Why would I hire some old guy who's going to miss days and only work 9-5 because he has sick kids, baseball games, piano recitals, etc?
One word: "Analyst".
As someone in the ballpark of my first halflife, who always considered myself a pretty damned good coder, I have slowly - ever so slowly - come to understand the difference between writing impressive code and getting the job done.
Very, very few jobs (outside research and academia) care about you shaving those last few cycles out of your code. They don't care if you used a neural net or plain ol' linear regression to predict the future sales of widgets for budgeting purposes. They don't notice that you have an excellent sense of color aesthetics in your once-a-month-force-crap-into-the-GL interface design.
They care about - in order:
1) It does the job.
2) It keeps doing the job.
3) When the job changes slightly, someone other than the original author can realistically update the software.
The most important part of that involves you as the coder understanding "the job". You need to figure out why and how someone who inherited a seemingly stupid task from their predecessor, who inherited it from their predecessor, who inherited it from some long-dead genius in 1950s tax law, needs to reconcile data between two seemingly unrelated systems. Sometimes the answer ends up "you don't", and they could have stopped doing it 30 years ago but no one understood it until you looked into it. Sometimes you need to do it and then some, because they haven't actually satisfied the original need for the past 30 years and no one noticed. And sometimes you need to keep the exact same typos and delays because a complex and fragile chain of downstream consumers depend on you spelling it "dolars" on page 4.
Don't get me wrong - You don't need to turn into a "business weenie", you don't need to start spouting management-BS-speak about "internal customers" and ROI and the like. But you do need to understand that you serve the business needs, not the other way around; and I have yet to meet a newbie coder, even among the best of the best, who can appreciate the difference there.
So Bethesda and EA may not hire someone with grey hair who flatly refuses to regularly put in 12 hour days "for the team". But you can bet the countless non-IT-specific companies out there who just have work that needs to get done, will.
your 1500 byte packet had best not take more than about 10 us to transmit. 10ms would be quite ridiculous.
1500 bytes per 10ms comes out to 1.2Mbit, very close to my actual (admittedly sucky) internet connection. 1500 bytes per 10us would mean you have a 1.2GIGAbit connection, faster than most LANs.
You know, like, measuring things? Where does the problem happen? Under what circumstances?
You mean, like figure-2 or even better, figure-5, in TFA? Where the (most common) 2^n buffer sizes stand out so obviously in the data that you'd need to try not to notice the trend?
Of course, this situation doesn't actually require much "real" data to prove. If each 1500 byte packet takes 10ms to transmit, and you have a full 256KB buffer - Which will unavoidably happen any time you try to sustain a transmit faster than your link can handle - You will have 1.7 seconds of latency in a FIFO queue.
Seems so, but isn't. For TCP traffic, a shallow buffer that drops traffic will result in more goodput than a deep buffer. Which is the point.
Yes and no...
If you don't (or only rarely) fill your buffer, a smaller buffer introduces less latency than a large one, while still allowing you to maximize throughput. If, however, you usually have your buffer full, you increase latency for literally no benefit, since you've already maximized throughput simply through resource demand.
The former will occur when your average load falls below your actual bandwidth, and allows you to get the most out of your link. The latter occurs when you consistently exceed your bandwidth, in which situation you may as well not even have a buffer, because it only increases latency without increasing throughput. That describes TFA's real point.
What he suggests amounts to actively choosing between those two conditions - If your average demand falls below your link speed, a larger buffer will help smooth the load over time. If, however, your average demand exceeds your link speed, throw away the buffer because it doesn't help.
But as per the GP's point - If you have an always-full buffer, you literally gain nothing but latency.
Hacking somebody's financial records isn't a just a concept
A few months ago, I, in the course of my job duties, discovered a massive, glaring, easily exploitable security flaw at a financial transaction processing company that a great many people (as in, somewhere around a third of Americans who pay their bills online) likely use without knowing it. And no, you probably haven't heard of them unless you work in the banking industry.
I didn't write an SQL injection. I didn't guess passwords. I didn't even probe for hidden options in a CGI... I merely mis-typed a path in a web-scraping script intended to retrieve information I legally had the right to get, and ended up with entirely someone else's information. Yes, literally as simple as "tweak the URL", and you could see anyone's info you want.
