Depends what you're doing though, if you have to have quite a few things open that taskbar gets cluttered pretty easily, and you can no longer see at a glance which taskbar button brings you to which window. At work I have to have a minimum of 6 browser windows open each with specific web-based tools in them, along with Notepad, Outlook, possibly Excel, and any other incidental browser windows I need to open while researching something, along with x-chat and msn which are also required for my work. And I can't go above 1024x768 either. 'Group similar tasks' sucks, since you have to click the group first before finding the one you actually want. At home with Firefox, everything is always where I expect it to be and readily seen. I have a bookmarks toolbar with about 8 sites in it, I right-click on it, hit 'Open in tabs' and they all come up in the exact order I have them in the toolbar, ready to go. At work, with IE I have to get my web tools open one at a time, trying to keep them in order so I can always find them rapidly as my poor taskbar icons get smaller and smaller as the day wears on. It's a pain in the ass that I could really do without.
Personally, though I use Firefox almost exclusively at home, at work I am forced to use IE, in an environment where tabbed browsing would be *extremely* useful. We haven't deployed SP2 yet unfortunately, but if an IE with tabbed browsing may eventually reach me at work, I'll be much happier, so bring it on.
1) Someone signs up with bogus information and false intentions 2) They gather and then post a bunch of deep links to someone else's blog urging people to spread those links around. 3) Links spread, by people who were not even asked if they agree to that silly rule or not, and they are completely in the clear. 4) Welcome to the web as we have always known it, nothing new to see here.
...too difficult to remember multiple passphrases. Second, it's difficult to remember passphrases! Phone numbers (In the US, at least) are limited to 10 digits because research shows the average person can only memorize 10 digits,
Remembering a string of numbers is a lot different than remembering a line of poetry, or a bit of dialogue from a favorite book, or movie, or the title of a cool song, or.. I could go on and on. For years I've used fairly short passwords of only around 8 characters, but they never spell anything, have upper- and lower-case and usually some punctuation, and are very easy to remember for me, because they are the first letters of the title or phrase expressing something I like. With the realization that the computing power is out there now to shred through something so short, it will be a simple matter to adopt the habit of fully spelling the entire phrase instead of just abbreviating it.
However, though there seems to be wisdom in long passphrases like this, I think it might also give way to easier guessing from camera data or casual eavesdropping, since an observer would have a greater chance of spotting enough letters to figure out what it must be. Anyone who has done well at home watching Wheel of Fortune should be able to attest to that.
Those are the starting numbers in the fibboraci(sp?) sequence.
You are both right and wrong, and that's what all the fuss is about. What you have said is technically correct, but we do not know the context in which this question was asked, which raises all of the questions the poster of that situation was talking about. Maybe those are the starting numbers of my locker combination, except the second 1 should be a 6.
I wasn't involved in this thread, but could I possibly call bullsh*t back on you? Just curious, since I've never actually met anyone like the person you describe having met several examples of. Far too often, even. Wow, could I meet at least one so I can see what it's like? I have heard of such people, yes, but for you to have met so many while I have yet to meet one, suggests a bit of imbalance, or shall we say, gross exaggeration? I should perhaps mention that in the course of the work I do I interact verbally for sometimes hours at a time with many hundreds of people from all walks of life, every year.
How can that be possible?! Could it be that some people are very bright, have good memories, AND can do well in high pressure situations?
Yeah but it's all about stress. Standardized tests are not necessarily stressful to a smart person. A lot depends on the perceived seriousness of the situation at hand. A serious situation could be a test that the individual places a high level of importance on, when combined with a sense of self-doubt. The self-doubt is not necessarily present in all test situations. Or it could be some other process they are suddenly forced to implement, most likely a new unfamiliar one with big consequences from errors. Confidence from past experience at succeeding in creating useful information on-the-fly goes a long way to combat this. But it still only goes so far. The breakdown in calm methodical reasoning and memory-sorting occurs as the realization sinks in that this is really important because of "this, this, and that other thing there, and the six things that will go wrong if such-and-such choice goes awry, and the other problems that will be caused later from such a failure, and blah blah blah ad nauseum". There's a lot of noise in an intelligent brain, most of the time it's organized, but let it slip and it's all over the damn place. Often the defense-mechanism, for me at least, is to shut down for a bit, during which time my clarity of thought becomes seriously impaired. I wind up getting through the situation with my reputation intact on sheer willpower.
