MOO2 was a great game. It had impressive graphics and a stunning musical score that stood toe to toe with games released years later. Not to mention it was one of the few strategy games that involved strategy back then. To this day, I know of one person who can beat MOO2 on 'impossible'. And not even directly.
It's not that hard as the Psilons - Creative was a major advantage, vastly underpriced IMO. Build a communications network out of Outpost Ships, making sure to plant the flag on any handy terran or Gaia planets early. This way you make contact with everyone before they meet each other, and you can set up lots of trade and research pacts. If someone starts looking nasty, you can buy 'em off with technological trinkets. You're extremely vulnerable in the early game, because someone with a big productive base (Sakkra or Bulrathi maybe) could just roll over you.
Later on, once you've converted some of those outposts to colonies and got something of a fleet and a serious technical lead, go after the monsters. A rich, huge Gaia with natives, defended only by a dragon is a good thing to have;-) Attack the Guardian once you've got ships with graviton guns or better, and zortrium armour at least. The best combo in the mid-game is a volley of grav cannon to knock down the shields, then a volley of ion cannon to demolish internal systems. A couple of Titans with this setup can destroy the Guardian without giving it a chance to return fire.
If you're in lamer mode, you might like to refight the Avenger several times. Loknar gives you four technologies at random - most are unresearchable, but he may give you Moleculartronic Computer. The ones you want are Xentronium Armour and Damper Field. Death rays and particle beams are heavily overrated - they don't miniaturise, so late in the game you'll get more value out of maulers. The black hole generator is cool, but not that useful in practice. Make sure you have a spare slot in your ship captains list before attacking Orion, else you'll just get the ship and not Loknar.
Once you command the Avenger and start integrating Orion tech into your ships, and with microlite construction at your shipyards and Recyclotrons coming into play, and the megafluxer being invented - all at about the same time - you're suddenly the ultimate superpower. You might consider building android worlds - the manual says androids are unaffected by morale, but they are. A planet full of Android Workers with +5 morale churns out Titans every couple of turns. Now pick a fight with someone you don't like. Preferably the one you've had to buy off a few times, the one who bullied you when you were small.
At the end? HV AF SP Phasors w Achilles Targeting System. 'Nuff said. Also, it's worth investigating the potential of phasing cloaks and timewarp facilitators. Does the 'decloak - fire - recloak' tactic appeal to you?;-)
Oh, and nothing says cheating like "node mastery".
The true shameless cheat doesn't take any special powers. He takes every Death book he can get, and takes Wraiths as a starting spell. He conjures them up first thing, and then begins acting very aggressively. Nobody has a chance that early in the game, and by the time someone does have something that can fight Wraiths, our dark lord rules most of the world and commands an immense undead army.
In normal play once - not cheating at all, ISTR I was a chaos / sorcery artificer - I came across a very unusual combination indeed. Taking out the Myrror nodes with an invisible flying Warrax the Chaos Warrior (OK, so maybe that's a BIT lame) I got given Divine Power _and_ Infernal Power. I assume I was doing a number on both sets of gods... great, but what happens when they find out? I get the feeling my wizard was headed for some really _deep_ trouble after death;-)
>Weapons Tech 33 may improve my score...but I'd rather have better guns/ships.
It did allow you better ships, the more future tech you researched, the smaller the weapons, and more of them you could fit in a ship. Useful for the deathstar ships, you could fill them plenty with death rays...
Death rays were Antaran technology, they didn't miniaturise at all. Mauler devices and phasors got very small, though. And it was so much fun once you could build cruisers with stellar converters;-)
Researching Advanced Sociology was a complete waste of time, though. AFAIK, it's only worth advancing in physics, chemistry and biology once you've exhausted the original tech tree.
Ok, I guess I reply instead. Turn based combat worked just fine in MOO and MOO 2!
No, it didn't. Two fleets of identical ships face off, and they are built so that it takes a full volley of fire from two ships to destroy one. Suppose there are 100 ships in each fleet. What is the deciding factor in the outcome of the battle?
Answer: who shoots first, wins.
