Now this allows them to fight wars without risking soldiers at all, so there is no downside at all to wading into any ridiculous unwinnable situation. Lose a few dozen UAVs, shrug, ask congress for another billion dollars.
Congress says 'piss off', you say... what, exactly? 'Support our droids'?
Lawsuits about internet usage, P2P, the *AA: news for nerds, stuff that matters.
Lawsuits about removal of crosses: news for nobody, stuff that doesn't matter.
Clear enough now on why Slashdot readers care about the one and not the other?
The original SMB (and many other games for the NES) had no save function. In order to beat the game, you had to either play for hours at a time or leave the console on and pray that there was no power outage (either caused by the electric company or your annoying little brother).
That said, before I found out about the warp whistles (from someone who had an import copy of Nintendo Power from America) I used to have to do the 'leave the NES on' thing with SMB3. It's a long, long way through that game. And when there's a thunderstorm one night and you're at the end of World 7 with a vast arsenal of P-wings and Tanooki suits and suchlike in your inventory, and the power glitches just for a half-second... AAAARRRRGGGGGHHHH!
And The guide, one game I know purposely cheats the player, making you start all over at the begining. Games now days cater too much to the people that can't beat a game without cheats and a strategy guide.
Didn't the old Infocom games come with a strategy guide? That old Invisiclues thing where you had one of those pens to reveal the invisible ink, and the hints would become gradually more explicit as you went down the page until at last they just told you right out what to do?
I don't want the game to be trivial or easy, but I want it to be survivable if I am doing the right thing. Some of the bosses in Zelda were not just difficult for me, they were extremely frustrating to the point it was souring me on the game. Every few seconds, the boss would pick me up or lock me down or shock/burn me out so I can't see a thing or move a muscle. In the brief intervals, I'd have to aim a crosshairs using a cruddy dpad or stick to hit some tiny little target, and of course I'd have to do this a dozen times.
Er... wow. See, for me the bosses on Twilight Princess were uniformly easy. I mean insultingly easy. They telegraphed their attacks well in advance so you could make damn sure you weren't there to get hit by them, and their weak spots might as well have had 'HIT ME HERE' written on them, they were so blatantly obvious.
The only boss that ever killed me was Zant's first form, and that was because I didn't realise I needed to use the boomerang as a weapon, as opposed to its prior role as a gadget for flipping switches. Once I got that, Zant went down as trivially as the rest; hardly even did any damage to me thereafter.
What was hard on Twilight Princess was the mini-bosses. The guy with the ball and chain in the ice dungeon, where you have to hookshot around to get behind him in a very confined cage? Hard. The Ironknuckles? Very hard, especially once you've got their armour off and they suddenly learn how to use their sword properly. But the main bosses seemed to be there more for show than anything else.
Then again, afterwards I bought a couple of Wii Points cards and downloaded Zelda 3 on SNES. Y'know what? Those bosses are nowhere near as hard as I remember them...
Feynman was the most overhyped scientist of the twentieth century. I mean, what has he done that will be remembered in 100 years time?
When people are solving problems in particle physics in the year 2107, I reckon there are pretty good odds they'll begin by drawing diagrams of the interaction...
But citing the original games as harder is not really fair. The reason the original NES Zelda shipped with a strategy guide right there in the box is that an awful lot of puzzles hinged on burning the exact right bush in a screen of about eighty identical bushes, or planting a bomb on exactly the right spot in a vast expanse of undifferentiated cliff. If your idea of a fulfilling time is to keep on stocking up on bombs and trying every single square of cliff in turn, go to, but if that's hardcore gaming then I'll stick to the casual stuff that's actually fun.
Back in the day playing Zelda 2, I got stuck and needed outside help at one point only: finding Hidden Kasuto. This time around playing Twilight Princess, I also got stuck at one point only: beating Zant's first form (kicked myself when I found out: I mean, it's Zelda Gaming Rule #1, when stuck, try every single item in turn! I'd forgotten the boomerang existed, I hadn't used it in so long!)
Nowadays sheer survival is less of an issue - I die much, much less frequently on contemporary Zeldas than I used to on the NES - but is that because the games are easier, or because after twenty years of experience I've got really, really good at this?
If they were UNIT employees, they were probably protecting us from the CyberMen or the Daleks, so I would excuse the perceived transgressions.
