Well, no. There are no markings to indicate compilation whatsoever. The back cover (dust jacket) has no writing on it except for the UPC code.
And I purchased the book when it first came out - before any reviews were available. I would guess that the prominent notes on these sites now are due to complaints received.
So let me get this straight - you are permitted to be rude to me when I take the time to answer your questions nicely and explicitly (for example, see your current.sig file or your journal entries) but I cannot? I'm just trying to get a feel for what the rules are, you see.
Unlimited power for the owners of a site is a fact you're never going to be able to get around. We've got SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE on our side. We've got Apache's log files to identify you, and a firewall to keep you out. That's just the way the world works.
If you don't like it you can build your own site. You can even use the code we provide, for free. What a deal!
Agendas? We have the *ultimate* agenda tool, the ability to decide what stories get run! Nothing else compares. If you think our story-selection sucks, my advice is don't read them.
The Scientology situation was handled way above my head. I have no particular opinion about it, except to note that Scientology has more money than VA Linux (excuse me, VA Software) does. And more lawyers. And a demonstrated immunity to bad press.
I don't think most people understand moderation very well. I see there's a reply that is correct about changes in Slash 2.2 that let the site maintainer turn off moderation, comment posting and story submission for particular users. CmdrTaco is the sole administrator of that on Slashdot.
So if you never get moderation points on Slashdot, there are two possible reasons. You might not qualify normally - moderator points are assigned to people who aren't within the newest accounts created, read the site often but not too often, and so forth, several different criteria. Or you might have been flagged. Doing things like moderating up goatse.cx links is a good way to get flagged as a bad moderator if CmdrTaco notices.
Is that "political"? Yeah, I suppose. But the politics being promoted is "trying to run a good discussion site", same as the motivation for everything else.
The only comments that were ever modded to -2 were due to a bug in the moderation system, fixed very quickly. There's a story posted about it somewhere.
I think the problem here - our failure to communicate - is because you're believing the various conspiracy theories without evidence.
And no, moderation is not comparable to putting someone in prison.
And no, from a legal standpoint, the moderation system does not make Slashdot more or less liable for comments posted. The law on this is now fairly clear - since Slashdot has the power to remove comments from the database, once we receive a complaint about any particular comment we're essentially "on the hook" for its content. If Slashdot receives fewer hassles over comments than other sites (and I think we do) it's because of the potential bad publicity (see what happened when Microsoft tried it), not because the law protects us in any fashion.
Yes, if they're both posted from the same IP address. It's an MD5 hash of whatever the actual IP address is. Doesn't mean it's the same person - there might be ten people logged in from the same corporate firewall, or people coming through AOL's proxy servers, or whatever.
I *think* the IPID records are supposed to be kept for a rolling two-week period, but I'm not certain that that's the actual policy, so don't quote me on that.
The slashdot editors are a half-dozen people with other jobs than moderating comments. Versus however-many thousand people with mod points at any time. I'd guess moderation from the Slashdot staff is less than one percent of all comment moderation. I think that I've expended two moderation points today, for example. Taking a system which:
--does not delete comments
--makes all comments available to anyone who chooses to view them
--is more free than any other system with a comparable number of users
and calling it "censorship" is silly IMHO. When you can tell me about another forum which tolerates users like "The Turd Report" maybe Slashdot will have a competitor for the title of web-based discussion forum with the least censorship.
Try an experiment: go to kuro5hin.org, advogato.org, any random message board, and start posting "Turd Report" comments. Take note of the mean time before you're banned from the site.
I'm not claiming that Slashdot is perfect - no place is. But it is certainly one of the best. Most of that is due to Rob's dedication to avoiding censorship as much as possible, for which he gets thanked every day with a load of hatemail from lusers.
1) bitchslap. Rob's name for a perl script to take care of flood-bots. He should have named it "anti-flood.pl" instead. Rob is the only one who has ever had access to use it; I don't think it's been used many times on the site at all; I'm almost certain it hasn't been used in many months. The dreaded formkeys now prevent flooding from scripts proactively instead of the previous reactive system, so it's doubtful it will ever be needed again.
