Dude, you haven't been watching enough TV from the US:) I'm from Canada, and even *I* know that you need to buy a baseball bat and cut off 2 ft from the top! It might be easier, however, to just buy a baseball bat meant for 8 year olds - they're still wood, but eminently easier to carry.
"Unless you can build up a database of every paper ever written, it will be hard to catch all cheaters."
The database already exists. It's called www.turnitin.com and is used by quite a few schools in North America.
Now, if *I* was going to plagarise a paper so I wouldn't get caught, I would first of all check to make sure my prof doesn't know any foreign languages (you'll see why in a second). Then I'd get a relevant paper on the subject written in a differnet langauge (preferably a Romance one, so the small differences in language ideosyncracies can be ironed out) and translate it into English. You'd have to rework the phrasing to match your regional dialect, and rewrite most of the phrases with a thesaurus, but once you're done you'll have something that nobody's gonna discover as unoriginal work.
I explained this concept to a prof once and she just laughed and laughed... she said it was more work to do it this way than it would actually take to write the stupid paper in the first place, although she applauded my sneakiness. If you can't fucking cheat well, then don't cheat at all, because most profs I know will have your balls if they catch you cheating. That same prof once said, "Legally, I can't kill you for plagarising. That's what the head of the department tells me, anyway... he doesn't know where the bodies are hidden."
It meaning that technology of your acquisition helps unlimited, Japanese is the simple language which it should learn, but perhaps at Babelfish should be looked. Actually if you speak Japanese, or everyone's oven it is private teacher, are possible, the person should be obtained.
Atari has apparently decided to cut back on video game titles by 20% and the number of PC games to only 20%. Driv3r isn't going to help this company as they go down, down, and further down, Interplay style. Not that I'm bitter.
"and the final thing: gameboy advance was HORRIBLY BROKEN IN DESIGN DUE TO THE CRAPPY SCREEN and the fix took quite a while"
Could be fixed with a $10 reading lamp or playing outside. Besides, with all the kick-ass games that came out for the GBA on launch, Nintendo could be forgiven for a small (yes, small!) design flaw. That flaw was fixed with the GBA SP - let's see if the NGage's major flaws can be fixed with the QD, shall we?
"Without Doom conceiving the multiplayer deathmatch, it could be radically touted that the PC today would be an abandoned platform insofar as gaming is concerned."
Yeah, right. Wolfie 3D was also a seminal moment in PC gaming, and made a *huge* impact on the entire industry. Doom was a major improvement, yes, but Doom couldn't have been made without Wolfenstein 3D. Multiplayer? No, W3D didn't have it, but all this means is that, had Doom not been made, all FPSs on the computer would be single player - maybe.
The development of the FPS on the comp has been linear, not arriving with Doom and being incrementally improved with subsequent iteration. Wolf 3d was the first major FPS (if not first in the first place; anyone remember when Marathon for the Mac was published?). Doom added better graphics and height (stairs!) as well as multiplayer. Duke 3d added shooting on the Y plane and not just X and Z, not to mention weapons that were more interesting than plain miniguns or rocket launchers (shrink ray, land mine, etc.) Quake I, II, UT... each had significant changes in gameplay, graphics, and capabilities - the shift from Quake 2 to 3 was huge, turning what was once a SP genre with a multi addon to a primarily multi game. If *any* game(s) cemented the shift from SP to MP, and help keep PC gaming alive today, I'd say it was UT and/or Q3, *not* Doom.
Maybe I'm out to lunch here, but has anybody thought of trying to buy tracks from Canada in the USA with an anonymous proxy that resides in the US? Get CAD tracks for less than the US counterparts...
"In fact, my problem is not whether it is technically legal or not. It is that the money certainly doesn't go to the artists. So it's just the same as non-legal."
No no no, you're getting this all wrong. If you get SUED, you can point to www.allofmp3.com and say, "See? Legal! Fsck off!" They tell you it's not legal, and you get all wide-eyed and say, "Holy shit, are you serious! My goodness, now what the hell am I supposed to do?"
The RIAA lawyers look uncomfortably around at your frank admission of guilt, and you say with a slight tinge of regret, "Look, I screwed up, I'm really sorry. Can I make it up to you guys? I can testify against these guys! Just let me go home, shove all the MP3s and paperwork onto a CD, and I'll be right back!" The RIAA lawyers agree, you go home and pack your stuff, hop a flight to Moscow.
See? Now you're in Russia, allofmp3.com is legal, and you're not getting sued! It makes PERFECT sense to me. What's the problem here?
