But hey, if you have to work to watch it, that must mean it's good, right?
And yet people still like it. Depending on your definitions, everything is work. Who wants to spend hours memorizing the layout of a map, the spawn locations of ammo, the best sniping spots, etc, just to add another digit to the frag counter sitting on your screen?
I know I don't, and that's why I don't often play FPSs. What I do like is playing a game where characters have personality, where the gamer empathizes with the characters, and where the player can, to some extent, control the characters.
I really enjoyed mucking around with the Materia system in FF7, and the relics on FF6, and the classes on older FFs - I liked being able to shape the character. I also appreciated the cutscenes in the PS+ games. Pre-rendered scenes can add a lot of drama to an intense moment in the game.
Basically, it comes down to different taste. Final Fantasy games are not marketed to the FPS crowd, nor the sports games to the adventure game groupies, nor the card games to the RTS bunch. And just because a GTA3 player doesn't find a interactive movie fun, doesn't mean the other game is crap. This concept is the main reason I don't play lawn bowls, yet don't harangue my poor old grandpa about his leisure hours.
Debates over RPG vs FPS are just as tedious, and ultimately pointless, as debates over Linux distros, Vi vs Emacs and a hoard of other arguments that exist pretty much solely for the sake of being argued.
The Australian population in general would no doubt be much obliged if you send Steve Irwin out after WMDs.
"Crikey, it's a big one, look at the plutonium on that-"
[Camera pans out, mushroom cloud silently expands to the clouds, and another Aussie stereotype dies a long-awaited death]
Insightful? What the? Where do you mods get off? Vegemite is an Australian spread (one might say icon, even though the yanks bought it out years ago) not cockroach puree.
And I don't think we'd want our happy little vegemites to glow in the dark after smearing some chemical weapons yeast extract, either. Roses in cheeks just wouldn't be in it then.
"They are a little bit smelly, and there's something about the way they move their antennae. But they look nicer when you put a little circuit on their backs and remove their wings."
Man, you so know this guy pulled the wings off of flies when he was a little tyke.
Well, seeing as though you loved Spirited Away, and Princess Mononoke, you might want to watch some other Miyazaki/Ghibli titles. Whisper of the Heart and I Can Hear the Sea are two of my favorites, but these are much more introspective than the two you listed. Wings of Honneamise is also a great film, by Gainax.
Anime TV series aren't usually as well done as theatrical releases, just due to time constraints. That said, my favorite series are Saishuu Heiki Kanojo (Often abbreviated to Saikano), and Hikaru no Go.
Saishuu Heiki Kanojo translates to "She, the Ultimate Weapon", but despite that, the show is fairly good. It's an apocalyptic, anti-war, romantic tragedy.
Hikaru no Go ("Hikaru's Go") is the story of a kid (Hikaru) who discovers talent and aptitude in the ancient oriental game "Go". The series follows him , and a bunch of his friends and opponents. The description doesn't sound very exciting, I know, but I haven't heard of anyone whose seen Hikaru no Go and disliked it. It's been credited for somewhat of a Go renaissance among Japanese children.
Some other recommendations: Serial Experiments Lain for a bit of a think, Full Metal Panic for a nice romantic-comedy/action show, and Neon Genesis Evangelion for angst, giant robots, destruction and general wierdness.
Serial Experiments Lain, Full Metal Panic, and Neon Genesis Evangelion are all available on DVD in the US. Saishuu Heiki Kanojo has been licensed in Australia, but is around in fansub form. Hikaru no Go hasn't been licensed (the manga has, not the anime) and is likewise around in fansub form.
Yeah, it's legal to chip the machines. Just a pity it's illegal to buy the chips.
(As the law stands, owning a chipped machine isn't illegal, and chipping a machine isn't legal, but buying or importing a mod chip is. If you had a chip before the law was passed, you're sitting sweet, but if you didn't, tough luck)
I think part of the reason people are reluctant to give the ISPs this sort of responsibility is that then that would make the internet analagous to a telco. The strength of the internet is that it is out of the control of companies (although this position is getting more and more tenuous - cf SiteFinder).
But much as I hate to use the term, this is a prime example of the slippery slop. If we refuse to guard ourselves, and appoint guardians, then we no longer control the system, the guardians do. Somebody has to do something about these problems. You can either do it yourself, and retain control, or give it to others, and lose control.
Maybe there's no choice but to lose control. Maybe the internet population in general just cannot exercise eternal vigilance. But that's the only coin that buys freedom.
- Sorry for the melodrama there, but I just can't help myself sometimes. I wonder if anybody else will find their way down to the bottom of this thread. Nice talking to you anyways. -
"Blocking port 25 stops 100% of spam. That's it's overgregarious is the problem."
