Thanks for your insight into artists... I feel even stupider since my old band thought getting 8% on an indy label was making out like bandits back in the early 90s - especially when we were offered 1% from another label (but that label agreed to absorb losses, which, in hindsight was absolutely the best thing to do).
Many bands I played with (primarily as a session bassist or temporary sub, but also once in a soon-to-be-bankrupt band) ended up owing the record companies because of expense clauses: say you record an album and have expenses that look something like: $2000 advertising/promotion $8000 CD printing/distribution $8000 studio time
Now say the album is a minor hit (most are not) and rakes in $20000. The record company even splits the $20000 50/50, giving the band [$10000 - $18000 in expenses] and the band still owes $8000 by contract, which the studio expects them to pay, so the band either pays from their gig profits, or declares bankruptcy.
The record company claims to have lost money because they didn't recoup $8000 in expenses the band still owes them, even though they paid themselves (and netted $2000) and then they write off the band as a $6000 total loss (I believe... maybe it is an $8000 loss still - I am not an accountant). Anyhow, do the math - the record company came out with $2000 in pocket and still expects the band to fork over another $8Gs. That's really evil. Unfortunately, this is the trap a lot of independent artists hit with the record companies.
What I want to see is a record company that shares expenses, which may exist, but I never knew an indy that did that (and doubt any major do for anything but established artists).
Not a surprise - the US is a capitalist nation, and would prefer to sell the technology if the EU wants it and not just give it away for the benefit of all - after all, the US spent billions developing it (you know, the old Open Source vs Closed Source argument).
I like to think of NASA like Microsoft - bloated, inefficient, and owner of a _LOT_ of patents and trade secrets they'd love to share for a couple of billion yearly.
I don't think the negative, backwater, view of Polish really started until the invasion of Poland in September of 1939. The Polish met German tanks with mounted rifle cavalry (which, by some accounts, were ambushed, and yes, they had some machine guns), which charged the invading army and were slaughtered (this is known to be the last mounted charge). German propoganda films changed the rifles to lances and the view of backwater Poles was born.
Anyhow, in 1920 'Polish' didn't have the negative connotations it does today.
It actually amazes me that Nazi propoganda from the 1940s still affects people's view over 60 years later.
Terry Gilliam was born in the Minneapolis area and moved to England.
Neil (Gaiman) is from England and moved to the Minneapolis area.
Neil would only work with Terry for making a Good Omens movie.
Is this some kind of weird symbiotic connection or am I drawing conclusions?:P
Re:Three Major Vulnerabilities
on
Windows ATMs by 2005
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You're right - this comment doesn't make any sense - ATM machines need a land line to get card validation, and, in the past at least, this land line has used 56 bit encryption (due to overseas requirements, I think). Sure, it's not connected to the Internet, but who says the machine it calls into isn't, and that machine can't pass on a virus?
Oh, wait - the machine it connects up to would be a large mainframe that runs 1/2 the speed of the slowest PC, and written entirely in COBOL - I forget these things about the stogy old banks we know and love.
I hate to break it to ya, but when I was 19 and a student at University of Minnesota, Duluth, about 40 of us rented an old school bus, hired a driver and went on a field trip bar hopping in Thunder Bay. Several of my peers stole beer mugs (I got some coasters) as well. I imagine a geek bus with bluetooth isn't far behind...
I can't see an American exodus to Canada, though - we barely understand Metric, and the foofly French-English stuff will scare others away. That and the average Summer temperature being maybe 25 above, not balmy 80s-90s (mind you the Canadian temp is Celcius, not Fahrenheit, but that's the metric thing again). No, I think slipping into Mexico and just buying off the police and mingling with tourists is more likely.
Yeah, but when I was 12, I was pirating software like mad and really didn't see it as something I would go to the slammer for, nor did I think I would get caught when I did realize it was illegal. Mom and Dad didn't understand what the heck was going on until I was 14 or 15 (and by then I'd more or less gotten out of cracking/pirating, mainly because the technology had gotten beyond my skills), so just being informed of children's hobbies probably isn't enough.
