I hate to admit it when the Republicans are right but damn, what an elitist attitude!
Hailed as the ultimate example of information retrieval, Google is, in fact, the device that gives you thousands of "hits" (which may or may not be relevant) in no very useful order.
Yeah, because we all know how effective the Dewey Decimal System is. Get over yourself asshole. If you can't even coax results out of Google then your time is done.
I read your comments at http://www.ultracade.com/mame.pdf. Respectfully sir, the trademark to MAME is not yours. Well reasoned good intentions do not change the basic fact that you are attempting to steal something as surely as the machine vendors you complain about.
If your goals are genuine, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about it. You already know the wrong way. The right way is to solicit a contract from the many authors of MAME that would enable you to hold the trademark in trust for the described purpose of taking action against lawbreaking commercial sellers as you describe.
Has it not occurred to these advertisers that the folks who are willing to buy their products aren't annoyed enough to enable popup blockers to begin with? At the rate they're going, they'll force the technologies to be engineered out of the browser entirely, and then where will they be?
People from 100 years ago, if told about MRIs, CAT scans, GeoSyncSats, GPS, Sat Phones, Computers, the Internet, and Microwave ovens would say you are crazy and such things would never be possible.
More to the point, if you told someone 150 years ago that time was a variable function of speed rather than the other way around they'd look at you cross-eyed. The uneducated still do. Yet relativity says the rate of unit time is variable and relativity has passed every test thrown at it.
This data suggests that probability too is something other than what we think it is. Perhaps Einstein was right and God indeed does not play dice with the universe. I think that possibility is fascinating.
The oldest scam on the Internet is forged email, though it was more of a prank than a scam (there was a santa@north.pole.com long before there was a pole.com). The second oldest is the Make Money Fast spam, though it wasn't called spam back then.
Typosquatting is a youngling. AFAIK, mine was the first (whitehouse.net) and that only happened in 2/96.
How about nominating someone who will put a higher priority on getting Sarge out the door than on the purity issues?
I like Debian's reliability and I've used debian as my primary OS since around '96. I also live in the real world where non-OSS commercial software gets used. The libraries in Woody have gotten too far behind current. Sarge needs to get out the door soon if Debian is going to remain viable outside of the core clique of maintainers.
Actually, if they offer BRIs out of your central office, they likely fall under the universal service fund rules. That means they're not allowed to charge you more than anyone else to bring it to your door. Even if they have to spend thousands stringing new wires. That was the whole point of allowing the telcos to collect the USF fee on every phone bill: so that they could afford to deliver service to rural customers where it would otherwise be prohibitively expensive.
You just have to figure out the right buttons to press and the right words to use. Its buried in their tariff somewhere; you just have to find it.
Of course, if their standard price is $80/month then its still going to be $80/month.
Actually, most ISPs did not support both standards because of the expense. They simply published a list of supported modems, and for that 3-year period you either picked a modem that your ISP supported or you picked an ISP that supported your modem. Or you used 33.6 and waited for the standard.
It was a minor hassle, but the reward was 56k a couple years earlier, and pressure off the standards group so they didn't try to rush it.
I was also working for an ISP at the time, so I speak from experience. It Wasn't That Bad. Yes, it did have a higher support cost. Yes, that runs counter to the industry favored practice of increasing automation instead of staffing. So what? It beat the alternative which was no 56k for several more years, or worse: a rushed, poorly designed 56k standard.
If we'd waited for standardization for 56k modems, we'd have waited an extra three years. Instead we had x2 and k56 flex for a little while. Was that a bad thing? No, not really. It took the pressure off the final v.90 standard, so they could take the time and get it right.
Unfortunately a couple machines had lying hardware that didn't commit to disk when asked, so InnoDB's durability wasn't so durable (though no fault of InnoDB).
Um, yeah. That happens when you configure the raid cards for write-back instead of write-through but forget to buy the cards with batteries.
Microchips were around well back into the '70s, but VLSI (very large scale integration) didn't happen until the mid-80's. If you're old enough, you owned computers (Apple, Commodore, Atari and even the IBM PC) whose motherboards were crammed full of chips. Now look and there are a half dozen big chips, a bunch of capacitors and that's it. And its the same in every device you inspect from your computer to your alarm clock radio to your microwave oven and beyond. VLSI is as far beyond microchips as microchips were beyond the transistor. Its a critical albeit unseen part of modern life.
