> [... ] There is no universal agreement on the size of the problem, on the way to count the victims, or even on how to define [... ]
"Perfect!"
- immediate reaction, with accompanying drool spot on table, of every bureaucrat and lobbyist, at every level of government, upon hearing these words, as applied to every issue ever raised for debate.
> 'The Towne of Weare has five people on the Board of Selectmen. If three of them vote to use the power of eminent domain to take this land from Mr. Souter we can begin our hotel development.
Your town may vary, but in many towns, the Board of Selectmen is elected. And if you didn't know that, neither do 99% of your fellow citizens.
What this means is that if three of them (or even if all five of 'em) don't vote to use the power of eminent domain (either because they think the planned redevelopment is a crock, or because they just don't care for Objectivists), it's entirely up to the citizens of Weare can choose whether or not their Selectmen are (or are not) worthy of re-election in a year or two.
I don't live in Weare. None of my business either way. But the Just Desserts Cafe sure sounds like a nice place for a bite to eat, should I be passing through the neighborhood.
D. Reed Freeman, the "Chief Privacy Officer" of Claria Networks (formerly Gator), the creators of the pervasive spyware package GAIN, has been appointed to the Department of Homeland Security's "Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee"
> Mr. Jamie Reed (Copeland) (Lab):
> Furthermore, as the first Jedi Member of this place, I look
forward to the protection under the law that will be provided
to me by the Bill.
Mr. Han Solo (Corellia) (Reb):
Listen, Mr. Reed, hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side.
Greedo (Tatooine) (Hutt):
free-boo-blee~fttz~Solo wise. Solo speak truth. Lucas speak false. Smuggler from Corellia shoot first. Still not having paid campaign donations, mind you.~ftttzgrbl~
> > Well, at least for BlindOS you don't have to worry about writing video drivers... > > Unless your tech support/any other user of the machine isn't blind.
Ah, this is about finding an OS for tech support folks in India. They could be blind, because all the work is done over the phone. Spending five minutes on the phone proves they're deaf. And the quality of the solutions proves that they're dumb.
Ever since I was a young boy,
I took the support call,
From Delhi down to Bangalore,
I must have played them all.
But I ain't seen nothin' like him
In any support-cube hall,
That deaf, dumb and blind tech
Always says "re-install!"
Sits there like a statue,
He's a voicemail machine,
Please to reading from scripts,
Keeps his call queue clean,
Bullshits by intuition,
Never seen him fall,
That deaf, dumb, and blind tech
Always says "re-install!"
> Never 'eard of 'im, guv.
> >I have just finished reading 'The World Jones Made' by Philip K. Dick, if he's any relation?
"No, we don't have Philip C. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Elektrik Sh33p" with two "K"s and l33t-speak "3"s! Why doesn't the author try W. H. Smith's?"
Suit: "Why did you drag me out here?"
New Hire: "$4 a square foot is why I dragged you out here."
Suit: "Sure, it's $4 a square foot, we're in the middle of nowhere."
New Hire: "We're not in the middle of nowhere. How'd you get here?"
Suit: "Airport."
New Hire: "Yeah, airport, highway, telephone."
Suit: "Internet."
New Hire: "Internet."
Suit: "Genius. $4 a square foot, and $4 an hour. You're fired!"
> The plan WAS to get all these linux penguins playing tag, but they never quite got started. The rules consulted on Wikipedia.org were changed from moment to moment.
Excuse me, I believe that I may have seen something that appeared like a statement of fact there.
Some people believed that the plan WAS to get all these linux penguins playing tag, but they never quite got started. Still other people believed that the rules consulted in Wokipedia.org were changed from moment to moment.
The people on my side of the issue believe I fixed your post, and the people on your side of the issue believe otherwise.
And neither of us is in a position to argue on behalf of offended Italian-Americans on the issue of people who believe "satire" is the answer to the question "Whadda you calla the rubber things onna you bicycle or-a you car wheels?", but we'll agree to put this stub in here for the benefit of future contributors.
