As the entire planet is being massacred by giant flesh-eating mutant dandelions, the fact that we've got a colony on mars is going to make me feel reeeeealy great.
Generally, anything that has a good chance of resulting in even minor catastrophies should be avoided.
I was a CS major for a year and a half at Boston University. I took a bunch of classes, and I finally realized that a University's idea of CS is fifty different flavors of Discrete Math. Most of my classmates had never even written a program over 100 lines....and I took up through Junior level courses. Now, I certainly realize there's math involved in CS, but CS != math. All of my friends in the CS program spend weeks simulating queues and predicting average TOS etc, but as soon as I start talking about things like polymorphism or inheritance I just get blank stares.
If my professors actually taught me USEFUL skills, like PHP / MySQL, I would have stuck with it...but a program that chooses completely useless, academic languages like Scheme and Standard ML over practical skills just doesn't give me enough competitive skills to be worth the money.
There's always a market for people with useful skills....it's no surprise that when the industry gets tougher people are not as likely to waste their time and money to come out of school without marketable skills.
Punkbuster doesn't just issue GUID bans for cheating.
This is a true story...happened the first time PB had to update. I hopped in this game, and boom, team spectator. I didn't know what happened, so I just hit join game. I played for five minutes, boom, back to spectator. It was printing warning messages in my console, but I didn't think to check unitl after the third time I got booted...then it booted me out of the game clear back to the title screen. I tried logging in, and it flagged my 100% legit purchased cd key with a GUID ban. I had to get a new one!
Before you accuse me of cheating, why don't you get your facts straight. I don't need any kind of cheats to kick your ass six ways from Sunday....if you doubt me, just send a PM and I'll hop on A51's instagib and fry your ass till you whimper for mercy...bitch.
A librarian is a bad example, because Google doesn't even understand what a person is...it's just a pattern-matching algorithm. You make them sound like some kind of a malevolent agent that refuses to stop telling big mean 'ol nasty lies...the truth of the matter is that Google just scans for whatever words you put in it, and if someone is publishing information that contains those words, it's going to turn up.
Furthermore, there are so many people in the world with any given name there's no expectation that just giving google a name is enough to be sure you're going to be talking about the same person.
This is like looking in the card catalog for your name and then suing the library for libel.
Don't be so quick to knock ridiculous metaphors, you had a really ridiculous one and you didn't seem to understand what was going on at all.
the software's not disguised as actual pirated software, but the keygens and cracks. AFAIK, those are in much more of a legal gray area than actual pirated software. Theoretically, if someone legitimately owns a piece of software, and they're on another computer, and they have the original installation media and they forgot their cd key at home, it wouldn't be terribly illegal to load up a keygen so they could play a round or two.
Or hell, even take the Baldur's gate series. I bought every single game in the series, and I still crack all of those games since I don't want to have to put the cd in when I play. What about somone who has their GUID banned by punkbuster? I don't believe they have any right to stop me permanently from playing a game I bought online...what if I just use a keygen and get another key?
Anyways, there's really not much of a case for what these people are doing. Besides, if they like vigilantes so much, what do you say we show them what a DDOS looks like?
Fuck the draft, fuck Bush, fuck 9-11, fuck Ashcroft, fuck every goddamn dictatorship in the third world, and most of all, fuck anyone who thinks they can trot out ANY of those things and expect me to die face-down in the muck in some third-world shithole for George Bush's vision of peace, democracy, or corporate profits. If you think any of those things are worth dying for, if you feel you owe George Bush your life for any of those things, enlist, get shot, and die already, because I'm sick of your crap.
Let the jews and palestineans kill each other off until the last ones die with their hands around each other's throats. They deserve each other.
Let Saddam Hussein gas his own people all day long. I won't get shot to kill one murderer when we've got one who's just as bad running our country.
Let the Afghanis live under a brutal dictatorship...if they were capable of anything better, they'd have it.
Let the US army, a blatant affront to our constitution and the values of our country, one of the evils our founding fathers risked their lives to prevent, die one by one. We won't miss you cowards, you murderers, you inhuman things who kill for money.
I'm not going to lay down my life for some coward's idea of cowboy justice, some spoiled brat's musings on the eternal conflict between good and evil. When I see the Iraqui army spilling off boats in Maryland, I'll be the first one to get a gun and defend my family, as our forefathers would have wished...but I'll be damned if I'm going to trot off to some foreign country and risk my life for the very meddling idiocy that this country was formed to fight against.
Go ahead, mod me down, bitch. That's what I believe. And that's final.
