> If I give something away for FREE in Wisconsin does it get taxed? And for what reason should something be taxed on this basis? What does the Wisconsin state government do to support the e-commerce system?
Winsconsin cultural mores have been the foundation of about half the C/C++ classes I've ever written.
I mean, you can't even write "Hello, world" properly unless you use void!
> Have you ever known anyone who's topped themselves?
Yeah.
> Why don't you try telling their family, friends and lovers that they should have left them alone and that they should respect their decision to end it all, which will perhaps magically absolve them of their feelings of grief and wondering why they did it and what they might have done that could have contributed to it?
I don't - because of people who like you who can respond only with a "waah! fuck you! you're selfish!"
But as for myself, privately, I respect the guy's decision. He was a good friend, but he decided it was time to go. It was his life, and it was his right to choose whether or not to proceed with it. Not mine, not his family's, and certainly not a third party's.
Somewhere in the West, ca. 1806. The Lone Ranger and Tonto are hiding together behind a rock to escape a withering field of arrows fired by a hostile tribe of Native Americans.
Lone Ranger: "Wow, we're sure facin' a lotta them Injuns!"
Tonto: "What you mean 'we', paleface?"
~wavylines as we fast-forward two centuries~
Somewhere in Cyberspace, ca. 2006. A techie and a legislator are hiding together behind a firewall. Beyond the firewall are piles of blogs, spam, pr0n, and lobbyist- and law-enforcement sponsored counterproposals of varying degrees of stupidity.
Techie: Is this really what we want our Internet to be?
Legislator: What you mean 'our', taxpayer?
> > You can't program a hammer to only pound nails. > >
sure you can: DRM
Anything not nailed down is yours.
Anything I can pry loose is not nailed down.
If at first you can't crack it, get a bigger hammer.
Corollaries:
If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
If the only tool you have is an axe, every problem looks like hours of hacking fun.
If the only tool you have is a shotgun, every problem looks for the nearest exit.
Bringin' pork, (Pork for Alaska)
Bringin' pork, (Pork for Alaska)
Pork! for Alaska,
They bring pork, the rush is on!
Pork! for Alaska,
They bring pork, the rush is on!
Big Ted left Alaska in the year '72,
On the Senate Rules Committee, was a real workhorse too,
With George and Michael Powell, and the FCC gang too.
They crossed the Yukon River and found the bonanza gold
Below that white-domed fountain, way the hell southeast of Nome.
Ted crossed the majestic mountains to the valleys far below.
He talked to his team of lobbyists as he mushed on through the snow.
With the northern lights a-running wild in the land of the midnight sun,
Yes, Teddy Stevens, a mighty man, in the year 2001.
Where the river is winding,
Pig nuggets they're finding!
Pork for Alaska!
They bring pork, the rush is on.
George turned to Ted with his pork in his hand,
Said: "Ted you're a-lookin' at a lonely, lonely man.
"I'd trade all the pork that's buried in this land,
"For one small slab of pork to[no, no NO, we are NOT goin' to find out what happened to Ginny in this filk as long as I have any say at the FCC]
> > No reasonably sensible person "needs" a warning to remind them of this fact.
> > Show me a reasonably sensible person, and I'll show you twelve people who have "met their true love" on the Internet, willing to drop everything to go meet some random person they only know from talking on AIM for a week. Sex is powerful, and sometimes it makes people do very, very dumb things.
Gimme a simple backbeat. *thumpa, thumpa, thumpa* Aaw yeah, that's it.
> The requested URL (%3CA%20HREF=) was not found. >
> Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
Percent three, with a Cee-Ayy percent,
Nothin' for you to see here.
Percent twenty, Aitch-Arr-Eee-Eff,
URL wasn't found.
Slashdot editors makin' no sense,
Nothin' for you to see here.
Least it wasn't a duplicate H-ref,
Time to move along.
(If the article was workin' I'd know how much to charge you for reading this. Sheesh.)
