I agree with you that the people reading and writing comments on slashdot are not exactly the same as the general population. But there are plenty of insightful/funny/informative comments on regular news sites. The problem is that these comments tend to get buried under a haystack of flames and spam. I think even a halfway decent user moderation system would at least hide these comments from the general readers. As the system is used more and more, it forces people to take a little time to think before spouting whatever garbage comes into their head. Even the unwashed masses can learn to think before they post. But the problem with most of the mainstream comment systems now is that the reward for a flame is exactly the same as the reward for an insightful post that takes some thought and effort.
I really don't understand why more news sites don't implement a threaded and user moderated comment system. Sure, the slashdot system isn't perfect, but the comments here are far more interesting/productive than the mainstream news sites. Removing anonymous commenting sounds like throwing out the baby with the bathwater, there are plenty of people who might have a valuable comment, but don't want to be bothered by registering for yet another web site.
In addition, I'm sure there are plenty of comments from registered users that just aren't that valuable. A threaded and user moderated system similar to slashot would vastly improve/filter the quality of comments on most sites, and long term would increase readership, so it just seems like an obvious solution.
Google Voice on Android does not provide VOIP. It works by first calling a google voice access number and then patching you through to the number you're trying to call. This can help for things like international calls, but it still uses up your minutes. Some plans have an option where you can make unlimited calls to certain numbers, and to the phone company it appears that you are just calling the google voice number again and again. So it can help you if you tend to max out your minutes to a variety of numbers, but using Google Voice by itself doesn't allow you to make calls over Wifi. However, with that said, you may be able to combine Google voice with other services to get free VOIP on android (http://lifehacker.com/5349506/make-free-voip-calls-from-google-voice)
Skype allows you to make calls completely over Wifi with just the single app. So you can call other Skype users without using any minutes, and the setup is much simpler than the Google Voice/SIP setup.
Do you have references that these constituents "overwhelmingly favor its repeal"? I've heard this before on Fox news but have not seen any reliable statistics to back it up. On the other hand I did hear last year from several places that the majority of people favoured a public option. However, the health insurance companies obviously didn't want this and therefore many in Washington made sure it didn't happen.
The reason I bring this up is because a lot of people didn't like the bill in the beginning because it didn't include medicare expansion or a public option. But I believe many of those people would still not want it repealed.
I'm using Thunderbird 3 on Fedora 13 to access my mail over IMAP. I'm not sure how much is "very large" but I have about 11,000 messages in my inbox now, and several folders with a total of probably 100,000 messages. I haven't seen any performance problems compared to Thunderbird 2.
Re:Not end to anything, rather, start of rapid cha
on
The End of Free
·
· Score: 2, Informative
the rhythm of change is beating faster and faster as time goes on.
Alvin Toffler wrote about this in 1970 in his book Future Shock. Technology is advancing at a faster and faster rate, and his prediction is that at some point technology will be changing faster than many people can adapt. This will have an effect similar to culture shock where the technology around these people has changed so much that they are not able to function normally in society.
1 - Stop snatching people off streets. Provide a Right to fair trial. (REALITY: No longer have Miranda rights even for U.S. citizens.) (Obama's advisers say americans can be held indefinitely w/o trial)
2 - Protect our Right to Privacy. (REALITY: They now spy on us via warrantless wiretaps and track our cellphones.) (Patriot Act renewed by Obama and the Pelosi Democrats.)
3 - Stop interrogation. Close Guantanamo. (Revoked - Club G is still open and now they interrogate US citizens too, not just foreigners.)
4 - End the war. (Nope. Instead it's been extended two more years and apparently involves killing children & journalists not soldiers (see wikileaks))
5 - Protect whistleblowers. (Instead of protecting them, Obama has decided to attack whistleblowers more strongly than any previous president. For example, Thomas Drake and Bradley Manning).
6 - Government transparency. (Obama negotiated away the public option in secret meetings with the big pharma companies)
7 - Obama has taken punishment without trial to a new level by authorizing assassination of US citizens who are no where near a battlefield.
Obama said a lot of great stuff during his campaign, it's too bad he has reversed himself on a lot of the most important issues.
No, it won't be an interesting nomination. Kagan has already said that she changed her mind about her statements about the confirmation process [1]. She has a discouraging lack of public record regarding important political issues, and she wants to keep it that way. The nomination process will probably consist of Republicans complaining about her lack of record, and her supposedly liberal bias, when in actuality she will make the court significantly more conservative by replacing Stevens [2].