The government cloned the entire Finger Lakes Region SCCA and set them loose in eastern europe...maybe they did the first thing that made sense to them...they made a web page.
From the post some people might imply that the co-op mode was given only to the x-box as some kind of incentive to play that particular version. However, it was not created by Id, but VV, the company in charge of porting D3 to the xbox.
Id didn't want a co-op mode, and these guys did. That makes me feel much better than if it had been a decision by Id itself in some kind of an attempt to make people buy both versions.
I'm running a Gentoo / XP dual-boot, and I have to say, I really love it. Gentoo doesn't just slap any ol' bootloader on there...you get to choose which one you'd like and configure it yourself...this ensures that both of your operatings systems are immediately available.
For anyone who already is comfortable working at a command line, Gentoo linux is the best way to learn a linux system from the bottom up. Every aspect of gentoo just makes sense. Besides, with a 3.2g processor, you'll hardly notice the compile times.
Gentoo.org has some really excellent install guides, and the people on the official forums are some of the most helpful forumers around. Try it, you'll love it!
When he talks about a bottom-up distro, there's really nothing more bottom-up than gentoo. Gentoo basically downloads the source off of the developer's web site, cvs, whatever, and compiles it.
If that's too "bottom-up," well, then write a tool that generates binary packages off of the gentoo portage tree, and then a pretty installer that uses them. You could run an apt-style repository on a gentoo box, and then have this new distro just combine the binary packages from gentoo. However, you have to make standardizations on certain libraries, and then you're in exactly the same position of debian or red hat. So what's he talking about, a red hat that's more "modular?" He really didn't do a good job of describing what he has in mind or why it's different from debian.
Why doesn't he just add features to existing distros? Face it, if the linux geeks don't see any unique features in a distro, it's going nowhere. Sure, impressing the PHB's is great and all, but who's going to use it? Who's going to work on it?
In short, the article really fails to give us anything meaningful to talk about. Some of you people seem ready to start gushing before you've even heard any details, saying how the PHB's love this stuff, but all I can say is...
is ensuring that others preserve those freedoms. Think about it this way...if you believe in freedom, why don't you believe in the freedom to kill people?
It's because that freedom comes at the cost of a greater freedom, the freedom to continue living. Just so, the freedom to take away other people's freedom, as SCO is doing by violating the GPL, is incompatible with ensuring that everyone can reap the benefits of free software.
In short, "free software" is only free insofar as you preserve for others the freedoms that you were given.
No, it couldn't.
DVDs / VHSs are licensed for home performance. They sell you those things as an individual, for individual use. Therefore, it's not within your rights to turn around and use that license to show it to a hundred people. That's why there's a difference between public and private performance. Showing a movie to a large group of people is outside of the agreement under which you're allowed to watch the DVD.
However, when you buy a computer game, the license explicitly allows you to install it on one computer and to play it online with other people. The point about the "public performance" law is not that you're doing something with other people, but that you're outside of the original parameters of your license to use the work.
A LAN party is just a group of people using their individual licenses lawfully together. A public screening of a movie is outside of the permissable license on a DVD sold for private viewing.
Your last two paragraphs are false and misleading. If I buy a laptop and sit on a park bench, using it, that would be a "public performance," according to you. There's absolutely no connection between this notion of "public performance" and computer software.
Seriously. Think about it this way. Ever been to a public lab? A public high school? A library? They all have computers, all running copies of Windows. Is that a "public performance"? No. As long as you have one license for each computer, you're in the clear.
Whoever told you that must have been thinking of movies or music...that's what the legal catch phrase "public showing" comes from. A lan party is no more a public performance than twenty people standing in the same room, listening to the same song on individual cd players with headphones.
No reasonable person would be in favor of a state without police...that's just a straw man argument. The issue here is that the FBI can just shut you down simply because it believes you're doing something wrong, and you don't get any compensation regardless of whether or not you really were doing something wrong.
If I'm hiding coke in my sofa, and the FBI raids my house and confiscates the sofa, I have no reasonable expectation that I will ever get the sofa back. If they also take apart my easy chair looking for more coke, but don't find it, then, well, I shouldn't have been hiding drugs in my furniture. Tough luck.
However, what if the FBI screws up, and they don't find anything, even though they trash all of my furniture? It seems pretty reasonable that they owe me the cost of all the furniture, EVEN IF there was no way they could have known. In other words, even if they cross all their t's and dot all their i's, if they don't come up with anything, they still wrongfully accused me, and thus they owe me compensation.
