That's a tad unnecessary. Jabber is an open, extensible protocol which is relatively easy to handle. The standard exists to dissuade anyone from developing yet another IM protocol. From what I've read, the ideal is that Jabber proxies will be set up to translate AIMJabber, ICQJabber, and so on, so that Jabber only users can talk to everyone, and everyone can talk to Jabber users. Gaim, Trillian, and many other clients, on many platforms already support Jabber. I seriously thought everyone on Slashdot knew this sort of stuff.
Submit a patch or a feature request. You're capable enough from what I've read. If no one posts even a requests in such a forum, there's no way to reasonably expect the code to get changed.
Re:Took mine apart
on
Old Toy Modding?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I wrote:
"This is a running problem with most batteries when operating a motor. Unless the battery is entirely solid state and doesn't decay over time, the voltage it supplies drops as it gets used up. Problem continues to exist today with Lego Mindstorm robots as well. To correct for this, one would want to put a sensor which senses the rotating shaft on the motor -- keep rotating motor until it's gone through the proper amount of degrees instead of just supplying driving voltage for about the right amount of time "
You wrote:
Though I'm not sure what your trying to say about "solid state" batteries
If a battery contains liquids, as the battery provides charge, the concentrations of these reactants change over time. The change of these concentrations cause the voltage of the battery to drop over time. This is the case with your average consumer battery -- items are in solution, so concentrations change over time. And then the voltage drops. Hence, your motor receives a different voltage, and may provide less movement for the same amount of time being activated.
but adding shaft encoders is not going to make steering work 100%.
My area of research is in robotics and I can tell you that it is incredibly difficult to get any kind of robot to turn 90 degrees. No matter how you turn the wheels are always going to slip some.
Quite right. But you would know better than I would. However, I was a little disappointed you didn't provide another suggestion. Are accelerometers a good way of actually measuring movement? Would you recommend, perhaps placing a rigid shaft on the ground, rotating about that, and having coded marking on that shaft to indicate movement? Myself, all I know is that a shaft encoder greatly improves performance relative to no correction mechanism.
And seriously, that has got to be the coolest washer I've seen. Forget all the fancy-smancy new machines with touchscreen LCDs, it's way cooler to do it yourself.:^)
Don't knock the LCDs. You can do it yourself, and still have them. I know Matrix Orbital makes quite a few LCDs, even graphical displays, for around $50-$80. Most of them speak RS232. Many PICs come with builtin support for RS232, so you can just write a byte to the output port, and have it go with no trouble. It's surprising how just a little extra work and a sturdy case can add a very professional look to a very hobbiest work. I've seen friends play with these displays (sans the microcontroller) to make a nice display for a computer which is largely used as an MP3 jukebox. Groovy little things.
Re:Culture jam Gi-Joe/Barbie
on
Old Toy Modding?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
So I thought you had just gipped this off of an episode of the Simpsons wherein Malibou Stacy says a phrase just like that. I was a tad shocked to find out it's true, and the Simpsons were merely mocking real life. Apparently it's called Teen Talk Barbie, released in 1992. A person with more details (but no references) posted on this board. According to that second link, the quote is "Math class is tough!" I imagine most people make the quote you did from having seen the Simpsons episode previously.
Re:Took mine apart
on
Old Toy Modding?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The most frustrating thing about the big trak was that it never got its turning radii correct... if you told it to turn right 90 degrees, it was always off by several degrees, enough that it would subsequently bump into a wall or corner.
This is a running problem with most batteries when operating a motor. Unless the battery is entirely solid state and doesn't decay over time, the voltage it supplies drops as it gets used up. Problem continues to exist today with Lego Mindstorm robots as well. To correct for this, one would want to put a sensor which senses the rotating shaft on the motor -- keep rotating motor until it's gone through the proper amount of degrees instead of just supplying driving voltage for about the right amount of time.
The problem is it's hard to find a language where you can have a reasonable graphical app up and running with only a couple days or weeks worth of learning time.
