It's also fascinating to watch Ebay implode. They alienated the seller groups, and then they started alienating the rank and file once they slipped on allowing fraudsters through the net.
It's as if Craiglist flourished because of the need for the direct deal. Not everyone wants to auction their stuff, people want looser, directly negotiated deals without the bullshit of 'Buy It now' and holdback auctions with reserves ("I know what I will let this go for, but I'm not telling")...
I guess we are destinated for the get rich quickers to start updating their books on how to make a million on Craigslist, as all the how to make a million on Ebay books for only $39.99 start gathering dust in warehouses...
Libraries often compete with one another on collections. They strive to be the foremost collection on some topic, maybe it's 17th century farming techniques, or modern optics. They compete and they gather rich alumni at major universities to donate private works and give them money to expand their very special collections.
Now along comes Google. Scanning books and keeping copyright on works that have been long abandoned. Some Universities were happy to take Google's money to be part of the scanning project, but now some want to turn and bite that hand.
If I can find a long since out of print book that no library has, or at least that no library would dare loan me, online and in a reproducible format - explain to me how that is different from assembling a rare collection in a library? Explain how the term monopoly is used in this context, because I do not think that word means what Senor Darnton from Hahh-vahhd thinks it means.
Google is adding to the diversity of publications in the world, and giving it to mankind. What they are doing, IN ACTUALITY, is removing the monopoly that university libraries once had. So I can see why they might be upset about it.
For most of us, it was our second job. We'd get off work at our real jobs at 5pm, go hang out until midnight in this little hole in the wall. We'd do all the account maintenance then. We each put about $30k of our own money in. We each took about $15k out each year. The remaining money went to the PRIs, we had a T3 from the telco to handle that many calls coming into our PBX. We outgrew the Bay equipment and had a dozen Cisco AS5200s with Micah modem chipsets. Crappy Nortel Meredian PBX, programming it was like doing assembly language.
We ended up having shell account surcharges that helped bring in additional revenue, and we tacked on a small fee for usenet news access. Still, overall - it was a fun time, but I wouldn't do it again.
I built a dial-up ISP in a major metro city with five Sparc 4s, and a Sparc Classic. Several Bay Terminal Servers and a crate full of USR Robotics Speedsters to attach to the octopus serial cables.
Upstream was a Cisco 2500 running two T1s, bonded with that new cool PPP protocol.
Over 650 shell accounts, usually 500 going at a time. A Special variant of SunOS 4.1.3 and access to tin, trn, pine and even... lynx!
Those Suns never took a break, never died and were solid, despite being located in a colo facility that alternated between being 100 degrees, and being 40 degrees. (Don't ask). Had a mind blowing $7,000/mo of revenue coming in the door to pay three people and keep the lights on the worlds crappiest office.
Warner subsidiary MTV announced that Tobias Andersson would be getting a reality show slated for primetime, called DataGeek Island.
The show features scantily clad women who compete for the affection of pasty sysadmins through a series of challenges, such as completing fibonacci sequences and climbing greased poles.
In a special segment, Peter Sunde from PirateBay will take over as the new CEO of Warner's file sharing site, now aptly named, Freedom's Destroyer with the iconic picture of a masted pirate ship replaced by a picture of the Battleship Bismarck. Peter will relocate to Venice Beach, California where he will share a home with Universal Music CEO Per Sundin. The two will strategize on money making opportunities, such as adding DRM directly to.torrent files and using pay-as-you trackers tied directly to credit card accounts.
Warner Brothers CEO Barry Meyer released this statement: "As somebody who had a hand in producing Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, I was ready to pull the plug on those fucking Swedes, if you know what I'm saying. But fortunately for all, we all came to our senses and realized that in the world of unbridled capitalism, co-opting the enemy is always the best strategy. Just look at Obama and the Taliban. We're just following the Zeitgeist here, guys. Now if you will excuse me, I have to take lunch with Dick Cheney. He's got some brilliant anti-privacy...err... sorry... anti-piracy ideas."
Copyright Reuters 2009.
Rogue Wireless Carrier SysAdmin
on
Cellular Repo Man
·
· Score: 4, Funny
How much fun will it be when the wireless carrier fires Crazy Stu, the wacky UNIX sysadmin with the penchant for conspiracy theories and bad dental health.
