The NAACP has nigger.com. Some professional domain-squatting outfit in Oklahoma has honky.com. Some other outfit has clintonsucks.com. Yet another has republicanssuck.com. This is WAY out of hand.
A modest proposal.
ONE DOMAIN PER ORGANIZATION. Period. If you happen to be a holding company, then each of your held incorporations can have one. ONE. GM gets eight. One for the six divisions, one for Saturn, one for GMAC. Ford gets four. Ford, Lincoln, Merc, and Ford Motor Credit. Little old me can have exactly ONE as an induhvidual unless I bother to incorporate.
Sure, Sony can go form gazillions of dummy corporations for thismovie.com and thatmovie.com, but at least it slows it down, and it puts a stop to these idiots making a zillion bucks off the namespace with a random word generator and a bunch of $70 checks to No Solutions Inc.
One to a customer. Is it so hard?
(I know I'm going to get flamed to hell, and probably shoot my karma in the foot to boot, but it needs to be said. Besides, who else has the 'nads to actually say "nigger" in here where the PC types get scared off by the Real Truth?)
-- "The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who tells you that we must hate that which is different.... and that hate will destroy you." -- Rev. Dexter, preaching on Babylon 5
you can't flirt with somebody who's in another state.
Dead on, Sig11... but the fact that somebody's thinking of it means they didn't read their Brooks.
In The Mythical Man-Month J.B. Brooks tells the story of the company that outlawed informal conferences around the water cooler and snack machines. Within a week the line to their helpdesk office was out the door and almost back to the snack machines. This book is 20 years old (and was required reading for us at Georgia Tech as froshlings).
I don't know if Month is still required at Tech. It should be. Despite the fact that Open Source development has proven some of his points wrong, there are still some important lessons in it that were obviously missed here. Lecture? Sure, go right ahead and cybercast it. History and English courses would work wonderfully well in cyberspace. (I've actually helped teach a number of cyber-assisted history and philosophy courses, a long time ago when mainframes were still king.) Science labs, however, need to be human-to-human... as does anything else where doing it as opposed to just talking about it is important (calculus recitation).
It's rather like the difference in a recipe for souffle sitting there on your screen, and the ache in your arm after beating all those eggs... and the ache in your belly that tells you you ate too much of the stuff.:)
Re:The slashdot moderation system is flawed
on
Moderation Ideas
·
· Score: 1
Problem: Moderation race conditions. Joe and Jane are both moderators reading a slashdot article. They both see a comment that they think is interesting, but not incredible. They both choose to spend one moderator point to raise the article to "Score: 2 (interesting)". They continue to read the comments and click the "moderate" button a few minutes later. Now the article is rated 3, but neither of them thought it was worthy of 3. Moderation has failed for both of them. One of them could choose to moderate it back down to 2, but then the article would be rated "Score: 2 (overrated)", which does not reflect their true opinion of the article.
Solution: Instead of incremental ratings (+1, -1), allow the moderator to score the article on a range, say from 0 to 5. Then if two moderators assign a score of 2, the article's score is 2, not 3.
True. I've spent a number of points on "overrated" more than likely because of that exact condition. Giving the mods a sliding scale and then taking the average (and having the thresholds round to the nearest integer, so we don't have any complaints of AC's needing two mod points to become visible) is IMHO a Good Idea.
Of course, this points to another dilemma, which I'll leave as an exercise... do you allow a mod to moderate a set number of articles, do you give him a total number of points he can spread around on an absolute basis (i.e. if I want to make an AC article a 5 I spend'em all in one fell swoop), or do we compromise and say "+1 or +2 costs 1 point, +3 or +4 costs 2", or.... hmmm. Maybe that wasn't such a Good Idea after all.
OK, then I have to go with the idea of ramping up the number of moderators, and not allowing any one moderation to kick a post over a threshold, but that two or three people have to be willing to spend a point in order to push it up. Oh, and do display the scores, so that you don't get things pushed too far one way or the other.
While we're at it, I'm all for eliminating AC's and making them use the Post Anonymous button, so we can lock out or karma-ize trollers without giving the DHCP boys a pain....
My two bits' da bot Moderation in everything... including moderation.
We do NOT have a democracy. We have a REPUBLIC, which means that our representatives are supposed to act in our best interests, regardless of what we think they are.
Supposed to.
Unfortunately, it's almost to the point where we do have a democracy, which roughly translates to the tyrrany of the lowest common denominator. Which lower end faction has learned to vote itself largesse from the Treasury. When that faction becomes the majority, we're all sunk.
