I run my own system, so changing my DNS to use (Alternic|OpenNic|...) wouldn't be a big deal to me. I could do in in about 60 seconds.
Let's suppose I did. OK, now lets suppose there some site, www.deepthought.42, that has all the answers to my life. Unfortunately, I don't know it exists. How do I find it?
This is the biggest problem with any of the alternate root servers IMHO: there is nobody indexing them! Now, suppose that Google set up to index that domain, and just to keep people from being confused set their system up so that they wouldn't list any Alternic domains in a search unless you were querying search.google, rather than www.google.com. Then, maybe I'd be motivated to use them. But until I can find these new domains, they are no good to me.
Now, what I keep waiting for: AOL gets pissed with InterNIC. AOL configures their DNS to resolve off AlterNIC (remember, you don't LOSE the current set of TLDs, you just gain new ones), and sets up a.aol domain. They offer their uses subdomains off that, so AOLuser JOE42 automatically gets JOE42.aol as a domain (which is an alias for members.aol.com/JOE42). Also, they do this for all the RoadRunner etc. customers.
Now, what a jumpstart THAT would provide for Alternic.....
Much as I'd LOVE to see a major player shipping a Linux based PDA, read the freaking article! They said "Linux OR PlamOS", not "Linux". Until I actually see Tux on the bootup, I will pessimistically assume it will be PalmOS. Then they can leverage all the PalmOS apps.
Mind you, if they did ship a Linux version... well, I'd have my Mastercard out so fast Einstein would be spinning in his grave.
There is a nasty bug in Mozilla's handling of V4.x plugins:
When Mozilla gets ready to load the plugin, it first tries to expressly load/usr/X11R4/lib/libXm.so.6 and/usr/X11R6/lib/libXt.so.6 (by full name and path, no less), and if the loads on these fail, it will silently fail to load the plug-in.
On my systems, a) libXt doesn't depend on libXm (good thing, as I don't HAVE a libXm) and b) I don't have a libXt.so.6! So all my 4.x plugins wouldn't load.
However, by adding a LD_PRELOAD=libXt.so before the actual invocation of mozilla-bin in run-mozilla.sh, it restored my plugins.
This is a known bug, but they sure as hell don't go out of their way to make it WELL known. It took me months of digging to find it...
In case anybody cares, I finally found the problem. When loading an old plug-in, Mozilla first tries to load "/usr/X11R6/lib/libXt.so.6" and "/usr/X11R6/lib/libXm.so.6" (by those very names! They hardcoded the paths!) and if those loads fail, they silently refuse to load the plugin. Nice, esp. since a) they could have let the system loader handle the load, b) they could have avoided hard coded paths, c) they could have avoided hard coded version numbers, and d) they could have checked if the plugin even needed those libraries!
However, if you do an LD_PRELOAD=libXt before mozilla-bin gets loaded, then all will be well.
Re:one of many ways Verizion frustrates customers
on
The State of Broadband
·
· Score: 2
If you were on a SLIC, you'd be on it 24/7. It sounds more like to me you have crosstalk from other lines, and they happen at that time of the day. You might try disconnecting the modem, picking up the phone, dialing a single digit to quiet the dial tone, and listening. See if you can hear any voice on the line (it will be pretty faint). If so, call the phone company and complain about "hearing other people on my line." DO NOT MENTION THE WORDS MODEM OR HOME WORKER If you say those words the phone company will try to nail you with a business line charge. Say you hear other people talking on the line and maybe they will re-route your pairs away from the problem. Or maybe they will make it worse....
DSL uses a bandwidth of about 1 MHz on the wire. If that's not broad, I don't know what is.
And gigabit ethernet will die a horrible death if the wire won't pass at least 100 MHz of signal.
