No sheet! As a former college-level composition instructor, I wish I could get paid to write that badly.
Even the author knows he's not even trying (e.g. "yes, this is a badly constructed rant!"). This isn't Slashdot-worthy. It's not even kindergarden-worthy. It's crap!
Approximately 500 words; 0 coherent concepts expressed ("I want a whole bunch of stupid programs put together that don't add up to Photoshop.").
Genesis 11:11 And Shem lived after he begat Arphaxad five hundred years, and begat sons and daughters. Genesis 11:12 And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years, and begat Salah: (Noah's age, 637 years old.),( Shem's age: 135 years old) Genesis 11:13 And Arphaxad lived after he begat
Salah four hundred and three years, and begat sons and daughters. Genesis 11:14 And Salah lived thirty years, and begat Eber: (Noah's age, 667 years old.),( Shem's age : 165 years old) Genesis 11:15 And Salah lived after he begat Eber four hundred and three years, and begat sons and daughters. Genesis 11:16 And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg: (Noah's age, 701 years old.),( Shem's age: 199 years old) Genesis 11:17 And Eber lived after he begat Peleg four hundred and thirty years, and begat sons and daughters. Genesis 11:18 And Peleg lived thirty years, and begat Reu: (Noah's age, 731 years old.),( Shem's age: 229 years old) Genesis 11:19 And Peleg lived after he begat Reu two hundred and nine years, and begat sons and daughters. Genesis 11:20 And Reu lived two and thirty years, and begat Serug: (Noah's age, 763 years old.),( Shem's age: 261 years old) Genesis 11:21 And Reu lived after he begat Serug two hundred and seven years, and begat sons and daughters. Genesis 11:22 And Serug lived thirty years, and begat Nahor: (Noah's age, 793 years old.),( Shem's age: 291 years old) Genesis 11:23 And Serug lived after he begat Nahor two hundred years, and begat sons and daughters. Genesis 11:24 And Nahor lived nine and twenty years, and begat Terah: (Noah's age, 822 years old.),( Shem's age: 320 years old) Genesis 11:25 And Nahor lived after he begat Terah an hundred and nineteen years, and begat sons and daughters. Genesis 11:26 And Terah lived seventy years, and begat Abram, Nahor, and Haran. (Noah's age, 892 years old when Abraham was born), Shem's age: 390 years old)
I'd rather have a guy on the street who, in the heat of passion, shot his wife when he caught her in bed with another man than somebody who is a habitual thief.
Wow, your values are pretty out-of-whack. Disappointed wife looks for fun and gets greased by poorly-chosen hubby? Versus me losing my chunk of $5 million dollars (or whatever the figure was, in a previous post) divided by 250 million supposedly affected people, to some abstract thief? In that [totally hypothetical] tradeoff, I'll pay my $0.02 to save the poor woman's life--even if she's a horrid nauseating harpy. But maybe it's just me. At that rate I could save 50 people for less than the price of a blank DVD.
Also, the "habitual thief" is a senseless concept. If someone is a habitual thief they're probably not stealing very much at one time; they're probably putting food on the table, also (theoretically) saving a life (or lives) or at least meeting minor needs (i.e. drugs). Genuine habitual thieves (ahem, Dick Cheney) aren't getting due prosecution but that's another dimension to the argument entirely.
Actually, the whole thing is pretty bogus. Repeated theft of your home PC? You must have a pretty sweet computer.
The problem is that when you have a decentralized enemy and no way of knowing their locations or when they will "strike", there's no effective offensive strategy. Defensive solutions (spam filters etc.) can be circumvented. So you end up either pulling out (abandoning e-mail/etc. entirely) or fighting a losing battle.
There are plenty of nerds able to create spam filters but nobody has been able to stop the root problem, which is the *desire* for someone to create spam. That is motivated by economics. Have fun fixing it.
Exactly. Newsgroups have been trashed. Once back around 1992 they were practically a gathering of experts all around the world (and the occasional fringe wacko); now they're nothing but spam and all discussion is by fringe wackos (who don't know how to tell spam, trolling, and flaming from real responses). So the *interpersonal* aspects of the Internet may be doomed. E-mail spam, IM spam, etc. threaten those technologies.
But the Internet is a lot of different things. The use of the Internet as, effectively, a billboard, with controlled content (moderation, web editing, etc), is not really at risk. BBC News is not at risk, nor are most generally non-interactive websites.
So much for the electronic frontier. Anarchy is always good until you have actual people involved.
