1: Build a Great Attractor
2: Suck up thousands of galaxies into a toroidal naked singularity
3: Avoid any pesky humans throwing relativistic neutron stars around the universe
4: Hold off neutrino birds at all costs
5: Escape universe
Potential hazards: physical constants of new universe may not be what you expected. Beware of ultra-high gravity.
A site requires an email address to sign up to limit the number of accounts-per-person to 1. The site doesn't send don't send any email after the initial confirmation email. However, if people enter in enough garbage addresses, the "good" company gets blacklisted by the various spam organizations.
How does that happen? If you send a single confirmation email to a garbage address, then it comes back undeliverable and you drop the address from the database. No spam there.
Or if the server's set up differently, maybe emails to non-existent users go to postmaster or something, then you get no response to the confirmation email, and then never send anything to that address ever again. No spam there, either.
Unless you're assuming that no answer to a confirmation email means it's OK to keep sending - which is opt-out, and hence spam - then I can't see how this system will get you blacklisted anywhere significant.
As for forging complaints, AFAIK SPEWS and Spamhaus operate on a spam-trap basis, rather than on forwarded complaints. ISPs with 'report spam' features will obviously be able to compare reports to their own logs and thereby detect fakes. Maybe Spamcop could be faked in this way, though...
I was in Reading in the summer of 2003, shortly before the retirement of Concorde. Reading is near London to the west, and right under the flight path out of Heathrow. It's also home to a very large, very loud annual rock festival, which is, of course, why I was there.
Even over the colossal speaker stacks, though, you could hear the thing roar. Loud, but but goddamn magnificent to see it go over. Economically it was a total waste of money, but it still brings a tear to my eye to see it retire...
Mods, that wasn't a troll. It was a parody of a viewpoint that is dangerously widespread...
"Resources exist to be consumed, and consumed they will be - if not by this generation, then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? Let us reach out and take what is ours, eat and drink our fill."
-- CEO Nwabudike Morgan
Impossible. The comet is gravitationally bound by the Sun; to escape the solar system would require the addition of far more energy than this probe will deliver.
Whether the comet will shift onto a course that will impact the Earth a billion years from now, when it otherwise would have missed... well, to be honest, who cares? On that timescale, this comet is as likely as any other given comet to hit us - and additionally, just as likely to hit us if we give it a random nudge as if we don't...
... I notice that Bioware have started selling Premium Modules online - additional adventures for Neverwinter Nights. If they had a lot of those available, at some point it's going to be in their interests to make sure that as many people as possible have the game engine, to maximise the market for extra adventures.
So: give away the engine for free. Sell the adventures.
So yes, biased in many ways, maybe not too accurate or authorative, but very useful nevertheless.
I always think of Wikipedia as being quite like the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. You'll find out a lot from reading it, if not always what you actually wanted to know...
The only ones responsible for this war are the American people who elected this administration twice.
That's a little unfair on the American people; they voted for the other guy the first time around. However, they did decide, having got this idiot without asking for him, and having seen what he then went and did, to endorse him for four more years, so yes... the American people are now in fact to blame for the idiocy of their administration.
It could be argued that the attempt to match the Shuttle helped bring about the fall of the Soviet Union; they spent far too much on Energia / Buran. So it could be said that the Shuttle has had a largish effect on the lives of quite a lot of people...
In itself, though, you're right; what has had a major effect is the satellites, and they've mostly been launched by disposable rockets.
I've always found the BBC news output to be fairly neutral, while their commentary output tends to be along the Paxman principle of assuming that all politicians of whatever stripe are lying conniving evil bastards; not so much 'left' or 'right' as 'up-yours'. I suppose their political comedy could perhaps be said to be left-wing, but I don't think there are very many right-wing comedians around, apart from the monstrous Chubby Brown type.
The Guardian, as has already been mentioned, is fairly left-wing. The Independent is perhaps a little to the left, economically speaking, but very socially liberal. And I suggest that you take a look at the Socialist Worker one day if you want to know what real left-wing attitudes look like...
The allegation is that this is illegally extending Apple's monopoly of selling downloads into a monopoly on portable music players, not the other way round.
That seems quite topsy-turvy, really. From what I've seen, the iPod monopoly is driving the iTMS monopoly, because the iPod won't play WMAs. iPod is popular in its own right, largely on its interface, aesthetics and cool factor.
