Clearly the WinXP developers would win since having produced so many security flaws they know exactly what to look for... boom - tish.
And no Microsoft probably hasn't been doing such a thing for years. There's no need enough security holes are found in OSS by OSS developers themselves to give MS all te FUD they need.
If Microsoft cared they could just look at fetchmail, it would single handedly destroy everything put forward in that cathedral and the bazaar thingamejig.
There is no "dark side" of the Moon using your definition, the obvious presence of phases of the moon indicates a day-night cycle and hence no side that is in permanent darkness.
So of course nobody has spent much time their, just as nobody has spent much time in the Fairy Kingdom.
I don't dispute that, I duspute that "Our economy is by far the most liberal of the industrialized countries". It clearly isn't. The USA is famous for its tarrifs and quotas and other barriers to free trade.
Hasn't seemed to hurt the economy though (as you just said) so maybe all that free trade stuff is garbage after all?
Because we're the world experts in free-market capitalism. We're the ones who made it work when everyone else failed. Our economy is by far the most liberal of the industrialized countries. In those respects, at least, everyone in the world wants to be like us.
Lets see 20 million people, 10,000 regions of 1,000 people. You seem to have missed half the country. Though letterboxes would imply not people but households in which case I suspect you are overestimating slightly (there were 7000 households in 2000, and it has been trending up at over 1000 a decade).
And which suckers get to cover the people outside of Darwin in the Northern Territory? Having to cover over 30 square km to letterbox those 1,000 people would be quite a task.
Copyright is one of those annoying areas where those with the cash want greater powers and longer terms, and the vast bulk of the population doesn't care about it at all (they probably don't know that things go into the public domain, they don't know what reverse engineering is, etc). So for the pollies it's a win-win.
I suspect writing large numbers of "letters to the editor" from lots of people to lots of papers would be more effective than letterboxing. Small businesses whinging about how it will ruin them and result in them having to sack their "battler" employees might even be able to "spin" it enough to make one of the crappy TV "current affairs" shows...
All the people in those photos were witnesses to a crime, this makes them of interest to authorities. Some of them are probably (it hasn't been proven in a court) guilty of a crime - it could well be their own car they were smashing up in which case I guess that isn't a crime, but I suspect it was someone elses... Or maybe there was some amazing reason to be standing on a smashed up car (standing on would seem to be vandalism in itself, I know I don't want foot print dents in my car).
In lots of jurisdictions police have powers to interview witnesses not just suspects.
People vote differently in secret ballots than they do in public ballots. That's a pretty significant reason to keep them.
Secret ballots prevent many problems associated with elections (breaking the legs of those who don't vote how you told them, for example). Of course with non-compulsary voting you can perform similar attacks anyway - prevent a bunch of people who will cast more votes for your opposition than for you from voting at all.
The UK has a system in which votes are tagged with unique identifiers that match a voter to a ballot - but the link is locked away somewhere "safe" and legally can't be accessed except on a court order and are destroyed after a year. That provides most of the benefits of a secret ballot, but still allows the votes to be checked if the election is suspect. See here for a short blurb on the system.
Now whether than system is good or bad is another matter, but it shows you can have some of the benefits of a secret ballot and also the main benefit of a non-secret ballot.
In my (granted not extensive) teaching experience the assembly programmers are the worst of the bunch when it comes to doing CS. Followed closely by the basic programmers. Then followed by the other "Prior Programming Experience" folks. Prior programming experience seems to make people think that CS is about programming, and not about math - which of course means they don't do so well. Of course maybe the blurb is incorrect and the book isn't about CS, but is about programming, which the title of the book indicates. But since the blurb author is the book author the point still seems valid. So is it about programming, or about CS?
"Old-timers" are often viewed as "wizards" because they have knowledge and experience, that they know assembler doesn't seem so important - they probably will know at least one flavour of assembler because of their experience of course.
So have you got some numbers to back up the "I've found that the key difference between mediocre and excellent programmers is whether or not they know assembly language" statement? Or is it anecdotal (which of course doesn't mean it isn't true)? Experience needs to be considered - if the assembler programmers have more years of experience then you would expect them to better programmers (that's what I would expect to explain the observation, since assembler use has declined over time, so people with experience in it probably started earlier...).
