I was a U.S. Senate intern this summer. I would say that the best way to be heard by your Senator is to contact the regional office. Your Senator has probably 3-7 regional offices around your state. You can find their addresses on their webpages. Type a letter and snail mail it to your regional office, then fax it as a followup, and then call a live person at the regional office and *keep calling them* until you get a response.
In my office, I checked in all the mail, and we sent it to Washington if it was just a normal letter on some issue we didn't really care about. But if later, they constituent called us about it, we'd check on it for them.
Basically it's hard to be completely heard unless you want to put in the time to keep on the office until they get back to you. And be understanding, they get literally thousands of letters a day, not counting the emails, and it usually takes the office several months to develop a position on an issue. But if you keep calling them enough, they will. And get your friends to call too, so they think lots of people are concerned about it.
Oh, and my name was Monica long before that other one did her thing.
In my experience working with my own grandparents and middle-agers, my main problem was getting them to not be scared of experimentation. With computers, the main way I (and probably most of you) have learned is by trying something and messing something up and fixing it. Like if there's some option in Word that i want to use but i can't find it, i go through the menus seeing what things do. It's important to tell them that no matter what they do, they probably can't unintentionally mess anything up permanently. Mostly the people who can't figure computers out are just unwilling to see what everything does and not be scared of messing up the machine.
The TV Netowork Channel One has been in schools for probably 10 years. It has targeted ads that the school has to agree to make part of the instructional day (ie, they can't do anything else while it's on so the kids are forced to sit and stare at the screen). If that's not illegal, I don't know why this would be.
Josh Centers started the Hacker Anti-Defamation League a couple of years ago to try to counteract the media's mis-use of Hacker, but the project has never really taken off.
I think that's probably because a small minority can't control how the majority of people are going to use words. We can spend all our time trying to tell the media that their definition of hacker is wrong, but it's not going to do any good because their definition sells. The real point here is that Joe Football would much prefer to read a story about their definition of hacker than our definition of hacker.
I agree, however, that everyone, including the press, should use the definition from the Jargon File. How we're going to get them to use it is another question entirely.
I think someone mentioned this already, but this is just like Channel One in secondary schools. In exchange for paying for televisions in every classroom and a closed circuit network, schools have to agree to make the national Channel One newscast (and highly targeted commercials) part of the mandatory instructional day. The newscast actually wasn't that bad, but the Pepsi commericials and movie previews were completely mindless drivel.
What you need is a check card. My bank issues Visa debit cards. You can use them at stores (and PayPal) without telling the merchant that they're a debit card, and the money still goes straight out of your account. It's wonderful for people with no credit; if there's no money in your bank account then the card will be refused. I think MasterCard may do it too, lobby your bank for a check card.
I'm a student at Bard College in NY state, and we use IMAP so presumably students, faculty, and staff can get their email at any terminal on or off-campus. I'm not a sysadmin, so I'm not sure what all they use, but I know they use IMP for our webmail. You can find out more at http://inside.bard.edu then cick on Henderson Computing Resources Center.
At West Virginia University, in my hometown, there's this place called Neer Notes. (The Mountaineer is the mascot of WVU.) They pay students to take two copies of notes in class, and then sell them to other students in the class that may have missed that day or for some reason didn't get the notes. This is perfectly legal, and the place has been around for at least 15 years. It's a private company, I think started by students, but not necessarily run by them now, and the University doesn't care. What's the difference?
Because MTV wasn't acting in good faith. When someone like that starts getting in your face, there's no chance of enlightening them. Mocking them and exposing them is the correct strategy.
What about just exposing them? Why mock and run the risk of children believing some crazy story you put on there?
The worst possible scenario would be that MTV started showing a mixture of their bullshit along with the truth. People might sometimes recognize the truth and then assume the bullshit is a part of it. As long as they remain completely disreputable, they are harmless.
Which is what happened. What I think Shamrock didn't realize is that his story wasn't going to look unbelievable enough. (I mean, come on, lots of kiddies believe the Hackers movie.) So the honorable thing to do, once you realize that MTV is not going to portray you and your culture correctly, is to not be a part of the bad show and educate people on how bad it was and why you were not involved. I would have more respect for Shamrock if he had just bowed out of it because he knew it was going to be bad.
We waited for months to see if they would be realistic and after it was obvious that they wouldn't we figured the only option would be to discredit them with as much fiction as possible).
