Yeah, uh, two problems with that. First, by all accounts these people are based out of places that aren't really friendly to any government intervention, let alone foreign governments, so good luck actually getting to them to take any sort of legal action. Second of all, even in mid evil times most forms of execution were relatively quick. Mind you, that's execution, not torture (which itself was often fatal), but then again there's a whole raft of extra-governmental regulations on torturing people, not that that has apparently stopped any of the governments from finding loopholes around it.
So, these people are trying to sell these botnets for extortion and spamming purposes right? Well, seems to me that they just opened up a loophole for at least one category of customer to get free "service" by spoofing whoever he wants to DDoS and poking the botnet till it retaliates. Boom, instant DDoS and he didn't have to pay a dime for the service. I do like the idea someone else put out of spoofing as one of the other control nodes, thereby getting the net to DDoS itself, but it may be just smart enough not to do that.
The worst one I remember in terms of speed was the stupid burger assembly line in one of the later space quests. You had to make so many before too many of them fell off the conveyor belt. Man did that take a lot of fast clicking. Also, was it the skimmer? I seem to remember buying the space ship and navigation droid... or maybe that's what you were supposed to try to get but you endup with the skimmer instead. I don't really remember anymore, it's been at least 10 years since I played any of those.
As a kid I learned a lot of spelling from playing Sierra games. I was always a fan of the Space Quest series, and to a lesser extent the Kinds Quest series. Some of those puzzles though, man were they tough. I can still remember in, I think it was Space Quest 2 or 3, saving just inside the casino and constantly reloading every time I lost at the slot machine just so I could get the, I think it was million, zorkmids or whatever the imaginary currency you used to use was. I should probably see if I still have those games around on a disk somewhere and go download one of the ScummVM projects.
First, I never voted for the DMCA, and I know a whole bunch of people who would much rather it never became a law. The senators voted for it, not the citizens, and so if I choose not to follow the DMCA it doesn't mean I'm refusing to follow the vote of the citizens because they never voted for it. Also, because of the way our legal system works, just about the only way to have a law repealed is to be arrested for violating it and to appeal to the supreme court. Finally, I'm not asking for criminals not to be locked away, but the fact is, until you've been convicted and run out of appeals you aren't legally a criminal, therefore if you get arrested for violating a law, appeal it to the supreme court and have the law overturned, you're not a criminal. There's also a difference between saying you're innocent of a crime that you either committed but didn't want to be caught for, or didn't commit and are falsely convicted of, and saying you're innocent of a crime because you don't think it should be illegal in the first place. If you fall into the later category it's your duty to appeal to the supreme court and convince them of why exactly it is that that law should be repealed.
I don't remember ever voting for the DMCA. So only laws that you voted for apply to you? That's not what I said. I said laws never seemed democratic, not that they don't apply. I do feel however that it's everyone duty to not follow unethical or immoral laws, and if arrested for violating those laws to take it to the highest possible court they can in the hope of getting the law overturned.
my question is why "Brazil" is in the title. the us, maybe, but brazil? Because the article is about how a Brazilian music genre is using file sharing to promote bands. Something that only a handful of artists in America are exploiting (Trent Reznor comes to mind, as well as Wierd Al Yankovic, both of which clearly know their fans).
I like the idea, assuming it's reported by the Media it sends a message about the general publics opinion of the candidates. If something like 70% of the population is voting "none of the above", and the winning candidate wins with 20% of the vote, it means that people really don't like him all that much. Would be better than that 70% either not voting, or voting randomly.
It's also traditional to crack jokes at Irish funerals (or wakes). A "traditional" Irish wake is usually just a bunch friends and family sitting around drinking talking about the person who died and cracking jokes. When my grandfather died that's what we all did. The guy who did his eulogy at the funeral even started it off with a joke.
If they set the damage levels anything near what the RIAA got in their last downloading lawsuit, that would put the brakes on ID theft right quick.