Ok, what just happened to me is way too funny, or at least, maybe it's funny to me because I've been drinking. Anyhow, I started to post about how I'm one of those people that has this 'curse' and realized that my typing was pretty impaired (I'm exerting a very solid effort right now), and so, given that this topic is about smart people, I realized that I would probably just come off like some kind of idiot and discredit myself, so I hit the back button.. And then it hit me, "Shit, I just did it didn't I??? That's too funny, I pretty much *HAVE* to post now, it's totally on-topic!"
Though now, I've sort of lost the thread of my original thought that I was going to post about, alcohol will do that. I could get it back, but then again, right now I worry that I won't get it out properly (just did it again, see??) so I'll just leave it here.
My C-64 power supply was kept alive by a desk-fan that I had perpetually pointed at it. It ran 24/7 with a BBS, so the fan was an absolute must. I still went through a couple power supplies, but probably not as many as I might have without the fan. Later on, my Amiga 500 power supply I also kept on a fan right from the start, but eventually it died at a time when no Amiga power supplies could be found anymore, at least not locally. But the repair shop I dealt with went and built me one out of a PC AT power supply spliced into the Amiga end of my old power cord, which worked just great, and I was pleased that now it had its very own fan.:)
I had to use their services a few times in the further past, once for a 1541 disk drive that suddenly started pouring out magic smoke one day. I opened it up to find that one of the components, a big thing shaped like a capacitor but it wasn't, it was a mylar package, had almost entirely melted due to some electrical problem somewhere.
Another time, I managed to somehow fry the 64 itself by reaching for the monitor and accidentally brushing one of the empty RCA inputs on the front. I had a bit of a static charge in me apparently, having just sat down, felt a shock in my fingertip and the computer died. The monitor was fine, though the shock that brought down the computer would have passed through the electronics in the monitor to get to the inputs at the back and hit the computer from there. The whole machine was made of plastic on the outside, so I didn't feel that my left hand resting on the keyboard as I touched the monitor would have anything to do with it.
The last time, before needing the Amiga power supply was a bit embarassing actually.. I was doing a hack on the motherboard that would let me use the 512k expansion board as 'Chip' RAM since I had an additional 2 megs on the side in the chassis of my external hard drive. Well for some reason, don't ask me why because to this day I still don't really know, I decided to do the hack while the machine was RUNNING, so I could see what, if anything crazy, it might do. Really stupid and I don't know what I was hoping to see. I mean, I didn't expect the numbers to suddenly shift or something, I think I just wanted to watch the screen go crazy or freeze up or something. Turning totally black and staying that way was not one of the postulated scenarios, but that's what happened as my soldering iron slipped across a couple of traces right near the CPU. That was really dumb, but fortunately the 68000 processor was going for a mere $20 at the time, so it was at least an inexpensive lesson. Got the machine back, did the hack with the machine OFF (!!!) and everything was fine and dandy.
Maybe a brown dwarf is just still a star in training? It just didn't get fed enough as a kid, but it could have hope someday, couldn't it? It's so cruel to just label it "failed" and leave it in misery... It could get a job on the set of a sci-fi show or something, you never know.
You know, for very similar reasons, I thought to myself "oh yeah, sure, I believe an article that claims to come from Special Agent Lazarus".
Yeah, that's it exactly, but even before I saw his name, I was already chuckling at the mention that this report about the breached email server came in the form of an email. Think about that for a moment... Then I noticed the name and laughed harder. The report was quite possibly made by the actual intruder, which if true, makes this hilarious, that's why I'm still grinning right now.
Only the people directly under him can truly speak for his leadership skills or his stability
There is some tasty video footage of Gates being questioned by the DoJ a few years ago, and in places he really looks like his head is going to explode or something. He slowly rocks himself back and forth, back and forth, staring at the table like a traumatized child.
