Handling the Loads

On Tuesday, something terrible happened. The effects rippled through the world. And Slashdot was hit with more traffic than ever before as people grabbed at any open line of communication. When many news sites collapsed under the load, we managed to keep stumbling along. Countless people have asked me questions about how Slashdot handled the gigantic load spike. I'm going to try to answer a few of these questions now. Keep reading if you're interested.

I woke up and it seemed like a normal day. Around 8:30 I got to the office and made a pot of coffee. I hopped on IRC, started rummaging through the submissions bin, and of course, began reading my mail. Within minutes someone told me on IRC what had happened just moments after the impact of the first plane. Just a minute or 2 later, submissions started streaming into the bin. And at 9:12 a.m. Eastern Time, I made the decision to cancel Slashdot's normal daily coverage of "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters," and instead focus on something more important then anything we had ever covered.

I couldn't get to CNN, and MSBNC loaded only enough to show me my first picture of the tragedy. I posted whatever facts we had: these were coming from random links over the net, and from Howard Stern who syndicates live from NY, even to my town. Over the next hour I updated the story as events happened. I updated when the towers collapsed. And the number of comments exploded as readers expressed their outrage, sadness, and confusion following the tragedy.

Not surprisingly, the load on Slashdot began to swell dramatically. Normally at 9:30 a.m., Slashdot is serving 18-20 pages a second. By 10 we were up to 30 and spiking to 40. This is when we started having problems.

At this point Jamie and Pudge were online and we started trying to sort out what we could do. The database crashed and Jamie went into action bringing it back up. I called Krow: he's on Western time, but he knows the DB best, and I had to wake him up. But worst of all, I had to tell him what had happened in New York. It was one of the strangest things I've ever done: it still hadn't settled in. I had seen a few grainy photos but I don't have a TV in my office and hadn't yet seen any of the footage. After I hung up the phone I almost broke down. It was the first time, but not the last.

The DB problem was a known bug and the decision was made to switch to the backup box. This machine was a replicated mirror of Slashdot, but running a newer version of MySQL. We hadn't switched the live box simply because it meant taking the site down for a few minutes. Well we were down anyway, and the box was a complete replica of the live DB, so we quickly moved.

At this point the DB stopped being a bottleneck, and we started to notice new rate limits on the performance of the 6 web servers themselves. Recently we fixed a glitch with Apache::SizeLimit: Functionally, it kills httpd processes that use more then a certain amount of memory, but the size limit was to low and processes were dying after serving just a few requests. This was complicated by the fact that the first story quickly swelled to more than a thousand comments ... we've tuned our caching to Slashdot's normal traffic: 5000-6000 comments a day, with stories having 200-500 comments. And this was definitely not the normal story. Our cache simply wasn't ready to handle this.

Our httpd processes cache a lot of data: this reduces hits to the database and just generally makes everything better. We turned down the number of httpd processes (From 60 on each machine, to 40) and increased the RAM that each process could use up (From 30 to 40 and later 45 megs) We also turned off reverse hostname lookups which we use for geotargetting ads: The time required to do the rdns is fine under normal load, but under huge loads we need that extra second to keep up with the primary job: spitting out pages as fast as possible.

This was around noon or so. I was keeping a close eye on the DB and we noticed a few queries that were taking a little too long. Jamie went in and switched our search from our own internal search, to hitting Google: Search is a somewhat expensive call on our end right now, and this was necessary just to make sure that we could keep up. We were serving 40-50 pages/second ... twice our usual peak loads of around "Just" 25 pages a second. I drove the 10 minutes to get home so I could watch CNN and keep up better with what was happening.

We trimmed a few minor functions out temporarily just to reduce the number of updates going to frequently read tables. But it was just not enough: The database was now beginning to be overworked and page views were slowing down. The homepage was full of discussions that were 3-4x the average size. The solution was to drop a few boxes from generating dynamic pages to serving static ones.

Let me explain: most people (around 60-70%) view the same content. They read the homepage and the 15 or so stories on the homepage. And they never mess with thresholds and filters and logins. In fact, when we have technical problems, we serve static pages. They don't require any database load, and the apache processes use very little memory. So for the next few hours, we ran with 4 of our boxes serving dynamic pages, and 2 serving static. This meant that 60-70% of people would never notice, and the others would only be affected when they tried to save something ... and then they would only notice if they hit a static box, which would happen only one in 3 times. It's not the ideal solution, but at this point we were serving 60-70 pages a second: 3x our usual traffic, and twice what we designed the system for. We got a lot of good data and found a lot of bottlenecks, so next time something that causes our traffic to triple, we'll be much more prepared.

At the end of the day we had served nearly 3 million pages -- almost twice our previous record of 1.6M, and far more then our daily average of 1.4M. During the peak hours, average page serving time slowed by just 2 seconds per page ... and over 8000 comments were posted in about 12 hours, and 15,000 in 48 hours.

On Wed. we started to put additional web servers into the pool, but that ended up not being necessary. We stayed dynamic and had no real problems on all 6 boxes all day. We peaked at around 35-40 pages/second. We served about 2 million pages. Thursday traffic loads were high, but relatively normal.

Summary So here is what we learned from the experience.

• We have great readers. I had only one single flame emailed to me in 24 hours, and countless notes of thanks and appreciation. We were all frazzled over here and your words of encouragement meant so much. You'll never know.
• Slashteam kicks butt. Jamie, Pudge, Krow, Yazz, Cliff, Michael, Jamie, Timothy, CowboyNeal, you guys all rocked. From collecting links to monitoring servers, to fixing bits of code in real time. It was good seeing the team function together so well ... I can't begin to describe the strangess of seeing 2 seperate discussions in our channel: one about keeping servers working, and another about bombs, terrorists, and war. But through it all these guys each did their part.
• Slash is getting really excellent. With tweaks that we learned from this, I think that our setup will soon be able to handle a quarter million pages an hour. In other words, it should handle 3x Slashdot's usual load, without any additional hardware. And with a more monstrous database, who knows how far it could scale.
• Watch out for Apache::SizeLimit if you are doing Caching.
• Writing and reading to the same innodb MySQL tables can be done since it does row-level locking. But as load increases, it can start being less then desirable.
• A layer of proxy is desirable so we could send static requests to a box tuned for static pages. For a long time now we've known that this was important, but its a tricky task. But it is super necessary for us to increase the size of caches in order to ease DB load and speed up page generation time ... but along with that we need to make sure that pages that don't use those caches don't hog precious apache forks that have them. Currently only images are served seperately, but anonymous homepages, xml, rdf, and many other pages could easily be handled by a stripped down process.

What happened on Tuesday was a terrible tragedy. I'm not a very emotional person but I still keep getting choked up when I see some new heart breaking photo, or a new camera angle, learn some new bit of heart breaking information, or read about something wonderful that somebody has done. This whole thing has shook me like nothing I can remember. But I'm proud of everyone involved with Slashdot for working together to keep a line of communication open for a lot of people during a crisis. I'm not kidding myself by thinking that what we did is as important as participating in the rescue effort, but I think our contribution was still important. And thanks to the countless readers who have written me over the last few days to thank us for providing them with what, for many, was their only source of news during this whole thing. And thanks to the whole team who made it happen. I'm proud of all of you.

Comments

A request

[rosewood]

I know that a lot of shackers and other people on the net aren't christian or don't even beleive in God. Thats fine. Tomorrow (now today) you will hear a lot of people praying, asking you to pray, etc. This isn't the snickers comercial where they bring in a representative of every religion before the big game. It will feel weird. I feel that a week ago that if NBC was showing a service that someone would whine. Today, I ask ya just let it slide. When they say pray, interperate that as 'do what makes you feel comfortable. Please just be respectful like your mama would want you to be. But for today, just kinda chalk it up to all those people burned, crushed, flateneted, chocked, suffocated, etc. to death.

Thank you

Re:A request

[Nicolas MONNET]

"Come back to this when you lose someone dear to you"

If it happened, odds are it would be due to some religious fanatics.

Re:A request

[zpengo]

On behalf of all the people saying that we should pray, I'd just like to say that Yeah, that's what we meant.

I almost wonder if this is a subconscious attempt from people to rally support for white Christian America. It's easy for those who fit comfortably into the majority to see this as an Us vs. Them battle.

Those people, however, are hideous hypocrites; They are "Christian" in the same way that those flying the suicide planes were "Muslim"; i.e., only in that they happen to use that term to describe themselves. Any white Christian who starts seeing those of other ethnicities or religions as "Them" is not only a poor excuse for a Christian, but ought to be considered as bad as the terrorists themselves.

Re:A request

[Happy Monkey]

They are "Christian" in the same way that those flying the suicide planes were "Muslim"; i.e., only in that they happen to use that term to describe themselves.

Here are some such people.

Re:A request

[hansk]

Speaking of religious fanatics, we have our own here in the US:

God Gave U.S. 'What We Deserve,' Falwell Says

Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blaming the events on liberals, feminists, etc. etc. etc.

Sick.

Re:A request

[Rimbo]

Any white Christian who starts seeing those of other ethnicities or religions as "Them" is not only a poor excuse for a Christian, but ought to be considered as bad as the terrorists themselves.

Speaking as a white Christian...bingo. You just hit the nail on the head. In fact, it's that very attitude that allowed these terrorists to believe that what they were doing was somehow God's Will.

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are all filled with references to people who, though they weren't Official Churchgoing Believers, represented God's will better than the average Believer. And an ongoing theme in both the Talmud and the Bible (I can't speak for the Koran, although I've been told Mohammed's teachings are very tolerant of other religions) is the failure of church leaders.

It's ironic. All of these religions which these misguided fundamentalist-whacko "leaders" (such as Osama Bin Laden and Jerry Falwell) supposedly follow condemn the most the Bin Ladens and Falwells of the world, who use God's Name to mislead people, or cause people to commit terrible atrocities.

Re:A request

[ChickenMaster]

"I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.' "

A statement like this is meant to strike fear in the hearts of those people he "fingered" or people who may associate with them. Isn't that the core definition of Terrorism...

Shame on you Falwell, for you are no better than those responsible for the thousands of deaths on Tuesday.

Re:A request

[SirKron]

It's ironic. All of these religions which these misguided fundamentalist-whacko "leaders" (such as Osama Bin Laden and Jerry Falwell) supposedly follow condemn the most the Bin Ladens and Falwells of the world, who use God's Name to mislead people, or cause people to commit terrible atrocities.

My beliefs are right with yours, however, we must know that bin Laden is not a Fundamentalist in the normal definition. He is not trying to run a society closer to the exact interpretation of the Muslim religion. Contraversially, he is funding the training of a new militant generation of soldiers who dispise any religion other than their grossly missinterpreted version.

Osama bin Laden must be dealt with my the US military, however, we can not become a martyr! As was said in the movie Gladiator, 'they must kill your name first.' Once his name has been reduced in popularity through his personal suffering, then we can truely erase his influence and destiny of USA disasters.

From a Navy reservist waiting to assist...
----------
# rm -rf /bin/laden

Re:A request

[Redline]

WTF?? How exactly is a request to pray a denial of most of america's ethnicity?

I agree. Where I am from (Houston, Texas) the population is 70 percent hispanic. Almost ALL of the latin population here is Christian. And they *certainly* pray.

Re:A request

[Fesh]

God, that's twisted. But what can you expect out of someone who calls a giant purple baby-alien-thing with a TV in its tummy and no sexual characteristics whatsoever a blatant homosexual?

Re:A request

[AugstWest]

Talk about irony.... I've been driving around with a huge flag on a pole duct taped to the rollbar on the back of my Jeep. It's amazing to see the reactions you get from people, from waves to peace signs to fists of solidarity, etc.

But I pulled up in front of a store, and an older gentleman was standing next to his car. He saw the flag and started to say something to me....

Then he looked me up and down. I have long hair, and a beard, and I wear sandals. HE scowled and got in his car with a Jesus fish on it.

Now, if he actually had a statue of Jesus on his dashboard, he would've then been staring at a long-haired man in sandals, which would have been the ultimate irony.

For some reason, it's mainly the Christians that have a problem with my appearance. I just don't get it.

Re:A request

[AugstWest]

There's nothing quite as pagan as dressing up in robes, then chanting as a group to turn a wafer into the body of a man who died around 2000 years ago.

Here, drink some of his blood.

If God has reason to be angry with this country, it's because we continue to support people like Falwell and Robertson.

Re:A request

[AugstWest]

That wasn't a troll, it was a valid response to Jerry Falwell referring to me as a pagan.

Pot, meet Kettle, Kettle, Pot.

Re:A request

[edibleplastic]

Speaking of fanatics, here is a response from Noam Chomsky, an "intellectual" who should have stopped at linguistics. Is "The terrorist attacks were major atrocities." the most he can say about the attack? I think he needs to leave academia and live in the real world for awhile.

Noam Chomsky on the Attacks Against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon

Sick.

Re:A request

[orangesquid]

AugstWest: Over the past few days, I've learned that no matter how important or interesting of a point you are making, people are bound to interpret it wrong, judge quickly, etc. Everybody's just anxious, nervous, and scared, for the most part; I think it's best not to worry about petty things like comment moderations :)

Re:A request

[daeley]

I've seen suggestions online that as soon as they find those responsible for the attack planning and support, that they should be held until the WTC is rebuilt.... then dropped from the observation deck.

I would like to suggest adding Falwell and Robertson to the drop.

Re:A request

[artdodge]

If it's any consolation, I'm a devout Christian who is also a bearded, long-haired, sandal-wearing flag-waver. So it's far from a universal hang-up. :-)

Re:A request

[Theodrake]

This reminds why I told my wife I don't like organized religion. I told her "I doubt you'll ever hear a statement like: an extremist atheist bin-laden follower today killed himself and 100's of others". She just didn't get it. She doesn't see how the hatred of the so called christians like the Pat Robertson's of the world can take us down the same path as the Taliban and the Bin Laden's.

Remember it was the senior President Bush that said there is no place in America for atheists. I say, yes lets get the people behind the attacks, but don't destroy the very foundation of our democracy in the process.

Re:A request

[AugstWest]

I can relate. My family is hardcore Irish-Catholic, and noone I've ever known has had as many problems with long hair as they have.

About 25 years ago, at thanksgiving, my oldest cousin was sitting at the "adults" table, when my grandmother and aunt just started harping and harping and harping on him about his long hair.

So he tied it back, grabbed a steak knife off the table, and cut it off. He got up, walked into the kitchen and dropped it into the garbage, sat back down and kept eating. Lots of silence, it was quite a moment.

Then, about 4 years ago, the same aunt was sitting down to the Easter dinner table, took a good look at me with my hair hanging down, and said "It's like having our Lord sitting right here at the table with us." So I asked her, "Then WHY do you have such a problem with the hair?"

She didn't have an answer then, and she hasn't bothered me about it since.

Re:A request

[Pig Hogger]

Noam Chomsky on the Attacks Against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon

That article reads like a bad comic with every other word printed in bold with all those links all over the place...

Re:A request

[ArticulateArne]

Yikes. I would agree with most of your post, but I have to say that comparing Jerry Falwell with Osama bin Laden is incredibly irresponsible. I too am a white Christian, and while I don't agree with everything Jerry Falwell says and does, he has never done anything even CLOSE to what Osama bin Laden has done, even if bin Laden wasn't responsible for the destruction of the WTC. To my knowledge, Falwell isn't even responsible for one person having died, ever. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've never heard anything to that effect. (And no, calling homosexuality a sin != creating a climate of hate != responsibility for someone getting killed). Falwell participates within the realm of ideas, and while you may vehemently disagree with his ideas, he stays within that realm. Osama bin Laden moves out of the realm of the ideas and murders those with whom he disagrees. There's absolutely no comparison.

Well, there goes all my karma.

Re:A request

[Pig Hogger]

I've seen suggestions online that as soon as they find those responsible for the attack planning and support, that they should be held until the WTC is rebuilt.... then dropped from the observation deck.

But not without having them bring up a few hundred cubic yards of concrete.

By foot

And using the stairs only.

Re:A request

[ArticulateArne]

To my knowledge, only Catholics believe in the doctrine of Transsubstantiation, which states that during the Eucharist, the bread and wine become the physical body and blood of Jesus. I think Lutherans believe in some kind of consubstantiation, which is like a pseudo-transsubstatiation, IIRC. Most Evangelicals, which includes Falwell and Robertson, believe that the Eucharist (usually called Communion in Evanagelical circles) involves only a Symbolic representation of the Crucifixion. And yes, the Crucifixion was an extremely violent, inhumane, unthinkably cruel act. But what Christians celebrate isn't the morbid violence of the act, but the love that stood behind the act, and the restoration of relationship that it brought about. &lt/pulpit&gt

Re:A request

[Rimbo]

He is not trying to run a society closer to the exact interpretation of the Muslim religion. Contraversially, he is funding the training of a new militant generation of soldiers who dispise any religion other than their grossly missinterpreted version.

And this is different from extreme fundamentalist Christians in this country how, exactly?

Re:A request

[Rimbo]

When they conquered most of Spain they basically left the churches alone and let people follow their chosen religious beliefs.

That's becaue Islam is, at its core, a very tolerant religion. So I've been informed.

Bin Laden and his kind don't represent Islam any more than I (a middle-class white nerd from the suburbs) represent African-American gang members.

Re:A request

[Rimbo]

It never ceases to amaze me how those who claim to be most christian, often display the most contrary (to the actual teachings of christ) behaviour. This is what drove me away.

You are not alone. Far from it, in fact.

You may be interested in this book: Why Christianity Must Change Or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile. It's been written just for people like you, my family, and most of my friends who are believers. I haven't read it yet, but my parents have, and I'm planning on doing so.

I remember a few years ago, when my mother was an Elder at her local Presbyterian church. This lasted until the more fundamentalist elements of the church organized and essentially staged a takeover of the church leadership, to ensure that their vision of the Bible was the one the church espoused, causing my family and others to be all but ostracized. And my hometown church wasn't alone; across the country, fundamentalist Christians have done the same thing in moderate and liberal churches, since no views are compatible with their mindsets but their own.

Anyhow... I tend to go on about this since it's pretty dear to my heart, but it's true. Modern Christian fundamentalists really are the new Pharisees.

Re:A request

[flewp]

Well said.
As someone who doesn't pray in the religious sense, (as I guess you could say I'm agnostic, though I never liked the term because it implies I'm not sure, when rather, I figure if there is something there, fine, if there isn't, fine - I'll keep living the way I always have) I've always taken "pray" to mean "think and hope for the best," rather than asking a diety for the best. Because praying varies among different religions, I feel that hoping for the best and thinking positive is similiar to praying for us non-religous types.

Re:A request

[AugstWest]

But what Christians celebrate isn't the morbid violence of the act, but the love that stood behind the act, and the restoration of relationship that it brought about.

It's still a weekly celebration (their word, not mine) of a human sacrifice.

Re:A request

[Oztun]

"I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'"

We didn't help it happen. It's true the people who did it are against Americans, freedom, and liberty. I will also die defending it if thats what it comes down to.

Re:A request

[Oztun]

By we I mean someone who is for the "American Way". I am not gay, I do support the ACLU. All the things you mentioned involve having liberty and exercising our freedom as Americans. Anyone who doesn't think so needs to go to a country other than America.

Re:A request

[roman_mir]

People in America think they can not understand the reasons that lead to the killings of innocent people in the events in New York, Washington and Pittsburgh. I am not American, (currently Canadian and lost one of my work colleagues in this incident) but I think that you would understand these reasons better if they were laid out to you in your own terms - in the manner you as a nation think (I am going to refer to the notion of American Dream - not the original one but the corrupted version).

An American radio listener said: "If only we could sit down and talk to these people (terrorists) rationally, then maybe we could reach agreement... etc."

Such wishfull thinking is flawed in its very root - what seems to be rational to an American does not mean anything to someone from Taliban for example.)

When asked how can someone kill innocent people for any cause what ever it might me - an Arab fundamentalist (who was at war 'Jihad' with USA for many years now, Americans are so late declaring a war, a war was declared to them almost fifteen years ago) would answer simply - if it was a good person, he/she would go to heaven, a bad person goes to hell. You can see that the answer is not even symantically correct and does not give an answer deemed reasonable by American or European standard for example.

The person who thinks in this manner was thinking in this manner his/her entire life, these people are taught that the best thing for them would be to kill as many bad people (non-believers, American terrorists who impose themselves on holly arab lands) as possible.

American version of this would be of-course - the US Dollar. This is the God created by Americans for Americans to believe in, this is the only moving power and holly bottom line that is worth doing anything for. By saying this, I do not mean every single American, only the preveiling general tendency. It would be impossible to convince a large number of people in America that their entire lives are not only given them to generate as much income as possible, there is a strong system of believe here embedded into young people's minds from the very beginning and it is a very powerfull incentive.

This is why I believe Americans should be able to understand what is really going on (as they get introduced to the real world, step at a time). In the global world, America is no longer separated from the entire world by its geographycal location, it is part of the world now. It is so difficult to see some one else's point of view, hopefully the metaphore provided above will help you out.

Re:A request

[DunbarTheInept]

He only apologised because it was necessary from a PR standpoint to do so. I have no confidence whatsoever in the sincerity of that apology.

Re:A request

[Micah]

re: "Why Christianity must Change or Die"

I haven't read it, but I've heard about it and its author. The guy basically throws out most or all of the divine nature of the Bible, says all prophesy has already been fulfilled (giving us no hope for the future), and tells us we can live however the heck we want.

That is well outside of orthodox Christianity. I'd really recommend avoiding it.

Re:A request

[Micah]

> This is what drove me away.

Why would something so trivial with some "followers" drive you away?

Has your belief changed? Do you still believe Christ is who He said He is? If so why would you want to abandon Him?

People of all sorts do stupid things. I used to look down on people with tattoos, guys with long hair and earrings and all that (I was raised in a pretty sheltered Christian environment) but lately I've seen that there's no point at all in that, and it's just downright dumb. Jesus certainly would not have done that.

But my faith remains strong. I continue to see how God works and continue to be amazed. Why dump Him?

Re:A request

[osgeek]

Oh my uh... God!

That article is absolutely infuriating!

Those sons of bitches are a huge reason for why we've spent so much money supporting the Israelies with their talk of "We must help the Jews retake the Holy Land because it is prophesied".

This terrorist attack was a direct result of our activities in the Middle East, activities that have been greatly motivated by religious concerns -- and they blame it on the secularization of America? These assholes were practically at the controls of the airplane, and they blame it on people like me who don't believe in their gods and wish for nothing more than for us to butt out of the Middle East's quagmire of endless religious battles?

Oh, man. I've been trying to avoid casting aspersions on Christians during this event, but speech like that forces me to respond. Blaming "us" is so intellectually dishonest and tragically unfair.

Re:A request

[weave]

You know, I sat and read that washington post article about falwell and robertson and couldn't believe it. It must have been taken out of context, not reported accurately, etc, etc...

So I went to the source.

It's pretty much true, that's how he really feels. :-(

Re:A request

[AugstWest]

Well, he certainly wouldn't (and Jesus didn't) request that we have a ceremony, get dressed up in robes, chant in Latin and eat his body and drink his blood.

Re:A request

[AugstWest]

Moderation Totals: Flamebait=1, Troll=1, Insightful=1, Interesting=1, Total=4.

Man, we can't agree on much lately, can we? :]

Re:A request

[DunbarTheInept]

Normally people calling themselves athiest aren't so sompassionate towards other religions.