What we need to be about is not the ballot box. The ballot box will be too late. We need to be about the FIRST Box of Freedom, the Soap. Bombard your congresscritter and your fellow citizens with your message of enlightenment. Look at what we did to Amazon. 48 hours, and they were forced to respect our privacy. We can do the same for Congress.
The poll numbers the politicians really respect are the ones coming thru their switchboards, into their email boxes, fax machines, and most importantly, snailmail. The challenge for us is to make the message "we want more freedom" heard more loudly than "we want more government".
Go get'em, Slashdotters. For your own sakes.
-- Freedom stands on four boxes. Soap, ballot, jury, cartridge.
Hey, Signal 11, maybe we should ask Alan what he thinks? Maybe our illustrious kernel hacker doesn't have TIME to winnow thru all the dross to get to the gold. I don't see anything wrong with requiring non-anonymity in order to access a scarce resource. Besides, it's Taco's sandbox; if'n you don't like it, the code is open source.
There are reasons to post anonymously; this isn't one of them. Besides, you have your +2 rating, and are IMHO abusing it to call attention to what for you is a non-issue.
Ob-on-topic-comment: I thought the questions were reasonably well-chosen; nothing truly juicy came out of them, but then, with the accelerated release schedule for 2.4 and the featurelist already public, there wasn't really room enough for anything truly juicy on that front....
Bah, I'll probably get modd'ed down for this one anyway, wtf...
Instead of posting these stories as they were submitted, maybe there could be a small group (10 or 20) people that would be willing to follow up on a rumor before it was posted to slashdot in order to qualm the negative responses.
Yes, that probably means a day or two turnaround for some stories. If it's necessary to tell people that these are being worked on, maybe/. could include a "In progress" box to let us know that this team is in gear. This would hopefully cut down the submissions of the same story about 1000 times.
Ummm, this would require/. to, like, have a real staff, no? Who knows, maybe if Andover throws enough long green behind it we might get a real journalistic entity instead of a bunch of geeks trying their darndest to get us the straight skinny in their spare time.
Don't get me wrong, I still think/. is the greatest source of high-tech news in the universe... I just don't have unrealistically high expectations of their product given the amount of time they've actually had real capital to work with. I think the above poster does, that's all.
In a word, patience, my friend, with all the pounding and flaming around here, the only thing that could possibly survive for long is the truth.
Linux/BSD flamewars aside.
-- Unix is like a Vorlon: Incredibly powerful, frequently cryptic, and there's a lot going on behind the scenes. -- Alaric, Zen Biker
Anyone who has been paying attention knows that when you hear "Bill Clinton" and "don't worry" in the same context, your BS meter should peg out and you should duck and cover your butt. Frankly, I'm surprised Bill made this public; it'll be easier for us to fight this way.
One must defend against every attempt at even thinking about encroaching on our freedom, lest it be chipped away so much that when we finally realize it, our goose is already cooked.
Instead of bitching about the government, why don't you take a look at the bigger picture, and issues such as the general degradation of the quality of life in the freest country in the world?
And do what about it?
I'll tell you. To hell with enough of the government (sinecure social programs, the entire IRS, etc... this is another rant) so that one parent (and I don't care whether it's Mom or Dad or how many Moms or Dads happen to live there) can stay home with Junior and make sure that whatever morals or ethics the household has are enforced. So that when Junior Geek gets ignored by his teachers and picked upon by his peers at school (cf. Hellmouth) said parent has time to show up at the government indoctrination facility, err, school, and jump up and down and make a nuisance of his/herself until Junior gets the attention he needs.... or just bloody keep him home and teach him him/herself... so that there's someone around to enforce the rules on weaponry...
Therein is the degradation of our quality of life, is that Mommy (usually) doesn't have TIME to stay home and teach Junior how this thing called life works. Left to his own devices, Junior gets it sadly wrong.
This is in fact the fault of government... for doing too much, not not enough. This is not something we can sit idly by and moan about. We have to get out there and fight to keep the Imperials down. What? Treason? Umm, hey, dimwit feddie reading this, ever wonder what the Second Amendment was really all about?
Freedom means having the opportunity to take responsibility for our own lives and those of whom we choose to raise, and not having some bureaucratic army do so for us. The current regime has seen fit to take that from us. We MUST take it back. The alternative may well make Columbine look like a paper cut.
There is our quality of life issue.
-- Freedom stands on four boxes. Soap, ballot, jury, cartridge.
Thanks to technology, images move quickly. Truth and clarity lags far behind. When it comes to sorting out the difference, we are on our own.
