As far as I'm concerned the AC above won the thread with: "The author suggests removing unnecessary resource handlers, but he doesn't say which ones are unnecessary." Short, active voice, very clear.
Agreed on the "-"; it was actually used in a valid way, but the sentence was moving into run-on territory, and needed to be stopped (As you can see, I love the ";" as well).
The word choice was by far the biggest problem, in my opinion. The desire to use a fancy word should never overcome the need to be understood...Unless you're James Joyce, or Thomas Pynchon, where being understood isn't the point.
I don't feel a need to use my vocabulary as a bludgeon against people who I believe to be intellectually inferior to myself. When I string words together, I'm not just talking to my linguistic equals, I'm talking to anyone who may happen to read what I've written.
I do this because my goal is to convey information clearly, to elucidate, as it were. It is in no way my intention to cloud my point with words that most English speakers won't clearly understand, not to mention all the people here whose primary language is not English.
If you think a huge vocabulary is a sign of intelligence, you're wrong. It's merely a sign that you have a large vocabulary. It may make you better at Crosswords and Scrabble, but that's about it. By constantly using a word like "elucidate" when you could as easily say "conveys clearly" or even, in this case, using the word "say."
A sentence like the one in the summary would be unacceptable in any job where clear, meaningful writing was required. It's also ugly, so it's hardly suited to more artistic writing. So what exactly is the point of crafting such a piece of impenetrable prose? Self-aggrandizement, and nothing more.
Oooo yea, that's better. Killed the passive "In the authors opinion." Not even sure "deregister" is a word, killed the annoying acronym, and the "however" crap is a weakness of mine.
Actually I was being ironic on purpose. I guess I feel like I have to prove that I'm not against their word choice simply because their bombastic verbiage outstrips my linguistic comprehension, but rather because their grandiloquent ostentation obfuscates their actual meaning. (---E-penis +10 bitches!;)
Never understood the obsession with big words. The point is to be understood, right? There are times when it is more elegant to use the word that has the exact nuance of meaning that you're trying to convey, but for the most part it's a lot more effective to use a word that everyone will understand.
Yea, that's the real kicker. In a RL situation, you can make a pretty solid determination of age, but online it's virtually impossible. Even if you make absolutely sure that the person who signs up for the account is of age, there is no way that you can be sure that the person who uses the account from day to day is the same person whose age you originally verified.
That is why you have to put a burden of responsibility on the parent and the kid. Their actions are absolutely relevant unless they're getting mugged and dragged against their will into an adult area.
Worst sentence I've read in a while, and during lunch I had to listen to a friend copyediting some weenie who routinely left out the verbs in his sentences.
Elucidate and superfluous are dross from a word of the day calendar; the english major equivalent of e-penis. Three seperate comma seperated subclauses in the sentence. Overuse of the passive voice. The use of an uncommon acronym (URI) can perhaps be forgiven since it's Slashdot. Hyphens are hard to use well, and should NOT be used unless you know exactly what you're doing.
How about this: "In the author's opinion, users should deregister all unnecessary URIs. He does not, however, give instructions on how to do so."
But what if one somehow sneaked in and was exposed to horrible depravity?!?! How was little Timmy to know the consequences of his actions?!?! OMG! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
I think most rational people agree with you. There is the responsibility of the parents, the responsibility of the kid, and the responsibility of the provider. SL in this case does enough (imho) to prevent this sort of crap, but when the irrational majority is confronted with a "Little Timmy" situation, they will immediately throw out the notion that the parents or the kid has any burden of personal responsibility and try to blame the provider, regardless of the safeguards put in place.
Well, https doesn't "remember" anything. It's more about your TCP/IP connection. If your connection was established with HTTPS on 443, that will continue until the connection times out, or until you establish a new connection somewhere else, or until the site redirects you to an insecure connection.
It's more like gmail keeps track...If you go to http://gmail.com/ it will redirect you to https to log in, and then back to http for your mail. However, if you go to https://gmail.com/ then you will stay in https the whole time. This is exactly the way it's supposed to work, where your status is maintained, though it can be argued that they should default you to https for security.
If you use the "Gmail notifier" plug in for Firefox, it defaults to https. There is also a "gmail customizer" app that will let you specify HTTPS as the default, but I've never used it.
Public keys are just that: public. They're meant to be available to anyone. A public key is used to encrypt traffic, but you can't use a public key to decrypt traffic...Only the private key can be used for that, and it is never transmitted...Indeed, the private key is often itself encrypted.