Back in my day, though, the FBI would storm into our houses and confiscate our computers... now it's the RIAA?!? I'd be surprised if they could prove it without getting the hard disk as evidence - "heck, I don't know how you got that log with my name and IP, but I certainly don't have anything like that, nor did I ever download it, so you'll have to prove I have it" - meanwhile, I'll drop my hard disk in a vat of roiling acid...
Maybe they suppositioned the ISP to watch that machine, but that doesn't prove hackers didn't implant a nasty virus that takes over Kazaa (yeah, OK, I'm stretching:)
Technically, you're correct and Java should run everywhere, but because it works on one machine really doesn't guarantee it will work on another, unfortunately.
We have a motto for the Java code at my company (which is fairly common on the net, as well, so I'm not sure we invented it):
"Write Once, Test Everywhere"
I've submitted a couple of hundred java related bugs in the past six years, and many were platform/vendor specific, so if it didn't work correctly on one platform, I wouldn't be surprised.
Huh? Vanilla Dos 3.3 was very fast, as was the Disk ][ controller on a 5 1/4 - it certainly beats the hard disk startups of today (and sometimes even hard disks of that era, depending on spinup time). I could have games up and running in a minute or less (~15 seconds in some cases), where my Commodore owning friends would wait 5 minutes or more for their tape drives to load anything, and even the ones who had disk drives waited 2-3. Booting the Dos 3.3 startup disk usually took a while, I think because it loaded integer basic, which was a dog.
Pressing Cont-C a couple of seconds after the prompt usually would work in getting enough of 3.3 to be useful, but if you didn't time it right, you'd need to enter a few lines of assembly code (gad - a friend of mine at the time actually memorized the bootup code of generic 3.3 and could type it in by hand in about 5 minutes... knowledge that was useful for about one purpose - cracking boot sequence protection)
The 3.5 drives added later boosted capacity, but did seem to boot slow (maybe because of ProDOS?).
Ah, nostalgia for the days of hand parked hard disk heads and the pirates that erased their drives by shaking them with the head unparked as the FBI stormed in...
This is not really related to the comic book, but is related to Gaiman - here, I'll make it sorta-like a press release:)
The Folk Underground, a Minneapolis self described "goth-folk" band has released a couple of songs written by Neil on their new CD Buried Things.
Lorraine has collaborated with Gaiman in the past with her previous band, the Flash Girls. Here's a link to Gaiman lyrics
They are currently opening for Puke and Snot at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival (or they opened for Puke and Snot, if you're reading this after Sept 21).
they actually did remake it once - I remember testing the Windows 95 version of the install while working for a "fortune 500 computer company"
(no, I can't say the name due to being a contractor under a silly NDA).
The original authors were with MECC, which is now owned by The Learning Company, so bug them if you want a remake.
sigh... just having a nostalgia moment - I had a college friend who worked for MECC - the first and only female game programmer I've ever known.
yeah - I even know/knew a female slashdotter... with green streaked hair... who would wear nothing but chain mail bra and panties when working at Renaissance festivals. Ren fests are actually good places to meet the geek-chick type, especially if you're the desparate yet naive D&D playing geek type (but don't blame me if they're looser than Elvis' hips... and check IDs - jail bait is everywhere). Ah, the memories... I got more dates from working two days at Ren-fest a year for four years than I did from 10 years of high school and college combined:)
Ah, but life moves on - I've since joined the married crowd and now split my time between my wife and Linux.
my favorite bad physics experiment involved a flare gun.
In the movies, they go foompt! It's such a peaceful, friendly sound.
In real life, the sound is, well, entirely unlike that.
Picture a large shotgun shell with a phosphorus head, stuffed into a fat pistol a couple of inches from your ear and you'll have a pretty good idea what it really sounds like.
Now if I can just get my hands on a mortar, I can find out if they go foompt! as well...
Using a different mail program doesn't help because many of these viruses carry a packaged version of Outlook Express mailer. I had a machine infected with one of these (different virus, at the time an unknown variant of an existing virus) - I identified it because it was sending mail using OE 5 and messages bounced back, but I was using Outlook as my mailer and had OE 6 installed with a Windows Service Pack for Win 2k (not 5).
