Re:HERE HE IS, the bastard
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The problem is you have to be REALLY sure this is him. What if an innocent person who shares the same name is targetted.
That's the problem with vigilanti-style justice - it requires an assumption of guilt, and the victim rarely gets an opportunity to reply until it's too late.
It's quite ironic that a company threatens to sue in order to have a fairly innocent piece of satire taken down, and by doing they draw more attention to it than if they'd just left things alone.
It's now on Slashdot and the cartoon is being mirrored all over the place... can't ask for more publicity than that!
A friend of mine bought Command and Conquer on the budget range recently. It wouldn't work - came up with a strange error message about a.TMP file.
I looked on the net and discovered it was a SafeDisk problem - his CD drive wasn't behaving in a way which was compatible with Safedisk.
He could have returned the game to the shop, bought a new CDROM drive and hoped for the best, or resorted to www.gamecopyworld.com for a no-CD crack. In the end he chose the latter option, but he told me that he somehow feels like a software pirate even though he paid real money for the game!
I also forgot the dreaded LENSLOCK which plagued Sinclair Spectrum owners in the 1980s.
Basically you got a piece of plastic which you had to fold and place onto your screen. You then had to line the plastic up with certain pixels and then look through the LENSLOCK device to "read" the scrambled symbol on screen.
Bear in mind that you plugged your Spectrum into your TV set, and you might have a 14" portable telly or a whopping great 30" beauty. In most cases (I think Elite was one of the culprits too) you only had 3 chances of getting it right. If you didn't THE COMPUTER WOULD RESET! And as the game was loaded from tape you had another 5-7 minute wait ahead of you.
In the end I bought a microdrive unit and a snapshot interface and saved the game to microdrive once I'd got past the copy protection. Happy days!
Yet another example of how ordinary consumers can be hurt by anti-piracy measures.
So far we've seen:
products which won't work after 30 days until you "activate them" (Win XP, Office XP, Autocad, etc), games which install fully to your hard-drive but require the CD in to be played, games which require a CD key to be played online (try playing a second-hand game online!), games which won't work with certain CD drives thanks to the way the Safedisk copy protection system works, programs which require you to enter a particular word or phrase from the manual every time you want to use it, CDs which stop you from making a legal backup copy, DVDs which only work if you are in a particular region, or use a particular OS, not to mention Macrovision problems etc etc. Yet the people who pirate products rarely have any of the above mentioned problems. OK, so they have to keep up-to-date with keygens and no-CD patches, but my point is that ordinary consumers are penalised for the crimes of others.
Shouldn't Slashdot have a rule where they contact a company before talking about something on their website, especially if it's a whopping great download?
I bet Honda will be cursing if their site goes down for 24 hours thanks to a resounding Slashdot Effect.
On the plus side, think of the free advertising to Honda...
Taking this idea one step further, what if each computer node on the network was given a basic set of rules so that it emulated a bunch of brain cells. Would the network self-organise to create some sort of intelligence?
However, there is a huge problem with it: If you hate someone all you do is make some fake ads with their phone numbers on and leave them for the Chinese authorities to find and then spam.
Result: an innocent person has a whole lotta shit to clean up.
If the authorities do take some time to investigate the ads (ie actually try phoning the numbers and try to buy the products would be a start) then I think it might be a good way to deal with the criminals who promote their wares.
Similar tactics have been done before against email spammers whereby people find out the spammer's home address and send them junk mail in the post. It pisses the spammers off, but unfortunately finding out the senders of such crap is much more difficult as they don't rely on an email address to take orders with.
Yes, it does matter. The US and UK have told Saddam that he will be ousted from power and his people liberated. He will be disarmed of his WMD.
The "shock and awe" tactics are propaganda designed to scare the crap out of the Iraqi army and make them surrender or be killed. Let's face it, if you were an Iraqi soldier living in fear of your life from a brutal regime, would you seriously want to take on 2 countries whose annual spending on "defence" is 350 times higher than your own coutries'?
Telling the Iraqis where and when we were going in would be stupid because they would have time to prepare and defend. Although the war won't be evenly matched we don't want to see ANY of our troups die, so protecting their lives is paramount.
There's so much propaganda on both sides. I think information is deliberately unreliable otherwise Saddam would know precisely what's going to happen and when.
