You live in a Free Country. But you are not free to steal; you are not free to shoot your boss or rape his wife.
Completely off-topic, I know, but I just love the way sexism is endemic to this community - the guy writing that post didnt deliberately make a sexist comment, but what he said came out very much like raping the boss's wife was just another way of being nasty to the boss.
What it should have been, of course, is:
You live in a Free Country. But you are not free to steal; you are not free to shoot your boss or rape her.
And when [Microsoft] try to distort reality with their perceptions, of course we need to counter their statements with the truth. Not with
scathing flames and rants, however, but with our own calm and reasonable statements. We have to get the word out beyond our little
community and into the mindset of the wider public view.
That is where this argument will be won, not on the PC.
I disagree. One overriding strength of the Linux movement is that its driven by people who concentrate on the technological problems to be solved and solving them, and in the process we're leaving the beancounters standing still.
A lot of linux development (apps and kernel) is done by people who don't care whether the stuff they write gets used by millions the world over - they do it because the problems are interesting and the solutions satisfying. And the GPL provides a way of protecting that kind of working attitude.
That is where this argument will be won, on the basis of technological excellence, which definitely includes the PC.
So posters to LKML might not use an @hotmail address, but what about the recipients? IANAL, but that license sounds to me like a single LKML recipient using hotmail would do it (and I can think of one borg^H^H^H^H person who might just register such an address).
So, are all open source lists now going to ban passport-based email addresses? More likely, in my opinion, is that Microsoft will shortly "clarify" the license, which was probably drafted by overzealous lawyers claiming anything and everything they could think of, and get rid of the ridiculous bits.
This really highlights a weakness of the Slashdot system - what looks "insightful" to an intelligent but uninformed (on this topic) moderator, is actually misguiding.
The Olivetti and Oracle Research Labs were acquired by in January 1998 by AT&T Research to form AT&T Labs Cambridge. The same guys work there, doing the same research, under a different banner.
Perhaps moderators need a "This guy is well-meaning but misinformed" option, which demotes the comment, but doesnt detract from the guy's karma? Hmm...
I've always wondered how Micro$oft can ship a product which is susceptible to viruses, insecurities, crashing, etc. and somehow escape most of the blame and cost when those things happen.
I just hope that the public opinion at this venture will be directed appropriately, at either the OS, or the fools setting stupid options in them. But its likely that articles talking about "hackers" and "file sharing" are likely to channel such opinions at the linux community instead.
Still, silver linings, at the end of the day this might cause lots of people to be more aware of their system security. They might even be tempted to look into an OS with fewer of those problems...
What happens if an insect-repellent gene leaks? Insects adapt. And then the crops which were genetically modified in the first place lose their advantage.
Thats all GM is essentially, just pushing evolution along at a faster rate.:) The media is full of scaremongering like "All the insects will die!!!", lets get sucked in to it on/.
Iraq had nowhere near the internet penetration that Serbia has, so I believe this to be the first war that can be "fought" virtually as well as in reality. Certainly there are a lot of Serbian sites out there, and email lists, and first-hand news from Belgrade is being distributed in the lightning fast way that is the net.
I wonder how long it will be before NATO decides to have a potshot at Serbia's internet connectivity. Its a difficult target to hit (you can fry the landlines, but not the satellites and certainly not the connectivity of Serbians in the West). On the other hand, they really should leave the link alone, because it allows the Serbians to get some information that does not originate from Milosevic and hence stops him from brainwashing attempts. And it allows us to hear their horror stories and reminds us of the consequences of the actions of NATO in real human terms, so we are not anaesthatised from the tragedy that we participate in.
The whole point of moderation is for the readers to be able to choose to read only the 'best' comments. All this waffle about issues with posters having default scores and so on is perhaps getting too complicated and losing sight of this.
For example, we now have two contradicting policies:
Posters cannot moderate for a story, and most definitely cannot moderate their own post
Posters with high default scores should be able to set the score of their post
Anyway, getting back to the point, from the reader's perspective I want to be able to see the top 10 (say) posts on a story in a short amount of time. I used to be able to do this by setting my score threshold to "2" or sometimes higher, now even setting it to "4" still gets lots of posts that havent been recognised as good by anyone, they've just been set at that by default and nobody's gotten round to changing it down yet.