By the same token, if they shut down a business, and they don't find evidence to accuse the business owner of a crime, the FBI should be responsible for every penny the company lost while their equipment was getting sniffed and probed by the FBI nerds, plus something for their trouble.
There's no reason why I should have to sue to get compensated...if you're not going to falsely accuse me I should be automatically compensated the instant my name is cleared.
The problem is that as it stands now is that the FBI could just hose an operation like 2600 for some minor offense and just keep their equipment indefinitely. Accountability, especially the financial kind will go a long way towards preventing the Gov's cronies from abusing their powers.
The reason your immune system is able to keep you alive is because it's constantly under bombardment by all kinds of nasty bacteria...even the keyboard you're holding right now has thousands of types of bacteria all over it. Without this constant exposure, we would weaken, becoming susceptible to the first bug we caught.
It's silly to go after virus-writers...it's just a natural force that punishes people who write shitty code. If it weren't for viruses, imagine how much damage hackers would be doing now? Viruses are the most visible indicator of the quality of software. Just look at the HL2 code...that happened because valve was stupid enough to use software that's infamous for passing viruses in a high-security environment. There have been warnings in the news for years, and they didn't listen...so they got burned.
Bottom line, don't blame the virus writers...blame yourself for not using secure software....and for not updating your computer in two years.
I hardly think FF7 is the best game ever produced, but I'm calling it right now...there's just so many tifa fanboys it's GOTTA win.
Personally, I think the laurels should go to Mario 64. Sure, I think there are a lot of games that are more technically impressive (Halo), have better stories (FF6 / FFX), but Mario 64 is really what bridged the gap for me between 2D and 3D gaming. Everything about it, from the new controller to it's vivid 3d world was just amazing to me. I really have some great memories of staying up all night with my friends, trading off, trying to beat that damn penguin. To me, the measure of a truly great game is not how much fun it is years later, but how revolutionary it was at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
As the entire planet is being massacred by giant flesh-eating mutant dandelions, the fact that we've got a colony on mars is going to make me feel reeeeealy great.
Generally, anything that has a good chance of resulting in even minor catastrophies should be avoided.
I was a CS major for a year and a half at Boston University. I took a bunch of classes, and I finally realized that a University's idea of CS is fifty different flavors of Discrete Math. Most of my classmates had never even written a program over 100 lines....and I took up through Junior level courses. Now, I certainly realize there's math involved in CS, but CS != math. All of my friends in the CS program spend weeks simulating queues and predicting average TOS etc, but as soon as I start talking about things like polymorphism or inheritance I just get blank stares.
If my professors actually taught me USEFUL skills, like PHP / MySQL, I would have stuck with it...but a program that chooses completely useless, academic languages like Scheme and Standard ML over practical skills just doesn't give me enough competitive skills to be worth the money.
There's always a market for people with useful skills....it's no surprise that when the industry gets tougher people are not as likely to waste their time and money to come out of school without marketable skills.
Read.
Punkbuster doesn't just issue GUID bans for cheating.
This is a true story...happened the first time PB had to update. I hopped in this game, and boom, team spectator. I didn't know what happened, so I just hit join game. I played for five minutes, boom, back to spectator. It was printing warning messages in my console, but I didn't think to check unitl after the third time I got booted...then it booted me out of the game clear back to the title screen. I tried logging in, and it flagged my 100% legit purchased cd key with a GUID ban. I had to get a new one!
Before you accuse me of cheating, why don't you get your facts straight. I don't need any kind of cheats to kick your ass six ways from Sunday....if you doubt me, just send a PM and I'll hop on A51's instagib and fry your ass till you whimper for mercy...bitch.
A librarian is a bad example, because Google doesn't even understand what a person is...it's just a pattern-matching algorithm. You make them sound like some kind of a malevolent agent that refuses to stop telling big mean 'ol nasty lies...the truth of the matter is that Google just scans for whatever words you put in it, and if someone is publishing information that contains those words, it's going to turn up.
Furthermore, there are so many people in the world with any given name there's no expectation that just giving google a name is enough to be sure you're going to be talking about the same person.
This is like looking in the card catalog for your name and then suing the library for libel.
Don't be so quick to knock ridiculous metaphors, you had a really ridiculous one and you didn't seem to understand what was going on at all.
the software's not disguised as actual pirated software, but the keygens and cracks. AFAIK, those are in much more of a legal gray area than actual pirated software. Theoretically, if someone legitimately owns a piece of software, and they're on another computer, and they have the original installation media and they forgot their cd key at home, it wouldn't be terribly illegal to load up a keygen so they could play a round or two.
