Don't know why this was modded flaimebait when it's true. I guess people are just too afraid to admit it. If I had some mod points I'd mod you up.
If it's true, then do what the person you're praising did not do, and provide some actual examples of what he's claiming. For example: in one post, he's managing to say that disagreeing with the executive branch of the government carries some dire consequences... and yet, here is doing exactly that. Well, which is it? If you agree that people in the US can't vocally complain about the administration, then how do you explain the entire political opposition? How do you explain Howard Dean? Barbara Streisand? How about people like Michael Moore, who made $200M by loudly disagreeing and ridiculing through distortion?
Those are the opposite of being "locked down," so I guess it's a good thing you don't actually have mod points, in that it sounds like they might be used to add some patina of credibility to a factually incorrect comment.
I often see people who say that with true capitalism, the market will regulate itself.
But when an operation (say, a casino or some other service business) is actually lying about what they're delivering for your money, that's different. The market could police itself, but when you're dealing with people who are committing fraud, etc., an established rule of law and a government to enforce it is a lot less... medieval. For some fantastic portrayal of this stuff getting hashed out, I highly, highly recommend watching the entire content of HBO's "Deadwood," from the very first episode.
Your opinion: The slashdot mods are a vast right wing conspiracy
>>putting words in my mouth and ideas in my head
Actually, it's a lot more fun, and just easier, to use your own words. You were the one referring to "redshifting" in mods that countered leftier-leaning posts. You are the one that doesn't like a debate that cites, for example, "only" my opinion, while actually typing sentences like this yourself: "despite being insightful or otherwise interesting, presumably because the mods 'didnt agree with it'." Nice mind reading there! How is it, given only the fact of the mod, that you're able to make presumptions about the basis for the mod? You're imagining/projecting behavior and thoughts without any basis for the conclusions you draw. Out of curiosity, do you draw the same conclusion when, say, an idealogically opposing perspective is modded down? You're unhappy about "redshift," but you probably only notice such mods because they are the abberation, and don't fit into your comfort zone. Just open your eyes and notice that the wide majority of opinions expressed on this board are lefter-leaning than not when the topic invites such positioning, and the wide majority of mods support those sentiments. Your choice of words, which you put in your own mouth, include referring to the mod system "broken" and allowing "partisan trolling" - but you only refer to that in the context of "redshift." Just what conclusion were you expecting readers to draw, other than that there is a particular orientation and mod pattern of which you approve (shifting away from "red"), and another of which disapprove. Who's partisan, now, exactly?
I did not call people who disagree with me fascists, I called people who censor me because they disagree with me fascists.
OK, so you've established that you do call people fascists, despite the word involved having nothing to do with open debate and communication in a forum such as this. I shouldn't be surprised that the very next word you so spectacularly get wrong is "censor." Since it's too much trouble for you to look it up on your own, just go ahead and read it now. See where you're going wrong on both counts? What's missing from your use of both words is the context of authority and force. Mods on slashdot don't have any more authority than you do. Rob Malda doesn't plow through comments as a government-like agent, shaping the presentation of the responding comments. It's the users - your peers - that do so. The same peers that routinely mod up and down across the entire idealogical spectrum, without any of the government-powered authority that's central to actual censorship. It's very telling that you consider peers empowered with the same authority you have to be "censors," but only when they disagree with you. When a neutral system like slashdot's mod engine is used to mark a "redshifted" comment down, do you call that left-leaning modder a fascist? By your standards, you should - but in terms of what the word actually means, that's just as absurd as your use of it against people who disagree with you.
Oh and was that another ad hominem attack?
No, it's called sarcasm. I'm guessing you're at least a little older than 12, but I'm pointing out - with apparently more subtlety than your radar can pick up on - that you are using ad hominem attacks by invoking inflammatory terms (like "fascism" and "censor"), knowing that you're using those terms incorrectly. Lack of nuance, and tantrum-like name calling with evil-sounding (and classically mis-applied) labels are hallmarks of immature discourse. By missing the point (which was a succinct identification of that behavior on your part through the use of a sarcastic observation), you're actually just reinforcing the truth of that observation. Reflexively grabbing at the term "ad hominem" just because thing
... then you're probably pretty much connected to the Real World. Running water, power, fancy new video boards... someone in the real world is providing those items.
