So I have my local station sending out a HDTV signal into the air.
And my $3000 HDTV-ready television
And my $700 HDTV tuner.
And my $1000 Dolby Digital receiver.
And my $2000 PowerMac G4 with Firewire (or a $1000 yet-to-be-created HDTV recorder)
And I have a job during my favorite show's HDTV broadcast.
I spent all of this money and I have to watch my show in analog format?
I do not mind digital copy-protection. But, as I have said before, let me have that ONE digital copy, in all of its HDTV glory). Make copying more than once illegal, that is fine with me. But give me that one copy!*
*Yes, I realize that this will be hacked quickly. However, I am fully in support of cracking down on people that distrbute digital copies of movies. But please do not make it illegalfor me to have that one copy!
I have been using my main email address since the fall of 1993 . My email address is listed on several web sites that I run, and has been posted, unchanged, to Usenet over 2000 times in the 7.5 years.
I have been on a couple dozen mailing lists, both commercial and hand-run over the years. I am still on about 5 different commerial mailing lists set up by companies to announce things. For about a year, I replied to most spam that I got, complaining and asking to be removed.
I even post to/. with my email address unchanged.
To date, I do not run any major SPAM filters and only get about 4-5 spams a week. I simply trash them anymore, figuring that if I kept replying I would only get more.
Perhaps that is the way to avoid SPAM. Perhaps spammers remove your email address after a certain amount of time, figuring that there is no way anyone would ever keep their email address more than five years...
My local ISP, IgLou.com, has been battling BellSouth (our local Baby Bell) for several years over DSL access. It seems that the ISP (local to a few local major cities) is actually winning a few small battles.
http://www.iglou.com/dsl/victory/ is their press release concerning their victory in courth, requiring that BellSouth provide DSL access to local ISPs for the same amout that it changes its largest cutomser, Bellsouth.net.
I keep waiting for IgLou to offer DSL for reasonable rates.
Slashdotters across the country should be informed of , with its inclusion of a bill by y Representative Billy Tauzin (R-LA) allowing BabyBells to prevent local ISPs from accessing their DSL lines.
Perhaps I should have submitted this as a full story...
As others have said, you can add secondary shipping addresses to your credit card account. Contact your credit card company for more information.
I, for one, never give my credit card number to any on-line site that will willingly ship to an address not seen as a good shipping address according to my credit card company.
I do not see this as a hassle, I see this as a security measure that I have to work with.
Anymore, I have a checklist I go through before putting my credit card on a site:
1) Does the server use SSL?
2) Does the site store my credit card number (acceptable if they make it optional - not acceptable if they require storage - no One Click for me).
3) Does the site have a good Privacy policy?
4) Has the site sent me Spam?
5) Does the site send to a non-authoized shipping address?
Anymore, the other quesiton that needs to be asked is "Is the site in danger of being bought out by a comapny I do not agree with?"
Yes, there is something wrong with the government getting ahold of information about me. There should always be a choice when it comes to information, and there should always be an exchange.
Take grocery store discount cards. I have a choice of whether or not I want to sign up in the first place. Then there is an exhange - they give me a discount in exchange for them being able to follow my spending habits.
Hopefully they can use this information to notice what brands I buy in order to better serve me in the future.
Credit card companies track me, but I have a choice of having a card (I do not), and they give me services in exchange for using their cards. I have theft protection, and easy access to money.
Slashdot tracks me through the use of cookies but I have a choice in the matter (I run a client that allows/disallows cookies based on the domain), and in exchange for Slashdot looking after me, I get to tailor what I want to see when I come here.
This brings us to the government. What choice do I have if a company wants to sell my habits to the government? None. What do I get out of this exhange? Nothing but a loss of privacy.
Before you reply to this comment talking about my grocery store selling my information to other companies - I have signed up using a false name, address, and phone number. Not only that, but the grocery gave me four cards when I signed up, and I distributed the other three to friends in other cities. The information they gather about me is useful to the store, but useless to other companies since it would be impossible to track me down fromthe information they have.
Yes, credit card companies could sell information about me to other companies, and this is one reason I do not have a card. However, there is still a choice in the matter (getting a card or not), and the credit card company still provides benifits. You just have to weigh the benifits against all of what the company does to you (tracks you *and* sells the information).