Let's compare the ratio of carrier frequency to signal bandwidth (Q:= BW/Fc). DSL and ethernet are baseband signals (Fc= 0Hz, BW ~ 100 MHz, Q = BW/Fc ~ NAN). Cable is fairly broad (Fc ~ 300 MHz, BW ~ 20 MHz, Q =.1). Fiber isn't broadband (Fc ~ 230 THz, BW ~ 600 MHz, Q = 2.6E-6).
Don't sweat it: most people think their modems are 56kBaud....
Re:one of many ways Verizion frustrates customers
on
The State of Broadband
·
· Score: 3
There may be a good technical reason for rural customers having DSL and urban customers not having it.
DSL requires clean copper from end to end. In a lot of urban areas, the phone company ran out of pairs out of the central office (CO) a long time ago. They solved this by using a thing called a SLIC-96 (subscriber line interface card). What a SLIC does is take 96 phone calls, encoded them to digital at 64 kbit/sec, and puts that on 4 pairs of wire. So, that new housing development gets all its needs solved without running new wires.
However, a SLIC will KILL a 56k modem, and DSL is right out. It may be that your local area is just chock full of SLICs, and the telco would have to run a SPL (shit pot load) of pairs from the CO to enable DSL.
For rural customers, the scenario is different. The only traps waiting for them are loading coils. A run of wire has an intrinsic capacitance, that gradually rolls the signal response off. In order to keep the voice band of 0Hz->3kHz flat, the insert inductors (loading coils) to offset the capactiance in the voice band. However, this doesn't come without price: everything above 3kHz is toast.
However, telcos haven't been installing loading coils for a great many years, since they knew this sort of thing was coming. Especially in a case where they had to upgrade the rural plants, they pulled a bunch of pairs and have clean copper in the ground. (The single biggest cost in pulling wire/fiber is the hole in the ground: the cost of the cable itself is trivial).
The other thing that is happening is that in the urban areas, the ILOC (incumbant local operating company, a.k.a. baby bell, Verison in your case) must provide space, equipment, and service to any CLOC (competitive local operating company, a.k.a. Bubba's Barbeque Pit and Phone Company) at a loss.
Now, why would Verison upgrade their racks again...?
Sorry about the accusation of trolling -/.'s been going to hell in a vomit bucket with respect to that, and too many trolls have also said what you said.
However, if you look into Shelly's personal life, you will see she and her husband were vehement socialists.
Do you know how many failures there are in a typical in vitro fertilization attempt? Just as many as in Dolly. Furthur, those failures result in miscarrage, just like the failures with Dolly. In point of fact, examination of "natural" miscarrages shows most of them had genetic abnormailites. And with respect to preventing geneticly defective individuals from breeding: careful, you might get the Downs' Syndrome people up in arms.
As for condesension: re-read you post as I have re-read mine. Perhaps we both are falling into that trap.
I think the single most important item in Kurt's suggestions is the feedback loop from viewer to advertiser. Too damn many advertisers are running open loop - the flashing banner ads on the 'Net, the stupid "7 up yours!" ads on TV, the blasted "CARGANZA" commercials on radio turn people off, but the advertisers don't know because there is no way to provide negative feedback. If I could (for example, since it's sitting right in front of me) tell ThinkGeek to lose the animated GIFS and just show me the damn product, I'd do it. And I like Thinkgeek!
I'd LOVE to be able to tell advertisers "I blocked your ad, because your damn server is overloaded and the ad took too long to load", or "I don't like javascript in ads, goodbye", or "Cookies? I don' need no steenkeen cookies", because they might actually LEARN from this and improve the ads (before you say advertisers cannot learn: even flatworms can learn.)
Perhaps if/., k5 et. al. start doing this, we can start a new trend.
First, try to study what Shelly was for a bit. She was not writing about science per se, rather she was writing about the abuse of the worker. Much like the Russian story from whence we derive the word "robot" she was trying to say that the creation of artificial life would be used to create artificial slaves.
