Given that there was a protest going on, and that protesters have a reputation for flouting the US drug laws, it's no wonder he got profiled as a dealer and arrested. After all, the convention is being held in a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area.
MarijuanaNews.com had a story on this very subject (that linked to LP.org, who were tickled pink by the whole affair).
(And, for good measure, hit SmokeDot.org while you're at it.)
Watching some other people play D&D is like watching someone else write code...it sucks to be the one sitting down listening to someone else's pointers and unasked-for advice.
There isn't a single other coder in this dump that'd know a pointer from their asshole. They all come to me for advice, and then want me to translate my C examples into fsck'n VB for them.
That is a game that was ruined quite early on by cheaters of many varieties. They had scripts in the form of 3rd party macro software. They had exploitable bugs in their inter-server protocol that allowed players to duplicate items (any number of gold pieces in a stack is considered one item, so gold could be duplicated en masse). They've had people trying very hard for a long time to get around the rules they threw in for the sake of "fairness". Cheater websites sprang up like weeds.
They never did anything about the root causes of the cheating. They left the recall spell in the game, so the world got really boring really quick. They have a system for distributing karma and fame numerically, but they screwed that up by giving the players a way to determine what their ratings were. They made it necessary to perform mindless tasks for hours to advance to any appreciable level, and they let players see exactly what level they're at.
Threed's First Law of Game Design - If you give people a goal, they'll shoot for it. If the goal is artificial, then artificial means will be used to achieve it.
(If 30 karma points grants a bonus, and people know how many points they have, you can bet your ass someone will figure out a way to get those points in a hurry, no matter how much hacking or whoring is needed.)
Remove the artificial goals, make the game interesting in and of itself and listen to the players. Don't be afraid to lose the entire "asshole" segment of your audience - the remaining players will be more loyal as a result.
Remaining standards compliant and hoping webapp developers will see "correct" as "better" is just taking the moral high road. That's not the best strategy when dealing with Microsoft ([sarcasm]which has no morals and is, in fact, purely evil[/sarcasm]). Mozilla, despite being an Open Source project, is still Netscape's next flagship and ought to be designed to compete.
Evil will win because good is dumb. --Dark Helmet, SpaceBalls: The Movie
WinAmp was forgiven for its user interface vagaries because it was able to rely on every user having had previous experience with another UI that fit its function: rack-mount stereo equipment.
Mozilla, on the other hand, tries to rewrite the rulebook, fails miserably, and will die as a result unless someone wraps a proper UI around it.
I've often wondered why the US got extra domains besides.us. And I've often answered that question with "we came up with it in the first place." Ok, score one for democracy. That, however, is where it all went to hell.
If it weren't for the special US TLDs (com, net, org) we'd have microsoft.wa.us and no one would think twice about it. If you didn't happen to know the URL, your ISP's home page (isp.state.us) would have links to portals where you could search.
The solution is not more classifying domains. Rather, the solution is less domains... precisely 3 less... com, net, org. I'm at a loss as to what to do about edu, mil, and gov. I guess we should get rid of those too..gov.us seems reasonable.
Looking far into the future, I see a net without domains. I see myself hitting my isp's portal (or perhaps a portal the isp contracted its users out to) that could find things for me, including other portals. I see email addresses that are more like phone numbers and email programs that handle the name-to-number conversion. I see the end of spam, as it becomes impossible to send an untraceable message. (Privacy buffs, think caller-id vs caller-id-block vs "this number does not accept calls marked private...", you'll be free to send anonymously but you should expect it to be bounced instantly without my ever seeing it.)
I find it hard to believe that the net really needs domain names. The postal and telephone systems accommodate more "nodes" than the net without needing to name each "node" after its owner.
Er... scratch that... I just remembered a particular company in Redmond whose address is... One Microsoft Way
This will likely never happen, but it'd be nice to see a sequel based on the Age of Apocalypse books.
