That's true. CmdrTaco has admitted this in the past - the editors are perfectly aware that some stories are dupes, but choose to "re-run" them nonetheless.
Maybe you should read item 5 ("But the scammers are only trying to get ahead & feed their families. If the West hadn't raped their country of its wealth they wouldn't have to do this") on http://www.419eater.com/html/ethics.htm.
I agree that scambaiting doesn't really lead anywhere and probably just endangers you, but I don't exactly feel compassion for the scammers, either. They're criminals who're only acting out of greed.
You're right, of course, but the editors won't listen to you.
The reason for that is simple: unlike you and me, the editors don't care for Slashdot as a community site; or at least, it's not their top priority. What they *do* care about is their bottom line - i.e., advertising revenue. In order to maximize revenue, they need to have a certain amount of stories each day, and the stories need to be sufficiently interesting. The best story, from an editor's perspective, is one that generates lots of attention and makes people come back the next day to read more.
Sadly enough, troll stories do fit this bill quite perfectly - they're simply exploiting human nature and its hunger for sensations. Ever wonder why there are so many tabloid newspapers and why they're read by so many people? It's the same thing.
Of course, Slashdot has a reputation as being a news source for people who're more intelligent and more interested in technical issues than the average Joe Sixpack from the street - but it's still the same fundamental mechanism.
You can't really change anything about it, either - you could stop reading Slashdot, of course, but chances are that due to the sheer number of users, it wouldn't be noticed. There are alternatives, of course, that you could turn to, but they, too, suffer from the same problem. Kuro5hin, for example, caters to a specific audience just as much as Slashdot does, and uses the same tricks - somebody reading Kuro5hin might condemn Slashdot for what they do, but will probably fail to realize that the same thing is happening on K5, too. Ultimately, all news sources find their target audience and cater to that - if you like it, good, if you don't, not good, but it's not gonna change.
Incidentally, this is why we get dupes so often, too - contrary to popular belief, editors *are* aware that they're posting dupes, but they need good stories, and if something garners a lot of attention the first time it's posted, then it'll likely be posted again. And of course, if an editor still feels uneasy about it, they can always rationalize it away by pointing out the fact that people from different time zones might have missed the original story and so on.
But yeah, that's Slashdot. Love it or hate it, but you're not gonna fundamentally change it; and personally, I can live with daily dupes and troll articles as long as *most* articles are good, at least.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions." - Terry Pratchett, "The Truth".
It just doesn't work that way. Most FOSS software is not developed because somebody has a "vision" of "taking over the market" or something similar; it's done because people want to scratch their own particular itches. This is a weakness of FOSS, if you view it from a marketing or management point of view, but it's also the key strength.
As for Linux taking over Windows and toppling M$... maybe it'll happen, and sure, if it does, that'll be a day to celebrate. But it's not the principal *aim* - Linus himself has repeatedly said that his goal is not to write an OS that is better than competitor X, Y or Z, but simply to write the best OS he can.
Of course, on top of the actual developer/user community, there is another layer - namely, the companies that produce distros, like Novell (SuSE), RedHat, Linspire (or Lindows or whatever they're called this week) and so on. And yes, if you view it from their perspective, then it very much *is* about beating Windows (as far as possible, anyway), and also about taking as big a slice of the Linux cake for your *own* particular company - this is one reason why distros are different and why UnitedLinux never took off.
Of course, the same principle applies everywhere in the IT world. And of course, like everywhere else, standards still are important, because even though distros can try to set themselves apart by being being better than their competitors, they will ultimately fail if they're too different from everyone else - in that case, the majority simply has more weight, even if the minority distro is better in technical terms.
This is a kind of conundrum that you'll encounter everywhere in the computer industry: standards and interoperability are good, not just for customers and users but also for companies that develop software, but if you have *too* much, then products will start to be completely interchangable, and that's something that companies will always try to prevent.
