How bout you use your TV for something else? I haven't sat down and watched tv in, jeez, 2 years. Mine I gave away to someone else. They make great backup moniters, and better sledgehammer fodder.
Well, you see, that's the normals. I would gauge half the population is made of normals. The other, of freaks. Freaks don't take it up the ass, they think and know that this shit is wrong. So long as everyone thinks everyone else is apathetic normals, then we won't organize. That's your problem; learn to spot the freaks and geeks, they're everywhere, but their clothing style and way of talking is different.
Besides, if you made linux illegal, and then began prosecuting linux hippies, what do you think they'd do? You'll creat a rather militant breed of hacker who is bent on destroying your computer network at all costs. Better that there is no network, than a network designed to enslave people.
Every hour or so for you sitting at your machine, sit back and close your eyelids, and completly relax and unfocus your eyes. Every night before you go to sleep, completly unfocus your eyes until you fall asleep. This will alleviate the pressure inside of the eye long enough for some of the fluid to drain and pressure to decrease, and will help combat the feeling that the moniter really isn't there nor are the words and the occasional difficulty reading them, or as I call it, virtual nausea, which tends to develope after a few thousand hours of using a computer without stopping for much. This is what I do, and it really helps to keep me focused. If you like meditation, it can really help you get focued and keep you from having problems seeing things. Anyone who games really should learn it. The other reccomendation, is to have a nice view to look at outside the window so you aren't always looking at the moniter, preferably by a strip club or beach or somethin;).
Put it to you this way; the american government is openly calling and implying protestors are terrorists and moving to profile and prosecute them, subdue them with non-lethal weapons of which several have been shown to be quite lethal on several occasions, and suppress our rights further and further while people become poorer and poorer.
What sparked the american revolution if 1770? The british went from door to door, collecting taxes, and shot 5 tax protestors when they refused to pay at point blank range. Not everyone joined in at first, but just about everyone knew that was wrong, and enough were outraged to organize and begin taking back towns.
Now, lets take this scenario. We've got a large protest, say, 1 million people in new york to protest, say, a draft. The cops, wanting to test their new toys, take out some, for example, taser guns and fire them at the croud to get it to back up. Lets say the tasers want through the croud, jolting 400 people, and 20 people don't wake up ever again.
What's the probability of that night, someone who just lost their relative taking out an automatic weapon and hunting down some cops? Get some buddies together, find a cop car, ram it to the side of the road, get out your gun, fill it up with holes. What's the probability after that, of bush calling red alert and finding protestors, arresting them, and putting them into concentration camps without a trial? What's the probability of those protestors friends heading over to the local governmental building and demanding that they pass legislation blocking the patriot act from working in their area and stopping the government from passing it? What's the probability of the government moving in with the military into the "rouge state" of some little town in Montana and reinstating democracy?
All of that is, of course, speculation and fud, but seriously, it isn't too far off. There are ways we can avoid a civil war, namely, if people at the local level begin organizing and activly resisting the governments advances, and at the national level, take time to set up organizations and political parties who are alternatives. But frankly, I don't think you'll be able to find a political scientist that won't tell you that the foundation of every single insurrection is a combination of poverty, available weapons, and a state tyrrany.
I don't think the guy was a troll, I think he was angry. I am too; I know guys who are ready to hop in their cars and take strafing runs at buildings. I get angrier when I see people doing stupid shit which affects me and they don't want to listen. I guess if you give into the consensus mentality whereas everything is ok and lie to yourself when it isn't, you will have fun time when the world goes to hell in a handbag because you ignored your problems.
Persay, find the server, find the data they are collecting (reverse engineer the software for the packet format), do a google search for port 8080, and fill up their systems with so much junk crap that the data becomes unreliable? Perhaps figure out how they use the data, and over a period of months, feed them innacurate data such as "print cartridges fail fewer times than they normally would, and use ink more quickly than they normally do" to get lexmark to say, for example, make unreliable print cartridges that fail often and do 50 pages for $40 a pop?
The problem is when judges give warrents, and people are not told why the warrent was issued, nor given an explination as to why their things were taken. Those being served a warrent have the right to an explination as to why their belongings are being searched and seized. Saying "we're investigating something" isn't a reason; I believe a good reason would be in serving someone the evidence used to convince a judge a search or seizure is needed, and them being able to contest that reason in a court of law in order to get the items back and the judge unseated.
There's also a problem when there's overly broad warrents; "seize all computers". Well, the TV has a comp in it, as does most electronics, and they take everything.
As for what indymedia has gone through. I'm beginning to wonder if the U.S. is really a soverign country or not. Our government has the responsability to protect it's citizens from foreign interests, not only do so when it's convienient to do so.
Re:I haven't taken anything like this...
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IT Literacy Test
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· Score: 1
Hey, I don't exactly use "Industry Standards" either. I'm all for newer, and better tests. Especially sledgehammer tests, which test your proficiency with a sledgehammer when used against cubish, metallic objects. Specifically, objects of 2 feet in height, 2 feet in depth, and 1 foot in width, and encased mostly in aluminum.
