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Well, actually, I've written the "Feed the World" app. Of course there's an app for that!

(It's an iPhone interface to http://www.thehungersite.com/ -- 'TouchToGive' from the Greater Good network, on the store within a couple weeks no doubt -- or listed on TFA's site. Place your bets which now!)

The twitterverse has spontaneously shifted from being a (supposed) forum for Iranian democracy to a Michael Jackson tribute site. News sites reporting the death of this one man, this self-obsessed child molester with a surgery fetish, have been swamped with traffic whilst sites reporting the deaths of thousands of innocent people never have any problem coping with traffic: http://www.thehungersite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=1

I am an atheist, believing in no life after this one, and the upshot of this is I find all human life to have indefinite value - indefinite but basically equal. If you are mourning right now and your surname isn't "Jackson", then it is a direct affront to those who die through no fault of their own and are implicitly disregarded by the rest of the world during the absurd rituals we employ to mark the death of somebody famous.

I don't believe in human nature or historical inevitability. I believe in free will, and thus I believe people have a choice. Masses of people have made the wrong choice, and it makes me both sad and angry. The reaction to Michael Jackson's death, rather than the death itself, has put a real downer on my day.

Is this crontab entry an example of traffic fraud?

20 5 * * * wget -R http://www.thehungersite.com/ > /dev/null

There is still the fact that they kill them, and it's probably fair to say a lot them enjoy it.

I can tell that you've never been hunting. Only a broken person takes actual pleasure in the death of the animal. Again, I know nobody like that.

However this hinges on whether animals have rights and feelings as humans do.

I'm comfortable saying that the animals I hunt don't have the same capacity for abstract dread that you and I have.

Animals rights? If protecting them from a violent end is just as compelling to you as protecting a fellow human from a violent end

why aren't you out feeding coyotes your table scraps so that they won't kill deer? If you convey rights on those animals, you're conveying responsibility, as well. That's another entire discussion.

there's a big difference between actively killing and 'killing by proxy' as it were

No, there isn't. And if you really mean that, then you have absolutely no business discussing ethics at all. Come on, think it through.

Much more essential for the world's daily operation than these cool kids' PCs, and tied directly to the wallets, by the minute, of most people with any money.

The point is these laptops are meant for people with no money at all.

About whether is essential, I can tell you: What is essential is to give children (who often don't even have anything to eat) the opportunity to technologically advance. You would be surprised to see how many children in the 21th century will die eventually without even knowing what a computer is. And I am not saying necessarly that they will die young.

The "world's daily operation" is a quest for survival. Some don't survive.

Quoting The Hunger Site:
About 24,000 people die every day from hunger or hunger-related causes. This is down from 35,000 ten years ago, and 41,000 twenty years ago. Three-fourths of the deaths are children under the age of five.

4. Therefore you might as well just kill people at random, because you are anyway.

No, since killing more people is even worse.

Which, of course, is an illogical conclusion, therefore proving, by contradiction, that helping others is pointless.

The chain of reasoning up to point 3 is logical, just unpleasant since it disturbs consumeristic hedonism. Point 4 is wrong, as I stated above. But even if it was all illogical, it wouldn't prove that "helping others is pointless", because "don't lift a finger to help anyone" and "give every last penny to the poor" aren't the only alternatives. Proof by contradiction only works if there's no third alternative, which there is - give some, but not all, of your money to the poor, or go to sites like Hungersite which are ad-funded and give some of the money to the poor.

The question is: were you trying to be sarcastic or are you one of those people who keep on claiming that altruism is evil - Rayndists, or whatever they were called ?

There are very nice blocklists for adblock and ways to automatically import them, which means you won't get to see the ads without having to block them yourself.

I suppose that's good if you like others controlling what content you see. I still add things to Adblock manually so that I have control. Is a site's banner showing a link to The Hunger Site an ad for you? Maybe it is, maybe it's not... but then again you might never see things that are to your interest if you've empowered someone else to make your choices for you.

There are people dying by the thousands in this country and abroad

According to the hungersite, 24,000 people die every day of hunger and related causes.

Just sayin'.

I am sure most advertisers will (sooner of later) try is they can lower their rice-per-click.

"Rice per click"? What does The Hunger Site have to do with anything?