That said, now let's look at cloning. We aren't talking about growing babies in a vat here: you still have to have a human uterus to grow the kid in, and the result is that after nine months you have a baby. This is in no substantive way different from in vitro fertilization.
The result of a cloning experiment won't be "a creature without family, without hope of love, a hideous demon without a soul", any more than a child conceived via in vitro fertilization would be. It will be a baby, with a mommy, a brain waiting to develop, and all the legal rights anybody else has.
I realize this person is just a moderate grade troll, but I've hear this particular non-argument slide by too many times to let it happen again.
While in some regards I would mourn the passing of Geocites et al., I would welcome the releif from the flood of spam pointing to [low grade porn|get rich quick|Find anyone fast] sites hosted on "free" suppliers like Geocities.
Furthurmore, the assumption that a web site must cost a lot to run is questionable, at least. Bandwidth is cheap, disk is cheap, CPU is cheap. Setting up a web site needn't cost a arm and leg if people would just band together. I know several people who got together, bought space at a coloc, and set up their own server for US$50/month/person. And that was only for 5 people!
That said, I would support advertising supported sites if and only if I get value for my money. I don't want to see any form of auto-billing - as has been pointed out, this is too easy to abuse. I don't want to be ripped off by content that I could get free: but if I could get known trolls blocked from my viewing of/. for US$5/month, payable via Paypal or Visa, TELL ME WHERE TO SIGN UP!.
I'm conflicted about this: on the one hand, I am concerned that companies will glom on to Vorbis, make proprietary extensions, and not release them back into the free software pool. Not good.
On the other hand, as a professional embedded software developer, I have a need that Vorbis would be just perfect for. Under a BSD license, I would have no problems with using it (due to constraints beyond my control, the code would have to be linked against some decidedly CLOSED SOURCE code, thus chucking the GPL out the window). However, I was perfectly willing to go to my managers and have them negotiate a license with Xiph to allow use to use the Vorbis code under a closed-source license and pay them money for the privilege (while maintaining the normal license as GPL). That will be a great deal harder to justify now....
Does the apt system maintain a database of what files belong to what packages?
One of the things that is nice about RPM is being able to say "rpm -qf filename" and having RPM tell you what package filename belongs to. Unlike certain other alleged operating systems *cough*Windows*cough* when you find some unknown 100 MB file on your system, you can ask "Who's fault is this?" of RPM.
(obviously, if the file in question wasn't installed by RPM, it won't be in the database. Nothing can solve this...)
Actually, what I'd like is if you could post a traceroute to them. Don't post the first part of the traceroute (unless you WANT everybody on/. to know your IP).
I'm trying to figure out if there's a misconfig on somebody's router or what. If so, and if I can deduce the correct entity to contact, maybe I can get them to correct the problem.
Might I ask where you guys are? It's not a name lookup issue, DNS resolves just fine. It's a "failure to communicate" - a traceroute dies:
7 p5-2.crtntx1-cr8.bbnplanet.net (4.24.117.65) 118.450 ms 110.531 ms 109.955 ms
8 pos3-3.core2.Dallas1.Level3.net (209.245.240.169) 144.880 ms 196.875 ms 146.190 ms
9 so-6-0-0.mp1.Dallas1.level3.net (209.247.10.101) 165.933 ms 178.693 ms 165.707 ms
10 212.187.128.161 (212.187.128.161) 235.667 ms 274.935 ms 235.741 ms
11 212.187.128.50 (212.187.128.50) 256.475 ms 256.279 ms 256.477 ms
12 212.187.131.7 (212.187.131.7) 259.357 ms 235.398 ms 240.713 ms
13 * 212.187.131.7 (212.187.131.7) 238.903 ms *
14 * * *
15 *
For the past several days I've been unable to get to www.theregister.co.uk. I'd assumed maybe they were having problems, and spaced it off. But with/. showing a link to them, it would make me think they are reachable from some places. I've even tried to traceroute from a few of the places on www.geektools.com, with no results.
