If Slashdot would want to ask me micro payments for the contents on here, I'd be willing to pay for it. Think about it, Slashdot would be perfect for this, with the moderation involved 'n all.
However, I would like to recommend something for that case. The submitted story approval should IMHO then not be done by the editors. No personal offense to the editors here, but I think their opinion on what's 'interesting' is not neccesarily a good representation of what readers find interesting (well, not like they've been doing *that* bad so far:)
Instead, the editors should be responsible for grouping multiple submitted stories together as a 'subject'. Readers can then moderate these subjects, and subjects that turn out to be very popular could then be put on the homepage. The more popular, the more 'payment' would be required to read this thread. Ofcourse, this way sometimes 'not so interesting but nearly free' subjects could be posted by the editors in order to give them the ability to still have some control over the identity of the site; Not *Everything* has to be 'profitable' per se, right?
Now, people post and moderate as usual. Reading very funny/very insightfull/very interesting posts costs more, depending on the moderation totals. Reading unmoderated posts costs nothing. This would also encourage reading the later posts which may be very interesting but not yet moderated.
This way the micropayments would also slightly steer the behaviour of/. readers into digging somewhat more into late posts, european, asian, australian posts for example (because they're posted later than most US articles, they often don't get moderated) and in this way make the site more international. The more I think about this, the more I think I should have Slashdot micropay me for this idea:P
He could use that fly suit! Just make him do a 'testflight' and put some extremely high energy fuel into his tank without telling him. He'll probably have one hell of a time getting to space with one of those babies.
Yeah, but hey, the US economy is doing pretty bad, Fed rate cuts are making minimal differences only, so the next step is evident... The US government will start pumping big money in the economy to revive the economy and keep all the unemployed off of the street. With all them high tech people laid off, what better plan than to pump this money into some high tech military equipment?
YES! I like your style, I'm SURE I'd love your coffee. But read on, on how to prepare turkish/yugoslavian coffee. I too, enjoy a good cup of espresso, but the good old-fashioned way of having the grounds directly INSIDE the water cannot be beaten!! At some point you even start enjoying grinding the super thin grinded coffee fragments between your teeth. Like you say, a good grinder is KEY. Go to a turkish coffeehouse if you have one close and resist your initial 'OH NO!!' and drink it. Do it for a week, every single day, and you're hooked. Even your espresso won't taste the same anymore:)
Besides that, it is said that you can read the future in the patterns the coffeegrounds make on the inside of the cup after you have drank your coffee and turned the cup upside down.
For a period in my life, all I drank was yugoslavian coffee (pretty much coz I was there but it's prepared similarly to turkish coffee). The first time I drank it in the train on my way to Zagreb, I nearly threw up, YUCK, ICK, how dare they do that to coffee!! Later I got introduced in 'the' way to prepare it (as opposed to the train-coffee for which I got laughed at for even daring to taste it, but hey, caffeine is life, the caffeine must flow!)
You take exactly enough water for one cup of coffee, and boil it in a little can that's shaped perfectly well for this purpose. Then, when it's boiling, put on a little bit of the very finely grinded coffee grounds (so, directly in the water). It starts foaming even though the can is now off the stove. It forms little bubbles a bit comparable to the bubbles on Guiness. If you drink sugar in it, remember to boil the sugar along with the water.
First I found it a bit weird, and kept spitting out little pieces of coffee gunk coz I drank too hastily. After learning how to avoid this, and getting used to the taste... *mmmmmmmm* yum yum. The caffeine flows!
The first cup of 'regular' coffee after a few weeks of this tasted REMARKABLY tasteless, like drinking dishwasher water almost. If you haven't drank coffee the before described way, you don't know what COFFEE is. Roast your own beans, too, and your coffee life will never be the same anymore:)))
Well DAMN wazza!! I could not agree with you more!! However, I must share with you this little secret that I posted these three posts while I had a buzz. Guiness rocks. I have to admit I had to rub out my eyes when I saw the original post had been moderated up. But then again, this JUST indicates that slashdotters can read between the lines and recognise a Guiness response! Life is good. *beep*
If you don't stop your actions, I will be forced to contact your ISP, and their ISP. I read securityfocus, bugtraq, slashdot, I KNOW what I'm doing, TRUST me! I will bring your site down, IF YOU DON'T STOP IT!!
