I certainly don't think I'd be useless without my current job. I love baking, drawing, painting, hiking, camping, fishing, kite flying, movies, tv shows, books, hanging out with friends, learning new skills and programming. I don't get paid for most of those and the one I do get paid for is only fun about a third of the time. Given my current level of comfort, I'd love to spend an extra thirty hours a week on more of those other things.
Take away any single one of those things I enjoy and I'll spend more time on the others. Heck, take all of them away and I'm confident I'd find new hobbies. Woodworking looks interesting.
I'd love to work ten hours a week for my current forty hour pay. I already spend around ten hours every week listening to podcasts that increase my understanding of the tech industry as a whole and my particular work areas. Given an additional thirty hours in a week to spend as I choose, I'd probably spend another ten on self education, another ten on personal enrichment like reading for pleasure and the last extra ten with my family.
Maybe I'd balance that a little differently. Perhaps I'd get a little more sleep and spend a little more time on slashdot, who knows. I'd like the opportunity to find out.
Nothing could be better for the business of providing privacy supporting VPNs and proxies than this. Every privacy service sees this legislation as a sudden boon to business. In six months there will be more and cheaper VPNs and proxies available all over the world. What could be better for proxy and VPN service providers than having governments produce an incentive to use them?
The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. - John Gilmore
Perhaps we'll look back some day and see this as the thing that created the generator of an economy of privacy.
If Spike TV finds a website streaming the Garcia vs Vargas fight tonight and they can identify which of their broadcasts is being streamed.... they have every right to turn that particular broadcast off.
That's all this is about. It isn't shutting down someone's site. It isn't spying on someone's data stream. It's not a wiretap.
It's a way to put different identifiers on the service you're providing to different customers. Once you have that, you can identify which of your customers is abusing your service and stop providing that service.
your own house and garden suddenly become public places where your asshole neighbor can film you and your children
It's not happening suddenly. It happened twenty years ago.
Annoying people is sometimes illegal, sometimes not, but the law doesn't (and shouldn't) consider using "shitty tech gadgets" any worse than lawnmowers, drums, or a ladder. At the same time, the US has strong legal protection for people who want to take pictures, videos or otherwise gather information. You can't make it generally illegal do those things without infringing on the freedom of the press.
All the discussion about drones specifically is due to the human tendency to see actions as being tied to tools. It is the same fallacy that drives laws to be disproportionate where a crime is done "with a computer." Even if you get laws to protect your privacy in your back yard "from drones," you will still have your privacy invaded completely legally by people with actual airplanes, or ladders, or model airplanes, or mini-blimps.
The core issue is defining what the law should treat as your right to privacy. (Not what tools people might use to infringe on it.) So far, the courts have determined that you have property rights extending about to shotgun height above your property and you have the right to privacy where you are not visible or try to keep yourself from being visible from public property. (The air above your backyard is public property at sufficient altitude.) For example, it's perfectly legal to take pictures of your neighbors if they're in front of an open window (or their backyard.) It's illegal to take the same picture if they have blinds on their windows which are failing to actually hide the people on the other side. (Indeed, you in some states, even being naked at home in front of an open window is illegal.
What, do you old timers have alerts when someone talks about ID lengths? I swear, every time someone brags, some older crustier nerd takes time out of their presumably busy day to one-up them. One of these days, I expect Taco himself will post about how two digit ID people need to step off.
It's not exactly normal, though defining a single normal would be difficult. I would say it's normal for a story about Mozilla. They've pretty much destroyed all the nerd cred they once had.
That's probably all it can run. Typically specially designed systems need the ability to configure the OS radically differently than has been done previously which requires source code. Microsoft provides source code, as does IBM, in some special situations, but mostly it tends to be Linux that is used first. Consider the reasoning behind the OS chosen for the fastest computers in the world.
Systemd? Probably because serious computer engineers don't have any trouble dealing with the irritation that systemd causes. (The rest of us may, but if you have enough smarts to handle building a specialized chip, then systemd isn't really a challenge.)
