I own a Mini S. It's not bad. It retains its value, and the prior owner got to sort out the bad stuff. It's odd. It's not a Hillman, it's not quite British, but it can keep up with the very best of them on a slalom run.
IMHO, the original Sir Wm Lyons Jags had style, and strange internal design. IRS suspension was a wonderment. The 3.8 and 4.2 engines were ill-fitted, but a good one lasted a while.
Post Ford acquisition, they were butt ugly. Then they increased the warranty, and probably cost Ford billions. They just weren't the same. No verve, no panache. The S-type was a long shot, and the rejuvenated XK-8 can be had on eBay for a song. But you won't sing long.... they break.
Tata? They know lipstick, but they don't know engineering.
Jaguar died as a brand in 1987, when Ford took them over. From there, they've largely rested on prior laurels. That said, most pre-1987 Jaguars were a cult. You could tell when one was really dead because it stopped leaking.
You can still get 50grand on eBay (++) for a 50's xk120/140. But the days of glory are largely gone, as they not only don't hold their value, but never achieved Ford's reliability goals, let alone Tata's.
The Mini Cooper is an example of a brand redone, but bettered, by BMW. Nominally made in Oxford (some elsewhere), it's an international effort that makes a stellar little ride, if deeply in a niche. Of course it helps to have a couple of popular movies featuring your car's ability to descend stairs and make wicked turns.
A modulation technique that didn't crater GPS would have been a start. If you look at the filing, their CFO still believes that they can get a deal with the FCC. So it proves the Insanity Law, 2x. Entrepreneurs will try to defy physics, then do it again. Good luck with that.
Quite the opposite, I believe, but in a different vector.
Anonymous Cowards perhaps may fear retribution. I don't doubt that Geeknet's user db would crack like an egg, given the right resources, and perhaps already has been breached, but I have no knowledge of this.... just a guess.
So it's easy to say bad stuff about Big Bad Anonymous if you're an AC, is my point.
Is it me, or are there others that see the irony in calling Anonymous "douchebag vandals" but only posting as ACs?
I think Anonymous, by this interview, may have a self-inflated view of themselves, but no more than many others. WikiLeaks, IMHO, has done more change for good. But if nothing else, they've sold billions in new security infrastructure... that probably won't work.
Since when, has any project like this come in for under budget, adjusted for inflation, ever? People do trades on Wall Street that last for milliseconds. What makes you think they'll invest in something that has no guarantee of working, then takes perhaps 60yrs+ to have the first possible return on investment? No one does that these days, because all rewards must be immediate, apparently.
An ion drive isn't even C+. The rate of return on investment is somewhere near what "Voldemort" did for JP Morgan Chase, except 500x as big-- to start.
This is one starving law firm and legal department. Imagine taking this to the ends of the earth.
Secret lawfirm partners meeting chatter:
"Hey, with over fifty time keepers running on this thing, it might go negative numbers, but we'll keep the rep that we'll burn every litigation right down to the bitter end. After all, this isn't about who wins, it's who has more kerosene..."
"What do they care, after all. With a 8% COGS, and a stock price that's at insane multiple of earnings, they have to continue make Google look stupid. After all, they desperately want to be 'in the game' since the Sun acquisition boiled off and their server game is barely chugging. Good thing they have that database thing-oil well in the basement."
It would be nice, but no one's bitching that their phone isn't fast enough. Native apps are lovely. Browser apps are lovely. What distinguishes Android and iOS is that there's a business model where lots of people get paid.
Watching videos isn't a business model anymore because the data plans are becoming mind-numbingly expensive. So what's left? Store-and-forward content viewing; low data rate interactives, including gaming. RIM has to offer something that's a monetary incentive to 1) carriers 2) developers 3) content providers 4) aggregators and CDNs and 5) all of these on an ongoing basis or no one's going to invest in doing BBx-specific stuff.
Apple has lots of salespeople and financial partners whose employer isn't Apple. So they promote Apple. Not so for RIM.
RIM gives no guarantees of privacy, security, or economy to increase their value from the user's context, either.
Speed isn't an issue, as phones are throttled by data rates that the carriers can support. Instead, things like actual security and real costs are the values.
