Every time we get a story about technology adoption in the developing world, we seem to get a few people saying stuff like "They don't need cellphones/cars/fax machines/other tech toy we use for frivoulous stuff". Look, just because we use a technology for mundane uses in the west does not mean that people can use it for important things in the developing world. Look, most of the printed publications in the west are trashy tabloids and dime novels, does that mean you would like people in the developing world to go without printing presses?
Here is my favorite example of computer usage in the third world: Somali internet cafes
Some quotes from the link to the pictures:
I export livestock such as sheep, goats, fish and camels to Dubai. I am sending invoices to my customers by e-mail, which is much quicker than the phone and you can include more details.
Or this woman: I am a nurse at Bannadir Hospital. I have come to check my e-mails.... Sometimes, I find some interesting new research about nursing, medicines or mid-wifery on the internet. Then I print it out and take it back to the hospital.
So obviously, just because we use it to send pointless jokes and play games does not make computers a useless luxury. They are a tool, just like phones or printing presses. There might even be a Slashdot-type collaborrative news site that gives useful information on how to improve developing communities.:)
Uh, keep in mind he will be starting and ending in Canada and travelling across the U.S., and therefore subject to a bunch of different state and federal laws regarding guns (I assume that's what you meant by the 45?). I doubt bringing a firearm will help him very much. A 45oz, on the other hand...
Also, he doesn't really make it clear what kinds of places he'll be travelling - out in the woods, or along urban areas, etc. If he keeps to the roads, I doubt he'll ever need a water purification kit.
I would also recommend a physical map, as opposed to a PDA that could break. Maybe also a address book in paper, so he doesn't lose important contat info when he drops his PDA or runs out of power.
I was in the process of getting my company, a Fortune 500 company in the defense sector with global operations, to switch major IT components to open source software. I had proposed that we switch our current nightmarish mix of Windows NT, 2000, XP, VMS, AIX, IIS, MSSQL, Oracle, Sybase,.Net, C++, VB, ActiveX, Java, Snobol, COBOL, Punch cards, and a giant wall of post-it notes with Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl.
The management was very worried about the level of support, but of course I assured them that we could do everything in-house. Then, they were worried that Linux and the "free software hippie crowd" was too unprofessional, and we would lose prestiege using their products. I had assured them that you guys were clean-cut, well-adjusted young men dedicatted to the scholarly task of Software Engineering, and was showing them around the F/OSS sites to prove my point. Everything was going well, until I came to Slashdot.
First, a wall of pink assaulted their eyes, and a collective gasp came out of the wall of grey suits in the conference room. Then the "OMG!!! Ponies!!!" tagline slowly sank in, and before I could react, they had noticed the very unprofessional line of emoticons (against Company Information Technology Policy CITP-0034A-1), and use of official sites to convey personal messages (against Company Information Technology Policy CITP-1138-THX). I panicked, and started to explain that there must be something wrong, they must have been hacked by teenage girls or something, but before I could go further, The Chairman Himself spoke up. He said, "My god, either they're a bunch of preverts an hemos-"(I think he meant homos)"-or they've been pwn3d by some little girlies!" (I'm still not sure if I heard him say 'pwn3d'-maybe I imagined it in the stress of the moment).
The Chairman then went on to explain that there was no way that our company, a respectable organization founded by, and still run by, patriotic God-fearing Anglo-Saxon males, could get mixed up with such a deviant and preverted group of people, and there was no way we could trust any software from 'men' such as these, no sir. The company's Open Source project was quietly shut down after that, and now they've even removed FireFox and gone back to "Good old-fashioned American-as-apple-pie Internet Explorer".
Now I have been fired, and sent to Guantanamo Bay for treasonous actions such as mine. I was able to smuggle a Commie 64 here up my ass, though, and my cellmate Junis from Afghanistan has been showing me how to use it to browse the web and get to Slashdot.
Dear God, my life sucks now. And it's all because of YOU, Taco!
Nah, they should have just set it in Iraq, and involve dragging Japanese soldiers into battle against their will. That would be really popular over there.
Oh, and their other launch titles should have been "Grand Theft Auto: Jap Car Smashing", "Fable II: The RPG With No Bishies, Schoolgirls or Giant Robots", "Medal of Honor: The Yellow Peril", and "Stomp Baby Puppies To Prove Your Manhood III".
It might also help if their marketing ran a lot of ads snickering that the PS2 and GC are less fun because "their controllers are smaller".
... and slightly less gay than the Apple color scheme.
But we need more than just a color scheme to get in touch with our femine side - I suggest new mod options.
