I do the exact same thing, WWBFT (What Would Ben Franklin Think?). I imagine him working on a project and I figure he would be glad to be able to get information so quickly so he could continue the thought process immediately. But I also figure he'd get distracted by all the same things we do; it's hard to stay in thinking mode when the whole world's at your fingertips.
Still, I always think WWBFT whenever someone complains about their slow phone or can't find something on Google. Most people take technology for granted today.
If this value is equal to 19790509 the threat will exit. This is thought to be an infection marker or a “do not in-
fect” marker. If this is set correctly infection will not occur. The value appears to be a date of May 9, 1979. While
on May 9, 1979 a variety of historical events occured, according to Wikipedia “Habib Elghanian was executed by
a firing squad in Tehran sending shock waves through the closely knit Iranian Jewish community. He was the first
Jew and one of the first civilians to be executed by the new Islamic government. This prompted the mass exodus
of the once 100,000 member strong Jewish community of Iran which continues to this day.” Symantec cautions
readers on drawing any attribution conclusions. Attackers would have the natural desire to implicate another
party.
Next, Stuxnet reads a date from the configuration data (offset 0x8c in the configuration data). If the current date
is later than the date in the configuration file then infection will also not occur and the threat will exit. The date
found in the current configuration file is June 24, 2012.
But really, May 9, 1979 being Rosario Dawson's birthday puts this back on the teenager in his basement path to me.
LVS was able to handle a medium-sized HTTP/HTTPS load at my last job quite well. It had 6 months of uptime serving 5-10 hits/second, and I literally never had to worry about it going down. In combination with mon, bringing machines up and down was never a problem, and failure situations were handled without the end user noticing.
Installation was a bit frustrating because I hadn't dealt with the networking issues before (the ARP problem). However, in the end it was only my lack of networking knowledge that was lacking, and the ARP problem turned out to be simple to overcome.
Support from the mailing list was great, I got thorough replies to my questions in a few hours. The documentation is good, although some parts of the HOWTO could be trimmed back a bit (more information than is needed to understand the problem, takes a bit of time to filter).
The hardware was two slower UP boxes (one live, one for failover), and the load was esstentially 0, even with mon and MRTG running.
LVS is of course just the load balancer, and the setup also included mon for monitoring, heartbeat for failover, and MRTG for trending. They all play well together, and create a very reliable, informative, load balancer setup.
Depending on your setup, one of the meta-packages such as Ultra Money or Redhat's HA suite might be best, but installing the components individually isn't much of a hassle either.
What will the kids run? What educational software is there for Linux? I mean REALLY? Sure, there is some, but it's not even close to what is available for Windows.
Hrm, could this have a *little something* to do with the fact that Microsoft has had a monopoly in the schools. With 980,000 or so potential Linux computers in schools, software development companies might consider making their educational software cross-platform, or maybe even some Linux-specific offerings. Until now there was been no motivation for them to create education software for Linux, so a major ramification of going with RedHat's proposed settlement would be to get the ball rolling in this area. That is, of course, a very good effect of a punitive monopoly settlement, giving the competition a jump start.
If you get tired of seeing the requests, you could always shut the server down (the requesting server of course, not yours:).
Might not remove the worm, but at least gets the "admin" (ha) to pay some attention. Maybe make a request for YOU_HAVE_THE_CODE_RED_WORM_YOU_MORON.HTML right before you do it in case they check the logs:)
I WANT to see commercials about tampons, I want to hear "Are you one of the millions of American males who would like increased sexual energy?" and "Not all women are satisfied with their bust size". I don't give a SHIT about any of those things, and I will never, ever buy them or anything related to them.
If all of a sudden the TV knows I'm a nerd, I get flooded with Computer Associate and Singular ads, not the mention the "This company just merged with another company, and their databases are compatible because they use" Mircosoft commercials. When I go to buy something, I want my judgement to be based on the product, not on the (subconcious, unavoidable) advertising.
I say keep the Viagra, Bowflex, and Rogaine commercials coming my way.
I had a couple of Hotmail accounts. One was a normal length username (can't even remember what it was), and the other was 14 characters long, with underscores and the word "spam" in it. I never gave either out, and only sent three emails total, none of which would have circulated. Guess what? I never got a single piece of spam in the 14 character one, but there were 20 or so pieces a day in the normal length one.
