It's like they're trying to say "that guy's an asshole so all of the bad shit about us doesn't matter because he's an asshole."
The article by Jemima Khan is more balanced that you guys are giving it credit for (since you haven't read it, because you're so anxious to show how much you know and all):
There is no evidence that US national security was damaged in any way by the leaks, nor indeed that democracy has ever been harmed by an increase in the publicâ(TM)s knowledge and understanding. If Assange is prosecuted in the US for espionage, I suspect even his most disenchanted former supporters will take to the barricades in his defence.
I like the Daniel Domscheit-Berg book myself, without being able to swear to it's veracity. It has the ring of truth about it, and while there are places where I disagree with the author I think the mistakes he makes are the ones that idealistic hackers are prone to -- e.g. he underrates the value of having a poster-boy like Assange (a position for which being egocentric is almost a job requirement), and D seemed to be groping for a purely technical solution to the wikileaks problem that would take all human decision-making out of the system (good luck with that...).
The idea that D was planted on Assange is crazy: he was with him too long, no one knew who Assange was when D started working with him.
D's "openleaks" project might've been a front of some sort, but couldn't you say the same thing about "wikileaks"? And even if these projects don't start that way, what stops them from being subverted later?
If you're going to play whistle-blower, watch your butt... myself I doubt it can be done anonymously at all, and the real trouble with wikileaks and co is that it encourages people to believe that that's possible.
Essentially no mail is hand sorted any longer: they have machines that can read handwritten zip codes.
The pre-sorted bulk mail rate shouldn't just be increased, the discount should be eliminated for commercial mail.
Non-profits should still have a discount (though it doesn't matter if we say it's for "pre-sorting" mail). This is for practical reasons-- good luck getting a policy change across with *every* non-profit against you-- and also, perhaps, because (most of) the non-profits deserve the break.
The US government is in the business of subsidising junk mail.
Does that make sense to you?
I'm (thankfully) not an expert in SEO, but my thought would be to put up an "index" page that links to every other page, and request the emacs community to link to that page from their own.
Well, that's pretty much the standard for heavy-thinking in the
art world these days. "What should we do with the Bay Bridge?";
"Let's cover it with a giant TV screen!"
I've seen stupider pieces of art-- like this cutsey
bow
and arrow over by the same bridge-- but this one does not,
shall we say, grab me.
(this complaint about Perl has never failed to puzzle me)
Like most complaints about perl, this one is over-argued, but it gets closer to a real problem than most do. The lack of standardisation in the perl world means you need to think a little harder about some things-- you can download an "object oriented" package off of CPAN, but if you need to extend it with a sub-class, you've got to do a lot of poking around under the hood just to see how it's objects were implemented. And by the way, what calling context does it report errors in (does it die or croak), and does it return error objects or just strings? Oh, and if you need to crunch some XML, is there a way to do it in perl? Sure. Which way should you do it? Well.... how much time do you have?
Myself I'm happy with (or at least resigned to) this state of affairs, and I look on it as the price of freedom. But the straight-jacket fetishists at least have a point that needs to be dealt with...
(What I like is the same people who argue that "there should be just one way" also argue that you should learn lots of languages for the educational effect. Which is it, is mental exercise good or bad?)
The problem is that people look at Perl - without having learned it - and say "unreadable!"
There's different theories about where the "unreadable" meme comes from. A lot of it has to do with regular expression integration, but then as Larry Wall has pointed out, everyone seems to be trying to imitate perl 5 regular expressions, so: "Go figure."
(And perl 5's regexp implementation is actually really fast and has more features than it's competitors... but whatever, us supremely rational software engineers only care about technical advantages on alternate Tuesdays.)
Perl popularity is due to its text file processing ability. Back durring it's high points relational databases were expensive and resource hogs. However with faster systems and lower cost or free databases available, Perl need has declined.
Well, now that's certainly a nice story. It has no connection with reality, but what do you expect, we're just a bunch of programmers.
