I have my popmail hosted by my ISP. I usually check my mail from my windows box. I'd like to configure my Linux box to periodically pull the POP3 mail from the server, spam-filter it, and then act as a "local" POP server that I'd just point my windows Eudora at.
Anyone have an easy (relatively speaking) means of doing this? Seems like each of the 3 parts (Getting mail from ISP, filter, and being a POP server) are trivial, but anything out there that would do all this or pieces that play well together?
I'm not keen on trying to deal with SMTP right now. My internet connection is a little too flaky for that...
Since this is a real issue for anyone that does a fair amount of web development, I thought maybe I should point out a good resource that really supplements any JS book you use..
The IRT JavaScript FAQ is a surprisingly comprehensive list of FAQ and "how do I..." type questions for JavaScript. I find myself relying very heavily on it for snippets of code.
Once you've "learned" JavaScript, a site like this is great when you don't want to reinvent the wheel or spend 20 minutes skimming a book trying to figure out why something works in Netscape but not IE...
A lot of smaller companies focus more on obtaining market share. Plus remember all the dot-com Superbowl commercials? I think they are pretty much intended for branding and establishing market identity, sometimes at great cost.
So technically these companies may have to make a conscious effort to focus on profits rather than marketing and growth...
While the analogy of the steam engine is striking, I'm not sure that we can easily find something that resembles the unique beast that the internet is...
It's an interesting nexus where we simultaneously have issues of:
copyright and plagiarism (remember the lawsuits asserting caching proxies like Squid violate copyright laws?)
free use (the various issues of anyone being able to link to proprietary content and attempts through legal disclaimers and contracts to prevent [or at least profit from] this...)
obscenity laws (if pr0n is illegal in my community, is it when I access it on a server in the next state over?)
taxation (they keep deferring it, but one of these days they have to pass some rules about taxing interstate e-commerce)
The legality of retaliation denial-of-service attacks?
The issues of privacy and the expense that spam imparts on the end user (the old "facsimile" comparison is hardly appropriate)
The whole problem of how to charge/license for internet audio (like broadcast radio stations) and other media systems that breakdown when it's not a brick and mortar selling a magazine, newspaper, or radio program.
Is it free speech to put up hate websites? Where people can organize into groups? Or sell memorabilia deemed inappropriate? (Think ebay and the nazi items)
I think we're only just now starting to get to the juicy issues. Much slack has been given to the Internet as a whole simply due to its novelty. Now that it's starting to coalesce into a more mature environment, some of those swarming buzzards are deciding to come roost on it..
We're going to get into even more sticky points when truly distributed computing and storage becomes more the norm and suddenly you can't just point to a box and say "that's where everything is. Apply your laws (privacy, taxation, copyright, etc) to it..."
The desire to keep it simple based on existing tort law is understandable, but I think they underestimate how many new legal scenarios we will be faced with simply because this beasty crosses into so many different realms...
Re:This isn't exactly a bug but...
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 1
No, that's called an easter egg...
There are sites out there devoted to them: http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet /Softwa re/Easter_Eggs/
Or another insidious one that has to have bitten lots of JS developers at one point or another...
Javascript treats integers with leading zeroes as octal! So when you're toiling away kicking out code for dates and times like yyyy-mm-dd and hh:mm, you get this weird bug where any August and September dates (08, 09) get reset to 00 but July and October (07,10) are fine!
This is sure to drive a tester and developer bonkers when the tester keeps insisting it's broken (because they just happen to use the numbers 08 or 09) and the programmer keeps swearing that it works for him (because he's using something like 05)....right up until the developer stands over the shoulder of the tester and then gets red-faced as he realizes what's happening.
Nope, never happened to me! Not once! Nosiree....;)
ColdFusion (at least until you get the new MX version) still parses the page each time it's loaded, and has to scan through all your comments to make sure they get weeded out. It all adds time, nearly trivial time, but time nonetheless that is a non-factor for a compiled language where that all gets stripped out during the compile stage...
Better yet: throw out the tutorial as soon as you can write "hello world" and try to write some program of your own design.
This strategy works fine if you never want to be any better than a good programmer (at least in that particular language). Learning by doing is great for getting started but leaves you a far cry from being someone that I'd want to hire.