My conclusion is that
1) spamers use incrementation to find usernames, and stop at a certain point
and/or
2) spamers don't send send mail to addresses with "spam" in them.
Pretty obvious from the evidence, but I thought I'd share.
Did I miss the link to pay for the online book, or does it really not exist? Since when does paying for a story ("book" seems silly in these times) mean getting a physical copy. I pay for the words in the book, not the paper it was written on or the people who bound the book (I hate to destroy the industry of paper binders, but in the name of progress we may have to).
I agree with most others that reading books online isn't as convenient as paper versions at the moment, but it will one day be. There is even the possibility of a book with paper (or very much paper like) pages that can change it's text. That may seem a bit far out now, but in 20 years it could very well be a reality.
And I am willing to pay the same amount for the online book as I would pay for the physical version. Of course with such great advances as we have even now, I get to read the book first and decide how much I would like to pay for it.
So I ask again, where is the link to pay for these books?
A new stable kernel announced on Slashdot, over 270 comments, and not a single, not one "well, there goes my uptime" remark? I'm really impressed with you all.
Great job and thanks to all of the kernel hackers, no matter how small your contribution.
The worst thing MS could do (and its very bad) is take every popular OS app that they needed (including Linux), and fork them. Change the name, change the code. Not keep records of what is what. Developers would be torn between sticking with the original code that follows the normal OS (usually slow) pace, or hacking on the MS code that has tons of paid programmers on it. Why bother messing with the original when all of the feature you add will have been added in the next release of the MS version, plus more? There would be no point.
Also, it would be to MS's benefit to fork as soon as possible, so no-one has a chance to change their license from GPL to "GPL minus MS" or "GPL with a fully Open Source disto."
I'm not an Ada developer, but I did notice that Glade supports Ada95. It's main function is for making graphical GTK programs, but it uses a meta-format, so the code it generates can be used for many different languages.
But what about the thousands of situations where people use a dialup ISP other than their phone company, and only pay the phone company for long distance charges? The person uses the phone lines for all of their net traffic, but the phone company doesn't see a dime.
That's why the whole VoIP thing doesn't much sense. Its just another way of using bandwidth, albeit slightly more bandwidth than is normal. If phone companies are smart, they'll start making up some of the lost revenue by increasing the flat fee rate and decreasing the long distance rate (or if they're greedy, keeping the long distance rate the same). This is probably what most phone companies do, but those who don't will be hurting if VoIP ever takes off.
There hasn't been much activity from the project lately, and I haven't tried it myself, but from the screenshots it looks like just what you need. SourceForge project page, and homepage.
I can't believe no-one has mentioned this yet. The school is required to remove the username/passwords from the logs files, right? This usually means writting a quick regex based script to filter out the first two columns or something similar. But what about logins/passwords for other sites? Or just explitive URLs? Here are some examples:
http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=userinfo&nick=Ja son+W - Shows that I probably use the nick Jason+W on Slashdot
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00%2F11%2F10 %2F1311205&cid=&pid=0&am p;am p;startat=&thresho ld=2&mode=nested&commentsort=3&op=Reply - Shows that I posted this comment, with 100% accuracy using time stamps
http://slashdot.org/index.pl?op=userlogin&upassw d=somepassword&unickname =Jason%20W - Shows both my username and password
These are just a few of the possible URLs. Also remember that POST and GET requests are logged too, so even if it doesn't show up in the URL, its still logged. It would not be hard at all to imagine someone collecting all of the records from around the country and doing a quick search to find where a particular "username" lives. Sure, not everyone is a student, but the internet is ATM mostly kids.
Me? I use an HTTPS proxy to encrypt everything I send, so I'm ok. But most students have no way of knowing such a thing exists, and recreational browsing at schools is a must in today's society.
I'm not sure why timothy mentioned Whitefish, Montana in particular, but its kind of strange he did. I live very close to Whitefish, and the ISP I use in based in Whitefish. First of all, its not/that/ small of a town (one of the bigger ones in Western MT. Try living in Big Arm:).
