Only if you don't know what you're doing, and continue using normal bullets. With the right low-power load, shooting with a silencer* can sound indistinguishable from pulling the trigger on empty brass. And still have plenty of power to kill unarmored people at short range.
* Yes, "silencer" is what they are called. That is the original 1920s word for the device, and it is an accurate description. "silence" + "er" = "makes something more silent than otherwise"
Running any kind of distributed anonymizer software will violate the typical internet provider's Terms of Service, because you are acting as a common carrier for the data of unknown strangers.
True, those terms aren't normally enforced... unless the bandwidth usage gets high... or someone like the MPAA files a complaint... then they can pull out an excuse to instantly terminate your access.
Dunno where you live, but it is perfectly legal to carry a concealed weapon where I live (with permit).
Dunno about you, but I am perfectly able to fly around (with an airplane). So apparently, humans can fly??
Your "objections" have just proved his point: by mentioning that these things can occasionally be legal with special permission, you demonstrated that they are ILLEGAL in general.
Really, do you know how incredibly hard it is to get a silencer permit? You've virtually got to invite ATF agents to come live with you.
Not all laws are just. If enough people break the laws that disobey "common sense", they eventually get changed.
If you want laws to be changed, break them in full view of the police and the media, and dare them to arrest you. Confront them with the damage the bad law is doing to you, an ostensibly decent person.
Civil Disobedience lives (although it needs a health plan lately).
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
But, anonymity isn't part of that process! It's the opposite of "willingly accepting the penalty". Trying to be anonymous is not working to get the law changed- it's just an attempt for you personally to ignore that law, leaving it in place to harm everyone else.
Furthermore I have used bittorrent myself and I see who is mainly using it. _Software Developers_
A totally invalid sampling methodology. I could just as well take a look around my office and conclude that 100% of adults have a postgraduate engineering degree.
One of the features that distinguishes bittorrent from prior P2p file sharing software is the compartmentalization of functions. With Napster / Gnutella / Kazaa, there was one single network (first hub, and then mesh) which all clients attached to. With older systems, if you wanted a Linux ISO, you'd connect to the same file search system used for MP3 music, cracked game warez, porn videos, and everything else.
But since BitTorrent has no searching in the protocol*, when you download a Linux ISO (or other software developer content), you are only connected to machines that are sharing that same exact file, none others. This is why serious corporations like Blizzard have started using BitTorrent variants to distribute their programs- because unlike earlier P2p systems, users wouldn't be intermingled with the mainly illegal majority of traffic.
Since your observations were meaningless, how can we really measure the the legality of the files BitTorrent is predominantly used for? Let's try the Google popularity test. Search for "bittorrent download" and observe that the top two hits are "suprnova.org" and "lokitorrent.com". Both of those sites are now 404 Not Found, but entering the names into news.google.com will return headlines like " FEDS SHUT DOWN FILE-SWAPPING SITE", demonstrating that the most popular recent BitTorrent sites were used for non-legal trading.
* Of course, I refer only to the original and still dominant version of BitTorrent, not the very recent proposed change to add searching.
2) using a public-key system, communicate your identity, thus defeating the purpose of anonymity
Public keys don't defeat anonymity, because they only communicate an identity, not your identity. They allow the establishment of multiple persistent online identities that are unconnectable to your real name.
One could repeatedly upload messages to a BBS directory (via one of the bouncing methods described above), each signed with your private key which enables readers to be sure that nobody is forging your postings. Readers know that all the files are from the same person, but cannot tell who that person is.
That anonymity can only be broken if your PC is seized/hacked and your private key is learned by the investigator.
I knew most geek weren't the strong type but this has to be a new low, the weight of modern CRTs is low, very low,
My new 20 inch CRT is 66 pounds, Terrestrial. Apparently you're a Martian, or even Lunarian...
Re:This is why I come to slasdot. Expert opinions!
on
A Gamer's Manifesto
·
· Score: 1
And, as we all know, the true mark of a good fighter is that he always attacks head on, regardless of circumstances.
