Heh: I just posted the question to the site (submitted by reader Bearhouse); it's not about *my* dad. (My own dad does very occasionally read Slashdot, and is tech savvy in his own, very scattershot way -- he's an EE, which helps, but he can make VCRs blink a mean 12:00. But he's got all the tech toys he needs, scattered somewhere around his basement.)
- Part of a car-puter system; dash cam / dome cam. - Home security system cam - video conf system - video input for rPi-controlled robots
There are some great cases now sized for the Raspberry Pi; would be cool to see the physical equivalent of Linux distros, with rPi cases sized for / sold with various accessories, and a working OS included, including apps appropriate for some particular use. (Things like Zoneminder, say.)
- Lego-based plans (diagrams, lego) - a case that includes this camera module (or equivalent -- hopefully this won't be the only one) with the camera either fixed, or in a swivel mount. - Rugged case designed for all-kinds-of-attachment, along the lines of the GoPro camera accessories (magnetic mount, suction cup, strong attachment points for cord/velcro, future gecko-foot-sticky technology....) basically something you could mount on any window of your car, or the hood, or the undercarriage.
I have great ambivalence about many of the things the U.S. government does, but I've been interviewed as a reference for several people who have applied for jobs with agencies where security clearance matters. The questions they ask to do with integrity I believe they take very seriously for exactly this reason.
JOHN CLEESE: "Protects against all security threats by which means someone wants to take over your wireless printer to print ASCII pr0n! Absolutely *NO* Word 2003 viruses get through. My life's work has been leading up to this."
ERIC IDLE: "Excuse me. I rather like the ASCII pr0n. The problem that I'm facing is that I run a facility --"
"Yes?"
"-- a facility that processes certain *material,* let us say --"
"Yes? Yes? Out with it, man!"
"-- is rather sensitive."
"How do?"
"We're making a nuclear bomb."
"Ah, well why didn't you *say* so?! We've got all kinds of help for you in that case... "
If Clinton had admitted the affair, maybe. Instead, he lied about it (or rather "them") for a long time, including to Congress, which didn't exactly help anyone in the end. He gambled on that, and lost.
Funny that everyone had "I believe Anita Hill" stickers, but not "I believe Gennifer Flowers, Among Others" stickers;)
Whatever you do, please don't attribute this to actual "capitalism" or "the free market." When people talk about deregulation as a horror, realize this is the kind of horror that the deregulators seek to undo -- complacent vendors with a cozy layer of protection against new entrants.
Also, consider how much like these state franchise laws resemble gerrymandering district agreements -- both rely on passing in secret -- or at least in relative obscurity, in a process that regular folks rationally stay away from -- agreements to use the force of law to keep things tidy, stable, and predictable (and profitable, for those who've done the manipulating), rather than dynamic, risky, interesting, innovative, and other nice adjectives.
The laws that give special privileges to state-sanctioned franchise owners are bad, even if they have some small silver linings, whether the franchise is for transportation, banking, legal services, auto sales, gambling, or Dixie cups. Not that their history in the auto industry isn't interesting -- this podcast is enlightening on that topic: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/06/munger_on_franc.html
"Coming from a guy who has done drugs, you'd be much better suited for your position sober. I would not employ you if I knew you were on drugs either. Get your lives together."
Probably would be my position as an employer, too -- I'm not, so can't prove either way, but that sounds like a perfectly reasonable policy. I am turned off by drug use in many circumstances, and generally uninterested in most others.
But "the majority of the hippies that did a lot of drugs died young"? That seems improbable, considering even the number who survived with enough brain cells to write books detailing all the drugs they did;)
November in Texas can be delightful, or it can feel like a hot summer day in many places norther. Today was hot -- and I waited close to an hour to vote, most of that outside on some baking concrete, waiting to get inside the polling place. 8 polling machines were set up in the nearby library, in the same room as my neighborhood association meets, in fact. (NOTE: today was merely warm, or perhaps barely warm, by Texas standards. July or August it would be dangerous to stand that long outside without shade.) Someone came around giving out water -- good idea; wish I had a nearby lemonade stand.
The elderly ladies running one part of the process (the third station below) had some technical trouble; a young guy with hip hair and clothes was helping them -- I assume he was there in official capacity;)
Showed voter ID card (no Photo ID requirement in Texas) at one station, got a two-part sticker printed; one part of this sticker, with bar code, was taken at the next station and placed on a sheet of paper along with other voter's stickers (for a logbook of some kind for later scanning, I guess?), and signature goes next to it. At station three, the 2d part of that two-part sticker was taken (not sure it's fate -- that part had my name on it and a few codes I didn't try hard enough to figure out or remember), and in exchange, I got a small printed ticket with a code. There was a pointless verification step in here, in which one part of that ticket is compared (by the voter) with one part of the sticker for which it's being swapped ("Yep, they both say 'R-25.' Does it matter that one has the hyphen and one does not?" Answer: "No. As long as the're the same."). The verification was easy, but since I'm not sure what's being compared, sort of silly. (But Hey, it's voting! Silly makes people feel right at home!)
