Slashdot Mirror

All the general sources of IT news have already been mentioned in other comments, but I tend to visit programming.reddit.com when I want news and articles on computer science and software development.

Basically you don't want a certain block of people to be able to vote (be it, republicans, democrats but, historically black democrats in tight elections). You send registered mail to every person on the registered voting list that meets your criteria.

Some mail will be failed to be delivered because the person doesn't live there anymore, they refuse to sign for the mail, they weren't home during delivered, etc, etc.

On election day you wait for those who have their registered mail returned to cast a ballot at their polling place. The agent then formally contests the ballot which is legal.

--

Attached is the excel document with the returned mail from Douglas County.

Chris Jaarda

--

From 'Douglas County Voter Fraud Master Spreadsheet.xls' properties

Network & Online Services

Republican National Committee

some found lost emails: search Caging-1.xls already scooped here.. Karl Rove's caging guy, Tim Griffin, replaced of one of the fired U.S. Attorneys.. it's gonna be a painful 600 days for the Republicans.. the Dems are smart not to impeach, even though that's what the country (and world) really needs..

Taking 5% of a company for TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS?

This is misleading. Y Combinator is not proposing to buy 5% of your company for $20,000, as that company doesn't even exist when the agreement is made. Rather, they provide the means to bootstrap an idea with no risk to yourself, then let you keep 95% of the result.

Anyone who accepts that deal should be shot.

Ok, so what's the alternative? How should a smart person with big ideas but no money go about starting a company?

Reddit was formed in 2005 by two 22 year old students during the first YC founders program. In 2006 they were acquired by Wired, almost certainly making them millionaires. YC, with their percentage, must have done well too. Sounds like a good deal for everyone.

Getting a company off the ground has traditionally been difficult, which is probably why so few people attempt it. For most folks it either means a tremendous leap of faith (quit job, mortgage house, cross fingers), or limiting yourself to evenings and weekends while you do something else to pay the bills. Y Combinator was designed to make forming a startup more accessible, and shouldn't be viewed as an alternative to traditional VC funding. It's an alternative to a regular job.

Just so you know; I submitted this comment to reddit earlier today. It hit the top of the front page for a couple of ours. You can see the discussion at http://reddit.com/info/1n5hw/comments

Lebski88 on reddit and /. [but I've lost my password here and changed email address]

Reddit is quicky following this trend. It can turn an interesting picture link every once in a while, but worthwhile news or tech articles are quickly burried by political spam and stupidly redundant discussion. I joined late in the game and have found it isn't worth the time to try and get my story preferences set to make the site worthwhile.

Fascinating.

"Kasparov is a supporter of Anatoly Fomenko's New Chronology." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasparov

"Fomenko asserts that all of ancient history (including the history of Greece, Rome, and Egypt) is just a reflection of events that occurred in the Middle Ages and that all of Chinese and Arab history are fabrications of 17th and 18th century Jesuits. He also claims that Jesus lived in the 11th century A.D. and that the Trojan war and the Crusades were the same historical event. He claims that Genghis Khan and the Mongols were actually Russians." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Timofeevich_F omenko

http://reddit.com/info/1hx93/comments/c1hyds

Slashdot
PSO World
Sega Boards
Reddit
GameFAQs
The onion, Pitchfork, News of the Weird, etc all figure in when I remember to check, usually once a week or so.

I read slashdot first mostly out of a near-decade of habit (I think I started in 1998... before there were real user accounts anyway). Usually I see everything a few days ahead on Reddit.

My list is pretty short, thanks to RSS. Google Reader filled up with all my 216 feeds, including Slashdot. (I don't read all 216.) Bloglines is also pretty good. Google News with saved searches for all my favorite topics. Not Easy for semi-random news. This sometimes helps me catch news I'd otherwise miss. Reddit for social news with much higher SNR and nicer design than Digg. For entertainment: QDB.us / random for IRC quotes. lingua.phobo.us (plug for a friend's 'zine :) Dear Abby for the occasional fucked up story. And a bunch of comics: Achewood, xkcd, Dilbert...

http://reddit.com/goto?id=1edx1

The fedora-devel-list has already responded to this, as well as Alan Cox himself.

Personally, I'd like to see ESR's response to these rebuffs.

I suppose you're referring to this, which affected eleven schools in a single city, and like I posted elsewhere:

Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show 11 schools in the city are using personal biometric data to identify pupils, but one said today they had suspended the practice, after a local politician voiced concerns.

A law passed by the government gave information on this to the public, and a politician acted on his constituents' behalves to stop it from continuing. Sure, it's a dumb move, but it's a dumb move that's out in the open and in the process of being corrected, and that is happening because in this case the political process is working properly.

So no, our government doesn't fingerprint children in schools, unless you count one city where it was tried and rejected by the public and politicians alike.

