The section machine name is not necessary. Go to http://slashdot.org/index.pl?section=games. You'll find that the Read More links go to e.g. http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/28/ 161209&etc. Copy and paste the link and take out the machine name -- edit it by hand to http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/28/161209 &etc which will work just as well.
Of course now they'll just block all of Slashdot.org, sigh...
just a sample post, seeing whether subscriber bonus works
Suspending disbelief in the power of the press
on
Ask Warren Ellis
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Warren,
In Transmet you never really question the power of the press.
The people of the city are overwhelmingly shown as self-absorbed,
Epicurean, sadistic fucks, barely able to hold a whole idea in
their head at once, much less aspire to things like altruism or
civic duty. When they're not actually the johns fucking little
kids, they're lost in their own worlds of drugs, body
manipulation, sex, or often all three at once.
So it seems anachronistic that a president still holds press
conferences, that a journalist can be universally loved, and that
a column feed can stop a riot.
Transmet drew details from current events, but not the big
picture. In a year where one news corp. runs attack ads against
another for not being pro-administration enough, and Helen Thomas
is sent to the back of the bus for not being a simpering twit, the
most famous journalist today is... Geraldo. What makes you think
a competent muckraker will have any kind of influence at all,
starting, let's say, negative ten years from now?
Rabbits should be kept in a house. Pet rabbits are a different species from the wild rabbits you see in the U.S. -- different genus, actually. They were bred by European monks to be docile and they don't like it outside. Strange sights, sounds or smells can literally frighten them to death.
Pet rabbits, like pet dogs or cats, should be kept inside.
As another poster mentioned, they litter-train easily. You keep them in a cage with a litterbox; shut them in at night and open the door when you're around during the day. They hop around your living room and occasionally leave stray droppings here and there, but mostly they go where they're supposed to go. And rabbit droppings are pretty solid and don't smell, so, eh, you vacuum them up. Not the worst thing in the world.
That's assuming you have the rabbits spayed and neutered, which you definitely should for health reasons anyway. Unfixed rabbits will mark their territory like crazy, and nobody wants that. But fortunately, a few months after that little operation, they lose those old habits.
Dumping rabbits
on
Easter Humor
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Maybe I'm just in a bad mood...
One of the hats I wear is volunteer for the
House Rabbit Society
(Michigan chapter). We get hundreds of calls every year from people
who get a rabbit for whatever reason -- gift from girl/boyfriend,
Easter gift, parents bought to teach kids "responsibility," or like
this case, someone who took a stray into his home instead of calling
his local animal control facility.
Probably 95% of these calls are dump calls. People get sick of an
animal and want to "get rid of" it -- and yes, those are the exact
words they use, almost every time, "get rid of."
Most of those are just people who don't know how to take care of
the damn thing. For cripe's sakes, people, when you get an animal,
go buy a book and read it. Rabbits are not dogs or cats. For
starters, they chew. And maybe I'm just in a bad mood but
how much of a genius do you have to be to turn a chewing animal
loose in your home without protecting your precious computer cables?
Baby gates, plexiglass and cable wrap -- this is not rocket science.
How much of a genius, to not realize that an animal that chews
through a
power cord
will very possibly kill itself?
And how much of a humanitarian, to blame the animal for your own
fuckup, and dump it on a shelter?
(If you have a rabbit, by the way, we recommend the
House Rabbit Handbook
because it's simply the best guide out there.)
Photo of Pokrovsky cathedral
on
Nuke-Lobbing
·
· Score: 1
From the article:
"Then you found an easily recognized landmark to serve as your Initial Point, which today will be Pokrovskiy cathedral in the center of Sevastopol.... When the onion tops of Pokrovskiy cathedral flash under the port wingtip, you press the pickle button..."
Here's a photo of that cathedral, it's the top one on the page:
Which is pretty close to the size of the observable universe in meters as given in the article, 4 * 10^26 -- I'm shy by a factor of slightly under 2. If I'd bumped the final exponent from 1.42 to 1.43, I'd be high by a factor of slightly over 2, so hey, I got close:)
Current download rate: 3 kB/s
Current upload rate: 35 kB/s
Is it running any faster now, after 15 minutes or so? My download rates shortly after the Slashdot story went live were around 5-7 K/s. Since then it's been steadily increasing -- presumably as more and more Slashdot readers download, install and run BitTorrent, providing more clients for me to connect to. I'm now up to 25-30 K/s, which is roughly the same as my upload speed.
A Midnight Clear is my favorite war movie of all time (All Quiet on the Western Front is a close second, Full Metal Jacket a close third). This is saying a great deal, because
the book by William Wharton
is one of my favorite books, and usually when I really love a book I hate the movie.
I'm mad 'cause I can't find my old film "And Garwin Alone" anywhere... I think it was from Myth:TFL... I fought a multiplayer match where my entire army was wiped out except for one warrior who had killed 17 (!) enemies with his sword. I uploaded it to some fan site but I don't remember which one and Google doesn't know about it anymore:/
"For the last two 'red' posts, (Austin and China's CPU) every time I click on 'Read More' I got a hung browser with a title of 'Error'. Is this supposed to be working?"
