Funny but I almost never shop at Walmart but I don't think they are "evil". The one thing I always do go to WalMart for is compost and mulch. My local WalMart sells "Earthwise" mulch that is made locally. I know the company that makes it and it is all "earth friendly". It is real simple if you don't like them don't shop there. Frankly I only ever guy food there if it is late at night and I need something. Sort of a big Seven Eleven. I don't by cloths there because they don't last and I don't by things like Law mowers, bikes, or BBQs there because they tend to be low quality and more expensive in the long run. But I don't hate Walmart of look down on people that shop there. Frankly it is very handy to have the option of getting a new shirt, a toaster, and weeks worth of food all in one shop. It saves time and gas. If I had a few kids to deal with I might go there more often just for the convince factor.
But the difference between Walmart and Target has more to do with choice. I have a lot of Choice in where I shop. I have little choice in what OS I have to deal with. WalMart Lawn mowers don't require Walmart oil and gas to work. Frankly this hate thing for Microsoft and or Walmart is all pretty silly. They are not the KKK or American Nazi party after all. The real truth about Bill Gates is this. If the Gates foundation cures Malaria then nothing that Microsoft has done in the past will matter at all. He will be remembered as a great humanitarian. I personally will still stick pins my Bill Gates voodoo doll for MFC but the rest of the world will love him for generations.
Okay let's take a look at the "real world" 1. It has Vista Home Basic so no Aero. It probably will not be stressing the harware. 2. It has a gig of Ram. I have NO problem running XP media Center and OpenSuse on a system with a Gig of ram as a duel boot. Open Office runs just fine. 3. It is under $300. 4. I has a DVD drive so yes you can watch DVDs on it. 5. It has IE on it. The sad truth is some sites require IE to work correctly. This is changing but having IE to fall back on does make life easy. 6. It has Open Office. Which gives you a lot of good tools. 7. Did I mention it is under $300. Less than a PS/3 or 360? 8. It only has an 80 gig drive. So it has 6 USB ports. Think Geek was selling 80 Gig external drives for under $50! Those are much better to put your music and videos on anyway. When the RIAA and Montag come knocking at your door they my not find your external drive with your MP3s or your collection of books. 9. It uses SATA for the HD. I bet you could put in another or a Larger drive if you really wanted it. 10. So it only has one gig of ram. It has an open memory slot. Go buy an extra gig.
For a High school kid or even a college student this would be a good machine. Frankly a lot of businesses could work just fine off one of these. It also doesn't use a lot of power thanks to the C7 CPU.
As to just building your own. Not everyone wants to build their own PC or even knows how. This machine with an LCD monitor would be a handy little system for many people. I don't know if it has any open slots but even without them you could add WiFi with USB. You could also add a TV tuner so it could be you kids TV as well. In other words it seems like a good deal for some people. The fact that it will not play the latest and greatest games I can only see as a plus.
Honestly that seems to be true of almost all the magazines I read. I read Kitplane and Sport pilot. Both tend to have advertisements I want to see and are related to the subject matter. I read Motorcycle, CycleWorld and Rider. They are pretty good except for the occasional full page ad for "enlargement" that I just skip over. Even Linux Journal is pretty good. Circuit Cellar is so good at it that I requested that they add and advertisers index to the website. It is easy to click a link there then dig through my magazine and type in the URL.
Until they hit 30 to 35. They also tend to not use the term "lame". Yes Visual Basic is pretty terrible but a well paying job is a well paying job. Besides you have no idea what he is working on in C#/.net. It maybe something that really interests him. Projects are what you make them. I wrote a program to deal with our support calls. You might think that would be "lame" Well the system needed to be done and I used it to test out idiot proofing a UI. I included code that wouldn't let them set the contrast between the foreground and background too low along with some other safe guards. That was actually a fun project for me.
1. What is part of the OS has gotten bigger. X Windows and KDE/GNOME are not really part of Linux or BSD they are a layer on top but everybody thinks of them as part of the OS. Want a fast OS my C64 will boot faster than any Linux or Windows Box! All that with less then one Mhz. 2. Security costs. Virus scanners, firewalls, email virus scanners.... Yuck. 3. Shear laziness. Sorry but it is true. We have such fast PCs that what is good enough is often far from best. 4. Scope. Linux, BSD, and even windows run on may different CPUs for example your statment. "It's like any other optimization job: you tighten the hell out of the most frequently-called code snippets like the scheduler and memory manager. If your scheduler is so contorted and polluted that it can't even fit in the L1 Cache anymore, you should be beaten with your keyboard!" Would that be a 386, 486, PII , K6, Athlon, or Xeon L1 Cache?
