We all bemoan the idea that some day, all the new moneyed interests in the Linux market are going to figure out some way of advancing their own financial interests by screwing the community. So, just think of this merger as insurance against at least one company's doing that. If slashdot/freshmeat/everything-else-andover.net-bou ght defines the community or at least the most vocal portions of the community, then having VA's revenue tied (in part) directly the community's happiness is a good incentive not to act contrary to the community's collective desires and interests.
If it were just about slashdot, then I might agree with some who'd say that the problem with corporate influence is not the obvious problems we see with companies like Microsoft but rather the subtle corrupting influences it has on a movement full of idealism. But remember, while slashdot may seem overly dominated by trolls and kiddies who wouldn't care about such corruption even if they could see it coming, Andover's other sites (particularly freshmeat) are dominated by the precise people who take the time to notice and care about these things: the programmers who fuel the open-source movement.
The sky is not falling. Now if only VA wanted to help the community a bit more with some more free hardware, we'd deign to be satisfied.:-)
Well, andover's been around since 1992 (albeit in software publishing rather than online ad-serving), so at least someone heard about them before.
As for whether slashdot has improved or depreciated since the Good Ol' Days (TM), I'd have to say it's done neither. C'mon, you remember what a pain it was to read/post on slashdot before threaded comments were implemented, and you remember how nice it was when nested comments were later implemented (and if you need to remind yourself how inconvenient it was before, just hop on over to technocrat.net, unless Bruce has upgraded to the latest slash version). Cachedot.slashdot.org was cute in its day, but isn't it nicer just to have the main site have more serving capacity? (Of course that could use another upgrade, and cachedot was long after the primordial age you're pining for.) The editorial content hasn't changed much -- slashdot was always quick to announce, quick to get it wrong, and quick to retract. There're certainly more trolls than before, but that's inevitable and the moderation takes care of them as it should.
We don't need criminal laws saying ISPs must do the appropriate filtering. What we need is tort remedies for the people walloped by the people DoSed against the people who were negligent in securing the systems that were cracked. If I were to have a cache of weapons left lying around my backyard and someone were to hop my low fence, steal one, and kill someone with it, you can be sure that there'd be a civil action (properly) initiated against me. Leaving your network available to others to exploit and cause mayhem isn't readily distinguished.
Either get a legislature to enact new tort legislation or get some enterprising judges to extend the common law. Either way, you won't need an overseeing regulatory agency. Ronald Dworkin would approve, I suspect.
Yahoo (YHOO) is up 19 1/8 points on the news. Either investors are confused and think the DoS attack is generating millions of dollars in ad-impression revenue, or the stock market makes absolutely no sense. I have no good reason to suspect it's anything but the latter.
If you use "Dupree" then you already have a live incarnation with its own webcam. The same goes for "Akbar".
And if you go with the ever popular "Iggy", you can save money by using a beanie baby instead of manufacturing a proprietary lizard, which is exactly the kind of let's-not-reinvent-the-wheel mentality that makes the open-source movement go 'round.
Under current US Supreme Court precedent, it doesn't violate the fourth amendment protections against unreasonable searches to make aerial photographs (from a plane) of someone's backyard that has a huge fence around it and is concealed from view on the ground. (California v. Ciraolo). Now imagine how much more powerful/dangerous satellites like this could be in the hands of law-enforcement.
Sure there are plenty of satellites out there in the hands of the government, but most of those are unavailable for mundane applications potentially inconsistent with national security. But one of the rationales in Ciraolo was that the policeman taking the photos from the plane was in publicly accessible space, and that can hardly be said of most spy satellites. But if this particular satellite is available for public use, then does that change the picture? I hope not -- privacy is a scarce enough quality as it is.
I applaud people's efforts to bring attention to this issue (slashdot has itself run a couple articles, both on the AOL-ADA lawsuit and did a Q&A on internet accessability for the handicapped a while ago), just as I applaud people's efforts to bring attention to the Free Tibet campaign. But I can't help but wonder whether, like with Free Tibet, people get involved, not because they truly care deeply about the principles at hand (although they might also do that), but because it's an easy cause with only one rational side to choose and which they can fight at no cost to them. Who wouldn't want to help the blind?
