Thanks, I'll think about it. Despite having a cat and a dog (mostly-German-Shepherd, a veritable hair factory) I haven't had to de-hair the mouse all that often. It gets full (I just now opened it up, and it was pretty hairy in there) but it seldom makes any difference at all, and I haven't had trouble with precision in the slightest. I'm not sure how much is driver (I'm running an ancient driver, as befits my ancient Win95 install) and how much is driver, but I'm mostly afraid to mess with it lest it stop working so well. (Which pretty much describes the whole Win95 setup here. I think this week is finally the time I'm going to migrate everything important off of it, though. Nostalgia only gets you so far.)
I've always thought Microsoft made the best keyboards and mice
I dunno about keyboards... I like my M-type much better, and have never quite gotten the appeal of the so-called Natural ones (and not from lack of being forced to use them, either).
Mice, you may be right. I can't make a judgment one way or another on modern ones, since my little dates-from-when-bus-mice-were-a-new-thing mouse (a Microsoft) is still puttering along, so I haven't had to buy any more. I've considered getting an optical and/or wheeled mouse, but there's the ain't-broke factor here...
Ah, that makes sense. (I was on the software side, not the engineering side, obviously.) And small, unmaintained locations were our target audience (it was a sensor with a modem that "phoned home" the levels nightly).
I think there was also a problem with fumes obscuring the reading, since it seems to me there'd still be some value in knowing at least the rough tank level ("nearly empty" or "half full" or whatever) but, like I said, I wasn't on the engineering side.
Wichita (a conservative industrial town) and lots of rural farmland,
And before anybody starts thinking "rural farmland" is redundant, let me say it's not. I thought it was until I moved to Wichita. The city's sitting in an incredibly fertile river valley, and has grown to encompass pretty much the whole valley (and thus all the best farmland) so if you've got an undeveloped bit of land, while you're waiting for the right buyer to come along and put a mall on it you lease it out to a farmer as a little bitty wheat field. There's a stretch (future parking, I guess) along the backside of a Best Buy, Sam's Club, WalMart, etc. that's all wheat, less than 100 feet wide but a quarter mile or so long. Gives a whole new meaning to "back 40." Well, okay, "back 4 or so."
A gallon is a measure of volume, which will vary by temperature.
Mod parent up, because it does, and a lot more than you'd expect, too.
I worked for a company that sold sensors to measure liquid levels, and we'd've sold a heck of a lot more if they'd been practical in gasoline storage tanks. (I'm not sure why we couldn't have just added temp sensors to compensate, other than in large tanks maybe the temp wasn't consistent even through the volume of the gasoline or something.)
It has nothing to do with commands being accepted from remote, and everything with characters typed at the remote end being echoed back. It's not a modem problem, it's a *software* problem.
Um... no. Some modems recognized the characters from remote *with no echo*. Most sysops fixed it on the BBS computer in a hurry, but in a few cases you could hang up on a *user's* computer because their modem defaulted to accepting commands from remote. I wrote code into the Phoenyx to escape the +++ sequence, so as not to allow that problem.
I don't think a real SmartModem had that problem (unless you set it that way on purpose) but not all "Hayes-compat" modems were fully Hayes compatible, and most of us couldn't afford a Hayes. I can't remember what brand my first 1200 was (my 300 was the manually-operated TRS-80 Modem I another poster mentioned... I've still got it) but it didn't support everything a Hayes did, and did support some things Hayes didn't (which wasn't always good).
And of course once that got fixed, it was always fun to social-engineer people into doing it (or similar things) to their own modem...
(I'm sure the bits have all rotted away, or I'd pull out the old diskettes (and an Amiga disk-reader program, I suppose) and dig up old Phoenyx messages on the subject...)
She BELIEVED me and actually left her dinosaur Win95 box running for a week straight. I was surprised after running that long she was able to get on to AOL 6.0 and IM me without the system falling to its knees in a spectacular stream of 30 BSODs.
