People who call themselves conservatives are not really conservative, they are just republicans who vote any repubican who runs.
My point is that there is no Republican candidate for 2004, just a Fascist candidate (and before anyone mods me a troll, do some research on the historical goals and ideals of Fascism).
Pretending that the Emperor is a Republican is like the Democrats running David Duke and claiming that he will represent the interests they are traditionally associated with, just because he's got their logo attached to his campaign.
It may be wishful thinking on my part, but I'm hoping enough Republicans feel like I did in 2000 - when the Democrats ran the husband of Tipper Gore (a huge opponent of free speech) and Lieberman (essentially a crypto-Fascist) - to make a difference.
Consider if these could be used in a better way, such as to invent a way to de-pollute the atmosphere, replenish the ozone layer, or figure out how to stop people from starving to death.
This is a common argument, and I see three main problems with it.
1 - It assumes an exclusive-or choice between the two. I fail to see why this is the case. There are plenty of smart people in the world to go around.
2 - It assumes that people who are good at creating a space exploration program would be equally good at solving problems like starvation in poor countries. I also fail to see why this is the case. The skills and personal interests involved in those two projects are radically different.
3 - The kind of worldwide problem-solving that people who make this argument always cite (e.g. feeding everyone in the world) is the kind of pie-in-the-sky goal that can (IMO) never really be met. I think that it is important to try and better the living standards of people who are in truly terrible situations, but OTOH unless there is an incredible shift in the nature of governments and societies everywhere then it's a project that will never be completed.
The comparison that comes to mind for me is someone who says that they're going to put off having children until they have a US$1,000,000+ yearly salary, a huge house, four cars, and a personal jet. It's *possible* that it will happen, just unlikely.
It is only recently that allegedly clever-sounding acronyms have been made by forcibly squishing words together that have the proper first letters, and I hope it's a practice that ends soon.
Everyone got by fine when you could abbreviate "signals intelligence" to SIGINT instead of calling it Superior Technological Assessment and Research for Signals Handling Intelligence and Nothing Else just so you could call it STARSHINE.
I have problems with the system described in this article, but not with abbreviating its name to MATRIX (other than the fromage factor).
Oh and ANYONE ELSE IN THE COUNTRY, even a prisoner off death row would be better than bush.
What about one of his relatives, like Jeb Bush? I read a rumour in a newsmagazine from last year that if Emperor Dubyah is re-elected in 2004, the Republicans are going to run Jeb in 2008.
Personally I think that there needs to be a law against anyone from the immediate family of a former president running for office again. I feel the same way about the idea of Hillary Clinton running in 2008 - I refuse to believe that out of millions of US citizens, the ones who are most qualified for the position just so happen to be related to each other or married to former presidents.
There are serious implications for abuse of this kind of automated military within ones own country too.
Right now, if a government wants to declare martial law and force its citizenry to live in a fascist dictatorship, they have to somehow convince the people of the military to do it. That's a lot easier when most of their "troops" can't think for themselves, and you can have them controlled by people who share the totalitarian point of view.
One of the few redeeming features of The Phantom Menace is that it illustrates why having remote-controlled war machines is a bad idea.
All your enemy has to do is take out the control center (e.g. by bombing your tele-operators into oblivion), or jam the signal and your expensive robot force is worthless.
But Enemy of the State was a flop. My movie would succeed because it wouldn't have Will Smith in it.
I'm still not sure why it flopped. There were a few bits of Hollywood-esque "technology" in it, like where the government guys build up a 3D model of the lingerie store Will Smith was in, but overall I thought it was a decent look at privacy and citizen versus government power issues in the modern era.
I mean, come on, it's got a Faraday cage, a TurboExpress handheld game system, and CGI shots of satellites going "beep beep beep" ominously. What else were people looking for?
In fact, I just had a vivid image of a doctor visiting a bunch of children in Iraq who'd lost limbs from playing with those cluster bombs that look like food packets and saying "You did what? Don't you retards know not to open unfamiliar packages?"
See how petty and insulting it sounds when it's in relation to another line of work? That's how the "dumb user" attitude makes tech workers look to people in other fields.
I know this may come as a shock, but there are plenty of careers where computers are a tool, not an end in and of themselves.
I work in IT for a large retailer in the US. Most of our non-IT people are paid well because they sell lots of merchandise to customers and keep them coming back. People who are good at that tend *not* to have the time to learn how to use something like Linux.