> These two strings walk into a bar and sit down. The bartender says, "So what'll it be?"
>The first string says, "I think I'll have a beer quag fulk boorg jdk^CjfdLk jk3s d#f67howe%^U r89nvy~~owmc63^Dz x.xvcu" >
"Please excuse my friend," the second string says, "He isn't null-terminated."
Huh?
That kinda humor might fly at a programmer's bar, but not at CERN. I mean, two strings walk into a bar, but what does your punchline have to do with deriving the structure of the universe from non-commutative geometries, gauge transformations, and the mass of the Higgs Boson?
I mean, really, I'm racking my brane here. Or was "a bar" just a typo?
Anyways, two strings walked into h/(2*pi), and one stri Gravitic quantization violation: divide by sparticle error. Universe dumped.
For the record, O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas were in the dissent. The minority. The losers. The folks saying "no, the government doesn't have the right to take private land from some citizens on behalf of other private citizens as long as there are a few extra tax dollars to be picked up in the process".
If you want to argue party politics ("It's all Bush's fault, favoring Special Interests"), there are plenty of threads where you can do so and still be on-topic.
Unless you're so blinded by partisan politics that you consider O'Connor, Scalia, Rehnquist, and Thomas to be liberals (well, at least for today), this isn't one of those threads.
This isn't about Republicans vs. Democrats.
It's about libertarians vs. statists.
> "DoubleClick Warns Against Ad-Blocking Browsers" ( Read More... | 482 of 587 comments
...which range in vitriol from "Fuck Doubleclick! Fuck them in their stupid asses!", to "Doubleclick sucks double donkey dick", and all the way up to the thoughtful, sensitive "What did the poor donkeys do to deserve having their poor schlongs assaulted by the tonsils of a Doubleclick executive?"
And on that note, I would just like to say:
> Using technology from Umbria Communications, a Boulder, Colo., company that aims to identify demographic groups online based on their speech patterns and discussion topics, WPP's G Whiz concluded that t
*coffeespew*
"G Whiz? G. Whiz, of WPP? You're a jerk, Whiz. A complete asshole."
(Yeah, it sucks being immortal, but some days suck less than others.)
>...if the craft suffered "failure to enter orbit at all", presumably that means it hit space and kept going, right? I'd imagine someone would have noticed a Russian ICBM falling randomly out of the sky.
In other words, what you're trying to say is that somewhere downrange of post-Soviet Russia, solar sail will eventually find yo*CRUNCH* NO CARRIER
> > SIR - Your article on software piracy was extreme, misleading and irresponsible ("BSA or just BS?", May 21st). The headline was particularly offensive. The implication that an industry would purposely inflate the rate of piracy and its impact to suit its political aims is ridiculous. The problem is real and needs no exaggeration. > > > >
Beth Scott > >
Business Software Alliance > >
London > >
Dear Madam: > >
The 'BS' in the headline was simply referring to your initials... >
No harm done. >
The use of the word 'Madam' in our letter, on the other hand, is deliberate. > >Sincerely, >
The Economist
Dear Economist:
Your reply to my earlier letter was extreme, misleading and irresponsible ("Madam", June 14th). The deliberate choice of the word "Madam" was particularly offensive. The implication that an industry would purposely inflate the rate of piracy and its impact to suit its political aims is ridiculous. Whether you refer to unpaid sex acts as "open source", "trying it before you buy", or "blocking the auto-updating daemon with a heavy-ass firewall" the threats posed by individuals slutting around, living together, and the signing of marriage contracts are real and need no exaggeration!
By placing the garbage pail full of water in your garden, you ensure that within five minutes of the link going live on Slashdot, you'll have several gallons of piping-hot vegetable soup!
