I own it for the games. (Splinter Cell and Ninja Gaiden especially.)
How is Ninja Gaiden? I'm not that interested in Splinter Cell - too much time in the military myself to be interested in it - but I thought I heard Ninja Gaiden was interesting - why? Also, do you know if it's being ported to or will play on the xBox 360?
I'll get Nintendo Revolution (yep, I'm a fanboy). What I do like so far is that they have said virtually nothing; they are quietly learning from the other 2. On the other hand, Sony and M$ have over promised, built expectations and are figuring ways to under-deliver (such as M$'s backward compatabilies issues)
So far for me it's a tossup between Nintendo Revolution - because they have more of the games that I tend to like and aren't so FPS-oriented - and the PS3 - which seems like a better system than the xBox.
Note: I currently own a GameCube and an xBox - but only own two titles for the xBox.
Pretty much for me - if it plays The Sims and it's variants, plus some cool Japanes and Euro games - you got me. Or if they come out with GTA: Seattle then I'll buy a platform that plays that.
Nah, any crashes would be to the East of them most likely, if properly situated, due to earth's rotation and the giant springs inside the mountains there.
we've been building tubes to carry people up to high altitudes for years, have rail connections, and a high number of people who understand British humor and can spell colour and centre correctly.
Think of Boeing, the Space Needle, and some award winning billionaires who already sent rockets to space.
And we don't mind travelling to British possessions for the space launch either, as we have tons (metric) of people who go to the UK frequently.
people would have been dancing over each other and freezing in those ridiculous poses, with an even higher body count.
.
mind you, i have a flash memory 512MB MP3 player, which is way smaller, so you'd never catch me in that line, i'm too busy downloading free local music from bands i like.
I nuke cookies with extreme prejudice, especially ones for "partners".
It's nobody's business. If I wanted to live in Soviet Amerika, I'd have voted for the failure.
Re:If it's a business model, where's the underwear
on
Ending Spam
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Except that spam does not use zombies to spread itself, SPAMMERS use zombies to spread spam.
Your analogy is simply flawed. Spam is NOT an organism. It does NOT "survive" somewhere, adapt and spread from the places where it survived.
And we certainly DO go for "species extinction", by eliminating the conditions that make spam practicable and profitable. You enumerate some of those conditions yourself in the end.
If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, and it paddles like a duck, you want me to check to see if it's a robotic assembly of nanobots pretending to be a duck.
Nah. My point is/was - not that I brought up the biological equivalency of spam to malaria (someone else did, and i said it isn't, but it could be thought of that way) - that even should we find a "cure" for spam, it would come back so long as the underlying model rewarded the spamsters in some way to continue to perpetuate.
So long as up to half the population won't report spam - in fact, it's more like 99 percent;
So long as enough people buy from spamsters to make it economically rewarding - which it is;
So long as the penalty is remote enough or far enough in the future to be ignored - which it is;
And so long as society encourages the pursuit of wealth above moral/ethical standards - which it does;
This won't change.
Sure, you can plug up a hole in the dike. I can - and do - turn in spamsters. But they will migrate and adapt.
Are they infectious diseases? Sometimes, see the use of zombies.
Can we truly eradicate them - no, because people will replace the prior spamsters so long as the afore-mentioned conditions perpetuate.
Want to cut down malaria? First, find easy methods of improving sanitation that allows it to perpetuate. Then find ways to interfere with the malarial infection of humans. If you do it backwards, it's likely that many places will still spread it. Because not everyone is rich like we are.
Same goes for spam - find ways to make it unrewarding for people to buy from spamsters (e.g. sell Viagra etc cheap, offer open source versions of office cheap - that's what they sell), find ways to make it bad to be a spamster, and then batten down the hatches with new protocols.
Re:If it's a business model, where's the underwear
on
Ending Spam
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I totally agree that computer worms/viruses work very much like an infectious disease. But they are merely one tool that spammers use, not identical with the phenomenon of spam as such.