As an atheist who hangs out with a lot of other atheists, let me say that this is a strongly filtered perception. It is filtered by the fact that most of the time, an atheist isn't going to really say or do anything that would clue you in to the fact that he's an atheist. It's not a religion - it's not a belief. It's a lack thereof. So it rarely comes up in conversation unless in response to something someone has said that is highly insulting to an atheist (for example the 700 club quote in this thread). So you never realize someone is an atheist until they've been riled up by such a statement and are (justifiably) argumentative about it. This gives the false impression that atheists aren't compassionate toward other religions. It's not that we aren't compassionate. It's just that we don't tend to say much about it when we are in that mood. Consider today's prayers across the country, and the "moment of silence" that is typically used for personal prayers. Think about whichever crowd you were in at the time, or were watching on TV. During that moment of silence, if everyone in the crowd was an atheist - would you have even noticed the difference? Not really. It was a moment to respect the dead, not to start arguments.

I suspect you are committing the statistical error of counting the hits and ignoring the misses. My compassion for a religious person dissapears when he tells me I am incapable of being a good person because I'm an atheist. But until then, I view him as a person just like any other.

Over the years I've noticed that religions are so varied and complex that they don't *really* dictate what morals people believe in, like they claim to do. Rather, what happens is the other way around: that the morals a person holds dear determines which religion, and which subsect of that religion he migrates toward, and this is mostly subconsious. You can twist a lot of religious teachings into whatever you like by selectively picking which parts to take literally vs which parts to take as "metaphor". Thus when someone tells me he's a Christian, or he's a Muslim, or he's a Jew - I try as hard as I can to *not* draw any predjudiced conclusions about what that really means. I wait to observe his actions and his words first. Or at least I *try* to. I will admit to not always succeeding at being gracious and polite as I should be - especially if I've just recently heard some hateful rhetoric such as that of today's 700 club (which has been floating around the net all day).

As a child I was brought up as a Ba'hii (Not sure where the apostrophe is supposed to go there - it's one of those Arabic words that just isn't easy to spell in English letters.) They are a modern offshoot from Islam, in much the same way that Christianity started as an offshoot of Judaism. (But the Ba'hii offshoot is much more recent - from the 1800's). Anyway, one of the core tenets of the Ba'hii faith is that one must spend time studying the other religions of the world as well as one's own, because they all came from the same god, and all have useful things to say. Given enough time studying, one is supposed to realize that the relgions all teach the same message, and that the similarities between them must be the "pure" message from God and the differences are supposed to be the minor points that don't matter as much, perhaps are even manglings of the original message a bit. It's a nice idea, and Ba'hiis tend to be *extremely* tolerant of other religions because of this. It is common to mix up different words from different relgions in a 'reading'. (The televised event today from the National Cathedral, with the list of different leaders from different faiths speaking is very reminiscent of what I remember from Ba'hii services I used to go to.) Anyway, where am I going with this? I don't really know.

I guess just one day I started toying idly with the idea that maybe the reason the religions overlap so much in what they say isn't because they all come from the same god, but because they don't come from a god at all, and instead come from people's own hearts and desires. Perhaps their similarities merely reflect the similarities cultures have because we're all human, and at some basic level we all think similarly when confronted with the taks of explaining the unknown. Over the years that little seed of doubt grew until finally I started thinking it the more plausable explanation to the one offered by the Bah'ii faith. When I turned 15 (the age at which one can officially make the declaration to become a Bahii for real), that doubt was so strong that I didn't feel comfortable doing it, and so I didn't. And I never have since, and what was once a small doubt is now what I see as the most plausable explanation. I called myself "agnostic" and decried atheists until much later when I realized they don't actually *have* a belief like I thought they did. I was applying the atheist label to a strawman that doesn't often exist. That's when I started calling myself one too.

But enough rambling. On this day, we shouldn't argue. Comfort yourself with the things you hold dear. I often think of religion as just a crutch, a teddy bear to make people feel better. But today is the last day to be taking people's teddy bears away. They need them now more than ever.

Re:A request

[AugstWest]

I agree, and it amazes me that these men were allowed to take the podium with our nation and others watching.

How many people spoke? Couldn't we have found some Christians to preach that might actually be worth listening to?

Re:A request

[AugstWest]

Judge Not, Lest Ye Be Judged indeed.

Re:A request

[ckd]

Falwell has apparently backpedaled and apologized for some of his comments.

Yeah, he said that only the hijackers and terrorists were responsible for the attack, but that maybe all that bad stuff we've been doing "caused God to lift the veil of protection". (See the CNN article about this "apology").

Meanwhile, Mark Bingham, one of the passengers on the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania (and apparently among those who fought to prevent its use as another aerial bomb) was an openly gay man.

If I had to pick one of the two to spend a day with, knowing only what I currently know about them both, I'd pick Mark any day. I've never met either Mark Bingham or Jerry Falwell, but Mark has a bunch of friends and family who miss him enough to put up a tribute web page and attend memorials; Jerry apparently has a bunch of people who give him money upon request.

Re:A request

[Paul Komarek]

Given what you've stated, why would you recommend avoiding it? You've made it sound interesting, and say nothing about it being a bad book. Do you have more to say about this book?

-Paul Komarek

Re:A request

[Cato]

That's because of how everything2.com works. See www.zmag.org for the original article, and some other good analysis of the events of this week.

Re:A request

[Rimbo]

I think he's simply missed the point: That "orthodox" Christianity is no longer truly orthodox. That there's a lot of baggage with "orthodox" Christianity that, when held up to scrutiny and logical thought, doesn't really fit, or is far less important than it's been made out to be.

Take the Virgin Birth. If this were proven to be false, it wouldn't affect my belief that Jesus is the Christ one iota. I certainly believe that God is capable of making a virgin become pregnant. I also believe that God can make a bastard son the Christ. The former version sounds more impressive, but who really needs it?

Re:A request

[Micah]

Ah, OK. :-)

Well there certainly are fairly good churches out there. I go to one. :-)

Re:A request

[Micah]

Well, IIRC, the book even denies the Resurrection.

If you read 1 Corinthians 15, you'll see that the Resurrection is foundational. If it was proven false, everything we believe and do is in vain.

Re:A request

[Rimbo]

Maybe (I don't see where Paul explains why the Resurrection is necessary for us to be saved, but I just skimmed the text -- he probably does, only elsewhere)...

But that's no excuse to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because he's wrong on one point doesn't make the entirety of it false. More importantly, what's really missing is that people nowadays have accepted interpretations of scripture without taking the effort to think about them. We've been doing this for too long. And if nothing else, this is a book about thought, and about questioning whether what we believe is really necessary, the only way to read Scripture, or even in agreement with scripture.

If the only thing the Bishop does is cause us to question our beliefs and come back and say that he's wrong on every point after thinking and analyzing his points thoroughly and honestly (which is harder than it sounds), the book still has enormous value.

Re:A request

[Micah]

Ok, points taken. Thinking about Scripture for yourself is definitely a good thing.

Regarding 1 Cor 15 and the Resurrection:

v3,4: Resurrection (along with death and burial) is of first importance

v6-8: People who the resurrected Christ appeared to. The people Paul was writing to could have checked this out personally.

v14: "And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith."

and keep reading from there. Clearly, if anyone rejects the Resurrection, they might as well live like a pagan. And given that that's exactly what Bishop Spong does, it's hard to give him much, if any, credibility as a "Christian".

But sure, read the book. Can I also encourage you to read through the whole Bible if you haven't already done so? That will give you a foundation with which to judge Mr. Spong's writings. I'm doing that for the first time this year and it's really bolstering my confidence in it. Also perhaps get into some Max Lucado books -- he really writes great stuff.

In Christ (hard to believe I'm saying that on Slashdot!),
Micah

I've been impressed overall

[WinDoze]

Not only with Slashdot (did that REALLY say 2-thousand-something comments on the front page?!?!), but with CNN, ABCNews, the NY Times, and just about every other major news source I can think of. Tuesday afternoon was tough. By Tuesday evening all these sites were responding as though I was the only connected user. The server power that must have been thrown at some of these sites is staggering.

Re:I've been impressed overall

[spagma]

So, does that mean that slashdot survived the ultimate slashdot effect?

Kudos to Slashdot and the Slashteam

[Whyte Wolf]

I've spent the last few days in something of a daze, waiting for the real ramifications of Tuesdays horror to sink in. Many of my collegues up here in Canada are not sure what to make of the events, and possible response, but we're sure it will be bad.

That said, in all my experiences on the net over the last couple of days, it was Slashdot I came back to for my info feed/dump. Who had their site up and running in the face of the massive demand? Slashdot.

CNN was there during the Gulf War. Slashdot was there for the start of this new era, and I'm sure will be there in the face of whatever is to come. You guys are just another indication of the strength the US can have in the face of adversisty.

Thank you.

Re:Kudos to Slashdot and the Slashteam

[Nos.]

As another Canadian I know exactly what you mean. This still feels like a bad dream or something that didn't really happen, though obviously it did.

As a side note, today, Canada has declared a National Day of Mourning, the last one being over 30 years ago. Jean Chretien gave a speech to the American Ambassador to Canada, Paul Celucci. I can't find a link to his entire speech. However, CBC is quoting some of his words here. Probably the most touching part of Paul's speech was when he said (referring to Canada), "You truly are our closest friend".

Canada also observed 3 minutes of silence for those lost in Tuesday's attack. I'd just like to issue a quick note of thanks for all of us that observed those three minutes.

The Community Was Served.

[pgrote]

Slashdot did provide a very valuable service the day of the attack.

Take into consideration that during the day at some point all major media web sites died.

Many people found Slashdot as their only source of updated information that was staying up.

This sentiment was echoed in pieces by Salon and Wired writers that mentioned Slashdot specifically as a site that had what people were looking for.

You should be proud and satisfied that what you have created did provide a needed service. Thanks, again.

Re:The Community Was Served.

[zpengo]

A huge part of this wasn't the news itself (which was sparse), but the fact that the Slashdot user discussions were where information was being placed in real time. As soon as something happened, someone posted it here. I just set my comments to "Newest First" and refreshed every few minutes, and I knew what was going on the entire time.

Re:The Community Was Served.

[styopa]

I noticed that San Jose Mercury News linked the Jon Katz article on their site for more information.

Slashdot has been quoted by people before though. I have stopped being shocked when I see articles quoting comments from Slashdot. Whether one wants to accept it or not, Slashdot has gained a lot of respect over the past year and a half, and this is just one more feather in their cap.

Kudos to the Slashteam.

did you forward this ...

[Rev.LoveJoy]

to CNN or MSNBC?

:-)

This is a great writeup. It covers all the things you could have done on your end to make /. fly. I guess the only prerequisite that most of us have trouble with are the Phat Pipes you folks can afford.

Cheers,
- RLJ

Very interesting stuff.

[XretsiM]

As a part owner of an internet developer/consultant, one of the more interesting things about Tuesday's tragedy was watching how various sites responded to the incredible load demands placed on them. Even watching the situation from the outside, it was clear that clear heads at Slashdot were doing something remarkable behind the scenes. Thanks for the insite into what was actually going on. I'll be passing this on to our staff, many of who came to rely on Slashdot's coverage on Tuesday morning.

thank you very much.

[garcia]

It is not common for people to recieve thanks for the great service that they do for a community but I am going to go ahead and give you thanks for feeding us the information that I was not able to get through TV and the basically non-exitant other news-sites.

I am normally a critic of /. and the editors but this entire week I felt that they did an extraordinary job of keeping us informed. For once I am going to applaud you.

I got links to personal experiences on the tragedies, movies, images not seen on TV, and personal reflection on the entire ordeal by people that seem to have valid ideas (not the crap that you hear from most people about the attacks)

Thank you again /. for making sure we got the news we needed.

Re:thank you very much.

[Amokscience]

I would also like to add my voice to this posting. When the times were worst, Slashdot and its team managed to do the right thing and do it well.

other sites...

[swright]

Part of my job is monitoring various web sites. They aren't news related and the average traffic levels fell by around 60% - rising to 50% under average after a day or so. They're only just returning to normal.

Thought y'all might be interested (the sites are generally eCommerce sites in Europe)

Re:other sites...

[Roblimo]

This seems to have been a Net-wide pattern; news sites got hard-hit, but all other kinds saw big traffic drop-offs.

There will be a story up at Online Journalism Review before long talking about that -- and about how Slashdot served as an ad hoc news portal in a way no traditional news site could.

- Robin

Staying focused was tough

[sphealey]

I also congratulate you guys for staying focused on getting your jobs done under very difficult circumstances. I would estimate my own productivity was 25% of normal that day, along with most people I was working with.

sPh

My only source

[nate1138]

At least for me, slashdot was the ONLY news source I had, no TV or radio in my office, and all of the usual suspects collapsed under the load. Thanks also to google for providing Cached pages from CNN, Wash Post, MSNBC, Etc. a little later in the day. And thanks to all the /.'ers that had personal reports from the area, that really helped to put a perspective on things.

Great Job, Cmdr Taco

[Petrus]

I was getting all my early informatins and initial links to working news sites from slashdot. Everybody in the office was surprised, where do I get working connection, since they could not get through any major news channels.

Regards,

Petrus

Hopefully a dumb question...

[cperciva]

But I'm still stuck on it. Why is /. running a per-Apache-process cache? Doesn't that mean that it would be keeping 50 copies of the same data in memory on each machine? I would have thought that having a single-process cache at the front-end (something like SQUID) which holds on to a much larger cache and then passes requests to non-caching Apache processes would have done much better.

CNN and MSNBC take note.

[AltGrendel]

This is how the REAL pros do it.

Slashteam, we salute you.

Re:CNN and MSNBC take note.

[Alomex]

They have an order of magnitude more visitors than /.

Try three orders of magnitude. Estimates of hits at CNN were over 50,000 per second.

Re:CNN and MSNBC take note.

[hattig]

Yeah, to compare slashdot to cnn is silly.

To compare 10 servers to 100 servers with content mirroring at all major ISPs is silly.

To compare dynamic real-time content to static content is silly.

Give up slashdot, you haven't got a hope! You only got 80 pages a second, CNN was dead at 50000. Now if Slashdot was scaled... (60*10 = 600(server advantage), 10*600(static advantage) = 6000, 100*6000=600000(mirroring advantage))
Now the only IDEA that I can give the Slashdot team is to have a network of Slashdot servers - sort of like newsgroups and IRC and whatnot. People connect to their local slashdot (uk.slashdot.org, etc), and their posts get sent over to the central slashdot for redistribution to the other nodes in the new global mirrored slashdot.

Re:CNN and MSNBC take note.

[zulux]

I would wager that Slashdot serves larger pages - AND Slashdot lets you post and view the comments in almost real time. MSNBC serves static pages, to be views by "consumers". Sashdot provides a forum for citizens, and hence, is more complicated.

Re:CNN and MSNBC take note.

[spectecjr]

Hmmm.. on an average day, Slashdot dishes out 20 pages per second.

MSNBC, on an average day, dishes out > 200 pages per second - and possibly higher.

Slashdot's traffic doubled. Well, whoopdidoo. It was still less than 1/5th that of MSNBC on a normal day. Congratulations to Slashdot for handling more load than they normally do. But is it really surprising when they don't even have to handle 1/5th the traffic?

Simon

Re:CNN and MSNBC take note.

[WNight]

Does CNN have any 800K pages? That is generates specifically for each viewer?

CNN had a huge problem, but it's a less interesting problem. If you simply throw enough computers at it, or a big enough one, you can fill any pipe with mostly static pages.

They are both challenges, but they're very different challenges.

Re:CNN and MSNBC take note.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't know what you're talking about, keep quiet.

During the 2000 elections, CNN set the world record for News (if not all sites) pages served, with peaks of 1.2 MILLION per minute. (~400 times slashdot's peak this week)

Tuesday, CNN eclipsed that, even with the downtime, at 164,200,000 page views. Wednesday was still larger yet, at more than 300,000,000 page views.

I heartily congratulate slashdot and thier team in doing an exceptional job. However, they are no where _near_ CNN's or MSNBC's league.

Re:CNN and MSNBC take note.

[WNight]

CNN has huge videos, but they're static. The same video served to you is served to me and hundreds of others.

CNN also doesn't have to maintain instantaneous consistency... As in, if I load the page from one server and see a certain page, and you at exactly the same instant see the older version, we're both still seeing consistent pages.

All they have to do is maintain transactional consistency.

If I loaded the new page, and got the old pictures, that'd be an issue, but as long as once the page changes to the new one, all the content is changed.

Just like a database, all or nothing, with rollbacks if it fails. And that's what they use, a remote database server.

Way to go Slashdot

[Sentry21]

When I first heard about this, after being woken up to it, I checked CNN's homepage - which was down. I checked several other news sites, and the only working one was CTV News. Then I thought to check slashdot - lo and behold, it was the only other site I could get to. I posted in one of the discussions that ctvnews.ca was working, and by the time I had hit 'submit', it wasn't.

Kudos to the Slashdot team for having the only satisfactorally working news service on the net. Combined with the people that made their own websites and posted their own pictures, and the people that mirrored news reports they COULD get to, it was an amazing triumph of technology. It's just too bad that this great moment in Slashdot history had to come at such a horrid moment in world history.

--Dan

A request for future

[tzanger]

Could you please cache the stories in NESTED mode instead of threaded? When the site is being hammered I would imagine it is far better to have guys grab a single large, cached page than a smaller cached page and then have to try to have teh system survive thosands of clicks for more information.

I really do thank you guys for this site and your decision to carry the news. I have a new respect for the amount of bandwidth you throw around with impunity on a daily basis.

one final request: get search back online so I can get to the old stories! Google doesn't have them (even now!)

Re:A request for future

[tshak]

Could you please cache the stories in NESTED mode

I second this statement.

Re:A request for future

[tzanger]

Well, that may be better for the system, but a nested page with ~2000 comments would take quite a while to load on a 56k modem, I'm guessing.

All the more reason to load it once; Take a couple minutes, it's loaded and you can take hours to read it all instead of pull up an partial page and not be able to read comments you're interested in.

(BTW: I am one of those 56k readers. :-)

Good job.

[standards]

Good job keeping things up.

I found Slashdot, BBC, and Boston.com to be the most available sites. ABCNews and CNN and Foxnews, etc, were all pretty much overwhelmed and unusable.

Fairly quickly, CNN went to a simple static page with 1 image, and that helped them out quite a bit.

Funny where the news comes from

[ellem]

I got a lot of my news from Howard Stern and from you guys when I locked my office door and shut the windows.

/. and Howard Stern had the best coverage -- I think that is just weird.

But true.

Re:Funny where the news comes from

[zpengo]

I have to agree. When the big news sources (CNN et al.) got smashed with traffic, an amazing amount of responsibility came down to the amateur journalists of the world, who did a wonderful job of reporting what they saw on their own websites.

Hats off to the webloggers and other people whose generally mundane daily updates suddenly became a source for an information-starved world.

Re:Funny where the news comes from

[Skyshadow]

This reminds me of John Stewart's reaction on hearing that many people consider the Daily Show thier prime news source:

"Don't do that!"

Re:Funny where the news comes from

[sulli]

I turned on Stern for about 20 min. on Wednesday and thought he was a total asshole. Fair enough that he wants to strike back, but his comments about Arabs et al. were completely uncalled for. Too bad, as he could have been a voice for reason (and may have been on the day of the attack).

Thank you

[sulli]

I posted this elsewhere, but I'll say it again: this has been Slashdot's finest hour. The eyewitness accounts and individual stories have been so meaningful, and the readers have been great - almost zero harassment and trolling (a bit more in the last day) and very honest, heartfelt comments. Also great were the mirrors in the first day that many participants posted, to handle the excess load for the news sites; the many Red Cross donation links; the updates and corrections of the news; and more.

Slashdot itself did very, very well in my experience. I experienced far fewer delays and errors than on other sites. Thanks to everyone who worked so hard to keep it running. You've made a huge difference for thousands of people.

Well Said

[Wyatt Earp]

That was really well said.

During my life I've always taken "bow your head and pray" as "shut up and look serious".

And I thought Slashdot did a very good job this week. I woulda emailed Taco that, but I figured there was enough traffic over the Internet.

Really good job guys. Between Slashdot and Drudge I felt as informed as a guy can be.

Big thanks to Slash Team

[Alien54]

You guys have down a marvelous job.

Although, being on dial up, getting into any site was a struggle [smile]

as a secondary note, I have seen a few random reports of senseless actions. I trust that the Slash Crowd is wise and intelligent and educated enough to avoid this.

One should never accept the invitation to hate, especially in conditions like these. it becomes a slippery slope.

We all have exceptions that we make, for our favorite pet peeves and political causes. Even so, This is a big step to making things right. This does not mean that we do not take action to save ourselves and our friends. People may appoint us as their enemies, their opponents, even as their executioners. We should hate them for their lack of good sense, or for their own hatred.

- - -
Radio Free Nation
an alternate news site using Slash Code
"If You have a Story, We have a Soap Box"
- - -

Re:Big thanks to Slash Team

[Alien54]

We should hate them for their lack of good sense, or for their own hatred.

DUH!

should read:

We should NOT hate them for their lack of good sense, or for their own hatred.

CNN's problems

[crow]

CNN's main problem was that they had canceled their contract with Akamai a month or two ago to save money. Akamai works by having servers at or near most major ISPs so that the majority of traffic is served locally.

While the load was heavy, it wasn't anything Akamai wasn't prepared to handle.

Unfortunately, Akamai's co-founder was one of the passengers flying out of Boston on a hijacked flight Tuesday. I have friends who work at Akamai for whom he was not just a boss, but a friend.

Re:CNN's problems

[Alomex]

CNN's main problem was that they had canceled their contract with Akamai a month or two ago to save money.

Are you sure about this?

As we speak the CNN page serves Akamaized content. Try it: open cnn.com in your browser, then say view source, and bingo: Akamai pics all over.

Remember that even if the contract was cancelled usually it takes time for the disconnect to take place.

Re:CNN's problems

[crow]

Yes, I am sure about this.

CNN re-akamaized Tuesday; that's why they were up again Tuesday afternoon. I read the internal email sent out to Akamai employees asking certain groups to stay on to help with the process if they could.

Re:CNN's problems

[Alomex]

Thanks for the info. That clears the point.

If CNN had kept Akamai, it certainly would have helped sustained the load. However do you thnk it would have been enough, or was the traffic so taxing that nothing could have possibly done the job?

Re:CNN's problems

[crow]

My source at Akamai described the load as "heavy, but nothing we couldn't handle."

Some Good News

[bahtama]

A reminder and fyi, the current totals at Amazon.com [amazon.com] are:

Total Collected: $4,528,374.96
# of Payments: 124408

I think that is truly amazing and by the time you go there it will be even more. I donated my $100, did you? Even 10 dollars could help buy all these guys [time.com] a cup of coffee, what's a couple bucks compared to the cause.

Re:Some Good News

[wurp]

And this is but a fraction of the money donated to the Red Cross. I donated directly ($250 - so there!) as I'm sure many others did. Note that this link is to their Yahoo store; you can get there even when www.redcross.org is overloaded.

I'll repeat that more plainly...

EVEN IF THE RED CROSS WEB SITE IS DOWN, YOU CAN DONATE MONEY HERE (http://store.yahoo.com/redcross-wtc/).

Thanks

[arete]

I didn't email you a thank you - partially 'cause I figured your box would be fairly full. But thank you. I do appreciate you keeping me informed better than anyone else was doing on the web.

Wonderful.

Primary source

[Anixamander]

It was interesting to see Slashdot move from a secondary source to a primary source. Throughout the day, I would check it for updates that folks had posted, and to all those individuals who constantly posted working links. I spoke with my wife several times throughout the day, and as she was only familiar with the standard sources (CNN, MSNBC, etc) I was able to give her URL's that worked. While those kept changing throughout the day, Slashdot remained available and useful.

Kudos to the slashdot team for their tireless efforts here...while work came to a halt everywhere, you guys managed to troubleshoot problems that would have given ordinary people fits on an average day. I am amazed at how quickly you adapted and improved, even though you no doubt would have preferred just to watch TV in saddened silence like the rest of us.