Unless you looked through the source code, knew what you were looking for, compiled it from libraries you trusted, and watched constantly for "updates", I wouldn't trust any VoIP app these days. Doesn't matter if you're in Luxembourg or Detroit.
We win nuclear wars all the time by not firing them.
Your joyously optimistic rendering of a post-nuclear hit seems to fly in the face of reality; look at the tiny atomic, non-hydrogen megaton payloads dropped on Japan. The loss of life was stupendous. The people killed, maimed, animals, crops, infrastructure, just gone in these blasts over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The effects don't last that long..... tell that to the children, should any survive.
You see, I don't want to kill anyone. I'm abhored that others do. The only reason that I can see for any nuclear program is that the genie is out of the bottle. There's unlikely a way to put the cork back in. That leaves us with nuclear stockpiles, and potential rogues in control. That makes it a dangerous world.
You can't bring people back from the dead. This game of brinkmanship has to stop. One day, a psycho will try and push the button. I don't doubt that it's already happened, and we'll probably never know about it.
I was raised in an era where we learned about nuclear war, survival rates, dug fallout shelters and kept non-perishable foods in there, and thought about what might happen if the food ran out. The bullets ran out. Hungry people came looking around because supply chains had been broken. You talk of clean kills, which are murderous enough without citing the dystopic era that comes after that. All for fucking oil, and big-boy brinkmanship. What does your life and the lives of your loved ones mean to you?
My response was abrupt and I need to clarify it. My fault.
I'm aware of the differential in expenditure columns, and how the US Congress funds various programs. The missile defense system under discussion here, was first imagined quite some time ago. The Bush administration used it to rattle swords, but funding for it has been tough to come by. This is good, in my estimation, as it's unneeded.
My point regarding current anti-missile systems is that there are many places around the US, from where a missile can arrive. Current technologies might be good, if you knew where to expect them from, and about what time. Hello, will you send an ICBM in around 1430 Zulu say, from a westernly vector around Mendocino? Jolly good of you. Yes, tea would be great with that. Two sugars.
The SCUD is not an ICBM. It is small, has a small payload, although they can be deadly payloads. Larger ICBMs have to be hit before they start delivering warheads, or each of the targeted warheads must be stopped individually. We can agree on these things.
I understand the railgun is experimental. Our borders are not, and subs E and W, and the N border across the poles are all vulnerability points. The railgun, when it starts to work successfully, has a chance-- if it's deployed and if it's ready to cover large areas of possible ingress into US and/or allied airspace.
North Korea can't put a rocket into the air it seems; they're worse than NASA, and not as deadly. Iran? I think Iran is clever enough to understand the crater where Tehran used to be, should they flex that muscle. Iran is small, and suicide isn't a normal human trait.
Where there is sabre rattling are all of the small countries fresh with scar tissue from having been a part of the Soviet Union, which is no more. Russia, OTOH, believes it is still the Soviet Union, and still has irrational latent fear coupled to a new status as a huge producer of oil and natural gas with all of the loot that it provides. They're actually paying their soldiers now, and feeding them regularly. That hasn't happened for a long time.
As politicians and those seeming in power must protect their position, pride, and income, they'll blather about the threats they perceive, and the big violent solutions they'll use if someone crosses their line in the sand. It won't happen. Indeed, this ruse has been going on for a long time, as we send lots of soldiers to their death and maim in the Middle East over oil policy. Was it some kind of moral war with Al Qaeda? Nope. It was about oil, and how a band of thugs dropped the Twin Towers and flew into the Pentagon. Did they have a right to do that? Not at all. Bad Al Qaeda. Dead Al Qaeda. The rest of it? We engendered neutral people to become our enemies. We threw seven trillion dollars and thousands of lives at it to prove the point: we want our oil.
Nah. Forget about the seven trillion dollars spent on oil wars. All that NATO dough? Spare change. B52s in the air? Cheap.
Yeah, Patriots. Against ICBMs? No, never tested. Those were ugly SCUDs on a good day. Did they work? Sometimes. They're good for lightweight stuff. Multiple warhead ICBMs spread their destruction. Ya know, that Patriot battery that lines the coast of the US ought to do a lot of good. It takes hours to deploy a Patriot battery when the logistics are good, and you knew something in advance.
