Right, because Israel, the UK, and France have been just so sucessfull in their counter-terrorism programs, or are they a bunch of softies too? Israel is probbably the most brutal nation on the planet right now, and they can't seem to do much of anything to stop terrorism.
An artist is someone who ignores function and concentrates on form where they think beauty lies.
Those are the crappy artists, the ones who think art is about "beauty". Unfortunately they're the majority. (And most of them can't even produce what they're trying to produce). The good artists try to communicate what can't be communicated through words. That's much harder than producing everyday beauty.
I will agree with you that artists tend concentrate too much of form, and function is some sort of basard stepchild. Crappy architects like Frank Lloyd Wright are exhaulted, even though he made dissfunctional buildings. People like Wright are hacks and have hypnotized the masses into ignoring their crappy disfunctional designs by their use of "prettiness".
As far as the "programming is art" discussion goes, I think art has the perception of being about freedom, whereas engineering has the perception of being narrow minded and closed. To escape this many programmers grasp onto the "programming must be art" idea to try to escape the perceived closedness of engineering.
In reality art isn't freedom, and engineering isn't narrow mindedness. In many ways the world of art can be seen as very narrow minded and closed. The current styles that're in vogue are as closed as you can get. The snobbery of the art world isn't a stereotype that comes from a vacuum. In contrast engineering is as open as the laws of physics, and computation will allow. The laws that judge what's good and bad are simply if it works well or not, and generally don't change with the direction of the wind. No one says "steel is out this year as a medium.. why don't you work with brass instead?".
The important statistic is: percentage of spam/number of IP address in a country.
My guess is that number is fairly high for Brazil. As for the "blocked by asshat american sysadmins" most people are using spamassassin and other score based spam tools these days, not simple IP blocking. I don't get much legit email from Brazil (I don't think I ever have), so if I do it's more than likely spam. Giving it a spam score to reflect that seems perfectly acceptable. As far as those that do simple IP blocking, it's not just American admins, everyone around the world does it.
it took you this long to switch from sendmail?
on
Postfix
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I thought everyone without a huge legacy setup had switched from the archaic sendmail to something decent like postfix, or qmail long ago.
A few years ago I simply wanted to re-write my host.domain.tld address on outgoing email to be simply host.tld. I bawked at the stupidities of learning a crappy sendmail language, then re-compiling it into yet another crappy language just to do this. A friend told me about postfix, and I've never looked back. I think only the massochistic, or those hopelessly lost in a legacy sendmail mess use sendmail these days.
Why? On what basis would an atheist regard these as obscene?
I'd certainly never limit myself to "atheists", (as if religion is the only way people come up with moral systems). But if you were to not use a book to tell you what's right and wrong, I'd say it's degrading to the people who were killed, and human life in general to show snuff films. The same would be true for televised execution.
Right - when a person invents a moral code, it's inherently flawed. So, how do we identify a valid moral code?
How do we identify a valid religion? The same way we identify a "valid" moral code, a big dogfight. The "validity" you want doesn't exist. You can identify moral codes that work and make a good society, but beyond that it's just a fight.
I just don't see why this specifically is a new issue. I'm sure there are books out that describe how to commit suidice. The Hemlock Society has published books and pamplets that describe just that. I'd be fairly certain they've done this long before the internet became popular.
The idiotic (and dangerous) Anarchists Cookbook was published many years ago, and I don't think the author or publisher was held responsible for the stupid people who've undoubtedly harmed themselves doing the things described in the book.
Actually the only thing that's prohibited by the first amendment is obscenity, not indecensy. The only reason that the FCC is allowed to regulate broadcast TV beyond the obscenity "standard" is the limited amount of channels available.
The indecency "standard" is a joke anyway. It's all a moving target that changes on an almost daily basis.
Quite frankly I think the whole thing should be thrown out and replaced with labels for content, not unobjective standards of what's "indescent", whatever that means today. Put at the front of each show what you're going to show. i.e. "you just might see a tittie for 2 seconds. If you don't want to see a tittie, go watch Little House On The Praire". If you really feel that "indecency" is so harmfull, or evil, wouldn't you rather decide for yourself what "indecent" was?
As far as the implied "morally abscent atheist" comment, I'd say most anyone would be against showing snuff films on TV. Televised executions would likely be in the same category. These are of course obscenity, and not indecency. I'm sorry, but the deeply religious people don't have a monopoly on what's right and wrong.
