Thank God it is only a mini design flaw!
I thought for a while that it might be some major flaw. Fortunately, that was not the case.
I can sleep tonight.
Is there anything Perl CAN'T do? I don't think so.
It is suboptimal with defining grammars and
writing lexers, parsers and compilers.
At least it is not as good
as Lex and Yacc or Bison.
Fortunately,
itwillchange.
I think that the public needs to be more educated about the alternatives to the monopoly which controls the machines all around us, as well as about the monopoly itself and the harm that it does.
First of all,
they should finally learn about
the monopoly itself.
The most important facts
can be found on the
Microsoft Financial Fraud Update website by Bill Parish.
MSFT is basically a pyramid scheme.
It has to collapse some day.
I find it much more likely than the suicide.
Does Pearl, a robot specifically designed to help old people, run Perl,
a language specifically designed to help old people think they have already lost their minds?
As much as I'd love to believe otherwise,
it suerly looks more like something personal.
Since I don't know you personally, that would be impossible.
I cannot be sure about that, for I have no idea who you are, now can I?
I don't know what are you talking about.
Very well, it was just my impression.
The only alternative I see is that someone is playing
some boring practical joke on you.
Not only boring but also childish and stupid.
If I ever stop making sense again,
please tell me about it before calling me
a foe in front of the whole Slashdot community.
The different lists are personal;
and although they are visible to everyone,
I can't imagine people regularly look
at other people's friends/foes list.
They are really only useful to others
in the form of friend of friends/foes
of friends lists (as a sidenote,
you still apear on my foes of friends list
since mr. GooberToo has made you a foe).
Incidentally,
if you'd like to know exactly when and why your good friend
GooberToo made me his foe, you should read
this
thread.
He has called me an "idiot" and "dolt" dozens of times
using such phrases as:
"this does a wonderful job of highlighting how big of an idiot you are."
"LOL. This is awesome stuff!
[...]
You are one of the biggest idiots/trolls on/. that I've ever seen.
LOL! You're a lost treasure of stupidity!!! LOL!"
"I've already stated why you're an idiot. Anyone with a brain agrees."
"Good thing you are an idiot,
which obviously has no idea what you're talking about"
as a supposed refutation of my reasoning.
Finally, this:
"You are the first dolt, to ever make my foe list. What an idiot."
is his sophisticated explanation
of the reason why I became his foe, which you today
consider to be an argument against my person
in your private moderation system
ruled by personal preferences of people like GooberToo.
Please read all of my and GooberToo's posts of
this
thread and draw your own conclusions.
You will see how I tried to stay calm and never use
any invectives even though he kept insulting me in every post
and almost in every sentence.
Please also notice that I have not made him my foe
even after this farce.
If part of your private moderation system is
giving negative points to "foes of your friends"
then I would strongly suggest
giving this idea a second thought.
But still, I don't really see what bothers you about all this.
I have four freaks vs. only one fan and couldn't care less.
Like moderation, it's not intended to judge you personally;
it's only a system to improve people's Slashdot Experience (tm)
by letting them customize things a bit.
You claim that censoring my texts
improves your Slashdot Experience
and you ask why does it bother me?
It bothers me because I would prefer a constructive
critic.
But to be honest, I think it might have been better
if the friends/foes lists had been entirely private.
Any privacy of those lists would be impossible
with "foes of friends" and "friends of friends" as
all you would have to do is make some person
your only friend and you would instantly
know all of her friends and foes.
Your felling is not as paranoid as it might seem.
I actually made some experiments and their advertisements
seem to be correlated with the keywords I use in my searches.
That's why I routinely change cookies and User-Agent headers,
using lots of automated searches with
I use the friend/foe system as a sort of private moderation system; I don't consider persons on my "foes" list to be my enemies, just as I don't have regular beers with most folks on my "friends" list.
Good. I just thought for a while that I might've
insulted you or otherwise written something inappropriate even though that was never my intention.
I add people to my foes list when I think they're talking bullshit. Conservatives, extremely close-minded Christians, people with big egos and all possible combinations of these are nominees for my foes list.
That would mean that I couldn't possibly be farther from being a nominee for your foe,
yet I have strangely become one nonetheless.
As much as I'd love to believe otherwise,
it suerly looks more like something personal.
In your case, if I remember correctly, it was your tendency to post AC replies to your own posts.
I don't know what are you talking about.
But since you actually seem to be making some sense lately, consider yourself un-foed;-)
Thank you. That was very kind.
If I ever stop making sense again,
please tell me about it before calling me a foe in front of the whole Slashdot community.
