australia has a right to be upset with us. i know that many americans don't want to hear this, but it's true.
as a government, the u.s. does act like a self-centered twit. i don't have any problem with being selfish...but self centeredness is another matter entirely. it doesn't even take much objectivity to see this.
i find it ironic that a country which was settled almost completely by immigrants has forgotten that there are actually other countries out there...and they don't like being treated like states (as in u.s. of a.) any more than the american people like being treated as insignifigant criminals by their own government. maybe this is because so many of these people came here to get away from their original homes that they've just blocked out the idea that they should pay attention...i don't know.
that being said, i'm still not sure that everything which is influencing our position on both the east timor issue and the anti-ABM treaty are readily obvious (particularly the former.) i found the way the east timor thing played out to be exceptionally strange. the u.n. _knew_ there was going to be violence, and yet they made no perceptible effort to protect those people. none.
to address xenex's point, i wish i had an answer for you. about the only i can come up with is 'sorry,' which doesn't do you or anyone else any damned good. i don't understand what's going on myself. perhaps we're better off not knowing...
for all intents and purposes, i treat insightful and interesting as equals while metamoderating. i agree that semantically (is that even a word?) this may not be the correct way to do it, but if the post deserves a +1, i'll play along.
redundants i almost always check by actually going back to the article and skimming through it. i've found that rarely does a post marked redundant deserve it. i'm just guesstimating, but i think it's only around 10% or so that i end up marking as fair. i'm not saying there aren't posts which don't deserve the 'redundant' label, but i generally only run into the ones which seem to suggest that the moderators need a dictionary.
offtopic is a toss up. if it's blatant one way or the other, i mark it as needed. if it's iffy, i'll check back through the thread if i've got time, or leave it alone.
Re:"redundant yet on-topic" shouldn't hurt user sc
on
Minor Slashdot Updates
·
· Score: 1
unfortunately, i'm not sure you're right about this. most 'redundant' moderated posts aren't redundant at all, rather some of these yahoos seem to think that redundant is a catch-all category for 'stupid posts that i don't like.' take for instance the first post in the next article about the ghost web cam. THE FIRST POST was marked redundant...*throws up hands in disgust.*
thank the gods metamoderation is around...is it actually having an affect, though?
the biggest problem that new users face is trying to find out _where_ this information is. it's easy enough to respond with RTFM, but if you don't know where the manual is, how do you read it?
there's nothing wrong with a little handholding...it helps prevent reinventing the wheel everytime you want to go for a sunday drive.
it takes awhile to get comfortable using linux. redhat, suse, caldera, and the like, make an effort to help a user get a system up and working without knowing all the intricate details.
i'll agree that hiding how the system works is probably counterproductive. this is part of the reason why i don't use caldera. too simple, there aren't enough package choices shipped with the cd's, and the latest caldera i tried (2.2) wouldn't even allow me to choose individual packages at install. since this bugs me, i don't use caldera. *shrug*
that being said, there's a tremendous difference between fluff and ease of use. caldera, to me, seems like fluff. suse has (relative) ease of use going for it. i don't really have an opinion about redhat. 5.1 left a bad taste in my mouth, and i've not tried it since. plenty of savvy folks use it, though, so i rather doubt the fluff moniker fully applies to it.
oh, and if Slack were on store shelves everywhere, you'd have just as many people asking the types of questions you are trolling about.
oh the horror....almost 800 comments! oh well, no time to read them all, but i'll put my naming scheme in anyway.
i use names of cities that Alexander the Great tromped through. Tyre, Illium, Issus, that sort of thing. Something like this might actually be alright for your 'professional' bastards.
sure, you could go out and buy all the movies on vhs that you wanted. you can even make your own movies. but most people seem to want new fluff rather than old favorites.
if most people could run the latest, greatest, fluffiest app without going to the store, they'd bite. not everyone, of course, but enough people.
when enough homes have the bandwidth to make this viable, it'll happen. frankly, i doubt the most common tools will cost anything...rather, your monitor will be as full of commercials as tv is now.
frankly, i agree with you. but if i could operate just by downloading stuff...or just running an app off of a central server, perhaps i'd feel differently.
i thought the source for this site was open sourced?:)
my spanish is...um...awful. one year of it in 6th grade will only get you so far, but from what i can make out of it, they credit and link back to slashdot. didn't find the source code from their page, but that could easily be as a result of my poor reading skills.
