My original point was that it'd be nice if politicians all got off on the same foot (funny how politicians can be anti-communism and anti-union but still band together in groups that sacrifice the few for the good of the many?) and if there was some actual separation of business and state. That's all.
Oh yeah. And maybe less HURR HURR I READ A BOOK and more grounding in reality... anyone who utters "capitalism can work.. just ask Adam Smith!" from one side of the mouth and "communism could never work... just look at the USSR!" from the other needs a reality check.
You are aware that the USSR wasn't communism, right? I never purported anything Marx said to be even remotely feasible; that said, I still think it's a lovely plan for a utopian society (would you rather have your psx2 or would you rather sleep well at night knowing that your neighbors and their kids aren't slowly starving themselves to death because of an imbalanced distribution of wealth?) but, as you correctly point out, human nature's a bitch; same goes for capitalism.
Not everyone gets off on the same foot, and most would rather step on those below them than give them a hand up. In the vacuum of human nature, either capitalism or communism or pretty much anything else sounds wonderful. But in practice... well. If you don't have any (valuable) goods, you're disenfranchised.
Upshot is that in capitalism, at least people ostensibly have an incentive to work hard. Too bad the rewards aren't always (rarely?) commensurate with the effort.
...you're quite right. While I'm at it, theoretically speaking, communism as Marx put it sounds absolutely gorgeous, too.
That said, theory and practice are oft two completely different beasts. Human nature or what have you...
It'd be nice to have people in office who haven't already been bought?
>There was a case last year where a guy was told that by operating a political website, he was in effect donating thousands of dollars to a candidate, so he had to either file a bunch of paperwork or quit.
Of course there was, and of course it got publicity: why would you point out the gross excesses of the rich when you can demonize the little guy? Corporations fnding loopholes to get their millions to their candidates' pockets is easy enough to ignore when we've got the little guy who's obviously up to no good. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain... capitalism as we know it only works when you've got someone to look down on so you don't notice what the big guys are doing. Divide and conquer are wonderful tactics, or so I hear.
You don't believe it? Then why all the focus on people exploiting welfare and illegal immigrants as a viable issue, when closing up corporate/"megarich" loopholes would bring back in many times more than what's being leaked out through the bloated welfare system?
>In school they learn that World War 2 started with Pearl Harbor, not with Germanys invasion of Poland and US entered after Pearl Harbor.
Either that or I learned that the US' non-involvement policy which began after WWI ended roughly about the same time that Pearl Harbor was attacked, along with discussing whether or not the US would have gotten involved in the war if it weren't for the war being brought to us. (for whatever it's worth, the revelation that they knew the japanese were coming and didn't bother stopping it was a fairly good indication that they would, but it was made that much easier by giving the public a reason to focus on).
So. Doesn't the stereotype go that we're the ones who are supposed to be making faulty blanket stereotypes of other nations? Everything's topsy-turvy now.
Or: one person's experiences aren't necessarily true for everyone else's experiences, even if they do happen to live in the same country.
Adulterous president (think Marilyn Monroe) with a 9th-rate foreign policy to boot (think Vietnam/Bay of Pigs/almost getting us into a nuclear war).
Taking one to the dome was the best thing he could have ever done; if he hadn't gotten shot, we'd be looking down on him farther than we do Nixon. Who, Watergate aside, wasn't all that bad of a president...
Hi? Greatest game ever made? Ringing any bells here? 12-odd years since I first laid eyes on it and I'm still engrossed by it. Dungeon-based RPGs, ah... hell. 90% of FPS games take place in a dungeon, so there's no mistaking the influence this one had; the rogue(like)/variants are superinfluential badboys.
Also, Myst? Huh? Honestly now. What games did it influence? Riven? Anything else? I mean, the game was gorgeous and were it not for the COP OUT ending, I'd have bought RealMyst already. But come on.
Also, totally not getting the Cult of Half-Life. The game was good, but not mind-blowingly so...
The guys at the journal sound absolutely clueless.
"WE ARE A VERY PROMISING UNTERNET STARTUP AND WE WILL PROTECT YOU FROM HAVING YOUR ATRICLES SOTLEN."
"OK. Sounds good to me."
"WILL YOU SIGN UP WITH US?"
"Yeah, whatever."
"VERY GOOD. LEAVE EVERYTHING TO US."
"Uh huh. Whatever you say. Listen, I've got to shake some scorpions out of my shoes now or something, so uh."
"YES. WE HAVE VERYTHING UDNER COTROL."... a few months pass...
"Hi. Johnny Wad from Wired here. You know that it costs $50 to link to you guys?"
"Huh?"
"Yeah. Why so much? Do you think anyone will pay? Do you think it's enforcable?"
"Umm. Uhh. The, uh.. editor who... deals with, umm... that company is, uh. Not in. For a week. Or two. Vacation."
