> Hollywood would have you believe that any car that has all of its wheels leave the ground blows up while in midair. > > This tends to make me distrust Hollywood as a source of physical phenomenon.
This tends to make me wonder about scrapping the ion engines, and just putting four wheels on one side of the asteroid.
> I'd imagine it'd work more like Star Wars than Star Trek. Everything is perfect on Star Trek.
There will be script kiddies using The Force to hack it. > > I just felt one million beowulf cluster jokes failing all at once. > >Dude, someone haxxored my Sorlac Pit.
> > Your Google Death Star is 0wn3d.
Geez, first it's Valve and HL2.
Someone call Sony, the Star Wars Galaxies source code has been leaked!
> This brings us to the keyword itself. Depending on the environment using "Computer" as the keyword or trigger may not be a good choice. For instance in an IT environment the word
computer is likely to come up often which would cause undesirable commands to be arbitrarily executed in a voice recognition situation.
1) Arrive early and get front row seat for keynote session at voice recognition trade show.
2) Wait for keynote speaker to load up PowerPoint.
3) Yell "START! RUN! CMD! ENTER! FORMAT SEE COLON! ENTER! YES! YES! YES!"
3) Hilarity ensues.
> [...] they must choose a name that is both pleasing to them and is unlikely to be used in the home for any other reason than addressing the
automation system.
What's the problem? "Darling", "Honey", "My love", "Dearest", "Girlfriend".
Plenty of room in the namepsace.
You could even provide bulletproof protection against my previous exploit by aliasing "FORMAT" to something like "I'm sorry", or "I love you".
> > But WCG sounded sincerely surprised to find out the infamous Eddy Marin was one of their customers." > >
Rule #1! Williams Communications Group is notorious for continuously providing bandwidth to spammers with dirty/24s. Then they feign this concern by "shinning" on those who complain about their dubious customers. Why don't someone ask them about Wholesalebandwidth.com/Optigate?
What I wanna know is how the fuck Marin manages to sign up Fortune 500 companies on a repeated basis. (Well, I also wanna know how he stays out of jail, but that's another story.)
In the past year, I've gotten spam from Daimler-Chrysler - not some fleabag Chrysler dealership in Rat's Bunghole, Floriduh, I mean Daimler-Chrysler Corporate - direct-to-MX from Marin's spam domains.
I've also gotten spams from Martha Stewart Omnimedia. Again, not some huckster selling counterfeit Martha-branded stuff ripped off the back of a truck from the K-Mart bankruptcy, but the real magazine, straight from MSO Corporate.
Others have reported Ford doing business with Eddy Marin, too.
In the first two cases, I received personal, non-form-letter-generated responses from personnel at those companies that this was not a case of forgery or identity theft.
In defense of Chrysler, the person I corresponded with seemed genuinely surprised and concerned. The Martha Stewart drone seemed utterly nonplussed at the realization that he'd been scammed by a convicted coke dealer - and now alleged identity theft and DDoSer - into believing that spamming was a good way to boost his company's already-tarnished reputation.
> If I type in "Arnnold", will it pop up "Arianna" as the one it thinks I should be voting for?
Verisign: "THIS CANDIDATE STILL AVAILABLE - ONLY $29.95 A MONTH!"
Microsoft: "I see you're trying to vote for Arnold Schwarzenegger. Would you like to vote for Arianna Huffington instead?"
Diebold: "Cherry, Bar, Flag. Sorry. Play 1 credit / 5 credits?"
> Anyone who hands over their documentation is obviously a ratfink and every time a paper carries one of their articles, it should be deluged with letters to the editor letting them know just what kind of asshole wrote the stories.
We all know that what gets printed and broadcast in the news is just the tip of the iceberg of what we call reality. The rest of "reality" is still embedded in the journalist's notes and interview tapes. If it's about "truth", then I say "the more data, the better". For everyone. This is Slashdot, aren't we for transparency?
If a journalist's responsibility is to "the truth", what harm could there be in turning over copies of one's notes to the FBI in the course of a criminal investigation? (Or, for that matter, sending copies of those same notes to the lawyer for the defendant, should a case come to trial? They're the journalist's notes, he can send copies to whomever he or she damn well pleases.)
The notes contain information. If the notes exonerate the defendant, the defendant is more likely to walk free or have the charges dropped before the case even gets to trial. If the notes confirm the defendant's guilt, the defendant is more likely to be tried and convicted. Both of these outcomes are Good Things.
