And although it's a little late to be asking this now, what's with the Flash 8 crap on the new website?
You guys at SOE allergic to HTML or something?
For another interesting experience, why do the forums at http://forums.station.sony.com/swg report a "server error" when you try to read them on Mozilla (with or without Javascript, with or without cookies), but work fine on IE?
> > Yet another reason for me to want to emigrate from the UK, what with ID cards, and 90 days detention without trial etc.(Thankfully the latter was defeated in parliment). At this rate, with ever more draconian laws I'll be able to claim asylum. > > Or you could do what we did, have a revolution! >
The UK Gov't hasn't given us a whole heck of a lot of trouble since...
Ah yes, flee UK ID cards and 90-day detention without trial for the balmy shores of the United States, with REAL ID, and, umm... indefini... aaw fuck.
As the gray of November gives way to a long cold winter for Western Civilization, the UK's forgotten stepchild (Canada, eh?) is beginning to look warm and sunny by comparison.
> "The primary aims claimed for the system are tackling untaxed and
uninsured vehicles, stolen cars and the considerably broader one of
'denying criminals the use of the roads.'
In other news, the Atlantic Ocean is described as being "considerably broader" than the English Channel.
But these are folks whose pet name for the gulf of water separating North America from Europe as "the pond".
One might go further and suggest that British people are prone to occasional tendencies towards understatement.
> > They want for the first time in history to separate us from the natural rotation of the Earth, which means as the years go by we will increasingly get out of sync with astronomy and the real world," > >
In other news, residents of Kansas experienced a timeshift, time going back to 1213 AD.
Oh, that's simple to explain. Kansas moved one state to the right - meaning they're no longer on CST, but on EST: Enlightenment Savings Time.
Re:Conditions they forgot
on
Space Lichens
·
· Score: 2, Funny
>
- Reentry heat (need to be inside a big rock or something) >
- Boredom. Lichens are fairly uncontemplative creatures, however.
Bored lichens. On fire.
Dude, the Star Wars Galaxies thread is
this way, bud!
Re:Never underestimate the power of Nandrolone...
on
Cow Tipping is a Myth
·
· Score: 2, Funny
> And of course you can tip a cow. This article is garbage pseudo-science. Blatant and ignorant misuse of perfectly good physics. Damn canadians.
I used to work at a restaurant. A cow orker of mine was little on the tubby side, but very cute, and she certainly never had any trouble getting tipped. *rimshot*
The usual MS obfuscation for "because we don't support 9x anymore, by definition there are no critical updates for 9x" is to state that 9x is "Not Critically Affected", with a URL to a page that defines "critically affected" in such a way as to exclude 9x.
"Not Affected", as claimed in MS05-053, is a stronger claim. That's not to say there aren't similar bugs in image-handling in 9x; only that the hole in this notice probably doesn't affect 9x.
> That law will read something as follows: > >
1. Individuals have no rights to privacy. >
2. Corporations can do what they want with any data. > >
That is, they want enshrined in national law the most pernicious possible data standards.
You must be new to K Street. Never miss an opportunity to enshrine a monopoly in legislation by finding a way to render your competitors' business practices, even where they're identical to your own, illegal - while simultaneously granting yourself the permission to do the same thing under color of law.
I've therefore amended your second rule as follows:
2. Corporations that have business models that conflict with that of Microsoft must be held to the most stringent privacy standards.
Although the Constitution is no longer relevant, it's still considered bad form to write a Bill of Attainder", so you have to be a little clever about it.
Thus, you'll typically end up with something like this:
Subsection 477.104.8453: the "All Your Base" clause - the use of hashes to represent hardware configurations ("GUIDs") for the purposes of managing software licensing, software configuration, and the provision of security updates, is a permitted use of personal information that enhances user privacy and shall not be penalized.
Subsection 8008.13: the "Booble" clause - the use of hashed unique identifiers ("Cookies") that represent individual software configurations for the purposes of providing stateful web browsing, search history, the relevance of clickthroughs for search engines, is an invasion of privacy punishable by having a chair thrown at oneself before being fucking buried, and then fucking killed.
> We're sorry -- you have reached this page because a web server error occurred. There are many possible causes for this type of error, so we can't be more specific.
Current setup was slashdotted within six comments.
Future setup will place an "emphasis on dependability instead of performance".
