As long as the tasteless jokes have started I'll tuck this one away down here (I was going to say bury, but under the circumstances...)
[begin tasteless joke] I seem to recall hearing somewhere that The Bible says we get threescore and ten. That's 70, so at 37 that's 47.1% compression [end tasteless joke]
It's a shame that he probably didn't squeeze 70 years worth into 37.
The link in the above post leads to --http://www.chronicle-online.com/homepage/obits/1 02299obit.htm--
which yields this--
Friday, October 22, 1999... ...Deaths Elsewhere
Stanley Dritz, 88, zipper inventor
NEW YORK -- Stanley L. Dritz, who popularized the zipper and other sewing products as part of his family's business, died Saturday in White Plains, N.Y. He was 88.
As president of John Dritz & Sons, Dritz raised the consumer appeal of a hookless fastener he had first seen in England. He made the fastener, commonly known as the zipper, out of plastic and rustproof metals.
It was one of the hundreds of sewing aids found in his company's catalog, which also included the seam ripper and the electric scissors.
Dritz was born in New York City and joined his father's business after graduating from college. He was president in the 1950s and 1960s, and the company was sold upon his retirement.
taken from
Citrus County Chronicle 1624 N. Meadowcrest Blvd. Crystal River, FL 34429
I don't know if the poster of the above is clueless or trying to be funny, but I've used both gentlemen's products and in both cases would have been at a serious disadvantge without them.
And something else I just thought of. If you take a post to Slashdot and put it in a book, separated from many, if not all, of the posts that appeared around it and that may have helped inspire it and that it may be, partially or more, in answer to, aren't you taking the post out of context, which gives it a not exactly the exact same meaning and feel?
Sorry to see that another moderator had to waste a point undoing some other moderator's moment of mental abberation, glad to see that that same other moderator stepped up to fix the problem and restore seebs karma.
"...in mediums such as TV, ads are placed according to the demographics of the poeple who watch the show they air during. Same with radio I assume."
Allow me to quickly point out that if you have more than one medium you have media, not mediums. That's why when newspapers, television, radio, etc. all get lumped together they're called the Media. Each one is a medium of communication. All of them taken together are communications media. Don't blame me, blame the guys who invented Latin. Or was it Greek?
Anyway, you're right, the reason the Nightly News with Tom Brokaw runs a bunch of antacid and laxitive commercials, and the Saturday morning cartoons run toy ads, and the golf tournament broadcasts run Cadillac and Lincoln spots, is demographics.
But that's still spending money to reach a bunch of people, of whom only some are the ones that you really want to reach. What if you could focus your advertising more tightly, or more locally or regionally?
Say, for instance, there's a baseball game on WGN with a piece of fence behind the catcher that's actually got an ad saying "subscribe to The Chicago Tribune for great sports coverage every day". If you're sitting in the stands at the game in Chicago, or watching it over the air on WGN somewhere in the Chicago area, where you can get the Trib home delivered, that's the ad you see. But if you're watching on a cable system in the hometown of the opposing team (which is usually Atlanta, so that there's nothing to watch for a few hours on WGN *or* WTBS), then what if that piece of fence is displaying an ad for a business that's local to the visiting team's hometown? You're watching the same game as the guy in Chicago is, and you're watching it on WGN, but you've been more narrowly targeted than if they didn't know your geographic area.
Or what about the time slots that your local cable company gets to fill? I see ads for local businesses even though I'm watching CNN, USA, TNT, whatever. What if your cable company sorts viewers out not just by city but according to neighborhoods, and you get the used car dealer's 30 second spot and the guy a few miles away in the house that cost 3 to 10 times what yours did sees a local Mercedes or Jaguar dealer's ad instead, even though you're both looking at "Fistfull of Dollars" on the same cable channel at the same time. Each car dealer just reached *his* target demographic without spending money advertising to the wrong viewer.
It's not that technically difficult nowadays to show a different ad to a different cable company's subscribers; for the cable co. themselves to segregate by neighborhood might still be too expensive, and sorting you out from your neighbor so that she sees the J.C. Penny jewelry sale ad while you see the Red Lobster combo platter ad while both of you are individually watching "Frasier" or VH-1 or whatever is probably not in the cards for the immediate future.
But that's television.
