They just need to put the check-out "beep" noise into the card itself -- make the reader charge up a capacitor with induction so the tag has enough power to sound off before it gives up the goods. Then if somebody reads it from 100ft away it still goes "beep" in your wallet and they can blame you for not reporting your RFID code as 'stolen' right away.
Uh, right, so to show CLR running "as well or even better of its equivalent" you compare two entirely different web architectures, J2EE and.NET. Kind of like comparing performance of OpenOffice to MS WordPad and concluding that g++ is much slower than MS c++.
To benchmark these is complicated as.NET gets a lot of its speed by directly calling C functions, whereas in Java pretty much everything is implemented actually as Java code. This is of course a tradeoff since.NET contains a LOT more functions that can potentially be cracked because they are not run as 'managed' code. In the end it's basically a wash on performance; on actual virtual machine operations Java is in general significantly faster and on API calls.NET is usually quite a bit faster.
DotNET has a couple technical shortcomings when it comes to performance, one being the impossibility of fast interpretation of bytecodes (the instructions depend on the argument types so can't be easily dispatched). Another is using "real" generics, which they thought would improve speed by avoiding some box/unbox operations but it also leads to type explosions and, slow instanceof and casts (for example you could use so much memory just due to instantiated types that CLR has to constantly throw away older code and re-JIT, not to mention poor use of cache).
If you want to see innovative, you should look at Project Xanadu. Uh, yeah conceived in 1960 and finally implemented in 1998. Yeah that's innovation alright. Meanwhile around 1960 Douglas Englebart basically invented and demoing everything we use today: the mouse, GUIs, hypertext links (aka the web), email, groupware, video confrencing, etc in the "mother of all demos".
Watch for yourself. What they dont have a computer history class anymore??
This just moves the burden of tamper-proofing from the machines in the booths to the one machine that scans the slips. If you can't tamper-proof the former, then you can't tamper-proof the latter either. Of course you can, because the scanner/counting machine is observable; after the polls close workers scan in one vote and one number goes up by one on the display. People from that location monitor this so it's only possible to cheat this step by counting so fast that humans and camcorders can't keep up with the numbers changing. You can't do this on the vote-placing machines themselves becase then the person that goes after you can see how you voted (by sending somebody through before you to get the total before you vote) and more importantly you only see a snapshot -- it could just subtract your vote 10sec after you leave.
What's sick is that the whole process can be done completely without the possibility of fraud, easily and pretty fast (can count say 1 vote per second):
1. Voter places vote on electronic vote-printing machine 2. Drops physical vote into box 3. After polls close, citizens watch workers open boxes and 4. Show vote, scan into tabulator that shows running total 5. List individual totals for all polling locations on the web/newspaper/wherever.
Because each step is observed by the public there is no fraud possible (unless there is not even one concerned citizen to cover that polling location).
First off all, he's retarded because in the screenshot he gives obviously there is one button for "off" and one for "lock" and one for "other". That's not a lot of choices. There are a lot of subtly different choices after you choose "other", but the answer isn't to have one option that somehow magically does everything right.
His "answer" is one choice that: 1) saves all memory to persistent storage (usb drive, hd, etc). 2) locks screen, 3) where you can: log in as a different user 4) or wait 30+ seconds for some kind of magic 'power off'
Except saving memory may take a long time (on say a 10mb/s flash drive) and if you have any tasks running like say a fileshare or bittorrent or whatever then you have to freeze them at the locked screen. And what does it mean to "power off"? Do you really want your bittorrent to stop because your computer just assumed after 30 seconds of idle it could shut down completely? If you actually want the power off you have to wait until it says "ok to turn power off" before unplugging the cord at full system power because your system doesn't even have an "off" button?
Solve the actual problem. People don't want to tell the computer what to do, they want to inform the computer of what they are doing. So instead of shutdown you have "Sign off". Instead of sleep you have "I'm Away". Instead of lock you have "I'm Idle". Like instant messengers. If people can say "Away->Extended Away" vs "Away->Eating" then this isn't a burden of choice at all. The computer can then magically do the right thing because it knows what you are going to do. Plus it can inform other computers of what you are doing, so you don't have to select "Eating" in gaim/trillian AND in the system menu.
Since the darts should hit with some sort of normal distribution with the "top" of the bell curve being the center of the paper, the lesson learned here is that as the companies symbols tend toward "MMMM" the probability of success goes up. This explains the success of 3M (symbol MMM) and of course my newly formed company "MMMM, Inc". We sell flavored snake oil, and let me tell you investor confidence in the flavored snake oil market has never been higher.