I'd say it sucks galactic black holes through buckytube, but that still wouldn't approach the Singular suckitude we're looking for.
> > more than 20% of the 5,800 man workforce > >Anyone got a torrent?
In other news, 1160 ex-Novell employees said to be raising capital for hostile takeover of Krispy Kreme donut franchises, said to be interested in realigning business model with.torrent releases targeted directly at the Japanese pr0n market.
Finally in business news, Fuller Brush Company stock is up 50% on the day. A spokesperson for Fuller Brush Company said that despite initial concerns about the Slashdotting of their website last Wednesday, no DDOS attack in fact took place. Credit card companies have reported no chargebacks from orders; none of the PCs from which orders were placed were zombies, despite a quintupling of sales of "brain brushes".
> Aren't they a bit hypocritic when they discourage cell phone use on the road on one hand, and then try to use cell phone usage to track traffic?
Not hypocritical at all.
A cell phone is trackable even when its owner is not talking on it.
This article provides a good outline on what happens. Basically, there's a control channel, through which your phone communicates whenever it's got a battery in it. Your phone listens for an SID (System Identification Code) on this channel, and tells the appropriate MTSO (Mobile Telephone Switching Office) "Hi, I'm here". The MTSO has to know where you are, so that it can route incoming calls to the device.
All that's happening here is that the traffic monitoring folks are listening in on the back-channel communications between a large number of cell phones and base stations, and using the changes in location (as averaged over a large number of devices) to guesstimate the average speed of traffic. Individualized cell phone tracking is useless for a traffic flow application, so it's actually highly likely that the traffic folks are telling you the truth when they say that individual data isn't being logged, and that only aggregate data is being recorded.
The technology's nothing new - a system like this is necessarily a part of any wireless phone system, otherwise your phone couldn't ring when someone called you. No such agency is now permitted to do such a thing domestically (a sentence that can be parsed in at least eight ways, all of which are true), but they probably don't, because everyone else who's also interested in individualized tracking, is already doing this, has been doing this for years, and is using other tricks in software to locate their targets to within a few meters, all in real-time. They aren't using the traffic-control folks' data, because they don't need it.
What you are witnessing is real. The participants are not actors. They are actual litigants with a case pending in a U.S. District court. Both parties have agreed to dismiss their court cases and have their disputes settled here! In our forum! The People's Court!
> > There's roughly 250,000,000 people in the US. Even if 95% of them absolutely hated science, that'd leave millions left to fight for reason.
> > As opposed to hundreds of millions non-americans fighting for reason..?
Group A: A fundamentalist theocracy of 237,500,000 people who reject the physics underlying radioactive decay, and who also reject the notion that DNA can, with suitable cleverness, be manipulated into new and useful forms.
Group B: A technologically-advanced splinter group consisting of 12,500,000 potential nuclear and biogenic weapons engineers.
When push comes to shove, Side A may have 20 times as many rifles, pointy sticks, and fists, but my money's still on Side B.
Note to the folks in Group A: If you think I'm only making fun of you, there's also...
Group C: A different fundamentalist theocracy whose population ranges from around 500,000,000 to 1,500,000,000 people, most of whom think the world would be a better place if everyone in both "Group A" and" Group B" were either assimilated or exterminated.
Just a friendly reminder to the "Group A" crowd. Most of us in "Group B" would be pretty happy to coexist with y'all in "Group A", but if y'all actually win your little war and manage to wipe us out (despite your renunciation of nuclear physics, geology, biology, and genetic engineering), you're going to find yourself in a pretty serious vortex of suck when "Group C" comes a-knockin' on your door.
> ATTACK THE HOST. Find some copyrighted text that a blogger has lifted from your Web site and threaten to sue his Internet service provider under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That may prompt the ISP to shut him down. Or threaten to drag the host into a defamation suit against the blogger. The host isn't liable but may skip the hassle and cut off the blogger's access anyway. Also:Subpoena the host company, demanding the blogger's name or Internet address.
"Reporters are a kiss of death unless one really is an expert PR man himself. Reporters have to be handled and well. If truly friendly, they have to be wooed. If not they have to be handled. The routine is (1) Whisper of a bad story (2) Get a lawyer (3) Threaten suit (4) Totally discredit using the technique of the Dead Agent caper which MUST be understood in full."
