He seems to have written a post on how this works and then later made an account. Sorta verified here. His post is very informative and might answer a lot of questions and generate more meaningful ones.
The only thing that would be newsworthy is if you managed to do something highly technical without having Linux play a vital role. For everyone who thinks that a complete absence of Linux is the norm: Did you use the internet?
After tinkering with Debian on my Raspberry Pis, it's pretty clear that kids are going to learn how pervasive Linux can be. As long as other operating systems are closed source or require money to run, Linux will be more than abundant. I worked at a Fortune 500 company and aside from some hilariously painful Sharepoint servers, everything was Linux. If OSX is Uranium on the periodic table, Linux is Hydrogen. If Windows is as abundant and costly as diamonds, Linux is as abundant and costly as carbon. It may be no-frills, it might be forever doomed to be passed over by gamers and musicians... but it's the de facto standard where I work when you need serious shit done -- large or small.
The common perception among Slashdotters is that while Bill Gates may cause us some professional difficulties, he makes up for it with an exemplary philanthropic record.
The short of it is that I think what Gates is doing is great but I don't understand why they buy research facilities in America and not Africa or why all the drug companies that get to sell their cures to Africa are all American. I mean without stability, roads and other infrastructure, Africa is going to constantly need someone else to fix their problems. And the money from the B&G Foundation stays in America invested in American companies that pays out to American companies that provide "cures" for Africa. It will perpetually work that way.
Imagine aliens landed on Earth, took an assessment of us and were saddened to see war, pollution, poverty, etc. So they say they're going to help us and they buy 10 long range matter transmitters from another alien race and give them to Earth. But if we ask them on how to make the transmitters ourselves they just laugh and say "Please, you're still searching for subatomic particles. Plus, you're just going to use them for war if you can make them. And on top of that, you would have to pay sums you cannot fathom to the alien race who invented these machines. When these break, we'll get you some new ones." Meanwhile they're receiving accolades from the galactic senate and Earth remains full of war, pollution, poverty, etc.
It's a horrible truth but the one thing Africa has a lot of is humans. Life is cheap there. If you want to reverse that, you need to introduce stability and then farming and then commerce. There are huge areas where crime, corruption and warlords make it impossible to raise crops. Curing malaria is important but it isn't going to stop that from being the hungriest place on Earth. And it's not going to raise the value of human life there. Gates' idea to fix that is to pair up with Monsanto (surprise another American company with tons of IP). Right. I wonder if they'll patent the seeds they breed that grow well in regions of Africa?
In income tax statements, it refers to a reduction of taxable income as recognition of certain expenses required to produce the income.
I'm guessing that on Microsoft's assets and liabilities balance sheets, they have finally realized (meaning evaluated currently) that the "investment" of $6.3 billion dollars is no longer worth more than a hundred thousand. So perhaps they knew this for a while but have now finally acknowledged it as an opportune time. Say they expect to bring in huge revenue this year and now this loss will counteract that. When you hear "it's a tax write off" it is usually referring to you reducing your taxes by counterbalancing your incoming revenue with a realized loss. Examples: You give a car away, you are paying off pure interest on your home, etc. In Microsoft's case, they made a bad investment and now their books are reflecting that. I'd imagine SEC regulates this kind of thing pretty tightly to stop manipulation of stocks and whatnot but I don't know those regulations.
And that, dear readers, is why Slashdot advice is sometimes unsound. After reading reports of client side exploits (like rumors of item duping via system clock adjustments) and understanding basic limits on server/client communication, it is apparent that Blizzard has to trust the client more than they're comfortable with. So if you look at their "warden" implementation for WoW, you can imagine that Diablo III has a similar "anti-cheat check" component running in user mode where Diablo III runs. And they probably (correctly) identify Wine as being not genuine Windows. It's an emulation. And therein lies the problem. Without setting up a highly invasive rootkit like The Warden, Blizzard cannot know if Wine is emulating Windows libraries correctly. A simple mental exercise is to imagine that the D3 client cannot query the servers every time it needs a time stamp for each event in the game -- to do so would DDOS their own servers so each client must query each user's system clock. The Windows call that does this is emulated by Wine. One could easily insert a dynamic control for this "system clock" into Wine and recompile. One of the achievements in Diablo III is to finish each act in under an hour. So a user could note the time, play to the end of an act and before beating the final boss, simply turn the clock one minute past the starting time and have Wine report that to the client. And if the client is not asking the server for these time stamps, achievement granted. This is a very coarse example for the sake of brevity but I would imagine that system timestamps affect many more aspects of the game. The rumor was that rolling back your system clock after an item sale would return the item to your inventory and you would still have the gold from selling it.
So is there actually a modified version of Wine cheating for you under your Diablo III client using the windows DLL api as a facade? Blizzard doesn't know. They can't know unless they have a rootkit that runs in super user (administrator) mode that profiles and scans all other programs for offending actions. That's how they caught WoWGlider but it would be infinitely harder with individual people like me tailoring their own versions of Wine. I am not saying their reaction is correct, I'm just trying to explain to you why they are employing arcane logic. The solution is for them to natively support Linux but that's a completely separate flame fest for which I really don't have the energy right now.
This used to be one of my favorite channels. Along with "Wild" Discovery, History, Scifi, and Animal. The last one's not too bad, but NatGeo and the others have turned-into reality shows. Yeah I know. Complain, complain
Well, let's not be too hasty now. I mean, what if they did a crossover where some of the animals from NatGeo join the casts of the other channel reality shows? I'd like to see a grizzly bear mix things up a bit on the Jersey Shore. Especially with those night vision cameras they have in the rooms. I mean, the "people" on those shows are already behaving pretty much like bonobo chimps.
Mediator: First I ask the former Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, how would you handle an alien invasion? Mitt Romney: Simple, I'd shoot them. Mediator: And to you, Mr. President, how would you handle an alien invasion? Barack Obama: *pauses* Instead of shooting where they are... *even longer pause*.. I would shoot at where they are going to be. Crowd: *breaks out in rapturous applause* Mitt Romney: Oh, come on, of course that's what I meant as well. I mean, I'd probably have the military figure all that out or pay someone in rubies or chickens or beads or whatever the hell it is you poor people are spending at Wal-Mart these days. Crowd: *boos loudly* Crowd Member #1: Oh, that Romney, I don't like him. I don't like him at all. Crowd Member #2: I've never seen a Mormon kill anyone -- let alone an alien. Have you? Crowd Member #3: I'd bet all my Wal-Mart rubies he doesn't win.
