Oh, Signal 11, get over it. Let'em have something they can identify with other than trenchcoats and bloody crime scenes. It might get them together enough to fight back.... or at least feel decent about themselves and not come out of high school with with that warped sense of self you tend to get so angsty about. Yes, stress is the crucible which makes the truly great ones. It also grinds up a lot of the good ones and spits them out in the gutter like so much spent bubble gum. I think we need numbers right now... a single voice crying in the wilderness doesn't have nearly the effect as several megabytes of hate mail in a Senator's inbox, all with different addresses....
So dump core and give me back that hash prompt alreddie.
--
You bitch about the present,
and blame it on the past -
I'd like to find your inner child
and kick it's little ass!
-- Don Henley, "Get Over It!"
I spend $80 to send an advertisement to X people, where X is a really God-forsakenly large number. I'll say 8000, because I like it. Keep in mind that unlike commercials or billboards or the like, this is a *one-time* cost.
99% of those 8000 just ignore my advertisement.
See, the ad men have got us conned into thinking that every pair of eyeballs that gets laid on their content is worth something to us. This is what has the whole media industry (and things dependent on it, like sports) so way fsking out of control, is that these big faceless corporate machines like, say, Pepsico or Kellogs or you-know-who up in Redmond are convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt that every doofus that sees their ad is statistimagically going to ante up another umpteen centicredits and fatten their coffers even more. And the little guys believe it too, because if it works for Megacorp, it must work for them, and so I get a hand-addressed envelope for "resident" in the mail with a couple of little hand-cut flyers for real estate... this poor deluded young lady thinks she's going to strike it rich by spamming our whole complex and wasting goddess knows how many trees.... and so we get spam any which way but loose across the net; banner ads, popup windows, email, usenet articles, Slashdot comments.... and there's no opt-in, only opt-out in which we have to tell them who we are to get them to stop.... now they have a list of potential subversives.... *sigh*
How do we make it stop?
I don't know. I'd sure like some ideas. But I think the most cost-effective way to do things is the moral equivalent of the yellow pages. If I want a given product, I'll go searching thru an index, and at that point I'm asking to see ads. I *might* be interested in a "what's new" area... anonymously tailored to my interests. Other than that, I prefer my world ad-free... and for damn sure I shouldn't be having to pay the freight for anyone else's content (banner ads, popups, or anything else that wastes my bandwidth). If I'm getting a service for free (radio, broadcast TV) that's one thing, but if I'm paying, real content only, please. Anything else is just going to annoy me, or worse.
--
Do not meddle in the affairs of the BOFH,
for he is subtle and quick to*#![[NO CARRIER
Take to an extreme it is just an anarchy (every individual is entirely self-sovereign).
Not anarchy. Something just this side of it. Somebody has to enforce the concept that the limit of where you can swing your fist is just the other side of my nose. That somebody is government. Yes, the Constitution mandates a certain amount of services. The Congress has gone way beyond this. It says PROVIDE for the common defense, and PROMOTE the general welfare. NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND!!!
Sorry if the shouting offends, but too may people don't get that concept. No, healthcare is not a federal right. Basic education should be, but only because we've let the universal sufferage cat out of the bag... too late to make sure that only those smart enough to understand got to vote, so we have to do it the other way 'round now. *shrug* gives us a few more people maybe brave enough to speak up when the emperor goes nekkid....
What really bugs me is these sheeple enslaved to the congressman they think will vote them the most largesse from the federal treasury.... but I digress. By getting the hell out the way, and in so doing not stealing so bloody much from your paycheck, the Libertarian government allows you to take care of yourself, invest for your retirement, contribute to private charity for people's welfare, and basically do all those things people get uptight about, without anyone telling them how they HAVE to do it. Yes, I suppose your basic county health department is a good thing; it keeps otherwise-sick folk from spreading things... but this is run at a very local level; it's not a federal mandate. Other than that, IMHO things are far better run by someone not drawing a government paycheck.
As for Cliff's Silicon Snake Oil: There is a difference in using the computer as a mechanism for escaping the real world, and using it as a tool to build communities that would not otherwise exist (and eventually getting parts of them to meet in realspace). Poor Cliff got burned by the former. I quickly learned to do the latter. My first trip to California, several love affairs, my first meeting with the lady who is now my wife, and this job, 3000 miles from home, are all consequences of encounters on various networks.
Sure, the box doesn't love you. But it doesn't make those little riffs from sweetie@myhome.com any less special... or the fact that it says "pick up some milk on the way home" any less useful. It's a tool, like a machete. You can hack your way thru all these trees, and find yourself lost in the forest.... or you can cut sugar cane, and make RUM!:) (Or Krispy Kreme donuts, for those of us less inclined to imbibe:)
Your choice. That's what it's all about.
--
I am Homer of Borg. You will be assim... Oooh! Donuts!
Libertarians believe that people should be free because intelligent people can differ. Objectivists believe that people should be free -- but that there is still only one "true way."
This is where the hardcore Randians run afoul of the old Zen koan:
If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.
What this really means is, if you see anyone espousing the One True Way And There Ain't No Other, he's a g-dd-mned liar.
Even Joshua ben Joseph gave notice that there's more than one way to do things.... Remember the Good Samaritan? Samaritans, lest you forget, were good, old-fashioned, bull-sacrificing, Baal-worshipping PAGANS... y'all are smart, go figure. Love your neighbors. Love your enemies, and drive'em nuts!
Oh, and one more thing. Objectivists have morals, sure. Rules somebody wrote down in some book somewhere, to be followed slavishly and at the expense of everything else. Gimme a fscking break. Libertarians have ethics: Guidelines(*) to be used within a situation to effect a desired set of consequences. In this case the consequences are to maximize freedom, in general by preventing others from imposing force or fraud on the individual in question.
