That outdated usenet definition is not applicable to slashdot. Sure, it's occasionally used, but mostly trolls are both pointlessly stupid and offensive posts and the people who post them.
How did this come to be? Well, I think the moderation system is largely to blame: seperate troll and flamebait categories (at best, the classical troll is just a particularly subtle flamebait) and nothing else remotely applicable to the "all Natalie Portman's hot grits are belong to penis bird" crowd (okay, "Offtopic" might do, but they're often at least somewhat topical, having crude references to the current story). With every such post marked "troll", you can hardly go around criticizing people for defining it that way.
Besides, I think most people here are more familiar with smelly, obnoxious, vaguely humanoid annoyances that live under bridges and in holes in the ground than with fishing by moving along slowly with a line in the water. ---
For some reason, they posted this one and rejected my very similar submission, which went:
"Hi, I would like to make lots of money running my own business (maybe with something fun and `geeky' like games, so I can enjoy myself and become more popular with my adopted community as I make my fortune), but don't know how. Would you thousands of slashdot readers please all get together and spend your own unpaid time and effort to figure out how to make me rich?" ---
The old-technology (or "classic") used video game store is a great business to get into because there is never a shortage of inventory available from bankruptcy and going-out-of-business sales. Heck, you can probably get a whole business, with merchandise already on shelves, at a suicide estate auction. ---
...it's not illegal for the reason of changing the agreement.
It might be (and probably is) illegal for deliberately tricking the seller. ("Look, you advertised it at this price, you have to sell it to me for that.") ---
When you are offered a contract, you can cross out sections and write in your own before you sign it (you should initial and date your modifications, in case of multiple rounds of this). However, signing it doesn't form a contract, it forms a counteroffer. It doesn't become a contract unless the other guy signs it after you've returned it, modified and signed, or performs some other overt act indicating acceptance (such as saying nothing and fulfilling his side of the bargain).
This, to me, seems no different legally than handing $5 to the cashier when the register says $27; if the cashier takes it, puts the goods in a bag and hands them to you, they've agreed to your counteroffer and have no further claim against you. Furthermore, regardless of internal policy, the management and owner of the business have to live with it because the cashier acted within their role as an agent empowered to make sales (though they might fire his ass after the fact, or sue him to make up the difference); you've made your deal with the company as much as if its president agreed to the $5 price. Whoever's running the order and delivery system acts as an agent in a similar fashion, if they, through their software, accept such a deal, it's the company's tough luck for hiring an incompetent who negligently agrees to any counteroffer.
If they want to have competitive hardware, they'll have to either charge twice as much as their competitors (and enjoy all the great mass-market success of 3DO and NeoGeo), or lose money on it. That's the way the console market works. Selling cutting edge hardware to teenagers is unprofitable.
The profit of the console market is in the software. To have any hope of breaking even, let alone making a profit, they need whopping licensing fees from the game developers. ---
Forget the lawyers. All you need is "This document is in the public domain, our trademark `Project Gutenberg' is not. Do anything you want with the document, but if you want an endorsement, you'll have to pay for it (don't worry it's not too expensive, contact for details). At Project Gutenberg we make public domain ASCII texts of public domain books, learn more at..."
I don't think the whole rigamarole with insisting people file off the serial numbers would stand up anyway. You can only protect your trademark from being used inaccurately, you can't go successfully sue someone just because they rightly say "this public domain document, which is on the CD-ROM I am selling you, was scanned and distributed to me by Project Gutenberg (TM)". It's not any sort of misrepresentation or trademark dilution; there's no tort, and since the documents are public domain there's no contract to break (since there's no agreement they'd need to have to be able to copy and redistribute it; also no signature or other overt indication of agreement and no consideration, regardless of whatever contracty-looking things are sent around with the free stuff. weak, weak, weak!).
Lawyers always make things seem more complicated than they are. I think they just like to make ominous sounds to invoke The Great Mystery of Secret Law (boogedy boogedy! Do as we say or we'll sue you! You may think you're safe but only We know the law!).
Sometimes I think lawyers positively delight in writing unenforceable clauses into contracts, and inaccurate warnings of liability. Maybe they figure they're making more business for other lawyers.
I've heard Windows programmers complain about Unix programmers because since practically every Unix system cleans up after a process when you shut it down, the programmers don't worry about memory leaks except in long-running programs. When you recompile this code for something like Windows 95, it eats a pile of memory every time you run it until the whole system goes down.