Plausible, very plausible. Is iCopyright.com a ThinkLab(!)-owned company? How many people have gone ahead and added iCopyright.com to their FuckedCompany list?
This is wonderfully insane stuff.
Having played Night Trap, Sewer Shark and a few other imminently forgettable Sega CD games... christ. Let it go already, people. There's a reason that the CD stunk like a dead fish and flopped like a live one. Sorry if I don't wax nostalgiac for an overpriced, remotely interactive, grainy movie/game playing device.
They can look forward to taking a bath on their "$100K" investment (are they serious?). Their money would have been better thro^H^H^H^H invested in an exciting new UNTERNET start-up or something.
Honestly. Have you ever played it? It's a good system if you want to catch up on sleep during the loads. And you want grainy? Brother, you got it!
Do I need to remind anyone else how much the Saturn hurt?
I forgot about these supercriminals with their high-tech encryption and whatnot. I also forgot that the law also provides for stiff penalties for burglars who have the audacity to wear gloves and ski masks whilst committing heists. No, wait...
If this bill passes, we're that much closer to the clustrfrick that Britain's in over encryption. Encryption doesn't remove physical evidence, just obfuscates it.
I'm guessing that rfp said it best...
Yes, it's likely entrapment. No, no one's really sure whether it'll hold up in court. No, you don't know what you're hoping to accomplish. Yes, it's a really bad idea. Worry about getting your IDS and firewall rules up to date and your security policies and tripwires strictly monitored before you bother with nonsense like a honeypot.
Also, the article neglected to blame the bounty of freezing rain and snow that I'm supposed to get tonight on that DASTARDLY Saddam. That's just shoddy journalism if you ask me.
1) where'd he get all the PSX2s?
2) will ebay be indicted for treason or something?
3) the PSX2 is classified as a computer in England (with the bundled BASIC); how is it not classified as one everywhere else?
4) even if all this is true, the DIA should've done that extra 15 seconds of legwork to figure out no one can make heads or tails of programming them
5) i hope these evil Iraqi computer scientists release the source code to the operating system that they build that allows for distributed computing on linked PSX2s. how are they building this cluster again?
Upshot is, there's no good games out for the PSX2 to distract the evil Iraqi computer scientists from their task of world domination. Hasn't this war been milked dry already? Cripes what a non-issue, but then again... now that Russia's our friends (here's a hint: it was china, not the us, they were soiling themselves over the whole time) might as well keep on demonizing those sinister brown people.
Glad to know the leaders of tomorrow will are today's morbidly obese kids hellbent (excuse me, h31183n7) on getting the latest warez.
Some of us want to kick back and blow shit up; it'd be nice if we were developing aesthetic sensibilites and leadership ability and "thinking outside the box" or whatever else at the same time, but it just ain't happening.
No new paradigm, just a newer way to waste what little free time we've got on our hands.
>Sun (Nasdaq: SUNW) and its partners announced a new milestone in the development of the ebXML infrastructure championed by the standards group OASIS and The United Nations.
Granted, it was a technology group, but really. What has the UN done for the world in terms of computational standards? Clever little end route that you tried there, Sun. Too bad it fell flat on its face. Not yet; give it a while. You simply don't have the market share to pull the same kind of garbage that Netscape did with ISOing Java(excuse me... ECMA)Script and get away with it.
I'm not exactly sure what Sun can complain about. There's nothing proprietary about flat text files. The vehicle for transmitting XML? Come on. You can transmit it from an Apple II, a C64, a VAX cluster, any damned computer you want: as long as it can send text, it can send XML. Define a new vocabulary, so what? If people like it, it's easy enough to implement yourself; there's absolutely nothing closed about it.
It would've been nice if there had been a real standards organization behind the drafting of XML itself; using it I often wonder why the left hand didn't know what the right hand was fucking up when they were drafting this tripe.
<i>A state could conceivably rule that if the company, and not the customer, still owns the game, then they should have to pay taxes on this "intangible property.")</i>
This regarding the fact that you don't actually <b>own</b> the software that you purchase, you merely rent a license of it.
I know jack squat about tax laws (just hand all my pertinent information to my accountant and let them sort it out), but if they're not claiming the software that I bought as a taxable asset on their end, is there some creative way to claim a tax exemption as a rental/loss on mine?
HELO? U R 4 SPEKENG BANGLADESH?
on
Author Unknown
·
· Score: 1
Bastardized in-jokes make for painful deciphering.
If you're dedicated enough, you can fracture and steal other people's words to get across a completely new message. If you don't believe me, just ask William S. Burroughs...
Slashdot Mirror
My original point was that it'd be nice if politicians all got off on the same foot (funny how politicians can be anti-communism and anti-union but still band together in groups that sacrifice the few for the good of the many?) and if there was some actual separation of business and state. That's all.