A few years back (pre-IPO), I bought a Slashdot T-Shirt from http://www.copyleft.net/ in part because some of the proceeds went to Slashdot. I use some blocking software that eliminates most ads from web sites, and I figured that the percentage of the shirt sale that went to Slashdot made up for any lost revenue.
Take a look at http://www.copyleft.net/info_donate.phtml
I do not have a problem with/. offering a paid ad-free version. As others have said, it is not so much the point that I want to avoid ads (I already do), but rather that I like/. and want to see it continue without "selling out". I would pay $15-$20 a year...
Options are never a bad thing.
If it meant paying a small fee and still seeing ads, I would probably go for it.
The only problem I have with Salon's model is the "extra content." I hate web sites that put links for more content, but then tell you that you have to be a (paying) member to access. How many web sites has that made me immediately send in a check? None.
Can you imagine Slashdot offering "extra" JonKatz articles for paying memebers?
Showing that 1.999... == 2 is not a "parlour trick." Indeed, the foundation on which such proofs lie is one of the basis for the set of real numbers. The real numbers allows for irrational numbers such as the square root of 2.
If you want to study this idea, I would suggest a good undergraduate-level Analysis class. The ideas you would want to pay attention to are least upper bounds, greatest lower bounds and the least upper bound theorem.
As far as the original article - there are always going to basic, unprovable ideas behind mathematics.
Actually, if you want to bring up a point with one assumption that math relies on, ask why math must assume that 1 does not equal 0.
Simply because there are no immediate applications does not mean that there are not applications. Also remember that you are asking an 8th. grader what the applications are of his thereom.
If nothing else, this may get kids more interested in math. That is more than enough application to make me happy.
[I suppose I am somewhat biased, I am going to be graduating with a degree in mathematics in May.]
I am big on not giving money to the chain store. This includes people like Amazon.com and others. I buy my books at locally owned book stores, I shop at locally owned grocery stores (the few there are), and so on.
I have avoided places like Amazon because I like people like Joe at the small bookstore down the street.
There are exceptions, however. I have yet to find a good way to buy airline tickets except online. I also tend to buy computer equipment online (http://www.smalldog.com/ - a small Mac online Mac store).
Before buying, however, I make sure of several security concerns - do they save my credit card number? Do they have well-written Privacy policies? Do they send unsolicited Spam?
Still, I would use one-time credit card numbers if they were made available to me.
So Apple has a choice - ship on time or ship late. Either way some/. zealot is going to bash them.
Other then shipping on time with complete, working features, I would rather a developer ship a product leaving some features out than ship it with buggy pre-release version of the software (I am sure that Apple has some early versions of a DVD-player, for example).
For someone like me (with a Mac without a DVD player), I would hate to see OS X get held up because of features I do not need just to please everyone.
I applaud Apple's holding to a ship date and being honsest about what features are and are not going to make it into the original release. Also remember that Apple is not planning on shipping the OS pre-installed on every computer until much later.
I only had one make it through iCab's image filtering. I am not even sure it was a real banner ad, though (came from their actual site, and did not seem to have an attached A HREF tag).
I am happy.
I do hate banner ads stuck in the middle of articles. At the top and the bottom is acceptable, on the side is marginal. In the middle of the article, though, is unacceptable.
I currently use iCab on the Mac and filter out about 98% of the banner ads I see (and I am getting the rules set up enough that pop-ups are a rare occasion).
If OSDN gave me the ability to custom tune what ads I see, and gave me the ability to comment on them, I would seriously consider turning off the filter for OSDN web sites.
I think that the system will only work if OSDN gets a lot of different ads. It seems that every time I check/. from school (where I have to put up with the ads), I get the stupid "See hot babes, and get fired" ad. If I turned that one off, I think that OSDN would simply have to rotate through the other three ads that I ever see.
Ad karma just sucks. I will leave it at that. Customizing ads cool, ad karma just stupid.
Man, this discussion makes me feel like a new-comer to Slashdot. I only have a four-digit ID in the midst of a three-digit conversation. I always have to grin a little when someone referes to a id of 60,000 as "low."
It should also be noted that Slashdot had been around for a while before the Andover buyout, and was making money. Granted the money was coming from advertising (which is not making the money it once did on the Internet), but it had an established method of making money.
