Not only didn't I find out that, but it looks like my first guess at his location was a fair way off. But from Saib0t's summary, it sounds like he just has cigarettes for breakfast. Mmm, delicious and healthy:).
Re:Funny, with the presumed intelligence level...
on
Interview with a Botmaster
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
How many of you actually completed reading the article?
Er, well, I did. I don't know why anyone who started reading the article wouldn't finish it. It's not long and it's quite well-written and interesting.
but it seems nobody has read near the end of the article where he talks of coming to realize that what he's doing can't last forever, and isn't really all that great, and that he is actually looking at making something of himself [...]
Yeah, I read that bit too. And just like most of the other people reading, I went "Yeah, right." If he does try to join the army, he'll keep his botnet income going right up until he leaves for basic training. Talk (about wanting to stop) is cheap. About all this section did is make me realise that he wasn't a complete sociopath, and might have some potential of being a decent guy one day.
Tell you what, 0x80, if you're reading - a great first step would be to remove all the spyware/adware from the machines you've broken into, and then patch the buggers for the hole you used to get in. Or at the very fucking least change the user's default login background to leave a brief apology message and tell them to get their system wiped and reinstalled (with Windows Update auto-enabled).
Anything less is just worthless talk.
The knowledge he has now and uses to do bad could just as easily be used to do good, and be every bit as lucrative and exciting for him.
...What "knowledge"? Some minor scripting and (possibly) Windows/C programming experience? I'm sure he knows enough to be useful in a generic PC/networking support job, but he's going to have trouble doing more than that with no real IT work experience, no college degree and (apparently) without even having graduated from highschool.
Maybe if someone at the state level got pissy about computer crime. [shrug]
Well, I think there's a couple of approaches you could take. First, from the story:
Just a few months ago, FBI agents arrested a 20-year-old from Southern California for installing adware on a botnet of more than 400,000 hacked computers.
Perhaps try to contact someone at the FBI? Don't they have a computer-crime-specific department yet? If you could track down the top agent that dealt with the above guy, you might at least get a pointer to the right place to call. Second, also from the story:
0x80 has also found credentials for thousands of e-mail accounts, including dozens at ".mil" and ".gov" (U.S. military and government) addresses.
Hmm. Access to thousands of government and military email accounts. Hello, Department of Homeland "Security"? Sounds like getting this dude would be about as useful as anything else they've ever done.:-)
Okay, after a double-check I think I stuffed it up. Second try - I think Cheyenne Gentlemen's Club is the strip club, LP Bottle Express is the gas/convenience store (which didn't show up when I searched for "gas station", but did for just "gas" - and the name sounds like a convenience store), and Blue Ribbon Chevrolet is the used-car place.
If so, he'd be located about here. Just about halfway between the strip club and gas station on one side, and the used-car place on the other.
I think this fits much better than my previous attempt - which was way closer to Muldrow than Roland, and too close to a "Main" street that'd have lots of other businesses.
BTW, it doesn't look like it was his family that were AOL customers, but his friend a couple of houses away:
"This buddy of mine who lived two houses down from me had a computer before I did. He was always on AOL, but he also always had trouble figuring out how to do stuff, so I'd just go on all the time and figure it out for him."
The guy really wants to get caught if he leaves that much information be published...
It's not too surprising in some ways - I suspect the journalist behind the story didn't think anything of including a few splashes of what he thought to be completely generic local colour (eg. by mentioning the nearby businesses). But it all starts caving in around that one huge mistake of revealing the town in the image metatags.
If it wasn't such a small town, it might still be too difficult to find the guy. But with the above info, as you say, even a dedicated ordinary person should be able to find him with a bit of detective work. The police of course would find him much faster - if they could be motivated to look:-).
And who knows? The journalist could have dropped in a few bits of irrelevant bullshit just in case, to mislead any pissed-off geek detectives:). I have no idea how to guess if that's likely or not. The only thing I'm pretty damn sure about is that the 0x80 guy would have talked up his age a year or two to make himself 21.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm having trouble imagining a kid spending three (or more, depending on when exactly he dropped out of school) years living with his parents in a tiny little town like that, doing nothing more than IRCing and script kiddie "work". One or two, sure. Three or more... hm. How fucking depressing.
Am I to understand that you are saying the movie industry would order the assassinations of authors whose works they wish to adapt to the movie screen? Because I think that's what I'm hearing.
