I don't even think there's a need for hyperbole on this (my, uh, previous post aside). Shuttle and Mir both worked, both developed problems and dangerous conditions developed over time. The only difference is which side of which border they were developed on, and national origin is a piss-poor standard upon which to judge the overall success of a project or decision, or even the ethics underlying such.
Canning the upper echelon of staff for political reasons rarely, if ever, has good results (I suspect PDVSA had some difficulty replacing that many people with that much experience). Neither does going cheap on the failsafe gear and deciding regulations don't really need to be followed that closely when dealing with complicated, ecologically-significant projects.
To be clear, there are multiple forms of blindness. I happen to be stuck with severe myopia and cone dystrophy - so shit's blurry and the daystar messes me up. The therapy described won't fix the myopia, but holy crap that's the closest thing I've heard of to a fix for the cone-rod mess in my life to this point. Mitigating that might not improve my ability to focus, but it might help reduce the strain on my eyes from things like looking around outside, even on cloudy days. A pair of good wraparound sunglasses already provides some relief, but they can't be worn everywhere...
I hope this works out. And as for that little aside from kdawson... I understand that some people do not adapt well to gaining visual capability they previously lacked, but unless you're squinting at a computer screen or iPod, or using a screen reader, or you've worked in a therapeutic or adaptive capacity with visually impaired individuals (or lived with one), then I'm not inclined to take that aside as anything but kdawson trying to be "deep". I, personally, just felt patronized and condescended to, and my initial reaction to that bit of editor splooge was much shorter and far more profane.
If your business model/economy can't adapt to deal with the occasional natural event, it's time to change that system to something a bit more robust or flexible.
This seems to be a semi-common issue. One place I kill time at uses Trend Micro on a couple of machines, and two updates within the past eight months have broken networking in funky ways that made updating impossible until workarounds were determined.
In the case of FOSS, there is no way to bankrupt or buyout the competition. They still try to compete with marketing FUD, but it is obvious that that is only good for trying to slow the growth of FOSS.
That leaves the legal route, and that's what I'm worried may be employed here down the road. I hope the Samba developers obtained a rock-solid agreement allowing them to use the results of the collaboration in the Samba project, now and in the future. I'm concerned that the company may attempt, without the knowledge of the MS developers who probably had a blast doing this, to argue that anything in Samba4 written after this project having to do with AD interoperability is covered by patents relating to AD, or that it descends from MS intellectual property accessed while they were at Redmond, etc. IIRC, one of the Linux NTFS coders had to refrain from working on the functionality for some time after working at Microsoft due to contract stipulations, slowing the development of stable write capability (this was years ago, so I could be way off here).
I can see how this is a possible sign of a culture change at Microsoft (and for that company's sake, I hope the EEE culture is withering away), but I can also see a few ways this could go horribly wrong based on the company's past behaviour. Their future behaviour will determine whether this was a good idea, and that's why I remain skeptical.
Popularity != trustworthiness, particularly regarding a company with a long, well-documented history of anticompetitive practices and protocol-busting behaviour.
I'm amazed so many people are willing to trust MS management's motives so easily. Maybe after they've gone a few years working with outside, even open-source developers, without pulling any technological or legal stunts to later eliminate those projects, will I be prepared to look kindly upon any effort involving MS.
Perhaps I'm just paranoid, or maybe I'm just the result of a company's past poor products and bad behaviour. It's up to that company to regain a semblance of trust from me.
I'm kind of surprised you don't get what's going on here. MS sees a way to make money from open source.
Get back to me in five years, and we'll see how this plays out. I'd love to see MS back away from its old policies, but they actually need to do it before I'll give them credit for it.
I don't think it's an earth moving change in the relationship between MS and the free world, but it's better than a sharp stick in the eye.
I'll breathe easier if this doesn't result in legal trouble for Linux distributions and the *BSDs down the road. MS has a long, long way to go before I could ever trust them to do something with the open source community for any purpose other than to, eventually, obliterate it as a threat.
Publicly recanting the Halloween Documents, and particularly "embrace, extend, and extinguish" would be a start, if only a start.
OK, it's an MS-created protocol anyway, but I'm still very suspicious about MS management's ultimate motives in allowing this collaboration to take place.
Nothing like setting off a good conversation and learning a couple of things along the way.
