The problem is that knowing that your life is under scrutiny at all times will cause you to lead it differently, even if you weren't at all criminal before. Knowing that buying a book about Islam will get you red-flagged at the airport will likely lead you to refrain from doing so. At the point that you have changed the way you live your life because of fears about repercussions from the State, you are no longer free.
If you think that's worth it, sign up. But there's 200,000 of us here ready to fight to prevent it, because we know that it won't make us safer, just less free.
Well, I missed asking yesterday, but I'll settle for asking today: What's your replacement?:)
Well, I'm a couple days behind myself, but we're live now - ximp.sourceforge.net. Ximp is the name of the SourceForge project, but Maverick is the name of the alternative. I just threw this stuff up 10 minutes ago, and I'll probably be hacking on it the rest of the night, but it'll still be pretty rough for awhile. Have a look at the two descriptions (I'm working on merging them) and let me know what you think. This is the first public notice, but I'm hoping that not a lot of people find out before some of the rough edges get smoothed out. Then we'll need to recruit a few folks. And I suppose eventually we should write some code... =)
That amounts to $100 million in tech support paid to Gateway by home-users. They damn well better care about the quality of tech support they're giving to home-users.
Just wanted to offer that Dell's (and, I presume, Gateway's) margins are so thin that one call to tech-support eliminates their profit. They're pretty much betting the farm that most people won't call.
No, I don't have any sources. I heard it from two people who used to work PSS whose opinions about these matters I generally trust well enough to repeat...
I'm not disagreeing with anything you say because I believe that government and corporate censorship isn't active and getting worse. Nor do I disagree because I'm not familiar with Freenet. I read the papers, and it seemed like an excellent idea, but after playing with it a bit, and finding myself ultimately unable to find anything worthwhile on the network, I began worrying about whether that was because of unsure adoption rates or Freenet's considerable technical barriers. I think Freenet, viewed from a reader and poster perspective without rose-colored glasses, is in serious trouble in its current incarnation. Maybe all of the technical problems get sorted out after hitting a certain threshold of nodes and replicability, but will it be able to make it that far?
As for your mentioned concerns, the bugtraq mailing list on securityfocus.com (now symantec) is still a full-disclosure mailing list. It takes a lot of flack for that, but stands by the decision. If Symantec were to restrict it, then the user base would move to one of the many other mailing lists that are already positioning themselves to take over. As long as the professionals reading the list want full-disclosure, they'll get it.
The biggest impact of censorship is not in suppressing all knowledge of a certain topic from all people, but in making sure that outsiders are discredited, labeled as heretics, and prevented from distributing their message to large audiences. Nobody's going to institutionally shut you down for sharing pics of an enthusiastic American killer on Kazaa, or even hosting them on a webpage (although you could probably find ISPs that would object). Certainly you're not going to be arrested. However, you're never going to be able to get the pics picked up by CNN or shown on television to further an anti-war agenda. You might even get dropped by Akamai. You will probably be mentioned in a Washington Post editorial as an anti-American crackpot. Maybe someone will find a picture of you burning an American flag, and that will be all they need. "Don't listen to him, he once burned a flag." The main distribution channels are centrally controlled and they will suppress you, and they know that completely stamping you out would get more people upset at the censorship issue than just keeping you off the air and ignoring you past that. As long as the threat you represent is neutralized, they have more to gain by discrediting you than silencing you.
And you will still get more people viewing the images or reading your essays on non-anonymous web pages or mailing lists than you will by publishing on Freenet and expecting people to find it that way. You'll still have the key distribution problem, and if it ever gets so bad that the most effective way of transmitting a key is to scratch it into the toilet stall, your movement will stall. The information will not be transmitted. You'd be better off taking your risks printing paper flyers and leafletting the town.
That's another issue. People are more likely to believe and be concerned when authors are willing to attach their name to their writing. Anonymous whistle-blowing may be enough to start an investigation, but certainly it won't move people like someone coming forward and saying, "I was part of a huge scandal." The only thing in Freenet's favor there is that I think the majority of the current user-base "wants to believe". But there will be no public outrage if the public never finds out.
Is there anything that you can recommend that functions better than Freenet for what I've mentioned? A way to, once posted, keep content as long as people want to retrieve it, but not have any 'real' place it's located?
I think I have a solution to the distribution and replication problems, and it does support pseudo-anonymous posting, but it does not offer anonymity on the strength of Freenet. That was a compromise I was willing to make, which should suffice for anything not legally 'obscene'.
Taking my tongue out of my cheek (or foot out of mouth, as case may be) Freenet alternately lets you: Post the inner documents of Any Given Cult Formed By A Hack Of A SciFi Author, post the source code for exploits that are especially meaty, and a detailed dissection for the non-script kiddies interested in knowing the nitties, photographs of war atrocities, done in the interest of protecting the unwashed masses of soccer moms from terrorists, etc, all with a high level of anonymity. Not perfection, of course, but remember, Freenet is *international*. This makes it harder for the Usian government to squash those little irritating things it doesn't like.
Avoiding any ad hominem responses myself, I'll reiterate that for all of the non-pedophilic uses you specified, it's so unlikely that the network will effectively transmit the information to a searcher that both the poster and seeker will use an alternative means. If you want scientology texts, search kazaa. If you want exploits, read bugtraq. Photographs of war atrocities? Try google. None of those things is so ruthlessly hunted by the FBI, or discriminated against by Corp censorship, that it becomes worthwhile to try to find them on Freenet rather than another, more easily accessible method.