A friend of mine turned me on to the X Men right in the middle of the AOA. I bought every one I could find in comic book stores, trying to catch what I'd missed (and trying to figure out how to follow such a twisted crossover). When the anternate timeline ended, I kept buying the books, and kept thinking "Where'd the plot go? When is it coming back?"
Then I realized that there was no plot, just good guys bashing bad guys. All of the really interesting stuff happened hundreds of issues ago. The characters have been developed into flatness. I think the artists who developed them are all gone now.
It'd be pretty cool if the next UNIX window system could be called "Y". It'd be the start of many a "who's on first" conversation. And imagine the marketing... Y Windows? Because it's better than X!
Perhaps we can get the Berlin project to change their name.
I just realized something... The title of the movie GATACA is made up of nucelotide abbreviations! Though, to be fair, I only caught that because I thought you'd embedded it in your made-up gene sequence (which you didn't, you just came close enough for me to catch the pattern).
I wonder how many other people caught that.
--Threed
The Slashdot Sig Virus was foiled before it could spread.
No, he had it right... But not just for crack. The overwhelming majority of ALL drug use is by whites.
The open-air drug markets where crack is sold are run mostly by blacks. The upper crust rich white folk wanting to buy an 8ball of powder do their business behind closed doors.
This, of course, completely ignores a lot of other contributing factors:
If it weren't for the black market, cocaine wouldn't be so expensive and the flow of crack through the gutters of the metropolii would dry up really fast.
The Driving While Black stop-n-search routines along major highways.
Drug tests that use hair are more likely to incriminate a black person (something about the structure of their hair binds cocaine better than white people's hair).
"Crack is the fast food item of the drug trade." -Drug Crazy, by Mike Gray - www.stopthedrugwar.org
--Threed
The Slashdot Sig Virus was foiled before it could spread.
...from the ONDCP, whose very existance depends on violating the constitutional and human rights of everyone in the US and strong-arming every other member of the UN into doing the same.
The entire ONDCP has got to GO. Down with McCaffrey!
(for more info, try MarijuanaNews.com, norml.org, lp.org)
--Threed
The Slashdot Sig Virus was foiled before it could spread.
Put it this way: imagine I'm (say) 10-15 years older, and with primary school age kids. Chances are, they're going to want to play with this Internet thing, just like we watched TV at that age. Now, do I want to have to say they can only surf whenever I'm watching over their shoulders? Of course not - that's ridiculously laborious and clearly impractical.
When we watched TV, it was all thoroughly PG cartoons and sitcoms. Gov't regulation was in place to limit the violence and sexual imagery. Consequently, the TV-as-babysitter concept actually worked for a while. Now, with the proliferation of video games and the Internet, the violence and sexual imagery are coming back into Kid-Space, and its harder to block it out.
As a parent, you have two options: 1) Do to the Net what we did to TV (it's already happening), 2) Give up the TV-as-babysitter and take responsibility for every sight, sound, and printed word that the kids see.
Clearly impractical? How so? Don't buy games you wouldn't want the kids to play, and play before you buy. Inform their friends' parents of your preferences. Let the kids know that the computer is strictly off limits unless you're with them, or better yet do their browsing for them and deliver hard-copy. They don't need to surf anyway; all that's out there is the same pap that's on the already-censored TV.
--Threed
The Slashdot Sig Virus was foiled before it could spread.
Oh I just can't wait for this baby! VCL is a dream to work with. It really is a pretty intelligently designed framework.
I just hope they go full-bore with this project and bring the BDE over as well. Borland's help files and such seem to divide VCL from BDE in subtle ways, and they really are seprate products, but the VCL relies on BDE for all of its ODBC functionality.
Someone was bitching about "yet another framework/widget set". One word: Quitcherbitchen. This is a Good Thing, especially for getting closed source apps ported over.
--Threed
The Slashdot Sig Virus was foiled before it could spread.
To get a set of keys for a secure page, I needed to send in proof that I owned the domain and that I had the right to own the domain.
Had to delve into the company records to find state certificates for the business's name. Painful.