Keep in mind that Robert McHenry was an Editor in Chief of Britannica.
"McHenry's definition of quality seems to consist solely of presentational matters such as spelling, grammar, and text flow."
In other words, McHenry was doing his job. Namely, the checking of spelling, grammar, and text flow, on the generally rational basis that a single person cannot reasonably be expected to be able to verify the truth, falsity, or indeterminacy of every fact in the encyclopedia.
If you were McHenry's boss, on what other basis would you grade the performance of your editor in chief?
I'm not saying that Britannica is a better encyclopedia than the Wikipedia. They're both pretty good. I prefer the Wikipedia because it's more accessible and because I (like Krowne), believe that coverage is an important metric, and I'm willing to sacrifice the quality of the prose somewhat in order to get more coverage. There are plenty of folks like me, and consequently, Wikipedia optimizes for coverage.
McHenry's boss doesn't share my preference. McHenry optimizes for spelling, grammar, and text flow.
Until we realize that, this debate is going to consist of both sides thumping their chests and flinging poo at each other, while screeching "You're optimizing for the wrong metric."
The Wikipedia entries for "primate psychology" and "total quality management" is probably better filled-out than the Britannica ones at my former schools. But that's what this debate comes down to.
> And the second image > Was those same women with their clothes off.
Close, but not quite. It was those same women with their undergarments simultaneously teleported one foot to the left, in accordance with the theory of indeterminacy.
Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for such a thing, partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties.
That's the lovely thing about standards: there are so many to choose from.
With 2,000,000,000 potential customers, and most of the world's manufacturing capability within two hours' flying time, you don't just get to choose standards, you get to write 'em.
"It is glorious to be rich! Let a thousand flowers bloom from the barrel of a Pringles can!"
Re:This sounds like a dystopia
on
Exultant
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
> The review makes the book sound like an enormous dystopia: I have seen the future, and it is horrible.
Interesting. The story works for me, because first of all, my reaction to the notion of humanity ending up "spread across the galaxy crushing everything in its way", powerful enough to waste trillions of lives and survive, is indeed "Exultation".
> Dystopias succeed, when they do, by pointing out dangerous trends in the present, and showing what could happen if they're allowed to grow unchecked.
And simultaneously, "a human society turned into a colossal war machine, dedicated to one aim: the destruction of its last enemy" is precisely what we have now -- and it applies whether you've chosen the side of America 2.0 or Allah 0.9 -- either way you're adopting "ruthless rules intended to keep [your notion of what it means to be] humanity conquering and to punish any deviations from [your ideal of] the human norm)
> Even so, it's a good review, because it told me exactly why I personally wouldn't want to read this. If you're interested in this type of thing, I hope you enjoy it.
No argument there. A future history in which we actually win such an otherwise pointless grudge match of a war sounds pretty interesting, particularly if we have to do so by transcending ourselves. For me, the best SF stories are simultaneously about humanity while being about transcending humanity. In that sense, I agree it's a good review. But I'm also sufficiently "interested in that type of thing" that it doesn't even sound dystopic. YMMV:)
MMORPG designers take note
on
Exultant
·
· Score: 1
> Trillions of human lives are wasted by hurling themselves at Xeelee defenses... and it goes on and on. A war machine with billions of worlds full of generations of soldiers barely in their teens born in tanks and dying in thousand-year-long projects aimed at smashing the Xeelee, and knowing nothing but training, the doctrines and death. Whether in a coalescent hive or a not, it seems most human lives are spent in an empty drone-like struggle governed by simple rules
There's your PvE and PvP options. There's your mindless hordes of PCs grinding their way to mastery. There's your Galactic War that's a perpetual stalemate.
And there's your 10,000,000 year story arc (Baxter's universe, FTL/time travel), followed by an opportunity for a player or two per month to break the mold and change the universe for the next time around, and punctuated by new content whenever Baxter writes some more backstory in the form of another novel.
