> I wonder how many of those people have any children to be exposed to TV
Huh? Where do you think we got the idea of stickin' Tab A into Slot B from in the first place? Why, the filthy TV, of course!
(But thank God that Mom and Dad only had access to the old filthy TV. With the new filthy TV (24/7 reruns of Queer Eye and Ellen), why, our Moms and Dads would have just sat there lookin' confused 'n' stuff, and we wouldn't even EXIST!)
WWYD? STFD, STFU, and DWYT.
on
Computer Forensics
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
> How would you cooperate with law enforcement when a crime has been committed on a computer?
I would do whatever the nice people with the guns told me to. Nothing more, and nothing less.
The guys with the guns are not my friends, but they're pretty nice to people who help them. The most helpful thing you can do for these people is to sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and to do what you're told.
Unless you're being paid to perform an investigation, getting good forensic data off that drive is not your responsibility. That's the responsibility of the friends of the guys with the guns. (Are you a friend? Easy to check! Is your paycheck signed by a big guy with a really big gun? If not, you are not one of their friends!)
Going further, getting data off the drive isn't your responsibility -- but not fucking up the chain of custody is your responsibility. If you fuck up the chain of custody, the guys with the guns will be very, very, very angry with you. (You do not want this to happen.)
So:
1) Do not make the people with guns angry.
2) Do not "help" the people with guns (even if you want to), because anything you do to "help" them runs the risk of making them angry.
3) STFD. STFU. DWYT.
Y'know how we geeks have hundreds of words to express the concept of "nontechnical person who is too clueless to be allowed anywhere near a computer"?
I'll bet cops have hundreds of words that translate to "civilian who is too clueless to be allowed anywhere near an ongoing investigation".
> If there was an alternative to Google Groups, then we'd all go use it now. But there isn't. This is the only usenet archive that is anywhere near being a 'complete' digest of the last two decades of usenet activity. What would librarians say if suddenly the last two decades of newspaper microfilms had to be accessed through some limited, moronic interface?
And while we're at it, WTF happened to "(xxx messages in thread)"?
If I query "foo bar obscureproduct", and get 100 hits, sometimes 20 of those hits will be to different parts of the same thread, and another 20 will be ("1 message in thread"), indicating some guy had the same problem but had no solution.
Old groups.google.com: I could click the "(47 messages in thread") once, and skip all other threads with 47 messages in them, because they were the same thread. (And I could skip the single-message threads)
Sucky groups.google.com: Now I have to try all 100 hits, because I know nothing about any of the threads until I waste time opening them.
What gibbering fucktard thought this was a good idea, and could someone kindly present me his severed testicles on a platter?
The new groups is semi-useful if you want to post through a web interface. But this change, and most of the other changes, make searching the archive (which is what 99% of us are using the archive for) impossibly harder.
> What would be so bad about Email masking?
> >On occasion, it can be very useful to try and contact somebody that had a similar problem, but a while ago. (ie, the thread is long since inactive)
"John" - non unique identifier.
"John " - Unique identifier, telling me which John I'm reading.
"John " - unique identifier with extremely valuable metadata about the reliability (or lack thereof) of John Q. Public's information in the context of a posting in the sci.med.* hierarchy.
> Everyone who works in a Fortune 1000 company, please raise your hand. Anyone who thinks that their employer COULDNT be any more bureauratic please raise their hand.
> >Implying Governments are INHERENTLY bureaucratic is a myth, conversly, arguing that a PRIVATE firm (of any notable size) isnt just as complex is silly. The Short: All big systems are complex and byzantine./raises hand.
Complexity is not the same as bureaucracy. Even in F1000 companies, bureaucracy is a bug, not a feature. (It's just harder to eliminate in larger companies.)
Large government contractors and suppliers fall somewhere between private enterprise and government in this scale; they have to be efficient enough to actually build a bomb that goes "boom", or a plane that flies, but they also have to be bureaucratic enough to fill out the reams of paperwork that come as part of the Faustian bargain: If you want a chunk of the taxpayer's money, you've gotta dedicate at least 20-30% of your manpower to jumping through the government's hoops.
