That's neat. Given that the bulk of your spam will be coming from future quantum computing machines... can you tell us what products are being used to treat erectile dysfunction, say, a hundred years from now?
I think your father would recover a lot faster if you weren't by his sickbed clacking over your keyboard and humming PC.
I know you're just being funny, and I don't really mean to pick on you, but that's rather unkind. As someone who spent three years doing the same thing full-time before my father died, I'd say his Dad should be bloody well thankful that he has a son willing to take care of him, clacking keyboard or otherwise. Heck, when I moved back in to my father's old house I moved my entire multinode Wildcat! BBS back in with me. It was sixteen processors, plus the file server and a couple of miscellaneous workstations. He thought it was cool (all those CGA monitors with text scrolling by looked like Mission Control.) I remember that system generating so much heat that we turned the furnace way down in winter.
Taking care of a sick person is difficult at best, even if you're trained for it, and if that individual happens to be a parent it is doubly hard, believe me. What Gopal.V is doing is very uncommon in this day and age (at least in the U.S.) and is to be commended. Parents are too often treated as disposable commodities that end up dying by degrees in a nursing home surrounded by strangers, because family members who should know better are too "busy" with their "responsibilities", or just too lazy and self-important to be bothered caring for the previous generation.
I'm sure that's part of it, but it's more a matter of Control Your Ass, meaning they want to control our asses insofar as we are accessing what they consider to be "their" information. It's not... it's ours. We paid for it, and if one of us wants to present a view of that data that is more useful than the view they chose to present... that's tough.
I keep wondering when they'll start arguing that providing "moral support" is sufficient, and at what point (if any) the American people will decide that they've had enough, and whether or not it'll be soon enough.
People generally ignore potential consequences that can only theoretically happen to them. Look how many people continue to smoke ("yes yes, I know it causes cancer but my Uncle Dudley smoked a thousand packs a day and lived to be a hundred and seventy so it won't happen to me") when they absolutely do know better. Human beings are, at the core, not rational animals. We are rationalizing creatures who, except in rare cases, require substantial training to become rational ones.
We are remarkably efficient at finding reasons to do what we want to do even when we know we shouldn't, and are even better at justifying to ourselves doing absolutely nothing when there's every reason to believe that we should do something. I can't see such a fundamental defect in human nature correcting itself in the near future, so I'm not sanguine about our ever deciding that we've had enough.
And if we do... we, exactly, will we be able to do about it?
I'd love to see a complete overhaul of all sitting candidates in favor for new blood, Democrat *and* Republican who can hopefully work together in a more non-partisan way to actually do something rather than continuously position and campaign.
To quote Lewis Black: "The only thing stupider than a Republican or a Democrat is when these little pricks work together."
Well, I discussed the matter with my girlfriend, and she said that if ever we ever do get married and have kids, she is flatly not going to eat the defective ones, resources be damned, and if that's my attitude I can just eat kids for dinner while she goes out with her friends.
It is inevitable, Mr Anderson. When you figure out how much money the world has put into copy protection, vs how much they have actually lost to piracy...what are they really gaining?
Congratulations on posting one of the most arrogant, clueless remarks I've heard in a long time. The rest of you had just as many centuries as we did to come up with something like the Internet and failed. We gave it to you for free, let all of you use it, even our bitterest enemies, and have managed it with a far more even hand than ANY of you "people who understand how serious this stuff really is" would ever have done.
Truthfully, your comment smacks more of blindly uninformed anti-Americanism and unadulterated sour grapes than anything resembling a legitimate complaint. Ask yourself just how useful the Internet would have been to the ENTIRE WORLD had China (Great Firewall aside) been running the show for the past thirty years. Would the fractious European Union have managed it particularly well? Would they have been able to resist the temptation to use the Domain Name System as a political tool? That is, I might add, exactly what the European Union was doing last year with all their posturing and threats to take over the root servers. The EU's governing bodies have already shown their irresponsibility in this regard, and I certainly wouldn't trust them with that much power.
