I would hope that moderators are fair enough to send comments up or down depending on their quality, not whether their point of view is agreeable. Even if someone says something we completely disagree with, as long as they say it well and bring facts to the table, it is worth hearing.
My guess is that there will be many otherwise-unremarkable posts which will be moderated up simply because they express a popular point of view forcefully, and, as always, meta-moderators are encouraged to mark lame upmods as Unfair. If a post isn't any more Insightful than average, but gets moderated that way, then rigorous meta-moderation will help the system, next time around, give mod points to someone else who deserves them more.
From his soundless nightmare, Henry soundlessly awoke. He slid out of bed and trotted out of his room, past his parents' open door -- they were awake, but he said nothing, and if they saw him, they said nothing either. Henry padded down the stairs and out into the warm night. He turned downtown at a dog-trot, and ran for three blocks south, one west, and two south. He may or may not have noticed that while the traffic lights still operated, they were no longer obeyed by anyone, including himself. Uncannily, cars and pedestrians set their courses and their speeds and held them, regardless of blind corners, passing and repassing each other without incident and with no perceptible added effort.
Re:Pronounced with a short "I"
on
Primer
·
· Score: 1
I think I read the dictionary explanation backwards... the British way seems to be with a long I, says our English editor... anyway the point is that when Tim was explaining the movie to me he kept saying it with a short I, and I eventually had to ask him "is it spelled primer like the paint, or primmer like more prim?"
To which Tim looked at me like, what are you, on crack?
It didn't sound like a movie on how to exceed one's current level of primness, so I assumed it referred to an instruction manual or tutorial, pronounced the way I do not normally pronounce it.
Pronounced with a short "I"
on
Primer
·
· Score: 0
The two guys who are doing the conversion don't work for VA Software / OSDN, they are doing it for their own reasons. One actually started on HTML 4.01 and then they decided to join forces and work on the same project, and chose XHTML instead of 4.01. So you'd have to ask them as to why. Stop by #slash on irc.slashnet.org if you want...
A pair of coders who use Slash are being generous with their time and effort, and working on migrating Slash to XML... we hope to work with them soon to get their work into the main Slash distribution.
Migrating a whole site to XHTML is much, much harder than doing a mockup of one page.
I just ran a quick sampling of recent Slashdot posts through 'style'. Turns out as a whole, everyone writes at about a 5th grade level. And that measure is consistent at all Scores, from Score:-1 up to Score:5 (there's a slight dip at 0, and a slight rise from 1 on up, but very slight).
We're going to be revamping the moderation system in the months to come, and we should totally provide a bonus for people who manage to write at higher than a fifth grade level. Well, that'd probably be way too easy to game, but still, it'd be interesting to see if that would improve the quality of discussion...
"No offense jamie, but you should really refrain from making things up like this. There is no one anywhere with any sort of legal background that would agree with this. Hell, it's probably libel to say that."
I traded email with several people who know the history of this algorithm and its patents fairly well. I wasn't able to get a quote from a legal expert backing this up by press time, but it hardly matters because this opinion indeed is the consensus of those I have talked to. And I mentioned the duplicate-patent issue to an IBM PR rep, who had plenty of time but didn't offer a correction.
174. IBM repeats and realleges the averments in paragraphs 1 through 173, with the same force and effect as though they were set forth fully herein.
175. IBM is the lawful owner, by assignment, of the entire right, title and interest in United States Patent No. 4814746 ("the '746 Patent"), duly and legally issued on March 21, 1989 to Miller et aI., entitled "Data Compression Method". A copy of the ' 746 Patent is attached hereto as Exhibit X.
176. Upon information and belief, SCO has infringed, contributorily infringed and/or actively induced others to infringe the '746 Patent within this judicial district and elsewhere in violation of35 U. C. 9271 by, without authority or license from IBM, (a) making, using, selling and/or offering to sell products, including Unix Ware and Open Server, that practice one or more claims of the '746 Patent and (b) actively, knowingly and intentionally causing and assisting others to infringe one or more claims of the' 746 Patent.
177. Upon information and belief, SCO will continue to infringe, contributorily infringe and/or actively induce others to infringe the '746 Patent unless enjoined by this Court.
