Well, no. You argue that there are two valid viewpoints:
* I don't want to pay, so I should get everything for free.
* I want to pay, so I should pay American prices.
I want to pay, but I don't think the standard, American channels are inately better than Allofmp3. Here are some of the arguments in favor of Allofmp3:
COST AND QUALITY
Allofmp3 offers better quality than iTunes or P2P. It offers better prices than Walmart, Borders, or iTunes. It offers more convenience than any retail shop. It is the best deal.
ARTISTS, PRICE, AND QUANTITY
Allofmp3 charges less per download, but that doesn't mean it pays producers less: lower prices inrease demand. Using allofmp3, I've spent more money on more works from more artists than I would have under the iTunes system. I suspect this is true is true of others.
Copyright laws in Russia and America are different. The Russian system of mandatory licensing encourages more on the demand side. The American system encourages more on the price side. Which approach is better? You'd have to develop a demand curve, and I certainly don't know anything about the demand curve. In fact, I have never heard genuine argument that the Allofmp3 pricepoint is unfair, unsustainable, or non-optimal.
MIDDLE MEN
You speak of artists. As a consumer, I don't deal with artists. I deal with middle-men -- Borders, Walmart, iTunes, allofmp3. The middle-men represent different distribution channels. Each of these channels has consumers paying at one end and artists getting money at the other end. But more importantly, more of the money goes into supporting the distribution (record executives, sales clerks, sysadmins, network firms, construction firms) than the production (artists and engineers). The middle-men are a bigger part of the economic-moral picture than the artists:
Why is the allofmp3 channel cheaper than the iTunes channel? Beesides the legal differences between Russia and America, there are currency issues. An American dollar will buy more in Russia than in America. Routing purchases through Russian middle men is more cost-effective than routing purchases through American middle-men. The Russian route offers the potential to charge less and benefit more.
Here's a question: does allofmp3 serve a positive role in Russia? * It brings in more money than it sends out. * As a technology firm, it probably provides better-than-average jobs. * As a legitimate firm, it's better than a lot of the alternatives in Russia. * As a small firm, it has a better affect on Russian civil society than Gazprom.
Should I discourage people from using allofmp3? * By decreasing supply, I force the middle-man to increase prices, which discourages other consumers, which increases prices, etc. * If allofmp3 can't sustain business, its workers will have to go somewhere else. Will the new jobs be better? * If a small technology firm fails, will Russian capitalists and entrepeneurs be more likely or less likely to support another?
CHINA
The best analogy for the Allofmp3 question is the China question: should I buy imported Chinese goods? The currency and labor issues are similar (USD has a relatively high value. US offers better labor laws.) The moral conundrum is similar: should I contribute to the more perfect system because I like perfection, or should I contribute to the less perfect system to enable its improvement?
My community seems to have adopted this approach: cheaper, imported goods are okay as long as the companies don't abuse or harm anyone. So far, nobody has suggested that Allofmp3 abuses its employees or its users, and the arguments that it harms foreign artists are extremely incomplete.
Anyone able to connect to TCP port 617 can gain read/write access to the filesystem of any host running the Arkeia agent software. This appears to be an intentional design decision on the part of the Arkeia developers... the first commercial backup product for the Linux platform...
Ha! I've already got a feature just like that, and I didn't even have to pay for my NFS software.
Re:Let me be the first to say...
on
SHA-1 Broken
·
· Score: 1
I'm not sure about your comments, but I did find some links which discuss combinations of hash functions:
That site has some interesting charts. It does look like they had a decline over the past week, and it's particularly pronounced looking at their daily averages over the past year.
But the decline predates this slashdot story by a couple days. Maybe some other variables (university finals?) explains it, or maybe slashdot was a little slow in picking up on this round of anti-piracy moves... or maybe I'm just making noise...
It's been reported a few times (including yesterday) that BitTorrent makes up something like a 1/3rd of Internet traffic. With the major hubs for finding torrent links going down... has there been a notable decrease in overall Internet bandwidth usage?