And believe me, the options around here are not great. When my family first signed up for internet access ~4 years ago, there were two choices, and we were only presented with one. The maximum speed was 33.6, and since then has only risen to 56k (for my particular ISP). The service is lowsy, although the stability is decent. A quick check shows almost 3000 accounts.
But recently things have begun to change. The larger ISP in the area was bought out by CenturyTel (national telco). Goodbye customer service, hello broadband. This summer they offered it to customers in Kalispell (larger city by Whitefish), and they recently aquired another small ISP and started offering DSL in even more "rural" areas.
And what was one of the big issues the incumbant senator was running on? Wide spread broadband. I kid you not. According to common knowledge, there is only one pipe in Montana. Its not enough. My school couldn't even get a T1 line. They had to settle for DSL (for an entire school district). There is a district wide technology committee for the schools, and almost everyone recognizes the importance. Despite the lack of broadband, the internet has become very widespread in rural areas, and I can't think of a single friend who doesn't have it.
So I don't know how much of an impact the MS/RS deal will have on the area. We already have DSL in the more urban areas (a town of 4000 has it), for reasonable prices. The only benefit I can foresee is if it prompts the local telcos to built more stations in the rural areas, because DSL does no good at my house, which is many, many miles from the nearest station/DSLAM.
Any maybe timothy would care to comment on why he chose Whitefish? Perhaps he went to the entire-town-including-adults-get-dressed-up-and-pa rty Halloween celebration?
Griffiths was also removed from his post as a student leader.
That one line says a lot. From the school's point of view, it says that in order to lead your fellow peers, you have to conform to the standards that the school has set forth. Not only do you have to go through the appropriate channels, be that a popularity contest (I mean election) or appointment by adminstrators, but you also have to continue to conform even after you have taken the position.
From the student body's point of view, the statement should be completely false. Because of the school's action of 'removing him from his leadership post', they have in fact elevated him to a higher standing among his peers. Obviously he was liked before, but now the school has willingly given him an issue to feed on - a starting point, if you will. From that he can continue to bring up important points and challenge the school's set-in-stone policies that have been passed down for who knows how long. His peers will be able to look back on this incident and know that their leader truly did sacrifice something for the sake of being true to himself and his beliefs. I hope he makes the most of the situation.
It is an unfortunate incident, but it may also be a blessing in disguise.
I didn't say 95% of my peers use drugs. Note that I said 50% aren't swayed either way by health class or DARE. So those 50% are up for grabs, and they decide based mostly on family morals, peer pressure, and, well, their personality.
And in my state they had/have a state-wide program that claims "7 out of 10 teens are tobacco free". PLEASE! The people they're spreading this too are mostly in high school. We/know/ how many of us use tobacco, and we know its more than 3 out of 10. You can lie to the grade school kids, but eventually they'll figure the truth out as well, just like we did.
As for the actually percentage, I don't know it for a fact. But I'd say at least 85% have tried it, and at least 60% use do it regularly. It depends on what 'it' is of course. Sadly, alcohol and marijuna have about the same percentage of experimentation, but alcohol has the much higher percentage of usage.
And I agree with you that you can have a good time without something in you, and I personally don't drink or use drugs. But you can't have teachers and police being totalitarian about it, and saying that any use at all is terrible, and you're a terrible person if you drink or try drugs. Let's take a realistic approach. Let the teachers tell about how they got smashed a few times and it didn't help them. But also let them tell about the teacher's party the other night, where almost everyone drank, but it was ok because they thought ahead and had a designated driver, and they didn't have to go to work the next morning. That's what would help students, not this DARE crap.
Its interesting that you bring this up now. Just yesterday in government class we had the opportunity to listen to one of the candidates for the local House seat speak. Its public record that he got a DUI when he was 19 (he's only 21 now). Even though the teacher asked him not to talk about it, he did. He said "DARE didn't work". The entire class gave a little chuckle because we all know its true. Even that very day, there was an assembly at the middle school for Red Ribbon Week, which alot of people in the high school had fun joking about what effect it had had on them.
Just from my personal experience with DARE and the health classes in my school, the basic effect is: 10% recognize the dangerous effects. 50% don't aren't swayed either way. 40% realize that the teachers, parents, and police don't want them to be drinking and smoking, so they have added incentive to do it.
