The really important part of his character was that, unlike the irreverent scientists who founded the company, he was religious (but needed the paycheck). It was not a "black" role. There was nothing about him that meant the character HAD to be black, but no reason he couldn't be either. Some people, for sad cultural/historical reasons, got caught up in his skin color and never saw the character. That's a shame.
As far as I can tell, the main objection is to the height of the water tower and the fact that it does not comply with zoning ordinances.
...which it doesn't have to because it is a utility.
Really, his objection is more like "I don't want it there, and I have enough money to hire lawyers so I should be able to get my way".
I don't really see the connection with fracking though. I suppose if he put his injection wells on his own property, he could perhaps solve the problem by making the ground there too geologically unstable to put a water tower on....
Here's another good developer example: GUIs. If you are developing an application, you generally have to have one. Now suppose you are developing in C++ or some other modern compiled language, you are targeting Windows, and you want a GUI for your application. How do you do this?
Here are your choices:
Instead of Windows, you target Microsoft's VM, and switch to using "managed" C++, or some other "managed" language.
You use MFC, Microsoft's ridiculously dated GUI design system that they quit supporting (except as a migration path) more than 10 years ago. If you do this, be very careful not to use new features that Microsoft put no-compete clauses into, as there's no telling when MS may decide to compete with you.
You use some third-party toolkit. QT seems to be a favored option, but there are loads of others
Yes folks, you read that right. As of right now there is no standard GUI toolkit targeting Windows. MS has decided everyone should use.NET and Microsoft's.NET compilers, so that's all they are providing any more.
Through behavioral studies we already knew that dogs are very good at reading human facial emotions. We also know that wolves (which they are descended from) are not any good at that at all.
So one possibility is that dogs have uniquely evolved this capacity for understanding humans, and you won't find any serious "voice center" or "face center" in other animals, even the wolves (which are arguably the same species).
Another possibility is that understanding vocalizations and physical expressions is an important feature in any animal that has to cooperate with others of its species every day to survive, and thus you will find it to some extent in any "social animal".
Another possibility is that this is just some latent brain feature found in all mammals.
It will be interesting to see which it ends up being.
If you mean hating an ideology that wants to subdue or kill all others....
It certainly isn't impossible to find stuff that implies that in the Koran. However, it isn't impossible to find stuff that implies that in The Bible either. Cherry-pick a verse here or there, and it can look pretty bad. It misses the point of the religion completely to do that, but I've seen it done.
So out of curiosity, do you hate Christianity too, or are you just being selective about which religion you apply those standards to?
For any Christian reading the parent and thinking perhaps its fine to throw the word "hate" around like this, I'd advise you go reread I Corinthians 13 and think about your own failures for a while. We are supposed to be better than that.
As a matter of interest remember how peak oil never happened? Can you draw any link to the lack of peak oil and the sudden interest in fracking, and scraping every last little bit of natural tar from sands within a natural reserve.
Glad someone else remembers that. I remember back in the 70's when that was first a big issue. Someone came to my school with all kinds of graphs showing how we'd run out totally by 2000.
The brought in an oil industry guy for equal time. It wasn't hard to find good smart knowledgeable oilmen in Oklahoma in the 70's. He said that there wasn't nessecarily anything wrong with the other person's math, but they'd completely neglected to take into account economics. If supplies started to get scarcer, prices would go up, which would drop demand. Also, there were many untapped sources that nobody was yet bothering with (he specifically mentioned shale) because it just wasn't presently worth it economically. If prices rose enough, it would become worth it. If they further rose enough, alternate energy forms would start to become worth using. So we'll never "run out", although we may one day get to a point where other sources make more sense to use.
Actually, I take that back. We don't even know for sure liquid water is a requirement. But what we do know about liquid water is that everywhere we've looked at it so far, we've found life.
Who says you need an atmosphere for life? We've found life at the bottom of our oceans where there's no oxygen or light. Pretty much the only thing we know for sure to be a requirement is liquid water. Any other supposed "requirement" has either been proven wrong, or is conjecture.