I don't think this is any more isolation than a serious resident of the library used to be 50 years ago. And when people in NY figured out (decades ago) that they could, say, write books for a living and have Chinese delivered at 3:00AM... it's scarecely different. In fact, I'd argue that a lot people who used to be hermits (or would have been if they were born 20 years earlier) are probalby more connected to the real world because the internet exists.
Unless, as I suspect, I'm currently typing this text into a big, scalable, and very flawed Turing test machine. If a response is posted to this, its non-sequitor-ness will prove my suspicions. Go!
Re:This is why I don't use GIMP
on
Beginning GIMP
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· Score: 2, Insightful
When I want to get work done I could care less if there is an "open source" alternative. I want the best tool for the job that's the easiest/quickest route to completeing that job. Not the tool that best suites my techno ideology.
I'd also prefer the better tool over the one that provides socialistic warmth and fuziness... but doesn't that mean you couldn't care less, rather than could?
Re:Gimpshop!
on
Beginning GIMP
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Open source is software developed by the community for the community. But the problem is always that the development community isn't very interested in making it easy for the community at large to use said software.
Which means... it's actually not "for the community," but for the developers who actually give it birth... since they're always going to be intimately familiar with it, and don't have to scratch their heads about an inscrutible UI. Making it for the user community would mean making their UI needs an important part of the effort - which isn't the case with the GIMP.
I'm really not sure how to digest this. I'll have to remove my normal slashdot comment pre-processor so that I can handle something lucid, rational, and level-headed right from the factory, as-is. Whew! Thanks.
Your opinion: The slashdot mods are a vast right wing conspiracy
My opinion: Weak posts deserve what they get, and even the largely left-leaning slashdot audience calls BS when they see a nonsensical comment or one that makes their philosophical camp look bad.
I'd say the mod system (including its meta-mechanism) work extremely well, considering the local demographic.
I don't consider you an authority on this at all
Since when does anyone need to be considered (especially by you!) an "expert" when simply pointing out that more speech is the cure for bad speech, and that members of a community forum disagreeing with you are not "fascists" (what are you, twelve?). Come back after you look up that word and realize that trotting it out in a lame attempt to shout down a opinion other than yours just makes you sound shrill and erodes your credibility.
modding other people down because you dont like what they say smacks of fascism
Either you don't quite know what "fascism" means, or you think that some government agency is modding down comments you like. Neither of those positions is any more lucid than you would appear to think the modders' opinions are.
You combat uninformed contrary opinions (in mod format or otherwise) by making unassailable, rational, non-whiny points. If you can't rise to that standard, then perhaps moaning about the mods is the more comfortable venue. Better, though, to work on the subject at hand, than to blame the audience for how poorly some comment landed on the thousands of people here who will see it.
By now, everyone knows that research on spelling, regional colloquialisms, and obscure information is best (and most accurately) satisfied by a visit to MySpace. After all, it's the busiest destination on the web now, and millions of people can't be wrong.
Which will make customers more unhappy? Notifying users of an issue and presenting a fix or hiding an issue and surreptitiously issuing a fix hidden in an upgrade? Situations like this cause customers to lose trust and once it is lost it is very difficult to earn back.
You're forgetting the third group: people who are glad they fixed it, and who are also glad that they minimized the vulnerability's exposure to the wider Guild Of Naughty People.
I'm quite certain that the government isn't going to let another telco come along and install a whole second set
I now have copper and fiber from three different companies running along the street in front of my house. Copper from two of them is running to the wall of my house, and the third company is forever begging me to get them in there, too. There are beating themselves silly on bundling service prices, and Verizon just sued the county to get them to speed up permission to let Verizon run more fiber for their FIoS service. Yes, these companies use public rights-of-way to get their cable from one point to the next, but they have to bear all of the costs of doing so. If they have to cut pavement, they have to fix it. If a pole isn't good enough, they have to put in a better one. If a neighborhood's rules are that only buried cables are OK, then they have to bury all of them at their expense. Pure competition, and it's working. And the local wireless providers are just getting started.