My point was that only the most reprehensible uses will be willing to permit Freenet's excesses.
And, since there's no search algorithm, you're pretty much relying on people to be able to transmit keys in a secure and anonymous manner. You're assuming that pages that say, "Kiddie porn on freenet at this key #" won't be censored by the same groups that would censor and prosecute authors that post the porn itself. If you've got a safe and anonymous channel, why not use it to transmit the subversive content and save yourself the trouble?
The problems will not be fixed by an implementation in C. Java is not the bottleneck - the distributed network is.
And no, even people with quite active imaginations are more offended by the exploitation of children than they are by exploit code. It's a convenient worst-case scenario when discussing the basin Freenet will find itself in. Instructions for plane hijackers would be a step up.
Right now there are two groups that use Freenet: the cautiously-paranoid and the rightfully-paranoid. The cautiously-paranoid is the group that (with good reason) fears the intrusion of not only government censorship but increasingly corporate censorship, as the line between Corp and State thins... The CP posts content that is unlikely to get them in much hot water if posted to the 'net, but that makes them feel better about supporting a system that will one day (supposedly) protect us from a surveillance-state gone mad.
The rightfully-paranoid are those that use Freenet to post content that is so heinous and illegal (i'm thinking kiddie porn here) that no one would ever host them, and leaving any non-cryptographically-secure trail, no matter how obfuscated, that leads back to them is an invitation for law enforcement to track their asses down and lock them up for a long time. In other words, they use Freenet because, for all the inefficiency and general-lousiness of Freenet as a distribution system, the expected value is still better than getting their ass in stir.
That's pretty much the problem. There's nothing to attract most users, who might appreciate anonymity but would much rather have pseudo-anonymity (which is more just the appearance of anonymity), and have content that might actually be read by someone. The only thing a new user is likely to find on Freenet was posted by tinfoil-hats or child pornographers. This is not likely to endear them to the system (unless they're into that sort of thing).
My argument is that, after the initial fascination with the power (read: geek-coolness factor) of the anonymity of the system wears off, most non-clinical tinfoil-hats would rather have their content read by someone, and will find a new distribution system. The only people who won't make that choice are people who can't afford to make that choice. I expect that will eventually leave the FreeNet as the network of kiddie porn, with a few ultra-paranoids hiding among them.
I'm not sure what the legal standing of Freenet will be if/when it will be used mostly for the dispersal of obscene material, but it will certainly be an easy target in the Ashkroft justice system... and if your intent is to preserve a means of communication when the State outlaws badthinkspeak, you're never going to be able to organize on something as inefficient as Freenet.
Do subscribers get input when something goes wrong, or are they, like regulars, just left in the dark?
Nice.
Nuts to subscription. I want a 'donation' model, ala the PACs and our 'elected' reps. Ads don't bother me, future stories don't interest me, but I'd donate $100 to sit next to CmdrTaco at the fundraising dinners. All slashdot readers are equal, but only some of them get their phone calls returned...
How about it, Taco? Cash in on your celebrity, save yourself hours a day replying to emails, and drive subscription rates through the roof.
I gotta disagree, you're taking an example of an older episode that doesn't even have a sub-plot (a lot of the earlier ones didn't), and comparing it to a later episode in which they pretty much all have sub-plots. Better example would be "Marge vs. The Monorail", an early episode with a subplot that starts with Smithers and Burns hiding toxic waste in the park, which in turn produces the $2 million (wasn't it $3 million? "uhhh yes, heh heh, my mistake") in cash for the town ("and I'll take that statue of Justice, too." Sold!), which they then use to build the monorail.
And there you have it. My first internet posting about Simpsons. I've crossed a line, and I can never go back...
It's not clear to me yet that they "picked" Opera as a "target".
The opera page points out that maybe the Opera page was custom made for Opera 6, and then they run the IE page through Opera 6 and show that it renders fine. Therefore, they say, there's no need for a custom Opera 6 page, therefore it couldn't have been a custom Opera 6 page.
But the right thing to test would be whether Opera 6 renders the "bad pages" acceptably or is similarly broken. I could easily picture a developer trying to customize things for Opera 6 (for some reason or another) and testing something and Opera6 handling it fine and it accidentally getting left in.
I mean, maybe this really totally is MSN screwing with Opera, but the omission of the above data point, and the way they say
there is no technical reason for MSN's behavior
when testing the Opera 6 case makes me a tad suspicious.
Sorry, that comment should have been modded up, it's the first intelligent thing I've found in this conversation.
Has anyone actually checked Opera's claims that the content was different? spongman is posting all over the place
the -38px adjustment is in there to overcome a non-standard +38px adjustment that Opera v6 adds to lists.
which seems to mean that the parent's suspicions were probably correct. The first thing I did when reading the story was check the facts, and when I loaded up all three pages (IE's, Mozilla's, and Opera's), yes, there was a difference in the display, but not the content. Where the hell did that allegation come from? Has anyone confirmed it?
I was quite disturbed to find basic fact-checking completely lacking from the readers. We're the fucking Slashdot Army, let's get the damn questions answered before we start shooting.
...means far far fewer people actually see that post, and it sits forever marked as a troll or flamebait or offtopic.
You know, I used to think so, too, but every time I've ever been modded down (except for the parent post above) it's been because I made a joke at Micros~1's expense. =) I've had a joke get posted at 2, hit -1, and then go up to 5, where it stayed, twice in the same story. Probably the same damn moderators... anyway, I've never worried about something that gets unfairly burned not working its way back up, just comments that I think should have been scored higher / read more widely that died a lonely, neglected, silent death.