Sort of. But prestige is something you can lose by being a jerk (or as happened in the book, by simply losing an argument) without actually receiving anything in return. On the other hand, it is something you might not necessarily lose any of by accepting a gift from someone else. So it isn't "spent" in the sense money is spent.
For your example, someone like Woody Allen doesn't have less prestige because he attended a big party he got invited to. If anything, he may end up with more prestige for going. However, if folks get it in their heads that he's been diddling children, he's quite likely to quit getting invites to parties altogether.
We have this already. Its called a gift economy. These tend to happen in societies where people's basic needs are fairly secure (eg: stable tribal herding/farming societies). So rather than showing everyone you are a Big Shot by accumulating lots of showy possessions, you do it by giving more and better gifts than can be given back to you. Polynesians do this by giving away pigs. High school students do this by throwing parties (or providing the booze for same). Free Software developers do it by contributing code to important projects.
So in a money-free gift society, some people would be "lazy" and not work, but they'd end up being very low status people. You'd work because it would raise your status. If your work is important enough (and thus you get high-status enough), others will start helping you because that will improve their status.
Corey Doctorow explored this in his Science Fiction novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. He still had a money-like token (chuffie) but it was more like a real-time measure of your status. If you do something a lot of people hate, it could all disappear without you "spending" any of it.
If we accept that taxation is they way to fund education, the smart move is to do it through general taxation.
Note the source: Forbes. This is a magazine for rich folks. You will never, ever, ever find an argument for raising general taxation on rich people in Forbes. So instead we get a proposal for some complicated new tax that rich folks can buy themselves out of (by paying the college costs up front out of their seat-cushion change), and only working stiffs will get stuck with.
Actually, IMHO the GW stuff at the end is the most interesting part. What happens to the Winter Olympics when ice and snow become rare things? Not only is finding sites going to be tough, but also finding participants.
Temperatures are usually reported in degrees Celsius.
Not in the USA (the country that hosts this website), they aren't. If you don't like that, I'm sure there are lots of other websites in the world hosted in Europe or Canada for you to visit. That's how you "fix" this problem.
Pretty much every one of your rebuttal points boils down to, "it won't work here because this website is set up in a way where it won't work". So basically, you are arguing for a total redesign to achieve any of that. My entire first point exactly!
Slashdot is essentially a "web 1.5" website. Perhaps its time to take it up to full 2.0? Maybe even beyond. Take/.'s biggest strength, the collaborative value of user-moderated commentary, and use more modern tools to further enhance and encourage it.
My second point though is that this does not seem to be the goal of the redesign we are witnessing. If anything, it appears to be a step back to "Web 1.0", where content is all statically presented by a central authority, and user commentary is if anything an afterthought.
Can someone from the/. team explain what exactly is wrong with the Classic site and why it can't be fixed?
I'm just a user, but I could go on for hours on what's wrong with the Classic site. It was perhaps innovative back when it was introduced, but it had just not aged well.
Why can't I edit my posts? Why can't I vote on stories, instead of just comments? Why are comments limited to 5 votes? Why can't high karma user mods edit summaries? Why are the badges so limited and marginalized? Why is comment voting so limited? I could go on and on./.'s commenting system is a nice quaint start, but it is way way way behind the times.
However, it doesn't look like it is being overhauled and modernized in Beta, just eviscerated.
Keep some space for ads if you want; I don't give a shit and I realize you've got bills to pay. I have the option of turning them off, but I don't because I like the site.
Same here. I've had the ability to turn them off for possibly more than a decade. I've never once done that, because I know that's how the bills get paid. That is how I support the site.
There'd better be a lot of lines before I have to "click for more", and I never want to have to "click for more" on the front page
If you haven't tried it lately, go check out how Google's image search, or Discourse.org handles this. They just automagically load you more content when you scroll down to the bottom of the page. This is the modern way to handle this. If you are going to modernize things, do that.
Since there's a redesign in the works, this _could_ be a good chance to make some things actually work better!
Again, totally agree. If you can't be as innovative as/. was back when it introduced the karma/voting system to the world, at least go look at what some other modern websites have done with the concept, and steal some of those ideas back here.
