Scientology "war"

Ah, Internet drama. So a bunch of kids have decided to "destroy" the Church of Scientology by DDoS'ing the Scientology website and making lots of prank calls to the various church buildings. Now, I'm thoroughly anti-Scientology and think that it's an incredibly dangerous and subversive cult; however, the rhetoric being thrown around by the members of "Anonymous" is almost as hilarious as the idea that a multi-million dollar business is going to be "destroyed" by a few kids ordering pizzas to the Scientology buildings and flooding their website off the Internet.

Perhaps the most stupid part of this whole affair is that it's possibly the worst possible action to take. Scientology likes to smear any of its critics as suppressive persons, effectively labelling them as hopelessly mentally ill people with anti-social and destructive tendencies. By "attacking" Scientology, the members of "Anonymous" are fitting themselves exactly into the role that the Scientologists would like to portray them as: "The antisocial personality supports only destructive groups and rages against and attacks any constructive or betterment group". Now it's easy for Scientology to dismiss any Internet criticism as having been concocted by antisocial "suppressives".

While people continue to believe in Hubbard's teachings, Scientology will continue to exist. The way to destroy Scientology is to destroy those beliefs, to show the lies that the church propagates and all the crazy stories about aliens found in the upper levels. The greatest weapon against Scientology is the truth, and the Internet is the most effective way to disseminate it. Of course, now, the church has an excuse to get more of its members running censorship software - "protect yourself from dangerous Internet subversives, out to destroy Scientology!". David Miscavige himself couldn't have come up with such an effective scheme.

There is obviously a large group of people participating in the "war". What a shame that so much energy has been put towards such an utterly counterproductive effort.

Syndicated 2008-01-25 13:26:06 from fragglet

Macbook Air

The minimum price for a Macbook Air is £1199. For this, you get a slow processor, 2 gig of RAM with no option to upgrade ever, mono speakers - although I guess it doesn't need decent speakers, since there is no DVD drive to watch movies on anyway, tiny (and slow) hard drive (just in case you thought you could download movies to watch instead), no Ethernet port, and a single USB port just to fuck you over in case you thought you could plug in a USB ethernet dongle and external USB hard drives and DVD drives to work around the above inadequacies.

The best part of all is that if you pay £2000, you can get the higher spec model, which has a slightly faster processor and even less storage.

Syndicated 2008-01-24 10:41:54 from fragglet

EU trolling

One of the features of the EU treaty being signed today is that it gives the Charter of fundamental rights of the EU legal force. I noticed this in Article 41:

4. Every person may write to the institutions of the Union in one of the languages of the Treaties and must have an answer in the same language.

Some things to consider:

• Institutions of the European Union are obliged to respond to questions in any of the languages of the EU with replies in the same language.
  
• The EU parliament is an "Institution of the European Union".
  
• Therefore, MEPs are members of an "institution of the EU".
  
• Does this mean that I can write to random MEPs (Robery Kilroy-Silk, for example) in random EU languages (Hungarian, for example), and they are obliged to reply to me in the same language?
  

I see great potential here for foreign language-based trolling.

Syndicated 2007-12-13 15:26:36 from fragglet

Offensive scrabble words

Ubisoft recently sparked some outrage over including the word "Lesbo" in their Nintendo DS version of Scrabble, which some people found offensive.

I decided to do some minor research, here is a list of several more words present in Scrabble DS:

Cursing: Asshole, Cunt, Fuck, Jism, Mofo, Shit, Wank

Homophobic: Fag, Ponce, Poof, Poon

Racist: Cracker, Dago, Gook, Jew (as a verb, meaning to haggle), Jigaboo, Kike, Raghead, Spic, Wog, Yid

There were many more racist terms but some of them seemed to be obscure words specific to a specific dialect, that I've never even heard before. Ubisoft certainly used a comprehensive dictionary!

Syndicated 2007-10-05 23:19:08 from fragglet

Psychic debugging

< AlexMax_> Oh fuck yes
< AlexMax_> my bash kung fu is still strong
< AlexMax_> heh this is getting messy, windows svn doesnt like being
            called from a shell script so now I'm using the batch file to
            update and shell script for everything else
< AlexMax_> heaven forbid anyone else try to replicate what I'm doing
< AlexMax_> OK this is really weird
< AlexMax_> If I put in a command at the bash command line, it runs fine
< AlexMax_> but if i put in that same command into a shell script, the
            command acts like it doesnt recognize the paramitors
<@fraggle> sh != bash
< AlexMax_> I'm using winbash
< AlexMax_> sh is winbash
< AlexMax_> wait a minute
<@fraggle> do you have #!/bin/sh at the top of your file?
< AlexMax_> what?
< AlexMax_> No, but why should i have to, I involke it using sh
            autobuild.sh
< AlexMax_> actually fuck
<@fraggle> try bash autobuild.sh
< AlexMax_> yeah, i could have sworn bash and sh were the same on this
            system
<@fraggle> i think it can behave differently depending on whether you
           invoke it as sh or bash
< AlexMax_> i know that sh and bash are usually distinct on linux
< AlexMax_> but i just remembered that sh is the msys sh and bash is
            winbash
<@fraggle> your bash kung foo may be strong but my psychic debugging
           powers are stronger

Syndicated 2007-10-02 21:44:34 from fragglet