The less stable the OS, the more carefully the software must be written. Moving software to a less-stable OS can cause serious headaches. ---
First of all, he wouldn't have to "run from it", forcing a name change on a citizen is not something the federal government has the power to do. They have practically unbounded power when they can convince the supreme court that what they do is necessary to running the state, but such arbitrary idiocy is not supported.
I think this was just a pack of idiots attacking a good idea because it came from a source they disliked. There are a lot of things wrong with the Canadian Alliance Party. That doesn't mean every idea they promote is a bad one.
"Oo, look: bad man say 'Ask people, do what they say.', so me know never ask people." ---
wishlist:
-main characters who occasionally set aside their principles to make a really big gain
-at least a few alien species that never betray their stereotypes
-at least one alien from a species with a deeply unpleasant, but generally accurate stereotype, who betrays the stereotype to be nasty in totally different and dramatically worse ways -weapons that blow their targets into messy globs of whatever the target is made of, even if it always happens offscreen
-reasonably intelligent robots without emotions, that everybody treats as machines (no casual conversation, are casually sacrificed without concern except for the cost of replacing them)
-deaths of main characters that serve the plot, not casting convenience
-badasses who are more concerned about their ability to wreak havok than any particular ideas about why they should do so
anti-wishlist:
-fistfights (unless there's a very good reason for the combatants to be unarmed)
-drawn-out close-range shootouts (as if their weapons couldn't blast through flimsy cover like tables)
-comic relief characters
-deus ex machina resolutions
-time travel or other "physics anomalies"
-humanoid aliens without at least a dozen immediately obvious distinctions from humanity (basically, anything that can be done with a rubber mask) ---
They brought in the cheesy special effects, costuming, acting, and fight scenes from the Hercules family of shows.
The first few shows looked great, even if the acting and FX were cheesy, and I thought it was going to be one great big storyline, but then it went totally episodic. They don't seem to be busily restaffing the ship, as I assumed they would, and their new allies from previous episodes don't seem to be helping them much in restoring the Commonwealth. It had such potential, it's really a shame to see it turn out as nothing more than a cross between Hercules and Star Trek. ---
Maybe people are just tired of the same old political correctness, deus ex machina problem resolution, goofy technology (thousands of weapons, and not a one that leaves gibs; stuff that works or doesn't work as the plot demands), and utter lack of continuity.
The same old plots come up over and over again: resolving generations-old blood feuds in a few days, refusing to take or use over-powerful weapons, facing trial by god-like aliens, respecting alien culture (no matter how stupid), forced alliance between old enemies, etc.
TOS was okay when it was new. TNG was okay for those who hadn't seen TOS, or were pathetically desperate fans of the sort who can watch the same second-rate show a hundred times without getting bored of it.
Going from loading an optical illusion into the borg so their computers will crash to giving the shapeshifters an incurable virus is not creating a new story. We've heard it all before, the players just keep putting on new masks. ---
Time travel works for the occasional episode, or standalone work of fiction, viewed in isolation, purely for its "wierd thought" value. The paradoxes of time travel are fun to think about once or twice a year, but a series based on free-roaming time travellers would just be stupid.
Time-travel paradoxes are always resolved by fiat: "Yes, today you can go to yesterday and murder yourself; it doesn't really matter, as a time-traveller, you're insulated from the effects." "No, even if you don't do anything important, you'll return to a dramatically different universe." It gets boring and obnoxious quickly.
The only logically consistent bidirectional time-travel is one in which a new parallel universe is created every time someone makes a jump backwards. Which means that you never actually accomplish anything by time travelling, which is totally unsatisfying when you're faced with it for more than an hour or two.
There's just no way to make a good time-traveller series. ---
Let's not forget that Australia is just a penal colony. Why should prisoners have the same rights as a free man? They were rightly disarmed a few year ago, and now their lines of communication are being cut to make them more isolated and easier to control. Nothing but good management on the Prime Warden's part.
I say that the things a man does to be sent to Botany Bay relieve society of any duty to respect his freedom.
Sure, you may say that a significant percentage of prisoners are merely descendants of criminals, but as anyone who's paid attention to his lessons on eugenics in high-school science class knows that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. And as for those odd souls who removed themselves to that place voluntarily, it only shows their preference for associating with criminal defectives; the clearest sign of actually being one.
