I moderate a debate forum. It could be a full-time job if I let it (rather, if I cared enough about it to bother to strictly enforce the rules.) I deal with this sort of thing on a semi-daily basis.
The vast majority of people who post anywhere--blogs, forums, newsgroups, etc--don't know how to engage in a normal conversation. They are so convinced in their rightness that they immediately launch a preemptive verbal attack against any and all who might remotely disagree with them. Instead of simply pointing out that a person is wrong, they feel the need to insult them. I've found that nearly all of these types cannot actually argue their points effectively and hide at the first sign of a challenge.
The problem is that people aren't actually posting anything but childish insults. I ban about a dozen people a week from my forum for trolling and repetitive ad hominem. Invariably they whine to me via e-mail that I banned them because I didn't like their ideas and it's censorship and blah blah blah...and they keep on even when I show them specifically which rules they break.
People have forgotten how to treat others with respect.
Most IT managers will tell you about "this one woman" or "a black guy I knew once" if you bring up sexism or racism in the IT department. Think about that for a minute...ONE. They have ONE example of someone who is above par in the IT field. They've learned from experience that the vast majority of qualified IT workers are white men.
Let's face it: white men still dominate the technology departments in most universities. What's more, women with IT-oriented degrees tend to get out of IT after a few years...I've seen more non-technical executive women with IT degrees than I have women in the IT field. They used IT as a path into management...it's often a shorter trip up than weaseling your way through a larger office staff.
One last thought: I think there's a culture of technology among white men that minorities and women lack. Women in general in this culture aren't as attracted to technology, and thus aren't as passionate about it. Men on the other hand have a love affair with gadgets; that translates into a greater interest and devotion to IT work. So men *tend* to be more capable IT workers.
It's much the same with minorities: there's something of a social stigma among blacks to spend a lot of time on computers, far moreso than there is among whites. This shrinks the hiring pool and triggers a bias among IT managers who have observed this part of the culture.
Of course, racial and sexual profiling are considered bad for a reason: while they may be based in fact, not hiring someone based on their sex or skin color throws out the good with the not-so-good. There are plenty of women and minorities in the field who are quite capable of performing. The problem is that IT managers don't take the time to tell the difference.
Takei is a great example of what a naturally gay man is like. He's an ordinary man who digs other men. He doesn't feel the need to act like a woman or boast about his homosexuality...it's simply normal to him.
I think the argument that men are "afraid" of homosexuals due to their own homosexual tendencies is absurd. That's a typical childhood playground argument: you don't like something because deep down you're in denial about being that way yourself.
Most men I know aren't afraid of homosexuals, they're disgusted by them. They find the idea of being with men revolting. A couple of gay friends and I got to talking about that once. They said they feel the same way about being with a woman--they simply can't imagine it.
Most texts I've read state simply that photons have no mass. Those that disucss the topic in depth usually indicate that most phycisists believe that photons do not have mass. Just because someone didn't have the same schooling/texts as you does NOT make them ignorant.
Oh, and for what it's worth, GWB was educated by Yale and Harvard. Too bad he didn't have the benefit of a quality education like one might receive in Texas.
My operating system, web browser, web server, preprocessor, database server, e-mail client, e-mail server, PHP/HTML/CSS editor, database admin software, and half the games I play...they're all SHIT?
Holy crap Batman! What have I been doing all these years???
...until I see a reliable service with quality music that is DRM-free.
I see a lot of people complain about DRM and then talk about what they bought on iTunes. I have to wonder if they understand that they're supporting the use of DRM by spending the money.
Right now, I just buy CDs I know are DRM-free, rip them how I want, then store the CD away in a closet.
a small 40/50 year old two-bedroom ranch house in my good-but-not-great suburb is > $350,000.
And a 2,300 square foot 30-year-old home in my rural town is $100,000. It's only in the metro areas that the housing market is severely inflated, and that's because urban sprawl has forced people to spend whatever they have to so they can drive to work and still have time to sleep at night.
