net neutrality (or the lack thereof) is a symptom of competition. there is no competition in the telecommunications industry, so clearly there is no net neutraliy.
the concept of net neutrality is not new. it used to be standard operating procedure for the FCC. the FCC is now owned and operated by the tecos, so now it's not. all that the net neutrality groups want is to make into law the historical practices of the FCC.
I'm far from certain this is a bad thing. Instead of everyone having the same (erratic) latency, some people will pay for better, and the rest will get slightly worse.
if i want to choose to pay more for faster access, then that is MY choice. the issue is that i may no longer have a choice since google/vonage/myspace will have to pay my ISP to deliver content and applications to me over the connection that i am already paying for. if i live in a small market that google may not have paid for, i may no longer be able to use the connection that i am paying for to access google at a speed that is useful to me.
then there are the free speech implications. if my ISP decides it likes liberal candidates in the presidential election, then my access to fox news, NPR radio online, and the like may be degraded, or vice versa in the case of conservative favoritism. that might sound crazy now, but look at how governments of various countries have tried to block access to youtube for the very same reasons.
PC security and stability is easy. take the money you would have paid for a macbook and buy 2 dells. then, if you get a virus or any sort of error, you can swap it for a brand new one while you are having the other one fixed. 100% uptime, guaranteed.
i sold my broken dell on ebay and keep my spare in it's case wrapped in $400 cash money like tycho from penny arcade does with his CD player.
Well, this is certainly a good brute-force approach. The problem, of course, is that there are a lot of vulnerable places.
the art of war by sun tzu is pretty much a handbook on guerilla warfare. guerilla warfare (which is all that terrorism is) can be summed up in two quotes from the art of war: 1) when the enemy is of superior strength, evade him and 2) those skillful in offense attack points which cannot be defended, those skillful in defense present points which cannot be attacked.
the point is that you cannot fight an enemy that won't fight you back (like the US learned in vietnam) so force of arms alone is rarely sufficient against guerilla tactics. you also can't devote tons of resources to policing a handful of radicals (like every taskforce ever assembled to catch a serial killer) because the cost is too great for the benefit achieved. because they will only hit what is not protected, you will never be able to mount an effective defense against terrorists. because they will not confront you in the open, you can never mount an effective offense against terrorists. once you close the hole they exploited last time, they will simply find another hole that you didn't know existed. all you can hope to do in that situation is take steps to minimize the damage done and speed and simplify recovery.
Is that really the best way to improve security? I can think of a lot of ways other than spending a trillion dollars on 'well trained guards in [all] vulnerable places'.
a group that is sufficiently clever and sufficiently motivated will hit some weak point that cannot be conceived of with conventional thinking, the US will then react by fixing the vulnerability and enacting newer and more restrictive policies. the group will then locate a new vulnerability and the process will repeat itself. much like the cat and mouse game played by makers of copy protection and the breakers of copy protection, the problem with such a scenario is that the enemy is working with infinite resources (cleverness and time) and the good guys are working with finite resources (money).
so, rather than take a pervasively defensive posture against terrorism, we should realize that this is insurgency rather than terrorism, and our responses should be counter-insurgent rather than counter-terrorist. the problem of course is that counter insurgency measures are very unpleasant and are probably political suicide for the leaders who invoke them.
in a single-player RPG, there are no griefing assholes out there to camp your corpse or talk smack about how you're a n00b or spam the chat... until there's a massive paradigm shift in the general attitude of MMO communities and people start playing nice with each other, I'll just stick to Star Wars: KotOR, The Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect, and the like for my RPG needs.
general asshattery is not why i stopped playing Asheron's Call... grinding was. it was annoying being called a noob by level 100 macroers and getting pimped to join allegiances and it almost ruined me for the genre. the thing to keep in mind is that AC (and EQ1, and ultima) are several years old now. for the most part, the decent people have all moved on to newer games. that has been my experience playing CoH. sure you occasionally get retards on more modern games, but once you shut off all the global, local, and help chat, you can pretty much choose only to play with nice people.