"+1 Hug!" "+1 You GO, Girl!" "+1 Uh huh, I know what you're going through" "+1 Oh, really like that shirt, where did you get it?" "+1 My boyfriend does that too! Men are such pigs!"
"-1 Talk to the mod, the user ain't listening" "-1 WhatEVER!" "-1 Oh sorry, I have to go paint my nails now"
Like anything else on the internet, it's not that it wasn't physically possible before, it's just that it's so much more convienient and fast that you end up with a lot more of it.
I had about 5 Gigs of porn total on my machines last time I checked. Since images are usually less than 500k and movies less than 10MB (at least the free stuff), I would imagine it's close to 10,000 images. To have that much porn physically would likely require a whole bookshelf of porn. In the 60's and 70's (and today, if you actually had a physical bookshelf), that would cost a lot of money and time to collect, and was well out of the reach of any highschooler.
The whole point is that ease of access is so great, that any high school kid can get his hands on more porn in more categories for less money than was possible in the past. Hell, look at Goatse or Tubgurl - how hard do you think porn of that sort was to get in the 60's? I'm sure it existed, but you'd have to jump through some hoops to get it back then. Now kids post links to them and try to trick their friends into clicking on them in the highschool lab.
It's like how porn movies exploded after the VCR was invented and people didn't have to deal with going to a theater and hang out with other horny guys. Now any sort of porn is available without having to go to a porn store and deal with some clerk who might smirk at your tastes or ask for proof of age.
Porn has been around since people figured out how to drraw, but to pretend that the amount of porn available to a man or teen hasn't changed in the past 20 years is to be in denial as much as the anti-porn crusaders.
I much prefer playing "Tr0n", myself. You haven't seen naked women until you've seen them lit up with neon and derezzing each other with frisbees while jumping and tumbling in gladiatorial combat.
If only there was some way to get *inside* the computer with them...
I definitely have to agree with the parent post - porn is prevalent now, it's just a part of the cultural background for kids these days. Even for girls, I suspect a lot of them at see at least a little porn to see what guys are like. I know I had a friend in high school who was asked to buy some porn of men for some girls.
I would be much more interested in the incidence of actual creation of porn among kids(okay, that came out sounding totally wrong:) ).
The prevailance of digital cameras are really changing things, like it or not. Kids are much more likely to play around with making dirty pictures of themselves if they know they don't have to get it developed.
I remember in high school some friends taking photos of themselves in their bras just for fun, so it's not like girls don't like to tease and get attention. Then there are the guys who would try to covertly try to film their girlfriends, or pressure them into doing stuff they might not want to.
I would worry that kids do not have the maturity to think through the consequences of their actions, and their effects on other people's feelings. None of the porn-related behavior I saw in high school bothered me, but the people who were obviously getting sex and flaunting it did. It got to the point that kids would be basically talk about having orgies in front of me, and make it plain that I wasn't invited. When you're a teenager, that takes a toll on your self-esteem that makes being snubbed by the in-crowd seem minor in comparison. I think adults would have had enough discretion not to discuss it in front of people who weren't in on it, at least.
But yeah, people might say that we had the sexual revolution in the 60's, but high school has been getting a bit more liberated since then. Even the fact that we can discuss the rights of homosexuals and other sexual minorities in high school is a big step, even if they haven't been totally accepted. I only wish our Sex Ed cirriculum was keeping up, but I suppose how far behind it was is a sign of how big the cultural gap between generations is.
You know, Europe would look a lot less hypocritical over this free speech thing if they didn't go around arresting people for denying the holocaust. The holocaust is probobly the best-recorded genocide in history, yet the governments want to lock up people who deny it, a totally unnessicary move if you believe in free speech and debate. Yeah, way to go, Europe, land of the free!
The quote from Voltaire is supposed to be "I may disagree with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it". The arguments I've been hearing from Europe seem to be more along the lines of "Well, we agree with the cartoons, so they have a right to print them". Their support of free speech would be much more convincing if they actually printed things that they would find offensive, like antisemitic cartoons. The editor of Jyllands-Posten that printed the Muhammed cartoons has been suspended for offering to print holocaust denial cartoons. IIRC, in many European countries it is still illegal to burn the national flag.
The cries of "Help, help, we're being opressed!" from Europe sound rather hollow - especially as the deaths occuring from the protests are all on the protesters' side, and the implication that they are entitled to muslim's business. All this is taking away from the real oppression of muslims and non-muslims in countries such as Iran.