It's object oriented, you can't make syntax errors, as you build programs by dragging and clicking blocks. For instance, you drag in a for loop, then you drag in the command to rotate some object in your scene, then you select the object from the dropdown, and so on.
some sort of non-MS (in other words, like the old-fashioned) BASIC
Woah there sailor! MS made one of the oldest versions of BASIC there is for the Altair computer! This is where they became famous before they were famous: They were highly critical of hobbiest programmers who freely shared their BASIC interpretter. MS wanted everyone to pay for their own copy. Some history man! Ye gods!
Call me a fool for responding here. Maybe you were intending to be silly, and the people who modded you up as Funny saw it right. But, let's be clear: this is a terrible idea.
Even if the network were broken into, the DMCA covers copyright law which is a civil matter. You acknolwedge this by saying 'sue' them. But then you would invite criminal charges being filed against you under the aforementioned NET act. You sue them, they charge you. And, once more, the original copyright owners also still have the right to seek civil action against you. What do you think the odds are a plea agreement might compel you to desist from any lawsuits?
If one were to try to make an example in this fashion, he may well find himself made an example of.
Personally, if it were my universtiry, I would prefer they started to use a RTBL. The fact of the matter is, if the likely spam isn't sorted out first, I have to try to discern the stuff entirely by hand. And although I can easily pick out Viagra ads, I have relatives and the occasional acquaintence who send mail that looks awfully like spam. Didn't want to type a subject. Used "hello" as the subject. Didn't configure their mail client properly, so their "replyto" looks crazy. Without some initialy spam filtering, I would miss at least some of these -- in fact, I'd probably miss more mail with no filtering than with a judicious blackhole in front of me.
Love or hate SPEWS and other kinder, gentler RTBLs, they're better than the present choice. It would certainly reduce the load of these email servers to where it could be more easily handled. And, if nothing else, they couldbe used to prioritize mail. Use Spam Assassin or something else to do some initial tag and filter so that mail coming from Asian IPs or originating from mail servers on cable/ADSL networks gets put into the "slow" processing queue while everything else gets sent down the faster pipe.
To be honest, though, I've never troubleshot such a problem. I wouldn't even have a suggestion for what tool to use to access the hibernate partition. Best of luck.
Windows 95 was often accused of being incredibly unstable, on through Windows 98. ME got weird, but many found it more stable. And with XP and 2000 it seems to have gotten rock solid. Is this the kernel maturing? Only slightly.
Drivers for all versions of Windows and Linux run in ring 0. They have the capability to bring the kernel down just as hard as a bug in the memory manager. This is the cost of not running a true microkernel, but it's been found often too hard to efficiently transfer large amounts of data through the levels of abstraction of a microkernel. As such, we have the situation we're in now.
Whenever a power change occurs, a message needs to be sent to every driver asking it to do whatever it needs to do. Often enough, what it needs to do is nothing at all. But even in such a simple case, the driver can hose up, and bring the machine crashing down. Heck, your machine might even have been in a stable state until you brought it awake from hibernating. Then, on getting the awake message, your NVidia driver corrupted something it shouldn't have, and it all comes tumbling down.
When faced with this in Windows 95 and 98, Microsoft started its signed driver initiative and manufacturers got better at writing drivers. Now, good hardware manufacturers get their drivers vetted, then signed by Microsoft. And Windows XP becomes stable.
Linux might be in a similar position if either (1) companies got much better at writing Linux drivers or (2) more companies opened the source to their drivers.
You can use Tab Browser Extentions to save your tab session, either on log off automatically, or manually. Be warned, there is some slightly weird menu placement, partially due to the fact that the author is not a native English speaker. I believe Opera does this automatically, with Nordic instead of Japanese authors.
I'm going to be short on details because I'm a tad tired right now. But Lycos had a decent media search, back in the day. I clearly recall using it to find MIDIs because it kindly listed the sizes of the media with a link directly to the MIDI file. As such, it was normally pretty easy to pick out all of the different versions of a song there were out there. This was back when the advanced/media search was at lycospro.lycos.com, IIRC.