> SUE THE BLOGGER. If all else fails, you can sue your attacker for defamation, at the risk of getting mocked. You will have to chase him for years to collect damages. Settle for a court order forcing him to take down his material.
ENEMY: [Suppressive Person] Order. Fair game. May be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.
"The purpose of [a lawsuit] is to harass and discourage rather than to win. The law can be used very easily to harass, and enough harassment on somebody who is simply on the thin edge anyway, well knowing that he is not authorized, will generally be sufficient to cause his professional decease. If possible, of course, ruin him utterly."
If you're running a UFO cult, and you're doing so in the media environment of the 1950s-1970s, L. Ron Hubbard's policies will work just fine. He may have been a raging nutbag, but he knew where the defects were in the news-gathering and news-dissemination networks of his day were, and his cult developed policies to exploit them successfully.
Most organizations have adapted to the new reality, and have come up with effective ways of managing the media - whether you agree with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, or whether you agree with Michael Moore and moveon.org, both groups have become effective in getting their respective messages out.
The Co$, ironically, is the final proof -- part of Cult doctrine is that the words of Hubbard must be regarded as both true, and immutably so. By its own doctrines, the Co$ has been unable to adapt to the new media reality -- because (by virtue of the doctrine of the immutable truth of Hubbard's writings) to deviate from these 1950s/60s/70s-style media manipulations is heresy. The fact that the cult has gone from "that kinda-weird ultra-wealthy Hollywood religion" to "a money-grubbing UFO cult that's the laughingstock of the planet" is testam
> no PowerBook G5). They also introduced a new professional photography application known as Aperture, rounding out their software lineup for creative professionals.
...but when they do, they'll guarantee that the living hell is confused out of of camera buffs, Macheads, Photoshop users, and, well, just about every search engine on the planet.
"Your problem is that you didn't correctly set the aperture on your G5, which accounts for the bad results in Aperture on your G5. That's because aperture data isn't recorded in the Aperture suite, so creative professionals should use Creative Suite, and don't even think of swapping your iPod Photo for a G5 and the Zen player made by these guys, and be thankful that Creative doesn't make a sound card for the G5 either.
Who the hell hired Bjarne Stroustroup as a product marketing specialist, and why, dear, God, why, did he accept?:)
> When prosecuting a case of trespass, the owner must often demarcate their property with signs indicating that it is private property and trespass is not allowed.
$ telnet 127.0.0.1 25
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to 127.0.0.1.
Escape character is '^]'
220 127.0.0.1 ESMTP Sendmail 8.13.37/8.00.8.135
214 Don't even think about attempting to relay spam through here, n00b. Tresspassers will be pwn3d.
> While I agree it is good for those who are doing this as a business (consignments) - it WILL move on to other things. Also, it will be hard to regulate.
"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
> It will also provide a new source of tax revenue, which is the main reason the gov't wants it.
Close, but not quite.
> That $35 fee does not pay for the classes, which can be hundreds. And that surety bond - unless you are part of a company, you may have to front that money...that is a barrier to entry and not a lot of people can afford it. THe great thing about consignment on eBay is that you could get in for free.
Now you've got it. The "great thing" is only "great" to people like the buyers of products on eBay (who want more goods to purchase from a wider array of sellers) and to people who want to get into the business without having to pony up a few grand of protection money (oops, "to take classes on how to talk fast!") to line the pockets of people who are already well established.
In a free market, anyone can enter. If you give enough money to your politicians, however, you can have him erect artificial barriers to your competition, turning a formerly free market into a cartel, or guild. A capitalist doesn't fear competition -- but sadly, owning a small business doesn't turn you into a capitalist any more than going into a garage makes you a car.
Slashdot Mirror
You guys at SOE allergic to HTML or something?
For another interesting experience, why do the forums at http://forums.station.sony.com/swg report a "server error" when you try to read them on Mozilla (with or without Javascript, with or without cookies), but work fine on IE?
>
> Or you could do what we did, have a revolution!
> The UK Gov't hasn't given us a whole heck of a lot of trouble since...
Ah yes, flee UK ID cards and 90-day detention without trial for the balmy shores of the United States, with REAL ID, and, umm... indefini... aaw fuck.