No, no perl is "failing" because the hype machine has moved on to other things. And that's happened because (a) the hype machine has to, it thrives on New New New, and (b) because there was a decade-long smear campaign against perl [1].
By any sane measure of "success" perl was and is a great success.
But don't let me get in the way of your consensus hallucination.
[1] The CS geeks were insulted that Larry suggested they didn't know what they're doing, but really they didn't (e.g. see Pascal). Larry has since admitted that he didn't know what he was doing either. There's a lot of it going around.
For me it's a matter of access to my registers, rather than just "the clipboard". I've got custom commands to do stuff in dired like stash the path in register p and the current name in register n, so I can switch to a sub-shell and use those in commands without re-typing them.
It's also nice to have access to the full kill-ring rather than just the top of it (non-emacs people: you do understand that it's silly you can only put one thing in the clipboard, right? Inside emacs you've got a stack to work with, not just one location).
I also like to save shell buffers to files, then emacs auto-save can take over, keeping a record of everything I do.
"'... EmacsWiki has a fair amount of problems..."
Actually, I don't think it has any problems at all compared to a lot of other wikis out there. My big complaint is that it doesn't seem to have any google-juice to speak of, so if you do a websearch on a problem you're not immediately steered to the right EmacsWiki page.
Postgresql 9.2 shipped with covering indexes. Postgres also has the "hstore" feature, which might-or-might-not be a good key-value store solution, depending on exactly what you're doing.
On top on innovation ? Not really. Debian has become too big to innovate fast, and Debian is a little bit too often in freeze ( like 20% of time ) due to release pressure.
And really, Debian's big selling point is their "stable" branch. They're famous for being slower to change things than other distros (which increasingly seems like a big advantage to me, in a world where everyone thinks they have a right to broadcast UI changes to you at the designer's whim).
Anyway, while the threat from Oracle taking over MySQL has always been obvious, I don't think the other shoe has ever really dropped, has it? A situation to keep an eye on, but not necessarily any need to act quickly.
Well, I for one look forward to the mess these methods will cause in academia, where it is likely that they can be used to identify the authors of referee reports.
It's not needed. There's already a limited pool of "peers" to use for "anonymous" peer review, and by definition they all know each other, and are familiar with each others patterns of thought. "Oh look, Fred at MIT is hassling us about using linear regression again."
You have some good points here, but you're missing a big one in my opinion: the slashdot system is easily gameable by any well-funded and/or well-organized group. Create a hundred accounts, have them post obvious crap that earns karma, then have them start moderating each other up (but only when posting dull stuff that the metamods won't complain about). Then when the crunch comes-- the political and/or marketing plan you're working on-- you've got the tools you need to put it over. The slashdot moderation scheme works only when no one cares very much, i.e. it's a toy.
And on another subject:
I do review stuff on Amazon. I feel like it's a way I can contribute a bit.
I respect your impulse of volunteerism, but you might want to think about what it is your contributing to.
I think the real fix is pretty obvious: verified ids + full disclosure + penalties
Verified IDs can be done a number of ways, most likely credit
card auth, or possibly via something like Google+. (Needless to
say, there is no way to do this that won't rub someone the wrong
way, because they all involve centralized agencies... you "web of
trust" guys, this is your queue, but please explain how you're
going to get something that hasn't taken-off for decades to work
now).
The "full disclosure" bit is also obvious: you have a TOS that
requires you explain (at a minimum) any financial connection that
might bias your opinions.
The "penalties" bit is trickier: we need the courts to start
recognizing intentionally deceptive behavior on the internet as a
form of fraud, and not just "guerrilla marketing" or "the way
politics works" or some such.
I've been saying this for years, now, anything that doesn't work
this way (and that's nearly everything, including slashdot) is
just a part of the THE_TOY_WEB.
The standard counter-argument is that if you impose any
user-restrictions at all, your traffic drops off by a factor of a
100 or more, but I fail to see how this is such an insurmountable
difficulty. Reducing the number of comments on, say, New York
Times columns by a factor of 100 wouldn't greatly disturb me, and
myself I'd prefer it if the political operatives were required to label
themselves.
