The sheer complexity of this issue makes soapboxing inappropriate. I'm an early poster, but it's already begun. Please try to refrain from making fools of yourselves.
Then, because federal government money is yours and mine, everyone in the administration should be fired, and the entire department should be dismantled and rebuilt with congressional oversight. It should be tightly supervised for the next decade or so.
None of this will happen, and the people who've lost their houses will be told 'tough shit'. They will be lucky to get the cost of their homes back. Insurance companies will be left holding the bag. They will be forced to raise rates, and the people who should have paid for this disaster in the first place will end up paying for it anyway, while the Government gets off scot-free.
I'm a Propaganda addict. I've got Volume 12 on my Linux box and Vol 14 on my Mac. I've read the site religiously for over a year. And I hope it's shut down, now.
I have to say with complete candor that Bowie's replacement Asmodean just couldn't cut it. I only saw his first release, but it was pitifully small and the tiles were ugly. I'd rather see the site go into stasis than downhill.
This is truer than I'd like it to be - two of the three newspapesr I've purchased in the last year I snagged because of the crimes reported therein. Where else can you read about seventeen-year-olds snagging credit card numbers out of "chat rooms", using them to buy ten-plus grand worth of merchandise from Amazon, and getting stung by seven cops after they let their entire class know about the operation?
Even that coverage is pathetic, though. The opening line from the cc-fraud story: When you build a high-tech world, you open yourself up to high-tech crime...
If we could conclusively determine that the attack originated from within, say, Iraq, we would ask Baghdad to prosecute and we'd give them the tools to do so. If they refused, or denied, we could conceivably label that harboring a terrorist, and take retaliatory/defensive action.
Of course, I have a very hard time imagining the Clinton Administration taking any kind of for-real action against terrorists. Remember his Great Crusade Against Terrorism in 1998? The one that coincided with impeachment, and dropped off radar in February 1999?
There was a Kevin Mitnick interview on this station last night for at least a half hour. Quite well done, really - the show's host didn't take everything Mitnick said at face value and did get Mitnick to mention from time to time that he'd done something wrong. They exposed both sides of the story (and this is a really complex story). I look forward to the Linus set.
Of course, WABI-Host is now talking in hushed tones about George W. Bush's potassium chloride addiction. *groan*
2. To Andover and Slashdot, as an African-American it is troubling to read threats of lynching on this board, but if that's how VA Linux Systems and Slashdot choose to handle its business competitors, so be it.
Not only have you obviously not read the disclaimer at the top of every comment page - "The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. Slashdot is not responsible for what they say" - but you're 'pulling the race card', which is incredibly bad form.
If you want us to take you seriously, you need to stop 'fucking up' (as you put it so eloquently) and start backpedaling now.
An official statement from LinuxOne explaining your behavior and your corrective intentions would be a good place to start.
...but you see, they didn't waste it. That commercial, by being hilarious, was the best of the Bowl. It'll likely get a lot more customers... and if eTrade's got tons of customers, they can lower their commissions per-user.
There really wasn't much worth speaking of commercial-wise this Super Bowl... e-Trade's monkey ad was great, and will probably get lodged in our mid-term memory as the best one of this Bowl. I wish they'd done more with the "Make Seven / Up Yours" guy as well...
But in general, the commercials were lame. Concur?
I think I said this in my original submission, but it got cut: The client for Linux does not need to be Open Source, so long as it's available. I know I for one would pay upwards of 30$ for it - though it probably wouldn't cost that much. Just letting us have it, free or not, open-source or not, would win Apple a lot of longhaired fans. And it needs them...
As for the Culture, I disagree... Consider Phlebas is incredibly fun, and a thirteen year old such as myself and (I believe) you would be completely at home in it. And if it's slightly above the reading level of the girl in question here, well... all the better.
I've never been a Baxter fan. His stuff is too... ethereal... for me. If that word even makes sense in context. It's like it's disconnected from any possible reality...
Censoring for a Thirteen Year Old & Reading Levels
on
Sci Fi Literature 101?