Its seems to me that scores are a lot more meaningful to readers if they are earned, i.e. you know that if something scores "3" high then thats because its earned that score through support from others and not, for example, through being scored at "4" by default and being moderated down.
So, from this point of view, I think that the default scoring idea is nice but too complicated to be worth the hassle. Its tempting to keep adding bells and whistles to/. but perhaps simple is best. In any case, good comments will get recognised without the default scoring system, it'll just take a little while for someone to moderate them up.
Final idea: For a fair number of stories on/., I have a passing interest only but I'd still like to hear a precis of the comments on it. So instead of trying to configure the view each time to give me that, how about links on the/. homepage for each story to the top ten and top twenty comments, where/. simply picks the highest scoring 10 or 20 of the comments? This involves a method of choosing in the circumstance where there are (e.g) 7 5-score comments and we need to pick 3 4-score comments to make up the 10. Perhaps its done in chronological order, maybe it would be better to pick the replies to comments already shown ahead of the others, as this gives more flow to the read. This would also encourage use of replies rather than new threads.
Its non-trivial to stop moderators posting and moderating the same forum - they could just do what you did and post as a Coward.
Hey - that means that any moderator can quite easily write anything they want and moderate their own writing up, even in the existing system. Unless Rob's thought of this already.
Of course, they dont get the recognition for the post, which is a big part of it, but on the other hand they do get people reading their point of view, which is also a big part.
I'd just like to point out the dangers of trusting the media to bring you a fully accurate story, even to those of you who think your country's (US/UK/wherever) media is free and trustworthy.
Firstly the media arent democratically elected public servants with responsiblity to the ideals of 'truth', they are in fact capitalists with their payrises depending on their viewing figures.
Also, they are only human, and for the US media for example, most of the journalists etc have been brought up in the US and are therefore influenced themselves by their culture and by patriotism.
So how can we expect them to bring an accurate picture? How can we expect a Western journalist who has been in Belgrade for a month to understand the true feelings of the people there, and yet we unquestioningly trust them because they are 'on the spot'?
I am from Hong Kong. I got cynical about the western media during the Hong Kong handover, where the BBC depicted the ceremonial marching in of the Chinese army like it was an unforeseen threatening invasion or something. Maybe the facts werent wrong but the slant put on them certainly was.
Looking at the current crisis - lets look at an analogy, namely the Northern Ireland troubles. Nobody threatened to airstrike London for opposing the IRA's terrorism there, and they like the KLA ferverently believe they are doing the right thing for their country.
Now lets imagine the British government went a bit haywire in its retributions against IRA terrorism and crossed the line, the British people would not stand for it. But if somebody started playing world policeman and did airstrike London, the people of Britain are then bound and helpless - how does one go about trying to overthrow a bad government when you have to keep hiding in your basement in case a stray NATO missile takes your house out? No - in such a situation, a people would stand by their government against the outsiders, regardless of the leader.
The point of all this spiel is to say - take your media with a pinch of salt. When they refer to "the Serbs" as villains, remember that includes a lot of innocent and scared people huddled in air-raid shelters, as well as young conscripts in the army who do as they are told because their home is being bombed and they dont know what else they can do.
You may think this is very pro-Serbian. I am actually impartial in the current crisis, I simply want it to end with as little more bloodshed as possible. But I have a friend here in the UK who is Serbian, she is not eating or sleeping properly out of fear for her family. And when she marched against Milosevic a while back, those demonstrating were branded as "Serbian Nationalists" and bad guys in the Western Media because it suited them then to do so. Now they've changed sides, and without telling you.
Next time you watch the CNN, or BBC, open your mind a little wider.
"Capable of withstanding nuclear hit"
on
Nerd Dream Home?
·
· Score: 1
The problem being - if there was to be a nuclear war what's the probability that a Russian missile somewhere is still targetted on that silo, just in case the US was lying when they said they'd de-nuked it?
