For those who aren't familiar with WAAS, it's the Wide Area Augmentation System. It's like DGPS on speed. It's run by the FAA. They have a dozen receiving location scattered around the country, at precisely surveyed locations. They measure the difference between where the GPS satelite says they are, and where they actualy are, and then transmit that information to geostationary satelites, which then beam the info back to earth. In a nutshell you get 3m GPS accuracy.
AFAIK there is no provision for reducing the accuracy of WAAS without just turning it off. The FCC would really like to use WAAS to enable planes to do instrument landings at airports without ILS. Of course the FAA can just turn it off anytime...
WAAS works great though. I've left my GPS on auto-detailed track mode, and I've inadvertantly created a highly accurate map of my campus just by walking around with my GPS in my pocket:)
Methanol is a highly reactive, flamable, and toxic chemical. You thought spontaniously combusting laptops were bad before? Now're you're carrying around rocket fuel to boot. I wonder if they'd even allow one of these on an airplane? It can be absorbed right through your skin and cause permanent eye and liver damage. I don't understand why they can't use a less flamable/reactive/toxic alcohol, like ethanol or isopropanol.
At my school, Vermont Tech, the Computer Club's student run server was recently shut off for "file shareing activities".
Our IT department noticed that our machine was originating a very large volume of outgoing traffic. They ran NMAP, and saw
6346/tcp filtered gnutella
and said "Oh, they're running Gnutella." They pulled our plug, without even bothering to try and contact the machine's administrator or the club's advisor first.
This is not a joke, they really did.
It turned out that someone was legitimately downloading a legitimate copy of the non-commercial QNX iso from our legitimate public FTP site.
Isn't there something in the constitution about cruel and unusual punishment, and right to a fair trial? What about double jeopardy? This sounds like a federally endorsed manditory minimum sentence for using encryption in the comitting of a felony. Department of Justice indeed, more like department of INJUSTICE. Aren't those assholes supposed to ENFORCE the law, not CREATE IT? What the hell did I learn in school about the three branches of federal government?
What if you're using a digital CELL phone to help with your crime, or a digital cordless phone? The average person probably doesn't even understand that their conversation is being encrypted.
I've half a mind to start encrypting everything I do on principle. Use your rights or lose your rights.
You'll find out in May;) Honestly though, I'm a little worried after seeing that one written in K. 240 bytes may not be much but that K one is still about half a long and definately a lot worse to look at.
But, here comes the biggest kick in the huevos. Every single generation of students wants/tries to change things. Evry single one. Each one seems to feel that they know better, what should be done. But, the sad fact is that, you don't have the necessary life, business, political, technical experience to be qualified to make that decision.
LOLLERSKATING. I worked in the computer industry for 10 years before I started college 5 years ago. From my experience, most of my professors' knowledge predates MY entrance into the industry. Here are some quotes from my professors:
"XMODEM will work over a 7 bit link." "Linux is useless junk." (That one is from today.) "128 megs of ram is plenty to run Visual Studio.NET on a Win2k box." (Also running AV software, Novell client, OpenOffice pre-loader, etc) "A lot of people program in ML." "Students don't know anything. If we taught what the students wanted us to teach, we wouldn't get anywhere."
Most of these guys are horribly out of touch, and weren't necessarily ever in touch to begin with. There are two kinds of professors at my college: The ones who retired from industry and are willing to tolerate the shit pay because they like teaching and living in rural Vermont, and the ones who are here because they couldn't get a better job (the vast majority). None of them are still ACTIVELY involved in the industry, they spend all their time teaching and correcting homework.
The bottom line is that LEARNING isn't a passive process, it requires active participation, discussion, circulation of ideas, and most of all dissent. Going to school isn't about learning a bunch of facts and forumlae, it's about LEARNING HOW TO LEARN. How can you learn how to learn if you take everything your teacher tells you at face value? Do you have the same attitude towards GOVERNMENT? You frighten me.
Uh oh I'm getting modded down. I guess there ARE still Apple zealots out there.
Sure HyperCard was pretty cool. I'm not dissing HyperCard. I'm dissing Apple's policies of charging big money for API docs, thus inhibiting my HyperCard development activities. I have done some pretty impressive stuff with HC, but only because I was able to skank an old copy of the developers manual from someone who got a newer edition. And AppleScript (which is also pretty cool and I also used quite a bit in the past) is of course a direct descendant of HyperTalk. I even bought the HyperCard serial driver so I could run a HyperCard based BBS, although that project never really went anywhere.
