Back when Jimbo's former right-hand man, Danny Wool, got the boot, he started letting slip how fast-and-loose King Jimmy The Embezzler really plays with Wikipedia finances.
Yeah. Wikipedia doesn't need money. They just need to jettison dead weight like Mad King Jimmy.
That means they are $6.4M shy. Assuming an average donation of $100, they have pissed off 640,000 people who are not bothering to donate. Assuming an average donation of $50, double that number. They claim to have "400 Million Users."
They also refuse to take donations of less than $20. That's a pissy mark of hubris right there. Especially considering the "if each of our 400 million users just donated $1" bit from King Jimmy The Embezzler's shilling.
Wikipedia tried to hush up scandal after scandal after scandal. The Durova "hit-list" scandal. The Essjay scandal. The "Jimmy was cleansing his girlfriend's wikipedia page" scandal. The "Jimmy was embezzling money" scandal. The Wikia/Wikimedia financial embezzlement scandal. "Sam Blacketer", Sockpuppet Admin. Wikipedia Scanner's revealed abuses. The Siegenthaler scandal. Gary Weiss as "Mantanmoreland" and Wikipedia administrators' refusals to investigate and accept evidence on the problem.
The ongoing behavior of the harassing, abusive assholes who call themselves "administrators" on Wikipedia and operate in ways that have been well documented, over and over again.
Why don't people donate to Wikipedia? Let's face it, if Wikipedia deserved it - if it were a worthwhile institution - they wouldn't be nearly having this much trouble. But they don't deserve it, so people don't donate. It's really that simple.
I like the idea of something far better than Other OS, because "Other OS" was fucking crippleware that couldn't access half the system's power.
I like the idea of launching a real, non-crippled media player that can natively understand the MKV format from within the XMB.
I like the idea of launching freeware games, and having people able to develop/port freeware games for either the XMB or Linux options on the console.
I like the idea of launching options that don't require me to use the DVD or Blu-ray drive as a fucking 5 1'4" dongle just to play a game from the hard drive, thus saving wear and tear on the discs.
I like the idea of a system (say, FTP access) that will actually let me archive savegames off of my PS3's hard drive before I upgrade to a larger hard drive (PS3's current one doesn't work properly if you stick in a different size drive), so that I don't lose data. I like something that will let me do this even when the save files are fucking "copy protected" by bullshit asshatted designers like the ones who created NFS:Carbon.
Usually, this isn't used as anything but a bludgeon to try to run your opponent out of money or force them to lay all their staff off and pray they can still hire back enough of the talent to resume production/innovation/sales on finalization of the court case.
You can "win" by convincing a dumbass judge to give you "preventative measures" in the US, dragging the court case out for 3-5 years on frivolous motions and "new requests for discovery", and waiting till the small company you're abusing defaults lack of funds even if, in a society where judges actually had two brain cells to rub together, you should have been laughed out of court on summary judgement in the first 48 hours of the case.
This is the kind of crap that congress ought to overturn in a heartbeat.
Unfortunately, the Republcrats and Demicans are so much both in the pocket of giant megacorporations that it's never going to happen. Once again, the two-party system means "bend over, consumers, here it comes again."
"The law does not provide workers with the right to remove themselves from work situations that endanger health and safety without jeopardizing their continued employment."
"State governments were responsible for enforcement of the Factories Act. However, the large number of industries covered by a small number of factory inspectors and the inspectors' limited training and susceptibility to bribery resulted in lax enforcement.
The enforcement of safety and health standards also was poor."
Once upon a time, workers had to deal with crap working conditions in which getting killed was commonplace. In shitass countries like India, or Malaysia, or China where all the manufacturing has been "outsourced" to for slave-labor wages, this is still true.
Today, the US has laws and agencies that are supposed to prevent this. But companies run by the soulless, inhuman "I have an MBA and never did a fucking day of real honest work in my life" types will try to get around it however they can.
OSHA says you have to have an office where phone calls can be private? Fine, we'll give you one "private phone room" for 20 employees. OSHA says you have to have a 30 minute lunch break? Fine, but we'll stick the kitchen in another building 10 minutes walk away, good luck getting there and back and still managing to do anything but bolt your lunch at choking-hazard speeds, sucker, or you can take a bag lunch in and keep it in your desk and you might as well work while eating anyways.
What we need to do is bust up the megacorporations and get rid of the top-level leech class that don't produce anything. But good luck seeing that happen any time soon. Those tax-evading assholes have too much media control to get the word out about them.
Yes. It was the first publicly released PC game that replicated the side-scrolling technique used to make smooth scrolling in 8-bit consoles.
Strangely, the first one *could* have been a port of Super Mario Bros. 3, because the technique was designed to replicate that game (iD actually shopped a fully complete clone to Nintendo, who turned them down on the idea).