We noticed network issues maybe 20 minutes ago, not sure at the moment what's going on but it doesn't seem to be the site. It's fine for me and most of the people I checked with, but it's down for some people, and intermittently up and down for others. My guess is you just happened to get those troubles on the Future posts.
Since I don't know what the problem is, I don't know when it will be fixed. If it persists on just Future posts, though, click the "bugs" link on the left and assign a bug to me on it. (Or just email me, jamie@slashdot.org.)
"You know what would've been a nice touch with this announcement? If they had actually had a few stories in the queue, so subscribers would be able to actually see what they're talking about."
The announcement itself was in the queue but I guess you missed it!:)
Stick around, check the homepage periodically, you'll catch some. We post most of our stories ahead of time, and the window is relatively large, so on a typical day, if you check the homepage 10 times you should probably see 1 or 2. In fact, in just a few minutes...
I'm not really satisfied with your answer to my question about
dollar cost of spam, but that's OK, you don't have to satisfy me:)
I did want to clear one thing up. I had written:
"As far as I can tell, SMTP traffic is at most 2-5% of net traffic."
And you responded:
"Your figures for the percentage of bandwidth which is spam are far too low. Others have put the numbers much higher. NewsFactor cites studies putting the figure somewhere between 17 and 38%."
I totally accept that spam is about 17-38% of SMTP traffic, that sounds roughly correct to me.
My point there was that SMTP traffic is a very small fraction of total net traffic.
I haven't found any recent statistics on this -- partly because I don't think anyone publishes these numbers anymore, and partly because it's a real pain to try to find with Google. (Do a search on "SMTP NNTP HTTP bandwidth backbone" and you turn up a zillion ISPs bragging about all the protocols they support and how many backbones they're connected to.)
Here's one example of the crappy data out there, a six-year-old report from a link near a backbone showing that SMTP traffic totaled 2.2% of all network traffic:
My point was just that if we're trying to assign a dollar figure to what spam costs an ISP, we might as well ignore connectivity charges, because SMTP itself uses so little bandwidth.
As for what all the other costs add up to... I still don't know.
When and how will the tech arms race tip?
on
Ask Larry Niven
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Mr. Niven,
In The Ones Who Stay Home, in a recent issue of Analog, you raise some pretty serious issues about terrorism and retaliation.
The technology of violence is an arms race which in my lifetime seems to have been pretty well balanced, attacker vs. defender. Lately, the worst the bad guys have done to the U.S. is take down a few buildings: no nuclear weapons yet in the hands of honest-to-goodness madmen, no "gray goo" against which there is no defense except going offplanet, no asteroids being dropped from the moon.
How long do you think this balance will hold? And what do you think the first weapon will be against which it is infeasible -- because of economics, technology, politics, or otherwise -- to mount a successful defense?
Slashdot Mirror
Of course now they'll just block all of Slashdot.org, sigh...
Go to users.pl?op=edithome, check Collapse Sections, click Save.
http://slashdot.org/games/ also works, as does http://slashdot.org/index.pl?section=games ...
Wow, you managed to be wrong about two things in that statement :)
In about 45 more seconds, yes. :)
just a sample post, seeing whether subscriber bonus works
In Transmet you never really question the power of the press.
The people of the city are overwhelmingly shown as self-absorbed, Epicurean, sadistic fucks, barely able to hold a whole idea in their head at once, much less aspire to things like altruism or civic duty. When they're not actually the johns fucking little kids, they're lost in their own worlds of drugs, body manipulation, sex, or often all three at once.
So it seems anachronistic that a president still holds press conferences, that a journalist can be universally loved, and that a column feed can stop a riot.
Transmet drew details from current events, but not the big picture. In a year where one news corp. runs attack ads against another for not being pro-administration enough, and Helen Thomas is sent to the back of the bus for not being a simpering twit, the most famous journalist today is... Geraldo. What makes you think a competent muckraker will have any kind of influence at all, starting, let's say, negative ten years from now?
Pet rabbits, like pet dogs or cats, should be kept inside.
As another poster mentioned, they litter-train easily. You keep them in a cage with a litterbox; shut them in at night and open the door when you're around during the day. They hop around your living room and occasionally leave stray droppings here and there, but mostly they go where they're supposed to go. And rabbit droppings are pretty solid and don't smell, so, eh, you vacuum them up. Not the worst thing in the world.
That's assuming you have the rabbits spayed and neutered, which you definitely should for health reasons anyway. Unfixed rabbits will mark their territory like crazy, and nobody wants that. But fortunately, a few months after that little operation, they lose those old habits.
One of the hats I wear is volunteer for the House Rabbit Society (Michigan chapter). We get hundreds of calls every year from people who get a rabbit for whatever reason -- gift from girl/boyfriend, Easter gift, parents bought to teach kids "responsibility," or like this case, someone who took a stray into his home instead of calling his local animal control facility.
Probably 95% of these calls are dump calls. People get sick of an animal and want to "get rid of" it -- and yes, those are the exact words they use, almost every time, "get rid of."