The only thing that pissed me off about HyperCard itself was the cobjob way the hacked color PICT support into it, but by that time I had already effectively given up on MacOS so...
To understand the present, you must understand the past. That is why archeologists painstakingly excevate ancient sites. That is why history is taught in schools. And that is why you have to learn RS232 before you learn USB. It's an obligatory point of passage.
Yes, TokenRing is still in very limited use, but it sucks. Maybe if anybody other than IBM had developed it... And no, nothing is based on it. Maybe FDDI but there's another crazy esoteric protocol that 99% of us will never have to deal with.
Searched the web for token ring. Results 1 - 100 of about 516,000. Searched the web for ethernet. Results 1 - 100 of about 5,770,000.
Which protocol do YOU think should be taught in schools?
Computer Science should be mostly theory. That's why I am not taking Computer Science. I am taking Computer Engineering because it is more practical.
Even with CE, though, it's still more important to teach the theory than the implementation. That is why I support teaching RS232 and XMODEM. I do NOT support teaching TokenRing, however, for obvious reasons. I ALSO support teaching USB, because it really isn't THAT hard to learn, and it is obviously the way of the future. There's no point to teaching FireWire since it is essentially fast USB.
I learned assembly on x86. Then I learned assembly on the Microchip PIC. Then I learned motorola HC12 assembly (backwards compatible with HC11) and I thought to myself "Holy christ HC12 assembly is dumb." Maybe I just had a bad teacher. IMO PIC assembly is the one to teach in the classroom because of it's simple yet powerful instruction set.
It's basicly the same here at Vermont Tech. Granted I think that RS232 and XMODEM are still relevant, as they're SIMPLE. Also RS232 is still widely used, and while XMODEM may be garbage it is still the basis of many other protocols and is easy to understand. At least I thought so. I got in an argument with a professor once, as a lab assignment he asked us to connect two computers with a null modem, set the link to 7 bits, and transfer a file using XMODEM, in that order. I told him XMODEM doesn't work over a 7 bit link. He told me it does. It took me about a half hour to convince him that he was wrong.
After putting intense pressure on this same professor, he did spend a couple of days at the end of the class talking about USB, but it was uselessly superficial. It would have been far more beneficial for us to have done some USB programming in lab, or something.
It is hard for schools to keep up with all of the modern hardware and software and protcols, as the industry moves to fast. But why should they keep right on the bleeding edge? While RS232 may be old, learning about RS232 teaches you the PRINCIPLES of communication, thus better equipping you to learn new interfaces. The same goes for XMODEM. USB and FireWire are pretty fucking complex protocols to jump right into when you haven't covered any time of communication standard before. But I think that considering how ubiquitous USB is becoming, it should absolutely be included in the curriculum.
On the other hand, there's no excuse for teaching TokenRing. For the love of god, spend that time teaching ethernet.
I used to be a big Mac booster. I owned a IIgs, a Mac IIvx, and a PowerMac 7500 later upgraded to a 604e/180MHz w/1MB L2 cache. This machine I still own, although I'm only using for the first time in 5 years now that it's running Yellow Dog Linux.
Why did I switch AWAY from Apple? Pascal, Inside Macintosh, and the exorbinant prices you had to pay to get it. As a grade school student growing up in rural Vermont, we did have computers (donated by IBM Essex Jnct) but there was zero computer related curriculum. I couldn't afford to buy a complete set of Inside Macintosh. Nor could I afford to subscribe to Apple Developer Network. Now I write open source software for Linux/BSD in perl and C and all of the documentation is available online and free, not to mention the source code (which really is documentation too, in a way). C is the best language ever. You can't argue that, it's a fact. Pascal is like C's retarded cousin. Frankly most languages that aim to make learning programming "easier" (eg Pascal, VB) tend to just make it harder in the long run. C simply operates in a very logical way. Yeah it might take a while to figure out how pointers work, but once you do they are incredibly powerful.
I've written programs in C, C++, VB, Java, Java Script, Perl, Python, SQL, Forth, VHDL, Pascal, various BASICs, HyperTalk, ML, TCL, BASH (sure that counts), and assembly for several different platforms. If I had to pick one language to use for the rest of my life, it would be C, and if I could choose a second language, it would be perl. Why? They both operate in a logical, orthagonal manner. C programs run fast, and perl programs get written fast. They're cross-platform and widely accepted. Perl is available on pretty much all modern platforms, and if I may be so bold, C is available for pretty much EVERY platform EVER.