From what I understand a lot of PCs with Windows can sell for cheaper than the base cost of the system. The reason is that they are effectively subsidized by the pre-installed thirdparty spam-ware. The thirdparty software vendors pay to have their applications pre-installed which covers the cost of the windows license plus a little bit extra. So the only way a linux or no-OS computer could be cheaper is if they also had a similar deal.
Unfortunately, much of Lessig's argument is based on his personal knowledge of her, and lacks evidence about what her political positions/ideology actually is. He even concedes at the end of the article that by replacing stevens, she will move the court further to the right, which wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that the current court is already pretty conservative.
Just to be clear they presented the data in both an edited and unedited version . I would agree with you if wikileaks had released only the edited version, but the fact that they released the full video right next to the edited one, puts them several levels above something like National Enquirer IMO. It also puts them at a higher standard than most of the current US mainstream media which is usually very light on references and heavy on granting anonymity even when it's not needed.
Did the edited video go overboard with the picture of the son in the edited video? Yes, probably. But in general I think wikileaks does a good job of providing unbiased information and filling a big gap left by most of the media.
I don't think it's morally wrong to cheat in a game of solitaire. Unless of course you are in some kind of solitaire competition where you cheating would cause another person to lose when they shouldn't have.
What victim? It says he didn't even make any posts. This seems more like opening the unlocked front door of your house, saying "yep it's open" and then leaving without taking anything.
I disagree. The "source code" for a book is the text, not the author's imagination. Both source code and text are created by the author's labor/imagination/creativity. Both source code and text can be copyrighted, and both can be used to produce something that is sold in a packaged format.
In the software world, I can by a particular packaging of the software, OTS, or via download. In the book world, I buy a particular packaging of the text, a physical book or e-book. In neither case do I own the copyrighted material.
As another example, if I pay a software developer to create some source code for me, I can negotiate a contract that says I own the code. Likewise, if I pay a writer to write some text for me, I can negotiate a contract that says I own the text.
You are right, and Glenn Greenwald has an excellent blog entry explaining this in more detail. This probably wouldn't be news at all if not for the attempt to use it to justify warrentless wire tapping. If not for the controversy around that and terrorism in general, the article could be titled "criminals convicted with help of legally obtained evidence". You can see how it loses it's effect.
That works out well for everyone, so you'll never see it in action.
Actually, you can already see it in action. Ever been to Milwaukee? They've had a voucher program going on for several years. So far the difference in student achievement is negligible, meaning that students do about the same with or without vouchers. But I think most or all of the studies find that the parents are happier having the choice. IMO as long as the students are not doing worse with the vouchers, they should be available.
Why would the admins have to watch these pages? Does it even matter if there is vandalism or spam on a page about some small garage band or anime episode X? The people (if any) who are interested in those pages are the ones who will notice or care if there is spamdalism on those pages, and I'm sure many of them would be happy to fix it. The reason wikipedia is successful I believe has a lot more to do with the decentralization of administration than the diligent efforts of the deletionist admins.
Just as an example, let's say I go to a page about important topic A (let's say Obama's page) this causes me to follow links to several other relevant topics (Health care, economy, etc). Where in this scenario will I be affected by the spam on the page of Joe the garage band member?
Another scenario, I know Joe the garage band member and I look up his band on wikipedia. Oops, it has an add for penis enlargement. Since I know Joe I check the history and revert the changes to see the page. Compare this with going to Joe's bands page and finding nothing. I spend 20 minutes writing something up. The next day it is deleted. Now the next person who goes to the page after seeing Joe's band at a local bar also finds no information on wikipedia.
My main point is that an article with history and spam is better than no article at all. It doesn't matter if the admin's can't monitor all the pages about every trivial topic, no one expects them to. I think a non-deletionist wiki could beat wikipedia in the long run. The problem is that wikipedia just has so much momentum that it would be very tough for a new site to catch up.
Maybe this is a new business opportunity for the Pirate Bay. In addition to the private VPN service, you could also get remote anonymous encrypted storage. If you only access the storage through the VPN, it could make it pretty difficult to track.
Here is the wikipedia link. Based on the information there, it does sound like the judge went too easy on her. There were two witnesses and a security camera that say the female Korean store owner was not in danger when she shot the girl.
When I worked at Motorola about 10 years ago they tried to pull that. We were given laptops and told that we could work from home. Unfortunately we were also expected to be in the office at least 40 hours a week. Hopefully they changed their policies somewhat since I left there several years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Using your webcam obviously. My computer is a bit of a pervert.
