Any time you create a new market with new taxes, you're creating new revenue.
This isn't just taxation though, because Sony controls the supply. The government doesn't control the supply of tobacco or alcohol or land or vehicles. They tax them, but they don't limit or restrict the amount that a given person can buy at once or possess assuming that they are old enough to legally do so.
Sony can make any item they want to make and then they can make it disappear at any time, artificially increasing the item's worth by creating an artificial scarcity. In turn, if their nominal fee happens to be a small percentage, the item's increase in value will in turn earn Sony more money in auction fees.
Now Sony can pump their revenues whenever they want, the same way OPEC can. "Oh hey, I think that actually, today, yep, oil will be worth... yeah, $53 a barrel. yep." = "Take manastones out of the game for two months, we need money for christmas bonuses."
Your comparison is somewhat irrelevant, because Everquest is largely PvE (player versus environment) whereas UT or Chess are PvP (player versus player). Paying more for a better PvE experience is not uncommon and will not ruin the game.
Sony gets a cut. They tax all the transactions. They make money turning virtual items into real items. Some items, yes, players will "work" for, but they are created out of nothing.
When you walk up to an NPC and slay him, he's got some loot on him. Couple coins, a skin, whatever. Where did that NPC come from? His spawn point. But wait, what was there before that...? NOTHING! So from nothing, comes something, comes loot, comes the opportunity to sell the loot for a profit, and be taxed in the process.
So when Sony wants to pump their revenues, they just introduce some no-drop floaty orb thingy that uses a special slot or whatever that *everybody wants* and can be gotten only by combining 8 of some special item that can be had via the station exchange for a dollar. That's $8 to make the whole thing. Some people won't buy all 8, maybe only 4 or 5. Let's say Sony's "nomincal fee" (which they do not specifically disclose; See here: http://stationexchange.station.sony.com/faq.vm ) works out to 25 cents per item. So the buyer spends $1, Sony takes $0.25, the seller gets $0.75. 400,000 people want this floaty orb and don't want to put time into getting the items, so they shell out $8 for them.
$2 on every $8 is 25%. 400,000 people buying 8 individual items for $1.00 each is 3.2 million dollars worth of commerce, of which $800,000 was created from thin air, and goes directly into Sony's pocket.
So you know that yearly bonus thing that your parent post mentioned? Think several hundred thousand dollars might cover it? Yeah, I think so too.
By allowing (condoning, actually) this sort of activity, Sony is ensuring that this game dies a slow and lingering death. Gone are the days when all you needed to excel at Everquest was a good internet connection and a complete lack of a life...now you need the cash, too. People with money will be better equipped than people with no money...those with no money will quit in disgust, and those with money will lose interest after they run up against enough other players with enough money to equip themselves well. Fortunately, those who don't want to participate in this mercenary practice will have the option to play on non-Station Exchange servers...that is, until a majority of the players on that server want the server to be a Station Exchange server...in which case you'll have to find another server...sorry.
You're paying for a service (to play the game, right?)... why does it not make sense to pay more for better service? That's capitalism! I'm going to parody your paragraph, because you seem to be blind to what capitalism is and what it's doing.
By allowing (condoning, actually) this capitalist activity, we are ensuring that this country dies a slow and lingering death. Gone are the days when all you needed to excel at life was a good strong back and a complete lack of a life...now you need the cash, too. People with money will be better equipped than people with no money...those with no money may quit in disgust[1], and those with money will lose interest after they run up against enough other people with enough money to equip themselves well. Fortunately those who don't want to participate in this mercenary practice will have the option to live in non-capitalist countries...that is, until a majority of the people in the country want the country to be a capitalist country...in which case you'll have to find another country, sorry.
Addendum [1]: http://webapp.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/leadcaus10.html Do the default search for 2002. The #3 cause of death for 15-24 year olds is suicide. The #2 cause of death for 25-34 year olds is suicide. The #1 cause across the board until age 44 according to their statistics is Unintentional Injury. Tangentially, 4 people in the 35-44 age group unintentionally killed themselves via overexertion. Aren't statistics fun?
I read a short story years ago about a similar implant which kept everybody on the same "mental level." In the interest of promoting societal equality between each individual, it was determined that nobody should have an intellectual advantage over anybody else. It'd dumb smart people down, help out the dumber people, etc.
