The battles were far bigger and far bloodier over pants in the 1800s than they are now.
Yes, mock me now. You all know what I meant, though.
ROFLMAO. I wish I could give you *every* mod point I get for the next year for these two. Your self-reply is exactly how I've felt too many times-- a split second after hitting return and *knowing* there's no enter/delete option.
That was priceless. Well, at least worth more than $30, considering I didn't even mind that I snorted coffee onto my keyboard when I read the typo. Worth losin' a keyboard.
The unit of time you've just experienced is known as the 'ohno second'. Most commonly tied to locking one's keys in the car, deleting files, and throwing something tasty away and keeping the wrapper.
In no particular order to the rants above: -- Lindberg didn't strap wings on and *fly*, he used ENGINES. With all that technology, anyone could have done it. Thus, no big deal. Besides, what'll ever come of it? Ditto every other pioneering act. -- Astronauts are, by your offhand and disparaging definition, just ballast. -- So are racecar drivers, stunt doubles, vice-presidents and moms. And don't even get me started on redundant hardware. -- Anyone that thinks that gadgetry prevents problems hasn't paid attention to critical systems failure modes. -- Fosset's difference may in fact only be a willingness and wherewithal, but it is still *his* thing. And his seems like a slightly more technically challenging hobby than whatever you (we!) do. With greater lessons and challenges. -- 'Basic research is what I do when I don't know what I'm doing' -- Von Braun -- and as for massive wastes of time and money, here's three words: Ultimate Case-Mod.
Get a grip, folks. This guy's the only rich fscker I know willing to forego 3 days of toilet-stops and basic hygiene while travelling strapped to 9 tons of aviation-grade fuel in a flimsy aircraft that he had to subsidize. Crazy rich white dude risks everything is why the rest of the world cares. His crashing is what we're contemplating. As for us slashdotters, the aircraft itself deserves our attention. Fossett's just the rich guy that's into ubergeek-toys. Toys we all should at least be able to agree are pretty damn cool.
Redress, not regress. And it must be getting late. I stared at that word for far too long, thinking 'THAT ain't right... er, IS it?!' before finally recalling the correct word.
I should thank you. I've wanted to have a way to track when/why I foe'd people integrated into slash, and it just occurred that THIS will work as a reminder, in case I ever need a reminder.
I agree about some jobs being less outsourcable/outsourceable... uh, steady. Hairdressers and plumbers, indeed. Nobody ever looks at my work and says "wow, cool integral" or "love what you've done with that VLAN diagram".
And, for that matter, I keep wondering when or if computers will become more like refrigerators and typewriters: commodity-grade business essentials that are bought and forgot. Given the swiss-cheese state of infosec, I don't see that situation improving very soon.
As for the whole corporate value of IT, there are enough complexities to everything you've ranted on that I'm not gonna go there. IT spending isn't money down a rathole, but an arms race.
And staff can be contentious, but a similar rift exists between every other branch of some (most?) companies: sales and research and operations and management and line workers all can invent an us-vs-them culture.
As for IT being hostile to support requests, I've never worked in those places. Seen 'em, but they're usually toxic enough to be obvious, and only a fool would spend the bulk of their day undermining their job and their firm, or join a group intent on doing something like that.
None of this has anything to do with women in IT. The closest link I see to your prior thread is circling back to my contention that a TV show would change perceptions. A show would also alter IT's perception of itself. IT, non-IT and management would all see their sense of how things SHOULD be altered, whether because the show mocked the dysfunctional (Office Space) or showed the challenges and variety of the job... or even if it just went miles from reality and showed a glamour that doesn't exist (like the whole CSI franchise does for forensics and prosecuting criminals).
Let's get the visceral, selfish reason out of the way first. I like women. Eight to ten hours a day, I'm at work. Having women around makes work more fun. QED; that's all the reason guys should need for supporting efforts to improve the gender gap via a TV show that'd polish up the public perception of techie work. As a bonus, it'd give us something to Tivo up on fridays, so we could hoot and heckle at the innacuracies and implausibles -- preferrably with dates/companions.
Now, more seriously:
I *also* like seeing minorities coaxed toward their greatest potential, and having women shy away from tech jobs is a damn shame, given the income and work-life flexibility that tech jobs usually have.
Tech jobs are underappreciated. People have bizarre and damaging misconceptions about what most techies do, and most intelligent and talented people adjust career decisions based on perceptions. These perceptions say that being a doctor or lawyer or politician is 'better' than being a scientist or an engineer or some other sort of technowizard. That leads to 'brain drain'-- the best people may choose to do something else, because they liked the intellectual and technical challenges of both (enjoying your job is critical to success) but thought they'd enjoy their career more as a nongeek because geeks are... well... geeks.
Your paycheck is affected by those perceptions. If techies and nerds got the same great PR via primetime shows as other professional careers, the increased respect would lead to people having a better feel for what they DO. Assuming this is done so it conveys the awareness that WHAT WE TEND TO DO IS HARD, this translates into better paychecks, higher budgets, less back-pressure during negotiations, less arguments with absurdly-unqualified people about stuff they really don't understand.
