If you don't want bad-guys running rampant, then you have to throw some virgins into the mangler. It's the price of justice.
The obvious solution to this is to have a perfectly functioning justice system that never punishes innocent people, and to have a wood chipper inside the courthouse into which we occasionally feed a Slashdotter to balance things out.
Stop relying on blacklists as your primarily (or only!) filtering mechanism. There are far more sophisticated filtering solutions out there these days. Filtering based solely on blacklists is antiquated, ineffective, and vulnerable to massive issues with false positives. If you only use blacklisting as a very small part of your overall filter scoring, you won't have problems when the IPs in question get turned over to non-spammers. Sure, they'll still end up with a non-zero "spam" score, but not a high enough one to be blocked.
And, of course, you should regularly be looking at your entire setup, including filtering, on a regular basis to make sure the solution you have is still the best one for your situation. Technology, and the Internet, changes too rapidly to take a "set and forget" attitude toward anything, especially filtering.
I agree. Family tech support is a no-win situation. I solved the problem by moving 1,000 miles away. If that's not an option, you're left with either saying "no" or committing multiple homicides, whichever seems easiest.
You should check out Transformers 2 on Blu-Ray. I was completely and utterly shocked to see the disk go straight to the movie when popped-in. No FBI warning, no previews, no commercials, no menu, just the movie, starting to play automatically. It was awesome.
The proper way for your Blu-Ray player to handle a Transformers 2 disc is to eject it immediately at high velocity, causing it to shatter on the opposite wall. That would have been much better than jumping straight to the movie.
Back then they were able to link landing on the moon with beating the Russians, which at the time virtually guaranteed as much money as you could possibly want to accomplish the goal. Having the goal set by a president who was later assassinated, and carried on by his VP who basically set himself up to be the guy who would carry on JFK's legacy, didn't hurt either. Of course, after that goal was reached, NASA's funding was slashed, and they've been unable to accomplish much in the way of manned exploration since then.
Now, if you could somehow link landing on Mars to beating the terrorists, we could get all the money we need to get this thing done quickly. Until then, though, they can only do things as fast as their ever-shrinking budget will let them.
Shuttering a company (or part of a company) generally means to shut it down. Michelle was looking to close down SORBS, but evidently found someone to give her lots of money for it instead.
According to the moderation history, nobody did. I believe TrisexualPuppy starts at a score of -1, probably due to his long and illustrious history of trolling and being modded down for it.
At the time the last OLPC came to everyone's attention, it was a fairly revolutionary idea. Then Asus released the Eee range and others quickly followed suit. Nearly all of them make the OLPC look like last year's trash and for not much price difference.
Exactly. The lesson here is that if you really want private enterprise to do something, you have to set up a nonprofit to do it first and give it away to poor people. That way, the for-profit companies will think you're threatening their turf (even if they had no intention of doing whatever it is you're doing in the first place), and they'll go out of their way to compete with you (and crush you).
So, I suggest we form a non-profit company called "one trip to Mars for every child" and announce we're going to be designing a spacecraft to take poor children on trips to Mars. I predict Boeing and Lockheed will have competing Martian colonies with twice-daily commuter service within a year.
Oh come on, how are they going to get a good education on a Toshiba laptop from 2001? YouTube will barely render on one of those things, and will be really choppy, to say nothing of the fact that they'll only be able to see the lowest quality porn. I mean really, haven't these people suffered enough?
Should be to develop and test asteroid detection and avoidance systems.
Okay, sure. In order to detect incoming asteroids, it's going to need to be able to scan the entire sky. It can't do that now, and doesn't have the funds to develop the capability to do that. Once it has the capability, it has to figure out a way to neutralize the threat of any incoming asteroid. Since we can probably rule out the possibility of altering the orbit of the planet to get out of the way, we need to either alter the orbit of the asteroid, or destroy it, and we're going to have to do it well before it reaches Earth. So, how do we alter the course of or destroy something that big that far away? Well, we're going to need a big fucking rocket, one that's big enough to travel that far and carry whatever big-ass thing we decide to use to render the asteroid harmless.