Hell, if Bill Gates is having problems giving away his chickens . . . I'll take a couple per week! Rotisserie, in a Burrito, or just plain Fried.
This is kind of my sentiment. Why would you refuse a gift that doesn't come with strings? I realize the gift is intended for a specific type of use, and not everyone agrees that the particular use is the best way to help, but even if it doesn't get used as intended or doesn't succeed in the intended goal, it's still useful.
If Bill Gates sends me a handful of chickens I don't or need, I won't refuse them. I will try to sell them or stock up my freezer and won't become a chicken rancher, but I'll take them. If he sends me a hundred thousand chickens, I'll go into business briefly as a chicken rancher until I can sell the business or maybe if it's profitable enough, my IT career will become my hobby and I'll take it on as my full time job.
So, yeah, maybe I wish Bill were using his resources a little differently, but he's willing to try to do something good and stopping him from even being allowed to try based on politics just irritates me.
Nice wording. By phrasing it so that a link needs to quote him specifically saying something you specify, you narrow legitimate potential replies, but lets take a look at what the interwebs are saying:
"The Mexican government is much smarter, much sharper, much more cunning. And they send the bad ones over because tehy don't want to pay for them, they don't want to take care of them."
"Sadly, the overwhelming amount of violent crime in our major cities is committed by blacks and hispanics [sic] - a tough subject - must be discussed."
Now, I don't think Trump actually hates Latinos but I do think he's trying to capture the votes of a lot of people who either fear or hate Mexico and illegal immigrants. I think he panders to the lowest parts of our society by carefully selecting rhetoric that gives them the idea that he agrees with them and feels the same ignorant hatred they do.
It's a politician's trick. You say something that sounds good to people you don't want to actually be caught agreeing with while carefully avoiding actually saying you agree with their opinions.
For most voters, sadly that's enough. People are flocking to Trump in droves because he represents the golden trinity of an electable candidate. 1 - He is running on one of the two parties tickets, 2 - He has a strong claim to being an outsider angered by the insiders, 3 - He stays in the headlines.
Say what you like about the man, but he's good at getting people to support him. The fact that he uses short small words to make emotional impact makes him sound silly and sometimes irritating to me, but it sticks in people's minds and gives them things they can quote and feel opinions about. He's being compared to historical villains who did the same thing, but really there have been all sorts of politicians who have done the same thing. To me he often sounds stupid, but when he's not pandering to the masses and actually speaking like a normal person, I've heard him sound like a sensible human being. That makes me think it has to be intentional.
People really don't care about the quality of journalism, they just want brand names they can pledge their loyalty to. The CSM is a highly respected organization that does good research and reporting.
Anybody who assumes the organization is as messed up as the religious dogma has no credibility themselves.
Oh deary me! I do hope so, since I have a few dollars worth of bitcoin now that will be worth hundreds or thousands if this progresses the same way as the War on Drugs.
I get what y86 is saying, but I think there should be some way to improve the system without sacrificing the drawbacks. Maybe additional votes for a 5 point comment only have a +0.75 option, then comments at 6 get a 0.50 option and so on, full on Zeno if that's what it takes.
There are times I want to skim the best of the best comments because I don't have time to go through 200 +5 rated comments. Toward that end, I'd like to be able to set my preferences to "top 10" or "top 50" or "top 100" instead of only being able to set the minimum ranking.
1) Remove the mobile version of the site. When I load it on my cell phone, I spend more time trying to find the link to the full site than scanning headlines
2) Make the slider bar to show more levels of comments work on mobile
Those two things seem a little contradictory. I second the second. I'd really like a good mobile site. Making it functional would be a good start, but I'd really like to see it go beyond merely functional and turn into the site I want to use on my phone rather than the one I'd need to.
Should we weight firehose voting more heavily so that highly voted stories make the front page regardless of an editor?