Indirectly, paying attention to perceptions of what tech jobs are about will cause slightly-increased nerd-counts in political positions, greater ability to influence policy, and so on. We move a bit toward technocracy. Technophobic horseshit like Intelligent Design gets shot down more easily. Oh, and nimrods that really shouldn't be in tech stop being allowed to coast along, because a few extra well-qualified people jumped ship from Med School. Your kids don't wince about your job description. Or whatever.
A decade and change ago, LA Law caused a flood of lawyers. ER and other med shows have kept prestige levels high for doctors since Marcus Welby. Yeah, these two professional careers have also stayed stronger via other factors, but paying attention to perceptions, and working to improve them, is something that has a track record. And for being so damn smart, nerds are pretty dumb about this part. There are some of us slaving away long hours for shit pay, doing stuff that is mission-critical and never getting the thanks or compensation they deserve. Many of us do pretty well, but we really do need to better-manage perceptions.
I'm just gonna pretend like I didn't hear all your sneering pink cliches. You devolved into some bizarre neanderthal when you started that rant. Of course, your posting history is a bit neanderthalic, sophist, and liberal-baiting, so maybe that's your norm. Pity, if so.
What I'd love to make a comeback - and what is part of the problem here - is a simple "off" switch that actually means off. A button that when I use it actually means "off" as in "absolutely no more electric power going into this device".
They do. The devices are called surge strips. Cheapass ones are a few bucks. I've got one hooked up to a 3-yr-old RCA DVD recorder that overheats in STANDBY! (how's that for great design!?) Surge strips on 'vampires' that suck watts in standby are the usual advice for people using off-grid power systems (solar, wind, inverter and battery setups that force users to be VERY miserly about power). If you dislike the inelegance of this solution, you can always rewire the house to tie outlets to wall switches, you can take up case-modding, or you can do what I do with wall warts... unplug the fsckers.
I agree with your request and premise, but *most* customers don't want a power switch. They want cheapness and features. Each device that adds standby has a popular-market reason... sadly, good design is held hostage because most folks are philistines and idiots.
Oh, and another crap-design whine common to slashdot: those searingly-bright LED's? As much as I despise them, it is easier to dim an LED than to brighten it-- even if you just paint over part of the LED. Better too bright than indetectibly dim.
I thought it was the Hunt brothers... Yup, google confirms (although it also confirms 477 cases of mistaken identity w/r/t bass brothers and silver market).
Wow... not that the Bass Brothers aren't noteworthy.... according to UTWatch, the Bass Brothers are notorious for their lengthy ties to Bush Sr and GW Bush, attempts to whiten up the Yale classics curriculum, and for (!) adding alcohol and tobacco ads to state park flyers. Oh, and their bankrolling Harken at a key moment in GBush Sr's involvement there, and buying GWBush's shares 2 weeks before Harken stock crashed..
After reading this, I'd say that if you're not happy with the President, blame Lee Bass for bankrolling him. And his daddy.
Forget about plastics, the one word you need to remember is "cheeseburger".
I had the unpleasant experience of eating a cheeseburger happy meal yesterday. Based on that reintroduction to them, I am quite certain the cheese was plastic, and I think maybe the meat was, too.
Google teaming with Wal-Mart? I thought their motto was "Do no evil"?
Nah, it's 'Don't BE evil'... which says nothing about hanging out with Evil at poolside, buyin' him a few drinks, and suggestin' that Evil might really enjoy killin' your mother-in-law.
3 thoughts: I still respect google. I am quite sure that there aren't laws that enforce mottos. And once they went public, Google acquired a legal burden to ignore that motto in favor of shareholders' best interests. As an example, just look at the corporate history of Ben & Jerry's, esp. after Unilever(?) bought 'em...
I think the 90% of the world that doesn't like obsessing with security would disagree with you about lassez-faire and how well it is handling identity theft and other criminal conduct that has exploded thanks to the internet. My dad *deserves* legal protections from phishing attacks (a specific example: banks should be required to guarantee client accounts... that is WHAT A BANK IS!!!). And a small business should have their online transactions safe from remote fraud (with banks again being held responsible for THEIR end of any fraudulent transaction). Doing so means legally-defined minimum standards and coverages for financial institutions.
You're quick to claim that all regulatory activity is a failure, but using your same (flawed) reasoning, technological remedies have also failed to 'solve' ID theft, viruses, trojans, spam, keyloggers, hacking, international abuses, and so on. These problems all remain, and they need a blend of tech and legal remedies. Tech wherever possible, legal to make sure that it is never cheaper/easier to deny or whitewash an expensive problem.