------------------------------------------------- If you can grow your own seeds after buying an initial crop whats stopping you from selling your seeds at a discount? ------------------------------------------------ --
nothing, and this does happen during years of bumper crops.
there are a few crimps in this, though. first, you've got to have something to plant next year, your livestock has to eat, and you need product to sell at market.
harvesting seeds tends to destroy the vegetable/fruit you're growing (the individual fruit, not the entire field,) so if you're only going to harvest corn for seed, you're not going to have any corn to sell for food.
the general practice is to set out a portion of the crop for animal feed/seed, and sell the rest for food. it's not uncommon in the u.s. for farmers to contract with seed companies, though...i'm not privy to what all such contracts entail, so i can't tell you whether those farmers buy new seed from those companies every year, or just seed for a portion of their crop, or...? i do know that there are a fair number of farmers who test new seeds though...plant a test crop, that sort of thing.
------------------------------------------------ -- And wouldn't Monsanto just hike the price of buying seeds to cover the fact that every customer is going to buy the seeds only once? ------------------------------------------------ --
Monsanto should raise prices because people don't trust the new seed, and want to do things the way they've always been done? perhaps i'm misunderstanding you here.
for the sake of argument....if creationist theory were true, then wouldn't that make it science?
while i lean far far closer to holding with the theory of evolution than creationism, i don't think it's perfected, by any means. there's nothing wrong with teaching alternatives to the current 'theory of the day'...unless, of course, you don't want to teach kids how to think.
-------------------------------------------------- but I seem to be banned from moderating. Dunno why, I only ever had time to moderate one or two posts, hardly enough of a sample to be marked an abuser ------------------------------------------------ --
it'll get back around to ya. it's kinda random, and you've only got your points for three days.
i like your idea about transfering your karma to someone else, btw.:)
well, it looks like no one else is going to point this out, so i'll put my $.02 here, though it may not be worth that much. lerc, this isn't so much directed at you as this is just a convenient place to bitch about this. i agree with most of what you said.
the u.s. is in the final stages of moving from a coalition of individual states (fairly) loosely associated for mutual protection to a centralized government. this change has been coming along fairly slowly, though the backbone was laid quite awhile ago. the military has essentially been running the country's foreign policy since ww2 (if not before.) folks see the noose tightening around their necks here, and are starting to get pissy...yep, we should've been paying attention 50 years ago.
you wonder why our country seems so screwed up, bu t the answer is pretty simple. we're in the middle of evolution/revolution.
you wonder how people like esr get to be such "crackpots," but they're just trying to hold on to what few scraps of sanity we have left. you may not agree with what he feels is important, but so what...your average libertarian isn't going to spend his life trying to dictate how you live your life. our government spends more than enough time doing that.
this 'civilized' society that i've seen ranted about lately is nothing but a crock. 'civilized' society has killed more people than (just) religion. if you don't like the fact that an american wants to be able to defend himself, his family, his home, his country, his poodle, or his computer, then don't become an american...there, that was easy. if you want to get the root of your problems with the american government, the place to start isn't by trying to foist off your hundreds of years of programming that you should let the government do the dirty work of protecting yourselves on the american individual, but rather fight the american government's encroachment upon your own damned sovereignty.
i find sweet, erisian irony in the fact that the same people who are lambasting the u.s. as being the least free nation in the 'free' world (which i don't necessarily disagree with,btw) are the same ones who seem to fail to understand that our decision to stay an armed populace is a free choice which we've already made.
i'm probably coming off like a real asshole, but my nightly dose of propoganda didn't do it's job tonight, and the soma shipment was late.
i'll make no excuses about the fact that we're screwed up. but the things you people are pushing on us aren't going to solve anyone's problem. not ours, and not yours.
and to get back onto something resembling the topic, if you guys don't like esr's opinions being portrayed as 'your's' or 'the community's,' then get someone that you _do_ like to get out and fill that spot.
and to the previous poster, if you think jennings is bad, you should see what passes for our local newspaper. *sigh*
i wonder if cringely (whoever's writing the column now, anyway) actually bothered to read the original version of the article in question.
cringely makes it sound as if it was some sort of treatise, or even news, about cyberterrorism developments. what it was (or seemed to me, anyway) was a simple piece grasping at the general idea.