One more thing I want to question here, and that is the giving to charity. Now, I don't give to too many folks. But I have enough enlightened self-interest to see that there are a number of charities that I, myself, do or might benefit from. EFF. GNU. Various medical research organizations. etc. etc. ad infinitum nauseumque. What goes around comes around... what those Silicon Valley hotshots haven't figured out is that you get out of life what you put into it, same as a computer. Those dudes down there may die with the most toys, but they're still dead. Game over, man! I say live a little, give a little, and be much happier for it.
Free-lovin', drug-legalizin', non-judgemental hippie heatherns, you betcha.... and a lot happier for it than anybody who says There Ain't But One Way To Do It. (cf. Larry Wall, eh?)
(*)Guidelines: remember them, Usenetters? rules made to be bent or even broken with just cause.
--
"I tried. I tried to warn them. But it all happened, just the way I remembered it." -- Jeffrey David Sinclair, "War Without End II" (B5)
Or you can become a consultant at a really good consulting company and once again have the illusion of cheap healthcare, paid vacation, etc.... natch, your percentage of take is less, but that's one of those little tradeoffs. Much rather pay a professional for those kinds of hassles. No, I don't clear six figures, but when something goes awry, I just call someone, and it gets taken care of. Badda-boom, badda-bing.
-- w.e.b., salaried consultant There are no dress rehearsals. We ARE professionals, and this IS the Big Time.
I think this is a great idea but I can think of problem areas that might need to be overcome first:
Developing a suitable legal framework
Ensuring authenticity of the signatures
Providing a scalable, secure infrastructure including provision for those who don't have access to the web
Selling the concept to technophobes
And importantly, ensuring the integrity of the results - perhaps more of a challenge in places where corruption is relatively high.
(1) if it ain't broke, don't fix it
(2) Registration for d.s. in person (motor voter?) (or better yet, at the public library, where all the free internet terminals are
(3) 128-bit SSL isn't scalable? And for those who don't have, (a) libraries and (b) mandatory backup paper method ("no purchase necessary to enter")
(4) see above paper method - and require the "old method" to be used to pass the new one (kinda implicit, but important nonetheless)
(5) Aaaah, the old quid custodes problem (pardon me if my latin is rusty). How to ensure that a disinterested party is keeping the results? OK, try this. Organizations on both sides of the issue receive duplicate copies of the (anonymized) balloting. Each then forwards their results to a Big Six accounting firm (or similar.... the same way a sweepstakes works) who has a third copy, and audits the results (the Big Six firm doesn't know which questions mean what, they just get "Issue #1, the following d.s.'s yea, these other d.s.'s nay" with no idea what Issue #1 is). Representatives from the two sides then publish the audited results.
Is this too complex? too easy? Let's thrash this out, folks.... we may as well get this right the first time; gods help us if we don't.
Oh, and please don't go global on me; the UN has been causing enough trouble lately. Ditto using one's official voting d.s. for anything other than the official process; we have enough abuse of the SSN as it is. P'raps one would encrypt one's d.s. with the political organization's public key, per issue? Sure would keep the ballot secret....
-- w.e.b. Oh, he thinks too much, he's 'bout half SMART! -- Brother Dave Gardener
2) A firewall breaks the end-to-end communication paradigm of the Internet. The idea is that you place smarts in the middle. Sorry, no. Hosts should communicate with hosts, not with intermediaries.
This is fine in a world that has never seen the Internet Worm, much less a real DDOS attack. Back when sysadmins were treated as gods and deserved that honor, when spaf@gatech spoke and it Was... But no, now we have dime-a-dozen dialup accounts, and every baggy-trousered pre-high-school geek with a dusty 486 in a corner and $15 can be Master of his own do.main (and cares not a fig for authority, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms). In short, it's wartime in cyberspace, and a gentleman's handshake is worth the paper it's written on.
2) A firewall breaks the end-to-end communication paradigm of the Internet. The idea is that you place smarts in the middle. Sorry, no. Hosts should communicate with hosts, not with intermediaries.
Nice theory, but the poster hasn't been reading the thread. It's much easier to secure a host when all it has to do is flip packets. You can also (theoretically) (I know it's in Linux 2.2, I just haven't heard of it being put into practice) imbed some QoS/load balancing smarts into a proper bridging router box... and since the kernel brings the interface for this out into userspace, you can write whatever kind of balance/filter algorithm you want. (dunno if OpenBSD does this by default, but, after all, what's Open Source for?:) And to label one of your servers the "firewall" and put the load balancing softwre there rather than in front of the server pool kinda defeats the purpose of load balancing, no?
So maybe he was a troll, but it's an obscure enough subject that somebody would take him for real.... and if I end up giving somebody somewhere the real picture, then I'll have done what I wanted to do.
"F**k you, B***h". When she turned around to confront the student, he said "You can't do anything. You have to give me a warning". And he was right. Her hands were tied.
My reply in that situation: "OK. You're hereby warned: The next infraction, under ANY circumstances, will result in your immediate explulsion from my presence. Do I make myself clear? OK, now, do it again. I double-dog dare ya." And give the kid the heave-ho.
The larger point is, I came up with that with about half a second's thought. Most of the teachers in there now couldn't think their way out of a wet paper bag. The rest, including the teacher in the previous example, are scared they'll cross somebody's liberal agenda and be without a paycheck.
There are ways to get the kids' attention even with the current system in place. If you want proof, go check out the video "The Real Horse Whisperer," the BBC video about Monty Roberts. The first half is about horses. The second is about people, young people, and getting them to respond in a positive manner, without violence or even raising your voice. Problem is, even if the teachers knew, who would have the cojones to put them in place?
