Actually, what makes his troll so brilliant is that those of us who whack spammer nads on a regular basis have seen spammers using his rhetoric. It's what most spammers really think.
Basically, it's close enough that it passes the Troll Turing Test, in that it's indistinguishable from the real thing.
Of course, if he stuck in markers that identified it as a troll, (e.g. first letter of every sentence spells TROLL, or AYBABTU), then he'd get bonus trollin' points for style - in that it was distinguishable from a "real spammer", but none of us picked up on it.
>I run a legitimate multi-level internet business,
This is NOT MLM! This is NOT a scam! It's 100% legal! The guy who spammed me and suckered me into it TOLD ME SO! Really!
> I think that digital solicitations provide a valuable service to consumers
If you were subsidizing my email account, you'd be entitled to spam the bejeezus out of it. But you're not. I'm the owner of my server, and I decide what's a valuable service and what's not. Not you. Because it's not yours.
When you pay for my server - or if I'm in Europe, my per-minute-local-calls, or if I'm in the US and reading it on a cellphone, my cell phone bill, or if I'm an ISP, the bill for the 30% capacity I have to add to/var/mail and/usr/spool/news that's currently taken up by spam - then, and only then, do you have a right to advertise on my hardware.
> Please, I urge you, give us a break, we're just trying to get by the only way we
know how.
On the very slim chance that you're not a troll:
If the only way you know how to make a living is by stealing the resources of others, I hope you either (a) learn another way of making a living, or (b) starve to death.
Theft is not a viable business model. Until you've learned that, please fuck off. Fuck off, stay fucked off, and don't come back until you've finished fucking off.
>> You were at home sleeping alone when the bomb went off, and have no alibi.
> >
What? No cameras at home?
You're right. We need to bust a few innocents like this. Only then will our subjects will beg for cameras in the home - to prove their innocence - like the masocthis begs for the whip.
> If my kids can make it to school safe
in the morning and come home alive without worrying about some fucked up anti-government militia pyschopath
needing to make a point by blowing something up, then I could give a shit less.
Accessing credit card records...
User: 107011
Slashdot alias: Listen Up
CDs purchased in 1999: 60
CDs purchased in 2000: 1
Date of last computer purchase: December, 2000
Computer equipped with: CD-R
ISP, 1999: AOL
ISP, 2000: AOL Roadrunner cable
Profile match: MP3 downloader
Analysis: Profile match constitutes probable cause to suspect copyright violation
Presiding judge in district: Joe Judge
Probability of warrant issuance given this profile and judge: 90%
Estimated value of computer equipment on premises: $2,500
Recommendation: Seize all computer equipment. We could use another computer.
> Mainly because the peaceful project intends to save lifes, whereas the US military tries to make things that are very efficient as possible.
Whoa, dude. Stop right there.
When you spend millions of dollars training pilots, and billions of dollars on developing advanced experimental aircraft, the first thing on your mind - as a general or a bean-counter - is the safety of the crew. And the best way to ensure the safety of the crew is to make goddamn sure that plane comes back in one piece.
I sense deep hostility in you towards the military. Might I suggest that the next time the.mil comes to town (airshows, Veteran's Day, etc...), that you ask a serviceman, servicewoman, or vet how they feel about their job. And that rather than telling them "what's right", you simply listen. Those who serve in the military are as interested in preventing war as you are.
Hey, I would, man, but it's not my job. You'll have to get someone from the International Brotherhood of First Step Replacers Local 668 to do that! Shouldn't cost you more than 150% of scale.
> By now we're able to build bombs with 100 megatons and more (this number practically only depends on the
amount of money you are willing to spend). 1 megaton = 1000 kilotons. It doesn't take a nuclear rocket scientist to know
that this stuff is capable of destroying whole countries.
Nor does it take a nuclear rocket scientist to realize that blast and radiation damage don't scale linearly with megatonnage.
Yes, Tsar Bomba was 100MT. No, even the Russians didn't make it part of their arsenal, because it cost a bloody fortune to build, and didn't do much more damage than a 25MT bomb.
With 1960s-era guidance systems, you needed large bombs to ensure that you took out the target, because you couldn't be sure your bomb would hit the target to within $BIGNUM radius.