no points to cringely on this one...if rule one is 'if you're going to print the news, print the news,' then surely rule number two is 'read what you write about.'
besides...how on earth can anyone make a judgement about how well this model will work before the article actually comes out??
one of the fine print bits at the top of each/. states specifically that the owners of the site DO NOT own the words of posters...
why would the owners of/., or any other site, want to place itself in legal trouble because of a statement made by someone that they've no control over?
not to mention that many people around here would stop posting if/. tried to claim a posters words as property of the site.
didn't this kinda come up awhile back during some talk of a dead tree version of/.?
one of the fine print bits at the top of each/. states specifically that the owners of the site DO NOT own the words of posters...
why would the owners of/., or any other site, want to place itself in legal comment because of a statement that someone that they have no control over made.
not to mention that many people around here would stop posting if/. tried to claim a posters words as property of the site.
didn't this kinda come up awhile back during some talk of a dead tree version of/.?
------------------------------------------------- Maybe there should be an option to post news of general interest on Slashdot that precludes comment but that refers Slashdotters to discussion forums on other sites so that those who are interested may still have their say. ------------------------------------------------ -
actually, if i'm remembering the article that the first poster mentioned correctly, it was the action of disabling comments that instigated all that flame.
this is a discussion site. if people don't want to read certain articles or any of the discussion, then don't read them!
so this doesn't affect the cost of ram...it's an issue that isn't going to go away any time soon. in fact, it's probably just going to become _more_ of an issue as genetic engineering becomes feasible. those people who do the genetic engineering are nerds...do i need to twist the argument around anymore to show how this topic does affect ram prices??
if it affects us, and we're nerds, the news that'll affect us is 'news for nerds.'
Slashdot Mirror
australia has a right to be upset with us. i know that many americans don't want to hear this, but it's true.
as a government, the u.s. does act like a self-centered twit. i don't have any problem with being selfish...but self centeredness is another matter entirely. it doesn't even take much objectivity to see this.
i find it ironic that a country which was settled almost completely by immigrants has forgotten that there are actually other countries out there...and they don't like being treated like states (as in u.s. of a.) any more than the american people like being treated as insignifigant criminals by their own government. maybe this is because so many of these people came here to get away from their original homes that they've just blocked out the idea that they should pay attention...i don't know.
that being said, i'm still not sure that everything which is influencing our position on both the east timor issue and the anti-ABM treaty are readily obvious (particularly the former.) i found the way the east timor thing played out to be exceptionally strange. the u.n. _knew_ there was going to be violence, and yet they made no perceptible effort to protect those people. none.
to address xenex's point, i wish i had an answer for you. about the only i can come up with is 'sorry,' which doesn't do you or anyone else any damned good. i don't understand what's going on myself. perhaps we're better off not knowing...
if nothing else comes of this story, i hope this gets instituted immediately.
add my vote for a 'duplicate' option, and get rid of 'redundant.'
for what little it's worth, here's how i do it:
for all intents and purposes, i treat insightful and interesting as equals while metamoderating. i agree that semantically (is that even a word?) this may not be the correct way to do it, but if the post deserves a +1, i'll play along.
redundants i almost always check by actually going back to the article and skimming through it. i've found that rarely does a post marked redundant deserve it. i'm just guesstimating, but i think it's only around 10% or so that i end up marking as fair. i'm not saying there aren't posts which don't deserve the 'redundant' label, but i generally only run into the ones which seem to suggest that the moderators need a dictionary.
offtopic is a toss up. if it's blatant one way or the other, i mark it as needed. if it's iffy, i'll check back through the thread if i've got time, or leave it alone.
unfortunately, i'm not sure you're right about this. most 'redundant' moderated posts aren't redundant at all, rather some of these yahoos seem to think that redundant is a catch-all category for 'stupid posts that i don't like.' take for instance the first post in the next article about the ghost web cam. THE FIRST POST was marked redundant...*throws up hands in disgust.*
thank the gods metamoderation is around...is it actually having an affect, though?
the biggest problem that new users face is trying to find out _where_ this information is. it's easy enough to respond with RTFM, but if you don't know where the manual is, how do you read it?
there's nothing wrong with a little handholding...it helps prevent reinventing the wheel everytime you want to go for a sunday drive.