It's worth mentioning the content of this commerical.
A kid is sitting at his computer, ostensibly downloading music, when a hazmat team shows up in full radiation gear, picks him up with some sort of metal implement (salad tongs?) and puts him in their big ol' van. Voiceover says something like: "When you download music, you're also downloading spyware, viruses and pornography. Want to download music legally? Head to www.puretracks.com."
FUD, plain and simple. I only got porn and *two* viruses when I downloaded my last batch of MP3s!
I hate to get drawn into a conversation like this, esp. with an AC, but with the rise of the Internet, non-corporeal goods (mp3s, e-texts, etc.) no longer have any monetary value. You might argue that companies like Apple *are* selling music online, but you have to understand that, since they have no resale value (they can't be resold), they have no intrinsic value in the first place. It's not that people are being suckered into buying something that's really free; it's more like consumers are convincing themselves that the mp3's they're purchasing have a dollar value attached to them. Even perishable goods that might not last for longer than an hour (say, ice cream on a hot day) still have a resale value, if you sell them at the right time. Even this is not possible for non-corporeal goods - no refunds, no exchanges.
Getting back to DRM restrictions on TV: satellite companies are broadcasting signals over the face of the entire earth. There's no way I can block out these signals; if I go outside, whoops, they're slamming into me. If these signals are being broadcast into my house anyway, without my permission, then why shouldn't I exploit them? "You can't," you say, "because they don't belong to you!" Well, the air I'm breathing doesn't belong to me either, but it's being shunted into my house without my permission either. Next thing you know, there'll be a new utility on the block: SaskAir (I'm from Saskatchewan).
And to slam home the point: I actually don't pay for either cable or satellite, because PeasantVision (TM) beams three channels into my house for absolutely nothing. Theoretically, there are restrictions on what I can and cannot do with these channels, but in practise I could have three VCRs recording all three stations 24x7. "But Digital TV has higher resolution!" you might say. "It's paid for by advertising, too!" These are good points, and I'll give you a cookie for them, but truly, what's the difference between watching Law and Order for free (a la rabbit ears), or Law and Order in Digitallifantastic Vision?
Not to start a flame war (honestly), but I think you've got it a bit backwards. Canadians aren't trying to be more like Europe, we're trying to be less like the US. We get your local news stations here on cable and satellite, and it ain't pretty, so we do anything we can do to make it so that we don't have to sit through five or six gun-related news stories per night.
Why do Canadians do things to distance ourselves from the US? We just don't agree all the time. That's acceptable, right? We didn't want to go to war, you guys did, so we each did our own thing. In Canada, the emphasis is on the community, not the individual - the greater group decided that we didn't want to go to war, so we didn't as a group. In the US, everything is geared towards individuals, so the people that wanted to go to war (i.e. politicans, soldiers) did, whereas the ones who didn't (i.e. Michael Moore;) ) protested. They're just different systems, that's all. This is a gross generalistion, of course, but it gives you a basic idea.
Canadian retail outlets use reward cards all the time. At Safeway, the only way you can get a discount is with their stupid card (although, to be fair, you just have to say you forgot your card and give them a valid phone number attached to a card and you'll be fine). AirMiles, RBC Reward points (bank), HBC Rewards (The Bay, Zellers, etc.)... they're all over the place.
I like my privacy, but if Safeway wants to know that I eat 20 tortillas a week, then so be it - maybe those damn shells will be on sale once in a while!
You forgot where to purchase said software! Lucky you, I have a brand new TrashCan sitting right here, unused and unopened... it cost $1000, but I'll let it go right now for $200, free shipping. I've also got Marriage, but it's an older version. Tell you what, you pay for shipping, it's yours absolutely free.
"I'm trying to be completely paper free by Fall semester, and will not accept any paper from my professors, they will be requested to somehow give me the electronic version of the document."
Um, yeah, good luck with that. I'd love to see a student refuse to accept a paper handout from a prof, followed by the student "requesting" an electronic version of the document. Twenty bucks says he'll be "requesting" you to leave the class.
I think you'll agree with me that Stephenson's Metaverse was much more interesting than There, at any rate. I'm still partial to Gibson's cyberspace myself, but that's just me... brilliant how the man came up with the concept in Neuromancer from an Apple advert.
As for the "snow crashing:" I had been led to believe that the code that caused it wasn't necessarily binary, but some sort of metalanguage/symbology that the brain understood at the lowest possible level, below the subconscious. Did I read this wrong?