This is the most immature thing I have ever heard about journalism. If MTV's getting it wrong, then why couldn't Shamrock et al. help them out? Or if you see that the show is going to be bad, and there is no way they're going to get it right, then the mature thing to do is get out of the show, and let MTV do their stupid thing without you involved. It's just plain dumb to be part of a badly-executed project and then apologize for it. Why be involved with it in the first place?
The only reason I can see Shamrock stayed with it is to be on MTV. Sure, I want to be on MTV too, but I'm not gonna spread misinformation to gullible preteens to get there.
Well, I saw the show today (Thursday Oct 14 99). MTV re-aired it about noon EDT. Just so you all are more informed when you post about it, here's a synopsis/review of the show. It centered around three self-proclaimed "hackers": Shamrock, Chameleon, and Mantis. Shamrock told Serena Altschul (anyone remember her from Channel One?) that he was a "phone phreaker." One of the first shots of him in action was when he was talking on a payphone and had a cell phone laying on top of it. During the course of the program, one of his friends was arrested, and he and Serena had to make it to this guy's apartment to get a disk before the police got to it. Shamrock refused to tell what was on the disk, and while he and a friend left Serena on the street she commented to the camera that this was the most exciting news lead she had ever been on. I found that interesting. At least Shamrock carried around a scanner for police frequencies. That's kind of hacker-like, I guess. Oh, and he also sells pot, has a criminal record, and got into hacking to change his grades. The next guy was Chameleon, who had blue hair. His strength was breaking into military systems. He alluded to cracking NASA and DOJ websites, but never really said it out right. A guy from AntiOnline told MTV all about Chameleon's downfall. Apparently he was alright poking around, until he started downloading the programs that control satellites. The FBI raided his house, arrested him, but didn't put him in jail. Instead, he has a job writing code to keep hackers out now. Near the end of the show, they showed him at Comdex in Las Vegas. It didn't have anything to do with anything. The third guy, Mantis, was interesting. He's a host of the radio show Parse (with some other guys and a GIRL! Yay hacker girls!). He told Serena that he's not the stereotypical hacker at all. I've never seen a hacker in a necktie, so I guess he must be right. He talked a lot more about the culture than anything (Mantis was the source of most of the misinformation on the show). I think the worst part of the show was how they didn't talk about any of the equipment/OS used. Ok, so it wasn't really catered to us geeks, but it wouldn't have been that hard to say as a sideline "And by the way, none of these hackers use Windows or AOL." The L0pht was interviewed too. They talked about "good hacking" like Mantis, but then Shamrock said that everyone's good and bad, that there are no good or bad, so that's the image Serena ended on. That all hacking is bad. It reminded me of all the DOJ kids anti-hacking pages. I think MTV could have done more with it. Someone should make a series on good hackers and the hacker culture.
I think of Ada as a geek. Her father, Lord Byron, had emotional problems, what we would probably call Manic Depression today. As his only legitimate child, Ada's mother raised her to be nothing like her dad. Unfortunately, Ada turned out more like her father than anyone wanted. She wasted much of her family's money on gambling and drugs. (Anyone read The Difference Engine by Gibson and Sterling? She's often seen at the racetrack in that book.) She was socially inept, and never really fitted into the social circle of the time. She mostly stuck to her math books, and wrote letters to Charles Babbage.
But how does that work when slashdot gives away their logos?
Re:Moderate thoughts on Moderation
on
Moderation Ideas
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· Score: 1
I think fractional moderation is wonderful idea. That way you never know if your moderation is going to change the number of points a post has (what Rob was talking about before) and one person wouldn't go around moderating posts he agreed with, ie GNOME vs. KDE, because his moderation may or may not do anything. It might even fix meta-moderation too, because it's more like Moderation By Concensus. This is a great idea!
PS: You can require previews, but that doesn't mean everyone will read over his comment before he hits Submit.
I'm surprised there's only been one mention of Charles Babbage so far. If Ada Lovelace is credited as being the first Computer Programmer, and she wrote programs for Babbage, and there had to be a computer for her to program, then why isn't Babbage credited?
Actually, the article was not about "Anonymous posters." It was about "posters who have logged in to Yahoo! but don't show their name when they're posting." Sometimes we forget this difference in our comments.