Worst controllers maybe but it had great games and graphics for the time. The controllers and it not being 2600 compatable killed it. Too bad really I think it was better than the NES in many ways.
What are you crabbing about. I am sure that once the novelty of the Wii wears off and all those hot new games for the PS3 come out you will be begging to send your money to Sony. In fact you should rush out and buy a PS3 now while they are available! The PS3 will be a huge smash by March of 08!
Well yes and no. Office, Outlook, and Exchange are big reasons to not use Linux. That and frankly VisualBasic are really deal killers for a lot of places as far as Linux on the desktop. Sharepoint and Exchange are great weapons to use to get Linux off servers. It is a problem for Linux in that if All of your software will run on Linux there is no reason to keep Windows If you have to keep Windows then you have to keep Windows.
Every one of those systems is a proxy and most have a lot less control or situational awareness than a drone. I love airplanes but the drone would seem to me to be less likley to make a mistake than a manned aircraft. If for no other reason than the drone operator can not die. He can take all the time in the world to line up his target and launch his weapon. Those AA guns my take out his drone but he will live another day and doesn't have to worry about sitting in a prison camp. A manned aircraft is more likely to survive but the drone is more likely to not hit the wrong target.
Well for one it has little to nothing to do with Linux. They have a few valid points but they are hard to work around. 1. OpenOffice will never be as compatible with Office as Office is. 2. If you know Office you must learn OpenOffice. Office is taught in every school I know of. 3. I still don't think Calc is even as good as Excel in Office 2000 but then I haven't really used it a lot in a long time. 4. Outlooks+Exchange are a better Enterprise calendering system than anything I have seen from FOSS. 5. Sharepoint. I haven't seen anything as easy to use from the FOSS community.
Microsoft had done some good things, give the devil his due.
"1. Advertising keeps them in business because of the bell curve -- some people block ads, some people overclick ads (causing them to pay zero), but the middle ground is usually enough to keep a site alive. My oldest website still earns somewhere in the realm of $200 a month through ads and it hasn't been updated in 2 years -- but people still get there through Google and the information on the site is still "good enough" because it has to do with old hardware. That income offsets my new sites. According to my records, only 12% of my visitors block ads, which isn't a big deal. But as ad-blocking grows, we've had to resort to new income streams such as "advertiser funded posts" (ReviewMe.com for example), which I absolutely hate. " I can think of some things to try. Sponsors for articles. Just a single blurb at the start of the article. NO FLASH or Animation and a limited size. If it has something to do with an article I am reading I might click on it. A direcory of Sponsors. If I am looking for something I might look their first. However at least on of your sites has my pet peeve! It is FIXED WIDTH! I have a 22" monitor so I hate websites that have HUGE boarders on the sides. I know it is harder to write CSS2 code that handles a variable width but I feel it is well worth the effort. Heck you could have more room for ads that don't get into my way then.
I remember Microsystems but Interface Age was before even my time. Just by a year or so but still. Then you had the fluffy mags with the type in programs. Creative Computing, Compute, Ahoy, and so on. Good times.
I know the pro windows crowd will jump up and down but I hope they will hear me out. 1. Windows is the most popular OS on the planet. Just for shear number of systems it is most hacked. 2. Windows is harder to lock down than most other OSs. That is often because software expects to be running with admin rights.
I am trying to figure out how no one noticed these programs trying to make connections to the outside world. My guess is that they where not expecting a Trojan. Heck we got hit by a worm at my office. It didn't get through our firewall at all. Somebody brought a notebook in and connected it to our network. It only infected three machines but it was a good cheap lesson for us.
Seems kind of a silly argument. In WWII artillery fired shells at targets more than 10 miles away. Subs fired torpedoes at ships from miles away. lanes dropped bombs from miles away. You always try to get the maximum distance between you and your target. This trend goes back to bow, spear, and sling. Frankly I would worry more about cruise missiles than these drones. You just point them and pull the trigger. A thousand miles away you hope the right thing gets blown up.