Given the current state of US/Canada relations, a game where Canadians burn down the White House might not be such a hot idea;)
Seriously, you're absolutely right. Where's my WWIII game w/fancy rifles and a nuclear-scarred landscape? What about a First Nations tribal conflict game/mod where archers hunt each other through thick, old growth forests with bows and arrows (and the arrow arc, a la the stake gun from Painkiller)? A colonial war where the US fights England in the War of Independence, with muskets and sneaky Yanks sniping massive hordes of ordered Brits? How about a 23rd century game that takes place on Mars, where contact between Mars and Earth has broken down (due to massive conflict on Earth), and the various settlers on Mars are forced to duke it out, Wild West meets SF (a la Firefly) style? Think Red Neck Rampage on Mars:) How about a feudal Japan mod where one side play as samurai, and the other as musket-wielding peasants in the 16th century? Post-apocalyptic where various mutants fight each other with old revolvers, bow and arrow, grenades and alien blasters (Fallout meets FPS)?
Folks, I've got a million of them. In the last few years we've had Medal of Honor, Wolfenstein, Battlefield 1942, and the one where you storm Stalingrad from the beach (can't remember name). These have all been breakaway successes. Most FPSers worth ther salt have played, played, and replayed them. Can we move on from the WWII genre now? Maybe limit them to one per year? I'd love to see a scripted single player campaign in any of the above settings I've described... Red Faction was pretty good, Halo was okay, we've had BF Vietnam, true, Doom III and HL2 will be released soon, but there are certainly more historical FPS settings to explore than the 20th century.
...nobody's missing much. It was basically a glorified chatroom with a few flash games. I was expecting something like the Metaverse from Stephenson's Snow Crash, but what I got was a bunch of people out in a forest, the desert, beach, and various other locales. What's the point of playing games just so you can customise your hair style or clothes?
Furthermore, what's the point of having a "game" with the same rules and goals of reality? It's more fun to get a few friends and go play frisbee than log on, run around a bit, and type in some stuff.
I'm going to have to disagree with you here. Their policies are draconian, as evidenced by the fact that they refuse to have anything to do with Freenet, even as little as holding some funds for them.
"Amazon is a standard business, they sell merchandise and they're directly responsible." Not true. They have a network of used product sellers ("Buy it used!") over whom they have little to no control. Amazon still has an excellent rep, Paypal doesn't.
"Pretty much anyone can just hop in and start doing business through them." Exactly, you just pop in a credit card number, pay for shipping, and you'll get your book/dvd/whatever in a few days... oh, you meant PayPal!
"What I'm saying is that when you have so many people from any walk of life, you're going to get a high volume of garbage." You've just described the customers for every single online business. What makes PayPal so special?
"Not advocating them or overlooking their crap, but anyone (or company) who deals with so much bullshit is likely to: 1) have a strict policy, 2) make mistakes. They could be worse and they aren't." Have you read PayPalSucks? They *are* worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Fuck, you know you're reading too much slashdot when you read the above comment as "I goatse a lot."
Dude, you haven't been watching enough TV from the US :) I'm from Canada, and even *I* know that you need to buy a baseball bat and cut off 2 ft from the top! It might be easier, however, to just buy a baseball bat meant for 8 year olds - they're still wood, but eminently easier to carry.
Fuck man, what's your street number and place of occupation? Why? Em.. I'm doing a survey, yeah, that's it!
The database already exists. It's called www.turnitin.com and is used by quite a few schools in North America.
Now, if *I* was going to plagarise a paper so I wouldn't get caught, I would first of all check to make sure my prof doesn't know any foreign languages (you'll see why in a second). Then I'd get a relevant paper on the subject written in a differnet langauge (preferably a Romance one, so the small differences in language ideosyncracies can be ironed out) and translate it into English. You'd have to rework the phrasing to match your regional dialect, and rewrite most of the phrases with a thesaurus, but once you're done you'll have something that nobody's gonna discover as unoriginal work.
I explained this concept to a prof once and she just laughed and laughed... she said it was more work to do it this way than it would actually take to write the stupid paper in the first place, although she applauded my sneakiness. If you can't fucking cheat well, then don't cheat at all, because most profs I know will have your balls if they catch you cheating. That same prof once said, "Legally, I can't kill you for plagarising. That's what the head of the department tells me, anyway... he doesn't know where the bodies are hidden."
This is a normal standing rule with most universities in Canada, at any rate.