I informed them of this flaw, as an official "you have to fix this now or consider yourself in violation of our contract" communication, and they have made it a bit better - In that you would now at least need to intend to attack them, rather than just anyone having the ability to do so accidentally. Good to know that no more pesky whitehats will bother them about their insecurities.
But put bluntly, companies don't give two shakes of a rat's ass about us. The very fact that such a trivial weakness existed in the first place demonstrates that they don't pay attention to security in the least; and their fix demonstrates that they don't really care even when they have known flaws. They care about how much it will cost them to fix vs the cost and probability of someone malicious discovering the problem, end of story.
But what happens in the poorer neighborhoods, where a number of households will likely find it more efficient to just dump their trash in the vacant lot or unused portion of the alley than to pay to have it picked up?
Then the city occasionally send out a truck to clear such hazards, some minimum-wage lackey sifts through the pile of debris looking for mail and the like, and anyone identified gets a hefty fine from the city, payable before they can re-register their car (assuming they don't own any real estate on which the city could place a lein). Dealing with illegal dumping follows a pretty well-established set of procedures in most places.
And FWIW, I live in a "poor" town without trash pickup. I have yet to see anyone (except the occasional shut-in granny) choose to live in a mountain of trash rather than cart it off to the dump once every week or two.
All of a sudden trash collection looks a lot like a civil liberties issue.
Most animals know better than to shit where they sleep.
The study adds to pressure on United Nations climate treaty negotiators from more than 190 countries attending two weeks of talks in Durban, South Africa that began Nov. 28.
I would agree with you, except that we can expect to see exactly the same thing that came out of the last UN climate summit... And the one before that. And the Kyoto accords.
Namely, nothing. Politicians act on a scale measured by the next election cycle (and can't even manage that lately). I have absolute confidence that our "leaders" will do nothing whatsoever about climate change until they get to feign surprise that all their precious coastal cities seem to have started taking on water - At which point, they'll blame the other party and still do nothing.
Seriously, do the quacks not realize that suing people will only draw attention to them?
Granted, they may well want that, since the more desperate-but-stupid people that hear about them, the more people they can fleece; but when you pretend to practice something vaguely medicine-like-but-not, it also doesn't hurt to stay below the FDA's radar.
Okay, so it is a bit rought that a business was put out of operation because it was being used to VPN up some torrent files - but it certainly didn't look like they were trying to hide it.
Although they advertised their intent, the very nature of their service makes me wonder how they got busted... I've long suspected that filesharing would move to entirely various VPN-like networks precisely to hide their traffic.
So I have to wonder, did Koppla get the boot solely for its PR, or for actual specific allegations of copyright infringement?
One reason might be because that's how IT staff treat everyone else.
The real problem here comes from the tools actually doing all the work, while the users lack any real skills worth mentioning.
Put bluntly, unless you repair brains or satellites, I can do your job better than you can. Often, I need to learn your job (which takes a whopping half hour for a good analyst) just so I explain to you how to use the tools you will then complain about for the next five years until the next management-dictated "upgrade" cycle comes along.
Now, Slashdot has a fairly technically literate crowd, so my above statement likely doesn't hold true for most people who will read it - The average user here may well have an extremely skill-intensive job, and so feel frustrated when IT gets in their way rather than helps them. But! The average office worker doesn't read Slashdot, they waste four hours a day playing Farmville - Which IT can tell (and for the most part doesn't care); and then Mr. Cog wonders why we get cranky that he desperately needs our help to do his "must-do this week" work at 4:55pm on a Friday.
yes the users in the organization are my "customers"
No true Scotsman would say that.
want-over-need translates to happy and productive people
Or that. People "want" a CNC, but need a awl. Giving them a CNC takes you 50x longer and the users will complain that they can't figure out how to use it and it makes holes too slowly for the original purpose anyway.
When the batteries fail on them, they will end up [snip]
I believe the word you wanted looks more like "recycled". People don't just toss 99% recyclable $3000 batteries like they do with a pair of dead double-As.
A 67 Camaro is better than a Prius, even 44 years later it is still desirable, people will still fix them
A 67 Camaro gets 15MPG. A Prius gets 50MPG. After 10 years of typical (1k miles/month) use at today's gas prices ($3.50/gallon), keeping that "desirable" Camaro on the road will have cost you literally the price of a new Prius ($19600) more.