But anyway, I think their interpretation of the doodle had a lot to do with whose they thought it was. Kind of like a tarot reading really. I'm betting that if they had thought it was Gates, there would be different things showing like, "Strong business sense, poor attention to small details, and for some reason our entire library got copies of the doodle all over every page of every book."
Yep, I don't think it could be any worse than the Intellivision controller, with those thumb-buttons on the sides, and the disc you would also work with your thumb. Certain games, like Space Hawk, made those buttons particularly important and well-used. I would go to sleep with both thumbs just pulsing. I've got thumb problems today, but for different reasons. I borrowed a bicycle from someone, a 10-speed with those sort of 'rams horn' handlebars that were just too low for me, couldn't be made any higher, and after one hour of riding it (round trip) I wound up with steady pain in my thumbs for several months, and something like arthritis in them for the past 5 years now. The Intellivision got way more hours of use and never came close to providing anything like that, the pain would be quite reasonable-to-gone within a day or so. But I'll bet it was harder on the thumbs than a blackberry would be, unless you're gaming on the thing I guess.. Point is, there's quite a few ways you can be bad to your body, it's silly to just pick on one particular thing and make it sound all alarming. There's much worse out there. I mean, can you believe some of us put burning sticks in our mouths to breathe the smoke? What the hell is that all about? I've finally stopped doing that after doing it for about 15 years, and already I am finding myself seriously wondering what the hell I had been thinking all that time.
And you don't even need the name, at least I haven't, just the phone number. My friends had been letting me use their Safeway club card, via their phone number, and I used it for a couple of years that way. The card itself, due to a clerical error, is NOT EVEN IN THEIR NAME. It's got someone else's name attached to their old phone number. So we're all racking up purchases in the name of somebody I can't recall, it shows up on the reciept but I never look at it closely enough to remember it. I've got my own card now, since it was getting harder to remember that old phone number, as my friends moved and got a different number.
Yeah, I don't think I will have my imagination wiped either by seeing the film. The TV mini-series didn't manage to do that, I don't see why the movie should. It didn't happen to me with Lord of the Rings either. Fantastic visuals, superb casting, truly a feast for the eyes, very memorable. Yet all of my memories of the people and places of Middle Earth as I first knew them over twenty years ago are all soundly intact and still the default images that appear in my mind when I think of them.
And besides, Mr. Adams himself talks a bit about the differences inherent in re-making the story yet again as a movie. It's in The Salmon of Doubt, but I can't find where right now. There's a bit where he talks about how HHGTTG has been in so many forms already, each of them different in places, downright contradictory in others, and he liked it that way. He fully expected the movie to follow the same pattern. That's the only form of 'canon' I require: Douglas says it's ok for it to be different, well then, the movie will be great for me as it might have been for him. I just hope the actors do a good job for me.
My 2 cents on Alpha Centauri: Definitely a great game, especially for fans of Civ2. But what really stood out for me was how the story and situation seemed so very much like a set of Frank Herbert books, which I think are referred to as the Void cycle. 'Destination: Void' was the original story, that led to the writing of three more books that he co-authored with someone whose name escapes me: The Jesus Incident, The Lazarus Effect, and The Ascension factor. The last one was completed by his co-author after Herbert's death. Alpha Centauri makes me think of those three books, particularly the hostile environment of Pandora, the world where Ship brought the characters in the very first book. It's so familiar, you almost want to wonder if there was a copyright-infringement suit dancing in some lawyer's mind at some point. The star system was Tau Ceti if I remember right, but close enough. A good read, not as well-known as Dune but similar to it, chock full of philosophy, religion, and ecology. If you like Frank Herbert but haven't heard of this, try to find it, it's cool.
I agree that it would be nice to see more features besides just the scripting, but frankly, in many games where I've been given the opportunity to create scripts that has been at least 50% of the fun. Me want.
I think it's the other way around though. Having a realistic outlook on life (which is a festering pile of rotten worms and crap) has a tendancy to give one depressed thoughts, and a loss of hope. Learning how to cope with that doesn't make you less realistic, or at least it shouldn't. You just get on better from understanding what is happening to you.
