The most amazing library disk encountered to date: broken clear from edge to middle. It wouldn't play, but it DID rip nice and clean.
That's pretty amazing, but isn't it quite likely to shatter (and ruin the drive, at the very least) at the very high speeds most modern drives can rotate the disc at?
There's no point spending a few hundred on a professional resurfacing machine, nor is there in risking doing it yourself with toothpaste or metal polish and a microfibre cloth
Ummm... exactly. What I don't get is that he said
I have a few [my emphasis] discs that have suffered extensive scratching [..] I would very much like to be able to repair [..] I've heard great things about JFJ devices that are seen on the counters of most Hollywood and BlockBuster video stores, but even their consumer devices start at $250.
My first reaction was to say "Well, if you've only got a few discs, why don't you just pay what Blockbuster are asking to repair them with those fine machines". Then I realised (duh) that they would have them for their own use, and might not necessarily be offering that service to the public. Maybe you could slip the underpaid peon behind the counter a few quid/bucks/yen/etc to do it "unoficially".
Otherwise, common sense dictates that there must be some services out there using that machine, and that it's just a question of finding a trustworthy one.
You are quite right. Money is not the root of all evil, as is often quoted. The LOVE OF money is the root of all evil.
Which makes more sense, but it's still transparently wrong to say that it's the root of *all* evil. Sexual desire isn't necessarily connected with money at all (particularly in men), but I'm damn sure it's caused more than a couple of minor problems in the history of the human race. That's just one example, but it's enough.
Interesting. Another thing I've noticed about English text from Asian countries is that it's often stretched or squished to fit a space. To me text with the wrong aspect ratio always looks weird and amateurish. Is it common practice to stretch and squish Asian characters, or is that something that's only done with English?
When the printer or layout person doesn't read English, they just make it fit. The customer often doesn't care either, it's just boilerplate to them.
Bingo; I once designed a leaflet for some guy who wanted Chinese and Urdu versions of the language alongside the English.
The Urdu translation was written text by some guy he knew(!), and had to be scanned. It looked okay once it had been tidied up, but since I'm not familiar with what typeset Urdu looks like, this probably hid flaws that might be obvious to people who spoke the language. Then I had trouble making it fit the space (since it was originally written text and I don't understand Urdu, it was hard to reliably rearrange). So I stretched and squashed it until it fitted. It still looked passable to me, but it was hard to tell.
To be honest, the tri-lingual leaflet looked okay overall to my eyes, but the Urdu *may* have looked a bit strange to someone who actually understood it.
Just to throw a little more oil onto the fire of this argument, I'll point out that while "Xerox" may have become a generic verb in the US (and possibly other countries), I've *never* heard it used in the UK.
Here everyone says "photocopy" or "photocopying", even in everyday conversation. I've heard it said that this is because Xerox was never that big here, and that the first copiers to break the mass market were manufactured by their rivals. Not that we "Canon" or "Brother" a document either, though.
FWIW, people here talk about a "Hoover" and doing the "hoovering" when they refer to vacuum cleaners. Yet I've heard that this isn't common usage in the US, despite Hoover being an American company. Anyway, I remember finding it unusual when my parents bought a Hoover washing machine, because I'd always associated the name with vacuum cleaners (and I *was* about to say "...associated the name with hoovers"!)
Java is the epitome of bad programming, despite all that you can do with it. It's just a terrible implementation of a great capability. I loathe its insurgence into the mainstream.
Regardless of whether that's true or not... the irony here is that on its launch, Java's use in web browsers- via Applets- was the main thing it was hyped for to the user in the street. And it totally *failed* to achieve mainstream success in that area. Seriously, how often do you see Java applets?
Flash- which used to be a tool for creating lightweight vector-based multimedia- somehow rose to become the tool for embedded apps in web pages. The exact niche that Java was supposed- and failed- to occupy.
I wouldn't even say Flash out-competed or usurped Java Applets. By the time Flash started growing up, Applets had been around for years and had clearly failed to be the success they were supposed to be.
