and will eventually go to the moon (between 2015 and 2020).
Whereupon they'll be given a warm welcome by Mike Melville and the crew of Tycho Station, who'll present them with their very own "Welcome to the Moon, Inc." wings.
How about "If you don't want to get DDoS'ed, then don't run a gambling website"?
Last I checked, the employees of the gambling site don't sneak into your business and steal your equipment in the middle of the night. Talk about a failure in applying logic....
But first we have to get over this strange idea that because it's The Internet, everyone should be allowed to use it, without any traceability or responsibility for their actions whatsoever, regardless of the harm it may cause others.
The sad thing is you could prevent 99% of the hijacking attempts against your (windows) machine by doing just two things:
- don't use IE; and - install ZoneAlarm
This isn't exactly rocket science. And it doesn't require draconian legislation requiring that all communication from every machine be traced and logged.
Sadly, among the largely 16-21 year old, male-dominated, non-long-term-thinking, annoyingly over-opinionated, idiot-savant Slashdot crowd, paying anything for information, regardless of real value, is an anathema.
This tripe is insightful? Jesus H., all I have to do to get modded up is make insulting gross overgeneralizations about specific groups of people and I'm off to the races! Oh, and construct grammatically nonsensical clauses like this:
"Your argument is sound as a balance of value and benefit"
It helps when the reader can't make heads nor tails of what the fuck you're trying to say.
Even if this were true in the past or (more dubiously) in the present, how does this obligate me to pay the NYT for archive access? They can charge, and I can decline to pay and decide to go somewhere else for old news - say, the local library.
You seem to imply there's a moral argument here. There isn't. It's about the introduction of a business model which may or may not work.
so you can end up with code completely unrelated to any GPLed code having to be GPLed because it's magically become "combined" with the GPLed code.
That's not only complete bullshit, but a nearly verbatim regurgitation of MS FUD. If you think otherwise, please cite - word-for-word - the clause in the GPL which proves your assertion.
There are few things more reliable than the GPL zealot's tendency to dismiss anything remotely critical of the GPL with the "but it's voluntary" spiel.
This coming from an anti-GPL zealot who can't even keep his fucking facts straight.
The answer to his question is because that's precisely what the GPL is *designed* to do - generate more GPLed code by "infecting" other code.
Riiiight. Again, cite that part of the GPL copyright which supports this idiotic statement.
Oh, but wait - you can't. Because there is no such clause in the GPL. All of this is nothing more than lies. Perhaps you think that if you lie long enough and often people people will actually begin to believe the horseshit coming out of your mouth?
Yet another waste of good oxygen screwing with the noise-to-signal ratio on the internet....
What you were doing there is called "Shill Bidding", and it's not only prohibited from eBay, but it may be illegal in some areas.
Actually, you're wrong about the legality. The legal definition involves artificial price inflation by the seller or people involved with the seller for the purpose of increasing the profit the seller makes on an auctioned item. A random stranger driving the price up for kicks is not shill bidding.
Even ebay's definition revolves around the legal one, if you read the entire FAQ on shill bidding (it presumes the bidding is being done to profit the seller, and not because someone finds it an amusing afternoon activity).
You may not like a stranger coming in and jacking up the price of an item by playing on the foolishness of ebay bidders, but that doesn't make it illegal. And there's always the risk that the person driving up the bidding will actually have to pay for the item if the other bidders aren't idiots, so the 'safety net' of actual shill bidding doesn't exist.
Right, so when redneck Billy Joe leaves his whole arsenal of personal firearms under the bed in his trailer, and one of his kids takes one to school and kills your kid, are you still going to stand up for Billy Joe's rights to have guns?
My kid has a far better chance of drowning or dying in a fall than getting shot. You won't, however, see me campaigning to outlaw swimming pools or ladders.
Unlike you I see an actual value in gun ownership: self defense.
I'd have to say the number of citizens who've SUCCESSFULLY fended off a burgler/rapist/murderer with a gun is MUCH lower than the number of people that use guns to go shoot up schools/stores/people, etc.