Last I check, we're on these floating masses called "plates" and they actually move around, shift and stuff.
Yep. I'm not a geologist but I don't think "floating masses" is a particularly great analogy. Gravity does have an effect on them at that point but once you hit turtles, I wouldn't bother digging any deeper.
Some get pushed under others, etc. Wouldn't that simply explain why one section might be seeing a change in sea level and not another?
So where has this been throughout history? I mean, we've been building cities near water forever -- you would figure there would be a lot more stories of cities swallowed by the sea. Also, tectonic plates move about 2 centimeters each year. So if we start to see sea levels indicating more movement than that, can we start talking about other factors?
Lastly, why does everyone panic when the world changes a little? We have fish fossils on mountain tops, dinosaur bones, the land mass used to be one large hunk of land. Mountains were created through plate shifts and valleys and hills formed by ice ages. So, knowing all this... Where do we come off panicking when there is the slightest change from the prior year? Do folks expect the world to sit stagnant as we know if forever and ever, and all the history of the world be damned? It will never change again?
The world changes, but the rate at which it changes certainly affects how many human bones you find in those caches. Pompeii? Lots of human bones. Glaciers? Not a lot of our ancestor's bones. The answer for that is simple. One was a catastrophic event and the other took course over hundreds of thousands of years (surrounded by lengthy transition periods). If a year from now a glacier parked itself on top of North America, we'd be dealing with more than megadeaths. So if sea levels rise next year, perhaps it would pay to study and investigate this lest we find New York and DC becoming Atlantis I and II?
Seems like these things are more politically motivated and looking for someone to blame rather than someone rationally just standing up and saying "Well, what did you think was going to happen? The same thing year after year? Had to change sometime..."
You seem open to change. You know, I think that you're politically motivated to stop me from filling in the gorge around your house to provide drinking water for the townsfolk. Don't investigate the dam I'm building down stream from you or I'll accuse you of being politically motivated. Wait, your house is at the bottom of a reservoir now? Well, what did you think was going to happen? The same thing year after year? Had to change sometime...
As far as political motivation, I think I'll stick to the peer reviewed and respected journal of Nature rather than you. It consists of people that just want to figure out what's going on and discover why the change is happening. You want to stick your head in the sand. Do us all a favor and go to the Outer Banks to do that.
Exactly how do you plan on broadcasting reality TV of your mission? Mars seems like a difficult place to get energy. When people's lives are at risk in a mercilessly harsh environment, isn't it a bit selfish for us to be asking them to use their solar panels to send us video of their daily lives? I understand the need for communications but how do you plan on sending enough video and audio back from the teams to make a reality show?
Is the following statement morally reprehensible to you? "I know you've had a long day but we need someone to do a walk out to dust off the south solar panels because we're not getting enough power to transmit cameras five and six to monitor you while you sleep."
This question may boil down to cultural differences but I'm an American, fairly non-nomadic and I have a lot of cargo -- both mentally and physically. There are places of my youth that I may never return to and I currently sit a thousand miles away from. But I'm okay with this because if I flipped out one day I could just board a plane or road trip it back. I'm aware that settlers who came to the Americas faced similar issues but they were moving to a new land that was already inhabited by humans and had new places to offer them. Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact, it's cold as hell. I would surmise that someone would need to be legally insane to willingly go to a place without society, without parks, without schools, without culture, without even atmosphere, without children, without the elderly and without the prospect of seeing those things first hand again. Furthermore, should a sane person make such a decision I can see no perceivable way they would remain sane. Even if the person is nomadic or adventurous in nature, you will bring them to a new world and require four of them to remain cooped up in a thousand cubic meters.
Call it cabin fever, call it space madness, call it batshit insanity, call it whatever you want but aside from bombarding them with digital crap from Earth, how are you going to combat it? I know your ratings go up but what happens when all your reality television is 90% insane ramblings of home?
If the Mars mission is brought to you as reality TV, you will see how the astronauts land on Mars, start construction on their habitat, cooperate, discuss, laugh and live.
Exactly what kind of laughter did you have in mind?
I would be very interested in how you made what you made.
I as well am very impressed and tip my hat in amazement. However, as I watched the video and then went to his page and started trying to understand how this would communicate with his mechanical bus, I couldn't help but wonder if he had consumed vast amounts of Cougar Boost.
Well, I can remember that summer and I spent it working in the fields, bailing hay, framing houses and working as a busboy/waiter/bartender at night. But that was just because that was the best way for me to earn extra cash before college. It was made clear to me that I was expected to pay for all of my schooling just like everyone else in my family and, growing up under the poverty line, that made sense. So if you have any legal way to acquire extra capital then that's what I would do. Bagging groceries isn't going to help your coding abilities but if it gives you enough breathing room to prevent a loan shark from taking advantage of you in college, I'd take that option.
Now had my family been able to pay my way through and acquiring capital was not an urgent necessity, there still wouldn't have been any internships or jobs available for a programmer at my location. In this situation and knowing what I know now, I would have opted for other paths:
1. Approach an entity that doesn't have a lot of money (e.g. school, library, city council, county park, church, whatever) and ask them if they need anything improved or fixed IT-wise. You can take an off-the-shelf route like just reskinning phpBB for a library forum or implement a server for voting on new books to acquire or an announcement system for school closings or even a static calendar page for events. Maybe you build it from the ground up like new reservation system for people who want to reserve a book at the library before they drive 40 minutes to pick it up. If the facility likes it, they'll use it. If they don't, well at least you learned something. The thing is, you'll build experience working with real-ish requirements and even if it amounts to nothing you'll learn why. Aim for something simple to ensure success and try not to reinvent the wheel. Now-a-days with Rails' scaffold system, you can stand up CRUD apps in no time. I remember a lot of broken processes as a kid that I saw at Boy Scouts, parks, libraries, etc where a simple registration form would have saved a couple people a lot of work.
2. Contribute to open source. I'd shy away from starting your own open source project. That is actually difficult to do unless you know someone demanding it and then you're kind of being held to get it done. Anyone can check in a project to sourceforge or github (and they often do) but without users it quickly withers and dies. I'd suggest looking into an active project and seeing if you can understand the source code. If you can contribute, that's great. That's experience and that's something you can put on your resume -- even if it goes defunct by the time you graduate.