It meaning that technology of your acquisition helps unlimited, Japanese is the simple language which it should learn, but perhaps at Babelfish should be looked. Actually if you speak Japanese, or everyone's oven it is private teacher, are possible, the person should be obtained.
Atari has apparently decided to cut back on video game titles by 20% and the number of PC games to only 20%. Driv3r isn't going to help this company as they go down, down, and further down, Interplay style. Not that I'm bitter.
Figures I'd screw this one up... I played Duke before Dark Forces ;) Yep, you're right - Dark Forces released Feb 95, Duke 3d in Jan 96.
Could be fixed with a $10 reading lamp or playing outside. Besides, with all the kick-ass games that came out for the GBA on launch, Nintendo could be forgiven for a small (yes, small!) design flaw. That flaw was fixed with the GBA SP - let's see if the NGage's major flaws can be fixed with the QD, shall we?
Yeah, right. Wolfie 3D was also a seminal moment in PC gaming, and made a *huge* impact on the entire industry. Doom was a major improvement, yes, but Doom couldn't have been made without Wolfenstein 3D. Multiplayer? No, W3D didn't have it, but all this means is that, had Doom not been made, all FPSs on the computer would be single player - maybe.
The development of the FPS on the comp has been linear, not arriving with Doom and being incrementally improved with subsequent iteration. Wolf 3d was the first major FPS (if not first in the first place; anyone remember when Marathon for the Mac was published?). Doom added better graphics and height (stairs!) as well as multiplayer. Duke 3d added shooting on the Y plane and not just X and Z, not to mention weapons that were more interesting than plain miniguns or rocket launchers (shrink ray, land mine, etc.) Quake I, II, UT... each had significant changes in gameplay, graphics, and capabilities - the shift from Quake 2 to 3 was huge, turning what was once a SP genre with a multi addon to a primarily multi game. If *any* game(s) cemented the shift from SP to MP, and help keep PC gaming alive today, I'd say it was UT and/or Q3, *not* Doom.
...in order to Sidetalk, but then I'd probably put it back down again.
Maybe I'm out to lunch here, but has anybody thought of trying to buy tracks from Canada in the USA with an anonymous proxy that resides in the US? Get CAD tracks for less than the US counterparts...
No no no, you're getting this all wrong. If you get SUED, you can point to www.allofmp3.com and say, "See? Legal! Fsck off!" They tell you it's not legal, and you get all wide-eyed and say, "Holy shit, are you serious! My goodness, now what the hell am I supposed to do?"
The RIAA lawyers look uncomfortably around at your frank admission of guilt, and you say with a slight tinge of regret, "Look, I screwed up, I'm really sorry. Can I make it up to you guys? I can testify against these guys! Just let me go home, shove all the MP3s and paperwork onto a CD, and I'll be right back!" The RIAA lawyers agree, you go home and pack your stuff, hop a flight to Moscow.
See? Now you're in Russia, allofmp3.com is legal, and you're not getting sued! It makes PERFECT sense to me. What's the problem here?
A kid is sitting at his computer, ostensibly downloading music, when a hazmat team shows up in full radiation gear, picks him up with some sort of metal implement (salad tongs?) and puts him in their big ol' van. Voiceover says something like: "When you download music, you're also downloading spyware, viruses and pornography. Want to download music legally? Head to www.puretracks.com."
FUD, plain and simple. I only got porn and *two* viruses when I downloaded my last batch of MP3s!
I hate to get drawn into a conversation like this, esp. with an AC, but with the rise of the Internet, non-corporeal goods (mp3s, e-texts, etc.) no longer have any monetary value. You might argue that companies like Apple *are* selling music online, but you have to understand that, since they have no resale value (they can't be resold), they have no intrinsic value in the first place. It's not that people are being suckered into buying something that's really free; it's more like consumers are convincing themselves that the mp3's they're purchasing have a dollar value attached to them. Even perishable goods that might not last for longer than an hour (say, ice cream on a hot day) still have a resale value, if you sell them at the right time. Even this is not possible for non-corporeal goods - no refunds, no exchanges.
Getting back to DRM restrictions on TV: satellite companies are broadcasting signals over the face of the entire earth. There's no way I can block out these signals; if I go outside, whoops, they're slamming into me. If these signals are being broadcast into my house anyway, without my permission, then why shouldn't I exploit them? "You can't," you say, "because they don't belong to you!" Well, the air I'm breathing doesn't belong to me either, but it's being shunted into my house without my permission either. Next thing you know, there'll be a new utility on the block: SaskAir (I'm from Saskatchewan).