Truly heirarchical in nature, the data is also of varying sizes, full of binary blobs, and generally unsuitable for your average SQL system.

I posted this on reddit which broke the story earlier, and on my blog. Thought you might find it useful.

Quick follow-up. On digg someone posted the un-obfuscated code: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~achille/contacts-source. txt

How it works

The code is pretty straightforward. Basically, Google docs has an embedded script that will run a callback function, passing the function your contact list as an object. The embedded script presumably checks a cookie to ensure you are logged into a Google account before handing over the list.

Unfortunately, the script doesnt check what page is making the request. So, if you are logged in on window 1, window 2 (an evil site) can make the function call. Since you are logged in somewhere, the cookie is valid and the request goes through.

Also, if you check the object that is returned, you see fields for the contact's name, email and "affinity". Presumably, a higher affinity means a more-emailed contact, so it may be possible to know the relative weight of links.

Possible solutions

Google is run by smart people and I'm sure they'll have this fixed soon. A few suggestions appear to be popping up, all centered on making sure the user is on a Google.com page and not a random site:

Referrer blocking: Block all requests from sites not in the google.com domain. However, some people run referrer-blocking software. It may be the price they have to pay for security, but there could be other consequences.

Script checks: An idea I had was to check the window.location (just like you check the cookie) to make sure it's coming from a google.com domain. This is another way to see what page is making the request.

Challenge-response: Google pages (like Gmail) can have some token or unique, computed data that they submit with their requests. Random pages won't have access to this token when they make the function call.

(From user JRF on reddit): Include part of cookie in the request URL as a unique token that only a "real" Google page would know. Need to watch out for proxies/browser history (accessible from other pages) being able to access this unique data. May need to seed or salt it in a challenge-response system.

It's interesting thinking of fixes for this - do you have any other suggestions for how Google would fix this?

You're right! Nothing to do at all! For anyone!

There was a similar discussion on Reddit (yeah, I know, sorry) which showed what an arrogant, ignorant baffoon he is. This is not a big deal, it really isn't, and he fails to see the opposite point of view at all and instead likes to shoot off with completely ridiculous analogies. Epitome of a non-story.

What I thought was nice is the repeated use of:

"cd tmp/a/b/c || mkdir -p a/b/c && tar xvf -C tmp/a/b/c archive.tar"

There are many things wrong with that command.

1) It is dumb to "automate" mkdir that way. as a human, you can easily see if the cd failed or succeeded. why would you want to type in "|| mkdir -p tmp/a/b/c &&" if you didn't have to?

2) The "mkdir -p tmp/a/b/c" already tests if the directory exists and won't do anything if it does. If you're going to bother typing in the "mkdir -p tmp/a/b/c" command, you may as well drop the "cd tmp/a/b/c" test in the first place.

3) The -C option to tar already creates the folders if they don't exist, so there's no reason to test and create it ahead of time.

4) If the directory actually existed, you'll be in the tmp/a/b/c directory already when you run tar, (thanks to the cd) which is obviously not what was intended, since the tmp/a/b/c is specified by -C, which means that the file will get unpacked to tmp/a/b/c/tmp/a/b/c

5) The "-C" option was specified between the -f option and its argument, so that tar will try to unpack the files named "tmp/a/b/c" and "archive.tar" from the archive named "-C"

Did I miss anything? :)

Edit:

I just noticed that "Listing 11" is even funnier, since it does all sort of random things that are clearly not what the author intended, and for no good reason. I can definitely say don't do what this guy does.

Slashdot lately feels like a delayed copy of reddit. Can this be good?

I don't know about books per se, but these links help:
http://joel.reddit.com/
http://programming.reddit.com/
The design patterns book website with, as I understand it most if not all of the content for the book:
http://lci.cs.ubbcluj.ro/~raduking/Books/Design%20 Patterns/

The next three I keep the bookmarks to in a folder called "Practicing programming:
http://www.devblog3000.com/archives/2-Practicing-P rogramming.html
http://butunclebob.com/
http://www.objectmentor.com/resources/publishedArt icles.html

I don't know about books per se, but these links help:
http://joel.reddit.com/
http://programming.reddit.com/
The design patterns book website with, as I understand it most if not all of the content for the book:
http://lci.cs.ubbcluj.ro/~raduking/Books/Design%20 Patterns/

The next three I keep the bookmarks to in a folder called "Practicing programming:
http://www.devblog3000.com/archives/2-Practicing-P rogramming.html
http://butunclebob.com/
http://www.objectmentor.com/resources/publishedArt icles.html

Seattle911.com is no longer able to operate,
because the Seattle Fire Feed has been removed.
Why?
Digg the story here
Reddit Here

Just for everyone information, my server was down earlier due to a rogue node on my VPS server (great timing by my host), not slashdotting. Here is my blog post on this issue that started some of this http://blog.eberly.org/2006/10/12/worlds-worst-use -of-a-jpeg Here are the comments at Reddit. http://reddit.com/info/lxbt/comments Reddit sent over 30k hits in a short period to my server and it handled it fine, it just seems every Saturday somebody on my server gobbles up all the resources. I really will never recommend VPS from this host to anyone.