Yes, that's what I'm saying could happen. And it could - people get killed over much, much smaller amounts of money. And in a case like this, where you may have rather valuable intellectual property that immediately becomes free for all to use when the IP owner dies... Seriously, how could that not be a motive to kill?
Note that I'm not trying to suggest it'd be widespread, that everywhere authors and musicians and computer programmers would be slaughtered in order to "free" their intellectual property (although that is kind of an amusing image:)) - I'm just trying to point out that it'd be a fairly good motive to kill someone. And sometimes that motive might result in action.
I didn't say protection for the life of the author was automatic, I said it was a limit. As in, upper bound. 28 years could be longer than the life of the author, in which case it is too long. I suppose there is a disincentive to older authors against creating new works, but as they say, you can't take it with you.
No, but in most cases you can leave it to your family. Or your friends. Or a charity. Or whatever.
The low fixed-term is the right idea, I think. But a creator's family shouldn't lose her/his rights to earn income from her/his work just because (as with the above example) some bastard decided to kill her/him. Or indeed if the creator died unexpectedly for any other reason.
He lives with his folks in a small town in Middle America. The nearest businesses are a used-car lot, a gas station/convenience store and a strip club, where 0x80 says he recently dropped $800 for an hour alone in a VIP room with several dancers.
Gee, I wonder if we can find any user-car lots, gas stations or strip clubs in Roland, OK? Hmmm....
And ya know what I reckon? I reckon the asshole's house is probably right about here. Given the businesses described above, I'm guessing somewhere very close to the intersection of Broadway and South Main St.
He's described in the article as 21, which might be a decent starting point. Anyone in the vicinity feel like going through the local highschool's yearbook for the guy? Note that, as the story helpfully mentioned, he's a highschool dropout, so that might even make it even easier.
The solution is quite simple, but would destroy the profit-making power of entire industries so it will never happen. Make copyright unalienable. Make it so you can't sell your copyright. Make it so only the author(s) of a work can own the work. The incentive that copyright is supposed to provide exists only in primary creators, not in third parties looking to make a dollar.
That's kind of an interesting idea - but I think what would happen is that the creator would (much as happens at the moment) end up signing legal contracts with a publisher (or music label, or whatever) allowing only that publisher to sell the work for a given period of time. So effectively it'd stay much as today - just prevent some of the more egregious abuses of some industries (most notably the music industry).
But your other suggestion:
A natural consequence is to limit copyright terms to the lifetime of the authors.
The natural consequence of such a thing is that if, for example, an author (eg. JK Rowling) is negotiating with a film studio for rights to produce films based on her work.... and the studio decides she just wants too damn much... I'm sure "accidents" would end up happening.
There shouldn't be any link to term of life. The average length of life for younger people living today is likely to be significantly higher than previous generations, which'll help even more to distort copyright protection. As several have already mentioned, the original fixed 28-year(?) term should be way more than sufficient for the overwhelming majority of works.
Lessig's idea of a renewable copyright works pretty well, I think. Those who want to pay to maintain copyright protection for their still-valuable works can do so - but those who just don't care anymore (or at least don't care enough to pay the fee) can let copyright protection lapse.
If Apple want to put some ridiculous EULA in their shrink-wrapped software, fine.
Expect me to laugh at it while I do whatever the hell I please with my purchase in the privacy of my own home.
To which daveschroeder responded:
Ok, humor me, here: so, you should be able to install it on as many machines as you wish, too? Say, 10? 100? If not, why not?
The point appeared to be that unreasonable conditions in a so-called "end-user license agreement" that the purchaser can't easily review before purchasing (because it's inside the shrinkwrap) should be entirely unenforceable.
With respect to your specific comment re: "installing on as many machines as you want" - that would not be legal due to copyright law - the EULA has nothing to do with it. The license agreement on a piece of software can make it legal for you to freely install and/or duplicate the software (eg. the GPL), but if you ignore the EULA then copyright by default means that you're not allowed to "copy" (given a whole raft of special conditions, eg. fair use). In some cases you may find that ignoring the Apple OSX EULA means you lose the legal right to install on up to five(?) other "family" computers (note, I'm not an OS X user myself - I've just heard some friends making reference to something like this) - so ignoring the EULA may even have some disadvantages.
