You do realise the only reason you're free to post this sort of thing on the Internet is because people have fought for that freedom in the past, right?
Yes, and hooray for that -- so how is Bush's little ego war defending my freedom? Or the fact that the USA is now justifying the actions of every "far nastier regime" by flushing away every remnant of moral authority it used to have?
> It's really not that hard to spot vandalism on Wikipedia
Sure, if the article is about any topic that's remotely controversial, you can assume by default it's been vandalized. Or at least riddled with crappy weasel-worded assertions everywhere.
Wikipedia's a decent resource for sciences I expect geeks afflicted with terminal Male Answer Syndrome to actually know about. Everything else is a crapshoot, minus the shoot.
Re:Perl 6: The Language of the Future (... Forever
on
State of the Onion 11
·
· Score: 4, Funny
> Thankfully, Perl 6 follows the same principle as previous Perls
Tell me you didn't type that with a straight face.
No, Wikipedia isn't being "ruled and dictated" by some "secret monolithic cabal". It's just got a bureacracy that's developed its own impenetrable code, and makes arbitrary decisions that act to reinforce their own feelings of mutual belonging in their weird little clique, regardless of whether it has any real positive impact on Wikipedia.
Sure, there are good admins on WP. Jimbo Wales and his little entourage are not among them.
> Basically all you've told us is that Jimbo Wales said the bans were OK, so they must be.
Heck, I draw the opposite conclusion of the GP: Wales is as much of a controlling paranoid lunatic as Durova.
Have you ever read wikipedia adminspeak? It's an unparseable argot of acronymic jargon. The only thing that I've seen that read similarly was ops manuals for Scientology orgs.
You're indeed correct. Which makes the article's title not just pretentious, but wrong (is it a bug report that's the problem, or the bug?) Oh well, at least it's spelled correctly.
Leaving aside the rest of your Manly Righteous Boldface Rant, let's just go with this one (in more effeminate italics:
These are not US citizens; therefore, the Bill of Rights + Constitution do not apply.
Perhaps next year when you take your high school civics class, you'll find that there's hardly any part of the constitution that applies only to citizens. The right to vote, and elegibility for office are about the only ones, in fact.
It's awful convenient how "illegal combatant" has now morphed into "enemy combatant". As in, we basically can treat anyone we label the enemy like we want, anywhere, any time.
And apparently these people are so awful and dangerous, it would destroy the country to actually charge them with any crime.
> What they really need is old fashioned from the book teaching and a lot of discipline.
Yeah because the gee-wiz high-tech approach of an Alabama education has really been a disaster compared to the intellectual dynamo created by its current approach.
Sure, Kuvayev has few aliases, but how many of them are common names? How many are in fact someone else's name? A "no register list" might work on him, but are we going to expand it to every alias we've accused a particular spammer of using? The registrars do need to get involved, sure, but you're not seriously proposing that they do background checks on their customers, are you?
There are quite a few registrars who need their license revoked, but as long as slimy bastards like DomainKing are allowed to operate out in the open, I don't think we can ever rely on ICANN to do anything at all.
> My point is, the "powers" that be, in the particular case, are likely incompetent - incapable of successfully pulling off such a conspiracy.
They're the ones creating the successful antispam systems -- you know, the ones that actually scale up on the gateway. The popular vision of bumbling PHB buffoons everywhere is just another stupid slashdot stereotype, fostered by insecure social retards who have to foist their apparent superiority over everyone by scoffing at everything. Sure, they exist, but long-term successful tech companies generally have -- get ready for it -- smart people working for them.
Anyway, the antispam companies don't have the leverage to pull off an end to spam. Symantec and Cloudmark and Ironport and so forth could stand up and scream and rant and rave at ISPs and yell about the need to secure email infrastructure, to block outbound port 25 from residential ranges, to deploy SPF, or hell just to stop bouncing (I'm looking at you Barracuda), but as long as the ISPs run their ranges as open sewers, and just slap in a few boxes to stop everyone else's spam, the spam problem will continue. And they don't like having vendors telling them how to run their business. The people with the power to stop the spam problem, who won't, are not the antispam vendors, it's the ISPs sending spam. So perhaps I was too harsh about the assessment of the PHB problem -- they certainly do seem to be the norm at ISPs (notable exceptions like AOL and parts of Roadrunner excepted).