I am a Linux newcomer, but I am not STUPID! Don't think you can DoS me with your scripts 'n all you SCRIPTKID evil hax0r!!! I have read all the security FAQs and trust me, I KNOW what I'm doing! I saw it in my syslog!!! You connected to my ident port!! It is the LAW that you cannot PORTSCAN me, it is illegal!
I'm a Dutch guy living in the US. Even though I have a disgust of some, or a lot, of this country's politics, I would like to try and come to the 'rescue' of 'Americans' as you call them.
The current American government was elected by a small majority of voters. Only 30% or so, if I remember correctly, of the Americans voted. Thus, the American government was chosen by approximately 15% of the Americans.
You cannot judge all Americans by the actions of their government. After having lived here for over 5 years, I can tell you that I have met a LOT of sane Americans, in fact the majority of people I have met here are very sane about a lot of the things often discussed here on slashdot for example. Perhaps this is indicative of which people I get in contact with, perhaps it's indicative of the 'Americans' as a whole. I will not make any judgement on that as I do not KNOW the majority of Americans, I can only give you my personal observation.
That said, I would like to elaborate a bit on why I DO think this is one F*CKED up country. Don't get me wrong, I live here still, I make good money still, I contribute through my tax money to upholding everything that's wrong in this country. I'm sure a lot of Americans feel the same. I fortunately have the choice to move back to my own country at some point, most Americans do not have that luxury.
So, why did only 30% of Americans vote, you might ask. I think that's a fair question. Does this indicate fundamental lazyness among 'Americans' ? A fundamental disinterest in politics and what goes on in the rest of the world? I think not. A fundamental despair of political choice, a deep, historically grown distrust of politics seem more likely. It is 70% of the Americans stating that they do NOT support their government or any of the choices they have.
So 70% of Americans (minus some lazy bums) says 'our government, our politics, our choices SUCK'. Half of the 30% that did vote did not vote on the current government. So basically, 85% of Americans SHARE your opinion about the ridicule that's going on in this country. So I hope that addresses your 'wondering' about Americans.
Now about 'tolerating breaches of constitutional law'. No, I won't go into details on how the Nazis got empowered. I'm quite certain though that a MAJORITY (maybe even more than 85%?) of Germans did NOT agree with the Nazis. They got in control anyways. This is what is happening in the USA right now. Just here you don't call them Nazis since they're not in the Nazi party, but elitarian facsists is probably a pretty good description of the current US government. Do you think Americans *want* that? That they've all gone collectively insane? I think not huh. At least 85% did not expressly agree with this government getting in control. I think of the 15% that did, lots are currently quickly changing their mind and thinking 'my god what have I done?' (does that sound remotely familiar to 'Ich habe es nicht gewusst').
My opinion is that excessive situations like the current US politics start forming when some of the fundamental beliefs in a country start clashing. Here in the US I think there's two very basic fundamental things that have always kind of kept each other in check have started growing apart rapidly lately:
Equality. The fundamental belief that every individual has the same rights, the same power, the same everything at birth.
Capitalism. The fundamental belief that every individual is allowed to make a living (?)... a BIG living (?) a PREPOSTEROUS living (?) and... use everything that he/she 'earned' to 'earn/bully' even more earnings and using all that your freedom has ALLOWED you to earn in order to bully other people into giving up some of their equality.
See, I make no judgement about either here, I believe these two fundamental things CAN co-exist. They can, when the 'morale' is right. As you can probably tell, I am biassed somewhat negatively towards capitalism. Putting an artificial cap to how much wealth one can obtain is no solution to avoiding the excesses of the capitalistic structure. Still, I believe that it's THESE EXCESSES that are currently giving the balance between those two fundamental things a really bad swing. The power structures created by these excesses are growing too large for the Equality to have a fair chance. The extremely powerfull are starting to think they're little tin Gods that DO have the power to limit other people's 'freedom' (a direct result of the 'Equality').
God I'm getting longwinded. I should stop here, before I start getting into an infinite loop disagreeing basically with myself.