Most of those are just people who don't know how to take care of the damn thing. For cripe's sakes, people, when you get an animal, go buy a book and read it. Rabbits are not dogs or cats. For starters, they chew. And maybe I'm just in a bad mood but how much of a genius do you have to be to turn a chewing animal loose in your home without protecting your precious computer cables? Baby gates, plexiglass and cable wrap -- this is not rocket science.
How much of a genius, to not realize that an animal that chews through a power cord will very possibly kill itself?
And how much of a humanitarian, to blame the animal for your own fuckup, and dump it on a shelter?
(If you have a rabbit, by the way, we recommend the House Rabbit Handbook because it's simply the best guide out there.)
Here's a photo of that cathedral, it's the top one on the page:
Pokrovsky cathedral
checking to see if posting works or if our DB is still having trouble
testing posting which seems to be broken
If anyone cares, the real advisory is here.
Now modding myself down because this is Offtopic (I just wanted to quash any rumors... probably won't make a habit of this though).
Hmmm, does your computer round things differently from mine? I get:
That's 2.0076 * 10^26.
Which is pretty close to the size of the observable universe in meters as given in the article, 4 * 10^26 -- I'm shy by a factor of slightly under 2. If I'd bumped the final exponent from 1.42 to 1.43, I'd be high by a factor of slightly over 2, so hey, I got close :)
Thanks for setting up the torrent... I just grabbed it and I'll vouch that it's the real thing not a troll :)
Is it running any faster now, after 15 minutes or so? My download rates shortly after the Slashdot story went live were around 5-7 K/s. Since then it's been steadily increasing -- presumably as more and more Slashdot readers download, install and run BitTorrent, providing more clients for me to connect to. I'm now up to 25-30 K/s, which is roughly the same as my upload speed.
A Midnight Clear is my favorite war movie of all time (All Quiet on the Western Front is a close second, Full Metal Jacket a close third). This is saying a great deal, because the book by William Wharton is one of my favorite books, and usually when I really love a book I hate the movie.
I wrote that script. Yeah, I was such a dork! :)
I'm mad 'cause I can't find my old film "And Garwin Alone" anywhere... I think it was from Myth:TFL... I fought a multiplayer match where my entire army was wiped out except for one warrior who had killed 17 (!) enemies with his sword. I uploaded it to some fan site but I don't remember which one and Google doesn't know about it anymore :/
Hm. Quit and relaunch your browser if you haven't already. Try clearing its disk cache. I'm not sure what else the issue would be...
Thanks :)
We noticed network issues maybe 20 minutes ago, not sure at the moment what's going on but it doesn't seem to be the site. It's fine for me and most of the people I checked with, but it's down for some people, and intermittently up and down for others. My guess is you just happened to get those troubles on the Future posts.
Since I don't know what the problem is, I don't know when it will be fixed. If it persists on just Future posts, though, click the "bugs" link on the left and assign a bug to me on it. (Or just email me, jamie@slashdot.org.)
Sorry for the inconvenience...
So, you're cool if you set it to 0. And thanks! :)
The announcement itself was in the queue but I guess you missed it! :)
Stick around, check the homepage periodically, you'll catch some. We post most of our stories ahead of time, and the window is relatively large, so on a typical day, if you check the homepage 10 times you should probably see 1 or 2. In fact, in just a few minutes...
Hi Barry,
Thanks for doing this interview :)
I'm not really satisfied with your answer to my question about dollar cost of spam, but that's OK, you don't have to satisfy me :)
I did want to clear one thing up. I had written:
And you responded:
I totally accept that spam is about 17-38% of SMTP traffic, that sounds roughly correct to me.
My point there was that SMTP traffic is a very small fraction of total net traffic.
I haven't found any recent statistics on this -- partly because I don't think anyone publishes these numbers anymore, and partly because it's a real pain to try to find with Google. (Do a search on "SMTP NNTP HTTP bandwidth backbone" and you turn up a zillion ISPs bragging about all the protocols they support and how many backbones they're connected to.)
Here's one example of the crappy data out there, a six-year-old report from a link near a backbone showing that SMTP traffic totaled 2.2% of all network traffic:
http://www.nlanr.net/NA/Learn/popular.html
Here's another survey of a backbone, this one five years old, showing SMTP traffic as 3.3% of all network traffic:
http://traffic.caida.org/Reading/Papers/Inet98/
My point was just that if we're trying to assign a dollar figure to what spam costs an ISP, we might as well ignore connectivity charges, because SMTP itself uses so little bandwidth.
As for what all the other costs add up to... I still don't know.
In The Ones Who Stay Home, in a recent issue of Analog, you raise some pretty serious issues about terrorism and retaliation.
The technology of violence is an arms race which in my lifetime seems to have been pretty well balanced, attacker vs. defender. Lately, the worst the bad guys have done to the U.S. is take down a few buildings: no nuclear weapons yet in the hands of honest-to-goodness madmen, no "gray goo" against which there is no defense except going offplanet, no asteroids being dropped from the moon.
How long do you think this balance will hold? And what do you think the first weapon will be against which it is infeasible -- because of economics, technology, politics, or otherwise -- to mount a successful defense?