Holy crap. ..you have any idea how badly their server is going to be slashdotted now? It's bad enough when its a php driven webpage but now you've just encouraged slashdotters to try a game or two against it. ..if the server crashes in the middle of a game is it considered a win for the human player?
It's a little difficult to play when you can't even load the game...
"Mozilla's Firefox web browser has made dramatic gains on Microsoft's Internet Explorer throughout Europe in the past year with a marked upturn in FF use compared to IE over the past four months, according to French web monitoring service XiTiMonitor. A study of nearly 96,000 websites carried out during the week of July 2 to July 8 found that FF had 27.8% market share across Eastern and Western Europe, IE had 66.5%, with other browsers including Safari and Opera making up the remaining 5.7%. In some key European markets FF has already reached parity and is threatening to overtake IE as the market leading browser."
From the current blurb:
Kevin Spiritus lets us know that XiTi Monitor, a French Web survey institute, has published its browser barometer for July, and Internet Explorer continues to lose ground. "The ascension of Firefox continues... Nearly 28% average use rate in Europe in the beginning of July 2007, with a progression in the totality of the 32 European countries studied. Firefox doesn't loose ground in any of the countries."
I realize we have the Firehose now but are people who read Slashdot daily using it properly? We don't need two stories in a short time frame (4 days) about the same topic.
Is it any wonder that Linux will never be adopted as a user-system for home and office desktops when IT support assumes doing so requires the user to understand "powercycling" (what, ride a bike?!?), "ethernet card" (isn't that a game called Myst?), and "DHCP client" (I'm the client, aren't I?).
Uhh, I was addressing the Slashdot crowd; I didn't feel the need to dumb it down but apparently I should have.
When I hooked up Comcast about 2 years ago, I got a self install kit, plugged it in to my router, waited 5 minutes, called the office and gave them my phone number, and I was off and away. Since then I've switched the modem out once and used 3 different MAC addresses (new router, and connected directly to my computer sometimes to troubleshoot) and never had a problem. If they authorized access by MAC none of that would have worked.
It depends per market. They aren't all the same due to the purchase of smaller markets. You might be in a market that doesn't have MAC auth.
The guy installing it made a few phone calls, and 15 minutes later I was set up. I dunno if they're just lazy or what, but it's definitely possible without it.
They have to call in to the office and have them register your modem's MAC and the ethernet card's MAC with the system. Generally this is done via a web interface that has weird proxy settings to get to the registration server. The techs that require that CD (and it could vary from day to day depending on what management's feeling like) may not know any better, may be told they require Windows that day, or they might just be lazy -- as you said.
They also offer no support. If you call with a trouble report you'd better pretend you are using a Windows machine when they give you their step by step connection test instructions. If they say "click Start -> Control Panel" and you say "I have neither", the problem is obviously on your end.
I worked tech support for AT&T@Home and ATTBI. If someone would call saying they had connectivity problems and they were running an alternative OS we were instructed to powercycle their modem remotely and if still no bloc-sync, to have them do it manually with a power down. If still nothing we rolled a truck after explaining that if it wasn't a line issue they would have to pay. Now, if that tech arrived at their house, hooked up the laptop and found that they had bloc-sync after all, then the person paid $90 for the trouble call.
Honestly, if you're running Linux in your home and nothing else, I expect you to be able to handle powercycling yourself and insuring that your computer is running properly (including checking your router, your ethernet card, and to make sure your DHCP client is running).
Vonage added 166,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2007, but lost $77 million.
The turnover rate for Vonage is very high from what I've read. Is that added subscriber number on top of their pre-existing user base or is it just what they added in the first quarter? They could be hemorrhaging faster than they can bring in.
What this depends on is information being indexed by coordinates, via tags or elsewise. Not sure that'll take off.
What world do you live in? Everything on Google (and plenty of other sites) is indexed by coordinates including my own. While I don't particularly care for the idea of push advertising to my GPS-enabled mobile device, I can see what a huge advantage it would be for advertisers and what a consumer's perceived benefit would be.
Hell, I spend a ton of time working with geospatial data for use with increasing marketing and recruitment range/success. It's a big deal these days and with the advent of Google Maps API, Google Earth, and other third party utilities like shp2kml, you can access a plethora of freely available GIS information to do your job better (like plotting data with KML overlays for counties).
Linux should be comfortable in what it is and not feel the need to compare.