I find it ironic that religious people live 7 years longer (after factoring out other factors) than atheists then. If you're an atheist, the most logical thing to do is pick up a religion -- both Christians, Hindus and Buddhists live longer, so you can take your pick. It's the most logically selfish thing to do, especially if you only have one go-round.
Ignoring, for the moment, that you don't provide any substantiation for that claim (which I find highly doubtful, seen in any categorical way), I'd say you're confusing causation and correlation - the hallmark of weak conjecture and rhetoric. In other words: what's your basis for suggesting that? What mechanism would mysticism emply to, say, make you less susceptible to carcinegens and car accidents?
Before there was money in botnets there were bragging rights. That will always be there...
Bragging rights didn't include 10,000 more traffic trying to sell fake drugs and bogus Rolex watches and pay-per-click on pr0n ads. It's just not the same, scale-wise. People who own 500 domains that are all stuffed with search spam content aren't in the bragging rights game, I think. But of course, more and better security/practices is worth it no matter what, and not just on MS's part.
So, if by some miracle, they actually discover a way to hunt down and nuetralize the search engine spammers, what are the odds that they share this information with other Search Engine companies?
Their purpose is to make their own search engine more effective for users, thus generating more traffic for them. A nice side effect would be that Yahoo and Google, etc., would feel more pressure to integrate similar technologies into their own engines. As usual, competition produces the best results.
Sure, preventing search engines from indexing blogspam posts is great. Maybe that's the first step, but it's not going for the root cause - the botnets that run the apps that post/email in the first place, and the compromised webservers hosting order sites.
These are not mutually exclusive goals. If you take away any incentive for spamalizing content (meaning, not only does it not boost your search placement, it penalizes you), then much of the pressure to run botnets and crack servers goes away.
You have to be careful now. If you ever turn in any of your own work for a future assignment, you may be flagged as a plagiarist!
Funny you should say that. I was talking to an acquaintance the other day, about a common interest. I brought up a point that I've been making a lot lately, and asked if I'd just read that on the such-and-such web site. I laughed, and pointed out that I wrote it on the such-and-such web site, that being my site and whatnot. He didn't believe me until I hopped on a laptop and changed the punctuation in a sentence while he was watching.
It's not clear, looking at the site, that it's ME writing it (no need to make the folks at the day job wonder about my priorities!). But your point is a good one. A particular turn of a phrase, or string of words that I like to use could easily be mis-interpreted by someone else as me ripping off... me.
I think it's ideal in many cases to use as a starting point.
You may think it's a starting point, but millions of people think it's the end of their research. As we all now know, research starts at MySpace. Whoever has the most embedded music videos has the most accurate link to the most salient Wikipedia article.
On an only slightly related note, I for the first time recently noticed that some of my web content was being crawled by a counter-plagarism search engine marketed to high school and college instructors. I'm not sure if I should be flattered or annoyed.
I hadn't heard anything about airports being threatened by ballistic missiles...
Presumably, the more likely concern would be shoulder-fired SAMs shot at approaching/departing aircraft. A system that could actually acquire and zap such a thing from anywhere around the airport grounds would have to be highly automated and very fast... I'm a little concerned about false positives. A lot, actually.
By which I mean actual, migrating waterfowl. They'll fall out of the sky right into the Orange Terminal's food vending area, where Duck a la Orange will still sell for $50, right next to the $50 sandwiches. This is convenient, because that's what it will take to finance the laser equipment.
Luckily, Reagan National, in DC, can just use shark-mounted lasers swimming in the Potomac River.
If you believe in God, and God doesn't exist, then you've lost what?
Your dignity, and the sense of self required to make the most of the brief life our species enjoys.
A little time hanging out with nice people who have high morals?
