Post in here to talk about why you modded me up or down, post off-topic commentary, or just say hi.
Warning: Flash links
The old
Zero Wing + Engrish + Photoshop = All Your Base Are Belong To Us
Badgers + Mushrooms + Snake = Badgerx3
The new
From the creator of Badgerx3:
Weebles
+ Bob
+ 355/113
= Wobbl and Bob,
now on DVD.
At least in Indiana.
In the United States, federal law defines "copyright infringement" in Title 17, United States Code, and state law defines "theft". For example, in the State of Indiana, Indiana Code 35-43-4 defines the crime of "theft" as "knowingly or intentionally exert[ing] unauthorized control over property of another person, with intent to deprive the other person of any part of its value or use". In turn:
a person's control over property of another person is "unauthorized" if it is exerted: [...] by transferring or reproducing:
- (A) recorded sounds; or
- (B) a live performance;
without consent of the owner of the master recording or the live performance, with intent to distribute the reproductions for a profit."
So yes, even pedants should recognize that some copyright infringements are considered theft. If you can come up with analogous laws in other U.S. states, please post the details in comments.
Others have said this before me so this will not be anything new. If you want something new, stop reading here. (And possibly, visit another site.)
Moderation is broken. You know it, and I know it. It's broken because people can use the moderation system to punish people for disagreeing with them without fear of retribution. The idea that metamoderation will keep people from moderating comments into oblivion because they don't like the person or they don't agree with them is quite simply flat wrong. People don't care, and will just moderate any way they like.
There are basically two problems with moderation. The first is that there are moderation choices for underrated and overrated. The use of any moderation choice suggests that you feel a comment is one or the other of these two - if you felt it was properly rated, you wouldn't need to moderate it, would you? The second is that the "Funny" mod does not change karma. Even if you don't think that being funny is a good enough reason for bumping someone's karma up a point, consider the following scenario: A comment is modded from Score: 2 (karma bonus) to Score: 5, Funny, with 100% of moderation using the "funny" mod. Next, it is modded down as being Overrated twice, and your karma drops two points. Then, it is modded back up to +5, Funny with two more funny mods, and then modded back down twice with Overrated. Consequence: The loss of four karma points.
Essentially, the moderation system has become a tool by which users can punish people for comments with which they disagree, or simply being someone they don't like, without fear of any recrimination. Hence, I suggest the following band-aids on the system:
There are other ideas which I've been kicking around. For instance, delete the karma kap, but make it harder to gain karma and easier to lose karma when you have over 50 points. For example, from 51-100 points, require two positive moderations to gain a single karma point (award half-points) and from 101 points onward, also remove two karma points for each negative moderation. If you do this, it might be worth it to re-expose the karma score.
Other than that, the only way to really fix moderation is to have someone look at the users who employ the greatest negative moderation and determine if they are moderating fairly or not. If they are not, then their powers of moderation should be taken away permanently.
If you can't trust someone to post and moderate under the same story, how can you trust them to moderate at all?
That does it.
People often discuss several clique web sites that require some sort of invitation before essential parts of the site become available. I'm not a Freemason; I'm not big on secret societies. I try to ignore those sites to the extent that I can because I don't want to jump in head-first without testing the waters.
Advogato
In my spare time, I maintain free software for PC and Game Boy Advance and am in the middle of writing an ambitious GBA programming tutorial. However, I'm not entirely sure that the projects I maintain have a high enough profile in the general interest community to attract the "certifications" that allow me to write anywhere but inside my own profile page. Free software advocates seem to prefer to certify people who design their software to run natively on popular free software operating systems that run on PC hardware. However, though I do make an effort to use cross-platform toolkits, I currently do not and cannot test my PC software on any platform but Microsoft Windows. I can't just switch to GNU/Linux because it has no drivers for peripherals that I own, and I cannot afford to purchase new compatible peripherals. I can't just dual-boot because I have processes that don't like to be started and stopped every hour with downtime. Therefore, it appears I'm not the model free software developer that Advogato is shooting for.
MetaFilter
MetaFilter doesn't accept new users because it wants the community to remain small, that is, not much over 17,000 members. The administrator discovered that not only does the MeFi system eat copious amounts of valuable traffic and computing resources, but also the MeFi format itself doesn't scale past that many members for at least two reasons: things would drop off a reasonably-sized front page too quickly, and it would take too much labor to clean up inevitable dupes. It appears that the administrator wants erroneous information to persist uncorrected on comment pages and wants prospective new users to migrate to competing sites such as MonkeyFilter. Likewise, people who found Kuro5hin locked-down for several months were driven to Hulver's site instead.
Orkut
This is the biggie. Orkut is a purportedly popular by-invitation-only social networking web site. From what I've gathered in comments to this Slashdot story, Orkut is just a big bulletin board, not much better than a Yahoo! Group and much slower and less stable. Second, it's said to be full of Brazilians who refuse to use English in communities designated as English-speaking. Third, be prepared to delete Portuguese spam from your internal private message mailbox. Finally, for all I can tell, it might not even exist; it could just be an elaborate hoax, as broad and deep from the outside as EA's old Majestic immersive game.
Oh, and the name "Orkut" means something not safe for work in Finnish.
Gmail
Other than the increased storage space, is there really anything significant that Gmail provides that other popular web mail doesn't? Does it warrant switching e-mail providers from SpamCop?
Here's an invite code. Or here's a site that doesn't need an invite code. Just try the site, and if you can't get the hang of it, quit.