One could accomplish the same thing, by writing the vote, and a human readable JPEG image to DVD
You've obviously never written a JPEG decoder if you think the files are human-readable.
Also paper doesn't have to be the solution... it could be anything large enough that people can sense and permanent enough to count. For example, you could engrave your vote on say a bar of soap or write your vote in ketchup on a hamburger -- as long as everybody is issued the same voting matter. Plus, this actually encourages people to stay and watch the counting since they'd get to consume the votes afterwards. Well since they probably want to hold the votes for a couple months in case of recount you might want to petition your director of elections to use ho-ho's or twinkies.
Piece of paper? Who wants to stick around 'till 10pm to get those leftovers! Blech.
"So I'm not too worried about undue influence on absentee voters."
All the rights you have come from your vote. The constitution is just a paper; elect the wrong people, for long enough, and all your rights all can disappear. Are you going to wait until you actually are coerced to vote a certain way to demand a completely anonymous verifiable election system?
Imagine it was your life on the line; you'll die if somebody knows you voted for somebody besides X. How comfortable are you that the secretary on duty at the election office doesn't know which vote is yours? Sounds like a terrible risk to take. In some places if you vote for the wrong candidate this is literally what happens. Here it isn't the case, yet, because we have anonymous voting.
Absentee ballots are a horrible way to do elections because a) somebody can require you to vote a certain way or you can sell your vote (and prove it) and b) you can't verify anybody else's vote.
The way it is supposed to work is that anybody can watch you vote anonymously (ie behind a curtain) and drop it into a box. They watch the box until the polls close through when it is counted. This gives you [1/NumberOfVotes] anonimity while giving everybody else a completely observable and verifiable election. Absentee doesn't give any of these benefits.
The reason this isn't done in America is because we have a long tradition of election fraud and also we are dumb and uneducated and lazy. Get over it, or do something about it.
Because *if* there are Microsoft's patents then unless Novell can extend usage rights for free to all, not just their "users", then they are in violation of the GPL. Clearly they won't be able to do this as that would effectively indemnify all Linux distros (since you could "patch" SuSE to be Fedora Core for instance). So you see that the other distro's are held in check by threats of lawsuits from Microsoft over patents and SuSe is held in check by lawsuits over copyright from GNU and/or Microsoft subsidiaries that get their GPL code included in the distro (parties with copyright to sue over).
The best response from the community is to boycott SuSE in every way as a distro. The best response from GNU and other rights holders is to immediately sue Novell over violation of GPL license (but this may require showing that there *are* patented code in Linux that SuSE aren't extending rights to use it).
Bad software engineers pick the most complicated solution and complain about how impossible the task is. Good ones find the nugget of truth that makes complicated problems easy. Same here... electronic voting is actually a very very easy problem if you realize the truth: secure systems are not needed at all.
1. You have a computerized vote selection system. This does not need to be secure at all, because it will print out the selected votes onto paper in a human readable form. It can be written in TCL/TK if you want, or Flash, or anything.
2. Voter takes his paper ballot and puts it in a box. This is secure because anybody that wants to can stick around and watch the box all day until counting.
3. When polls close the workers open the boxes and run them through a computerized scanner where the observers see how the ballot is marked, watch a ballot go in and watch the individual tallies change by one. This does not need to be secure because you have citizen observers watching and/or videotaping the process. If you see one for Gore go in and you see his count go down by ten you put your video of it on YouTube.
4. Poll workers call in the results to the the central office, who posts them on the internet listed by individual polling location.
5. Citizens for each polling location verify that their local total is correct.
Simple, effective, fast, and with essentially zero need for security at any step. If there is even ONE concerned citizen per polling location then the results are guarenteed accurate. Contrast this to the current system in at my polling location:
1. select vote on computer
2. read in paper who won
Where it would take a mythical perfect security to have any confidence whatsoever that the counts were accurate. This is NOT a hard problem technologically. It IS a hard problem politically because the corrupt want a corruptable system.
After 9.11 Bush said "I've maxed out this Priest class" and rolled a Warlock. But he hasn't realized yet that Death Coil is on a 2-year timer and diminishing returns against Target(Voter) has made them immune to Fear Effects for the next 30 days.
You and the mods have totally missed the point. "Encoding: gzip" has absolutely no relevance to cross-site scripting (XSS). I mention a.zip as a way to send multiple 'files' in one stream, which *does* solve the problem, not as a way to compress them. Which is why I never mentioned compression.