I digress. Other than Pascal, the cost of programming for the Mac was what really turned me off. Yeah you could do silly basic stuff with HyperCard or Turbo Pascal without spending a lot of money, but without the REAL HC docs or the REAL MacOS API docs, you couldn't get very far. Apple charged $$$ that I didn't have then and I don't have now.
IMO, Apple really shot themselves in the foot. I could have been a whizbang mac programmer, working hard to increase the mac platforms popularity.
On the up side, it seems that Apple did learn from it's mistakes. I was very happy to see that OSX now comes with free multilanguage development tools and API docs. But it's too late for this ex-apple user. Pascal is junk. Free software forever.
Anyway I don't see what VisiCalc has to do with bandwidth. This guy needs to slow down a little bit and think before he talks. Spread spectrum != unlimited bandwidth. Yes it results in more efficient bandwidth utilization but it is still finite. You cannot avoid the fact that transmitting data consumes bandwidth, and the faster your data rate, the more bandwidth your signal consumes. Sure you can spread it out but it still uses bandwidth and the more people who share your band the less bandwidth is available to each user.
And, shit, it's not like spread spectrum isn't already hugely popular. Cell phones, cordless phones, high-end commercial 2 way radios, and yes even HAM RADIO OPERATORS are all using spread spectrum. 802.11 is spread spectrum. Yeah it's cool but put 100 people on a single 802.11 channel and I think you'll realize just how limited that bandwidth really is. The nice thing about spread spectrum is that it's graceful under load. As more people are sharing the "channel", it doesn't break, it just slows down. It's not "unlimited".
The best place for surplus stuff is hamfests. Big hamfests, like Dayton. There's some frigginsurplusthereforya. Here in northern New England we like to go to Hosstraders. May 2nd & 3rd!!!
Uh, conventional hybrids are advantagious because internal combustion engines are grossly inefficient when accelerating and idleing. Hydrogen fuel cells produce electricity on demand, so accelerating is just as efficient as coasting, and they don't use any energy (well maybe a very little to run the cars electrical system) at idle.
Using biodiesel actually REDUCES the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Think about it, plants grow and absorb CO2. PART of the plant (the oil pressed from the seeds) is burned. The rest of the plant is (presumably) composted into fertilizer for next year's crop. So most of the CO2 in the plant ends up returning to the soil. Over the course of 100 million years it might even turn into petroleum.
I was running 2.2.19 on my APRS digipeater untill last week. It was always stable, I don't recall it ever crashing. About once every few months the AX.25 stack would fail and I'd have to restart the KISS interface, but other than that it was pretty flawless.
I'm now running 2.4.20, libax25 0.0.10, and aprsdigi 2.1.2. We'll see how it goes...
Why should Journalism be entertaining? People like entertainment. I belive it when Fox News says they're number 1. Fox News is pretty entertaining. But are they good journalists? When I was O'Reilly spout off on hippies and California and anybody who opposes war in Iraq, I get a good chuckle. But I certainly don't learn much about what it really going on in the world.
Entertaining journalism may appeal to a wide audience, but obviously at the cost of some journalistic integrity. It's obvious that networks such as Fox News are far more concerned with ratings than with reporting what's truely significant. I don't mean to be cold hearted but one mexican girl gets a botched transplant and it makes headlines. What about the other million people that died that day? The editors decided those stories weren't as popular.
Real journalism is about reporting information in an efficient manner. We can evaluate journalism by the signal to noise ratio. In my hometown newspaper, which is roughly 75% ads, there is really only 25% left for real news. And most of that is filled up with crap.
I guess I really try to draw a line between work and play. Reading the paper, watching the news, that's work. That isn't supposed to be entertaining. I might enjoy it, but that doesn't make it play. I enjoy it BECAUSE I'm aquireing information. If the information is diluted to male it more "entertaining", my enjoyment is lessened. Play is playing CS or watching Cowboy Bebop. That's what entertainment should be.
Perhaps there is space for entertaining journalism. I do enjoy the political comics, sometimes, and Doonsbury. And like I said I do get a kick out of O'Reilly. But that stuff is the desert, not the healthy meal. Don't forget that.