With 2000-era guidance systems, you can hit the target, and you therefore no longer need to dump anywhere near the same amount of explosive power onto the target to take it out.
The future of warfare is precision munitions. Even for hardened targets, a penetrating warhead and a conventional load (or for soft targets, a big-ass FAE - fuel-air-explosive) can be far more effective than either a tac-nuke (multi-kiloton) or big-ass nuke (multi-megaton) device.
The target's destroyed - the fact that there's no fallout issue with precision-guided conventional munitions is just one hell of a nice fringe benefit for your troops.
Nukes kick ass. But for the most part, they're obsolete except as a deterrent. They have a place in the arsenal, but the generals - from any nation - are aware that there are almost always better (cheaper and more effective) ways of accomplishing the mission.
If you want to worry about something, fear the rogue state that builds a basement nuke, or worse, chemical/biological weapons (e.g. the possibility that foot-and-mouth disease being a possible instance of bioterrorism or asymmetrical warfare). The nuclear arsenals of the superpowers are the least of your worries.
> Perhaps the "root cause" of the
accident would be on the part of the vehicle that was sitting in the blind spot, but guess
who's going to be faulted for the accident?
...and this fixes my mangled Porsche... how?
To borrow another analogy, yes, pedestrians have the right of way, but if you hop into the crosswalk directly in front of a bus on a rainy day, you're "dead right" - as in "roadkill".
When it comes to insurance claims for auto accidents - where the goal is to sue the bejeezus out of your opponent in front of a sympathetic jury, your argument works. The consequences of any given mistake are usually a fender-bender, maybe a couple of injuries, once in a while, a fatality, but on balance, the system works.
When it comes to airmanship - where the goal is to not let the mistake happen again, it doesn't. The consequences of screwing up in the air almost always result in the deaths of everyone involved, and Not Letting It Happen Again becomes paramount.
As a society, we tolerate an astonishing amount of clueless behavior on the roads, and we don't train our drivers well enough to understand the consequences of their actions. The same is not true of pilots. (American or Chinese). During peacetime, it's their job not to put themselves, or other aircraft, in harm's way.
> [Pr0n] runs women through a blender, converting their bodies into liquified youth.
Really? Hey, that's a new one, even for rotten.com! Wonder if there's a market for that? And if there is, can I get some from Yahoo?
> Every dollar Yahoo makes is now tainted with the blood and tears of exploited women.
You forgot their vaginal juices! And the lube! And what about the jizz of the exploited men who have to lay pipe all day long, or stand erect with their schlongs in some fluffer's mouth while the director sets up the cameras for the next scene, to make these movies? Blue balls hurt after the first couple of hours! Where's your compassion, woman?
> The Bible also tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves. Yahoo fails.
I tried that with Mrs. Jones across the street. She wasn't too happy with me. Umm, neither was Mr. Jones, for that matter. Guess I failed too!
(Though I admit it was a brilliant troll, Anne. Well done!;-)
Bah! That's been going on since the early '90s! Remember this guy?
"UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this
IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS."
- Robert McElwaine, net.kook extraordinaire...
> if the systems continue to evolve, the agents might
be able to glean much of their knowledge from existing web pages.
April 1, 2038: SkyNet gains sentience, having gleaned most of its knowledge from web pages.
April 2, 2038: SkyNet proclaims f1rst p0st, d00d, and promptly goes into a coma fantasizing about h0t gr1tz and how all Natalie Portman's daughter are belong to it. Humanity doesn't notice.
> Everybody stands to gain
by lying, and I think it just depends on which soil your feet are planted on right now as to who you
believe.
If, however, we believe the (Chinese-originated?) rumor/story about how the cockpit of the fighter hit the belly of the EP-3, and then fell back while losing control, having his tail sliced up by the props, accounting for the prop and wing damage on the EP-3, I would like to ask the world...
...if that's where the fighter was, how on earth could the EP-3 pilots have been expected to know he was there?