Not having had a very impressive machine at the time, I can't state whether it was a decent enough MP3 search engine. Listening to them using whatever version of WinAmp existed at that time pretty much locked the machine to all other uses. But this did predate Napster, and people had to get their MP3s somehow.
There's always a limited number of people who can read code. It's limited by those who know the language. Those who are interested in the code. Those who have the time. Oracle was given as a case of an extreme example. They could hide massive amounts of things in relatively plain view in such a large source. Because, even with many eyes, the scope would be too large. But, how many eyes would be qualified and capable to understand all of that code? How many eyes would be drawn to the firmware of a router which has a strange function name which happens to be parsed in weird ways during the authentication procedure?
Oracle is closed source. But, let's say they went open. I'm told they have somewhere around 2 million lines of code in their database server alone. And you can vet 2 million lines of code for something suspicious? What if it's a buffer overflow which can only be triggered under specific conditions? How do you detect built-in security holes in gigabytes of executable when the accidental ones still slip by?
Your argument is the same old tired/. speak, and it's old and tired.
Sometimes Gaim tries to use ActiveState's Perl and that breaks something, or tries to use some of Cygwin's libraries.
That shouldn't happen, at least not if you used mingw all the way through. The whole purpose of compiling using Mingw is so that it uses msvcrt.dll and other common Windows equivalents instead of the Cygwin ones. I suggest you see what "ldd gaim" tells you. If you don't see 'cygwin3.dll' in there, it really shouldn't be loading said DLL. If you do, you didn't build suing Mingw all the way through.
So, let's face something. This point here, it's just a repeat of what's been said time and time again. It's what people mean when they say "Slashdot groupthink". Althought the author supports her point with seemingly sound arguments, there are no references. It's all idealism.
Here's a heads up to the rest of the world: Most people who abuse security holes don't write them. Most crackers are young and clever, but ignorant of many things. And, among those things, is how to search for, write code to abuse, and utilize security holes. The reason people fight publication of exploit code is because, without that code, most exploits would not happen. The reason people fight publication of mere issues is that there are people who will not search for security holes but will write and distribute code.
There are simple so many discontent script kiddies out there compiling together other people's code to break into machines to retain some feeling of power and importance. One feels powerless, and breaking into systems and making others feel violated suppresses that feeling. It's the control that muggers and disadvantaged youths revel in, otherwise disregards them. This is the advantaged youth's power grap. And similar motivation goes to the people who publish security exploiting code. And who find these exploits. Each level up, you find a more sophisticated mind and a different sort of disenfranchisement.
But what it breaks down to is that completely nonpublic disclosure of many application-specific vulnerabilities would fix these problems and filter out most actual acts of exploiting security holes.
This isn't a Catch-22. It's Comcast's making a prohibition and your breaking your word. You signed a contract where they said "Don't do this unless we provide another way." In your market, they don't provide another way. So it's quite simple: Use VPN, and you're breaking your ToS. Comcast is being the good guy by not blocking your VPN connections outright and turning a blind eye to your blatant violation.
Cash as an investment is almost always a loss as are the vast majority of savings accounts. If the interest gained on an investment is below inflation, one is losing buying power, and therefore value. Cash is useful if you wish to make sure you have some money later on to fall on, and you're willng to tolerate the loss. Otherwise, spend your money or invest it proper.
Oh, it really is hard to click on the link on the linked page, or, even worse, search Google for FUPIDS and find the page in, as he puts it, "my poor English". Pretty sparse on details when you get to it anyhow. Use the source, Luke.
I appreciate the humor, but please note the distance of the moon is around 60 times the radius of the Earth. Meanwhile, proposed space elevators represent at most 7 Earth radii out. That's one heck of an increase for an already gigantic budget.