But to get back to my original point, that's just something that happens in the business layer on top of the actual FOSS communit(y|ies), and it doesn't matter to Linux as such - because, ultimately, FOSS is not developed so companies can build new business models around it, but rather so that users will be able to scratch their own itches in the best possible way.
That's what it's about: the software. To stay with one of your examples, some people like Qt, some prefer GTK+ (for whatever reasons), but there is no reason why there shouldn't be both. It may be bad for a business trying to maximize its profits, yes. But why should the community members care?
It doesn't make a difference to us whether Joe Sixpack uses Linux or Windows. Why should we give up our choice so it's easier for a company to sell a Linux distro to him?
The big problem with that is that in order to break the vicious circle, somebody has to act - but nobody wants to go first.
Microsoft doesn't want to default to unprivileged accounts when software is abundant that relies on administrator rights; software companies will continue to make use of administrator rights as long as they're available.
The real problem here is that neither of them - nor Microsoft nor third-party software companies - actually feels the effects of the problems these invariably causes. The one who does is the end user; and while end users usually have the option of forcing companies (M$ and everyone else) to listen to their problems by not buying their products anymore, this option isn't really available when M$ has a quasi-monopoly on the market.
People who still think that M$ isn't so bad and hasn't actually caused much harm and that windows isn't that bad should think about this for a while. The problem is not in the absolute quality of the products - it's in the loss of quality compared to what we'd see if there was real competition. The monopoly it has allows M$ to be lazy and not care about users' problems. And THAT is why they're really bad and why it would've been a good thing to break them up.
I aqgree with that. Good graphics are good, obviously, but good graphics alone don't make a good game, just like good (well-executed) special effects don't make a good movie. One classic example of this is DOOM, probably - it's more than 11 years old now, but there's still a vibrant community, with lots of new levels being released each week, demos being recorded, and advanced versions being worked on.
Sure, the graphics of even the most advanced versions suck when you compare them to modern egoshooters. But the game itself just has that "special something" that makes it a timeless classic; everything fits together *perfectly*, and it continues to be loads of fun even after almost a dozen years.
This is something that pretty much no other FPS game has achieved that I'm aware of. Earlier games like Wolfenstein 3D do have their following, but it's only a few people that still play them, for the most part; newer games like Quake are also still being played, but not to the same extent as DOOM. And games from the same time, such as Rise of the Triad, Descent, Duke Nukem 3D or Strife, are completely forgotten nowadays.
So? You just have to tell them once. One could use the same reasoning to say that passwords are too much trouble because people have to type them in every time want to log in (assuming you're not using public key-based authentication).
Running services that don't need to be open to a wide variety of people on a non-standard port is generally a good idea. It's not a replacement for properly securing your services (obscurity never is), but it's another layer on top that can't hurt.
For that matter, do look into port knocking. A port scan will still pick up services on uncommon ports, but properly-implemented port knocking will hide the services completely. I think there was a paper linked to in a Slashdot story earlier this year - a very interesting read, if you can find it.
It's also easy to say "I can't know for sure that my decision not to participate in these things is 100% right, so I'll do it anyway".
What exactly did he think would happen? If you work on any bomb, atomic or not, then you'll have to expect that it'll get used, and in the case of an atomic bomb, there are no civil uses (as is the case with conventional explosives), so it's hard to justify what you're doing.
The only actual attempts at justification I've ever seen are along the lines of "sure, we'll kill a lot of people, but if we don't, then even more people will get killed, so it's the lesser of two evils". Of course, that isn't actually a justification, because you don't actually KNOW what would've happened otherwise, but it's at least an attempt, and an admission that there are, in fact, moral dilemmas involved.
Saying that the scientists working on the bomb weren't aware of these dilemmas, and, even more, couldn't have been at that time, is stupid. Of course they did - but they chose to work on it, anyway, so it's interesting to hear their reasoning and debate with/about them.
But don't give us that kind of "it didn't occur to them that the atomic bomb would be used to kill people" bull.
