The Taliban's religous fervor has died with it's troops.
As the core of soldiers and officers with deep religous conviction (right or wrong) gets killed in battles, they are replaced by mercenaries and gangsters.
The end result is that the strict disipline of the Taliban militia is worn away and the people continue to suffer.
This is not a typical guerilla war situation, where a rebel or other dissident group is using guerilla tactics against a regular army.
Bin Laden & Co have hundreds if not thousands of followers, funded by a variety of financial schemes and states. When the 'rouge' states are forced to cut off the money supply to terrorists, the terror will stop.
This will not be a war on methodology when all is said and done. It will be a clash of civilizations.
That I give a flying shit about what Stallman has to say.
There is a big difference between acceptable government policy during wartime and peacetime. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary methods.
During Roman times, the Senate would elect a dictator in times or war or natural disaster. This system worked for centuries.
During the American Civil War, the writ of habeaus corpus was recinded and bills of attainder were permitted.
We should be pushing the government to make WARTIME changes to civil rights laws and policy. When our enemies are vanquished, we return to the status quo.
Try reading Benjamin Franklin's writing besides that single quote. He would agree with me.
(c) Copyright 2001 duffbeer703
Copying, Moderating and other use of this Post is strictly prohibited without purchase of a posting licensing agreement.
And our nation is about to plunge into an abyss of war and destruction, and you fags are still bickering about Linux "taking over" the MS Office market....
Get a life.
Re:The towers collapsed for a simple reason!
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 2
These jets were heavily laden with fuel, which is atypical in emergency situations, because airliners typically dump fuel during an emergency.
Also keep in mind that the outer walls of the empire state building are the weight-bearing structural members as well. When the second building was hit, a corner and about 1/2 of the supports were taken out about halfway up the building. This combined with weakening from 1000 degree heat led to catastrophic failure.
Fuel dumped down the bulding core, which became a flue that sucked in air from the street and made the fire even worse. I don't think any building could survive it.
When the B-25 struck the empire state building, it had dumped it's fuel and was preparing to ditch in Jersey or the Hudson River.
Re:It's been said before...
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This is war buddy. The congress will be issuing a declaration of war within days or hours. War conditions change everything.
There is ample precedent to clamp down on civil liberties during time of war, dating back to the ancient romans. President Lincoln suspened Habeus Corupus and allowed writs of attainder during the civil war.
There comes a time when even idealogues need to get a grip.
I don't think that you have absorbed the enormity of what has happened here. There may be 10-30 THOUSAND people dead.
We need to send a strong message to every group who would consider doing such a thing that if they do, they will die.
War is a brutal, horrible thing. Unfortunately, violence & death is the only thing understood by these people.
Re:Careful about targeting one source...
on
Our New Pearl Harbor
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
That's a nice thought, but it will never happen.
Everybody is shocked at the moment, anger has not kicked in yet. When the smoke clears and the mangled bodies of civilians and fireman are pulled from the rubble the muslim world will be in a world of hurt.
These terrorists have upped the stakes and have forced the world's most powerful military power into a corner. Over 10,000 Americans are DEAD. When 10,000 people die, pleas for compassion go unheard.
America's revenge and reprisals will be swift, violent and devastating. May god have mercy on whoever is behind this, because we won't.
To be perfectly honest with you, the only remotely interesting discussions on this site these days are "troll" or offtopic arguments.
The topics on Slashdot are trolls themselves. Tech news or "news for nerds" consist of less than 25% of the stories. 75% of the stories are some tired old patent argument, Paid advertising posing as news or "RIAA sucks" stories. Even ask Slashdot is worthless drivel as good contributers flee.
The utter collapse of the moderation system is an amusing sidenote. Six months ago the people who run this site were staunch and outspoken opponents of all censorship. Now they are so sensitive to criticism that they moderate down an offtopic comment within 3 minutes.
I visit Slashdot out of habit when I'm bored at work, which has been alot lately since I am between projects and writing documentation. It's entertaining in the same way driving by a car wreck is.
I did not write this, but it deserves to be heard.
OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"
The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap . Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.
Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.
On to modslap ]. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.
OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, you're moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.
To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.
We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"
comments.pl : Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".
You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.
The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the parent of this post should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.
The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on, without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.
What this does is, it actually compresses you're comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!
As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.
Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.
A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.
Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.
As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.
Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.
It depends what kind of person you are.
on
Techs on Commission?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I enjoyed being on commission. There is a certain thrill when you double or triple your salary for doing something you enjoy.
If you do not like to wheel and deal, go to a salaried job. If you want to make alot of money, take a commissioned job.
Slashdot Mirror
The Taliban's religous fervor has died with it's troops.
As the core of soldiers and officers with deep religous conviction (right or wrong) gets killed in battles, they are replaced by mercenaries and gangsters.
The end result is that the strict disipline of the Taliban militia is worn away and the people continue to suffer.
Not true. IBM ships workstations on the PowerPC platform. Shipments equal about 30% of apple desktop shipments.
No shit sherlock.
The guy knows what a Beowulf does, he needs somebody to BUILD one for him.
Goddamn karma whore.
The egyptians invented this thing called "paper" which works alot better. Less need for expesive cabling too :)
There are alot of motherboard vendors...
Just ditch this piece of shit Tyan and buy something that works properly... MBs only cost like $100
Although this would probaly work, is it ethical for a Slashdotter to use an Intel product? They are an *evil* corporation, you know.