65 million years and a lot of heat and pressure within the earth's crust and mantle (remember continental drift and how the crust is "recycled") will remove all of those objects from existence, if they ever existed in the first place.
I have Verizon DSL and I have had few problems until just recently. Just recently they changed their IP scheme (used to be 4.x.x.x now it's 71.x.x.x) in my area as well as the behavior of their DHCP servers (MAC-based authorization). It's been a huge pain in my ass that I wasn't at all notified about. They've also been getting progressively slower over time and just recently (Saturday) they had an unexplained 5-hour outage in the 425 area code (the *entire* area code). However, I am at the outer limits of DSL's coverage range and any number of factors could be affecting my own personal experiences.
Comcast is running a special right now, first 5 months for $29.99 each month (This makes it the same price as Verizon) if you're a current Comcast subscriber. It's $10/month extra for "naked cable internet" as it were. That's the nice thing about Comcast: they'll give you what you want, for a price, while Verizon is just not about making people happy.
I say that they're not about making people happy because I spent 35 minutes on hold while waiting to talk to somebody about their nullroute problem. They play a "helpful tips" message over and over again, no hold music, and a "your call is important, you're in a queue, yadda yadda" message, looped as well. There's a pause between the voice offering tips and when it plays the first tip, lulling you into some kind of false sense of security, as if it's picking a random tip to share. Nope, it's the same stupid tips, over and over. ("unplugging and restarting your DSL modem can fix most DSL problems!") I really wish they'd just give me some hold music and an option to press 1 for some quick tips if I want them. But you see, Verizon isn't about choices, which is why they like locking people into the "you need basic phone service to get DSL" thing. They don't like people having options, they like to dictate what people can and can't do. I say fuck 'em, if they're gonna be like that.
Tangentially, I wonder how much latent anger towards women is generated by these automated female voices that do nothing other than frustrate and irritate us? I would prefer an obviously-synthesized robotic voice over a trying-to-sound-human voice. I hate those machines
The "I'm mad at the company, so I'm going to pay the minimum-wage cashier in something REALLY inconvenient" strikes me as a nasty, pointless way to get "revenge," and a useless form of protest.
Well, I don't know about that. Now *everybody* knows this man's story, and that's definitely worth something. (It'll also be worth about 20% to the lawyer he hires to sue the shit out of Best Buy...)
Actually, I was just musing to myself that it could be a lensing effect caused by the light sources of out own solar system and the entropy involved therein, and not necessarily "painted" on. And there doesn't have to really be a crystal (read: physical) lens, either; it could all be due to some weird gravity envelope of our star or something absurd like that.
It'd make for good sci-fi tv, no doubt. Especially if the bubble or lens or whatever was shrinking.
It's amazing how much respect you earn when people think you're a competent, educated intellectual.
In other words: Capitalize "I" as a pronoun and don't confuse "your" with "you're" and maybe you too will eventually earn some respect. This is actually a great deal of the problem; AIM kiddies that don't know how to properly form a sentence calling themselves "geeks" and "nerds" and giving the real mccoy a bad name. It has nothing to do with computers being perceived as infallible when they are in reality fallible; it has to do with the way you project yourself.
If you project yourself like a child, you'll be treated like one.
"Forked discussion is bad because it means that you can't look in one place to see the whole spectrum of discussion."
So you should be able to just go to one place and find all information? Is there a magical library of alexandria in your dreams or something? You always need to go to multiple sources to see the bigger picture. Forked discussions are a GOOD thing. Is there only one mathematics textbook? No? Well why not? Why all that forked discussion about math, why not one be-all end-all book about it? Forked discussion is an extremely good thing as it promotes DIVERSITY of thought. It encourages different people with different ideas to contribute to the same topic. There's not only one web forum out there for car enthusiasts or computer enthusiasts or whatever. If only for the reason that some people don't get along with others, diversity of discussion is a good thing.