Not quite the old hand you are, but I have been hanging here quite a while, and this is the first I'm hearing of Technocrat. If you start it up again, and I hear about it, I'll be there.
The really sad part about all this is that there actually is lots of room for improvement in they way Slashdot does things. I was here before the moderation system was introduced. It was really innovative at the time, and of course has been a huge success, but that was then and the world has moved on. StackOverflow took the concept, expanded it, and did some amazing things. Some of the same folks are looking to make similar advances with Discourse. There's no reason why Slashdot can't take some of those more modern user-moderation ideas back.
I've actually had no real problem with Slashdot UI upgrades in the past. Heck, if I didn't like learning new things, I'm definitely hanging out on the wrong website. And it is certainly time for some upgrades. For instance, why can't we vote on stories instead of just comments? Why can't we edit our own comments? Why can't high-karma users get more moderation perks? Why can't user-moderators do more than get an occasional miserly 5 votes (immediately rescinded when they want to comment, which is what got them the karma to get moderation votes in the first place).
But as near as I can tell, for this upgrade the operating principle instead of "our users' experience needs to be better", is "our advertisers' experience needs to be better".
I stopped reading the NYT because it has too much fluff
Interesting point of view.
Personally I avoid reading the NYT because their policies discourage me from doing so. I only get something like 10 views a month, so whenever I find a NYT link, before clicking I always have to stop and ask myself, "Is the content of this link really important enough to burn one of my 10 views?" Often times, the answer is no, and I'll do a web search on the subject and find another source for the story. Is this what NYT wants me doing? For their sake, I hope so, but as my daddy always said, seems like a poor way to run a rodeo to me.
For me, not worth it. I do buy the CR auto issue every year, just to have a handy library of them whenever I find myself in need of a car. Since I buy used, having back issues is really important.
For lesser purchases, I have much better luck doing online searches and sifting through user reviews. CR does great reviews, but they are still the reviews of just one person. They might miss a big problem a lot of people have, or they might have a very rare big problem. Often I find CR has very different priorities than I do (eg: I don't care about "value" that much on a purchase that I expect to use for 10+ years.)
So of course, for that purpose, the free internet beats the pants off of CR.
If you mean an upfront paywall, the answer is none. The entire concept of the WWW is the synergy everyone gets sharing and linking to free content. It makes every participant far more valuable than they would be alone. Any attempt to put up artificial walls around a particular bit of content violates the entire social contract the Web operates on. You are making everyone else's content less valuable, and are inconveniencing every visitor, simply for your own personal financial gain. Essentially, you are sabotaging the Web.
This is why people get pissed off at paywalls, even though they can't necessarily find the words to explain it.
Now I realize folks have to eat, and the social contract of the Web doesn't mesh very well with a lot of old information brokers' steam-press era business models. Tough. Find a way to adapt, or go out of business. Your choice.
Back in the day, they used to say that the price of newspapers only covered the cost of delivery. Ads paid for the actual salaries of the folks generating the content. Delivery on the web is essentially free to the content producers now. If your grandfathers could figure out how to pay for the rest with advertising, I bet you can too.
Start putting the Daily Doubles in the first two slots. From a long-term statistical point of view, placing them randomly would do better, but if they really want to break this one guy of picking bottom questions, this would be the way to do it
Change the rules so that you *have* to chose the lowest-point question available in a category. If this is the way the game is "supposed to be played", then make it a rule. Otherwise, STFU.
...its just a matter of exactly how fake they are. If you think the way people portray themselves online is 100% accurate, or that all those folks are really your friends, you have some serious issues with reality.
I heard a great interview with Matt Groening on NPR a few years back. He said when he first started Simpsons (and I can vouch for this as an early viewer), the show was essentially all about Bart. However, as he got older and the show wore on, something weird happened and the cartoonishly buffoonish dad slowly became the show's protagonist. Now he finds as he gets even older he's starting to empathise more and more with Grampa...
As an engineering graduate of 1986, I joined a group of classmates a couple of years ago on a visit to the Dean, who asked us what we would change, looking back, in the curriculum. There were two answers common to all of us: project management and English writing.