Of course a book which teaches programming and not a specific language is a good thing, provided it is well written, edited, and tech reviewed.
It's annoying to have to reply to myself because people want to use journals instead of the far more practical forum...
Anyway, when I said "[close window]", I meant I closed the browser window without posting the comment, since you clearly weren't in the mood for any sort of civil discussion with me. The fact that I would have needed a time machine to post either of those replies makes it pretty obvious I didn't do so.
Also he admits to "following me" after posting to another thread of mine.
No I didn't. I didn't follow and I didn't admit following. I happened to read a post by you, and wrote a reply which I didn't end up submitting - partly because I thought you might yell "stalking" as you have, and partly because you didn't seem interest in communication.
Certainly, that is a trollish statement.
Since I didn't post the message I didn't make the statement, so it's irrelevant.
Of course nobody reads Slashdot articles.
The point was that I do journal type stuff on my own site, since less people read that then read slashdot. Unless of course slashdot has a readership of less than six...
Ok, that's not insulting... [the sarcasm is lost by the short quote, read it sarcastically]
Yes that was insulting, I used past tense because I hadn't thought I'd insulted you in the previous messages. That was certainly meant to be an insult, I even stated that in the next paragraph.
I think the problem might be miscommunication. You seem to have misinterpreted everything I have written. I've probably done the same with what you've written, since I can't work out what is going on here.
I never used it in that context, and I only used it in the AC post as a BURN for the importance he "obviously" places in it.
See misinterpretation. I don't place any importance on it at all. The point I was trying to make with it was obvious I thought. Clearly it wasn't, yet again communication issues. I thought highlighting the generalisation in your statement was justified, but it really doesn't matter, you are free to generalise as much as you like I'll try not to point it out again.
Clearly both you and I absolutely suck at both reading and writing. At least with respect to the other's attempted communications.
You keep saying I've said things that I haven't, so I guess I must be writing sloppily at least. I've also used language that you clearly didn't appreciate. You've certainly been sloppy in claiming I've done/said things which I clearly haven't and in fact could not have done so without violating basic rules of physics.
Doing a reverse DNS lookup of the name associated with the IP of the server connecting is common enough already, eg.:
$ telnet staff.cs.usyd.edu.au 25 Trying 129.78.8.1... Connected to staff.cs.usyd.edu.au. Escape character is '^]'. 220 staff.cs.usyd.edu.au. V1.2 ready at Tue, 03 Feb 2004 10:22:23 +1100 HELO foo.com 250 G'day foo.com, I'm staff.cs.usyd.edu.au., I thought you were [censored].swiftdsl.com.au.
That doesn't seem to have brought DNS to its knees...
And it would do lots for spoofed addresses from real domains - you couldn't send email from a domain except via the outgoing mail servers of that domain. Hence you couldn't spoof email from ebay.com (well you could spoof it in the From: header but not in the envelo), unless you managed to get one of ebay.com's outgoing mail servers to do it for you (which hopefully, they would be configured not to do).
spf.pobox.com is one implementation of the idea, not using MX records obviously since that would break existing mail senders, but using TXT records.
Criminals are easily identifiable on sight? That must make it damn easy for the police, how come they don't just arrest them all?
Walking in the street is a pretty normal thing to do, I do it a lot. Does that mean I want to rob everyone who happens to be in front of me?
Maybe they figured he saw some criminals (who are easily identifiable by sight) and hence they ran away from said criminals (they didn't want to risk turning around to see for themselves and hence slowing down) as well.
Re:Worse than that...key features are neglected
on
KISS
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Of course many people would prefer not having a transmitter that can "punch" through a house millimeters from their brain...
I would have though the phrase "the smartest of which we likely know nothing of" made it pretty obvious the poster had included those people in the 0.01%.
But don't let that get in the way of some repitition.
Honestly, I tried to tell you that overusing bold is bad style (not just for the sake of it, but because it makes reading harder). You decided to troll about whitespace. So why am I labelled the troll?