Its all very well "surviving", but you'd be five storeys under with the epicentre of the radiation above you, with no power and no net access, and it would really make a mess of the rose garden:)
Slashdot Mirror
Completely off-topic, I know, but I just love the way sexism is endemic to this community - the guy writing that post didnt deliberately make a sexist comment, but what he said came out very much like raping the boss's wife was just another way of being nasty to the boss.
What it should have been, of course, is:
You live in a Free Country. But you are not free to steal; you are not free to shoot your boss or rape her.
And when [Microsoft] try to distort reality with their perceptions, of course we need to counter their statements with the truth. Not with scathing flames and rants, however, but with our own calm and reasonable statements. We have to get the word out beyond our little community and into the mindset of the wider public view.
That is where this argument will be won, not on the PC.
I disagree. One overriding strength of the Linux movement is that its driven by people who concentrate on the technological problems to be solved and solving them, and in the process we're leaving the beancounters standing still.
A lot of linux development (apps and kernel) is done by people who don't care whether the stuff they write gets used by millions the world over - they do it because the problems are interesting and the solutions satisfying. And the GPL provides a way of protecting that kind of working attitude.
That is where this argument will be won, on the basis of technological excellence, which definitely includes the PC.
don't worry, I can... oh shit, I can't anymore :)
So, are all open source lists now going to ban passport-based email addresses? More likely, in my opinion, is that Microsoft will shortly "clarify" the license, which was probably drafted by overzealous lawyers claiming anything and everything they could think of, and get rid of the ridiculous bits.
All your kernel are belong to us
The Olivetti and Oracle Research Labs were acquired by in January 1998 by AT&T Research to form AT&T Labs Cambridge. The same guys work there, doing the same research, under a different banner.
Perhaps moderators need a "This guy is well-meaning but misinformed" option, which demotes the comment, but doesnt detract from the guy's karma? Hmm...
I just hope that the public opinion at this venture will be directed appropriately, at either the OS, or the fools setting stupid options in them. But its likely that articles talking about "hackers" and "file sharing" are likely to channel such opinions at the linux community instead.
Still, silver linings, at the end of the day this might cause lots of people to be more aware of their system security. They might even be tempted to look into an OS with fewer of those problems...
In the UK we've had this kind of stuff for years - as a TV programme produced by the BBC!
I know the compression one's just started, but...
On January 1 2000, I'll be:
Expecting most stuff to work fine
Avoiding flights and nuclear reactors
In an underground bunker at a secret location
On call to fix Y2K bugs, for exorbitant charges per minute
hating Rob/Hemos/Andover
What happens if an insect-repellent gene leaks?
:) /.
Insects adapt.
And then the crops which were genetically modified in the first place lose their advantage.
Thats all GM is essentially, just pushing evolution along at a faster rate.
The media is full of scaremongering like "All the insects will die!!!", lets get sucked in to it on
--J
Iraq had nowhere near the internet penetration that Serbia has, so I believe this to be the first war that can be "fought" virtually as well as in reality. Certainly there are a lot of Serbian sites out there, and email lists, and first-hand news from Belgrade is being distributed in the lightning fast way that is the net.
I wonder how long it will be before NATO decides to have a potshot at Serbia's internet connectivity. Its a difficult target to hit (you can fry the landlines, but not the satellites and certainly not the connectivity of Serbians in the West). On the other hand, they really should leave the link alone, because it allows the Serbians to get some information that does not originate from Milosevic and hence stops him from brainwashing attempts. And it allows us to hear their horror stories and reminds us of the consequences of the actions of NATO in real human terms, so we are not anaesthatised from the tragedy that we participate in.
For example, we now have two contradicting policies:
Posters cannot moderate for a story, and most definitely cannot moderate their own post
Posters with high default scores should be able to set the score of their post
/. but perhaps simple is best. In any case, good comments will get recognised without the default scoring system, it'll just take a little while for someone to moderate them up.