I value my time. Between participating in online communities [S] [G] [D] [B] [N], exercising at a local gym, writing free software, and babysitting, I feel that I may already be spreading myself too thinly. In fact, I have had to become nearly inactive in several communities [K] [U] [P] [T] [R], to the point where some administrators have even deleted my account one or more times.
Perhaps when somebody decides that one of these communities wants me, by sending me a well-reasoned explanation of what I could get out of a membership, such as job leads in northeast Indiana, then I'll decide that I want the community. If you wish to contact me privately, feel free to do so.
The question is, is it a jihad against me, or the work of a lone fucknut? Or perhaps, are people just reacting to my "last journal entry"? I probably should have given this one an innocuous lead-in and title just to find out...
I can't be the only one who would like to see a game console based on inexpensive commodity hardware, using as the platform linux with opengl and sdl. If based on a PC it would have fixed hardware and software configurations available on a fairly fixed (and fairly long) time scale and you could target whichever one(s) you liked. The version you buy in the store has everything on a single board and is not (trivially) upgradable but is otherwise no different from a high quality PC. You do have to sell it at a profit, because this is where most of the money comes from, but it doesn't have to cost much. Graphics don't have to be better than a PC, but they do have to look good on TVs.
You do have to send source to people for everything but the interface but lo and behold, that's basically all you have to write, besides perhaps tweaking some drivers. Anyway, the other way to make money is to put it in stores and become a producer to put games in stores as well with a unified marketing scheme and such based on licensing fees. People will be able to make unlicensed games but they won't have access to your brand and your position. You will of course need brand and position for this.
Naturally, it doesn't have to be based on a PC, but that does seem to be about the cheapest way to go, especially (for example) using a 32 bit AMD processor with either a VIA or nVidia chipset. This way, you don't end up writing drivers yourself. If you commit to buying enough parts, people will do that for you so long as you have firm commitments, by which I mean contracts. There is however plenty of room for a system based on the PowerPC or a MIPS core, though it does seem that neither Nintendo nor Sony are particularly interested in MIPS right now.
The Constitution for the United States of America is the supreme written law of the United States. It lays out a set of powers for an elected legislature called the Congress, reserving power over everything else to the several states (50 at last count). The Congress regulates commerce across state lines, but each state regulates commerce within its borders. This would seem to allow each state to set its own drinking age.
However, the Constitution has more to say: "The Congress shall have power
Each state has power to set its own minimum age to purchase and consume "drinks" (beverages containing ethanol), but the Congress will not grant highway funds to states whose drinking age is less than 21 years. To make it easier to enforce this law, states have established separate licensing for establishments that serve food: "restaurants" admit minors, and "bars" don't. States also limit the amount of drinks that restaurants can serve.
A "rock band" is a group of people who routinely perform live rock music together in front of an audience. A rock band can choose to perform in any of several venues: a recording studio, a stadium, a theatre, a restaurant, or a bar. Problem is that many people won't spend money on a record they've never heard, and radio stations charge an exorbitant "independent promotion" fee to get a record played. Stadiums and theatres also charge an exorbitant venue fee, which many local rock bands cannot afford. This leaves restaurants and bars, and very few restaurants find it profitable to let rock bands perform on their premises.
Local rock bands also have trouble getting their records heard on the radio.
Therefore, minors have nowhere to turn to see a local rock band perform. A captive audience of teenage listeners is exactly what the largest publishers of recorded music (hereinafter "major labels") want, as they find it easier to cultivate a Britney Spears or *NSYNC than to find real musical talent. Instead of buying records at shows, they buy what they've heard on the radio, which the major labels control, or what they've seen in stadiums and theaters, which the major labels also control.
Google has more information on how the legal drinking age has affected the local music scene.
In the story Stallman: Accusatory Report Deliberately Confuses on LinuxInsider, linked from Stallman vs. Ken Brown, we have the following jewel:
"And the open-source and free-software movements are very different," he added, arguing that the latter has a set of values codified by Stallman's oft-quoted "four freedoms," while the former is primarily commercial in its aims. "By misusing those terms, it's meant to confuse people who don't know any better," he said.
All of you who think that "Open Source" is synonymous with "Free Software" need to read this. Then read it again. This is fairly offtopic but please, read this paragraph. When I tell people that a piece of software is open source they often say "But it has a restrictive license!" "Yes," I say, "It is open, but it is not free."
Stallman gets it. Hopefully Stallman's army of party line-following fanboy-droids can pick up on this and follow suit.
My new cafepress store features a hat, tee shirt, bumper sticker and license plate frame emblazoned "IT Pros do it under your desk" in attractive Courier lettering. For all those geeks looking for the next way to really bring across what a classy individual they are, this is your ticket.
If anyone wants me to put it on anything else, just let me know and I'll whip it up. I know that anyone who does so will only be doing it because of laziness, which is why I haven't done anything like this long before now.
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This is absolutely fucking retarded. My comments (over the last four hours apparently) have spawned more non-flame responses and attracted more positive moderation than those of the typical poster* and yet I am still penalized for posting?
* (The typical poster whose user page I view.)
I thought slashdot was about interaction. To that end, I have been commenting like a madman. Now I find out it's about doing what you're told. I'm glad we got that clear, anyway.
Conventional wisdom holds that at least the following five problems block the adoption of Free operating environments such as GNU/Linux on home computers. What steps have GNU/Linux advocates begun to take in order to fix these?
An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.
