In summary then, he believes an unborn US fetus has more right to life than an Iraqi child. It seems therefore that he is in favour of "justifiable" homicide.
With Bill stumping up so much cash for the building they will have some money left over to install Linux instead of Windows. Since Linux has been repeatedly shown to have a higher TCO it makes sense to install it when you can, instead of having to settle on that cheaper option, Windows. Now, with the cost savings made on infrastructure, the money can go to education and software instead.
Maybe you don't care about that data today, since the terror experience is still fresh, but you might care about it later. For example, assume that data was full of photographs of friends, deceased relatives, and other impossible to replace stuff. This backup scheme would've suited you even better than grabbing the hard drive, because you wouldn't even have had to do that.
I bought this SlashDot post off a former poster
on
Cheating Made Easy
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· Score: 5, Funny
And it only cost me a reasonable $20! Here's my new business plan:
I have one of those new fangled "CD players" attached to a "stereo" system. It's amazing what you can do with technology these days. And don't bother to shout about how poor some of these gamers are, if they can afford $1000 worth of PC and $50 worth of game then they can shell out another for a portable CD player and plug it into their soundcard input.
The developers typically take less than 5% of the total sales of a game. 95% of games lose money which is why so many companies go up against the wall. If you want to complain about the billions, complain about the *distributors* and *retailers*, they're the ones gouging you.
I guess people responding to my parent post didn't read the bit where I say that I don't block ads on sites that are relevant, or sites I want to support. The sites that get ads blocked are the ones where they are present on all four sides of the page, and with a dirty great big flashing Flash ad in the middle of the article. I wouldn't have blocked just banner ads, but they started appearing down the sides, and started flashing and it has become really hard to read the content since it's the only thing on the page that isn't in flashing colours from the opposite sides of the spectrum.
When advertisers start to put useful context sensitive ads that are relevant to the content I am viewing and are not intrusive then I will unblock them, but not before.
Websites can put premium content on their sites which you have to pay for as a revenue model rather than this advertising rubbish. I'd happily pay for quality premium content rather than have my eyeballs constantly offended.
That is just about every online "news" site out there. Notice how the article is broken up into 3-10 pages so you have to see the advertising (banner, left side, right side, body copy ads, footer ads) 3-10 times for one article which is often itself a thinly veiled review/ad for the product.
Here's the future of advertising, inside our FPS games there will be billboards which have a simple web browser built in. They will display ads for shit like the latest Alienware hardware or NVidia cards, and you can click the board and use the browser inside the game. The bastards will probably even use the Mozilla engine to do this, except it will render to a DirectX buffer instead of the screen.
Next step, your subsidised mobile phone will display ads while you're not actively talking on it. It'll pull them over GPRS and 3G and use it's flashy colour screen to sell you shit. Advertising isn't quite all pervasive yet, but it will be one day.
I never click on the banners, and since most revenue is now derived from click-throughs, I don't see the point in displaying them on my machine. Why should I be *forced* to see some ad when I don't have to. In any case, those greedy bastards would expand advertising into every possible medium, not because they aren't already making money (they are) but because they always want more money. On the very few sites which carry ads I am interested in I let the server display them (Penny Arcade, SlashDot).
I've seen some guys here complain about how they hate having to swap the copy protected CDs in and out for each game and that maybe they will go play on the console instead. Hasn't anyone noticed that consoles *always* require you to put the CD in the drive to play the game? How is this any better than the PC games?
Games need copy protection so developers can get paid to write them. I'm no fan of copy protection, but I am a fan of developers earning enough to feed their family while working on the next big release. I hate disc protection as much as the next guy, but if it's really such hard work to put a disc in your CD drive then maybe you need to lose some weight and take some exercise because you are clearly a lazy bastard.
As for a copy protection scheme I would be happy to use...I propose they lock the game to your PGP key and that to play you either require a PGP or GPG key. These are free to obtain and provide excellent security. An independant organisation tracks the keys and your licences. You are entitled to move the game from PC to PC as desired, but it needs your private key to play. A local keysafe utility can remember the key, so you punch it in once at the start of a night, like you do for your email and stuff. The keys can be revoked if they are obviously being shared so lamers can't just buy one copy and hand the key to everyone. This could be made no more onerous than iTunes.