Re:Comments on his statistics
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Is IRC All Bad?
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Just a personal anecdote here, but back in earlier times I used to spend a fair bit of time in the warez channels getting appz and gamez. I buy everything nowadays, but whatever, back then I needed my warez. Then one day there was some big crackdown, by the BSA I think, and we heard that over 100 people got arrested. In a wave of terror, almost all the good fserve bots got taken down within minutes of hearing the news, and within hours you could barely find anything at all. At the time we figured it would only be a matter of time till things came back, so we weren't too worried. But I sat there for a couple weeks wondering where I could get my fix, as I'd given up on warez on the web long before that. Too much bullshit and hassle involved. I don't recall that there were P2P apps yet, there was just IRC and the web, and the web sucked for getting warez, probably still does.
Nowadays, yeah I would have just switched to P2P, or rather, would have been using it already rather than IRC anyhow, as there's a bullshit-hassle factor in IRC warez as well, just less than on the web. With IRC you have you hang around waiting in the queues to get into the fserves so you can manually browse the files, manually download each file, and if it's many parts you probably have to re-enter the queue multiple times as the downloads progress, because there is often a limit on how many slots you can take up at a time. The bots that are listed in the article, those kind are much nicer as they are generally not serving 50 separate rar files. If the release actually is a bunch of rar files they are more often enclosed in a giant zip file, so those ones aren't too bad. But I liked fserves because you never knew what you'd find until you went into one and looked around, it was like being left in a huge mall with a platinum card. IRC was also an advertizing spot for ftp servers with warez on them, so it wasn't all DCC that you used during a visit to IRC-land.
But P2P is much easier to search, and you've got lovely auto-resume and reconnect features, just place your order and forget about it for awhile, and every so often you've got some of your stuff you wanted. If the powers that be could break IRC and P2P at the same time, and if I still actually wanted to get warez (like I said, not for years now), I don't think I'd revert to the web, unless it's gotten better. I don't know what I would do in that position. Go without or start buying, I suppose.
My first few years on IRC were actually spent in actual chat rooms actually chatting about actual topics that did not involve anything illegal. I didn't get into warez from the internet until after the www was invented. Didn't try IRC for warez until much later. Earlier warez were for the C64 on BBSs, but that's getting pretty off-topic.
IANAL, but I don't know that Person A should be liable for defamation, because Company B still acted anyway. Surely Company B would have wanted to investigate the matter first before taking action? I don't suppose that an ISP will shut down a major account based solely on the complaints of a single person. Person A may have gotten the ball rolling, but Company B felt confident enough to act on that, and should have done so with a sense of responsibility, and a bit of research. My own ISP sent me a couple of emails, one describing a complaint of intrusions coming from my IP *cough, woops* and on another occasion from too much traffic on my line. Both of those were willful acts on my part, but I was able to just downplay it to them, and got off with a half-assed warning in both cases. Now, I'm a very minor customer, Joe Six-pack if you will, not worth a lot of money to them, but they still wanted to keep my business. So they approached the matters diplomatically. I would imagine that if they were contemplating shutting down a larger account, they would take care to look into it very carefully before doing so. Company B would then be just as guilty or moreso, of the supposed 'defamation', as they would (or should, yeah I guess that's where it all falls apart, that fucking *should*) have to have researched the matter and come to the same conclusion as Person A themselves.
Btw, it's a bit amusing to note that on the day I got the email about the intrusion attempts (I was just playing around), I had just returned from a successful job interview at that same company.:)
The Amiga was a great games machine, with cool custom chips taking the load off
Which makes it kind of ironic that it was games that ultimately led me to leave the Amiga in favor of the PC. There were all these cool games I was seeing at my friends' houses, that I couldn't play. It sucked to switch, but the gamer in me just had to.
