Holy crap. Let's send nuclear missles up the tailpipe of any car with a burnt out light. After all, it is a safety hazard, and we want the public to be protected.

Mood music: Fake Beach Goths by Mannequin Porn. Silly me, when I heard this song for the first several times, I thought it was about goth wannabies.

I saw Thirteen the other day. Not too bad. I heard a nasty rumor News Corp was fronting for it, but didn't see any logo at the start of the movie...plenty of Fox Searchlight and Sony Classics on the previews though.

Slashdot VIPs

People on slashdot who are significant...as I remember anyway.

• volkerdi - maintainer of Slackware.
• linuxbaby - The creator of CDBaby....I think.
• m.dillon - Was a developer for FreeBSD, now works on his own version Dragonfly.
• Bruce Perens - More or less the posterboy for Open Source. IIRC, he even coined the term.
• pjones
• CowboyNeal - The coolest person who works on Slashdot.
• Sarcasta - Well...I'm not sure if she belongs on this list, but she is funny and married to one of the Slashdot monkeys. Look at her site, it's cool. I loved the milk cow poster. :-D
• sreilly - I think has some sort of significance, but I can't remember why.
• Submarine - Same as above...anyone know this guy? I wish I could take notes on the Slashdot system. Perhaps I should've made a text file...

Reason #666 why the MPAA is evil - check this! One of many examples of the entertainment cartel flooding the internet with bogus DMCA complaints. Too bad small individual users who have been pounded don't have a voice. They probably just lose their internet connection or some odd thing. Then we'd see the real depth to the problem. I'm sure they number in the thousands.

I was looking through my old bookmarks and found slashgoth. It's like Slashdot's cool little sister.

Here is a Halloween game. Yes, it's a java applet with shitty graphics.

While I'm posting, if you haven't taken a look at the Internet Ray Tracing Competition before, check it out. They have some good stuff.

As some of you may know, I've been thinking of buying a GameCube. However I may be moving/traveling a lot in the coming months.

The GameBoy advance seems to have some fun games. It even has Super Monkey Ball. Are they just as fun and playable?

I've noticed the GameCube appears to come in some sort of carrying case. Is is good for traveling? Would I have too much trouble hooking it up to hotel &etc TVs? What about cheap portable TVs? Maybe I could just bring a TV along in the car. Don't have a car yet, but looking into getting one--there's a nice trashy Ford Escort Wagon with my name on it. ;-)

Ideas? Suggestions? Flames? Should I just watch the paint dry instead? Or should I just spend my money on hugs from prostitutes? I know I would increase my sanity if I had more hugs. :-)

The women at MAdGE have a great argument for genetic engineering! Who wouldn't want such an enhancement? I for one would be first in line to be modified with this great technology. I just hope the milking machine is optional as it would be painful and cumbersome to have those things attached to my chest all day...then again, I may like it. }:8P

I've mentioned this system on Slashdot, and meant to mention it in my last JE. I figure I may as well write a JE on it.

There is this P2P network called The Circle. It not only has file sharing (with Debian apt-get functionality), but an IRC like chat system and a group messaging system as well. The reason I am talking about it here is the group messaging has an interesting moderation system. They call it "trust based".

Basically you move a slider according to how much you trust another user. If you move it towards the left, it means you think the person is a liar, annoying, stupid, or you just hate them. (Like a foe in slashdot.) Towards the right, you trust them, you like their posts. (like a friend[1] in slashdot) If it's in the middle, you don't feel either way about the user. It's not a binary sort of thing. The trust value can vary in any amount you want, more than just foe/neutral/friend) You can rate individual posts this way as well.

I don't remember the exact way the trust values were calculated. More or less, the post's default was rated by how much you trust the poster. If you haven't rated the poster, then the system goes by others' trust values adjusted by how much you trust them. If that post was rated by you (or a user you trust), then the rating overrides the poster's rating. Posts with a rating below a certain threshold are deleted from your computer (so you don't have to see untrusted posts). Posts are also sorted by rating, so you will see higher rated posts first.

I think this system would work very well--they didn't have many users when I was on it, and almost no posts. Everyone can moderate. You will probably see posts you want. No one person can control the rating of a post, everyone will see different ratings according to who (and how much) they trust/distrust. In this system, you can see what others think of you. (all ratings are shown) Troll posts shouldn't last long. I believe new users have a default of neutral, so unless you go for strict a config, you'll still see them. The system also allows anonymous posting (not sure if this is good or not).

Keep in mind The Circle is still in beta and the group messages weren't a high priority, so the interface is clunky. They didn't even support threading when I was using it. Also, this type of system wouldn't work well on a web board (like slashdot). It'd probably take too much processing time.

[1] Update: mistake fixed

The subject line doesn't really mean anything. I just like the way it sounds. An entry for some misc things I thought I should mention.[1] MsGeek: you have replies in your journal turned off, so I replied here (further down).

For those of you who are hiding under a rock, Master Knox has published the images for the Slashdot Photo Contest. Tet was kind enough to make a thumbnail sheet. May the Great Internet Goddess have mercy on their bandwidth. Inspired by the amazing photos (they have some hot ones in there!), Bethanie asks the eternal question "What Sexy Is."

Ms Geek has become discouraged by the moderators on crack. Don't worry love, you're not the only one. In fact, you get lots of upmods, so be happy. Join us in the glorious land of Journals, and the trolls will have a more difficult time finding you.

