If you want to you can carry on running Gnome 2 with your current version (e.g 10.4 LTS) of Ubuntu indefinitely.
Yeah and by that I will also be locked out from any other software upgrade. Great choice...
If you don't like that you can switch to another Distro (e.g. Centos 6 with another 6+ years of Gnome 2).
Yeah, and when you don't like Windows Phone you can get an iPhone or an Android. Point being?
It's really not much difference in the end. The only different thing is that Ubuntu allows me to "sudo" right from the start without jailbreaking, but in practical terms it really doesn't make much difference, as building your own Gnome2 isn't really all that much easier then jailbreaking a phone, if anything, it's probably harder.
Or Ubuntu, see all the complains when Gnome2 went away with no easy way to get it back. Or Steam, which provides no way to undo a software upgrade. The ability to remote-kill applications naturally follows from having the ability to automatically upgrade them.
That SD card adapter was however not a memory card replacement, but only usable by games that specifically supported it and there weren't many that did. It was also never sold outside of Japan. Third party replacements used for homebrew/piracy do however exist.
You do realize that CGI and greenscreen is WAY cheaper than the model and set-based filming they are doing, don't you?
That completely depends on what you do with the CGI and the complexity of it. If you use a green-screen instead of building a huge set and mostly just do composition, sure that can be a good bit cheaper. On the other side doing a bit of makeup and going into the next forest is a heck of a lot cheaper then trying to replicate all that detail in 3D via CGI Avatar-style.
If you look at the budgets of current day blockbusters compared to what they had in the 80's, prices haven't exactly gone down, even so CGI is used almost everywhere.
There are many many factors that make this an insane and retarded statement.
You are looking at it from the wrong viewpoint. You look at the phones and tablets and then try to measure how good they are to replicate the gaming experience you already know. That's however not how this game works.
What matters isn't what the hardcore gamers think about these devices, what matters is what the casual crowd thinks. And they don't give a shit about game controllers, in fact game controllers are one of the main things that kept them from gaming in the first place. So getting rid of game controls is a big plus for them, not something negative. Equally motion and touchscreen gaming is what got them got them into gaming, it's what made games accessible and easy to understand. It's what made the Wii, iPhone and iPad sell a shitloads of units.
All that said, I agree that this won't be the death of the game consoles. For one, there is still a large hardcore gaming market, a market that is around the same size as the casual one (judging from Wii vs PS3/Xbox360 sales). And secondly, just because casual games are popular on small devices, doesn't mean they won't also be popular on a big TV screen. They might of course run on AppleTV that syncs of with your iPhone instead of on a Wii in the not so distance future. But fundamentally that would stil be a "console", a very versatile one that isn't focused on games only, but game consoles have been moving away from that for essentially the last decade anyway, so that wouldn't be anything new.
You're in the position of having to manually clean every device in the world, and the bad guys can find another vulnerability and make you start over by the time you get finished with half of them.
That situation has existed for ages on the PC, yet hardly any virus has bothered killing a PC by destroying BIOS or firmware, as there is simply nothing to gain in doing so.
So while not completely impossible, it's highly unlikely that somebody who is pulling of such a highly sophisticated attack that not only compromises the servers, but also the signing keys and OS protections has nothing better to do then pull such an idiotic prank.
And depending on the device and the attack, it might not even be catastrophic to begin with. A bricked PSP for example could be brought back to live by inserting a battery with a special serial number and a memory card.
You're at PC level security no matter what you do.
Complete and utter bullshit. Walled garden protect against a ton of attacks perfectly well. They can't protect you against all imaginable attacks, but they can make them extremely unlikely and extremely hard to pull off.
All the walled garden does is make it so that if Apple makes a mistake, it happens at global scale rather than on one device.
That has essentially nothing to do with a walled garden specifically, but is simply the result of central software management. If Debian uploads compromised software to their servers, every Debian user is in trouble and also every Ubuntu or Mint user or any other Debian derivate (and yes, that has already happened in the past with OpenSSH).