Fleet 1 fires, destroying as many ships as possible and leaving the others undamaged. Fifty of Fleet 2's ships go down in flames. Now it's Fleet 2's turn - but because half of them are dead, they only take down 25 of Fleet 1. Fleet 1 returns fire again and demolishes 37 of Fleet 2's ships, seriously damaging one other. The thirteen remaining ships (if they are at all sensible) turn and run.
And the player _always_ got first shot. I ended up piling on as many weapons as possible to my ships at the total expense of armour and shielding. If the enemy fired a shot at me, I was going down, but I knew full well that they weren't going to get the chance.
It got worse at the end of the game; the defence technology didn't keep pace with the weapons. Shield-piercing autofire (3 shots instead of 1 at a 20% accuracy penalty) heavy phasors coupled to a good computer (making up for that penalty) and an Achilles targeting system (which totally bypasses the target's armour and massively increases damage) were so good they were almost like cheating. Phasors miniaturised well, so you could pack a whole lot onto a ship. It got to the point where one ship could take down several enemy ships in its turn. With a kill rate of 1 a turn or greater, Fleet 2 aren't going to fire a shot; they're just going to be mown down.
One cute thing to do is to conquer all the galaxy except one enemy world - then give them 10% tribute. With such enormous cash supplies they build fleets of hundreds of ships, which you can then use as target drones. See how many you can take down with a single ship...
If they went about it the right way. Using Big Dumb Boosters, which have low development costs, and with a little bit of research into ion drive technology. The cost also depends on the level of risk which is acceptable.
If we really wanted to go back to the Moon we could do it cheaply, easily, safely and pretty much now. The Russians still have the Soyuz spacecraft, which was originally developed during the moon race, and has since evolved through thirty years of upgrades.
They don't have the N1 rocket, which was cancelled and never worked anyway, nor do they have Energia which worked beautifully, launched the Buran then got mothballed, but they do have Proton; two of those and a rendezvous at ISS ought to be fine for a moonshot.
Launch one with the ship - the Soyuz and the lander - and another with the fuel, probably a Progress drone - and you're away. All we need to do is write the Russians a nice big cheque and they can do a moon mission just fine, with off-the-shelf hardware.
Could it be, they asked, that perhaps some "secrets" of the universe are simply beyond our ability to even know what we don't know; and like the Apes, we are unable to even conceive their solutions?
Maybe. Not necessarily a problem; research in biotechnology and cybernetics ought to help there. Hopefully the people of five centuries hence will view us as we view chimpanzees.
Also, a chimp couldn't even frame the question 'what is the gradient of the curve f(x) at the point x?' If we can ask the question, that's a good sign, and chances are we'll get some way towards an answer. If we can't even frame the question, then we never even know there's something we've missed, and so we won't mind.
A human from 5000 years ago probably couldn't grasp the concept of differential calculus, either. "Intelligence" in this context is as much about learning as capacity.
It took me sixteen years to go from newborn to differential calculus. Given a competent mathematics teacher, so could a human from 5000 years ago; indeed, they could almost certainly do it in far less time than that.
Now what confused me was why the future family didn't know the 1985 Marty and Jennifer were there. Did the future family just forget that they had travelled forward in time 20+ years ago? If I went forward in time, I think I would mark it on my calendar to go visit myself on the day that I get there.
The future Marty visits is not the future that eventually comes to be. He saw himself as a loser who gets fired for being a party to fraud, who still couldn't say no for fear of being called chicken. After seeing this future, and after his experience in 1885 with Mad Dog Tannen, Marty is able to overcome this personality flaw and set out to a more prosperous future. The future he saw in BttF2 no longer exists. In some alternate reality, Loser McFly is still there, but he never travelled in time, and so doesn't expect to meet himself - that's where the plot hole comes in, because by the time we meet him Marty has already left 1985, so Loser McFly's future ought not to exist.
Perhaps Loser McFly is a Marty who didn't go to 1885 to rescue Doc Brown, but even then I'd expect his future to become very different, simply because he would take deliberate steps to prevent it coming about. He can't be one who never visited 2015, because Marty is already in 2015 when he's introduced.