If *I* were made king, first thing I'd do is start looking for a way to stop urban sprawl and put an end to two-hour commutes. Those two related things are probably the largest consumers of resources and time in America.
Can't stress this enough. If you've got seven remotes, that's at least four too many.
Get a good learning, programmable remote. You can find some decent ones for under $100 and it will greatly simplify your life. And if/when you have kids, there's only one remote to find. Hunting for three remotes after a toddler has swept through the living room takes longer than the movie you're trying to watch.
Not with a mouse, not in a house, not on a train, not in the rain...
I've read this book entirely too much in the past year. Parenthood does that to you. On the plus side, my 1-year-old is already trying to read books on his own. I'm hoping to have him reading before he's 2 1/2.
More important even than hardware compatibility (that's relatively easy to assure these days as compared to six or eight years ago), Dell has a toll-free tech support line and a reliable warranty.
Us hardcore DIY guys don't need either of those...we keep track of the warranties on individual parts and can support ourselves better than Dell's second-tier techs. But for Joe Blow who just needs internet access and and office suite without too much trouble, $150 extra isn't so bad when it means never having to tinker. And then there's the IT departments that REALLY don't want to build, support, and troubleshoot 1,000 PCs without any support of their own.
A few years ago Dell was easily the best company for tech support. You'd be amazed how big a difference a few competent phone jockeys make in a company's performance.
OS X: A niche OS that is as much flash as it is substance.
Garage Band: What? (Google...) Oh. A mixer. Whoopee. FastTracker, anyone?
iTunes: Crap that only got marketshare because it's packaged with the overpriced trendwhore magnet called iPod.
Spotlight: Again, what? (Google...) An indexing search agent? That's special? I bet my Google Desktop can do a much better job.
I pay for my bandwidth. The vast majority of e-mail traffic on that domain is spam. In other words, *I* am paying for them to send unsolicited advertisements to me. Since they refuse to stop spamming my servers, I have no choice but to ask the government to force them to stop.
It would be even better if I could step into my car with a latte, cell phone, and laptop, ask the car to take me to the airport, and read slashdot along the way. My guess is that it will happen within 20 years.
Not going to happen that soon. The only way to make that safe is for every car on the road to communicate with all the other cars, and for the roads to have embedded communications to supplement GPS information that isn't 100% reliable.
Autobraking scares me. Mostly, it scares me that people will become reliant on it. I just hope I'm not one of the people who winds up with a luxury car in his back seat because some schmuck with too much money waited too late to realize his car wasn't going to stop itself.
Use SATA RAID for your backup instead of CD/DVD. It's faster anyway.
If you need offsite backup use an external hard drive. Faster, more reliable, and less troublesome than a stack of CDs.
The best analogy I can come up with for this is sticking a sign in your window. You're not advertising it's there, you're not calling attention to it in any way, but it's there for the public to read if they know where to look.
If you make a libelous claim on that sign, you're still guilty of libel. You're still publicly making a false claim, even if only one other person knows it's there.
By installing an HTTP server, your computer ceases to be "private". The minute you make it publicly accessible you open yourself up to all the legal issues that come with public speech and publishing.
That depends on the content of the review. Actually, it depends on whether what is written even qualifies for a review.
If I said "The instructor is boring and uninspiring, reciting the book verbatim in a near monotone and offering no real instruction; he is also inaccessible to students outside of classtime, making it impossible to ask questions," that's a review.
If I said "This guy is a total f***wad who couldn't teach a rock to fall down," it's not.
...you had an employee who regularly criticized you and your company on the internet? Personally, I'd fire them. Free speech is one thing, but when an employee's actions outside work threaten to directly harm a business' ability to make money, they should no long be an employee. This of course is a dangerous position: there's a huge difference between calling your boss a "cockmaster" and pointing out safety violations. Of course, if a company is doing something illegal then you shouldn't take it to the internet first....someone came in your house and insulted you, your family, and everything you believe in? I'm talking about a guest you invited into your house. Do you plan to sit there and put up with the abuse, or would you ask them to leave your house? But what about their right to free speech? When you come on MY property, your rights are somewhat limited by mine. If you say something that offends me, I am well within my rights to require you to get off my property.
