No, Taco hasn't beaten anyone in weeks. But we do try to not go too long without posting anything, and most of the time there's something reasonably interesting to post. But Friday night/Saturday morning, well, those can be tough.
Hint to people who want to have their stuff linked on slashdot: submit the story friday night, saturday or sunday. Your odds are better.:)
You're thinking about tritium, which is used to enhance the power of weapons (adding a fusion reaction to the normal fission reaction, an "H-bomb"). Tritium has a half-life of 12 years, so has to be changed from time to time.
I think "robot" carries with it the connotation that not only is the thing mechanical, it was also made by humans. If the... aliens... were mechanical (I don't recall them describing themselves at all), then at least they weren't created by humans, so I wouldn't call them robots.
It's a troll. Artfully done, but troll nonetheless. Use of the word "ghetto" is a major clue. Read it carefully - don't just skim - and you'll see that it makes no sense whatsoever.
Of course, it's an open question whether "moderators who skim" or "moderators who read carefully" are in the majority.
This isn't an open-and-shut case. The ACLU of Oregon submitted a friend-of-the-court brief which suggested the court adopt a fairly strict standard of defining what a "true threat" was - a strict standard would be favorable to the defendants, the website, of course. The District court adopted a looser standard than the ACLU recommended, and the jury held the website liable. The Appeals Court basically agreed with the ACLU a bit more, and held the website innocent.
So in other words, yes, the ACLU supported the free speech of the website, even though they may find it distasteful.
The brief is available here if you'd like to read it.
I would strongly suggest people read Microsoft's OEM guidelines before believing this. Slashdot received a submission of this early this morning, and I downloaded and read said guidelines from MS's web site. Microsoft has some suggestions for an "Easy PC", a sort of IMac for the PC world - it should have bright colors, interesting designs, no confusing upgradability, etc. etc. It is clear from reading the specifications that there is no intent for ALL PCs to be "Easy PCs" - this would be just for certain product lines intended for new PC owners.
So, ZDNet is full of shit. At best they are poor readers. At worst they are intentionally confusing these guidelines for the Easy PC with all of the other guidelines (in the same document) for regular desktops, servers, etc., none of which say anything about expansion cards except for notes like "All expansion slots in the system are accessible for users to insert cards" (that's a direct quote from the general system guide, by the way).
There are plenty of things going on in the hardware world that people need to be concerned about. Copy protection is being built in at a very basic level. But in this particular case, ZDNet is entirely wrong.
I'm aware of that. But since the numbers from widely varying machines are not widely varying, most of the number isn't available for use as a unique ID - this is clear immediately.
Example: if you have an ID string from a machine in China and a machine in New York and the two strings are:
FOOBAR-5654375
FOOBAR-6327264
You'd probably suspect that the FOOBAR- part of the string did not differ between machines and so can't count for uniqueness. Go look at the examples provided again.
I don't have the ability to "tamper with posts" and have never done so. Anyone who says differently is lying.
Frankly, if Kuro5hin was choosing between having their site shut down by their ISP or deleting a post due to copyright complaints, my guess about how they would respond is a bit different than yours.
And finally, any poster who uses the phrase "common carrier" in discussing this situation has no idea what it means. (Hint: "common carrier" is a term that refers ONLY to a very limited set of telecommunications companies: mainly the various Bells.) We just posted (a week ago) a link to this paper which examines copyright issues with peer-to-peer services - most of it is applicable to slashdot too. Read it before you spout off about copyright issues.
The real answer is that a couple of the slashdot authors are sick. Laying myself off would be nice though, as long as I got to decide how big of a severance package I received. I could use a year or two on some caribbean island...
The mysql database barfed last night and was down for maybe three-four hours or so. During that time only static pages were served. There is still some sort of corruption issue with the users table, and I'm not sure what the planned solution to that is. There are nightly backups, so at most we'd lose the new users created yesterday/today.
I was sort of hoping people would chime in with other systems as well.:) We got a bunch of submissions over the past few days - O'Reilly's P2P conference - and I just picked some that looked interesting.