As someone who has been through close to a dozen different languages, I've come to realize that the syntax is one of the easier things to pick up when learning a new language. What you need guidance on is about best practices in your new language.
It's the old "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" dilemma. Just because the using lists is a convenient data structure in, say, ColdFusion, doesn't mean it should be what you reach for first in "language X". This is especially true when maker bigger leaps from compiled to scripted languages (what? Verbose comments slows things down??) and procedural to object-oriented languages. Some of the (sorry, I gotta say it) paradigm shifts are key to writing optimized code in the new language. And you'll never grasp those through trial and error.
So while I'll agree on the point that you have to have some hands-on to master a language, I'll strenuously object to the idea that hands-on can replace a good book (or other training source).
Actually there is a house rule (not Wizards-endorsed, of course) where a DM can award "luck points", perhaps for some supreme sacrifice that was made, or particularly good role-playing in a tough situation, or what have you. Then, at the players choice, they can opt to "spend" that luck point by getting to use a d30 on any one roll instead of a d20. This doesn't exactly give you an overwhelming advantage as you can still roll something like a 1 and fumble, but it may prove the difference on some key roll that you need to make.
Personally, in our 3rd ed. games, we've relegated d20 to skill and saving throw rolls only. After lots of calculations on probability and odds, we've opted to use a d10/d12 combo for initiative and combat. The dice are modified (physically, or in your head) so that the 10 on the d10 and the 12 on the d12 are both considered zeros. So rather than a flat distribution where a 1 is as likely as a 10, we have more of a curve (well, technically, not a curve, just an inverted "V"). We changed the critical and fumble rules a little since rolling a 20 or a 1 is now much rarer, but our new system has gone a long way to eliminating the frequency of having a monk with an amazing dexterity get topped on initiative entirely too often by stupid things like undead. By pulling things back around the mean, your plusses (or minuses) suddenly matter a little more...
If any other gamers are interested, I'd be happy to provide more details.. I experimented with many systems before settling on this one (4d6, 3d8, 2d10, d10+d12, etc). We chose this one because it seemed the best balance between the d20 rules (we didn't wanna have to rewrite everything) and the an overdone system (like the 4d6 where rolling anything more than 3 or 4 away from average was exceedingly rare). Also it had the advantage that every player, even with minimal dice, already had a d10 and d12 and no one had to buy or borrow others...
I keep threatening our DM that I'm going to make an entire system that revolves around the d30 (I'm the only one in our group that has any) to the point that it's now an inside joke of ours. I just like 'em cause they're big and it feels great to roll something like a natural 28.:^)
Actually, I've been using an approach similar to this all along: Bookmarklets!
My toolbar is pretty much nothing but bookmarklets now. One for Google, one for Google groups, one for AltaVista, one for Yahoo Maps, etc. It's a clever use of JavasScript in bookmarks. Since the dialog boxes they popup are client side (since it's just JS), I save a roundtrip to each of the websites. In other words, I can actually execute my Google search without ever waiting for the main Google page to download and render. I'm submitting my query directly to the cgi...
If you're even moderately handy with JavaScript it's very easy to enhance the existing ones or write your own. There's a whole set of them targetted at web developers that let you do lots of handy features like computing color codes, changing browser dimensions, and so on.
I haven't tried out the keyword function you're describing, but given the bookmarklets I'm using, it doesn't sound like they do anything I can't already do...
Of course, O'Reilly would be bummed, because they'd no longer have to publish books like the CSS Pocket Guide (which delineates in great detail the myriad ways in which different tags are supported by different browsers).
Not to worry. Many (if not most) of us are still putting out apps that are required to be backwards compatible to various older browser versions.
Books like the O'Reilly guide (Or the Osborne one I use, "Cascading Style Sheets 2.0 Programmer's Reference") will remain useful for quite a while until some (hypothetical) point in the future when the unwashed masses have all finally migrated to versions created after the Great Reconcilliation Of All Browsers.
But considering how I find even that concept unlikely given that while Mozilla and IE are more closely compatible than the Navigator and IE of olde, they still are different enough that some detection code is still probably needed. And we won't even throw Opera, Konquerer, et al, into the mix...
I suspect my book will be quite dog-eared by then...
Considering how many of these "MP3 jukebox in an arcade case", "C64 streaming audio server", "Pringles can wireless networks", etc, stories we get, I can see them meriting a category of their own...
