We protect the stupid, because we are all stupid in our own way. I highly doubt that many of the people on Slashdot are qualified to assess medical treatments and those who claim to do so are mostly choosing their own authority (one of which could be the FDA).
I, for one, welcome institutions like the FDA because it is comforting to know that there is an independent organization that evaluates the claims of medical devices and treatments. It may not be a perfect institution, but it is fully accountable to the law as well as public ire when things do go wrong. But most of all it uses rational methods in order to test medical claims.
Ratings may not be the whole story when it comes down to a game or movie's content, but the purpose of a rating is to restrict the sale of a product so that the proper authority (e.g. the parent) can make a final decision.
And I do support the state restricting the sale of a product to minors. While the authority on if the child watches or plays it rightfully belongs to a parent rather than the state, that authority also rightfully belongs to a parent rather than a retailer. Handing the retailer the authority to make that decision is pure idiocy since they are more likely to be motiated by money or apathy than the rights of the parent. Handing that authority to the state gives ratings legal standing, which self-regulation just doesn't have.
I was on the swings one day with a bunch of children, then noticed that they were all swinging higher a few of them were flipping their heads back for the thrill of it. So I decided to try it, and it was scary. Especially the vertigo from flipping my head back.
It made me realise how safe I, as an adult tend to act and how it takes all of the thrills out of life.
I work with children, and sometimes they get sent home with bruises and scraped knees just because they were playing so vigorously. Most of the children I've seen will cry for a little bit, accept a bandage, then will be eager to do the same thing again.
Parents though, well, some of them will assume that the supervisors were negligent or abusive. Not all of them, not even many of them, since they tend to know how their kids play. But it is the ones that wrap their child in a protective coccoon that you have to be petrified of. Even those parents aren't so bad once they get to know you, to trust you, but a lot of them don't even bother.
The unfortunate truth is that those overly protective parents count for a lot because the consequences are many. Lawsuits is the often cited one, but losing your job or your license is an even bigger and more real concern. So all of the children suffer.
In a lot of senses, Apple's solution is much more elegant since you can figure out the orientation of a device that can be rotated around 3 axes (assuming triple axis accelerometer), the sensor can be in motion and the device still works, you can have a bit of a hysteresis effect in the rotation, and it does not use hazardous chemicals that are fluid at STP. Remember, it's the implementation that they're patenting, not the idea.
That being said, I do feel that the solution is obvious since one of the first things you notice when using an accelerometer is that it detects the Earth's gravitational field. For a stationary device, that makes it quite easy to determine the orientation. For a moving device, you could still hazard a good guess.
I was playing around with a Wiimote on my Mac a few years ago, looking at the plots generated from the X/Y/Z accelerometers. The first thing that I noticed about the readings for a stationary Wiimote was, "oh, one of the accelerometers is giving a non-zero reading." My second thought was, "like duh, that's acceleration due to the gravitational field." Then I tested the theory, and it worked.
Now I'm not going to claim that I came up with rotating a display based upon the readings from accelerometers. On the other hand, if you put me on the design team for a portable device and someone said, "how can we implement a rotating display based on orientation?" Well, I would know the answer in an instant. And it's not because I'm a genius or invested a huge amounts of money in it. It is simply a case of knowing that part A worked and part A would solve the problem posed. To me that qualifies as obvious. To a court, well, I can't claim to understand what goes through the minds of judges and lawyers.
Whether you like it or not, you're going to lose some privacy when you're in a public space. Unless you go walking around wearing a mask or a disguise, you will lose your ability to conceal your identity because there's always a chance that someone can recognize. The only difference in this case is that the someone may be a machine.
If there are any restrictions on this technology, it should be based upon how the information is used rather than the use of the tool itself. For example, the police should not be able to detain a person purely upon a computer generated result and should use their existing procedures while identifying an individual (e.g. to avoid false positives). The use of the data in situations where a person would normally expect privacy (e.g. in their home) should also be curtailed.
... but why are we trying to straddle SSD onto a standard that was presumably developed for magnetic media?
My meager understanding of the situation is that standards like SATA were developed to read and write for media with symmetric block sizes (i.e. you have to read as much data as you write at one time), with no real consideration to physical limitations such as the maximum number of writes, and with the consideration that it was difficult to map a disk to a physical memory location (e.g. due to latency).
Ignoring the issue of compatibility with both current OSes and BIOSes, wouldn't it be best to develop a bus that is specific to SSD and is presumably closer to being directly addressed by the CPU via. contemporary OSes?
