I think this story is ridiculously one-sided and contains a minimum of useful information. What exactly are 'Pure politics'? What kind of abuse was it specifically? Was he given fair warning? What rules were layed down when he started this project? And for that matter, what the heck was the site's content exactly?
It does sound like a pretty harsh deal here, but before we start ranting and raving about the general principles at stake here, how about some specifics about what led to all of this extreme action on the University's part?
Pearl Harbor got absolutely horrible reviews and it's made $120 million dollars in two weeks. At the same time a movie like Memento gets stellar reviews and can't even get a widespread release.
A blurb from some non-major paper like the Ridgefield Press is generally a sign that they are desperate for any positive blurb at all.
I used to do this years ago with a big dish and game shows. Watch the feed in the morning, then amaze your friends and family by solving Wheel of Fortune puzzles without any letters and answering all of the Jeopardy questions correctly.
Is it me or does that seem like an awful lot for a single city?
Just like an old Asimov story..
on
The DNA Bomb
·
· Score: 2
Back in 1976 Isaac Asmiov wrote a short story called 'The Winnowing' that basically talked about eliminating overpopulation by infecting food to starving nations with a virus that targetted only a certain percentage with a DNA match (so they couldn't tell that it was the food that was killing them).
Of course Asimov wrote about 10,000 stories, so one or two of them was bound to hit the mark...
What bothers me about this is that there's no info from Qwest as to what's happening except for a press release and no info on what's going to change (pricing, policies, etc.) People on the qwest newsgroups have to sit there speculating as to what the wording of the press release means, since no one in the company will answer any customer questions.
Saying that the Daily Show beat out network coverage is inaccurate, as it's not as if they won an award in a 'journalism' category. It would be just as accurate to say that Malcolm in the Middle or the West Wing beat them out.
From the Peabody website:
"The George Foster Peabody Awards, established in 1939 and first awarded in 1940, recognize distinguished achievement and meritorious service by radio and television networks, stations, producing organizations, cable television organizations and individuals."
The Peabody Awards have a history of rewarding programs off the beaten path - I remember MST3K winning a few years back. It's nice to see, since the Daily Show is one of the smartest, most consistently funny shows on television.
Regardless of whether it's a fan site or the New York Times, too many folks accept information without question. Having been on the journalist side of things, it's scary to know just how easy it is to mold the facts to support just about any view. Just find an expert or two that agree with your supposition and suddenly you have news. Of course that's only when you aren't regurgitating the endless stream of PR/marketing crapola that gets thrown at you to 'inform' you of what's newsworthy.
It's interesting reading the responses so far - they seem to indicate that only the weak (unskilled) tech folks will be hurt by layoffs and well, since they aren't as smart as we all are, that's fine.
Sometimes it feels like an awfully cold world we live in.
A spaceship is spinning wildly out of control, crashing into everything.
Man: "Oh my God, they must be using a cell phone!"
Personally I think cell phones are a godsend. They finally let us easily identify and avoid the idiot drivers that have existed since the invention of the automobile...
I don't know if this happened or not, but what if this kid created the page on his own time/computer, posted it then at school he (or someone else) gives the URL to a buddy, who looks at it on a classroom computer.
How is this any different than distributing flyers of the same picture in the school? I think as with so much net stuff, the traditional boundaries start to get pretty murky.
Bill's a tough cookie. His thing on merchandising borders on the religious. He feels that even to do an animated version of his strip is somehow cheapening it. Certainly, a toy line is not going to add mystique to a comic strip... but we're not talking Doonsebury here.... and Bill - as great a talent as he is - was never writing Hamlet. Taking anything too seriously is as big a threat as not taking it seriously enough. The world could have used a Calvin and Hobbes movie...
You know, I just can't agree with this. Art is art - whether it's Shakespeare or a comic strip, and I hardly think Watterson is a fanatic because he wants to maintain the integrity of his message (even if that is 'don't you hate it when you boogers freeze?').
On second thought,I guess if you don't want to exploit your work for all possible $$$, you *are* a radical.
is to track down Bill Watterson and get him to talk about his post-Calvin and Hobbes life.
And why is it that comics like Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes have such short lives while crapola like Beetle Bailey, Blondie, and Family Circus lives forever?
It seems like lately I've been seeing story after story that basically says 'look - tech savvy kids are smarter than stupid adults!' Perhaps this is just Slashdot speaking to its target audience (which skews young I'm sure), but I have to wonder if a story like 'Students ruin school network' would ever make it to the front page.
I think Taco has made it quite clear on numerous occasions that this will never happen. I believe one of his concerns was that the queue itself would become spammed with 'first post' and other similar kinds of crapola if it were open up for the public to see.