In government per se, bureaucracy is not merely a feature -- it's practically the raison d'etre for the whole enterprise. What good is open source if we can't have studies on it, build fiefdoms around approving and sharing it, and make other people from other fiefdoms fill out paperwork to get their hands on it? What good are space shuttles unless we build space stations for them to go to, and space stations without space shuttles to ferry the parts up there $500M at a time?
Remember, there's Fedland from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash
NEW TP POOL REGULATIONS I've been asked to distribute the new regulations regarding office pool displays. The enclosed memo is a new subchapter of the EBGOC Procedure Manual, replacing the old subchapter entitled PHYSICAL PLANT/CALIFORNIA/LOS ANGELES/BUILDINGS/OFFICE AREAS/PHYSICAL LAYOUT REGULATIONS/EMPLOYEE INPUT/GROUP ACTIVITIES. The old subchapter was a flat prohibition on the use of office space or time forr "pool" activities of any kindm whteher permanent (e.g., coffee pool) or one-time (e.g., birthday parties). This prohibition still applies, but a single, one-time exception has now been made for any office that wishes to pursue a joint bathroom-tissue strategy. [... ]
FSIS streamlined the system in a final rule issued on December 29, 1995, (60 FR 67444) that became effective July 1, 1996, by expanding the categories of products for which labeling can be approved generically by industry. For example, the rule allows Federal establishments to design and use labeling that conforms to the regulatory requirements for meat, poultry, and egg products that have standards of identity and composition defined in the regulations (9 CFR 319 and 381) or in the Food Standards and Labeling Policy Book.
Everyone who's worked in both a Fortune 1000 company and government, and who has obtained approval for the funding of a working group to ascertain the value of conducting a study on the relative levels of bureaucratization, please contact your union steward for permission to obtain form G3122 ("Application for Exception to Standard Rule 7431, section 8, supbaragraph 6") before even thinking about raising your hand.
> This is going to get at least ONE slashdotter killed....
> >Great photos though.
What, the photos on the site, or the photos and video our soon-to-be-deceased Slashdotter will be streaming back to his webserver as he falls screaming to his death, practically guaranteeing a simultaneous appearance on both Slashdot and Fark.
Hmm, a late-model ruggedized laptop equipped with wireless and a dozen pringles cans to guarantee that at least one Starbucks is at range after the crash... it'll survive the impact, but nothing will survive a Slashfarking. You can take it with you!
(I mean, think of the Afterlife. Oh, sure, you might go to the place where Tux gives everyone an iPod and a rack or two from ACSI Ultraviolet, but what if you wind up in the Other Place, with that chubby guy condemned to jump around and yell "Developers" for all eternity? Wouldn't you want to have at least one of your own servers with you?)
And college students during exam season. (Can't speak for the Koreans.)
Blue-stained hands-up, all those who remember those glorious essay exams from the mandatory humanities courses, where your grade ceases to be based on the merits of your ideas (and/or your ability to parrot your professor's ideas), but is solely a function of how well-developed the muscles in your right hand are, in order to keep scribbling for the entire three hours what would have taken you 90 minutes to type.
Of course, even in the dark days before I discovered Slashdot, my CS education had proven to be more than ample preparation for the worst that any Philosophy, History, or (worst of all) English prof could throw at me. *rimshot*
So, when does henscratch.google.com (searchable handwritten blogs) come out?
In Korea, old - no, wait, "Snuggling Ifbot" robots provide companionship to old Japanese, not old Koreans (they just use email).
Problem is, the snuggling ifbots were only warranted for the first four years... and then...
HUMAN: I'm surprised you didn't come to
me sooner.
IFBOT: It's not an easy thing to meet
your maker.
HUMAN: And what can he do for you?
IFBOT: Can the maker repair what he makes?
HUMAN: Would you like to be modified?
IFBOT: Had in mind something a little more
radical.
HUMAN: What's the problem?
IFBOT: Death.
HUMAN: I'm afraid that's a little out of
my...
IFBOT: I want more life, fucker.
From the article:
> We will still die, of course - from crossing the road carelessly, being bitten by snakes, catching a new flu variant etcetera -
Guess we gotta add "eyes gouged out by snuggling ifbot" to that hazard list, bub. On the other hand, four years (or more, depending on whose interpretation you follow) with a Rachelbot sounds pretty sweet. Sign me up.