I don't think "morals" means what you think it means. Your "morals" are simply your "values." Some people's value systems include the wonderfulness of molesting children, or seriously embracing the sacrificing of chickens to persuade your dead ancestors to alter the weather for your wedding reception. "High" morals doesn't mean anything. You have to identify which morals, and speak to the underlying system of thought - or in the case of religion, childish fantasy - upon which the world view in question, and thus the system of values (morals) that a person develops (or simply takes out of a story book).
people who believe in a hard days' work, who are willing to feed themselves and raise their children with a good education and proper values
The people I know that most fit this description are the least religious. Conversely, the more religious ones tend to keep talking in terms of their food being provided by the mystical personality they pray to before dinner, and indicate that when the going gets tough, it's not hard work or personal accountability, but Jesus(tm) that's actually responsible for everything that happens. What a cheap cop-out.
laying on the couch living off government welfare, eating cheesy poofs bought with government food stamps
Well, at least we can see that you don't belong to one of those charitable churches that does things like collect canned food for people, or shelter lazy homeless women who are running from their abusive husbands, etc. I mean, taking that sort of handout is a sure sign of moral weakness, so any church that would dole out such support is surely a major player in Satan's campaign to make people morally weak. No doubt.
Good luck in hell
Heh! Joke's on you. There isn't one, other than that which you make for yourself while you (meaning, your functioning brain, which pretty much requires you to be alive in order to do things like fire the synapses that allow you to actually be yourself) are actually alive. And since you're so scared of actually living your real life, in the face of a sure eventual death, you're focused on an imaginary afterlife that doesn't exist... and I'd call all of that wasted time and fretting to be a current, living hell that you personally occupy. And when you die, it will end - but you'll never get back the time you spent obsessing over such absurdities as original sin and whether you've properly entertained, through treacly hymns and magic hand-waving, a cruel and capricious god that allows priests to bugger altar boys and beautiful, innocent children to burn alive in crashed church vans or whither away from blood cancer no matter how much everyone prays they won't. Hell's right here, bub, if that's all you can think about... but those of us who don't attach a personality to the laws of physics get to produce our own meaning in life, and live our actual lives undistracted by fairy tales we should have grown out of when we were five years old.
I can either think and ponder about the forseeable future, or be like you and say the future doesn't exist yet so who cares because things are great now
Help me out, here, and point out where I said that, OK?
The only way to tend to a maintainable future is to have the technological sophistication and economic largesse required to invest in improvements in efficiency. Would you rather go back in time? To what time? When people just shoveled coal into basement furnaces? Or when we only lived until 35, and rarely benefited from the wisdom and cooler heads that come with maturity?
Economic health is the only thing that can fund the investments needed for a maintainable future. Wringing your hands and cursing prosperity accomplishes nothing. Putting prosperity to work in useful ways is the only rational course - and torpedoing prosperity because it's somehow - what? distasteful to some peopel? - bad... that's absurd.
I always find this perspective to be sort of a head-scratcher. What time-frame are you using? Is it less hospitable than, say, during the ice age? Or, while the plague was slaughtering half the population of Europe? Or while the Soviets and their puppets were within inches of launching nukes from Cuba? Or, while we were paying more (in real dollars) for oil a couple decades back... or suffering horrible inflation and much higher unemployment in the 1970s? Or while millions were dying in the great world wars? Or while slavery was a key part of the colonial economy?
Personally I like antibiotics, refridgeration, satellite communication, computer networks with millions of nodes including something smaller than a bar of soap that lets me write and send things like this while sitting in the woods listening to birds chirp. We've never had a higher standard of living, longer life expectancy, or more ways to communicate with one another. That we're having cultural friction with someo groups that don't want things to play out quite that way, and have to sort out amongst ourselves the best way to deal with that (while not getting blown up on a train, etc), is unfortunate... but still nothing compared to the growing pains of the past.
That being said, I also want to zoom around the universe. A lot.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't know why this was modded flaimebait when it's true. I guess people are just too afraid to admit it. If I had some mod points I'd mod you up.