Here's the problem:
<search_text> user input </search_text>
If you don't quote properly the user can send "<script>...any script... </script>" and the html becomes:
The page loads and the script executes. But if you change HTML so that the scripts are by reference (ex, "<script id=#scriptname"/>) then even if you forget to quote the text, the worst they can do is have it run an existing script in your page.
Note that you don't allow urls for the script since HTML has the problem of letting user input unquoted text be "part" of the document, so the malicious user can still put HTML tags into the final page and thus could just have the id link to a script someplace and get that included. Also by separating the script from the HTML it doesn't mean you have to download a huge script library for each page, for example it could just be links to the scripts the page uses, but outside the html. That's why I said "inline scripts". Even just only allowing scripts to be defined in the page head would almost eliminate the XSS problem.
If Microsoft would just stick to the bloody standards, we'd all be better off.
The real problem is that the standards suck, mostly because they are trying to be 'human readable'. For instance in-line scripts as ascii... if the page were delivered as a.zip where page.html was the html, scripts.js had the javascript, and the html could only refer to the external scripts then XSS would be impossible. Well, at least it would be limited to running the site's existing scripts rather than any arbitrary JavaScript code.
Install Hypervisor [OK] Detect Windows OS [FAIL] Warning: Your system is damaged. Repair by upgrading to Windows 2006 [Y/y]? No dammit!!!! Set Memory Access Policy == slow [OK] Set Network Reliability Helper == unreliable [OK] Set Mean Time To Failure == 3600 [OK] Transition to Grub [OK]
Maybe you've never heard the saying, that those in glass houses should not throw stones? Yes, exactly.
As far as I can tell this 'news story' is about whining that a technological system blocked their attack ad in exactly the same way it blocks attack ads from other parties. Was there any evidence given for example that other videos were marked inapproprate after this one but were cleared before it? Nope. Was there any evidence for even a single claim in the article, for example the claims about Google? Nope. Just some quotes by random people.
A mod gave my post Offtopic for giving an example of actual media censorship on a story about alleged media censorship. It makes me wonder what exactly the topic is if it isn't media censorship... some crackpot whining republicans? youtube's method of blocking inappropriate ads? what?
It's not just that they are dishonest by spinning this video situation, they are also ignoring the countless examples of Republican censorship. For example, several months ago Dean wanted to put up a billboard with no profanity, which essentially just said "We want you to focus on Iraq, Senator X". The DNC had a contract and had already payed for the billboard, but the Republican-owned media company saw the ad and said they didn't like it so they canceled the contract -- despite having put up much more extreme pro-republican billboards.
To me this is far, far worse and it seems to me this company should start with something a little more serious than some spin video getting marked inappropriate by users.
Maybe you picked up on the sarcasm that, yes, actually there has been good music made since 1980. And there have been improvements in kernel design since then too. And languages besides C. And licenses besides GPLv2.
I actually think this is informative because pretty much anybody would have heard something good just visiting with their friends. I suppose Linus is that busy that he never gets out, or maybe he doesn't know people who expose him to new things like this.
In any case, I think it's safe to say the chance of getting a neko or similar into a standard linux kernel is pretty much zero.
As in zero, the number. QED. They are a physical manifestation of this concept, and like mass/0 they have 'undefined' density. Incidentally, this is also the reason why we have String Theory (although that does not actually exist).;-P
-- I don't think QED means that I think it means...
I like how Linus says "taste" is the most important quality for a programmer, but then listens to "various classic-rockish things, ranging from Pink Floyd to the Beatles to Queen and The Who". I guess, like operating systems, there hasn't been anything good since 1980s?
The 'rather documents' are a good lesson on how the 'blogosphere' can fail miserably. Anybody familiar with Rove's past realizes that the content of the document was almost certainly entirely correct with only the format being fake. Even if CBS had done the due diligence in verifying this document that agreed with all their eye witness accounts and determined it was a fraud, they would have had to question everything else with the same information. That's just human nature to transfer the fraud from document to its contents even though there is no logical basis to do so.
The problem with bloggers is that they each have a narrow perspective and clear biases. Few see the big picture, because they don't want to, so the blogs are easy to manipulate. For instance, if we found out that the printer used to print the document was assigned to Rove's office then clearly either he was trying to sabotage the pres (unlikely) or was trying to create a straw-man to knock down (likely). Instead, without knowing where the document came from, the conservative bloggers claim the document was 'fake' so therefore the eyewitnesses were lying and also it was a left-wing hit. Of course this reasoning is pretty stupid if you stop to think about it.