According to the FBI somewhere between 200,000 and 800,000 violent crimes are prevented every year because the intended victim was carrying a gun. The gun is actually discharged in less than 1/10 of 1% of these cases, and most of the time the discharge doesn't result in an actual injury. So you're dead wrong in your assumption.
The FBI no longer publishes the study in question, but there are plenty of others that support these statistics. One of the most scientific and widely-reknown is "Firearms and Violence: A Critical View" by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences; you used to be able to get a pdf version of their report online and I have a copy of it myself. Unless you're going to go completely whacko and contend that these folks have a huge pro-gun bias I suggest that you use this study (along with all the others cited in the paper) to educate yourself on the actual defensive use of guns in the U.S. and its efficacy in preventing violent crimes.
I don't get it. When you were doing this, how did you know that you were pushing the winner over the price they were willing to pay?
By comparing the action on item A, the item where I was finagling the bidders, to the action on an identical or nearly-identical item B. At first I thought the same as you, but that's why I started choosing random items with equivalents on different bids: to see if this was something that could be encouraged, or if I was just lucky in that everything I started bidding on/engineering just happened to turn into a contest.
And then I did this on about a half-dozen occasions to see if it was consistent. It was.
Anecdotal to be sure, but not imcomprehensible. You see the same sort of thing in gamblers; in fact, it's not unlike the tactics used to drive up the stake in a poker game. Experienced, canny poker players will ignore the tactic, but the vast majority of players are neither experienced nor canny and will fall for it every time.
(Note: this sounds like research, but in fact I had time to kill and found the whole thing damned amusing.)
Additionally, I've found the on-line info has made me a less impulsive Brick and Mortar shopper. There are some items I refuse (still) to purchase on-line, but that doesn't stop me from using the internet to find out as much as I can about a product before going to the store. And, I've found myself now seeing an interesting item in a Brick and Mortar, and making note of the product name/manufacture and waiting until I've researched it on the internet before buying.
Nice to know I'm not alone in this. It happens more and more frequently for me when I'm at an actual store, i.e., I put off the purchase until I can research the item and the manufacturer. I want to know if that's the best I can do, or if there's a better deal to be had somewhere else. Or if the item is actually worth purchasing at all (e.g., computer games).
My impulse buying of anything over a few dollars has dropped to nearly zero because of the ease of getting information on the product at home. Even if I'm interested in the product, by the time I do the research the impulse passes and I end up deciding the money could be better spent elsewhere. The internet, perhaps paradoxically for sellers, seems to be a great curb on impulse buys both on and offline, at least for me.
A few years back, there were 3 classical music CD shops around. A big megachain opened, and they dedicated an entire floor to classical and lowballed all prices trying to get the volume sale. These 3 independants went under, and shortly after that, the megachain closed down/vented their classical section.
Yet another reason I shop online for many items. If BestBuy manages to drive out smaller competitors do you honestly think I'm going to go shop there because there isn't anyone else close by? Hell no! I'll turn to Newegg.com and screw BestBuy!
Same thing for music, books, etc. Some chain stores I like, but in most cases I either can't find what I want at the physical store, the prices are higher at the physical store, the clerks are obnoxious and clueless, or the store has a very bad rep (e.g., the aforementioned BestBuy).
Crowd psychology. Despite the timers on auctions and the last-minute blitzes, you can induce people interested in the item to bid on it by doing so yourself. If you time things right and place the bid 'just so', other people who were initially waiting to bid close to the end of the auction will instead feel compelled to jump in and make a counter-bid of their own. A little social engineering and you can start a (completely nonsensical) bidding war over something that would never have reached it's ridiculous end price otherwise.
I've done this before, just to see if it would work. It isn't at all logical, but many of the folks who frequent ebay often get excited when something like this happens and will get in on the action. I've managed to drive the price up on a selection of random items on several occasions using these tactics, and although at first I was concerned that I'd end up 'winning' something I most certainly didn't want I quickly realized the odds of that were small. If done correctly it's almost certain an over-eager easily excited bidder will hop in to claim the prize even if you drive the price up far beyond what the item would otherwise sell for.