The more information the FBI has, the more likely it is that it can make the correct decision about whether to press charges. And if a case comes to trial, the more information both sides have, the more likely it is that the judge and/or jury will come to the correct verdict.
Finally - is this precedent more likely to make "crackers" reluctant to talk to journalists, and thereby dry up an important conduit of information? Sure it is. But if you happen to be a "cracker", and "cracking" is illegal in your jurisdiction, perhaps telling a journalist that you're involved in such a thing is a dumb idea in the first place.
> I'm guessing you're not paranoid because you're not married or you don't have a long term girlfriend. You will be...
We "will be"? You're new here, aren't you?
Telling us we might have two girlfriends was pushing it. Telling us we're gonna meet the second one while we're still dating the first one, however, is so ridiculous that it borders on trolling:)
Re:Why, yes, it IS an aluminum foil hat.
on
TIA Project to End
·
· Score: 1
> Anybody who thinks for a minute that TIA is going away as long as Ashcroft is AG is high. This isn't a retreat, it's a regrouping before the next attack. As has been discussed here before, we will see this thing pop up again, medusa-like, under a variety of disguises; they'll be tracking child molesters, deadbeat dads, drug dealers, rapists, what have you, and each will be a noble enterprise, as difficult to criticize as a newborn baby.
Newborn babies? Damn, those fuckers are loud. "YO, THE 90S ARE OVER! THIS IS AN OFFICE, NOT A NURSERY! TAKE YOUR PET OUTSIDE OR PUT A MUZZLE ON IT!"
Now where were we? Right. Tracking bad guys. Tracking even bad guys who abuse their library privileges. And we won't need to mention rogue librarians because the librarian won't need to be involved in the process, so we won't need to ask them to do anything that would compromise their sense of ethics.
Unless you're asserting that somehow we go from drug dealers to law-abiding citizens, would someone explain to me what the problem is again? (It's hard to think with that goddamn baby in the office... one sec. "JUST PUT A SOCK IN IT! I GOT A NERF BALL IF THAT'LL HELP!")
"Hey, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, the 19 hijackers, Osama bin Laden, Uday and Qusay Hussein are all swimming in brimstone for eternity. Ain't that enough? What do you guys want from me?"
- Satan.
Yeah, what the hell's going on here? Judge screws over 50,000,000 people because Congress screwed up. OK, so far, story makes sense.
But what's with Congress fixing the problem, especially fixing it within a few days. I mean, come on, this is September 2003, not 2004! Nobody's gonna remember Congress fixing its mistakes when the elections are over a year away.
WTF d00d? Did they also legalize drugs and a stoned-out-of-its-gourd Congress just forget to put it in the Record? Did terrorists put LSD in the Congressional water supply? KGB Agents under deep cover flipping all the calendars a year ahead in every office? A sudden attack of civic conscience? Just what the hell is going on on Capitol Hill, and is there any way of continuing it?
> > So you've got a terrabyte of data, but can it handle Slashdot? > > Increasing the amount of data without increasing the bandwidth is not the way to avoid slashdoting.
Hell, the guy could have had an OC-48, we're talking about a Slashdotting, even Firewire's gonna be a bottleneck. (Those poor, poor, poor drives. He should give them to me.)
> But I understand that, especially now during our war against terrorism, law enforcement must
prioritize, and go after bigger threats to our well-being. > > I applaud John Ashcroft for realizing this, and using our scarce law enforcement resources to attack the
real threats: Tommy Chong, the bong seller, and porn that personally offends him.
OK, so you're being tongue-in-cheek, but you've actually got a good point.
I haven't seen much illegal drug spam lately (legal drugs sold illegally through "online pharmacies" are another story), but if John Aschroft really wants the FBI to get rid of pr0n that offends him... then why the fuck are any of the beastiality, rape, and incest spammers still alive, let alone dumping their filth in our inboxes on a 24/7 basis?
> > Then, he tried calling the FBI. The receptionist who took the call apparently didn't understand a word of Ron's explanation of a "denial of service attack against his Internet servers" and asked him "Is that illegal?". Ron insisted that he must speak to somebody who is more capable of understanding the issue. The receptionist transferred the call to the duty officer, which turned out to be an answering machine. > > If this is correct, I have no indication that it should not be, it looks like a total FBI fuck up.
Buzzword conflict.
You: "I'm suffering from a denial of service attack"
FBI drone: "WTF d00d? Is that even illegal?"
Use of proper buzzwords is essential:
You: "I need to speak to someone in CYBER SECURITY. I have information about a MASSIVE CYBER ATTACK in progress. The ATTACK against my SECURITY is coming from CHINA and SOUTH ASIA."
