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Wow, I thought this was news for nerds, stuff that matters. I now know why Katz no longer works at Wired, and why Suck constantly comments on him 1 2 3 4 5 (and about 40 other hits on their search). He is (-1 offtopic)!

Corporatism, "Hellmouth", while interesting, belong more an something like brill's or adbusters, but they would not accept them. These magazines have editorial control, they actually proof facts and check grammar before they post. Does /. do this? no. They allow katz to stray so far off focus it is ridiculous. Unless it is about tech issues or geek culture (which you ar not a part of katz) do not post it. What the hell's the point, this place is getting more innacurate, sucking more daily and I can get my news anywhere else.
bye.
moderate as necessary. I no longer care.

Wow, I thought this was news for nerds, stuff that matters. I now know why Katz no longer works at Wired, and why Suck constantly comments on him 1 2 3 4 5 (and about 40 other hits on their search). He is (-1 offtopic)!

Corporatism, "Hellmouth", while interesting, belong more an something like brill's or adbusters, but they would not accept them. These magazines have editorial control, they actually proof facts and check grammar before they post. Does /. do this? no. They allow katz to stray so far off focus it is ridiculous. Unless it is about tech issues or geek culture (which you ar not a part of katz) do not post it. What the hell's the point, this place is getting more innacurate, sucking more daily and I can get my news anywhere else.
bye.
moderate as necessary. I no longer care.

Wow, I thought this was news for nerds, stuff that matters. I now know why Katz no longer works at Wired, and why Suck constantly comments on him 1 2 3 4 5 (and about 40 other hits on their search). He is (-1 offtopic)!

Corporatism, "Hellmouth", while interesting, belong more an something like brill's or adbusters, but they would not accept them. These magazines have editorial control, they actually proof facts and check grammar before they post. Does /. do this? no. They allow katz to stray so far off focus it is ridiculous. Unless it is about tech issues or geek culture (which you ar not a part of katz) do not post it. What the hell's the point, this place is getting more innacurate, sucking more daily and I can get my news anywhere else.
bye.
moderate as necessary. I no longer care.

FuckedCompany.com says everything you need to know about the IPO/.COM insanity.

It's possibly the most clever website I've ever seen... Vote on your favorite shitty "eCommerceIntegrationBizPortal"... When it dies, you get points! Or something.

It is not surprising that tech is moving to a centralized model. Just as renting, leasing, and contracting give the (sometimes valid) illusion of freedom and mobility, so do the new content distribution models. Convenience has become our new favorite form of empowerment.

All these things ARE empowering under the right circumstances. When there are lots of jobs, and the economy is doing well, this means rapid upward-mobility for workers, and the ability to purchase items based on that upward-mobility. As for software/content, when there is competition for the consumer, the consumer benefits from all this new convience. He/she never has to worry about upgrading their software, as apps are pulled down from a central server. Music is accessible from anywhere, and if you wish to BUY physical objects, it's only OneClick (tm) away.

However, there's a dark side to both of these forms of fluidity. When the "new" economy tanks, employment-at-will becomes much less attractive. Things like job security, rent control, social security and welfare start to seem much more sensible. Having all your life's savings tied up in a mutual fund starts to seem a bit riskier.

Similarly, convenience in the world of bits starts to lose its appeal when competition is stifled, and the number of producers shrinks. All of a sudden, you can't view something you bought. Or maybe you become forced to pay a subscription fee for something you don't need updated. Or maybe you give up your privacy because the alternative is prohibitively expensive or inconvenient. Or maybe you give up your fair-use rights to all media because the 5 companies at the top have decided they don't want you to share "content."

In fact, the very word "content" really sums up our rent-not-own culture. Not "art," or "ideas." CONTENT. Nothing designed to have any lasting value - just stuff to fill a hole in a marketing plan until the next fad rolls around.

Are you content with "content"?

Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori (as the romans put it: it is right and proper to die for one's country)

Very romantic, but somewhat counterproductive if taken to the extreme of dying like lemmings, not in pursuit of a goal but to give the enemy a 50:50 chance...

if a general orders an air attack on a hill, rather than guaranteeing more fatalities in a troop assault, is he a coward?

if the division commander does, is he a wuss?

the NCO's of sections at the foot of the hill: if they have a way of achieving objectives while minimising their own casualties, what should they do?

