We need to continue to work to improve the base human condition, but we cannot lose scope of our potential, of exploring and expanding to survive and achieve
I completely agree. Thank you.
I have no problem if 99.9% of our resources go to these short-term problems (world hunger, peace, etc.) so long as that 0.1% is sufficient to keep making progress towards our long-term goals.
I hardly consider "world hunger" a short-term problem.
That's just a problem with your sense of scale. I do consider it a short-term problem, at least on the scale that space exploration requires.
Consider the frequency of mass extinctions going on here, and consider the probability (100%) that another one will occur. How many resources are we willing to put towards preventing our own extinction? 0% (as you seem to be suggesting)? 0.1%? $1/year? How much is too much?
I'd love nothing more than to take NASA programs like this and break them out of the normal tax budget. Let it be a checkbox on our tax returns. Those of us that choose to fund it should get exclusive access to the benefits reaped from it. Everyone else can sit and rot. I think that satisfies everyone, yes?
Don't use MY tax dollars
And this is the benefit of a representative democracy over a direct one. You're always free to say things like this, and I'm always free to say just the opposite. Fortunately it's our elected officials that decide this, and they're paid to look at things like the big picture.
But again, these are hardly new questions and hardly new answers. You suggest that the only answer people get to this question is "because it's there." I don't know if that's because you don't read the answers or what, but that's clearly untrue. Maybe some of the posts don't get a large number of good answers because other posts in the same article asked the same thing (and already got those answers) or maybe people are just so bored at answering the question that they don't do it anymore.. I don't know.
And I'm amused that you consider Slashdot readership to be "intelligent, thoughtful people.":)
Personally, I find the same anti-space-exploration arguments being repeated for every single article discussing space-exploration to be a bit depressing and redundant with each other. "Why?" is certainly a good question, but when people ask it OVER and OVER again, while covering their ears when someone replies, that's just irritating.
After a while, I'm sure many moderators start getting annoyed to the point where they begin moderating the same questions/arguments down because they're hardly new questions, or questions that haven't been addressed in any of the thousand other space-related Slashdot articles.
Just a thought, anyway.
I too question the need for things like this, but I consistently come to the conclusion that exploration is still a very necessary thing for the survival of our species. Sure, we have "localized" issues that we need to give attention to, but a good planner devotes some amount of resources to long-term goals. If we constantly forget about the big picture and devote 100% of our resources to fighting short-term problems, we piss our children off (and maybe go extinct).
And you are absolutely correct that I did take this to a ridiculous extreme. That was kind of the point. I think they call that "hyperbole." It was the exaggarated conclusion to frequent use of the "they abuse this power, let's eliminate it" statements made every day.
I get annoyed at people who want to "fix" something entirely the wrong way. If someone abuses their power, do you eliminate the power, or do you fix things so the power cannot be abused? Generally this is dependent on the situation, and needs an unbiased examination of the benefits and consequences of each option (which few, if any Slashdot posters are remotely qualified to do). Frequently people suggest the elimination of a power even though it's clearly not the best option, but their tunnel vision prevents them from seeing any other solution.
I'm sorry this point was lost on you, and I hope this explains it better. If you still don't understand my point (whether or not you agree with it), consult your sociology or government instructor. I'm not going to "coddle you" any further.
I can't believe I'm arguing with a belligerent AC here (and believe me, this will be my last posting), but I hate to see people going through life this confused.
The emphasis on more implies they have ENOUGH powers.
Emphasis is not required to make that point. "They do not need more powers" is sufficient to make it. When someone says, "They do not need MORE powers," it implies that the operative word quoted in the original statement is INCORRECT. Here, emphasis is used as an informal, emphasized quotation. The logical correction would be to use "less" instead of "more". Thus, "They need more powers" becomes "They need less powers."
I can't fathom where you get your knowledge of the English language, but I suggest you take this thread and go ask your high school english teacher before you go off and start making personal attacks against complete strangers (who just might know more than you do). It's highly tactless and will neither earn you friends nor respect. It has nothing to do with "coddling" and everything to do with maturity. Grow the fuck up. Goodbye.
Oh I see this all the time in my office. If I ever sit down and try to help someone with a problem, I make a point to mention to them that their system is horribly misconfigured in that regard.