First, I'd like to thank the people who pointed out the difference between EMRs and a full-up EHR system across the province. I hadn't even encountered the terms and differences until commenters here pointed them out (I submitted this during a slow moment from a handheld while waiting for a title to finish ingesting, so doing my own damn research wasn't even in my mind). That said, the Wikipedia entry for electronic health records is currently a bad game of buzzword bingo, and it sounds like a system-wide version of an EMR, only requiring a much larger database(s), fine-grained security, and secure, or at least encrypted, links to transmit data, along with the personnel and infrastructure to maintain and administer the system. Big, but certainly not overwhelming for solutions based upon open source technologies.
I don't think OSCAR would have been the solution out of the box, but an existing EMR could have been a good starting point for developing the client-side interface, and possibly even the central databases. I wonder if some combination of central databases for things like basic patient info could be tied with peer-to-peer storage for things like results gathered at, and procedures performed by, particular institutions, so that the storage load is spread out. Then again, the problems presented by centralized data storage and maintenance would be replaced by the problems presented by distributed data storage and maintenance. Do you want your problems in a few data centres, or in every office around the province... flip a coin and decide how complicated/insane you'd like to make your considerations. I wonder if something could have even been built on the side of, or to replace, the existing OHIP billing system. I wonder, I wonder, I wonder...
As a few other commenters pointed out, much of the trouble was due to completely incompetent/corrupt management and contractors riding the gravy train, though one person made what I think is also an important point - a management culture capable of accepting open source solutions as a starting point would probably have been a culture actually interested in getting something done, instead of impressing itself with its magnificence and getting nothing done. Another person pointed out that Ontario is hamstrung by the specifications developed by another committee, though I'm still not clear on why this would have excluded things like OSCAR as a starting point for something bigger. This may simply be a result of my ignorance; I'm a bit more bogged down in smashing my brain against buggy "professional" video/film editing software to dive into the morass of buzzwords and legalese surrounding development specs at this point in time. However, this boondoggle makes me wonder if I should get a bit more interested...
Finally, to those using this to launch an assault on the idea of socialized medicine -- don't bother. My family wouldn't have been able to stay above the poverty line had we lived in the US due to surgery I required as a toddler, and I'm currently having a model experience in the Ontario health system. I've already paid for it through gobs of taxes, and in exchange I can worry more about getting medical advice and assistance while remaining a productive member of the community instead of sweating over how I'm going to pay the bills and keep a roof over my head. I'm not going to dive into the gory sociopolitical details and arguments right now, but there are certain things where laissez-faire policies do more harm than good -- and in medicine, "do no harm" is supposed to be the first commandment.
And to think, this mess started during the "Common Sense Revolution"... thanks Mike and Ernie, and up yours Dalton; your government only started caring when the opposition started poking around and asking questions. Oh well, could be worse; I could be battling an insurance provider for coverage of the surgery I have coming up...
If Apple + AT&T weren't prepared to deal with that gaping hole in their business plan, they deserve to lose money. There is no law that guarantees profit, and it's not up to iPhone owners to fulfill a deal made between Apple and AT&T.
Apple made a mistake by locking the iPhone to a single provider. If Apple's execs are shocked and appalled that computer nerds are modifying what is basically a portable computer, they need to be replaced with people who actually understand what techies will do with computers and plan accordingly.
We know quite a bit more than 'almost nothing' about the fundamental nature of the Universe thank you
Says the member of a species still stuck on a rocky body in an unassuming part of an average galaxy in one tiny part of the -verse, experiencing reality in three dimensions as space and a fourth dimension as time.
Love the hubris, but while we may think we know a helluva lot more than we did even a hundred years ago, there is no doubt that reality has components and aspects we haven't even conceived of at this point. We're still viewing things from this little corner of reality, and while we can probably figure out a helluva lot, I have no doubt we've barely scratched the surface of what exists, and what is possible.
Glickman made a mistake claiming content providers will stop producing good TV and film if consumers don't give in to the MPAA protection racket. There isn't enough quality programming out there in the 1000-channel universe to justify this argument.
I stopped watching TV a year ago. I don't miss it. The few interesting, informative, or entertaining shows out there aren't enough to make me drop $100 for a boob tube and at least an extra $20/month for the basic cable package, especially since some of that good programming is only available on the more expensive tiers. Better to blow my cash on food, content I can peruse at my heart's and mind's desire, and spending time with friends, among other things.