The final station of the cross, the machines themselves. I completely forgot to check what brand of machines were being used. They used a jogwheel for selecting choices; to start the process, the code from the small printed ticket was entered, by using the jogwheel to select each digit in turn and then hit a (hardware, not touchscreen) "enter" button. I believe that the controls on the machine were, from left to right:
Submit ballot / Previous / Next / Enter / [jogwheel]
There was no paper trail, but there was a confirmation step at the end; it was not especially user friendly, but it does exist, and it doesn't look like I voted for Buchanan. Having one machine both ask you for choices and "verify" them on screen doesn't feel especially rigorous, but Oh well. If there are shenanigans in how votes are transmitted *from that machine,* I'd have no idea. But at least as an interface, I have no real complaints about it except I am not sure how I could have entered a write-in choice for any office. (Since I did not have a write-in demand -- I just chose to leave the unopposed without my specific endorsement -- I didn't pursue it. The instructions mentioned that write-ins could be done via the jogwheel, but I am not sure how it would have been initiated for a particular office / race.)
I'm not sure how many states have "Straight Ticket" as an option; I do know that Texas has it. This is the first step, actually: You can select (R), (D), or (L) as a straight ticket (possibly (G) as well, but I don't think any others have enough offices covered with a candidate for that to make sense... (C) might, too, for that matter.) I don't think there should be a straight-ticket option, actually, but it exists and I used it. However, it's not as bad as I used to think; you still must page through the various offices, and you can modify the straight-ticketness of your actual ballot by piecemeal changing the selected vote for any of them you want. (That is, you could select, say, straight-ticket (R) and then go through and change each and every vote to (D), (L), or whatever. But if you do select a straight ticket, your favored party's candidate is pre-selected by default
Not to say that there might not be design changes down the road, but the month of October really was its own special snowflake:) We tried to make that clear in the way the initial call for entries was phrased, and in the story to which you're responding, but quite a few people evidently have the same confusion -- sorry about that. This was a chance to let readers get their name and creativity on the site in a way other than the usual story / poll submissions, not an attempt at long-term rebranding.
Some of the logos submitted were great, and perhaps one day we'll either want to use them or be inspired by them, but we're back as planned, and for the currently-anticipated future, to the old, regular Slashdot logo.
There are no current plans to change the default logo -- this was a month-long, one-per-day happening. Not to say that it might not change one day in the future, but you're safe for now;)
So you're saying you'd rather not stimulate the economy with 100 million more dollars? Why do you hate America?:)
Businesses waste money sometimes, but they can more easily go out of business if they screw up enough. University funding, when it comes from the state / State, may or may not be at the optimal level for educational outcomes as seen from any particular perspective, but it isn't based on a strong feedback between money spent and outcomes. So when I see people complain that California schools "can't afford" a cut to higher education budgets in that state (these ads follow me around for some reason, though I don't live in California;)), it seems like maybe there's some wiggle room wrt what they *can* afford, if Cisco thought this was a big that might be accepted.
I'm watching this projected on my wall -- not quite as good as being there, but exciting anyhow. Maybe should open my windows and crank up the volume, so the neighborhood gets to hear those engines roar...
It's complicated and imperfect, unfortunately -- being able to assign things to sections of the site by means of tags is powerful and useful, but also leads to annoyance, I know -- sorry about that. Stories tagged "apple" (in this case, it'd be hard not to give it that tag) will show up in the apple part of the rss feed, as you found, even though ideally this one in particular would have been better in its little Idle pen (things that are cute / wacky / bizarro / fun) and not in both. The software is always a work in progress...
So: The official, officious cut-off's been reached, which sounds like "will." But truly, it's "may," in that a) often people overbook themselves, which means that any a particular gathering, there may be one or several no-shows who've requested shirts, and b) at least some of the parties will have a few extra shirts mailed.
You're not wrong, of course -- but a SNAFU meant that the NYC party got added a lot later than we'd meant it to, so that number isn't what it might have been. They should have some extra shirts on hand, though, to help make up for the shorter time there was to sign up before the t-shirt deadline. And you're right about attendance; there's some critical mass to it... once people see at least a handful of attendees at a party in striking distance, at least up to their personal tolerance for crowds, it might sound more fun than does a closer one with a smaller crowd.