As the gray of November gives way to a long cold winter for Western Civilization, the UK's forgotten stepchild (Canada, eh?) is beginning to look warm and sunny by comparison.
In other news, the Atlantic Ocean is described as being "considerably broader" than the English Channel.
But these are folks whose pet name for the gulf of water separating North America from Europe as "the pond".
One might go further and suggest that British people are prone to occasional tendencies towards understatement.
In other words, right now it's time to...
...LICK OUT THE KAMS, NOTHERGUCKERS!
Nothing for you to see anymore. Please stumble along.
>
> In other news, residents of Kansas experienced a timeshift, time going back to 1213 AD.
Oh, that's simple to explain. Kansas moved one state to the right - meaning they're no longer on CST, but on EST: Enlightenment Savings Time.
> - Boredom. Lichens are fairly uncontemplative creatures, however.
Bored lichens. On fire.
Dude, the Star Wars Galaxies thread is this way, bud!
I used to work at a restaurant. A cow orker of mine was little on the tubby side, but very cute, and she certainly never had any trouble getting tipped. *rimshot*
Ironic.
The usual MS obfuscation for "because we don't support 9x anymore, by definition there are no critical updates for 9x" is to state that 9x is "Not Critically Affected", with a URL to a page that defines "critically affected" in such a way as to exclude 9x.
"Not Affected", as claimed in MS05-053, is a stronger claim. That's not to say there aren't similar bugs in image-handling in 9x; only that the hole in this notice probably doesn't affect 9x.
>
>
Still no cure for ca... hey, wait a minute!
>
> 1. Individuals have no rights to privacy.
> 2. Corporations can do what they want with any data.
>
> That is, they want enshrined in national law the most pernicious possible data standards.
You must be new to K Street. Never miss an opportunity to enshrine a monopoly in legislation by finding a way to render your competitors' business practices, even where they're identical to your own, illegal - while simultaneously granting yourself the permission to do the same thing under color of law.
I've therefore amended your second rule as follows:
2. Corporations that have business models that conflict with that of Microsoft must be held to the most stringent privacy standards.
Although the Constitution is no longer relevant, it's still considered bad form to write a Bill of Attainder", so you have to be a little clever about it.
Thus, you'll typically end up with something like this:
Current setup was slashdotted within six comments.
Future setup will place an "emphasis on dependability instead of performance".
I'd say it sucks galactic black holes through buckytube, but that still wouldn't approach the Singular suckitude we're looking for.
Bite my dimly red-shifted neutronium ass.
From: <billgatus.of.borg>
To: <ceo.of.cisco>
"Johnny, you're doin' a heck of a job!"
>
>Anyone got a torrent?
In other news, 1160 ex-Novell employees said to be raising capital for hostile takeover of Krispy Kreme donut franchises, said to be interested in realigning business model with .torrent releases targeted directly at the Japanese pr0n market.
Finally in business news, Fuller Brush Company stock is up 50% on the day. A spokesperson for Fuller Brush Company said that despite initial concerns about the Slashdotting of their website last Wednesday, no DDOS attack in fact took place. Credit card companies have reported no chargebacks from orders; none of the PCs from which orders were placed were zombies, despite a quintupling of sales of "brain brushes".
Not hypocritical at all.
A cell phone is trackable even when its owner is not talking on it.
This article provides a good outline on what happens. Basically, there's a control channel, through which your phone communicates whenever it's got a battery in it. Your phone listens for an SID (System Identification Code) on this channel, and tells the appropriate MTSO (Mobile Telephone Switching Office) "Hi, I'm here". The MTSO has to know where you are, so that it can route incoming calls to the device.
All that's happening here is that the traffic monitoring folks are listening in on the back-channel communications between a large number of cell phones and base stations, and using the changes in location (as averaged over a large number of devices) to guesstimate the average speed of traffic. Individualized cell phone tracking is useless for a traffic flow application, so it's actually highly likely that the traffic folks are telling you the truth when they say that individual data isn't being logged, and that only aggregate data is being recorded.
The technology's nothing new - a system like this is necessarily a part of any wireless phone system, otherwise your phone couldn't ring when someone called you. No such agency is now permitted to do such a thing domestically (a sentence that can be parsed in at least eight ways, all of which are true), but they probably don't, because everyone else who's also interested in individualized tracking, is already doing this, has been doing this for years, and is using other tricks in software to locate their targets to within a few meters, all in real-time. They aren't using the traffic-control folks' data, because they don't need it.
