> I know it was modded as funny, but the DOHS plan on actually doing something about the internet.
What makes you think it hasn't already happened.
It's no secret that the 'net is the greatest domestic intelligence treasure trove in history. Not only do society's unreliable elements self-register as such with the authorities, but they do so voluntarily.
STASI had about 10-15% of its population as informants, and wrecked its economy while doing so. We got 50-60% coverage, and our informants paid for the privilege!
Stone may be overrated, but CD-ROM is good enough of a medium for our society.
> I met a traveller from an antique land >
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone >
Stand in the desert. . . Near them, on the sand, >
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, >
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, >
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read >
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, >
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. >
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"Oz scratchum HTML in stone with stick thing"
Make-um website, for venture capital bling"
> Nothing beside remains. Round the decay >
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare >
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
With apologies to > -- Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias,
circa 2000.
> [Raph Koster] is associated with fun like Dick Cheyney is associated with gay and lesbian tolerance... only by indirect association and then as a bad example.
More to the point -- Raph Koster has a pretty good theory of fun. But SWG (from beta to present day) bears no resemblance to that theory in any way, shape, or form. It's sorta the MMORPG proof by example that the difference between theory and practice is always bigger in practice than in theory.
--Bwaaaahaha*cough, splutter*, oh, God. No more. *wheeze* Make it stop. You're killin' me. Can't read another line.
Raph Koster, the man most directly associated with shitting out Star Wars Galaxies from between his Goatse-like buttcheeks, is lecturing us on what makes a fun game.
And for our next articles, an interview with the guy who invented the Edsel on his new book about his theory of automotive design, to be followed up by the guy who invented the:Cue:Cat about his theory of digital convergence, Jack Valenti's Theory of Digital Rights, George W. Bush's theory of fiscal conservatism, and a book on portfolio management theory co-authored by FDR and Charles Ponzi.
> Why would you let your SO attach an unpatched and unprotected PC to the Internet? Would the author let her walk SF's Tenderloin after dark in a halter, leather mini & fishnets?
> "We use these accounts to communicate with you folks, view internet sites, and conduct other non-sensitive bureau business such as sending out press releases," Special Agent Steve Lazarus, the FBI's media coordinator in Atlanta, said in an e-mail describing the problem.
In a followup e-mail describing the problem, Special Agent Laz Steverus said "No sensitive information was compromised, but today is a good time to remind citizens that the FBI is in posession of approximately 22,000,000,000 (TWENTY TWO BILLION DOLLARS) in uncollected judicial judgements from spammers, a portion of which we're trying to return to you folks. Just visit our web site, and read our press release, and it will instruct you in how to help us get this money back to you..."
> That they are trying to sue a dead person, or an 83 year old woman called herself "smittenedkitten"? >*shudder* The horror... the horror... >I guess she was "smittened" with something terminal. >Ha hee heh hee... computers... terminal... I crack me up.:-)
"Every time you share an MP3, [RIAA chairman] Mitch Bainwol kills a kitten. Please, think of the kittens."
(You want disturbing? I almost typed "Hilary Rosen". My head asplode, my Fark account surrenders, and after a Hilary Rosen dead kitten joke, you really don't want to think about what your dog wants.)
> Why don't they invent one even more useful to: * Detect when women are horny
* Detect when a woman has had enough to drink and will sleep with almost anyone
* Detect when a woman has just broken up with a boy friend, and wants to 'show him' by sleeping with another man..
* Warn you when YOU are drunk and hitting on the boss's wife at a party
Because of convergence.
You see, if you buy the WiFi detector ring that shows you when you have ready access to pr0n, you have one device that eliminates the need for all four of these separate devices.
> * One that shows she's gonna sleep with you, and not just leeching drinks off you at the bar
Speaking of convergence, I built one of those last week. All it took was about 3 inches of wire, a 3V battery, a current-limiting resistor, and an LED.
> Nah, you just switch fingers. You've got 10 ways to authenticate...
> >...and before someone else says it:
>I've only got 9 fingers, you insensitive clod!
"How about I take from you the finger, and you give me my phone call?"