> > "...a nation whose principal exports are fast food, Hollywood movies, Internet cafes, arrogance, swagger, and democracy" > >...and nuclear weapons, cultural imperialism, lowest-common-denominator entertainment, anti-intellectualism, gun culture, hyper-agressive business practices, corporate owned 'democracy', business by lawsuit, capitalism as religion, religion as capitalism, all-out economic war against it's supposed allies (cloaked in fluffy terms like 'globalisation' and 'free trade'), 18th-century labour and health policies... I could go on and on and on, but your last sentence just can't go unnoted:
And while we're on the subject of exports.
Name two things (other than "oil" and "terror") that have been exported by the Muslim world in the past 50 - hell, the past 100 - years.
> Slashdot.
> >
The only place you can work in "open-source" while talking about HIV vaccines.
Heh. And I had a wisecrack about how "this isn't a cure, it's merely a treatment that will enable people to continue to spread the virus into the general population for a longer period of time". (And expose themselves to other varieties of the virus in the meantime, should they encounter another infected partner.)
You can try to limit that risk by encouraging responsible behavior, but as we all know -- abstinence doesn't work. Because people like to fuck.
And then, like you, I had my Slashdot moment.
I mean... what's this "fuck" verb? I get too much exposure to that stuff in my spam filter every day. So who cares?:)
> My opinion is that playability outlasts graphics. Graphics are an immediately gratifying factor, but in the long term, I think peoeple are sick of the fantasy and or sci-fi genre. So what's next? I dunno... something completely out of the box.
Yeah. As for the comment about how graphics and gameplay draw players in, it's the community that makes them stay...
Today's UserFriendly is a perfect illustration of why, for me, it's the
community that drives me away from MMORPGs.
I had more fun in three months of Morrowind out-of-the-box (a near-MMORPG-sized environment My opinion is that playability outlasts graphics. Graphics are an immediately gratifying factor, but in the long term, I think peoeple are sick of the fantasy and or sci-fi genre. So what's next? I dunno... something completely out of the box. marred only by a combat system that looked like... well, MMORPG combat) than I did in any MMORPG I've tried.
> No group of fanbois can obsess like Massively Multiplayer Gamers,
"We're working on that..." - Everyone on the pro- and anti-Steam sides of the HL2/Steam debate.
> and every aspect of the game was poked, prodded, and analyzed by the legions of would-be players. Once the Beta began, a line was thrown up between the lucky gamers who had the opportunity to participate and those who didn't. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the [developer's] forums, and expectations ran even higher for those on the outside looking in.
Hmm, maybe MMORPGs and FPSes aren't so different after all. *rimshot*
> I'm torn though - do I want to listen to Shitty Beep Concerto, or Tinny Licensed Song in G minor
Dear holy mother of fuck, it's worse than I thought. Depending on which brand of consultant crack you smoke, we live in a world in which Cell phone ringtones are worth between $1B and $3.3B per year.
Compared to listening to your cow orker's annoying cell phone from six cubicles away, hookin' up a set of headphones to the SNES is a welcome relief.
You are in a little white house near a forest on the outer edge of the Great Underground Empire. There is a computer on the table here.
> BUY HALF-LIFE 2
You cannot buy Half-Life 2. You can only rent it.
> RENT HALF-LIFE 2
You download a Steam client and supply your FrobozzcoCard number.
> PLAY HALF-LIFE 2
You cannot play Half-Life 2 on this computer without signing into your Steam account.
> LOGIN STEAM
You punch in your account information, but because you're in a little white house in the middle of nowhere, the computer's modem dials up the nearest internet provider and the game begins to download.
> WAIT
Time passes...
4.9 gigabytes remaining. (5.4k/s)
> WAIT
Time passes...
4.9 gigabytes remaining. (5.4k/s)
Your blood pressure just went up. (Oh, wait, this only *feels* like you're stuck in "Bureaucracy". Your blood pressure is actually just fine.)
> WAIT
Time passes...
4.9 gigabytes remaining. (5.4k/s) Your UPS battery is fading.
> TURN OFF MONITOR
You turn off the monitor to conserve power. The only light is the "RD" light on the modem - a solid, but feeble, red. Clever.
> WAIT
Time passes...