As to the google/gmail issue, I find it pretty scary too. Google/Orkut/Gmail are very easy to wire together internally, creating a potential for abuse that's possibly greater than that of Microsoft's monopoly since it also tends to attract the tech-savvy. It's just that Google tries to market its tech as unobtrusive, user-friendly and still powerful; and as such would never want to be remotely associated with spam, as you suggested.
Fair enough.
I'd like to apologize Google for that
accusation.
Even though I'm a regular user, I never seem to be able to get rid of the feeling that Google & Co might be a very carefully crafted Trojan Horse, conceiling a system that monitors everything every user does to detect [terrorist/anti-american/your sin here] leanings and place them on some New World Order blacklist.
Your felling is not as paranoid as it might seem.
I actually made some experiments and their advertisements seem to be correlated with the keywords I use in my searches.
That's why I routinely change cookies and User-Agent headers, using lots of automated searches with random keywords.
It seems to work so far.
But I often think that maybe if I wasn't using anonymous proxies, they could track my IP. I don't know.
Is it really not forbidden?
on
Weapons in Space
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Putting weapons in earth orbit is not forbidden by any treaty or law.
I thought it was
forbidden by the
Brannigan's law
and the
Democratic Order of Planets.
Choices are hard for most of less intelligent people. Any choices, not necessarily those related to computer software or even the technology as a whole.
I suspect that you have it backwards; it's the intelligent people who have problems with too many choices. They see the options, the details, etc, and tend to get lost in all the minutiae.
Yes, but the intelligent people have much more powerful minds which help them find the way out.
The problems are objectively more complex, but the problem-solving capabilities are at least proportionally higher.
People who don't see all the options have it easier.
Don't forget that even though those
choices they make may seem laughably easy for you and me, they might actually be very hard for those poor simpletons nonetheless.
One more thing:
No one ever got fired for buying IBM...
That is simply not true.
I have personally fired few people for doing just that. Actually, I have fired them mostly because of buying Microsoft software installed on IBM boxen, but I have fired them nonetheless.
So please stop spreading that myth.
Yeesh, Ph.D.'s. Just proves you can be trained like a poodle, not that you can think.
Could you please explain that supposed proof?
I honestly fail to follow your reasoning.
Why do I think that this
idea has something in common with
killall(1) implementation
on Solaris,
considering its possible destructive
effects?
Funny jokes aside, I really think
this migh not be a smart move for Sun.
I think they should think about it before
they finally roll it out.
I might've overreacted a little bit. When I read that I have to give them my address, this whole "gigabyte email" idea instantly started to look much scarier than ever before.
(As a sidenote I might ask: why have you made me your foe? I seriously cannot remember ever insulting you.)
I would be first in line to buy hosting on Google clusters.
If they are planning to offer virtual servers running Debian GNU/Hurd, Debian GNU/Linux, EROS or OpenBSD with fool root access,
I am willing to instantly move all of my domains to Google, even if it costs more than my current provider.
Do you hear me, Google?
(Do you hear me, my current provider?)
What do you people think? Whould that be a good idea? Google might actually become Internet! Seriously. They are capable of hosting everything. Imagine how it would simplify spidering and indexing.
Yes, it's real. The 1000 MB storage limit is listed at the GMail homepage here.
If you are ainterested in an account, you can give them you current e-mail here
and they will send information once GMail goes gold.
Also note that Firefox and Mozilla support is explicitly mentioned!
Right, of course,
to get gigabyte email
let me just give my email to them! I think gigabyte of spam is exactly what I need! (Oh, by the way, that was sarcasm!)
I've gone through my third tuxedo this week from diving through large glass windows. At least the last window had a pool in the courtyard two stories below. Luckily though, the Russians didn't get the prototype chip from me. Once I plug that into my homebrew kit, I should be able to decode the hot new NSA encryption.
Heh, back in my day we didn't have windows, and we were grateful.
For those who don't know that with that interface it takes many hours to copy and decrypt two or three files
(and there are no more objects in the system than maybe half a dozen, imagine a real filesystem with gigabytes of data in hundreds of thousands of files)
download
Beneath a Steel Sky CD Version or Floppy Version and play it with ScummVM.
It's a great game, even though that interface is nothing but a joke, like most of things there.
Actually, I was dreaming about this kind of User Interface ever since I played the classic "Beneath Steel Sky" graphical adventure. In this game, the player enters a virtual reality system to perform certain file management functions (basically, find an encrypted file and decrypt it). The game designers created a beautiful and consistent interface just for the game sake and I always wanted to have a real file manager like this.
Yes, that would be a great idea.
I am still dreaming about exactly this kind of User Interface.