I'm of the "walk into the store, buy my shit, and leave" category. I do not browse, I do not shop, I go directly to the isle where the thing I want is, I look at what's available, buy it, and leave. If I go into the gaming section, I'm looking for something that looks interesting, and memorizing game names for later browsing of suprnova and review sites.
About 6 months ago I walked into a best buy to get a few simple USB cables (of which there was a 10 foot wall of cables of all kinds, connectors, ect). Of course, now I know not to walk into a retail store like best buy to get cables (better to use newegg, you save a fscksum of money), but I musn't digress. I walk in, first thing the door greeter hands me a paper, I turn it down, he insists, I begin looking for a garbage can; none in sight. Then, I begin walking the 50 foot stretch from the entrance of the store to the USB cables. I am approached by 2 salesman, I turn both down. I get into the isle, resist the urge to help an old couple looking at power surge strips (they spent 10 minutes there looking, and you could overhear the talking), decipher the mess of cable's infront of me, pick out a pair of 6 foot, $10 cables that were on sale. I proceed to the counter, 2 more salesman come upto me, I turn them down. I get to the cash register, I am asked for my name/address, I ask if that's necissary, they say no (I'm tempted to begin making up fake names and ID's). Pay for my stuff, begin leaving the store, someone approaches me with a startrek-looking PDA (which was neat) and asks me if I want to take a survey, I turn them down (It was neat, but not THAT neat). I begin leaving the store, the exit security guard/doorgreater hands me another fuckin flyer, and I'm out.
Compair this to, say, compusa or microcenter. At compusa, the salesman actually run away from you, and the people working there will have conversations with you. It's rather nice actually, and if you do end up needing help, they call out the actual techs. Microcenter doesn't rip people off, they're retail, but their salesman are of such I quality that I actually like them. I had one guy looking through keyboards for 5 minutes trying to find a really nice one that wasn't full of crap, and eventually, I baught a pair of $4.99 keyboards (to get the DIN-5 to Mini-Din6 converters from them) and a really nice $9.99 belkin keyboard from them.
So, in short, I'm never going to best buy again, ever.
Halo is good for an adrenaline rush...
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Halo 2 Reviews
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You've got your shotgun, 108 pcs of ammo, level on hard. The area is dark, too dark, and something slithers out of the corner. You turn, finding nothing to within your reticle, but when you turn back, the wall begins crawling, crawling and falling in a browinish grey tide...
Hellsau, the master of puppets hits the hard spot (0:38) (or perhaps ministry, just one fix, at 0:22) maxed volume on a 5.1 surround sound system, drounding out blast after blast from the shotgun.
That's how halo is to be played. You get bored otherwise. It's a straight FPS shootem' up, like Serious Sam, but with vehicles, no smart remarks, and a sci-fi twist. You supply the smart remarks. The fun comes in when you add in violent, gory music to pure skill.
Less profits for bush, cheny, and the oil hording neocons in power. Seems fairly simple to see that. Additionally, we need oil to make energy to power crap, so using less means increasing energy prices, which means a depressed instead of regressive economy, which means massive depression since people won't be able to even service their debt or produce goods.
Now, if Bush really wants to make some friends, he'd make [insert really large number here] of dollars available for research into alternative energy sources and storage, and begin selling the public on nuclear power for the meantime as it's the only safe alternative to, say, burning coal or natural gas like mofo's. Then again, the man is turning our social security over to a private corp, among other things.
Stores must take merchandise back within 3 business days if the customer believes it is flawed, and return payment. Perhaps she returned it in perfect condition, but the store won't give the money back because it feels she is taking advantage of them. If she returned the clothing with a complaint such as "hey, I payed $80 for this brand name clothing, and it isn't double stiched" or something to that degree, then she'd have an arguement.
As for the "perfect" solution, I'v got an idea; Don't buy from retail chains that abuse you, and if you know they abuse other people, don't buy from them either. Perhaps the second best point I could make, would be consume less you consumerist pig!. We all have needs and wants, and in our society, those wants have gotten out of control due the mind control of advertising and schools. Yes, it takes some time for people to wise up to this, but if public schools hadn't coupled making us childish with making us smart, then mabye the advertising would've kicked in as hard and screwed with our grey mass as kids. I know I'm still dealing with that mindfuck, and I also know that if I ever find someone who's in marketing, I'm going to walk away from them without saying a word.
"Hi, I'm grace, I work in the marketing department"
*Ty walks away, without saying a word.*
If anyone asks, it's because when I find people who do marketing I feel the almost insupressable urge to disembowel them with anything that's handy. They have been a part of destroying my life and identity to turn a profit. It's one thing if they ask "well, how's marketing bad?", it's different when they try to lie and be friends.
With that said though, learn not to be tracked, and consuming less is as simple as using less for awhile and paying off all of your debt, then living within your means properly while keeping a saving account going for a rainy day or emergency. Learn not to be wasteful, that's the key.
congratulations america! you've completely alienated yourselves from all of your former allies and friends and earned the distrust and emnity of the rest of the planet.