If it's true, then do what the person you're praising did not do, and provide some actual examples of what he's claiming. For example: in one post, he's managing to say that disagreeing with the executive branch of the government carries some dire consequences... and yet, here is doing exactly that. Well, which is it? If you agree that people in the US can't vocally complain about the administration, then how do you explain the entire political opposition? How do you explain Howard Dean? Barbara Streisand? How about people like Michael Moore, who made $200M by loudly disagreeing and ridiculing through distortion?
Those are the opposite of being "locked down," so I guess it's a good thing you don't actually have mod points, in that it sounds like they might be used to add some patina of credibility to a factually incorrect comment.
I often see people who say that with true capitalism, the market will regulate itself.
But when an operation (say, a casino or some other service business) is actually lying about what they're delivering for your money, that's different. The market could police itself, but when you're dealing with people who are committing fraud, etc., an established rule of law and a government to enforce it is a lot less... medieval. For some fantastic portrayal of this stuff getting hashed out, I highly, highly recommend watching the entire content of HBO's "Deadwood," from the very first episode.
Your opinion: The slashdot mods are a vast right wing conspiracy
>>putting words in my mouth and ideas in my head
Actually, it's a lot more fun, and just easier, to use your own words. You were the one referring to "redshifting" in mods that countered leftier-leaning posts. You are the one that doesn't like a debate that cites, for example, "only" my opinion, while actually typing sentences like this yourself: "despite being insightful or otherwise interesting, presumably because the mods 'didnt agree with it'." Nice mind reading there! How is it, given only the fact of the mod, that you're able to make presumptions about the basis for the mod? You're imagining/projecting behavior and thoughts without any basis for the conclusions you draw. Out of curiosity, do you draw the same conclusion when, say, an idealogically opposing perspective is modded down? You're unhappy about "redshift," but you probably only notice such mods because they are the abberation, and don't fit into your comfort zone. Just open your eyes and notice that the wide majority of opinions expressed on this board are lefter-leaning than not when the topic invites such positioning, and the wide majority of mods support those sentiments. Your choice of words, which you put in your own mouth, include referring to the mod system "broken" and allowing "partisan trolling" - but you only refer to that in the context of "redshift." Just what conclusion were you expecting readers to draw, other than that there is a particular orientation and mod pattern of which you approve (shifting away from "red"), and another of which disapprove. Who's partisan, now, exactly?
I did not call people who disagree with me fascists, I called people who censor me because they disagree with me fascists.
OK, so you've established that you do call people fascists, despite the word involved having nothing to do with open debate and communication in a forum such as this. I shouldn't be surprised that the very next word you so spectacularly get wrong is "censor." Since it's too much trouble for you to look it up on your own, just go ahead and read it now. See where you're going wrong on both counts? What's missing from your use of both words is the context of authority and force. Mods on slashdot don't have any more authority than you do. Rob Malda doesn't plow through comments as a government-like agent, shaping the presentation of the responding comments. It's the users - your peers - that do so. The same peers that routinely mod up and down across the entire idealogical spectrum, without any of the government-powered authority that's central to actual censorship. It's very telling that you consider peers empowered with the same authority you have to be "censors," but only when they disagree with you. When a neutral system like slashdot's mod engine is used to mark a "redshifted" comment down, do you call that left-leaning modder a fascist? By your standards, you should - but in terms of what the word actually means, that's just as absurd as your use of it against people who disagree with you.
Oh and was that another ad hominem attack?
No, it's called sarcasm. I'm guessing you're at least a little older than 12, but I'm pointing out - with apparently more subtlety than your radar can pick up on - that you are using ad hominem attacks by invoking inflammatory terms (like "fascism" and "censor"), knowing that you're using those terms incorrectly. Lack of nuance, and tantrum-like name calling with evil-sounding (and classically mis-applied) labels are hallmarks of immature discourse. By missing the point (which was a succinct identification of that behavior on your part through the use of a sarcastic observation), you're actually just reinforcing the truth of that observation. Reflexively grabbing at the term "ad hominem" just because thing
Are you sure? What makes you feel this way?