Could it be that you are you one of those misguided individuals that wants DNS placed under United Nations control? Good luck with that, my friend. I figure the ENTIRE WORLD will eventually find a way to balkanize and limit the capability of the Internet to levels that suit your average totalitarian state, and make it much less useful than it is today. When that finally does happen (and it will) you'll be looking back to the glory days of United States control, when you could send data anywhere in the world, anytime, anywhere, for whatever reason you wanted.
As you say, this is serious stuff so you'd best be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.
And you're right... the atmosphere in that game was remarkably creepy, and the sound effects were perfect. The artwork in both Shadow Warrior and Blood was incredible: the only game of that era that surpassed even Blood from a graphics perspective was probably Redneck Rampage. Now THAT was a fun game, and about as far from being PC as it's possible to get. Yee Haw!
All those early Build Engine games really had an outrageous sense of fun, of hilarity, that is missing in most modern first-person shooters. Contrast Duke Nukem ("Yeah. Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out!") with, say, Half Life. Half Life is a great game but you don't find yourself unable to breathe because you're laughing so hard at the way your opponent walked into the trip bomb you left around the corner and blew himself up. I had many long nights with a half dozen friends playing those games on a LAN. Regularly in those sessions you'd hear a burst of gunfire, a rocket launch, or some other weapon going off, and a couple seconds later someone in the room yells "Shit!", "Son of a BITCH!", "You BASTARD!" or simply, "fuck you, man. Yeah, and your horse too." It was great entertainment, really it was. A few months ago I discovered JonoF's Windows ports of Duke and Shadow Warrior and even though he claims the network code is only preliminary it's all done via TCP/IP and plays great over the Internet (which is something I managed to do with the original Duke and Blood by tunnelling IPX packets, but it was neither convenient nor stable.)
As Captain Kirk said to Commissioner Baris in the Trouble with Tribbles episode: "Well, there's no accounting for taste." Besides, I usually buy good beans and grind 'em fresh... it makes pretty damn good coffee.
You can still buy it from the 3DRealms Web site, apparently. Only ten bucks. But you'll have to set up a DOS system (or maybe Linux under DOSEMU, I don't know.) Alternatively, you could try one of the better Windows ports available. Both his Duke Nukem and Shadow Warrior ports play just like the original, only with substantially better graphics. You will, however, have to have the original games around for it to extract the graphics data, since he can't legally make the copyrighted WAD files available for download.
If you liked Shadow Warrior, you would probably have liked the original Blood as well. All those Build Engine games were just hysterical. We'd get seven or eight of us in network play and we would keep going from dusk 'til dawn. Of course, pretty much all of our fingers were numb by morning, but it was worth it.
Yes, but that's because they don't have to... the penalty for a dead microwave oven is maybe having to use your regular oven instead, or going out for dinner. On the other hand, take your refrigerator. How many people have ever had a refrigerator fail? Losing an entire fridge full of food would cause most consumers to never buy from that manufacturer ever again. Manufacturers will design a reliable product when the consequence to the consumer for that device failing is severe.
Companies have also gotten accustomed to the revenue stream they receive from our being forced to buy replacements on a regular basis. I first noticed this with coffeemakers many years ago: I was buying a new one every year. I finally spent a couple hundred bucks in 1996 and bought an honest-to-God Bunn VP-series restaurant coffee machine. It's been ten years and the thing is still going strong. Makes better coffee than any ordinary coffeemaker, which is another bonus and it brews a pot from start to finish in about two minutes. Sometimes you get what you pay for.
I get scans from China, and a lot from India. Also, I get continual attempts to get in on my FTP server. I had one guy from an Indian IP address that spent days trying to guess a password. I finally set up a dummy account with a simple password and let him guess it. He came in, looked around for a while, saw a bunch of Gutenberg Project text files that I left him, and went away again. Hasn't been back since. Weird.
The reply will probably more along the lines of "Hello, beings from Earth, we thank you for the delicious-appearing pictures of your food animals, and welcome you to the Interstellar Federation of Meat-Eating Worlds. A trade mission is already on its way to your planet via hyperdrive: we look forward to a mutually-beneficial exchange of meats."