You said "a person searching stories later might only find the dupe" -- yes, might. World might also end right now. might. You might get hit by a bus tomorrow. might. You think that all discussion should be had in the same place; that there should be only one forum of discussion, because somebody might miss your comment? To presume that anything modded insightful on slashdot is "an important contribution" is pretty asinine in and of itself. +5 Informative, maybe, but I've seen some pretty shitty +5 Insightfuls. Believing that all discussion should be held in the same place because of the off chance that somebody searching for something isn't interested enough in it to do a thorough search and they may miss your comment is incredibly, almost dumbfoundedly idiotic.
Diversity is about DIFFERENT thoughts, not about somebody reading your post and going "wow, you're insightful" and then not posting anything because they're awed by your insight. Perhaps not having your insight around will allow another to provide an alternate and different insight and therefore an alternate viewpoint. AHA! that's it! Now you see! An alternate viewpoint! The way you see the world isn't the way the world necessarily is! So getting additional viewpoints is good, and having multiple discussions about a particular topic allows for multiple viewpoints to be explored, free from the insinuations or debates that have built up from the last discussion. Maybe now you'll understand that forking a discussion does absolutely nothing to hurt the diversity of thought.
Slashdot is populated by a bunch of immature geek fanboys who are unfamiliar with the concept of the rerun or its noteworthy value. These people read slashdot every day. Not just every day, but every hour. If there's not something new or fresh there to read, they bitch and moan about it. They're spoiled little geek brats. Simple.
"Dupes suck, if for not other reason, because they fork discussion"
Forked discussion is bad? Diversity in thought is... bad? Should we all don our uniforms now and all talk and act the same way? Diversity is good, forked discussions are good. Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
"confuse the archive"
Confuse how? The article titles are concise. If somebody reads a pair of duplicated articles on slashdot and they don't possess the mental capacity to identify them as articles about the same thing, then that's their loss. This is slashdot. News for nerds. You know, smart people. Do we really need to cater to the stupid?
"make searches less precise"
Precise how? By encouraging a greater diversity of results? It might ruin precision but it sure increases your pool of available results.
I posit the notion that a dupe is posted because the editor finds the story to be interesting. Just think of it like the 11 o'clock news rehashing the 5 o'clock news for other peoples' benefit because a given story is still interesting. In most cases, with slashdot, it's an unintentional duplication. But the effect is the same, you repeat the valid content to a new audience.
The editors don't post stories solely for the fanbois who never leave slashdot.org through the course of their waking hours. They post stories to post them, for people to read them. If something is interesting enough to post about twice, can't those of us who feel it's a waste of time just look past it? I mean, yes, it might not be benefiting you particularly, but there's really no reason to bitch about it at all (especially if you aren't even a subscriber)
I'm curious, where in the slashdot user agreement does it say that there will be no duplicate stories? Where does it say that they won't be redundant? Does it?
This is a case of not knowing how good you have it until you don't have it any more. Would you rather have no slashdot, or slashdot with the occasional dupe? Think about that one. Some people might benefit from the dupe that your feeble mind cannot possibly scroll past without erupting into an aneurism of dupe-loathing.
I really don't get what is so bad about reading about the same (generally interesting) thing twice; you all seem like a bunch of narrow-minded inside-the-box fuckwits.
That was incredible informative. It's a shame I've posted in this thread already, else I'd mod you up. I really felt good about that 12-character password, too!
Actually, according to another slashdotter's comment, gumstix is smaller by almost 3 cubic centimeters. 99 euro is $127. For $109 you can get a gumstix with a 200mhz processor, 4MB flash, and 64MB of RAM. Granted, the gumstix doesn't come with built-in ethernet. It does however have almost four times the processing power and eight times the RAM. A waysmall basix can be had for $139. Add the audiostix expansion board ($40) and you've got the beginnings of a portable media player, or the like.
Here at Microsoft they have strong passwords enabled and they force you to change passwords every 70 days, and it keeps a list of your most-recent passwords and disallows selecting one of them. After my first 70 days I got the little password change dialog. I tried a few things to no avail and then settled on: Micr0$hizzle -- a 12-character password with a digit and a punctuation symbol. I chuckled to myself every day I logged on for 70 days. I find that leet-icizing common words makes for really nice passwords. Frequently, when setting up new systems, I give the administrator account some variant of "password" such as "P4$$w0rd" or the like.