They all start out on the lowest rung, making ticket quota. They quickly learn every trick in the book to make it "my word vs yours" - pointing their car's nose wrong-way to block off dashcam, leaning into your car to muffle the audio recording, and so on.
By the time they graduate from traffic ticket quota days, there's no saving them - they're about number of arrests and convictions, not whether they actually did their job right, or followed the law, or got the real culprit. The goal of the police interrogator isn't to find out what you know and determine if your alibi checks out, it's to get you to say something that can be used to incriminate you, and to do so, they will pull any underhanded trick they need - drop a hint in the hallway, sit there "waiting for your lawyer" with the tape off for hours while bugging you about how "all you have to do is talk to us and you can go home", and on and on and on.
I never wanted to admit this growing up, but cops - at least, cops that come up through the corrupt US system - are slime. If not 100% of them, better than 90% of them, easily.
The problem with that is, most cops in the US are corrupt dickheads who will beat you down or arrest you on the "fuck it we'll find something to charge you with later" principle if they don't think you are being properly "respectful" to them.
And yes, this includes telling them "no, I don't consent to any searches." Their actual response isn't "well then I can't search you", it's "well fuck that, I'll beat you up, throw you in my car in cuffs, and while you spend 48 hours in jail we'll break your window and search your car anyways."
You know, for all the "practicing" lawyers do, I have yet to see more than a handful ever get it right... hell, Eldred went to the SC, and at least 5 idiots in robes got it wrong!
Careful. Your comment is probably convincing someone to try doing that just to freak out the mundanes.
Until the government gets their heads out of their rears and makes it so that you can't track or collect info unless people opt IN, however, this kind of crap is just going to keep going on.
In any event, yes, theoretically, you could be arrested for "participating" if you downloaded and installed LOIC.
On the other hand, protesters get arrested all the time in noble causes. There were dozens of arrests in lunch counter sit-ins and bus sit-ins and this is no different: people, by the mere weight of participation, showing abusive governments and businesses that their abuses will no longer be tolerated.
Re:That's one heck of a "long goodbye"
on
Goodbye, VGA
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The phrase "certified adapter" means "video quality degraded to crap and DRM added."
This is the modern equivalent of a lunch counter sit-in. No user has had their computer hijacked, they are all participating of their free will. Are they "disrupting business"? Perhaps, but no worse than the lunch counter sit-ins did.
Their main goal is to allow you to do what you want on your wii, like play SNES, N64, NES, etc. games on your wii,
Nintendo would call that "piracy."
I still say the term "Jesusing" would be better. Think of the parable of the fish and the loaves: "copying" a rom is literally creating something from nothing. Piracy is an actual act which takes something away from someone else.
If we all just started calling it "Jesusing" instead, think of how much sympathy we'd get from the fundie christian types too!
- Dosbox. Running classic old DOS games on other hardware is phenomenal. - Third-party web browsers that do a better job than the "included" browser. Most Opera ports to "closed system" consoles count as homebrew. - Alternate OS. Sony's "OtherOS" linux implementation was a locked down, powerless mess that didn't give proper access to the video system. With the advent of homebrew now, actual, full-access Linux can be loaded to perform far better. I look forward to the day when I can slap in a hauppauge USB TV tuner and turn my PS3 into a MythTV backend when it's not running games. - Emulators for dead systems. Atari 2600, Colecovision, Intellivision, Atari 7800, and onwards. This includes not just the questionable "archived roms", but actual homebrew games for those systems that are still being programmed. - Third-party software apps such as media players, audio jukebox players, etc.
Actually, the US has laws against funding terrorist organizations, and is moving to try to put Wikileaks on that list. So there may be either fear on the part of the businesses, or else behind-the-scenes pressure (a "friendly warning" from the FBI for instance) to do so.
At the same time, I can't fault Paypal for their actions. I used to donate to UNICEF, but I stopped when it was revealed that a sizable portion of money from them was being used to fund "summer camps" like the Wafa Idris, Ayyat al-Akhras and Dalal Mughrabi summer camps; these are named after suicide bombing terrorists and places where nothing but hate and racism is taught to children.
Slashdot Mirror
Back when Jimbo's former right-hand man, Danny Wool, got the boot, he started letting slip how fast-and-loose King Jimmy The Embezzler really plays with Wikipedia finances.
Yeah. Wikipedia doesn't need money. They just need to jettison dead weight like Mad King Jimmy.
Their goal is $16M.
They are supposedly at $9.6M.
That means they are $6.4M shy. Assuming an average donation of $100, they have pissed off 640,000 people who are not bothering to donate. Assuming an average donation of $50, double that number. They claim to have "400 Million Users."
