Slashdot Mirror

DeBeers is an even bigger fraud than the RIAA. Diamonds (even natural ones) are not really scarce. Also, the new lab methods do not all rely on the mettalic solvents to create diamonds. One is deposited as plasma, with no extra gunk in the process. They are white diamonds, of unusual perfection.

BTW, Plastic had this a few weeks ago.

Dean G.

DeBeers is an even bigger fraud than the RIAA. Diamonds (even natural ones) are not really scarce. Also, the new lab methods do not all rely on the mettalic solvents to create diamonds. One is deposited as plasma, with no extra gunk in the process. They are white diamonds, of unusual perfection.

BTW, Plastic had this a few weeks ago.

Dean G.

• Don't send our kids to concentration camps
  
• Treat Chechens like humans (although criminals and enemies) and do not send them to death camps
  
• Do not jail political protesters
  
• Do not dream about total control over all citizens anymore
  
• No longer use 1984 tricks like doublespeak and editing history
  
• Do not jail people for hyperlinking
  
• Do not jail people for jokes in their belongings
  
• No longer send KGB officers to make people "disappear"
  
• Do not jail people for writing fiction
  
• And overall are highly unlikely to become a totalitarian prison-state
  
• Do not get busted for downloading an MP3 (and since most artists place MP3s on their sites, we don't even need P2P).
  
• Don't have perpetual copyrights.
  

• Don't send our kids to concentration camps
  
• Treat Chechens like humans (although criminals and enemies) and do not send them to death camps
  
• Do not jail political protesters
  
• Do not dream about total control over all citizens anymore
  
• No longer use 1984 tricks like doublespeak and editing history
  
• Do not jail people for hyperlinking
  
• Do not jail people for jokes in their belongings
  
• No longer send KGB officers to make people "disappear"
  
• Do not jail people for writing fiction
  
• And overall are highly unlikely to become a totalitarian prison-state
  
• Do not get busted for downloading an MP3 (and since most artists place MP3s on their sites, we don't even need P2P).
  
• Don't have perpetual copyrights.
  

• Don't send our kids to concentration camps
  
• Treat Chechens like humans (although criminals and enemies) and do not send them to death camps
  
• Do not jail political protesters
  
• Do not dream about total control over all citizens anymore
  
• No longer use 1984 tricks like doublespeak and editing history
  
• Do not jail people for hyperlinking
  
• Do not jail people for jokes in their belongings
  
• No longer send KGB officers to make people "disappear"
  
• Do not jail people for writing fiction
  
• And overall are highly unlikely to become a totalitarian prison-state
  
• Do not get busted for downloading an MP3 (and since most artists place MP3s on their sites, we don't even need P2P).
  
• Don't have perpetual copyrights.
  

I've noticed that there is a considerable amount of overlap with various web sites, and you can usually tell which ones they are by how much/how little they have in common story wise.

Is there a sizeable overlap in readership of HardOCP and Slashdot? Probably enough to make sure all the interesting stories there end up here. I see a lot of things that are picked up by Plastic and Metafilter after appearing here, and often the other way around.

So it's not an uncommon occurence at all... you could probably use story/topic overlap as a guide to how much of a readership overlap there is.

Or, more succinctly, this kind of blame tossing is not very helpful, particularly on an SCO thread. If you want to talk politics, take it to Plastic, or if that is too left wing for you, freep.

It would be a nice discussion to have, but it's a troll because the article is a book review that never even mentions Unix (aside from an unrelated book title).

If you want a real and insightful discussion, i.e. one devoid of the flaming and evangelizing of /., visit Plastic, write up a submission about what is and isn't Unixy in OS X, and hopefully it'll get posted. Or try MacSlash.

Best of luck!

If you're looking a a website that accepts you for who your are, go to plastic.com.

If you read Slashdot at score=-1, you soon see that it is full of racist homophobes who like to shout "first post."

Sidenote related to your post, but Plastic has an excellent posting system, offering both a superb spell checker, but also a nice reader level style meter. Just an FYI about a very nice board system.

"hey do whatever they do to get laid..."

For a second there, I thought we were on Plastic.

I didn't miss the point of your post, but it seems that you did.

There still is no evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein or Iraq and the attacks on September 11th.

Maybe that's the incompetance that should scare us so much.

--qtp

Hey, this is /. , I'm just playing to my audience. If you want good arguments, go somewhere else!

No, they don't know exactly what they're not getting. Indeed, the better "Clean Flicks" are at doing their cuts, the less they know about what they're not getting. All they know is that there's some violence and some sex in the original, or probably is. They don't know what was communicated by those scenes, what the context was, what the artist was actually trying to say.

That's the whole point. They'll end up missing some things that the director or writer wanted to communicate, but that's exactly what the Clean Flicks purchaser wanted, after all. Nobody is forcing them to skip the naughty parts, it's a choice they are making for themselves. Clean Flicks just happens to be helping them along.