No offense to Katz, but we always have been on our own. Only in the early days of Usenet was the signal to noise ratio high enough that killfiles were only necessary on the really high volume groups.
The point of Free Press is that ALL the ideas can get out there. It is up to you and me to figure out which ideas are worth hacking on and which are in the realm of bovine scatology (thanks, Norm). Journalism thinks it has this gatekeeper function... it does not. The fact that it thinks it does means I no longer get my news from corporate entities based on this continent.
Yes, it's annoying when the Big Boys interrupt the ballgame to tell us that they haven't found John-John yet. Waste a few sheets of paper and write a formal protest and maybe they won't do it next time. (Sending email isn't enough; they're not required to keep it for the station logs for their FCC review. They are required to keep snailmail.) But other than that, vote with your feet for your news.
I read Neal Boortz, a noted Libertarian talk show host who always has pointers to the political outrage(s)-du-jour,/., and Yahoo!'s news feed, because it's based on Rueters, and Rueters knows that if it doesn't tell the truth, it gets in deep doo-doo with the British Crown's libel laws. Aside from that, and an audio fix from WSB Radio in Atlanta, I ignore the rest of the news weasels. Not worth my time.
In short, stop whining, and vote with your feet.
(Kudos to Taco, this is the FIRST John-John story I've seen on/.)
It has to. British libel law applies regardless of whether you knew it was false, and regardless of whether you had any malice. If it's a lie, you swing for libel in Her Majesty's Realm.
I don't care if the smarmyest tabloid on Fleet Street said it, if it's British press, I believe it until proven otherwise. They're very careful about such things....
Try reading BBC or Rueters sometime. It's an entirely different take on the news.... there may be some spin there, but they're not going to outright lie to you. Unlike some American organizations I can think of... abc, cbs, nbc, cnn....
warp eight bot clan crawford (by marriage) neither the green, for rome, nor the orange, for london, but the blue, for Ireland's own sake.
Oh, but it is technical, too. A good UI specialist has to understand what's going on underneath all that doubleclicky on the thingamabob in order to give the user a viable interface without causing the guys who have to maintain the stuff an ulcer. Sorry, but you cannot totally remove the design process from the hardware.
Furthermore, making the UI Just Like Winders is not only stupid, but liable to get you sued. A given UI doesn't have to be Just Like anything. It does have to be intuitive. The singleclicky buttons on the Gnome panel make MORE sense, IMHO, than the doubleclicky icons up the side. (They should probably give a bit more feedback, tho.... such as greying out Netscape when it's active... that or having the thing do a netscape -remote might be simpler approach... but I digress.)
We're doing this from scratch, folks, and as long as we do it in a manner that makes sense, we can do it however we want. Maybe keeping fvwm95 around for the Luddites is a good idea.... or maybe we can write something SO good, we don't NEED to think about M$ anymore! Let's try, shall we?
-- warp eight bot "Tell me what you mean by that." -- Dr. Albert Badre, Georgia Tech (my Human Factors prof)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the whole point of shared libraries and such the idea that the second time somebody loads up the 800 pound gorilla app (Netscape, Emacs, GIMP) that they share executable space with the first instance? Now, natch, that doesn't do diddly for the dataspace (like those monster global circulation model datasets with the 192mb initialization files...) but for most "normal people" (whatever that is) this isn't an issue. And those of you running the monster 3d models have NSF grants to get you a few extra sticks for your RAM sockets.
-- Poor man's supercomputer: 64-node Beowulf using white box commodity PC's, Node 65 with 19" monitor, 3x24-port switches, wiring, total cost, less than $50k. Less racks and that monster power/cooling requirement. Think about it.
I'll tell you why/. should keep bringing up the GPL ad infinitum nauseumque, and pretty much ignore BSD:
The fine folks at UC Regents aren't going to change the BSD license anytime soon. It's been thru two decades of crucible, they own it, and nothing we whine or complain about is going to induce a bunch of bureaucrats to change something that already does just exactly what THEY want it to do.
The GPL, on the other hand, is OURS. Anyone who cares enough can use it, or even (Larry Wall) come up with their own similar kind of thing. And slashdot is the crucible in which we flame the hell out of it, and what is left is the pure gold we were in search of. Yes, there's much more heat than light. Such is the nature of things. So it cheeses off the BSD'ers. Well, I say, nuts on'em if they can't use a filter... or write content of their own, as was done here. But this is bazzar-mode, the way things get improved, and since Usenet is all but unuseable, we choose to get blood all over Taco's floor instead, and he seems to be cool with that. In short, we're actually trying to improve the darn thing here, whether we know it or not. Not gonna happen to BSD, and IMHO it doesn't need it. So of course, GPL will get brought up again and again, and BSD will get short shrift.... because nothing's HAPPENING with the BSD license, and won't. 'Tis the nature of the news, folks.