So I fix it for them, and they say, "Oh, erm, thanks I guess. I don't notice any difference though."
Then, to top it off, I come back a few weeks later and it's nearly always reverted to its previous state somehow. They must be switching hardware configurations or something and it ends up wiping out the refresh rate changes. AND THEY DON'T NOTICE. *!%!%(!*#%&(
What makes you think I think those are irrelevant?
Due process is very much a good thing. I just have issues with people willing to strip certain powers from our executive branch without looking for ways to fix the real problem.
If your authorities are not trustworthy, you either replace them with someone you think you can trust more, or you fix the system so they are less likely to abuse your trust (e.g. more oversight, more checks and balances). Whether or not they should be granted certain powers is a separate issue meant for other branches of the government to decide.
My point is there will always be people willing to abuse your trust, if they think they can get away with it. Some people are more likely to abuse your trust than others, and if you can identify those people (unfortunately, some are only identified after they're caught), you can replace them. But for the others, the best you can do is try to fix the system so that they're unable or unwilling to abuse your trust in the first place.
If you have a beef with the powers granted to your local authorities, and believe that those exceed the powers granted in the founding documents (including those that are granted through legislation or judicial interpretation), by all means take them to court. The ACLU might even be willing to back you if they think you have a valid case.
The emphasis on 'more' implies a suggestion of 'less'.
Invest in some tact, and stop calling people names. You'll be surprised at how often you'll have a constructive conversation and not be immediately killfiled. Or is that why you were posting as an AC?
Yah, that's good, let's eliminate all powers that have the potential to be abused. That leaves us with.. erm, what, exactly?
What you're probably more interested in is a better system of checks and balances and oversight. That could still mean a change in the way the Patriot Act was written, but it's really a different goal than what most people here are advocating.
And in any event, this has absolutely nothing to do with Singapore's quarantine enforcement steps.
I've sent a couple of letters post-anthrax scare via the USPS and received USPS replies in a reasonable amount of time. This was a few months ago, but it wasn't that long ago.
People seem to be coming to the conclusion that this new mechanism is somehow forcing parents to use it, and forcing parents to constantly press their children, potentially to the child's deteriment.
This simply is not the case. This is another mechanism that a parent can choose to check up on the progress of their child, much like a parent-teacher conference (which can generally be initiated by either side at any time anyway). How a parent chooses to use this new technology is a completely different issue. If there are trust issues here, they need to be discussed between the parent and the child.
We should be giving parents the means to parent their children, but we should not tell them when and how they should use it. Each child is different, each parent is different, and each relationship is different.
How you parent your children is totally out of the scope of this issue here. Give parents the tools so they can parent they way they feel best, but don't force crap on them.
Where I work, they gave up trying to keep up with the title scheme of the week and went with a static set of titles given out to everyone in the organization. That isn't to say all of those people do the same things, but it's easier to toss around unofficial roles that change weekly than it is to reprint your business cards.
Typical sysadmin/application admin = Systems Analyst Typical planner, designer = Technical Architect Typical developer or other technical position = Analyst
Prefixing that term, you can have "Associate" or "Senior" (one step below and one step above the position without a prefix, respectively).
Analyst is a nice, generic vague term that just tells others what area of the company you work in.
By now, most people equate "administrative assistant" == secretary, anyways.
It's worse than that.. Nowadays since everyone is so sick of articulating the whole "administrative assistant" term, they've started abbreviating it as "admin", which is coincidentally what many technical titles have in them as well. It's a PITA trying to figure out when non-techs are referring to a system administrator versus an administrative assistant. Many casualties have resulted.
Re:Homebrew antennas can be inefficient
on
Open Node In A Bag
·
· Score: 1
I didn't say this explicitly in my other comment, but there's an efficiency loss here too. If your antenna is reflecting a lot of the energy back into the transmitter, that's energy that isn't being pumped out into the ether. Build your antenna well, and your transmitting coverage area could increase dramatically over a similar, untuned antenna.
Just another note on point #2: if you're going to build yourself an antenna (which is perfectly doable if the topic interests you), be sure you do it properly. A poorly made antenna, not tuned for the frequency you're transmitting on, can reflect much of the RF energy back into the transmitter. This has the effect of slowly frying the amplifier circuitry in your equipment. It's still worth it to experiment, if you're into experimentation, but if you're going to be doing this a lot, or many times, buy a SWR meter. Your equipment will thank you. (Generally a home-brew antenna is not a cheaper solution in the long run due to the shorter lifespan of transmitting equipment connected to poorly tuned antennas.)