Frankly, the system needs replacing, privatizing. (I wonder how the voucher system is doing in Florida?) Unfortunately, few of us have the resources to even attempt that; we're going to have to start by pounding on the one we've got. We need to get some smart, dedicated, fearless teachers in there, and give them some discretion. (What? Hire teachers on merit? Horrors!)
(PRECISELY horrors, see also Columbine!)
-- All bad precedents began as justifiable measures. -- Gaius Julius Caesar, quoted by Sallust
The question Hotaine should be asking here is "why?" What is it that makes an above-average mind so angry it wants to wreak death and destruction on its peers? What is it that makes other brilliant kids take their own lives, or otherwise render themselves incapable of functioning in polite society?
The answer, while two-pronged, is pretty damn simple. "Average" kids hate smart kids. Gives'em an inferiority complex. So the smart kids get picked on. That's the "A" part.
The "B" part is the degeneration of the government-run schools. Teachers can no longer open a can of whoop-ass on a miscreant when he deserves it.... if s/he bothers to care enough to want to do so. Teachers these days come from the lower end of the educational spectrum (not my own blathering, but results from the guys who give the SAT's), and are often only interested in getting thru the day and cashing the paycheck. The idea of putting in some extra work to make sure Einstein Junior over there stays interested is anathema to this mentality. Far easier to put this overactive kid on Ritalin....
Boom.
Frankly, I think it should have been up to the parents to step in and make sure the kids' needs were being addressed. But when Uncle Sugar all but decrees that Mom must work to pay the taxes on the fruits of Dad's labor, it becomes very easy to shirk that responsibility. So whose responsibility does it become?
Mine. And yours. Even if it's nothing more than flapping our yaps, or pounding our fingers on the keyboard. Just getting the word out will help... If we can get this topic, properly explained, before parents (and it's going to be geeky parents who are more likely to have geeky kids) maybe hopefully a couple of them will remember and get just pissed off enough to go in and thump some heads in a school system that really needs it.... or just maybe start one of their own....
Yeah, bot, you keep dreaming. It just might happen.
At the risk of taking away from Dan's fine comments....
We the geeks do not condone what Eric and Dylan did. However, to correctly answer the more important question why they did what they did, as terrible as it was, would in fact place them among the ranks of the victims. The whole point of this exercise is to not let it happen again.
Eric and Dylan were two sick individuals. Sick of the abuse from their peers, sick of being ignored by teachers and parents alike. Sick and tired both of being bored out of their skulls, and being kicked around by a society that has grown incapable of handling them.
And so they went and did that terrible thing. And we the geeks said, scheisse, I remember feeling like that.... and so some of us tried to do something, and Katz got hold of it, and here we are. Not because we want to wallow in our own misery, gods no, enough of that. And heaven forbid we should cause more... gratuitously. We are standing up for our fellow human being, not to condone violence, but to stop it... the very subtle violence that we ourselves endured in silence for years, and to which we finally have a chance to say:
NO MORE!!!
And if in the process a few people Don't Qute Get It, Blue, well, that's just tough. We'll try our best to explain... once. And then we'll move on and find someone who will listen, and, gods willing, make sure the listener ends up in charge.
47 USC 227 is, in fact, the junk fax law. IANAL either, but my reading of the section (backed up by a course in software law decades ago) says that a computer, analog modem, and printer, coupled with appropriate software, meet the definition of "fax machine" for the purposes of the law. (I'd have to re-read it to see if DSL would count.) (Cable modems are right out.) Anything of a business nature sent unsolicited to a "fax machine" is illegal, and is, in fact, worth $500 a pop, recoverable in the courts of either the sender or the recipient. Treble damages apply.
Now, it's worth noting that I've never heard of a spammer being succesfully sued under this statute, although I have sent some threatening emails with this clause in there, and gotten good results (i.e. blessed silence).
It would certainly make things simpler if we could get together a test case and set a precedent...
-- All bad precedents began as justifiable measures. -- Gaius Julius Caesar, quoted by Sallust
On behalf of all Slashdot readers, I wish you good luck, and I hope that you beat those a$$holes.
And if you don't... I say storm the castle.
I don't know which Bill's heavy handed tactics I'm sicker of, but the one that lives in Redmond has just hit somebody close to home.... and lives within an hour's driving distance of me. And doesn't have Secret Service agents guarding his body. Elian was an outrage. Waco even more so. But I read Slashdot every day. If this site is "stuff that matters", if it matters to us... this cause is uniquely ours.
Remember, folks, Roblimo specifically said, anything short of a tac nuke. Let the legal system have its say.... but if what it says is against the cause of free speech, that which is an unalienable right which neither man nor Borg can take, then I say we, the people, use whatever means is necessary to defend that right, and take it back.
In a related announcement, Our Lord King Case announced that he would immediately initiate a hostile takeover of MCIWorldComSprintUUnetTheInternetAsWeKnowIt. He expects to have subdued the entire Internet by the end of the Federal, err, Imperial fiscal year on June 30. Once the American Internet and its global subsidiaries are conquered, His Majesty expects to complete World Domination by the Feast of Bacchus on 26 December, after which he intends to go after Mars, probably some time in April when everyone has sobered up.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled Slashdot.
The one most excellent reason for having the treeware that heretofore no one has mentioned:
YOU CAN SCRIBBLE ON IT.
You can highlight, you can underline, you can make notes in the margins, you can note where the tech pubs dudes fscked up... you can put those little flourescent sticky tabs on the critical sections and scribble what they are on the tabs, thus producing over time a crude but bloody effective search engine...
As long as you can still print the HTML/PDF/Word doc/whatever, geeks will continue to do so, for this very reason... and, of course, the fact that it's portable and not power-dependent, and just plain easier to read. But the scribble factor is quite large... and often overlooked.