Besides, for every movie like A Clockwork Orange that would likely lose so much in the "clean" version as to make it not worth watching, there are at least 10 films that will throw some gratuitous T&A in the film just to get the "R" rating. Some people may want to skip those parts, for their own reasons. Telling them they can't skip those parts is just as bad as telling someone else that they can't see any boobies, even if they want to. It's the element of choice, in my mind, that makes Clean Flicks acceptable -- if you want to watch the full version, you still can!

Posted by CaptBean on Monday December 13, @03:05PM
from the jihad!-jihad! dept.
RabidZelot was one of a bunch to report: "In Richmond, California, this afternoon, this dude said something bad about Linux at the Hilltop Mall near the fountains right after the first showing of Phantom Menace let out. He was last seen heading towards Sears and has a 'Where Do You Want to Go Today?' T-shirt and brown hair. Let us know when you spot him."

I knew plastic was a corny site.

Well, it's too late, since they sold their site, but anyway...
How about mirrors? Let everyone set up a mirror of all gamefaq content (without message board). It doesn't help their bandwidth host that many of the FAQ writers are paranoid fuckwit jerks that write 2-page copyright notices, prohibiting any redistribution and posting on any sites except gamefaqs.

Size of all the content is probably in the range of several gigabytes. By distributing hosting costs you can solve the problem. There are many people who have the possibility to run a mirror (a dedicated machine and a solid connection) but don't want (can't) contribute a comparable sum of money.

Since most of the content is static, there aren't many problems with setting the mirrors up. The whole collection can even be packed and distributed on CDs/P2P. All FAQs will probably fit on one or two CDs. Sell them for a few bucks to cover printing costs, simple packaging and S&H. Upload them to eDonkey and BitTorrent to allow people to have the whole collection on their harddrives.

Honestly, if technology can't solve all problems, it can make them significantly less serious. It reminds me of Plastic's hosting problems, which could be solved by changing the HTML output of the board, which currently consists mostly of unnecessary HTML code (>80%), not text content (20%).

$3000 for a decent droid isn't too bad, but what's even better is that brains are only $16 these days. And nope, that's not a goatse link. His brain would be even cheaper.

the so-called "Amber Alert" bill, which was initially intended to provide a national alert system for missing children (ooh, tug at those heartstrings!) yet is larded up with all sorts of crapola that would never have passed otherwise, including mandatory minimum sentencing, expanded wiretaps, and Joe Biden's "RAVE Act" that would make it a felony to hold dances with electronic music if someone gets high there. Ri-fucking-diculous. (Good discussion over at plastic.)

AI = AC. I'm too used to Plastic's "Anonymous Idiot."

BTW NineNine, we miss you!

Plastic if you have a liberal bent.

K5 for general high quality zine type stuff.

Or check out all the sites that run slashcode. The above two are the most popular.

ymmv, but some people (myself included) seem to like it.

Hey,

A New York Times Magazine article about how a London surgeon is planning on performing an experimental full-face transplant.

You know, that this is possible was announced months ago.

I read it here first.

Michael

ever try plastic?

According to this, it's OK to make fun of Asians.

Yeah the technology is definately not new, this has been the standard format for tennis ball cans for well over a decade. The question is market acceptance and given the recycling concerns, I can't see that being too great.

You can already get beer in plastic bottles in the US but most people think the beer will not taste as good (for the Miller, Lite, and MGD brands that use the technology, taste isn't really a concern anyway - but somehow these consumers consider themselves beer conoisseurs if you change the bottling material). So given the limited acceptance of plastic bottles I've only seen them at sporting events where it is prefereable not to arm potentially drunken disgruntled fans with glass missiles just in case the home team loses.

Yeah the technology is definately not new, this has been the standard format for tennis ball cans for well over a decade. The question is market acceptance and given the recycling concerns, I can't see that being too great.

You can already get beer in plastic bottles in the US but most people think the beer will not taste as good (for the Miller, Lite, and MGD brands that use the technology, taste isn't really a concern anyway - but somehow these consumers consider themselves beer conoisseurs if you change the bottling material). So given the limited acceptance of plastic bottles I've only seen them at sporting events where it is prefereable not to arm potentially drunken disgruntled fans with glass missiles just in case the home team loses.

your garbage goes through YOU!!

Simply put: Plastic has low status and appeal.

I disagree, I think Plastic has a lot of appeal. I now waste much more time there than on SlashDot.

As to status, Plastic having a lower membership would seem to make it somewhat more exclusive and therefore higher status. Plus regular members get to participate in the high status job of rating the submit Q.

Of course YMMV.

yeah, but even after your plug, the face transplant story on plastic has only 22 comments, as opposed to the 207 comments at time of writing here on slashdot.