"Rick Berman, on the other hand..."
- Trek's fanbase
Cause I've got faith - but no art,
Goin' where the ratings take me,
I've got faith to believe,
Borg chicks sell anything,
Branding strength - but no soul,
Finally the Nielsens break me,
I can sell - any script...
I've got faith... (I've got faith...)
Faith without art...
> Then what is the difference between talking to someone in your car, and talking to someone on a hands free headset.
I'll bite. "A combination of shared situational awareness and greatly increased audio bandwidth".
Shared situational awareness: If I'm talking to a driver and I see a hazard, I'll either STFU if it appears the driver has noticed the hazard, or I'll road hazard: tire fragment ahead on left mention it in midsentence if it looks like it's something out of the driver's field of view.
Increased audio bandwidth in meatspace relative to cellphonespace: When I'm talking to someone in meatspace, I'm getting a full uncompressed analog signal of that person's voice. Real easy for my brain to parse that into words, because that's what my ears evolved to receive, and what my brain evolved to parse.
When I'm talking on the cellphone, I'm getting the analog voice, downsampled to 8 KHz analog bandwidth for the POTS connection, and then digitized and recompressed to what sounds like a swishy watery-sounding MP3 at 16 Kb/s (with squelch/dropouts for near-silent bits of the conversation, to save the phone company even more bandwidth). Ugh.
Even off the road, my brain has to work a lot harder to reconstruct that into human speech than it does in meatspace. A fraction of a second pause, a few milliseconds of a breath that don't make it past the squelch, all of those things make a difference. Was that stunned silence? Was it "whoa?" [as in whoa, that's stupid], or was it "whoa!" [as in whoa, that's brilliant].
Our brains evolved to detect those nuances in meatspace speech. The nuances can sruvive text transmissions like email, because we've trained ourselves (unless we're insensitive clods!) to manually reinsert them. It all gets stripped out at downsampled, 16 KHz compressed audio, with bandwidth-saving squelch.
And that's why your driving-brain runs out of CPU cycles more quickly when talking on a cellphone than when talking to a passenger.
> Whatever they get will likely be 80% redacted. How is that useful? How is that freedom of information? You ask for info and they black out much of the useful stuff.
Well, if they did the redaction digitally in a PDF, the information could be pretty damned useful after all, as long as you render the PDF on a sufficiently slow PC.
> For Pirates who love acronyms, Puzzle Pirates is an massively multi-player online roleplaying game, or mmoarrrrpg."
Fresh on the heels of the Wired sex columnist who recommends MMORPGs as the place to cyber, we now have a pirate-themed MMORPG.
sweet17: What do you need me to do?
Bloodninja: I need you talk like a pirate.
sweet17: ???
Bloodninja: When I start to go limp... you say "HARRRR!!!"
Bloodninja: ok?
Bloodninja: Hello?
sweet17: You can't be serious
Bloodninja: Oh yes I am!
I guess it's time to put on my robe and wizard hat and, umm... HARRRRRRRRRR!
But since your alternative involves electricity, water, and chemicals, we'll forgive it. (But next time, could you kindly use something more dangerous than sodium chloride? We've got reputations to uphold here, and if the case mod weren't so danged cool, we'd feel we were slipping.)
> the thing that everyone is forgetting is this: high school is not now nor has it ever been anything like "real life".
> >witness: in school, teachers routinely punish the entire class until the party guilty of a particular offense comes forward. in real life, we would call this sort of activity by authorities "terrorism". in school, the mantra of maintaining order is "i don't care who started it." in the real world, we spend billions of dollars on a justice system to figure out "who started it."
Actually, in real life, governments routinely apply laws to the entire population (banning firearms, banning marijuana) due to the irresponsibility of the few. And just as in school -- when it comes down to a sense of fairness or maintaining order, our leaders also don't care who started it.
Rather than trying to make high school more like real life, we discovered it was more efficient to make real life more like high school.
The spin-the-crowbar decision wheel determines whether or not you'll be allowed to play.