Boy, that looks like moderation is working for me. But, perhaps there was some lag in this effect. Also, I give a -1 Anonymous modifier. You might try it. (Granted, it would be valuable if modifiers and thresholds could be made per section or dependent on the number of comments, but beggars can't be choosers.)
The issue, I believe, is that troll patrol is done in large amounts by the slashdot admins who have infinite moderator points. As was shown in the early days of Slashdot, one admin with infinite mod points per 100 users spread across 10 articles is sufficient. The same works for the small sections like Developer and BSD. It just takes more lag time for admin to notice these things in small sections because they're concentrating on more highly commented stories. Once more, as you noted, there are less people with mod points reading. So, as near as I can tell, the system works, albeit maybe a little more slowly than you like.
Now, then there's your reaction. To be honest, the grandparent post was mildly humorous. Since I don't see many troll posts, I don't know if these is a unique post, or just another unoriginal copy and paste. The reason it was made, however, in either case, is because of people -- well -- like you. You're reacting strongly to a stupid post of relatively little significance which most people won't see. The post offends you and raises your ire. But consider the lack of talent required to make such a post and how little effect it truly has. It's a dying joke that anyone who reads Slashdot has seen before in some form or another.
If that doesn't help you, consider this strategy: give anonymous posters -6. Give foes -6. Foe logged in trolls. You won't see trolls. But, as always, please don't feed the trolls.
2) Moderation is self-regulating.
The fallacy of this belief was brought home to me not long ago when I was metamoderated "unfair" twice in succession for down-moderating obvious trolls in the BSD section.
You really want to be paranoid? For EVERY time someone metamods you as unfair, even if everyone else mods you as fair, you lose karma. Don't believe me? Check out metamod.pl in the CVS. Now if that makes you uncomfortable, I think you lack perspective. If you're not a troll yourself and have useful things to say, your karma will recover. And that second part isn't wholly necessary.
Trolls exist because some guys just plain don't have the right chemical balance in their brains, and they will always be that way. They can destroy a community if not properly regulated because to be a troll is to simply not see value in that community. But it looks to me that they are being properly regulated on Slashdot. Consider that it only takes one active non-troll moderator on average to cancel the effects of an active troll moderator. How many active troll moderators do you think there are? How about non-trolls like you and me? The bad thing is that in individual cases, someone might be poorly treated by the system, but I don't see any reason for your prediction of chaos. System works fine for me, on average.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a tad unnecessary. Jabber is an open, extensible protocol which is relatively easy to handle. The standard exists to dissuade anyone from developing yet another IM protocol. From what I've read, the ideal is that Jabber proxies will be set up to translate AIMJabber, ICQJabber, and so on, so that Jabber only users can talk to everyone, and everyone can talk to Jabber users. Gaim, Trillian, and many other clients, on many platforms already support Jabber. I seriously thought everyone on Slashdot knew this sort of stuff.
Submit a patch or a feature request. You're capable enough from what I've read. If no one posts even a requests in such a forum, there's no way to reasonably expect the code to get changed.
If a battery contains liquids, as the battery provides charge, the concentrations of these reactants change over time. The change of these concentrations cause the voltage of the battery to drop over time. This is the case with your average consumer battery -- items are in solution, so concentrations change over time. And then the voltage drops. Hence, your motor receives a different voltage, and may provide less movement for the same amount of time being activated.
Quite right. But you would know better than I would. However, I was a little disappointed you didn't provide another suggestion. Are accelerometers a good way of actually measuring movement? Would you recommend, perhaps placing a rigid shaft on the ground, rotating about that, and having coded marking on that shaft to indicate movement? Myself, all I know is that a shaft encoder greatly improves performance relative to no correction mechanism.
Don't knock the LCDs. You can do it yourself, and still have them. I know Matrix Orbital makes quite a few LCDs, even graphical displays, for around $50-$80. Most of them speak RS232. Many PICs come with builtin support for RS232, so you can just write a byte to the output port, and have it go with no trouble. It's surprising how just a little extra work and a sturdy case can add a very professional look to a very hobbiest work. I've seen friends play with these displays (sans the microcontroller) to make a nice display for a computer which is largely used as an MP3 jukebox. Groovy little things.