Ofcourse, you could always just build your own
LART or just purchase one from Aleph1's website. At least that way also the hardware design is opensource.... You'll have to buy your own radiocrack box for this though, and they don't have ethernet on the board itself (you need a 'kitchensink' board for that)
All kinds of creative thoughts were going through my mind. See, the opinion here on/. always seems to be that the law is on big corporate's side. However, this lawyer who recently answered a bunch of questions on the GPL (sorry dude, forgot your name:) said that this is not always the case. I wonder IF this is really so. What if thousands of people 'sign' their support electronically on some webform stating something like 'Corporate bullying has gone TOO far. This is where *I* take a personal stand AGAINST such practices AND, where applicable, the legal backing by the courts for those with the deepest pockets. This MUST end, and the law should again be more in the SPIRIT of the law as opposed to the letter of the law.'.
Lawyers? Would this make any impression on the court whatsoever if these guys decide to go to court? If so, how big need the numbers be to be impressive? If this is of any benefit at all, I'll whip up some form and some mysql DB in a bit and put it on a webserver.
That said... the other point of view is that... fighting them (AOL) is not the way I think. The opensource movement is beating M$'s and AOL's at their own game by NOT playing by their rules, by NOT charging money for work, by a FAIRNESS principle that none of these huge corporations will ever understand. What would be better to do than to just say 'sure AOL, we will change the name' and put some nice piece of publicity or something around it?
Then again... there's probably not many/.'s out there that would give 'yetanothercorporatebullystory' the light of day, and if they would, all people would think (probably) "oh... another one".
By taking away ALL IP rights, artists have nothing left to sell to publishers
Sure they have. Do like painters do, set up a little shop, sell your original CD's in your gallery. Ask premium money for it. If you're really good, people will pay it for the 'original'.
If you're not so good... Well, you should probably go find another job then. Or practice at getting better, better, until you find *just* that right style that lots of people will like. I admit, it's a really NEW concept to work that way isn't it?
There's something about 'art' and 'massproduction' that just don't go very well together for me. Anybody else have that feeling too??
So you think that paying the record industry, oh, 95% of the purchase price of a CD just to keep some band of artists in business is 'intelligent' ? I can see why you plan to get a law degree, lawyers often mistake ill logic for intelligence and their acts always enrich corporations. Party on smarthead.
Hah! I don't know what this First Amendment Right of companies having the 'right' to contact you is all about. While this may be part of the first amendment in the US, it CERTAINLY is not a right of companies in all countries in the world, heaven forbids. 'All your phonelines, mailboxes and emailaddresses are belong to us'... riiiiiight. This senator should take his head out of his ass and look across the border, since this nationally assumed 'right' is certainly not appreciated across the borders of the USA and everybody knows that spammers know no borders. What kind of an IDIOTIC 'right' is this anyway?!?!?!
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Re:Am I the only one who can "tune out" the noise?
on
Yo - Pay Attention!
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· Score: 2
And I REALLY don't beleive the corelation with ADD.
I concur. As the step-parent of a kid who's suffering from ADD, I can tell you for certain that ADD is caused by a chemical imbalance, and not like Katz suggests by an overload of information. Katz, drag your head out of your ass and don't comment on medical issues that you apparently don't know anything about.
Honestly, I do not believe that the original poster meant to elaborate on the average IQ of fuckedcompany.com posters.
I have noticed however that it's very very VERY quiet in VA Linux land and I'm a tad annoyed myself that rumors on impending (new) layoffs at VA Linux are not posted on/. while profit reports for Redhat ARE posted.
When reading this, I all of the sudden got this visual of evil nasty beasts from Hell jumping on this cute 'lil deer's neck and ripping it to pieces. I must be hallucinating.
But, when I was in college and lived in a small house with three other students, one of the guys had a brother who actually made it his hobby to build speakers himself.
Another guy was an industrial design student so you can guess those two teamed up pretty well. And the logical endresult was two guys designing a set of speakers which 1) looked good and 2) sound great.
They still cost a fair amount of money, probably more than I would ever shell out for them, but my God, it was really most impressive how, armed with some books on the subject and some good quality material, these guys made a speakerset that really sounds awesome! If you're a true audiophile, I definitely think it's worth to experiment with building at least the speakers yourself, for relatively little money you can built speakers that are far better than most commercially available. The speakers are very often the quickest and most rewarding improvement even the average listener can make to their stereo equipment.