But, go ahead, try to lock down mass-broadcast media. Perhaps the time of pirate TV has come...
Your post says you can't stand it, but your repeated visits say you can't stand to leave.
Ah, the old "put up or shut up" argument, or "love it or leave it".
I've been a pretty regular visitor for, I think, five or so years now. In that time, I've watched it go from a heavily-visited geek site with influence and a vibrant community to Yet Another Tech Portal. It wouldn't be so bad if the editors seemed as interested in posting articles and coming up with fun new enhancements as they once did. However, I get the impression that some of the old-timers are tired of the whole thing, and less care is being taken in article selection and responsibility.
I still visit to read the comments, but there has been a definite upsurge in complaints aimed at the editors in comments beyond the usual troll warz and the anti-slash jihad. If the paid staff don't seem as interested in providing a high-quality website, doing what I suppose many visitors here (not necessarily myself) would consider a dream job, then that lack of interest is going to generate a similar reaction among the users.
That said, perhaps it is time for me to say goodbye for a while and see how things are in a few months. The parent comments make it pretty clear that Taco and crew are unresponsive to repeated complaints, even ones that have become pathetic running jokes which reflect negatively on the editors.
G'bye for now, Slashdot. Hope something gets through to the editors before too many more users are alienated.
he thinks people who constantly complain about dupes are dumb.
Oh really?
I think dupes, especially ones posted within the space of a day, are an indication that the editors are not even reading their own site. There have been numerous recent examples of editors failing to check for working links and at least ensuring a hint of accuracy in submission text, along with proper attribution, before posting. If they're going to take the time to post something on a page viewed by millions, they can take a few extra minutes to make sure it isn't crap, or posted two hours earlier and three items down the page. Otherwise, wtf are they doing all day?
Really, if the editors/authors can't live up to their self-granted titles, and can't give the viewing community--which is helping pay for the site either through ad views or subscriptions--a greater degree of oversight that they won't do themselves, I see no reason to ever subscribe. As it is, I'm pretty close to mapping slashdot.org to 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file and staying away for a while.
So I'm not the only one that has noticed many more botched Slashdot renderings over the past couple of days? Galeon 1.3.18/Mozilla 1.7.5 here, and the infamous rendering problem only occurred rarely until a couple of days ago. Now, half the pages I load come up with the stupid overlap issue.
I think someone "updated" Slashcode and exacerbated whatever issue is causing the random botches in the first place. I also think this is an indication it's not entirely a Gecko problem, but a problem with Slashcode that only manifests in Gecko; I don't recall similar complaints from IE or KHTML-based users.
...then Slashcode sucks even more than I imagined!
Not just a lame attempt at a joke--I've had the fabled Gecko layout issue all day*. Since I've seen it at rare, completely random times in the past, and I haven't updated Mozilla or Galeon in weeks, I'm willing to lay good money the main problem is on Slashdot's end and has always been on Slashdot's end, feeding junk output to browsers with which Gecko does something slightly funky.
Taco, what did you break?
* the issue where the middle column is shifted a touch farther to the left than where it should be, and the left column overlaps it as a result.
I don't think AOL are too concerned about having an open standard, blah blah.... I think they see VoIP and Skype as the next bet thing and want to get people like Vonage to use AIM IDs to call people.
The difference between VoIP and IM is that you can leave an IM window idle for a few moments while you do something else and not feel compelled to immediately reply. In phone conversations, leaving a few moments of silence between every sentence feels awkward, and you don't get a log of what has been said, you can't include links, etc...
Now, tying optional VoIP access to IM accounts is a neat idea, but the technologies are not in opposition or mutually exclusive. I don't view them as competitors, since they fill different needs--just as television and the Internet haven't made sound-only radio broadcasts obsolete (no, the communications cartels will do that:-(. )
i'm honestly taking sides, because i think there's going to be an amount of chicanery on both sides. but if this is your kool-aid, and you focus on voting problems, a system which has served us for 200 years, then you're living in la la land.
So fraud is acceptable in elections for the sake of stability?