I'm sometimes wonder if there might be something clever you can
do with privileges that ramp up if you're willing to pay a
nominal fee and not incidentally, verify who you are.
I think the real fix is pretty obvious: verified ids + full disclosure + penalities
Verified IDs can be done a number of ways, most likely credit
card auth, or possibly via something like Google+. (Needless to
say, there is no way to do this that won't rub someone the wrong
way, because they all involve centralized agencies... you "web of
trust" guys, this is your queue, but please explain how you're
going to get something that hasn't taken-off for decades to work
now).
The "full disclosure" bit is also obvious: you have a TOS that
requires you explain (at a minimum) any finacial connection that
might bias your opinions.
The "penalities" bit is trickier: we need the courts to start
recognizing intentionally deceptive behavior on the internet as a
form of fraud, and not just "guerilla marketing" or "the way
politics works" or some such.
I've been saying this for years, now, anything that doesn't work
this way (and that's nearly everything, including slashdot) is
just a part of the THE_TOY_WEB.
The standard counter-argument is that if you impose any
user-restrictions at all, your traffic drops off by a factor of a
100 or more, but I fail to see how this is such an insurmountable
difficulty. Reducing the number of comments on, say, New York
Times columns by a factor of 100 wouldn't greatly disturb me, and
myself I'd prefer it if the political operatives were required to label
themselves.
I'm sometimes wonder if there might be something clever you can
do with privileges that ramp up if you're willing to pay a
nominal fee and not incidentally, verify who you are.
Or could it be that the people complaining about Unity doesn't know how to change to to Xubuntu, Kubuntu and so on? A lot of the comments are "Unity is crap" bla bla. I just don't get it, If you don't like Unity, just use Xubuntu or whatever. Unity has been here for over a year now, it's here too stay, just use Xubuntu or whatever if you don't like it.
Yeah, thanks. Myself I run icewm on whatever linux distro I'm
using, but the reason I care about something like Unity-suckage
is it indicates something about the attitude of the people
setting up the distro, and it seems likely to me that there's
going to be other decisions made I won't like (if only, lack of
attention to the real problems: like, libreoffice appears to be
horked on Ubuntu 10 at least).
The business with desktop search phoning home is even more
disturbing however, particularly with the attempt at partnering
with the still-evil-in-my-book Amazon.
Apparently this makes me one of those silly nerds who cares
about *software licences* and stuff like that. I probably need to
find a distro setup along different lines.
Slashdot Mirror
The article by Jemima Khan is more balanced that you guys are giving it credit for (since you haven't read it, because you're so anxious to show how much you know and all):
I see, so you regard his fears of "extraordinary rendition" as entirely reasonable?
I like the Daniel Domscheit-Berg book myself, without being able to swear to it's veracity. It has the ring of truth about it, and while there are places where I disagree with the author I think the mistakes he makes are the ones that idealistic hackers are prone to -- e.g. he underrates the value of having a poster-boy like Assange (a position for which being egocentric is almost a job requirement), and D seemed to be groping for a purely technical solution to the wikileaks problem that would take all human decision-making out of the system (good luck with that...).
The idea that D was planted on Assange is crazy: he was with him too long, no one knew who Assange was when D started working with him.
D's "openleaks" project might've been a front of some sort, but couldn't you say the same thing about "wikileaks"? And even if these projects don't start that way, what stops them from being subverted later?
If you're going to play whistle-blower, watch your butt... myself I doubt it can be done anonymously at all, and the real trouble with wikileaks and co is that it encourages people to believe that that's possible.
The US government is in the business of subsidising junk mail. Does that make sense to you?
I'm (thankfully) not an expert in SEO, but my thought would be to put up an "index" page that links to every other page, and request the emacs community to link to that page from their own.