You're assuming the signing keys aren't on a server somewhere that the attackers can hack into. They are.
Even assuming that would be the case, so what? Shutdown the servers, revoke the keys, fix the server and bring everything up again.
Also keep in mind that even a compromised AppStore server with compromised keys doesn't have to mean much, as the application would still operate only with application level privileges on the device, which would limit the harm it can do.
If Apple is negligent and an infected iOS update gets pushed out, everybody's device is infected.
Yeah, and in the unlikely case that would happen Apple will push out a fix and everybodies device will be fixed again.
I mean it's not even really an argument, even in the case of complete and utter failure of every bit of protection a walled garden should provide, all that means that you are back to PC level security. That certainly is a shitty place to be at security wise, but its a highly unlikely worse case scenario for walled garden environments, while it's everyday reality for personal computers.
My advice is to keep your archives, but take the time to filter out the stuff you really don't need or want any more.
The problem with that is that it's extremely hard to judge what you will find valuable 20 years down the road.
Simple example: Old TV recordings on VHS. I have all of Star Trek: TNG on VHS, labeled, sorted, with the commercials cut out. All nice and dandy you might think.
You know which part I would love to rewatch? Now, some 15 years later? The commercials, exactly that part which I deleted. All the episodes I can get easily on DVD or on BluRay without problems, with higher quality and everything, but the stuff between the episodes? Nope, that's not available. Here and there a bit of stuff shows up on Youtube, but raw uncut TV from 15 years ago simply isn't easily available.
There will also be obsolete software, video and flash attachments that were funny five years ago, and other junk.
Yeah, and exactly that stuff might turn out to be extremely valuable years down the line, as your copy of it might be the only copy left or at least the only copy accessible to you.
I have absolutely nothing against sorting, indexing and organizing the data, I quite welcome that, but that should be done as a layer on top of the data, not by hacking and slashing the original data itself.
Storage is cheap and 500MB are hardly worth worrying about. The damage done by reducing that amount will likely be far larger then any temporal benefits you might get. If you want to have it smaller so that you can have faster search, look for a tool that is better at searching and indexing the mails instead of trying to cut the mail into pieces.
either by hacking them to include malware within approved apps or by simply DDOSing them.
You can't include malware that way, as the devices check the applications signatures and thus will reject everything not authorized.
DDOS'ing, sure, might work, but that's simply temporary inconvenience, not really any fundamental problem. Also big companies these days have plenty of spare resources and scalable infrastructure, thus DDOS'ing them really isn't very realistic to begin with.
These walled gardens seem like a cool idea until you realize they introduce a single point of failure.
A single point of failure is a heck of a lot easier to patrol and fix then the billions points of failure you have on a PC.
It's okay give it a few years and your walled gardens will be infested as well.
A well maintained walled gardens will never be invested with bugs and worms as you have a central authority to clean the mess up when security issues arise, assuming the issue even make it past quality control in the first place.
Furthermore the security model is fundamentally different to what you have on a PC. PC software operates on the assumptions of having free access to the device and be able to do whatever it wants to, it's open by default, software running on an iPhone or Android device does not, it has an API it is allowed to talk to, but doesn't have raw system access, it's closed by default. There might not even be a way to get it by any standard means.
See game consoles for comparison: Are they unhackable? No. But running unauthorized code on them generally requires a hardware mod, not just clicking on an malicious email.
A 360 or PS3 pad both work wonderfully on a computer.
If by "wonderful" you mean need homebrew custom drivers, additional tools for configuration and a bunch of other hackery, then yeah they work totally great. On top of that Microsoft seems to have given up on selling the wireless adapter separately for their controllers, you can get those now only with a bundled controller, sucks if you already have some left over controllers from an Xbox360.
Using your PC as a console today is far easier than it was just 5 years ago.