Heh, the various layers of company attachments / name changes / etc. have made for some confusion over the years, incl. often for employees. The "main office" for Slashdot, though, is still in Dexter, MI (near Ann Arbor), as it has been for something like a decade. (I forget which year it moved there, exactly.) I've visited there 2 or 3 or maybe 4 times over the years. SourceForge / Geeknet proper has some people in San Francisco and NYC as well as VA; ThinkGeek's offices have been in VA the whole time it's been associated w/ Slashdot (and as far as I know it was was also founded there... have no reason to think otherwise, and lots of reason to think so), and Yes, a lot of parent company backend stuff has been out of that office. But (sorry, pedantry) I don't think one could ever make the case that *Slashdot's* HQ has been in VA -- but it's nice to have the organization of a company with things like billing / payroll / businessy stuff in general, which lets Slashdot concentrate on stories and discussions about glowing animals, software licensing, model rockets, etc. OTOH, the ThinkGeek folks (being very gracious and fun to hang out with) have let me work from there on several occasions when I was on the east coast and within driving range of their place. Their kitchen always has cool stuff in it, like a giant Death Star cookie jar.
Dice is in Iowa... and although I've been briefly in Iowa while on road trips a few years back, that's about it. Pretty place, IMO, at least during the times I was there.
The parties [suffer / benefit] from the uncertainties of crowd-sourcing; there's some Shaker-meeting uncertainty, but that also makes things interesting. We hope the ones that transpire turn out to be interesting and fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh: I just posted the question to the site (submitted by reader Bearhouse); it's not about *my* dad. (My own dad does very occasionally read Slashdot, and is tech savvy in his own, very scattershot way -- he's an EE, which helps, but he can make VCRs blink a mean 12:00. But he's got all the tech toys he needs, scattered somewhere around his basement.)
timothy
We'll try; any help you have in tracking him down or persuading him to take part would be appreciated :)
Seriously :) We'd love to have McAfee in this slot ...
Sorry 'bout that. Warren's Buffet truly is a different place. Changed to reflect; mea culpa.
Tim
- Part of a car-puter system; dash cam / dome cam.
- Home security system cam
- video conf system
- video input for rPi-controlled robots
There are some great cases now sized for the Raspberry Pi; would be cool to see the physical equivalent of Linux distros, with rPi cases sized for / sold with various accessories, and a working OS included, including apps appropriate for some particular use. (Things like Zoneminder, say.)
- Lego-based plans (diagrams, lego) ....) basically something you could mount on any window of your car, or the hood, or the undercarriage.
- a case that includes this camera module (or equivalent -- hopefully this won't be the only one) with the camera either fixed, or in a swivel mount.
- Rugged case designed for all-kinds-of-attachment, along the lines of the GoPro camera accessories (magnetic mount, suction cup, strong attachment points for cord/velcro, future gecko-foot-sticky technology
Well-said.
I have great ambivalence about many of the things the U.S. government does, but I've been interviewed as a reference for several people who have applied for jobs with agencies where security clearance matters. The questions they ask to do with integrity I believe they take very seriously for exactly this reason.
READ IN MONTY PYTHON VOICES, midstream:
JOHN CLEESE: "Protects against all security threats by which means someone wants to take over your wireless printer to print ASCII pr0n! Absolutely *NO* Word 2003 viruses get through. My life's work has been leading up to this."
ERIC IDLE: "Excuse me. I rather like the ASCII pr0n. The problem that I'm facing is that I run a facility --"
"Yes?"
"-- a facility that processes certain *material,* let us say --"
"Yes? Yes? Out with it, man!"
"-- is rather sensitive."
"How do?"
"We're making a nuclear bomb."
"Ah, well why didn't you *say* so?! We've got all kinds of help for you in that case ... "
If Clinton had admitted the affair, maybe. Instead, he lied about it (or rather "them") for a long time, including to Congress, which didn't exactly help anyone in the end. He gambled on that, and lost.
Funny that everyone had "I believe Anita Hill" stickers, but not "I believe Gennifer Flowers, Among Others" stickers ;)
Tim
Whatever you do, please don't attribute this to actual "capitalism" or "the free market." When people talk about deregulation as a horror, realize this is the kind of horror that the deregulators seek to undo -- complacent vendors with a cozy layer of protection against new entrants.
Also, consider how much like these state franchise laws resemble gerrymandering district agreements -- both rely on passing in secret -- or at least in relative obscurity, in a process that regular folks rationally stay away from -- agreements to use the force of law to keep things tidy, stable, and predictable (and profitable, for those who've done the manipulating), rather than dynamic, risky, interesting, innovative, and other nice adjectives.