Oh yes, because those Chinese, Russians, and others located outside the US are so mortally afraid of being sued for a hojillion dollars. The one good thing this law is doing is allowing the victim to recoup some of the loss, and maybe might act as incentive for the credit card companies to actually do something to reduce identity theft. The problem till now is it was always the victims eating the costs of identity theft, not the credit card and credit reporting agencies.
It all sounds good except this line makes me a bit nervous:
and expand the definition of cybercrime to include extortion schemes that threaten to damage or access confidential information on a computer.
Would threatening to expose a security flaw in a server or website unless it was patched open you up to prosecution under cybercrime laws then? I know that's already fairly shaky ground from a legal standpoint, but would this make it even worse?
Sometimes bad version control is almost worse than no version control. My current job is using some horrible system called PVCS. And don't even get me started on their "deployment" procedure, it's a joke.
Likewise we didn't want to get into a situation where we were 'just part of a network' using all our stories to plug other network sites.
The occasional slashvertisment not withstanding. To be fair though, I'm sure those aren't corporately mandated which was the point of that sentence, just people (ab)using Slashdot to generate some traffic.
Ah, the lawful good response. You should be a Paladin. Me, I'm more of a True Good (also known as Neutral Good), or possibly even True Neutral. For anyone that this makes absolutely no sense to, read up on D&D. Also, turn in your geek card.
If it's one of the advanced maps I haven't done that one yet, but there's a map like that in the normal game and the way I completed it was just to drop the cubes on the turrets themselves.
There's an expression, the punishment should fit the crime. If you stole some candy bars a proper punishment might be a small fine, say $100, or perhaps 6 months of community service or some other small punishment. If the statutory fine for stealing a candy bar was $6,000 per candy bar, you'd sure as hell see people fighting it in court. That's the point, the damages that are being awarded for these cases are grossly out of proportion to the offense, it's like getting the death penalty for trespassing.
Ah, so that's what it was babbling about. I was to busy trying to vaporise them to really listen to what they said, but I do remember it saying something like "2 cups of sugar" at some point. At any rate, the cake was kind of a lie, you were never going to get it.
You missed the point. People aren't raving about the story because it was some amazing story in and of itself, they're raving because of how well the story was told. Portal manages to immerse the player and make them actually want to be part of the story itself, something a lot of games miss. For instance even in Half-Life, you spend so much time just killing guys and scrambling for more ammo that a lot of the time the story is lost in the playing of the game. In episode one half the time I wander off to go look for things I missed while Alyx is babbling about something or other, because I just don't care what she has to say.
Luckily it seems most people do see the genius at work and we'll be seeing more from the Portal universe.
I don't know about you, but it seems to me based on various things in Portal, that it's set in the same universe as Half-Life. The mention of black mesa not withstanding, the sentry turrets are awfully close to the ones from Half-Life.
Well, they could make it work, even if it was more combat oriented with the addition of some more mechanics. As one idea, say they give you a cloaking device that makes you invisible if you stand still, and your objective is to infiltrate and destroy a combine facility. Part of the puzzle then becomes how to avoid getting spotted by combine troops and also to occasionally eliminate them. Say you put one portal in the ceiling over a pit, then you wait for a combine patrol to walk past you and shoot a portal under his feet. Or maybe you place a portal such that you can step through it when a combine is coming by to keep from being spotted. There are all kinds of ways it could work, but what I'd be more worried about is making sure that they keep the awesome narrative which I'm afraid would suffer without that AI constantly giving feedback.
I picked up the orange box primarily because of Portal. I've been looking forward to this game since it was announced. I'm really impressed with it. It was shorter than I thought it would be, but it had a lot more depth than I was expecting as well. I figured it would just be a puzzle game, but it has a genuinely compelling story. The ending credits blew me away, and I had to save the game right before the credits rolled just so I could come back and watch them whenever I want to. I really hope they release a Portal 2 at some point and that it maintains the level of quality that this one has.
also
The cake is a lie!
The cake is a lie!
The cake is a lie!
The cake is a lie!
Maybe if they had used fiber optic connectors instead?
