The project centres on a fundamental human desire to 'map' and 'mark' territory as part of belonging and of feeling a sense of ownership of our environment.
this, in fact, is the stated purpose of the project.
now if they included some sort of slashdot-style moderation-system where people could mod down annoying messages, this might become interesting. But then again, who wants to pay for GPRS traffic just to mod down some troll
not at all! now is the time to block it. if people swarm to use it, you can still unblock it and get all the hits you like. until that time, if enough people block it, it may remain so obviously behind that it will never gain momentum (most people use google, right now, remember? it's difficult to get people to switch from something they know, remember? even if what they are using is crap, so how much more will it take to make people leave google?)
we vote for a search engine not only by using it, but also by letting ourselves be crawled by it (google can crawl me even when other users are locked out due to server overload...)
if you have a non-commercial website, and if you can do without visits by some random jerk stumbling across your website,
simply block by referrer: "msnbot/0.11 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
let's see successful they get if the really useful pages (which are mostly non-commercial) cannot be found with them
you did not get his point -- he didn't say he hated Stephenson being too erudite. He said he hated Stephenson making a big fuss about something not nearly as erudite as he thinks.
I agree.
read Stephenson going on for two pages about a pipe organ.
read Umberto Eco going on for two pages about $ARTEFACT
Stephenson makes a fool of himself, or pales into insignificance, simple as that.
what he said. this is really the best (and shortestest) characterisation of NS's 'plot-crashing' I can think of.
yep, the concept of a human 'machine language' is cool. but, in a cyberpunk (not, faery or whatnot) setting, shouldn't at least an attempt be made to be neurologically credible? just evoking sumerian is lame. if you study only a little bit of sumerian, you will see that it is just another human language people write their everyday stuff in. for my taste, the conspiracy would have had to be slightly more involved to be palatable; apart from being totally foreign to the rest of the concepts -- come on, this is like Darth Vader hunting for the Holy Grail!
so, would you argue that everything that doesn't make sense in his books must be a parody, and therefore he is a brilliant writer?
I can see satirical value about the FBI devolving into a tribal society. In fact I found the post-USA bits very well done. But for the book's resolution he has shot at just a tiny bit too much fulminance.
Snow Crash interweaves everything from Sumerian myth to visions of a postmodern civilization on the brink of collapse.
-- unless they are being sarcastic and by "interweaving sumerian myths" they mean "mumbling about obscure concepts he hopes his readers haven't heard about'.
I think there are common threads between writing and programming
Except at the end of a program, you have close all your open brackets. And, programs do not need to have overblown hollywood showdowns as endings --
seriously, I was fascinated by NS's books. I read Snowcrash, Diamond Age (the first novel I read on my cellphone, commuting), Cryptonomicon --- every one of these books made me unable to put them down during their first chapters, and had me cringing more and more towards their less than satisfying resolutions. This may be just a matter of taste, though. (But seriously -- mind-controlling magic qualities of the old sumerian language???)
I was under the impression that you can only be localized with a precision of around 100m using cellphone signal strength (maybe slightly better in urban centers) -- how will you lure players to some specific 'dark corner' then? I suppose the service providers could do some fancy triangulation with your signal strength at different stations, but a) you would have to get them to actually do that and give you the data, b) this would raise serious privacy issues.
this may be just a ploy to get people to accept tracking technologies. I have been waiting for them to come up with a reason why tracking us was a "good thing", but I didn't figure the rationale would be a game. I suppose, soon standard phones will come with gps receivers, and as to who your position is transmitted to -- well, you'll just have to trust the firmware does what the booklet says it does.
I concur with you, sir! The trolling of April's Fools threads should actually be rewarded. In fact, they should just invert the whole karma system for the day and be done with it.
back in 1997 when I was a physics exchange student in Glasgow, they made me solve a *quantum machanics* problem using excel! it was ridiculous. I kept the spreadsheet just for its absurdity (it's the only.xls file on my entire harddrive)
if it will mean I have to pay fees to Microsoft to get my domain signed, I'd rather continue filtering out spoofed-bounces, thank you.
