They do show the complete breakdown if you actually view the comment on its own page (click the comment number in each comments header).
But, yeah, the mod type is next-to-useless anyway, but fixing that is beyond the scope of the friend/foe discussion. A numbers-only system like K5 might be better, where the total rating is an average of the individual ratings, or some other more statistically-valid result.
How about an encrypted channel between the keyboard/mouse and the computer?
Ive heard a lot about the media mega-corps talking about encrypting the output of video and sound cards to prevent people from copying their digital content the old-fashioned way; if thats possible, wouldnt this also be?
Randomize the position of the window, the size of the keys (sometimes 16x16, sometimes 24x24, etc.), and the position of the keys relative to each other (sometimes QWERTY..., sometimes AZSGBR..., etc.). Maybe even have the window reconfigure itself after each click as an option for the paranoid.
Scanning mouseclicks would not be useful, as all they would get are coordinates. Unless they also hooked into the software to ascertain what key that coord represented, the logger would just simply not work, but in the software is where the logger could be detected and blocked.
Point-and-click text entry for your passwords. Ever seen the Key Caps desk accessory on a Macintosh (or the Character Map on Windows)? Tie something like that into a graphical login display, and there you go. Logging mouseclicks is still a viable option, but how would the logger know that {x=260; y=580} was the letter F? It would need to hook into the software displaying the charac oh, look, now we can secure ourselves via the OS software, cant we?
No, the reason you cannot yell fire! in a crowded theatre is because thats considered inciting a riot, and the speech is considered the direct cause of any accidents and injuries that may result. The same goes for the fight example.
When you can prove to me that a video game actually directly caused someone injury, then you can use that line of reasoning.
The technology doesn't store the faces anywhere, unless you're a criminal.
Are you sure about this? The police will store all sorts of records on you (fingerprints, mugshots, etc.) if youve ever been arrested, whether or not you were actually convicted of a crime. Why wouldnt digital images of faces be added to the list?
And youre also ignoring the problem of false positives, i.e., innocent bystanders being recognized. You want to be denied access to some place or have an hour or two of your time wasted by the police because the computer thought you looked like someone in its database?
Well, if the final mod is Troll, then you can. Set Troll to -6 and even a comment that is (Score:5; Troll)* will plummet to -1.
* Yes, this is possible. If a comment is rated to (Score:5; something), then modded as troll, it becomes (Score:4; Troll). If someone then applies an Underrated mod (Underrated gives a comment +1 while maintaining the previous mod label), the comment becomes (Score:5; Troll).
Bwahahahah, $318,000 out of the taxpayers pockets. Hell of a price to pay to impose your morality on everyone else, isnt it? Next election year, I hope whatever local politicians that run against the morons who supported this censorship make sure the public is well-aware of this.
Re:Another suggestion:have *potential* friend and
on
Slashdot Code Update
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· Score: 1
It would be nice to have more granularity such that you could assemble lists of users that you assign +1 to, another list +2, another list -1, and so on.
That would be more confusing, would it not? If you are allowed to set each type of moderation to have a value of ±5, the total moderation on the comment could end up much higher than +5 or lower than -1.
Say a comment has received two Interestings, one Flamebait, and four Funnies. Youve assigned +2 to Interesting, -1 to Flamebait, and +3 to Funny. This would then total (+2)(2) + (-1)(1) + (+3)(4) = +15. Is this what you want?
The way it seems to work now, is that the total moderation has a factor from -6 to +6 added to it based on the one, final moderation type, which I think is good enough. It also fixes the range that a comment could achieve to something reasonable (-7 to +11, which is outside the threshold pulldown menu, but still acceptable).
To everyone complaining this is going to create more exclusive cliques, groupthink, and so on:
Usenet, the original online discussion forum, has had these things called Killfiles for years. (Actually Usenet itself does not, but nearly all the clients have these kinds of filters.) Now Slashdot is starting to finally implement the same functionality. Whats the big deal then?
You can automatically add (or subtract) mod points to Anonymous Coward posts through your preferences (under Comments). For example, if you add -3 points to AC posts, unless his post has an initial score of +2 or more, the resultant score will be -2 or lower, hence not visible even if you are browsing at -1.
A succint way of summing it up would be that this law isnt restricting speech, its restricting actions you take to make yourself heard. The writing of an email is the speech, the sending of the email is an attempt to act to make yourself heard.