I was a little rude, I admit. But I didn't insult you. You didn't insult me from what I read either.
Are you from a parallel universe or something? Or does your browser rewrite stuff? Or are you taking drugs?
OK, that last bit was an insult. So now I agree with you, I insulted you first (and only).
And again, you seem to place importance on "karma" and "last 24" then I do. I used it as a specific piece of evidence to counter a generalisation on your part. You protect it rather than have a conversation.
I had just written a reply to an earlier post by you regarding circumcision. A non-trolling, non-flaming, post about my experiences (I married into a muslim family - so my "discussions" were possibly more "interesting"). But there's clearly no point, you just wanted to do some trolling. Oh well [close window].
Of course your protection of your "top 24" will probably mean you miss out on my greatly humourous post...
And I don't do journals... I whine on my own web space - less people see it that way:)
First of all, karma is not a "pissing contest", many people on Slashdot understand this you don't... Moderators are given their points in short supply,and they tend to concentrate those points into the latest discussion. Editors sometimes take up the slack and mod down entire threads which are off-topic (like this one), regardless of the "quality" of the conversation. I have had more than my fair share of mod points, and am capped. I didn't say that you never have anything to say, just that that particular comment was lame.
I know karma is meaningless, which is why I didn't refer to karma. You are the one who declared that I could not post anything useful, I merely supplied some indication that others don't agree with you. The fact that you know what "capped" is means you care more about karma than I do...
And this thread is about excessive use of bolding text, so I can't see how these posts could be considered off-topic. The article isn't, I agree, but threads move around and this particular one is about bolding.
You said "So rather than burst out with something truly useful (which apparently you can't)". The word "can't" means lack of ability. I can't see any way to interpete that statement other than that you said you think I "never have anything to say". Please explain the meaning you intended.
I don't like excessive whitespace expecially in short abusive comments, which don't even pretend to be about the thread in question. Of course I don't jump into a discussion just to bitch about people who use excessive whitespace and how STUPID and IGNORANT they are, like you did to me, in third person, to boot.
The only marginal whitespace I see in my original post is that the last two paragraphs could be merged into one. However, I intended them as seperate paragraphs since they were about slightly different things. The overly large amounts of whtespace between elements was added by slashdot and your web browser.
Again, personally insulting based on your preference. Basically you were saying that the "good people" of slashdot needed your general "wisdom" to fully understand that stupid poster (me). You have done again with words, exactly what you accuse me of doing with a simple HTML tag, talking down to people in general. What are you, like 12 years old, I doubt it, but you sure do act like it. (you might notice that this is the first time that I have made a general insult of your person, and character, but after all you said...).
And I'm not "personally insulting" based on my "preference". In fact I didn't insult you. In my first post I said that I suspect you used bold because you know your writing is crap - I guess that could be an insult - but crap writing isn't exactly unusual (my writing is so crap that all my drafts have more superviser authored red ink on them than the black printed stuff I wrote). Excessive use of bold for emphasis is condemned in every English style guide I have ever seen, it is condescending towards the reader. I didn't call you stupid, I didn't say anything about other people on slashdot or my wisdom. I merely explained that excessive bolding implies you think your readers are morons (the malice answer) or that your writing is so bad it can't stand on its own (the ignorance answer). Foolishly I thought you might care not to treat your readers as morons, obviously I was mistaken.
My statement on what non-stupid readers think is not a statement of what you actually do or are. It does not say you are stupid. It says people will think you are if you do certain things. I might be wrong of course, maybe people won't think you're stupid. Maybe they like lots of bold text. Every style guide I've ever seen says that they will, however.
It isn't talking down to you. I have not said "you are too stupid to understand me", I've just presented my views on excessive bolding (views which coincide with every style book I've seen - is there an echo in here?). You can disagree it doesn't worry me. You might even bring
I didn't say formatting was bad. I said that bolding "important" words is insulting to your readers. It says "you are too stupid to understand so I will bold stuff". Of course the non-stupid readers interprete it as the author saying "I am too stupid to compose a meaningful sentence that says what I want to say, so I'll bold the important bits of my drivel." Pick any English style guide you like and it'll say the same thing. The occassional bold is fine (an example of me doing so indicates I don't have a religious belief against it - it's not HTML bolding but the intent to emphasise is the same), it's over use that makes the author look stupid.