Every user with a login should be afforded the opportunity to fight against unfair mods.
And that's kind of the idea behind metamoderation. I know you wish you could right the wrong, rather than punishing the fiend, but if you metamoderate often enough, you'll find you almost always have mod points.
Keep track of my journal. I talked with Taco a bit this morning, and I'm going to post something either tonight or tomorrow about ways for the community to keep track of changes to the slashcode, as well as providing feedback to our benevolent Janitors. I think that the community, working together, can come up with some interesting ways to solve these problems.
Listen, it's not "off topic", it's just on a different topic. Relax. A lot of people are wondering why scoring is different now, I was one of them, I found out, I tried to share, other people decided that was worth modding up, so let it go. Until there's an article devoted to "Everything you always wanted to know about slash code changes last week, but we never told you", I'm afraid this is the only venue.
So relax. I'm not trying to subvert the discussion or anything with all this crazy scoring talk, I just figured it was something other people would be interested in. A few people agreed with me. What you're saying by modding me down is that you think other people wouldn't be interested, and I think you're doing them a disservice.
It's a fairly old sport, and not very popular theese days, but it's still featured in the Summer Olympics held every four years. They call it "Athletics" but us Americans tend to refer to it as Track and Field.
I would argue that this isn't a sport. This argument has been waged time and again, but I think that in a sport, the teams have to be reacting to the actions of their competitors. Football is a sport. Bowling is not. Golf is iffy. Chess loses due to the physical exertion requirement. But races, pole vault, high jump, etc would be "competitions", but not really "sport", since your actions are not in reaction to those of your competitors. If they are, it is probably to the extent that golf is - how you play a hole might be determined based on your standing in relation to your competition. You might need to gamble, or you might be able to relax, but otherwise you're always going to play the same game. That's why golf is iffy.
See, I'm not sure. 3 player FFA has been around for a while. I remember playing war2 that way. But I don't think it changes the way you think about the game - everything bad that happens to your opponents is good, everything bad that happens to you is bad.
I thought about 3-team before settling on 5-color. Trying to play 5-color like a FFA is only going to get you knocked out first. A 3-team tournament-situation would probably always dictate a logical alliance. Two of the teams would recognize which competitor they could least afford to let win, destroy him first in hardly-competitive two-on-one play, and then duke it out between themselves. First it's Us vs. Them, and second it's Us vs. Them. I skipped over 4 players, since that would probably end up in 2v2 alliances (or worse, 3v1), and when I got to 5 I remembered the old Magic Five Color game.
The set up would largely prevent the "which competitor can we underdogs least afford to let win" scenario. If that competitor is one of your allies, you would probably be unwilling to team up against him, since you would be depriving yourself of his strength. This leaves his enemies to team up against him... which really shouldn't be that surprising. Of course, you would probably rather destroy him than let him win, so at some point when your mutual foe is almost vanquished, you might betray him. But perhaps he's already anticipated this, and his other ally and he have already almost destroyed your last ally, leaving you powerless to prevent them from overwhelming you...
anyway I digress. But 5-Color is a truly interesting playing experience that FFA doesn't measure up against. In War3, is it possible to set the winning conditions for a player as the elimination of two other players? If so, you could easily set up a 5-color game, and I would love to play one.
I'm sorry, but it seems rather juvenile, even pathetically so, to obsess so much about what 'score' your comment gets.
Only if you assume that everyone reads at -1, which I guarantee you, we don't. What score your comment is determines who reads it, which determines who responds to it. If you have something worth saying (which remains to be seen), then you should care whether anyone reads it, or whether anyone replies to it. Otherwise, you might as well just say it on your webpage.
(haha sorry to dig, I figured you were fishing for it tho, what with the "pathetically juvenile" crack)
Besides, you missed my point. I'm concerned the way changes are rolled in to our community. The editors own the code, not the community, yet the community is profitable, not the code. This would dictate a logical course of action, but is still unheeded.
Incidentally, I'm not posting this reply with a karma bonus, because I don't think it would be interesting to everyone, only you and anyone who read your comment. Maybe. Which I think is the best way that the karma bonus can be applied. Don't shun it - use it responsibly. My parent comment got modded up 4 times so far, so obviously it was worthy of using my karma bonus.
Ok, so the new way of doing things is that instead of adding a point to your comment's overall score when you post with your karma bonus, your comment is posted at 1 with a separate "karma_bonus=yes|no" variable. Thereafter, users can specify how much weight to assign to the karma bonus on their preferences page. This was 0 when the editors quietly rolled in the changes without telling anyone (why so sneaky?), but has since been changed to '+1' by default, to by default be the same as the old way.
So, your comment that got 3 good moderations is scored at 4/1. Users who have a '+1' modifier to karma bonus will see this comment at 5, whereas users with a '0' karma modifier will see it at 4, and users with (for whatever reason) a '-6' modifier will see it at -2. If such a thing were possible.
Unfortunately, I see this as making it unlikely that comments posted with a karma bonus will ever be modded up to 5, since most moderators will be viewing with a karma bonus and see that the comment is already scored at 5, and that it therefore cannot be modded up further.
I'm going to say that the way this was changed was disgraceful. There is no reason not to maintain a place on slashdot indicating how the code is being changed. I have relied on CmdrTaco's journal to inform me of changes, but in this case it was silent, and after thinking about it further, it's still a crappy way of running things.