Good points. However, there's the flip side. One class I was required to take by my department for my CS degree was biology. All CS students had to take it. I argued bitterly against it at the time, and would happily do so again today 25 years later. It was a complete and utter waste of college credit hours.
Slashdot Mirror
The runners are programs like Sublime Text, BBedit, Text Wrangler, gedit, Jedit, notepad++, or even vim.
But not emacs.
Of course not. Emacs is an IDE (just not a very graphical one).
The really important part of his character was that, unlike the irreverent scientists who founded the company, he was religious (but needed the paycheck). It was not a "black" role. There was nothing about him that meant the character HAD to be black, but no reason he couldn't be either. Some people, for sad cultural/historical reasons, got caught up in his skin color and never saw the character. That's a shame.
As far as I can tell, the main objection is to the height of the water tower and the fact that it does not comply with zoning ordinances.
...which it doesn't have to because it is a utility.
Really, his objection is more like "I don't want it there, and I have enough money to hire lawyers so I should be able to get my way".
I don't really see the connection with fracking though. I suppose if he put his injection wells on his own property, he could perhaps solve the problem by making the ground there too geologically unstable to put a water tower on....
"We know better, and you have no choice".
Here's another good developer example: GUIs. If you are developing an application, you generally have to have one. Now suppose you are developing in C++ or some other modern compiled language, you are targeting Windows, and you want a GUI for your application. How do you do this?
Here are your choices:
Yes folks, you read that right. As of right now there is no standard GUI toolkit targeting Windows. MS has decided everyone should use .NET and Microsoft's .NET compilers, so that's all they are providing any more.
Through behavioral studies we already knew that dogs are very good at reading human facial emotions. We also know that wolves (which they are descended from) are not any good at that at all.
So one possibility is that dogs have uniquely evolved this capacity for understanding humans, and you won't find any serious "voice center" or "face center" in other animals, even the wolves (which are arguably the same species).
Another possibility is that understanding vocalizations and physical expressions is an important feature in any animal that has to cooperate with others of its species every day to survive, and thus you will find it to some extent in any "social animal".
Another possibility is that this is just some latent brain feature found in all mammals.
It will be interesting to see which it ends up being.
If you mean hating an ideology that wants to subdue or kill all others ....
It certainly isn't impossible to find stuff that implies that in the Koran. However, it isn't impossible to find stuff that implies that in The Bible either. Cherry-pick a verse here or there, and it can look pretty bad. It misses the point of the religion completely to do that, but I've seen it done.
So out of curiosity, do you hate Christianity too, or are you just being selective about which religion you apply those standards to?
For any Christian reading the parent and thinking perhaps its fine to throw the word "hate" around like this, I'd advise you go reread I Corinthians 13 and think about your own failures for a while. We are supposed to be better than that.
As a matter of interest remember how peak oil never happened? Can you draw any link to the lack of peak oil and the sudden interest in fracking, and scraping every last little bit of natural tar from sands within a natural reserve.
Glad someone else remembers that. I remember back in the 70's when that was first a big issue. Someone came to my school with all kinds of graphs showing how we'd run out totally by 2000.
The brought in an oil industry guy for equal time. It wasn't hard to find good smart knowledgeable oilmen in Oklahoma in the 70's. He said that there wasn't nessecarily anything wrong with the other person's math, but they'd completely neglected to take into account economics. If supplies started to get scarcer, prices would go up, which would drop demand. Also, there were many untapped sources that nobody was yet bothering with (he specifically mentioned shale) because it just wasn't presently worth it economically. If prices rose enough, it would become worth it. If they further rose enough, alternate energy forms would start to become worth using. So we'll never "run out", although we may one day get to a point where other sources make more sense to use.
Actually, I take that back. We don't even know for sure liquid water is a requirement. But what we do know about liquid water is that everywhere we've looked at it so far, we've found life.
Who says you need an atmosphere for life? We've found life at the bottom of our oceans where there's no oxygen or light. Pretty much the only thing we know for sure to be a requirement is liquid water. Any other supposed "requirement" has either been proven wrong, or is conjecture.