1. You live in Alaska! unless you eat fish, crab, and or moose food is going to be expensive there. Lots of people in Alaska hunt to subsidize there food for that reason. 2. Yes you can grow a good garden in many places in Alaska. Yes the season is short but you have a lot of sun. You will get one crop a year not three of four like I do in Florida but then you don't have to fight bugs we do. 3. Yes it can take time but it is also good to get out in the fresh air. Some people think of it as fun and there is something about eating what you grow. 4. It is good for the environment. It does take a lot of oil to ship food to Alaska. 5. Isn't land cheap in Alaska? I mean there is a lot of it but I will bet that depends on location.
It is a good way to save money. Heck even in the US you can go to Sam's club or Costco when they have something in bulk on sale and then can it. Frankly it is probably better for their health that the people in Moldova still can. Do they make good pickles there? I love homemade pickles:)
Yes and no. Frankly have you seen how bad many local websites are? To setup a good website does take time and some skill. A good example of really bad and almost useless sites are most Motorcycle shops. I am talking about Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki.. You know the big boys. I am not a Harley guy so I haven't looked at those. What to know what used bikes they have? Well you may or may not find out. How about the price of an Helmet? Maybe sales or Events? Heck half the time the email doesn't work. The other thing that I find most of the sites don't do is make themselves Cell phone friendly. When I am in a car It would be great if I could find their number and hours on my cell phone browser. Yes the Web really can help but it is often not used well or not at all. And then Bill has to decide if it is worth it to him.
If the billing module is a stand alone program then it is all good. If you added code to Inksscape which I would find an odd way of doing things then you would be bound by the GPL.
What I would suggest if you really wanted to make money from this is to find a bunch of FOSS packages that do most of what you would want them to do. Add some bits of code to improve them and donate that back to the community. Then create a pretty package, installer, and a good mannual along with any closed source custom programs that you think would add value. Then sell it with support. Or offer PCs with your package preloaded so you are a one shop stop.
You must add some value or else you are just ripping people off.
As too selling GPL software. That is totally legal. But you have to let the people that buy it from you redistribute all of the GPL software and the source code for it MUST be available to them. GPL 3 adds some more cruft but that is the basic idea behind GPL you can sell it but you can not stop them from modifying your code or them selling and or giving it away. As long as they also follow the GPL.
"Now consider that Joe fixes a security hole in the GPL version of your software, and the same hole exists in your closed version. You can use his patch to fix the GPL version, but you cannot use it to fix the closed version." Well.... 1. Not if you follow the FSFs suggestion that every contributers transfers the ownership of the code to the original copyright holder. You would then own the code and could do with the the patch as you will. See CUPS as an example. 2. Not if the patch is obvious. If it is a simple security hole then while you couldn't take the patch you could look at it and write your own version. Saying otherwise would be much the same as SCO saying that Linux stole a line of code from Unix that says for(i=0;iMAX;i++)
"In theory these kind of high technologies shouldn't be restricted to the whims of capitalism though. I'd like to elaborate I don't have the time to discuss all of my ideas on future communication/knowledge/info-sharing technology, though.." Well yes they really do. Someone has to pay for the service. You would have to subscribe or there is advertising. Your sponsored result in the article would be the only result since the idea is that doesn't ask you which one you want to go to. BTW we already do have that system. When traveling to Texas I used Google Local on my cell phone to find what was available to eat in the next town while my wife drove. It worked pretty well. There are places in Louisiana where food is pretty few and far between. Peer review can be hacked. Take a look at Digg and the Slashvertisments you get on Slashdot. Moderation often fails on Slashdot. My favorite example was on of my own postings. It was about people that claim the Holocost never happened. Someone posted that it would be impossible to "fake" the evidence. I posted that yes the evidence could be faked but I know it wasn't because my Uncle served in WWII and helped liberate one of the camps. I got moderated down as flamebait simply because someone read only the first line. The amount of power that a small number of people have on sites like Slashdot and Digg is often hidden from view but it is there. Read anything post about file sharing on Slashdot. A well written post that voices concerns about the morality of downloading will be marked as -1 flamebait while a post that says "The RIAA sucks and rapes kittens for fun!" will be marked as insightful or funny. Frankly I read Slashdot more than Digg because I have a lot less crap to go through. The editors do a pretty fair if not perfect job of selecting stories even if they are a little slow.