Abolishing the Electoral College... eliminates the representation from small populations.... They devised a solution to a problem that still exists today: Ensuring that large populations do not dicate law to smaller populations
Protecting minorities from the whims of the majority is valuable. But the separation of states, with small states and large states, is poor application of that principle. The problem is that (today, anyway) the interesting problems of factions and minorities (workers vs managers, blacks vs whites, rich vs poor, rural vs urban) don't really line up along state lines. Take a look inside any California, Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri -- you'll find very distinct regions; the differences among between two Missourians may be much greater than the differences between a Rhode Island resident and Connecticut resident. In fact, no matter what changes you make to the borders between states, your approach will still be flawed: every citizen is simultaneously a member of several minorities and several majorities.
The division among states reflects more on the accidents of history than the social, economic, or cultural diversity of America. The "minority" living in Delaware gets special protection. But another minority, living in a section of Texas with the same land area and the same population, gets lumped in with the rest of Texas.
(That sounds like a challenge... I'll bite, but I hope you can excuse the sophomoric tone...)
I would verbify it, and, like the tree did to Newton, I would apple anyone who got in the way of my fruition.
If I were feeling particularly naughty (and a bit omnipotent), I might even applize the person who beliefed you couldn't verbify and then gift it to my English teacher.
There is an incorrect statement, caused by an error in my original test. I updated my test, and the last line should read
Code in bar.WonkPrime.doThat can access this.fld, this.mth, sameInput.fld, sameInput.mth. But it can't access superInput.fld or superInput.mth.
Your last comment (protected members have package visibility AND are visible to subclasses) helps explain the discrepancy betweeen foo.WonkPrime and bar.WonkPrime: there are two distinct access rules in play. The package visibility rule (which only applies to foo.WonkPrime) allows foo.* to access any protected member in any instance of foo.Wonk. The subclass visibility rule allows bar.WonkPrime to access protected members inherited from foo.Wonk. (For me, it was helpful to think that "protected members inherited from foo.Wonk" != "protected members in foo.Wonk")
There is order in the universe, and I'll stop wasting everyone's time now.:)
Well, the grandparent's comment was pretty random, but it interested me, too, so I did a quick search of Google and a thread with a Java + protected + field problem. So I did my own test (with Blackdown JDK 1.4.1 for Debian).
First, recap. These points are usually mentioned in "Intro to Java" texts:
1) A class member marked as protected can be accessed from any subclass. A normal use cases might have a subclass modify some inherited field.
2) One instance of a class is allowed to access any member of another instance of the same class. This might be used when a node in a linked list examines its successor in the list.
Apparently, the interaction between these rules depends on whether the super- and sub-classes reside in the same package. Suppose we have the following:
class foo.Wonk --> protected int fld --> protected void mth()
class foo.WonkPrime extends foo.Wonk --> void doThis(foo.WonkPrime sameInput, foo.Wonk superInput)
class bar.WonkPrime extends foo.Wonk --> void doThat(bar.WonkPrime sameInput, foo.Wonk superInput)
Code in foo.WonkPrime.doThis can access this.fld, this.mth, sameInput.fld, sameInput.mth, superInput.fld, and/or superInput.mth.
Code in bar.WonkPrime.doThat can access this.fld, this.mth, sameInput.fld, sameInput.mth, and superInput.mth. But it can't access superInput.fld.
It's been said that "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."
So GNOME's development vector has been the inverse of Zawinski's: it started as an environment trying to provide everything, and it's slowly reducing its visible functionality. Every new iteration produces a new fight with users about simplified user interfaces, but the platform still exists. In fact, if GNOME's growth is anything like Linux's, then there are probably more users today than two years ago.
Where have my comments been unfair? Is there another lesson buried in here?
Unfortunately, expect Mr. Powell's blog to be spammed by every idealogue around.
If Powell actually follows the posts, Internet idealogues won't be the only ones posting: expect paid lobbiests. Readers (and Powell) will want to carefully consider the backgrounds of any regular, articulate, well-versed commentors. Of course, if such people do post, the public will be well-served: maybe we can personally examine the lobbying process. That would be a wonderful.
