It still amazes me after all these years that so many people react to the Slashdot editors' trolls. A lot of articles posted to Slashdot are informative, but obviously as a corporate entity, Slashdot needs to attract the masses with sensationalist, trollish stories as well. There are at least three 5-rated posts in response to this story that it is exagerative.
This happens over and over. Do you think that the Slashdot editors are that stupid? No, they are smart, and they make a lot of money. If they keep it too tight and smart, a lot of people (read: lurkers, not the average poster) might get bored or scared away.
Why do you think there is no article moderation or ratings in this supposedly "open" community? All I'm saying is that you shouldn't waste so much energy on getting worked up over Slashdot's editing.
I'm not a John Katz Hater, but who is he? Why does he write political rants AND movie reviews? Is he a seasoned expert on politics, law, and cinema? Couldn't they find someone better to write articles for Slashdot? Actually, none of the original articles posted to slashdot are ever interesting, except for the occasional book review. There's more than enough interesting offsite content for posters to comment on, so maybe Slashdot should stick to that.
Why is everyone being so apologetic about being "paranoid"? You've heard the saying: "Just because your paranoid, don't mean they're not after you." Well, they are after you. Do you think that those in power have a final point at which they will be satiated, then decide to start doing good for humanity? NO. Those in power build more power to protect their power.
I don't think that those in power want to control your lives for the sake of it. You are all just chess pieces in a world-wide game of power. You are the grunts in Warcraft, the peons of THE biggest real-time strategy game. And to forget about the fact that you are slaves, you play real-time strategy games. The irony...
Since we are making assumptions about the submitter's motives, maybe they want a non-Intel laptop, or maybe they have stock in Transmeta. Or maybe they want to support the company that hired Linus, or maybe...
If they provide radio stations with content the people want to hear, it WILL be all mainstream music. "The people" are the mainstream. Have you flipped through the 100 channels on your TV lately? Almost all crap. Anyone who really has divergent tastes really needs to get an MP3 player, or wireless broadband connection when those are eventually available.
I use a yahoo address for my email, and have it forward to my local server's mailbox. Yahoo adds a header "X-Rocket-Spam" to mail tagged as spam, and I use procmail to filter these out. While their spam detection still works pretty well, ever since the economy went to shits their filtering has progressively gotten worse. I suspect that they are letting certain spam slip for a fee. It used to catch everything, but now I get at least 10 messages a day getting through.
I would have to agree that the radio metaphor is flawed, as I had mentioned earlier. But the heavy regulation only allows big money junk and commercials on the airwaves with a few notable exceptions. I fear that spam regulation would have the same effect. Big corporations could send spam unpunished through some twisted legislation. I've been getting a lot of spam from large corporations lately in my spam filter box, so I wouldn't put it past them.
I don't agree that you can't filter properly. I get very little spam in my inbox with properly setup filters.
"allow people to stop receiving information". Hmmm. Shut off your radio if you don't want to "receive". How about, "prohibit people from sending information". Much different, isn't it? How would spam be defined? What if other things like petitions get lumped in with spam?
Damn, I paid for my radio and electricity, and all these damn stations keep sending me unsolicited information.
This may all sound like a troll, but it's not. The metaphors used in associating with email seem to break down when you get into the details.
If you want to live in a free society, you will have to "receive" the good with the bad.
"In many ways they sort of look at the computer as something that an average person shouldn't really touch unless they know what they are doing"
No kidding... I have a computer science degree, and have been using computers forever. But I can't keep up with everything that is out there. For instance, I mentioned on slashdot that I only had enough time to get basic security on my linux box, and everyone screamed that I should take my box off the net. My box is secure enough to not have been hacked in over a year, but what about these newbies? How are they going to secure an OS, when they barely understand the concept of logging in?
I see that you are so sure of yourself as to comeback anonymously, Mr. Duh. If you thought things out, you would have never even replied initially: Since I showed that it cannot be done, because the decision to click through is arbitrarily based on a snipet of text, then all you will get is a clickthrough rate generally based on the order they are returned. In otherwords, useless. Asshole.
Ok, Mr. Duh, how do you adjust for the fact that click-throughs that deviate from the standard distribution are based on the little snippet of text that google returns, instead of the the whole page?