Or hell, even take the Baldur's gate series. I bought every single game in the series, and I still crack all of those games since I don't want to have to put the cd in when I play. What about somone who has their GUID banned by punkbuster? I don't believe they have any right to stop me permanently from playing a game I bought online...what if I just use a keygen and get another key?
Anyways, there's really not much of a case for what these people are doing. Besides, if they like vigilantes so much, what do you say we show them what a DDOS looks like?
Wow, they're actually just sending the television signals RIGHT THROUGH THIN AIR?! WHAT'LL THEY THINK OF NEXT!
Fuck the draft, fuck Bush, fuck 9-11, fuck Ashcroft, fuck every goddamn dictatorship in the third world, and most of all, fuck anyone who thinks they can trot out ANY of those things and expect me to die face-down in the muck in some third-world shithole for George Bush's vision of peace, democracy, or corporate profits. If you think any of those things are worth dying for, if you feel you owe George Bush your life for any of those things, enlist, get shot, and die already, because I'm sick of your crap.
Let the jews and palestineans kill each other off until the last ones die with their hands around each other's throats. They deserve each other.
Let Saddam Hussein gas his own people all day long. I won't get shot to kill one murderer when we've got one who's just as bad running our country.
Let the Afghanis live under a brutal dictatorship...if they were capable of anything better, they'd have it.
Let the US army, a blatant affront to our constitution and the values of our country, one of the evils our founding fathers risked their lives to prevent, die one by one. We won't miss you cowards, you murderers, you inhuman things who kill for money.
I'm not going to lay down my life for some coward's idea of cowboy justice, some spoiled brat's musings on the eternal conflict between good and evil. When I see the Iraqui army spilling off boats in Maryland, I'll be the first one to get a gun and defend my family, as our forefathers would have wished...but I'll be damned if I'm going to trot off to some foreign country and risk my life for the very meddling idiocy that this country was formed to fight against.
Go ahead, mod me down, bitch. That's what I believe. And that's final.
The PS2 contains a PS1 emulator...does that mean the PS2 is in violation of Nintendo's patent?
The government cloned the entire Finger Lakes Region SCCA and set them loose in eastern europe...maybe they did the first thing that made sense to them...they made a web page.
echo off format c:
From the post some people might imply that the co-op mode was given only to the x-box as some kind of incentive to play that particular version. However, it was not created by Id, but VV, the company in charge of porting D3 to the xbox.
Id didn't want a co-op mode, and these guys did. That makes me feel much better than if it had been a decision by Id itself in some kind of an attempt to make people buy both versions.
Did anyone else have ABSOLUTELY no idea what that guy in the trailer was talking about? Something about a keesanai dayshoe.
just swap pieces of the song around...like abcd to cdab. It doesn't have to be complex, only infinitely variable.
I'm running a Gentoo / XP dual-boot, and I have to say, I really love it. Gentoo doesn't just slap any ol' bootloader on there...you get to choose which one you'd like and configure it yourself...this ensures that both of your operatings systems are immediately available. For anyone who already is comfortable working at a command line, Gentoo linux is the best way to learn a linux system from the bottom up. Every aspect of gentoo just makes sense. Besides, with a 3.2g processor, you'll hardly notice the compile times. Gentoo.org has some really excellent install guides, and the people on the official forums are some of the most helpful forumers around. Try it, you'll love it!
intel and amd are not your friends...they're your bitches.
If a company's workers would rather go hungry than go to work, it doesn't deserve to be in business.
When he talks about a bottom-up distro, there's really nothing more bottom-up than gentoo. Gentoo basically downloads the source off of the developer's web site, cvs, whatever, and compiles it.
...enjoy pre-registering for your Phantom.
;)
If that's too "bottom-up," well, then write a tool that generates binary packages off of the gentoo portage tree, and then a pretty installer that uses them. You could run an apt-style repository on a gentoo box, and then have this new distro just combine the binary packages from gentoo. However, you have to make standardizations on certain libraries, and then you're in exactly the same position of debian or red hat. So what's he talking about, a red hat that's more "modular?" He really didn't do a good job of describing what he has in mind or why it's different from debian.
Why doesn't he just add features to existing distros? Face it, if the linux geeks don't see any unique features in a distro, it's going nowhere. Sure, impressing the PHB's is great and all, but who's going to use it? Who's going to work on it?