Congradulations foreign moron! You've just alienated the other 51% of americans who didn't vote for bush. Like what? You think because the government goes in one direction that the people want to go in that direcion?
The recourse is, we spread that word as far and as clearly as possible, and most importantly, acquire every record and publicy distribute them so others may look at them. You can still acquire diebolds e-mails off of gnutella, afterall.
It's one thing for your canadate to lose or win an election. It's different for a corporation to put them in power.
Functionality and time. EIDE, PCI, AGP all added functionality to the PC; all the archetectures were designed for multiple uses. EIDE added ATAPI, which allowed for the use of CD-Rom, Zip disk, Jazz drives, ect on the EIDE bus. PCI added a whole ton of new functions, but manely, automatic configuration and a better interface to the processor. AGP added a direct bus to the processor, allowing for MMX and 3Dnow to really take off once implimented, as well as some real nice multimedia stuff. Infact, I really thing AGP got the whole multimedia thing going. The modem was tacked on becuase, although EISA did provide the bandwidth for 56K transmission, the bus was designed without bus masterning, meaning, it was real, real slow.
The time aspect comes from that it seems motherboards tend to get several new things replaced on them at a time. You can see that within the last year or so, the Athlon boards haven't changed much at all; still the same PCI, DDR, Socket A, EIDE, parallel/usb/firewyre ports, ect.
Each step of the way has, I suppose, made computing a lot better and easier, but that's been a recurring theme throughout the industry. If you compair ISA, EISA, PCI, and PCI-X, which all had the purpose of connecting general external devices to the processor, you'll see a 3 recurring theme's; stability, speed, and ease of use. The bus's functionality hasn't increased; sure, the printer of last year isn't the same or as high a DPI as this year, but really, what else has the tech added? You can't really add a whole lot to a generic bus interface aside from those 3 things. With each set of speed increases, we've seen new tech come around that uses that extra power.
Each generation of tech tends to increase functionality, meaning, you can add on new things. Your first IBM PC's were barely functional, then they came out with the next gen stuff and POOF, printers, scanners, ect. Gen 2 we saw multimedia applications and portability with some mass networking moved in there. Gen 3, 3d Gaming and a great deal of new external devices. Gen 4, power is being ramped up a great deal, and I'v got no clue as to what it'll be used for. All of those previous things will get a *lot* better. I do know that the next generation will work with mobility and robots, becuase by then tech will be so fast and cheap that we can do that; third generation tech that does 3d graphics will so inexpensive that you can throw it into a helmet and walk around a city.
Secondly, there is the invasion of privacy. I really could care less if anyone read all my email or searched my computer. There's nothing incriminating.
Ahh, correction bub. There's nothing incriminating, yet. They'll think of something. If you're reading Al-Jazeera, for example, then perhaps you're conspiring with terrorists. Or perhaps they don't particularily like some radio show you've downloaded and are sharing on a p2p app. Or perhaps you have "subversive" tendancies because you read "subversive" web content, such as slashdot?
First, you pass the privacy laws so you can spy on everyone, then you begin persecuting the most extreme first, then begin persecuting the less and less extreme while justifying it more and more. Perhaps it's in my interest to see violent drug merchants and suicide bombers go to prison, but it certainly isn't in my interest to see protestors go to jail, or coworkers. But those protestors are just as bad as the drug cartel or mafia, because of some likeness I have yet to hear of.
How do I know it's going this way? Started with islamic militants, moved onto US citizens with ties to said islamic militants, then moved to drug merchants and prostitutes, and now we've got wiretaps on people who go to and organize peaceful protests and the police ontop of buildings taking pictures of said protestors. Next stage seems to be shutting down websites such as indymedia's, among others, confiscating our weapons, with probably a crapton of voting fraud and probably rioting to go with it. But that last part is just my prediction.
If a tech gets used in a new way, slashdot points at it and goes "LOOKIE!!!!". It's part of the news for nerds that seems to have all but dissapeared from slashdot.
Is illegal, and you'll be subject to being called a terrorist and having your right suspended if you talk about how the FBI came to your house and confiscated your dishes and cat...
The reason we haven't heard much, is becuase if you go to the news, guess what? You become a martyr. Most people have families and friends, and lives; they don't want to sacrifice that, and I don't think the goons have a problem reminding people about that.
Then all those software companies making investments on more and more inefficient software are gonna take a hit big time. It would definatly be nice to see a good sine curve to moorse's law, whereas you get peaks of developement (meaning, progress is doubling every year or so) and drops (where tech is only gaining in 1.2-1.3 times capacity every 2 or so years). Gives technicians a chance to catch up and spend time unionizing, gives companies time to review their strategies and focus their designers on better materials and more feature filled hardware, and it forces software designers and especially their bosses to rethink their strategy of creating ultimatly trashy, inefficient, flashy software tools.