3. Copy last year's course pages for the beginning CS and Math classes you intend to take and start working through them. Seriously, I wish I had thought of this way back then and if they're still up for your college, grab them and start looking at the problems so you don't get a wake up call. My college required me to take four semesters of calc as a CS major and that was a harsh reality indeed. If you start working on a project now and it's great by the time you get to the course, your professor might ask you to become a TA for some extra cash. Sure, it's brown nosing but it also feels really good to be prepared.
Those two suggestions are assuming you don't need capital and there's no paying gig. If you don't like them, hell, just enjoy your summer -- when you succeed you'll be working 9 to 5 and I sorta wish I had spent more time at the pool, hanging out with friends, playing music with crappy bands, playing baseball with pickup groups, etc. Don't forget to live a little.
I had the same experience with Westerns. I guess when I saw "My Name Is Nobody" I was a bit lost but the Fist Full of Dollars stuff was right in my wheelhouse. Today I don't watch much other than Clint and my dad was okay with that. On the other hand, my dad used to play records for me like Baba O'Riley by The Who and The Beatles' Red and Blue collections on his old record player. I gobbled that stuff up and, later, when I would be exposed to then popular bands like Ace of Base and Green Day from my classmates my body rejected that trash like a baboon heart with the wrong blood type. So I think it can easily go both ways depending on the relationship and the kid's interests. This guy's kid already sounds like he's showing a positive enjoyment towards the books so let's further it.
And today, I have many younger cousins that I guess I never realized looked up to me and thought I was cool. Well, one Christmas, my aunt just put my name on a present to my younger cousin Hunter and it was for some book I never heard of. She e-mailed me the synopsis and he read that book in five days we did a little back and forth over e-mail about it. So I took her cue and started sending him books I pick up at thrift stores and other used book stores if they're cheap (I'd wager he's got some pretty good sets and maybe even doubles of most of these authors). Seriously, stop in a goodwill sometime, pick out some good books and gift them to your younger relatives, it's worth the ~50 cents for the old paperback on the chance the kid reads it. Now when I'm visiting I casually ask him about the books and he goes nuts where he never said two words before.
So, if you want to help the person asking Slashdot, perhaps the suggestion should be "Give the book to his idol and politely ask them to give the book to your kid." Then once the kid is hooked, you just so happen to have read the book as well.
I don't recall getting into this stuff seriously until I was 11 or 12 but names I would throw out would be Madeline L'Engle (Wrinkle in Time), C.S. Lewis (Perelandra, That Hideous Strength), Ray Bradbury (Martian Chronicles or his short stories), Lowis Lowry (The Giver), Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game although it's a long one for kids), Robert Heinlein (The Star Beast, The Rolling Stones), Arthur C. Clarke (Childhood's End), Terry Pratchett (Johnny Maxwell series)... now, since I was young there have been a whole raft of others and I think Neil Gaiman is even writing children's books now. I guess some names I've heard that you can look into are Andre Norton, Douglas E. Richards, Terrance Dicks, Donald Moffitt, Larry Niven, Jane Yolen, Gary Paulson, etc.
Just so you know, Asimov did edit collections of sci-fi for children (on his way to having his name on 500 books) and I think I remember Young Mutants and Tomorrow's Children being okay collections.
I'm not sure what level of arthritis we're dealing with here but I'm guessing he can't use a keyboard for extended lengths of time. I've seen companies that make devices that all the user to put a headband on that has a reflective dot on it (you can google for it, I'm not going to plug a product). This, in turn is watched by a camera mounted on or near the monitor and the user can then direct the mouse using the direction of their head. So, decide which of these has the best support for your needs and treat it like an input device. Then you could get two buttons (one for each thumb) and think of novel ways to implement the input from these two buttons. One simple way would be left click/right click. But you could also write a driver and some software that allows him to click into a word processing application and, say, does Morse Code to type with his right thumb and can click once with his left thumb to go back a space. Maybe give him a foot switch to toggle between modes of operation of his two thumb buttons? From that point, he might be able to slowly contribute to code.
Is this a practical input device? Probably not. Is it going to be you doing all the initial wiring and coding while your grandfather learns like a guinea pig? Probably. Is he going to look like a moron using it? Definitely. But if it keeps his mind active and allows him to contribute even a little bit to the code portions of your future projects, maybe it's worth it?
My grandfather was more mechanical than electrical and as such he would love to work on engines and things with me. Well, one day he had laid out all these parts in his living room (it was winter) and was working on something when he got up in the night, slipped on a small motor and broke his hip. So please, exercise caution in whatever you're doing and check with his doctor/physician to make sure that you are in no way exacerbating his arthritis!
The post has some merit however I take issue with some of the evidence offered up
Per capita spending on music is 47% lower than it was in 1973!!
The number of professional musicians has fallen 25% since 2000.
Of the 75,000 albums released in 2010 only 2,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. Only 1,000 sold more than 10,000 copies. Without going into details, 10,000 albums is about the point where independent artists begin to go into the black on professional album production, marketing and promotion.
It is my opinion that the introduction of the "Top 40" and other lists of hot songs has recently lead to people who only want to hear the same hook over and over on the radio. Radio stations comply, the labels control what radio stations play and then that's what people buy. I listen to Radio K/MPR's The Current streaming online and I will tell you that the diversity of what's on those stations far outweighs any popular radio station I have access to. It seems more logical to me that the RIAA and bigger labels have done this to themselves and contributed to the decline of musicians. I have been in four bands in my life and aside from close friends that came to shows, nobody cared. No radio station wanted to play our songs (some said they legally could not play our songs) and people just wanted to hear The Killers or Radiohead or Britney Spears or whatever the hell the entire world is listening to these two weeks.
I spend plenty of money on music but it's definitely not to artists that belong to organizations that design their promotional and middleman fees off of a few major acts while absolutely dicking and ignoring everyone else. I pay my money directly to bands like Cloud Cult, to labels that are not members of the RIAA, to kickstarter projects of unsigned bands and use distribution channels like Bandcamp to pay for MP3s that come in any quality or format I want as many times as I want (although after kickstarting a project I now own twenty vinyl records of a punk bluegrass band that I frankly do not know with what to do). That's what stimulates diversity and number of musicians, I'm no longer even a hobby musician and I tried very hard to give my music away. We didn't make great music but there's just no place for it when everyone is trained to listen to the same damn shit on the radio. Have you considered the possibility that if record labels moved money around to starting acts, there would be more musicians? Instead the CEO of Universal Music Group has a new Bentley.
