I saw the movie - come to think of it, it's one of the few movies I ever saw that I had no idea what was going on half the time.. it's rather messed up in places.
Not really, I still am not bothered enough to resurrect my old gaming PC (fried PSU). I could maybe expound my love of Anime or something, that's mostly what I've been taking up my time with.
I'm pretty sure I know what it would feel like to play Portal. I've played enough FPSes to know what it feels like to fight your oppressors, break free, yada yada. I wouldn't mind hearing the song and seeing the actual situation that spawned the 'the cake is a lie' crap, but I'm in no rush. I'd rather spend this evening watching the second half of Elfen Lied, and perhaps read more of my go karting book:p
Well, I live in the UK so I can't really express my displeasure at the PATRIOT act other than complaining on slashdot;)
Dictatorships do have their merits, but my view of them is probably heavily skewed by DiscWorld:)
I really don't want to be a politician either. I dislike the world of politics as you can probably see. I much prefer my coding and network admin for a living, and am really not in the mood to start running for public office! I'm not particularly charismatic or confident either, so I doubt that would work too well. I could make myself do it if I had strong enough convictions that our country was heading in the wrong direction, but I think our government knows well how pissed off we are about the whole Iraq situation, and after the initial drive we haven't had so many troops out there. The only other thing I can think that I'd be upset about is the state of healthy eating in Scotland, but that has been being addressed by making school meals healthier and such. I think we're the worst country in Europe for heart problems because of our poor diet. Personally I have been trying to eat healthily recently, but I can't see a way of getting the whole country to change. I think changing the meals in school is a good start though, it worked for Sweden..
These all exist because the companies who want access to your eyes are subsidizing most, if not all, of the costs to produce them.
A lot, but not all. BBC TV and radio is paid by a licensing fee from UK TV owners (I'm not sure if they take any from other countries), and presumably from selling their shows to other networks, and selling DVDs etc. So the BBC themselves may advertise their products, but they are not paid by advertisers!
As for websites, most probably start off as someone's pet project, but then if they get popular they start to accrue ads, to at the very least help pay for the bandwidth. http://www.weebls-stuff.com/ started off as a very well designed website, and is now back to being fairly tasteful (though that could just be because I'm blocking ads, oops:p ), but at the height of his fame, it was chock full of seizure inducing craptacular flash banner ads. Sometimes people lose sight of why they even are running their site when the big advertising carrot gets dangled in front of their face. It's understandable, but still disappointing.
Exactly! That kind of thing should have never been allowed in the first place, but now it's just commonly accepted practice. It's not like those currently in power with the aid of sponsorship are going to move to make it illegal!
Actually, I like the giant puppets concept - could be the way to go. I propose we construct a giant papier-mache Clippy god to scare people away from the voting venue. He could utter such abominable sayings as you appear to be trying to vote - would you like me to rain down burning sulphur upon you and your descendants?. I think this covers most requirements. As for the swing states, we just have to try to convince them of the merits of SWT.
I'd say you're only a "cracker" if you have malicious intent, ie instead of just finding a way into a system, you then use that way in to cause damage. Anything else is just being inquisitive or giving yourself a challenge. The US clobberment (wonder if anyone's ever said that before? hehe) probably don't see things that way though.
Alternatively you could just use my handy "obnoxious elitist prick" plugin for a mere 40 USD a year subscription fee?
Instead of whining about ads, I tried adblock and it works a treat. I was just trying to point out that if you don't like the ads, get rid of them. If I had $0.05 for every time I saw someone complain about ads, I'd be able to buy a newspaper or something by now!
What is even sillier is that the freaking running of a country has little to do with issues such as abortion or gay marriage or whatever. Capital punishment perhaps is a little more relevant, but I think has been shown to have little effect on actual crime rates. Anyway, for issues like that wouldn't it make much more sense to vote on the issues rather than vote on people who may agree with you on one issue, but have completely opposite ideals for a lot of other things? IMO even if everyone voted for 'the third guy' or whatever, the country would still keep going to shit. That's pretty much why I've never voted (I live in the UK though, not the US).
I suppose the only issue I'd see affecting me as an individual in an immediate and direct way is changes in taxes. Politicians often make a big deal about that too, but overall tax levels tend to stay the same even if they are shifted to different places or spun in a different light. Rich people are still rich, poor people are still poor. Voting for a change in tax isn't going to make that much difference - educating yourself and getting a better job is (though in this case voting could make a difference if you found a politician sympathetic to this kind of issue, who will make it easier for people to go through nightclasses or open university courses, stuff like that). Better education should generally lead to a better economy (as long as you can keep people in the country!) at least, and that will be good for most people.
