Slashdot Mirror

Zedz.net (under their former name of replay.com) have done sterling work for years - advocating and providing strong crypto, providing assured anonymity systems and services _for free_, and in general raising the awareness of crypto in Europe and providing valuable resources. To be honest, they've been on the block longer than Slashdot.

The domain issue is a silly one - I am strongly opposed to the "register everywhere to protect the organisation" policies advocated by Network Solutions - it obviously helps them sell more domains, but if your organisation is weak enough to need this type of protection, you have other things to worry about. It is arguable whether the current "hierachical" domain model is valid any more - if everyone "has" to be under .com, then surely .com is redundant.

Two things occur to me - the OpenSSH project(s) should be about cutting code, getting it out there early and often, and providing a viable alternative to the closed-source implementations. Squabbling about who has what domain name has nothing to do with open-source.
The Linux v BSD issue is also a non-event as far as I am concerned. Why can't you develop something that is cross-platform? The adoption rate will be far higher? In my opinion, the most desperate need for an open-ssh client is on WinTel - something which will compile and run on Linux, BSD and Wintel stands the most chance of being the prevalent package of use. Simply writing something that your friends will use probably means that your friends will be impressed, but the rest of the world will ignore you.

For Slashdot to caricature this as a "domain squatting" issue seems at least, sloppy journalism, and at worst, rampant bias.

If slashdot wishes to be seen as the voice of the opensource community, then it needs to raise its standards above simple jingoism, and present a balanced view. You certainly don't speak for me on this issue.

who needs 3-D MRI visualization or 3-D Ultrasound for medical diagnoses, or 3-D molecule design software to produce more efficient pharmaceuticals and materials for engineering?

Silly cartoons are of no use in these fields.

Furthermore, you may well be proud of your cartoon caricatures of life, but remember that your Creator created life itself, which you in all your foolish arrogance can never hope to duplicate.

"But I invite you to provide examples of the "PC left's" attempts to outright block speech."

When I was a student, the Black Student League disagreed with a conservative columnist in the student paper. Instead of writing letters to the editor, they decided to steal and *burn* all the papers the day he was to be published. Perhaps, you'd like to explain to me how this is not blocking speech. . .or perhaps you don't believe the BSL couldn't be painted with the PC left brush.

FYI, this commonly happens to conservative publications (think "The Dartmouth Review"). The most fascinating thing is that the perpetrators are rarely (never?) punished by the administration. Hypothetically, how long would it take the university to cry "civil rights violation" if a conservative student took and burned all the copies of a paper "Asian American Times?" BTW, in one of the northeastern states (New York I believe; I'll look it up if you don't believe me), the legislature got annoyed enough with the intransigence of various administrations (WRT non-punishment of an obvious civil rights violation) that they made, in effect, burning of papers to repress a viewpoint a state crime. In other words, the legislature believed (rightfully IMO) universities would continue to do nothing and took matters into its own hands.

FYI: the conservative columnist ended up under investigation for racism charges by the Judicial Inquiry Office. You know what the complainants pointed to as evidence of his racism. It should be obvious by now--his published columns. If you'd like to retort that I've only provided one anecdotal example, I'd be more than happy to provide you 10-15 more.

In any case, you (presumably) should be more concerned than I am about the left's ideological straightjacket. I'm not bound (since I've now graduated) by campus speech codes nor am I a member of the left. You (assuming you're a lefty) are associated with an ideology having a general intolerance for dissension within its *own* ranks (lookup relatively recent articles on Christopher Hitchens).

Finally, you might read about what the following lefties think of free speech (actually liberty in general): Herbert Marcuse, Richard Delgado, Charles Lawrence, Mari Matsuda, Catherine MacKinnon, or Stanley Fish. There belief is quite simple (I'm trying hard not to caricature their view)--content-neutral protection of free speech should *not* exist. In other words, they only believe free speech should exist if someone (presumably them!!!) support its message--furtherance of their cause. Similarly, they have the incredulous belief that free speech is most beneficial to the group currently in power and can be used as a tool to further oppress groups further down the food chain.

You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you. You are a bloody nardless newbie twit protohominid chromosomally aberrant caricature of a coprophagic cloacal parasitic pond scum and I wish you would go away.

You're a putrescence mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.

You are a bleating fool, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done.

I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell?

If you aren't an idiot, you made a world-class effort at simulating one. Try to edit your writing of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly.

You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs.

You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot.

And what meaning do you expect your delusionally self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake?

You are a waste of flesh. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslapper.

On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.

