I wonder how long it will take before non-Christian religious holidays start getting the same treatment. I can see it now: Buy Ramadanorade, the only fluid replacement you can trust for your fasting needs!;)
The adaptation of non-christian spiritual practices for shallow western purposes has been going on for a while...
So yep, I've been rewired by video games. Now I'm in the work force, but now I find that it's hard to apply my "twichspeed" mentality to work. Everything is too slow, and it's hard to keep the ball rolling.
A thought: try doing two things at once. People talk about the task-switching overhead, and it's real, possibly insurmountable for some tasks.
However, I've noticed that when I have trouble paying attention (especially in a setting where I'm listening to someone present/lecture/speak), if I start to lose focus, get mentally restless, my mind is often sharpened by pulling out a math problem and working on it... usually nothing too deep, but a review of something I'm acquainted with, like the solution to an ammortization-related difference equation, or how raising something to a power n 10 changes its order of magnitude in base 10, or whatever. Anyway, as I work on that, I find my min calms down and I'm able to pay at least as good attention to what the speaker is saying as if I'd simply twiddled my thumbs.
Don't know if it would work as well in many work settings. I have trouble doing something like the above and talking on the phone, for example, but I have taken programming breaks by doing the above....
Corollary: Every cell phone company beleives that they have more disatisfied customers than their competitors do.
See, it works both ways. In theory, taking this barrier out should make it just as easy for customers to flock to you as away from you. One thing keeping me from walking away from T-Mobile and to a more data-friendly service and never looking back is the fact that I like my number. I've had it for two years, it's a combination of only 3 numbers, and I think it's good. OK, so T-Mobile should be afraid. But there's at least five other carriers out there that should be ready to take me and people like me. And I can't beleive that there's not people who wouldn't swich *to* T-Mobile, given the chance, due to the morass of good information on the relative merits of the wireless services, not to mention the genuine difference in value propositions between them.
But apparently, most of the wireless companies believe they are delivering inferior services to their competitors. That's the only explanation.
Further Corollary: at least one of them is wrong.:)
no one is claiming that rehabilitation is impossible
And that's why, apparently without knowing it, Mitnick's prosecutor is calling into question a large portion of the justification under which the system he works for operates. What's the point of locking somebody up? (1) To stop them from doing it again. Fine. But we also work for (2) to turn them into people who won't do it again, even if we let them out, right? Whether they won't do it again because they don't want to go to prison or because they realize what they did was wrong, whatever... the important part is the reform.
If reform is real, then the convicted felon is as safe a bet as the non-convicted felon. Maybe safer, because they've been down the road before, know they can be caught, and know where it leads.
If reform is not real, you have to start asking yourself questions about whether you should ever let anyone out.
An IPO is not the only exit strategy for investors. A private buyout by other shareholders or investors is always a possibility, especially if the shares held by other Google investors/founders are appreciable.
In addition, private investors may have concerns other than ROI. It may be everyone who invested with Google bought into "don't be evil." At the very least, I'm sure there was some due dilligence where that core philosophy was noticed.
The realities of economics do not have to be the real bottom line, and while they may turn out to be here, it isn't a sure thing.
Re:Anyone interested in extending this concept?
on
Geocoding All Content
·
· Score: 1
WHERE Distance RelevanceThreshold
I meant: WHERE Distance < RelevanceThreshold
Re:Anyone interested in extending this concept?
on
Geocoding All Content
·
· Score: 1
How are you getting on with your spatial query and scaling issues?
Would this really be hard? Off the top of my head, suppose you had a table in a relational database which had some sort of coordinates in them:
LocationID int LocationX float LocationY float
Given an xpos and ypos for a given location, to find other locations by succesive closeness, couldn't you do an SQL query something like:
SELECT
LocationID,
LocationX,
LocationY,
SQRT((xpos-LocationX)^2 +(ypos-LocationY)^2) AS Distance FROM Locations WHERE Distance RelevanceThreshold ORDER BY Distance
Obviously, some modification might be required for the distance metric if you're using a coordinate scheme which isn't strictly cartesian (a spherical coordinate system might make more sense:), but the basics remain the same, yes?
only 30 years ago the idea that human pollution could affect our athmosphere and the seas, was regarded as utter nonsense and hysteria.