Maybe this is to sell subscriptions. Perhaps they'll announce an "april fools-free" version of news just for subscribers while the rest of us slog through these bogus and arguably lame hoaxes...
Yeah, today sucked for us as well... About 8:30-11:00 AM we got seriously slammed by all this.
Looking through the logs is jaw-dropping. In a couple hour span, 3 of our machines (desktop ones at that, not main servers) got hit by no less than 21 unique IP addresses (combined). If each of our boxes is just 1 of the 100 that were also attacked, the magnitude of this is truly alarming.
One thing to know about the Win2K patch from Microsoft is that you have to at least have Service Pack 1 installed. Bare Win2K servers won't let you install the patch, so be ready with Win2K SP1 or SP2...
Good luck to those of you who are having to cope with this. On the bright side, this is great fuel for campaign to convince the boss we should be using Apache...;)
I completely agree. While I will always treasure the fun I had with my Lego "space" sets (since you could use your imagination and make all sorts of fun stories with them), I think the Fischer Technik set I had was much more fun when it came to actually building things.
I got mine back before there were any computer interfaces (Like 1978-80ish), but I did have several of the motor packs and you could do all sorts of *amazing* things given all the pulleys, gearboxes, and chain linkages they gave you. I have my original set in an attic and have recently decided that it's time to dust it off and bring it down so that *my* daughter can enjoy the same eye-opening experience. It's probably no coincidence that I owned a Fischer Technik set as a child and ended up getting an engineering degree...
The answer to this is quite easy by using a (simple) password algorithm:
1) Take that random number, say 5934
2) Now for everyplace where you need a password, append/prepend the name of the site/computer to that string. So if you decided something like first and last letters, plus the random number, you'd get:
yahoo.com = y5934a
slashdot = s5934t
etc.
If that's too short (like for hotmail) use a full-name variant for those like ho59tm34ail.
For better security, always use caps for one of the ends, and/or tack on some (consistent) non-alpha at beginning or end, whatever rules you want to always use.
Benefits:
1) You never need to "remember" a password. Just the numeric bit, which you get to reuse everywhere, and the rule for picking the letters.
2) Unique password nearly everywhere. Getting one of them doesn't give access to the other sites, and pattern isn't obvious with just one.
3) If you ever are required to change a password (or just want to be safer anyway), ditch the first random number and select a new one, using the same basic scheme with it for all new passwords. Worst case scenario is you'll have to make 2, maybe 3 guesses, at a site you haven't been to for a while....
I've been doing this for about 4 years now and it works like a champ. I've lost track of how many times I've suggested this to users when they're griping about having to remember passwords, but they still give me a blank look and use something like their dog's name anyway. Lamers...;)
Well, I missed them when they were originally played on the radio, but for some extremely excellent audio drama, check out the chronicles of "Jack Flanders", "Ruby", and the other creations of ZBS.
They're available on cd and tape now and make for a rivetting distraction while commuting or traveling. I highly recommend them...
We are having vigorous debate about the implementation of moderation systems, but I think before we consider any of them, each needs to be held up to the singular purpose of moderation:
Moderation is solely intended to improve the signal-to-noise ratio
The whole reason Rob's put this system in place is so that readers (me, you, and everyone else on here) can choose the "quality" of the news and information they read on here.
Everyone is free to pick whatever filter settings suit their needs. I'm usually busy, read/. from the office, and want to just keep up with news headlines related to the technology fields I'm in. Slashdot, prior to the moderation, was not very conducive to quickly getting *facts*. Now, we have this great chance to optimize some schema to fix this.
Most of the posts on here seem to worry about security (preventing people not selected as moderators from becoming moderators). I'm not sure how applicable this is. This worst thing that I can imagine happening in this case is that they post something useless and inflamatory and then bump up the score of it Well, with 400 or 4000 (or whatever) moderators, aren't the odds high that someone else will come along and say "this is just flamebait" and dock its score back to the appropriate level?
Lots of the scenarios on here are really fears that are more applicable to *posting* abuses not *moderating* abuses. I think the only way to abuse this system of moderating is to be fickle or biased. And few of the proposed ideas for selecting moderators would have any effect at preventing that.