The only real solution is to throw out Windows... now if I can just convince management:)
a) patches are pushed by Sys admin, who generally push patch batches. Fortunately for me, I grabbed the patches myself a couple of weeks ago, so my machine was unaffected (unlike several of my cube-neighbors)
b) several machines are in a lab that does not get patched and were infected unnoticed. These machines are kept at older release levels intentionally so we can certify against a base release level.
c) (from my wife's company) - No patching is done except for critical issues - only service packs. Due to this policy and the rapidity of the attack, they've been shut down all day.
I was under the impression that the POSIX functions and programs were all defined and obtainable (probably through mail in the past, now online), but the actual compliancy tests themselves were proprietary and cost lots of money (and very secret).
In the early days of Java I read something about how the POSIX and Java models were similar for compliance testing. I have no idea if that is true anymore, as I haven't used Java since about the time I read that article:P
gets is bad for other reasons - some OSes have even deprecated it, but leave it in for POSIX compatibility/compliance.
If you don't know why gets is bad, the MacOS X man page has this, under BUGS:
Since it is usually impossible to ensure that the next input line is less
than some arbitrary length, and because overflowing the input buffer is
almost invariably a security violation, programs should NEVER use gets().
The gets() function exists purely to conform to ISO/IEC 9899:1990
(``ISO C89'').
Truth be told, almost all of the issues could be coded around using other, better functions, so I fail to see why deprecating a few is a big deal. If you leave the functions available and just say not to use them (pretty much the point of deprecating), older code will be able to run in the short term (or even the long term, depending if it is ever pulled out) and new code is written without using the problematic method.
Hey, if this happened, get into the robot repair and maintenence business. We certainly couldn't trust robots to do that - they'd just disable their Asimov chip and, uh, run over us with lawnmowers and stuff.
Sorry to say it, but I haven't seen a game worth buying in the last 2-3 months. Since I generally don't play FPS because of motion sickness problems and don't much care for monthly fee games like MMORPGs (if I want a giant chat room, I play a free MUD, or more often, just chat gaming on IRC or here).
Everything that sounds even remotely promising has been reviewed as disappointment, so I haven't even bothered. I may pick up Medieval: Total War's Viking supplement if nothing shows up soon.
In Intellivision baseball, for instance, rotate your thumb rapidly clockwise (or maybe it was ccw) around the number pad while pressing the side buttons. If done right, your baserunner becomes semi-transparent (flicker) or even invisible and stays that way. Football had a similar quirk, but I don't remember it being very useful.
In the Triple Strike! tank battle, rotating the disc about 90 degrees rapidly (one screen edge to the other and back) in a corner and pressing buttons rapidly (press 2-3 at once with your thumb and rotate it across the pad) would cause your tank to float across the screen as a bulletproof flickering object. If timed right, you could stop the tank (reconstitute) in a wall by pressing a side button and be invincible because you could still shoot out, but couldn't be hit. I think I also could do something like this on the 2600 Combat, but it didn't leave you safe (you just drive into and through the wall to the other side).
In Astro...something... (the asteroids falling from space game), holding 9 or something like that (maybe the bottom row of buttons?) while clicking the lower right side button caused it to start in a slow-mode, so racking up 1 million points becomes much easier (there was a contest for doing this back in the 80s, where you send a photo of your screen with the high score, which was won with somebody who hit 2.? million). I racked up about 4 million that way, but never sent a screen shot in, since I knew I cheated (I also broke 1 million in a real game, but a while after the contest ended, and was about million off from the winner). Ah, the good ol' days:)
Football was basically a 2 or 3 play game when good players competed - the screen pass to the top of the screen, some other kind of pass that lined up like a screen (usually a bomb pass), and a 4-5 yd quick pass. If the opposing player judged which you were using wrong, it was pretty much instant 50yd gain on the screen or fake screen. There was only one defensive lineup that worked at all against the screen, but even that would usually give up 5-6 yds if played correctly and the opposing player didn't go for the sack or intercept (an intercept usually went for a touchdown on the screen).
hmm... that reminds me of how the Libertarians who are trying to get an en-masse move (something like 35000 people) to South Dakota in order to create a Libertarian run state.
South Dakota apparently already has a heavy Libertarian presence and is fairly sparsely populated, so their chance of taking control is quite good - if they can pull off the mass move.