If I was allowed to vote on individual issues like abortion, capital punishment etc I think I would. But during the time that they are in office, politicians will have to deal with a lot more things besides those 'obvious' issues. And those little issues along the way are likely to be the things that change the face of a country, rather than whether they kill rapists or allow abortions. Lots of people in the US, UK and other countries protested against the war in Iraq, but their governments went along with it anyway. Besides, everyone knows (or perhaps just 'knows') that politicians often can't be trusted to do what they say they will do. When does that ever happen? What they have been claiming to be 'for' all along, they may be outright against, or just don't care about. When they get into power they can do whatever they want for a few years.
Sure, some politicians may want to get re-elected and therefore are forced to do a good job (or at least try to shift focus onto things that they know people will like and away from stuff like the PATRIOT act), but some will have their own hidden agendas. Voting just seems like such a poor way of 'making a difference'. Someone will say "but it's the best system we have", and that's kind of true, but all I see happening is people whining about republican this, democrat that, creating a pretty artificial divide and pointless groupthink system that just serves to create a lot of friction and distraction from actually getting on with the realities of improving government. Get rid of the politicians and the stupid amounts of time and money being wasted on the popularity campaigns, and get some people who actually want to manage the country, rather than people who want to become superstars. I know that's not going to happen though - the masses love their celebrities and are too easily fooled.
To counter this problem, I have created a new type of open source license, that allows my code to be used in any other project, regardless of what license it uses*!
*Unless of course the resulting product is conceivably going to be used for commercial purposes, or by people with moustaches.
Yeah, I didn't really try the GT single player until someone pointed out that you can win cars (and sell them if you need the cash), which vastly increased the rate you could buy cars at. Unfortunately we then loaned the disc to a friend about a week after I started getting into it, and they ireparably scratched it up!
Gran Turismo 2 I was obsessed with though - I think I had 600 cars, 60 of which I'd actually bought:p I used to do the endurance races too - not quite 24 hours, but 100 laps, that type of thing. GT3 and 4 were pretty, but I didn't really like them so much due to the lack of 'normal' vehicles. And in those days I didn't really have an idea on how to make a RWD car handle. I think it was 'Sports Car GT' or something on the PC when I got okay at that.
Sure GT is a lot of fun even with just a joypad, and it feels pretty realistic, but try 'professional' mode and you will notice you have to be even more controlled. I thought it was way too slippy at first, but then again I've never been on a real racetrack either. I'm considering taking up go-kart racing after trying go-karts on a mini outdoor track in France, it was great fun and you really could powerslide round corners if you wanted:) Anyway, you can still control the car suitably enough with the PS3 controller's joystick and 2 main analog shoulder buttons, but the steering wheel makes it so much easier (whereas with for example rally games I find the steering wheel makes it more challenging as it's harder to flick on opposite-lock, etc). I just wish I had somewhere suitable to mount my steering wheel, at the moment I have it on a chair which is lying on it's side, so I can only use one foot for the pedals (my G25 has gated gears and a clutch pedal which I'd like to make use of)!
I'm not sure if the 'quick tune' settings in GT5:Prologue have LSD settings but yeah I can look. I don't generally have a problem putting power down, it's just that in the game if the weight shifts to the front of the car it seems to oversteer very easily (same with the Honda NSX-R in the game, which is reportedly pretty easy to control and understeery in real life). I'll try tonight firming up the front suspension or something but I've not got much clue about that level of tweaking as yet. I can control all the cars easily in 'standard' mode though when there's plenty of grip available, and it's still a challenge to actually get 1st place - the game forces you to start at the back of the grid without a chance at qualifying, and you only have 3 or 5 laps to get to the front depending on the event!
I'm expecting the full version of GT5 to be spectacular if it includes stuff like qualifying, and I think they're going to have the Nurburgring which will be awesome:)
This has more to do with an oversight in the DNS standard - doesn't have anything to do with any single implementation. Windows, Linux, and any other networked system that uses DNS are equally affected.
Besides, it doesn't matter if your operating system is Open Source. You can write closed or open source software on any platform you want, and just because the source is available does not necessarily mean that bugs will be noticed and fixed. This situation just shows that even if there are no 'bugs' in an implementation of a standard, the original design may still be flawed.
I haven't been following this situation very closely, so perhaps I'm a bit off with the details, but I'd be happy for someone to put me right if that's the case.