Problem with fiber optic is it's a lot easier to break than a standard copper wire, and in the event it does break much hard to jury rig a replacement. It's not recommended long term, but if you have a broken copper wire you can always find some piece of conducting material of the proper length and stuff it in there till you get a replacement component. In this case they got around the problem by using some jumper cables to bypass the power cutoffs, a approach they couldn't have used if those cables had been optical (although I think they were putting the jumpers on the power feeds, which can't be optical in the first place, but the point still stands).
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, uh, two problems with that. First, by all accounts these people are based out of places that aren't really friendly to any government intervention, let alone foreign governments, so good luck actually getting to them to take any sort of legal action. Second of all, even in mid evil times most forms of execution were relatively quick. Mind you, that's execution, not torture (which itself was often fatal), but then again there's a whole raft of extra-governmental regulations on torturing people, not that that has apparently stopped any of the governments from finding loopholes around it.
So, these people are trying to sell these botnets for extortion and spamming purposes right? Well, seems to me that they just opened up a loophole for at least one category of customer to get free "service" by spoofing whoever he wants to DDoS and poking the botnet till it retaliates. Boom, instant DDoS and he didn't have to pay a dime for the service. I do like the idea someone else put out of spoofing as one of the other control nodes, thereby getting the net to DDoS itself, but it may be just smart enough not to do that.
The worst one I remember in terms of speed was the stupid burger assembly line in one of the later space quests. You had to make so many before too many of them fell off the conveyor belt. Man did that take a lot of fast clicking. Also, was it the skimmer? I seem to remember buying the space ship and navigation droid... or maybe that's what you were supposed to try to get but you endup with the skimmer instead. I don't really remember anymore, it's been at least 10 years since I played any of those.
As a kid I learned a lot of spelling from playing Sierra games. I was always a fan of the Space Quest series, and to a lesser extent the Kinds Quest series. Some of those puzzles though, man were they tough. I can still remember in, I think it was Space Quest 2 or 3, saving just inside the casino and constantly reloading every time I lost at the slot machine just so I could get the, I think it was million, zorkmids or whatever the imaginary currency you used to use was. I should probably see if I still have those games around on a disk somewhere and go download one of the ScummVM projects.
Yes.
First, I never voted for the DMCA, and I know a whole bunch of people who would much rather it never became a law. The senators voted for it, not the citizens, and so if I choose not to follow the DMCA it doesn't mean I'm refusing to follow the vote of the citizens because they never voted for it. Also, because of the way our legal system works, just about the only way to have a law repealed is to be arrested for violating it and to appeal to the supreme court. Finally, I'm not asking for criminals not to be locked away, but the fact is, until you've been convicted and run out of appeals you aren't legally a criminal, therefore if you get arrested for violating a law, appeal it to the supreme court and have the law overturned, you're not a criminal. There's also a difference between saying you're innocent of a crime that you either committed but didn't want to be caught for, or didn't commit and are falsely convicted of, and saying you're innocent of a crime because you don't think it should be illegal in the first place. If you fall into the later category it's your duty to appeal to the supreme court and convince them of why exactly it is that that law should be repealed.
Laws have never struck me as democratic. I don't remember ever voting for the DMCA.
I like the idea, assuming it's reported by the Media it sends a message about the general publics opinion of the candidates. If something like 70% of the population is voting "none of the above", and the winning candidate wins with 20% of the vote, it means that people really don't like him all that much. Would be better than that 70% either not voting, or voting randomly.
It's also traditional to crack jokes at Irish funerals (or wakes). A "traditional" Irish wake is usually just a bunch friends and family sitting around drinking talking about the person who died and cracking jokes. When my grandfather died that's what we all did. The guy who did his eulogy at the funeral even started it off with a joke.
Oh yes, because those Chinese, Russians, and others located outside the US are so mortally afraid of being sued for a hojillion dollars. The one good thing this law is doing is allowing the victim to recoup some of the loss, and maybe might act as incentive for the credit card companies to actually do something to reduce identity theft. The problem till now is it was always the victims eating the costs of identity theft, not the credit card and credit reporting agencies.