> 1. Netsplits - my primary hate object. Since IRC is adfree and without a corporate backer, the service levels are often poor to terrible.
The poor service levels have little to do with the lack of corporate backing (many of them *do* have backing) and everything to do with the craptastic architecture of IRC. IRC was a poor hack right out of the gate, and has continued to be a pile of stupid largely undocumented hacks on top ever since. If IRC tried to be a little more robust, maybe it might lose 10% of its total capacity per-node... but probably not even that, because the traffic storms of netsplits are probably more noise than a link-status heartbeat signal would have been.
Good thing evolution doesn't claim how life originated. It just makes statements about how species form, and it's proven a pretty good model for showing how previous species formed. Abiogenesis is a matter for chemists.
You folks on the other hand seem to have lots of stories about the origins of life. Also not quite all that reproduceable.
> Einstein said, "God doesn't play dice with the universe."
Look, sometimes when I don't know the answer to something, I say "God only knows." This is not a statement of faith. It's an idiom.
Einstein at his most religious was a Spinozan. Basically, God as the universe itself, and not one that "designed" us, loves us, or cares if we eat pork.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realise the only reason you're free to post this sort of thing on the Internet is because people have fought for that freedom in the past, right?
Yes, and hooray for that -- so how is Bush's little ego war defending my freedom? Or the fact that the USA is now justifying the actions of every "far nastier regime" by flushing away every remnant of moral authority it used to have?
> In fact, I don't think that any of my teachers even pointed out that the encyclopedia cites primary sources.
They don't, they cite secondary sources. That's why they're called tertiary sources.
A primary source is an eyewitness. A secondary source is typically a newspaper.
> It's really not that hard to spot vandalism on Wikipedia
Sure, if the article is about any topic that's remotely controversial, you can assume by default it's been vandalized. Or at least riddled with crappy weasel-worded assertions everywhere.
Wikipedia's a decent resource for sciences I expect geeks afflicted with terminal Male Answer Syndrome to actually know about. Everything else is a crapshoot, minus the shoot.
> Thankfully, Perl 6 follows the same principle as previous Perls
Except for actually existing.
> The Register's credibility
Tell me you didn't type that with a straight face.
No, Wikipedia isn't being "ruled and dictated" by some "secret monolithic cabal". It's just got a bureacracy that's developed its own impenetrable code, and makes arbitrary decisions that act to reinforce their own feelings of mutual belonging in their weird little clique, regardless of whether it has any real positive impact on Wikipedia.
Sure, there are good admins on WP. Jimbo Wales and his little entourage are not among them.
> Basically all you've told us is that Jimbo Wales said the bans were OK, so they must be.
Heck, I draw the opposite conclusion of the GP: Wales is as much of a controlling paranoid lunatic as Durova.
Have you ever read wikipedia adminspeak? It's an unparseable argot of acronymic jargon. The only thing that I've seen that read similarly was ops manuals for Scientology orgs.
You're indeed correct. Which makes the article's title not just pretentious, but wrong (is it a bug report that's the problem, or the bug?) Oh well, at least it's spelled correctly.
Erratum is singular. Errata is plural.
The conventional terms used for erratum, however, are usually "error" or "bug".
It looks like it's a penalty enhancement for "harvesting", not a specific prohibition. My bad.
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.shtm
Or if you prefer your laws raw: http://uscode.house.gov/download/pls/15C103.txt
Gosh, you're so smart. How about you run your own email service and show us how spam doesn't affect you at all. Go show us all how it's done.
Leaving aside the rest of your Manly Righteous Boldface Rant, let's just go with this one (in more effeminate italics:
These are not US citizens; therefore, the Bill of Rights + Constitution do not apply.
Perhaps next year when you take your high school civics class, you'll find that there's hardly any part of the constitution that applies only to citizens. The right to vote, and elegibility for office are about the only ones, in fact.