The word "better" can mean an awfully lot of different things to different people. I can't, however, find a way to use it to describe something more expensive, less safe, and with fewer features - Other than the dumb nostalgia of "I wanted one as a kid and can finally afford it 40 years later".
And for the record, I don't own a Prius. I most certainly will, however, as soon as my current car dies.
The argument being made is that expensive and potentially hazardous materials are required to make wind turbines and solar panels.
Wind turbines use essentially the same materials as an electric motor, albeit optimized for working backward (not to mention, they use the same materials as every other mechanical-to-electrical energy converter in common use, whether powered by coal or nuclear or geothermal). Solar panels use essentially the same materials as CPUs.
Trying to justify the stance that we can't use them to generate power amounts to the same argument as saying we can't use that power (for anything more interesting than heat and light), either.
This is why I simply don't buy what they're selling when they tell consumers it's simply to inform you of usage and keep your rates down by saving on employing people for meter reading. If that was the entire truth, they wouldn't need such capabilities.
Well, that, and the fact that (at least for CMP's much-contested rollout), they have no intention of cutting rates or even allowing residential customers to go to the sort of time-of-use billing that lets people shift their loads to cheaper off-peak times. They offered us a great big stick if we want to keep a "dumb" meter, but not a single carrot in sight.
And for the biggest "fuck you" of all from CMP - To keep your old meter, not only do they want $12 a month, they want people to pay a $40 fee up front NOT to have their old meter replaced with an expensive new one. And the Maine PUC just rolled right over, like they did with Fairpoint/Verizon, like the always do.
Ease back on the rhetoric (calling it a rootkit, for example), and assign the blame where it's due.
So what would you call deliberately hidden software running as root, without your knowledge or consent?
Spyware by any other name would smell as bad.
It's a shame he picked the wrong target.
At some point, you have to hold the guys "just doing their job" accountable for their actions. Yes, their customers (the cell carriers) bear the brunt of the bad karma here, but no one sells thumb-screws to 4th-world dictators "for novelty purposes only".
With line of sight problems and lots of water-containing organic obstacles (aka "trees"), lower frequency means much much better signal quality. Use a 900MHz WDS and many of your problems will vanish.
I know Ubiquiti offers 900MHz kit, can't say for HP.
Anyone that seriously believes [pyramid schemes, 419 scams, etc.], deserves the resultant stupid-tax that results?
Personally, I would say "yes", but let's pretend I agree with your examples of obvious scams, for the sake of argument.
Aquafina WILL keep you hydrated (and if you want to go the BS electrolytes route, sub in "Gatorade" for "Aqufina"), thus the entire reason we have this silly of a discussion occurring on Slashdot. Simple as that. You don't, however, have a Nigerian prince asking you to help him smuggle 20 billion dollars out of the country. Uncle Bernie cannot really make you a fixed 20% return year over year over year.
See the difference between these "scams"? The dehydration claim holds true. Ponzis and 419s do not.
Sorry, but if there's nothing special about the product in that regard, it's misleading. If the intent was not to mislead, then they don't have a reason to put it there at all.
Sorry, but no. I grudgingly accept government's role to protect the masses, but at some point, you need to step out of the way and let the stupid punish themselves.
Anyone that seriously believes that only Aquafina can keep them from drying up and blowing away like a dead leaf, deserves the resultant stupid-tax that results.
Fortunately, as bad as they've gotten, police in the US still try to maintain the facade that they count as the "good guys", at least to the extent that they don't (frequently) torture information out of people.
Trick, cajole, threaten, inconvenience, stress, discomfit, and a whole host of other verbs that come just shy of it, but not quite outright torture yet.
So, really -- what's the point of this? PC enforcement? Social modeling? Productivity improvement? Lawsuit prevention?
The point seems all too clear - Having a pseudo-objective reason to fire just about anyone at any time.
And as usual, the lying sacks of shit at the top who have immaculate hair and a sycophantic grin 24/7 will remain immune to it, while the geeks who look like hell after putting in 30 hours straight to keep the servers limping along through Black Friday will enjoy sub-inflation-level raises due to their "bad attitude".
You're mistaken, tape is a lot cheaper than hard drives. You can buy 1 TB of tape for as little as $30.