That is pretty much what I meant. Stupid doesn't necessarily mean ineffective - it can mean inappropriate too.
No, I don't particularly want governments interfering with this. Quite apart from the legendary technical ineptitude of most governments, you'd have problems with the governments of various countries implementing contradictory regulations and such. I think that the best solution for spam is a technical one.
Filtering is ok, but it's a stop-gap measure at best. Even if it got a 100% success rate, it wouldn't stop the bandwidth wastage spam causes. I'm hoping a bunch of smart people are going to come up with a replacement, or enhanced, SMTP that retains enough backwards compatibility to be slowly phased in over time. The only real answer to a technical problem is a technical solution. Regulations and litigation deal with societal problems, not technical ones.
"You consider firewalls bad, then?"
If it's my machines they're protecting, and I can't reconfigure them, damn straight I do. Perhaps I should rephrase that "control of their ports", but that would just mangle the quote even more. The gist comes through, I think.
"Why would you need to parse a connection? Look at the origin, compare to the destination."
Um, that is parsing the data being transferred. When you look at a datastream, and analyze it so it forms actual information, that's parsing.
Monitoring volume of traffic may work, but that would mean penalizing people who transfer large attachments too.
SSHing into a rooted box may be overkill, but it's one way I could think of off the top of my head to easily foil any content analysis of a datastream over port 25. I didn't bother trying to find a light, streamlined approach, as I was merely using it as an example of how such as an idea as the original post puts forward could be avoided. As long as it can be avoided, the approach is stupid. ISPs monitoring, filtering or denying the use of port 25 is a stupid way to prevent spam.
To butcher an oft-used quote: Those who trade their ports for a little temporary security do not deserve ports or security, and in the end, will have neither.
How on earth would this system be done, technically? I mean, ok, if the spammers were sending mail through their ISPs SMTP server, it could be done.
However, most spammers seem to rely on open relays to send spam through. So unless the ISPs monitor all port 25 traffic, and parse it to determine the number of emails, there's no way they could block it. Not to mention I'd leave any ISP that did this as soon as I'd stopped swearing at them. And of course, encrypting the traffic between the spammer and the relay (like SSHing into a rooted box before spamming) would nullify this technique anyway.
I assume the grandparent is referring to the ISP providing the spammer with his service, not the ISPs providing the intermediate jumps. I'm pretty sure any ISP would disconnect anyone who it can be proved has been spamming.
And you'll notice Neo actually has a copy of Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation" on his bookshelf. It's the hollowed out book where he keeps his contraband software. So the book that talks about simulucra isn't actually a book, it's only the image of a book.
I laughed myself silly over that one. I have no life.
IANAL, but I don't think that's the case. It is for trademarks I believe (Hence cases against Kleenex and Xerox and Band-Aid; there was the thought that the names for these products had become a part of the english language, not a label for a product) but in the case of copyrights, I don't believe you can lose them for not enforcing them.
You're right. The Oracle is obviously their database admin. And I didn't understand half the stuff the Architect went on about - maybe he's their perl programmer?
Australian votes aren't counted by volunteers. I've worked in the last 4 or 5 elections as a polling official. Basically, that means that I initial a ballot when I hand it out (un-initialed ballots are not counted, so nobody can nick a bunch of papers and vote multiple times), check off people's names when they collect their ballot paper, and tell them what is required for their vote to be counted. After the election, we then count the votes.
During the counting process, representatives of any of the parties involved in the election may come and oversee (although not participate in) the counting. I work in a small electorate, so we don't often get more than one or two, but their role is to make sure the counting of their party votes is accurate.
Also, Australia may have a vastly smaller population than America, but all Australian citizens over 18 are compelled to vote. So Australia might actually have a comparable voting public to America, I don't know. How many people voted in the last US election?
Wouldn't the age of the mouse be just the same as a normal mouse? It wouldn't experience a longer life, it'd just be like the equivelant of crossing a 20 year time zone. Do mice get jet lag?
What you're talking about has already been done by my ISP in Australia. They introduced their FlatRate plans when every other ISP with unlimited download plans was either changing them or going out of business. Their plans have remained sustainable. Since then, other providers have started up again with the unlimited plans, although not using Internodes priority system.
One unintended consequence is that any packets going through the priority system, even if they're at a high priority, are slowed down. In response to this, Internode has put most of the main gaming servers people use outside of the priority system.
Internode use CISCO routers and a homebrew software solution to manage all this stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
"I would suggest you leave the IT industry and take up something you are competent at."
Aye, there's the rub.
It doesn't - it runs 1/5th. Other webservers make up the difference between Apache's 66% and IIS' 20%.
Man, you can so tell you're on Slashdot when the major impact of our species losing one gender is that you don't have to remember a few pronouns.
