Exactly. Be careful what you ask for. You just might get it.
For starters, who's going to draft a Federal Shield Law? Politicians. And who's going to enforce it? Cops. And it's an election year.
What goes into the sausage grinder as "Reporters should be shielded" comes out as "Congressmen's offices are shielded from search by police." (With a rider attached to the effect that because many federal agents (US Marshals, SS, FBI to name a few) carry badges shaped like shields, such officers shall be shielded from investigation by non-shieldbearers.
(Yeah, I should really shut up and stop giving them ideas.)
>...I won't get my $.50 back now when I flip off the soda machine every time it chomps my coins? Or, is the snack machine going to recognize my frustration, and shake the stuck bag of Cheetos loose for me?
Never flip off a vending machine. They carry one hell of a grudge.
DISPENSER: You are my nemesis... one day, our paths will cross again, and I - I will destroy you...
RIMMER: And on that day, I will be the Captain of this ship.
(A whole lot of plot spoilers happen)
DISPENSER: Every dog has its day, and today's the day... [ ejects can and knocks Rimmer unconsciousness amidst the flaming corridors of the doomed ship ]...that I'm the dog.
> And perhaps not planting trees near power lines would give civilization a better chance of another 100 years.
Doesn't work that way.
You know how if you bury any length of network cable, a backhoe will eventually show up? So if you're ever lost in the forest, just bury some fiber, and ask the backhoe driver for directions.
Well, trees and power lines work the same way. Just string a power line above the ground, and a tree will come along and drop a branch through it.
You've probably not heard of this because it's not as useful. First off, it takes a lot longer than the backhoe trick. Second, trees suck at giving directions. Third, if you're lost in a forest, you're probably already pretty fucking sick of trees and don't care to see any more of 'em. But fourthly - if you're ever lost in a forest and you find a power line that some other schmuck has carved out for you, you can just walk the length of it and find your way back to civilization.
> "One of the most popular games in America teaches a little boy how to have sex with a prostitute and then beat her to death, and then rewards that," said Rep. Jeff Johnson, who sponsored the bill in the House. "I think some small restriction on that is reasonable."
One of the most profitable games in America teaches young politicians how fuck over their constituents while becoming prostitutes to campaign donors, and then tax their constituents to poverty, optionally imprisoning and torturing their opponents to, and then rewards that.
Tell you what. You go first, Rep. Johnson. Then we'll clean up our naughty video games.
> If in a population of 300,000,000 only 1,000,000 are capable of understanding how the voting system works, and if only 1,000 people are actually allowed to see how it works, and if there's no verifiable paper trail or any simple and legitimate verification system, then democracy is a farce.
That's not a bug, it's a feature. Using your numbers, that's 1000 government-approved whitew^Wsecurity auditors, and 9,999,000 potential crackers.
Politicians will wake up when President Stallman of the GNU/Hurd Party is sworn in on January 21, 2009, after taking 53% of the votes, against 47% for the OSS Party, led by candidate Eric Raymond. (Raymond credits his near-victory to having a landslide amongst the "Retired CIA/NSA Agents" demographic, on account of his party having "a more intel-friendly acronym":)
> We can safely assume that the lion's share of our empire's surveillance, terrorism, goes unreported; and that the most insidious state must hide from its citizens. Haven't we learned any lessons from the hideous Bolsheviks?
Of course we have! Who do you think's been testing it for us all these years?
The USSR was the alpha test site. We learned that it doesn't work too well in a pen-and-paper world; you end up with something like East Germany's STASI, in which your economy implodes because a third of your population is busy filing reports on the other two thirds of your population... but nobody can actually find the reports to use them for anything.
China is the beta test site. A technologically-advanced state, a mixed economy, and strict information controls. Data storage is too expensive to store everyone's everything, so if you search for something naughty, it just gets blocked. Citizens quickly learn how to circumvent the censorship and/or the logging.
With what we've learned, we're ready to go to full implementation. Search for whatever you like. Talk about whatever you like. Everything gets delivered to you, you're never aware that you've crossed the line until... hang on a sec. There's a knock at my door.
An amendment to the CALEA law would make it easier for the government to monitor calls made over VoIP and even temporarily store some packet traffic.
...for values of "temporarily" approaching the heat death of the Universe. For legal precedent, see any case regarding DMCA and/or copyright extension.
Tell me about it. Yesterday, I'd hoped to see Raph Koster On Fire, and today I hear about Myspace's servers literally exploding, and the only flames I see are on a message board. At least when Wired promised to tell me about spammer clubbed to death like a baby seal, they delivered.
Substituting everything with Goatse or Tubgirl (Goatse was already done with airpwn at DEFCON 12) would be funny, but Joe Sixpack would call tech support, and they'd all shrug it off saying he'd been cracked with some sort of virus.