Quite correct. If you can attack head-on and win, you have proven yourself to be a very good fighter.
it is indeed clever to attack a well organized and superiorly equipped force that has readily accessible artillery and air support head on,
Wrong. They never faced a "superiorly equipped force". The enemy was blatantly disorganized, with no ability to concentrate their scattered units on the single point of threat. Master Chief, individually, was superior to the entire alien army, in both firepower and survivability. The fact that clever tactics were absolutely unneeded just further underscores what better fighters those heros were.
easy for a compuer - it's pure math. The number of possible moves are finite.
The number of moves in ANY game is finite. That truth is especially obvious if the game is played on a computer, because you should already know it has non-infinite RAM.
But in FPS, MMOGS and RPGs it's just not possible.
It's absolutely possible- but it simply isn't fun.
The labels "Jock" and "Geek" are not mutually exclusive.
Yes they are. You just apparently have no idea what the word "Geek" means, and seem to have exchanged it with "nerd". (See the banner of this page- it says "nerd", not "geek")
"Nerd" implies intelligence. "Geek" merely means socially unattractive, something that Jock-like athleticism renders unlikely.
Doesn't follow at all. Being a free person does not imply being a creative person.
Entirely follows. Being a non-free person implies your creativity is irrelevant, as you have no liberty to make use of it.
And there have been plenty of creative slaves and subjects of authoritarianism. It was after all Nazis engineers who made rockets practical, and the authoritarian Soviet Union that put the first artificial satellite and first humans into orbit.
False examples. The pioneering engineers of rocketry weren't slaves.
Jazz and blues music was created by a people oppressed.
Not slaves either. (They were descended from ex-slaves, but still...)
Going way back, IIRC the alphabet that we use can be traced back to an innovation by slaves in Egypt, to use simple symbols derived from hieroglyphs to represent sounds.
Your recollection is absolutely, entirely wrong.
Give a group of craftmen 100 pounds of iron to make widgets, give them as much time as you like to develop efficent methods, and you will never get 200 pounds of iron tools out of them.
Even that one is false. The environment contains more than 200 pounds of iron, and after sufficient time, they will extract and fabricate from it.
We live on a finite planet; following economic theory that disregards that basic fact, we have already passed the point where the human population exceeds the sustainable carrying capacity of the biosphere.
Not true. It wasn't just him, and it wasn't recent. That claim has been conventional wisdom in "blue states" for 15 years. It was trotted out, for example, to debunk Republican mayors claiming to have cleaned-up crime in New York City.
just maybe, some people would be better off not having been born.
That's an oversimplification. If it were true, those people would be rationally attempting suicide, instead of struggling to keep living as long as they can.
The question is not whether it is in the individual best interests of a genetically crippled person to be born, but whether allowing the birth is better for enjoyable human life for everyone.
When it is considered that most parents considering abortion over a major congenital defect will try again for a luckier mix of genes the next year, the net effect on total human lives is actually positive. The pre-partum death of the first child means not only that a second will be born, but also that the second will probably live longer, happier, and cheaper.
Battlefield made solved this problem somewhat simply by making foot movement slow.
Do you mean Battlefield 1942? They didn't solve that problem at all- they just transferred it to vertical juking, AKA "bunny hopping". A machine gun is about the only chance you'll have to shoot a man who leaps 4 feet into the air with every pace. (Actually, the largest effect of bunny hopping is that grenades are the preferred weapon for close range infantry combat, even in open environments)
I have other stuff going on in my life. I'd much rather have 10 hours of *solid* gameplay,(with a nice beginning, middle, and end) than 40 hours that have been padded ou
That's the wonderful secret of PC gaming: most games have demo versions which can often give you 10 hours worth of 85% of the game's most distinctive content, and for free!
Why buy one of Half-Life2, FarCry, Painkiller, Doom3, Snowblind, Pariah, or Riddick, when you can sample them ALL for less money, more playing time, and more variety?