We outgrew that silly business-will-self-regulate oversimplification with Love Canal and DDT, if not with child labor. Online crime is huge and growing rapidly. People's lives are being harmed. And the single biggest cause is that easy-and-unsafe technological setups are not being held accountable for damages. Time and again, the market has proven unable to accomodate safety concerns: they are ignored in a race toward the bottom line. Whether we're talking about child labor, environmental protections, social security or online fraud, the market regrettably lacks this ability. The only difference here is that it is harder to directly KILL people via online crime. Because the market seems unwilling and unable to self-correct, tech remedies alone won't solve things. Culpability and minimum standards are needed to force all businesses to work at a minimum standard of protection.
You're wrong here because you overreach. Both tech and legal remedies fail alone because of what they're up against: a rapidly-changing landscape of attacks and remedies.
Tech innovation is incredibly powerful. For example, as much as I hate DRM, it at least improves the aggressive segmentation of data and code, strengthens authentication (itself a two-edged sword), and gets the problem back out of joe-user's lap. And that is exactly WHERE the problem needs to not be: producers should have minimum standards of quality and be held liable whenever they undercut these minimum standards. The argument worth holding is about the threshold required, not about whether public interests are served by having legal minimum standards.
(Really, dada, it seems like every free-market crank message I see lately is written by you. Went to Foe you a week ago and found you ALREADY are on my foes list. This is finally a flaw with mitigating my slash-addiction with alterslash.org: it can't realign you into the permanent-troll status you deserve.)
Stack up the unlikelies high enough, and this doesn't just look implausible... it looks dorky beyond comprehension.
If the baddies don't use covert communications, this MITM attack needs the NSA to know which of a zillion calls matters, know precisely WHEN the exchange will happen and between who, assemble hardware and people capable of faking the exchange (no small task!), intercept the call, carefully make the fake, complete the call in a way that neither party is tipped off, and then be ready to act as a MITM every time these two try to use PGP-phone to communicate.
An implausible on top of an unlikely on top of insanely-labor-intensive on top of a few more 'ugh's, etc., and you get to 'WHY BOTHER.' Which is where international-terrorist MITM infiltrations belong. This shit would only work in a James Bond movie or after Scotty (or Giordi) *seriously* modifies their tricorder.
This SO isn't a legal opression of religion. Don't paint yourself as a martyr. It just says religion cannot be taught in *science* class. Nowhere does this preclude religious studies. Once again for the dimmer members of the Christian extreme: BIOLOGY isn't about 'and then a miracle occured'. It is about understanding life. Tautologies like Intelligent Design-- or of any kind-- circumvent the 'but-why?' part of scientific research, where we keep digging to understand the grey mysteries in between what we've learned so far.
And so some pinhead doesn't question my religious credentials, I am a deeply religious person who believes that divine nature *is* exemplified by that ever-deepening pool of mysteries. Every answer we find tends to awaken new questions.
Only an idiot fears questions like Why or How? And I'm unsurprised when that sort of limp, scared zealot seems to insist God is so mediocre at engineering universes (or whatever the deity call this craft) that God can't withstand a scientist's scrutiny.
This is proven on a daily basis by countless geeks masturbating *while* klicking hyperlinks (and sometimes even while @ work).
Ugh... thank [deity] they're countless. Can't imagine asking geeks about their (ahem) private habits like this --eeew! Without a doubt, doing *THAT* census would immediately become the #1 worst-job-in-the-world.
subsituting hobby grade lamps is going to give you terrible colour rendering (I've seen cheap lamps that were more pink than white), and also the light output will be considerably lower... the colour will suffer and the life will be affected (plus the lamps will run very hot indeed).
Erm, as opposed to, um... a screen that is presumably dead!?
So, actually someone else had an idiot stalker watching their apartment. Let's both hope the new apartment-dweller was fat-naked-guy. And that the stalker went blind and craz... cr... well, I was gonna say crazy, but anyone that'd waste their time stalking via the internet when there's a whole world out there is a fair distance beyond batshit crazy to start with.
The deep-down URLs in apple.com usually mention webobjects, so that's a safe bet, but nobody sane would actually run a farm of business-critical servers based on BSD. Get real. </snark>
Hey, while the other reply ('a 10 letter acrostic') is an elegant idea, it won't get a lot of use. All we need to do is to pick some fun daily-usable meaning and run with it.
I nominate: nonesevant, noun, Pronounced: NUN-sev-ant, Possessing horrifyingly-bad managerial skills, as in Dilbert's pointy-haired boss was a nonesevant twit. See: nonesevance, renonesevance (like recidivism, falling back into pointy-hairedness), noneseveral, noneseved, and (of course) nonesense (a misguided belief that you're a good manager when you're not).
Between WTFKenneth, InSoviet, AllYourBase, Goatse, JonKatz (I put them adjacent for maximum comedic value), Old Koreans, Our*Overlords, and all the other geek memes slashdot has formed, we might as well invent ourselves a word.
Oh, and this is admittedly a lot like 'frindle', if you don't have kids that know the story.