Uh... how did this win an "insightful", and +5 at that? Good grief, I know the popular view is that all Americans are ignorant warmongers that just can't wait to lob a few cruise missiles at anyone that looks at us funny, but if you're gonna slam us get your facts straight. I have news for you, the Soviet Union orbited tons of satellites over the U.S. and her territories. They did this throughout the Cold War and are still doing it to this very day. And they aren't the only ones.
Furthermore, we never did bomb Russia (for that reason or any other) and haven't bombed anyone else for launching a satellite, spy or otherwise. The reason that most nations don't bother to spy on the U.S. with satellites is because they don't really have to, at least not to the same degree that we do. Anyone can come over here and buy a map at a gas station showing the location of most of our major military installations. Garnering that sort of information with nations like China or Russia without satellite or other technology (such as the U-2) is substantially more difficult. That's why spy satellites were invented in the first place.
Besides, this isn't about China launching an asset, but China screwing around with our assets. And that's all well and good, but you know very well that that government would scream bloody murder if the U.S. or anyone else tried the same thing with one of their birds.
Not really. The power system in the U.S. is remarkably fragile, as a number of recent, rather catastrophic failures have indicated. You have to size a power grid for the peak loads that it will experience: untold millions of air conditioners and refrigerators beating back the summer heat, for example. There currently isn't enough reserve capacity to handle a massive buildout of electric vehicles... if such were to occur, there would have to be a simultaneous buildout of new power plants and distribution capacity to match. Just bringing a new coal-fired plant online can take ten years or more, and nukes, because of various regulatory burdens, take even longer. In any event, it would cost billions and take decades, and I can't see it happening in the near future, not when America is on the verge of economic collapse anyway. No, cars and trucks will be chemically powered for some time to come: we just need to find something better to burn.
Actually, the Middle East has continually sabotaged every effort the United States has made to try and curb its energy use, or develop other fuel technologies. After the wholly-synthetic "energy crisis" of the seventies, smaller, fuel-efficient cars starting becoming extremely popular. OPEC and other non-aligned petroleum-producing countries saw this, and dropped the price of crude to the point where Honda Accords and Chevy Chevettes no longer made economic sense. So, the world can bitch about America being "addicted to petroleum", but certain Middle Eastern countries saw dollar signs and did everything possible to prevent America from weaning itself off their product.
On the other hand, a gallon (U.S., I believe) of gasoline is the energy-equivalent of roughly one hundred sticks of dynamite.
The filling station will probably be, itself, a bank of ultracaps. They'll continually top off from a high-tension line and dump charge really, really fast into each vehicle that comes in.
Of course, none of this really matters at the moment since no nation on Earth has a power grid capable of supporting a significant number of electric vehicles. Certainly not here in the U.S. Adding a few million electric vehicles into the mix would bring our power system to its knees.
Is it because Linux is World made and not American made?
You first point out the Microsoft is employing a lot of non-U.S. developers, and then complain that you can't get Linux because it's "world made"? The only reason you can't get a pre-installed Linux distro at Best Buy or Circuit City is because Microsoft has applied economic pressure (the same old tactics they've used for decades) to prevent that. It has nothing to do with whether it's "American made" or "World made", just that Windows is Microsoft made. And, actually, Linspire and other distros have begun making some headway at the larger retailers, and I expect they'll make more as time goes on.
And just FYI, an American company by the name of IBM has put a ton of money into Linux development. Of course, a lot of their developers are in India. So, what again was your point?
Slashdot Mirror
That's neat. Given that the bulk of your spam will be coming from future quantum computing machines ... can you tell us what products are being used to treat erectile dysfunction, say, a hundred years from now?
I think your father would recover a lot faster if you weren't by his sickbed clacking over your keyboard and humming PC.