I agree with you that the people reading and writing comments on slashdot are not exactly the same as the general population. But there are plenty of insightful/funny/informative comments on regular news sites. The problem is that these comments tend to get buried under a haystack of flames and spam. I think even a halfway decent user moderation system would at least hide these comments from the general readers. As the system is used more and more, it forces people to take a little time to think before spouting whatever garbage comes into their head. Even the unwashed masses can learn to think before they post. But the problem with most of the mainstream comment systems now is that the reward for a flame is exactly the same as the reward for an insightful post that takes some thought and effort.
I really don't understand why more news sites don't implement a threaded and user moderated comment system. Sure, the slashdot system isn't perfect, but the comments here are far more interesting/productive than the mainstream news sites. Removing anonymous commenting sounds like throwing out the baby with the bathwater, there are plenty of people who might have a valuable comment, but don't want to be bothered by registering for yet another web site.
In addition, I'm sure there are plenty of comments from registered users that just aren't that valuable. A threaded and user moderated system similar to slashot would vastly improve/filter the quality of comments on most sites, and long term would increase readership, so it just seems like an obvious solution.
Google Voice on Android does not provide VOIP. It works by first calling a google voice access number and then patching you through to the number you're trying to call. This can help for things like international calls, but it still uses up your minutes. Some plans have an option where you can make unlimited calls to certain numbers, and to the phone company it appears that you are just calling the google voice number again and again. So it can help you if you tend to max out your minutes to a variety of numbers, but using Google Voice by itself doesn't allow you to make calls over Wifi. However, with that said, you may be able to combine Google voice with other services to get free VOIP on android (http://lifehacker.com/5349506/make-free-voip-calls-from-google-voice)
Skype allows you to make calls completely over Wifi with just the single app. So you can call other Skype users without using any minutes, and the setup is much simpler than the Google Voice/SIP setup.
Do you have references that these constituents "overwhelmingly favor its repeal"? I've heard this before on Fox news but have not seen any reliable statistics to back it up. On the other hand I did hear last year from several places that the majority of people favoured a public option. However, the health insurance companies obviously didn't want this and therefore many in Washington made sure it didn't happen.
The reason I bring this up is because a lot of people didn't like the bill in the beginning because it didn't include medicare expansion or a public option. But I believe many of those people would still not want it repealed.
I'm using Thunderbird 3 on Fedora 13 to access my mail over IMAP. I'm not sure how much is "very large" but I have about 11,000 messages in my inbox now, and several folders with a total of probably 100,000 messages. I haven't seen any performance problems compared to Thunderbird 2.
the rhythm of change is beating faster and faster as time goes on.
Alvin Toffler wrote about this in 1970 in his book Future Shock. Technology is advancing at a faster and faster rate, and his prediction is that at some point technology will be changing faster than many people can adapt. This will have an effect similar to culture shock where the technology around these people has changed so much that they are not able to function normally in society.
5 - Protect whistleblowers. (Instead of protecting them, Obama has decided to attack whistleblowers more strongly than any previous president. For example, Thomas Drake and Bradley Manning).
6 - Government transparency. (Obama negotiated away the public option in secret meetings with the big pharma companies)
7 - Obama has taken punishment without trial to a new level by authorizing assassination of US citizens who are no where near a battlefield.
Obama said a lot of great stuff during his campaign, it's too bad he has reversed himself on a lot of the most important issues.
No, it won't be an interesting nomination. Kagan has already said that she changed her mind about her statements about the confirmation process [1]. She has a discouraging lack of public record regarding important political issues, and she wants to keep it that way. The nomination process will probably consist of Republicans complaining about her lack of record, and her supposedly liberal bias, when in actuality she will make the court significantly more conservative by replacing Stevens [2].
[1]http://dailycaller.com/2010/05/10/elena-kagan-no-longer-thinks-supreme-court-nominees-should-have-to-answer-direct-questions/
[2]http://themoderatevoice.com/72203/kagan-will-move-supreme-court-to-the-right-guest-voice/
I don't see any license information on the download site. Was this released under the creative commons license?
From what I understand a lot of PCs with Windows can sell for cheaper than the base cost of the system. The reason is that they are effectively subsidized by the pre-installed thirdparty spam-ware. The thirdparty software vendors pay to have their applications pre-installed which covers the cost of the windows license plus a little bit extra. So the only way a linux or no-OS computer could be cheaper is if they also had a similar deal.