·
· Score: 2
I'd like to add to The Dull Blade's insightful comment about censoring your kid's reading. I agree with him almost completely:
Expose a 13-year-old to Marx and they'll think their way out of it before they do anything stupid. Restrict their access until they reach 18 and you might have a revolutionary on your hands.
This worked wonders for me. My parents showered me with books beginning when I was four; I'd read all of Asimov's famous stuff by the time I was your daughter's age. My mind hasn't been perverted in the least. And I still haven't ever giggled at sex, having been completely clued in about it through books prior to puberty.
The concern that a book is too advanced (conceptually or linguistically) for your child is a valid one. I am having to reread some books that I read ten years ago and didn't understand, now that I'm eighteen. But be careful - by reading works above her reading level, your child can improve her reading level, and she can grow to understand the world through sci-fi allegories in ways a history class could never teach her.
The school systems today make this mistake. Very few other people my age that I know in real life can read much above the level of a ninth grader - they were taught to read phonetically, and have a Pavlovian association between "reading" and "book report". I still get laughed at when I haul in a three hundred page book to read during a free period... but the laughter stops when I clip through fourty pages by the time the bell rings.
Bless my parents for teaching me to read themselves, and excusing me from the first-grade "huked awn fonix" classes.
Consider Phlebas is what I reccomend to get people started on Sci-Fi. It has worked every time I've tried it (that's on three separate occasions) - it's classic widescreen space-opera, with ringworlds and three-hundred-kilometre long starships, but one can tell it was written by a modern writer: Banks' concept of a post-scarcity society is a giveaway that this book was penned in the eighties. Phlebas has to offer the most believable future I've seen to date, even if it is a few thousand years off.
Excession, which takes place a thousand years after CP in the same universe, has only a handful of human characters - and they're all minor ones. All the main characters are artificial intelligences, which is fitting considering they're the ones who run the Culture. Excession is nearly as good as CP.
Neither of the above are too advanced for a thirteen year old with an above-average reading capability, nor are they too easy for an adult.
The City and the Stars is perhaps the greatest classic science fiction novel. It's touching and powerful on a literal scale and yet is also a metaphor for the progress and awakening of our race: a young boy is born with a new mind into a city whose inhabitants never 'die'; their consciousnesses are simply transplanted into new bodies. Alvin, the boy, becomes obsessed with revealing what is outside his hermetically sealed city of ten million... and when he does, the reader's mind begins to reel.
That's enough for now. I may make another posting with further reviews of my other favorites, A Fire Upon the Deep and Glory Season - the latter especially being great for a teenager.
I'd like to know what business the US Post Office has trying to compete with the private sector.
Forgetting the fact that at least half of these ideas are completely hairbrained (printing email? Puhlease; and email is supposed to be discrete from physicality), USPS is getting Government backing for its work. UPS and FedEx are not and neither are any of the other smaller American courier companies that specialize in fast delivery. What right do they have to compete against the taxpaying managers of FedEx?
The United States Post Office serves one task: to ensure that anyone can send a letter anywhere in the country for a reasonable fee. They've proven they can barely do that job (I don't get mail delivery when it snows hard or hails), and I am downright afraid of what they'll do to the email system if they jump into this fray.
They should stay in the physical world where they've always been and, as email starts to push snail mail into the dustbin of history, fade out of existence willingly. The USPS is not chartered to pull a profit or compete in a free market.
I'm curious as to turnout in the Beanie Awards. This forum sure isn't very popular, which leads me to believe the poll isn't either... and I am not seeing a votecount as we get in the standard polls. And I just managed to first-post on something like three of the category forums... they're deserted.
Would someone in charge care to let us see a running turnout tally?
LWP's one to conider, but really - half the time I use libwww-perl, I'm using it in conjunction with a CGI. Keep in mind which of the two is more important, not simply which is cooler, when casting your vote.
Mr Hubbard is the obvious choice here. FreeBSD, while it ain't LInux per se, led the Open Source movement into Corporate America. Without FreeBSD-STABLE as the icebreaker with the iron hull smashing a path for us, Linux would not be the wild success that it is.
