What's funny is that the word "come" WAS AND IS correct slang for male ejaculate, anyway. Ask any sex educator, they'll spell it that way. This may be changing, but certainly was true in decades past.
"cum" is just the miscreant's way of spelling it. So when folks get all giggly over it, it really doesn't make any more sense than laughing at the use of the word "come".
As the other poster pointed out, it comes down to most people today learning their spelling from speech. Or so it seems.
My personal pet peeve, and I've only really noticed this in the past few years, has been the word "ridiculous". Seemingly overnight, half of the under-25 crowd on IRC started typing "rediculous". Drove me bonkers for months. Finally, I went on a very long and pompous tirade about spelling. I couldn't take it anymore.
Several of them then explained to me that that is how they think it's spelled, because that's how it's pronounced. Which made no sense to me at all, for 2 reasons:
1. If this were the case, channel #philidelphia (and others, I'm going to stereotype here:) would consist of people who had to "brb" for a drink of "wadda".
2. IT'S NOT PRONOUNCED THAT WAY!
Or so I thought. Being back in school at the time, I then started asking the folks I knew to pronounce "ridiculous". Turns out, an awful lot of them DO pronounce it that way. By the way, for any non-English natives, rId and rEd have fairly different pronunciations in most English dialects. But not to these kids.
I've noticed an awful lot of this lately. Kids used to mis-pronounce words because of how they're spelled. Understandable to a degree, because English is nothing if not inconsistent. But with the advent of a generation that seems to get most of its reading done online (and IM and other forms of chat simply exacerbate the problem), what I'm seeing lately is the opposite: words being mis-spelled because of how they're pronounced.
And this, folks, is how languages evolve very quickly. 30 years ago, we had a somewhat consistent written language (yes, there are differences like color vs colour), with much variation in the spoken form. These days, the written form is reflecting the spoken form. Kind of annoying for those of us with inner spelling and grammar Nazis (notice the distinct lack of apostrophe when pluralizing, people!!!).
Kind of like Hindi/Punjabi - 2 different written forms, but mostly the same spoken form. Or so I'm told by friends from India/Pakistan.
When did this happen? Why wasn't I informed?? Damnit, I'm handing in my UID PRONTO!
Now I know why you want to filter comments with "In Other News..."
"Slashdot has a pro-OSS bias. In other news, water is wet, the Sun rises in the east, and Microsoft-funded studies show that Windows has a lower TCO than Linux or Solaris."
Personally, I'm surprised anyone notices the multiple Add/Remove entries for Firefox, what with them being mixed in with about 75 "Windows 2000 Hotfix" entries...
Yes, this is humour. But seriously, it's not like the Add/Remove list isn't polluted all to hell and back anyway.
Far more broadband. Let's face it, 90-some % of Canada's population is concentrated in what, a dozen major urban areas? Far easier to roll out broadband to everyone in a situation like that.
Heck, I had broadband in 1998. 7 years later, many Americans in major cities still don't have access to it (or so I keep seeing posts on Slashdot claiming).
Also, home computer ownership here is (last I checked) significantly higher overall than the US.
No, see there *is* no last number on each line in 2000. The -o flag doesn't exist, and as such, you can't get a PID from netstat - at least as far as I've ever been able to tell.
Well, unless you can find me a 96-way Windows server, or a version of Windows where it's possible to actually close every network port except the ones I actually want listening...
That's because bonch, like a lot of others as of late, seem to think that 800,000+ people are only allowed one collective opinion about anything. That way, they can decry 'hypocrasy!!!!!!!' all day long.
I swear, he must have had 5 or 6 posts to that effect on the recent CherryOS story alone.
He's also notorious for decrying "Slashdot's" "anti-Microsoft bias". Over and over and over in some stories. Again, we're all one person here, apparently.
Textbook trolling, but like-minded moderators don't seem to catch on. It's more useful to those types to post and moderate up the same lines again and again, because they feel they've somehow stumbled upon some great hidden truth that must be exposed to the world.
Trojans are trivially easy to avoid. Worms aren't.