It all goes back to the difference between slashdot as community and slashdot as business. As a business, sure, slashdot can do whatever the hell it wants, who am I to lecture, blah blah blah. But as a community, changing things in profound ways without approval, comment, or even notification is bastardly. And slashdot as a business would do well to perceive its dimensions as a community.
Wow, who would have thought that there'd be a moderated discussion of football on slashdot... What's next? Maxim magazine reviewing computer games?
Seriously though, I was at a hockey game last week and witnessed the same phenemenon - "There are no good calls that don't go in your favor." Every time your guys trip, you're glad when the ref doesn't call it. Every time one of their guys trips your guys, you scream bloody murder, and if the ref doesn't see it then you invite him to join the game, or offer to buy his seeing-eye dog ice-skates, etc.
Their goalie blocked one of our shots, and one of the guys with me, an Aussie watching his first game, cheered. I said, "Don't cheer, that was their play." And he said, "It was a good play. Hockey was the winner." And that blew my mind, it sounded so foreign. Hard to imagine an American fan cheering for Hockey rather than a specific team.
So I was thinking about this, after the game. If we Americans have such an 'Us vs. Them' mindset in our sports, is it a condition of our cultural environment, or is our enjoyment of the sports conditioning us to perceive other conflicts in the same 'Us vs. Them' mindset? Or is it just part of the same mix of people->culture->people?
Specifically, why don't we have any sports/games with more than two teams? Does anyone else, for that matter? What is it that prevents us from being able to invent interesting games that perceive conflict in more than an 'Us vs. Them' fashion?
I remember WoTC back in the day (dating myself) publishing different variants for their Magic card game that were quite interesting, the best of which was the 'Five Color' game. I've never heard the mechanics of a good 5-team game described anywhere else, so I will describe it as the Five Color game.
5 teams are logically arranged in a pentagon. From the top, clockwise, we find White, Blue, Black, Red, and Green. The object of the game is to destroy the teams positioned 'across' from you, ie not next to you on the pentagon. The teams next to you are potentially your allies, not for any high reason, just because you happen to share an enemy. Additionally, your other ally is your ally's other enemy. Tricky.
The additional level of depth and strategy required adds an entirely new enjoyment to the game. You know every alliance is going to be betrayed at some point, it's in calculating the exact moment of betrayal that rewards the winner. It forces the player to be aware of conflicts happening between entirely other teams, and how to use those conflicts to perhaps set your enemies against themselves, or gain an ally. It forces strategy to become sophisticated in ways that calling a football game a chess-match doesn't even come close to.
And the interesting question would be, if America's favorite sports became 5-color games, would we see a corresponding increase in the sophistication with which we perceive international affairs?
I throw it out for conversation. (And secretly I hope that a few mod-makers (or budding sport-inventors) are inspired. I'd love to go hack WarCraft2 to make it support larger maps and a 5-color match up, or making a TF mod for such a game (maybe when TF2 comes out *chuckle*). Or maybe someday my internationally-savvy children will teach their old man how to play '5-color ball'... )
The work in question is 1984, the prophetic novel about a government that controls the masses by spreading propaganda, cracking down on subversive thought and altering history to suit its needs. It was intended to be read as a warning about the evils of totalitarianism - not a how-to manual.
Does anyone know what's been going on the last week with comment scoring? I have a karma bonus, and I thought I used it when I posted the above comment, in that I did not check the "No Karma Bonus" box on my comment. But when I was msged about a moderation, it told me that the comment was currently scored '2' (should have been '3'). My info page currently lists the comment as being at '5', after three moderations (correct), but when I look up on the screen at it as I type this reply, it clearly says, '4'.
I'm going to file this on the sourceforge page unless someone can explain what's going on...
the main thing you need to make a good album is good music played well. If you don't have that, you have........ well, you have what we seem to have now. Rap, "boy bands", Brittany Spears (I'm sure I'm spelling that wrong. I sure hope so, anyway.), or whatever overproduced, corporate-manufactured non-music they're trying to sell now.
You know, I used to have the same problem. For about eight years, I mourned the death of Classic Rock. New music was crap, and I wouldn't listen to it. When Cobain killed himself, I was glad I could add Nirvana to my Classic Rock staples (Foo Fighters still suck). I eagerly anticipated Rage's breakup so that I could put them in my collection, too.
If I could quote a sage who once remarked to me,
"But then everything around me got to start to feeling so low. So I decided quickly to disco down and check out the show.
They were dancing! And singing! And moving to the groovin! And just when it hit me, somebody turned around and shouted, "Play that funky music, white boy!"
Now first it wasn't easy, changing rock and rollin' minds. Things were getting shakey - I thought I'd have to leave it behind.
But now it's so much better, so much better. I'm funkin' out in every way! But I'll never lose that feeling, of how I learned my lesson that day."
Play That Funky Music - Wild Cherry
The reason, I think, for the suckage of new pop-consumption music is that it is without soul. And I think 'consumption' is a good name, because it wasn't written for the intrinsic joy that creating music brings artists - it was written for popular consumption to bring studios money. If you want soul, you have to find out what the kids are doing, and the kids are, and always have been, on the dance floor. In the sixties it was rock and roll, in the seventies it was disco and funk, the eighties was european techno (read: eighties disco), the nineties were electronica (read: nineties disco), and it's still going strong. The new music that I like these days, I hear from DJs on the dance floor, and that would blow the mind of someone who hasn't seen me since I was exclusively a Classic Rock bigot.