And for those that are interested in hacking things together in this regard, I recommend that you take a few hours to learn some basic RF theory and get yourself an amateur radio license. Depending on the license and your skills, you can hack together an 802.11-style solution on amateur bands and legally skirt many of the power restrictions these devices face (in exchange for other restrictions about how you can use it).
I believe the original poster was talking about the spamming aspects of his business, which is what my comments were targeting. The article does discuss the possibility that he is selling counterfeit software, but that's not a conviction (yet?).
Simply nailing this guy on piracy charges alone isn't a win for the anti-spamming community. We can't use the same tactics on other ("legitimate") spammers that don't do illegal things on the side.
To you and I, it's doubtless questionable, immoral, unethical, and a million other adjectives. It's an evil business.
But legally, it's perfectly legitimate. Some US states have restrictions on that business, to keep the shady crap in check, but I know none who have outright banned it.
If you have information to the contrary, please furnish it to the proper authorities.
There is a difference between who is "at fault" for an event, and the primary cause of the event. The mere act of one person clicking on a link is insignificant. The primary cause is the posting on Slashdot.
mirroring a site qualifies as republishing that site, which is generally considered a violation of copyright law.
If you're publishing a document through HTTP, you are implicitly agreeing to allow your document to be redistributed as the HTTP specification designed. If your web site is providing a document, and providing cache-control headers that indicate that document will not change in the next 5 minutes, you are implicitly allowing for servers acting as caching HTTP proxies to cache that document and serve it up to clients that request it, until that 5 minutes expires and the proxy has to re-request (or just re-validate) it.
If your "mirror" acts as a caching HTTP proxy, in that it's following the HTTP caching specifications, there are no legal issues whatsoever.
If someone wishes to defeat the mechanism, all they have to do is express a "no-cache" cache-control header, and the "mirror" ceases to function as a caching proxy.
if you don't want anybody to see your website, what the heck are you doing publishing a website to begin with?
They do want people to see their site. When Slashdot readers bring it down due to the large volume of requests, nobody can see their site. In order to restore service, they have to somehow mitigate the damage, which I believe these guys did by taking the page down. Their site recovered.
I fail to see why Slashdot should be held responsible
I look at the situation differently than you do. I'm not holding Slashdot "responsible" so much as I'd like to see Slashdot be a little more courteous towards those that they link to, and towards the readership who might like to read the articles Slashdot is linking to.
The mirror/cache idea is meant to combat the availability issue. I'm not trying to save the site owner so much as I'm pushing for a way that Slashdot readers can still have access to the articles. The result is the same, but my motive is a little more selfish.
Because Slashdot is causing the problem. Because Slashdot readers are unable to view the articles that Slashdot is posting. Because comments about pages that are now offline are invariably less interesting than comments about pages that the posters can read.
hosters of the original site DON'T have to use any bandwidth AND they get the ad revenue?
HTTP was always envisioned to work like this. Every ISP could have a set of HTTP proxies for both inbound and outbound HTTP requests. The proxy would cache in either direction, honoring HTTP's cache-control headers while doing so. Static content would invariably be cached at one or more proxies between the origin server and the end user, while more dynamic content would be passed through.
As unfair as it may sound to you, HTTP was meant to work this way. It's a shame that the real world hasn't implemented things that way. All I'm really talking about here is a non-conventional HTTP proxy.
partly because the whole system was kind-of pricey to implement.
I don't understand how it would be pricey. I've done something like this in the past and could probably re-implement it in Apache within a day (add a few more if you want a fancy interface to add sites to the system). It's not like we're talking about writing entirely new software here. Apache has this functionality built in (mod_proxy, taking advantage of its caching features and ProxyPass directives, and/or mod_rewrite and its P RewriteRule flag).
This is a non-issue. If your site is expressing HTTP headers that indicate a willingness to be cached, HTTP proxies should be free to cache! The fact that a proxy can have a web front-end (making it look and act like a mirror) doesn't make it any less of a caching proxy.