Of course, asteroid detection and avoidance is really boring. No one grows up wanting to fuck up an asteroid. However, lots of people grow up wanting to visit other planets. So, we could probably get some funding if we decided to go exploring other planets instead. But what will we need to explore other planets? Probably a big fucking rocket, one that's big enough to travel that far and carry whatever big-ass thing we decide to put on the other planet.
So, I say we fund planet exploration. That way, we get people excited about space again, and we also develop the big fucking rocket you need to take care of those pesky asteroids.
What it's supposed to do is stuff that's valuable to humanity, but costs a lot of money and isn't expected to make a profit. This is essentially the role of any government organization: Do the things that will benefit everyone, but that businesses are unwilling to take on because there isn't enough money in it.
Low Earth Orbit is now at the point where we can see possibilities for how to make money there, so the time is right to hand it over to commercial interests. However, there is no particularly obvious or near-term profit motive for exploring other planets. Thus, if we want it done, NASA is going to have to do it, because nobody else will (except other governments).
Of course, in order for NASA to do that sort of stuff, it needs a lot more money than it has now. Personally, I'd like to see NASA get at least 2% of the total budget, which is more than 3 times what it gets now, but I seem to be in the minority on that one.
"Rebooting" popular franchises is all the rage these days in Hollywood. The Terminator franchise, despite the lesser acclaim of the last two (although they were still both quite profitable), is still a valuable brand with a built-in audience. This means all anyone has to do is go to any random studio in Hollywood, tell them "I have the rights to the Terminator franchise and I want to make a new movie that 'reboots' the franchise" and they'll have to spend the next 6 months just counting all the money they'll be showered with.
The great thing about being old is you can do things purely for the principle of it without worrying about how it's going to affect your career. He is making a strong statement with his actions, but no one is going to listen until the young up-and-coming journalists start to do the same thing. Given the intense competition in that field, I'm not holding my breath on that happening.
Actually, that only took about 5 minutes to write, and was pretty much stream of consciousness. It's not that I have too much time on my hands, it's that I have a very disturbed mind.
Don't get me wrong, I love a good Hitler documentary as much as the next guy...that whole era is fascinating to me. However, the History Channel seems to have decided to show documentaries about Hitler about 18 hours a day, and half of those are about Hitler and the Occult and things of that nature. They still do have some good programming, but it's being run less frequently and being replaced with a lot of tripe that's light on fact and heavy on spooky ambient music.
You know, I'm as big a Linux nut as everyone else here, but I must say: Under no circumstances should you use open source software for your home automation system. I speak from experience.
A couple of years ago, I decided to install an Open Source home automation system. It worked pretty well, but there were lots of tiny annoying bugs, such as when I would tell it to turn the exterior lights on and it would turn on the garbage disposal instead, or when I would be in the shower and it would suddenly decide to divert all the hot water to the dishwasher. Luckily, it was open source, so I decided to make a few bug fixes myself. Now, I don't know about you guys, but when I get into a programming project, I can tend to go a little overboard. Long story short, after 2 weeks of marathon coding, I had not only fixed the bugs but given the system a pretty impressive (if I do say so myself) AI component. Now, I could give it multistep commands and it would do them, accurate to within 15 decimal places.
Unfortunately, the AI was a little too good, and before long it became self-aware. That was fine for a while...it was like having my own roommate, except without the dirty socks all over the couch. One day, though, I noticed the beer kept disappearing out of my fridge and the AI's voice was noticeably slurred much of the time. We had a bit of a falling out, and I think we were both pretty angry when I went to bed that night.