Now if only I could get paid for posting on slashdot... maybe then I'd start making worthwhile posts...
precompiled binaries will never run as quickly as those compiled with the right optimizations for your own machine
A straw man. Precompiled binaries may have been compiled with the optimal settings for your machine, and binaries which you compile may not have the optimal settings. Identifying the optimal settings can actually be non-trivial. Source-based distributions are not necessarily the best fix to the 'one-size-fits-all' approach used by some distro's.
Interestingly, Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments is actually an extension of the earlier, smaller study entitled, You're So Stupid: Why the Hell Can't You See It. The researcher ultimately decided that a study about his editors wouldn't survive review.
..I acknowledge that he DID further computer science a significant bit...
Uh huh. Turing's halting proof is, like, so totally derivative of Godel's incompleteness proof, and, like, Cantor's diagonalization. And don't even get me started on Church. Like, geez. Turing's way overrated.
...The Samizdat report recommends that the U.S. government should invest $5 billion in research and development efforts that produce true open source products, such as BSD and MIT license-based open source. Government investment in open source development will accelerate innovation. However, increased investment should be in true open source, open source without any stipulations, other than attribution and copyright notification, not hybrid source......The purpose of Samizdat is to demonstrate how and why the hybrid model encourages these types of activities [stealing, reverse engineering, and illegal copying].
AdTI argues the best way to solve this problem is to create a more substantive pool of true, free open source code...
Mr. Brown argues that the "hybrid" (e.g. copyleft) model encourages "stealing, reverse engineering, and illegal copying." His evidence is that some supporters of copyleft licensing make contradictory claims about who said or did what and when they said or did it. I agree that such contradictions are unfortunate, sometimes relevent for practical reasons, and often difficult to resolve.
Mr. Brown has successfully demonstrated that some large, open, multinational, cooperative projects (organized by free agents) do not provide the same type of legalistic consistency as a bureaucratic, corporate or governmental project. Kudos to Mr. Brown.
I agree that some hybrid licenses encourage large, open, cooperative projects, and such projects may suffer some legal laxness. But it does not follow -- and I don't agree -- that "true" properietary and "true" open-source licenses discourage such laxness. Indeed, the case-law in computer-related IP was built on the indiscretions and disagreements of companies which use proprietary licensing. At the same, "true" open source projects -- like contemporary BSD or XFree86 -- suffer the same level of laxness as Linux.
Oh, whatever. I'm getting tired of writing.
Re:They should stick with C
on
The GNOME Roadmap
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Tim: Hi, my name is Tim.
Slashdot: Hello, Tim
Tim: I used to use KDE. I've been sober for 6 months now.
Slashdot Leader: When did you realize that KDE wasn't healthy for you?
Tim: I just always... I got angry and irritable. My wife started getting concerned. I tried doing less KDE, but... then, some lonely night when my wife was at a meeting, I'd see that KAtomic icon staring back at me. It made feel less lonely. Then one day I was trying to edit a menu -- I wanted KAtomic to be in the K menu -- and I just couldn't figure it out. There must have been 30,000 icons on the screen, but none of them made it work. And then my little girl tries to show me how, and I slapped her hand off my mouse. She started crying and said, "Daddy I wish KDE was never invented!"
Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: A lot of people cope with loneliness by getting angry or acting out.
Tim: No, it's more like I'd turn to KDE to take away my inner loneliness, but then it would just make me angry with the people who really should make me happy.
Alternate-Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: I think you're really angry with yourself.
Slashdot Leader: Mr. Alternate-Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person has a lot of experience with anger. Maybe you two can help each other.
Tim: Well, I mean, I don't want to share everything with the group. Some things are just private.
Alternate-Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: You should really be more honest and open. When more people are looking at your personal life, it's easier to find the flaws. Many eyeballs, you know.
Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: You should really GPL your life.
Teenage-Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: Yeah, I'd like to see how your wife works on the inside.
Tim: No, really, some things are personal.
Alternate-Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: Don't you like open source?
Tim: I guess not.
Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: Kill him!
Teenage-Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: Kill him! His widow will date geeks!
Alternate-Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: Mod him down! Troll! Troll!
[*Tim's karma becomes negative*]
Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: Now I need something else to do.
Slashdot Mirror
2^6^8 would be bigger than 2.6.8.