The other thing that/. has going for it is the lack of a product (tell that to etoys and Amazon). It is damn cheap to come up with stories that will get hundred of thousands of hits a day (especially when fools like us send them in). Not only that, but the hits are coming from a very targetted audience (one that has quite a bit of money at that).
Very low overhead. The servers and bandwidth probably cost a little, but other than that... (I mean, we all know that CmdrTaco sits at home and eats peanut butter and Ramin).
While it sounds nice to require people to upgrade, look at a few results: The only two browsers you will be able to use will be Netscape/Mozilla and IE.
I regularly use iCab on my Mac, and I have no idea how many times I have had web pages redirect me "because our web pages require [frames|JavaScript]." That is all nice and good, but iCab supports frames and JavaScript just well. But the web server is simply looking at the client identity and seeing that I do not have (Netscape) or (IE) >= 4.0
Many pages will also permanently turn me away for not using Netscape or IE. iCab will support the pages just fine, but there is *no way* the server will allow me to see them as long as I am reporting using an alternative browser. iCab allows me to change the client identity string, but it should not have to - web designers should warn me that I am using an non-supported browser, and then let me in.
Posters are also complaing about how badly older browsers display their pages. Two points:
1) Make sure you are using completely W3 compliant HTML (or XML or CSS) - you cannot complain if an older browser does not support a non-standard MS-created HTML tag.
2) Realize that there are people out there who are willing to view your page less than perfectly. People who browse with images and JavaScript off are a perfect example of this - giving up display in order to gain speed.
I am all for the suggestion if
1) Web filtering is more powerful than simply "You are not using the most up-to-date Mozilla/IE." There are alternatives out there.
2) Web designers use only 100% compliant HTML.
Since chances are neither of these will ever happen, I am against this proposal.
What? Silly me, I thought the kernel was GPL software. Imagine my disillusionment, I though that "Information wants to be free."
Apparently I have this all wrong - the kernel belongs to Linus. If I want to use it, I to ask him to use it.
Linus simply maintains one of the Linux forks (currently about the only one, excepting patched versions). He maintains the fork that he wants to maintain, with the features that he likes. He controls this fork, but that does not mean that it belongs to him. It is GPLed software, after all.
If he does not accept a patch into the fork that he maintains, that his within his powers. But anyone can start a forked copy with the patches and, since the kernel is GPLed, use any future versions of Linus's kernel in their fork (since the forked kernel would have to be GPLed, as well).
Sometimes I think that forking the Linux kernel might be one of the best things to happen to Linux. We are getting close to the need, since it will begin to be difficult to maintain a full kernel that will run on everything from a palm-top to a mutiple-processor server.
Competition encourages development, and if you add GPL to the mix, the competition benifits everyone.
I just bought a DVD player yesterday, and went out and bought Gattaga and Heat to test it out. Great timing, as I just got done watching Gattaga (for about the tenth time).
The movie is a great example of what can result from allowing things like this. While it is just information, given a job candidate (or an person to insure) who is more prone to certain illnesses over someone who is not, who are you going to hire/insure?
Eudora used to include the ability to generate formatted, but non-HTML, text. It included everything you mention, and did not include any networking-specific code. It failed (no one else started to use it, so it was Eudora-specific, and HTML mail became all the rage). It would be a great idea of someone would write up a subset of HTML as an RFC that could be used simply for text formatting (STRONG, BLOCKQUOTE, etc. - maybe even TABLE) for email use (and I would image there are many other uses, as well).
Text/enriched seems to cover this (RFC 1896), but that is Eudora's failed attempt.
I would look for most mailers to move to where they get rid of image-fetching and JavaScript.
Since I am going to be graduating in May and going into teaching (high school math):
1) My sophomore/junior year math teacher for Trig/Pre-Cal/Calculus. I went to a Xavierian (Catholic) high school and Brother John was... well, a brother. Super nice. He got to school about an hour and a half before school and stayed about two hours afterwards just to be there for questions. He expected everyone to be paying attention at all times, and seemed to know the answer to every question you could imagine.
2) My Calc II TA my freshman year in college. Man, that guy was weird. He mostly just goofed off and did really strange things. One time he stopped in the middle of a discussion and punched the wall. One time he explained to us that whenever he asked "Well, what do *you* think we should do here?" actually meant "I do not have a clue what to do here and I am hoping you have some idea." He also never complained when I never turned in homework. Never, even though homework was 20% of our grade. He realized that I knew my stuff and that was what was important.