The number of possible options for a password is [number of valid characters in a given position] to the power of [number of positions]. A one character all lowercase password has only 26 possibilities. Upper or lowercase and it's 52. Two characters upper and lower case is 2704 possibilities. Upper and lowercase (52), 0-9 (10), the associated punctuation marks (10), curly/angled/square brackets (6), comma, period, question mark, forward and backward slash, tilde, quote, double quote, backquote, semicolon, colon (11). That's 52 + 10 + 10 + 6 + 11 or 89 possible characters per position. Most of the punctuation marks aren't ever used though, so let's give a conservative 78 possible characters.
For a base-78 password: 1 character is 78 possibilities 2 characters is 6084 possibilities 3 characters is 474552 possibilities 4 characters is 37015056 possibilities, 5 characters is 2887174368 possibilities, 6 characters is 225199600704 possibilities,... 12 characters is 50,714,860,157,241,037,295,616 possibilities. That's 50 septillion, for anyone keeping track.
Anything can be a good password.
Devout catholic? How about Pop3J0hnP4ul! (13 chars) or Bish()pFr3d? (12) Animal lover? Il0ved0g5! (10).
So on and so forth. Just take a word or a phrase and leeticize (that's my new favorite nonce word of the day) it so it still reads more or less the same. Then the password can be remembered visually and likened to an easily recognized word or phrase and look less like a random jumble of characters. I wouldn't at all mind if people used their pet's name to help them remember the sequence of characters in their password, but I don't think people should use their pet's names AS their passwords. If the dog's name is Bartholomew, the password would be B4r+hol0m3w! (the exclamation point is part of the password, making it 12 characters).
You should stipulate that it needs to live without assistive medical technology, as the pro-life defender here seems to be convinced that medical technology can make anything live, including a 24-week prematurely-born infant.
He'll probably nitpick, so you should define "live" as "persist in an independent animated state with heartbeat and breath for a period longer than one day."
I heard about something similar years ago. Instead of roaming around, it had this key part which was also a bouncing ball. It would eject the ball and you needed to find and replace said ball to turn off the alarm. Now, if such a device were, say, built into the wall behind a polycarbonate guard (to prevent hammer smashing) it would be more reasonable. Need to make sure you add the functionality of this watch, which detects when the "best" time to awaken you would be. Yeah, then you'd be really damn close to ideal...
The people would be more inclined to approve nuclear-powered lasers on the ground pointing up than solar-powered lasers in orbit pointed down, even though there's no real danger having lasers in orbit.
Lasers are a good idea because of the availability commercially, but microwave power transmission holds greater efficiencies over long distances (a cellphone, which can work miles away from a tower, is a low-power microwave transmitter).
The reason the Star Wars program never really worked is because you can't use a space-based laser to hit a ground-based target, as the atmosphere scatters too much of the light. You need to use a wavelength that won't be interfered with as much on its way to its destination.
Citizen makes a line of watches called EcoDrive, which are all solar powered. Seiko makes a few watches under the Seiko Kinetic brand which are all movement powered.
You don't really need superconductors for neat technology.
Actually, null characters are used to terminate strings, so if there's one byte left to be read and it's a null character, the read routine would just return a string with length of zero. If it's the EOF character, it would return -1.
I actually had a problem with the null character recently where somehow one of them ended up in an XML document and my parser was just choking all over it and I couldn't figure out why until I pulled the source into a hex editor the examine all the character codes specifically. A null character and a space look very much the same in Windows' Notepad. If you have a string like "see jack run" and between the k of "jack" and r of "run" there's a null character, you can select the string and copy it, but it doesn't all get into RAM and when you paste it you'll only get up until the end of Jack. Weird huh? The odd copy and paste behavior is actually what alerted me to the presence of the null character...
Slashdot Mirror
Any time you create a new market with new taxes, you're creating new revenue.
This isn't just taxation though, because Sony controls the supply. The government doesn't control the supply of tobacco or alcohol or land or vehicles. They tax them, but they don't limit or restrict the amount that a given person can buy at once or possess assuming that they are old enough to legally do so.
Sony can make any item they want to make and then they can make it disappear at any time, artificially increasing the item's worth by creating an artificial scarcity. In turn, if their nominal fee happens to be a small percentage, the item's increase in value will in turn earn Sony more money in auction fees.