I know you're just being funny, and I don't really mean to pick on you, but that's rather unkind. As someone who spent three years doing the same thing full-time before my father died, I'd say his Dad should be bloody well thankful that he has a son willing to take care of him, clacking keyboard or otherwise. Heck, when I moved back in to my father's old house I moved my entire multinode Wildcat! BBS back in with me. It was sixteen processors, plus the file server and a couple of miscellaneous workstations. He thought it was cool (all those CGA monitors with text scrolling by looked like Mission Control.) I remember that system generating so much heat that we turned the furnace way down in winter.
Taking care of a sick person is difficult at best, even if you're trained for it, and if that individual happens to be a parent it is doubly hard, believe me. What Gopal.V is doing is very uncommon in this day and age (at least in the U.S.) and is to be commended. Parents are too often treated as disposable commodities that end up dying by degrees in a nursing home surrounded by strangers, because family members who should know better are too "busy" with their "responsibilities", or just too lazy and self-important to be bothered caring for the previous generation.
Sorry for going off-topic.
That's all. It's entirely _cya_.
... it's ours. We paid for it, and if one of us wants to present a view of that data that is more useful than the view they chose to present ... that's tough.
I'm sure that's part of it, but it's more a matter of Control Your Ass, meaning they want to control our asses insofar as we are accessing what they consider to be "their" information. It's not
Could we even vote to have folks we don't like zapped?
If that were the case, I suspect that the number of heart attacks among cell phone users would rise dramatically.
I keep wondering when they'll start arguing that providing "moral support" is sufficient, and at what point (if any) the American people will decide that they've had enough, and whether or not it'll be soon enough.
... we, exactly, will we be able to do about it?
People generally ignore potential consequences that can only theoretically happen to them. Look how many people continue to smoke ("yes yes, I know it causes cancer but my Uncle Dudley smoked a thousand packs a day and lived to be a hundred and seventy so it won't happen to me") when they absolutely do know better. Human beings are, at the core, not rational animals. We are rationalizing creatures who, except in rare cases, require substantial training to become rational ones.
We are remarkably efficient at finding reasons to do what we want to do even when we know we shouldn't, and are even better at justifying to ourselves doing absolutely nothing when there's every reason to believe that we should do something. I can't see such a fundamental defect in human nature correcting itself in the near future, so I'm not sanguine about our ever deciding that we've had enough.
And if we do
I'd love to see a complete overhaul of all sitting candidates in favor for new blood, Democrat *and* Republican who can hopefully work together in a more non-partisan way to actually do something rather than continuously position and campaign.
To quote Lewis Black: "The only thing stupider than a Republican or a Democrat is when these little pricks work together."
Well, I discussed the matter with my girlfriend, and she said that if ever we ever do get married and have kids, she is flatly not going to eat the defective ones, resources be damned, and if that's my attitude I can just eat kids for dinner while she goes out with her friends.
Other than that, I pretty much agree with you.
It is inevitable, Mr Anderson. When you figure out how much money the world has put into copy protection, vs how much they have actually lost to piracy...what are they really gaining?
It's the smell (of money.)
Congratulations on posting one of the most arrogant, clueless remarks I've heard in a long time. The rest of you had just as many centuries as we did to come up with something like the Internet and failed. We gave it to you for free, let all of you use it, even our bitterest enemies, and have managed it with a far more even hand than ANY of you "people who understand how serious this stuff really is" would ever have done.
Truthfully, your comment smacks more of blindly uninformed anti-Americanism and unadulterated sour grapes than anything resembling a legitimate complaint. Ask yourself just how useful the Internet would have been to the ENTIRE WORLD had China (Great Firewall aside) been running the show for the past thirty years. Would the fractious European Union have managed it particularly well? Would they have been able to resist the temptation to use the Domain Name System as a political tool? That is, I might add, exactly what the European Union was doing last year with all their posturing and threats to take over the root servers. The EU's governing bodies have already shown their irresponsibility in this regard, and I certainly wouldn't trust them with that much power.