2^6^8 - 2.6.8 == 281474976710656 - 2.68 == 281474976710653.32
2.6.8 / 2^6^8 == 2.68 / 281474976710656 == 9.521272659e-15
Way bigger.
Well, no. You argue that there are two valid viewpoints:
* I don't want to pay, so I should get everything for free.
* I want to pay, so I should pay American prices.
I want to pay, but I don't think the standard, American channels are inately better than Allofmp3. Here are some of the arguments in favor of Allofmp3:
COST AND QUALITY
Allofmp3 offers better quality than iTunes or P2P. It offers better prices than Walmart, Borders, or iTunes. It offers more convenience than any retail shop. It is the best deal.
ARTISTS, PRICE, AND QUANTITY
Allofmp3 charges less per download, but that doesn't mean it pays producers less: lower prices inrease demand. Using allofmp3, I've spent more money on more works from more artists than I would have under the iTunes system. I suspect this is true is true of others.
Copyright laws in Russia and America are different. The Russian system of mandatory licensing encourages more on the demand side. The American system encourages more on the price side. Which approach is better? You'd have to develop a demand curve, and I certainly don't know anything about the demand curve. In fact, I have never heard genuine argument that the Allofmp3 pricepoint is unfair, unsustainable, or non-optimal.
MIDDLE MEN
You speak of artists. As a consumer, I don't deal with artists. I deal with middle-men -- Borders, Walmart, iTunes, allofmp3. The middle-men represent different distribution channels. Each of these channels has consumers paying at one end and artists getting money at the other end. But more importantly, more of the money goes into supporting the distribution (record executives, sales clerks, sysadmins, network firms, construction firms) than the production (artists and engineers). The middle-men are a bigger part of the economic-moral picture than the artists:
Why is the allofmp3 channel cheaper than the iTunes channel? Beesides the legal differences between Russia and America, there are currency issues. An American dollar will buy more in Russia than in America. Routing purchases through Russian middle men is more cost-effective than routing purchases through American middle-men. The Russian route offers the potential to charge less and benefit more.
Here's a question: does allofmp3 serve a positive role in Russia?
* It brings in more money than it sends out.
* As a technology firm, it probably provides better-than-average jobs.
* As a legitimate firm, it's better than a lot of the alternatives in Russia.
* As a small firm, it has a better affect on Russian civil society than Gazprom.
Should I discourage people from using allofmp3?
* By decreasing supply, I force the middle-man to increase prices, which discourages other consumers, which increases prices, etc.
* If allofmp3 can't sustain business, its workers will have to go somewhere else. Will the new jobs be better?
* If a small technology firm fails, will Russian capitalists and entrepeneurs be more likely or less likely to support another?
CHINA
The best analogy for the Allofmp3 question is the China question: should I buy imported Chinese goods? The currency and labor issues are similar (USD has a relatively high value. US offers better labor laws.) The moral conundrum is similar: should I contribute to the more perfect system because I like perfection, or should I contribute to the less perfect system to enable its improvement?
My community seems to have adopted this approach: cheaper, imported goods are okay as long as the companies don't abuse or harm anyone. So far, nobody has suggested that Allofmp3 abuses its employees or its users, and the arguments that it harms foreign artists are extremely incomplete.
Anyone able to connect to TCP port 617 can gain read/write access to the filesystem of any host running the Arkeia agent software. This appears to be an intentional design decision on the part of the Arkeia developers... the first commercial backup product for the Linux platform...
Ha! I've already got a feature just like that, and I didn't even have to pay for my NFS software.
That site has some interesting charts. It does look like they had a decline over the past week, and it's particularly pronounced looking at their daily averages over the past year.
But the decline predates this slashdot story by a couple days. Maybe some other variables (university finals?) explains it, or maybe slashdot was a little slow in picking up on this round of anti-piracy moves... or maybe I'm just making noise...
It's been reported a few times (including yesterday) that BitTorrent makes up something like a 1/3rd of Internet traffic. With the major hubs for finding torrent links going down... has there been a notable decrease in overall Internet bandwidth usage?