Linux isn't comfortable or not as it's an OS but I disagree with your assertion that the community should be comfortable with the state the OS is in as it's no where near good enough to compete with more polished systems.
Until the day that Linux is just as easy to use as Windows/OS X and the professional application base is the same, the community will need to continue the push towards greatness. While that day may never come, I can never imagine that everyone should just sit back and agree with your suggestion.
That said, the comment was immature and should have had some more thought put behind the ramifications of it.
DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink. There's no real thought involved. I've ripped hundreds of DVDs this way and I do ALL my own purchased DVDs as well (not just for backup sake but to remove the mandatory commercials and stupid fucking warnings about piracy). I bought the fucking DVD already and I don't share my physical DVD copies with anyone as they never seem to come back in the same shape.
I have several DVD players (including one from 1998) and all play the DVD+Rs I've burned just fine.
Basic sysadmin-skills. If you can't install apache without a wizard, how are you going to keep apache (and the underlying system) up-to-date? We allready have enough spambots at it is...
I thought we were talking about modern Linux systems here (Ubuntu). apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade -- hmm, looks like all you need to keep your underlying system up-to-date.
If you require a graphical wizard to install apache, you don't have the necessary skills to be running a webserver.
What skills would those be? I have the knowledge necessary to host all of my own services (DNS, e-mail, etc) and the one thing that requires almost zero effort on my part is Apache. Why would it be different for someone else? You're making it sound like there's so much to do other than start the daemon.
Simple: Ubuntu has a charismatic millionaire behind it. That's really all there is to it. Marketing is everything
Uhh, no, it has to do with being called "Feisty Fawn". I mean, what's hotter than Bambi being naughty?;-) (BTW, I've been a Debian user for 6 years and don't understand the hype either).
The sad thing is that the summary reads almost identical:
"Kernel trap has a nice summary of what is going on behind the scenes to change the Linux Scheduler. The O(1) Linux scheduler is going to be changed so that it is fair to interactive tasks. You will be surprised to know that O(1) is really too good not to have any side-effects on fairness to all tasks."
Let me make this clear: your ability to write code in no way makes you a computer scientist. It's like saying that the ability to operate a forklift makes you a structural engineer. Stop it already.
I never made any such connection. All I said was that people here on Slashdot are on their high horse and think that their shit doesn't stink when it comes to writing code. Please stop THAT.
We need fewer programmers, not more. Maybe professional certification would help somewhat.
I don't consider myself a "programmer". I have a background in CS (a minor in it) and I use that knowledge to do my job better. If I had to wait for a "programmer" at my institution to write the code I use I'd never get my work done.
People have been fucking saying this about various versions of BASIC since the beginning. Instead of trashing it, what did BASIC's various incarnations teach us?
It taught us that Microsoft could roll what amounts to a scripting language into its Office line and make the programs ever more powerful without having to relearn something completely new and difficult. An education in just about any language, a book or a list of commands, and some time and you will have a fully functional module or two that saves you a ton of time and energy.
I honestly think a lot of the hostility, here, towards VB has to do with the fact that now pretty much anyone can write code and that it's from Microsoft. If you're somehow saying that if they used C/C++ or even Perl that their code would somehow be wonderful or safe, you're insane.
COMPUTING IS HARD. You can't dumb it down just because it would be nice to do so. And I'm sorry but mathematics is just the way in which meaning is expressed for machines. There's no free lunch here. And he's wrong about algorithms too - since a non-terminating algorithm is always expressible by deconstruction into a series of terminating algorithms.
I agree and while most applications require this, if you look at VB as a way to either get people started coding or to do quick things because it's built into the system instead of concerning yourself with the necessity of math-based algorithms, it serves its need.
I'm no math whiz but I can write code (in languages other than VB) and so can plenty of others. Enough putting people down and being on your high-horse because you write in such and such. Math is important to CS and so is easy access to be able to write code.
Gosh, because there's no way alcohol could be more harmful than caffeine, especially when drinking to the point of getting "too drunk."
Gosh, because I'm not addicted to alcohol I don't drink every day, all day, and I'm able to control what goes into my system. Because of the addition of extreme amounts of caffeine to carbonated water, I was addicted to caffeine and was compelled to drink more and more of the stuff.
When they start adding caffeine to alcohol to make it addictive to people other than those with a predisposition to become alcoholics, then we'll talk. Oh wait...
