I'm not sure if you're just trying to clarify what I said or disagreeing with a point you purport I make, viz. that the Architect's speech is "bad" or that something is "wrong" with it. Just in case it's the latter, observe some of the words used in my original message: "superfluous", "nonsensical", "convoluted", "plausible". I don't say things that way to be pretentious or to demonstrate my big vocabulary - I naturally express myself that way. I guess that if the last sentence of my original post is true, then in this respect, I tend to be somewhat like the Architect myself, although to a less extreme degree. (For example, there's not much reason for him to say "concurrently" rather than "at the same time" or just "also", except to establish that he has a big vocabulary and likes to use long words. Don't get me wrong, there are times when "concurrently" is exactly the right word to use - in particular, any other word would probably be a bad idea when describing computer programs interacting with one another at the same time, since "concurrency" is a well-established piece of CS jargon. In fact, this might be exactly why the Architect's line goes that way...)
I know the common meaning of "apropos". The Architect's usage of it sounds strange because 1) it's too obvious to bear mention that Trinity (Neo's previous one-word line) is the subject the Architect was discussing in the antepenultimate line, and 2) I've never seen that usage before - and since I am at least familiar with the term itself, something which I don't think you can assume for most viewers of the movie, that usage must be rare indeed. It sounds like a speech affectation that somehow made it into the dictionary, actually.
While I'm at it, other examples of things that sound odd (trying to go with only issues that are relatively close to the surface, not deep plot speculation) in the Architect's speech:
"Pertinent" and "relevant" are synonymous, so saying that something is both pertinent and irrelevant is an oxymoron.
"creating fluctuations in even the most simplistic equations" sounds very odd given the way we use the word "equation" - an equation can't fluctuate. Presumably he is using this as a technical term to refer specifically to the type of equations (or functions, more likely) needed to instantiate an environment such as the Matrix.
"allowing a temporary dissemination of the code you carry, reinserting the
prime program" - must be jargon for some of the issues involved in the Matrix. Not comprehensible without more explanation of how the Matrix works, but probably not meant to be - just some "technobabble" to reassure you that something technical is going on here. Or this might be illuminated in Revolutions.
"There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept." This line is ambiguous. I assumed when I first saw the movie that the level they were prepared to accept was the current state, although it seems that most others thought it meant that the machines could still get by - albeit at a lower level of function - without humans.
"Your five predecessors were by design based on a similar predication" and "Already I can see the chain reaction, the chemical precursors that signal
the onset of emotion, designed specifically to overwhelm logic, and reason." Either the Architect likes to use the word "design" in a heavily metaphorical manner, or something really weird is going on here.
Some words in the Architect's speech are completely superfluous (for example, there's no reason for him to say "apropos" when he does, and it's even slightly nonsensical in context). However, the vast majority of it is just a long, convoluted way of saying the same things that others have said in their summaries in this thread. I have no doubt the Architect's speech was designed to confuse a reasonably high percentage of the viewers (he could have said everything he did far more simply). But it also creates an interesting effect for those who look a little deeper, as it seems at least plausible that an earlier AI program (remember, the Architect created the Matrix, so he's pretty old) would favor using a lot of technical terms so as to be as precise as possible.
You can't go to a movie with a pretty girl and still call yourself a geek.
... you got the date by asking out a bulletin board?
From khamm@andrew.cmu.edu Tue May 13 18:56:58 2003
Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 13:02:43 -0400 (EDT)
From: Kenn Brooks Hamm
Reply-To: kenn@cmu.edu
Newsgroups: cmu.misc.market
Subject: Matrix ticket seeks date
So, being a graduating senior, I just picked up a couple of tickets to The
Matrix: Reloaded on Wednesday night. I am now looking for someone to give
my second ticket to, in exchange for accompanying me. This is not a joke.
This is not a left-myself-logged-in post.
Qualifying factors:
* Must be female
* Must be a CMU undergrad student (freshman through 5th year senior is
fine), although I might waive this requirement if you can make a really
good case
If you're interested, please submit by email to kenn@cmu.edu the following
items:
* A recent (last 2 years) picture of yourself, or a link to same
* An essay of not less than 100 nor more than 200 words describing
yourself (please do not include information I can retrieve with
finger(1) - name, major, or class standing, in particular)
* An essay of not less than 100 nor more than 200 words telling me why I
should pick you over any other applicant
If you have a personal website or webjournal, please include a link to it
in your submission. Feel free to include any other information or links
you wish, but make sure that the items listed above are clearly marked,
and keep in mind that I may not go through such material, especially if it
is voluminous.