If you don't like what Taco and the rest of us are up to, you can vote with your feet... but don't expect your whining to make it past my threshold....
-- We can't legislate against every stupid thing people will do. -- Jesse "The Governor" Ventura
"[Linux is] a 'techie' technology right now," said Cam Cullen, product marketing manager of large enterprise served marketing at 3Com [...] "When the big applications vendors say they'll support it, then we'll support it. And believe me, we're tracking what they do."
Huh? Oracle? Word Perfect? Oh, I'm sorry, by "big applications vendors" he must have meant Microsoft. Well, pardon the heck out of me. I guess we can write 3Com off....
No, I'm not Microsoft bashing. I'm PHB-bashing.
-- 10. Thou shalt forever forswear and abjure the vile notion that All The World's A VAX. -- Henry Spencer (was henry@utzoo.utoronto.edu), the Ten Commandments for Hackers
OK, I have a question. Is this kind of thing going to be squished firmly for its chilling effect on the First Amendment? Or are we going to get sold out again by our pseudoelected pseudoleaders and abandon any claim we have to govern ourselves?
What used to be the land of the free and the home of the brave is rapidly becoming neither... and efforts like this aren't helping.
Those who would give up a little freedom for a little security will soon have neither. -- Poor Richard, more or less.
What a good idea, give the topic (which needs a LOT more airing out, IMHO) a page of its own.
I just happen to be working on such a thing; a safe haven for kids to discuss things, sharpen their brains, and hopefully get some help if they need it; it could perhaps include a separate forum for those of us who have already been there and done that to hash on it.
Anyone who wants to counsel kids, or who knows something about running an IRC server, or would otherwise be interested in such a cyber-place, drop me a line.
Glenn Stone Geeks Anonymous (Real Soon Now - watch this space!)
I didn't hear a thing about Himself in the what, four? articles he's posted so far on the subject. The reason he's posted so much is because there is, in fact, more to tell. The first was about how he thought it was. The second, about all the email telling us how it really is. The third, the "normal people"'s backlash. This one, about the anti-backlash.
Furthermore, this last one is the most important one, IMHO. It means we're not dead yet. It means that something good is going to come out of all this death and destruction. Katz has an ego, yeah. But this ain't part of it. For once he's being a good journalist, unlike the shlock we get on the street and the boob toob every day, and telling as many sides of the story as he can get his hands on. Tell me where the hell else I can go and get that, huh? Please, I'd love to get some unbiased non-nerd news once in a while. The ONLY place I know of to get ALL sides of a story is none other than right here. And Taco don't post politics.
Don't criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins. Then you'll be a mile away, and you'll have his shoes.
I think the most telling thing in the companion interview with Ed Muth, noted M$ FUD artist, is the following:
[Linux] also lacks a port for the great majority of hardware platforms in the marketplace.
Do what?
Does Windows run on SGI's? RS/6000's? PowerMacs? Or anything else made by Motorola? No. Windows runs only on Intel-made hardware (while Dec/Compaq developed the Alpha, Intel is manufacturing them, so no flames there). Windows on a Netwinder? Ho, ha, it is to laugh.
People get upset about others yelling "FUD! FUD! FUD!" at Microsoft (and others (SCO)) without backing it up.... but there is a legal precedent that says that once you commit a lie of this magnitude, all your other testimony is automatically suspect. I would daresay there is very little in that interview which can't be discredited.
But, you know what? I'm not going to waste my time. I've got better things to do.... like whip up some new groovy apps for Linux. And get paid for it.
"... which is why we're going to take over the world." -- Linus Torvalds
What with the Imperial Federal Government doing their best to use the tax system to select for idiots, and the state-run schools ignoring our best and brightest in order to kowtow to those same idiots (who, in turn, vote the politicians back into office), and now the Fourth Estate of Government (aka the press) doing everything it can to demonize us geeks, no, I'm not surprised they'd publish something like that, whether or not it's true. So what're we going to do about it?
If it IS true, we need to get into the schools and encourage kids... easier said than done, I know, but...
If not, we need to expose the news mediums for the liars that they are (they're known liars on a lot of other issues, so this one doesn't change the premise) and get some face time so we can tell folks where the real truth hangs out... right here.
"Matthew C," the final author in the column, wondered if there was some sort of organization out there to support those who will, if they live, grow up to be the next generation of Slashdotters.