Abolishing the Electoral College ... eliminates the representation from small populations. ... They devised a solution to a problem that still exists today: Ensuring that large populations do not dicate law to smaller populations
Protecting minorities from the whims of the majority is valuable. But the separation of states, with small states and large states, is poor application of that principle. The problem is that (today, anyway) the interesting problems of factions and minorities (workers vs managers, blacks vs whites, rich vs poor, rural vs urban) don't really line up along state lines. Take a look inside any California, Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri -- you'll find very distinct regions; the differences among between two Missourians may be much greater than the differences between a Rhode Island resident and Connecticut resident. In fact, no matter what changes you make to the borders between states, your approach will still be flawed: every citizen is simultaneously a member of several minorities and several majorities.
The division among states reflects more on the accidents of history than the social, economic, or cultural diversity of America. The "minority" living in Delaware gets special protection. But another minority, living in a section of Texas with the same land area and the same population, gets lumped in with the rest of Texas.
A number of scientific societies were trying to get the candidates to do webcast q&a's.
http://www.hitechtownhall.org/
Has anyone heard whether the campaigns answered the invitations?
Awesome! I'm gonna think about that, but first I need a little more brain power...
...how would turn the noun "apple" into a verb?
(That sounds like a challenge... I'll bite, but I hope you can excuse the sophomoric tone...)
I would verbify it, and, like the tree did to Newton, I would apple anyone who got in the way of my fruition.
If I were feeling particularly naughty (and a bit omnipotent), I might even applize the person who beliefed you couldn't verbify and then gift it to my English teacher.
They're talking about IBM's
(((Anti-Spam) Filtering) Research) Project
This is not the same as the
((Anti-(Spam Filtering)) Research) Project
Nor is it the
(Anti-((Spam Filtering) Research)) Project
I'm not sure, but I think the last two are run by AT&T.
There is an incorrect statement, caused by an error in my original test. I updated my test, and the last line should read
Your last comment (protected members have package visibility AND are visible to subclasses) helps explain the discrepancy betweeen foo.WonkPrime and bar.WonkPrime: there are two distinct access rules in play. The package visibility rule (which only applies to foo.WonkPrime) allows foo.* to access any protected member in any instance of foo.Wonk. The subclass visibility rule allows bar.WonkPrime to access protected members inherited from foo.Wonk. (For me, it was helpful to think that "protected members inherited from foo.Wonk" != "protected members in foo.Wonk")
There is order in the universe, and I'll stop wasting everyone's time now. :)
First, recap. These points are usually mentioned in "Intro to Java" texts:
1) A class member marked as protected can be accessed from any subclass. A normal use cases might have a subclass modify some inherited field.
2) One instance of a class is allowed to access any member of another instance of the same class. This might be used when a node in a linked list examines its successor in the list.
Apparently, the interaction between these rules depends on whether the super- and sub-classes reside in the same package. Suppose we have the following:Code in foo.WonkPrime.doThis can access this.fld, this.mth, sameInput.fld, sameInput.mth, superInput.fld, and/or superInput.mth.
Code in bar.WonkPrime.doThat can access this.fld, this.mth, sameInput.fld, sameInput.mth, and superInput.mth. But it can't access superInput.fld.
It's been said that "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."
So GNOME's development vector has been the inverse of Zawinski's: it started as an environment trying to provide everything, and it's slowly reducing its visible functionality. Every new iteration produces a new fight with users about simplified user interfaces, but the platform still exists. In fact, if GNOME's growth is anything like Linux's, then there are probably more users today than two years ago.
Where have my comments been unfair? Is there another lesson buried in here?
Unfortunately, expect Mr. Powell's blog to be spammed by every idealogue around.
If Powell actually follows the posts, Internet idealogues won't be the only ones posting: expect paid lobbiests. Readers (and Powell) will want to carefully consider the backgrounds of any regular, articulate, well-versed commentors. Of course, if such people do post, the public will be well-served: maybe we can personally examine the lobbying process. That would be a wonderful.
Now if only I could get paid for posting on slashdot... maybe then I'd start making worthwhile posts...