I think the only requirements for anyone to moderate, should be something like: 1. Agree to be impartial. (You may think Macs suck, but if someone posts something insightful about them, you give it the props it deserves and bump up its score) 2. Agree to always score things against the single measuring stick of signal vs. noise.
I think that anyone adhering to those two tenets would do a fine job moderating. And if we're worried about keeping those people honest, the idea of a "score balance" that alerts anytime someone skews significantly to some + or - threshold would identify those people.
By having a large number of moderators who all agree to the above, it's sure to dilute the effect that any one or few malicious "fake moderators" might have on the system.
Remember the only point of moderation is to rate articles on an "importance/insightful/useful" scale so that readers can filter based on their scores. Getting into details like "moderate vs. post" detracts from this purpose. Let's keep it simple.
I welcome any comments for or against these ideas...
mooman (Who just wants any system for quickly keeping up with current techie news without all the flamewars)
Ditto! The S/N ration was *reaaally* starting to get on my nerves. I tweaked the threshold up a notch and suddenly insight emerges from the murky depths! Makes it worth reading from work again!
I didn't see any mention of this here on Slashdot, but I *do* see how the internet has cut down on cd sales, at least for me anyway:
1. With so many cd stores that have realaudio samples of cd songs, I get to preview more of the cd that just hearing a song or two on the radio. I'm finding that in many cases, the rest of the cd just doesn't interest me, whereas before I might have impulse bought it before figuring that out.
2. The 4% drop is no doubt for *new* record sales. With the internet, it's *much* easier to find used copies up for grabs, reducing the odds that I'd pay full price and buy it new. So cds may still be getting sold and bought, just not new from the big name stores any more...
3. I think it's just may be a convenient scapegoat for coincidental statistics... Notice that cd sales have dropped as *Furbies* have come onto the market? *gasp* Maybe *they* are responsible for the decline in sales! Sheesh. One line going up while another is going down doesn't mean one caused the other....
I don't pirate MP3s (only rip my own) and I haven't bought but a couple cds in the past year (due to #1 and #2 above), so I don't see that the RIAA can pin any of this on *me*..;)
Actually, my "scathing" email *did* get a response, and a very nice one at that... Here's what one of the FCC commissioners wrote back to me: =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Thank you for your message regarding the Commission's decision on reciprocal compensation. I agree with you that it would be bad policy for the FCC to treat calls to ISPs the same way it treats calls to long distance carriers. Any suggestion that the FCC has intentionally or inadvertently imposed per-minute charges on Internet use is false, and I regret that some have portrayed our decision that way. The FCC's longstanding "hands off the Internet" policy has worked well to promote the growth of the Internet, and I see no reason to change that.
Slashdot Mirror
This is basically an "ask slashdot" question.
I have my popmail hosted by my ISP. I usually check my mail from my windows box. I'd like to configure my Linux box to periodically pull the POP3 mail from the server, spam-filter it, and then act as a "local" POP server that I'd just point my windows Eudora at.
Anyone have an easy (relatively speaking) means of doing this? Seems like each of the 3 parts (Getting mail from ISP, filter, and being a POP server) are trivial, but anything out there that would do all this or pieces that play well together?
I'm not keen on trying to deal with SMTP right now. My internet connection is a little too flaky for that...
Thanks for any ideas.
Since this is a real issue for anyone that does a fair amount of web development, I thought maybe I should point out a good resource that really supplements any JS book you use..
The IRT JavaScript FAQ is a surprisingly comprehensive list of FAQ and "how do I..." type questions for JavaScript. I find myself relying very heavily on it for snippets of code.
Once you've "learned" JavaScript, a site like this is great when you don't want to reinvent the wheel or spend 20 minutes skimming a book trying to figure out why something works in Netscape but not IE...
A lot of smaller companies focus more on obtaining market share. Plus remember all the dot-com Superbowl commercials? I think they are pretty much intended for branding and establishing market identity, sometimes at great cost.
So technically these companies may have to make a conscious effort to focus on profits rather than marketing and growth...
It's an interesting nexus where we simultaneously have issues of:
I think we're only just now starting to get to the juicy issues. Much slack has been given to the Internet as a whole simply due to its novelty. Now that it's starting to coalesce into a more mature environment, some of those swarming buzzards are deciding to come roost on it..