Now, this may be the game devs or MS, but I've currently got around 600MB free RAM. Surely you could load more than one small room or one level in there. NWN is really bad about this, almost every door brings up a load screen.
I actually believe this is rather a limitation of current OS design / memory allocation paradigms.
If a game (or any program) goes and uses up 100% of your free RAM precaching nearby zones, then the user can no longer alt-tab and open a webpage or email. Current OS design basically treats application allocation of dynamic memory as all-or-nothing: the program either absolutely needs it, or doesn't get it at all.
There is no good way for the programmer to request some RAM with a lowered priority, so that it can be automatically freed if some other application needs RAM for a more important purpose. And without that capability, more precaching from NWN impairs the machine's other, multitasked functions.
(The tape did have one great game - Revenge of the Mutant Camels!)
Double the piracy! Not only did they pre-emptively violate Namco's loading-game patent, but they also stole the gameplay from Lucasart's Empire Strikes Back, which was all focused on robotic super-camels.
which tells you what have you done all the time along:
It's only truely "second person" if the narrator telling the story (or cameraman following the hero) has a name or otherwise exists inside the game's fictional world.
Maybe they were being sarcastic and I missed it, but I don't get #20.
Yes, it's very sarcastic. Clues: (a) it's blatantly false. When someone says something too obviously untrue to even consider, it's usually attempted humor. For an example, visit any website on April 1st.
(b) it's the last item in the list. People like to conclude essays on a lighter note, or save the punchline till the end.
(c) it's the only one where he's immediately optimistic. All the others he decides are either impossible, or not going to happen soon... but this complaint is solved immediately.
but I think the consoles will end up horizontal more often than not other than for novelty sake.
They will end up however it was designed, so you can pop out discs without them falling on the floor.
You could at least PRETEND you have some real evidence to back up your claim.
Real females cited in the comment: 2. Real females cited in the original article: zero.
Ratio of eviditary accuracy: infinite.
You could at least PRETEND you have some real evidence to back up your claim.
Bah, you want scientific evidence? Look at Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Good Housekeeping, People, or anything similar. All magazines designed for an exclusively female readership- all plastered with outrageously clothed (or half-nude) supermodels on every other page. And yet, all of them big sellers.
Re:I could help, but I doubt he'd take it.
on
A Gamer's Manifesto
·
· Score: 1
At the end of the article, I thought "well, if this guy wants something that will satisfy most of his demands, he should head down to the store and pick up a copy of MS Flight simulator. It's challenging.
That's not a game; it's a simulator. Games are about winning and fun, simulators are about realism (or at least accuracy). Note that you can use Flight Simulator to play a game, by creating success rules you impose yourself, but it is still not a game, just like cleated shoes and leather balls aren't games.
While simulators are frequently fun, it is in the same way that Photoshop can be days of fun for some people.
I'll be -1 Redudant and point out, say, many of Will Wright's offerings,
Wright is most famous for producing toys, not games. The semantic difference is that games are necessarily about progressing towards a defined victory condition.
Games such as Thief and, to a lesser extent, Splinter Cell, fulfill the former; and the underrated
Um, no. Splinter Cell was all about roving hallways and killing. Thief wasn't spying either (it was "thieving", but on low difficulty you could also play it hunter-killer style).
For a game about spying, try something like Spycraft. That was ages ago, and it's high time a brave developer tried it again for a modern system. I'd say that WWII is the best setting for espionage fun, except that reviewers are too sick 1940s overexposure by now.
Real spying, like real organized-crime, is primarily a verbal task of interpersonal relationships, and is hard for the current state of hardware/software technology, and also hard for the average gamer to appreciate.
Slashdot Mirror
Suppressed gunshots are still quite noisey.
Only if you don't know what you're doing, and continue using normal bullets. With the right low-power load, shooting with a silencer* can sound indistinguishable from pulling the trigger on empty brass. And still have plenty of power to kill unarmored people at short range.