I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I'm sorry. I can't go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me. After this, _you_ may not hear from me again for a while. I don't have enough strength left to deride your ignorant questions and half baked comments about unimportant trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel. Duh.

• Home users - Ultimately, these people are responsible for everything on their machine. Security, permissions, configuring new hardware, etc. It's lovely to think of granny playing aisle riot and emailing her grandkids from redhat, but let's remember too that under this model GRANNY IS ROOT. Think about the ramifications of this. When she fires up her pre-installed OS, who's she going to log in as? What happens when she starts saving her recipies in /etc? I'm not saying that linux can't evolve to meet the needs of these people, but it will definitely take a lot of time, and as others have pointed out, will probably require linux to turn into something muuuuch different than most /.ers know and love.

• Workplace users - this is the target. Linux is a complex multiuser environment that realistically requires a systems administrator, if only occasionally. The workplace provides exactly that. IT can set up the system, assign a login, provide tips and hints on how to do certain tasks, restrict access from places where people shouldn't play, configure new hardware (and when necessary, software), be there to answer questions, etc. For the user the experience is relatively hassle-free and as time passes, they may even begin to learn a bit beyond point-and-click. As more time passes and they've developed a basic competency, then maybe they'll install it on their home machines. They'll be around to show it to their neighbors, evangalize how cool it is, and help them get set up.

Little known fact... they're making fun of a particular recording of "It's a small world after all" done many years ago where, after a few verses in English, they said "And if you went to another country, the kids singing it might sound like this!" and then proceeded to have various renditions of the song in very bad pigeon caricatures of the languages. That is, in French it wasn't really French but French-sounding jibberish, and same for Hebrew and Japanese and the like. Very stereotypical, stupid, and completely contrary to the point of the song (for what that's worth).
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Yup, another excellent reason to be cautious about this stuff. Funny that neither of us is the simplistic caricature the previous poster constructed. There's also the rainbow/brown trout problem in Uk/Ireland with fish-farms, the zebra-muscle, rhododendrons in the UK ( a major pain in the ass for foresters - not literally), cane toads in Australia. All these were rapid introductions of novel species.

If you want to learn something about what atheists actually do believe -- as opposed to your caricature of them to make them look closeminded and you morally superior -- you should read "An Introduction to Atheism" and "Common Arguments". Of course, with your sense of superiority established around thinking of atheists as cowards or those with no good reason to reject your religion, I doubt you'll bother to learn.

Your bringing up the problems with the filtering software back in 1993 have been noted, and will be recorded as historical fact.

It's no longer relevant, of course, because the filtering software has improved. You wouldn't know, because you are fighing a caricature, not your real opponent.

Evolution/Creationism is not a black and white issue.

There is very little that science has disproven about creationism that mainstream religions (meaning those which don't fanatically believe everything literally in the bible) advocate.

Put it this way: So the mechanisms of evolution are true. Science has shown enough strong evidence that we accept that. Suppose that the mechanisms of evolution are accepted as part of God's plan. All you have to give up to accept this is the notion that evolution is totally driven by chance. It's pretty easy to accept that fact, so you can remain a Christian, believe that God created the earth, and marvel in what a good job he did of creating a robust adaptable earth on which the life forms can evolve.

The myth of Evolution versus Creationism is promoted by both extremes, the "God created everything in 7 days, the earth is 6000 years old" people and the "God is dead, the earth is just a spiritless machine that we will eventually figure out completely" people.

What was accomplished in Kansas was a rolling back of the anti-spiritual pure-science crap, which is based out of a hollow philosophy which has a spiritual void.

I can't believe people buy into the caricatures that the extremists spam us with on this issue.

Duke isn't offensive because he's buff. He's "offensive" (I disagree with that label -- I find it hard to believe people can see him as anything but a humorous caricature of action-movie heroes) because of what he says. :)

"There's nothing you can do about it" has an awfully fatalistic sound to it, for something involving the human brain, which we still don't really understand. I'll just say I politely disagree with your views on that and leave it at that.

I find myself unwilling to admit how irritating I find Katz's paternalistic, touchy-feely, approach to group dynamics. I should be able to ignore this half-arsed pop psychology, and laughable desire to extrapolate "Norman Rockwell" caricatures of real-world social institutions into the digital medium.

Congratulation, John - you have developed a new form of writing, transcending mere emotional connection to the reader, and actually inducing within them the desire to take a shower and scrub away the clinging, cloying sentiments that have engulfed them.