Are you sure? Even 15 years ago, it was pretty much well-acknowledged that Los Angeles ought to come with a surgeon general's warning, especially some of those places like Glendale, where the air clots up against the foothills.
But I guess Rachel Carson was considered a bit of a radical nut....
This may be the most insightful comment in the whole list, especially considering that the application mentioned on the PC preferred page is, in fact, focused in digital video editing. Adobe has been bit by a competetive product in the Mac market. So they promote the PC, where there is no such competitor.
The interesting thing is that I seem to recall that Apple bought the main technology for video editing 3-4 years back... from Adobe? Anyone know anything about this?
Yup, it would be useless. 14 years ago, it would be 1989, so what technology did we have then? 386s just coming into birth? I was still using my 640K 8088 with 8 MHz turbo speed. I don't think MS Windows 3.1 was officially out until 1990.
Some things, yes, but then there's things like McConnel's Code Complete, or Numerical Recipes, or Knuth's Art of Computer Programming.
Granted, O'Reilly doesn't sell a whole lot of these things. Though they do have a vi pocket guide.:)
I think 14 years is *plenty* of time for a copyright holder to hold control of permission over their work.
My perspective is...if I'm an author, then I'm not going to be sitting on my hands for 14 years, soaking up the control-trip...I'll be writing more things along the way.
Absolutely agree in the "sit on your hands" argument. The thing I'm anticipating... while it doesn't take much time to achieve modest success with a work, it takes a while for it to permeate most of society. So there's some financial concern with that, yes, but my bigger concern is creative/artistic. OK, so, say I'm Victor Hugo (even though there's no resemblance), and I'm just getting started and write this "Hunchback of Notre Dame" novel. It's not quite as accessible as, say, your average John Grisham novel, but it's pretty good, and a number of people like it. Disney, wanting new material, decides they like it too. They ask for film rights. I say, OK, but insist on preserving character of the book. They hum and haw, then decide they don't like me. A few years later, the copyright goes, and they do whatever they like. Mass-marketed and watered down, it goes to screen. Lots of people who might have actually liked the book the way it was get a different impression of what the story is, and decide never to pick it up.
If the copyright is longer, the idea of the book has more time to permeate society, so people can at least compare....
Or imagine you're Michael Crichton, and you have these books called "Jurassic Park" or "The Lost World"... oh. wait.
I'm a bit ambivalent about this... on one hand, I like the idea of open flow of information, and think copyright periods could definitely be cut down. What the public gets out of the copyright "bargain" now is clearly less and less, and if you can't turn a good profit from a single edition of a book inside of 2-3 decades, another 4-6 decades isn't going to help (and if you can, profit in 2-3, don't just sit and coast on that).
But under two decades.... I don't know. For one thing, if I wrote something famous, I'd want control over it long enough for a perception of it to soak into collective consciousness before it got Disney-raped or something. For another, the more substantial you make the time period you have copyright, the more you can recover risk/opportunity costs associated with a work -- or other works that didn't make it (indefinite or 75 years is waaay too long, but I don't think 30 is).
I know I am going to get killed for saying this... but here we go...
Who decides what is effectively the moral authority.
You do. There really isn't any other way. Except....
So, what do we create. We create a "Moral Structure" in which the person need not be immediately punished to fear doing something that overall the group considers wrong... What is this... this sounds like religion... hey.. That's odd..
Or like... the law. On a practical level, if you live in a society with other people, you have some obligation to respect its generally accepted tenets and institutions, or face the consequences that said/society and intitutions would impose.
Note that I'd use "respect" here not in the "revere" or "worship" sense -- though you well may, if that were your choice -- but in the sense that you have a healthy respect for gravity or the claws on a mountain lion. It may not fit your ideal conception of how things should be, and you may be able to bend the rules and work within it (airplanes work with gravity and aerodynamics to provide the freedom of flight, and there are animal trainers/handlers), but you recognize that real consequences can exist for not respecting certain consequences.
Cost savings of open source software in the server room." If you let the kids back there, you might be in trouble.
Where I went to highschool, we had an old Icon minicomputer running some kind Sys V unix, I think. Some of "the kids" -- that is, us 16-17 year olds knew every bit as much about system administration as the faculty/staff. A number of the students figured out exploits to gain root access (keep in mind, scripts for kiddies weren't prevalently available yet). Around that point, our instructor, if I recall, got smart and actually encouraged those who really knew what was up and let them help out. No catastrophe ensued. Four years later, I understand, at least one of my classmates was pulling down around $60k as a sysadmin somewhere.
