Because 15-year-old trolls are so much more mature.
Seriously, I gave up on OSNews and Slashdot maybe a year and a half ago -- for the same reasons. I've been back on Slashdot for a couple of months, but it doesn't seem to have changed much.
I think the problem with this discussion is that people are arguing two different issues.
Position A: It's wrong for an institution to do this. Position B: No, it's perfectly legal.
But B isn't responding to A -- A's position isn't that it's illegal, but that it's wrong. And B isn't saying it's right, but that it's legal.
Legality and morality are two separate issues that happen to intersect in a number of places (murder being both immoral and illegal) but differ in others (it's perfectly legal to cheat on your girlfriend, but few people would claim that it's moral to do so -- and many would argue it's immoral to be sleeping with her in the first place).
Back to your post, I've never understood the blind faith in private enterprise that big-L Libertarians seem to have. The idea seems to be that the corporations will save us from the government. That's kind of like hoping that a tiger will save you from a lion. I say throw the lion and the tiger in a pit and let them keep each other busy.
Yep. Because it's so easy to predict exactly what hazards a probe will encounter on another planet millions of miles away that has swallowed up half a dozen other probes before they could start transmitting. And God forbid that we encourage people to build things solidly. Let's make the next one out of papier mache so that we don't have to worry about it anymore.
Seriously, I suspect they'd save more money by just decommissioning the working rover than they would have saved by making the probe cheaper, but still solid enough to survive the mission.
Are you serious? There are about half a dozen top-level posts on "over-engineering." Sure, half of them are marked redundant, and you may have gotten in the first one, but I'd hardly say no one is talking about it.
NASA's been following the "faster, better, cheaper" plan for, what, a decade now? (Compare the last dozen probes sent to Mars, Saturn, various comets, etc. with, say, the massive Voyager or Galileo missions.) The whole idea has been to send a bunch of relatively cheap probes instead of a few really expensive ones, and if a couple of the cheap ones disappear or fall apart, well, that's no big deal.
The problem is that when some of the cheap probes disappeared, crashed, or fell apart, people were still upset over the "waste of resources." The level of engineering, materials, fuel, etc. it takes to make sure that most of the probes get where they're supposed to and collect the data we want is too high for a spacecraft to really be expendable in the eyes of the public -- or the people in charge of the budget.
In part, this is because a multiplayer game is inherently social, while an online auction is primarily commercial. In an eBay transaction, it all comes down to three things: Will the buyer pay in a reasonable time? Will the seller ship in a reasonable time? Is the item as advertised? Your interactions with the other users are very limited in scope, and your chances of running into the same person repeatedly are rather small unless the market you're shopping in is very select. You're more likely to encounter an entirely new person and try to gauge the answers to those questions by looking at feedback than to run into someone you already know by name.
By contrast, in a game you need to know not only whether the other player has the capabilities you need for a mission, but whether you can stand working with him and whether the mission will actually be fun. You can't get that from stats, but you can get it by recognizing the name of someone you've played with before.
On the other hand, most married women don't change their entire name. And they're generally still recognizable if you see them face to face.
That said, there's a reason that most women who make a name for themselves professionally -- authors, actresses, etc. -- will keep their original name. (OK, actresses may not be the best example, given the Hollywood divorce rate.)
It does -- the issue is that in WoW other people only know you by your name, not by your stats, armor, or database key.
You can walk up to someone and say "Hey, it's XYZ, the GMs made me change my name," but they won't recognize you until you tell them. It's like playing with an alt (in games that allow you more than one character), except for the fact that an alt is voluntary and you can go back to the other character whenever you want.
I don't give a flying #@$! who posted this story. If it was some random submission I would've said the same thing (except for the part about it being "his" blog.)
The fact is, there's a potentially thought-provoking story about (a) bad customer service and silly rules, and (b) the impact of names on the online experience.
If you can't see that, move onto the next story and quit whining about how this one doesn't measure up to your standards.
Get a blog loser and don't bore the rest of us with your childish rant about how you're not allowed to break the rules everyone else conforms to.
As others have pointed out, this *is* his blog, but more importantly, you clearly missed the point. First of all, there's a difference between "You should make an exception for me" and "This rule is silly." And the rest of the piece? Musings about online identity. Rather thought-provoking if you bother to think about it. Which you clearly didn't.
There is of course a difference between ejecting people who carry their skateboards into the mall and ejecting people who have skateboards sitting in the garage at home.
