As someone who just inherited a huge repo full of uncommented code with nondescript variable names (A, B, C...) and no error handling, I have to say that the parent comment isn't scored high enough. Posting crap like that on the internet does nobody any good. Even if it is short enough to understand, poorly written code is especially intolerable if the subject is cryptography.
(Anyone who says that their code documents itself hasn't tried waiting a year and then trying to figure out why their undocumented code doesn't handle some edge case.)
You appear to be in vigorous agreement with me. I was responding to a post which claimed that the government would use tanks and planes against the citizenry, making small arms useless. I was claiming that any government action would be more police-like in reality.
Automatic weapons like a belt-fed.50 machine gun are terrifying because they are mounted and can sustain fire for long enough to mow a bunch of people down. If you actually fired that modified AR-15, you probably emptied the magazine pretty quickly, hit the target a couple of times and spewed the rest of the rounds up above the target.
Fully automatic fire, especially from a light hand-held rifle with a magazine filled with so-so.223 rounds, is pretty crappy at actually hitting anything. It was used for suppressing fire until the military decided that it was nothing but wasteful and changed it to burst-fire. If all of the criminals made their little pistols fully automatic, the homicide rate would probably go down and they would go broke buying ammunition.
You appear to have missed the part about the governments that attempt to enact such social engineering having tanks and planes to kill you with before your guns have a chance to mean a damn thing.
Assuming that your only interface with the enemy will be through your strongest and most defensible position is the sort of idiocy that has permeated the arrogant US military since at least as early as Vietnam. It's especially idiotic when the 'enemy' lives in your own country and is indistinguishable from yourself. A rebellion would likely involve very little shooting at tanks and planes with.22 rifles. However, the supply chain that keeps those tanks and planes functioning is enormous, intertwined with civilian infrastructure, and extremely difficult to protect from within.
I'm not weighing in on the whole "we have guns to use against the government" debate... I'm just pointing out that your tired old argument doesn't reflect reality very well. I mean, supply chain issues aside... history tells us that bombing and shelling cities full of your own civilians doesn't exactly instill a sense of gratitude and acceptance toward the government. Quelling an urban guerrilla rebellion is more of a police action and would primarily use small arms.
Of course they do. Were you trying to employ a reductio ad absurdum argument?
We casually infringe on their natural rights because we want to and they (often) can't stop us. That we infringe on their natural rights doesn't mean that they don't exist, any more than it does when our government infringes on ours. We do the same thing to humans who live in different nations, and the established premise is that humans have natural rights.
There's more than enough data and processing power on a phone do accomplish that without phoning home. The reason they phone home to to monetize your data, one way or another.
In general you're right, but there are some things that are actually broken and need fixing. Most of them are technical, though and fixing them shouldn't bother anyone.
It doesn't appear to just be posting that counts against you. I generally check the site at least once a day, but I've noticed that if I go on vacation or have a crazy busy spell at work and don't check for a few days, I invariably have mod points when I return. If you have good karma and haven't received mod points in a while, try staying away for a few days.
Of course you need to actually *read* some of the comments. If there are 437 comments, but 400 of them are "foobar sucks" and "why won't foobar die", maybe you *shouldn't* post more stories.
Make sure that you guys take heed of this point, though. I think that Dice was under the impression that, "more comments means more ad impressions... end of story." We've seen a huge uptick in articles that don't fit the demographic in the last few years because of this, and the overall result has been regular users bailing. Pissing off your userbase is not a solid strategy for longterm profit!
Articles on tech are fine, but TECH is not the only subject that falls under the "News for Nerds" umbrella (oh yeah: add that tagline back to the front page). Slashdot should run articles on a broad array of nerdy subjects including SCIENCE and MATH.
The areas that should be avoided altogether are purely political articles, which are highly toxic to the environment here, and most of the social justice type articles. If most of the comments below an article are bitching about its presence, it's a good indicator that the site would be better off without it. Even trollish tech articles like mdsolar's end up being somewhat informative. The political ones never do.
USB devices appearing to the OS as a serial port isn't terribly ugly and is a great way to keep from having to release drivers for each new OS. On the other hand...