The deadline for submissions is Sunday, May 11 at 23:59:59
(coincidentally, the same time as my 15-498 take-home exam is due). The
winner will be notified by email by Monday, May 12 at 23:59:59. If I
receive no acceptable applications by that time, my second ticket will be
for sale for $9.50 (the same price I paid for it), but I hope I don't have
to do that. I reserve the right not to pick a winner even if I do receive
applications.
If you want to know about me, please refer to
<http://ragnar.nilmop.com/kenn/Kenn.html> for information, and
<http://ragnar.nilmop.com/kenn/news/default.htm l > for my webjournal.
Kenn
See http://ragnar.nilmop.org/kenn/history/matrix.txt for the whole thread. (Quick note: the links in the above message don't work. Read the thread for the details why. Replace.com with.org if you just want to make them work.)
What the hell kind of protocol is "fttps"? That's what fttps://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/15/1 528253&mode=nested&tid=123 (the last link in the story) specifies... which means the submitter either typed this out by hand (in which case, I feel sorry for them, do they not know about copy/paste?) or deliberately messed it up. (For what it's worth, the same URL with "https" as protocol does work. Although I do think https is a good idea and should be used more often, Slashdot browsing is probably one of the last things I'd worry about encrypting...)
Well, dcop is KDE's IPC mechanism, so I kind of doubt any non-KDE programs support it or will do so, although it should be theoretically possible... although for the particular case of Mozilla, if you just like its rendering (rather than the browser itself) then you can easily set Konqueror to embed Mozilla rather than khtml for its rendering component.
To the best of my knowledge (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong here), Gnome doesn't have anything like dcop - kind of surprising, to me at least, given that Gnome is generally positioned as more developer-oriented. (By dcop in the previous sentence I specifically mean the command-line client; I'm pretty sure that Gnome does have some sort of IPC architecture.) I don't know if GTK+/Gnome are architected in such a way as to cleanly support something like this - the reason it's so easy to do in KDE is that QT keeps around a lot of information about the source at runtime, and dispatches things even more dynamically than normal C++ with RTTI (that is, it looks up functions by name and argument type, rather than just indexing into a vtable).
I'm glad you were able to get some use out of it (as evidenced by your post below).
Well, I suppose it would have been, but I didn't know about it, and KDE has its own screensaver system (I'm not sure if it's embedding something else or what, but it has its own password dialog - it matches color schemes and fonts with your current KDE setup, which is a slight improvement, I suppose). If you're a programmer, though, and you use KDE, I'd encourage you to check out dcop. Granted, not everything (or even close to it) is scriptable at this point, but there are a fair number of functions you can get to - you're basically directly accessing the exported API of a program by this method. Type
dcop
for a list of programs you have running which provide a DCOP interface, then
dcop program
for a list of interfaces, and so on until you get down to the actual functions you can call.
Also, somewhat more directly in response to the question posed by the article, Konqueror can embed Konsole (the KDE terminal emulator) in a frame. When you switch directories in KDE's file browser, the terminal automatically does a "cd" to the new location. I've found this useful from time to time, although generally dragging and dropping directories or files from Konqueror to a separate Konsole instance has worked well for me.
And the syntax for command-line control of KDE apps looks roughly like this (shooting from the hip, since I'm not near a KDE-running system at the moment):
dcop KScreensaverIface lock
(This would lock your screen, probably one of the more useful actions to be able to script.)
I don't think using substandard materials and components is going to make you a successful business when RMAing all those drives (and most drives have exceptional warranties when compared to other consumer electronics)
Actually, hard drive manufacturers have all just reduced their warranties to one year. Here are a few stories about it:
Look, everyone, I see a lot of knee-jerk reactions going on here. At least in our current legal system, if you, say, leave a loaded gun (which you legally possess) out on your front porch, and someone comes along, picks it up and uses it to shoot someone you could probably be held negligent by our court system (whether this is a good thing is obviously a separate question). On the other hand if you leave the keys in your car and someone steals it and uses it to run someone down, the equivalent result is unlikely.