Find the kids, and you'll find the music with soul. (If you're hearing Britney Spears, you've traveled back in time to a 1999 Rec dance full of teenyboppers. Try again. =)
Oh, and OT in my own post, an interesting thing to chart is the correspondence between different drug use and different music. In a completely unscientific way, I associate disco with cocaine, classic rock with heroin, and electronica with everything else. =) (Everyone's drinking and smoking, so I don't include that.) So the question is, does the music dictate the drugs, or do the drugs dictate the music?
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that knowing that your life is under scrutiny at all times will cause you to lead it differently, even if you weren't at all criminal before. Knowing that buying a book about Islam will get you red-flagged at the airport will likely lead you to refrain from doing so. At the point that you have changed the way you live your life because of fears about repercussions from the State, you are no longer free.
If you think that's worth it, sign up. But there's 200,000 of us here ready to fight to prevent it, because we know that it won't make us safer, just less free.
Haha. That's what I love about this rabble. No one need fear that we could organize or agree long enough to put together an army... =)
Well, I missed asking yesterday, but I'll settle for asking today: What's your replacement? :)
Well, I'm a couple days behind myself, but we're live now - ximp.sourceforge.net. Ximp is the name of the SourceForge project, but Maverick is the name of the alternative. I just threw this stuff up 10 minutes ago, and I'll probably be hacking on it the rest of the night, but it'll still be pretty rough for awhile. Have a look at the two descriptions (I'm working on merging them) and let me know what you think. This is the first public notice, but I'm hoping that not a lot of people find out before some of the rough edges get smoothed out. Then we'll need to recruit a few folks. And I suppose eventually we should write some code... =)
That amounts to $100 million in tech support paid to Gateway by home-users. They damn well better care about the quality of tech support they're giving to home-users.
Just wanted to offer that Dell's (and, I presume, Gateway's) margins are so thin that one call to tech-support eliminates their profit. They're pretty much betting the farm that most people won't call.
No, I don't have any sources. I heard it from two people who used to work PSS whose opinions about these matters I generally trust well enough to repeat...
I'm not disagreeing with anything you say because I believe that government and corporate censorship isn't active and getting worse. Nor do I disagree because I'm not familiar with Freenet. I read the papers, and it seemed like an excellent idea, but after playing with it a bit, and finding myself ultimately unable to find anything worthwhile on the network, I began worrying about whether that was because of unsure adoption rates or Freenet's considerable technical barriers. I think Freenet, viewed from a reader and poster perspective without rose-colored glasses, is in serious trouble in its current incarnation. Maybe all of the technical problems get sorted out after hitting a certain threshold of nodes and replicability, but will it be able to make it that far?
As for your mentioned concerns, the bugtraq mailing list on securityfocus.com (now symantec) is still a full-disclosure mailing list. It takes a lot of flack for that, but stands by the decision. If Symantec were to restrict it, then the user base would move to one of the many other mailing lists that are already positioning themselves to take over. As long as the professionals reading the list want full-disclosure, they'll get it.
The biggest impact of censorship is not in suppressing all knowledge of a certain topic from all people, but in making sure that outsiders are discredited, labeled as heretics, and prevented from distributing their message to large audiences. Nobody's going to institutionally shut you down for sharing pics of an enthusiastic American killer on Kazaa, or even hosting them on a webpage (although you could probably find ISPs that would object). Certainly you're not going to be arrested. However, you're never going to be able to get the pics picked up by CNN or shown on television to further an anti-war agenda. You might even get dropped by Akamai. You will probably be mentioned in a Washington Post editorial as an anti-American crackpot. Maybe someone will find a picture of you burning an American flag, and that will be all they need. "Don't listen to him, he once burned a flag." The main distribution channels are centrally controlled and they will suppress you, and they know that completely stamping you out would get more people upset at the censorship issue than just keeping you off the air and ignoring you past that. As long as the threat you represent is neutralized, they have more to gain by discrediting you than silencing you.
And you will still get more people viewing the images or reading your essays on non-anonymous web pages or mailing lists than you will by publishing on Freenet and expecting people to find it that way. You'll still have the key distribution problem, and if it ever gets so bad that the most effective way of transmitting a key is to scratch it into the toilet stall, your movement will stall. The information will not be transmitted. You'd be better off taking your risks printing paper flyers and leafletting the town.
That's another issue. People are more likely to believe and be concerned when authors are willing to attach their name to their writing. Anonymous whistle-blowing may be enough to start an investigation, but certainly it won't move people like someone coming forward and saying, "I was part of a huge scandal." The only thing in Freenet's favor there is that I think the majority of the current user-base "wants to believe". But there will be no public outrage if the public never finds out.
Is there anything that you can recommend that functions better than Freenet for what I've mentioned? A way to, once posted, keep content as long as people want to retrieve it, but not have any 'real' place it's located?
Haha, funny you should ask. Ask me again on Monday. =)
I think I have a solution to the distribution and replication problems, and it does support pseudo-anonymous posting, but it does not offer anonymity on the strength of Freenet. That was a compromise I was willing to make, which should suffice for anything not legally 'obscene'.
Taking my tongue out of my cheek (or foot out of mouth, as case may be) Freenet alternately lets you: Post the inner documents of Any Given Cult Formed By A Hack Of A SciFi Author, post the source code for exploits that are especially meaty, and a detailed dissection for the non-script kiddies interested in knowing the nitties, photographs of war atrocities, done in the interest of protecting the unwashed masses of soccer moms from terrorists, etc, all with a high level of anonymity. Not perfection, of course, but remember, Freenet is *international*. This makes it harder for the Usian government to squash those little irritating things it doesn't like.