They also refuse to take donations of less than $20. That's a pissy mark of hubris right there. Especially considering the "if each of our 400 million users just donated $1" bit from King Jimmy The Embezzler's shilling.
No kidding.
Wikipedia tried to hush up scandal after scandal after scandal. The Durova "hit-list" scandal. The Essjay scandal. The "Jimmy was cleansing his girlfriend's wikipedia page" scandal. The "Jimmy was embezzling money" scandal. The Wikia/Wikimedia financial embezzlement scandal. "Sam Blacketer", Sockpuppet Admin. Wikipedia Scanner's revealed abuses. The Siegenthaler scandal. Gary Weiss as "Mantanmoreland" and Wikipedia administrators' refusals to investigate and accept evidence on the problem.
The ongoing behavior of the harassing, abusive assholes who call themselves "administrators" on Wikipedia and operate in ways that have been well documented, over and over again.
Why don't people donate to Wikipedia? Let's face it, if Wikipedia deserved it - if it were a worthwhile institution - they wouldn't be nearly having this much trouble. But they don't deserve it, so people don't donate. It's really that simple.
Plenty of stupid people watch MSNBC. CBS. ABC. CNN. And so on and so forth.
Relying on any ONE news source is a great way to be uninformed.
Oh?
I like the idea of something far better than Other OS, because "Other OS" was fucking crippleware that couldn't access half the system's power.
I like the idea of launching a real, non-crippled media player that can natively understand the MKV format from within the XMB.
I like the idea of launching freeware games, and having people able to develop/port freeware games for either the XMB or Linux options on the console.
I like the idea of launching options that don't require me to use the DVD or Blu-ray drive as a fucking 5 1'4" dongle just to play a game from the hard drive, thus saving wear and tear on the discs.
I like the idea of a system (say, FTP access) that will actually let me archive savegames off of my PS3's hard drive before I upgrade to a larger hard drive (PS3's current one doesn't work properly if you stick in a different size drive), so that I don't lose data. I like something that will let me do this even when the save files are fucking "copy protected" by bullshit asshatted designers like the ones who created NFS:Carbon.
Usually, this isn't used as anything but a bludgeon to try to run your opponent out of money or force them to lay all their staff off and pray they can still hire back enough of the talent to resume production/innovation/sales on finalization of the court case.
You can "win" by convincing a dumbass judge to give you "preventative measures" in the US, dragging the court case out for 3-5 years on frivolous motions and "new requests for discovery", and waiting till the small company you're abusing defaults lack of funds even if, in a society where judges actually had two brain cells to rub together, you should have been laughed out of court on summary judgement in the first 48 hours of the case.
The hell are you smoking?
Name ONE THING in a Wal-Mart that's still made in America these days.
This is the kind of crap that congress ought to overturn in a heartbeat.
Unfortunately, the Republcrats and Demicans are so much both in the pocket of giant megacorporations that it's never going to happen. Once again, the two-party system means "bend over, consumers, here it comes again."
shitass countries.
"The law does not provide workers with the right to remove themselves from work situations that endanger health and safety without jeopardizing their continued employment."
"State governments were responsible for enforcement of the Factories Act. However, the large number of industries covered by a small number of factory inspectors and the inspectors' limited training and susceptibility to bribery resulted in lax enforcement.
The enforcement of safety and health standards also was poor."
I'll say it again. Shitass countries.
Shocker of shockers... no, not really.
Once upon a time, workers had to deal with crap working conditions in which getting killed was commonplace. In shitass countries like India, or Malaysia, or China where all the manufacturing has been "outsourced" to for slave-labor wages, this is still true.
Today, the US has laws and agencies that are supposed to prevent this. But companies run by the soulless, inhuman "I have an MBA and never did a fucking day of real honest work in my life" types will try to get around it however they can.
OSHA says you have to have an office where phone calls can be private? Fine, we'll give you one "private phone room" for 20 employees. OSHA says you have to have a 30 minute lunch break? Fine, but we'll stick the kitchen in another building 10 minutes walk away, good luck getting there and back and still managing to do anything but bolt your lunch at choking-hazard speeds, sucker, or you can take a bag lunch in and keep it in your desk and you might as well work while eating anyways.
What we need to do is bust up the megacorporations and get rid of the top-level leech class that don't produce anything. But good luck seeing that happen any time soon. Those tax-evading assholes have too much media control to get the word out about them.
Yes. It was the first publicly released PC game that replicated the side-scrolling technique used to make smooth scrolling in 8-bit consoles.
Strangely, the first one *could* have been a port of Super Mario Bros. 3, because the technique was designed to replicate that game (iD actually shopped a fully complete clone to Nintendo, who turned them down on the idea).
Bullshit.