Someone who feels justified in ignoring unreasonable conditions in an EULA (remember again that they weren't able to review the EULA and thus make an informed decision before purchasing the product) will not necessarily feel justified in ignoring copyright law.
There are many other issues with shrinkwrap EULAs (and of course copyright in general), but I'll leave them to the philosophers.:)
I've just realised that I was missing one of the sort-of vital components - the URI id extension.
This enables you put stuff like body#www-google-com {
background-color: #ddf !important;
} in the userContent.css file and have it apply only to www.google.com.
And there seems to be an even better alternative built in for Firefox 1.5 and recent Mozillas. Though I haven't had a chance to try this out yet, it looks good.
You can actually solve that problem yourself in a browser that permits user stylesheets. For example, in Firefox, add something like:
div.intro i {
font-style: normal !important;
color: #aabbff !important;
}
to your ~/.mozilla/firefox/$PROFILE_DIR/chrome/userContent .css file (create it if it's not already there), restart Firefox and browse to Slashdot. Presto, no more italics - and the formerly italicised text is now an annoying light blue colour.:)
There's almost certainly a lot of better ways to do this. That's just one quick example.
You already have a team of editors. Are you saying they are actually incapable of communicating in English?
No, he's not. But it is actually quite an effort for many (most?) people to improve their grammar, and it takes time - and if you don't regularly reinforce those lessons by reading read high-quality English text, that effort may be wasted. In terms of cost-efficiency, it makes much more sense to outsource this part of the process.
You could say that correct English is not a Slashdot core competency.:)
It's not that I disrespect the readers who consider grammar to equal quality.
You may not mean to disrespect the readers, but you are. Especially when you insinuate that those of us complaining about Slashdot spelling/grammar are equating that with quality.
Bad spelling/grammar detracts from the quality. It detracts from the readability, it detracts from the humour (if any), it detracts from the friendliness, it detracts from the tone, it detracts from the content. Those other slices of the quality cake still stand on their own merits - they just tend to get obscured by the bad spelling and grammar.:-/
It's also misleading of you to equate poor spelling/grammar with "Slashdot-style". It's also a bit FUD-ish to think that the feel of Slashdot will change for the worse if the stories are edited for spelling and grammar. It's understandable in a way, but you may be just a little too paranoid on this point.
If nothing else, it might reduce the amount of (occasionally) entertaining bitching that goes on in the comments of a particularly badly written story. But I think that's an acceptable loss - and anyway, we'd still have the dupes to bitch about.:)
Go on. Give it a go. Get a full-time proofreader. It'll be great. You can trust me, I have only four digits and I use my real name.:)
I have personally met people not only with extremely poor communication and literacy skills, but fairly odious personal habits too, but they have proven to be incredibly wise and inciteful in spite of their personal flaws.
As long as they don't incite a riot with their incitefulness, I guess.
Phew, I'm glad there was no chance of me misreading you there.:-)
You actually have to stop and re-read the sentence to understand it?
I'm not the OP, but I completely agree with his/her point. And very often I do need to "stop and re-read the sentence" to be sure I've parsed what is meant rather than what is written.
It isn't even just bad spelling/grammar that causes the problem, though that's certainly a large part. It's that a lot of people just express themselves badly in written form (and probably the same people express themselves badly in spoken form too, but then they can also use body language, which helps a lot).
People misspell lose as loose (and you're as your and it's as its and to as too, and so on) often enough that if you can't tell what somebody means by the context, I can only shake my head at you.
Speaking for my fellow wincers here (hopefully they won't mind:-)) - it's not that we can't. It's that it trips up the reading "flow". And it's like a stone in your shoe - tiny but irritating. And when there's a lot of them, it's difficult to even maintain your footing. Just try to imagine walking (or indeed running) with your shoes full of loose pebbles.
Heh. I like that analogy. I should write that down somewhere.:)
Note as well that we probably all read faster than you, even taking into account our sentence rereading and re-parsing.:)
Given that those words are homonyms, how are you able to tell what people mean when they speak to you out loud?
The answer to this question should be so overwhelmingly obvious that I'm not sure why you're even asking it. But I'll answer anyway - it's that you get more information in text than you do in speech. It's not unusual to run into ambiguities in spoken language (which a listener may have to interrupt to clarify, eg. "sorry, did you mean.... or...?") that simply don't happen in written.