3) My Linear Algebra/Number Systems/Moder Algebra prof. I am not sure what was worse - the fact that you could not read a single thing he wrote on the board, or the fact that he just seemed to never be explaining things very well. Three semesters with him, though, and I caught on to his style. Everyone in the classes had to work thier asses off to figure out what he was talking about (and writing on the board), but that extra work helped me, at least, figure it out. He also gave me A's despite the fact that I never did homework.
4) My stats/probability prof. He only gave two homework problems a week, and gave ten "suggested problems." No ten-page problem sets here. Most test problems were very similar to the "suggested problems", though.
Homework always was a killer for me. I never really liked doing it. I always appreciated when a prof could see that, despite me not doing homework, I actually knew the stuff. I realized that convincing them of that meant showing up to every class and making sure to participate in class (a sure way to show profs that you know what you are talking about).
From everything that I have heard and read, HDTV is a very nice picture... The bigger the screen, the more you can appreciate it...
Note also that most of the players in the HDTV market are the manufacturers. People like Mitsubitshi and Panasonic are paying the networks to start broadcasting in HDTV. Even then only a very few shows are broadcast in it.
And for everyone who knocks HDTV as "it sucks" - wait to see it. Great quality. I am sure that people with cassette tapes were complaining about CDs, too.
"They are better sounding but you cannot record? I think I will stick with cassettes..."
[Forewarning: It has been a while since I looked over the slash code.]
I beleive the article has it wrong. Anyone with a positive karma has just as good a chance to moderate as someone with a 537 karma. The entire Slashdot community continues to choose their "community leaders," rather than a self-selecting group of elite overlords with a +1 ability.
What you also fail to mention is the "protest" contingent. These are people that post somewhat informative posts in order to get a positive karma. They are then able to moderate and meta-moderate. But since the believe that the moderation system sucks, they moderate incorrectly (and mainly meta-moderate incorrectly, since there are no checks on that). Using the system to corrupt the system.
I do believe that Slashdot has a serious problem with people simply copying-and-pasting the original article, and then getting a (5, Informative) instead of a (-1, Redundant).
I believe that minority voices are often moderated down. A pro-MS, anti-Linux argument, even if 100% correct, will often be moderated down to join the Hot Grits comments.
Yes, Slashdot is self-adaptive, but to a certain pro-Linux community. As a Mac user myself, it is always distressing to see a *factually incorrect* anti-Apple comment get moderated up. Yes, meta-moderation should take care of this, but that is entirely dependant upon the meta-moderator seeing the mistake.
Would a "self-adaptive" community be better served by people knowledgable in the field in question moderating? If someone knows a lot about Gnome, but not a lot about BSD, would it not be better to limit him/her to moderating Gnome and related articles?
I sent in a request that any meta-moderation with more than say 7 "Unfairs" would be flagged for CmdrTaco (or other) to look at... That is most probably a "Rebel" trying to disrupt the system...
As with any GPL project, I suppose that the Slasdot-type communities are a work in progress...
[I am downloading the Slash code right now to check on moderation selection, as well as punishment/reward for good/bad moderation]
Oh, and receivers with digital auidio *switching*.
Yeah, except for those...
I would really like to see more digital audio (both DTS/Dolby Digital streams as well as straight coaxial digital streams) on computers... At prices for DTS/DD receivers, you could almost get one specifically for the computer...
(And I am still waiting on the Soundblaster for the Macintosh...)
Slashdot Mirror
So I have my local station sending out a HDTV signal into the air.
And my $3000 HDTV-ready television
And my $700 HDTV tuner.
And my $1000 Dolby Digital receiver.
And my $2000 PowerMac G4 with Firewire (or a $1000 yet-to-be-created HDTV recorder)
And I have a job during my favorite show's HDTV broadcast.
I spent all of this money and I have to watch my show in analog format?
I do not mind digital copy-protection. But, as I have said before, let me have that ONE digital copy, in all of its HDTV glory). Make copying more than once illegal, that is fine with me. But give me that one copy!*
*Yes, I realize that this will be hacked quickly. However, I am fully in support of cracking down on people that distrbute digital copies of movies. But please do not make it illegalfor me to have that one copy!