FBI drone: "I still haven't a clue what that means, but I've been read those words in memos, and I know that area of the world is important. And I have those words in my phone book, so I can transfer you to someone who might actually give a shit."
Then, once you get to someone in, uh, "cyber" security, you can say "Hi. I'm being DDoSed. Yes, my bandwidth costs are over $5000. I have a pretty good idea who the perps are. I also have a long list of ISPs, some foreign, but many domestic, that you can subpoena for logs to prove it."
I'm not saying you will get results this way, only that you're more likely to.
(If your CD-ROM drive was broken, would you walk into the sysadmin's cubicle and complain about the broken cupholder in your PC?:-)
> > For anyone with some spare time and a sniper rifle handy, Spamhaus maintain a list of known spammers [spamhaus.org]. > > Didn't some US court rule that the militant anti-abortionists' "hitlists" on the web were legal...
The difference between the fundie "hitlists" and Spamhaus is that Spamhaus doesn't maintain the list of known spammers with any expectation or the hope that a mentally-unbalanced person will Do Something Nasty to the spammers. Spamhaus maintains the list because knowing who the spammers are enables ISPs to choose whether or not to do business with these individuals. "Sorry, Sir. We don't want your business. Go darken someone else's network."
The only person who suggested that the Spamhaus registry be used for nefarious purposes was the previous poster. He or she may be in legal trouble for suggesting that the Spamhaus archives be misused in this way.
Regrettably, it takes law a long time to catch up with technology. At the moment, US law still considers spammers to be human beings, and therefore hunting them still constitutes homicide.
Were someone charged with the homicide of a spammer, and were I chosen to serve on such a jury, I would be forced to divulge, under oath, that I did not consider spammers human, and that I could not therefore render a verdict of "guilty" on homicide charges. The prosecuting attorney would be well within his or her rights to have me removed from the pool of jurors under consideration for that trial.
The ha-ha-only-serious thing is... the more spam I get, the more I wonder if anybody would be eligible to serve on such a jury these days. *sigh*
> I never cared much for anonymous chat. I remember working in a computer lab in college and walking around the room and finding out who was who in the different chats hostend on our vax. You'd have a little skinny 98 pound no sunlight no food no life guy with an ident of jockstud. Then you'd have a 400 pound girl called supermodel01. When they hooked up, look out! LOLx3
Yeah, I remember when dumb terminals were around 98 pounds, but how'd you get a VAX to weigh less than 1000?
(And why not call the VAX supermodel750? There was never a VAX 11/101, man!)
> But he can't possibly compete against Marey Carey's not-so-different tactic of giving out free
porn.
From marycareyforgovernor.com:
"Contribute $5000, get a date with Mary! Click here for details!"
Oracle gave $25,000 to Gray Davis, and all they got was this stinkin' $125M contract. HAH! Who gets more bang for the campaign buck now, Larry? Who's yo' daddy?:)
(Don't look at me like that. You know you were all thinking it. Besides, I'm still hoping Robert Anton Wilson's Guns and Dope Party carries the day as a write-in candidate. Any party whose "First order of business" is "Fire 33% of the legislature, names selected at random, and replace them with full-grown adult ostriches, whose mysterious and awesome dignity will elevate the suidean barbarity long established there", can't be that bad.
> Gray Davis can go suck monkey balls for all I care. He triples the car tax when he's faced with an upcoming recall, the recall starts to look like a sure thing, and then he says "Oh, if I'm not recalled, I'll repeal the tripling of the car tax."
Unfortunately, monkeys are not a sufficiently wealthy lobby group for Gray Davis to bother sucking their balls.
(Shoulda donated to the Guvnah while you had the chance, you damned dirty apes!)
> Davis never met a job he didn't want to destroy.
Yeah, but I didn't think he'd driven all the jobs other than spamming out of California. At least, not yet!
(Now before you think I'm getting political here, Florida's governor is a Republican. And what the hell does anybody do for a living in Florida other than spam the ever-lovin' fuck out of the rest of the planet?:-)
> > maybe im fed up of scinetific experiments with no purpose until they throw in the critical
"nanotubes" "space elevators" "quantum computers" "cure for cancer" >
> As opposed to any/. posting with the critical "Natalie Portman", "Hot Grits", "In Soviet Russia...", "Beowulf Cluster", or "You insensitive clod!",
Sure, in Soviet Russia, a beowulf cluster imagines Natalie Portman naked, but what really petrifies my hot grits is that we can talk about a single-atom cesium laser for 140 posts, without even one mention alt.cesium, you insensitive clods!