Interesting how instead of supporting a perfectly sound project that has been going for a year, everybody seems to have to come up with their own little *patented* scheme.
why does everyone go on about how mysterious dark matter is supposed to be? dark matter is any matter that is not undergoing violent nuclear reaction (viz., in stars)so it can be seen from lightyears away. I am dark matter. You are dark matter. Now let me hear you say dark matter is mysterious, or it doesn't exist.
the question is, of course, does it account for the vast majority of mass out there. That would be what this article is really about, doh.
this is rubbish -- spammers do not need advanced technology to generate spam that gets through the filters (disfiguring it so much in the process that a human spots it as junk immediately). All they need to do is fashion their spam after email users could receive legitimately.
I think a german pron dialler used to do this for some time. It was very annoying -- not because it got through the filters, but because you actually had to focus your attention on it for a few seconds to figure out it was not legitimate mail.
if spammers did that (omitting giveaway keywords like 'make money' or 'viagra'...) their junk could only be identified by the originating server or by the contact information (which may be just a phone number or a freemail account in the case of the nigerians)
most people will prefer suffering through some spam in their inbox to fearing loss of legitimate mail through false positives. it is this niche I would aspire to as a spammer.
to reduce this possibility, users should be educated *not* to send html email. the only function I can see in html encoded email today is hiding spamfilter-evading junk from the eyes of the unsuspecting user. but since we all know it is not possible to educate users (and since I wish to communicate with non-geeks as well as with geeks), the battle will just go on forever.
I actually received an email from a (nice) girl once, which was branded *spam* all over by spamassassin (I think it got about 6 points), because she sent it from yahoo and because she employed red and blue font colour-tags, and which spent weeks in my spambin as a consequence before I found it. fear false positives!
ah, organs ist it, as in wetware?
...and I already thought somebody
made a fugue for laser-printers as
a follow-up project to the
symphony for dot matrix printers
`
-5 clueless. you simply made this up. ok, well, so there may be something to the claim that the swiss are stingy;) , but believe me, I never heard of anyone being fined for not voting. which would be a stupid idea anyway, because people would cast nonsense votes just to spite the system
yeah, I am redirected if my query yields no result. But how does goolge know where to redirect me to?? Maybe I would want to fiddle with my query some more instead of being redirected where some algorithm thinks I might want to be redirected to.
And if this makes sense for some people, at least I want the option to turn it off! I mean, man. Even Clippy the annoying Paperclip can be turned off (not that I ever did short of ctrl-Q:)
yes, google is doing *too much thinking* for you, these days.
my google button goes to http://www.google.com/search?q= - no redirect from there.
but I was at least as annoyed by their "did you mean to search for"-redirects. If I did mean to search for it, I can bloody well click on the suggestion myself!
look,I know the waste is here and it has to be dealt with. But there is also the waste that is not yet here and that _we_ _are_ _about_ _to_ _produce: The decision to keep going is one that we make continually.And once all the existing waste is "safely" buried in the desert, those in charge are _much_ less likely to feel inclined do do anything about this untenable situation that has, much to our shame, been going on for decades.
And of course, the money that goes into building this should turn up on your electricity bill. _where_ _else_ -- so much for nuclear energy being economically attractive.
Now I know we can not switch to running no the power of wind and moonshine by tomorrow. But saying more could have been done to provide alternatives, or that that the industry is at all prepared to show interest in improvement would be a blatant, hm, euphemism.
the bottomline is that, yes, it will have to be buried sometime. But not before we have taken the responsibility to take a course so that production of nuclear waste will cease in the forseeable future.
Slashdot Mirror
The project centres on a fundamental human desire to 'map' and 'mark' territory as part of belonging and of feeling a sense of ownership of our environment.
this, in fact, is the stated purpose of the project.
now if they included some sort of slashdot-style moderation-system where people could mod down annoying messages, this might become interesting. But then again, who wants to pay for GPRS traffic just to mod down some troll
> The stupidest comment of the day. Congrats!
not at all! now is the time to block it. if people swarm to use it, you can still unblock it and get all the hits you like. until that time, if enough people block it, it may remain so obviously behind that it will never gain momentum (most people use google, right now, remember? it's difficult to get people to switch from something they know, remember? even if what they are using is crap, so how much more will it take to make people leave google?)
we vote for a search engine not only by using it, but also by letting ourselves be crawled by it (google can crawl me even when other users are locked out due to server overload...)
if you have a non-commercial website, and if you can do without visits by some random jerk stumbling across your website,
simply block by referrer:
"msnbot/0.11 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
let's see successful they get if the really useful pages (which are mostly non-commercial) cannot be found with them
I realize it's not a true colour image. But still...
hello? are you replying to me? You are basically saying what I was saying: compare Stephenson to Eco, and Stephenson will look like a schoolboy.