As for moors law coming to an end, we'll have to see. There's been an auful lot of new stuff on the horizon, and I think we've gotten to the growing pains number 4, where major hardware changes are occuring; the first started with the 80386 and 80486, virtual mode, simm memory, EISA, IDE, and AT standards. The second with the pentium, EIDE, PCI, AGP, MMX, 3dNow, widespread modem use, and CD-rom's with the ATX standard. The third with the pentium 4/ddr/qdr, DVD-rom drives, PCI taking off into never never land (how many different kinds of cards is that?), LANing PC's together via DSL lines. Now we're in the 4th generation, where we've got 64 bit datapaths, new instruction set additions, SATA, PCI-X and PCI-express, DVD burners, Gigabit ethernet, usable, pretty linux, mini-ITX standards.
The first set of changes turned the PC into a mutli-user inexpensive platform. The second gave it internetworkability and spurred the internet, as well as drove it into some multimedia stuff. The third added 3d gaming to the platform, perfected the networking aspect, and added a lot more data features and especially, and most importantly, stability. Now, we're getting into the most significant of those stages; making machines a *lot* more powerful and easier to configure. Just look at some of the newer 3d games coming out, I remembered watching some Cutscene's from old FF games as well as some old computer games, and Doom3 blows their socks off. Again, after these changes have occured, we'll move into another term of relative peace.
The 5th generation tech I fully expect to come in around 2007-2008, and will be centered around public wireless networks (more or less, people leaving open wifi all over the place), porability, altered reality (think virtual grafitti, waypointing your friends, ect). It'll also be marked by a major freedom vs corporatism; DRM vs the internet, for example; DRM will probably seek to segment the internet into trade zones, or as the companies will call them, "trustworthy zones"(example message: You are leaving the safe zone, if you leave the safe zone, you will be subject to viruses, trojan's, malware, and bad stuff. Do you wish to continue?"). As malicious software becomes more prevalent and voracious, we'll see the open source movement gaining a lot of steam considering these corps will begin digitally enslaving people. Why spend a billion on advertising when you could simply serve it to people off of their own computers?
So, within the next few years, we're going to see a lot of bad and good things happening, and most likely, some people's lives turning to hell, namely, those who don't care. Those who choose to fight it out will probably be persecuted; breaking DRM is, afterall, against the DMCA, and if MS gets angry, they can pull strings to have your linux-coding monkey ass assassinated or thrown into jail as a terrorist. Things'll get interesting, to say the least.
I run adaware, spybot, bazooka, teatimer, antivir, CWS shredder, AVG, and a few custom scanners I'v made myself for personal uses (batch file for deleting all cookies and IE cache). They all run via a batch script sunday while I'm doin' laundry and washin' dishes. I come back, press "ok" a few times, and it's tidy again.
Every time I find a scanner, I say "hey, it's free" download it, update it weekly, set the batch file to run the apps. It's a common security tactic called LAYERING. You've got 3 levels to network secuirty; instrustion prevention, instrusion detection, and intrusion elimination. Preventing intrustions is as simple as using firefox and some common sense, detecting and eliminating them are as simple as layering spyware scanners. I routinely find that one scanner catches what the other doesn't, and one regular deletion of a cookie catch catches what a number won't.
Take, for example, what I consider a good firewall setup; don't run 1 firewall, run 2 or 3. Preferably on different machines so an exploit on one firewall doesn't lead to the machine getting r00ted and your extra firewalls being useless.
As for what this is, this is bullshit. Frankly, EULA's hold up in court, but they're BS; you can copyright a program just like you can copyright a song (songs have octaves and time, computer's have on/off and time), but you CANNOT tell me that using it on a computer is copying, just like you cannot tell me playing a roll of sheet music on a player piano is copying, even if that piano happens to buffer the music entirely before playing it.
Frankly, I look at it this way. Most programs say you may not distribute the application. Now, wait a minute, I'm distributing it on my computer, from chip to chip, in it's entirety (take a good night of gaming) so technically, there's an arguement there that the software vendor is falsely advertising their software and inciting their customers into commiting copyright infringement. Either way, they lose. The problem here is EULA's, and they're being abused like no tommaow by these big corps to make a buck. I believe in letting them have their copyright (although, with today's copyright system being so fucked as it is, I only do so at my own discretion, but my discretion will take a long, long time to explain, so I won't go into it here).
As for a solution to this, well, there's a couple of ways to solve the problem. Frankly, my favoire would be r00ting them and cleverly disassembling the infrastructure of their company piece by piece. However, considering this is probably some grubby CS student clicking at the looking glass, I'd think it would be far more entertaining to send some convincing people over to his general neck of the concrete jungle to convince him that mabye this isn't the thing he should be doing for a living.
Barring that, I think it would be even funnier if we got some of the slashdot crowd to, say, go over to a website that pilfers this kind of wares, install the app, then file a class action lawsuit asking for $500 is removal costs per infected machine. If we succeed, we can make a tidy profit AND knock out spyware vendors.
Slashdot Mirror
How bout you use your TV for something else? I haven't sat down and watched tv in, jeez, 2 years. Mine I gave away to someone else. They make great backup moniters, and better sledgehammer fodder.
