If you have a wife and 2 kids and live off from $575 you should have used that piece of grey matter called a brain before you put yourself into that situation. Instead of simply putting yourself into a bad situation you've brought your wife there and two complete innocents that YOU decided to have. It's your own fault, you cannot run away from responsibilities that you brought entirely upon yourself.
I would never put myself in that situation much less drag 3 other people into it. Don't expect pity from me, expect contempt from me. Your stupidity will profoundly effect your children for their entire lives.
Well, I never said this situation lasted. This happened a fairly long time ago and had nothing to do with either idealism of having fun at work. If you would have read the paragraph carefully you should have guessed why and how that happened (er... I am assuming standard thinking abilities, I am not sure that applies). Right now my kids are doing quite well, thank you very much. Both me and my wife make six-figure salaries so I don't think putting the kids through college is going to be a problem. That, by the way, is a direct consequence of the fact that I with my family had to manage being very poor for some time.
You better get your fucking priorities straight. Work isn't a game, it's work. If you have dependants, it's your duty to put them ahead of yourself, otherwise you shouldn't even have the right to have kids. You're a selfish twit, have the balls to see it. If you're not going to take care of your kids, I don't see why the fuck an asshole like you had them in the first place.
Ah, the fire in his fingers... But really, you should polish your flaming style. I've seen better flames on Usenet from aolers. Besides, it helps to know what you are talking about, but you've never experienced that, did you?
If you don't like your job, T.S. You can always quit. Bitching about it only annoys other co-workers and management and is completely useless.
Did I say anything about bitching and whining? I was mostly talking about self-respect, not about complaining because you don't like something.
Companies remain competitive, you are a commodity you are not an individual.
Well, that's where we disagree, don't we? But it's OK by me. You can continue thinking of yourself as a commodity, and I'll continue thinking about myself as an individual.
Do yourself a favor and talk to somebody that's gone through the Great Depression. You're a spoiled little brat, not an adult by any means.
Heh. Think I am an idealistic college kid with stars in his eyes? You should try surviving on $575 a month with a wife and two kids, no right to work, no medical insurance, no welfare, no nothing. Try it, you'll be unpleasantly surprised.
I'd roll over you like a steamroller if you got in my way because when it comes to my job it's my fanancial security that comes first and then whatever my boss wants to pimp me to second.
Just in case we ever meet, please remind me to never have any dealing with you. There are a couple of people like that at my workplace and I find them intensely unpleasant.
When you do a job and you are paid for it, you keep your mouth shut and do whatever the job it is that you are paid to do
You are a servant to your company, a wage slave, that's the cold hard truth.
No, I don't think so. You have a strange perception that if you go to work for a company, you sold yourself to that company body and soul and now have to obey orders like a mindless automaton. Now, the company may want you to believe this, but that doesn't make this true.
I tend to think about this in another way. You and the company are independent entities and you two have a contract (which may be written or implicit) that says "I, the person, will do certain stuff for the company, and in compensation for that the company will give me money and other benefits". Generally there is nothing in that contract which says "shut up and do as you are told", and if there is I would have great doubts about entering into it.
Of course the situation, the power balance if you will, depends greatly on how valuable job-wise you are. If you are a data-entry clerk the company probably treats you as completely fungible and you may have problems persuading it that you are somebody and not something. On the other hand, if you are Rasterman or somebody with the same coding skills, you are valuable and the company better accomodate you or you'll find sweeter pastures elsewhere. This all is a power game between you and the company, but nowhere it is set in stone that you have to bend over and take it.
This, everybody, is called a "work ethic".
This, everybody, is NOT called a "work ethic". This is called "I believe I am a little piece of shit that the great and magnificent company is doing a great favor to by not kicking me out of the door, although I deserve it". Work ethic, in case you are interested, has been developed in medieval Europe by Protestants and it basically holds that doing one's job properly and assidiously is pleasing to God, while engaging in entertainment, leisure and other non-useful activities is sinful and wasteful of one's life. If anything, people with strong work ethic tend to value what they do and do not accept "shut up and do what you are told" approach.
Rob and Hemos, congrats! I hope the whole thing works out well.I also hope you had a good lawyer write the contract -- creative control is all good and well, but Slashdot can now be killed -- the easiest way would be for, say, @Home (I know there are other big companies, too:) to buy Andover.net and then decide that Slashdot doesn't fit their editorial policy... Sure you can start another one, but the intellectual property issues are going to be problematic. Heh. Unfortunately in the world we live in, lawyers determine a lot of what happens.
Other than that, I hope that the advertising level on Slashdot isn't going to go up. I can live with one banner, but sites with banners left, right, top and bottom, not counting all those oh-so-cute buttons, cause active distaste in me, and, I suppose, in most of Slashdot's readers.
Slashdot may end up looking like the Well (and I don't know if it's a good thing or bad) which had owners' change galore, but managed to retain its core audience so far.
Still, change is good. We'll see if this change will be good as well, and in the meantime, more congrats.
I also was contemplating a wireless LAN for my house a month ago. I decided against it because:
(1) Wireless LANs are expensive as hell
(2) Speed over wireless LANs sucks
(3) There are few standards and it's not a well-understood technology. There is high probability that you'll spend all that money and end up being locked into some proprietary suboptimal solution with limited upgradeability.