Distributed trustworthiness... Some sort of "Well, no one else has been burned by accepting this CC#" algorythm? That leads to databases and privacy violations. What if I don't want my CD retailer knowing that I bought a box of sex toys last week? Or that I bought ANYTHING from certain businesses?
The credit card is the best defense, both for the seller and the buyer. Most businesses will only ship to the address on the card. If you receive goods you didn't order and suspect fraud, the CC companies have policies for dealing with it. You can also dispute charges for things you never received.
The photo can be faked. The scan of the card can be faked. CC#s can be stolen (I'm sure that shoulder surfing still goes on today). The system has been dealing with this for a long time.
--Threed
The Slashdot Sig Virus was foiled before it could spread.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that was a hoax...?
--Threed-Looking out for Numero Uno since 1976!
I wasn't justifying the arrest, just adding more fuel to the fire. You're incensed, good, now point it in the right direction.
--Threed-Looking out for Numero Uno since 1976!
Given that there was a protest going on, and that protesters have a reputation for flouting the US drug laws, it's no wonder he got profiled as a dealer and arrested. After all, the convention is being held in a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area.
MarijuanaNews.com had a story on this very subject (that linked to LP.org, who were tickled pink by the whole affair).
(And, for good measure, hit SmokeDot.org while you're at it.)
--Threed-Looking out for Numero Uno since 1976!
Early and Often.
--Threed-Looking out for Numero Uno since 1976!
Watching some other people play D&D is like watching someone else write code...it sucks to be the one sitting down listening to someone else's pointers and unasked-for advice.
There isn't a single other coder in this dump that'd know a pointer from their asshole. They all come to me for advice, and then want me to translate my C examples into fsck'n VB for them.
(Ok, I thought it was funny...)
--Threed-Looking out for Numero Uno since 1976!
Fingers grip the pen.
Carpal Tunnel agony.
Bring back the keyboard.
--Threed-Looking out for Numero Uno since 1976!
Stuck in the office,
Fighting off scripted attacks.
Someone's gonna pay.
Packets on the wire,
Had to come from someone's desk.
Pray we don't find you.
Script Kid in The Chair.
One volt for every packet.
I feel better now.
--Threed-Looking out for Numero Uno since 1976!
How can a library which is a superset of another library be "inferior"?
X, Y, and Z are feature sets. The subscript q denotes quality.
Let X = Y + Z; if Zq Xq.
If the superset sucks, and the subset leaves out that which sucks, the superset is inferior.
--Threed-Looking out for Numero Uno since 1976!
All I can say is... Ultima Online
That is a game that was ruined quite early on by cheaters of many varieties. They had scripts in the form of 3rd party macro software. They had exploitable bugs in their inter-server protocol that allowed players to duplicate items (any number of gold pieces in a stack is considered one item, so gold could be duplicated en masse). They've had people trying very hard for a long time to get around the rules they threw in for the sake of "fairness". Cheater websites sprang up like weeds.
They never did anything about the root causes of the cheating. They left the recall spell in the game, so the world got really boring really quick. They have a system for distributing karma and fame numerically, but they screwed that up by giving the players a way to determine what their ratings were. They made it necessary to perform mindless tasks for hours to advance to any appreciable level, and they let players see exactly what level they're at.
Threed's First Law of Game Design - If you give people a goal, they'll shoot for it. If the goal is artificial, then artificial means will be used to achieve it.
(If 30 karma points grants a bonus, and people know how many points they have, you can bet your ass someone will figure out a way to get those points in a hurry, no matter how much hacking or whoring is needed.)
Remove the artificial goals, make the game interesting in and of itself and listen to the players. Don't be afraid to lose the entire "asshole" segment of your audience - the remaining players will be more loyal as a result.
--Threed-Looking out for Numero Uno since 1976!
Remaining standards compliant and hoping webapp developers will see "correct" as "better" is just taking the moral high road. That's not the best strategy when dealing with Microsoft ([sarcasm]which has no morals and is, in fact, purely evil[/sarcasm]). Mozilla, despite being an Open Source project, is still Netscape's next flagship and ought to be designed to compete.