I don't know that there is. There should be. If there isn't, WE should make one. An all-volunteer (Open Source?:) organization of been-there geeks, counselors, and others who can help these kids get thru the Hellmouth when no one else will.
And I'm going to go way the hell out on a limb and volunteer to coordinate the effort.
I need someone who can volunteer a co-located server and bandwidth, a webslinger, and some folks who know something about counseling. I'll handle the sysadmin end of it. (If someone wants to point me at an IRC server HOWTO, I'd appreciate it.)
If someone thinks they can do better, go for it; I just want to see this done. If somebody doesn't, we'll end up with all the smart ones selected out, and.... the rest is left as an exercise for the reader.
Talk to me, people.
Glenn Stone "This was the moment I was born for!" -- Michael Garibaldi
If the Libertarian Party had its way, cable fraud would be a civil suit, not a criminal one, and she would have simply written a couple of cease and desist letters and been done with it. But nooooo, Big Brother has to get involved... and I'm sorry, anytime the fuzz gets involved, you Have Been Hassled.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, enough already!!
The NAACP has nigger.com. Some professional domain-squatting outfit in Oklahoma has honky.com. Some other outfit has clintonsucks.com. Yet another has republicanssuck.com. This is WAY out of hand.
A modest proposal.
ONE DOMAIN PER ORGANIZATION. Period. If you happen to be a holding company, then each of your held incorporations can have one. ONE. GM gets eight. One for the six divisions, one for Saturn, one for GMAC. Ford gets four. Ford, Lincoln, Merc, and Ford Motor Credit. Little old me can have exactly ONE as an induhvidual unless I bother to incorporate.
Sure, Sony can go form gazillions of dummy corporations for thismovie.com and thatmovie.com, but at least it slows it down, and it puts a stop to these idiots making a zillion bucks off the namespace with a random word generator and a bunch of $70 checks to No Solutions Inc.
One to a customer. Is it so hard?
(I know I'm going to get flamed to hell, and probably shoot my karma in the foot to boot, but it needs to be said. Besides, who else has the 'nads to actually say "nigger" in here where the PC types get scared off by the Real Truth?)
--
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who tells you that we must hate that which is different.... and that hate will destroy you." -- Rev. Dexter, preaching on Babylon 5
In The Mythical Man-Month J.B. Brooks tells the story of the company that outlawed informal conferences around the water cooler and snack machines. Within a week the line to their helpdesk office was out the door and almost back to the snack machines. This book is 20 years old (and was required reading for us at Georgia Tech as froshlings).
I don't know if Month is still required at Tech. It should be. Despite the fact that Open Source development has proven some of his points wrong, there are still some important lessons in it that were obviously missed here. Lecture? Sure, go right ahead and cybercast it. History and English courses would work wonderfully well in cyberspace. (I've actually helped teach a number of cyber-assisted history and philosophy courses, a long time ago when mainframes were still king.) Science labs, however, need to be human-to-human... as does anything else where doing it as opposed to just talking about it is important (calculus recitation).
It's rather like the difference in a recipe for souffle sitting there on your screen, and the ache in your arm after beating all those eggs... and the ache in your belly that tells you you ate too much of the stuff.
Of course, this points to another dilemma, which I'll leave as an exercise... do you allow a mod to moderate a set number of articles, do you give him a total number of points he can spread around on an absolute basis (i.e. if I want to make an AC article a 5 I spend'em all in one fell swoop), or do we compromise and say "+1 or +2 costs 1 point, +3 or +4 costs 2", or.... hmmm. Maybe that wasn't such a Good Idea after all.
OK, then I have to go with the idea of ramping up the number of moderators, and not allowing any one moderation to kick a post over a threshold, but that two or three people have to be willing to spend a point in order to push it up. Oh, and do display the scores, so that you don't get things pushed too far one way or the other.
While we're at it, I'm all for eliminating AC's and making them use the Post Anonymous button, so we can lock out or karma-ize trollers without giving the DHCP boys a pain....
My two bits'
da bot
Moderation in everything... including moderation.
Hey, something to remember in all this foofawraw:
We do NOT have a democracy. We have a REPUBLIC, which means that our representatives are supposed to act in our best interests, regardless of what we think they are.
Supposed to.
Unfortunately, it's almost to the point where we do have a democracy, which roughly translates to the tyrrany of the lowest common denominator. Which lower end faction has learned to vote itself largesse from the Treasury. When that faction becomes the majority, we're all sunk.