Ignoring any user agreement that we implicitly agreed to by posting to Slashdot, there is a quite clear statement posted at the bottom of each page: "Trademarks property of their respective owners. Comments owned by the poster." So yes, you own the rights to your comments just as I own the rights to mine. Similarly, you have the rights to "process" my comments (e.g. quote and comment upon the appropriate sections). What you don't have the right to is the original comment without "processing" (e.g. the entire comment without commentary).
At any rate, it probably depends a lot upon context. Slashdot is a venue for discussion. As such it follows a certain set of rules. Photography is a different context, with a different set of rules. Snapping pictures with a photographer at the helm (i.e. the initial camera's settings) and a photo editor at the stern (e.g. cropping, colour adjustments, etc.) is yet a different context.
What I would suggest, in this case, is the original photographs have dubious copyright status (since a bunch of monkeys were involved). This is because it is probably a first, as such it has no social or legal context. Yet the processed photographs would have a much better defined social and legal context, and they are most likely property of the company that they were contracted out to.
So unless you can get your evolved monkey fingers on the originals, republishing them is almost certainly a violation of their copyrights. Even if you could get your hands on the originals, you would still have to deal with the uncertainty of the legal system determining who actually owns the rights. Monkeys or humans. (Personally I'd support the monkeys, but I'm just one member of a larger society that has to make that decision.)
I'm guessing that any claims to copyright will be made over processing done to the photo prior to publication and, perhaps any setup done to the camera before they monkeys started monkeying around. After all, it's hard to get photos that good by pure chance.
People have created regardless of copyright and patent protection, and I doubt that any particular industry would collapse if we revoked those protections tomorrow. That being said, individual businesses would probably collapse since their business models depend upon those protections and we'd probably see more incremental oneupmanship than revolutionary progress (but I suspect the end result would be the same).
Teaching is a similar profession in that it usually depends upon the fair use/fair dealing. While much of it is publicly funded, a huge proportion of it is private.
Just to be clear, I didn't mean to suggest that the singled out demographic agree with child porn or exploitation. Yet they do seem to be more willing to accept it as the cost of (their absolutist views of) freedom. Well, things just don't seem to be quite as absolute once you are responsible for someone else's life.
CP is a unique case because it is illegal and seems to be illegal in most jurisdictions. So if a domain is blocked because of that content (and from what I've heard, the Aussies are blocking domains and not IP addresses), it is because the domain's owner decided not to keep their operations clean. So, in many respects, they are to blame.
As for the consultation and (presumably follow-up legislation), that will ensure that the classification and censoring (keep in mind, they are distinct) are applied more uniformly and less arbitrarily.
Yes, parents should parent. And some parents do a very good job at it while others are negligent.
The thing is, even good parents don't have control over what a child hears and sees. Sometimes that is because they have to hand control over to other people. Sometimes it's because they need to give their child some independence, in order for their child to become independent.
How can a parent offer their child some independence without having the unscrupulous business owner pumping up violence and porn just to grab their allowance money? You can't unless you have ratings (or "classification" as the Aussies appear to call it) and accompanying penalties. I'm not going to claim that will stop everyone, but it will stop a few. And some of the others will be driven under by law enforcement.
This notion that a parent is the ultimate authority though is preposterous. Even a good parent can't and shouldn't provide a 24/7 escort, and a cell (erm, bedroom) with bars on the windows and a lock on the outside.
They're probably right about the convoluted questions deterring submissions. Yet I also think that's a good thing, since the people who submit their opinion should have an understanding of the issues.
I fear that articles such as this one will pull in a particular demographic who will share a narrow world view, say 20 something gamers who are not raising children and have no concern in community issues.
My apologies for that stereotype, but I've noticed that the perspective of young adults shifts radically once family and/or community plays a stronger role in their lives.
This is a piece of the flag that went up for the first moon landing. I don't care if it is the flag of another nation. I find it presumptuous to devalue the remnant because it never went to the moon. Heck, it's presumptuous to think that many people will ever own anything that actually went to the moon. It is even more absurd to assume that someone would buy it for its future selling price. The fact remains that it was part of humanities first foray to another planet. (And the Earth-Moon system is essentially a double planet system.) It is an important piece of history that says more about our future than almost any artifact dug out of the soil of our home planet.
To the nay-sayer's: just stuff it. You clearly have no appreciation of how important this achievement was. And it was unbelievably important since, within a few decades of achieving heavier than air flight, we managed to reach another world!