Erm, I have my even-more-dinosaurish-these-days Win95 box running 24/7. I reboot on occasion, but probably not weekly, and generally not because of BSODs (inexplicable lockups are more common, but still not weekly).
Of course, I'm not running AOL. And I suppose it's a case of survival of the fittest; crash-prone installs probably led to upgrades sooner than this.
Back in the olden days, modems would indeed send NO CARRIER, and many BBSi would cheerfully record it.
Many people didn't set their modems with appropriate timeout space before and after +++, so you could do goofy things like drop the server's modem into command mode (because it faithfully echoed your keystrokes) by doing that. As I recall, some modems even acknowledged the +++ when it was received from remote, so you could have even more fun by embedding +++ATH0 or worse commands into your messages.
There were all sorts of fun things to do with Hayes-compat modems, Back In The Day.
I feel compelled to point out that all ATMs are covered by security cameras. Duh. They're built into the ATM.
You're assuming the cameras feed somewhere. They don't, always, at least in my experience. (I worked for the bank, thankyouverymuch, not the criminals.)
No... it really doesn't, especially assuming you're generally serving static files.
It's just that RSS is pretty much read-only. Which *is* generally fine for announcement lists (I have some gripes with the limitations of the format, but it's nothing insurmountable), just not for your garden-variety discussion lists.
Private NNTP servers actually seem to be the most appropriate solution for those. You've got built-in authentication, so you don't have to worry about forged messages (whitelisting mailing-list subscribers fails when other members get infected and send forged mail), that sort of thing. There are plenty of clients out there, and IIRC even Outlook supports it, for the hopelessly Microsoft-dependent. (I prefer XNews, and in fact that (and inertia) is the only thing keeping my Win95 box from going to the scrapheap.)
The only drawback is lack of familiarity with the process. Everybody's already got a web browser and an email client.
RSS isn't ideal (though Gamehawk will offer it), but yes, speaking as a small mailing-list operator, I have to say we (at least) are looking at offering pull-technology versions of our mailing lists... netnews, web versions, RSS, etc., just because it's darn near impossible for nontechnical people to subscribe to a mailing list without either getting it put in their spam folder, or leaving their mailbox open to spam.
I used to argue against sender-pays systems, but these days I say "What the hey... it's not going to kill us any more than spam already does."
Well, yeah, you do have to factor in that if your wife's not working she has more time to shop. For some people, that can more than offset any other savings...
(In our household, I'm the cheapskate, *he's* the big spender, so twasn't a problem for us.)
We had satellite (and gave it up because we weren't watching it; Netflix is a better use of the money), still have a cell phone (we'd probably lose the landline if the DSL wasn't on it), a company-provided pager (unfortunately), but no new car. My husband drives a 17-year-old beater to work (it's ugly, but it's a 1-ton truck and gets 25 mpg, so it's eminently practical), I drive a nine-year-old minivan that's still in excellent shape. We're putting money aside so when time comes to buy another (non-new, probably another program car), we'll pay cash again.
My hobby business made enough to buy a 29" TV (I think it was... ) a couple Christmases ago. And we do have high-speed DSL, with static IPs, for the Phoenyx, so that's an extra $40ish every month we don't have to spend but do.
And we regularly support nonprofits... tithing at our church, public broadcasting (TV/radio), food banks, etc.
On the other hand, I'm not dressing my preschooler at The Gap and Old Navy, so that makes a difference. He wears mostly secondhand stuff, in fact - makes more sense when they seldom wear clothes out. Heck, *I* wear the occasional secondhand find, though since I'm not working I don't need to overdress so my wardrobe's cheaper these days even new (another one of those hidden bennies).
So, what prevents one parent from staying home? Money, duh. They need more money. The income of one person cannot support the family of 4 unless you have a really good job.
This is often a myth... when you sit down and do the math, you find out that the second income is eaten up (and then some) by daycare, convenience foods and restaurants, and all the less obvious expenses that pile up when you're both working. Some of that's *so* "less obvious that even sitting down and doing the math doesn't tell you the real story.
