you did.
As an ex-Everquest junkie, I can appreciate all of your hard work and the intense devotion of your subscribers. What I am really interested in, however, are your thoughts on the real future of MMO games. There has been a lot of speculation on games that would be tied to a true RL monetary currency such as gold. Gold has a fixed value around the world and there are now online services that allow you to purchase physical and virutal items using gold as a currency.
Do you forsee a time when an adult level MMO game could be based on such a standard? Where we would see the the legal exchange of virtual items using a hard currency in places like eBay. Where the user could actually make a living buying and selling items acquired in game by their characters? Perhaps a game where the in game items are extremely limited or take massive amounts of time online to acquire such that a sword you win from defeating a dragon could literally be worth thousands of dollars. Is it possible?
that I just spent a good half hour reading your replies and some of the comments. It's been a long time since I posted, but your interview was thought provoking and entertaining. Thanks, you made my day.
I have seen some stories about an MMO in development that is based on Gold. since the value of gold is consistent across the world, it is the perfect medium of exchange. Everything in the game can be exchanged for gold, real gold. And all in game items are can be bought/sold/traded for gold. The NPC merchants keep a percentage of all transactions, kind of tax, so the developer continues to make money over the cost of adding new items/treasure in game. Now if that would be the highest subscribed MMO in history, I don't know what would.
I wanted to express my dismay at the continuing assault on the public's rights with regards to Sen. Orrin Hatch's forthcoming introduction of legislation that amends Title 17 and the copyright laws. The "Inducement Devolves into Unlawful Child Exploitation Act" that Senator Hatch is preparing to introduce contains an amendment to Title 17 in Section 2 of the Act which has nothing to do with the unlawful exploitation of children. Specifically, the amendement appears to make it a crime for anyone to develop, discuss, buy, sell or recommend tools or information that will allow for the "fair use" rights of average citizens to be realized if these tools might also be used for copyright infringement.
Are we going to outlaw the VCR Senator? Are we going to go to jail for using copy machines? Are we going to discourage research into cryptography by academia and computer security professionals such as myself? Are our legislators going to continue catering to the special interests that are lining their war chests with contributions or are they going to stand up for the public's right to use content they purchase as they wish?
The worst part of this is that Senator Hatch is hiding this amendment inside of a bill supposedly designed to punish unlawful child exploitation. Now what person in there right mind would come out in opposition to laws against unlawful exploitation of children? It is a totally underhanded ploy by Senator Hatch to pass legislation aimed at helping some of his largest contributors, while sneaking it into a bill that would make a colleague think twice about voting no on the other provisions hidden inside.
I urge you to work hard to strip the copyright law changes from this bill when it is introduced into the Senate and, if not abandon them completely, at least address them separately. These deserve to be argued on their own and not as part of some other bill or compromise.
Finally, the Supreme Court ruled against Hollywood in the 1984 Betamax case when they determined that any device capable of a substantial non-infringing use was legal. The Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 shored up the rights of the average citizen and made home taping legal given the properly used equipment and blank media. Let's build on these rulings and continue to represent your constituents rights, not trample them into the ground. If the old business models of the media conglomerates cannot adapt to the technology of today or the future, then they need to come up with a new business-model or go broke. Our legislature should not be in the business of restricting the public's rights so that outdated companies that do not innovate and move with the times continue to survive.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.cnn.com/2003/EDUCATION/12/12/facial.rec ognition.ap/
http://www.identix.com/datasheets/faceit/ABIS_law. pdf
http://www.identix.com/datasheets/faceit/ABIS_civi l_id.pdf
http://www.identix.com/datasheets/faceit/ABIS.pdf
http://www.compukiss.com/populartopics/travel_tran shtm/article836.htm
http://www.findbiometrics.com/Pages/smile.html
http://www.aaae.org/government/150_Transportation_ Security_Policy/400_sponsors_and_corporate_members /visionicspr9.html
http://www.identix.com/industries/BRCH/border_sol. pdf
There are lots more out there. Look for yourself.