As for enforcing that, heh, good luck.
They have a monopoly, why would it be in their interest to bargan with copyright infringers, when they can futilly attempt to control their actions?
Well, you see, that's the normals. I would gauge half the population is made of normals. The other, of freaks. Freaks don't take it up the ass, they think and know that this shit is wrong. So long as everyone thinks everyone else is apathetic normals, then we won't organize. That's your problem; learn to spot the freaks and geeks, they're everywhere, but their clothing style and way of talking is different.
Besides, if you made linux illegal, and then began prosecuting linux hippies, what do you think they'd do? You'll creat a rather militant breed of hacker who is bent on destroying your computer network at all costs. Better that there is no network, than a network designed to enslave people.
Every hour or so for you sitting at your machine, sit back and close your eyelids, and completly relax and unfocus your eyes. Every night before you go to sleep, completly unfocus your eyes until you fall asleep. This will alleviate the pressure inside of the eye long enough for some of the fluid to drain and pressure to decrease, and will help combat the feeling that the moniter really isn't there nor are the words and the occasional difficulty reading them, or as I call it, virtual nausea, which tends to develope after a few thousand hours of using a computer without stopping for much. This is what I do, and it really helps to keep me focused. If you like meditation, it can really help you get focued and keep you from having problems seeing things. Anyone who games really should learn it. The other reccomendation, is to have a nice view to look at outside the window so you aren't always looking at the moniter, preferably by a strip club or beach or somethin ;).
Your theory only works if people take it up the butt without fighting back.
Put it to you this way; the american government is openly calling and implying protestors are terrorists and moving to profile and prosecute them, subdue them with non-lethal weapons of which several have been shown to be quite lethal on several occasions, and suppress our rights further and further while people become poorer and poorer.
What sparked the american revolution if 1770? The british went from door to door, collecting taxes, and shot 5 tax protestors when they refused to pay at point blank range. Not everyone joined in at first, but just about everyone knew that was wrong, and enough were outraged to organize and begin taking back towns.
Now, lets take this scenario. We've got a large protest, say, 1 million people in new york to protest, say, a draft. The cops, wanting to test their new toys, take out some, for example, taser guns and fire them at the croud to get it to back up. Lets say the tasers want through the croud, jolting 400 people, and 20 people don't wake up ever again.
What's the probability of that night, someone who just lost their relative taking out an automatic weapon and hunting down some cops? Get some buddies together, find a cop car, ram it to the side of the road, get out your gun, fill it up with holes. What's the probability after that, of bush calling red alert and finding protestors, arresting them, and putting them into concentration camps without a trial? What's the probability of those protestors friends heading over to the local governmental building and demanding that they pass legislation blocking the patriot act from working in their area and stopping the government from passing it? What's the probability of the government moving in with the military into the "rouge state" of some little town in Montana and reinstating democracy?
All of that is, of course, speculation and fud, but seriously, it isn't too far off. There are ways we can avoid a civil war, namely, if people at the local level begin organizing and activly resisting the governments advances, and at the national level, take time to set up organizations and political parties who are alternatives. But frankly, I don't think you'll be able to find a political scientist that won't tell you that the foundation of every single insurrection is a combination of poverty, available weapons, and a state tyrrany.
I don't think the guy was a troll, I think he was angry. I am too; I know guys who are ready to hop in their cars and take strafing runs at buildings. I get angrier when I see people doing stupid shit which affects me and they don't want to listen. I guess if you give into the consensus mentality whereas everything is ok and lie to yourself when it isn't, you will have fun time when the world goes to hell in a handbag because you ignored your problems.
Persay, find the server, find the data they are collecting (reverse engineer the software for the packet format), do a google search for port 8080, and fill up their systems with so much junk crap that the data becomes unreliable? Perhaps figure out how they use the data, and over a period of months, feed them innacurate data such as "print cartridges fail fewer times than they normally would, and use ink more quickly than they normally do" to get lexmark to say, for example, make unreliable print cartridges that fail often and do 50 pages for $40 a pop?
The problem is when judges give warrents, and people are not told why the warrent was issued, nor given an explination as to why their things were taken. Those being served a warrent have the right to an explination as to why their belongings are being searched and seized. Saying "we're investigating something" isn't a reason; I believe a good reason would be in serving someone the evidence used to convince a judge a search or seizure is needed, and them being able to contest that reason in a court of law in order to get the items back and the judge unseated.
There's also a problem when there's overly broad warrents; "seize all computers". Well, the TV has a comp in it, as does most electronics, and they take everything.
As for what indymedia has gone through. I'm beginning to wonder if the U.S. is really a soverign country or not. Our government has the responsability to protect it's citizens from foreign interests, not only do so when it's convienient to do so.
Hey, I don't exactly use "Industry Standards" either. I'm all for newer, and better tests. Especially sledgehammer tests, which test your proficiency with a sledgehammer when used against cubish, metallic objects. Specifically, objects of 2 feet in height, 2 feet in depth, and 1 foot in width, and encased mostly in aluminum.