Heck, it doesn't even have to cost you anything except a couple of seconds (literally) of your time - and you can stay in front of your computer.

There are a whole bunch of sites that donate advertiser clicks to charity - just click the button once a day and $0.02 or so will go to a charity.
Sure, it's not much, but if enough people do it it can add up pretty damn quick.

The Hunger Site is a good place to start (and has links to a bunch of other similar sites at the top)

Likewise Care2 has a whole collection of donation sites.

I've looked in to both of these places a bit, and it seems they are reputable (in terms of not skimming off huge amounts for "administrative fees", etc).. but at the end of the day it's not like it costs you anything anyways

Apologies for the interruption, we now return you to your irregularly programmed schedule.

Well, you made me stop and think long enough to do the math.

With 12.5 % of a population of 295,000,000 at the poverty level, or 36,875,000. Following the previous poster's chart of $250 billion donated, that means that each person at the poverty level in the United States could receive $6779.66. (No links, you can do your own math.) I'd say giving each impoverished American a newer used Volvo is pretty generous. Of course, if it was donated more wisely instead of more freely, it might actually get where it is needed.

Also, if you'd care to check around on your 'American' spirit you leftist commie pinko America hating Michael Moore wannabe moron, on such sites as The World Food Programme, you might see that America normally gives more to humanitarian causes than the rest of the world combined.

If you wanted to start a "save the world" thread on slashdot, it would have probably been more beneficial and more 'interesting' to suggest we all visit thehungersite.com.

I'd also be more inclined to suggest that the author possibly donate his old PC to the local library after he upgrades or something that seems maybe a little less forceful than "screw your wants and needs, give your hard earned money away".

Btw, to the author, since you seem to be interested in SFF, the Asus S-presso has a nice look to me.

I appreciate the humor in clicking on all of Microsoft's ads to deplete their cash. Heck, I used to leave my phone off the hook when telemarketers called, hoping to run up their phone bills a little bit extra while they tried to decide when to hang up. Realistically, though, it probably doesn't do much good--just a drop in the ocean.

There are better places to invest those clicks, like chartible cash-for-click sites. For example, there is The Hunger Site, where a click on a button causes ad sponsors to donate a cup or more of staple food to the hungry. That ends up making a real difference, IMHO.

Like The Hunger Site?

http://www.thehungersite.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/CT DSites

I'm sure there are other sites like that too.

(go here if you like animals more than people... lol)

and have some dignity

a bowl of rice today is too dam expensive, make fun about it next time you sit in in your RV with a McD.

The Hunger Site : Give Food for Free to Hungry People in the World

www.thehungersite.com

You need to lay off the crack pipe. I am in no way obligated to take the slightest bit of notice of advertisements. Sure, some idiot is paying good money after bad thinking he might get something out of me, but the truth is, he won't. I don't buy products based on advertisements. I actually avoid buying products advertised in an intrusive manner. And I block advertisements when surfing the web. Is that so bad? I, not the advertisers, determine where I spend my money. I figure that when I buy something from a company, I am paying their wages, and I'd rather that my hard-earned was spent on quality control than annoying the daylights out of everyone. If the advertisers would just cotton onto that, we could all get on with our work.

"Eat all you want" you say. Fine. I'm just not going to take the lumps of gristle, thank you.

You really need to get out more if you think advertising is so necesssary. Take a walk in the glorious, billboard-free countryside. Watch the BBC. Luxuriate in the feeling of not having someone trying to sell you something.

By the way, I'll give you a particularly egregious example of intrusive advertising: the hunger site. Actually I don't think it's there anymore. Their premise was "if you don't visit our web site, we won't give food to the starving". Bollox. You can give food to the starving even whether or not I visit your poxy little web site, so don't try to lay a guilt trip on me. And why do you suppose the starving have no food in the first place? Because of money-grasping companies with attitudes like that?

Indeed. And there are dozens of distributed computing projects, so everyone can find one to his likings.

Click here for an overview of active distributed computing projects. Also have a look at the lists at the bottom of the page: these are projects you donate some of your own time to, instead of spare CPU cycles (from Distributed Proofreaders to The Hunger Site).

Further info on distributed computing: Bottomquark has reviewed a number of projects.