> > > So what's in it for [the programmers who build the Great Firewall of China]? How do they feel about what they do? Anyone have a link to any information about them? > > > > > >
AFAIK, a lot of this gets done by a variety of American companies, who are quite happy providing and customizing their filtering software for anyone willing to pay up. Unlike cryptographic software, there aren't any restrictions on the export of filtering software, and the continual efforts of users to get around the software provide a steady revenue stream. > > Well, if that's true, it's kind of evil, maybe even racist, isn't it? It's one (fairly bad) thing if China decides to exclude themselves from the global dialog. It's another (really bad) thing if we actually help them to do it.
What's racist about it? Developers code bits. Bits don't care where they're used.
There's a word for China: beta site.
The USSR and former Socialist Republics were the alpha site. The implementation collapsed under the weight of its own bureaurcacy. You're doing it with paper, not computers, so you're reliant on humans. The fundamental scaling limitation is that because humans can be bought - can betray you - so, for every layer of Secret Police you implement, you have to add another layer of S00per-S33kr1t Police on top of it. East Germany's STASI was the canonical example; an economy imploded because 30% of the population were paid informants on each other.
China, as the beta site, is doing something new: an industrialized society with totalitarian controls over information. The system is automated - avoiding the risk of implosion. The system works much like the standard USSR/DDR model, however, in that prohibited information is blocked from the population.
Full implementation of the production version will be even slicker. Unlike the Chinese model, where citizens know they've've crossed the line (because the request for that "interesting" URL was blocked, or because the email to that "interesting" person never got delivered), the live system will simply log the data for future reference and cross-archiving - it'll be done automatically, avoiding the problem that crashed the alpha site under heavy load.
Give a subversive enough rope, and he'll hang himself. And unlike the beta site, the production version will enable society to track its unreliable elements until they've exposed all of their secrets and, by extension, all of their friends' secrets.
Absolute social control, with minimal loss of economic productivity, and (unlike China), practically no diminishment of civilian morale, because everyone thinks they're still free-as-in-speech. Quite clever, really, and the Chinese (as one of the few societies that doesn't really have the morale problem that the beta version might induce in the target market) still manage to benefit by testing the beta version for a free-as-in-beer cost.
Everybody involved with the project - on both sides of the Pacific - wins.
> I have the feeling that nobody's really trying hard enough to protect us. We stand an hour longer in the security line just so that people can bring explosives through in their shoes? Now they make us take our shoes off. What if someone brings explosives through in their pants?
...then evolutionary pressures start to select in favor of people like the Goatse Guy?
Seriously - that was the biggest disappointment about the shoe-bomber case. If he'd only smuggled the bomb up his ass, the simple act of getting in line at the airport would be a lot more fun.
Imagine hearing stuff like "Excuse me, ma'am, I think you're kinda cute, and since I'm kinda average, and since the guy front of me is obviously better-looking than me, and since the guy standing behind you is obviously gay, I think that three out of the four of us would be happier if you and I switched places. How 'bout it?"
Everybody wins!
Re:This on it's face looks pretty good.
on
The Death of Folders?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
> > But the very concept of having millions of files just scattered about in a completely flat heirarchy, well, doesn't seem like a really good way to handle your company's data. > >Why not? With Smart Folders it allows EVERYONE with access to that location to sort that data in their own personal way, rather than one person forcing their filing method on everyone else.
Because you are not a unique and beautiful snowflake.
And because, contrary to what they teach in public schools these days, the filesystem on your employer's fileserver was not installed for the purposes of protecting your self esteem.
> > nano [nano-editor.org] rocks! The smaller your editor, the bigger your penis! Text editors want to be minimalist! > > That's why I use ed. >
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2144156 Apr 4 16:11/usr/bin/vim
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 152984 Jun 3 15:15/bin/nano
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 74348 Mar 21 14:34/bin/ed
Increase your size! Give her more pleasure with echo.
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 48208 May 16 2004/bin/echo
But when I really want to show off, I just turn on echoing and use a dumb terminal. My Wang weighs about 15 pounds and uses only a few kilobits of ROM!
> This article at LinuxDevices.com describes an interesting project at the University of Vermont in which researchers use real-time Linux to build a laser trap
Dr. Torvalds: You know, I have one simple request... and that is to have penguins with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads. Now evidently, my megaloptic Naval colleage informs me that IT'S A TRAP!