my point isn't to accuse anyone of racism, least of all yourself. i don't know anything about you or where you are on the subject. my point is that while most people have evolved their thinking past skin color, it may not necessarily have evolved past culture. that's all.
here's an example: if i were to say something like "i don't care what color your skin is, as long as you are cool we will get along just fine". that sounds fairly tolerant and i'll bet that many people would say that they treat people the same way.
and if i had a problem with someone of a different race, i would say "i don't have a problem because of his race, i have a problem with the fact that he's not cool." again, sounds very tolerant and many people would say the same thing.
the thing to consider is that what i think is cool (and is not cool) is influenced significantly by the culture that i come from. race is a significant factor in that culture, so while my difficulties with another person are clearly not related to the amount of melanin in a person's epidermis, race is still a factor due to the effect that race has on our respective cultures.
nah, redirecting to/dev/null allows the malicious statement to remain intact and accessible to stdout before being discarded:-) i'm talking about instantly ignoring whatever follows the term "ms funded".
in unix terms, "ms funded" is an alias for/* or # meaning that the following is a comment that should be ignored by the interpreter/compiler.
Not everyone understands how much we depend on celebrity spending to entertain us.
everytime i watch some rapper on MTV cribs admiring is diamond studded refrigerator i worry that they will end up like MC Hammer. they really do need a fund or something to help these stars continue to live in opulence.
Those millions she already made were not nearly enough compensation for those few hours of music she put on records.
what the hell is wrong with you? do you think that cars, mansions, designer clothes, and heroin pays for itself? what about rehab? what about agent fees? what about lawyers and accountants? these are all very expensive things that help starts live their expensive lives. who's going to pay for all of that stuff?
you think that because you go to work every day that everyone has to work every day as well and simply pay their own way. well, i'm here to tell you that simply isn't true. just like the french aristocracy, some people have to pay for others to enjoy the good life. stars need more money than regular people and so regular people need to share the wealth. regular people have jobs and families... they can clearly afford to pay celebrities so that they can maintain their celebrity lifestyles.
when i played asheron's call i discovered that people who play MMO's and don't know me in real life are either jerks, wankers, or mentally retarded. even my guild was more than 50% asshats.
now i play lord of the rings online and city of heroes now, and while i have to turn of all chat channels but my kinship/supergroup, fellowship/team, friends and tells, i have to say that the level of asshattery has reduced significantly.
instanced event areas are a great invention. in AC if you entered a dungeon there was a good chance (especially in a choice hunting spot) that someone would already be there. they would invite you to a fellowship with a bunch of people who where obviously PLing squeakers and when you declined to join them they would get angry that you were hogging the lewtz. having a quest/mission where i can enter a "dungeon" that belongs soley to me and my friends is a real boon the the MMO experience.
if I/ignore a player, I want the option to ignore the WHOLE account
the global ignore was also a good invention, where you can ignore the human and all of it's iterations, rather than his current instance on a specific server. COH has such an ignore.
The only sure way to assure the user community of nice and polite players is to have a RL mobile unit in each city that will personally visit the basement of the annoying troll and give him a nice and polite looking over with an aluminum baseball bat.
or just make all games with communities of anykind be 18 and up. that's 85% of your offenders right there. minors shouldn't be consorting with people online anyway due to the dangers of online predators.
speaking of predators... are you predators out there aware that CS, live, and WoW are ripe with nubile and energetic young boys? if you guys worked a little harder or were maybe a little more vigilant there wouldn't be quite so many squeakers online, and the ones you guys missed wouldn't be such a problem.
relax, the mod system still works. i am routinely modded insightful by people who get my jokes, and modded a troll or flamebait by people who don't get my jokes... or worse, i get called stupid or crazy when people don't get them. in the great karmic scheme of things, it all balances out.