In order for them to exist in the future, they would have eventually needed to make it back somewhere between 1985 and 2015. Preferably no later than 1995 in order to have time to have kids that would be as old as they were in the future. They had a whole 10 year window to return to. Having an existence in that particular future proves that they eventually made it back to their proper time.
No; the Marty who had travelled in time was not the Marty who crashed into the Rolls and went on to become a loser. He returned to 1985 in cowboy gear and (presumably) made a success of his life, being able to ignore being called chicken. The Marty who became a loser is one who did not travel in time - never saw his own fate, never not-confronted Mad Dog Tannen.
This needn't be a major plot hole because there are countless possible consistent histories involved. It's more of a philosophical problem. What happened to Marty in BttF2 changed his future; he saw what lay ahead of him and had to change it. That future no longer exists, so Marty OUGHT to have met his successful future self. So... if he goes to the future and sees it's all roses, how does he know to avoid becoming... ick. It's the grandfather paradox again.
Picture taken. Figure added to base picture at a later date. Argue the point arrogant fuck.
Photoshop nonexistent in 1969, arrogant fuck. Picture taken, figure added later, crosshairs added last, no problem, arrogant fuck. Bloody stupid example in the first place, arrogant fuck. Not a fucking clue about photography at all, have you, arrogant fuck?
But if I ever got a spam that read something like "Get memory from cruical.com for 70% off", I (and I suspect many/. readers as well) would probably read it. It all depends on the target and message.
No. No. No. The issue is consent, not content. I don't care if it's Ralsky's chicks-with-horses or some Alabaman spam-for-Christ, I don't care if it's selling herbal viagra or asking for donations for sick children. If I didn't ask for it, it goes to abuse@ and to uce@ftc.gov. I will never, ever, under any circumstances, buy a product or service of any description whatsoever, from a spammer. Even if the spammer happens to be a store down the road, and the advertised product one I intended to buy from them anyway that very morning - I'll go elsewhere.
If I got a '70% off memory' spam I would probably buy a memory upgrade from the sender's chief competitor, and let both firms know why. Actually, that might encourage the wrong behaviour... we don't want MS joe-jobbing RH, now, do we?
media and justice systems being run by the Washington fat cats and the Jewish media moguls in New York and Hollywood
Sir, you have no proof whatsoever that the people who control our media are Jewish. Please refrain from posting such offensive garbage.
Um... this reads to me as if the people controlling the media might have been offended to be called Jews, rather than vice-versa. Probably not what you wanted to say.
But that said, the last i heard, unauthorized use of computer resources IS a crime, here in the states at least.. And as far as I'm concerned what Theo is proposing constitutes unauthorized use of the so called 'offenders' systems, therefore criminal. ( this is NOT a slam on Theo btw, as i do have respect for the other things he has done )
The unauthorised use of the system has already happened by the time this system comes into play - it was done by the spammer. An 'undeliverable' response is quite acceptable in an SMTP session, it's hardly unauthorised. If this means that the sending server keeps the spam on its own disk, too bad - but the spammer put it there, not me.
I like how Spews just blocks based on Internet politics more than anything. You can get on Spews because the admins don't like you personally.
Please give an example of a SPEWS listing that was created because the admins didn't like someone personally.
Of course, there are plenty of people in news.admin.net-abuse.email who add to their private blocklists anyone who threatens to sue people over a SPEWS listing, but that's another matter entirely...
I liked the story of Zelda 2, but not the sidescroller feel of the game.
Zelda 2 was my first, so I didn't find it at all unusual... I think combat in Zelda 2 was far more intense than in any of the others until the N64. Top-down you can wander about with the sword fully charged and spin-attack just about anything. But going toe-to-toe with a blue bird-knight in the Great Palace - that's tough. And nothing has ever compared to the final fight against your shadow.
Did you discover missiles? Equip bomb+Bow and press both buttons at once!
