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Your probably right. In retrospect, I see that my knee was jerking a bit.

For all who are interested Godwin's law states:

"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups. However there is also a widely- recognized codicil that any intentional triggering of Godwin's Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful.

Sniffing will also not get you anywhere if you are trying to see what happening on a https stream as all you'll see is the encrypted traffic.

That's generally true, but not entirely so. If web developers have the server's private key, they can indeed decrypt HTTPS streams. I once had to do it for a heisenbug on a secure website. You can use the tool ssldump from Eric Rescorla. If you're this deep into SSL, you should certainly buy his book SSL and TLS, which is very helpful.

Godwin's Law!

It's humor. Laugh. It's funny.

Read about Godwin's Law.

astroturfing n. The use of paid shills to create the impression of a popular movement, through means like letters to newspapers from soi-disant `concerned citizens', paid opinion pieces, and the formation of grass-roots lobbying groups that are actually funded by a PR group (astroturf is fake grass; hence the term). This term became common among hackers after it came to light in early 1998 that Microsoft had attempted to use such tactics to forestall the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust action against the company.

This backfired horribly, angering a number of state attorneys-general enough to induce them to go public with plans to join the Federal suit. It also set anybody defending Microsoft on the net for the accusation "You're just astroturfing!".

Methinks slashdot needs to be more careful about who gets moderated up in these discussions. Of course if parent poster is not guilty, let them prove it.

Godwin's Law prov. [Usenet] "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups. However there is also a widely- recognized codicil that any intentional triggering of Godwin's Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful.


How about KNOWING the laws you are trying to enforce, you insensitive clod! :p

Oh, and to the poster who made the original reference, you not only LOST the arguement by making the comparison, you are making plain for all to see what an uneducated fool you are. Any comparison is ludicrous until Bush:
1.) Commits or attempts genocide.
2.) Invades his three closest neighbors on a mission of conquest and empire building (It's not as if we're trying to KEEP or colonialize Iraq and Afghansitan [though I've been in favor of colonizing Iraq with the option to apply for statehood in 100 years since the first Gulf War]), and,
3.) Imprisons his OWN COUNTRYMEN in death/work/detention camps. Foreign combatants DO NOT count!

Please note, I did not vote for GWB, but he was a damn sight a better choice than that spineless pansy Gore. I will almost certainly vote for Bush over whoever the Democratic nominee is (John "Effing" Kerry? NO way), seeing as there doesn't seem to be an independant running this year. He's FUBAR'd some stuff up here, but it could be a lot worse (How about three times the already ridiculous tax rate, as the Dem's would have it... Why should I give away even more of my hard-earned money so some worthless slacker who hasn't worked a day in the last 15 years can continue to live on welfare eating as well [if not better] than I do, and make more babies in- between Jerry Springer and the next soap opera?), and in the long run, the Iraq invasion was the right thing to do. Maybe some Iraqi's are protesting in the streets right now, but they are mostly blowing EACH OTHER up now, not us. Besides, were it not for the U.S. soldiers there right now, those protesting would all be dead or dying in Saddam or Uday's torture chambers. We've given them freedoms such as they've never had in their entire history. Bush has done a great thing here, and anybody who says differently (One guy [a Frenchman] said to me, "They [the Iraqi people] were neither ready for, nor deserving of liberty because they are too culturally backwards and repressed to handle freedom, like most Arabs.") is a facist at heart, pure and simple.


--
All your terrorist base are belong to U.S.!

Agreed, really well written. From IBM's counterclaims:

SCO undertook to create fear, uncertainty and doubt in the marketplace in regard to SCO's rights in and to that [Unix] technology.

This has to be the first time I've seen jargon actually fit concisely and neatly into a legal text!

Go IBM...

When the fraternity Lambda Chi Alpha measured the Harvard Bridge in Boston with the body of MIT freshman Oliver Smoot, the length was determined to be 'exactly 364.4 Smoots plus or minus an ear'. Obviously they know what's going on.

Ladies and gentlemen, We have a Godwin. Thanks for playing.

require big muscles on the hand just to work full day

This is technically known as gorilla-arm syndrome.

It passes the Zawinski's Law test . . .

But does invading two countries really make you conclude that Bush wants to invade the world, making it into one country, like Hitler?

I present to you: Godwin's law.

On another tack . . Royal . . Gentoo . . Adelie . . detecting a theme?

I think that one of the biggest problems that Linux is going to face in the coming years is that there are only seventeen or so different species of penguin.

Probably fewer will be good names for products. Would you install "Little or Fairy" Linux?

