Maybe it is automatic because there are some of us who have many, many problems with Slashdot rendering.
Perhaps I have a different layout (for example slashboxes turned off). For whatever reason, I have many many pages that don't render correctly.
If I were not a free software zealot, I would surely have switched to another browser. There's no question about it. That rendering problem is serious for some people.
I grew up in the midwest and now live in the bible belt and I can tell you with complete certainty the majority of the people I know don't give a shit about the facts or reality. Most of them still believe saddahm worked with the terrorists that blew up the wtc, that abortion is their decision for everyone, that gay marriage is their decision for everyone, that "faith" should be their decision for everyone because "they are right." Most of the people around here, in fact, are believers in all that second coming bullshit - to them chaos in the mideast is a GOOD thing because it "clears the way for jesus." These goddamned wackos want nothing more than to see the world vaporized in a cloud of thunder, and this administration is not only catering to their whims, it's preaching those wacko beliefs from the state department.
Thank you for saying this. I had noticed the same thing, but no one seems willing to come out and say it.
I don't do any monitoring, and haven't except when I needed to do work in the garage where I wouldn't hear a cry.
I have found remote control lighting to be of great value however. You won't need it for an infant, but you may value it with a toddler.
My daughter is 3 years now. She is somewhat afraid of the dark (as I was at that age). So I use the remote light, which can be dimmed and I close her door. After a while, when she is asleep, I can silently turn off the light without entering her room and waking her.
She also has a tendancy to wake around 5am quite afraid of the dark. I don't even have to get out of bed--I keep a remote next to my pillow. I just turn on her light and dim it some, and she calms down quickly.
My wife is disabled, and uses the lights to get my attention when we are on opposite ends of the house. I know a lot of people use bells, but we've found the lights work quite nicely. They were also very helpful before she had enough arm strength to reach a light switch.
And yes, I did buy my lights from the most evil of Internet companies, x10.com. I recently discovered that Radio Shack sells rebranded components that are compatible, which is handy when you need another lamp module.
> I've never had a firm that wouldn't work to address the issue.
I've seen several cases where phone companies would not address the issue. AT&T in particular was particularly evil about not resolving fraudulent charges.
So I refused to pay them, held out, and in the end it was cheaper for them to write it off.
Insurance companies are also well-known for persistently not addressing issues. Look up "vexatious refusal to pay" some time.
My worst experience was really my wife's. She was my girlfriend at the time and didn't have a computer of her own, so I let her use mine once when I was gone.
I gave her a bit of introduction, and finished with, "And if you get stuck or confused, just let it stand the way it is and I'll help when I get back." I didn't show her opening/closing/saving of files, she just wanted to type. The WP had an autosave function, so even if the power went off, everything would be fine.
The only thing that could possibly screw her was the "revert to saved" function. I thought about telling her about it and saying, "Don't!" But then I realized she might later not remember if it was do or don't. What she didn't know couldn't hurt her.
So, she types in this whole paper and decides to go back and do a bit of editing. She gets some text highlighted, then realizes it isn't what she wanted to edit. She can't figure out how to get the highlighting off. Very determined girl, my then-girlfriend. She picks up the dead-tree manual off the shelf and starts leafing through.
Guess who found "revert to saved" on her own? It sounded like just what she needed... only she had never actually saved. So it ate her paper, i.e. reverted to the beginning.
When I got home, she had already retyped it a second time and was gone. I asked my roomate if she had seen her. He said yes, and she was stomping around the room and kicking my bed. It wasn't until later that I learned the whole story.
Just goes to show, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
> My classes are never more than 25 or 30, and I read all the essays myself. A good student could probably get something by me (however, a good student can generally write something much better than what you'd find on the internet). The weak students (or lazy ones who wait until the last moment) are the ones who can't get away with copying something from the internet.
I teach at University as well, and I disagree. Until you have used a service like turnitin.com, you don't really get a sense of how pervasive cheating can be.
This is a tool. The computer doesn't flunk anyone. It just presents the professor with a very well-organized summary of what it found. It's the professor who has to decide what to do with that information.
Whether the service is "guilty until proven innocent" or not is something that a campus community has to discuss. Personally I don't see it that way, but I can see how some do.
That calculation is incorrect. Ask any STAT teacher (like me). The median is the value of the 50th user (after listing them in order). So for the example given, the median is 5 as expected.
You can get spam quick by simpling listing your email address in your "personal info" with an instant messaging service like ICQ. I have experienced this personally, and I have also seen magazine articles stating that this is the worst place to let your addr get out.