So if a student is publicly insulting a school and possibly causing that school harm (without making any claim of wrongdoing that can be supported), then that school's dean has a responsibility to deal with the issue. They have a right to expel him from the school should her persist.
That said, I agree that the original (and probably the new) punishment was too harsh. He let off a few childish rants and insulted some people. Slap him on the wrist (probation), tell him what will happen if he continues, and leave it at that.
Which is just evil. I'm hoping for a new version of SLI which can intelligently turn off multiple monitors for specific functions and allow the video cards to function independently when SLI isn't implemented.
I doubt 4-way SLI--much less 8-way--will ever become mainstream. It's a neat idea, but let's be honest here: how many people here are going to shell out close to $2,000 just for video cards that will be nearly obselete in two years? And if the average slashdot user won't spend the money, don't expect many people at all to do it.
Two-way SLI is too expensive for most gamers to maintain. Four-way will be awesome in workstations, but in the consumer market it will be a novelty rich kid geeks use to impress their peers at LAN parties. Eight-way will be stupidly expensive and only justifiable in the most demanding applications.
This sort of technology will become common right around the same time SASCSI becomes the standard for consumer PCs.
No, it derives its energy from another sun, where the heavy element was formed.
Of course, it could be said that geothermal actually does get its energy in part from the sun, as the current theory (as I understand it) is that tidal forces from the sun and moon are largely responsible for our planet still being geologically active.
Slashdot Mirror
I moderate a debate forum. It could be a full-time job if I let it (rather, if I cared enough about it to bother to strictly enforce the rules.) I deal with this sort of thing on a semi-daily basis. The vast majority of people who post anywhere--blogs, forums, newsgroups, etc--don't know how to engage in a normal conversation. They are so convinced in their rightness that they immediately launch a preemptive verbal attack against any and all who might remotely disagree with them. Instead of simply pointing out that a person is wrong, they feel the need to insult them. I've found that nearly all of these types cannot actually argue their points effectively and hide at the first sign of a challenge. The problem is that people aren't actually posting anything but childish insults. I ban about a dozen people a week from my forum for trolling and repetitive ad hominem. Invariably they whine to me via e-mail that I banned them because I didn't like their ideas and it's censorship and blah blah blah...and they keep on even when I show them specifically which rules they break. People have forgotten how to treat others with respect.
...those Intel chips are finally getting to do something USEFUL!
:)
Not all that boring gaming and photo editing and video compressing and web/database/file serving they were doing before.
I love Mac commercials. It's like they're designed to piss off geeks
Most IT managers will tell you about "this one woman" or "a black guy I knew once" if you bring up sexism or racism in the IT department. Think about that for a minute...ONE. They have ONE example of someone who is above par in the IT field. They've learned from experience that the vast majority of qualified IT workers are white men.
Let's face it: white men still dominate the technology departments in most universities. What's more, women with IT-oriented degrees tend to get out of IT after a few years...I've seen more non-technical executive women with IT degrees than I have women in the IT field. They used IT as a path into management...it's often a shorter trip up than weaseling your way through a larger office staff.
One last thought: I think there's a culture of technology among white men that minorities and women lack. Women in general in this culture aren't as attracted to technology, and thus aren't as passionate about it. Men on the other hand have a love affair with gadgets; that translates into a greater interest and devotion to IT work. So men *tend* to be more capable IT workers.
It's much the same with minorities: there's something of a social stigma among blacks to spend a lot of time on computers, far moreso than there is among whites. This shrinks the hiring pool and triggers a bias among IT managers who have observed this part of the culture.
Of course, racial and sexual profiling are considered bad for a reason: while they may be based in fact, not hiring someone based on their sex or skin color throws out the good with the not-so-good. There are plenty of women and minorities in the field who are quite capable of performing. The problem is that IT managers don't take the time to tell the difference.