* Yes, "silencer" is what they are called. That is the original 1920s word for the device, and it is an accurate description. "silence" + "er" = "makes something more silent than otherwise"
Running any kind of distributed anonymizer software will violate the typical internet provider's Terms of Service, because you are acting as a common carrier for the data of unknown strangers.
True, those terms aren't normally enforced... unless the bandwidth usage gets high... or someone like the MPAA files a complaint... then they can pull out an excuse to instantly terminate your access.
Dunno where you live, but it is perfectly legal to carry a concealed weapon where I live (with permit).
Dunno about you, but I am perfectly able to fly around (with an airplane). So apparently, humans can fly??
Your "objections" have just proved his point: by mentioning that these things can occasionally be legal with special permission, you demonstrated that they are ILLEGAL in general.
Really, do you know how incredibly hard it is to get a silencer permit? You've virtually got to invite ATF agents to come live with you.
If you want laws to be changed, break them in full view of the police and the media, and dare them to arrest you. Confront them with the damage the bad law is doing to you, an ostensibly decent person.
Civil Disobedience lives (although it needs a health plan lately).
Martin Luther King was famous for civil disobedience. He explained it like so:
But, anonymity isn't part of that process! It's the opposite of "willingly accepting the penalty". Trying to be anonymous is not working to get the law changed- it's just an attempt for you personally to ignore that law, leaving it in place to harm everyone else.
Furthermore I have used bittorrent myself and I see who is mainly using it. _Software Developers_
A totally invalid sampling methodology. I could just as well take a look around my office and conclude that 100% of adults have a postgraduate engineering degree.
One of the features that distinguishes bittorrent from prior P2p file sharing software is the compartmentalization of functions. With Napster / Gnutella / Kazaa, there was one single network (first hub, and then mesh) which all clients attached to. With older systems, if you wanted a Linux ISO, you'd connect to the same file search system used for MP3 music, cracked game warez, porn videos, and everything else.
But since BitTorrent has no searching in the protocol*, when you download a Linux ISO (or other software developer content), you are only connected to machines that are sharing that same exact file, none others. This is why serious corporations like Blizzard have started using BitTorrent variants to distribute their programs- because unlike earlier P2p systems, users wouldn't be intermingled with the mainly illegal majority of traffic.
Since your observations were meaningless, how can we really measure the the legality of the files BitTorrent is predominantly used for? Let's try the Google popularity test. Search for "bittorrent download" and observe that the top two hits are "suprnova.org" and "lokitorrent.com". Both of those sites are now 404 Not Found, but entering the names into news.google.com will return headlines like "
FEDS SHUT DOWN FILE-SWAPPING SITE", demonstrating that the most popular recent BitTorrent sites were used for non-legal trading.
* Of course, I refer only to the original and still dominant version of BitTorrent, not the very recent proposed change to add searching.
2) using a public-key system, communicate your identity, thus defeating the purpose of anonymity
Public keys don't defeat anonymity, because they only communicate an identity, not your identity. They allow the establishment of multiple persistent online identities that are unconnectable to your real name.
One could repeatedly upload messages to a BBS directory (via one of the bouncing methods described above), each signed with your private key which enables readers to be sure that nobody is forging your postings. Readers know that all the files are from the same person, but cannot tell who that person is.
That anonymity can only be broken if your PC is seized/hacked and your private key is learned by the investigator.
I knew most geek weren't the strong type but this has to be a new low, the weight of modern CRTs is low, very low,
My new 20 inch CRT is 66 pounds, Terrestrial. Apparently you're a Martian, or even Lunarian...
And, as we all know, the true mark of a good fighter is that he always attacks head on, regardless of circumstances.
Quite correct. If you can attack head-on and win, you have proven yourself to be a very good fighter.
it is indeed clever to attack a well organized and superiorly equipped force that has readily accessible artillery and air support head on,
Wrong. They never faced a "superiorly equipped force". The enemy was blatantly disorganized, with no ability to concentrate their scattered units on the single point of threat. Master Chief, individually, was superior to the entire alien army, in both firepower and survivability. The fact that clever tactics were absolutely unneeded just further underscores what better fighters those heros were.