Just as a mosquito is merely a tool the malarial parasite uses to spread itself.
Let's say we knock out something that permits mosquitos to infect human hosts. Chances are that it might only partially impact malarial infections of non-human hosts. The impacted malarial bug, provided it survives and breeds, may then decide to use another vector to complete the infection.
Same with spam - we can knock out the zombies. We can knock out the spam kingpins. We can make the email transmission more secure - it migrates to cell phones or text messages or video messages. Unless we go for species extinction, it is likely that it won't die, but will instead change.
Nowadays I rarely see pop-under ads any more - due to using different browsers - but now ads show up that are movies, which really burn up my bandwidth. To kill off those ads, I would have to disable the very useful site portions that i do want.
So long as the evolutionary niche exists that permits spamsters to make a buck or two from sending spam, so long as people don't turn in most spam, so long as some people buy from spamsters, and so long as most spamsters don't serve long jail sentences and are never caught, it is highly unlikely that spam will cease to exist.
double oops, I heard that SCO pirated the code from Firefox and then IBM showed it had patented it and donated the patent to open source...
If it's a business model, where's the underwear?
on
Ending Spam
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Bad analogy. Spam is not an organism or infection. It is a business model. It does not "survive" in computers, but in a combination of economical, technical and legal conditions.
True and False.
Spam acts like a parasitic organism, due to the favorable conditions for the business model. It does, in some cases, actually "survive" in certain computers, which are spam zombies that spew out spam from a spam source - in fact, there are a few at the other UW (in Wisconsin) which utilize the identified computers there to get thru the filters here (in Seattle).
Informing consumers is highly unlikely to stop this behaviour - or else AIDS/HIV would have been halted. Some consumers are highly resistant to changing their behaviour, don't think it's important, or it's such a good deal what would it hurt.
And, like the malarial mosquito, spam uses those responders (infected persons) to download more spam zombie software, since they tend not to be technical enough to remove the infection.
Is spam a parasitic malady and, if so, what next?
on
Ending Spam
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm wondering... will UCE (Spam) be like malaria... controllable in most areas but impossible to eradicate?
Or will these dedicated folks and others be able to eliminate it, perhaps by changes to the mail protocols?
Interesting question that, considering my work involves malaria.
My guess is that, like malaria and most parasitic infestations, we will at some point develop a "cure". The "cure" will work for a few years, after which the parasite (spam) will have adapted, surviving until then in different hosts (old windows machines donated to Africa, who knows). Then, having developed a new trick, it will come back as strong as ever.
Biology teaches us that organisms adapt to changing environments, thru selective breeding (natural), point mutations, and unforseen combinations (see the H51N avian influenza). We can develop cures, but once we do so, we can be fairly sure that, baring species extinction, it will develop methods to cope with our cures.
An easy solution would be to move to IPv6 - but this, like authentication, will only kill off the spam which doesn't use "trusted email clients that are identified" while the spam that can survive will be encouraged to spread like wildfire.
So long as the fiscal, legal, and societal penalties for spamming are fairly low and the rewards are high, and while most people do nothing about it, it will spread.
The best way to fight spam
on
Ending Spam
·
· Score: 5, Funny
is with a knife, a spatula, and a frying pan, preferably over a hot wood fire.
Slashdot Mirror
I own an XBox, but not either of the Halos.
It has never crashed.
My xBox has crashed quite a few times when playing Fable. Very disconcerting.
I own it for the games. (Splinter Cell and Ninja Gaiden especially.)
How is Ninja Gaiden? I'm not that interested in Splinter Cell - too much time in the military myself to be interested in it - but I thought I heard Ninja Gaiden was interesting - why? Also, do you know if it's being ported to or will play on the xBox 360?
