I may disagree with you sometimes, but in the end, Mr. Catsro, I think you're the best evidence Slashdot has to offer that spelling isn't always correlated with intelligence. Often, but not always.
I've known plenty of dyslexic folks growing up and in college, and some of them are the most creative individuals I've ever met (and not just creative spellers).
Because the usernames are still on the list, still public, and still available for anyone else on the list to take advantage of. Whether or not they're still active Wikipedia contributors is irrelevant to their right not to have their passwords exposed in such a fashion.
Huh? "Perrak doesn't count as he is not an active user"? I take it, then, if you took a break from Wikipedia and your password was exposed to various vandals and trolls while you were gone, you'd be all right with that.
I just can't believe you don't understand the concern here. "Troll" indeed.
Yes, I don't doubt that's true for most of the usernames on the list. But what about the people who had nothing to do with any of it? On the talk page, User:Eloquence says he's found some users who appear to be innocent (I imagine by pawing through their contributions history).
This does not reflect well upon us as Wikipedians.
"My guess, since you seem so emotionally vested in this...is that you are one of the trolls"
Beg pardon? You're right on one count--I am emotionally invested in this, as I have an account on Wikipedia (User:Typogfk). If my being concerned about Wikipedia's keeping my password a secret makes me a troll, then I guess I must be a troll. Clearly only a troll could be bothered by the exposure of innocent users' passwords, am I right?
"A quick glance at those lists shows that they're all duplicate ("sock-puppet") accounts, and they're mostly from trolls"
And as I just pointed out here--how can you be so sure? Is it just because they happen to share the same password? Or is it because they've been caught vandalizing before?
And if the latter, then what's the need for this page at all?
The fact is, you can't know that all those accounts belong to sockpuppets and vandals. I'm a contributor to Wikipedia myself, and it's more than a little discouraging that all the other Wikipedia users posting to this discussion are scrambling to make excuses for what is, in reality, a rather serious incident.
You don't understand. There's no guarantee all those accounts belong to vandals; in all likelihood, there's at least a few on that list whose only mistake was to pick a weak password, like a dictionary word. Which is admittedly a stupid thing to do, but they certainly don't deserve to have Wikipedia hand their password to trolls on a silver platter.
"And if they're not copies, you should have used a better password anyways, there's not even numbers in those"
Right. It's THEIR fault, they DESERVED to have their passwords leaked. What a wonderful attitude.
Potentially up to 100 accounts and passwords are compromised, and you don't think it's a big deal? Especially since there's no policy in place to guarantee the same thing won't happen again?
OK, so the real number is probably only a couple dozen, not 100. I still don't think it helps in this situation to be an apologist for Wikipedia.
Isn't that the whole point of this translation mechanism? If it can automatically determine that the English phrase "it's raining cats and dogs" is not to be translated literally, but rather substituted with the language-specific idiom, then there's no theoretical reason it couldn't also intelligently substitute culturally idiomatic references. Depending on the amount of hand-holding you do with the translation, the substitution of such cultural references might even happen automatically.
You'd need the right source texts, of course, and enough number-crunching to find the right associations, but these issues are of the same nature as the issues with the process as a whole.
Haha, I like it. Just like Children of the Corn--hey, God exists after all! Only thing is, He's no kind and loving God. He's a vengeful, bloodthirsty God, and he's coming for you.
Makes me glad to have been raised Shinto, where the only spirits of concern were those shitting into buckets on the street.
Hey, don't knock war--it's what made us what we are. You've heard it before, war drives innovation and all that.
What gives me hope, though, is the idea that eventually we'll have reached a point where war (by which I mean armed conflict) hurts the participants more than anyone can expect to gain, and so no one will see any use in it anymore. Just as territorial disputes between feudal lords within European kingdoms slowly disappeared, just as war between states of the U.S. all but ended in the 19th century, just as the E.U. has been gaining strength for the past forty years (no snide remarks about the French rejection of the constitution, please), the day is at last within the realm of human imagination when all peoples of the earth set down their arms and embrace each other in harmonious love, or maybe even loving harmony. Look at the League of Nations and the U.N. Ineffective as both may have proved in their time, nobody had even attempted such institutions on a global scale until the 20th century. Even Charlemagne restricted his ambition to Europe.
Or maybe I've been smoking too much pot. Which is it?
Well, OK, but maybe that's what makes it funny. I know I chuckled.