...Which you need a $1500 drive to do anything with.
That said, if you really have a need for backing up 50TB nightly, yes, a good tape robot counts as a no-brainer. For most businesses, however, if you have 50TB to back up nightly, you seriously need to look at your personal-files-on-PCs policy and the specificity of your backups... A legitimate non-media, non-IT oriented office worker rarely produces even 1GB/year of business-relevant data.
/ aaaaaand... Queue the droves of particle physicists on Slashdot explaining how their accelerator spits out 15PB per hour.
What would they look like if they weren't designed to be seen from orbit?
Then they wouldn't look so amazingly straight from orbit. Those structures occupy some pretty treacherous hilly terrain, yet look perfectly straight from above.
Built from the perspective of some unknown ground-use, not only would they tend to work with natural contours rather than stubbornly going in straight lines over hills and chasms, they quite likely wouldn't even look straight.
The only way most people can afford internet service at all is by sharing the cost with a whole bunch of other people. Sharing the cost also means you are sharing the resource with them. Sorry, but your $50/month does not entitle you to any specific performance.
I understand that, and don't expect to literally get the "up to" speed 24/7/365.24.
I do, however, expect to "fairly" compete with other users for the available bandwidth. That way, when everyone gets to enjoy sub-dialup speeds right after dinner, the ISPs might actually feel enough pressure to invest at least enough to bring us up to 2nd world broadband speeds.
Hell, South frickin' Korea has 100Mbps residential service, and I, living in the last remaining superpower (albeit in its twilight days), have to bounce signals off a goddamned satellite just to get 1.5Mbps with a half-second latency?
We don't need network neutrality (just) to avoid a "walled garden", we need it to force the ISPs to upgrade rather than throttle us.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would I hire some old guy who's going to miss days and only work 9-5 because he has sick kids, baseball games, piano recitals, etc?
One word: "Analyst".
As someone in the ballpark of my first halflife, who always considered myself a pretty damned good coder, I have slowly - ever so slowly - come to understand the difference between writing impressive code and getting the job done.
Very, very few jobs (outside research and academia) care about you shaving those last few cycles out of your code. They don't care if you used a neural net or plain ol' linear regression to predict the future sales of widgets for budgeting purposes. They don't notice that you have an excellent sense of color aesthetics in your once-a-month-force-crap-into-the-GL interface design.
They care about - in order:
1) It does the job.
2) It keeps doing the job.
3) When the job changes slightly, someone other than the original author can realistically update the software.
The most important part of that involves you as the coder understanding "the job". You need to figure out why and how someone who inherited a seemingly stupid task from their predecessor, who inherited it from their predecessor, who inherited it from some long-dead genius in 1950s tax law, needs to reconcile data between two seemingly unrelated systems. Sometimes the answer ends up "you don't", and they could have stopped doing it 30 years ago but no one understood it until you looked into it. Sometimes you need to do it and then some, because they haven't actually satisfied the original need for the past 30 years and no one noticed. And sometimes you need to keep the exact same typos and delays because a complex and fragile chain of downstream consumers depend on you spelling it "dolars" on page 4.
Don't get me wrong - You don't need to turn into a "business weenie", you don't need to start spouting management-BS-speak about "internal customers" and ROI and the like. But you do need to understand that you serve the business needs, not the other way around; and I have yet to meet a newbie coder, even among the best of the best, who can appreciate the difference there.
So Bethesda and EA may not hire someone with grey hair who flatly refuses to regularly put in 12 hour days "for the team". But you can bet the countless non-IT-specific companies out there who just have work that needs to get done, will.
your 1500 byte packet had best not take more than about 10 us to transmit. 10ms would be quite ridiculous.
1500 bytes per 10ms comes out to 1.2Mbit, very close to my actual (admittedly sucky) internet connection. 1500 bytes per 10us would mean you have a 1.2GIGAbit connection, faster than most LANs.
You know, like, measuring things? Where does the problem happen? Under what circumstances?
You mean, like figure-2 or even better, figure-5, in TFA? Where the (most common) 2^n buffer sizes stand out so obviously in the data that you'd need to try not to notice the trend?