I have to admit that Digg has done what I thought was impossible. It has a community that is more bad mannered and nasty than Slashdot. Slashdot looks down right friendly compared to Digg.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny but I almost never shop at Walmart but I don't think they are "evil". The one thing I always do go to WalMart for is compost and mulch. My local WalMart sells "Earthwise" mulch that is made locally. I know the company that makes it and it is all "earth friendly". It is real simple if you don't like them don't shop there. Frankly I only ever guy food there if it is late at night and I need something. Sort of a big Seven Eleven. I don't by cloths there because they don't last and I don't by things like Law mowers, bikes, or BBQs there because they tend to be low quality and more expensive in the long run. But I don't hate Walmart of look down on people that shop there. Frankly it is very handy to have the option of getting a new shirt, a toaster, and weeks worth of food all in one shop. It saves time and gas. If I had a few kids to deal with I might go there more often just for the convince factor.
But the difference between Walmart and Target has more to do with choice. I have a lot of Choice in where I shop. I have little choice in what OS I have to deal with. WalMart Lawn mowers don't require Walmart oil and gas to work.
Frankly this hate thing for Microsoft and or Walmart is all pretty silly. They are not the KKK or American Nazi party after all.
The real truth about Bill Gates is this.
If the Gates foundation cures Malaria then nothing that Microsoft has done in the past will matter at all. He will be remembered as a great humanitarian. I personally will still stick pins my Bill Gates voodoo doll for MFC but the rest of the world will love him for generations.
Okay let's take a look at the "real world"
1. It has Vista Home Basic so no Aero. It probably will not be stressing the harware.
2. It has a gig of Ram. I have NO problem running XP media Center and OpenSuse on a system with a Gig of ram as a duel boot. Open Office runs just fine.
3. It is under $300.
4. I has a DVD drive so yes you can watch DVDs on it.
5. It has IE on it. The sad truth is some sites require IE to work correctly. This is changing but having IE to fall back on does make life easy.
6. It has Open Office. Which gives you a lot of good tools.
7. Did I mention it is under $300. Less than a PS/3 or 360?
8. It only has an 80 gig drive. So it has 6 USB ports. Think Geek was selling 80 Gig external drives for under $50! Those are much better to put your music and videos on anyway. When the RIAA and Montag come knocking at your door they my not find your external drive with your MP3s or your collection of books.
9. It uses SATA for the HD. I bet you could put in another or a Larger drive if you really wanted it.
10. So it only has one gig of ram. It has an open memory slot. Go buy an extra gig.
For a High school kid or even a college student this would be a good machine. Frankly a lot of businesses could work just fine off one of these. It also doesn't use a lot of power thanks to the C7 CPU.
As to just building your own. Not everyone wants to build their own PC or even knows how. This machine with an LCD monitor would be a handy little system for many people.
I don't know if it has any open slots but even without them you could add WiFi with USB. You could also add a TV tuner so it could be you kids TV as well.
In other words it seems like a good deal for some people. The fact that it will not play the latest and greatest games I can only see as a plus.
Honestly that seems to be true of almost all the magazines I read.
I read Kitplane and Sport pilot. Both tend to have advertisements I want to see and are related to the subject matter.
I read Motorcycle, CycleWorld and Rider. They are pretty good except for the occasional full page ad for "enlargement" that I just skip over.
Even Linux Journal is pretty good.
Circuit Cellar is so good at it that I requested that they add and advertisers index to the website. It is easy to click a link there then dig through my magazine and type in the URL.
Looks good but it isn't FOSS yet. At least the website says that a FOSS version will be shipped available in 07
Don't forget Custer's Revenge.
I get the feeling that this list was written by somebody that thinks that Nintendo invented the video game.
Until they hit 30 to 35.
They also tend to not use the term "lame". Yes Visual Basic is pretty terrible but a well paying job is a well paying job.
Besides you have no idea what he is working on in C#/.net. It maybe something that really interests him. Projects are what you make them. I wrote a program to deal with our support calls. You might think that would be "lame" Well the system needed to be done and I used it to test out idiot proofing a UI. I included code that wouldn't let them set the contrast between the foreground and background too low along with some other safe guards.
That was actually a fun project for me.
1. What is part of the OS has gotten bigger. X Windows and KDE/GNOME are not really part of Linux or BSD they are a layer on top but everybody thinks of them as part of the OS. Want a fast OS my C64 will boot faster than any Linux or Windows Box! All that with less then one Mhz.
2. Security costs. Virus scanners, firewalls, email virus scanners.... Yuck.
3. Shear laziness. Sorry but it is true. We have such fast PCs that what is good enough is often far from best.
4. Scope. Linux, BSD, and even windows run on may different CPUs for example your statment.
"It's like any other optimization job: you tighten the hell out of the most frequently-called code snippets like the scheduler and memory manager. If your scheduler is so contorted and polluted that it can't even fit in the L1 Cache anymore, you should be beaten with your keyboard!" Would that be a 386, 486, PII , K6, Athlon, or Xeon L1 Cache?
