On my browser (right now it's FF 3.x on RH 5.x) the edit box doesn't even bound the text. I have to guess what words are under the right edge of it, or compose in another window and paste into the box. Honestly, on this browser/OS combo,/. behaves like incredible crap.
Asking the thing to have more features to screw up? Might as well ask it to crash on cue.
In reality, I have seen them edit my submissions, in particular to un-hyperlink some things for which the hyperlinking is redundant. And capitalization. They seem to deal in that.
Not so much for grammar, though, and there's some sentence structure I rushed and wish I had to do over again. I think they may leave those in just to...fuck with us...hmm...
It's far less effort to check the "misery this miserable fuck" box than it is for them to do all the things to become a miserable fuck in a different mask.
It doesn't matter if it's the same troll or a totally different person trolling. They all look alike after awhile anyway, and dealing with them is pretty much a fixed cost.
So either they'll eventually tire of being fucked with and flicked away, or they'll not, which is more expense to them than it is to me.
I invite the public into my place of business. If some of those people become unruly and disturb others in a way I consider wrong, I have the right to ask them to leave, convince them to leave, tell them to leave, or, if they refuse to leave of their own free will, force them to leave. No force is necessary on the Internet, as in order to "be there" they have to continuously enter the door to collect data to present to themselves on their client machines. But I can use any means to convince them to leave. Personally I'd stop short of damaging their equipment, but feeding them content that fills their page cache, clogs their link history, and bloats the allocated memory of their browser, causing it to thrash in swap? They allow for that by running their browser. Heck, I can name a few facebook games that do it as a matter of course. And if my content happens to interact with known bugs in their browser to stop them from browsing, so be it.
But before it gets to that point, fucking with their minds would be only a fitting response to their behavior.
In short, if you want me to remain a solicitous proprietor and gracious host, you know what not to do.
That only happened because until they did it was running neck-and-neck, with several major studios working both sides of the street, and there were only a few of the bigs left to decide. Whichever one of them had chosen, the others would have followed.
As for Netflix, its selection is vastly overrated. They do have Star Trek on disc and instant. But they've probably got 5% penetration to the universe of movies, and 20-30% in terms of recent titles.
Which means they have lots of growing room, but also lots of room for competitors. And since delivering content online is pretty easy if you buy a big enough server, the content owners can just run their own show. No need for an aggregator at all. If there's a client on the user's hardware that can browse and access and play it.
Oh look. Netflix is based on Microsoft Silverlight, which anyone can purchase a server license for.
it's things like this make you wonder who designed IPv6 and why they didn't think it would have to coexist. the answers to those questions for IPv4 are obvious.
The only thing that hasn't gone according to plan is that, apparently, Microsoft doesn't understand that routers that grok IPv6 are a lot cheaper than $11 per addressable address...
That "travel farther in less time" thing is hitting walls all over the place.
It's not a matter of serendipitous engineering discoveries, sweat equity, and balls any more.
You're going to have to find a new branch of physics that allows such travel.
As for why haven't they visited? Well, have you actually checked out the livingroom of every dust mite in your mattress? Gone out of your way to commune with the coyotes who live on the other side of the hill you drive by on your commute? Put 3/4ths of your planetary productivity into developing and launching a mission to our nearest star?
They aren't here because they probably have no idea we're here. Even if our faintest signals could be seen out in space, they're only about 100 light-years away. About a 15,000 stars in that envelope. And they're probably not tuning into AM radio looking for signals at -500 dbm. in our direction. We're out here in the galactic boonies, and they'll be looking primarily towards the galactic center. So only that small sliver of the spheroid that is farther out than we are will have much chance of looking our way at all.
What are the chances 100 stars have someone likely to see us who are ready to visit us within a century?
Literary fiction is a genre of its own, with rules far more rigid
I think that's why they look down at the other genres. They think they work to a higher standard. And in many ways they do.
They can't just make things up for entertainment effect; they have to stick to humans in human situations. And where the surreality comes in, it has to be essential to the theme, not merely a gimmick for the plot or fluffing for a character. It has to be referential to the thing the book is trying to get us to think about in the real world.
So a book like Wells' _The Time Machine_ is a crossover to literary fiction. In it, a time machine isn't merely a super-cool plot device, but a way to make us think about how time works in our own lives, and how we have to deal with our limitations. However, by the novelization of _Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure_ it's merely a way to get a couple of dopes into a place where they can party with Abe Lincoln, and time travel really has little to do with the meaning of their story; ordinary travel, or just a sequence of crazy cab rides, would have done as well.
So what I'm saying is, SF, unless it deliberately follows the rule of F, is easier to write, as long as you know a little about S.
Slashdot Mirror
On the web, everyone is a CEO.
Poster doesn't understand etiology.
Developer probably understands random() fine.
It's the doco who does not understand how to describe it. Or uses common idiom and expects J. Random Reader to just get what he means.
Requests aren't that big. And trolls aren't that numerous. A few K in the webserver here and there? peanuts. Totally worth it.
And unless they have real DDoS tools, all they do by coming from more directions is make their outline visible in the fog of the internet.
I know how to aim center-mass.
HAHAHAHHAHAHAAAAAA!
Seriously?
On my browser (right now it's FF 3.x on RH 5.x) the edit box doesn't even bound the text. I have to guess what words are under the right edge of it, or compose in another window and paste into the box. Honestly, on this browser/OS combo, /. behaves like incredible crap.
Asking the thing to have more features to screw up? Might as well ask it to crash on cue.
In theory.