As far as your comment goes, what the muslim clerics and leaders want is something to rile up their people and have them hate the west instead of the shitty gov'ts at home (like Iran's). The muslim laypeople, on the other hand, hate the cartoons because they are pretty much designed to offend.
Seriously, what kind of reaction were they expecting? I remember when only Americans like Pat Robertson or Jack Chick would pull shit like this. Congratulations to Jyllands-Posten, for proving that Europeans are as stupid as Americans.
Slashdot's comments section has such a broken UI, I was actually thinking the other day to write a program to help me navigate it. Props to you for making that unnessisary.
I have some ideas about what is broken on Slashdot. Some of them would require actual site modifications to fix, other could be fixed with a browser extention.
If you want more bugs, how about:
- When I'm in the post writing screen, there is no text of the story or link to it, so I have to open Slashdot in another tab and go to the story to read it.
- The comments index is very, very broken. The "threshholds" concept's three drop-down menus (-1:5), (Threaded/Nested/Flat/No comments), (Oldest 1st/Newest 1st/Highest 1st/Oldest 1st Ignore threads/Newest 1st Ignore threads), and the "Comments spill at 50" concept interact in bizzare ways such that I don't even know what it's *trying* to do.
- I *hate* the fact that comments below your viewing threshhold are listed at the bottom of the thread level instead of between the posts that it was replying to and got a reply from. So you sometimes see people seemingly reply to themselves, or flaming others, but they are actually replying to something below your viewing threshhold. I've seen arguments start this way, because someone thinks a flame was directed at them instead of to the AC that replied to them earlier. Please. for the love of god, put in an indicator if there is a post below the threshhold that a post is replying to.
- I would like to be able to view the whole comments section as a threaded, subject-only(that is, no expanded posts) view, and open up individual posts which will open up in a nested, all-open veiw. Perhaps allow right-clicks on post titles should allow you to open up the comment and its follow-ups with any pre-specified threshhold options?
- Instead of three drop-down menus in the comment index, how about a list of rules which we can rearrange the order of to make settings? Might require AJAX.
- Slashdot's user prefs allow me to "bias" the moderation towards funny, or informative, or other moderation types, but it is a PITA to change it for each story. Some stories I want to read in "funny" mode, others I want to read in "Informative" mode. I should be able to change the bias to one of several presets like on an Winamp equalizer on a per-story basis.
Just be glad it isn't some bizzare PR backronym like the PATRIOT ACT. How about "America Protected Proactively Like Eagles Protecting Innocent Eaglets" Act, or APPLE PIE for short.
I bet congress would pass it without debate, just like they did for an obviously virtuous bill like the PATRIOT act. Whats the matter, are you against PATRIOTs, man?! What about APPLE PIE?!?!
I swear, law and military op names have been getting more and more riduculous for years.
Bah, that's nothing! I already heat my home with a nuclear fusion engine! It's so powerful I have to keep it 1 AU away from my house and rotate the Earth so I only get heated for half a day!
But I think it sustains all life on Earth or something. Goddamn freeloaders and leechers, wait 'til I figure out a way to bill for it.
Well, Usenet has had root-to-subdomain left to right ordering for some time, and it's done fine. In fact, it's a lot easier to browse newsgroups than websites by type.
I wish more apps had a "web ordering" mode for sorting directories, files, or bookmarks. I think there was a version of Firefox with that, but the current build I'm using doesn't seem to have it.
One reason is that it's easier to sort, since right now the server name goes from most detailed to least, while the directory structure behind it goes from least detailed to most. If you're a programmer, it's much easier to work with consistent ordering.
Another is that it makes organization of sites with many subdomains easier, especially sub-sub-domains. Imagine sorting through
It wouldn't suprise me if the media image is more than a little unrepresentative of the Arab or Islamic world.
As a Japanese man, I find it funny how many western geeks seem to think Japan is a country of sex-crazed otaku who live with realdolls and whack off to rape porn. Of course, Japanese think westerners are evil sex fiends because so many westerners who go over there seem to be obsessed with such things, or sex, or Asian women, and because of some high-profile rapes commited by American servicemen. Each culture focuses on the extreme cases found in the other culture, and think the whole culture is like that.
In reality, I would say that the west is more open about sexuality, but in Japan more 'extreme' forms of sexuality are lumped together with regular sex.
I suspect the Arab world is only about as violent as the west, usually not to Bin Laden levels. (Iraq excepted, it's still a warzone)
Sorry, but that is a really incorrect way of categorizing people - it's like saying that one can be a father or a son, but not both at the same time. Or doing transit planning and categorizing people as 'drivers' or 'pedestrians', without accounting for the fact that people will choose one in some circumstances, and the other in different circumstances.