You could always hang on to messages locally, if they mattered to you.
You could always do that with a messages on a web-based forum, if they mattered to you.
And that misses (or intentionally skirts around) the point of your original message, which was that a supposed benefit of Usenet was that it would not be lost because it was being systematically archived. People saving a few messages that are important to them doesn't constitute a proper archive.
And if one *had* wanted to create their own permanent archive back then, well... easier said than done. Particularly from the vantage point of 2008. Storage space is cheap now; even in relative terms, I'd say that it was much cheaper compared to what people wanted to do with it now than was the case 15 years ago.
Which is to say that there was a good reason that servers didn't hold on to messages for too long. It's because- by the standards of the time- there were a lot of them, and they took up a lot of space which back then was pretty expensive. I remember considering buying a computer in late 1993 and wondering if a 120MB drive would have been a bit gratuitous for a poorish student (80MB was pretty middle of the road then).
How much Usenet would that have stored, excluding binaries? To create your own permanent mirror/archive of Usenet would have taken up a *lot* of expensive hard drives over the long term.
Maybe someone was intentionally creating an archive back then; but the way most people saw and used Usenet was that it was ephemeral, and the web hadn't really exploded then, so the possibility that someone might make such an archive accessible via a search engine wasn't so obvious either.
If a web forum goes down, all the information on that site goes with it, likely forever. (Do you think Google will index and preserve LiveJournal or MySpace when they eventually go offline?)
You seem to assume (or imply) that Usenet's content being archived was always a part of its nature. This wasn't really the case.
I can't speak for everyone, but I started using Usenet in 1993 and I don't recall ever getting the impression that it was a permanent archive. If that sounds vague, it's probably because I never thought about it that much. You posted something on Usenet and after a while it got deleted from the servers to make way for newer messages. Some servers may have held older messages, but it was still basically ephemeral. That's the impression I get in general from other people who used it back then too.
Prior to Deja News, there was no obvious and easy way to access older messages (this was shortly before the web exploded, and Usenet had been around for quite a long time before that). Even if I'd considered the possibility that someone was creating or keeping an archive, I'd probably assume it would be data stuck on some backup tapes somewhere.
At any rate, I used to use Usenet(!) as if it were ephemeral, and now that I realise that my old posts (under my real name) will be around forever, I don't- which I don't really like, to be honest.
Wasn't Google Groups the old Deja usenet frontend originally?
Well, that started off as "Deja News", during which time it was quite good, although IIRC it still had annoying banner ads. By the time it was renamed to "Deja.com" though, it had begun to suck, with fruit-machine-like ads down both sides of the page and branching out into other stuff.
The news archives side got sold to Google later on, which was actually a major improvement over deja.com's annoying Las Vegas style pages...
And to the GP: people nowadays are humorless dicks and will probably sue you for a billion US dollars
Nah, firstly because I'd make completely clear in the case of selling them that it was Zimbabwean dollars that were worth bugger all and intended for a "joke". And in the second case (the competition) it'd still be obviously tongue-in-cheek and include a (prominent enough) disclaimer.
And the other reason is that because I'm in the UK people wouldn't (or *shouldn't*) assume that they're US dollars anyway!
However, as I said, although in isolation it's a practical idea (IMHO), it'd be insensitive and in somewhat poor taste given the real financial hardship being suffered by the Zimbabweans as a result of the currency crash. To be honest, I'd feel like some odious toff laughing at something I wouldn't find remotely funny if it affected me.
And yeah, I realise that buying the currency might improve things slightly, but not by a lot, and it'd give the cause of all this trouble, Robert Mugabe, another excuse to make the British look bad and pass the blame.
BTW, yeah, I did notice that they were devaluing the currency- I mentioned and linked that in my original post! It won't stop the problem, although whether things'll still get bad to a factor of 10^9 *again* is unclear.