I'm of the "walk into the store, buy my shit, and leave" category. I do not browse, I do not shop, I go directly to the isle where the thing I want is, I look at what's available, buy it, and leave. If I go into the gaming section, I'm looking for something that looks interesting, and memorizing game names for later browsing of suprnova and review sites.
/doorgreater hands me another fuckin flyer, and I'm out.
About 6 months ago I walked into a best buy to get a few simple USB cables (of which there was a 10 foot wall of cables of all kinds, connectors, ect). Of course, now I know not to walk into a retail store like best buy to get cables (better to use newegg, you save a fscksum of money), but I musn't digress. I walk in, first thing the door greeter hands me a paper, I turn it down, he insists, I begin looking for a garbage can; none in sight. Then, I begin walking the 50 foot stretch from the entrance of the store to the USB cables. I am approached by 2 salesman, I turn both down. I get into the isle, resist the urge to help an old couple looking at power surge strips (they spent 10 minutes there looking, and you could overhear the talking), decipher the mess of cable's infront of me, pick out a pair of 6 foot, $10 cables that were on sale. I proceed to the counter, 2 more salesman come upto me, I turn them down. I get to the cash register, I am asked for my name/address, I ask if that's necissary, they say no (I'm tempted to begin making up fake names and ID's). Pay for my stuff, begin leaving the store, someone approaches me with a startrek-looking PDA (which was neat) and asks me if I want to take a survey, I turn them down (It was neat, but not THAT neat). I begin leaving the store, the exit security guard
Compair this to, say, compusa or microcenter. At compusa, the salesman actually run away from you, and the people working there will have conversations with you. It's rather nice actually, and if you do end up needing help, they call out the actual techs. Microcenter doesn't rip people off, they're retail, but their salesman are of such I quality that I actually like them. I had one guy looking through keyboards for 5 minutes trying to find a really nice one that wasn't full of crap, and eventually, I baught a pair of $4.99 keyboards (to get the DIN-5 to Mini-Din6 converters from them) and a really nice $9.99 belkin keyboard from them.
So, in short, I'm never going to best buy again, ever.
You've got your shotgun, 108 pcs of ammo, level on hard. The area is dark, too dark, and something slithers out of the corner. You turn, finding nothing to within your reticle, but when you turn back, the wall begins crawling, crawling and falling in a browinish grey tide...
Hellsau, the master of puppets hits the hard spot (0:38) (or perhaps ministry, just one fix, at 0:22) maxed volume on a 5.1 surround sound system, drounding out blast after blast from the shotgun.
That's how halo is to be played. You get bored otherwise. It's a straight FPS shootem' up, like Serious Sam, but with vehicles, no smart remarks, and a sci-fi twist. You supply the smart remarks. The fun comes in when you add in violent, gory music to pure skill.
If there's one thing I hate more than flamebait, it's someone who won't fight for what they believe in.
Less profits for bush, cheny, and the oil hording neocons in power. Seems fairly simple to see that. Additionally, we need oil to make energy to power crap, so using less means increasing energy prices, which means a depressed instead of regressive economy, which means massive depression since people won't be able to even service their debt or produce goods.
Now, if Bush really wants to make some friends, he'd make [insert really large number here] of dollars available for research into alternative energy sources and storage, and begin selling the public on nuclear power for the meantime as it's the only safe alternative to, say, burning coal or natural gas like mofo's. Then again, the man is turning our social security over to a private corp, among other things.
Stores must take merchandise back within 3 business days if the customer believes it is flawed, and return payment. Perhaps she returned it in perfect condition, but the store won't give the money back because it feels she is taking advantage of them. If she returned the clothing with a complaint such as "hey, I payed $80 for this brand name clothing, and it isn't double stiched" or something to that degree, then she'd have an arguement.
As for the "perfect" solution, I'v got an idea; Don't buy from retail chains that abuse you, and if you know they abuse other people, don't buy from them either. Perhaps the second best point I could make, would be consume less you consumerist pig!. We all have needs and wants, and in our society, those wants have gotten out of control due the mind control of advertising and schools. Yes, it takes some time for people to wise up to this, but if public schools hadn't coupled making us childish with making us smart, then mabye the advertising would've kicked in as hard and screwed with our grey mass as kids. I know I'm still dealing with that mindfuck, and I also know that if I ever find someone who's in marketing, I'm going to walk away from them without saying a word.
"Hi, I'm grace, I work in the marketing department"
*Ty walks away, without saying a word.*
If anyone asks, it's because when I find people who do marketing I feel the almost insupressable urge to disembowel them with anything that's handy. They have been a part of destroying my life and identity to turn a profit. It's one thing if they ask "well, how's marketing bad?", it's different when they try to lie and be friends.
With that said though, learn not to be tracked, and consuming less is as simple as using less for awhile and paying off all of your debt, then living within your means properly while keeping a saving account going for a rainy day or emergency. Learn not to be wasteful, that's the key.
Compair it to CNN and Fox. Then it doesn't get so funny.