MODERATION: I don't think this is flamebait

[MarkusQ]

To whoever modded this as flamebait:

While I don't claim to support all his points, the post is on topic he has a right to ask these sorts of questions.

-- MarkusQ

No need to reverselookup hostnames for geotarget

[bodin]

There's no need to reverselookup just to be able to geotarget ads. Build up a reverse-database, and you are all set.

See http://www.ipindex.net/ for an updated index.

You just need country or so location anyway, right? I mean there are a lot of .com-domains in europe now, and that's when reverse-lookups does WRONG instead of looking at where the actual nets are allocated.

Good job to /., but forgive CNN and MSNBC

[Jayde Stargunner]

First off kudos to Slashteam. You kept a valuable news source up and running while most people were too stunned to do anything other than watch, horrified, at the TV. Good work. You provided a valuable service to many people in this crisis.

Also, to those who are getting down on CNN and MSNBC... From what I've heard, those sites are already tuned--and regularly do--serve around 45 pages per second...even with loads of media.

Crashing them was likely no small feat, either. Likely every person with internet typed in the very familiar cnn.com or msnbc.com just on instinct. It probably didn't help MSNBC or CNN that the MSN and AOL/Netscape portals, respectivly, link to them directly.

I was actually pretty impressed with how they handled the load...it was a little slower than /.'s recovery, but it was rather impressive given the HUGE load they were experiencing. First, they stripped down the page content to low-bandwidth versions, then phased in their site. I'm not sure about CNN, but MSNBC added static mirrors to their pool, and got Akamai servers to serve all their media. By around noon, both sites were running their normal full-content versions, even though they were probably still getting hammered to high-heaven.

Personally, I give many thanks to all the techs for all the news sites who worked like mad to ensure that people were able to understand what was happening. It must not have been easy to work in conditions like that: especially considering the stress that was put on them.

-Jayde

Re:Good job to /., but forgive CNN and MSNBC

[jesser]

Did Slashdot switch to light mode globally at any point on Tuesday? That would have saved some bandwidth, and also would have allowed most graphical browsers to display the large threads more quickly. (IE/NS4/Opera won't display any text of a heavy-mode Slashdot page until the entire page is recieved. IE/NS4/Opera in light mode and Mozilla in heavy mode display the story as soon as it finishes coming in but won't display the comments until the entire page loads. Mozilla in light mode displays comments as they come in.)

I use light mode normally, so I wouldn't have noticed if Slashdot made everyone use light mode temporarily. Early on Tuesday I was getting static, non-light versions of the homepage no matter what slashdot URL I clicked on, but that problem went away quickly.

Other sites went to stripped down initial pages

[tcyun]

One of the things that I noticed were that many of the major sites reduced the content size on their home pages to the smallest size possible. I know that the NYT, MS-NBC and other sites removed most all of their images and went to fairly small home pages with a few lines of text.

I think it is a credit to Slashcode, the Slash coders and great up-front planning that Slashdot was able to handle the load as well as it did. I know that Slashdot was one of the few sites where I could get a collection of information when many of the other sites were down.

Kudos to all of you.

thanks /.

[Dr. Awktagon]

Usually when something big happens, I instantly turn to the net and usually slashdot for the news links and especially for the reader comments, which usually give the best picture of whatever happened. I'm glad you guys were able to stay up.

I must admit though, the TV coverage, especially MSNBC, was excellent during the first day. Usually I avoid it.

After a while though, the ratings grabbing kicked in and they added the graphics and the special music and the "let's get them to cry on camera" bits and I remembered why I don't usually watch TV news, and have come back to the 'net and slashdot.

Anyway thanks Slashdot!

Re:thanks /.

[BinxBolling]

You know, that's what _always_ gets me going about TV news outlets. They start out with really excellent coverage as the events unfold, but eventually the action dies down and they shift into "Emmy mode".

Somebody moderate this up. There was something vaguely sickening about the development of the "America Under Attack" logos. We don't need flashy graphics to bring home to us just what a major event this was.

Slash team kicks butt...

[srvivn21]

* Slashteam kicks butt. Jamie, Pudge, Krow, Yazz, Cliff, Michael, Jamie, Timothy, CowboyNeal, you guys all rocked.

And Jamie rocks twice as much. ;o)

My thanks to the lot of you. The Slashteam, and the /. community.

DNS & mod_gzip

[drwho]

Everyone knows that you should turn off hostname lookups. I was wondering why slashdot would often be some damned slow first thing in the morning -- well there's why. Because the PTR record had expired overnight. Another way we suffer for advertisers. Oh well.

static content can be stored and transmitted in gzip format, to be uncompressed by the browser (all modern browsers support this). HTML coompressed very well -- pages here end up averaging 28% of their original size! This not only saves slashdot bandwidth, but saves it for the end user as well. Some people out there are still using crufty old 28.8 modems, and need every bit of help they can get. Anyhow, do a search for apache mod_gzip and you'll find all you need to know.

Re:DNS & mod_gzip

[syates21]

Uh, gzip is all fine and good, except in this case it probably would have made the problem *worse*.

I don't recall them saying that bandwidth was ever a bottleneck. Causing the slash servers to do even *more* processing (ie compression) doesn't seem like it would have helped much.

Re:DNS & mod_gzip

[Genom]

Exactly right. mod_gzip is a bandwidth-saver not a load-saver. The problem (from what I've gathered) was the server load, with the larger page sizes chewing up more memory, along with a LOT more requests multiplying that number.

Of course, I *could* be wrong =)

Re:DNS & mod_gzip

[tshak]

You don't "suffer" from advertisers. Rather, you benefit from the services they finance like "/.".

Once again ...

[Buck2]

I received my first indication that something was happening in the world through Slashdot.

I heard that the other sites weren't available, but I wouldn't have known this empirically since there were already so many quality posts, comments, and bits of information to sort through in the Slashdot forum.

Any long term Usenet denizen will know what I speak of when I refer to that rare, but addictive, experience that seems to be only able to be brought by these forums of such spatially disconnected people, joined only by common interests. When, seemingly all of a sudden, someone writes something so perfect, so funny, so outrageous, so wonderful, so _different_, or so incredibly informative, that you all of a sudden feel justified for all of the times that you wondered why you just kept coming back.

Slashdot did it again.

BTW, perhaps the moderators have been out in force, or maybe I'm just getting old and much more interested in politics than before, but it seems that the quality of posts in the last few days have been much more thoughtful and interesting.

Kudos to both the Slashteam and community.

Stuff that Mattters

[gorilla]

I made the decision to cancel Slashdot's normal daily coverage of "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters,"

If this wasn't "Stuff that Matters" I don't know what is.

Of Slash and Slashdot

[ajs]

When I started reading this, I was disgusted. I was expecting something like CNN's ads after the Gulf war, touting the fact that they were the ones who got most of the scoops.

By the time I got half-way through the actuall content (not the front-page piece) I was in awe of how much went on. Usually when a massive load spike happens on my watch, I try to get everyone's fingers out of the pie so that we have a good chance of the machines just doing their jobs. The fact that these folks were able to make emergency changes in real-time to compensate for the load is just astounding.

CNN should be rolling out a Slash-based discussion forum for top stories. Heck, so should Whitehouse.gov!

Thanks guys, and good luck with your ongoing coverage of News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters!

Re:Of Slash and Slashdot

[Datafage]

The main problem with that is both simple and depressing. Do you really think CNN and the White House would be so tolerant of posters posting opposing information or even illegal comments? It's a nice thought, but it would lack the almost completely uninhibited free speech of /..

Irony

[Skyshadow]

Knock on wood, Taco -- saying stuff like this tends to be the perfect cue for your servers to crash an burn.

Other phrases to avoid:
- Boy, sendmail's been rock solid for months!
- Hey, I've been driving years without a ticket/accident.
- Wow, this economy is unstoppable!
- I don't have to run in to apply that patch; what are the odds some script-kiddie will notice before Monday?
- Alright! I'm worth millions in stock options!
- Pft, what are the odds she'll get pregnant from just that one time?

I was at work

[einTier]

Since I was at work, I had no TV, and no radio -- everyone thought someone else would bring one (it's a small office). So, I was stuck with no way to get any real data. Slashdot was the only site working, and the only place to get my news updates. At the time, I didn't think much of it -- this WAS slashdot, after all. I even directed my friends to it, saying "Slashdot has news and they are up." I really took the hard work for granted, though I wondered how you stayed up when CNN, MSNBC, and all other major news sites were completely down.

CmdrTaco, thank you so much for the hard work that went into making slashdot the site it was Tuesday. I would have been lost without it.

Its Been Said

[Cylix]

Slashdot held under the tremendous load. Yeah, it was sluggish at times. It was sluggish when all the other sites were failing.

I stayed home a little earlier on tuesday to watch the news. I didn't want to leave for work, but it wasn't really an option to stay home. I was really hoping I could keep up on the events with most of the major news sources being online.

Slashdot served as a place of information. Many posters were pasting articles as they were able to retrieve them from sites as they opened up temporarily.

All of slashdot team's efforts and the posters deserve a good deal of thanks.

As always, keep up the good work.

Emergency Mode

[datavortex]

Rob touched on this in what he said above, but I also wanted to bring to attention this story that is of similar subject matter posted Wednesday on the Slash site. It's an idea for a slash feature to automatically do several of the things that the Slashteam did manually on Tuesday to keep the site alive. Things such as serving static HTML, disabling or changing the functionality of the search and other dynamic functionality, etc.

I'd also like to throw in my public note of thanks to everyone who kept the site up on Tuesday. We thirsted for answers, and you were there to provide, as always. Your work and dedication are wholly appreciated.

I used slashdot to gauge public opinion

[uchian]

I first heard what was going on from Slashdot, and I had to turn the television on to believe it - it sounded too much for a prank story when I first read it.

For me, the television was more important than Slashdot for recieving information on what was going as and when it happened.

But for me, Slashdot has been much more important as a place where I could see what other people from all over the world were thinking about this tradegy. I hope that the different pesrpectives and posts which I have read have allowed me to more maturely handle how I feel about the situation than I otherwise would have been able to.

Re:I used slashdot to gauge public opinion

[DoomHaven]

Yes, could you have imagined the initial uproar that would have happenned if this tragedy occured on April 1st? A lot of people would have been incredible angry...until they found out it *wasn't* a joke.

A big kudos to the Slashteam! You guys really pulled through!

Re:I used slashdot to gauge public opinion

[jesser]

One problem with using Slashdot as a gauge of public opinion is that Slashdot is biased toward geekiness, toward protecting privacy even at great cost, and against large corporations and major religions. If you were aware of the kinds of biases that are common on Slashdot, you could ignore comments related to those topics -- but then you would be mislead if non-Slashdotters were focusing on those topics.

I thought Plastic did a slightly better job of being unbiased, but then again Plastic has a reputation for having a strong liberal bias, and I tend to be liberal.

Only place to get information...

[tommyk]

While everything else was crumbling, this was the only place to get info in the office here. I guess I surf too much, because more than one person came over to me in the first few minutes because they literally could not get to anything... CNN, Boston.com, washington post... DOA... that made you wonder even scarier things when you had no idea what was next...

And I guess maybe I do surf to much cause I knew to go to slashdot and news.yahoo. News.yahoo held up for a very short time, and then it died too. I know it wasn't our proxy servers, cause I could get recipies and stuff. Slashdot was there, which is just amazing.

Everyone on the crew deserves kudos. I never sent a thank you... I feel bad, you shouldn't need your boss to fish for one. Thing is, you are tops and like everything else that seems so seamless, you sometimes forget that it's people doing this stuff...

So now I'm saying it. Thanks.

/.ers: Don't get too cocky...

[Alomex]

While my heartfell thanks go to /. for keeping this site up; others who are dissing the major news organizations must keep in mind that while
Slashdot was serving 50 pages per second, CNN was peaking at about an estimated 50,000 hits per second.

In light of this it was amazing that CNN was up at all, slow as it was.

Re:/.ers: Don't get too cocky...

[Alomex]

Don't forget the difference between pages and hits. A hit is anything - one of any ten-twenty images on the main page, for example.

Not in this case. CNN disabled all but one-two images per page.

Re:/.ers: Don't get too cocky...

[hattig]

And CNN.com is served from a single PII 533MHz server! Totally amazing.

Honestly, CNN's website will be composed of more than 10 times the servers that house Slashdot, possibly 100 times. The web server software will be serving static content, which is a lot easier than serving non-static content, even if the static content is larger (images, video). So 100x the servers plus 1/10th the work of Slashdot sounds fair to me...

Re:/.ers: Don't get too cocky...

[Kiaser Zohsay]

Props to Taco and team, not only for their hard work keeping the site up, but for this behind-the-scenes look at what it took to do so.

CNN was peaking at about an estimated 50,000 hits per second.

I also noticed after CNN came back up that they seemed to be in a sort of stripped-down static-only "combat mode". A talk with the guys behind CNN's site during the height of Tuesdays events would make for a great slashdot interview.

Re:/.ers: Don't get too cocky...

[Datafage]

That says nothing about the quality of code/administration, CNN has incredibly more money than /. for boxes and bandwidth.

Re:/.ers: Don't get too cocky...

[MikeFM]

IMO it is quite impressive to crank out 3x the performance from any program on-the-fly when you had no idea you were about to need to do so. To handle all the stress of the day and do their jobs so well is amazing. CNN has more experience in having sudden runs on their site as people look for news in bursts of interest. Slashdot I'd imagine is more stable usually because well it's geek stuff and none of the content disappears anytime soon after it's posted. :)

Re:/.ers: Don't get too cocky...

[Slump]

From what we've heard from CNN, they were serving over 9 million pages per hour, or about 2,500 pages per second. This seems to follow the 50K hits per second quoted above.

Our network of local news sites (http://www.ibsys.com) peaked at above 1.5M pages per hour - about 425 pages per second.

We got slow in the morning, but recovered by about noon - where we were serving pretty quickly.

Interestingly, our biggest problem is that we use Akamai extensively for image serving, and Akamai fell apart early in the day and took a while to recover.

Between pages and video, and our local bandwidth and Akamai/IBEAM video serving, we peaked at about 450Mb/s...

Re:/.ers: Don't get too cocky...

[Polo]

Well, cnn seems to use akamai for lots of it's content, so that should help distrubute the load quite well. (their website claims over 11,000 servers)

During high-load situations like these - many web objects come out of semi-local cache, probably at your ISP, and the response times are usually low.

I learned from last job, use of CDN's (content distribution networks) can drastically increase the load a site can take. At first I was not sold on them because they were essentially "very expensive bandwidth", but the bigwigs didr some negotiations, and they came out at closer to the same price as the ISP bandwidth costs (with our volumes). (of course, you can get charged double/extra for some requests, so ymmv)

One thing to mention though is that using CDN's increases the amount of DNS lookups necessary. Akamai has this wierd 3-level dns lookup scheme.

I wonder how the DNS heirarchy fared during all this...

Kudos

[MouseR]

I'm based in Montréal.

Data routes to most US news site was either non-existent, or too painfull to use.

By the time I found a local news site that had goo info on what was going on, I had read most of the (shocking) first details of what was going on on Slashdot. I actually learned about it on Slashdot, which is when I checked-out washingtonpost.com, as posted by a read (by then, CNN, ABCNEWS, CBS and MSNBC we already down).

I followed most of the developments on slashdot until I could get a BBC QuickTime stream of their newscast.

As far as I'm concerned, as a end-user of SlashDot, I didn't notice the load from your servers.

Kudos for a job extremely well done.

Re:Kudos

[Alomex]

I'm based in Montréal. Data routes to most US news site was either non-existent, or too painfull to use.

Montreal traffic is usually routed through a NY City peering point. This might have compounded your problems.

picture this:

[Wakko Warner]

Two tin cans, a thin piece of wet string, a couple of acoustic-coupled modems (BGP routing, see), a cisco 3600 (used as doorstop), two 486 DX/50s running RedHat 3.1, and a Mead 250-page spiral "database".

- A.P.

"Use Squid?" Answered in the article

[yerricde]

I would have thought that having a single-process cache at the front-end (something like SQUID) which holds on to a much larger cache and then passes requests to non-caching Apache processes would have done much better.

Taco mentioned this in his conclusion:

A layer of proxy is desirable so we could send static requests to a box tuned for static pages.

Re:"Use Squid?" Answered in the article

[MikeFM]

I think this is a good example of why all users on the Net should consider using a proxy server to cut down on how we're hammering sites. Even my home LAN uses Squid and it makes it possible for several users to browse the web in comfort even over a 56K line. Any business or ISP absolutely should be using proxy servers. For those of you who are unfamiliar with proxy servers it basiclly acts a lot like your browsers cache but it in general is far more effecient and is shared aong many users. If you turn off your browser cache and use just the proxy server the browser tends to crash less often too. :)

Re:So why then is Slashdot always down ?

[cowboy junkie]

I think the major difference between /. and sites like CNN & MSNBC is the fact that it's completely dynamic - what makes /. what it is is the constant stream of viewer commentary. And everyone is viewing that content on gigantic-ass dynamic pages with different thresholds, sorts, etc. plus all of the other 'goodies' that add load to the server.

What the Internet was designed to do...

[Robber Baron]

You guys did what the Internet was designed to do: Maintain communications in a time of crisis. Well done! Amazing that most of the other so-called "news" sites had their pants around their ankles for most of the day...at least where the net was concerned.

Not looking for a db war

[Samus]

...but since slash has the db independence layer, has anybody done comparisons between postgres and the different mysqls(table handlers)? And also between the various other commercial dbs?

Thank you, Slashdot

[Legion303]

I don't ordinarily turn on my TV in the morning, but even if I had on tuesday I would have seen nothing. The cable was out. If it weren't for Slashdot, I would not have heard about this incident until much later in the day. My thanks to the Slashdot team.

This next part is slightly offtopic; I'd like to not be modded down because of it, but by the same token I'd like to not be modded up either. Not that that will sway anyone. :)

The feds found evidence linked to the hijackers that strongly suggests they used MS Flight Simulator to practice dry runs on buildings. What I want to know is, where are all those hypocrites who were pointing fingers and suing game makers for games like Doom and Quake after the Columbine incident? They seem strangely silent on this point. Could it be because MS Flight Sim is (all together now) JUST A GAME?

I know it's offtopic, but I felt it had to be said.

-Legion

A solution for the links bogging down

[barnaclebarnes]

We were discussing how well /. stayed up just last night and how other news servers seemed to melt. thanks.n you guys gave us people with no tv a valuable news source.

What also impressed me were the people who put up pics/videos/news stories on their own servers to help people get news, even if they only had a dsl connection. Of course these sites soon got /.'ed as well...

So that led me to a new feature idea for news sites like this:

- People 'donate' a section of their web site to be a mirror for overloaded news stories.
- Whenever a link is /.'ed these sites replicate the site and store the data on their server.
- Slashdot keeps track of what sites have replicated and changes the url each time it serves a page with that link in it. That way the orginal site is now spread across 100's of dsl connections instead of one.
- After a set time (say a week?) the mirrors then delete the site from there servers and deregister their site from the mirrors list.
- Of course all this could be scripted with no input from users. All the /. admin would need to do is add some form of switch to say 'mirror this link' and the process would be put in place to start the morroring process.

And then you have your own distributed news network that handles major news stories with out getting slashdotted as much.

\well it sounds like a good idea...any comments?\

My only gripe..

[shayne321]

I want to thank the slash team as well for doing a great job of keeping slashdot up and running! It was my primary news source all day long when I wasn't able to get news from the "major" media sites.

My only gripe is I think it was very out of place and a bit insensitive that right in the middle of this (around 12pm if IIRC) Jon Katz took this tragedy as an opportunity to post some rant about how technology led us to this evil situation we were in and how technology was changing the way people get news or some such. I'm normally not a Katz-basher, but I think this was WAAAY out of place and insensitive to the people that died that day. Not only that, but it was unnecessary noise while people were still scrambling to get to the FACTS of what was going on. We really didn't need some insensitive wanna-be journalist's opinion on technology, of all things, in the middle of all of this. Maybe it would have been more appropriate on Wednesday or Thursday, but (to me) it was out of line at 12pm on Tuesday. Not to mention the whole crux of his article was off base (people killed people Tuesday, not technology).

Okay, I'll stop bitching now. Thanks again Slashdot, for stepping up to the plate and knocking one out of the park!

Shayne

Re:My only gripe..

[jfunk]

Yeah, I was annoyed by Katz as well, even though I used to stick up for him.

His story would have been *perfect* if he left out that technology angle he applies to *everything*.

If I ignore the technology part, I see a very well written and clear story that hits you right where it matters.

To be fair, it seems that he started the whole technology-in-every-story thing due to the gripes of Slashdotters. ("This is not news for nerds! Go away!")

I think Katz should just leave out the technology angle where it doesn't fit (most of the time) and concentrate on the articles themselves. I'd probably start reading him again (I used to read and enjoy all of his articles) if he did that...

"Substantially less than major news sites?"

[Rayonic]

Wired had an article about tech news sites picking up the slack, and mentioned that Slashdot was getting up to 60 hits per second. The next part confused me, though:

"That is substantially less than major news sites. The Lycos news network -- of which Wired News is a part -- receives about 115 page views per second each day."

I can see how the entire Lycos news network can get that much traffic, but did any one site get hit that much? I haven't heard any other news site statistics.

Some say the Internet failed, I disagree.

[NetJunkie]

I've read a few reports about how the Internet failed during this disaster since almost all news sites were too busy to respond. I disagree with that. Slashdot was here, as well as things like IRC.

On the channel I've frequented for years I got more up to the minute information than anyone in the office. Everyone was wondering where my news was coming from, especially since it was so accurate. While some people were sitting around watching CNN we were discussing and talking about what was going on with people very close (too close) to the events.

This doesn't even take in to consideration email. With cell phones and land lines too congested people were sending emails back and forth to get word on loved ones or just to talk about the events.

I think the Internet did a great job.

Thanks, Slashdot Crew

[FFFish]

While the television remained my primary news feed, Slashdot was my primary web feed. It provided the community side of the equation: a finger on the pulse of the world and, particularly, America.

Thanks to the Slashdot crew for scrambling to provide the best possible service during a time when many other people were in emotional and occupational shutdown.

And thank-you to the people who form this community. On the whole, the discussions have been remarkably insightful and rational.

I'm hopeful that this web community is representative of the American population, and that we will see your political and military leaders taking sane action. This tragedy could all too easily throw us into devastating war with continuing long-term consequences.

I'll also take this opportunity to apologise for the several postings where I lost my head. While most of what I've written has attempted to educate a broadly ill-informed public as to why this attack took place, and to preach sanity in dealing with the attack, I have also lost my head in responding to some of the more dreadfully ignorant folk. For that, I am sorry: I should have been more patient and tolerant.

In closing, I'd like to assure our American friends that this has been a global tragedy. The outpouring of support, and demonstrations of grief and sorrow, have encircled the globe. Every nation mourns with you, and every nation feels a sense of shock and loss.

You are not alone.

Howard Stern

[wiredog]

I wonder. Was he professional, or his usual annoying self. When the Air Florida crash happened he was a DJ here in DC. The next day he called up the airline and asked for a one way ticket to the 14th Street bridge. He left town soon after.

I thought the "Elliot in the Morning" crew at DC101 did a wonderful job. I need to write a letter to thank them. Hope Clear Channel gives them all raises after this.

Re:Howard Stern

[wiredog]

No.Greaseman said "no wonder they drag them behind trucks" when he was with 94.7 a couple of years ago. After Howie left, in 81, Grease came to town.

Light Mode

[rho]

In the future, you might consider making the "HTML Light" mode the default mode under heavy load.

Granted, it doesn't alleviate the DB problem, but it does limit the images sent down the pipe.

