Slashdot should allow you to bookmark stories you like. Its way to difficult to lose a good story you want to get back to later.

Bookmarks:
How to lock down XP

UPDATE: Thanks to Thunderbirds new RSS ability, I can keep a link of some (not all) of previous slashdot stories. This provides one way of keep track of stories I like, because I can delete the stories I don't like from the containing folder. But I'd still like to see some support for this is SlashCode as well.

Chris Weber

The topic of fixing Star Trek was revisted here on slashdot in June of 2004. I wanted to post the link here before it's lost in Slashdot's sea of stories.

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/21/171255&tid=

Over the past couple of weeks I have been trying to explore the various web engines that are freely available on the internet. For two years I have been using postnuke and I think its time for a change.

I have discovered Movable Type (MT) , Moodle, and WordPress (WP). MT and WP are both blog engines and Moodle is specifically targeted for schools. I have successfull installed them all and out of the three I like MT the best. Sure Moodle offeres a lot, such as Active Directory authentication, Quizzes, and a good look and feel. But MT is the only web engine I have found that movtivates the user to control the theme of the site throgh Cascading Style Sheets.

I have had fun over the past couple of days trying to get the stylesheet to correctly perform shadow effects. From my efforts, I have shown that IE and Mozilla handle positioning differently. Good thing I don't have to care about that. I'll just focus on coding for mozilla.

Today I have done two things, I've been meaning to do. First I enabled comments on my journal posts (turns out I'm really not that interesting, no suprise there). Second I turned on some modifiers for viewing comments on slashdot. I find that I don't have much time to read comments on slashdot and without modifiers I get a lot of angry and misinformed posts. I'd rather just pull out the interesting and insightful posts and lower the offtopic posts in priority.

I'm still experimenting with the settings to find best one for me, but already I've seen the impact. Now when I read slashdot I see a wealth of information, but alas very few funny posts. I guess I could boost those as well. The change has been so dramatic that I'm thinking about FINALLY change my sig. I think I'll make it into, Don't blame me, I was educated by +2 Interesting and +2 Insightful. Yes, I am really that lame.

I've started this journal entry to be a placeholder for when I come up with ideas that could improve slashdot. Please feel free to add your own ideas here if you are passing by.

1. Moderator-mode comment settings. When a slashdot user is giving moderator points allow for a different set of comment preferences to take place.

Slashdot's suggestions for moderators is to set the comments on -1 Raw and Uncut and looks through the comments for good posts. But when I'm not moderating I like to set my posts to bring out the interesting, informative, and insightful posts and decrease the visibility of Offtopic posts.

I would prefer two sets of settings for comments for these two different modes of viewing.

The CRN (Center for Responsible Nanotechnology) reports that nanofactories (like the ones that were installed in every home in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age) will arrive "almost certainly within 20 years". In short they claim that molecular nanotechnology manufacturing (MNT) will solve many of our world's problems, catalyze a technologic revolution, and start the greatest arms race we've ever seen. It will change society to such a degree that we should figure out how to not kill ourselves when it arrives.

Here's what they say about MNT's timeline:
"The Space Shuttle took less than ten years to design and build, from 1972 to 1981. The atomic bomb took only three years, from 1942 to 1945. Both of these programs involved more new science research and more development of new technologies and techniques than an assembler program would likely require. As analyzed above, they probably cost more too. The main question in estimating a timeline for fabricator development, then, is when it will be technically and politically feasible. There are probably five or more nations, and perhaps several large companies, that could finance a molecular fabricator effort starting in this decade. The technical feasibility depends on the enabling technologies. Even a single present-day technology, dip-pen nanolithography, may be able to fabricate an entire proto-fabricator with sufficient effort. At this point, we have not seen anything to make us believe that a five-year $10 billion fabricator project, starting today, would be infeasible, though we don't yet know enough to estimate its chance of success. Five years from now, we expect that a five-year project will be obviously feasible, and its cost may be well under $5 billion."

source

I just found out that my November 18th article about Government Transparency was published by Slashdot. Wow, I totally forgot about writing that. Now that I've read through the comments it seems that some people got it and some didn't.

Transparency offers an organziation full disclosure of information so that all descision makers can make their best judgements. Governmental Transparency discloses information to the descision makers (who through direct or indirect means are the taxpayers) so that we can make the best descisions on what to support, when to voice our support, and to whom.

This decentralization of information can be a deterrent to secret bureacrating squandering of taxpayer funds. Much like micro cameras became a deterrent for crime in David Brim's Second City. When everyone has information about what is budgeted, where it is budgeted, and if budgetees use the funds wisely, a strong incentive for lawfulness is created.

A strong chance of misinformation is also create. Yes, this system could be abused by terrorists to infer how we are defending ourselves, by political parties to give perceived truths to baseless claims, and by criminals to learn how to better cheat or beat the system.

Obviously, a government couldn't be fully transparent. For example, we wouldn't want to tell our enemies what secret operatives we are paying, or even how much we are paying for all secret operatives everywhere. That information could be used to infer how strong our intelligence gathering is. So we have to keep hidden our classified secrets.

We also can be publishing personally confidential information. Social Security numbers and medical documents should not be published as that promotes identity theft. Other personal documents such as phone bills, Instant Message correspondence, personal finance documents should also be unavailable yet assessable to investigates after obtaining a court order (much as they can now).

Political parties while obviously use this influx of politically charged information as a way to shade the opposition in the worst light available. Yet, I believe that good, honest journalism can do a lot refute political hooey. In the end citizens will be able to have all the facts on their screens.

Well, its 2003 and a lot of things have changed. I have a steady job as an IT instructor and have recently finished my MCSE. I am working towards getting Network+ certified. I also married my long-time girlfriend Karen and she is about to finish her masters studies.

At work I have implemented a lot of different MS products, Exchange, SQL Server, Sharepoint, MS Office, Active Directory w/ Group Policies, and I'm working on networking our two locations via Active directory, some routers, and a private line.

So I feel that I've gained enough knowledge to beat out my former self for a job now. I'm thinking about becoming Linux+ or Java certified but my employer probably won't cover the cost of those.

In short, life is good, the tech is good, and I'm enjoying it.

In the past I have tried many times to maintain a journal. I have never been able to continue to write because of loss of interst or focus. Now, I not only have a strong focus, but a need to write down my thoughts.

This journal is also a way for fellow Nullset members to find me and communicate with me. For those of you who don't know about the Nullset, read our mission statement at

I like the idea of writing down one's thoughts. It allows the author to attack their thinking, to enable them to form sharper ideas. This can be done by presenting your ideas to others without spending extra time to consider an opposing point of view, but that method often lead to feeling dumb, offended, or naive. So journals can supply another way of practicing thought that lets interal conflict replace external arguements.

These are the kind of things I've been thinking about because I'm planning on building a website that will make a difference in this world. My idea isn't a completely new one, but it is one that I haven't found out on the net yet. And it is definitely one that has potential.