I was taking 100 to 125mg of Toprol XL and 20 to 40mg of Lisinopril (depending on what the Dr was trying to accomplish as I never got it fully under control). My BP, un-medicated, was averaging 190 to 210 over 90 to 100.
Now I'm on 20mg of Lisinopril (to bring it further under control than it is) and I'm currently at 110 to 125 over 75 to 80. With my family history this is what the Dr recommends. I'm fine with keeping it under control in this manner.
For a while I was down to 10mg of Lisinopril but after changing Dr's, they moved me to 20mg to keep it a bit lower than what they consider "good" for good measure.
As far as exercise/diet goes, no, I didn't change anything other than the soda. My family history predisposes me to this and even when I was in 100% athletic shape my BP was 180/100 regularly. They attributed it to the distance events I trained for and became concerned only after I stopped. After ending the soda kicks, I didn't need the meds anymore and I began training again (after a 5 year hiatus) and found that my pressure INCREASED. This completely baffled the Dr but such is my life.
I've posted about my caffeine free lifestyle on here before but I'm too drunk (it was 97F today) to look it up while I'm mobile.
I used to drink up to a case of Coke (in cans) daily during college and once I was done with organized athletics I decided to switch to diet to keep the calories down. I hated the way diet colas tasted so I went with the new diet drink at the time, Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper (aka, to my circle of friends, as Liquid Crack).
After several months of drinking it, I as up to at least 4 or 5 20oz bottles and 12+ 12oz cans daily. I wasn't having any sugar guilt so I didn't think anything of the caffeine's effect on my system.
After numerous sleepless nights in terror because of a pounding chest, I went cold turkey. That 7 day migraine sucked more than anything ever before.
Now, over 1.5 years later, I'm much better off. I am convinced that the high caffeine levels of diet soda is to compensate for the lack of sugar and to force addiction over the flavor.
My BP dropped to near normal levels (I was on 150MG+ of two different BP meds prior to the caffeine habit kick) which is likely a combination of the drop in caffeine as well as elevated sodium levels in diet soda and I feel a ton better overall.
Drop the caffeine habit, you'll love yourself for it both health and money wise.
Check out the iPhone Dev Wiki here. As of 10:15 PM (July 6th) they are here:
* A serial console is now working to the device. It requires a 6.8k resistor from pin 21 to ground, and tie pin 11 (sergnd) to the real ground. You can use iPhoneInterface to send some commands in recovery mode (setenv debug-uarts 1, saveenv, and reboot), and then you'll be in the boot loader.
* Some of us believe that the boot loader is the key to really unlocking the radio but we have several other approaches a serial console has enabled us to test. A few of us have been hard at work on some proof of concept code for these pieces, and we will release them as available.
* We know exactly how to unlock the radio right now. The problem is, getting the commands to the radio has proved more difficult than we anticipated. We have a couple of different potential vectors:
o The boot loader's memory display and writing commands, or the ability to send commands to the radio directly using 'radio send'. Many of these commands report permission denied. We are interested in getting around this.
o bbupdater and imeisv can do interesting things with the radio. We are trying to get to the point where we can run these commands and get output back.
* We have made some really good progress getting third party apps to run on the phone. More information on this will be available soon.
I use iTunes to play my MP3s which unfortunately requires QuickTime be installed. Is QT opening the MP3 because of your browser settings because it's not happening to me in Firefox (and I just had a computer upgrade at work and had to reinstall QT and iTunes).
Explain to me why I need one? I honestly want to know a few reasons why "everyone" should have one. Because me, not having any urgent need to travel to a foreign country (in fact, avoiding travel outside of our borders because I'm American), don't feel any need to have one. Especially one of those new-fangled ones that have RFID tags in them.
I have only seen about 1/2 of the United States (much of that in the last 4 years) and I have little to no desire to travel to most all places abroad. I know that the majority of Americans are just like me and I don't consider myself to be "sheltered".
I guess my travels to Europe as a teenager was enough.
I realize that this doesn't matter to a lot of the Slashdot crowd, but Discussion2 is still buggy in IE (IE7, specifically).
I ignore it because it doesn't display the messages as I have them set in my preferences. I assumed that they should take my preferences and then display the same way as the old system but apparently they don't.
Slashdot Mirror
Holy crap. . .you have any idea how badly their server is going to be slashdotted now? It's bad enough when its a php driven webpage but now you've just encouraged slashdotters to try a game or two against it. . .if the server crashes in the middle of a game is it considered a win for the human player?