it takes awhile to get comfortable using linux. redhat, suse, caldera, and the like, make an effort to help a user get a system up and working without knowing all the intricate details.
i'll agree that hiding how the system works is probably counterproductive. this is part of the reason why i don't use caldera. too simple, there aren't enough package choices shipped with the cd's, and the latest caldera i tried (2.2) wouldn't even allow me to choose individual packages at install. since this bugs me, i don't use caldera. *shrug*
that being said, there's a tremendous difference between fluff and ease of use. caldera, to me, seems like fluff. suse has (relative) ease of use going for it. i don't really have an opinion about redhat. 5.1 left a bad taste in my mouth, and i've not tried it since. plenty of savvy folks use it, though, so i rather doubt the fluff moniker fully applies to it.
oh, and if Slack were on store shelves everywhere, you'd have just as many people asking the types of questions you are trolling about.
oh the horror....almost 800 comments! oh well, no time to read them all, but i'll put my naming scheme in anyway.
i use names of cities that Alexander the Great tromped through. Tyre, Illium, Issus, that sort of thing. Something like this might actually be alright for your 'professional' bastards.
for the same reason people watch television.
sure, you could go out and buy all the movies on vhs that you wanted. you can even make your own movies. but most people seem to want new fluff rather than old favorites.
if most people could run the latest, greatest, fluffiest app without going to the store, they'd bite. not everyone, of course, but enough people.
when enough homes have the bandwidth to make this viable, it'll happen. frankly, i doubt the most common tools will cost anything...rather, your monitor will be as full of commercials as tv is now.
frankly, i agree with you. but if i could operate just by downloading stuff...or just running an app off of a central server, perhaps i'd feel differently.
anyone have any idea which frequencies are supposed to be allocated for this?
hormones
Good Omens is a great book!
i thought the source for this site was open sourced? :)
my spanish is...um...awful. one year of it in 6th grade will only get you so far, but from what i can make out of it, they credit and link back to slashdot. didn't find the source code from their page, but that could easily be as a result of my poor reading skills.
wow...dot translates to some variation of 'punt' all over europe, apparantly. wonder how our version got bastardized to 'dot.'
how about more ham news?
hrm...i saw it too. maybe rob and co. are sneaking fnords in on us.
don't forget the possiblity of cross-pollination with 'native' species.
-------------------------------------------------- --
- -- - --
If you can grow your own seeds after buying an initial crop whats stopping you from selling your seeds at a discount?
-----------------------------------------------
nothing, and this does happen during years of bumper crops.
there are a few crimps in this, though. first, you've got to have something to plant next year, your livestock has to eat, and you need product to sell at market.
harvesting seeds tends to destroy the vegetable/fruit you're growing (the individual fruit, not the entire field,) so if you're only going to harvest corn for seed, you're not going to have any corn to sell for food.
the general practice is to set out a portion of the crop for animal feed/seed, and sell the rest for food. it's not uncommon in the u.s. for farmers to contract with seed companies, though...i'm not privy to what all such contracts entail, so i can't tell you whether those farmers buy new seed from those companies every year, or just seed for a portion of their crop, or...? i do know that there are a fair number of farmers who test new seeds though...plant a test crop, that sort of thing.
-----------------------------------------------
And wouldn't Monsanto just hike the price of buying seeds to cover the fact that every customer is going to buy the seeds only once?
-----------------------------------------------
Monsanto should raise prices because people don't trust the new seed, and want to do things the way they've always been done? perhaps i'm misunderstanding you here.
for the sake of argument....if creationist theory were true, then wouldn't that make it science?
while i lean far far closer to holding with the theory of evolution than creationism, i don't think it's perfected, by any means. there's nothing wrong with teaching alternatives to the current 'theory of the day'...unless, of course, you don't want to teach kids how to think.
