The problem with up-votes/down-votes is that if you want that, just go to Digg (remember them?) or Reddit already. Being able to up/down vote any and every message with no limit, even when you're a brand new user, just breeds circle-jerking and sock-puppetry.
I'm sure that would work, why Disqus has that, and nobody's ever seen Disqus threads full of blatant trolling!;-)
But you have to log in to down-vote Disgust posts, which means you actually have to (ewwwww) create a Disgust account. Just thinking about it makes me feel icky. (And I do from time to time up-vote good posts.) I would never use it without a user blacklist feature that can block hundreds of users. But at least they let you hit the report button without logging in, unlike a lot of other similar message thread services.
Seriously, the slashdot moderation system works well for what it moderates: a bunch of threads which each get a couple of hundred replies that you see mostly at the same time.
Those who actually read articles accumulate points that let them moderate up to 5 or 15 posts in a 3-day period every month or so, and (something I would implement if I set up a blog, because of all the "thanks for your post!" spammers) all threads are closed after two weeks. It's not trivial to get mod points on multiple accounts, and you also don't know exactly when you'll get points.
Meta-moderation is a good idea too, but it's been fucked since they changed it from Agree/Disagree to +/- about five or so years ago without ever updating the FAQ to say whether +/- means Agree/Disagree or Good post/Bad post. Actually it was fucked much, much earlier than that when there was a bug that prevented the "Have you meta-moderated today?" from ever showing up on certain accounts (like mine) and the only way to meta-moderate was to go to metamod.pl manually.
Twitter is basically just a bunch of random posts (like "Hey, I just pooped!") that are loosely linked with # and @ characters in free-form text. It's like in the old BBS days when you would post a message to "All", with nothing like a "thread" with a root post. You just poop out your "hashtag BowelMovement" into the Twitter-space, where you might get as few as zero readers. Try to crowd-moderate that. Frankly, I'm surprised Twitter ended up as popular as it is for having basically no structure other than "fits in an SMS message" and "# and @ mean something". Really, the only significant thing added beyond that original idea is attaching an image.
This. "We need to go to the moon so we can get all the He3!" is one of my pet peeves as well. He3 fusion will probably not be achieved until the late 21st century at the earliest.
They should put the menu on a wooden table, take a picture with a film camera, scan the photograph on a flatbed scanner, then post that picture on their website.
Classic ADSL (the original 1998 version) goes to 8M/1M. If all you can get is 3M down, then that's because Verizon sucks. I had a less ambitious 6M/600K for years from AT&T until I upgraded to U-verse last year.
ADSL2+ (Annex M 2008) supports 24M down / 3.3M up and the telco side gear should be compatible with classic ADSL CPE. VDSL1 supports 55M down / 3M up and should also be backward compatible with ADSL. Both of these are probably where FCC got their numbers.
That's what U-verse uses. Last summer I finally switched over from 6m/600k DSL to 24M/8M(?) since 2004-ish, though my line (about 500 wire feet from the pedestal) syncs at 64/24 or so on a single wire pair. (I think U-verse can bond two pairs) I get only Internet/VoIP because I refuse to pay for television. (MythTV gives me nice unrestricted.mpg files from my antenna.) Then they silently upgraded me to 32M down, which I only noticed when I started half a dozen torrents one Saturday morning.
The first of your links refers to an incident in Australia. Just because it's on the Daily Fail doesn't mean it happened in the UK. And the third one? Maybe if petrol wasn't taxed so highly they could have just towed the ATM away. Fourth link shows a long list of ATMs that were hit by one gang... maybe it's just a few gangs of yobbos with little common sense?
That's why credit cards in the US have a 3-digit number printed on the back for when you make online purchases. A skimmer can't read that number, at least not without including a really good camera to scan an image of the card.
They haven't bothered with that for years. These days they put a faceplate over the card reader with a second card reader inside to skim the card data. Then they either have a telescopic camera nearby to watch for PINs or they include a keypad as part of the fake faceplate.
Not all ATM cards are debit cards. (I think you can even use credit cards, but you'll be subject to the credit card company's steep cash withdrawal charges.)
Back before the banks realized how much money they could make off of fees (and also have YOU be responsible for fraud) and went nuts with debit cards, back in the '90s there was such a thing as an ATM-only card, usually based off of a network like Pulse, Plus, or Cirrus. The fun part was that these networks had regional coverage, so when traveling you had to look for your network's logo on the machine to be sure you could get money from it.
I still have a Pulse card from my bank that I got in the mid '90s. I keep worrying that at some point it will wear out and stop working and I will have to go to the trouble of getting another, and if they will even make new non-debit ATM cards anymore.
The thing is, unless the control system is set up to shut down the site (that "positive shut-down" thing is new to me), gas pumps (just like honey badger) don't care what the tank level is and will continue to dispense fuel until it goes dry.