Could it be that you are you one of those misguided individuals that wants DNS placed under United Nations control? Good luck with that, my friend. I figure the ENTIRE WORLD will eventually find a way to balkanize and limit the capability of the Internet to levels that suit your average totalitarian state, and make it much less useful than it is today. When that finally does happen (and it will) you'll be looking back to the glory days of United States control, when you could send data anywhere in the world, anytime, anywhere, for whatever reason you wanted.
As you say, this is serious stuff so you'd best be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.
"You're going to need a bigger boat."
... I'm the guy with the gun."
... the atmosphere in that game was remarkably creepy, and the sound effects were perfect. The artwork in both Shadow Warrior and Blood was incredible: the only game of that era that surpassed even Blood from a graphics perspective was probably Redneck Rampage. Now THAT was a fun game, and about as far from being PC as it's possible to get. Yee Haw!
"Good, bad
"Manu matsen fearbo!"
And you're right
All those early Build Engine games really had an outrageous sense of fun, of hilarity, that is missing in most modern first-person shooters. Contrast Duke Nukem ("Yeah. Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out!") with, say, Half Life. Half Life is a great game but you don't find yourself unable to breathe because you're laughing so hard at the way your opponent walked into the trip bomb you left around the corner and blew himself up. I had many long nights with a half dozen friends playing those games on a LAN. Regularly in those sessions you'd hear a burst of gunfire, a rocket launch, or some other weapon going off, and a couple seconds later someone in the room yells "Shit!", "Son of a BITCH!", "You BASTARD!" or simply, "fuck you, man. Yeah, and your horse too." It was great entertainment, really it was. A few months ago I discovered JonoF's Windows ports of Duke and Shadow Warrior and even though he claims the network code is only preliminary it's all done via TCP/IP and plays great over the Internet (which is something I managed to do with the original Duke and Blood by tunnelling IPX packets, but it was neither convenient nor stable.)
As Captain Kirk said to Commissioner Baris in the Trouble with Tribbles episode: "Well, there's no accounting for taste." Besides, I usually buy good beans and grind 'em fresh ... it makes pretty damn good coffee.
You can still buy it from the 3DRealms Web site, apparently. Only ten bucks. But you'll have to set up a DOS system (or maybe Linux under DOSEMU, I don't know.) Alternatively, you could try one of the better Windows ports available. Both his Duke Nukem and Shadow Warrior ports play just like the original, only with substantially better graphics. You will, however, have to have the original games around for it to extract the graphics data, since he can't legally make the copyrighted WAD files available for download.
"Ho! Sticky bomb like-a you!"
"Are you a stupid?"
"You want to wash wang, or watch Wang wash wang?
If you liked Shadow Warrior, you would probably have liked the original Blood as well. All those Build Engine games were just hysterical. We'd get seven or eight of us in network play and we would keep going from dusk 'til dawn. Of course, pretty much all of our fingers were numb by morning, but it was worth it.
Electric cars damage the environment less than gasoline cars.
So long as you properly dispose of used batteries.
I'd go with Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition, Shadow Warrior and Blood.
Yes, but that's because they don't have to ... the penalty for a dead microwave oven is maybe having to use your regular oven instead, or going out for dinner. On the other hand, take your refrigerator. How many people have ever had a refrigerator fail? Losing an entire fridge full of food would cause most consumers to never buy from that manufacturer ever again. Manufacturers will design a reliable product when the consequence to the consumer for that device failing is severe.
Companies have also gotten accustomed to the revenue stream they receive from our being forced to buy replacements on a regular basis. I first noticed this with coffeemakers many years ago: I was buying a new one every year. I finally spent a couple hundred bucks in 1996 and bought an honest-to-God Bunn VP-series restaurant coffee machine. It's been ten years and the thing is still going strong. Makes better coffee than any ordinary coffeemaker, which is another bonus and it brews a pot from start to finish in about two minutes. Sometimes you get what you pay for.
I get scans from China, and a lot from India. Also, I get continual attempts to get in on my FTP server. I had one guy from an Indian IP address that spent days trying to guess a password. I finally set up a dummy account with a simple password and let him guess it. He came in, looked around for a while, saw a bunch of Gutenberg Project text files that I left him, and went away again. Hasn't been back since. Weird.
that the "Great Firewall" doesn't work so well in the other direction.