As a high school debater, we never used USNews, Newsweek, Time or other aggregators as a valid source. To do so was to shout 'I'm an intellectual lightweight' only a bit more quietly than someone who used People magazine. So, I agree that SERIOUS research shouldn't depend on wikimedia.
But youth-educational use of wikimedia isn't even close to deserving the rap you give it. Bias is considerably more prevalent elsewhere (like in NYT vs. WSJ), falsification happens elsewhere, etc. Scientific journals fall victim, policy debates are overwhelmingly biased any more, and last time I checked, Fox news doesn't allow liberals to publish fact-checking or challenge data.
Given the efforts it makes to empower EITHER side in any debate and find a balanced answer, give me wikimedia every time as a quick reference, or a jumping-off-point for detailed research. If depth or second opinions are needed, I can get a head start by reading the discussion and glancing at the document history.
Great column, Roblimo. I've got 3 colleagues who're nth-generation newsies and my local paper's online subscription plan is essentially 'pay again for the same content' that even *I* won't buy (and I'd say I'm their prime demographic). Wanting to help 'em with constructive criticism, I had thought things through to answer this same question and many of my ideas were in my remarks. I'll be printing your column out and handing it to them.
I probably overlooked a few overlaps, but here are some ideas that I don't see you mentioning, tied to your 'community news' theme:
Take advantage of the web-news' ability to add color, and take advantage of locals carrying digital cameras everywhere. Don't be afraid to let your online edition gradually become indistinguishable from a streaming-content-enriched website for CNN or some TV station, even. After all, large color photos on newsprint is expensive and paper-based A/V streams are impossible -- but online, it becomes stupid-cheap. Rather than just web-publishing the same single-best image from last night's high-school game, have the best shot in the paper and then link to your website's five, ten or twenty best photos. Let readers write captions (to identify players, etc). Content-overload should be your motto everywhere: include edited highlights, unedited footage, streaming-audio archives of town meetings, etc. Embrace coral-cache and bittorrent, whereever possible. To use a business cliche, try to eat local TV's lunch!
While slashdot seems incapable of growing a substantial and credible trusted-expert base (sorry for the knock), it is reasonable for sub-million-population communities to grow a large, trusted group of regular readers that are recognized as impartial, interested topical experts, and grant them minor editorial powers. Rather than a 12-member reader's advisory board, aim for dozen or more such groups, each on a field of expertise or interest: town planning, public meetings, sports, crime, courts, restaurants, local politics, summarizers or aggregators of state or national political news with local impact, entertainment and music, outdoors/activities, events, technology, businesses, state news aggregators, national or international news aggregators, etc. For example, let any 'vetted' enthusiast provide any local sport stats, even if you've never covered scuba-lacrosse before. Unlike with large anonymous sites, locals face the loss of privileges and a tarnished daily reputation if they act unscrupulously or doctor things, so they usually WON'T! The goal here is twofold: you answer the locals who regularly complain you're not covering 'their' favorite news adequately, and you embrace a commonly-stated strength that newspapers have over other media: readership studies consistently show that people turn to newspapers for DETAIL and DEPTH in the stories that interest them.
Never forget: a news *website* doesn't need to restrict the quantity of news or data... you're not limited to a single page of local sports in the online edition. Find ways (like the many-advisory-boards above) to enable trusted locals to write and peer-edit or moderate things. Spend your editorial time choosing the gems that ripple up in those categories to your printed edition, rather than restricting your content because you're overworked.
I didn't see roblimo mention anything about NY Times vs. WSJ editorials: the former has deemed editorials 'premium' content, the latter gives them away freely. Early results seem to show that the WSJ got it right: pushing editorial content acts as a draw to a news website while increasing a paper's prestige and increasing their impact on public discourse. Charging for it so far has caused NYT to diminish both their ability to influence public policy and their overall readership. Recognize that anything that grabs eyeballs (and ad viewership) increases ad revenues.
Color reprints (of images or archive pages) are an income prospect (Local TV stations, the same thing goes for your news/video footage!) Whe
Agreed that you can just stick to GPLv2. However, 'I don't see a need' both ignores Eben M's prior editorials on why GPL3 is needed and presumes you're better-versed in international IP law than he is.
A few threads arguing for clarifying ambiguities, delving into specifics geared toward their own pet concern, and language changes also need to temper their remarks with the thought that FSF is writing general-purpose legalese applicable to a few thousand projects in ~200 countries. I don't mean 'shut up and be grateful'... our job is to think of specifics and speak up, and try to give clearcut examples when arguing a concern.
And as for being very specific (clarify the nonexistent nonlinking clause, a clause to automatically upgrade gpl2 to gpl3, or whatever), remember the contract lawyer's favorite subordinate clause. It's easy: every time you see a call for very specific language, add the words '...so we can find loopholes!'
Contract details are like razor blades: whether they're useful or lethally hazardous depends on how expertly and carefully you handle them.