Yes, it works better, for most part for the simple reason that most PC games are now console ports with gamepad support, but overall it's still a completely terrible experience. As an enthusiast gamer one might of course put up with that, I do, but it's light years away from being mass market compatible.
I don't get this. Why would someone pay for something they already got for free?
Added value. Most people are not going to download full BluRay iso from the net, but.avi's that lack extra features, extra languages, resolution, quality, etc. thus buying the movie again after having verified that it's actually worth to have will still give some things they haven't seen yet. This might of course only apply to a lesser degree to other media.
The article claims that game pirates play more games and music downloaders visit more concerts, but that doesn't mean piracy is contributing to that
That however doesn't mean that it is not contributing to that. A heavy movie watcher will get their movies through all available channels, some of them might be piracy, because there simply isn't any commercial offering that offers him what piracy does.
I just don't get the mindset that not only thinks they are entitled to something they didn't pay for
Well, most people pirate simply because they can, a lot because they don't have the money, some because they like to try before they buy, some because they want to "catch'em all", etc. In essence there are lots of reasons why people might pirate. It's not about entitlement, but simply about availability.
Also, do you have a clear conscience while forwarding through commercial breaks on a TV recording? As that's pretty much the same thing as piracy, at least morally speaking.
The lengths some people go to try to establish themselves as freedom fighters, setting up a "Pirate Party" or ranting about the evils of copyright signifies a level of denial I can't even begin to imagine suffering under.
There is no level of denial. Copyright is not something 'God given" or "law of nature", it's something that was established to benefit society. The problem today is that fighting piracy is causing far more harm then good and has absolutely no benefit to society. It also has lead to a lot of invasion into privacy and other corrupt laws.
(but don't you dare steal copyrighted GPL code!)
That's about deriving profits from other peoples work, while not following the license. Very different thing. Your average pirate isn't all that big of a fan of commercial piracy either.
Irony with that of cause is that current laws drive people into commercial piracy, as services like Rapidshare, Megaupload and whatever provide better privacy protection then Bittorrent.
Yes, but the reason we wouldn't do that is because if most things are human readable you can just manually do the edits your self if you need to.
A text file is really just as human-unreadable as a binary blob, cat a text file without having the proper charset loaded and you just get a mess. The only difference between a text and a binary file is that text files has widespread support in software and the OS, while a binary blob has not.
It's a distortion to suggest that the model doesn't work when clearly it does.
Well, it does work, but it works purely, daily Linux use is full of cases where you can't tell if a piece of text is data, pretty-printing or a field separator.
You actually can uncrop some images, as some image formats/applications save a thumbnail in the metadata and that thumbnail might not be updated properly if the image gets edited, leaving a low-res original in place. Other images formats like JPEG allow you to uncrop up to 7 pixel around the image, as the format only supports width/height that is a multiple of 8, thus the crop to the final image size happens at the decoding stage and data might be left over (depends however on the encoder).
Why are people against the ESRB? It's just metadata. If you don't want to use it, ignore it.
The problem is when retailers use that metadata to keep things out of their shop and away from their devices, as then it becomes simply a censorship method. In the mobile space the ESRB might not yet have that power, but on game console it has, getting an AO rating means your game becomes unpublishable. Of course Apple is censoring what you can run anyway, even without the ESRB, so the damage is already done there and the ESRB might not be able to do additional harm.
Let's face it, the slashdot moderation system has been broken for a long time.
I hear that a lot, but I really don't see it. As far as I see it the system works extremely well, interesting post might sink to -1 Troll for a few minutes, but that is most of the time quickly corrected and the post then ends up with a +5 or whatever. There are of course some topics that are more troublesome then others, but that's mostly with stuff like politics, right-wing vs left-wing, not so much the tech stuff.
Comments that go immediately down? Tell informative, but bad points about the current state of Linux, [...]
I like to bitch a lot about Linux, but half the time, but when that happens I generally get a +5 Insightful, not a -1 Troll. Erroneous -1 Troll are actually extremely rare.
