In some environments, acting like BOFH is the best way to get users and coworkers to respect you, and there is little you can do about it. Some workplaces expect employees to compete "tooth-and-nail" with each other, and BOFH-type maneuvers are considered not only legitimate but also a sign of intelligence. Since changing the culture of a given workplace is extremely difficult, if you find yourself in this position and cannot (or will not) play that game, you should consider leaving at the earliest opportunity; otherwise, you will either become a BOFH... or get abused by users and coworkers until you break down and/or get fired.
Even AdBlock and NoScript may not be enough. I've read about a recent trend where adverts are hosted directly on the content server. So if your website "requires" JavaScript and/or people have whitelisted it, ads will get through because the scripts and images are hosted directly on your website. Bastards.
> I always thought the difference between race and species was species can't interbreed and produce viable offspring. So while small dogs and large dogs may be able to be divided, the line gets a lot fuzzier after that.
Never mind size. Consider biochemistry. Miscarriages and fetal diseases can result from basic physiological incompatibility between the mother and the fetus -- even when copulation and conception are successful.
Some human populations are especially vulnerable to such problems.
The western Basque, for example, have a very high incidence of O-negative blood-type. When a Basque woman decides to bear a Spaniard's children, she isn't just being open-minded -- she may be endangering the well-being of their second-born children and literally risking her own life, too.
"OMG! Does this mean the Basque and other affine peoples of ancient stock are teetering on the brink of speciation or... extinction?"
I want to say "no" -- but I realize this depends a lot on how we deal with the aforementioned reproductive challenges. I would bet on interbreeding (with a little help from the medical sciences) as the Basques' best hope.; unfortunately, there people who think of humans the way they think of dogs (as if distinct races and speciation were legitimate goals), so... who knows?
I'll leave you with this parting thought:
Anybody advocating racial separation is ultimately advocating eventual speciation. I try not to let this offend me; after all, the fossil record shows that, for our distant evolutionary relatives, speciation meant extinction.:>
The arrangement between TuneCore and Amazon is certainly an improvement over the current situation, but it doesn't cut out the middleman — it replaces him. Record companies could dictate terms to artists and consumers because they parlayed their control over the distribution of the physical product into a comprehensive racket. This development merely confirms that there is a new distribution channel for music... and that it is dominated by the likes of Apple and Amazon. Jeff Price may have struck this deal because he's a decent fellow who just wants to help music makers and music lovers meet; but I'm pretty sure Jeff Bezos only agreed because he wants to be Caliph instead of the Caliph and, in this space, the RIAA is clearly the Caliph.
This whole "new kind of [whatever]" meme might be really funny if it weren't so sad -- not because Wolfram doesn't really think he is smarter than almost everybody else (he does), but because - reportedly - he can't be prevailed upon to care about what most other people think, let alone how his choices might affect them:
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
[...]
From: Kent M Pitman <pit...@world.std.com>
[...]
Message-ID: <sfwr8dvbpz3.fsf@shell01.TheWorld.com>
[...]
I was in Pasadena at one point, visiting a friend at Caltech, and popped in to see Wolfram around the time he was gearing up to write SMP, I think. [...]
He told me that Lisp was "inherently" (I'm pretty sure even after all this time that this was his exact word) 100 times slower than C and therefore an unsuitable vehicle. I tried to explain to him that this was implausible. [...]
He in fact did not purport to be adequately competent on the matter of computation at the time but he pointed to a stack (literally) of books (I'd say about a foot high) including the Knuth books, the compiler book with the dragon on it, and a number of other really standard texts.
He then said "I'm going to read these and then I'll know as much as you." (Again, I'm pretty sure even now that this is pretty close to an exact quote. But whether it's exact or not, what struck me was the incredible arrogance of the remark.) The point seemed debatable, but I didn't bother to debate it. [...]
My real concern, of course, was not that he was using optimized data structures so much as that he seemed on target to reintroduce numerical error back into a world that we had worked hard to make 'exact' (Macsyma used bignums from Lisp) or at least 'arbitrarily exact' [...]
There's a fine ethical line here between simply making a tool and actively promoting it, but I'll not expound on that in detail. Rather, I'll just say that this line concerned me. The problem I have, and had then, is that other users, not him, might NOT understand that this trade-off had been made and so might not be making an informed choice. [...]