And because you get more information, it's more of a setback when you get information that doesn't fit the context - or worse, information that does fit the context and does parse as valid English, but doesn't mean what the writer meant it to mean.
[...] but I've rarely misunderstood anyone -- certainly not to the point of having to stop and manually parse a sentence [...]
You may have misunderstood what the OP meant by rereading/re-parsing. It's not stopping and drawing up a parse tree on a whiteboard and going "Hmmm... which of the options is more likely?... Hmm....":) As I suggested above, for most of us this process probably happens much faster than an average person can read. And usually it doesn't lead to misunderstanding, because it's usually possible to understand what is (probably) meant from the context. But it's fucking irritating that we have to do the work for the lazy/incompetent writer. Especially when there's likely to be a lot more of us reading than there are writing.
To use another analogy, imagine how irritating it'd be having to breathe through an extremely narrow straw rather than as normal. This is what bad writing does - it forces the reader (assuming they want to keep reading) to work much harder than they need to. And that can be really annoying.
It's really quite funny that Taco gives us advice about writing effectively and, for example, giving direct URLs to a problem:
It takes you 3 seconds to cut and paste a URL. It might take me 3 minutes to find the content in question if you don't. That doesn't sound like much, but if it happens a couple dozen times, it adds up really fast.
But apparently it's okay to not fix bad English. That surely doesn't waste the reading time of any of Slashdot's however-many-millions of readers.</sarcasm>
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on that point. I'd consider the government's policies at the time to be a direct cause of the mass starvation, so they should be added to the tally of those dead due to Chinese government actions.
It's kind of depressing that that death tally was so much higher than for China's invasions of Tibet and Vietnam. But, well, China has a lot of people to kill.
You silly opt-in would be pointless, since they don't collect the information, let alone pass it on.
Did you even bother to read the link I supplied? The information is being passed on, and to a marketing company. And what else would such a company do with the information other than collect it?
I think you can look at any time period you like within the last 200 years. It can be during the Qing dynasty and the US war against the Cherokee, during the boxer rebellions and the mining towns slaughters, during the cultural revolution and the Vietnam war, or it can be right now. In just about any case it is the US government doing more killing and yet somehow the US press is quite self-righteous about it all.
Gee. Any time period within the last 200 years? Can it be from 1959 to 1962? *eyeroll*
Or if you prefer, the invasion and occupation of Tibet?
On an unrelated issue, China's punishment systems, while brutal, are effective.
And you know this because...? Hang on, let me guess. Chinese government statistics?
You list bad examples - reasons you want your information private. And they are valid. But consider medical emergencies. I'm allergic to morphine, but I have no PCP right now. If I were injured and taken to a hospital and they were able to scan my fingerprints and access my medical records they would know not to give me morphine. As it is - they're going to have to find out the hard way I'm allergic.
Or, just like most sane people with an allergy or other medical condition that could be an issue in an emergency, you wear a medic alert bracelet that says ALLERGIC TO $WHATEVER.
No need for fingerprint scanning and medical records access. And especially no need to solve a problem that's already been solved. *wry grin*
Regarding the rest, you seem to have the idea that there's no middle ground - if you can't have total privacy then you might as well have zero privacy. This is simply not true.
You don't mind Apple taking this information (and passing it on to a Utah-based company called Omniture, Inc.) without asking your permission. Others, however, do. Hey, a lot of guys probably wouldn't mind an attractive woman appearing out of nowhere to give them a blowjob (without asking permission) - but that's not good enough to presume it's okay for all guys.
Apple should require the user to explicitly opt-in, that's all. "Do you mind having information about your music passed on to some unknown Utah market research company, when there's absolutely no benefit for you in you doing so?"
According to Amnesty International's annual report on official judicial execution, in 2004 there were 3,797 executions in 25 countries. Nine of every ten executions took place in the People's Republic of China (PRC) which carried out at least 3,400 executions.
Or were you trying to be clever and (for example) add the approximate tally of Iraq-invasion deaths to the USA's scoreboard?
Seriously, the USA has a pretty corrupt and evil government. But China's government is, by any reasonable comparison, worse.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Not only didn't I find out that, but it looks like my first guess at his location was a fair way off. But from Saib0t's summary, it sounds like he just has cigarettes for breakfast. Mmm, delicious and healthy :).