This model would enable online downloading of games too, possibly saving the distribution costs and lowering the cost of the game. Best of all, no more 20 character serial numbers to punch in as you install the game - you simply auhorise it over the internet. Non internet users could authorise via phone/letter if needed.
This argument is a straw man at best. That disgruntled developer can trash your Windows system just as easily without kernel level code. Most Windows users are using it as an admin, unless they are at work where they are unlikely to be playing games. Even if you are that 1 in a million users who doesn't run with admin privilege then it can still trash all your files anyway. You almost always need to be admin to install these games, and I'm guessing there are few people who will log out, log in as admin, install, log out again, log in again as yourself.
The hardest part is getting those huge laser discs into your DVD player so you can rip them. Place them in a medium oven for an hour first, and they shrink right down to size, then get ripping with DVD Decryptor. No really, if it works for "shrinky dinks" it will work for this;->
Re:Some of the changes (possible spoilers)
on
Star Wars on DVD
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· Score: 4, Funny
Look for the extra scenes where they have digitally inserted Jar Jar Binks in. Plus, Jar Jar does a stand up comedy routine in the bar scene in Star Wars;->
That's pretty much where I'm at now, and why I don't worry about portsentry and auto-firewall rules anymore. The packets I was checking for were intended for a server, just ones I wasn't actually hosting on that machine e.g. SQL, hosted internally, but defintely not to the outside world. The reason people couldn't prevent me from accessing google is because that is an outgoing connection, and the data is returned on a TCP socket that you open to google. So, really not a lot to worry about as a home user, but not recommended for business.
You're right, it was portsentry. I also ran tripwire to check the integrity, but it was a while ago so my memories were fuzzy. You're wrong about the no more Slashdot and Google, the connections being firewalled were incoming, not outgoing.
I ran this setup for well over a year and nobody ever did anything like this to me. I blocked IPs, not IP and port combo, and averaged 20 blocks a day. The firewall laughed it off. The blocks were against incoming traffic, and I wasn't running a DNS that the outside world should access. As stated, I didn't mind locking off access to my server to various spoofed IPs since it was just for a few weeks at a time, not really an issue for a home user.
If you don't want to ignore them, but rather take some action then you can combine tripwire (IIRC) with a shell action that firewalls their IP address. I used to do this for my home machine, but it's not really recommended for business machines. Here's what I did:
Set up tripwire to detect incomming conenctions to 139, 1433 and other ports that people shouldn't be attempting to reach.
Any attempts to open got a IPTABLES rule added against their IP
Every couple of weeks I'd clear it down and let it build up again
There would be better ways to do this, but it was mainly for basic home security and I wasn't worried about blocking whole companies (because of NAT/Proxy) because of one dick in the place. YMMV.
Don't bother, the real crackers are probably usings some lusers box to launch the attack from. You're just warning the person who didn't secure their box, and they're not likely to understand why you are telling them they are attacking your box.
Whatever happened to freedom of speech? I know you can be sued for libellous speech but I also believe that it would need to be reasonable shown that people would believe this. In any case, calling a fat person fat is not libellous. You might have trouble with shyster since you would need to show they are a shyster, but fuck sakes, he's a lawyer and that is automatic qualification into the shyster category. I'd say that an anonymous posting on a website wouldn't carry the necessary weight to be believable by the common man, and thus wouldn't qualify for libel...but then IANAL.
But my point is just because it can be used for bad purposes does not mean it necessarily will.Yes. It's in the nature of man that anything that can be, wil be used for evil/base purposes. Some examples:
Nuclear physics - could have given cheap clean energy, gave us masss death and paranoia as well. Telephone/Email - meant for personal communications, now so badly choked with shit/marketing that they are barely worth using. Guns - meant for personal defense or defense of a nation against attack, mainly used to kill people. Knifes - meant for cutting up food and stuff, also great for stabbing people. Rope - good for tying things up, like people who you are assulting. Telescopes, meant for astronomy, but also superb for voyeurism and stalking.