I think Wolfram's attitude evokes pity, but indignation seems to be a far more common response. He should really consider working on (or, if he's already done so, promoting) A New Kind of Wolfram; he might find it a terrific challenge, but the new kind of Stephen would probably get more recognition than the old kind.
Note that I am not claiming that the studies discussed on the pages I linked to are paragons of integrity and transparency. I wish merely to show that TFAs are giving people a fractional distillate of available information. If you went to school at the Jesuits', you might refer to this sort of clever maneuvering as “interpreting vetted facts” — but I call it “lying with the help of a gratuitous reduction of the data”. If you had any doubts that there is an agenda behind the way data from genetic studies is presented to the public, consider this your wake up call.
I'm afraid that, here, on Slashdot, we do not acknowledge the existence of a color by that name. Other purported color names that were likewise found to be wholly unnecessary include turquoise, azure, chartreuse, gainsboro, goldenrod, and moccasin. Note that the foregoing is not an exhaustive list. Please, consult with you friendly neighborhood slashbot before using these or any other words outside the basic English vocabulary. I mean, really, Gould... didn't you get the memo?:>
Seriously, though, Slashdot's default color scheme assaults readers most grievously. But it is distinctive and memorable, isn't it? By which I mean to say that one doesn't easily forget being stabbed in the eyes.
The terminal session excerpts in Cédric's article are intelligible to a great many more Unix-speaking geeks than script kiddie-ready Ruby; therefore, regardless of the popularity of the French language, the link I provided is still probably more illuminating for most geeks than the self-congratulatory sploit TFA links to. And, in any case, if you had bothered to read past the article title and meta-info, you might have noticed the link to a suitable machine translationright there, above the article text.
Your reply does a great disservice to people who might otherwise have clicked through and learned something. But I guess that, to you, getting a measly karma point is more important than educating people w.r.t. network security issues. You had better hope that black-hat hackers have the same linguistic scruples as you; otherwise, one of these times, the ones who are undeterred by French and Russian and [whatever else] are going to have a field day pounding your... NIC.
So-called “proof by mutual reference” is a classic invalid technique for proof, and AFAICT this incident would exemplify it. If, however, one were to assume the complicity of parties involved, it could be seen as an allusion to a clever hack that some writers pulled off some time ago in which a book was put together which contained reviews of the book. I have made a(n admittedly) cursory attempt at finding an online account of this hack (the mastermind of which may have been Douglas Hofstadter) and failed to come up with a link for you; any replies containing suitable links thereto would be appreciated.
Slashdot Mirror
In some environments, acting like BOFH is the best way to get users and coworkers to respect you, and there is little you can do about it. Some workplaces expect employees to compete "tooth-and-nail" with each other, and BOFH-type maneuvers are considered not only legitimate but also a sign of intelligence. Since changing the culture of a given workplace is extremely difficult, if you find yourself in this position and cannot (or will not) play that game, you should consider leaving at the earliest opportunity; otherwise, you will either become a BOFH... or get abused by users and coworkers until you break down and/or get fired.
Even AdBlock and NoScript may not be enough. I've read about a recent trend where adverts are hosted directly on the content server. So if your website "requires" JavaScript and/or people have whitelisted it, ads will get through because the scripts and images are hosted directly on your website. Bastards.
In case you are willing to do something about it:
the last of which is hosted by... SourceForge.
> I always thought the difference between race and species was species can't interbreed and produce viable offspring. So while small dogs and large dogs may be able to be divided, the line gets a lot fuzzier after that.
Never mind size. Consider biochemistry. Miscarriages and fetal diseases can result from basic physiological incompatibility between the mother and the fetus -- even when copulation and conception are successful.
Some human populations are especially vulnerable to such problems.
The western Basque, for example, have a very high incidence of O-negative blood-type. When a Basque woman decides to bear a Spaniard's children, she isn't just being open-minded -- she may be endangering the well-being of their second-born children and literally risking her own life, too.
(You can read about erythroblastosis fetalis if you are interested in the details.)
"OMG! Does this mean the Basque and other affine peoples of ancient stock are teetering on the brink of speciation or... extinction?"