It's a sad day when a mention on Slashdot can bring down archive.org, though. I mean... seriously, guys, you consider it your mission to preserve the entire Internet (many times over, in fact), and you can't handle the load generated by the mentioning of a tech website?
Cool stuff - I really hope there will be some competitors on that market, though, since a price tag of 400 EUR for a few chips in a box seems more than unjustified...
And? What would prevent a spammer or phisher from creating the necessary setup to pass verification? Things like SPF and Sender-ID are good for stopping (or at least warning about) mail that some spam clown sent with a forged From: address (which can be highly annoying if the forged address is in one of *your* domains), but it won't do a thing about, say, email that comes from, say, "support@paypa1.com" or so.
Besides, if you want to warn users about phishing, you don't even need any of these tricks. GMail, for example, warns me with a big red banner when it thinks that an email may be a phishing attempt, and so far, it's always been right - no false positives, no false negatives, even without any technical trick that depend on the honesty of the sender (which both SPF and Sender-ID ultimately do, in that they allow malicious senders to set up systems so that tests are passed for spam and phishing mails and the like).
I only wish their spam filter would be as effective...:)
I don't think moving to Sealand will accomplish much, and in fact, I'm not sure that HavenCo'd even accept you as a customer.
Why? It's pretty simple - the legal status of Sealand is at best disputed, and everyone involved there knows perfectly well that the only reason they're not being crushed by (for example) Great Britain is that a crackdown on innocent people would give the British government bad press. If they decided to host lots of controversial content, though, then that could be used to justify a crackdown - after all, who's gonna complain if a bunch of criminals on an abandoned oil platform are being arrested and put on trial?
No matter what Sealand claims about having been de facto recognized and so on, unless they are really stupid, they know that they're only going to get through with what they do as long as they don't give anyone a reason to put an end to the whole thing.
I can understand your concerns about China, which is essentially a fascist dictatorship, but why India or Russia? That seems like unnecessary xenophobic flamebait.
If I go to a doctor and get an injection, can I come back six months later and sue the doctor because he did not explicitely ask for permission to give me that injection? Well, I can true, of course, but I won't get far, because when he said "I'll have to give you an injection" and I didn't say no but instead rolled up my sleeve so he could give it to me, he was allowed to conclude that I was OK with it, even if I did not explicitely say so.
IANAL, but I personally think the same principle should apply here. There is a standard mechanism for limiting access (in the sense of not authorizing it, that is, not as in making it technically impossible) - namely, robots.txt exclusion -, but if you chose to not use it, then the fact that you are running a *public* webserver that has the *sole purpose* of handing out its information to *everyone* who asks for it should be enough to conclude that you are, in fact, OK with not only the fact that people do receive your information, but also with the fact that they use it - no matter whether that means reading it (like a regular user would), indexing it (like a search engine would) or archiving it (like the Internet Archive *and* just about any search engine would).
(please disregard the earlier reply. It's textually the same, but I forgot to set it to Plain Old Text, so the formatting is horrible.)
Concludent behaviour.
If I go to a doctor and get an injection, can I come back six months later and sue the doctor because he did not explicitely ask for permission to give me that injection? Well, I can true, of course, but I won't get far, because when he said "I'll have to give you an injection" and I didn't say no but instead rolled up my sleeve so he could give it to me, he was allowed to conclude that I was OK with it, even if I did not explicitely say so.
IANAL, but I personally think the same principle should apply here. There is a standard mechanism for limiting access (in the sense of not authorizing it, that is, not as in making it technically impossible) - namely, robots.txt exclusion -, but if you chose to not use it, then the fact that you are running a *public* webserver that has the *sole purpose* of handing out its information to *everyone* who asks for it should be enough to conclude that you are, in fact, OK with not only the fact that people do receive your information, but also with the fact that they use it - no matter whether that means reading it (like a regular user would), indexing it (like a search engine would) or archiving it (like the Internet Archive *and* just about any search engine would).