Your analogy with DDoS and airbags is wrong, and for the same reason on each comparison.
1) The real solution, the only one that will really work, is for the ISP's to shut down the non-internal-source packets. Period. The rest of the solutions can and will be gotten around, easily.
2) Other DDoS solutions are dangerous in that they can and will drop legit packets... just as air bags are dangerous to small people, adults and children alike.
If a good safety harness is good enough for Dale Ernhard going 200mph, it's good enough for me going 60. If shutting down the non-internal-source packets, and making it stick, will stop this problem cold and not harm other traffic, then let's do it, and keep pounding on folks until they do.
Fancy gee-whiz workarounds are no substitute for personal responsibility.
that the week Mozilla goes Beta will be the same week Penfield Jackson wields the legal axe on Microsoft? I gotta say, looks like the Beginning of the End for old Borgie-Bill....
Not that it really makes a rodent's rear end in the long run; the ascendancy of Linux (particularly with the new functionality in Red Hat 6.2 and Kernel 2.4) and the BSD's and the resurgence of the Mac and the return of commercial Unix, the 800-pound gorilla's clay feet are getting very wet. And IBM, of course, is holding the hose pipe....
Me, I'd get me some hearing protectors and safety goggles and find a place that isn't downwind... the show is going to be fun.
I've even noticed that the last several times I've moderated, I end up losing about 3-4 points of Karma. Now, perhaps I'm being "a bad moderator", but I don't think so: I take great care to moderate well and in the spirit of the Moderator guidelines. I wonder if the Trolls haven't managed to get several accounts they use for bogus MetaModeration.
Ummm, yeah, I've noticed the same thing of late....
Hey, Taco, care to fix it where AC's and negative karma-ites can't MetaMod? Methinks we're being Had....
-- sooner or later, the only way to run a truly value-added anything is to become a real BOFH on trolls.
Red Hat 6.2 (so bloody new you can't even get it in the store yet, I'm probably going to suck mine down the bitpipe tonight or tomorrow) has Piranha, which supports 2-node failover functionality. It's not Qualix, but it's a start.... and Red Hat is supported.
So, we have an enterprise-class RDBMS on a world-class operating system with RAID and failover capability, and several world-class organizations supporting it. Sounds like a Real World Solution to me.... So it doesn't scale into the terabyte range. How many folks really need that? and how many folks are employed by small businesses?
-- "We came, we saw, we kicked its ass!" -- Bill Murray, "Ghostbusters"
Imagine trying to navigate Slashdot without any images or tables or little boxes to organize everything. You'd very quickly go insane, or at least stop visiting.
Exqueeze me?
Slashdot is not about all the little boxes. Matter of fact, CNN is the only little box I use on a regular basis.... and it could be replaced by a link at the bottom of the page.
Slashdot is, as a matter of fact, about content... and, as the previous poster said, about moderation... not in graphics use, but in the readership weeding out the AC's from the juicy tidbits. If all I had was a steenking dummy terminal and 2400 baud, I would still read Slashdot, although all those little boxes would surely go bye-bye.... Thanks to Taco's excellent customizations, mostly with one flick of the spacebar. (q.v. "lite mode") (I would probably also run the threshold up another notch, and decline to moderate.... weeding thru 100kb of AC flamage isn't nearly as much fun when your download speed is within an order of magnitude of your reading speed as when you've got a significaant fraction of a megabit for a pipe....)
No, the problem is that the Microsofties and the Netscape/AOLs of the world (a plague on both their houses for this) have convinced all the newbies that a world devoid of flashy grahpics and megabitpipes is one not worth living in. Politely put, bullshit. One can live just fine at 2400 baud, no graphics, dummy terminal. I did for many years. It's simply a matter of picking sites with minimal fluff and maximal real content.... like Usenet used to be ten years ago. Matter of fact, some places on Usenet are still very useful. Even better, what about mailing lists? Those don't generally have graphics (although I can't say that for a number of better-known MUA's:), and still manage to be extremely useful.
Slashdot unusable without tables and little boxes. Puh-leeeze. Admittedly there is a good portion of the web that does, in fact, stink when you have your images turned off. Even my own ISP has a major problem with overgraphicsitis on some pages, and those guys are otherwise cool as a dewar full of liquid nitrogen. But we went thirty years without requiring a graphics-able terminal in order to do useful things in cyberspace, and we're not bloody about to start now.
I love how they handled the censorship issue wrt the F-word... Robin and company was really a class act there. I'd say give him an Oscar for that little performance.... but no, that would be an Emmy, being on the small screen.
ObCoinkyDink: Isaac Hayes was associated with two films last night, and both of them had to censor the F-word in the middle of a song... and both were handled brilliantly. He played the voice of Chef in "South Park", and wrote/performed the theme from "Shaft", which was presented in one of those (actually quite good) retrospective pieces.
Isaac, you still Da Man.
-- That Shaft is one baaaad muthah-Hush yo' mouth! I'm just talkin' 'bout Shaft! We can dig it!
"The network IS the computer." Looks like Sun was finally proven correct..... and that the Microsoft marketing juggernaut has finally lost a battle. Oh, yeah, sure, this isn't a definitive Waterloo, but I think we can safely say that M$'s attempt to take over the Internet will fail, if it hasn't alreddie.
-- Pohl's Law: Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere, will not hate it.
[...]
I sometimes find myself getting up early on the weekends to go slam out some code before my wife gets up, [...]