2) IP availability. According to Slashdot, your IPID is "8e451..." Mr. Ska's IPID is "b18e8..." Whoop. Big invasion of privacy there. The IPID system is solely a reaction to people abusing anonymity to post hundreds of crap comments. Now people who do that get automatically IP-banned for 72 hours. I'm all for it.
Bingo. If I understand the above complaint, he's complaining that he's got 50 karma, and that he managed to get two down-mods in thirty seconds on one occasion. Gee, there are only 10,000 readers with mod points at any one time, what are the odds that two of them would moderate something at the same time (hint: it's a birthday problem, the odds are essentially 100%).
I disagree entirely with A_Non_Moose about +2 posters being given the "benefit of the doubt". In the real world, if you're nice to a person ten times and nasty to them once, what are you? An asshole. But on Slashdot, you're up nine karma. Slashdot's system is *far* more forgiving of abuses than the real world is, and kids like FortKnox who live on Slashdot (713 comments, christ!) need to get out more.
I was talking to a grad student the other day who's doing a thesis paper on Slashdot. I told her that one of the mistakes made when building the site was giving "karma" a name, because that made it a game. Guess what people, your self-worth is *not* dependent on what value is stored in Slashdot's users table under the karma field. The sole purpose of the moderation system is to make discussions readable. Other sites delete posts that are off-topic. We do not. But I never fail to be amazed at the people who spend all their time trying to fill discussions with garbage and then complaining that the system worked as it is supposed to.
Every time I read a story about more liberties getting trashed, for the sake of the "war against terrorism", for the sake of Microsoft's "freedom to innovate", for the sake of corporate profits or control, I get a tiny bit more bitter. I've been reading a lot of those lately.
It never fails to amaze me how many people will take an off-the-cuff remark and run with it rather than examining the actual situation at hand.
Here's a general hint that applies to all slashdot stories at all times: we assume you can read and understand the links, and we have at most a few sentences to write about what are often very complex topics. Always, always take the links first and foremost, and don't take offense if the blurb has a flip comment or doesn't seem 100% accurate in every conceivable way. That's why the links are there.
In any case, the reason I didn't express an opinion like "Warpvision stole the code, they should be shot at dawn" was because it isn't clear, at all, what is going on here. You're only hearing from one side, which is rarely conducive to getting the truth.
It would be very slow. KDE on a Pentium-233 with 64Mb of RAM is sluggish but usable. Move up to a Celeron-333 and 128Mb of RAM and it's perfectly usable. But moving down to a P-90 and 40Mb.... I don't know. You might find it pretty painful to use.
Exactly. Let's take yesterday. Yesterday, we got a bazillion submissions about Bell Labs having invented a one-molecule transistor. Wait, we said, we already ran a story about that.
Now, every news source that covers these things went ahead and ran two stories about this - after all, there were two press releases! Nobody wrote in to them to complain about duplication, because it isn't easy and your complaint just disappears into the ether. Here it's easy and you can complain publicly.
Sigh. I couldn't remember if this had been posted, and a search for "neutrino" doesn't bring up the other article, because, of course, the other article used "neutrinos" and MySQL's indexing leaves a lot to be desired.
This is sort of like saying it wasn't a problem with Ford Pintos, just their gas tanks.
No current edition of Windows can operate without Internet Explorer. IE is a component of Windows like an engine is a part of car. The security flaw is exposed any time Windows processes URLs - so it's an IE vulnerability, and an Outlook vulnerability, and a help file vulnerability, and... It's a Windows vulnerability.
Yep. If we post a story (BUY SOURCEFORGE 3.0 NOW) about something VA does, we're corporate (BUY SOURCEFORGE 3.0 NOW) whores. If we don't, (BUY SOURCEFORGE 3.0 NOW) we're covering something up. It's a sweet deal, being an anonymous whiner griping about a free site.
There's no such law, only a question of journalistic ethics. News outlets that note such things about ownership and financial interests are trying to "do the right thing".
Slashdot Mirror
MySQL doesn't index words shorter than four characters. Can't search for any three letter acronym.
For KDE though, you could search by topic.
Well, no. There are no markings to indicate compilation whatsoever. The back cover (dust jacket) has no writing on it except for the UPC code.
And I purchased the book when it first came out - before any reviews were available. I would guess that the prominent notes on these sites now are due to complaints received.
Heh. Whoops. Someone ought to tell her publicist, too.