Anybody give me a spot-check on this? After all, how can I read the links this story refers to if I cannot get packets to the servers?
It seems to me the primary problem is that the public school system is not allowed to toss the 10% of the population that ARE troublemakers out so hard they bounce. As a result, that 10% screw it up for everybody else.
Perhaps, if we would acknowledge that what people have a right to is the OPPORTUNITY for education, and that if they throw it out the window it's their own tough luck, we could begin to straighten out the school system.
However, as long as education is funded by public money, this is unlikely to happen.
No, a troll or flame is, by definition, off topic. It brings no information to the discussion.
Furthur, should CT&crew ever start actually applying any analysis to the moderation, I'd rather trolls/flames really be marked as such, rather than as merely "off-topic". Personally, I'd like to see them implement a "Hall of Shame", where the top 10 trolls would be posted (nick, IP address(s) posted from, time of post) along with a vote as to whether or not to bitchslap them into minusland. However, that would not work if everybody keeps moderating the posts as "offtopic".
To me, a moderation of "offtopic" simple means "what you are saying doesn't pertain to the discussion at hand, nor is it very interesting. Please shut up."
I propose implanting these chips into lobbyist's heads, along with a small charge of TNT. We then program the chips to detonate the charge whenever the lobbyist gets within a mile of an elected official.
This, of course, requires we chip elected officials, and continuously monitor their locations. Since this seems to be what they wish to do to us, they should have little problem with experiencing it themselves.
This would also have the side effect of allowing us to locate the positions of bars, brothels, and gambling houses with unprecidented accuracy.
Slashdot Mirror
Did anyone else notice the bit about "and e-mail" as part of the campaign? I hope that does NOT mean spam!
I run my own system, so changing my DNS to use (Alternic|OpenNic|...) wouldn't be a big deal to me. I could do in in about 60 seconds.
.aol domain. They offer their uses subdomains off that, so AOLuser JOE42 automatically gets JOE42.aol as a domain (which is an alias for members.aol.com/JOE42). Also, they do this for all the RoadRunner etc. customers.
Let's suppose I did. OK, now lets suppose there some site, www.deepthought.42, that has all the answers to my life. Unfortunately, I don't know it exists. How do I find it?
This is the biggest problem with any of the alternate root servers IMHO: there is nobody indexing them! Now, suppose that Google set up to index that domain, and just to keep people from being confused set their system up so that they wouldn't list any Alternic domains in a search unless you were querying search.google, rather than www.google.com. Then, maybe I'd be motivated to use them. But until I can find these new domains, they are no good to me.
Now, what I keep waiting for: AOL gets pissed with InterNIC. AOL configures their DNS to resolve off AlterNIC (remember, you don't LOSE the current set of TLDs, you just gain new ones), and sets up a
Now, what a jumpstart THAT would provide for Alternic.....
The implication is that I would extract my plasic at V >> C, thus violating special relativity.
Much as I'd LOVE to see a major player shipping a Linux based PDA, read the freaking article! They said "Linux OR PlamOS", not "Linux". Until I actually see Tux on the bootup, I will pessimistically assume it will be PalmOS. Then they can leverage all the PalmOS apps.
Mind you, if they did ship a Linux version... well, I'd have my Mastercard out so fast Einstein would be spinning in his grave.
There is a nasty bug in Mozilla's handling of V4.x plugins:
/usr/X11R4/lib/libXm.so.6 and /usr/X11R6/lib/libXt.so.6 (by full name and path, no less), and if the loads on these fail, it will silently fail to load the plug-in.
When Mozilla gets ready to load the plugin, it first tries to expressly load
On my systems, a) libXt doesn't depend on libXm (good thing, as I don't HAVE a libXm) and b) I don't have a libXt.so.6! So all my 4.x plugins wouldn't load.
However, by adding a LD_PRELOAD=libXt.so before the actual invocation of mozilla-bin in run-mozilla.sh, it restored my plugins.