Takei is a great example of what a naturally gay man is like. He's an ordinary man who digs other men. He doesn't feel the need to act like a woman or boast about his homosexuality...it's simply normal to him. I think the argument that men are "afraid" of homosexuals due to their own homosexual tendencies is absurd. That's a typical childhood playground argument: you don't like something because deep down you're in denial about being that way yourself. Most men I know aren't afraid of homosexuals, they're disgusted by them. They find the idea of being with men revolting. A couple of gay friends and I got to talking about that once. They said they feel the same way about being with a woman--they simply can't imagine it.
Once more I managed to forget to tag/format a post. Grr.
Let's try a few OSS titles: Linux Firefox Thunderbird OpenOffice Apache I'm now in my fourth IT job, and every one I've worked in uses OSS.
Funny you should ask this. Sagan said it in Cosmos, I just read that portion last night. From a quick Google search:N uclear/photon_mass.html r s/960731.html 0 .cfm w onderquest/photonmass.htm h ot.html
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ParticleAnd
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answe
http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae18
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/resources/basics/
http://www.ibiblio.org/lunar/school/library/massp
Most texts I've read state simply that photons have no mass. Those that disucss the topic in depth usually indicate that most phycisists believe that photons do not have mass. Just because someone didn't have the same schooling/texts as you does NOT make them ignorant.
Oh, and for what it's worth, GWB was educated by Yale and Harvard. Too bad he didn't have the benefit of a quality education like one might receive in Texas.
Really?
My operating system, web browser, web server, preprocessor, database server, e-mail client, e-mail server, PHP/HTML/CSS editor, database admin software, and half the games I play...they're all SHIT?
Holy crap Batman! What have I been doing all these years???
Time for sepuku, I suppose.
...until I see a reliable service with quality music that is DRM-free.
I see a lot of people complain about DRM and then talk about what they bought on iTunes. I have to wonder if they understand that they're supporting the use of DRM by spending the money.
Right now, I just buy CDs I know are DRM-free, rip them how I want, then store the CD away in a closet.
And a 2,300 square foot 30-year-old home in my rural town is $100,000. It's only in the metro areas that the housing market is severely inflated, and that's because urban sprawl has forced people to spend whatever they have to so they can drive to work and still have time to sleep at night.
If *I* were made king, first thing I'd do is start looking for a way to stop urban sprawl and put an end to two-hour commutes. Those two related things are probably the largest consumers of resources and time in America.
Can't stress this enough. If you've got seven remotes, that's at least four too many.
Get a good learning, programmable remote. You can find some decent ones for under $100 and it will greatly simplify your life. And if/when you have kids, there's only one remote to find. Hunting for three remotes after a toddler has swept through the living room takes longer than the movie you're trying to watch.
I've read this book entirely too much in the past year. Parenthood does that to you. On the plus side, my 1-year-old is already trying to read books on his own. I'm hoping to have him reading before he's 2 1/2.
(not really)
More important even than hardware compatibility (that's relatively easy to assure these days as compared to six or eight years ago), Dell has a toll-free tech support line and a reliable warranty. Us hardcore DIY guys don't need either of those...we keep track of the warranties on individual parts and can support ourselves better than Dell's second-tier techs. But for Joe Blow who just needs internet access and and office suite without too much trouble, $150 extra isn't so bad when it means never having to tinker. And then there's the IT departments that REALLY don't want to build, support, and troubleshoot 1,000 PCs without any support of their own. A few years ago Dell was easily the best company for tech support. You'd be amazed how big a difference a few competent phone jockeys make in a company's performance.
OS X: A niche OS that is as much flash as it is substance. Garage Band: What? (Google...) Oh. A mixer. Whoopee. FastTracker, anyone? iTunes: Crap that only got marketshare because it's packaged with the overpriced trendwhore magnet called iPod. Spotlight: Again, what? (Google...) An indexing search agent? That's special? I bet my Google Desktop can do a much better job.