So let me get this straight - you are permitted to be rude to me when I take the time to answer your questions nicely and explicitly (for example, see your current .sig file or your journal entries) but I cannot? I'm just trying to get a feel for what the rules are, you see.
Unlimited power for the owners of a site is a fact you're never going to be able to get around. We've got SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE on our side. We've got Apache's log files to identify you, and a firewall to keep you out. That's just the way the world works.
If you don't like it you can build your own site. You can even use the code we provide, for free. What a deal!
Agendas? We have the *ultimate* agenda tool, the ability to decide what stories get run! Nothing else compares. If you think our story-selection sucks, my advice is don't read them.
The Scientology situation was handled way above my head. I have no particular opinion about it, except to note that Scientology has more money than VA Linux (excuse me, VA Software) does. And more lawyers. And a demonstrated immunity to bad press.
I don't think most people understand moderation very well. I see there's a reply that is correct about changes in Slash 2.2 that let the site maintainer turn off moderation, comment posting and story submission for particular users. CmdrTaco is the sole administrator of that on Slashdot.
So if you never get moderation points on Slashdot, there are two possible reasons. You might not qualify normally - moderator points are assigned to people who aren't within the newest accounts created, read the site often but not too often, and so forth, several different criteria. Or you might have been flagged. Doing things like moderating up goatse.cx links is a good way to get flagged as a bad moderator if CmdrTaco notices.
Is that "political"? Yeah, I suppose. But the politics being promoted is "trying to run a good discussion site", same as the motivation for everything else.
The only comments that were ever modded to -2 were due to a bug in the moderation system, fixed very quickly. There's a story posted about it somewhere.
I think the problem here - our failure to communicate - is because you're believing the various conspiracy theories without evidence.
And no, moderation is not comparable to putting someone in prison.
And no, from a legal standpoint, the moderation system does not make Slashdot more or less liable for comments posted. The law on this is now fairly clear - since Slashdot has the power to remove comments from the database, once we receive a complaint about any particular comment we're essentially "on the hook" for its content. If Slashdot receives fewer hassles over comments than other sites (and I think we do) it's because of the potential bad publicity (see what happened when Microsoft tried it), not because the law protects us in any fashion.
Yes, if they're both posted from the same IP address. It's an MD5 hash of whatever the actual IP address is. Doesn't mean it's the same person - there might be ten people logged in from the same corporate firewall, or people coming through AOL's proxy servers, or whatever.
I *think* the IPID records are supposed to be kept for a rolling two-week period, but I'm not certain that that's the actual policy, so don't quote me on that.
The slashdot editors are a half-dozen people with other jobs than moderating comments. Versus however-many thousand people with mod points at any time. I'd guess moderation from the Slashdot staff is less than one percent of all comment moderation. I think that I've expended two moderation points today, for example. Taking a system which:
--does not delete comments
--makes all comments available to anyone who chooses to view them
--is more free than any other system with a comparable number of users
and calling it "censorship" is silly IMHO. When you can tell me about another forum which tolerates users like "The Turd Report" maybe Slashdot will have a competitor for the title of web-based discussion forum with the least censorship.
Try an experiment: go to kuro5hin.org, advogato.org, any random message board, and start posting "Turd Report" comments. Take note of the mean time before you're banned from the site.
I'm not claiming that Slashdot is perfect - no place is. But it is certainly one of the best. Most of that is due to Rob's dedication to avoiding censorship as much as possible, for which he gets thanked every day with a load of hatemail from lusers.
You need to readjust your tinfoil hat.
A few points -
1) bitchslap. Rob's name for a perl script to take care of flood-bots. He should have named it "anti-flood.pl" instead. Rob is the only one who has ever had access to use it; I don't think it's been used many times on the site at all; I'm almost certain it hasn't been used in many months. The dreaded formkeys now prevent flooding from scripts proactively instead of the previous reactive system, so it's doubtful it will ever be needed again.
2) IP availability. According to Slashdot, your IPID is "8e451..." Mr. Ska's IPID is "b18e8..." Whoop. Big invasion of privacy there. The IPID system is solely a reaction to people abusing anonymity to post hundreds of crap comments. Now people who do that get automatically IP-banned for 72 hours. I'm all for it.
