Back in my callow college years, I was a ripper for EPiC. I only did three or four releases; I was flush with the success of having learned to encode amateur porn using DivX (these were the heady days when DivX 3.11 with all that toolkit crap on top of it was the preferred encoding solution), and I put it to use.
The guys had an ad on one of the XDCC channels---#imp-iso on EFNet, if I recall---asking for encoders. So I joined a chat channel, they helped me get set up, I got a Netflix account, and started encoding.
Then Netflix didn't send me the DVDs, and kept charging me until I notified my card company and they stopped the autopayment. I don't know if it's changed since then, but there was no fucking way to get in touch with Netflix.
But in the meantime, I had ratio access to some great big FTP dump in Europe. I was, at the time, frickin' amazed at how easy it was, and how clearly the feds either (a) didn't care, at that point, or (b) were horribly inept. I leaned towards (a).
But, indeed, I was impressed at how sophisticated the tools (RaidenFTPD, mostly, seeming way, way better than the basic FTP daemons legit sites used) and organizations were, for people who never bothered to spell right or use there real names.
And it wasn't like it was a really big or impressive group like Centropy. (They were, maybe still are, the guys who had telesync releases of every new movie the week it was in the theater. Watchable ones, which was the impressive part.)
I do a lot of work fixing syntax and using the proper style and markup. It's an uphill task---for any given Wikipedia task, there's always an arbitrary amount of work left to be done.
But hey, if there's a specific example you have in mind, let me know and I'll fix it right away. Usually I just fix things as I run into them, which is as good a way as any other...
Okay, any guy who does groundbreaking research that changes lives (making nearly all chronic peptic ulcers a thing of the past) like that, and puts his own health on the line because he's that damned sure of his own competence, and it works---I want to mod him +1, Fucking Rocks.
I remember coming over the hill on I-80/I-90 west on my way to Chicago and running into this vast field of smoke and industry and thinking to myself, "Hey, it looks like I've just rolled up into Mordor!".
In other news, did you know that Gary is called Gary after someone's last name, and that Gary as a first name did not become popular until Gary Cooper made it so?
I didn't know they even made people as altruistic as you. I don't know how you do it, but I don't think I can ignore that it would be my missing PDA and bruised head (or, hell, I don't know how crazy he was---perhaps my life) versus a dead someone-else. I'd have to be a fool to throw down my life for a thief's.
Intellectually, I'd shoot the guy in a hot second. If it came to it? I hope I never have to know, and I wouldn't want that on my conscience in any case. But it's utter insanity to just lay down your life if you have a choice. (Absolutely no disrespect meant to the original poster, as he didn't have the luxury of making that choice.)
Real-world situations, I gather, tend to be inconclusive and fuzzy. There's no way to know what the outcome would have been if he hadn't had the gun. There's no way to know what his potential assailants' intended actions or states of mind were.
I don't think it's really possible to be as precise as you'd like in stories where no one ends up dead, where everyone goes home and gets into bed with what they started out with.
Robbery of an item of that value is a misdemeanor where you live? And the cops aren't interested in pursuing someone for assault with actual bodily harm?
What sort of cockamamie state do you live in, so I can avoid ever moving there?
Man posts large, bitter critique of extremely popular website.
Founder of said website responds. Responds! In a day and age when most companies' sites don't have a feedback mechanism of any kind, Craig is lurking around Slashdot. Of course, his response is a bland corporate "well, we still have customers left, so we can't be doing anything wrong" (spent a little too much time in management before 'demoting yourself', eh?), but he responded.
I take issue with this. I know, libertarians say this like neocons say "why do you hate America so much?". But I'd like you to explain how the first following scenario creates wealth, whereas the second only redistributes it.
ResearchCo solicits investment from the public. ResearchCo develops Velcro with this money. Velcro is then marketed and sold to the public, with a portion of the costs paid back to the investors.
NASA taxes the public. NASA develops Velcro with this money. Velcro is then marketed and sold to the public; however, there are no licensing fees, so the cost is equivalent to (in the first example) the cost of ResearchCo velcro less the costs paid back to the investors.
No, they're not precisely equivalent cases, but the flow of things is the same. Why the difference? Can you explain it to me?
He quit! He's no longer a community member? Since Wikipedia changes so frequently (the Arbitration Committee is pretty new, the article count is at least an order of magnitude higher, speedy-deletion guidelines have changed, the category system is entirely new, for instance), the Wikipedia he left in 2002 bears little resemblance to the one he advocates for today. So what happened?
Did he change his username and continue to edit as just another one of us plebs? Why the sudden resurgence of interest?
As of right now, what does Larry Sanger have to do with Wikipedia?