Wish I'd been reading advanced unix programming at age 17. But I was having trouble with C memory allocation....
Europe's treatment of MS's place in the market is going to be particularly interesting. They don't have the same kind of political/economic interest in playing nice with MS that the U.S. might have, and a more centrist view prevails when it comes to market operation, so it won't lead as easily to "leave the market alone"/"you're just jealous of success" positions.
But where things get especially interesting is considering how the EU is in the stage of becoming more of a unified and global power. Some commentators have likened the reforms going on there to the transition phase that the 13 original colonies went through... articles of confederation, then consitution... and anticipate an accelerated transition into a true block. As this block acquires more power, we may see more jockeying for power between the U.S. and th E.U.... maybe everything from the sort of tariff tiffs that happened last year over steel, to looking at ways to improve their domestic advantage when it comes to software and I/T. Losing licensing costs for Windows and paying local companies for development may be one way to encourage that.
Re:Aren't APPS the real issue?
on
Halloween VII
·
· Score: 2
>> "Well, duh, so that we can kill Microsoft!"
> Why?
Not sure about the rest, I can explain the "stick it to MS" attitude pretty easily. Microsoft, in their business practices, has two common variations on a single theme:
(1) Whenever possible, make it so people have no choice but to use their product. (2) Whenever possible, destroy a competing product
They will bring this to bear on Linux, to be sure . The Halloween documents are about evidence that MS is doing this -- and there's evidence that most of the time, they're terrifically succesful at doing it. The urgent need to deliver a deadly blow to Microsoft's market control comes from the understanding that Microsoft will stop at nothing until Linux is not a choice -- and they won't do it by simply providing a better product, they'll do it by subverting open protocols and formats, they'll do it by creating "trusted" hardware platforms, difficult or impossible to run free software on, they'll use legal/licensing tactics, and in general, do anything they can. The only safe Microsoft -- one that will just let people who want to use Linux use Linx -- is one whose monopole market power is broken.
And all you folks who claim that #1 and #2 is just plain business -- go find a third world country to rape, OK? On a pragmatic level, markets work as a tool when companies compete to provide goods and services and compete on quality, not control of channels and information flow... it's well-known that Microsoft bullshit is exactly the sort of stuff that messes up markets. And on an ethical level -- let's just say that those style of business tactics make a business that engages them the equivalent of Tonya Harding. Do you want to win by doing your best, or sucker-punching the next guy?
How do you play this game? All that's happening to me is that I'm getting eaten by the dragons. Then a bat flies by, gloating with a chalice. I managed to get a black key to a black castle, grab a chalice from a red dragon, which then followed me until I got eaten.
Here's the problem with personal blogging. Most of the people keeping "journal" style sites (referred to as "notebooks" above in the review) don't understand the difference between a well-written personal narrative and letting the world know that you went to the bathroom, just talked to Suzie, or stepped in dog crap. I agree that reading those kind of blogs are about as interesting as listening to a standard cell phone conversation. You don't learn anything.
But some of the personal narrative sites can be amusing, moving, and occasionally wise. I've really enjoyed reading this one and this one over the last year or two. You're missing out on some great writing, story telling, and even an odd discussion about the semantic web if you don't read them.
(And don't forget my own merely semi-pitiful narratives. I promise there is only one mention of attending to bodily functions on the whole site, and that's only in the context of a "wackiness ensues" story. I'd say that was a shameless plug, but I'm now somewhat ashamed. Ah, well.)
As for "link style" blogging -- I haven't figured out what makes the difference between the good and the bad. It's not necessarily focus -- Metafilter and even Slashdot are both all over the map. It's not even necessarily commentary... weak commentary or no commentary and a collection of links can still be interesting. Near as I can tell, it's interesting if the person/people collecting them have interesting trains of thought. Whatever that means.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how long it will take before non-Christian religious holidays start getting the same treatment. I can see it now: Buy Ramadanorade, the only fluid replacement you can trust for your fasting needs! ;)
The adaptation of non-christian spiritual practices for shallow western purposes has been going on for a while...
So yep, I've been rewired by video games. Now I'm in the work force, but now I find that it's hard to apply my "twichspeed" mentality to work. Everything is too slow, and it's hard to keep the ball rolling.