Anyway maybe you count this as a success for bloggers, but don't color me impressed.
Slashdot Mirror
They just need to put the check-out "beep" noise into the card itself -- make the reader charge up a capacitor with induction so the tag has enough power to sound off before it gives up the goods. Then if somebody reads it from 100ft away it still goes "beep" in your wallet and they can blame you for not reporting your RFID code as 'stolen' right away.
Uh, right, so to show CLR running "as well or even better of its equivalent" you compare two entirely different web architectures, J2EE and .NET. Kind of like comparing performance of OpenOffice to MS WordPad and concluding that g++ is much slower than MS c++.
.NET gets a lot of its speed by directly calling C functions, whereas in Java pretty much everything is implemented actually as Java code. This is of course a tradeoff since .NET contains a LOT more functions that can potentially be cracked because they are not run as 'managed' code. In the end it's basically a wash on performance; on actual virtual machine operations Java is in general significantly faster and on API calls .NET is usually quite a bit faster.
To benchmark these is complicated as
DotNET has a couple technical shortcomings when it comes to performance, one being the impossibility of fast interpretation of bytecodes (the instructions depend on the argument types so can't be easily dispatched). Another is using "real" generics, which they thought would improve speed by avoiding some box/unbox operations but it also leads to type explosions and, slow instanceof and casts (for example you could use so much memory just due to instantiated types that CLR has to constantly throw away older code and re-JIT, not to mention poor use of cache).
Watch for yourself. What they dont have a computer history class anymore??
Yeah google is really going to let you decrypt your email at the client... I can see the ads now:
413b57037 buying guide
replacement 6cf46e1dfc quote
fd8869a15cb936d8e59 Free Shipping!
bee5e2b at Amazon
What's sick is that the whole process can be done completely without the possibility of fraud, easily and pretty fast (can count say 1 vote per second):
1. Voter places vote on electronic vote-printing machine
2. Drops physical vote into box
3. After polls close, citizens watch workers open boxes and
4. Show vote, scan into tabulator that shows running total
5. List individual totals for all polling locations on the web/newspaper/wherever.
Because each step is observed by the public there is no fraud possible (unless there is not even one concerned citizen to cover that polling location).
Folding a point is an identity operation so really it's more futile than pointless.
First off all, he's retarded because in the screenshot he gives obviously there is one button for "off" and one for "lock" and one for "other". That's not a lot of choices. There are a lot of subtly different choices after you choose "other", but the answer isn't to have one option that somehow magically does everything right.
His "answer" is one choice that:
1) saves all memory to persistent storage (usb drive, hd, etc).
2) locks screen,
3) where you can: log in as a different user
4) or wait 30+ seconds for some kind of magic 'power off'
Except saving memory may take a long time (on say a 10mb/s flash drive) and if you have any tasks running like say a fileshare or bittorrent or whatever then you have to freeze them at the locked screen. And what does it mean to "power off"? Do you really want your bittorrent to stop because your computer just assumed after 30 seconds of idle it could shut down completely? If you actually want the power off you have to wait until it says "ok to turn power off" before unplugging the cord at full system power because your system doesn't even have an "off" button?
Solve the actual problem. People don't want to tell the computer what to do, they want to inform the computer of what they are doing. So instead of shutdown you have "Sign off". Instead of sleep you have "I'm Away". Instead of lock you have "I'm Idle". Like instant messengers. If people can say "Away->Extended Away" vs "Away->Eating" then this isn't a burden of choice at all. The computer can then magically do the right thing because it knows what you are going to do. Plus it can inform other computers of what you are doing, so you don't have to select "Eating" in gaim/trillian AND in the system menu.
Since the darts should hit with some sort of normal distribution with the "top" of the bell curve being the center of the paper, the lesson learned here is that as the companies symbols tend toward "MMMM" the probability of success goes up. This explains the success of 3M (symbol MMM) and of course my newly formed company "MMMM, Inc". We sell flavored snake oil, and let me tell you investor confidence in the flavored snake oil market has never been higher.
1. Physical
...
...
2. DataLink
6. Presentation
7. Application
8. Tubes
9. Bricks
10. Porn
11. Google
12. YouTube
13. ??
16. Profit
It was hard enough remembering them all back when there were only 7.
One could accomplish the same thing, by writing the vote, and a human readable JPEG image to DVD
You've obviously never written a JPEG decoder if you think the files are human-readable.