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Depends what you're doing though, if you have to have quite a few things open that taskbar gets cluttered pretty easily, and you can no longer see at a glance which taskbar button brings you to which window. At work I have to have a minimum of 6 browser windows open each with specific web-based tools in them, along with Notepad, Outlook, possibly Excel, and any other incidental browser windows I need to open while researching something, along with x-chat and msn which are also required for my work. And I can't go above 1024x768 either. 'Group similar tasks' sucks, since you have to click the group first before finding the one you actually want. At home with Firefox, everything is always where I expect it to be and readily seen. I have a bookmarks toolbar with about 8 sites in it, I right-click on it, hit 'Open in tabs' and they all come up in the exact order I have them in the toolbar, ready to go. At work, with IE I have to get my web tools open one at a time, trying to keep them in order so I can always find them rapidly as my poor taskbar icons get smaller and smaller as the day wears on. It's a pain in the ass that I could really do without.
Personally, though I use Firefox almost exclusively at home, at work I am forced to use IE, in an environment where tabbed browsing would be *extremely* useful. We haven't deployed SP2 yet unfortunately, but if an IE with tabbed browsing may eventually reach me at work, I'll be much happier, so bring it on.
1) Someone signs up with bogus information and false intentions
2) They gather and then post a bunch of deep links to someone else's blog urging people to spread those links around.
3) Links spread, by people who were not even asked if they agree to that silly rule or not, and they are completely in the clear.
4) Welcome to the web as we have always known it, nothing new to see here.
...too difficult to remember multiple passphrases. Second, it's difficult to remember passphrases! Phone numbers (In the US, at least) are limited to 10 digits because research shows the average person can only memorize 10 digits,
Remembering a string of numbers is a lot different than remembering a line of poetry, or a bit of dialogue from a favorite book, or movie, or the title of a cool song, or.. I could go on and on. For years I've used fairly short passwords of only around 8 characters, but they never spell anything, have upper- and lower-case and usually some punctuation, and are very easy to remember for me, because they are the first letters of the title or phrase expressing something I like. With the realization that the computing power is out there now to shred through something so short, it will be a simple matter to adopt the habit of fully spelling the entire phrase instead of just abbreviating it.
However, though there seems to be wisdom in long passphrases like this, I think it might also give way to easier guessing from camera data or casual eavesdropping, since an observer would have a greater chance of spotting enough letters to figure out what it must be. Anyone who has done well at home watching Wheel of Fortune should be able to attest to that.
Those are the starting numbers in the fibboraci(sp?) sequence.
You are both right and wrong, and that's what all the fuss is about. What you have said is technically correct, but we do not know the context in which this question was asked, which raises all of the questions the poster of that situation was talking about. Maybe those are the starting numbers of my locker combination, except the second 1 should be a 6.
I wasn't involved in this thread, but could I possibly call bullsh*t back on you? Just curious, since I've never actually met anyone like the person you describe having met several examples of. Far too often, even. Wow, could I meet at least one so I can see what it's like? I have heard of such people, yes, but for you to have met so many while I have yet to meet one, suggests a bit of imbalance, or shall we say, gross exaggeration? I should perhaps mention that in the course of the work I do I interact verbally for sometimes hours at a time with many hundreds of people from all walks of life, every year.
How can that be possible?! Could it be that some people are very bright, have good memories, AND can do well in high pressure situations?
Yeah but it's all about stress. Standardized tests are not necessarily stressful to a smart person. A lot depends on the perceived seriousness of the situation at hand. A serious situation could be a test that the individual places a high level of importance on, when combined with a sense of self-doubt. The self-doubt is not necessarily present in all test situations. Or it could be some other process they are suddenly forced to implement, most likely a new unfamiliar one with big consequences from errors. Confidence from past experience at succeeding in creating useful information on-the-fly goes a long way to combat this. But it still only goes so far. The breakdown in calm methodical reasoning and memory-sorting occurs as the realization sinks in that this is really important because of "this, this, and that other thing there, and the six things that will go wrong if such-and-such choice goes awry, and the other problems that will be caused later from such a failure, and blah blah blah ad nauseum". There's a lot of noise in an intelligent brain, most of the time it's organized, but let it slip and it's all over the damn place. Often the defense-mechanism, for me at least, is to shut down for a bit, during which time my clarity of thought becomes seriously impaired. I wind up getting through the situation with my reputation intact on sheer willpower.