Best time to pull upgrades on the home machines, too.... oh-god-thirty on Sunday morning, get up, suck down an upgrade set, slam it in there, then when it gets to be 10:30 or so, "Good morning. I fixed xxx on your box..." "Oh, good." and she'll be on the box the rest of the day if you let her....:)
ObOnTopic: If you work at home you're always around to fix those scrooey little things that happen to her Linux box that you can't get to from your former office because of the steenking firewall...
-- The five minutes after 9am are far more productive than the fire hours after 5pm. -- me, from years of experience
That is one of the big things I like about working in cubieland. Just now I heard a dirty rumor in the hallway, sauntered over to the guy-in-question's cube, addressed the issue, found it to be far more benign than I had first heard, and came to an operational agreement that meant I could finish this message while he did what he wanted to do. No email, no voicemail tag, no meetings to schedule meetings to come up with agendas for meetings to carefully craft reports for the Big Meeting In The Sky.... just getting the job done as quickly and expeditiously as possible. I've also had a lot of problems solved, and solved a few, just by pararie dogging. And of course, the coffee area is a great place to network and address issues.
Now, as it has been said before, when you have a lot of heads-down, balls-to-the-wall coding to do, there's no substitute for being able to geek naked in the solitude of your own spare bedroom, and being just a few steps away from your own bed and your own snack cache and not having to worry about vending machine change.... and a really competent support geek can do a _lot_ with a DSL line and a headset for his voice line (I also know travel agents who work this way.... means Momma can stay home _and_ bring home the bacon). (AT&T does this with operators, too... voice line, data line, headset, "AT&T, how may I help you?")
But.
I really honestly have to say that when you're doing that sustaining, support-group kind of environment, cubieland is, in MY experience, more effective. For most things.
Perhaps the best approach is an employer enlightened enough to allow the employees to be flexible on the issue.... one of my previous ones was. A simple e-mail "I'm working from home today" was notice enough when one needed to be heads-down on something... on the other hand, everybody wanted to be in on Friday, because that's when the beer and chicken wings were served.:)
More importantly, anybody who is upset by how the corporation they work for is distorting their work and using it for unethical means (this could be everyone from GM to Amazon.com to Monsanto to Disney).
Think about it. Geeks aren't the only ones pissed off by the actions of the rich and powerful.
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. - Preamble to the IWW constitution.
Perhaps so, but I don't think traditional unionization (as your link to the IWW constitution in your.sig quote indicates) is the answer. Unions are about the idea that control of money is equal to power. It is not. Control of information is power. It is the information between my ears that makes me valuable to my employer. Money is simply a bribe to me, one that does not always work, to induce me to use that information on his behalf. If I don't like a workplace, I will go elsewhere. If I see a really cool working environment, I will often endeavour to get into it, even if it means a pay cut.
Bottom line, geeks don't fit the traditional union model.
Actually, I'm going to debate that last line there. The working class and the employing class do have things in common, particularly in a white-collar environment. Good engineers make good managers. Good tradesmen make good foremen. These individuals often go out and start their own businesses and succeed, thus becoming members of the employing class. I personally know people both white and blue collar who have done this; I've even had the pleasure of working for a few of these individuals. And I do mean pleasure. Having been there and done that, they know the score, and they understand that they need to make your job easier... and do. But I digress.
I can correct that statement. The unenlightened working class and the unenlightened employing class have nothing in common. Except that they're both induhviduals. Those who think about it know that to oppose each other, to create conflict between the classes, is counterproductive, and just plain stupid. The Japanese, on the other hand, understand the concept of team management, and are currently kicking our asses. Without unions. American auto workers who are exposed to this concept burn their union cards and run anyone who keeps his out of town.
I guess the moral of the story isn't that we need to kick ass, so much as we need to simply co-opt the leadership. Suborn it. 0wN it.
In other words, as has been said around here before, hack The System. And that, boys and girls, will be the Greatest Hack of All. Bigger than emacs, bigger than Linux itself.
And I have the sneaking suspicion that's exactly what Linus meant when he said World Domination.
-- "See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too;-)" --Linus
We have to form a consensus on the issues (maybe borrow Taco's polling engine), figure out which candidates support them or might be willing to, Slashdot the hell out of them (and not just with email, but with face time and with treeware), in short, we have to get it in gear, here and now.
Or we're going to get squashed.
I'm serious, folks, with DMCA and DeCSS and CyberPatrol in the courts, we stand a good chance of getting promoted to outlaw. The time to act is now.
Let's Do It.
-- This was the year everything changed. -- Commander Ivanova, 2261
Slashdot Mirror
So dump core and give me back that hash prompt alreddie.
--
You bitch about the present,
and blame it on the past -
I'd like to find your inner child
and kick it's little ass!
-- Don Henley, "Get Over It!"
(yeah, I dare you, -5, waythehellofftopic)
How do we make it stop?
I don't know. I'd sure like some ideas. But I think the most cost-effective way to do things is the moral equivalent of the yellow pages. If I want a given product, I'll go searching thru an index, and at that point I'm asking to see ads. I *might* be interested in a "what's new" area... anonymously tailored to my interests. Other than that, I prefer my world ad-free... and for damn sure I shouldn't be having to pay the freight for anyone else's content (banner ads, popups, or anything else that wastes my bandwidth). If I'm getting a service for free (radio, broadcast TV) that's one thing, but if I'm paying, real content only, please. Anything else is just going to annoy me, or worse.
--
Do not meddle in the affairs of the BOFH,
for he is subtle and quick to*#![[NO CARRIER
Sorry if the shouting offends, but too may people don't get that concept. No, healthcare is not a federal right. Basic education should be, but only because we've let the universal sufferage cat out of the bag... too late to make sure that only those smart enough to understand got to vote, so we have to do it the other way 'round now. *shrug* gives us a few more people maybe brave enough to speak up when the emperor goes nekkid....