> I tried the star wars MMPORPG because friend insisted it was "the greatest thing ever". > >
Its so freaking boring...the tutorial fine, but the game, you get to a world, and it consists of guys looking for raw materials so they can level up characters, so they can then look for different raw materials so they can level up characters...
...and then, because they can't do anything without giving up their skills, they surrender all their skills and start over. And this is supposed to be something different than just quitting and reloading?
> I'm only saying this because I think the mentality of people who play these games is not part of what most people consider "normal", and therefore, the current MMPORPG population is just a collection of weird geeks.
At least the premise of Second Life sounds half-interesting. ("There is no content. Here are tools. Build it yourself. Play it yourself.")
By comparison, Star Wars Galaxies is "There is no content. There are no tools. Pretend you're inventing content." (Don't level up, you evil powergamer! There's so little content, and there are no tools for players to create add-on missions, but that's why you're paying $15/month, so you can roleplay... you know, imagine the content and roleplay what you'd be doing if the content was there!:-)
I'm a weird geek. SWG fans make me look positively normal. Bah. Gimme NWN. Hell, gimme Bard's Tale and Wizardry. If I wanna roleplay social interaction, I'll roleplay a party of six on my old-school CRPG. And not one of those characters will know the word "pwn".
Slashdot Mirror
>
> You mean it's "guilty until proven innocent" at UF.
In Soviet Russia, you're innocent until proven guilty!
And the probability of collision as the "*" :)
>
> This tends to make me distrust Hollywood as a source of physical phenomenon.
This tends to make me wonder about scrapping the ion engines, and just putting four wheels on one side of the asteroid.
>
> I just felt one million beowulf cluster jokes failing all at once.
>
>Dude, someone haxxored my Sorlac Pit.
>
> Your Google Death Star is 0wn3d.
Geez, first it's Valve and HL2.
Someone call Sony, the Star Wars Galaxies source code has been leaked!
1) Arrive early and get front row seat for keynote session at voice recognition trade show.
2) Wait for keynote speaker to load up PowerPoint.
3) Yell "START! RUN! CMD! ENTER! FORMAT SEE COLON! ENTER! YES! YES! YES!"
3) Hilarity ensues.
> [...] they must choose a name that is both pleasing to them and is unlikely to be used in the home for any other reason than addressing the automation system.
What's the problem? "Darling", "Honey", "My love", "Dearest", "Girlfriend".
Plenty of room in the namepsace.
You could even provide bulletproof protection against my previous exploit by aliasing "FORMAT" to something like "I'm sorry", or "I love you".
>
> Rule #1! Williams Communications Group is notorious for continuously providing bandwidth to spammers with dirty
What I wanna know is how the fuck Marin manages to sign up Fortune 500 companies on a repeated basis. (Well, I also wanna know how he stays out of jail, but that's another story.)
In the past year, I've gotten spam from Daimler-Chrysler - not some fleabag Chrysler dealership in Rat's Bunghole, Floriduh, I mean Daimler-Chrysler Corporate - direct-to-MX from Marin's spam domains.
I've also gotten spams from Martha Stewart Omnimedia. Again, not some huckster selling counterfeit Martha-branded stuff ripped off the back of a truck from the K-Mart bankruptcy, but the real magazine, straight from MSO Corporate.
Others have reported Ford doing business with Eddy Marin, too.
In the first two cases, I received personal, non-form-letter-generated responses from personnel at those companies that this was not a case of forgery or identity theft.
In defense of Chrysler, the person I corresponded with seemed genuinely surprised and concerned. The Martha Stewart drone seemed utterly nonplussed at the realization that he'd been scammed by a convicted coke dealer - and now alleged identity theft and DDoSer - into believing that spamming was a good way to boost his company's already-tarnished reputation.
Verisign: "THIS CANDIDATE STILL AVAILABLE - ONLY $29.95 A MONTH!"
Microsoft: "I see you're trying to vote for Arnold Schwarzenegger. Would you like to vote for Arianna Huffington instead?"
Diebold: "Cherry, Bar, Flag. Sorry. Play 1 credit / 5 credits?"
We all know that what gets printed and broadcast in the news is just the tip of the iceberg of what we call reality. The rest of "reality" is still embedded in the journalist's notes and interview tapes. If it's about "truth", then I say "the more data, the better". For everyone. This is Slashdot, aren't we for transparency?