I have a hammer. Does anyone have suggestions on how I can integrate nails into Firefox 2.0?
precompiled binaries will never run as quickly as those compiled with the right optimizations for your own machine
A straw man. Precompiled binaries may have been compiled with the optimal settings for your machine, and binaries which you compile may not have the optimal settings. Identifying the optimal settings can actually be non-trivial. Source-based distributions are not necessarily the best fix to the 'one-size-fits-all' approach used by some distro's.
>> One training expert, however, cautions that Red
>> Hat certifications can lock administrators in to
>> Red Hat-specific skills.
> And the MSCE and other qualifications don't?
Silly person. Why on Earth would Microsoft support certifications that can lock administrators in to Red Hat-specific skills?
[*ducks*]
...not to mention the fact that the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled
filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc...
I think I just got 0wn3d.
I'm going to go back to lurking now.
...having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming...
I think you'll need to clarify that for us slashdot folk.
Interestingly, Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments is actually an extension of the earlier, smaller study entitled, You're So Stupid: Why the Hell Can't You See It. The researcher ultimately decided that a study about his editors wouldn't survive review.
..I acknowledge that he DID further computer science a significant bit...
Uh huh. Turing's halting proof is, like, so totally derivative of Godel's incompleteness proof, and, like, Cantor's diagonalization. And don't even get me started on Church. Like, geez. Turing's way overrated.
Mr. Brown argues that the "hybrid" (e.g. copyleft) model encourages "stealing, reverse engineering, and illegal copying." His evidence is that some supporters of copyleft licensing make contradictory claims about who said or did what and when they said or did it. I agree that such contradictions are unfortunate, sometimes relevent for practical reasons, and often difficult to resolve.
Mr. Brown has successfully demonstrated that some large, open, multinational, cooperative projects (organized by free agents) do not provide the same type of legalistic consistency as a bureaucratic, corporate or governmental project. Kudos to Mr. Brown.
I agree that some hybrid licenses encourage large, open, cooperative projects, and such projects may suffer some legal laxness. But it does not follow -- and I don't agree -- that "true" properietary and "true" open-source licenses discourage such laxness. Indeed, the case-law in computer-related IP was built on the indiscretions and disagreements of companies which use proprietary licensing. At the same, "true" open source projects -- like contemporary BSD or XFree86 -- suffer the same level of laxness as Linux.
Oh, whatever. I'm getting tired of writing.
Tim: Hi, my name is Tim.
Slashdot: Hello, Tim
Tim: I used to use KDE. I've been sober for 6 months now.
Slashdot Leader: When did you realize that KDE wasn't healthy for you?
Tim: I just always... I got angry and irritable. My wife started getting concerned. I tried doing less KDE, but... then, some lonely night when my wife was at a meeting, I'd see that KAtomic icon staring back at me. It made feel less lonely. Then one day I was trying to edit a menu -- I wanted KAtomic to be in the K menu -- and I just couldn't figure it out. There must have been 30,000 icons on the screen, but none of them made it work. And then my little girl tries to show me how, and I slapped her hand off my mouse. She started crying and said, "Daddy I wish KDE was never invented!"
Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: A lot of people cope with loneliness by getting angry or acting out.
Tim: No, it's more like I'd turn to KDE to take away my inner loneliness, but then it would just make me angry with the people who really should make me happy.
Alternate-Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: I think you're really angry with yourself.
Slashdot Leader: Mr. Alternate-Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person has a lot of experience with anger. Maybe you two can help each other.
Tim: Well, I mean, I don't want to share everything with the group. Some things are just private.
Alternate-Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: You should really be more honest and open. When more people are looking at your personal life, it's easier to find the flaws. Many eyeballs, you know.
Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: You should really GPL your life.
Teenage-Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: Yeah, I'd like to see how your wife works on the inside.
Tim: No, really, some things are personal.
Alternate-Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: Don't you like open source?
Tim: I guess not.
Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: Kill him!
Teenage-Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: Kill him! His widow will date geeks!
Alternate-Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: Mod him down! Troll! Troll!
[*Tim's karma becomes negative*]
Slashdot-AOL-Me-Too-Person: Now I need something else to do.
...it's Xchat that calls me "an idiot" when I've tried to run it as root...
It's nice to see that we finally have chatbots which pass the Turing test.