If they're that anal about their content and want to prevent it from being cached by HTTP proxies, they're more than welcome to do that by expressing a "no-cache" flag in their cache-control headers, which would make a mirroring solution based off of HTTP caching technologies impossible for them, which means they'd get Slashdotted, and they'd deserve it.
the fact is when a site is slashdotted nobody sees the ads
The "we don't wanna cache" reasons given in the FAQ are mostly artificial. There's no technological reason behind their decision not to mirror sites.
HTTP is designed such that resources can be cached. If they were to exploit that HTTP caching functionality and stick a mirror-like front-end on it, they could effectively cache most of the content and even preserve the ad-serving functionality of the target. (Assuming they had their cache-control headers set up properly.) To the site owner, they'd see a handful of their pages requested by the proxy, and a bazillion requests for their advertising (since that probably wouldn't be marked as cacheable). This is HTTP at work.
Something like this has been suggested for a while, and nobody's ever really explained why this isn't workable. IMO, the Slashdot editors are just lazy/insufficiently staffed. (For the record, most major news sites will inform you when they're about to link to you.)
and the whole point is that people come and see it.
Yes, and when the level of traffic spikes one day because of a Slashdot posting, and it makes your server and/or network link unable to service those requests, people will be unable to come and see it.
put up a password site and only let in those that you want in.
Or use an Apache::Throttle-type technique and limit the traffic to what your server and bandwidth is capable of. In this situation, they more or less did that (by hand), just by blocking the content that was being requested by the Slashdot readers. The rest of the site is up to service requests for "real" visitors.
slashdot should mirror the pages - but that in itself is nearly as retarded as the first complaint.
How is that retarded? It allows their article to remain available to Slashdot readers in the event the origin server is no longer able to serve it. Do you want an article with lots of interesting comments about a topic, or do you want an article with a bunch of comments saying "slashdotted!" A mirror would solve this problem. (A mirror can be created that doesn't suffer from the artificial problems discussed in the FAQ by combining a caching HTTP proxy with a web site front-end. To users it would appear as a mirror, but the server would treat it as a proxy, so it'd always be following HTTP caching rules and the site owner couldn't/wouldn't ever have grounds to complain.)
Slashdot Mirror
We need to continue to work to improve the base human condition, but we cannot lose scope of our potential, of exploring and expanding to survive and achieve
I completely agree. Thank you.
I have no problem if 99.9% of our resources go to these short-term problems (world hunger, peace, etc.) so long as that 0.1% is sufficient to keep making progress towards our long-term goals.
I hardly consider "world hunger" a short-term problem.
:)
That's just a problem with your sense of scale. I do consider it a short-term problem, at least on the scale that space exploration requires.
Consider the frequency of mass extinctions going on here, and consider the probability (100%) that another one will occur. How many resources are we willing to put towards preventing our own extinction? 0% (as you seem to be suggesting)? 0.1%? $1/year? How much is too much?
I'd love nothing more than to take NASA programs like this and break them out of the normal tax budget. Let it be a checkbox on our tax returns. Those of us that choose to fund it should get exclusive access to the benefits reaped from it. Everyone else can sit and rot. I think that satisfies everyone, yes?
Don't use MY tax dollars
And this is the benefit of a representative democracy over a direct one. You're always free to say things like this, and I'm always free to say just the opposite. Fortunately it's our elected officials that decide this, and they're paid to look at things like the big picture.
But again, these are hardly new questions and hardly new answers. You suggest that the only answer people get to this question is "because it's there." I don't know if that's because you don't read the answers or what, but that's clearly untrue. Maybe some of the posts don't get a large number of good answers because other posts in the same article asked the same thing (and already got those answers) or maybe people are just so bored at answering the question that they don't do it anymore.. I don't know.
And I'm amused that you consider Slashdot readership to be "intelligent, thoughtful people."
Personally, I find the same anti-space-exploration arguments being repeated for every single article discussing space-exploration to be a bit depressing and redundant with each other. "Why?" is certainly a good question, but when people ask it OVER and OVER again, while covering their ears when someone replies, that's just irritating.
After a while, I'm sure many moderators start getting annoyed to the point where they begin moderating the same questions/arguments down because they're hardly new questions, or questions that haven't been addressed in any of the thousand other space-related Slashdot articles.
Just a thought, anyway.