When you're talking in the tens or hundreds of billions (yes, that's billions- 10^9- not millions) of dollars for basic foodstuffs like eggs and bread, you know your economy's in the shit. (*)
(*) I did have the idea of getting my hands on some Zimbabwean currency to sell as a joke ("you *too* can be a genuine billionaire/trillionaire! Impress your friends") and use for tongue-in-cheek competitions ("Win a billion dollars!" etc) Unfortunately, given that this relied on a situation with some very unfunny implications for those actually living in Zimbabwe, I quickly realised that this would also be in very poor taste, and my conscience nixed the idea.
I agree with much of what you say, including the assertion that although an old laptop may only be worth (say) $10 secondhand, you wouldn't be able to manufacture it for that price.
However...
Just in case Intel decided to release 386 again they wouldn't be much cheaper than $30.
You might be surprised to know that Intel was still selling versions of the 386 until last year- as embedded systems. I don't know how much they charged for it, but although issues may be complicated by those chips (probably) integrating other functionality, I'd still expect them to be able to sell something like that for under $30.
I'm sorry: I trust no company with all of my data. That's why I don't use Google docs or Microsoft's current document offering. And now they want to store all of my data? I, for one, will gladly continue using Linux.
No, no! You're only allowed to use that phrase if you welcome our data-hoarding overlords!
Don't mistake fanboys' loudness for numbers
on
Apple After Jobs
·
· Score: 1
Apple is built on "fanbois" - Slashdot residing or not. Hell the Apple "cult" is probably the ORIGIN of the whole concept of a "fanboy" as is has come to be known on the Internet.
I'm not convinced. Apple's fanboys may be some of the most obsessive and cultish out there, but although their vocalism makes them disproportionately prominent, we shouldn't automatically assume that their loudness implies size (in terms of numbers) or even influence. I'm willing to bet that as a proportion of the total number of people who own Apple products, they're not *that* big.
Fanboys and similar types often make the mistake of overestimating their own importance. Apple could probably do some respectable turnover selling to this obsessive core market, but in general- and particularly with the iPod and iPhone- Apple's success has been in the mass market. While the fanboys may have helped fan a few rumours and get some attention, I very much doubt that they are anything like the main reason for Apple's present success.
Which I still remember as being a lousy movie even when I was a kid. Kept up the standard disney mediocrity from the Barefoot Executive to the Black Hole. Even the metaphors to how computers really worked seemed lame. The only area where the movie works for me is in the visuals.
I think you're being slightly harsh, but I agree that Tron isn't a particularly great movie overall- and also that the visuals are by far and away the best thing about it.
To be fair, although I'm in my early thirties and old enough to have seen (and clearly remembered) Tron when it first came out, I didn't. (*) It wasn't until years later that I caught it on TV. That might colour my judgement- but also to be fair, I could say the same about the nostalgia of people who saw it as kids when it first came out.
Problem isn't just that the plot is flimsy, it's that the film never really makes you believe in the characters or care about what's at stake. The dialogue is clunky and the acting nothing special. I could tolerate the cheesiness, but not that.
So, no... Tron isn't- and never was- a Matrix for its times. Despite being a staple of 80s "nostalgia", its influence on most people at the time was minimal. However, I do think it's visually and technically brilliant, and although some aspects of its attempt to bring the then-new computer culture to the mainstream were quite cheesy, it deserves some credit for the attempt (and has to be seen in the context of the time).
Hans is an ass, but at least I can explain what Hans did.
You can? Please enlighten us.
The only thing that was clear about that case was that Hans killed his wife, and even that was only after he admitted it and showed them where the body was to get more favourable parole terms. (Some considered the judicial process that convicted Reiser to be flawed even if- in retrospect- it's clear that it came to the correct conclusion).
Beyond that, the circumstances and motivations behind the killing are still unclear. If you can explain anything beyond that, it would be very enlightening.
There's no limit to how sad something can be, while still being joke-worthy.
"(Joke) Worthy" is subjective, and that's all that can be said about it. However, while those involved in tragedies may make jokes about it at some stage, they typically don't do so on the same or following day.