What I'd like is an option in preferences to have the highest firehose voted stories included on the front page. I already get preview stories highlighted in red, maybe have the five highest ranked firehose stories highlighted in yellow.
The temptation will be to push them as a default option, but resist that temptation. Advertise it like the firehose is advertised (and there ought to be a link on the footer all the time) but don't make it the default for established users and only make it the default for new users if adoption and feedback are consistently positive.
Wow. I've been going back over your responses and appreciate all the effort you're already putting in. I should expect no less, but it does come across as different from what we've come to expect.
I can't expect you to go through the background of everybody who's commented to you, so here's my relationship with slashdot in a nutshell:
Long time and frequent visitor
Regular commenter
Rare story submitter
Rare financial supporter
Despite all the issues, which you seem to have gotten an earful of, I still visit daily. I am often surprised by the depth of experience and knowledge shown by commenters here. That's why I come. I suspect it is people like me that you'll be focusing your efforts on, so if I were in your shoes I think I'd want to know what we value most. I value the insightful comments by people who really understand the topics. I value people who can disagree civilly and help me understand both sides of issues. In short, I value the community. I imagine much of your job will be giving the community a feeling of belonging, being welcomed and being heard.
Welcome to a tough job, I wish you great success with it.
Kinda with you on that one. The idea of a government that does what it says it wants to do shouldn't be scary, but I've heard what the candidates say they want to do and I'd rather have a government that accomplishes almost nothing.
I'll have to check it out, but just for reference, PuTTY can save session logs or configuration parameters and there is a command line associated program psftp for an sftp client along with a handful of other handy things in the suite.
Personally though, I prefer KiTTY for the transparency and system tray options. For a GUI SFTP/FTP/FTPS/Whatever client, I use WinSCP.
Slashdot Mirror
I certainly don't think I'd be useless without my current job. I love baking, drawing, painting, hiking, camping, fishing, kite flying, movies, tv shows, books, hanging out with friends, learning new skills and programming. I don't get paid for most of those and the one I do get paid for is only fun about a third of the time. Given my current level of comfort, I'd love to spend an extra thirty hours a week on more of those other things.
Take away any single one of those things I enjoy and I'll spend more time on the others. Heck, take all of them away and I'm confident I'd find new hobbies. Woodworking looks interesting.
I'd love to work ten hours a week for my current forty hour pay. I already spend around ten hours every week listening to podcasts that increase my understanding of the tech industry as a whole and my particular work areas. Given an additional thirty hours in a week to spend as I choose, I'd probably spend another ten on self education, another ten on personal enrichment like reading for pleasure and the last extra ten with my family.
Maybe I'd balance that a little differently. Perhaps I'd get a little more sleep and spend a little more time on slashdot, who knows. I'd like the opportunity to find out.
Nothing could be better for the business of providing privacy supporting VPNs and proxies than this. Every privacy service sees this legislation as a sudden boon to business. In six months there will be more and cheaper VPNs and proxies available all over the world. What could be better for proxy and VPN service providers than having governments produce an incentive to use them?
The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. - John Gilmore
Perhaps we'll look back some day and see this as the thing that created the generator of an economy of privacy.
Hahahahahahahaa! Nice one.
Me too. I was intensely excited for several seconds.
If Spike TV finds a website streaming the Garcia vs Vargas fight tonight and they can identify which of their broadcasts is being streamed.... they have every right to turn that particular broadcast off.
That's all this is about. It isn't shutting down someone's site. It isn't spying on someone's data stream. It's not a wiretap.
It's a way to put different identifiers on the service you're providing to different customers. Once you have that, you can identify which of your customers is abusing your service and stop providing that service.
TL;DR version: The "dystopian future has really arrived" because the US Supreme court disagrees with you.
your own house and garden suddenly become public places where your asshole neighbor can film you and your children
It's not happening suddenly. It happened twenty years ago.