I am not a big fan of micropayments, but I do think that we need a kind of digital cash. I don't consider PayPal or any of its direct competitors suitable.
Unfortunately the guys who came up with the implementations of digital cash (and therefore own the patents) have been dreadfully pathetic at getting it going in the real world.
You won't see micropayments, etc. go anywhere until those patents expire. Then I wouldn't be too surprised to see something useful come around with hope of getting adopted on a large (i.e. useful) scale. And I look forward to it.
Anyone who has had a kid with colic knows you're full of crap. It's a totally different experience and I agree with the first poster, you feel old quick.
Every can keep going on about how this only helps 3 people in the whole world, but it would help me. I guess there must be 2 other people who would really like to see this come about.
A lot of scams could be nipped in the bud by one simple right. I should have the RIGHT to request that only my phone company put charges on my phone bill.
My cable company does not put charges on my electric bill.
My electric company does not put charges on my gas bill.
My gas company does not put charges on my water bill.
But my phone company tells me that by law they must put charges on my bill from carriers, even if I don't have a business relationship with them.
Of course you have the right to remand a charge and have the company bill you for it. But you have to notice the charge first. I'll tell you, the phone bill is the one bill I scrutinize every month. I have had several fraudulent charges on my bill in the last 5 years.
If scam artists had to bill you direct like any other business, that would not eliminate fraud, but it would keep people from going 8 months without even noticing.
So if I choose to run this client, how do I know that it won't accidentally index content that is only accessible from behind my firewall?
You don't, and the spider regularly indexes
things on 127.0.0.1. There are an awful lot
of domains out there that resolve to that.
That's why I don't run the spider.
Please, people. Dont use "myself" to refer to yourself as the direct object in a sentence. You don't look intelligent. You look like a fucking buffoon. This probably goes for anything else you do to try to look intelligent.
Ahem. In this case, you mean don't use "myself" to refer to yourself as the subject in a sentence!
Speaking of that, does anyone find it strange that a person appointed to his job by a court of people appointed to their jobs is going to be the deliverer of Democracy around the world?
The folks I worry about with copyright are small artists who either themselves make a living off of their work, or who have living relatives who do so. These are the people that copyright needs to protect, and these are the same people who cannot afford to pay to extend that protection.
Look, there's no innate right to make money on one idea forever. At any other job you have to keep producing, or you get fired. Why should you be able to make one successful work and expect to be paid forever?
If you want to keep getting paid, keep producing new successful works. That's life in every endeavor other than authorship.
Frankly, 10-20 years is plenty for copyright. Anyone who is still making money after that (i.e. they aren't out of print) is good enough to produce more new work. And in those years they have made plenty of money that they don't have to "starve". Everyone else is in jeopardy of disappearing into obscurity, and projects like Project Gutenberg should get a crack at preserving that work.
I noticed that a bunch of smaller companies were scraping our content,
stuff we owned, and redisplayed it on their sites..
Bad choice of words. People don't own information, or "content" for that matter. You have a copyright to your creative work. To claim some kind of ownership confuses things a lot.
Copying information is not the same thing as stealing. It's copyright infringement. Your web site did not disappear from the net when it was "stolen". This is not to say you may not have suffered some harm from the act. But to claim ownership of "bond rates, mutual fund performance calculations" etc. is a bit offensive.
I was very impressed with the idea to see stories ahead. I have to say that it is pretty annoying to have sites be gone so quickly when the mass descends on them.
This allows people to spend a little to get something of a head start, which should be of value to those who actually want to look at the articles.
It should also have the effect of diminishing the Slashdot effect as well by smoothing the network access. After all, by the time the hoards arrive, some of the early birds will be gone and not weighing down a site.
And to top it all off, this is done without really removing value for the regular freeloaders, who are an integral part of the Slashdot puzzle.
This is not FUD. My co-worker two doors down was have regular lockups with his machine. He was an educated, intelligent person. And he did in fact, just expect that it was the price for doing business with Windows.
He was wrong of course. He got one of those Gateways with the bad capacitors. The point isn't actually that working with Windows is good or bad now. Really it's that it has/had been bad for long enough that there is a culture of "that's how you expect it to work."
And frankly, people don't expect their computers to work as reliably as they should. It's hard not to think of MS as having something to do with this as the clear market leader for some time now.