We cut our household income in half when I quit to have a baby. And our standard of living hasn't changed (to our great surprise). Difference is, I have to cook and shop and all that instead of managing an AS/400 shop. Yeah, in a lot of ways *that's* a major sacrifice - at least I can still code at home on my *own* projects, so I don't feel at all like I'm completely falling behind on my career. Not everybody can do that. On the other hand, not every second income is 50% of the income, either, so a lot of wives (and the occasional husband) can stay home and actually *improve* the household bottom line.
Exactly. I find it's fun at the end of the day to write down what you did, it adds closure and inspires you to do more the next day.
That's exactly why I started keeping a journal of my housekeeping. Given my sig, here seemed an appropriate place, especially since I wasn't publicizing it to anybody I actually knew. I didn't expect any actual people to read it (or even notice it), but a few do. I'm not really sure why.
On the assumption that this is true, would you still think it's right for ISP's to pull content straight away, without any investigation?
Sure. Just because faster distribution exists doesn't mean nobody's going to use a slower one. The expression "sneaking under the radar" comes to mind.
I know, because it would have landed in my mailbox if you had. (I think. I'm not actually sure we have an abuse address set up over there, though it being the only nonvirtual it might end up being mapped anyway.) That's what was so funny in your first reply. Well, that and the idea of the Phoenyx being a hot warez site.
No, I wasn't really thinking of child porn - I somehow doubt the copyright holder would be the one going after it in that case. And generally speaking it ought to be obvious from just looking at it that it's porn, whereas an ISP can't always just look at stuff and know whether it's legit copyright/licensewise.
I was thinking of copyrighted stuff in which the copyright holder didn't want public distribution. (I'm in favor of all copyright holders *permitting* public distribution, but I'm also in favor of respecting the wishes of those that don't. Change their minds via saying "You're a selfish git" and not "Try and stop us BWAHAHA.") The longer the stuff's there, the wider the unauthorized distribution can be. The earlier you catch it, the more likely you are to contain the spread. It's still a well-nigh hopeless task, but if an ISP says "Well, uh, let us do a search, call our lawyers, and we'll get back to you," they're gonna end up with subpoena'd server logs and a lawyer asking a judge for damages proportional to the number of accesses AFTER the ISP was notified.
Yeah, well. The system *does* work pretty much the way I suggested it did, after all. At least, with decent ISPs.
You do bring up a problem, from a copyright-holder's perspective: you *can't* get that sort of instant response when your stuff is posted on a self-hosted site. The ISP can't, and shouldn't, just cut the service off altogether, but the infringing site (I'm assuming here a legitimate report) can just fail to answer phone calls, etc. for enough time to pass to cause real harm. Sure, the ISP could cut the line as soon as they can't get hold of somebody right away, but what about the bogus claims files on Friday at 5:05? Should the ISP pull the plug on a company site over a weekend? Doesn't seem right.
I'll be interested to see if your isp does disconnect you. They don't need to host it to be able to unplug your internet connection.
But they won't. And that in no way invalidates what I said... I *don't* expect an ISP to pull the plug based on an anonymous claim. That's a horse of a different color from simply taking a contested *file* offline.
(And there's not the slightest chance of Wirebird disconnecting us. Real geeks will understand the humor in that.)
I rather like Bloglines. It polls all the sites itself (and its bot is polite and tells you how many subscribers the feed has, so you don't have to worry about losing that information because of a proxy), so I don't have to go round-robin all the time. (It's not really different from setting up an automatic poller, other than I don't feel guily about pinging a site all the time just for one little feed.)
It's not all that useful for Slashdot, being that I generally want to see comments as much as or more than the article itself, other than new Slashdot articles come up along with everything else so I don't have to poll the front page myself.
So basically, if you're going to read everything anyway, no, it's not going to substitute for any site's mainpage. But if you pick and choose, like I do, it saves you having to make the rounds to check for new stuff.