And to slam home the point: I actually don't pay for either cable or satellite, because PeasantVision (TM) beams three channels into my house for absolutely nothing. Theoretically, there are restrictions on what I can and cannot do with these channels, but in practise I could have three VCRs recording all three stations 24x7. "But Digital TV has higher resolution!" you might say. "It's paid for by advertising, too!" These are good points, and I'll give you a cookie for them, but truly, what's the difference between watching Law and Order for free (a la rabbit ears), or Law and Order in Digitallifantastic Vision?
Am I the only one that finds it ironic that the American Civil Liberties Union only helps out in criminal cases?
Why do Canadians do things to distance ourselves from the US? We just don't agree all the time. That's acceptable, right? We didn't want to go to war, you guys did, so we each did our own thing. In Canada, the emphasis is on the community, not the individual - the greater group decided that we didn't want to go to war, so we didn't as a group. In the US, everything is geared towards individuals, so the people that wanted to go to war (i.e. politicans, soldiers) did, whereas the ones who didn't (i.e. Michael Moore ;) ) protested. They're just different systems, that's all. This is a gross generalistion, of course, but it gives you a basic idea.
Disclaimer: I am not a troll. Promise!
I like my privacy, but if Safeway wants to know that I eat 20 tortillas a week, then so be it - maybe those damn shells will be on sale once in a while!
You forgot where to purchase said software! Lucky you, I have a brand new TrashCan sitting right here, unused and unopened... it cost $1000, but I'll let it go right now for $200, free shipping. I've also got Marriage, but it's an older version. Tell you what, you pay for shipping, it's yours absolutely free.
Um, yeah, good luck with that. I'd love to see a student refuse to accept a paper handout from a prof, followed by the student "requesting" an electronic version of the document. Twenty bucks says he'll be "requesting" you to leave the class.
As for the "snow crashing:" I had been led to believe that the code that caused it wasn't necessarily binary, but some sort of metalanguage/symbology that the brain understood at the lowest possible level, below the subconscious. Did I read this wrong?
Seriously, you're absolutely right. Where's my WWIII game w/fancy rifles and a nuclear-scarred landscape? What about a First Nations tribal conflict game/mod where archers hunt each other through thick, old growth forests with bows and arrows (and the arrow arc, a la the stake gun from Painkiller)? A colonial war where the US fights England in the War of Independence, with muskets and sneaky Yanks sniping massive hordes of ordered Brits? How about a 23rd century game that takes place on Mars, where contact between Mars and Earth has broken down (due to massive conflict on Earth), and the various settlers on Mars are forced to duke it out, Wild West meets SF (a la Firefly) style? Think Red Neck Rampage on Mars :) How about a feudal Japan mod where one side play as samurai, and the other as musket-wielding peasants in the 16th century? Post-apocalyptic where various mutants fight each other with old revolvers, bow and arrow, grenades and alien blasters (Fallout meets FPS)?
Folks, I've got a million of them. In the last few years we've had Medal of Honor, Wolfenstein, Battlefield 1942, and the one where you storm Stalingrad from the beach (can't remember name). These have all been breakaway successes. Most FPSers worth ther salt have played, played, and replayed them. Can we move on from the WWII genre now? Maybe limit them to one per year? I'd love to see a scripted single player campaign in any of the above settings I've described... Red Faction was pretty good, Halo was okay, we've had BF Vietnam, true, Doom III and HL2 will be released soon, but there are certainly more historical FPS settings to explore than the 20th century.
Furthermore, what's the point of having a "game" with the same rules and goals of reality? It's more fun to get a few friends and go play frisbee than log on, run around a bit, and type in some stuff.
"It's not a tumah!"
"Amazon is a standard business, they sell merchandise and they're directly responsible." Not true. They have a network of used product sellers ("Buy it used!") over whom they have little to no control. Amazon still has an excellent rep, Paypal doesn't.
"Pretty much anyone can just hop in and start doing business through them." Exactly, you just pop in a credit card number, pay for shipping, and you'll get your book/dvd/whatever in a few days... oh, you meant PayPal!
"What I'm saying is that when you have so many people from any walk of life, you're going to get a high volume of garbage." You've just described the customers for every single online business. What makes PayPal so special?
"Not advocating them or overlooking their crap, but anyone (or company) who deals with so much bullshit is likely to: 1) have a strict policy, 2) make mistakes. They could be worse and they aren't." Have you read PayPalSucks? They *are* worse.