Did you read any of OBL's published documents? You don't have to read that many to realize that the guy was not a redneck at all. A redneck is someone who picks up a stick of dynamite and hollers, "Hey y'all watch this!!!"
OBL was an intelligent, complex thinker who was quite sophisticated about media manipulation and message control, in addition to being quite competent with logistics and managing people. If you read what he wrote, you do not get the sense at all that he was insane or irrational. He had strong convictions and he had a plan that he put into action.
In saying this I am not excusing or defending him, but rather trying to make the point that if you dismiss OBL and his leadership as rednecks and incompetent fools then you will surely miss future OBLs and continue to make the same policy mistakes that keep re-creating them over, and over.
And next time, the death toll might be very much greater than 3K.
I have been reading Slashdot nearly every day since the late 90's, and I have deep feelings of nostalgia for the site. I truly hope they listen to what everyone is saying here and do a major course correction and get back on-mission.
But I doubt the editors can make that happen because idiot MBA's are now clearly in charge and determined to drive this site off a cliff.
It makes me deeply sad to say that, but I want to contribute something positive to the discussion about Slashdot alternatives. I don't know of any one site that is what Slashdot used to be, but I have in the last couple of years found the same creative energy represented at the Maker Faires. The work being done by MakerBot, Fab@Home, Adafruit, and all the many, many DIY'ers of all stripes out there is unbelievably cool and inspiring. I read/. and science news all the time, but when I visited the Maker Faire last Fall at the Queens Science Center I saw 7 different revolutions in the making that I wasn't even really aware of, and the one I had learned about at previous iterations of the Maker Faire, 3D printing, had grown by leaps and bounds.
So maybe somewhere between Make Magazine, Thingiverse.com, and some of the others is where the next Slashdot could be born. What do you all think?
I defended/. when people slammed the video, because video is something that could add to the/. experience if done well; Nobody still does journalism in the English language except for the BBC, and/. could help step into that gap.
But this BI thing? Naw, this is horribly off-mission, guys. No self-respecting geek would ever read this stuff. The buzzword itself creates a geek-repulsion field. And after more than a decade of CNET and its ilk why do/.'s publishers think they're going to lure away PHB's & MBAs to read the same kind of fluff on another site? PHB's and MBAs strongly dislike real geeks, and fear the things they know as "geek stuff." That's why they mainly read Fortune and Forbes and the WSJ because they like to fantasize about their stock options and only occasionally dip into CNET when they feel like being a little "edgy."
Please, guys, don't keep going in this direction. Listen to what Tom said up-thread: refocus on being brilliant at/.'s core mission of being News for Nerds. The MBA's who are obviously driving this trend toward mission creep and dilution are going in exactly the wrong direction. You do not alienate your core audience, because they are a high-value audience. They are fully segmented and demographically, ie. relatively affluent males ages 18-45, are highly desireable. You can charge a much higher CPM for that than the opposite that the MBA's are driving you toward.
So just in case any of said MBA's are reading this (which I doubt very much, because they're probably sitting on the shitter jacking off to their sheaf of the afore-mentioned stock options), then DO NOT KILL SLASHDOT. Go back to business school or go work for AIG or whatever you worthless sacks of crap do. (Sorry, fellow slashdotters, for the vitriol)
You're such a paid shill that you literally reek! GTFO and don't let the door hit you on the ass. A pox on your house and the crappy people you represent.
Jesus, it's 2012 and we can't even get shills who can come up with new FUD? This crap hasn't even changed a micron since the year 2000.
If it were me, I'd build the world's first airborne cruise ship. Yes, there were zeppelins, but they were point-to-point precursors to 747s. But a zeppelin that was outfitted like a cruise ship and didn't need to compete with 747s on speed would be excellent, because it would fly slower and lower and give the passengers far more to look at than your average waterborne cruise, staring out at the featureless sea for day after day. Imagine a sky yacht cruise taking you at low elevation over the Grand Canyon or Arches and you get the idea. How awesome would that be?