So I thought you had just gipped this off of an episode of the Simpsons wherein Malibou Stacy says a phrase just like that. I was a tad shocked to find out it's true, and the Simpsons were merely mocking real life. Apparently it's called Teen Talk Barbie, released in 1992. A person with more details (but no references) posted on this board. According to that second link, the quote is "Math class is tough!" I imagine most people make the quote you did from having seen the Simpsons episode previously.
This is a running problem with most batteries when operating a motor. Unless the battery is entirely solid state and doesn't decay over time, the voltage it supplies drops as it gets used up. Problem continues to exist today with Lego Mindstorm robots as well. To correct for this, one would want to put a sensor which senses the rotating shaft on the motor -- keep rotating motor until it's gone through the proper amount of degrees instead of just supplying driving voltage for about the right amount of time.
ALICE, a 3D programming language, originally built on Python, rewritten in the last two years in Java. Previously mentioned, in an earlier, similar Ask Slashdot. Within 15 minutes, you can make a 3D program which reacts to mouse interaction.
It's object oriented, you can't make syntax errors, as you build programs by dragging and clicking blocks. For instance, you drag in a for loop, then you drag in the command to rotate some object in your scene, then you select the object from the dropdown, and so on.
Funded by NIST, it's been used in intro to CS classes, and has been shown effective at teaching programming concepts. Your tax dollars at work. Check it out.
Woah there sailor! MS made one of the oldest versions of BASIC there is for the Altair computer! This is where they became famous before they were famous: They were highly critical of hobbiest programmers who freely shared their BASIC interpretter. MS wanted everyone to pay for their own copy. Some history man! Ye gods!
SOY! SOY! SOY! Soy makes you strong! Strength crushes enemies! SOY!
I'm sure you already know.
Call me a fool for responding here. Maybe you were intending to be silly, and the people who modded you up as Funny saw it right. But, let's be clear: this is a terrible idea.
Even if the network were broken into, the DMCA covers copyright law which is a civil matter. You acknolwedge this by saying 'sue' them. But then you would invite criminal charges being filed against you under the aforementioned NET act. You sue them, they charge you. And, once more, the original copyright owners also still have the right to seek civil action against you. What do you think the odds are a plea agreement might compel you to desist from any lawsuits?
If one were to try to make an example in this fashion, he may well find himself made an example of.
As always, IANAL.
Personally, if it were my universtiry, I would prefer they started to use a RTBL. The fact of the matter is, if the likely spam isn't sorted out first, I have to try to discern the stuff entirely by hand. And although I can easily pick out Viagra ads, I have relatives and the occasional acquaintence who send mail that looks awfully like spam. Didn't want to type a subject. Used "hello" as the subject. Didn't configure their mail client properly, so their "replyto" looks crazy. Without some initialy spam filtering, I would miss at least some of these -- in fact, I'd probably miss more mail with no filtering than with a judicious blackhole in front of me.
Love or hate SPEWS and other kinder, gentler RTBLs, they're better than the present choice. It would certainly reduce the load of these email servers to where it could be more easily handled. And, if nothing else, they couldbe used to prioritize mail. Use Spam Assassin or something else to do some initial tag and filter so that mail coming from Asian IPs or originating from mail servers on cable/ADSL networks gets put into the "slow" processing queue while everything else gets sent down the faster pipe.
</spouting with little to no knowledge>
When you go to hibernate, it writes to a specific partition block on disk to save the state of RAM. I believe you can either overwrite the contents of this partition with zeroes or just blow it away entirely, and then you should be able to boot fine. If you can at least get far enough to press F8, this might help. There's also some info which might be related here, but it seems Win95 specific.
To be honest, though, I've never troubleshot such a problem. I wouldn't even have a suggestion for what tool to use to access the hibernate partition. Best of luck.