All contributors are users first, but not all users end up as contributors. Obviously, one needs to be familiar with the software or wiki before one starts putting one's own ideas in, so all contributors must be users. There is no point in chiding people for being only users, because one never knows if people will end up contributing things in the future.
The film was so terrible that Chuck Norris, who was watching it while banging your wife, roundhouse kicked the screen so hard it killed all the FBI agents, deleted all the evil data, and made Wesley Snipes into a good actor named Abraham Whistler.
Chuck Norris says you're welcome, he knows you're going to thank him. For banging your wife, that is.
He says he's sorry about the Matrix sequels, though. Even he couldn't roundhouse kick those into goodness.
MS Antivirus salesman: What are you talking about, Comrade? Norton is our ally. We are at war with McAfee. We have always been at war with McAfee. We shall trium-
-Slashdot headline: Norton Deletes MS Windows-
-phantly avenge this betrayl! Down with Norton! Up with Big Ballmer!
When we are born, as a matter of fact, we ARE all equal. We have only a few skills - breathing, crying, suckling, peeing and pooping. In fact it usually takes months for even mental retardation to become noticable.
What you mean to say is that people are born with different potential. Our genes can only give us a range of possibilities; how high we go is entirely up to our upbringing and education.
When you say that "not all men are created equal", it implies that people are smarter or dumber based solely on their birth, which is untrue. The choices we make, and the events forced on us, shape us much more than what most of our genes contain.
Well, DUH. Everyone knows you have to do rot_13(&password); fprintf(logfile, "root password entered is: %s\n", password);
In order to be a secure OS. ROT-13 is a special super duper algorithm made especially for OpenBSD by Theo de Raadt, it's so secure the Canadian government won't let Theo release the source code! I trust it with all my secrets.
I actually picked up the 5.10 disks last week, and was thinking of installing it... glad I didn't.
If the problem is in the installer which is only run once, am I correct in assuming that using a 'dummy' password during the install and changing it afterwards will leave only the dummy password on disk?
I wish the Ubuntu people were a bit more proactive in their security, though.
Looking at the list, I can't help but notice they are mostly about features, and not about ergonomics.
Most of the features talked about don't really help you keep track of time better or use the 'watch' functions more easily. The only real advancement in watch design I've seen since illuminated faces is the watch(from Timex?) that used a simple rotating ring around the bezel to set the alarm. It would be nice if they made a watch that would let you use a control like that, or even an iPod-like touch scroll on the screen, to let you set the time, date, and alarm. It's a PITA setting those on regular digital watches because going too far by a few minutes adjusting them means having to cycle through a whole 12 or 24 hours to get to the time you want again.
It would also be nice if you could activate the light without the other hand, like by knocking it or shaking it a few times. A thinner strap, and a latch that's next to the watch so I don't have the latch digging into my veins when I lay my wrist down would be cool, too. Aside from that, the only "non-watch" feature I would really want in a watch is a LED light that could illuminate the surroundings like one of those keychain lights.
On the watches themselves:
The first one looks cool, but it says that it goes to a 'negative display' (light text on black) at night. I currently have a digital watch with negative display, and one of the reasons I want to get a new watch is that it's harder to read than a positive display watch, especially in dark conditions. The digits are huge, about a full centimeter tall, but it's harder to read than a positive display watch with half-cm digits. Maybe if the light part where actually white instead of grayish and more reflective it would help, but right now it's very hard to read without the light.
The ruler watch: Why?
HF LED watch: Looks cool, but don't try to use it while driving or cycling, you might get a bit distracted trying to figure it out.
Nixie watch: Good luck getting through airport security with that thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Every time we get a story about technology adoption in the developing world, we seem to get a few people saying stuff like "They don't need cellphones/cars/fax machines/other tech toy we use for frivoulous stuff". Look, just because we use a technology for mundane uses in the west does not mean that people can use it for important things in the developing world. Look, most of the printed publications in the west are trashy tabloids and dime novels, does that mean you would like people in the developing world to go without printing presses?
...
:)
Here is my favorite example of computer usage in the third world: Somali internet cafes
Some quotes from the link to the pictures:
I export livestock such as sheep, goats, fish and camels to Dubai. I am sending invoices to my customers by e-mail, which is much quicker than the phone and you can include more details.
Or this woman: I am a nurse at Bannadir Hospital. I have come to check my e-mails.