As far as I can tell, the 'rush' of the action seems to encourage people to bid on things they normally wouldn't, and to bid higher on things they might be interested in. Logic tells them to do one thing, but adrenaline short-circuits logic. Not unlike gambling in Vegas, I'd guess.
Caveat: I haven't done this in a couple of years and have no idea if ebay has changed it's bidding system to discourage this sort of price jacking. If not, it's an amusing way to waste a lazy afternoon. "There's one born every minute...."
It's also used (quite effectively, even according to the FBI) as a means of defense against violent human predators.
I have no problem if you don't want to carry or use a gun. Go ahead, be prey - your safety isn't my problem. It isn't even the problem of the cops, according to recent court rulings. But you don't have any business trying to turn me into prey just because you can't stand the notion that I may not be as spineless as you are.
But the truth is, 99% of gun use is against people.
This is the flamebait since it's complete bullshit. Guns are primarily used for target practice and hunting, vastly outstripping all instances where guns are used against people - even in the United States.
1.) They are asking already loyal members to suddenly pay for something they've always gotten for free before.
So what? Those "loyal members" don't own the equipment and don't pay for the bandwidth. Loyalty doesn't mean jackshit if you're the guy that has to pay the bills.
2.) Those of us who have been around the Internet for a while remember when the whole purpose of the thing was the free exchange of information.
Big - fucking - deal. I remember those days, too; they weren't nearly as entertaining as they are now. In any event, refer to my previous point. Those "sections of the internet" are owned by someone *who isn't you*.
I think it's a crock that people pay nothing for a service and then feel they have been cheated because they used it for free and now have to pay.
Let the free market decide. If there are enough folks willing to pay for the service, it'll survive; if not it'll die, and good riddance.
I've seen all sorts of sites try to institute pay schemes of various kinds. With a few exceptions (some of them well-known) they all went belly-up and new sites took over after they died.
Slashdot could easily fix the 'idiot moderator' problem, like this:
- award mod points as they do now. However, these mod points can only be used to mod comments *up*, not down.
- anyone at all can mod a comment down, by one point. However, every time you mod a comment down *it also subtracts a point from your own karma*.
What does this do? It keeps the random karma infusion system intact, but effectively castrates the trolls and idiots from slamming the people they don't like because most of the trolls and idiots don't have the karma to spare to mod other folks down. Or they're too invested in increasing their own karma to use it in this fashion.
If someone who isn't a troll or an idiot wants to mod a comment down and has karma to burn they can do so. But my guess is that either a) most high-karma users probably don't bother to negatively moderate anyway, or b) they really care about their karma scores and will only mod down if they're really, really pissed off about something.
Problem solved. Fools are declawed but the moderation system remains intact.
Sorry, but there's no way in hell I'd pay to provide content, especially if my content then was to become someone else's copyright (which I bet just might be the case here).
Second that. As the poster said, if what we wanted was news we'd go to more credible sites than this one. It's the interesting commentary that keeps me dropping in every now and then, commentary provided for free by posters. If I had to pay for that I can better spend my money elsewhere.
And despite what any site may say in its terms of agreement, I will never give up ownership of my words - at least not without proper compensation, spelled out in a contract signed by yours truly. Slashdot does not, and will never, own my words regardless of the TOS.
It appears my information on recidivism and treatment effectiveness is badly out of date, as I haven't kept up with the field since 1991. Ignore my statistics on recidivism as the current science on the subject is considerably different than what it was 14 years ago. If I could delete the above post I would.
Slashdot Mirror
and will eventually go to the moon (between 2015 and 2020).
Whereupon they'll be given a warm welcome by Mike Melville and the crew of Tycho Station, who'll present them with their very own "Welcome to the Moon, Inc." wings.
Max
Mind if I adopt it?
Go right ahead. But be warned: crazy-assed Christian zealots will take to modding down everything you write whenever they get mod points.
Max
I really don't see any reason why you should be able to.
Fortunately the decision isn't up to you. If it were we'd all be victims just waiting our turn to be preyed upon.