And of the 10% that recognized the dangerous effects, I'd say at least half do it anyways. No-one has given them a good enough reason why not to. Most kids in middle school, especially, have no way to comprehend what their actions will cause in the future. And most kids in high school have friends a few years older than them who partied hard in high school, went to college and partied hard, and still ended up with normal jobs, normal families, and the whole bit. No-one has given a good enough reason not to do it (if one exists).
On a funny note, in health class we watched a video about binge drinking Americans crossing the border into Mexico. The video was kids partying with half naked members of the opposite sex while drinking their brains out and having the time of their life, intersperced with parents and police preaching the dangers of alcohol use....right, whatever you say...
Yes, anyone who has admined a Slash site should know this, but for those of you who haven't, there it is (including one of those annoying spaces probably).
This is not a flame. This is me trying to debunk CT's obviously wrong view of politics.:)
He'll bitch to the end of time about how stupid Bush is and how Gore's policies suck, but what does he do about it? And guess what? When the 2004 election rolls around, he won't be able to say crap about any candidate without being hypocritical, because its his own damn fault there isn't a third party candidate with as much funding. (Ok, I'm giving CT too much credit for the election results, but his vote is worth more than mine since he lives in Michigan).
Yeah, democracy is great. It lets you say what you want to say, and hopefully get something done. This is worth than voter apathy, its voter insincerity. Not only do you not get what you really want, you make the wrong impression with your vote, the impression that you want Gore to win. As much as you may applaud Nader and put Gore and Bush down, in the end only your vote counts.
And when you say that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush, that just fuzzy math. Do you think of the Nader supporters more were originally Democratic or Republican supporters? Who knows? From a statistical point of view (and realistic pov too), its 50-50. So if everyone voted for who they really wanted, a vote for Nader would be a vote for Nader.
There is too much politics in government. We don't need politics in the way we vote!
Yeah, moderation isn't perfect. The main flaw is people. We're a very imperfect species, not at all fit to judge each other.
But the assumption that Slashdot is dying is just plain stupid IMO. First and foremost its "News for Nerds". The frontpage still shows the most relavant news, things that I'm interested in. The comments from the authors and sumbittors are great. Even the dept line is good most of the time.
Sure, the comments might not be the most intellectual forum possible, but browse at 2. There should really be a setting to display any posivitely moderated comments. Numerical thresholds just don't accomplish their purpose. I think the comments have become more of a place for passing information rather than ideas. Relavant links, past history. And don't forget personal experiences. Sure they're just one person's example, but if we all said what we've been through with a particular topic, a pattern emerges very quickly.
And even to this day, Slashdot remains the one place where you can post a story and know that anybody in the Open Source/tech community will either read it or hear of it second hand, assuming its worth knowing. Contrast that to CNet, ZDnet, Yahoo, even Reuters. This little site off in nowhere can get news out where it needs to be like nothing else.
And like someone already mentioned, the political aspects are amazing. It would not be unlikely to see Slashdot to be a great organizing factor in future geek-initiated political movements. I do think Rob needs to get off this "I'm neutral, I swear!" soapbox, or at least let everyone else start spreading some opinion (even Katz has good ideas mixed in).
Anyhow, just my thoughts. I don't like to see people blasting my favorite website w/o fully exploring the issue. Good luck in whatever you do. Let us know if you find a place better than Slashdot (but don't tell the trolls!).
Slashdot Mirror
I do the exact same thing, WWBFT (What Would Ben Franklin Think?). I imagine him working on a project and I figure he would be glad to be able to get information so quickly so he could continue the thought process immediately. But I also figure he'd get distracted by all the same things we do; it's hard to stay in thinking mode when the whole world's at your fingertips.
Still, I always think WWBFT whenever someone complains about their slow phone or can't find something on Google. Most people take technology for granted today.
Or in other words, CSI was actually accurate all of these years. They just had better cameras.