Anyone can generate a public key, which means that the system itself is insecure without a third party who can reliably state that public key X definitively belongs to person/organization Y. That's where security certificates come in...They're really just keys that are certified to belong to a specific group by a reputable third party. An "unsigned" certificate is a key that hasn't been certified.
It's part of the implementation of https to maintain connection status as long as you're not redirected to another site, so if you log in to gmail using a secure connection, it will maintain as long as you're on the site, unless your session expires or something...It'd be a pretty big security problem otherwise, because every time you used a relative link (e.g metamod.pl, instead of http://slashdot.org/metamod.pl), it would redirect you to an unencrypted connection.
The only times you'll ever get booted from a secure session on a website is when you're redirected to another site, another part of the site that uses a different certificate, or when the code on that site specifically redirects you to an unsecured connection.
Yea, I thought they were cool as well. Imho, the thing that makes a game great is when people take it to the next level and do things that you didn't originally foresee...That shows that your system is powerful and flexible.
I played WoW for a good long time. Still have an account, but I haven't signed in in a month or so. It always takes me a while, depending on how cool the game is, but I get dead tired of the damn eternal item grind.
They banned player run casinos in WoW in early 2005(iirc). You couldn't even gamble for "real" money; they had some sort of "it's not what we want the game to be about and there are a lot of instances of fraud" crap. Not much of a stink over it.
Anyway, I used too many "air quotes" in that post already, without adding more. If someone is confused enough about the nature of SL to think that they can have actual sex, I don't feel any requirement to enlighten them.
In a nutshell: Yes. Your Avatar with a few mods can have "sex" with an Avatar that looks like a child, one that may even be controlled by a minor, though far more likely by a 55 year old guy who could win a "Jabba the Hut" lookalike contest.
Here is a link to a virtual worlds site that's been following Germany's ongoing hissy over virtual child porn. It's funny how we're such a conservative country compared to pretty much every country in europe, but our conservative government is really trying to push us in the direction of their weird morality laws.
I still think all this stuff devolves on parents to monitor and supervise their kids; in the absence of a reliable way to make sure underage people aren't involved, that's the only workable solution.
That cuts the attractions of SL by 50%...When the "Think of the Children" crowd gets 'em to ban sex, Second Life will become officially pointless.
On the one hand, I get it. Since the Linden actually has a conversion rate with "real" money, the gambling is gambling for "real" money and there are all kinds of laws about that, including last years Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, which is directed at the companies that host gambling sites, rather than the players, making it much easier to enforce. I can't see Linden bucking that, though a sneaky gambling "underground" would be awesome, far far cooler than actual legal gambling.
On the other hand, what a bunch of nanny-state crap.
It's also tempting to note that obesity is increasing all over the country. You hit 25 and gain 40 pounds, and so do most of your friends...That's certainly not a causal relationship.
To establish an actual causal connection, you'd need to find a skinny population and introduce a fat person to it, and see if the fat spread to other people, or conversely, if the fat person adopted the skinny people's ways because of their societal pressures. Do that a few times and work to eliminate the other variables, and you may have something worth publishing.
This though...Take data randomly collected, and run some numerical analysis on it and claim "proof"? I don't think so. It may be suggestive, but there are way too many other possibilities. Most people have friends at work that they lunch with; maybe certain jobs are more likely to make you fat. There are just too many possibilities.
You said "Research" and "Ted Stevens" in the same sentence...I don't know if you remember, but this is Ted "The internet is a series of tubes" Stevens, the guy knows flat nothing about technology...Hell, he probably thinks this is technically feasible, when anyone with a networking background would just start laughing.
Hopefully fossils like him will just die off or (even better) get thrown out of office and replaced by people who aren't utterly clueless. Our only hope in this situation is for him to kick off, unfortunately, because he'll never stop winning in Alaska as long as he keeps up with the "Bridge to Nowhere" pork projects.
I like java; it's a good tool...And it is unquestionably a poor tool for this sort of work.
Java is slow, compared to many lower level languages, and even a small performance hit is a big deal when you're talking about this sort of application...This is one of those places where C really shines.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I'm concerned the AC above won the thread with: "The author suggests removing unnecessary resource handlers, but he doesn't say which ones are unnecessary." Short, active voice, very clear.
Agreed on the "-"; it was actually used in a valid way, but the sentence was moving into run-on territory, and needed to be stopped (As you can see, I love the ";" as well).