I have been using my main email address since the fall of 1993 . My email address is listed on several web sites that I run, and has been posted, unchanged, to Usenet over 2000 times in the 7.5 years.
/. with my email address unchanged.
I have been on a couple dozen mailing lists, both commercial and hand-run over the years. I am still on about 5 different commerial mailing lists set up by companies to announce things. For about a year, I replied to most spam that I got, complaining and asking to be removed.
I even post to
To date, I do not run any major SPAM filters and only get about 4-5 spams a week. I simply trash them anymore, figuring that if I kept replying I would only get more.
Perhaps that is the way to avoid SPAM. Perhaps spammers remove your email address after a certain amount of time, figuring that there is no way anyone would ever keep their email address more than five years...
I just submitted the article to the Slashdot queue:
m is a site for good (biased) information.
1) The bill is HR 1542
2) http://www.newnetworks.com/TauzinDingellisevil.ht
My local ISP, IgLou.com, has been battling BellSouth (our local Baby Bell) for several years over DSL access. It seems that the ISP (local to a few local major cities) is actually winning a few small battles.
http://www.iglou.com/dsl/victory/ is their press release concerning their victory in courth, requiring that BellSouth provide DSL access to local ISPs for the same amout that it changes its largest cutomser, Bellsouth.net.
I keep waiting for IgLou to offer DSL for reasonable rates.
Slashdotters across the country should be informed of , with its inclusion of a bill by y Representative Billy Tauzin (R-LA) allowing BabyBells to prevent local ISPs from accessing their DSL lines.
Perhaps I should have submitted this as a full story...
As others on this thread have pointed out, things like tobacco, alcohol, and skydiving all fit the category that you have described.
As with anything, drugs *in moderation* can be a socially acceptable thing.
I am sure that drugs have torn many a family apart, but I am also just as sure that alcohol has torn even more apart.
Legalize, tax, and regulate.
Make it illegal to do stupid things while under the influence.
There are examples out there of how legalized drugs can work.
As others have said, you can add secondary shipping addresses to your credit card account. Contact your credit card company for more information.
I, for one, never give my credit card number to any on-line site that will willingly ship to an address not seen as a good shipping address according to my credit card company.
I do not see this as a hassle, I see this as a security measure that I have to work with.
Anymore, I have a checklist I go through before putting my credit card on a site:
1) Does the server use SSL?
2) Does the site store my credit card number (acceptable if they make it optional - not acceptable if they require storage - no One Click for me).
3) Does the site have a good Privacy policy?
4) Has the site sent me Spam?
5) Does the site send to a non-authoized shipping address?
Anymore, the other quesiton that needs to be asked is "Is the site in danger of being bought out by a comapny I do not agree with?"
Yes, there is something wrong with the government getting ahold of information about me. There should always be a choice when it comes to information, and there should always be an exchange.
Take grocery store discount cards. I have a choice of whether or not I want to sign up in the first place. Then there is an exhange - they give me a discount in exchange for them being able to follow my spending habits.
Hopefully they can use this information to notice what brands I buy in order to better serve me in the future.
Credit card companies track me, but I have a choice of having a card (I do not), and they give me services in exchange for using their cards. I have theft protection, and easy access to money.
Slashdot tracks me through the use of cookies but I have a choice in the matter (I run a client that allows/disallows cookies based on the domain), and in exchange for Slashdot looking after me, I get to tailor what I want to see when I come here.
This brings us to the government. What choice do I have if a company wants to sell my habits to the government? None. What do I get out of this exhange? Nothing but a loss of privacy.
Before you reply to this comment talking about my grocery store selling my information to other companies - I have signed up using a false name, address, and phone number. Not only that, but the grocery gave me four cards when I signed up, and I distributed the other three to friends in other cities. The information they gather about me is useful to the store, but useless to other companies since it would be impossible to track me down fromthe information they have.
Yes, credit card companies could sell information about me to other companies, and this is one reason I do not have a card. However, there is still a choice in the matter (getting a card or not), and the credit card company still provides benifits. You just have to weigh the benifits against all of what the company does to you (tracks you *and* sells the information).
