I am one of these people that would rather have the moderation system remain as it is. I honestly don't think I have a "pathological" fear as such of Reddit or any other social site out there. Honestly, I am having trouble comming up with a scenario where anyone can be afraid of some page on the Internet. You can perhaps call us "conservative" for resisting such a major site overhall, but I will argue that there is nothing wrong with having such a point of view.
I for one am against changing moderation system because this is one of the fundamentals of how Slashdot functions. This is our identity and represents us as a community. Those people that like Reddit's system have already left and now read Reddit. Those that like Digg's way of filtering have left and now part of Digg's community. All the people that remained here are those that are satisfied with the current scheme.
Yes, there are many flaws with Slashdot's moderation, but there is no such thing as perfection in the real world. All of them, including your favourite Reddit, have their own problems. Question you need to ask is not "Why don't Slashdot becomes like <website>?" but "Do I prefer <website>'s way better than Slashdot's?". If so, just go there instead of making your selfish calls to make changes that will affect great number of people that have a different opinion!
How I wish that my school brought someone from the industry to tell us what it is like and crush the naive, blind idealism right from the start, instead of spending years of specialization before finding out the lay of the land on the first job. There should be a compolsary subject covering "Office Politics".
Best advice to all the students: Pursue what you love as much as you can in your own time, but never as a career. Othervise your passion will be used as a tool to manipulate and exploit you.
Even if there are a lot of reasons to hate them, one fact just can't be ignored: Oracle got the best database solutions for when you got a big enterprise system to run. Probably the only other alternative is IBM, but they got their own horror stories.
What the hell is wrong with our IT industry and its hostility towards their users? When did this start and where did we go wrong that brought us to this state?!
You see, I was in deep enemy territory and got hit by a bird. Disabled my engines right out. Alas it also fried majority of my electronics, so couldn't report home. But things weren't that bad: wind was good, so I glided for a long while and landed down here beneath the trees. I certanly don't want to get captured, so my C4 is nicely rigged to blow if anyone doesn't cut that beige wire in time.
Trouble is, I am bored! Its been over a year ago. Where are the glorious troops of the USA to take me home?! Haven't I been a good drone? Don't I deserve to go home by now?!
Wait! There are a bunch of kids comming this way. They better be American kids that know about that beige wire or I will let them have it!
Hello, I am a drone. I am the best of the best! I am packing navigation system, signal location unit and enough C4 that if I am jammed, I will make that fucker dead! Glory to the USA!
Today is a special day for me: I was just launched to carry out a patrol against (hopefully) unfriendly targets. I am being remotely piloted from this aircraft carrier towards the shore.
Oh damn: That lowest-bidder-made capacitor in my communication system just got blown. My backup system was installed backwards. Lost signal from my pilot. That could mean one thing: Some god-damned tango JAMMED me!
Right. Where is that strong jamming signal, so I can nail the bastard?! Whoah! That ship over there got one loud, strong signal comming off its radar-looking dish! Just a simple case of turning around and arming the explosives.
where control of the government and economy is tightly confined to those who became extremely wealthy after the disbanding of the Soviet Union opened up economic markets. Once that happened, various well-connected individuals were able to profit immensely from the sale of natural resources (i.e., Russian oil and natural gas) to Europe, and political corruption increased in direct proportion as these individuals leveraged their wealth to gain political influence in a freshly post-Communist country.
I am under an impression that the the massive division of wealth that happened after the dissolution of the Soviet Union happened in a much more quick and simple way. I don't have the in-depth story, but this is the gist of what my friend living in Russia told me. According to him the oligarchs have nearly instantly gained their wealth by gaming the voucher privatization system in the 90s.
In essence, in order to privatize the assets of the former Soviet Union every single person (Including minors) were issued a voucher that granted them a portion of the national wealth. After the finalization of the voucher distribution, I believe the intention was that the people would use them to buy ownership of various formerly government-owned assets like factories. By its look it is an extremely simple and fair system.
Now where the whole thing went wrong is that somehow relatively small portion of population ended up aquiring the majority of vouchers. I am not clear how they done that, but it couldn't of been clean or honest. My guess is that simple, worker folk did not understand the value of the vouchers and sold them off for trivial ammounts. Perhaps there are some russians on Slashdot that could give us a full story on how they accomplished that.
I am honestly at a loss for words. Because you are a part of the community. Because in the long term you too will be affected by the results of your selfish actions. Because if everyone was selfish like you civilization willl be impossible. This is a classic case of Tragedy of the commons
Ok...I'm having to laugh now.