It's a little difficult to play when you can't even load the game...
Yeah, we know. From that blurb:
"Mozilla's Firefox web browser has made dramatic gains on Microsoft's Internet Explorer throughout Europe in the past year with a marked upturn in FF use compared to IE over the past four months, according to French web monitoring service XiTiMonitor. A study of nearly 96,000 websites carried out during the week of July 2 to July 8 found that FF had 27.8% market share across Eastern and Western Europe, IE had 66.5%, with other browsers including Safari and Opera making up the remaining 5.7%. In some key European markets FF has already reached parity and is threatening to overtake IE as the market leading browser."
From the current blurb:
Kevin Spiritus lets us know that XiTi Monitor, a French Web survey institute, has published its browser barometer for July, and Internet Explorer continues to lose ground. "The ascension of Firefox continues... Nearly 28% average use rate in Europe in the beginning of July 2007, with a progression in the totality of the 32 European countries studied. Firefox doesn't loose ground in any of the countries."
I realize we have the Firehose now but are people who read Slashdot daily using it properly? We don't need two stories in a short time frame (4 days) about the same topic.
Is it any wonder that Linux will never be adopted as a user-system for home and office desktops when IT support assumes doing so requires the user to understand "powercycling" (what, ride a bike?!?), "ethernet card" (isn't that a game called Myst?), and "DHCP client" (I'm the client, aren't I?).
Uhh, I was addressing the Slashdot crowd; I didn't feel the need to dumb it down but apparently I should have.
When I hooked up Comcast about 2 years ago, I got a self install kit, plugged it in to my router, waited 5 minutes, called the office and gave them my phone number, and I was off and away. Since then I've switched the modem out once and used 3 different MAC addresses (new router, and connected directly to my computer sometimes to troubleshoot) and never had a problem. If they authorized access by MAC none of that would have worked.
It depends per market. They aren't all the same due to the purchase of smaller markets. You might be in a market that doesn't have MAC auth.
The guy installing it made a few phone calls, and 15 minutes later I was set up. I dunno if they're just lazy or what, but it's definitely possible without it.
They have to call in to the office and have them register your modem's MAC and the ethernet card's MAC with the system. Generally this is done via a web interface that has weird proxy settings to get to the registration server. The techs that require that CD (and it could vary from day to day depending on what management's feeling like) may not know any better, may be told they require Windows that day, or they might just be lazy -- as you said.
They also offer no support. If you call with a trouble report you'd better pretend you are using a Windows machine when they give you their step by step connection test instructions. If they say "click Start -> Control Panel" and you say "I have neither", the problem is obviously on your end.
I worked tech support for AT&T@Home and ATTBI. If someone would call saying they had connectivity problems and they were running an alternative OS we were instructed to powercycle their modem remotely and if still no bloc-sync, to have them do it manually with a power down. If still nothing we rolled a truck after explaining that if it wasn't a line issue they would have to pay. Now, if that tech arrived at their house, hooked up the laptop and found that they had bloc-sync after all, then the person paid $90 for the trouble call.
Honestly, if you're running Linux in your home and nothing else, I expect you to be able to handle powercycling yourself and insuring that your computer is running properly (including checking your router, your ethernet card, and to make sure your DHCP client is running).
Vonage added 166,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2007, but lost $77 million.
The turnover rate for Vonage is very high from what I've read. Is that added subscriber number on top of their pre-existing user base or is it just what they added in the first quarter? They could be hemorrhaging faster than they can bring in.
What this depends on is information being indexed by coordinates, via tags or elsewise. Not sure that'll take off.
What world do you live in? Everything on Google (and plenty of other sites) is indexed by coordinates including my own. While I don't particularly care for the idea of push advertising to my GPS-enabled mobile device, I can see what a huge advantage it would be for advertisers and what a consumer's perceived benefit would be.
Hell, I spend a ton of time working with geospatial data for use with increasing marketing and recruitment range/success. It's a big deal these days and with the advent of Google Maps API, Google Earth, and other third party utilities like shp2kml, you can access a plethora of freely available GIS information to do your job better (like plotting data with KML overlays for counties).
Linux should be comfortable in what it is and not feel the need to compare.
Linux isn't comfortable or not as it's an OS but I disagree with your assertion that the community should be comfortable with the state the OS is in as it's no where near good enough to compete with more polished systems.
Until the day that Linux is just as easy to use as Windows/OS X and the professional application base is the same, the community will need to continue the push towards greatness. While that day may never come, I can never imagine that everyone should just sit back and agree with your suggestion.