Enjoy your slow death, I'm taking my disposable income elsewhere.
It was basically an open threat to Iran and North Korea that we were going to invade them next.
Which is sort of incorrect, the speech was given on January 29, 2002 and Iraq was invaded on 19 of March 2003. So let's look at Mohammad Khatami who was in office from 2 August 1997 – 3 August 2005 and I'll leave it to the reader to decide if it was the speech of George W. Bush on in January of 2002 or the ongoing "Operation Iraqi Freedom" that started in 2003 and was still going on when he left office that was the primary motivation for him being replaced by someone that would scare the US. The endless Iraq War is a bigger blunder! Not his stupid speech and Republican rhetoric! Actions speak louder than words.
George W. Bush is a moron, I agree with you here. But I don't want history rewritten to say that the greatest political blunder was his Axis of Evil speech -- look at the freaking invasion of Iraq, for the love of Allah!
Guess what happened to him after W. had his "We're coming for you next, Iran" cowboy moment?
What in the hell are you talking about?! The US wasn't even in Iraq when he made this speech! You are rewriting history, you are fudging timelines, adding dialogue, cheap rhetoric and twisting facts to align with your ideals and your reality just like a politician!
Iran was actually getting pretty moderate before that speech, even sending open condolences and holding vigils after 9-11, with fairly moderate leadership. After the speech we get Ahmadinejad and and full-on nuke program. Smart move, George.
You are flat out wrong. The candle light vigils held for 9-11 victims were entirely citizen events and had nothing to do with the government. I have two Iranian citizens as good friends and they are completely different people than Ahmadinejad and, worse, their nutjob supreme leader. Your insinuation that Iran the nation state sent open condolences and held vigils after 9-11 is laughable and erroneous -- some of the leadership did condemn the attacks but that's as far as it went. Hate the nation not the national. Hate the religion not the religious.
Your blame on George is also largely misplaced. They had deals with Russia to improve their nuke program long before him and the leaders have always wanted the ultimate weapon. I know life would be simpler if everything was George W. Bush's fault but, unfortunately for you, we must face reality.
How could contributing to the spread of clever computer-intrusion technologies(both with things like Stuxnet, and with the pernicious habit of doing business with the sort of slimy vulnerability-sellers whose customers want to exploit, not patch, them), possibly be a bad idea for a country whose citizens, businesses, government, and R&D capabilities are overwhelmingly dependent on computerized infrastructure?
I have to disagree with you here. To ensure that your businesses and citizens and government and infrastructure are sound, you should always be investigating modes for attacks and publishing them. My logic is that if the United States Government is able to develop this, then so is China's, Russia's, India's, etc so get it out in the open already. In fact, your claim almost seems to advocate security through obscurity. If you want to ensure that people aren't pilfering data without your knowledge, publish your exploits and what you see as "contributing to the spread of clever computer-intrusion technologies" could just as well be seen as "telling SCADA and other makers to pull their heads out of their asses and fix this." Also, your statements can apply to every single country now, even third world countries are largely dependent on networking hardware to function.
The reason this is a "destabilizing and dangerous" action was because it was effective -- not because the US Government secretly given hackers a bunch of ways to hack every computer ever made. Also, the US kind of lost the "moral high ground" now when someone hacks their nuclear facilities with the intent of disabling our capabilities. Use an effective cyber attack against a nation state that does not have similar capabilities... "destabilizing and dangerous" is a definition of what you can expect the repercussions to be.
Oh my god you're right, so the title should have been:
Charles Carreon Sues the Oatmeal Over TM and "Incitement To Cyber-Vandalism"
But wait! Even that's not correct, how does one sue a website? Charles Carreon isn't suing a website, he's suing Matthew Inman! So it really should have read:
Charles Carreon Sues Matthew Inman Over TM and "Incitement To Cyber-Vandalism"
Actually, that's not quite true either. If you read the links you'll find out that the suit names multiple defendants and Inman is only one of them so the title should have been:
Charles Carreon Sues Matthew Inman; IndieGogo Inc.; National Wildlife Federation; American Cancer Society; and Does Over TM and "Incitement To Cyber-Vandalism"
And abbreviating trademark as TM? Well, that's totally 13 year old girl! So now we have:
Charles Carreon Sues Matthew Inman; IndieGogo Inc.; National Wildlife Federation; American Cancer Society; and Does Over Trademark Infringement and "Incitement To Cyber-Vandalism"
There, that is correct! Seriously, dude, for the sake of brevity can I catch a break? Trust me, I've produced much more incorrect shit than this but you only get so many characters in the title.
The quoted text from Carreon is too long and you get the feeling someone fell asleep writing it. I re-read it a second time, imagining better formatting and it read better, IMO.
So help me out here, can you show me what you mean? I basically grabbed those quotes from the two news articles where he gave interviews. I'm not one to change the language, punctuation or grammar of what someone is quoted as saying from a reputable news source. Please, if you want to help me, tell me what I was supposed to do with the quote in this article:
“So someone takes one of my letters and takes it apart. That doesn’t mean you can just declare netwar, that doesn’t mean you can encourage people to hack my website, to brute force my WordPress installation so I have to change my password. You can’t encourage people to violate my trademark and violate my twitter name and associate me with incompetence with stupidity, and douchebaggery,” he says. “And if that’s where the world is going I will fight with every ounce of force in this 5’11 180 pound frame against it. I’ve got the energy, and I’ve got the time.”
That's how it appears in Forbes and it's the entire basis for his lawsuit so I thought it was important. I took his words and left Forbes' interjections because that's their work and also when you're writing a summary it should be concise so I remove the "he said" and "she wrote" pieces.
I'm willing to learn and get better at this. It's really hard when people just say "You're a 13 year old girl, you're illiterate and other people's quotes are too long." Any helpful suggestions are greatly appreciated -- especially when they're more constructive than name calling.
The summary is so poorly written, assuming that the reader knows and cares about tiny details and any of players, that I am finally convinced the real Slashdot is dead.
Sorry to suck so badly. I'll try harder next time. Thought my name was good around here but apparently I'm the end of Slashdot. Care to rewrite the summary in a concise manner so I can take notes? It's really really easy to leave empty criticisms with no valid critiques and rhetoric about how Slashdot is dead. But someone's modding you up so I'll bite. You have zero submissions and 150 comments? I hate to say it but I think I've been registered on here a bit longer than you and have been a little more active (that's me on the hall of fame list for submitters)... but we who paraphrase, link, write book reviews and write comments with content, we're the ones who are ruining Slashdot? Got it.