I want to say "no" -- but I realize this depends a lot on how we deal with the aforementioned reproductive challenges. I would bet on interbreeding (with a little help from the medical sciences) as the Basques' best hope.; unfortunately, there people who think of humans the way they think of dogs (as if distinct races and speciation were legitimate goals), so... who knows?
I'll leave you with this parting thought:
Anybody advocating racial separation is ultimately advocating eventual speciation. I try not to let this offend me; after all, the fossil record shows that, for our distant evolutionary relatives, speciation meant extinction. :>
The arrangement between TuneCore and Amazon is certainly an improvement over the current situation, but it doesn't cut out the middleman — it replaces him. Record companies could dictate terms to artists and consumers because they parlayed their control over the distribution of the physical product into a comprehensive racket. This development merely confirms that there is a new distribution channel for music... and that it is dominated by the likes of Apple and Amazon. Jeff Price may have struck this deal because he's a decent fellow who just wants to help music makers and music lovers meet; but I'm pretty sure Jeff Bezos only agreed because he wants to be Caliph instead of the Caliph and, in this space, the RIAA is clearly the Caliph.
Never mind the search results -- your "Angelina Jolie nude" search yielded something much more valuable. Behold the power of this incipient meme:
The possibilities are endless.
This whole "new kind of [whatever]" meme might be really funny if it weren't so sad -- not because Wolfram doesn't really think he is smarter than almost everybody else (he does), but because - reportedly - he can't be prevailed upon to care about what most other people think, let alone how his choices might affect them:
I think Wolfram's attitude evokes pity, but indignation seems to be a far more common response. He should really consider working on (or, if he's already done so, promoting) A New Kind of Wolfram; he might find it a terrific challenge, but the new kind of Stephen would probably get more recognition than the old kind.
That would have to be a pre-release copy of DNF — just one of the perquisites of abject [sic] wealth and influence, I suppose.
These linked-to articles are intellectually dishonest on two levels:
Note that I am not claiming that the studies discussed on the pages I linked to are paragons of integrity and transparency. I wish merely to show that TFAs are giving people a fractional distillate of available information. If you went to school at the Jesuits', you might refer to this sort of clever maneuvering as “interpreting vetted facts” — but I call it “lying with the help of a gratuitous reduction of the data”. If you had any doubts that there is an agenda behind the way data from genetic studies is presented to the public, consider this your wake up call.
I'm afraid that, here, on Slashdot, we do not acknowledge the existence of a color by that name. Other purported color names that were likewise found to be wholly unnecessary include turquoise, azure, chartreuse, gainsboro, goldenrod, and moccasin. Note that the foregoing is not an exhaustive list. Please, consult with you friendly neighborhood slashbot before using these or any other words outside the basic English vocabulary. I mean, really, Gould... didn't you get the memo? :>
Seriously, though, Slashdot's default color scheme assaults readers most grievously. But it is distinctive and memorable, isn't it? By which I mean to say that one doesn't easily forget being stabbed in the eyes.
FWIW, CAU has also posted a second sploit script that implements Cédric Blanchard's proof-of-concept.
The terminal session excerpts in Cédric's article are intelligible to a great many more Unix-speaking geeks than script kiddie-ready Ruby; therefore, regardless of the popularity of the French language, the link I provided is still probably more illuminating for most geeks than the self-congratulatory sploit TFA links to. And, in any case, if you had bothered to read past the article title and meta-info, you might have noticed the link to a suitable machine translation right there, above the article text.
Your reply does a great disservice to people who might otherwise have clicked through and learned something. But I guess that, to you, getting a measly karma point is more important than educating people w.r.t. network security issues. You had better hope that black-hat hackers have the same linguistic scruples as you; otherwise, one of these times, the ones who are undeterred by French and Russian and [whatever else] are going to have a field day pounding your... NIC.
Cédric Blancher's annotated command-line exploration of the “in-bailiwick” DNS vulnerability
So-called “proof by mutual reference” is a classic invalid technique for proof, and AFAICT this incident would exemplify it. If, however, one were to assume the complicity of parties involved, it could be seen as an allusion to a clever hack that some writers pulled off some time ago in which a book was put together which contained reviews of the book. I have made a(n admittedly) cursory attempt at finding an online account of this hack (the mastermind of which may have been Douglas Hofstadter) and failed to come up with a link for you; any replies containing suitable links thereto would be appreciated.