Damn right I did. Nastiest red herring in history - I spent so long feeling _certain_ this was the way to beat the Nightmare Boss. But you can't equip arrows, bombs AND the roc's feather, and so I invariably got smashed. OK, it could have been done with really quick use of the menu, but that's just lame...
Incidentally, you've got me all nostalgic. I spent this afternoon slaving over a hot compiler trying out a variety of NES emulators so I could play Zelda 2 again... I think I might take on one of the challenges people have posted on the web. 'Complete the game in one sitting with no 1UP dolls' looks tough. Doable,though, as long as I'm allowed the extra lives given by advancing level beyond 8 - 8 - 8.
I once played Zelda 1 right through in one life just Because It Was There. Somewhere in the sixth dungeon my then roommate pulled out an air rifle and shot out both my computer's speakers.
Given their ongoing (but apparently lapsed) dispute with LucasArts over their replacement.exe for the old SCUMM games - maybe this signals a more enlightened approach across the board? Maybe LucasArts will actually start giving the ScummVM developers some pointers on how SCUMM works, and we'll get 100% compatibility much more quickly?
(For anyone who doesn't know, ScummVM is a replacement.exe for old games like Day of the Tentacle and Monkey Island; it uses antialiased graphics and hardware MIDI to dramatically improve the picture and sound, and runs on any platform SDL does - unlike the old.exe's that come with the games, which struggle to run on modern machines. LucasArts seem to have mistaken ScummVM with an abandonware site...)
The IQ of a mob is the IQ of the least intelligent person, divided by the amount of media coverage, multiplied by the size of the crowd.
Hang on, that can't be right. In that case, adding people to the mob would increase its IQ, which I very much doubt. Also, a mob that is entirely ignored by the media would be infinitely intelligent...
Re:Is this a good thing? Nigerian Miss World Riots
on
Smart Mobs
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I've heard anecdotal evidence that the angry protests that led to the bloody "Miss World" riots in Nigeria were coordinated by cell phones and text messaging. If this is true, we may long for the day of Dumb Mobs.
A little over two years ago, the near-total penetration of mobile phones allowed a mob consisting of a small number of truckers and farmers to bring the UK almost to a standstill - they were able to coordinate blockades of oil refineries and depots all over the country, and organise go-slow convoys on the major motorways. If each group of protestors had needed to have access to a landline phone to communicate, things would have been far more difficult.
I gather rival football hooligans have actually been known to contact each other by mobile before the match to arrange fights. Mad.
Does being part of a group make you smarter? Possibly, though I would postulate that instead it make you more of an instrument of the group, therefore less likely to exercise free will.
The IQ of a mob is the IQ of its least intelligent member divided by the number of people in the mob.
Don't you mean that the information's quality is only as good as its LEAST trustworthy member?
Not if people can identify and select in favour of those most trustworthy people. How they do it might vary - on the internet, chances are you'll pick out bbc.co.uk as a reliable news source based on their offline reputation.
Or a system might arise whereby the users themselves select particularly informative, insightful, interesting or funny posts and mark them up as worthy of attention, while reducing the level of priority given to trolls and flamebaiters.
Or you might have a facility in whatever software you use to access this information to filter the data based on how much you trust the source. Scoring, killfiling, whatever.
Re:Give me a break
on
Smart Mobs
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· Score: 4, Funny
It's just a fucking wireless network! It's not gonna change society, there are no new paradigms".
It's just a fucking computer network! It's not gonna change society, there are no new paradigms.
It's just a fucking wireless with pictures! It's not gonna change society, there are no new paradigms.
It's just a fucking way to transmit voice over the telegraph! It's not gonna change society, there are no new paradigms.
It's just a fucking round piece of rock! It's not gonna change society, there are no new paradigms.
The original Zelda was close to being the perfect game, Simple interface that was completely intuitive, dynamic and interesting story that progresses clearly through the game, and it was jut plain enjoyable.
Story? All you do is collect Triforce pieces and lots of equipment, build up your life meter, and then go kill Ganon. The nearest you get to character interaction is 'PAY ME FOR THE DOOR REPAIR CHARGE'...