Of course, this situation doesn't actually require much "real" data to prove. If each 1500 byte packet takes 10ms to transmit, and you have a full 256KB buffer - Which will unavoidably happen any time you try to sustain a transmit faster than your link can handle - You will have 1.7 seconds of latency in a FIFO queue.
tldr
Don't worry, we could tell.
Seems so, but isn't. For TCP traffic, a shallow buffer that drops traffic will result in more goodput than a deep buffer. Which is the point.
Yes and no...
If you don't (or only rarely) fill your buffer, a smaller buffer introduces less latency than a large one, while still allowing you to maximize throughput. If, however, you usually have your buffer full, you increase latency for literally no benefit, since you've already maximized throughput simply through resource demand.
The former will occur when your average load falls below your actual bandwidth, and allows you to get the most out of your link. The latter occurs when you consistently exceed your bandwidth, in which situation you may as well not even have a buffer, because it only increases latency without increasing throughput. That describes TFA's real point.
What he suggests amounts to actively choosing between those two conditions - If your average demand falls below your link speed, a larger buffer will help smooth the load over time. If, however, your average demand exceeds your link speed, throw away the buffer because it doesn't help.
But as per the GP's point - If you have an always-full buffer, you literally gain nothing but latency.
Hacking somebody's financial records isn't a just a concept
A few months ago, I, in the course of my job duties, discovered a massive, glaring, easily exploitable security flaw at a financial transaction processing company that a great many people (as in, somewhere around a third of Americans who pay their bills online) likely use without knowing it. And no, you probably haven't heard of them unless you work in the banking industry.
I didn't write an SQL injection. I didn't guess passwords. I didn't even probe for hidden options in a CGI... I merely mis-typed a path in a web-scraping script intended to retrieve information I legally had the right to get, and ended up with entirely someone else's information. Yes, literally as simple as "tweak the URL", and you could see anyone's info you want.
I informed them of this flaw, as an official "you have to fix this now or consider yourself in violation of our contract" communication, and they have made it a bit better - In that you would now at least need to intend to attack them, rather than just anyone having the ability to do so accidentally. Good to know that no more pesky whitehats will bother them about their insecurities.
But put bluntly, companies don't give two shakes of a rat's ass about us. The very fact that such a trivial weakness existed in the first place demonstrates that they don't pay attention to security in the least; and their fix demonstrates that they don't really care even when they have known flaws. They care about how much it will cost them to fix vs the cost and probability of someone malicious discovering the problem, end of story.
But what happens in the poorer neighborhoods, where a number of households will likely find it more efficient to just dump their trash in the vacant lot or unused portion of the alley than to pay to have it picked up?
Then the city occasionally send out a truck to clear such hazards, some minimum-wage lackey sifts through the pile of debris looking for mail and the like, and anyone identified gets a hefty fine from the city, payable before they can re-register their car (assuming they don't own any real estate on which the city could place a lein). Dealing with illegal dumping follows a pretty well-established set of procedures in most places.
And FWIW, I live in a "poor" town without trash pickup. I have yet to see anyone (except the occasional shut-in granny) choose to live in a mountain of trash rather than cart it off to the dump once every week or two.
All of a sudden trash collection looks a lot like a civil liberties issue.
Most animals know better than to shit where they sleep.
The study adds to pressure on United Nations climate treaty negotiators from more than 190 countries attending two weeks of talks in Durban, South Africa that began Nov. 28.
I would agree with you, except that we can expect to see exactly the same thing that came out of the last UN climate summit... And the one before that. And the Kyoto accords.
Namely, nothing. Politicians act on a scale measured by the next election cycle (and can't even manage that lately). I have absolute confidence that our "leaders" will do nothing whatsoever about climate change until they get to feign surprise that all their precious coastal cities seem to have started taking on water - At which point, they'll blame the other party and still do nothing.
Seriously, do the quacks not realize that suing people will only draw attention to them?
Granted, they may well want that, since the more desperate-but-stupid people that hear about them, the more people they can fleece; but when you pretend to practice something vaguely medicine-like-but-not, it also doesn't hurt to stay below the FDA's radar.
Okay, so it is a bit rought that a business was put out of operation because it was being used to VPN up some torrent files - but it certainly didn't look like they were trying to hide it.
Although they advertised their intent, the very nature of their service makes me wonder how they got busted... I've long suspected that filesharing would move to entirely various VPN-like networks precisely to hide their traffic.