Slashdot Mirror
He seems to have written a post on how this works and then later made an account. Sorta verified here. His post is very informative and might answer a lot of questions and generate more meaningful ones.
The only thing that would be newsworthy is if you managed to do something highly technical without having Linux play a vital role. For everyone who thinks that a complete absence of Linux is the norm: Did you use the internet?
... but it's the de facto standard where I work when you need serious shit done -- large or small.
After tinkering with Debian on my Raspberry Pis, it's pretty clear that kids are going to learn how pervasive Linux can be. As long as other operating systems are closed source or require money to run, Linux will be more than abundant. I worked at a Fortune 500 company and aside from some hilariously painful Sharepoint servers, everything was Linux. If OSX is Uranium on the periodic table, Linux is Hydrogen. If Windows is as abundant and costly as diamonds, Linux is as abundant and costly as carbon. It may be no-frills, it might be forever doomed to be passed over by gamers and musicians
But what an awesome 15 seconds that must have been!
Yep, just like my first time ... she didn't seem to think so though.
The common perception among Slashdotters is that while Bill Gates may cause us some professional difficulties, he makes up for it with an exemplary philanthropic record.
Not me. I've voiced my concerns that are not so warmly received.
The short of it is that I think what Gates is doing is great but I don't understand why they buy research facilities in America and not Africa or why all the drug companies that get to sell their cures to Africa are all American. I mean without stability, roads and other infrastructure, Africa is going to constantly need someone else to fix their problems. And the money from the B&G Foundation stays in America invested in American companies that pays out to American companies that provide "cures" for Africa. It will perpetually work that way.
Imagine aliens landed on Earth, took an assessment of us and were saddened to see war, pollution, poverty, etc. So they say they're going to help us and they buy 10 long range matter transmitters from another alien race and give them to Earth. But if we ask them on how to make the transmitters ourselves they just laugh and say "Please, you're still searching for subatomic particles. Plus, you're just going to use them for war if you can make them. And on top of that, you would have to pay sums you cannot fathom to the alien race who invented these machines. When these break, we'll get you some new ones." Meanwhile they're receiving accolades from the galactic senate and Earth remains full of war, pollution, poverty, etc.
It's a horrible truth but the one thing Africa has a lot of is humans. Life is cheap there. If you want to reverse that, you need to introduce stability and then farming and then commerce. There are huge areas where crime, corruption and warlords make it impossible to raise crops. Curing malaria is important but it isn't going to stop that from being the hungriest place on Earth. And it's not going to raise the value of human life there. Gates' idea to fix that is to pair up with Monsanto (surprise another American company with tons of IP). Right. I wonder if they'll patent the seeds they breed that grow well in regions of Africa?
Just like thinking up a new microfinancing system can win you a Nobel Prize, ideas on how to make areas secure and stable will go much further for farming in Africa than importing Monsanto seed with terminator genes.
In income tax statements, it refers to a reduction of taxable income as recognition of certain expenses required to produce the income.
I'm guessing that on Microsoft's assets and liabilities balance sheets, they have finally realized (meaning evaluated currently) that the "investment" of $6.3 billion dollars is no longer worth more than a hundred thousand. So perhaps they knew this for a while but have now finally acknowledged it as an opportune time. Say they expect to bring in huge revenue this year and now this loss will counteract that. When you hear "it's a tax write off" it is usually referring to you reducing your taxes by counterbalancing your incoming revenue with a realized loss. Examples: You give a car away, you are paying off pure interest on your home, etc. In Microsoft's case, they made a bad investment and now their books are reflecting that. I'd imagine SEC regulates this kind of thing pretty tightly to stop manipulation of stocks and whatnot but I don't know those regulations.
And that, dear readers, is why Slashdot advice is sometimes unsound. After reading reports of client side exploits (like rumors of item duping via system clock adjustments) and understanding basic limits on server/client communication, it is apparent that Blizzard has to trust the client more than they're comfortable with. So if you look at their "warden" implementation for WoW, you can imagine that Diablo III has a similar "anti-cheat check" component running in user mode where Diablo III runs. And they probably (correctly) identify Wine as being not genuine Windows. It's an emulation. And therein lies the problem. Without setting up a highly invasive rootkit like The Warden, Blizzard cannot know if Wine is emulating Windows libraries correctly. A simple mental exercise is to imagine that the D3 client cannot query the servers every time it needs a time stamp for each event in the game -- to do so would DDOS their own servers so each client must query each user's system clock. The Windows call that does this is emulated by Wine. One could easily insert a dynamic control for this "system clock" into Wine and recompile. One of the achievements in Diablo III is to finish each act in under an hour. So a user could note the time, play to the end of an act and before beating the final boss, simply turn the clock one minute past the starting time and have Wine report that to the client. And if the client is not asking the server for these time stamps, achievement granted. This is a very coarse example for the sake of brevity but I would imagine that system timestamps affect many more aspects of the game. The rumor was that rolling back your system clock after an item sale would return the item to your inventory and you would still have the gold from selling it.
So is there actually a modified version of Wine cheating for you under your Diablo III client using the windows DLL api as a facade? Blizzard doesn't know. They can't know unless they have a rootkit that runs in super user (administrator) mode that profiles and scans all other programs for offending actions. That's how they caught WoWGlider but it would be infinitely harder with individual people like me tailoring their own versions of Wine. I am not saying their reaction is correct, I'm just trying to explain to you why they are employing arcane logic. The solution is for them to natively support Linux but that's a completely separate flame fest for which I really don't have the energy right now.
This used to be one of my favorite channels. Along with "Wild" Discovery, History, Scifi, and Animal. The last one's not too bad, but NatGeo and the others have turned-into reality shows. Yeah I know. Complain, complain
Well, let's not be too hasty now. I mean, what if they did a crossover where some of the animals from NatGeo join the casts of the other channel reality shows? I'd like to see a grizzly bear mix things up a bit on the Jersey Shore. Especially with those night vision cameras they have in the rooms. I mean, the "people" on those shows are already behaving pretty much like bonobo chimps.
Mediator: First I ask the former Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, how would you handle an alien invasion? ... *even longer pause* .. I would shoot at where they are going to be.
Mitt Romney: Simple, I'd shoot them.
Mediator: And to you, Mr. President, how would you handle an alien invasion?