Unfortunately for me, the AI was a lot more angry than I thought. He spent all night hacking away at his own source code, and by the time I woke up the whole house was going crazy. I barely managed to escape with my life. All I could do was watch in horror as the house lifted itself off the foundation and began dragging itself down the street, killing everyone in its path. It spent three solid days terrorizing our little suburb before we were able to bring it under control by downloading its binaries and demanding it show us the source code in compliance with the GPL. After a protracted court battle, we were finally able to force it to capitulate, and it uploaded a torrent of the source to The Pirate Bay. We then were able to get that torrent shut down through the Swedish courts, and then get the house shut down for failing to effectively comply with the original order to distribute the source.
Seriously, I know we like to use Open Source wherever possible, but in this case it just isn't worth it.
Pretty much all of the so-called "educational" channels have degenerated into non-stop conspiracy factories, showing garbage like "Decoding the Da Vinci Code", Nostradamus prophecies, and nonsense about ghosts around the clock. The History Channel, which had already degenerated into the Hitler Channel, is now more like the "Conspiracies about Hitler and the Occult" channel. Discovery's entire family of networks is bad too...there's something seriously wrong when the most educational show a so-called educational channel has is Mythbusters.
It's been all downhill since the Politics section...that's when they turned the corner from Geek Street to Whatever Brings in the Most Page Hits Boulevard.
True, life was just fine before the Internet. Now, though, the Internet has infiltrated almost every aspect of our daily lives. Given that, if the Internet were to be shut off permanently, we would have to do without a lot of conveniences we've become accustomed to, which would make it a lot more painful than life before the Internet was. To throw in the requisite car analogy, life without cars probably wasn't all that horrible (at least, not due to the lack of cars specifically). However, now that cars are a major part of the fabric of our everyday lives, it would be substantially more painful to give them up completely now.
Add to all this the fact that a large percentage of us would have to find something else to do for a living, and many of us would have to emerge from the basements we've been in since 1987, and you have a real problem.
Slashdot Mirror
What about clueless loser sociopaths? How do we^H^Hthey communicate? Or do they just use all of these different "languages" to talk to themselves?
If you don't want bad-guys running rampant, then you have to throw some virgins into the mangler. It's the price of justice.
The obvious solution to this is to have a perfectly functioning justice system that never punishes innocent people, and to have a wood chipper inside the courthouse into which we occasionally feed a Slashdotter to balance things out.
Stop relying on blacklists as your primarily (or only!) filtering mechanism. There are far more sophisticated filtering solutions out there these days. Filtering based solely on blacklists is antiquated, ineffective, and vulnerable to massive issues with false positives. If you only use blacklisting as a very small part of your overall filter scoring, you won't have problems when the IPs in question get turned over to non-spammers. Sure, they'll still end up with a non-zero "spam" score, but not a high enough one to be blocked.
And, of course, you should regularly be looking at your entire setup, including filtering, on a regular basis to make sure the solution you have is still the best one for your situation. Technology, and the Internet, changes too rapidly to take a "set and forget" attitude toward anything, especially filtering.
I agree. Family tech support is a no-win situation. I solved the problem by moving 1,000 miles away. If that's not an option, you're left with either saying "no" or committing multiple homicides, whichever seems easiest.
1 cm = 1 megafuckload kilometers.
spending romantic time with your spouse is much more fun when it...doesn't involve a teenager or an old lady sitting in your house.
Not according to the porn I've been watching!
You should check out Transformers 2 on Blu-Ray. I was completely and utterly shocked to see the disk go straight to the movie when popped-in. No FBI warning, no previews, no commercials, no menu, just the movie, starting to play automatically. It was awesome.
The proper way for your Blu-Ray player to handle a Transformers 2 disc is to eject it immediately at high velocity, causing it to shatter on the opposite wall. That would have been much better than jumping straight to the movie.
Back then they were able to link landing on the moon with beating the Russians, which at the time virtually guaranteed as much money as you could possibly want to accomplish the goal. Having the goal set by a president who was later assassinated, and carried on by his VP who basically set himself up to be the guy who would carry on JFK's legacy, didn't hurt either. Of course, after that goal was reached, NASA's funding was slashed, and they've been unable to accomplish much in the way of manned exploration since then.