It all sounds good except this line makes me a bit nervous:
and expand the definition of cybercrime to include extortion schemes that threaten to damage or access confidential information on a computer.Would threatening to expose a security flaw in a server or website unless it was patched open you up to prosecution under cybercrime laws then? I know that's already fairly shaky ground from a legal standpoint, but would this make it even worse?
Sometimes bad version control is almost worse than no version control. My current job is using some horrible system called PVCS. And don't even get me started on their "deployment" procedure, it's a joke.
The occasional slashvertisment not withstanding. To be fair though, I'm sure those aren't corporately mandated which was the point of that sentence, just people (ab)using Slashdot to generate some traffic.
Ah, the lawful good response. You should be a Paladin. Me, I'm more of a True Good (also known as Neutral Good), or possibly even True Neutral. For anyone that this makes absolutely no sense to, read up on D&D. Also, turn in your geek card.
If it's one of the advanced maps I haven't done that one yet, but there's a map like that in the normal game and the way I completed it was just to drop the cubes on the turrets themselves.
There's an expression, the punishment should fit the crime. If you stole some candy bars a proper punishment might be a small fine, say $100, or perhaps 6 months of community service or some other small punishment. If the statutory fine for stealing a candy bar was $6,000 per candy bar, you'd sure as hell see people fighting it in court. That's the point, the damages that are being awarded for these cases are grossly out of proportion to the offense, it's like getting the death penalty for trespassing.
Ah, so that's what it was babbling about. I was to busy trying to vaporise them to really listen to what they said, but I do remember it saying something like "2 cups of sugar" at some point. At any rate, the cake was kind of a lie, you were never going to get it.
You missed the point. People aren't raving about the story because it was some amazing story in and of itself, they're raving because of how well the story was told. Portal manages to immerse the player and make them actually want to be part of the story itself, something a lot of games miss. For instance even in Half-Life, you spend so much time just killing guys and scrambling for more ammo that a lot of the time the story is lost in the playing of the game. In episode one half the time I wander off to go look for things I missed while Alyx is babbling about something or other, because I just don't care what she has to say.
I don't know about you, but it seems to me based on various things in Portal, that it's set in the same universe as Half-Life. The mention of black mesa not withstanding, the sentry turrets are awfully close to the ones from Half-Life.
Well, they could make it work, even if it was more combat oriented with the addition of some more mechanics. As one idea, say they give you a cloaking device that makes you invisible if you stand still, and your objective is to infiltrate and destroy a combine facility. Part of the puzzle then becomes how to avoid getting spotted by combine troops and also to occasionally eliminate them. Say you put one portal in the ceiling over a pit, then you wait for a combine patrol to walk past you and shoot a portal under his feet. Or maybe you place a portal such that you can step through it when a combine is coming by to keep from being spotted. There are all kinds of ways it could work, but what I'd be more worried about is making sure that they keep the awesome narrative which I'm afraid would suffer without that AI constantly giving feedback.
I picked up the orange box primarily because of Portal. I've been looking forward to this game since it was announced. I'm really impressed with it. It was shorter than I thought it would be, but it had a lot more depth than I was expecting as well. I figured it would just be a puzzle game, but it has a genuinely compelling story. The ending credits blew me away, and I had to save the game right before the credits rolled just so I could come back and watch them whenever I want to. I really hope they release a Portal 2 at some point and that it maintains the level of quality that this one has.
also
The cake is a lie!
The cake is a lie!
The cake is a lie!
The cake is a lie!
PPPS: I'M STILL ALIVE!
Problem with fiber optic is it's a lot easier to break than a standard copper wire, and in the event it does break much hard to jury rig a replacement. It's not recommended long term, but if you have a broken copper wire you can always find some piece of conducting material of the proper length and stuff it in there till you get a replacement component. In this case they got around the problem by using some jumper cables to bypass the power cutoffs, a approach they couldn't have used if those cables had been optical (although I think they were putting the jumpers on the power feeds, which can't be optical in the first place, but the point still stands).
Now that was funny.