/., I have a passing interest only but I'd still like to hear a precis of the comments on it. So instead of trying to configure the view each time to give me that, how about links on the /. homepage for each story to the top ten and top twenty comments, where /. simply picks the highest scoring 10 or 20 of the comments?
Anyway, getting back to the point, from the reader's perspective I want to be able to see the top 10 (say) posts on a story in a short amount of time. I used to be able to do this by setting my score threshold to "2" or sometimes higher, now even setting it to "4" still gets lots of posts that havent been recognised as good by anyone, they've just been set at that by default and nobody's gotten round to changing it down yet.
Its seems to me that scores are a lot more meaningful to readers if they are earned, i.e. you know that if something scores "3" high then thats because its earned that score through support from others and not, for example, through being scored at "4" by default and being moderated down.
So, from this point of view, I think that the default scoring idea is nice but too complicated to be worth the hassle. Its tempting to keep adding bells and whistles to
Final idea: For a fair number of stories on
This involves a method of choosing in the circumstance where there are (e.g) 7 5-score comments and we need to pick 3 4-score comments to make up the 10. Perhaps its done in chronological order, maybe it would be better to pick the replies to comments already shown ahead of the others, as this gives more flow to the read. This would also encourage use of replies rather than new threads.
Its non-trivial to stop moderators posting and moderating the same forum - they could just do what you did and post as a Coward.
Hey - that means that any moderator can quite easily write anything they want and moderate their own writing up, even in the existing system. Unless Rob's thought of this already.
Of course, they dont get the recognition for the post, which is a big part of it, but on the other hand they do get people reading their point of view, which is also a big part.
I'd just like to point out the dangers of trusting the media to bring you a fully accurate story, even to those of you who think your country's (US/UK/wherever) media is free and trustworthy.
Firstly the media arent democratically elected public servants with responsiblity to the ideals of 'truth', they are in fact capitalists with their payrises depending on their viewing figures.
Also, they are only human, and for the US media for example, most of the journalists etc have been brought up in the US and are therefore influenced themselves by their culture and by patriotism.
So how can we expect them to bring an accurate picture? How can we expect a Western journalist who has been in Belgrade for a month to understand the true feelings of the people there, and yet we unquestioningly trust them because they are 'on the spot'?
I am from Hong Kong. I got cynical about the western media during the Hong Kong handover, where the BBC depicted the ceremonial marching in of the Chinese army like it was an unforeseen threatening invasion or something. Maybe the facts werent wrong but the slant put on them certainly was.
Looking at the current crisis - lets look at an analogy, namely the Northern Ireland troubles. Nobody threatened to airstrike London for opposing the IRA's terrorism there, and they like the KLA ferverently believe they are doing the right thing for their country.
Now lets imagine the British government went a bit haywire in its retributions against IRA terrorism and crossed the line, the British people would not stand for it. But if somebody started playing world policeman and did airstrike London, the people of Britain are then bound and helpless - how does one go about trying to overthrow a bad government when you have to keep hiding in your basement in case a stray NATO missile takes your house out? No - in such a situation, a people would stand by their government against the outsiders, regardless of the leader.
The point of all this spiel is to say - take your media with a pinch of salt. When they refer to "the Serbs" as villains, remember that includes a lot of innocent and scared people huddled in air-raid shelters, as well as young conscripts in the army who do as they are told because their home is being bombed and they dont know what else they can do.
You may think this is very pro-Serbian. I am actually impartial in the current crisis, I simply want it to end with as little more bloodshed as possible. But I have a friend here in the UK who is Serbian, she is not eating or sleeping properly out of fear for her family. And when she marched against Milosevic a while back, those demonstrating were branded as "Serbian Nationalists" and bad guys in the Western Media because it suited them then to do so. Now they've changed sides, and without telling you.
Next time you watch the CNN, or BBC, open your mind a little wider.
The problem being - if there was to be a nuclear war what's the probability that a Russian missile somewhere is still targetted on that silo, just in case the US was lying when they said they'd de-nuked it?
:)
Its all very well "surviving", but you'd be five storeys under with the epicentre of the radiation above you, with no power and no net access, and it would really make a mess of the rose garden
-J