This point can be made about nearly any political cause, so let me explain why I make it about this one: people will say they care, and they might even make a half-assed attempt to comply with the dictates of these principles, but when push comes to shove, they will not forgo doing what they would've already done simply because of their allegiance to a political belief. They'll wave their flag and chant their slogans, and then they'll go home and quietly forget to implement the very changes they demanded. The 'cool' factor is just too dominant. The trend is away from text-accessability and towards whizbang GUIs, and we'll all suffer from it, blind or visually empowered. I hope to be proven wrong on this matter and hope to see a massive consumer revolt in favor of ALT tags and the like (logical formatting, not lexical formatting), but I'm not holding my breath.
I'm being facetious, of course, but it does reflect at least somewhat on the integrity of slashdot/Andover that they weren't won over (or bribed) by superior moneyed interests and went with what they felt was actually the best product.
I do have to wonder at people's insistence on these general rankings. Clearly SuSE isn't best for all people, since last I checked Slashdot isn't running on it.
If you recall, Quark tried to take over Adobe a year and a half ago. Adobe is valued at something like one and a half billion dollars, and Quark (itself half the size of Adobe) was too small to take them over. What makes you think (relatively puny) Corel would succeed?
*whacks forehead* Norton! *whacks forehead* Norton! Too much influence from reading the AC idiots posting below. As for Peter Norton, there are plenty of those also.
The guy on the symantec products is busy writing books last I checked. (Don't buy from Amazon.com, but do waste their bandwidth by looking for books there.) I can't imagine he'd be involved with this outfit.
North isn't an uncommon name, anyway. A quick romp through the phonebook will turn up at least 19 Peter Norths living in the US.
This proposal, while mostly laudable, won't stop another type of flight to Delaware. I speak of laws of incorporation.
Look at Delaware. Look at how many corporations are incorporated in Delaware. Notice anything? There are lots. Why is Dupont incorporated in Delaware? It certainly isn't because Delaware is rich in petroleum.
The reason is Delaware, as a small state, can afford to have fewer or less restrictive laws on subjects like these, because what would have an insignificant economic effect on the economy of a larger state like Texas or even Pennsylvania would have a quite significant effect in Delaware. If one of the requirements for incorporating is to produce several hundred jobs in the local state, then that is actually a meaningful contribution to Delaware's economy.
States like Pennsylvania can't compete with states like Delaware (just as Massachusetts can't compete with New Hampshire) on the subject of taxes. Being a small state means requiring much less tax revenue, which means it can get away with fewer taxes (of course). Whereas Pennsylvania might temporarily boost revenues or boost economic activity by temporarily lowering or eliminating taxes on items like PCs, Delaware can do so on a permanent basis without many reprocussions. This is inevitable.
Judging from the content of his speech as well as his inability to insert a period in his run-on sentence, I assume he is only an "employee" and not an owner. As an employee, he likely doesn't get a percentage of sales or a bonus because of sales, and therefore it makes no difference whether he is busy selling peecees or just twiddling his thumbs -- either way, he's getting his normal hourly salary. Apart from having his company go belly-up from lack of revenue, there's no real reason why he should unselfishly care about the vollume of sales processed, especially if the company is running on a bare-bones staff as it is (as many such retailers are). His post is entirely valid, except for that little matter of punctuation.
Anonymous Coward: I wonder what it'd be like to build a beowulf out of these! /: It is a frickin' beowulf, you turd! Anonymous Coward: Oh yeah, right.
The build-a-beowulf joke has officially been beaten into the ground for the last time. Anyone who uses it at a future date will be liable for being beaten into the ground. You have been foreworned.
You're forgetting to comment on the certain style that the questions are presented in: "Some say that Bill Gates is a pedophile, that he routinely eats spotted owls for breakfast, that he doubleparks on busy streets, that he doesn't give generous tips, that he keeps all his money in a so-called 'money bin' and swims through it like Scrooge MacDuck, that he doesn't call his mother, that he keeps his children in the basement for medical experiments, and that he advocates the violent overthrow of the American government in favor of a New International World Order where he, as fuhrer, reigns over the newly enslaved American populace. Others say he doesn't do those things. What do you think?"
You really can't get much more leading than some of the questions here. People who don't know any better usually choose the side with more words and more clauses. It's human-nature == stupidity.
Ach, crap. I missed your reference to Ally Sheedy. The problem is, there's a quite similar Matthew-Broderick-breaks-into-the-school's-compute r-and-changes-his-grades scene in Ferris Bueller. So much for originality.