Free 802.11b Internet access isn't quite like either of these things, because it's more like a utility that ties into a lot of other people too. However, the key difference between it and a highway (substitute a utility if you want) is that those are basically heavily regulated, state-granted monopolies in the US. One of the closer analogies I can think of here is an easement. This is when there's a well-trodden path over a piece of your property. You still own the property, but you can't deny people the right to cross it. (Of course, you can deny anyone access to your 802.11b access point at any time, but bear with me...) Anyway, I think it's obvious that you can be held liable for the misuse of your easement.
The only relevant difference between access through an open 802.11b and just any old ISP as far as security-related issues goes is that the 802.11b is probably anonymous (at least unless you're caught in the act). Is this a significant security threat, justifying government intervention? I don't think so. Even the anonymity can almost certainly be achieved through other means if it's actually important. Trying to seal security threats by denying "bad" people Internet access at all is just stupid. They're going to get it. You have to secure your own systems.
One final point: it's really starting to piss me off when people write "802.11" rather than "802.11b" or "Wi-Fi" (as does the title of this story). 802.11 is the entire Ethernet standard. Wireless Ethernet is a particular set of.x pieces of that number, and in these cases, they're almost certainly referring exclusively to 802.11b. Why do people keep dropping the b?
I'd like to see the "Offtopic" removed as a negative Slashdot moderation.
See my sig.:-)
I also think that there's a reasonable argument that "Overrated" should go. That's really what M2 is for, and having an M2-proof M1 sort of defeats the whole purpose of M2.
It can also be used as a miscellaneous category, though. How about having a "miscellaneous good" and "miscellaneous bad" that are still subject to M2, but don't force you to give a predefined category? (Or even allow people to enter their own categories of a word or two, although I can see the trolls using this to post obscene words...)
New Information (for posts that introduce additional facts to a story, like "I worked as an engineer at the company and...")
This is what Informative is supposed to be for, as far as I know (although it's also used to moderate up people who post copies of the story when the original site is Slashdotted)... I think Informative covers this category reasonably well.
Interesting. Merge of Insightful/Interesting, as the two are not distinguished between by any moderators that I've seen.
I do distinguish between these, actually, in a way: I never use Insightful, because it implies agreement with the poster. Since I have very strong opinions, I almost never agree with every statement in a post of decent length. On the other hand, Interesting just means that I think the comment is worthy to be read. Also, I think Interesting is a "safer" moderation in M2 - I know it is when I'm the metamoderator.
Of course, none of this is a counterargument to merging the two into just Interesting.
One further suggestion: you didn't mention Redundant. I think it's similarly useless to Offtopic, perhaps even more so since there can easily be a post that says roughly the same thing you're saying that you haven't seen (or even that was posted while you were writing your comment!)
I think Crapflood (or some more PC variant thereof) should replace Offtopic, for posts that are truly junk (you know what I'm talking about if you ever read with a threshold under 1) rather than just not terribly related to the story they're attached to.
Other possible moderation categories:
+1 Famous (for when Linus Torvalds posts. Sounds stupid to have a category, but the point is that some people can set it to not give a bonus if they want to)
I think it's a reasonable assumption that, barring a massive conspiracy (which, frankly, I don't think we could pull off), we can't get Microsoft to produce a whole bunch of X-Boxen and then never sell them. On the other hand, their production is probably at least somewhat demand-driven, so by buying one, you actually encourage them to make more. I mean, I'm not suggesting anyone buy one just to hurt Microsoft, but if you have a legitimate use for it as well (low-end webserver for $200? Not too bad of a deal...) and the hacks actually work, then you both get a product that's useful to you and get to stick it to Microsoft.
If Microsoft is stupid enough to advertise on Slashdot, I say let 'em. They're subsidizing a website we like, and it's pretty unlikely to have much of an impact on their sales, given how polarized Slashdot readers already are. I mean, seriously. It's like buying an X-Box and never buying a game for it, but running Linux on it (Microsoft loses money on every X-Box sold) but we don't even have to go out and do anything, Microsoft is screwing themselves over with no help. Plus, I think it's pretty funny.
Perhaps more to the point, who really wants to watch local news anyway? Personally I really don't care about it. Now, you might say that I'm insulated from my community at large since I'm a college student (and they make sure that we know about anything going on on campus by spamming us over and over and over again). But even when I lived at home, I didn't really care about local news. As far as I can tell it basically falls into three categories:
Crime incidents. While I think it's useful to have a general idea of the crime rate in your area and what places to avoid at 1 am, hearing about specific incidents doesn't really do anything for me.