Spend the money for a literacy program in the first place

Thanks, mate. It's enlightened, literate Westerners like you who need to come to India and teach us how to read, write, eat, cook, have sex and oh, log in to the net to watch (American) p0rno.

I don't care if I'm marked down as a troll, but I'm fed up with this paternalistic attitude that most posts here seem to have. You think there are no literate Indians out there? Or you think there's so little money that we can't provide for both Simputers and mass adult literacy? Does the US government stop all research until all the 33 million "food-insecure" Americans get a proper nutritious meal every day? Why do I not see any posts comparing that with Windows XP's billion dollar marketing budget?

Oh wait. This is about bloddy Indians, isn't it.

world medical fund

click (free) to give food

mercy corps

second harvest

You mean like this button???

Unfortunately I do not have enough money to donate ca$h, but I still give food to the needing using http://www.thehungersite.com/.

Someone should start a similar service where one can donate bandwidth/hardware/etc by clicking and watching banners, similar to The Hunger Site.

That would be neat, I could add another good cause to my daily donation procedure.

I'd gladly click a daily banner if it'd help the guys down at OpenBSD.

-5!{

I think it's been at least a year since they're bandwidth just dropped, and instead of being able to stream ads in real-time (on my cable modem), it took ten minutes for Quicktime to download them, and more often then not it just failed. I'm surprised they lasted this long.

But, here's some good news: TheHungerSite.com is back up! Not sure when it happened... it was several months ago that it got shut down... but it's back up now.

Go feed somebody.

That's a great idea!!

Someone should build a online database over those who need programs due to cost and/or accessibility. If I could just enter this database and see who needs what, burn & ship it, I would. Quite often, actually.

One could develop a project like TheHungerSite too.

there's always The Hunger Site.

Please, please, PLEASE try to look at the articles objectively before posting. Don't read the article and turn every little vauge remark into some sort of OSS Slander..

Real Headline: "Microsoft employee accidently drops large box on foot of stranger on the street".

Slashdot Headline: "Microsoft now physically harming others to get their way"

Slashdot User: "Well, that stranger could have been a leet linux coder.. Microsoft is stifleing innovation by causing that coder to go to the hospital! He could have been producing CODE at that time! (like a good communist!)"

My point.. this article was more or less void before it was even an issue. Plus, it doesnt directly pertain to all downloads. Read the patent. If you can get all the way through it without feeling drowsy, that is. legaleese.. blech!
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Management is not a tunable parameter.

2. Something that I can talk about in public without seeming like a social outcast. Maybe they should do a sitcom -- "Star Trek: Friends" with the lovely Jennifer Aniston as Yeoman Rachel.

ROFL.. How about:

"Touched by a Borg"
"As the dyson sphere turns"
"The Section 31 Files"
"Bajoran Hills, 90210"
"Wesley in the middle"


Slashdot something useful.
Management is not a tunable parameter.

Personally, I thought first contact was an okay movie, better than generations and much better than insurrection. The only things i wish were different were

1: The borg movie should NOT have introduced the borg queen.. The borg queen gave the borg a "weak spot", both in their infrastructure AND in their plotline.. The borg in "Best of Both Worlds" were MUCH MUCH more menacing. Though its hard to complain about 44dd of 9.

2: No time travel. For once, do something in trek that DOESNT DO TIME TRAVEL! I'd much prefer it if they would stick to one method of time travel if they even do that - slingshot around a sun, its got some danger associated with it.
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Management is not a tunable parameter.

I forgot to mention - it was touched on in one of the books that the first "Q" was Trelane, from The squire of Gothos. So, it may come to pass that we see some Q, but not identified as "Q".

The romulan war hasn't happened yet in this timeline, according to an article i read. im sure it will be a point of conflict later in the series - and it may be a great one, if properly executed.

I'm going to wax theoretical..

I hope the klingons have their nose ridges, for one, and their sense of "Honor". I've always thought of it kind of like this.. Perhaps the klingons from the original series, identified as being from the planet "Khlinzahi", were an offshoot bunch - Klingons, without honor, perhaps some form of half-breed (perhaps with romulans? It might explain why they were allies in most of TOS [They shared the same ship design]).. If i remember correctly, they seemed to have some romulan personality traits. Somewhere between TOS and TMP, the klingons from Qo'nos became dominant again, either through politics (Perhaps all of the old klingons were from another "house") Perhaps thats why we see the "Old" klingons as the "modern rendition". Perhaps it was considered so dishonorable that klingon blood mixed with romulan blood that Worf mentioned "We don't speak of it.".