I too question the need for things like this, but I consistently come to the conclusion that exploration is still a very necessary thing for the survival of our species. Sure, we have "localized" issues that we need to give attention to, but a good planner devotes some amount of resources to long-term goals. If we constantly forget about the big picture and devote 100% of our resources to fighting short-term problems, we piss our children off (and maybe go extinct).
And you are absolutely correct that I did take this to a ridiculous extreme. That was kind of the point. I think they call that "hyperbole." It was the exaggarated conclusion to frequent use of the "they abuse this power, let's eliminate it" statements made every day.
I get annoyed at people who want to "fix" something entirely the wrong way. If someone abuses their power, do you eliminate the power, or do you fix things so the power cannot be abused? Generally this is dependent on the situation, and needs an unbiased examination of the benefits and consequences of each option (which few, if any Slashdot posters are remotely qualified to do). Frequently people suggest the elimination of a power even though it's clearly not the best option, but their tunnel vision prevents them from seeing any other solution.
I'm sorry this point was lost on you, and I hope this explains it better. If you still don't understand my point (whether or not you agree with it), consult your sociology or government instructor. I'm not going to "coddle you" any further.
I can't believe I'm arguing with a belligerent AC here (and believe me, this will be my last posting), but I hate to see people going through life this confused.
The emphasis on more implies they have ENOUGH powers.
Emphasis is not required to make that point. "They do not need more powers" is sufficient to make it. When someone says, "They do not need MORE powers," it implies that the operative word quoted in the original statement is INCORRECT. Here, emphasis is used as an informal, emphasized quotation. The logical correction would be to use "less" instead of "more". Thus, "They need more powers" becomes "They need less powers."
I can't fathom where you get your knowledge of the English language, but I suggest you take this thread and go ask your high school english teacher before you go off and start making personal attacks against complete strangers (who just might know more than you do). It's highly tactless and will neither earn you friends nor respect. It has nothing to do with "coddling" and everything to do with maturity. Grow the fuck up. Goodbye.
Oh I see this all the time in my office. If I ever sit down and try to help someone with a problem, I make a point to mention to them that their system is horribly misconfigured in that regard.
So I fix it for them, and they say, "Oh, erm, thanks I guess. I don't notice any difference though."
Then, to top it off, I come back a few weeks later and it's nearly always reverted to its previous state somehow. They must be switching hardware configurations or something and it ends up wiping out the refresh rate changes. AND THEY DON'T NOTICE. *!%!%(!*#%&(
What makes you think I think those are irrelevant?
Due process is very much a good thing. I just have issues with people willing to strip certain powers from our executive branch without looking for ways to fix the real problem.
If your authorities are not trustworthy, you either replace them with someone you think you can trust more, or you fix the system so they are less likely to abuse your trust (e.g. more oversight, more checks and balances). Whether or not they should be granted certain powers is a separate issue meant for other branches of the government to decide.
My point is there will always be people willing to abuse your trust, if they think they can get away with it. Some people are more likely to abuse your trust than others, and if you can identify those people (unfortunately, some are only identified after they're caught), you can replace them. But for the others, the best you can do is try to fix the system so that they're unable or unwilling to abuse your trust in the first place.
If you have a beef with the powers granted to your local authorities, and believe that those exceed the powers granted in the founding documents (including those that are granted through legislation or judicial interpretation), by all means take them to court. The ACLU might even be willing to back you if they think you have a valid case.
The emphasis on 'more' implies a suggestion of 'less'.
Invest in some tact, and stop calling people names. You'll be surprised at how often you'll have a constructive conversation and not be immediately killfiled. Or is that why you were posting as an AC?
Yah, that's good, let's eliminate all powers that have the potential to be abused. That leaves us with.. erm, what, exactly?
What you're probably more interested in is a better system of checks and balances and oversight. That could still mean a change in the way the Patriot Act was written, but it's really a different goal than what most people here are advocating.
And in any event, this has absolutely nothing to do with Singapore's quarantine enforcement steps.
I've sent a couple of letters post-anthrax scare via the USPS and received USPS replies in a reasonable amount of time. This was a few months ago, but it wasn't that long ago.
People seem to be coming to the conclusion that this new mechanism is somehow forcing parents to use it, and forcing parents to constantly press their children, potentially to the child's deteriment.