What you are witnessing is real. The participants are not actors. They are actual litigants with a case pending in a U.S. District court. Both parties have agreed to dismiss their court cases and have their disputes settled here! In our forum! The People's Court!
Judge Yakov Smirnoff (Ret.) presiding.
Ask Slashdot: Where would YOU put the UK's store of lethal radioactive waste?
Yucca Mountain
Loch Ness
Orbit
The basement of The Women's Institute
CowboyNeal
Breasts!
CowboyNeal's Breasts!
>
> As opposed to hundreds of millions non-americans fighting for reason..?
Group A: A fundamentalist theocracy of 237,500,000 people who reject the physics underlying radioactive decay, and who also reject the notion that DNA can, with suitable cleverness, be manipulated into new and useful forms.
Group B: A technologically-advanced splinter group consisting of 12,500,000 potential nuclear and biogenic weapons engineers.
When push comes to shove, Side A may have 20 times as many rifles, pointy sticks, and fists, but my money's still on Side B.
Note to the folks in Group A: If you think I'm only making fun of you, there's also...
Group C: A different fundamentalist theocracy whose population ranges from around 500,000,000 to 1,500,000,000 people, most of whom think the world would be a better place if everyone in both "Group A" and" Group B" were either assimilated or exterminated.
Just a friendly reminder to the "Group A" crowd. Most of us in "Group B" would be pretty happy to coexist with y'all in "Group A", but if y'all actually win your little war and manage to wipe us out (despite your renunciation of nuclear physics, geology, biology, and genetic engineering), you're going to find yourself in a pretty serious vortex of suck when "Group C" comes a-knockin' on your door.
Just sayin'.
Pretty un-sage. And pretty un-Forbes-like. Sounds a lot like a certain UFO cult, actually.
> BASH BACK. If you get attacked, dig up dirt on your assailant and feed it to sympathetic bloggers. Discredit him.
> ATTACK THE HOST. Find some copyrighted text that a blogger has lifted from your Web site and threaten to sue his Internet service provider under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That may prompt the ISP to shut him down. Or threaten to drag the host into a defamation suit against the blogger. The host isn't liable but may skip the hassle and cut off the blogger's access anyway. Also:Subpoena the host company, demanding the blogger's name or Internet address.
> SUE THE BLOGGER. If all else fails, you can sue your attacker for defamation, at the risk of getting mocked. You will have to chase him for years to collect damages. Settle for a court order forcing him to take down his material.
and
"Your problem is that you didn't correctly set the aperture on your G5, which accounts for the bad results in Aperture on your G5. That's because aperture data isn't recorded in the Aperture suite, so creative professionals should use Creative Suite, and don't even think of swapping your iPod Photo for a G5 and the Zen player made by these guys, and be thankful that Creative doesn't make a sound card for the G5 either.
Who the hell hired Bjarne Stroustroup as a product marketing specialist, and why, dear, God, why, did he accept? :)
In other words, people break into your box at their own RISC?
$ telnet 127.0.0.1 25
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to 127.0.0.1.
Escape character is '^]'
220 127.0.0.1 ESMTP Sendmail 8.13.37/8.00.8.135
214 Don't even think about attempting to relay spam through here, n00b. Tresspassers will be pwn3d.
> It will also provide a new source of tax revenue, which is the main reason the gov't wants it.
Close, but not quite.
> That $35 fee does not pay for the classes, which can be hundreds. And that surety bond - unless you are part of a company, you may have to front that money...that is a barrier to entry and not a lot of people can afford it. THe great thing about consignment on eBay is that you could get in for free.
Now you've got it. The "great thing" is only "great" to people like the buyers of products on eBay (who want more goods to purchase from a wider array of sellers) and to people who want to get into the business without having to pony up a few grand of protection money (oops, "to take classes on how to talk fast!") to line the pockets of people who are already well established.
In a free market, anyone can enter. If you give enough money to your politicians, however, you can have him erect artificial barriers to your competition, turning a formerly free market into a cartel, or guild. A capitalist doesn't fear competition -- but sadly, owning a small business doesn't turn you into a capitalist any more than going into a garage makes you a car.
Slashdot Saturn later!