Shades of not enough TLAs.

YOU HBT YHL HAND

Thanks for the biting psycoanalysis, Doc_Ruby, unfortunately, you have jumped to a incredably wrong conclusion, and cried racism where none exists, in an attempt to silence anyone that chooses to discuss something that you don't think should be talked about.

I suppose we should just go ahead and invoke Godwin's Law at this point, since you are only a half-step from accusing me of Nazi, and wanting to exterminate an entire race.

You HBT YHL HAND

There goes Godwin's law. You lose ;)

lookitup

Well, clearly you don't understand Godwin's Law, which is:

"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." (from The Jargon Dictionary)

The key text being "a comparison *involving* Nazis or Hitler". And that's exactly what the previous poster did. Well, indirectly... the grandparent's link all but calls gun control supporters Nazis. Hell, they've got a lovely picture of Jews in a prison camp, and then attempt to link gun control with the death of Jews! How is this *not* an example of Godwin's Law in action?

Oh, and BTW, early US rocket designs have elements directly lifted from Nazi rockets! The same rockets used to bomb London! Think of it!

An Anonymous Coward spammer talking about sales being "pretty darn good."

Now was it about spammers... Oh yeah, now I remmeber it was the rules of spam and rule #1, Spammers Lie.

Gee, if this is true, that means that spammers are posting to slashdot. I wouldn't be surprised if they are astroturfing all the spam stories, with the intent to protect their "business" intrests. That would explain a lot of the comments and their scores (spammers shouldn't have harsh jail punishments, blocklists are evil, just hit delete, have filters hide the fact that you still are getting and downloading their crap, etc).

>> IBM still has a policy of never smearing a competitor as far as I am aware... ;)
>lol, you make them sound so fluffy

I thought that was sarcasm. They invented FUD for crying out loud!

I would like to suggest that most of us asshats know not to put a space before quotes and not to put punctuation outside quotes.

The first one is still legit. The second criticism is out-of-date. That is called "logical quoting" as explained by the Jargon Dictionary, and I have indeed started to see it in significant and serious use outside of the Hacker community as well.

Remember the rule wasn't grammatical but typographical in the first place, and logical quoting is more expressive.

Lately I've taken it to the logical conclusion, and if quoting somebody's exclamation, I will do it like this: He said, "Oh my gosh that hurts!". That's right, I don't allow the quote's punctuation to terminate my sentence, because I'm not exclaiming. Your English teacher may not like it, but by the metrics of "range of expression" and "logical consistency", my way is better, and I think in the end as the typographical issues fade this is how it's going to be.

(Remember the Rule of Breaking Rules: "You may break a rule if you understand it.". I understand this rule and its history quite well.)

And finally, there is a difference between a Slashdot posting and a CEO's communication ;-) I'd never use a smiley in a corporate communication, and I'd never write a comment inside of Mozilla's text box without spell-checking support. But it's not worth the effort to do any better for a Slashdot comment.

Oh, for crying out loud, does every irritating jackass who uses intimidation tactics have to be called a "terrorist" now?

Well, hang on a minute here.

Sure, comparing them to 9/11 terrorists, Saddam Hussein, Hitler, or Osama is somewhat overrated, and Certianly within a stones throw of a Godwin's Law Violation, but there is a stone of truth in there.

SCO has begun an attack on Free Software's way of life. They have done so by inciting fear into the hearts of those who participate, based solely on their desire to milk the Free software out of their rights.

Fear is getting awfully close to terror, but I'll grant the split hair, and say Terror is too far. Still, we need a word for this... "Fearist?" hmm, too pansey...

anyone?

IANA is subassigned from ICANN.

So that's where all these IANALs come from! I was wondering that.

There really was a bug based on the phase of the moon. See the Jargon Dictionary for more info: phase of the moon:


phase of the moon
phase of the moon n. Used humorously as a random parameter on which something is said to depend. Sometimes implies unreliability of whatever is dependent, or that reliability seems to be dependent on conditions nobody has been able to determine. "This feature depends on having the channel open in mumble mode, having the foo switch set, and on the phase of the moon." See also heisenbug.

True story: Once upon a time there was a program bug that really did depend on the phase of the moon. There was a little subroutine that had traditionally been used in various programs at MIT to calculate an approximation to the moon's true phase. GLS incorporated this routine into a LISP program that, when it wrote out a file, would print a timestamp line almost 80 characters long. Very occasionally the first line of the message would be too long and would overflow onto the next line, and when the file was later read back in the program would barf. The length of the first line depended on both the precise date and time and the length of the phase specification when the timestamp was printed, and so the bug literally depended on the phase of the moon!