Worst controllers maybe but it had great games and graphics for the time.
The controllers and it not being 2600 compatable killed it. Too bad really I think it was better than the NES in many ways.
What are you crabbing about. I am sure that once the novelty of the Wii wears off and all those hot new games for the PS3 come out you will be begging to send your money to Sony. In fact you should rush out and buy a PS3 now while they are available! The PS3 will be a huge smash by March of 08!
Oh and yea I am kidding.
Well yes and no.
Office, Outlook, and Exchange are big reasons to not use Linux. That and frankly VisualBasic are really deal killers for a lot of places as far as Linux on the desktop.
Sharepoint and Exchange are great weapons to use to get Linux off servers.
It is a problem for Linux in that if All of your software will run on Linux there is no reason to keep Windows If you have to keep Windows then you have to keep Windows.
I don't produce presentations anymore thank goodness but I will take your word for it.
Every one of those systems is a proxy and most have a lot less control or situational awareness than a drone. I love airplanes but the drone would seem to me to be less likley to make a mistake than a manned aircraft.
If for no other reason than the drone operator can not die. He can take all the time in the world to line up his target and launch his weapon.
Those AA guns my take out his drone but he will live another day and doesn't have to worry about sitting in a prison camp.
A manned aircraft is more likely to survive but the drone is more likely to not hit the wrong target.
Well for one it has little to nothing to do with Linux.
They have a few valid points but they are hard to work around.
1. OpenOffice will never be as compatible with Office as Office is.
2. If you know Office you must learn OpenOffice. Office is taught in every school I know of.
3. I still don't think Calc is even as good as Excel in Office 2000 but then I haven't really used it a lot in a long time.
4. Outlooks+Exchange are a better Enterprise calendering system than anything I have seen from FOSS.
5. Sharepoint. I haven't seen anything as easy to use from the FOSS community.
Microsoft had done some good things, give the devil his due.
"1. Advertising keeps them in business because of the bell curve -- some people block ads, some people overclick ads (causing them to pay zero), but the middle ground is usually enough to keep a site alive. My oldest website still earns somewhere in the realm of $200 a month through ads and it hasn't been updated in 2 years -- but people still get there through Google and the information on the site is still "good enough" because it has to do with old hardware. That income offsets my new sites. According to my records, only 12% of my visitors block ads, which isn't a big deal. But as ad-blocking grows, we've had to resort to new income streams such as "advertiser funded posts" (ReviewMe.com for example), which I absolutely hate.
"
I can think of some things to try.
Sponsors for articles. Just a single blurb at the start of the article. NO FLASH or Animation and a limited size. If it has something to do with an article I am reading I might click on it.
A direcory of Sponsors. If I am looking for something I might look their first.
However at least on of your sites has my pet peeve! It is FIXED WIDTH!
I have a 22" monitor so I hate websites that have HUGE boarders on the sides. I know it is harder to write CSS2 code that handles a variable width but I feel it is well worth the effort.
Heck you could have more room for ads that don't get into my way then.
I remember Microsystems but Interface Age was before even my time. Just by a year or so but still.
Then you had the fluffy mags with the type in programs. Creative Computing, Compute, Ahoy, and so on.
Good times.
I know the pro windows crowd will jump up and down but I hope they will hear me out.
1. Windows is the most popular OS on the planet. Just for shear number of systems it is most hacked.
2. Windows is harder to lock down than most other OSs. That is often because software expects to be running with admin rights.
I am trying to figure out how no one noticed these programs trying to make connections to the outside world. My guess is that they where not expecting a Trojan. Heck we got hit by a worm at my office. It didn't get through our firewall at all. Somebody brought a notebook in and connected it to our network.
It only infected three machines but it was a good cheap lesson for us.
Seems kind of a silly argument. In WWII artillery fired shells at targets more than 10 miles away. Subs fired torpedoes at ships from miles away. lanes dropped bombs from miles away.
You always try to get the maximum distance between you and your target. This trend goes back to bow, spear, and sling. Frankly I would worry more about cruise missiles than these drones. You just point them and pull the trigger. A thousand miles away you hope the right thing gets blown up.
What about Microcornucopia? If you want to feel very old.
I subscribe to Circuit Cellar. It is one of the few tech magazines I bother with.