If a journalist's responsibility is to "the truth", what harm could there be in turning over copies of one's notes to the FBI in the course of a criminal investigation? (Or, for that matter, sending copies of those same notes to the lawyer for the defendant, should a case come to trial? They're the journalist's notes, he can send copies to whomever he or she damn well pleases.)
The notes contain information. If the notes exonerate the defendant, the defendant is more likely to walk free or have the charges dropped before the case even gets to trial. If the notes confirm the defendant's guilt, the defendant is more likely to be tried and convicted. Both of these outcomes are Good Things.
The more information the FBI has, the more likely it is that it can make the correct decision about whether to press charges. And if a case comes to trial, the more information both sides have, the more likely it is that the judge and/or jury will come to the correct verdict.
Finally - is this precedent more likely to make "crackers" reluctant to talk to journalists, and thereby dry up an important conduit of information? Sure it is. But if you happen to be a "cracker", and "cracking" is illegal in your jurisdiction, perhaps telling a journalist that you're involved in such a thing is a dumb idea in the first place.
We "will be"? You're new here, aren't you?
Telling us we might have two girlfriends was pushing it. Telling us we're gonna meet the second one while we're still dating the first one, however, is so ridiculous that it borders on trolling :)
Newborn babies? Damn, those fuckers are loud. "YO, THE 90S ARE OVER! THIS IS AN OFFICE, NOT A NURSERY! TAKE YOUR PET OUTSIDE OR PUT A MUZZLE ON IT!"
Now where were we? Right. Tracking bad guys. Tracking even bad guys who abuse their library privileges. And we won't need to mention rogue librarians because the librarian won't need to be involved in the process, so we won't need to ask them to do anything that would compromise their sense of ethics.
Unless you're asserting that somehow we go from drug dealers to law-abiding citizens, would someone explain to me what the problem is again? (It's hard to think with that goddamn baby in the office... one sec. "JUST PUT A SOCK IN IT! I GOT A NERF BALL IF THAT'LL HELP!")
You mean in addition to representing their constitutents, Congressmen and their families and friends answer their own phones?!?!
Hell didn't freeze over, it must have phase-transitioned into superconductivity.
"Hey, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, the 19 hijackers, Osama bin Laden, Uday and Qusay Hussein are all swimming in brimstone for eternity. Ain't that enough? What do you guys want from me?"
- Satan.
Yeah, what the hell's going on here? Judge screws over 50,000,000 people because Congress screwed up. OK, so far, story makes sense.
But what's with Congress fixing the problem, especially fixing it within a few days. I mean, come on, this is September 2003, not 2004! Nobody's gonna remember Congress fixing its mistakes when the elections are over a year away.
WTF d00d? Did they also legalize drugs and a stoned-out-of-its-gourd Congress just forget to put it in the Record? Did terrorists put LSD in the Congressional water supply? KGB Agents under deep cover flipping all the calendars a year ahead in every office? A sudden attack of civic conscience? Just what the hell is going on on Capitol Hill, and is there any way of continuing it?
>
> Increasing the amount of data without increasing the bandwidth is not the way to avoid slashdoting.
Hell, the guy could have had an OC-48, we're talking about a Slashdotting, even Firewire's gonna be a bottleneck. (Those poor, poor, poor drives. He should give them to me.)
>
> I applaud John Ashcroft for realizing this, and using our scarce law enforcement resources to attack the real threats: Tommy Chong, the bong seller, and porn that personally offends him.
OK, so you're being tongue-in-cheek, but you've actually got a good point.
I haven't seen much illegal drug spam lately (legal drugs sold illegally through "online pharmacies" are another story), but if John Aschroft really wants the FBI to get rid of pr0n that offends him... then why the fuck are any of the beastiality, rape, and incest spammers still alive, let alone dumping their filth in our inboxes on a 24/7 basis?
>
> If this is correct, I have no indication that it should not be, it looks like a total FBI fuck up.
Buzzword conflict.
You: "I'm suffering from a denial of service attack"
FBI drone: "WTF d00d? Is that even illegal?"
Use of proper buzzwords is essential:
You: "I need to speak to someone in CYBER SECURITY. I have information about a MASSIVE CYBER ATTACK in progress. The ATTACK against my SECURITY is coming from CHINA and SOUTH ASIA."
FBI drone: "I still haven't a clue what that means, but I've been read those words in memos, and I know that area of the world is important. And I have those words in my phone book, so I can transfer you to someone who might actually give a shit."