That said, the comment was immature and should have had some more thought put behind the ramifications of it.
Make an ISO with DVD Shrink and then burn it with DVD Decrypter. That way you don't have to deal w/stupid fucking Nero.
DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink. There's no real thought involved. I've ripped hundreds of DVDs this way and I do ALL my own purchased DVDs as well (not just for backup sake but to remove the mandatory commercials and stupid fucking warnings about piracy). I bought the fucking DVD already and I don't share my physical DVD copies with anyone as they never seem to come back in the same shape.
I have several DVD players (including one from 1998) and all play the DVD+Rs I've burned just fine.
Basic sysadmin-skills. If you can't install apache without a wizard, how are you going to keep apache (and the underlying system) up-to-date? We allready have enough spambots at it is...
I thought we were talking about modern Linux systems here (Ubuntu). apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade -- hmm, looks like all you need to keep your underlying system up-to-date.
If you require a graphical wizard to install apache, you don't have the necessary skills to be running a webserver.
What skills would those be? I have the knowledge necessary to host all of my own services (DNS, e-mail, etc) and the one thing that requires almost zero effort on my part is Apache. Why would it be different for someone else? You're making it sound like there's so much to do other than start the daemon.
Simple: Ubuntu has a charismatic millionaire behind it. That's really all there is to it. Marketing is everything
;-) (BTW, I've been a Debian user for 6 years and don't understand the hype either).
Uhh, no, it has to do with being called "Feisty Fawn". I mean, what's hotter than Bambi being naughty?
The sad thing is that the summary reads almost identical:
"Kernel trap has a nice summary of what is going on behind the scenes to change the Linux Scheduler. The O(1) Linux scheduler is going to be changed so that it is fair to interactive tasks. You will be surprised to know that O(1) is really too good not to have any side-effects on fairness to all tasks."
Let me make this clear: your ability to write code in no way makes you a computer scientist. It's like saying that the ability to operate a forklift makes you a structural engineer. Stop it already.
I never made any such connection. All I said was that people here on Slashdot are on their high horse and think that their shit doesn't stink when it comes to writing code. Please stop THAT.
We need fewer programmers, not more. Maybe professional certification would help somewhat.
I don't consider myself a "programmer". I have a background in CS (a minor in it) and I use that knowledge to do my job better. If I had to wait for a "programmer" at my institution to write the code I use I'd never get my work done.
Do the lessons of VB6 teach us nothing?
People have been fucking saying this about various versions of BASIC since the beginning. Instead of trashing it, what did BASIC's various incarnations teach us?
It taught us that Microsoft could roll what amounts to a scripting language into its Office line and make the programs ever more powerful without having to relearn something completely new and difficult. An education in just about any language, a book or a list of commands, and some time and you will have a fully functional module or two that saves you a ton of time and energy.
I honestly think a lot of the hostility, here, towards VB has to do with the fact that now pretty much anyone can write code and that it's from Microsoft. If you're somehow saying that if they used C/C++ or even Perl that their code would somehow be wonderful or safe, you're insane.
COMPUTING IS HARD. You can't dumb it down just because it would be nice to do so. And I'm sorry but mathematics is just the way in which meaning is expressed for machines. There's no free lunch here. And he's wrong about algorithms too - since a non-terminating algorithm is always expressible by deconstruction into a series of terminating algorithms.
I agree and while most applications require this, if you look at VB as a way to either get people started coding or to do quick things because it's built into the system instead of concerning yourself with the necessity of math-based algorithms, it serves its need.
I'm no math whiz but I can write code (in languages other than VB) and so can plenty of others. Enough putting people down and being on your high-horse because you write in such and such. Math is important to CS and so is easy access to be able to write code.
Gosh, because there's no way alcohol could be more harmful than caffeine, especially when drinking to the point of getting "too drunk."
Gosh, because I'm not addicted to alcohol I don't drink every day, all day, and I'm able to control what goes into my system. Because of the addition of extreme amounts of caffeine to carbonated water, I was addicted to caffeine and was compelled to drink more and more of the stuff.
When they start adding caffeine to alcohol to make it addictive to people other than those with a predisposition to become alcoholics, then we'll talk. Oh wait...
I was taking 100 to 125mg of Toprol XL and 20 to 40mg of Lisinopril (depending on what the Dr was trying to accomplish as I never got it fully under control). My BP, un-medicated, was averaging 190 to 210 over 90 to 100.