The way that Windows handles serial devices by assigning them COM numbers is ugly as fuck. If they would at the very least, call the port "COM+serialnumber", the situation would be much better.
Then if he wishes to do it safely, he would have to send several unmanned missions (I'm thinking three) before he can get a safe certification for the one year (wo)manned journey.
Who exactly is responsible for "safe certification" of manned spaceflight missions?
Statistically, you're more likely to die from a ladder fall if you own one, so our governments should bad all lawful possession of ladders to protect us from our own poor decisionmaking.
Keep your safety-padded overly-nerfed world to yourself. Not everybody wants to live in a state of constant fear in an overly protected world. You nervous nancies and your kitchen knife bans...
So Slashdot is a pretty obvious money sink, but it does have a desirable reading audience, many of whom are absurdly vocal about how they don't want to read ads, subscribe or otherwise do anything that would, you know, make the site profitable.
The first easy fix for monetization is fixing the subscription system. I don't care for ads at all, but I've always paid for a subscription here (until it stopped working). Turning down cold hard cash (and basically hiding the existence of the subscription system) always seemed like a strange approach to making money from the site.
I know that modern businesses seem to think that the world runs on ads, but there are simpler and more profitable means of paying for things.
APK has some pretty good posts, every once in a while. I wouldn't mind if he stopped with the stalking and the multiple long link-ridden copy-pasted replies that pollute some threads, though.
Do you have a citation for encrypted radio being illegal? It's not lawful to encrypt communications on amateur frequencies, but I'm not aware of any law against encrypting communications on ISM or any unregulated band.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who just inherited a huge repo full of uncommented code with nondescript variable names (A, B, C...) and no error handling, I have to say that the parent comment isn't scored high enough. Posting crap like that on the internet does nobody any good. Even if it is short enough to understand, poorly written code is especially intolerable if the subject is cryptography.
(Anyone who says that their code documents itself hasn't tried waiting a year and then trying to figure out why their undocumented code doesn't handle some edge case.)
It's a sad state of affairs when Google is used as an example of non-nefarious, privacy-respecting behavior.
(Frankly, the level of trust reserved for Google is pretty sad, too.)
In the context of GPS and SA, he was most likely referring to DGPS. It's not really antiquated (and you can read more at wikipedia).
They're going to add him to the great hosts file in the sky?
I didn't read past the title, so you should probably mention it there, too.
You appear to be in vigorous agreement with me. I was responding to a post which claimed that the government would use tanks and planes against the citizenry, making small arms useless. I was claiming that any government action would be more police-like in reality.
Automatic weapons like a belt-fed .50 machine gun are terrifying because they are mounted and can sustain fire for long enough to mow a bunch of people down. If you actually fired that modified AR-15, you probably emptied the magazine pretty quickly, hit the target a couple of times and spewed the rest of the rounds up above the target.
Fully automatic fire, especially from a light hand-held rifle with a magazine filled with so-so .223 rounds, is pretty crappy at actually hitting anything. It was used for suppressing fire until the military decided that it was nothing but wasteful and changed it to burst-fire. If all of the criminals made their little pistols fully automatic, the homicide rate would probably go down and they would go broke buying ammunition.
You appear to have missed the part about the governments that attempt to enact such social engineering having tanks and planes to kill you with before your guns have a chance to mean a damn thing.
Assuming that your only interface with the enemy will be through your strongest and most defensible position is the sort of idiocy that has permeated the arrogant US military since at least as early as Vietnam. It's especially idiotic when the 'enemy' lives in your own country and is indistinguishable from yourself. A rebellion would likely involve very little shooting at tanks and planes with .22 rifles. However, the supply chain that keeps those tanks and planes functioning is enormous, intertwined with civilian infrastructure, and extremely difficult to protect from within.
I'm not weighing in on the whole "we have guns to use against the government" debate... I'm just pointing out that your tired old argument doesn't reflect reality very well. I mean, supply chain issues aside... history tells us that bombing and shelling cities full of your own civilians doesn't exactly instill a sense of gratitude and acceptance toward the government. Quelling an urban guerrilla rebellion is more of a police action and would primarily use small arms.
Of course they do. Were you trying to employ a reductio ad absurdum argument?