If you really are writing for the stupid people, then the bolding is just fine. However, you will come across as an illiterate fool to people with ar least two functioning brain cells.
Note, I am not talking about spelling and grammar. They help in constructing sentences which don't need the non-crap bolded, but are not essential. People with English as a second language manage without bolding even when they make language errors (of course many have better English than the natives - my spelling and grammar is god-awful , for example, and English is my native language).
So rather than burst out with something truly useful (which apparently you can't) they try to disparage the author of the original post for his "great crimes against proper etiquette".
Based upon our "Latest 24" comments sections my comments seem to have been judged far more "useful" (which I'll define as rated insightful, informative, or interesting).
Did you really need to use what amounts to a paragraph for every insult?
Whitespace is cheap and is a renewable resource, why not use it.
I checked the code, sloppy, sloppy, you didn't even open the ordered list. Luckly for you most browsers will render the list anyways.
What do you think the <ol> is?
What I didn't do was close my <li>s but then again you don't need to in HTML...
In fact, the only HTML tags I typed in that post were <i> </i> <ol><li> <li> </ol>, everything else was added by slashdot (from the whitespace I used)...
Also, when you close an ordered list, there is no need to futher break your line, which you did oddly enough, but I also suspect that you like the extra space. See below for an example.
I used "Plain Old Text" which automatically added some <br> tags everywhere.
My I suggest HTML for dummies, should be a short read you only need to cover 14 tags (12 if you get your wish)
You can suggest it, but I don't use HTML anymore. On slashdot sloppy HTML is necessary to keep in sync with the HTML of the slashdot pages.
One of the allowed tags is the <P>, it's very useful, but I would suggest that you don't close it. In the slashdot page it renders with extra space above the sig. As you don't have one, I guess you find sigs offensive as well, I am not sure what happens without a sig.
I don't use it at all, as I said I use "Plain Old Text" and then sprinkle in some HTML, for things which can't be done with just text.
No I don't find sigs offensive, I just don't have one. I also don't have a private jet - does that mean I find them offensive?
One more note about the paragraph tag, many people incorrect say that the tag is the same as the line break, but at the end of an list, a paragraph handles it correctly, but a hard break doesn't.
A paragraph tag is obviosly different than a line break, but who cares?
BTW, going Bold is a tool to help people clearly understand the point, much like using paragraphs so that the words don't all jumble together, or blockquotes to separate text, or lists to enumerate points.
Bold is only used the way you used it in two cases:
The author knows their writing is so crap that nobody else will be able to work out what they are saying unless they bold important words. As opposed to writing sentences that make the important content obvious by their structure.
The author thinks their readers are brain dead morons who can't read a simple sentence and work out what the main points are without having them highlighted.
Either way, there's no point reading anything written by such idiotic users of bolding.
Of course the second reason makes a lot of sense on slashdot, but I suspect the first reason is at work.
The rather major difference between this form of plagerism detection and most is that it is performed by an external for profit company.
I have run plagerism detection on all the assignments for all the courses I've run. No one has ever complained, and no one would have grounds to. Since the plagerism detection is just part of marking and placed no extra requirements upon the students.
My university tried a similar thing last year and it also caused a stink amongst the students. The problem is that to submit the assignment the student must first submit it to the plagerism detection company. That submission requires assigning some rights to that company - essentially to comply with the assignment submission requirements the student must license their work to the company in question to use for profit making purposes with no compensation at all.
At my university that actually conflicts with the letter of the university regulatoins about student intellectual property, since the university isn't allowed to force the students to do anything with the student's own IP.
Or put the machine outside the studio, with some cat5 cable connecting (there must be air ducts somewhere...) it to a dumb terminal in the studio with no moving parts in it at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly the WinXP developers would win since having produced so many security flaws they know exactly what to look for... boom - tish.
And no Microsoft probably hasn't been doing such a thing for years. There's no need enough security holes are found in OSS by OSS developers themselves to give MS all te FUD they need.