That doesn't mean it's perfect, but I haven't really seen a better system. The up/down vote like systems always turn into a popularity contest of a given opinion, not into a score for the quality of the post. It's also really tricky in those systems to know what to do with a joke post. Is that a +1 because it's funny or a -1 because it's not contributing to the discussion?
The only other good system I have seen is the Gawker one, where people can gain the ability to promote other people post. There is no scoring and no down moderation, so all it does is essentially give you a featured list of posts other people found worthwhile. It's simple and works quite well, but it doesn't have the expressiveness the Slashdot system has. Rest of the Gawker discussion system is however rather terrible, as it makes it hard to see all posts at once.
It still might be the case that there's an order behind the quantum randomness, but that's currently more an article of faith than scientific insight.
The randomness in quantum mechanics is interpretation, not evidence. What the experiment ruled out wasn't a deterministic universe, but local hidden variables, you can still have a deterministic universe with non-local hidden variables, see Bohm interpretation.
The efficiency didn't reduce jobs, it created jobs.
Efficiency always destroys jobs, that's the whole point of it, replacing one process with another one that needs less resources. This in turn might lead to economic growth and that might create new jobs, but it's not the increased efficiency that is doing that by itself. If we would all live at the same standards of living from 100 years ago, then you sure as hell would have a lot of job less people, but we don't, we have iPods and stuff to keep busy and those take man-power to be build. Of course how long one can sustain endless economic growth is another question, it worked well in the past, if it will continue in the future isn't all that clear.
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Sensible people, on the other hand, see sandboxing as just one more tool in the toolbox.
So please enlighten us. How do you run untrusted code on your machine without some kind of sandbox?
Why do you insist that sandboxes are the only solution to security problems?
So how exactly do you propose to run native code securely without some kind of sandbox?
If you want to you can carry on running Gnome 2 with your current version (e.g 10.4 LTS) of Ubuntu indefinitely.
Yeah and by that I will also be locked out from any other software upgrade. Great choice...
If you don't like that you can switch to another Distro (e.g. Centos 6 with another 6+ years of Gnome 2).
Yeah, and when you don't like Windows Phone you can get an iPhone or an Android. Point being?
It's really not much difference in the end. The only different thing is that Ubuntu allows me to "sudo" right from the start without jailbreaking, but in practical terms it really doesn't make much difference, as building your own Gnome2 isn't really all that much easier then jailbreaking a phone, if anything, it's probably harder.
Or Ubuntu, see all the complains when Gnome2 went away with no easy way to get it back. Or Steam, which provides no way to undo a software upgrade. The ability to remote-kill applications naturally follows from having the ability to automatically upgrade them.
It did in fact work for all games.
Do you have a source for that? As that contradicts all the information you can find on the net about it.
That SD card adapter was however not a memory card replacement, but only usable by games that specifically supported it and there weren't many that did. It was also never sold outside of Japan. Third party replacements used for homebrew/piracy do however exist.
That's not computer graphics, that was done via slit-scan photography.
You do realize that CGI and greenscreen is WAY cheaper than the model and set-based filming they are doing, don't you?
That completely depends on what you do with the CGI and the complexity of it. If you use a green-screen instead of building a huge set and mostly just do composition, sure that can be a good bit cheaper. On the other side doing a bit of makeup and going into the next forest is a heck of a lot cheaper then trying to replicate all that detail in 3D via CGI Avatar-style.
If you look at the budgets of current day blockbusters compared to what they had in the 80's, prices haven't exactly gone down, even so CGI is used almost everywhere.
There are many many factors that make this an insane and retarded statement.
You are looking at it from the wrong viewpoint. You look at the phones and tablets and then try to measure how good they are to replicate the gaming experience you already know. That's however not how this game works.