A thought: try doing two things at once. People talk about the task-switching overhead, and it's real, possibly insurmountable for some tasks.
However, I've noticed that when I have trouble paying attention (especially in a setting where I'm listening to someone present/lecture/speak), if I start to lose focus, get mentally restless, my mind is often sharpened by pulling out a math problem and working on it... usually nothing too deep, but a review of something I'm acquainted with, like the solution to an ammortization-related difference equation, or how raising something to a power n 10 changes its order of magnitude in base 10, or whatever. Anyway, as I work on that, I find my min calms down and I'm able to pay at least as good attention to what the speaker is saying as if I'd simply twiddled my thumbs.
Don't know if it would work as well in many work settings. I have trouble doing something like the above and talking on the phone, for example, but I have taken programming breaks by doing the above....
Um, where's the content? Where's the screenshots? Looks like a press release in sheeps clothing to me.
"Yeah, it's got this feature and this one too...and it's gonna whoop up on Longhorn! Woohoo!"
Longhorn screenshots anyone?
Corollary: Every cell phone company beleives that they have more disatisfied customers than their competitors do.
:)
See, it works both ways. In theory, taking this barrier out should make it just as easy for customers to flock to you as away from you. One thing keeping me from walking away from T-Mobile and to a more data-friendly service and never looking back is the fact that I like my number. I've had it for two years, it's a combination of only 3 numbers, and I think it's good. OK, so T-Mobile should be afraid. But there's at least five other carriers out there that should be ready to take me and people like me. And I can't beleive that there's not people who wouldn't swich *to* T-Mobile, given the chance, due to the morass of good information on the relative merits of the wireless services, not to mention the genuine difference in value propositions between them.
But apparently, most of the wireless companies believe they are delivering inferior services to their competitors. That's the only explanation.
Further Corollary: at least one of them is wrong.
no one is claiming that rehabilitation is impossible
And that's why, apparently without knowing it, Mitnick's prosecutor is calling into question a large portion of the justification under which the system he works for operates. What's the point of locking somebody up? (1) To stop them from doing it again. Fine. But we also work for (2) to turn them into people who won't do it again, even if we let them out, right? Whether they won't do it again because they don't want to go to prison or because they realize what they did was wrong, whatever... the important part is the reform.
If reform is real, then the convicted felon is as safe a bet as the non-convicted felon. Maybe safer, because they've been down the road before, know they can be caught, and know where it leads.
If reform is not real, you have to start asking yourself questions about whether you should ever let anyone out.
Take a look behind the scenes of this campaign....
Also, they can take the time to go back, re-read TTT and ROTK and correct all the plot problems they introduced in TTT.
When Faramir turned out to be "Boromir II" I nearly walked out of the theatre.
How did they get the first film so right and the second one so wrong? *pounds head against wall*
An IPO is not the only exit strategy for investors. A private buyout by other shareholders or investors is always a possibility, especially if the shares held by other Google investors/founders are appreciable.
In addition, private investors may have concerns other than ROI. It may be everyone who invested with Google bought into "don't be evil." At the very least, I'm sure there was some due dilligence where that core philosophy was noticed.
The realities of economics do not have to be the real bottom line, and while they may turn out to be here, it isn't a sure thing.
WHERE Distance RelevanceThreshold
I meant: WHERE Distance < RelevanceThreshold
How are you getting on with your spatial query and scaling issues?
:), but the basics remain the same, yes?
Would this really be hard? Off the top of my head, suppose you had a table in a relational database which had some sort of coordinates in them:
LocationID int
LocationX float
LocationY float
Given an xpos and ypos for a given location, to find other locations by succesive closeness, couldn't you do an SQL query something like:
SELECT
LocationID,
LocationX,
LocationY,
SQRT((xpos-LocationX)^2 +(ypos-LocationY)^2) AS Distance
FROM Locations
WHERE Distance RelevanceThreshold
ORDER BY Distance
Obviously, some modification might be required for the distance metric if you're using a coordinate scheme which isn't strictly cartesian (a spherical coordinate system might make more sense
Of course, this still doesn't explain the lack of flying cars ...
No, no, it actually does, because future pundits everywhere insisted those would happen.
(OK, there's a potential logical error there, but we might have a <=> b here...)
only 30 years ago the idea that human pollution could affect our athmosphere and the seas, was regarded as utter nonsense and hysteria.