> Add a headset and Skype, and you don't need a cell phone to have loud, annoying phone conversations on an airplane."
Time for serious airpwnage. No, not the kind of pwnage that'll befall you for playing CS (namely wearing a headset and being prone to mutter things like "OK, 3 terrorists to the left, one's got a gun! Kill that fucker!" under your breath) on an airplane.
I'm talking about the amount of fun you can have when that annoying cellphone-addict using Skype to escape the withdrawal... you can already hear him from three seats behind of you, hollering to his wife and kids... and then the holler he makes when he finds himself
airpwned!
Slashdot Mirror
"Perfect!"
- immediate reaction, with accompanying drool spot on table, of every bureaucrat and lobbyist, at every level of government, upon hearing these words, as applied to every issue ever raised for debate.
Your town may vary, but in many towns, the Board of Selectmen is elected. And if you didn't know that, neither do 99% of your fellow citizens.
What this means is that if three of them (or even if all five of 'em) don't vote to use the power of eminent domain (either because they think the planned redevelopment is a crock, or because they just don't care for Objectivists), it's entirely up to the citizens of Weare can choose whether or not their Selectmen are (or are not) worthy of re-election in a year or two.
I don't live in Weare. None of my business either way. But the Just Desserts Cafe sure sounds like a nice place for a bite to eat, should I be passing through the neighborhood.
> new: We know where you've been!
That's not (+5, Funny), it's (+5, Informative), you insensitive clod!
Gator CPO at the Department of Homeland Security
Art imitates Life. Life imitates Slashdot.
"Nextel. Done."
> Furthermore, as the first Jedi Member of this place, I look forward to the protection under the law that will be provided to me by the Bill.
Mr. Han Solo (Corellia) (Reb):
Listen, Mr. Reed, hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side.
Greedo (Tatooine) (Hutt):
free-boo-blee~fttz~Solo wise. Solo speak truth. Lucas speak false. Smuggler from Corellia shoot first. Still not having paid campaign donations, mind you.~ftttzgrbl~
>
> Unless your tech support/any other user of the machine isn't blind.
Ah, this is about finding an OS for tech support folks in India. They could be blind, because all the work is done over the phone. Spending five minutes on the phone proves they're deaf. And the quality of the solutions proves that they're dumb.
Ever since I was a young boy,
I took the support call,
From Delhi down to Bangalore,
I must have played them all.
But I ain't seen nothin' like him
In any support-cube hall,
That deaf, dumb and blind tech
Always says "re-install!"
Sits there like a statue,
He's a voicemail machine,
Please to reading from scripts,
Keeps his call queue clean,
Bullshits by intuition,
Never seen him fall,
That deaf, dumb, and blind tech
Always says "re-install!"
>
>I have just finished reading 'The World Jones Made' by Philip K. Dick, if he's any relation?
"No, we don't have Philip C. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Elektrik Sh33p" with two "K"s and l33t-speak "3"s! Why doesn't the author try W. H. Smith's?"
"He did, the article submitter sent him here!"
> SLASHDOT
Slashdotter descriptions. (Lewd mode wasn't enough for you, was it, you perv?)
> KISS MY KNEECAPS
She blushes a bit, and admonishes you with her finger. "Nyet, comrade. In Soviet Russia, kneecaps kiss you!"
New Hire: "$4 a square foot is why I dragged you out here."
Suit: "Sure, it's $4 a square foot, we're in the middle of nowhere."
New Hire: "We're not in the middle of nowhere. How'd you get here?"
Suit: "Airport."
New Hire: "Yeah, airport, highway, telephone."
Suit: "Internet."
New Hire: "Internet."
Suit: "Genius. $4 a square foot, and $4 an hour. You're fired!"
IBM. Solutions for a small planet. :)
Excuse me, I believe that I may have seen something that appeared like a statement of fact there.