Zelda 2 gave you much more of a world you could believe in; there were towns of people here and there, separated by vast spaces of wilderness in which the ruined palaces of the ancient kingdom still stood... There's a real sense of a vanished golden age, of the terrible damage Ganon did before you defeated him. The destroyed town of Kasuto was downright tragic. And here and there you discover ancient marble pillars standing out in the desert, sometimes with treasure lying about at the base. 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings...'
After that the plot goes into the past; I assume the King who returns at the end of Zelda 3 (on the SNES) is the same one who hid the Triforce Courage because he didn't trust his son, and who was responsible for the insanely tough guardians I had to beat in Zelda 2;-) It's a strange feeling, fighting for weeks to defeat a monster, recover the Golden Power and save the kingdom when you KNOW what's in store for the place. Whether I win or lose, Ganon will rise again and ruin Hyrule, and Kasuto will be devastated by monster raids.
I think Zelda 4 on the Gameboy was my favourite. The gameplay was similar to Zelda 1 and 3, but there was a lot more plot. I don't think I'll ever forget Marin... The ending is perhaps the most memorable I've ever seen in a game, though I don't want to give it away here. Took me ages to work out how to take down the final boss - the top-down interface makes you think in 2D, and so you don't realise you can jump his attacks with the Roc's Feather.
I've only played bits of Zelda 5 on N64 and 7 and 8 on GBC (Seasons and Ages) and none of 6 (Majora's Mask) so I don't fully know what's happened since. But GameCube Zelda looks wonderful and I _want_ it, NOW!:-)
Slashdot Mirror
It's not that hard as the Psilons - Creative was a major advantage, vastly underpriced IMO. Build a communications network out of Outpost Ships, making sure to plant the flag on any handy terran or Gaia planets early. This way you make contact with everyone before they meet each other, and you can set up lots of trade and research pacts. If someone starts looking nasty, you can buy 'em off with technological trinkets. You're extremely vulnerable in the early game, because someone with a big productive base (Sakkra or Bulrathi maybe) could just roll over you.
Later on, once you've converted some of those outposts to colonies and got something of a fleet and a serious technical lead, go after the monsters. A rich, huge Gaia with natives, defended only by a dragon is a good thing to have ;-) Attack the Guardian once you've got ships with graviton guns or better, and zortrium armour at least. The best combo in the mid-game is a volley of grav cannon to knock down the shields, then a volley of ion cannon to demolish internal systems. A couple of Titans with this setup can destroy the Guardian without giving it a chance to return fire.
If you're in lamer mode, you might like to refight the Avenger several times. Loknar gives you four technologies at random - most are unresearchable, but he may give you Moleculartronic Computer. The ones you want are Xentronium Armour and Damper Field. Death rays and particle beams are heavily overrated - they don't miniaturise, so late in the game you'll get more value out of maulers. The black hole generator is cool, but not that useful in practice. Make sure you have a spare slot in your ship captains list before attacking Orion, else you'll just get the ship and not Loknar.
Once you command the Avenger and start integrating Orion tech into your ships, and with microlite construction at your shipyards and Recyclotrons coming into play, and the megafluxer being invented - all at about the same time - you're suddenly the ultimate superpower. You might consider building android worlds - the manual says androids are unaffected by morale, but they are. A planet full of Android Workers with +5 morale churns out Titans every couple of turns. Now pick a fight with someone you don't like. Preferably the one you've had to buy off a few times, the one who bullied you when you were small.
At the end? HV AF SP Phasors w Achilles Targeting System. 'Nuff said. Also, it's worth investigating the potential of phasing cloaks and timewarp facilitators. Does the 'decloak - fire - recloak' tactic appeal to you? ;-)
The true shameless cheat doesn't take any special powers. He takes every Death book he can get, and takes Wraiths as a starting spell. He conjures them up first thing, and then begins acting very aggressively. Nobody has a chance that early in the game, and by the time someone does have something that can fight Wraiths, our dark lord rules most of the world and commands an immense undead army.
