Your post strikes me as a lame excuse for trumpeting your awesome coolness for not using Facebook or Myspace.
Congratulations on not reading what was written. I didn't say I don't use either of those. I said that they don't have that significant of a role to justify front-page status for a news site titled "News for Nerds: stuff that matters".
Consider your awesome coolness recognized, now leave us alone to talk about things that affect many thousands of people.
I would like to see Slashdot return to actually discussing important technical news, rather than piddly things like applications on social networking sites.
Most people on the Internet are on one (or both) of those. I see why this article justifies front-page status.
That would be a very difficult number to back up. I'd call you on not providing a citation for that statement, but likely there simply is no way to say that "most people on the internet" use any particular function.
Or how about I bitch about all the articles about C and Ruby and a whole load of other programming languages I don't know?
Programming would be "news for nerds", which is also part of the name of the website. I haven't seen slashdot.org load as "Slashdot: social networking site reviews for nerds", which is what this article would be better classified as.
There are still plenty of us who don't really care about myspace / facebook. Not every person on the internet is on one (or both) of those. I don't see why this article justifies front-page status.
Couldn't you get a used laptop that beats those specs for $130? Granted, you would almost certainly need to buy a new battery for said used laptop, but nonetheless I don't see the advantage of this system.
It appears that the author of the website gathered a >very minimal set of data on a few different programs for around a dozen different schools. And as has already been pointed out, it is mostly just which courses use which books.
I hope the author didn't use too much time that could have otherwise been spent learning actual science (including computer science) on that exercise.
The positive news of the story (the spam king is gone for good) pales in the shadow of this tragedy.
Except that there are many, many, more spam kings around. This guy was just one fish in a large, toxic pond. While the world is better off with fewer spam kings, the loss of one of them is statistically insignificant.
Add that to the fact that he took his wife and child out with him, and there is almost no real silver lining to this story.
Since when did we actually start prosecuting and jailing people for spam? Was he actually caught under the (you)-CAN-SPAM act? Or did he go down like Al Capone, caught for income tax evasion instead?
I couldn't read the image well enough. I'd like to know what the license was for that was so important that a single sheet of A4 paper needed to be packed in a foam-lined box.
We had the same thing in Minnesota when I lived there. We called it "private towing companies". They were known on multiple occasions to take cars without reason, and then demand their owners pay to get them back. On top of that, the Minneapolis police were completely unwilling to do anything about it.
Ergo, Minneapolis essentially legalized car theft. You just had to be licensed as a private towing company to do it.
Satellite Radio is a much better choice for this than the joke that is HD Radio.
Satellite radio is a good choice for people who don't mind paying to listen to radio. HD Radio, on the other hand, is broadcast over traditional Radio spectrum and is thus just as free to listen to as traditional analog radio.
You can call it a joke if you want, but some of us prefer to call it free.
If you look around next time your out shopping, you'll see (part of) how IBM is doing so well. They got back into the BM (no, not bowel movement) part of IBM. A very significant portion of all point of sale terminals (amongst other things) are made by IBM. Whether or not Apple could pull the same move is hard to say.
Then Obama flip-flopped on FISA and voted for a bill containing telecom immunity
Obama did not vote for the bill out of support of telecom immunity. He voted for the bill out of the fact that he supported most of the other parts of the bill. Keep in mind that senators don't have line-item veto powers; if a bill comes up they have only three choices. They can vote yes, vote no, or abstain from voting.
And when you consider that much of the rest of the bill was for counter-terrosism measures that are well accepted, he didn't really have much choice. A no vote (or a non-vote) would have naturally been spun by the conservative media as supporting (or at least being soft on) terrorism.
If you can find anything that actually shows Obama flip-flopping on telecom immunity, I'd like to see it. Had he not voted yes on this bill, he would have been throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Why should a comment that started at +2 ever be marked "overrated"?
Because other, better comments start at 1, 0, -1. Chiming in at +2 or +3 with "oops replying to thread 'cause of mismod" SHOULD BE DOWNSLAPPED to +1 on a charitable day and "-1 'TARDED" any other day.
Perhaps since you post as anonymous coward, you are not aware of this, but you have to earn a starting score of +2. You earn it by having a reputation of good posts (good karma). I could be mistaken but I have never seen anyone whose posts start at +3 as you claim.