You don't pry into whether our local wardens prefer thumbscrews or the lash, so why bother yourself about how Australians can talk to each other? ---
They bought the original windows-only Direct3D (which sucked mightily), but it was developed from the original sucky version in-house to the modern version which is superior to OpenGL in many ways.
You can confirm most of the items on the above list pretty easily, can't you?
The difference between conscious and unconscious memory is essential to the advertiser's trade.
They don't want to you to think about the ad after you've left it, they want you to recognize the brand, and associate certain qualities with it.
How many things do you associate with Coca-Cola? Pepsi? Ford trucks? You don't remember every ad, but they all affected your gut feeling toward these brands. Advertising is mind pollution. You are dumber for having seen it. ---
there would be mining colonies on the moon, and human expeditions out to Jupiter by now.
But cutting their budget won't help at all. Higher government has to allow spaceflight without consulting NASA, which has become a hideously bloated incompetent bureaucracy which barely manages a handful of projects through gratuitous spending. Cutting the budget without removing them will only hurt the handful of projects they do manage.
If you have any doubts about NASA, look at the shuttle. Look at it's original purpose as an experimental vehicle, and look how they've ignored the data it brought in and its lousy performance and how they've made it their main launch vehicle. ---
It is not trivially easy to associate web bugs you encounter while surfing with your email address, only ones in spam. And then you have to read the spam while online, and allow it to load images. ---
See, that's the problem. These might be good ideas for advertisers (the illusion of interactivity is good for getting attention), but the content wouldn't be taken at face value.
If someone clicks "I really hate this ad, never show it to me again!" the people who made it go "Yay! They looked at it! They saw it so many times they got sick of it! We're geniuses!" and work on the next generation of even more annoying ads.
This, of course, isn't considering the obvious trick: fake feedback tools. Seriously, you don't think 90% of "This ad sucks" links will just link to the same page? ---
Slashdot Mirror
That outdated usenet definition is not applicable to slashdot. Sure, it's occasionally used, but mostly trolls are both pointlessly stupid and offensive posts and the people who post them.
How did this come to be? Well, I think the moderation system is largely to blame: seperate troll and flamebait categories (at best, the classical troll is just a particularly subtle flamebait) and nothing else remotely applicable to the "all Natalie Portman's hot grits are belong to penis bird" crowd (okay, "Offtopic" might do, but they're often at least somewhat topical, having crude references to the current story). With every such post marked "troll", you can hardly go around criticizing people for defining it that way.
Besides, I think most people here are more familiar with smelly, obnoxious, vaguely humanoid annoyances that live under bridges and in holes in the ground than with fishing by moving along slowly with a line in the water.
---
For some reason, they posted this one and rejected my very similar submission, which went:
"Hi, I would like to make lots of money running my own business (maybe with something fun and `geeky' like games, so I can enjoy myself and become more popular with my adopted community as I make my fortune), but don't know how. Would you thousands of slashdot readers please all get together and spend your own unpaid time and effort to figure out how to make me rich?"
---
The old-technology (or "classic") used video game store is a great business to get into because there is never a shortage of inventory available from bankruptcy and going-out-of-business sales. Heck, you can probably get a whole business, with merchandise already on shelves, at a suicide estate auction.
---
...it's not illegal for the reason of changing the agreement.
It might be (and probably is) illegal for deliberately tricking the seller. ("Look, you advertised it at this price, you have to sell it to me for that.")
---
You can modify agreements before returning them.
When you are offered a contract, you can cross out sections and write in your own before you sign it (you should initial and date your modifications, in case of multiple rounds of this). However, signing it doesn't form a contract, it forms a counteroffer. It doesn't become a contract unless the other guy signs it after you've returned it, modified and signed, or performs some other overt act indicating acceptance (such as saying nothing and fulfilling his side of the bargain).
This, to me, seems no different legally than handing $5 to the cashier when the register says $27; if the cashier takes it, puts the goods in a bag and hands them to you, they've agreed to your counteroffer and have no further claim against you. Furthermore, regardless of internal policy, the management and owner of the business have to live with it because the cashier acted within their role as an agent empowered to make sales (though they might fire his ass after the fact, or sue him to make up the difference); you've made your deal with the company as much as if its president agreed to the $5 price. Whoever's running the order and delivery system acts as an agent in a similar fashion, if they, through their software, accept such a deal, it's the company's tough luck for hiring an incompetent who negligently agrees to any counteroffer.
