I just love trolling libertarians. They are so easy to work up into a frothing rage. Like flat-earthers and creationists, they have to shut off all logical parts of their minds in order to go on believing their patently untrue and counter-factual ideology. This makes them easy pickings for trolls. Now, unlike most trolls, I actually believe what I'm writing. But that's beside the point. The point is, watching stupid people get angry is fun.
From this comment by gringofrijolero, I got the idea to do a whole 'wiki-dickory-sock' song, I figure 8-10 verses would do. So, first verse, taking gringofrijolero's verse and making it more Wikipedia specific:
Wiki-Dickery-Sock
Rules lawyers ran out the clock
We all got bored
"Yeah, you're the lord."
Wiki-Dickery-Sock
Then the verse I came up with:
Wiki-Dickery-Sock
Deletionists erased 'River_Ock'
The river's not notable,
Its water's not potable,"
Wiki-Dickery-Sock
Now to expand on the examples I came up with in the thread:
Wiki-Dickery-Sock
The vandals defaced 'Iraq.'
They said it was good
When Saddam got wood
Wiki-Dickery-Sock
Hmm, the original rhyme does end with the same nonsense line it begins with, but Andrew Dice Clay uses the last line for the punchline to good comedic effect, perhaps I should here.
Wiki-Dickery-Sock
The vandals defaced 'Iraq.'
They said it was good
When Saddam got wood
So we banned their whole IP block.
But then there is the difficulty in coming up with twice as many relevant and funny '-ock' rhymes. Cock and block only go so far.
Wiki-Dickery-Sock
Deletionists erased 'River_Ock'
The river's not notable,
Its water's not potable,
Put it on the chopping block!
Wiki-Dickery-Sock
Rules lawyers ran out the clock
We all got bored
"Yeah, you're the lord."
(of making us sleepy, you cock)
Thought for latter 'Trekkies aren't quite as logical as Spock.' Work it in somehow. 'Puppet masters brought out every sock' will make a good last line somewhere.
Sorry, no time for fancy formatting. Here's the article... I don't keep up with the topic, so I don't know why it got yanked. Here's the link, in case it comes back: http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/16/1945246 Enjoy!
The Long Term Impact of Jacobsen v. Katzer
Posted by timothy in The Mysterious Future!
from the stabs-in-the-dark dept.
snydeq (http://www.infoworld.com/) writes
"Lawyer Jonathan Moskin has called into question the long-term impact (http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source/does-court-ruling-raise-risks-open-source-687) last year's Java Model Railroad Interface court ruling will have on open source adoption among corporate entities. For many, the case in question, Jacobsen v. Katzer (http://jmri.sourceforge.net/k/docket/index.shtml), has represented a boon for open source, laying down a legal foundation for the protection of open source developers (http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/03/1447248&tid=185). But as Moskin sees it, the ruling 'enables a set of potentially onerous monetary remedies for failures to comply with even modest license terms, and it subjects a potentially larger community of intellectual property users to liability (http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?id=1202429618746).' In other words, in Moskin's eyes, Jacobsen v. Katzer could make firms wary of using open source software because they fear that someone in the food chain has violated a copyright, thus exposing them to lawsuit. It should be noted that Moskin's firm has represented Microsoft in anti-trust litigation before the European Union."
I'll admit, I fell in love with Sony's XMB interface. It's so simple and easy to use. Everything is placed in categories, the files open how you'd expect (for the most part), and you can easily mass delete or move files to alternative drives. It has it's flaws, but overall I think it flows better for the common user (ie. my parents) than current alternatives. Since then, I've pondered different interface designs including BeOS, Windows, Gnome, KDE, and more recently "Smart Phones." My hands on experience is limited to PC/Console interfaces.
I see a trend that's becoming more and more pervasive: Search.
Personally, I feel as though search is merely a bandage fix to a poor interface design. If the user cannot quickly find their application or document, is it their fault or the fault of the interface design? I could understand if it was voice operated. Telling a computer "Open Applications, Internet, Run Firefox" seems a bit clumsy. With the inevitable presence of touchscreen devices though, doesn't it seem more clumsy to have to type in what you need to find instead of placing it three taps or a slide away?
Another perspective for discussion: Why does Internet search feel acceptable, but desktop search feels like broken design? Quantity of content?
Ghosts of Slashdot: 11/13/2008
[This looked like an awesome story, and it's a new discovery, so I wondered why it got yanked. Turned out there was an even more awesome version in the pipeline, that referenced not one but two extraterrestrial systems being imaged, and threw in a jab at the Hubble to boot. Plus, this story linked to a page on the KeckObservatory.org site that doesn't have any actual content (perhaps it was about to get Slashdotted and they blanked it to avoid meltdown?).]