What we need to be about is not the ballot box. The ballot box will be too late. We need to be about the FIRST Box of Freedom, the Soap. Bombard your congresscritter and your fellow citizens with your message of enlightenment. Look at what we did to Amazon. 48 hours, and they were forced to respect our privacy. We can do the same for Congress.
The poll numbers the politicians really respect are the ones coming thru their switchboards, into their email boxes, fax machines, and most importantly, snailmail. The challenge for us is to make the message "we want more freedom" heard more loudly than "we want more government".
Go get'em, Slashdotters. For your own sakes.
--
Freedom stands on four boxes. Soap, ballot, jury, cartridge.
Hey, Signal 11, maybe we should ask Alan what he thinks? Maybe our illustrious kernel hacker doesn't have TIME to winnow thru all the dross to get to the gold. I don't see anything wrong with requiring non-anonymity in order to access a scarce resource. Besides, it's Taco's sandbox; if'n you don't like it, the code is open source.
There are reasons to post anonymously; this isn't one of them. Besides, you have your +2 rating,
and are IMHO abusing it to call attention to what for you is a non-issue.
Ob-on-topic-comment: I thought the questions were reasonably well-chosen; nothing truly juicy came out of them, but then, with the accelerated release schedule for 2.4 and the featurelist already public, there wasn't really room enough for anything truly juicy on that front....
Bah, I'll probably get modd'ed down for this one anyway, wtf...
--
Louis, Louis, Louis, STOP WHINING!!!
-- Lestat
Don't get me wrong, I still think
In a word, patience, my friend, with all the pounding and flaming around here, the only thing that could possibly survive for long is the truth.
Linux/BSD flamewars aside.
--
Unix is like a Vorlon: Incredibly powerful, frequently cryptic, and there's a lot going on behind the scenes.
-- Alaric, Zen Biker
Who ratcheted that up to a 4?!?
Anyone who has been paying attention knows that when you hear "Bill Clinton" and "don't worry" in the same context, your BS meter should peg out and you should duck and cover your butt. Frankly, I'm surprised Bill made this public; it'll be easier for us to fight this way.
One must defend against every attempt at even thinking about encroaching on our freedom, lest it be chipped away so much that when we finally realize it, our goose is already cooked.
Never Again the Burning
Please, don't give them any bright ideas!
I'll tell you. To hell with enough of the government (sinecure social programs, the entire IRS, etc... this is another rant) so that one parent (and I don't care whether it's Mom or Dad or how many Moms or Dads happen to live there) can stay home with Junior and make sure that whatever morals or ethics the household has are enforced. So that when Junior Geek gets ignored by his teachers and picked upon by his peers at school (cf. Hellmouth) said parent has time to show up at the government indoctrination facility, err, school, and jump up and down and make a nuisance of his/herself until Junior gets the attention he needs.... or just bloody keep him home and teach him him/herself... so that there's someone around to enforce the rules on weaponry...
Therein is the degradation of our quality of life, is that Mommy (usually) doesn't have TIME to stay home and teach Junior how this thing called life works. Left to his own devices, Junior gets it sadly wrong.
This is in fact the fault of government... for doing too much, not not enough. This is not something we can sit idly by and moan about. We have to get out there and fight to keep the Imperials down. What? Treason? Umm, hey, dimwit feddie reading this, ever wonder what the Second Amendment was really all about?
Freedom means having the opportunity to take responsibility for our own lives and those of whom we choose to raise, and not having some bureaucratic army do so for us. The current regime has seen fit to take that from us. We MUST take it back. The alternative may well make Columbine look like a paper cut.
There is our quality of life issue.
--
Freedom stands on four boxes. Soap, ballot, jury, cartridge.
No offense to Katz, but we always have been on our own. Only in the early days of Usenet was the signal to noise ratio high enough that killfiles were only necessary on the really high volume groups.
The point of Free Press is that ALL the ideas can get out there. It is up to you and me to figure out which ideas are worth hacking on and which are in the realm of bovine scatology (thanks, Norm). Journalism thinks it has this gatekeeper function... it does not. The fact that it thinks it does means I no longer get my news from corporate entities based on this continent.
Yes, it's annoying when the Big Boys interrupt the ballgame to tell us that they haven't found John-John yet. Waste a few sheets of paper and write a formal protest and maybe they won't do it next time. (Sending email isn't enough; they're not required to keep it for the station logs for their FCC review. They are required to keep snailmail.) But other than that, vote with your feet for your news.
I read Neal Boortz, a noted Libertarian talk show host who always has pointers to the political outrage(s)-du-jour,
In short, stop whining, and vote with your feet.