CNN's panel embodies the usual (in)competence I expect from the mass media. They included MEMS which are barely out of the experimental stage but forgot about VLSI which has become completely ubiquitous. In all probability the current crop of retards has never even heard of VLSI because the engineers take it for granted and so don't mention it.
I guess you could say that VLSI has become such a ubiquitous underpinning of so much of our modern lives that its absence a quarter century ago has fallen out of our conciousness. I probably would have forgotten myself but I maintain and repair early 80's arcade games for a hobby so the difference between how we build electronics now and how we built them then is constantly fresh in my mind.
Some of their choices were obvious. Others were poor. Here are my complaints:
10) RFID tags. Given that RFID is still mostly smoke and mirrors, is it reasonable to call it a major innovation of the past 25 years? Maybe 10 years from now we'll think so, but it doesn't belong on this year's list.
11) MEMS. What? No! VLSI is vastly more important than MEMS, and it didn't even make the list. Besides, MEMS is little more than a pit stop on the road to nanotech.
19) HDTV. HDTV is not a top innovation of any year, let alone a top innovation of the past 25. It was a committee-designed system haphazardly thrown together that has yet to make any meaningful impact on everyday life.
21) Nanotech. Nanotech will be an amazing innovation if it ever gets here, but is it fair to call something that's still mostly science fiction a top innovation of the past 25 years?
24) Modern hearing aids. Yes, they're better, but its evolutionary not revolutionary.
25) Short Range, High Frequency Radio. Uh yeah. This is not an innovation. Its a category of innovations like digital radio, spread spectrum, 802.11 and cordless phones.
And of course, #1 will be the World Wide Web. Since they've seperated email from the Internet, they'll seperate that as well.
But, having split out the Internet into its components the panel has failed badly in missing TCP/IP v4 from 1981, clearly a critical innovation of the past 25 years. Vastly more important than HDTV.
Listening to the most dedicated FOSS advocates, one could easily imagine the speaker was talking of civil rights, war protests, or women's suffrage.
No imagination necessary: that's exactly what we're talking about. Only the enemy has changed: domineering big business instead of a domineering government.
I've been running Debian Unstable [and] it's every bit as stable as the Fedora install it replaced
I've been running Debian stable systems since '97 or so. I did some recent short-term work where I had to build and support some Red Hat Enterprise 3 systems and some Fedora Core 2 systems.
Talk about "fun" problems. I got all manner of grief from Red Hat's Linux kernel. I had a particularly fun one where every couple weeks the cached copy of one of the filenames would have a corrupted last character. So I compiled and installed a new kernel from the base linux source. I had also set the / partition to "rw,noatime" instead of "defaults" in/etc/fstab. Oops! mkinitrd (not used in Debian) turned this into a "mount -r -o rw,noatime/" in its script which crapped out fsck on boot. The server was 50 miles away and trying to talk someone through fixing it was even more fun: it seems I couldn't get it to continue to boot up after failing the fsck the way Debian will. No, exiting that shell generated a nice reboot and repeat.
And don't get me started about "up2date", Red Hat's version of apt-get. Damn thing gets stuck in infinite loops consuming 100% of the cpu until killed hours later. And no, the most recent updates havn't fixed it. Nor did following the instructions for regenerating the.db files.
My point is: I don't want to run anything as unstable as Fedora or Red Hat. That's why I chose Debian in the first place. So why would I want to run Debian Unstable?
I do want to see SOME forward motion though. Its long past time for those few package maintainers that are blocking testing's release to stable to either buckle down and get it done or be replaced.
Maybe it would help if they halted updates to those maintainers' packages in unstable and experimental until testing was releasable.
There are two main problems which tend to block mainstream acceptance.
1) Case Sensitive Filesystem. Tech Elites understand that A != a. Nobody else gets it. Sure, they "understand" that A isn't the same as a, but why can't the computer see the file when I type a?
Using a case-insensitive filesystem is one of the first, easiest and most important concessions an OS author makes to DWIM (do what I mean). This involves changing the kernel (e.g. http://bill.herrin.us/freebies/ ) and then recompiling the apps like the shell and find so that they understand the filesystem may be case insensitive.
2) X-Windows. The unix architecture in general has held up remarkably well over time. X-Windows has not. Its overweight, difficult to program for, and slow. It should be replaced from the ground up with a graphics system designed to be a modern desktop gamer's system.