When HR comes around to fire Stu, he leaves his timebomb in place. The one that fires out the kill message to hundreds - nay - thousands of customers - and disables their leased laptops all at once.
The problem is all inside your head, my manager said to me
The answer is easy if you take it logically
Id like to help you in your struggle to be free
There must be fifty ways to leave your employer
He said its really not my habit to intrude
Furthermore, I hope my meaning wont be lost or misconstrued
But Ill repeat myself at the risk of being crude
There must be fifty ways to leave your employer
Fifty ways to leave your employer
Just slip a virus out the back, jack
Make a new botnet plan, stan
You dont need to be coy, roy
Just get yourself free with stolen accounts!
Hop on the ddos bus, gus
You dont need to discuss much
Just drop off the encryption key, lee
And get yourself free
He said it grieves me so to see you in such pain
I wish there was something I could do to make you smile again
I said I appreciate that and would you please explain
why the fuck you laid me off
He said why dont we both just sleep on it tonight
And I believe in the morning youll begin to see the light
And then he blew me off and I realized he probably was right
There must be fifty ways to leave your employer
Fifty ways to leave your employer
IANAL, esp. a constitutional one:
However, this seems to get into 5th Amendment territory. You can't be underage, post pictures of yourself on the internet, and be charged with child pornography distribution as a minor. The act of distributing lewd material inherently assumes that you are not a party in the material itself, or at LEAST, that you are not the ONLY party in the material.
If anything, you could charge the minor with public nudity or something, but not a pornography charge. That's ludicrous.
Few people know this, but he actually knows what the next three days of Slashdot articles are going to be. Even breaking news articles, he's already taken it into account and written it up ahead of time. He knows what you are going to submit before you do.
The relevant question is: We know playing these games stimulates brain pathways, but is it THRESHOLD behavior? Does it lower the inhibition to perform violence in real life?
My answer is that it may, but the jury is still out. A leading study tried to correlate racing and aggressive driving games with road rage, and came up empty.
My second point is that many forms of mass media are moving in the same direction, so we must be saying something quite specific about the interactive nature of video games to single them out for repression.
As to your, "maybe some people just like video violence" or "is everyone who plays these games destined for violence in real life?" - these are straw men, and not really on topic.
Look, the whole world culture is becoming more violent when compared to - say - the 1950s. Comics like Tales of the Black Freighter existed in the 1960s, but they were harder to get instead of say, Archie comics. Television had violence in shows like Gunsmoke, but always with a moral tone.
Movies like Last House on the Left would have a hard time getting made even in the 1980s. Yes, Texas Chainsaw Massacre existed, but Last House on the Left depicts a violent rape, and the Saw movies are torture porn.
Responses to web boards (every major newspaper now takes comments to about every single story) depicts a violent world. I took a look at the Entertainment Weekly website, looked at an article about Natasha Richardson's death from head injury. Unfortunately, the sysadmins at EW don't screen comments. It was horrific, with comments that are hard to repeat, many talking about what they would do to her corpse and many being glad that she "got what she deserved".
Videogames are simply reflecting this culture shift. A game like Bully simply reflects what goes on. It's a deep, and very unfortunate, confusion of the chicken and the egg. Somehow, legislators look at Resident Evil 5 and see something that they don't see in the remake of Dawn of the Dead. They look at Far Cry 2 and they take a pass on Sorority Row, a trailer I saw last night that looked as violent and horrific as anything I've seen from Wes Craven.
Somehow the interactive nature of video games makes people feel that it "thresholds" behavior. If you fantasize about harming animals, you need therapy. If you actually bind, torture and kill animals - you are quite a step closer to being a human killer. Somehow, this logic is being applied to shooters. That makes playing shooters itself a deviant behavior. I think it signals something deeply wrong with our culture, but it's interactivity alone does not single it out as threshold behavior.
Jason Statham was in a film called The Bank Job, a film which was actually pretty good. In it, they break into a bank in 1970 and get into safe deposit boxes. One of the boxes has pictures of Princess Margaret in flagrante delicto.
Maybe that's what this is all about. Snooping facebook so that there aren't any nasty pics of the royals giving head.
Steel hood, cast iron frame, cast iron block. If you hit a truck tire with that thing, your head is going through the windshield, the car would likely buck straight up, and AH's had a nasty tendency to roll over because they were so rigid.
Driving that car at 45 was inherently more dangerous than driving a modern Caddy at 75 or even 80. ABS, Traction Control, the removal of those bias-ply tires in favor of ones that will shed water easily and grip 100x better.