You really think you can press "W" more often than I can tell you that Time Passes? I'm the computer here, remember? But have it your way - we'll skip a the next nine days.
> WAIT
Time passes...
It is dark.
You are still unlikely to be eaten by a headcrab.
Grues, however, are another story
*** You have died ***
Your score is 0/150 (Victim of improperly-conducted usability study). Would you like to try again?
> I think steam is a great delivery system for games.
My PC is not a platform for a third party's content. Period.
I haven't bought HL2. I won't buy it until there's a non-steam version of singleplayer, or a reliable crack. Two weeks ago, I'd have bought it retail from Vivendi and sent $20 to Valve on principle.
I'm sufficiently disgusted with the way Valve has handled the situation that (when the nonsteam release, or the reliable crack, comes out - whichever comes first) I'll buy it retail from Vivendi - also on principle.
For anyone who still thinks steam's cool, try going into offline mode, setting your date forward a year, and rebooting. Whether you got it out of a Vivendi box or a Valve download, you haven't purchased HL2 singleplayer - you've rented it.
If I wanted to rent games and play them on a PC-based console system, I'd have bought a Phantom from Infinium. (You Steam fans do all own Phantoms, don't you?)
Given the propensity of college students to kill themselves is greater than that of high school students, I think we'll also see an expansion of the New Freedom Initiative to require mandatory mental health screening of college students.
Just because we were/are/will-be insane while we're in college, doesn't mean there's anything to fear.
Although your typical professor assigned to teaching an undergrad class might like the sound of that, if they locked all the undergrads up, there'd be nobody around to buy their textbooks.
So unlike New Freedom for Public Schools, New Freedom for College will be a self-limiting phenomenon.
> 'Journalists' no more serve a function anymore than Google News reprinting press releases. Commentary has replaced fact-checking and persistence and integrity in the media.
Blogs aren't reporting either. They're jouranlism. But what passes for "reporting" ("get the facts") these days is really "journalism" ("spin the interpretation"), and that's the problem.
And because nobody in the MSM fact-checks... How many times have hoax headlines from Fark and The Onion made the 6 o'clock news so far this year? (I can think at least three or four off the top of my head.)
> They aren't about reporting the news, they're about giving equal time to opposing viewpoints, even if one is completely wrong and not worth acknowledgement.
*applause*
Seriously, MSM folks. What's this "input from both sides" stuff? My gut reaction is "fuck that". If you're reporting the discovery of a new dinosaur fossil, there is no second side that says that we need to be wary of such discoveries because the Earth is only 6,000 years old. (If I want pseudoscience, I'll watch the Religion Channel's newscast.)
How the fuck many people died because some fuckwitted "journalist" decided he needed to "tell both sides" of a story about therapeutic touch as a cure for cancer? (If I want that, I'll watch the Discovery Channel these days. *sigh*:)
If you're reporting about phishing scams, or the reason Little Johnny has 100 "H0t P3n15 5lu+ 4x+iun" mails in his email box every day, there is no "both sides" of "ethikul small bidnidmen" working out of "home offices". The fact is that Little Johnny is getting buried in crap. (I can't get media coverage, because marketeers own (and pwn) the broadcast networks.)
And finally, if you're reporting that some Postscript printed from a Microsoft Word file was having been typed in 1970, there is no second side to the story. I don't give a flying fark whose signature you claim is on it, and I really don't give a fark about how many self-styled "andwriting experts" you can pay to claim that the signature resembles an original specimen -- because the memo itself is bogus, immediately rendering any possibility of an "other side" irrelevant. (And I need blogs here, because Emperor Dan Has No Clothes (if he had side pockets, he'd be a frog, or something), and nobody else in the MSM was willing to say it loud enough to make people listen.)
When I go to freerepublic.com, I know I'm gonna get the Republican spin. When I go to democraticunderground.com, I know I'm gonna get the Democratic spin. When one side is full of posters saying "Don't worry, this is a conspiracy, it'll all blow over", and the other side is saying "Hey, look at this neat fact that supports that guy's observation", I know which side is more likely to be correct in any given scenario.