What happened was an accident - there was no intent on either side to cause harm. BUT - if a Porsche sits in the blind spot of a semi trailer for long enough, it'll get squashed when the semi changes lanes. Yeah, that's an accident too. But don't tell me for a minute that the root cause of the accident is anything other "pilot error" on the part of the vehicle - Porsche or J-8 - that chose to situate itself in the blind spot of the larger vehicle.
Unlike our hypothetical Porsche, in the case of the J-8, (totally speculating here) perhaps he was taking pictures of the various chunks of equipment on the belly of the EP-3, and believed the risk/reward ratio justified the action. Well, he was wrong, and he paid for that mistake with his life, and damn near paid for that mistake with the lives of 24 others.
Unless and until evidence to the contrary becomes public, I will continue to believe that on the balance of probabilities, the most likely cause of this regrettable incident was poor airmanship on the part of the fighter pilot.
Although I don't fault the Chinese government for holding the EP-3 and stripping it to the bone - it's a valuable intelligence asset until proven otherwise - I can see no legitimate reason why they continue to hold its crew.
I find this to be the most disturbing aspect of the controversy. Granted, the crew is a vaulable intelligence asset too, but there's a world of difference between stripping a plane down for parts and interrogating the crew - the Chinese government is smart enough to do the former - but hopefully smart enough not to attempt the latter.
> In a l999 CBS.MarketWatch.com poll, 23 per cent of the people surveyed called
pornography the Net's worst feature.
L-999, huh? Nice typewriter ya got there, Katz!
As for the 23% who saw pornography as "the Net's worst feature" - obviously too many banner ads and not enough pr0n to make it worthwhile.
Re:So you can't save it..
on
CPRM Lecture
·
· Score: 1
> What's the big deal about not being able to save it? If ya can't save it that's a very effective form of copy protection. I can't seem to get my stupid windows box to view it:(
That's not a bug, it's a feature. After all, if you could view it, you could tell us what you saw, and that'd be violating their copyright, right?
Unviewable media is the best form of copy control of all!
> Usenet, created in l979, uses no central control, and copies files between computers.
C'mon, Katz, get with the "l970s". Just because a "1" and an "l" on old-sk00l typewriters looked the same in Courier monospace, doesn't mean they're equivalent. Please, please, please adjust your spell checker. You really date yourself when you make this error.
> Easier than finding a gigolo to
service Hillary Rosen on her next Vegas junket?
<rimshot>
Not only will spending a few million bucks on implementing CPRM be easier than that, it'll probably be cheaper, too.
</rimshot>
Re:I for one will never buy a copy protected HD
on
CPRM Voted Down
·
· Score: 2
> Saying you'll never buy a CPRM HD is similar to the "no one will ever need more than 640k"
mentality.
For general-purpose computing, right. But for homebrew entertainment use, which is the only use threatened by CPRM, mistaken:
My worst-case scenario: MP3 at 320kpbs. 2.5M per minute of music. 60G IDE drive. 24,000 minutes, or 400 hours - the equivalent of 320 74-minute CDs.
Hardware? A friggin' P166, 32M of RAM, and an old SoundBlaster will do the trick.
For any conceivable audio application, $1000 (the price of a good stereo) worth of 60G IDE hard drives purchased this summer, along with a couple of surplus PCs (to be bought a couple of years from now) will last a lifetime.
If you wanna do video, that's another story. Yeah, we probably will have to wait for optical holo-cubes or whatever, before we can store a few hundred DVDs on a single chunk of data, and yeah, CPRM will be an issue then.
But if your ears can't hear the difference between a CD and a 320k MP3, grab a drive.
"Nobody will ever need more than 640 gigs for home audio".
>Solution: Install WMP 7 to get the updated codecs. [and then go back to using mplayer2.exe, the WMP 6.x player]
Dude, you rock!
(And props to Julius X for his comment encluing me about the WMP options menu to turn off the auto-phone-home feature, *doh*, I've gotten so accustomed to MS wanting to do this stuff "for me" that I never considered they'd put an option in to turn it off - so I never looked!;-)
RealPlayer is arguably the worst offender - every time they add a new DLL on their Windoze platform, and you attempt to play something encoded with the "new" version, they force you to re-download the entire player.