I'll get Nintendo Revolution (yep, I'm a fanboy). What I do like so far is that they have said virtually nothing; they are quietly learning from the other 2. On the other hand, Sony and M$ have over promised, built expectations and are figuring ways to under-deliver (such as M$'s backward compatabilies issues)
So far for me it's a tossup between Nintendo Revolution - because they have more of the games that I tend to like and aren't so FPS-oriented - and the PS3 - which seems like a better system than the xBox.
Note: I currently own a GameCube and an xBox - but only own two titles for the xBox.
Pretty much for me - if it plays The Sims and it's variants, plus some cool Japanes and Euro games - you got me. Or if they come out with GTA: Seattle then I'll buy a platform that plays that.
oops meant crashes to the West, my bad, not the East.
got turned around for a second.
Nah, any crashes would be to the East of them most likely, if properly situated, due to earth's rotation and the giant springs inside the mountains there.
there you go, Moses Lake. Besides, we're used to planes crashing around here, and at least the tires won't melt in the summer sun.
but they charge to gamble, so I guess that doens't apply here.
not the launch site, the spacecraft build site.
...
And, why not launch from Martinique? That's closer to the equator
Does anyone have any details on how it will be launched?
...
...
either that or using a rail gun
or we could go back to the future and use hot air balloons (or helium) to lift them to Near Orbital Altitutude and then launch them
we've been building tubes to carry people up to high altitudes for years, have rail connections, and a high number of people who understand British humor and can spell colour and centre correctly.
Think of Boeing, the Space Needle, and some award winning billionaires who already sent rockets to space.
And we don't mind travelling to British possessions for the space launch either, as we have tons (metric) of people who go to the UK frequently.
turnabout's fair play for MSFT patenting the iPod ...
people would have been dancing over each other and freezing in those ridiculous poses, with an even higher body count.
.
mind you, i have a flash memory 512MB MP3 player, which is way smaller, so you'd never catch me in that line, i'm too busy downloading free local music from bands i like.
OMG! Zerg Rush!
...
Good thing they hadn't evolved
If they go the Madden route, they're shooting themselves in the foot for long-term growth.
But, hey, no prob.
1. Halo 3(60)
2. Halo 2
3. Halo
4. Sims: The Urbz
5. Sims: Rural Catfight (the suburban gen-Z'ers)
6. GTA: Seattle
7. GTA: that other S place
8. Quake 5.0.3
9. something fun like Dance Dance Revolution 4
10. something else
would ever have been on my list.
Guess I'm buying a PS3. Or the Nintendo box.
They just lost my market share. And my son's.
I nuke cookies with extreme prejudice, especially ones for "partners".
It's nobody's business. If I wanted to live in Soviet Amerika, I'd have voted for the failure.
Except that spam does not use zombies to spread itself, SPAMMERS use zombies to spread spam.
Your analogy is simply flawed. Spam is NOT an organism. It does NOT "survive" somewhere, adapt and spread from the places where it survived.
And we certainly DO go for "species extinction", by eliminating the conditions that make spam practicable and profitable. You enumerate some of those conditions yourself in the end.
If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, and it paddles like a duck, you want me to check to see if it's a robotic assembly of nanobots pretending to be a duck.
Nah. My point is/was - not that I brought up the biological equivalency of spam to malaria (someone else did, and i said it isn't, but it could be thought of that way) - that even should we find a "cure" for spam, it would come back so long as the underlying model rewarded the spamsters in some way to continue to perpetuate.
So long as up to half the population won't report spam - in fact, it's more like 99 percent;
So long as enough people buy from spamsters to make it economically rewarding - which it is;
So long as the penalty is remote enough or far enough in the future to be ignored - which it is;
And so long as society encourages the pursuit of wealth above moral/ethical standards - which it does;
This won't change.
Sure, you can plug up a hole in the dike. I can - and do - turn in spamsters. But they will migrate and adapt.
Are they infectious diseases? Sometimes, see the use of zombies.
Can we truly eradicate them - no, because people will replace the prior spamsters so long as the afore-mentioned conditions perpetuate.