How about you earn those mod points and detail how much each politician got from RIAA members?
how about you learn a little bit about humor?. i don't have to list the precise number of lion-related zebra deaths last year in order for the statement "lions eat zebras" to hold a shred of truth.
things are often funny because they are true. things are rarely true because they are funny.
It assumes that copyright law around the world will not eventually be in line with U.S. copyright law as per the wishes of the *AA
you probably meant to type this:
It assumes that copyright law around the world will not eventually be in line with U.S. copyright law thanks to all the money paid to american lawmakers by the *AA
it's a pretty common mistake, those keys are so close together. i accidentally type that all the time.
the zapruder film was wrong. dan rather told all of america on CBS that kennedy's head went "forward, with considerable violence". dan says it was all oswald, and that should be good enough for you too.
My phone provider sends me an SMS every now and then, and I get about one call a month by somebody who mistyped someone else's phone number. I wouldn't want to risk that while assembling or placing a bomb. The couple of cheap phones that I've owned don't have an option to switch the vibrator off for everything except calls from certain known phone numbers.
there is a difference between a timer, a trigger (sometimes called a switch), and a detonator. you can install and test a timer or trigger (the things that tell the detonator to detonate) completely independent of the explosive.
when you are testing a trigger, you plug the leads into an electronic device of some sort instead of the detonator, usually a light or a beeper of some kind. pretty much all triggers and timers work by completing a circuit of some sort between a power source and the detonator. when the circuit is complete the light lights up or the beeper goes beep. you don't connect the trigger to the detonator until the second to the last step.
the detonator is normally a very small explosive (like a primer or a blasting cap) so that a mishap might be painful, but not life threatening to anyone but the handler. you don't want to connect the detonator to the explosive until the very last step.
all a timer does is wait for the proper time to activate the trigger that completes the circuit. cellphones (and previously, pagers) are mostly used as timers (with their alarm functions) not as remote detonators.
pretty much the only way to jam a timer is to somehow freeze time. that is a technology that i am very interested in.
palast was a principal resource for michael moore for ferenheit 9/11. politically, he makes michael moore look like tony snow. it's not that i don't think palast is a good journalist, or that he's not correct, just that his name might as well be/ignore as far as right wingers are concerned.
Vista isn't the failure that/. anti-MS pundits would have you believe, but it is a long way from the success that Microsoft's marketing department would have you believe.
which is it sir? vista is either a success or a failure. pick a side, we're at war!
Slashdot Mirror
net neutrality (or the lack thereof) is a symptom of competition. there is no competition in the telecommunications industry, so clearly there is no net neutraliy.
the concept of net neutrality is not new. it used to be standard operating procedure for the FCC. the FCC is now owned and operated by the tecos, so now it's not. all that the net neutrality groups want is to make into law the historical practices of the FCC.
if i want to choose to pay more for faster access, then that is MY choice. the issue is that i may no longer have a choice since google/vonage/myspace will have to pay my ISP to deliver content and applications to me over the connection that i am already paying for. if i live in a small market that google may not have paid for, i may no longer be able to use the connection that i am paying for to access google at a speed that is useful to me.
then there are the free speech implications. if my ISP decides it likes liberal candidates in the presidential election, then my access to fox news, NPR radio online, and the like may be degraded, or vice versa in the case of conservative favoritism. that might sound crazy now, but look at how governments of various countries have tried to block access to youtube for the very same reasons.
i am interested in linux, but i am looking for protection from people throwing chairs. any ideas? xandros maybe?