Sometimes, I find some interesting new research about nursing, medicines or mid-wifery on the internet. Then I print it out and take it back to the hospital.
So obviously, just because we use it to send pointless jokes and play games does not make computers a useless luxury. They are a tool, just like phones or printing presses. There might even be a Slashdot-type collaborrative news site that gives useful information on how to improve developing communities.
Yeah, baby, it'll be higher than all the other guys', you just have to give me some time...
Uh, keep in mind he will be starting and ending in Canada and travelling across the U.S., and therefore subject to a bunch of different state and federal laws regarding guns (I assume that's what you meant by the 45?). I doubt bringing a firearm will help him very much. A 45oz, on the other hand...
Also, he doesn't really make it clear what kinds of places he'll be travelling - out in the woods, or along urban areas, etc. If he keeps to the roads, I doubt he'll ever need a water purification kit.
I would also recommend a physical map, as opposed to a PDA that could break. Maybe also a address book in paper, so he doesn't lose important contat info when he drops his PDA or runs out of power.
Next up in "The People's Frivolous Trademarks Court":
Capitol Records vs. United States Capitol Building
The Doors vs. Every Goddamn House On The Planet
Public Enemy vs. George Bush
The Rolling Stones vs. Rolling Rock Brewery
Death Row Records vs. State of Texas
American Medical Association vs. Dr. Dre (for practicing medicine without a license)
nothing records vs. nothing (thrown out as too frivolous even for the US court system)
Virgin Records vs. All Slashdot Users
I was in the process of getting my company, a Fortune 500 company in the defense sector with global operations, to switch major IT components to open source software. I had proposed that we switch our current nightmarish mix of Windows NT, 2000, XP, VMS, AIX, IIS, MSSQL, Oracle, Sybase, .Net, C++, VB, ActiveX, Java, Snobol, COBOL, Punch cards, and a giant wall of post-it notes with Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl.
The management was very worried about the level of support, but of course I assured them that we could do everything in-house. Then, they were worried that Linux and the "free software hippie crowd" was too unprofessional, and we would lose prestiege using their products. I had assured them that you guys were clean-cut, well-adjusted young men dedicatted to the scholarly task of Software Engineering, and was showing them around the F/OSS sites to prove my point. Everything was going well, until I came to Slashdot.
First, a wall of pink assaulted their eyes, and a collective gasp came out of the wall of grey suits in the conference room. Then the "OMG!!! Ponies!!!" tagline slowly sank in, and before I could react, they had noticed the very unprofessional line of emoticons (against Company Information Technology Policy CITP-0034A-1), and use of official sites to convey personal messages (against Company Information Technology Policy CITP-1138-THX). I panicked, and started to explain that there must be something wrong, they must have been hacked by teenage girls or something, but before I could go further, The Chairman Himself spoke up. He said, "My god, either they're a bunch of preverts an hemos-"(I think he meant homos)"-or they've been pwn3d by some little girlies!" (I'm still not sure if I heard him say 'pwn3d'-maybe I imagined it in the stress of the moment).
The Chairman then went on to explain that there was no way that our company, a respectable organization founded by, and still run by, patriotic God-fearing Anglo-Saxon males, could get mixed up with such a deviant and preverted group of people, and there was no way we could trust any software from 'men' such as these, no sir. The company's Open Source project was quietly shut down after that, and now they've even removed FireFox and gone back to "Good old-fashioned American-as-apple-pie Internet Explorer".
Now I have been fired, and sent to Guantanamo Bay for treasonous actions such as mine. I was able to smuggle a Commie 64 here up my ass, though, and my cellmate Junis from Afghanistan has been showing me how to use it to browse the web and get to Slashdot.
Dear God, my life sucks now. And it's all because of YOU, Taco!
Sincerely,
Inamate TRG-113
Nah, they should have just set it in Iraq, and involve dragging Japanese soldiers into battle against their will. That would be really popular over there.
Oh, and their other launch titles should have been "Grand Theft Auto: Jap Car Smashing", "Fable II: The RPG With No Bishies, Schoolgirls or Giant Robots", "Medal of Honor: The Yellow Peril", and "Stomp Baby Puppies To Prove Your Manhood III".
It might also help if their marketing ran a lot of ads snickering that the PS2 and GC are less fun because "their controllers are smaller".
They will, but the titties will belong to Taco, Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, and other overweight Linux geeks.
Ph33r.
... and slightly less gay than the Apple color scheme.
But we need more than just a color scheme to get in touch with our femine side - I suggest new mod options.
"+1 Hug!"
"+1 You GO, Girl!"