So I have to wonder, did Koppla get the boot solely for its PR, or for actual specific allegations of copyright infringement?
One reason might be because that's how IT staff treat everyone else.
The real problem here comes from the tools actually doing all the work, while the users lack any real skills worth mentioning.
Put bluntly, unless you repair brains or satellites, I can do your job better than you can. Often, I need to learn your job (which takes a whopping half hour for a good analyst) just so I explain to you how to use the tools you will then complain about for the next five years until the next management-dictated "upgrade" cycle comes along.
Now, Slashdot has a fairly technically literate crowd, so my above statement likely doesn't hold true for most people who will read it - The average user here may well have an extremely skill-intensive job, and so feel frustrated when IT gets in their way rather than helps them. But! The average office worker doesn't read Slashdot, they waste four hours a day playing Farmville - Which IT can tell (and for the most part doesn't care); and then Mr. Cog wonders why we get cranky that he desperately needs our help to do his "must-do this week" work at 4:55pm on a Friday.
yes the users in the organization are my "customers"
No true Scotsman would say that.
want-over-need translates to happy and productive people
Or that. People "want" a CNC, but need a awl. Giving them a CNC takes you 50x longer and the users will complain that they can't figure out how to use it and it makes holes too slowly for the original purpose anyway.
When the batteries fail on them, they will end up [snip]
I believe the word you wanted looks more like "recycled". People don't just toss 99% recyclable $3000 batteries like they do with a pair of dead double-As.
A 67 Camaro is better than a Prius, even 44 years later it is still desirable, people will still fix them
A 67 Camaro gets 15MPG. A Prius gets 50MPG. After 10 years of typical (1k miles/month) use at today's gas prices ($3.50/gallon), keeping that "desirable" Camaro on the road will have cost you literally the price of a new Prius ($19600) more.
The word "better" can mean an awfully lot of different things to different people. I can't, however, find a way to use it to describe something more expensive, less safe, and with fewer features - Other than the dumb nostalgia of "I wanted one as a kid and can finally afford it 40 years later".
And for the record, I don't own a Prius. I most certainly will, however, as soon as my current car dies.
The argument being made is that expensive and potentially hazardous materials are required to make wind turbines and solar panels.
Wind turbines use essentially the same materials as an electric motor, albeit optimized for working backward (not to mention, they use the same materials as every other mechanical-to-electrical energy converter in common use, whether powered by coal or nuclear or geothermal). Solar panels use essentially the same materials as CPUs.
Trying to justify the stance that we can't use them to generate power amounts to the same argument as saying we can't use that power (for anything more interesting than heat and light), either.
This is why I simply don't buy what they're selling when they tell consumers it's simply to inform you of usage and keep your rates down by saving on employing people for meter reading. If that was the entire truth, they wouldn't need such capabilities.
Well, that, and the fact that (at least for CMP's much-contested rollout), they have no intention of cutting rates or even allowing residential customers to go to the sort of time-of-use billing that lets people shift their loads to cheaper off-peak times. They offered us a great big stick if we want to keep a "dumb" meter, but not a single carrot in sight.
And for the biggest "fuck you" of all from CMP - To keep your old meter, not only do they want $12 a month, they want people to pay a $40 fee up front NOT to have their old meter replaced with an expensive new one. And the Maine PUC just rolled right over, like they did with Fairpoint/Verizon, like the always do.
Ease back on the rhetoric (calling it a rootkit, for example), and assign the blame where it's due.
So what would you call deliberately hidden software running as root, without your knowledge or consent?
Spyware by any other name would smell as bad.
It's a shame he picked the wrong target.
At some point, you have to hold the guys "just doing their job" accountable for their actions. Yes, their customers (the cell carriers) bear the brunt of the bad karma here, but no one sells thumb-screws to 4th-world dictators "for novelty purposes only".
If you can get line of site from the remote sites back to the central site you should use 5Ghz for the backhaul.
At the risk of posting essentially a dupe - Not in dense tree coverage, he doesn't.
5GHz works great in opens spaces, but degrades horribly without line of sight. In this case, lower frequency will work much, much better.
I'll second Ubiquiti (no, I don't work for them, but they have good cheap gear), but go with their 900MHz gear for the backhaul.