Sort of. But prestige is something you can lose by being a jerk (or as happened in the book, by simply losing an argument) without actually receiving anything in return. On the other hand, it is something you might not necessarily lose any of by accepting a gift from someone else. So it isn't "spent" in the sense money is spent.
For your example, someone like Woody Allen doesn't have less prestige because he attended a big party he got invited to. If anything, he may end up with more prestige for going. However, if folks get it in their heads that he's been diddling children, he's quite likely to quit getting invites to parties altogether.
I cannot imagine a world without money.
We have this already. Its called a gift economy. These tend to happen in societies where people's basic needs are fairly secure (eg: stable tribal herding/farming societies). So rather than showing everyone you are a Big Shot by accumulating lots of showy possessions, you do it by giving more and better gifts than can be given back to you. Polynesians do this by giving away pigs. High school students do this by throwing parties (or providing the booze for same). Free Software developers do it by contributing code to important projects.
So in a money-free gift society, some people would be "lazy" and not work, but they'd end up being very low status people. You'd work because it would raise your status. If your work is important enough (and thus you get high-status enough), others will start helping you because that will improve their status.
Corey Doctorow explored this in his Science Fiction novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. He still had a money-like token (chuffie) but it was more like a real-time measure of your status. If you do something a lot of people hate, it could all disappear without you "spending" any of it.
If we accept that taxation is they way to fund education, the smart move is to do it through general taxation.
Note the source: Forbes. This is a magazine for rich folks. You will never, ever, ever find an argument for raising general taxation on rich people in Forbes. So instead we get a proposal for some complicated new tax that rich folks can buy themselves out of (by paying the college costs up front out of their seat-cushion change), and only working stiffs will get stuck with.
Actually, IMHO the GW stuff at the end is the most interesting part. What happens to the Winter Olympics when ice and snow become rare things? Not only is finding sites going to be tough, but also finding participants.
Temperatures are usually reported in degrees Celsius.
Not in the USA (the country that hosts this website), they aren't. If you don't like that, I'm sure there are lots of other websites in the world hosted in Europe or Canada for you to visit. That's how you "fix" this problem.
Pretty much every one of your rebuttal points boils down to, "it won't work here because this website is set up in a way where it won't work". So basically, you are arguing for a total redesign to achieve any of that. My entire first point exactly!
Slashdot is essentially a "web 1.5" website. Perhaps its time to take it up to full 2.0? Maybe even beyond. Take /.'s biggest strength, the collaborative value of user-moderated commentary, and use more modern tools to further enhance and encourage it.
My second point though is that this does not seem to be the goal of the redesign we are witnessing. If anything, it appears to be a step back to "Web 1.0", where content is all statically presented by a central authority, and user commentary is if anything an afterthought.
Can someone from the /. team explain what exactly is wrong with the Classic site and why it can't be fixed?
I'm just a user, but I could go on for hours on what's wrong with the Classic site. It was perhaps innovative back when it was introduced, but it had just not aged well.
Why can't I edit my posts? Why can't I vote on stories, instead of just comments? Why are comments limited to 5 votes? Why can't high karma user mods edit summaries? Why are the badges so limited and marginalized? Why is comment voting so limited? I could go on and on. /.'s commenting system is a nice quaint start, but it is way way way behind the times.
However, it doesn't look like it is being overhauled and modernized in Beta, just eviscerated.
Keep some space for ads if you want; I don't give a shit and I realize you've got bills to pay. I have the option of turning them off, but I don't because I like the site.
Same here. I've had the ability to turn them off for possibly more than a decade. I've never once done that, because I know that's how the bills get paid. That is how I support the site.
There'd better be a lot of lines before I have to "click for more", and I never want to have to "click for more" on the front page
If you haven't tried it lately, go check out how Google's image search, or Discourse.org handles this. They just automagically load you more content when you scroll down to the bottom of the page. This is the modern way to handle this. If you are going to modernize things, do that.
Since there's a redesign in the works, this _could_ be a good chance to make some things actually work better!