The people on my side of the issue believe I fixed your post, and the people on your side of the issue believe otherwise.
And neither of us is in a position to argue on behalf of offended Italian-Americans on the issue of people who believe "satire" is the answer to the question "Whadda you calla the rubber things onna you bicycle or-a you car wheels?", but we'll agree to put this stub in here for the benefit of future contributors.
>The first string says, "I think I'll have a beer quag fulk boorg jdk^CjfdLk jk3s d#f67howe%^U r89nvy~~owmc63^Dz x.xvcu"
> "Please excuse my friend," the second string says, "He isn't null-terminated."
Huh?
That kinda humor might fly at a programmer's bar, but not at CERN. I mean, two strings walk into a bar, but what does your punchline have to do with deriving the structure of the universe from non-commutative geometries, gauge transformations, and the mass of the Higgs Boson?
I mean, really, I'm racking my brane here. Or was "a bar" just a typo?
Anyways, two strings walked into h/(2*pi), and one stri
Gravitic quantization violation: divide by sparticle error. Universe dumped.
For the record, O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas were in the dissent. The minority. The losers. The folks saying "no, the government doesn't have the right to take private land from some citizens on behalf of other private citizens as long as there are a few extra tax dollars to be picked up in the process".
If you want to argue party politics ("It's all Bush's fault, favoring Special Interests"), there are plenty of threads where you can do so and still be on-topic.
Unless you're so blinded by partisan politics that you consider O'Connor, Scalia, Rehnquist, and Thomas to be liberals (well, at least for today), this isn't one of those threads.
This isn't about Republicans vs. Democrats. It's about libertarians vs. statists.
> "DoubleClick Warns Against Ad-Blocking Browsers"
( Read More... | 482 of 587 comments
And on that note, I would just like to say:
> Using technology from Umbria Communications, a Boulder, Colo., company that aims to identify demographic groups online based on their speech patterns and discussion topics, WPP's G Whiz concluded that t
*coffeespew*
"G Whiz? G. Whiz, of WPP? You're a jerk, Whiz. A complete asshole."
(Yeah, it sucks being immortal, but some days suck less than others.)
In other words, what you're trying to say is that somewhere downrange of post-Soviet Russia, solar sail will eventually find yo*CRUNCH*
NO CARRIER
> >
> > Beth Scott
> > Business Software Alliance
> > London
>
> Dear Madam:
>
> The 'BS' in the headline was simply referring to your initials...
> No harm done.
> The use of the word 'Madam' in our letter, on the other hand, is deliberate.
>
>Sincerely,
> The Economist
Dear Economist:
Your reply to my earlier letter was extreme, misleading and irresponsible ("Madam", June 14th). The deliberate choice of the word "Madam" was particularly offensive. The implication that an industry would purposely inflate the rate of piracy and its impact to suit its political aims is ridiculous. Whether you refer to unpaid sex acts as "open source", "trying it before you buy", or "blocking the auto-updating daemon with a heavy-ass firewall" the threats posed by individuals slutting around, living together, and the signing of marriage contracts are real and need no exaggeration!
Beth S., Madam
Bunnyranch Sex-worker's Alliance
Nevada
>
> He's probably going to kill younglings.
Hmm...
Do I reply with "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" or "It's a TRAP!". Decisions, decisions...
Decisions, decisions, decisions, decisions, decisions [ ... ] decisions! Decisions! I! LOVE! THIS! DISTRO!
By placing the garbage pail full of water in your garden, you ensure that within five minutes of the link going live on Slashdot, you'll have several gallons of piping-hot vegetable soup!
> >
> >
> > AFAIK, a lot of this gets done by a variety of American companies, who are quite happy providing and customizing their filtering software for anyone willing to pay up. Unlike cryptographic software, there aren't any restrictions on the export of filtering software, and the continual efforts of users to get around the software provide a steady revenue stream.
>
> Well, if that's true, it's kind of evil, maybe even racist, isn't it? It's one (fairly bad) thing if China decides to exclude themselves from the global dialog. It's another (really bad) thing if we actually help them to do it.