Huh, no kidding? Well, maybe you should tell reddit.com (one of Paul Graham's spinoffs). Because, you see, they switched from Lisp to Python a while back (sorry, I can't find the original block entry). And why? Because, to quote:

"If Lisp is so great, why did we stop using it? One of the biggest issues was the lack of widely used and tested libraries. Sure, there is a CL library for basically any task, but there is rarely more than one, and often the libraries are not widely used or well documented."

So, sure, there may be tons of libaries, but who wants a library that's poorly documented, poorly tested, and may not even work on your CL implementation?

Moreover, in addition to the ffi, things like sockets and threads, which I think we can all agree are important, aren't standardized across implementations, which just makes things harder.

Now, is this a problem with the language? No, it's the implementations. But the fact is that until you can grab a library off the net and drop it into your Lisp implementation of choice (assuming they've implemented the standard) and hit the ground running, it will, like Scheme, Smalltalk (my poison of choice), and others, remaining a niche language.

Unfortunately, this is, in part, also an issue of critical mass. Unless you can get people using your language, there won't be high quality, well tested modules for it. OTOH, Perl, Python, and Ruby have all proved it's possible... 'course, it helps that the people running those projects aren't sequestored in ivory towers (well, okay, Guido just deigns to join us down here, occasionally).

That was an awesome game. And the only time I can stomach people using dig and dug in the same sentence. I'm sorry, but there is already a word for server meltdown, and that is slashdotted. There is no point in inventing new synonyms for every website that links to stuff. And to add insult to injury, http://reddit.com/ is better than digg. Thank you for reading, now please mod me and parent down.

http://reddit.com/ is a good place.

http://reddit.com/info/dokh/comments/

As I was saying elsewhere, the UK has a history of passing stupid laws, and then having the rest of the country ignore or bypass them.

For example, we have a law saying that all schools must provide daily worship of a predominantly Christian nature. Over three-quarters of schools in the country are simply breaking the law or finding loopholes. As a result, the law is being relaxed, and will probably be disposed of entirely before long.

If you are approaching this from an American perspective, where bad laws like the DMCA are routinely enforced, then I can see how this might be considered an absolute disaster in terms of liberty. But from a British perspective, it's just another law to be ignored, and if anybody tries to use it, there'll be an uproar. As things stand, it hasn't even been used and there's already a backlash that has reached the House of Lords.

Power tool industry refuses to license techology for the table saw from that amazing video. (Anyone really surprised by this?)

• The cool thing I've noticed about Reddit is it has some of the democratic, fast-paced nature of Digg with a *much* more intelligent community.
• Reddit also has a much cleaner layout than Digg and is more useable.
• And of course, Reddit has none of that admin censorship that Digg has been bitched at about recently.

I've been reading Reddit a lot lately. I find that Reddit has a good article flow and also has much better discussions than Digg. In particular, I like reading the programming subreddit on Reddit. It's a lot slower than the main page, but faster than developers.slashdot.com.

I've been reading Reddit a lot lately. I find that Reddit has a good article flow and also has much better discussions than Digg. In particular, I like reading the programming subreddit on Reddit. It's a lot slower than the main page, but faster than developers.slashdot.com.

How can this be insightful? This must be the biggest collection of web design misconceptions I've ever read.

• You're supposed to separate semantics and style, because it makes the pages more flexible, accessible, and terse. Everything on a web page has some semantics (if marked up properly) and a style which completely depends on the capabilities of the client. If you believe these are inseparable, I bet you've never used a textual or audio browser. Input elements are no different from other markup in this respect.
• An HTML page cannot be XML. At least, it cannot be valid HTML and valid XML, except for trivial cases. XHTML is valid XML, but it wasn't created because of CSS. It was created because of stricter syntax rules (leading to easier parsing). CSS works fine with any XML, but millions of pages use it successfully with old-style HTML. And I'd love to know what kind of positioning can only be handled by attributes - I've never seen a case of this.
• Only uninformed zealots will tell you that tables are always bad. Tables have a well-known semantic meaning, but that does not include layout. DIVs also have a well-defined meaning: Division. DIVs separate the markup into parts, which can then be styled (and positioned) at the whim of the developer. But, being completely flexible with regard to visual representation, they can be difficult to handle for novices - Been there, done that. Positioning is IMO the only really difficult part of CSS, mostly because of client bugs. Oh, and DIVs are block elements, even though you can override this.
• HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are not the same thing! HTML defines contents, and can be used for web pages, help files, presentations (S5), and books. CSS defines style, and can be used for any HTML or XML markup. JavaScript defines functionality, and is a full-fledged programming language. It's a pipe dream that any number of languages with vastly different capabilities and goals can be merged into a consistent whole without adding oodles of complexity.