If you're trying to find honour and cowardice in war, honour is in saving lives through one's actions. Cowardice is in the opposite.

Were we to concentrate on the Kosova, I would say that if there was cowardice, it was political. There was a quite understnadable reluctance for NATO to become involved in a costly ground war. And a nice technical one makes good TV.

How effective it actually was is best summarised in this editorial.

Armed forces are there to achieve the goals set by the political branch of a society. Sometimes how these goals are achieved can be legislated by the political branch, for example through UN mandates and so on, but Sinjun our original poster should understand that where it can be avoided, not getting oneself killed in the process is a service one owes to one's family, one's colleagues, and one's society.

Perhaps he/she should also be aware that there are no swelling orchestras on a battlefield to accompany death-or-glory attacks upon the enemy...

BTW, you might also be interested in this artefact from WW1.

Actually quoting an entire document can fall within the fair use doctrines. For example if I had quoted your entire comment. But don't just trust me, trust a harvard law professor:
See the amusing link of Harvard law professor William W. Fisher, III where he copies a suck.com article, presumably for a class. He also mentions a recent case which states:

The Fair Use Doctrine allows certain use of copyrighted material under special circumstances. Four factors weigh for or against fair use: (1) purpose and character of the use, (2) the nature of the copyrighted work, (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole, and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. (Click here to see the complete "fair use" doctrine)
I would argue that it is hard to comment or report upon something without actually viewing what it is that is to be commented on. So even those posters who merely posted the entire document could be said to be furthering disscussion on the document. Especially since Slashdot is a disscussion forum where posts are not to be read in an individual way but rather as an ongoing corespondence between posters.

Quoting selectively from the fair use section of the us code 17 section 107
the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. Plainly Microsoft doesn't have a leg to stand on. But we all knew that didn't we?
-Rich

Delete them? Could he be serious? This only shows how ignorant the artists are to the technology they are up against.

Not at all. All he has to do is have them implement Zapster on their asses.
:-)

I hope this is a troll that I'm falling for.

The web is supposed to be linked together. That's why you put something on the web instead of publishing it in a 'zine or a book or any other form of printed materials. Just because you don't want or need one click access to relevent information doesn't mean that it shouldn't be there. Would you still visit slashdot if it didn't link to the articles it talked about? Would suck be any good without links?

I'm not arguing for linking to random information just because you can, but informative linking is why hypertext has the hyper.
--

1/2 rabid "kill kill kill" posts, and 1/2 "hey, let's at least talk to them first." posts

I think perhaps we need a new category for this sort of thing, something that will help diffuse these otherwise ugly occurrences.

I'd like to humbly propose we accept the suggestion made by suck.com, and use From the Jihad, Jihad dept. for news of GPL violations. They even have a cute little topic icon for us to use. Seriously, taken in such light it would be hard to justify some of the over-the-top responses that news like this seems to get.

Just a suggestion :)

1/2 rabid "kill kill kill" posts, and 1/2 "hey, let's at least talk to them first." posts

I think perhaps we need a new category for this sort of thing, something that will help diffuse these otherwise ugly occurrences.

I'd like to humbly propose we accept the suggestion made by suck.com, and use From the Jihad, Jihad dept. for news of GPL violations. They even have a cute little topic icon for us to use. Seriously, taken in such light it would be hard to justify some of the over-the-top responses that news like this seems to get.

Just a suggestion :)

rOD.
--

Attention all faithful Slashdot viewers! It seems that somewhere in the U.S. today, some dude did something bad that you should all be really mad at. We must make sure that these dudes stop doing bad stuff so we can be happy. It would be a real travesty to see backwater America (read: Everywhere inbetween L.A. and New York) lost to the rednecks, ignorants, simpletons and retards! So write to all your congressmen and tell them to make sure doesn't happen!
Over and out.

This was the subject of a Suck parody a couple of weeks ago. Check out project Crapster which is exactly that. The full article can be found here

This was the subject of a Suck parody a couple of weeks ago. Check out project Crapster which is exactly that. The full article can be found here

This was the subject of a Suck parody a couple of weeks ago. Check out project Crapster which is exactly that. The full article can be found here

If my browser had this capability, I would damn well use it.

I'd set my browser up so that no site would ever appear as a stripe of text, only about six words wide, scrolling down the center of the window for pages and pages.

