Nah, people will just imagine the side effects too.
I was wondering the other night why placebos aren't used more widely (at least when all other treatments have failed). And then I realised: they probably are. Doctors just don't talk about it because placebos would stop working if people knew about them. At last, a benign conspiracy theory!
Cracking is a natural extension of hacking, because so many of the interesting things have locks on them, and the locks are kind of interesting in their own right...
LATTE?!?!?? HA!!! LATTE is only for MILK-DRINKING PUSSIES!!##! ESPRESSO is the ONLY WAY T NGGG GD FFFFFG HRRRRRG real CAFFFFFFFFFFF REAL caffeine WHY DON'T THE LETTERS GET BIGGER WHEN I PRESS HARDER?!?!!#'@!"DAMN TRAITOR ELONEX KEYBOARD!!!!!$%%~#plz getgun killme
I've been wondering the same thing - I started reading Slashdot in late '97 but like you I didn't create an account for some time. I wish they had a graph of account numbers vs time.
There's really no comparison between the browser wars and the "search engine wars". The barrier for switching browsers was high: you had to download and install Netscape, which not all users were in a position to do because of skills, bandwidth or permission; then as Netscape started to lose ground the number of IE-specific sites increased, raising the barrier even further.
The barrier to switching search engines is basically the length of the search engine's name, because all you have to do is type a different name in the address bar. It doesn't matter how many clueless newbies use Microsoft's built-in search engine: Google will still be a maximum of ten keystrokes away on any PC. And unlike Netscape, it will still be able to access the entire web.
MSN is already the default search engine on Windows, and a lot of poor suckers are probably using it every day without realising that Google exists, but that doesn't affect my ability to use Google from any PC, so why should I care?
...selling (or even just giving) a burned DVD of Star Wars should be illegal.
And selling (or even just giving) a burned DVD of Episode I should be punishable by death. I mean, I'm a liberal-minded person, but pushing Jar-Jar to our kids?. Death's too good for 'em.
His deportation serves as an example to prospective illegal aliens from entering Canada.
The example it sets is that if you enter Canada illegally and commit crimes, the worst that will happen is that they'll send you home, so you might as well give it a shot.
I don't advocate stealing from corporations, but we shouldn't talk about the moral treatment of corporations as if it's equivalent to the moral treatment of human beings. Corporations are amoral, inanimate objects and thus have no right to moral treatment - they don't "deserve" to be stolen from, and they don't "deserve" not to be stolen from. Morals describe how you should act towards other sentient beings, not towards inanimate objects.
Of course every corporation has human owners, and it could be argued that you're indirectly stealing from the owners when you steal from the corporation. But as Ambrose Bierce said, a corporation is "an ingenious device for securing individual profit without individual responsibility". Shareholders are not held morally responsible for a corporation's actions, so why should they expect the moral prohibitions which protect them as individuals to extend to the corporation they collectively own? Either a corporation is morally transparent or morally opaque, but it shouldn't be a one-way mirror. Otherwise a corporation would become an instrument which allows people to act immorally while claiming moral protection for themselves.
not only can you find everybody who is emailing to dump.ashcroft@new.american.revolution.org, you can also find -- and investigate -- all the friends of the dissenter, too.
In the UK they can already do this without a court order, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and emergency powers enacted after Sept. 11 2001. They can also look at web server logs, details of phone calls made and received (although not the content - whoop dee do), and find out which base stations your mobile phone communicated with (effectively allowing them to track your movements). Since all this can be done without a court order, I assume a comprehensive "social map" of the UK has already been drawn up.
The best part is that "they" aren't just MI5 or the police - the Home Office was considering giving every government employee access to this data. Know a government employee? Know someone you'd like to stalk? Small world, isn't it?
Journalist: Bob, you've gotta help me! My article about Perl 6 is due in an hour. WTF is Perl? Bob: Uh... it's an internet programming language. The webmaster's always talking about it. Journalist: Great - I'll put "critical in the initial construction of the internet". When was it invented? Bob: I dunno. It's pretty old though, it still uses ASCII. Journalist: Don't get technical with me, I'm on a deadline. So what do you know about the new version? Bob: I heard it's going to be a completely new language. The expressions are all going to be regular now, and the grammar's going to be regular. Journalist (typing): Hmm... I could put in something about Latin... Perl as the lingua franca of the Internet... nah, don't want to go over their heads. OK, gotta go. Thanks for your help, Bob. Bob: No problem man, just don't quote me.
Reminds me of the joke about driving in $denigrated_country_of_your_choice. They wanted to switch from driving on the left to driving on the right in order to be compatible with their neighbours, but they were worried that the sudden changeover would confuse drivers and cause accidents. So they phased it in over six months.
now, you can look at the code and have a pretty good idea what it's doing.
With the greatest respect, I think you're missing the point of Perl. If you can understand your code, the Indian programmer who replaces you can understand it.
The internet isn't actually simple, it just does a good job of appearing simple. At the physical and link layers things are horribly complex, but IP abstracts away all that complexity and presents a dumb interface that (necessarily, because of the complexity it hides) makes almost no guarantees. (In fact the genius of IP is that it doesn't make any reliability guarantees, which allows things to change below the IP layer as well as above it, without breaking any other layers - wireless networking, for example.) Freenet does the same thing but at a higher level of the networking stack - it hides the complexity of encrypting, routing and storing data (or it should, anyway) and presents a simple interface with no reliability guarantees. The interface is storage and retrieval rather than datagram delivery, but the analogy to IP is still clear.
Hopefully in the coming years people will build applications on top of Freenet in the same way that they have on IP, but for the moment we're still at a stage analogous to manually addressing and transmitting your own IP packets. This is not a weakness in Freenet's design, however - it just reflects the relative immaturity of the project. Now that the network is stable and fast (or so they claim - I'm going to set up a node and find out for myself), we should see some interesting applications emerging that make use of Freenet's abstract storage/retrieval service.