Favouring cached DNS records seems to me to not be a spectacular idea for all situations. It depends on the length of the TTL setting on your DNS server though. I'm not sure what expiry time would be sensible for an ISP to use. You have to balance the fact that you want to up to date records with the amount of overhead that will be generated by all the DNS traffic.
For once slashdot uses the term 'cracker' instead of 'hacker', and still people complain! I'm beginning to see how this works:p
I sometimes get uppity about how hacker is used to mean cracker since I learned the distinction a few years ago, but overall yes, it's how the word is being used and we can't really do anything about it now. That's how language works. Blackhat/whitehat distinction is more useful anyway.
But somebody please do something about people mixing up 'then' and 'than'. I saw some comments the other day by someone who managed to use exactly the wrong word each time. It wasn't like he just thought that the word 'than' didn't exist, he actually had completely reversed the meaning of both than and then in his head. *sigh*
Wow, they managed to murder innocent women and children, but no adult males? That's pretty impressive stuff.
Perhaps the US just kept them to learn the secrets of their amazingly selective bombing techniques?
Joking aside, I also find the whole US attitude to terrorism pretty hypocritical, considering they are known for having funded a few terrorist organisations when it suits their goals. They didn't give a toss about the IRA repeatedly bombing us, but they go and invade whole other countries as retribution for one single terrorist attack against them. Some crazy guy hacking a website is extradited to the US, but the murderers of innocent women, children and adult males are protected. That is truly sickening.
Well, that site appears to be owned by michaelmiller@gmail.com . Wonder if that's his real name, and if he ever gets unwelcome visitors round at his place.. I hope so!
I read it, and I have to admit that I don't see anything particularly funny about the incessant racist, antisemitic and homophobic jokes! In certain sarcastic contexts that can be funny, but when people mean it, it's just sad.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, it's not even flash. Good stuff
I saw the movie - come to think of it, it's one of the few movies I ever saw that I had no idea what was going on half the time.. it's rather messed up in places.
Even BEFORE they smell your breath?
Oh wow! http://www.scummbar.com/community/games/swordfighting/ Great idea for a flash game :p
Film will be interrupted for a recap of the story at 7
Not really, I still am not bothered enough to resurrect my old gaming PC (fried PSU). I could maybe expound my love of Anime or something, that's mostly what I've been taking up my time with.
I'm pretty sure I know what it would feel like to play Portal. I've played enough FPSes to know what it feels like to fight your oppressors, break free, yada yada. I wouldn't mind hearing the song and seeing the actual situation that spawned the 'the cake is a lie' crap, but I'm in no rush. I'd rather spend this evening watching the second half of Elfen Lied, and perhaps read more of my go karting book :p
Well, I live in the UK so I can't really express my displeasure at the PATRIOT act other than complaining on slashdot ;)
Dictatorships do have their merits, but my view of them is probably heavily skewed by DiscWorld :)
I really don't want to be a politician either. I dislike the world of politics as you can probably see. I much prefer my coding and network admin for a living, and am really not in the mood to start running for public office! I'm not particularly charismatic or confident either, so I doubt that would work too well. I could make myself do it if I had strong enough convictions that our country was heading in the wrong direction, but I think our government knows well how pissed off we are about the whole Iraq situation, and after the initial drive we haven't had so many troops out there. The only other thing I can think that I'd be upset about is the state of healthy eating in Scotland, but that has been being addressed by making school meals healthier and such. I think we're the worst country in Europe for heart problems because of our poor diet. Personally I have been trying to eat healthily recently, but I can't see a way of getting the whole country to change. I think changing the meals in school is a good start though, it worked for Sweden..
These all exist because the companies who want access to your eyes are subsidizing most, if not all, of the costs to produce them.
A lot, but not all. BBC TV and radio is paid by a licensing fee from UK TV owners (I'm not sure if they take any from other countries), and presumably from selling their shows to other networks, and selling DVDs etc. So the BBC themselves may advertise their products, but they are not paid by advertisers!
As for websites, most probably start off as someone's pet project, but then if they get popular they start to accrue ads, to at the very least help pay for the bandwidth. http://www.weebls-stuff.com/ started off as a very well designed website, and is now back to being fairly tasteful (though that could just be because I'm blocking ads, oops :p ), but at the height of his fame, it was chock full of seizure inducing craptacular flash banner ads. Sometimes people lose sight of why they even are running their site when the big advertising carrot gets dangled in front of their face. It's understandable, but still disappointing.