Suck.com does this. For the love of God, I have no clue why. Surely no one likes it.

Didn't you read suck this morning. We're responsible for the DDoS on Yahoo...

The actual perpetrator is more likely a surly thirteen-year-old kid, tired of knocking over neighbor's mailboxes. Or he's a railing anti-consumerist, hopped up on grade-B agitprop and ready to take down the Man. Or he's a Canadian -- you just know they're involved somehow -- amusing himself by testing what makes Americans panic. The specifics hardly matter.

Or check out the movie Canadian Bacon.

The fact is that people have been making fun of and flaming different cultures/countries for as long as they been on the face of the earth. But, we [Canadians] do have a tendency to look down our noses at "the states". And you know, after a while it might wear a little thin south of the border. This is the same way that one might find it a little presumptious that the championship of baseball is called the World Series.

So lets do a quick comparison:
Canadian National Broadcaster:CBC
Conistently tells you point blank what you will think today (citizen).
American National Broadcaster: NPR
Consistently puts you to sleep.
Canadian Leader:Jean Chretien
Beats up protesters.
American Leader:Bill Clinton
Hits on interns.
Canadian Currency:The Looney
Nuff Said.
American Currency:The Green Back
Worth something like 1 million to the Canadian dollar
...
So, don't take it so seriously, and don't worry about being picked on for being a Canuck, 'eh. Now how about you and all the snowbirds[1] go down to the deep south and remind 'em who torched the Whitehouse during the war of 1812.

--locust

[1] Snowbirds, Canadians who go to the southern states [florida] for the winter. Did you know they have a couple of french language dailys down there just for those lucky SoBs?.. Eh Jaques, votre testicules sont echape de vos speedos!

This is from the suck.com article.:

But the people who truly deserve the blame for the public's hours-long inability to swap "Steam Engine" jackknives on eBay are the short-sighted, tight-fisted monkeys who managed to build a multi-billion dollar industry on an insecure networking system, something so fragile that it can be brought to its knees by anyone willing to bother. The fact that a target as big and fat as Yahoo is fundamentally vulnerable to something as simple as a DoS attack is a clear invitation to go right ahead and shut them down.

Whoa, that's pretty intense there. They also go on to say that since vandalism is inevitable, its up to the people who will be vandalized to protect themselves. I agree to a good extent.

My question is this: How can you properly protect against many DOS attacks? Once so many requests come in from one IP, you block that IP? I can see problems there, such as if many customers through one ISP go through a cachebox. The way I see it, stopping this is just as hard as stopping the slashdot effect. What types of protections are there concering router-level protection?

thanks..

PS - I know that packets coming from our ISP cannot be spoofed due to our routers, so if my box (soul.apk.net) caught wind of the problem, nothing would be allowed out anyway. However, I don't think it's always our job to do the security for outgoing traffic.

- Mike Roberto
-- roberto@apk.net
--- AOL IM: MicroBerto

Right now I am using a computer at my school that passes traffic throgh proxy based filter called Webtrack (neé Smartfilter ). The software runs on the server rather than the client. I believe the blacklist is self-updating. BUT (and I think this is important) If I find a blacklisted site that I want to access (for legitimate reasons), I can fill out a form, and the Dean of Acad. Services will review it. So far I have successfully gotten Suck.com and theonion.com unblocked. I can understand the university's (and the library's) positions. The public does not need to be subsidizing anybody's porn habits. But I think it is important that final control of the blacklist resides on the local level (rather than with some far off company) and that users can have bad blocks removed. .

Right now I am using a computer at my school that passes traffic throgh proxy based filter called Webtrack (neé Smartfilter ). The software runs on the server rather than the client. I believe the blacklist is self-updating. BUT (and I think this is important) If I find a blacklisted site that I want to access (for legitimate reasons), I can fill out a form, and the Dean of Acad. Services will review it. So far I have successfully gotten Suck.com and theonion.com unblocked. I can understand the university's (and the library's) positions. The public does not need to be subsidizing anybody's porn habits. But I think it is important that final control of the blacklist resides on the local level (rather than with some far off company) and that users can have bad blocks removed.

On his subject, I feel he is forgetting a important item. Namely, that with freedom comes responsibility. Responsibility to reread your articles before you post. Responsibility to address readers concerns (he now just posts without reading people's reactions). Etc.