We're going to get into even more sticky points when truly distributed computing and storage becomes more the norm and suddenly you can't just point to a box and say "that's where everything is. Apply your laws (privacy, taxation, copyright, etc) to it..."
The desire to keep it simple based on existing tort law is understandable, but I think they underestimate how many new legal scenarios we will be faced with simply because this beasty crosses into so many different realms...
No, that's called an easter egg...
t /Softwa re/Easter_Eggs/
There are sites out there devoted to them:
http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Interne
Or another insidious one that has to have bitten lots of JS developers at one point or another...
...right up until the developer stands over the shoulder of the tester and then gets red-faced as he realizes what's happening.
;)
Javascript treats integers with leading zeroes as octal! So when you're toiling away kicking out code for dates and times like yyyy-mm-dd and hh:mm, you get this weird bug where any August and September dates (08, 09) get reset to 00 but July and October (07,10) are fine!
This is sure to drive a tester and developer bonkers when the tester keeps insisting it's broken (because they just happen to use the numbers 08 or 09) and the programmer keeps swearing that it works for him (because he's using something like 05).
Nope, never happened to me! Not once! Nosiree....
Just because I have a web page that I haven't updated in 5 years doesn't mean I don't know programming. I've just been too busy to work on it.
It's an ironic comment coming from someone whose own webpage says "don't bitch about the web design. This is a quick hacked-together page...".
Oh well. I guess neither of us will hire each other....
ColdFusion (at least until you get the new MX version) still parses the page each time it's loaded, and has to scan through all your comments to make sure they get weeded out. It all adds time, nearly trivial time, but time nonetheless that is a non-factor for a compiled language where that all gets stripped out during the compile stage...
This strategy works fine if you never want to be any better than a good programmer (at least in that particular language). Learning by doing is great for getting started but leaves you a far cry from being someone that I'd want to hire.
As someone who has been through close to a dozen different languages, I've come to realize that the syntax is one of the easier things to pick up when learning a new language. What you need guidance on is about best practices in your new language.
It's the old "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" dilemma. Just because the using lists is a convenient data structure in, say, ColdFusion, doesn't mean it should be what you reach for first in "language X". This is especially true when maker bigger leaps from compiled to scripted languages (what? Verbose comments slows things down??) and procedural to object-oriented languages. Some of the (sorry, I gotta say it) paradigm shifts are key to writing optimized code in the new language. And you'll never grasp those through trial and error.
So while I'll agree on the point that you have to have some hands-on to master a language, I'll strenuously object to the idea that hands-on can replace a good book (or other training source).
Actually there is a house rule (not Wizards-endorsed, of course) where a DM can award "luck points", perhaps for some supreme sacrifice that was made, or particularly good role-playing in a tough situation, or what have you. Then, at the players choice, they can opt to "spend" that luck point by getting to use a d30 on any one roll instead of a d20. This doesn't exactly give you an overwhelming advantage as you can still roll something like a 1 and fumble, but it may prove the difference on some key roll that you need to make.
:^)
Personally, in our 3rd ed. games, we've relegated d20 to skill and saving throw rolls only. After lots of calculations on probability and odds, we've opted to use a d10/d12 combo for initiative and combat. The dice are modified (physically, or in your head) so that the 10 on the d10 and the 12 on the d12 are both considered zeros. So rather than a flat distribution where a 1 is as likely as a 10, we have more of a curve (well, technically, not a curve, just an inverted "V"). We changed the critical and fumble rules a little since rolling a 20 or a 1 is now much rarer, but our new system has gone a long way to eliminating the frequency of having a monk with an amazing dexterity get topped on initiative entirely too often by stupid things like undead. By pulling things back around the mean, your plusses (or minuses) suddenly matter a little more...
If any other gamers are interested, I'd be happy to provide more details.. I experimented with many systems before settling on this one (4d6, 3d8, 2d10, d10+d12, etc). We chose this one because it seemed the best balance between the d20 rules (we didn't wanna have to rewrite everything) and the an overdone system (like the 4d6 where rolling anything more than 3 or 4 away from average was exceedingly rare). Also it had the advantage that every player, even with minimal dice, already had a d10 and d12 and no one had to buy or borrow others...