There will soon be facial recognition scanning done in most metropolitan areas, airports, etc and they will know everything you do, buy and are interested in. Google can change their policies whenever they want and share or sell their information to the highest bidder. There will be huge databases with this information in the next few years and they will know what you are coming to the store to buy before you even walk in the door. Did you see Minority Report? Remember when Tom Cruise walked into the car dealer with the set of eyes he had replaced and the computer system addressed him by name and told him what they had for him? That's what the world will be like very soon. Only they won't tell you they know what you are doing and thinking.
http://worldwithoutsecrets.gartner.com/section.php .id.49.s.1.jsp
July 29, Netcraft (UK) -- Phishers steal trust from eBay sign in pages. Scammers have exploited a flaw in the eBay Website that allows them to orchestrate phishing attacks using eBay's own Sign In page. Registered users of eBay's popular online auction Website must sign in using a username and password in order to participate in bidding and listing of items. A new style of phishing attack shows scammers exploiting flaws on the Sign In page and on another ancilliary page which results in victims being redirected to the scammer's phishing site after they have logged in. This particular attack starts off like many others, by sending thousands of emails that instruct victims to update their eBay account details by visiting a URL. However, that is where the similarity ends, because the URL in this case actually takes the victim to the genuine eBay Sign In page, hosted on signin.ebay.com. By including special parameters at the end of the URL, the scammer has changed the behavior of the Sign In page so that when a user successfully logs in, they will then be sent to the scammer's phishing site via an open redirect hosted on servlet.ebay.com. Source: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/07/29/phish ers_steal_
trust_from_ebay_sign_in_pages.html
I have a 12 yr. old daughter that loves to game, but you are right when you say that they have left the children behind. That said, here are a few games that we have really enjoyed playing over the past year that have what I, as a conscientious parent, would consider acceptable content. 1. Sid Meier's Pirates! is a great game that appeals to not only kids, but adults as well. We have really enjoyed playing this. Unfortunately, it's not a multiplayer game, so we end up fighting a little over our one copy. Definitely worth checking out for the $29.99 I spent on it at Target. Rated E for everyone. 2. Neverwinter Nights is a Dungeons and Dragons game with lots of replayability due to it having the toolset used to create the game included as part of the package. The original episode and two expansions packs are a blast. The official content is generally acceptable for my daughter. If you are concerned about the violence level, it contains a slider bar to tone it down that can be password protected. We love this one. 3. Magic the Gathering Online is an online version of the popular collectible card game. Since you are an adult with money to burn, you won't have any problem shelling out money for virtual booster packs. Really though, I've got thousands of these cards sitting at home that I never get to play with. By buying the virtual cards, I can at least get a game anytime day or night within seconds. You can trade the cards online in the game with other users or sell them on Ebay if you want. There is a good secondary market. Oh and did I mention that it is an awesome strategic game too. You must use your math, logic and creativity in this one. A great, fun exercise for kids and the game is a heck of a lot of fun too. There is some concern about behavior of other players, but I've generally found the chat during games to be pretty minimal and 99.9% of the players very friendly. 4. The EA sports games are all good for kids. My daughter is not a big sports fan, but the Madden 2004 you can pick up for $15 these days is well worth it. It's light years away from Front Page Sports Football. OK, so I can't really think of many more. You are absolutely right about ignoring the kid market though. When I go in to Best Buy and my daughter and I look at the shelves, we hardly ever find anything acceptable for her. It's either for 6 year olds or the 18+ crowd. Way too much killing and having played EQ for years, I am not ready to unleash her on the perverts playing online. So maybe they are not all perverts, but there are enough to scare me away from letting her get involved with a MMORPG.
If you do go out and pick up the new DMG2 and decide to add Saltmarsh to your campaign, it would be worthwhile to go pick up the old module "The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh". It is actually the first of a three part series that leads to some pirate ship adventure and more. The first one actually begins with the exploration of a haunted house (or is it?) just outside of town and proceeds onto the high seas of adventure in the following two modules. Well worth seeking out and fairly easy to run, but you'll have to do some conversion for the new rules.
These are really small transactions in the big scheme of things. It is really not surprising that they are able to get away with it. Try it some time. Take out a $10,000 loan, get a new credit card and transfer the balance. Transfer it again in 25 days and start the process all over again. You really think they would come knocking on your door when it shows you are paying off all of those cards and have a great credit rating?
I've been a long time game geek from the pen and pencil D&D days, what has been most challenging for me is to find games computer and non-computer that I can play with my 12 year old daughter. She is relatively innocent still, so stuff like Doom 3 and Half-Life were relegated to after she went to sleep. I played EQ for four years and finally burnt out on the same old pull-and-kill every night.
So what follows here are the games we've found that I can enjoy with her and are pretty much age appropriate and a lot of fun.