So AC's, don't get all hyped up about this. It's not about you. It's about the rest of us. We should be worried, because slashdot has some info about us (real name, email, etc.) if we've chosen to provide it.
Somebody's just bitter because they haven't had good luck with chicks, I think.:) As an attractive female (so I'm told) both starting out in the Computer Science field and dating an amazing geeky guy, I have to disagree with your comments. I don't think the fact that most CS majors are geeks has anything to do with females in the field. How many attractive felmales go into physical education (I'm using your example)?
If anything, remotely intelligent girls would want nothing more than to go into a field where there is an overabundance of single genius men.
I do agree on the math thing. I don't know who came up with the idea that girls were worse at math. Just because some of us are more social than many guys doesn't mean we can't do math.
I also agree that many men do feel free to ignore the lack of estrogen in engineering/computer/mechanical fields.
I also want information on how to apply for Rob's scholarship.:)
My 50-year-old dad and step-mother watched "Pirates" with us, and although they use their computer like parents do, they were interested in the story. At the end, my stepmother went off on how Gates and Jobs were both scum and how she lost respect for them, but that they should make a movie about "who's that Scandanavian Linux guy?" Open Source has been in the press alot lately, and my parents have seen/heard it on NPR and CNN, and then asked me more about it. I hope more of the older generation has too. We all agreed that the real movie we wanted to see, with real heroes, would be one about Richard Stallman and Open Source.
I even forgot it was April Fool's Day, thanks man. Anyway, the support pages have up a gray ribbon(?), so that would be the way to go i guess. Or like, a perf or something, that would be cool. Speaking of those support pages, they should have some way to for non-webmasters to express support.
Finally. I hoped at least one poster had actually read the article. Yes, the case is not about an Anonymous Coward, it is about a user with a real account. There have been other cases like this, such as people trying to hold ISPs responsible for what their users post on a webpage. The Anonymous Coward option should stay; the whole point of it is to be able to speak freely.
Slashdot Mirror
i was totally one of those little geek girls whose first celebrity crush was on wesley crusher.
now i'm a grown up geek girl and i have a crush on wil wheaton. you're awesome. that interview rocked. thank you.
I was a U.S. Senate intern this summer. I would say that the best way to be heard by your Senator is to contact the regional office. Your Senator has probably 3-7 regional offices around your state. You can find their addresses on their webpages. Type a letter and snail mail it to your regional office, then fax it as a followup, and then call a live person at the regional office and *keep calling them* until you get a response.
In my office, I checked in all the mail, and we sent it to Washington if it was just a normal letter on some issue we didn't really care about. But if later, they constituent called us about it, we'd check on it for them.
Basically it's hard to be completely heard unless you want to put in the time to keep on the office until they get back to you. And be understanding, they get literally thousands of letters a day, not counting the emails, and it usually takes the office several months to develop a position on an issue. But if you keep calling them enough, they will. And get your friends to call too, so they think lots of people are concerned about it.
Oh, and my name was Monica long before that other one did her thing.
In my experience working with my own grandparents and middle-agers, my main problem was getting them to not be scared of experimentation. With computers, the main way I (and probably most of you) have learned is by trying something and messing something up and fixing it. Like if there's some option in Word that i want to use but i can't find it, i go through the menus seeing what things do. It's important to tell them that no matter what they do, they probably can't unintentionally mess anything up permanently. Mostly the people who can't figure computers out are just unwilling to see what everything does and not be scared of messing up the machine.
The TV Netowork Channel One has been in schools for probably 10 years. It has targeted ads that the school has to agree to make part of the instructional day (ie, they can't do anything else while it's on so the kids are forced to sit and stare at the screen). If that's not illegal, I don't know why this would be.
I think Mir will splash down at 2001-03-22 06:23:25.
Josh Centers started the Hacker Anti-Defamation League a couple of years ago to try to counteract the media's mis-use of Hacker, but the project has never really taken off.
I think that's probably because a small minority can't control how the majority of people are going to use words. We can spend all our time trying to tell the media that their definition of hacker is wrong, but it's not going to do any good because their definition sells. The real point here is that Joe Football would much prefer to read a story about their definition of hacker than our definition of hacker.
I agree, however, that everyone, including the press, should use the definition from the Jargon File. How we're going to get them to use it is another question entirely.