Tiny detail... that 25-cent for first ten minutes is 25-cents per minute for the first ten minutes of use in a day.
Am just pointing this out because your way of saying it could be misinterpreted as a single 0.25 flat-fee for the first ten minutes of use. And other posters here are right: it ain't like the boilerplate in these contracts is written for easy reading.
Slashdot Mirror
ROFLMAO. I wish I could give you *every* mod point I get for the next year for these two. Your self-reply is exactly how I've felt too many times-- a split second after hitting return and *knowing* there's no enter/delete option.
That was priceless. Well, at least worth more than $30, considering I didn't even mind that I snorted coffee onto my keyboard when I read the typo. Worth losin' a keyboard.
The unit of time you've just experienced is known as the 'ohno second'. Most commonly tied to locking one's keys in the car, deleting files, and throwing something tasty away and keeping the wrapper.
In no particular order to the rants above:
-- Lindberg didn't strap wings on and *fly*, he used ENGINES. With all that technology, anyone could have done it. Thus, no big deal. Besides, what'll ever come of it? Ditto every other pioneering act.
-- Astronauts are, by your offhand and disparaging definition, just ballast.
-- So are racecar drivers, stunt doubles, vice-presidents and moms. And don't even get me started on redundant hardware.
-- Anyone that thinks that gadgetry prevents problems hasn't paid attention to critical systems failure modes.
-- Fosset's difference may in fact only be a willingness and wherewithal, but it is still *his* thing. And his seems like a slightly more technically challenging hobby than whatever you (we!) do. With greater lessons and challenges.
-- 'Basic research is what I do when I don't know what I'm doing' -- Von Braun
-- and as for massive wastes of time and money, here's three words: Ultimate Case-Mod.
Get a grip, folks. This guy's the only rich fscker I know willing to forego 3 days of toilet-stops and basic hygiene while travelling strapped to 9 tons of aviation-grade fuel in a flimsy aircraft that he had to subsidize. Crazy rich white dude risks everything is why the rest of the world cares. His crashing is what we're contemplating. As for us slashdotters, the aircraft itself deserves our attention. Fossett's just the rich guy that's into ubergeek-toys. Toys we all should at least be able to agree are pretty damn cool.
Redress, not regress. And it must be getting late. I stared at that word for far too long, thinking 'THAT ain't right... er, IS it?!' before finally recalling the correct word.
Ping! Bozo Bit.
I should thank you. I've wanted to have a way to track when/why I foe'd people integrated into slash, and it just occurred that THIS will work as a reminder, in case I ever need a reminder.
wow, way to get off into the weeds...
I agree about some jobs being less outsourcable/outsourceable... uh, steady. Hairdressers and plumbers, indeed. Nobody ever looks at my work and says "wow, cool integral" or "love what you've done with that VLAN diagram".
And, for that matter, I keep wondering when or if computers will become more like refrigerators and typewriters: commodity-grade business essentials that are bought and forgot. Given the swiss-cheese state of infosec, I don't see that situation improving very soon.
As for the whole corporate value of IT, there are enough complexities to everything you've ranted on that I'm not gonna go there. IT spending isn't money down a rathole, but an arms race.
And staff can be contentious, but a similar rift exists between every other branch of some (most?) companies: sales and research and operations and management and line workers all can invent an us-vs-them culture.
As for IT being hostile to support requests, I've never worked in those places. Seen 'em, but they're usually toxic enough to be obvious, and only a fool would spend the bulk of their day undermining their job and their firm, or join a group intent on doing something like that.
None of this has anything to do with women in IT. The closest link I see to your prior thread is circling back to my contention that a TV show would change perceptions. A show would also alter IT's perception of itself. IT, non-IT and management would all see their sense of how things SHOULD be altered, whether because the show mocked the dysfunctional (Office Space) or showed the challenges and variety of the job... or even if it just went miles from reality and showed a glamour that doesn't exist (like the whole CSI franchise does for forensics and prosecuting criminals).
Let's get the visceral, selfish reason out of the way first. I like women. Eight to ten hours a day, I'm at work. Having women around makes work more fun. QED; that's all the reason guys should need for supporting efforts to improve the gender gap via a TV show that'd polish up the public perception of techie work. As a bonus, it'd give us something to Tivo up on fridays, so we could hoot and heckle at the innacuracies and implausibles -- preferrably with dates/companions.
Now, more seriously:
I *also* like seeing minorities coaxed toward their greatest potential, and having women shy away from tech jobs is a damn shame, given the income and work-life flexibility that tech jobs usually have.
Tech jobs are underappreciated. People have bizarre and damaging misconceptions about what most techies do, and most intelligent and talented people adjust career decisions based on perceptions. These perceptions say that being a doctor or lawyer or politician is 'better' than being a scientist or an engineer or some other sort of technowizard. That leads to 'brain drain'-- the best people may choose to do something else, because they liked the intellectual and technical challenges of both (enjoying your job is critical to success) but thought they'd enjoy their career more as a nongeek because geeks are... well... geeks.