Just because you can't see the zebra in this painting doesn't mean it's there. And if you think obfuscated code is linenoise, you should listen to Michael Gordon or some of his comrades in arms (which isn't to say I don't like Michael Gordon).
Once you let the government distinguish between types of speech based on content, there's no going back.
The scene you describe is from Ferris Bueller's Day Off (the password was "pencil", IIRC) and not from Wargames. Both starred Matthew Broderick and both are great films, but let's not confuse them.
One of the hopes for understanding ball lightening that I've seen bandied about was that it might lead to advancements in containing fusion reactions and lead to fusion power plants. A burning ball of silicon hardly seems as relevant.
Corporations may mostly be treated as themselves people, but I have to agree with most of the logic that dictates that result -- there are practical and sensible reasons why corporations should have things like standing to sue and pay taxes and the like, and there is actually plenty of English precedent stemming from partnership law in doing so -- indeed, after all, in a sense, the first European settlers of the Americas were corporations). While corporations are especially moneyed, they don't in fact vote, and if the rest of voting America lets themselves get ridden roughshod, that's something within their power to change. Privacy violations are wrong whether committed by individuals or groups of individuals.
And at least corporations are composed of actual people. As for the personification of natural features, who is to say whether it would actually level the playing field away from corporations? Who is to say whether the marsh would or would not rather be developed into a condominium? Surely the marsh can't speak for itself, and why should we favor the opinion of the environmentalists over the developers? Why should we assume that the marsh would favor preservation instead of development? Perhaps the marsh sees development in the same way a human child sees accademic development; surely we shouldn't let children remain ignorant, so why not marshes? Maybe they don't like being so smelly.
My belabored point there is that changing the principles of standing according to Douglas's proposal wouldn't actually benefit the legal system any. We'd just be back to square one where we try to figure out which of two competing human interests should be favored.
Slashdot Mirror
We all bemoan the idea that some day, all the new moneyed interests in the Linux market are going to figure out some way of advancing their own financial interests by screwing the community. So, just think of this merger as insurance against at least one company's doing that. If slashdot/freshmeat/everything-else-andover.net-bou ght defines the community or at least the most vocal portions of the community, then having VA's revenue tied (in part) directly the community's happiness is a good incentive not to act contrary to the community's collective desires and interests.
:-)
If it were just about slashdot, then I might agree with some who'd say that the problem with corporate influence is not the obvious problems we see with companies like Microsoft but rather the subtle corrupting influences it has on a movement full of idealism. But remember, while slashdot may seem overly dominated by trolls and kiddies who wouldn't care about such corruption even if they could see it coming, Andover's other sites (particularly freshmeat) are dominated by the precise people who take the time to notice and care about these things: the programmers who fuel the open-source movement.
The sky is not falling. Now if only VA wanted to help the community a bit more with some more free hardware, we'd deign to be satisfied.
Well, andover's been around since 1992 (albeit in software publishing rather than online ad-serving), so at least someone heard about them before.
;)
As for whether slashdot has improved or depreciated since the Good Ol' Days (TM), I'd have to say it's done neither. C'mon, you remember what a pain it was to read/post on slashdot before threaded comments were implemented, and you remember how nice it was when nested comments were later implemented (and if you need to remind yourself how inconvenient it was before, just hop on over to technocrat.net, unless Bruce has upgraded to the latest slash version). Cachedot.slashdot.org was cute in its day, but isn't it nicer just to have the main site have more serving capacity? (Of course that could use another upgrade, and cachedot was long after the primordial age you're pining for.) The editorial content hasn't changed much -- slashdot was always quick to announce, quick to get it wrong, and quick to retract. There're certainly more trolls than before, but that's inevitable and the moderation takes care of them as it should.
I'd say it has to be you.
We don't need criminal laws saying ISPs must do the appropriate filtering. What we need is tort remedies for the people walloped by the people DoSed against the people who were negligent in securing the systems that were cracked. If I were to have a cache of weapons left lying around my backyard and someone were to hop my low fence, steal one, and kill someone with it, you can be sure that there'd be a civil action (properly) initiated against me. Leaving your network available to others to exploit and cause mayhem isn't readily distinguished.
Either get a legislature to enact new tort legislation or get some enterprising judges to extend the common law. Either way, you won't need an overseeing regulatory agency. Ronald Dworkin would approve, I suspect.