Human interest stories. I guess some people might like these (certainly those who are involved in the particular story that's airing...) Personally, again, I find it pretty boring.
Weather. The 'net is obviously a better source for this since you can just head over to weather.com or something any time you feel like it. Radio can also be good while you're in the car, but TV doesn't even have that advantage.
I guess sports might loosely be considered local news as well, but (and I don't think I'm alone among the/. readership here) I don't really care about sports. If I did, again, the 'net would probably be just as good of a source, if not better.
So, overall, I'm just not seeing the advantage to following local news. Maybe someone can enlighten me, but until then, TV news remains relatively useless to me except for the rare occasion like 9/11.
Umm... what on earth are you talking about? Mega Man X had some good songs (although awesome some boring ones). The original Mega Man series' music wasn't at all awe-inspiring in my opinion. However, I'll leave the Mega Man music criticism to those better acquainted with the series than I.
But your comments about Final Fantasy's music are just flat out false. While which is better among Final Fantasy or Mega Man as far as music is a matter at least somewhat open to debate, the Final Fantasy series' music involves more variety than just about any other game series I have had the pleasure to experience. Here is a brief listing of some of the tracks which, should you wish to have that variety amply demonstrated to you, you should have no difficulty finding on Gnutella:
Celes, Final Fantasy VI OST
One-Winged Angel, Final Fantasy VII OST
Man with the Machine Gun, Final Fantasy VIII OST
Sleepless City Treno, Final Fantasy IX OST
Fighting, Final Fantasy VII OST
I think music criticism in words is more or less a lost cause, so I really do encourage you to download these songs and try them out. But, to give you some idea, these range from piano to techno to classical (think Orff) to traditional video game music. Really, few artists in any genre deal with this much variety and pull it off this convincingly. And then of course there are the classic trademarks - the Chocobo song, the Prelude, and my single favorite song of all time, the Final Fantasy theme. Nobuo Uematsu's work is truly first-class, and it pains me to see him unthinkingly trashed like this. Give it a try - you might like it.
A car owner isn't a mechanic, even if they do mechanic like things (change the oil, etc.) Sysadmins are (hopefully) trained professionals. Web designers who throw up an ms webserver on a computer over a cable modem don't really fit that bill.
Well, no, they're not a mechanic, but they're still responsible if they modify the car so that it doesn't meet emissions standards or something, right?
The only significant difference between that and Code Red seems to be that whereas you generally have to actually do something to make your car fail emissions standards, all you have to do for Code Red to get you is not patch your system.
No, home computer enthusiasts are not sysadmins, and therefore they aren't being "lazy" when they don't patch their homebrew creations.
Maybe "lazy" isn't the best term, but I would definitely say they are being irresponsible. If you choose to run a service on your computer, you are responsible for the maintenance of that service, period.
But the single most concern of admins is pleasing your user community and management which means - uptime & performance & recovery. Security is an afterthought.
With all due respect, it seems like security would be a very important concern in maintaining uptimes...
To be fair, do you blame the Open Source community for writing buggy software?
When they do so, yes, I do. (Although an argument can be made that a business is more responsible to its customers than open source authors are to their users.) As I stated, I think software should be engineered in such a way that it can't reasonably fail - at least in simple ways like buffer overflows. I think it's a crying shame that buffer overflows still exist at all, when we have tools that can eliminate them for good.
The problem is not "lazy sysadmins". I'll bet most of these machines didn't even have one.
This appears to be a difference in definition. I consider the sysadmin for a machine to be the person who is most responsible for it (whoever pays the power bill, if no one at all is actually watching the machine). As a matter of fact, I would consider not having a sysadmin (as in an active one) to be the ultimate sign of a lazy sysadmin.:-)
Blaming admins for breakin's is like blaming car problems on auto mechanics. "Yes all those lazy mechanics out there didn't wan't to tune up their cars...they'd rather play quake". Absurd. Most mechanical car failures are probably due to owner neglect, not mechanic neglect (other than what is generated by not seeing one). Dentists don't cause cavities. Admins don't cause breakins.
I wasn't blaming the sysadmins. If anyone, I blame Microsoft - they wrote buggy software. But still, you can't deny that if whoever's responsible for the machines (let's avoid the word "sysadmin", as it seems to be controversial) had patched them, Code Red would be stopped dead.
Moreover security isn't typically a function that is even *expected* of most admin jobs I've seen. I've practically begged every outfit I've worked for to develop a security policy, check passwords, etc. and it's a small minority that cares- "there are other irons in the fire".