I think the drugs part came in because Congress decided not to support the Contras partially because of ties to cocaine production/producers. Cocaine producers supported the Contras against the communists because they stood to lose all their land and wealth under communist rule (which puts ownership of property and businesses [thus income] under state control). I don't know if that's enough to say the Christics supported Soviet imperialism - just that they, like Congress, viewed the Soviets as a lesser evil to the drug trade (a view the Reagan administration apparently disagreed with). I honestly know next to nothing about the Christics themselves, though, so I could be wrong.
Technically Guns for Drugs is wrong, since the CIA had been illegally giving weapons, money, and training to the Contras secretly and no drugs were being directly 'bought' with the monies, but it was subsidizing drug producers with the monies, so in a way it was supporting the drug trade.
A little background for the young 'uns - the Iran/Contra affair was something like US sells arms to Iran to improve relations, a slew of hostages were released by extremist groups (so it basically was viewed as arms for hostages), money from sales of arms was then diverted to support the Contras, which Congress had prohibited the support of, partially due to drug ties (among other things).
well, by the late 70s, us kids had moved up to launching them up in model rockets with see-thru plastic tubes. Frogs had a tendency not to survive, tho - yellow spotted salamanders, on the other hand...
Thankfully Frogger came out a few years later and curbed my destructive habits towards 'em.
sigh. I miss yellow spotted salamanders - seem to have just up and died out. Used to find 'em by the hundreds:(
this reminds me of learning a little bit of German from Wolfenstein phrases before I ever had German or WWII history classes. Things like Mein Leben! (My life!) Scheutsteuffel (the SS) Aaaaaaaah! (Aaaaaaaah!)
(hopefully I spelled those correctly)
Even stuff like the letter to Eva Braun in the game identifies a historical figure, which for me, at least, was rewarding a few years later when I actually found out who that was. For that matter, having learned phrases in German, even not knowing what they meant, made it that much easier to learn later because I had a good context on how they are used.
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Thanks for your insight into artists... I feel even stupider since my old band thought getting 8% on an indy label was making out like bandits back in the early 90s - especially when we were offered 1% from another label (but that label agreed to absorb losses, which, in hindsight was absolutely the best thing to do).
Many bands I played with (primarily as a session bassist or temporary sub, but also once in a soon-to-be-bankrupt band) ended up owing the record companies because of expense clauses:
say you record an album and have expenses that look something like:
$2000 advertising/promotion
$8000 CD printing/distribution
$8000 studio time
Now say the album is a minor hit (most are not) and rakes in $20000. The record company even splits the $20000 50/50, giving the band [$10000 - $18000 in expenses] and the band still owes $8000 by contract, which the studio expects them to pay, so the band either pays from their gig profits, or declares bankruptcy.
The record company claims to have lost money because they didn't recoup $8000 in expenses the band still owes them, even though they paid themselves (and netted $2000) and then they write off the band as a $6000 total loss (I believe... maybe it is an $8000 loss still - I am not an accountant). Anyhow, do the math - the record company came out with $2000 in pocket and still expects the band to fork over another $8Gs. That's really evil. Unfortunately, this is the trap a lot of independent artists hit with the record companies.
What I want to see is a record company that shares expenses, which may exist, but I never knew an indy that did that (and doubt any major do for anything but established artists).
Not a surprise - the US is a capitalist nation, and would prefer to sell the technology if the EU wants it and not just give it away for the benefit of all - after all, the US spent billions developing it (you know, the old Open Source vs Closed Source argument).
I like to think of NASA like Microsoft - bloated, inefficient, and owner of a _LOT_ of patents and trade secrets they'd love to share for a couple of billion yearly.
I don't think the negative, backwater, view of Polish really started until the invasion of Poland in September of 1939. The Polish met German tanks with mounted rifle cavalry (which, by some accounts, were ambushed, and yes, they had some machine guns), which charged the invading army and were slaughtered (this is known to be the last mounted charge). German propoganda films changed the rifles to lances and the view of backwater Poles was born.
Anyhow, in 1920 'Polish' didn't have the negative connotations it does today.
It actually amazes me that Nazi propoganda from the 1940s still affects people's view over 60 years later.