I wrote code for automated gas station stuff back in the late '90s (6809 assembly code to talk to the pump and terminal; Gilbarco, Wayne, Tokheim and Schlumberger were the brands back in the day), and late one afternoon when I was on-site at a unattended station (we were testing cash acceptors), suddenly nobody could get gas. I was worried at first because I thought my code might have been the problem. Turned out that the tank of regular had gone dry, so you could only get premium. Because the site used "blender" pumps, you couldn't get mid-grade either. The pumps were apparently smart enough to know not to give you pure premium when this happened.
...which brings up the main point of having a tank monitor. It's not to tell the pumps or the unattended site control when the gas is empty, they know from the lack of product, it's to tell the company running the station when they need to send a truck out. So this is just as likely if not more so to cause an unnecessary truck roll.
Yep, I worked on software to talk to gas pumps back in the late '90s. The gallons to price stuff happens entirely in the pump. The various prices are all sent to the pump in advance, and it knows which to use based on what grade button the user presses. It then reports gallons and price back when the hose handle is hung up.
You could possibly fool the system into turning on the pumps without the accounting system knowing, but there are low-tech odometers in gas pumps for actual gallons dispensed, and eventually someone will notice that the numbers don't match up, basically an inventory problem.
The configuration software for Harmony remotes uses Silver(b)light. I only tolerate that piece of crap because it has codes for things that I never had the remote for.
Murphy only applies to bad improbable things happening. Microsoft getting something right would be a good improbable thing.
As there are many somethings to get right, they'll always get a few of them right by accident, but nobody can remember what they did right in Vista and 8.0 because there was so much bad.
That's great when you can get the communication as text. It's another thing when it's only spoken, and could possibly have phonemes that are not identifiable or can be differentiated by most non-speakers. Would you be able do a "simple substitution" on people speaking a tonal language like Chinese to each other? And Japanese is really poor in phonemes, especially vowels, compared to other languages, which probably put them at more of a disadvantage than others would have been.
Slashdot Mirror
The celebritards need to learn what we here have known for years: The Internet is Serious Business[tm].
Stick with TV appearances if you want a one-way hug-box.
The problem with up-votes/down-votes is that if you want that, just go to Digg (remember them?) or Reddit already. Being able to up/down vote any and every message with no limit, even when you're a brand new user, just breeds circle-jerking and sock-puppetry.
I'm sure that would work, why Disqus has that, and nobody's ever seen Disqus threads full of blatant trolling! ;-)
But you have to log in to down-vote Disgust posts, which means you actually have to (ewwwww) create a Disgust account. Just thinking about it makes me feel icky. (And I do from time to time up-vote good posts.) I would never use it without a user blacklist feature that can block hundreds of users. But at least they let you hit the report button without logging in, unlike a lot of other similar message thread services.
Seriously, the slashdot moderation system works well for what it moderates: a bunch of threads which each get a couple of hundred replies that you see mostly at the same time.
Those who actually read articles accumulate points that let them moderate up to 5 or 15 posts in a 3-day period every month or so, and (something I would implement if I set up a blog, because of all the "thanks for your post!" spammers) all threads are closed after two weeks. It's not trivial to get mod points on multiple accounts, and you also don't know exactly when you'll get points.
Meta-moderation is a good idea too, but it's been fucked since they changed it from Agree/Disagree to +/- about five or so years ago without ever updating the FAQ to say whether +/- means Agree/Disagree or Good post/Bad post. Actually it was fucked much, much earlier than that when there was a bug that prevented the "Have you meta-moderated today?" from ever showing up on certain accounts (like mine) and the only way to meta-moderate was to go to metamod.pl manually.
Twitter is basically just a bunch of random posts (like "Hey, I just pooped!") that are loosely linked with # and @ characters in free-form text. It's like in the old BBS days when you would post a message to "All", with nothing like a "thread" with a root post. You just poop out your "hashtag BowelMovement" into the Twitter-space, where you might get as few as zero readers. Try to crowd-moderate that. Frankly, I'm surprised Twitter ended up as popular as it is for having basically no structure other than "fits in an SMS message" and "# and @ mean something". Really, the only significant thing added beyond that original idea is attaching an image.
Just watch out for the mountain slope on the other side of that cloud...
This. "We need to go to the moon so we can get all the He3!" is one of my pet peeves as well. He3 fusion will probably not be achieved until the late 21st century at the earliest.
Because the Monolith said so!
"ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA"
I think that's clear enough!
They should put the menu on a wooden table, take a picture with a film camera, scan the photograph on a flatbed scanner, then post that picture on their website.
Classic ADSL (the original 1998 version) goes to 8M/1M. If all you can get is 3M down, then that's because Verizon sucks. I had a less ambitious 6M/600K for years from AT&T until I upgraded to U-verse last year.