Have you ever heard of satire, or dark humour? I guess not. There's multiple ways a human cookbook could serve as legitimate speech. The animal rights wackos could use it as was to convince people of their point of view. It could be part of a fiction novel, or an SNL skit. Is a "Donner Party Cookbook" really inciting people to go out and eat people? Try to open your mind a bit past your intial revultion. There's a BIG difference between inciting violence, and expressing a viewpoint.
The thing about free speech is that you're almost guaranteed to be offended by something. It doesn't matter if the majority of people are offended by something, it's still protected.
Can you be a Ken Kessey fan, and an idiot at the same time?
Apparently you have quite a narrow view of democrats. We're not all weeny, castrated hippies who believe that every countries traditions are beyond reproach.
There's nothing in the article that says they logged all IRC traffic. Generally this isn't done, as it's considered an invasion of privacy. Why would you waste a terrabyte of data on something as useless as logging IRC?
It's times like these I'm glad I live in a country that doesn't put useless royalty on its money. Are these people really so important to distribute their pictures on currency? Maybe I'm just a traditionalist when it comes to money, but you should be putting important people who've contributed to the society on money, not royalty.
True, but at least among the console market, the other segment of the market are guys as portrayed in the movie Swingers. Guys sitting around after work playing stupid games together. It's a social activity, and women don't seem to engage in that kind of social activity as much. Why? I don't know.
I guess you could try to say it's the damn evil corporations who don't cater to women. I don't think it's quite that simple though. I just don't see many women sitting around wishing there were games marketed toward them.
What if we look at a (somewhat) parallel sitution? Why aren't men interested in these "product marketing parties" that a certain segment of the female population seems enamored with? It used to be mainly tupperware, and Mary Kay Cosmetics, but now it's this overpriced Pampered Chef crap. Is it because men aren't targeted by the marketing? No, I'm fairly certain that most guys would _never_ be interested in getting together with his male friends and look at products being sold by one them. I think there's just a difference in how men socialize with other men, and how women socialize with other women.
You can spout off about all the "misconceptions" until you pass out, but I don't see any evidence to back up your claims. The women I've seen play console games really _do_ seem to be more interested in Dance Dance Revolution. I know at least one guy that's into it too, but he also plays LOTS of games. I've known one woman who's into games like Thief and Diablo, but for the most part that's it.
I've played FPSs with women before, and they had fun, but they just weren't into it as much as the guys were. Women may play computer games some, but I think it's the guys who're the real hardcore gamers. I don't think I'm particularly unusual, but I keep hearing these "misconceptions of women gamers", but no real evidence to back it up and it conflicts with my real world experience. Sorry, but it just smacks of politicism.
The real mystery is, why do they insist on calling them "Women Grand Masters" instead of just "Grand Masters", or is this your name for them?
geez.. I think it was just a way to say that there are women grand masters. The vast majority of Grand Master chess players are male, so in a discussion about sex differences among game players you might want to point that out.
Grand Mistress is a stupid term though. I think the original poster thought the term master was a term used to distinguish gender, not a term to distinguish proficiency level. A Masters degree has nothing to do with gender after all.
The best definition of a sport I've heard is you have to be able to be injured, and you have to be able to win. Interestingly enough (or sadly depending on your perspective) War qualifies as a sport under this definition.
yah, yah. 75% of statistics are made up. The article is interesting, but it never provides any context. What are all these women gamers playing? Are we talking about online chess? Yahoo games? Solitaire Chat^H^H^H^H Simms Online?
The difference is one of identity and level of interest. What percentage of people who consider themselves "gamers" are women, as opposed to just the percentage of people that play computer games?
All else being equal, in a long-distance race between a man and a woman, the woman will win.
Why do the best Marathon times come from men then? Why aren't women winning the Tour de France? The reference I found is that they are eligible for it, but none have yet been good enough to be picked for a team. Top women can compete with top men in many areas, but in general the testosterone wins in sports.
Re:You can't get parts from India...
on
Orwellian Tech Support
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· Score: 4, Interesting
So, who loses on this deal? At the very least, the consumer trying to get tech support loses. The support is supposedly lousy (and tech support in general is pretty lousy, so it has to be worse than that. There's also a weird cultural thing going on when people from India are suddenly acting like they're in the US and trying to speak with US accents, taking on fake favorite sports teams, etc. Is that really a good thing for India?