Yahoo (YHOO) is up 19 1/8 points on the news. Either investors are confused and think the DoS attack is generating millions of dollars in ad-impression revenue, or the stock market makes absolutely no sense. I have no good reason to suspect it's anything but the latter.
Rather than answer your question here, I'll point you to a thread I started on the subject a while ago.
Wasn't minix already running on x86 and therefore Linus's version wasn't truly a "port"?
If you use "Dupree" then you already have a live incarnation with its own webcam. The same goes for "Akbar".
And if you go with the ever popular "Iggy", you can save money by using a beanie baby instead of manufacturing a proprietary lizard, which is exactly the kind of let's-not-reinvent-the-wheel mentality that makes the open-source movement go 'round.
Under current US Supreme Court precedent, it doesn't violate the fourth amendment protections against unreasonable searches to make aerial photographs (from a plane) of someone's backyard that has a huge fence around it and is concealed from view on the ground. ( California v. Ciraolo ). Now imagine how much more powerful/dangerous satellites like this could be in the hands of law-enforcement.
Sure there are plenty of satellites out there in the hands of the government, but most of those are unavailable for mundane applications potentially inconsistent with national security. But one of the rationales in Ciraolo was that the policeman taking the photos from the plane was in publicly accessible space, and that can hardly be said of most spy satellites. But if this particular satellite is available for public use, then does that change the picture? I hope not -- privacy is a scarce enough quality as it is.
I applaud people's efforts to bring attention to this issue (slashdot has itself run a couple articles, both on the AOL-ADA lawsuit and did a Q&A on internet accessability for the handicapped a while ago), just as I applaud people's efforts to bring attention to the Free Tibet campaign. But I can't help but wonder whether, like with Free Tibet, people get involved, not because they truly care deeply about the principles at hand (although they might also do that), but because it's an easy cause with only one rational side to choose and which they can fight at no cost to them. Who wouldn't want to help the blind?
This point can be made about nearly any political cause, so let me explain why I make it about this one: people will say they care, and they might even make a half-assed attempt to comply with the dictates of these principles, but when push comes to shove, they will not forgo doing what they would've already done simply because of their allegiance to a political belief. They'll wave their flag and chant their slogans, and then they'll go home and quietly forget to implement the very changes they demanded. The 'cool' factor is just too dominant. The trend is away from text-accessability and towards whizbang GUIs, and we'll all suffer from it, blind or visually empowered. I hope to be proven wrong on this matter and hope to see a massive consumer revolt in favor of ALT tags and the like (logical formatting, not lexical formatting), but I'm not holding my breath.
I'm being facetious, of course, but it does reflect at least somewhat on the integrity of slashdot/Andover that they weren't won over (or bribed) by superior moneyed interests and went with what they felt was actually the best product.
I do have to wonder at people's insistence on these general rankings. Clearly SuSE isn't best for all people, since last I checked Slashdot isn't running on it.
If you recall, Quark tried to take over Adobe a year and a half ago. Adobe is valued at something like one and a half billion dollars, and Quark (itself half the size of Adobe) was too small to take them over. What makes you think (relatively puny) Corel would succeed?
*whacks forehead* Norton! *whacks forehead* Norton!
Too much influence from reading the AC idiots posting below.
As for Peter Norton, there are plenty of those also.
The guy on the symantec products is busy writing books last I checked. (Don't buy from Amazon.com, but do waste their bandwidth by looking for books there.) I can't imagine he'd be involved with this outfit.
North isn't an uncommon name, anyway. A quick romp through the phonebook will turn up at least 19 Peter Norths living in the US.
This proposal, while mostly laudable, won't stop another type of flight to Delaware. I speak of laws of incorporation.
Look at Delaware. Look at how many corporations are incorporated in Delaware. Notice anything? There are lots. Why is Dupont incorporated in Delaware? It certainly isn't because Delaware is rich in petroleum.
The reason is Delaware, as a small state, can afford to have fewer or less restrictive laws on subjects like these, because what would have an insignificant economic effect on the economy of a larger state like Texas or even Pennsylvania would have a quite significant effect in Delaware. If one of the requirements for incorporating is to produce several hundred jobs in the local state, then that is actually a meaningful contribution to Delaware's economy.
States like Pennsylvania can't compete with states like Delaware (just as Massachusetts can't compete with New Hampshire) on the subject of taxes. Being a small state means requiring much less tax revenue, which means it can get away with fewer taxes (of course). Whereas Pennsylvania might temporarily boost revenues or boost economic activity by temporarily lowering or eliminating taxes on items like PCs, Delaware can do so on a permanent basis without many reprocussions. This is inevitable.