First off, the common rebuttal to this kind of argument is that one has a right to speech but not a guarantee of a venue. You can say anything you want but you cant force your audience to listen. Spam has been equated to tresspassing in some cases the lengths that spammers go to to intentionally thwart peoples filters should be clear enough evidence that they are not only interested in speaking, but also going to try to force you to listen however they can. This is, in my opinion, the online equivalent of breaking into someones home to shout your speech at the top of your lungs at them.
But theres also a second rebuttal argument to this, and that is that commercial speech can and should be regulated. Many countries do in fact regulate commercial speech while having generally free speech otherwise. The spirit of freedom of speech laws is that the speech has some political, literary or artistic value (theres a Supreme Court quote vis-à-vis obscenity that people usually kick around about this; sorry I do not know it at the moment). Economic speech, motivated purely by the desire to make money, has no such value.
But I believe more in the first argument; spam is damned annoying. This isnt restricting speech, its restricting actions you take to make yourself heard. You can advertise all you want (just like you can make political speeches, pen novels, or make porn), you just cannot attempt to force your supposed audience to listen to you.
Re:So what ASCII value will the Euro be?
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1, Informative
It doesnt have an ASCII value ignore the nitwits below you, as ASCII is only 7 bits (127 characters maximum), and theyre giving you the Windows-specific 8-bit value 128. For example, on Macintosh, it has a different location: 219 (Option-shift-2).
Its Unicode value is 0x20AC, which is a standard. It can be written as € in HTML/XML, or € for the few browsers that support the symbolic name (mine doesnt seem to).
I use IE/5.0 on Macintosh (MacOS9.2, 450MHz G3) and there are significant slowdowns with heavily-nested comments. Rendering can take several seconds, sometimes longer. The comments/page setting only seems to control how many top-level comments one sees: e.g., if I set it to show 25 comments/page, but every comment has 4 replies (or reply-replies, etc.), I see 125 comments/page.
I wonder how difficult it would be to write a web script (CGI/Perl or PHP) to fetch Usenet messages (NNTP is a text-based, line-oriented protocol, with commands similar to SMTP, POP, FTP) and organize them (based on the References header, sort of how Slashdot comments have a Parent ID [pid]) in tables.
The format specifier %Y.%m.%d %H:%M is nearly ISO8601 (which is the format I prefer), its just using dots instead of dashes. It would output a date such as 2002-01-01 00:00.
Slashdots HTML definitely could use an overhaul, and I think that even the tables could go (in favor of some nested DIV tags whose appearance could be controlled via stylesheets). The comments are not tabular data, hence using the TABLE tag is incorrect by definition. I was messing around once with this kind of layout a while back to see what it would look like. In my example, I used borders around the comments to show the parentchild relationship, but the stylesheet could be set to look nearly identical to Slashdot in its current state.
Threaded mode is desirable if there are a lot of comments with a lot of replies (i.e., nested tables). Try rending a hundred tables, eighty with one or two nested inside, and a dozen or so with tentwenty nested inside several levels deep, and see how long it takes on various browsers. What Slashdot needs is a mode like Kuro5hin where you can set it to display nested for a few comments (user-configurable), and threaded for stories with more. Of course, what Kuro5hin needs is the ability to break up comments across several pages (25 comments per page), because there are still rendering-time issues with K5 stories since their HTML is even more atrocious than Slashdots.
The reason the story disappears is that the Change form submits to comments.pl, not article.pl. It might not be possible to submit the form to article.pl; check the source, does article.pl support all the parameters (threshold, sort, etc.) that comments.pl does?
Thirdly, change your date format! Several of the date formats do have the year embedded in them. I use the %Y.%m.%d %H:%M format, which does.
Youre right, but whoever buys it is then free to do whatever he wishes with it, including give it away, sell it for less (or for more), or print it out and use it for napkins. So whats the point of HP selling it when all they have to do is make one sale, then the buyer could turn around and give it away to thousands of people? They cannot stop this from happening, because the code must be GPLed, and the GPL allows that.
You havent been paying attention. A few months ago a law was drafted (I do not believe it has been introduced into congress yet) by a Senator Hollings called the SSSCA which would mandate that computer hardware and software use digital rights management. Now herere Microsoft with the DRMOS, which they have actually been working on for some time. Follow this to line of reasoning to its natural conclusion and what do you have?