Hah! I knew it!
... then you're probably pretty much connected to the Real World. Running water, power, fancy new video boards... someone in the real world is providing those items.
I don't think this is any more isolation than a serious resident of the library used to be 50 years ago. And when people in NY figured out (decades ago) that they could, say, write books for a living and have Chinese delivered at 3:00AM... it's scarecely different. In fact, I'd argue that a lot people who used to be hermits (or would have been if they were born 20 years earlier) are probalby more connected to the real world because the internet exists.
Unless, as I suspect, I'm currently typing this text into a big, scalable, and very flawed Turing test machine. If a response is posted to this, its non-sequitor-ness will prove my suspicions. Go!
When I want to get work done I could care less if there is an "open source" alternative. I want the best tool for the job that's the easiest/quickest route to completeing that job. Not the tool that best suites my techno ideology.
I'd also prefer the better tool over the one that provides socialistic warmth and fuziness... but doesn't that mean you couldn't care less, rather than could?
Open source is software developed by the community for the community. But the problem is always that the development community isn't very interested in making it easy for the community at large to use said software.
Which means... it's actually not "for the community," but for the developers who actually give it birth... since they're always going to be intimately familiar with it, and don't have to scratch their heads about an inscrutible UI. Making it for the user community would mean making their UI needs an important part of the effort - which isn't the case with the GIMP.
I'm really not sure how to digest this. I'll have to remove my normal slashdot comment pre-processor so that I can handle something lucid, rational, and level-headed right from the factory, as-is. Whew! Thanks.
but then again only your opinion
Your opinion: The slashdot mods are a vast right wing conspiracy
My opinion: Weak posts deserve what they get, and even the largely left-leaning slashdot audience calls BS when they see a nonsensical comment or one that makes their philosophical camp look bad.
I'd say the mod system (including its meta-mechanism) work extremely well, considering the local demographic.
I don't consider you an authority on this at all
Since when does anyone need to be considered (especially by you!) an "expert" when simply pointing out that more speech is the cure for bad speech, and that members of a community forum disagreeing with you are not "fascists" (what are you, twelve?). Come back after you look up that word and realize that trotting it out in a lame attempt to shout down a opinion other than yours just makes you sound shrill and erodes your credibility.
modding other people down because you dont like what they say smacks of fascism
Either you don't quite know what "fascism" means, or you think that some government agency is modding down comments you like. Neither of those positions is any more lucid than you would appear to think the modders' opinions are.
You combat uninformed contrary opinions (in mod format or otherwise) by making unassailable, rational, non-whiny points. If you can't rise to that standard, then perhaps moaning about the mods is the more comfortable venue. Better, though, to work on the subject at hand, than to blame the audience for how poorly some comment landed on the thousands of people here who will see it.
By now, everyone knows that research on spelling, regional colloquialisms, and obscure information is best (and most accurately) satisfied by a visit to MySpace. After all, it's the busiest destination on the web now, and millions of people can't be wrong.
Which will make customers more unhappy? Notifying users of an issue and presenting a fix or hiding an issue and surreptitiously issuing a fix hidden in an upgrade? Situations like this cause customers to lose trust and once it is lost it is very difficult to earn back.
You're forgetting the third group: people who are glad they fixed it, and who are also glad that they minimized the vulnerability's exposure to the wider Guild Of Naughty People.
I'm quite certain that the government isn't going to let another telco come along and install a whole second set
I now have copper and fiber from three different companies running along the street in front of my house. Copper from two of them is running to the wall of my house, and the third company is forever begging me to get them in there, too. There are beating themselves silly on bundling service prices, and Verizon just sued the county to get them to speed up permission to let Verizon run more fiber for their FIoS service. Yes, these companies use public rights-of-way to get their cable from one point to the next, but they have to bear all of the costs of doing so. If they have to cut pavement, they have to fix it. If a pole isn't good enough, they have to put in a better one. If a neighborhood's rules are that only buried cables are OK, then they have to bury all of them at their expense. Pure competition, and it's working. And the local wireless providers are just getting started.