What matters isn't what the hardcore gamers think about these devices, what matters is what the casual crowd thinks. And they don't give a shit about game controllers, in fact game controllers are one of the main things that kept them from gaming in the first place. So getting rid of game controls is a big plus for them, not something negative. Equally motion and touchscreen gaming is what got them got them into gaming, it's what made games accessible and easy to understand. It's what made the Wii, iPhone and iPad sell a shitloads of units.
All that said, I agree that this won't be the death of the game consoles. For one, there is still a large hardcore gaming market, a market that is around the same size as the casual one (judging from Wii vs PS3/Xbox360 sales). And secondly, just because casual games are popular on small devices, doesn't mean they won't also be popular on a big TV screen. They might of course run on AppleTV that syncs of with your iPhone instead of on a Wii in the not so distance future. But fundamentally that would stil be a "console", a very versatile one that isn't focused on games only, but game consoles have been moving away from that for essentially the last decade anyway, so that wouldn't be anything new.
You're in the position of having to manually clean every device in the world, and the bad guys can find another vulnerability and make you start over by the time you get finished with half of them.
That situation has existed for ages on the PC, yet hardly any virus has bothered killing a PC by destroying BIOS or firmware, as there is simply nothing to gain in doing so.
So while not completely impossible, it's highly unlikely that somebody who is pulling of such a highly sophisticated attack that not only compromises the servers, but also the signing keys and OS protections has nothing better to do then pull such an idiotic prank.
And depending on the device and the attack, it might not even be catastrophic to begin with. A bricked PSP for example could be brought back to live by inserting a battery with a special serial number and a memory card.
You're at PC level security no matter what you do.
Complete and utter bullshit. Walled garden protect against a ton of attacks perfectly well. They can't protect you against all imaginable attacks, but they can make them extremely unlikely and extremely hard to pull off.
All the walled garden does is make it so that if Apple makes a mistake, it happens at global scale rather than on one device.
That has essentially nothing to do with a walled garden specifically, but is simply the result of central software management. If Debian uploads compromised software to their servers, every Debian user is in trouble and also every Ubuntu or Mint user or any other Debian derivate (and yes, that has already happened in the past with OpenSSH).
You're assuming the signing keys aren't on a server somewhere that the attackers can hack into. They are.
Even assuming that would be the case, so what? Shutdown the servers, revoke the keys, fix the server and bring everything up again.
Also keep in mind that even a compromised AppStore server with compromised keys doesn't have to mean much, as the application would still operate only with application level privileges on the device, which would limit the harm it can do.
If Apple is negligent and an infected iOS update gets pushed out, everybody's device is infected.
Yeah, and in the unlikely case that would happen Apple will push out a fix and everybodies device will be fixed again.
I mean it's not even really an argument, even in the case of complete and utter failure of every bit of protection a walled garden should provide, all that means that you are back to PC level security. That certainly is a shitty place to be at security wise, but its a highly unlikely worse case scenario for walled garden environments, while it's everyday reality for personal computers.
My advice is to keep your archives, but take the time to filter out the stuff you really don't need or want any more.
The problem with that is that it's extremely hard to judge what you will find valuable 20 years down the road.
Simple example: Old TV recordings on VHS. I have all of Star Trek: TNG on VHS, labeled, sorted, with the commercials cut out. All nice and dandy you might think.
You know which part I would love to rewatch? Now, some 15 years later? The commercials, exactly that part which I deleted. All the episodes I can get easily on DVD or on BluRay without problems, with higher quality and everything, but the stuff between the episodes? Nope, that's not available. Here and there a bit of stuff shows up on Youtube, but raw uncut TV from 15 years ago simply isn't easily available.
There will also be obsolete software, video and flash attachments that were funny five years ago, and other junk.
Yeah, and exactly that stuff might turn out to be extremely valuable years down the line, as your copy of it might be the only copy left or at least the only copy accessible to you.
I have absolutely nothing against sorting, indexing and organizing the data, I quite welcome that, but that should be done as a layer on top of the data, not by hacking and slashing the original data itself.