Anyway, I don't think the persona you adopt to tell a joke necessarily says anything about the kind of person you really are. Or do you think Jason Alexander (who played George on Seinfeld) is truly a petty, despicable loser? Fat and balding, sure, but...
Yeah, I get the impression people don't know the difference between flamebait and a good old-fashioned troll. Then again, the poster is a self-admitted Microsoft employee, so maybe, in some small way, he deserved it.:)
I'm actually with you there. The important W3C standards were always pipe dreams. In reality, browser compatibility headaches persist, even between projects like Gecko and KHTML that try their damnedest to adhere to the standards. And not only has the W3C been a failure--it has also substantially set back the pace of innovation by discouraging developers and coders from trying new things. Hordes of slavish standards fanatics stand ready to pounce on you the minute you try.
C'mon, mods, the parent poster makes a good point. It's only "flamebait" if you're ready to apologize for the hypocrisy of the Mozilla developers.
For the record, the new methods are NOT ECMA standards, according to the Array object reference. In other words, developers relying on these methods will be locking themselves into Gecko, unless other vendors scramble to support them, which they will likely do in buggy and incomplete ways--which, incidentally, is exactly what standards (like ECMAScript) were supposed to prevent.
I suspect we'll be seeing similar non-standard extensions to CSS and (X)HTML in the months and years to come, rendering the W3C more and more irrelevant. The standards armistice was always a nice dream, I guess, and it was good while it lasted. So much for that.
Indeed. Not to let IE off the hook, but Gecko's lack of support for display: inline-block and display: run-in has substantially complicated many a project of mine. Even IE supports these properties, for shame, and the workarounds for Gecko are a real bitch, where they exist at all.
Argh! Control's for contextual menus, actually, if you're into that kind of wacky thing. Also, the "Apple" key is what any self-respecting Mac user would call the "command" key.
This guy is a self-hating Mac user, but he still gets the girl. Just imagine if you were a self-respecting one.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like we're on the same page. Good luck. :)
I may disagree with you sometimes, but in the end, Mr. Catsro, I think you're the best evidence Slashdot has to offer that spelling isn't always correlated with intelligence. Often, but not always.
I've known plenty of dyslexic folks growing up and in college, and some of them are the most creative individuals I've ever met (and not just creative spellers).Hope you don't take this as a flame.
Because the usernames are still on the list, still public, and still available for anyone else on the list to take advantage of. Whether or not they're still active Wikipedia contributors is irrelevant to their right not to have their passwords exposed in such a fashion.
Huh? "Perrak doesn't count as he is not an active user"? I take it, then, if you took a break from Wikipedia and your password was exposed to various vandals and trolls while you were gone, you'd be all right with that.
I just can't believe you don't understand the concern here. "Troll" indeed.
Yes, I don't doubt that's true for most of the usernames on the list. But what about the people who had nothing to do with any of it? On the talk page, User:Eloquence says he's found some users who appear to be innocent (I imagine by pawing through their contributions history).
This does not reflect well upon us as Wikipedians.
Beg pardon? You're right on one count--I am emotionally invested in this, as I have an account on Wikipedia (User:Typogfk). If my being concerned about Wikipedia's keeping my password a secret makes me a troll, then I guess I must be a troll. Clearly only a troll could be bothered by the exposure of innocent users' passwords, am I right?
"A quick glance at those lists shows that they're all duplicate ("sock-puppet") accounts, and they're mostly from trolls"
And as I just pointed out here--how can you be so sure? Is it just because they happen to share the same password? Or is it because they've been caught vandalizing before?
And if the latter, then what's the need for this page at all?
The fact is, you can't know that all those accounts belong to sockpuppets and vandals. I'm a contributor to Wikipedia myself, and it's more than a little discouraging that all the other Wikipedia users posting to this discussion are scrambling to make excuses for what is, in reality, a rather serious incident.
You don't understand. There's no guarantee all those accounts belong to vandals; in all likelihood, there's at least a few on that list whose only mistake was to pick a weak password, like a dictionary word. Which is admittedly a stupid thing to do, but they certainly don't deserve to have Wikipedia hand their password to trolls on a silver platter.
Yeah, or if you happened to use the same password as one of those trolls. Not hard to imagine.
"And if they're not copies, you should have used a better password anyways, there's not even numbers in those"
Right. It's THEIR fault, they DESERVED to have their passwords leaked. What a wonderful attitude.
Potentially up to 100 accounts and passwords are compromised, and you don't think it's a big deal? Especially since there's no policy in place to guarantee the same thing won't happen again?