So I sighed, and spend a weekend draping cat5 cable all over my house (primarily outside over external walls). It isn't aesthetic, but for $80=Linksys hub + 3x$25=NIC cards + ~$40=patch cables I have a 100Mbs Ethernet that works very well. If anything goes wrong with it, there are zillions sources of information on how to deal with it. And there is a cable modem, hanging off it, as well {grin}.
So, my point is, think carefully whether you *really* need a wireless network.
Anyone stupid enough to register an domain name which is so similar to a big company deserves the grief.
Well, yes and no. If you take the stance that the world works this way and there is nothing you can do about it, then yes, it's much better not to annoy big corporations and powerful entities in general. Such a position generally makes life easier, more comfortable and, most of the time, allows you to achieve more. The downside is that once in a while the big corporation/government/etc. will come and say "Bend over and spread your legs, now that's a good boy!" and that can be mighty unpleasant and sometimes even fatal.
You can take the other stance as well and say that in principle there is no difference between a AOL and a mom-and-pop operation running out of a spare bedroom -- they both have the same rights, don't they? So if the big bad corporation want some priviledge, you slap it back and keep slapping until one of you (hint: in 99% of the cases it's not the big corp) keels over. The plus side is that you conscience is very happy and once in a while you'll change the world for the better. The minus side is that it's easy to dedicate your life to fighting a faceless bureaucratic monster with no results and your life or large chunks of it ends up being spend for nothing.
As has been pointed out in some Usenet.sig, "You shall cooperate with Microsoft for the good of Microsoft and for your own survival". I guess it depends on how much do you want to survive...
I think it's best to start from the assumption that all sites are potentially harmful to children without parental supervision, and let anyone who wants to warrant their site as child-safe -- whatever that means -- do so at their own risk.
Oooh... this is just great. Of course, what's special about web sites? Nothing really, so it much for the best to start from the assumption that all books are potentially harmful to children, so children should not have access to books unless the publisher legally certifies that there is nothing in the book that could potentially harm even a single child. What, the publishers say they don't have suicidal tendencies? Too bad, too bad... But there is nothing really important in books, anyway, right?
And movies! No, movies are definitely potentially harmful to children. And don't start me on TV. I suggest that our wise legislators should pass a law to embed a chip in each TV set that will scan the age of people in the room. If any of the present is a child (say, under 21 years of age), the TV should automatically and immediately switch to the Disney channel. Technical problems? Ah, don't bother my little pointy head with these complicated words!
But these are all half-measures. If we think about it, life is potentially harmful to children so why don't we just collect al the kids and put them in nice institutions where the government-certified nurses will make sure that nothing harmful (like an idea) ever approaches our little angels...
The whole point in laws like this is to empower local communities to show discretion
Nope, that's wrong. The local communities can show discretion on their own without any help from the Feds. The whole point in laws like this is to force the local communities to adopt whatever standards Washington considers appropriate. Look at the legal min drinking age. The Feds cannot legislate it, but they shoved it down the throat of every state (do you really want federal highway funds? Here is how...)
The system works when local communities aren't told they MUST expose their children to a completely wide-open Internet.
I don't even know where to start. First, communities do not have children, parents do. I very specifically do not want my local community to tell me what I should teach my children. I am perfectly capable of taking such decisions by myself and do not need help from local politicians.
Second, what do you think the point of the Bill of Rights is? Community is a relative term, the Federal government is as much representative of a community, as you local town hall is. The whole point of the Bill of Rights is that people, individuals have rights that no government, including the local community one, can take away. Maybe my community wants to exercise discretion and forbid me to read Cosmopolitan (speaking of sex in the libraries [grin]), or to read Karl Marx or Ayn Rand or fill-in-the-blank -- well, it cannot. And why? Because I, as a person, have rights that my local community cannot take away.
Now, it's arguable whether absence of restrictions to access the Internet is a basic right. But that's not the issue. The issue is that the system does not work when the local communities can impose whatever idiocy the local politicians can come up with (and call it discretion) onto their population.
The problem is not only with the Feds. There is a great deal of local-level cluelessnees and fear of open information. Note that in the Loudon (sp?) library case, it weren't the Feds who forced it to block access to uncomfortable material, but the library itself, a bunch of moralizing assholes that they all are.
Recently my daughter who is in second grade brought home a note from a teacher, which basically said: "Dear parents, it came to my attention that boys tease girls. Teasing is illegal (no, I'm quoting and I'm not making it up) so please talk to your child so that he/she does not do this any more".
Washington is bad, but local morons can be much, much worse, especially if they see encouragement from the Feds. Hell, if my local library implements filtering, I'll be the first to hack around it and post the instructions on how to do this around the neighborhood.
They can say that there is no manitory censorship, you just won't get any money from them. The Feds do stuff like this all the time. Why do you think the drinking age is 21? The Feds can't mandate a drinking age, so how do they get around the 10th amendment. Simple, we won't give you highway funds if you don't have a 21 drinking age.
Well, the case is a bit different here. There is no constitutional right to drink before you're 21:( -- or ever after 21 for that matter -- so the Feds can force the state/local governments to make these laws. However, from the Bill of Rights point of view there is no difference between the Feds, the states and your friendly local town hall -- it's all "government" and government's ability to trample/ignore/go around the Bill of Rights is quite limited (subject, of course, to the whims of the Supreme Court). So the issue has nothing to do with Feds forcing local laws -- if the measure is declared unconstitutional (hopefully), it doesn't matter if it's a public school/library that made this regulation, or the Federal government.
Of course the Bill of Rights does not apply to private entities, school and libraries included, but that's a whole different can o'worms.