Exactly! That kind of thing should have never been allowed in the first place, but now it's just commonly accepted practice. It's not like those currently in power with the aid of sponsorship are going to move to make it illegal!
You could just set your comment viewing settings to downmod all 'insightful' and 'interesting' posts - I'm sure that would get most of them.
Actually, I like the giant puppets concept - could be the way to go. I propose we construct a giant papier-mache Clippy god to scare people away from the voting venue. He could utter such abominable sayings as you appear to be trying to vote - would you like me to rain down burning sulphur upon you and your descendants?. I think this covers most requirements. As for the swing states, we just have to try to convince them of the merits of SWT.
I was using HTML ordered lists, if that helps make it more nerdy ,_,
Nerd != coder anyway, but yes I am a coder :)
TY AC. BTW ILU.
I'd say you're only a "cracker" if you have malicious intent, ie instead of just finding a way into a system, you then use that way in to cause damage. Anything else is just being inquisitive or giving yourself a challenge. The US clobberment (wonder if anyone's ever said that before? hehe) probably don't see things that way though.
Alternatively you could just use my handy "obnoxious elitist prick" plugin for a mere 40 USD a year subscription fee?
Instead of whining about ads, I tried adblock and it works a treat. I was just trying to point out that if you don't like the ads, get rid of them. If I had $0.05 for every time I saw someone complain about ads, I'd be able to buy a newspaper or something by now!
In the interests of learning, I propose we switch it off to see what happens.
What is even sillier is that the freaking running of a country has little to do with issues such as abortion or gay marriage or whatever. Capital punishment perhaps is a little more relevant, but I think has been shown to have little effect on actual crime rates. Anyway, for issues like that wouldn't it make much more sense to vote on the issues rather than vote on people who may agree with you on one issue, but have completely opposite ideals for a lot of other things? IMO even if everyone voted for 'the third guy' or whatever, the country would still keep going to shit. That's pretty much why I've never voted (I live in the UK though, not the US).
I suppose the only issue I'd see affecting me as an individual in an immediate and direct way is changes in taxes. Politicians often make a big deal about that too, but overall tax levels tend to stay the same even if they are shifted to different places or spun in a different light. Rich people are still rich, poor people are still poor. Voting for a change in tax isn't going to make that much difference - educating yourself and getting a better job is (though in this case voting could make a difference if you found a politician sympathetic to this kind of issue, who will make it easier for people to go through nightclasses or open university courses, stuff like that). Better education should generally lead to a better economy (as long as you can keep people in the country!) at least, and that will be good for most people.
If I was allowed to vote on individual issues like abortion, capital punishment etc I think I would. But during the time that they are in office, politicians will have to deal with a lot more things besides those 'obvious' issues. And those little issues along the way are likely to be the things that change the face of a country, rather than whether they kill rapists or allow abortions. Lots of people in the US, UK and other countries protested against the war in Iraq, but their governments went along with it anyway. Besides, everyone knows (or perhaps just 'knows') that politicians often can't be trusted to do what they say they will do. When does that ever happen? What they have been claiming to be 'for' all along, they may be outright against, or just don't care about. When they get into power they can do whatever they want for a few years.
Sure, some politicians may want to get re-elected and therefore are forced to do a good job (or at least try to shift focus onto things that they know people will like and away from stuff like the PATRIOT act), but some will have their own hidden agendas. Voting just seems like such a poor way of 'making a difference'. Someone will say "but it's the best system we have", and that's kind of true, but all I see happening is people whining about republican this, democrat that, creating a pretty artificial divide and pointless groupthink system that just serves to create a lot of friction and distraction from actually getting on with the realities of improving government. Get rid of the politicians and the stupid amounts of time and money being wasted on the popularity campaigns, and get some people who actually want to manage the country, rather than people who want to become superstars. I know that's not going to happen though - the masses love their celebrities and are too easily fooled.
I think that's what he's wanting. Since this is slashdot, he's probably hoping someone rewrites his numbering scheme thus:
The sorts of ideas I'm looking for will have these qualities:
What does this mean, "advertising"? *pats ad-blocker and noscript* :)
To counter this problem, I have created a new type of open source license, that allows my code to be used in any other project, regardless of what license it uses*!
*Unless of course the resulting product is conceivably going to be used for commercial purposes, or by people with moustaches.
Yeah, I didn't really try the GT single player until someone pointed out that you can win cars (and sell them if you need the cash), which vastly increased the rate you could buy cars at. Unfortunately we then loaned the disc to a friend about a week after I started getting into it, and they ireparably scratched it up!