In fairness to the ladies (for whom I am not the best spokesmodel, being male), there should be a -1 Sexist moderator option... Who brings me dinner when I've been coding for hours at home?? I'm not that easy to maintain myself!
Or maybe around here it would be a +1 Sexist? Wink wink, nudge nudge...
I'm a writer and a programmer and I didn't understand the description either.
One thing I can say, though, is that fiction doesn't have to be true. Hence the name! Basing what science fiction authors can or cannot do in terms of what is likely to happen in the future, is absurd. I know someone will say that truth is stranger than fiction, and that fiction must hew close to the truth. Anyone who actually takes that pap seriously should not be reading sci-fi (hard or otherwise) or any other form of fiction, for that matter, since it is speculative. (Blah, blah blah, probability, spare me. Prove to me that Genghis Khan did not come from a distant galaxy.)
The real assumption is that there is macro-truth (background, history, physics, etc.) and micro-truth (characters behaving, their interactions, etc). If the term fiction can apply, authors should be given the liberty to fake whatever they please. (And again, spare me any argument involving economics and who is going to read a book about talking toasters from the 35th century, etc..)
That's my philosophy in a nutshell (Barbarian parts about crushing my enemies notwithstanding). I went to a very good college to be a career-oriented CS major, then completely changed my mind, studied archaeology and got a graduate degree in creative writing.
Frost said it. "I took the road less traveled and it has made all the difference" (yada yada yada). Well, the difference is, I'm poor.:) But I do feel like I am in control of my own destiny. I have no boss but myself......and cops. Who keep yelling at me not to sleep under bridges.
No, seriously. Following the "traditional" life is a sort of self-zombie-fication. I cannot say whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, because as yet, I've only dabbled my feet in it, and then run screaming in the opposite direction. And that has made all the difference...
The classic political "whitewash" concept (a P.R. cover-up) is referred to, when applied this way, as greenwashing. If you see an oil company--say, Exxon Mobil--describing how great they are for the environment, there may be an element of truth in it. The truth stops wherever there's no profit to be found. Pay attention to the distinction between the often vague, platitudinous words juxtaposed with the glorious images of unspoilt nature. They're visually trying to establish a connection between themselves and the nature they're--generally speaking--destroying irrevocably. A corporate-sponsored ad is not a good source for accurate information about that corporation...
They target PBS because they know the left-leaning viewers are unsettled about the spectre of environmental apocalypse--but not radical enough to really go nuts about it. A gentle greenwash will settle them down...
Granted, it would also be fallacious to assume the company has no environmental motive, just because they are a big, faceless corporation. There's no sense in either jumping to the negative conclusion, or breezily accepting the corporation's positive spin. But keep in mind, they're likely to say something like "we have invested over $2 million in environmental initiatives"--but a) that money is peanuts to Exxon, and insignificant contrasted to the money spent opposing the same initiatives; b) the phrase "environmental initiatives" is an amorphous or meaningless term; c) what exactly that "investment" would entail is vague; etc. etc. etc. Yes, my argument here is a straw man, but a fairly representative one.
You're amazingly lucky. I'm not in the slightest bit a computer idiot, and I always end up calling tech support as a last resort. Then I spend the next hour or so detailling all the ways in which I already tested the problem, while they read me all the answers in the built-in troubleshooter in Windows, whose solutions tend to be fairly obvious to geeks (and unworthy of the cell phone bill to call tech support). And if I dare mention that I'm actually using Linux (dual boot, really) they immediately tell me "oh, we don't support Linux." Not supporting Linux, frankly, is kind of understandable, but the way they jump to tell you and rush to hang up the phone is rather telling...!
My last bad experience was with Earthlink about three nights ago... 'round midnight when I came home and needed to send an e-mail. The internet connection had simply vanished--except it worked on a different computer when plugged into the cable modem. After much hardware fooling-around (all the hardware, thankfully, was working just fine), the only explanation I could conceive for the problem was that they had locked out my MAC address somehow. Five minutes into the online chat conversation (and yes, after several ridiculous Windows Troubleshooter explanations, and a transfer to a "more knowledgeable" tech), I got a cut-and-paste note saying there are service outtages in certain areas. I pointed out that that did not explain the problem since I was, in fact, chatting to them over the Internet using my Earthlink connection (and there was no reported outtage in my city)....Maybe, I thought, they'd locked me out because I downloaded too much... Fifteen minutes of explaining later, I got exactly the same note about service outtages pasted into the chat. I politely told them thanks for nothing and exited. I wound up trying crazy things like MAC address spoofing via SMAC, which, I note, didn't work.