Slashdot Mirror
However, I would like to recommend something for that case. The submitted story approval should IMHO then not be done by the editors. No personal offense to the editors here, but I think their opinion on what's 'interesting' is not neccesarily a good representation of what readers find interesting (well, not like they've been doing *that* bad so far :)
Instead, the editors should be responsible for grouping multiple submitted stories together as a 'subject'. Readers can then moderate these subjects, and subjects that turn out to be very popular could then be put on the homepage. The more popular, the more 'payment' would be required to read this thread. Ofcourse, this way sometimes 'not so interesting but nearly free' subjects could be posted by the editors in order to give them the ability to still have some control over the identity of the site; Not *Everything* has to be 'profitable' per se, right?
Now, people post and moderate as usual. Reading very funny/very insightfull/very interesting posts costs more, depending on the moderation totals. Reading unmoderated posts costs nothing. This would also encourage reading the later posts which may be very interesting but not yet moderated.
This way the micropayments would also slightly steer the behaviour of /. readers into digging somewhat more into late posts, european, asian, australian posts for example (because they're posted later than most US articles, they often don't get moderated) and in this way make the site more international. The more I think about this, the more I think I should have Slashdot micropay me for this idea :P
So I read the license and it's 'Free as in Speech, not Free as in Beer'. Damn small print!
Besides that, it is said that you can read the future in the patterns the coffeegrounds make on the inside of the cup after you have drank your coffee and turned the cup upside down.
You take exactly enough water for one cup of coffee, and boil it in a little can that's shaped perfectly well for this purpose. Then, when it's boiling, put on a little bit of the very finely grinded coffee grounds (so, directly in the water). It starts foaming even though the can is now off the stove. It forms little bubbles a bit comparable to the bubbles on Guiness. If you drink sugar in it, remember to boil the sugar along with the water.
First I found it a bit weird, and kept spitting out little pieces of coffee gunk coz I drank too hastily. After learning how to avoid this, and getting used to the taste... *mmmmmmmm* yum yum. The caffeine flows!
The first cup of 'regular' coffee after a few weeks of this tasted REMARKABLY tasteless, like drinking dishwasher water almost. If you haven't drank coffee the before described way, you don't know what COFFEE is. Roast your own beans, too, and your coffee life will never be the same anymore :)))
The current American government was elected by a small majority of voters. Only 30% or so, if I remember correctly, of the Americans voted. Thus, the American government was chosen by approximately 15% of the Americans.
You cannot judge all Americans by the actions of their government. After having lived here for over 5 years, I can tell you that I have met a LOT of sane Americans, in fact the majority of people I have met here are very sane about a lot of the things often discussed here on slashdot for example. Perhaps this is indicative of which people I get in contact with, perhaps it's indicative of the 'Americans' as a whole. I will not make any judgement on that as I do not KNOW the majority of Americans, I can only give you my personal observation.
That said, I would like to elaborate a bit on why I DO think this is one F*CKED up country. Don't get me wrong, I live here still, I make good money still, I contribute through my tax money to upholding everything that's wrong in this country. I'm sure a lot of Americans feel the same. I fortunately have the choice to move back to my own country at some point, most Americans do not have that luxury.
So, why did only 30% of Americans vote, you might ask. I think that's a fair question. Does this indicate fundamental lazyness among 'Americans' ? A fundamental disinterest in politics and what goes on in the rest of the world? I think not. A fundamental despair of political choice, a deep, historically grown distrust of politics seem more likely. It is 70% of the Americans stating that they do NOT support their government or any of the choices they have.
So 70% of Americans (minus some lazy bums) says 'our government, our politics, our choices SUCK'. Half of the 30% that did vote did not vote on the current government. So basically, 85% of Americans SHARE your opinion about the ridicule that's going on in this country. So I hope that addresses your 'wondering' about Americans.
Now about 'tolerating breaches of constitutional law'. No, I won't go into details on how the Nazis got empowered. I'm quite certain though that a MAJORITY (maybe even more than 85%?) of Germans did NOT agree with the Nazis. They got in control anyways. This is what is happening in the USA right now. Just here you don't call them Nazis since they're not in the Nazi party, but elitarian facsists is probably a pretty good description of the current US government. Do you think Americans *want* that? That they've all gone collectively insane? I think not huh. At least 85% did not expressly agree with this government getting in control. I think of the 15% that did, lots are currently quickly changing their mind and thinking 'my god what have I done?' (does that sound remotely familiar to 'Ich habe es nicht gewusst').