Ok, so what level of security on someone's box makes them no longer a moron? Is there a canonical list of things I must do to secure a box so that I am no longer a moron? To be honest, I run my own box for personal use, and learning anything more than basic security takes more time than it's worth. Please let me know where I can go to learn what it takes to build a secure box as defined by non-moron security experts.
I've always thought the best way to destroy the windows monopoly was a more subtle approach. The current approach is to build a system to capture market share from windows. But a better approach (which is supported by Cygwin and KDE), is to slowly replace windows components, eventually down to the core, so that there is no longer such a thing as "Windows" or "Linux", but instead a set of interchangable parts to build your system. I don't know the technical details of doing this at the kernel level, but I bet with enough effort the windows kernel could be replaced with a free version.
I agree with all of you. I don't think that people should be restricted in their usage of art in their own possesion. But the idea that people need to be shielded from it is the idea that I am attacking. Repression (whether chosen or forced) breeds neurosis. Europeans are generally more sexually healthy, but they don't shield everyone from tits and ass.
So to make myself clear, I have no legal or political problems with the system of rating choice, but I find it symptomatic of bigger issues that we face.
Considering the small timeframe humans have been civilized (10k years?), the chance that we are at anything but a severely inferior technology level is remote. Any advanced races would probably be comfortable in dimensions we can't even imagine, and probably be aware of humanity without us trying to contact them. We know an ant hill is there without being able to smell the phermones they use to communicate, right?
I thought that cinema was form of art. In the future, will museums provide glasses to selectively block genitals and breasts on certain paintings? Will e-book readers have settings too? Must everything be compromised and converted into interactive fiction?
I seriously doubt any claims that violence and sex in various mediums are the root causes of any ills of society. But I think that the lack of any concept of artistic integrity points to where humanity's problems DO come from.
A bomb is an inadequate metaphor for the population crisis. Basically it boils down to this: recent population expansion is a result of oil, and when the oil runs out (predicted mid-21st century), then the energy wont be there to support the civilization it fostered. Humanity will then regress in what will probably be a messy scramble for resources.
You can see that commercial oil usage and mining began in the mid 19th century, approximately when the population started booming. Oil is the foundation for mechanical and electrical energy necessary for industry, farming, and communication, which creates a positive feedback loop with science and medicine, thus progressing population growth through lower mortality, higher birth rate, and more food.
The special thing about oil is that the payoff in energy is so much higher than the amount you put in to harvest it, unlike most other renewable sources.
A good analogy for our present situation: Imagine humans are extinct through some virus. Somewhere in mid-california there are huge werehouses of packaged food. A small pack of bears, say 50, finds this werehouse and begins to sustain themselves on it. After a few generations, there are 5000 bears. Then the food runs out. What happens to the bears?
We are the bears, and the the food is oil. But we are different. We have brains and can figure out how to lower our energy usage and/or find new sources. But we only have 50 years.
You fail to see that there is no endgame to all of this. People like Hillary are all about competition and power. They wouldn't stop at putting quarters in a stereo; they would keep on until they had direct control over every quark in the universe. These people have major psychological issues ingrained in them since youth. These types of people are actually quite rare (though very visibile), and the checks and balances of the laws of society and physics stop their coniving ways.
"The moon was ours once... now every time I step outside at night and look up I see another example of failure."
Perhaps the failure is your own for not seeing that the moon has the same poetic beauty it has always had. Looking at the moon as another object of ownership is the exact point of contention with the privatization of space. Coca Cola has wanted to put an advertisement the size of the moon in space. That would be the day that I would officially become a criminal...
Slashdot Mirror
It still amazes me after all these years that so many people react to the Slashdot editors' trolls. A lot of articles posted to Slashdot are informative, but obviously as a corporate entity, Slashdot needs to attract the masses with sensationalist, trollish stories as well. There are at least three 5-rated posts in response to this story that it is exagerative.
This happens over and over. Do you think that the Slashdot editors are that stupid? No, they are smart, and they make a lot of money. If they keep it too tight and smart, a lot of people (read: lurkers, not the average poster) might get bored or scared away.
Why do you think there is no article moderation or ratings in this supposedly "open" community? All I'm saying is that you shouldn't waste so much energy on getting worked up over Slashdot's editing.