Judging from the content of his speech as well as his inability to insert a period in his run-on sentence, I assume he is only an "employee" and not an owner. As an employee, he likely doesn't get a percentage of sales or a bonus because of sales, and therefore it makes no difference whether he is busy selling peecees or just twiddling his thumbs -- either way, he's getting his normal hourly salary. Apart from having his company go belly-up from lack of revenue, there's no real reason why he should unselfishly care about the vollume of sales processed, especially if the company is running on a bare-bones staff as it is (as many such retailers are). His post is entirely valid, except for that little matter of punctuation.
Note: To build a Beowulf, a Linux-based cluster, we think...
;)
The funny part is that the slashdot story-posting perl scripts didn't post this story twice for mentioning both linux and beowulfs.
C'mon, CmdtTaco! Release the source to the story-posting perl scripts, already!
Anonymous Coward: I wonder what it'd be like to build a beowulf out of these!
/: It is a frickin' beowulf, you turd!
Anonymous Coward: Oh yeah, right.
The build-a-beowulf joke has officially been beaten into the ground for the last time. Anyone who uses it at a future date will be liable for being beaten into the ground. You have been foreworned.
You're forgetting to comment on the certain style that the questions are presented in:
"Some say that Bill Gates is a pedophile, that he routinely eats spotted owls for breakfast, that he doubleparks on busy streets, that he doesn't give generous tips, that he keeps all his money in a so-called 'money bin' and swims through it like Scrooge MacDuck, that he doesn't call his mother, that he keeps his children in the basement for medical experiments, and that he advocates the violent overthrow of the American government in favor of a New International World Order where he, as fuhrer, reigns over the newly enslaved American populace. Others say he doesn't do those things. What do you think?"
You really can't get much more leading than some of the questions here. People who don't know any better usually choose the side with more words and more clauses. It's human-nature == stupidity.
Report to your spouse that it's splashed with sexual fluids not matching your spouse's
Ach, crap. I missed your reference to Ally Sheedy. The problem is, there's a quite similar Matthew-Broderick-breaks-into-the-school's-compute r-and-changes-his-grades scene in Ferris Bueller. So much for originality.
[I]titanium isn't even out yet and these goys are shipping code.
:)
You know, with names like John Crawford, Don Alpert, and Hans Mulder, Jerry Huck, Bill Worley, and Rajiv Gupta, maybe they are all goys.
Just because you can't see the zebra in this painting doesn't mean it's there. And if you think obfuscated code is linenoise, you should listen to Michael Gordon or some of his comrades in arms (which isn't to say I don't like Michael Gordon).
Once you let the government distinguish between types of speech based on content, there's no going back.
The scene you describe is from Ferris Bueller's Day Off (the password was "pencil", IIRC) and not from Wargames. Both starred Matthew Broderick and both are great films, but let's not confuse them.
One of the hopes for understanding ball lightening that I've seen bandied about was that it might lead to advancements in containing fusion reactions and lead to fusion power plants. A burning ball of silicon hardly seems as relevant.
Corporations may mostly be treated as themselves people, but I have to agree with most of the logic that dictates that result -- there are practical and sensible reasons why corporations should have things like standing to sue and pay taxes and the like, and there is actually plenty of English precedent stemming from partnership law in doing so -- indeed, after all, in a sense, the first European settlers of the Americas were corporations). While corporations are especially moneyed, they don't in fact vote, and if the rest of voting America lets themselves get ridden roughshod, that's something within their power to change. Privacy violations are wrong whether committed by individuals or groups of individuals.
And at least corporations are composed of actual people. As for the personification of natural features, who is to say whether it would actually level the playing field away from corporations? Who is to say whether the marsh would or would not rather be developed into a condominium? Surely the marsh can't speak for itself, and why should we favor the opinion of the environmentalists over the developers? Why should we assume that the marsh would favor preservation instead of development? Perhaps the marsh sees development in the same way a human child sees accademic development; surely we shouldn't let children remain ignorant, so why not marshes? Maybe they don't like being so smelly.
My belabored point there is that changing the principles of standing according to Douglas's proposal wouldn't actually benefit the legal system any. We'd just be back to square one where we try to figure out which of two competing human interests should be favored.