The laws that give special privileges to state-sanctioned franchise owners are bad, even if they have some small silver linings, whether the franchise is for transportation, banking, legal services, auto sales, gambling, or Dixie cups. Not that their history in the auto industry isn't interesting -- this podcast is enlightening on that topic: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/06/munger_on_franc.html
Re: the ice shortage, etc, if you don't already know of it, IMO the most amusing account of this is from the always illuminating Mike Munger :)
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/01/munger_on_price_1.html
"Coming from a guy who has done drugs, you'd be much better suited for your position sober. I would not employ you if I knew you were on drugs either. Get your lives together."
Probably would be my position as an employer, too -- I'm not, so can't prove either way, but that sounds like a perfectly reasonable policy. I am turned off by drug use in many circumstances, and generally uninterested in most others.
But "the majority of the hippies that did a lot of drugs died young"? That seems improbable, considering even the number who survived with enough brain cells to write books detailing all the drugs they did ;)
November in Texas can be delightful, or it can feel like a hot summer day in many places norther. Today was hot -- and I waited close to an hour to vote, most of that outside on some baking concrete, waiting to get inside the polling place. 8 polling machines were set up in the nearby library, in the same room as my neighborhood association meets, in fact. (NOTE: today was merely warm, or perhaps barely warm, by Texas standards. July or August it would be dangerous to stand that long outside without shade.) Someone came around giving out water -- good idea; wish I had a nearby lemonade stand.
The elderly ladies running one part of the process (the third station below) had some technical trouble; a young guy with hip hair and clothes was helping them -- I assume he was there in official capacity ;)
Showed voter ID card (no Photo ID requirement in Texas) at one station, got a two-part sticker printed; one part of this sticker, with bar code, was taken at the next station and placed on a sheet of paper along with other voter's stickers (for a logbook of some kind for later scanning, I guess?), and signature goes next to it. At station three, the 2d part of that two-part sticker was taken (not sure it's fate -- that part had my name on it and a few codes I didn't try hard enough to figure out or remember), and in exchange, I got a small printed ticket with a code. There was a pointless verification step in here, in which one part of that ticket is compared (by the voter) with one part of the sticker for which it's being swapped ("Yep, they both say 'R-25.' Does it matter that one has the hyphen and one does not?" Answer: "No. As long as the're the same."). The verification was easy, but since I'm not sure what's being compared, sort of silly. (But Hey, it's voting! Silly makes people feel right at home!)
The final station of the cross, the machines themselves. I completely forgot to check what brand of machines were being used. They used a jogwheel for selecting choices; to start the process, the code from the small printed ticket was entered, by using the jogwheel to select each digit in turn and then hit a (hardware, not touchscreen) "enter" button. I believe that the controls on the machine were, from left to right:
Submit ballot / Previous / Next / Enter / [jogwheel]
There was no paper trail, but there was a confirmation step at the end; it was not especially user friendly, but it does exist, and it doesn't look like I voted for Buchanan. Having one machine both ask you for choices and "verify" them on screen doesn't feel especially rigorous, but Oh well. If there are shenanigans in how votes are transmitted *from that machine,* I'd have no idea. But at least as an interface, I have no real complaints about it except I am not sure how I could have entered a write-in choice for any office. (Since I did not have a write-in demand -- I just chose to leave the unopposed without my specific endorsement -- I didn't pursue it. The instructions mentioned that write-ins could be done via the jogwheel, but I am not sure how it would have been initiated for a particular office / race.)
I'm not sure how many states have "Straight Ticket" as an option; I do know that Texas has it. This is the first step, actually: You can select (R), (D), or (L) as a straight ticket (possibly (G) as well, but I don't think any others have enough offices covered with a candidate for that to make sense ... (C) might, too, for that matter.) I don't think there should be a straight-ticket option, actually, but it exists and I used it. However, it's not as bad as I used to think; you still must page through the various offices, and you can modify the straight-ticketness of your actual ballot by piecemeal changing the selected vote for any of them you want. (That is, you could select, say, straight-ticket (R) and then go through and change each and every vote to (D), (L), or whatever. But if you do select a straight ticket, your favored party's candidate is pre-selected by default
Hi!
Not to say that there might not be design changes down the road, but the month of October really was its own special snowflake :) We tried to make that clear in the way the initial call for entries was phrased, and in the story to which you're responding, but quite a few people evidently have the same confusion -- sorry about that. This was a chance to let readers get their name and creativity on the site in a way other than the usual story / poll submissions, not an attempt at long-term rebranding.