There's this really long northern border. You think the Canadians have deployed Patriot or SM3s up north? Sure.
The US Navy's Railgun has problems of its own. Take six subs, three off each coast, and kiss it goodbye. This is all for show, and to burn money so as to keep the defense contractors moving, paying their legislative tolls, and making money in important congressional districts. This is not about reality. This is about perceived propagandized threats. I think they've sucked you in, too.
This is a chess game played by people with huge egos. The US missile defense system is employed to keep the economy chugging along. We have sufficient firepower to destroy the planet into a wasteland that would last, for practical purposes, forever.
What you're seeing is fear. Big testosterone-driven egos. Drama from political drama queens whose military economies are fed by conflict between smaller countries.
Missile defense is an oxymoron. We have only a few experimental weapons that are designed to stop ICBMs and multiple warhead devices with unbelievably large price tags. Why? Only a fool would press the big red button. This is about brinksmanship, a boys game. There will be no onslaught from Russia. Yet much smaller allies don't believe that. They're been propagandized from birth about the evils and historical warrior nature of their natural enemies, the guys next door, the apostates, or the heretics-once-our-friends.
Microsoft was in a position to do good, and didn't. Linux wouldn't have risen, Steve Jobs wouldn't have come back from the desert, Solaris might be the King Unix, all sorts of things might have happened if Microsoft's domination and boorish behavior wasn't so thorough and without remorse. As an antagonist, Microsoft proved useful to many. They were the one to beat. They have been beaten. Microsoft provided return for their shareholders, at the cost of business integrity.
But the Internet is still way cool, and these things, too, shall pass.
I have seen that trend, too. But many open, non-partisan social forums have become political battlegrounds as polarized peoples become trolled, and fights bring ideological thread drifts that bring little to discussion topics.
Domestic policy is another problem: who's turf? Yes, Americans seem to dominate, but I'm interested in international input, and that means *everyone*. It's like slow torture to read the advent of the Big Brother era in the UK, but heartening to hear the Germans are doing something about privacy, even if that means wrenching pressure to on one hand, stanch brilliant hacker code, while additionally giving high currency to privacy. Americans, I'm one, have a really myopic view of the world. So "domestic", while interesting, also occasionally means inbred and brutal.
CmdrTaco, for all of his bad days, seemed to have an unerring pulse on the interesting stuff that makes a geek's day. Yes, there were colorful sidetracks, and flamewars, and threads that had 700+ comments and drifts that strung to the nebulae.
You meet interesting and thoughtful folks. Some of them are clearly way out on edge of reality. Some beyond. Deciding which is who can be interesting. I don't think that Reddit Getsit, that Digg Diggs, and the other sandpile of social geek communities gets there, either. Hell, even BurningMan has jumped the shark. Slashdot used to *make* the memes, not report on them a dozen days later while grafting the elephant's behind of **BI** onto itself.
Robin, are you listening? Would you give these jokers a klewww? Smack them upside the head, pull their heads out of their butts, and through them back on the cluetrain? Sigh. Big sigh.
Yet this is GeekNet's Jump The Shark moment, today, May 1, 2012, for anyone keeping track.
Philosophically, News for Nerds, and the concept of what/. means now has another branding barnacle: BI. I understand BI, big data, and why. I see the horizon of words and phrases like: new paradigm, hadoop(y), your OpenStack engine, and other revenue-generating phrases.
This is branding gone wrong, like putting a Continental kit onto a Kia Rio. We, the customers of/. aren't ideological customers of BIG DATA and BI. We're theorists, engineers, completely whacked out of our mind gamers, and people that make antennas with Pringles cans. I'm shocked that the publishers would believe that they can somehow meld these two concepts together. It's really frightening that they're trying as BI would have told them: only a subsection of/. readers give a rat's patootie about BI, and BI's been around for more than a decade in one form or another.
You can opt out of the scanners. I do every time I go thru. Yeah, I've been frisked plenty of times. Goes with the turf.
I've watched some shakedowns that make a TSA frisk job look like a walk in the park. You have no clue what you're talking about. Think about your teeth on the concrete pavement. Maybe in your head, maybe no more.