The word choice was by far the biggest problem, in my opinion. The desire to use a fancy word should never overcome the need to be understood...Unless you're James Joyce, or Thomas Pynchon, where being understood isn't the point.
I don't feel a need to use my vocabulary as a bludgeon against people who I believe to be intellectually inferior to myself. When I string words together, I'm not just talking to my linguistic equals, I'm talking to anyone who may happen to read what I've written.
I do this because my goal is to convey information clearly, to elucidate, as it were. It is in no way my intention to cloud my point with words that most English speakers won't clearly understand, not to mention all the people here whose primary language is not English.
If you think a huge vocabulary is a sign of intelligence, you're wrong. It's merely a sign that you have a large vocabulary. It may make you better at Crosswords and Scrabble, but that's about it. By constantly using a word like "elucidate" when you could as easily say "conveys clearly" or even, in this case, using the word "say."
A sentence like the one in the summary would be unacceptable in any job where clear, meaningful writing was required. It's also ugly, so it's hardly suited to more artistic writing. So what exactly is the point of crafting such a piece of impenetrable prose? Self-aggrandizement, and nothing more.
Oooo yea, that's better. Killed the passive "In the authors opinion." Not even sure "deregister" is a word, killed the annoying acronym, and the "however" crap is a weakness of mine.
Actually I was being ironic on purpose. I guess I feel like I have to prove that I'm not against their word choice simply because their bombastic verbiage outstrips my linguistic comprehension, but rather because their grandiloquent ostentation obfuscates their actual meaning. (---E-penis +10 bitches! ;)
Never understood the obsession with big words. The point is to be understood, right? There are times when it is more elegant to use the word that has the exact nuance of meaning that you're trying to convey, but for the most part it's a lot more effective to use a word that everyone will understand.
Yea, that's the real kicker. In a RL situation, you can make a pretty solid determination of age, but online it's virtually impossible. Even if you make absolutely sure that the person who signs up for the account is of age, there is no way that you can be sure that the person who uses the account from day to day is the same person whose age you originally verified.
That is why you have to put a burden of responsibility on the parent and the kid. Their actions are absolutely relevant unless they're getting mugged and dragged against their will into an adult area.
Worst sentence I've read in a while, and during lunch I had to listen to a friend copyediting some weenie who routinely left out the verbs in his sentences.
Elucidate and superfluous are dross from a word of the day calendar; the english major equivalent of e-penis. Three seperate comma seperated subclauses in the sentence. Overuse of the passive voice. The use of an uncommon acronym (URI) can perhaps be forgiven since it's Slashdot. Hyphens are hard to use well, and should NOT be used unless you know exactly what you're doing.
How about this: "In the author's opinion, users should deregister all unnecessary URIs. He does not, however, give instructions on how to do so."
Heh. Yea, sorry, I've been programming today, so I'm thinking in terms of code rather than the underlying protocol.
But what if one somehow sneaked in and was exposed to horrible depravity?!?! How was little Timmy to know the consequences of his actions?!?! OMG! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
I think most rational people agree with you. There is the responsibility of the parents, the responsibility of the kid, and the responsibility of the provider. SL in this case does enough (imho) to prevent this sort of crap, but when the irrational majority is confronted with a "Little Timmy" situation, they will immediately throw out the notion that the parents or the kid has any burden of personal responsibility and try to blame the provider, regardless of the safeguards put in place.
Well, https doesn't "remember" anything. It's more about your TCP/IP connection. If your connection was established with HTTPS on 443, that will continue until the connection times out, or until you establish a new connection somewhere else, or until the site redirects you to an insecure connection.
Yup. That's usually referred to as a "Digital Signature" since obviously it's not much use in keeping your information secret.
It's more like gmail keeps track...If you go to http://gmail.com/ it will redirect you to https to log in, and then back to http for your mail. However, if you go to https://gmail.com/ then you will stay in https the whole time. This is exactly the way it's supposed to work, where your status is maintained, though it can be argued that they should default you to https for security.
If you use the "Gmail notifier" plug in for Firefox, it defaults to https. There is also a "gmail customizer" app that will let you specify HTTPS as the default, but I've never used it.
Public keys are just that: public. They're meant to be available to anyone. A public key is used to encrypt traffic, but you can't use a public key to decrypt traffic...Only the private key can be used for that, and it is never transmitted...Indeed, the private key is often itself encrypted.