I think someone mentioned this already, but this is just like Channel One in secondary schools. In exchange for paying for televisions in every classroom and a closed circuit network, schools have to agree to make the national Channel One newscast (and highly targeted commercials) part of the mandatory instructional day. The newscast actually wasn't that bad, but the Pepsi commericials and movie previews were completely mindless drivel.
What you need is a check card. My bank issues Visa debit cards. You can use them at stores (and PayPal) without telling the merchant that they're a debit card, and the money still goes straight out of your account. It's wonderful for people with no credit; if there's no money in your bank account then the card will be refused. I think MasterCard may do it too, lobby your bank for a check card.
How about "people looking to fill their brain with technical know-how"? I am female and I very much enjoyed this article.
I'm a student at Bard College in NY state, and we use IMAP so presumably students, faculty, and staff can get their email at any terminal on or off-campus. I'm not a sysadmin, so I'm not sure what all they use, but I know they use IMP for our webmail. You can find out more at http://inside.bard.edu then cick on Henderson Computing Resources Center.
I'd say Robin Hood and Friar Tuck is the best hack.
I also support Stonehenge, everything MIT, and the turning of the Rice statue.
At West Virginia University, in my hometown, there's this place called Neer Notes. (The Mountaineer is the mascot of WVU.) They pay students to take two copies of notes in class, and then sell them to other students in the class that may have missed that day or for some reason didn't get the notes. This is perfectly legal, and the place has been around for at least 15 years. It's a private company, I think started by students, but not necessarily run by them now, and the University doesn't care. What's the difference?
Because MTV wasn't acting in good faith. When someone like that starts getting in your face, there's no chance of enlightening them. Mocking them and exposing them is the correct strategy.
What about just exposing them? Why mock and run the risk of children believing some crazy story you put on there?
The worst possible scenario would be that MTV started showing a mixture of their bullshit along with the truth. People might sometimes recognize the truth and then assume the bullshit is a part of it. As long as they remain completely disreputable, they are harmless.
Which is what happened. What I think Shamrock didn't realize is that his story wasn't going to look unbelievable enough. (I mean, come on, lots of kiddies believe the Hackers movie.) So the honorable thing to do, once you realize that MTV is not going to portray you and your culture correctly, is to not be a part of the bad show and educate people on how bad it was and why you were not involved. I would have more respect for Shamrock if he had just bowed out of it because he knew it was going to be bad.
We waited for months to see if they would be realistic and after it was obvious that they wouldn't we figured the only option would be to discredit them with as much fiction as possible).
This is the most immature thing I have ever heard about journalism. If MTV's getting it wrong, then why couldn't Shamrock et al. help them out? Or if you see that the show is going to be bad, and there is no way they're going to get it right, then the mature thing to do is get out of the show, and let MTV do their stupid thing without you involved. It's just plain dumb to be part of a badly-executed project and then apologize for it. Why be involved with it in the first place?
The only reason I can see Shamrock stayed with it is to be on MTV. Sure, I want to be on MTV too, but I'm not gonna spread misinformation to gullible preteens to get there.
Well, I saw the show today (Thursday Oct 14 99). MTV re-aired it about noon EDT. Just so you all are more informed when you post about it, here's a synopsis/review of the show.
It centered around three self-proclaimed "hackers": Shamrock, Chameleon, and Mantis.
Shamrock told Serena Altschul (anyone remember her from Channel One?) that he was a "phone phreaker." One of the first shots of him in action was when he was talking on a payphone and had a cell phone laying on top of it. During the course of the program, one of his friends was arrested, and he and Serena had to make it to this guy's apartment to get a disk before the police got to it. Shamrock refused to tell what was on the disk, and while he and a friend left Serena on the street she commented to the camera that this was the most exciting news lead she had ever been on. I found that interesting. At least Shamrock carried around a scanner for police frequencies. That's kind of hacker-like, I guess. Oh, and he also sells pot, has a criminal record, and got into hacking to change his grades.
The next guy was Chameleon, who had blue hair. His strength was breaking into military systems. He alluded to cracking NASA and DOJ websites, but never really said it out right. A guy from AntiOnline told MTV all about Chameleon's downfall. Apparently he was alright poking around, until he started downloading the programs that control satellites. The FBI raided his house, arrested him, but didn't put him in jail. Instead, he has a job writing code to keep hackers out now. Near the end of the show, they showed him at Comdex in Las Vegas. It didn't have anything to do with anything.