Damn tab key. Please ignore the previous post. A note to Rob: perhaps it's a good idea to reconfigure the posting screen so that tabbing out of the comment text box gets you to the *Preview* button instead of *Submit* button?
Hm, some people tended to understand my comments as going against cloning. That was not my intent. I think that cloning is morally neutral (as organ transplants per se are morally neutral) and inevitable. All the wailing and gnashing of teeth that's coming from the morons and the religious right is not going to change the fact that the cloning and genetic manipulation of humans is coming.
I think that at first it'll be treated similarly to the way various fertility techniques are viewed now: not necessary for "normal" people (heavy, heavy quotes around 'normal'), expensive, not the proper topic of a party conversation, but very useful if you really need them. Later the cloning/genetic manipulation should become more accepted and get to the status of, say, plastic surgery.
There is nothing intrinsically evil about cloning and even nothing clearly evil about the scenarios I described. What's evil about clone banks where you could pick the genes for your child? Still, the idea seems to make most people uncomfortable:). The point of my argument was that cloning is not a cut-and-dried moral issue (as in the post that I was replying to: clones are full humans, problem solved). Yeah, clones *are* full humans, but there are other problems, too... I don't think that we (most people, that is) right now have the concepts and the framework to think deeply and clearly about cloning/genetic manipulation. This is a new area that has been little explored and sweeping generalizations of both kinds (It's evil! No, it's science, so it's good!) do little to help.
Hm, some people tended to understand my comments as going against cloning. That was not my intent. I think that cloning is morally neutral (as organ transplants per se are morally neutral) and inevitable. All the wailing and gnashing of teeth that's coming from the morons and the religious right is not going to change the fact that the cloning and genetic manipulation of humans is coming. I think that at first it'll be treated similarly to the way various fertility techniques are viewed now: not necessary for "normal" people (heavy, heavy quotes around 'normal'), expensive, not the proper topic of a party conversation Kaa
Can someone explain what is so "scary" about this? I'm not really that frightened -- the "huge ethical questions" raised seem to have simple answers. (Are clones human? Well, yes. Do they have full human rights? Well, yes. Huh. That seems to end the discussion.)
Nothing particularly scary, after all single-egg twins (~1.5% of births IIRC) are clones. Still, there are some things you might want to consider:
(1) If you believe, as a lot of Christians do, that putting the soul into a body (embryo) is God's prerogative, then trying to clone people is a sin of hubris (arrogance).
(2) Knowing that one is a clone is likely to have psychological consequences. I know that I am unique and that's important for my world-view. Imagine that you know that you are a clone of some guy, a copy of him. How does that make you feel?
(3) I think that the thing that most frightens people about cloning is not cloning per se, but rather the ease of genetic manipulation that cloning provides. What is a big ethical problem is how to treat designing humans. "Hmm... I would like my child to have blond hair and blue eyes, be tall and not chunky,... have breast size YYY / dick size XXX... ". In the extreme case I can imagine designing a child, tracking its development as an embryo to see if the manipulation turned out to be OK, and if not, clone the embryo, terminate the unsuccesful one, and go to work on v2.0.
Or, alternatively, imagine clone banks where you can go to pick the genes of your child when you can check out how these genes turned out in real people. "See, the type CX774976 has a very good body, but 56% of these develop mild depression around the age of 30... if you check out type DN8743992, it has no depression tendencies, but it's grade point average in high school tends to be noticeably lower, and of course they have to watch their diet or they'll become fat by middle age...".
And think of how great the responsibility of parents will be...
(4) There are undesirable long-term genetic and demographic consequences to widespread cloning. Working them out is left as the exercise for the reader.
There is more, just think through the consequences and don't stop halfway:)
educated, rational people will react in educated, rational ways, regardless of their religion.
Unfortunately the world is much more complicated than you seem to believe. "Being rational" means very different things to different people. Besides an off-the-cuff definition of rationality would probably look something like "A rational person is one whose system of beliefs is logically coherent and whose behavior is consistent with his beliefs". Do you see the problem here?
Try thinking not in terms of US college-educated suburban upper-middle-class, but in terms of, say, Saudi Arabian or Vietnamese college grads.
Basically, people react based on their value system which has nothing to do with rationality and little to do with education.
Lucky you, just a littly uneasy. I am downright pissed off!
It seems that suddenly we can open up a whole new world of law, where a computer crime can be tried in whatever state seems to have the laws that are most in favor of the prosecution.
Well, the problem itself is not new. E.g. if you, a Californian, kill another Californian in Nevada, either California or Nevada can try you for murder (either, but not both, though). Of course, in Internet age the problem becomes much more severe and it is not helped by clueless courts.
What if some American libels me on a newsgroup and some usenet server in Swizerland gets ahold of it. Can I try him under Swiss Law if I live in Swizerland?
You can, if you can convince the Swiss court that it has jurisdiction. I don't know about Switzerland, but various countries have different ideas about the jurisdiction of their courts. Even if you convince the court it has jurisdiction, and win the case (probably by default), your problems are not over. You have a judgement against that pesky American and what are you going to do with it? You'll probably want to enforce it, but you'll need an *American* court to enforce it and in this specific case the American court is likely to lecture you on First Amendement and tell you to go jump into the lake (living in the US does have some advantages, after all).