Of course, governments have been trying to deny people the opportunity to protest for generations. Sometimes their concerns are legitimate (e.g. riots due to the mob mentality), and sometimes they are not (since some protests are genuinely peaceful).
Even with the Facebook angle, I'm fairly certain that the situation is not unique. Stephen Harper (Prime Minister of Canada) was barring activists from the opposition due to statements on Facebook months prior to this Israel thing. And if Harper's Conservatives did it, it has probably been done by other people a million times before. There isn't a creative bone in the party's collective body.
Incidentally, I am neutral on Israel barring access to their country based upon Facebook shenanigans. I am opposed to people being placed on terrorism watch lists. The former is simply an expression of national sovereignty, even if I think it's foolish. The latter is an assumption of intent that may have far reaching impacts upon innocent lives.
Most of what you do online can still be done the traditional way. You can still use phone books to find people and businesses, maps to find places, books for entertainment or to learn about stuff. And so on.
The biggest hurdle will be other people's expectations. Some people simply expect you to be reachable via email, or (depending on your social circles) social networking sites, and so on.
Maybe the best solution to that is to obtain dialup Internet. That way you need to make a conscious decision about when you connect to the Internet and when you disconnect from it. I would not suggest using libraries or coffee shops, since you're really only translating your problem to another place and their hours dictate your hours. (Example: it may be best to grab your email and surf the web between 9 pm and 10 pm. You can't always do that by using someone else's WiFi, so you'd end up spending valuable daylight hours translating your Internet problem to the library and whittle away the evening hours watching TV.)
Ignore the privacy bit for a moment, because that seems to garner knee-jerk reactions around these parts, and look at the security bit.
There are a lot of transactions that need to be secure, yet would not qualify for the.secure network. For example: you could cram bank systems into the new network, but are you really going to allow every business that uses these financial systems on it (e.g. credit card transactions or trades on the stock market)? Even if you did, you would still end up with 'insecure' connections between the customer and the business. Or are you going to give every citizen a security token too? In that case, the ability to verify the identity of the user drops to nil since identify theft becomes an issue. Or people lending their identity to friends. Or people using loopholes in the system to create new identities.
Even a network which tightly restricts who could access it would face hurdles. Research labs attract all sort of riff-raff scientists and technicians. Some of those people will create bridges between the.secure network and everything else. Even if it is unintentional, because they are using the same systems to access secure databases as they use to access journals (and their goof-off resources). I'm not saying that it is impossible to stop that sort of thing, but it will be awfully difficult given the population involved.
I know the big thing about Ubuntu is that it is ready to go out of the box (so to speak), but people are always complaining about the default programs. And if you changed them to what the complainers wanted, other people would complain about the changes.
So why not give "advanced users" the option to install just the programs they want so that they can add in what they want later without a mess of orphaned packages. They don't even have to be sophisticated about it. Deselecting "Internet Applications" then adding Firefox, Thunderbird, and Pidgin in the Software Centre would be a lot easier than removing Empathy and Evolution then adding Thunderbird and Pidgin. (Never mind tracking down that orphaned package that leaves a dysfunctional Evolution icon hanging around or removing the other network applications that I just don't use.)
It's just an idea. After all, it could be tucked away behind that "advanced" button on the last screen so that the typical user will never be burdened/confused by it.
... after all, she goes around hiding strange packages every year.
While some disgust was expressed over a local ad campaign called, "report the suspicious, not the strange", it is essentially correct: we should be reporting suspicious activities, but there is a definite role for discretion.
Sometimes you can even ask the person what they're doing and discover, "hey, this geocaching thing is cool."
My guess as to why the 'advert farm' pages make it to Slashdot's front page most of the time, while original links don't: the secondary sources provide a good overview and are easier for a general audience to understand.
In this case, I wouldn't have even bothered looking at the project page because it is too much information thrown up all at once. After reading the secondary source I could see that there were several components of the project that I'm interested in, so I'll probably head over to the project pages later.
A leader who cannot face the questions of his constituents and provide them with answers that they accept is an authoritarian, not a democrat.
And yes, I realize that the questions are filtered so that this will end up being more of a public relations exercise. But that is still a heck of a lot better than the leaders of some nations who refuses to be questioned at all. Here's to you Mr. Harper (Prime Minister of Canada, for ye foreigners.)
Slashdot Mirror
We protect the stupid, because we are all stupid in our own way. I highly doubt that many of the people on Slashdot are qualified to assess medical treatments and those who claim to do so are mostly choosing their own authority (one of which could be the FDA).