(Kudos to Taco, this is the FIRST John-John story I've seen on
It has to. British libel law applies regardless of whether you knew it was false, and regardless of whether you had any malice. If it's a lie, you swing for libel in Her Majesty's Realm.
I don't care if the smarmyest tabloid on Fleet Street said it, if it's British press, I believe it until proven otherwise. They're very careful about such things....
Try reading BBC or Rueters sometime. It's an entirely different take on the news.... there may be some spin there, but they're not going to outright lie to you. Unlike some American organizations I can think of... abc, cbs, nbc, cnn....
warp eight bot
clan crawford (by marriage)
neither the green, for rome, nor the orange,
for london, but the blue, for Ireland's own sake.
Oh, but it is technical, too. A good UI specialist has to understand what's going on underneath all that doubleclicky on the thingamabob in order to give the user a viable interface without causing the guys who have to maintain the stuff an ulcer. Sorry, but you cannot totally remove the design process from the hardware.
Furthermore, making the UI Just Like Winders is not only stupid, but liable to get you sued. A given UI doesn't have to be Just Like anything. It does have to be intuitive. The singleclicky buttons on the Gnome panel make MORE sense, IMHO, than the doubleclicky icons up the side. (They should probably give a bit more feedback, tho.... such as greying out Netscape when it's active... that or having the thing do a netscape -remote might be simpler approach... but I digress.)
We're doing this from scratch, folks, and as long as we do it in a manner that makes sense, we can do it however we want. Maybe keeping fvwm95 around for the Luddites is a good idea.... or maybe we can write something SO good, we don't NEED to think about M$ anymore! Let's try, shall we?
--
warp eight bot
"Tell me what you mean by that."
-- Dr. Albert Badre, Georgia Tech
(my Human Factors prof)
somebody check this kid for midi-chlorians. :) :)
tongue firmly in cheek...
warp eight bot
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the whole point of shared libraries and such the idea that the second time somebody loads up the 800 pound gorilla app (Netscape, Emacs, GIMP) that they share executable space with the first instance? Now, natch, that doesn't do diddly for the dataspace (like those monster global circulation model datasets with the 192mb initialization files...) but for most "normal people" (whatever that is) this isn't an issue. And those of you running the monster 3d models have NSF grants to get you a few extra sticks for your RAM sockets.
--
Poor man's supercomputer: 64-node Beowulf using white box commodity PC's, Node 65 with 19" monitor, 3x24-port switches, wiring, total cost, less than $50k. Less racks and that monster power/cooling requirement. Think about it.
I'll tell you why /. should keep bringing up the GPL ad infinitum nauseumque, and pretty much ignore BSD:
The fine folks at UC Regents aren't going to change the BSD license anytime soon. It's been thru two decades of crucible, they own it, and nothing we whine or complain about is going to induce a bunch of bureaucrats to change something that already does just exactly what THEY want it to do.
The GPL, on the other hand, is OURS. Anyone who cares enough can use it, or even (Larry Wall) come up with their own similar kind of thing. And slashdot is the crucible in which we flame the hell out of it, and what is left is the pure gold we were in search of. Yes, there's much more heat than light. Such is the nature of things. So it cheeses off the BSD'ers. Well, I say, nuts on'em if they can't use a filter... or write content of their own, as was done here. But this is bazzar-mode, the way things get improved, and since Usenet is all but unuseable, we choose to get blood all over Taco's floor instead, and he seems to be cool with that. In short, we're actually trying to improve the darn thing here, whether we know it or not. Not gonna happen to BSD, and IMHO it doesn't need it. So of course, GPL will get brought up again and again, and BSD will get short shrift.... because nothing's HAPPENING with the BSD license, and won't. 'Tis the nature of the news, folks.
If you don't like what Taco and the rest of us are up to, you can vote with your feet... but don't expect your whining to make it past my threshold....
--
We can't legislate against every stupid thing people will do.
-- Jesse "The Governor" Ventura
From the article:
"[Linux is] a 'techie' technology right now," said Cam Cullen, product marketing manager of large enterprise served marketing at 3Com [...] "When the big applications vendors say they'll support it, then we'll support it. And believe me, we're tracking what they do."
Huh? Oracle? Word Perfect? Oh, I'm sorry, by "big applications vendors" he must have meant Microsoft. Well, pardon the heck out of me. I guess we can write 3Com off....
No, I'm not Microsoft bashing. I'm PHB-bashing.
--
10. Thou shalt forever forswear and abjure the vile notion that All The World's A VAX.
-- Henry Spencer (was henry@utzoo.utoronto.edu), the Ten Commandments for Hackers
OK, I have a question. Is this kind of thing going to be squished firmly for its chilling effect on the First Amendment? Or are we going to get sold out again by our pseudoelected pseudoleaders and abandon any claim we have to govern ourselves?