I claim that Jon Katz has been given his responsibility to post articles on SlashDot much too lightly, and that it should be revoked; not based on his race, his non-geekness or whatever but because of his opinions and thoughts, which basically suck and for which he takes no responsibility.

I never said Newsweek or Salon were good, did I? Only "professional" and "middlebrow".

There was a funny Suck article a few months back where they called the Time offices and asked why they should renew their subscription when Newsweek offers identical content at half the price:

http://www.suck.com/daily/99/11/18/

(The answer, BTW, is priceless.)

In retrospect, I do realize that comparing Slashdot to Newsweek was a little extreme. Slashdot does have good interviews and technology articles sometimes. And there is the occasional "Insightful" comment that's actually insightful.

~k.lee

What, then, is the Slashdot community?

It's a handful of funny trolls and a handful of informative coders, sitting atop a vast shitheap of yammering idiots.


Are the various forums and communities that exist all over the Internet totally devoid of intelligentsia?

Well . . . yes. They are. I spent some time subscribed to the Thomas Pynchon listserv this Fall. What a waste of bandwidth. And the net goes downhill from there, the only exceptions being Suck and McSweeney's. Feed has its moments too, I guess. But none of those is a "community" in any sense at all. Hey, wait, there's Neal Stephenson, too; IMHO he's ahead even of the Sucksters in the "internet intellectual" game. He's a thoughtful, intelligent person who groks the damn subject well enough to illuminate it. Jon Katz is endlessly amusing and I think he's a perfect fit for Slashdot, but he's not thoughtful, he's not intelligent, and he sure as hell doesn't grok anything, least of all technology.


I was under the impression that before this 'new economy' came a whole new brand of intelligentsia - the self-teaching, self-enhancing swag of techno-brutes that have been lifting themselves out of the muck of obscurity with the tools of the Internet and creating whole new social spheres, which subsequently resulted in entirely different modes of online economy.

They teach themselves Perl and enhance their t-shirt collections. This has nothing to do with an "intelligentsia". I'm hoping that you're using "economy" in some figurative sense, 'cause if you're not, you've missed the point more thoroughly than I care to contemplate. It's really not about making a quick buck at all. Crack dealers do that. BFD. If you're coming from a hard-core libertarian perspective, that would explain a lot: That viewpoint is fundamentally hostile to intellectualism, and answers all questions with the word "money". Hey, it's a free country, YMMV, it takes all kinds, etc. No problem. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, just a very profoundly different thing.


am I missing something here or is Bruce waxing poetic and I'm just being too literal?

Yer waxin' a bit poetic there yourself, my friend :) You're not being literal, he is. He's talking about a phenomenon that hasn't existed in the US for the last few decades, that's all. It's nothing most Americans have ever encountered, at least not since the lad in my .sig shuffled off.

The one that always sticks in my mind is the Harvard scientists putting electrodes in a cat's brain to decode its vision, The Cat Cam! The other one that I remember is the suck.com parody of slashdot that included a reference to The Cat Cam.

That's cute. The headline - "Linux Possibly Defamed Somewhere" with that icon fits this fairly well.

Isn't this exactly the sort of article that should get the "Jihad! JIHAD!" penguin icon from Suckdot? :-)

Isn't this exactly the sort of article that should get the "Jihad! JIHAD!" penguin icon from Suckdot? :-)

"Mills' theory is derived from first principles and holds over a scale of spacetime of 45 orders of magnitude: it correctly predicts the nature of the universe from the scale of the quarks to that of the cosmos."

Indeed, I believe there is a company in Translobia looking at providing Terabit access via sewage lines. All you need is an ethernet-equipped toilet. See ShitNet for more details.

Amazon.com obviously grew into the commercial giant they are today solely because they engineered their name to grab the most 'net pr0n boys possible without offending the others. ;)

hmm, I knew there was a reason Suck is still around.

I read an article, I think it was on Suck that made the point that MTV killed rock and made hip-hop the music of the nineties.

Interesting stuff.

...is in Suck today.

I for one think they make great pages. I can't stand reading things that go waaay across the page and only take up three lines with 256 characters per line. Perhaps you're reading it at 48pt.

Speaking of column, seen suck.com lately?