Computers and the Internet, on the other hand, aren't as communal. It's not a case of watching whatever's on the local cable or in the local airwaves, it's ask for and be sent a web page that maybe nobody else in your town knows or cares about, but if there is an advertiser out there who already knows that you probably make enough money to buy his product, let's say outboard motor, for example, and that you subscribe to a fishing magazine, and that you've been looking at new boats on other web sites, and that you reported your old boat and motor stolen and filed a claim with your insurance company, then even though you've just downloaded a site about model railroading, he just might want to replace the generic ad for HO scale scenery or Pulse Width Modulation power supplies at the top of the page with an announcement about his latest remote start, low wake, fuel efficient 2 cylinder outboard (or whatever features would make an outboard attractive to buyers)on the version of the page that you see. If the model railroading site sells that ad space to a company that can find you in their database and match the info on you against client businesses, then it's just a matter of whether they have the computer power to do it cheaply enough for that outboard motor manufacturer to be willing to pay. If so, they've just bought some very tightly targeted advertising, without spending anything to advertise to a household that's not even home to watch the TV this weekend.
I think everybody from AuntTilliesQuiltingCircleDotOrg to the Mattel Hot Wheels site *except* Slashdot carried the story (though now that 2600 is involved, Taco&Co. have a take on it as well), but considering that Predictive Network is probably secretly telling the government to be nice to them because they can help with tracking down "mafiaboy" types, I don't see the above post as off-topic at all, and feel that the moderator in question could have found better use for that point elsewhere.
I'm going to answer rwade, daviddennis, and hartsock all in this one post.
A previous rwade post to this story got moderated down from the default +1 any registered user's posts get to a 0 and the moderation category was "overrated".
This is by no means the first time that I've seen moderations that were just *barely* defensible. In metamoderation you might let it slide instead of calling it fair or unfair, not agreeing with it but giving the moderator the benefit of the doubt and not wanting to reduce the karma of one of Slashdot's "good" moderators. So someone gets away with a malicious moderation. Even if metamoderation zings them for it, rwade's karma has still taken a hit, maybe the one that's the final straw in taking away his moderator privileges, and costing us another "good" moderator. I think of these people as "attack moderators". Some of them are subtle like this one (about whom I *might* be mistaken, and apologise to in that unlikely event, but I'd want to know why that mod point wasn't put to better use elsewhere), others are a little more obviously out to get the person they moderated down.
And I'm pretty sure that they have more than one account, so that they can use one or more for the moderation privileges, logging in as that account just enough to retain moderator eligibility (reading Slashdot too seldom or too frequently, or commenting too frequently, disqualifies you from being selected for moderation). I wouldn't be surprised if several people were acting together on this, moderating each other up and ganging up on people they take a dislike to.
As regards the more juvenile of the trolls (and the source of attack moderators), although Slashdot would have grown larger and in need of a moderation system even if there were no such person as Jon Katz, when Katz appointed himself geek ambassador/evangelist he brought Slashdot to the attention of a lot of adolescents, some of them not too well adjusted socially, and all of them, like adolescents everywhere, with a lot of pent-up angers, frustrations, creative urges, fears, and passions in need of an outlet.
Also, many have pointed out that this sort of behavior occurred on other sites where Slashdot would have been mentioned, where this sort of behavior is now blocked in some way, or has run off everyone else, depriving them of an audience to offend, or is no longer possible due to the demise of the site.
I realise we're getting wa-a-ay off-topic here (especially me), but since this story was about a non-event (building a laptop with a passive backplane board), I feel as though I've made a greater contribution here than I would have with one more remark about the pointlessness of considering using a passive backplane board for building a laptop.
"Once HDTV signal is sent via optical cable,..." it isn't broadcasting anymore and what we are talking about here is broadcasting and the way that broadcasters think that they have some God-given right to spectrum space that's actually public property (although the politicians are trying their best to screw us out of it and hand it off to their rich buddies, instead of just making them pay rent on it).
I seem to recall reading somewhere that the King family have a foundation which receives the proceeds of any publication of his works.
Something else to be considered is that there are rights to the written speech, and rights to the "performance", and they aren't the same.
This raises the question of whether the placement, timing, and formatting of a Slashdot post is separately copyrightable from the words of the post. Also, if one post quotes the post that it's replying to, or some other previous post, where do one poster's rights begin and another one's end?
"...to set himself up as some sort of "geek authority" with traditional media (which is what I'm half-convinced Jon Katz has been trying to do since day one of this tragedy)."