If Microsoft cared they could just look at fetchmail, it would single handedly destroy everything put forward in that cathedral and the bazaar thingamejig.
Papers in well respected journals is what gets you name and reputation.
Patents just prevent prevent society from benefiting from your research for a couple of decades.
There is no "dark side" of the Moon using your definition, the obvious presence of phases of the moon indicates a day-night cycle and hence no side that is in permanent darkness.
So of course nobody has spent much time their, just as nobody has spent much time in the Fairy Kingdom.
I can't join since I'm rabidly anti-Liberal and hence not apolitical.
:)
Plus I'm negative, apathetic, and lazy
I don't dispute that, I duspute that "Our economy is by far the most liberal of the industrialized countries". It clearly isn't. The USA is famous for its tarrifs and quotas and other barriers to free trade.
Hasn't seemed to hurt the economy though (as you just said) so maybe all that free trade stuff is garbage after all?
Because we're the world experts in free-market capitalism. We're the ones who made it work when everyone else failed. Our economy is by far the most liberal of the industrialized countries. In those respects, at least, everyone in the world wants to be like us.
You clearly know nothing about your own country.
Lets see 20 million people, 10,000 regions of 1,000 people. You seem to have missed half the country. Though letterboxes would imply not people but households in which case I suspect you are overestimating slightly (there were 7000 households in 2000, and it has been trending up at over 1000 a decade).
And which suckers get to cover the people outside of Darwin in the Northern Territory? Having to cover over 30 square km to letterbox those 1,000 people would be quite a task.
Copyright is one of those annoying areas where those with the cash want greater powers and longer terms, and the vast bulk of the population doesn't care about it at all (they probably don't know that things go into the public domain, they don't know what reverse engineering is, etc). So for the pollies it's a win-win.
I suspect writing large numbers of "letters to the editor" from lots of people to lots of papers would be more effective than letterboxing. Small businesses whinging about how it will ruin them and result in them having to sack their "battler" employees might even be able to "spin" it enough to make one of the crappy TV "current affairs" shows...
All the people in those photos were witnesses to a crime, this makes them of interest to authorities. Some of them are probably (it hasn't been proven in a court) guilty of a crime - it could well be their own car they were smashing up in which case I guess that isn't a crime, but I suspect it was someone elses... Or maybe there was some amazing reason to be standing on a smashed up car (standing on would seem to be vandalism in itself, I know I don't want foot print dents in my car).
In lots of jurisdictions police have powers to interview witnesses not just suspects.
People vote differently in secret ballots than they do in public ballots. That's a pretty significant reason to keep them.
Secret ballots prevent many problems associated with elections (breaking the legs of those who don't vote how you told them, for example). Of course with non-compulsary voting you can perform similar attacks anyway - prevent a bunch of people who will cast more votes for your opposition than for you from voting at all.
The UK has a system in which votes are tagged with unique identifiers that match a voter to a ballot - but the link is locked away somewhere "safe" and legally can't be accessed except on a court order and are destroyed after a year. That provides most of the benefits of a secret ballot, but still allows the votes to be checked if the election is suspect. See here for a short blurb on the system.
Now whether than system is good or bad is another matter, but it shows you can have some of the benefits of a secret ballot and also the main benefit of a non-secret ballot.
In my (granted not extensive) teaching experience the assembly programmers are the worst of the bunch when it comes to doing CS. Followed closely by the basic programmers. Then followed by the other "Prior Programming Experience" folks. Prior programming experience seems to make people think that CS is about programming, and not about math - which of course means they don't do so well. Of course maybe the blurb is incorrect and the book isn't about CS, but is about programming, which the title of the book indicates. But since the blurb author is the book author the point still seems valid. So is it about programming, or about CS?
"Old-timers" are often viewed as "wizards" because they have knowledge and experience, that they know assembler doesn't seem so important - they probably will know at least one flavour of assembler because of their experience of course.
So have you got some numbers to back up the "I've found that the key difference between mediocre and excellent programmers is whether or not they know assembly language" statement? Or is it anecdotal (which of course doesn't mean it isn't true)? Experience needs to be considered - if the assembler programmers have more years of experience then you would expect them to better programmers (that's what I would expect to explain the observation, since assembler use has declined over time, so people with experience in it probably started earlier...).