As I said, that's not true. Can you name a processor on which, say, rep movsd wouldn't work? I'm not sure it would on a 286, but that's about it, and I don't think you seriously want to suggest that Intel is trying to keep their compiler compatible with that one...
It's not about a lack of optimization, though, or about code that will not run as fast because it's optimized for another architecture - it's about code that is (seemingly) deliberately crippled to run slower than what even a novice Assembler programmer would write.
Using rep movsb (byte-wise copy) instead of rep movsd (dword-wise copy) for the implementation of memcpy, which was mentioned in another comment above, is a good example of this. Unless one believes that the programmers Intel had working on that particular piece of code were so incompetent they didn't even know about the latter variant (which is not only faster, but works on *any* modern processor, so compatibility is not an argument), it's hard to conclude anything except that Intel deliberately pessimized the code used for AMD processors.
They key point here is that in order to invoke Hanlon's razor, you have to be able to *adequately* explain the issue by assuming stupidity instead of malice, though. In other words, the explanation of the issue by means of stupidity must be reasonable; if you (as an unprejudiced, objective person) can instantly dismiss that explanation because it's obviously untrue, then Hanlon's razor does not apply.
Now ask yourself again: do you believe that it's PURE COINCIDENCE that Intel's compiler produces slow code for its competitor's processors? Code that even a novice Assembler programmer would be able to improve instantly (see the rep movsb vs. rep movsd issue mentioned in a comment above, for example?) Do you believe that, for some funny reason, they never happened to notice? That noone ever complained to them about it? That they're really just an innocent victim here?
Well, do you? If yes, please get back to me, I have a used car to sell you.:)
Slashdot Mirror
That's true. CmdrTaco has admitted this in the past - the editors are perfectly aware that some stories are dupes, but choose to "re-run" them nonetheless.
I've written about it a while ago here.
The "shame" part refers to the scammers, though, not the baiters, so in a way, "trophy pictures" is still not an entirely inaccurate description.
Maybe you should read item 5 ("But the scammers are only trying to get ahead & feed their families. If the West hadn't raped their country of its wealth they wouldn't have to do this") on http://www.419eater.com/html/ethics.htm .
I agree that scambaiting doesn't really lead anywhere and probably just endangers you, but I don't exactly feel compassion for the scammers, either. They're criminals who're only acting out of greed.
99 bucks is cheaper than *many* text books? Come on. Sure, there are *some* that cost more than that, but not *many*...
You're right, of course, but the editors won't listen to you.
The reason for that is simple: unlike you and me, the editors don't care for Slashdot as a community site; or at least, it's not their top priority. What they *do* care about is their bottom line - i.e., advertising revenue. In order to maximize revenue, they need to have a certain amount of stories each day, and the stories need to be sufficiently interesting. The best story, from an editor's perspective, is one that generates lots of attention and makes people come back the next day to read more.
Sadly enough, troll stories do fit this bill quite perfectly - they're simply exploiting human nature and its hunger for sensations. Ever wonder why there are so many tabloid newspapers and why they're read by so many people? It's the same thing.
Of course, Slashdot has a reputation as being a news source for people who're more intelligent and more interested in technical issues than the average Joe Sixpack from the street - but it's still the same fundamental mechanism.
You can't really change anything about it, either - you could stop reading Slashdot, of course, but chances are that due to the sheer number of users, it wouldn't be noticed. There are alternatives, of course, that you could turn to, but they, too, suffer from the same problem. Kuro5hin, for example, caters to a specific audience just as much as Slashdot does, and uses the same tricks - somebody reading Kuro5hin might condemn Slashdot for what they do, but will probably fail to realize that the same thing is happening on K5, too. Ultimately, all news sources find their target audience and cater to that - if you like it, good, if you don't, not good, but it's not gonna change.
Incidentally, this is why we get dupes so often, too - contrary to popular belief, editors *are* aware that they're posting dupes, but they need good stories, and if something garners a lot of attention the first time it's posted, then it'll likely be posted again. And of course, if an editor still feels uneasy about it, they can always rationalize it away by pointing out the fact that people from different time zones might have missed the original story and so on.