The website http://www.phoenyx.net continues to in distributing the stolen source code from our proprietry game.
Just a second, I'll answer that after I stop laughing at your unintentional humor.
But seriously... assuming there was in fact some sort of game source code on the Phoenyx (instead of it being a pen-n-paper-by-email site), *and* assuming we were hosted on some large site (instead of running a site ourselves), I would not be offended if the source was taken offline and I was notified.
Now, if it didn't get put back online promptly after I said "Nope, none of it's true... we put it there, we wrote every word of it, and we're prepared to say so in writing," *then* I could see getting up in arms. Or if they didn't keep track of that and *not* pull it the next time some nimnul wrote in.
But seriously... I don't expect a large site to be equipped to make that sort of judgment on a specific claim. Not when they're probably seeing clueless users with poor security becoming unwitting warez sites, stuff like that. And it comes down to the damage difference I mentioned before... taking something offline temporarily is going to cause a lot less damage than leaving something online inappropriately.
If I owned an ISP and someone reported that there was a problem with copyrighted material on my equipment, I would take the stuff down too.
I have to agree, and I would hope any ISP would do the same. Err on the side of caution, and all. Were I a copyright holder trying to stop my stuff from being scattered hither and yon, I'd be railing to Slashdot if I couldn't get ISPs to cooperate.
Both that and things like the GPL rest on the same principle: copyright holders should be able to control the use of their work. With the GPL, you want to use that control to make it stay freely (speech) available, but that's still control.
Some Slashdotters want to have their cake and eat it, too... copyright control is okay when it means they get stuff free, not okay when it means they can't get stuff free. Waah, waah, waah.
I think the potential harm from having something temporarily taken offline inappropriately is far less than the potential harm from having something left online inappropriately.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, I'll think about it. Despite having a cat and a dog (mostly-German-Shepherd, a veritable hair factory) I haven't had to de-hair the mouse all that often. It gets full (I just now opened it up, and it was pretty hairy in there) but it seldom makes any difference at all, and I haven't had trouble with precision in the slightest. I'm not sure how much is driver (I'm running an ancient driver, as befits my ancient Win95 install) and how much is driver, but I'm mostly afraid to mess with it lest it stop working so well. (Which pretty much describes the whole Win95 setup here. I think this week is finally the time I'm going to migrate everything important off of it, though. Nostalgia only gets you so far.)
I've always thought Microsoft made the best keyboards and mice
I dunno about keyboards... I like my M-type much better, and have never quite gotten the appeal of the so-called Natural ones (and not from lack of being forced to use them, either).
Mice, you may be right. I can't make a judgment one way or another on modern ones, since my little dates-from-when-bus-mice-were-a-new-thing mouse (a Microsoft) is still puttering along, so I haven't had to buy any more. I've considered getting an optical and/or wheeled mouse, but there's the ain't-broke factor here...
Ah, that makes sense. (I was on the software side, not the engineering side, obviously.) And small, unmaintained locations were our target audience (it was a sensor with a modem that "phoned home" the levels nightly).
I think there was also a problem with fumes obscuring the reading, since it seems to me there'd still be some value in knowing at least the rough tank level ("nearly empty" or "half full" or whatever) but, like I said, I wasn't on the engineering side.
Wichita (a conservative industrial town) and lots of rural farmland,
And before anybody starts thinking "rural farmland" is redundant, let me say it's not. I thought it was until I moved to Wichita. The city's sitting in an incredibly fertile river valley, and has grown to encompass pretty much the whole valley (and thus all the best farmland) so if you've got an undeveloped bit of land, while you're waiting for the right buyer to come along and put a mall on it you lease it out to a farmer as a little bitty wheat field. There's a stretch (future parking, I guess) along the backside of a Best Buy, Sam's Club, WalMart, etc. that's all wheat, less than 100 feet wide but a quarter mile or so long. Gives a whole new meaning to "back 40." Well, okay, "back 4 or so."
A gallon is a measure of volume, which will vary by temperature.