That's what I call that idea. Nothing will stop cord cutting. The reason is on-demand. A good friend of mine is the head of programming at a well-known cable channel. He tells me he has to run like crazy every day to try to not lose ground, but they're still losing ground because they can't compete with on-demand, anywhere entertainment that the Internet offers.
If Hulu does this, they're only nuking their own business. Customers have already seen the future and it is Netflix. Yes, given the intransigence of the MPAA and Cable companies, there is an initial adjustment to the absence of the blockbuster titles. But then you discover the excellent content produced in other places around the world and the American stuff starts to look tedious.
Since Starz channel picked up its ball and went home, I've discovered production values on Korean movies are just as high as here, and their plots are twisted and interesting. And Bollywood movies are pure fun. Bollywood! Who knew?
I was thunderstruck the other day when my 3-yr old daughter saw a picture of Mickey Mouse somewhere and said, "Who's that?" She honestly had no idea. And it occurred to me that because Disney (and by extension the other MPAA and Cable players) have so locked away their content and have been so intransigent about getting with the times that they are running a real risk of rendering themselves culturally irrelevant. Think about what that also means about their ancillary revenue streams: my kids will never pester me to buy Disney toys or to take them to Disneyland. Disney has unwittingly saved me about $20K (over their lifetimes) that way.
So go on, guys, do the world a favor and destroy Hulu, too. The rest of us will move on happily without you!
9/11 was forgettable in no way. The event itself, on its own merits, is not forgettable. I watched the towers fall and the ground tremble all the way here in Brooklyn. Bits of burning paper drifted over our neighborhood for weeks. So as an eye witness it's not forgettable. Also, it happened in New York, which has as much claim to the title of capitol of the world as any city, and so because it won't forget there's little chance the rest of the world will either. The Oklahoma City bombing, by contrast, happened in Oklahoma City.
Also, the legacy of 9/11 is not entirely the sum of the evil that it has excused since. It also shattered the illusion of invulnerability of the United States, for others and for Americans. For all the NSA and military and nuclear weapons and wealth and power the United States was brought to its knees by a handful of guys with box cutters who were thinking outside the box; that's a powerful lesson for everyone, not just Americans, including for us geeks as we go about our technical jobs.
Yes we do need to deal with Bush and Cheney and all those who have used 9/11 to strip America of its freedom; I hope we do it soon, with prejudice.
But don't be so dismissive of the event itself. It was and continues to be significant.
And thus the Reformation began. Apparently prior to the Reformation it was not even sanctioned for the common people to have bibles they could read for themselves because they might get confused about what it actually says; it was necessary for Rome to tell you what it meant.
Many protestants still don't read the bible themselves and let themselves be led around by the nose by their pastors. However, they do have bibles and could, theoretically, read them. After 1,517 years of not having them, in Christian terms, that counts as huge progress.
It's ironic. Recently SallieMae called to talk to me about one of my employees who's delinquent on his student loans. The caller was clearly Indian. I remarked that it hardly seems to help American students repay their loans, in general, if SallieMae itself outsources its operations to India, thus depriving a number of Americans from the opportunity to repay their loans.
There's some truth to what you're saying, but history does not uniformly support your claim, and there are so many variables that you cannot determine that result follows from the cause, revolution.
For example, take Gandhi. He put together a coalition of many parties who disagreed on many policies but which were united in the desire to get rid of the British. So they conducted a campaign of non-violence and non-cooperation that compelled the UK to leave. The United States is not India, but recent shifts brought about by the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and even the SOPA protest indicate Washington DC is not as monolithic as many suppose and can be moved.
I would not like a post-revolution order imposed by the Tea Party and they would probably dislike many things I would do, but we all agree that this Republic, as currently constituted, has ceased to do its job. We ought to be able to put together a new constitutional convention to craft the American Constitution 2.0 for the next 200 years.
There are a million things in the world to do that are more fulfilling than turning yourself into a mindslave for the content industries. Literally, a million. So go do them!
The best thing that could happen from all the endless *AA's' lawsuits would be for everyone to switch off the slave colla...um, I mean, the TVs and stereos and go outside and discover any one of the million things to do that are not that. Or stay inside and discover the million things to do that are not sitting around waiting for some marketing jackass to tell you how to think or what to buy.