Would RMS Approve?
If a machine is 75% as effective as an alert human being, it is worth having, since machines are always working.
$9.00/hour airport guards spend plenty of time staring into space, oogling girls and thinking about what pub they'll be drinking in that night.
The heart of the matter is money.
This is not a typical guerilla war situation, where a rebel or other dissident group is using guerilla tactics against a regular army.
Bin Laden & Co have hundreds if not thousands of followers, funded by a variety of financial schemes and states. When the 'rouge' states are forced to cut off the money supply to terrorists, the terror will stop.
This will not be a war on methodology when all is said and done. It will be a clash of civilizations.
God you are an ignorant idiot aren't you?
The facial recognition system in Tampa can match individual faces out of a database of 350,000 in less than 5 seconds with 92% accuracy.
It uses measurements between your eyes, mouth and nose to make a match, so disguises don't work to well against it.
Computers are not better at making weather forecasts either. (they do keep good records though)
That I give a flying shit about what Stallman has to say.
There is a big difference between acceptable government policy during wartime and peacetime. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary methods.
During Roman times, the Senate would elect a dictator in times or war or natural disaster. This system worked for centuries.
During the American Civil War, the writ of habeaus corpus was recinded and bills of attainder were permitted.
We should be pushing the government to make WARTIME changes to civil rights laws and policy. When our enemies are vanquished, we return to the status quo.
Try reading Benjamin Franklin's writing besides that single quote. He would agree with me.
(c) Copyright 2001 duffbeer703
Copying, Moderating and other use of this Post is strictly prohibited without purchase of a posting licensing agreement.
They will be de-listed in a few months.
Shut the fuck up.
Wartime is different, you putz.
Can't you use simply use a PCMCIA-PCI adapter like they use for wireless ethernet to use the bluetooth adapter?
I have also seen drive-bay mounts for PCMCIA cards at a place I used to work at.
And our nation is about to plunge into an abyss of war and destruction, and you fags are still bickering about Linux "taking over" the MS Office market....
Get a life.
These jets were heavily laden with fuel, which is atypical in emergency situations, because airliners typically dump fuel during an emergency.
Also keep in mind that the outer walls of the empire state building are the weight-bearing structural members as well. When the second building was hit, a corner and about 1/2 of the supports were taken out about halfway up the building. This combined with weakening from 1000 degree heat led to catastrophic failure.
Fuel dumped down the bulding core, which became a flue that sucked in air from the street and made the fire even worse. I don't think any building could survive it.
When the B-25 struck the empire state building, it had dumped it's fuel and was preparing to ditch in Jersey or the Hudson River.
This is war buddy. The congress will be issuing a declaration of war within days or hours. War conditions change everything.
There is ample precedent to clamp down on civil liberties during time of war, dating back to the ancient romans. President Lincoln suspened Habeus Corupus and allowed writs of attainder during the civil war.
There comes a time when even idealogues need to get a grip.
The answer is, there is no hack.
Try reading the archives.
I don't think that you have absorbed the enormity of what has happened here. There may be 10-30 THOUSAND people dead.
We need to send a strong message to every group who would consider doing such a thing that if they do, they will die.
War is a brutal, horrible thing. Unfortunately, violence & death is the only thing understood by these people.
That's a nice thought, but it will never happen.
Everybody is shocked at the moment, anger has not kicked in yet. When the smoke clears and the mangled bodies of civilians and fireman are pulled from the rubble the muslim world will be in a world of hurt.
These terrorists have upped the stakes and have forced the world's most powerful military power into a corner. Over 10,000 Americans are DEAD. When 10,000 people die, pleas for compassion go unheard.
America's revenge and reprisals will be swift, violent and devastating. May god have mercy on whoever is behind this, because we won't.
LDAP and PAM are great for other operating systems like Solaris and AIX.
Unfortunately, the current Linux PAM codebase is a big, ugly, bug-ridden mass of spaghetti code.
Keep using whatever ISP you use now, and run a POP daemon on port 80 or some other port.
To be perfectly honest with you, the only remotely interesting discussions on this site these days are "troll" or offtopic arguments.
The topics on Slashdot are trolls themselves. Tech news or "news for nerds" consist of less than 25% of the stories. 75% of the stories are some tired old patent argument, Paid advertising posing as news or "RIAA sucks" stories. Even ask Slashdot is worthless drivel as good contributers flee.
The utter collapse of the moderation system is an amusing sidenote. Six months ago the people who run this site were staunch and outspoken opponents of all censorship. Now they are so sensitive to criticism that they moderate down an offtopic comment within 3 minutes.
I visit Slashdot out of habit when I'm bored at work, which has been alot lately since I am between projects and writing documentation. It's entertaining in the same way driving by a car wreck is.
OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"
The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap . Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.
Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.
On to modslap ]. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.
OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, you're moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.
To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.
We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"
comments.pl : Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".
You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.
The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the parent of this post should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.
The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on, without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.
What this does is, it actually compresses you're comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!
As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.
Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.
A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.
Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.
As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.
Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.
I enjoyed being on commission. There is a certain thrill when you double or triple your salary for doing something you enjoy.
If you do not like to wheel and deal, go to a salaried job. If you want to make alot of money, take a commissioned job.
TrueSync software allows you to sync your cellphone with a PDA or a Yahoo calendar/address book account.
TrueSync is a windows program, but you can obviously read yahoo on your Unix box.