Windows 95 was often accused of being incredibly unstable, on through Windows 98. ME got weird, but many found it more stable. And with XP and 2000 it seems to have gotten rock solid. Is this the kernel maturing? Only slightly.
Drivers for all versions of Windows and Linux run in ring 0. They have the capability to bring the kernel down just as hard as a bug in the memory manager. This is the cost of not running a true microkernel, but it's been found often too hard to efficiently transfer large amounts of data through the levels of abstraction of a microkernel. As such, we have the situation we're in now.
Whenever a power change occurs, a message needs to be sent to every driver asking it to do whatever it needs to do. Often enough, what it needs to do is nothing at all. But even in such a simple case, the driver can hose up, and bring the machine crashing down. Heck, your machine might even have been in a stable state until you brought it awake from hibernating. Then, on getting the awake message, your NVidia driver corrupted something it shouldn't have, and it all comes tumbling down.
When faced with this in Windows 95 and 98, Microsoft started its signed driver initiative and manufacturers got better at writing drivers. Now, good hardware manufacturers get their drivers vetted, then signed by Microsoft. And Windows XP becomes stable.
Linux might be in a similar position if either (1) companies got much better at writing Linux drivers or (2) more companies opened the source to their drivers.
You can use Tab Browser Extentions to save your tab session, either on log off automatically, or manually. Be warned, there is some slightly weird menu placement, partially due to the fact that the author is not a native English speaker. I believe Opera does this automatically, with Nordic instead of Japanese authors.
I'm going to be short on details because I'm a tad tired right now. But Lycos had a decent media search, back in the day. I clearly recall using it to find MIDIs because it kindly listed the sizes of the media with a link directly to the MIDI file. As such, it was normally pretty easy to pick out all of the different versions of a song there were out there. This was back when the advanced/media search was at lycospro.lycos.com, IIRC.
Not having had a very impressive machine at the time, I can't state whether it was a decent enough MP3 search engine. Listening to them using whatever version of WinAmp existed at that time pretty much locked the machine to all other uses. But this did predate Napster, and people had to get their MP3s somehow.
Open source software is great, isn't it? It makes one hide his chicanery better. There's a wonderful old bit about the dangers of trusting trust. Perhaps you've read it?
There's always a limited number of people who can read code. It's limited by those who know the language. Those who are interested in the code. Those who have the time. Oracle was given as a case of an extreme example. They could hide massive amounts of things in relatively plain view in such a large source. Because, even with many eyes, the scope would be too large. But, how many eyes would be qualified and capable to understand all of that code? How many eyes would be drawn to the firmware of a router which has a strange function name which happens to be parsed in weird ways during the authentication procedure?
You're spouting rhetoric here.
Oracle is closed source. But, let's say they went open. I'm told they have somewhere around 2 million lines of code in their database server alone. And you can vet 2 million lines of code for something suspicious? What if it's a buffer overflow which can only be triggered under specific conditions? How do you detect built-in security holes in gigabytes of executable when the accidental ones still slip by?
Your argument is the same old tired /. speak, and it's old and tired.
That shouldn't happen, at least not if you used mingw all the way through. The whole purpose of compiling using Mingw is so that it uses msvcrt.dll and other common Windows equivalents instead of the Cygwin ones. I suggest you see what "ldd gaim" tells you. If you don't see 'cygwin3.dll' in there, it really shouldn't be loading said DLL. If you do, you didn't build suing Mingw all the way through.
So, let's face something. This point here, it's just a repeat of what's been said time and time again. It's what people mean when they say "Slashdot groupthink". Althought the author supports her point with seemingly sound arguments, there are no references. It's all idealism.
Here's a heads up to the rest of the world: Most people who abuse security holes don't write them. Most crackers are young and clever, but ignorant of many things. And, among those things, is how to search for, write code to abuse, and utilize security holes. The reason people fight publication of exploit code is because, without that code, most exploits would not happen. The reason people fight publication of mere issues is that there are people who will not search for security holes but will write and distribute code.
