With the messaging system down, it's like everybody is blind. Even the front page stories are devoid of comments. Maybe it's intentional, since it makes much more difficult to filter out the spam. Poor Slashdot... Maybe it really is time to let go...
*how I learned to love electronic voting...
Before, I used to believe the ACA was a crime of opportunity. With the democrat majority in both houses, the republicans could get their insurance bill passed without having to put up a single vote. Smell that flowery aroma surrounding them? Yeah, it worked perfectly, and still is. The show has been one hell of a diversion. Millions of people like Smith and pudge are still believers in the gag. Okay, old story, on to new business...
So, now we have a different dilemma, and a bit of role reversal. The democrats (and republicans) want to get this Keystone and TPP and various other ripoffs out of the way before they can attract too much more attention, before 2016 if possible. But there's a problem. The democrats are the fluffy bunny party, and they held the majority in the Senate. They can't sign off on a deal to have containers of fluffy bunnies shipped from China to be soaked in tar in Canada and shot through a tube to Houston to be put on a boat to Belgium to make chocolate confectioneries in time for Easter.. So... What to do.... I know! With the votes too close to call and these new contraptions they're using to tally the count, it will be trivial to nudge the table without tilting the machine. Voila! You tagged your partner into the ring. Majority to republicans, the bills cruise on through, and as the president signs them, the democrats can blame the new republican majority for being environmental nazis/slaves of the telecoms, keeping the vote evenly divided for the '16 race, everybody's happy.
I have become more convinced than ever that consent is indeed being manufactured through this type of fraud. To be able to keep independents out of congress so completely and effectively takes some serious bullshit. It is too bad everyone is too stark struck by celebrity politics to look into it.
When you can keep elections so perfectly divided down the middle, it is very easy to 'miscount' the vote to produce a desired result without anybody noticing.
Something stinks...
This story on Slashgear about net neutrality showed up in Google News this morning. I was appalled.
Not at the story, so far I've only read the first sentence. "Today, President Obama sided with you and I."
What the God damned FUCK?! I don't know what uneducated moron wrote that sentence... wait, I found a byline: Nate Swanner. Nate, you show about a fourth grade reading level. Nate, you uneducated moron, QUIT YOU JOB, go back and get your GED and learn the English language before you present yourself as a "journalist".
And you who run slashgear, have you not thought about just maybe hiring an editor who's spent a semester or two in college?
One more question: how do these rank amateurs wind up in the Google News feed?
Oh, and Nate, for your information, it's "you and ME." Would you say "Today, President Obama sided with I"?
Moron. I hear McDonald's and Wal Mart are hiring.
Before S/N opened, I spent a lot of time commenting at
I hadn't had mod points at
So two days ago I had five
I have found the way!
Praise the lord! I can see!
It's not quite the whole day, but it's a new beginning!
It appears you can no longer go back more than 66 pages in front page news stories, where previously you could go all the way back to 1999. If this is actually a permanent thing, then Slashdot is truly dead, and it is no longer worth lingering around here. Shame on you, Dice. You are horrible people. You killed a great web site. All to make space for the spammers in the Journal section.
If this is only temporary, I take back everything.
Thank you
PS: Grab your old journals, and those of your best friends while you still can. This will probably disappear also, along with your old style user page that keeps a tally of your total comment count.
Oh woe to sweet Slashdot! The end is nigh... to be scattered into the abyss of the quantum vortex in the space-time continuum... *The dream, is over*
PSS: It appears the stories are still on the site. That is very good news. They're just not available on the old fronts pages. That is still bad news. I will keep searching for a way into the archives..
Service Pack 6 provides move up/down functionality for the Chains for all of the supported databases. Note that the RAM storage does not support Chains or complex object deletes at all -- it's intended for high volume read/update/delete data, such as the call record information for an Asterisk or FreeSwitch PBX system, or the internals of MSS Code Factory itself.
There are some critical bugs fixed with Service Pack 6, including cache integrity bugs that were discovered during testing of the move up/down functionality.
With this release, I think I'm pretty much done with MSS Code Factory 1.11. I can't think of any more functions I'd want to add that I have experience with. Sure I could implement proper login security with hashing algorithms, a JEE server to receive and respond to X(ml)Msg requests, and polish the prototype GUI some more, but that's really not my forte. I spent 30 years as a back end database programmer, tuning servers and wringing every last bit of performance out of database engines that I could.
MSS Code Factory 1.11 now incorporates everything I ever learned about making an RDBMS sing and dance. It provides all the functionality points that I was ever asked to deliver to a front end application programming team, and does it all automagically from a Business Application Model.
It's been 18 years of long hours working on this project to get to this point. The idea was around even longer (I came up with the concept way back in 1987, before I'd even had any experience with data modelling tools.)
Service Pack 6 is, in essence, my life's work. My magnum opus. I have climbed my mountain, and the view is great.
This story takes place in a bar on Mars over a century later than "Mars, Ho!". Kudos to slashdot for finally fixing its handling of smart characters.
âoeJoe? Is that you? You're still tending bar? I thought you'd be retired. How you doin', you old rascal?â
Joe frowned. âoeSorry, son, I must be getting old, do I know you? And can I get you a drink?â
âoeIt's Dave, man. Give me a Knolls lager, draft.â
âoeSorry, Dave, we're sold out of Knolls. We have some Guinness, that's almost as good. But I'm sorry, but I still don't know who you are. Memory ain't as good as it used to be.â
âoeDave Rayfield, Joe. Of course it's been a lot longer for you than me. Yeah, Guinness will do.â
âoeDave Rayfield? I haven't seen him since I was twenty. You his grandson?â he asked, pouring the beer.