Er, well, I did. I don't know why anyone who started reading the article wouldn't finish it. It's not long and it's quite well-written and interesting.
Yeah, I read that bit too. And just like most of the other people reading, I went "Yeah, right." If he does try to join the army, he'll keep his botnet income going right up until he leaves for basic training. Talk (about wanting to stop) is cheap. About all this section did is make me realise that he wasn't a complete sociopath, and might have some potential of being a decent guy one day.
Tell you what, 0x80, if you're reading - a great first step would be to remove all the spyware/adware from the machines you've broken into, and then patch the buggers for the hole you used to get in. Or at the very fucking least change the user's default login background to leave a brief apology message and tell them to get their system wiped and reinstalled (with Windows Update auto-enabled).
Anything less is just worthless talk.
Well, I think there's a couple of approaches you could take. First, from the story:
Perhaps try to contact someone at the FBI? Don't they have a computer-crime-specific department yet? If you could track down the top agent that dealt with the above guy, you might at least get a pointer to the right place to call. Second, also from the story:
Hmm. Access to thousands of government and military email accounts. Hello, Department of Homeland "Security"? Sounds like getting this dude would be about as useful as anything else they've ever done. :-)
Okay, after a double-check I think I stuffed it up. Second try - I think Cheyenne Gentlemen's Club is the strip club, LP Bottle Express is the gas/convenience store (which didn't show up when I searched for "gas station", but did for just "gas" - and the name sounds like a convenience store), and Blue Ribbon Chevrolet is the used-car place.
If so, he'd be located about here . Just about halfway between the strip club and gas station on one side, and the used-car place on the other.
I think this fits much better than my previous attempt - which was way closer to Muldrow than Roland, and too close to a "Main" street that'd have lots of other businesses.
BTW, it doesn't look like it was his family that were AOL customers, but his friend a couple of houses away:
It's not too surprising in some ways - I suspect the journalist behind the story didn't think anything of including a few splashes of what he thought to be completely generic local colour (eg. by mentioning the nearby businesses). But it all starts caving in around that one huge mistake of revealing the town in the image metatags.
If it wasn't such a small town, it might still be too difficult to find the guy. But with the above info, as you say, even a dedicated ordinary person should be able to find him with a bit of detective work. The police of course would find him much faster - if they could be motivated to look :-).
And who knows? The journalist could have dropped in a few bits of irrelevant bullshit just in case, to mislead any pissed-off geek detectives :). I have no idea how to guess if that's likely or not. The only thing I'm pretty damn sure about is that the 0x80 guy would have talked up his age a year or two to make himself 21.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm having trouble imagining a kid spending three (or more, depending on when exactly he dropped out of school) years living with his parents in a tiny little town like that, doing nothing more than IRCing and script kiddie "work". One or two, sure. Three or more... hm. How fucking depressing.
Yes, that's what I'm saying could happen. And it could - people get killed over much, much smaller amounts of money. And in a case like this, where you may have rather valuable intellectual property that immediately becomes free for all to use when the IP owner dies... Seriously, how could that not be a motive to kill?
Note that I'm not trying to suggest it'd be widespread, that everywhere authors and musicians and computer programmers would be slaughtered in order to "free" their intellectual property (although that is kind of an amusing image :)) - I'm just trying to point out that it'd be a fairly good motive to kill someone. And sometimes that motive might result in action.
No, but in most cases you can leave it to your family. Or your friends. Or a charity. Or whatever.
The low fixed-term is the right idea, I think. But a creator's family shouldn't lose her/his rights to earn income from her/his work just because (as with the above example) some bastard decided to kill her/him. Or indeed if the creator died unexpectedly for any other reason.
1u3hr:
Not that anyone on slashdot really needs this, but here's the town on Google Maps.
From the story:
Gee, I wonder if we can find any user-car lots, gas stations or strip clubs in Roland, OK? Hmmm....
Well, here's the strip clubs and here's the used-car lots and here's the gas stations.
And ya know what I reckon? I reckon the asshole's house is probably right about here . Given the businesses described above, I'm guessing somewhere very close to the intersection of Broadway and South Main St.
He's described in the article as 21, which might be a decent starting point. Anyone in the vicinity feel like going through the local highschool's yearbook for the guy? Note that, as the story helpfully mentioned, he's a highschool dropout, so that might even make it even easier.