And people wonder why so many potential voters don't bother getting to the polls. Maybe they recognize a deeper truth than the people who consider voting every few years the pinnacle of liberty realize.
"Restoration of voting rights for former felons": Not sure. Is a felon that has served its sentence entitled to the same rights as others?
A felon that has served his/her punishment, in the form of a sentence, should no longer be considered to have a societal debt. Otherwise, the person is still being punished long after the expiry of the sanction.
If a person can expect to be punished for the rest of their lives, regardless of the declared sentence length, then there is little reason for that individual to bother working toward rehabilitation. Under that circumstance, an offender may as well embrace the life of an outlaw, since that is how society and the state chooses to treat them regardless of the actual, official punishment.
Either a person can regain their acceptance by state and society by serving their punishment, or there is no hope of regaining that acceptance, creating an underclass of less-than-citizens. Consider the implications; arguably, this already exists.
This would also help a few other people. It could score some free PR for FreeBSD, and if Bill was really smart he could even ally with the FreeBSD Foundation and Apple with the goal of driving back the GPL somewhat...Something which I for one wouldn't necessarily see as a bad thing. Stallman gives himself far too much credit for FOSS in general...the man is in dire need of being put squarely back in his box, in my opinion. More promotion of the BSD and other licenses could go a long way towards demonstrating to him that the world does not in fact need him anywhere near as much as he likes to think. I'm aware the GPL zealots will now materialise howling out of the woodwork and mod me a troll, as they generally do when I express this kind of opinion...but they are welcome to mod me a troll as much as they like...it won't silence me.
Your problem is that you pit FOSS licences and their supporters against each other for no good reason. You also tie this dreamed assault on the GPL to Stallman's huge ego, ignoring the thousands of non-FSF developers who choose of their own free will to place their work under the GPL, just as thousands of others choose BSD.
Next you'll be telling me why the Romans should support the People's Front of Judea, and maybe even the Popular Front of Judea, to push back against the Judean People's Front.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't even think there's a need for hyperbole on this (my, uh, previous post aside). Shuttle and Mir both worked, both developed problems and dangerous conditions developed over time. The only difference is which side of which border they were developed on, and national origin is a piss-poor standard upon which to judge the overall success of a project or decision, or even the ethics underlying such.
Canning the upper echelon of staff for political reasons rarely, if ever, has good results (I suspect PDVSA had some difficulty replacing that many people with that much experience). Neither does going cheap on the failsafe gear and deciding regulations don't really need to be followed that closely when dealing with complicated, ecologically-significant projects.
When Reagan broke the ATC union, he was standing up to the Big Bad Union. When Chavez did it, he was being an autocratic commie.
Collusion.
To be clear, there are multiple forms of blindness. I happen to be stuck with severe myopia and cone dystrophy - so shit's blurry and the daystar messes me up. The therapy described won't fix the myopia, but holy crap that's the closest thing I've heard of to a fix for the cone-rod mess in my life to this point. Mitigating that might not improve my ability to focus, but it might help reduce the strain on my eyes from things like looking around outside, even on cloudy days. A pair of good wraparound sunglasses already provides some relief, but they can't be worn everywhere...
I hope this works out. And as for that little aside from kdawson... I understand that some people do not adapt well to gaining visual capability they previously lacked, but unless you're squinting at a computer screen or iPod, or using a screen reader, or you've worked in a therapeutic or adaptive capacity with visually impaired individuals (or lived with one), then I'm not inclined to take that aside as anything but kdawson trying to be "deep". I, personally, just felt patronized and condescended to, and my initial reaction to that bit of editor splooge was much shorter and far more profane.
If your business model/economy can't adapt to deal with the occasional natural event, it's time to change that system to something a bit more robust or flexible.
This seems to be a semi-common issue. One place I kill time at uses Trend Micro on a couple of machines, and two updates within the past eight months have broken networking in funky ways that made updating impossible until workarounds were determined.
In the case of FOSS, there is no way to bankrupt or buyout the competition. They still try to compete with marketing FUD, but it is obvious that that is only good for trying to slow the growth of FOSS.