Now Sony can pump their revenues whenever they want, the same way OPEC can. "Oh hey, I think that actually, today, yep, oil will be worth... yeah, $53 a barrel. yep." = "Take manastones out of the game for two months, we need money for christmas bonuses."
Your comparison is somewhat irrelevant, because Everquest is largely PvE (player versus environment) whereas UT or Chess are PvP (player versus player). Paying more for a better PvE experience is not uncommon and will not ruin the game.
You missed the point of your parent post.
Sony gets a cut. They tax all the transactions. They make money turning virtual items into real items. Some items, yes, players will "work" for, but they are created out of nothing.
When you walk up to an NPC and slay him, he's got some loot on him. Couple coins, a skin, whatever. Where did that NPC come from? His spawn point. But wait, what was there before that...? NOTHING! So from nothing, comes something, comes loot, comes the opportunity to sell the loot for a profit, and be taxed in the process.
So when Sony wants to pump their revenues, they just introduce some no-drop floaty orb thingy that uses a special slot or whatever that *everybody wants* and can be gotten only by combining 8 of some special item that can be had via the station exchange for a dollar. That's $8 to make the whole thing. Some people won't buy all 8, maybe only 4 or 5. Let's say Sony's "nomincal fee" (which they do not specifically disclose; See here: http://stationexchange.station.sony.com/faq.vm ) works out to 25 cents per item. So the buyer spends $1, Sony takes $0.25, the seller gets $0.75. 400,000 people want this floaty orb and don't want to put time into getting the items, so they shell out $8 for them.
$2 on every $8 is 25%. 400,000 people buying 8 individual items for $1.00 each is 3.2 million dollars worth of commerce, of which $800,000 was created from thin air, and goes directly into Sony's pocket.
So you know that yearly bonus thing that your parent post mentioned? Think several hundred thousand dollars might cover it? Yeah, I think so too.
By allowing (condoning, actually) this sort of activity, Sony is ensuring that this game dies a slow and lingering death. Gone are the days when all you needed to excel at Everquest was a good internet connection and a complete lack of a life...now you need the cash, too. People with money will be better equipped than people with no money...those with no money will quit in disgust, and those with money will lose interest after they run up against enough other players with enough money to equip themselves well. Fortunately, those who don't want to participate in this mercenary practice will have the option to play on non-Station Exchange servers...that is, until a majority of the players on that server want the server to be a Station Exchange server...in which case you'll have to find another server...sorry.
... why does it not make sense to pay more for better service? That's capitalism! I'm going to parody your paragraph, because you seem to be blind to what capitalism is and what it's doing.
l
You're paying for a service (to play the game, right?)
By allowing (condoning, actually) this capitalist activity, we are ensuring that this country dies a slow and lingering death. Gone are the days when all you needed to excel at life was a good strong back and a complete lack of a life...now you need the cash, too. People with money will be better equipped than people with no money...those with no money may quit in disgust[1], and those with money will lose interest after they run up against enough other people with enough money to equip themselves well. Fortunately those who don't want to participate in this mercenary practice will have the option to live in non-capitalist countries...that is, until a majority of the people in the country want the country to be a capitalist country...in which case you'll have to find another country, sorry.
Addendum
[1]: http://webapp.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/leadcaus10.htm
Do the default search for 2002. The #3 cause of death for 15-24 year olds is suicide. The #2 cause of death for 25-34 year olds is suicide. The #1 cause across the board until age 44 according to their statistics is Unintentional Injury. Tangentially, 4 people in the 35-44 age group unintentionally killed themselves via overexertion. Aren't statistics fun?
If the continental plates get larger over time, wouldn't that mean that the volume of the earth is ... increasing?
I read a short story years ago about a similar implant which kept everybody on the same "mental level." In the interest of promoting societal equality between each individual, it was determined that nobody should have an intellectual advantage over anybody else. It'd dumb smart people down, help out the dumber people, etc.
65 million years and a lot of heat and pressure within the earth's crust and mantle (remember continental drift and how the crust is "recycled") will remove all of those objects from existence, if they ever existed in the first place.