What used to be the land of the free and the home of the brave is rapidly becoming neither... and efforts like this aren't helping.
Those who would give up a little freedom for a little security will soon have neither. -- Poor Richard, more or less.
What a good idea, give the topic (which needs a LOT more airing out, IMHO) a page of its own.
I just happen to be working on such a thing; a safe haven for kids to discuss things, sharpen their brains, and hopefully get some help if they need it; it could perhaps include a separate forum for those of us who have already been there and done that to hash on it.
Anyone who wants to counsel kids, or who knows something about running an IRC server, or would otherwise be interested in such a cyber-place, drop me a line.
Glenn Stone
Geeks Anonymous (Real Soon Now - watch this space!)
I didn't hear a thing about Himself in the what, four? articles he's posted so far on the subject. The reason he's posted so much is because there is, in fact, more to tell. The first was about how he thought it was. The second, about all the email telling us how it really is. The third, the "normal people"'s backlash. This one, about the anti-backlash.
Furthermore, this last one is the most important one, IMHO. It means we're not dead yet. It means that something good is going to come out of all this death and destruction. Katz has an ego, yeah. But this ain't part of it. For once he's being a good journalist, unlike the shlock we get on the street and the boob toob every day, and telling as many sides of the story as he can get his hands on. Tell me where the hell else I can go and get that, huh? Please, I'd love to get some unbiased non-nerd news once in a while. The ONLY place I know of to get ALL sides of a story is none other than right here . And Taco don't post politics.
Don't criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins. Then you'll be a mile away, and you'll have his shoes.
Stick that in your pipe and smoke it!
I think the most telling thing in the companion interview with Ed Muth, noted M$ FUD artist, is the following:
[Linux] also lacks a port for the great majority of hardware platforms in the marketplace.
Do what?
Does Windows run on SGI's? RS/6000's? PowerMacs? Or anything else made by Motorola? No. Windows runs only on Intel-made hardware (while Dec/Compaq developed the Alpha, Intel is manufacturing them, so no flames there). Windows on a Netwinder? Ho, ha, it is to laugh.
People get upset about others yelling "FUD! FUD! FUD!" at Microsoft (and others (SCO)) without backing it up.... but there is a legal precedent that says that once you commit a lie of this magnitude, all your other testimony is automatically suspect. I would daresay there is very little in that interview which can't be discredited.
But, you know what? I'm not going to waste my time. I've got better things to do.... like whip up some new groovy apps for Linux. And get paid for it.
"... which is why we're going to take over the world." -- Linus Torvalds
What with the Imperial Federal Government doing their best to use the tax system to select for idiots, and the state-run schools ignoring our best and brightest in order to kowtow to those same idiots (who, in turn, vote the politicians back into office), and now the Fourth Estate of Government (aka the press) doing everything it can to demonize us geeks, no, I'm not surprised they'd publish something like that, whether or not it's true. So what're we going to do about it?
If it IS true, we need to get into the schools and encourage kids... easier said than done, I know, but...
If not, we need to expose the news mediums for the liars that they are (they're known liars on a lot of other issues, so this one doesn't change the premise) and get some face time so we can tell folks where the real truth hangs out... right here.
"Matthew C," the final author in the column, wondered if there was some sort of organization out there to support those who will, if they live, grow up to be the next generation of Slashdotters.
:) organization of been-there geeks, counselors, and others who can help these kids get thru the Hellmouth when no one else will.
.... the rest is left as an exercise for the reader.
I don't know that there is. There should be. If there isn't, WE should make one. An all-volunteer (Open Source?
And I'm going to go way the hell out on a limb and volunteer to coordinate the effort.
I need someone who can volunteer a co-located server and bandwidth, a webslinger, and some folks who know something about counseling. I'll handle the sysadmin end of it. (If someone wants to point me at an IRC server HOWTO, I'd appreciate it.)
If someone thinks they can do better, go for it; I just want to see this done. If somebody doesn't, we'll end up with all the smart ones selected out, and
Talk to me, people.
Glenn Stone
"This was the moment I was born for!"
-- Michael Garibaldi
If the Libertarian Party had its way, cable fraud would be a civil suit, not a criminal one, and she would have simply written a couple of cease and desist letters and been done with it. But nooooo, Big Brother has to get involved... and I'm sorry, anytime the fuzz gets involved, you Have Been Hassled.
http://www.lp.org for more info.
AMD.