That leaves the legal route, and that's what I'm worried may be employed here down the road. I hope the Samba developers obtained a rock-solid agreement allowing them to use the results of the collaboration in the Samba project, now and in the future. I'm concerned that the company may attempt, without the knowledge of the MS developers who probably had a blast doing this, to argue that anything in Samba4 written after this project having to do with AD interoperability is covered by patents relating to AD, or that it descends from MS intellectual property accessed while they were at Redmond, etc. IIRC, one of the Linux NTFS coders had to refrain from working on the functionality for some time after working at Microsoft due to contract stipulations, slowing the development of stable write capability (this was years ago, so I could be way off here).
I can see how this is a possible sign of a culture change at Microsoft (and for that company's sake, I hope the EEE culture is withering away), but I can also see a few ways this could go horribly wrong based on the company's past behaviour. Their future behaviour will determine whether this was a good idea, and that's why I remain skeptical.
Popularity != trustworthiness, particularly regarding a company with a long, well-documented history of anticompetitive practices and protocol-busting behaviour.
I'm amazed so many people are willing to trust MS management's motives so easily. Maybe after they've gone a few years working with outside, even open-source developers, without pulling any technological or legal stunts to later eliminate those projects, will I be prepared to look kindly upon any effort involving MS.
Perhaps I'm just paranoid, or maybe I'm just the result of a company's past poor products and bad behaviour. It's up to that company to regain a semblance of trust from me.
I'm kind of surprised you don't get what's going on here. MS sees a way to make money from open source.
Get back to me in five years, and we'll see how this plays out. I'd love to see MS back away from its old policies, but they actually need to do it before I'll give them credit for it.
I don't think it's an earth moving change in the relationship between MS and the free world, but it's better than a sharp stick in the eye.
I'll breathe easier if this doesn't result in legal trouble for Linux distributions and the *BSDs down the road. MS has a long, long way to go before I could ever trust them to do something with the open source community for any purpose other than to, eventually, obliterate it as a threat.
Publicly recanting the Halloween Documents, and particularly "embrace, extend, and extinguish" would be a start, if only a start.
OK, it's an MS-created protocol anyway, but I'm still very suspicious about MS management's ultimate motives in allowing this collaboration to take place.
Embrace, extend, and extinguish.
Nothing like setting off a good conversation and learning a couple of things along the way.
First, I'd like to thank the people who pointed out the difference between EMRs and a full-up EHR system across the province. I hadn't even encountered the terms and differences until commenters here pointed them out (I submitted this during a slow moment from a handheld while waiting for a title to finish ingesting, so doing my own damn research wasn't even in my mind). That said, the Wikipedia entry for electronic health records is currently a bad game of buzzword bingo, and it sounds like a system-wide version of an EMR, only requiring a much larger database(s), fine-grained security, and secure, or at least encrypted, links to transmit data, along with the personnel and infrastructure to maintain and administer the system. Big, but certainly not overwhelming for solutions based upon open source technologies.
I don't think OSCAR would have been the solution out of the box, but an existing EMR could have been a good starting point for developing the client-side interface, and possibly even the central databases. I wonder if some combination of central databases for things like basic patient info could be tied with peer-to-peer storage for things like results gathered at, and procedures performed by, particular institutions, so that the storage load is spread out. Then again, the problems presented by centralized data storage and maintenance would be replaced by the problems presented by distributed data storage and maintenance. Do you want your problems in a few data centres, or in every office around the province... flip a coin and decide how complicated/insane you'd like to make your considerations. I wonder if something could have even been built on the side of, or to replace, the existing OHIP billing system. I wonder, I wonder, I wonder...
As a few other commenters pointed out, much of the trouble was due to completely incompetent/corrupt management and contractors riding the gravy train, though one person made what I think is also an important point - a management culture capable of accepting open source solutions as a starting point would probably have been a culture actually interested in getting something done, instead of impressing itself with its magnificence and getting nothing done. Another person pointed out that Ontario is hamstrung by the specifications developed by another committee, though I'm still not clear on why this would have excluded things like OSCAR as a starting point for something bigger. This may simply be a result of my ignorance; I'm a bit more bogged down in smashing my brain against buggy "professional" video/film editing software to dive into the morass of buzzwords and legalese surrounding development specs at this point in time. However, this boondoggle makes me wonder if I should get a bit more interested...
