Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Yet another NSA shill pointing fingers at someo (Score 1) 667

God forbid somebody who happens to work for or be a Congressperson spread disinfomation by alphabetizing categories...

So, judging by the reaction to the article (the whole thread from this submission),

No, not the whole thread. See below.

each and every single employee of Russian state media responds directly to Putin (even those who, say, use their wifi networks),

In the posting to which you responded, I said "just as somebody working at or for the VGTRK isn't necessarily acting on behalf of the Russian government.", which says that employees of Russian state media are not necessarily acting on behalf of the Russian government". The person who made the edit in question might well have been acting on his or her own; I'm not going to assume that they were acting part of an officially-organized propaganda campaign, or even a propaganda campaign at all, any more than I'm going to assume, at this point, that the Russians had anything to do with the decision to shoot down the plane.

but some edit directly from a political/administrative institution only "alphabetizes categories".

In the posting to which you responded, I said that one particular edit, namely the one referred to here was only "alphabetizing categories", and that one other edit, namely the one referred to here, merely added a serial comma.

If your goal was to demonstrate that people from IP addresses assigned to the US congress edit Wikipedia pages, those edits might be relevant; if your goal was to show edits, from IP addresses assigned to the US congress, that show a pro-US bias, those edits are completely irrelevant - this one might be more relevant.

Comment Re:Yet another NSA shill pointing fingers at someo (Score 4, Informative) 667

God forbid somebody who happens to work for or be a Congressperson spread disinfomation by alphabetizing categories...

...or adding serial commas!

You might want to limit yourself to examples where somebody's changing the tone of an article to favor (or mock) some particular view, like the rest of the links.

And, of course, a particular Congressperson or staffer for that Congressperson isn't necessarily acting on behalf of the US Government, just as somebody working at or for the VGTRK isn't necessarily acting on behalf of the Russian government. (Perhaps it'd be more likely in the latter case, but if it were somebody posting from the Duma in that case, or somebody from the Voice of America in the former case, it'd be a closer match.)

Comment Re:Evolution (Score 1) 253

I think it's more likely that more people are becoming obese because of exactly one factor: age. They are living artificially prolonged lifetimes due to access to adequate food and to medicine. It's easier to get fat when you are 50 than when you are 30 because of the natural changes in your metabolism.

Comment Re:Evolution (Score 1) 253

:-)

You make it sound like starving people are getting fat too.

If they are becoming obese, the particular individual has a surplus of caloric intake, if only for this year or month. This is not to say that they have proper nutrition. So I am not at all clear that the fact that there is obesity in the third world is confounding evidence.

Comment Evolution (Score 1) 253

For most of the existence of mankind and indeed all of mankind's progenitors, having too much food was a rare problem and being hungry all of the time was a fact of life. We are not necessarily well-evolved to handle it. So, no surprise that we eat to repletion and are still hungry. You don't really have any reason to look at it as an illness caused by anything other than too much food.

Comment Re:Really miss the 68k (Score 1) 236

Or maybe Intel picked up the ball and used the 68k (as their engineers wanted) for the original IBM PC.

Presumably you mean "IBM picked up the ball...".

Intel? They're the guys that make memory and strange CPUs for calculators, right?

No, at the time, they were the guys who make 8-bit and 16-bit computers used in a variety of applications; I'm not sure whether they were still making the 4004 or not.

Comment Re:PPC macs were awful (Score 1) 236

Besides, if you were really serious about running a server with Mac hardware, you loaded up MkLinux or bastardized AUX implementation. Hell, there was even a Mach kernel implementation for Mac hardware.

...which was what MkLinux ran atop ("Mk" for "microkernel", although how micro the Mach kernel is could be considered a "topic for discussion").

Comment Re:Pairing? (Score 1) 236

I don't think the ISA was a goal, because PowerPC was really just a subset of the POWER architecture

Superset of a subset, to be precise. For example, PowerPC omitted the multiplier-quotient register, and multiply/divide instructions using it, that were in the POWER instruction set architecture, but added multiply and divide instructions that used the general-purpose registers.

that IBM currently had in their mainframes and servers.

Presumably meaning "RS/6000 workstations and servers"; the instruction set architecture in the mainframes was System/370 (or S/370 XA or ESA or whatever).

Comment Re: If you pay... (Score 2) 15

Martin,

The last time I had a professional video produced, I paid $5000 for a one-minute commercial, and those were rock-bottom prices from hungry people who wanted it for their own portfolio. I doubt I could get that today. $8000 for the entire conference is really volunteer work on Gary's part.

Someone's got to pay for it. One alternative would be to get a corporate sponsor and give them a keynote, which is what so many conferences do, but that would be abandoning our editorial independence. Having Gary fund his own operation through Kickstarter without burdening the conference is what we're doing. We're really lucky we could get that.

Comment Re:One hell of a slashvertisement! (Score 2) 15

I think TAPR's policy is that the presentations be freely redistributable, but I don't know what they and Gary have discussed. I am one of the speakers and have always made sure that my own talk would be freely redistributable. I wouldn't really want it to be modifiable except for translation and quotes, since it's a work of opinion. Nobody should get the right to modify the video in such a way as to make my opinion seem like it's anything other than what it is.

Comment Re:If you pay... (Score 2) 15

Yes. I put in $100, and I am asking other people to put in money to sponsor these programs so that everyone, including people who did not put in any money at all, can see them for free. If you look at the 150+ videos, you can see that Gary's pretty good at this (and he brought a really professional-seeming cameraman to Hamvention, too) and the programs are interesting. Even if at least four of them feature yours truly :-) He filmed every one of the talks at the TAPR DCC last year (and has filmed for the past 5 years) and it costs him about $8000 to drive there from North Carolina to Austin, Texas; to bring his equipment and to keep it maintained, to stay in a motel, to run a multi-camera shoot for every talk in the conference, and to get some fair compensation for his time in editing (and he does a really good job at that).

Slashdot Top Deals

And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones

Working...