Yes but of the now 212 comments on /. only 96 have current mod scores of 1 or higher. Whereas 21 of the now 23 comments on the Plastic story are at 1 or higher (the two others being anonymous posts, not down-modded posts). I think you'll find that when price is irrelevant, quality will trump quantity every time.

Here on slashdot I find there is a very real price in terms of my time taken up by low quality posts - or if raise my filter, by missing potentiall good AC posts.

yeah, but even after your plug, the face transplant story on plastic has only 22 comments, as opposed to the 207 comments at time of writing here on slashdot.

Maybe the repeats on slashdot are intentional and allow the many users who weren't logged on when the story was on the front page to catch up on the state of the world.

Or better yet, allow users to moderate stories rather than just comments.

You should come over to PLASTIC then. Users with 50 or more karma (which you can generally earn much quicker than here) can moderate the submission queue which does significantly reduce repeats. Not that we don't revisit subjects where a given angle migh have been passed over before.

There's also a messaging system so its much easier to respond to off-topic posts without getting modded down. And there is spell checking for story submissions and comments.

While the choice of topics does vary from SlashDot in that there is a much smaller emphasis on Linux, BSD, the DMCA, etc. those issues do come up occasionally. And issues like this one on Face Transplants would be pretty typical of the scitech category on Plastic. But in additional there are categores for Film &TV, Music, Games (& sports), Politics, The Work (and academic) world, and a catch-all category called Etc (covering news of the weird / oddly enough type stories).

there is only so many times in a day you can "go make coffee" or "check your email".

Geek Slack List

• http://www.subgenius.com/
• http://www.slackersguild.com/
• BBC News
• http://www.memepool.com/
• http://www.plastic.com/
• http://www.arstechnica.com/
• http://www.metafilter.com/
• http://www.techdirt.com/
• http://www.bottomquark.com/ (Science News)
• http://newsforge.com/
• http://www.theregister.co.uk/
• http://www.anandtech.com/
• http://www.bjorn3d.com/
• http://cellar.org - Image of the Day
• http://www.collegehumor.com/
• http://www.everything2.com/
• http://www.kuro5hin.org/
• http://www.theonion.com/
• NASA - Astronomy Picutre of the Day
• http://www.majorgeeks.com - Windows Shareware / Freeware
• http://www.advogato.org/
• http://www.sweetcode.org/
• http://www.disinfo.com/ - Disinformation
• http://www.somethingawful.com/
• http://www.astronomynow.com/ - Astronomy News
• http://www.aip.org/ - American Institue of Physics - News
• http://www.adequacy.org/

• The Effects of Moore's Law and Slacking 1 on Large Computations

Hope this helps =)

looks like it got dropped in a hole.

You mean a more communal approach than an oligarchy of "editros" that can't spot day-old duplicates? Great idea!

Just in case that is actually modded up and someone finds it funny, I didn't come up with it myself. I read it in a Plastic discussion a while ago. I can't remember which, however, and I can't remember who said it, so I guess this isn't much help tracing down the original source. I just didn't want credit for such a brilliant acronym unless I came up with it myself.

Oh bullshit. Go check out Plastic. Or, if you're too afraid of leaving the warm comforting confines of geekdom, there's always kuro5hin.

Slashdot...recycling the web in real time.

Oh wait that is plastic.com!

I don't like being the person who makes these trite complaints, but I also don't want to see Slashdot get into a habit of being days behind other sites.

Plastic had a nice article about this on July 28th.

Peace.

Yeah, the 10,000 user weblog with articles about cooking salmon on a budget, how to chew smokeless tobacco, how the existentialist movement ties in with the Mayan-American work ethic with regard to organic farming in the Mississippi Delta, and articles by supposed 20-year veterans about how it's "too hard" to build your own machine?

It's all about Plastic. Wit everywhere, and even the fluff is more interesting.

This was on plastic. I recommend some people steal some posts from there for some ez-modpoints.

personally i'm a little overweight have been interested in the idea the eating bacon w/ butter as a main food could make me loose weight, the down side a lot of people on the adkins diet have dangerously high cholesterol counts. Then again, all research in the field seems to be highly biased, the only nugget of consistent truth i can find is eating less works, typically on a high far or low fat diet you'll end up consuming less calories, which seems to always work.

There was something about a low calorie diet on Scientific Frontiers a while back, you can view it here if you like

-Jon

You should try reading Plastic. It's built on Slashcode, but the level of discourse is much more mature and enlightened than Slashdot.

Actually, over on plastic, we had a recent discussion about being on sex offender lists. The point was made that sex offender lists often include people who flashed someone 40 years ago and got caught. However, they're branded with the big 'A' (or is it 'P' these days?) wherever they go, in spite of the fact that these lists didn't exist back then. People think they're pedophiles when they might just have been sleeping with their underage girl/boy friend. Great.