With line of sight problems and lots of water-containing organic obstacles (aka "trees"), lower frequency means much much better signal quality. Use a 900MHz WDS and many of your problems will vanish. I know Ubiquiti offers 900MHz kit, can't say for HP.
Anyone that seriously believes [pyramid schemes, 419 scams, etc.], deserves the resultant stupid-tax that results?
Personally, I would say "yes", but let's pretend I agree with your examples of obvious scams, for the sake of argument.
Aquafina WILL keep you hydrated (and if you want to go the BS electrolytes route, sub in "Gatorade" for "Aqufina"), thus the entire reason we have this silly of a discussion occurring on Slashdot. Simple as that. You don't, however, have a Nigerian prince asking you to help him smuggle 20 billion dollars out of the country. Uncle Bernie cannot really make you a fixed 20% return year over year over year.
See the difference between these "scams"? The dehydration claim holds true. Ponzis and 419s do not.
Sorry, but if there's nothing special about the product in that regard, it's misleading. If the intent was not to mislead, then they don't have a reason to put it there at all.
Sorry, but no. I grudgingly accept government's role to protect the masses, but at some point, you need to step out of the way and let the stupid punish themselves.
Anyone that seriously believes that only Aquafina can keep them from drying up and blowing away like a dead leaf, deserves the resultant stupid-tax that results.
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/security.png
Fortunately, as bad as they've gotten, police in the US still try to maintain the facade that they count as the "good guys", at least to the extent that they don't (frequently) torture information out of people.
Trick, cajole, threaten, inconvenience, stress, discomfit, and a whole host of other verbs that come just shy of it, but not quite outright torture yet.
So, really -- what's the point of this? PC enforcement? Social modeling? Productivity improvement? Lawsuit prevention?
The point seems all too clear - Having a pseudo-objective reason to fire just about anyone at any time.
And as usual, the lying sacks of shit at the top who have immaculate hair and a sycophantic grin 24/7 will remain immune to it, while the geeks who look like hell after putting in 30 hours straight to keep the servers limping along through Black Friday will enjoy sub-inflation-level raises due to their "bad attitude".
You're mistaken, tape is a lot cheaper than hard drives. You can buy 1 TB of tape for as little as $30.
...Which you need a $1500 drive to do anything with.
That said, if you really have a need for backing up 50TB nightly, yes, a good tape robot counts as a no-brainer. For most businesses, however, if you have 50TB to back up nightly, you seriously need to look at your personal-files-on-PCs policy and the specificity of your backups... A legitimate non-media, non-IT oriented office worker rarely produces even 1GB/year of business-relevant data.
/ aaaaaand... Queue the droves of particle physicists on Slashdot explaining how their accelerator spits out 15PB per hour.
What would they look like if they weren't designed to be seen from orbit?
Then they wouldn't look so amazingly straight from orbit. Those structures occupy some pretty treacherous hilly terrain, yet look perfectly straight from above.
Built from the perspective of some unknown ground-use, not only would they tend to work with natural contours rather than stubbornly going in straight lines over hills and chasms, they quite likely wouldn't even look straight.
Simple, pay the guy the 340 thousand it is worth
Also simple, and arguably better, since it actually answers the underlying question of "owning" the followers:
Tweet "I have moved to @mynewhandle, and may soon lose control of this account to my former employer's spam-loving marketing department."
Then let the fans decide.
The only way most people can afford internet service at all is by sharing the cost with a whole bunch of other people. Sharing the cost also means you are sharing the resource with them. Sorry, but your $50/month does not entitle you to any specific performance.
I understand that, and don't expect to literally get the "up to" speed 24/7/365.24.
I do, however, expect to "fairly" compete with other users for the available bandwidth. That way, when everyone gets to enjoy sub-dialup speeds right after dinner, the ISPs might actually feel enough pressure to invest at least enough to bring us up to 2nd world broadband speeds.
Hell, South frickin' Korea has 100Mbps residential service, and I, living in the last remaining superpower (albeit in its twilight days), have to bounce signals off a goddamned satellite just to get 1.5Mbps with a half-second latency?
We don't need network neutrality (just) to avoid a "walled garden", we need it to force the ISPs to upgrade rather than throttle us.