That's kind of an interesting idea - but I think what would happen is that the creator would (much as happens at the moment) end up signing legal contracts with a publisher (or music label, or whatever) allowing only that publisher to sell the work for a given period of time. So effectively it'd stay much as today - just prevent some of the more egregious abuses of some industries (most notably the music industry).
But your other suggestion:
The natural consequence of such a thing is that if, for example, an author (eg. JK Rowling) is negotiating with a film studio for rights to produce films based on her work.... and the studio decides she just wants too damn much... I'm sure "accidents" would end up happening.
There shouldn't be any link to term of life. The average length of life for younger people living today is likely to be significantly higher than previous generations, which'll help even more to distort copyright protection. As several have already mentioned, the original fixed 28-year(?) term should be way more than sufficient for the overwhelming majority of works.
Lessig's idea of a renewable copyright works pretty well, I think. Those who want to pay to maintain copyright protection for their still-valuable works can do so - but those who just don't care anymore (or at least don't care enough to pay the fee) can let copyright protection lapse.
To which daveschroeder responded:
The point appeared to be that unreasonable conditions in a so-called "end-user license agreement" that the purchaser can't easily review before purchasing (because it's inside the shrinkwrap) should be entirely unenforceable.
With respect to your specific comment re: "installing on as many machines as you want" - that would not be legal due to copyright law - the EULA has nothing to do with it. The license agreement on a piece of software can make it legal for you to freely install and/or duplicate the software (eg. the GPL), but if you ignore the EULA then copyright by default means that you're not allowed to "copy" (given a whole raft of special conditions, eg. fair use). In some cases you may find that ignoring the Apple OSX EULA means you lose the legal right to install on up to five(?) other "family" computers (note, I'm not an OS X user myself - I've just heard some friends making reference to something like this) - so ignoring the EULA may even have some disadvantages.
Someone who feels justified in ignoring unreasonable conditions in an EULA (remember again that they weren't able to review the EULA and thus make an informed decision before purchasing the product) will not necessarily feel justified in ignoring copyright law.
There are many other issues with shrinkwrap EULAs (and of course copyright in general), but I'll leave them to the philosophers. :)
I've just realised that I was missing one of the sort-of vital components - the URI id extension. This enables you put stuff like body#www-google-com { background-color: #ddf !important; } in the userContent.css file and have it apply only to www.google.com.
And there seems to be an even better alternative built in for Firefox 1.5 and recent Mozillas. Though I haven't had a chance to try this out yet, it looks good.
You can actually solve that problem yourself in a browser that permits user stylesheets. For example, in Firefox, add something like:
div.intro i { font-style: normal !important; color: #aabbff !important; }to your ~/.mozilla/firefox/$PROFILE_DIR/chrome/userContent .css file (create it if it's not already there), restart Firefox and browse to Slashdot. Presto, no more italics - and the formerly italicised text is now an annoying light blue colour. :)
There's almost certainly a lot of better ways to do this. That's just one quick example.
*standing ovation while rotfling*
Thank you for that :). If I could mod you up more, I would.
No, he's not. But it is actually quite an effort for many (most?) people to improve their grammar, and it takes time - and if you don't regularly reinforce those lessons by reading read high-quality English text, that effort may be wasted. In terms of cost-efficiency, it makes much more sense to outsource this part of the process.
You could say that correct English is not a Slashdot core competency. :)
You may not mean to disrespect the readers, but you are. Especially when you insinuate that those of us complaining about Slashdot spelling/grammar are equating that with quality.
Bad spelling/grammar detracts from the quality. It detracts from the readability, it detracts from the humour (if any), it detracts from the friendliness, it detracts from the tone, it detracts from the content. Those other slices of the quality cake still stand on their own merits - they just tend to get obscured by the bad spelling and grammar. :-/
It's also misleading of you to equate poor spelling/grammar with "Slashdot-style". It's also a bit FUD-ish to think that the feel of Slashdot will change for the worse if the stories are edited for spelling and grammar. It's understandable in a way, but you may be just a little too paranoid on this point.
If nothing else, it might reduce the amount of (occasionally) entertaining bitching that goes on in the comments of a particularly badly written story. But I think that's an acceptable loss - and anyway, we'd still have the dupes to bitch about. :)
Go on. Give it a go. Get a full-time proofreader. It'll be great. You can trust me, I have only four digits and I use my real name. :)
As long as they don't incite a riot with their incitefulness, I guess.