The truth is, there are two reasons there's not much malware for non-Windows systems. One is because of market share, and the other is because the users of minority operating systems tend to be a little more technically savvy than the soccer moms and nascar dads that make up the Windows world.
Except for the third, and biggest reason: insecure applications/network stacks/operating systems.
Believe me, people have tried, and tried hard, to write something like Blaster for Linux. Slammer for (insert OSS SQL server here). Code Red for Apache. There's more than enough market share (and certainly for Apache!), and these days, plenty of less savvy users setting these things up. In fact, people try far harder, because quite simply an owned *nix box is far more useful than a Windows zombie (much easier to keep out further crackers:).
Fact is, until XP SP2, every network-capable version of Windows was just asking to be cracked, out of the box. Unintended services needlessly listening on well-known ports (note this pretty much guarantees they'll never be updated/monitored) == Warhol worms waiting to happen. What's more fun, is that some of these services are almost impossible to turn off (just try removing the C$ or IPC$ share in Windows, for a start).
It's been a few years for me since a default Linux install had ANYTHING listening.
That, by default, makes it a far more secure environment.
For years, they advertised, in large capital letters, UNLIMITED INTERNET ACCESS.
After they oversold an insane amount, realized they were going to lose their shirts, they started introducing bandwidth caps. All while still advertising UNLIMITED INTERNET ACCESS.
It's sad that we need lawsuits and regulations to deal with this sort of thing - but I'm sorry, don't advertise something in 100% plain english if you're not going to follow through.
Blockbuster just rolled this campaign out in Canada, and I've been waiting to hear the catch. Call me a hopeless optimist, but NO MORE LATE FEES means, in English, that if I return a movie LATE, there will be NO FEE as a result of my returning it late. Looks like NO MORE LATE FEES just means DEFERRED LATE FEES.
Morons. They deserve whatever they get. This is about as ethical as advertising $25 cars - with small print explaining that there is a $25,000 processing fee.
If the sun was only 10 kilometres from your house, a mass extinction might occur.
Seriously, this has to be the most bizzare astronomy story tagline I've ever read. I figured this was the submitter's quote, or possibly the article writer - nope, it was from one of the physicists.
Does the artist of the song get paid? No? Well, arent you kind of screwing him/her over? I think the answer is clear.
You're absolutely right. I've been following this plan for years.
Considering something like 0.1% of artists ever actually make any money from their recording contracts (wish I had a link to the classic Courtney Love article), I haven't purchased a big label CD since the late 90s.
I'll still download, however. The artist gets screwed either way, so why not? Besides, I live in Canada. So not only is it legal, it's no longer immoral either. I'm paying for this right with every blank media purchased.
Is there a place in my preferences where I can turn off viewing "Death of..." articles?
Yeah. That part of your brain that forced you to click on the article, and then "reply", and then all the keystrokes needed to compose your complaint and hit "submit"?
Retrain it to simply ignore the story next time, and move on to the next story.
Is there a place in my preferences where I can turn off viewing posts about "I don't want to see story X"? You'd think people read Slashdot just to complain about all of the things they don't like about it...
Bullshit. You can selectively breed humans to be stronger, or whatever. You cannot selectively breed humans to grow 10 arms and be green.
The difference between the two is only a matter of breeding generations, or if you prefer, time. I can selectively breed a bacterium into a human, given enough time - so I don't see what's so impossible about something as trivial as skin colour or limb count.
(Unless you were trying to start up a micro/macro evolution debate, which I don't think was the case)
You know, I was raised in Manitoba/Ontatio, and for all of my life I've been hearing the stereotype perpetuated by the parent. I just moved here (Calgary) a few months back, and I have to tell you, this province is anything but. Maybe it's the hippie influence from BC, maybe it's just that most Canadians don't really travel anywhere, and get 99% of their information from the Toronto-centric CBC.
If this province is right-wing, well at least they've done right-wing "right" (ie: correctly). The taxes here are lower than almost anywhere, people are in general more prosperous than anywhere I've ever been, we have an incredible public transportation system, some of the best roads in the country, an AMAZING parks system, some of the cleanest air I've ever breathed, North America's largest urban park (and mostly natural, too, although in this neck of the woods that basically means prarie grass), an incredibly healthy and athletic population, one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country...