Slashdot Mirror
And, just like Big Dig, by the time its done, it will be outdated.
So, we have DeCSS. Whos up for writing a DeWMA?
Yep. Leave it to Microsoft to invent the first game console that crashes as badly as the rest of their products.
Uhm, Gartner is also the group recommending companies dump Microsofts IIS due to security issues.
They do show the complete breakdown if you actually view the comment on its own page (click the comment number in each comments header).
But, yeah, the mod type is next-to-useless anyway, but fixing that is beyond the scope of the friend/foe discussion. A numbers-only system like K5 might be better, where the total rating is an average of the individual ratings, or some other more statistically-valid result.
How about an encrypted channel between the keyboard/mouse and the computer?
Ive heard a lot about the media mega-corps talking about encrypting the output of video and sound cards to prevent people from copying their digital content the old-fashioned way; if thats possible, wouldnt this also be?
Randomize the position of the window, the size of the keys (sometimes 16x16, sometimes 24x24, etc.), and the position of the keys relative to each other (sometimes QWERTY..., sometimes AZSGBR..., etc.). Maybe even have the window reconfigure itself after each click as an option for the paranoid.
Scanning mouseclicks would not be useful, as all they would get are coordinates. Unless they also hooked into the software to ascertain what key that coord represented, the logger would just simply not work, but in the software is where the logger could be detected and blocked.
Point-and-click text entry for your passwords. Ever seen the Key Caps desk accessory on a Macintosh (or the Character Map on Windows)? Tie something like that into a graphical login display, and there you go. Logging mouseclicks is still a viable option, but how would the logger know that {x=260; y=580} was the letter F? It would need to hook into the software displaying the charac oh, look, now we can secure ourselves via the OS software, cant we?
When you can prove to me that a video game actually directly caused someone injury, then you can use that line of reasoning.
And youre also ignoring the problem of false positives, i.e., innocent bystanders being recognized. You want to be denied access to some place or have an hour or two of your time wasted by the police because the computer thought you looked like someone in its database?
Well, if the final mod is Troll, then you can. Set Troll to -6 and even a comment that is (Score:5; Troll)* will plummet to -1.
* Yes, this is possible. If a comment is rated to (Score:5; something), then modded as troll, it becomes (Score:4; Troll). If someone then applies an Underrated mod (Underrated gives a comment +1 while maintaining the previous mod label), the comment becomes (Score:5; Troll).
Bwahahahah, $318,000 out of the taxpayers pockets. Hell of a price to pay to impose your morality on everyone else, isnt it? Next election year, I hope whatever local politicians that run against the morons who supported this censorship make sure the public is well-aware of this.
It would be nice to have more granularity such that you could assemble lists of users that you assign +1 to, another list +2, another list -1, and so on.
That would be more confusing, would it not? If you are allowed to set each type of moderation to have a value of ±5, the total moderation on the comment could end up much higher than +5 or lower than -1.
Say a comment has received two Interestings, one Flamebait, and four Funnies. Youve assigned +2 to Interesting, -1 to Flamebait, and +3 to Funny. This would then total (+2)(2) + (-1)(1) + (+3)(4) = +15. Is this what you want?
The way it seems to work now, is that the total moderation has a factor from -6 to +6 added to it based on the one, final moderation type, which I think is good enough. It also fixes the range that a comment could achieve to something reasonable (-7 to +11, which is outside the threshold pulldown menu, but still acceptable).
To everyone complaining this is going to create more exclusive cliques, groupthink, and so on:
Usenet, the original online discussion forum, has had these things called Killfiles for years. (Actually Usenet itself does not, but nearly all the clients have these kinds of filters.) Now Slashdot is starting to finally implement the same functionality. Whats the big deal then?
You can automatically add (or subtract) mod points to Anonymous Coward posts through your preferences (under Comments). For example, if you add -3 points to AC posts, unless his post has an initial score of +2 or more, the resultant score will be -2 or lower, hence not visible even if you are browsing at -1.
A succint way of summing it up would be that this law isnt restricting speech, its restricting actions you take to make yourself heard. The writing of an email is the speech, the sending of the email is an attempt to act to make yourself heard.