The first paper edition of the Jargon File (Steele-1983) included an example of one of the timestamp lines that exhibited this bug, but the typesetter `corrected' it. This has since been described as the phase-of-the-moon-bug bug.

However, beware of assumptions. A few years ago, engineers of CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) were baffled by some errors in experiments conducted with the LEP particle accelerator. As the formidable amount of data generated by such devices is heavily processed by computers before being seen by humans, many people suggested the software was somehow sensitive to the phase of the moon. A few desperate engineers discovered the truth; the error turned out to be the result of a tiny change in the geometry of the 27km circumference ring, physically caused by the deformation of the Earth by the passage of the Moon! This story has entered physics folklore as a Newtonian vengeance on particle physics and as an example of the relevance of the simplest and oldest physical laws to the most modern science.

mainframe

mainframe != server
mainframe == big iron dinosaur, OS-less, usually non-interactive, number cruncher.

For once, the answer to "But does it run Linux?" is "NO!"

At least not the vanilla kernel...

Ever heard of Gorilla Arm? Do you want the police to tumble down in swathes, grabbing their arms and yelping from touchscreen induced pain?

The best interface would be simply a QWERTY keyboard. Police have been using keyboards since.. well, since ages. They do paperwork, you see? No windows and widgets, just simple menus (like a wizzard!) with every option labelled with a letter or number.. So that a few keystrokes give them access to a screen where you input a license plate and you get a list of owner and outstanding tickets.. No pictures, just text - it's easily the most effective interface..

I have a serious beef with touchscreen graphical systems that are so full of whizz-bangy "user friendly" animation and menus that the GUI is what's slowing the thing down..

Case in point; old machines to buy traintickets had a list of codes (identical to zipcodes!) of all destinations on them, enter the 4-digit zipcode, select method of payment, and you get your ticket.

On new machines I have to first select the first letter of the city I want to go to, and then pick it out of a list of cities (and press cancel if I tapped the wrong letter because it uses the real estate of the entire screen).. This is "easier" only if you go to a different destination every time you use it because it's way easier to blindly(!) tap in a zipcode..

Last time I checked, my bank still had a text-only DOS-like interface on their computers.. Why? Because simply tapping in "ANNC" to enter a new customer account is way faster than navigating through wizzards and menus and "most recently used" lists..

Try for yourself; try finding that app you installed last week in your overcrowded start menu.. Now just tap in windowsflaggykey+r, c:\pro(autocomplete)\nameofprogr(autocomplete)\nam eoffile(autocomplete).exe

Which is faster?

Back in the early 80's I remember DEC had reported that a couple of their VAXs somehow shoed up in the USSR.

kremvax was an April Fool's joke.

At my college, it was a dollars-for-points system. They didn't even adjust the points to some wierd scale to mask the ratio: $1.06 paid in advance on the meal plan was worth $1 of cafeteria food. Also, no refunds on remaining balances. What a ripoff! So, we found ways to balance the ledger: anything that could be eaten before stepping up to the cash register *was*. We'd guzzle 'Free' refills on soda. Or misidentify items to the clerk (Nah, I only ordered a medium).

To stay on topic, I haven't seen mention of Dover books. Had 3 times that a prof used a dover book ($8 instead of $65, one time). Also, Alibris.com is DA BOMB for used books. Getting last-year's edition can save you some money. Bookswaps: primo. A friend at a bigger University can sometimes find used texts cheaply (or get them on a full-semester checkout from their library!), if you're one of 6 students in a junior/senior class in something obscure. Back before the September that never ended, I even bought a book or two off Usenet.

Oh, and a particularly lame Pascal textbook (in the 1980's) that priced out at 16 cents a page? I photocopied it ALL, then took the book back for a refund. Strangely, doing this just once cured me of being cheap. For ten bucks, I learned, I could have a smaller form factor, a hard binding, and a 2nd color used for highlighting key details that the photocopies lost.

See? College teaches you all sorts of useful things. Only a few during class, though.

Don't you know that by intentionaly using Godwin's Law you invalidate it? And, it also means you lose the argument.

--
In London? Need a Physics Tutor?

American Weblog in London

Hi Eric,

I have noticed a tendency among younger folk of non-cluelessness among AOL users. I don't know if this is because AOL has services which are useful to clueful teens, or simply because younger folk have had the internet as a part of their lives more so than the older AOLers. Either way, hey if it works for you, who are we to criticize?