Um... Isn't this basically a new version of the tired old argument that made Verisign rich even as Netscape tanked because Netscape and IE popped up dire (and largely useless) warnings if an https site didn't have a signed certificate?
Code signing might make gobs of money for the signing authority, but it doesn't do anyone else a heck of a lot of good, least of all the developers who volunteer their time to make something good and don't want to be hassled.
Personally, I block any flashing ad I see. That in addition to blocking all popups. This means atwola and doubleclick are dead to me.
I don't mind plain ads and Google-style ads. I'll click on them if they're pitching something which interests me. I've even purchased stuff that way.
But "punch the monkey" is the kind of flashy , content-free ad that drags my attention to it just long enough to piss me off.
Hey advertisers, newsflash: not all publicity is good publicity. If your ad pisses me off, I'm not going to buy your product. Hey advertising agencies, newsflash: I have the power to block you. If you permit ads in a style which pisses me off, block you I will.
Retirement? Feh. What the the dangers of teen drivers they'll raise the driving age to 50, the voting age to 100 and the drinking age to some time in your third century. Now THAT would seriously suck.
I worked for a small ISP which pulled out of Altoona PA because it was impossible to compete with the tax-subsidized dialup there. We weren't the only ones. The end result was an "abundance" of choices for Altoona's consumers: Poor quality subsidized dialup or AOL.
Of course, Verizon doesn't particularly want to share the infrastructure, so its trade one devil for another when it comes to broadband. But the principle is reasonable.
that the slashdot community has two different consensus viewpoints on two different issues.
I see. So you five-finger-discount a shirt at a local store and when caught you claim:
A) I made it myself with a sewing machine. B) I bought it at another store.
If you're the shopkeeper, is there any difference between the two? Probably not. Whether they're seperate issues depends entirely on which side of the issue you're on.
Plagiarism adds insult to injury, but make no mistake about it: the plagiarism is just an insult. The injury is the actual theft.
Of course, I'm sure you'll point out that copyright violation isn't the same as physical theft and data wants to be free, etc. etc. Be my guest, but consider this: fundamentally moral positions don't need mental gymnastics to justify themselves. They tend to be self-evident.
Under 2.4, software raid 5 is stable. Monitoring it is trivial (cat/proc/mdstat). Rebuilding the array after adding a drive is trivial (raidhotadd/dev/md0/dev/hda1). Rebuild happens in the background on the fly and you can watch it in mdstat. You can even set the partition types to raid-autodetect instead of linux (type fd instead of 83 in fdisk) and have the kernel notice and build the raid5 device before trying to mount root.
I use 8x250gb Linux raid 5 at work for an online backup server. Its rock solid, a real champ.
Couple gotchas:
1) Only ONE parallel ATA drive per controller. NO SLAVE DRIVES. IDE drives can't disconnect the way SCSI drives can, so having parallel traffic to both a master and a slave drive will KILL your performance.
2) Beware of multiple Promise cards in older (P2 and P3) machines under Linux 2.4. Something has gone haywire in the driver. Works fine on old Pentiums and fine on Athlons and P4s but on all three P2 and P3 motherboards I tried (two different model intel boards and an ASUS P2B) I got rapidly increasing ERR counts in/proc/interrupts followed by eventual kernel oopses. A single drive channel worked flawlessly but simultaneous access to two drives = problems.
The CMD Technology Inc PCI0680 controllers (e.g. SIIG, Adaptec) worked great.
Remember: 8 drives, 1 drive per chain = 2 drives per card = 4 cards = 4 PCI slots. Make sure you have enough left for video and ethernet.
Always the same reason.
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 1
The US always falls a bit down the list on this report, and its always for the same reason: Anonymity. Journalists following the Creed want to be able to promise anonymity to their sources while US law says that if the Journalist is offered immunity from prosecution himself then he MUST reveal the identity of any source of information he publishes.
There is a strong case to be made that requiring Journalists to reveal their sources is damaging to individual rights, but there is also a strong case to be made that permitting second-hand libel is also damaging to individual rights. Anonymous accusers (and that's what journalists want to allow here) have been one of the centerpieces of every modern secret police organization. With the right to publish anonymously, journalists can easily become the tool of that very evil process rather than its counterweight.
My personal opinion is that there are enough people with the balls to put their names to their statements that we really don't need anonymity in journalism.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to admit it when the Republicans are right but damn, what an elitist attitude!