Yes, rather like a 90 lb. gorilla.
The reply will probably more along the lines of "Hello, beings from Earth, we thank you for the delicious-appearing pictures of your food animals, and welcome you to the Interstellar Federation of Meat-Eating Worlds. A trade mission is already on its way to your planet via hyperdrive: we look forward to a mutually-beneficial exchange of meats."
Uh ... how did this win an "insightful", and +5 at that? Good grief, I know the popular view is that all Americans are ignorant warmongers that just can't wait to lob a few cruise missiles at anyone that looks at us funny, but if you're gonna slam us get your facts straight. I have news for you, the Soviet Union orbited tons of satellites over the U.S. and her territories. They did this throughout the Cold War and are still doing it to this very day. And they aren't the only ones.
Furthermore, we never did bomb Russia (for that reason or any other) and haven't bombed anyone else for launching a satellite, spy or otherwise. The reason that most nations don't bother to spy on the U.S. with satellites is because they don't really have to, at least not to the same degree that we do. Anyone can come over here and buy a map at a gas station showing the location of most of our major military installations. Garnering that sort of information with nations like China or Russia without satellite or other technology (such as the U-2) is substantially more difficult. That's why spy satellites were invented in the first place.
Besides, this isn't about China launching an asset, but China screwing around with our assets. And that's all well and good, but you know very well that that government would scream bloody murder if the U.S. or anyone else tried the same thing with one of their birds.
Not really. The power system in the U.S. is remarkably fragile, as a number of recent, rather catastrophic failures have indicated. You have to size a power grid for the peak loads that it will experience: untold millions of air conditioners and refrigerators beating back the summer heat, for example. There currently isn't enough reserve capacity to handle a massive buildout of electric vehicles ... if such were to occur, there would have to be a simultaneous buildout of new power plants and distribution capacity to match. Just bringing a new coal-fired plant online can take ten years or more, and nukes, because of various regulatory burdens, take even longer. In any event, it would cost billions and take decades, and I can't see it happening in the near future, not when America is on the verge of economic collapse anyway. No, cars and trucks will be chemically powered for some time to come: we just need to find something better to burn.
Actually, the Middle East has continually sabotaged every effort the United States has made to try and curb its energy use, or develop other fuel technologies. After the wholly-synthetic "energy crisis" of the seventies, smaller, fuel-efficient cars starting becoming extremely popular. OPEC and other non-aligned petroleum-producing countries saw this, and dropped the price of crude to the point where Honda Accords and Chevy Chevettes no longer made economic sense. So, the world can bitch about America being "addicted to petroleum", but certain Middle Eastern countries saw dollar signs and did everything possible to prevent America from weaning itself off their product.
On the other hand, a gallon (U.S., I believe) of gasoline is the energy-equivalent of roughly one hundred sticks of dynamite.
The filling station will probably be, itself, a bank of ultracaps. They'll continually top off from a high-tension line and dump charge really, really fast into each vehicle that comes in.
Of course, none of this really matters at the moment since no nation on Earth has a power grid capable of supporting a significant number of electric vehicles. Certainly not here in the U.S. Adding a few million electric vehicles into the mix would bring our power system to its knees.
Is it because Linux is World made and not American made?
You first point out the Microsoft is employing a lot of non-U.S. developers, and then complain that you can't get Linux because it's "world made"? The only reason you can't get a pre-installed Linux distro at Best Buy or Circuit City is because Microsoft has applied economic pressure (the same old tactics they've used for decades) to prevent that. It has nothing to do with whether it's "American made" or "World made", just that Windows is Microsoft made. And, actually, Linspire and other distros have begun making some headway at the larger retailers, and I expect they'll make more as time goes on.
And just FYI, an American company by the name of IBM has put a ton of money into Linux development. Of course, a lot of their developers are in India. So, what again was your point?