It's awful convenient how "illegal combatant" has now morphed into "enemy combatant". As in, we basically can treat anyone we label the enemy like we want, anywhere, any time.
And apparently these people are so awful and dangerous, it would destroy the country to actually charge them with any crime.
Judging by the shops on Folsom St, buggy whips are doing a brisk business. They're just not used on horses.
> What they really need is old fashioned from the book teaching and a lot of discipline.
Yeah because the gee-wiz high-tech approach of an Alabama education has really been a disaster compared to the intellectual dynamo created by its current approach.
Sure, Kuvayev has few aliases, but how many of them are common names? How many are in fact someone else's name? A "no register list" might work on him, but are we going to expand it to every alias we've accused a particular spammer of using? The registrars do need to get involved, sure, but you're not seriously proposing that they do background checks on their customers, are you?
There are quite a few registrars who need their license revoked, but as long as slimy bastards like DomainKing are allowed to operate out in the open, I don't think we can ever rely on ICANN to do anything at all.
> I wouldn't say no to outlawing email harvesting either.
This is already specifically forbidden by CAN-SPAM
> I'm sorry, but I really fail to appreciate the harm done to me by receiving a handful of viagra emails every now and then.
Do you know how much it costs your ISP to run the mail infrastructure for your legitimate mail?
Triple it. That's the cost of spam.
> My point is, the "powers" that be, in the particular case, are likely incompetent - incapable of successfully pulling off such a conspiracy.
They're the ones creating the successful antispam systems -- you know, the ones that actually scale up on the gateway. The popular vision of bumbling PHB buffoons everywhere is just another stupid slashdot stereotype, fostered by insecure social retards who have to foist their apparent superiority over everyone by scoffing at everything. Sure, they exist, but long-term successful tech companies generally have -- get ready for it -- smart people working for them.
Anyway, the antispam companies don't have the leverage to pull off an end to spam. Symantec and Cloudmark and Ironport and so forth could stand up and scream and rant and rave at ISPs and yell about the need to secure email infrastructure, to block outbound port 25 from residential ranges, to deploy SPF, or hell just to stop bouncing (I'm looking at you Barracuda), but as long as the ISPs run their ranges as open sewers, and just slap in a few boxes to stop everyone else's spam, the spam problem will continue. And they don't like having vendors telling them how to run their business. The people with the power to stop the spam problem, who won't, are not the antispam vendors, it's the ISPs sending spam. So perhaps I was too harsh about the assessment of the PHB problem -- they certainly do seem to be the norm at ISPs (notable exceptions like AOL and parts of Roadrunner excepted).
> So is MP3 good or evil? Make up your mind already.
Some of us have brains large enough to comprehend that it perhaps lies in the middle of a continuum.
I'm pretty sure he didn't say "lose both", let alone "loose both." (Ben Franklin was literate, for starters)
Don't trust the squirrels. They lie.
> 1. Netsplits - my primary hate object. Since IRC is adfree and without a corporate backer, the service levels are often poor to terrible.
... but probably not even that, because the traffic storms of netsplits are probably more noise than a link-status heartbeat signal would have been.
The poor service levels have little to do with the lack of corporate backing (many of them *do* have backing) and everything to do with the craptastic architecture of IRC. IRC was a poor hack right out of the gate, and has continued to be a pile of stupid largely undocumented hacks on top ever since. If IRC tried to be a little more robust, maybe it might lose 10% of its total capacity per-node
Geddy Lee, who himself was paraphrasing Sartre.
Good thing evolution doesn't claim how life originated. It just makes statements about how species form, and it's proven a pretty good model for showing how previous species formed. Abiogenesis is a matter for chemists.
You folks on the other hand seem to have lots of stories about the origins of life. Also not quite all that reproduceable.
> Einstein said, "God doesn't play dice with the universe."
Look, sometimes when I don't know the answer to something, I say "God only knows." This is not a statement of faith. It's an idiom.
Einstein at his most religious was a Spinozan. Basically, God as the universe itself, and not one that "designed" us, loves us, or cares if we eat pork.