A few years back (pre-IPO), I bought a Slashdot T-Shirt from http://www.copyleft.net/ in part because some of the proceeds went to Slashdot. I use some blocking software that eliminates most ads from web sites, and I figured that the percentage of the shirt sale that went to Slashdot made up for any lost revenue.
/. offering a paid ad-free version. As others have said, it is not so much the point that I want to avoid ads (I already do), but rather that I like /. and want to see it continue without "selling out". I would pay $15-$20 a year...
Take a look at http://www.copyleft.net/info_donate.phtml
I do not have a problem with
Options are never a bad thing.
If it meant paying a small fee and still seeing ads, I would probably go for it.
The only problem I have with Salon's model is the "extra content." I hate web sites that put links for more content, but then tell you that you have to be a (paying) member to access. How many web sites has that made me immediately send in a check? None.
Can you imagine Slashdot offering "extra" JonKatz articles for paying memebers?
Showing that 1.999... == 2 is not a "parlour trick." Indeed, the foundation on which such proofs lie is one of the basis for the set of real numbers. The real numbers allows for irrational numbers such as the square root of 2.
If you want to study this idea, I would suggest a good undergraduate-level Analysis class. The ideas you would want to pay attention to are least upper bounds, greatest lower bounds and the least upper bound theorem.
As far as the original article - there are always going to basic, unprovable ideas behind mathematics.
Actually, if you want to bring up a point with one assumption that math relies on, ask why math must assume that 1 does not equal 0.
-Hank, mathematics major
Simply because there are no immediate applications does not mean that there are not applications. Also remember that you are asking an 8th. grader what the applications are of his thereom.
If nothing else, this may get kids more interested in math. That is more than enough application to make me happy.
[I suppose I am somewhat biased, I am going to be graduating with a degree in mathematics in May.]
The kids state that they do not want to fight this.
/. hounds on the school is only going to make it *worse* for these kids.
*We should respect their decision.*
This is their fight. If they decide to fight it, then asking for SlashDot's help, for better or worse, might be acceptable.
Releasing the
I am big on not giving money to the chain store. This includes people like Amazon.com and others. I buy my books at locally owned book stores, I shop at locally owned grocery stores (the few there are), and so on.
I have avoided places like Amazon because I like people like Joe at the small bookstore down the street.
There are exceptions, however. I have yet to find a good way to buy airline tickets except online. I also tend to buy computer equipment online (http://www.smalldog.com/ - a small Mac online Mac store).
Before buying, however, I make sure of several security concerns - do they save my credit card number? Do they have well-written Privacy policies? Do they send unsolicited Spam?
Still, I would use one-time credit card numbers if they were made available to me.
So Apple has a choice - ship on time or ship late. Either way some /. zealot is going to bash them.
Other then shipping on time with complete, working features, I would rather a developer ship a product leaving some features out than ship it with buggy pre-release version of the software (I am sure that Apple has some early versions of a DVD-player, for example).
For someone like me (with a Mac without a DVD player), I would hate to see OS X get held up because of features I do not need just to please everyone.
I applaud Apple's holding to a ship date and being honsest about what features are and are not going to make it into the original release. Also remember that Apple is not planning on shipping the OS pre-installed on every computer until much later.
I only had one make it through iCab's image filtering. I am not even sure it was a real banner ad, though (came from their actual site, and did not seem to have an attached A HREF tag).
I am happy.
I do hate banner ads stuck in the middle of articles. At the top and the bottom is acceptable, on the side is marginal. In the middle of the article, though, is unacceptable.
I currently use iCab on the Mac and filter out about 98% of the banner ads I see (and I am getting the rules set up enough that pop-ups are a rare occasion).
/. from school (where I have to put up with the ads), I get the stupid "See hot babes, and get fired" ad. If I turned that one off, I think that OSDN would simply have to rotate through the other three ads that I ever see.
If OSDN gave me the ability to custom tune what ads I see, and gave me the ability to comment on them, I would seriously consider turning off the filter for OSDN web sites.
I think that the system will only work if OSDN gets a lot of different ads. It seems that every time I check
Ad karma just sucks. I will leave it at that. Customizing ads cool, ad karma just stupid.
Man, this discussion makes me feel like a new-comer to Slashdot. I only have a four-digit ID in the midst of a three-digit conversation. I always have to grin a little when someone referes to a id of 60,000 as "low."
