If you're not interested in the article, why on earth were you interested in the comments?
Anyway, there's only one coherent argument for doing or not doing something, and that's whether the positives outweigh the negatives. That also applies to posting articles which are different from most Slashdot articles. If you have an argument that the negatives outweight the positives, fine. But saying "Slashdot is not your blog" is not an argument. br.
Again, be substantive, not articulate. Think MIT, not Harvard.
I thought I replied to this already, not sure if the post got deleted, but:
Definitely agree on #1 and #2. I'm not sure about #3 because I think most big sites already generate most of their HTML content dynamically, which means it won't be cached anyway, or shouldn't be.
Do you have an *argument* that the analysis in the post is incorrect? A grammatically correct sentence is not an argument. Be substantive, not articulate. Think MIT, not Harvard.
ShapeShifter might work or it might not (probably not), but I don't see how https has anything to do with it.
HTTPS are easy for a bot to access, to crawl, to test passwords against, and to log in to if the bot has valid credentials. HTTPS prevents eavesdropping, not automated access.
ShapeShifter is equally useful (or useless) for a site whether the site runs https or not.
It's a heads-up because rightly or wrongly, I think this product will be in the news for a while, and so the deserved skepticism needs to get up and running too.
The problem is that you then can't ask the suspect questions that are relevant. For example, suppose there's incontrovertible proof that the suspect was in the room at the time of a shooting, but he claims he didn't do it.
What's a good reason why we can't just ask the suspect (and require an answer): "OK, if you didn't do it, what did you see?" If they're lying, they might get caught, and if they're not lying, their answer might contain useful information.
Subject to the obvious constraints: They can't be tortured (obviously), they can't be required to answer "the way we want them to" (obviously), they can't be punished for "lying" in their answer unless the court can prove that they lied (under the same standard of proof as any other criminal act), etc.
This is incorrect. The right against physical coercion is separate from the right to refuse to answer questions.
As I said in the original article, the proof of this is that if you are a third-party witness, you cannot refuse to answer questions about a crime about which you may have been a witness (but are not a suspect). The Fifth Amendment does not apply. But, obviously, you still can't be beaten up by the police. Because that right is separate from the Fifth Amendment.
I explained this in the original article. Judging from the comments, many people just scrolled to the bottom and started typing without reading it.
You could always continue to harass the recipient by sending messages from different email addresses. You can only block a sender if the sender is really lazy.
I never wrote anything questioning the Fourth Amendment.
Actually, if you read the original article: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/06/07/1439220/seeking-fifth-amendment-defenders
and scroll down to the paragraph beginning, "Compare that to the collateral damage caused by, for example, a search warrant," it should be clear that I think the potential harm to innocents caused by a search of one's property, is greater than the potential for harm in asking, "Did you do it?", and that if anything we need stronger protection against searches.
We already know your views on every topic: whatever gives the powerful central authority even more power is what BH wants..
I wrote: "If it's true that Facebook has been silently marking users as publicly 'liking' a page because they mentioned the page in a private message, the plaintiff's lawyers ought to clean them out for that one."
"A robotic Cyberknife to fight cancer" -- "The Cyberknife is not a real knife. This is a robot radiotherapy machine which works with great accuracy during treatment, thanks to its robotic arm which moves around a patient when he breathes."
"Human hair to feed plants?" -- "You all know that agricultural crop production relies on fertilizers, such as composted waste materials. But I bet you wouldn't have thought to add human hair to animal manure to produce better and greener fertilizers."
"Protecting beer from bacteria" -- "A Canadian PhD student from the University of Saskatchewan has a mission: saving beer from bacterial contamination."
You still haven't given any reason why it's better host the article somewhere else and link to it there, instead of hosting the article on Slashdot -- other than "that's not the way it's usually done". Reasons should be in terms of costs and benefits.
But surely it's more convenient for the readers to click through to an article on Slashdot t
Not having a concise 2 paragraph summary makes them unequivocally less convenient for us to decide whether we WANT to read it.
