"Your third sentence ends in a preposition (something generally frowned on in grammatical circles)."
This is bunkum and/or tummyrot. Even the new edition of Modern English Usage (aka the infamous Fowler) doesn't condemn terminal prepositions. Others who are not opposed include Strunk & White and the Chicago Manual of Style. Rewriting a sentence to avoid a TP usually results in something abysmally stilted and weird-sounding.
I'm a rampant prescriptivist myself, and usually very intent on correcting others' usage and grammar, but even I don't consider terminal prepositions something about which to complain.
I agree on all counts. Contrast this with (e.g.) the W. Richard Stevens obituary thread, which contained basically one post* of any value at all. Kinda restores my faith in the Slashdot community (which was not necessarily dead, but definitely on the wane).
*Tom Christiansen's, of course.
Re:Someone moderate Rob down for flamebaiting
on
Disposable Computers
·
· Score: 1
Congratulations! You've just discovered the phenomenon known as "media bias". Consider yourself lucky to have encountered it in such an innocuous form.
There are plenty of things (e.g.: this, the 3-lines-of-Perl RSA sig, the publication in exportable book form of the PGP source code) that fall somewhere between protest action and Gedankenexperiment.
There should be a catchy generic name for these sorts of hijinks. Anyone care to step up?
Do you ever consider taking a sabbatical for a year or so, away from the conferences, "serious" coding, and community-building, to give time to projects you enjoy?
I'd be tempted to spend a while extending INTERCAL and/or Nethack, myself.
The Z80 was the only processor I could ever write machine code for directly (in hex, no assembler)--I actually did a bunch more low-level programming for 8086 and friends, but the Intel reg/mem addressing mode bits were so screwy that you needed at least a book to help you.
I miss the Z80, I really do. It was kind of non-orthogonal compared to the 6502 and 6800, but it powered some of the neater computers and homebrew kits I had growing up.
'"It sure would be exciting if we could go into that ocean if the ocean exists," says Dr. Kargel. "Who knows what we would find there? Maybe an organism."'
Better than that--certain cryptosystems (one-time pads are the most obvious example, but there are others) provide not only computational, but unconditional security when properly implemented.
Don't take my work for it; see D.R. Stinson, Cryptography: Theory and Practice, in which the information-theoretical underpinnings of unconditionally secure cryptography are explained in a way that anyone with a basic knowledge of probability can understand.
Then start doing your part to render the NSA irrelevant: Write Code.
I'm still working on Cryptonomicon, but until and unless I decide to prefer it, The Diamond Age is still far and away my favourite of Stephenson's books. That's assuming a serious book (which there's no doubt it is) can even be directly compared to a funny one (Snow Crash)--but whatever.
I saw Stephenson at an appearance in support of TDA and (of course) got him to sign my copy, which is now one of my most cherished possessions. During the Q&A session someone asked him "What was the most difficult task you faced in writing the book?" After a moment's pause, he replied:
"Creating a plausible nanotechnological future in which everyone wasn't dead."
A poster before me has asked "how" you propose to do this. I'd like to ask "why?"
At the risk of seeming like a pedantic pointer-out of the obvious, you can "limit the amount of noise and increase the signal" by your very own self, by setting the filter to (e.g.) +2.
Personal aside: Your tone, as evinced by comments like "Ever since/. has started getting overly popular", smacks of arrogance and old-timer-ism. Does anyone care how few digits are in your Slashdot uid? (I don't.) Rather than moaning about how everything sucks now that the newbies are here--shades of Usenet 1993!--why not moderate and meta-moderate (as applicable), contribute stories, post sensible things that are likely to be well regarded, and otherwise do your part to make Slashdot a better place?
You raise an interesting and valid point, which is that the {Over,Under}rated specifier is redundant with respect to M2. I think the solution should be to remove OR/UR from the regular moderation menus, and let MetaModerators determine how well or poorly a post was moderated.
An extreme example is a fellow I interviewed last month for a senior developer position at my company: he has just completed a PhD in theoretical physics (at a world-renowned institution no less), and wants a career as a programmer. I'm not sure what to make of that, possibly because I was a physics major before I dropped out of college.
I was off by a mere factor of 1024. The 8GB drive, of course, can store only 546 15-minute increments, which would make the tax C$409.50. Which is excessive, but not quite as bad as the earlier figure.
What about hard drives, which are digital media frequently used to store music in both dedicated and general-purpose systems?
If you assume that music is stored as uncompressed 16-bit 44.1kHz 2-channel samples, an 8GB drive contains roughly 54 15-minute units, for a total tax of 0.74*54 = C$39.96, which is not bad.
On the other hand, if music is stored as 112kbit stereo MP3s (using the rule of thumb that 1MB=1min), that same 8-gig drive can store 559,240 units of 15 minutes, for a total tax of C$413,837.60.