(more ideas pulled out of the ass) Perhaps another Apache instance or a Perl script (horrors!) to watch traffic and to ratchet the options down as traffic increases, based on a weighted system (level 1: no sigs, level 2: drop journals, level 3: no search, ... level N serve only static HTML)

This is an interesting problem, and I'm impressed with y'all ability to handle it.

Automatic static page failover?

[Ed Avis]

Couldn't the switch to static pages happen _automatically_ if the database goes down? The only difference to most users would be inability to post comments.

Hmm, that is actually quite a problem (though still better than just having the site go down). Maybe a 'comment spool' where the comments can be saved as flat files, ready to be inserted when the DBMS comes back up?

Anyway, kudos to Taco and the gang for keeping Slashdot up. Three million pages in 24 hours... how does that compare with the really big sites like Yahoo, AOL and CNN?

Net traffic in general

[Kallahar]

On a similar note, network traffic over the backbones increased from the normal 40% utilization to an 80% utilization Tuesday. (Sorry, can't remember the source). The article also said that traffic to search sites such as Google did not increase.

What this means is that people already knew where to go for the information, people know to look to certain sites for information. When MSNBC, NPR, CNN, and all the other sites failed I came here, and from here found a link to shoutcast which in turn led me to people who put up audio feeds from CNN - my only way to get the information while at work.

Thanks guys,

Travis

One of the karma winners for that day was Slashdot

[sg3000]

along with the volunteers rescuing people, donating blood or money, and helping us make sense of this madness. It's important to realize that informing the public about what happened was a crucial part helping the country when we needed it.

Thanks for keeping Slashdot running. When I heard about the news, I couldn't get to CNN or any of the news sites, so on a whim, I checked Slashdot. It loaded fast, and it was a great source of information. Eventually, I just had to go out to my car and listen to NPR.

I was surprised at how many good, informative comments there were. Sure, there were a few trolls or flamebait, but on the whole, the coverage helped in a time when many of us were at a loss.

My thoughts go out to the people who were affected by this and their families. This isn't over yet, but it seems Slashdot was a microcosm of the kind of stuff America is made of.

Thank you slashdot

[o'bryon]

I live in Manhattan on the Lower East Side. I watched the the events of Sept 11th from my roof top in stunned disbelief. My disbelief turned to tears when the second tower fell. Throughout that day and the days that have followed, I've turned to the TV and the internet for any information that I can get, but my patience for what is passing for news on TV is wearing thin. I almost feel as though I can't trust what they say on TV anymore given
that last night the reports were claiming that they had arrested 10
people at JFK and LGA with compelling evidence that they were potential
hijackers. This morning when I got up story had changed and now it turns
out that they hadn't arrested anybody nor was there any real evidence.
There are similar stories are floating around regarding people rescued
from the rubble. As far as I know, every story that I've heard so far
about survivors being dug out, has turned out to be false. Every
channel has a different number of survivors and sometimes they are
policemen and sometimes they are firemen. And then it turns out that
they were two rescue workers
who had been trapped in the course of the rescue efforts! Can someone
please confirm or deny if they have pulled anyone out who was trapped at
the time that the towers fell?

The part of it that makes me really mad is that I haven't heard very
much in the way of apologies for these mistakes, nor have I heard any of
the reporters comment on the sheer volume of misinformation that is
being reported as fact. I understand that the reporters are human and
there is a great deal of competition that drives them to report
information before they can do a throrough fact check, in order to scoop
their rivals. But they've begun to lose their credibility and are
unconsciously furthering the terrorists' agenda of fear and uncertainty.

My apologies for the rant. I guess I'm feeling the fear and anger that
is inescapable right now...

Thanks to the slash team for keeping slashdot up and running and thank you to all of the slashdot readers, who've provided both information and commentary that is sorely lacking on all of the major television networks.

eirik

CmdrTaco is one of us

[fobbman]

"Slashteam kicks butt. Jamie, Pudge, Krow, Yazz, Cliff, Michael, Jamie, Timothy, CowboyNeal, you guys all rocked. "

Looks like Taco has the KatzFilter on, too.

Why hasn't anyone thanked the KatzFilter for greatly reducing the server load by not sending his crap down the pipeline?

Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[cybrpnk]

Folks, I've got a very very bad feeling and if it's true then the worst is yet to come and President Bush is going to need all the support he can get. The other day when he got off the phone from the mayor and governor of New York (neither of which I can spell), President Bush started speaking off the cuff (undoubtably to the horror of his PR people) and after rambling a little he said, "...I'm a likable guy....but I've got a job to do...and I'm going to do it..." and he said this with tears in his eyes. Several people in my office including me think they've decided to use a nuke and Bush is getting shook up about how HE is the one who is going to go down in history for authorizing it. This is a terrible burden for him, no matter what. He deserves your thoughts and support....

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[cybrpnk]

Let us know, please, just how long it takes the Secret Service to contact you about this post. Seriously, I'm curious.

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[glitch_]

Blockquoting Your_Mom (that sounds dirty):

Or he could be going on his (probably) 26-27th hour without sleep and everything sort of caught up with him.

On FoxNews this morning they mentioned that Bush has not changed his schedule at all. Meaning that he still is going to bed at his normal time and getting up and to work at 7:00. Just a little FYI that Bush propably wasn't half asleep when he said it.

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[ari_j]

It won't take long. Back during the election, some non-front-page article in the North Dakota State University student newspaper included the sentence "I advocate the killing of whoever wins the election.", justifying his statement by claiming that the vice presidential candidates were both better presidential candidates than either of the actual presidential candidates were. The next morning, the SS paid him a pretty nice visit. And only the three literate students at NDSU even read that paper; this is Slashdot.

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[cybrpnk]

Or they will think the threshhold is lowered and use US actions as an excuse for their own nuclear antics now or later....

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[WNight]

Sure pissed people off, but that sort of was the idea.

Wake the sheep up and make them think. Hello, they're talking about supporting a mental deficient who's likely to start world war three.

We're talking about how the Afghanis, if they don't want to be bombed, have an obligation to overthrow their leaders and turn over Osama. So why don't we have that obligation?

I'm not actually from the US, so the chance of me going there to do that is kinda nil, but I'm NOT going to buy into the little sheep-act and support their retard of a president in his jihad.

Why does being upset about the trajedy suddenly make people willing to accept whatever someone in authority says without thinking about it?

The emperor had no clothing yesterday, now you're congragulating him on his wardrobe. Ugh.

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[WNight]

I think you're the only one who got it...

I'm saying that I'd much rather fight back against "our" (western world) leaders leading us into WW3 than I'd like to abdicate responsibility and let them get us killed, all in our own little holy war.

It would suck if nobody was punished for killing the thousands of innocents in this disaster, but it will not ever be right to bomb another country full of innocents for it. If "we" attack, we need to surgically extract the guilty, try them, and then if they're guilty, punish them with all force.

If we bomb their cites and kill 5000 innocents, what's the real difference between them and us?

And yeah, the US has freedom of speech, except where it's inconvenient or unpopular. (Ditto most governments though, even though they usually don't make such a big deal of the rights that they pretend you have.)

And yes, if the SS does come and get me, they'll be dragging a foreign national into their country to stand trial for the hideous crime of not supporting a US foreign policy of nuking innocents. Hmmm, much like the Skylarov and Johansen (?) stuff. Maybe I should pack a travel bag.

(And, note that I said it as a conditional. If Dubya handles this well, then I'll support him. If he wants to nuke something, as the message I replied to suggested, then he's no better than a rabid dog and needs to be dealt with like one.)

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[WNight]

Actually, only the US has a blanket law against uttering any threats towards the president (of the US).

That's like only the British commonwealth has a law against "Alarming the Queen" (a rather broad law, I might add).

You're free to threaten the queen, as long as you stay in the US, and commonwealth citizens don't face commonwealth laws for threatening Bush.

(Though, I'm sure, if I was important enough to them, they'd buy whatever court outcome they wanted, much like the MPAA does.)

But, this is a bit irrelevant because I was saying this conditional with Bush wanting to drag us into a nuclear war. At that point, I think all right-thinking people would rather get rid of Bush than follow him in a jihad.
btw, great country you have where it's illegal to express that you'd support, to the death, your beliefs that you should nuke innocent people.

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[WNight]

When should one threaten the presidents life, conditionally for using Nukes?

When nothing happened, when he's not likely to go off on a murderous rampage?

Silly me, I thought it'd be more appropriate at a time when he's likely to go off half-cocked and do something really really stupid.

If he uses nukes, the only red-tape I'll deal with to enter to US will be getting permission to lead an archeological team into the radioactive wastelands.

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[WNight]

Thanks. The lackwits who replied to me mostly wanted too, but seemed incapable of figuring it out. I think they needed your help.

On a similar topic... way to go. Clog up the governmental works in this emergency, when they're supposed to find the people who did this, by reporting me for disliking the US president. Just so you're happy to know you did you part in helping terrorists get away.

Here's a tip junior, the number of people who think the US president is a fuck-nut is expressed by this litle formula

(PopulationOfWorld - PopulationOfUSA) = BushHaters

It's really unpleasant knowing that someone who likely needs help to solve basic math problems is able to launch enough nuclear weapons to destroy most life on Earth.

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[Quikah]

If "we" attack, we need to surgically extract the guilty, try them, and then if they're guilty, punish them with all force.

I am curiouse. I am assuming you are European (please correct me if I am wrong). The majority of Europe is against the death penalty, even to the extent of advocating that Timothy McVae not be executed. So my question to you and other Europeans:

If we do find the people who are responsible for this act would you support the death penalty in this case? If not what is your idea of punishing them with all force?

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[WNight]

I doubt they'll nab you in the night and take you for questioning... They'll simply label you (and me) as likely subversives, like communists in the 50s.

If you ever want to get security clearance, you'll be inspected a bit more, etc.

But it's likely fairly obvious that neither of us are likely going to pick up a gun and attempt to kill him, so it'll just go down as a political comment.

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[WNight]

Why don't you believe assasination is valid?

Would you have shot Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Milosevic, Saddam, etc?

If not, why not? Do you think it's better to go to war against their armies of conscripts, killing waves of people who are only there because their families will be killed if they leave?

In any case where a leader is doing something seriously wrong by the standards of the people, I think the people have the responsibility to remove them, and few leaders would leave unless killed. Power corrupts, corrupt people don't want to leave power.

People on Slashdot are talking about how the Afghanis have a responsibility to hand over Osama, even if their leaders disagree, or they're just as good as him...

Well, if you happily pay your taxes, Dubya takes that money, and nukes someone with it, and you don't complain... YOU'RE GUILTY!

When is it ever NOT justified to kill one person to save thousands?

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[WNight]

Well, I'm Canadian, but I feel much more of a link to Europe sometimes, than to the USA...

I feel the death penalty is misguided. Not that it's wrong to kill someone who killed many, but because it's often hard to know with certainty if someone is guilty.

If someone like Jeffery Dahmer confesses and shows us evidence, it's pretty clear. But there are a lot of cases where everyone is sure someone's guilty, until someone later comes along and confesses, or is caught for the next murder and we find out they were guilty all along...

If we had a crystal ball and knew with certainty, I'd have no issue. But I've seen too many people in jail for years be released later when we found they were guilty. If we'd executed them, how would we justify it?

Canada, as a country is mostly against the death penalty, but individuals vary quite widely in opinion.

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[cybrpnk]

Wow - a Slashdot post gone, poof, censored. I'm impressed. The Secret Service moves pretty fast...

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[WNight]

"Report this fuckwad to the secret service."

How short their memories. Do you think you deserve anything better?

You and all of your spiritual brothers (everyone else who thinks I should be locked up for not liking Bush) were asses, I didn't think you were worth wasting politeness on. I try to save that for people who don't go out of their way to insult me in their first message.

Btw, great way to dodge the issue. You asked when assasination was acceptable, I provided an answer. Hell, I think I showed when it's not only acceptable, but morally required to assasinate your political leader.

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[WNight]

Well, that's my feeling, and yours...

And I don't even think Dubya should be assasinated, unless he reaches for the big red button.
Actually, the people on here are over-reacting, it's *not* illegal, even in the USA, to express an opinion that the president should be killed, it's only illegal to threaten him...

The problem is that it's easy for the SS and the courts to interpret a joke or an opinion as a threat, and they're likely to drag you off and break knuckles to question you.

Well, as long as you don't threaten the president with DeCSS, the MPAA won't be after you as well, and they're the ones who really trample of civil rights and intrude into other counties. Well, them and Scientologists.

Hell, my parent post was already modded to -1, so I'll go all the way and say that scientologists are parasites anyways and should be dealt with as such.

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[WNight]

I insulted everyone who called for me to be reported to the secret service, as if my simply preferring Bush dead, to a bunch of innocent Afghanis dead, was some huge threat to national security. It's pathetic, "use some law to shut him up, he said something I didn't want to hear!"

"most of us in this thread DO NOT support nuclear force"

If you're not willing to stop it, then your statement against it is a little empty. You mean, you might vote against him next time if he uses nukes? Wow! What a strong political statement!

"You threatened his life"

No, you don't seem to grasp this. I said I'd prefer to kill him than let him use nukes. To threaten him would require me saying I WAS going to do something, which I did not.

Which leads into ...

"(And your weasily "It was conditional" doesn't make it ok, it makes you weasily.)"

Umm, no. Weasily would be if I said it, but then tried to say I didn't mean it. I do mean it.

If I say "I'd kill you if you broke into my house in the middle of the night" that's a conditional, but isn't actually a threat.

Trust me on this one, it's a statement of my willingness to defend myself in case of attack, not a desire to hunt you down and kill you. "You" is even implied as a generic.

Ditto with Bush. If he died tomorrow and Cheney replaced him, and decided to push the button, I'd want someone to shoot him before he did it.

I'm not backing down on my original statement. I'd prefer Bush gorily dead before I want him to attack innocent people, especially with a nuke which would kill many and introduce the likelihood of nuclear retaliation.

But, as long as he stays rational, then he's okay.

That is just like saying I'd shoot someone (Canadians are allowed guns, just not pistols, and Shotguns are the recommended home defense weapon anyways) for breaking into my house, but if they didn't break in, I wouldn't shoot them.

The conditional isn't a bad thing, it simply means that I'm capable of evaluating a situation and acting differently as it warrants. If you don't understand conditionals, you must react in the same way to everything that happens.

"Your answer spoke for itself."

Of course. That's why it was my answer.

Well, I'll assume you agree, because you are very willing to call me on things you don't agree with.

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[cybrpnk]

Wrong - What your link points to is a post by somebody else that quotes ***only the first sentence*** of the post I'm refering to...and THAT one is gone, poof, censored.

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[cybrpnk]

And WTF are the two of us doing up at this ungodly hour of the morning on a Saturday no less? We have got to get lives...

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[cybrpnk]

D'OH!!! CORRECTION!!! You are right and I am wrong! That IS the original post! Slashdot Rocks! Free Speech Lives! Hooray!!! Something interesting, tho (and what threw me off) is that Taco or somebody on the Slash Team disconected this post from the ones under it so the original post about "full metal jacket" sank to -1 and all the ones under it stayed up here near the top of the thread. Or maybe that's an automatic feature of Slashcode?

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[cybrpnk]

DOUBLE D'OH...Well, the true situation is even more convoluted - and Slashdot HAS effectively censored the post after all. Your link DOES bring up the original post - but you can't find the original post IN THE THREAD. It's not just above the "Seriously, I'm curious" post where it should be, and it's not down in the -1 dreck either. Somehow it must be at -1 just above the "Seriously, I'm curious" post and INVISIBLE.

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[cybrpnk]

TRIPLE D'OH - Now the original "full metal jacket" post IS visible again IN THE THREAD!!! Maybe they made it invisible only until this news item became non-current??? Somehow this post has become a hot potato behind the scenes at Slashdot and they have pulled it for a while and now it's back....an interesting real-time exercise in free speech...

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[cybrpnk]

QUADRUPLE D'OH - The PIQ (Post In Question) has vanished again...

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[WNight]

Do they change the meaning of the expression?

Actually, I tend to over-use parens because I program and you might want to toss a modifier on the end of that, such as /2, or something, and it's easier to not have to go back and add something at each end later.

But, that asside, I don't think Americans are stupid. I just think that some (most?) Americans now have the stupid idea of rallying behind Bush, regardless of what he does. I think now, more than ever, you need to examine what he's doing.

On Monday, people would have bitched like crazy about Carnivore, on Wednesday they rolled over and accepted it... What's next?

btw, are you a South American perhaps? From Brazil maybe? Or did you mean US-American?

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[WNight]

Obviously for no decent reason.

Just remember, if you sit passively by, or worse, actively support him, and he does something really stupid, you bear some of the responsibility for that.

Also the idea is that extreme actions justify extreme responses. If he threatens to kill millions, he should be removed in any way possible. If he simply wants to carpet bomb a few camps without seeing if they're full of the guilty people, maybe it only justifies a few political demonstrations, etc. All actions in the proper context.

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[WNight]

Heh, I'm not saying I'm always consistent, but honestly, the programming thing is why I use more parens than I need.

And yeah, usually only USians call themselves American, but it's sort of a shame because it's not terribly accurate.

I guess it's fairly clear why, I used USian, you used "citizen of the USA", neither sounds very clear or easy to say.

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[WNight]

"No, I just realized there's no way I'm ever going to convince you otherwise."

Of course not, you never even said why you disagree. And the point of discussion (at least for most people) isn't to brow-beat someone into their point of view, but to explain why another viewpoint makes sense.

Your picture indicates though that you can't imagine anything other than a shouting match to determine who was right.

If you'll notice, I took time to explain something when asked, you on the other hand didn't. Likely because you haven't actually examined what you believe and why, probably because you were simply told what to believe and you've never questioned it.

Tis okay. Don't bother with any more cute pictures, or excuses.

"that's EXACTLY the argument I'd use."

Then you'd be clueless. There's no way the deaths of thousands warrant the deaths of hundreds of thousands, or than one innocent dying justifies killing other innocents.

Not that I'm saying you wouldn't use the argument, or even that you wouldn't sway a bunch of droolers with it, but it wouldn't be a rational argument.

Now it's pretty clear why you never explain your opinions. If you can't, don't. But don't waste time by making up excuses for it.

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[WNight]

"I cannot imagine where I ever got the idea that things might turn into a shouting match. Oh wait, it's the unceasing use of ad hominem attacks rather than actual debate!"

When I attack you as an inbred, twinkie-eater, it's not debate. I know that. It's my way of having fun at your expense. Anyone who opens by calling me a fuckwad should expect nothing less.

The debate is where I explain what I believe and spell out my reasons. Note the lack of "fuckwad" when I do so.

"The fact that you keep attempting to cast me as supporting nukes is vexing, also."
"And remember, in your response, I do not support nukes in this situation, stop acting and arguing as if I do!"

The whole point of this is that if you support a politician in their (possible) use of nukes, or are unwilling to stand against them, then you might as well support nukes.

Any blanket statement that you support Bush is tantamount to supporting any actions he might take.

"but I do know that as a country, we have gone out of our way to NOT assassinate leaders of other countries."

I know. And you (as a country) have gone out of your way to destroy armies of conscripts, just to save the life of one leader who often only holds power through direct threat of violence.

"So until Canada declares war on the US, your comments must be taken as threats of assassination."

Now who's using the weasel words. Listen, if killing one nut-job would save them from nuking innocents, I don't care if you call it an act of war or an act of cabbage, it's still justified.

"If using deadly force against innocents was likely to result in fewer total civilian casualties in the end, would you do it?"

Depends. And honestly, it does.
"If using force against innocents in a different country which would result in 100,000 deaths would likely save 100,000 civilian casualities in your own country, would you do it?"

I have no special love for citizens of my country over those of another, but depending on circumstance, I might weigh the "innocence" of both sides.
Now, this assumes there's a war going on, or something like that. And for the hell of it, I'll use Afghanistan and the USA for an example.

If the citizens actively hate and are trying to get rid of their government, yet are unable, like those of Afghanistan, I might give them more weight.

If the citizens of the USA are backing a leader who was bent on genocide, I wouldn't give them as much weight.

Now, honestly, I don't think the average US citizen would support violent reprisals on a civilian population, and I hope the government isn't planning it. I hope that most people would fight their own country, if needed, to stop that kind of travesty.
So I probably wouldn't trade one group of people for another, unless the numbers were overwhelming, or one of those groups seemed less than innocent.

This comes back to my complete disregard for the sanctity of leaders. If one person could be killed, to stop their violence towards many, I think it would be justified.

If Osama had a button he was about to press to set off a nuke in an American city, I'd support having someone blow him away. But I can't very well hold that opinion without supporting the same consequences for the same crime, if someone else were the perpetrator.

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[WNight]

"'Stand against them' and 'assassinate' are very different things for those of us who don't think in black & white."

Nukes are a somewhat black & white thing, they deserve stronger reactions than economic sanctions do.

"What actions are you taking, right now, to prevent that? Are you unwilling to stand against your own country's activities?"

I don't think that if Canada totally opposed the US's use of nukes, that it would really change anything.

I try to make a difference, but there's not a lot I can do other than try to influence people's opinions and hope that it spreads to people who can stop Bush from making a big mistake.

I however am not blindly supportive of someone until the make a fatal mistake, I set limits and what I'm willing to have done in my name, and even if I'm powerless to stop it, I'll let it be known that I do not support it.

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[WNight]

My government has a slightly better track record at listening to citizens than yours, and I still don't see that the opinions of NATO countries matters much to Bush, he's not very bright, a jingoist war-monger, and prone to snap-decisions.

As long as my country doesn't prepare to use nukes, why would I take action against them?

"You certainly had a proposal on how to deal with Bush. Have you considered threatening your own government instead?"

That's like saying "You were prepared to fight the Nazis, why not kill some aid-workers?"

Bush is the one with the button, Bush should be the target of those who wish to stop the potential use of nukes.

"Trust me, my current opposition as an individual to nukes REALLY won't change anything."

That's why I think removing Bush is a valid solution, if he looks likely to do something really stupid.

As yet another protester, he'd ignore you. The guy basically cheated his way into office, your fellow countrymen don't mean anything to him unless you're rich. If you want to make a difference, it'll take something stronger than words.

I know you won't do anything, but it's funny hearing how you're so against nukes, yet you support Bush, and wouldn't do anything to him even if he announced a plan to use them.

There's a reason that much of the world associates US citizens with their government's foreign policy. It's really easy for you to speak again it, as long as that doesn't involve actually doing anything. As long as you accept that, you'll be a target for every two-bit religious nutcase with an axe to grind, and somewhat, rightly so.

Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush

[WNight]

Yeesh, and you tried to call me for weasel words.

So far your stated opinion has been practically nonexistant, yet you berate me for both taking no actions and taking a strong stand on the issue.

No matter what you want to say, the smallest of NATO countries and complete US-vassal isn't going to come into Bush's consideration on this issue. I doubt your legislators could find Canada on a map, much less care for our support.

When Canada has nukes and threatens to launch them, then I might consider us directly responsible. Until then, it's all in Bush's hands. Anything else you say is just trying to cover your collective asses.

"Your country supports Bush in ways much more meaninful than I could ever do"

If my country supports Bush, then at best (assuming he cares what we say) it still puts me twice as far from anyone noticing what I say, as you are. Quit berating me and do something yourself.

"And remember, if you want to make a difference, it'll take something stronger than words."

Yes, if I was to have a hope of changing Bush's mind, it would.

I'm pretty sure the only thing that'll get through to him is another attack like this. For which he'll doubtlessly retaliate and stir up even more anti-US sentiment, endlessly.

"You get all the advantages of the policy, AND the ablility to act righteous and pissed off."

Ahhh, gotcha. Your country rapes and pillages, then tosses us some scraps. For that, we're as guilty, moreso in fact, you seem to think.