That said, I've got an iRiver player and I fill it up by buying CDs and ripping them. I'm on dialup, so downloading music isn't so convenient that it's worth the DRM.
Hell I can describe *exactly* what locations in Zork I, II, III, StarCross, PlanetFall and Enchanter looked like. I remember vividly what color the sky was, what the walls looked like, paintings on the wall, weird machinery, smells, music playing, etc.
I also played the hell out of Wolf3D the day the shareware was released. (We downloaded from BBS's in those days). But I can't say I have the same vivid memories from that game. I can't say I have any sort of emotional attachment to that world at all.
This is because you're an RPG'er, I think. You lived in those Infocom worlds, but you only blasted through Wolfenstein. A story is what fixes you on a game, much more than action... hence also your apparent preference for Planescape over BG2:-)
I think improving technology will also improve RPGs, though. The more you can customise your character, the more you can empathise with her and the more involved you feel. More technology means more realistic avatars, which you can modify with greater flexibility, and more storage available for a broader selection of voices. Crafting your armour in NWN to look just the way you like it (hobbits don't wear shoes, dammit, and someone pass me that green and brown dye!) really helps make the character yours. That said, NWN lacked the rich interactions between characters that went throughout Baldur's Gate, at least until Hordes came out.
Holy fuck... who marked this Insightful? A note to you, whoever you may be: if I get this in metamod, I'll contradict it with great joy, and if I see you crossing the road, I won't brake. You evil piece of shit.
I remember the first level on Mario 3 took 30 minutes alone....it always sucked to die at level 8 (especially if you were hard core and used no warms).
If you went through the whole game, world 8 should be trivially easy. You should have accumulated a healthy arsenal of P-wings and Jugem clouds and dozens of extra lives, and so you should breeze through. Going for the speed record by using the two whistles to warp direct from world 1 to world 8, now, that was hardcore, because you had no extra weapons and precious few lives.
If you find yourself running short of extra lives, try this. In level 9 of world 3, there's a winged Koopa at the very start of the level, and about halfway through the level are two cannons on the floor with a breakable brick wall between them and a long platform above. Stun the Koopa, carry the shell to the two cannons and release it to bounce between them; then stand on the platform above and watch it spin back and forth. The cannons fire bullets continually, and the shell knocks them away. 100 points, 200, 400, 800, 1000, 2000, 4000, 8000, 1UP! 1UP! 1UP!... However, that's a fair way into the game; normally, if I play through without warps, I have about 60 extra lives by the time I get that far, and so I don't need this trick. YMMV.
Not only that, we have no complete map of Mercury. Only one spacecraft has ever visited Mercury, and it flew past photographing about two thirds of the planet's surface as it went by.
Now, Pluto's a hell of a way away, and it's not even a real planet anyway, so it's understandable that we've never been. But our neglect of Mercury is downright shameful.
Damn, shouldn't have phrased things quite like that. I'll be singing 'Blame Pluto' to myself all day now...
It is both wrong an very dangerous to think our rights come to us as gifts from our governments.
True, but it is also wrong and very dangerous to think that everyone has rights as a matter of course. Such thinking leads to us taking our rights for granted.
Our rights are what we have won for ourselves, by confronting our governments and the governments of other nations, in 1215 and in 1776 and in 1789 and in 1945... We'll keep them as long as we still think they're important. Of course, nowadays the argument seems to be that we must give up some rights because otherwise we might get killed by Terrorists; so, it seems that we no longer consider liberty worth dying for. What rights we will still have at the end of this, I can't help but wonder...
China oh China when will you give up, and be democratic.. so that you can kick our American financial butts?
When India starts to surpass them. India has the same colossal population as China, but is less well developed; however, it is a democracy. If democracy really is economically advantageous, India should overtake China at some point. As we on/. are all too well aware, the Indian IT industry is really doing well lately... That's when China will start to think about political reform - when their neighbour to the south is suddenly bigger than they are.
I actually much prefer the iRiver to the iPod as far as transferring stuff goes. Certainly iTunes will copy across all your music from PC to iPod, but it's an absolute nightmare doing it the other way round. iTunes seems to reorganise your collection into a bizarre, twisted file structure comprehensible to no human mind, while the iRiver machines just keep it the way it was on your PC. Easy to download, easy to upload... A major selling point, to me, is the ability to pirate enormous amounts of music to and from my friends via sneakernet (well, busnet, and occasionally carnet, but you know what I mean...)