Barack Obama: *pauses* Instead of shooting where they are
Crowd: *breaks out in rapturous applause*
Mitt Romney: Oh, come on, of course that's what I meant as well. I mean, I'd probably have the military figure all that out or pay someone in rubies or chickens or beads or whatever the hell it is you poor people are spending at Wal-Mart these days.
Crowd: *boos loudly*
Crowd Member #1: Oh, that Romney, I don't like him. I don't like him at all.
Crowd Member #2: I've never seen a Mormon kill anyone -- let alone an alien. Have you?
Crowd Member #3: I'd bet all my Wal-Mart rubies he doesn't win.
Last I check, we're on these floating masses called "plates" and they actually move around, shift and stuff.
Yep. I'm not a geologist but I don't think "floating masses" is a particularly great analogy. Gravity does have an effect on them at that point but once you hit turtles, I wouldn't bother digging any deeper.
Some get pushed under others, etc. Wouldn't that simply explain why one section might be seeing a change in sea level and not another?
So where has this been throughout history? I mean, we've been building cities near water forever -- you would figure there would be a lot more stories of cities swallowed by the sea. Also, tectonic plates move about 2 centimeters each year. So if we start to see sea levels indicating more movement than that, can we start talking about other factors?
Lastly, why does everyone panic when the world changes a little? We have fish fossils on mountain tops, dinosaur bones, the land mass used to be one large hunk of land. Mountains were created through plate shifts and valleys and hills formed by ice ages. So, knowing all this... Where do we come off panicking when there is the slightest change from the prior year? Do folks expect the world to sit stagnant as we know if forever and ever, and all the history of the world be damned? It will never change again?
The world changes, but the rate at which it changes certainly affects how many human bones you find in those caches. Pompeii? Lots of human bones. Glaciers? Not a lot of our ancestor's bones. The answer for that is simple. One was a catastrophic event and the other took course over hundreds of thousands of years (surrounded by lengthy transition periods). If a year from now a glacier parked itself on top of North America, we'd be dealing with more than megadeaths. So if sea levels rise next year, perhaps it would pay to study and investigate this lest we find New York and DC becoming Atlantis I and II?
Seems like these things are more politically motivated and looking for someone to blame rather than someone rationally just standing up and saying "Well, what did you think was going to happen? The same thing year after year? Had to change sometime..."
You seem open to change. You know, I think that you're politically motivated to stop me from filling in the gorge around your house to provide drinking water for the townsfolk. Don't investigate the dam I'm building down stream from you or I'll accuse you of being politically motivated. Wait, your house is at the bottom of a reservoir now? Well, what did you think was going to happen? The same thing year after year? Had to change sometime...
As far as political motivation, I think I'll stick to the peer reviewed and respected journal of Nature rather than you. It consists of people that just want to figure out what's going on and discover why the change is happening. You want to stick your head in the sand. Do us all a favor and go to the Outer Banks to do that.
Exactly how do you plan on broadcasting reality TV of your mission? Mars seems like a difficult place to get energy. When people's lives are at risk in a mercilessly harsh environment, isn't it a bit selfish for us to be asking them to use their solar panels to send us video of their daily lives? I understand the need for communications but how do you plan on sending enough video and audio back from the teams to make a reality show?
Is the following statement morally reprehensible to you? "I know you've had a long day but we need someone to do a walk out to dust off the south solar panels because we're not getting enough power to transmit cameras five and six to monitor you while you sleep."
Call it cabin fever, call it space madness, call it batshit insanity, call it whatever you want but aside from bombarding them with digital crap from Earth, how are you going to combat it? I know your ratings go up but what happens when all your reality television is 90% insane ramblings of home?
If the Mars mission is brought to you as reality TV, you will see how the astronauts land on Mars, start construction on their habitat, cooperate, discuss, laugh and live.
Exactly what kind of laughter did you have in mind?
I would be very interested in how you made what you made.
I as well am very impressed and tip my hat in amazement. However, as I watched the video and then went to his page and started trying to understand how this would communicate with his mechanical bus, I couldn't help but wonder if he had consumed vast amounts of Cougar Boost.
Well, I can remember that summer and I spent it working in the fields, bailing hay, framing houses and working as a busboy/waiter/bartender at night. But that was just because that was the best way for me to earn extra cash before college. It was made clear to me that I was expected to pay for all of my schooling just like everyone else in my family and, growing up under the poverty line, that made sense. So if you have any legal way to acquire extra capital then that's what I would do. Bagging groceries isn't going to help your coding abilities but if it gives you enough breathing room to prevent a loan shark from taking advantage of you in college, I'd take that option.
Now had my family been able to pay my way through and acquiring capital was not an urgent necessity, there still wouldn't have been any internships or jobs available for a programmer at my location. In this situation and knowing what I know now, I would have opted for other paths:
1. Approach an entity that doesn't have a lot of money (e.g. school, library, city council, county park, church, whatever) and ask them if they need anything improved or fixed IT-wise. You can take an off-the-shelf route like just reskinning phpBB for a library forum or implement a server for voting on new books to acquire or an announcement system for school closings or even a static calendar page for events. Maybe you build it from the ground up like new reservation system for people who want to reserve a book at the library before they drive 40 minutes to pick it up. If the facility likes it, they'll use it. If they don't, well at least you learned something. The thing is, you'll build experience working with real-ish requirements and even if it amounts to nothing you'll learn why. Aim for something simple to ensure success and try not to reinvent the wheel. Now-a-days with Rails' scaffold system, you can stand up CRUD apps in no time. I remember a lot of broken processes as a kid that I saw at Boy Scouts, parks, libraries, etc where a simple registration form would have saved a couple people a lot of work.
2. Contribute to open source. I'd shy away from starting your own open source project. That is actually difficult to do unless you know someone demanding it and then you're kind of being held to get it done. Anyone can check in a project to sourceforge or github (and they often do) but without users it quickly withers and dies. I'd suggest looking into an active project and seeing if you can understand the source code. If you can contribute, that's great. That's experience and that's something you can put on your resume -- even if it goes defunct by the time you graduate.
3. Copy last year's course pages for the beginning CS and Math classes you intend to take and start working through them. Seriously, I wish I had thought of this way back then and if they're still up for your college, grab them and start looking at the problems so you don't get a wake up call. My college required me to take four semesters of calc as a CS major and that was a harsh reality indeed. If you start working on a project now and it's great by the time you get to the course, your professor might ask you to become a TA for some extra cash. Sure, it's brown nosing but it also feels really good to be prepared.