Unlike every MMORPG universe to date, Baxter's sounds like an interesting universe to live in, even if your marketing department says "don't forget to put in a treadmill for the powergrinder set". And unlike most serial SF (or SciFi, or fantasy) works, it also sounds like a universe that's close enough to a game environments MMORPG designers are capable of making. Anyone crazy enough to steal some concepts? Maybe even steal Baxter himself?
> Does it mean something along the lines of "we were actively attacked by skilled persons who exploited a little-known/unknown flaw" or does it mean "we were sloppy".
Yes. Anybody who thinks there's a difference between those two choices shouldn't be allowed to set security policy, data retention policy, or have input into the design of any web application on any system that stores private (personally-identifiable) customer data.
I'd go further: they shouldn't be allowed within an airgap's distance of any system with confidential data on it. If you cannot explain, or worse, if it takes you less than 30 seconds to explain the distinction between poor design and being cracked, you, and everyone who works under you, use the sneakernet.
If you can't explain the difference - it's obvious that you're too clueless to be trusted with customer data. If you can explain the difference in soundbite fashion: "It's always because we were hacked!", you're part of the PR operation, and have been trained to speak in soundbites, and you're too slimy to be trusted with customer data.
If you come up with this post -- starting with a one-line quip, and then taking more than 30 seconds to explain it -- you might be enclued enough to come up with a trustworthy design that might be worth looking into implementing.
> > Female and my occupation is the fist item in the drop down list.
> >So... you're "Flat"? Perhaps "-1: 40 comments"? Or would you rather be "Oldest Fist"?
I was going to pay homage to Hunter S. Thompson by writing an article on the fist post phenomenon. I started with a Google Image Search for "gonzo fist".
Heh. Not quite what I was expecting. But it'll do.
Making Linux run under Windows would "work" for a lot of the gaming crowd -- MSLinux would still require the sale of an MS licence, and would presumably be "easier" to set up than the current dual-boot configurations.
Personally, I use removable hard drive racks. It ain't dual-boot, but it lets me game on a system I don't care about, and store XP disk images on the system I do care about. (Solves the reactivation thing pretty well, too -- I have a disk image of an activated XP/SP2 without installed video/audio drivers, which seems to work a little better when I swap hardware and install the new drivers cleanly.)
The real question is what would it sound like if Redmond were to pull out the Death Star and kill Linux. Probably sound something like a dupe of a 30,000-year-old Martian microbe story that suddenly cried out in terror that there was "nothing to see here", only to be suddenly made invisible.
> How many internet marketers would, if the technology were available, opt to have a physical hand come out of someone's monitor and slap them in the face until they read your ad?
> >I just wonder where some marketers draw the line.
"There's a line?" - Some marketoon
I can only say this: Given that marketroids tend to surf with IE, Flash enabled, and Javascript enabled, and I tend to surf with Mozilla, Flash disabled, and Javascript disabled (through the use of the PrefBar extension), and have never seen a "floater" anywhere other than my toilet bowl, I'd very much like to see an over-the-Internet face-slapping technology developed.
"Nat Friedman, co-founder of Ximian, expresses his excitement about the Hula collaboration Server [... ]"
Thursday afternoon is here,
Boobies links and time for beer,
We've been good, but we can't last,
Hurry Slashdot, hurry fast,
Knock your server for a loop,
Collaborating hula hoop,
We are those shall not mate,
Please Slashdot, don't be late!
- CmdrTaco and the Chipmunks
> The interview is a 30MB MP3 file.
Not for long, it ain't. ALVIN! Put that server cable down!
> > "It costs around $4, fits in your pocket and runs on air" > >
Is that a turbine in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
From the Department of Industrial Design at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.
I believe you meant to say "Please be telling me is in your pocket a turbine, or are you happy to be seeing me?"