LS
I'm not a John Katz Hater, but who is he? Why does he write political rants AND movie reviews? Is he a seasoned expert on politics, law, and cinema? Couldn't they find someone better to write articles for Slashdot? Actually, none of the original articles posted to slashdot are ever interesting, except for the occasional book review. There's more than enough interesting offsite content for posters to comment on, so maybe Slashdot should stick to that.
LS
Right here, bitches
No, this aint a troll. See the headline.
Why is everyone being so apologetic about being "paranoid"? You've heard the saying: "Just because your paranoid, don't mean they're not after you." Well, they are after you. Do you think that those in power have a final point at which they will be satiated, then decide to start doing good for humanity? NO. Those in power build more power to protect their power.
I don't think that those in power want to control your lives for the sake of it. You are all just chess pieces in a world-wide game of power. You are the grunts in Warcraft, the peons of THE biggest real-time strategy game. And to forget about the fact that you are slaves, you play real-time strategy games. The irony...
LS
Since we are making assumptions about the submitter's motives, maybe they want a non-Intel laptop, or maybe they have stock in Transmeta. Or maybe they want to support the company that hired Linus, or maybe...
If they provide radio stations with content the people want to hear, it WILL be all mainstream music. "The people" are the mainstream. Have you flipped through the 100 channels on your TV lately? Almost all crap. Anyone who really has divergent tastes really needs to get an MP3 player, or wireless broadband connection when those are eventually available.
LS
I use a yahoo address for my email, and have it forward to my local server's mailbox. Yahoo adds a header "X-Rocket-Spam" to mail tagged as spam, and I use procmail to filter these out. While their spam detection still works pretty well, ever since the economy went to shits their filtering has progressively gotten worse. I suspect that they are letting certain spam slip for a fee. It used to catch everything, but now I get at least 10 messages a day getting through.
LS
I would have to agree that the radio metaphor is flawed, as I had mentioned earlier. But the heavy regulation only allows big money junk and commercials on the airwaves with a few notable exceptions. I fear that spam regulation would have the same effect. Big corporations could send spam unpunished through some twisted legislation. I've been getting a lot of spam from large corporations lately in my spam filter box, so I wouldn't put it past them.
I don't agree that you can't filter properly. I get very little spam in my inbox with properly setup filters.
Word games.
"allow people to stop receiving information". Hmmm. Shut off your radio if you don't want to "receive". How about, "prohibit people from sending information". Much different, isn't it? How would spam be defined? What if other things like petitions get lumped in with spam?
Damn, I paid for my radio and electricity, and all these damn stations keep sending me unsolicited information.
This may all sound like a troll, but it's not. The metaphors used in associating with email seem to break down when you get into the details.
If you want to live in a free society, you will have to "receive" the good with the bad.
LS
"In many ways they sort of look at the computer as something that an average person shouldn't really touch unless they know what they are doing"
No kidding... I have a computer science degree, and have been using computers forever. But I can't keep up with everything that is out there. For instance, I mentioned on slashdot that I only had enough time to get basic security on my linux box, and everyone screamed that I should take my box off the net. My box is secure enough to not have been hacked in over a year, but what about these newbies? How are they going to secure an OS, when they barely understand the concept of logging in?
LS
You haven't heard a corporate theme song until you've heard Cybermedia's theme song, Power to the People
I cringed so much listening to this that my soul feels wrinkled!
LS
I.K.U. ("I'm Coming!" in Japanese)
Digitally enhanced pornography based upon the Bladerunner universe.
It was the hit of the Sundance festival:
http://www.i-k-u.com/
This is one of those sites that actually treats press releases as news... When will they learn?
LS
I see that you are so sure of yourself as to comeback anonymously, Mr. Duh. If you thought things out, you would have never even replied initially: Since I showed that it cannot be done, because the decision to click through is arbitrarily based on a snipet of text, then all you will get is a clickthrough rate generally based on the order they are returned. In otherwords, useless. Asshole.
Ok, Mr. Duh, how do you adjust for the fact that click-throughs that deviate from the standard distribution are based on the little snippet of text that google returns, instead of the the whole page?