You're actually insinuating that I WASH my trash, before disposing of it??
It is surprising that you are so shocked about it. It is very common to rince out tuna cans, various jars and other containers. This has been taught to me as a kid and I have observed this practice in majority of households I've been in. Perhaps you live in a cold climate, but around here any residue will start to make a smell after about two days in the bin.
In addition to eliminating the smell, the rincing reduces the posibility of roach and ant infestations. It is probably not an issue for you if you take the garbage out every single day, but then it is a hassle when you can just rince the items as you go and not have to worry about the garbage bin for a week.
I never was present at any official, large LAN parties, but I have hosted/attended several back in my high school days for just with close circle of friends. Size was never more than 12 people and the length was about three days. It is actually very simple formula with nothing really interesting or sinister about it
Essentially the host orginised the event based on when his house will be free (ie. Parents out). He would make some space in the living room by moving a couch to the side and getting one or two large tables in with some chairs. Ideally he would also stock up the fridge with drinks and have a hub or a switch (With at least 12 ports).
Attendees must bring with them their computer, monitor, power strip and all the cabling that goes with it. On very rare ocation we would decide during organisation stage on what games would be installed, but in majority of cases everyone would just bring their entire collection of CDs and external hard drives with pirated games. Some extra cables also come in handy because as a rule at least someone will forget a power strip or a network cable.
First half of the day would consist of assembling everyone's machines and installing/copying whatever games we decide we will be playing. Normally everyone would have their drives fully shared, so after the software are installed everyone just browses each other's PCs and external drives for anything interesting to copy (Movies, games, music, porn, etc). Once everyone finishes installing the games/had their fill of copying the we start plaing games. Starcraft, Quake 2, Counter Strike, Total Annihilation were very popular choises.
In terms of food, we would either pool the money for pizzas or car pool to go the nearest shopping centre. In terms of sleeping arrengments everyone just finds a free couch/bed or in worst case on the floor in a sleeping bag. Othervise it is just gaming non-stop with nothing else in the between. That is where the smell comment comes from: By second day of just sitting around eating junk food and gaming everyone starts to smell earthly.
The party ends at the agreed time (Normally at least half a day before parents of the host come back) and that really is it. Large ones are probably vastly different since with more people further organisation will be needed. Entire thing can be held in a net cafe, but then you need to pay and just lacked certain charm. Certanly there won't be any swapping of pirated materials and porn:-)
I wish to have mod points to mods to raise the parent post even higher. It is good to see that there are at least some people here who see the difference between justice and revenge.
It is appauling to see to what height of bloodthirstiness people work themselves into. My opinion is that this is a result of very conservative culture and the sheer feer that Americans subject themselves to (Especially since 9/11). They are afraid of their government, corporations, foreign cultures and different religions. From what I read on Slashdot and elsewhere, quite a sizable percentage of the population own and train in the use of firearms because they fear to walk on the streets unarmed due to the perception that criminals are everywhere and house invasions to be commonplace. This gives me the impression that Americans are frightened of even each other.
And the result of all that buildup of fear is disproportional lashing out at any perceived threat. An analogy would be like a person with mild arachnophobia finding a very scary, poisonous-looking spider in the evening in his bedroom. He can try to capture it to release it outside, but he is too frightened of the possibility that it might get back in again. So he would thoroughly kill it just to be able to sleep comfortably.
When you are greatly afraid, why would you trust mental health facilities to rehabilitate the sexual offender, when permanently isolating, driving him to suicide or execution would bring a guaranteed removal of the threat?
Very sadly even much less hideous crimes result in backlashes. Apperently even if you never hurt anyone but get caught in the act of using illicit drugs results in you being sent to prison. I also find it shocking how prisons are not viewed as a place of rehabilitation but as a way to inflict vengence. I base that on the attitude of how prison rape is viewed not a problem, but as a source humour and almost endoursement since it is people who are accused of crimes that are the victums.
Of course everything above is just my personal opinion and how I explain to myself the reason for such harshness of the American justice system. Another explanation I found was in a freely available, easy to read book by Bob Altemeyer called The Authoritarians. Trouble is that you really can't tell if it is just another biased opinion.
ArcGIS is fucking expensive though. I use it for work and we are paying huge amounts in license fees. A single license is cheaper ($1500 I believe) but is still a very hard expensive exercise.