FreeBSD will always be unsung. But it will also forever lead the way in the less glamorous server market by simply never, ever crashing. We ought to recognize that.
Some of us use the Mac OS. Our beloved Mac OS X wasn't eligible for this category, but that's all right - at work I run RedHat and use Enlightenment. But I am not sufficiently clued about these themes to cast a vote.
Linux folks: Help us out! Can someone point me to screenshots of BlueHeart and the rest? Educate us Mac and Windows folk.
Hi. I'm speaking here as a representative of the Mac coding team for distributed.net.
You're basically right on MacCSC. We're not wonderfully happy with its performance, but it does get the job done. The coders were extremely busy getting the Mac client to exist, and by the time it was stable and usable, CSC was almost over - G4 core optimization would have been next to futile. (Don't interpret me as making excuses; just explaining.)
RC5 performance, on the other hand, is mind-numbingly cool.
We agree wholehartedly with the philosophy of release early, release often and adhere to it wherever possible. (I'm actually building a new client for seeding to our beta testers in the background as I write this.)
You aren't rambling offtopic at all - after all, this is slashdot.:) Pleased to hear the comments; rest assured we're working on fixing everything you mention. Feel free to contact me at any time (I'm also vetere@distributed.net) for any reason.
I just though I'd repost Nugget's.plan for clarification on the team issue n' stuff.
First, yes we do know who won, but we haven't been able to contact him so we're not releasing his name or information. We've got a good email address for him so contacting him will not be a problem. (I'm still going to try for the traditional phone call, first)
The winner was not on a team, and lives in the United States. Beyond that, I'd rather wait until we've made contact before more information is released.
OGR's next. We're going to do our best to make you guys happy... keep your eye out for future announcements!
Am I completely nuts, or is RedHat's distro already free? I hop on over to their ftp site and see it. They must mean they're giving the Brits CDs free of charge - which is pretty darned cool. (I paid 30$ for mine.)
Slashdot Mirror
Lomberg has responded, in initial brief, to the fraud charges. And, according to Glenn Reynolds, most of the panel's complaints seem to be directed at Lomberg's response to the initial SciAm critique (PDF).
The sheer complexity of this issue makes soapboxing inappropriate. I'm an early poster, but it's already begun. Please try to refrain from making fools of yourselves.
The Federal Government should pay the damages to the citizens. Believe it or not, this is not yet something they've agreed to do.
Then, because federal government money is yours and mine, everyone in the administration should be fired, and the entire department should be dismantled and rebuilt with congressional oversight. It should be tightly supervised for the next decade or so.
None of this will happen, and the people who've lost their houses will be told 'tough shit'. They will be lucky to get the cost of their homes back. Insurance companies will be left holding the bag. They will be forced to raise rates, and the people who should have paid for this disaster in the first place will end up paying for it anyway, while the Government gets off scot-free.
Of course, I hope I'm wrong.
I'm a Propaganda addict. I've got Volume 12 on my Linux box and Vol 14 on my Mac. I've read the site religiously for over a year. And I hope it's shut down, now.
I have to say with complete candor that Bowie's replacement Asmodean just couldn't cut it. I only saw his first release, but it was pitifully small and the tiles were ugly. I'd rather see the site go into stasis than downhill.
This is truer than I'd like it to be - two of the three newspapesr I've purchased in the last year I snagged because of the crimes reported therein. Where else can you read about seventeen-year-olds snagging credit card numbers out of "chat rooms", using them to buy ten-plus grand worth of merchandise from Amazon, and getting stung by seven cops after they let their entire class know about the operation?
Even that coverage is pathetic, though. The opening line from the cc-fraud story: When you build a high-tech world, you open yourself up to high-tech crime...
Made with real penguin!
This is extremely good for the DeCSS case. Notice:
Precisely the same reason for going to court.
Fill in the blank. A precedent has been set. We're going to win this one.
If we could conclusively determine that the attack originated from within, say, Iraq, we would ask Baghdad to prosecute and we'd give them the tools to do so. If they refused, or denied, we could conceivably label that harboring a terrorist, and take retaliatory/defensive action.