Storage is cheap and 500MB are hardly worth worrying about. The damage done by reducing that amount will likely be far larger then any temporal benefits you might get. If you want to have it smaller so that you can have faster search, look for a tool that is better at searching and indexing the mails instead of trying to cut the mail into pieces.
either by hacking them to include malware within approved apps or by simply DDOSing them.
You can't include malware that way, as the devices check the applications signatures and thus will reject everything not authorized.
DDOS'ing, sure, might work, but that's simply temporary inconvenience, not really any fundamental problem. Also big companies these days have plenty of spare resources and scalable infrastructure, thus DDOS'ing them really isn't very realistic to begin with.
These walled gardens seem like a cool idea until you realize they introduce a single point of failure.
A single point of failure is a heck of a lot easier to patrol and fix then the billions points of failure you have on a PC.
It's okay give it a few years and your walled gardens will be infested as well.
A well maintained walled gardens will never be invested with bugs and worms as you have a central authority to clean the mess up when security issues arise, assuming the issue even make it past quality control in the first place.
Furthermore the security model is fundamentally different to what you have on a PC. PC software operates on the assumptions of having free access to the device and be able to do whatever it wants to, it's open by default, software running on an iPhone or Android device does not, it has an API it is allowed to talk to, but doesn't have raw system access, it's closed by default. There might not even be a way to get it by any standard means.
See game consoles for comparison: Are they unhackable? No. But running unauthorized code on them generally requires a hardware mod, not just clicking on an malicious email.
fewer crap console ports and PC exclusives tend to be better anyway.
Yeah, have fun playing FarmVille and AngryBirds all day as that are the type of games he is talking about.
A 360 or PS3 pad both work wonderfully on a computer.
If by "wonderful" you mean need homebrew custom drivers, additional tools for configuration and a bunch of other hackery, then yeah they work totally great. On top of that Microsoft seems to have given up on selling the wireless adapter separately for their controllers, you can get those now only with a bundled controller, sucks if you already have some left over controllers from an Xbox360.
Using your PC as a console today is far easier than it was just 5 years ago.
Yes, it works better, for most part for the simple reason that most PC games are now console ports with gamepad support, but overall it's still a completely terrible experience. As an enthusiast gamer one might of course put up with that, I do, but it's light years away from being mass market compatible.
Steam-couch mode is also not out yet.
I don't get this. Why would someone pay for something they already got for free?
Added value. Most people are not going to download full BluRay iso from the net, but .avi's that lack extra features, extra languages, resolution, quality, etc. thus buying the movie again after having verified that it's actually worth to have will still give some things they haven't seen yet. This might of course only apply to a lesser degree to other media.
The article claims that game pirates play more games and music downloaders visit more concerts, but that doesn't mean piracy is contributing to that
That however doesn't mean that it is not contributing to that. A heavy movie watcher will get their movies through all available channels, some of them might be piracy, because there simply isn't any commercial offering that offers him what piracy does.
I just don't get the mindset that not only thinks they are entitled to something they didn't pay for
Well, most people pirate simply because they can, a lot because they don't have the money, some because they like to try before they buy, some because they want to "catch'em all", etc. In essence there are lots of reasons why people might pirate. It's not about entitlement, but simply about availability.
Also, do you have a clear conscience while forwarding through commercial breaks on a TV recording? As that's pretty much the same thing as piracy, at least morally speaking.
The lengths some people go to try to establish themselves as freedom fighters, setting up a "Pirate Party" or ranting about the evils of copyright signifies a level of denial I can't even begin to imagine suffering under.
There is no level of denial. Copyright is not something 'God given" or "law of nature", it's something that was established to benefit society. The problem today is that fighting piracy is causing far more harm then good and has absolutely no benefit to society. It also has lead to a lot of invasion into privacy and other corrupt laws.