Oh yeah. And maybe less HURR HURR I READ A BOOK and more grounding in reality... anyone who utters "capitalism can work.. just ask Adam Smith!" from one side of the mouth and "communism could never work... just look at the USSR!" from the other needs a reality check.
You are aware that the USSR wasn't communism, right? I never purported anything Marx said to be even remotely feasible; that said, I still think it's a lovely plan for a utopian society (would you rather have your psx2 or would you rather sleep well at night knowing that your neighbors and their kids aren't slowly starving themselves to death because of an imbalanced distribution of wealth?) but, as you correctly point out, human nature's a bitch; same goes for capitalism.
Not everyone gets off on the same foot, and most would rather step on those below them than give them a hand up. In the vacuum of human nature, either capitalism or communism or pretty much anything else sounds wonderful. But in practice... well. If you don't have any (valuable) goods, you're disenfranchised.
Upshot is that in capitalism, at least people ostensibly have an incentive to work hard. Too bad the rewards aren't always (rarely?) commensurate with the effort.
...you're quite right. While I'm at it, theoretically speaking, communism as Marx put it sounds absolutely gorgeous, too.
That said, theory and practice are oft two completely different beasts. Human nature or what have you...
>How is campaign finance reform the solution?
It'd be nice to have people in office who haven't already been bought?
>There was a case last year where a guy was told that by operating a political website, he was in effect donating thousands of dollars to a candidate, so he had to either file a bunch of paperwork or quit.
Of course there was, and of course it got publicity: why would you point out the gross excesses of the rich when you can demonize the little guy? Corporations fnding loopholes to get their millions to their candidates' pockets is easy enough to ignore when we've got the little guy who's obviously up to no good. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain... capitalism as we know it only works when you've got someone to look down on so you don't notice what the big guys are doing. Divide and conquer are wonderful tactics, or so I hear.
You don't believe it? Then why all the focus on people exploiting welfare and illegal immigrants as a viable issue, when closing up corporate/"megarich" loopholes would bring back in many times more than what's being leaked out through the bloated welfare system?
>In school they learn that World War 2 started with Pearl Harbor, not with Germanys invasion of Poland and US entered after Pearl Harbor. Either that or I learned that the US' non-involvement policy which began after WWI ended roughly about the same time that Pearl Harbor was attacked, along with discussing whether or not the US would have gotten involved in the war if it weren't for the war being brought to us. (for whatever it's worth, the revelation that they knew the japanese were coming and didn't bother stopping it was a fairly good indication that they would, but it was made that much easier by giving the public a reason to focus on).
So. Doesn't the stereotype go that we're the ones who are supposed to be making faulty blanket stereotypes of other nations? Everything's topsy-turvy now.
Or: one person's experiences aren't necessarily true for everyone else's experiences, even if they do happen to live in the same country.
Adulterous president (think Marilyn Monroe) with a 9th-rate foreign policy to boot (think Vietnam/Bay of Pigs/almost getting us into a nuclear war).
Taking one to the dome was the best thing he could have ever done; if he hadn't gotten shot, we'd be looking down on him farther than we do Nixon. Who, Watergate aside, wasn't all that bad of a president...
I read over at ScottSloan.com that what you said is all bullshit.
Hi? Greatest game ever made? Ringing any bells here? 12-odd years since I first laid eyes on it and I'm still engrossed by it. Dungeon-based RPGs, ah... hell. 90% of FPS games take place in a dungeon, so there's no mistaking the influence this one had; the rogue(like)/variants are superinfluential badboys. Also, Myst? Huh? Honestly now. What games did it influence? Riven? Anything else? I mean, the game was gorgeous and were it not for the COP OUT ending, I'd have bought RealMyst already. But come on. Also, totally not getting the Cult of Half-Life. The game was good, but not mind-blowingly so...
The guys at the journal sound absolutely clueless. "WE ARE A VERY PROMISING UNTERNET STARTUP AND WE WILL PROTECT YOU FROM HAVING YOUR ATRICLES SOTLEN." "OK. Sounds good to me." "WILL YOU SIGN UP WITH US?" "Yeah, whatever." "VERY GOOD. LEAVE EVERYTHING TO US." "Uh huh. Whatever you say. Listen, I've got to shake some scorpions out of my shoes now or something, so uh." "YES. WE HAVE VERYTHING UDNER COTROL." ... a few months pass ...
"Hi. Johnny Wad from Wired here. You know that it costs $50 to link to you guys?"
"Huh?"
"Yeah. Why so much? Do you think anyone will pay? Do you think it's enforcable?"
"Umm. Uhh. The, uh.. editor who... deals with, umm... that company is, uh. Not in. For a week. Or two. Vacation."