But hey, if you have to work to watch it, that must mean it's good, right?
And yet people still like it. Depending on your definitions, everything is work. Who wants to spend hours memorizing the layout of a map, the spawn locations of ammo, the best sniping spots, etc, just to add another digit to the frag counter sitting on your screen?
I know I don't, and that's why I don't often play FPSs. What I do like is playing a game where characters have personality, where the gamer empathizes with the characters, and where the player can, to some extent, control the characters.
I really enjoyed mucking around with the Materia system in FF7, and the relics on FF6, and the classes on older FFs - I liked being able to shape the character. I also appreciated the cutscenes in the PS+ games. Pre-rendered scenes can add a lot of drama to an intense moment in the game.
Basically, it comes down to different taste. Final Fantasy games are not marketed to the FPS crowd, nor the sports games to the adventure game groupies, nor the card games to the RTS bunch. And just because a GTA3 player doesn't find a interactive movie fun, doesn't mean the other game is crap. This concept is the main reason I don't play lawn bowls, yet don't harangue my poor old grandpa about his leisure hours.
Debates over RPG vs FPS are just as tedious, and ultimately pointless, as debates over Linux distros, Vi vs Emacs and a hoard of other arguments that exist pretty much solely for the sake of being argued.
The Australian population in general would no doubt be much obliged if you send Steve Irwin out after WMDs.
"Crikey, it's a big one, look at the plutonium on that-" [Camera pans out, mushroom cloud silently expands to the clouds, and another Aussie stereotype dies a long-awaited death]
Insightful? What the? Where do you mods get off? Vegemite is an Australian spread (one might say icon, even though the yanks bought it out years ago) not cockroach puree.
And I don't think we'd want our happy little vegemites to glow in the dark after smearing some chemical weapons yeast extract, either. Roses in cheeks just wouldn't be in it then.
"They are a little bit smelly, and there's something about the way they move their antennae. But they look nicer when you put a little circuit on their backs and remove their wings."
Man, you so know this guy pulled the wings off of flies when he was a little tyke.
Tracker keeps timing out for me :/
Well, seeing as though you loved Spirited Away, and Princess Mononoke, you might want to watch some other Miyazaki/Ghibli titles. Whisper of the Heart and I Can Hear the Sea are two of my favorites, but these are much more introspective than the two you listed. Wings of Honneamise is also a great film, by Gainax.
Anime TV series aren't usually as well done as theatrical releases, just due to time constraints. That said, my favorite series are Saishuu Heiki Kanojo (Often abbreviated to Saikano), and Hikaru no Go.
Saishuu Heiki Kanojo translates to "She, the Ultimate Weapon", but despite that, the show is fairly good. It's an apocalyptic, anti-war, romantic tragedy.
Hikaru no Go ("Hikaru's Go") is the story of a kid (Hikaru) who discovers talent and aptitude in the ancient oriental game "Go". The series follows him , and a bunch of his friends and opponents. The description doesn't sound very exciting, I know, but I haven't heard of anyone whose seen Hikaru no Go and disliked it. It's been credited for somewhat of a Go renaissance among Japanese children.
Some other recommendations: Serial Experiments Lain for a bit of a think, Full Metal Panic for a nice romantic-comedy/action show, and Neon Genesis Evangelion for angst, giant robots, destruction and general wierdness.
Serial Experiments Lain, Full Metal Panic, and Neon Genesis Evangelion are all available on DVD in the US. Saishuu Heiki Kanojo has been licensed in Australia, but is around in fansub form. Hikaru no Go hasn't been licensed (the manga has, not the anime) and is likewise around in fansub form.
Yeah, it's legal to chip the machines. Just a pity it's illegal to buy the chips. (As the law stands, owning a chipped machine isn't illegal, and chipping a machine isn't legal, but buying or importing a mod chip is. If you had a chip before the law was passed, you're sitting sweet, but if you didn't, tough luck)
Thanks
I think part of the reason people are reluctant to give the ISPs this sort of responsibility is that then that would make the internet analagous to a telco. The strength of the internet is that it is out of the control of companies (although this position is getting more and more tenuous - cf SiteFinder).
But much as I hate to use the term, this is a prime example of the slippery slop. If we refuse to guard ourselves, and appoint guardians, then we no longer control the system, the guardians do. Somebody has to do something about these problems. You can either do it yourself, and retain control, or give it to others, and lose control.
Maybe there's no choice but to lose control. Maybe the internet population in general just cannot exercise eternal vigilance. But that's the only coin that buys freedom.
- Sorry for the melodrama there, but I just can't help myself sometimes. I wonder if anybody else will find their way down to the bottom of this thread. Nice talking to you anyways. -
"Blocking port 25 stops 100% of spam. That's it's overgregarious is the problem."