Anyone can generate a public key, which means that the system itself is insecure without a third party who can reliably state that public key X definitively belongs to person/organization Y. That's where security certificates come in...They're really just keys that are certified to belong to a specific group by a reputable third party. An "unsigned" certificate is a key that hasn't been certified.
It's part of the implementation of https to maintain connection status as long as you're not redirected to another site, so if you log in to gmail using a secure connection, it will maintain as long as you're on the site, unless your session expires or something...It'd be a pretty big security problem otherwise, because every time you used a relative link (e.g metamod.pl, instead of http://slashdot.org/metamod.pl), it would redirect you to an unencrypted connection.
The only times you'll ever get booted from a secure session on a website is when you're redirected to another site, another part of the site that uses a different certificate, or when the code on that site specifically redirects you to an unsecured connection.
Having sex with a puppy in SL doesn't feel, look, or smell like having sex with a puppy in real life.
Hey come on! Leave my sex life out of this! Geez, I'm not speculating about sex with rodents am I?
Yea, I thought they were cool as well. Imho, the thing that makes a game great is when people take it to the next level and do things that you didn't originally foresee...That shows that your system is powerful and flexible.
I played WoW for a good long time. Still have an account, but I haven't signed in in a month or so. It always takes me a while, depending on how cool the game is, but I get dead tired of the damn eternal item grind.
They banned player run casinos in WoW in early 2005(iirc). You couldn't even gamble for "real" money; they had some sort of "it's not what we want the game to be about and there are a lot of instances of fraud" crap. Not much of a stink over it.
Don't look at me, I don't even like phone sex.
Anyway, I used too many "air quotes" in that post already, without adding more. If someone is confused enough about the nature of SL to think that they can have actual sex, I don't feel any requirement to enlighten them.
In a nutshell: Yes. Your Avatar with a few mods can have "sex" with an Avatar that looks like a child, one that may even be controlled by a minor, though far more likely by a 55 year old guy who could win a "Jabba the Hut" lookalike contest.
Here is a link to a virtual worlds site that's been following Germany's ongoing hissy over virtual child porn. It's funny how we're such a conservative country compared to pretty much every country in europe, but our conservative government is really trying to push us in the direction of their weird morality laws.
I still think all this stuff devolves on parents to monitor and supervise their kids; in the absence of a reliable way to make sure underage people aren't involved, that's the only workable solution.
Bah. Screwed up my hyperlink somehow... Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006
That cuts the attractions of SL by 50%...When the "Think of the Children" crowd gets 'em to ban sex, Second Life will become officially pointless.
On the one hand, I get it. Since the Linden actually has a conversion rate with "real" money, the gambling is gambling for "real" money and there are all kinds of laws about that, including last years
Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, which is directed at the companies that host gambling sites, rather than the players, making it much easier to enforce. I can't see Linden bucking that, though a sneaky gambling "underground" would be awesome, far far cooler than actual legal gambling.
On the other hand, what a bunch of nanny-state crap.
That's cool, thanks.
It's also tempting to note that obesity is increasing all over the country. You hit 25 and gain 40 pounds, and so do most of your friends...That's certainly not a causal relationship.
To establish an actual causal connection, you'd need to find a skinny population and introduce a fat person to it, and see if the fat spread to other people, or conversely, if the fat person adopted the skinny people's ways because of their societal pressures. Do that a few times and work to eliminate the other variables, and you may have something worth publishing.
This though...Take data randomly collected, and run some numerical analysis on it and claim "proof"? I don't think so. It may be suggestive, but there are way too many other possibilities. Most people have friends at work that they lunch with; maybe certain jobs are more likely to make you fat. There are just too many possibilities.
Only if you go to lunch afterward.
You said "Research" and "Ted Stevens" in the same sentence...I don't know if you remember, but this is Ted "The internet is a series of tubes" Stevens, the guy knows flat nothing about technology...Hell, he probably thinks this is technically feasible, when anyone with a networking background would just start laughing.
Hopefully fossils like him will just die off or (even better) get thrown out of office and replaced by people who aren't utterly clueless. Our only hope in this situation is for him to kick off, unfortunately, because he'll never stop winning in Alaska as long as he keeps up with the "Bridge to Nowhere" pork projects.
I like java; it's a good tool...And it is unquestionably a poor tool for this sort of work.
Java is slow, compared to many lower level languages, and even a small performance hit is a big deal when you're talking about this sort of application...This is one of those places where C really shines.