Bottom line, if it can be used for nasty purposes it *will* be used for that.
My absolute all time favorite feature of Doom is the one that has never returned - co-operative mode. Running through the campaign with your buddies on a network fighting demons together is heaps of fun. I don't understand why they don't reintroduce this feature, unless it's because their storylines are so singularly linear that it just isn't fun to play co-op.
Slashdot Mirror
In summary then, he believes an unborn US fetus has more right to life than an Iraqi child. It seems therefore that he is in favour of "justifiable" homicide.
With Bill stumping up so much cash for the building they will have some money left over to install Linux instead of Windows. Since Linux has been repeatedly shown to have a higher TCO it makes sense to install it when you can, instead of having to settle on that cheaper option, Windows. Now, with the cost savings made on infrastructure, the money can go to education and software instead.
Maybe you don't care about that data today, since the terror experience is still fresh, but you might care about it later. For example, assume that data was full of photographs of friends, deceased relatives, and other impossible to replace stuff. This backup scheme would've suited you even better than grabbing the hard drive, because you wouldn't even have had to do that.
Write "Insightful" SlashDot posts for losers
...
Profit!
I have one of those new fangled "CD players" attached to a "stereo" system. It's amazing what you can do with technology these days. And don't bother to shout about how poor some of these gamers are, if they can afford $1000 worth of PC and $50 worth of game then they can shell out another for a portable CD player and plug it into their soundcard input.
The developers typically take less than 5% of the total sales of a game. 95% of games lose money which is why so many companies go up against the wall. If you want to complain about the billions, complain about the *distributors* and *retailers*, they're the ones gouging you.
When advertisers start to put useful context sensitive ads that are relevant to the content I am viewing and are not intrusive then I will unblock them, but not before.
Websites can put premium content on their sites which you have to pay for as a revenue model rather than this advertising rubbish. I'd happily pay for quality premium content rather than have my eyeballs constantly offended.
Here's the future of advertising, inside our FPS games there will be billboards which have a simple web browser built in. They will display ads for shit like the latest Alienware hardware or NVidia cards, and you can click the board and use the browser inside the game. The bastards will probably even use the Mozilla engine to do this, except it will render to a DirectX buffer instead of the screen.
Next step, your subsidised mobile phone will display ads while you're not actively talking on it. It'll pull them over GPRS and 3G and use it's flashy colour screen to sell you shit. Advertising isn't quite all pervasive yet, but it will be one day.
I just bought a Canyonero, and talk about a smooth ride...
I never click on the banners, and since most revenue is now derived from click-throughs, I don't see the point in displaying them on my machine. Why should I be *forced* to see some ad when I don't have to. In any case, those greedy bastards would expand advertising into every possible medium, not because they aren't already making money (they are) but because they always want more money. On the very few sites which carry ads I am interested in I let the server display them (Penny Arcade, SlashDot).
Games need copy protection so developers can get paid to write them. I'm no fan of copy protection, but I am a fan of developers earning enough to feed their family while working on the next big release. I hate disc protection as much as the next guy, but if it's really such hard work to put a disc in your CD drive then maybe you need to lose some weight and take some exercise because you are clearly a lazy bastard.
As for a copy protection scheme I would be happy to use...I propose they lock the game to your PGP key and that to play you either require a PGP or GPG key. These are free to obtain and provide excellent security. An independant organisation tracks the keys and your licences. You are entitled to move the game from PC to PC as desired, but it needs your private key to play. A local keysafe utility can remember the key, so you punch it in once at the start of a night, like you do for your email and stuff. The keys can be revoked if they are obviously being shared so lamers can't just buy one copy and hand the key to everyone. This could be made no more onerous than iTunes.
This model would enable online downloading of games too, possibly saving the distribution costs and lowering the cost of the game. Best of all, no more 20 character serial numbers to punch in as you install the game - you simply auhorise it over the internet. Non internet users could authorise via phone/letter if needed.