There is no right to free speech in a shopping mall, if the shopping mall has a rule that says otherwise.
What if the shopping mall has a rule that says you don't have free speech at home? Does the shopping mall have any right, legally, morally, or ethically, to restrict what you do in your back yard?
The issue here is freedom of speech, but it's not about the first amendment. Yes, strictly speaking the first amendment only restricts what the government can do, but the reason it's in there in the first place is that, societally, we generally agree that freedom of speech is a good thing (with exceptions, like doctor-patient confidentiality, and, of course, speech we don't personally want to hear.)
Actually, freedom of speech is only the reason this case is worrisome. It really comes down to whether the school has any (for lack of a better term) jurisdiction over what the students do on their own time, off-campus. Would you expect a school to be able to enforce a dress code off-campus? Any student seen in Starbucks on the weekend gets suspended? Any student seen browsing the banned book display at the bookstore gets called into the principal's office?
The question is, what right does the school have to limit what the students do at home, on their own time?
Is it within the school's rights to suspend anyone who watches an R-rated movie, even if their parents are present?
Suppose someone reads books not on the approved list -- at home? Plays D&D on the weekends? Dates someone of another religion (again, not on school time)? Eats junk food?
What gives the school the right to dictate the student's personal life when the student is not on school property or engaged in a school function? And if something does give them that right, where does it stop?
OK, you installed 2 copies on one machine, and I installed one copy on 10 machines. So which way does the inaccuracy go once we factor in everyone who downloads multiple times, or installs on multiple computers?
Download numbers are just that, download numbers. There's no sense using them to determine the number of installed copies, or currently-installed copies, or copies in use, or users. By the time you make enough assumptions about repeat downloads, or redistribution, or downloads from alternate sources, or installs from Linux CDs, APT or Yum, or the initial adoption rate, the assumptions far outweigh the actual data and any number you come up with is meaningless. It's just a guess.
Better to look at the numbers for what they are: the number of successful downloads from official Mozilla mirrors (and possibly a few others that provide stats). And you know what, those numbers keep going up. Some of those people are re-downloading, some of them are downloading for the first time, but the servers can't tell the difference. What they can tell is that, for whatever reason, people keep downloading the software.
Sounds great, as long as they don't take the opportunity to lock out their actual customers.
Good ideas:
Hardware that doesn't actually need to be plugged into the computer (such as the token with constantly-changing access codes)
Hardware dongle that plugs into the USB port and talks to the computer using standard USB protocols
Bad ideas:
Hardware dongle that requires you to install drivers. Even if they commit to producing cross-platform drivers, there's always going to be some obscure platform that they didn't think was worth implementing. (See today's article on the lack of 64-bit Flash for an example of why this is an issue.)
Smart cards for the next few years, until readers are as ubiquitous as USB is today. Lots of computers still ship without memory card readers, and I shouldn't be forced to buy one to do something I can already do without it. (In my case I'm just stubborn, but you can bet there will be people for whom the money to buy a card reader is money that they'd rather spend on, say, food for that week.)
Bottom line: These are average people on home PCs, not corporate desktops where they can dictate the hardware/OS config, and anything that takes too much time/effort/skill/cash to install is going to be prohibitive. If banks keep that in mind, this should work. If not, they'll find a sharp drop in use of their online services.
Argh. I'd forgotten that 64-bit XP was *still* only XP Pro.
As for the Pentium 4's 64-bit capability, a quick Google search turned up a couple of sources and dates. The first Pentium 4 processors with EM64T support -- Intel's version of AMD64 (because there's no way they'd actually use a name with AMD in it!) -- came out in March, and apparently the "majority" of the Pentium 4 line has been 64-bit since June. Maybe PR is keeping quiet because the average user will be using XP Home?
For me it was the 5.0 series. Opera was going the kitchen sink route and somehow managed to make Mozilla's UI look simple by comparison. I kept buying upgrades to support them, since I thought what they were doing was important -- I especially made sure to buy the Linux version, just to encourage them to keep building it -- but it was 8.0 that got me to start using it for more than website testing. I think I'm at 80/20 Firefox/Opera, or maybe 70/30, but before Opera 8 it was more like 99.9%/0.1%.
Slashdot Mirror
s/student/parent/gi and this makes more sense... generally speaking high school students don't have much say in where they go to school.
