If you remember when semi-protection was introduced, it was only going to apply on a short-term basis to the barest number of pages.
If you're browsing major topics on Wikipedia sometime, glance in the upper-right-hand corner at the silver lock which means that the page is semi-protected. It's gotten so common that they took to using a little generic icon instead of a text snippet explaining what's going on.
Why? Because some admin decides that His Way is the Only Way. And there we are. It'll happen here too, mark my words.
The problem is that Wikipedia can't decide what its focus is. It can't decide whether or not it's an encyclopaedia that focuses subjects of universal importance with a large number of eyes on each subject, or a central clearinghouse for pop culture and trivialities.
So what you end up with is what we have: patches of admin and users on each side defending their own little piece of ideological turf and leading to a heinously uneven project that ranges from brilliant to utterly useless.
Most of them advertise XP/Vista compatability, but that's not always entirely true. Freespace and Freespace 2, for example, say that they work with XP and Vista and do so long as your computer doesn't have more than three gigabytes of RAM. Their support was unhelpful as well: I sent in the bug report, got one message back asking me a question, I sent back an answer, and never heard from them again.
I eventually found the cause of the problem via Google, luckily. Now, in this particular case the Freespace open source project meant that I could play it anyway, but it's something to bear in mind when you're dropping six bucks on 'Redneck Rampage'.
To be fair, shuffling machines in some games (blackjack being the most notorious) can reduce your chances against the house. They speed up the games being dealt, which obviously increases your rate of loss, and they also remove the only way for a player to get an advantage over the house by card-counting systems.
If you want a perfect game of blackjack, you'll want to go with hand shuffling at a casino you can trust to play a straight game - most major North American and Western European gaming destinations fit the bill.
Which is why it works so boringly. No crashes, no wacky untested software with potentially unrealised bugs, no fancy memory-sapping 3D effects... where's the fun in that?
People don't drive into rush hour congestion because they like sitting around in their car waiting for lights to turn green. They drive into rush hour congestion because they have places to go, and because if you can avoid it, public transit is by and by large garbage. Congestion charging won't stop people from driving into work so they can save a few bucks by climbing onto a cramped bus next to the homeless people, in the same way that rising fuel prices hasn't led to the abandonment of automotive or airplane travel.
There's nothing inherently wrong with just trying to grab the cash. What's immoral is trying to hide it beneath a thin veneer of social engineering. If a government wants to yank up additional revenue by gouging commuting in the same way it gouges everything else, then at least have the balls to be straightforward about it.
Everybody mumbling about how this guy was fired for having his opinions should bear in mind that, as his company is doing strategy for a Clinton competitor for the Democratic presidential nomination, the sight of a guy making viral videos ragging on her could hint at a pretty big conflict of interest and serious public relations trouble. While it's sad that a guy lost his job for this, it's understandable.
...they can rot for all I care. There's plenty of stuff out there which targets power users that people who forget to plug their computer in could never handle, this is just going to be one more. That said, you know the feds are going to have the "master password", because if there's one thing that's bad, it's liberty. That is my main concern.
Despite the liberal attitudes to intellectual property here on slashdot, slashdot is not the mainstream public. So has anyone considered that there are in fact millions of people out there who have an actual social conscience, and get rid of files that they've illegally pirated?
Social conscience? Sheesh, then they deserve what they get.
No need to. You proved it yourself by this post, which required at least a networking subsystem and console access to HTTP.:-)
Ah, unless he was accessing Slashdot from another terminal! There's always a way out of any hole, as long as you stop digging.
Then again, there's always the chance that he meant he deleted literally everything. In which case, my typing a reply on Slashdot right now is merely a cruel illusion and I should get off the heroin.
As has been pointed out, it's possible that their coinage was simply lost in the system. To me, the irony of Microsoft being the recepient of bad design is delicious.
The irony is that it would probably cost less to get a POP3 account than to renew passport.com.
But, of course, the guy was just using it as a spam trap. And I'm sure you don't need me to tell you this, but Hotmail is the universe's ultimate spam trap.
I actually think that, for gaming, Windows XP Telnet is a bit of an improvement. I mean, don't get me wrong, it still sucks more buttock than...er, a buttock-sucking vacuum...but it's a damned improvement over the old Telnet that might have been useful on your TRS-80 but is just really sad in the modern world.
Who's the moron who moderated that sockpuppet as "insightful"? Spam is THEFT of ressources and as such is CRIMINAL
I agree with the second sentence but not the first. Somebody can be insightful and still be wrong. They're just bringing another argument to the table, aka 'intelligent debate'.
Do they have taxes in Canadia? I may just move my biz there, and get health insurance!!!
Like you wouldn't believe. Well, maybe you'd believe it. But we have them. Plus, our 7% goods and services tax. Woo.
However, we don't have to worry about Internet taxation. So you should move up here. Unless you're an undesirable, in which case, I doubt Costa Rica has Internet taxes.
One hZ? What the hell sort of supercomputer are you going on about there? Sheesh, back when we ran our computer by sticking our head in the CPU and flicking little switches on or off, so it would take the better part of a millennium to play a single game of Pong, that was computing!
On a mildly more serious notice, as a Canadian, I had no idea this guy ever did what he did. And I like to think that I'm reasonably well up on Canadian history and Canadian inventors. But this one...which could have been a very big development in the history of personal computing...was quite beyond my knowledge.
Makes you wonder how many other 'unsung geniuses' there are lying around in the shadows.
Slashdot Mirror
...my first concern would honestly be that my educators seem to be shit at both business and economics.
China and other totalitarian dictatorships haven't exactly been restrained in their executions regardless of the profit motive.