Unfortunately, much of Lessig's argument is based on his personal knowledge of her, and lacks evidence about what her political positions/ideology actually is. He even concedes at the end of the article that by replacing stevens, she will move the court further to the right, which wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that the current court is already pretty conservative.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/27/lessig/index.html
Glenn Greenwald has written several articles over the past few weeks detailing what information is available about Kagan.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/13/kagan
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/05/10/kagan/
Just to be clear they presented the data in both an edited and unedited version . I would agree with you if wikileaks had released only the edited version, but the fact that they released the full video right next to the edited one, puts them several levels above something like National Enquirer IMO. It also puts them at a higher standard than most of the current US mainstream media which is usually very light on references and heavy on granting anonymity even when it's not needed.
Did the edited video go overboard with the picture of the son in the edited video? Yes, probably. But in general I think wikileaks does a good job of providing unbiased information and filling a big gap left by most of the media.
Why would it be morally wrong to drive without a seatbelt? It's against the law in many places, but that doesn't make it morally wrong.
I don't think it's morally wrong to cheat in a game of solitaire. Unless of course you are in some kind of solitaire competition where you cheating would cause another person to lose when they shouldn't have.
What victim? It says he didn't even make any posts. This seems more like opening the unlocked front door of your house, saying "yep it's open" and then leaving without taking anything.
I disagree. The "source code" for a book is the text, not the author's imagination. Both source code and text are created by the author's labor/imagination/creativity. Both source code and text can be copyrighted, and both can be used to produce something that is sold in a packaged format. In the software world, I can by a particular packaging of the software, OTS, or via download. In the book world, I buy a particular packaging of the text, a physical book or e-book. In neither case do I own the copyrighted material. As another example, if I pay a software developer to create some source code for me, I can negotiate a contract that says I own the code. Likewise, if I pay a writer to write some text for me, I can negotiate a contract that says I own the text.
You are right, and Glenn Greenwald has an excellent blog entry explaining this in more detail. This probably wouldn't be news at all if not for the attempt to use it to justify warrentless wire tapping. If not for the controversy around that and terrorism in general, the article could be titled "criminals convicted with help of legally obtained evidence". You can see how it loses it's effect.
That works out well for everyone, so you'll never see it in action.
Actually, you can already see it in action. Ever been to Milwaukee? They've had a voucher program going on for several years. So far the difference in student achievement is negligible, meaning that students do about the same with or without vouchers. But I think most or all of the studies find that the parents are happier having the choice. IMO as long as the students are not doing worse with the vouchers, they should be available.
For anyone who is interested, there is also a Pirate Party of the United States. It appears to be based on similar ideas as other pirate parties.
Why would the admins have to watch these pages? Does it even matter if there is vandalism or spam on a page about some small garage band or anime episode X? The people (if any) who are interested in those pages are the ones who will notice or care if there is spamdalism on those pages, and I'm sure many of them would be happy to fix it. The reason wikipedia is successful I believe has a lot more to do with the decentralization of administration than the diligent efforts of the deletionist admins.
Just as an example, let's say I go to a page about important topic A (let's say Obama's page) this causes me to follow links to several other relevant topics (Health care, economy, etc). Where in this scenario will I be affected by the spam on the page of Joe the garage band member?
Another scenario, I know Joe the garage band member and I look up his band on wikipedia. Oops, it has an add for penis enlargement. Since I know Joe I check the history and revert the changes to see the page. Compare this with going to Joe's bands page and finding nothing. I spend 20 minutes writing something up. The next day it is deleted. Now the next person who goes to the page after seeing Joe's band at a local bar also finds no information on wikipedia.
My main point is that an article with history and spam is better than no article at all. It doesn't matter if the admin's can't monitor all the pages about every trivial topic, no one expects them to. I think a non-deletionist wiki could beat wikipedia in the long run. The problem is that wikipedia just has so much momentum that it would be very tough for a new site to catch up.
Maybe this is a new business opportunity for the Pirate Bay. In addition to the private VPN service, you could also get remote anonymous encrypted storage. If you only access the storage through the VPN, it could make it pretty difficult to track.
Here is the wikipedia link. Based on the information there, it does sound like the judge went too easy on her. There were two witnesses and a security camera that say the female Korean store owner was not in danger when she shot the girl.
When I worked at Motorola about 10 years ago they tried to pull that. We were given laptops and told that we could work from home. Unfortunately we were also expected to be in the office at least 40 hours a week. Hopefully they changed their policies somewhat since I left there several years ago.