But yeah, that's Slashdot. Love it or hate it, but you're not gonna fundamentally change it; and personally, I can live with daily dupes and troll articles as long as *most* articles are good, at least.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions." - Terry Pratchett, "The Truth".
It just doesn't work that way. Most FOSS software is not developed because somebody has a "vision" of "taking over the market" or something similar; it's done because people want to scratch their own particular itches. This is a weakness of FOSS, if you view it from a marketing or management point of view, but it's also the key strength.
As for Linux taking over Windows and toppling M$... maybe it'll happen, and sure, if it does, that'll be a day to celebrate. But it's not the principal *aim* - Linus himself has repeatedly said that his goal is not to write an OS that is better than competitor X, Y or Z, but simply to write the best OS he can.
Of course, on top of the actual developer/user community, there is another layer - namely, the companies that produce distros, like Novell (SuSE), RedHat, Linspire (or Lindows or whatever they're called this week) and so on. And yes, if you view it from their perspective, then it very much *is* about beating Windows (as far as possible, anyway), and also about taking as big a slice of the Linux cake for your *own* particular company - this is one reason why distros are different and why UnitedLinux never took off.
Of course, the same principle applies everywhere in the IT world. And of course, like everywhere else, standards still are important, because even though distros can try to set themselves apart by being being better than their competitors, they will ultimately fail if they're too different from everyone else - in that case, the majority simply has more weight, even if the minority distro is better in technical terms.
This is a kind of conundrum that you'll encounter everywhere in the computer industry: standards and interoperability are good, not just for customers and users but also for companies that develop software, but if you have *too* much, then products will start to be completely interchangable, and that's something that companies will always try to prevent.
But to get back to my original point, that's just something that happens in the business layer on top of the actual FOSS communit(y|ies), and it doesn't matter to Linux as such - because, ultimately, FOSS is not developed so companies can build new business models around it, but rather so that users will be able to scratch their own itches in the best possible way.
That's what it's about: the software. To stay with one of your examples, some people like Qt, some prefer GTK+ (for whatever reasons), but there is no reason why there shouldn't be both. It may be bad for a business trying to maximize its profits, yes. But why should the community members care?
It doesn't make a difference to us whether Joe Sixpack uses Linux or Windows. Why should we give up our choice so it's easier for a company to sell a Linux distro to him?
And the spyware even comes pre-installed that way! :)
The big problem with that is that in order to break the vicious circle, somebody has to act - but nobody wants to go first.
Microsoft doesn't want to default to unprivileged accounts when software is abundant that relies on administrator rights; software companies will continue to make use of administrator rights as long as they're available.
The real problem here is that neither of them - nor Microsoft nor third-party software companies - actually feels the effects of the problems these invariably causes. The one who does is the end user; and while end users usually have the option of forcing companies (M$ and everyone else) to listen to their problems by not buying their products anymore, this option isn't really available when M$ has a quasi-monopoly on the market.
People who still think that M$ isn't so bad and hasn't actually caused much harm and that windows isn't that bad should think about this for a while. The problem is not in the absolute quality of the products - it's in the loss of quality compared to what we'd see if there was real competition. The monopoly it has allows M$ to be lazy and not care about users' problems. And THAT is why they're really bad and why it would've been a good thing to break them up.
I aqgree with that. Good graphics are good, obviously, but good graphics alone don't make a good game, just like good (well-executed) special effects don't make a good movie. One classic example of this is DOOM, probably - it's more than 11 years old now, but there's still a vibrant community, with lots of new levels being released each week, demos being recorded, and advanced versions being worked on. Sure, the graphics of even the most advanced versions suck when you compare them to modern egoshooters. But the game itself just has that "special something" that makes it a timeless classic; everything fits together *perfectly*, and it continues to be loads of fun even after almost a dozen years. This is something that pretty much no other FPS game has achieved that I'm aware of. Earlier games like Wolfenstein 3D do have their following, but it's only a few people that still play them, for the most part; newer games like Quake are also still being played, but not to the same extent as DOOM. And games from the same time, such as Rise of the Triad, Descent, Duke Nukem 3D or Strife, are completely forgotten nowadays.