First Picture of an Alien Solar System
Posted by ScuttleMonkey in The Mysterious Future!
from the say-cheese dept.
dtolman writes
"Astronomers at the Keck Observatory have announced that they have taken the first image of an alien solar system. 'The new solar system orbits the dusty young star named HR8799, which is 140 light years away and about 1.5 times the size of our sun. Three planets, roughly 10, 9 and 6 times the mass of Jupiter, orbit the star. The sizes of the planets decrease with distance from the parent star, much like the giant planets do in our system.'"
What are the Ghosts of Slashdot?
As a Slashdot Subscriber, I get to see stories before they're posted to the general public. This means that I get to see the mistakes -- the articles that almost made it, but got sent to the cutting room floor at the last minute. They become the Ghosts of Slashdot, a URL that points to nothing.
Note that this is NOT the same as whining about article submissions that didn't get accepted! And it's not the same as seeing an article come close-but-not-close-enough on the Firehose. These stories were accepted, posted on the front page for subscribers, and then pulled from the site. Their brief existence gives us a glimpse into the Slashdot post-submission process, for those who are interested in what's going on behind the curtain.
Ghosts of Slashdot: 10/24/2008
[Finally, I think this one will *stay* dead! No idea what it's all about, or why it didn't stay on the front page. Probably a dupe, but it's far enough outside my sphere of knowledge that I wouldn't know exactly what to search on. And, I have to admit, I'm not interested enough to find out...]
Antitrust Working For Samba and FSFE
Posted by kdawson in The Mysterious Future!
from the in-an-ideal-world dept.
H4x0r Jim Duggan writes
"It's now just over a year since Microsoft lost their final court case in the EU regarding breaches of antitrust regulation. Samba developer Andrew Bartlet writes in his blog that the documentation and help MS was forced to deliver is proving truly useful: '[T]he bottleneck is our own pace of implementation and comprehension, not missing documentation or the difficult task of network analysis so often required in the past.' FSFE blogger Ciaran O'Riordan also explains the motivations for those years of work. Hint: it wasn't about fines."
What are the Ghosts of Slashdot?
As a Slashdot Subscriber, I get to see stories before they're posted to the general public. This means that I get to see the mistakes -- the articles that almost made it, but got sent to the cutting room floor at the last minute. They become the Ghosts of Slashdot, a URL that points to nothing.
Note that this is NOT the same as whining about article submissions that didn't get accepted! And it's not the same as seeing an article come close-but-not-close-enough on the Firehose. These stories were accepted, posted on the front page for subscribers, and then pulled from the site. Their brief existence gives us a glimpse into the Slashdot post-submission process, for those who are interested in what's going on behind the curtain.
We now abbreviate journals in the firehose... so they are more like slashdot stories with a Read More link to the full text.
The big user facing change this week was structural: historically we had 2 different "skeletons" on Slashdot, but with this refresh we unified to a single one. This change simplifies maintenance for us quite a bit (maintaining the idle section and the firehose views of the same data was a royal pain).
You also will see some changes to the firehose.pl layout. We're playing with the tab layout a bit, moving some menus around and better integrating the core functions into the site chrome. It's a bit buggy atm, so feel free to email me if you see something wonky. We're extinguishing a few minor brush fires but there's no forest fires that we're aware of.
Ghosts of Slashdot: 10/08/2008
[They're rarer, but sometimes the ghosts still make it to red-link front page status before they're hosed away. Not sure why this one got doused, but I suspect it's a dupe.]
Recovering Blurred Text Using Photoshop
Posted by Timothy in The Mysterious Future!
from the careful-how-you-hide-stuff dept.
An anonymous reader writes
"There's been a lot of talk about recovering blurred or pixelated text, but here's an actual implementation using nothing but Photoshop and a little JavaScript. Includes a Hollywood-esque video showing the uncovered letters slowly appearing."
What are the Ghosts of Slashdot?
As a Slashdot Subscriber, I get to see stories before they're posted to the general public. This means that I get to see the mistakes -- the articles that almost made it, but got sent to the cutting room floor at the last minute. They become the Ghosts of Slashdot, a URL that points to nothing.
Note that this is NOT the same as whining about article submissions that didn't get accepted! And it's not the same as seeing an article come close-but-not-close-enough on the Firehose. These stories were accepted, posted on the front page for subscribers, and then pulled from the site. Their brief existence gives us a glimpse into the Slashdot post-submission process, for those who are interested in what's going on behind the curtain.