What really bugs me is these sheeple enslaved to the congressman they think will vote them the most largesse from the federal treasury.... but I digress. By getting the hell out the way, and in so doing not stealing so bloody much from your paycheck, the Libertarian government allows you to take care of yourself, invest for your retirement, contribute to private charity for people's welfare, and basically do all those things people get uptight about, without anyone telling them how they HAVE to do it. Yes, I suppose your basic county health department is a good thing; it keeps otherwise-sick folk from spreading things... but this is run at a very local level; it's not a federal mandate. Other than that, IMHO things are far better run by someone not drawing a government paycheck.
As for Cliff's Silicon Snake Oil: There is a difference in using the computer as a mechanism for escaping the real world, and using it as a tool to build communities that would not otherwise exist (and eventually getting parts of them to meet in realspace). Poor Cliff got burned by the former. I quickly learned to do the latter. My first trip to California, several love affairs, my first meeting with the lady who is now my wife, and this job, 3000 miles from home, are all consequences of encounters on various networks. Sure, the box doesn't love you. But it doesn't make those little riffs from sweetie@myhome.com any less special... or the fact that it says "pick up some milk on the way home" any less useful. It's a tool, like a machete. You can hack your way thru all these trees, and find yourself lost in the forest.... or you can cut sugar cane, and make RUM! :) (Or Krispy Kreme donuts, for those of us less inclined to imbibe :)
Your choice. That's what it's all about.
--
I am Homer of Borg. You will be assim... Oooh! Donuts!
Even Joshua ben Joseph gave notice that there's more than one way to do things.... Remember the Good Samaritan? Samaritans, lest you forget, were good, old-fashioned, bull-sacrificing, Baal-worshipping PAGANS... y'all are smart, go figure. Love your neighbors. Love your enemies, and drive'em nuts!
Oh, and one more thing. Objectivists have morals, sure. Rules somebody wrote down in some book somewhere, to be followed slavishly and at the expense of everything else. Gimme a fscking break. Libertarians have ethics: Guidelines(*) to be used within a situation to effect a desired set of consequences. In this case the consequences are to maximize freedom, in general by preventing others from imposing force or fraud on the individual in question.
One more thing I want to question here, and that is the giving to charity. Now, I don't give to too many folks. But I have enough enlightened self-interest to see that there are a number of charities that I, myself, do or might benefit from. EFF. GNU. Various medical research organizations. etc. etc. ad infinitum nauseumque. What goes around comes around... what those Silicon Valley hotshots haven't figured out is that you get out of life what you put into it, same as a computer. Those dudes down there may die with the most toys, but they're still dead. Game over, man! I say live a little, give a little, and be much happier for it.
Free-lovin', drug-legalizin', non-judgemental hippie heatherns, you betcha.... and a lot happier for it than anybody who says There Ain't But One Way To Do It. (cf. Larry Wall, eh?)
(*)Guidelines: remember them, Usenetters? rules made to be bent or even broken with just cause.
--
"I tried. I tried to warn them. But it all happened, just the way I remembered it." -- Jeffrey David Sinclair, "War Without End II" (B5)
--
w.e.b., salaried consultant
There are no dress rehearsals.
We ARE professionals, and this
IS the Big Time.
(2) Registration for d.s. in person (motor voter?) (or better yet, at the public library, where all the free internet terminals are
(3) 128-bit SSL isn't scalable? And for those who don't have, (a) libraries and (b) mandatory backup paper method ("no purchase necessary to enter")
(4) see above paper method - and require the "old method" to be used to pass the new one (kinda implicit, but important nonetheless)
(5) Aaaah, the old quid custodes problem (pardon me if my latin is rusty). How to ensure that a disinterested party is keeping the results? OK, try this. Organizations on both sides of the issue receive duplicate copies of the (anonymized) balloting. Each then forwards their results to a Big Six accounting firm (or similar.... the same way a sweepstakes works) who has a third copy, and audits the results (the Big Six firm doesn't know which questions mean what, they just get "Issue #1, the following d.s.'s yea, these other d.s.'s nay" with no idea what Issue #1 is). Representatives from the two sides then publish the audited results.
Is this too complex? too easy? Let's thrash this out, folks.... we may as well get this right the first time; gods help us if we don't.
Oh, and please don't go global on me; the UN has been causing enough trouble lately. Ditto using one's official voting d.s. for anything other than the official process; we have enough abuse of the SSN as it is. P'raps one would encrypt one's d.s. with the political organization's public key, per issue? Sure would keep the ballot secret....
--
w.e.b.
Oh, he thinks too much, he's 'bout half SMART!
-- Brother Dave Gardener
So maybe he was a troll, but it's an obscure enough subject that somebody would take him for real.... and if I end up giving somebody somewhere the real picture, then I'll have done what I wanted to do.
--
Use the Force
Read the Source
The larger point is, I came up with that with about half a second's thought. Most of the teachers in there now couldn't think their way out of a wet paper bag. The rest, including the teacher in the previous example, are scared they'll cross somebody's liberal agenda and be without a paycheck.
There are ways to get the kids' attention even with the current system in place. If you want proof, go check out the video "The Real Horse Whisperer," the BBC video about Monty Roberts. The first half is about horses. The second is about people, young people, and getting them to respond in a positive manner, without violence or even raising your voice. Problem is, even if the teachers knew, who would have the cojones to put them in place?
Frankly, the system needs replacing, privatizing. (I wonder how the voucher system is doing in Florida?) Unfortunately, few of us have the resources to even attempt that; we're going to have to start by pounding on the one we've got. We need to get some smart, dedicated, fearless teachers in there, and give them some discretion. (What? Hire teachers on merit? Horrors!)
(PRECISELY horrors, see also Columbine!)