I keep threatening our DM that I'm going to make an entire system that revolves around the d30 (I'm the only one in our group that has any) to the point that it's now an inside joke of ours. I just like 'em cause they're big and it feels great to roll something like a natural 28.
Actually, I've been using an approach similar to this all along: Bookmarklets!
My toolbar is pretty much nothing but bookmarklets now. One for Google, one for Google groups, one for AltaVista, one for Yahoo Maps, etc. It's a clever use of JavasScript in bookmarks. Since the dialog boxes they popup are client side (since it's just JS), I save a roundtrip to each of the websites. In other words, I can actually execute my Google search without ever waiting for the main Google page to download and render. I'm submitting my query directly to the cgi...
If you're even moderately handy with JavaScript it's very easy to enhance the existing ones or write your own. There's a whole set of them targetted at web developers that let you do lots of handy features like computing color codes, changing browser dimensions, and so on.
I haven't tried out the keyword function you're describing, but given the bookmarklets I'm using, it doesn't sound like they do anything I can't already do...
Books like the O'Reilly guide (Or the Osborne one I use, "Cascading Style Sheets 2.0 Programmer's Reference") will remain useful for quite a while until some (hypothetical) point in the future when the unwashed masses have all finally migrated to versions created after the Great Reconcilliation Of All Browsers.
But considering how I find even that concept unlikely given that while Mozilla and IE are more closely compatible than the Navigator and IE of olde, they still are different enough that some detection code is still probably needed. And we won't even throw Opera, Konquerer, et al, into the mix...
I suspect my book will be quite dog-eared by then...
Count my vote.
Considering how many of these "MP3 jukebox in an arcade case", "C64 streaming audio server", "Pringles can wireless networks", etc, stories we get, I can see them meriting a category of their own...
Yeah, like what the hell is a "GOP" anyway? Maybe it's japanese for "elephant" or something... I often see the two in close proximity...
Maybe this is to sell subscriptions. Perhaps they'll announce an "april fools-free" version of news just for subscribers while the rest of us slog through these bogus and arguably lame hoaxes...
Evil tactic if you ask me...
Somebody call me?
moo.
Yeah, today sucked for us as well... About 8:30-11:00 AM we got seriously slammed by all this.
;)
Looking through the logs is jaw-dropping. In a couple hour span, 3 of our machines (desktop ones at that, not main servers) got hit by no less than 21 unique IP addresses (combined). If each of our boxes is just 1 of the 100 that were also attacked, the magnitude of this is truly alarming.
One thing to know about the Win2K patch from Microsoft is that you have to at least have Service Pack 1 installed. Bare Win2K servers won't let you install the patch, so be ready with Win2K SP1 or SP2...
Good luck to those of you who are having to cope with this. On the bright side, this is great fuel for campaign to convince the boss we should be using Apache...
I got mine back before there were any computer interfaces (Like 1978-80ish), but I did have several of the motor packs and you could do all sorts of *amazing* things given all the pulleys, gearboxes, and chain linkages they gave you. I have my original set in an attic and have recently decided that it's time to dust it off and bring it down so that *my* daughter can enjoy the same eye-opening experience. It's probably no coincidence that I owned a Fischer Technik set as a child and ended up getting an engineering degree...
whups. missed a typo in the preview.
The yahoo example should be 'y5934o' *not* 'y5934a'
Sorry for any confusion.
The answer to this is quite easy by using a (simple) password algorithm:
;)
1) Take that random number, say 5934
2) Now for everyplace where you need a password, append/prepend the name of the site/computer to that string. So if you decided something like first and last letters, plus the random number, you'd get:
yahoo.com = y5934a
slashdot = s5934t
etc.
If that's too short (like for hotmail) use a full-name variant for those like ho59tm34ail.
For better security, always use caps for one of the ends, and/or tack on some (consistent) non-alpha at beginning or end, whatever rules you want to always use.
Benefits:
1) You never need to "remember" a password. Just the numeric bit, which you get to reuse everywhere, and the rule for picking the letters.
2) Unique password nearly everywhere. Getting one of them doesn't give access to the other sites, and pattern isn't obvious with just one.
3) If you ever are required to change a password (or just want to be safer anyway), ditch the first random number and select a new one, using the same basic scheme with it for all new passwords. Worst case scenario is you'll have to make 2, maybe 3 guesses, at a site you haven't been to for a while....