Besides, poor Jon Katz would never make it on the front page again...:)
How exactly do you know it's because you are young? Garnering respect from your peers can be as much about how you conduct yourself as what you can do. Is it at all possible that you're just an arrogant jerk? Or on the flipside, that your demeanor doesn't show much self-confidence?
Anyhow, regardless of age, who at one point or another doesn't feel they are getting enough respect from the boss/co-workers/guy at Starbucks, etc.?
Unless you can organize a substantial base of parents and community members to support you, you are pissing in the wind.
If you are a school district, what scares you more?
1. The threat of ultra-conservative/liberal parents suing you for their kids accessing pornography, Neo-Nazi message boards, or a chat room that hooks them up with a potential child molester...
OR
2. The threat of free speech zealots suing you because kids can't access some legitimate sites.
What most folks don't understand is that outside of the federal $$ issue that has recently appeared, most school districts have installed blocking software already to cover their asses in case of lawsuit (and districts are easy targets). Even if the stuff is flawed, at least a district can argue that they installed the best available safeguards.
While there are certainly an incredible amount of great sites that are blocked by proxies like Bess, you have to understand that a district isn't going to get sued because a student *couldn't* access a site.
My high school AP physics teacher told us on the first day that for his class, the physics was secondary to learning how to problem-solve - to think through any challenge we would encounter in life.
He was an excellent teacher for two reasons - he had an unsurpassed enthusiasm both for physics and for teaching. And that's the crucial combination...
He also had a sweet remote-controlled random 'student selector' on his Apple II so no one could ever feel that he picked on them. Heh.
Yeah, it really strikes a blow against telemarketing to take it out on the poor guy making minimum wage whose circumstances have made him desperate enough to take one of the worst jobs in the universe.
The same can't be said for spammers, though, since they typically are self-employed jerks...
The 14 hour model by itself is pretty useless if you want to store anything at all, since it's only like 8 hours at watchable quality. And when I think of price, the long-term subscription cost has to be taken into account.
And while it's certainly viable for tech-savvy folks to upgrade a cheap Tivo into something useful, how many normal folks are even going to know that it's possible? And of those, how many are going to feel comfortable on the Linux command-line?
I'm not bashing it at all - personally I think my Tivo really is 'revolutionary' in that you watch what you want when you want in the lowest-maintenance way possible. I just know a lot of folks that are put off by the price tag.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this story is ridiculously one-sided and contains a minimum of useful information. What exactly are 'Pure politics'? What kind of abuse was it specifically? Was he given fair warning? What rules were layed down when he started this project? And for that matter, what the heck was the site's content exactly?
It does sound like a pretty harsh deal here, but before we start ranting and raving about the general principles at stake here, how about some specifics about what led to all of this extreme action on the University's part?
Pearl Harbor got absolutely horrible reviews and it's made $120 million dollars in two weeks. At the same time a movie like Memento gets stellar reviews and can't even get a widespread release.
A blurb from some non-major paper like the Ridgefield Press is generally a sign that they are desperate for any positive blurb at all.
I used to do this years ago with a big dish and game shows. Watch the feed in the morning, then amaze your friends and family by solving Wheel of Fortune puzzles without any letters and answering all of the Jeopardy questions correctly.
Is it me or does that seem like an awful lot for a single city?
Back in 1976 Isaac Asmiov wrote a short story called 'The Winnowing' that basically talked about eliminating overpopulation by infecting food to starving nations with a virus that targetted only a certain percentage with a DNA match (so they couldn't tell that it was the food that was killing them).
Of course Asimov wrote about 10,000 stories, so one or two of them was bound to hit the mark...
I've just been playing with .9 a bit, and it appears that the Junkbuster proxy actually works with it! Woo hoo!
What bothers me about this is that there's no info from Qwest as to what's happening except for a press release and no info on what's going to change (pricing, policies, etc.) People on the qwest newsgroups have to sit there speculating as to what the wording of the press release means, since no one in the company will answer any customer questions.
Saying that the Daily Show beat out network coverage is inaccurate, as it's not as if they won an award in a 'journalism' category. It would be just as accurate to say that Malcolm in the Middle or the West Wing beat them out.
From the Peabody website:
"The George Foster Peabody Awards, established in 1939 and first awarded in 1940, recognize distinguished achievement and meritorious service by radio and television networks, stations, producing organizations, cable television organizations and individuals."
The Peabody Awards have a history of rewarding programs off the beaten path - I remember MST3K winning a few years back. It's nice to see, since the Daily Show is one of the smartest, most consistently funny shows on television.