IANAL, IANYL, TINLA
---
If they want to have competitive hardware, they'll have to either charge twice as much as their competitors (and enjoy all the great mass-market success of 3DO and NeoGeo), or lose money on it. That's the way the console market works. Selling cutting edge hardware to teenagers is unprofitable.
The profit of the console market is in the software. To have any hope of breaking even, let alone making a profit, they need whopping licensing fees from the game developers.
---
Forget the lawyers. All you need is "This document is in the public domain, our trademark `Project Gutenberg' is not. Do anything you want with the document, but if you want an endorsement, you'll have to pay for it (don't worry it's not too expensive, contact for details). At Project Gutenberg we make public domain ASCII texts of public domain books, learn more at ..."
I don't think the whole rigamarole with insisting people file off the serial numbers would stand up anyway. You can only protect your trademark from being used inaccurately, you can't go successfully sue someone just because they rightly say "this public domain document, which is on the CD-ROM I am selling you, was scanned and distributed to me by Project Gutenberg (TM)". It's not any sort of misrepresentation or trademark dilution; there's no tort, and since the documents are public domain there's no contract to break (since there's no agreement they'd need to have to be able to copy and redistribute it; also no signature or other overt indication of agreement and no consideration, regardless of whatever contracty-looking things are sent around with the free stuff. weak, weak, weak!).
Lawyers always make things seem more complicated than they are. I think they just like to make ominous sounds to invoke The Great Mystery of Secret Law (boogedy boogedy! Do as we say or we'll sue you! You may think you're safe but only We know the law!).
Sometimes I think lawyers positively delight in writing unenforceable clauses into contracts, and inaccurate warnings of liability. Maybe they figure they're making more business for other lawyers.
IANAL, IANYL, TINLA
---
I've heard Windows programmers complain about Unix programmers because since practically every Unix system cleans up after a process when you shut it down, the programmers don't worry about memory leaks except in long-running programs. When you recompile this code for something like Windows 95, it eats a pile of memory every time you run it until the whole system goes down.
The less stable the OS, the more carefully the software must be written. Moving software to a less-stable OS can cause serious headaches.
---
First of all, he wouldn't have to "run from it", forcing a name change on a citizen is not something the federal government has the power to do. They have practically unbounded power when they can convince the supreme court that what they do is necessary to running the state, but such arbitrary idiocy is not supported.
I think this was just a pack of idiots attacking a good idea because it came from a source they disliked. There are a lot of things wrong with the Canadian Alliance Party. That doesn't mean every idea they promote is a bad one.
"Oo, look: bad man say 'Ask people, do what they say.', so me know never ask people."
---
no text
---
1) of course it's a joke
2) I'm not in or from the USA
---
no text
---
wishlist:
-main characters who occasionally set aside their principles to make a really big gain
-at least a few alien species that never betray their stereotypes
-at least one alien from a species with a deeply unpleasant, but generally accurate stereotype, who betrays the stereotype to be nasty in totally different and dramatically worse ways
-weapons that blow their targets into messy globs of whatever the target is made of, even if it always happens offscreen
-reasonably intelligent robots without emotions, that everybody treats as machines (no casual conversation, are casually sacrificed without concern except for the cost of replacing them)
-deaths of main characters that serve the plot, not casting convenience
-badasses who are more concerned about their ability to wreak havok than any particular ideas about why they should do so
anti-wishlist:
-fistfights (unless there's a very good reason for the combatants to be unarmed)
-drawn-out close-range shootouts (as if their weapons couldn't blast through flimsy cover like tables)
-comic relief characters
-deus ex machina resolutions
-time travel or other "physics anomalies"
-humanoid aliens without at least a dozen immediately obvious distinctions from humanity (basically, anything that can be done with a rubber mask)
---
They brought in the cheesy special effects, costuming, acting, and fight scenes from the Hercules family of shows.
The first few shows looked great, even if the acting and FX were cheesy, and I thought it was going to be one great big storyline, but then it went totally episodic. They don't seem to be busily restaffing the ship, as I assumed they would, and their new allies from previous episodes don't seem to be helping them much in restoring the Commonwealth. It had such potential, it's really a shame to see it turn out as nothing more than a cross between Hercules and Star Trek.
---
All rules regarding logical consistency in drama go out the window for ultra-silly comedies.
---
Maybe people are just tired of the same old political correctness, deus ex machina problem resolution, goofy technology (thousands of weapons, and not a one that leaves gibs; stuff that works or doesn't work as the plot demands), and utter lack of continuity.