Also paper doesn't have to be the solution... it could be anything large enough that people can sense and permanent enough to count. For example, you could engrave your vote on say a bar of soap or write your vote in ketchup on a hamburger -- as long as everybody is issued the same voting matter. Plus, this actually encourages people to stay and watch the counting since they'd get to consume the votes afterwards. Well since they probably want to hold the votes for a couple months in case of recount you might want to petition your director of elections to use ho-ho's or twinkies.
Piece of paper? Who wants to stick around 'till 10pm to get those leftovers! Blech.
"So I'm not too worried about undue influence on absentee voters."
All the rights you have come from your vote. The constitution is just a paper; elect the wrong people, for long enough, and all your rights all can disappear. Are you going to wait until you actually are coerced to vote a certain way to demand a completely anonymous verifiable election system?
Imagine it was your life on the line; you'll die if somebody knows you voted for somebody besides X. How comfortable are you that the secretary on duty at the election office doesn't know which vote is yours? Sounds like a terrible risk to take. In some places if you vote for the wrong candidate this is literally what happens. Here it isn't the case, yet, because we have anonymous voting.
Absentee ballots are a horrible way to do elections because a) somebody can require you to vote a certain way or you can sell your vote (and prove it) and b) you can't verify anybody else's vote.
The way it is supposed to work is that anybody can watch you vote anonymously (ie behind a curtain) and drop it into a box. They watch the box until the polls close through when it is counted. This gives you [1/NumberOfVotes] anonimity while giving everybody else a completely observable and verifiable election. Absentee doesn't give any of these benefits.
The reason this isn't done in America is because we have a long tradition of election fraud and also we are dumb and uneducated and lazy. Get over it, or do something about it.
Because *if* there are Microsoft's patents then unless Novell can extend usage rights for free to all, not just their "users", then they are in violation of the GPL. Clearly they won't be able to do this as that would effectively indemnify all Linux distros (since you could "patch" SuSE to be Fedora Core for instance). So you see that the other distro's are held in check by threats of lawsuits from Microsoft over patents and SuSe is held in check by lawsuits over copyright from GNU and/or Microsoft subsidiaries that get their GPL code included in the distro (parties with copyright to sue over).
The best response from the community is to boycott SuSE in every way as a distro. The best response from GNU and other rights holders is to immediately sue Novell over violation of GPL license (but this may require showing that there *are* patented code in Linux that SuSE aren't extending rights to use it).
Bad software engineers pick the most complicated solution and complain about how impossible the task is. Good ones find the nugget of truth that makes complicated problems easy. Same here... electronic voting is actually a very very easy problem if you realize the truth: secure systems are not needed at all.
1. You have a computerized vote selection system. This does not need to be secure at all, because it will print out the selected votes onto paper in a human readable form. It can be written in TCL/TK if you want, or Flash, or anything.
2. Voter takes his paper ballot and puts it in a box. This is secure because anybody that wants to can stick around and watch the box all day until counting.
3. When polls close the workers open the boxes and run them through a computerized scanner where the observers see how the ballot is marked, watch a ballot go in and watch the individual tallies change by one. This does not need to be secure because you have citizen observers watching and/or videotaping the process. If you see one for Gore go in and you see his count go down by ten you put your video of it on YouTube.
4. Poll workers call in the results to the the central office, who posts them on the internet listed by individual polling location.
5. Citizens for each polling location verify that their local total is correct.
Simple, effective, fast, and with essentially zero need for security at any step. If there is even ONE concerned citizen per polling location then the results are guarenteed accurate. Contrast this to the current system in at my polling location:
1. select vote on computer
2. read in paper who won
Where it would take a mythical perfect security to have any confidence whatsoever that the counts were accurate. This is NOT a hard problem technologically. It IS a hard problem politically because the corrupt want a corruptable system.
After 9.11 Bush said "I've maxed out this Priest class" and rolled a Warlock. But he hasn't realized yet that Death Coil is on a 2-year timer and diminishing returns against Target(Voter) has made them immune to Fear Effects for the next 30 days.
You and the mods have totally missed the point. "Encoding: gzip" has absolutely no relevance to cross-site scripting (XSS). I mention a .zip as a way to send multiple 'files' in one stream, which *does* solve the problem, not as a way to compress them. Which is why I never mentioned compression.