You need shapefiles of the New York zip code boundaries. Quick Google search gives me this:
If you want to view and edit shapefiles and don't want to pay or pirate ArcGIS, there are several open source alternatives. I recommend QuantumGIS. It has all the facilities for most common tasks and also scriptable using Python.
If QuantumGIS is not your cup of tea, MapWindow is another good one. It is much more lightweight and also can do majority of common functions.
Have a look at history. While strictly pacifist movements have gotten results (Ghandi), there are much greater number of examples where lives have to be lost before the demands are taken seriously.
Self-immolation seems to be rather effective way to turn heads at the moment. Thich Quang Duc's example is probably one of the most famous ones. It has been said that Arab Spring has gotten into swing only after Mohamed Bouazizi's immolation which was followed by quite a number of copycats in other regions.
So in the end I would answer: Most likely yes, people do have to die before any significant change is to happen.
All that being said, I would be very surprised to see any kind of protests of that kind of determination from the Occupy movement. I haven't even heard of any cases of hunger strike (Something which doesn't need that much of determination since it can be stopped before damage results) incidents from the protesters.
Very true. Writing to congressmen never worked for me in the past either. All I was getting back are the generic thank you replies. Still, there must be something productive we can do.
Occupy movement is camping out in front of Wall Street while this issue is with the government. I guess we can try protesting at capitol hill, but I doubt that enough people understand what this act is about or what it intails to make enough of the showing.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually enjoyed Dark Messiah. Maybe because throughout the entire game not once have I used the kick button.
I am one of these people that would rather have the moderation system remain as it is. I honestly don't think I have a "pathological" fear as such of Reddit or any other social site out there. Honestly, I am having trouble comming up with a scenario where anyone can be afraid of some page on the Internet. You can perhaps call us "conservative" for resisting such a major site overhall, but I will argue that there is nothing wrong with having such a point of view.
I for one am against changing moderation system because this is one of the fundamentals of how Slashdot functions. This is our identity and represents us as a community. Those people that like Reddit's system have already left and now read Reddit. Those that like Digg's way of filtering have left and now part of Digg's community. All the people that remained here are those that are satisfied with the current scheme.
Yes, there are many flaws with Slashdot's moderation, but there is no such thing as perfection in the real world. All of them, including your favourite Reddit, have their own problems. Question you need to ask is not "Why don't Slashdot becomes like <website>?" but "Do I prefer <website>'s way better than Slashdot's?". If so, just go there instead of making your selfish calls to make changes that will affect great number of people that have a different opinion!
Why not remove the middle man again and just dump the freshly extracted oil into the landfill?! :-)
All too true.
How I wish that my school brought someone from the industry to tell us what it is like and crush the naive, blind idealism right from the start, instead of spending years of specialization before finding out the lay of the land on the first job. There should be a compolsary subject covering "Office Politics".
Best advice to all the students: Pursue what you love as much as you can in your own time, but never as a career. Othervise your passion will be used as a tool to manipulate and exploit you.
Even if there are a lot of reasons to hate them, one fact just can't be ignored: Oracle got the best database solutions for when you got a big enterprise system to run. Probably the only other alternative is IBM, but they got their own horror stories.
What the hell is wrong with our IT industry and its hostility towards their users? When did this start and where did we go wrong that brought us to this state?!
Hello. I am a drone and I am bored.
You see, I was in deep enemy territory and got hit by a bird. Disabled my engines right out. Alas it also fried majority of my electronics, so couldn't report home. But things weren't that bad: wind was good, so I glided for a long while and landed down here beneath the trees. I certanly don't want to get captured, so my C4 is nicely rigged to blow if anyone doesn't cut that beige wire in time.
Trouble is, I am bored! Its been over a year ago. Where are the glorious troops of the USA to take me home?! Haven't I been a good drone? Don't I deserve to go home by now?!
Wait! There are a bunch of kids comming this way. They better be American kids that know about that beige wire or I will let them have it!
Hello, I am a drone. I am the best of the best! I am packing navigation system, signal location unit and enough C4 that if I am jammed, I will make that fucker dead! Glory to the USA!
Today is a special day for me: I was just launched to carry out a patrol against (hopefully) unfriendly targets. I am being remotely piloted from this aircraft carrier towards the shore.
Oh damn: That lowest-bidder-made capacitor in my communication system just got blown. My backup system was installed backwards. Lost signal from my pilot. That could mean one thing: Some god-damned tango JAMMED me!