Again, totally agree. If you can't be as innovative as /. was back when it introduced the karma/voting system to the world, at least go look at what some other modern websites have done with the concept, and steal some of those ideas back here.
Not quite the old hand you are, but I have been hanging here quite a while, and this is the first I'm hearing of Technocrat. If you start it up again, and I hear about it, I'll be there.
The really sad part about all this is that there actually is lots of room for improvement in they way Slashdot does things. I was here before the moderation system was introduced. It was really innovative at the time, and of course has been a huge success, but that was then and the world has moved on. StackOverflow took the concept, expanded it, and did some amazing things. Some of the same folks are looking to make similar advances with Discourse. There's no reason why Slashdot can't take some of those more modern user-moderation ideas back.
I've actually had no real problem with Slashdot UI upgrades in the past. Heck, if I didn't like learning new things, I'm definitely hanging out on the wrong website. And it is certainly time for some upgrades. For instance, why can't we vote on stories instead of just comments? Why can't we edit our own comments? Why can't high-karma users get more moderation perks? Why can't user-moderators do more than get an occasional miserly 5 votes (immediately rescinded when they want to comment, which is what got them the karma to get moderation votes in the first place).
But as near as I can tell, for this upgrade the operating principle instead of "our users' experience needs to be better", is "our advertisers' experience needs to be better".
I stopped reading the NYT because it has too much fluff
Interesting point of view.
Personally I avoid reading the NYT because their policies discourage me from doing so. I only get something like 10 views a month, so whenever I find a NYT link, before clicking I always have to stop and ask myself, "Is the content of this link really important enough to burn one of my 10 views?" Often times, the answer is no, and I'll do a web search on the subject and find another source for the story. Is this what NYT wants me doing? For their sake, I hope so, but as my daddy always said, seems like a poor way to run a rodeo to me.
For me, not worth it. I do buy the CR auto issue every year, just to have a handy library of them whenever I find myself in need of a car. Since I buy used, having back issues is really important.
For lesser purchases, I have much better luck doing online searches and sifting through user reviews. CR does great reviews, but they are still the reviews of just one person. They might miss a big problem a lot of people have, or they might have a very rare big problem. Often I find CR has very different priorities than I do (eg: I don't care about "value" that much on a purchase that I expect to use for 10+ years.)
So of course, for that purpose, the free internet beats the pants off of CR.
If you mean an upfront paywall, the answer is none. The entire concept of the WWW is the synergy everyone gets sharing and linking to free content. It makes every participant far more valuable than they would be alone. Any attempt to put up artificial walls around a particular bit of content violates the entire social contract the Web operates on. You are making everyone else's content less valuable, and are inconveniencing every visitor, simply for your own personal financial gain. Essentially, you are sabotaging the Web.
This is why people get pissed off at paywalls, even though they can't necessarily find the words to explain it.
Now I realize folks have to eat, and the social contract of the Web doesn't mesh very well with a lot of old information brokers' steam-press era business models. Tough. Find a way to adapt, or go out of business. Your choice.
Back in the day, they used to say that the price of newspapers only covered the cost of delivery. Ads paid for the actual salaries of the folks generating the content. Delivery on the web is essentially free to the content producers now. If your grandfathers could figure out how to pay for the rest with advertising, I bet you can too.
...its just a matter of exactly how fake they are. If you think the way people portray themselves online is 100% accurate, or that all those folks are really your friends, you have some serious issues with reality.
I heard a great interview with Matt Groening on NPR a few years back. He said when he first started Simpsons (and I can vouch for this as an early viewer), the show was essentially all about Bart. However, as he got older and the show wore on, something weird happened and the cartoonishly buffoonish dad slowly became the show's protagonist. Now he finds as he gets even older he's starting to empathise more and more with Grampa...
As an engineering graduate of 1986, I joined a group of classmates a couple of years ago on a visit to the Dean, who asked us what we would change, looking back, in the curriculum. There were two answers common to all of us: project management and English writing.
Good points. However, there's the flip side. One class I was required to take by my department for my CS degree was biology. All CS students had to take it. I argued bitterly against it at the time, and would happily do so again today 25 years later. It was a complete and utter waste of college credit hours.