The economic picture is more fuzzy, but at the very least it's taking money away from US cities and sending it to India. That's not really in the interests of the United States, but it is in the interests of the Big Corps. The lipservice is of course that this all benefits the consumers, as if that makes up for everything. Gee, wow I can get the computer for $3 less because super-corp decided to outsource to India. Frankly I'm tired of all this malarchy about how everything benefits the consumer. Does extra cheap widgets from Super-Corp really make your life any better?
Why are you complaining specifically about Salon, when every other article linked to on slashdot gets the same thing done to it? The NYT requires free registration, nut no one seems to mind it when text is copied (except maybe the lawyers).
Now, Salon needs the money and they do get some for each advertisement shown. On the other hand the site does seem kind of slow at the moment though, so even Salon gets slowed down by slashdotting. Anyway, I read the article yesterday, so I already watched my ad (sorry Salon, I'm a cheap, poor, bastard).
Carrey has actually done some decent films. The man you're thinking of is Keanu Reeves. How can you top the dialog delivery in Speed or Point Break? Combined with the mediocre everything in Chain Reaction, he's the perfect choice for mediocrity.
All car alarms are unreasonable behavior. Annoying other people is not a way to protect your car from being stolen. If I saw someone stealing someones car that had a car alarm, I might just help them.
The fact that your car alarm goes off because it wasn't opened in the same way it was locked is just plain paranoid. If you feel you have a right to wake people up, annoy them to no end, and your car make loud screaching sounds every time someone just _might_ be stealing your precious car, you've lost touch with the society.
Slashdot give me a new appreciation for the narrow mindedness of people. Say anything the challenges peoples beliefs and you're "flamebait". Take any kind of tangent from the prescribed topic and you're "offtopic". All it takes is a few narrow minded idiots. It's really quite a sad testement to community based moderation.
Q: What do you get when you cross a camera and a computer? A: A computer.
Perhaps I'm missing the point (I've never read the afformentioned book), but when I cross a camera and a computer, I usually get a camera. Digital cameras are exactly this, no? The question seems a silly one. When we started making bridges out of steel did they somehow become something other than bridges?
A camera is a thing that can capture pictures and later reproduce them. You can use film, or silicon to do that, but it's a camera because of what it does, not how it does it.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, because Israel, the UK, and France have been just so sucessfull in their counter-terrorism programs, or are they a bunch of softies too? Israel is probbably the most brutal nation on the planet right now, and they can't seem to do much of anything to stop terrorism.
An artist is someone who ignores function and concentrates on form where they think beauty lies.
Those are the crappy artists, the ones who think art is about "beauty". Unfortunately they're the majority. (And most of them can't even produce what they're trying to produce). The good artists try to communicate what can't be communicated through words. That's much harder than producing everyday beauty.
I will agree with you that artists tend concentrate too much of form, and function is some sort of basard stepchild. Crappy architects like Frank Lloyd Wright are exhaulted, even though he made dissfunctional buildings. People like Wright are hacks and have hypnotized the masses into ignoring their crappy disfunctional designs by their use of "prettiness".
As far as the "programming is art" discussion goes, I think art has the perception of being about freedom, whereas engineering has the perception of being narrow minded and closed. To escape this many programmers grasp onto the "programming must be art" idea to try to escape the perceived closedness of engineering.
In reality art isn't freedom, and engineering isn't narrow mindedness. In many ways the world of art can be seen as very narrow minded and closed. The current styles that're in vogue are as closed as you can get. The snobbery of the art world isn't a stereotype that comes from a vacuum. In contrast engineering is as open as the laws of physics, and computation will allow. The laws that judge what's good and bad are simply if it works well or not, and generally don't change with the direction of the wind. No one says "steel is out this year as a medium.. why don't you work with brass instead?".
The important statistic is:
percentage of spam/number of IP address in a country.
My guess is that number is fairly high for Brazil. As for the "blocked by asshat american sysadmins" most people are using spamassassin and other score based spam tools these days, not simple IP blocking. I don't get much legit email from Brazil (I don't think I ever have), so if I do it's more than likely spam. Giving it a spam score to reflect that seems perfectly acceptable. As far as those that do simple IP blocking, it's not just American admins, everyone around the world does it.
I thought everyone without a huge legacy setup had switched from the archaic sendmail to something decent like postfix, or qmail long ago.