You don't remember an entire picture - you remember things about the picture
Well, I don't know about you, but I have a reasonably good visual memory and frequently remember things by visualizing in my mind a picture of what I need and then scanning it for the specific detail/item I want. Lossy compression -- sure, but the quality is not as bad as you make it. There is *huge* amount of visual information stored in the brain, the problem is retrieving it. If I briefly think about my last vacation, for example, I can remember some stuff, but not all that much. But if I stop and really think about it, immersing myself into that experience, so much stuff that I actually remember pops up...
And didn't say anything about the methodolody -- measuring the brain's storage capacity by checking how many yes/no questions you need to guess what an average moron thinks about? Gimme a break.
2.5G of data stored in the human brain?? Boggle. This is so far removed from reality it's not even funny. Humans store a great deal of visual information, which is heavy of bit usage. Besides, there are experiments which seem to indicate that people never forget anything they saw/heard. If you electrically stimulate the right spot in the brain, the experience will come back, very vivid and perfectly remembered.
And top speed of storing data?? 100bps??? Close your eyes. Do you remember what you've just seen? How many bits per second is that? Aw, geez...
Now, technically, in English law, the act of serving an article from a news spool is publication.
Aye, here is the rub. That clearly should not be so. To me, serving the article from a server is more akin to *delivering* a newspaper rather than publishing it.
The major problem is that this ruling makes ISPs responsible for bits that pass through their wires. Every crackpot with an axe to grind can now pester ISPs to cancel postings he doesn't like. And I presume that the same logic can (and would) be applied to web sites.
In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't Communist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. They they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up.
Martin Niemoeller
For people who are having difficulty relating to this, here is a modernized version:
First they came for the fourth amendment, and I did not speak out, because I didn't deal drugs. Then they came for the fifth amendment, and I was silent because I owned no property involved in crimes. Then they came for the sixth amendment, and I did not protest because I was innocent. Then they came for the second amendment, and I said nothing because I didn't like guns. And then they at last came for the first amendment, and I could say nothing at all.
Unknown
Think about it, OK?
Kaa
No need for watermarking people
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DNA Encryption
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· Score: 2
You and a lot of other posters forget that there is absolutely no need to watermark people -- everybody is already "watermarked".
Consider this: to watermark a person you need to access his DNA and insert a watermark, then access it again to read it. Well, if during the first time you just read his DNA (which is unique) and the second time read it again and compare to a database -- voila! exactly the same result without all the unpleasantness of invasive DNA surgery. Why do you think reasonable people get worried when the police decides to take DNA samples from everybody arrested? (I don't know if the law/regulation to that effect passed in New York, but was definitely considered).
Kaa
Nothing earth-shattering here
on
DNA Encryption
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· Score: 2
OK, in crypto language what we have here is a symmetric, secret key system where the key is the marker sequence at the ends of the DNA chain (I'm assuming the coding of the message into four bases is trivial). To put it into a more commonplace form, imagine taking your plaintext, encoding it into, say, the lower bit of 3 seconds of an audio CD recording, putting it into the middle of an audio CD and then sending it to the recipient. The key is knowing which 3 seconds to decrypt. Accordingly, you need a secret key which tells you: when you see a, say, 0x6a6c7ff45c054 sequence, start decoding. The advantage of using DNA is that your "CD" is very very long, but you can compensate for this in a variety of ways.
So, while this whole thing sounds cool, cryptographically this is nothing new and has no particular advantages (all the problems of dealing with secret symmetric keys, etc.). No wonder the NSA was not interested.
You can most certainly write games (and with somewhat more effort write *good* games) for Linux, but IMHO in the gaming world Linux is at disadvantage to the Win95/98 platform, even leaving aside all the market size problems. As I see it there are two serious problems:
(1) Win95/98 will essentially surrender the machine with all its hardware to the game code. If the code wants to play games with hardware it can. This makes code unportable, buggy and very hard to debug and maintain, but if the code can pull this off, then it has a speed advantage. And while you don't care much about speed in, say, Civ2 and its cousins, there are a lot of other games where the speed at which the game runs is very important. By the virtue of being an OS, Linux will not permit game code to play all these maybe-clever tricks.
(2) The X graphics. They were *not* designed for fast throwing pixels/polygons at the screen and it shows. Yes, I know, there are workarounds, but again, either you climb in bed with specific hardware, forget about X and gain speed (the problems with this approach are left as the exercise for the reader), or you are at a disadvantage again.
Sure the whole thing is unworkable. I wouldn't be so cavalier about its effects, though. I don't know how reasonable the Australian legal system is, but in the US at least the threat of lawsuits does wonders for scaring people into over-compliance. Does an ISP really want to spend time and money (a lot of money) in court arguing that not blocking a site outright was a "reasonable" effort on its part? Probably not. When in doubt, do the safe thing.
This is similar to making a hard car speed limit of 20 mph. Sure, it's unenforceable and will not work, but now the police will have full justification to stop anyone whom they did not like (as in "he didn't look at us with proper respect"). Pissed at an Aussie ISP or just think that sex for pleasure should be banned? Call the police and complain that you searched for "Jenny" and found Jennycam. Why wasn't it blocked? Repeat at will and soon there would be great incentive for the ISPs to block everything but disney.com.
Slashdot Mirror
Lucky for you
I don't see what luck has to do with this. I didn't win the lottery, in case you are wondering.
Oh Great Magic 8 Ball, please undecipher the paragraph since the author cannot verbalize it himself."
It seems that I was right about undeveloped thinking abilities. Oh well, this was becoming boring anyway.
You've certainly put me in MY place.