Reading blogs makes interpreting the news an active process, not a passive one -- which is bad for the MSM business, (and probably unhealthy to me over the long term as we require more conformity out of our citizens), but it's so much fun I can't seem to stop:)
The fact that it's fun, more than anything else, is why I gave up on the MSM as anything other than a source of cheap laughs. (Oh, Dan, Dan, Dan... how I'm gonna miss you on election night 2008. You were responsible for at least twelve shots of bourbon during your coverage of '04, by far and away the most drinks-per-hour guy on the tube!)
From the article:
> Recently bloggers were part of the forces compelling Trent Lott to resign as Senate majority leader and Dan Rather to apologize to viewers on national television -- leaving many to ponder if blogs could someday supplant traditional journalism. More likely they'll become a 'fifth estate' keeping watch over mainstream media and politics, says Dan Drezner and Henry Farrell in Foreign Policy Magazine's current issue.
Hello 2004! Reporting myfinded something in Google Temporality cachecopy of Slasharticle in question.
"The decision is available. As we noted in an earlier story, the Eldred case attacked the length of copyright expansion, this one attacked the breadth, and so far, this one is as big a victory for freedom as the Eldred case was. Stanford has an overview of the case."
Those who control the past, control the future; those who control the future, control the
present; those who control the present, control the past.
> Help / About Netscape Browser, then click on the "Credits" button. Hmmm, a whole load of names missing there.
That's not a bug, it's a feature!
We're talking about a design committee that must have obtained a dozen Congresses worth of stupidity, distilled it over the flames of historical ignorance, condensed it on flask walls of monumental technological apathy, and beer-bong-chugged the elixir obtained therefrom.
I wouldn't want my name attached to the resulting code either. If it was, I'd sue for defamation of character.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? Where do you think we got the idea of stickin' Tab A into Slot B from in the first place? Why, the filthy TV, of course!
(But thank God that Mom and Dad only had access to the old filthy TV. With the new filthy TV (24/7 reruns of Queer Eye and Ellen), why, our Moms and Dads would have just sat there lookin' confused 'n' stuff, and we wouldn't even EXIST!)
I would do whatever the nice people with the guns told me to. Nothing more, and nothing less.
The guys with the guns are not my friends, but they're pretty nice to people who help them. The most helpful thing you can do for these people is to sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and to do what you're told.
Unless you're being paid to perform an investigation, getting good forensic data off that drive is not your responsibility. That's the responsibility of the friends of the guys with the guns. (Are you a friend? Easy to check! Is your paycheck signed by a big guy with a really big gun? If not, you are not one of their friends!)
Going further, getting data off the drive isn't your responsibility -- but not fucking up the chain of custody is your responsibility. If you fuck up the chain of custody, the guys with the guns will be very, very, very angry with you. (You do not want this to happen.)
So:
1) Do not make the people with guns angry.
2) Do not "help" the people with guns (even if you want to), because anything you do to "help" them runs the risk of making them angry.
3) STFD. STFU. DWYT.
Y'know how we geeks have hundreds of words to express the concept of "nontechnical person who is too clueless to be allowed anywhere near a computer"?
I'll bet cops have hundreds of words that translate to "civilian who is too clueless to be allowed anywhere near an ongoing investigation".
And while we're at it, WTF happened to "(xxx messages in thread)"?
If I query "foo bar obscureproduct", and get 100 hits, sometimes 20 of those hits will be to different parts of the same thread, and another 20 will be ("1 message in thread"), indicating some guy had the same problem but had no solution.
Old groups.google.com: I could click the "(47 messages in thread") once, and skip all other threads with 47 messages in them, because they were the same thread. (And I could skip the single-message threads)
Sucky groups.google.com: Now I have to try all 100 hits, because I know nothing about any of the threads until I waste time opening them.
What gibbering fucktard thought this was a good idea, and could someone kindly present me his severed testicles on a platter?
The new groups is semi-useful if you want to post through a web interface. But this change, and most of the other changes, make searching the archive (which is what 99% of us are using the archive for) impossibly harder.
>
>On occasion, it can be very useful to try and contact somebody that had a similar problem, but a while ago. (ie, the thread is long since inactive)
"John" - non unique identifier.
"John " - Unique identifier, telling me which John I'm reading.
"John " - unique identifier with extremely valuable metadata about the reliability (or lack thereof) of John Q. Public's information in the context of a posting in the sci.med.* hierarchy.