They all start out on the lowest rung, making ticket quota. They quickly learn every trick in the book to make it "my word vs yours" - pointing their car's nose wrong-way to block off dashcam, leaning into your car to muffle the audio recording, and so on.
By the time they graduate from traffic ticket quota days, there's no saving them - they're about number of arrests and convictions, not whether they actually did their job right, or followed the law, or got the real culprit. The goal of the police interrogator isn't to find out what you know and determine if your alibi checks out, it's to get you to say something that can be used to incriminate you, and to do so, they will pull any underhanded trick they need - drop a hint in the hallway, sit there "waiting for your lawyer" with the tape off for hours while bugging you about how "all you have to do is talk to us and you can go home", and on and on and on.
I never wanted to admit this growing up, but cops - at least, cops that come up through the corrupt US system - are slime. If not 100% of them, better than 90% of them, easily.
The problem with that is, most cops in the US are corrupt dickheads who will beat you down or arrest you on the "fuck it we'll find something to charge you with later" principle if they don't think you are being properly "respectful" to them.
And yes, this includes telling them "no, I don't consent to any searches." Their actual response isn't "well then I can't search you", it's "well fuck that, I'll beat you up, throw you in my car in cuffs, and while you spend 48 hours in jail we'll break your window and search your car anyways."
You know, for all the "practicing" lawyers do, I have yet to see more than a handful ever get it right... hell, Eldred went to the SC, and at least 5 idiots in robes got it wrong!
It's sad that the above post has languished at 0 points and not been modded up. If I had the mod points to give, I'd give.
Programming is a hacking subculture. Or, program hacking is a subculture of hacking generally.
The people who are program hackers today, would have been gearheads 60 years ago, constantly tweaking their engines for performance.
Careful. Your comment is probably convincing someone to try doing that just to freak out the mundanes.
Until the government gets their heads out of their rears and makes it so that you can't track or collect info unless people opt IN, however, this kind of crap is just going to keep going on.
Wait. I thought the internet was for porn?
In any event, yes, theoretically, you could be arrested for "participating" if you downloaded and installed LOIC.
On the other hand, protesters get arrested all the time in noble causes. There were dozens of arrests in lunch counter sit-ins and bus sit-ins and this is no different: people, by the mere weight of participation, showing abusive governments and businesses that their abuses will no longer be tolerated.
The phrase "certified adapter" means "video quality degraded to crap and DRM added."
Just FYI.
"Act like fucking adolescents?"
This is the modern equivalent of a lunch counter sit-in. No user has had their computer hijacked, they are all participating of their free will. Are they "disrupting business"? Perhaps, but no worse than the lunch counter sit-ins did.
Bullshit. the MPAA and RIAA, better known as the MafiAA, are a bunch of crooked thieves who defraud the real artists regularly.
Like So. Or perhaps see here. Or this one.
The government doesn't protect you for shit. It ought to be busy busting up the MPAA and RIAA as illegal monopolies, but it does nothing.
Their main goal is to allow you to do what you want on your wii, like play SNES, N64, NES, etc. games on your wii,
Nintendo would call that "piracy."
I still say the term "Jesusing" would be better. Think of the parable of the fish and the loaves: "copying" a rom is literally creating something from nothing. Piracy is an actual act which takes something away from someone else.
If we all just started calling it "Jesusing" instead, think of how much sympathy we'd get from the fundie christian types too!
Homebrew is a number of things:
- Dosbox. Running classic old DOS games on other hardware is phenomenal.
- Third-party web browsers that do a better job than the "included" browser. Most Opera ports to "closed system" consoles count as homebrew.
- Alternate OS. Sony's "OtherOS" linux implementation was a locked down, powerless mess that didn't give proper access to the video system. With the advent of homebrew now, actual, full-access Linux can be loaded to perform far better. I look forward to the day when I can slap in a hauppauge USB TV tuner and turn my PS3 into a MythTV backend when it's not running games.
- Emulators for dead systems. Atari 2600, Colecovision, Intellivision, Atari 7800, and onwards. This includes not just the questionable "archived roms", but actual homebrew games for those systems that are still being programmed.
- Third-party software apps such as media players, audio jukebox players, etc.
ADL: http://www.adl.org/presrele/IslME_62/4153_62.asp
IMRA: http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=13110
Actually, the US has laws against funding terrorist organizations, and is moving to try to put Wikileaks on that list. So there may be either fear on the part of the businesses, or else behind-the-scenes pressure (a "friendly warning" from the FBI for instance) to do so.
At the same time, I can't fault Paypal for their actions. I used to donate to UNICEF, but I stopped when it was revealed that a sizable portion of money from them was being used to fund "summer camps" like the Wafa Idris, Ayyat al-Akhras and Dalal Mughrabi summer camps; these are named after suicide bombing terrorists and places where nothing but hate and racism is taught to children.