This is a known bug, but they sure as hell don't go out of their way to make it WELL known. It took me months of digging to find it...
In case anybody cares, I finally found the problem. When loading an old plug-in, Mozilla first tries to load "/usr/X11R6/lib/libXt.so.6" and "/usr/X11R6/lib/libXm.so.6" (by those very names! They hardcoded the paths!) and if those loads fail, they silently refuse to load the plugin. Nice, esp. since a) they could have let the system loader handle the load, b) they could have avoided hard coded paths, c) they could have avoided hard coded version numbers, and d) they could have checked if the plugin even needed those libraries!
However, if you do an LD_PRELOAD=libXt before mozilla-bin gets loaded, then all will be well.
If you were on a SLIC, you'd be on it 24/7. It sounds more like to me you have crosstalk from other lines, and they happen at that time of the day. You might try disconnecting the modem, picking up the phone, dialing a single digit to quiet the dial tone, and listening. See if you can hear any voice on the line (it will be pretty faint). If so, call the phone company and complain about "hearing other people on my line." DO NOT MENTION THE WORDS MODEM OR HOME WORKER If you say those words the phone company will try to nail you with a business line charge. Say you hear other people talking on the line and maybe they will re-route your pairs away from the problem. Or maybe they will make it worse....
Precisely my point: their DB server has 2G of RAM. Assume they've maxed it out: that's 4G since it's an Intel system.
/. system must track, upgrading that to a dual or 4-way Alpha with 10G of RAM would probably help a bunch.
Given the amount of crap the
How much RAM do you guys HAVE? At current prices, is it that hard to add more? After all, I've seen PC133 RAM down to $60/256M.
Heck, get VA to cough up an Alpha for the DB system, and load that puppy up to 10G of memory! It worked for Altavista...
DSL uses a bandwidth of about 1 MHz on the wire. If that's not broad, I don't know what is.
:= BW/Fc). DSL and ethernet are baseband signals (Fc= 0Hz, BW ~ 100 MHz, Q = BW/Fc ~ NAN). Cable is fairly broad (Fc ~ 300 MHz, BW ~ 20 MHz, Q = .1). Fiber isn't broadband (Fc ~ 230 THz, BW ~ 600 MHz, Q = 2.6E-6).
And gigabit ethernet will die a horrible death if the wire won't pass at least 100 MHz of signal.
Let's compare the ratio of carrier frequency to signal bandwidth (Q
Don't sweat it: most people think their modems are 56kBaud....
There may be a good technical reason for rural customers having DSL and urban customers not having it.
DSL requires clean copper from end to end. In a lot of urban areas, the phone company ran out of pairs out of the central office (CO) a long time ago. They solved this by using a thing called a SLIC-96 (subscriber line interface card). What a SLIC does is take 96 phone calls, encoded them to digital at 64 kbit/sec, and puts that on 4 pairs of wire. So, that new housing development gets all its needs solved without running new wires.
However, a SLIC will KILL a 56k modem, and DSL is right out. It may be that your local area is just chock full of SLICs, and the telco would have to run a SPL (shit pot load) of pairs from the CO to enable DSL.
For rural customers, the scenario is different. The only traps waiting for them are loading coils. A run of wire has an intrinsic capacitance, that gradually rolls the signal response off. In order to keep the voice band of 0Hz->3kHz flat, the insert inductors (loading coils) to offset the capactiance in the voice band. However, this doesn't come without price: everything above 3kHz is toast.
However, telcos haven't been installing loading coils for a great many years, since they knew this sort of thing was coming. Especially in a case where they had to upgrade the rural plants, they pulled a bunch of pairs and have clean copper in the ground. (The single biggest cost in pulling wire/fiber is the hole in the ground: the cost of the cable itself is trivial).