We might not necessarily need to do that... there are a lot of really massive holes in the ground already. I wonder how many people could take cover in the Channel Tunnel, for instance? Twenty-odd miles of it, deep in the rock under the sea. Given time to dig some side-tunnels, expand the complex a little, and you've got something that makes Vault 13 look pretty puny. I believe there's something similar in Japan - a tunnel to Hokkaido, IIRC. Enough underground space to save a couple of cities' worth of people, at least.
A few days later, after heavy pressure from the US govt, he was released, immediately departed India, and though India has been pressing for his extradition ever sence, he remains free and very rich.
The way I heard it, he was released on bail, rather than as a result of government pressure. He promptly left India never to return. He is, of course, now a fugitive from justice, but naturally that is no bar to his continuing comfortable lifestyle in the US. They were only Indians who died, after all...
Slashdot Mirror
2: Suck up thousands of galaxies into a toroidal naked singularity
3: Avoid any pesky humans throwing relativistic neutron stars around the universe
4: Hold off neutrino birds at all costs
5: Escape universe
Potential hazards: physical constants of new universe may not be what you expected. Beware of ultra-high gravity.
I am the Phisher King. I con pagans out of their PayPal accounts.
How does that happen? If you send a single confirmation email to a garbage address, then it comes back undeliverable and you drop the address from the database. No spam there.
Or if the server's set up differently, maybe emails to non-existent users go to postmaster or something, then you get no response to the confirmation email, and then never send anything to that address ever again. No spam there, either.
Unless you're assuming that no answer to a confirmation email means it's OK to keep sending - which is opt-out, and hence spam - then I can't see how this system will get you blacklisted anywhere significant.
As for forging complaints, AFAIK SPEWS and Spamhaus operate on a spam-trap basis, rather than on forwarded complaints. ISPs with 'report spam' features will obviously be able to compare reports to their own logs and thereby detect fakes. Maybe Spamcop could be faked in this way, though...
Even over the colossal speaker stacks, though, you could hear the thing roar. Loud, but but goddamn magnificent to see it go over. Economically it was a total waste of money, but it still brings a tear to my eye to see it retire...
"Resources exist to be consumed, and consumed they will be - if not by this generation, then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? Let us reach out and take what is ours, eat and drink our fill."
-- CEO Nwabudike Morgan
Is the anti-Kyoto mob on Slashdot so desperate as to cite his latest as their scientific evidence?
Whether the comet will shift onto a course that will impact the Earth a billion years from now, when it otherwise would have missed... well, to be honest, who cares? On that timescale, this comet is as likely as any other given comet to hit us - and additionally, just as likely to hit us if we give it a random nudge as if we don't...
So: give away the engine for free. Sell the adventures.
Actually, I prefer to send my SMS's discretely. Sending them continuously is just too much hard work.
I always think of Wikipedia as being quite like the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. You'll find out a lot from reading it, if not always what you actually wanted to know...
That's a little unfair on the American people; they voted for the other guy the first time around. However, they did decide, having got this idiot without asking for him, and having seen what he then went and did, to endorse him for four more years, so yes... the American people are now in fact to blame for the idiocy of their administration.
In itself, though, you're right; what has had a major effect is the satellites, and they've mostly been launched by disposable rockets.
Come to Liverpool some day. Then head up the road to Newcastle. Then before you go home, take a trip to Birmingham.
Some of the accents you'll find in Britain, you'd think we were putting on for a joke :-)
The Guardian, as has already been mentioned, is fairly left-wing. The Independent is perhaps a little to the left, economically speaking, but very socially liberal. And I suggest that you take a look at the Socialist Worker one day if you want to know what real left-wing attitudes look like...
That seems quite topsy-turvy, really. From what I've seen, the iPod monopoly is driving the iTMS monopoly, because the iPod won't play WMAs. iPod is popular in its own right, largely on its interface, aesthetics and cool factor.
That said, I've got an iRiver player and I fill it up by buying CDs and ripping them. I'm on dialup, so downloading music isn't so convenient that it's worth the DRM.
I also played the hell out of Wolf3D the day the shareware was released. (We downloaded from BBS's in those days). But I can't say I have the same vivid memories from that game. I can't say I have any sort of emotional attachment to that world at all.