What's racist about it? Developers code bits. Bits don't care where they're used.
There's a word for China: beta site.
The USSR and former Socialist Republics were the alpha site. The implementation collapsed under the weight of its own bureaurcacy. You're doing it with paper, not computers, so you're reliant on humans. The fundamental scaling limitation is that because humans can be bought - can betray you - so, for every layer of Secret Police you implement, you have to add another layer of S00per-S33kr1t Police on top of it. East Germany's STASI was the canonical example; an economy imploded because 30% of the population were paid informants on each other.
China, as the beta site, is doing something new: an industrialized society with totalitarian controls over information. The system is automated - avoiding the risk of implosion. The system works much like the standard USSR/DDR model, however, in that prohibited information is blocked from the population.
Full implementation of the production version will be even slicker. Unlike the Chinese model, where citizens know they've've crossed the line (because the request for that "interesting" URL was blocked, or because the email to that "interesting" person never got delivered), the live system will simply log the data for future reference and cross-archiving - it'll be done automatically, avoiding the problem that crashed the alpha site under heavy load.
Give a subversive enough rope, and he'll hang himself. And unlike the beta site, the production version will enable society to track its unreliable elements until they've exposed all of their secrets and, by extension, all of their friends' secrets.
Absolute social control, with minimal loss of economic productivity, and (unlike China), practically no diminishment of civilian morale, because everyone thinks they're still free-as-in-speech. Quite clever, really, and the Chinese (as one of the few societies that doesn't really have the morale problem that the beta version might induce in the target market) still manage to benefit by testing the beta version for a free-as-in-beer cost.
Everybody involved with the project - on both sides of the Pacific - wins.
I just had a vision of RMS screaming "That's GNU/Clitoris, you insensitive clod!"
And since I'm not sure the battery acid will be enough to erase it, I figured I'd share the misery.
Seriously - that was the biggest disappointment about the shoe-bomber case. If he'd only smuggled the bomb up his ass, the simple act of getting in line at the airport would be a lot more fun.
Imagine hearing stuff like "Excuse me, ma'am, I think you're kinda cute, and since I'm kinda average, and since the guy front of me is obviously better-looking than me, and since the guy standing behind you is obviously gay, I think that three out of the four of us would be happier if you and I switched places. How 'bout it?"
Everybody wins!
>
>Why not? With Smart Folders it allows EVERYONE with access to that location to sort that data in their own personal way, rather than one person forcing their filing method on everyone else.
Because you are not a unique and beautiful snowflake.
And because, contrary to what they teach in public schools these days, the filesystem on your employer's fileserver was not installed for the purposes of protecting your self esteem.
>
> That's why I use ed.
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2144156 Apr 4 16:11
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 152984 Jun 3 15:15
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 74348 Mar 21 14:34
Increase your size! Give her more pleasure with echo.
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 48208 May 16 2004 /bin/echo
But when I really want to show off, I just turn on echoing and use a dumb terminal. My Wang weighs about 15 pounds and uses only a few kilobits of ROM!
Dr. Torvalds: You know, I have one simple request... and that is to have penguins with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads. Now evidently, my megaloptic Naval colleage informs me that IT'S A TRAP!
Time for serious airpwnage. No, not the kind of pwnage that'll befall you for playing CS (namely wearing a headset and being prone to mutter things like "OK, 3 terrorists to the left, one's got a gun! Kill that fucker!" under your breath) on an airplane.
I'm talking about the amount of fun you can have when that annoying cellphone-addict using Skype to escape the withdrawal... you can already hear him from three seats behind of you, hollering to his wife and kids... and then the holler he makes when he finds himself airpwned!
>
> Are you processing what I'm processing??
Seeing as how they're using slices of mouse brain, I believe the correct answer would be along the lines of...
"Umm, I think so, Brain, but a billion parallelized microprocessors and a human named CmdrTaco? What would the children look like?"