The other thing that is happening is that in the urban areas, the ILOC (incumbant local operating company, a.k.a. baby bell, Verison in your case) must provide space, equipment, and service to any CLOC (competitive local operating company, a.k.a. Bubba's Barbeque Pit and Phone Company) at a loss.
Now, why would Verison upgrade their racks again...?
Sorry about the accusation of trolling - /.'s been going to hell in a vomit bucket with respect to that, and too many trolls have also said what you said.
However, if you look into Shelly's personal life, you will see she and her husband were vehement socialists.
Do you know how many failures there are in a typical in vitro fertilization attempt? Just as many as in Dolly. Furthur, those failures result in miscarrage, just like the failures with Dolly. In point of fact, examination of "natural" miscarrages shows most of them had genetic abnormailites. And with respect to preventing geneticly defective individuals from breeding: careful, you might get the Downs' Syndrome people up in arms.
As for condesension: re-read you post as I have re-read mine. Perhaps we both are falling into that trap.
I think the single most important item in Kurt's suggestions is the feedback loop from viewer to advertiser. Too damn many advertisers are running open loop - the flashing banner ads on the 'Net, the stupid "7 up yours!" ads on TV, the blasted "CARGANZA" commercials on radio turn people off, but the advertisers don't know because there is no way to provide negative feedback. If I could (for example, since it's sitting right in front of me) tell ThinkGeek to lose the animated GIFS and just show me the damn product, I'd do it. And I like Thinkgeek!
/., k5 et. al. start doing this, we can start a new trend.
I'd LOVE to be able to tell advertisers "I blocked your ad, because your damn server is overloaded and the ad took too long to load", or "I don't like javascript in ads, goodbye", or "Cookies? I don' need no steenkeen cookies", because they might actually LEARN from this and improve the ads (before you say advertisers cannot learn: even flatworms can learn.)
Perhaps if
First, try to study what Shelly was for a bit. She was not writing about science per se, rather she was writing about the abuse of the worker. Much like the Russian story from whence we derive the word "robot" she was trying to say that the creation of artificial life would be used to create artificial slaves.
That said, now let's look at cloning. We aren't talking about growing babies in a vat here: you still have to have a human uterus to grow the kid in, and the result is that after nine months you have a baby. This is in no substantive way different from in vitro fertilization.
The result of a cloning experiment won't be "a creature without family, without hope of love, a hideous demon without a soul", any more than a child conceived via in vitro fertilization would be. It will be a baby, with a mommy, a brain waiting to develop, and all the legal rights anybody else has.
I realize this person is just a moderate grade troll, but I've hear this particular non-argument slide by too many times to let it happen again.
While in some regards I would mourn the passing of Geocites et al., I would welcome the releif from the flood of spam pointing to [low grade porn|get rich quick|Find anyone fast] sites hosted on "free" suppliers like Geocities.
/. for US$5/month, payable via Paypal or Visa, TELL ME WHERE TO SIGN UP!.
Furthurmore, the assumption that a web site must cost a lot to run is questionable, at least. Bandwidth is cheap, disk is cheap, CPU is cheap. Setting up a web site needn't cost a arm and leg if people would just band together. I know several people who got together, bought space at a coloc, and set up their own server for US$50/month/person. And that was only for 5 people!
That said, I would support advertising supported sites if and only if I get value for my money. I don't want to see any form of auto-billing - as has been pointed out, this is too easy to abuse. I don't want to be ripped off by content that I could get free: but if I could get known trolls blocked from my viewing of
That's what I'd do, but not as many people are as ethical as I try to be.
I'm conflicted about this: on the one hand, I am concerned that companies will glom on to Vorbis, make proprietary extensions, and not release them back into the free software pool. Not good.
On the other hand, as a professional embedded software developer, I have a need that Vorbis would be just perfect for. Under a BSD license, I would have no problems with using it (due to constraints beyond my control, the code would have to be linked against some decidedly CLOSED SOURCE code, thus chucking the GPL out the window). However, I was perfectly willing to go to my managers and have them negotiate a license with Xiph to allow use to use the Vorbis code under a closed-source license and pay them money for the privilege (while maintaining the normal license as GPL). That will be a great deal harder to justify now....