"And on an issue which you feel so strongly about that you broke a law of a different country and threatened assassination!"

Oh, yawn. If I go to Amsterdam and smoke pot, are you going to say I broke the US's laws? Really, the point is moot, even if I did do something which might have violated your laws if I were in the US, I'm not.

Might have, I say, because no matter how you slice it, I didn't say I'd kill Bush. Technically, I just said the only support he'd get would be full-metal jacketed, which doesn't preclude him not getting any support at all. But, ignoring any technicalities, my support for his downfall is conditional on his acting like a rabid animal and using weapons of mass destruction.

Remember this, a conditional threat isn't a threat unless the conditional is met.

Bah, nevermind.

You'll never accept an iota of responsibility, while trying to blame me and everyone else except your president.

Go off to your pep rally now. I'm sure the president needs your support, after all, genocide is really tiring.

Slashdot up

[msheppard]

I read "Plane Hits World Trade Center" on Saloon probably a couple seconds after they posted it. No link or nothing. Then everything went down...Except Slashdot. Everyone in my office was trying to get some info, so I decided to just watch someone else's screen for a moment. But they couldn't bring anything up. I went to my machine, tried slashdot first, and got the news.

Great Job

[Uttles]

I agree, you guys kick ass.

On the other hand, there is a congressman trying to use this moment for political gain by criticizing Bush and Guliani at every moment, so let him know that he's not doing the right thing: martin.meehan@mail.house.gov

A suggestion for the /. office

[HongPong]

All things considered, it might not be a bad idea to get cable at slashdot headquarters. It might have been invaluable earlier this week, and who knows, when CT took the time to drive home he might have gotten distracted and hit in a car accident. Or not, but the chance was there.

Also, most local stations were simulcasting from CNN, FoxNews, CBS, ABC, etc. Twice through Tuesday I used paper clips as antennas to catch so-so signals from local stations.

Also, cable'd let you guys watch Toonami at work.

Oh, now I see why you don't have it. CT and Hemos watching anime all afternoon... :) (That and cable's 0wned by evil conglomerates, I guess)

Thanks.

[trcooper]

You've all done great. I think everyone appreciates that /. dropped it's standard format for a bit to allow us to get the news, and provided us with a forum to vent our anger and disgust with this horrible act.

I think the forums were the most important thing /. provided us with. I was able to get the news, because I work for a company that provides satellite feeds, so we have AP and Reuters on all our desks. But I still came to /. to be able to tell people what I thought, and a lot of other folks did the same.

I've criticized /. before, hopefully constructively (but sometimes probably not :) because I've been a reader for a long time, and fear change. But I must say, this was one of the site's brightest moments, in some of the darkest times.

Thanks guys. You did great.

This nearly happened before

[Tonytheloony]

this is a little offtopic but It has something to do with the WTC towers event.

First I wish to say that I sympathize with all americans and families of those that died in the terrorist attack.

I'm a french citizen and wanted to say that this kind of event nearly took place in Paris in 1994. At the time a large airplane (can't remember if it was a boeing or airbus) was hijaacked by a group of algerian islamists.That plane had departed from Algeria. The terrorists requests on board the plane were very vague and unclear. The french air force was hesitating to shoot the plane down, which would have been a very difficult decision to take.

Luckily the plane which wasn't meant to fly to Paris didn't have enough fuel on board and had to land in Marseille (south of France) where the GIGN (~SWAT) took control of the plane. At the time the government didn't explain the reasons for this hijaacking and we never got any explanations from the terrorists themselves.

Later the interior minister Charles Pasqua admitted the plane was headed to Paris to crash on the Eiffel tower. Maybe he was wrong but this does seem suspiciously comparable to what has happened in New York 3 days ago.

Hey Slashdot Team....

[cybrpnk]

Great job on coverage, but how about starting a thread where all the slasdotters can vent on WTC without going offtopic? We need it...

Re:Hey Slashdot Team....

[ekrout]

Excellent idea.

Slashdot was my ONLY news source

[Anonymous Coward]

So I was at the airport in Seattle at 6:00am. on Tuesday Sept 11. 2001

I had just checked in and as usual logged on to the 802.11 network and started surfing for news.

I normally hit Yahoo first, but for some reason I could not get to yahoo.com. My first reaction was, "Oh maybe the nameserver on this WayPort thingy is messed up". So then I tried /. (I always read /. to start my day).

The top article was the first one to be posted about a jet crashing into the WTC. By reading the comments, I was able to find an active link to the picture of the smoke pouring out of the first building.

By this time they are starting to board the plane, and NOONE else knows what has just happened. (The CNN channel on the monitors was playing pre-recorded stuff). Since I was not able to find out much more, I just boarded the plane. However I can still get a good signal from the plane, so as soon as I got to my seat I started reading /. again.

That is when I saw the second plane had hit the second tower. At this point I call my wife on the cell phone and she is crying and I can't hear very well (her best friend worked in the Amex building and is safe).

So I feel VERY awkward that I am the only one on this plane that knows about this. So I lean over to the guy sitting next to me and show him the pictures. He kinda looks dazed, and then asks, "So how are you surfing the web on a PLANE?" It just didn't sink in, he was much more interested in learning about the wireless technology than the incidents that were happening in NY.

(Oh they had long ago told us to shut off all electronics, but I wan't about to). Then the captian comes in over the intercom and tells us that they are going to reopen the doors and unload us because all US flights across the country recieved groundstop orders. At this point people start asking questions and word quickly spreads through the plane about info that I was able to gather from /.

I just want to thank EVERYONE at /. for providing a service that I find invaluable everyday, but on Tuesday Sept 11, 2001 they were the first news source that many people on that flight had of the terrible tragedy.

BRAVO!

--Wayne

Thanks

[TeachingMachines]

CmdrTaco,

Thanks for the site. Not only was it the only site that was up, but better coverage was provided. I think we're all a little traumatized, but if it wasn't for Slashdot, I don't know what I'd be doing right now. I have to admit, I was really proud of you guys for working so hard on this story. I think that we all are. Thanks again.

Steve

Hey Slashdot Team

[cybrpnk]

Great job on coverage, but how about starting a thread where all the slashdotters can vent on WTC without going offtopic? We need it...

Re:The irony

[edunbar93]

Well, it's in no small part because religion isn't about crusades and blowing stuff up. That's not the way it's supposed to be.

"Supposed to be" and "are" are two different things of course. Religion sometimes becomes a justification for slaughter, but it's never really the root cause, just an excuse.

Re: hits or pages?

[bracher]

is that hits or pages for cnn? I count about 60 images on the cnn.com front page. still works out to an impressive ~850 _pages_ for 50k _hits_, but not as impressive as 50k pages would have been... that's the whole point of the comment earlier about cnn dropping their contract with akamai. with akamai, cnn would have been serving those 850 pages, but never would have seen the 50,000 images requests...

- mark

Re:So why then is Slashdot always down ?

[CyberKnet]

But... Lets also not forget that streaming video and pics are static, and that at least the video is served up by completely separate machines. And while the serving up of that video may be no trivial task, its comparing apples and oranges; completely different tasks.

Lets also differentiate between content type, and content. Because doing expensive db ops to get that "light" demand text is a completely different ballpark to making several thousand GIF/HTML pages available for download.

I think you're under-estimating the work behind slash... make sure you differentiate between large-bandwidth and server-processor-intensive operations. Video streams use next to no processor time on a server. Database operations to retrieve an ordered page with dynamic content on the other hand are rather expensive on the processor, especially when x10,000 users. The end result is that it is easier to stream a LARGE video file than it is to send a SMALL html file.

Just FYI

database duplication

[stilwebm]

I'm curious, what method of duplication do you use to keep a duplicate of all tables ready as a backup? It is very useful to have backups that can easily serve as drop in replacements.

Re:database duplication

[MikeBabcock]

Go to MySQL's Homepage and read up on their replication system.

Re:Couldn't get to CNN

[firewort]

Here at IBM, we have in-house TV served over Token Ring to monitors at the corners of the buildings.

The monitors were re-broadcasting live news feeds from the outside world (can't remember who they were showing, CNN or NBC, or someone else).

Re:Sorry, folks, but I have to say it...

[Skyshadow]

This was more than just a localized tragedy; it effected all of us. In that vein, we all have a role to play in the recovery.

Slashdot can't dig anyone out of the rubble, but thanks to the efforts of its creators it managed to both keep us informed and (more importantly) allowed us to share our feelings and thoughts. For a lot of us, Slashdot allowed us to begin some sort of healing. In facilitating that, in allowing us to help each other cope in those first few hours, Slashdot performed a great service, and the people who kept it running did more than "their part" in all this.

I understand you're angry. Please don't let that anger consume you and blind you to the good that was done here.

Re:The irony

[ttyRazor]

If you think that the inevitable result of any sort of belief in a religion and practice of it is vengance and violence, you are sadly and pathetically mistaken. Did it ever occur to you that those muslims calling for peace and throwing bombs were entirely seperate groups of people? That there are those who say their beliefs fobid them from taking a life actually mean it and put it in practice? It isn't the talkng out of your ass hypocrisy that people on /. wallow in and condemn on a regular basis that you seem to confuse heartfelt religious sentiment with. I can only hope that any people who are as misguided and confused as you suggest will look back on tuesday and realize just how wrong and contrary justifying murder with their faith is.

Correction

[tedd]

"I'm a loving guy. And I am also someone, however, who's got a job to do and I intend to do it. And this is a terrible moment," Bush said.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,34322,00.html

I hope you're wrong about the nuke.

Re:Correction

[cybrpnk]

The actual quotes here are even more worrisome than I thought.....

Tears welling in his eyes, Bush spoke of a need to win the battle against terrorism.

"I'm a loving guy. And I am also someone, however, who's got a job to do and I intend to do it. And this is a terrible moment," Bush said.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said the administration's retaliation would be "sustained and broad and effective" and that the United States "will use all our resources."

"All our resources" includes nukes.....

Re:Correction

[Heem]

I'd love to say that I hope we dont use a nuke. I'd love to be able to take that stance. I'm sure I'm going to be disagreed with, maybe even modded down, flamed. Probably rightfully so. But you know what, I hope we do nuke those fuckers. It certainaly worked on the Japenese

to quote Leonard Pitts, From the Miami Herald - 9/12/2001

"This is the lesson Japan was taught to its bitter sorrow the last time
anyone
hit us this hard, the last time anyone brought us such abrupt and monumental
pain. When roused, we are righteous in our outrage, terrible in our force.
When provoked by this level of barbarism, we will bear any suffering, pay
any
cost, go to any length, in the pursuit of justice."

All I hope is that we have a well planned attack.

Re:Correction

[DunbarTheInept]

My hope here is that "sustained" implies ground action as opposed to nukes. Nuking a country is not something I would describe as a "sustained" action. "sustained" implies something that's going to take a lot of time, a description which does not fit for a nuclear attack.

And I deeply hope that I'm right in this. If I'm wrong...I don't even want to think about what it means for the world if I'm wrong.

Thanks!

[moonboy]

I'd like to take this time to say thanks to the Slashteam. Great job!

Also, I'd like to take this opportunity (since Slashdot is read by people from many countries) to thank the rest of the world for all of the support. We are going to need it even more in the future as we plan and execute our next course of action and the many actions sure to be in our future.

We as citizens of the world need to send a message that this type of behavior will not be tolerated. Not only in the United States but in every country. We Americans take a lot for granted, but once something like this happens in our own backyard, it becomes personal and you can be certain we will bring all of our resources to bear in punishing those responsible.

Please continue to support us as we go forward. We will prevail and come out even stronger. Rather than tear us apart, this has only steeled us and made us more resolute in the course of action we all know we need to take.

Thank you!

MANY kudos to Slashdot, many barfs to network

[jd]

Slashdot is proving to be a phenominal piece of software. Sure, it's not "perfect", but what's "perfect" anyway? I'd say that surviving Tuesday intact is as damn near "perfect" on the stress charts as you can get.

But software's no good without a team to back it. The quality of Slashdot, the ability to keep it going in the face of world-wide panic, and the fact that CmdrTaco hasn't throttled me for being an obnoxious SOB, is proof that the team is about as good as you get.

The network, however, is another matter. The actual wires, the routers, the DNS servers - the things which are ESSENTIAL in times of crisis - just couldn't cope. THAT is NOT ok.

The network, as-is, is designed for "typical" loads. Translated, that means it's as cheap and unstable as the designers could get away with & still make a buck. However, communication in times of crisis is the single-most important thing you can have. Many rescuers are relying on cell-phone calls to work their way through the rubble. Do you think they'd be happy if the local receivers were sporadically rebooting? Or if the phone system collapsed, half-way through?

The Internet is a vital resource, in a time of emergency, and it proved this week that commercial organizations CANNOT handle emergencies. WILL NOT handle emergencies. The extra capacity required to cope might impact their profits. (Awwww!)

People in that rubble are depending on an infrastructure that is barely there, to survive. Sooner or later, other people will depend on it again, whether it's a natural or man-made disaster. It's probable that the shoddy infrastructure has added unnecessarily to the very high death toll. That is SO easy to prevent in future. Even if one additional life is saved, from higher-quality networking, I'd say that was worth every cent.

Re:So why then is Slashdot always down ?

[tmark]

I think we may also be underestimating how dynamic CNN etc's web pages may be. It is clear, for instance, that pages are customized to some extent by broad geographical region. They have seem to display random user's comments in several sections. There is probably other dynamism going on there, too.

The moderation system made the difference

[parabyte]

Slashdot was also my primary source of background and first hand information, and it seems to be the only system that can handle a large number of comments and display them them in a useful and readable format.

Among all the useful slashdot features the moderation system seems to be the most important feature, and even if it is not balanced to deal with 2000+ articles, it still behaved pretty well, minor glitches aside.

Overall, slashdot and it's moderastion system helped me a least threefold to sustain this disaster:

It provided a huge low noise discussion forum by encouraging people to think what other readers might like, and by discouraging people to dump garbage into the system

It is very rewarding to post a comment and see it beeing moderated up; it was especially helpful in this case to see other people reading what I wrote, reducing the feeling of fear and powerlessness in this situation

The slashdot community, often critized for beeing somewhat narrow minded, and especially the moderators have clearly shown that they cover a large political and social spektrum, and few extreme lunatics write here, compared to other places on the internet.

Thank you all, the slashdot team, and everybody else who contributed to make the last days a bit easier to endure.

p.

Re:The moderation system made the difference

[tb3]

Thank you, i was just about to say the same thing. I think the moderators did a terrific job in dealing with the signal-to-noise ratio here, and I think everyone in the community deserves congratulations, along with the slash crew.

And my karma's maxxed out at 50, so I'm not whoring for karma here, gang :)

Re:Here we go again...

[CokeBear]

I think he inadvertently made an excellent point.

Six Degrees Of Seperation

I think that everyone knows someone who knows someone (etc) who was involved in this tragedy. SDOS reminds us how close we are, as a human family, to each other.

Time for some highly unpopular opinion...

[tzanger]

Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blaming the events on liberals, feminists, etc. etc. etc.

While I wholly condemn the actions of the terrorists I do have to critically ask, "Did the government of the United States of America have this coming?

You'd have to be blind to see that the U.S. government has been supplying arms and training and money to factions around the world for over 50 years. You'd have to be blind to see the American government change its mind mid-stride -- first by supporting a group (again, with weapons and money), then by turning face, cutting off support or even condemning the actions of the group they supported.

You'd have to be insane to believe the 1973 crap propaganda article by Gordon Sinclair is a clear and frank view of the United States of America and its leaders and their policies.

The government of the United States of America has been bullying and harassing nations for a very long time, flaunting themselves as a superpower which is untouchable. They've stuck their noses in other nations' business too many times and someone had decided to cut it off.

I don't agree entirely with this Guardian article but it does rise a very strong and important point: The U.S. must change the way it carries itself in foreign affairs. The American people must stand up and take active interest in their nation's government. The American media must stop downplaying foreign affairs.

an aside: the Canadian people aren't much (any) better in this regard. Canadian readers: How much interest do you show in your government??

I do not believe that this is the act of one nation, or even of a nation. And I am frightened because I do not think this is the last.

The U.S. government and media is running around crying "Why me? Why us?" and you have the President standing frail and shaken, telling his nation that "He's gotta do what he's gotta do" instead of analyzing the situation properly and keeping cool.

I must give Bush credit -- he did not spout off about Arabs or "them guys" as Clinton did with OKC -- Bush remained calm and rational. I fear that this is quickly fizzling out because his anger is taking over and as President, he is not allowed to have those emotions. He is a man with the power of a very large, wealthy and military nation. He is not allowed to be angry. I think he is grappling with those emotions and his reserve is failing.

As a Canadian, I demand retribution for what happened in the United States this week. I am not saying "forgive and forget." Blood will be shed, and rightly so. Check out my /. userpage for views on what I personally feel is acceptable for retaliation. I also think the President should send a strong message that it is not acceptable to hate the middle eastern people -- Just as there was no witchhunt against all white people with OKC, there should be no anger towards the Arab, Muslim and other middle-eastern people within or outside the U.S. This is not an attack by the middle eastern people nor their religion; this is an attack by terrorists and cowards too cowardly to stand up and fight.

And I fear that we will be brought into a world war because of it.

Re:Time for some highly unpopular opinion...

[NMerriam]

The government of the United States of America has been bullying and harassing nations for a very long time, flaunting themselves as a superpower which is untouchable. They've stuck their noses in other nations' business too many times and someone had decided to cut it off.

I barely know where to begin when I read crap like this. The simple truth is that people hate us because we're the biggest kid on the block.

yes, they care about individual policy decisions, but there isn't a nation on earth that doesn't make the exact same decisions every day. WE're criticized for butting our noses into foreign affairs, then criticized for being isolationist if we DON'T get involved in foreign affairs.

We're criticized for supporting side A against B, but if we switch sides, we're criticized for supporting B against A.

There is no policy we could possibly have that would make other nations happy with us. If we withdraw, we're "ignoring our responsibilities" but if we get involved we're "flaunting our power".

Well fuck you all very much, planet earth. We didn't ask to be the only superpower. We're not itching to feed your hungry or shelter your homeless or finance your economic devastations, but we're the ones you call on first when you need those things done.

You complain because american hegemony is destroying your cultures, then you go out and buy coca-cola and watch Friends on TV. You complain about our imperialism while ignoring the fact that Germany and Japan are our biggest competitors exactly BECAUSE we rebuilt them at OUR EXPENSE after we could have conquered them.

We're damned if we do and damned if we don't, so don't give me any shit that we had it coming because of our policies. NO FUCKING POLICY WILL MAKE EVERYONE HAPPY!

We're like the prettiest girl at a party -- all the women want to be her, all the men want to fuck her. There is not a country on earth that wouldn't trade places with us in a second, and on days like today i'd almost be happy to do it.

Re:Time for some highly unpopular opinion...

[namespan]

I barely know where to begin when I read crap like this. The simple truth is that people hate us because we're the biggest kid on the block.

yes, they care about individual policy decisions, but there isn't a nation on earth that doesn't make the exact same decisions every day. WE're criticized for butting our noses into foreign affairs, then criticized for being isolationist if we DON'T get involved in foreign affairs.


There's some degree of truth to your statement -- not all the reasons america is disliked are legitimate, and the prettiest girl at the party metaphor was great. We've done some great things in the world.

But indications are that we've been responsible for some pretty terrible things at times in our nations history. We've supported and trained regimes who've used terrorism and torture because it suited us. Israel is a prime example. Several central american governements are an example.

There's a book called "What Uncle Sam Really Wants" by Noam Chomsky with some details. I'm still trying to figure out how much of it to swallow, but he paints a grim picture, and if even a fraction of it is true, we have a lot to own up to here in the US.

That said, attacking such a large civilian target as the WTC in peacetime is unprecedented and completely wrong. The people who did/would do that need to be fought.

Re:Time for some highly unpopular opinion...

[tzanger]

I barely know where to begin when I read crap like this. The simple truth is that people hate us because we're the biggest kid on the block.

That is not entirely true. I simply don't believe it's possible to convince people to die terrorizing a country because they're the "biggest kid on the block." The hatred runs far far deeper than this and it must be resolved if there is any hope of this not happenning in the future.

Did you read the Guardian article? Have you looked into your country's foreign policies over the past 50 years? There are people who have very legitimate reasons to be upset at the U.S. because of the way it handles itself in foreign lands.

Well fuck you all very much, planet earth. We didn't ask to be the only superpower. We're not itching to feed your hungry or shelter your homeless or finance your economic devastations, but we're the ones you call on first when you need those things done.

Please go do some research before you post so you don't come off so totally ignorant of the reality.

Actually yes the U.S. does strive to be the only superpower. What did America do to Russia? What is it doing with China? I can't believe you actually think that nations don't strive to be the biggest and best. I believe that the U.S. is the only nation not paying its UN membership fees. Or behaving poorly in UN. Or trying to be the police of the world. The U.S. government does flaunt its power; that is what I believe got the United States into this mess in the first place!

You complain because american hegemony is destroying your cultures, then you go out and buy coca-cola and watch Friends on TV. You complain about our imperialism while ignoring the fact that Germany and Japan are our biggest competitors exactly BECAUSE we rebuilt them at OUR EXPENSE after we could have conquered them.

Actually I don't drink Coke and dislike Friends, but thanks for generalizing.

Your comments on WW2 are laughable at best. The American government sold arms (to both sides? I don't remember) when WW2 broke out. America didn't come to the aid of the other nations; it waited until it was hit before getting involved, instead profiting from the war. Whether this reserved attitude is good or bad I reserve judgement -- but don't think that for a second that America saved the world; if you read through your history you'll see that the Soviets and British played key roles in ending the war, as did America. It was a group effort.

We're damned if we do and damned if we don't, so don't give me any shit that we had it coming because of our policies. NO FUCKING POLICY WILL MAKE EVERYONE HAPPY!

You're right, America can't make everyone happy. Instead of meddling in the affairs of foreign nations by selling arms and supporting conflict, it should do more peacekeeping and put its own military into action. The "hands off" kind of "support" that the U.S. has done in the near past reminds me of a parent shouting at fighting kids to stop instead of getting their hands dirty and stopping the conflict themselves.

Or, better yet, let the nations battle amongst themselves without making profit from it! Maybe even by providing relief to the civilians!

As a citizen, you can stand up, take notice and get involved in your government and the politics of your government! What was voter turnout this past election, something like 46%? While Canada isn't much better in this regard, we don't have the problems that America has and our foreign policies seem to be less convoluted and more focussed on peace than profit.

I hope you realize that I did not say the American citizens had it coming. Killing thousands of civilians is horrible and will be met with vengeance. Terrorist attacks like this are beyond words. No war was declared, no "plain-to-see" warnings... this is terrorism of the worst sort.

But to think for a second that America is right and innocent and that they didn't have an attack coming is just plain stupid, ignorant and totally unbelievable. I am sorry it happened and I do mourn the loss of civilian life but I am also not blinded by my patriotism like I believe you are.

Re:Time for some highly unpopular opinion...

[tzanger]

Well, DAMN YOU and the rest of the western hemisphere for asking for us to get involved when it's convenient for you, and DAMN US for agreeing to it!

I'm not sure if I am following your mode of thought... What is wrong with saying that profiting from war is bad and is to be deplored?

I feel I have to keep repeating this, if for no other reason than to make sure that people don't paint me with the "anti-american" brush that's always ready: America has done some beautiful, impressive and extraordinarily commendable things. American citizens are no better, nor are they any worse than citizens of any other country. Christians are no better nor are they any worse than any other religous group. What happened on Tuesday is deplorable and goulish and will be avenged. I hope it will be avenged properly and not with the redneck "nuke the fuckers off the planet" rederick I keep hearing. At the same time, America is not innocent and it is very likely that the its own government brought this down upon itself. America the Beautiful and America the Barbaric are not entirely contradictory.