Similarly, when I need to clobber a few twelve-year olds, I don't bother with anything but a frontal assault either!
easy for a compuer - it's pure math. The number of possible moves are finite.
The number of moves in ANY game is finite. That truth is especially obvious if the game is played on a computer, because you should already know it has non-infinite RAM.
But in FPS, MMOGS and RPGs it's just not possible.
It's absolutely possible- but it simply isn't fun.
"If not free, not creative" does not imply "if free, creative".
And since that isn't what the other poster (or Julian) said, your objection is baseless.
The labels "Jock" and "Geek" are not mutually exclusive.
Yes they are. You just apparently have no idea what the word "Geek" means, and seem to have exchanged it with "nerd". (See the banner of this page- it says "nerd", not "geek")
"Nerd" implies intelligence. "Geek" merely means socially unattractive, something that Jock-like athleticism renders unlikely.
"Geek" and "Moronic" are not mutually exclusive.
Doesn't follow at all. Being a free person does not imply being a creative person.
Entirely follows. Being a non-free person implies your creativity is irrelevant, as you have no liberty to make use of it.
And there have been plenty of creative slaves and subjects of authoritarianism. It was after all Nazis engineers who made rockets practical, and the authoritarian Soviet Union that put the first artificial satellite and first humans into orbit.
False examples. The pioneering engineers of rocketry weren't slaves.
Jazz and blues music was created by a people oppressed.
Not slaves either. (They were descended from ex-slaves, but still...)
Going way back, IIRC the alphabet that we use can be traced back to an innovation by slaves in Egypt, to use simple symbols derived from hieroglyphs to represent sounds.
Your recollection is absolutely, entirely wrong.
Give a group of craftmen 100 pounds of iron to make widgets, give them as much time as you like to develop efficent methods, and you will never get 200 pounds of iron tools out of them.
Even that one is false. The environment contains more than 200 pounds of iron, and after sufficient time, they will extract and fabricate from it.
We live on a finite planet; following economic theory that disregards that basic fact, we have already passed the point where the human population exceeds the sustainable carrying capacity of the biosphere.
That's true, but separate.
One economist recently claimed
Not true. It wasn't just him, and it wasn't recent. That claim has been conventional wisdom in "blue states" for 15 years. It was trotted out, for example, to debunk Republican mayors claiming to have cleaned-up crime in New York City.
just maybe, some people would be better off not having been born.
That's an oversimplification. If it were true, those people would be rationally attempting suicide, instead of struggling to keep living as long as they can.
The question is not whether it is in the individual best interests of a genetically crippled person to be born, but whether allowing the birth is better for enjoyable human life for everyone.
When it is considered that most parents considering abortion over a major congenital defect will try again for a luckier mix of genes the next year, the net effect on total human lives is actually positive. The pre-partum death of the first child means not only that a second will be born, but also that the second will probably live longer, happier, and cheaper.
Battlefield made solved this problem somewhat simply by making foot movement slow.
Do you mean Battlefield 1942? They didn't solve that problem at all- they just transferred it to vertical juking, AKA "bunny hopping". A machine gun is about the only chance you'll have to shoot a man who leaps 4 feet into the air with every pace. (Actually, the largest effect of bunny hopping is that grenades are the preferred weapon for close range infantry combat, even in open environments)
This humor article wonderfully illustrates the point. Continues here.
I have other stuff going on in my life. I'd much rather have 10 hours of *solid* gameplay,(with a nice beginning, middle, and end) than 40 hours that have been padded ou
That's the wonderful secret of PC gaming: most games have demo versions which can often give you 10 hours worth of 85% of the game's most distinctive content, and for free!
Why buy one of Half-Life2, FarCry, Painkiller, Doom3, Snowblind, Pariah, or Riddick, when you can sample them ALL for less money, more playing time, and more variety?
Now, this may be the game devs or MS, but I've currently got around 600MB free RAM. Surely you could load more than one small room or one level in there. NWN is really bad about this, almost every door brings up a load screen.