If you remember when semi-protection was introduced, it was only going to apply on a short-term basis to the barest number of pages.
If you're browsing major topics on Wikipedia sometime, glance in the upper-right-hand corner at the silver lock which means that the page is semi-protected. It's gotten so common that they took to using a little generic icon instead of a text snippet explaining what's going on.
Why? Because some admin decides that His Way is the Only Way. And there we are. It'll happen here too, mark my words.
The problem is that Wikipedia can't decide what its focus is. It can't decide whether or not it's an encyclopaedia that focuses subjects of universal importance with a large number of eyes on each subject, or a central clearinghouse for pop culture and trivialities.
So what you end up with is what we have: patches of admin and users on each side defending their own little piece of ideological turf and leading to a heinously uneven project that ranges from brilliant to utterly useless.
Most of them advertise XP/Vista compatability, but that's not always entirely true. Freespace and Freespace 2, for example, say that they work with XP and Vista and do so long as your computer doesn't have more than three gigabytes of RAM. Their support was unhelpful as well: I sent in the bug report, got one message back asking me a question, I sent back an answer, and never heard from them again.
I eventually found the cause of the problem via Google, luckily. Now, in this particular case the Freespace open source project meant that I could play it anyway, but it's something to bear in mind when you're dropping six bucks on 'Redneck Rampage'.
To be fair, shuffling machines in some games (blackjack being the most notorious) can reduce your chances against the house. They speed up the games being dealt, which obviously increases your rate of loss, and they also remove the only way for a player to get an advantage over the house by card-counting systems.
If you want a perfect game of blackjack, you'll want to go with hand shuffling at a casino you can trust to play a straight game - most major North American and Western European gaming destinations fit the bill.
Which is why it works so boringly. No crashes, no wacky untested software with potentially unrealised bugs, no fancy memory-sapping 3D effects... where's the fun in that?
People don't drive into rush hour congestion because they like sitting around in their car waiting for lights to turn green. They drive into rush hour congestion because they have places to go, and because if you can avoid it, public transit is by and by large garbage. Congestion charging won't stop people from driving into work so they can save a few bucks by climbing onto a cramped bus next to the homeless people, in the same way that rising fuel prices hasn't led to the abandonment of automotive or airplane travel. There's nothing inherently wrong with just trying to grab the cash. What's immoral is trying to hide it beneath a thin veneer of social engineering. If a government wants to yank up additional revenue by gouging commuting in the same way it gouges everything else, then at least have the balls to be straightforward about it.
Everybody mumbling about how this guy was fired for having his opinions should bear in mind that, as his company is doing strategy for a Clinton competitor for the Democratic presidential nomination, the sight of a guy making viral videos ragging on her could hint at a pretty big conflict of interest and serious public relations trouble. While it's sad that a guy lost his job for this, it's understandable.
...they can rot for all I care. There's plenty of stuff out there which targets power users that people who forget to plug their computer in could never handle, this is just going to be one more. That said, you know the feds are going to have the "master password", because if there's one thing that's bad, it's liberty. That is my main concern.
Despite the liberal attitudes to intellectual property here on slashdot, slashdot is not the mainstream public. So has anyone considered that there are in fact millions of people out there who have an actual social conscience, and get rid of files that they've illegally pirated?
Social conscience? Sheesh, then they deserve what they get.
No need to. You proved it yourself by this post, which required at least a networking subsystem and console access to HTTP. :-)
Ah, unless he was accessing Slashdot from another terminal! There's always a way out of any hole, as long as you stop digging.
Then again, there's always the chance that he meant he deleted literally everything. In which case, my typing a reply on Slashdot right now is merely a cruel illusion and I should get off the heroin.
As has been pointed out, it's possible that their coinage was simply lost in the system. To me, the irony of Microsoft being the recepient of bad design is delicious.
The irony is that it would probably cost less to get a POP3 account than to renew passport.com.
But, of course, the guy was just using it as a spam trap. And I'm sure you don't need me to tell you this, but Hotmail is the universe's ultimate spam trap.
No, individuals are smart, people as a whole are stupid. (And yes, that includes here.)
Okay, I can accept that.
Because (most) people are rabidly stupid.
I actually think that, for gaming, Windows XP Telnet is a bit of an improvement. I mean, don't get me wrong, it still sucks more buttock than...er, a buttock-sucking vacuum...but it's a damned improvement over the old Telnet that might have been useful on your TRS-80 but is just really sad in the modern world.
But Windows XP telnet is bearable. Is the point.
Who's the moron who moderated that sockpuppet as "insightful"? Spam is THEFT of ressources and as such is CRIMINAL
I agree with the second sentence but not the first. Somebody can be insightful and still be wrong. They're just bringing another argument to the table, aka 'intelligent debate'.
Like you wouldn't believe. Well, maybe you'd believe it. But we have them. Plus, our 7% goods and services tax. Woo.
However, we don't have to worry about Internet taxation. So you should move up here. Unless you're an undesirable, in which case, I doubt Costa Rica has Internet taxes.
One hZ? What the hell sort of supercomputer are you going on about there? Sheesh, back when we ran our computer by sticking our head in the CPU and flicking little switches on or off, so it would take the better part of a millennium to play a single game of Pong, that was computing! On a mildly more serious notice, as a Canadian, I had no idea this guy ever did what he did. And I like to think that I'm reasonably well up on Canadian history and Canadian inventors. But this one...which could have been a very big development in the history of personal computing...was quite beyond my knowledge. Makes you wonder how many other 'unsung geniuses' there are lying around in the shadows.