Of course, I have a very hard time imagining the Clinton Administration taking any kind of for-real action against terrorists. Remember his Great Crusade Against Terrorism in 1998? The one that coincided with impeachment, and dropped off radar in February 1999?
There was a Kevin Mitnick interview on this station last night for at least a half hour. Quite well done, really - the show's host didn't take everything Mitnick said at face value and did get Mitnick to mention from time to time that he'd done something wrong. They exposed both sides of the story (and this is a really complex story). I look forward to the Linus set.
Of course, WABI-Host is now talking in hushed tones about George W. Bush's potassium chloride addiction. *groan*
Not only have you obviously not read the disclaimer at the top of every comment page - "The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. Slashdot is not responsible for what they say" - but you're 'pulling the race card', which is incredibly bad form.
If you want us to take you seriously, you need to stop 'fucking up' (as you put it so eloquently) and start backpedaling now.
An official statement from LinuxOne explaining your behavior and your corrective intentions would be a good place to start.
...but you see, they didn't waste it. That commercial, by being hilarious, was the best of the Bowl. It'll likely get a lot more customers... and if eTrade's got tons of customers, they can lower their commissions per-user.
And you'd like that, wouldn't you?
There really wasn't much worth speaking of commercial-wise this Super Bowl... e-Trade's monkey ad was great, and will probably get lodged in our mid-term memory as the best one of this Bowl. I wish they'd done more with the "Make Seven / Up Yours" guy as well...
But in general, the commercials were lame. Concur?
I think I said this in my original submission, but it got cut: The client for Linux does not need to be Open Source, so long as it's available. I know I for one would pay upwards of 30$ for it - though it probably wouldn't cost that much. Just letting us have it, free or not, open-source or not, would win Apple a lot of longhaired fans. And it needs them...
Adrian, comrade! You sure reply fast.
As for the Culture, I disagree... Consider Phlebas is incredibly fun, and a thirteen year old such as myself and (I believe) you would be completely at home in it. And if it's slightly above the reading level of the girl in question here, well... all the better.
I've never been a Baxter fan. His stuff is too ... ethereal ... for me. If that word even makes sense in context. It's like it's disconnected from any possible reality...
At least I didn't reccomend Walking On Glass .
I'd like to add to The Dull Blade's insightful comment about censoring your kid's reading. I agree with him almost completely:
This worked wonders for me. My parents showered me with books beginning when I was four; I'd read all of Asimov's famous stuff by the time I was your daughter's age. My mind hasn't been perverted in the least. And I still haven't ever giggled at sex, having been completely clued in about it through books prior to puberty.
The concern that a book is too advanced (conceptually or linguistically) for your child is a valid one. I am having to reread some books that I read ten years ago and didn't understand, now that I'm eighteen. But be careful - by reading works above her reading level, your child can improve her reading level, and she can grow to understand the world through sci-fi allegories in ways a history class could never teach her.
The school systems today make this mistake. Very few other people my age that I know in real life can read much above the level of a ninth grader - they were taught to read phonetically, and have a Pavlovian association between "reading" and "book report". I still get laughed at when I haul in a three hundred page book to read during a free period... but the laughter stops when I clip through fourty pages by the time the bell rings.
Bless my parents for teaching me to read themselves, and excusing me from the first-grade "huked awn fonix" classes.
Consider Phlebas is what I reccomend to get people started on Sci-Fi. It has worked every time I've tried it (that's on three separate occasions) - it's classic widescreen space-opera, with ringworlds and three-hundred-kilometre long starships, but one can tell it was written by a modern writer: Banks' concept of a post-scarcity society is a giveaway that this book was penned in the eighties. Phlebas has to offer the most believable future I've seen to date, even if it is a few thousand years off.
Excession , which takes place a thousand years after CP in the same universe, has only a handful of human characters - and they're all minor ones. All the main characters are artificial intelligences, which is fitting considering they're the ones who run the Culture. Excession is nearly as good as CP.
Neither of the above are too advanced for a thirteen year old with an above-average reading capability, nor are they too easy for an adult.