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Management is not a tunable parameter.

Well, im sure the engines will be less efficient. And keep in mind, the saucer section & Engineering hull didnt "change" between Star Trek: TOS and TMP, just the deflector, nacelles, interior, and bridge module "changed" (while in reality, the entire model was upgraded. you werent supposed to consider it being an entirely new hull).

But your right, the saucer (at least in the views i've seen) are a little too thin-faced for my liking.
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Management is not a tunable parameter.

Personally, i'd love to see them drop the whole episodic series concept for a while and go to miniseries with large budgets. Give us a rest from these "second-hand" treks for a little while.

I would have also loved to see an Excelsior series - The ship seems to have a lot of history with it, and it's right in there in perhaps the most interesting (imho) era of trek. and maybe they could have gotten George Tekei to sign on.

However.. I'd like to know, of the trek fans out there, how would you prefer to see the series live on?

1: A new series.. if so, with what plotline?
2: Forget voyager ever existed?
3: Star trek miniseries?
4: Just movies?
5: Something else?


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Management is not a tunable parameter.

Its been said that they will use phase pistols, a precuror to phasers, and the flip-out communicators. its ironic, my cell phone is approximately the same size as one of those.. AND i've seen one about 1/3rd said size.. hmm.

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Management is not a tunable parameter.

1: Of course Jon didn't watch the discovery channel last night... He would have missed his appearance "So you wanna be an opinonated loudmouth" on PBS.

2: 5 degrees C isnt too bad.. personally, i'm one of those people who would rather be too cold than too warm. Anyway, say the average temp is 38 degrees C (100 F). 33 degrees C = 91 F.

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Management is not a tunable parameter.

Thats why theres a license in the front of most books:

All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retreival system, or transmitted by any means....without written permission from the publisher.

You've never had the rights to do this with most books.

This poses as much danger to that law as, say, a photocopier. Maybe a little more. I don't forsee a bookster in anyone's future. Some of you heathens dare not read dissenting opinions anyway. =)
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Management is not a tunable parameter.

XP recently hit RC1. Microsoft, of course, still has time to change the hashing mechanism before release, if they so choose.

If you don't like the idea of smart tags: Don't upgrade.

If you don't like the idea of WPA: Don't upgrade.

If you don't like the idea of being held accountable for licensed software, stay in your little OSS world and stop telling everyone what we should think.
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Management is not a tunable parameter.

Just FYI -

The files the upgrade process looks for aren't unique to the full version of the product. I don't belive it goes through extreme tests to see which edition of the release it is.

Slashdot something useful.
Management is not a tunable parameter.

40 years ago, we had a goal, or three. We were in a race with the russians, one that defined america's character, to a point. Space was the newest and niftyist thing out - everything in US culture there for a while somewhat focused around space, and what space could do for them.

Now that group of children have grown up, and as adults, have come to accept space travel as the norm. Nothing special about it, why spend money on it? There arent any more hyped-up goals. There really hasn't been. Closest thing in recent times was the hubble, and most people were too short-sighted to see the benefits of such a device. The IIS isnt generating the kinds of emotions from the public NASA should be looking for.

IMHO, what i think would be nice, to rekindle the "spirt" of the space program - go back to the moon. Go to mars. Send a human bean somewhere beyond the van allen belts, once again. The world has no more great adventures.

Maybe when the children and teenagers of the computer age reach their 30's and 40's, some of their knowledge and wonder generated by their youths will inspire them to create new adventures, and NOT be concerned with the financial aspects of every little thing.

I do agree though with those that say nasa is absorbing a lot of tax dollars - but so is the military (arguably). So are government employee overhead. I bet they all put premium unleaded in their lawnmowers, golf carts, and 400HP marital aids. Space is just one of several budget concerns, but it seems to be the one that always gets the most heat from the public, perhaps since its probably one of the newest broad-categorys of expense, and still considered "newfangled" by 50-something year old people who use GPS mapping, cell phones, satellite television, etc, etc, etc.


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Management is not a tunable parameter.