Annoying people is sometimes illegal, sometimes not, but the law doesn't (and shouldn't) consider using "shitty tech gadgets" any worse than lawnmowers, drums, or a ladder. At the same time, the US has strong legal protection for people who want to take pictures, videos or otherwise gather information. You can't make it generally illegal do those things without infringing on the freedom of the press.
All the discussion about drones specifically is due to the human tendency to see actions as being tied to tools. It is the same fallacy that drives laws to be disproportionate where a crime is done "with a computer." Even if you get laws to protect your privacy in your back yard "from drones," you will still have your privacy invaded completely legally by people with actual airplanes, or ladders, or model airplanes, or mini-blimps.
The core issue is defining what the law should treat as your right to privacy. (Not what tools people might use to infringe on it.) So far, the courts have determined that you have property rights extending about to shotgun height above your property and you have the right to privacy where you are not visible or try to keep yourself from being visible from public property. (The air above your backyard is public property at sufficient altitude.) For example, it's perfectly legal to take pictures of your neighbors if they're in front of an open window (or their backyard.) It's illegal to take the same picture if they have blinds on their windows which are failing to actually hide the people on the other side. (Indeed, you in some states, even being naked at home in front of an open window is illegal.
I believe this described the tacit limit of your property rights as "within shotgun range."
Repeating my statement from From Tuesday October 27, 2015
What, do you old timers have alerts when someone talks about ID lengths? I swear, every time someone brags, some older crustier nerd takes time out of their presumably busy day to one-up them. One of these days, I expect Taco himself will post about how two digit ID people need to step off.
It's not exactly normal, though defining a single normal would be difficult. I would say it's normal for a story about Mozilla. They've pretty much destroyed all the nerd cred they once had.
That's probably all it can run. Typically specially designed systems need the ability to configure the OS radically differently than has been done previously which requires source code. Microsoft provides source code, as does IBM, in some special situations, but mostly it tends to be Linux that is used first. Consider the reasoning behind the OS chosen for the fastest computers in the world.
Systemd? Probably because serious computer engineers don't have any trouble dealing with the irritation that systemd causes. (The rest of us may, but if you have enough smarts to handle building a specialized chip, then systemd isn't really a challenge.)
Hell, if Bill Gates is having problems giving away his chickens . . . I'll take a couple per week! Rotisserie, in a Burrito, or just plain Fried.
This is kind of my sentiment. Why would you refuse a gift that doesn't come with strings? I realize the gift is intended for a specific type of use, and not everyone agrees that the particular use is the best way to help, but even if it doesn't get used as intended or doesn't succeed in the intended goal, it's still useful.
If Bill Gates sends me a handful of chickens I don't or need, I won't refuse them. I will try to sell them or stock up my freezer and won't become a chicken rancher, but I'll take them. If he sends me a hundred thousand chickens, I'll go into business briefly as a chicken rancher until I can sell the business or maybe if it's profitable enough, my IT career will become my hobby and I'll take it on as my full time job.
So, yeah, maybe I wish Bill were using his resources a little differently, but he's willing to try to do something good and stopping him from even being allowed to try based on politics just irritates me.
Nice wording. By phrasing it so that a link needs to quote him specifically saying something you specify, you narrow legitimate potential replies, but lets take a look at what the interwebs are saying:
9 Outrageous Things Donald Trump Has Said About Latinos
And then there's this headline "5 QUOTES THAT PROVE DONALD TRUMP HATES MEXICANS"
Now, I don't think Trump actually hates Latinos but I do think he's trying to capture the votes of a lot of people who either fear or hate Mexico and illegal immigrants. I think he panders to the lowest parts of our society by carefully selecting rhetoric that gives them the idea that he agrees with them and feels the same ignorant hatred they do.
It's a politician's trick. You say something that sounds good to people you don't want to actually be caught agreeing with while carefully avoiding actually saying you agree with their opinions.
For most voters, sadly that's enough. People are flocking to Trump in droves because he represents the golden trinity of an electable candidate. 1 - He is running on one of the two parties tickets, 2 - He has a strong claim to being an outsider angered by the insiders, 3 - He stays in the headlines.