Mann and Eco are my favourite authors.
But I think there is vague agreement in this sub-thread that Stephenson, while he has much potential, needs some heavy editing. and more style.
you did not get his point -- he didn't say he hated Stephenson being too erudite. He said he hated Stephenson making a big fuss about something not nearly as erudite as he thinks.
I agree.
read Stephenson going on for two pages about a pipe organ.
read Umberto Eco going on for two pages about $ARTEFACT
Stephenson makes a fool of himself, or pales into insignificance, simple as that.
He does that. It just looks like }}}}}}}}.
what he said. this is really the best (and shortestest) characterisation of NS's 'plot-crashing' I can think of.
yep, the concept of a human 'machine language' is cool. but, in a cyberpunk (not, faery or whatnot) setting, shouldn't at least an attempt be made to be neurologically credible? just evoking sumerian is lame. if you study only a little bit of sumerian, you will see that it is just another human language people write their everyday stuff in. for my taste, the conspiracy would have had to be slightly more involved to be palatable; apart from being totally foreign to the rest of the concepts -- come on, this is like Darth Vader hunting for the Holy Grail!
so, would you argue that everything that doesn't make sense in his books must be a parody, and therefore he is a brilliant writer?
I can see satirical value about the FBI devolving into a tribal society. In fact I found the post-USA bits very well done. But for the book's resolution he has shot at just a tiny bit too much fulminance.
amazon does not seem to think it's a parody:
Snow Crash interweaves everything from Sumerian myth to visions of a postmodern civilization on the brink of collapse.
-- unless they are being sarcastic and by "interweaving sumerian myths" they mean "mumbling about obscure concepts he hopes his readers haven't heard about'.
I think there are common threads between writing and programming
Except at the end of a program, you have close all your open brackets. And, programs do not need to have overblown hollywood showdowns as endings --
seriously, I was fascinated by NS's books. I read Snowcrash, Diamond Age (the first novel I read on my cellphone, commuting), Cryptonomicon --- every one of these books made me unable to put them down during their first chapters, and had me cringing more and more towards their less than satisfying resolutions. This may be just a matter of taste, though. (But seriously -- mind-controlling magic qualities of the old sumerian language???)
I was under the impression that you can only be localized with a precision of around 100m using cellphone signal strength (maybe slightly better in urban centers) -- how will you lure players to some specific 'dark corner' then? I suppose the service providers could do some fancy triangulation with your signal strength at different stations, but a) you would have to get them to actually do that and give you the data, b) this would raise serious privacy issues.
this may be just a ploy to get people to accept tracking technologies. I have been waiting for them to come up with a reason why tracking us was a "good thing", but I didn't figure the rationale would be a game. I suppose, soon standard phones will come with gps receivers, and as to who your position is transmitted to -- well, you'll just have to trust the firmware does what the booklet says it does.
I concur with you, sir!
The trolling of April's Fools threads should actually be rewarded. In fact, they should just invert the whole karma system for the day and be done with it.
back in 1997 when I was a physics exchange student in Glasgow, they made me solve a *quantum machanics* problem using excel! it was ridiculous. I kept the spreadsheet just for its absurdity (it's the only .xls file on my entire harddrive)
if it will mean I have to pay fees to Microsoft to get my domain signed, I'd rather continue filtering out spoofed-bounces, thank you.
Interesting how instead of supporting a perfectly sound project that has been going for a year, everybody seems to have to come up with their own little *patented* scheme.
why does everyone go on about how mysterious dark matter is supposed to be? dark matter is any matter that is not undergoing violent nuclear reaction (viz., in stars)so it can be seen from lightyears away. I am dark matter. You are dark matter. Now let me hear you say dark matter is mysterious, or it doesn't exist.
the question is, of course, does it account for the vast majority of mass out there. That would be what this article is really about, doh.
this is rubbish -- spammers do not need advanced technology to generate spam that gets through the filters (disfiguring it so much in the process that a human spots it as junk immediately). All they need to do is fashion their spam after email users could receive legitimately.