I, for one, welcome institutions like the FDA because it is comforting to know that there is an independent organization that evaluates the claims of medical devices and treatments. It may not be a perfect institution, but it is fully accountable to the law as well as public ire when things do go wrong. But most of all it uses rational methods in order to test medical claims.
Ratings may not be the whole story when it comes down to a game or movie's content, but the purpose of a rating is to restrict the sale of a product so that the proper authority (e.g. the parent) can make a final decision.
And I do support the state restricting the sale of a product to minors. While the authority on if the child watches or plays it rightfully belongs to a parent rather than the state, that authority also rightfully belongs to a parent rather than a retailer. Handing the retailer the authority to make that decision is pure idiocy since they are more likely to be motiated by money or apathy than the rights of the parent. Handing that authority to the state gives ratings legal standing, which self-regulation just doesn't have.
I was on the swings one day with a bunch of children, then noticed that they were all swinging higher a few of them were flipping their heads back for the thrill of it. So I decided to try it, and it was scary. Especially the vertigo from flipping my head back.
It made me realise how safe I, as an adult tend to act and how it takes all of the thrills out of life.
I work with children, and sometimes they get sent home with bruises and scraped knees just because they were playing so vigorously. Most of the children I've seen will cry for a little bit, accept a bandage, then will be eager to do the same thing again.
Parents though, well, some of them will assume that the supervisors were negligent or abusive. Not all of them, not even many of them, since they tend to know how their kids play. But it is the ones that wrap their child in a protective coccoon that you have to be petrified of. Even those parents aren't so bad once they get to know you, to trust you, but a lot of them don't even bother.
The unfortunate truth is that those overly protective parents count for a lot because the consequences are many. Lawsuits is the often cited one, but losing your job or your license is an even bigger and more real concern. So all of the children suffer.
A scientist who knows pi to 1 significant figure is useless (e.g. they cannot make basic estimates).
A scientist who knows pi to 3 significant figures is efficient.
A scientist who knows pi to 1600 significant figures doesn't understand what they're doing.
Memorization is a basic part of learning, but we need to realize what is important to remember and what is not.
In a lot of senses, Apple's solution is much more elegant since you can figure out the orientation of a device that can be rotated around 3 axes (assuming triple axis accelerometer), the sensor can be in motion and the device still works, you can have a bit of a hysteresis effect in the rotation, and it does not use hazardous chemicals that are fluid at STP. Remember, it's the implementation that they're patenting, not the idea.
That being said, I do feel that the solution is obvious since one of the first things you notice when using an accelerometer is that it detects the Earth's gravitational field. For a stationary device, that makes it quite easy to determine the orientation. For a moving device, you could still hazard a good guess.
I was playing around with a Wiimote on my Mac a few years ago, looking at the plots generated from the X/Y/Z accelerometers. The first thing that I noticed about the readings for a stationary Wiimote was, "oh, one of the accelerometers is giving a non-zero reading." My second thought was, "like duh, that's acceleration due to the gravitational field." Then I tested the theory, and it worked.
Now I'm not going to claim that I came up with rotating a display based upon the readings from accelerometers. On the other hand, if you put me on the design team for a portable device and someone said, "how can we implement a rotating display based on orientation?" Well, I would know the answer in an instant. And it's not because I'm a genius or invested a huge amounts of money in it. It is simply a case of knowing that part A worked and part A would solve the problem posed. To me that qualifies as obvious. To a court, well, I can't claim to understand what goes through the minds of judges and lawyers.
Whether you like it or not, you're going to lose some privacy when you're in a public space. Unless you go walking around wearing a mask or a disguise, you will lose your ability to conceal your identity because there's always a chance that someone can recognize. The only difference in this case is that the someone may be a machine.
If there are any restrictions on this technology, it should be based upon how the information is used rather than the use of the tool itself. For example, the police should not be able to detain a person purely upon a computer generated result and should use their existing procedures while identifying an individual (e.g. to avoid false positives). The use of the data in situations where a person would normally expect privacy (e.g. in their home) should also be curtailed.
... but why are we trying to straddle SSD onto a standard that was presumably developed for magnetic media?
My meager understanding of the situation is that standards like SATA were developed to read and write for media with symmetric block sizes (i.e. you have to read as much data as you write at one time), with no real consideration to physical limitations such as the maximum number of writes, and with the consideration that it was difficult to map a disk to a physical memory location (e.g. due to latency).