According to spam laws of various states, including California, Colorado, Tennessee, and to some extent Pennsylvania, all spam covered under their jurisdiction must contain the letters "ADV" in the subject line. I've seen quite a few "ADV" tags, and it makes it a lot easier to filter e-mail.


Slashdot something useful.
Management is not a tunable parameter.

I have to wonder.

First, banner ads - bad. OK, maybe. But they're okay by me. Look at the top of the screen, for crying out loud! (Those not using virgin, image enabled browsers need not reply.)

Next, Java Popups. Okay, now you're starting to get on my nerves.

Next, in-browser java windows. These are also acceptable, to me.

Next, Java popups of death (Hereafter referred to as JPOD's.). These bother me to no end, ya know, when i go do l33t stuff like w4ar3z hunting, or pr0n surfing. (Fer god sakes, newsgroups people. Most of them *are* ads, but they're free and you get to see what you're looking for.)

Next, pop-unders. Not nearly as bothersome as some of the others. I really don't mind.

Heres the reason i don't mind:

In a capitalist society, you need money. therefore, these websites - need money. Without money these websites may go away. Some of these websites have insufficent revenue stream to provide services on the web without some form of advertising.

My question:

What form of advertising would you people, as slashdot dro..err users accept? Banner ads irk some of you. Bigger banner ads piss off the rest of you to no end. How would you suggest non-retail companies get revenue off the web? Slavery is illegal (Well, usually.. try explaining that to my boss). Im sure none of you would work for free, but some of you would love to work for, say, slashdot. Somehow, I don't think hemos could get by showing leg on 3rd avenue and bringing Taco's cut back to him both.

I agree that having a chip implanted in your arm that flashes up 10 second ads in your brain every few minutes, or gives you one lucid dream a night about Tammy the Tampax superhero with leaky the wonder-pad might be a little much, but i don't quite think we're there yet.

(On a side note, personally, i would rather see ads targeted towards me than ones not. I'd rather see a ad advertising TLC's special on ramses the great than a condom advertisement about ramses.)

Just my $0.000000002

Slashdot something useful.
Management is not a tunable parameter.

if [ "$SHELL" = "/usr/bin/bash" ]
then
PS1="[\u] \h:\w\\$ "
fi

Something simple, clean, to the point.. i dont need my prompt to tell me the time, date, system load, users logged in, DIJA, uptime, and attention span of the average 2nd grader where i can type commands. And i DONT need it in color :)


Slashdot something useful.
Management is not a tunable parameter.

Personally, i think it takes too much time to build up adequate pressure to modify the behavior of my cat. Then again, they dont make supersoakers with reinforced steel pressure chambers hooked up to air compressors.

STOP CLIMBING ON THE DAMN CURTAINS !@!@()$*

Deceptively cute. Holstien Cat.

Slashdot something useful.
Management is not a tunable parameter.

What did you expect?
Sure, shitty thing happen all the time, but could we change them if we wouldn't ask for oversea SMS? If you want to change something, donate food and donate money, but don't bitch about it in the wrong places. http://www.thehungersite.com

THANK YOU for your donation of 1.0 slice(s) of human meat to a hungry person, paid for by: Hormel.

--

How many residents of third world countries can even eat?

Wouldn't it be theoretically possible for an open source community to apply for patents on things that are generally considered to be public domain, just so an unscrupulous company can't do the same? As I understand it, in order to get in trouble for patent infringement, the patent holder has to get their panties up in bunches and whine to the feds first. Either you could get a site to solicit donations, or just do a kind of hungersite thing, IE: "Thanks, you just kept .8 public domain ideas out of the hands of unscrupulous money grubbing idiots."

As much as I love the prospect of veggie plantations on Mars, I wish we(humans) would get our act together and distribute the food on earth in a manner to feed all people. We already produce enough food to support the earth's population. It is just that much of it is throw out to keep prices up. Also, a lot of US farmland remains unused because of gov't subsidies.

While I am ranting on this I might as well plug thehungersite.com. They donate food when you click through to vendors and you can buy Tshirts from them. They also have other sites like thekidsaidssite.com

Check out the hunger site to donate food for the hungry at no cost to you (except for 3 seconds of your time and a few hundred bytes of bandwidth).

peace out...

http://www.thehungersite.com

You can click on the site to donate food, or spend some money and help a whole lot more