Slashdot Mirror
For those who aren't familiar with WAAS, it's the Wide Area Augmentation System. It's like DGPS on speed. It's run by the FAA. They have a dozen receiving location scattered around the country, at precisely surveyed locations. They measure the difference between where the GPS satelite says they are, and where they actualy are, and then transmit that information to geostationary satelites, which then beam the info back to earth. In a nutshell you get 3m GPS accuracy.
:)
AFAIK there is no provision for reducing the accuracy of WAAS without just turning it off. The FCC would really like to use WAAS to enable planes to do instrument landings at airports without ILS. Of course the FAA can just turn it off anytime...
WAAS works great though. I've left my GPS on auto-detailed track mode, and I've inadvertantly created a highly accurate map of my campus just by walking around with my GPS in my pocket
Methanol is a highly reactive, flamable, and toxic chemical. You thought spontaniously combusting laptops were bad before? Now're you're carrying around rocket fuel to boot. I wonder if they'd even allow one of these on an airplane? It can be absorbed right through your skin and cause permanent eye and liver damage. I don't understand why they can't use a less flamable/reactive/toxic alcohol, like ethanol or isopropanol.
Our IT department noticed that our machine was originating a very large volume of outgoing traffic. They ran NMAP, and saw
and said "Oh, they're running Gnutella." They pulled our plug, without even bothering to try and contact the machine's administrator or the club's advisor first.
This is not a joke, they really did.
It turned out that someone was legitimately downloading a legitimate copy of the non-commercial QNX iso from our legitimate public FTP site.
1984 wasn't like 1984 but maybe 2004 will be.
Isn't there something in the constitution about cruel and unusual punishment, and right to a fair trial? What about double jeopardy? This sounds like a federally endorsed manditory minimum sentence for using encryption in the comitting of a felony. Department of Justice indeed, more like department of INJUSTICE. Aren't those assholes supposed to ENFORCE the law, not CREATE IT? What the hell did I learn in school about the three branches of federal government?
What if you're using a digital CELL phone to help with your crime, or a digital cordless phone? The average person probably doesn't even understand that their conversation is being encrypted.
I've half a mind to start encrypting everything I do on principle. Use your rights or lose your rights.
You'll find out in May ;) Honestly though, I'm a little worried after seeing that one written in K. 240 bytes may not be much but that K one is still about half a long and definately a lot worse to look at.
#!/bin/sh
wget --http://www.noodleroni.com/beerlyrics.txt ; cat beerlyrics.txt
All we have to do to disqualify obvious entries is post them here.
I don't think that really earns any points for obfuscation or originality, so you get a 40 out of 100.
NAZI
Fuck there's the winning entry :( Oh wait, you posted it on /. so you're disqualified. YES, now I have a chance! :)
My entry is only 248 bytes and whoops the shit out of the beerlyrics program written in the same language on that other site.
LOLLERSKATING. I worked in the computer industry for 10 years before I started college 5 years ago. From my experience, most of my professors' knowledge predates MY entrance into the industry. Here are some quotes from my professors:
"XMODEM will work over a 7 bit link."
"Linux is useless junk." (That one is from today.)
"128 megs of ram is plenty to run Visual Studio
"A lot of people program in ML."
"Students don't know anything. If we taught what the students wanted us to teach, we wouldn't get anywhere."
Most of these guys are horribly out of touch, and weren't necessarily ever in touch to begin with. There are two kinds of professors at my college: The ones who retired from industry and are willing to tolerate the shit pay because they like teaching and living in rural Vermont, and the ones who are here because they couldn't get a better job (the vast majority). None of them are still ACTIVELY involved in the industry, they spend all their time teaching and correcting homework.
The bottom line is that LEARNING isn't a passive process, it requires active participation, discussion, circulation of ideas, and most of all dissent. Going to school isn't about learning a bunch of facts and forumlae, it's about LEARNING HOW TO LEARN. How can you learn how to learn if you take everything your teacher tells you at face value? Do you have the same attitude towards GOVERNMENT? You frighten me.
Oh no I used the wrong vowel. BTW what are you shitting?
Uh oh I'm getting modded down. I guess there ARE still Apple zealots out there.
Sure HyperCard was pretty cool. I'm not dissing HyperCard. I'm dissing Apple's policies of charging big money for API docs, thus inhibiting my HyperCard development activities. I have done some pretty impressive stuff with HC, but only because I was able to skank an old copy of the developers manual from someone who got a newer edition. And AppleScript (which is also pretty cool and I also used quite a bit in the past) is of course a direct descendant of HyperTalk. I even bought the HyperCard serial driver so I could run a HyperCard based BBS, although that project never really went anywhere.