Re:Time for some highly unpopular opinion...

[NMerriam]

...Or trying to be the police of the world. The U.S. government does flaunt its power; that is what I believe got the United States into this mess in the first place!
...
it should do more peacekeeping and put its own military into action. The "hands off" kind of "support" that the U.S. has done in the near past reminds me of a parent shouting at fighting kids to stop instead of getting their hands dirty and stopping the conflict themselves.


So you want us to stop flaunting our power and being police of the world by "getting our hands dirty" with our military and stopping all the fighting everywhere else on earth.

I hope that it is now crystal clear to you why we cannot make other nations happy.

If even Canada wants us to stop throwing our weight around, while at the same time demanding we step in to enforce world peace, what hope do we have to make friends with the actual combatants?

I've found that Americans understand the world better than others seem to think. we understand that anything less than perfection is unacceptable. I'm sorry, we cannot be everywhere at every moment and stop all conflict while also remining quietly on the sidelines...

Re:Time for some highly unpopular opinion...

[tzanger]

Wow a civil response; I was hoping I would get some of these. :-)

Maybe, but I think you're wrong to suggest that they stop this practice. While they may sometimes pick their involvements for reasons of self-interest, I believe it is important that they do so for two reasons:

• It is the responsibilty of the strong to protect the weak. Period.
• America is nationalistic enough without becoming absolutely introverted besides.

Yes, the strong have a moral obligation to protect the weak. However I do not think that Iran-Contra was protective. I don't believe that building up Saddam Hussein was protective. These were self-interest and for-profit international issues. I'm not sure if training Bin Laden and helping the Taliban was such a good idea, even back when the Reds were Evil. Israel is different, and it is very complex. I do not pretend to grasp the entire conflict.

My point is not that the U.S. should withdraw completely but rather that they rethink what the hell it is they were/are doing. I really don't think that hand-delivering (i.e. military personnel in the area) foreign aid (medical, food, personnel) can be construed as aggression or self-interest. I seriously doubt that the blind hatred for the U.S. would continue in the next generations if their meddling stopped. The world does not want to be America. People are different.

Imagine a U.S. that thinks only of itself and takes no interest in outside affairs.

That really isn't too difficult. The Americans do perform humanitarian runs and quite honestly, I really do like the majority of the American citizens. They're friendly, helpful and supportive. Honest. But it's hard to keep that good side showing when the other hand is making shady deals and going after self-interest causes, all the while pretending that nothing is going on.

And, of course, I wouldn't be a good Canadian if I didn't take a shot at my own country. Perhaps Canadians would understand the French culture in their own country better if they did a little travelling of their own...

This is where I must disagree with you. I have no problem with official bilingualism. Hell I even think that that would be a good thing. What I very much dislike is the "sans anglais" practise that Quebec enforces while out of the other side of their mouth comes "bilinguisme partout". It's hipocritical and offensive and makes me see red. All or none; they can't have both as far as I'm concerned. If they want a bilingual nation, then they themselves must be bilingual. However if they want to "protect their language" then don't expect Federal support.

Re:Time for some highly unpopular opinion...

[tzanger]

I am sorry I didn't make this clear. Please allow me to try again:

So you want us to stop flaunting our power and being police of the world by "getting our hands dirty" with our military and stopping all the fighting everywhere else on earth.

No.

Instead of selling arms and having them defend themselves, send troops to defend. Now you know your weapons won't be re-sold or used against you. That is what I mean by getting your hands dirty.

Throwing money at the nation saying "Here ya go, hope this helps" is a hands-off approach; Sending foreign aid (medical, food, personnel) with military protection is hands-on and ensures that the aid gets to the people who need it, and not the armies battling the war. This approach also doesn't have you fighting (or defending) the troubled nation's causes; you are just helping those stuck in the middle.

If even Canada wants us to stop throwing our weight around, while at the same time demanding we step in to enforce world peace, what hope do we have to make friends with the actual combatants?

That's just it -- when they're in the midst of battle you don't try to make friends. You support the people caught in the middle. At least that is my view.

I've found that Americans understand the world better than others seem to think. we understand that anything less than perfection is unacceptable. I'm sorry, we cannot be everywhere at every moment and stop all conflict while also remining quietly on the sidelines...

I hope that this post has cleared up what it is I was trying to say. I'm not blaming the United States for the problems of the world. I'm not calling Americans evil or contemptable. I'm saying that, as a superpower, I really really think you could have done a whole lot better. American foreign policies have caused a lot of grief; I would almost say more grief than they have cured.

Re:Time for some highly unpopular opinion...

[dszd0g]

I find it humorous that some people actually believe our foreign policy is based on helping others.

I am not saying that the US does not help other countries. We quite often come to the support of our allies and troubled nations.

However, one can not ignore the horrors we commit. The 150,000 deaths we are responsible for in Guatemala. Supporting De Beers and the diamond cartel and the slavery and thousands of deaths involved there. The whole cold war and how the USSR and the US used entire other nations as pawns in the war against each other. Our intelligence leaking information to US companies and helping to eliminate foreign competition.

There are a number of books on these subjects. A couple good reads are "The Good Citizen" and "Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy."

A lot of Americans seem to believe that others get pissed off at us just because we are doing well. What people are pissed off at us for are the horrid things we do that aren't covered by American media.

Re:Time for some highly unpopular opinion...

[tzanger]

That is the problem isn't it. The USs involvement. I would like to point out though that lack of involvement is also involvement.

Are you American? I hope so; because this question is directed at Americans:

• Would you rather your government sell arms and make profit from other's wars, or would you rather your government sit out altogether?

• Also, Would you rather your government sell arms and give money / aid, all of which could be misappropriated
• very easily, or would you rather send military personnel to either a) defend and/or b) chaperone and administer foreign aid to those directly in need of it?

You are entirely correct: no involvement is also involvement. However the kind of involvement, especially in the middle east, in the past has been questionable or even double-edged at best.

Re:Time for some highly unpopular opinion...

[denshi]

You'd have to be blind to see the American government change its mind mid-stride -- first by supporting a group (again, with weapons and money), then by turning face, cutting off support or even condemning the actions of the group they supported.

We have had a poor track record of withdrawing support for groups we provided for. The ideal situation entails choosing the right group, funding it with enough arms to win their local cause and no more, and tapering down arms to nothing in the case of withdrawing support after the cause is completed. If it ends too soon, you should try to get back some percentage of the weapons, such as the standing offer of 300 million US dollars for the stockpile of Stinger missiles still in Afghanistan. It doesn't help much that Afghanis are fetishists for guns, or that other Arab states are outbidding us for the missiles.

In the case of the Afghanis, there were really no good choices, except for Massoud, who didn't really want foreign support in his country - he is/was the pro-democrary guy in the mujahedin. We focused on Hetmakyar and bin Laden, who schmoozed better with the West. Hetmakyar, by the way, basically avoided fighting and stockpiled everything we sent to him; he knew that the war would end, then he would conquer the nation. So the war ended, and chaos continued as Hetmakyar, Dostum, and Massoud shook it up amongst themselves. Later, the Talibs, primarily religious students from the south and funded by merchants with Pakistani ties, grew sick of the corruption of the warlords and started raising hell. They eventually captured all Hetmakyar's territory, who then fled to Pakistan, then diplomacy & assassination delivered them Dostum's territory, who fled to Turkey. When the Taliban captured Hetmakyar's weapon's cache, they proclaimed that they "now have enough weapons for 25 years of war". I'm inclined to believe them.

I wrote this little rant to point something out: Afghanistan is probably the wierdest place we have ever intervened in. The forces in control have shifted numerous times the culture in place has changed radically, and its not easy to just say 'we supported this guy and now he is out to get us' when everything over there changes radically every 5 years. Finally, it just goes to show that if you give a man a gun, you never know who will eventually hold it, and who it will be used on...

Interested parties might want to read up on Afghanistan at dangerfinder, as well as at more conventional news sources.

Re:Time for some highly unpopular opinion...

[tzanger]

This is one of several posts that I have seen commenting on the horrible possiblity of a world war. How exactly would this happen?

If President Bush's own anger gets the best of him and he goes off half-cocked that would be one very easy way for war, and eventually world war, to start.

Where are we going to find enough people to say this was a good thing and have the power to fight?

Again, it depends almost entirely on how President Bush responds. If he retaliates incorrectly he could lose a lot of support from the world's nations. I am particulary concerned about how China would see a misdirected retaliation. China has the power and more importantly, the people, to cause a very long and bloody war.

Re:Time for some highly unpopular opinion...

[tzanger]

If it ends too soon, you should try to get back some percentage of the weapons, such as the standing offer of 300 million US dollars for the stockpile of Stinger missiles still in Afghanistan. It doesn't help much that Afghanis are fetishists for guns, or that other Arab states are outbidding us for the missiles.

That's exactly the problem with selling arms to nations: it's hard to control them once they're sold.

<sarcasm>Hey! Maybe the U.S. should License arms to the nations! It works for corporations, don't it?</sarcasm>

I wrote this little rant to point something out: Afghanistan is probably the wierdest place we have ever intervened in. The forces in control have shifted numerous times the culture in place has changed radically, and its not easy to just say 'we supported this guy and now he is out to get us' when everything over there changes radically every 5 years. Finally, it just goes to show that if you give a man a gun, you never know who will eventually hold it, and who it will be used on...

Thank you for proving my point wrt selling arms. I really did appreciate the history lesson on Afghanistan too; I did not know much of this before today and will be doing more research tonight.

As I said in other posts, America isn't all roses and perfume, but they sure as hell aren't anywhere near the "giant devil" that the extremist organizations make them out to be. It's horrible what has happened and I want retribution to be total. I wish the attacks would have been a proper military strike with all of the rules and tradition that goes along with them, but how do you attack the United States Military through traditional means?

Re:Time for some highly unpopular opinion...

[NMerriam]

But you're still saying we should get MORE involved in other people's conflicts in order to solve the problem of uss being percieved as a "global policeman".

Whether its a "hands-off" or "hands-on" approach as you describe, or leaving people to fight it out amongst themselves, people still turn to US for some reason to solve THEIR problems, and then complain no matter the outcome.

So what should we do in the middle east? Stop selling weapons to Israel (because that's hands-off) but defend them with our troops? Then we'll be even more likely to be attacked by palestinians. Should we attack Israel and force them to give up their country? Should we stand by as Israel gets annihilated by surrounding nations? Then we'll get bombed by jewish extremists.

For all the wisdom everyone in every OTHER country has, why isn't Canada or the UK solving all the problems on earth? Are we stopping the canadian troops from landing in the middle east to solve everything?

Is it easier to sit back on the sidelines and monday morning quarterback? Is it easier to pass resolutions in the UN and then never actually do anything?

I'm not saying we're wholly virtuous, simply that there is no way the US gets even remotely treated fairly. We're expected to step in early, but not TOO early, and strike with force, precision, and strength, but not TOO much force or strength, and we better be 100% precise.

I'm not blinded by patriotism, as was suggested in the first message -- I'm blinded by the growing futility of us doing anything because of the paradox that every other nation has set before us. Inaction is punished, action is punished, delay is punished, immediate response is punished.

Everyone else has a lot to say about what we should do with OUR lives and OUR troops, until they actually show up, at which point everyone says what a blunder we've made and how we should just get out of the middle. everyone else seems to have all the answers, so why do they keep calling us?

Re:Time for some highly unpopular opinion...

[NMerriam]

However, one can not ignore the horrors we commit

But we haven't committed horrors any more atrocious than those committed by other large nations. We haven't come close to the international atrocities that came out of french colonialism. The british were somewhat better, because at least they brought education and public works where they went, but there is no shortage of 20th century bogeymen, and yet we get singled out.

we get singled out because we're the biggest, the most successful, and ultimately the "representative" of all the western nations. Individual policy decisions are the excuses upon which people can hang their hatred and jealousy.

If afghanistan or the UK or japan or any other nation had our influence they would have an equally long list of individual decisions to complain about because its impossible for us to function without making decisions that affect people.

Frequently we have to choose the lesser of two evils (as with most of our mid-east CIA trainees gone bad). The other option is to stay out of it until it reaches our shores. Well, it's reached our shores and I have a feeling we'll be sticking our fingers in a lot more pies, and people who have a problem with our foreign policy will have even more to hate us for in the future...

Re:Time for some highly unpopular opinion...

[denshi]

I think we *do* license some weapon designs. I'd have to check, which would entail caring a bit more than I do now.

I wish the attacks would have been a proper military strike with all of the rules and tradition that goes along with them, but how do you attack the United States Military through traditional means?

You, um, don't. Afghanistan is a land-locked country with no airforce save some helicopters. Actually attacking another country means ships, because planes simply can't carry enough cargo efficiently. Getting ships across to US soil demands, first, a sea port that they don't have, second, mastery of the seas, third, air command of the seas to attack subs. Then you can actually start planning an invasion. With all that as a *requirement*, you can see why a big war won't be seen again for a long, long time. A civil attack from Afghanistan would look more like "The Mouse That Roared" rather than D-Day. You might like to read Dunningham's "How to Make War" -- it's very informative on necessary logistics.

I compiled some of my rantings about difficulties of attacking the Talib in my latest journal entry.

Re:Time for some highly unpopular opinion...

[NMerriam]

So you're telling me that you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. I'm asking you about gradients between the extremes. Somehow I don't think that people would be as pissed about helping civilians as they would about the one-sided arming, financial and technical backing of one side of a faction, do you?

So you're suggesting a repeat of Somalia -- where we sent food with troops to protect it, but stayed out of the actual conflict? We simply went to provide support for civilians. The thanks we got was a lot of dead US soldiers. It seems combatants don't like for others to help civilians when THEY want to control the civilians.

So now we're back to the question of helping civilians and having both sides hate us, picking a side and having the other side hate us, or staying out and having the rest of the world hate us for "doing nothing".

Perhaps it is because the United States government makes their nation out to be the end-all, be-all of nations. Capable of anything, impenetrable and wealthy beyond all comparison.

Maybe it goes both ways. We certainly aren't lacking for suitors (to butcher my "prettiest girl at the party" metaphor). Maybe we're just a plain-looking girl but everyone else is desperate? Or wearing beer goggles? :)

But the track record your government shows indicates that they tend to be more interested in serving their own interests than genuinely helping others. That, as a foreign policy, will get you into trouble. Do you not agree?

I'm not sure -- will we be doing people a favor to be driven by 100% benevolent intentions? These nations were all very capable of playing the US off of the USSR, getting money and goods from both while avoiding any real commitments for 50 years. They are no strangers to capitalism or self-interest. Now that only the US is left, they seem shocked that we're not willing to keep sending them money just for being nice people.

We HAVE had mutually beneficial relationships with small nations who are willing to genuinely "grow" -- look at Turkey, for example, which is STILL shunned by the EU but has consistently been a close friend of the US. We have military bases there, but what we have REALLY gained is a stable nation in that part of the world, truly dedicated to democracy and ready to join the first world.

I understand what you're saying, and yes it would be great if we could all be friends, but ultimately I think Washington was right when he warned us to beware of foreign entanglements. We would love to go back to isolationism if it was possible, which of course it isn't.

BTW, sorry for all the cursing earlier -- I've been going through mood swings all week, from angry to despondent and everything in-between. There was actually a shouting match with three people in the office on thursday, over a video tape! Irritability is at an all-time high, that's for sure. Right now I'm at the "why bother?" stage of foreign policy. Its a good thing I'm not president, thats for sure...

Re:Time for some highly unpopular opinion...

[NMerriam]

that was a really insightful message -- and a good point, I think.

I tend to think america is more idealistic than most nations domestically, but internationally we're pragnmatic 100%.

The interesting cases are like the soviet union where idealism and pragmatism wound up being incompatible -- communism just didn't work in any pragmatic way, so you had this tension that built and built over the century.

But the US, we've been reasonably successful at recognizing that idealism only goes so far outside our borders -- but our desire for "fair play" has always been a limiting factor in our national psyche (note that I think this is a good thing, but a limit nonetheless).

Re:All of Islam must be punished for this!

[SlippyToad]

That can't be anything but a deliberate troll. Or a complete mindless idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about. Then again, there's so little difference between the two that I just couldn't tell.

Has Slashdot's own search been removed for good?

[kjj]

I was wondering if Slashdot was going to stick with "google search" indefinitely or is Slashdot going to bring back there own search engine. I really hope the regular Slashdot search comes back. Google just doesn't cut it when searching for something specific. I wanted to go back to a story about a benchmark and review of DDR motherboards used with Linux. So I tried the following search: linux ddr motherboards
and this is what I got:

Slashdot | Pentium 4 Under Linux
... Under Linux, I would not buy a P4 ... Re:Why didn't they use DDR RAM on the AMD? by Splork ... someone
out there selling G4 motherboards with standard form factors and ...
www.slashdot.org/articles/01/07/15/209215.shtml - 69k - Cached - Similar pages

Slashdot | Linux Intel Chipset Comparison
... it in march, and i run linux on it, and it performs ... Re:Athlon Motherboards... (Score:1)
by Diabolus (troy ... until we start seeing DDR mobos hit the shelves (any ...
www.slashdot.org/articles/00/12/18/056248.shtml - 46k - Cached - Similar pages

Slashdot | AMD Athlon Multi-Processor Under Linux
... on several single-CPU motherboards; check your favourite vendor's ... Quake3 demo benchmarks
under linux on the following boards ... with 256 meg ddr sdram running at ...
www.slashdot.org/articles/01/07/12/1838238.shtml - 101k - Cached - Similar pages

Slashdot | Intel To Drop Rambus Exclusivity, Support SDRAM
... problems with the newest linux kernels - but widespread - well ... the cost of producing
motherboards and chipsets, but ... need two seperate 400MHz DDR channels to get ...
www.slashdot.org/articles/01/07/26/1153225.shtml - 89k - Cached - Similar pages

That is just the first few but I looked through a number of them and I couldn't find the story I was looking for.

Pages/hits - the math doesn't seem right

[mgkimsal2]

The article stated 50 pages/second were being served. 50 pages/second on ONE machine would be 86400*50=4320000. 4 million page views. From *one* machine. The article indicated 6 web servers, IIRC. 6 * 4 = 24 million page views. I realize there are spikes in usage - there's not an even distribution. And I also realize that the DB was working overtime (as were the people) trying to serve up info. But at the end of the day they recorded 3 million page views. Something doesn't seem to add up.

Re:Pages/hits - the math doesn't seem right

[mgkimsal2]

Aha - I guess that was my bad assumption. If that's the case - 25 pages/second average, across 6 machines, that's fine. But I also don't think that's anything to get all that excited about. Yes, I understand there's a lot of large db calls going on, but medium sized hardware handling 4 pages per second (with images from another server it seems) just doesn't sound that impressive.

Piggy-backing on Terrorism

[rjamestaylor]

A statement like this is meant to strike fear in the hearts of those people he "fingered" or people who may associate with them. Isn't that the core definition of Terrorism...

You're right, Fawell, while not part of the atrocities on Tuesday, is piggy-backing on the tragedies to promote his ideological viewpoints. Not much different than the rejoicing Palestinians.

Yes, I'm a Christian. Yes, I wept when Rev. Billy Graham spoke today annoucing, unashamedly, the Gospel of Jesus Christ at the National Cathedral. And, yes, I rejoiced to hear the Muslim cleric standing with OTHER Americans on this day of prayer. But, I cannot stomach the transcript I have read in that Washington Post article. May the author of those words be shamed at the Lord's appearing.

Re:Disturbing development in US news stream.

[David E. Smith]

That was more likely to be your local cable system's
choice than that of the government. I've got about
150 channels (love that digital cable box), and
most of the ones that were off-air (i.e. their
transmitters dropped 1500 feet) were, at least here,
running simulcasts of CNN or MSNBC. (The religious
channels, oddly enough, are all local, and they
just kept right on with their preaching, not
breaking the network, presumably because they're
all run from a glorified TiVo box in someone's basement. :)

Christianity is at its worst...

[FreeUser]

... with reactions such as you describe. Christianity is (even more than Islam) an evangelical religion, in which there are strong pressures built into the belief system to convert others to one's own way of thinking, generally under the guise of "saving their soul." I have personally experienced this sort of pyschological assault from Christian sects ranging from Catholic to Mormonism (yes, they do qualify as Christian in that they worship Christ, even if the other sects won't claim them).

I won't go into a long diatribe at the offensiveness of this mindset or this behavior, but rather reference it in order to point out that, as a genre of religion which is bent on conversion, i.e. selling their viewpoint to others, Christian sects tend to be obsessed with appearance as much as substance. Whether it is cloaked as "setting a good example to others," "representing your faith/church to others," or "demonstrating through actions what it is to be a good Christian," none of which are as blatent as the Mormon adage of "avoid the appearance of evil," the underlying message is clear: appearances are at least as important as substance. With a mindset like that, reinforced every sunday from one's spiritual leaders, is it any suprise that people who look even a little non-mainstream garner the reactions like you describe?

We should kick ass and eradicate our enemies. Not in the name of God, not in the name of some religion, but in the name our our country and our people, which have been attacked and shall be avenged. Keep church and state where they belong, separate, and obliterate the bastards who committed these atrocities last Tuesday in the name of our secular, democratic instutions, leaving each of us to pray, and to grieve, in our own fashion, according to our own beliefs. And never make the mistake that just because someone doesn't share your beliefs, ethnic background, or skin color that they are in any respect less capable of grieving than you.

Re:Christianity is at its worst...

[AugstWest]

I totally agree with you, pulling religion into this ordeal is really not in anyone's best interest, but because we are America, it is inevitable.

To tell you the truth, I'm somewhat amazed at how well this country deals with non-Christian religions when you consider how deeply rooted Christianity is in out culture.

All of our songs of nationalism mention God, from "God Bless America" to the Star Spangled Banner -- which has the line "And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'" in the final, and rarely if ever sung verse.

Of course, none of this has anything to do with /.'s load-handling capabilities, which I am genuinely interested in.

Re:Christianity is at its worst...

[Pig Hogger]

I won't go into a long diatribe at the offensiveness of this mindset or this behavior, but rather reference it in order to point out that, as a genre of religion which is bent on conversion, i.e. selling their viewpoint to others, Christian sects tend to be obsessed with appearance as much as substance

Odd. Last night, I saw Contact and I was very surprised at the almost hippyish appearance of Josh Palmer...

Re:Christianity is at its worst...

[AugstWest]

ah, he was just beefcake. they ruined his character and created a love story where it wasn't necessary.

Re:Christianity is at its worst...

[BroadbandBradley]

this is why I WON'T cut my hair, I'm promoting being different and good.

Moral Of the story....

[Lumpy]

It looks like CNN and CNBC need to fire their web guys and hire the caliber of people that slashdot has. It's funny how a backwater news site has better technology and higer reliability and scaleability than the largest news sites on the web.... It really makes you think.

Thank you, Slashdot _community_!

[snake_dad]

Obviously, the Slashdot team deserves all the thank yous and kudos that they get here. But I would like to thank some other people as well.

Thank you Slashdot community, every one of you who posted insightful and informative comments and links, and everyone who took the time to moderate while they probably wanted to hunt for more info.

Slashdot was one of the few sites that kept us informed at work, and some co-workers actually first heard from the disaster here on slashdot. All the opinions and feelings expressed in the posts also helped us Europeans to understand even better the impact of this disaster on your society. (Please don't get me wrong, everyone here is probably as shocked and horrified as you are).

Once again, thank you, both Slashdot team and community!

no one will probably read this, but....

[poil11]

no one will probably read this, but this is a great story and i would have loved to read more about what was done. and in depth. i hope that someone reading my comment will put it in wired or shift or create or web techniques.

You got my vote this time, Commander.