A validation system is in progress. Ideally, it would have a sort of advogato-style trust metric, so that community consensus would ensure all validated articles were of a particular quality; more trusted users would have a bigger vote towards validation.
Thus, there would be the 'live' version and the 'validated' version, trailing a short interval behind the live one.
Check out test.wikipedia.org for a really shitty implementation of validation. (It's vulnerable to all the same problems that editing is, thus providing no additional benefit, and a kludgy interface to boot. But validation could do what you say, in a scalable and extensible fashion.)
I didn't actually purchase the book; my father did, possibly from the discount rack.
Turing's death was indeed tragic. His house was broken into, he reported the crime, his homosexuality was discovered, he offered no defense, believing that he had done nothing wrong. He was offered a choice between prison and estrogen shots. After a year or so on the drugs (which were not without their side effects), he killed himself.
The story infuriates me every time I tell it. A brilliant man, to whom we all owe a debt of gratitude for founding our field, struck down in the middle of his productive years by stupid bigotry. What a waste.
I think you may have misread me; I didn't stop reading the book when I realized who he was, though I felt a strange cloud of duality overhanging the whole thing. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and I found the part about the decimation of the Gottingen mathematics department in the early 1930s (a legacy handed down from Gauss, etc., to Hilbert, who watched it die), I was truly touched.
And yeah, Andrew Sullivan is a bit of a tool sometimes. I read his blog, sure, but I read Little Green Footballs, Ted Rall's column, ESR's blog and This Modern World as well.
I noticed the book sitting on the downstairs couch, and gave it a read. Personally, once I realized that the Derbyshire who wrote the book was, indeed, the Derbyshire of Andrew Sullivan's Derbyshire Award, I was impressed at the lack of disgusting bigotry in the book. He doesn't even take a single cheap shot at Alan Turing.
Now there's a man who knows how to separate his two personas.
I'm a keyboard freak. It comes largely from using DOS for years as a kid and using Unix and Linux when I started programming in college. I usually do most things in windows without touching the mouse.
This is so, so exactly me. Grew up on DOS, switched to Linux for coding at school. I remember when I'd do something simple (switching or minimizing windows, for instance) with the keyboard instead of the mouse, and the guy looking over my shoulder would blink and say, "how'd you do that?".
Wait, there are IE-targeted sites now that have some sort of 'you must click yes' mousetrap? I don't remember that. Maybe some jerk programmer got smarter since I switched to Firefox a few months ago, but could you provide an example?
Perhaps because I've never seen a dialog like that in my several years of running a variety of applications on Windows 2000? True, I didn't get that dialog when installing Firefox---I find it hard to believe that this guy had all that go wrong at once---but the day we start blaming random application boo-boos on the operating system is... well, it's a very sad day.
Did you know that Firefox runs on Microsoft systems as well? I know, I was surprised too, to learn that this machine that I'm running Firefox on was, in fact, running Windows. I'm a little curious as to how running Windows 2000 makes me a "Linux pussyboy", but perhaps I lack your nuanced understanding of web browser politics.
I suppose saying that a lack thereof makes me twitchy and irritable is the same thing. So, I second the thought. (Though it's also a great way to just plain procrastinate...)
I, too, don't use flash. Ever. I don't remember the last time I did. (Same camera.) I got a fast lens (EF 50mm f/1.8, under a hundred bucks, my only major purchase for the Digital Rebel since buying it this summer) so I wouldn't have all of my shots coming out either blurry or noisy, and I pretty much never take it off now. Makes pretty nice portraits, too.
Still, I'd rather have the old tab-based method back. It's familiar, damn it. And it seemed more... keyboard-centric instead of mouse-centric, which I like. This is like it's been put in for old codgers like me, to shut us all up. (I'm sorry, but CTRL-L?!) And not for actual usage.
I forget who it was that said that a single mouse move and click (including time to move hands from the keyboard) was worth up to eighteen keystrokes in time. Perhaps that's a bit much, but I will lament the slow passing of the keyboard-centric GUI.
What sorts of tirades? The statement, "It's a 200mm lens, but on my Digital Rebel it's equivalent to a 300mm lens on a full-frame 35mm camera" is true. The statement you wrote seems to be a slightly more ambiguous version of that. What's the issue?
Slashdot Mirror
Hard to get into? Pfft. No damn way.
Back in my callow college years, I was a ripper for EPiC. I only did three or four releases; I was flush with the success of having learned to encode amateur porn using DivX (these were the heady days when DivX 3.11 with all that toolkit crap on top of it was the preferred encoding solution), and I put it to use.