Export 16 first checks that the configuration data is valid, after that it checks the value “NTVDM TRACE” in the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\MS-DOS Emulation
If this value is equal to 19790509 the threat will exit. This is thought to be an infection marker or a “do not in- fect” marker. If this is set correctly infection will not occur. The value appears to be a date of May 9, 1979. While on May 9, 1979 a variety of historical events occured, according to Wikipedia “Habib Elghanian was executed by a firing squad in Tehran sending shock waves through the closely knit Iranian Jewish community. He was the first Jew and one of the first civilians to be executed by the new Islamic government. This prompted the mass exodus of the once 100,000 member strong Jewish community of Iran which continues to this day.” Symantec cautions readers on drawing any attribution conclusions. Attackers would have the natural desire to implicate another party.
Next, Stuxnet reads a date from the configuration data (offset 0x8c in the configuration data). If the current date is later than the date in the configuration file then infection will also not occur and the threat will exit. The date found in the current configuration file is June 24, 2012.
But really, May 9, 1979 being Rosario Dawson's birthday puts this back on the teenager in his basement path to me.
LVS was able to handle a medium-sized HTTP/HTTPS load at my last job quite well. It had 6 months of uptime serving 5-10 hits/second, and I literally never had to worry about it going down. In combination with mon, bringing machines up and down was never a problem, and failure situations were handled without the end user noticing.
Installation was a bit frustrating because I hadn't dealt with the networking issues before (the ARP problem). However, in the end it was only my lack of networking knowledge that was lacking, and the ARP problem turned out to be simple to overcome.
Support from the mailing list was great, I got thorough replies to my questions in a few hours. The documentation is good, although some parts of the HOWTO could be trimmed back a bit (more information than is needed to understand the problem, takes a bit of time to filter).
The hardware was two slower UP boxes (one live, one for failover), and the load was esstentially 0, even with mon and MRTG running.
LVS is of course just the load balancer, and the setup also included mon for monitoring, heartbeat for failover, and MRTG for trending. They all play well together, and create a very reliable, informative, load balancer setup.
Depending on your setup, one of the meta-packages such as Ultra Money or Redhat's HA suite might be best, but installing the components individually isn't much of a hassle either.
Hrm, could this have a *little something* to do with the fact that Microsoft has had a monopoly in the schools. With 980,000 or so potential Linux computers in schools, software development companies might consider making their educational software cross-platform, or maybe even some Linux-specific offerings. Until now there was been no motivation for them to create education software for Linux, so a major ramification of going with RedHat's proposed settlement would be to get the ball rolling in this area. That is, of course, a very good effect of a punitive monopoly settlement, giving the competition a jump start.
Might not remove the worm, but at least gets the "admin" (ha) to pay some attention. Maybe make a request for YOU_HAVE_THE_CODE_RED_WORM_YOU_MORON.HTML right before you do it in case they check the logs :)
Are you CRAZY?
I WANT to see commercials about tampons, I want to hear "Are you one of the millions of American males who would like increased sexual energy?" and "Not all women are satisfied with their bust size". I don't give a SHIT about any of those things, and I will never, ever buy them or anything related to them.
If all of a sudden the TV knows I'm a nerd, I get flooded with Computer Associate and Singular ads, not the mention the "This company just merged with another company, and their databases are compatible because they use" Mircosoft commercials. When I go to buy something, I want my judgement to be based on the product, not on the (subconcious, unavoidable) advertising.
I say keep the Viagra, Bowflex, and Rogaine commercials coming my way.
It's also the official project name for Sourceforge (https://sourceforge.net/projects/alexandria). I guess they didn't really learn a lesson.
My conclusion is that
1) spamers use incrementation to find usernames, and stop at a certain point
and/or
2) spamers don't send send mail to addresses with "spam" in them.
Pretty obvious from the evidence, but I thought I'd share.
I agree with most others that reading books online isn't as convenient as paper versions at the moment, but it will one day be. There is even the possibility of a book with paper (or very much paper like) pages that can change it's text. That may seem a bit far out now, but in 20 years it could very well be a reality.
And I am willing to pay the same amount for the online book as I would pay for the physical version. Of course with such great advances as we have even now, I get to read the book first and decide how much I would like to pay for it.
So I ask again, where is the link to pay for these books?
Great job and thanks to all of the kernel hackers, no matter how small your contribution.
Also, it would be to MS's benefit to fork as soon as possible, so no-one has a chance to change their license from GPL to "GPL minus MS" or "GPL with a fully Open Source disto."