But what you may not know (or remember) is that there is a history of AOL being 'the gateway drug to the internet'. Countless people have used AOL long enough to get a clue, then dropped them in favor of services which met their more sophisticated needs. I was a college freshman during the September that never ended. People would assume that I knew all kinds of things about the internet that I didn't, simply because I had a address that ended in .edu instead of aol.com. Everyone on the internet was pissed off at the AOLers, a feeling which still resonates to this day. AOL still thinks of themselves as "The Easy Way to get onto the Internet", so people still think of them as "The Idiots way to get onto the Internet".

Good luck at UF in the fall. Who knows what your September will be remembered for? (With condolences to the incoming class of '01).

Luser Attitude Readjustment Tool

Ah, Godwin strikes again.

Ooo that's almost a Godwin's Law event, how tantalizing!

Congratulations! You have just triggered Godwin's Law. Whatever argument you were trying to make, you've lost.

This discussion will now terminate.

>>so STFU about not liking HDTV.
You can always count on the 12-year olds for the insightful comments. *sigh*

No where in my post did I say that I don't like TV. And, contrary to your suggestion, I have seen HDTV, it is impressive, and I am looking forward(in a strange sort of way) to the day that my 61" screen kicks it so that I can upgrade.

What I do not like is the fact that upgrading to HDTV is being made mandatory. Why incur the added expense for something as non-essential as a television? Why not allow market forces to dictate the adoption of HDTV? Why must it be legistlated? Again, where is the benefit to the consumer by discontinuing the use of the analog frequencies and requiring people to upgrade their televisions?

The manufacturers gain by the added revenue relized from forcing people to replace all of their TVs. The broadcasters gain by raising their advertising rates disproportionately to cover the added cost, as well as adding DVD-style restrictions on use. The government gains by reselling the analog frequencies at a much higher cost. The consumer gains, how? By being able to watch "The Bachelor" in a higher quality?

It might be beyond your comprehension to understand the term "corporate welfare" but you would probably cut down on your trolling dramatically if you did a little reading. At risk of being accused of invoking the Ayn Rand version of Godwin's Law ( as well as giving you something to *shudder* think about), you might want to check out Atlas Shrugged.

Do yourself a favor: stop watching TV and read a book.

Given the nature of binary, you can have words based on multiples of 8 bits (and sometimes 4 bits such as a nibble (4 consecutive bits)).

You can have words on powers of 2, given the nature of the binary system. Though a 2 bit computer would be rather limited.

And you mis-spelt Nybble. :-))

Are you a BOFH or not ? Just because they're your kids, they shouldn't go away without a good LART .

"compound in Idaho" indeed, if I recall correctly, most "compounds" are for right-wing Christian militants. David Koresh and Nazis come to mind.

What then are we to make of the Kennedy Compound?

Well, I'm not sure about the others, but the Nazis don't exactly have too many activist groups sticking up for their rights.

By the way, Godwin Tag! You're "it" until someone else mentions the Nazis! :D

But as long as all the Democrats have to offer is "Bush is a Nazi"

I invoke Godwin's Law. You have lost the thread. Thank you and have a nice day.

I think that qualifies as a comparison
according to Godwins Law this thread is over.

Makes you wonder what'll go under the hammer next...

• a clue-by-four
• a LART
• a grue

In fact, I just had an idea. Head over to this entry in my journal and let's get some ideas of geek relics and the bids they might attract...

Makes you wonder what'll go under the hammer next...

• a clue-by-four
• a LART
• a grue

In fact, I just had an idea. Head over to this entry in my journal and let's get some ideas of geek relics and the bids they might attract...

I hereby invoke Godwin's Law.

Hey This may interest you....

a little Blurb about how Gork was able to Grok the internet or Grok life without having to be a GoAT

I think we need something similiar to Godwin's Law for threads that mention terrorists. Something along the lines of: Any poster without anything usefull to say about a subject will immediatly mention terrorists.

BTW, how fucking paranoid are you? Dude, get out from under the tinfoil and think about it for second. What the hell are the evil terrorists going to do with a sattelite? Take pictures Dubya taking Cheney skinny dipping at his Texas ranch?

Godwin's Law

I vote for "munged" , myself.

Or.... Imagine some bright lab boy dropping a decimal place in designing a nano-replicator! *glub glub glub* Grey Goo!

or Black Goo(tm) (Grey Goo someone did on purpose).

NOT so Utopian.

Ok, ok - you can make arguments that PURE 'gray goo' scenerio being implausible, but much damage can still be done by rouge, or badly designed NanoReplicators (Replicator.NET).

Nanotechnology, like all technology, is not an unconditional good.