The guys had an ad on one of the XDCC channels---#imp-iso on EFNet, if I recall---asking for encoders. So I joined a chat channel, they helped me get set up, I got a Netflix account, and started encoding.
Then Netflix didn't send me the DVDs, and kept charging me until I notified my card company and they stopped the autopayment. I don't know if it's changed since then, but there was no fucking way to get in touch with Netflix.
But in the meantime, I had ratio access to some great big FTP dump in Europe. I was, at the time, frickin' amazed at how easy it was, and how clearly the feds either (a) didn't care, at that point, or (b) were horribly inept. I leaned towards (a).
But, indeed, I was impressed at how sophisticated the tools (RaidenFTPD, mostly, seeming way, way better than the basic FTP daemons legit sites used) and organizations were, for people who never bothered to spell right or use there real names.
And it wasn't like it was a really big or impressive group like Centropy. (They were, maybe still are, the guys who had telesync releases of every new movie the week it was in the theater. Watchable ones, which was the impressive part.)
Ah, youth.
--grendel drago
I do a lot of work fixing syntax and using the proper style and markup. It's an uphill task---for any given Wikipedia task, there's always an arbitrary amount of work left to be done.
But hey, if there's a specific example you have in mind, let me know and I'll fix it right away. Usually I just fix things as I run into them, which is as good a way as any other...
--grendel drago
Okay, any guy who does groundbreaking research that changes lives (making nearly all chronic peptic ulcers a thing of the past) like that, and puts his own health on the line because he's that damned sure of his own competence, and it works---I want to mod him +1, Fucking Rocks.
--grendel drago
I remember coming over the hill on I-80/I-90 west on my way to Chicago and running into this vast field of smoke and industry and thinking to myself, "Hey, it looks like I've just rolled up into Mordor!".
In other news, did you know that Gary is called Gary after someone's last name, and that Gary as a first name did not become popular until Gary Cooper made it so?
--grendel drago
I didn't know they even made people as altruistic as you. I don't know how you do it, but I don't think I can ignore that it would be my missing PDA and bruised head (or, hell, I don't know how crazy he was---perhaps my life) versus a dead someone-else. I'd have to be a fool to throw down my life for a thief's.
Intellectually, I'd shoot the guy in a hot second. If it came to it? I hope I never have to know, and I wouldn't want that on my conscience in any case. But it's utter insanity to just lay down your life if you have a choice. (Absolutely no disrespect meant to the original poster, as he didn't have the luxury of making that choice.)
--grendel drago
Real-world situations, I gather, tend to be inconclusive and fuzzy. There's no way to know what the outcome would have been if he hadn't had the gun. There's no way to know what his potential assailants' intended actions or states of mind were.
I don't think it's really possible to be as precise as you'd like in stories where no one ends up dead, where everyone goes home and gets into bed with what they started out with.
--grendel drago
Robbery of an item of that value is a misdemeanor where you live? And the cops aren't interested in pursuing someone for assault with actual bodily harm?
What sort of cockamamie state do you live in, so I can avoid ever moving there?
Man posts large, bitter critique of extremely popular website.
Founder of said website responds. Responds! In a day and age when most companies' sites don't have a feedback mechanism of any kind, Craig is lurking around Slashdot. Of course, his response is a bland corporate "well, we still have customers left, so we can't be doing anything wrong" (spent a little too much time in management before 'demoting yourself', eh?), but he responded.
I think I may have a warm fuzzy.
--grendel drago
I take issue with this. I know, libertarians say this like neocons say "why do you hate America so much?". But I'd like you to explain how the first following scenario creates wealth, whereas the second only redistributes it.
ResearchCo solicits investment from the public. ResearchCo develops Velcro with this money. Velcro is then marketed and sold to the public, with a portion of the costs paid back to the investors.
NASA taxes the public. NASA develops Velcro with this money. Velcro is then marketed and sold to the public; however, there are no licensing fees, so the cost is equivalent to (in the first example) the cost of ResearchCo velcro less the costs paid back to the investors.
No, they're not precisely equivalent cases, but the flow of things is the same. Why the difference? Can you explain it to me?
--grendel drago
He quit! He's no longer a community member? Since Wikipedia changes so frequently (the Arbitration Committee is pretty new, the article count is at least an order of magnitude higher, speedy-deletion guidelines have changed, the category system is entirely new, for instance), the Wikipedia he left in 2002 bears little resemblance to the one he advocates for today. So what happened?
Did he change his username and continue to edit as just another one of us plebs? Why the sudden resurgence of interest?
As of right now, what does Larry Sanger have to do with Wikipedia?
--grendel drago
But the memory of the porn lives on. How else would there be a freely licensed image to illustrate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Saint?