This argument is a straw man at best. That disgruntled developer can trash your Windows system just as easily without kernel level code. Most Windows users are using it as an admin, unless they are at work where they are unlikely to be playing games. Even if you are that 1 in a million users who doesn't run with admin privilege then it can still trash all your files anyway. You almost always need to be admin to install these games, and I'm guessing there are few people who will log out, log in as admin, install, log out again, log in again as yourself.
If your age is around the 35 mark, then yep, I am around your age.
The hardest part is getting those huge laser discs into your DVD player so you can rip them. Place them in a medium oven for an hour first, and they shrink right down to size, then get ripping with DVD Decryptor. No really, if it works for "shrinky dinks" it will work for this ;->
Look for the extra scenes where they have digitally inserted Jar Jar Binks in. Plus, Jar Jar does a stand up comedy routine in the bar scene in Star Wars ;->
That's pretty much where I'm at now, and why I don't worry about portsentry and auto-firewall rules anymore. The packets I was checking for were intended for a server, just ones I wasn't actually hosting on that machine e.g. SQL, hosted internally, but defintely not to the outside world. The reason people couldn't prevent me from accessing google is because that is an outgoing connection, and the data is returned on a TCP socket that you open to google. So, really not a lot to worry about as a home user, but not recommended for business.
You're right, it was portsentry. I also ran tripwire to check the integrity, but it was a while ago so my memories were fuzzy. You're wrong about the no more Slashdot and Google, the connections being firewalled were incoming, not outgoing.
I ran this setup for well over a year and nobody ever did anything like this to me. I blocked IPs, not IP and port combo, and averaged 20 blocks a day. The firewall laughed it off. The blocks were against incoming traffic, and I wasn't running a DNS that the outside world should access. As stated, I didn't mind locking off access to my server to various spoofed IPs since it was just for a few weeks at a time, not really an issue for a home user.
Set up tripwire to detect incomming conenctions to 139, 1433 and other ports that people shouldn't be attempting to reach.
Any attempts to open got a IPTABLES rule added against their IP
Every couple of weeks I'd clear it down and let it build up again
There would be better ways to do this, but it was mainly for basic home security and I wasn't worried about blocking whole companies (because of NAT/Proxy) because of one dick in the place. YMMV.
Don't bother, the real crackers are probably usings some lusers box to launch the attack from. You're just warning the person who didn't secure their box, and they're not likely to understand why you are telling them they are attacking your box.
Whatever happened to freedom of speech? I know you can be sued for libellous speech but I also believe that it would need to be reasonable shown that people would believe this. In any case, calling a fat person fat is not libellous. You might have trouble with shyster since you would need to show they are a shyster, but fuck sakes, he's a lawyer and that is automatic qualification into the shyster category. I'd say that an anonymous posting on a website wouldn't carry the necessary weight to be believable by the common man, and thus wouldn't qualify for libel...but then IANAL.
Nuclear physics - could have given cheap clean energy, gave us masss death and paranoia as well.
Telephone/Email - meant for personal communications, now so badly choked with shit/marketing that they are barely worth using.
Guns - meant for personal defense or defense of a nation against attack, mainly used to kill people.
Knifes - meant for cutting up food and stuff, also great for stabbing people.
Rope - good for tying things up, like people who you are assulting.
Telescopes, meant for astronomy, but also superb for voyeurism and stalking.
Bottom line, if it can be used for nasty purposes it *will* be used for that.
He better pay the licensing fees on my new patent "How to make skin brown by lying in the Sun" first. YOU ALL BETTER PAY DAMMIT!
It was also great for finding all the secrets, since sometimes a mate would have discovered a secret you missed.
My absolute all time favorite feature of Doom is the one that has never returned - co-operative mode. Running through the campaign with your buddies on a network fighting demons together is heaps of fun. I don't understand why they don't reintroduce this feature, unless it's because their storylines are so singularly linear that it just isn't fun to play co-op.