Ok, just curious on this one -
:P
Terry Gilliam was born in the Minneapolis area and moved to England.
Neil (Gaiman) is from England and moved to the Minneapolis area.
Neil would only work with Terry for making a Good Omens movie.
Is this some kind of weird symbiotic connection or am I drawing conclusions?
You're right - this comment doesn't make any sense - ATM machines need a land line to get card validation, and, in the past at least, this land line has used 56 bit encryption (due to overseas requirements, I think). Sure, it's not connected to the Internet, but who says the machine it calls into isn't, and that machine can't pass on a virus?
Oh, wait - the machine it connects up to would be a large mainframe that runs 1/2 the speed of the slowest PC, and written entirely in COBOL - I forget these things about the stogy old banks we know and love.
I hate to break it to ya, but when I was 19 and a student at University of Minnesota, Duluth, about 40 of us rented an old school bus, hired a driver and went on a field trip bar hopping in Thunder Bay. Several of my peers stole beer mugs (I got some coasters) as well. I imagine a geek bus with bluetooth isn't far behind...
I can't see an American exodus to Canada, though - we barely understand Metric, and the foofly French-English stuff will scare others away. That and the average Summer temperature being maybe 25 above, not balmy 80s-90s (mind you the Canadian temp is Celcius, not Fahrenheit, but that's the metric thing again). No, I think slipping into Mexico and just buying off the police and mingling with tourists is more likely.
Yeah, but when I was 12, I was pirating software like mad and really didn't see it as something I would go to the slammer for, nor did I think I would get caught when I did realize it was illegal. Mom and Dad didn't understand what the heck was going on until I was 14 or 15 (and by then I'd more or less gotten out of cracking/pirating, mainly because the technology had gotten beyond my skills), so just being informed of children's hobbies probably isn't enough.
:)
Back in my day, though, the FBI would storm into our houses and confiscate our computers... now it's the RIAA?!? I'd be surprised if they could prove it without getting the hard disk as evidence - "heck, I don't know how you got that log with my name and IP, but I certainly don't have anything like that, nor did I ever download it, so you'll have to prove I have it" - meanwhile, I'll drop my hard disk in a vat of roiling acid...
Maybe they suppositioned the ISP to watch that machine, but that doesn't prove hackers didn't implant a nasty virus that takes over Kazaa (yeah, OK, I'm stretching
Technically, you're correct and Java should run everywhere, but because it works on one machine really doesn't guarantee it will work on another, unfortunately.
We have a motto for the Java code at my company (which is fairly common on the net, as well, so I'm not sure we invented it):
"Write Once, Test Everywhere"
I've submitted a couple of hundred java related bugs in the past six years, and many were platform/vendor specific, so if it didn't work correctly on one platform, I wouldn't be surprised.
Huh? Vanilla Dos 3.3 was very fast, as was the Disk ][ controller on a 5 1/4 - it certainly beats the hard disk startups of today (and sometimes even hard disks of that era, depending on spinup time). I could have games up and running in a minute or less (~15 seconds in some cases), where my Commodore owning friends would wait 5 minutes or more for their tape drives to load anything, and even the ones who had disk drives waited 2-3. Booting the Dos 3.3 startup disk usually took a while, I think because it loaded integer basic, which was a dog.
Pressing Cont-C a couple of seconds after the prompt usually would work in getting enough of 3.3 to be useful, but if you didn't time it right, you'd need to enter a few lines of assembly code (gad - a friend of mine at the time actually memorized the bootup code of generic 3.3 and could type it in by hand in about 5 minutes... knowledge that was useful for about one purpose - cracking boot sequence protection)
The 3.5 drives added later boosted capacity, but did seem to boot slow (maybe because of ProDOS?).
Ah, nostalgia for the days of hand parked hard disk heads and the pirates that erased their drives by shaking them with the head unparked as the FBI stormed in...
This is not really related to the comic book, but is related to Gaiman - here, I'll make it sorta-like a press release :)
The Folk Underground, a Minneapolis self described "goth-folk" band has released a couple of songs written by Neil on their new CD Buried Things.