Evil will win because good is dumb. --Dark Helmet, SpaceBalls: The Movie
--Threed-Looking out for Numero Uno since 1976!
WinAmp was forgiven for its user interface vagaries because it was able to rely on every user having had previous experience with another UI that fit its function: rack-mount stereo equipment.
Mozilla, on the other hand, tries to rewrite the rulebook, fails miserably, and will die as a result unless someone wraps a proper UI around it.
--Threed-Looking out for Numero Uno since 1976!
I've often wondered why the US got extra domains besides .us. And I've often answered that question with "we came up with it in the first place." Ok, score one for democracy. That, however, is where it all went to hell.
.gov.us seems reasonable.
If it weren't for the special US TLDs (com, net, org) we'd have microsoft.wa.us and no one would think twice about it. If you didn't happen to know the URL, your ISP's home page (isp.state.us) would have links to portals where you could search.
The solution is not more classifying domains. Rather, the solution is less domains... precisely 3 less... com, net, org. I'm at a loss as to what to do about edu, mil, and gov. I guess we should get rid of those too.
Looking far into the future, I see a net without domains. I see myself hitting my isp's portal (or perhaps a portal the isp contracted its users out to) that could find things for me, including other portals. I see email addresses that are more like phone numbers and email programs that handle the name-to-number conversion. I see the end of spam, as it becomes impossible to send an untraceable message. (Privacy buffs, think caller-id vs caller-id-block vs "this number does not accept calls marked private...", you'll be free to send anonymously but you should expect it to be bounced instantly without my ever seeing it.)
I find it hard to believe that the net really needs domain names. The postal and telephone systems accommodate more "nodes" than the net without needing to name each "node" after its owner.
Er... scratch that... I just remembered a particular company in Redmond whose address is... One Microsoft Way
--Threed-Looking out for Numero Uno since 1976!
This will likely never happen, but it'd be nice to see a sequel based on the Age of Apocalypse books.
A friend of mine turned me on to the X Men right in the middle of the AOA. I bought every one I could find in comic book stores, trying to catch what I'd missed (and trying to figure out how to follow such a twisted crossover). When the anternate timeline ended, I kept buying the books, and kept thinking "Where'd the plot go? When is it coming back?"
Then I realized that there was no plot, just good guys bashing bad guys. All of the really interesting stuff happened hundreds of issues ago. The characters have been developed into flatness. I think the artists who developed them are all gone now.
--Threed-Looking out for Numero Uno since 1976!
It'd be pretty cool if the next UNIX window system could be called "Y". It'd be the start of many a "who's on first" conversation. And imagine the marketing... Y Windows? Because it's better than X!
Perhaps we can get the Berlin project to change their name.
--Threed-Looking out for Numero Uno since 1976!
I don't moderate, so I'll reply...
/. haiku I've ever seen!
That was the best
--Threed
The Slashdot Sig Virus was foiled before it could spread.
I just realized something... The title of the movie GATACA is made up of nucelotide abbreviations! Though, to be fair, I only caught that because I thought you'd embedded it in your made-up gene sequence (which you didn't, you just came close enough for me to catch the pattern).
I wonder how many other people caught that.
--Threed
The Slashdot Sig Virus was foiled before it could spread.
No, he had it right... But not just for crack. The overwhelming majority of ALL drug use is by whites.
The open-air drug markets where crack is sold are run mostly by blacks. The upper crust rich white folk wanting to buy an 8ball of powder do their business behind closed doors.
This, of course, completely ignores a lot of other contributing factors:
If it weren't for the black market, cocaine wouldn't be so expensive and the flow of crack through the gutters of the metropolii would dry up really fast.
The Driving While Black stop-n-search routines along major highways.
Drug tests that use hair are more likely to incriminate a black person (something about the structure of their hair binds cocaine better than white people's hair).
"Crack is the fast food item of the drug trade." -Drug Crazy, by Mike Gray - www.stopthedrugwar.org
--Threed
The Slashdot Sig Virus was foiled before it could spread.