And the AC's like you that post at 0 could easily start posting at +1 just by signing up for an account. I have yet to see anyone post at -1 who didn't have abysmal karma - and these people could reverse their fortune by more than one method if they so chose.
As an aside â" since I'm posting anonymously, will the moderations I've also made in this thread still be annulled?
I've had my moderations annulled when I posted anonymously in the same thread. I don't know if it would help to log out completely beforehand, or if it uses some more interesting method to track where moderations come from.
Underrated and overrated should be meta-moddable, at least
I'm not sure that either of those actually accomplish what they were likely intended to do. They seem to be used more for political purposes now than anything.
For that matter, I noticed that I acquired a new "freak" not long ago. I can't help but wonder if this person may be responsible for politically moderating some of my other comments down.
Moderator points are dealt more often to people with high meta-mod scores (but not too high). The peak is probably something like 90% approved.
I really would like to believe that, though I haven't seen any evidence to support that statement. For that matter, where is a meta-moderation score kept? Is there any way that a user can view their meta-mod score?
I've moderated many times, but not once have I seen anything resembling meta-moderation feedback.
I have done a fair amount of moderation and I have yet to see any meta-mod feedback.
I don't think that Slashdot really needs to hand out gold stars for doing a decent job of moderating.
I don't see it as a way of rewarding good moderators as much as a way of watching out for incredibly bad moderators. I guess I expected that the meta-mod system would perhaps have some influence on who would receive moderation points at what frequencies, based on how often they moderate carelessly.
Slashdot Mirror
Your post strikes me as a lame excuse for trumpeting your awesome coolness for not using Facebook or Myspace.
Congratulations on not reading what was written. I didn't say I don't use either of those. I said that they don't have that significant of a role to justify front-page status for a news site titled "News for Nerds: stuff that matters".
Consider your awesome coolness recognized, now leave us alone to talk about things that affect many thousands of people.
I would like to see Slashdot return to actually discussing important technical news, rather than piddly things like applications on social networking sites.
Most people on the Internet are on one (or both) of those. I see why this article justifies front-page status.
That would be a very difficult number to back up. I'd call you on not providing a citation for that statement, but likely there simply is no way to say that "most people on the internet" use any particular function.
Or how about I bitch about all the articles about C and Ruby and a whole load of other programming languages I don't know?
Programming would be "news for nerds", which is also part of the name of the website. I haven't seen slashdot.org load as "Slashdot: social networking site reviews for nerds", which is what this article would be better classified as.
There are still plenty of us who don't really care about myspace / facebook. Not every person on the internet is on one (or both) of those. I don't see why this article justifies front-page status.
If I'm being lied to, will my tinfoil hat help in this case?
Yeah, but how many /.errs have a Beowulf cluster of friends?
I think the actual question is how many /.ers consider a Beowulf cluster to be their friends?
I'm just an anonymous coward and I don't have 99 friends.
It would be particularly informative if parent comment was now modded up with "underrated" to reach a score of "+5, redundant".
Couldn't you get a used laptop that beats those specs for $130? Granted, you would almost certainly need to buy a new battery for said used laptop, but nonetheless I don't see the advantage of this system.
I guess even with the preview button that we have to click before submitting a comment, we still don't catch all of our own typos.
It appears that the author of the website gathered a >very minimal set of data on a few different programs for around a dozen different schools. And as has already been pointed out, it is mostly just which courses use which books.
I hope the author didn't use too much time that could have otherwise been spent learning actual science (including computer science) on that exercise.
The positive news of the story (the spam king is gone for good) pales in the shadow of this tragedy.
Except that there are many, many, more spam kings around. This guy was just one fish in a large, toxic pond. While the world is better off with fewer spam kings, the loss of one of them is statistically insignificant.
Add that to the fact that he took his wife and child out with him, and there is almost no real silver lining to this story.
So then essentially caught in a method of the spirit of Capone's capture, though not the exact method.
Since when did we actually start prosecuting and jailing people for spam? Was he actually caught under the (you)-CAN-SPAM act? Or did he go down like Al Capone, caught for income tax evasion instead?