Ok, what just happened to me is way too funny, or at least, maybe it's funny to me because I've been drinking. Anyhow, I started to post about how I'm one of those people that has this 'curse' and realized that my typing was pretty impaired (I'm exerting a very solid effort right now), and so, given that this topic is about smart people, I realized that I would probably just come off like some kind of idiot and discredit myself, so I hit the back button.. And then it hit me, "Shit, I just did it didn't I??? That's too funny, I pretty much *HAVE* to post now, it's totally on-topic!"
Though now, I've sort of lost the thread of my original thought that I was going to post about, alcohol will do that. I could get it back, but then again, right now I worry that I won't get it out properly (just did it again, see??) so I'll just leave it here.
Beer good after stressful day, mmmmmmm.
My C-64 power supply was kept alive by a desk-fan that I had perpetually pointed at it. It ran 24/7 with a BBS, so the fan was an absolute must. I still went through a couple power supplies, but probably not as many as I might have without the fan. Later on, my Amiga 500 power supply I also kept on a fan right from the start, but eventually it died at a time when no Amiga power supplies could be found anymore, at least not locally. But the repair shop I dealt with went and built me one out of a PC AT power supply spliced into the Amiga end of my old power cord, which worked just great, and I was pleased that now it had its very own fan. :)
I had to use their services a few times in the further past, once for a 1541 disk drive that suddenly started pouring out magic smoke one day. I opened it up to find that one of the components, a big thing shaped like a capacitor but it wasn't, it was a mylar package, had almost entirely melted due to some electrical problem somewhere.
Another time, I managed to somehow fry the 64 itself by reaching for the monitor and accidentally brushing one of the empty RCA inputs on the front. I had a bit of a static charge in me apparently, having just sat down, felt a shock in my fingertip and the computer died. The monitor was fine, though the shock that brought down the computer would have passed through the electronics in the monitor to get to the inputs at the back and hit the computer from there. The whole machine was made of plastic on the outside, so I didn't feel that my left hand resting on the keyboard as I touched the monitor would have anything to do with it.
The last time, before needing the Amiga power supply was a bit embarassing actually.. I was doing a hack on the motherboard that would let me use the 512k expansion board as 'Chip' RAM since I had an additional 2 megs on the side in the chassis of my external hard drive. Well for some reason, don't ask me why because to this day I still don't really know, I decided to do the hack while the machine was RUNNING, so I could see what, if anything crazy, it might do. Really stupid and I don't know what I was hoping to see. I mean, I didn't expect the numbers to suddenly shift or something, I think I just wanted to watch the screen go crazy or freeze up or something. Turning totally black and staying that way was not one of the postulated scenarios, but that's what happened as my soldering iron slipped across a couple of traces right near the CPU. That was really dumb, but fortunately the 68000 processor was going for a mere $20 at the time, so it was at least an inexpensive lesson. Got the machine back, did the hack with the machine OFF (!!!) and everything was fine and dandy.
Maybe a brown dwarf is just still a star in training? It just didn't get fed enough as a kid, but it could have hope someday, couldn't it? It's so cruel to just label it "failed" and leave it in misery... It could get a job on the set of a sci-fi show or something, you never know.
You know, for very similar reasons, I thought to myself "oh yeah, sure, I believe an article that claims to come from Special Agent Lazarus".
Yeah, that's it exactly, but even before I saw his name, I was already chuckling at the mention that this report about the breached email server came in the form of an email. Think about that for a moment... Then I noticed the name and laughed harder. The report was quite possibly made by the actual intruder, which if true, makes this hilarious, that's why I'm still grinning right now.
I read the article, and I didn't see anything at all about a world populated entirely by biros, and geared toward a uniquely biroid lifestyle.
Sorry, others started it I couldn't help myself.
Only the people directly under him can truly speak for his leadership skills or his stability
There is some tasty video footage of Gates being questioned by the DoJ a few years ago, and in places he really looks like his head is going to explode or something. He slowly rocks himself back and forth, back and forth, staring at the table like a traumatized child.