Avoiding any ad hominem responses myself, I'll reiterate that for all of the non-pedophilic uses you specified, it's so unlikely that the network will effectively transmit the information to a searcher that both the poster and seeker will use an alternative means. If you want scientology texts, search kazaa. If you want exploits, read bugtraq. Photographs of war atrocities? Try google. None of those things is so ruthlessly hunted by the FBI, or discriminated against by Corp censorship, that it becomes worthwhile to try to find them on Freenet rather than another, more easily accessible method.
My point was that only the most reprehensible uses will be willing to permit Freenet's excesses.
And, since there's no search algorithm, you're pretty much relying on people to be able to transmit keys in a secure and anonymous manner. You're assuming that pages that say, "Kiddie porn on freenet at this key #" won't be censored by the same groups that would censor and prosecute authors that post the porn itself. If you've got a safe and anonymous channel, why not use it to transmit the subversive content and save yourself the trouble?
The problems will not be fixed by an implementation in C. Java is not the bottleneck - the distributed network is.
And no, even people with quite active imaginations are more offended by the exploitation of children than they are by exploit code. It's a convenient worst-case scenario when discussing the basin Freenet will find itself in. Instructions for plane hijackers would be a step up.
Right now there are two groups that use Freenet: the cautiously-paranoid and the rightfully-paranoid. The cautiously-paranoid is the group that (with good reason) fears the intrusion of not only government censorship but increasingly corporate censorship, as the line between Corp and State thins... The CP posts content that is unlikely to get them in much hot water if posted to the 'net, but that makes them feel better about supporting a system that will one day (supposedly) protect us from a surveillance-state gone mad.
The rightfully-paranoid are those that use Freenet to post content that is so heinous and illegal (i'm thinking kiddie porn here) that no one would ever host them, and leaving any non-cryptographically-secure trail, no matter how obfuscated, that leads back to them is an invitation for law enforcement to track their asses down and lock them up for a long time. In other words, they use Freenet because, for all the inefficiency and general-lousiness of Freenet as a distribution system, the expected value is still better than getting their ass in stir.
That's pretty much the problem. There's nothing to attract most users, who might appreciate anonymity but would much rather have pseudo-anonymity (which is more just the appearance of anonymity), and have content that might actually be read by someone. The only thing a new user is likely to find on Freenet was posted by tinfoil-hats or child pornographers. This is not likely to endear them to the system (unless they're into that sort of thing).
My argument is that, after the initial fascination with the power (read: geek-coolness factor) of the anonymity of the system wears off, most non-clinical tinfoil-hats would rather have their content read by someone, and will find a new distribution system. The only people who won't make that choice are people who can't afford to make that choice. I expect that will eventually leave the FreeNet as the network of kiddie porn, with a few ultra-paranoids hiding among them.
I'm not sure what the legal standing of Freenet will be if/when it will be used mostly for the dispersal of obscene material, but it will certainly be an easy target in the Ashkroft justice system... and if your intent is to preserve a means of communication when the State outlaws badthinkspeak, you're never going to be able to organize on something as inefficient as Freenet.
But, to top it off, I read ALL of the comments to this article so far. Not a single good one
Yep, still true.
=p
Do subscribers get input when something goes wrong, or are they, like regulars, just left in the dark?
Nice.
Nuts to subscription. I want a 'donation' model, ala the PACs and our 'elected' reps. Ads don't bother me, future stories don't interest me, but I'd donate $100 to sit next to CmdrTaco at the fundraising dinners. All slashdot readers are equal, but only some of them get their phone calls returned...
How about it, Taco? Cash in on your celebrity, save yourself hours a day replying to emails, and drive subscription rates through the roof.
"Call me, babe..."
Meh.
"What is that?"
M. E. H. Meh.
One of us...one of us...
hehe
... That's the American way!"
I gotta disagree, you're taking an example of an older episode that doesn't even have a sub-plot (a lot of the earlier ones didn't), and comparing it to a later episode in which they pretty much all have sub-plots. Better example would be "Marge vs. The Monorail", an early episode with a subplot that starts with Smithers and Burns hiding toxic waste in the park, which in turn produces the $2 million (wasn't it $3 million? "uhhh yes, heh heh, my mistake") in cash for the town ("and I'll take that statue of Justice, too." Sold!), which they then use to build the monorail.
And there you have it. My first internet posting about Simpsons. I've crossed a line, and I can never go back...
Sorry, that comment should have been modded up, it's the first intelligent thing I've found in this conversation.
Has anyone actually checked Opera's claims that the content was different? spongman is posting all over the placewhich seems to mean that the parent's suspicions were probably correct. The first thing I did when reading the story was check the facts, and when I loaded up all three pages (IE's, Mozilla's, and Opera's), yes, there was a difference in the display, but not the content. Where the hell did that allegation come from? Has anyone confirmed it?
I was quite disturbed to find basic fact-checking completely lacking from the readers. We're the fucking Slashdot Army, let's get the damn questions answered before we start shooting.
lg final is the 640x472. I've got the same one, and my MD5 is:Oh yeah, also, it crashes my QT 6 (latest) on windows after about 10 seconds. Anyone else having problems?
...means far far fewer people actually see that post, and it sits forever marked as a troll or flamebait or offtopic.