[AtariDatacenter]

I'm normally one of the first to rant against Slashdot when it is hosed. (Kind of like upgrading to the new version of Slash when I said it really wasn't ready for prime time?) I mainly get bent out of shape because I expect this to be treated like a production site.

You did great this time. Much better than I would ever have expected. Grats, and thanks for the level of service.

"Unique IP" business rules; my.*.com

[yerricde]

Any business or ISP absolutely should be using proxy servers.

Proxies are good for static content, but many sites use dynamic content, assuming each human user has a unique IP address. For example, discussion sites such as Kuro5hin and Slashdot often limit the number of comments a given unique IP address can post; running all comments.pl posts through the proxy makes it look as though one user is flooding Slashdot with AC comments. Proxies can also have bugs: I've used a Novell BorderManager proxy that didn't even let me set persistent cookies.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with proxy servers it basiclly acts a lot like your browsers cache but it in general is far more effecient and is shared aong many users.

How can a browser or proxy cache dynamic content personalized for each user?

Chomsky, and *you*, are mistaken

[Pinball Wizard]

Not to speak of much worse cases, which easily come to mind.

They don't come to mind, because there are none. Funny how much you left out, such as the fact the pharmacy in question was owned by Osama Bin Laden.

This attack further justifies the promotion of missile defense, not the other way around. This is the first battle in the first real war of the 21st century, in which we won't have the luxury of fighting organized militaries, only nutcase terrorists. The terrorists will gain access to weapons of imaginable destruction. We have to root them out, and we have to defend ourselves against them.

Chomskys arguments make me sick. This incident proved who is on the side of good and who is on the side of evil. When we (justifiably) bombed Iraq, there were not parties in the street celebrating the deaths of Iraqis. We simply don't act like they do; respect for life is built into our culture.

Since the event, I have a much greater appreciation of the Israelis plight. They looked bad to us when we were comfortably enjoying life, but now that this tragedy has hit home its clear why the Israelis act so harshly toward the Palestinians. The extremist militant Islam factions WANT US DEAD. Their goal is not to establish peace with Israel, but to drive them into the sea. We can add America to that list.

I don't see how we can establish peace with or negotiate with those who want to destroy our way of life and replace it with a much more oppressive one. How can you have respect for societies that cut off the hands of theives or stone women to death for exposing their ankles? They hate us. They want us dead. I say, kill them first. Establish peace and democracy throughout the world.

Its pretty clear to me that this is now a battle between good and evil, and who is who in this world.

Re:Woe be the "CNN effect"

[unitron]

If CNN had linked to Slashdot...

"What happened to Slashdot?"

"It got Turnered, dude."

What I'm Thinking

[virg_mattes]

> I keep seeing this sentiment. What on earth are the purveyors of it thinking?

What I'm thinking is that he's doing exactly the same things, for exactly the same reasons, as those who started the chain of events that ended those peoples' lives. See below.

> Would you say, "Jerry Falwell killed 5,000 people. Send him
> to The Hague."? It sounds ridiculous, but you're not leaving any
> room for any other interpretation.

Well, if bin Laden is responsible for this tragedy, you can't officially say, "bin Laden killed 5,000 people" either, because it's not literally accurate. Few, however, would have difficulty placing responsibility if he was the mastermind. By the same token, Falwell doesn't directly commit crimes, but his inflammatory rhetoric inspires those who do.

> Hey, disagree with him, tell me he's rude, tell me he's a hypocrite,
> but don't put commentators on the same level as terrorists.

I don't think of Jerry as a commentator, I think of him as a hatemonger. He demonizes those with whom he disagrees and seeks to lay blame for all of the world's woes on those who are different from him. He hates others merely because of religious belief, and that makes him no better than the terrorists that committed these atrocities. The perpetrators of Tuesday's attacks killed thousands in one act, and Falwell's followers are trying to do it one clinic, one student, one religion at a time. But, it's only the scale that differs. It's still terrorism, and it's still evil.

Virg

Thanks!

[krmt]

I just wanted to throw out another note of appreciation to you guys. /. was my primary source for news on Tuesday, since I don't have a TV at home. You guys did a fantastic job and we all are indebted to you for the great work you've done. Thanks again!

Re:hardware spec's?

[Scoria]

Since search is down, I cannot provide you with a link to the Slashdot story about their changeover to a new cluster...

However, I believe that Slashdot utilizes four machines: three webservers and one machine dedicated to database serving. As far as I know, the database machine has either dual processors or one that is rather fast (see: 1.2ghz +).

Re:Has Slashdot's own search been removed for good

[FattMattP]

It doesn't help that Slashdot doesn't show the year of the stories either.

Apache::SizeLimit

[consumer]

I'm the maintainer of Apache::SizeLimit. I suggest you use the MAX_UNSHARED_SIZE setting. It's the most effective for heavilly loaded sites. If you have suggestions or questions about usage, send them to the mod_perl mailing list. I monitor it and will see them and respond.

Slashdot user comments and prayer

[Micah]

I agree Slashdot did a gre job on Tuesday.

I actually searched through the user comments for "prayer", expecting to see a flood of "how DARE you tell me to pray! What a crock!" but didn't find ANY.

I know that attitude runs among some people, but I'm pleased you could restrain yourselves this time. There really is a time for prayer, and this is certainly one of those times.

Re:Slashdot user comments and prayer

[kilgore_47]

Someone had to take the bait, so here goes:

Quiet respect for other religions is fine if the religion is harmless. However foreign policy, written mostly by White Old Christian Men, has made our country so hated that groups of people will spend years of their life training for a suicide mission to kill American citizens. As much as we hate these terrorists, I don't think any one of us here would spend years living in their country training for a suicide mission to kill civilians. Their hate runs deeper than ours, and, proportionally, they are a more religious people.

Religion is the opium of the masses.
It was religion, both Christian and muslim, that brought us this tragedy. So no, I won't shutup and be respectfull when you want to go on praying.

Also:
As firm beleiver in the seperation of church and state, I find the President declaring a "national day of prayer" downright un-American. The point is to remove religious interference or endorsement from the government. As an atheist I find it wrong to have the President thrust prayer in my face.

Re:Slashdot user comments and prayer

[Micah]

> It was religion, both Christian and muslim, that brought us this tragedy.

Uh, no.

This tragedy was caused by a radical, militant, fanatical misinterpretation of Islam.

Similarly, the actions of the current IRA and the past Crusades are the result of a similar misinterpretation of Christianity.

Neither religion teaches violence or hate.

> As firm beleiver in the seperation of church and state, I find the President declaring a "national day of prayer" downright un-American.

Well, for the record I also believe in the separation of church and state. Uniting them only screws up religion and the state both!

But remember that America was founded on principles relating to God and religion. Nearly all our founding fathers acknowledged God, if not Jesus. Therefore I think DIScouraging prayer is un-American. Note that nearly all religions (except atheism) involve prayer. No one is saying you have to pray to Jesus.

But Jesus is the only diety that is actually alive to HEAR the prayers. :-)

Re:Slashdot user comments and prayer

[Wyatt Earp]

As a firm believer in the seperation of church and state as held in the Constitution of the United States, I feel that it's fine to declare a "National Day of Prayer and Remeberance." See if you don't pray or ain't the praying type, you can remeber. And praying is pretty damned non-denominational...

In the Constitution it says...
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

The President's asking for a day of prayer and remeberance does not violate the 1st Amendment. As for removing religious interferance or endorsement, look at a Dollar bill, it says "In God We Trust."and it has Masonic symbolism.

Re:Slashdot user comments and prayer

[ConsumedByTV]

Sure you don't have to. Free Speech. But just cause you can, it doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. Just because you're callous, doesn't mean you have to go out of you're way to hurt other people.

Your statement says it all, and I agree with it. Just because you can, doesnt mean you should.

It hurts everyone when the nation is under attack by suspected non christians and the leader prays for the souls of the lost in a christian manner (I find this fucking sicking). GWB didnt even quote the bible correctly. He is not a christian anymore than I am.

Re:Slashdot user comments and prayer

[ConsumedByTV]

Nazi huh? Do do you even know what Nazi stands for? Funny its a socialist movement. Just because you are part of something doesnt mean that you are what it is for. Muslim, Satanist, Christian, communist, jew, american. Every group has its good and bad. Almost all have god in them, so its your call. Even the nazis simply had followers that did it because it was popular. Lots of people seem to think that they would be against nazis if it happeded to them in their own country. Well its AMERICAS FOREIGN POLICY that killed all of these people you fucking baffon! We trained the terrorists! Fight the US goverment that allows fucking insane people to kill innocent people. Replace those in power and the US wont be a target for this in the same way it is today!

Re:Slashdot user comments and prayer

[ConsumedByTV]

Or perhaps that one does not believe in god. After all its a personal choice, these terrorists might think that its a good thing in one book to die for a cause. Others will disagree. Allmost all religion has DOGMA, I havent met a single Atheist that had a strict inherent dogma relating to anything other than simple social orders that were nesscary.

Re:Slashdot user comments and prayer

[ConsumedByTV]

He was vegan, so perhaps he realised it was good to remove the bad from your life. God was in the mind of said terrorists right? Perhaps it was a skewed version of god in your mind but looks what this great god has created. You, and the terrorist both. And you arent equal to me, your not strong enough to stand up to others for your beliefes.

Re:Slashdot user comments and prayer

[ConsumedByTV]

This tragedy was caused by a radical, militant, fanatical misinterpretation of Islam.

Perhaps, or this is your take on it and the islamic faith.

Neither religion teaches violence or hate.
But both leave enough up to you to let you choose interpretations that fit your end.

But remember that America was founded on principles relating to God and religion
And the freedom there of.

Therefore I think DIScouraging prayer is un-American

And thats great, I am glad that I fight for your rights to say that. Now try real hard to think that if you didnt have that right where we would be.

Nearly all our founding fathers acknowledged God, if not Jesus.

Not all, but those that did certianly did not like the fact that they were being told what version of the bible to read. So when bush didnt read the king james version, but the "bible for dummys" and mis quoted the other version I find that offensive. He represents america as the shape of an image for all americans. That we are all stupid enough to eat up his two word speechs. We went from speechs that had the words "Better angels of our nature" to "apparent terrorist act"

But Jesus is the only diety that is actually alive to HEAR the prayers. > :-)

Then pray by voting for a change in foregn policy, thats whats going to save lives.

Re:Slashdot user comments and prayer

[ConsumedByTV]

The President's asking for a day of prayer and remeberance does not violate the 1st Amendment.

He doesnt represent me, and harm may come to me as a result of his statement.

As for removing religious interferance or endorsement, look at a Dollar bill, it says "In God We Trust."and it has Masonic symbolism.


Just because it has, doesnt mean it should. Get a pen and change it. I do.

Re:Slashdot user comments and prayer

[ConsumedByTV]

If not with religion, how else would you suggest venting all the feeling that the poeple of America have about this?

Well I guess you should let others off the hook for their crimes because they couldnt think of a better way to deal with their pain.

Can you think of anything more calming than a religious service of the types that have been going on these past few days after the Attack On America?

Yes I can. .Thought.

It might not be exactly constitutional to thrust prayer into your face, but it sure does help a whole lot of people out there.

Then dont do it, or change the laws.

No matter who you are (from my experience at least), religious services are very comforting, and alot of people need comfort right now. Tell that to the alter boys raped when they were looking for comfot. I guess if you think that all people get comfort out of that type of thing, by all means availible to you should get out more.

Re:Slashdot user comments and prayer

[ConsumedByTV]

I agree. Stop praying for the dead, no where in the bible does it say that it will help the souls of the dead. This is purely selfish. Stop the others from dying. Dont pray out loud, vote to change the policys that helped kill these people.

Religion is the opium of the masses.
Its also the cynide.

It was religion, both Christian and muslim, that brought us this tragedy. So no, I won't shutup and be respectfull when you want to go on praying

Correction it was a beliefe so strong (in god) that people forgot that respecting someone elses right to live was more important than a quick trip to heaven.

As firm beleiver in the seperation of church and state, I find the President declaring a "national day of prayer" downright un-American. The point is to remove religious interference or endorsement from the government. As an atheist I find it wrong to have the President thrust prayer in my face

Well as a Satanist, it makes no difference to me if its the president or the people pulling the puppets strings. Its a sign of the comming of war and the best way to touch a heart is to reach out to a feable mind.

Re:Slashdot user comments and prayer

[jgerman]

Bullshit, it was moronic fanatics that were so in-capable of thinking for themselves that they would sacrifice themselves for evil that killed those people. The blame cannot be placed on this country's policies in any way shape or form. Terrorist attacks have been going on for decades under various U.S. leaders and changing foreign policy. No matter what we do there will always be smaller countries (and people) who are envious of our prosperity and feel that they need to strike out. It's unfortunate that a tragedy like this becomes the vehichle for people like you to get on their political soap boxes.

Re:Slashdot user comments and prayer

[ConsumedByTV]

Bullshit, it was moronic fanatics that were so in-capable of thinking for themselves that they would sacrifice themselves for evil that killed those people.

And do you think they could have done this, if we didnt train them first?

Re:Slashdot user comments and prayer

[jgerman]

Ok don't train anybody, close our borders to everyone. No more immigration no more visas. Wait there may be some still here, ok all Muslims will be exiled. Oh wait, what if soemone converts. Damn, I guess we'll have to ship out anyone who doesn't pass a test for approved religions. Ok, problem solved, oh no I just had a thought, what if South America decides to start trouble. That's it all hispanics, get out. Oops we forgot about Africa, all you guys get out too, sorry, we just can't take any chances.

We can't help if the people we train and help turn on us. That's a fact of human nature, and has nothing to do with the situation at hand. But yes, I do believe that this event or one similar would have occured even if we had not trained bin Laden. We didn't train those that actually performed this deed though. And I'm really not sure what your question has to do with the quoted sentence.

Re:Slashdot user comments and prayer

[Micah]

> Neither religion teaches violence or hate.

> But both leave enough up to you to let you choose interpretations that fit your end.

RE: Islam -- I just saw a Koran expert on the Fox News Channel who basically said Bin Laden is a sinner in his own religion by encouraging people to commit suicide.

RE: Christianity -- It's quite clear that Jesus teaches peace, not violence. He was the recipient of the most horrible kind of violence immaginable, yet he prayed for their forgiveness. There are acts of violence mentioned in the Bible, but nowhere does Jesus say that is how we are to live today. The main act of violence and destruction will come "in the day of the Lord" when everything will be pretty much annihilated by Jesus Himself and POSSIBLY with the help of His people. That has clearly not arrived yet, and it will be obvious to everyone when it does.

Re:Slashdot user comments and prayer

[ConsumedByTV]

I will take the bait and bite this bullshit.
We can't help if the people we train and help turn on us. That's a fact of human nature, and has nothing to do with the situation at hand. But yes, I do believe that this event or one similar would have occured even if we had not trained bin Laden. We didn't train those that actually performed this deed though. And I'm really not sure what your question has to do with the quoted sentence.


We trained them because we wanted to use them for our objective at the time (to fight russia for us). This event might have happened as a result of something else, however IT DID NOT. Just because your going to die one day from *something* doesnt give me the right to KILL you.

Re:Slashdot user comments and prayer

[jgerman]

Bullshit my ass. Try reading the entire thread. The question was would this have happened had we not trained them. And my answer was yes. I know exactly why we trained them and that has nothing to do with it. You're analogy about death is meaningless, seriously try a little harder next time, it makes no sense.

Re:Slashdot user comments and prayer

[ConsumedByTV]

Well i suppose that it could have happened if someone else trained them, but I was also implying that they might not have ATTACKED us if we hadnt turned on them. Are they bombing germany? Or any other isreal supporters? Or are they attacking us first as a sign that turning your back on them is less than a good idea.

Re:No need to reverselookup hostnames for geotarge

[Kurt Gray]

It's bascially just top-level domain targeting, loosely referred to "geotargeting". Using HostnameLookups in Apache is not the optimal solution, I've tried other approaches and it ends up causing big problems and headaches. True geotargeting requires a large database (which some compnaies sell) that maps subnet address to city/country, and then you're talking about hitting another database in realtime for every page loaded and I don't want to do that Slashdot.

P0rN?

[tcc]

>about how Slashdot handled the gigantic load

Taco, if you ever want to make a XXX movie for nerds (with 'stuff' that matters :) ) You've just found an attractive title without even knowing it :)

why God let it happen

[Micah]

Well, God "lets" lots of things happen. There is a lot of evil and hate in the world, and God has given us free will. Hard to accept, but true.
As for specifically why God let it happen, I think there are a few possibilities. He wants to get our attention. Badly. Now you're saying "then why doesn't he just show himself!" Well, to some, He does - either directly or indirectly.

But God showing himself often doesn't do too much good. The Old Testament is full of stories about God physically manifesting Himself to His people. And guess what -- they kept getting farther and farther away from Him. it finally took their exile to Babylon to really get their attention, and there was a joyous celebration upon the people's return to isreal.

In a similar way, I really believe that God will use this to draw many, many people to Himself. He works in all things for good for those that love Him. What Satan has meant for evil, God has meant for good.

I'm not God of course, so I'm just spouting of speculation, but I am fairly convinced there's some truth in this.

Re:why God let it happen

[Micah]

> The next step is taking responsibility for your own thoughts and actions - we'll welcome you into the world of the conscious when you do, you know.

I have, believe me. Are you suggesting that just because my thoughts lead me to believe in God I'm not in the world of the conscious? That seems a tad short sighted. (Correct me if that's not what you're saying, but it sounds like it...)

> Do you perhaps feel that since you give your will to God, you are somehow worthy of better understanding man's relationship with a deity?

Maybe not more worthy. And no I can't understand it all. Better than others who don't accept God -- well, sure. My understanding of man's relationship with God is based on what the Bible says and on experiences.

> If you don't believe what the church says, then quite often you wouldn't comprehand God as a figure who can reveal himself.

I'm not sure if it's a matter of comprehending a God who can reveal Himself. He is just so different than anyone who doesn't know Him or believe in Him can possibly immagine. Either you are open to Him or you aren't. And He Himself makes it easier for some to open up to Him than others. No, i don't understand why that is, but it does appear to be true. I believe anyone can be saved, but some will have to make more sacrifices than others.

Re:why God let it happen

[Micah]

> Is one of the church's key teachings not that you must give your heart, mind , desire, 10% of your income, etc to the Lord?

Heart, soul, mind, strength -- yes. That's what Jesus said is the greatest commandment. And love your neighbor as yourself is right after that. Tithing is a Very Good Idea(TM) but is not a foundational teaching.

> Would that not constitute giving up your sovereignty to God through the church?

Yes, God is sovereign and therefore deserves our full being. The church is just the body of believers.

> Many of the 'heathens' you fail to consider the position of actually came from this background.

Yes, I'm aware of that.

For what it's worth, I don't think I'm "intolerant" and I don't want to push God on anyone who doesn't want Him. I recognize that religion is everyone's choice, and if they want to reject it they can. My job is only to stand up for Jesus to the best of my ability and do what Jesus commanded -- that is love my neighbor, forgive others, do justice, and of course preach the Gospel. Whether any particular person believes is really up to them and the Holy Spirit.

I fully see why people such as yourself find it hard to believe in the message. It *does* sound ridiculous if you look at it from a worldly perspective. Everything about God is totally opposite of what people expect. The last shall be first; the first last. He reveals Himself to the oppressed, not the powerful. Even the Jews expected a Messiah to come who would be politically powerful. They had no idea, even though it was prophesied, that He had to come from a normal family, suffer, and die.

In spite of how ridiculous it seems, I have no doubt about its truth. Everything about the human body and how and why we're here screams we have a Creator. We have intelligence, minds, consciences. Humans in general have a longing to know God (although some people have managed to quench that hole through their own desires).

But why Jesus? Well, the Bible is probably the most consistent book ever written, at least over the span of millennia, and on all the issues that are important. (I won't say it has NO contradictions, because there are a few minor ones, but they can generally be explained by the memorization practices of the Jews.) But about the character of God, the nature of Man, our need to be reconciled to God, and all that, is 100% consistent from Genesis to Revelation. I'm reading the Bible straight through for the first time this year -- I'm almost done and it has only bolstered my confidence in its consistency.

Then there's what I've seen. God does comfort people. He does heal people. He does miracles.

Then there's fulfilled prophesies. Israel returning as a nation is probably the biggest that we can see today. All other ancient cultures are totally destroyed, but not the Jews, God's "chosen" people.

Then there's evil. I really think the nature of evil today matches precisely how the Bible describes Satan. Satan is a liar, a theif, a murderor. His only goal is to destroy the knowledge of God and replace it with counterfeit crap. Take astrology and the occult for example. Those things have real drawing power, but they're not of God.

So I hope this gives you a better idea of where I'm coming from. If you chose to ignore or reject the message, I'll respect you for that. I just hope and pray that you'll give it serious thought before doing that!

Re:why God let it happen

[Micah]

> ...so as to completely preclude rational discussion with a broader perspective.

Well, there's a place for rational discussion and endless philisophical arguments. Both sides (atheists and theologins) can do that quite well. But when one knows of God's existence (and I mean KNOWS), what point does all that play? When one has experienced a real God, arguments against His existence (or presence in our lives) have a way of becoming moot. I know you won't like that answer, but like I said, everything about God is different than people expect.

> Yes God is a sovereign being, but so are you

Cool, maybe I should go try to create a solar system or two...

> That being said I personally believe that God is a being either unaware of our conscience existance, or simply too complex an entity to be capable of our limited conscious thought

OK, so you do believe in some kind of God?

Anyway, that statement is a bit absurd. Why wouldn't a God that created us and the universe be able to understand us and our thoughts?

> The church is not God, yet it claims to be.

Well, mine doesn't. Some claim the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church as pretty infallable. I do not.

> and the another 10% to an organisation who spend it on amongst others things:

Yikes, I dunno where you got your ideas of how churches spend tithe money. Mine uses it to pay the pastors, keep up the buildings, send missionaries, and give help to community members who need it (benevolence fund).

As for attitudes towards women, the church (as in body of believers) is fairly progressive in that area. My church allows women to do anything but be senior pastor. I do fully agree with Biblical princiles such as the husband is the head of the house, but he should make all decisions in love for the wife and kids. Beyond that, I think that the Bible's description of the role of women is mostly tied to their early culture. There certainly were strong women in the Bible -- Ruth and Esther to name a couple.

> 1) Reconcile "dont want to push yadda yadda yadda" with "My job is....

What I mean is that I should speak to those who want to hear it, but don't interfere with those that wish to reject it. Christians have tried that in the past, it doesn't work, nor should it.

> Jesus may have told his disciples to go out and preach (did he, I can't remember?)

Yes, the Great Commission -- go preach the Gospel in all the world and make disciples and baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit... and that is for us as well, not just the disciples.

> ...my amazement that a group of people who have no problem beleiving the stories about Jesus, ie: virgin birth...

well what can I say... you believe the Bible or you don't. If Jesus was God incarnate, and the Gospel accounts are real accounts of His life, as I believe is the case, why should I not believe all that?

> eject out of hand, spirituality, esp, numerology (based on actual observed patterns over millenia), astrology (likewise), tarot reading, divination of any type, natural healing, etc.

That's what I mean by Satan's counterfeit miracles. God can also impart wisdom to people -- it has happened to me and many others I know. Why would you want to ask Satan with all those things when you can ask God?

> Leaving it up to God, however, ensures that no man will see it is done

Justice shouldn't be "left to God" -- He commanded us to see that it is done! (And yeah, I need to really see how I can improve in that area, for one)

> We have clearly evolved from the primate family of species on this planet.

I won't get into that. I think God could have used either 6-day creationism or evolution to put us here. While I tend to believe in the former, proof of evolution is definitely NOT proof against God

> Now, who told you to generalise and say humans have a longing for God?

That has pretty much been the case since ancient times. What culture has never had a religion?