And being able to find humour in something doesn't necessarily make it not insensitive.
The dead babies example is quite abstract, and perversely the quantity takes away the tragedy (you know what Stalin said about the difference between a single death and a million).
This whole thread is fucking depressing anyway. Either the Slashdot crowd is seriously blinkered to anything else by its hostility to spammers, or it really shows how eugenically-oriented, right-wing and downright hateful it fundamentally is. Modding my comment down as a troll was one thing- a look at my history probably would have shown otherwise, whether you agreed with the sentiment or not- but that could be rationalised as bad modding. The fact that most of the views in the other direction got modded up (even if just as "funny") says more, however.
I half expected some rationalisation about why his wife deserved it, but I really didn't expect this reaction to- and even endorsement of- the death of a three-year old child.
You can mod this one as a troll too (and some smartass probably will).
I work in Chicago. Let me know if you'd like to meet and tell me that in person.
Okay; my mistake- you really *are* a sociopathic fuck!
By the way, I look forward to hearing the results of you loudly declaring your views in a public bar ("in person") that a three-year-old got what she deserved because her Dad was a spammer.
Out of curiosity, do you think that Hans Reiser's kids deserve the same fate because their father was a murderer?
Slashdot Mirror
The most amazing library disk encountered to date: broken clear from edge to middle. It wouldn't play, but it DID rip nice and clean.
That's pretty amazing, but isn't it quite likely to shatter (and ruin the drive, at the very least) at the very high speeds most modern drives can rotate the disc at?
There's no point spending a few hundred on a professional resurfacing machine, nor is there in risking doing it yourself with toothpaste or metal polish and a microfibre cloth
Ummm... exactly. What I don't get is that he said
I have a few [my emphasis] discs that have suffered extensive scratching [..] I would very much like to be able to repair [..] I've heard great things about JFJ devices that are seen on the counters of most Hollywood and BlockBuster video stores, but even their consumer devices start at $250.
My first reaction was to say "Well, if you've only got a few discs, why don't you just pay what Blockbuster are asking to repair them with those fine machines". Then I realised (duh) that they would have them for their own use, and might not necessarily be offering that service to the public. Maybe you could slip the underpaid peon behind the counter a few quid/bucks/yen/etc to do it "unoficially".
Otherwise, common sense dictates that there must be some services out there using that machine, and that it's just a question of finding a trustworthy one.
You are quite right. Money is not the root of all evil, as is often quoted. The LOVE OF money is the root of all evil.
Which makes more sense, but it's still transparently wrong to say that it's the root of *all* evil. Sexual desire isn't necessarily connected with money at all (particularly in men), but I'm damn sure it's caused more than a couple of minor problems in the history of the human race. That's just one example, but it's enough.
Except that the Templars ran into trouble with the French, not the Spanish.
That'd be why they weren't expecting the Spanish Inquisition then, wouldn't it? Silly boy.
If you think about it, Starbucks abandoning Java would make for interesting news as well...
You're saying you wouldn't be equally intrigued if you found out that IBM are leaving the baked goods market?!
What? No Rick Roll?
Oh well, if you insist!
Interesting. Another thing I've noticed about English text from Asian countries is that it's often stretched or squished to fit a space. To me text with the wrong aspect ratio always looks weird and amateurish. Is it common practice to stretch and squish Asian characters, or is that something that's only done with English?
When the printer or layout person doesn't read English, they just make it fit. The customer often doesn't care either, it's just boilerplate to them.
Bingo; I once designed a leaflet for some guy who wanted Chinese and Urdu versions of the language alongside the English.
The Urdu translation was written text by some guy he knew(!), and had to be scanned. It looked okay once it had been tidied up, but since I'm not familiar with what typeset Urdu looks like, this probably hid flaws that might be obvious to people who spoke the language. Then I had trouble making it fit the space (since it was originally written text and I don't understand Urdu, it was hard to reliably rearrange). So I stretched and squashed it until it fitted. It still looked passable to me, but it was hard to tell.