I used to have a similar sort of superior attitude about the vast majority of people out there who don't understand computer issues in any sort of detail. Then I started noticing how irritating it was when people who were specialized in other fields - e.g. medicine, car mechanics - did the same thing to me.
I can understand giving someone a bit of trouble if they're clueless *and* work in a tech-related field, but not if they just use computers as a tool for getting something else done.
Do you honestly know how to disassemble and repair your car and home appliances, or perform surgery? My body gets more use than my home or work PCs by default, but I can't perform more than basic repairs on it. Does that make me a moron? No, it just means that I do something else for a living.
Therefore I cannot vouch 100% for the single-click story, it is simply what i have been told by people who have used Outlook.
I was going to ask about this if you hadn't posted a followup.
I've used Outlook at work for almost four years (Eudora at home), and none of the versions we've had (95, 2000, XP, 2003) has opened attachments with a single click. Maybe if you click on a hyperlink in a message, but then it should ask you if you want to save the executable or open it.
Has anyone seen Outlook configured this way first-hand?
This is getting a little off-topic, but you should always, *always* do a VIN check before buying a used car. You will have to pay a little bit, but it is worth it to save yourself the trouble of getting a deathtrap or a vehicle like you describe.
About six months ago I was ready to buy a car, then did a VIN check and found out that according to the DMV records, it wasn't even legally allowed on the road anymore - meaning that either someone had bought it wrecked and fixed it up with substandard parts, or it was stolen and had its VIN tags swapped with the car that really was wrecked, Gone in 60 Seconds-style.
I used Carfax, because you can buy an unlimited use account for a month for about $20, but there are cheaper alternatives if you just want to run a single VIN.
Back on topic: if you google for my name, you get some technical documentation on Soul Reaver and a link to an Old Man Murray screenshot contest from 2000 where I submitted a picture of John Romero's head on Marilyn Monroe's body. Ladies, you may form an orderly queue - please, no shoving or cutting in line.
"But, then we'd have to *support* it!" which would be oh-so-hard...
End users always complain about this attitude without understanding the reasons behind it.
It isn't your one Mozilla installation they *really* care about. It is what allowing you to do it would mean: pretty soon people would be running IE, Netscape, Opera, AvantBrowser, and a whole host of other oddball web clients.
In a situation like that, when someone comes to you with a problem, it multiplies the number of possible reasons by so many that it makes supporting them a nightmare.
When you've helped administer an environment where your job is to make sure that hundreds or thousands of employees (or students) can do what they need to do, *then* you can complain if you still think everyone should be able to set their own standard.
The device I have has no scan feature or anything. Would be an extremely tedious trial and error experiment.
No PS2 cheat device has code-finding features.
Independent hackers generally use PS2Dis to disassemble the ELF files from commercial games and make codes that way.
I used it to make some excellent codes for Soul Reaver 2 and Legacy of Kain: Defiance that enable use of debugging menus from when the games were being tested.
Hopefully when PS2 emulation is a little further along, that software will be able to be used to do things like scan active memory while the game is running.
I say kudos to Gameshark for doing this. Sadly other sites will still post codes, but it's a good start to killing off cheating for the most part.
AFAIK, Gameshark (by which I mean the new, MadCatz-owned company, not the old Interact-owned company) is the *last* one to make this kind of pledge. Try finding online cheating codes on Pelican's site for the Codebreaker, or Datel's site for the Action Replay (formerly sold in the US as the Gameshark), and you will come up empty.
IMO, MadCatz probably only did it after pressure from Sony.
Hey, I watched the footage. I still fail to see how my post was a troll, just because I mentioned that there are people out there that don't want to know anything about new the new film before it comes out. That includes things like Anakin's new look - previously (at least the last time I looked into Episode III) it wasn't even certain if he was going to appear in the Vader costume.
That having been said, Hayden Christiansen as Captain Harlock looks pretty cool.
It's all good until tech support says, "So... Do you have a boot disk?":-)
You joke, but newer servers can do this remotely too.
We have a bunch of Compaq servers at work, and one of the really cool features of the remote administration software is that you can send a virtual floppy image to the machine from anywhere in the world that can open a web browser connection to the server's remote administration board.
A few months ago one of our servers in Denver died, and I had to boot it up in Windows 2000's command prompt only safe mode... but the local admin password had never been written down. I was able to make virtual floppy images of a tool that resets the local admin password, send them over the wire, and boot off of them from the remote administration system.