Then, once you get to someone in, uh, "cyber" security, you can say "Hi. I'm being DDoSed. Yes, my bandwidth costs are over $5000. I have a pretty good idea who the perps are. I also have a long list of ISPs, some foreign, but many domestic, that you can subpoena for logs to prove it."
I'm not saying you will get results this way, only that you're more likely to.
(If your CD-ROM drive was broken, would you walk into the sysadmin's cubicle and complain about the broken cupholder in your PC? :-)
>
> Didn't some US court rule that the militant anti-abortionists' "hitlists" on the web were legal...
The difference between the fundie "hitlists" and Spamhaus is that Spamhaus doesn't maintain the list of known spammers with any expectation or the hope that a mentally-unbalanced person will Do Something Nasty to the spammers. Spamhaus maintains the list because knowing who the spammers are enables ISPs to choose whether or not to do business with these individuals. "Sorry, Sir. We don't want your business. Go darken someone else's network."
The only person who suggested that the Spamhaus registry be used for nefarious purposes was the previous poster. He or she may be in legal trouble for suggesting that the Spamhaus archives be misused in this way.
Regrettably, it takes law a long time to catch up with technology. At the moment, US law still considers spammers to be human beings, and therefore hunting them still constitutes homicide.
Were someone charged with the homicide of a spammer, and were I chosen to serve on such a jury, I would be forced to divulge, under oath, that I did not consider spammers human, and that I could not therefore render a verdict of "guilty" on homicide charges. The prosecuting attorney would be well within his or her rights to have me removed from the pool of jurors under consideration for that trial.
The ha-ha-only-serious thing is... the more spam I get, the more I wonder if anybody would be eligible to serve on such a jury these days. *sigh*
Yeah, I remember when dumb terminals were around 98 pounds, but how'd you get a VAX to weigh less than 1000?
(And why not call the VAX supermodel750? There was never a VAX 11/101, man!)
From marycareyforgovernor.com: "Contribute $5000, get a date with Mary! Click here for details!"
Oracle gave $25,000 to Gray Davis, and all they got was this stinkin' $125M contract. HAH! Who gets more bang for the campaign buck now, Larry? Who's yo' daddy? :)
(Don't look at me like that. You know you were all thinking it. Besides, I'm still hoping Robert Anton Wilson's Guns and Dope Party carries the day as a write-in candidate. Any party whose "First order of business" is "Fire 33% of the legislature, names selected at random, and replace them with full-grown adult ostriches, whose mysterious and awesome dignity will elevate the suidean barbarity long established there", can't be that bad.
Unfortunately, monkeys are not a sufficiently wealthy lobby group for Gray Davis to bother sucking their balls.
(Shoulda donated to the Guvnah while you had the chance, you damned dirty apes!)
Yeah, but I didn't think he'd driven all the jobs other than spamming out of California. At least, not yet!
(Now before you think I'm getting political here, Florida's governor is a Republican. And what the hell does anybody do for a living in Florida other than spam the ever-lovin' fuck out of the rest of the planet? :-)
In Soviet Russia, KGB doesn't enforce the DMCA!
>
> As opposed to any
Sure, in Soviet Russia, a beowulf cluster imagines Natalie Portman naked, but what really petrifies my hot grits is that we can talk about a single-atom cesium laser for 140 posts, without even one mention alt.cesium, you insensitive clods!
Shift your paradigm and e-leverage yourself into the 90s already.
Punching VeriSign people in the face is a solution, not a service.
>
> Its so freaking boring...the tutorial fine, but the game, you get to a world, and it consists of guys looking for raw materials so they can level up characters, so they can then look for different raw materials so they can level up characters...
> I'm only saying this because I think the mentality of people who play these games is not part of what most people consider "normal", and therefore, the current MMPORPG population is just a collection of weird geeks.
At least the premise of Second Life sounds half-interesting. ("There is no content. Here are tools. Build it yourself. Play it yourself.")
By comparison, Star Wars Galaxies is "There is no content. There are no tools. Pretend you're inventing content." (Don't level up, you evil powergamer! There's so little content, and there are no tools for players to create add-on missions, but that's why you're paying $15/month, so you can roleplay... you know, imagine the content and roleplay what you'd be doing if the content was there! :-)
I'm a weird geek. SWG fans make me look positively normal. Bah. Gimme NWN. Hell, gimme Bard's Tale and Wizardry. If I wanna roleplay social interaction, I'll roleplay a party of six on my old-school CRPG. And not one of those characters will know the word "pwn".