178. IBM has been and continues to be damaged and irreparably harmed by the aforesaid acts of infringement of the '746 Patent by SCD, and will suffer additional damages and irreparable harm unless this Court enjoins SCD from further infringement.
179. Upon information and belief, SCO's continued manufacture, use, sale and/or offer for sale of the infringing products, including UnixWare and Open Server, following receipt of notice from IBM of SCO's infringing activities was and is willful, and such activities by SCO prior to receipt of such notice also have been willful if, after reasonable opportunity for discovery, evidence arises that SCO had actual knowledge that its actions could constitute infringement of the '746 Patent, making this an exceptional case and justifying the assessment of treble damages pursuant to 35 U.S.C. 284, and the award of attorneys' fees pursuant to 35 U.S.C. 285.
That complicates matters somewhat. But if the conventional wisdom on this is correct and there's no way IBM's patent would hold up in court, this is going to be tossed out anyway. Better perhaps to drop it now and continue fighting SCO on the stronger grounds. Fighting fire with fire has always seemed inappropriate to me, but maybe that's because I'm not a lawyer...
Yep, you're right about that both those things -- transcript not complete, and the somewhat fuller Rice quote.
But here's an even fuller transcript of the Rice quote, and more importantly, the question that she was just asked. Given this, I don't think Moore was out of line using the excerpt he did:
Harry Smith, CBS: Certainly the soldiers that were interviewed said it was a major morale boost, to have the President, have the Commander-in-Chief there. But you brought something up, an interesting point, why they're there. The President said during his remarks to the troops, he said: 'You're defeating terrorists in Iraq so we don't have to face them in our own country.' Now, there's no connection between Iraq and 9/11. Why does the President persist in tying those two together?
Condoleezza Rice: Oh, indeed there is a tie between Iraq and what happened on 9/11. It's not that Saddam Hussein was somehow himself and his regime involved in 9/11, but, if you think about what caused 9/11, it is the rise of ideologies of hatred that lead people to drive airplanes into buildings in New York. This is a great terrorist, international terrorist network that is determined to defeat freedom. It has perverted Islam from a peaceful religion into one in which they call on it for violence. And they're all linked. And Iraq is a central front because, if and when, and we will, we change the nature of Iraq to a place that is peaceful and democratic and prosperous in the heart of the Middle East, you will begin to change the Middle East....
The fact is that the interviewer said a perfectly true statement: there's no connection between Iraq and 9/11, and asked a perfectly clear question: Why does the President persist in tying those two together?
And Rice responded that there are ties. She went on to handwave confusingly about how the total extent of the ties is that Osama and his hijackers used to live in a country next door to the one we invaded but we are making Iraq into the "front." (Huh?) We could argue about whether that really constitutes a "tie," and indeed at the point in the movie, Moore has just spent a great deal of time on that very subject (and is involved in wrapping it up, summarizing, which is why he uses a series of short quotations).
But according to Dr. Rice, it was indeed a "tie." She was clear and emphatic on that point.
If she'd wanted to offer a nuanced response, then when asked why the President persists in tying together Iraq and 9/11, Rice could have begun "he's been careful not to do that" or "you need to listen more carefully" or "there are no direct ties, but." Something like that.
But that's not what she said. Her response was that there are ties between Iraq and 9/11, not direct ties, not very close ties, but ties nonetheless. Since the officials in this adminstration deliberately used confusing language to conflate two very different things in the minds of Americans -- which is Moore's point -- they have no business complaining when people quote them doing just that.
I remember one scene where he shows Condi Rice saying something like "There is a link between Saddam and 9/11" to support his position that the administraiton ever made such a claim (they didn't). He left off the rest of the comment, though, that was along the lines of "There is a link between Saddam and 9/11 in that both are bad things." This is a terribly different statement.
According to the unofficial (and probably illegal) transcript online at redlinerants.com, the work "link" does not appear in the movie. Condoleeza Rice has a total of two lines. They are:
CONDOLEEZA RICE: I believe the title of the report was 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.'
CONDOLEEZA RICE: (subtitle "July 2001") We are able to keep arms from him [Saddam Hussein]. His military forces have not been rebuilt.