The only thing that pissed me off about HyperCard itself was the cobjob way the hacked color PICT support into it, but by that time I had already effectively given up on MacOS so...
To understand the present, you must understand the past. That is why archeologists painstakingly excevate ancient sites. That is why history is taught in schools. And that is why you have to learn RS232 before you learn USB. It's an obligatory point of passage.
Yes, TokenRing is still in very limited use, but it sucks. Maybe if anybody other than IBM had developed it... And no, nothing is based on it. Maybe FDDI but there's another crazy esoteric protocol that 99% of us will never have to deal with.
Searched the web for token ring. Results 1 - 100 of about 516,000.
Searched the web for ethernet. Results 1 - 100 of about 5,770,000.
Which protocol do YOU think should be taught in schools?
Computer Science should be mostly theory. That's why I am not taking Computer Science. I am taking Computer Engineering because it is more practical.
Even with CE, though, it's still more important to teach the theory than the implementation. That is why I support teaching RS232 and XMODEM. I do NOT support teaching TokenRing, however, for obvious reasons. I ALSO support teaching USB, because it really isn't THAT hard to learn, and it is obviously the way of the future. There's no point to teaching FireWire since it is essentially fast USB.
I learned assembly on x86. Then I learned assembly on the Microchip PIC. Then I learned motorola HC12 assembly (backwards compatible with HC11) and I thought to myself "Holy christ HC12 assembly is dumb." Maybe I just had a bad teacher. IMO PIC assembly is the one to teach in the classroom because of it's simple yet powerful instruction set.
It's basicly the same here at Vermont Tech. Granted I think that RS232 and XMODEM are still relevant, as they're SIMPLE. Also RS232 is still widely used, and while XMODEM may be garbage it is still the basis of many other protocols and is easy to understand. At least I thought so. I got in an argument with a professor once, as a lab assignment he asked us to connect two computers with a null modem, set the link to 7 bits, and transfer a file using XMODEM, in that order. I told him XMODEM doesn't work over a 7 bit link. He told me it does. It took me about a half hour to convince him that he was wrong.
After putting intense pressure on this same professor, he did spend a couple of days at the end of the class talking about USB, but it was uselessly superficial. It would have been far more beneficial for us to have done some USB programming in lab, or something.
It is hard for schools to keep up with all of the modern hardware and software and protcols, as the industry moves to fast. But why should they keep right on the bleeding edge? While RS232 may be old, learning about RS232 teaches you the PRINCIPLES of communication, thus better equipping you to learn new interfaces. The same goes for XMODEM. USB and FireWire are pretty fucking complex protocols to jump right into when you haven't covered any time of communication standard before. But I think that considering how ubiquitous USB is becoming, it should absolutely be included in the curriculum.
On the other hand, there's no excuse for teaching TokenRing. For the love of god, spend that time teaching ethernet.
I used to be a big Mac booster. I owned a IIgs, a Mac IIvx, and a PowerMac 7500 later upgraded to a 604e/180MHz w/1MB L2 cache. This machine I still own, although I'm only using for the first time in 5 years now that it's running Yellow Dog Linux.
Why did I switch AWAY from Apple? Pascal, Inside Macintosh, and the exorbinant prices you had to pay to get it. As a grade school student growing up in rural Vermont, we did have computers (donated by IBM Essex Jnct) but there was zero computer related curriculum. I couldn't afford to buy a complete set of Inside Macintosh. Nor could I afford to subscribe to Apple Developer Network. Now I write open source software for Linux/BSD in perl and C and all of the documentation is available online and free, not to mention the source code (which really is documentation too, in a way). C is the best language ever. You can't argue that, it's a fact. Pascal is like C's retarded cousin. Frankly most languages that aim to make learning programming "easier" (eg Pascal, VB) tend to just make it harder in the long run. C simply operates in a very logical way. Yeah it might take a while to figure out how pointers work, but once you do they are incredibly powerful.
I've written programs in C, C++, VB, Java, Java Script, Perl, Python, SQL, Forth, VHDL, Pascal, various BASICs, HyperTalk, ML, TCL, BASH (sure that counts), and assembly for several different platforms. If I had to pick one language to use for the rest of my life, it would be C, and if I could choose a second language, it would be perl. Why? They both operate in a logical, orthagonal manner. C programs run fast, and perl programs get written fast. They're cross-platform and widely accepted. Perl is available on pretty much all modern platforms, and if I may be so bold, C is available for pretty much EVERY platform EVER.