To be honest, the tri-lingual leaflet looked okay overall to my eyes, but the Urdu *may* have looked a bit strange to someone who actually understood it.
Just to throw a little more oil onto the fire of this argument, I'll point out that while "Xerox" may have become a generic verb in the US (and possibly other countries), I've *never* heard it used in the UK.
Here everyone says "photocopy" or "photocopying", even in everyday conversation. I've heard it said that this is because Xerox was never that big here, and that the first copiers to break the mass market were manufactured by their rivals. Not that we "Canon" or "Brother" a document either, though.
FWIW, people here talk about a "Hoover" and doing the "hoovering" when they refer to vacuum cleaners. Yet I've heard that this isn't common usage in the US, despite Hoover being an American company. Anyway, I remember finding it unusual when my parents bought a Hoover washing machine, because I'd always associated the name with vacuum cleaners (and I *was* about to say "...associated the name with hoovers"!)
Java is the epitome of bad programming, despite all that you can do with it. It's just a terrible implementation of a great capability. I loathe its insurgence into the mainstream.
Regardless of whether that's true or not... the irony here is that on its launch, Java's use in web browsers- via Applets- was the main thing it was hyped for to the user in the street. And it totally *failed* to achieve mainstream success in that area. Seriously, how often do you see Java applets?
Flash- which used to be a tool for creating lightweight vector-based multimedia- somehow rose to become the tool for embedded apps in web pages. The exact niche that Java was supposed- and failed- to occupy.
I wouldn't even say Flash out-competed or usurped Java Applets. By the time Flash started growing up, Applets had been around for years and had clearly failed to be the success they were supposed to be.
Just imagine - something as innocent as lolcats could be a potential minefield. God only knows what goatse would do.
I don't know about online credentials, but Goatse and Tubgirl have been stealing something for years- peoples' minds.
You could always hang on to messages locally, if they mattered to you.
You could always do that with a messages on a web-based forum, if they mattered to you.
And that misses (or intentionally skirts around) the point of your original message, which was that a supposed benefit of Usenet was that it would not be lost because it was being systematically archived. People saving a few messages that are important to them doesn't constitute a proper archive.
And if one *had* wanted to create their own permanent archive back then, well... easier said than done. Particularly from the vantage point of 2008. Storage space is cheap now; even in relative terms, I'd say that it was much cheaper compared to what people wanted to do with it now than was the case 15 years ago.
Which is to say that there was a good reason that servers didn't hold on to messages for too long. It's because- by the standards of the time- there were a lot of them, and they took up a lot of space which back then was pretty expensive. I remember considering buying a computer in late 1993 and wondering if a 120MB drive would have been a bit gratuitous for a poorish student (80MB was pretty middle of the road then).
How much Usenet would that have stored, excluding binaries? To create your own permanent mirror/archive of Usenet would have taken up a *lot* of expensive hard drives over the long term.
Maybe someone was intentionally creating an archive back then; but the way most people saw and used Usenet was that it was ephemeral, and the web hadn't really exploded then, so the possibility that someone might make such an archive accessible via a search engine wasn't so obvious either.
If a web forum goes down, all the information on that site goes with it, likely forever. (Do you think Google will index and preserve LiveJournal or MySpace when they eventually go offline?)
You seem to assume (or imply) that Usenet's content being archived was always a part of its nature. This wasn't really the case.
I can't speak for everyone, but I started using Usenet in 1993 and I don't recall ever getting the impression that it was a permanent archive. If that sounds vague, it's probably because I never thought about it that much. You posted something on Usenet and after a while it got deleted from the servers to make way for newer messages. Some servers may have held older messages, but it was still basically ephemeral. That's the impression I get in general from other people who used it back then too.
Prior to Deja News, there was no obvious and easy way to access older messages (this was shortly before the web exploded, and Usenet had been around for quite a long time before that). Even if I'd considered the possibility that someone was creating or keeping an archive, I'd probably assume it would be data stuck on some backup tapes somewhere.