Are you sure? Even 15 years ago, it was pretty much well-acknowledged that Los Angeles ought to come with a surgeon general's warning, especially some of those places like Glendale, where the air clots up against the foothills.
But I guess Rachel Carson was considered a bit of a radical nut....
This may be the most insightful comment in the whole list, especially considering that the application mentioned on the PC preferred page is, in fact, focused in digital video editing. Adobe has been bit by a competetive product in the Mac market. So they promote the PC, where there is no such competitor.
The interesting thing is that I seem to recall that Apple bought the main technology for video editing 3-4 years back... from Adobe? Anyone know anything about this?
Yup, it would be useless. 14 years ago, it would be 1989, so what technology did we have then? 386s just coming into birth? I was still using my 640K 8088 with 8 MHz turbo speed. I don't think MS Windows 3.1 was officially out until 1990.
:)
Some things, yes, but then there's things like McConnel's Code Complete, or Numerical Recipes, or Knuth's Art of Computer Programming.
Granted, O'Reilly doesn't sell a whole lot of these things. Though they do have a vi pocket guide.
I think 14 years is *plenty* of time for a copyright holder to hold control of permission over their work.
My perspective is...if I'm an author, then I'm not going to be sitting on my hands for 14 years, soaking up the control-trip...I'll be writing more things along the way.
Absolutely agree in the "sit on your hands" argument. The thing I'm anticipating... while it doesn't take much time to achieve modest success with a work, it takes a while for it to permeate most of society. So there's some financial concern with that, yes, but my bigger concern is creative/artistic. OK, so, say I'm Victor Hugo (even though there's no resemblance), and I'm just getting started and write this "Hunchback of Notre Dame" novel. It's not quite as accessible as, say, your average John Grisham novel, but it's pretty good, and a number of people like it. Disney, wanting new material, decides they like it too. They ask for film rights. I say, OK, but insist on preserving character of the book. They hum and haw, then decide they don't like me. A few years later, the copyright goes, and they do whatever they like. Mass-marketed and watered down, it goes to screen. Lots of people who might have actually liked the book the way it was get a different impression of what the story is, and decide never to pick it up.
If the copyright is longer, the idea of the book has more time to permeate society, so people can at least compare....
Or imagine you're Michael Crichton, and you have these books called "Jurassic Park" or "The Lost World"... oh. wait.
I'm a bit ambivalent about this... on one hand, I like the idea of open flow of information, and think copyright periods could definitely be cut down. What the public gets out of the copyright "bargain" now is clearly less and less, and if you can't turn a good profit from a single edition of a book inside of 2-3 decades, another 4-6 decades isn't going to help (and if you can, profit in 2-3, don't just sit and coast on that).
But under two decades.... I don't know. For one thing, if I wrote something famous, I'd want control over it long enough for a perception of it to soak into collective consciousness before it got Disney-raped or something. For another, the more substantial you make the time period you have copyright, the more you can recover risk/opportunity costs associated with a work -- or other works that didn't make it (indefinite or 75 years is waaay too long, but I don't think 30 is).
That's what this is. You don't get quite the comfy ride in the back of a Vogon Space Cruiser or anything, but it's still hitchiking.
Now if only I could get a free ride to the Midwest or East Coast this way.
I know I am going to get killed for saying this... but here we go...
Who decides what is effectively the moral authority.
You do. There really isn't any other way. Except....
So, what do we create. We create a "Moral Structure" in which the person need not be immediately punished to fear doing something that overall the group considers wrong... What is this... this sounds like religion... hey.. That's odd..
Or like... the law. On a practical level, if you live in a society with other people, you have some obligation to respect its generally accepted tenets and institutions, or face the consequences that said/society and intitutions would impose.
Note that I'd use "respect" here not in the "revere" or "worship" sense -- though you well may, if that were your choice -- but in the sense that you have a healthy respect for gravity or the claws on a mountain lion. It may not fit your ideal conception of how things should be, and you may be able to bend the rules and work within it (airplanes work with gravity and aerodynamics to provide the freedom of flight, and there are animal trainers/handlers), but you recognize that real consequences can exist for not respecting certain consequences.
Cost savings of open source software in the server room." If you let the kids back there, you might be in trouble.