Sadly not. Cybermen and Daleks are both typically immune to bullets, so UNIT's general policy of responding to alien menace with Five Rounds Rapid is fairly ineffective. They'd just have been observing from their flying aircraft carrier.
I wonder, who would win in a fight between X-Com, UNIT and NERV?
There is very little that you could say about this administration that I would find too insane to be plausible.
I think I can: if I recall correctly it was elected by Americans not only once but twice.....
No, only the once. But it's almost worse this way. Having got Bush in power by accident the first time, and having lived through his first term in power and seen clearly exactly what he was, the American public then said 'Yep. That's the sort of leadership we want!' and then went out and elected him for real this time.
And I'd spent four years saying that no, the American people weren't to blame for the actions of Bush because they hadn't voted for him... How embarrassing.
What's next, Linux will help me leverage my key skills and maximize my full potential, making my chakras spin in unison to bring me closer to a fully actualized human being?
No, that's ninja training with the Perverted Hermit. You'll be spending a lot of time with water balloons.
An MP3 bootlegger is certainly a "thorn in the side" of the RIAA. But of the U.S. government? Somehow, in this era of major terrorism, genocide, nuclear proliferation, insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, and other thorny issues, I don't think anybody in the government loses sleep over allofmp3.
Terrorists kill ordinary people, mostly foreign. Allofmp3 is reducing the profits of rich people, mostly American. Which do you think the US government cares more about?
Imagine some aliens sending us some peaceful message, but these aliens look grotesque by our standards. Guess what? The neocons, China and Russia declare "War on Aliens", we'll jihad their asses.
You are Prime Minister Harold Saxon and I claim my $5.
Except for the challenges of making one, what's it useful for? You can't use it to calibrate anything, the wear and tear caused by the friction of handling would eventually change it's mass and defy it's purpose.
It's hierarchical. You use the standard kilogram to calibrate other, slightly less exalted standard kilograms. So the one kept in London and the one in New York and the one in Tokyo get calibrated against the one in Paris. Then you calibrate actual working weights against those.
Labour could only get into power by espousing Conservative policies.
Have you read Labours '97 manifesto?... a national minimum wage, improving universal free-at-the-point-of-service healthcare, windfall taxes on big business, increased European integration.
Uhh? That's two elections ago!
Correct. Now, when did Labour get into power, allegedly by espousing Conservative policies? Was it by any chance two elections ago, in 1997?
Third Earth? Well, if that's your choice of destination I suppose you're free to go there, but I'd suggest you avoid going anywhere near the Onyx Pyramid. Just a helpful safety tip.
In the middle of a cave/dungeon you encounter another party of adventurers, a low-level party; they're bragging about having Magic Missile, etc. (you're about level 8-9 at this point i think).
In Throne of Bhaal, you should be more like level 18-19. You _started_ BG2 at level 8:-)
The influence of the USA is just too insidious to stop it, certainly with the open backdoor they have in the EU with their fellow-anglo-saxon-mentality country; the UK.
Speaking as a British eurofederalist, it's painful to admit it, but de Gaulle was right. We should never have been allowed in, and for that very reason. We're a vassal of Uncle Sam, and that's not going to change however much we pretend to be good Europeans. Sometimes I think we should be kicked out post-haste, especially when we act up.
Still, we were about the only place in the union to stick to that bit about free movement of labour when the East joined up:-)
But even murderers often come off with less then 65 years, so is spam, impersonating people, using botnets, etc. *really* worse than murdering people?
If I murder somebody, I have taken from them perhaps 50 years of life, of which perhaps 35 years would be waking time.
If I spam 50,000,000 people, I have taken from each of them five seconds of waking life, assuming all of them Just Hit Delete.
Five seconds times fifty million people equals twenty-five million seconds. That's over nine months right there. After about 45 such spam runs, I've taken life equivalent to one murder.
How many times did this guy spam? How many cumulative seconds has he taken from the population at large? How many people could he in fact have murdered and done less damage to humanity? Quite a few, I think.
Common mistake. Joseph Swan invented the light bulb, and he did it in England. But Edison had better marketing. Story of the 20th century, really. We invent it, the Yanks sell it and claim the credit...
Ummm... doesn't the NATO security shield, left since the last time the U.S. and U.K. had to invade Europe, make up the "prepare for war" part of the European peace?