There are simple so many discontent script kiddies out there compiling together other people's code to break into machines to retain some feeling of power and importance. One feels powerless, and breaking into systems and making others feel violated suppresses that feeling. It's the control that muggers and disadvantaged youths revel in, otherwise disregards them. This is the advantaged youth's power grap. And similar motivation goes to the people who publish security exploiting code. And who find these exploits. Each level up, you find a more sophisticated mind and a different sort of disenfranchisement.
But what it breaks down to is that completely nonpublic disclosure of many application-specific vulnerabilities would fix these problems and filter out most actual acts of exploiting security holes.
Pardon me for straying offtopic.
This isn't a Catch-22. It's Comcast's making a prohibition and your breaking your word. You signed a contract where they said "Don't do this unless we provide another way." In your market, they don't provide another way. So it's quite simple: Use VPN, and you're breaking your ToS. Comcast is being the good guy by not blocking your VPN connections outright and turning a blind eye to your blatant violation.
Cash as an investment is almost always a loss as are the vast majority of savings accounts. If the interest gained on an investment is below inflation, one is losing buying power, and therefore value. Cash is useful if you wish to make sure you have some money later on to fall on, and you're willng to tolerate the loss. Otherwise, spend your money or invest it proper.
Oh, it really is hard to click on the link on the linked page, or, even worse, search Google for FUPIDS and find the page in, as he puts it, "my poor English". Pretty sparse on details when you get to it anyhow. Use the source, Luke.
I appreciate the humor, but please note the distance of the moon is around 60 times the radius of the Earth. Meanwhile, proposed space elevators represent at most 7 Earth radii out. That's one heck of an increase for an already gigantic budget.
Boy, that looks like moderation is working for me. But, perhaps there was some lag in this effect. Also, I give a -1 Anonymous modifier. You might try it. (Granted, it would be valuable if modifiers and thresholds could be made per section or dependent on the number of comments, but beggars can't be choosers.)
The issue, I believe, is that troll patrol is done in large amounts by the slashdot admins who have infinite moderator points. As was shown in the early days of Slashdot, one admin with infinite mod points per 100 users spread across 10 articles is sufficient. The same works for the small sections like Developer and BSD. It just takes more lag time for admin to notice these things in small sections because they're concentrating on more highly commented stories. Once more, as you noted, there are less people with mod points reading. So, as near as I can tell, the system works, albeit maybe a little more slowly than you like.
Now, then there's your reaction. To be honest, the grandparent post was mildly humorous. Since I don't see many troll posts, I don't know if these is a unique post, or just another unoriginal copy and paste. The reason it was made, however, in either case, is because of people -- well -- like you. You're reacting strongly to a stupid post of relatively little significance which most people won't see. The post offends you and raises your ire. But consider the lack of talent required to make such a post and how little effect it truly has. It's a dying joke that anyone who reads Slashdot has seen before in some form or another.
If that doesn't help you, consider this strategy: give anonymous posters -6. Give foes -6. Foe logged in trolls. You won't see trolls. But, as always, please don't feed the trolls.
You really want to be paranoid? For EVERY time someone metamods you as unfair, even if everyone else mods you as fair, you lose karma. Don't believe me? Check out metamod.pl in the CVS. Now if that makes you uncomfortable, I think you lack perspective. If you're not a troll yourself and have useful things to say, your karma will recover. And that second part isn't wholly necessary.
Trolls exist because some guys just plain don't have the right chemical balance in their brains, and they will always be that way. They can destroy a community if not properly regulated because to be a troll is to simply not see value in that community. But it looks to me that they are being properly regulated on Slashdot. Consider that it only takes one active non-troll moderator on average to cancel the effects of an active troll moderator. How many active troll moderators do you think there are? How about non-trolls like you and me? The bad thing is that in individual cases, someone might be poorly treated by the system, but I don't see any reason for your prediction of chaos. System works fine for me, on average.