The third guy, Mantis, was interesting. He's a host of the radio show Parse (with some other guys and a GIRL! Yay hacker girls!). He told Serena that he's not the stereotypical hacker at all. I've never seen a hacker in a necktie, so I guess he must be right. He talked a lot more about the culture than anything (Mantis was the source of most of the misinformation on the show).
I think the worst part of the show was how they didn't talk about any of the equipment/OS used. Ok, so it wasn't really catered to us geeks, but it wouldn't have been that hard to say as a sideline "And by the way, none of these hackers use Windows or AOL." The L0pht was interviewed too. They talked about "good hacking" like Mantis, but then Shamrock said that everyone's good and bad, that there are no good or bad, so that's the image Serena ended on. That all hacking is bad. It reminded me of all the DOJ kids anti-hacking pages.
I think MTV could have done more with it. Someone should make a series on good hackers and the hacker culture.
I think of Ada as a geek. Her father, Lord Byron, had emotional problems, what we would probably call Manic Depression today. As his only legitimate child, Ada's mother raised her to be nothing like her dad. Unfortunately, Ada turned out more like her father than anyone wanted. She wasted much of her family's money on gambling and drugs. (Anyone read The Difference Engine by Gibson and Sterling? She's often seen at the racetrack in that book.) She was socially inept, and never really fitted into the social circle of the time. She mostly stuck to her math books, and wrote letters to Charles Babbage.
But how does that work when slashdot gives away their logos?
I think fractional moderation is wonderful idea. That way you never know if your moderation is going to change the number of points a post has (what Rob was talking about before) and one person wouldn't go around moderating posts he agreed with, ie GNOME vs. KDE, because his moderation may or may not do anything. It might even fix meta-moderation too, because it's more like Moderation By Concensus. This is a great idea!
PS: You can require previews, but that doesn't mean everyone will read over his comment before he hits Submit.
I'm surprised there's only been one mention of Charles Babbage so far. If Ada Lovelace is credited as being the first Computer Programmer, and she wrote programs for Babbage, and there had to be a computer for her to program, then why isn't Babbage credited?
Actually, the article was not about "Anonymous posters." It was about "posters who have logged in to Yahoo! but don't show their name when they're posting." Sometimes we forget this difference in our comments.
So AC's, don't get all hyped up about this. It's not about you. It's about the rest of us. We should be worried, because slashdot has some info about us (real name, email, etc.) if we've chosen to provide it.
Somebody's just bitter because they haven't had good luck with chicks, I think. :) As an attractive female (so I'm told) both starting out in the Computer Science field and dating an amazing geeky guy, I have to disagree with your comments. I don't think the fact that most CS majors are geeks has anything to do with females in the field. How many attractive felmales go into physical education (I'm using your example)?
:)
If anything, remotely intelligent girls would want nothing more than to go into a field where there is an overabundance of single genius men.
I do agree on the math thing. I don't know who came up with the idea that girls were worse at math. Just because some of us are more social than many guys doesn't mean we can't do math.
I also agree that many men do feel free to ignore the lack of estrogen in engineering/computer/mechanical fields.
I also want information on how to apply for Rob's scholarship.
My 50-year-old dad and step-mother watched "Pirates" with us, and although they use their computer like parents do, they were interested in the story. At the end, my stepmother went off on how Gates and Jobs were both scum and how she lost respect for them, but that they should make a movie about "who's that Scandanavian Linux guy?"
Open Source has been in the press alot lately, and my parents have seen/heard it on NPR and CNN, and then asked me more about it. I hope more of the older generation has too. We all agreed that the real movie we wanted to see, with real heroes, would be one about Richard Stallman and Open Source.
I even forgot it was April Fool's Day, thanks man. Anyway, the support pages have up a gray ribbon(?), so that would be the way to go i guess. Or like, a perf or something, that would be cool. Speaking of those support pages, they should have some way to for non-webmasters to express support.
Finally. I hoped at least one poster had actually read the article. Yes, the case is not about an Anonymous Coward, it is about a user with a real account. There have been other cases like this, such as people trying to hold ISPs responsible for what their users post on a webpage. The Anonymous Coward option should stay; the whole point of it is to be able to speak freely.
So he shouldn't have picked a state at all, knowing any one would have offended someone.