You are a commodity, remember? That's what your place is.
Kaa
If you have a wife and 2 kids and live off from $575 you should have used that piece of grey matter called a brain before you put yourself into that situation. Instead of simply putting yourself into a bad situation you've brought your wife there and two complete innocents that YOU decided to have. It's your own fault, you cannot run away from responsibilities that you brought entirely upon yourself.
I would never put myself in that situation much less drag 3 other people into it. Don't expect pity from me, expect contempt from me. Your stupidity will profoundly effect your children for their entire lives.
Well, I never said this situation lasted. This happened a fairly long time ago and had nothing to do with either idealism of having fun at work. If you would have read the paragraph carefully you should have guessed why and how that happened (er... I am assuming standard thinking abilities, I am not sure that applies). Right now my kids are doing quite well, thank you very much. Both me and my wife make six-figure salaries so I don't think putting the kids through college is going to be a problem. That, by the way, is a direct consequence of the fact that I with my family had to manage being very poor for some time.
You better get your fucking priorities straight. Work isn't a game, it's work. If you have dependants, it's your duty to put them ahead of yourself, otherwise you shouldn't even have the right to have kids. You're a selfish twit, have the balls to see it. If you're not going to take care of your kids, I don't see why the fuck an asshole like you had them in the first place.
Ah, the fire in his fingers... But really, you should polish your flaming style. I've seen better flames on Usenet from aolers. Besides, it helps to know what you are talking about, but you've never experienced that, did you?
Kaa
Work for a bit.
I have.
If you don't like your job, T.S. You can always quit. Bitching about it only annoys other co-workers and management and is completely useless.
Did I say anything about bitching and whining? I was mostly talking about self-respect, not about complaining because you don't like something.
Companies remain competitive, you are a commodity you are not an individual.
Well, that's where we disagree, don't we? But it's OK by me. You can continue thinking of yourself as a commodity, and I'll continue thinking about myself as an individual.
Do yourself a favor and talk to somebody that's gone through the Great Depression. You're a spoiled little brat, not an adult by any means.
Heh. Think I am an idealistic college kid with stars in his eyes? You should try surviving on $575 a month with a wife and two kids, no right to work, no medical insurance, no welfare, no nothing. Try it, you'll be unpleasantly surprised.
I'd roll over you like a steamroller if you got in my way because when it comes to my job it's my fanancial security that comes first and then whatever my boss wants to pimp me to second.
Just in case we ever meet, please remind me to never have any dealing with you. There are a couple of people like that at my workplace and I find them intensely unpleasant.
Kaa
When you do a job and you are paid for it, you keep your mouth shut and do whatever the job it is that you are paid to do
You are a servant to your company, a wage slave, that's the cold hard truth.
No, I don't think so. You have a strange perception that if you go to work for a company, you sold yourself to that company body and soul and now have to obey orders like a mindless automaton. Now, the company may want you to believe this, but that doesn't make this true.
I tend to think about this in another way. You and the company are independent entities and you two have a contract (which may be written or implicit) that says "I, the person, will do certain stuff for the company, and in compensation for that the company will give me money and other benefits". Generally there is nothing in that contract which says "shut up and do as you are told", and if there is I would have great doubts about entering into it.
Of course the situation, the power balance if you will, depends greatly on how valuable job-wise you are. If you are a data-entry clerk the company probably treats you as completely fungible and you may have problems persuading it that you are somebody and not something. On the other hand, if you are Rasterman or somebody with the same coding skills, you are valuable and the company better accomodate you or you'll find sweeter pastures elsewhere. This all is a power game between you and the company, but nowhere it is set in stone that you have to bend over and take it.
This, everybody, is called a "work ethic".
This, everybody, is NOT called a "work ethic". This is called "I believe I am a little piece of shit that the great and magnificent company is doing a great favor to by not kicking me out of the door, although I deserve it". Work ethic, in case you are interested, has been developed in medieval Europe by Protestants and it basically holds that doing one's job properly and assidiously is pleasing to God, while engaging in entertainment, leisure and other non-useful activities is sinful and wasteful of one's life. If anything, people with strong work ethic tend to value what they do and do not accept "shut up and do what you are told" approach.
Kaa
Rob and Hemos, congrats! I hope the whole thing works out well.I also hope you had a good lawyer write the contract -- creative control is all good and well, but Slashdot can now be killed -- the easiest way would be for, say, @Home (I know there are other big companies, too :) to buy Andover.net and then decide that Slashdot doesn't fit their editorial policy... Sure you can start another one, but the intellectual property issues are going to be problematic. Heh. Unfortunately in the world we live in, lawyers determine a lot of what happens.
Other than that, I hope that the advertising level on Slashdot isn't going to go up. I can live with one banner, but sites with banners left, right, top and bottom, not counting all those oh-so-cute buttons, cause active distaste in me, and, I suppose, in most of Slashdot's readers.
Slashdot may end up looking like the Well (and I don't know if it's a good thing or bad) which had owners' change galore, but managed to retain its core audience so far.
Still, change is good. We'll see if this change will be good as well, and in the meantime, more congrats.
Kaa
I also was contemplating a wireless LAN for my house a month ago. I decided against it because:
(1) Wireless LANs are expensive as hell
(2) Speed over wireless LANs sucks
(3) There are few standards and it's not a well-understood technology. There is high probability that you'll spend all that money and end up being locked into some proprietary suboptimal solution with limited upgradeability.