Max
How about "If you don't want to get DDoS'ed, then don't run a gambling website"?
Last I checked, the employees of the gambling site don't sneak into your business and steal your equipment in the middle of the night. Talk about a failure in applying logic....
Max
The very idea of killing someone over something so trivial as a router makes me sick.
If you don't want to get shot then don't steal. It's really that simple.
Max
But first we have to get over this strange idea that because it's The Internet, everyone should be allowed to use it, without any traceability or responsibility for their actions whatsoever, regardless of the harm it may cause others.
The sad thing is you could prevent 99% of the hijacking attempts against your (windows) machine by doing just two things:
- don't use IE; and
- install ZoneAlarm
This isn't exactly rocket science. And it doesn't require draconian legislation requiring that all communication from every machine be traced and logged.
Max
Sadly, among the largely 16-21 year old, male-dominated, non-long-term-thinking, annoyingly over-opinionated, idiot-savant Slashdot crowd, paying anything for information, regardless of real value, is an anathema.
This tripe is insightful? Jesus H., all I have to do to get modded up is make insulting gross overgeneralizations about specific groups of people and I'm off to the races! Oh, and construct grammatically nonsensical clauses like this:
"Your argument is sound as a balance of value and benefit"
It helps when the reader can't make heads nor tails of what the fuck you're trying to say.
Max
Newspapers are very important to our society.
Even if this were true in the past or (more dubiously) in the present, how does this obligate me to pay the NYT for archive access? They can charge, and I can decline to pay and decide to go somewhere else for old news - say, the local library.
You seem to imply there's a moral argument here. There isn't. It's about the introduction of a business model which may or may not work.
Max
I just think it's pathetic that we live in an era where people trying to do something nice gets stabbed in the back for it..
And this would be different from any other era in human history how?
Max
so you can end up with code completely unrelated to any GPLed code having to be GPLed because it's magically become "combined" with the GPLed code.
That's not only complete bullshit, but a nearly verbatim regurgitation of MS FUD. If you think otherwise, please cite - word-for-word - the clause in the GPL which proves your assertion.
There are few things more reliable than the GPL zealot's tendency to dismiss anything remotely critical of the GPL with the "but it's voluntary" spiel.
This coming from an anti-GPL zealot who can't even keep his fucking facts straight.
The answer to his question is because that's precisely what the GPL is *designed* to do - generate more GPLed code by "infecting" other code.
Riiiight. Again, cite that part of the GPL copyright which supports this idiotic statement.
Oh, but wait - you can't. Because there is no such clause in the GPL. All of this is nothing more than lies. Perhaps you think that if you lie long enough and often people people will actually begin to believe the horseshit coming out of your mouth?
Yet another waste of good oxygen screwing with the noise-to-signal ratio on the internet....
Max
What you were doing there is called "Shill Bidding", and it's not only prohibited from eBay, but it may be illegal in some areas.
Actually, you're wrong about the legality. The legal definition involves artificial price inflation by the seller or people involved with the seller for the purpose of increasing the profit the seller makes on an auctioned item. A random stranger driving the price up for kicks is not shill bidding.
Even ebay's definition revolves around the legal one, if you read the entire FAQ on shill bidding (it presumes the bidding is being done to profit the seller, and not because someone finds it an amusing afternoon activity).
You may not like a stranger coming in and jacking up the price of an item by playing on the foolishness of ebay bidders, but that doesn't make it illegal. And there's always the risk that the person driving up the bidding will actually have to pay for the item if the other bidders aren't idiots, so the 'safety net' of actual shill bidding doesn't exist.
Max
Right, so when redneck Billy Joe leaves his whole arsenal of personal firearms under the bed in his trailer, and one of his kids takes one to school and kills your kid, are you still going to stand up for Billy Joe's rights to have guns?
My kid has a far better chance of drowning or dying in a fall than getting shot. You won't, however, see me campaigning to outlaw swimming pools or ladders.
Unlike you I see an actual value in gun ownership: self defense.
I'd have to say the number of citizens who've SUCCESSFULLY fended off a burgler/rapist/murderer with a gun is MUCH lower than the number of people that use guns to go shoot up schools/stores/people, etc.