Ignoring the issue of compatibility with both current OSes and BIOSes, wouldn't it be best to develop a bus that is specific to SSD and is presumably closer to being directly addressed by the CPU via. contemporary OSes?
Ignoring any user agreement that we implicitly agreed to by posting to Slashdot, there is a quite clear statement posted at the bottom of each page: "Trademarks property of their respective owners. Comments owned by the poster." So yes, you own the rights to your comments just as I own the rights to mine. Similarly, you have the rights to "process" my comments (e.g. quote and comment upon the appropriate sections). What you don't have the right to is the original comment without "processing" (e.g. the entire comment without commentary).
At any rate, it probably depends a lot upon context. Slashdot is a venue for discussion. As such it follows a certain set of rules. Photography is a different context, with a different set of rules. Snapping pictures with a photographer at the helm (i.e. the initial camera's settings) and a photo editor at the stern (e.g. cropping, colour adjustments, etc.) is yet a different context.
What I would suggest, in this case, is the original photographs have dubious copyright status (since a bunch of monkeys were involved). This is because it is probably a first, as such it has no social or legal context. Yet the processed photographs would have a much better defined social and legal context, and they are most likely property of the company that they were contracted out to.
So unless you can get your evolved monkey fingers on the originals, republishing them is almost certainly a violation of their copyrights. Even if you could get your hands on the originals, you would still have to deal with the uncertainty of the legal system determining who actually owns the rights. Monkeys or humans. (Personally I'd support the monkeys, but I'm just one member of a larger society that has to make that decision.)
I'm guessing that any claims to copyright will be made over processing done to the photo prior to publication and, perhaps any setup done to the camera before they monkeys started monkeying around. After all, it's hard to get photos that good by pure chance.
People have created regardless of copyright and patent protection, and I doubt that any particular industry would collapse if we revoked those protections tomorrow. That being said, individual businesses would probably collapse since their business models depend upon those protections and we'd probably see more incremental oneupmanship than revolutionary progress (but I suspect the end result would be the same).
Teaching is a similar profession in that it usually depends upon the fair use/fair dealing. While much of it is publicly funded, a huge proportion of it is private.
No offense taken.
Just to be clear, I didn't mean to suggest that the singled out demographic agree with child porn or exploitation. Yet they do seem to be more willing to accept it as the cost of (their absolutist views of) freedom. Well, things just don't seem to be quite as absolute once you are responsible for someone else's life.
CP is a unique case because it is illegal and seems to be illegal in most jurisdictions. So if a domain is blocked because of that content (and from what I've heard, the Aussies are blocking domains and not IP addresses), it is because the domain's owner decided not to keep their operations clean. So, in many respects, they are to blame.
As for the consultation and (presumably follow-up legislation), that will ensure that the classification and censoring (keep in mind, they are distinct) are applied more uniformly and less arbitrarily.
Yes, parents should parent. And some parents do a very good job at it while others are negligent.
The thing is, even good parents don't have control over what a child hears and sees. Sometimes that is because they have to hand control over to other people. Sometimes it's because they need to give their child some independence, in order for their child to become independent.
How can a parent offer their child some independence without having the unscrupulous business owner pumping up violence and porn just to grab their allowance money? You can't unless you have ratings (or "classification" as the Aussies appear to call it) and accompanying penalties. I'm not going to claim that will stop everyone, but it will stop a few. And some of the others will be driven under by law enforcement.
This notion that a parent is the ultimate authority though is preposterous. Even a good parent can't and shouldn't provide a 24/7 escort, and a cell (erm, bedroom) with bars on the windows and a lock on the outside.
They're probably right about the convoluted questions deterring submissions. Yet I also think that's a good thing, since the people who submit their opinion should have an understanding of the issues.
I fear that articles such as this one will pull in a particular demographic who will share a narrow world view, say 20 something gamers who are not raising children and have no concern in community issues.
My apologies for that stereotype, but I've noticed that the perspective of young adults shifts radically once family and/or community plays a stronger role in their lives.
If I could afford it, hell, why not?
This is a piece of the flag that went up for the first moon landing. I don't care if it is the flag of another nation. I find it presumptuous to devalue the remnant because it never went to the moon. Heck, it's presumptuous to think that many people will ever own anything that actually went to the moon. It is even more absurd to assume that someone would buy it for its future selling price. The fact remains that it was part of humanities first foray to another planet. (And the Earth-Moon system is essentially a double planet system.) It is an important piece of history that says more about our future than almost any artifact dug out of the soil of our home planet.