But the connection worked again the following morning. I noted the next day that my slightly late ISP check payment cleared around 6 pm the night the service went down. [Cr/H]ackers may be interested to note, then, the discrepancy here--the computer I almost always connect through was locked out, apparently, but the other one worked fine...! I still have no real idea what the problem was, only theories. It may have been totally unrelated to the bill. And it may be that you can buy a cable modem, fool around wiht some settings, plug into the wall plug in your apartment, and surf away...
But my point, in fact, is that the so-called Tech Support proved to be much more frustrating than the problem. I quite like Earthlink as an ISP (excellent newsgroups). But if I had never tried reaching them, and had just sat reading a book, I would have been a lot happier.
Moral of the story: they should tell tech support people to simply say "go to bed".
I agree, I stopped watching the Simpsons about four or five years ago when they stopped being that funny. Know what, I STILL get all the Simpsons references people (on/. and elsewhere) make, because they're all from older episodes!
If you stopped watching the Simpsons four or five years ago, you wouldn't recognize more recent Simpsons quotes! Worst logic ever!:)
Ha! I said the same thing, here on Slashdot, a few weeks ago about eBay posts and I was both flamed and also ended up with a 5 rating. Weird.
My letter:
The Stephen Evans article linking Linux to the SCO article is absolute hogwash. It may have been a Linux partisan who wrote the MyDoom virus; right now there is no evidence of any sort. Could there not also be other parties with motives against SCO? More importantly, Evans' article slanders a "movement" wherein no "members" are party to the activities of the other members. The virus is not open source software. It may have been written by a small group, but based on other viruses, it was probably written by an individual. So, Evans' article jumps straight into the fallacy of guilt by association. If this was not his intent, then he should issue an apology--or at least a clarification.
Linux is gaining popularity because Windows is shoddy and overpriced. It's more difficult than Windows; one might say Linux exemplifies the attitude that people should try to learn something to better themselves. It comes as no surprise, then, when one finds willful ignorance and Windows partisanship in the same individuals. However, people read the BBC to further their knowledge, not to further their ignorance. When a journalist can only accomplish the latter, he's not helping your organization.
Unless he's working in America.:)
Okay, a smiley isn't exactly punctuation, but I do like the BBC, ordinarily.
Slashdot Mirror
Has anybody noticed that no Kansas residents have added their comments to this discussion?
Oh wait-- Slashdot, news for NERDS... I thought this was Slashgod, News for Rubes.
We should get some of these underground mineshaft cities in the USA. Mister President, we must not have a mineshaft gap!
-Ben
No sheet! As a former college-level composition instructor, I wish I could get paid to write that badly.
Even the author knows he's not even trying (e.g. "yes, this is a badly constructed rant!"). This isn't Slashdot-worthy. It's not even kindergarden-worthy. It's crap!
Approximately 500 words; 0 coherent concepts expressed ("I want a whole bunch of stupid programs put together that don't add up to Photoshop.").
Grade: F, for "Fired."
Will never *be*, that is.
So much for comic timing...
Linux will never as much of a POS as Windows!
A Piece O'...
Who would choose to use a distribution called "Unreliable Linux"?
I would rather study a phone book.
Now, who wants to start a campaign to sticker bibles?
I've been reading Slashdot for six years, and this is the single best idea I have ever seen here.
Where do we get the stickers? Can we sticker Korans, books of Mormon, Bhagavad-gitas, Dianetics, etc.?
Bill Hicks: Has anybody ever actually seen a Gideon?
I'd rather have a guy on the street who, in the heat of passion, shot his wife when he caught her in bed with another man than somebody who is a habitual thief.
Wow, your values are pretty out-of-whack. Disappointed wife looks for fun and gets greased by poorly-chosen hubby? Versus me losing my chunk of $5 million dollars (or whatever the figure was, in a previous post) divided by 250 million supposedly affected people, to some abstract thief? In that [totally hypothetical] tradeoff, I'll pay my $0.02 to save the poor woman's life--even if she's a horrid nauseating harpy. But maybe it's just me. At that rate I could save 50 people for less than the price of a blank DVD.
Also, the "habitual thief" is a senseless concept. If someone is a habitual thief they're probably not stealing very much at one time; they're probably putting food on the table, also (theoretically) saving a life (or lives) or at least meeting minor needs (i.e. drugs). Genuine habitual thieves (ahem, Dick Cheney) aren't getting due prosecution but that's another dimension to the argument entirely.