That seems bizarre. It seems to me like security would be the single most important concern of any competent admin. An insecure system can actually be worse than no system at all - if you have industrial secrets to protect, for example. On the other hand, I have never worked as a sysadmin, and what you're saying does seem (sadly) plausible.
I've heard this argument an awful lot, and no one in the open source community (who seems to want to use this argument) has ever been able to bring any factual instances to light. Has there ever really been a Microsoft vulnerability reported to MS where the company replied "That damage is only theoretical. We don't feel obliged to fix it." I mean, a real world story.
I admit I don't personally have such a story. However, you have to admit that this result is unlikely - why would Microsoft announce that they're not going to fix the problem? Much more likely is just silently ignoring it.
And keep in mind, MS probably receives dozens of fake security exploits a day by open source/hacking zealots (and I include myself wholeheartedly in that group). You can only expend so much money on determining what exploits are "real".
Doesn't this go against the other point you were making, though? In a way, the writing of exploits prevents Microsoft's having to spend so much money on determining which ones are "real" - if there's an exploit publicly available, it's definitely real.
I've always been a firm believer against virus-watchers who release full exploits to the general public. It simply isn't necessary. The same results (warning Microsoft) could have been done without causing such a hyped panic.
If the only action taken is to warn Microsoft, someone will discover the problem elsewhere, eventually. In the meantime, Microsoft is unlikely to take the complaint seriously - after all, the damage is only "theoretical", right? Now, it's a fact that there are a lot of inattentive, lazy sysadmins out there, many of whom are running IIS, and that's why they haven't all applied the patch yet - but at least with this in the news, it's harder for them to avoid it. How many would bother to apply the patch if there weren't any obvious benefit to doing so? Many might choose not to disturb a working installation.
Personally, I think that the only software that can ever hope to be secure in the real world is built like a tank. Use a language or library that makes it impossible to have buffer overflows; assign permissions to everything and never give out more than you need to; etc. But in an environment where exploits are only theoretical and only announced to the entity responsible for fixing them, you have to admit that companies like Microsoft will be very slow to fix them.
Oof... believe me, I know about strong versus weak typing. (I posted the parent, but posted it anonymously by accident.) I learned real programming (i.e. not Applesoft Basic) with Scheme, and learned SML last year. SML is just about as strongly-typed as you can get, and Scheme is weakly typed.
Weak typing does have some advantages. I use Perl, which is weakly typed, and the convenience is worth it. But weakly typed languages are slower than strongly typed ones (and this is a fundamental limitation that can't be removed, weakly typed languages have to have runtime checks for types). Also, type errors can catch a lot of common mistakes at compile time rather than runtime (for example, putting arguments to a function in the wrong order will often trigger a type error.)
Overall, I definitely agree that weak typing has some purpose, but for general applications development, strong typing makes for significantly more maintainable code - at a cost to developers, to be sure, but in my opinion a worthwhile one.
I've always used "nerd" and "geek" in a way which places the positive connotation opposite of the way you do. Geek was essentially a wannabe nerd. Nerd was someone who actually understood what he/she was doing.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure if you're just trying to clarify what I said or disagreeing with a point you purport I make, viz. that the Architect's speech is "bad" or that something is "wrong" with it. Just in case it's the latter, observe some of the words used in my original message: "superfluous", "nonsensical", "convoluted", "plausible". I don't say things that way to be pretentious or to demonstrate my big vocabulary - I naturally express myself that way. I guess that if the last sentence of my original post is true, then in this respect, I tend to be somewhat like the Architect myself, although to a less extreme degree. (For example, there's not much reason for him to say "concurrently" rather than "at the same time" or just "also", except to establish that he has a big vocabulary and likes to use long words. Don't get me wrong, there are times when "concurrently" is exactly the right word to use - in particular, any other word would probably be a bad idea when describing computer programs interacting with one another at the same time, since "concurrency" is a well-established piece of CS jargon. In fact, this might be exactly why the Architect's line goes that way...)
Some words in the Architect's speech are completely superfluous (for example, there's no reason for him to say "apropos" when he does, and it's even slightly nonsensical in context). However, the vast majority of it is just a long, convoluted way of saying the same things that others have said in their summaries in this thread. I have no doubt the Architect's speech was designed to confuse a reasonably high percentage of the viewers (he could have said everything he did far more simply). But it also creates an interesting effect for those who look a little deeper, as it seems at least plausible that an earlier AI program (remember, the Architect created the Matrix, so he's pretty old) would favor using a lot of technical terms so as to be as precise as possible.