Want to cut down malaria? First, find easy methods of improving sanitation that allows it to perpetuate. Then find ways to interfere with the malarial infection of humans. If you do it backwards, it's likely that many places will still spread it. Because not everyone is rich like we are.
Same goes for spam - find ways to make it unrewarding for people to buy from spamsters (e.g. sell Viagra etc cheap, offer open source versions of office cheap - that's what they sell), find ways to make it bad to be a spamster, and then batten down the hatches with new protocols.
I totally agree that computer worms/viruses work very much like an infectious disease. But they are merely one tool that spammers use, not identical with the phenomenon of spam as such.
Just as a mosquito is merely a tool the malarial parasite uses to spread itself.
Let's say we knock out something that permits mosquitos to infect human hosts. Chances are that it might only partially impact malarial infections of non-human hosts. The impacted malarial bug, provided it survives and breeds, may then decide to use another vector to complete the infection.
Same with spam - we can knock out the zombies. We can knock out the spam kingpins. We can make the email transmission more secure - it migrates to cell phones or text messages or video messages. Unless we go for species extinction, it is likely that it won't die, but will instead change.
Nowadays I rarely see pop-under ads any more - due to using different browsers - but now ads show up that are movies, which really burn up my bandwidth. To kill off those ads, I would have to disable the very useful site portions that i do want.
So long as the evolutionary niche exists that permits spamsters to make a buck or two from sending spam, so long as people don't turn in most spam, so long as some people buy from spamsters, and so long as most spamsters don't serve long jail sentences and are never caught, it is highly unlikely that spam will cease to exist.
I heard that SCO is claiming that code is theirs!
...
double oops, I heard that SCO pirated the code from Firefox and then IBM showed it had patented it and donated the patent to open source
Bad analogy. Spam is not an organism or infection. It is a business model. It does not "survive" in computers, but in a combination of economical, technical and legal conditions.
True and False.
Spam acts like a parasitic organism, due to the favorable conditions for the business model. It does, in some cases, actually "survive" in certain computers, which are spam zombies that spew out spam from a spam source - in fact, there are a few at the other UW (in Wisconsin) which utilize the identified computers there to get thru the filters here (in Seattle).
Informing consumers is highly unlikely to stop this behaviour - or else AIDS/HIV would have been halted. Some consumers are highly resistant to changing their behaviour, don't think it's important, or it's such a good deal what would it hurt.
And, like the malarial mosquito, spam uses those responders (infected persons) to download more spam zombie software, since they tend not to be technical enough to remove the infection.
I'm wondering... will UCE (Spam) be like malaria... controllable in most areas but impossible to eradicate?
Or will these dedicated folks and others be able to eliminate it, perhaps by changes to the mail protocols?
Interesting question that, considering my work involves malaria.
My guess is that, like malaria and most parasitic infestations, we will at some point develop a "cure". The "cure" will work for a few years, after which the parasite (spam) will have adapted, surviving until then in different hosts (old windows machines donated to Africa, who knows). Then, having developed a new trick, it will come back as strong as ever.
Biology teaches us that organisms adapt to changing environments, thru selective breeding (natural), point mutations, and unforseen combinations (see the H51N avian influenza). We can develop cures, but once we do so, we can be fairly sure that, baring species extinction, it will develop methods to cope with our cures.
An easy solution would be to move to IPv6 - but this, like authentication, will only kill off the spam which doesn't use "trusted email clients that are identified" while the spam that can survive will be encouraged to spread like wildfire.
So long as the fiscal, legal, and societal penalties for spamming are fairly low and the rewards are high, and while most people do nothing about it, it will spread.
is with a knife, a spatula, and a frying pan, preferably over a hot wood fire.
Yum!
so, obviously, we must do away with RIAA, since it's the cause of all this piracy.
Besides, if we do away with RIAA, artist revenues for new artists will skyrocket.
seriously?
until China imposes a recordable media tax on all their MP3 flash cards that can record music and dupe it, why should we in the US give a hoot?