Sleep? Why? I mean, we have plenty of caffeine available, and the office gives it to us free!
Because 15-year-old trolls are so much more mature.
Seriously, I gave up on OSNews and Slashdot maybe a year and a half ago -- for the same reasons. I've been back on Slashdot for a couple of months, but it doesn't seem to have changed much.
Is it just my imagination, or are the more posts whining about whether this belongs on Slashdot than about questions of online identity?
At 1500 I don't really feel like reading them all to get exact numbers, but that's certainly the impression I'm getting.
You sir, are in desperate need of a Jump-to-Conclusions(tm) mat.
Agreed!
I think the problem with this discussion is that people are arguing two different issues.
Position A: It's wrong for an institution to do this.
Position B: No, it's perfectly legal.
But B isn't responding to A -- A's position isn't that it's illegal, but that it's wrong. And B isn't saying it's right, but that it's legal.
Legality and morality are two separate issues that happen to intersect in a number of places (murder being both immoral and illegal) but differ in others (it's perfectly legal to cheat on your girlfriend, but few people would claim that it's moral to do so -- and many would argue it's immoral to be sleeping with her in the first place).
Back to your post, I've never understood the blind faith in private enterprise that big-L Libertarians seem to have. The idea seems to be that the corporations will save us from the government. That's kind of like hoping that a tiger will save you from a lion. I say throw the lion and the tiger in a pit and let them keep each other busy.
Yep. Because it's so easy to predict exactly what hazards a probe will encounter on another planet millions of miles away that has swallowed up half a dozen other probes before they could start transmitting. And God forbid that we encourage people to build things solidly. Let's make the next one out of papier mache so that we don't have to worry about it anymore.
Seriously, I suspect they'd save more money by just decommissioning the working rover than they would have saved by making the probe cheaper, but still solid enough to survive the mission.
Are you serious? There are about half a dozen top-level posts on "over-engineering." Sure, half of them are marked redundant, and you may have gotten in the first one, but I'd hardly say no one is talking about it.
NASA's been following the "faster, better, cheaper" plan for, what, a decade now? (Compare the last dozen probes sent to Mars, Saturn, various comets, etc. with, say, the massive Voyager or Galileo missions.) The whole idea has been to send a bunch of relatively cheap probes instead of a few really expensive ones, and if a couple of the cheap ones disappear or fall apart, well, that's no big deal.
The problem is that when some of the cheap probes disappeared, crashed, or fell apart, people were still upset over the "waste of resources." The level of engineering, materials, fuel, etc. it takes to make sure that most of the probes get where they're supposed to and collect the data we want is too high for a spacecraft to really be expendable in the eyes of the public -- or the people in charge of the budget.
I was personally assured that they had "top men" working on this!
In part, this is because a multiplayer game is inherently social, while an online auction is primarily commercial. In an eBay transaction, it all comes down to three things: Will the buyer pay in a reasonable time? Will the seller ship in a reasonable time? Is the item as advertised? Your interactions with the other users are very limited in scope, and your chances of running into the same person repeatedly are rather small unless the market you're shopping in is very select. You're more likely to encounter an entirely new person and try to gauge the answers to those questions by looking at feedback than to run into someone you already know by name.
By contrast, in a game you need to know not only whether the other player has the capabilities you need for a mission, but whether you can stand working with him and whether the mission will actually be fun. You can't get that from stats, but you can get it by recognizing the name of someone you've played with before.
On the other hand, most married women don't change their entire name. And they're generally still recognizable if you see them face to face.
That said, there's a reason that most women who make a name for themselves professionally -- authors, actresses, etc. -- will keep their original name. (OK, actresses may not be the best example, given the Hollywood divorce rate.)
It does -- the issue is that in WoW other people only know you by your name, not by your stats, armor, or database key.
You can walk up to someone and say "Hey, it's XYZ, the GMs made me change my name," but they won't recognize you until you tell them. It's like playing with an alt (in games that allow you more than one character), except for the fact that an alt is voluntary and you can go back to the other character whenever you want.
Why am I not surprised that an anonymous coward doesn't care about the power of names?
I don't give a flying #@$! who posted this story. If it was some random submission I would've said the same thing (except for the part about it being "his" blog.)
The fact is, there's a potentially thought-provoking story about (a) bad customer service and silly rules, and (b) the impact of names on the online experience.
If you can't see that, move onto the next story and quit whining about how this one doesn't measure up to your standards.