And the tilde is typed... guess how... shift-backquote!
What the hell kind of protocol is "fttps"? That's what fttps://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/15/1 528253&mode=nested&tid=123 (the last link in the story) specifies... which means the submitter either typed this out by hand (in which case, I feel sorry for them, do they not know about copy/paste?) or deliberately messed it up. (For what it's worth, the same URL with "https" as protocol does work. Although I do think https is a good idea and should be used more often, Slashdot browsing is probably one of the last things I'd worry about encrypting...)
Well, dcop is KDE's IPC mechanism, so I kind of doubt any non-KDE programs support it or will do so, although it should be theoretically possible... although for the particular case of Mozilla, if you just like its rendering (rather than the browser itself) then you can easily set Konqueror to embed Mozilla rather than khtml for its rendering component.
To the best of my knowledge (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong here), Gnome doesn't have anything like dcop - kind of surprising, to me at least, given that Gnome is generally positioned as more developer-oriented. (By dcop in the previous sentence I specifically mean the command-line client; I'm pretty sure that Gnome does have some sort of IPC architecture.) I don't know if GTK+/Gnome are architected in such a way as to cleanly support something like this - the reason it's so easy to do in KDE is that QT keeps around a lot of information about the source at runtime, and dispatches things even more dynamically than normal C++ with RTTI (that is, it looks up functions by name and argument type, rather than just indexing into a vtable).
I'm glad you were able to get some use out of it (as evidenced by your post below).
Well, I suppose it would have been, but I didn't know about it, and KDE has its own screensaver system (I'm not sure if it's embedding something else or what, but it has its own password dialog - it matches color schemes and fonts with your current KDE setup, which is a slight improvement, I suppose). If you're a programmer, though, and you use KDE, I'd encourage you to check out dcop. Granted, not everything (or even close to it) is scriptable at this point, but there are a fair number of functions you can get to - you're basically directly accessing the exported API of a program by this method. Type
dcop
for a list of programs you have running which provide a DCOP interface, then
dcop program
for a list of interfaces, and so on until you get down to the actual functions you can call.
Also, somewhat more directly in response to the question posed by the article, Konqueror can embed Konsole (the KDE terminal emulator) in a frame. When you switch directories in KDE's file browser, the terminal automatically does a "cd" to the new location. I've found this useful from time to time, although generally dragging and dropping directories or files from Konqueror to a separate Konsole instance has worked well for me.
And the syntax for command-line control of KDE apps looks roughly like this (shooting from the hip, since I'm not near a KDE-running system at the moment):
dcop KScreensaverIface lock
(This would lock your screen, probably one of the more useful actions to be able to script.)
Actually, hard drive manufacturers have all just reduced their warranties to one year. Here are a few stories about it:
(These are just the first couple I found on Google.)
Look, everyone, I see a lot of knee-jerk reactions going on here. At least in our current legal system, if you, say, leave a loaded gun (which you legally possess) out on your front porch, and someone comes along, picks it up and uses it to shoot someone you could probably be held negligent by our court system (whether this is a good thing is obviously a separate question). On the other hand if you leave the keys in your car and someone steals it and uses it to run someone down, the equivalent result is unlikely.
.x pieces of that number, and in these cases, they're almost certainly referring exclusively to 802.11b. Why do people keep dropping the b?
Free 802.11b Internet access isn't quite like either of these things, because it's more like a utility that ties into a lot of other people too. However, the key difference between it and a highway (substitute a utility if you want) is that those are basically heavily regulated, state-granted monopolies in the US. One of the closer analogies I can think of here is an easement. This is when there's a well-trodden path over a piece of your property. You still own the property, but you can't deny people the right to cross it. (Of course, you can deny anyone access to your 802.11b access point at any time, but bear with me...) Anyway, I think it's obvious that you can be held liable for the misuse of your easement.
The only relevant difference between access through an open 802.11b and just any old ISP as far as security-related issues goes is that the 802.11b is probably anonymous (at least unless you're caught in the act). Is this a significant security threat, justifying government intervention? I don't think so. Even the anonymity can almost certainly be achieved through other means if it's actually important. Trying to seal security threats by denying "bad" people Internet access at all is just stupid. They're going to get it. You have to secure your own systems.