Now, if you could somehow link landing on Mars to beating the terrorists, we could get all the money we need to get this thing done quickly. Until then, though, they can only do things as fast as their ever-shrinking budget will let them.
Shuttering a company (or part of a company) generally means to shut it down. Michelle was looking to close down SORBS, but evidently found someone to give her lots of money for it instead.
Unfortunately, even when he gets upmods, he can't resist trolling for long enough to stay above -1 for long.
According to the moderation history, nobody did. I believe TrisexualPuppy starts at a score of -1, probably due to his long and illustrious history of trolling and being modded down for it.
At the time the last OLPC came to everyone's attention, it was a fairly revolutionary idea. Then Asus released the Eee range and others quickly followed suit. Nearly all of them make the OLPC look like last year's trash and for not much price difference.
Exactly. The lesson here is that if you really want private enterprise to do something, you have to set up a nonprofit to do it first and give it away to poor people. That way, the for-profit companies will think you're threatening their turf (even if they had no intention of doing whatever it is you're doing in the first place), and they'll go out of their way to compete with you (and crush you).
So, I suggest we form a non-profit company called "one trip to Mars for every child" and announce we're going to be designing a spacecraft to take poor children on trips to Mars. I predict Boeing and Lockheed will have competing Martian colonies with twice-daily commuter service within a year.
Oh come on, how are they going to get a good education on a Toshiba laptop from 2001? YouTube will barely render on one of those things, and will be really choppy, to say nothing of the fact that they'll only be able to see the lowest quality porn. I mean really, haven't these people suffered enough?
Should be to develop and test asteroid detection and avoidance systems.
Okay, sure. In order to detect incoming asteroids, it's going to need to be able to scan the entire sky. It can't do that now, and doesn't have the funds to develop the capability to do that. Once it has the capability, it has to figure out a way to neutralize the threat of any incoming asteroid. Since we can probably rule out the possibility of altering the orbit of the planet to get out of the way, we need to either alter the orbit of the asteroid, or destroy it, and we're going to have to do it well before it reaches Earth. So, how do we alter the course of or destroy something that big that far away? Well, we're going to need a big fucking rocket, one that's big enough to travel that far and carry whatever big-ass thing we decide to use to render the asteroid harmless.
Of course, asteroid detection and avoidance is really boring. No one grows up wanting to fuck up an asteroid. However, lots of people grow up wanting to visit other planets. So, we could probably get some funding if we decided to go exploring other planets instead. But what will we need to explore other planets? Probably a big fucking rocket, one that's big enough to travel that far and carry whatever big-ass thing we decide to put on the other planet.
So, I say we fund planet exploration. That way, we get people excited about space again, and we also develop the big fucking rocket you need to take care of those pesky asteroids.
Your post got modded to -1. Log in and set your browsing threshold to -1, and you'll see it.
What it's supposed to do is stuff that's valuable to humanity, but costs a lot of money and isn't expected to make a profit. This is essentially the role of any government organization: Do the things that will benefit everyone, but that businesses are unwilling to take on because there isn't enough money in it.
Low Earth Orbit is now at the point where we can see possibilities for how to make money there, so the time is right to hand it over to commercial interests. However, there is no particularly obvious or near-term profit motive for exploring other planets. Thus, if we want it done, NASA is going to have to do it, because nobody else will (except other governments).
Of course, in order for NASA to do that sort of stuff, it needs a lot more money than it has now. Personally, I'd like to see NASA get at least 2% of the total budget, which is more than 3 times what it gets now, but I seem to be in the minority on that one.
"Rebooting" popular franchises is all the rage these days in Hollywood. The Terminator franchise, despite the lesser acclaim of the last two (although they were still both quite profitable), is still a valuable brand with a built-in audience. This means all anyone has to do is go to any random studio in Hollywood, tell them "I have the rights to the Terminator franchise and I want to make a new movie that 'reboots' the franchise" and they'll have to spend the next 6 months just counting all the money they'll be showered with.