/. has going for it is the lack of a product (tell that to etoys and Amazon). It is damn cheap to come up with stories that will get hundred of thousands of hits a day (especially when fools like us send them in). Not only that, but the hits are coming from a very targetted audience (one that has quite a bit of money at that).
It should also be noted that Slashdot had been around for a while before the Andover buyout, and was making money. Granted the money was coming from advertising (which is not making the money it once did on the Internet), but it had an established method of making money.
The other thing that
Very low overhead. The servers and bandwidth probably cost a little, but other than that... (I mean, we all know that CmdrTaco sits at home and eats peanut butter and Ramin).
While it sounds nice to require people to upgrade, look at a few results: The only two browsers you will be able to use will be Netscape/Mozilla and IE.
I regularly use iCab on my Mac, and I have no idea how many times I have had web pages redirect me "because our web pages require [frames|JavaScript]." That is all nice and good, but iCab supports frames and JavaScript just well. But the web server is simply looking at the client identity and seeing that I do not have (Netscape) or (IE) >= 4.0
Many pages will also permanently turn me away for not using Netscape or IE. iCab will support the pages just fine, but there is *no way* the server will allow me to see them as long as I am reporting using an alternative browser. iCab allows me to change the client identity string, but it should not have to - web designers should warn me that I am using an non-supported browser, and then let me in.
Posters are also complaing about how badly older browsers display their pages. Two points:
1) Make sure you are using completely W3 compliant HTML (or XML or CSS) - you cannot complain if an older browser does not support a non-standard MS-created HTML tag.
2) Realize that there are people out there who are willing to view your page less than perfectly. People who browse with images and JavaScript off are a perfect example of this - giving up display in order to gain speed.
I am all for the suggestion if
1) Web filtering is more powerful than simply "You are not using the most up-to-date Mozilla/IE." There are alternatives out there.
2) Web designers use only 100% compliant HTML.
Since chances are neither of these will ever happen, I am against this proposal.
"The Linux kernel belongs to Linus."
What? Silly me, I thought the kernel was GPL software. Imagine my disillusionment, I though that "Information wants to be free."
Apparently I have this all wrong - the kernel belongs to Linus. If I want to use it, I to ask him to use it.
Linus simply maintains one of the Linux forks (currently about the only one, excepting patched versions). He maintains the fork that he wants to maintain, with the features that he likes. He controls this fork, but that does not mean that it belongs to him. It is GPLed software, after all.
If he does not accept a patch into the fork that he maintains, that his within his powers. But anyone can start a forked copy with the patches and, since the kernel is GPLed, use any future versions of Linus's kernel in their fork (since the forked kernel would have to be GPLed, as well).
Sometimes I think that forking the Linux kernel might be one of the best things to happen to Linux. We are getting close to the need, since it will begin to be difficult to maintain a full kernel that will run on everything from a palm-top to a mutiple-processor server.
Competition encourages development, and if you add GPL to the mix, the competition benifits everyone.
I just bought a DVD player yesterday, and went out and bought Gattaga and Heat to test it out. Great timing, as I just got done watching Gattaga (for about the tenth time).
The movie is a great example of what can result from allowing things like this. While it is just information, given a job candidate (or an person to insure) who is more prone to certain illnesses over someone who is not, who are you going to hire/insure?
Rent the movie.
iCab, available for the Macintosh, actually is very compliant browser I have ever seen.
Check out http://www.icab.de/test.html for a browser test that they run. See how badly Netscape and IE fail the test.
iCab even has a HTML error report generated for each page it visits.
Try, iCab does not fully support CSS and JavaScript yet, but they are working on it. IE certainly does not have the most compliant browser.
Eudora used to include the ability to generate formatted, but non-HTML, text. It included everything you mention, and did not include any networking-specific code. It failed (no one else started to use it, so it was Eudora-specific, and HTML mail became all the rage). It would be a great idea of someone would write up a subset of HTML as an RFC that could be used simply for text formatting (STRONG, BLOCKQUOTE, etc. - maybe even TABLE) for email use (and I would image there are many other uses, as well).
Text/enriched seems to cover this (RFC 1896), but that is Eudora's failed attempt.
I would look for most mailers to move to where they get rid of image-fetching and JavaScript.