You know, I used to think so, too, but every time I've ever been modded down (except for the parent post above) it's been because I made a joke at Micros~1's expense. =) I've had a joke get posted at 2, hit -1, and then go up to 5, where it stayed, twice in the same story. Probably the same damn moderators... anyway, I've never worried about something that gets unfairly burned not working its way back up, just comments that I think should have been scored higher / read more widely that died a lonely, neglected, silent death.
Every user with a login should be afforded the opportunity to fight against unfair mods.
And that's kind of the idea behind metamoderation. I know you wish you could right the wrong, rather than punishing the fiend, but if you metamoderate often enough, you'll find you almost always have mod points.
Keep track of my journal. I talked with Taco a bit this morning, and I'm going to post something either tonight or tomorrow about ways for the community to keep track of changes to the slashcode, as well as providing feedback to our benevolent Janitors. I think that the community, working together, can come up with some interesting ways to solve these problems.
Thank you sir for proposing a simple solution to what should have been an easy problem. You should post this on the original page, too.
Listen, it's not "off topic", it's just on a different topic. Relax. A lot of people are wondering why scoring is different now, I was one of them, I found out, I tried to share, other people decided that was worth modding up, so let it go. Until there's an article devoted to "Everything you always wanted to know about slash code changes last week, but we never told you", I'm afraid this is the only venue.
So relax. I'm not trying to subvert the discussion or anything with all this crazy scoring talk, I just figured it was something other people would be interested in. A few people agreed with me. What you're saying by modding me down is that you think other people wouldn't be interested, and I think you're doing them a disservice.
Let us hope metamoderation finds you swiftly.
It's a fairly old sport, and not very popular theese days, but it's still featured in the Summer Olympics held every four years. They call it "Athletics" but us Americans tend to refer to it as Track and Field.
I would argue that this isn't a sport. This argument has been waged time and again, but I think that in a sport, the teams have to be reacting to the actions of their competitors. Football is a sport. Bowling is not. Golf is iffy. Chess loses due to the physical exertion requirement. But races, pole vault, high jump, etc would be "competitions", but not really "sport", since your actions are not in reaction to those of your competitors. If they are, it is probably to the extent that golf is - how you play a hole might be determined based on your standing in relation to your competition. You might need to gamble, or you might be able to relax, but otherwise you're always going to play the same game. That's why golf is iffy.
See, I'm not sure. 3 player FFA has been around for a while. I remember playing war2 that way. But I don't think it changes the way you think about the game - everything bad that happens to your opponents is good, everything bad that happens to you is bad.
I thought about 3-team before settling on 5-color. Trying to play 5-color like a FFA is only going to get you knocked out first. A 3-team tournament-situation would probably always dictate a logical alliance. Two of the teams would recognize which competitor they could least afford to let win, destroy him first in hardly-competitive two-on-one play, and then duke it out between themselves. First it's Us vs. Them, and second it's Us vs. Them. I skipped over 4 players, since that would probably end up in 2v2 alliances (or worse, 3v1), and when I got to 5 I remembered the old Magic Five Color game.
The set up would largely prevent the "which competitor can we underdogs least afford to let win" scenario. If that competitor is one of your allies, you would probably be unwilling to team up against him, since you would be depriving yourself of his strength. This leaves his enemies to team up against him... which really shouldn't be that surprising. Of course, you would probably rather destroy him than let him win, so at some point when your mutual foe is almost vanquished, you might betray him. But perhaps he's already anticipated this, and his other ally and he have already almost destroyed your last ally, leaving you powerless to prevent them from overwhelming you...
anyway I digress. But 5-Color is a truly interesting playing experience that FFA doesn't measure up against. In War3, is it possible to set the winning conditions for a player as the elimination of two other players? If so, you could easily set up a 5-color game, and I would love to play one.
I'm sorry, but it seems rather juvenile, even pathetically so, to obsess so much about what 'score' your comment gets.
Only if you assume that everyone reads at -1, which I guarantee you, we don't. What score your comment is determines who reads it, which determines who responds to it. If you have something worth saying (which remains to be seen), then you should care whether anyone reads it, or whether anyone replies to it. Otherwise, you might as well just say it on your webpage.
(haha sorry to dig, I figured you were fishing for it tho, what with the "pathetically juvenile" crack)
Besides, you missed my point. I'm concerned the way changes are rolled in to our community. The editors own the code, not the community, yet the community is profitable, not the code. This would dictate a logical course of action, but is still unheeded.
Incidentally, I'm not posting this reply with a karma bonus, because I don't think it would be interesting to everyone, only you and anyone who read your comment. Maybe. Which I think is the best way that the karma bonus can be applied. Don't shun it - use it responsibly. My parent comment got modded up 4 times so far, so obviously it was worthy of using my karma bonus.
I'm responding to your sig.
Ok, so the new way of doing things is that instead of adding a point to your comment's overall score when you post with your karma bonus, your comment is posted at 1 with a separate "karma_bonus=yes|no" variable. Thereafter, users can specify how much weight to assign to the karma bonus on their preferences page. This was 0 when the editors quietly rolled in the changes without telling anyone (why so sneaky?), but has since been changed to '+1' by default, to by default be the same as the old way.
So, your comment that got 3 good moderations is scored at 4/1. Users who have a '+1' modifier to karma bonus will see this comment at 5, whereas users with a '0' karma modifier will see it at 4, and users with (for whatever reason) a '-6' modifier will see it at -2. If such a thing were possible.