-------------------------------------------------- but I seem to be banned from moderating. Dunno why, I only ever had time to moderate one or two posts, hardly enough of a sample to be marked an abuser - --
:)
-----------------------------------------------
it'll get back around to ya. it's kinda random, and you've only got your points for three days.
i like your idea about transfering your karma to someone else, btw.
well, it looks like no one else is going to point this out, so i'll put my $.02 here, though it may not be worth that much. lerc, this isn't so much directed at you as this is just a convenient place to bitch about this. i agree with most of what you said.
the u.s. is in the final stages of moving from a coalition of individual states (fairly) loosely associated for mutual protection to a centralized government. this change has been coming along fairly slowly, though the backbone was laid quite awhile ago. the military has essentially been running the country's foreign policy since ww2 (if not before.) folks see the noose tightening around their necks here, and are starting to get pissy...yep, we should've been paying attention 50 years ago.
you wonder why our country seems so screwed up, bu t the answer is pretty simple. we're in the middle of evolution/revolution.
you wonder how people like esr get to be such "crackpots," but they're just trying to hold on to what few scraps of sanity we have left. you may not agree with what he feels is important, but so what...your average libertarian isn't going to spend his life trying to dictate how you live your life. our government spends more than enough time doing that.
this 'civilized' society that i've seen ranted about lately is nothing but a crock. 'civilized' society has killed more people than (just) religion. if you don't like the fact that an american wants to be able to defend himself, his family, his home, his country, his poodle, or his computer, then don't become an american...there, that was easy. if you want to get the root of your problems with the american government, the place to start isn't by trying to foist off your hundreds of years of programming that you should let the government do the dirty work of protecting yourselves on the american individual, but rather fight the american government's encroachment upon your own damned sovereignty.
i find sweet, erisian irony in the fact that the same people who are lambasting the u.s. as being the least free nation in the 'free' world (which i don't necessarily disagree with,btw) are the same ones who seem to fail to understand that our decision to stay an armed populace is a free choice which we've already made.
i'm probably coming off like a real asshole, but my nightly dose of propoganda didn't do it's job tonight, and the soma shipment was late.
i'll make no excuses about the fact that we're screwed up. but the things you people are pushing on us aren't going to solve anyone's problem. not ours, and not yours.
and to get back onto something resembling the topic, if you guys don't like esr's opinions being portrayed as 'your's' or 'the community's,' then get someone that you _do_ like to get out and fill that spot.
and to the previous poster, if you think jennings is bad, you should see what passes for our local newspaper. *sigh*
i think he had it right the first time.
i wonder if cringely (whoever's writing the column now, anyway) actually bothered to read the original version of the article in question.
cringely makes it sound as if it was some sort of treatise, or even news, about cyberterrorism developments. what it was (or seemed to me, anyway) was a simple piece grasping at the general idea.
no points to cringely on this one...if rule one is 'if you're going to print the news, print the news,' then surely rule number two is 'read what you write about.'
besides...how on earth can anyone make a judgement about how well this model will work before the article actually comes out??
-derek
well, i know that he read at least some of the responses directly off the site, as he replied to a couple (that i saw.)
:)
along with that, his threshold was set to at least '1' (some of the posts he responded to were score '1' at the time.
my guess is that his threshold was set to '0,'...i doubt anyone told 'im about the moderation system.
one of the fine print bits at the top of each /. states specifically that the owners of the site DO NOT own the words of posters...
/., or any other site, want to place itself in legal trouble because of a statement made by someone that they've no control over?
/. tried to claim a posters words as property of the site.
/.?
why would the owners of
not to mention that many people around here would stop posting if
didn't this kinda come up awhile back during some talk of a dead tree version of
one of the fine print bits at the top of each /. states specifically that the owners of the site DO NOT own the words of posters...
/., or any other site, want to place itself in legal comment because of a statement that someone that they have no control over made.
/. tried to claim a posters words as property of the site.
/.?
why would the owners of
not to mention that many people around here would stop posting if
didn't this kinda come up awhile back during some talk of a dead tree version of
-------------------------------------------------- -
Maybe there should be an option to post news of general interest on Slashdot that
precludes comment but that refers Slashdotters to discussion forums on other sites so that those
who are interested may still have their say.
-----------------------------------------------
actually, if i'm remembering the article that the first poster mentioned correctly, it was the action of disabling comments that instigated all that flame.
this is a discussion site. if people don't want to read certain articles or any of the discussion, then don't read them!
so this doesn't affect the cost of ram...it's an issue that isn't going to go away any time soon. in fact, it's probably just going to become _more_ of an issue as genetic engineering becomes feasible. those people who do the genetic engineering are nerds...do i need to twist the argument around anymore to show how this topic does affect ram prices??
if it affects us, and we're nerds, the news that'll affect us is 'news for nerds.'