Mod parent up, because it does, and a lot more than you'd expect, too.
I worked for a company that sold sensors to measure liquid levels, and we'd've sold a heck of a lot more if they'd been practical in gasoline storage tanks. (I'm not sure why we couldn't have just added temp sensors to compensate, other than in large tanks maybe the temp wasn't consistent even through the volume of the gasoline or something.)
It has nothing to do with commands being accepted from remote, and everything with characters typed at the remote end being echoed back. It's not a modem problem, it's a *software* problem.
Um... no. Some modems recognized the characters from remote *with no echo*. Most sysops fixed it on the BBS computer in a hurry, but in a few cases you could hang up on a *user's* computer because their modem defaulted to accepting commands from remote. I wrote code into the Phoenyx to escape the +++ sequence, so as not to allow that problem.
I don't think a real SmartModem had that problem (unless you set it that way on purpose) but not all "Hayes-compat" modems were fully Hayes compatible, and most of us couldn't afford a Hayes. I can't remember what brand my first 1200 was (my 300 was the manually-operated TRS-80 Modem I another poster mentioned... I've still got it) but it didn't support everything a Hayes did, and did support some things Hayes didn't (which wasn't always good).
And of course once that got fixed, it was always fun to social-engineer people into doing it (or similar things) to their own modem...
(I'm sure the bits have all rotted away, or I'd pull out the old diskettes (and an Amiga disk-reader program, I suppose) and dig up old Phoenyx messages on the subject...)
She BELIEVED me and actually left her dinosaur Win95 box running for a week straight. I was surprised after running that long she was able to get on to AOL 6.0 and IM me without the system falling to its knees in a spectacular stream of 30 BSODs.
Erm, I have my even-more-dinosaurish-these-days Win95 box running 24/7. I reboot on occasion, but probably not weekly, and generally not because of BSODs (inexplicable lockups are more common, but still not weekly).
Of course, I'm not running AOL. And I suppose it's a case of survival of the fittest; crash-prone installs probably led to upgrades sooner than this.
Back in the olden days, modems would indeed send NO CARRIER, and many BBSi would cheerfully record it.
Many people didn't set their modems with appropriate timeout space before and after +++, so you could do goofy things like drop the server's modem into command mode (because it faithfully echoed your keystrokes) by doing that. As I recall, some modems even acknowledged the +++ when it was received from remote, so you could have even more fun by embedding +++ATH0 or worse commands into your messages.
There were all sorts of fun things to do with Hayes-compat modems, Back In The Day.
I feel compelled to point out that all ATMs are covered by security cameras. Duh. They're built into the ATM.
You're assuming the cameras feed somewhere. They don't, always, at least in my experience. (I worked for the bank, thankyouverymuch, not the criminals.)
No... it really doesn't, especially assuming you're generally serving static files.
It's just that RSS is pretty much read-only. Which *is* generally fine for announcement lists (I have some gripes with the limitations of the format, but it's nothing insurmountable), just not for your garden-variety discussion lists.
Private NNTP servers actually seem to be the most appropriate solution for those. You've got built-in authentication, so you don't have to worry about forged messages (whitelisting mailing-list subscribers fails when other members get infected and send forged mail), that sort of thing. There are plenty of clients out there, and IIRC even Outlook supports it, for the hopelessly Microsoft-dependent. (I prefer XNews, and in fact that (and inertia) is the only thing keeping my Win95 box from going to the scrapheap.)
The only drawback is lack of familiarity with the process. Everybody's already got a web browser and an email client.
RSS isn't ideal (though Gamehawk will offer it), but yes, speaking as a small mailing-list operator, I have to say we (at least) are looking at offering pull-technology versions of our mailing lists... netnews, web versions, RSS, etc., just because it's darn near impossible for nontechnical people to subscribe to a mailing list without either getting it put in their spam folder, or leaving their mailbox open to spam.
I used to argue against sender-pays systems, but these days I say "What the hey... it's not going to kill us any more than spam already does."