I have Verizon DSL and I have had few problems until just recently. Just recently they changed their IP scheme (used to be 4.x.x.x now it's 71.x.x.x) in my area as well as the behavior of their DHCP servers (MAC-based authorization). It's been a huge pain in my ass that I wasn't at all notified about. They've also been getting progressively slower over time and just recently (Saturday) they had an unexplained 5-hour outage in the 425 area code (the *entire* area code). However, I am at the outer limits of DSL's coverage range and any number of factors could be affecting my own personal experiences.
Comcast is running a special right now, first 5 months for $29.99 each month (This makes it the same price as Verizon) if you're a current Comcast subscriber. It's $10/month extra for "naked cable internet" as it were. That's the nice thing about Comcast: they'll give you what you want, for a price, while Verizon is just not about making people happy.
I say that they're not about making people happy because I spent 35 minutes on hold while waiting to talk to somebody about their nullroute problem. They play a "helpful tips" message over and over again, no hold music, and a "your call is important, you're in a queue, yadda yadda" message, looped as well. There's a pause between the voice offering tips and when it plays the first tip, lulling you into some kind of false sense of security, as if it's picking a random tip to share. Nope, it's the same stupid tips, over and over. ("unplugging and restarting your DSL modem can fix most DSL problems!") I really wish they'd just give me some hold music and an option to press 1 for some quick tips if I want them. But you see, Verizon isn't about choices, which is why they like locking people into the "you need basic phone service to get DSL" thing. They don't like people having options, they like to dictate what people can and can't do. I say fuck 'em, if they're gonna be like that.
Tangentially, I wonder how much latent anger towards women is generated by these automated female voices that do nothing other than frustrate and irritate us? I would prefer an obviously-synthesized robotic voice over a trying-to-sound-human voice. I hate those machines
I am curious what the price per LED was and why these LEDs were chosen over the super-cheap variety that can be had on eBay?
The "I'm mad at the company, so I'm going to pay the minimum-wage cashier in something REALLY inconvenient" strikes me as a nasty, pointless way to get "revenge," and a useless form of protest.
Well, I don't know about that. Now *everybody* knows this man's story, and that's definitely worth something. (It'll also be worth about 20% to the lawyer he hires to sue the shit out of Best Buy...)
Actually, I was just musing to myself that it could be a lensing effect caused by the light sources of out own solar system and the entropy involved therein, and not necessarily "painted" on. And there doesn't have to really be a crystal (read: physical) lens, either; it could all be due to some weird gravity envelope of our star or something absurd like that.
It'd make for good sci-fi tv, no doubt. Especially if the bubble or lens or whatever was shrinking.
Exactly. The voyager probes are very nice science-nerd toys, but not much else.
The rovers have pictures; hell, they have individual names--they aren't numbered "probes" or anything hyper-nerdy like that.
Rovers = PR toys
Probes = nerd toys
It's amazing how much respect you earn when people think you're a competent, educated intellectual.
In other words: Capitalize "I" as a pronoun and don't confuse "your" with "you're" and maybe you too will eventually earn some respect. This is actually a great deal of the problem; AIM kiddies that don't know how to properly form a sentence calling themselves "geeks" and "nerds" and giving the real mccoy a bad name. It has nothing to do with computers being perceived as infallible when they are in reality fallible; it has to do with the way you project yourself.
If you project yourself like a child, you'll be treated like one.
"Forked discussion is bad because it means that you can't look in one place to see the whole spectrum of discussion."
So you should be able to just go to one place and find all information? Is there a magical library of alexandria in your dreams or something? You always need to go to multiple sources to see the bigger picture. Forked discussions are a GOOD thing. Is there only one mathematics textbook? No? Well why not? Why all that forked discussion about math, why not one be-all end-all book about it? Forked discussion is an extremely good thing as it promotes DIVERSITY of thought. It encourages different people with different ideas to contribute to the same topic. There's not only one web forum out there for car enthusiasts or computer enthusiasts or whatever. If only for the reason that some people don't get along with others, diversity of discussion is a good thing.