Hailed as the ultimate example of information retrieval, Google is, in fact, the device that gives you thousands of "hits" (which may or may not be relevant) in no very useful order.
Yeah, because we all know how effective the Dewey Decimal System is. Get over yourself asshole. If you can't even coax results out of Google then your time is done.
I sent him this letter:
I read your comments at http://www.ultracade.com/mame.pdf. Respectfully sir, the trademark to MAME is not yours. Well reasoned good intentions do not change the basic fact that you are attempting to steal something as surely as the machine vendors you complain about.
If your goals are genuine, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about it. You already know the wrong way. The right way is to solicit a contract from the many authors of MAME that would enable you to hold the trademark in trust for the described purpose of taking action against lawbreaking commercial sellers as you describe.
Has it not occurred to these advertisers that the folks who are willing to buy their products aren't annoyed enough to enable popup blockers to begin with? At the rate they're going, they'll force the technologies to be engineered out of the browser entirely, and then where will they be?
People from 100 years ago, if told about MRIs, CAT scans, GeoSyncSats, GPS, Sat Phones, Computers, the Internet, and Microwave ovens would say you are crazy and such things would never be possible.
More to the point, if you told someone 150 years ago that time was a variable function of speed rather than the other way around they'd look at you cross-eyed. The uneducated still do. Yet relativity says the rate of unit time is variable and relativity has passed every test thrown at it.
This data suggests that probability too is something other than what we think it is. Perhaps Einstein was right and God indeed does not play dice with the universe. I think that possibility is fascinating.
The oldest scam on the Internet is forged email, though it was more of a prank than a scam (there was a santa@north.pole.com long before there was a pole.com). The second oldest is the Make Money Fast spam, though it wasn't called spam back then.
Typosquatting is a youngling. AFAIK, mine was the first (whitehouse.net) and that only happened in 2/96.
critics question whether the new system is reliable and safe enough to warrant the closure of these historical beacons of safety
Critics still believe the world is flat. I have no truck with critics.
How about nominating someone who will put a higher priority on getting Sarge out the door than on the purity issues?
I like Debian's reliability and I've used debian as my primary OS since around '96. I also live in the real world where non-OSS commercial software gets used. The libraries in Woody have gotten too far behind current. Sarge needs to get out the door soon if Debian is going to remain viable outside of the core clique of maintainers.
Actually, if they offer BRIs out of your central office, they likely fall under the universal service fund rules. That means they're not allowed to charge you more than anyone else to bring it to your door. Even if they have to spend thousands stringing new wires. That was the whole point of allowing the telcos to collect the USF fee on every phone bill: so that they could afford to deliver service to rural customers where it would otherwise be prohibitively expensive.
You just have to figure out the right buttons to press and the right words to use. Its buried in their tariff somewhere; you just have to find it.
Of course, if their standard price is $80/month then its still going to be $80/month.
Actually, most ISPs did not support both standards because of the expense. They simply published a list of supported modems, and for that 3-year period you either picked a modem that your ISP supported or you picked an ISP that supported your modem. Or you used 33.6 and waited for the standard.
It was a minor hassle, but the reward was 56k a couple years earlier, and pressure off the standards group so they didn't try to rush it.
I was also working for an ISP at the time, so I speak from experience. It Wasn't That Bad. Yes, it did have a higher support cost. Yes, that runs counter to the industry favored practice of increasing automation instead of staffing. So what? It beat the alternative which was no 56k for several more years, or worse: a rushed, poorly designed 56k standard.
If we'd waited for standardization for 56k modems, we'd have waited an extra three years. Instead we had x2 and k56 flex for a little while. Was that a bad thing? No, not really. It took the pressure off the final v.90 standard, so they could take the time and get it right.
Unfortunately a couple machines had lying hardware that didn't commit to disk when asked, so InnoDB's durability wasn't so durable (though no fault of InnoDB).
Um, yeah. That happens when you configure the raid cards for write-back instead of write-through but forget to buy the cards with batteries.
Microchips were around well back into the '70s, but VLSI (very large scale integration) didn't happen until the mid-80's. If you're old enough, you owned computers (Apple, Commodore, Atari and even the IBM PC) whose motherboards were crammed full of chips. Now look and there are a half dozen big chips, a bunch of capacitors and that's it. And its the same in every device you inspect from your computer to your alarm clock radio to your microwave oven and beyond. VLSI is as far beyond microchips as microchips were beyond the transistor. Its a critical albeit unseen part of modern life.