Well, yeah, you do have to factor in that if your wife's not working she has more time to shop. For some people, that can more than offset any other savings...
(In our household, I'm the cheapskate, *he's* the big spender, so twasn't a problem for us.)
We had satellite (and gave it up because we weren't watching it; Netflix is a better use of the money), still have a cell phone (we'd probably lose the landline if the DSL wasn't on it), a company-provided pager (unfortunately), but no new car. My husband drives a 17-year-old beater to work (it's ugly, but it's a 1-ton truck and gets 25 mpg, so it's eminently practical), I drive a nine-year-old minivan that's still in excellent shape. We're putting money aside so when time comes to buy another (non-new, probably another program car), we'll pay cash again.
My hobby business made enough to buy a 29" TV (I think it was... ) a couple Christmases ago. And we do have high-speed DSL, with static IPs, for the Phoenyx, so that's an extra $40ish every month we don't have to spend but do.
And we regularly support nonprofits... tithing at our church, public broadcasting (TV/radio), food banks, etc.
On the other hand, I'm not dressing my preschooler at The Gap and Old Navy, so that makes a difference. He wears mostly secondhand stuff, in fact - makes more sense when they seldom wear clothes out. Heck, *I* wear the occasional secondhand find, though since I'm not working I don't need to overdress so my wardrobe's cheaper these days even new (another one of those hidden bennies).
It's all in where you want to spend it, I guess.
So, what prevents one parent from staying home? Money, duh. They need more money. The income of one person cannot support the family of 4 unless you have a really good job.
This is often a myth... when you sit down and do the math, you find out that the second income is eaten up (and then some) by daycare, convenience foods and restaurants, and all the less obvious expenses that pile up when you're both working. Some of that's *so* "less obvious that even sitting down and doing the math doesn't tell you the real story.
We cut our household income in half when I quit to have a baby. And our standard of living hasn't changed (to our great surprise). Difference is, I have to cook and shop and all that instead of managing an AS/400 shop. Yeah, in a lot of ways *that's* a major sacrifice - at least I can still code at home on my *own* projects, so I don't feel at all like I'm completely falling behind on my career. Not everybody can do that. On the other hand, not every second income is 50% of the income, either, so a lot of wives (and the occasional husband) can stay home and actually *improve* the household bottom line.
I saw the parenthetical "archive.org" after it and thought the Wayback Machine was threatened (other than with a slashdotting).
Whew.
Old fridges are cool, as opposed to the modern kind which are intentionally designed to last for an average of 7 years.
Even so, the modern kind are generally still cool for those seven years.
My question becomes: are the ones being routed to Bulk only the ones that just have the stock text in them?
Certainly when I send out the invites, I actually write a message to someone in it. I haven't invited anyone from Hotmail, though.
Exactly. I find it's fun at the end of the day to write down what you did, it adds closure and inspires you to do more the next day.
That's exactly why I started keeping a journal of my housekeeping. Given my sig, here seemed an appropriate place, especially since I wasn't publicizing it to anybody I actually knew. I didn't expect any actual people to read it (or even notice it), but a few do. I'm not really sure why.
On the assumption that this is true, would you still think it's right for ISP's to pull content straight away, without any investigation?
Sure. Just because faster distribution exists doesn't mean nobody's going to use a slower one. The expression "sneaking under the radar" comes to mind.
I know, because it would have landed in my mailbox if you had. (I think. I'm not actually sure we have an abuse address set up over there, though it being the only nonvirtual it might end up being mapped anyway.) That's what was so funny in your first reply. Well, that and the idea of the Phoenyx being a hot warez site.
No, I wasn't really thinking of child porn - I somehow doubt the copyright holder would be the one going after it in that case. And generally speaking it ought to be obvious from just looking at it that it's porn, whereas an ISP can't always just look at stuff and know whether it's legit copyright/licensewise.