A few years ago I simply wanted to re-write my host.domain.tld address on outgoing email to be simply host.tld. I bawked at the stupidities of learning a crappy sendmail language, then re-compiling it into yet another crappy language just to do this. A friend told me about postfix, and I've never looked back. I think only the massochistic, or those hopelessly lost in a legacy sendmail mess use sendmail these days.
Or have the terms changed? Not to be confused with the very different (and vastly more powerful) super nova.
Why? On what basis would an atheist regard these as obscene?
I'd certainly never limit myself to "atheists", (as if religion is the only way people come up with moral systems). But if you were to not use a book to tell you what's right and wrong, I'd say it's degrading to the people who were killed, and human life in general to show snuff films. The same would be true for televised execution.
Right - when a person invents a moral code, it's inherently flawed. So, how do we identify a valid moral code?
How do we identify a valid religion? The same way we identify a "valid" moral code, a big dogfight.
The "validity" you want doesn't exist. You can identify moral codes that work and make a good society, but beyond that it's just a fight.
I just don't see why this specifically is a new issue. I'm sure there are books out that describe how to commit suidice. The Hemlock Society has published books and pamplets that describe just that. I'd be fairly certain they've done this long before the internet became popular.
The idiotic (and dangerous) Anarchists Cookbook was published many years ago, and I don't think the author or publisher was held responsible for the stupid people who've undoubtedly harmed themselves doing the things described in the book.
Actually the only thing that's prohibited by the first amendment is obscenity, not indecensy. The only reason that the FCC is allowed to regulate broadcast TV beyond the obscenity "standard" is the limited amount of channels available.
The indecency "standard" is a joke anyway. It's all a moving target that changes on an almost daily basis.
Quite frankly I think the whole thing should be thrown out and replaced with labels for content, not unobjective standards of what's "indescent", whatever that means today. Put at the front of each show what you're going to show. i.e. "you just might see a tittie for 2 seconds. If you don't want to see a tittie, go watch Little House On The Praire". If you really feel that "indecency" is so harmfull, or evil, wouldn't you rather decide for yourself what "indecent" was?
As far as the implied "morally abscent atheist" comment, I'd say most anyone would be against showing snuff films on TV. Televised executions would likely be in the same category. These are of course obscenity, and not indecency. I'm sorry, but the deeply religious people don't have a monopoly on what's right and wrong.
Have you ever heard of satire, or dark humour? I guess not. There's multiple ways a human cookbook could serve as legitimate speech. The animal rights wackos could use it as was to convince people of their point of view. It could be part of a fiction novel, or an SNL skit. Is a "Donner Party Cookbook" really inciting people to go out and eat people? Try to open your mind a bit past your intial revultion. There's a BIG difference between inciting violence, and expressing a viewpoint.
The thing about free speech is that you're almost guaranteed to be offended by something. It doesn't matter if the majority of people are offended by something, it's still protected.
Can you be a Ken Kessey fan, and an idiot at the same time?
Apparently you have quite a narrow view of democrats. We're not all weeny, castrated hippies who believe that every countries traditions are beyond reproach.
There's nothing in the article that says they logged all IRC traffic. Generally this isn't done, as it's considered an invasion of privacy. Why would you waste a terrabyte of data on something as useless as logging IRC?
It's times like these I'm glad I live in a country that doesn't put useless royalty on its money. Are these people really so important to distribute their pictures on currency? Maybe I'm just a traditionalist when it comes to money, but you should be putting important people who've contributed to the society on money, not royalty.
True, but at least among the console market, the other segment of the market are guys as portrayed in the movie Swingers. Guys sitting around after work playing stupid games together. It's a social activity, and women don't seem to engage in that kind of social activity as much. Why? I don't know.
I guess you could try to say it's the damn evil corporations who don't cater to women. I don't think it's quite that simple though. I just don't see many women sitting around wishing there were games marketed toward them.
What if we look at a (somewhat) parallel sitution? Why aren't men interested in these "product marketing parties" that a certain segment of the female population seems enamored with? It used to be mainly tupperware, and Mary Kay Cosmetics, but now it's this overpriced Pampered Chef crap. Is it because men aren't targeted by the marketing? No, I'm fairly certain that most guys would _never_ be interested in getting together with his male friends and look at products being sold by one them. I think there's just a difference in how men socialize with other men, and how women socialize with other women.
Again, this is basically spinning you until you pass out, which doesn't really make a sport either.
No, but I think it is the plot of the next Reality TV show.