I don't see any references in the article...
congratulations america! you've completely alienated yourselves from all of your former allies and friends and earned the distrust and emnity of the rest of the planet.
Congradulations foreign moron! You've just alienated the other 51% of americans who didn't vote for bush. Like what? You think because the government goes in one direction that the people want to go in that direcion?
The recourse is, we spread that word as far and as clearly as possible, and most importantly, acquire every record and publicy distribute them so others may look at them. You can still acquire diebolds e-mails off of gnutella, afterall.
It's one thing for your canadate to lose or win an election. It's different for a corporation to put them in power.
Functionality and time. EIDE, PCI, AGP all added functionality to the PC; all the archetectures were designed for multiple uses. EIDE added ATAPI, which allowed for the use of CD-Rom, Zip disk, Jazz drives, ect on the EIDE bus. PCI added a whole ton of new functions, but manely, automatic configuration and a better interface to the processor. AGP added a direct bus to the processor, allowing for MMX and 3Dnow to really take off once implimented, as well as some real nice multimedia stuff. Infact, I really thing AGP got the whole multimedia thing going. The modem was tacked on becuase, although EISA did provide the bandwidth for 56K transmission, the bus was designed without bus masterning, meaning, it was real, real slow.
The time aspect comes from that it seems motherboards tend to get several new things replaced on them at a time. You can see that within the last year or so, the Athlon boards haven't changed much at all; still the same PCI, DDR, Socket A, EIDE, parallel/usb/firewyre ports, ect.
Each step of the way has, I suppose, made computing a lot better and easier, but that's been a recurring theme throughout the industry. If you compair ISA, EISA, PCI, and PCI-X, which all had the purpose of connecting general external devices to the processor, you'll see a 3 recurring theme's; stability, speed, and ease of use. The bus's functionality hasn't increased; sure, the printer of last year isn't the same or as high a DPI as this year, but really, what else has the tech added? You can't really add a whole lot to a generic bus interface aside from those 3 things. With each set of speed increases, we've seen new tech come around that uses that extra power.
Each generation of tech tends to increase functionality, meaning, you can add on new things. Your first IBM PC's were barely functional, then they came out with the next gen stuff and POOF, printers, scanners, ect. Gen 2 we saw multimedia applications and portability with some mass networking moved in there. Gen 3, 3d Gaming and a great deal of new external devices. Gen 4, power is being ramped up a great deal, and I'v got no clue as to what it'll be used for. All of those previous things will get a *lot* better. I do know that the next generation will work with mobility and robots, becuase by then tech will be so fast and cheap that we can do that; third generation tech that does 3d graphics will so inexpensive that you can throw it into a helmet and walk around a city.
Secondly, there is the invasion of privacy. I really could care less if anyone read all my email or searched my computer. There's nothing incriminating.
Ahh, correction bub. There's nothing incriminating, yet. They'll think of something. If you're reading Al-Jazeera, for example, then perhaps you're conspiring with terrorists. Or perhaps they don't particularily like some radio show you've downloaded and are sharing on a p2p app. Or perhaps you have "subversive" tendancies because you read "subversive" web content, such as slashdot?
First, you pass the privacy laws so you can spy on everyone, then you begin persecuting the most extreme first, then begin persecuting the less and less extreme while justifying it more and more. Perhaps it's in my interest to see violent drug merchants and suicide bombers go to prison, but it certainly isn't in my interest to see protestors go to jail, or coworkers. But those protestors are just as bad as the drug cartel or mafia, because of some likeness I have yet to hear of.
How do I know it's going this way? Started with islamic militants, moved onto US citizens with ties to said islamic militants, then moved to drug merchants and prostitutes, and now we've got wiretaps on people who go to and organize peaceful protests and the police ontop of buildings taking pictures of said protestors. Next stage seems to be shutting down websites such as indymedia's, among others, confiscating our weapons, with probably a crapton of voting fraud and probably rioting to go with it. But that last part is just my prediction.
If a tech gets used in a new way, slashdot points at it and goes "LOOKIE!!!!". It's part of the news for nerds that seems to have all but dissapeared from slashdot.
Is illegal, and you'll be subject to being called a terrorist and having your right suspended if you talk about how the FBI came to your house and confiscated your dishes and cat...
The reason we haven't heard much, is becuase if you go to the news, guess what? You become a martyr. Most people have families and friends, and lives; they don't want to sacrifice that, and I don't think the goons have a problem reminding people about that.
Then all those software companies making investments on more and more inefficient software are gonna take a hit big time. It would definatly be nice to see a good sine curve to moorse's law, whereas you get peaks of developement (meaning, progress is doubling every year or so) and drops (where tech is only gaining in 1.2-1.3 times capacity every 2 or so years). Gives technicians a chance to catch up and spend time unionizing, gives companies time to review their strategies and focus their designers on better materials and more feature filled hardware, and it forces software designers and especially their bosses to rethink their strategy of creating ultimatly trashy, inefficient, flashy software tools.