I take exception to your unfair characterisation of the B.E.F.o.Y.-S. The nit who calls himself "Eugene Terrell" has no connection with our organisation, and is in fact probably from Connecticut.
The same *general* way, yes. But Nielsen (the TV incarnation) has historically taken great care to make their ratings base a truly random, representative sample of TV-viewing households in the US. That representativeness is what makes their numbers so valuable to the networks, and what I think is so hard to duplicate on the net.
Note that there's not a word of where Media Metrix, Nielsen/NetRatings, et al. get their numbers from.
Unlike Nielsen's TV counterpart, there's no easy way to make the figures they generate anything other than wild guesses. PHB alert: A sufficiently naive interactive account manager or media planner will believe anything you tell them, as long as there's a chart attached.
I was looking at this story and scratching my head in confusion, since I had ftp.apache.org/dist open in a browser window and I knew there was no 1.3.9 there...then I reloaded and, of course, there it was.
It's official: Reading Slashdot is actually better than relying on primary sources.
We all know how strong crypto (and kin, e.g. steganography) can make all sorts of censorship and conspiracy laws obsolete by effectively eliminating governments' ability to collect evidence.
The same is true of pretty much any proposed measure to tax Internet users directly, whether it's a tariff on email messages, bandwidth usage, commercial transactions, or anything else. It's trivially easy to make my sending or receiving email look to any monitor like a bout of web surfing; in fact, sometimes that's exactly what it is. Traffic-analysis-defeating measures, combined with decent crypto/stego, can defeat pretty much anything a snooper would throw your way.
The only way a (more-or-less democratic--totalitarians have a lot of leeway here) government might get away with this sort of thing is by imposing huge duties on backbone providers, based on traffic or aggregate supportable bandwidth, who would then pass the increase in their operating costs downstream through ISPs until it eventually reached the consumer. I wouldn't enjoy seeing that, but it's a lot more likely than an individual tax on users.
Slashdot Mirror
This is bunkum and/or tummyrot. Even the new edition of Modern English Usage (aka the infamous Fowler) doesn't condemn terminal prepositions. Others who are not opposed include Strunk & White and the Chicago Manual of Style. Rewriting a sentence to avoid a TP usually results in something abysmally stilted and weird-sounding.
I'm a rampant prescriptivist myself, and usually very intent on correcting others' usage and grammar, but even I don't consider terminal prepositions something about which to complain.
I agree on all counts. Contrast this with (e.g.) the W. Richard Stevens obituary thread, which contained basically one post* of any value at all. Kinda restores my faith in the Slashdot community (which was not necessarily dead, but definitely on the wane).
*Tom Christiansen's, of course.
Congratulations! You've just discovered the phenomenon known as "media bias". Consider yourself lucky to have encountered it in such an innocuous form.
Speaking of Net Dot Activism:
There are plenty of things (e.g.: this, the 3-lines-of-Perl RSA sig, the publication in exportable book form of the PGP source code) that fall somewhere between protest action and Gedankenexperiment.
There should be a catchy generic name for these sorts of hijinks. Anyone care to step up?
Do you ever consider taking a sabbatical for a year or so, away from the conferences, "serious" coding, and community-building, to give time to projects you enjoy?
I'd be tempted to spend a while extending INTERCAL and/or Nethack, myself.
Sorry--you swallowed The Man's point of view, hook line & sinker.
Try these on for size:
"Of course I (or my car) should be able to be stopped and searched at any time by a police officer. I don't have anything to hide."
"Laws against gang activity? Sounds great. I don't mind if it restricts people's freedom to dress as they wish...that's no big deal to me."
"Mandatory drug testing? Fine by me; I don't use drugs."
Not in my country, bud.
What Blockbuster really needs is a twenny-tun nookler duvice fused for airburst at ten thousand feet.
His precise quote on the Academy Awards was that they were "offensive, barbarous and innately corrupt."
OT: does anyone besides me think that the Muppet character Sam the Eagle was based on him?
The Z80 was the only processor I could ever write machine code for directly (in hex, no assembler)--I actually did a bunch more low-level programming for 8086 and friends, but the Intel reg/mem addressing mode bits were so screwy that you needed at least a book to help you.
I miss the Z80, I really do. It was kind of non-orthogonal compared to the 6502 and 6800, but it powered some of the neater computers and homebrew kits I had growing up.
(Sinclair ZX81: nuff respect.)
'"It sure would be exciting if we could go into that ocean if the ocean exists," says Dr. Kargel. "Who knows what we would find there? Maybe an organism."'
ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS. EXCEPT EUROPA.
ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.
Better than that--certain cryptosystems (one-time pads are the most obvious example, but there are others) provide not only computational, but unconditional security when properly implemented.