Plausible, very plausible. Is iCopyright.com a ThinkLab(!)-owned company? How many people have gone ahead and added iCopyright.com to their FuckedCompany list?
This is wonderfully insane stuff.
Having played Night Trap, Sewer Shark and a few other imminently forgettable Sega CD games... christ. Let it go already, people. There's a reason that the CD stunk like a dead fish and flopped like a live one. Sorry if I don't wax nostalgiac for an overpriced, remotely interactive, grainy movie/game playing device. They can look forward to taking a bath on their "$100K" investment (are they serious?). Their money would have been better thro^H^H^H^H invested in an exciting new UNTERNET start-up or something. Honestly. Have you ever played it? It's a good system if you want to catch up on sleep during the loads. And you want grainy? Brother, you got it! Do I need to remind anyone else how much the Saturn hurt?
Granted, this stake seems dead-on aimed at its heart...
I forgot about these supercriminals with their high-tech encryption and whatnot. I also forgot that the law also provides for stiff penalties for burglars who have the audacity to wear gloves and ski masks whilst committing heists. No, wait...
If this bill passes, we're that much closer to the clustrfrick that Britain's in over encryption. Encryption doesn't remove physical evidence, just obfuscates it.
I'm guessing that rfp said it best...
Yes, it's likely entrapment. No, no one's really sure whether it'll hold up in court. No, you don't know what you're hoping to accomplish. Yes, it's a really bad idea. Worry about getting your IDS and firewall rules up to date and your security policies and tripwires strictly monitored before you bother with nonsense like a honeypot.
Also, the article neglected to blame the bounty of freezing rain and snow that I'm supposed to get tonight on that DASTARDLY Saddam. That's just shoddy journalism if you ask me.
1) where'd he get all the PSX2s?
2) will ebay be indicted for treason or something?
3) the PSX2 is classified as a computer in England (with the bundled BASIC); how is it not classified as one everywhere else?
4) even if all this is true, the DIA should've done that extra 15 seconds of legwork to figure out no one can make heads or tails of programming them
5) i hope these evil Iraqi computer scientists release the source code to the operating system that they build that allows for distributed computing on linked PSX2s. how are they building this cluster again?
Upshot is, there's no good games out for the PSX2 to distract the evil Iraqi computer scientists from their task of world domination. Hasn't this war been milked dry already? Cripes what a non-issue, but then again... now that Russia's our friends (here's a hint: it was china, not the us, they were soiling themselves over the whole time) might as well keep on demonizing those sinister brown people.
The new Slashdot math?
You get an E for good effor and T for nice try.
When did that happen? I thought the sell-out to the Mexican mogul was it for them.
What a wonderful place to work it was. (???)
Zero context, infinite fun.
Glad to know the leaders of tomorrow will are today's morbidly obese kids hellbent (excuse me, h31183n7) on getting the latest warez.
Some of us want to kick back and blow shit up; it'd be nice if we were developing aesthetic sensibilites and leadership ability and "thinking outside the box" or whatever else at the same time, but it just ain't happening.
No new paradigm, just a newer way to waste what little free time we've got on our hands.
>Sun (Nasdaq: SUNW) and its partners announced a new milestone in the development of the ebXML infrastructure championed by the standards group OASIS and The United Nations.
Granted, it was a technology group, but really. What has the UN done for the world in terms of computational standards? Clever little end route that you tried there, Sun. Too bad it fell flat on its face. Not yet; give it a while. You simply don't have the market share to pull the same kind of garbage that Netscape did with ISOing Java(excuse me... ECMA)Script and get away with it.
I'm not exactly sure what Sun can complain about. There's nothing proprietary about flat text files. The vehicle for transmitting XML? Come on. You can transmit it from an Apple II, a C64, a VAX cluster, any damned computer you want: as long as it can send text, it can send XML. Define a new vocabulary, so what? If people like it, it's easy enough to implement yourself; there's absolutely nothing closed about it.
It would've been nice if there had been a real standards organization behind the drafting of XML itself; using it I often wonder why the left hand didn't know what the right hand was fucking up when they were drafting this tripe.
<i>A state could conceivably rule that if the company, and not the customer, still owns the game, then they should have to pay taxes on this "intangible property.")</i>
This regarding the fact that you don't actually <b>own</b> the software that you purchase, you merely rent a license of it.
I know jack squat about tax laws (just hand all my pertinent information to my accountant and let them sort it out), but if they're not claiming the software that I bought as a taxable asset on their end, is there some creative way to claim a tax exemption as a rental/loss on mine?
SynchroNet's released under the GPL and it's as solid and easy to set up as I could ask for. Under my Win95 box, anyhoo.
Bastardized in-jokes make for painful deciphering.
If you're dedicated enough, you can fracture and steal other people's words to get across a completely new message. If you don't believe me, just ask William S. Burroughs...