PC security and stability is easy. take the money you would have paid for a macbook and buy 2 dells. then, if you get a virus or any sort of error, you can swap it for a brand new one while you are having the other one fixed. 100% uptime, guaranteed.
i sold my broken dell on ebay and keep my spare in it's case wrapped in $400 cash money like tycho from penny arcade does with his CD player.
hello... language?
i swear to fucking god that you shitcocks on fucking slashdot have the worst goddamn language i have ever fucking seen.
the art of war by sun tzu is pretty much a handbook on guerilla warfare. guerilla warfare (which is all that terrorism is) can be summed up in two quotes from the art of war: 1) when the enemy is of superior strength, evade him and 2) those skillful in offense attack points which cannot be defended, those skillful in defense present points which cannot be attacked.
the point is that you cannot fight an enemy that won't fight you back (like the US learned in vietnam) so force of arms alone is rarely sufficient against guerilla tactics. you also can't devote tons of resources to policing a handful of radicals (like every taskforce ever assembled to catch a serial killer) because the cost is too great for the benefit achieved. because they will only hit what is not protected, you will never be able to mount an effective defense against terrorists. because they will not confront you in the open, you can never mount an effective offense against terrorists. once you close the hole they exploited last time, they will simply find another hole that you didn't know existed. all you can hope to do in that situation is take steps to minimize the damage done and speed and simplify recovery.
a group that is sufficiently clever and sufficiently motivated will hit some weak point that cannot be conceived of with conventional thinking, the US will then react by fixing the vulnerability and enacting newer and more restrictive policies. the group will then locate a new vulnerability and the process will repeat itself. much like the cat and mouse game played by makers of copy protection and the breakers of copy protection, the problem with such a scenario is that the enemy is working with infinite resources (cleverness and time) and the good guys are working with finite resources (money).
so, rather than take a pervasively defensive posture against terrorism, we should realize that this is insurgency rather than terrorism, and our responses should be counter-insurgent rather than counter-terrorist. the problem of course is that counter insurgency measures are very unpleasant and are probably political suicide for the leaders who invoke them.
general asshattery is not why i stopped playing Asheron's Call... grinding was. it was annoying being called a noob by level 100 macroers and getting pimped to join allegiances and it almost ruined me for the genre. the thing to keep in mind is that AC (and EQ1, and ultima) are several years old now. for the most part, the decent people have all moved on to newer games. that has been my experience playing CoH. sure you occasionally get retards on more modern games, but once you shut off all the global, local, and help chat, you can pretty much choose only to play with nice people.
i say tell the industry to go "manage" itself.
my point isn't to accuse anyone of racism, least of all yourself. i don't know anything about you or where you are on the subject. my point is that while most people have evolved their thinking past skin color, it may not necessarily have evolved past culture. that's all.
here's an example: if i were to say something like "i don't care what color your skin is, as long as you are cool we will get along just fine". that sounds fairly tolerant and i'll bet that many people would say that they treat people the same way.
and if i had a problem with someone of a different race, i would say "i don't have a problem because of his race, i have a problem with the fact that he's not cool." again, sounds very tolerant and many people would say the same thing.
the thing to consider is that what i think is cool (and is not cool) is influenced significantly by the culture that i come from. race is a significant factor in that culture, so while my difficulties with another person are clearly not related to the amount of melanin in a person's epidermis, race is still a factor due to the effect that race has on our respective cultures.
why isn't the west as closely tied to those parts of africa and asia? is it because of race? is it because of culture?
if it is culture and not race, isn't race still a significant factor in culture?
nah, redirecting to /dev/null allows the malicious statement to remain intact and accessible to stdout before being discarded :-) i'm talking about instantly ignoring whatever follows the term "ms funded".
in unix terms, "ms funded" is an alias for /* or # meaning that the following is a comment that should be ignored by the interpreter/compiler.
in this day and age, and on slashdot in particular, isn't "MS funded" synonymous with "/ignore"?
everytime i watch some rapper on MTV cribs admiring is diamond studded refrigerator i worry that they will end up like MC Hammer. they really do need a fund or something to help these stars continue to live in opulence.
what the hell is a pension plan? i live in america, not soviet canada.
what the hell is wrong with you? do you think that cars, mansions, designer clothes, and heroin pays for itself? what about rehab? what about agent fees? what about lawyers and accountants? these are all very expensive things that help starts live their expensive lives. who's going to pay for all of that stuff?