"Boss, it was a hard week! I copied two files and even renamed one of them! Oh, God, I really need some vacation!"
A man can dream though, a man can dream...
[...]
Real leet0 ninja teams would have to sneak around (hide logs) via thief or hitman to avoid the security (IDS's) to locate the files they were looking for. If they set off a laser tripwire (Snortbox) the Counter-Terrorists (Secret Service) would be notified and they'd start spawning in on the maps a la "The Matrix". It'd be a huge gunfight, file fragments would be flying everywhere, and people would be dropping off-line left and right while plugged into their Nebuchadnezzar-like chairs.
It seems that "The Neuromancer" is closer to actualization than I ever imagined.
My God,
you are clearly brainwashed after watching
to many "hacker" movies.
I might suggest reading
Phrack to
see how it really works.
It would be great if life was like a violent video game, but it unfortunately is not.
I can assure you that both sides of network security is just sitting in a dark room staring in a terminal window, writing text and reading text. There is no blood, there are no explosions, we are not muscular machos and hot chicks don't give a damn what we do. Welcome to the real world.
Well, call me old-fashioned, but I personally find the CLIt o be the most intuitive and enjoyable interface. What can be more intuitivet han writing and reading? Have anyone done any productivity benchmarkscomparing those new 3-D file managers to CLI and standard 2-D GUI? Wouldn't 3-D GUI make sense only to someone who sees in 4-D? Seriously, I don't know if that is really a future of Linux on the desktop. But then again, what do I know, I like Bash which is totally "uncool" by today standards, even though I can do most of the things 8 times faster than with GUI. Still, it might be a good project to use in hacker movies, to make them more exciting. I personally look forward, but I am not holding my breath.
Sorry if I am misinformed
(I only use plain Vesa standard X11 drivers) but is it really a problem that there is an annoying new functionality if anyone can disable it? How long before a patch starts circulating? Isn't that the true power of open suorce and Linux that we are the ones who control our OSen, not them?
I have one question: does it scale well enough to work with pornography? From the ethical point of view I suerely hope it doesn't, nevertheless it might be the only advantage which could ever make it more popular than Google. Of course the described example of automotive parts is obviously an exaggeration, for the last thing I want looking for a new carburetor is an ingnition exheust manifield of similar shape, but it is a very interesting idea nonetheless, like most of inventions
developed by engineers at Purdue University
I have seen so far. Great article.
All that having been said,
as much as I love to read such arguments like
this
one
[...]
I am afraid I just forgot what was my point...
[...]
I know it was something unquestionably insightful.
I have recalled what it was.
It is a continuation of my
previous
thought. I wrote, I quote:
As it become obvious that every imaginable philosophy,
religion, cult or opinion---no matter how wrong or ridiculous---is
represented by lots of otherwise intelligent people,
the conclusion is obvious:
any further continuation of
the argumentum ad verecundiam
and ad hominem mixture
makes no sense any more, as the
simple genetic fallacy alone becomes unsound.
At this point we already know there are smart/good
(as well as dumb/evil)
people representing both (or more) sides
(no matter where the line is).
What can we do now?
Of course, the only possible way is to count
how many people there are who represent
any given opinion.
This is, in turn,
argumentum ad populum
also known as the "bandwagon fallacy."
The most popular opinion wins.
Now, please let me continue this thought.
Of course such a reasoning
might not be stricte what we all usually understand
as a pure argumentum ad populum per se, for it is a very
specific populum of the greatest scientists
we are examining,
as we started from argumentum ad verecundiam
and this is just a quantitative examination of both sides popularity
and the strenght thereof,
so the "bandwagon" metaphor might be highly misleading,
if not wrong.
It might not be a fallacious reasoning to
examine the results of our "scientific popularity contest,"
so to speak,
(at least not more than the democracy itself is)
and actually might be considered to form a premiss
of a perfectly valid inductive argument, however
it is very unfavorable for anyone who tries to use it
as a basis for a sound pro-God argument,
because the percentage of God believers
(and those who believe in any form of immortality,
for that matter) in the scientific community
is not only low, but also quickly decreasing:
If that trend continues, the percentage of God believers
among scientists might sadly become statistically insignificant
and thus irrelevant before the end of the 21st century,
or during the first decades of the 22nd century.
Now, the original point I was trying to make is as follows.
The most popular interpretation of your signature
forms an argumentum ad verecundiam
which can only result
(and indeed often results, as we have seen in numerous
discussions it had started)
in people providing counter-arguments of the same form,
showing examples of great scientists who do not believe in God.
At this point we can only use statistics as a mean to
examine those examples as inductive arguments,
and those very statistics are strongly against God, who
exists only in the minds of less than 7% of scientists,
decreasing every year.