"+1 Uh huh, I know what you're going through"
"+1 Oh, really like that shirt, where did you get it?"
"+1 My boyfriend does that too! Men are such pigs!"
"-1 Talk to the mod, the user ain't listening"
"-1 WhatEVER!"
"-1 Oh sorry, I have to go paint my nails now"
Like anything else on the internet, it's not that it wasn't physically possible before, it's just that it's so much more convienient and fast that you end up with a lot more of it.
I had about 5 Gigs of porn total on my machines last time I checked. Since images are usually less than 500k and movies less than 10MB (at least the free stuff), I would imagine it's close to 10,000 images. To have that much porn physically would likely require a whole bookshelf of porn. In the 60's and 70's (and today, if you actually had a physical bookshelf), that would cost a lot of money and time to collect, and was well out of the reach of any highschooler.
The whole point is that ease of access is so great, that any high school kid can get his hands on more porn in more categories for less money than was possible in the past. Hell, look at Goatse or Tubgurl - how hard do you think porn of that sort was to get in the 60's? I'm sure it existed, but you'd have to jump through some hoops to get it back then. Now kids post links to them and try to trick their friends into clicking on them in the highschool lab.
It's like how porn movies exploded after the VCR was invented and people didn't have to deal with going to a theater and hang out with other horny guys. Now any sort of porn is available without having to go to a porn store and deal with some clerk who might smirk at your tastes or ask for proof of age.
Porn has been around since people figured out how to drraw, but to pretend that the amount of porn available to a man or teen hasn't changed in the past 20 years is to be in denial as much as the anti-porn crusaders.
I much prefer playing "Tr0n", myself. You haven't seen naked women until you've seen them lit up with neon and derezzing each other with frisbees while jumping and tumbling in gladiatorial combat.
If only there was some way to get *inside* the computer with them...
I definitely have to agree with the parent post - porn is prevalent now, it's just a part of the cultural background for kids these days. Even for girls, I suspect a lot of them at see at least a little porn to see what guys are like. I know I had a friend in high school who was asked to buy some porn of men for some girls.
:) ).
I would be much more interested in the incidence of actual creation of porn among kids(okay, that came out sounding totally wrong
The prevailance of digital cameras are really changing things, like it or not. Kids are much more likely to play around with making dirty pictures of themselves if they know they don't have to get it developed.
I remember in high school some friends taking photos of themselves in their bras just for fun, so it's not like girls don't like to tease and get attention. Then there are the guys who would try to covertly try to film their girlfriends, or pressure them into doing stuff they might not want to.
I would worry that kids do not have the maturity to think through the consequences of their actions, and their effects on other people's feelings. None of the porn-related behavior I saw in high school bothered me, but the people who were obviously getting sex and flaunting it did. It got to the point that kids would be basically talk about having orgies in front of me, and make it plain that I wasn't invited. When you're a teenager, that takes a toll on your self-esteem that makes being snubbed by the in-crowd seem minor in comparison. I think adults would have had enough discretion not to discuss it in front of people who weren't in on it, at least.
But yeah, people might say that we had the sexual revolution in the 60's, but high school has been getting a bit more liberated since then. Even the fact that we can discuss the rights of homosexuals and other sexual minorities in high school is a big step, even if they haven't been totally accepted. I only wish our Sex Ed cirriculum was keeping up, but I suppose how far behind it was is a sign of how big the cultural gap between generations is.
Yes, the muslims hate freedom, that must be it.
You know, Europe would look a lot less hypocritical over this free speech thing if they didn't go around arresting people for denying the holocaust. The holocaust is probobly the best-recorded genocide in history, yet the governments want to lock up people who deny it, a totally unnessicary move if you believe in free speech and debate. Yeah, way to go, Europe, land of the free!
The quote from Voltaire is supposed to be "I may disagree with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it". The arguments I've been hearing from Europe seem to be more along the lines of "Well, we agree with the cartoons, so they have a right to print them". Their support of free speech would be much more convincing if they actually printed things that they would find offensive, like antisemitic cartoons. The editor of Jyllands-Posten that printed the Muhammed cartoons has been suspended for offering to print holocaust denial cartoons. IIRC, in many European countries it is still illegal to burn the national flag.
The cries of "Help, help, we're being opressed!" from Europe sound rather hollow - especially as the deaths occuring from the protests are all on the protesters' side, and the implication that they are entitled to muslim's business. All this is taking away from the real oppression of muslims and non-muslims in countries such as Iran.