Of course a book which teaches programming and not a specific language is a good thing, provided it is well written, edited, and tech reviewed.
It's annoying to have to reply to myself because people want to use journals instead of the far more practical forum...
... [the sarcasm is lost by the short quote, read it sarcastically]
:(
Anyway, when I said "[close window]", I meant I closed the browser window without posting the comment, since you clearly weren't in the mood for any sort of civil discussion with me. The fact that I would have needed a time machine to post either of those replies makes it pretty obvious I didn't do so.
So let's go through some things from the journal.
Also he admits to "following me" after posting to another thread of mine.
No I didn't. I didn't follow and I didn't admit following. I happened to read a post by you, and wrote a reply which I didn't end up submitting - partly because I thought you might yell "stalking" as you have, and partly because you didn't seem interest in communication.
Certainly, that is a trollish statement.
Since I didn't post the message I didn't make the statement, so it's irrelevant.
Of course nobody reads Slashdot articles.
The point was that I do journal type stuff on my own site, since less people read that then read slashdot. Unless of course slashdot has a readership of less than six...
Ok, that's not insulting
Yes that was insulting, I used past tense because I hadn't thought I'd insulted you in the previous messages. That was certainly meant to be an insult, I even stated that in the next paragraph.
I think the problem might be miscommunication. You seem to have misinterpreted everything I have written. I've probably done the same with what you've written, since I can't work out what is going on here.
I never used it in that context, and I only used it in the AC post as a BURN for the importance he "obviously" places in it.
See misinterpretation. I don't place any importance on it at all. The point I was trying to make with it was obvious I thought. Clearly it wasn't, yet again communication issues. I thought highlighting the generalisation in your statement was justified, but it really doesn't matter, you are free to generalise as much as you like I'll try not to point it out again.
Clearly both you and I absolutely suck at both reading and writing. At least with respect to the other's attempted communications.
You keep saying I've said things that I haven't, so I guess I must be writing sloppily at least. I've also used language that you clearly didn't appreciate. You've certainly been sloppy in claiming I've done/said things which I clearly haven't and in fact could not have done so without violating basic rules of physics.
And you didn't laugh at my joke
Did you not have the attention span to reach the next paragraph?
Why?
Doing a reverse DNS lookup of the name associated with the IP of the server connecting is common enough already, eg.:
$ telnet staff.cs.usyd.edu.au 25
Trying 129.78.8.1...
Connected to staff.cs.usyd.edu.au.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 staff.cs.usyd.edu.au. V1.2 ready at Tue, 03 Feb 2004 10:22:23 +1100
HELO foo.com
250 G'day foo.com, I'm staff.cs.usyd.edu.au., I thought you were [censored].swiftdsl.com.au.
That doesn't seem to have brought DNS to its knees...
And it would do lots for spoofed addresses from real domains - you couldn't send email from a domain except via the outgoing mail servers of that domain. Hence you couldn't spoof email from ebay.com (well you could spoof it in the From: header but not in the envelo), unless you managed to get one of ebay.com's outgoing mail servers to do it for you (which hopefully, they would be configured not to do).
spf.pobox.com is one implementation of the idea, not using MX records obviously since that would break existing mail senders, but using TXT records.
Mmmm... decisions decisions.
Do I trust a random slashdot poster or a law firm specialising in IP?
What if another law firm also involved in IP disagrees with the random slashdot poster?
Criminals are easily identifiable on sight? That must make it damn easy for the police, how come they don't just arrest them all?
Walking in the street is a pretty normal thing to do, I do it a lot. Does that mean I want to rob everyone who happens to be in front of me?
Maybe they figured he saw some criminals (who are easily identifiable by sight) and hence they ran away from said criminals (they didn't want to risk turning around to see for themselves and hence slowing down) as well.
Of course many people would prefer not having a transmitter that can "punch" through a house millimeters from their brain...
I would have though the phrase "the smartest of which we likely know nothing of" made it pretty obvious the poster had included those people in the 0.01%.