Oh, and all the squares on the board (and all the cards, and all the markings on the crowbar and wheel) are printed in #000033 dark blue against a #220011 dark maroon background, because we can't have anybody photocopying the game board.
(If you want to play at a friend's house, we'll FAX you a copy!)
Slashdot Mirror
Attention Citizen 95676.
[redacted] - - [06/Feb/2004:14:02:25 PDT] "GET www.[redacted].com/gallery/SpILF/poland001.html HTTP/1.0"
You were saying?
What makes you think it hasn't already happened.
It's no secret that the 'net is the greatest domestic intelligence treasure trove in history. Not only do society's unreliable elements self-register as such with the authorities, but they do so voluntarily.
STASI had about 10-15% of its population as informants, and wrecked its economy while doing so. We got 50-60% coverage, and our informants paid for the privilege!
> I met a traveller from an antique land
> Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
> Stand in the desert. . . Near them, on the sand,
> Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
> And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
> Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
> Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
> The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
> And on the pedestal these words appear:
"Oz scratchum HTML in stone with stick thing"
Make-um website, for venture capital bling"
> Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
> Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
> The lone and level sands stretch far away.
With apologies to
> -- Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias, circa 2000.
More to the point -- Raph Koster has a pretty good theory of fun. But SWG (from beta to present day) bears no resemblance to that theory in any way, shape, or form. It's sorta the MMORPG proof by example that the difference between theory and practice is always bigger in practice than in theory.
--Bwaaaahaha*cough, splutter*, oh, God. No more. *wheeze* Make it stop. You're killin' me. Can't read another line.
Raph Koster, the man most directly associated with shitting out Star Wars Galaxies from between his Goatse-like buttcheeks, is lecturing us on what makes a fun game.
And for our next articles, an interview with the guy who invented the Edsel on his new book about his theory of automotive design, to be followed up by the guy who invented the :Cue:Cat about his theory of digital convergence, Jack Valenti's Theory of Digital Rights, George W. Bush's theory of fiscal conservatism, and a book on portfolio management theory co-authored by FDR and Charles Ponzi.
Sheesh.
You've obviously not seen what's at the bottom of the guy's archive of previous columns page...
In a followup e-mail describing the problem, Special Agent Laz Steverus said "No sensitive information was compromised, but today is a good time to remind citizens that the FBI is in posession of approximately 22,000,000,000 (TWENTY TWO BILLION DOLLARS) in uncollected judicial judgements from spammers, a portion of which we're trying to return to you folks. Just visit our web site, and read our press release, and it will instruct you in how to help us get this money back to you..."
>*shudder* The horror... the horror...
>I guess she was "smittened" with something terminal.
>Ha hee heh hee... computers... terminal... I crack me up.
"Every time you share an MP3, [RIAA chairman] Mitch Bainwol kills a kitten. Please, think of the kittens."
(You want disturbing? I almost typed "Hilary Rosen". My head asplode, my Fark account surrenders, and after a Hilary Rosen dead kitten joke, you really don't want to think about what your dog wants.)
Because of convergence.
You see, if you buy the WiFi detector ring that shows you when you have ready access to pr0n, you have one device that eliminates the need for all four of these separate devices.
> * One that shows she's gonna sleep with you, and not just leeching drinks off you at the bar
Speaking of convergence, I built one of those last week. All it took was about 3 inches of wire, a 3V battery, a current-limiting resistor, and an LED.
>
>or maybe I'll just skip that party.
You think you've got trouble. I was at this party, and the guy was telling me about Y!Q.
Fortunately, I was raised by a !Kung tribe, so I was able to understand it when this guy started talking about Y!Q.
Unfortunately, DNS (which was not invented by the !Kung), I couldn't even guess what the domain name for the Y!Q search engine was supposed to be.
So I thought I'd just google for it. Heh.
I really shoulda skipped that party.
>
>...and before someone else says it:
>I've only got 9 fingers, you insensitive clod!
"How about I take from you the finger, and you give me my phone call?"
I could tell the difference between just about anything at 128kbps and 64kbps too.
The question is - can they tell the difference between 192kbps MP3 encoded with LAME, 128kbps OGG, and/or the original CD?