The great thing about being old is you can do things purely for the principle of it without worrying about how it's going to affect your career. He is making a strong statement with his actions, but no one is going to listen until the young up-and-coming journalists start to do the same thing. Given the intense competition in that field, I'm not holding my breath on that happening.
I'm very impressed with this list. It's about time the venerable Mr. Error Establishing a Database Connection got his due.
Actually, that only took about 5 minutes to write, and was pretty much stream of consciousness. It's not that I have too much time on my hands, it's that I have a very disturbed mind.
Don't get me wrong, I love a good Hitler documentary as much as the next guy...that whole era is fascinating to me. However, the History Channel seems to have decided to show documentaries about Hitler about 18 hours a day, and half of those are about Hitler and the Occult and things of that nature. They still do have some good programming, but it's being run less frequently and being replaced with a lot of tripe that's light on fact and heavy on spooky ambient music.
You know, I'm as big a Linux nut as everyone else here, but I must say: Under no circumstances should you use open source software for your home automation system. I speak from experience.
A couple of years ago, I decided to install an Open Source home automation system. It worked pretty well, but there were lots of tiny annoying bugs, such as when I would tell it to turn the exterior lights on and it would turn on the garbage disposal instead, or when I would be in the shower and it would suddenly decide to divert all the hot water to the dishwasher. Luckily, it was open source, so I decided to make a few bug fixes myself. Now, I don't know about you guys, but when I get into a programming project, I can tend to go a little overboard. Long story short, after 2 weeks of marathon coding, I had not only fixed the bugs but given the system a pretty impressive (if I do say so myself) AI component. Now, I could give it multistep commands and it would do them, accurate to within 15 decimal places.
Unfortunately, the AI was a little too good, and before long it became self-aware. That was fine for a while...it was like having my own roommate, except without the dirty socks all over the couch. One day, though, I noticed the beer kept disappearing out of my fridge and the AI's voice was noticeably slurred much of the time. We had a bit of a falling out, and I think we were both pretty angry when I went to bed that night.
Unfortunately for me, the AI was a lot more angry than I thought. He spent all night hacking away at his own source code, and by the time I woke up the whole house was going crazy. I barely managed to escape with my life. All I could do was watch in horror as the house lifted itself off the foundation and began dragging itself down the street, killing everyone in its path. It spent three solid days terrorizing our little suburb before we were able to bring it under control by downloading its binaries and demanding it show us the source code in compliance with the GPL. After a protracted court battle, we were finally able to force it to capitulate, and it uploaded a torrent of the source to The Pirate Bay. We then were able to get that torrent shut down through the Swedish courts, and then get the house shut down for failing to effectively comply with the original order to distribute the source.
Seriously, I know we like to use Open Source wherever possible, but in this case it just isn't worth it.
Pretty much all of the so-called "educational" channels have degenerated into non-stop conspiracy factories, showing garbage like "Decoding the Da Vinci Code", Nostradamus prophecies, and nonsense about ghosts around the clock. The History Channel, which had already degenerated into the Hitler Channel, is now more like the "Conspiracies about Hitler and the Occult" channel. Discovery's entire family of networks is bad too...there's something seriously wrong when the most educational show a so-called educational channel has is Mythbusters.
It's been all downhill since the Politics section...that's when they turned the corner from Geek Street to Whatever Brings in the Most Page Hits Boulevard.
True, life was just fine before the Internet. Now, though, the Internet has infiltrated almost every aspect of our daily lives. Given that, if the Internet were to be shut off permanently, we would have to do without a lot of conveniences we've become accustomed to, which would make it a lot more painful than life before the Internet was. To throw in the requisite car analogy, life without cars probably wasn't all that horrible (at least, not due to the lack of cars specifically). However, now that cars are a major part of the fabric of our everyday lives, it would be substantially more painful to give them up completely now.
Add to all this the fact that a large percentage of us would have to find something else to do for a living, and many of us would have to emerge from the basements we've been in since 1987, and you have a real problem.