Right. Where is that strong jamming signal, so I can nail the bastard?! Whoah! That ship over there got one loud, strong signal comming off its radar-looking dish! Just a simple case of turning around and arming the explosives.
FOR GLORY!!!!!!!!!!
Future does not look bright in Soviet Russia.
Of course the future doesn't look bright. Because Soviet Russia doesn't exist and haven't existed since 1991!
20 years is not such a short time. Try to keep up.
where control of the government and economy is tightly confined to those who became extremely wealthy after the disbanding of the Soviet Union opened up economic markets. Once that happened, various well-connected individuals were able to profit immensely from the sale of natural resources (i.e., Russian oil and natural gas) to Europe, and political corruption increased in direct proportion as these individuals leveraged their wealth to gain political influence in a freshly post-Communist country.
I am under an impression that the the massive division of wealth that happened after the dissolution of the Soviet Union happened in a much more quick and simple way. I don't have the in-depth story, but this is the gist of what my friend living in Russia told me. According to him the oligarchs have nearly instantly gained their wealth by gaming the voucher privatization system in the 90s.
In essence, in order to privatize the assets of the former Soviet Union every single person (Including minors) were issued a voucher that granted them a portion of the national wealth. After the finalization of the voucher distribution, I believe the intention was that the people would use them to buy ownership of various formerly government-owned assets like factories. By its look it is an extremely simple and fair system.
Now where the whole thing went wrong is that somehow relatively small portion of population ended up aquiring the majority of vouchers. I am not clear how they done that, but it couldn't of been clean or honest. My guess is that simple, worker folk did not understand the value of the vouchers and sold them off for trivial ammounts. Perhaps there are some russians on Slashdot that could give us a full story on how they accomplished that.
I am annoyed at how often these obvious "Space Nutter" troll posts keep popping up in even the most least relevant stories.
I am just as much shocked at how effective they are at getting so many people to bite.
This is definitely Kids Do Not Try This AT Home territory.
I love the extra emphasis on the AT.
Kids: Never at home, but the backyard is fine.
Why?
I am honestly at a loss for words. Because you are a part of the community. Because in the long term you too will be affected by the results of your selfish actions. Because if everyone was selfish like you civilization willl be impossible. This is a classic case of Tragedy of the commons
Ok...I'm having to laugh now.
You're actually insinuating that I WASH my trash, before disposing of it??
It is surprising that you are so shocked about it. It is very common to rince out tuna cans, various jars and other containers. This has been taught to me as a kid and I have observed this practice in majority of households I've been in. Perhaps you live in a cold climate, but around here any residue will start to make a smell after about two days in the bin.
In addition to eliminating the smell, the rincing reduces the posibility of roach and ant infestations. It is probably not an issue for you if you take the garbage out every single day, but then it is a hassle when you can just rince the items as you go and not have to worry about the garbage bin for a week.
I never was present at any official, large LAN parties, but I have hosted/attended several back in my high school days for just with close circle of friends. Size was never more than 12 people and the length was about three days. It is actually very simple formula with nothing really interesting or sinister about it
Essentially the host orginised the event based on when his house will be free (ie. Parents out). He would make some space in the living room by moving a couch to the side and getting one or two large tables in with some chairs. Ideally he would also stock up the fridge with drinks and have a hub or a switch (With at least 12 ports).
Attendees must bring with them their computer, monitor, power strip and all the cabling that goes with it. On very rare ocation we would decide during organisation stage on what games would be installed, but in majority of cases everyone would just bring their entire collection of CDs and external hard drives with pirated games. Some extra cables also come in handy because as a rule at least someone will forget a power strip or a network cable.
First half of the day would consist of assembling everyone's machines and installing/copying whatever games we decide we will be playing. Normally everyone would have their drives fully shared, so after the software are installed everyone just browses each other's PCs and external drives for anything interesting to copy (Movies, games, music, porn, etc). Once everyone finishes installing the games/had their fill of copying the we start plaing games. Starcraft, Quake 2, Counter Strike, Total Annihilation were very popular choises.
In terms of food, we would either pool the money for pizzas or car pool to go the nearest shopping centre. In terms of sleeping arrengments everyone just finds a free couch/bed or in worst case on the floor in a sleeping bag. Othervise it is just gaming non-stop with nothing else in the between. That is where the smell comment comes from: By second day of just sitting around eating junk food and gaming everyone starts to smell earthly.