This simply is not the case. This is another mechanism that a parent can choose to check up on the progress of their child, much like a parent-teacher conference (which can generally be initiated by either side at any time anyway). How a parent chooses to use this new technology is a completely different issue. If there are trust issues here, they need to be discussed between the parent and the child.
We should be giving parents the means to parent their children, but we should not tell them when and how they should use it. Each child is different, each parent is different, and each relationship is different.
How you parent your children is totally out of the scope of this issue here. Give parents the tools so they can parent they way they feel best, but don't force crap on them.
Where I work, they gave up trying to keep up with the title scheme of the week and went with a static set of titles given out to everyone in the organization. That isn't to say all of those people do the same things, but it's easier to toss around unofficial roles that change weekly than it is to reprint your business cards.
Typical sysadmin/application admin = Systems Analyst
Typical planner, designer = Technical Architect
Typical developer or other technical position = Analyst
Prefixing that term, you can have "Associate" or "Senior" (one step below and one step above the position without a prefix, respectively).
Analyst is a nice, generic vague term that just tells others what area of the company you work in.
By now, most people equate "administrative assistant" == secretary, anyways.
It's worse than that.. Nowadays since everyone is so sick of articulating the whole "administrative assistant" term, they've started abbreviating it as "admin", which is coincidentally what many technical titles have in them as well. It's a PITA trying to figure out when non-techs are referring to a system administrator versus an administrative assistant. Many casualties have resulted.
I didn't say this explicitly in my other comment, but there's an efficiency loss here too. If your antenna is reflecting a lot of the energy back into the transmitter, that's energy that isn't being pumped out into the ether. Build your antenna well, and your transmitting coverage area could increase dramatically over a similar, untuned antenna.
Just another note on point #2: if you're going to build yourself an antenna (which is perfectly doable if the topic interests you), be sure you do it properly. A poorly made antenna, not tuned for the frequency you're transmitting on, can reflect much of the RF energy back into the transmitter. This has the effect of slowly frying the amplifier circuitry in your equipment. It's still worth it to experiment, if you're into experimentation, but if you're going to be doing this a lot, or many times, buy a SWR meter. Your equipment will thank you. (Generally a home-brew antenna is not a cheaper solution in the long run due to the shorter lifespan of transmitting equipment connected to poorly tuned antennas.)
And for those that are interested in hacking things together in this regard, I recommend that you take a few hours to learn some basic RF theory and get yourself an amateur radio license. Depending on the license and your skills, you can hack together an 802.11-style solution on amateur bands and legally skirt many of the power restrictions these devices face (in exchange for other restrictions about how you can use it).
I believe the original poster was talking about the spamming aspects of his business, which is what my comments were targeting. The article does discuss the possibility that he is selling counterfeit software, but that's not a conviction (yet?).
Simply nailing this guy on piracy charges alone isn't a win for the anti-spamming community. We can't use the same tactics on other ("legitimate") spammers that don't do illegal things on the side.
To you and I, it's doubtless questionable, immoral, unethical, and a million other adjectives. It's an evil business.
But legally , it's perfectly legitimate. Some US states have restrictions on that business, to keep the shady crap in check, but I know none who have outright banned it.
If you have information to the contrary, please furnish it to the proper authorities.
There is a difference between who is "at fault" for an event, and the primary cause of the event. The mere act of one person clicking on a link is insignificant. The primary cause is the posting on Slashdot.
mirroring a site qualifies as republishing that site, which is generally considered a violation of copyright law.
If you're publishing a document through HTTP, you are implicitly agreeing to allow your document to be redistributed as the HTTP specification designed. If your web site is providing a document, and providing cache-control headers that indicate that document will not change in the next 5 minutes, you are implicitly allowing for servers acting as caching HTTP proxies to cache that document and serve it up to clients that request it, until that 5 minutes expires and the proxy has to re-request (or just re-validate) it.
If your "mirror" acts as a caching HTTP proxy, in that it's following the HTTP caching specifications, there are no legal issues whatsoever.
If someone wishes to defeat the mechanism, all they have to do is express a "no-cache" cache-control header, and the "mirror" ceases to function as a caching proxy.
if you don't want anybody to see your website, what the heck are you doing publishing a website to begin with?