No, I don't want the new player with a million flashing banners in it. I just want to play the damn video stream, and all I need is the missing.DLL file associated with the new codec, damnit!
My solution: Check what's in C:\Wherever\Common Files\Real, copy it out, perform the "upgrade" on an expendable Windoze install, and see what DLLs got upgraded.
Then just copy the new DLLs into the old directory. Odds are you'll be able to play the.RM file just fine.
I've managed to keep using RealPlayer version 6 up to the present day using this technique.
Does anyone have a similar hack for things like the Sorenson.MOV codec under 'doze media player? I'm damned if I'm ever upgrading that monstrosity past version 6. It's bad enough that Real tries to re-download itself when it finds an unknown codec, but WMP phones home without my consent to do it "automatically".
Fuck that. Anyone know where WMP stores its files, and what's required for the various codecs?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, what makes his troll so brilliant is that those of us who whack spammer nads on a regular basis have seen spammers using his rhetoric. It's what most spammers really think.
Basically, it's close enough that it passes the Troll Turing Test, in that it's indistinguishable from the real thing.
Of course, if he stuck in markers that identified it as a troll, (e.g. first letter of every sentence spells TROLL, or AYBABTU), then he'd get bonus trollin' points for style - in that it was distinguishable from a "real spammer", but none of us picked up on it.
This is NOT MLM! This is NOT a scam! It's 100% legal! The guy who spammed me and suckered me into it TOLD ME SO! Really!
> I think that digital solicitations provide a valuable service to consumers
If you were subsidizing my email account, you'd be entitled to spam the bejeezus out of it. But you're not. I'm the owner of my server, and I decide what's a valuable service and what's not. Not you. Because it's not yours.
When you pay for my server - or if I'm in Europe, my per-minute-local-calls, or if I'm in the US and reading it on a cellphone, my cell phone bill, or if I'm an ISP, the bill for the 30% capacity I have to add to /var/mail and /usr/spool/news that's currently taken up by spam - then, and only then, do you have a right to advertise on my hardware.
> Please, I urge you, give us a break, we're just trying to get by the only way we know how.
On the very slim chance that you're not a troll:
If the only way you know how to make a living is by stealing the resources of others, I hope you either (a) learn another way of making a living, or (b) starve to death.
Theft is not a viable business model. Until you've learned that, please fuck off. Fuck off, stay fucked off, and don't come back until you've finished fucking off.
>
> What? No cameras at home?
You're right. We need to bust a few innocents like this. Only then will our subjects will beg for cameras in the home - to prove their innocence - like the masocthis begs for the whip.
>
> Think needle. Then think big ass haystack.
Think database. Think bigger-ass magnet.
Accessing credit card records...
User: 107011
Slashdot alias: Listen Up
CDs purchased in 1999: 60
CDs purchased in 2000: 1
Date of last computer purchase: December, 2000
Computer equipped with: CD-R
ISP, 1999: AOL
ISP, 2000: AOL Roadrunner cable
Profile match: MP3 downloader
Analysis: Profile match constitutes probable cause to suspect copyright violation
Presiding judge in district: Joe Judge
Probability of warrant issuance given this profile and judge: 90%
Estimated value of computer equipment on premises: $2,500
Recommendation: Seize all computer equipment. We could use another computer.
Whoa, dude. Stop right there. When you spend millions of dollars training pilots, and billions of dollars on developing advanced experimental aircraft, the first thing on your mind - as a general or a bean-counter - is the safety of the crew. And the best way to ensure the safety of the crew is to make goddamn sure that plane comes back in one piece.
I sense deep hostility in you towards the military. Might I suggest that the next time the .mil comes to town (airshows, Veteran's Day, etc...), that you ask a serviceman, servicewoman, or vet how they feel about their job. And that rather than telling them "what's right", you simply listen. Those who serve in the military are as interested in preventing war as you are.
Hey, I would, man, but it's not my job. You'll have to get someone from the International Brotherhood of First Step Replacers Local 668 to do that! Shouldn't cost you more than 150% of scale.
The first man that made 'er
Was an Engineer, of course
But then a bloody asteroid
Squished Godiva's horse?