I find it ironic that religious people live 7 years longer (after factoring out other factors) than atheists then. If you're an atheist, the most logical thing to do is pick up a religion -- both Christians, Hindus and Buddhists live longer, so you can take your pick. It's the most logically selfish thing to do, especially if you only have one go-round.
Ignoring, for the moment, that you don't provide any substantiation for that claim (which I find highly doubtful, seen in any categorical way), I'd say you're confusing causation and correlation - the hallmark of weak conjecture and rhetoric. In other words: what's your basis for suggesting that? What mechanism would mysticism emply to, say, make you less susceptible to carcinegens and car accidents?
Before there was money in botnets there were bragging rights. That will always be there...
Bragging rights didn't include 10,000 more traffic trying to sell fake drugs and bogus Rolex watches and pay-per-click on pr0n ads. It's just not the same, scale-wise. People who own 500 domains that are all stuffed with search spam content aren't in the bragging rights game, I think. But of course, more and better security/practices is worth it no matter what, and not just on MS's part.
So, if by some miracle, they actually discover a way to hunt down and nuetralize the search engine spammers, what are the odds that they share this information with other Search Engine companies?
Their purpose is to make their own search engine more effective for users, thus generating more traffic for them. A nice side effect would be that Yahoo and Google, etc., would feel more pressure to integrate similar technologies into their own engines. As usual, competition produces the best results.
Sure, preventing search engines from indexing blogspam posts is great. Maybe that's the first step, but it's not going for the root cause - the botnets that run the apps that post/email in the first place, and the compromised webservers hosting order sites.
These are not mutually exclusive goals. If you take away any incentive for spamalizing content (meaning, not only does it not boost your search placement, it penalizes you), then much of the pressure to run botnets and crack servers goes away.
You have to be careful now. If you ever turn in any of your own work for a future assignment, you may be flagged as a plagiarist!
Funny you should say that. I was talking to an acquaintance the other day, about a common interest. I brought up a point that I've been making a lot lately, and asked if I'd just read that on the such-and-such web site. I laughed, and pointed out that I wrote it on the such-and-such web site, that being my site and whatnot. He didn't believe me until I hopped on a laptop and changed the punctuation in a sentence while he was watching.
It's not clear, looking at the site, that it's ME writing it (no need to make the folks at the day job wonder about my priorities!). But your point is a good one. A particular turn of a phrase, or string of words that I like to use could easily be mis-interpreted by someone else as me ripping off... me.
I hate them because of that incident the word rootkit became popular.
I know what you mean! Just the other day I was listening to two teenage girls yakking in the mall...
"Oh no you did-uhnt! Girl, you can't be lettin' some loser root your kit like that!"
I think it's ideal in many cases to use as a starting point.
You may think it's a starting point, but millions of people think it's the end of their research. As we all now know, research starts at MySpace. Whoever has the most embedded music videos has the most accurate link to the most salient Wikipedia article.
On an only slightly related note, I for the first time recently noticed that some of my web content was being crawled by a counter-plagarism search engine marketed to high school and college instructors. I'm not sure if I should be flattered or annoyed.
I hadn't heard anything about airports being threatened by ballistic missiles...
Presumably, the more likely concern would be shoulder-fired SAMs shot at approaching/departing aircraft. A system that could actually acquire and zap such a thing from anywhere around the airport grounds would have to be highly automated and very fast... I'm a little concerned about false positives. A lot, actually.
By which I mean actual, migrating waterfowl. They'll fall out of the sky right into the Orange Terminal's food vending area, where Duck a la Orange will still sell for $50, right next to the $50 sandwiches. This is convenient, because that's what it will take to finance the laser equipment.
Luckily, Reagan National, in DC, can just use shark-mounted lasers swimming in the Potomac River.
If you believe in God, and God doesn't exist, then you've lost what?
Your dignity, and the sense of self required to make the most of the brief life our species enjoys.