By and large, the government seems to want to keep out of people's lives (contrast this with the "right" down south these days). About the only thing, and I admit it really pisses me off, is the provincial government's opposition to gay marriage.
I also work for one of the big oil companies out here, and from what I've seen, things are a hell of a lot different than they were in the past. I got to go on a field tour of our seismic lines recently (natural gas exploration), and was completely blown away as to the steps taken NOT to destroy the environment. It's really amazing - the people marching through the bush running wires etc are trained to bend tree branches out of their way, as opposed to breaking them off. Zero-impact indeed.
In short, for those that don't live here, don't listen to what you're told. Alberta is pretty much the polar opposite of what you hear on TV. Well, we do have the Stampede still, and some people wear cowboy hats during it. Whoopdee do.
I tried the earlier version when Google first released this, and while it was sorta nice, I really didn't like one feature: Picasa drops a file in every directory you have that has an image file in it. Let it spider your hard drive (which is one of the cooler things about it, I thought), and suddenly every directory has a mini-database in it.
This sort of behaviour drove me nuts with a certain Windows FTP client, but at least that could be turned off. Can you tell 2.0 to use a centralized database somehow?
Slashdot Mirror
What's funny is that the word "come" WAS AND IS correct slang for male ejaculate, anyway. Ask any sex educator, they'll spell it that way. This may be changing, but certainly was true in decades past.
"cum" is just the miscreant's way of spelling it. So when folks get all giggly over it, it really doesn't make any more sense than laughing at the use of the word "come".
*shrug*
As the other poster pointed out, it comes down to most people today learning their spelling from speech. Or so it seems.
:) would consist of people who had to "brb" for a drink of "wadda".
My personal pet peeve, and I've only really noticed this in the past few years, has been the word "ridiculous". Seemingly overnight, half of the under-25 crowd on IRC started typing "rediculous". Drove me bonkers for months. Finally, I went on a very long and pompous tirade about spelling. I couldn't take it anymore.
Several of them then explained to me that that is how they think it's spelled, because that's how it's pronounced. Which made no sense to me at all, for 2 reasons:
1. If this were the case, channel #philidelphia (and others, I'm going to stereotype here
2. IT'S NOT PRONOUNCED THAT WAY!
Or so I thought. Being back in school at the time, I then started asking the folks I knew to pronounce "ridiculous". Turns out, an awful lot of them DO pronounce it that way. By the way, for any non-English natives, rId and rEd have fairly different pronunciations in most English dialects. But not to these kids.
I've noticed an awful lot of this lately. Kids used to mis-pronounce words because of how they're spelled. Understandable to a degree, because English is nothing if not inconsistent. But with the advent of a generation that seems to get most of its reading done online (and IM and other forms of chat simply exacerbate the problem), what I'm seeing lately is the opposite: words being mis-spelled because of how they're pronounced.
And this, folks, is how languages evolve very quickly. 30 years ago, we had a somewhat consistent written language (yes, there are differences like color vs colour), with much variation in the spoken form. These days, the written form is reflecting the spoken form. Kind of annoying for those of us with inner spelling and grammar Nazis (notice the distinct lack of apostrophe when pluralizing, people!!!).
Kind of like Hindi/Punjabi - 2 different written forms, but mostly the same spoken form. Or so I'm told by friends from India/Pakistan.
I mean, that's why it's OK to share and download copyrighted music, right?
I'm sorry, I must have missed this part of the article, settlement, or story. Where did this issue even come up again?
WHAT?
Slashdot has a pro-OSS bias???
When did this happen? Why wasn't I informed?? Damnit, I'm handing in my UID PRONTO!
Now I know why you want to filter comments with "In Other News..."
"Slashdot has a pro-OSS bias. In other news, water is wet, the Sun rises in the east, and Microsoft-funded studies show that Windows has a lower TCO than Linux or Solaris."