Email making makes Google USENET useless.
>
>Implying Governments are INHERENTLY bureaucratic is a myth, conversly, arguing that a PRIVATE firm (of any notable size) isnt just as complex is silly. The Short: All big systems are complex and byzantine.
Complexity is not the same as bureaucracy. Even in F1000 companies, bureaucracy is a bug, not a feature. (It's just harder to eliminate in larger companies.)
Large government contractors and suppliers fall somewhere between private enterprise and government in this scale; they have to be efficient enough to actually build a bomb that goes "boom", or a plane that flies, but they also have to be bureaucratic enough to fill out the reams of paperwork that come as part of the Faustian bargain: If you want a chunk of the taxpayer's money, you've gotta dedicate at least 20-30% of your manpower to jumping through the government's hoops.
In government per se, bureaucracy is not merely a feature -- it's practically the raison d'etre for the whole enterprise. What good is open source if we can't have studies on it, build fiefdoms around approving and sharing it, and make other people from other fiefdoms fill out paperwork to get their hands on it? What good are space shuttles unless we build space stations for them to go to, and space stations without space shuttles to ferry the parts up there $500M at a time?
Remember, there's Fedland from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash
And there's the Real McCoy: (Excerpted from Meat, Poultry, Egg Produce Labeling Review Process)
Everyone who's worked in both a Fortune 1000 company and government, and who has obtained approval for the funding of a working group to ascertain the value of conducting a study on the relative levels of bureaucratization, please contact your union steward for permission to obtain form G3122 ("Application for Exception to Standard Rule 7431, section 8, supbaragraph 6") before even thinking about raising your hand.
>
>Great photos though.
What, the photos on the site, or the photos and video our soon-to-be-deceased Slashdotter will be streaming back to his webserver as he falls screaming to his death, practically guaranteeing a simultaneous appearance on both Slashdot and Fark.
Hmm, a late-model ruggedized laptop equipped with wireless and a dozen pringles cans to guarantee that at least one Starbucks is at range after the crash... it'll survive the impact, but nothing will survive a Slashfarking. You can take it with you!
(I mean, think of the Afterlife. Oh, sure, you might go to the place where Tux gives everyone an iPod and a rack or two from ACSI Ultraviolet, but what if you wind up in the Other Place, with that chubby guy condemned to jump around and yell "Developers" for all eternity? Wouldn't you want to have at least one of your own servers with you?)
Wait, the dupe of the "100 things to do before you die" article hasn't even been posted yet!
And college students during exam season. (Can't speak for the Koreans.)
Blue-stained hands-up, all those who remember those glorious essay exams from the mandatory humanities courses, where your grade ceases to be based on the merits of your ideas (and/or your ability to parrot your professor's ideas), but is solely a function of how well-developed the muscles in your right hand are, in order to keep scribbling for the entire three hours what would have taken you 90 minutes to type.
Of course, even in the dark days before I discovered Slashdot, my CS education had proven to be more than ample preparation for the worst that any Philosophy, History, or (worst of all) English prof could throw at me. *rimshot*
So, when does henscratch.google.com (searchable handwritten blogs) come out?
Hmm, NASA spent how much on SHIVA and got a grainy 1cm^3 image at 30fps?
Solution? Outsource it!
"Help us, holographic pr0n industry! You're our only hope!"
In Korea, old - no, wait, "Snuggling Ifbot" robots provide companionship to old Japanese, not old Koreans (they just use email).
Problem is, the snuggling ifbots were only warranted for the first four years... and then...
HUMAN: I'm surprised you didn't come to me sooner.
IFBOT: It's not an easy thing to meet your maker.
HUMAN: And what can he do for you?
IFBOT: Can the maker repair what he makes?
HUMAN: Would you like to be modified?
IFBOT: Had in mind something a little more radical.
HUMAN: What's the problem?
IFBOT: Death.
HUMAN: I'm afraid that's a little out of my...
IFBOT: I want more life, fucker.
From the article:
> We will still die, of course - from crossing the road carelessly, being bitten by snakes, catching a new flu variant etcetera -
Guess we gotta add "eyes gouged out by snuggling ifbot" to that hazard list, bub. On the other hand, four years (or more, depending on whose interpretation you follow) with a Rachelbot sounds pretty sweet. Sign me up.