You said "a person searching stories later might only find the dupe" -- yes, might. World might also end right now. might. You might get hit by a bus tomorrow. might. You think that all discussion should be had in the same place; that there should be only one forum of discussion, because somebody might miss your comment? To presume that anything modded insightful on slashdot is "an important contribution" is pretty asinine in and of itself. +5 Informative, maybe, but I've seen some pretty shitty +5 Insightfuls. Believing that all discussion should be held in the same place because of the off chance that somebody searching for something isn't interested enough in it to do a thorough search and they may miss your comment is incredibly, almost dumbfoundedly idiotic.
Diversity is about DIFFERENT thoughts, not about somebody reading your post and going "wow, you're insightful" and then not posting anything because they're awed by your insight. Perhaps not having your insight around will allow another to provide an alternate and different insight and therefore an alternate viewpoint. AHA! that's it! Now you see! An alternate viewpoint! The way you see the world isn't the way the world necessarily is! So getting additional viewpoints is good, and having multiple discussions about a particular topic allows for multiple viewpoints to be explored, free from the insinuations or debates that have built up from the last discussion. Maybe now you'll understand that forking a discussion does absolutely nothing to hurt the diversity of thought.
Slashdot is populated by a bunch of immature geek fanboys who are unfamiliar with the concept of the rerun or its noteworthy value. These people read slashdot every day. Not just every day, but every hour. If there's not something new or fresh there to read, they bitch and moan about it. They're spoiled little geek brats. Simple.
... bad? Should we all don our uniforms now and all talk and act the same way? Diversity is good, forked discussions are good. Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
"Dupes suck, if for not other reason, because they fork discussion"
Forked discussion is bad? Diversity in thought is
"confuse the archive"
Confuse how? The article titles are concise. If somebody reads a pair of duplicated articles on slashdot and they don't possess the mental capacity to identify them as articles about the same thing, then that's their loss. This is slashdot. News for nerds. You know, smart people. Do we really need to cater to the stupid?
"make searches less precise"
Precise how? By encouraging a greater diversity of results? It might ruin precision but it sure increases your pool of available results.
I posit the notion that a dupe is posted because the editor finds the story to be interesting. Just think of it like the 11 o'clock news rehashing the 5 o'clock news for other peoples' benefit because a given story is still interesting. In most cases, with slashdot, it's an unintentional duplication. But the effect is the same, you repeat the valid content to a new audience.
The editors don't post stories solely for the fanbois who never leave slashdot.org through the course of their waking hours. They post stories to post them, for people to read them. If something is interesting enough to post about twice, can't those of us who feel it's a waste of time just look past it? I mean, yes, it might not be benefiting you particularly, but there's really no reason to bitch about it at all (especially if you aren't even a subscriber)
I'm curious, where in the slashdot user agreement does it say that there will be no duplicate stories? Where does it say that they won't be redundant? Does it?
This is a case of not knowing how good you have it until you don't have it any more. Would you rather have no slashdot, or slashdot with the occasional dupe? Think about that one. Some people might benefit from the dupe that your feeble mind cannot possibly scroll past without erupting into an aneurism of dupe-loathing.
I really don't get what is so bad about reading about the same (generally interesting) thing twice; you all seem like a bunch of narrow-minded inside-the-box fuckwits.
Just.
Keep.
Scrolling.
That was incredible informative. It's a shame I've posted in this thread already, else I'd mod you up. I really felt good about that 12-character password, too!
Actually, according to another slashdotter's comment, gumstix is smaller by almost 3 cubic centimeters. 99 euro is $127. For $109 you can get a gumstix with a 200mhz processor, 4MB flash, and 64MB of RAM. Granted, the gumstix doesn't come with built-in ethernet. It does however have almost four times the processing power and eight times the RAM. A waysmall basix can be had for $139. Add the audiostix expansion board ($40) and you've got the beginnings of a portable media player, or the like.
It's the most effective kind, duh.
That thing will NEVER pass an evil packet!
Here at Microsoft they have strong passwords enabled and they force you to change passwords every 70 days, and it keeps a list of your most-recent passwords and disallows selecting one of them. After my first 70 days I got the little password change dialog. I tried a few things to no avail and then settled on: Micr0$hizzle -- a 12-character password with a digit and a punctuation symbol. I chuckled to myself every day I logged on for 70 days. I find that leet-icizing common words makes for really nice passwords. Frequently, when setting up new systems, I give the administrator account some variant of "password" such as "P4$$w0rd" or the like.