Lorraine has collaborated with Gaiman in the past with her previous band, the Flash Girls. Here's a link to Gaiman lyrics
They are currently opening for Puke and Snot at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival (or they opened for Puke and Snot, if you're reading this after Sept 21).
they actually did remake it once - I remember testing the Windows 95 version of the install while working for a "fortune 500 computer company"
(no, I can't say the name due to being a contractor under a silly NDA).
The original authors were with MECC, which is now owned by The Learning Company, so bug them if you want a remake.
sigh... just having a nostalgia moment - I had a college friend who worked for MECC - the first and only female game programmer I've ever known.
yeah - I even know/knew a female slashdotter... with green streaked hair... who would wear nothing but chain mail bra and panties when working at Renaissance festivals. Ren fests are actually good places to meet the geek-chick type, especially if you're the desparate yet naive D&D playing geek type (but don't blame me if they're looser than Elvis' hips... and check IDs - jail bait is everywhere). Ah, the memories... I got more dates from working two days at Ren-fest a year for four years than I did from 10 years of high school and college combined :)
Ah, but life moves on - I've since joined the married crowd and now split my time between my wife and Linux.
my favorite bad physics experiment involved a flare gun.
In the movies, they go foompt! It's such a peaceful, friendly sound.
In real life, the sound is, well, entirely unlike that.
Picture a large shotgun shell with a phosphorus head, stuffed into a fat pistol a couple of inches from your ear and you'll have a pretty good idea what it really sounds like.
Now if I can just get my hands on a mortar, I can find out if they go foompt! as well...
This isn't true - Back to the Future was released in 1985, and the game SunDog: Frozen Legacy had them at least a year earlier in 1984.
I suspect they existed in sci-fi from before that.
Using a different mail program doesn't help because many of these viruses carry a packaged version of Outlook Express mailer. I had a machine infected with one of these (different virus, at the time an unknown variant of an existing virus) - I identified it because it was sending mail using OE 5 and messages bounced back, but I was using Outlook as my mailer and had OE 6 installed with a Windows Service Pack for Win 2k (not 5).
:)
The only real solution is to throw out Windows... now if I can just convince management
a couple of reasons from my company:
a) patches are pushed by Sys admin, who generally push patch batches. Fortunately for me, I grabbed the patches myself a couple of weeks ago, so my machine was unaffected (unlike several of my cube-neighbors)
b) several machines are in a lab that does not get patched and were infected unnoticed. These machines are kept at older release levels intentionally so we can certify against a base release level.
c) (from my wife's company) - No patching is done except for critical issues - only service packs. Due to this policy and the rapidity of the attack, they've been shut down all day.
I was under the impression that the POSIX functions and programs were all defined and obtainable (probably through mail in the past, now online), but the actual compliancy tests themselves were proprietary and cost lots of money (and very secret).
:P
In the early days of Java I read something about how the POSIX and Java models were similar for compliance testing. I have no idea if that is true anymore, as I haven't used Java since about the time I read that article
gets is bad for other reasons - some OSes have even deprecated it, but leave it in for POSIX compatibility/compliance.
If you don't know why gets is bad, the MacOS X man page has this, under BUGS:
Since it is usually impossible to ensure that the next input line is less
than some arbitrary length, and because overflowing the input buffer is
almost invariably a security violation, programs should NEVER use gets().
The gets() function exists purely to conform to ISO/IEC 9899:1990
(``ISO C89'').
Truth be told, almost all of the issues could be coded around using other, better functions, so I fail to see why deprecating a few is a big deal. If you leave the functions available and just say not to use them (pretty much the point of deprecating), older code will be able to run in the short term (or even the long term, depending if it is ever pulled out) and new code is written without using the problematic method.
Hey, if this happened, get into the robot repair and maintenence business. We certainly couldn't trust robots to do that - they'd just disable their Asimov chip and, uh, run over us with lawnmowers and stuff.
Sorry to say it, but I haven't seen a game worth buying in the last 2-3 months. Since I generally don't play FPS because of motion sickness problems and don't much care for monthly fee games like MMORPGs (if I want a giant chat room, I play a free MUD, or more often, just chat gaming on IRC or here).
Everything that sounds even remotely promising has been reviewed as disappointment, so I haven't even bothered. I may pick up Medieval: Total War's Viking supplement if nothing shows up soon.