According to the FBI somewhere between 200,000 and 800,000 violent crimes are prevented every year because the intended victim was carrying a gun. The gun is actually discharged in less than 1/10 of 1% of these cases, and most of the time the discharge doesn't result in an actual injury. So you're dead wrong in your assumption.
The FBI no longer publishes the study in question, but there are plenty of others that support these statistics. One of the most scientific and widely-reknown is "Firearms and Violence: A Critical View" by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences; you used to be able to get a pdf version of their report online and I have a copy of it myself. Unless you're going to go completely whacko and contend that these folks have a huge pro-gun bias I suggest that you use this study (along with all the others cited in the paper) to educate yourself on the actual defensive use of guns in the U.S. and its efficacy in preventing violent crimes.
Max
I don't get it. When you were doing this, how did you know that you were pushing the winner over the price they were willing to pay?
By comparing the action on item A, the item where I was finagling the bidders, to the action on an identical or nearly-identical item B. At first I thought the same as you, but that's why I started choosing random items with equivalents on different bids: to see if this was something that could be encouraged, or if I was just lucky in that everything I started bidding on/engineering just happened to turn into a contest.
And then I did this on about a half-dozen occasions to see if it was consistent. It was.
Anecdotal to be sure, but not imcomprehensible. You see the same sort of thing in gamblers; in fact, it's not unlike the tactics used to drive up the stake in a poker game. Experienced, canny poker players will ignore the tactic, but the vast majority of players are neither experienced nor canny and will fall for it every time.
(Note: this sounds like research, but in fact I had time to kill and found the whole thing damned amusing.)
Max
Additionally, I've found the on-line info has made me a less impulsive Brick and Mortar shopper. There are some items I refuse (still) to purchase on-line, but that doesn't stop me from using the internet to find out as much as I can about a product before going to the store. And, I've found myself now seeing an interesting item in a Brick and Mortar, and making note of the product name/manufacture and waiting until I've researched it on the internet before buying.
Nice to know I'm not alone in this. It happens more and more frequently for me when I'm at an actual store, i.e., I put off the purchase until I can research the item and the manufacturer. I want to know if that's the best I can do, or if there's a better deal to be had somewhere else. Or if the item is actually worth purchasing at all (e.g., computer games).
My impulse buying of anything over a few dollars has dropped to nearly zero because of the ease of getting information on the product at home. Even if I'm interested in the product, by the time I do the research the impulse passes and I end up deciding the money could be better spent elsewhere. The internet, perhaps paradoxically for sellers, seems to be a great curb on impulse buys both on and offline, at least for me.
Max
A few years back, there were 3 classical music CD shops around. A big megachain opened, and they dedicated an entire floor to classical and lowballed all prices trying to get the volume sale. These 3 independants went under, and shortly after that, the megachain closed down/vented their classical section.
Yet another reason I shop online for many items. If BestBuy manages to drive out smaller competitors do you honestly think I'm going to go shop there because there isn't anyone else close by? Hell no! I'll turn to Newegg.com and screw BestBuy!
Same thing for music, books, etc. Some chain stores I like, but in most cases I either can't find what I want at the physical store, the prices are higher at the physical store, the clerks are obnoxious and clueless, or the store has a very bad rep (e.g., the aforementioned BestBuy).
Max
Crowd psychology. Despite the timers on auctions and the last-minute blitzes, you can induce people interested in the item to bid on it by doing so yourself. If you time things right and place the bid 'just so', other people who were initially waiting to bid close to the end of the auction will instead feel compelled to jump in and make a counter-bid of their own. A little social engineering and you can start a (completely nonsensical) bidding war over something that would never have reached it's ridiculous end price otherwise.
I've done this before, just to see if it would work. It isn't at all logical, but many of the folks who frequent ebay often get excited when something like this happens and will get in on the action. I've managed to drive the price up on a selection of random items on several occasions using these tactics, and although at first I was concerned that I'd end up 'winning' something I most certainly didn't want I quickly realized the odds of that were small. If done correctly it's almost certain an over-eager easily excited bidder will hop in to claim the prize even if you drive the price up far beyond what the item would otherwise sell for.