To answer your question: CSS is not an "elite thing". It's really quite simple, if you run through a tutorial or two. I recommend W3Schools' tutorial to start with and for reference, Jeffrey Zeldman's Designing with Web Standards to learn practical CSS, and searching Digg, Reddit, and especially del.icio.us to learn lots more.

They blocked Fark where I work for pornographic reasons. You know what I do? I wait til I get home.

You know what's even worse? I'm a public school teacher, and they block Slashdot at my school because it's a "message board". You know what I do? Read reddit and (gasp!) sometimes Digg (neither of which are blocked... yet) during my conference period, and catch up on Slashdot when I get home. I can't even check my personal email from school. BFD.

Let's all repeat after me, class: blocking your access to certain websites -- whether at school, at work, or even by your ISP -- is not censorship. Censorship has a narrower definition than the average high school kid thinks.

because deleting a shortcut is just a few clicks away.

You Python fan boys are getting to be as bad as the Gentoo crowd!

Python is in no way shape or form, a replacement for C.

Python is a scripting language.

It may be suitable for RAD and prototyping, for which it was developed.

But, it is not suitable for "production" applications!

Pyhthon may be better than Lisp but, that's not saying much at all.

You'd have a hard time finding Lisp programmers anywhere, let alone India.

> There's gotta be some sort of *article moderation system* to prevent FUD like this from misleading Slashdot readers.

http://www.reddit.com/

...so next time you do a major product release, submit an article about it to slashdot, or write a blog entry about it and submit that. I'm sure if you product is interesting it will get posted. Also look to reddit and digg for more coverage.

For more insightful advice of this nature, see 10 Stupid Mistakes Made by the Newly Self-Employed, first linked from Joel Spolsky's Reddit page and later on the front page of Reddit.

For more insightful advice of this nature, see 10 Stupid Mistakes Made by the Newly Self-Employed, first linked from Joel Spolsky's Reddit page and later on the front page of Reddit.

Check out http://reddit.com./ At least, once it isn't broken. It's a news aggragation site per slashdot/digg, but incorporates some of what you are looking for.

Posted and reposted through out the community for over a week at least. Reddit has this conversation about it, started six days ago: http://reddit.com/info?id=28041

First time I've really seen Slashdot behind the curve.

digg is completely meaningless accept to people "anonymous" as they may be, posting in every story how digg had some story first, or that digg would do it bettar!!11one. heres a little hint: GOOD SITES DONT NEED TO ANONYMOUSLY PLUG THEMSELVES ALL THE TIME.

This is all i see with digg. As i understand it, digg was made by some guy who constantly drops rumors that google is buying digg or whatever. its sickening. Ive been to that site. Its compeletly different from this one and generally i would also perfer reddit in almost every way. I honestly DONT CARE wether other people liked a link or not before i click it, which seems to be the only difference between slashdot and digg. (besides the overwhelming ego trip that members of digg.com seem to be flying on)

the most amusing thing about digg.com is that these former techTV people are spamming EVERYWHERE trying to advertise and talk about how digg is SOOOO much better than everywhere else. do everyone a favor and shutup. Real sites, like slashdot and reddit, dont have to advertise. they are already cool.

"Fuck Paul Graham with a red hot fork". ...or a reddit fork.

Sites like Digg and Reddit, are burying Slashdot. Not to mention the cesspool of a forum each article creates (I am aware of the irony - no flames please), which most of the time aren't even on topic - I do my best to moderate - but 5 moderator points is meager. Here's a graph showing the traffic comparison of Digg and Slashdot. Now we have front page stories made of the kind of he-said she-said BS that I expect from a high school newspaper, and I feel things are only going to get worse.

Maybe it's time Slashdot innovated, and came up with a new format. Perhaps something like reddit or digg, but giving priority to 'classic submitters' (the Slashdot staff).

There's really no point to posting this, true. It's not news. It is, however, making the internet rounds. It's on the front page of reddit and digg. It's probably elsewhere. The internet "news" sites tend to share quite a number of the same silly stories.

http://reddit.com/

E.g. reddit.com code is mostly a rather thin wrapper around database + Web server, so free Common Lisp implementation may not be a best tool for the job. It may be better to use a commercial CL implementation or some other language (such as Python) in such cases, depending on how much money & spare time you have.

So you're advocating CL over Scheme? It seems like CL suffers from the same fragmentation of features/implementations that you describe for Scheme. Just take a look at what the reddit guys had to do http://reddit.com/blog/2005/12/on-lisp.html because of this [rewrite in Python].

Hmmmmm, very timely. Since I started reading reddit, I rarely see anything new on slashdot.