But anyway, I think their interpretation of the doodle had a lot to do with whose they thought it was. Kind of like a tarot reading really. I'm betting that if they had thought it was Gates, there would be different things showing like, "Strong business sense, poor attention to small details, and for some reason our entire library got copies of the doodle all over every page of every book."
Yep, I don't think it could be any worse than the Intellivision controller, with those thumb-buttons on the sides, and the disc you would also work with your thumb. Certain games, like Space Hawk, made those buttons particularly important and well-used. I would go to sleep with both thumbs just pulsing. I've got thumb problems today, but for different reasons. I borrowed a bicycle from someone, a 10-speed with those sort of 'rams horn' handlebars that were just too low for me, couldn't be made any higher, and after one hour of riding it (round trip) I wound up with steady pain in my thumbs for several months, and something like arthritis in them for the past 5 years now. The Intellivision got way more hours of use and never came close to providing anything like that, the pain would be quite reasonable-to-gone within a day or so. But I'll bet it was harder on the thumbs than a blackberry would be, unless you're gaming on the thing I guess.. Point is, there's quite a few ways you can be bad to your body, it's silly to just pick on one particular thing and make it sound all alarming. There's much worse out there. I mean, can you believe some of us put burning sticks in our mouths to breathe the smoke? What the hell is that all about? I've finally stopped doing that after doing it for about 15 years, and already I am finding myself seriously wondering what the hell I had been thinking all that time.
Or maybe the carbon dating on the article is what is wrong, in an article about wrong carbon dating-- *fizzle* *zap*
And you don't even need the name, at least I haven't, just the phone number. My friends had been letting me use their Safeway club card, via their phone number, and I used it for a couple of years that way. The card itself, due to a clerical error, is NOT EVEN IN THEIR NAME. It's got someone else's name attached to their old phone number. So we're all racking up purchases in the name of somebody I can't recall, it shows up on the reciept but I never look at it closely enough to remember it. I've got my own card now, since it was getting harder to remember that old phone number, as my friends moved and got a different number.
Yeah, I don't think I will have my imagination wiped either by seeing the film. The TV mini-series didn't manage to do that, I don't see why the movie should. It didn't happen to me with Lord of the Rings either. Fantastic visuals, superb casting, truly a feast for the eyes, very memorable. Yet all of my memories of the people and places of Middle Earth as I first knew them over twenty years ago are all soundly intact and still the default images that appear in my mind when I think of them.
And besides, Mr. Adams himself talks a bit about the differences inherent in re-making the story yet again as a movie. It's in The Salmon of Doubt, but I can't find where right now. There's a bit where he talks about how HHGTTG has been in so many forms already, each of them different in places, downright contradictory in others, and he liked it that way. He fully expected the movie to follow the same pattern. That's the only form of 'canon' I require: Douglas says it's ok for it to be different, well then, the movie will be great for me as it might have been for him. I just hope the actors do a good job for me.
My 2 cents on Alpha Centauri: Definitely a great game, especially for fans of Civ2. But what really stood out for me was how the story and situation seemed so very much like a set of Frank Herbert books, which I think are referred to as the Void cycle. 'Destination: Void' was the original story, that led to the writing of three more books that he co-authored with someone whose name escapes me: The Jesus Incident, The Lazarus Effect, and The Ascension factor. The last one was completed by his co-author after Herbert's death. Alpha Centauri makes me think of those three books, particularly the hostile environment of Pandora, the world where Ship brought the characters in the very first book. It's so familiar, you almost want to wonder if there was a copyright-infringement suit dancing in some lawyer's mind at some point. The star system was Tau Ceti if I remember right, but close enough. A good read, not as well-known as Dune but similar to it, chock full of philosophy, religion, and ecology. If you like Frank Herbert but haven't heard of this, try to find it, it's cool.
I agree that it would be nice to see more features besides just the scripting, but frankly, in many games where I've been given the opportunity to create scripts that has been at least 50% of the fun. Me want.
It can't climb out of my monitor and do me yet, so I'm still waiting for improvement.