We have no control over the ads. O'Reilly's ad probably is timed to coincide with their peer-to-peer conference, and the reason all these companies are unveiling their systems is also due to the conference, so there is some sort of correlation here, but it's not as if we chose to run a particular ad on a particular story.
Kleinbottle.com is real. The structures that they sell aren't true klein bottles, but they're as close as you can come in three dimensions. Great gifts.
I think you're missing the point of insurance - to spread risk among a pool. The insurance company is already guaranteed to make a profit - by definition, they charge more than they expect to pay out, and over a large group, death rates are very, very predictable.
Right to know? Where'd you come up with that concept?
We think that it isn't news because it can - and will - happen to any site. Computer outages happen. People are inconvenienced. This is news in the same way as "Bill Gates in car wreck" is news - it's something that happens to people every day of the year, but because some famous name is attached to it, it suddenly becomes important instead of trivial. I think Taco thinks - and I know I do - that just because it's Gates in the car or MS experiencing the technical difficulties, it's still a trivial, unimportant event.
ALA moved it. The filename originally had a space in it, and their link had a space (not a %20) as well, so it would only work on IE and not Netscape. I linked to the URL with %20.... but obviously they got complaints and changed the filename. Anyway, I've fixed the link in the story.
Whoops. I wasn't sure if this had run or not; it seemed familiar, but I searched for "transnote", "notepad" and one or two other terms but the previous story didn't show up. Oh well, it's still a neat device.
Slashdot Mirror
No, Taco hasn't beaten anyone in weeks. But we do try to not go too long without posting anything, and most of the time there's something reasonably interesting to post. But Friday night/Saturday morning, well, those can be tough.
:)
Hint to people who want to have their stuff linked on slashdot: submit the story friday night, saturday or sunday. Your odds are better.
Actually, I just got back from a bachelor party, where we got our soon-to-be-married friend very intoxicated indeed. A brief lesson in bad liquor:
--Goldschlager - bad
--Jagermeister - awful
--Shots of half Jager, half Goldschlager - not as bad as either one alone
Strange, isn't it.
You're thinking about tritium, which is used to enhance the power of weapons (adding a fusion reaction to the normal fission reaction, an "H-bomb"). Tritium has a half-life of 12 years, so has to be changed from time to time.
Plutonium has a long half-life.
I think "robot" carries with it the connotation that not only is the thing mechanical, it was also made by humans. If the... aliens... were mechanical (I don't recall them describing themselves at all), then at least they weren't created by humans, so I wouldn't call them robots.
Note that a contribution from the CEO of a bank is a "private" contribution.
Opensecrets.org shows that about 1/6 of Leach's campaign funding comes from the finance and insurance industries.
Too true. But I can't help trying.
It's a troll. Artfully done, but troll nonetheless. Use of the word "ghetto" is a major clue. Read it carefully - don't just skim - and you'll see that it makes no sense whatsoever.
Of course, it's an open question whether "moderators who skim" or "moderators who read carefully" are in the majority.
He's not that fast. His article was written last week.
This isn't an open-and-shut case. The ACLU of Oregon submitted a friend-of-the-court brief which suggested the court adopt a fairly strict standard of defining what a "true threat" was - a strict standard would be favorable to the defendants, the website, of course. The District court adopted a looser standard than the ACLU recommended, and the jury held the website liable. The Appeals Court basically agreed with the ACLU a bit more, and held the website innocent.
So in other words, yes, the ACLU supported the free speech of the website, even though they may find it distasteful.
The brief is available here if you'd like to read it.
I would strongly suggest people read Microsoft's OEM guidelines before believing this. Slashdot received a submission of this early this morning, and I downloaded and read said guidelines from MS's web site. Microsoft has some suggestions for an "Easy PC", a sort of IMac for the PC world - it should have bright colors, interesting designs, no confusing upgradability, etc. etc. It is clear from reading the specifications that there is no intent for ALL PCs to be "Easy PCs" - this would be just for certain product lines intended for new PC owners.