There is a short summary that appears on the front page (or wherever the article is linked from) before the link to the article. In this case it was:
"Google has fixed a vulnerability, first discovered by researcher Gergely Kalman, which let users search for credit card numbers by using hex number ranges. However, Google should have acknowledged or at least responded to the original bug finder (and possibly even paid him a bounty for it), and should have been more transparent about the process in general."
Oh OK, so I misunderstood -- you're not primarily saying that the style is too wordy for the argument I'm making, you just think the conclusion should be posted on Slashdot and the supporting argument should be linked somewhere else, thus making the Slashdot-hosted portion much shorter.
Well, at that point you're essentially saying I should set up a second domain just for hosting the supporting-argument portion, so that the intro text can link to that off-site domain, and then the content would be exactly the same. Sorry, I don't see the benefit to anyone. (After all, in both cases, the reader can read the summary and decide if they want to click through to read the whole article.) Agree to disagree.
This just states the conclusions, without the arguments in support of each conclusion. Of course you can make anything shorter if you just list the conclusion and not the intermediate steps.
For example, saying it's "not a bug" has no supporting argument. I said in the article that since Google decided to block the original number-range searches, that means they had implicitly declared that one of their design goals was to block searches that match lots of credit card numbers. If that's a design goal, then allowing the hex searches is a bug.
But this "rule" doesn't seem to have any bearing on clear communication. I'm all in favor of rules for writing that improve communication, but what's the point of following a rule that exists just for its own sake?
Slashdot Mirror
If you're not interested in the article, why on earth were you interested in the comments?
Anyway, there's only one coherent argument for doing or not doing something, and that's whether the positives outweigh the negatives. That also applies to posting articles which are different from most Slashdot articles. If you have an argument that the negatives outweight the positives, fine. But saying "Slashdot is not your blog" is not an argument.
br. Again, be substantive, not articulate. Think MIT, not Harvard.
V frr jung lbh qvq gurer.
I thought I replied to this already, not sure if the post got deleted, but:
Definitely agree on #1 and #2. I'm not sure about #3 because I think most big sites already generate most of their HTML content dynamically, which means it won't be cached anyway, or shouldn't be.
Do you have an *argument* that the analysis in the post is incorrect? A grammatically correct sentence is not an argument. Be substantive, not articulate. Think MIT, not Harvard.
ShapeShifter might work or it might not (probably not), but I don't see how https has anything to do with it.
HTTPS are easy for a bot to access, to crawl, to test passwords against, and to log in to if the bot has valid credentials. HTTPS prevents eavesdropping, not automated access.
ShapeShifter is equally useful (or useless) for a site whether the site runs https or not.
That's a very good point, I hadn't thought of that.
The fact that this got moderated lower than "kruach aum"s non-post seems to support the point that Slashdot comment ratings are a crap shoot.
It's a heads-up because rightly or wrongly, I think this product will be in the news for a while, and so the deserved skepticism needs to get up and running too.
Do you have an argument that either (a) ShapeShifter is not an important topic, or (b) that the analysis in the post is incorrect?
The problem is that you then can't ask the suspect questions that are relevant. For example, suppose there's incontrovertible proof that the suspect was in the room at the time of a shooting, but he claims he didn't do it.
What's a good reason why we can't just ask the suspect (and require an answer): "OK, if you didn't do it, what did you see?" If they're lying, they might get caught, and if they're not lying, their answer might contain useful information.
Subject to the obvious constraints: They can't be tortured (obviously), they can't be required to answer "the way we want them to" (obviously), they can't be punished for "lying" in their answer unless the court can prove that they lied (under the same standard of proof as any other criminal act), etc.
This is incorrect. The right against physical coercion is separate from the right to refuse to answer questions.