In part. Should the Red Army come storming west out of Russia towards Poland, the EU will surely be glad of NATO. These days, however, the Russians are more likely to apply pressure by cutting off the gas supply.
And isn't the free security it provides the continent the main reason that we get to hear these over-protected adolescent political ideas coming from there.
That's probably more because a generation of Europeans have grown up to whom ideas like 'nationalism' are kind of old-fashioned - they're what got us to kill each other off by the millions in the last century, and to be honest such tribalist notions seem rather childish. 'My country, right or wrong'? Please.
Not that I'm saying everyone's massively in favour of immediate establishment of a European federal republic, but that the boundaries of nationality have become blurred. We don't do flag-waving so much. We don't differentiate between Americans killed and Iraqis killed when deciding who to grieve for, so now that about twenty times as many Iraqis have died as Americans did on 9/11, the balance of sympathy is no longer very much in America's favour.
It's interesting to hear repeatedly that they are making so much effort in this area. The obvious target is the United States, though they could effectively attack our allies as well.
That, and neutrals, and for that matter your enemies. The world doesn't revolve entirely around the US, you know.
Consider: Company A in country M is trying to sell products to company B in country N. Company C in China would like some of that business. So: the Chinese dig out some of their black-magic tools and pwnz0r some of the machines in company B and in company A - after all, Windows machines are much the same wherever in the world they are. They find out the minimum A is willing to take for its products, and the maximum B is willing to pay, and pass that information on to C so that it can make a killer offer. Also, if they discover that people from Company A are quietly offering backhanders to officials in Country N to ensure their deal goes through, they can leak the information to the press in country M, and cause no end of bad publicity, maybe scuppering Company A's deal altogether.
they probably wont try to destroy our systems completely as that would likely have a ripple effect on their economy as well- they sell a lot of stuff to us and where they to screw that up it would hurt them quite dearly. there is one thing that we have that they dont and that is oddly enough sheer number- if i remember correctly we out number them in computing power so if we ever needed to we could do a real DOS attack from hell on them.
In a shooting war, a DOS wouldn't work, certainly not against China. Filter everything out at the Great Firewall. Then the border routers might be saturated, but who wants to email the enemy? Everything inside China would still work fine.
My guess is they'll use these techniques not for aggressive warfare but for espionage. They don't want to bring down the USA. Why bite the hand that feeds you, why destroy the people who'll buy all the cheap plastic junk you can produce? But you certainly would want to spy on what they're doing. Certainly you'd like to know what their government's thinking. Certainly you'd like to know what the American companies who compete with Chinese companies are thinking.
China isn't an enemy of the USA in military terms, and isn't likely to be any time soon, but in business they're a deadly rival, and if they can gain an advantage by spying they'll do it. And I'm quite sure that Japan's doing the same. And if Britain and France and Germany aren't also at it I'd be absolutely amazed.
It'd seem likely that if viruses are being developed for military applications, some of those viruses are indeed targeted at Linux and the BSDs: even if these operating systems don't have enough market share to be viable for virus writers whose goal is maximum infection percentage, or economic gain through spamming or scamming, they do keep a lot of important servers up and running and serve confidential information from important databases.
Probably not viruses, but worms, and remote-root exploits. If your local equivalent of NSA or GCHQ has found a really nasty bug in, let us say, Apache, which allows root control of the server, they'll quietly code up a worm to exploit it, and keep it in storage against the day they decide they need to knock down a whole bunch of systems.
However, the potential economic gain from owning Apache / MySQL systems is far greater than from owning IIS / SQL Server systems. The reason Windows-based servers are more commonly attacked isn't because they're more numerous, it's because they're more vulnerable. That, and a vulnerability affecting one generally affects all. That's not always the case with the more varied Linux systems, where exploits often depend on a very specific combination of software. So, if you're truly paranoid about informational attack, make sure your crucial systems are as secure as possible, and also varied in configuration, so that no single attack can take out all of them.
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Congress says 'piss off', you say... what, exactly? 'Support our droids'?
They can do it already. That's what Britain and Israel are for.
Lawsuits about removal of crosses: news for nobody, stuff that doesn't matter.
Clear enough now on why Slashdot readers care about the one and not the other?
1-1, 1-2, 4-1, 4-2, 8-1, 8-2, 8-3, 8-4. Doesn't take hours.