Actually, the whole thing is pretty bogus. Repeated theft of your home PC? You must have a pretty sweet computer.
A bunch of kids discovered how much fun you could have with a pile of rocks.
The problem is that when you have a decentralized enemy and no way of knowing their locations or when they will "strike", there's no effective offensive strategy. Defensive solutions (spam filters etc.) can be circumvented. So you end up either pulling out (abandoning e-mail/etc. entirely) or fighting a losing battle.
There are plenty of nerds able to create spam filters but nobody has been able to stop the root problem, which is the *desire* for someone to create spam. That is motivated by economics. Have fun fixing it.
Exactly. Newsgroups have been trashed. Once back around 1992 they were practically a gathering of experts all around the world (and the occasional fringe wacko); now they're nothing but spam and all discussion is by fringe wackos (who don't know how to tell spam, trolling, and flaming from real responses). So the *interpersonal* aspects of the Internet may be doomed. E-mail spam, IM spam, etc. threaten those technologies.
But the Internet is a lot of different things. The use of the Internet as, effectively, a billboard, with controlled content (moderation, web editing, etc), is not really at risk. BBC News is not at risk, nor are most generally non-interactive websites.
So much for the electronic frontier. Anarchy is always good until you have actual people involved.
In fairness to the ladies (for whom I am not the best spokesmodel, being male), there should be a -1 Sexist moderator option... Who brings me dinner when I've been coding for hours at home?? I'm not that easy to maintain myself!
Or maybe around here it would be a +1 Sexist? Wink wink, nudge nudge...
Now if there were only 700,000 of you, I might get my novel published. :)
I'm a writer and a programmer and I didn't understand the description either.
One thing I can say, though, is that fiction doesn't have to be true. Hence the name! Basing what science fiction authors can or cannot do in terms of what is likely to happen in the future, is absurd. I know someone will say that truth is stranger than fiction, and that fiction must hew close to the truth. Anyone who actually takes that pap seriously should not be reading sci-fi (hard or otherwise) or any other form of fiction, for that matter, since it is speculative. (Blah, blah blah, probability, spare me. Prove to me that Genghis Khan did not come from a distant galaxy.)
The real assumption is that there is macro-truth (background, history, physics, etc.) and micro-truth (characters behaving, their interactions, etc). If the term fiction can apply, authors should be given the liberty to fake whatever they please. (And again, spare me any argument involving economics and who is going to read a book about talking toasters from the 35th century, etc..)
Oh for god's sake... thank you!!!!!!
There's plenty of good stuff on the internet... But if you're looking for real knowledge it still doesn't compare to the local public library.
That's my philosophy in a nutshell (Barbarian parts about crushing my enemies notwithstanding). I went to a very good college to be a career-oriented CS major, then completely changed my mind, studied archaeology and got a graduate degree in creative writing.
:) But I do feel like I am in control of my own destiny. I have no boss but myself... ...and cops. Who keep yelling at me not to sleep under bridges.
Frost said it. "I took the road less traveled and it has made all the difference" (yada yada yada). Well, the difference is, I'm poor.
No, seriously. Following the "traditional" life is a sort of self-zombie-fication. I cannot say whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, because as yet, I've only dabbled my feet in it, and then run screaming in the opposite direction. And that has made all the difference...
The classic political "whitewash" concept (a P.R. cover-up) is referred to, when applied this way, as greenwashing. If you see an oil company--say, Exxon Mobil--describing how great they are for the environment, there may be an element of truth in it. The truth stops wherever there's no profit to be found. Pay attention to the distinction between the often vague, platitudinous words juxtaposed with the glorious images of unspoilt nature. They're visually trying to establish a connection between themselves and the nature they're--generally speaking--destroying irrevocably. A corporate-sponsored ad is not a good source for accurate information about that corporation...
They target PBS because they know the left-leaning viewers are unsettled about the spectre of environmental apocalypse--but not radical enough to really go nuts about it. A gentle greenwash will settle them down...
Granted, it would also be fallacious to assume the company has no environmental motive, just because they are a big, faceless corporation. There's no sense in either jumping to the negative conclusion, or breezily accepting the corporation's positive spin. But keep in mind, they're likely to say something like "we have invested over $2 million in environmental initiatives"--but a) that money is peanuts to Exxon, and insignificant contrasted to the money spent opposing the same initiatives; b) the phrase "environmental initiatives" is an amorphous or meaningless term; c) what exactly that "investment" would entail is vague; etc. etc. etc. Yes, my argument here is a straw man, but a fairly representative one.