You can spout off about all the "misconceptions" until you pass out, but I don't see any evidence to back up your claims. The women I've seen play console games really _do_ seem to be more interested in Dance Dance Revolution. I know at least one guy that's into it too, but he also plays LOTS of games. I've known one woman who's into games like Thief and Diablo, but for the most part that's it.
I've played FPSs with women before, and they had fun, but they just weren't into it as much as the guys were. Women may play computer games some, but I think it's the guys who're the real hardcore gamers. I don't think I'm particularly unusual, but I keep hearing these "misconceptions of women gamers", but no real evidence to back it up and it conflicts with my real world experience. Sorry, but it just smacks of politicism.
The real mystery is, why do they insist on calling them "Women Grand Masters" instead of just "Grand Masters", or is this your name for them?
geez.. I think it was just a way to say that there are women grand masters. The vast majority of Grand Master chess players are male, so in a discussion about sex differences among game players you might want to point that out.
Grand Mistress is a stupid term though. I think the original poster thought the term master was a term used to distinguish gender, not a term to distinguish proficiency level. A Masters degree has nothing to do with gender after all.
The best definition of a sport I've heard is you have to be able to be injured, and you have to be able to win. Interestingly enough (or sadly depending on your perspective) War qualifies as a sport under this definition.
yah, yah. 75% of statistics are made up. The article is interesting, but it never provides any context. What are all these women gamers playing? Are we talking about online chess? Yahoo games? Solitaire Chat^H^H^H^H Simms Online?
The difference is one of identity and level of interest. What percentage of people who consider themselves "gamers" are women, as opposed to just the percentage of people that play computer games?
All else being equal, in a long-distance race between a man and a woman, the woman will win.
Why do the best Marathon times come from men then? Why aren't women winning the Tour de France? The reference I found is that they are eligible for it, but none have yet been good enough to be picked for a team. Top women can compete with top men in many areas, but in general the testosterone wins in sports.
So, who loses on this deal?
At the very least, the consumer trying to get tech support loses. The support is supposedly lousy (and tech support in general is pretty lousy, so it has to be worse than that. There's also a weird cultural thing going on when people from India are suddenly acting like they're in the US and trying to speak with US accents, taking on fake favorite sports teams, etc. Is that really a good thing for India?
The economic picture is more fuzzy, but at the very least it's taking money away from US cities and sending it to India. That's not really in the interests of the United States, but it is in the interests of the Big Corps. The lipservice is of course that this all benefits the consumers, as if that makes up for everything. Gee, wow I can get the computer for $3 less because super-corp decided to outsource to India. Frankly I'm tired of all this malarchy about how everything benefits the consumer. Does extra cheap widgets from Super-Corp really make your life any better?
Why are you complaining specifically about Salon, when every other article linked to on slashdot gets the same thing done to it? The NYT requires free registration, nut no one seems to mind it when text is copied (except maybe the lawyers).
Now, Salon needs the money and they do get some for each advertisement shown. On the other hand the site does seem kind of slow at the moment though, so even Salon gets slowed down by slashdotting. Anyway, I read the article yesterday, so I already watched my ad (sorry Salon, I'm a cheap, poor, bastard).
Carrey has actually done some decent films. The man you're thinking of is Keanu Reeves. How can you top the dialog delivery in Speed or Point Break? Combined with the mediocre everything in Chain Reaction, he's the perfect choice for mediocrity.
All car alarms are unreasonable behavior. Annoying other people is not a way to protect your car from being stolen. If I saw someone stealing someones car that had a car alarm, I might just help them.
The fact that your car alarm goes off because it wasn't opened in the same way it was locked is just plain paranoid. If you feel you have a right to wake people up, annoy them to no end, and your car make loud screaching sounds every time someone just _might_ be stealing your precious car, you've lost touch with the society.
Slashdot give me a new appreciation for the narrow mindedness of people. Say anything the challenges peoples beliefs and you're "flamebait". Take any kind of tangent from the prescribed topic and you're "offtopic". All it takes is a few narrow minded idiots. It's really quite a sad testement to community based moderation.
Q: What do you get when you cross a camera and a computer?
A: A computer.
Perhaps I'm missing the point (I've never read the afformentioned book), but when I cross a camera and a computer, I usually get a camera. Digital cameras are exactly this, no? The question seems a silly one. When we started making bridges out of steel did they somehow become something other than bridges?
A camera is a thing that can capture pictures and later reproduce them. You can use film, or silicon to do that, but it's a camera because of what it does, not how it does it.