Nah, he's been doing that since October of '98 and the "Halloween Papers".
I agree that we're seeing a much better level of writing than usual from each of them here (especially Katz), but that doesn't change the fact that they should have explained all of this up front, before putting the book together.
What if s/he has been posting anonymously from the beginning of Slashdot and just now registered to put a little more gravity behind her/his final post?
Now that I'm browsing at +2, I do avoid a lot of junk, but I sorta miss seeing my own posts
As I have pointed out previously, it's self-deprecation style humor, the idea being that I'm snobby enough to browse at +2, but not good enough to get moderated up that high.
A number of responding posters *appear* to take it literally and don't understand how I can reply to posts that are scored under +2. The ones that seem sincerely puzzled I respond to politely, but there are others that respond in full flame mode. I'm not as polite with them.
I feel weird every time I say something nice about Katz too, but I try to do so whenever I think it's warranted. The problem here isn't really with Katz, though, it's with Slashdot. If, as others had suggested, they had announced their intentions in advance and asked if anybody had a problem with being quoted and pointed out at the time the good that such a book could do, I suspect that the reaction would have been quite different.
When you change your sig file, it changes on *all* of your posts retroactively, not just the ones posted after the change. If you go back over threads from the past few days that I have posted to, you'll see a number of replies expressing *opinions* about the sig my comments originally appeared with.
Actually the score system and moderation are supposed to assist us in deciding whether or not to read some people's posts, while leaving the decision in our hands.
If it worked as it should most of TrollMastah's eminently ignorable tripe would wind up below a certain threshold, based on previous moderations, because s/he's proven that s/he can't be assumed to be posting something of the minimal acceptable quality, and the (surprisingly) good stuff s/he's posted lately would be moderated up so that *it* could be seen at a level that blocks the other stuff, and after enough of having "mended her/his ways", the moderation induced karma increase would put her/him back amongst the trusted.
Unfortunately, the recent influx of attack moderators (who I'm convinced are moderating under one account and using another to post just as heavily as those of us who post too frequently to qualify as moderators anymore) has severely undermined an otherwise workable scheme.
Slashdot Mirror
[begin tasteless joke] I seem to recall hearing somewhere that The Bible says we get threescore and ten. That's 70, so at 37 that's 47.1% compression [end tasteless joke]
It's a shame that he probably didn't squeeze 70 years worth into 37.
which yields this--
Friday, October 22, 1999 ...
...Deaths Elsewhere
Stanley Dritz, 88, zipper inventor
NEW YORK -- Stanley L. Dritz, who popularized the zipper and other sewing products as part of his family's business, died Saturday in White Plains, N.Y. He was 88.
As president of John Dritz & Sons, Dritz raised the consumer appeal of a hookless fastener he had first seen in England. He made the fastener, commonly known as the zipper, out of plastic and rustproof metals.
It was one of the hundreds of sewing aids found in his company's catalog, which also included the seam ripper and the electric scissors.
Dritz was born in New York City and joined his father's business after graduating from college. He was president in the 1950s and 1960s, and the company was sold upon his retirement.
taken from
Citrus County Chronicle
1624 N. Meadowcrest Blvd.
Crystal River, FL 34429
I don't know if the poster of the above is clueless or trying to be funny, but I've used both gentlemen's products and in both cases would have been at a serious disadvantge without them.
And something else I just thought of. If you take a post to Slashdot and put it in a book, separated from many, if not all, of the posts that appeared around it and that may have helped inspire it and that it may be, partially or more, in answer to, aren't you taking the post out of context, which gives it a not exactly the exact same meaning and feel?
Sorry to see that another moderator had to waste a point undoing some other moderator's moment of mental abberation, glad to see that that same other moderator stepped up to fix the problem and restore seebs karma.
Isn't that what the Slashdot effect is for?
How in the *bleep* does the above post rate being moderated as a troll?!?!?
Allow me to quickly point out that if you have more than one medium you have media, not mediums. That's why when newspapers, television, radio, etc. all get lumped together they're called the Media. Each one is a medium of communication. All of them taken together are communications media. Don't blame me, blame the guys who invented Latin. Or was it Greek?