--grendel drago
A validation system is in progress. Ideally, it would have a sort of advogato-style trust metric, so that community consensus would ensure all validated articles were of a particular quality; more trusted users would have a bigger vote towards validation.
Thus, there would be the 'live' version and the 'validated' version, trailing a short interval behind the live one.
Check out test.wikipedia.org for a really shitty implementation of validation. (It's vulnerable to all the same problems that editing is, thus providing no additional benefit, and a kludgy interface to boot. But validation could do what you say, in a scalable and extensible fashion.)
--grendel drago
I didn't actually purchase the book; my father did, possibly from the discount rack.
Turing's death was indeed tragic. His house was broken into, he reported the crime, his homosexuality was discovered, he offered no defense, believing that he had done nothing wrong. He was offered a choice between prison and estrogen shots. After a year or so on the drugs (which were not without their side effects), he killed himself.
The story infuriates me every time I tell it. A brilliant man, to whom we all owe a debt of gratitude for founding our field, struck down in the middle of his productive years by stupid bigotry. What a waste.
--grendel drago
I think you may have misread me; I didn't stop reading the book when I realized who he was, though I felt a strange cloud of duality overhanging the whole thing. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and I found the part about the decimation of the Gottingen mathematics department in the early 1930s (a legacy handed down from Gauss, etc., to Hilbert, who watched it die), I was truly touched.
And yeah, Andrew Sullivan is a bit of a tool sometimes. I read his blog, sure, but I read Little Green Footballs, Ted Rall's column, ESR's blog and This Modern World as well.
--grendel drago
I noticed the book sitting on the downstairs couch, and gave it a read. Personally, once I realized that the Derbyshire who wrote the book was, indeed, the Derbyshire of Andrew Sullivan's Derbyshire Award, I was impressed at the lack of disgusting bigotry in the book. He doesn't even take a single cheap shot at Alan Turing.
Now there's a man who knows how to separate his two personas.
--grendel drago
I'm a keyboard freak. It comes largely from using DOS for years as a kid and using Unix and Linux when I started programming in college. I usually do most things in windows without touching the mouse.
This is so, so exactly me. Grew up on DOS, switched to Linux for coding at school. I remember when I'd do something simple (switching or minimizing windows, for instance) with the keyboard instead of the mouse, and the guy looking over my shoulder would blink and say, "how'd you do that?".
--grendel drago
That wasn't me.
I reply under my own username.
Dick.
--grendel drago
Wait, there are IE-targeted sites now that have some sort of 'you must click yes' mousetrap? I don't remember that. Maybe some jerk programmer got smarter since I switched to Firefox a few months ago, but could you provide an example?
--grendel drago
Perhaps because I've never seen a dialog like that in my several years of running a variety of applications on Windows 2000? True, I didn't get that dialog when installing Firefox---I find it hard to believe that this guy had all that go wrong at once---but the day we start blaming random application boo-boos on the operating system is... well, it's a very sad day.
--grendel drago
Did you know that Firefox runs on Microsoft systems as well? I know, I was surprised too, to learn that this machine that I'm running Firefox on was, in fact, running Windows. I'm a little curious as to how running Windows 2000 makes me a "Linux pussyboy", but perhaps I lack your nuanced understanding of web browser politics.
--grendel drago
I suppose saying that a lack thereof makes me twitchy and irritable is the same thing. So, I second the thought. (Though it's also a great way to just plain procrastinate...)
--grendel drago
Wait, Celebrex? Don't you mean Vioxx?
--grendel drago
I, too, don't use flash. Ever. I don't remember the last time I did. (Same camera.) I got a fast lens (EF 50mm f/1.8, under a hundred bucks, my only major purchase for the Digital Rebel since buying it this summer) so I wouldn't have all of my shots coming out either blurry or noisy, and I pretty much never take it off now. Makes pretty nice portraits, too.
--grendel drago
Thanks!
Still, I'd rather have the old tab-based method back. It's familiar, damn it. And it seemed more... keyboard-centric instead of mouse-centric, which I like. This is like it's been put in for old codgers like me, to shut us all up. (I'm sorry, but CTRL-L?!) And not for actual usage.
I forget who it was that said that a single mouse move and click (including time to move hands from the keyboard) was worth up to eighteen keystrokes in time. Perhaps that's a bit much, but I will lament the slow passing of the keyboard-centric GUI.
--grendel drago
What sorts of tirades? The statement, "It's a 200mm lens, but on my Digital Rebel it's equivalent to a 300mm lens on a full-frame 35mm camera" is true. The statement you wrote seems to be a slightly more ambiguous version of that. What's the issue?
--grendel drago