So I sighed, and spend a weekend draping cat5 cable all over my house (primarily outside over external walls). It isn't aesthetic, but for $80=Linksys hub + 3x$25=NIC cards + ~$40=patch cables I have a 100Mbs Ethernet that works very well. If anything goes wrong with it, there are zillions sources of information on how to deal with it. And there is a cable modem, hanging off it, as well {grin}.
So, my point is, think carefully whether you *really* need a wireless network.
Kaa
Anyone stupid enough to register an domain name which is so similar to a big company deserves the grief.
.sig, "You shall cooperate with Microsoft for the good of Microsoft and for your own survival". I guess it depends on how much do you want to survive...
Well, yes and no. If you take the stance that the world works this way and there is nothing you can do about it, then yes, it's much better not to annoy big corporations and powerful entities in general. Such a position generally makes life easier, more comfortable and, most of the time, allows you to achieve more. The downside is that once in a while the big corporation/government/etc. will come and say "Bend over and spread your legs, now that's a good boy!" and that can be mighty unpleasant and sometimes even fatal.
You can take the other stance as well and say that in principle there is no difference between a AOL and a mom-and-pop operation running out of a spare bedroom -- they both have the same rights, don't they? So if the big bad corporation want some priviledge, you slap it back and keep slapping until one of you (hint: in 99% of the cases it's not the big corp) keels over. The plus side is that you conscience is very happy and once in a while you'll change the world for the better. The minus side is that it's easy to dedicate your life to fighting a faceless bureaucratic monster with no results and your life or large chunks of it ends up being spend for nothing.
As has been pointed out in some Usenet
Kaa
I think it's best to start from the assumption that all sites are potentially harmful to children without parental supervision, and let anyone who wants to warrant their site as child-safe -- whatever that means -- do so at their own risk.
Oooh... this is just great. Of course, what's special about web sites? Nothing really, so it much for the best to start from the assumption that all books are potentially harmful to children, so children should not have access to books unless the publisher legally certifies that there is nothing in the book that could potentially harm even a single child. What, the publishers say they don't have suicidal tendencies? Too bad, too bad... But there is nothing really important in books, anyway, right?
And movies! No, movies are definitely potentially harmful to children. And don't start me on TV. I suggest that our wise legislators should pass a law to embed a chip in each TV set that will scan the age of people in the room. If any of the present is a child (say, under 21 years of age), the TV should automatically and immediately switch to the Disney channel. Technical problems? Ah, don't bother my little pointy head with these complicated words!
But these are all half-measures. If we think about it, life is potentially harmful to children so why don't we just collect al the kids and put them in nice institutions where the government-certified nurses will make sure that nothing harmful (like an idea) ever approaches our little angels...
Kaa
The whole point in laws like this is to empower local communities to show discretion
Nope, that's wrong. The local communities can show discretion on their own without any help from the Feds. The whole point in laws like this is to force the local communities to adopt whatever standards Washington considers appropriate. Look at the legal min drinking age. The Feds cannot legislate it, but they shoved it down the throat of every state (do you really want federal highway funds? Here is how...)
The system works when local communities aren't told they MUST expose their children to a completely wide-open Internet.
I don't even know where to start. First, communities do not have children, parents do. I very specifically do not want my local community to tell me what I should teach my children. I am perfectly capable of taking such decisions by myself and do not need help from local politicians.
Second, what do you think the point of the Bill of Rights is? Community is a relative term, the Federal government is as much representative of a community, as you local town hall is. The whole point of the Bill of Rights is that people, individuals have rights that no government, including the local community one, can take away. Maybe my community wants to exercise discretion and forbid me to read Cosmopolitan (speaking of sex in the libraries [grin]), or to read Karl Marx or Ayn Rand or fill-in-the-blank -- well, it cannot. And why? Because I, as a person, have rights that my local community cannot take away.
Now, it's arguable whether absence of restrictions to access the Internet is a basic right. But that's not the issue. The issue is that the system does not work when the local communities can impose whatever idiocy the local politicians can come up with (and call it discretion) onto their population.
Phew, I am getting off the soapbox now...
Kaa
The problem is not only with the Feds. There is a great deal of local-level cluelessnees and fear of open information. Note that in the Loudon (sp?) library case, it weren't the Feds who forced it to block access to uncomfortable material, but the library itself, a bunch of moralizing assholes that they all are.
Recently my daughter who is in second grade brought home a note from a teacher, which basically said: "Dear parents, it came to my attention that boys tease girls. Teasing is illegal (no, I'm quoting and I'm not making it up) so please talk to your child so that he/she does not do this any more".
Washington is bad, but local morons can be much, much worse, especially if they see encouragement from the Feds. Hell, if my local library implements filtering, I'll be the first to hack around it and post the instructions on how to do this around the neighborhood.
Kaa
They can say that there is no manitory censorship, you just won't get any money from them. The Feds do stuff like this all the time. Why do you think the drinking age is 21? The Feds can't mandate a drinking age, so how do they get around the 10th amendment. Simple, we won't give you highway funds if you don't have a 21 drinking age.
:( -- or ever after 21 for that matter -- so the Feds can force the state/local governments to make these laws. However, from the Bill of Rights point of view there is no difference between the Feds, the states and your friendly local town hall -- it's all "government" and government's ability to trample/ignore/go around the Bill of Rights is quite limited (subject, of course, to the whims of the Supreme Court). So the issue has nothing to do with Feds forcing local laws -- if the measure is declared unconstitutional (hopefully), it doesn't matter if it's a public school/library that made this regulation, or the Federal government.