--
All bad precedents began as justifiable measures.
-- Gaius Julius Caesar, quoted by Sallust
The question Hotaine should be asking here is "why?" What is it that makes an above-average mind so angry it wants to wreak death and destruction on its peers? What is it that makes other brilliant kids take their own lives, or otherwise render themselves incapable of functioning in polite society?
The answer, while two-pronged, is pretty damn simple. "Average" kids hate smart kids. Gives'em an inferiority complex. So the smart kids get picked on. That's the "A" part.
The "B" part is the degeneration of the government-run schools. Teachers can no longer open a can of whoop-ass on a miscreant when he deserves it.... if s/he bothers to care enough to want to do so. Teachers these days come from the lower end of the educational spectrum (not my own blathering, but results from the guys who give the SAT's), and are often only interested in getting thru the day and cashing the paycheck. The idea of putting in some extra work to make sure Einstein Junior over there stays interested is anathema to this mentality. Far easier to put this overactive kid on Ritalin....
Boom.
Frankly, I think it should have been up to the parents to step in and make sure the kids' needs were being addressed. But when Uncle Sugar all but decrees that Mom must work to pay the taxes on the fruits of Dad's labor, it becomes very easy to shirk that responsibility. So whose responsibility does it become?
Mine. And yours. Even if it's nothing more than flapping our yaps, or pounding our fingers on the keyboard. Just getting the word out will help... If we can get this topic, properly explained, before parents (and it's going to be geeky parents who are more likely to have geeky kids) maybe hopefully a couple of them will remember and get just pissed off enough to go in and thump some heads in a school system that really needs it.... or just maybe start one of their own....
Yeah, bot, you keep dreaming. It just might happen.
We the geeks do not condone what Eric and Dylan did. However, to correctly answer the more important question why they did what they did, as terrible as it was, would in fact place them among the ranks of the victims. The whole point of this exercise is to not let it happen again.
Eric and Dylan were two sick individuals. Sick of the abuse from their peers, sick of being ignored by teachers and parents alike. Sick and tired both of being bored out of their skulls, and being kicked around by a society that has grown incapable of handling them.
And so they went and did that terrible thing. And we the geeks said, scheisse, I remember feeling like that.... and so some of us tried to do something, and Katz got hold of it, and here we are. Not because we want to wallow in our own misery, gods no, enough of that. And heaven forbid we should cause more... gratuitously. We are standing up for our fellow human being, not to condone violence, but to stop it... the very subtle violence that we ourselves endured in silence for years, and to which we finally have a chance to say:
NO MORE!!!
And if in the process a few people Don't Qute Get It, Blue, well, that's just tough. We'll try our best to explain... once. And then we'll move on and find someone who will listen, and, gods willing, make sure the listener ends up in charge.
--
Never Again -- not-so-old Jewish saying
Now, it's worth noting that I've never heard of a spammer being succesfully sued under this statute, although I have sent some threatening emails with this clause in there, and gotten good results (i.e. blessed silence).
It would certainly make things simpler if we could get together a test case and set a precedent...
--
All bad precedents began as justifiable measures.
-- Gaius Julius Caesar, quoted by Sallust
I don't know which Bill's heavy handed tactics I'm sicker of, but the one that lives in Redmond has just hit somebody close to home.... and lives within an hour's driving distance of me. And doesn't have Secret Service agents guarding his body. Elian was an outrage. Waco even more so. But I read Slashdot every day. If this site is "stuff that matters", if it matters to us... this cause is uniquely ours.
Remember, folks, Roblimo specifically said, anything short of a tac nuke. Let the legal system have its say.... but if what it says is against the cause of free speech, that which is an unalienable right which neither man nor Borg can take, then I say we, the people, use whatever means is necessary to defend that right, and take it back.
--
My LAN is Microsoft and Intel-free.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled Slashdot.
YOU CAN SCRIBBLE ON IT.
You can highlight, you can underline, you can make notes in the margins, you can note where the tech pubs dudes fscked up... you can put those little flourescent sticky tabs on the critical sections and scribble what they are on the tabs, thus producing over time a crude but bloody effective search engine...
As long as you can still print the HTML/PDF/Word doc/whatever, geeks will continue to do so, for this very reason... and, of course, the fact that it's portable and not power-dependent, and just plain easier to read. But the scribble factor is quite large... and often overlooked.
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Nuts on modding up the AC's. Make them login.
Your analogy with DDoS and airbags is wrong, and for the same reason on each comparison.
1) The real solution, the only one that will really work, is for the ISP's to shut down the non-internal-source packets. Period. The rest of the solutions can and will be gotten around, easily.
2) Other DDoS solutions are dangerous in that they can and will drop legit packets... just as air bags are dangerous to small people, adults and children alike.
If a good safety harness is good enough for Dale Ernhard going 200mph, it's good enough for me going 60. If shutting down the non-internal-source packets, and making it stick, will stop this problem cold and not harm other traffic, then let's do it, and keep pounding on folks until they do.
Fancy gee-whiz workarounds are no substitute for personal responsibility.
Not that it really makes a rodent's rear end in the long run; the ascendancy of Linux (particularly with the new functionality in Red Hat 6.2 and Kernel 2.4) and the BSD's and the resurgence of the Mac and the return of commercial Unix, the 800-pound gorilla's clay feet are getting very wet. And IBM, of course, is holding the hose pipe....
Me, I'd get me some hearing protectors and safety goggles and find a place that isn't downwind... the show is going to be fun.
--
Timberrrrrrrrrr!
Hey, Taco, care to fix it where AC's and negative karma-ites can't MetaMod? Methinks we're being Had....
--
sooner or later, the only way to
run a truly value-added anything
is to become a real BOFH on trolls.