Or when you haven't been making your payments, and you find your car smashed to bits. Go ahead and go to the police station. Enjoy.
I tend to agree. I'd like to see laser engineering used to prevent ICBMs from hitting their targets. Knowledge is important, but so is the knowledge of capsizing technologies that become rife for misuse. Wicked viruses? Wicked cures. Global weather change? Population controls and astute resource management.
Yes, publishing information is onerous. What's worse is that if they're developed without peer review and public scrutiny, they can easily go out of control. Oppenheimer's little toy could become the next Ice 9.
Sharing is good. The utilities that Stallman rewrote are historic, and have their origins in BSD, which is a version of Unix. The leadership in making the Linux kernel evolve stands on the shoulders of many, but riding several thousand elephants at once stands out for Linus. Stallman: somewhat solo. Linus: lasso'd a hurricane.
Ignoring your --> gmail address -- I don't think you're going to provoke an action in the manner you describe, nor is that his goal. His goal is a sympathetic audience, and getting that audience moving. Facebook doesn't imply slavery at all; that's an attitude on your part not borne by actual fact.
It could have been done on G+. Tweets. I get the feeling that his message will be heard; whether anything gets done remains to be seen. It's a shot across Comcast/xFinity's bow. Nothing more. Nothing less, IMHO
Software becomes entropic, just like other designs. B-52s flying today probably have what remaining parts are original thoroughly examined for airframe stress, and go through a lifecycle just like an app does. I don't know, and I'm guessing, but I'll lay odds that very little of what's flying called a B-52 is what originally flew from Boeing. The parts are comparatively low-tech. It's not a fly-by-wire aircraft, and the failure modes are pretty well-known at this point.
I do, however, doubt that the collective cost over the lifecycle of B52s is accurately portrayed. The chances of actually knowing those numbers won't likely happen in my lifetime unless Wikileaks gets busy.
Slashdot Mirror
I own a Mini S. It's not bad. It retains its value, and the prior owner got to sort out the bad stuff. It's odd. It's not a Hillman, it's not quite British, but it can keep up with the very best of them on a slalom run.
IMHO, the original Sir Wm Lyons Jags had style, and strange internal design. IRS suspension was a wonderment. The 3.8 and 4.2 engines were ill-fitted, but a good one lasted a while.
Post Ford acquisition, they were butt ugly. Then they increased the warranty, and probably cost Ford billions. They just weren't the same. No verve, no panache. The S-type was a long shot, and the rejuvenated XK-8 can be had on eBay for a song. But you won't sing long.... they break.
Tata? They know lipstick, but they don't know engineering.
Jaguar died as a brand in 1987, when Ford took them over. From there, they've largely rested on prior laurels. That said, most pre-1987 Jaguars were a cult. You could tell when one was really dead because it stopped leaking.
You can still get 50grand on eBay (++) for a 50's xk120/140. But the days of glory are largely gone, as they not only don't hold their value, but never achieved Ford's reliability goals, let alone Tata's.
The Mini Cooper is an example of a brand redone, but bettered, by BMW. Nominally made in Oxford (some elsewhere), it's an international effort that makes a stellar little ride, if deeply in a niche. Of course it helps to have a couple of popular movies featuring your car's ability to descend stairs and make wicked turns.
A modulation technique that didn't crater GPS would have been a start. If you look at the filing, their CFO still believes that they can get a deal with the FCC. So it proves the Insanity Law, 2x. Entrepreneurs will try to defy physics, then do it again. Good luck with that.
Quite the opposite, I believe, but in a different vector.
Anonymous Cowards perhaps may fear retribution. I don't doubt that Geeknet's user db would crack like an egg, given the right resources, and perhaps already has been breached, but I have no knowledge of this.... just a guess.
So it's easy to say bad stuff about Big Bad Anonymous if you're an AC, is my point.
Is it me, or are there others that see the irony in calling Anonymous "douchebag vandals" but only posting as ACs?
I think Anonymous, by this interview, may have a self-inflated view of themselves, but no more than many others. WikiLeaks, IMHO, has done more change for good. But if nothing else, they've sold billions in new security infrastructure... that probably won't work.
With all due respect, as this is common knowledge, I'll ask you to perform your own research, so as not to embarrass you fully.