The party ends at the agreed time (Normally at least half a day before parents of the host come back) and that really is it. Large ones are probably vastly different since with more people further organisation will be needed. Entire thing can be held in a net cafe, but then you need to pay and just lacked certain charm. Certanly there won't be any swapping of pirated materials and porn :-)
Just ignore your score.
There are very many of us that read at -1 and I for one appreciate any constructive input to a story.
I wish to have mod points to mods to raise the parent post even higher. It is good to see that there are at least some people here who see the difference between justice and revenge.
It is appauling to see to what height of bloodthirstiness people work themselves into. My opinion is that this is a result of very conservative culture and the sheer feer that Americans subject themselves to (Especially since 9/11). They are afraid of their government, corporations, foreign cultures and different religions. From what I read on Slashdot and elsewhere, quite a sizable percentage of the population own and train in the use of firearms because they fear to walk on the streets unarmed due to the perception that criminals are everywhere and house invasions to be commonplace. This gives me the impression that Americans are frightened of even each other.
And the result of all that buildup of fear is disproportional lashing out at any perceived threat. An analogy would be like a person with mild arachnophobia finding a very scary, poisonous-looking spider in the evening in his bedroom. He can try to capture it to release it outside, but he is too frightened of the possibility that it might get back in again. So he would thoroughly kill it just to be able to sleep comfortably.
When you are greatly afraid, why would you trust mental health facilities to rehabilitate the sexual offender, when permanently isolating, driving him to suicide or execution would bring a guaranteed removal of the threat?
Very sadly even much less hideous crimes result in backlashes. Apperently even if you never hurt anyone but get caught in the act of using illicit drugs results in you being sent to prison. I also find it shocking how prisons are not viewed as a place of rehabilitation but as a way to inflict vengence. I base that on the attitude of how prison rape is viewed not a problem, but as a source humour and almost endoursement since it is people who are accused of crimes that are the victums.
Of course everything above is just my personal opinion and how I explain to myself the reason for such harshness of the American justice system. Another explanation I found was in a freely available, easy to read book by Bob Altemeyer called The Authoritarians. Trouble is that you really can't tell if it is just another biased opinion.
ArcGIS is fucking expensive though. I use it for work and we are paying huge amounts in license fees. A single license is cheaper ($1500 I believe) but is still a very hard expensive exercise.
You need shapefiles of the New York zip code boundaries. Quick Google search gives me this:
http://www.census.gov/geo/www/cob/z52000.html#shp
If you want to view and edit shapefiles and don't want to pay or pirate ArcGIS, there are several open source alternatives. I recommend QuantumGIS. It has all the facilities for most common tasks and also scriptable using Python.
If QuantumGIS is not your cup of tea, MapWindow is another good one. It is much more lightweight and also can do majority of common functions.
Have a look at history. While strictly pacifist movements have gotten results (Ghandi), there are much greater number of examples where lives have to be lost before the demands are taken seriously.
Self-immolation seems to be rather effective way to turn heads at the moment. Thich Quang Duc's example is probably one of the most famous ones. It has been said that Arab Spring has gotten into swing only after Mohamed Bouazizi's immolation which was followed by quite a number of copycats in other regions.
So in the end I would answer: Most likely yes, people do have to die before any significant change is to happen.
All that being said, I would be very surprised to see any kind of protests of that kind of determination from the Occupy movement. I haven't even heard of any cases of hunger strike (Something which doesn't need that much of determination since it can be stopped before damage results) incidents from the protesters.
It is my impression that chocolate contains caffein. So just look up the rating for that.
def knightsWhoSay():
#{
return 'Ni!'
#}
Who said Python doesn't support block delimiters! :-)
Very true. Writing to congressmen never worked for me in the past either. All I was getting back are the generic thank you replies. Still, there must be something productive we can do.
Occupy movement is camping out in front of Wall Street while this issue is with the government. I guess we can try protesting at capitol hill, but I doubt that enough people understand what this act is about or what it intails to make enough of the showing.
So what is your solution? Just roll over and take it up the ass?
At least we can TRY to do something.
They had 350 years to follow their lead. If they haven't done it thus far, it will never happen.
Yes, ideally you would be right. Sadly idealism never survives in the real world.
at the end of the day, some pencil headed boss will look at the work you did, pat you on the back for doing a good job and give you a cold beer.
Could someone mod that post 5 Funny. Been a long time since I laughed so hard.