Okay, it's not fixing a super-expensive robot on another planet, but I thought it was pretty cool.
I have ZERO confidence in Microsoft's ability to harden Windows against constant security peril.
You should check out 2003 Server and the docs on XP SP2. They haven't fixed everything, but they're doing a surprisingly good job.
If you're interested in teaching, though, I would recommend going that route anyway - it is a much more potentially important job than doing IT work for a corporation.
No, a friend of mine did some testing and saw similar restuls.
He applied both types of paste to his CPU using the same method, and with AS3 it was about five degrees cooler.
Interestingly enough, most factory-applied paste is actually used too liberally. Applying your own is pretty much guaranteed to do a better job. On my GeForce4 (which I had to replace a bad fan on), there was a big glop of goo in the middle of the GPU, and none at the edges.
PC gamers are approaching a cult level of devotion to what they expect out of a game, and any deviation from it is unacceptable.
I've played PC games for almost twenty years, but two years ago I started switching to consoles because that's where all the innovation in terms of gameplay and UI is happening.
My prediction is that in a few years, there will be three types of PC game left - the FPS, the RTS, and the MMORPG. PC gamers just don't seem to be willing to support anything else.
I agree. This is a limit of the game engine, not the system. Metroid Prime on the Gamecube and Soul Reaver on the Playstation had seamless worlds that streamed the game data off of the disc into less memory than the XBox has.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that the research that page cites was retracted and that the rest of the site reads like an X-Files fanfiction:
"The described disc was clearly an antigravity levitating aerial weapons platform in the U.S. arsenal, possibly a Lockheed X-22A two-man discoid craft, the real DarkStar, (of which the unmanned drone X-22 DarkStar is a front "cover" aircraft program to disguise this manned antigravity fighter disc.) Further, it appears that the real DarkStar manned discs come equipped with the latest Neutral Particle Beam weapons, which take apart the target at the molecular level. ET craft do not incinerate humans. Only human military fighters are so deployed. So this report does not deal with any extraterrestrial event."
I would be more than a little suspicious of anything you read there.
See also the other reply discussing the movie-promotion aspect of the story.
People who call themselves conservatives are not really conservative, they are just republicans who vote any repubican who runs.
My point is that there is no Republican candidate for 2004, just a Fascist candidate (and before anyone mods me a troll, do some research on the historical goals and ideals of Fascism).
Pretending that the Emperor is a Republican is like the Democrats running David Duke and claiming that he will represent the interests they are traditionally associated with, just because he's got their logo attached to his campaign.
It may be wishful thinking on my part, but I'm hoping enough Republicans feel like I did in 2000 - when the Democrats ran the husband of Tipper Gore (a huge opponent of free speech) and Lieberman (essentially a crypto-Fascist) - to make a difference.
Consider if these could be used in a better way, such as to invent a way to de-pollute the atmosphere, replenish the ozone layer, or figure out how to stop people from starving to death.
This is a common argument, and I see three main problems with it.
1 - It assumes an exclusive-or choice between the two. I fail to see why this is the case. There are plenty of smart people in the world to go around.
2 - It assumes that people who are good at creating a space exploration program would be equally good at solving problems like starvation in poor countries. I also fail to see why this is the case. The skills and personal interests involved in those two projects are radically different.
3 - The kind of worldwide problem-solving that people who make this argument always cite (e.g. feeding everyone in the world) is the kind of pie-in-the-sky goal that can (IMO) never really be met. I think that it is important to try and better the living standards of people who are in truly terrible situations, but OTOH unless there is an incredible shift in the nature of governments and societies everywhere then it's a project that will never be completed.
The comparison that comes to mind for me is someone who says that they're going to put off having children until they have a US$1,000,000+ yearly salary, a huge house, four cars, and a personal jet. It's *possible* that it will happen, just unlikely.
It is only recently that allegedly clever-sounding acronyms have been made by forcibly squishing words together that have the proper first letters, and I hope it's a practice that ends soon.
Everyone got by fine when you could abbreviate "signals intelligence" to SIGINT instead of calling it Superior Technological Assessment and Research for Signals Handling Intelligence and Nothing Else just so you could call it STARSHINE.
I have problems with the system described in this article, but not with abbreviating its name to MATRIX (other than the fromage factor).
9/11 was more a convenient excuse for the right wing to reimplement domestic spying.
In all fairness, it's not all of the right wing who support the fascist ideology of the neo-conservatives.