Regardless of whether it's a fan site or the New York Times, too many folks accept information without question. Having been on the journalist side of things, it's scary to know just how easy it is to mold the facts to support just about any view. Just find an expert or two that agree with your supposition and suddenly you have news. Of course that's only when you aren't regurgitating the endless stream of PR/marketing crapola that gets thrown at you to 'inform' you of what's newsworthy.
Sure, I can name more than eight. Just let me break out my copy of Civ 2...
It's interesting reading the responses so far - they seem to indicate that only the weak (unskilled) tech folks will be hurt by layoffs and well, since they aren't as smart as we all are, that's fine.
Sometimes it feels like an awfully cold world we live in.
A spaceship is spinning wildly out of control, crashing into everything.
Man: "Oh my God, they must be using a cell phone!"
Personally I think cell phones are a godsend. They finally let us easily identify and avoid the idiot drivers that have existed since the invention of the automobile...
I don't know if this happened or not, but what if this kid created the page on his own time/computer, posted it then at school he (or someone else) gives the URL to a buddy, who looks at it on a classroom computer.
How is this any different than distributing flyers of the same picture in the school? I think as with so much net stuff, the traditional boundaries start to get pretty murky.
You know, I just can't agree with this. Art is art - whether it's Shakespeare or a comic strip, and I hardly think Watterson is a fanatic because he wants to maintain the integrity of his message (even if that is 'don't you hate it when you boogers freeze?').
On second thought,I guess if you don't want to exploit your work for all possible $$$, you *are* a radical.
is to track down Bill Watterson and get him to talk about his post-Calvin and Hobbes life.
And why is it that comics like Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes have such short lives while crapola like Beetle Bailey, Blondie, and Family Circus lives forever?
It seems like lately I've been seeing story after story that basically says 'look - tech savvy kids are smarter than stupid adults!' Perhaps this is just Slashdot speaking to its target audience (which skews young I'm sure), but I have to wonder if a story like 'Students ruin school network' would ever make it to the front page.
You're telling me that there are public schools prepping kids for the SAT's four years before they'd take the test?!? Are you kidding me?
I think Taco has made it quite clear on numerous occasions that this will never happen. I believe one of his concerns was that the queue itself would become spammed with 'first post' and other similar kinds of crapola if it were open up for the public to see.
:)
Besides, poor Jon Katz would never make it on the front page again...
How exactly do you know it's because you are young? Garnering respect from your peers can be as much about how you conduct yourself as what you can do. Is it at all possible that you're just an arrogant jerk? Or on the flipside, that your demeanor doesn't show much self-confidence?
Anyhow, regardless of age, who at one point or another doesn't feel they are getting enough respect from the boss/co-workers/guy at Starbucks, etc.?
Unless you can organize a substantial base of parents and community members to support you, you are pissing in the wind.
If you are a school district, what scares you more?
1. The threat of ultra-conservative/liberal parents suing you for their kids accessing pornography, Neo-Nazi message boards, or a chat room that hooks them up with a potential child molester...
OR
2. The threat of free speech zealots suing you because kids can't access some legitimate sites.
What most folks don't understand is that outside of the federal $$ issue that has recently appeared, most school districts have installed blocking software already to cover their asses in case of lawsuit (and districts are easy targets). Even if the stuff is flawed, at least a district can argue that they installed the best available safeguards.
While there are certainly an incredible amount of great sites that are blocked by proxies like Bess, you have to understand that a district isn't going to get sued because a student *couldn't* access a site.
My high school AP physics teacher told us on the first day that for his class, the physics was secondary to learning how to problem-solve - to think through any challenge we would encounter in life.
He was an excellent teacher for two reasons - he had an unsurpassed enthusiasm both for physics and for teaching. And that's the crucial combination...
He also had a sweet remote-controlled random 'student selector' on his Apple II so no one could ever feel that he picked on them. Heh.
Yeah, it really strikes a blow against telemarketing to take it out on the poor guy making minimum wage whose circumstances have made him desperate enough to take one of the worst jobs in the universe.
The same can't be said for spammers, though, since they typically are self-employed jerks...
Every game of Counterstrike I play has someone bitching about cheating. Imagine if money was thrown into the picture.
Or at the very least the Mystery Men...
The 14 hour model by itself is pretty useless if you want to store anything at all, since it's only like 8 hours at watchable quality. And when I think of price, the long-term subscription cost has to be taken into account.
And while it's certainly viable for tech-savvy folks to upgrade a cheap Tivo into something useful, how many normal folks are even going to know that it's possible? And of those, how many are going to feel comfortable on the Linux command-line?
I'm not bashing it at all - personally I think my Tivo really is 'revolutionary' in that you watch what you want when you want in the lowest-maintenance way possible. I just know a lot of folks that are put off by the price tag.