OK, so the real number is probably only a couple dozen, not 100. I still don't think it helps in this situation to be an apologist for Wikipedia.
Isn't that the whole point of this translation mechanism? If it can automatically determine that the English phrase "it's raining cats and dogs" is not to be translated literally, but rather substituted with the language-specific idiom, then there's no theoretical reason it couldn't also intelligently substitute culturally idiomatic references. Depending on the amount of hand-holding you do with the translation, the substitution of such cultural references might even happen automatically.
You'd need the right source texts, of course, and enough number-crunching to find the right associations, but these issues are of the same nature as the issues with the process as a whole.
Is that like when they hide your password with stars? Would I be able to see it if I switched to IE?
Haha, I like it. Just like Children of the Corn--hey, God exists after all! Only thing is, He's no kind and loving God. He's a vengeful, bloodthirsty God, and he's coming for you.
Makes me glad to have been raised Shinto, where the only spirits of concern were those shitting into buckets on the street.
Hey, don't knock war--it's what made us what we are. You've heard it before, war drives innovation and all that.
What gives me hope, though, is the idea that eventually we'll have reached a point where war (by which I mean armed conflict) hurts the participants more than anyone can expect to gain, and so no one will see any use in it anymore. Just as territorial disputes between feudal lords within European kingdoms slowly disappeared, just as war between states of the U.S. all but ended in the 19th century, just as the E.U. has been gaining strength for the past forty years (no snide remarks about the French rejection of the constitution, please), the day is at last within the realm of human imagination when all peoples of the earth set down their arms and embrace each other in harmonious love, or maybe even loving harmony. Look at the League of Nations and the U.N. Ineffective as both may have proved in their time, nobody had even attempted such institutions on a global scale until the 20th century. Even Charlemagne restricted his ambition to Europe.
Or maybe I've been smoking too much pot. Which is it?
Well, OK, but maybe that's what makes it funny. I know I chuckled.
Anyway, I don't think the persona you adopt to tell a joke necessarily says anything about the kind of person you really are. Or do you think Jason Alexander (who played George on Seinfeld) is truly a petty, despicable loser? Fat and balding, sure, but...
Yeah, I get the impression people don't know the difference between flamebait and a good old-fashioned troll. Then again, the poster is a self-admitted Microsoft employee, so maybe, in some small way, he deserved it. :)
Wow. I am dumbfounded. Only on Slashdot could this be modded a troll.
But the way you put it--that's no comment on our society. That's a comment on human nature.
I'm actually with you there. The important W3C standards were always pipe dreams. In reality, browser compatibility headaches persist, even between projects like Gecko and KHTML that try their damnedest to adhere to the standards. And not only has the W3C been a failure--it has also substantially set back the pace of innovation by discouraging developers and coders from trying new things. Hordes of slavish standards fanatics stand ready to pounce on you the minute you try.
Oh, and fuck you too.
C'mon, mods, the parent poster makes a good point. It's only "flamebait" if you're ready to apologize for the hypocrisy of the Mozilla developers.
For the record, the new methods are NOT ECMA standards, according to the Array object reference. In other words, developers relying on these methods will be locking themselves into Gecko, unless other vendors scramble to support them, which they will likely do in buggy and incomplete ways--which, incidentally, is exactly what standards (like ECMAScript) were supposed to prevent.
I suspect we'll be seeing similar non-standard extensions to CSS and (X)HTML in the months and years to come, rendering the W3C more and more irrelevant. The standards armistice was always a nice dream, I guess, and it was good while it lasted. So much for that.
Indeed. Not to let IE off the hook, but Gecko's lack of support for display: inline-block and display: run-in has substantially complicated many a project of mine. Even IE supports these properties, for shame, and the workarounds for Gecko are a real bitch, where they exist at all.
Just a pet peeve of mine, I guess. Anyone else?
Yeah, there was a Slashdot story about this a while back. Good reading.
Argh! Control's for contextual menus, actually, if you're into that kind of wacky thing. Also, the "Apple" key is what any self-respecting Mac user would call the "command" key.
This guy is a self-hating Mac user, but he still gets the girl. Just imagine if you were a self-respecting one.
Not in the vanilla Mac port, it doesn't. Fortunately, there's a PPC-optimized compile that does make middle-click work; it's available here.
Me? I use Safari.
In a hurry to post? :-) Option is the shortcut to download the link, actually. To open it in a new tab, you want to command-click.