I think a german pron dialler used to do this for some time. It was very annoying -- not because it got through the filters, but because you actually had to focus your attention on it for a few seconds to figure out it was not legitimate mail.
if spammers did that (omitting giveaway keywords like 'make money' or 'viagra'...) their junk could only be identified by the originating server or by the contact information (which may be just a phone number or a freemail account in the case of the nigerians)
most people will prefer suffering through some spam in their inbox to fearing loss of legitimate mail through false positives. it is this niche I would aspire to as a spammer.
to reduce this possibility, users should be educated *not* to send html email. the only function I can see in html encoded email today is hiding spamfilter-evading junk from the eyes of the unsuspecting user. but since we all know it is not possible to educate users (and since I wish to communicate with non-geeks as well as with geeks), the battle will just go on forever.
I actually received an email from a (nice) girl once, which was branded *spam* all over by spamassassin (I think it got about 6 points), because she sent it from yahoo and because she employed red and blue font colour-tags, and which spent weeks in my spambin as a consequence before I found it. fear false positives!
just hire a yogin to recite your private key as his secret mantra. we all know religious knowledge has the longest life expectancy.
ah, organs ist it, as in wetware?
...and I already thought somebody
made a fugue for laser-printers as
a follow-up project to the
symphony for dot matrix printers
`
-5 clueless. you simply made this up. ;) , but
ok, well, so there may be something to the
claim that the swiss are stingy
believe me, I never heard of anyone being
fined for not voting. which would be a stupid
idea anyway, because people would cast nonsense
votes just to spite the system
yeah, I am redirected if my query yields
:)
no result. But how does goolge know where
to redirect me to?? Maybe I would want
to fiddle with my query some more instead
of being redirected where some algorithm
thinks I might want to be redirected to.
And if this makes sense for some people,
at least I want the option to turn it off!
I mean, man. Even Clippy the annoying Paperclip
can be turned off (not that I ever did short of
ctrl-Q
yes, google is doing *too much thinking* for
you, these days.
my google button goes to
http://www.google.com/search?q=
- no redirect from there.
but I was at least as annoyed by their
"did you mean to search for"-redirects.
If I did mean to search for it, I can bloody
well click on the suggestion myself!
...I was updating my debian & was checking
r ns.png
slashdot out of boredom because there seemed
to be a network problem.
[screenshot]
http://flaez.ch/scratch/twente_bu
look in the source. the link is
/gits-sac/ link goes down!
commented out. I got the file, it's just
35M but it seems to be the thing
(compressed further, maybe?)
anyway, I renamed it to koukaku.mpg
and put it on gnutella - dare you to find
it there in case the
peers,
everyone, put it on gnutella as soon as
you lay your hands on it. let's do this
'distributedly', for once
look,I know the waste is here and it has to be dealt with. But there is also the waste that is not yet here and that _we_ _are_ _about_ _to_ _produce: The decision to keep going is one that we make continually.And once all the existing waste is "safely" buried in the desert, those in charge are _much_ less likely to feel inclined do do anything about this untenable situation that has, much to our shame, been going on for decades.
And of course, the money that goes into building this should turn up on your electricity bill.
_where_ _else_ -- so much for nuclear energy being
economically attractive.
Now I know we can not switch to running no the power of wind and moonshine by tomorrow. But
saying more could have been done to provide
alternatives, or that that the industry is at all
prepared to show interest in improvement would
be a blatant, hm, euphemism.
the bottomline is that, yes, it will have to be buried sometime. But not before we have taken the responsibility to take a course so that production of nuclear waste will cease in the forseeable future.
i just found & downloaded an audio stream
of the complete bbc production (170M);
for once, gnutella yielded satisfactory
results. I also found the complete text
of LotR, Hobbit, Silmarillion and UT.
still, I am trying to collect the 13
mp3 files and will be sharing them on
gnutella once I get them together