One final point: it's really starting to piss me off when people write "802.11" rather than "802.11b" or "Wi-Fi" (as does the title of this story). 802.11 is the entire Ethernet standard. Wireless Ethernet is a particular set of
I'd like to see the "Offtopic" removed as a negative Slashdot moderation.
:-)
See my sig.
I also think that there's a reasonable argument that "Overrated" should go. That's really what M2 is for, and having an M2-proof M1 sort of defeats the whole purpose of M2.
It can also be used as a miscellaneous category, though. How about having a "miscellaneous good" and "miscellaneous bad" that are still subject to M2, but don't force you to give a predefined category? (Or even allow people to enter their own categories of a word or two, although I can see the trolls using this to post obscene words...)
New Information (for posts that introduce additional facts to a story, like "I worked as an engineer at the company and...")
This is what Informative is supposed to be for, as far as I know (although it's also used to moderate up people who post copies of the story when the original site is Slashdotted)... I think Informative covers this category reasonably well.
Interesting. Merge of Insightful/Interesting, as the two are not distinguished between by any moderators that I've seen.
I do distinguish between these, actually, in a way: I never use Insightful, because it implies agreement with the poster. Since I have very strong opinions, I almost never agree with every statement in a post of decent length. On the other hand, Interesting just means that I think the comment is worthy to be read. Also, I think Interesting is a "safer" moderation in M2 - I know it is when I'm the metamoderator.
Of course, none of this is a counterargument to merging the two into just Interesting.
One further suggestion: you didn't mention Redundant. I think it's similarly useless to Offtopic, perhaps even more so since there can easily be a post that says roughly the same thing you're saying that you haven't seen (or even that was posted while you were writing your comment!)
I think Crapflood (or some more PC variant thereof) should replace Offtopic, for posts that are truly junk (you know what I'm talking about if you ever read with a threshold under 1) rather than just not terribly related to the story they're attached to.
Other possible moderation categories:
+1 Famous (for when Linus Torvalds posts. Sounds stupid to have a category, but the point is that some people can set it to not give a bonus if they want to)
+1 Original (for haikus and such)
I think it's a reasonable assumption that, barring a massive conspiracy (which, frankly, I don't think we could pull off), we can't get Microsoft to produce a whole bunch of X-Boxen and then never sell them. On the other hand, their production is probably at least somewhat demand-driven, so by buying one, you actually encourage them to make more. I mean, I'm not suggesting anyone buy one just to hurt Microsoft, but if you have a legitimate use for it as well (low-end webserver for $200? Not too bad of a deal...) and the hacks actually work, then you both get a product that's useful to you and get to stick it to Microsoft.
If Microsoft is stupid enough to advertise on Slashdot, I say let 'em. They're subsidizing a website we like, and it's pretty unlikely to have much of an impact on their sales, given how polarized Slashdot readers already are. I mean, seriously. It's like buying an X-Box and never buying a game for it, but running Linux on it (Microsoft loses money on every X-Box sold) but we don't even have to go out and do anything, Microsoft is screwing themselves over with no help. Plus, I think it's pretty funny.
Perhaps more to the point, who really wants to watch local news anyway? Personally I really don't care about it. Now, you might say that I'm insulated from my community at large since I'm a college student (and they make sure that we know about anything going on on campus by spamming us over and over and over again). But even when I lived at home, I didn't really care about local news. As far as I can tell it basically falls into three categories:
I guess sports might loosely be considered local news as well, but (and I don't think I'm alone among the /. readership here) I don't really care about sports. If I did, again, the 'net would probably be just as good of a source, if not better.
So, overall, I'm just not seeing the advantage to following local news. Maybe someone can enlighten me, but until then, TV news remains relatively useless to me except for the rare occasion like 9/11.
This site appears to be getting Slashdotted, so I'm in the process of mirroring it: http://ragnar.nilmop.com/kenn/www.thereverend.com/ brick_testament/
Umm... what on earth are you talking about? Mega Man X had some good songs (although awesome some boring ones). The original Mega Man series' music wasn't at all awe-inspiring in my opinion. However, I'll leave the Mega Man music criticism to those better acquainted with the series than I.