In reality, I have seen them edit my submissions, in particular to un-hyperlink some things for which the hyperlinking is redundant. And capitalization. They seem to deal in that.
Not so much for grammar, though, and there's some sentence structure I rushed and wish I had to do over again. I think they may leave those in just to...fuck with us...hmm...
It's far less effort to check the "misery this miserable fuck" box than it is for them to do all the things to become a miserable fuck in a different mask.
It doesn't matter if it's the same troll or a totally different person trolling. They all look alike after awhile anyway, and dealing with them is pretty much a fixed cost.
So either they'll eventually tire of being fucked with and flicked away, or they'll not, which is more expense to them than it is to me.
I invite the public into my place of business. If some of those people become unruly and disturb others in a way I consider wrong, I have the right to ask them to leave, convince them to leave, tell them to leave, or, if they refuse to leave of their own free will, force them to leave. No force is necessary on the Internet, as in order to "be there" they have to continuously enter the door to collect data to present to themselves on their client machines. But I can use any means to convince them to leave. Personally I'd stop short of damaging their equipment, but feeding them content that fills their page cache, clogs their link history, and bloats the allocated memory of their browser, causing it to thrash in swap? They allow for that by running their browser. Heck, I can name a few facebook games that do it as a matter of course. And if my content happens to interact with known bugs in their browser to stop them from browsing, so be it.
But before it gets to that point, fucking with their minds would be only a fitting response to their behavior.
In short, if you want me to remain a solicitous proprietor and gracious host, you know what not to do.
Users who cause harm are not my users any more. If they choose to continue to come to my site, they get what they get.
Sigh.
There's a vast intergalactic space between "free speech" and harassment.
Knowingly allowing a user to download something they should know will crash their browser, after they knowingly violated my TOS?
Hardly give it a second thought.
No, it's a total success. We called it World of Warcraft.
That only happened because until they did it was running neck-and-neck, with several major studios working both sides of the street, and there were only a few of the bigs left to decide. Whichever one of them had chosen, the others would have followed.
As for Netflix, its selection is vastly overrated. They do have Star Trek on disc and instant. But they've probably got 5% penetration to the universe of movies, and 20-30% in terms of recent titles.
Which means they have lots of growing room, but also lots of room for competitors. And since delivering content online is pretty easy if you buy a big enough server, the content owners can just run their own show. No need for an aggregator at all. If there's a client on the user's hardware that can browse and access and play it.
Oh look. Netflix is based on Microsoft Silverlight, which anyone can purchase a server license for.
If it's the sale price instead of the listing price, it would never get this far.
Or did someone pay $22 million elsewhere?
But in order for this to happen, each one has to have "price X% higher than seller Y's price, with no maximum" as its algorithm.
I'm not sure how that's supposed to be a profitable system.
Anyone looking on Amazon is going to buy from X because their price is lower. Raising your price above someone else's means you lose the sale.
So why are these people doing that to themselves?
Where do the underpants come in?
Seemed kind of low to me, too.
it's things like this make you wonder who designed IPv6 and why they didn't think it would have to coexist. the answers to those questions for IPv4 are obvious.
The only thing that hasn't gone according to plan is that, apparently, Microsoft doesn't understand that routers that grok IPv6 are a lot cheaper than $11 per addressable address...
Honestly, I think you have that assessment backwards.
SETI is less practical than a Mars mission. And far less likely to succeed in Musk's lifetime.
Andromeda's a smudge, not a dot. And you can't see it from a city. At least not one whose power grid hasn't been recently bombed out.
That "travel farther in less time" thing is hitting walls all over the place.
It's not a matter of serendipitous engineering discoveries, sweat equity, and balls any more.
You're going to have to find a new branch of physics that allows such travel.
As for why haven't they visited? Well, have you actually checked out the livingroom of every dust mite in your mattress? Gone out of your way to commune with the coyotes who live on the other side of the hill you drive by on your commute? Put 3/4ths of your planetary productivity into developing and launching a mission to our nearest star?
They aren't here because they probably have no idea we're here. Even if our faintest signals could be seen out in space, they're only about 100 light-years away. About a 15,000 stars in that envelope. And they're probably not tuning into AM radio looking for signals at -500 dbm. in our direction. We're out here in the galactic boonies, and they'll be looking primarily towards the galactic center. So only that small sliver of the spheroid that is farther out than we are will have much chance of looking our way at all.
What are the chances 100 stars have someone likely to see us who are ready to visit us within a century?
Huh. Someone alert the ISS crews that it's now a one-way trip.
Let me guess. It was these guys.
I'm not sure what you are, but if you think that Facebook and Twitter is all 12-year-old girls, I'm sure you're not very clueful.
Literary fiction is a genre of its own, with rules far more rigid
I think that's why they look down at the other genres. They think they work to a higher standard. And in many ways they do.
They can't just make things up for entertainment effect; they have to stick to humans in human situations. And where the surreality comes in, it has to be essential to the theme, not merely a gimmick for the plot or fluffing for a character. It has to be referential to the thing the book is trying to get us to think about in the real world.
So a book like Wells' _The Time Machine_ is a crossover to literary fiction. In it, a time machine isn't merely a super-cool plot device, but a way to make us think about how time works in our own lives, and how we have to deal with our limitations. However, by the novelization of _Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure_ it's merely a way to get a couple of dopes into a place where they can party with Abe Lincoln, and time travel really has little to do with the meaning of their story; ordinary travel, or just a sequence of crazy cab rides, would have done as well.
So what I'm saying is, SF, unless it deliberately follows the rule of F, is easier to write, as long as you know a little about S.