Your paycheck is affected by those perceptions. If techies and nerds got the same great PR via primetime shows as other professional careers, the increased respect would lead to people having a better feel for what they DO. Assuming this is done so it conveys the awareness that WHAT WE TEND TO DO IS HARD, this translates into better paychecks, higher budgets, less back-pressure during negotiations, less arguments with absurdly-unqualified people about stuff they really don't understand.
Indirectly, paying attention to perceptions of what tech jobs are about will cause slightly-increased nerd-counts in political positions, greater ability to influence policy, and so on. We move a bit toward technocracy. Technophobic horseshit like Intelligent Design gets shot down more easily. Oh, and nimrods that really shouldn't be in tech stop being allowed to coast along, because a few extra well-qualified people jumped ship from Med School. Your kids don't wince about your job description. Or whatever.
A decade and change ago, LA Law caused a flood of lawyers. ER and other med shows have kept prestige levels high for doctors since Marcus Welby. Yeah, these two professional careers have also stayed stronger via other factors, but paying attention to perceptions, and working to improve them, is something that has a track record. And for being so damn smart, nerds are pretty dumb about this part. There are some of us slaving away long hours for shit pay, doing stuff that is mission-critical and never getting the thanks or compensation they deserve. Many of us do pretty well, but we really do need to better-manage perceptions.
I'm just gonna pretend like I didn't hear all your sneering pink cliches. You devolved into some bizarre neanderthal when you started that rant. Of course, your posting history is a bit neanderthalic, sophist, and liberal-baiting, so maybe that's your norm. Pity, if so.
They do. The devices are called surge strips. Cheapass ones are a few bucks. I've got one hooked up to a 3-yr-old RCA DVD recorder that overheats in STANDBY! (how's that for great design!?) Surge strips on 'vampires' that suck watts in standby are the usual advice for people using off-grid power systems (solar, wind, inverter and battery setups that force users to be VERY miserly about power). If you dislike the inelegance of this solution, you can always rewire the house to tie outlets to wall switches, you can take up case-modding, or you can do what I do with wall warts... unplug the fsckers.
I agree with your request and premise, but *most* customers don't want a power switch. They want cheapness and features. Each device that adds standby has a popular-market reason... sadly, good design is held hostage because most folks are philistines and idiots.
Oh, and another crap-design whine common to slashdot: those searingly-bright LED's? As much as I despise them, it is easier to dim an LED than to brighten it-- even if you just paint over part of the LED. Better too bright than indetectibly dim.
Heh, you guys beat me to that punch, but I also chuckled at the words 'more modern' between 1997's Fifth Element and 2001's Blackhawk Down.
You weren't impressed, you gave it an 8/10, and due to this the release party was *uncomfortable* for your man in attendance.
Talk about grade inflation... that pretty much much proves TFA's point.
I thought it was the Hunt brothers... Yup, google confirms (although it also confirms 477 cases of mistaken identity w/r/t bass brothers and silver market).
Wow... not that the Bass Brothers aren't noteworthy.... according to UTWatch, the Bass Brothers are notorious for their lengthy ties to Bush Sr and GW Bush, attempts to whiten up the Yale classics curriculum, and for (!) adding alcohol and tobacco ads to state park flyers. Oh, and their bankrolling Harken at a key moment in GBush Sr's involvement there, and buying GWBush's shares 2 weeks before Harken stock crashed..
After reading this, I'd say that if you're not happy with the President, blame Lee Bass for bankrolling him. And his daddy.
3 thoughts: I still respect google. I am quite sure that there aren't laws that enforce mottos. And once they went public, Google acquired a legal burden to ignore that motto in favor of shareholders' best interests. As an example, just look at the corporate history of Ben & Jerry's, esp. after Unilever(?) bought 'em...
I've used OWA. Um... not so nice. Bordering on excruciating.
Oh, for pete's sake...
I think the 90% of the world that doesn't like obsessing with security would disagree with you about lassez-faire and how well it is handling identity theft and other criminal conduct that has exploded thanks to the internet. My dad *deserves* legal protections from phishing attacks (a specific example: banks should be required to guarantee client accounts... that is WHAT A BANK IS!!!). And a small business should have their online transactions safe from remote fraud (with banks again being held responsible for THEIR end of any fraudulent transaction). Doing so means legally-defined minimum standards and coverages for financial institutions.
You're quick to claim that all regulatory activity is a failure, but using your same (flawed) reasoning, technological remedies have also failed to 'solve' ID theft, viruses, trojans, spam, keyloggers, hacking, international abuses, and so on. These problems all remain, and they need a blend of tech and legal remedies. Tech wherever possible, legal to make sure that it is never cheaper/easier to deny or whitewash an expensive problem.