We casually infringe on their natural rights because we want to and they (often) can't stop us. That we infringe on their natural rights doesn't mean that they don't exist, any more than it does when our government infringes on ours. We do the same thing to humans who live in different nations, and the established premise is that humans have natural rights.
It's how they make predictive typing work.
There's more than enough data and processing power on a phone do accomplish that without phoning home. The reason they phone home to to monetize your data, one way or another.
You can do that here: http://slashdot.org/subscribe.pl. It even gives you a special symbol: *
If only it worked anymore. Seriously, Dice neglecting the means to directly collect money from the users was more than a little stupid.
[It stops embedding ads in the site, but I don't remember it disabling the third party tracking code.]
In general you're right, but there are some things that are actually broken and need fixing. Most of them are technical, though and fixing them shouldn't bother anyone.
It doesn't appear to just be posting that counts against you. I generally check the site at least once a day, but I've noticed that if I go on vacation or have a crazy busy spell at work and don't check for a few days, I invariably have mod points when I return. If you have good karma and haven't received mod points in a while, try staying away for a few days.
I've always wanted to get a +5 Troll, which I know is technically possible. I guess I'll have to try harder...
Of course you need to actually *read* some of the comments. If there are 437 comments, but 400 of them are "foobar sucks" and "why won't foobar die", maybe you *shouldn't* post more stories.
Make sure that you guys take heed of this point, though. I think that Dice was under the impression that, "more comments means more ad impressions... end of story." We've seen a huge uptick in articles that don't fit the demographic in the last few years because of this, and the overall result has been regular users bailing. Pissing off your userbase is not a solid strategy for longterm profit!
Articles on tech are fine, but TECH is not the only subject that falls under the "News for Nerds" umbrella (oh yeah: add that tagline back to the front page). Slashdot should run articles on a broad array of nerdy subjects including SCIENCE and MATH.
The areas that should be avoided altogether are purely political articles, which are highly toxic to the environment here, and most of the social justice type articles. If most of the comments below an article are bitching about its presence, it's a good indicator that the site would be better off without it. Even trollish tech articles like mdsolar's end up being somewhat informative. The political ones never do.
There should also be a limit to how many of them are posted. One slashvertisement per day is probably approaching too many.
USB devices appearing to the OS as a serial port isn't terribly ugly and is a great way to keep from having to release drivers for each new OS. On the other hand...
The way that Windows handles serial devices by assigning them COM numbers is ugly as fuck. If they would at the very least, call the port "COM+serialnumber", the situation would be much better.
That's a citation for encryption not being lawful on amateur frequencies, which I already covered in my two sentence post. Try again...
The fact is that encryption on unlicensed or commercial bands is perfectly legal.
Then if he wishes to do it safely, he would have to send several unmanned missions (I'm thinking three) before he can get a safe certification for the one year (wo)manned journey.
Who exactly is responsible for "safe certification" of manned spaceflight missions?
Statistically, you're more likely to die from a ladder fall if you own one, so our governments should bad all lawful possession of ladders to protect us from our own poor decisionmaking.
Keep your safety-padded overly-nerfed world to yourself. Not everybody wants to live in a state of constant fear in an overly protected world. You nervous nancies and your kitchen knife bans...
Please, please, please do not support Emoji on Slashdot.
This site will clear out so fast if you do that.
So Slashdot is a pretty obvious money sink, but it does have a desirable reading audience, many of whom are absurdly vocal about how they don't want to read ads, subscribe or otherwise do anything that would, you know, make the site profitable.
The first easy fix for monetization is fixing the subscription system. I don't care for ads at all, but I've always paid for a subscription here (until it stopped working). Turning down cold hard cash (and basically hiding the existence of the subscription system) always seemed like a strange approach to making money from the site.
I know that modern businesses seem to think that the world runs on ads, but there are simpler and more profitable means of paying for things.
APK has some pretty good posts, every once in a while. I wouldn't mind if he stopped with the stalking and the multiple long link-ridden copy-pasted replies that pollute some threads, though.
Do you have a citation for encrypted radio being illegal? It's not lawful to encrypt communications on amateur frequencies, but I'm not aware of any law against encrypting communications on ISM or any unregulated band.