...
The number of possible options for a password is [number of valid characters in a given position] to the power of [number of positions]. A one character all lowercase password has only 26 possibilities. Upper or lowercase and it's 52. Two characters upper and lower case is 2704 possibilities. Upper and lowercase (52), 0-9 (10), the associated punctuation marks (10), curly/angled/square brackets (6), comma, period, question mark, forward and backward slash, tilde, quote, double quote, backquote, semicolon, colon (11). That's 52 + 10 + 10 + 6 + 11 or 89 possible characters per position. Most of the punctuation marks aren't ever used though, so let's give a conservative 78 possible characters.
For a base-78 password:
1 character is 78 possibilities
2 characters is 6084 possibilities
3 characters is 474552 possibilities
4 characters is 37015056 possibilities,
5 characters is 2887174368 possibilities,
6 characters is 225199600704 possibilities,
12 characters is 50,714,860,157,241,037,295,616 possibilities. That's 50 septillion, for anyone keeping track.
Anything can be a good password.
Devout catholic? How about Pop3J0hnP4ul! (13 chars) or Bish()pFr3d? (12)
Animal lover? Il0ved0g5! (10).
So on and so forth. Just take a word or a phrase and leeticize (that's my new favorite nonce word of the day) it so it still reads more or less the same. Then the password can be remembered visually and likened to an easily recognized word or phrase and look less like a random jumble of characters. I wouldn't at all mind if people used their pet's name to help them remember the sequence of characters in their password, but I don't think people should use their pet's names AS their passwords. If the dog's name is Bartholomew, the password would be B4r+hol0m3w! (the exclamation point is part of the password, making it 12 characters).
You should stipulate that it needs to live without assistive medical technology, as the pro-life defender here seems to be convinced that medical technology can make anything live, including a 24-week prematurely-born infant.
He'll probably nitpick, so you should define "live" as "persist in an independent animated state with heartbeat and breath for a period longer than one day."
I heard about something similar years ago. Instead of roaming around, it had this key part which was also a bouncing ball. It would eject the ball and you needed to find and replace said ball to turn off the alarm. Now, if such a device were, say, built into the wall behind a polycarbonate guard (to prevent hammer smashing) it would be more reasonable. Need to make sure you add the functionality of this watch, which detects when the "best" time to awaken you would be. Yeah, then you'd be really damn close to ideal...
The people would be more inclined to approve nuclear-powered lasers on the ground pointing up than solar-powered lasers in orbit pointed down, even though there's no real danger having lasers in orbit.
Lasers are a good idea because of the availability commercially, but microwave power transmission holds greater efficiencies over long distances (a cellphone, which can work miles away from a tower, is a low-power microwave transmitter).
The reason the Star Wars program never really worked is because you can't use a space-based laser to hit a ground-based target, as the atmosphere scatters too much of the light. You need to use a wavelength that won't be interfered with as much on its way to its destination.
Citizen makes a line of watches called EcoDrive, which are all solar powered.
Seiko makes a few watches under the Seiko Kinetic brand which are all movement powered.
You don't really need superconductors for neat technology.
Actually, null characters are used to terminate strings, so if there's one byte left to be read and it's a null character, the read routine would just return a string with length of zero. If it's the EOF character, it would return -1.
I actually had a problem with the null character recently where somehow one of them ended up in an XML document and my parser was just choking all over it and I couldn't figure out why until I pulled the source into a hex editor the examine all the character codes specifically. A null character and a space look very much the same in Windows' Notepad. If you have a string like "see jack run" and between the k of "jack" and r of "run" there's a null character, you can select the string and copy it, but it doesn't all get into RAM and when you paste it you'll only get up until the end of Jack. Weird huh? The odd copy and paste behavior is actually what alerted me to the presence of the null character...
I prefer the latter form:
//...
int buffer;
while((buffer = in.read()) != -1) {
It reads the easiest, to me. "While the read operation doesn't return -1"
Since most read operations return the number of characters/bytes read though, I'd probably write it as:
while ((buffer = in.read()) > 0)
to give a clearer indication of expecting more than 0 characters/bytes. Maybe I'm just overly used to reading while(read(buf,1024) > 0) statements.