CNN's panel embodies the usual (in)competence I expect from the mass media. They included MEMS which are barely out of the experimental stage but forgot about VLSI which has become completely ubiquitous. In all probability the current crop of retards has never even heard of VLSI because the engineers take it for granted and so don't mention it.
I guess you could say that VLSI has become such a ubiquitous underpinning of so much of our modern lives that its absence a quarter century ago has fallen out of our conciousness. I probably would have forgotten myself but I maintain and repair early 80's arcade games for a hobby so the difference between how we build electronics now and how we built them then is constantly fresh in my mind.
Some of their choices were obvious. Others were poor. Here are my complaints:
10) RFID tags. Given that RFID is still mostly smoke and mirrors, is it reasonable to call it a major innovation of the past 25 years? Maybe 10 years from now we'll think so, but it doesn't belong on this year's list.
11) MEMS. What? No! VLSI is vastly more important than MEMS, and it didn't even make the list. Besides, MEMS is little more than a pit stop on the road to nanotech.
19) HDTV. HDTV is not a top innovation of any year, let alone a top innovation of the past 25. It was a committee-designed system haphazardly thrown together that has yet to make any meaningful impact on everyday life.
21) Nanotech. Nanotech will be an amazing innovation if it ever gets here, but is it fair to call something that's still mostly science fiction a top innovation of the past 25 years?
24) Modern hearing aids. Yes, they're better, but its evolutionary not revolutionary.
25) Short Range, High Frequency Radio. Uh yeah. This is not an innovation. Its a category of innovations like digital radio, spread spectrum, 802.11 and cordless phones.
And of course, #1 will be the World Wide Web. Since they've seperated email from the Internet, they'll seperate that as well.
But, having split out the Internet into its components the panel has failed badly in missing TCP/IP v4 from 1981, clearly a critical innovation of the past 25 years. Vastly more important than HDTV.
Listening to the most dedicated FOSS advocates, one could easily imagine the speaker was talking of civil rights, war protests, or women's suffrage.
No imagination necessary: that's exactly what we're talking about. Only the enemy has changed: domineering big business instead of a domineering government.
I've been running Debian Unstable [and] it's every bit as stable as the Fedora install it replaced
/etc/fstab. Oops! mkinitrd (not used in Debian) turned this into a "mount -r -o rw,noatime /" in its script which crapped out fsck on boot. The server was 50 miles away and trying to talk someone through fixing it was even more fun: it seems I couldn't get it to continue to boot up after failing the fsck the way Debian will. No, exiting that shell generated a nice reboot and repeat.
.db files.
I've been running Debian stable systems since '97 or so. I did some recent short-term work where I had to build and support some Red Hat Enterprise 3 systems and some Fedora Core 2 systems.
Talk about "fun" problems. I got all manner of grief from Red Hat's Linux kernel. I had a particularly fun one where every couple weeks the cached copy of one of the filenames would have a corrupted last character. So I compiled and installed a new kernel from the base linux source. I had also set the / partition to "rw,noatime" instead of "defaults" in
And don't get me started about "up2date", Red Hat's version of apt-get. Damn thing gets stuck in infinite loops consuming 100% of the cpu until killed hours later. And no, the most recent updates havn't fixed it. Nor did following the instructions for regenerating the
My point is: I don't want to run anything as unstable as Fedora or Red Hat. That's why I chose Debian in the first place. So why would I want to run Debian Unstable?
I do want to see SOME forward motion though. Its long past time for those few package maintainers that are blocking testing's release to stable to either buckle down and get it done or be replaced.
Maybe it would help if they halted updates to those maintainers' packages in unstable and experimental until testing was releasable.
There are two main problems which tend to block mainstream acceptance.
1) Case Sensitive Filesystem. Tech Elites understand that A != a. Nobody else gets it. Sure, they "understand" that A isn't the same as a, but why can't the computer see the file when I type a?
Using a case-insensitive filesystem is one of the first, easiest and most important concessions an OS author makes to DWIM (do what I mean). This involves changing the kernel (e.g. http://bill.herrin.us/freebies/ ) and then recompiling the apps like the shell and find so that they understand the filesystem may be case insensitive.
2) X-Windows. The unix architecture in general has held up remarkably well over time. X-Windows has not. Its overweight, difficult to program for, and slow. It should be replaced from the ground up with a graphics system designed to be a modern desktop gamer's system.