There are plenty of old-school Republicans out there who really do support things like small government, low taxes, and individual rights.
I just hope they realize that even though Emperor Dubyah calls himself a Republican instead of a Fascist, they don't need to vote for him this year.
Oh and ANYONE ELSE IN THE COUNTRY, even a prisoner off death row would be better than bush.
What about one of his relatives, like Jeb Bush? I read a rumour in a newsmagazine from last year that if Emperor Dubyah is re-elected in 2004, the Republicans are going to run Jeb in 2008.
Personally I think that there needs to be a law against anyone from the immediate family of a former president running for office again. I feel the same way about the idea of Hillary Clinton running in 2008 - I refuse to believe that out of millions of US citizens, the ones who are most qualified for the position just so happen to be related to each other or married to former presidents.
+1 bonus removed for being offtopic.
Mod parent up.
There are serious implications for abuse of this kind of automated military within ones own country too.
Right now, if a government wants to declare martial law and force its citizenry to live in a fascist dictatorship, they have to somehow convince the people of the military to do it. That's a lot easier when most of their "troops" can't think for themselves, and you can have them controlled by people who share the totalitarian point of view.
One of the few redeeming features of The Phantom Menace is that it illustrates why having remote-controlled war machines is a bad idea.
All your enemy has to do is take out the control center (e.g. by bombing your tele-operators into oblivion), or jam the signal and your expensive robot force is worthless.
But Enemy of the State was a flop. My movie would succeed because it wouldn't have Will Smith in it.
I'm still not sure why it flopped. There were a few bits of Hollywood-esque "technology" in it, like where the government guys build up a 3D model of the lingerie store Will Smith was in, but overall I thought it was a decent look at privacy and citizen versus government power issues in the modern era.
I mean, come on, it's got a Faraday cage, a TurboExpress handheld game system, and CGI shots of satellites going "beep beep beep" ominously. What else were people looking for?
In fact, I just had a vivid image of a doctor visiting a bunch of children in Iraq who'd lost limbs from playing with those cluster bombs that look like food packets and saying "You did what? Don't you retards know not to open unfamiliar packages?"
See how petty and insulting it sounds when it's in relation to another line of work? That's how the "dumb user" attitude makes tech workers look to people in other fields.
I know this may come as a shock, but there are plenty of careers where computers are a tool, not an end in and of themselves.
I work in IT for a large retailer in the US. Most of our non-IT people are paid well because they sell lots of merchandise to customers and keep them coming back. People who are good at that tend *not* to have the time to learn how to use something like Linux.
I used to have a similar sort of superior attitude about the vast majority of people out there who don't understand computer issues in any sort of detail. Then I started noticing how irritating it was when people who were specialized in other fields - e.g. medicine, car mechanics - did the same thing to me.
I can understand giving someone a bit of trouble if they're clueless *and* work in a tech-related field, but not if they just use computers as a tool for getting something else done.
Do you honestly know how to disassemble and repair your car and home appliances, or perform surgery? My body gets more use than my home or work PCs by default, but I can't perform more than basic repairs on it. Does that make me a moron? No, it just means that I do something else for a living.
Therefore I cannot vouch 100% for the single-click story, it is simply what i have been told by people who have used Outlook.
I was going to ask about this if you hadn't posted a followup.
I've used Outlook at work for almost four years (Eudora at home), and none of the versions we've had (95, 2000, XP, 2003) has opened attachments with a single click. Maybe if you click on a hyperlink in a message, but then it should ask you if you want to save the executable or open it.
Has anyone seen Outlook configured this way first-hand?
I feel old. I can't believe someone who is younger than my little sister is in jail and has her picture up on a personals site for convicts.
The checked the VIN on the Internet
This is getting a little off-topic, but you should always, *always* do a VIN check before buying a used car. You will have to pay a little bit, but it is worth it to save yourself the trouble of getting a deathtrap or a vehicle like you describe.
About six months ago I was ready to buy a car, then did a VIN check and found out that according to the DMV records, it wasn't even legally allowed on the road anymore - meaning that either someone had bought it wrecked and fixed it up with substandard parts, or it was stolen and had its VIN tags swapped with the car that really was wrecked, Gone in 60 Seconds-style.
I used Carfax, because you can buy an unlimited use account for a month for about $20, but there are cheaper alternatives if you just want to run a single VIN.