But don't let that get in the way of some repitition.
I never claimed you insulted me.
:)
Honestly, I tried to tell you that overusing bold is bad style (not just for the sake of it, but because it makes reading harder). You decided to troll about whitespace. So why am I labelled the troll?
I was a little rude, I admit. But I didn't insult you. You didn't insult me from what I read either.
Are you from a parallel universe or something? Or does your browser rewrite stuff? Or are you taking drugs?
OK, that last bit was an insult. So now I agree with you, I insulted you first (and only).
And again, you seem to place importance on "karma" and "last 24" then I do. I used it as a specific piece of evidence to counter a generalisation on your part. You protect it rather than have a conversation.
I had just written a reply to an earlier post by you regarding circumcision. A non-trolling, non-flaming, post about my experiences (I married into a muslim family - so my "discussions" were possibly more "interesting"). But there's clearly no point, you just wanted to do some trolling. Oh well [close window].
Of course your protection of your "top 24" will probably mean you miss out on my greatly humourous post...
And I don't do journals... I whine on my own web space - less people see it that way
First of all, karma is not a "pissing contest", many people on Slashdot understand this you don't... Moderators are given their points in short supply,and they tend to concentrate those points into the latest discussion. Editors sometimes take up the slack and mod down entire threads which are off-topic (like this one), regardless of the "quality" of the conversation. I have had more than my fair share of mod points, and am capped. I didn't say that you never have anything to say, just that that particular comment was lame.
I know karma is meaningless, which is why I didn't refer to karma. You are the one who declared that I could not post anything useful, I merely supplied some indication that others don't agree with you. The fact that you know what "capped" is means you care more about karma than I do...
And this thread is about excessive use of bolding text, so I can't see how these posts could be considered off-topic. The article isn't, I agree, but threads move around and this particular one is about bolding.
You said "So rather than burst out with something truly useful (which apparently you can't)". The word "can't" means lack of ability. I can't see any way to interpete that statement other than that you said you think I "never have anything to say". Please explain the meaning you intended.
I don't like excessive whitespace expecially in short abusive comments, which don't even pretend to be about the thread in question. Of course I don't jump into a discussion just to bitch about people who use excessive whitespace and how STUPID and IGNORANT they are, like you did to me, in third person, to boot.
The only marginal whitespace I see in my original post is that the last two paragraphs could be merged into one. However, I intended them as seperate paragraphs since they were about slightly different things. The overly large amounts of whtespace between elements was added by slashdot and your web browser.
Again, personally insulting based on your preference. Basically you were saying that the "good people" of slashdot needed your general "wisdom" to fully understand that stupid poster (me). You have done again with words, exactly what you accuse me of doing with a simple HTML tag, talking down to people in general. What are you, like 12 years old, I doubt it, but you sure do act like it. (you might notice that this is the first time that I have made a general insult of your person, and character, but after all you said...).
And I'm not "personally insulting" based on my "preference". In fact I didn't insult you. In my first post I said that I suspect you used bold because you know your writing is crap - I guess that could be an insult - but crap writing isn't exactly unusual (my writing is so crap that all my drafts have more superviser authored red ink on them than the black printed stuff I wrote). Excessive use of bold for emphasis is condemned in every English style guide I have ever seen, it is condescending towards the reader. I didn't call you stupid, I didn't say anything about other people on slashdot or my wisdom. I merely explained that excessive bolding implies you think your readers are morons (the malice answer) or that your writing is so bad it can't stand on its own (the ignorance answer). Foolishly I thought you might care not to treat your readers as morons, obviously I was mistaken.
My statement on what non-stupid readers think is not a statement of what you actually do or are. It does not say you are stupid. It says people will think you are if you do certain things. I might be wrong of course, maybe people won't think you're stupid. Maybe they like lots of bold text. Every style guide I've ever seen says that they will, however.