That said, before I found out about the warp whistles (from someone who had an import copy of Nintendo Power from America) I used to have to do the 'leave the NES on' thing with SMB3. It's a long, long way through that game. And when there's a thunderstorm one night and you're at the end of World 7 with a vast arsenal of P-wings and Tanooki suits and suchlike in your inventory, and the power glitches just for a half-second... AAAARRRRGGGGGHHHH!
Didn't the old Infocom games come with a strategy guide? That old Invisiclues thing where you had one of those pens to reveal the invisible ink, and the hints would become gradually more explicit as you went down the page until at last they just told you right out what to do?
Er... wow. See, for me the bosses on Twilight Princess were uniformly easy. I mean insultingly easy. They telegraphed their attacks well in advance so you could make damn sure you weren't there to get hit by them, and their weak spots might as well have had 'HIT ME HERE' written on them, they were so blatantly obvious.
The only boss that ever killed me was Zant's first form, and that was because I didn't realise I needed to use the boomerang as a weapon, as opposed to its prior role as a gadget for flipping switches. Once I got that, Zant went down as trivially as the rest; hardly even did any damage to me thereafter.
What was hard on Twilight Princess was the mini-bosses. The guy with the ball and chain in the ice dungeon, where you have to hookshot around to get behind him in a very confined cage? Hard. The Ironknuckles? Very hard, especially once you've got their armour off and they suddenly learn how to use their sword properly. But the main bosses seemed to be there more for show than anything else.
Then again, afterwards I bought a couple of Wii Points cards and downloaded Zelda 3 on SNES. Y'know what? Those bosses are nowhere near as hard as I remember them...
When people are solving problems in particle physics in the year 2107, I reckon there are pretty good odds they'll begin by drawing diagrams of the interaction...
But citing the original games as harder is not really fair. The reason the original NES Zelda shipped with a strategy guide right there in the box is that an awful lot of puzzles hinged on burning the exact right bush in a screen of about eighty identical bushes, or planting a bomb on exactly the right spot in a vast expanse of undifferentiated cliff. If your idea of a fulfilling time is to keep on stocking up on bombs and trying every single square of cliff in turn, go to, but if that's hardcore gaming then I'll stick to the casual stuff that's actually fun.
Back in the day playing Zelda 2, I got stuck and needed outside help at one point only: finding Hidden Kasuto. This time around playing Twilight Princess, I also got stuck at one point only: beating Zant's first form (kicked myself when I found out: I mean, it's Zelda Gaming Rule #1, when stuck, try every single item in turn! I'd forgotten the boomerang existed, I hadn't used it in so long!)
Nowadays sheer survival is less of an issue - I die much, much less frequently on contemporary Zeldas than I used to on the NES - but is that because the games are easier, or because after twenty years of experience I've got really, really good at this?
Sadly not. Cybermen and Daleks are both typically immune to bullets, so UNIT's general policy of responding to alien menace with Five Rounds Rapid is fairly ineffective. They'd just have been observing from their flying aircraft carrier.
I wonder, who would win in a fight between X-Com, UNIT and NERV?
I think I can: if I recall correctly it was elected by Americans not only once but twice.....
No, only the once. But it's almost worse this way. Having got Bush in power by accident the first time, and having lived through his first term in power and seen clearly exactly what he was, the American public then said 'Yep. That's the sort of leadership we want!' and then went out and elected him for real this time.
And I'd spent four years saying that no, the American people weren't to blame for the actions of Bush because they hadn't voted for him... How embarrassing.
It is most certainly not! Unless, that is, you don't much care about getting a proper pint.
No, that's ninja training with the Perverted Hermit. You'll be spending a lot of time with water balloons.
Terrorists kill ordinary people, mostly foreign. Allofmp3 is reducing the profits of rich people, mostly American. Which do you think the US government cares more about?
You are Prime Minister Harold Saxon and I claim my $5.
Or I would if I dared.
It's hierarchical. You use the standard kilogram to calibrate other, slightly less exalted standard kilograms. So the one kept in London and the one in New York and the one in Tokyo get calibrated against the one in Paris. Then you calibrate actual working weights against those.
Correct. Now, when did Labour get into power, allegedly by espousing Conservative policies? Was it by any chance two elections ago, in 1997?
Third Earth? Well, if that's your choice of destination I suppose you're free to go there, but I'd suggest you avoid going anywhere near the Onyx Pyramid. Just a helpful safety tip.