In normal play once - not cheating at all, ISTR I was a chaos / sorcery artificer - I came across a very unusual combination indeed. Taking out the Myrror nodes with an invisible flying Warrax the Chaos Warrior (OK, so maybe that's a BIT lame) I got given Divine Power _and_ Infernal Power. I assume I was doing a number on both sets of gods... great, but what happens when they find out? I get the feeling my wizard was headed for some really _deep_ trouble after death ;-)
It did allow you better ships, the more future tech you researched, the smaller the weapons, and more of them you could fit in a ship. Useful for the deathstar ships, you could fill them plenty with death rays...
Death rays were Antaran technology, they didn't miniaturise at all. Mauler devices and phasors got very small, though. And it was so much fun once you could build cruisers with stellar converters ;-)
Researching Advanced Sociology was a complete waste of time, though. AFAIK, it's only worth advancing in physics, chemistry and biology once you've exhausted the original tech tree.
No, it didn't. Two fleets of identical ships face off, and they are built so that it takes a full volley of fire from two ships to destroy one. Suppose there are 100 ships in each fleet. What is the deciding factor in the outcome of the battle?
Answer: who shoots first, wins.
Fleet 1 fires, destroying as many ships as possible and leaving the others undamaged. Fifty of Fleet 2's ships go down in flames. Now it's Fleet 2's turn - but because half of them are dead, they only take down 25 of Fleet 1. Fleet 1 returns fire again and demolishes 37 of Fleet 2's ships, seriously damaging one other. The thirteen remaining ships (if they are at all sensible) turn and run.
And the player _always_ got first shot. I ended up piling on as many weapons as possible to my ships at the total expense of armour and shielding. If the enemy fired a shot at me, I was going down, but I knew full well that they weren't going to get the chance.
It got worse at the end of the game; the defence technology didn't keep pace with the weapons. Shield-piercing autofire (3 shots instead of 1 at a 20% accuracy penalty) heavy phasors coupled to a good computer (making up for that penalty) and an Achilles targeting system (which totally bypasses the target's armour and massively increases damage) were so good they were almost like cheating. Phasors miniaturised well, so you could pack a whole lot onto a ship. It got to the point where one ship could take down several enemy ships in its turn. With a kill rate of 1 a turn or greater, Fleet 2 aren't going to fire a shot; they're just going to be mown down.
One cute thing to do is to conquer all the galaxy except one enemy world - then give them 10% tribute. With such enormous cash supplies they build fleets of hundreds of ships, which you can then use as target drones. See how many you can take down with a single ship...
Correction: the best coaster park in the world.
For sheer density of coasters per unit area, Blackpool has to be tough to beat...
If we really wanted to go back to the Moon we could do it cheaply, easily, safely and pretty much now. The Russians still have the Soyuz spacecraft, which was originally developed during the moon race, and has since evolved through thirty years of upgrades.
They don't have the N1 rocket, which was cancelled and never worked anyway, nor do they have Energia which worked beautifully, launched the Buran then got mothballed, but they do have Proton; two of those and a rendezvous at ISS ought to be fine for a moonshot.
Launch one with the ship - the Soyuz and the lander - and another with the fuel, probably a Progress drone - and you're away. All we need to do is write the Russians a nice big cheque and they can do a moon mission just fine, with off-the-shelf hardware.
Maybe. Not necessarily a problem; research in biotechnology and cybernetics ought to help there. Hopefully the people of five centuries hence will view us as we view chimpanzees.
Also, a chimp couldn't even frame the question 'what is the gradient of the curve f(x) at the point x?' If we can ask the question, that's a good sign, and chances are we'll get some way towards an answer. If we can't even frame the question, then we never even know there's something we've missed, and so we won't mind.
It took me sixteen years to go from newborn to differential calculus. Given a competent mathematics teacher, so could a human from 5000 years ago; indeed, they could almost certainly do it in far less time than that.