But can you imagine Joe Sixpack trying to explain to Pradeep that all the images in his web pages were being displayed upside-down (or better yet, blurry, or upside-down and blurry!), while all the text in the very same web pages was being displayed upside-right in crystal clarity?
Joe Sixpack probably doesn't know the differences between images and text. Pradeep would hear the word "upside down" or "blurry" and immediately think it was a hardware problem.
It'd probably take any of us half an hour to convince a second-tier tech that we weren't trolling him, never mind Joe Sixpack.
I'd give my left nut to hear the support calls on this. (Particularly as I'm pretty sure that those of you in tech support have no use for my left nut.:)
> Well there's your problem - everyone knows cubes aren't aerodynamic.
Cubeless stupid! Harmonic simultaneous Time Cubesat is Omnific, Infinite, Ineffable and ON DUTY. Russian Dneper denies reality of Time Cube, meets firey doom at hands of Cubic GOD!
> > "Innocent passengers are being entered into an international intelligence database as suspicious persons, acting in a suspicious manner on an aircraft... and they did nothing wrong," said one federal air marshal.
> >
2006.07.25 DenverChannel malsaid "unorthodox" as "suspicious". rectify.
2006.07.25 cvd6262 malsaid oldspeak "unorthodox" as "facecrime" rewrite fullwise.
It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in
any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing
could igve you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety,
a habit of muttering to yourself, anything that carried with it the
suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case,
to wear an improper expression on your face, was itself a punishable
offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime"
"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said
Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that
it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know
that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power
and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick,
and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men.
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.
Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares
so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live
without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens'
What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that
can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and
you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt.
Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you
understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
...and when one only has so many laws on the books that the libraries are ready to undergo gravitational collapse into a black hole, and when one has enough criminals that it has a higher incarceration rate than the Soviet Union (the very same dystopian hellhole that spawned Rand's original screed in 1957), and still doesn't have enough criminals, one fabricates them out of thin air.
Homeland Security: Our budget is proportional to the number of terrorists we find. When there aren't enough terrorists, we make them.
> "Bucholz, who designed some of the first mobile license plate reading, or LPR, equipment, gave a presentation at the 2006 National Institute of Justice conference here last week laying out a vision of the future in which LPR does everything from helping insurance companies find missing cars to letting retail chains chart customer migrations. It could also let a nosy citizen with enough cash find out if the mayor is having an affair, he says."
CFO: You dumbass! The mayor is the guy who signs the check! You just terrified our entire customer base!
Bucholz:...b-but I said "with enough cash". It's not like just any citizen could use i-
CFO: NO! Remember your mantra. "Citizen is to sheep as Mayor is to farmer." Nothing more. Nothing less. Go now. Do not speak to me again until you've meditated upon your mantra for another week.
Re:Too Much Serious Violence
on
Prey Review
·
· Score: 5, Funny
> I personally prefer humorous violence. For example : WORMS!!!
All violence is funny. You can't spell slaughter without laughter!
> Doubtless, the lead developer has his sights on becoming governor of California. At least, that's what I hear happened to the last guy that was involved in Conan.
Conan, what is good in life? "To crush Gray Davis, to see him driven before you, and to hear the emptying coffers of his campaign donors!"
But this isn't politics, it's a MMORPG. The dialogue from the original movie will have to be...
"Crom, I have never prayed 2 u b4. I suck at typing. No 1, not even u, will remember if we were teh r0x or teh sux, why we PVP, or how we got pwnt. All dat matters is that my guildies griefed teh Chinese gold farmers. Dat's wut's important. Valor pleases u Crom, so grant me 1 request, grant me teh win! And if u do not listen, then up urs n00b!"
> I'm pretty sure that they'll still jerk off as their main source of sexual interaction. - Make that huge calfs, thighs AND a single massive forearm.
Huge calfs? Explains a lot about my cow-orkers.
Meanwhile, this Homsy guy sounds like a real perv. From TFA:
With a hand-crank system, if you're gung-ho about it, you can get about five watts out of it. But you get tired after about a minute or so," says Geo Homsy, a partner and designer at Squid Labs. With the new system, generating 20 watts is comfortable, and it's possible to generate 10 watts for "as long as you want," the developers say.
[... ]
The new generator is also quiet -- one of the key design requirements. "If you imagine an entire school room full of kids using this thing, it needs to be as quiet as possible. Otherwise it will drive everyone insane," Homsy says.
Personally, if I go gung-ho on the hand-crank system, I get pretty tired after a minute or so as well. Can't imagine why I'd want to generate 10 watts for any longer than that. And dude... that next paragraph... that's just sick.