Exactly. If the mortgage guys don't like the packets coming from our screensavers, why haven't they sent us any opt-out requests?
>
>
And while we're on the subject of exports.
Name two things (other than "oil" and "terror") that have been exported by the Muslim world in the past 50 - hell, the past 100 - years.
Go on, we're waiting.
>
> The only place you can work in "open-source" while talking about HIV vaccines.
Heh. And I had a wisecrack about how "this isn't a cure, it's merely a treatment that will enable people to continue to spread the virus into the general population for a longer period of time". (And expose themselves to other varieties of the virus in the meantime, should they encounter another infected partner.)
You can try to limit that risk by encouraging responsible behavior, but as we all know -- abstinence doesn't work. Because people like to fuck.
And then, like you, I had my Slashdot moment.
I mean... what's this "fuck" verb? I get too much exposure to that stuff in my spam filter every day. So who cares? :)
And to read stuff like...
"u need wud?"
- gwbush, Lvl 50 Politician
Yeah. As for the comment about how graphics and gameplay draw players in, it's the community that makes them stay...
Today's UserFriendly is a perfect illustration of why, for me, it's the community that drives me away from MMORPGs.
I had more fun in three months of Morrowind out-of-the-box (a near-MMORPG-sized environment My opinion is that playability outlasts graphics. Graphics are an immediately gratifying factor, but in the long term, I think peoeple are sick of the fantasy and or sci-fi genre. So what's next? I dunno ... something completely out of the box. marred only by a combat system that looked like... well, MMORPG combat) than I did in any MMORPG I've tried.
"We're working on that..."
- Everyone on the pro- and anti-Steam sides of the HL2/Steam debate.
> and every aspect of the game was poked, prodded, and analyzed by the legions of would-be players. Once the Beta began, a line was thrown up between the lucky gamers who had the opportunity to participate and those who didn't. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the [developer's] forums, and expectations ran even higher for those on the outside looking in.
Hmm, maybe MMORPGs and FPSes aren't so different after all. *rimshot*
Dear holy mother of fuck, it's worse than I thought. Depending on which brand of consultant crack you smoke, we live in a world in which Cell phone ringtones are worth between $1B and $3.3B per year.
Compared to listening to your cow orker's annoying cell phone from six cubicles away, hookin' up a set of headphones to the SNES is a welcome relief.
> BUY HALF-LIFE 2
You cannot buy Half-Life 2. You can only rent it.
> RENT HALF-LIFE 2
You download a Steam client and supply your FrobozzcoCard number.
> PLAY HALF-LIFE 2
You cannot play Half-Life 2 on this computer without signing into your Steam account.
> LOGIN STEAM
You punch in your account information, but because you're in a little white house in the middle of nowhere, the computer's modem dials up the nearest internet provider and the game begins to download.
> WAIT
Time passes...
4.9 gigabytes remaining. (5.4k/s)
> WAIT
Time passes...
4.9 gigabytes remaining. (5.4k/s)
Your blood pressure just went up. (Oh, wait, this only *feels* like you're stuck in "Bureaucracy". Your blood pressure is actually just fine.)
> WAIT
Time passes...
4.9 gigabytes remaining. (5.4k/s)
Your UPS battery is fading.
> TURN OFF MONITOR
You turn off the monitor to conserve power. The only light is the "RD" light on the modem - a solid, but feeble, red. Clever.
> WAIT
Time passes...
You really think you can press "W" more often than I can tell you that Time Passes? I'm the computer here, remember? But have it your way - we'll skip a the next nine days.
> WAIT
Time passes...
It is dark. You are still unlikely to be eaten by a headcrab.
Grues, however, are another story
*** You have died ***
Your score is 0/150 (Victim of improperly-conducted usability study). Would you like to try again?
My PC is not a platform for a third party's content. Period.
I haven't bought HL2. I won't buy it until there's a non-steam version of singleplayer, or a reliable crack. Two weeks ago, I'd have bought it retail from Vivendi and sent $20 to Valve on principle.