Phew, I'm glad there was no chance of me misreading you there. :-)
Dammit, the parent post needs another couple of Funny (because it's true) mods. :-)
I'm not the OP, but I completely agree with his/her point. And very often I do need to "stop and re-read the sentence" to be sure I've parsed what is meant rather than what is written.
It isn't even just bad spelling/grammar that causes the problem, though that's certainly a large part. It's that a lot of people just express themselves badly in written form (and probably the same people express themselves badly in spoken form too, but then they can also use body language, which helps a lot).
Speaking for my fellow wincers here (hopefully they won't mind :-)) - it's not that we can't. It's that it trips up the reading "flow". And it's like a stone in your shoe - tiny but irritating. And when there's a lot of them, it's difficult to even maintain your footing. Just try to imagine walking (or indeed running) with your shoes full of loose pebbles.
Heh. I like that analogy. I should write that down somewhere. :)
Note as well that we probably all read faster than you, even taking into account our sentence rereading and re-parsing. :)
The answer to this question should be so overwhelmingly obvious that I'm not sure why you're even asking it. But I'll answer anyway - it's that you get more information in text than you do in speech. It's not unusual to run into ambiguities in spoken language (which a listener may have to interrupt to clarify, eg. "sorry, did you mean.... or ...?") that simply don't happen in written.
And because you get more information, it's more of a setback when you get information that doesn't fit the context - or worse, information that does fit the context and does parse as valid English, but doesn't mean what the writer meant it to mean.
You may have misunderstood what the OP meant by rereading/re-parsing. It's not stopping and drawing up a parse tree on a whiteboard and going "Hmmm... which of the options is more likely?... Hmm...." :) As I suggested above, for most of us this process probably happens much faster than an average person can read. And usually it doesn't lead to misunderstanding, because it's usually possible to understand what is (probably) meant from the context. But it's fucking irritating that we have to do the work for the lazy/incompetent writer. Especially when there's likely to be a lot more of us reading than there are writing.
To use another analogy, imagine how irritating it'd be having to breathe through an extremely narrow straw rather than as normal. This is what bad writing does - it forces the reader (assuming they want to keep reading) to work much harder than they need to. And that can be really annoying.
It's really quite funny that Taco gives us advice about writing effectively and, for example, giving direct URLs to a problem:
But apparently it's okay to not fix bad English. That surely doesn't waste the reading time of any of Slashdot's however-many-millions of readers.</sarcasm>
It's kind of depressing that that death tally was so much higher than for China's invasions of Tibet and Vietnam. But, well, China has a lot of people to kill.
I was meaning the so-called Great Leap Forward. For which China apparently killed somewhere between 25-60 million of its own people.
The US at its most bloodthirsty would have trouble beating that.
Did you even bother to read the link I supplied? The information is being passed on, and to a marketing company. And what else would such a company do with the information other than collect it?
Gee. Any time period within the last 200 years? Can it be from 1959 to 1962? *eyeroll*
Or if you prefer, the invasion and occupation of Tibet?
And you know this because...? Hang on, let me guess. Chinese government statistics?
Or, just like most sane people with an allergy or other medical condition that could be an issue in an emergency, you wear a medic alert bracelet that says ALLERGIC TO $WHATEVER.
No need for fingerprint scanning and medical records access. And especially no need to solve a problem that's already been solved. *wry grin*
Regarding the rest, you seem to have the idea that there's no middle ground - if you can't have total privacy then you might as well have zero privacy. This is simply not true.
You don't mind Apple taking this information (and passing it on to a Utah-based company called Omniture, Inc.) without asking your permission. Others, however, do. Hey, a lot of guys probably wouldn't mind an attractive woman appearing out of nowhere to give them a blowjob (without asking permission) - but that's not good enough to presume it's okay for all guys.
Apple should require the user to explicitly opt-in, that's all. "Do you mind having information about your music passed on to some unknown Utah market research company, when there's absolutely no benefit for you in you doing so?"
Uh..... what?
Wikipedia article:
Or were you trying to be clever and (for example) add the approximate tally of Iraq-invasion deaths to the USA's scoreboard?
Seriously, the USA has a pretty corrupt and evil government. But China's government is, by any reasonable comparison, worse. :)