One might explain it with the fact that science was very successful
in explaining the world effectively rende
Slashdot Mirror
Thank God it is only a mini design flaw! I thought for a while that it might be some major flaw. Fortunately, that was not the case. I can sleep tonight.
It is suboptimal with defining grammars and writing lexers, parsers and compilers. At least it is not as good as Lex and Yacc or Bison. Fortunately, it will change.
I think that the public needs to be more educated about the alternatives to the monopoly which controls the machines all around us, as well as about the monopoly itself and the harm that it does.
First of all, they should finally learn about the monopoly itself. The most important facts can be found on the Microsoft Financial Fraud Update website by Bill Parish. MSFT is basically a pyramid scheme. It has to collapse some day. I find it much more likely than the suicide.
Does Pearl, a robot specifically designed to help old people, run Perl, a language specifically designed to help old people think they have already lost their minds?
That's it! After reading this article about Linux babes, I decided to install BSD right now!
It must be this script kiddie porn I've been hearing so much about...
Couldn't we use the security flag from RFC 3514 for that? It would make as much sense as the broadcast flag, but would be more general. Why new flag?
I cannot be sure about that, for I have no idea who you are, now can I?
Not only boring but also childish and stupid.
Incidentally, if you'd like to know exactly when and why your good friend GooberToo made me his foe, you should read this thread. He has called me an "idiot" and "dolt" dozens of times using such phrases as:
as a supposed refutation of my reasoning. Finally, this: "You are the first dolt, to ever make my foe list. What an idiot." is his sophisticated explanation of the reason why I became his foe, which you today consider to be an argument against my person in your private moderation system ruled by personal preferences of people like GooberToo.
Please read all of my and GooberToo's posts of this thread and draw your own conclusions. You will see how I tried to stay calm and never use any invectives even though he kept insulting me in every post and almost in every sentence. Please also notice that I have not made him my foe even after this farce. If part of your private moderation system is giving negative points to "foes of your friends" then I would strongly suggest giving this idea a second thought.
You claim that censoring my texts improves your Slashdot Experience and you ask why does it bother me? It bothers me because I would prefer a constructive critic.
Any privacy of those lists would be impossible with "foes of friends" and "friends of friends" as all you would have to do is make some person your only friend and you would instantly know all of her friends and foes.
Good. I just thought for a while that I might've insulted you or otherwise written something inappropriate even though that was never my intention.
That would mean that I couldn't possibly be farther from being a nominee for your foe, yet I have strangely become one nonetheless. As much as I'd love to believe otherwise, it suerly looks more like something personal.
I don't know what are you talking about.
Thank you. That was very kind. If I ever stop making sense again, please tell me about it before calling me a foe in front of the whole Slashdot community.
Fair enough. I'd like to apologize Google for that accusation.
Your felling is not as paranoid as it might seem. I actually made some experiments and their advertisements seem to be correlated with the keywords I use in my searches. That's why I routinely change cookies and User-Agent headers, using lots of automated searches with random keywords. It seems to work so far. But I often think that maybe if I wasn't using anonymous proxies, they could track my IP. I don't know.
Putting weapons in earth orbit is not forbidden by any treaty or law.
I thought it was forbidden by the Brannigan's law and the Democratic Order of Planets.
Yes, but the intelligent people have much more powerful minds which help them find the way out. The problems are objectively more complex, but the problem-solving capabilities are at least proportionally higher.
Don't forget that even though those choices they make may seem laughably easy for you and me, they might actually be very hard for those poor simpletons nonetheless.
That is simply not true. I have personally fired few people for doing just that. Actually, I have fired them mostly because of buying Microsoft software installed on IBM boxen, but I have fired them nonetheless. So please stop spreading that myth.
Could you please explain that supposed proof? I honestly fail to follow your reasoning.
Why do I think that this idea has something in common with killall(1) implementation on Solaris, considering its possible destructive effects? Funny jokes aside, I really think this migh not be a smart move for Sun. I think they should think about it before they finally roll it out.
I might've overreacted a little bit. When I read that I have to give them my address, this whole "gigabyte email" idea instantly started to look much scarier than ever before. (As a sidenote I might ask: why have you made me your foe? I seriously cannot remember ever insulting you.)
I would be first in line to buy hosting on Google clusters. If they are planning to offer virtual servers running Debian GNU/Hurd, Debian GNU/Linux, EROS or OpenBSD with fool root access, I am willing to instantly move all of my domains to Google, even if it costs more than my current provider.
Do you hear me, Google?
(Do you hear me, my current provider?)