A little time hanging out with nice people who have high morals?
I don't think "morals" means what you think it means. Your "morals" are simply your "values." Some people's value systems include the wonderfulness of molesting children, or seriously embracing the sacrificing of chickens to persuade your dead ancestors to alter the weather for your wedding reception. "High" morals doesn't mean anything. You have to identify which morals, and speak to the underlying system of thought - or in the case of religion, childish fantasy - upon which the world view in question, and thus the system of values (morals) that a person develops (or simply takes out of a story book).
people who believe in a hard days' work, who are willing to feed themselves and raise their children with a good education and proper values
The people I know that most fit this description are the least religious. Conversely, the more religious ones tend to keep talking in terms of their food being provided by the mystical personality they pray to before dinner, and indicate that when the going gets tough, it's not hard work or personal accountability, but Jesus(tm) that's actually responsible for everything that happens. What a cheap cop-out.
laying on the couch living off government welfare, eating cheesy poofs bought with government food stamps
Well, at least we can see that you don't belong to one of those charitable churches that does things like collect canned food for people, or shelter lazy homeless women who are running from their abusive husbands, etc. I mean, taking that sort of handout is a sure sign of moral weakness, so any church that would dole out such support is surely a major player in Satan's campaign to make people morally weak. No doubt.
Good luck in hell
Heh! Joke's on you. There isn't one, other than that which you make for yourself while you (meaning, your functioning brain, which pretty much requires you to be alive in order to do things like fire the synapses that allow you to actually be yourself) are actually alive. And since you're so scared of actually living your real life, in the face of a sure eventual death, you're focused on an imaginary afterlife that doesn't exist... and I'd call all of that wasted time and fretting to be a current, living hell that you personally occupy. And when you die, it will end - but you'll never get back the time you spent obsessing over such absurdities as original sin and whether you've properly entertained, through treacly hymns and magic hand-waving, a cruel and capricious god that allows priests to bugger altar boys and beautiful, innocent children to burn alive in crashed church vans or whither away from blood cancer no matter how much everyone prays they won't. Hell's right here, bub, if that's all you can think about... but those of us who don't attach a personality to the laws of physics get to produce our own meaning in life, and live our actual lives undistracted by fairy tales we should have grown out of when we were five years old.
I can either think and ponder about the forseeable future, or be like you and say the future doesn't exist yet so who cares because things are great now
Help me out, here, and point out where I said that, OK?
The only way to tend to a maintainable future is to have the technological sophistication and economic largesse required to invest in improvements in efficiency. Would you rather go back in time? To what time? When people just shoveled coal into basement furnaces? Or when we only lived until 35, and rarely benefited from the wisdom and cooler heads that come with maturity?
Economic health is the only thing that can fund the investments needed for a maintainable future. Wringing your hands and cursing prosperity accomplishes nothing. Putting prosperity to work in useful ways is the only rational course - and torpedoing prosperity because it's somehow - what? distasteful to some peopel? - bad... that's absurd.
With this planet's increasing inhospitability
I always find this perspective to be sort of a head-scratcher. What time-frame are you using? Is it less hospitable than, say, during the ice age? Or, while the plague was slaughtering half the population of Europe? Or while the Soviets and their puppets were within inches of launching nukes from Cuba? Or, while we were paying more (in real dollars) for oil a couple decades back... or suffering horrible inflation and much higher unemployment in the 1970s? Or while millions were dying in the great world wars? Or while slavery was a key part of the colonial economy?
Personally I like antibiotics, refridgeration, satellite communication, computer networks with millions of nodes including something smaller than a bar of soap that lets me write and send things like this while sitting in the woods listening to birds chirp. We've never had a higher standard of living, longer life expectancy, or more ways to communicate with one another. That we're having cultural friction with someo groups that don't want things to play out quite that way, and have to sort out amongst ourselves the best way to deal with that (while not getting blown up on a train, etc), is unfortunate... but still nothing compared to the growing pains of the past.
That being said, I also want to zoom around the universe. A lot.