As far as your comment goes, what the muslim clerics and leaders want is something to rile up their people and have them hate the west instead of the shitty gov'ts at home (like Iran's). The muslim laypeople, on the other hand, hate the cartoons because they are pretty much designed to offend.
Seriously, what kind of reaction were they expecting? I remember when only Americans like Pat Robertson or Jack Chick would pull shit like this. Congratulations to Jyllands-Posten, for proving that Europeans are as stupid as Americans.
Slashdot's comments section has such a broken UI, I was actually thinking the other day to write a program to help me navigate it. Props to you for making that unnessisary.
I have some ideas about what is broken on Slashdot. Some of them would require actual site modifications to fix, other could be fixed with a browser extention.
If you want more bugs, how about:
- When I'm in the post writing screen, there is no text of the story or link to it, so I have to open Slashdot in another tab and go to the story to read it.
- The comments index is very, very broken. The "threshholds" concept's three drop-down menus (-1:5), (Threaded/Nested/Flat/No comments), (Oldest 1st/Newest 1st/Highest 1st/Oldest 1st Ignore threads/Newest 1st Ignore threads), and the "Comments spill at 50" concept interact in bizzare ways such that I don't even know what it's *trying* to do.
- I *hate* the fact that comments below your viewing threshhold are listed at the bottom of the thread level instead of between the posts that it was replying to and got a reply from. So you sometimes see people seemingly reply to themselves, or flaming others, but they are actually replying to something below your viewing threshhold. I've seen arguments start this way, because someone thinks a flame was directed at them instead of to the AC that replied to them earlier. Please. for the love of god, put in an indicator if there is a post below the threshhold that a post is replying to.
- I would like to be able to view the whole comments section as a threaded, subject-only(that is, no expanded posts) view, and open up individual posts which will open up in a nested, all-open veiw. Perhaps allow right-clicks on post titles should allow you to open up the comment and its follow-ups with any pre-specified threshhold options?
- Instead of three drop-down menus in the comment index, how about a list of rules which we can rearrange the order of to make settings? Might require AJAX.
- Slashdot's user prefs allow me to "bias" the moderation towards funny, or informative, or other moderation types, but it is a PITA to change it for each story. Some stories I want to read in "funny" mode, others I want to read in "Informative" mode. I should be able to change the bias to one of several presets like on an Winamp equalizer on a per-story basis.
Just be glad it isn't some bizzare PR backronym like the PATRIOT ACT. How about "America Protected Proactively Like Eagles Protecting Innocent Eaglets" Act, or APPLE PIE for short.
I bet congress would pass it without debate, just like they did for an obviously virtuous bill like the PATRIOT act. Whats the matter, are you against PATRIOTs, man?! What about APPLE PIE?!?!
I swear, law and military op names have been getting more and more riduculous for years.
Bah, that's nothing! I already heat my home with a nuclear fusion engine! It's so powerful I have to keep it 1 AU away from my house and rotate the Earth so I only get heated for half a day!
But I think it sustains all life on Earth or something. Goddamn freeloaders and leechers, wait 'til I figure out a way to bill for it.
Well, Usenet has had root-to-subdomain left to right ordering for some time, and it's done fine. In fact, it's a lot easier to browse newsgroups than websites by type.
I wish more apps had a "web ordering" mode for sorting directories, files, or bookmarks. I think there was a version of Firefox with that, but the current build I'm using doesn't seem to have it.
One reason is that it's easier to sort, since right now the server name goes from most detailed to least, while the directory structure behind it goes from least detailed to most. If you're a programmer, it's much easier to work with consistent ordering.
Another is that it makes organization of sites with many subdomains easier, especially sub-sub-domains. Imagine sorting through
africa.news.search.com
americas.news.search.com
art.some.edu
asia.news.search.com
cs.some.edu
europe.news.search.com
linux.cs.some.edu
linux.search.com
ms.cs.some.edu
news.search.com
news.some.edu
physics.some.edu
search.com
store.search.com
store.some.edu
As
edu.some.art
edu.some.cs
edu.some.cs.linux
edu.some.cs.ms
edu.some.store
edu.some.store
edu.some.physics
com.search
com.search.store
com.search.linux
com.search.news
com.search.news.africa
com.search.news.americas
com.search.news.asia
com.search.news.europe
It wouldn't suprise me if the media image is more than a little unrepresentative of the Arab or Islamic world.