Ok, so what level of security on someone's box makes them no longer a moron? Is there a canonical list of things I must do to secure a box so that I am no longer a moron? To be honest, I run my own box for personal use, and learning anything more than basic security takes more time than it's worth. Please let me know where I can go to learn what it takes to build a secure box as defined by non-moron security experts.
LS
This doesn't make any sense. Higher rated results will automatically get more clickthroughs.
LS
I've always thought the best way to destroy the windows monopoly was a more subtle approach. The current approach is to build a system to capture market share from windows. But a better approach (which is supported by Cygwin and KDE), is to slowly replace windows components, eventually down to the core, so that there is no longer such a thing as "Windows" or "Linux", but instead a set of interchangable parts to build your system. I don't know the technical details of doing this at the kernel level, but I bet with enough effort the windows kernel could be replaced with a free version.
LS
I agree with all of you. I don't think that people should be restricted in their usage of art in their own possesion. But the idea that people need to be shielded from it is the idea that I am attacking. Repression (whether chosen or forced) breeds neurosis. Europeans are generally more sexually healthy, but they don't shield everyone from tits and ass.
So to make myself clear, I have no legal or political problems with the system of rating choice, but I find it symptomatic of bigger issues that we face.
LS
Considering the small timeframe humans have been civilized (10k years?), the chance that we are at anything but a severely inferior technology level is remote. Any advanced races would probably be comfortable in dimensions we can't even imagine, and probably be aware of humanity without us trying to contact them. We know an ant hill is there without being able to smell the phermones they use to communicate, right?
LS
I thought that cinema was form of art. In the future, will museums provide glasses to selectively block genitals and breasts on certain paintings? Will e-book readers have settings too? Must everything be compromised and converted into interactive fiction?
I seriously doubt any claims that violence and sex in various mediums are the root causes of any ills of society. But I think that the lack of any concept of artistic integrity points to where humanity's problems DO come from.
LS
Idiots:
The fact that AMERICAN politicians do nothing about SCIENTIFIC DATA from satellites and other sources is a travesty. Global warming DOES exist. I trust the opinions of over 90 Nobel Laureats over at FAS and the over than 150 countries signing the Kyoto protocol (the US being the only country to back out) than your pig-headed "patriotic" asses.
About the population situation:
A bomb is an inadequate metaphor for the population crisis. Basically it boils down to this: recent population expansion is a result of oil, and when the oil runs out (predicted mid-21st century), then the energy wont be there to support the civilization it fostered. Humanity will then regress in what will probably be a messy scramble for resources.
You can see that commercial oil usage and mining began in the mid 19th century, approximately when the population started booming. Oil is the foundation for mechanical and electrical energy necessary for industry, farming, and communication, which creates a positive feedback loop with science and medicine, thus progressing population growth through lower mortality, higher birth rate, and more food.
The special thing about oil is that the payoff in energy is so much higher than the amount you put in to harvest it, unlike most other renewable sources.
A good analogy for our present situation: Imagine humans are extinct through some virus. Somewhere in mid-california there are huge werehouses of packaged food. A small pack of bears, say 50, finds this werehouse and begins to sustain themselves on it. After a few generations, there are 5000 bears. Then the food runs out. What happens to the bears?
We are the bears, and the the food is oil. But we are different. We have brains and can figure out how to lower our energy usage and/or find new sources. But we only have 50 years.
LS
Non-story. Limewire is open source. Go download it and remove any ads if you want, whiny bitches:
m e
http://limewire.limewire.org/servlets/ProjectHo
You fail to see that there is no endgame to all of this. People like Hillary are all about competition and power. They wouldn't stop at putting quarters in a stereo; they would keep on until they had direct control over every quark in the universe. These people have major psychological issues ingrained in them since youth. These types of people are actually quite rare (though very visibile), and the checks and balances of the laws of society and physics stop their coniving ways.
"The moon was ours once... now every time I step outside at night and look up I see another example of failure."
Perhaps the failure is your own for not seeing that the moon has the same poetic beauty it has always had. Looking at the moon as another object of ownership is the exact point of contention with the privatization of space. Coca Cola has wanted to put an advertisement the size of the moon in space. That would be the day that I would officially become a criminal...
LS