The future Marty visits is not the future that eventually comes to be. He saw himself as a loser who gets fired for being a party to fraud, who still couldn't say no for fear of being called chicken. After seeing this future, and after his experience in 1885 with Mad Dog Tannen, Marty is able to overcome this personality flaw and set out to a more prosperous future. The future he saw in BttF2 no longer exists. In some alternate reality, Loser McFly is still there, but he never travelled in time, and so doesn't expect to meet himself - that's where the plot hole comes in, because by the time we meet him Marty has already left 1985, so Loser McFly's future ought not to exist.
Perhaps Loser McFly is a Marty who didn't go to 1885 to rescue Doc Brown, but even then I'd expect his future to become very different, simply because he would take deliberate steps to prevent it coming about. He can't be one who never visited 2015, because Marty is already in 2015 when he's introduced.
No; the Marty who had travelled in time was not the Marty who crashed into the Rolls and went on to become a loser. He returned to 1985 in cowboy gear and (presumably) made a success of his life, being able to ignore being called chicken. The Marty who became a loser is one who did not travel in time - never saw his own fate, never not-confronted Mad Dog Tannen.
This needn't be a major plot hole because there are countless possible consistent histories involved. It's more of a philosophical problem. What happened to Marty in BttF2 changed his future; he saw what lay ahead of him and had to change it. That future no longer exists, so Marty OUGHT to have met his successful future self. So... if he goes to the future and sees it's all roses, how does he know to avoid becoming... ick. It's the grandfather paradox again.
Photoshop nonexistent in 1969, arrogant fuck. Picture taken, figure added later, crosshairs added last, no problem, arrogant fuck. Bloody stupid example in the first place, arrogant fuck. Not a fucking clue about photography at all, have you, arrogant fuck?
No. No. No. The issue is consent, not content. I don't care if it's Ralsky's chicks-with-horses or some Alabaman spam-for-Christ, I don't care if it's selling herbal viagra or asking for donations for sick children. If I didn't ask for it, it goes to abuse@ and to uce@ftc.gov. I will never, ever, under any circumstances, buy a product or service of any description whatsoever, from a spammer. Even if the spammer happens to be a store down the road, and the advertised product one I intended to buy from them anyway that very morning - I'll go elsewhere.
If I got a '70% off memory' spam I would probably buy a memory upgrade from the sender's chief competitor, and let both firms know why. Actually, that might encourage the wrong behaviour... we don't want MS joe-jobbing RH, now, do we?
Sir, you have no proof whatsoever that the people who control our media are Jewish. Please refrain from posting such offensive garbage.
Um... this reads to me as if the people controlling the media might have been offended to be called Jews, rather than vice-versa. Probably not what you wanted to say.
The unauthorised use of the system has already happened by the time this system comes into play - it was done by the spammer. An 'undeliverable' response is quite acceptable in an SMTP session, it's hardly unauthorised. If this means that the sending server keeps the spam on its own disk, too bad - but the spammer put it there, not me.
Please give an example of a SPEWS listing that was created because the admins didn't like someone personally.
Of course, there are plenty of people in news.admin.net-abuse.email who add to their private blocklists anyone who threatens to sue people over a SPEWS listing, but that's another matter entirely...
I don't think it's anything so malicious as that. It's just gloating. 'La la la, we made Ralsky's life hell, la la la!'
The real site is here and this time I'm using Preview.
Zelda 2 was my first, so I didn't find it at all unusual... I think combat in Zelda 2 was far more intense than in any of the others until the N64. Top-down you can wander about with the sword fully charged and spin-attack just about anything. But going toe-to-toe with a blue bird-knight in the Great Palace - that's tough. And nothing has ever compared to the final fight against your shadow.
Did you discover missiles? Equip bomb+Bow and press both buttons at once!
Damn right I did. Nastiest red herring in history - I spent so long feeling _certain_ this was the way to beat the Nightmare Boss. But you can't equip arrows, bombs AND the roc's feather, and so I invariably got smashed. OK, it could have been done with really quick use of the menu, but that's just lame...