...from the ONDCP, whose very existance depends on violating the constitutional and human rights of everyone in the US and strong-arming every other member of the UN into doing the same.
The entire ONDCP has got to GO. Down with McCaffrey!
(for more info, try MarijuanaNews.com, norml.org, lp.org)
--Threed
The Slashdot Sig Virus was foiled before it could spread.
Put it this way: imagine I'm (say) 10-15 years older, and with primary school age kids. Chances are, they're going to want to play with this Internet thing, just like we watched TV at that age. Now, do I want to have to say they can only surf whenever I'm watching over their shoulders? Of course not - that's ridiculously laborious and clearly impractical.
When we watched TV, it was all thoroughly PG cartoons and sitcoms. Gov't regulation was in place to limit the violence and sexual imagery. Consequently, the TV-as-babysitter concept actually worked for a while. Now, with the proliferation of video games and the Internet, the violence and sexual imagery are coming back into Kid-Space, and its harder to block it out.
As a parent, you have two options: 1) Do to the Net what we did to TV (it's already happening), 2) Give up the TV-as-babysitter and take responsibility for every sight, sound, and printed word that the kids see.
Clearly impractical? How so? Don't buy games you wouldn't want the kids to play, and play before you buy. Inform their friends' parents of your preferences. Let the kids know that the computer is strictly off limits unless you're with them, or better yet do their browsing for them and deliver hard-copy. They don't need to surf anyway; all that's out there is the same pap that's on the already-censored TV.
--Threed
The Slashdot Sig Virus was foiled before it could spread.
Where did you find that information? I've looked at all the links and find no reference to CLX or porting VCL apps to CLX.
The press release says pretty plainly that they're planning on using Qt as the basis for a Linux version of VCL.
Can you post a link to the document you're referencing?
--Threed
The Slashdot Sig Virus was foiled before it could spread.
Oh I just can't wait for this baby! VCL is a dream to work with. It really is a pretty intelligently designed framework.
I just hope they go full-bore with this project and bring the BDE over as well. Borland's help files and such seem to divide VCL from BDE in subtle ways, and they really are seprate products, but the VCL relies on BDE for all of its ODBC functionality.
Someone was bitching about "yet another framework/widget set". One word: Quitcherbitchen. This is a Good Thing, especially for getting closed source apps ported over.
--Threed
The Slashdot Sig Virus was foiled before it could spread.
If I weren't so tired, I could test this method using XMMS plugins. But I am tired, so I'll concede that it'd probably work.
At what cost, though? Far more than searching for filenames, that's for sure.
--Threed
The Slashdot Sig Virus was foiled before it could spread.
To get a set of keys for a secure page, I needed to send in proof that I owned the domain and that I had the right to own the domain.
Had to delve into the company records to find state certificates for the business's name. Painful.
Distributed trustworthiness... Some sort of "Well, no one else has been burned by accepting this CC#" algorythm? That leads to databases and privacy violations. What if I don't want my CD retailer knowing that I bought a box of sex toys last week? Or that I bought ANYTHING from certain businesses?
The credit card is the best defense, both for the seller and the buyer. Most businesses will only ship to the address on the card. If you receive goods you didn't order and suspect fraud, the CC companies have policies for dealing with it. You can also dispute charges for things you never received.
The photo can be faked. The scan of the card can be faked. CC#s can be stolen (I'm sure that shoulder surfing still goes on today). The system has been dealing with this for a long time.
--Threed
The Slashdot Sig Virus was foiled before it could spread.
Holy shnikeys! My post went to the wrong story!
--Threed
The Slashdot Sig Virus was foiled before it could spread.
I like the quote "It's by apple, so it must be good!".
:)
Um, yeah...
Aside from the immediate potential (Rub here to continue, big boy), I see a lot of possibilities for gaming and even accessibility.
If they add tactile feedback, the possibilities are endless.
--Threed
The Slashdot Sig Virus was foiled before it could spread.