So, we have an enterprise-class RDBMS on a world-class operating system with RAID and failover capability, and several world-class organizations supporting it. Sounds like a Real World Solution to me.... So it doesn't scale into the terabyte range. How many folks really need that? and how many folks are employed by small businesses?
--
"We came, we saw, we kicked its ass!"
-- Bill Murray, "Ghostbusters"
Slashdot is not about all the little boxes. Matter of fact, CNN is the only little box I use on a regular basis.... and it could be replaced by a link at the bottom of the page.
Slashdot is, as a matter of fact, about content... and, as the previous poster said, about moderation... not in graphics use, but in the readership weeding out the AC's from the juicy tidbits. If all I had was a steenking dummy terminal and 2400 baud, I would still read Slashdot, although all those little boxes would surely go bye-bye.... Thanks to Taco's excellent customizations, mostly with one flick of the spacebar. (q.v. "lite mode") (I would probably also run the threshold up another notch, and decline to moderate.... weeding thru 100kb of AC flamage isn't nearly as much fun when your download speed is within an order of magnitude of your reading speed as when you've got a significaant fraction of a megabit for a pipe....)
No, the problem is that the Microsofties and the Netscape/AOLs of the world (a plague on both their houses for this) have convinced all the newbies that a world devoid of flashy grahpics and megabitpipes is one not worth living in. Politely put, bullshit. One can live just fine at 2400 baud, no graphics, dummy terminal. I did for many years. It's simply a matter of picking sites with minimal fluff and maximal real content.... like Usenet used to be ten years ago. Matter of fact, some places on Usenet are still very useful. Even better, what about mailing lists? Those don't generally have graphics (although I can't say that for a number of better-known MUA's :), and still manage to be extremely useful.
Slashdot unusable without tables and little boxes. Puh-leeeze. Admittedly there is a good portion of the web that does, in fact, stink when you have your images turned off. Even my own ISP has a major problem with overgraphicsitis on some pages, and those guys are otherwise cool as a dewar full of liquid nitrogen. But we went thirty years without requiring a graphics-able terminal in order to do useful things in cyberspace, and we're not bloody about to start now.
--
I remember when we had 300 baud and liked it.
ObCoinkyDink: Isaac Hayes was associated with two films last night, and both of them had to censor the F-word in the middle of a song... and both were handled brilliantly. He played the voice of Chef in "South Park", and wrote/performed the theme from "Shaft", which was presented in one of those (actually quite good) retrospective pieces.
Isaac, you still Da Man.
--
That Shaft is one baaaad muthah-Hush yo' mouth!
I'm just talkin' 'bout Shaft! We can dig it!
--
Pohl's Law: Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere, will not hate it.
ObOnTopic: If you work at home you're always around to fix those scrooey little things that happen to her Linux box that you can't get to from your former office because of the steenking firewall...
--
The five minutes after 9am are far more productive than the fire hours after 5pm.
-- me, from years of experience
Now, as it has been said before, when you have a lot of heads-down, balls-to-the-wall coding to do, there's no substitute for being able to geek naked in the solitude of your own spare bedroom, and being just a few steps away from your own bed and your own snack cache and not having to worry about vending machine change.... and a really competent support geek can do a _lot_ with a DSL line and a headset for his voice line (I also know travel agents who work this way.... means Momma can stay home _and_ bring home the bacon). (AT&T does this with operators, too... voice line, data line, headset, "AT&T, how may I help you?")
But.
I really honestly have to say that when you're doing that sustaining, support-group kind of environment, cubieland is, in MY experience, more effective. For most things.
Perhaps the best approach is an employer enlightened enough to allow the employees to be flexible on the issue.... one of my previous ones was. A simple e-mail "I'm working from home today" was notice enough when one needed to be heads-down on something... on the other hand, everybody wanted to be in on Friday, because that's when the beer and chicken wings were served. :)
--
"It's cocktail time..." -- Skip Caray
Bottom line, geeks don't fit the traditional union model.
Actually, I'm going to debate that last line there. The working class and the employing class do have things in common, particularly in a white-collar environment. Good engineers make good managers. Good tradesmen make good foremen. These individuals often go out and start their own businesses and succeed, thus becoming members of the employing class. I personally know people both white and blue collar who have done this; I've even had the pleasure of working for a few of these individuals. And I do mean pleasure. Having been there and done that, they know the score, and they understand that they need to make your job easier... and do. But I digress.
I can correct that statement. The unenlightened working class and the unenlightened employing class have nothing in common. Except that they're both induhviduals. Those who think about it know that to oppose each other, to create conflict between the classes, is counterproductive, and just plain stupid. The Japanese, on the other hand, understand the concept of team management, and are currently kicking our asses. Without unions. American auto workers who are exposed to this concept burn their union cards and run anyone who keeps his out of town.
I guess the moral of the story isn't that we need to kick ass, so much as we need to simply co-opt the leadership. Suborn it. 0wN it.
In other words, as has been said around here before, hack The System. And that, boys and girls, will be the Greatest Hack of All. Bigger than emacs, bigger than Linux itself.
And I have the sneaking suspicion that's exactly what Linus meant when he said World Domination.
-- ;-)"
"See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too
--Linus
And who's going to have to change that?
We are.
We have to form a consensus on the issues (maybe borrow Taco's polling engine), figure out which candidates support them or might be willing to, Slashdot the hell out of them (and not just with email, but with face time and with treeware), in short, we have to get it in gear, here and now.
Or we're going to get squashed.
I'm serious, folks, with DMCA and DeCSS and CyberPatrol in the courts, we stand a good chance of getting promoted to outlaw. The time to act is now.
Let's Do It.
--
This was the year everything changed.
-- Commander Ivanova, 2261