Say what you like about the man, but he's good at getting people to support him. The fact that he uses short small words to make emotional impact makes him sound silly and sometimes irritating to me, but it sticks in people's minds and gives them things they can quote and feel opinions about. He's being compared to historical villains who did the same thing, but really there have been all sorts of politicians who have done the same thing. To me he often sounds stupid, but when he's not pandering to the masses and actually speaking like a normal person, I've heard him sound like a sensible human being. That makes me think it has to be intentional.
People really don't care about the quality of journalism, they just want brand names they can pledge their loyalty to. The CSM is a highly respected organization that does good research and reporting.
Anybody who assumes the organization is as messed up as the religious dogma has no credibility themselves.
Oh deary me! I do hope so, since I have a few dollars worth of bitcoin now that will be worth hundreds or thousands if this progresses the same way as the War on Drugs.
Open source the code. Allow code enhancement submissions. Don't be afraid of competition, be afraid of not keeping the quality high enough.
Never would have happened under Dice. I wouldn't have even bothered asking. I'm actually expecting no change on this front, but I can't help but ask.
I get what y86 is saying, but I think there should be some way to improve the system without sacrificing the drawbacks. Maybe additional votes for a 5 point comment only have a +0.75 option, then comments at 6 get a 0.50 option and so on, full on Zeno if that's what it takes.
There are times I want to skim the best of the best comments because I don't have time to go through 200 +5 rated comments. Toward that end, I'd like to be able to set my preferences to "top 10" or "top 50" or "top 100" instead of only being able to set the minimum ranking.
1) Remove the mobile version of the site. When I load it on my cell phone, I spend more time trying to find the link to the full site than scanning headlines
2) Make the slider bar to show more levels of comments work on mobile
Those two things seem a little contradictory. I second the second. I'd really like a good mobile site. Making it functional would be a good start, but I'd really like to see it go beyond merely functional and turn into the site I want to use on my phone rather than the one I'd need to.
Should we weight firehose voting more heavily so that highly voted stories make the front page regardless of an editor?
What I'd like is an option in preferences to have the highest firehose voted stories included on the front page. I already get preview stories highlighted in red, maybe have the five highest ranked firehose stories highlighted in yellow.
The temptation will be to push them as a default option, but resist that temptation. Advertise it like the firehose is advertised (and there ought to be a link on the footer all the time) but don't make it the default for established users and only make it the default for new users if adoption and feedback are consistently positive.
I want the candidate to obey the laws. Especially the laws of physics!
I didn't realize until now what I was missing from my life.
Ditto.
I couldn't guess how many times I've checked the Post Anonymously box after re-reading a comment before posting.
Wow. I've been going back over your responses and appreciate all the effort you're already putting in. I should expect no less, but it does come across as different from what we've come to expect.
I can't expect you to go through the background of everybody who's commented to you, so here's my relationship with slashdot in a nutshell:
Despite all the issues, which you seem to have gotten an earful of, I still visit daily. I am often surprised by the depth of experience and knowledge shown by commenters here. That's why I come. I suspect it is people like me that you'll be focusing your efforts on, so if I were in your shoes I think I'd want to know what we value most. I value the insightful comments by people who really understand the topics. I value people who can disagree civilly and help me understand both sides of issues. In short, I value the community. I imagine much of your job will be giving the community a feeling of belonging, being welcomed and being heard.
Welcome to a tough job, I wish you great success with it.
Kinda with you on that one. The idea of a government that does what it says it wants to do shouldn't be scary, but I've heard what the candidates say they want to do and I'd rather have a government that accomplishes almost nothing.
I'll have to check it out, but just for reference, PuTTY can save session logs or configuration parameters and there is a command line associated program psftp for an sftp client along with a handful of other handy things in the suite.
Personally though, I prefer KiTTY for the transparency and system tray options. For a GUI SFTP/FTP/FTPS/Whatever client, I use WinSCP.