This has been mentioned elsewhere in a comment - it might be worth looking into, as it seems to do pretty exactly what you want.
:)
Outside of that, if you're not doing so yet, why not contribute those logs to DShield? More data is always good for them.
So? You just have to tell them once. One could use the same reasoning to say that passwords are too much trouble because people have to type them in every time want to log in (assuming you're not using public key-based authentication).
Running services that don't need to be open to a wide variety of people on a non-standard port is generally a good idea. It's not a replacement for properly securing your services (obscurity never is), but it's another layer on top that can't hurt.
For that matter, do look into port knocking. A port scan will still pick up services on uncommon ports, but properly-implemented port knocking will hide the services completely. I think there was a paper linked to in a Slashdot story earlier this year - a very interesting read, if you can find it.
I sense a disturbance in the force... as if a million illusions cried out at once as they shattered and then went silent.
It's also easy to say "I can't know for sure that my decision not to participate in these things is 100% right, so I'll do it anyway".
What exactly did he think would happen? If you work on any bomb, atomic or not, then you'll have to expect that it'll get used, and in the case of an atomic bomb, there are no civil uses (as is the case with conventional explosives), so it's hard to justify what you're doing.
The only actual attempts at justification I've ever seen are along the lines of "sure, we'll kill a lot of people, but if we don't, then even more people will get killed, so it's the lesser of two evils". Of course, that isn't actually a justification, because you don't actually KNOW what would've happened otherwise, but it's at least an attempt, and an admission that there are, in fact, moral dilemmas involved.
Saying that the scientists working on the bomb weren't aware of these dilemmas, and, even more, couldn't have been at that time, is stupid. Of course they did - but they chose to work on it, anyway, so it's interesting to hear their reasoning and debate with/about them.
But don't give us that kind of "it didn't occur to them that the atomic bomb would be used to kill people" bull.
It's a sad day when a mention on Slashdot can bring down archive.org, though. I mean... seriously, guys, you consider it your mission to preserve the entire Internet (many times over, in fact), and you can't handle the load generated by the mentioning of a tech website?
It's pretty sad really.
Cool stuff - I really hope there will be some competitors on that market, though, since a price tag of 400 EUR for a few chips in a box seems more than unjustified...
And? What would prevent a spammer or phisher from creating the necessary setup to pass verification? Things like SPF and Sender-ID are good for stopping (or at least warning about) mail that some spam clown sent with a forged From: address (which can be highly annoying if the forged address is in one of *your* domains), but it won't do a thing about, say, email that comes from, say, "support@paypa1.com" or so.
:)
Besides, if you want to warn users about phishing, you don't even need any of these tricks. GMail, for example, warns me with a big red banner when it thinks that an email may be a phishing attempt, and so far, it's always been right - no false positives, no false negatives, even without any technical trick that depend on the honesty of the sender (which both SPF and Sender-ID ultimately do, in that they allow malicious senders to set up systems so that tests are passed for spam and phishing mails and the like).
I only wish their spam filter would be as effective...
Why, what's wrong with hackers (real hackers, that is) using words like "boxen"? :)
I don't think moving to Sealand will accomplish much, and in fact, I'm not sure that HavenCo'd even accept you as a customer.
Why? It's pretty simple - the legal status of Sealand is at best disputed, and everyone involved there knows perfectly well that the only reason they're not being crushed by (for example) Great Britain is that a crackdown on innocent people would give the British government bad press. If they decided to host lots of controversial content, though, then that could be used to justify a crackdown - after all, who's gonna complain if a bunch of criminals on an abandoned oil platform are being arrested and put on trial?