The problem is - quite simply - speed limits. Re-instate the national 55 limit. There are certainly enough cops out there to enforce it, and enough new cheap portable radar gear to make it enforced. Do not confuse an engineering problem with one that requires a legislative remedy. This is clearly a case where we do not need more technology to let us know we are driving unsafe. We already have cars that can brake automatically when detecting an upcoming collision, can make note of late swerving, and cars that can smell our breath. We don't need cars that tell us when our driving sucks. Just make everyone slow down.
Get over yourself. Hoover had the phone system built to tap in the 1950s. The cellphone networks have voice recognition software all over it. Spy satellites watch people leave their homes. There are radiation detectors at all major ports. You are scanned to the nines when your board a public passenger jet.
Yet Sir Timmy wants an unfettered control channel free from snooping that is so fast, it can be used for real-time feedback, to come in and out of every corporation, every public utility, every school and every home in a nation under threat from global nuclear attack and information warfare around the clock by the Chinese? And I'm not just talking to US citizens out there in Slashdotland, all Europeans, all Russians, everyone - set up SSH and tcpdump and watch the brute forcers from China start in on you.
Net Neutrality is a good thing, lack of QoS on the internet is a "good thing". Being free to set up an IP stream to do ANYTHING, safe in the knowledge that nobody is watching? That is a bullshit Ivory Tower shithead thing, and he ought to STFU.
Slashdot Mirror
Like ebay; but without the evil.
It's also fascinating to watch Ebay implode. They alienated the seller groups, and then they started alienating the rank and file once they slipped on allowing fraudsters through the net.
It's as if Craiglist flourished because of the need for the direct deal. Not everyone wants to auction their stuff, people want looser, directly negotiated deals without the bullshit of 'Buy It now' and holdback auctions with reserves ("I know what I will let this go for, but I'm not telling")...
I guess we are destinated for the get rich quickers to start updating their books on how to make a million on Craigslist, as all the how to make a million on Ebay books for only $39.99 start gathering dust in warehouses...
I looked everywhere for a vidclip of Jake Blues asking "How much for the wife? How much for the children?"
Wanted to insert witty URL here. No dice.
Libraries often compete with one another on collections. They strive to be the foremost collection on some topic, maybe it's 17th century farming techniques, or modern optics. They compete and they gather rich alumni at major universities to donate private works and give them money to expand their very special collections.
Now along comes Google. Scanning books and keeping copyright on works that have been long abandoned. Some Universities were happy to take Google's money to be part of the scanning project, but now some want to turn and bite that hand.
If I can find a long since out of print book that no library has, or at least that no library would dare loan me, online and in a reproducible format - explain to me how that is different from assembling a rare collection in a library? Explain how the term monopoly is used in this context, because I do not think that word means what Senor Darnton from Hahh-vahhd thinks it means.
Google is adding to the diversity of publications in the world, and giving it to mankind. What they are doing, IN ACTUALITY, is removing the monopoly that university libraries once had. So I can see why they might be upset about it.
Republican much?
I wasn't bragging about the money, believe me.
For most of us, it was our second job. We'd get off work at our real jobs at 5pm, go hang out until midnight in this little hole in the wall. We'd do all the account maintenance then. We each put about $30k of our own money in. We each took about $15k out each year. The remaining money went to the PRIs, we had a T3 from the telco to handle that many calls coming into our PBX. We outgrew the Bay equipment and had a dozen Cisco AS5200s with Micah modem chipsets. Crappy Nortel Meredian PBX, programming it was like doing assembly language.
We ended up having shell account surcharges that helped bring in additional revenue, and we tacked on a small fee for usenet news access. Still, overall - it was a fun time, but I wouldn't do it again.
Did somebody say hot chicks? That are good at math?
I knew you Slashdot guys were cool...
I built a dial-up ISP in a major metro city with five Sparc 4s, and a Sparc Classic. Several Bay Terminal Servers and a crate full of USR Robotics Speedsters to attach to the octopus serial cables.
Upstream was a Cisco 2500 running two T1s, bonded with that new cool PPP protocol.
Over 650 shell accounts, usually 500 going at a time. A Special variant of SunOS 4.1.3 and access to tin, trn, pine and even... lynx!