> This book has changed so much from generation to generation, language to language, spin artist to spin artist that if there are any books that have lasted so long, this is by far the least consistant.

Whoa. Sure there have been translations, some more accurate than others, but I mean what the book SAYS -- from Genesis to Revelation. We do have fairly good ancient manuscripts for most if not all of it. And it all agrees on the character of God: He is holy, powerful, loving, disciplining, but also seeks vengeance for sin. His anger is quickly extinguished when one repents.

> you can say there are definately bits that are wrong, then you'll need to identify all of those bits

Perhaps so... I'm talking things like:
1) one account says Judas gave the blood money of Jesus back to the religious leaders, who bought the field in which he hung himself, another says he bought the field himself
2) One account says Jesus rode a donkey into Jerusalem, another says a colt.
Big deal? Not really in the grand scheme of things. So we need to look at what the Bible is consistent about, and it definitely is about the character of God and how we are to be saved (by faith in Jesus).

> The remainder of your post degraded into speculation

Huh? It's what I've seen and experienced and how I belive in God, and I think it's logical.

slashdot has performed...

[freaq]

...admirably.

thank you, rob & crew.

upon hearing rumour of what happened, and not being able to access any of my bookmarked news sites, take a wild guess what url i typed in.
up it came, immediately, with usable information.

good? yes. you've done well. if you still need to break down, go ahead. i find no fault in tears.

tragedy is not a strong enough word for the recent calamity. i (a canadian, if it matters) cried also.

peter

(i sin ø)
e

Re:Wow. You hate a lot don't you.

[AugstWest]

Make fun? Was I cracking jokes? Did I claim superiority? Where did I even REMOTELY compare them to the terrorists?

I was raised Catholic, and was an altar boy for years. I've had my share of religion and religious education. I am still a Christian, and see no reason not to admit that.

Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are a blight on the Christian faith. Statements like the ones they made that started this thread can turn millions off from the faith, especially women (FEMINISTS brought this on our country?).

I never compared them to the terrorists, I simply stated that God can't be too pleased with them. I used hyperbole, admittedly, but it fit into the context. I think you may have misread my statement.

Also, I don't hate.

Video Game Sabotage

[dmaxwell]

Long ago in my wasted youth 3 or 4 of us would play lots and lots of "Atari". You know back when playing video games at home meant "playing Atari". I could look out the window and see velociraptors on the hunt.

Anyhoo, sometimes one of us would be on a really long streak that the rest of us wanted to end. When someone has racked up 60,000 points at River Raid then he needs to DIE because I wanna play damn it! The rest of us would exchange knowing glances then I would say, "Wow Chris! You're awesome today! I've never seen anybody go this far on one plane......" Blam! Works every time.

Re:Pray [etc] For President Bush

[!coward]

Let me just start by stating 2 things:

- I'm portuguese (as in Europe) which means that I might not take things as personal as some of you.

- I don't like the guy (G. W. Bush). I honestly believe you chose an underqualified person for President (although the voting majority didn't actually vote for him, your system made him the winner -- which is ok, it _is_ the same system you've used for years.. if it's wrong, change it and it won't happen again).

First of all, IMHO, there is no excuse, no cause, no ideal, nothing that can justify the killing of people. We define certain circumstances in the law in which this is tolerable: self-defense, etc.. Terrorism, whatever form it may take, isn't one of them. It is intolerable. We all live on the same planet, depend on basically the same things to survive and, most of all, belong to the same species. We all have to accept and live by a certain number of rules in order to make it possible for _everyone_ to have as good of a life as possible. To think that one is superior to any other because you or him/her think/act/feel different is not only stupid, it's a waste of the cognitive faculties we've enhanced, as a species, over thousands of generations.

But the truth is, things don't work. The "system" doesn't work for most people. People die every day of hunger, dehidration, or lack of medicine as common as rain in most industrialized countries. I'm not saying we should try to understand the people who commit acts of terror. At least, not to look for excuses for there are none. But it does seem a terrible waste (not to say an insult to all the deceased) when we fail to realize that any 'normal' human being would never do something as hideous as this Tuesday's attack if things were ok.

The Al-Koran is, unlike 'popular' opinion, a very 'open-minded' text. The message is not about hate, or pain, or punishment, but rather of self-enlightenment, respect and tolerance, much like the "New Testament" for christians or catholics. So why do we see this kind of fanatic behaviour (suicide attacks, I mean) repeatedly associated with arabic people? Could it be that they feel, somehow, _we_ are to blame for a lot of their problems? Could it be that, to some extent, they're actually right?

When you see priests or vicars, like Falwell, feeding intolerance into people do you imediately generalize it to the whole population of priests and vicars? Or their believers? Why don't we extend the same curtesy to arabic people? Why don't we accept the likely possibility that these people have been mis-lead by other people who should know best, but don't? If you feel down, feel that the whole world is against you, wouldn't you be a little more willing to embrace such extremist views?

Should the people involved in the terrorist attacks of the 11th be brought to justice? Damn right! But notice I said 'justice'. We can't fight terrorism with some new form of terrorism (state or country-sponsored assassinations/attacks ARE forms of terrorism). There has been no declaration of war. No state or country or protectorate has declared war against any NATO country. The point I'm trying to make is: you either consider every person in Afghanistan (sorry, can't spell it) a terrorist or otherwise guilty of the attacks on the planes, WTC and Pentagon -- which would justify the envolvement of armies (it _would_ be the same as a declaration of war), or you stipulate that there _are_ people in Afghanistan who have _nothing_ to do with what happened last Tuesday. In this later case, there is nothing that justifies treating those people the same way you/me/we all want to treat terrorists.

What am I trying to say? Generically speaking: I find it already troubling that my country can go to war for reasons I totally disagree with and, I, along with every other citizen of my country (regardless of their views towards that conflict) would pay the price. But it troubles me more to know that, if NATO really gets involved and we end up bombing the hell out of Afghanistan, we will be opening up a precedent whereas any criminal actions by a citizen or group of citizens of any country, or living in any country, can lead to that country becoming extinct. I shudder to think that anyone can be killed because of someone else's actions. In a way, however inexcusable the reasons might have been, the people on the airplanes, Pentagon, WTC towers and those who came to help, who died last Tuesday, died just because of that. They payed the price _someone_ stipulated for things they did not do.

This is the only oportunity we have to really do things right. To show that we DO believe in democracy, in tolerance, and in the principle 'innocent until _proven_ guilty'. And to prove that, no matter how much our hearts call for blood, from sheer shock and pain, we _can_ act as we all say we all should.

I'm not worried if G W Bush is sad because he doesn't want to be the 1st person to use a nuke in a non-war scenario. I'm worried about the thousands, maybe millions of people who will suffer, directly or indirectly should that come to pass.

I sympathise with you all. I may not agree with a lot of the USA's foreign policy, but I do not confuse it with the american people. Please don't do the same with the afghans. If their regime, government, whatever, is somehow responsible (aiding and abeding, for example), then there _are_ solutions out there better than massive destruction. Economic sanctions (Iraq, Germany after WWII), blocking that country out. International Courts to judge all the people suspected of involvement, instead of summary executions (P.R. of China, anyone?). Isn't that how things are supposed to work?

These people have shown they do not know what democracy, freedom and tolerance mean. Let's try to show everyone that we, at least, do.

Re:You are going to be scared....

[Moonshadow]

Clancey is getting to me.

In Executive Orders, terrorists flew a plane into the White House, killing most of the major gov't officials that were there for a ceremony. Sound famaliar?

Don't remember which book it is (Never finished it), but there's one about a small terrorist group gathering materials and machining a nuclear bomb to set off in a football stadium in Colorado. The possibility of it seemed to be almost zero...but so did the possibility of a hijacked plane being flown into the Pentagon. What's scary is that it's not as hard as it seems. With bin Laden's resources, he could have procured the materials and gotten people to carry a nuke-in-a-briefcase into the WTC, and taken out all of Manhattan. Not that I'm saying what happened isn't terrible - it is - but the possibilities for terrorists these days are WAY past frightening.

Terrorists don't care about diplomacy, they don't care about the politics, they care about causing pain, terror, death, and destruction. How are we supposed to fight an enemy that is free to use weaspons many times more destructive than our government will dare to use? How can you guarantee safty?

Look at me...I'm turning into a paranoid conspiracy theorist.

Re:Uh...

[DunbarTheInept]

The deaths occured because Communism itself was treated like a relgion of state worship. They killed the religious because the religious were their competition. They killed them because of how alike they were, not how different.

Now, the day you can convince me that all atheists must necesarilly be communists, you might have a point.

Slashdot kicks ass:

[A_Non_Moose]

Like Taco, one of the major sites I hit was cnn and msnbc ...after, mind you... loading up /.

Well, everyone where I work (well, now used to work as of today) was feeling so out of it because there is literally no cable access in the entire building(s).

People wanted *information* and the tradegy also opened a few eyes with us being asked (the techs).

My response was "slashdot.org is the best place to go...and don't forget to read the comments section which will have more valuable information by support from other techs and people out there".

Heck, even today one of the Directors asked where to go for even more info...and once again, I recommended slashdot.org with the "down and dirty" explanation 'this is a community of "nerds/techs" that kept the information flowing by giving up their time and resources to keep the rest of the world up to date.'

Some of my coworkers asked why, to which I would smile and say "what does the "I" in IT stand for, but "Information".

Moose.

Oh, and over at arstechnica.com's "lounge" section there was a comment that deserves to be on /., as it was very insightful and correct in a backhanded way:
"We seem to project to the rest of the world that we are 'fat, lazy, and kind of goofy', but what most of those that dislike us forget is: when you piss us off we tend to fight like cornered badgers (Tooth and Nail or the movie "tombstone" the "I'm coming and I'm bringing hell with me for those that don't get the badger reference).

I *am* Interesting and I *am* Insightful and IF ppl would read my FSCKing comments they'd see that. (me ranting after several post, esp after losing a +4 to database corruption...now..who the hell cares? It ain't that important in the grand scheme of things.
Amazing what happens when you actually get on board the "cluetrain".

Heh, I've babbled enuf, thanks to everyone + world.

Re:You are going to be scared....

[cybrpnk]

Actually, the crash of a plane occurred at the end of Debt of Honor and was also referred to at the beginning of Executive Orders. The Colorado nuke scene is the climax of The Sum Of All Fears. Ole Tom will have trouble topping what's happening these past few days and in the weeks to come....

News for nerds,

[larien]

...Stuff that matters. What happened on Tuesday was news for everyone, nerd or not, and it most certainly mattered.

Thanks to the team for keeping the site up (just, but better than most news sites), even if I did have trouble getting logged in that afternoon. However, I put that down to the load you must have had and shrugged. I guess I must have been hitting the static servers.

Finally, the obligatory sympathies to all involved, in whatever way. Personally, I'm surprised it was only 5,000 missing given that the WTC could hold 50,000. 5,000 deaths is still a tragedy, but it could have been much, much more, so we have to thank the small mercies.

Does MySQL Scale?

[fm6]

I'm no DBMS expert, but I can't help but think that Slashdot has outgrown MySQL. The DBMS is already unable to keep up even with normal usage. Making static copies of the most heavily-used queries strikes me as a really kludgy workaround.

Real DBMS people will correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't MySQL's problem with multi-field keys a symptom of bad query optimization? As I understand it, MySQL is just a simple SQL interpreter running on top of a simple ISAM engine. What's missing? A query optimizer, which expedites data access in much the same way that a optimizing compiler expedites execution of native code.

Of course, you'll want to stick to open-source engines. But that still gives you plenty of choices. Have a look at Interbase, its Firebird variant (see IBPhoenix.com for Open Source efforts for both engines), and, of course, Postgres.

Re:Does MySQL Scale?

[VB]

So, you're suggesting Oracle could do better on the same hardware? Perhaps you could provide a more compelling argument if you showed similar stats to what these 6 little servers produced over the past couple days running on an Oracle setup.

MySQL is the fastest database on the planet. It lacks features: not speed. If you outgrow this database, you switch to which one?...

A paperclip for reception!

[chuck]

Ha! I used a staple and an RCA cable!

Man, I thought I was the only one with such ghetto-style equipment! :)

Re:So why then is Slashdot always down ?

[CyberKnet]

however, I believe that those regional pages are probably (on a country-wide basis at least) generated dynamically to a static page which is then served up to the masses. It is also entirely possible that close zip codes are grouped together also in a static page.

These pages may well be generated every ten minutes, to appear dynamic, but to say the least, this is far below slashdot's level of (normal level) 25 pages per second, let alone the peak of 60 pages per second.

Just my opinion, make what you will for your own.

Your fine work during the 911 disaster

[khaladan]

Thank you. You were my main on-line information source. CNN got evened-out later in the day, but from my point of view Slashdot never faltered. I was deeply affected by the events and stayed home all day and I *needed* information. Even now I'm deeply shaken, but I appreciate you guys almost as much as the rescue workers.

Khaladan's dad

Re:No need to reverselookup hostnames for geotarge

[bodin]

But hey. They ARE ALREADY hitting another database today as they do the DNS-reverselookup. Making that lookup more simple by reducing and grouping nets into a small .cdb or other LOCAL FIXED DATABASE, will speed up that process indeed. It's just a matter of interpreting the ipindex in an intelligent way in respect to what the result is used for. Not name-mapping but actual geotargeting.

Re:Read the Old Testament

[Paul Komarek]

Almost correct, but you messed up the conclusion. Falwell and Robertson want the populace to pay them money.

I don't believe they much care about love, or else they wouldn't hate so often. Since God==Love (according to *their* *own* sources), they must not care about God. I doubt they care at all about the populace repenting or doing anything regarding God at all. Even if you switch to God~=Love or God iff Love, I don't think this argument changes in any substantial manner. If they want to prove me wrong, they should quit hating.

Of course, I doubt *they'd* agree with my analysis...

-Paul Komarek

Possible project?

[harmonica]

True geotargeting requires a large database (which some compnaies sell) that maps subnet address to city/country, and then you're talking about hitting another database in realtime for every page loaded and I don't want to do that Slashdot.

Wouldn't that be a nice open content project for the open source software community? Everybody contributes, many can profit from this, everybody's happy (except for the guys selling this).

Any comments on how one could set this up?

NNTP

[harmonica]

Yeah, whatever happened to the planned NNTP access to /. comments? Read-only would be great, as a start.

Akamaized site

[Cato]

One of the few sites that was accessible on Tuesday was washingtonpost.com - they Akamaized every page on the site (not just the graphics).

Re:Has Slashdot's own search been removed for good

[Cato]

Exactly... Slashdot should start showing the year - now that it has been going for more than a year :)

Not himself, no... (& scarey quote)

[leonbrooks]

I doubt you'll ever hear a statement like: an extremist atheist bin-laden follower today killed himself and 100's of others

OK, how about this: ``an extreme Atheist, Joseph Stalin, and his followers some time ago killed not himself but millions of others, especially Orthodox Christians.'' I am neither an Orthodox Christian nor an Atheist, extreme or otherwise, just calling the shots where they hit.

Stalin is far from being alone. The only difference between an extreme Atheist and an extreme InsertReligionHere is that the extreme Atheist generally won't kill ``themselves and'' - they'll just kill the other people. In principle, the Muslim kamikaze is better than the Atheist murderer because (s)he is not asking others to die when (s)he refuses to.

it was the senior President Bush that said there is no place in America for atheists

That's quite frightening. America is most definitely a place for Atheist, Christian, Muslim, Jainist, whatever, according to its key founding principles. If Dubya is saying otherwise, it's time to pack and move somewhere that really does grant you freedom on conscience. Australia's Constitution is pathetically weak on the topic when compared to the US Constitution, but our politicians have also done less work to undermine what protection it contains.

In times of stress and tragedy ...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

It's predictable that soulless people with an agenda to push will capitalize on tragedy in order to push it. The degree of their true callousness can be measured by how quickly they move to do so.

In times of stress and tragedy - like the death of a loved one or kilodeaths from a terrorist attack - people will respond to the pain by episodes of "displacement behavior" - frantically doing more of whatever it is that they do normally as their specialty.

(For instance: I recall a lawyer who, in the first quarter-hour after being informed of his grandfather's death, thought of at least four possible suits that could result.)

This is generally a GOOD reaction to have.

Those whose specialty is particularly useful to the community in times of trouble (such as the slashteam or the fire/police departments) put on an exceptional burst of productive effort.

Those whose specialty might get in the way usually figure this out in a short time and shift to doing something else.

Those whose specialty is not particularly useful in the situation are kept busy and can be ignored until they get over the shock and find something more useful to do - and even if their specialty is not useful to the particular situation it may be useful to the general health of the community in the long run.

Those whose specialty is totally irrelivant to both the immediate problem and the general health of the community continue to be totally irrelivant.

Of course different members of the Slashdot community will have different opioions of where Katz falls in this list. B-)

The Community Was Served - and by another, too.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Slashdot did provide a very valuable service the day of the attack.

Absolutely!

Take into consideration that during the day at some point all major media web sites died.

I noticed that one other survived: The Drudge Report

Matt's site stayed up when the rest went down. (It also has taken a lot of load in the past, and as a static, hand-edited, HTML page it doesn't have as much potential for database trouble when the going gets rough.) He did a fine job of finding and linking relevant major-media news items as they showed up - and you could often figure out what was up from his summary when the media outlet went down shortly after. He also found stories the US media won't cover - such as the outrage among many Moslems at the attack and a hint at the enormous charitable contributions in Moslem countries for the victims in the US.

But Matt's largely one-man show and dependence on the regular media put him at a disadvantage to Slashdot's fine team and enormous user base - many of whom were on-scene for the events or had expert info to contribute.

Fortunately, comparasons are not necessary. The two outlets complemented each other very well. With Matt to find virtually everything of interest in the old media (and to provide a pipe to keep politically-incorrect stories from being hidden), Slashdot to bring in info the old media miss (and provide ANOTHER pipe for the non-PC), and both sites up throughout (whether through simplicity or heroic effort), internet users who surfed both were some of the best informed people on the planet.

Clarificiation: organised religion

[leonbrooks]

I don't like organized religion

Actually, if you look very closely at the problem, you'll find that the issue is generally the organisation, not the religion.

Here in Australia, we have unions, which may be somewhat different to American unions. Most unions here have gone from being a vital lever for employees to use against expliotative employers, to being exploitative self-serving bullies in their own right. Unions should serve freedom of choice, but they've actually reduced freedom of choice. This becomes clear when you see building sites covered with ``NO TICKET, NO START'' stickers. It's not as if the building companies have any choice left, and regardless of what the law says, the reality is that if you want to work on a large site, you must join a union and you must continue to obey the union.

It's almost the same in Science. In many disciplines, you must believe in ``natural history'' (ie a theory of origins which supports Atheism in particular) in order to hold a job. If you don't do this, even if you hold no particular religion, it becomes effectively impossible to publish in mainstream journals, regardless of the value [detailed] of your work.

This is a problem to do with people, and with the nature of mankind - about which religion has much to say, some of it true - not with the particular area of dispute.

I noticed the static pages

[GC]

I noticed on Tuesday that Slashdot was serving me static pages, unfortunately that just kept making me try to login time and time again and trying to refresh the page to get my personalised one up.

The fact is - unless I can "browse at 2" Slashdot becomes pretty much unnewsworthy - especially as I was relying on user comments for information.

My boss eventually got a 14" TV set up in our area.

Sky TV in the UK kept their website up for the entire day, which is good as they run my company's software - and from the links in the original story at Slashdot I would imagine that they would have been /.'d a few times over.

Good idea, but gzip takes grunt/cacheing

[leonbrooks]

static content can be stored and transmitted in gzip format, [...] pages here end up averaging 28% of their original size

Excellent idea, but gzip sucks up compute, and the alternative to bogging the webserver's CPU is to cache a second, gzipped version of each fresh page as it takes its first hit - which of course soaks up RAM and maybe causes (slow) swapping. You need two copies because some browsers don't do gzip, and some browsers will be coming through firewalls which strip all headers except those in a short list which often doesn't include the I-understand-compression header (thwack forehead).

Things like video streams, sound and images are generally already compressed to the gills anyway (and anyone who uses BMP instead of, say, PNG is too incompetent to be running a real website anyway). As I understand ./'s position, actual bandwidth was never an issue for them.

In short, it would not be a clear-cut decision for them.

Knee. Jerk.

[fm6]

The term "kneejerk reaction" is overused, but this is clearly an example of such. Not only did I not mention Oracle (probably my least favorite DBMS!), I specifically limited my comparisons to other Open Source engines.

Any statement of the form "X is the Yest Z on the planet" is simply ignorant, at least in the context of software. The variables that affect performance are endless. Any claim that a product performs better than anybody else in all situations has to be viewed with extreme skepticism.

In any case, assertions about the qualities of any software product needs to be backed by specifics. Such as explanations of the technology and the theory behind it, why X is better than Y, and in what circumstances etc. Even benchmarks can be helpful, provided you avoid the self-serving kind that are little better than the bigoted ignorant crap you're feeding us.

Re:Knee. Jerk.

[VB]

The use of Oracle as an example was arbitrary. Had I used MSSQL, I'm sure you're rather harsh response would have been even more so.

I don't expect you'll respond any more rationally to this post, so just don't bother.

This was not a "knee-jerk" response. It's verbiage was compiled specifically for your original post with the tone of that post in mind. I did my best to stay objective and not get personal. Perhaps you're capable of the same.

Re:Knee. Jerk.

[fm6]

I'll work on my rationality if you'll work on your reading skills. And you still haven't backed up your claim that MySQL is faster than any other DBMS.

Re:Read the Old Testament

[ksheff]

No, I think they really want people to repent and change their ways. They want to be paid at some point along the way too, which is one reason I don't like many evangelists, esp. television ones. Many appear to be more concerned with building up their own little empires than teaching God's Word.

The "Hate the sin, love the sinner" concept is a bit tricky when a person defines themselves by the sin and revel in it. Some people take this too far and give up on trying to distinguish between the person and the actions. On the other end of the spectrum, people take the warm & fuzzy "God is love" concept and twist it into tolerating anything on the basis of "we are supposed to love everyone and if we tell someone they're doing something wrong, we're being judgemental not loving" which pulls in "judge not, lest ye be judged also" into the fray too. IMHO, the latter has more to do with trying to stop people from being judge, jury and executioner than those who want to warn others of errors.

Additional Quotes

[cybrpnk]

I really believe we are going to use a nuke before this is all over to show everybody thet they mess with the USA on our own soil at their peril. Check out this from today's "talking heads" on TV (from www.drudgereport.com):

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld this morning refused to rule out the use of nuclear weapons in America's coming battle with terrorists.

Appearing on ABC's THIS WEEK, Rumsfeld was asked if a possible tactical nuclear strike would be used.

"Can we rule out the use of nuclear weapons?" questioned ABC's Sam Donaldson.

RUMSFELD: You know, that subject--we have an amazing accomplishment that's been achieved on the part of human beings. We've had this unbelievably powerful weapon, nuclear weapons, since what 55 years now plus, and it's not been fired in anger since 1945. That's an amazing accomplishment. I think it reflects a sensitivity on the part of successive presidents that they ought to find as many other ways to deal with problems as is possible.

DONALDSON: I'll have to think about your answer. I don't think the answer was no.

RUMSFELD: The answer was that that we ought to be very proud of the record of humanity that we have not used those weapons for 55 years. And we have to find as many ways possible to deal with this serious problem of terrorism.

And if, Sam, you think of the loss of human life on Tuesday and then put in your head the reality that a number of countries today have other so-called asymmetrical threat capabilities--ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, chemical weapons, biological weapons, cyber warfare--these are the kinds of things that are used in this era the 21st century. And a germ warfare attack anywhere in the world would bring about losses of lives not in the thousands but in the millions.