To read more about greenwashing, check out these articles: These Greenwashers Don't Come Clean and Perception is Reality.
Ads that give us free stuff are basically good, but don't ever take them seriously.
I'd say just give the kid a gun. Then he won't need friends.
I agree 100%! I learned to write without ever actually learning to read!
You're amazingly lucky. I'm not in the slightest bit a computer idiot, and I always end up calling tech support as a last resort. Then I spend the next hour or so detailling all the ways in which I already tested the problem, while they read me all the answers in the built-in troubleshooter in Windows, whose solutions tend to be fairly obvious to geeks (and unworthy of the cell phone bill to call tech support). And if I dare mention that I'm actually using Linux (dual boot, really) they immediately tell me "oh, we don't support Linux." Not supporting Linux, frankly, is kind of understandable, but the way they jump to tell you and rush to hang up the phone is rather telling...!
...Maybe, I thought, they'd locked me out because I downloaded too much... Fifteen minutes of explaining later, I got exactly the same note about service outtages pasted into the chat. I politely told them thanks for nothing and exited. I wound up trying crazy things like MAC address spoofing via SMAC, which, I note, didn't work.
My last bad experience was with Earthlink about three nights ago... 'round midnight when I came home and needed to send an e-mail. The internet connection had simply vanished--except it worked on a different computer when plugged into the cable modem. After much hardware fooling-around (all the hardware, thankfully, was working just fine), the only explanation I could conceive for the problem was that they had locked out my MAC address somehow. Five minutes into the online chat conversation (and yes, after several ridiculous Windows Troubleshooter explanations, and a transfer to a "more knowledgeable" tech), I got a cut-and-paste note saying there are service outtages in certain areas. I pointed out that that did not explain the problem since I was, in fact, chatting to them over the Internet using my Earthlink connection (and there was no reported outtage in my city).
But the connection worked again the following morning. I noted the next day that my slightly late ISP check payment cleared around 6 pm the night the service went down. [Cr/H]ackers may be interested to note, then, the discrepancy here--the computer I almost always connect through was locked out, apparently, but the other one worked fine...! I still have no real idea what the problem was, only theories. It may have been totally unrelated to the bill. And it may be that you can buy a cable modem, fool around wiht some settings, plug into the wall plug in your apartment, and surf away...
But my point, in fact, is that the so-called Tech Support proved to be much more frustrating than the problem. I quite like Earthlink as an ISP (excellent newsgroups). But if I had never tried reaching them, and had just sat reading a book, I would have been a lot happier.
Moral of the story: they should tell tech support people to simply say "go to bed".
And from Bill Hicks' grave a hand thrusts, through the layer of mud, into the air...
I agree, I stopped watching the Simpsons about four or five years ago when they stopped being that funny. Know what, I STILL get all the Simpsons references people (on /. and elsewhere) make, because they're all from older episodes!
:)
If you stopped watching the Simpsons four or five years ago, you wouldn't recognize more recent Simpsons quotes! Worst logic ever!
IBM
UBM
We all BM
(circa 1981?)
Ha! I said the same thing, here on Slashdot, a few weeks ago about eBay posts and I was both flamed and also ended up with a 5 rating. Weird.
:)
My letter:
The Stephen Evans article linking Linux to the SCO article is absolute hogwash. It may have been a Linux partisan who wrote the MyDoom virus; right now there is no evidence of any sort. Could there not also be other parties with motives against SCO? More importantly, Evans' article slanders a "movement" wherein no "members" are party to the activities of the other members. The virus is not open source software. It may have been written by a small group, but based on other viruses, it was probably written by an individual. So, Evans' article jumps straight into the fallacy of guilt by association. If this was not his intent, then he should issue an apology--or at least a clarification.
Linux is gaining popularity because Windows is shoddy and overpriced. It's more difficult than Windows; one might say Linux exemplifies the attitude that people should try to learn something to better themselves. It comes as no surprise,
then, when one finds willful ignorance and Windows partisanship in the same individuals. However, people read the BBC to further their knowledge, not to further their ignorance. When a journalist can only accomplish the latter, he's not helping your organization.
Unless he's working in America.
Okay, a smiley isn't exactly punctuation, but I do like the BBC, ordinarily.