We outgrew that silly business-will-self-regulate oversimplification with Love Canal and DDT, if not with child labor. Online crime is huge and growing rapidly. People's lives are being harmed. And the single biggest cause is that easy-and-unsafe technological setups are not being held accountable for damages. Time and again, the market has proven unable to accomodate safety concerns: they are ignored in a race toward the bottom line. Whether we're talking about child labor, environmental protections, social security or online fraud, the market regrettably lacks this ability. The only difference here is that it is harder to directly KILL people via online crime. Because the market seems unwilling and unable to self-correct, tech remedies alone won't solve things. Culpability and minimum standards are needed to force all businesses to work at a minimum standard of protection.
You're wrong here because you overreach. Both tech and legal remedies fail alone because of what they're up against: a rapidly-changing landscape of attacks and remedies.
Tech innovation is incredibly powerful. For example, as much as I hate DRM, it at least improves the aggressive segmentation of data and code, strengthens authentication (itself a two-edged sword), and gets the problem back out of joe-user's lap. And that is exactly WHERE the problem needs to not be: producers should have minimum standards of quality and be held liable whenever they undercut these minimum standards. The argument worth holding is about the threshold required, not about whether public interests are served by having legal minimum standards.
(Really, dada, it seems like every free-market crank message I see lately is written by you. Went to Foe you a week ago and found you ALREADY are on my foes list. This is finally a flaw with mitigating my slash-addiction with alterslash.org: it can't realign you into the permanent-troll status you deserve.)
Stack up the unlikelies high enough, and this doesn't just look implausible... it looks dorky beyond comprehension.
If the baddies don't use covert communications, this MITM attack needs the NSA to know which of a zillion calls matters, know precisely WHEN the exchange will happen and between who, assemble hardware and people capable of faking the exchange (no small task!), intercept the call, carefully make the fake, complete the call in a way that neither party is tipped off, and then be ready to act as a MITM every time these two try to use PGP-phone to communicate.
An implausible on top of an unlikely on top of insanely-labor-intensive on top of a few more 'ugh's, etc., and you get to 'WHY BOTHER.' Which is where international-terrorist MITM infiltrations belong. This shit would only work in a James Bond movie or after Scotty (or Giordi) *seriously* modifies their tricorder.
Horsefeathers.
This SO isn't a legal opression of religion. Don't paint yourself as a martyr. It just says religion cannot be taught in *science* class. Nowhere does this preclude religious studies. Once again for the dimmer members of the Christian extreme: BIOLOGY isn't about 'and then a miracle occured'. It is about understanding life. Tautologies like Intelligent Design-- or of any kind-- circumvent the 'but-why?' part of scientific research, where we keep digging to understand the grey mysteries in between what we've learned so far.
And so some pinhead doesn't question my religious credentials, I am a deeply religious person who believes that divine nature *is* exemplified by that ever-deepening pool of mysteries. Every answer we find tends to awaken new questions.
Only an idiot fears questions like Why or How? And I'm unsurprised when that sort of limp, scared zealot seems to insist God is so mediocre at engineering universes (or whatever the deity call this craft) that God can't withstand a scientist's scrutiny.
Ugh... thank [deity] they're countless. Can't imagine asking geeks about their (ahem) private habits like this --eeew! Without a doubt, doing *THAT* census would immediately become the #1 worst-job-in-the-world.
Erm, as opposed to, um... a screen that is presumably dead!?
So, actually someone else had an idiot stalker watching their apartment. Let's both hope the new apartment-dweller was fat-naked-guy. And that the stalker went blind and craz... cr... well, I was gonna say crazy, but anyone that'd waste their time stalking via the internet when there's a whole world out there is a fair distance beyond batshit crazy to start with.
The deep-down URLs in apple.com usually mention webobjects, so that's a safe bet, but nobody sane would actually run a farm of business-critical servers based on BSD. Get real. </snark>
Hey, while the other reply ('a 10 letter acrostic') is an elegant idea, it won't get a lot of use. All we need to do is to pick some fun daily-usable meaning and run with it.
I nominate: nonesevant, noun, Pronounced: NUN-sev-ant, Possessing horrifyingly-bad managerial skills, as in Dilbert's pointy-haired boss was a nonesevant twit. See: nonesevance, renonesevance (like recidivism, falling back into pointy-hairedness), noneseveral, noneseved, and (of course) nonesense (a misguided belief that you're a good manager when you're not).
Between WTFKenneth, InSoviet, AllYourBase, Goatse, JonKatz (I put them adjacent for maximum comedic value), Old Koreans, Our*Overlords, and all the other geek memes slashdot has formed, we might as well invent ourselves a word.
Oh, and this is admittedly a lot like 'frindle', if you don't have kids that know the story.
As a high school debater, we never used USNews, Newsweek, Time or other aggregators as a valid source. To do so was to shout 'I'm an intellectual lightweight' only a bit more quietly than someone who used People magazine. So, I agree that SERIOUS research shouldn't depend on wikimedia.