Now I'm on 20mg of Lisinopril (to bring it further under control than it is) and I'm currently at 110 to 125 over 75 to 80. With my family history this is what the Dr recommends. I'm fine with keeping it under control in this manner.
For a while I was down to 10mg of Lisinopril but after changing Dr's, they moved me to 20mg to keep it a bit lower than what they consider "good" for good measure.
As far as exercise/diet goes, no, I didn't change anything other than the soda. My family history predisposes me to this and even when I was in 100% athletic shape my BP was 180/100 regularly. They attributed it to the distance events I trained for and became concerned only after I stopped. After ending the soda kicks, I didn't need the meds anymore and I began training again (after a 5 year hiatus) and found that my pressure INCREASED. This completely baffled the Dr but such is my life.
Good luck yourself.
I've posted about my caffeine free lifestyle on here before but I'm too drunk (it was 97F today) to look it up while I'm mobile.
I used to drink up to a case of Coke (in cans) daily during college and once I was done with organized athletics I decided to switch to diet to keep the calories down. I hated the way diet colas tasted so I went with the new diet drink at the time, Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper (aka, to my circle of friends, as Liquid Crack).
After several months of drinking it, I as up to at least 4 or 5 20oz bottles and 12+ 12oz cans daily. I wasn't having any sugar guilt so I didn't think anything of the caffeine's effect on my system.
After numerous sleepless nights in terror because of a pounding chest, I went cold turkey. That 7 day migraine sucked more than anything ever before.
Now, over 1.5 years later, I'm much better off. I am convinced that the high caffeine levels of diet soda is to compensate for the lack of sugar and to force addiction over the flavor.
My BP dropped to near normal levels (I was on 150MG+ of two different BP meds prior to the caffeine habit kick) which is likely a combination of the drop in caffeine as well as elevated sodium levels in diet soda and I feel a ton better overall.
Drop the caffeine habit, you'll love yourself for it both health and money wise.
Check out the iPhone Dev Wiki here. As of 10:15 PM (July 6th) they are here:
* A serial console is now working to the device. It requires a 6.8k resistor from pin 21 to ground, and tie pin 11 (sergnd) to the real ground. You can use iPhoneInterface to send some commands in recovery mode (setenv debug-uarts 1, saveenv, and reboot), and then you'll be in the boot loader.
* Some of us believe that the boot loader is the key to really unlocking the radio but we have several other approaches a serial console has enabled us to test. A few of us have been hard at work on some proof of concept code for these pieces, and we will release them as available.
* We know exactly how to unlock the radio right now. The problem is, getting the commands to the radio has proved more difficult than we anticipated. We have a couple of different potential vectors:
o The boot loader's memory display and writing commands, or the ability to send commands to the radio directly using 'radio send'. Many of these commands report permission denied. We are interested in getting around this.
o bbupdater and imeisv can do interesting things with the radio. We are trying to get to the point where we can run these commands and get output back.
* We have made some really good progress getting third party apps to run on the phone. More information on this will be available soon.
What makes you think that just because Google picked the company up that they will give it the support it needs to flourish?
Plenty of Google's recent purchases have been left to die (most notably Dodgeball) .
Just because we currently have a mostly positive view of Google and what they have done, doesn't mean that it's a rose garden for everything they buy.
I use iTunes to play my MP3s which unfortunately requires QuickTime be installed. Is QT opening the MP3 because of your browser settings because it's not happening to me in Firefox (and I just had a computer upgrade at work and had to reinstall QT and iTunes).
Everyone should have one anyway.
Explain to me why I need one? I honestly want to know a few reasons why "everyone" should have one. Because me, not having any urgent need to travel to a foreign country (in fact, avoiding travel outside of our borders because I'm American), don't feel any need to have one. Especially one of those new-fangled ones that have RFID tags in them.
I have only seen about 1/2 of the United States (much of that in the last 4 years) and I have little to no desire to travel to most all places abroad. I know that the majority of Americans are just like me and I don't consider myself to be "sheltered".
I guess my travels to Europe as a teenager was enough.
I realize that this doesn't matter to a lot of the Slashdot crowd, but Discussion2 is still buggy in IE (IE7, specifically).
I ignore it because it doesn't display the messages as I have them set in my preferences. I assumed that they should take my preferences and then display the same way as the old system but apparently they don't.