Now, if you'll pleased to be pardoning me, I have another caller in my queue. Some woman named Paris Hilton needs to be blowing on my hard drive to reboot her Windows.
Today's real headlines are better than anything HST or Onion can possibly come up with. He achieved his life's work: when the going got weird, the weird turned pro.
Look for the upcoming Dan Goldin autobiography HUBBLE: Fear and Loathing in Low Earth Orbit, coming soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Winsconsin cultural mores have been the foundation of about half the C/C++ classes I've ever written.
I mean, you can't even write "Hello, world" properly unless you use void!
> that such a f'ugly language should be named with an homonym of such a beautiful thing as a pearl.
Huh? I just finished converting my codebase from Brainfuck to Perl, because I found Perl to be a little bit more readable.
And that guy muttering to himself in the corner isn't crazy. He's just our Ook porting lead.
Yeah.
> Why don't you try telling their family, friends and lovers that they should have left them alone and that they should respect their decision to end it all, which will perhaps magically absolve them of their feelings of grief and wondering why they did it and what they might have done that could have contributed to it?
I don't - because of people who like you who can respond only with a "waah! fuck you! you're selfish!"
But as for myself, privately, I respect the guy's decision. He was a good friend, but he decided it was time to go. It was his life, and it was his right to choose whether or not to proceed with it. Not mine, not his family's, and certainly not a third party's.
Somewhere in the West, ca. 1806. The Lone Ranger and Tonto are hiding together behind a rock to escape a withering field of arrows fired by a hostile tribe of Native Americans.
Lone Ranger: "Wow, we're sure facin' a lotta them Injuns!"
Tonto: "What you mean 'we', paleface?"
~wavylines as we fast-forward two centuries~
Somewhere in Cyberspace, ca. 2006. A techie and a legislator are hiding together behind a firewall. Beyond the firewall are piles of blogs, spam, pr0n, and lobbyist- and law-enforcement sponsored counterproposals of varying degrees of stupidity.
Techie: Is this really what we want our Internet to be?
Legislator: What you mean 'our', taxpayer?
>
> sure you can: DRM
Anything not nailed down is yours.
Anything I can pry loose is not nailed down.
If at first you can't crack it, get a bigger hammer.
Corollaries:
If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
If the only tool you have is an axe, every problem looks like hours of hacking fun.
If the only tool you have is a shotgun, every problem looks for the nearest exit.
That was pre-IPO.
We'd like you to meet Bubba. Bubba's fully vested, and as this article says, he's, uh... he's grown somewhat.
Bringin' pork, (Pork for Alaska)
Pork! for Alaska,
They bring pork, the rush is on!
Pork! for Alaska,
They bring pork, the rush is on!
Big Ted left Alaska in the year '72,
On the Senate Rules Committee, was a real workhorse too,
With George and Michael Powell, and the FCC gang too.
They crossed the Yukon River and found the bonanza gold
Below that white-domed fountain, way the hell southeast of Nome.
Ted crossed the majestic mountains to the valleys far below.
He talked to his team of lobbyists as he mushed on through the snow.
With the northern lights a-running wild in the land of the midnight sun,
Yes, Teddy Stevens, a mighty man, in the year 2001.
Where the river is winding,
Pig nuggets they're finding!
Pork for Alaska!
They bring pork, the rush is on.
George turned to Ted with his pork in his hand,
Said: "Ted you're a-lookin' at a lonely, lonely man.
"I'd trade all the pork that's buried in this land,
"For one small slab of pork to[no, no NO, we are NOT goin' to find out what happened to Ginny in this filk as long as I have any say at the FCC]
To the tune of North to Alaska, Johnny Horton
>
> Show me a reasonably sensible person, and I'll show you twelve people who have "met their true love" on the Internet, willing to drop everything to go meet some random person they only know from talking on AIM for a week. Sex is powerful, and sometimes it makes people do very, very dumb things.