But your comments about Final Fantasy's music are just flat out false. While which is better among Final Fantasy or Mega Man as far as music is a matter at least somewhat open to debate, the Final Fantasy series' music involves more variety than just about any other game series I have had the pleasure to experience. Here is a brief listing of some of the tracks which, should you wish to have that variety amply demonstrated to you, you should have no difficulty finding on Gnutella:
I think music criticism in words is more or less a lost cause, so I really do encourage you to download these songs and try them out. But, to give you some idea, these range from piano to techno to classical (think Orff) to traditional video game music. Really, few artists in any genre deal with this much variety and pull it off this convincingly. And then of course there are the classic trademarks - the Chocobo song, the Prelude, and my single favorite song of all time, the Final Fantasy theme. Nobuo Uematsu's work is truly first-class, and it pains me to see him unthinkingly trashed like this. Give it a try - you might like it.
Well, no, they're not a mechanic, but they're still responsible if they modify the car so that it doesn't meet emissions standards or something, right?
The only significant difference between that and Code Red seems to be that whereas you generally have to actually do something to make your car fail emissions standards, all you have to do for Code Red to get you is not patch your system.
Maybe "lazy" isn't the best term, but I would definitely say they are being irresponsible. If you choose to run a service on your computer, you are responsible for the maintenance of that service, period.
With all due respect, it seems like security would be a very important concern in maintaining uptimes...
When they do so, yes, I do. (Although an argument can be made that a business is more responsible to its customers than open source authors are to their users.) As I stated, I think software should be engineered in such a way that it can't reasonably fail - at least in simple ways like buffer overflows. I think it's a crying shame that buffer overflows still exist at all, when we have tools that can eliminate them for good.
This appears to be a difference in definition. I consider the sysadmin for a machine to be the person who is most responsible for it (whoever pays the power bill, if no one at all is actually watching the machine). As a matter of fact, I would consider not having a sysadmin (as in an active one) to be the ultimate sign of a lazy sysadmin. :-)
I wasn't blaming the sysadmins. If anyone, I blame Microsoft - they wrote buggy software. But still, you can't deny that if whoever's responsible for the machines (let's avoid the word "sysadmin", as it seems to be controversial) had patched them, Code Red would be stopped dead.
That seems bizarre. It seems to me like security would be the single most important concern of any competent admin. An insecure system can actually be worse than no system at all - if you have industrial secrets to protect, for example. On the other hand, I have never worked as a sysadmin, and what you're saying does seem (sadly) plausible.
I admit I don't personally have such a story. However, you have to admit that this result is unlikely - why would Microsoft announce that they're not going to fix the problem? Much more likely is just silently ignoring it.
Doesn't this go against the other point you were making, though? In a way, the writing of exploits prevents Microsoft's having to spend so much money on determining which ones are "real" - if there's an exploit publicly available, it's definitely real.
If the only action taken is to warn Microsoft, someone will discover the problem elsewhere, eventually. In the meantime, Microsoft is unlikely to take the complaint seriously - after all, the damage is only "theoretical", right? Now, it's a fact that there are a lot of inattentive, lazy sysadmins out there, many of whom are running IIS, and that's why they haven't all applied the patch yet - but at least with this in the news, it's harder for them to avoid it. How many would bother to apply the patch if there weren't any obvious benefit to doing so? Many might choose not to disturb a working installation.
Personally, I think that the only software that can ever hope to be secure in the real world is built like a tank. Use a language or library that makes it impossible to have buffer overflows; assign permissions to everything and never give out more than you need to; etc. But in an environment where exploits are only theoretical and only announced to the entity responsible for fixing them, you have to admit that companies like Microsoft will be very slow to fix them.
Oof... believe me, I know about strong versus weak typing. (I posted the parent, but posted it anonymously by accident.) I learned real programming (i.e. not Applesoft Basic) with Scheme, and learned SML last year. SML is just about as strongly-typed as you can get, and Scheme is weakly typed.
Weak typing does have some advantages. I use Perl, which is weakly typed, and the convenience is worth it. But weakly typed languages are slower than strongly typed ones (and this is a fundamental limitation that can't be removed, weakly typed languages have to have runtime checks for types). Also, type errors can catch a lot of common mistakes at compile time rather than runtime (for example, putting arguments to a function in the wrong order will often trigger a type error.)
Overall, I definitely agree that weak typing has some purpose, but for general applications development, strong typing makes for significantly more maintainable code - at a cost to developers, to be sure, but in my opinion a worthwhile one.
I've always used "nerd" and "geek" in a way which places the positive connotation opposite of the way you do. Geek was essentially a wannabe nerd. Nerd was someone who actually understood what he/she was doing.