Anyway, you're right, the reason the Nightly News with Tom Brokaw runs a bunch of antacid and laxitive commercials, and the Saturday morning cartoons run toy ads, and the golf tournament broadcasts run Cadillac and Lincoln spots, is demographics.
But that's still spending money to reach a bunch of people, of whom only some are the ones that you really want to reach. What if you could focus your advertising more tightly, or more locally or regionally?
Say, for instance, there's a baseball game on WGN with a piece of fence behind the catcher that's actually got an ad saying "subscribe to The Chicago Tribune for great sports coverage every day". If you're sitting in the stands at the game in Chicago, or watching it over the air on WGN somewhere in the Chicago area, where you can get the Trib home delivered, that's the ad you see. But if you're watching on a cable system in the hometown of the opposing team (which is usually Atlanta, so that there's nothing to watch for a few hours on WGN *or* WTBS), then what if that piece of fence is displaying an ad for a business that's local to the visiting team's hometown? You're watching the same game as the guy in Chicago is, and you're watching it on WGN, but you've been more narrowly targeted than if they didn't know your geographic area.
Or what about the time slots that your local cable company gets to fill? I see ads for local businesses even though I'm watching CNN, USA, TNT, whatever. What if your cable company sorts viewers out not just by city but according to neighborhoods, and you get the used car dealer's 30 second spot and the guy a few miles away in the house that cost 3 to 10 times what yours did sees a local Mercedes or Jaguar dealer's ad instead, even though you're both looking at "Fistfull of Dollars" on the same cable channel at the same time. Each car dealer just reached *his* target demographic without spending money advertising to the wrong viewer.
It's not that technically difficult nowadays to show a different ad to a different cable company's subscribers; for the cable co. themselves to segregate by neighborhood might still be too expensive, and sorting you out from your neighbor so that she sees the J.C. Penny jewelry sale ad while you see the Red Lobster combo platter ad while both of you are individually watching "Frasier" or VH-1 or whatever is probably not in the cards for the immediate future.
But that's television.
Computers and the Internet, on the other hand, aren't as communal. It's not a case of watching whatever's on the local cable or in the local airwaves, it's ask for and be sent a web page that maybe nobody else in your town knows or cares about, but if there is an advertiser out there who already knows that you probably make enough money to buy his product, let's say outboard motor, for example, and that you subscribe to a fishing magazine, and that you've been looking at new boats on other web sites, and that you reported your old boat and motor stolen and filed a claim with your insurance company, then even though you've just downloaded a site about model railroading, he just might want to replace the generic ad for HO scale scenery or Pulse Width Modulation power supplies at the top of the page with an announcement about his latest remote start, low wake, fuel efficient 2 cylinder outboard (or whatever features would make an outboard attractive to buyers)on the version of the page that you see. If the model railroading site sells that ad space to a company that can find you in their database and match the info on you against client businesses, then it's just a matter of whether they have the computer power to do it cheaply enough for that outboard motor manufacturer to be willing to pay. If so, they've just bought some very tightly targeted advertising, without spending anything to advertise to a household that's not even home to watch the TV this weekend.
I think everybody from AuntTilliesQuiltingCircleDotOrg to the Mattel Hot Wheels site *except* Slashdot carried the story (though now that 2600 is involved, Taco&Co. have a take on it as well), but considering that Predictive Network is probably secretly telling the government to be nice to them because they can help with tracking down "mafiaboy" types, I don't see the above post as off-topic at all, and feel that the moderator in question could have found better use for that point elsewhere.
And your source for these rather serious allegations is...?
A previous rwade post to this story got moderated down from the default +1 any registered user's posts get to a 0 and the moderation category was "overrated".
This is by no means the first time that I've seen moderations that were just *barely* defensible.
In metamoderation you might let it slide instead of calling it fair or unfair, not agreeing with it but giving the moderator the benefit of the doubt and not wanting to reduce the karma of one of Slashdot's "good" moderators.
So someone gets away with a malicious moderation.
Even if metamoderation zings them for it, rwade's karma has still taken a hit, maybe the one that's the final straw in taking away his moderator privileges, and costing us another "good" moderator.
I think of these people as "attack moderators".
Some of them are subtle like this one (about whom I *might* be mistaken, and apologise to in that unlikely event, but I'd want to know why that mod point wasn't put to better use elsewhere), others are a little more obviously out to get the person they moderated down.