I tried to be offended, really, I did, but it just didn't work and I laughed out loud instead. Hope you're not too disappointed. ;)
I think it's the other way around though. Having a realistic outlook on life (which is a festering pile of rotten worms and crap) has a tendancy to give one depressed thoughts, and a loss of hope. Learning how to cope with that doesn't make you less realistic, or at least it shouldn't. You just get on better from understanding what is happening to you.
Just a personal anecdote here, but back in earlier times I used to spend a fair bit of time in the warez channels getting appz and gamez. I buy everything nowadays, but whatever, back then I needed my warez. Then one day there was some big crackdown, by the BSA I think, and we heard that over 100 people got arrested. In a wave of terror, almost all the good fserve bots got taken down within minutes of hearing the news, and within hours you could barely find anything at all. At the time we figured it would only be a matter of time till things came back, so we weren't too worried. But I sat there for a couple weeks wondering where I could get my fix, as I'd given up on warez on the web long before that. Too much bullshit and hassle involved. I don't recall that there were P2P apps yet, there was just IRC and the web, and the web sucked for getting warez, probably still does.
Nowadays, yeah I would have just switched to P2P, or rather, would have been using it already rather than IRC anyhow, as there's a bullshit-hassle factor in IRC warez as well, just less than on the web. With IRC you have you hang around waiting in the queues to get into the fserves so you can manually browse the files, manually download each file, and if it's many parts you probably have to re-enter the queue multiple times as the downloads progress, because there is often a limit on how many slots you can take up at a time. The bots that are listed in the article, those kind are much nicer as they are generally not serving 50 separate rar files. If the release actually is a bunch of rar files they are more often enclosed in a giant zip file, so those ones aren't too bad. But I liked fserves because you never knew what you'd find until you went into one and looked around, it was like being left in a huge mall with a platinum card. IRC was also an advertizing spot for ftp servers with warez on them, so it wasn't all DCC that you used during a visit to IRC-land.
But P2P is much easier to search, and you've got lovely auto-resume and reconnect features, just place your order and forget about it for awhile, and every so often you've got some of your stuff you wanted. If the powers that be could break IRC and P2P at the same time, and if I still actually wanted to get warez (like I said, not for years now), I don't think I'd revert to the web, unless it's gotten better. I don't know what I would do in that position. Go without or start buying, I suppose.
My first few years on IRC were actually spent in actual chat rooms actually chatting about actual topics that did not involve anything illegal. I didn't get into warez from the internet until after the www was invented. Didn't try IRC for warez until much later. Earlier warez were for the C64 on BBSs, but that's getting pretty off-topic.
IANAL, but I don't know that Person A should be liable for defamation, because Company B still acted anyway. Surely Company B would have wanted to investigate the matter first before taking action? I don't suppose that an ISP will shut down a major account based solely on the complaints of a single person. Person A may have gotten the ball rolling, but Company B felt confident enough to act on that, and should have done so with a sense of responsibility, and a bit of research. My own ISP sent me a couple of emails, one describing a complaint of intrusions coming from my IP *cough, woops* and on another occasion from too much traffic on my line. Both of those were willful acts on my part, but I was able to just downplay it to them, and got off with a half-assed warning in both cases. Now, I'm a very minor customer, Joe Six-pack if you will, not worth a lot of money to them, but they still wanted to keep my business. So they approached the matters diplomatically. I would imagine that if they were contemplating shutting down a larger account, they would take care to look into it very carefully before doing so. Company B would then be just as guilty or moreso, of the supposed 'defamation', as they would (or should, yeah I guess that's where it all falls apart, that fucking *should*) have to have researched the matter and come to the same conclusion as Person A themselves.
:)
Btw, it's a bit amusing to note that on the day I got the email about the intrusion attempts (I was just playing around), I had just returned from a successful job interview at that same company.
The Amiga was a great games machine, with cool custom chips taking the load off
Which makes it kind of ironic that it was games that ultimately led me to leave the Amiga in favor of the PC. There were all these cool games I was seeing at my friends' houses, that I couldn't play. It sucked to switch, but the gamer in me just had to.