Some of the logos submitted were great, and perhaps one day we'll either want to use them or be inspired by them, but we're back as planned, and for the currently-anticipated future, to the old, regular Slashdot logo.
Tim
There are no current plans to change the default logo -- this was a month-long, one-per-day happening. Not to say that it might not change one day in the future, but you're safe for now ;)
So you're saying you'd rather not stimulate the economy with 100 million more dollars? Why do you hate America? :)
Businesses waste money sometimes, but they can more easily go out of business if they screw up enough. University funding, when it comes from the state / State, may or may not be at the optimal level for educational outcomes as seen from any particular perspective, but it isn't based on a strong feedback between money spent and outcomes. So when I see people complain that California schools "can't afford" a cut to higher education budgets in that state (these ads follow me around for some reason, though I don't live in California ;)), it seems like maybe there's some wiggle room wrt what they *can* afford, if Cisco thought this was a big that might be accepted.
Uncle Miltie had it years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RDMdc5r5z8
Nothing to see here, folks.
At least, not much. Maybe the remnants of an ongoing bad childhood ;)
If Dice were to impose some sort of comment filter, this isn't how you'd hear about it.
Sorta clever, but that's charitable, and only applies to the first time. Since this isn't the first time, it doesn't.
Hey, this time you got an extra half hour ;)
I'm watching this projected on my wall -- not quite as good as being there, but exciting anyhow. Maybe should open my windows and crank up the volume, so the neighborhood gets to hear those engines roar ...
timothy
It's complicated and imperfect, unfortunately -- being able to assign things to sections of the site by means of tags is powerful and useful, but also leads to annoyance, I know -- sorry about that. Stories tagged "apple" (in this case, it'd be hard not to give it that tag) will show up in the apple part of the rss feed, as you found, even though ideally this one in particular would have been better in its little Idle pen (things that are cute / wacky / bizarro / fun) and not in both. The software is always a work in progress ...
It is in Idle, actually ...
It's just called "Worms." Creepy song -- one I've liked for a long time.
http://www.lyricstime.com/the-pogues-worms-lyrics.html
Since +5 is the limit, I will just have to say this is the comment of the day (so far -- the judges are still determining the weight of your genius).
"No, you cannot build guns for personal use without a permit, It is still illegal and a felony."
In some places, perhaps, but not as a general rule in the U.S. (or in Texas).
There are a lot of ways to land in prohibited territory, but not (merely) making a gun at home.
BTW we chose today's because it's the most little-endian day of the month. Har har har.
That is all
So: The official, officious cut-off's been reached, which sounds like "will." But truly, it's "may," in that a) often people overbook themselves, which means that any a particular gathering, there may be one or several no-shows who've requested shirts, and b) at least some of the parties will have a few extra shirts mailed.
You're not wrong, of course -- but a SNAFU meant that the NYC party got added a lot later than we'd meant it to, so that number isn't what it might have been. They should have some extra shirts on hand, though, to help make up for the shorter time there was to sign up before the t-shirt deadline. And you're right about attendance; there's some critical mass to it ... once people see at least a handful of attendees at a party in striking distance, at least up to their personal tolerance for crowds, it might sound more fun than does a closer one with a smaller crowd.
Heh, the various layers of company attachments / name changes / etc. have made for some confusion over the years, incl. often for employees. The "main office" for Slashdot, though, is still in Dexter, MI (near Ann Arbor), as it has been for something like a decade. (I forget which year it moved there, exactly.) I've visited there 2 or 3 or maybe 4 times over the years. SourceForge / Geeknet proper has some people in San Francisco and NYC as well as VA; ThinkGeek's offices have been in VA the whole time it's been associated w/ Slashdot (and as far as I know it was was also founded there ... have no reason to think otherwise, and lots of reason to think so), and Yes, a lot of parent company backend stuff has been out of that office. But (sorry, pedantry) I don't think one could ever make the case that *Slashdot's* HQ has been in VA -- but it's nice to have the organization of a company with things like billing / payroll / businessy stuff in general, which lets Slashdot concentrate on stories and discussions about glowing animals, software licensing, model rockets, etc. OTOH, the ThinkGeek folks (being very gracious and fun to hang out with) have let me work from there on several occasions when I was on the east coast and within driving range of their place. Their kitchen always has cool stuff in it, like a giant Death Star cookie jar.
Dice is in Iowa ... and although I've been briefly in Iowa while on road trips a few years back, that's about it. Pretty place, IMO, at least during the times I was there.
The parties [suffer / benefit] from the uncertainties of crowd-sourcing; there's some Shaker-meeting uncertainty, but that also makes things interesting. We hope the ones that transpire turn out to be interesting and fun.