So, how do you feel about "Cupid's Bow"
Well, that's pretty much the standard for heavy-thinking in the art world these days. "What should we do with the Bay Bridge?"; "Let's cover it with a giant TV screen!"
I've seen stupider pieces of art-- like this cutsey bow and arrow over by the same bridge-- but this one does not, shall we say, grab me.
print "Oh, give it a $expletive rest\n";
Like most complaints about perl, this one is over-argued, but it gets closer to a real problem than most do. The lack of standardisation in the perl world means you need to think a little harder about some things-- you can download an "object oriented" package off of CPAN, but if you need to extend it with a sub-class, you've got to do a lot of poking around under the hood just to see how it's objects were implemented. And by the way, what calling context does it report errors in (does it die or croak), and does it return error objects or just strings? Oh, and if you need to crunch some XML, is there a way to do it in perl? Sure. Which way should you do it? Well.... how much time do you have?
Myself I'm happy with (or at least resigned to) this state of affairs, and I look on it as the price of freedom. But the straight-jacket fetishists at least have a point that needs to be dealt with...
(What I like is the same people who argue that "there should be just one way" also argue that you should learn lots of languages for the educational effect. Which is it, is mental exercise good or bad?)
There's different theories about where the "unreadable" meme comes from. A lot of it has to do with regular expression integration, but then as Larry Wall has pointed out, everyone seems to be trying to imitate perl 5 regular expressions, so: "Go figure."
(And perl 5's regexp implementation is actually really fast and has more features than it's competitors... but whatever, us supremely rational software engineers only care about technical advantages on alternate Tuesdays.)
Well, now that's certainly a nice story. It has no connection with reality, but what do you expect, we're just a bunch of programmers.
No, no perl is "failing" because the hype machine has moved on to other things. And that's happened because (a) the hype machine has to, it thrives on New New New, and (b) because there was a decade-long smear campaign against perl [1].
By any sane measure of "success" perl was and is a great success. But don't let me get in the way of your consensus hallucination.
[1] The CS geeks were insulted that Larry suggested they didn't know what they're doing, but really they didn't (e.g. see Pascal). Larry has since admitted that he didn't know what he was doing either. There's a lot of it going around.
You're not still using grep are you? I almost always use ack, myself. It is, of course, written in perl, and is up on CPAN.
(It sure is weird that a "stagnant" language like perl has so much stuff going up on CPAN all the time.)
For me it's a matter of access to my registers, rather than just "the clipboard". I've got custom commands to do stuff in dired like stash the path in register p and the current name in register n, so I can switch to a sub-shell and use those in commands without re-typing them.
It's also nice to have access to the full kill-ring rather than just the top of it (non-emacs people: you do understand that it's silly you can only put one thing in the clipboard, right? Inside emacs you've got a stack to work with, not just one location).
I also like to save shell buffers to files, then emacs auto-save can take over, keeping a record of everything I do.
"'... EmacsWiki has a fair amount of problems ..."
Actually, I don't think it has any problems at all compared to a lot of other wikis out there. My big complaint is that it doesn't seem to have any google-juice to speak of, so if you do a websearch on a problem you're not immediately steered to the right EmacsWiki page.
Postgresql 9.2 shipped with covering indexes. Postgres also has the "hstore" feature, which might-or-might-not be a good key-value store solution, depending on exactly what you're doing.
Oh: you mean you know what he did? I don't. Once you get the lawyers involved the people who really know things all shut up.
And really, Debian's big selling point is their "stable" branch. They're famous for being slower to change things than other distros (which increasingly seems like a big advantage to me, in a world where everyone thinks they have a right to broadcast UI changes to you at the designer's whim).
Anyway, while the threat from Oracle taking over MySQL has always been obvious, I don't think the other shoe has ever really dropped, has it? A situation to keep an eye on, but not necessarily any need to act quickly.
It's not needed. There's already a limited pool of "peers" to use for "anonymous" peer review, and by definition they all know each other, and are familiar with each others patterns of thought. "Oh look, Fred at MIT is hassling us about using linear regression again."