Those two suggestions are assuming you don't need capital and there's no paying gig. If you don't like them, hell, just enjoy your summer -- when you succeed you'll be working 9 to 5 and I sorta wish I had spent more time at the pool, hanging out with friends, playing music with crappy bands, playing baseball with pickup groups, etc. Don't forget to live a little.
I had the same experience with Westerns. I guess when I saw "My Name Is Nobody" I was a bit lost but the Fist Full of Dollars stuff was right in my wheelhouse. Today I don't watch much other than Clint and my dad was okay with that. On the other hand, my dad used to play records for me like Baba O'Riley by The Who and The Beatles' Red and Blue collections on his old record player. I gobbled that stuff up and, later, when I would be exposed to then popular bands like Ace of Base and Green Day from my classmates my body rejected that trash like a baboon heart with the wrong blood type. So I think it can easily go both ways depending on the relationship and the kid's interests. This guy's kid already sounds like he's showing a positive enjoyment towards the books so let's further it.
And today, I have many younger cousins that I guess I never realized looked up to me and thought I was cool. Well, one Christmas, my aunt just put my name on a present to my younger cousin Hunter and it was for some book I never heard of. She e-mailed me the synopsis and he read that book in five days we did a little back and forth over e-mail about it. So I took her cue and started sending him books I pick up at thrift stores and other used book stores if they're cheap (I'd wager he's got some pretty good sets and maybe even doubles of most of these authors). Seriously, stop in a goodwill sometime, pick out some good books and gift them to your younger relatives, it's worth the ~50 cents for the old paperback on the chance the kid reads it. Now when I'm visiting I casually ask him about the books and he goes nuts where he never said two words before.
So, if you want to help the person asking Slashdot, perhaps the suggestion should be "Give the book to his idol and politely ask them to give the book to your kid." Then once the kid is hooked, you just so happen to have read the book as well.
I don't recall getting into this stuff seriously until I was 11 or 12 but names I would throw out would be Madeline L'Engle (Wrinkle in Time), C.S. Lewis (Perelandra, That Hideous Strength), Ray Bradbury (Martian Chronicles or his short stories), Lowis Lowry (The Giver), Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game although it's a long one for kids), Robert Heinlein (The Star Beast, The Rolling Stones), Arthur C. Clarke (Childhood's End), Terry Pratchett (Johnny Maxwell series) ... now, since I was young there have been a whole raft of others and I think Neil Gaiman is even writing children's books now. I guess some names I've heard that you can look into are Andre Norton, Douglas E. Richards, Terrance Dicks, Donald Moffitt, Larry Niven, Jane Yolen, Gary Paulson, etc.
Just so you know, Asimov did edit collections of sci-fi for children (on his way to having his name on 500 books) and I think I remember Young Mutants and Tomorrow's Children being okay collections.
I'm not sure what level of arthritis we're dealing with here but I'm guessing he can't use a keyboard for extended lengths of time. I've seen companies that make devices that all the user to put a headband on that has a reflective dot on it (you can google for it, I'm not going to plug a product). This, in turn is watched by a camera mounted on or near the monitor and the user can then direct the mouse using the direction of their head. So, decide which of these has the best support for your needs and treat it like an input device. Then you could get two buttons (one for each thumb) and think of novel ways to implement the input from these two buttons. One simple way would be left click/right click. But you could also write a driver and some software that allows him to click into a word processing application and, say, does Morse Code to type with his right thumb and can click once with his left thumb to go back a space. Maybe give him a foot switch to toggle between modes of operation of his two thumb buttons? From that point, he might be able to slowly contribute to code.
Is this a practical input device? Probably not. Is it going to be you doing all the initial wiring and coding while your grandfather learns like a guinea pig? Probably. Is he going to look like a moron using it? Definitely. But if it keeps his mind active and allows him to contribute even a little bit to the code portions of your future projects, maybe it's worth it?
My grandfather was more mechanical than electrical and as such he would love to work on engines and things with me. Well, one day he had laid out all these parts in his living room (it was winter) and was working on something when he got up in the night, slipped on a small motor and broke his hip. So please, exercise caution in whatever you're doing and check with his doctor/physician to make sure that you are in no way exacerbating his arthritis!
Per capita spending on music is 47% lower than it was in 1973!!
The number of professional musicians has fallen 25% since 2000.
Of the 75,000 albums released in 2010 only 2,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. Only 1,000 sold more than 10,000 copies. Without going into details, 10,000 albums is about the point where independent artists begin to go into the black on professional album production, marketing and promotion.
It is my opinion that the introduction of the "Top 40" and other lists of hot songs has recently lead to people who only want to hear the same hook over and over on the radio. Radio stations comply, the labels control what radio stations play and then that's what people buy. I listen to Radio K/MPR's The Current streaming online and I will tell you that the diversity of what's on those stations far outweighs any popular radio station I have access to. It seems more logical to me that the RIAA and bigger labels have done this to themselves and contributed to the decline of musicians. I have been in four bands in my life and aside from close friends that came to shows, nobody cared. No radio station wanted to play our songs (some said they legally could not play our songs) and people just wanted to hear The Killers or Radiohead or Britney Spears or whatever the hell the entire world is listening to these two weeks.
I spend plenty of money on music but it's definitely not to artists that belong to organizations that design their promotional and middleman fees off of a few major acts while absolutely dicking and ignoring everyone else. I pay my money directly to bands like Cloud Cult, to labels that are not members of the RIAA, to kickstarter projects of unsigned bands and use distribution channels like Bandcamp to pay for MP3s that come in any quality or format I want as many times as I want (although after kickstarting a project I now own twenty vinyl records of a punk bluegrass band that I frankly do not know with what to do). That's what stimulates diversity and number of musicians, I'm no longer even a hobby musician and I tried very hard to give my music away. We didn't make great music but there's just no place for it when everyone is trained to listen to the same damn shit on the radio. Have you considered the possibility that if record labels moved money around to starting acts, there would be more musicians? Instead the CEO of Universal Music Group has a new Bentley.
Enjoy your slow death, I'm taking my disposable income elsewhere.
It was basically an open threat to Iran and North Korea that we were going to invade them next.