I couldn't read the image well enough. I'd like to know what the license was for that was so important that a single sheet of A4 paper needed to be packed in a foam-lined box.
We had the same thing in Minnesota when I lived there. We called it "private towing companies". They were known on multiple occasions to take cars without reason, and then demand their owners pay to get them back. On top of that, the Minneapolis police were completely unwilling to do anything about it.
Ergo, Minneapolis essentially legalized car theft. You just had to be licensed as a private towing company to do it.
Satellite Radio is a much better choice for this than the joke that is HD Radio.
Satellite radio is a good choice for people who don't mind paying to listen to radio. HD Radio, on the other hand, is broadcast over traditional Radio spectrum and is thus just as free to listen to as traditional analog radio.
You can call it a joke if you want, but some of us prefer to call it free.
If you look around next time your out shopping, you'll see (part of) how IBM is doing so well. They got back into the BM (no, not bowel movement) part of IBM. A very significant portion of all point of sale terminals (amongst other things) are made by IBM. Whether or not Apple could pull the same move is hard to say.
I don't have a good explanation for why it happens like that, but The Simpsons provided a good commentary on it.
Then Obama flip-flopped on FISA and voted for a bill containing telecom immunity
Obama did not vote for the bill out of support of telecom immunity. He voted for the bill out of the fact that he supported most of the other parts of the bill. Keep in mind that senators don't have line-item veto powers; if a bill comes up they have only three choices. They can vote yes, vote no, or abstain from voting.
And when you consider that much of the rest of the bill was for counter-terrosism measures that are well accepted, he didn't really have much choice. A no vote (or a non-vote) would have naturally been spun by the conservative media as supporting (or at least being soft on) terrorism.
If you can find anything that actually shows Obama flip-flopping on telecom immunity, I'd like to see it. Had he not voted yes on this bill, he would have been throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Why should a comment that started at +2 ever be marked "overrated"?
Because other, better comments start at 1, 0, -1. Chiming in at +2 or +3 with "oops replying to thread 'cause of mismod" SHOULD BE DOWNSLAPPED to +1 on a charitable day and "-1 'TARDED" any other day.
Perhaps since you post as anonymous coward, you are not aware of this, but you have to earn a starting score of +2. You earn it by having a reputation of good posts (good karma). I could be mistaken but I have never seen anyone whose posts start at +3 as you claim.
And the AC's like you that post at 0 could easily start posting at +1 just by signing up for an account. I have yet to see anyone post at -1 who didn't have abysmal karma - and these people could reverse their fortune by more than one method if they so chose.
As an aside â" since I'm posting anonymously, will the moderations I've also made in this thread still be annulled?
I've had my moderations annulled when I posted anonymously in the same thread. I don't know if it would help to log out completely beforehand, or if it uses some more interesting method to track where moderations come from.
We can also show that said methods fail in a vacuum.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I meant that I have yet to see any meta-moderation feedback for any of the moderation that I have left.
I would expect (hope) that the meta-moderation system is intelligent enough to not allow someone to meta-moderate their own moderations.
After all, it would be rather pointless to ask someone if they agreed with the moderation that they left, wouldn't it?
And shouldn't the meta-moderation score be the result of how your own moderations have been meta-moderated?
Underrated and overrated should be meta-moddable, at least
I'm not sure that either of those actually accomplish what they were likely intended to do. They seem to be used more for political purposes now than anything.
For that matter, I noticed that I acquired a new "freak" not long ago. I can't help but wonder if this person may be responsible for politically moderating some of my other comments down.
Moderator points are dealt more often to people with high meta-mod scores (but not too high). The peak is probably something like 90% approved.
I really would like to believe that, though I haven't seen any evidence to support that statement. For that matter, where is a meta-moderation score kept? Is there any way that a user can view their meta-mod score?
I've moderated many times, but not once have I seen anything resembling meta-moderation feedback.
I don't think that Slashdot really needs to hand out gold stars for doing a decent job of moderating.
I don't see it as a way of rewarding good moderators as much as a way of watching out for incredibly bad moderators. I guess I expected that the meta-mod system would perhaps have some influence on who would receive moderation points at what frequencies, based on how often they moderate carelessly.
However I see no evidence to support that.