I'm not an Ada developer, but I did notice that Glade supports Ada95. It's main function is for making graphical GTK programs, but it uses a meta-format, so the code it generates can be used for many different languages.
That's why the whole VoIP thing doesn't much sense. Its just another way of using bandwidth, albeit slightly more bandwidth than is normal. If phone companies are smart, they'll start making up some of the lost revenue by increasing the flat fee rate and decreasing the long distance rate (or if they're greedy, keeping the long distance rate the same). This is probably what most phone companies do, but those who don't will be hurting if VoIP ever takes off.
There hasn't been much activity from the project lately, and I haven't tried it myself, but from the screenshots it looks like just what you need. SourceForge project page, and homepage.
199.166.24.1 (ns1.vrx.net)
205.189.73.102 (ns2.vrx.net)
If you're using a real OS, just plug them into /etc/resolv.conf.
If you're stuck under Windows they even have a program that changes them for you.
I've been using them for over a year without any problem whatsoever.
These are just a few of the possible URLs. Also remember that POST and GET requests are logged too, so even if it doesn't show up in the URL, its still logged. It would not be hard at all to imagine someone collecting all of the records from around the country and doing a quick search to find where a particular "username" lives. Sure, not everyone is a student, but the internet is ATM mostly kids.
Me? I use an HTTPS proxy to encrypt everything I send, so I'm ok. But most students have no way of knowing such a thing exists, and recreational browsing at schools is a must in today's society.
And believe me, the options around here are not great. When my family first signed up for internet access ~4 years ago, there were two choices, and we were only presented with one. The maximum speed was 33.6, and since then has only risen to 56k (for my particular ISP). The service is lowsy, although the stability is decent. A quick check shows almost 3000 accounts.
But recently things have begun to change. The larger ISP in the area was bought out by CenturyTel (national telco). Goodbye customer service, hello broadband. This summer they offered it to customers in Kalispell (larger city by Whitefish), and they recently aquired another small ISP and started offering DSL in even more "rural" areas.
And what was one of the big issues the incumbant senator was running on? Wide spread broadband. I kid you not. According to common knowledge, there is only one pipe in Montana. Its not enough. My school couldn't even get a T1 line. They had to settle for DSL (for an entire school district). There is a district wide technology committee for the schools, and almost everyone recognizes the importance. Despite the lack of broadband, the internet has become very widespread in rural areas, and I can't think of a single friend who doesn't have it.
So I don't know how much of an impact the MS/RS deal will have on the area. We already have DSL in the more urban areas (a town of 4000 has it), for reasonable prices. The only benefit I can foresee is if it prompts the local telcos to built more stations in the rural areas, because DSL does no good at my house, which is many, many miles from the nearest station/DSLAM.
Any maybe timothy would care to comment on why he chose Whitefish? Perhaps he went to the entire-town-including-adults-get-dressed-up-and-pa rty Halloween celebration?
Griffiths was also removed from his post as a student leader.
That one line says a lot. From the school's point of view, it says that in order to lead your fellow peers, you have to conform to the standards that the school has set forth. Not only do you have to go through the appropriate channels, be that a popularity contest (I mean election) or appointment by adminstrators, but you also have to continue to conform even after you have taken the position.
From the student body's point of view, the statement should be completely false. Because of the school's action of 'removing him from his leadership post', they have in fact elevated him to a higher standing among his peers. Obviously he was liked before, but now the school has willingly given him an issue to feed on - a starting point, if you will. From that he can continue to bring up important points and challenge the school's set-in-stone policies that have been passed down for who knows how long. His peers will be able to look back on this incident and know that their leader truly did sacrifice something for the sake of being true to himself and his beliefs. I hope he makes the most of the situation.
It is an unfortunate incident, but it may also be a blessing in disguise.
And in my state they had/have a state-wide program that claims "7 out of 10 teens are tobacco free". PLEASE! The people they're spreading this too are mostly in high school. We /know/ how many of us use tobacco, and we know its more than 3 out of 10. You can lie to the grade school kids, but eventually they'll figure the truth out as well, just like we did.