Which of those, do you feel, was distorted due to missing context?
Yes, one school district -- with 63,000 students, on a couple hundred campuses. It's the size of a small city all by itself. Spending a total of $1,000 per student over two years, to do a massive networking infrastructure upgrade, doesn't seem wildly unreasonable to me.
I'm sure it could have been more cost-effective, yes. But this isn't like an $85,000 flat tire.
I heard that same show. I don't see why this is surprising. The network cost $80 million to put together, and IBM included a $27 milllion support contract with the bid. Why is this news? Of course a very large, complicated network requires support.
On the same Rush Limbaugh program, minutes later, a caller who claimed to be an anonymous IT expert explained that schools will put together a $500,000 network when they could just purchase a $100 cable modem. This sounds like one of the usual idiots who sees that a T1 is 1.5 Mbits/sec, local cable provider offers 1.5 Mbits/sec, hey they must be the same thing! And what expenses could there possibly be apart from bandwidth?
The caller and host went on to agree that everyone could save a lot of money if we just got some of the "12- and 13-year old boys" in class to string up the network themselves. Rush isn't the most reliable source for information...
I remember playing a text adventure on a DEC PDP-10 back in the early '80s, but I've never been able to find reference to it since. I'm almost sure it was called "Crystal Caves" or "Caverns" or something.
The main parts I remember are wandering around a city in a taxicab, trying to find something to do. The text used to read something like "There is a taxi stand here, and a cabbie waiting for a fare." And then there was a scene in a bar in the city where the description read something like "One of them asks for a match, and everyone laughs uproariously." (I didn't get the joke at the time, not that it's a very funny joke.)
I eventually found my way into an adventure of some sort because I remember there being a cave or dungeon or something, with a sign over a door reading "Breathes there a man with soul so dead," or some other quip about a soul.
I never got very far into the game, and I never have seen any mention of it since...
You did the math wrong. Assuming you're right about there being 92 chars usable in each char of a password, the number of possible 8-char passwords is 92**8, not 92*8. Put another way, you get 6.52 bits per character, or 52.19 bits total:
Replicate to a slave DB that isn't used for anything but backups. On the slave, you can do a 'mysqldump -x'. That'll block updating while it does the write, but you won't care. The only problem arises if your hardware is too slow to catch up replication before the next time you do the dump, in which case you're kind of screwed anyway. This works on both myisam and innodb tables.
Slashdot Mirror
But, we're working on a better interface for this, one that's both more flexible and comprehensible. Stay tuned.
My guess is that there will be many otherwise-unremarkable posts which will be moderated up simply because they express a popular point of view forcefully, and, as always, meta-moderators are encouraged to mark lame upmods as Unfair. If a post isn't any more Insightful than average, but gets moderated that way, then rigorous meta-moderation will help the system, next time around, give mod points to someone else who deserves them more.
To which Tim looked at me like, what are you, on crack?
It didn't sound like a movie on how to exceed one's current level of primness, so I assumed it referred to an instruction manual or tutorial, pronounced the way I do not normally pronounce it.
BTW, it's pronounced with a short I, the British way.
When it's done, it will get 100% of the time on the /. front page :)
The two guys who are doing the conversion don't work for VA Software / OSDN, they are doing it for their own reasons. One actually started on HTML 4.01 and then they decided to join forces and work on the same project, and chose XHTML instead of 4.01. So you'd have to ask them as to why. Stop by #slash on irc.slashnet.org if you want...
Migrating a whole site to XHTML is much, much harder than doing a mockup of one page.
We're going to be revamping the moderation system in the months to come, and we should totally provide a bonus for people who manage to write at higher than a fifth grade level. Well, that'd probably be way too easy to game, but still, it'd be interesting to see if that would improve the quality of discussion...
This is a Mozilla engine bug, and should be fixed in an upcoming version of Firefox and other Moz-based browsers.
Sorry about that. We're working on it :)
I traded email with several people who know the history of this algorithm and its patents fairly well. I wasn't able to get a quote from a legal expert backing this up by press time, but it hardly matters because this opinion indeed is the consensus of those I have talked to. And I mentioned the duplicate-patent issue to an IBM PR rep, who had plenty of time but didn't offer a correction.