What do you people think? Whould that be a good idea? Google might actually become Internet! Seriously. They are capable of hosting everything. Imagine how it would simplify spidering and indexing.
Right, of course, to get gigabyte email let me just give my email to them! I think gigabyte of spam is exactly what I need! (Oh, by the way, that was sarcasm!)
Heh, back in my day we didn't have windows, and we were grateful.
Those are great links, but please use HTML <a href="..."> tags to make them clickable, like this:
That way people can just click on them instead of creating new tab, copying, pasting, remembering to remove the spaces inserted by Slashcode, etc.
For those who don't know that with that interface it takes many hours to copy and decrypt two or three files (and there are no more objects in the system than maybe half a dozen, imagine a real filesystem with gigabytes of data in hundreds of thousands of files) download Beneath a Steel Sky CD Version or Floppy Version and play it with ScummVM. It's a great game, even though that interface is nothing but a joke, like most of things there.
Yes, that would be a great idea. I am still dreaming about exactly this kind of User Interface. "Boss, it was a hard week! I copied two files and even renamed one of them! Oh, God, I really need some vacation!" A man can dream though, a man can dream...
My God, you are clearly brainwashed after watching to many "hacker" movies. I might suggest reading Phrack to see how it really works. It would be great if life was like a violent video game, but it unfortunately is not. I can assure you that both sides of network security is just sitting in a dark room staring in a terminal window, writing text and reading text. There is no blood, there are no explosions, we are not muscular machos and hot chicks don't give a damn what we do. Welcome to the real world.
Well, call me old-fashioned, but I personally find the CLIt o be the most intuitive and enjoyable interface. What can be more intuitivet han writing and reading? Have anyone done any productivity benchmarkscomparing those new 3-D file managers to CLI and standard 2-D GUI? Wouldn't 3-D GUI make sense only to someone who sees in 4-D? Seriously, I don't know if that is really a future of Linux on the desktop. But then again, what do I know, I like Bash which is totally "uncool" by today standards, even though I can do most of the things 8 times faster than with GUI. Still, it might be a good project to use in hacker movies, to make them more exciting. I personally look forward, but I am not holding my breath.
Sorry if I am misinformed (I only use plain Vesa standard X11 drivers) but is it really a problem that there is an annoying new functionality if anyone can disable it? How long before a patch starts circulating? Isn't that the true power of open suorce and Linux that we are the ones who control our OSen, not them?
I have one question: does it scale well enough to work with pornography? From the ethical point of view I suerely hope it doesn't, nevertheless it might be the only advantage which could ever make it more popular than Google. Of course the described example of automotive parts is obviously an exaggeration, for the last thing I want looking for a new carburetor is an ingnition exheust manifield of similar shape, but it is a very interesting idea nonetheless, like most of inventions developed by engineers at Purdue University I have seen so far. Great article.
I have recalled what it was. It is a continuation of my previous thought. I wrote, I quote:
Now, please let me continue this thought. Of course such a reasoning might not be stricte what we all usually understand as a pure argumentum ad populum per se, for it is a very specific populum of the greatest scientists we are examining, as we started from argumentum ad verecundiam and this is just a quantitative examination of both sides popularity and the strenght thereof, so the "bandwagon" metaphor might be highly misleading, if not wrong.
It might not be a fallacious reasoning to examine the results of our "scientific popularity contest," so to speak, (at least not more than the democracy itself is) and actually might be considered to form a premiss of a perfectly valid inductive argument, however it is very unfavorable for anyone who tries to use it as a basis for a sound pro-God argument, because the percentage of God believers (and those who believe in any form of immortality, for that matter) in the scientific community is not only low, but also quickly decreasing:
God:
||||||||||||| _____________________________________ 1914
||||||| ___________________________________________ 1933
||| _______________________________________________ 1998
Immortality:
||||||||||||||||| _________________________________ 1914
||||||||| _________________________________________ 1933
||| _______________________________________________ 1998
(Source: Nature Journal: table, article)
If that trend continues, the percentage of God believers among scientists might sadly become statistically insignificant and thus irrelevant before the end of the 21st century, or during the first decades of the 22nd century.
Now, the original point I was trying to make is as follows. The most popular interpretation of your signature forms an argumentum ad verecundiam which can only result (and indeed often results, as we have seen in numerous discussions it had started) in people providing counter-arguments of the same form, showing examples of great scientists who do not believe in God. At this point we can only use statistics as a mean to examine those examples as inductive arguments, and those very statistics are strongly against God, who exists only in the minds of less than 7% of scientists, decreasing every year. One might explain it with the fact that science was very successful in explaining the world effectively rende