"Mutual benefit is the core of community" says Katz. Rubbish! Mutual protection is the core of physical community - the desire to group with those who are similar in opposition to those who are different, based on perceived threat. Mutual benefit is just a coincidence. Hostile environments form wherever there is fear of that which is different - fear manifest in rascism, nationalism, sectarianism (and all the other 'isms as well).

But Email, Usenet, /. are not "enviroments" which posess hostility or benevolence. They are simply collection of bits shuttling back and forth between computers. The experience of an individual user - the sequence of bits to which they are exposed - can only encompass a tiny percentage of the total mass of data in the system. No two people get quite the same experience, and technology is the very reason for that. Filtration, selection and peer-review allow for the creation of a unique information environment for every single person.

The suggested alterations to /. amount to an admission that the author does not know how to filter his experience. Or that he chooses not to, in the desire to share his pain with the rest of the world. Bugger off! I don't want a group hug. I don't care if you hated your school-days. Spare me your incessant whining. In fact, what am I saying? Uncheck the "JonKatz" box, add "JonKatz" to the killfile, "/ignore JonKatz". There, done! My sense of perspective returns, and the rights of all persons involved remain unviolated.

In the cold war era the danger was from "Big Brother" shaping thought and controlling information. Now it seems we've got to deal with "Big Sister" covering our eyes and protecting us from the big, bad world which is really much too dangerous and scary for us. No, don't look! You won't like it! Trust me!


(yes I know there's a bit of stereotyping of female authority figures in that, but work with me here - I'm doing a soundbite.)

Does anyone have any news about Linux?

SlickJim

I have always considered "flaming" to be an out-of-proportion response to a comment, question, or answer posted in a public forum. Mr. Katz includes personal, "private" replies with public ones. I agree that both are "flames" in the traditional sense, but I think that one is very different from another in terms of scope and impact. I wll generally consider only public flames, although private flames can also be generally considered in the same boat.

First, though, I will do what Mr. Katz refused to do-- I will define what I consider to be a flame, versus what I consider to be a response. As I mentioned above, one of the key identifiers of a flame is that it is out-of-proportion response to an original comment. A second identifier of a flame would be a personal tone to the response that implies that the original poster is deficient in some manner. The second aspect is what I would consider the real crux of the flame-- a person with no knowledge of another other than online interaction expresses a judgement on his or her good (or, more likely, bad) points as a human being. These can often be very non-specific-- for instance: "You suck," or "Please Die." However, the personal aspect to the flame is the heart of the matter for Mr. Katz (although he does not state this very well) and I would have to agree.

Mr. Katz is also onto something when he attempts to relate flaming to the creation and lifetimes of electronic or virtual communities (hereafter e-communities). These relatively new groupings are vastly different from their real-world counterparts. There are a number of reasons for this, all relevant to the issue of flaming. One is the breadth of e-communities. These communities grow into enormous groups, with participants having very different levels of participation-- lurkers "participate" in these e-communities, as do frequent posters, moderators, and others. For instance, my /. user number is 98832, which I have always assumed is a number incrementing from 0 for each new user. This would mean that /. has a huge number of users, in excess of 100,000. I don't know of many communities that have that many active participants (and /. doesn't, I know, but the point is that an e-community is huge).

E-communities are also very fluid. People join and leave constantly. People change their level of involvement constantly (lurker to participant to lurker). In a huge community where people are constantly on the move, it is very hard to judge anyone other than a select few known participants.

Finally, e-communities divorce participants from most of the details that we use to evaluate people in our meatspace communities. All we see on /. or other forums are screen names/e-mail addresses and the words that the other person has chosen to share with the community. That sharing with the rest of the e-community is the primary method of interaction in e-communities. Sometimes this sharing is anonymous, or nearly so. Anonymous sharing is good and bad-- an anonymous poster doesn't own his or her own words, and therefore is less likely to consider their online reputation as they post either well-though comments or flames. This stripping of the actual human details from postings to /. or to mailing lists creates what Mr. Katz calls "surreal distance," a phenomenon that many have remarked upon where the flamer is believed not to think of the target as a human being. I disagree with this interpretation of the phenomenon. I believe that the flamer knows, in the abstract, that there is a person on the receiving end of flames. However, the stripping of human details from the words in the post creates a caricature human in the flamer's mind-- based on the words in the post. The person may have just posted something laughably wrong or perhaps unknowingly insulting. This person has no grounding in the flamer's real world and is therefore a prime target for, well, a flame.