But youth-educational use of wikimedia isn't even close to deserving the rap you give it. Bias is considerably more prevalent elsewhere (like in NYT vs. WSJ), falsification happens elsewhere, etc. Scientific journals fall victim, policy debates are overwhelmingly biased any more, and last time I checked, Fox news doesn't allow liberals to publish fact-checking or challenge data.
Given the efforts it makes to empower EITHER side in any debate and find a balanced answer, give me wikimedia every time as a quick reference, or a jumping-off-point for detailed research. If depth or second opinions are needed, I can get a head start by reading the discussion and glancing at the document history.
Great column, Roblimo. I've got 3 colleagues who're nth-generation newsies and my local paper's online subscription plan is essentially 'pay again for the same content' that even *I* won't buy (and I'd say I'm their prime demographic). Wanting to help 'em with constructive criticism, I had thought things through to answer this same question and many of my ideas were in my remarks. I'll be printing your column out and handing it to them.
I probably overlooked a few overlaps, but here are some ideas that I don't see you mentioning, tied to your 'community news' theme:
Take advantage of the web-news' ability to add color, and take advantage of locals carrying digital cameras everywhere. Don't be afraid to let your online edition gradually become indistinguishable from a streaming-content-enriched website for CNN or some TV station, even. After all, large color photos on newsprint is expensive and paper-based A/V streams are impossible -- but online, it becomes stupid-cheap. Rather than just web-publishing the same single-best image from last night's high-school game, have the best shot in the paper and then link to your website's five, ten or twenty best photos. Let readers write captions (to identify players, etc). Content-overload should be your motto everywhere: include edited highlights, unedited footage, streaming-audio archives of town meetings, etc. Embrace coral-cache and bittorrent, whereever possible. To use a business cliche, try to eat local TV's lunch!
While slashdot seems incapable of growing a substantial and credible trusted-expert base (sorry for the knock), it is reasonable for sub-million-population communities to grow a large, trusted group of regular readers that are recognized as impartial, interested topical experts, and grant them minor editorial powers. Rather than a 12-member reader's advisory board, aim for dozen or more such groups, each on a field of expertise or interest: town planning, public meetings, sports, crime, courts, restaurants, local politics, summarizers or aggregators of state or national political news with local impact, entertainment and music, outdoors/activities, events, technology, businesses, state news aggregators, national or international news aggregators, etc. For example, let any 'vetted' enthusiast provide any local sport stats, even if you've never covered scuba-lacrosse before. Unlike with large anonymous sites, locals face the loss of privileges and a tarnished daily reputation if they act unscrupulously or doctor things, so they usually WON'T! The goal here is twofold: you answer the locals who regularly complain you're not covering 'their' favorite news adequately, and you embrace a commonly-stated strength that newspapers have over other media: readership studies consistently show that people turn to newspapers for DETAIL and DEPTH in the stories that interest them.
Never forget: a news *website* doesn't need to restrict the quantity of news or data... you're not limited to a single page of local sports in the online edition. Find ways (like the many-advisory-boards above) to enable trusted locals to write and peer-edit or moderate things. Spend your editorial time choosing the gems that ripple up in those categories to your printed edition, rather than restricting your content because you're overworked.
I didn't see roblimo mention anything about NY Times vs. WSJ editorials: the former has deemed editorials 'premium' content, the latter gives them away freely. Early results seem to show that the WSJ got it right: pushing editorial content acts as a draw to a news website while increasing a paper's prestige and increasing their impact on public discourse. Charging for it so far has caused NYT to diminish both their ability to influence public policy and their overall readership. Recognize that anything that grabs eyeballs (and ad viewership) increases ad revenues.
Color reprints (of images or archive pages) are an income prospect (Local TV stations, the same thing goes for your news/video footage!) Whe
Agreed that you can just stick to GPLv2. However, 'I don't see a need' both ignores Eben M's prior editorials on why GPL3 is needed and presumes you're better-versed in international IP law than he is.
A few threads arguing for clarifying ambiguities, delving into specifics geared toward their own pet concern, and language changes also need to temper their remarks with the thought that FSF is writing general-purpose legalese applicable to a few thousand projects in ~200 countries. I don't mean 'shut up and be grateful'... our job is to think of specifics and speak up, and try to give clearcut examples when arguing a concern.
And as for being very specific (clarify the nonexistent nonlinking clause, a clause to automatically upgrade gpl2 to gpl3, or whatever), remember the contract lawyer's favorite subordinate clause. It's easy: every time you see a call for very specific language, add the words '...so we can find loopholes!'
Contract details are like razor blades: whether they're useful or lethally hazardous depends on how expertly and carefully you handle them.
Tiny detail... that 25-cent for first ten minutes is 25-cents per minute for the first ten minutes of use in a day.
Am just pointing this out because your way of saying it could be misinterpreted as a single 0.25 flat-fee for the first ten minutes of use. And other posters here are right: it ain't like the boilerplate in these contracts is written for easy reading.