My opinion is that excessive situations like the current US politics start forming when some of the fundamental beliefs in a country start clashing. Here in the US I think there's two very basic fundamental things that have always kind of kept each other in check have started growing apart rapidly lately:
- Equality. The fundamental belief that every individual has the same rights, the same power, the same everything at birth.
- Capitalism. The fundamental belief that every individual is allowed to make a living (?)
... a BIG living (?) a PREPOSTEROUS living (?) and... use everything that he/she 'earned' to 'earn/bully' even more earnings and using all that your freedom has ALLOWED you to earn in order to bully other people into giving up some of their equality.
See, I make no judgement about either here, I believe these two fundamental things CAN co-exist. They can, when the 'morale' is right. As you can probably tell, I am biassed somewhat negatively towards capitalism. Putting an artificial cap to how much wealth one can obtain is no solution to avoiding the excesses of the capitalistic structure. Still, I believe that it's THESE EXCESSES that are currently giving the balance between those two fundamental things a really bad swing. The power structures created by these excesses are growing too large for the Equality to have a fair chance. The extremely powerfull are starting to think they're little tin Gods that DO have the power to limit other people's 'freedom' (a direct result of the 'Equality'). God I'm getting longwinded. I should stop here, before I start getting into an infinite loop disagreeing basically with myself.Lawyers? Would this make any impression on the court whatsoever if these guys decide to go to court? If so, how big need the numbers be to be impressive? If this is of any benefit at all, I'll whip up some form and some mysql DB in a bit and put it on a webserver.
That said... the other point of view is that... fighting them (AOL) is not the way I think. The opensource movement is beating M$'s and AOL's at their own game by NOT playing by their rules, by NOT charging money for work, by a FAIRNESS principle that none of these huge corporations will ever understand. What would be better to do than to just say 'sure AOL, we will change the name' and put some nice piece of publicity or something around it?
Then again... there's probably not many /.'s out there that would give 'yetanothercorporatebullystory' the light of day, and if they would, all people would think (probably) "oh... another one".
I'm sure if they just trick their SCO customers into believing they're still using SCO, they could pull that off. bah.
Sure they have. Do like painters do, set up a little shop, sell your original CD's in your gallery. Ask premium money for it. If you're really good, people will pay it for the 'original'.
If you're not so good... Well, you should probably go find another job then. Or practice at getting better, better, until you find *just* that right style that lots of people will like. I admit, it's a really NEW concept to work that way isn't it?
There's something about 'art' and 'massproduction' that just don't go very well together for me. Anybody else have that feeling too??
Huh?
So you think that paying the record industry, oh, 95% of the purchase price of a CD just to keep some band of artists in business is 'intelligent' ? I can see why you plan to get a law degree, lawyers often mistake ill logic for intelligence and their acts always enrich corporations. Party on smarthead.
I concur. As the step-parent of a kid who's suffering from ADD, I can tell you for certain that ADD is caused by a chemical imbalance, and not like Katz suggests by an overload of information. Katz, drag your head out of your ass and don't comment on medical issues that you apparently don't know anything about.
I have noticed however that it's very very VERY quiet in VA Linux land and I'm a tad annoyed myself that rumors on impending (new) layoffs at VA Linux are not posted on /. while profit reports for Redhat ARE posted.
Another guy was an industrial design student so you can guess those two teamed up pretty well. And the logical endresult was two guys designing a set of speakers which 1) looked good and 2) sound great.
They still cost a fair amount of money, probably more than I would ever shell out for them, but my God, it was really most impressive how, armed with some books on the subject and some good quality material, these guys made a speakerset that really sounds awesome! If you're a true audiophile, I definitely think it's worth to experiment with building at least the speakers yourself, for relatively little money you can built speakers that are far better than most commercially available. The speakers are very often the quickest and most rewarding improvement even the average listener can make to their stereo equipment.
No, that's WABI, or also known among Sun support people as 'What A Bloody Interface.
Sorry for being offtopic but I had to correct this };-)