Does the apt system maintain a database of what files belong to what packages?
One of the things that is nice about RPM is being able to say "rpm -qf filename" and having RPM tell you what package filename belongs to. Unlike certain other alleged operating systems *cough*Windows*cough* when you find some unknown 100 MB file on your system, you can ask "Who's fault is this?" of RPM.
(obviously, if the file in question wasn't installed by RPM, it won't be in the database. Nothing can solve this...)
Can you do this with apt?
Actually, what I'd like is if you could post a traceroute to them. Don't post the first part of the traceroute (unless you WANT everybody on /. to know your IP).
I'm trying to figure out if there's a misconfig on somebody's router or what. If so, and if I can deduce the correct entity to contact, maybe I can get them to correct the problem.
Might I ask where you guys are? It's not a name lookup issue, DNS resolves just fine. It's a "failure to communicate" - a traceroute dies:
7 p5-2.crtntx1-cr8.bbnplanet.net (4.24.117.65) 118.450 ms 110.531 ms 109.955 ms
8 pos3-3.core2.Dallas1.Level3.net (209.245.240.169) 144.880 ms 196.875 ms 146.190 ms
9 so-6-0-0.mp1.Dallas1.level3.net (209.247.10.101) 165.933 ms 178.693 ms 165.707 ms
10 212.187.128.161 (212.187.128.161) 235.667 ms 274.935 ms 235.741 ms
11 212.187.128.50 (212.187.128.50) 256.475 ms 256.279 ms 256.477 ms
12 212.187.131.7 (212.187.131.7) 259.357 ms 235.398 ms 240.713 ms
13 * 212.187.131.7 (212.187.131.7) 238.903 ms *
14 * * *
15 *
(I've deleted the first part of the traceroute)
For the past several days I've been unable to get to www.theregister.co.uk. I'd assumed maybe they were having problems, and spaced it off. But with /. showing a link to them, it would make me think they are reachable from some places. I've even tried to traceroute from a few of the places on www.geektools.com, with no results.
Anybody give me a spot-check on this? After all, how can I read the links this story refers to if I cannot get packets to the servers?
It seems to me the primary problem is that the public school system is not allowed to toss the 10% of the population that ARE troublemakers out so hard they bounce. As a result, that 10% screw it up for everybody else.
Perhaps, if we would acknowledge that what people have a right to is the OPPORTUNITY for education, and that if they throw it out the window it's their own tough luck, we could begin to straighten out the school system.
However, as long as education is funded by public money, this is unlikely to happen.
And the music track, with the funky '70 "wikka wikka" guitars and the "boom-chiss-boom" drums.
No, a troll or flame is, by definition, off topic. It brings no information to the discussion.
Furthur, should CT&crew ever start actually applying any analysis to the moderation, I'd rather trolls/flames really be marked as such, rather than as merely "off-topic". Personally, I'd like to see them implement a "Hall of Shame", where the top 10 trolls would be posted (nick, IP address(s) posted from, time of post) along with a vote as to whether or not to bitchslap them into minusland. However, that would not work if everybody keeps moderating the posts as "offtopic".
To me, a moderation of "offtopic" simple means "what you are saying doesn't pertain to the discussion at hand, nor is it very interesting. Please shut up."
I propose implanting these chips into lobbyist's heads, along with a small charge of TNT. We then program the chips to detonate the charge whenever the lobbyist gets within a mile of an elected official.
This, of course, requires we chip elected officials, and continuously monitor their locations. Since this seems to be what they wish to do to us, they should have little problem with experiencing it themselves.
This would also have the side effect of allowing us to locate the positions of bars, brothels, and gambling houses with unprecidented accuracy.