The same old plots come up over and over again: resolving generations-old blood feuds in a few days, refusing to take or use over-powerful weapons, facing trial by god-like aliens, respecting alien culture (no matter how stupid), forced alliance between old enemies, etc.
TOS was okay when it was new. TNG was okay for those who hadn't seen TOS, or were pathetically desperate fans of the sort who can watch the same second-rate show a hundred times without getting bored of it.
Going from loading an optical illusion into the borg so their computers will crash to giving the shapeshifters an incurable virus is not creating a new story. We've heard it all before, the players just keep putting on new masks.
---
Time travel works for the occasional episode, or standalone work of fiction, viewed in isolation, purely for its "wierd thought" value. The paradoxes of time travel are fun to think about once or twice a year, but a series based on free-roaming time travellers would just be stupid.
Time-travel paradoxes are always resolved by fiat: "Yes, today you can go to yesterday and murder yourself; it doesn't really matter, as a time-traveller, you're insulated from the effects." "No, even if you don't do anything important, you'll return to a dramatically different universe." It gets boring and obnoxious quickly.
The only logically consistent bidirectional time-travel is one in which a new parallel universe is created every time someone makes a jump backwards. Which means that you never actually accomplish anything by time travelling, which is totally unsatisfying when you're faced with it for more than an hour or two.
There's just no way to make a good time-traveller series.
---
Let's not forget that Australia is just a penal colony. Why should prisoners have the same rights as a free man? They were rightly disarmed a few year ago, and now their lines of communication are being cut to make them more isolated and easier to control. Nothing but good management on the Prime Warden's part.
I say that the things a man does to be sent to Botany Bay relieve society of any duty to respect his freedom.
Sure, you may say that a significant percentage of prisoners are merely descendants of criminals, but as anyone who's paid attention to his lessons on eugenics in high-school science class knows that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. And as for those odd souls who removed themselves to that place voluntarily, it only shows their preference for associating with criminal defectives; the clearest sign of actually being one.
You don't pry into whether our local wardens prefer thumbscrews or the lash, so why bother yourself about how Australians can talk to each other?
---
They bought the original windows-only Direct3D (which sucked mightily), but it was developed from the original sucky version in-house to the modern version which is superior to OpenGL in many ways.
There was never an open standard to corrupt.
---
You can confirm most of the items on the above list pretty easily, can't you?
The difference between conscious and unconscious memory is essential to the advertiser's trade.
They don't want to you to think about the ad after you've left it, they want you to recognize the brand, and associate certain qualities with it.
How many things do you associate with Coca-Cola? Pepsi? Ford trucks? You don't remember every ad, but they all affected your gut feeling toward these brands. Advertising is mind pollution. You are dumber for having seen it.
---
there would be mining colonies on the moon, and human expeditions out to Jupiter by now.
But cutting their budget won't help at all. Higher government has to allow spaceflight without consulting NASA, which has become a hideously bloated incompetent bureaucracy which barely manages a handful of projects through gratuitous spending. Cutting the budget without removing them will only hurt the handful of projects they do manage.
If you have any doubts about NASA, look at the shuttle. Look at it's original purpose as an experimental vehicle, and look how they've ignored the data it brought in and its lousy performance and how they've made it their main launch vehicle.
---
It is not trivially easy to associate web bugs you encounter while surfing with your email address, only ones in spam. And then you have to read the spam while online, and allow it to load images.
---
Yeah, weren't they using old-fashioned liquid helium metallic superconductors?
Doing it with modern liquid nitrogen superconductors would probably be much cheaper.
---
See, that's the problem. These might be good ideas for advertisers (the illusion of interactivity is good for getting attention), but the content wouldn't be taken at face value.
If someone clicks "I really hate this ad, never show it to me again!" the people who made it go "Yay! They looked at it! They saw it so many times they got sick of it! We're geniuses!" and work on the next generation of even more annoying ads.
This, of course, isn't considering the obvious trick: fake feedback tools. Seriously, you don't think 90% of "This ad sucks" links will just link to the same page?
---
You may deny it now, but you all laughed at me. At 800 lbs., you said I was overweight and disgusting; helpless in my obesity.
You laughed all the harder when I told you that it was intentional: a stage in my evolution to the ultimate form of a super-human God-emperor.
But now, puny mortals, you stand no chance before my cartilage-armored body!
I will crush you all.
---