Please mod me: Mr Obvious.
Since when, has any project like this come in for under budget, adjusted for inflation, ever? People do trades on Wall Street that last for milliseconds. What makes you think they'll invest in something that has no guarantee of working, then takes perhaps 60yrs+ to have the first possible return on investment? No one does that these days, because all rewards must be immediate, apparently.
An ion drive isn't even C+. The rate of return on investment is somewhere near what "Voldemort" did for JP Morgan Chase, except 500x as big-- to start.
This is one starving law firm and legal department. Imagine taking this to the ends of the earth.
Secret lawfirm partners meeting chatter:
"Hey, with over fifty time keepers running on this thing, it might go negative numbers, but we'll keep the rep that we'll burn every litigation right down to the bitter end. After all, this isn't about who wins, it's who has more kerosene..."
"What do they care, after all. With a 8% COGS, and a stock price that's at insane multiple of earnings, they have to continue make Google look stupid. After all, they desperately want to be 'in the game' since the Sun acquisition boiled off and their server game is barely chugging. Good thing they have that database thing-oil well in the basement."
Feel free to add your own plausible remarks.
They've tried to fatten up instead of building muscle. Perhaps News Corp will be hungry for more acquisitions.
It would be nice, but no one's bitching that their phone isn't fast enough. Native apps are lovely. Browser apps are lovely. What distinguishes Android and iOS is that there's a business model where lots of people get paid.
Watching videos isn't a business model anymore because the data plans are becoming mind-numbingly expensive. So what's left? Store-and-forward content viewing; low data rate interactives, including gaming. RIM has to offer something that's a monetary incentive to 1) carriers 2) developers 3) content providers 4) aggregators and CDNs and 5) all of these on an ongoing basis or no one's going to invest in doing BBx-specific stuff.
Apple has lots of salespeople and financial partners whose employer isn't Apple. So they promote Apple. Not so for RIM.
RIM gives no guarantees of privacy, security, or economy to increase their value from the user's context, either.
Speed isn't an issue, as phones are throttled by data rates that the carriers can support. Instead, things like actual security and real costs are the values.
Unless you looked through the source code, knew what you were looking for, compiled it from libraries you trusted, and watched constantly for "updates", I wouldn't trust any VoIP app these days. Doesn't matter if you're in Luxembourg or Detroit.
We win nuclear wars all the time by not firing them.
Your joyously optimistic rendering of a post-nuclear hit seems to fly in the face of reality; look at the tiny atomic, non-hydrogen megaton payloads dropped on Japan. The loss of life was stupendous. The people killed, maimed, animals, crops, infrastructure, just gone in these blasts over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The effects don't last that long..... tell that to the children, should any survive.
You see, I don't want to kill anyone. I'm abhored that others do. The only reason that I can see for any nuclear program is that the genie is out of the bottle. There's unlikely a way to put the cork back in. That leaves us with nuclear stockpiles, and potential rogues in control. That makes it a dangerous world.
You can't bring people back from the dead. This game of brinkmanship has to stop. One day, a psycho will try and push the button. I don't doubt that it's already happened, and we'll probably never know about it.
I was raised in an era where we learned about nuclear war, survival rates, dug fallout shelters and kept non-perishable foods in there, and thought about what might happen if the food ran out. The bullets ran out. Hungry people came looking around because supply chains had been broken. You talk of clean kills, which are murderous enough without citing the dystopic era that comes after that. All for fucking oil, and big-boy brinkmanship. What does your life and the lives of your loved ones mean to you?
My response was abrupt and I need to clarify it. My fault.
I'm aware of the differential in expenditure columns, and how the US Congress funds various programs. The missile defense system under discussion here, was first imagined quite some time ago. The Bush administration used it to rattle swords, but funding for it has been tough to come by. This is good, in my estimation, as it's unneeded.
My point regarding current anti-missile systems is that there are many places around the US, from where a missile can arrive. Current technologies might be good, if you knew where to expect them from, and about what time. Hello, will you send an ICBM in around 1430 Zulu say, from a westernly vector around Mendocino? Jolly good of you. Yes, tea would be great with that. Two sugars.