Don't take my work for it; see D.R. Stinson, Cryptography: Theory and Practice , in which the information-theoretical underpinnings of unconditionally secure cryptography are explained in a way that anyone with a basic knowledge of probability can understand.
Then start doing your part to render the NSA irrelevant: Write Code.
I'm still working on Cryptonomicon, but until and unless I decide to prefer it, The Diamond Age is still far and away my favourite of Stephenson's books. That's assuming a serious book (which there's no doubt it is) can even be directly compared to a funny one (Snow Crash)--but whatever.
I saw Stephenson at an appearance in support of TDA and (of course) got him to sign my copy, which is now one of my most cherished possessions. During the Q&A session someone asked him "What was the most difficult task you faced in writing the book?" After a moment's pause, he replied:
"Creating a plausible nanotechnological future in which everyone wasn't dead."
A poster before me has asked "how" you propose to do this. I'd like to ask "why?"
/. has started getting overly popular", smacks of arrogance and old-timer-ism. Does anyone care how few digits are in your Slashdot uid? (I don't.) Rather than moaning about how everything sucks now that the newbies are here--shades of Usenet 1993!--why not moderate and meta-moderate (as applicable), contribute stories, post sensible things that are likely to be well regarded, and otherwise do your part to make Slashdot a better place?
At the risk of seeming like a pedantic pointer-out of the obvious, you can "limit the amount of noise and increase the signal" by your very own self, by setting the filter to (e.g.) +2.
Personal aside: Your tone, as evinced by comments like "Ever since
You raise an interesting and valid point, which is that the {Over,Under}rated specifier is redundant with respect to M2. I think the solution should be to remove OR/UR from the regular moderation menus, and let MetaModerators determine how well or poorly a post was moderated.
/me rushes to Foresight Exchange to check the ticker for activity on claim Neut....
I've been seeing more and more of these lately.
An extreme example is a fellow I interviewed last month for a senior developer position at my company: he has just completed a PhD in theoretical physics (at a world-renowned institution no less), and wants a career as a programmer. I'm not sure what to make of that, possibly because I was a physics major before I dropped out of college.
Sorry, Gentle Readers.
I was off by a mere factor of 1024. The 8GB drive, of course, can store only 546 15-minute increments, which would make the tax C$409.50. Which is excessive, but not quite as bad as the earlier figure.
(post && (!caffeine)) == bad;
What about hard drives, which are digital media frequently used to store music in both dedicated and general-purpose systems?
If you assume that music is stored as uncompressed 16-bit 44.1kHz 2-channel samples, an 8GB drive contains roughly 54 15-minute units, for a total tax of 0.74*54 = C$39.96, which is not bad.
On the other hand, if music is stored as 112kbit stereo MP3s (using the rule of thumb that 1MB=1min), that same 8-gig drive can store 559,240 units of 15 minutes, for a total tax of C$413,837.60.
I personally would find that excessive.
I take exception to your unfair characterisation of the B.E.F.o.Y.-S. The nit who calls himself "Eugene Terrell" has no connection with our organisation, and is in fact probably from Connecticut.
The same *general* way, yes. But Nielsen (the TV incarnation) has historically taken great care to make their ratings base a truly random, representative sample of TV-viewing households in the US. That representativeness is what makes their numbers so valuable to the networks, and what I think is so hard to duplicate on the net.
Note that there's not a word of where Media Metrix, Nielsen/NetRatings, et al. get their numbers from.
Unlike Nielsen's TV counterpart, there's no easy way to make the figures they generate anything other than wild guesses. PHB alert: A sufficiently naive interactive account manager or media planner will believe anything you tell them, as long as there's a chart attached.
I don't buy it.
How about...
Lady Ada Lovelace?
Capt. Grace Hopper?
Ann Winblad?
Brenda Laurel?
Pattie Maes?
At least I know I'm not part of the problem...and I won't be until the apache+ssl patches for 1.3.9 are out. :)
It's official: Reading Slashdot is actually better than relying on primary sources.
The same is true of pretty much any proposed measure to tax Internet users directly, whether it's a tariff on email messages, bandwidth usage, commercial transactions, or anything else. It's trivially easy to make my sending or receiving email look to any monitor like a bout of web surfing; in fact, sometimes that's exactly what it is. Traffic-analysis-defeating measures, combined with decent crypto/stego, can defeat pretty much anything a snooper would throw your way.
The only way a (more-or-less democratic--totalitarians have a lot of leeway here) government might get away with this sort of thing is by imposing huge duties on backbone providers, based on traffic or aggregate supportable bandwidth, who would then pass the increase in their operating costs downstream through ISPs until it eventually reached the consumer. I wouldn't enjoy seeing that, but it's a lot more likely than an individual tax on users.