Unfortunately, I see this as making it unlikely that comments posted with a karma bonus will ever be modded up to 5, since most moderators will be viewing with a karma bonus and see that the comment is already scored at 5, and that it therefore cannot be modded up further.
I'm going to say that the way this was changed was disgraceful. There is no reason not to maintain a place on slashdot indicating how the code is being changed. I have relied on CmdrTaco's journal to inform me of changes, but in this case it was silent, and after thinking about it further, it's still a crappy way of running things.
It all goes back to the difference between slashdot as community and slashdot as business. As a business, sure, slashdot can do whatever the hell it wants, who am I to lecture, blah blah blah. But as a community, changing things in profound ways without approval, comment, or even notification is bastardly. And slashdot as a business would do well to perceive its dimensions as a community.
Wow, who would have thought that there'd be a moderated discussion of football on slashdot... What's next? Maxim magazine reviewing computer games?
Seriously though, I was at a hockey game last week and witnessed the same phenemenon - "There are no good calls that don't go in your favor." Every time your guys trip, you're glad when the ref doesn't call it. Every time one of their guys trips your guys, you scream bloody murder, and if the ref doesn't see it then you invite him to join the game, or offer to buy his seeing-eye dog ice-skates, etc.
Their goalie blocked one of our shots, and one of the guys with me, an Aussie watching his first game, cheered. I said, "Don't cheer, that was their play." And he said, "It was a good play. Hockey was the winner." And that blew my mind, it sounded so foreign. Hard to imagine an American fan cheering for Hockey rather than a specific team.
So I was thinking about this, after the game. If we Americans have such an 'Us vs. Them' mindset in our sports, is it a condition of our cultural environment, or is our enjoyment of the sports conditioning us to perceive other conflicts in the same 'Us vs. Them' mindset? Or is it just part of the same mix of people->culture->people?
Specifically, why don't we have any sports/games with more than two teams? Does anyone else, for that matter? What is it that prevents us from being able to invent interesting games that perceive conflict in more than an 'Us vs. Them' fashion?
I remember WoTC back in the day (dating myself) publishing different variants for their Magic card game that were quite interesting, the best of which was the 'Five Color' game. I've never heard the mechanics of a good 5-team game described anywhere else, so I will describe it as the Five Color game.
5 teams are logically arranged in a pentagon. From the top, clockwise, we find White, Blue, Black, Red, and Green. The object of the game is to destroy the teams positioned 'across' from you, ie not next to you on the pentagon. The teams next to you are potentially your allies, not for any high reason, just because you happen to share an enemy. Additionally, your other ally is your ally's other enemy. Tricky.
The additional level of depth and strategy required adds an entirely new enjoyment to the game. You know every alliance is going to be betrayed at some point, it's in calculating the exact moment of betrayal that rewards the winner. It forces the player to be aware of conflicts happening between entirely other teams, and how to use those conflicts to perhaps set your enemies against themselves, or gain an ally. It forces strategy to become sophisticated in ways that calling a football game a chess-match doesn't even come close to.
And the interesting question would be, if America's favorite sports became 5-color games, would we see a corresponding increase in the sophistication with which we perceive international affairs?
I throw it out for conversation. (And secretly I hope that a few mod-makers (or budding sport-inventors) are inspired. I'd love to go hack WarCraft2 to make it support larger maps and a 5-color match up, or making a TF mod for such a game (maybe when TF2 comes out *chuckle*). Or maybe someday my internationally-savvy children will teach their old man how to play '5-color ball'... )
OH MY GOD! I've been thinking like the SAME THING with him and George Orwell... =p
Google cache:
Does anyone know what's been going on the last week with comment scoring? I have a karma bonus, and I thought I used it when I posted the above comment, in that I did not check the "No Karma Bonus" box on my comment. But when I was msged about a moderation, it told me that the comment was currently scored '2' (should have been '3'). My info page currently lists the comment as being at '5', after three moderations (correct), but when I look up on the screen at it as I type this reply, it clearly says, '4'.
I'm going to file this on the sourceforge page unless someone can explain what's going on...
thanks
You know, I used to have the same problem. For about eight years, I mourned the death of Classic Rock. New music was crap, and I wouldn't listen to it. When Cobain killed himself, I was glad I could add Nirvana to my Classic Rock staples (Foo Fighters still suck). I eagerly anticipated Rage's breakup so that I could put them in my collection, too.
If I could quote a sage who once remarked to me,
The reason, I think, for the suckage of new pop-consumption music is that it is without soul. And I think 'consumption' is a good name, because it wasn't written for the intrinsic joy that creating music brings artists - it was written for popular consumption to bring studios money. If you want soul, you have to find out what the kids are doing, and the kids are, and always have been, on the dance floor. In the sixties it was rock and roll, in the seventies it was disco and funk, the eighties was european techno (read: eighties disco), the nineties were electronica (read: nineties disco), and it's still going strong. The new music that I like these days, I hear from DJs on the dance floor, and that would blow the mind of someone who hasn't seen me since I was exclusively a Classic Rock bigot.
Find the kids, and you'll find the music with soul. (If you're hearing Britney Spears, you've traveled back in time to a 1999 Rec dance full of teenyboppers. Try again. =)
Oh, and OT in my own post, an interesting thing to chart is the correspondence between different drug use and different music. In a completely unscientific way, I associate disco with cocaine, classic rock with heroin, and electronica with everything else. =) (Everyone's drinking and smoking, so I don't include that.) So the question is, does the music dictate the drugs, or do the drugs dictate the music?