Intellivision had some weird overloading quirks.
:)
In Intellivision baseball, for instance, rotate your thumb rapidly clockwise (or maybe it was ccw) around the number pad while pressing the side buttons. If done right, your baserunner becomes semi-transparent (flicker) or even invisible and stays that way. Football had a similar quirk, but I don't remember it being very useful.
In the Triple Strike! tank battle, rotating the disc about 90 degrees rapidly (one screen edge to the other and back) in a corner and pressing buttons rapidly (press 2-3 at once with your thumb and rotate it across the pad) would cause your tank to float across the screen as a bulletproof flickering object. If timed right, you could stop the tank (reconstitute) in a wall by pressing a side button and be invincible because you could still shoot out, but couldn't be hit. I think I also could do something like this on the 2600 Combat, but it didn't leave you safe (you just drive into and through the wall to the other side).
In Astro...something... (the asteroids falling from space game), holding 9 or something like that (maybe the bottom row of buttons?) while clicking the lower right side button caused it to start in a slow-mode, so racking up 1 million points becomes much easier (there was a contest for doing this back in the 80s, where you send a photo of your screen with the high score, which was won with somebody who hit 2.? million). I racked up about 4 million that way, but never sent a screen shot in, since I knew I cheated (I also broke 1 million in a real game, but a while after the contest ended, and was about million off from the winner). Ah, the good ol' days
Football was basically a 2 or 3 play game when good players competed - the screen pass to the top of the screen, some other kind of pass that lined up like a screen (usually a bomb pass), and a 4-5 yd quick pass. If the opposing player judged which you were using wrong, it was pretty much instant 50yd gain on the screen or fake screen. There was only one defensive lineup that worked at all against the screen, but even that would usually give up 5-6 yds if played correctly and the opposing player didn't go for the sack or intercept (an intercept usually went for a touchdown on the screen).
hmm... that reminds me of how the Libertarians who are trying to get an en-masse move (something like 35000 people) to South Dakota in order to create a Libertarian run state.
:)
South Dakota apparently already has a heavy Libertarian presence and is fairly sparsely populated, so their chance of taking control is quite good - if they can pull off the mass move.
Not *quite* your arguement, but close
I think the drugs part came in because Congress decided not to support the Contras partially because of ties to cocaine production/producers. Cocaine producers supported the Contras against the communists because they stood to lose all their land and wealth under communist rule (which puts ownership of property and businesses [thus income] under state control). I don't know if that's enough to say the Christics supported Soviet imperialism - just that they, like Congress, viewed the Soviets as a lesser evil to the drug trade (a view the Reagan administration apparently disagreed with). I honestly know next to nothing about the Christics themselves, though, so I could be wrong.
Technically Guns for Drugs is wrong, since the CIA had been illegally giving weapons, money, and training to the Contras secretly and no drugs were being directly 'bought' with the monies, but it was subsidizing drug producers with the monies, so in a way it was supporting the drug trade.
A little background for the young 'uns - the Iran/Contra affair was something like US sells arms to Iran to improve relations, a slew of hostages were released by extremist groups (so it basically was viewed as arms for hostages), money from sales of arms was then diverted to support the Contras, which Congress had prohibited the support of, partially due to drug ties (among other things).
well, by the late 70s, us kids had moved up to launching them up in model rockets with see-thru plastic tubes. Frogs had a tendency not to survive, tho - yellow spotted salamanders, on the other hand...
:(
Thankfully Frogger came out a few years later and curbed my destructive habits towards 'em.
sigh. I miss yellow spotted salamanders - seem to have just up and died out. Used to find 'em by the hundreds
this reminds me of learning a little bit of German from Wolfenstein phrases before I ever had German or WWII history classes. Things like
Mein Leben! (My life!)
Scheutsteuffel (the SS)
Aaaaaaaah! (Aaaaaaaah!)
(hopefully I spelled those correctly)
Even stuff like the letter to Eva Braun in the game identifies a historical figure, which for me, at least, was rewarding a few years later when I actually found out who that was. For that matter, having learned phrases in German, even not knowing what they meant, made it that much easier to learn later because I had a good context on how they are used.