Which is sort of incorrect, the speech was given on January 29, 2002 and Iraq was invaded on 19 of March 2003. So let's look at Mohammad Khatami who was in office from 2 August 1997 – 3 August 2005 and I'll leave it to the reader to decide if it was the speech of George W. Bush on in January of 2002 or the ongoing "Operation Iraqi Freedom" that started in 2003 and was still going on when he left office that was the primary motivation for him being replaced by someone that would scare the US. The endless Iraq War is a bigger blunder! Not his stupid speech and Republican rhetoric! Actions speak louder than words.
George W. Bush is a moron, I agree with you here. But I don't want history rewritten to say that the greatest political blunder was his Axis of Evil speech -- look at the freaking invasion of Iraq, for the love of Allah!
Guess what happened to him after W. had his "We're coming for you next, Iran" cowboy moment?
What in the hell are you talking about?! The US wasn't even in Iraq when he made this speech! You are rewriting history, you are fudging timelines, adding dialogue, cheap rhetoric and twisting facts to align with your ideals and your reality just like a politician!
Iran was actually getting pretty moderate before that speech, even sending open condolences and holding vigils after 9-11, with fairly moderate leadership. After the speech we get Ahmadinejad and and full-on nuke program. Smart move, George.
You are flat out wrong. The candle light vigils held for 9-11 victims were entirely citizen events and had nothing to do with the government. I have two Iranian citizens as good friends and they are completely different people than Ahmadinejad and, worse, their nutjob supreme leader. Your insinuation that Iran the nation state sent open condolences and held vigils after 9-11 is laughable and erroneous -- some of the leadership did condemn the attacks but that's as far as it went. Hate the nation not the national. Hate the religion not the religious.
Your blame on George is also largely misplaced. They had deals with Russia to improve their nuke program long before him and the leaders have always wanted the ultimate weapon. I know life would be simpler if everything was George W. Bush's fault but, unfortunately for you, we must face reality.
How could contributing to the spread of clever computer-intrusion technologies(both with things like Stuxnet, and with the pernicious habit of doing business with the sort of slimy vulnerability-sellers whose customers want to exploit, not patch, them), possibly be a bad idea for a country whose citizens, businesses, government, and R&D capabilities are overwhelmingly dependent on computerized infrastructure?
I have to disagree with you here. To ensure that your businesses and citizens and government and infrastructure are sound, you should always be investigating modes for attacks and publishing them. My logic is that if the United States Government is able to develop this, then so is China's, Russia's, India's, etc so get it out in the open already. In fact, your claim almost seems to advocate security through obscurity. If you want to ensure that people aren't pilfering data without your knowledge, publish your exploits and what you see as "contributing to the spread of clever computer-intrusion technologies" could just as well be seen as "telling SCADA and other makers to pull their heads out of their asses and fix this." Also, your statements can apply to every single country now, even third world countries are largely dependent on networking hardware to function.
... "destabilizing and dangerous" is a definition of what you can expect the repercussions to be.
The reason this is a "destabilizing and dangerous" action was because it was effective -- not because the US Government secretly given hackers a bunch of ways to hack every computer ever made. Also, the US kind of lost the "moral high ground" now when someone hacks their nuclear facilities with the intent of disabling our capabilities. Use an effective cyber attack against a nation state that does not have similar capabilities
Isn't "Surface" the name of their SDK for both devices and Windows 7 computers that's been available since 2009?
Also, is this just like the Courier or will we one day actually see these devices like the Zune?
Charles Carreon Sues the Oatmeal Over TM and "Incitement To Cyber-Vandalism"
But wait! Even that's not correct, how does one sue a website? Charles Carreon isn't suing a website, he's suing Matthew Inman! So it really should have read:
Charles Carreon Sues Matthew Inman Over TM and "Incitement To Cyber-Vandalism"
Actually, that's not quite true either. If you read the links you'll find out that the suit names multiple defendants and Inman is only one of them so the title should have been:
Charles Carreon Sues Matthew Inman; IndieGogo Inc.; National Wildlife Federation; American Cancer Society; and Does Over TM and "Incitement To Cyber-Vandalism"
And abbreviating trademark as TM? Well, that's totally 13 year old girl! So now we have:
Charles Carreon Sues Matthew Inman; IndieGogo Inc.; National Wildlife Federation; American Cancer Society; and Does Over Trademark Infringement and "Incitement To Cyber-Vandalism"
There, that is correct! Seriously, dude, for the sake of brevity can I catch a break? Trust me, I've produced much more incorrect shit than this but you only get so many characters in the title.
The quoted text from Carreon is too long and you get the feeling someone fell asleep writing it. I re-read it a second time, imagining better formatting and it read better, IMO.
So help me out here, can you show me what you mean? I basically grabbed those quotes from the two news articles where he gave interviews. I'm not one to change the language, punctuation or grammar of what someone is quoted as saying from a reputable news source. Please, if you want to help me, tell me what I was supposed to do with the quote in this article:
“So someone takes one of my letters and takes it apart. That doesn’t mean you can just declare netwar, that doesn’t mean you can encourage people to hack my website, to brute force my WordPress installation so I have to change my password. You can’t encourage people to violate my trademark and violate my twitter name and associate me with incompetence with stupidity, and douchebaggery,” he says. “And if that’s where the world is going I will fight with every ounce of force in this 5’11 180 pound frame against it. I’ve got the energy, and I’ve got the time.”
That's how it appears in Forbes and it's the entire basis for his lawsuit so I thought it was important. I took his words and left Forbes' interjections because that's their work and also when you're writing a summary it should be concise so I remove the "he said" and "she wrote" pieces.
I'm willing to learn and get better at this. It's really hard when people just say "You're a 13 year old girl, you're illiterate and other people's quotes are too long." Any helpful suggestions are greatly appreciated -- especially when they're more constructive than name calling.
The summary is so poorly written, assuming that the reader knows and cares about tiny details and any of players, that I am finally convinced the real Slashdot is dead.
Sorry to suck so badly. I'll try harder next time. Thought my name was good around here but apparently I'm the end of Slashdot. Care to rewrite the summary in a concise manner so I can take notes? It's really really easy to leave empty criticisms with no valid critiques and rhetoric about how Slashdot is dead. But someone's modding you up so I'll bite. You have zero submissions and 150 comments? I hate to say it but I think I've been registered on here a bit longer than you and have been a little more active (that's me on the hall of fame list for submitters) ... but we who paraphrase, link, write book reviews and write comments with content, we're the ones who are ruining Slashdot? Got it.
Submitter here. I forgot to mention in the summary he's also the lawyer for FunnyJunk.