Those Suns never took a break, never died and were solid, despite being located in a colo facility that alternated between being 100 degrees, and being 40 degrees. (Don't ask). Had a mind blowing $7,000/mo of revenue coming in the door to pay three people and keep the lights on the worlds crappiest office.
Good times.
Yeah - he is 70 now, and perhaps that mary jane use in the 1960s is catching up with him.
Warner subsidiary MTV announced that Tobias Andersson would be getting a reality show slated for primetime, called DataGeek Island.
.torrent files and using pay-as-you trackers tied directly to credit card accounts.
The show features scantily clad women who compete for the affection of pasty sysadmins through a series of challenges, such as completing fibonacci sequences and climbing greased poles.
In a special segment, Peter Sunde from PirateBay will take over as the new CEO of Warner's file sharing site, now aptly named, Freedom's Destroyer with the iconic picture of a masted pirate ship replaced by a picture of the Battleship Bismarck. Peter will relocate to Venice Beach, California where he will share a home with Universal Music CEO Per Sundin. The two will strategize on money making opportunities, such as adding DRM directly to
Warner Brothers CEO Barry Meyer released this statement: "As somebody who had a hand in producing Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, I was ready to pull the plug on those fucking Swedes, if you know what I'm saying. But fortunately for all, we all came to our senses and realized that in the world of unbridled capitalism, co-opting the enemy is always the best strategy. Just look at Obama and the Taliban. We're just following the Zeitgeist here, guys. Now if you will excuse me, I have to take lunch with Dick Cheney. He's got some brilliant anti-privacy...err... sorry... anti-piracy ideas."
Copyright Reuters 2009.
How much fun will it be when the wireless carrier fires Crazy Stu, the wacky UNIX sysadmin with the penchant for conspiracy theories and bad dental health.
When HR comes around to fire Stu, he leaves his timebomb in place. The one that fires out the kill message to hundreds - nay - thousands of customers - and disables their leased laptops all at once.
What a day that will be.
The problem is all inside your head, my manager said to me
The answer is easy if you take it logically
Id like to help you in your struggle to be free
There must be fifty ways to leave your employer
He said its really not my habit to intrude
Furthermore, I hope my meaning wont be lost or misconstrued
But Ill repeat myself at the risk of being crude
There must be fifty ways to leave your employer
Fifty ways to leave your employer
Just slip a virus out the back, jack
Make a new botnet plan, stan
You dont need to be coy, roy
Just get yourself free with stolen accounts!
Hop on the ddos bus, gus
You dont need to discuss much
Just drop off the encryption key, lee
And get yourself free
He said it grieves me so to see you in such pain
I wish there was something I could do to make you smile again
I said I appreciate that and would you please explain
why the fuck you laid me off
He said why dont we both just sleep on it tonight
And I believe in the morning youll begin to see the light
And then he blew me off and I realized he probably was right
There must be fifty ways to leave your employer
Fifty ways to leave your employer
IANAL, esp. a constitutional one: However, this seems to get into 5th Amendment territory. You can't be underage, post pictures of yourself on the internet, and be charged with child pornography distribution as a minor. The act of distributing lewd material inherently assumes that you are not a party in the material itself, or at LEAST, that you are not the ONLY party in the material. If anything, you could charge the minor with public nudity or something, but not a pornography charge. That's ludicrous.
Few people know this, but he actually knows what the next three days of Slashdot articles are going to be. Even breaking news articles, he's already taken it into account and written it up ahead of time. He knows what you are going to submit before you do.
Here, you will like this:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html
Violence is more often borne from desperation of one form or another, I'd be willing to bet.
Ok, I'll be unpopular around Slashdot and say you are wrong. First, you fail to quantify the type of desperation. Economic? Social? Political?
Secondly, there are direct studies that show alteration to blood pressure and sleep habits with violent video games:
http://www.zampbioworld.org/bionews/index.php/2008/11/15/10883
The relevant question is: We know playing these games stimulates brain pathways, but is it THRESHOLD behavior? Does it lower the inhibition to perform violence in real life?
My answer is that it may, but the jury is still out. A leading study tried to correlate racing and aggressive driving games with road rage, and came up empty.
My second point is that many forms of mass media are moving in the same direction, so we must be saying something quite specific about the interactive nature of video games to single them out for repression.
As to your, "maybe some people just like video violence" or "is everyone who plays these games destined for violence in real life?" - these are straw men, and not really on topic.