you think that because you go to work every day that everyone has to work every day as well and simply pay their own way. well, i'm here to tell you that simply isn't true. just like the french aristocracy, some people have to pay for others to enjoy the good life. stars need more money than regular people and so regular people need to share the wealth. regular people have jobs and families... they can clearly afford to pay celebrities so that they can maintain their celebrity lifestyles.
yeah. it's one of those square ones in the middle, it's between idawa to montakota.
when i played asheron's call i discovered that people who play MMO's and don't know me in real life are either jerks, wankers, or mentally retarded. even my guild was more than 50% asshats.
now i play lord of the rings online and city of heroes now, and while i have to turn of all chat channels but my kinship/supergroup, fellowship/team, friends and tells, i have to say that the level of asshattery has reduced significantly.
instanced event areas are a great invention. in AC if you entered a dungeon there was a good chance (especially in a choice hunting spot) that someone would already be there. they would invite you to a fellowship with a bunch of people who where obviously PLing squeakers and when you declined to join them they would get angry that you were hogging the lewtz. having a quest/mission where i can enter a "dungeon" that belongs soley to me and my friends is a real boon the the MMO experience.
the global ignore was also a good invention, where you can ignore the human and all of it's iterations, rather than his current instance on a specific server. COH has such an ignore.
or just make all games with communities of anykind be 18 and up. that's 85% of your offenders right there. minors shouldn't be consorting with people online anyway due to the dangers of online predators.
speaking of predators... are you predators out there aware that CS, live, and WoW are ripe with nubile and energetic young boys? if you guys worked a little harder or were maybe a little more vigilant there wouldn't be quite so many squeakers online, and the ones you guys missed wouldn't be such a problem.
relax, the mod system still works. i am routinely modded insightful by people who get my jokes, and modded a troll or flamebait by people who don't get my jokes... or worse, i get called stupid or crazy when people don't get them. in the great karmic scheme of things, it all balances out.
how about you learn a little bit about humor?. i don't have to list the precise number of lion-related zebra deaths last year in order for the statement "lions eat zebras" to hold a shred of truth.
things are often funny because they are true. things are rarely true because they are funny.
you typed this:
you probably meant to type this:
it's a pretty common mistake, those keys are so close together. i accidentally type that all the time.
the zapruder film was wrong. dan rather told all of america on CBS that kennedy's head went "forward, with considerable violence". dan says it was all oswald, and that should be good enough for you too.
there is a difference between a timer, a trigger (sometimes called a switch), and a detonator. you can install and test a timer or trigger (the things that tell the detonator to detonate) completely independent of the explosive.
when you are testing a trigger, you plug the leads into an electronic device of some sort instead of the detonator, usually a light or a beeper of some kind. pretty much all triggers and timers work by completing a circuit of some sort between a power source and the detonator. when the circuit is complete the light lights up or the beeper goes beep. you don't connect the trigger to the detonator until the second to the last step.
the detonator is normally a very small explosive (like a primer or a blasting cap) so that a mishap might be painful, but not life threatening to anyone but the handler. you don't want to connect the detonator to the explosive until the very last step.
all a timer does is wait for the proper time to activate the trigger that completes the circuit. cellphones (and previously, pagers) are mostly used as timers (with their alarm functions) not as remote detonators.
pretty much the only way to jam a timer is to somehow freeze time. that is a technology that i am very interested in.
yeah, that was retarded. bill gates' email address is billg@microsoft.com
palast was a principal resource for michael moore for ferenheit 9/11. politically, he makes michael moore look like tony snow. it's not that i don't think palast is a good journalist, or that he's not correct, just that his name might as well be /ignore as far as right wingers are concerned.
which is it sir? vista is either a success or a failure. pick a side, we're at war!
i don't think so. i think that an haven for EFF'ers seeking politcal asylum (EFFugees if you will pardon the pun) would have to be a country with:
sealand is probably compliant on issue 1 but i would consider it to be pretty light on issue 2.