Finally, to those using this to launch an assault on the idea of socialized medicine -- don't bother. My family wouldn't have been able to stay above the poverty line had we lived in the US due to surgery I required as a toddler, and I'm currently having a model experience in the Ontario health system. I've already paid for it through gobs of taxes, and in exchange I can worry more about getting medical advice and assistance while remaining a productive member of the community instead of sweating over how I'm going to pay the bills and keep a roof over my head. I'm not going to dive into the gory sociopolitical details and arguments right now, but there are certain things where laissez-faire policies do more harm than good -- and in medicine, "do no harm" is supposed to be the first commandment.
And to think, this mess started during the "Common Sense Revolution"... thanks Mike and Ernie, and up yours Dalton; your government only started caring when the opposition started poking around and asking questions. Oh well, could be worse; I could be battling an insurance provider for coverage of the surgery I have coming up...
If Apple + AT&T weren't prepared to deal with that gaping hole in their business plan, they deserve to lose money. There is no law that guarantees profit, and it's not up to iPhone owners to fulfill a deal made between Apple and AT&T.
Apple made a mistake by locking the iPhone to a single provider. If Apple's execs are shocked and appalled that computer nerds are modifying what is basically a portable computer, they need to be replaced with people who actually understand what techies will do with computers and plan accordingly.
It's just good business sense. If you could cripple your competitors' OSes while acquiring things you wanted, wouldn't you do it?
Apparently, having "good business sense" equates with a complete and total lack of scruples.
I guess this is why I'm not a businessperson.
We know quite a bit more than 'almost nothing' about the fundamental nature of the Universe thank you
Says the member of a species still stuck on a rocky body in an unassuming part of an average galaxy in one tiny part of the -verse, experiencing reality in three dimensions as space and a fourth dimension as time.
Love the hubris, but while we may think we know a helluva lot more than we did even a hundred years ago, there is no doubt that reality has components and aspects we haven't even conceived of at this point. We're still viewing things from this little corner of reality, and while we can probably figure out a helluva lot, I have no doubt we've barely scratched the surface of what exists, and what is possible.
Glickman made a mistake claiming content providers will stop producing good TV and film if consumers don't give in to the MPAA protection racket. There isn't enough quality programming out there in the 1000-channel universe to justify this argument.
I stopped watching TV a year ago. I don't miss it. The few interesting, informative, or entertaining shows out there aren't enough to make me drop $100 for a boob tube and at least an extra $20/month for the basic cable package, especially since some of that good programming is only available on the more expensive tiers. Better to blow my cash on food, content I can peruse at my heart's and mind's desire, and spending time with friends, among other things.
But, go ahead, try to lock down mass-broadcast media. Perhaps the time of pirate TV has come...
Your post says you can't stand it, but your repeated visits say you can't stand to leave.
Ah, the old "put up or shut up" argument, or "love it or leave it".
I've been a pretty regular visitor for, I think, five or so years now. In that time, I've watched it go from a heavily-visited geek site with influence and a vibrant community to Yet Another Tech Portal. It wouldn't be so bad if the editors seemed as interested in posting articles and coming up with fun new enhancements as they once did. However, I get the impression that some of the old-timers are tired of the whole thing, and less care is being taken in article selection and responsibility.
I still visit to read the comments, but there has been a definite upsurge in complaints aimed at the editors in comments beyond the usual troll warz and the anti-slash jihad. If the paid staff don't seem as interested in providing a high-quality website, doing what I suppose many visitors here (not necessarily myself) would consider a dream job, then that lack of interest is going to generate a similar reaction among the users.
That said, perhaps it is time for me to say goodbye for a while and see how things are in a few months. The parent comments make it pretty clear that Taco and crew are unresponsive to repeated complaints, even ones that have become pathetic running jokes which reflect negatively on the editors.
G'bye for now, Slashdot. Hope something gets through to the editors before too many more users are alienated.
he thinks people who constantly complain about dupes are dumb.
Oh really?
I think dupes, especially ones posted within the space of a day, are an indication that the editors are not even reading their own site. There have been numerous recent examples of editors failing to check for working links and at least ensuring a hint of accuracy in submission text, along with proper attribution, before posting. If they're going to take the time to post something on a page viewed by millions, they can take a few extra minutes to make sure it isn't crap, or posted two hours earlier and three items down the page. Otherwise, wtf are they doing all day?