Look, the whole world culture is becoming more violent when compared to - say - the 1950s. Comics like Tales of the Black Freighter existed in the 1960s, but they were harder to get instead of say, Archie comics. Television had violence in shows like Gunsmoke, but always with a moral tone.
Movies like Last House on the Left would have a hard time getting made even in the 1980s. Yes, Texas Chainsaw Massacre existed, but Last House on the Left depicts a violent rape, and the Saw movies are torture porn.
Responses to web boards (every major newspaper now takes comments to about every single story) depicts a violent world. I took a look at the Entertainment Weekly website, looked at an article about Natasha Richardson's death from head injury. Unfortunately, the sysadmins at EW don't screen comments. It was horrific, with comments that are hard to repeat, many talking about what they would do to her corpse and many being glad that she "got what she deserved".
Videogames are simply reflecting this culture shift. A game like Bully simply reflects what goes on. It's a deep, and very unfortunate, confusion of the chicken and the egg. Somehow, legislators look at Resident Evil 5 and see something that they don't see in the remake of Dawn of the Dead. They look at Far Cry 2 and they take a pass on Sorority Row, a trailer I saw last night that looked as violent and horrific as anything I've seen from Wes Craven.
Somehow the interactive nature of video games makes people feel that it "thresholds" behavior. If you fantasize about harming animals, you need therapy. If you actually bind, torture and kill animals - you are quite a step closer to being a human killer. Somehow, this logic is being applied to shooters. That makes playing shooters itself a deviant behavior. I think it signals something deeply wrong with our culture, but it's interactivity alone does not single it out as threshold behavior.
I just think it's funny that a guy named McCarthy is pointing out that this smells like a witch hunt.
Jason Statham was in a film called The Bank Job, a film which was actually pretty good. In it, they break into a bank in 1970 and get into safe deposit boxes. One of the boxes has pictures of Princess Margaret in flagrante delicto.
Maybe that's what this is all about. Snooping facebook so that there aren't any nasty pics of the royals giving head.
Let us take a look, shall we, at what kind of car the Healey was. Here's a nice pic:
http://www.seriouswheels.com/pics-abc/Austin-Healey-3000-Mk-III-green-fa-lr.jpg
Steel hood, cast iron frame, cast iron block. If you hit a truck tire with that thing, your head is going through the windshield, the car would likely buck straight up, and AH's had a nasty tendency to roll over because they were so rigid.
Driving that car at 45 was inherently more dangerous than driving a modern Caddy at 75 or even 80. ABS, Traction Control, the removal of those bias-ply tires in favor of ones that will shed water easily and grip 100x better.
The problem is - quite simply - speed limits. Re-instate the national 55 limit. There are certainly enough cops out there to enforce it, and enough new cheap portable radar gear to make it enforced. Do not confuse an engineering problem with one that requires a legislative remedy. This is clearly a case where we do not need more technology to let us know we are driving unsafe. We already have cars that can brake automatically when detecting an upcoming collision, can make note of late swerving, and cars that can smell our breath. We don't need cars that tell us when our driving sucks. Just make everyone slow down.
You have no idea how the world works.
Did I say ban encryption? No, I don't think I did.
Investigate encrypted IP streams from US IP ranges to Chinese ones? You betcha.
Get over yourself. Hoover had the phone system built to tap in the 1950s. The cellphone networks have voice recognition software all over it. Spy satellites watch people leave their homes. There are radiation detectors at all major ports. You are scanned to the nines when your board a public passenger jet.
Yet Sir Timmy wants an unfettered control channel free from snooping that is so fast, it can be used for real-time feedback, to come in and out of every corporation, every public utility, every school and every home in a nation under threat from global nuclear attack and information warfare around the clock by the Chinese? And I'm not just talking to US citizens out there in Slashdotland, all Europeans, all Russians, everyone - set up SSH and tcpdump and watch the brute forcers from China start in on you.
Net Neutrality is a good thing, lack of QoS on the internet is a "good thing". Being free to set up an IP stream to do ANYTHING, safe in the knowledge that nobody is watching? That is a bullshit Ivory Tower shithead thing, and he ought to STFU.
What happened to the killers?
If you take away Killzone 2, then I will have the urge to stab Brian Cox.
Right now, Ballmer is drawing a nice warm bath. He just came back from the drug store where he bought some sharp razor blades.