Nor does it take a nuclear rocket scientist to realize that blast and radiation damage don't scale linearly with megatonnage.
Yes, Tsar Bomba was 100MT. No, even the Russians didn't make it part of their arsenal, because it cost a bloody fortune to build, and didn't do much more damage than a 25MT bomb.
With 1960s-era guidance systems, you needed large bombs to ensure that you took out the target, because you couldn't be sure your bomb would hit the target to within $BIGNUM radius.
With 2000-era guidance systems, you can hit the target, and you therefore no longer need to dump anywhere near the same amount of explosive power onto the target to take it out.
The future of warfare is precision munitions. Even for hardened targets, a penetrating warhead and a conventional load (or for soft targets, a big-ass FAE - fuel-air-explosive) can be far more effective than either a tac-nuke (multi-kiloton) or big-ass nuke (multi-megaton) device.
The target's destroyed - the fact that there's no fallout issue with precision-guided conventional munitions is just one hell of a nice fringe benefit for your troops.
Nukes kick ass. But for the most part, they're obsolete except as a deterrent. They have a place in the arsenal, but the generals - from any nation - are aware that there are almost always better (cheaper and more effective) ways of accomplishing the mission.
If you want to worry about something, fear the rogue state that builds a basement nuke, or worse, chemical/biological weapons (e.g. the possibility that foot-and-mouth disease being a possible instance of bioterrorism or asymmetrical warfare). The nuclear arsenals of the superpowers are the least of your worries.
I vote for rectal thermometer. Every time I see that goddamn paperclip, I know what I wanna do with it. Something involving Bill Gates.
Slashdot Editors, please, give us a poll topic. I wasn't at all pleased with the options available on officeclippy.com.
To borrow another analogy, yes, pedestrians have the right of way, but if you hop into the crosswalk directly in front of a bus on a rainy day, you're "dead right" - as in "roadkill".
When it comes to insurance claims for auto accidents - where the goal is to sue the bejeezus out of your opponent in front of a sympathetic jury, your argument works. The consequences of any given mistake are usually a fender-bender, maybe a couple of injuries, once in a while, a fatality, but on balance, the system works.
When it comes to airmanship - where the goal is to not let the mistake happen again, it doesn't. The consequences of screwing up in the air almost always result in the deaths of everyone involved, and Not Letting It Happen Again becomes paramount.
As a society, we tolerate an astonishing amount of clueless behavior on the roads, and we don't train our drivers well enough to understand the consequences of their actions. The same is not true of pilots. (American or Chinese). During peacetime, it's their job not to put themselves, or other aircraft, in harm's way.
"Well, I guess that's your problem, not ours"
- CEO, every software company that ever existed.
Really? Hey, that's a new one, even for rotten.com! Wonder if there's a market for that? And if there is, can I get some from Yahoo?
> Every dollar Yahoo makes is now tainted with the blood and tears of exploited women.
You forgot their vaginal juices! And the lube! And what about the jizz of the exploited men who have to lay pipe all day long, or stand erect with their schlongs in some fluffer's mouth while the director sets up the cameras for the next scene, to make these movies? Blue balls hurt after the first couple of hours! Where's your compassion, woman?
> The Bible also tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves. Yahoo fails.
I tried that with Mrs. Jones across the street. She wasn't too happy with me. Umm, neither was Mr. Jones, for that matter. Guess I failed too!
(Though I admit it was a brilliant troll, Anne. Well done! ;-)
"UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS."
- Robert McElwaine, net.kook extraordinaire...
April 1, 2038: SkyNet gains sentience, having gleaned most of its knowledge from web pages.
April 2, 2038: SkyNet proclaims f1rst p0st, d00d, and promptly goes into a coma fantasizing about h0t gr1tz and how all Natalie Portman's daughter are belong to it. Humanity doesn't notice.
If, however, we believe the (Chinese-originated?) rumor/story about how the cockpit of the fighter hit the belly of the EP-3, and then fell back while losing control, having his tail sliced up by the props, accounting for the prop and wing damage on the EP-3, I would like to ask the world...