They do want people to see their site. When Slashdot readers bring it down due to the large volume of requests, nobody can see their site. In order to restore service, they have to somehow mitigate the damage, which I believe these guys did by taking the page down. Their site recovered.
I fail to see why Slashdot should be held responsible
I look at the situation differently than you do. I'm not holding Slashdot "responsible" so much as I'd like to see Slashdot be a little more courteous towards those that they link to, and towards the readership who might like to read the articles Slashdot is linking to.
The mirror/cache idea is meant to combat the availability issue. I'm not trying to save the site owner so much as I'm pushing for a way that Slashdot readers can still have access to the articles. The result is the same, but my motive is a little more selfish.
Why put the Onus on Slashdot to fix the problem?
Because Slashdot is causing the problem. Because Slashdot readers are unable to view the articles that Slashdot is posting. Because comments about pages that are now offline are invariably less interesting than comments about pages that the posters can read.
hosters of the original site DON'T have to use any bandwidth AND they get the ad revenue?
HTTP was always envisioned to work like this. Every ISP could have a set of HTTP proxies for both inbound and outbound HTTP requests. The proxy would cache in either direction, honoring HTTP's cache-control headers while doing so. Static content would invariably be cached at one or more proxies between the origin server and the end user, while more dynamic content would be passed through.
As unfair as it may sound to you, HTTP was meant to work this way. It's a shame that the real world hasn't implemented things that way. All I'm really talking about here is a non-conventional HTTP proxy.
partly because the whole system was kind-of pricey to implement.
I don't understand how it would be pricey. I've done something like this in the past and could probably re-implement it in Apache within a day (add a few more if you want a fancy interface to add sites to the system). It's not like we're talking about writing entirely new software here. Apache has this functionality built in (mod_proxy, taking advantage of its caching features and ProxyPass directives, and/or mod_rewrite and its P RewriteRule flag).
mirroring their site without permission
This is a non-issue. If your site is expressing HTTP headers that indicate a willingness to be cached, HTTP proxies should be free to cache! The fact that a proxy can have a web front-end (making it look and act like a mirror) doesn't make it any less of a caching proxy.
If they're that anal about their content and want to prevent it from being cached by HTTP proxies, they're more than welcome to do that by expressing a "no-cache" flag in their cache-control headers, which would make a mirroring solution based off of HTTP caching technologies impossible for them, which means they'd get Slashdotted, and they'd deserve it.
the fact is when a site is slashdotted nobody sees the ads
The "we don't wanna cache" reasons given in the FAQ are mostly artificial. There's no technological reason behind their decision not to mirror sites.
HTTP is designed such that resources can be cached. If they were to exploit that HTTP caching functionality and stick a mirror-like front-end on it, they could effectively cache most of the content and even preserve the ad-serving functionality of the target. (Assuming they had their cache-control headers set up properly.) To the site owner, they'd see a handful of their pages requested by the proxy, and a bazillion requests for their advertising (since that probably wouldn't be marked as cacheable). This is HTTP at work.
Something like this has been suggested for a while, and nobody's ever really explained why this isn't workable. IMO, the Slashdot editors are just lazy/insufficiently staffed. (For the record, most major news sites will inform you when they're about to link to you.)
and the whole point is that people come and see it.
Yes, and when the level of traffic spikes one day because of a Slashdot posting, and it makes your server and/or network link unable to service those requests, people will be unable to come and see it.
put up a password site and only let in those that you want in.
Or use an Apache::Throttle-type technique and limit the traffic to what your server and bandwidth is capable of. In this situation, they more or less did that (by hand), just by blocking the content that was being requested by the Slashdot readers. The rest of the site is up to service requests for "real" visitors.
slashdot should mirror the pages - but that in itself is nearly as retarded as the first complaint.
How is that retarded? It allows their article to remain available to Slashdot readers in the event the origin server is no longer able to serve it. Do you want an article with lots of interesting comments about a topic, or do you want an article with a bunch of comments saying "slashdotted!" A mirror would solve this problem. (A mirror can be created that doesn't suffer from the artificial problems discussed in the FAQ by combining a caching HTTP proxy with a web site front-end. To users it would appear as a mirror, but the server would treat it as a proxy, so it'd always be following HTTP caching rules and the site owner couldn't/wouldn't ever have grounds to complain.)