I digress. Other than Pascal, the cost of programming for the Mac was what really turned me off. Yeah you could do silly basic stuff with HyperCard or Turbo Pascal without spending a lot of money, but without the REAL HC docs or the REAL MacOS API docs, you couldn't get very far. Apple charged $$$ that I didn't have then and I don't have now.
IMO, Apple really shot themselves in the foot. I could have been a whizbang mac programmer, working hard to increase the mac platforms popularity.
On the up side, it seems that Apple did learn from it's mistakes. I was very happy to see that OSX now comes with free multilanguage development tools and API docs. But it's too late for this ex-apple user. Pascal is junk. Free software forever.
Don't tread on me.
Anyway I don't see what VisiCalc has to do with bandwidth. This guy needs to slow down a little bit and think before he talks. Spread spectrum != unlimited bandwidth. Yes it results in more efficient bandwidth utilization but it is still finite. You cannot avoid the fact that transmitting data consumes bandwidth, and the faster your data rate, the more bandwidth your signal consumes. Sure you can spread it out but it still uses bandwidth and the more people who share your band the less bandwidth is available to each user.
And, shit, it's not like spread spectrum isn't already hugely popular. Cell phones, cordless phones, high-end commercial 2 way radios, and yes even HAM RADIO OPERATORS are all using spread spectrum. 802.11 is spread spectrum. Yeah it's cool but put 100 people on a single 802.11 channel and I think you'll realize just how limited that bandwidth really is. The nice thing about spread spectrum is that it's graceful under load. As more people are sharing the "channel", it doesn't break, it just slows down. It's not "unlimited".
The best place for surplus stuff is hamfests. Big hamfests, like Dayton. There's some friggin surplus there for ya. Here in northern New England we like to go to Hosstraders. May 2nd & 3rd!!!
Uh, conventional hybrids are advantagious because internal combustion engines are grossly inefficient when accelerating and idleing. Hydrogen fuel cells produce electricity on demand, so accelerating is just as efficient as coasting, and they don't use any energy (well maybe a very little to run the cars electrical system) at idle.
Using biodiesel actually REDUCES the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Think about it, plants grow and absorb CO2. PART of the plant (the oil pressed from the seeds) is burned. The rest of the plant is (presumably) composted into fertilizer for next year's crop. So most of the CO2 in the plant ends up returning to the soil. Over the course of 100 million years it might even turn into petroleum.
I was running 2.2.19 on my APRS digipeater untill last week. It was always stable, I don't recall it ever crashing. About once every few months the AX.25 stack would fail and I'd have to restart the KISS interface, but other than that it was pretty flawless.
I'm now running 2.4.20, libax25 0.0.10, and aprsdigi 2.1.2. We'll see how it goes...
Why should Journalism be entertaining? People like entertainment. I belive it when Fox News says they're number 1. Fox News is pretty entertaining. But are they good journalists? When I was O'Reilly spout off on hippies and California and anybody who opposes war in Iraq, I get a good chuckle. But I certainly don't learn much about what it really going on in the world.
Entertaining journalism may appeal to a wide audience, but obviously at the cost of some journalistic integrity. It's obvious that networks such as Fox News are far more concerned with ratings than with reporting what's truely significant. I don't mean to be cold hearted but one mexican girl gets a botched transplant and it makes headlines. What about the other million people that died that day? The editors decided those stories weren't as popular.
Real journalism is about reporting information in an efficient manner. We can evaluate journalism by the signal to noise ratio. In my hometown newspaper, which is roughly 75% ads, there is really only 25% left for real news. And most of that is filled up with crap.
I guess I really try to draw a line between work and play. Reading the paper, watching the news, that's work. That isn't supposed to be entertaining. I might enjoy it, but that doesn't make it play. I enjoy it BECAUSE I'm aquireing information. If the information is diluted to male it more "entertaining", my enjoyment is lessened. Play is playing CS or watching Cowboy Bebop. That's what entertainment should be.
Perhaps there is space for entertaining journalism. I do enjoy the political comics, sometimes, and Doonsbury. And like I said I do get a kick out of O'Reilly. But that stuff is the desert, not the healthy meal. Don't forget that.