I've been up all night installing Debian on a 486 with no CD-ROM and a broken floppy drive. If they sue me for using Linux I'm going to fucking shoot them.
Perhaps parallel computers could be 'programmed' with Chinese characters having the horizontal characters represent threads and the vertical arrangement of characters represent something else.
What would Chinese characters trickling down a green-phosphor screen represent?
Slashdot Mirror
I was wondering the other night why placebos aren't used more widely (at least when all other treatments have failed). And then I realised: they probably are. Doctors just don't talk about it because placebos would stop working if people knew about them. At last, a benign conspiracy theory!
Cracking is a natural extension of hacking, because so many of the interesting things have locks on them, and the locks are kind of interesting in their own right...
So you're saying that the meek shall inherit the Earth after everyone else pisses off to Andromeda?
Begin the brutal enslavement of humanity? Guess I dreamed the last 7 years of my life then...
LATTE?!?!?? HA!!! LATTE is only for MILK-DRINKING PUSSIES!!##! ESPRESSO is the ONLY WAY T NGGG GD FFFFFG HRRRRRG real CAFFFFFFFFFFF REAL caffeine WHY DON'T THE LETTERS GET BIGGER WHEN I PRESS HARDER?!?!!#'@!"DAMN TRAITOR ELONEX KEYBOARD!!!!!$%%~#plz getgun killme
I've been wondering the same thing - I started reading Slashdot in late '97 but like you I didn't create an account for some time. I wish they had a graph of account numbers vs time.
D'oh!
The barrier to switching search engines is basically the length of the search engine's name, because all you have to do is type a different name in the address bar. It doesn't matter how many clueless newbies use Microsoft's built-in search engine: Google will still be a maximum of ten keystrokes away on any PC. And unlike Netscape, it will still be able to access the entire web.
MSN is already the default search engine on Windows, and a lot of poor suckers are probably using it every day without realising that Google exists, but that doesn't affect my ability to use Google from any PC, so why should I care?
A British pint weighs 20 ounces - the size of the pint changed, not the size of the ounce. US gallons are smaller too IIRC.
And selling (or even just giving) a burned DVD of Episode I should be punishable by death. I mean, I'm a liberal-minded person, but pushing Jar-Jar to our kids?. Death's too good for 'em.
The example it sets is that if you enter Canada illegally and commit crimes, the worst that will happen is that they'll send you home, so you might as well give it a shot.
Hmm... so which one weighs an ounce then? ;-)
Sorry, but your beer is weaker, your pints are smaller, and therefore your women are uglier for longer.
The logo of the new project can be seen here.
Of course every corporation has human owners, and it could be argued that you're indirectly stealing from the owners when you steal from the corporation. But as Ambrose Bierce said, a corporation is "an ingenious device for securing individual profit without individual responsibility". Shareholders are not held morally responsible for a corporation's actions, so why should they expect the moral prohibitions which protect them as individuals to extend to the corporation they collectively own? Either a corporation is morally transparent or morally opaque, but it shouldn't be a one-way mirror. Otherwise a corporation would become an instrument which allows people to act immorally while claiming moral protection for themselves.
In the UK they can already do this without a court order, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and emergency powers enacted after Sept. 11 2001. They can also look at web server logs, details of phone calls made and received (although not the content - whoop dee do), and find out which base stations your mobile phone communicated with (effectively allowing them to track your movements). Since all this can be done without a court order, I assume a comprehensive "social map" of the UK has already been drawn up.
The best part is that "they" aren't just MI5 or the police - the Home Office was considering giving every government employee access to this data. Know a government employee? Know someone you'd like to stalk? Small world, isn't it?
Journalist: Bob, you've gotta help me! My article about Perl 6 is due in an hour. WTF is Perl?
Bob: Uh... it's an internet programming language. The webmaster's always talking about it.
Journalist: Great - I'll put "critical in the initial construction of the internet". When was it invented?
Bob: I dunno. It's pretty old though, it still uses ASCII.
Journalist: Don't get technical with me, I'm on a deadline. So what do you know about the new version?
Bob: I heard it's going to be a completely new language. The expressions are all going to be regular now, and the grammar's going to be regular.
Journalist (typing): Hmm... I could put in something about Latin... Perl as the lingua franca of the Internet... nah, don't want to go over their heads. OK, gotta go. Thanks for your help, Bob.
Bob: No problem man, just don't quote me.
Reminds me of the joke about driving in $denigrated_country_of_your_choice. They wanted to switch from driving on the left to driving on the right in order to be compatible with their neighbours, but they were worried that the sudden changeover would confuse drivers and cause accidents. So they phased it in over six months.
With the greatest respect, I think you're missing the point of Perl. If you can understand your code, the Indian programmer who replaces you can understand it.
Yup, i've added Perl 6 to my resume already.
Unless the monkeys use Extreme Programming... then they only need half an infinite number of keyboards.
s/commie/terrorist/g
Hopefully in the coming years people will build applications on top of Freenet in the same way that they have on IP, but for the moment we're still at a stage analogous to manually addressing and transmitting your own IP packets. This is not a weakness in Freenet's design, however - it just reflects the relative immaturity of the project. Now that the network is stable and fast (or so they claim - I'm going to set up a node and find out for myself), we should see some interesting applications emerging that make use of Freenet's abstract storage/retrieval service.
I've been up all night installing Debian on a 486 with no CD-ROM and a broken floppy drive. If they sue me for using Linux I'm going to fucking shoot them.
Chinese alphabet soup? The cans would have to be huge!
What would Chinese characters trickling down a green-phosphor screen represent?