(but don't you dare steal copyrighted GPL code!)
That's about deriving profits from other peoples work, while not following the license. Very different thing. Your average pirate isn't all that big of a fan of commercial piracy either.
Irony with that of cause is that current laws drive people into commercial piracy, as services like Rapidshare, Megaupload and whatever provide better privacy protection then Bittorrent.
Yes, but the reason we wouldn't do that is because if most things are human readable you can just manually do the edits your self if you need to.
A text file is really just as human-unreadable as a binary blob, cat a text file without having the proper charset loaded and you just get a mess. The only difference between a text and a binary file is that text files has widespread support in software and the OS, while a binary blob has not.
It's a distortion to suggest that the model doesn't work when clearly it does.
Well, it does work, but it works purely, daily Linux use is full of cases where you can't tell if a piece of text is data, pretty-printing or a field separator.
You actually can uncrop some images, as some image formats/applications save a thumbnail in the metadata and that thumbnail might not be updated properly if the image gets edited, leaving a low-res original in place. Other images formats like JPEG allow you to uncrop up to 7 pixel around the image, as the format only supports width/height that is a multiple of 8, thus the crop to the final image size happens at the decoding stage and data might be left over (depends however on the encoder).
Why are people against the ESRB? It's just metadata. If you don't want to use it, ignore it.
The problem is when retailers use that metadata to keep things out of their shop and away from their devices, as then it becomes simply a censorship method. In the mobile space the ESRB might not yet have that power, but on game console it has, getting an AO rating means your game becomes unpublishable. Of course Apple is censoring what you can run anyway, even without the ESRB, so the damage is already done there and the ESRB might not be able to do additional harm.
Let's face it, the slashdot moderation system has been broken for a long time.
I hear that a lot, but I really don't see it. As far as I see it the system works extremely well, interesting post might sink to -1 Troll for a few minutes, but that is most of the time quickly corrected and the post then ends up with a +5 or whatever. There are of course some topics that are more troublesome then others, but that's mostly with stuff like politics, right-wing vs left-wing, not so much the tech stuff.
Comments that go immediately down? Tell informative, but bad points about the current state of Linux, [...]
I like to bitch a lot about Linux, but half the time, but when that happens I generally get a +5 Insightful, not a -1 Troll. Erroneous -1 Troll are actually extremely rare.
That doesn't mean it's perfect, but I haven't really seen a better system. The up/down vote like systems always turn into a popularity contest of a given opinion, not into a score for the quality of the post. It's also really tricky in those systems to know what to do with a joke post. Is that a +1 because it's funny or a -1 because it's not contributing to the discussion?
The only other good system I have seen is the Gawker one, where people can gain the ability to promote other people post. There is no scoring and no down moderation, so all it does is essentially give you a featured list of posts other people found worthwhile. It's simple and works quite well, but it doesn't have the expressiveness the Slashdot system has. Rest of the Gawker discussion system is however rather terrible, as it makes it hard to see all posts at once.
PS: I browse Slashdot at -1.
TrackIR has existed for some years and there is also a free clone of it with FreeTrack.
It still might be the case that there's an order behind the quantum randomness, but that's currently more an article of faith than scientific insight.
The randomness in quantum mechanics is interpretation, not evidence. What the experiment ruled out wasn't a deterministic universe, but local hidden variables, you can still have a deterministic universe with non-local hidden variables, see Bohm interpretation.
The efficiency didn't reduce jobs, it created jobs.
Efficiency always destroys jobs, that's the whole point of it, replacing one process with another one that needs less resources. This in turn might lead to economic growth and that might create new jobs, but it's not the increased efficiency that is doing that by itself. If we would all live at the same standards of living from 100 years ago, then you sure as hell would have a lot of job less people, but we don't, we have iPods and stuff to keep busy and those take man-power to be build. Of course how long one can sustain endless economic growth is another question, it worked well in the past, if it will continue in the future isn't all that clear.