At any rate, I used to use Usenet(!) as if it were ephemeral, and now that I realise that my old posts (under my real name) will be around forever, I don't- which I don't really like, to be honest.
Wasn't Google Groups the old Deja usenet frontend originally?
Well, that started off as "Deja News", during which time it was quite good, although IIRC it still had annoying banner ads. By the time it was renamed to "Deja.com" though, it had begun to suck, with fruit-machine-like ads down both sides of the page and branching out into other stuff.
The news archives side got sold to Google later on, which was actually a major improvement over deja.com's annoying Las Vegas style pages...
And to the GP: people nowadays are humorless dicks and will probably sue you for a billion US dollars
Nah, firstly because I'd make completely clear in the case of selling them that it was Zimbabwean dollars that were worth bugger all and intended for a "joke". And in the second case (the competition) it'd still be obviously tongue-in-cheek and include a (prominent enough) disclaimer.
And the other reason is that because I'm in the UK people wouldn't (or *shouldn't*) assume that they're US dollars anyway!
However, as I said, although in isolation it's a practical idea (IMHO), it'd be insensitive and in somewhat poor taste given the real financial hardship being suffered by the Zimbabweans as a result of the currency crash. To be honest, I'd feel like some odious toff laughing at something I wouldn't find remotely funny if it affected me.
And yeah, I realise that buying the currency might improve things slightly, but not by a lot, and it'd give the cause of all this trouble, Robert Mugabe, another excuse to make the British look bad and pass the blame.
BTW, yeah, I did notice that they were devaluing the currency- I mentioned and linked that in my original post! It won't stop the problem, although whether things'll still get bad to a factor of 10^9 *again* is unclear.
yeah but the value of the dollar's fallen a LOT since when it was announced as 100.
Assuming you mean the US dollar... it's certainly not had as bad a time of it as the Zimbabwean Dollar.
When you're talking in the tens or hundreds of billions (yes, that's billions- 10^9- not millions) of dollars for basic foodstuffs like eggs and bread, you know your economy's in the shit. (*)
Particularly when your president announces that he's going to devalue the currency by knocking off 10 zeroes.
(*) I did have the idea of getting my hands on some Zimbabwean currency to sell as a joke ("you *too* can be a genuine billionaire/trillionaire! Impress your friends") and use for tongue-in-cheek competitions ("Win a billion dollars!" etc) Unfortunately, given that this relied on a situation with some very unfunny implications for those actually living in Zimbabwe, I quickly realised that this would also be in very poor taste, and my conscience nixed the idea.
However...
Just in case Intel decided to release 386 again they wouldn't be much cheaper than $30.
You might be surprised to know that Intel was still selling versions of the 386 until last year- as embedded systems. I don't know how much they charged for it, but although issues may be complicated by those chips (probably) integrating other functionality, I'd still expect them to be able to sell something like that for under $30.
So a free laptop is just one marketing promotion away.
The "free" laptop is already here. As you suggest it's a marketing promotion and you have to spend a lot of money to get your "free" laptop.
I'm sorry: I trust no company with all of my data. That's why I don't use Google docs or Microsoft's current document offering. And now they want to store all of my data? I, for one, will gladly continue using Linux.
No, no! You're only allowed to use that phrase if you welcome our data-hoarding overlords!
Apple is built on "fanbois" - Slashdot residing or not. Hell the Apple "cult" is probably the ORIGIN of the whole concept of a "fanboy" as is has come to be known on the Internet.
I'm not convinced. Apple's fanboys may be some of the most obsessive and cultish out there, but although their vocalism makes them disproportionately prominent, we shouldn't automatically assume that their loudness implies size (in terms of numbers) or even influence. I'm willing to bet that as a proportion of the total number of people who own Apple products, they're not *that* big.