That is pretty much what I meant. Stupid doesn't necessarily mean ineffective - it can mean inappropriate too.
No, I don't particularly want governments interfering with this. Quite apart from the legendary technical ineptitude of most governments, you'd have problems with the governments of various countries implementing contradictory regulations and such. I think that the best solution for spam is a technical one.
Filtering is ok, but it's a stop-gap measure at best. Even if it got a 100% success rate, it wouldn't stop the bandwidth wastage spam causes. I'm hoping a bunch of smart people are going to come up with a replacement, or enhanced, SMTP that retains enough backwards compatibility to be slowly phased in over time. The only real answer to a technical problem is a technical solution. Regulations and litigation deal with societal problems, not technical ones.
"You consider firewalls bad, then?"
If it's my machines they're protecting, and I can't reconfigure them, damn straight I do. Perhaps I should rephrase that "control of their ports", but that would just mangle the quote even more. The gist comes through, I think.
"Why would you need to parse a connection? Look at the origin, compare to the destination."
Um, that is parsing the data being transferred. When you look at a datastream, and analyze it so it forms actual information, that's parsing.
Monitoring volume of traffic may work, but that would mean penalizing people who transfer large attachments too.
SSHing into a rooted box may be overkill, but it's one way I could think of off the top of my head to easily foil any content analysis of a datastream over port 25. I didn't bother trying to find a light, streamlined approach, as I was merely using it as an example of how such as an idea as the original post puts forward could be avoided. As long as it can be avoided, the approach is stupid. ISPs monitoring, filtering or denying the use of port 25 is a stupid way to prevent spam.
To butcher an oft-used quote: Those who trade their ports for a little temporary security do not deserve ports or security, and in the end, will have neither.
That's the crappiest busines plan I've ever heard. It doesn't even have a ????? Profit in it.
Grandparent is talking about telecommuters - so, no, it wouldn't be internal mail.
How on earth would this system be done, technically? I mean, ok, if the spammers were sending mail through their ISPs SMTP server, it could be done.
However, most spammers seem to rely on open relays to send spam through. So unless the ISPs monitor all port 25 traffic, and parse it to determine the number of emails, there's no way they could block it. Not to mention I'd leave any ISP that did this as soon as I'd stopped swearing at them. And of course, encrypting the traffic between the spammer and the relay (like SSHing into a rooted box before spamming) would nullify this technique anyway.
I assume the grandparent is referring to the ISP providing the spammer with his service, not the ISPs providing the intermediate jumps. I'm pretty sure any ISP would disconnect anyone who it can be proved has been spamming.
And you'll notice Neo actually has a copy of Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation" on his bookshelf. It's the hollowed out book where he keeps his contraband software. So the book that talks about simulucra isn't actually a book, it's only the image of a book.
I laughed myself silly over that one. I have no life.
IANAL, but I don't think that's the case. It is for trademarks I believe (Hence cases against Kleenex and Xerox and Band-Aid; there was the thought that the names for these products had become a part of the english language, not a label for a product) but in the case of copyrights, I don't believe you can lose them for not enforcing them.
You're right. The Oracle is obviously their database admin. And I didn't understand half the stuff the Architect went on about - maybe he's their perl programmer?
Australian votes aren't counted by volunteers. I've worked in the last 4 or 5 elections as a polling official. Basically, that means that I initial a ballot when I hand it out (un-initialed ballots are not counted, so nobody can nick a bunch of papers and vote multiple times), check off people's names when they collect their ballot paper, and tell them what is required for their vote to be counted. After the election, we then count the votes.
During the counting process, representatives of any of the parties involved in the election may come and oversee (although not participate in) the counting. I work in a small electorate, so we don't often get more than one or two, but their role is to make sure the counting of their party votes is accurate.
Also, Australia may have a vastly smaller population than America, but all Australian citizens over 18 are compelled to vote. So Australia might actually have a comparable voting public to America, I don't know. How many people voted in the last US election?
Exactly. Mr spaceman isn't any older. He hasn't had a longer life. It's just time has passed in a different way for him.
Wouldn't the age of the mouse be just the same as a normal mouse? It wouldn't experience a longer life, it'd just be like the equivelant of crossing a 20 year time zone. Do mice get jet lag?
What you're talking about has already been done by my ISP in Australia. They introduced their FlatRate plans when every other ISP with unlimited download plans was either changing them or going out of business. Their plans have remained sustainable. Since then, other providers have started up again with the unlimited plans, although not using Internodes priority system.
One unintended consequence is that any packets going through the priority system, even if they're at a high priority, are slowed down. In response to this, Internode has put most of the main gaming servers people use outside of the priority system.
Internode use CISCO routers and a homebrew software solution to manage all this stuff.
Like Final Fantasy IX?