I've been doing this for about 4 years now and it works like a champ. I've lost track of how many times I've suggested this to users when they're griping about having to remember passwords, but they still give me a blank look and use something like their dog's name anyway. Lamers...
Well, I missed them when they were originally played on the radio, but for some extremely excellent audio drama, check out the chronicles of "Jack Flanders", "Ruby", and the other creations of ZBS.
They're available on cd and tape now and make for a rivetting distraction while commuting or traveling. I highly recommend them...
Moderation is solely intended to improve the signal-to-noise ratio
The whole reason Rob's put this system in place is so that readers (me, you, and everyone else on here) can choose the "quality" of the news and information they read on here.
Everyone is free to pick whatever filter settings suit their needs. I'm usually busy, read
Most of the posts on here seem to worry about security (preventing people not selected as moderators from becoming moderators). I'm not sure how applicable this is. This worst thing that I can imagine happening in this case is that they post something useless and inflamatory and then bump up the score of it Well, with 400 or 4000 (or whatever) moderators, aren't the odds high that someone else will come along and say "this is just flamebait" and dock its score back to the appropriate level?
Lots of the scenarios on here are really fears that are more applicable to *posting* abuses not *moderating* abuses. I think the only way to abuse this system of moderating is to be fickle or biased. And few of the proposed ideas for selecting moderators would have any effect at preventing that.
I think the only requirements for anyone to moderate, should be something like:
1. Agree to be impartial. (You may think Macs suck, but if someone posts something insightful about them, you give it the props it deserves and bump up its score)
2. Agree to always score things against the single measuring stick of signal vs. noise.
I think that anyone adhering to those two tenets would do a fine job moderating. And if we're worried about keeping those people honest, the idea of a "score balance" that alerts anytime someone skews significantly to some + or - threshold would identify those people.
By having a large number of moderators who all agree to the above, it's sure to dilute the effect that any one or few malicious "fake moderators" might have on the system.
Remember the only point of moderation is to rate articles on an "importance/insightful/useful" scale so that readers can filter based on their scores. Getting into details like "moderate vs. post" detracts from this purpose. Let's keep it simple.
I welcome any comments for or against these ideas...
mooman (Who just wants any system for quickly keeping up with current techie news without all the flamewars)
Ditto! The S/N ration was *reaaally* starting to get on my nerves. I tweaked the threshold up a notch and suddenly insight emerges from the murky depths! Makes it worth reading from work again!
Thanks again, CmdrTaco!
I didn't see any mention of this here on Slashdot, but I *do* see how the internet has cut down on cd sales, at least for me anyway:
;)
1. With so many cd stores that have realaudio samples of cd songs, I get to preview more of the cd that just hearing a song or two on the radio. I'm finding that in many cases, the rest of the cd just doesn't interest me, whereas before I might have impulse bought it before figuring that out.
2. The 4% drop is no doubt for *new* record sales. With the internet, it's *much* easier to find used copies up for grabs, reducing the odds that I'd pay full price and buy it new. So cds may still be getting sold and bought, just not new from the big name stores any more...
3. I think it's just may be a convenient scapegoat for coincidental statistics... Notice that cd sales have dropped as *Furbies* have come onto the market? *gasp* Maybe *they* are responsible for the decline in sales! Sheesh. One line going up while another is going down doesn't mean one caused the other....
I don't pirate MP3s (only rip my own) and I haven't bought but a couple cds in the past year (due to #1 and #2 above), so I don't see that the RIAA can pin any of this on *me*..
moo.
Actually, my "scathing" email *did* get a response, and a very nice one at that... Here's what one of the FCC commissioners wrote back to me:
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Thank you for your message regarding the Commission's decision on reciprocal compensation. I agree with you that it would be bad policy for the FCC to treat calls to ISPs the same way it treats calls to long distance carriers. Any suggestion that the FCC has intentionally or inadvertently imposed per-minute charges on Internet use is false, and I regret that some have portrayed our decision that way. The FCC's longstanding "hands off the Internet" policy has worked well to promote the growth of the Internet, and I see no reason to change that.
Gloria Tristani
Commissioner
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
I'm impressed at the response and I feel bad that I jumped on the bandwagon based on some bogus news.