As for the actually percentage, I don't know it for a fact. But I'd say at least 85% have tried it, and at least 60% use do it regularly. It depends on what 'it' is of course. Sadly, alcohol and marijuna have about the same percentage of experimentation, but alcohol has the much higher percentage of usage.
And I agree with you that you can have a good time without something in you, and I personally don't drink or use drugs. But you can't have teachers and police being totalitarian about it, and saying that any use at all is terrible, and you're a terrible person if you drink or try drugs. Let's take a realistic approach. Let the teachers tell about how they got smashed a few times and it didn't help them. But also let them tell about the teacher's party the other night, where almost everyone drank, but it was ok because they thought ahead and had a designated driver, and they didn't have to go to work the next morning. That's what would help students, not this DARE crap.
Just from my personal experience with DARE and the health classes in my school, the basic effect is: 10% recognize the dangerous effects. 50% don't aren't swayed either way. 40% realize that the teachers, parents, and police don't want them to be drinking and smoking, so they have added incentive to do it.
And of the 10% that recognized the dangerous effects, I'd say at least half do it anyways. No-one has given them a good enough reason why not to. Most kids in middle school, especially, have no way to comprehend what their actions will cause in the future. And most kids in high school have friends a few years older than them who partied hard in high school, went to college and partied hard, and still ended up with normal jobs, normal families, and the whole bit. No-one has given a good enough reason not to do it (if one exists).
On a funny note, in health class we watched a video about binge drinking Americans crossing the border into Mexico. The video was kids partying with half naked members of the opposite sex while drinking their brains out and having the time of their life, intersperced with parents and police preaching the dangers of alcohol use. ...right, whatever you say...
Slashdot in Black! (or any set of colors you want).
Yes, anyone who has admined a Slash site should know this, but for those of you who haven't, there it is (including one of those annoying spaces probably).
He'll bitch to the end of time about how stupid Bush is and how Gore's policies suck, but what does he do about it? And guess what? When the 2004 election rolls around, he won't be able to say crap about any candidate without being hypocritical, because its his own damn fault there isn't a third party candidate with as much funding. (Ok, I'm giving CT too much credit for the election results, but his vote is worth more than mine since he lives in Michigan).
Yeah, democracy is great. It lets you say what you want to say, and hopefully get something done. This is worth than voter apathy, its voter insincerity. Not only do you not get what you really want, you make the wrong impression with your vote, the impression that you want Gore to win. As much as you may applaud Nader and put Gore and Bush down, in the end only your vote counts.
And when you say that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush, that just fuzzy math. Do you think of the Nader supporters more were originally Democratic or Republican supporters? Who knows? From a statistical point of view (and realistic pov too), its 50-50. So if everyone voted for who they really wanted, a vote for Nader would be a vote for Nader.
There is too much politics in government. We don't need politics in the way we vote!
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But the assumption that Slashdot is dying is just plain stupid IMO. First and foremost its "News for Nerds". The frontpage still shows the most relavant news, things that I'm interested in. The comments from the authors and sumbittors are great. Even the dept line is good most of the time.
Sure, the comments might not be the most intellectual forum possible, but browse at 2. There should really be a setting to display any posivitely moderated comments. Numerical thresholds just don't accomplish their purpose. I think the comments have become more of a place for passing information rather than ideas. Relavant links, past history. And don't forget personal experiences. Sure they're just one person's example, but if we all said what we've been through with a particular topic, a pattern emerges very quickly.
And even to this day, Slashdot remains the one place where you can post a story and know that anybody in the Open Source/tech community will either read it or hear of it second hand, assuming its worth knowing. Contrast that to CNet, ZDnet, Yahoo, even Reuters. This little site off in nowhere can get news out where it needs to be like nothing else.
And like someone already mentioned, the political aspects are amazing. It would not be unlikely to see Slashdot to be a great organizing factor in future geek-initiated political movements. I do think Rob needs to get off this "I'm neutral, I swear!" soapbox, or at least let everyone else start spreading some opinion (even Katz has good ideas mixed in).
Anyhow, just my thoughts. I don't like to see people blasting my favorite website w/o fully exploring the issue. Good luck in whatever you do. Let us know if you find a place better than Slashdot (but don't tell the trolls!).