Incidentally, you've got me all nostalgic. I spent this afternoon slaving over a hot compiler trying out a variety of NES emulators so I could play Zelda 2 again... I think I might take on one of the challenges people have posted on the web. 'Complete the game in one sitting with no 1UP dolls' looks tough. Doable,though, as long as I'm allowed the extra lives given by advancing level beyond 8 - 8 - 8.
I once played Zelda 1 right through in one life just Because It Was There. Somewhere in the sixth dungeon my then roommate pulled out an air rifle and shot out both my computer's speakers.
(For anyone who doesn't know, ScummVM is a replacement .exe for old games like Day of the Tentacle and Monkey Island; it uses antialiased graphics and hardware MIDI to dramatically improve the picture and sound, and runs on any platform SDL does - unlike the old .exe's that come with the games, which struggle to run on modern machines. LucasArts seem to have mistaken ScummVM with an abandonware site...)
Hang on, that can't be right. In that case, adding people to the mob would increase its IQ, which I very much doubt. Also, a mob that is entirely ignored by the media would be infinitely intelligent...
A little over two years ago, the near-total penetration of mobile phones allowed a mob consisting of a small number of truckers and farmers to bring the UK almost to a standstill - they were able to coordinate blockades of oil refineries and depots all over the country, and organise go-slow convoys on the major motorways. If each group of protestors had needed to have access to a landline phone to communicate, things would have been far more difficult.
I gather rival football hooligans have actually been known to contact each other by mobile before the match to arrange fights. Mad.
The IQ of a mob is the IQ of its least intelligent member divided by the number of people in the mob.
- Terry Pratchett, 'Maskerade'
Not if people can identify and select in favour of those most trustworthy people. How they do it might vary - on the internet, chances are you'll pick out bbc.co.uk as a reliable news source based on their offline reputation.
Or a system might arise whereby the users themselves select particularly informative, insightful, interesting or funny posts and mark them up as worthy of attention, while reducing the level of priority given to trolls and flamebaiters.
Or you might have a facility in whatever software you use to access this information to filter the data based on how much you trust the source. Scoring, killfiling, whatever.
It's just a fucking computer network! It's not gonna change society, there are no new paradigms.
It's just a fucking wireless with pictures! It's not gonna change society, there are no new paradigms.
It's just a fucking way to transmit voice over the telegraph! It's not gonna change society, there are no new paradigms.
It's just a fucking round piece of rock! It's not gonna change society, there are no new paradigms.
Story? All you do is collect Triforce pieces and lots of equipment, build up your life meter, and then go kill Ganon. The nearest you get to character interaction is 'PAY ME FOR THE DOOR REPAIR CHARGE'...
Zelda 2 gave you much more of a world you could believe in; there were towns of people here and there, separated by vast spaces of wilderness in which the ruined palaces of the ancient kingdom still stood... There's a real sense of a vanished golden age, of the terrible damage Ganon did before you defeated him. The destroyed town of Kasuto was downright tragic. And here and there you discover ancient marble pillars standing out in the desert, sometimes with treasure lying about at the base. 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings...'
After that the plot goes into the past; I assume the King who returns at the end of Zelda 3 (on the SNES) is the same one who hid the Triforce Courage because he didn't trust his son, and who was responsible for the insanely tough guardians I had to beat in Zelda 2 ;-) It's a strange feeling, fighting for weeks to defeat a monster, recover the Golden Power and save the kingdom when you KNOW what's in store for the place. Whether I win or lose, Ganon will rise again and ruin Hyrule, and Kasuto will be devastated by monster raids.
I think Zelda 4 on the Gameboy was my favourite. The gameplay was similar to Zelda 1 and 3, but there was a lot more plot. I don't think I'll ever forget Marin... The ending is perhaps the most memorable I've ever seen in a game, though I don't want to give it away here. Took me ages to work out how to take down the final boss - the top-down interface makes you think in 2D, and so you don't realise you can jump his attacks with the Roc's Feather.
I've only played bits of Zelda 5 on N64 and 7 and 8 on GBC (Seasons and Ages) and none of 6 (Majora's Mask) so I don't fully know what's happened since. But GameCube Zelda looks wonderful and I _want_ it, NOW! :-)