Well, the case is a bit different here. There is no constitutional right to drink before you're 21
Of course the Bill of Rights does not apply to private entities, school and libraries included, but that's a whole different can o'worms.
Kaa
Damn tab key. Please ignore the previous post. A note to Rob: perhaps it's a good idea to reconfigure the posting screen so that tabbing out of the comment text box gets you to the *Preview* button instead of *Submit* button?
:). The point of my argument was that cloning is not a cut-and-dried moral issue (as in the post that I was replying to: clones are full humans, problem solved). Yeah, clones *are* full humans, but there are other problems, too... I don't think that we (most people, that is) right now have the concepts and the framework to think deeply and clearly about cloning/genetic manipulation. This is a new area that has been little explored and sweeping generalizations of both kinds (It's evil! No, it's science, so it's good!) do little to help.
Hm, some people tended to understand my comments as going against cloning. That was not my intent. I think that cloning is morally neutral (as organ transplants per se are morally neutral) and inevitable. All the wailing and gnashing of teeth that's coming from the morons and the religious right is not going to change the fact that the cloning and genetic manipulation of humans is coming.
I think that at first it'll be treated similarly to the way various fertility techniques are viewed now: not necessary for "normal" people (heavy, heavy quotes around 'normal'), expensive, not the proper topic of a party conversation, but very useful if you really need them. Later the cloning/genetic manipulation should become more accepted and get to the status of, say, plastic surgery.
There is nothing intrinsically evil about cloning and even nothing clearly evil about the scenarios I described. What's evil about clone banks where you could pick the genes for your child? Still, the idea seems to make most people uncomfortable
Kaa
Hm, some people tended to understand my comments as going against cloning. That was not my intent. I think that cloning is morally neutral (as organ transplants per se are morally neutral) and inevitable. All the wailing and gnashing of teeth that's coming from the morons and the religious right is not going to change the fact that the cloning and genetic manipulation of humans is coming.
I think that at first it'll be treated similarly to the way various fertility techniques are viewed now: not necessary for "normal" people (heavy, heavy quotes around 'normal'), expensive, not the proper topic of a party conversation
Kaa
Can someone explain what is so "scary" about this? I'm not really that frightened -- the "huge ethical questions" raised seem to have simple answers. (Are clones human? Well, yes. Do they have full human rights? Well, yes. Huh. That seems to end the discussion.)
... have breast size YYY / dick size XXX ... ". In the extreme case I can imagine designing a child, tracking its development as an embryo to see if the manipulation turned out to be OK, and if not, clone the embryo, terminate the unsuccesful one, and go to work on v2.0.
:)
Nothing particularly scary, after all single-egg twins (~1.5% of births IIRC) are clones. Still, there are some things you might want to consider:
(1) If you believe, as a lot of Christians do, that putting the soul into a body (embryo) is God's prerogative, then trying to clone people is a sin of hubris (arrogance).
(2) Knowing that one is a clone is likely to have psychological consequences. I know that I am unique and that's important for my world-view. Imagine that you know that you are a clone of some guy, a copy of him. How does that make you feel?
(3) I think that the thing that most frightens people about cloning is not cloning per se, but rather the ease of genetic manipulation that cloning provides. What is a big ethical problem is how to treat designing humans. "Hmm... I would like my child to have blond hair and blue eyes, be tall and not chunky,
Or, alternatively, imagine clone banks where you can go to pick the genes of your child when you can check out how these genes turned out in real people. "See, the type CX774976 has a very good body, but 56% of these develop mild depression around the age of 30... if you check out type DN8743992, it has no depression tendencies, but it's grade point average in high school tends to be noticeably lower, and of course they have to watch their diet or they'll become fat by middle age...".
And think of how great the responsibility of parents will be...
(4) There are undesirable long-term genetic and demographic consequences to widespread cloning. Working them out is left as the exercise for the reader.
There is more, just think through the consequences and don't stop halfway
Kaa
educated, rational people will react in educated, rational ways, regardless of their religion.
Unfortunately the world is much more complicated than you seem to believe. "Being rational" means very different things to different people. Besides an off-the-cuff definition of rationality would probably look something like "A rational person is one whose system of beliefs is logically coherent and whose behavior is consistent with his beliefs". Do you see the problem here?
Try thinking not in terms of US college-educated suburban upper-middle-class, but in terms of, say, Saudi Arabian or Vietnamese college grads.
Basically, people react based on their value system which has nothing to do with rationality and little to do with education.
Kaa
I'm a little uneasy about this decision
Lucky you, just a littly uneasy. I am downright pissed off!
It seems that suddenly we can open up a whole new world of law, where a computer crime can be tried in whatever state seems to have the laws that are most in favor of the prosecution.
Well, the problem itself is not new. E.g. if you, a Californian, kill another Californian in Nevada, either California or Nevada can try you for murder (either, but not both, though). Of course, in Internet age the problem becomes much more severe and it is not helped by clueless courts.
What if some American libels me on a newsgroup and some usenet server in Swizerland gets ahold of it. Can I try him under Swiss Law if I live in Swizerland?
You can, if you can convince the Swiss court that it has jurisdiction. I don't know about Switzerland, but various countries have different ideas about the jurisdiction of their courts. Even if you convince the court it has jurisdiction, and win the case (probably by default), your problems are not over. You have a judgement against that pesky American and what are you going to do with it? You'll probably want to enforce it, but you'll need an *American* court to enforce it and in this specific case the American court is likely to lecture you on First Amendement and tell you to go jump into the lake (living in the US does have some advantages, after all).