Fanboys and similar types often make the mistake of overestimating their own importance. Apple could probably do some respectable turnover selling to this obsessive core market, but in general- and particularly with the iPod and iPhone- Apple's success has been in the mass market. While the fanboys may have helped fan a few rumours and get some attention, I very much doubt that they are anything like the main reason for Apple's present success.
Without Jobs, Apple would be toast within 5 years.
Mmmmmmmm...... Apple toast.
HP is also quite popular for their laptops
Not to mention their workstations.
But HP's sauce is the best of all!
Which I still remember as being a lousy movie even when I was a kid. Kept up the standard disney mediocrity from the Barefoot Executive to the Black Hole. Even the metaphors to how computers really worked seemed lame. The only area where the movie works for me is in the visuals.
I think you're being slightly harsh, but I agree that Tron isn't a particularly great movie overall- and also that the visuals are by far and away the best thing about it.
:-)
To be fair, although I'm in my early thirties and old enough to have seen (and clearly remembered) Tron when it first came out, I didn't. (*) It wasn't until years later that I caught it on TV. That might colour my judgement- but also to be fair, I could say the same about the nostalgia of people who saw it as kids when it first came out.
Problem isn't just that the plot is flimsy, it's that the film never really makes you believe in the characters or care about what's at stake. The dialogue is clunky and the acting nothing special. I could tolerate the cheesiness, but not that.
So, no... Tron isn't- and never was- a Matrix for its times. Despite being a staple of 80s "nostalgia", its influence on most people at the time was minimal. However, I do think it's visually and technically brilliant, and although some aspects of its attempt to bring the then-new computer culture to the mainstream were quite cheesy, it deserves some credit for the attempt (and has to be seen in the context of the time).
I could say more, but I already said a lot of what I wanted to say in two previous posts; why I think trying to make a Tron sequel after 20-25 years is pointless and why Tron's true technical achievements with pre-digital film-matte animation went sadly unrecognised. Both with Score:5 goodness
(*) I did, however, get to see ET, like most other people did. Vastly overrated film, I never liked it.
Hans is an ass, but at least I can explain what Hans did.
You can? Please enlighten us.
The only thing that was clear about that case was that Hans killed his wife, and even that was only after he admitted it and showed them where the body was to get more favourable parole terms. (Some considered the judicial process that convicted Reiser to be flawed even if- in retrospect- it's clear that it came to the correct conclusion).
Beyond that, the circumstances and motivations behind the killing are still unclear. If you can explain anything beyond that, it would be very enlightening.
Spammers have no right to exist.
Nor do their three-year-old children, apparently.
There's no limit to how sad something can be, while still being joke-worthy.
"(Joke) Worthy" is subjective, and that's all that can be said about it. However, while those involved in tragedies may make jokes about it at some stage, they typically don't do so on the same or following day.
And being able to find humour in something doesn't necessarily make it not insensitive.
The dead babies example is quite abstract, and perversely the quantity takes away the tragedy (you know what Stalin said about the difference between a single death and a million).
This whole thread is fucking depressing anyway. Either the Slashdot crowd is seriously blinkered to anything else by its hostility to spammers, or it really shows how eugenically-oriented, right-wing and downright hateful it fundamentally is. Modding my comment down as a troll was one thing- a look at my history probably would have shown otherwise, whether you agreed with the sentiment or not- but that could be rationalised as bad modding. The fact that most of the views in the other direction got modded up (even if just as "funny") says more, however.
I half expected some rationalisation about why his wife deserved it, but I really didn't expect this reaction to- and even endorsement of- the death of a three-year old child.
You can mod this one as a troll too (and some smartass probably will).
I work in Chicago. Let me know if you'd like to meet and tell me that in person.
Okay; my mistake- you really *are* a sociopathic fuck!
By the way, I look forward to hearing the results of you loudly declaring your views in a public bar ("in person") that a three-year-old got what she deserved because her Dad was a spammer.
Out of curiosity, do you think that Hans Reiser's kids deserve the same fate because their father was a murderer?