Personally, I'm surprised anyone notices the multiple Add/Remove entries for Firefox, what with them being mixed in with about 75 "Windows 2000 Hotfix" entries...
Yes, this is humour. But seriously, it's not like the Add/Remove list isn't polluted all to hell and back anyway.
Good thing the summary already covered this:
when a spam email is received, it is immediately sent back to the originating computer - not an email account
Unless you know of a way to mass spoof TCP handshaking, that is...
Yeah, but LAND attacks work again!
:)
Isn't progress wonderful?
Far more broadband. Let's face it, 90-some % of Canada's population is concentrated in what, a dozen major urban areas? Far easier to roll out broadband to everyone in a situation like that.
Heck, I had broadband in 1998. 7 years later, many Americans in major cities still don't have access to it (or so I keep seeing posts on Slashdot claiming).
Also, home computer ownership here is (last I checked) significantly higher overall than the US.
No, see there *is* no last number on each line in 2000. The -o flag doesn't exist, and as such, you can't get a PID from netstat - at least as far as I've ever been able to tell.
-o isn't a valid option in Windows 2000.
I've used 3rd party tools to check which processes are bound to which ports in Win2000; if there's a native method please share!
Yup.
:)
Except that in one case, it's true
Well, unless you can find me a 96-way Windows server, or a version of Windows where it's possible to actually close every network port except the ones I actually want listening...
That's because bonch, like a lot of others as of late, seem to think that 800,000+ people are only allowed one collective opinion about anything. That way, they can decry 'hypocrasy!!!!!!!' all day long.
I swear, he must have had 5 or 6 posts to that effect on the recent CherryOS story alone.
He's also notorious for decrying "Slashdot's" "anti-Microsoft bias". Over and over and over in some stories. Again, we're all one person here, apparently.
Textbook trolling, but like-minded moderators don't seem to catch on. It's more useful to those types to post and moderate up the same lines again and again, because they feel they've somehow stumbled upon some great hidden truth that must be exposed to the world.
Trojans are trivially easy to avoid. Worms aren't.
:).
The truth is, there are two reasons there's not much malware for non-Windows systems. One is because of market share, and the other is because the users of minority operating systems tend to be a little more technically savvy than the soccer moms and nascar dads that make up the Windows world.
Except for the third, and biggest reason: insecure applications/network stacks/operating systems.
Believe me, people have tried, and tried hard, to write something like Blaster for Linux. Slammer for (insert OSS SQL server here). Code Red for Apache. There's more than enough market share (and certainly for Apache!), and these days, plenty of less savvy users setting these things up. In fact, people try far harder, because quite simply an owned *nix box is far more useful than a Windows zombie (much easier to keep out further crackers
Fact is, until XP SP2, every network-capable version of Windows was just asking to be cracked, out of the box. Unintended services needlessly listening on well-known ports (note this pretty much guarantees they'll never be updated/monitored) == Warhol worms waiting to happen. What's more fun, is that some of these services are almost impossible to turn off (just try removing the C$ or IPC$ share in Windows, for a start).
It's been a few years for me since a default Linux install had ANYTHING listening.
That, by default, makes it a far more secure environment.
Up here, the trailer for ep1 first got shown before Wing Commander.
No, I'm not kidding. I wish I was.
They actually made up special signs saying "no refunds after the trailers start" for the obvious reasons.
Then again, it could have been Battlefield Earth.
Well, not anymore, no :)
For years, they advertised, in large capital letters, UNLIMITED INTERNET ACCESS.
After they oversold an insane amount, realized they were going to lose their shirts, they started introducing bandwidth caps. All while still advertising UNLIMITED INTERNET ACCESS.
It's sad that we need lawsuits and regulations to deal with this sort of thing - but I'm sorry, don't advertise something in 100% plain english if you're not going to follow through.
Blockbuster just rolled this campaign out in Canada, and I've been waiting to hear the catch. Call me a hopeless optimist, but NO MORE LATE FEES means, in English, that if I return a movie LATE, there will be NO FEE as a result of my returning it late. Looks like NO MORE LATE FEES just means DEFERRED LATE FEES.