Where I went to highschool, we had an old Icon minicomputer running some kind Sys V unix, I think. Some of "the kids" -- that is, us 16-17 year olds knew every bit as much about system administration as the faculty/staff. A number of the students figured out exploits to gain root access (keep in mind, scripts for kiddies weren't prevalently available yet). Around that point, our instructor, if I recall, got smart and actually encouraged those who really knew what was up and let them help out. No catastrophe ensued. Four years later, I understand, at least one of my classmates was pulling down around $60k as a sysadmin somewhere.
Wish I'd been reading advanced unix programming at age 17. But I was having trouble with C memory allocation....
Europe's treatment of MS's place in the market is going to be particularly interesting. They don't have the same kind of political/economic interest in playing nice with MS that the U.S. might have, and a more centrist view prevails when it comes to market operation, so it won't lead as easily to "leave the market alone"/"you're just jealous of success" positions.
... maybe everything from the sort of tariff tiffs that happened last year over steel, to looking at ways to improve their domestic advantage when it comes to software and I/T. Losing licensing costs for Windows and paying local companies for development may be one way to encourage that.
But where things get especially interesting is considering how the EU is in the stage of becoming more of a unified and global power. Some commentators have likened the reforms going on there to the transition phase that the 13 original colonies went through... articles of confederation, then consitution... and anticipate an accelerated transition into a true block. As this block acquires more power, we may see more jockeying for power between the U.S. and th E.U.
>> "Well, duh, so that we can kill Microsoft!"
> Why?
Not sure about the rest, I can explain the "stick it to MS" attitude pretty easily. Microsoft, in their business practices, has two common variations on a single theme:
(1) Whenever possible, make it so people have no choice but to use their product.
(2) Whenever possible, destroy a competing product
They will bring this to bear on Linux, to be sure . The Halloween documents are about evidence that MS is doing this -- and there's evidence that most of the time, they're terrifically succesful at doing it. The urgent need to deliver a deadly blow to Microsoft's market control comes from the understanding that Microsoft will stop at nothing until Linux is not a choice -- and they won't do it by simply providing a better product, they'll do it by subverting open protocols and formats, they'll do it by creating "trusted" hardware platforms, difficult or impossible to run free software on, they'll use legal/licensing tactics, and in general, do anything they can. The only safe Microsoft -- one that will just let people who want to use Linux use Linx -- is one whose monopole market power is broken.
And all you folks who claim that #1 and #2 is just plain business -- go find a third world country to rape, OK? On a pragmatic level, markets work as a tool when companies compete to provide goods and services and compete on quality, not control of channels and information flow... it's well-known that Microsoft bullshit is exactly the sort of stuff that messes up markets. And on an ethical level -- let's just say that those style of business tactics make a business that engages them the equivalent of Tonya Harding. Do you want to win by doing your best, or sucker-punching the next guy?
How do you play this game? All that's happening to me is that I'm getting eaten by the dragons. Then a bat flies by, gloating with a chalice. I managed to get a black key to a black castle, grab a chalice from a red dragon, which then followed me until I got eaten.
Some of the best darn free books out there are available as PDFs -- good for on-screen reading, fine for printing out if you want to do that.
The one I linked to, "manual," is a mix of fiction and personal narratives and something else. Great stuff.
Here's the problem with personal blogging. Most of the people keeping "journal" style sites (referred to as "notebooks" above in the review) don't understand the difference between a well-written personal narrative and letting the world know that you went to the bathroom, just talked to Suzie, or stepped in dog crap. I agree that reading those kind of blogs are about as interesting as listening to a standard cell phone conversation. You don't learn anything.
But some of the personal narrative sites can be amusing, moving, and occasionally wise. I've really enjoyed reading this one and this one over the last year or two. You're missing out on some great writing, story telling, and even an odd discussion about the semantic web if you don't read them.
(And don't forget my own merely semi-pitiful narratives. I promise there is only one mention of attending to bodily functions on the whole site, and that's only in the context of a "wackiness ensues" story. I'd say that was a shameless plug, but I'm now somewhat ashamed. Ah, well.)
As for "link style" blogging -- I haven't figured out what makes the difference between the good and the bad. It's not necessarily focus -- Metafilter and even Slashdot are both all over the map. It's not even necessarily commentary... weak commentary or no commentary and a collection of links can still be interesting. Near as I can tell, it's interesting if the person/people collecting them have interesting trains of thought. Whatever that means.