Of course, you're both right.
http://www.bash.org/?11339
Because it's the little things -- like people who need warnings and do very, very dumb things -- that make life worthwhile.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a date with a chick who digs my robe and wizard hat.
Now witness the power of this fully armed and operational tentacle station upon the quivering form of a miniskirt-wearing Sarah Connor!
Never underestimate the power of the otaku side.
> The requested URL (%3CA%20HREF=) was not found.
> > Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
Percent three, with a Cee-Ayy percent,
Nothin' for you to see here.
Percent twenty, Aitch-Arr-Eee-Eff,
URL wasn't found.
Slashdot editors makin' no sense,
Nothin' for you to see here.
Least it wasn't a duplicate H-ref,
Time to move along.
(If the article was workin' I'd know how much to charge you for reading this. Sheesh.)
"McHenry's definition of quality seems to consist solely of presentational matters such as spelling, grammar, and text flow."
In other words, McHenry was doing his job. Namely, the checking of spelling, grammar, and text flow, on the generally rational basis that a single person cannot reasonably be expected to be able to verify the truth, falsity, or indeterminacy of every fact in the encyclopedia.
If you were McHenry's boss, on what other basis would you grade the performance of your editor in chief?
I'm not saying that Britannica is a better encyclopedia than the Wikipedia. They're both pretty good. I prefer the Wikipedia because it's more accessible and because I (like Krowne), believe that coverage is an important metric, and I'm willing to sacrifice the quality of the prose somewhat in order to get more coverage. There are plenty of folks like me, and consequently, Wikipedia optimizes for coverage.
McHenry's boss doesn't share my preference. McHenry optimizes for spelling, grammar, and text flow.
Until we realize that, this debate is going to consist of both sides thumping their chests and flinging poo at each other, while screeching "You're optimizing for the wrong metric."
The Wikipedia entries for "primate psychology" and "total quality management" is probably better filled-out than the Britannica ones at my former schools. But that's what this debate comes down to.
>Vital measurments: 503px by 400px w00-w00!
LHC? Hey, it gave me a hadron.
> Was those same women with their clothes off.
Close, but not quite. It was those same women with their undergarments simultaneously teleported one foot to the left, in accordance with the theory of indeterminacy.
Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for such a thing, partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties.
With 2,000,000,000 potential customers, and most of the world's manufacturing capability within two hours' flying time, you don't just get to choose standards, you get to write 'em.
"It is glorious to be rich! Let a thousand flowers bloom from the barrel of a Pringles can!"
Interesting. The story works for me, because first of all, my reaction to the notion of humanity ending up "spread across the galaxy crushing everything in its way", powerful enough to waste trillions of lives and survive, is indeed "Exultation".
> Dystopias succeed, when they do, by pointing out dangerous trends in the present, and showing what could happen if they're allowed to grow unchecked.
And simultaneously, "a human society turned into a colossal war machine, dedicated to one aim: the destruction of its last enemy" is precisely what we have now -- and it applies whether you've chosen the side of America 2.0 or Allah 0.9 -- either way you're adopting "ruthless rules intended to keep [your notion of what it means to be] humanity conquering and to punish any deviations from [your ideal of] the human norm)
> Even so, it's a good review, because it told me exactly why I personally wouldn't want to read this. If you're interested in this type of thing, I hope you enjoy it.
No argument there. A future history in which we actually win such an otherwise pointless grudge match of a war sounds pretty interesting, particularly if we have to do so by transcending ourselves. For me, the best SF stories are simultaneously about humanity while being about transcending humanity. In that sense, I agree it's a good review. But I'm also sufficiently "interested in that type of thing" that it doesn't even sound dystopic. YMMV :)
There's your PvE and PvP options. There's your mindless hordes of PCs grinding their way to mastery. There's your Galactic War that's a perpetual stalemate.
And there's your 10,000,000 year story arc (Baxter's universe, FTL/time travel), followed by an opportunity for a player or two per month to break the mold and change the universe for the next time around, and punctuated by new content whenever Baxter writes some more backstory in the form of another novel.