And I'm pretty sure that they have more than one account, so that they can use one or more for the moderation privileges, logging in as that account just enough to retain moderator eligibility (reading Slashdot too seldom or too frequently, or commenting too frequently, disqualifies you from being selected for moderation).
I wouldn't be surprised if several people were acting together on this, moderating each other up and ganging up on people they take a dislike to.
As regards the more juvenile of the trolls (and the source of attack moderators), although Slashdot would have grown larger and in need of a moderation system even if there were no such person as Jon Katz, when Katz appointed himself geek ambassador/evangelist he brought Slashdot to the attention of a lot of adolescents, some of them not too well adjusted socially, and all of them, like adolescents everywhere, with a lot of pent-up angers, frustrations, creative urges, fears, and passions in need of an outlet.
Also, many have pointed out that this sort of behavior occurred on other sites where Slashdot would have been mentioned, where this sort of behavior is now blocked in some way, or has run off everyone else, depriving them of an audience to offend, or is no longer possible due to the demise of the site.
I realise we're getting wa-a-ay off-topic here (especially me), but since this story was about a non-event (building a laptop with a passive backplane board), I feel as though I've made a greater contribution here than I would have with one more remark about the pointlessness of considering using a passive backplane board for building a laptop.
"Once HDTV signal is sent via optical cable,..." it isn't broadcasting anymore and what we are talking about here is broadcasting and the way that broadcasters think that they have some God-given right to spectrum space that's actually public property (although the politicians are trying their best to screw us out of it and hand it off to their rich buddies, instead of just making them pay rent on it).
Something else to be considered is that there are rights to the written speech, and rights to the "performance", and they aren't the same.
This raises the question of whether the placement, timing, and formatting of a Slashdot post is separately copyrightable from the words of the post. Also, if one post quotes the post that it's replying to, or some other previous post, where do one poster's rights begin and another one's end?
Nah, he's been doing that since October of '98 and the "Halloween Papers".
Well now there's an issue that's probably of interest to a frightening number of Slashdotters--Is vandalism copyrightable?
I agree that we're seeing a much better level of writing than usual from each of them here (especially Katz), but that doesn't change the fact that they should have explained all of this up front, before putting the book together.
What if s/he has been posting anonymously from the beginning of Slashdot and just now registered to put a little more gravity behind her/his final post?
Imagine being a prosecuter trying to explain to a jury how 2600's logs are proof of some crime.
See the "Voice s from the Hellmouth Released in Paperback" story.
Now that I'm browsing at +2, I do avoid a lot of junk, but I sorta miss seeing my own posts
As I have pointed out previously, it's self-deprecation style humor, the idea being that I'm snobby enough to browse at +2, but not good enough to get moderated up that high.
A number of responding posters *appear* to take it literally and don't understand how I can reply to posts that are scored under +2. The ones that seem sincerely puzzled I respond to politely, but there are others that respond in full flame mode. I'm not as polite with them.
Sylvania should be the one with the copyright on "blue dot" from their flashbulbs.
I feel weird every time I say something nice about Katz too, but I try to do so whenever I think it's warranted. The problem here isn't really with Katz, though, it's with Slashdot. If, as others had suggested, they had announced their intentions in advance and asked if anybody had a problem with being quoted and pointed out at the time the good that such a book could do, I suspect that the reaction would have been quite different.
When you change your sig file, it changes on *all* of your posts retroactively, not just the ones posted after the change. If you go back over threads from the past few days that I have posted to, you'll see a number of replies expressing *opinions* about the sig my comments originally appeared with.
If it worked as it should most of TrollMastah's eminently ignorable tripe would wind up below a certain threshold, based on previous moderations, because s/he's proven that s/he can't be assumed to be posting something of the minimal acceptable quality, and the (surprisingly) good stuff s/he's posted lately would be moderated up so that *it* could be seen at a level that blocks the other stuff, and after enough of having "mended her/his ways", the moderation induced karma increase would put her/him back amongst the trusted.
Unfortunately, the recent influx of attack moderators (who I'm convinced are moderating under one account and using another to post just as heavily as those of us who post too frequently to qualify as moderators anymore) has severely undermined an otherwise workable scheme.
Further discussion of this should be directed to sid=attack_moderat or
"...actually this isn't self promotion."So your name won't be on the cover or otherwise prominently featured? :-)
It transmits its signal over telephone lines, but broadcasting is what you want to avoid.