Answer, no, clearly they didn't read it at all, they were in too big a hurry to show how clever they are.
You just realized this? Son, real hackers are still bitching that there's no control key next to the A.
(Though my capslock is re-programmed as a second ESC key.)
You have some good points here, but you're missing a big one in my opinion: the slashdot system is easily gameable by any well-funded and/or well-organized group. Create a hundred accounts, have them post obvious crap that earns karma, then have them start moderating each other up (but only when posting dull stuff that the metamods won't complain about). Then when the crunch comes-- the political and/or marketing plan you're working on-- you've got the tools you need to put it over. The slashdot moderation scheme works only when no one cares very much, i.e. it's a toy.
And on another subject:
I respect your impulse of volunteerism, but you might want to think about what it is your contributing to.
I think the real fix is pretty obvious: verified ids + full disclosure + penalties
Verified IDs can be done a number of ways, most likely credit card auth, or possibly via something like Google+. (Needless to say, there is no way to do this that won't rub someone the wrong way, because they all involve centralized agencies... you "web of trust" guys, this is your queue, but please explain how you're going to get something that hasn't taken-off for decades to work now).
The "full disclosure" bit is also obvious: you have a TOS that requires you explain (at a minimum) any financial connection that might bias your opinions.
The "penalties" bit is trickier: we need the courts to start recognizing intentionally deceptive behavior on the internet as a form of fraud, and not just "guerrilla marketing" or "the way politics works" or some such.
I've been saying this for years, now, anything that doesn't work this way (and that's nearly everything, including slashdot) is just a part of the THE_TOY_WEB.
The standard counter-argument is that if you impose any user-restrictions at all, your traffic drops off by a factor of a 100 or more, but I fail to see how this is such an insurmountable difficulty. Reducing the number of comments on, say, New York Times columns by a factor of 100 wouldn't greatly disturb me, and myself I'd prefer it if the political operatives were required to label themselves.
I'm sometimes wonder if there might be something clever you can do with privileges that ramp up if you're willing to pay a nominal fee and not incidentally, verify who you are.
I think the real fix is pretty obvious: verified ids + full disclosure + penalities
Verified IDs can be done a number of ways, most likely credit card auth, or possibly via something like Google+. (Needless to say, there is no way to do this that won't rub someone the wrong way, because they all involve centralized agencies... you "web of trust" guys, this is your queue, but please explain how you're going to get something that hasn't taken-off for decades to work now).
The "full disclosure" bit is also obvious: you have a TOS that requires you explain (at a minimum) any finacial connection that might bias your opinions.
The "penalities" bit is trickier: we need the courts to start recognizing intentionally deceptive behavior on the internet as a form of fraud, and not just "guerilla marketing" or "the way politics works" or some such.
I've been saying this for years, now, anything that doesn't work this way (and that's nearly everything, including slashdot) is just a part of the THE_TOY_WEB.
The standard counter-argument is that if you impose any user-restrictions at all, your traffic drops off by a factor of a 100 or more, but I fail to see how this is such an insurmountable difficulty. Reducing the number of comments on, say, New York Times columns by a factor of 100 wouldn't greatly disturb me, and myself I'd prefer it if the political operatives were required to label themselves.
I'm sometimes wonder if there might be something clever you can do with privileges that ramp up if you're willing to pay a nominal fee and not incidentally, verify who you are.
Yeah, thanks. Myself I run icewm on whatever linux distro I'm using, but the reason I care about something like Unity-suckage is it indicates something about the attitude of the people setting up the distro, and it seems likely to me that there's going to be other decisions made I won't like (if only, lack of attention to the real problems: like, libreoffice appears to be horked on Ubuntu 10 at least).
The business with desktop search phoning home is even more disturbing however, particularly with the attempt at partnering with the still-evil-in-my-book Amazon.
Apparently this makes me one of those silly nerds who cares about *software licences* and stuff like that. I probably need to find a distro setup along different lines.
It's looking like Debian for me...