If you like music, pick up an affordable guitar and teach yourself how to play. You might not ever achieve a respectable rendition of 'Stairway to Heaven,' but you will probably enjoy it much more than passively listening to a performance of the real thing. Likewise movies. Pick up your smartphone and shoot home movies of your kids. Nobody but you will ever enjoy them, but your family will enjoy them forever. And isn't that what's important?
Stop living in the realm of other people's fantasies, especially when those fantasies come with real chains attached.
I have a startup that is bootstrapping itself as we speak. It is difficult. Banks won't lend to you. VCs want to exploit you. Access to funds is non-existent. One of the ways that the government claims to help startups is with the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants. They are exceptionally restrictive and prone to cronyism at worst, and extreme risk aversion at best. Solyndra in particular has exacerbated the latter.
Bureaucrats are about the world's least able people to evaluate business ideas or technological innovation. Bureaucrats are the diametric opposite of the risk-takers that entrepreneurs are. They are the last people who ought to be sitting in judgement on the merits of innovative ideas.
So, holding competitions to award prize money to great ideas sounds like an excellent proposition in theory, but in practice it gets sucked down into the mire of why our country is failing badly: the wrong people are in charge.
I've been working in interactive advertising in New York for the last 13 years (hey, when the dot-com days ended it was the only thing left in this neck of the woods). I despise advertising. Especially the indiscriminate TV kind. God, what I wouldn't give to get back all the time I've been exposed to feminine hygiene commercials.
But, when I've been online and experienced advertising that is actually geared toward me, it does not annoy me. I find it helpful. Likewise when a friend has forwarded something they thought I might be interested in, I often have been and have been grateful they thought of me.
So I'll express a contrarian opinion on this subject and say that if all advertising was done in the latter way, we'd probably see it as much more of a positive than as a negative. We should all hope that advertising in general follows this model and only routes to the people who might or could find it interesting and useful.
Slashdot Mirror
Make the NFL touch football only.
Did you read any of OBL's published documents? You don't have to read that many to realize that the guy was not a redneck at all. A redneck is someone who picks up a stick of dynamite and hollers, "Hey y'all watch this!!!"
OBL was an intelligent, complex thinker who was quite sophisticated about media manipulation and message control, in addition to being quite competent with logistics and managing people. If you read what he wrote, you do not get the sense at all that he was insane or irrational. He had strong convictions and he had a plan that he put into action.
In saying this I am not excusing or defending him, but rather trying to make the point that if you dismiss OBL and his leadership as rednecks and incompetent fools then you will surely miss future OBLs and continue to make the same policy mistakes that keep re-creating them over, and over.
And next time, the death toll might be very much greater than 3K.
I have been reading Slashdot nearly every day since the late 90's, and I have deep feelings of nostalgia for the site. I truly hope they listen to what everyone is saying here and do a major course correction and get back on-mission.
But I doubt the editors can make that happen because idiot MBA's are now clearly in charge and determined to drive this site off a cliff.
It makes me deeply sad to say that, but I want to contribute something positive to the discussion about Slashdot alternatives. I don't know of any one site that is what Slashdot used to be, but I have in the last couple of years found the same creative energy represented at the Maker Faires. The work being done by MakerBot, Fab@Home, Adafruit, and all the many, many DIY'ers of all stripes out there is unbelievably cool and inspiring. I read /. and science news all the time, but when I visited the Maker Faire last Fall at the Queens Science Center I saw 7 different revolutions in the making that I wasn't even really aware of, and the one I had learned about at previous iterations of the Maker Faire, 3D printing, had grown by leaps and bounds.
So maybe somewhere between Make Magazine, Thingiverse.com, and some of the others is where the next Slashdot could be born. What do you all think?
I defended /. when people slammed the video, because video is something that could add to the /. experience if done well; Nobody still does journalism in the English language except for the BBC, and /. could help step into that gap.