I pay for my bandwidth. The vast majority of e-mail traffic on that domain is spam. In other words, *I* am paying for them to send unsolicited advertisements to me. Since they refuse to stop spamming my servers, I have no choice but to ask the government to force them to stop.
No, no...it's "That's no ordinary galaxy!"
It would be even better if I could step into my car with a latte, cell phone, and laptop, ask the car to take me to the airport, and read slashdot along the way. My guess is that it will happen within 20 years.
Not going to happen that soon. The only way to make that safe is for every car on the road to communicate with all the other cars, and for the roads to have embedded communications to supplement GPS information that isn't 100% reliable.
Autobraking scares me. Mostly, it scares me that people will become reliant on it. I just hope I'm not one of the people who winds up with a luxury car in his back seat because some schmuck with too much money waited too late to realize his car wasn't going to stop itself.
Use SATA RAID for your backup instead of CD/DVD. It's faster anyway. If you need offsite backup use an external hard drive. Faster, more reliable, and less troublesome than a stack of CDs.
Nah. I'll take Keaggy over this guy any day.
:)
Could be that I find Keaggy more palatable with his blues roots. Technique isn't everything
The best analogy I can come up with for this is sticking a sign in your window. You're not advertising it's there, you're not calling attention to it in any way, but it's there for the public to read if they know where to look. If you make a libelous claim on that sign, you're still guilty of libel. You're still publicly making a false claim, even if only one other person knows it's there. By installing an HTTP server, your computer ceases to be "private". The minute you make it publicly accessible you open yourself up to all the legal issues that come with public speech and publishing.
That depends on the content of the review. Actually, it depends on whether what is written even qualifies for a review.
If I said "The instructor is boring and uninspiring, reciting the book verbatim in a near monotone and offering no real instruction; he is also inaccessible to students outside of classtime, making it impossible to ask questions," that's a review.
If I said "This guy is a total f***wad who couldn't teach a rock to fall down," it's not.
...you had an employee who regularly criticized you and your company on the internet? Personally, I'd fire them. Free speech is one thing, but when an employee's actions outside work threaten to directly harm a business' ability to make money, they should no long be an employee. This of course is a dangerous position: there's a huge difference between calling your boss a "cockmaster" and pointing out safety violations. Of course, if a company is doing something illegal then you shouldn't take it to the internet first. ...someone came in your house and insulted you, your family, and everything you believe in? I'm talking about a guest you invited into your house. Do you plan to sit there and put up with the abuse, or would you ask them to leave your house? But what about their right to free speech? When you come on MY property, your rights are somewhat limited by mine. If you say something that offends me, I am well within my rights to require you to get off my property.
So if a student is publicly insulting a school and possibly causing that school harm (without making any claim of wrongdoing that can be supported), then that school's dean has a responsibility to deal with the issue. They have a right to expel him from the school should her persist.
That said, I agree that the original (and probably the new) punishment was too harsh. He let off a few childish rants and insulted some people. Slap him on the wrist (probation), tell him what will happen if he continues, and leave it at that.
Which is just evil. I'm hoping for a new version of SLI which can intelligently turn off multiple monitors for specific functions and allow the video cards to function independently when SLI isn't implemented.
I doubt 4-way SLI--much less 8-way--will ever become mainstream. It's a neat idea, but let's be honest here: how many people here are going to shell out close to $2,000 just for video cards that will be nearly obselete in two years? And if the average slashdot user won't spend the money, don't expect many people at all to do it.
Two-way SLI is too expensive for most gamers to maintain. Four-way will be awesome in workstations, but in the consumer market it will be a novelty rich kid geeks use to impress their peers at LAN parties. Eight-way will be stupidly expensive and only justifiable in the most demanding applications.
This sort of technology will become common right around the same time SASCSI becomes the standard for consumer PCs.
Of course, it could be said that geothermal actually does get its energy in part from the sun, as the current theory (as I understand it) is that tidal forces from the sun and moon are largely responsible for our planet still being geologically active.