As for moors law coming to an end, we'll have to see. There's been an auful lot of new stuff on the horizon, and I think we've gotten to the growing pains number 4, where major hardware changes are occuring; the first started with the 80386 and 80486, virtual mode, simm memory, EISA, IDE, and AT standards. The second with the pentium, EIDE, PCI, AGP, MMX, 3dNow, widespread modem use, and CD-rom's with the ATX standard. The third with the pentium 4/ddr/qdr, DVD-rom drives, PCI taking off into never never land (how many different kinds of cards is that?), LANing PC's together via DSL lines. Now we're in the 4th generation, where we've got 64 bit datapaths, new instruction set additions, SATA, PCI-X and PCI-express, DVD burners, Gigabit ethernet, usable, pretty linux, mini-ITX standards.
The first set of changes turned the PC into a mutli-user inexpensive platform. The second gave it internetworkability and spurred the internet, as well as drove it into some multimedia stuff. The third added 3d gaming to the platform, perfected the networking aspect, and added a lot more data features and especially, and most importantly, stability. Now, we're getting into the most significant of those stages; making machines a *lot* more powerful and easier to configure. Just look at some of the newer 3d games coming out, I remembered watching some Cutscene's from old FF games as well as some old computer games, and Doom3 blows their socks off. Again, after these changes have occured, we'll move into another term of relative peace.
The 5th generation tech I fully expect to come in around 2007-2008, and will be centered around public wireless networks (more or less, people leaving open wifi all over the place), porability, altered reality (think virtual grafitti, waypointing your friends, ect). It'll also be marked by a major freedom vs corporatism; DRM vs the internet, for example; DRM will probably seek to segment the internet into trade zones, or as the companies will call them, "trustworthy zones"(example message: You are leaving the safe zone, if you leave the safe zone, you will be subject to viruses, trojan's, malware, and bad stuff. Do you wish to continue?"). As malicious software becomes more prevalent and voracious, we'll see the open source movement gaining a lot of steam considering these corps will begin digitally enslaving people. Why spend a billion on advertising when you could simply serve it to people off of their own computers?
So, within the next few years, we're going to see a lot of bad and good things happening, and most likely, some people's lives turning to hell, namely, those who don't care. Those who choose to fight it out will probably be persecuted; breaking DRM is, afterall, against the DMCA, and if MS gets angry, they can pull strings to have your linux-coding monkey ass assassinated or thrown into jail as a terrorist. Things'll get interesting, to say the least.
I run adaware, spybot, bazooka, teatimer, antivir, CWS shredder, AVG, and a few custom scanners I'v made myself for personal uses (batch file for deleting all cookies and IE cache). They all run via a batch script sunday while I'm doin' laundry and washin' dishes. I come back, press "ok" a few times, and it's tidy again.
Every time I find a scanner, I say "hey, it's free" download it, update it weekly, set the batch file to run the apps. It's a common security tactic called LAYERING. You've got 3 levels to network secuirty; instrustion prevention, instrusion detection, and intrusion elimination. Preventing intrustions is as simple as using firefox and some common sense, detecting and eliminating them are as simple as layering spyware scanners. I routinely find that one scanner catches what the other doesn't, and one regular deletion of a cookie catch catches what a number won't.
Take, for example, what I consider a good firewall setup; don't run 1 firewall, run 2 or 3. Preferably on different machines so an exploit on one firewall doesn't lead to the machine getting r00ted and your extra firewalls being useless.
As for what this is, this is bullshit. Frankly, EULA's hold up in court, but they're BS; you can copyright a program just like you can copyright a song (songs have octaves and time, computer's have on/off and time), but you CANNOT tell me that using it on a computer is copying, just like you cannot tell me playing a roll of sheet music on a player piano is copying, even if that piano happens to buffer the music entirely before playing it.
Frankly, I look at it this way. Most programs say you may not distribute the application. Now, wait a minute, I'm distributing it on my computer, from chip to chip, in it's entirety (take a good night of gaming) so technically, there's an arguement there that the software vendor is falsely advertising their software and inciting their customers into commiting copyright infringement. Either way, they lose. The problem here is EULA's, and they're being abused like no tommaow by these big corps to make a buck. I believe in letting them have their copyright (although, with today's copyright system being so fucked as it is, I only do so at my own discretion, but my discretion will take a long, long time to explain, so I won't go into it here).
As for a solution to this, well, there's a couple of ways to solve the problem. Frankly, my favoire would be r00ting them and cleverly disassembling the infrastructure of their company piece by piece. However, considering this is probably some grubby CS student clicking at the looking glass, I'd think it would be far more entertaining to send some convincing people over to his general neck of the concrete jungle to convince him that mabye this isn't the thing he should be doing for a living.
Barring that, I think it would be even funnier if we got some of the slashdot crowd to, say, go over to a website that pilfers this kind of wares, install the app, then file a class action lawsuit asking for $500 is removal costs per infected machine. If we succeed, we can make a tidy profit AND knock out spyware vendors.
Well, you go upto it, unplug it, and take it...after telling them that it's yours, and documenting those transactions, of course.