I was thinking of copyrighted stuff in which the copyright holder didn't want public distribution. (I'm in favor of all copyright holders *permitting* public distribution, but I'm also in favor of respecting the wishes of those that don't. Change their minds via saying "You're a selfish git" and not "Try and stop us BWAHAHA.") The longer the stuff's there, the wider the unauthorized distribution can be. The earlier you catch it, the more likely you are to contain the spread. It's still a well-nigh hopeless task, but if an ISP says "Well, uh, let us do a search, call our lawyers, and we'll get back to you," they're gonna end up with subpoena'd server logs and a lawyer asking a judge for damages proportional to the number of accesses AFTER the ISP was notified.
rats.
Yeah, well. The system *does* work pretty much the way I suggested it did, after all. At least, with decent ISPs.
You do bring up a problem, from a copyright-holder's perspective: you *can't* get that sort of instant response when your stuff is posted on a self-hosted site. The ISP can't, and shouldn't, just cut the service off altogether, but the infringing site (I'm assuming here a legitimate report) can just fail to answer phone calls, etc. for enough time to pass to cause real harm. Sure, the ISP could cut the line as soon as they can't get hold of somebody right away, but what about the bogus claims files on Friday at 5:05? Should the ISP pull the plug on a company site over a weekend? Doesn't seem right.
There's no good answer to that one.
I'll be interested to see if your isp does disconnect you. They don't need to host it to be able to unplug your internet connection.
But they won't. And that in no way invalidates what I said... I *don't* expect an ISP to pull the plug based on an anonymous claim. That's a horse of a different color from simply taking a contested *file* offline.
(And there's not the slightest chance of Wirebird disconnecting us. Real geeks will understand the humor in that.)
It depends on how often you update it.
I rather like Bloglines. It polls all the sites itself (and its bot is polite and tells you how many subscribers the feed has, so you don't have to worry about losing that information because of a proxy), so I don't have to go round-robin all the time. (It's not really different from setting up an automatic poller, other than I don't feel guily about pinging a site all the time just for one little feed.)
It's not all that useful for Slashdot, being that I generally want to see comments as much as or more than the article itself, other than new Slashdot articles come up along with everything else so I don't have to poll the front page myself.
So basically, if you're going to read everything anyway, no, it's not going to substitute for any site's mainpage. But if you pick and choose, like I do, it saves you having to make the rounds to check for new stuff.
The website http://www.phoenyx.net continues to in distributing the stolen source code from our proprietry game.
Just a second, I'll answer that after I stop laughing at your unintentional humor.
But seriously... assuming there was in fact some sort of game source code on the Phoenyx (instead of it being a pen-n-paper-by-email site), *and* assuming we were hosted on some large site (instead of running a site ourselves), I would not be offended if the source was taken offline and I was notified.
Now, if it didn't get put back online promptly after I said "Nope, none of it's true... we put it there, we wrote every word of it, and we're prepared to say so in writing," *then* I could see getting up in arms. Or if they didn't keep track of that and *not* pull it the next time some nimnul wrote in.
But seriously... I don't expect a large site to be equipped to make that sort of judgment on a specific claim. Not when they're probably seeing clueless users with poor security becoming unwitting warez sites, stuff like that. And it comes down to the damage difference I mentioned before... taking something offline temporarily is going to cause a lot less damage than leaving something online inappropriately.
If I owned an ISP and someone reported that there was a problem with copyrighted material on my equipment, I would take the stuff down too.
I have to agree, and I would hope any ISP would do the same. Err on the side of caution, and all. Were I a copyright holder trying to stop my stuff from being scattered hither and yon, I'd be railing to Slashdot if I couldn't get ISPs to cooperate.
Both that and things like the GPL rest on the same principle: copyright holders should be able to control the use of their work. With the GPL, you want to use that control to make it stay freely (speech) available, but that's still control.
Some Slashdotters want to have their cake and eat it, too... copyright control is okay when it means they get stuff free, not okay when it means they can't get stuff free. Waah, waah, waah.
I think the potential harm from having something temporarily taken offline inappropriately is far less than the potential harm from having something left online inappropriately.