I've been reading MSDN articles about 64-bit for years. MS has been taking a very methodical and well planned route to 64-bit for quite some time. The reality however is that MS is still mainly developing their products for the low to mid level consumer (i.e. not the big iron machines although they are working towards that). For this market 64-bit will have absolutely no impact for YEARS. If you think otherwise you need to lay off the crack pipe. When the Merced comes out Windows 2000 will take advantage of 98% of the advantages of 64-bit processing for the high end customer, and it will evolve.

This reminds me of the other post on here regarding how MS had a tough time going from 16-bit to 32-bit. What a pile of crud. It is INCREDIBLY EASY to dump everything you've done and start from scratch (i.e. for MS to boot up the assembly and start a brand new 64-bit OS), but that doesn't serve the consumer. It is a lot harder dealing with real life situations and upgrades over time. That is why Linux is currently the industry darling (sort of like how OS/2 was initially...then the legacy issues began...)...give it time and it'll be just another piece of crud UNIX variant.

You take cues from design every day; you just don't know it. You decide whether things are too cheap or too expensive based on what fonts and colors are used in their packaging. You instinctively use roads and walkways according to how they are designed.

You would complain if the "up volume" button on your remote control was far away from the "down volume" button. If you got into a car, and the gas pedal and brake pedal were reversed, you could die. If someone gave you a business card that was 8 1/2" by 11", you'd throw it away in disgust. If you came across a parking lot with no lines, you probably wouldn't be able to get your car in or out.

So why complain about quality design and usability choices on the web? Sorry, it's because you don't know any better.

Geeks read Wired as if it were the Koran. Everybody else read it because they were afraid not to.

It's fitting that in writing a eulogy for the "Wired era," one of its writers continues the magazine's longest-running trend -- masturbatory love.

Amid all the hype for new media and the emerging digital culture, you could always count on Wired to be more excited about itself than any of the subjects it was slavishly heaping praise on. Wired continues the trend this month by placing on its cover one of its contributors, Po Bronson, at the center and in front of four people he's writing about.

No one is more prominent in the photograph than Bronson, who coincidentally has penned a wonderful article in the issue about those other four shlumps -- people who came to Silicon Valley to make it rich in this IPO-mad climate and failed more often than not.

Wired strongly believed how important it all was because that made the magazine and its writers important, too. Never mind the fact that many of the things it hyped most were least deserving of it -- remember videogame-design-supergroup Rocket Science and zippies? I don't either.

When Conde Nast finally succeeds in removing anything that was ever good about Wired magazine, it will be best remembered more for what its refugees did afterward, such as Suck, The Fray and ClearStation.

(Some refugees, at least.)

As for the "Era" it supposedly ushered in, file that along with push, Netizen, the failed HotWired IPO and other as-if speedbumps on the road from gopherspace to here.

Wired published some nice articles -- and a good news site -- about a parade it more often followed than led. It paid some great writers and Web designers and hawked 1,000 technologically wonderful but completely unnecessary gadgets like the digitally enhanced notepad. (I'm still waiting for teledildonics.)

Let's not get carried away, though. I refuse to get excited about any digital revolution that wasn't fought at the command line.

Wired ignored celebrities. It was addicted to squabbles and arguments. Its cover looked like somebody had thrown up on it. It bristled with ideas and theories, many of them loopy and incomprehensible. Wired was the herald and cheerleader for the digital culture at a time when few non-geeks understood a thing about it, or believed it would amount to much.

Other than that, you're right on though. The passing of Wired's online stuff DOES deserve mention. As long as they keep Suck online, I'll be happy. (don't flame...i know, Suck hasn't been owned by Wired for some time now).

Suck.com

In a wired-offshoot site called suck.com, often cynical, but right on about a lot of things, today's article discusses the media discussing the media discussing the shooting (or something like that) and mentions Jon Katz's "flow of consciousness" articles with a link to slashdot. (and I guess this post is /(a discussion about )+the shooting/)

Bzzzt. White space good. I'm always happy when site designers keep their text columns in the 60-80 character range. It's called readability. Too bad more web jockeys don't bother to get at least a cursory background in typography. It would save me from my next spare-time mini project: writing a local style sheet for Opera to slim down all the overly wide text blankets I read.

NB: Ever read suck with a standards-compliant browser? Classic misuse of the <p> tag, and it kills all the italicized text that spans line breaks.