Mr. Katz's personal experience is that there are a significant number of flames generated when one posts to a website, and that, when flames are responded to, the original flamer almost always apologizes, replies in a more civil tone, or flees. However, this is to be expected-- the reply by the recipient adds more details to the picture of the person/poster in the flamer's mind. The natural reaction is that the tone of the interaction will become more civil. However, Mr. Katz seems to indicate that this is a surprise when it is not-- remember that reports of starving children didn't lead to action in Somalia-- TV pictures, which humanized the suffering, did so.

Mr. Katz makes a larger point about flaming-- that it discourages free speech. His argument is that public flaming or private flaming leads to fewer people joining in the conversation of the e-community. He states that the civil interactions are often not seen publicly, while the attacks generally are seen publicly. This is true in some forums, but is not necessarily the case. The unmoderated e-mail list is the most typical of this problem. A few flame-wielding posters can easily destroy the entire valuable interaction by overwhelming the civil posts. USENET is also vulnerable. Moderated forums generally can keep this from occurring by, well, moderating the submissions from participants. On mailing lists, this generally works well, but depends greatly on the moderator and is open to the charge of suppression of unpopular viewpoints (as is /.).

Flames, however, in some cases are an important protection vehicle for the community, especially when it is under attack by those who damage the cherished signal/noise ratio for the community. The reaction of flamers is usually toward those that bring the least to the discussion, thus perhaps regulating the forum by discouraging these from participating. These flames are often directed, and rightfully so in my opinion, against kooks who invade forums with wildly inaccurate claims or off-topic postings. The likes of Jim Fleming, Richard Sexton, Joe Baptista, Bob Allisat, Jeff Williams, and other net.kooks are barraged with flames when they enter a forum spewing their junk posts at unsuspecting participants. Although in the case of net.kooks it is impossible to stop them, the flames will keep others from being taken in by the inaccuracies of them and their posts.

Beyond simple kookism, flames do perhaps help to keep the signal/noise ratio high by discouraging ill-informed posts, for example from newbies in forums with highly technical content. Although the flames may seem hostile, they do establish a barrier to entry that will help keep the s/n ratio high.

Other flames are less useful. However, sometimes we need to apply the "good sense" filter to flames that we see. For me, flames from anonymous sources fall into the "ignore completely" category. Flames with content that is low on informational measures and high on the "you suck" measures also find their way to the bit-bucket. The second kind is often anonymous, so these messages are ignored anyway. Finally, there are some flames that are worth responding to. It can be difficult to determine which are in this subset, but there are some. Usually they contain some information that (however vaguely) supports their view. These flames may be from people with real views that don't have the language tools to easily approach them. They may also be from people who think, however wrongly, that "that's my style, so I can't be bothered to change it to make my point." These folks are an unfortunate case-- they are diminishing their own right to free speech by not fully exercising it. Perhaps replying to their messages can help them understand a more useful approach to online communication.

Some topics will never be divorced from their ability to generate flames. The Mac Evangelists werer the first well-known group to flame everyone who said anything negative in any way about Apple or the Mac, and the Linux evangelists are similar in their flame-expressed ardor. In politics, tobacco, guns, and abortion in the U.S. might as well be consigned to flame-only news groups and mailing lists.

Flames are a fact of life in the e-communities that we are building on the net. I, somehow, don't see them as quite a scourge as Mr. Katz. Perhaps if you flame me I will.

Allan

Step 2: Watch for the scene where General Jack Ripper (Sterling Hayden as a caricature of a paranoid right-wing nut) says that flouridation is "monstrously conceived and diabolical" or words to that effect.

Step 3: Please accept my apology for mistyping "diabolical". My brain must have rolled out of my ear for a moment. :(


I'm a troll. It's all a joke. I don't believe a word of anything I posted.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Don Martin create the veeblefetzer name/character? That's the first thing that pops into my mind when I think of Don Martin.

Martin was never one my favorites, though he did have funny stuff. I really liked Spy vs. Spy, Aragones' "Marginal Art", and Mort Drucker's great caricatures in the movie parodies. And of course Al Jaffee's fold-ins ("The Almighty Dollar??" say Bart and Milhouse...)

I knew Mad was going downhill when Dave Berg stopped doing "The Lighter Side of..." with a single theme for the entire segment and instead had a different theme for each piece.

The extremists on the right-wing end of the spectrum like to pretend that we must choose to annihilate either the human race, or all other life on Earth, and the Earth First! viewpoint is only slightly more nuanced than that.