Um... Isn't this basically a new version of the tired old argument that made Verisign rich even as Netscape tanked because Netscape and IE popped up dire (and largely useless) warnings if an https site didn't have a signed certificate?
Code signing might make gobs of money for the signing authority, but it doesn't do anyone else a heck of a lot of good, least of all the developers who volunteer their time to make something good and don't want to be hassled.
Personally, I block any flashing ad I see. That in addition to blocking all popups. This means atwola and doubleclick are dead to me.
I don't mind plain ads and Google-style ads. I'll click on them if they're pitching something which interests me. I've even purchased stuff that way.
But "punch the monkey" is the kind of flashy , content-free ad that drags my attention to it just long enough to piss me off.
Hey advertisers, newsflash: not all publicity is good publicity. If your ad pisses me off, I'm not going to buy your product. Hey advertising agencies, newsflash: I have the power to block you. If you permit ads in a style which pisses me off, block you I will.
Retirement? Feh. What the the dangers of teen drivers they'll raise the driving age to 50, the voting age to 100 and the drinking age to some time in your third century. Now THAT would seriously suck.
This is not necessarilly a bad thing.
I worked for a small ISP which pulled out of Altoona PA because it was impossible to compete with the tax-subsidized dialup there. We weren't the only ones. The end result was an "abundance" of choices for Altoona's consumers: Poor quality subsidized dialup or AOL.
Of course, Verizon doesn't particularly want to share the infrastructure, so its trade one devil for another when it comes to broadband. But the principle is reasonable.
that the slashdot community has two different consensus viewpoints on two different issues.
I see. So you five-finger-discount a shirt at a local store and when caught you claim:
A) I made it myself with a sewing machine.
B) I bought it at another store.
If you're the shopkeeper, is there any difference between the two? Probably not. Whether they're seperate issues depends entirely on which side of the issue you're on.
Plagiarism adds insult to injury, but make no mistake about it: the plagiarism is just an insult. The injury is the actual theft.
Of course, I'm sure you'll point out that copyright violation isn't the same as physical theft and data wants to be free, etc. etc. Be my guest, but consider this: fundamentally moral positions don't need mental gymnastics to justify themselves. They tend to be self-evident.
Under 2.4, software raid 5 is stable. Monitoring it is trivial (cat /proc/mdstat). Rebuilding the array after adding a drive is trivial (raidhotadd /dev/md0 /dev/hda1). Rebuild happens in the background on the fly and you can watch it in mdstat. You can even set the partition types to raid-autodetect instead of linux (type fd instead of 83 in fdisk) and have the kernel notice and build the raid5 device before trying to mount root.
/proc/interrupts followed by eventual kernel oopses. A single drive channel worked flawlessly but simultaneous access to two drives = problems.
I use 8x250gb Linux raid 5 at work for an online backup server. Its rock solid, a real champ.
Couple gotchas:
1) Only ONE parallel ATA drive per controller. NO SLAVE DRIVES. IDE drives can't disconnect the way SCSI drives can, so having parallel traffic to both a master and a slave drive will KILL your performance.
2) Beware of multiple Promise cards in older (P2 and P3) machines under Linux 2.4. Something has gone haywire in the driver. Works fine on old Pentiums and fine on Athlons and P4s but on all three P2 and P3 motherboards I tried (two different model intel boards and an ASUS P2B) I got rapidly increasing ERR counts in
The CMD Technology Inc PCI0680 controllers (e.g. SIIG, Adaptec) worked great.
Remember: 8 drives, 1 drive per chain = 2 drives per card = 4 cards = 4 PCI slots. Make sure you have enough left for video and ethernet.
The US always falls a bit down the list on this report, and its always for the same reason: Anonymity. Journalists following the Creed want to be able to promise anonymity to their sources while US law says that if the Journalist is offered immunity from prosecution himself then he MUST reveal the identity of any source of information he publishes.
There is a strong case to be made that requiring Journalists to reveal their sources is damaging to individual rights, but there is also a strong case to be made that permitting second-hand libel is also damaging to individual rights. Anonymous accusers (and that's what journalists want to allow here) have been one of the centerpieces of every modern secret police organization. With the right to publish anonymously, journalists can easily become the tool of that very evil process rather than its counterweight.
My personal opinion is that there are enough people with the balls to put their names to their statements that we really don't need anonymity in journalism.