"It turns out all speech is nothing but sequences of utterances ( vowels and syllabic ). Just string them together and you get speech. String them together very carefully and the speech begins sounding like it came from a human instead of a machine."
It's a whole lot more complicated than that. If you think phonetically about the way we talk we often merge words together rather than leave short descreet pauses between words. (For example, do you say "leaderovthepack" or "leader. ov. the. pack"? Also note the "ov" instead of "of")
Not only that we pronounce words differently depending on the context of which they appear in (if you think about the mechanics of speaking you'll realise our mouths change shape, therefore if you've just pronounced an "m" you may find it tricky to hit an immediate "l"). Also, we give away many clues about our state or mind as we speak - when we say "yours truly" we often sound humble, but when we say "Mine's better than yours" the "yours" in the latter sentence sounds more aggressive.
Probably the most important difference is emotion. A good narrator or speaker can draw you in to what he's saying because of the way he says it. Think about Kennedy delivering the line "We do these things not because they are easy..." - now feed the same line into a speech synthesizer. It's dead, isn't it? No impact, no emotion, no feeling. Personally, I find I can concentrate much more when a good narrator is reading an audio book than I can if a bad one reads it.
I found an audio book on Kazaa once where Stephen Hawking's synthesizer reads aloud A Brief History Of Time. I had to stop listening after 2 minutes because it no longer made sense - had Richard Dawkin been reading it then I'm sure I could have absorbed it 10 times better.
The Currah speech unit for the Spectrum was hilarious. It came with a free game which was supposed to say "The Banshee wails at you but nothing happens".
It actually sounded like "Shbansheehailsacthoowawaaaawaaaens"
I remember you could also turn it on while you were programming, so evertime you pressed a key it would say "ONE ZERO PRINT QUOTE ACH EE ELL ELL O QUOTE ENTER TWO ZERO ENTER RUN ENTER". I used to drive me batty. It was one of those eighties things which you thought was "cool" at the time, but had no practical use. I think they were only ever invented so you could show your neighbours how advanced your computer is: "LOOK, IT CAN TALK TO ME!"
Er, maybe I've missed something here but if you're a Catholic priest and you want to look at kiddy pictures then you're hardly likely to hand your logs over to someone are you?
Slashdot Mirror
That's the problem with vigilanti-style justice - it requires an assumption of guilt, and the victim rarely gets an opportunity to reply until it's too late.
If a non-existant phone rings when you're in the woods do you get billed for it?
Isn't it true that ADSL compresses data better than cable does?
It's now on Slashdot and the cartoon is being mirrored all over the place... can't ask for more publicity than that!
I looked on the net and discovered it was a SafeDisk problem - his CD drive wasn't behaving in a way which was compatible with Safedisk.
He could have returned the game to the shop, bought a new CDROM drive and hoped for the best, or resorted to www.gamecopyworld.com for a no-CD crack. In the end he chose the latter option, but he told me that he somehow feels like a software pirate even though he paid real money for the game!
Basically you got a piece of plastic which you had to fold and place onto your screen. You then had to line the plastic up with certain pixels and then look through the LENSLOCK device to "read" the scrambled symbol on screen.
Bear in mind that you plugged your Spectrum into your TV set, and you might have a 14" portable telly or a whopping great 30" beauty. In most cases (I think Elite was one of the culprits too) you only had 3 chances of getting it right. If you didn't THE COMPUTER WOULD RESET! And as the game was loaded from tape you had another 5-7 minute wait ahead of you.
In the end I bought a microdrive unit and a snapshot interface and saved the game to microdrive once I'd got past the copy protection. Happy days!
So far we've seen:
products which won't work after 30 days until you "activate them" (Win XP, Office XP, Autocad, etc),
games which install fully to your hard-drive but require the CD in to be played,
games which require a CD key to be played online (try playing a second-hand game online!),
games which won't work with certain CD drives thanks to the way the Safedisk copy protection system works,
programs which require you to enter a particular word or phrase from the manual every time you want to use it,
CDs which stop you from making a legal backup copy,
DVDs which only work if you are in a particular region, or use a particular OS, not to mention Macrovision problems
etc etc. Yet the people who pirate products rarely have any of the above mentioned problems. OK, so they have to keep up-to-date with keygens and no-CD patches, but my point is that ordinary consumers are penalised for the crimes of others.