To the nay-sayer's: just stuff it. You clearly have no appreciation of how important this achievement was. And it was unbelievably important since, within a few decades of achieving heavier than air flight, we managed to reach another world!
Of course, governments have been trying to deny people the opportunity to protest for generations. Sometimes their concerns are legitimate (e.g. riots due to the mob mentality), and sometimes they are not (since some protests are genuinely peaceful).
Even with the Facebook angle, I'm fairly certain that the situation is not unique. Stephen Harper (Prime Minister of Canada) was barring activists from the opposition due to statements on Facebook months prior to this Israel thing. And if Harper's Conservatives did it, it has probably been done by other people a million times before. There isn't a creative bone in the party's collective body.
Incidentally, I am neutral on Israel barring access to their country based upon Facebook shenanigans. I am opposed to people being placed on terrorism watch lists. The former is simply an expression of national sovereignty, even if I think it's foolish. The latter is an assumption of intent that may have far reaching impacts upon innocent lives.
Most of what you do online can still be done the traditional way. You can still use phone books to find people and businesses, maps to find places, books for entertainment or to learn about stuff. And so on.
The biggest hurdle will be other people's expectations. Some people simply expect you to be reachable via email, or (depending on your social circles) social networking sites, and so on.
Maybe the best solution to that is to obtain dialup Internet. That way you need to make a conscious decision about when you connect to the Internet and when you disconnect from it. I would not suggest using libraries or coffee shops, since you're really only translating your problem to another place and their hours dictate your hours. (Example: it may be best to grab your email and surf the web between 9 pm and 10 pm. You can't always do that by using someone else's WiFi, so you'd end up spending valuable daylight hours translating your Internet problem to the library and whittle away the evening hours watching TV.)
Ignore the privacy bit for a moment, because that seems to garner knee-jerk reactions around these parts, and look at the security bit.
There are a lot of transactions that need to be secure, yet would not qualify for the .secure network. For example: you could cram bank systems into the new network, but are you really going to allow every business that uses these financial systems on it (e.g. credit card transactions or trades on the stock market)? Even if you did, you would still end up with 'insecure' connections between the customer and the business. Or are you going to give every citizen a security token too? In that case, the ability to verify the identity of the user drops to nil since identify theft becomes an issue. Or people lending their identity to friends. Or people using loopholes in the system to create new identities.
Even a network which tightly restricts who could access it would face hurdles. Research labs attract all sort of riff-raff scientists and technicians. Some of those people will create bridges between the .secure network and everything else. Even if it is unintentional, because they are using the same systems to access secure databases as they use to access journals (and their goof-off resources). I'm not saying that it is impossible to stop that sort of thing, but it will be awfully difficult given the population involved.
I know the big thing about Ubuntu is that it is ready to go out of the box (so to speak), but people are always complaining about the default programs. And if you changed them to what the complainers wanted, other people would complain about the changes.
So why not give "advanced users" the option to install just the programs they want so that they can add in what they want later without a mess of orphaned packages. They don't even have to be sophisticated about it. Deselecting "Internet Applications" then adding Firefox, Thunderbird, and Pidgin in the Software Centre would be a lot easier than removing Empathy and Evolution then adding Thunderbird and Pidgin. (Never mind tracking down that orphaned package that leaves a dysfunctional Evolution icon hanging around or removing the other network applications that I just don't use.)
It's just an idea. After all, it could be tucked away behind that "advanced" button on the last screen so that the typical user will never be burdened/confused by it.
... after all, she goes around hiding strange packages every year.
While some disgust was expressed over a local ad campaign called, "report the suspicious, not the strange", it is essentially correct: we should be reporting suspicious activities, but there is a definite role for discretion.
Sometimes you can even ask the person what they're doing and discover, "hey, this geocaching thing is cool."
My guess as to why the 'advert farm' pages make it to Slashdot's front page most of the time, while original links don't: the secondary sources provide a good overview and are easier for a general audience to understand.
In this case, I wouldn't have even bothered looking at the project page because it is too much information thrown up all at once. After reading the secondary source I could see that there were several components of the project that I'm interested in, so I'll probably head over to the project pages later.
A leader who cannot face the questions of his constituents and provide them with answers that they accept is an authoritarian, not a democrat.
And yes, I realize that the questions are filtered so that this will end up being more of a public relations exercise. But that is still a heck of a lot better than the leaders of some nations who refuses to be questioned at all. Here's to you Mr. Harper (Prime Minister of Canada, for ye foreigners.)