First off, the common rebuttal to this kind of argument is that one has a right to speech but not a guarantee of a venue. You can say anything you want but you cant force your audience to listen. Spam has been equated to tresspassing in some cases the lengths that spammers go to to intentionally thwart peoples filters should be clear enough evidence that they are not only interested in speaking, but also going to try to force you to listen however they can. This is, in my opinion, the online equivalent of breaking into someones home to shout your speech at the top of your lungs at them.
But theres also a second rebuttal argument to this, and that is that commercial speech can and should be regulated. Many countries do in fact regulate commercial speech while having generally free speech otherwise. The spirit of freedom of speech laws is that the speech has some political, literary or artistic value (theres a Supreme Court quote vis-à-vis obscenity that people usually kick around about this; sorry I do not know it at the moment). Economic speech, motivated purely by the desire to make money, has no such value.
But I believe more in the first argument; spam is damned annoying. This isnt restricting speech, its restricting actions you take to make yourself heard. You can advertise all you want (just like you can make political speeches, pen novels, or make porn), you just cannot attempt to force your supposed audience to listen to you.
It doesnt have an ASCII value ignore the nitwits below you, as ASCII is only 7 bits (127 characters maximum), and theyre giving you the Windows-specific 8-bit value 128. For example, on Macintosh, it has a different location: 219 (Option-shift-2).
Its Unicode value is 0x20AC, which is a standard. It can be written as € in HTML/XML, or € for the few browsers that support the symbolic name (mine doesnt seem to).
I use IE/5.0 on Macintosh (MacOS9.2, 450MHz G3) and there are significant slowdowns with heavily-nested comments. Rendering can take several seconds, sometimes longer. The comments/page setting only seems to control how many top-level comments one sees: e.g., if I set it to show 25 comments/page, but every comment has 4 replies (or reply-replies, etc.), I see 125 comments/page.
I wonder how difficult it would be to write a web script (CGI/Perl or PHP) to fetch Usenet messages (NNTP is a text-based, line-oriented protocol, with commands similar to SMTP, POP, FTP) and organize them (based on the References header, sort of how Slashdot comments have a Parent ID [pid]) in tables.
The format specifier %Y.%m.%d %H:%M is nearly ISO8601 (which is the format I prefer), its just using dots instead of dashes. It would output a date such as 2002-01-01 00:00.
Slashdots HTML definitely could use an overhaul, and I think that even the tables could go (in favor of some nested DIV tags whose appearance could be controlled via stylesheets). The comments are not tabular data, hence using the TABLE tag is incorrect by definition. I was messing around once with this kind of layout a while back to see what it would look like. In my example, I used borders around the comments to show the parentchild relationship, but the stylesheet could be set to look nearly identical to Slashdot in its current state.
Threaded mode is desirable if there are a lot of comments with a lot of replies (i.e., nested tables). Try rending a hundred tables, eighty with one or two nested inside, and a dozen or so with tentwenty nested inside several levels deep, and see how long it takes on various browsers. What Slashdot needs is a mode like Kuro5hin where you can set it to display nested for a few comments (user-configurable), and threaded for stories with more. Of course, what Kuro5hin needs is the ability to break up comments across several pages (25 comments per page), because there are still rendering-time issues with K5 stories since their HTML is even more atrocious than Slashdots.
The reason the story disappears is that the Change form submits to comments.pl, not article.pl. It might not be possible to submit the form to article.pl; check the source, does article.pl support all the parameters (threshold, sort, etc.) that comments.pl does?
Thirdly, change your date format! Several of the date formats do have the year embedded in them. I use the %Y.%m.%d %H:%M format, which does.
Youre right, but whoever buys it is then free to do whatever he wishes with it, including give it away, sell it for less (or for more), or print it out and use it for napkins. So whats the point of HP selling it when all they have to do is make one sale, then the buyer could turn around and give it away to thousands of people? They cannot stop this from happening, because the code must be GPLed, and the GPL allows that.
Linux From Scratch. Not for newbies, but you can make an extremely small distro yourself.
Watch yer typos. DMA is nearly the opposite of DRM. :)
You havent been paying attention. A few months ago a law was drafted (I do not believe it has been introduced into congress yet) by a Senator Hollings called the SSSCA which would mandate that computer hardware and software use digital rights management. Now herere Microsoft with the DRMOS, which they have actually been working on for some time. Follow this to line of reasoning to its natural conclusion and what do you have?