Get a blog loser and don't bore the rest of us with your childish rant about how you're not allowed to break the rules everyone else conforms to.
As others have pointed out, this *is* his blog, but more importantly, you clearly missed the point. First of all, there's a difference between "You should make an exception for me" and "This rule is silly." And the rest of the piece? Musings about online identity. Rather thought-provoking if you bother to think about it. Which you clearly didn't.
There is of course a difference between ejecting people who carry their skateboards into the mall and ejecting people who have skateboards sitting in the garage at home.
There is no right to free speech in a shopping mall, if the shopping mall has a rule that says otherwise.
What if the shopping mall has a rule that says you don't have free speech at home? Does the shopping mall have any right, legally, morally, or ethically, to restrict what you do in your back yard?
The issue here is freedom of speech, but it's not about the first amendment. Yes, strictly speaking the first amendment only restricts what the government can do, but the reason it's in there in the first place is that, societally, we generally agree that freedom of speech is a good thing (with exceptions, like doctor-patient confidentiality, and, of course, speech we don't personally want to hear.)
Actually, freedom of speech is only the reason this case is worrisome. It really comes down to whether the school has any (for lack of a better term) jurisdiction over what the students do on their own time, off-campus. Would you expect a school to be able to enforce a dress code off-campus? Any student seen in Starbucks on the weekend gets suspended? Any student seen browsing the banned book display at the bookstore gets called into the principal's office?
But did these Mormons try to disallow you from drinking Coke *outside* that residence? If so, did they think they could enforce it?
The question is, what right does the school have to limit what the students do at home, on their own time?
Is it within the school's rights to suspend anyone who watches an R-rated movie, even if their parents are present?
Suppose someone reads books not on the approved list -- at home? Plays D&D on the weekends? Dates someone of another religion (again, not on school time)? Eats junk food?
What gives the school the right to dictate the student's personal life when the student is not on school property or engaged in a school function? And if something does give them that right, where does it stop?
Please don't tell me that "most people" write their PIN numbers on their ATM cards.
OK, you installed 2 copies on one machine, and I installed one copy on 10 machines. So which way does the inaccuracy go once we factor in everyone who downloads multiple times, or installs on multiple computers?
Download numbers are just that, download numbers. There's no sense using them to determine the number of installed copies, or currently-installed copies, or copies in use, or users. By the time you make enough assumptions about repeat downloads, or redistribution, or downloads from alternate sources, or installs from Linux CDs, APT or Yum, or the initial adoption rate, the assumptions far outweigh the actual data and any number you come up with is meaningless. It's just a guess.
Better to look at the numbers for what they are: the number of successful downloads from official Mozilla mirrors (and possibly a few others that provide stats). And you know what, those numbers keep going up. Some of those people are re-downloading, some of them are downloading for the first time, but the servers can't tell the difference. What they can tell is that, for whatever reason, people keep downloading the software.
Sounds great, as long as they don't take the opportunity to lock out their actual customers.
Good ideas:
Bad ideas:
Bottom line: These are average people on home PCs, not corporate desktops where they can dictate the hardware/OS config, and anything that takes too much time/effort/skill/cash to install is going to be prohibitive. If banks keep that in mind, this should work. If not, they'll find a sharp drop in use of their online services.
Argh. I'd forgotten that 64-bit XP was *still* only XP Pro.
As for the Pentium 4's 64-bit capability, a quick Google search turned up a couple of sources and dates. The first Pentium 4 processors with EM64T support -- Intel's version of AMD64 (because there's no way they'd actually use a name with AMD in it!) -- came out in March, and apparently the "majority" of the Pentium 4 line has been 64-bit since June. Maybe PR is keeping quiet because the average user will be using XP Home?
January: The Pentium 4 adds 64-bit Extensions
March: Intel's 64-Bit Pentium 4s Hit The Streets
June: Intel Shifts Pentium 4 to 64-Bits
For me it was the 5.0 series. Opera was going the kitchen sink route and somehow managed to make Mozilla's UI look simple by comparison. I kept buying upgrades to support them, since I thought what they were doing was important -- I especially made sure to buy the Linux version, just to encourage them to keep building it -- but it was 8.0 that got me to start using it for more than website testing. I think I'm at 80/20 Firefox/Opera, or maybe 70/30, but before Opera 8 it was more like 99.9%/0.1%.