Really, if the editors/authors can't live up to their self-granted titles, and can't give the viewing community--which is helping pay for the site either through ad views or subscriptions--a greater degree of oversight that they won't do themselves, I see no reason to ever subscribe. As it is, I'm pretty close to mapping slashdot.org to 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file and staying away for a while.
So I'm not the only one that has noticed many more botched Slashdot renderings over the past couple of days? Galeon 1.3.18/Mozilla 1.7.5 here, and the infamous rendering problem only occurred rarely until a couple of days ago. Now, half the pages I load come up with the stupid overlap issue.
I think someone "updated" Slashcode and exacerbated whatever issue is causing the random botches in the first place. I also think this is an indication it's not entirely a Gecko problem, but a problem with Slashcode that only manifests in Gecko; I don't recall similar complaints from IE or KHTML-based users.
...then Slashcode sucks even more than I imagined!
Not just a lame attempt at a joke--I've had the fabled Gecko layout issue all day*. Since I've seen it at rare, completely random times in the past, and I haven't updated Mozilla or Galeon in weeks, I'm willing to lay good money the main problem is on Slashdot's end and has always been on Slashdot's end, feeding junk output to browsers with which Gecko does something slightly funky.
Taco, what did you break?
* the issue where the middle column is shifted a touch farther to the left than where it should be, and the left column overlaps it as a result.
I don't think AOL are too concerned about having an open standard, blah blah.... I think they see VoIP and Skype as the next bet thing and want to get people like Vonage to use AIM IDs to call people.
:-(. )
The difference between VoIP and IM is that you can leave an IM window idle for a few moments while you do something else and not feel compelled to immediately reply. In phone conversations, leaving a few moments of silence between every sentence feels awkward, and you don't get a log of what has been said, you can't include links, etc...
Now, tying optional VoIP access to IM accounts is a neat idea, but the technologies are not in opposition or mutually exclusive. I don't view them as competitors, since they fill different needs--just as television and the Internet haven't made sound-only radio broadcasts obsolete (no, the communications cartels will do that
In other news, the Japanese government has proposed to raise the sunken WWII-era battleship Yamato...
i'm honestly taking sides, because i think there's going to be an amount of chicanery on both sides. but if this is your kool-aid, and you focus on voting problems, a system which has served us for 200 years, then you're living in la la land.
So fraud is acceptable in elections for the sake of stability?
And people wonder why so many potential voters don't bother getting to the polls. Maybe they recognize a deeper truth than the people who consider voting every few years the pinnacle of liberty realize.
"Restoration of voting rights for former felons": Not sure. Is a felon that has served its sentence entitled to the same rights as others?
A felon that has served his/her punishment, in the form of a sentence, should no longer be considered to have a societal debt. Otherwise, the person is still being punished long after the expiry of the sanction.
If a person can expect to be punished for the rest of their lives, regardless of the declared sentence length, then there is little reason for that individual to bother working toward rehabilitation. Under that circumstance, an offender may as well embrace the life of an outlaw, since that is how society and the state chooses to treat them regardless of the actual, official punishment.
Either a person can regain their acceptance by state and society by serving their punishment, or there is no hope of regaining that acceptance, creating an underclass of less-than-citizens. Consider the implications; arguably, this already exists.
This would also help a few other people. It could score some free PR for FreeBSD, and if Bill was really smart he could even ally with the FreeBSD Foundation and Apple with the goal of driving back the GPL somewhat...Something which I for one wouldn't necessarily see as a bad thing. Stallman gives himself far too much credit for FOSS in general...the man is in dire need of being put squarely back in his box, in my opinion. More promotion of the BSD and other licenses could go a long way towards demonstrating to him that the world does not in fact need him anywhere near as much as he likes to think. I'm aware the GPL zealots will now materialise howling out of the woodwork and mod me a troll, as they generally do when I express this kind of opinion...but they are welcome to mod me a troll as much as they like...it won't silence me.
Your problem is that you pit FOSS licences and their supporters against each other for no good reason. You also tie this dreamed assault on the GPL to Stallman's huge ego, ignoring the thousands of non-FSF developers who choose of their own free will to place their work under the GPL, just as thousands of others choose BSD.
Next you'll be telling me why the Romans should support the People's Front of Judea, and maybe even the Popular Front of Judea, to push back against the Judean People's Front.