I noticed a while ago that my spam filter was 100% accurate on all plain-text emails. Spammers are now forced to use obfuscation techniques like embedded images and HTML. It seems to me that this provides an easy way of totally eliminating spam:
This means that anyone I email is free to send me whatever they want. Anyone can still contact me, but they are restricted to sending me plain text for the first email, until I reply to them.
Of course, spammers could start sending out messages saying 'I tried to send you some spam but your filter blocked it, please email me.' These will be caught in grey-traps for 8 hours, and by the end of the 8 hours there's a very good chance that the email will have been caught and the sender added to an RBL.
I'll probably try implementing this when I have time, but if anyone has time before me then please do and let me know how well it works.
Ghosts of Slashdot: 08/20/2008
[Wow, it's been forever! But I finally caught one. I was going to send a note to the DaddyPants address warning them that this was a dupe, but I couldn't find the article it was a duplicate *of*. Someone did, though. Oh, and it's "Caucasus", not "Caucuses". It's Georgia, not Iowa.]
ISS Threatened by War in The Caucuses
Journal written by Presto Vivace (882157) and posted by samzenpus in The Mysterious Future!
from the no-space-for-you dept.
According to this report in the Washington Post, the ISS program could become a casualty of the war in the Caucuses. Our current space shuttle craft will be retired in 2010, with no replacements until 2015. In the meantime, in order for NASA to contract with Russia's Soyuz spacecraft, Congress would have to pass a waiver to a 2000 law forbidding government contracts with nations that help Iran and North Korea with their nuclear programs, as Russia has done. Even before the war in the Caucuses this was controversial, now the ISS mission is at great risk. It would be a shame if the ISS mission were jeopardized over this, a real shame.
What are the Ghosts of Slashdot?
As a Slashdot Subscriber, I get to see stories before they're posted to the general public. This means that I get to see the mistakes -- the articles that almost made it, but got sent to the cutting room floor at the last minute. They become the Ghosts of Slashdot, a URL that points to nothing.
Note that this is NOT the same as whining about article submissions that didn't get accepted! These stories were accepted, posted for subscribers, and then pulled from the site. Their brief existence gives us a glimpse into the Slashdot post-submission process, for those who are interested in what's going on behind the curtain.
By the way, any Subscriber can join the Ghost Hunt, but so far only morcheeba has shown the requisite sensitivity to ectoplasmic vibrations.
The first real change is that we've changed the meanings of the UI around. The old system is 'Fair' and 'Unfair' and the new system is '+' and '-'. The meanings are subtly different. You are no longer rating individual 'Insightful' or 'Troll' or whatever... you are now stating basically "Is this comment good or bad for you". Personally, since I find very few Score:5 funny comments to be actually really funny (and not just cliche memes) I '-' most of them. You are encouraged to be harsh if you don't actually think something is insightful or funny, call it such. The system encourages more of what you + and less of what you -.
You are also welcome now to do more than 10 m2 per day... however we internally have diminishing returns after 10, so you can do more, but they start to matter less and less.
There will undoubtedly be bugs so feel free to email me or vroom at slashdot if you find them. Probably next week or so we'll move this out to everyone, so your assistance is appreciated.
My current contract at the university expires a week on Monday. It's been fun. I've been employed to set up a History of Computing Collection - a chance to indulge one of my hobbies for a bit after finishing my PhD and relaxing after the immense stress of writing a book and a thesis (in more or less unrelated areas) at the same time.
Now I'm back to freelance writing and spare-time hacking. If anyone wants to employ me for a bit, let me know...
A couple of weeks ago, one of the hard drives in a FreeBSD box of mine died. This was mildly inconvenient, but since it was one of a RAID-1 array, not totally catastrophic. It seems to be the season for drives dying, because the disk in my MacBook Pro just died this evening.
The machine had been being a bit slow and randomly pausing for a while for no apparent reason. I now realise that the random pauses were caused by I/O errors causing userspace processes to block waiting for kernel locks to be released. Ho hum.
Over the last month, I've been becoming progressively more concerned about how long it had been since my last backup (October 2007!) and last weekend I finally got around to running a full backup of my home directory. As such, I haven't lost very much. Most of the work I did in the last week is in svn and the grant proposal I've been working on was rescued just before the drive died completely. I lost a paper I was working on and some emails and chat logs, but nothing particularly important.
I think my next laptop is going to be solid state. Mechanical storage is more trouble than it's worth.
Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future. - Niels Bohr