ADSL2+ (Annex M 2008) supports 24M down / 3.3M up and the telco side gear should be compatible with classic ADSL CPE. VDSL1 supports 55M down / 3M up and should also be backward compatible with ADSL. Both of these are probably where FCC got their numbers.
And Verizon also sucks because they're not going to build out any more FIOS.
Why are you still using 3c509 when you can get eepro100 by the crate-load?
VDSL?
That's what U-verse uses. Last summer I finally switched over from 6m/600k DSL to 24M/8M(?) since 2004-ish, though my line (about 500 wire feet from the pedestal) syncs at 64/24 or so on a single wire pair. (I think U-verse can bond two pairs) I get only Internet/VoIP because I refuse to pay for television. (MythTV gives me nice unrestricted .mpg files from my antenna.) Then they silently upgraded me to 32M down, which I only noticed when I started half a dozen torrents one Saturday morning.
Actually they're using a gas, not "gas"oline. Acetylene or propane. Taste the meat, not the heat!
The first of your links refers to an incident in Australia. Just because it's on the Daily Fail doesn't mean it happened in the UK. And the third one? Maybe if petrol wasn't taxed so highly they could have just towed the ATM away. Fourth link shows a long list of ATMs that were hit by one gang... maybe it's just a few gangs of yobbos with little common sense?
That's why credit cards in the US have a 3-digit number printed on the back for when you make online purchases. A skimmer can't read that number, at least not without including a really good camera to scan an image of the card.
by hacking a vendor's card reader
They haven't bothered with that for years. These days they put a faceplate over the card reader with a second card reader inside to skim the card data. Then they either have a telescopic camera nearby to watch for PINs or they include a keypad as part of the fake faceplate.
Not all ATM cards are debit cards. (I think you can even use credit cards, but you'll be subject to the credit card company's steep cash withdrawal charges.)
Back before the banks realized how much money they could make off of fees (and also have YOU be responsible for fraud) and went nuts with debit cards, back in the '90s there was such a thing as an ATM-only card, usually based off of a network like Pulse, Plus, or Cirrus. The fun part was that these networks had regional coverage, so when traveling you had to look for your network's logo on the machine to be sure you could get money from it.
I still have a Pulse card from my bank that I got in the mid '90s. I keep worrying that at some point it will wear out and stop working and I will have to go to the trouble of getting another, and if they will even make new non-debit ATM cards anymore.
and DSLR remote shooting is also much easier with a large screen
You have a tablet with a DSLR camera in it?
The thing is, unless the control system is set up to shut down the site (that "positive shut-down" thing is new to me), gas pumps (just like honey badger) don't care what the tank level is and will continue to dispense fuel until it goes dry.
I wrote code for automated gas station stuff back in the late '90s (6809 assembly code to talk to the pump and terminal; Gilbarco, Wayne, Tokheim and Schlumberger were the brands back in the day), and late one afternoon when I was on-site at a unattended station (we were testing cash acceptors), suddenly nobody could get gas. I was worried at first because I thought my code might have been the problem. Turned out that the tank of regular had gone dry, so you could only get premium. Because the site used "blender" pumps, you couldn't get mid-grade either. The pumps were apparently smart enough to know not to give you pure premium when this happened.
...which brings up the main point of having a tank monitor. It's not to tell the pumps or the unattended site control when the gas is empty, they know from the lack of product, it's to tell the company running the station when they need to send a truck out. So this is just as likely if not more so to cause an unnecessary truck roll.
Yep, I worked on software to talk to gas pumps back in the late '90s. The gallons to price stuff happens entirely in the pump. The various prices are all sent to the pump in advance, and it knows which to use based on what grade button the user presses. It then reports gallons and price back when the hose handle is hung up.
You could possibly fool the system into turning on the pumps without the accounting system knowing, but there are low-tech odometers in gas pumps for actual gallons dispensed, and eventually someone will notice that the numbers don't match up, basically an inventory problem.
The configuration software for Harmony remotes uses Silver(b)light. I only tolerate that piece of crap because it has codes for things that I never had the remote for.
So why the hell are you wasting your time slumming around here, shill-boy?
...and I just replied to the wrong sub-comment. Thanks, Murphy.
Murphy only applies to bad improbable things happening. Microsoft getting something right would be a good improbable thing.
As there are many somethings to get right, they'll always get a few of them right by accident, but nobody can remember what they did right in Vista and 8.0 because there was so much bad.
the woman in the car next to you voted for Boehner
Nope. I am nowhere near Ohio. (Wait, he's from Ohio? Sheesh.)
That's great when you can get the communication as text. It's another thing when it's only spoken, and could possibly have phonemes that are not identifiable or can be differentiated by most non-speakers. Would you be able do a "simple substitution" on people speaking a tonal language like Chinese to each other? And Japanese is really poor in phonemes, especially vowels, compared to other languages, which probably put them at more of a disadvantage than others would have been.