But this BI thing? Naw, this is horribly off-mission, guys. No self-respecting geek would ever read this stuff. The buzzword itself creates a geek-repulsion field. And after more than a decade of CNET and its ilk why do /.'s publishers think they're going to lure away PHB's & MBAs to read the same kind of fluff on another site? PHB's and MBAs strongly dislike real geeks, and fear the things they know as "geek stuff." That's why they mainly read Fortune and Forbes and the WSJ because they like to fantasize about their stock options and only occasionally dip into CNET when they feel like being a little "edgy."
Please, guys, don't keep going in this direction. Listen to what Tom said up-thread: refocus on being brilliant at /.'s core mission of being News for Nerds. The MBA's who are obviously driving this trend toward mission creep and dilution are going in exactly the wrong direction. You do not alienate your core audience, because they are a high-value audience. They are fully segmented and demographically, ie. relatively affluent males ages 18-45, are highly desireable. You can charge a much higher CPM for that than the opposite that the MBA's are driving you toward.
So just in case any of said MBA's are reading this (which I doubt very much, because they're probably sitting on the shitter jacking off to their sheaf of the afore-mentioned stock options), then DO NOT KILL SLASHDOT. Go back to business school or go work for AIG or whatever you worthless sacks of crap do. (Sorry, fellow slashdotters, for the vitriol)
You're such a paid shill that you literally reek! GTFO and don't let the door hit you on the ass. A pox on your house and the crappy people you represent.
Jesus, it's 2012 and we can't even get shills who can come up with new FUD? This crap hasn't even changed a micron since the year 2000.
Die in a fire, a*holes.
If it were me, I'd build the world's first airborne cruise ship. Yes, there were zeppelins, but they were point-to-point precursors to 747s. But a zeppelin that was outfitted like a cruise ship and didn't need to compete with 747s on speed would be excellent, because it would fly slower and lower and give the passengers far more to look at than your average waterborne cruise, staring out at the featureless sea for day after day. Imagine a sky yacht cruise taking you at low elevation over the Grand Canyon or Arches and you get the idea. How awesome would that be?
That's what I call that idea. Nothing will stop cord cutting. The reason is on-demand. A good friend of mine is the head of programming at a well-known cable channel. He tells me he has to run like crazy every day to try to not lose ground, but they're still losing ground because they can't compete with on-demand, anywhere entertainment that the Internet offers.
If Hulu does this, they're only nuking their own business. Customers have already seen the future and it is Netflix. Yes, given the intransigence of the MPAA and Cable companies, there is an initial adjustment to the absence of the blockbuster titles. But then you discover the excellent content produced in other places around the world and the American stuff starts to look tedious.
Since Starz channel picked up its ball and went home, I've discovered production values on Korean movies are just as high as here, and their plots are twisted and interesting. And Bollywood movies are pure fun. Bollywood! Who knew?
I was thunderstruck the other day when my 3-yr old daughter saw a picture of Mickey Mouse somewhere and said, "Who's that?" She honestly had no idea. And it occurred to me that because Disney (and by extension the other MPAA and Cable players) have so locked away their content and have been so intransigent about getting with the times that they are running a real risk of rendering themselves culturally irrelevant. Think about what that also means about their ancillary revenue streams: my kids will never pester me to buy Disney toys or to take them to Disneyland. Disney has unwittingly saved me about $20K (over their lifetimes) that way.
So go on, guys, do the world a favor and destroy Hulu, too. The rest of us will move on happily without you!
9/11 was forgettable in no way. The event itself, on its own merits, is not forgettable. I watched the towers fall and the ground tremble all the way here in Brooklyn. Bits of burning paper drifted over our neighborhood for weeks. So as an eye witness it's not forgettable. Also, it happened in New York, which has as much claim to the title of capitol of the world as any city, and so because it won't forget there's little chance the rest of the world will either. The Oklahoma City bombing, by contrast, happened in Oklahoma City.
Also, the legacy of 9/11 is not entirely the sum of the evil that it has excused since. It also shattered the illusion of invulnerability of the United States, for others and for Americans. For all the NSA and military and nuclear weapons and wealth and power the United States was brought to its knees by a handful of guys with box cutters who were thinking outside the box; that's a powerful lesson for everyone, not just Americans, including for us geeks as we go about our technical jobs.