I'm sufficiently disgusted with the way Valve has handled the situation that (when the nonsteam release, or the reliable crack, comes out - whichever comes first) I'll buy it retail from Vivendi - also on principle.
For anyone who still thinks steam's cool, try going into offline mode, setting your date forward a year, and rebooting. Whether you got it out of a Vivendi box or a Valve download, you haven't purchased HL2 singleplayer - you've rented it.
If I wanted to rent games and play them on a PC-based console system, I'd have bought a Phantom from Infinium. (You Steam fans do all own Phantoms, don't you?)
Just because we were/are/will-be insane while we're in college, doesn't mean there's anything to fear. Although your typical professor assigned to teaching an undergrad class might like the sound of that, if they locked all the undergrads up, there'd be nobody around to buy their textbooks.
So unlike New Freedom for Public Schools, New Freedom for College will be a self-limiting phenomenon.
Blogs aren't reporting either. They're jouranlism. But what passes for "reporting" ("get the facts") these days is really "journalism" ("spin the interpretation"), and that's the problem.
And because nobody in the MSM fact-checks... How many times have hoax headlines from Fark and The Onion made the 6 o'clock news so far this year? (I can think at least three or four off the top of my head.)
> They aren't about reporting the news, they're about giving equal time to opposing viewpoints, even if one is completely wrong and not worth acknowledgement.
*applause*
Seriously, MSM folks. What's this "input from both sides" stuff? My gut reaction is "fuck that". If you're reporting the discovery of a new dinosaur fossil, there is no second side that says that we need to be wary of such discoveries because the Earth is only 6,000 years old. (If I want pseudoscience, I'll watch the Religion Channel's newscast.)
How the fuck many people died because some fuckwitted "journalist" decided he needed to "tell both sides" of a story about therapeutic touch as a cure for cancer? (If I want that, I'll watch the Discovery Channel these days. *sigh* :)
If you're reporting about phishing scams, or the reason Little Johnny has 100 "H0t P3n15 5lu+ 4x+iun" mails in his email box every day, there is no "both sides" of "ethikul small bidnidmen" working out of "home offices". The fact is that Little Johnny is getting buried in crap. (I can't get media coverage, because marketeers own (and pwn) the broadcast networks.)
And finally, if you're reporting that some Postscript printed from a Microsoft Word file was having been typed in 1970, there is no second side to the story. I don't give a flying fark whose signature you claim is on it, and I really don't give a fark about how many self-styled "andwriting experts" you can pay to claim that the signature resembles an original specimen -- because the memo itself is bogus, immediately rendering any possibility of an "other side" irrelevant. (And I need blogs here, because Emperor Dan Has No Clothes (if he had side pockets, he'd be a frog, or something), and nobody else in the MSM was willing to say it loud enough to make people listen.)
When I go to freerepublic.com, I know I'm gonna get the Republican spin. When I go to democraticunderground.com, I know I'm gonna get the Democratic spin. When one side is full of posters saying "Don't worry, this is a conspiracy, it'll all blow over", and the other side is saying "Hey, look at this neat fact that supports that guy's observation", I know which side is more likely to be correct in any given scenario.
Reading blogs makes interpreting the news an active process, not a passive one -- which is bad for the MSM business, (and probably unhealthy to me over the long term as we require more conformity out of our citizens), but it's so much fun I can't seem to stop :)
The fact that it's fun, more than anything else, is why I gave up on the MSM as anything other than a source of cheap laughs. (Oh, Dan, Dan, Dan... how I'm gonna miss you on election night 2008. You were responsible for at least twelve shots of bourbon during your coverage of '04, by far and away the most drinks-per-hour guy on the tube!)
From the article:
>
> I think the quote you're looking for is "rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling"
Believe me, if I could upsub anteposting, I would have. Serves me right for posting prepreviewing :)
Those who control the past, control the future; those who control the future, control the present; those who control the present, control the past.
Rewrite fullwise ubsub netarch.
That's not a bug, it's a feature!
We're talking about a design committee that must have obtained a dozen Congresses worth of stupidity, distilled it over the flames of historical ignorance, condensed it on flask walls of monumental technological apathy, and beer-bong-chugged the elixir obtained therefrom.
I wouldn't want my name attached to the resulting code either. If it was, I'd sue for defamation of character.