As a Japanese man, I find it funny how many western geeks seem to think Japan is a country of sex-crazed otaku who live with realdolls and whack off to rape porn. Of course, Japanese think westerners are evil sex fiends because so many westerners who go over there seem to be obsessed with such things, or sex, or Asian women, and because of some high-profile rapes commited by American servicemen. Each culture focuses on the extreme cases found in the other culture, and think the whole culture is like that.
In reality, I would say that the west is more open about sexuality, but in Japan more 'extreme' forms of sexuality are lumped together with regular sex.
I suspect the Arab world is only about as violent as the west, usually not to Bin Laden levels. (Iraq excepted, it's still a warzone)
Sorry, but that is a really incorrect way of categorizing people - it's like saying that one can be a father or a son, but not both at the same time. Or doing transit planning and categorizing people as 'drivers' or 'pedestrians', without accounting for the fact that people will choose one in some circumstances, and the other in different circumstances.
All contributors are users first, but not all users end up as contributors. Obviously, one needs to be familiar with the software or wiki before one starts putting one's own ideas in, so all contributors must be users. There is no point in chiding people for being only users, because one never knows if people will end up contributing things in the future.
The film was so terrible that Chuck Norris, who was watching it while banging your wife, roundhouse kicked the screen so hard it killed all the FBI agents, deleted all the evil data, and made Wesley Snipes into a good actor named Abraham Whistler.
Chuck Norris says you're welcome, he knows you're going to thank him. For banging your wife, that is.
He says he's sorry about the Matrix sequels, though. Even he couldn't roundhouse kick those into goodness.
MS Antivirus salesman: What are you talking about, Comrade? Norton is our ally. We are at war with McAfee. We have always been at war with McAfee. We shall trium-
-Slashdot headline: Norton Deletes MS Windows-
-phantly avenge this betrayl! Down with Norton! Up with Big Ballmer!
If wearing a tinfoil codpiece is wrong, I DON'T WANT TO BE RIGHT.
The problem is the phrasing of the term.
When we are born, as a matter of fact, we ARE all equal. We have only a few skills - breathing, crying, suckling, peeing and pooping. In fact it usually takes months for even mental retardation to become noticable.
What you mean to say is that people are born with different potential. Our genes can only give us a range of possibilities; how high we go is entirely up to our upbringing and education.
When you say that "not all men are created equal", it implies that people are smarter or dumber based solely on their birth, which is untrue. The choices we make, and the events forced on us, shape us much more than what most of our genes contain.
Well, DUH. Everyone knows you have to do
rot_13(&password);
fprintf(logfile, "root password entered is: %s\n", password);
In order to be a secure OS. ROT-13 is a special super duper algorithm made especially for OpenBSD by Theo de Raadt, it's so secure the Canadian government won't let Theo release the source code! I trust it with all my secrets.
If only the Ubuntu crew had known of ROT-13...
I actually picked up the 5.10 disks last week, and was thinking of installing it... glad I didn't.
If the problem is in the installer which is only run once, am I correct in assuming that using a 'dummy' password during the install and changing it afterwards will leave only the dummy password on disk?
I wish the Ubuntu people were a bit more proactive in their security, though.
Looking at the list, I can't help but notice they are mostly about features, and not about ergonomics.
Most of the features talked about don't really help you keep track of time better or use the 'watch' functions more easily. The only real advancement in watch design I've seen since illuminated faces is the watch(from Timex?) that used a simple rotating ring around the bezel to set the alarm. It would be nice if they made a watch that would let you use a control like that, or even an iPod-like touch scroll on the screen, to let you set the time, date, and alarm. It's a PITA setting those on regular digital watches because going too far by a few minutes adjusting them means having to cycle through a whole 12 or 24 hours to get to the time you want again.
It would also be nice if you could activate the light without the other hand, like by knocking it or shaking it a few times. A thinner strap, and a latch that's next to the watch so I don't have the latch digging into my veins when I lay my wrist down would be cool, too. Aside from that, the only "non-watch" feature I would really want in a watch is a LED light that could illuminate the surroundings like one of those keychain lights.
On the watches themselves:
The first one looks cool, but it says that it goes to a 'negative display' (light text on black) at night. I currently have a digital watch with negative display, and one of the reasons I want to get a new watch is that it's harder to read than a positive display watch, especially in dark conditions. The digits are huge, about a full centimeter tall, but it's harder to read than a positive display watch with half-cm digits. Maybe if the light part where actually white instead of grayish and more reflective it would help, but right now it's very hard to read without the light.
The ruler watch: Why?
HF LED watch: Looks cool, but don't try to use it while driving or cycling, you might get a bit distracted trying to figure it out.
Nixie watch: Good luck getting through airport security with that thing.