Yes we do need to deal with Bush and Cheney and all those who have used 9/11 to strip America of its freedom; I hope we do it soon, with prejudice.
But don't be so dismissive of the event itself. It was and continues to be significant.
And thus the Reformation began. Apparently prior to the Reformation it was not even sanctioned for the common people to have bibles they could read for themselves because they might get confused about what it actually says; it was necessary for Rome to tell you what it meant.
Many protestants still don't read the bible themselves and let themselves be led around by the nose by their pastors. However, they do have bibles and could, theoretically, read them. After 1,517 years of not having them, in Christian terms, that counts as huge progress.
It's ironic. Recently SallieMae called to talk to me about one of my employees who's delinquent on his student loans. The caller was clearly Indian. I remarked that it hardly seems to help American students repay their loans, in general, if SallieMae itself outsources its operations to India, thus depriving a number of Americans from the opportunity to repay their loans.
The rep hung up on me.
There's some truth to what you're saying, but history does not uniformly support your claim, and there are so many variables that you cannot determine that result follows from the cause, revolution.
For example, take Gandhi. He put together a coalition of many parties who disagreed on many policies but which were united in the desire to get rid of the British. So they conducted a campaign of non-violence and non-cooperation that compelled the UK to leave. The United States is not India, but recent shifts brought about by the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and even the SOPA protest indicate Washington DC is not as monolithic as many suppose and can be moved.
I would not like a post-revolution order imposed by the Tea Party and they would probably dislike many things I would do, but we all agree that this Republic, as currently constituted, has ceased to do its job. We ought to be able to put together a new constitutional convention to craft the American Constitution 2.0 for the next 200 years.
And yet corporations write checks, while citizens pick up guns. Wonder who the politician will think butters his bread then?
That would be "shitty," "poopy," and "crappy?"
I see you've met my wife.
There are a million things in the world to do that are more fulfilling than turning yourself into a mindslave for the content industries. Literally, a million. So go do them!
The best thing that could happen from all the endless *AA's' lawsuits would be for everyone to switch off the slave colla...um, I mean, the TVs and stereos and go outside and discover any one of the million things to do that are not that. Or stay inside and discover the million things to do that are not sitting around waiting for some marketing jackass to tell you how to think or what to buy.
If you like music, pick up an affordable guitar and teach yourself how to play. You might not ever achieve a respectable rendition of 'Stairway to Heaven,' but you will probably enjoy it much more than passively listening to a performance of the real thing. Likewise movies. Pick up your smartphone and shoot home movies of your kids. Nobody but you will ever enjoy them, but your family will enjoy them forever. And isn't that what's important?
Stop living in the realm of other people's fantasies, especially when those fantasies come with real chains attached.
I have a startup that is bootstrapping itself as we speak. It is difficult. Banks won't lend to you. VCs want to exploit you. Access to funds is non-existent. One of the ways that the government claims to help startups is with the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants. They are exceptionally restrictive and prone to cronyism at worst, and extreme risk aversion at best. Solyndra in particular has exacerbated the latter.
Bureaucrats are about the world's least able people to evaluate business ideas or technological innovation. Bureaucrats are the diametric opposite of the risk-takers that entrepreneurs are. They are the last people who ought to be sitting in judgement on the merits of innovative ideas.
So, holding competitions to award prize money to great ideas sounds like an excellent proposition in theory, but in practice it gets sucked down into the mire of why our country is failing badly: the wrong people are in charge.
I've been working in interactive advertising in New York for the last 13 years (hey, when the dot-com days ended it was the only thing left in this neck of the woods). I despise advertising. Especially the indiscriminate TV kind. God, what I wouldn't give to get back all the time I've been exposed to feminine hygiene commercials.
But, when I've been online and experienced advertising that is actually geared toward me, it does not annoy me. I find it helpful. Likewise when a friend has forwarded something they thought I might be interested in, I often have been and have been grateful they thought of me.
So I'll express a contrarian opinion on this subject and say that if all advertising was done in the latter way, we'd probably see it as much more of a positive than as a negative. We should all hope that advertising in general follows this model and only routes to the people who might or could find it interesting and useful.