I actually believe this is rather a limitation of current OS design / memory allocation paradigms.
If a game (or any program) goes and uses up 100% of your free RAM precaching nearby zones, then the user can no longer alt-tab and open a webpage or email. Current OS design basically treats application allocation of dynamic memory as all-or-nothing: the program either absolutely needs it, or doesn't get it at all.
There is no good way for the programmer to request some RAM with a lowered priority, so that it can be automatically freed if some other application needs RAM for a more important purpose. And without that capability, more precaching from NWN impairs the machine's other, multitasked functions.
(The tape did have one great game - Revenge of the Mutant Camels!)
Double the piracy! Not only did they pre-emptively violate Namco's loading-game patent, but they also stole the gameplay from Lucasart's Empire Strikes Back, which was all focused on robotic super-camels.
which tells you what have you done all the time along:
It's only truely "second person" if the narrator telling the story (or cameraman following the hero) has a name or otherwise exists inside the game's fictional world.
The whole stealth (Thief/Splinter Cell) genre started 6 or so years ago,
Nope. Wolfenstein was programmed 25 years ago. Even Ms. Pacman had a little stealth.
and lately we've created the "open city game" (GTA).
Daggerfall etc are much older than GTA.
if they'd actually bother to model a palette or two but dear gods, the laziness.
Palettes are really a kind of laziness. They're for wimps who can't lift crates over their heads all day.
After all, if a human can easily run at 20 mph carrying 9 guns and 200 rounds for each, why would supermen like that need help shifting a few crates?
Maybe they were being sarcastic and I missed it, but I don't get #20.
Yes, it's very sarcastic. Clues:
(a) it's blatantly false. When someone says something too obviously untrue to even consider, it's usually attempted humor. For an example, visit any website on April 1st.
(b) it's the last item in the list. People like to conclude essays on a lighter note, or save the punchline till the end.
(c) it's the only one where he's immediately optimistic. All the others he decides are either impossible, or not going to happen soon... but this complaint is solved immediately.
but I think the consoles will end up horizontal more often than not other than for novelty sake.
They will end up however it was designed, so you can pop out discs without them falling on the floor.
You could at least PRETEND you have some real evidence to back up your claim.
Real females cited in the comment: 2.
Real females cited in the original article: zero.
Ratio of eviditary accuracy: infinite.
You could at least PRETEND you have some real evidence to back up your claim.
Bah, you want scientific evidence? Look at Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Good Housekeeping, People, or anything similar. All magazines designed for an exclusively female readership- all plastered with outrageously clothed (or half-nude) supermodels on every other page. And yet, all of them big sellers.
At the end of the article, I thought "well, if this guy wants something that will satisfy most of his demands, he should head down to the store and pick up a copy of MS Flight simulator. It's challenging.
That's not a game; it's a simulator. Games are about winning and fun, simulators are about realism (or at least accuracy). Note that you can use Flight Simulator to play a game, by creating success rules you impose yourself, but it is still not a game, just like cleated shoes and leather balls aren't games.
While simulators are frequently fun, it is in the same way that Photoshop can be days of fun for some people.
I'll be -1 Redudant and point out, say, many of Will Wright's offerings,
Wright is most famous for producing toys, not games. The semantic difference is that games are necessarily about progressing towards a defined victory condition.
Games such as Thief and, to a lesser extent, Splinter Cell, fulfill the former; and the underrated
Um, no. Splinter Cell was all about roving hallways and killing. Thief wasn't spying either (it was "thieving", but on low difficulty you could also play it hunter-killer style).
For a game about spying, try something like Spycraft. That was ages ago, and it's high time a brave developer tried it again for a modern system. I'd say that WWII is the best setting for espionage fun, except that reviewers are too sick 1940s overexposure by now.
Real spying, like real organized-crime, is primarily a verbal task of interpersonal relationships, and is hard for the current state of hardware/software technology, and also hard for the average gamer to appreciate.