In Throne of Bhaal, you should be more like level 18-19. You _started_ BG2 at level 8 :-)
Speaking as a British eurofederalist, it's painful to admit it, but de Gaulle was right. We should never have been allowed in, and for that very reason. We're a vassal of Uncle Sam, and that's not going to change however much we pretend to be good Europeans. Sometimes I think we should be kicked out post-haste, especially when we act up.
Still, we were about the only place in the union to stick to that bit about free movement of labour when the East joined up :-)
If I murder somebody, I have taken from them perhaps 50 years of life, of which perhaps 35 years would be waking time.
If I spam 50,000,000 people, I have taken from each of them five seconds of waking life, assuming all of them Just Hit Delete.
Five seconds times fifty million people equals twenty-five million seconds. That's over nine months right there. After about 45 such spam runs, I've taken life equivalent to one murder.
How many times did this guy spam? How many cumulative seconds has he taken from the population at large? How many people could he in fact have murdered and done less damage to humanity? Quite a few, I think.
Common mistake. Joseph Swan invented the light bulb, and he did it in England. But Edison had better marketing. Story of the 20th century, really. We invent it, the Yanks sell it and claim the credit...
In part. Should the Red Army come storming west out of Russia towards Poland, the EU will surely be glad of NATO. These days, however, the Russians are more likely to apply pressure by cutting off the gas supply.
And isn't the free security it provides the continent the main reason that we get to hear these over-protected adolescent political ideas coming from there.
That's probably more because a generation of Europeans have grown up to whom ideas like 'nationalism' are kind of old-fashioned - they're what got us to kill each other off by the millions in the last century, and to be honest such tribalist notions seem rather childish. 'My country, right or wrong'? Please.
Not that I'm saying everyone's massively in favour of immediate establishment of a European federal republic, but that the boundaries of nationality have become blurred. We don't do flag-waving so much. We don't differentiate between Americans killed and Iraqis killed when deciding who to grieve for, so now that about twenty times as many Iraqis have died as Americans did on 9/11, the balance of sympathy is no longer very much in America's favour.
That, and neutrals, and for that matter your enemies. The world doesn't revolve entirely around the US, you know.
Consider: Company A in country M is trying to sell products to company B in country N. Company C in China would like some of that business. So: the Chinese dig out some of their black-magic tools and pwnz0r some of the machines in company B and in company A - after all, Windows machines are much the same wherever in the world they are. They find out the minimum A is willing to take for its products, and the maximum B is willing to pay, and pass that information on to C so that it can make a killer offer. Also, if they discover that people from Company A are quietly offering backhanders to officials in Country N to ensure their deal goes through, they can leak the information to the press in country M, and cause no end of bad publicity, maybe scuppering Company A's deal altogether.
In a shooting war, a DOS wouldn't work, certainly not against China. Filter everything out at the Great Firewall. Then the border routers might be saturated, but who wants to email the enemy? Everything inside China would still work fine.
My guess is they'll use these techniques not for aggressive warfare but for espionage. They don't want to bring down the USA. Why bite the hand that feeds you, why destroy the people who'll buy all the cheap plastic junk you can produce? But you certainly would want to spy on what they're doing. Certainly you'd like to know what their government's thinking. Certainly you'd like to know what the American companies who compete with Chinese companies are thinking.
China isn't an enemy of the USA in military terms, and isn't likely to be any time soon, but in business they're a deadly rival, and if they can gain an advantage by spying they'll do it. And I'm quite sure that Japan's doing the same. And if Britain and France and Germany aren't also at it I'd be absolutely amazed.
Probably not viruses, but worms, and remote-root exploits. If your local equivalent of NSA or GCHQ has found a really nasty bug in, let us say, Apache, which allows root control of the server, they'll quietly code up a worm to exploit it, and keep it in storage against the day they decide they need to knock down a whole bunch of systems.
However, the potential economic gain from owning Apache / MySQL systems is far greater than from owning IIS / SQL Server systems. The reason Windows-based servers are more commonly attacked isn't because they're more numerous, it's because they're more vulnerable. That, and a vulnerability affecting one generally affects all. That's not always the case with the more varied Linux systems, where exploits often depend on a very specific combination of software. So, if you're truly paranoid about informational attack, make sure your crucial systems are as secure as possible, and also varied in configuration, so that no single attack can take out all of them.