I stand by what I wrote.
That complicates matters somewhat. But if the conventional wisdom on this is correct and there's no way IBM's patent would hold up in court, this is going to be tossed out anyway. Better perhaps to drop it now and continue fighting SCO on the stronger grounds. Fighting fire with fire has always seemed inappropriate to me, but maybe that's because I'm not a lawyer...
But here's an even fuller transcript of the Rice quote, and more importantly, the question that she was just asked. Given this, I don't think Moore was out of line using the excerpt he did:
The fact is that the interviewer said a perfectly true statement: there's no connection between Iraq and 9/11, and asked a perfectly clear question: Why does the President persist in tying those two together?
And Rice responded that there are ties. She went on to handwave confusingly about how the total extent of the ties is that Osama and his hijackers used to live in a country next door to the one we invaded but we are making Iraq into the "front." (Huh?) We could argue about whether that really constitutes a "tie," and indeed at the point in the movie, Moore has just spent a great deal of time on that very subject (and is involved in wrapping it up, summarizing, which is why he uses a series of short quotations).
But according to Dr. Rice, it was indeed a "tie." She was clear and emphatic on that point.
If she'd wanted to offer a nuanced response, then when asked why the President persists in tying together Iraq and 9/11, Rice could have begun "he's been careful not to do that" or "you need to listen more carefully" or "there are no direct ties, but." Something like that.
But that's not what she said. Her response was that there are ties between Iraq and 9/11, not direct ties, not very close ties, but ties nonetheless. Since the officials in this adminstration deliberately used confusing language to conflate two very different things in the minds of Americans -- which is Moore's point -- they have no business complaining when people quote them doing just that.
According to the unofficial (and probably illegal) transcript online at redlinerants.com, the work "link" does not appear in the movie. Condoleeza Rice has a total of two lines. They are:
Which of those, do you feel, was distorted due to missing context?
It's fixed, but who knows when the next build of your favorite Moz browser is coming out? The bug report says "Maybe 1.7.1" :)
I'm sure it could have been more cost-effective, yes. But this isn't like an $85,000 flat tire.
On the same Rush Limbaugh program, minutes later, a caller who claimed to be an anonymous IT expert explained that schools will put together a $500,000 network when they could just purchase a $100 cable modem. This sounds like one of the usual idiots who sees that a T1 is 1.5 Mbits/sec, local cable provider offers 1.5 Mbits/sec, hey they must be the same thing! And what expenses could there possibly be apart from bandwidth?
The caller and host went on to agree that everyone could save a lot of money if we just got some of the "12- and 13-year old boys" in class to string up the network themselves. Rush isn't the most reliable source for information...
Especially if you plan on titling one of your videos "Ooops! Forgot to make sure the fittings were tight!"
Jeez...
Anyone could say they were hosting Playfair. Its moving wasn't news, in my opinion, until its code actually appeared on the new site.
Nope, it wasn't Colossal Cave, it was quite different in many respects. Maybe it shared some of the same code but it was a wholly different adventure.
The main parts I remember are wandering around a city in a taxicab, trying to find something to do. The text used to read something like "There is a taxi stand here, and a cabbie waiting for a fare." And then there was a scene in a bar in the city where the description read something like "One of them asks for a match, and everyone laughs uproariously." (I didn't get the joke at the time, not that it's a very funny joke.)
I eventually found my way into an adventure of some sort because I remember there being a cave or dungeon or something, with a sign over a door reading "Breathes there a man with soul so dead," or some other quip about a soul.
I never got very far into the game, and I never have seen any mention of it since...
Anyone know any BitTorrent links for the Mac version, also released today?
$ perl -le 'print log(92)*8/log(2)'
52.1884956484561
There are obviously a lot more than 736 possibilities -- even if you just use the numbers, you can count from 0 to 99,999,999 :)
Replicate to a slave DB that isn't used for anything but backups. On the slave, you can do a 'mysqldump -x'. That'll block updating while it does the write, but you won't care. The only problem arises if your hardware is too slow to catch up replication before the next time you do the dump, in which case you're kind of screwed anyway. This works on both myisam and innodb tables.