âoeNo, Joe, I'm Dave. Same Dave you knew back then.â
âoeBut you're so young!â
âoeIt was the trip. I piloted the science expedition to Grommler while you were throwing rocks from the asteroid belt at Mars.â
âoeThe terraforming is still going on here. I'm a little old for space hopping. Hell, if I spent any more time traveling through space I'd live forever. But how the hell did you stay a damned kid?â
âoeSame way you're not dead at a hundred twenty five. Time dilation. Most Earthians die before they're ninety five, but speed stretches time. You'd be dead by now if you hadn't been a spaceship captain. It's been a hundred years since you've seen me, but it's only been ten years since I've seen you.â
âoeSo where have you been for the last hundred years?â
âoeTen years to me. We went to Grommler.â
âoeWhere's that?â
Dave laughed. "It orbits Sirius, but it was the least serious place I've ever seen! Really weird place.â
âoeWeird how?â
âoeEvery way weird goes. First off, there was no fauna at all, not even insects. Only flora, despite having more oxygen than Earth. The geologists said it was because of the CO2 from volcanoes that there could even be any flora.
âoeBut the weirdest was the plants. We were there for two years, and that's in real time, and every single plant the biologists tested had cannabinoids and other psychoactive components. There were a lot of brush fires because of the wind and lightning, so every time you went outside you got stoned. Hell, some of the guys practically lived outside!â
âoeNeed another beer?â
Dave eyed his glass and downed it. âoeYeah. Jesus, Joe, things sure changed in the last ten years.â
âoeIt's been a hundred years since you left, Dave. It only seems like ten to you.â
âoeI guess. But you know what, Joe? I'm going to clean up!â
âoeWhat do you mean?â
Dave pulled out an envelope. âoeThese. Grommlerian tomato seeds. Grommlerian plants have a completely different ordering than our plants, it's something different than DNA and the scientists are still trying to figure it out. But they make seeds like Earth plants.â
âoeTomatoes?â
âoeNot really. They look like tomatoes but taste way different, but they taste really good. And they get you really stoned.â
âoeWell, okay, you found a reefer planet. When you find a beer planet, let me know.â
Okay... and heeeeerr we go!
Organic? Who said anything about 'organic'?
*Please state your answer in the form of an answer*
I "finished" writing Mars, Ho! early in the summer, and since it became a horror story I was aiming to publish it by Halloween. Well, that didn't happen.
I wanted it to be done by then so it would show up in bookstores by Thanksgiving. I still had hopes of getting it at least for sale on my web site by then, especially since a fan wrote with news he was planning to buy several copies as gifts.
It doesn't look like that will happen, either. I just finished making the changes I'd made in the second printed copy (the first goes to my daughter Patty, the second to Dewey, who stirred the muse) and sent off for a third. It will be a couple weeks before it shows up on my porch, and if there are no more changes, which is doubtful, it would be at least another week before I cleared it for publication.
I'll be lucky if it's for sale this year. I'm frustrated.
Oh, well. I'm not in it for the money, just for the satisfaction of writing novels and actually have people read them. It's a good thing I'm not in it for the money because I'm barely breaking even, after copyright registration, ISBNs, and buying copies, many of which are marked up in pencil, not completely edited, and not for sale.
However, even though I'm not in it for the money, I'm still planning to sell the e-book on Amazon. If I got on their best seller list it would get more people reading, and many might read other of my books from the web site. Mars, Ho!'s HTML and PDF will still be free. Few are downloading the free e-books of the first two books, most are either reading it online or downloading the single HTML file.
Anyway, I guess I'm on vacation again... oh, wait, there's Random Scribblings.
Ronald Reagan said that... No he didn't... Yes he did.... No, he didn't... You just want me to have an abortion...
Hey Smitty! Wake up!
Somebody has a question for you... And given your expertise, well..
This is what you get for electing such dorks... But heeyyyy, no problemo, in 10 or 12 years 50.1% will be pissed at the republicans again... for another 6 or 8... and then, like the end of Daylight Savings Time, we set the clocks back (Shut up! I'm just having a bit of partisan fun, you silly bitch!)
To any of you who still doubt the success of Bernays' work, well, all I can say is, PFFFFT! Not a single independent in the house... Public relations is some powerful shit on the individual who surrenders to the collective, which apparently, 99% of them do. It produces election results, and, it produces radical fanatics financed by the war machine. Through all of you it produces heaven and hell, god and satan. It's all spelled out. We know why, but we still have no lasting antidote, only the bourgeois(UGH!) 'revolution'. And what would the 'antidote' be to one of nature's more basic survival instincts of staying with the herd anyway? Better ice cream, perhaps? That always seems to work. Something like *a new hat*... Since breaking up the herd isn't an option, all that's left is to try to steer it. But fuck that. The better option is to sell the ranch and move to the tropics, and politely ask that you stay off my lawn. No, actually you are welcome, just have the courtesy to remove the clip and empty the chamber.
On the spectator side, if you're a betting man, Jeb just might pay off (yeah, republicans are morons also, but if they win, who cares? A good poker face can up the payoffs), especially if the dems are actually stupid enough to put up Ms. Hillary, which I really doubt right now, but, as dumb as they are, you never know. We do know that both sides have to be careful not to let things get too lopsided one way or the other. As the cliche goes, the object is not to win, but not to lose, and to keep the game going.
8 Catfish = 1 Octo-puss