1. Neverwinter Nights - yeah, it's graphics are not state of the art, but what it lacks in graphics it makes up for in replayability, story, game play and ability to customize and create your own adventures. We just finished Hordes of the Underdark and it was a real challenge and a heck of a lot of fun. She loves it. And the ability to play any of the literally 100's of user created modules for free just makes it that much easier on my wallet. She begs me to play most nights and their is a content control to lower the violence level. We both love this one and it doesn't take a massive computer to run. Just be aware that each computer you play on (if doing multiplayer) will require a copy with a license key.
2. Heroes of Might and Magic 3 w/ In The Wake of the Gods free expansion (WOG)
HOMM3 was a great game even before the user created WOG expansion. After 3DO went under, some users out there took the best parts of Heroes 4 and some of their own ideas and created an expansion that gives you a ton of new options and content. If you liked it before, get the WOG download and check out the changes - new monsters, demolish buildings, build new towns, give magic items to your hero's champion, etc. Here's a link to the WOG site - http://www.strategyplanet.com/homm/wog/wog.shtml
3. Magic the Gathering Online (and off)
Again not a great graphics game, but the game play is always awesome and the online version enforces the rules. That eliminates a lot of the quibbling that goes on in real life Magic games. The only drawback here is cost - you have to pay for your online boosters. There is a good aftermarket, however, on Ebay and other sites where you can sell your entire collection or just buy that one card you need to get your deck tuned up. We like playing in real life too as I've been playing 10 years and have lots of cards laying around. Give it a try - free on the demo site. http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=magic/magicon line
4. Neopets
She loves the Neopets site and I have to admit that some of the games are fun for a while. It keeps her interested and I would recommend it for any kid. My sister-in-law spends hours on the site. There is a reason that MTV bought it - you don't want to leave because there is so much to do there. Oh, and it's totally free. www.neopets.com
5. MAME
We've got an old 300MHz box setup with an X-Arcade dual joystick. Nothing like firing up a game of Galaga or Black Tiger. My daughter loves discovering those old games and trying to beat them. Dig out that old PC in your basement, what are you waiting for.
Non-Computer Game All Stars
1. Puerto Rico
This board game has great replayability as every game ends up different. It sounds cheesy trying to become the governor of a little island by growing and selling coffee, sugar, indigo and corn, but the game revolves around tough decision making and its weird turn based system is pretty cool once you get used to it. An all-time favorite at our house.
2. Talisman
If you can find it, pick this one up. Games Workshop made this and a number of expansions some years ago and it went out of print for a long time. The originals sell for huge amounts on Ebay, but I found a recent reprint at a local game store a few months ago for $75. Great g
http://www.gigalaw.com/articles/2001-all/samuels-2 001-04-all.html
What's so different about this other than it prevents burning on a CD-ROM? If you want to burn CD's to your heart's content without fear from the man, just follow the law http://www.virtualrecordings.com/ahra.htm.
Link to previous comments on this issue.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=104952&cid=893 7703
"Believe half of what you hear and even less of what you read" Anonymous
For what purposes? What was your personal experience with using Linux?
Oops, the dreaded mis-click. Thanks.
A new form of employee bribery in the making? Give me a raise or I will start blogging about all this idiotic stuff you do everyday to your customers and employees.
And now that I think about it, wouldn't it have been great to start quoting my boss that used to call his management team "the most ignorant SOB's on the face of the earth." Boy were we motivated by that.
Good music too. Subscribing got you real time video of them in the studio. Subscriber only streaming audio concerts. A CD and more. Check it out.
to bring your site to a grinding halt.
He pointed out that because of the predominance of sight in our habitual way of perceiving the world, the shamans of ancient Mexico described the act of directly apprehending energy as seeing. For them to perceive energy as it flowed in the universe meant that energy adopted nonidiosyncratic, specific configurations that repeated themselves consistently, and that those configurations could be perceived in the same terms by anyone who saw.
The most important example don Juan Matus could give of this consistency of energy in adopting specific configurations was the perception of the human body when it was seen directly as energy. As it was already said, shamans like don Juan perceive a human being as a conglomerate of energy fields that gives the total impression of a clear-cut sphere of luminosity. Taken in this sense, energy is described by shamans as a vibration that agglutinates itself into cohesive units. Shamans describe the entire universe as being composed of energy configurations that appear to the seeing eye as filaments, or luminous fibers that are strung in every which way without ever being entangled. This is an incomprehensible proposition for the linear mind. It has a built-in contradiction that can't be resolved: How could those fibers extend themselves every which way and yet not be entangled?
Don Juan emphasized the point that shamans were able only to describe events, and that if their terms of description seemed inadequate and contradictory, it was because of the limitations of syntax. Yet their descriptions were as strict as anything could be.