Morons. They deserve whatever they get. This is about as ethical as advertising $25 cars - with small print explaining that there is a $25,000 processing fee.
If the sun was only 10 kilometres from your house, a mass extinction might occur.
Seriously, this has to be the most bizzare astronomy story tagline I've ever read. I figured this was the submitter's quote, or possibly the article writer - nope, it was from one of the physicists.
Does the artist of the song get paid? No? Well, arent you kind of screwing him/her over? I think the answer is clear.
You're absolutely right. I've been following this plan for years.
Considering something like 0.1% of artists ever actually make any money from their recording contracts (wish I had a link to the classic Courtney Love article), I haven't purchased a big label CD since the late 90s.
I'll still download, however. The artist gets screwed either way, so why not? Besides, I live in Canada. So not only is it legal, it's no longer immoral either. I'm paying for this right with every blank media purchased.
Is there a place in my preferences where I can turn off viewing "Death of ..." articles?
Yeah. That part of your brain that forced you to click on the article, and then "reply", and then all the keystrokes needed to compose your complaint and hit "submit"?
Retrain it to simply ignore the story next time, and move on to the next story.
Is there a place in my preferences where I can turn off viewing posts about "I don't want to see story X"? You'd think people read Slashdot just to complain about all of the things they don't like about it...
Other than Windows product activation
"Other than the fact that the mere installation of the OS requires DRM, what DRM is there?"
WPA is more than enough to keep me from using XP, thanks.
Heh.
:)
There's always someone who can Bill Joy any thread about science, these days.
Then again, maybe mods with senses of humour could start showing up on Slashdot
Bullshit. You can selectively breed humans to be stronger, or whatever. You cannot selectively breed humans to grow 10 arms and be green.
The difference between the two is only a matter of breeding generations, or if you prefer, time. I can selectively breed a bacterium into a human, given enough time - so I don't see what's so impossible about something as trivial as skin colour or limb count.
(Unless you were trying to start up a micro/macro evolution debate, which I don't think was the case)
You know, I was raised in Manitoba/Ontatio, and for all of my life I've been hearing the stereotype perpetuated by the parent. I just moved here (Calgary) a few months back, and I have to tell you, this province is anything but. Maybe it's the hippie influence from BC, maybe it's just that most Canadians don't really travel anywhere, and get 99% of their information from the Toronto-centric CBC.
If this province is right-wing, well at least they've done right-wing "right" (ie: correctly). The taxes here are lower than almost anywhere, people are in general more prosperous than anywhere I've ever been, we have an incredible public transportation system, some of the best roads in the country, an AMAZING parks system, some of the cleanest air I've ever breathed, North America's largest urban park (and mostly natural, too, although in this neck of the woods that basically means prarie grass), an incredibly healthy and athletic population, one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country...
By and large, the government seems to want to keep out of people's lives (contrast this with the "right" down south these days). About the only thing, and I admit it really pisses me off, is the provincial government's opposition to gay marriage.
I also work for one of the big oil companies out here, and from what I've seen, things are a hell of a lot different than they were in the past. I got to go on a field tour of our seismic lines recently (natural gas exploration), and was completely blown away as to the steps taken NOT to destroy the environment. It's really amazing - the people marching through the bush running wires etc are trained to bend tree branches out of their way, as opposed to breaking them off. Zero-impact indeed.
In short, for those that don't live here, don't listen to what you're told. Alberta is pretty much the polar opposite of what you hear on TV. Well, we do have the Stampede still, and some people wear cowboy hats during it. Whoopdee do.
I tried the earlier version when Google first released this, and while it was sorta nice, I really didn't like one feature: Picasa drops a file in every directory you have that has an image file in it. Let it spider your hard drive (which is one of the cooler things about it, I thought), and suddenly every directory has a mini-database in it.
This sort of behaviour drove me nuts with a certain Windows FTP client, but at least that could be turned off. Can you tell 2.0 to use a centralized database somehow?
Irony:
Someone correcting another person's internet language/humour by using the most insipid internet abbreviation ever.