What happened was an accident - there was no intent on either side to cause harm. BUT - if a Porsche sits in the blind spot of a semi trailer for long enough, it'll get squashed when the semi changes lanes. Yeah, that's an accident too. But don't tell me for a minute that the root cause of the accident is anything other "pilot error" on the part of the vehicle - Porsche or J-8 - that chose to situate itself in the blind spot of the larger vehicle.
Unlike our hypothetical Porsche, in the case of the J-8, (totally speculating here) perhaps he was taking pictures of the various chunks of equipment on the belly of the EP-3, and believed the risk/reward ratio justified the action. Well, he was wrong, and he paid for that mistake with his life, and damn near paid for that mistake with the lives of 24 others.
Unless and until evidence to the contrary becomes public, I will continue to believe that on the balance of probabilities, the most likely cause of this regrettable incident was poor airmanship on the part of the fighter pilot.
Although I don't fault the Chinese government for holding the EP-3 and stripping it to the bone - it's a valuable intelligence asset until proven otherwise - I can see no legitimate reason why they continue to hold its crew.
I find this to be the most disturbing aspect of the controversy. Granted, the crew is a vaulable intelligence asset too, but there's a world of difference between stripping a plane down for parts and interrogating the crew - the Chinese government is smart enough to do the former - but hopefully smart enough not to attempt the latter.
L-999, huh? Nice typewriter ya got there, Katz!
As for the 23% who saw pornography as "the Net's worst feature" - obviously too many banner ads and not enough pr0n to make it worthwhile.
That's not a bug, it's a feature. After all, if you could view it, you could tell us what you saw, and that'd be violating their copyright, right?
Unviewable media is the best form of copy control of all!
Anyone got some backbeats and a sampler? Sounds like serious opportunity for a parody.
C'mon, Katz, get with the "l970s". Just because a "1" and an "l" on old-sk00l typewriters looked the same in Courier monospace, doesn't mean they're equivalent. Please, please, please adjust your spell checker. You really date yourself when you make this error.
<rimshot>
Not only will spending a few million bucks on implementing CPRM be easier than that, it'll probably be cheaper, too.
</rimshot>
For general-purpose computing, right. But for homebrew entertainment use, which is the only use threatened by CPRM, mistaken:
My worst-case scenario: MP3 at 320kpbs. 2.5M per minute of music. 60G IDE drive. 24,000 minutes, or 400 hours - the equivalent of 320 74-minute CDs.
Hardware? A friggin' P166, 32M of RAM, and an old SoundBlaster will do the trick.
For any conceivable audio application, $1000 (the price of a good stereo) worth of 60G IDE hard drives purchased this summer, along with a couple of surplus PCs (to be bought a couple of years from now) will last a lifetime.
If you wanna do video, that's another story. Yeah, we probably will have to wait for optical holo-cubes or whatever, before we can store a few hundred DVDs on a single chunk of data, and yeah, CPRM will be an issue then.
But if your ears can't hear the difference between a CD and a 320k MP3, grab a drive.
"Nobody will ever need more than 640 gigs for home audio".
You Know You've Been Reading Slashdot Too Long When:
Dude, you rock!
(And props to Julius X for his comment encluing me about the WMP options menu to turn off the auto-phone-home feature, *doh*, I've gotten so accustomed to MS wanting to do this stuff "for me" that I never considered they'd put an option in to turn it off - so I never looked! ;-)
No, I don't want the new player with a million flashing banners in it. I just want to play the damn video stream, and all I need is the missing .DLL file associated with the new codec, damnit!
My solution: Check what's in C:\Wherever\Common Files\Real, copy it out, perform the "upgrade" on an expendable Windoze install, and see what DLLs got upgraded.
Then just copy the new DLLs into the old directory. Odds are you'll be able to play the .RM file just fine.
I've managed to keep using RealPlayer version 6 up to the present day using this technique.
Does anyone have a similar hack for things like the Sorenson .MOV codec under 'doze media player? I'm damned if I'm ever upgrading that monstrosity past version 6. It's bad enough that Real tries to re-download itself when it finds an unknown codec, but WMP phones home without my consent to do it "automatically".
Fuck that. Anyone know where WMP stores its files, and what's required for the various codecs?