I know very few Linux folks or users of any Unix that would tolerate that kind of behavior. This isn't necessarily because Linux/Unix is so much better that comparison is futile. It's because Unix people do not have a culture around their computer working incorrectly.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it is automatic because there are some of us who have many, many problems with Slashdot rendering.
Perhaps I have a different layout (for example slashboxes turned off). For whatever reason, I have many many pages that don't render correctly.
If I were not a free software zealot, I would surely have switched to another browser. There's no question about it. That rendering problem is serious for some people.
Thank you for saying this. I had noticed the same thing, but no one seems willing to come out and say it.
I don't do any monitoring, and haven't except when I needed to do work in the garage where I wouldn't hear a cry.
I have found remote control lighting to be of great value however. You won't need it for an infant, but you may value it with a toddler.
My daughter is 3 years now. She is somewhat afraid of the dark (as I was at that age). So I use the remote light, which can be dimmed and I close her door. After a while, when she is asleep, I can silently turn off the light without entering her room and waking her.
She also has a tendancy to wake around 5am quite afraid of the dark. I don't even have to get out of bed--I keep a remote next to my pillow. I just turn on her light and dim it some, and she calms down quickly.
My wife is disabled, and uses the lights to get my attention when we are on opposite ends of the house. I know a lot of people use bells, but we've found the lights work quite nicely. They were also very helpful before she had enough arm strength to reach a light switch.
And yes, I did buy my lights from the most evil of Internet companies, x10.com. I recently discovered that Radio Shack sells rebranded components that are compatible, which is handy when you need another lamp module.
> I've never had a firm that wouldn't work to address the issue.
I've seen several cases where phone companies would not address the issue. AT&T in particular was particularly evil about not resolving fraudulent charges.
So I refused to pay them, held out, and in the end it was cheaper for them to write it off.
Insurance companies are also well-known for persistently not addressing issues. Look up "vexatious refusal to pay" some time.
I think I did. Some time ago.
My worst experience was really my wife's. She was my girlfriend at the time and didn't have a computer of her own, so I let her use mine once when I was gone.
I gave her a bit of introduction, and finished with, "And if you get stuck or confused, just let it stand the way it is and I'll help when I get back." I didn't show her opening/closing/saving of files, she just wanted to type. The WP had an autosave function, so even if the power went off, everything would be fine.
The only thing that could possibly screw her was the "revert to saved" function. I thought about telling her about it and saying, "Don't!" But then I realized she might later not remember if it was do or don't. What she didn't know couldn't hurt her.
So, she types in this whole paper and decides to go back and do a bit of editing. She gets some text highlighted, then realizes it isn't what she wanted to edit. She can't figure out how to get the highlighting off. Very determined girl, my then-girlfriend. She picks up the dead-tree manual off the shelf and starts leafing through.
Guess who found "revert to saved" on her own? It sounded like just what she needed... only she had never actually saved. So it ate her paper, i.e. reverted to the beginning.
When I got home, she had already retyped it a second time and was gone. I asked my roomate if she had seen her. He said yes, and she was stomping around the room and kicking my bed. It wasn't until later that I learned the whole story.
Just goes to show, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
The difference is weather. It's not so cool arriving at work wet. It's also not so cool for people with disabilities.
In the gym I can run with people who are faster than me (on the treadmills). I can lift with people who are stronger than me, etc.
Working out is social in a way that walking to your car really isn't.
Yes! I loved PowerC. It had the greatest debugger. I still have a licensed copy around somewhere.
> My classes are never more than 25 or 30, and I read all the essays myself. A good student could probably get something by me (however, a good student can generally write something much better than what you'd find on the internet). The weak students (or lazy ones who wait until the last moment) are the ones who can't get away with copying something from the internet.
I teach at University as well, and I disagree. Until you have used a service like turnitin.com, you don't really get a sense of how pervasive cheating can be.
This is a tool. The computer doesn't flunk anyone. It just presents the professor with a very well-organized summary of what it found. It's the professor who has to decide what to do with that information.
Whether the service is "guilty until proven innocent" or not is something that a campus community has to discuss. Personally I don't see it that way, but I can see how some do.
Well, ok with an even number is is actually
the mean of the two middle values. So it is
the average of the 50th and 51st. Still 5.
> this will leave you with a median of 3!.
That calculation is incorrect. Ask any
STAT teacher (like me). The median is the
value of the 50th user (after listing them
in order). So for the example given, the
median is 5 as expected.
You can get spam quick by simpling listing
your email address in your "personal info"
with an instant messaging service like ICQ.
I have experienced this personally, and I
have also seen magazine articles stating that
this is the worst place to let your addr get
out.