\Berman would write a script like that. Problem is, it'd still suck.
Never mind him. He's new here.
- JMS
"Rick Berman, on the other hand..."
- Trek's fanbase
Cause I've got faith - but no art,
Goin' where the ratings take me,
I've got faith to believe,
Borg chicks sell anything,
Branding strength - but no soul,
Finally the Nielsens break me,
I can sell - any script...
I've got faith... (I've got faith...)
Faith without art...
I'll bite. "A combination of shared situational awareness and greatly increased audio bandwidth".
Shared situational awareness: If I'm talking to a driver and I see a hazard, I'll either STFU if it appears the driver has noticed the hazard, or I'll road hazard: tire fragment ahead on left mention it in midsentence if it looks like it's something out of the driver's field of view.
Increased audio bandwidth in meatspace relative to cellphonespace: When I'm talking to someone in meatspace, I'm getting a full uncompressed analog signal of that person's voice. Real easy for my brain to parse that into words, because that's what my ears evolved to receive, and what my brain evolved to parse.
When I'm talking on the cellphone, I'm getting the analog voice, downsampled to 8 KHz analog bandwidth for the POTS connection, and then digitized and recompressed to what sounds like a swishy watery-sounding MP3 at 16 Kb/s (with squelch/dropouts for near-silent bits of the conversation, to save the phone company even more bandwidth). Ugh.
Even off the road, my brain has to work a lot harder to reconstruct that into human speech than it does in meatspace. A fraction of a second pause, a few milliseconds of a breath that don't make it past the squelch, all of those things make a difference. Was that stunned silence? Was it "whoa?" [as in whoa, that's stupid], or was it "whoa!" [as in whoa, that's brilliant].
Our brains evolved to detect those nuances in meatspace speech. The nuances can sruvive text transmissions like email, because we've trained ourselves (unless we're insensitive clods!) to manually reinsert them. It all gets stripped out at downsampled, 16 KHz compressed audio, with bandwidth-saving squelch.
And that's why your driving-brain runs out of CPU cycles more quickly when talking on a cellphone than when talking to a passenger.
"First passing of the Turing test!"
Well, if they did the redaction digitally in a PDF, the information could be pretty damned useful after all, as long as you render the PDF on a sufficiently slow PC.
Fresh on the heels of the Wired sex columnist who recommends MMORPGs as the place to cyber, we now have a pirate-themed MMORPG.
I guess it's time to put on my robe and wizard hat and, umm... HARRRRRRRRRR!
What do you have against archaeologists from the future?
>
>Do you want to play a game?
Ahem. That's "Shall we play a game?" to you, sir.
Turn in your geek card. As mistakes go, that's a WOPR. (Slashdot is a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.)
First off, there's nothing a Dremel can't do.
But since your alternative involves electricity, water, and chemicals, we'll forgive it. (But next time, could you kindly use something more dangerous than sodium chloride? We've got reputations to uphold here, and if the case mod weren't so danged cool, we'd feel we were slipping.)
>
>witness: in school, teachers routinely punish the entire class until the party guilty of a particular offense comes forward. in real life, we would call this sort of activity by authorities "terrorism". in school, the mantra of maintaining order is "i don't care who started it." in the real world, we spend billions of dollars on a justice system to figure out "who started it."
Actually, in real life, governments routinely apply laws to the entire population (banning firearms, banning marijuana) due to the irresponsibility of the few. And just as in school -- when it comes down to a sense of fairness or maintaining order, our leaders also don't care who started it.
Rather than trying to make high school more like real life, we discovered it was more efficient to make real life more like high school.
But only if the government approves of the news article!
> 2 striders
> 3 gunships
> [
>1 dog
> 1 G-man
> 1 spin-the-crowbar decision wheel
The spin-the-crowbar decision wheel determines whether or not you'll be allowed to play.
Oh, and all the squares on the board (and all the cards, and all the markings on the crowbar and wheel) are printed in #000033 dark blue against a #220011 dark maroon background, because we can't have anybody photocopying the game board.
(If you want to play at a friend's house, we'll FAX you a copy!)