Kaa
You don't remember an entire picture - you remember things about the picture
Well, I don't know about you, but I have a reasonably good visual memory and frequently remember things by visualizing in my mind a picture of what I need and then scanning it for the specific detail/item I want. Lossy compression -- sure, but the quality is not as bad as you make it. There is *huge* amount of visual information stored in the brain, the problem is retrieving it. If I briefly think about my last vacation, for example, I can remember some stuff, but not all that much. But if I stop and really think about it, immersing myself into that experience, so much stuff that I actually remember pops up...
And didn't say anything about the methodolody -- measuring the brain's storage capacity by checking how many yes/no questions you need to guess what an average moron thinks about? Gimme a break.
Kaa
2.5G of data stored in the human brain?? Boggle. This is so far removed from reality it's not even funny. Humans store a great deal of visual information, which is heavy of bit usage. Besides, there are experiments which seem to indicate that people never forget anything they saw/heard. If you electrically stimulate the right spot in the brain, the experience will come back, very vivid and perfectly remembered.
And top speed of storing data?? 100bps??? Close your eyes. Do you remember what you've just seen? How many bits per second is that? Aw, geez...
Kaa
Now, technically, in English law, the act of serving an article from a news spool is publication.
Aye, here is the rub. That clearly should not be so. To me, serving the article from a server is more akin to *delivering* a newspaper rather than publishing it.
The major problem is that this ruling makes ISPs responsible for bits that pass through their wires. Every crackpot with an axe to grind can now pester ISPs to cancel postings he doesn't like. And I presume that the same logic can (and would) be applied to web sites.
Kaa
In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't Communist.
Then they came for the Jews and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
They they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up.
Martin Niemoeller
For people who are having difficulty relating to this, here is a modernized version:
First they came for the fourth amendment, and I did not speak out, because I didn't deal drugs.
Then they came for the fifth amendment, and I was silent because I owned no property involved in crimes.
Then they came for the sixth amendment, and I did not protest because I was innocent.
Then they came for the second amendment, and I said nothing because I didn't like guns.
And then they at last came for the first amendment, and I could say nothing at all.
Unknown
Think about it, OK?
Kaa
You and a lot of other posters forget that there is absolutely no need to watermark people -- everybody is already "watermarked".
Consider this: to watermark a person you need to access his DNA and insert a watermark, then access it again to read it. Well, if during the first time you just read his DNA (which is unique) and the second time read it again and compare to a database -- voila! exactly the same result without all the unpleasantness of invasive DNA surgery. Why do you think reasonable people get worried when the police decides to take DNA samples from everybody arrested? (I don't know if the law/regulation to that effect passed in New York, but was definitely considered).
Kaa
OK, in crypto language what we have here is a symmetric, secret key system where the key is the marker sequence at the ends of the DNA chain (I'm assuming the coding of the message into four bases is trivial). To put it into a more commonplace form, imagine taking your plaintext, encoding it into, say, the lower bit of 3 seconds of an audio CD recording, putting it into the middle of an audio CD and then sending it to the recipient. The key is knowing which 3 seconds to decrypt. Accordingly, you need a secret key which tells you: when you see a, say, 0x6a6c7ff45c054 sequence, start decoding. The advantage of using DNA is that your "CD" is very very long, but you can compensate for this in a variety of ways.
So, while this whole thing sounds cool, cryptographically this is nothing new and has no particular advantages (all the problems of dealing with secret symmetric keys, etc.). No wonder the NSA was not interested.
Kaa
You can most certainly write games (and with somewhat more effort write *good* games) for Linux, but IMHO in the gaming world Linux is at disadvantage to the Win95/98 platform, even leaving aside all the market size problems. As I see it there are two serious problems:
(1) Win95/98 will essentially surrender the machine with all its hardware to the game code. If the code wants to play games with hardware it can. This makes code unportable, buggy and very hard to debug and maintain, but if the code can pull this off, then it has a speed advantage. And while you don't care much about speed in, say, Civ2 and its cousins, there are a lot of other games where the speed at which the game runs is very important. By the virtue of being an OS, Linux will not permit game code to play all these maybe-clever tricks.
(2) The X graphics. They were *not* designed for fast throwing pixels/polygons at the screen and it shows. Yes, I know, there are workarounds, but again, either you climb in bed with specific hardware, forget about X and gain speed (the problems with this approach are left as the exercise for the reader), or you are at a disadvantage again.
Kaa
Think before you post.
Kaa
Sure the whole thing is unworkable. I wouldn't be so cavalier about its effects, though. I don't know how reasonable the Australian legal system is, but in the US at least the threat of lawsuits does wonders for scaring people into over-compliance. Does an ISP really want to spend time and money (a lot of money) in court arguing that not blocking a site outright was a "reasonable" effort on its part? Probably not. When in doubt, do the safe thing.
This is similar to making a hard car speed limit of 20 mph. Sure, it's unenforceable and will not work, but now the police will have full justification to stop anyone whom they did not like (as in "he didn't look at us with proper respect"). Pissed at an Aussie ISP or just think that sex for pleasure should be banned? Call the police and complain that you searched for "Jenny" and found Jennycam. Why wasn't it blocked? Repeat at will and soon there would be great incentive for the ISPs to block everything but disney.com.
Kaa