The SCUD is not an ICBM. It is small, has a small payload, although they can be deadly payloads. Larger ICBMs have to be hit before they start delivering warheads, or each of the targeted warheads must be stopped individually. We can agree on these things.
I understand the railgun is experimental. Our borders are not, and subs E and W, and the N border across the poles are all vulnerability points. The railgun, when it starts to work successfully, has a chance-- if it's deployed and if it's ready to cover large areas of possible ingress into US and/or allied airspace.
North Korea can't put a rocket into the air it seems; they're worse than NASA, and not as deadly. Iran? I think Iran is clever enough to understand the crater where Tehran used to be, should they flex that muscle. Iran is small, and suicide isn't a normal human trait.
Where there is sabre rattling are all of the small countries fresh with scar tissue from having been a part of the Soviet Union, which is no more. Russia, OTOH, believes it is still the Soviet Union, and still has irrational latent fear coupled to a new status as a huge producer of oil and natural gas with all of the loot that it provides. They're actually paying their soldiers now, and feeding them regularly. That hasn't happened for a long time.
As politicians and those seeming in power must protect their position, pride, and income, they'll blather about the threats they perceive, and the big violent solutions they'll use if someone crosses their line in the sand. It won't happen. Indeed, this ruse has been going on for a long time, as we send lots of soldiers to their death and maim in the Middle East over oil policy. Was it some kind of moral war with Al Qaeda? Nope. It was about oil, and how a band of thugs dropped the Twin Towers and flew into the Pentagon. Did they have a right to do that? Not at all. Bad Al Qaeda. Dead Al Qaeda. The rest of it? We engendered neutral people to become our enemies. We threw seven trillion dollars and thousands of lives at it to prove the point: we want our oil.
Nah. Forget about the seven trillion dollars spent on oil wars. All that NATO dough? Spare change. B52s in the air? Cheap.
Yeah, Patriots. Against ICBMs? No, never tested. Those were ugly SCUDs on a good day. Did they work? Sometimes. They're good for lightweight stuff. Multiple warhead ICBMs spread their destruction. Ya know, that Patriot battery that lines the coast of the US ought to do a lot of good. It takes hours to deploy a Patriot battery when the logistics are good, and you knew something in advance.
There's this really long northern border. You think the Canadians have deployed Patriot or SM3s up north? Sure.
The US Navy's Railgun has problems of its own. Take six subs, three off each coast, and kiss it goodbye. This is all for show, and to burn money so as to keep the defense contractors moving, paying their legislative tolls, and making money in important congressional districts. This is not about reality. This is about perceived propagandized threats. I think they've sucked you in, too.
Uh, no.
This is a chess game played by people with huge egos. The US missile defense system is employed to keep the economy chugging along. We have sufficient firepower to destroy the planet into a wasteland that would last, for practical purposes, forever.
What you're seeing is fear. Big testosterone-driven egos. Drama from political drama queens whose military economies are fed by conflict between smaller countries.
Missile defense is an oxymoron. We have only a few experimental weapons that are designed to stop ICBMs and multiple warhead devices with unbelievably large price tags. Why? Only a fool would press the big red button. This is about brinksmanship, a boys game. There will be no onslaught from Russia. Yet much smaller allies don't believe that. They're been propagandized from birth about the evils and historical warrior nature of their natural enemies, the guys next door, the apostates, or the heretics-once-our-friends.
Microsoft was in a position to do good, and didn't. Linux wouldn't have risen, Steve Jobs wouldn't have come back from the desert, Solaris might be the King Unix, all sorts of things might have happened if Microsoft's domination and boorish behavior wasn't so thorough and without remorse. As an antagonist, Microsoft proved useful to many. They were the one to beat. They have been beaten. Microsoft provided return for their shareholders, at the cost of business integrity.
But the Internet is still way cool, and these things, too, shall pass.
I have seen that trend, too. But many open, non-partisan social forums have become political battlegrounds as polarized peoples become trolled, and fights bring ideological thread drifts that bring little to discussion topics.