As I said in the original article, the proof of this is that if you are a third-party witness, you cannot refuse to answer questions about a crime about which you may have been a witness (but are not a suspect). The Fifth Amendment does not apply. But, obviously, you still can't be beaten up by the police. Because that right is separate from the Fifth Amendment.
I explained this in the original article. Judging from the comments, many people just scrolled to the bottom and started typing without reading it.
You could always continue to harass the recipient by sending messages from different email addresses. You can only block a sender if the sender is really lazy.
It's quality, not quantity. But he's getting better.
I never wrote anything questioning the Fourth Amendment.
Actually, if you read the original article:
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/06/07/1439220/seeking-fifth-amendment-defenders
and scroll down to the paragraph beginning, "Compare that to the collateral damage caused by, for example, a search warrant," it should be clear that I think the potential harm to innocents caused by a search of one's property, is greater than the potential for harm in asking, "Did you do it?", and that if anything we need stronger protection against searches.
We already know your views on every topic: whatever gives the powerful central authority even more power is what BH wants..
I wrote: "If it's true that Facebook has been silently marking users as publicly 'liking' a page because they mentioned the page in a private message, the plaintiff's lawyers ought to clean them out for that one."
I read to the third word of your comment and stopped reading. Argh, WORDS!
http://slashdot.org/~rpiquepa/submissions:
"A robotic Cyberknife to fight cancer" -- "The Cyberknife is not a real knife. This is a robot radiotherapy machine which works with great accuracy during treatment, thanks to its robotic arm which moves around a patient when he breathes."
"Human hair to feed plants?" -- "You all know that agricultural crop production relies on fertilizers, such as composted waste materials. But I bet you wouldn't have thought to add human hair to animal manure to produce better and greener fertilizers."
"Protecting beer from bacteria" -- "A Canadian PhD student from the University of Saskatchewan has a mission: saving beer from bacterial contamination."
This is your designated whipping boy?
What's a "Roland Junior"?
You still haven't given any reason why it's better host the article somewhere else and link to it there, instead of hosting the article on Slashdot -- other than "that's not the way it's usually done". Reasons should be in terms of costs and benefits.
But surely it's more convenient for the readers to click through to an article on Slashdot t
Not having a concise 2 paragraph summary makes them unequivocally less convenient for us to decide whether we WANT to read it.
There is a short summary that appears on the front page (or wherever the article is linked from) before the link to the article. In this case it was:
"Google has fixed a vulnerability, first discovered by researcher Gergely Kalman, which let users search for credit card numbers by using hex number ranges. However, Google should have acknowledged or at least responded to the original bug finder (and possibly even paid him a bounty for it), and should have been more transparent about the process in general."
Oh OK, so I misunderstood -- you're not primarily saying that the style is too wordy for the argument I'm making, you just think the conclusion should be posted on Slashdot and the supporting argument should be linked somewhere else, thus making the Slashdot-hosted portion much shorter.
Well, at that point you're essentially saying I should set up a second domain just for hosting the supporting-argument portion, so that the intro text can link to that off-site domain, and then the content would be exactly the same. Sorry, I don't see the benefit to anyone. (After all, in both cases, the reader can read the summary and decide if they want to click through to read the whole article.) Agree to disagree.
OK, so I'll assume you don't have any specific examples to support the claim that you're making. If you think of one, let me know.
This just states the conclusions, without the arguments in support of each conclusion. Of course you can make anything shorter if you just list the conclusion and not the intermediate steps.
For example, saying it's "not a bug" has no supporting argument. I said in the article that since Google decided to block the original number-range searches, that means they had implicitly declared that one of their design goals was to block searches that match lots of credit card numbers. If that's a design goal, then allowing the hex searches is a bug.
You're very articulate; now, do you have a specific example of a sentence or paragraph that is evidence of the claims you're making?
But this "rule" doesn't seem to have any bearing on clear communication. I'm all in favor of rules for writing that improve communication, but what's the point of following a rule that exists just for its own sake?
Do you have an example of what you're referring to?