No matter what Sealand claims about having been de facto recognized and so on, unless they are really stupid, they know that they're only going to get through with what they do as long as they don't give anyone a reason to put an end to the whole thing.
I can understand your concerns about China, which is essentially a fascist dictatorship, but why India or Russia? That seems like unnecessary xenophobic flamebait.
Concludent behaviour.
If I go to a doctor and get an injection, can I come back six months later and sue the doctor because he did not explicitely ask for permission to give me that injection? Well, I can true, of course, but I won't get far, because when he said "I'll have to give you an injection" and I didn't say no but instead rolled up my sleeve so he could give it to me, he was allowed to conclude that I was OK with it, even if I did not explicitely say so.
IANAL, but I personally think the same principle should apply here. There is a standard mechanism for limiting access (in the sense of not authorizing it, that is, not as in making it technically impossible) - namely, robots.txt exclusion -, but if you chose to not use it, then the fact that you are running a *public* webserver that has the *sole purpose* of handing out its information to *everyone* who asks for it should be enough to conclude that you are, in fact, OK with not only the fact that people do receive your information, but also with the fact that they use it - no matter whether that means reading it (like a regular user would), indexing it (like a search engine would) or archiving it (like the Internet Archive *and* just about any search engine would).
(please disregard the earlier reply. It's textually the same, but I forgot to set it to Plain Old Text, so the formatting is horrible.)
Concludent behaviour. If I go to a doctor and get an injection, can I come back six months later and sue the doctor because he did not explicitely ask for permission to give me that injection? Well, I can true, of course, but I won't get far, because when he said "I'll have to give you an injection" and I didn't say no but instead rolled up my sleeve so he could give it to me, he was allowed to conclude that I was OK with it, even if I did not explicitely say so. IANAL, but I personally think the same principle should apply here. There is a standard mechanism for limiting access (in the sense of not authorizing it, that is, not as in making it technically impossible) - namely, robots.txt exclusion -, but if you chose to not use it, then the fact that you are running a *public* webserver that has the *sole purpose* of handing out its information to *everyone* who asks for it should be enough to conclude that you are, in fact, OK with not only the fact that people do receive your information, but also with the fact that they use it - no matter whether that means reading it (like a regular user would), indexing it (like a search engine would) or archiving it (like the Internet Archive *and* just about any search engine would).
For that matter, better also sue each every search engine company who has crawled and indexed the page.
As I said, that's not true. Can you name a processor on which, say, rep movsd wouldn't work? I'm not sure it would on a 286, but that's about it, and I don't think you seriously want to suggest that Intel is trying to keep their compiler compatible with that one...
It's not about a lack of optimization, though, or about code that will not run as fast because it's optimized for another architecture - it's about code that is (seemingly) deliberately crippled to run slower than what even a novice Assembler programmer would write.
Using rep movsb (byte-wise copy) instead of rep movsd (dword-wise copy) for the implementation of memcpy, which was mentioned in another comment above, is a good example of this. Unless one believes that the programmers Intel had working on that particular piece of code were so incompetent they didn't even know about the latter variant (which is not only faster, but works on *any* modern processor, so compatibility is not an argument), it's hard to conclude anything except that Intel deliberately pessimized the code used for AMD processors.
They key point here is that in order to invoke Hanlon's razor, you have to be able to *adequately* explain the issue by assuming stupidity instead of malice, though. In other words, the explanation of the issue by means of stupidity must be reasonable; if you (as an unprejudiced, objective person) can instantly dismiss that explanation because it's obviously untrue, then Hanlon's razor does not apply.
:)
Now ask yourself again: do you believe that it's PURE COINCIDENCE that Intel's compiler produces slow code for its competitor's processors? Code that even a novice Assembler programmer would be able to improve instantly (see the rep movsb vs. rep movsd issue mentioned in a comment above, for example?) Do you believe that, for some funny reason, they never happened to notice? That noone ever complained to them about it? That they're really just an innocent victim here?
Well, do you? If yes, please get back to me, I have a used car to sell you.