In short, the article really fails to give us anything meaningful to talk about. Some of you people seem ready to start gushing before you've even heard any details, saying how the PHB's love this stuff, but all I can say is...
is ensuring that others preserve those freedoms. Think about it this way...if you believe in freedom, why don't you believe in the freedom to kill people? It's because that freedom comes at the cost of a greater freedom, the freedom to continue living. Just so, the freedom to take away other people's freedom, as SCO is doing by violating the GPL, is incompatible with ensuring that everyone can reap the benefits of free software. In short, "free software" is only free insofar as you preserve for others the freedoms that you were given.
No, it couldn't. DVDs / VHSs are licensed for home performance. They sell you those things as an individual, for individual use. Therefore, it's not within your rights to turn around and use that license to show it to a hundred people. That's why there's a difference between public and private performance. Showing a movie to a large group of people is outside of the agreement under which you're allowed to watch the DVD. However, when you buy a computer game, the license explicitly allows you to install it on one computer and to play it online with other people. The point about the "public performance" law is not that you're doing something with other people, but that you're outside of the original parameters of your license to use the work. A LAN party is just a group of people using their individual licenses lawfully together. A public screening of a movie is outside of the permissable license on a DVD sold for private viewing. Your last two paragraphs are false and misleading. If I buy a laptop and sit on a park bench, using it, that would be a "public performance," according to you. There's absolutely no connection between this notion of "public performance" and computer software.
Seriously. Think about it this way. Ever been to a public lab? A public high school? A library? They all have computers, all running copies of Windows. Is that a "public performance"? No. As long as you have one license for each computer, you're in the clear. Whoever told you that must have been thinking of movies or music...that's what the legal catch phrase "public showing" comes from. A lan party is no more a public performance than twenty people standing in the same room, listening to the same song on individual cd players with headphones.
No reasonable person would be in favor of a state without police...that's just a straw man argument. The issue here is that the FBI can just shut you down simply because it believes you're doing something wrong, and you don't get any compensation regardless of whether or not you really were doing something wrong.
If I'm hiding coke in my sofa, and the FBI raids my house and confiscates the sofa, I have no reasonable expectation that I will ever get the sofa back. If they also take apart my easy chair looking for more coke, but don't find it, then, well, I shouldn't have been hiding drugs in my furniture. Tough luck.
However, what if the FBI screws up, and they don't find anything, even though they trash all of my furniture? It seems pretty reasonable that they owe me the cost of all the furniture, EVEN IF there was no way they could have known. In other words, even if they cross all their t's and dot all their i's, if they don't come up with anything, they still wrongfully accused me, and thus they owe me compensation.
By the same token, if they shut down a business, and they don't find evidence to accuse the business owner of a crime, the FBI should be responsible for every penny the company lost while their equipment was getting sniffed and probed by the FBI nerds, plus something for their trouble.
There's no reason why I should have to sue to get compensated...if you're not going to falsely accuse me I should be automatically compensated the instant my name is cleared.
The problem is that as it stands now is that the FBI could just hose an operation like 2600 for some minor offense and just keep their equipment indefinitely. Accountability, especially the financial kind will go a long way towards preventing the Gov's cronies from abusing their powers.
Seriously, you may not agree with the parent's post, but it's obviously a serious opinion, not a troll or flamebait.
The reason your immune system is able to keep you alive is because it's constantly under bombardment by all kinds of nasty bacteria...even the keyboard you're holding right now has thousands of types of bacteria all over it. Without this constant exposure, we would weaken, becoming susceptible to the first bug we caught.
It's silly to go after virus-writers...it's just a natural force that punishes people who write shitty code. If it weren't for viruses, imagine how much damage hackers would be doing now? Viruses are the most visible indicator of the quality of software. Just look at the HL2 code...that happened because valve was stupid enough to use software that's infamous for passing viruses in a high-security environment. There have been warnings in the news for years, and they didn't listen...so they got burned.
Bottom line, don't blame the virus writers...blame yourself for not using secure software....and for not updating your computer in two years.
I hardly think FF7 is the best game ever produced, but I'm calling it right now...there's just so many tifa fanboys it's GOTTA win. Personally, I think the laurels should go to Mario 64. Sure, I think there are a lot of games that are more technically impressive (Halo), have better stories (FF6 / FFX), but Mario 64 is really what bridged the gap for me between 2D and 3D gaming. Everything about it, from the new controller to it's vivid 3d world was just amazing to me. I really have some great memories of staying up all night with my friends, trading off, trying to beat that damn penguin. To me, the measure of a truly great game is not how much fun it is years later, but how revolutionary it was at the time.