As for the posts you mentioned, technically the offtopic modded post was offtopic[2], and if you know FAQNatzis like I do, they like to arbitrarily punish people in the worst way. The stupid bloke was probably saying to himself "They should delete the message, block her account, and kick her off her ISP! In fact, all the posts on this entire site are offtopic! I'll mod them all! Damn! Out of mod points...guess I'll have to kick some puppies for playing in my front yard." That whole thread was marked with OT, troll, and flamebait mods.

As for the flamebait post, was proably some luser who's girlfriend couldn't sing a tune to save her live, and his copy of Autotune was the only reason she goes out with him. ;-) I don't think anyone is out to get you specifically--if those are the only ones, I didn't see any others. Just wait until someone modbombs you with all 5 of their mod point across a wide variety of discussions including JEs.[3] That's when you know you've pissed someone off! Try it sometime, you may like it. :-)

BTW MsGeek, I love the subject line: "Autotune must die." Classic. You don't mind if I use it do you? I hope not. It could be a new trend.

[1] Apologies to Surak if this seems too much like his weekly recap.

[2] ...but is anything really offtopic?

[3] Happened to me once. (or was it twice?)

Dubya didn't ask me to leak this information!

My roommate decided to pay the bill. Don't know why he lead us to believe he wasn't going to. Maybe he changed his mind?

It looks like I'll be off the internet for a while. The roommate who handles the isp bill decided not to pay, yet was still happy to take money for it. Since that is the only real option for internet access from my home besides dialup between 2am-5am, I won't be posting much. (Using a crappy kiosk now--25 cents/minute, and it has a huge strip of ads on the side.) I love you all. From the front page, one would think there aren't nice people on slashdot. ;-)

I need to stay off the front page. I'm getting too pissy for my own good.

In other news, I couldn't resist friending Surak. I thought most of his journal entries were only the somewhat entertaining weekly recaps (as everyone likes to link to them). This after I defriended a bunch of people because I didn't want to keep up with all the journal entries. Oh well, I was starting to see a gap there anyway...

I spend too much time on Slashdot.

I'm migrating from Linux to FreeBSD. One of the major things which is keeping it from going smoothly is the need to be able to access files between each one's partitions. I thought about using my old DOS partition (1 Gig), but fat doesn't keep track of permissions (maybe I should just bite the bullet). But also it would be nice to just use the Linux partitions from FreeBSD.

I could use FreeBSD's kernel drivers for ext2, but the docs say it may be unstable and outdated, so I am afraid to use them. Do they work? I'm using FreeBSD 4.8. If not, are there alternatives? Searching freebsd.org only turns up articles from 1996. There is a Linux+FreeBSD Howto, but it doesn't say anything about the stablilty of FreeBSD's ext2 driver. I've looked at Freshmeat and whatnot, but the few tools I've found are simplistic. The best one seems to work like an ftp program. Not very convenient. Is there a userland daemon where I can mount an ext2 partion in FreeBSD (that way if the thing crashes, my entire system won't be screwed)?

Oh well, my FreeBSD install is somewhat messed up anyway--accidently got all this GNOME crap installed because it was a dependency for some other package...will have to hunt down that package and kill it. Sendmail has to die as well. If the ext2 driver trashes my hard drive, I'll just reinstall, I guess. So, should I live on the wild side?

Just making notes.

Karnaugh Maps -- an easy way to simplify boolean expressions. Draw a two dimensional grid, the X/Y axis are the different possible inputs, and the cells contain the desired output. Inputs are expressed as the value if input is true, or the not value if input is false. Surround all ones/on/true with the largest circles possible (widths only in 2 to the Xth power). The inputs which contain both true and false values within the circle can be eliminated. Inputs which are only true -> the value. Inputs which are only false -> the inverted (not) value. The resultant values for a circle are ANDed together, and all the circle expressions are ORed toether.

• Wikipedia entry
• maxmon From some book called "Bebop to the Boolean Boogie"...looks kind of interesting...
• Common error when chosing circles
• nist.gov

Hmmm...may make a fun video game. Probably better than Minesweeper!

I was just reading Slashdot, and an idea hit me.

From this article (posted by rkz): But the bar owners are in a bind. If a person is caught smoking it, is the bar that is fined, not the individual.

This form of forced "self censorship" sounds shockingly like something I was hearing about China and how they censor information about SARS on the internet and SMS. Force the business owners to take measures to stop people from being able to commit illegal (or potentially illegal) acts instead of punishing the actual "criminals". The fat lawsuits against McDonalds work this way as well. In a more direct correlation, the DMCA does it too--though for corporations instead of the government.

This is a good story about China and SMS: SMS, SARS, And Censorship June 2003. At any rate, it goes into the details.

In March last year it required all websites and domestic and foreign internet providers to sign a "self-discipline pact" obliging them not to disseminate "harmful texts or news likely to jeopardise national security and social stability, violate laws and regulations, or spread false news, superstitions and obscenities".

Sound familiar? Just substitue "intellectual property" for "national security and social stability" and you just described how ISPs are regulated in the US.

A report about China's censorship from the State Department itself. US State Department: Expert Commission Links Spread of SARS, China's Legal System.

Maybe the US isn't quite at the level of China, but it's sad how the US is degenerating into behaviors which are typical of oppressive communist regimes.

Some time ago, I found this supposed true story which started the "rocket car" urban legend. I thought some of you might like it. :-)