I'm concerned that you're operating with a caricature of Earth First!, which is actually a very diverse, radically decentralized organization, with incredible folks like Judy Bari who organized and worked to protect the ancient redwoods in her home with great success because she pointed out that clear-cutting was destroying the jobs of loggers as well (and so they worked together). Earth First! is not an anti-human movement; rather, it's a diverse movement of people protecting the land from profit-seeking corporations who, legally, must maximize profit rather than considering the long-term consequences of destruction of wilderness and natural systems. Of course, the major media, controlled by companies like Disney, GE, etc, present Earth First! as a collection of nuts, rather than the incredibly brave, loving people that they are, people who have not forgotten the tradition of civil disobedience in opposition to unjust laws.

Oh, incidentally, Judy is dead. She was car-bombed in 1990 during a campaign to save the redwoods in Mendocino County, then framed for her own bombing (the facts are clear on this), and died of liver on March 2, 1997. She will never be forgotten.

The same is true of most other species we consider "cute": "Babe" wouldn't have half its resonance if it were about a wild boar raised by a wolf pack who learns wolflike methods of hunting rams. Up until the century just passed, most children's stories, either "Western", or traditional, rarely cast wild animals as sympathetic characters: they were usually cast, even in vegetarian India and hunter-gatherer tribes, as being caricatures of humanity's gross and ignoble nature. A hundred years ago, educators warned parents that buying their daughters "Roosevelt's cubs" would pervert their maternal instinct away from their future roles as wives and mothers. (Sorry, guys, you're about 90,000 years too late...) Today, teddy bears share their toy chests with such perverse beasts as mandrills, owl-like Furbies, seals, and even (gasp!) penguins with Linuxmall buttons on them, as concerns as diverse as The Nature Conservancy and Mc Donald's find that the best way to popularize the plight of endangered species is to make plush animals in their image. Deer are now a problem in many suburban neighborhoods -- no one wants to shoot Bambi's mother. (Mice, which eat everything, crap everywhere, and spread fleas and microbes, are a sore point with many people, thanks to the same concern -- we now project our disgust on rats.) Bears are dangerous, destructive, beasts, who also invade human settlements -- who wants to draw a bead on Pooh?

True, there aren't many ways of cutesifying snail darters. Most of the animals who occupy an important position in the food chain aren't all that glamorous (with the exception of rodents). But who wants to read zoological data to their kids at bedtime, or snuggle up to an ecocensus report at the end of the day?

In keeping with the communitarian spirit of Linux, perhaps there ought to be a permanent Penguin fund set up with the Audubon Society, with contributions from Linux-minded people and groups. Such proposal has been made before, and would do much to popularize both causes in a way that would be truly commensal.

"'Cause penguins are so sensitive, to my needs." --Lyle Lovett.

I'm still waiting for the hammer to fall after the 'Leader' episode. The caricature of the leader is a PERFECT L. Ron.

Maybe the scientologists are just too thick-skulled to get it.

"Hey Nicole, look at the stupid leader!"

In case you ignored earlier comments and those in my post, the fact is that these scanners are part of an overhall based on complaints of abuses. The customs officers have already been put on notice that they are not immune to the backlash of public opinion. In that context, the implication that customs officers would conduct a violating seach of a 12 to 14 year old, isn't "skepticism", its outright paranoia, and was responded to as such.

(perhaps because no such argument has ever survived collision with historical fact),

You will now be presenting some historical facts about the number of preteens frisked or strip searched with no warning by customs. Come on, just give me one that didn't result in an imediate firing.

but by caricature of the skeptic's position (as in the opening paragraphs of KahunaBurger's post).

The poster talked about being observed naked against your will as a form of rape or a violation. He suggested that no teenaged girl would willingly undergo such an ordeal even if she had to walk where she was going. My representation was not a caricature, but merely the only sort of scenerio I could envision that would actually make this true given the facts that we have learned about the device and the situations under which it will be used. While I admitted that the dialogue of my scenerio was an extreme, the type of exchange was realistic (since this is an option to be presented) and any such explaination that included a example of the type of image seen and the fact that it would be observed by one person and unrecorded would negate the previous posters worries of psyche damaging violation.

If you honestly think that the officers wouldn't convey that information (and that they wouldn't give a little bit of gentle handling to a kid) then again, you are exibiting paranoia, not any sort of skepticism.

Here we see one of the standard problems with faith in government power -- its workings are always presented on the assumption that it will be wielded in a just and responsible manner. Skepticism toward this assumption is never addressed by sound argument (perhaps because no such argument has ever survived collision with historical fact), but by caricature of the skeptic's position (as in the opening paragraphs of KahunaBurger's post).
/.