Not sure about the sweaty arms comment... :P
Exactly. Suing 5 spammers won't wipe out spam overnight but it should send a strong message to the other spamming bastards out there.
So can I sue AOL for spamming me with all those frigging CDs?
I bet Honda will be cursing if their site goes down for 24 hours thanks to a resounding Slashdot Effect.
On the plus side, think of the free advertising to Honda...
Err, if you RTFA you'd know the tyres had weights in them.
Taking this idea one step further, what if each computer node on the network was given a basic set of rules so that it emulated a bunch of brain cells. Would the network self-organise to create some sort of intelligence?
However, there is a huge problem with it: If you hate someone all you do is make some fake ads with their phone numbers on and leave them for the Chinese authorities to find and then spam.
Result: an innocent person has a whole lotta shit to clean up.
If the authorities do take some time to investigate the ads (ie actually try phoning the numbers and try to buy the products would be a start) then I think it might be a good way to deal with the criminals who promote their wares.
Similar tactics have been done before against email spammers whereby people find out the spammer's home address and send them junk mail in the post. It pisses the spammers off, but unfortunately finding out the senders of such crap is much more difficult as they don't rely on an email address to take orders with.
The "shock and awe" tactics are propaganda designed to scare the crap out of the Iraqi army and make them surrender or be killed. Let's face it, if you were an Iraqi soldier living in fear of your life from a brutal regime, would you seriously want to take on 2 countries whose annual spending on "defence" is 350 times higher than your own coutries'?
Telling the Iraqis where and when we were going in would be stupid because they would have time to prepare and defend. Although the war won't be evenly matched we don't want to see ANY of our troups die, so protecting their lives is paramount.
There's so much propaganda on both sides. I think information is deliberately unreliable otherwise Saddam would know precisely what's going to happen and when.
As a aside issue, can anyone tell me why Saddam sets fire to the oil fields?
If only Slashdot would post a thread every time something on *n?x needed patching then Slashdot would probably Slashdot iteself!
It's a whole lot more complicated than that. If you think phonetically about the way we talk we often merge words together rather than leave short descreet pauses between words. (For example, do you say "leaderovthepack" or "leader. ov. the. pack"? Also note the "ov" instead of "of")
Not only that we pronounce words differently depending on the context of which they appear in (if you think about the mechanics of speaking you'll realise our mouths change shape, therefore if you've just pronounced an "m" you may find it tricky to hit an immediate "l"). Also, we give away many clues about our state or mind as we speak - when we say "yours truly" we often sound humble, but when we say "Mine's better than yours" the "yours" in the latter sentence sounds more aggressive.
Probably the most important difference is emotion. A good narrator or speaker can draw you in to what he's saying because of the way he says it. Think about Kennedy delivering the line "We do these things not because they are easy..." - now feed the same line into a speech synthesizer. It's dead, isn't it? No impact, no emotion, no feeling. Personally, I find I can concentrate much more when a good narrator is reading an audio book than I can if a bad one reads it.
I found an audio book on Kazaa once where Stephen Hawking's synthesizer reads aloud A Brief History Of Time. I had to stop listening after 2 minutes because it no longer made sense - had Richard Dawkin been reading it then I'm sure I could have absorbed it 10 times better.
I hope it doesn't have a strong scottish accent, they're hard enough to understand in real life...
Maybe they should be used to generate the speech in those Weebl and Bob animations you link to in your profile!
It actually sounded like "Shbansheehailsacthoowawaaaawaaaens"
I remember you could also turn it on while you were programming, so evertime you pressed a key it would say "ONE ZERO PRINT QUOTE ACH EE ELL ELL O QUOTE ENTER TWO ZERO ENTER RUN ENTER". I used to drive me batty. It was one of those eighties things which you thought was "cool" at the time, but had no practical use. I think they were only ever invented so you could show your neighbours how advanced your computer is: "LOOK, IT CAN TALK TO ME!"
Some of the voices sound okay I guess. Better than Stephen Hawking anyway.
One word: Knoppix.
Er, maybe I've missed something here but if you're a Catholic priest and you want to look at kiddy pictures then you're hardly likely to hand your logs over to someone are you?