I am not a big fan of micropayments, but I do think that we need a kind of digital cash. I don't consider PayPal or any of its direct competitors suitable.
Unfortunately the guys who came up with the implementations of digital cash (and therefore own the patents) have been dreadfully pathetic at getting it going in the real world.
You won't see micropayments, etc. go anywhere until those patents expire. Then I wouldn't be too surprised to see something useful come around with hope of getting adopted on a large (i.e. useful) scale. And I look forward to it.
> Only if you're a crappy parent.
Anyone who has had a kid with colic knows you're
full of crap. It's a totally different experience
and I agree with the first poster, you feel old
quick.
Uh, that's exactly how people use VNC.
And it's cross-platform to boot. So you
can work on your X11 sessions form a
Mac or Win box.
Every can keep going on about how this only helps 3 people in the whole world, but it would help me. I guess there must be 2 other people who would really like to see this come about.
I don't remember who said it on the Debian mailing list, but the sentiment was right:
You can either have control, or you can write free software.
Period.
A lot of scams could be nipped in the bud by
one simple right. I should have the RIGHT to
request that only my phone company put charges
on my phone bill.
My cable company does not put charges on my
electric bill.
My electric company does not put charges on
my gas bill.
My gas company does not put charges on my
water bill.
But my phone company tells me that by law they
must put charges on my bill from carriers, even
if I don't have a business relationship with
them.
Of course you have the right to remand a charge
and have the company bill you for it. But you
have to notice the charge first. I'll tell you,
the phone bill is the one bill I scrutinize every
month. I have had several fraudulent charges on
my bill in the last 5 years.
If scam artists had to bill you direct like any
other business, that would not eliminate fraud,
but it would keep people from going 8 months
without even noticing.
You don't, and the spider regularly indexes things on 127.0.0.1. There are an awful lot of domains out there that resolve to that. That's why I don't run the spider.
Ahem. In this case, you mean don't use "myself" to refer to yourself as the subject in a sentence!
Speaking of that, does anyone find it
strange that a person appointed to his job
by a court of people appointed to their
jobs is going to be the deliverer of
Democracy around the world?
The folks I worry about with copyright are small artists who either themselves make a living off of their work, or who have living relatives who do so. These are the people that copyright needs to protect, and these are the same people who cannot afford to pay to extend that protection.
Look, there's no innate right to make money on one idea forever. At any other job you have to keep producing, or you get fired. Why should you be able to make one successful work and expect to be paid forever?
If you want to keep getting paid, keep producing new successful works. That's life in every endeavor other than authorship.
Frankly, 10-20 years is plenty for copyright. Anyone who is still making money after that (i.e. they aren't out of print) is good enough to produce more new work. And in those years they have made plenty of money that they don't have to "starve". Everyone else is in jeopardy of disappearing into obscurity, and projects like Project Gutenberg should get a crack at preserving that work.
Bad choice of words. People don't own information, or "content" for that matter. You have a copyright to your creative work. To claim some kind of ownership confuses things a lot.
Copying information is not the same thing as stealing. It's copyright infringement. Your web site did not disappear from the net when it was "stolen". This is not to say you may not have suffered some harm from the act. But to claim ownership of "bond rates, mutual fund performance calculations" etc. is a bit offensive.
I was very impressed with the idea to see stories ahead. I have to say that it is pretty annoying to have sites be gone so quickly when the mass descends on them.
This allows people to spend a little to get something of a head start, which should be of value to those who actually want to look at the articles.
It should also have the effect of diminishing the Slashdot effect as well by smoothing the network access. After all, by the time the hoards arrive, some of the early birds will be gone and not weighing down a site.
And to top it all off, this is done without really removing value for the regular freeloaders, who are an integral part of the Slashdot puzzle.
This is not FUD. My co-worker two doors down was have regular lockups with his machine. He was an educated, intelligent person. And he did in fact, just expect that it was the price for doing business with Windows.
He was wrong of course. He got one of those Gateways with the bad capacitors. The point isn't actually that working with Windows is good or bad now. Really it's that it has/had been bad for long enough that there is a culture of "that's how you expect it to work."
And frankly, people don't expect their computers to work as reliably as they should. It's hard not to think of MS as having something to do with this as the clear market leader for some time now.
I know very few Linux folks or users of any Unix that would tolerate that kind of behavior. This isn't necessarily because Linux/Unix is so much better that comparison is futile. It's because Unix people do not have a culture around their computer working incorrectly.