It isn't talking down to you. I have not said "you are too stupid to understand me", I've just presented my views on excessive bolding (views which coincide with every style book I've seen - is there an echo in here?). You can disagree it doesn't worry me. You might even bring
I didn't say formatting was bad. I said that bolding "important" words is insulting to your readers. It says "you are too stupid to understand so I will bold stuff". Of course the non-stupid readers interprete it as the author saying "I am too stupid to compose a meaningful sentence that says what I want to say, so I'll bold the important bits of my drivel." Pick any English style guide you like and it'll say the same thing. The occassional bold is fine (an example of me doing so indicates I don't have a religious belief against it - it's not HTML bolding but the intent to emphasise is the same), it's over use that makes the author look stupid.
If you really are writing for the stupid people, then the bolding is just fine. However, you will come across as an illiterate fool to people with ar least two functioning brain cells.
Note, I am not talking about spelling and grammar. They help in constructing sentences which don't need the non-crap bolded, but are not essential. People with English as a second language manage without bolding even when they make language errors (of course many have better English than the natives - my spelling and grammar is god-awful , for example, and English is my native language).
So rather than burst out with something truly useful (which apparently you can't) they try to disparage the author of the original post for his "great crimes against proper etiquette".
Based upon our "Latest 24" comments sections my comments seem to have been judged far more "useful" (which I'll define as rated insightful, informative, or interesting).
Did you really need to use what amounts to a paragraph for every insult?
Whitespace is cheap and is a renewable resource, why not use it.
I checked the code, sloppy, sloppy, you didn't even open the ordered list. Luckly for you most browsers will render the list anyways.
What do you think the <ol> is?
What I didn't do was close my <li>s but then again you don't need to in HTML...
In fact, the only HTML tags I typed in that post were <i> </i> <ol><li> <li> </ol>, everything else was added by slashdot (from the whitespace I used)...
Also, when you close an ordered list, there is no need to futher break your line, which you did oddly enough, but I also suspect that you like the extra space. See below for an example.
I used "Plain Old Text" which automatically added some <br> tags everywhere.
My I suggest HTML for dummies, should be a short read you only need to cover 14 tags (12 if you get your wish)
You can suggest it, but I don't use HTML anymore. On slashdot sloppy HTML is necessary to keep in sync with the HTML of the slashdot pages.
One of the allowed tags is the <P>, it's very useful, but I would suggest that you don't close it. In the slashdot page it renders with extra space above the sig. As you don't have one, I guess you find sigs offensive as well, I am not sure what happens without a sig.
I don't use it at all, as I said I use "Plain Old Text" and then sprinkle in some HTML, for things which can't be done with just text.
No I don't find sigs offensive, I just don't have one. I also don't have a private jet - does that mean I find them offensive?
One more note about the paragraph tag, many people incorrect say that the tag is the same as the line break, but at the end of an list, a paragraph handles it correctly, but a hard break doesn't.
A paragraph tag is obviosly different than a line break, but who cares?
Bold is only used the way you used it in two cases:
Either way, there's no point reading anything written by such idiotic users of bolding.
Of course the second reason makes a lot of sense on slashdot, but I suspect the first reason is at work.
http://www.mp3-world.net/d/software/programs/mp3_s earch/2074.shtml
No, silver is a much better thermal conductor than gold. Looking it up almost anywhere would show that you just made shit up.
For example: http://www.tak2000.com/data/prop1.htm
The rather major difference between this form of plagerism detection and most is that it is performed by an external for profit company.
I have run plagerism detection on all the assignments for all the courses I've run. No one has ever complained, and no one would have grounds to. Since the plagerism detection is just part of marking and placed no extra requirements upon the students.
I don't know anyhing about Moss that I didn't read on http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~aiken/moss.html just now, but it doesn't seem to infringe on the rights of the student.
My university tried a similar thing last year and it also caused a stink amongst the students. The problem is that to submit the assignment the student must first submit it to the plagerism detection company. That submission requires assigning some rights to that company - essentially to comply with the assignment submission requirements the student must license their work to the company in question to use for profit making purposes with no compensation at all.
At my university that actually conflicts with the letter of the university regulatoins about student intellectual property, since the university isn't allowed to force the students to do anything with the student's own IP.
Or put the machine outside the studio, with some cat5 cable connecting (there must be air ducts somewhere...) it to a dumb terminal in the studio with no moving parts in it at all.