Gran Turismo 2 I was obsessed with though - I think I had 600 cars, 60 of which I'd actually bought :p I used to do the endurance races too - not quite 24 hours, but 100 laps, that type of thing. GT3 and 4 were pretty, but I didn't really like them so much due to the lack of 'normal' vehicles. And in those days I didn't really have an idea on how to make a RWD car handle. I think it was 'Sports Car GT' or something on the PC when I got okay at that.
Sure GT is a lot of fun even with just a joypad, and it feels pretty realistic, but try 'professional' mode and you will notice you have to be even more controlled. I thought it was way too slippy at first, but then again I've never been on a real racetrack either. I'm considering taking up go-kart racing after trying go-karts on a mini outdoor track in France, it was great fun and you really could powerslide round corners if you wanted :) Anyway, you can still control the car suitably enough with the PS3 controller's joystick and 2 main analog shoulder buttons, but the steering wheel makes it so much easier (whereas with for example rally games I find the steering wheel makes it more challenging as it's harder to flick on opposite-lock, etc). I just wish I had somewhere suitable to mount my steering wheel, at the moment I have it on a chair which is lying on it's side, so I can only use one foot for the pedals (my G25 has gated gears and a clutch pedal which I'd like to make use of)!
I'm not sure if the 'quick tune' settings in GT5:Prologue have LSD settings but yeah I can look. I don't generally have a problem putting power down, it's just that in the game if the weight shifts to the front of the car it seems to oversteer very easily (same with the Honda NSX-R in the game, which is reportedly pretty easy to control and understeery in real life). I'll try tonight firming up the front suspension or something but I've not got much clue about that level of tweaking as yet. I can control all the cars easily in 'standard' mode though when there's plenty of grip available, and it's still a challenge to actually get 1st place - the game forces you to start at the back of the grid without a chance at qualifying, and you only have 3 or 5 laps to get to the front depending on the event!
I'm expecting the full version of GT5 to be spectacular if it includes stuff like qualifying, and I think they're going to have the Nurburgring which will be awesome :)
This has more to do with an oversight in the DNS standard - doesn't have anything to do with any single implementation. Windows, Linux, and any other networked system that uses DNS are equally affected.
Besides, it doesn't matter if your operating system is Open Source. You can write closed or open source software on any platform you want, and just because the source is available does not necessarily mean that bugs will be noticed and fixed. This situation just shows that even if there are no 'bugs' in an implementation of a standard, the original design may still be flawed.
I haven't been following this situation very closely, so perhaps I'm a bit off with the details, but I'd be happy for someone to put me right if that's the case.
Favouring cached DNS records seems to me to not be a spectacular idea for all situations. It depends on the length of the TTL setting on your DNS server though. I'm not sure what expiry time would be sensible for an ISP to use. You have to balance the fact that you want to up to date records with the amount of overhead that will be generated by all the DNS traffic.
For once slashdot uses the term 'cracker' instead of 'hacker', and still people complain! I'm beginning to see how this works :p
I sometimes get uppity about how hacker is used to mean cracker since I learned the distinction a few years ago, but overall yes, it's how the word is being used and we can't really do anything about it now. That's how language works. Blackhat/whitehat distinction is more useful anyway.
But somebody please do something about people mixing up 'then' and 'than'. I saw some comments the other day by someone who managed to use exactly the wrong word each time. It wasn't like he just thought that the word 'than' didn't exist, he actually had completely reversed the meaning of both than and then in his head. *sigh*
In the backdoor.
It was the only port that was available at the time.
Wow, they managed to murder innocent women and children, but no adult males? That's pretty impressive stuff.
Perhaps the US just kept them to learn the secrets of their amazingly selective bombing techniques?
Joking aside, I also find the whole US attitude to terrorism pretty hypocritical, considering they are known for having funded a few terrorist organisations when it suits their goals. They didn't give a toss about the IRA repeatedly bombing us, but they go and invade whole other countries as retribution for one single terrorist attack against them. Some crazy guy hacking a website is extradited to the US, but the murderers of innocent women, children and adult males are protected. That is truly sickening.
Well, that site appears to be owned by michaelmiller@gmail.com . Wonder if that's his real name, and if he ever gets unwelcome visitors round at his place.. I hope so!
I read it, and I have to admit that I don't see anything particularly funny about the incessant racist, antisemitic and homophobic jokes! In certain sarcastic contexts that can be funny, but when people mean it, it's just sad.