> Every item you cross off a 'to do' list gives you an experience bonus, until eventually you 'level up' your life.
Played this game once. Problem is, it's like the Sims in boringness, but the time-acceleration key can only be used once a day, and the stupid devs made it so that the time-speedup key only works at night, when you're at home trying to game, rather than you just during the day when nobody's home! What fucktard thought that was a good UI?
But the real dealbreaker is the lack of save/restore. Spend six weeks setting up a menage-a-trois with your boss' wife and just one lousy goat, and you might as well pull out the old.45 and reroll your character.
Passively Multiplayer Life is teh sux0r. I wouldn't even warez it. (Anyone have a patch to get the smell of goat outa my clothes? The NPC vendor won't even look at me when I try to buy ammo.)
<voice=texan>
An' they hate us for our freedom. So...
</voice>
> But sounds good to me, but i'm a filthy liberal.
<voice=texan>
Yeah, it's all your fault! Fer six years some folks have been complaining that the government isn't listening to the people... an' now that it does, y'all are haulin' us into court for it! What gives?
</voice>
"In bureaucratic India, overlords who are first at posting are pleased to be welcoming you!" - Steve.
(Yes I am really being named Steve, and the weather here in Bango...r, Maine is wonderful! We in America are overjoyed to be reading this and posting about it on your Slashdot!)
Captain Non-Sequitur to the Rescue
on
What Spore May Spawn
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Pretty good article, right up until the last paragraph, where we get change the subject so fast I got whiplash.
If you are feeling particularly vindictive toward a planet, you can hover above it and indulge in a spot of terraforming - such as submerging the main city under a lake. And you can acquire nuclear weapons that completely destroy planets, which is why Will Wright developed Spore's database system, which sucks up and redistributes content created by other players (apparently, a fully compressed creature occupies a mere 3Kb).
The "nukes" gameplay feature drove the fundamental design decision to enable user-created content?
Slashdot Mirror
You go, Japan. Someone's gotta do it, and ever since we rejected science for religion, all your base are no longer belong to US.
Exactly. Be careful what you ask for. You just might get it.
For starters, who's going to draft a Federal Shield Law? Politicians. And who's going to enforce it? Cops. And it's an election year.
What goes into the sausage grinder as "Reporters should be shielded" comes out as "Congressmen's offices are shielded from search by police." (With a rider attached to the effect that because many federal agents (US Marshals, SS, FBI to name a few) carry badges shaped like shields, such officers shall be shielded from investigation by non-shieldbearers.
(Yeah, I should really shut up and stop giving them ideas.)
Never flip off a vending machine. They carry one hell of a grudge.
>
> Was that a Goatse joke?
It's a Goatse joke and a P.T. Barnum joke and a FPS joke, all in one tasty package!
For inspiration, see the screenshots of the Q2 and UT2K4 mods
Pay no mind of the hands on either side that hold the portal wide! This way to the egress!
Doesn't work that way.
You know how if you bury any length of network cable, a backhoe will eventually show up? So if you're ever lost in the forest, just bury some fiber, and ask the backhoe driver for directions.
Well, trees and power lines work the same way. Just string a power line above the ground, and a tree will come along and drop a branch through it.
You've probably not heard of this because it's not as useful. First off, it takes a lot longer than the backhoe trick. Second, trees suck at giving directions. Third, if you're lost in a forest, you're probably already pretty fucking sick of trees and don't care to see any more of 'em. But fourthly - if you're ever lost in a forest and you find a power line that some other schmuck has carved out for you, you can just walk the length of it and find your way back to civilization.
One of the most profitable games in America teaches young politicians how fuck over their constituents while becoming prostitutes to campaign donors, and then tax their constituents to poverty, optionally imprisoning and torturing their opponents to, and then rewards that.
Tell you what. You go first, Rep. Johnson. Then we'll clean up our naughty video games.
That's not a bug, it's a feature. Using your numbers, that's 1000 government-approved whitew^Wsecurity auditors, and 9,999,000 potential crackers.
Politicians will wake up when President Stallman of the GNU/Hurd Party is sworn in on January 21, 2009, after taking 53% of the votes, against 47% for the OSS Party, led by candidate Eric Raymond. (Raymond credits his near-victory to having a landslide amongst the "Retired CIA/NSA Agents" demographic, on account of his party having "a more intel-friendly acronym" :)
Of course we have! Who do you think's been testing it for us all these years?
The USSR was the alpha test site. We learned that it doesn't work too well in a pen-and-paper world; you end up with something like East Germany's STASI, in which your economy implodes because a third of your population is busy filing reports on the other two thirds of your population... but nobody can actually find the reports to use them for anything.