Back on topic: if you google for my name, you get some technical documentation on Soul Reaver and a link to an Old Man Murray screenshot contest from 2000 where I submitted a picture of John Romero's head on Marilyn Monroe's body. Ladies, you may form an orderly queue - please, no shoving or cutting in line.
Holy crap, they really need a "convicted for" field. Not out until 2024? What did she do, commit genocide?
"Flamebait"?
Slashdot needs to change its tagline to "News for Nerds, Moderation by Dumbasses."
"But, then we'd have to *support* it!" which would be oh-so-hard...
End users always complain about this attitude without understanding the reasons behind it.
It isn't your one Mozilla installation they *really* care about. It is what allowing you to do it would mean: pretty soon people would be running IE, Netscape, Opera, AvantBrowser, and a whole host of other oddball web clients.
In a situation like that, when someone comes to you with a problem, it multiplies the number of possible reasons by so many that it makes supporting them a nightmare.
When you've helped administer an environment where your job is to make sure that hundreds or thousands of employees (or students) can do what they need to do, *then* you can complain if you still think everyone should be able to set their own standard.
The device I have has no scan feature or anything. Would be an extremely tedious trial and error experiment.
No PS2 cheat device has code-finding features.
Independent hackers generally use PS2Dis to disassemble the ELF files from commercial games and make codes that way.
I used it to make some excellent codes for Soul Reaver 2 and Legacy of Kain: Defiance that enable use of debugging menus from when the games were being tested.
Hopefully when PS2 emulation is a little further along, that software will be able to be used to do things like scan active memory while the game is running.
I say kudos to Gameshark for doing this. Sadly other sites will still post codes, but it's a good start to killing off cheating for the most part.
AFAIK, Gameshark (by which I mean the new, MadCatz-owned company, not the old Interact-owned company) is the *last* one to make this kind of pledge. Try finding online cheating codes on Pelican's site for the Codebreaker, or Datel's site for the Action Replay (formerly sold in the US as the Gameshark), and you will come up empty.
IMO, MadCatz probably only did it after pressure from Sony.
Hey, I watched the footage. I still fail to see how my post was a troll, just because I mentioned that there are people out there that don't want to know anything about new the new film before it comes out. That includes things like Anakin's new look - previously (at least the last time I looked into Episode III) it wasn't even certain if he was going to appear in the Vader costume.
That having been said, Hayden Christiansen as Captain Harlock looks pretty cool.
Spoiler warnings on the front page please? Some people like to be surprised when they finally see a film.
It's all good until tech support says, "So... Do you have a boot disk?" :-)
You joke, but newer servers can do this remotely too.
We have a bunch of Compaq servers at work, and one of the really cool features of the remote administration software is that you can send a virtual floppy image to the machine from anywhere in the world that can open a web browser connection to the server's remote administration board.
A few months ago one of our servers in Denver died, and I had to boot it up in Windows 2000's command prompt only safe mode... but the local admin password had never been written down. I was able to make virtual floppy images of a tool that resets the local admin password, send them over the wire, and boot off of them from the remote administration system.
Okay, it's not fixing a super-expensive robot on another planet, but I thought it was pretty cool.
I have ZERO confidence in Microsoft's ability to harden Windows against constant security peril.
You should check out 2003 Server and the docs on XP SP2. They haven't fixed everything, but they're doing a surprisingly good job.
If you're interested in teaching, though, I would recommend going that route anyway - it is a much more potentially important job than doing IT work for a corporation.
No, a friend of mine did some testing and saw similar restuls.
He applied both types of paste to his CPU using the same method, and with AS3 it was about five degrees cooler.
Interestingly enough, most factory-applied paste is actually used too liberally. Applying your own is pretty much guaranteed to do a better job. On my GeForce4 (which I had to replace a bad fan on), there was a big glop of goo in the middle of the GPU, and none at the edges.
I think you've hit the nail on the head.
PC gamers are approaching a cult level of devotion to what they expect out of a game, and any deviation from it is unacceptable.
I've played PC games for almost twenty years, but two years ago I started switching to consoles because that's where all the innovation in terms of gameplay and UI is happening.
My prediction is that in a few years, there will be three types of PC game left - the FPS, the RTS, and the MMORPG. PC gamers just don't seem to be willing to support anything else.
I agree. This is a limit of the game engine, not the system. Metroid Prime on the Gamecube and Soul Reaver on the Playstation had seamless worlds that streamed the game data off of the disc into less memory than the XBox has.