The shamans of ancient Mexico, according to don Juan, described intent as a perennial force that permeates the entire universe -- a force that is aware of itself to the point of responding to the beckoning or to the command of shamans. By means of intent, those shamans were capable of unleashing not only all the human possibilities of perceiving, but all the human possibilities of action. Through intent, they realized the most far-fetched formulations.
http://www.uazone.org/naph/ccarlos/books/cc10/tens egrity40.html
http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/199408.pdf
You'll all be crying the blues and downloading the "No-Steam" crack when Valve closes their shop and they all head off to the Caribbean with their millions. What a scam!
It probably wasn't too hard to fill several large hard drives with this drivel, but when you begin to look into other realms of music including jazz, classical, old C&W and even punk rock you hit a dead end with services like Kazaa and iTunes.
In fact, I spend much more time converting my old LP's into CD and MP3 using Soundforge 7 (yes, I own a legal copy) than I do looking online because there just isn't that much out there of real value.
If this guy was really interested in preserving music for the rest of us, he'd be out at garage sales every weekend and converting all of the Ventures surf music to MP3 for us. There is so much music out there that is not digitized that the mark he is going to make in his lifetime is like the scratches on my Eddie Cleanhead Vinson "Kidney Stew" CD converted from LP.
Oh, and these sound so much better than the label's crappy offerings once you've removed the clicks, hiss and scratches. If you've got an old record collection, get to converting. You'll be glad you did.
Do you forsee a time when an adult level MMO game could be based on such a standard? Where we would see the the legal exchange of virtual items using a hard currency in places like eBay. Where the user could actually make a living buying and selling items acquired in game by their characters? Perhaps a game where the in game items are extremely limited or take massive amounts of time online to acquire such that a sword you win from defeating a dragon could literally be worth thousands of dollars. Is it possible?
http://www.e-gold.com/
that I just spent a good half hour reading your replies and some of the comments. It's been a long time since I posted, but your interview was thought provoking and entertaining. Thanks, you made my day.
I have seen some stories about an MMO in development that is based on Gold. since the value of gold is consistent across the world, it is the perfect medium of exchange. Everything in the game can be exchanged for gold, real gold. And all in game items are can be bought/sold/traded for gold. The NPC merchants keep a percentage of all transactions, kind of tax, so the developer continues to make money over the cost of adding new items/treasure in game. Now if that would be the highest subscribed MMO in history, I don't know what would.
I wanted to express my dismay at the continuing assault on the public's rights with regards to Sen. Orrin Hatch's forthcoming introduction of legislation that amends Title 17 and the copyright laws. The "Inducement Devolves into Unlawful Child Exploitation Act" that Senator Hatch is preparing to introduce contains an amendment to Title 17 in Section 2 of the Act which has nothing to do with the unlawful exploitation of children. Specifically, the amendement appears to make it a crime for anyone to develop, discuss, buy, sell or recommend tools or information that will allow for the "fair use" rights of average citizens to be realized if these tools might also be used for copyright infringement.
Are we going to outlaw the VCR Senator? Are we going to go to jail for using copy machines? Are we going to discourage research into cryptography by academia and computer security professionals such as myself? Are our legislators going to continue catering to the special interests that are lining their war chests with contributions or are they going to stand up for the public's right to use content they purchase as they wish?
The worst part of this is that Senator Hatch is hiding this amendment inside of a bill supposedly designed to punish unlawful child exploitation. Now what person in there right mind would come out in opposition to laws against unlawful exploitation of children? It is a totally underhanded ploy by Senator Hatch to pass legislation aimed at helping some of his largest contributors, while sneaking it into a bill that would make a colleague think twice about voting no on the other provisions hidden inside.
I urge you to work hard to strip the copyright law changes from this bill when it is introduced into the Senate and, if not abandon them completely, at least address them separately. These deserve to be argued on their own and not as part of some other bill or compromise.
Finally, the Supreme Court ruled against Hollywood in the 1984 Betamax case when they determined that any device capable of a substantial non-infringing use was legal. The Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 shored up the rights of the average citizen and made home taping legal given the properly used equipment and blank media. Let's build on these rulings and continue to represent your constituents rights, not trample them into the ground. If the old business models of the media conglomerates cannot adapt to the technology of today or the future, then they need to come up with a new business-model or go broke. Our legislature should not be in the business of restricting the public's rights so that outdated companies that do not innovate and move with the times continue to survive.
that doesn't just pay a living wage, but a "buy all the over-priced CD/book/movies I want wage"?