Unlike every MMORPG universe to date, Baxter's sounds like an interesting universe to live in, even if your marketing department says "don't forget to put in a treadmill for the powergrinder set". And unlike most serial SF (or SciFi, or fantasy) works, it also sounds like a universe that's close enough to a game environments MMORPG designers are capable of making. Anyone crazy enough to steal some concepts? Maybe even steal Baxter himself?
Yes. Anybody who thinks there's a difference between those two choices shouldn't be allowed to set security policy, data retention policy, or have input into the design of any web application on any system that stores private (personally-identifiable) customer data.
I'd go further: they shouldn't be allowed within an airgap's distance of any system with confidential data on it. If you cannot explain, or worse, if it takes you less than 30 seconds to explain the distinction between poor design and being cracked, you, and everyone who works under you, use the sneakernet.
If you can't explain the difference - it's obvious that you're too clueless to be trusted with customer data. If you can explain the difference in soundbite fashion: "It's always because we were hacked!", you're part of the PR operation, and have been trained to speak in soundbites, and you're too slimy to be trusted with customer data.
If you come up with this post -- starting with a one-line quip, and then taking more than 30 seconds to explain it -- you might be enclued enough to come up with a trustworthy design that might be worth looking into implementing.
>
>So... you're "Flat"? Perhaps "-1: 40 comments"? Or would you rather be "Oldest Fist"?
I was going to pay homage to Hunter S. Thompson by writing an article on the fist post phenomenon. I started with a Google Image Search for "gonzo fist".
Heh. Not quite what I was expecting. But it'll do.
>
> Sure will spell the end of their credibility.
I have to admit I like the "E" that's been added to denote their delisting. SCOXE. Rhymes with "Goatse".
Personally, I use removable hard drive racks. It ain't dual-boot, but it lets me game on a system I don't care about, and store XP disk images on the system I do care about. (Solves the reactivation thing pretty well, too -- I have a disk image of an activated XP/SP2 without installed video/audio drivers, which seems to work a little better when I swap hardware and install the new drivers cleanly.)
The real question is what would it sound like if Redmond were to pull out the Death Star and kill Linux. Probably sound something like a dupe of a 30,000-year-old Martian microbe story that suddenly cried out in terror that there was "nothing to see here", only to be suddenly made invisible.
*rimshot*
>
>I just wonder where some marketers draw the line.
"There's a line?"
- Some marketoon
I can only say this: Given that marketroids tend to surf with IE, Flash enabled, and Javascript enabled, and I tend to surf with Mozilla, Flash disabled, and Javascript disabled (through the use of the PrefBar extension), and have never seen a "floater" anywhere other than my toilet bowl, I'd very much like to see an over-the-Internet face-slapping technology developed.
Thursday afternoon is here,
Boobies links and time for beer,
We've been good, but we can't last,
Hurry Slashdot, hurry fast,
Knock your server for a loop,
Collaborating hula hoop,
We are those shall not mate,
Please Slashdot, don't be late!
- CmdrTaco and the Chipmunks
> The interview is a 30MB MP3 file.
Not for long, it ain't. ALVIN! Put that server cable down!
>
> Is that a turbine in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
From the Department of Industrial Design at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.
I believe you meant to say "Please be telling me is in your pocket a turbine, or are you happy to be seeing me?"
Now, if you'll pleased to be pardoning me, I have another caller in my queue. Some woman named Paris Hilton needs to be blowing on my hard drive to reboot her Windows.
You got brilliance and stupidity mixed up. From the fox's perspective, hiring a fox to guard the henhouse is brilliance.
Today's real headlines are better than anything HST or Onion can possibly come up with. He achieved his life's work: when the going got weird, the weird turned pro.
Look for the upcoming Dan Goldin autobiography HUBBLE: Fear and Loathing in Low Earth Orbit, coming soon.