This is because you're an RPG'er, I think. You lived in those Infocom worlds, but you only blasted through Wolfenstein. A story is what fixes you on a game, much more than action... hence also your apparent preference for Planescape over BG2 :-)
I think improving technology will also improve RPGs, though. The more you can customise your character, the more you can empathise with her and the more involved you feel. More technology means more realistic avatars, which you can modify with greater flexibility, and more storage available for a broader selection of voices. Crafting your armour in NWN to look just the way you like it (hobbits don't wear shoes, dammit, and someone pass me that green and brown dye!) really helps make the character yours. That said, NWN lacked the rich interactions between characters that went throughout Baldur's Gate, at least until Hordes came out.
Holy fuck... who marked this Insightful? A note to you, whoever you may be: if I get this in metamod, I'll contradict it with great joy, and if I see you crossing the road, I won't brake. You evil piece of shit.
If you went through the whole game, world 8 should be trivially easy. You should have accumulated a healthy arsenal of P-wings and Jugem clouds and dozens of extra lives, and so you should breeze through. Going for the speed record by using the two whistles to warp direct from world 1 to world 8, now, that was hardcore, because you had no extra weapons and precious few lives.
If you find yourself running short of extra lives, try this. In level 9 of world 3, there's a winged Koopa at the very start of the level, and about halfway through the level are two cannons on the floor with a breakable brick wall between them and a long platform above. Stun the Koopa, carry the shell to the two cannons and release it to bounce between them; then stand on the platform above and watch it spin back and forth. The cannons fire bullets continually, and the shell knocks them away. 100 points, 200, 400, 800, 1000, 2000, 4000, 8000, 1UP! 1UP! 1UP!... However, that's a fair way into the game; normally, if I play through without warps, I have about 60 extra lives by the time I get that far, and so I don't need this trick. YMMV.
Not only that, we have no complete map of Mercury. Only one spacecraft has ever visited Mercury, and it flew past photographing about two thirds of the planet's surface as it went by.
Now, Pluto's a hell of a way away, and it's not even a real planet anyway, so it's understandable that we've never been. But our neglect of Mercury is downright shameful.
Damn, shouldn't have phrased things quite like that. I'll be singing 'Blame Pluto' to myself all day now...
True, but it is also wrong and very dangerous to think that everyone has rights as a matter of course. Such thinking leads to us taking our rights for granted.
Our rights are what we have won for ourselves, by confronting our governments and the governments of other nations, in 1215 and in 1776 and in 1789 and in 1945... We'll keep them as long as we still think they're important. Of course, nowadays the argument seems to be that we must give up some rights because otherwise we might get killed by Terrorists; so, it seems that we no longer consider liberty worth dying for. What rights we will still have at the end of this, I can't help but wonder...
When India starts to surpass them. India has the same colossal population as China, but is less well developed; however, it is a democracy. If democracy really is economically advantageous, India should overtake China at some point. As we on /. are all too well aware, the Indian IT industry is really doing well lately... That's when China will start to think about political reform - when their neighbour to the south is suddenly bigger than they are.
China already is capitalist. They say they're communist, but then North Korea say they're democratic...
I actually much prefer the iRiver to the iPod as far as transferring stuff goes. Certainly iTunes will copy across all your music from PC to iPod, but it's an absolute nightmare doing it the other way round. iTunes seems to reorganise your collection into a bizarre, twisted file structure comprehensible to no human mind, while the iRiver machines just keep it the way it was on your PC. Easy to download, easy to upload... A major selling point, to me, is the ability to pirate enormous amounts of music to and from my friends via sneakernet (well, busnet, and occasionally carnet, but you know what I mean...)
We might not necessarily need to do that... there are a lot of really massive holes in the ground already. I wonder how many people could take cover in the Channel Tunnel, for instance? Twenty-odd miles of it, deep in the rock under the sea. Given time to dig some side-tunnels, expand the complex a little, and you've got something that makes Vault 13 look pretty puny. I believe there's something similar in Japan - a tunnel to Hokkaido, IIRC. Enough underground space to save a couple of cities' worth of people, at least.
The way I heard it, he was released on bail, rather than as a result of government pressure. He promptly left India never to return. He is, of course, now a fugitive from justice, but naturally that is no bar to his continuing comfortable lifestyle in the US. They were only Indians who died, after all...