Domestic policy is another problem: who's turf? Yes, Americans seem to dominate, but I'm interested in international input, and that means *everyone*. It's like slow torture to read the advent of the Big Brother era in the UK, but heartening to hear the Germans are doing something about privacy, even if that means wrenching pressure to on one hand, stanch brilliant hacker code, while additionally giving high currency to privacy. Americans, I'm one, have a really myopic view of the world. So "domestic", while interesting, also occasionally means inbred and brutal.
CmdrTaco, for all of his bad days, seemed to have an unerring pulse on the interesting stuff that makes a geek's day. Yes, there were colorful sidetracks, and flamewars, and threads that had 700+ comments and drifts that strung to the nebulae.
You meet interesting and thoughtful folks. Some of them are clearly way out on edge of reality. Some beyond. Deciding which is who can be interesting. I don't think that Reddit Getsit, that Digg Diggs, and the other sandpile of social geek communities gets there, either. Hell, even BurningMan has jumped the shark. Slashdot used to *make* the memes, not report on them a dozen days later while grafting the elephant's behind of **BI** onto itself.
Robin, are you listening? Would you give these jokers a klewww? Smack them upside the head, pull their heads out of their butts, and through them back on the cluetrain? Sigh. Big sigh.
Thank you.
Yet this is GeekNet's Jump The Shark moment, today, May 1, 2012, for anyone keeping track.
Philosophically, News for Nerds, and the concept of what /. means now has another branding barnacle: BI. I understand BI, big data, and why. I see the horizon of words and phrases like: new paradigm, hadoop(y), your OpenStack engine, and other revenue-generating phrases.
This is branding gone wrong, like putting a Continental kit onto a Kia Rio. We, the customers of /. aren't ideological customers of BIG DATA and BI. We're theorists, engineers, completely whacked out of our mind gamers, and people that make antennas with Pringles cans. I'm shocked that the publishers would believe that they can somehow meld these two concepts together. It's really frightening that they're trying as BI would have told them: only a subsection of /. readers give a rat's patootie about BI, and BI's been around for more than a decade in one form or another.
You haven't been to the eastern EU, have you?
You can opt out of the scanners. I do every time I go thru. Yeah, I've been frisked plenty of times. Goes with the turf.
I've watched some shakedowns that make a TSA frisk job look like a walk in the park. You have no clue what you're talking about. Think about your teeth on the concrete pavement. Maybe in your head, maybe no more.
Or when you haven't been making your payments, and you find your car smashed to bits. Go ahead and go to the police station. Enjoy.
I tend to agree. I'd like to see laser engineering used to prevent ICBMs from hitting their targets. Knowledge is important, but so is the knowledge of capsizing technologies that become rife for misuse. Wicked viruses? Wicked cures. Global weather change? Population controls and astute resource management.
Yes, publishing information is onerous. What's worse is that if they're developed without peer review and public scrutiny, they can easily go out of control. Oppenheimer's little toy could become the next Ice 9.
And I've enjoyed becoming a treacherous son of a bitch while herding unsuspecting coders. Mwahh hahahahaha! Oh, wait....
Sharing is good. The utilities that Stallman rewrote are historic, and have their origins in BSD, which is a version of Unix. The leadership in making the Linux kernel evolve stands on the shoulders of many, but riding several thousand elephants at once stands out for Linus. Stallman: somewhat solo. Linus: lasso'd a hurricane.
Ignoring your --> gmail address -- I don't think you're going to provoke an action in the manner you describe, nor is that his goal. His goal is a sympathetic audience, and getting that audience moving. Facebook doesn't imply slavery at all; that's an attitude on your part not borne by actual fact.
It could have been done on G+. Tweets. I get the feeling that his message will be heard; whether anything gets done remains to be seen. It's a shot across Comcast/xFinity's bow. Nothing more. Nothing less, IMHO
Software becomes entropic, just like other designs. B-52s flying today probably have what remaining parts are original thoroughly examined for airframe stress, and go through a lifecycle just like an app does. I don't know, and I'm guessing, but I'll lay odds that very little of what's flying called a B-52 is what originally flew from Boeing. The parts are comparatively low-tech. It's not a fly-by-wire aircraft, and the failure modes are pretty well-known at this point.
I do, however, doubt that the collective cost over the lifecycle of B52s is accurately portrayed. The chances of actually knowing those numbers won't likely happen in my lifetime unless Wikileaks gets busy.