...any script... </script>" and the html becomes:
...any script... </script> </search_text>
Here's the problem:
<search_text> user input </search_text>
If you don't quote properly the user can send "<script>
<search_text> <script>
The page loads and the script executes. But if you change HTML so that the scripts are by reference (ex, "<script id=#scriptname"/>) then even if you forget to quote the text, the worst they can do is have it run an existing script in your page.
Note that you don't allow urls for the script since HTML has the problem of letting user input unquoted text be "part" of the document, so the malicious user can still put HTML tags into the final page and thus could just have the id link to a script someplace and get that included. Also by separating the script from the HTML it doesn't mean you have to download a huge script library for each page, for example it could just be links to the scripts the page uses, but outside the html. That's why I said "inline scripts". Even just only allowing scripts to be defined in the page head would almost eliminate the XSS problem.
The real problem is that the standards suck, mostly because they are trying to be 'human readable'. For instance in-line scripts as ascii... if the page were delivered as a
Welcome to Microsoft Bootcamper 2006!
Boot Progress:
Install Hypervisor [OK]
Detect Windows OS [FAIL]
Warning: Your system is damaged.
Repair by upgrading to Windows 2006 [Y/y]? No dammit!!!!
Set Memory Access Policy == slow [OK]
Set Network Reliability Helper == unreliable [OK]
Set Mean Time To Failure == 3600 [OK]
Transition to Grub [OK]
Maybe you've never heard the saying, that those in glass houses should not throw stones? Yes, exactly.
As far as I can tell this 'news story' is about whining that a technological system blocked their attack ad in exactly the same way it blocks attack ads from other parties. Was there any evidence given for example that other videos were marked inapproprate after this one but were cleared before it? Nope. Was there any evidence for even a single claim in the article, for example the claims about Google? Nope. Just some quotes by random people.
A mod gave my post Offtopic for giving an example of actual media censorship on a story about alleged media censorship. It makes me wonder what exactly the topic is if it isn't media censorship... some crackpot whining republicans? youtube's method of blocking inappropriate ads? what?
It's not just that they are dishonest by spinning this video situation, they are also ignoring the countless examples of Republican censorship. For example, several months ago Dean wanted to put up a billboard with no profanity, which essentially just said "We want you to focus on Iraq, Senator X". The DNC had a contract and had already payed for the billboard, but the Republican-owned media company saw the ad and said they didn't like it so they canceled the contract -- despite having put up much more extreme pro-republican billboards.
To me this is far, far worse and it seems to me this company should start with something a little more serious than some spin video getting marked inappropriate by users.
So wait... is FSU the #2 exporter of oil, or is oil the #2 exporter of FSU?
In FSU, my jokes comprehend me.
Maybe you picked up on the sarcasm that, yes, actually there has been good music made since 1980. And there have been improvements in kernel design since then too. And languages besides C. And licenses besides GPLv2.
I actually think this is informative because pretty much anybody would have heard something good just visiting with their friends. I suppose Linus is that busy that he never gets out, or maybe he doesn't know people who expose him to new things like this.
In any case, I think it's safe to say the chance of getting a neko or similar into a standard linux kernel is pretty much zero.
There is an easy proof that black holes exist:
;-P
0
As in zero, the number. QED. They are a physical manifestation of this concept, and like mass/0 they have 'undefined' density. Incidentally, this is also the reason why we have String Theory (although that does not actually exist).
--
I don't think QED means that I think it means...
I like how Linus says "taste" is the most important quality for a programmer, but then listens to "various classic-rockish things, ranging from Pink Floyd to the Beatles to Queen and The Who". I guess, like operating systems, there hasn't been anything good since 1980s?
The 'rather documents' are a good lesson on how the 'blogosphere' can fail miserably. Anybody familiar with Rove's past realizes that the content of the document was almost certainly entirely correct with only the format being fake. Even if CBS had done the due diligence in verifying this document that agreed with all their eye witness accounts and determined it was a fraud, they would have had to question everything else with the same information. That's just human nature to transfer the fraud from document to its contents even though there is no logical basis to do so.
The problem with bloggers is that they each have a narrow perspective and clear biases. Few see the big picture, because they don't want to, so the blogs are easy to manipulate. For instance, if we found out that the printer used to print the document was assigned to Rove's office then clearly either he was trying to sabotage the pres (unlikely) or was trying to create a straw-man to knock down (likely). Instead, without knowing where the document came from, the conservative bloggers claim the document was 'fake' so therefore the eyewitnesses were lying and also it was a left-wing hit. Of course this reasoning is pretty stupid if you stop to think about it.
Anyway maybe you count this as a success for bloggers, but don't color me impressed.