So, with that in mind - is keeping blacklists (or greylists, really) of people a good idea at all? We like to pretend that they keep us 'safer' - but I bet the sixty-year-old gay man (prosecuted under one of those 'unenforced' state sodomy laws) who's driven out of his neighborhood with cries of 'think of the children!' isn't feeling any safer as a result of the existence of these lists.

"like the French government's purchase and placing in the public domain of the first photographic patents in the early nineteenth century... The work of Harvard economist Michael Kremer ( 1998, 2000), both with respect to the possibility of public purchase of patents at auction and of shifting some public research and development funding from effort-oriented to result-oriented processes (that is, holding contests for private companies to develop vaccines instead of funding research directly), is especially intriguing in its attempts to develop institutions that have all the advantages of market competition, natural monopoly, and public provision."

If you think otherwise, prove it. Don't post about how your uncle can dowse water, or how you saw your friend after he died, etc. Sit down and prove it; prove that there are phenomena that are attributable to paranormal forces.

Cross-posting from another board - Plastic. Someone had a point there, that I just want to re-iterate here:

Wouldn't proving that there are phenomena that are attributable to paranormal forces prove those phenomena are, in fact, results of natural forces?

Just using the loose definition "Paranormal Force" == "Unproven Force."

So, no. No one needs to prove this, because it is by (albeit loose) definition unprovable.

As for otherwise rational people behaving subrationally, check out my other recent post. I bet you think it's "subrational", too. ;)

You don't know of enough tech sites to claim that "almost every tech site" banded together on something. No one does.

You've just equalled "Those who profess to hate us the most" with "those who provide us with free content". Pause a moment, and wonder if those 3% are "those who actually care". Then, wonder if maybe their ranting against you would, in a kinder environment, have taken the form of suggestions for improvement. You can only suggest something so many times and be ignored / discarded before you start getting all jiggy with it.

You're running a site where 3% of your users provide content to the other 97%. You've just said that you doubt the 3% will ever pay. Do you think they're going to not pay, and continue to provide you with free content? Particularly taking into account the "venom posted in this discussion"?

Taco, you're running a magazine of sorts. 75% of your writers and researchers are screaming their heads off at you, and your response is that you doubt they'll pay you at all. You should probably be wondering who, exactly, is going to pay you at all if those 3% leave.

It's strange that of the 3% who make this site worth visitng, probably 20% of them are no longer allowed to moderate, and 75% of them are yelling at you right now, and you're so blase about the entire affair. Aren't you just a little bit worried? Particularly if your ads are large enough to screw page formatting and make everything ugly when filtered by proxomitron or junkbuster, those 3% might not be around for much longer.

I respect what you've done with this place (aside from $rtbl'ing me and a couple thousand others), and I know this decision is driven by your advertisers, and your corporate parent, but I can't believe that what I'm saying here passed under your radar. I assume these concerns were raised, addressed, and resolved -- so tell me, what was the resolution?

I'm worried Slashdot is going to die. Assure me that this is not the case, that these new measures are not going to cause all of your unpaid content providers to scatter on the wind.

-l

As a designer and geek-by-trade, I'm going to have to side against the majority of Slashtypes here.

The importance weighting of design vs. content can vary by 180 degrees depending on the context of the site.

First off, if it's a shopping site, or "brochureware," design is 50 times more important than the content within. It's the difference between handing a customer a professionally designed brochure and a photocopy. The content on those sites is almost always brochure/catalog spooge.

Design isn't Flash, it isn't animated graphics... it's a polished, useful, easy to navigate user interface that doesn't suck or make them think. (Those are both fantastic books, BTW)

If you're building a community-based site, or an information-based site, then design falls (rightfully) into the back seat.

I guess that the point I'm trying to make is -- establish your priorities when designing the site. Is your primary userbase going to be the Slashcrowd? If so, you better make sure that the site is tolerable in Lynx -- and that crowd is much less likely to avoid a site just because it's ugly.

Joe Sixpack Consumer AOL User or Middle Management Stooge, on the other hand, will be less forgiving.

Bottom line -- if you're selling image or product, design matters a LOT. If you're selling community and ideas, design doesn't matter as much -- but try to make the site easy on the eyes.

And, please know that I'll personally hunt you down and kill you if you require IE5+, Win, or a plug-in to view over 50% of your site.

You've been warned!

Although you've got some kind of a point, I wouldn't really take Slashdot as an example of good design, but rather as an example that having good content is much more important then a snappy look...
(By the way, a Slash site I do like design-wise is Plastic.com, check it out!)

Slashdot got fucked AGAIN!

The code is so whack, the page is THIRTY FEET LONG!

What the fuck?

By the way, try go over to Plasticfor a much better time, AND NO THIRTY FEET WIDE FUCK UPS!