So, ZDNet is full of shit. At best they are poor readers. At worst they are intentionally confusing these guidelines for the Easy PC with all of the other guidelines (in the same document) for regular desktops, servers, etc., none of which say anything about expansion cards except for notes like "All expansion slots in the system are accessible for users to insert cards" (that's a direct quote from the general system guide, by the way).
There are plenty of things going on in the hardware world that people need to be concerned about. Copy protection is being built in at a very basic level. But in this particular case, ZDNet is entirely wrong.
It would, except that, as I noted, it is sent whether or not you are signing up for a new account.
I'm aware of that. But since the numbers from widely varying machines are not widely varying, most of the number isn't available for use as a unique ID - this is clear immediately.
Example: if you have an ID string from a machine in China and a machine in New York and the two strings are:
FOOBAR-5654375
FOOBAR-6327264
You'd probably suspect that the FOOBAR- part of the string did not differ between machines and so can't count for uniqueness. Go look at the examples provided again.
I don't have the ability to "tamper with posts" and have never done so. Anyone who says differently is lying.
Frankly, if Kuro5hin was choosing between having their site shut down by their ISP or deleting a post due to copyright complaints, my guess about how they would respond is a bit different than yours.
And finally, any poster who uses the phrase "common carrier" in discussing this situation has no idea what it means. (Hint: "common carrier" is a term that refers ONLY to a very limited set of telecommunications companies: mainly the various Bells.) We just posted (a week ago) a link to this paper which examines copyright issues with peer-to-peer services - most of it is applicable to slashdot too. Read it before you spout off about copyright issues.
The real answer is that a couple of the slashdot authors are sick. Laying myself off would be nice though, as long as I got to decide how big of a severance package I received. I could use a year or two on some caribbean island...
Actually, you've yet to hear a single one wax nostalgic about a math, science, or computer science course either. :)
The mysql database barfed last night and was down for maybe three-four hours or so. During that time only static pages were served. There is still some sort of corruption issue with the users table, and I'm not sure what the planned solution to that is. There are nightly backups, so at most we'd lose the new users created yesterday/today.
I was sort of hoping people would chime in with other systems as well. :) We got a bunch of submissions over the past few days - O'Reilly's P2P conference - and I just picked some that looked interesting.
We have no control over the ads. O'Reilly's ad probably is timed to coincide with their peer-to-peer conference, and the reason all these companies are unveiling their systems is also due to the conference, so there is some sort of correlation here, but it's not as if we chose to run a particular ad on a particular story.
Kleinbottle.com is real. The structures that they sell aren't true klein bottles, but they're as close as you can come in three dimensions. Great gifts.
I think you're missing the point of insurance - to spread risk among a pool. The insurance company is already guaranteed to make a profit - by definition, they charge more than they expect to pay out, and over a large group, death rates are very, very predictable.
Right to know? Where'd you come up with that concept?
Probably why we had a 500-comment story about it the other day.
We think that it isn't news because it can - and will - happen to any site. Computer outages happen. People are inconvenienced. This is news in the same way as "Bill Gates in car wreck" is news - it's something that happens to people every day of the year, but because some famous name is attached to it, it suddenly becomes important instead of trivial. I think Taco thinks - and I know I do - that just because it's Gates in the car or MS experiencing the technical difficulties, it's still a trivial, unimportant event.
ALA moved it. The filename originally had a space in it, and their link had a space (not a %20) as well, so it would only work on IE and not Netscape. I linked to the URL with %20 .... but obviously they got complaints and changed the filename. Anyway, I've fixed the link in the story.
It isn't the same URL, so that wouldn't have worked.
Most of the people suggesting a technical solution to the problem of double-posting stories don't realize that the technical solution is AI-complete.
Whoops. I wasn't sure if this had run or not; it seemed familiar, but I searched for "transnote", "notepad" and one or two other terms but the previous story didn't show up. Oh well, it's still a neat device.