1. You live in Alaska! unless you eat fish, crab, and or moose food is going to be expensive there. Lots of people in Alaska hunt to subsidize there food for that reason.
2. Yes you can grow a good garden in many places in Alaska. Yes the season is short but you have a lot of sun. You will get one crop a year not three of four like I do in Florida but then you don't have to fight bugs we do.
3. Yes it can take time but it is also good to get out in the fresh air. Some people think of it as fun and there is something about eating what you grow.
4. It is good for the environment. It does take a lot of oil to ship food to Alaska.
5. Isn't land cheap in Alaska? I mean there is a lot of it but I will bet that depends on location.
It is a good way to save money. Heck even in the US you can go to Sam's club or Costco when they have something in bulk on sale and then can it. Frankly it is probably better for their health that the people in Moldova still can. :)
Do they make good pickles there? I love homemade pickles
Yes and no.
Frankly have you seen how bad many local websites are? To setup a good website does take time and some skill. A good example of really bad and almost useless sites are most Motorcycle shops. I am talking about Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki.. You know the big boys. I am not a Harley guy so I haven't looked at those.
What to know what used bikes they have? Well you may or may not find out. How about the price of an Helmet? Maybe sales or Events? Heck half the time the email doesn't work.
The other thing that I find most of the sites don't do is make themselves Cell phone friendly. When I am in a car It would be great if I could find their number and hours on my cell phone browser.
Yes the Web really can help but it is often not used well or not at all. And then Bill has to decide if it is worth it to him.
If the billing module is a stand alone program then it is all good. If you added code to Inksscape which I would find an odd way of doing things then you would be bound by the GPL.
What I would suggest if you really wanted to make money from this is to find a bunch of FOSS packages that do most of what you would want them to do. Add some bits of code to improve them and donate that back to the community. Then create a pretty package, installer, and a good mannual along with any closed source custom programs that you think would add value. Then sell it with support. Or offer PCs with your package preloaded so you are a one shop stop.
You must add some value or else you are just ripping people off.
As too selling GPL software. That is totally legal. But you have to let the people that buy it from you redistribute all of the GPL software and the source code for it MUST be available to them.
GPL 3 adds some more cruft but that is the basic idea behind GPL you can sell it but you can not stop them from modifying your code or them selling and or giving it away. As long as they also follow the GPL.
"Now consider that Joe fixes a security hole in the GPL version of your software, and the same hole exists in your closed version. You can use his patch to fix the GPL version, but you cannot use it to fix the closed version."
Well....
1. Not if you follow the FSFs suggestion that every contributers transfers the ownership of the code to the original copyright holder. You would then own the code and could do with the the patch as you will. See CUPS as an example.
2. Not if the patch is obvious. If it is a simple security hole then while you couldn't take the patch you could look at it and write your own version. Saying otherwise would be much the same as SCO saying that Linux stole a line of code from Unix that says for(i=0;iMAX;i++)
"In theory these kind of high technologies shouldn't be restricted to the whims of capitalism though. I'd like to elaborate I don't have the time to discuss all of my ideas on future communication/knowledge/info-sharing technology, though.."
Well yes they really do. Someone has to pay for the service. You would have to subscribe or there is advertising. Your sponsored result in the article would be the only result since the idea is that doesn't ask you which one you want to go to. BTW we already do have that system. When traveling to Texas I used Google Local on my cell phone to find what was available to eat in the next town while my wife drove. It worked pretty well. There are places in Louisiana where food is pretty few and far between. Peer review can be hacked. Take a look at Digg and the Slashvertisments you get on Slashdot. Moderation often fails on Slashdot. My favorite example was on of my own postings. It was about people that claim the Holocost never happened. Someone posted that it would be impossible to "fake" the evidence. I posted that yes the evidence could be faked but I know it wasn't because my Uncle served in WWII and helped liberate one of the camps. I got moderated down as flamebait simply because someone read only the first line. The amount of power that a small number of people have on sites like Slashdot and Digg is often hidden from view but it is there. Read anything post about file sharing on Slashdot. A well written post that voices concerns about the morality of downloading will be marked as -1 flamebait while a post that says "The RIAA sucks and rapes kittens for fun!" will be marked as insightful or funny. Frankly I read Slashdot more than Digg because I have a lot less crap to go through. The editors do a pretty fair if not perfect job of selecting stories even if they are a little slow.
I have to admit that Digg has done what I thought was impossible. It has a community that is more bad mannered and nasty than Slashdot. Slashdot looks down right friendly compared to Digg.