The City and the Stars is perhaps the greatest classic science fiction novel. It's touching and powerful on a literal scale and yet is also a metaphor for the progress and awakening of our race: a young boy is born with a new mind into a city whose inhabitants never 'die'; their consciousnesses are simply transplanted into new bodies. Alvin, the boy, becomes obsessed with revealing what is outside his hermetically sealed city of ten million... and when he does, the reader's mind begins to reel.
That's enough for now. I may make another posting with further reviews of my other favorites, A Fire Upon the Deep and Glory Season - the latter especially being great for a teenager.
...and Pater and the rest of the gang. I think you've just defused virtually all of the criticism headed your way as of late...
I'm downloading the code now, and you can expect diffs from me. And it's time for the requisite gripe: "You coulda used the artistic license..."
I'd like to know what business the US Post Office has trying to compete with the private sector.
Forgetting the fact that at least half of these ideas are completely hairbrained (printing email? Puhlease; and email is supposed to be discrete from physicality), USPS is getting Government backing for its work. UPS and FedEx are not and neither are any of the other smaller American courier companies that specialize in fast delivery. What right do they have to compete against the taxpaying managers of FedEx?
The United States Post Office serves one task: to ensure that anyone can send a letter anywhere in the country for a reasonable fee. They've proven they can barely do that job (I don't get mail delivery when it snows hard or hails), and I am downright afraid of what they'll do to the email system if they jump into this fray.
They should stay in the physical world where they've always been and, as email starts to push snail mail into the dustbin of history, fade out of existence willingly. The USPS is not chartered to pull a profit or compete in a free market.
Isn't Hemos supposed to be posting this stuff?
Rob, let Hemos out of his cage, please.
I'm curious as to turnout in the Beanie Awards. This forum sure isn't very popular, which leads me to believe the poll isn't either... and I am not seeing a votecount as we get in the standard polls. And I just managed to first-post on something like three of the category forums... they're deserted.
Would someone in charge care to let us see a running turnout tally?
LWP's one to conider, but really - half the time I use libwww-perl, I'm using it in conjunction with a CGI. Keep in mind which of the two is more important, not simply which is cooler, when casting your vote.
I just found three scripts in my /cgi/ that begin:
use CGI;use LWP::Simple;
Mr Hubbard is the obvious choice here. FreeBSD, while it ain't LInux per se, led the Open Source movement into Corporate America. Without FreeBSD-STABLE as the icebreaker with the iron hull smashing a path for us, Linux would not be the wild success that it is.
FreeBSD will always be unsung. But it will also forever lead the way in the less glamorous server market by simply never, ever crashing. We ought to recognize that.
Some of us use the Mac OS. Our beloved Mac OS X wasn't eligible for this category, but that's all right - at work I run RedHat and use Enlightenment. But I am not sufficiently clued about these themes to cast a vote.
Linux folks: Help us out! Can someone point me to screenshots of BlueHeart and the rest? Educate us Mac and Windows folk.
Hi. I'm speaking here as a representative of the Mac coding team for distributed.net.
You're basically right on MacCSC. We're not wonderfully happy with its performance, but it does get the job done. The coders were extremely busy getting the Mac client to exist, and by the time it was stable and usable, CSC was almost over - G4 core optimization would have been next to futile. (Don't interpret me as making excuses; just explaining.)
RC5 performance, on the other hand, is mind-numbingly cool.
The lagging on 68k machines is due to timing issues; they're on the shor t list of Stuff To Fix.
We agree wholehartedly with the philosophy of release early, release often and adhere to it wherever possible. (I'm actually building a new client for seeding to our beta testers in the background as I write this.)
You aren't rambling offtopic at all - after all, this is slashdot. :) Pleased to hear the comments; rest assured we're working on fixing everything you mention. Feel free to contact me at any time (I'm also vetere@distributed.net) for any reason.
I just though I'd repost Nugget's .plan for clarification on the team issue n' stuff.
Am I completely nuts, or is RedHat's distro already free? I hop on over to their ftp site and see it. They must mean they're giving the Brits CDs free of charge - which is pretty darned cool. (I paid 30$ for mine.)