China is the beta test site. A technologically-advanced state, a mixed economy, and strict information controls. Data storage is too expensive to store everyone's everything, so if you search for something naughty, it just gets blocked. Citizens quickly learn how to circumvent the censorship and/or the logging.
With what we've learned, we're ready to go to full implementation. Search for whatever you like. Talk about whatever you like. Everything gets delivered to you, you're never aware that you've crossed the line until... hang on a sec. There's a knock at my door.
Tell me about it. Yesterday, I'd hoped to see Raph Koster On Fire, and today I hear about Myspace's servers literally exploding, and the only flames I see are on a message board. At least when Wired promised to tell me about spammer clubbed to death like a baby seal, they delivered.
One outa three ain't bad.
If I pay royalties, can I see it here?
But can you imagine Joe Sixpack trying to explain to Pradeep that all the images in his web pages were being displayed upside-down (or better yet, blurry, or upside-down and blurry!), while all the text in the very same web pages was being displayed upside-right in crystal clarity?
Joe Sixpack probably doesn't know the differences between images and text. Pradeep would hear the word "upside down" or "blurry" and immediately think it was a hardware problem.
It'd probably take any of us half an hour to convince a second-tier tech that we weren't trolling him, never mind Joe Sixpack.
I'd give my left nut to hear the support calls on this. (Particularly as I'm pretty sure that those of you in tech support have no use for my left nut. :)
Cubeless stupid! Harmonic simultaneous Time Cubesat is Omnific, Infinite, Ineffable and ON DUTY. Russian Dneper denies reality of Time Cube, meets firey doom at hands of Cubic GOD!
Disappointment is seeing the phrase "Raph Koster on Fire", and not even seeing a black-and-white screenshot.
>
> 2006.07.25 DenverChannel malsaid "unorthodox" as "suspicious". rectify.
2006.07.25 cvd6262 malsaid oldspeak "unorthodox" as "facecrime" rewrite fullwise.
Homeland Security: Our budget is proportional to the number of terrorists we find. When there aren't enough terrorists, we make them.
Ayn Rand was an optimist.
CFO: You dumbass! The mayor is the guy who signs the check! You just terrified our entire customer base! ...b-but I said "with enough cash". It's not like just any citizen could use i-
Bucholz:
CFO: NO! Remember your mantra. "Citizen is to sheep as Mayor is to farmer." Nothing more. Nothing less. Go now. Do not speak to me again until you've meditated upon your mantra for another week.
All violence is funny. You can't spell slaughter without laughter!
Conan, what is good in life? "To crush Gray Davis, to see him driven before you, and to hear the emptying coffers of his campaign donors!"
But this isn't politics, it's a MMORPG. The dialogue from the original movie will have to be...
"Crom, I have never prayed 2 u b4. I suck at typing. No 1, not even u, will remember if we were teh r0x or teh sux, why we PVP, or how we got pwnt. All dat matters is that my guildies griefed teh Chinese gold farmers. Dat's wut's important. Valor pleases u Crom, so grant me 1 request, grant me teh win! And if u do not listen, then up urs n00b!"
Huge calfs? Explains a lot about my cow-orkers.
Meanwhile, this Homsy guy sounds like a real perv. From TFA:
Personally, if I go gung-ho on the hand-crank system, I get pretty tired after a minute or so as well. Can't imagine why I'd want to generate 10 watts for any longer than that. And dude... that next paragraph... that's just sick.
Played this game once. Problem is, it's like the Sims in boringness, but the time-acceleration key can only be used once a day, and the stupid devs made it so that the time-speedup key only works at night, when you're at home trying to game, rather than you just during the day when nobody's home! What fucktard thought that was a good UI?
But the real dealbreaker is the lack of save/restore. Spend six weeks setting up a menage-a-trois with your boss' wife and just one lousy goat, and you might as well pull out the old .45 and reroll your character.
Passively Multiplayer Life is teh sux0r. I wouldn't even warez it. (Anyone have a patch to get the smell of goat outa my clothes? The NPC vendor won't even look at me when I try to buy ammo.)
<voice=texan>
An' they hate us for our freedom. So...
</voice>
> But sounds good to me, but i'm a filthy liberal.
<voice=texan>
Yeah, it's all your fault! Fer six years some folks have been complaining that the government isn't listening to the people... an' now that it does, y'all are haulin' us into court for it! What gives?
</voice>
- Steve.
(Yes I am really being named Steve, and the weather here in Bango...r, Maine is wonderful! We in America are overjoyed to be reading this and posting about it on your Slashdot!)
The "nukes" gameplay feature drove the fundamental design decision to enable user-created content?
What. The. Fuck?