Bingo. If I understand the above complaint, he's complaining that he's got 50 karma, and that he managed to get two down-mods in thirty seconds on one occasion. Gee, there are only 10,000 readers with mod points at any one time, what are the odds that two of them would moderate something at the same time (hint: it's a birthday problem, the odds are essentially 100%).
I disagree entirely with A_Non_Moose about +2 posters being given the "benefit of the doubt". In the real world, if you're nice to a person ten times and nasty to them once, what are you? An asshole. But on Slashdot, you're up nine karma. Slashdot's system is *far* more forgiving of abuses than the real world is, and kids like FortKnox who live on Slashdot (713 comments, christ!) need to get out more.
I was talking to a grad student the other day who's doing a thesis paper on Slashdot. I told her that one of the mistakes made when building the site was giving "karma" a name, because that made it a game. Guess what people, your self-worth is *not* dependent on what value is stored in Slashdot's users table under the karma field. The sole purpose of the moderation system is to make discussions readable. Other sites delete posts that are off-topic. We do not. But I never fail to be amazed at the people who spend all their time trying to fill discussions with garbage and then complaining that the system worked as it is supposed to.
Every time I read a story about more liberties getting trashed, for the sake of the "war against terrorism", for the sake of Microsoft's "freedom to innovate", for the sake of corporate profits or control, I get a tiny bit more bitter. I've been reading a lot of those lately.
My suggestion is that you do instead:
#apt-get install bsd-ftpd
which is a port of the audited OpenBSD FTP server.
It never fails to amaze me how many people will take an off-the-cuff remark and run with it rather than examining the actual situation at hand.
Here's a general hint that applies to all slashdot stories at all times: we assume you can read and understand the links, and we have at most a few sentences to write about what are often very complex topics. Always, always take the links first and foremost, and don't take offense if the blurb has a flip comment or doesn't seem 100% accurate in every conceivable way. That's why the links are there.
In any case, the reason I didn't express an opinion like "Warpvision stole the code, they should be shot at dawn" was because it isn't clear, at all, what is going on here. You're only hearing from one side, which is rarely conducive to getting the truth.
It would be very slow. KDE on a Pentium-233 with 64Mb of RAM is sluggish but usable. Move up to a Celeron-333 and 128Mb of RAM and it's perfectly usable. But moving down to a P-90 and 40Mb.... I don't know. You might find it pretty painful to use.
There are several interpreters available for Linux - just do a bit of searching. And the game files are the same across systems.
Works fine for me - following the link from slashdot - in konqueror.
Exactly. Let's take yesterday. Yesterday, we got a bazillion submissions about Bell Labs having invented a one-molecule transistor. Wait, we said, we already ran a story about that.
Here's the link that we ran a few weeks ago. And here's the press release from yesterday that caused another round of news stories, and another round of story submissions to slashdot. Go ahead, click through and check them out.
Now, every news source that covers these things went ahead and ran two stories about this - after all, there were two press releases! Nobody wrote in to them to complain about duplication, because it isn't easy and your complaint just disappears into the ether. Here it's easy and you can complain publicly.
Sigh. I couldn't remember if this had been posted, and a search for "neutrino" doesn't bring up the other article, because, of course, the other article used "neutrinos" and MySQL's indexing leaves a lot to be desired.
That's the mark of a good scientist.
Really.
When you have beliefs about the world and universe that are absolute, the term for that is "religion". Good scientists know that they don't know.
This is sort of like saying it wasn't a problem with Ford Pintos, just their gas tanks.
... It's a Windows vulnerability.
No current edition of Windows can operate without Internet Explorer. IE is a component of Windows like an engine is a part of car. The security flaw is exposed any time Windows processes URLs - so it's an IE vulnerability, and an Outlook vulnerability, and a help file vulnerability, and
Yep. If we post a story (BUY SOURCEFORGE 3.0 NOW) about something VA does, we're corporate (BUY SOURCEFORGE 3.0 NOW) whores. If we don't, (BUY SOURCEFORGE 3.0 NOW) we're covering something up. It's a sweet deal, being an anonymous whiner griping about a free site.
http://slashdot.org/palm/ doesn't do it for you?
There's no such law, only a question of journalistic ethics. News outlets that note such things about ownership and financial interests are trying to "do the right thing".