Since I am going to be graduating in May and going into teaching (high school math):
1) My sophomore/junior year math teacher for Trig/Pre-Cal/Calculus. I went to a Xavierian (Catholic) high school and Brother John was... well, a brother. Super nice. He got to school about an hour and a half before school and stayed about two hours afterwards just to be there for questions. He expected everyone to be paying attention at all times, and seemed to know the answer to every question you could imagine.
2) My Calc II TA my freshman year in college. Man, that guy was weird. He mostly just goofed off and did really strange things. One time he stopped in the middle of a discussion and punched the wall. One time he explained to us that whenever he asked "Well, what do *you* think we should do here?" actually meant "I do not have a clue what to do here and I am hoping you have some idea." He also never complained when I never turned in homework. Never, even though homework was 20% of our grade. He realized that I knew my stuff and that was what was important.
3) My Linear Algebra/Number Systems/Moder Algebra prof. I am not sure what was worse - the fact that you could not read a single thing he wrote on the board, or the fact that he just seemed to never be explaining things very well. Three semesters with him, though, and I caught on to his style. Everyone in the classes had to work thier asses off to figure out what he was talking about (and writing on the board), but that extra work helped me, at least, figure it out. He also gave me A's despite the fact that I never did homework.
4) My stats/probability prof. He only gave two homework problems a week, and gave ten "suggested problems." No ten-page problem sets here. Most test problems were very similar to the "suggested problems", though.
Homework always was a killer for me. I never really liked doing it. I always appreciated when a prof could see that, despite me not doing homework, I actually knew the stuff. I realized that convincing them of that meant showing up to every class and making sure to participate in class (a sure way to show profs that you know what you are talking about).
From everything that I have heard and read, HDTV is a very nice picture... The bigger the screen, the more you can appreciate it...
Note also that most of the players in the HDTV market are the manufacturers. People like Mitsubitshi and Panasonic are paying the networks to start broadcasting in HDTV. Even then only a very few shows are broadcast in it.
And for everyone who knocks HDTV as "it sucks" - wait to see it. Great quality. I am sure that people with cassette tapes were complaining about CDs, too.
"They are better sounding but you cannot record? I think I will stick with cassettes..."
[Forewarning: It has been a while since I looked over the slash code.]
I beleive the article has it wrong. Anyone with a positive karma has just as good a chance to moderate as someone with a 537 karma. The entire Slashdot community continues to choose their "community leaders," rather than a self-selecting group of elite overlords with a +1 ability.
What you also fail to mention is the "protest" contingent. These are people that post somewhat informative posts in order to get a positive karma. They are then able to moderate and meta-moderate. But since the believe that the moderation system sucks, they moderate incorrectly (and mainly meta-moderate incorrectly, since there are no checks on that). Using the system to corrupt the system.
I do believe that Slashdot has a serious problem with people simply copying-and-pasting the original article, and then getting a (5, Informative) instead of a (-1, Redundant).
I believe that minority voices are often moderated down. A pro-MS, anti-Linux argument, even if 100% correct, will often be moderated down to join the Hot Grits comments.
Yes, Slashdot is self-adaptive, but to a certain pro-Linux community. As a Mac user myself, it is always distressing to see a *factually incorrect* anti-Apple comment get moderated up. Yes, meta-moderation should take care of this, but that is entirely dependant upon the meta-moderator seeing the mistake.
Would a "self-adaptive" community be better served by people knowledgable in the field in question moderating? If someone knows a lot about Gnome, but not a lot about BSD, would it not be better to limit him/her to moderating Gnome and related articles?
I sent in a request that any meta-moderation with more than say 7 "Unfairs" would be flagged for CmdrTaco (or other) to look at... That is most probably a "Rebel" trying to disrupt the system...
As with any GPL project, I suppose that the Slasdot-type communities are a work in progress...
[I am downloading the Slash code right now to check on moderation selection, as well as punishment/reward for good/bad moderation]
Yeah, the RIAA would never allow this...
Except on most mid to high-end CD players...
Oh, and almost all DVD players...
Oh, and receivers with digital auidio *switching*.
Yeah, except for those...
I would really like to see more digital audio (both DTS/Dolby Digital streams as well as straight coaxial digital streams) on computers... At prices for DTS/DD receivers, you could almost get one specifically for the computer...
(And I am still waiting on the Soundblaster for the Macintosh...)