As far as I can tell, the 'rush' of the action seems to encourage people to bid on things they normally wouldn't, and to bid higher on things they might be interested in. Logic tells them to do one thing, but adrenaline short-circuits logic. Not unlike gambling in Vegas, I'd guess.
Caveat: I haven't done this in a couple of years and have no idea if ebay has changed it's bidding system to discourage this sort of price jacking. If not, it's an amusing way to waste a lazy afternoon. "There's one born every minute...."
Max
So there is still a fairly just debate over the fact that guns are by nature evil .
Inanimate objects are incapable of being evil.
Max
Take the example of Eyes Wide Shut, probably among the best written erotic films in existence.
This is logically equivalent to calling "Debbie Does Dallas" one of the greatest dramas of all time.
Max
It is used as a weapon of war.
It's also used (quite effectively, even according to the FBI) as a means of defense against violent human predators.
I have no problem if you don't want to carry or use a gun. Go ahead, be prey - your safety isn't my problem. It isn't even the problem of the cops, according to recent court rulings. But you don't have any business trying to turn me into prey just because you can't stand the notion that I may not be as spineless as you are.
Max
But the truth is, 99% of gun use is against people.
This is the flamebait since it's complete bullshit. Guns are primarily used for target practice and hunting, vastly outstripping all instances where guns are used against people - even in the United States.
Max
1.) They are asking already loyal members to suddenly pay for something they've always gotten for free before.
So what? Those "loyal members" don't own the equipment and don't pay for the bandwidth. Loyalty doesn't mean jackshit if you're the guy that has to pay the bills.
2.) Those of us who have been around the Internet for a while remember when the whole purpose of the thing was the free exchange of information.
Big - fucking - deal. I remember those days, too; they weren't nearly as entertaining as they are now. In any event, refer to my previous point. Those "sections of the internet" are owned by someone *who isn't you*.
Max
I think it's a crock that people pay nothing for a service and then feel they have been cheated because they used it for free and now have to pay.
Let the free market decide. If there are enough folks willing to pay for the service, it'll survive; if not it'll die, and good riddance.
I've seen all sorts of sites try to institute pay schemes of various kinds. With a few exceptions (some of them well-known) they all went belly-up and new sites took over after they died.
Works for me.
Max
Slashdot could easily fix the 'idiot moderator' problem, like this:
- award mod points as they do now. However, these mod points can only be used to mod comments *up*, not down.
- anyone at all can mod a comment down, by one point. However, every time you mod a comment down *it also subtracts a point from your own karma*.
What does this do? It keeps the random karma infusion system intact, but effectively castrates the trolls and idiots from slamming the people they don't like because most of the trolls and idiots don't have the karma to spare to mod other folks down. Or they're too invested in increasing their own karma to use it in this fashion.
If someone who isn't a troll or an idiot wants to mod a comment down and has karma to burn they can do so. But my guess is that either a) most high-karma users probably don't bother to negatively moderate anyway, or b) they really care about their karma scores and will only mod down if they're really, really pissed off about something.
Problem solved. Fools are declawed but the moderation system remains intact.
Max
Sorry, but there's no way in hell I'd pay to provide content, especially if my content then was to become someone else's copyright (which I bet just might be the case here).
Second that. As the poster said, if what we wanted was news we'd go to more credible sites than this one. It's the interesting commentary that keeps me dropping in every now and then, commentary provided for free by posters. If I had to pay for that I can better spend my money elsewhere.
And despite what any site may say in its terms of agreement, I will never give up ownership of my words - at least not without proper compensation, spelled out in a contract signed by yours truly. Slashdot does not, and will never, own my words regardless of the TOS.
Max
It appears my information on recidivism and treatment effectiveness is badly out of date, as I haven't kept up with the field since 1991. Ignore my statistics on recidivism as the current science on the subject is considerably different than what it was 14 years ago. If I could delete the above post I would.
Max