If I said that all content must be charged for regardless of type or quality, I'd be a nut. Yet on Slashdot we regularly have people saying that no content should be charged for, which is just as crazy.
The Internet has changed the game. There are many types of content which you used to be able to charge for that you no longer can. For example, there is almost no sports coverage you can charge for because there are 10 zillion sports fans will to provide almost as good coverage for free.
But there is plenty of content that "charity and love" have not and will not ever produced. Open source projects have produced amazing operating systems, servers, etc. - but have not yet produced a single World of Warcraft or Wii Sports. We've seen a lot of funny YouTube videos, but no one is producing the next Batman movie for free and posting it to YouTube.
It's amazing that the same people who say that the advertisers should pay for the whole system are also the ones trying to cut advertising out of their feed - who use AdBlock, who listen to XM because they can't stand constant advertisements, who use DVRs to skip past ads, and who get movies on NetFlix because watching them on TV have too many ads. And the same people who also think that the prices of media content - like DVDs - are way too high and need to come down.
Well, guess what. Free content and no ads means no content. Free content and ads means a LOT of advertising. You want the next movie you see to be interrupted by an ad every 2 minutes?
A lot of people on Slashdot want to eat their cake and have it too. Content should be free and supported by ads - but we should get to block/skip ads!
Do me a favor and call me when someone posts a home-made movie on YouTube that is, I dunno, let's say 10% as well-made, written, and acted as Star Trek.
People are willfully misrepresenting what Diller is saying. Diller is a media executive. He's not talking about Slashdot or your blog. Believe me, Diller doesn't give a shit if you keep posting reviews of local restaurants or Linux tips on your own web site, just like media executives 20 years ago wouldn't give a shit about a local church newsletter.
What Diller is talking about are things that are not so easily produced by "a thousand people putting out far more content for nothing." And the truth is, 1,000 people putting out content for nothing are still not going to produce Up!, or put out a daily newspaper with world-wide investigative reporting.
His point is that there are too many of those "premium content" services chasing too few advertising dollars to be free. Just like cable or print newspapers, we're going to need to move to a mixed advertising and fee-for-service model.
Are a lot of local newspapers going out of business because the Internet has destroyed the model of simply reprinting the AP feed in order to sell classified ads? Absolutely. You can get the AP feed from tons of web sites, and classified ads have been taken over by Craigslist.
Maybe AP content will continue to be free on the web, if enough web sites see a traffic boost from it worth the cost of subscribing, then the cost of generating AP content can be kept low by spreading it across many web sites, and end users won't have to bear it.
But Diller is absolutely right that premium content will be paid for one way or another. There is simply no model right now that supports the free distribution of movies that cost $140 million to make and would additional require huge amounts of bandwidth to distribute. There is no model that will support free access to quality content like the Christian Science Monitor, The Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker, or Wall Street Journal.
Music may be an exception to this. Bands may make enough money from touring to view albums as free advertising. And music production has come down so much in cost that there may be enough people creating music that the supply essentially prevents anyone from charging for it.
Nevertheless, I think Diller is absolutely right that we are moving away from the free model for many types of content. The free content to generate advertising model has been tried twice now, and it's failed miserably both times.
This is impressive. Not only didn't you read the RTFA - which doesn't discourage people from blogging, but instead interviews someone who has successfully created a career from blogging - you didn't even RTFS, which is attacking the WSJ for saying that you can make money just from ad-blogging
Jesus. Forget about engaging brain before posting. Engage eyes before posting!
Do you understand that it's a long, painful death for all newspapers right now? And that includes all those newspapers whose web sites are free to the public (the New York Times almost closed the Boston Globe last week!).
Murdoch - who has built a multi-billion empire from a start in newspapers - may actually understand the newspaper business better than you do. My guess is that he is counting on most newspapers to go out of business. The advertising model is simply not profitable enough to support most newspapers. Once the news industry has shaken down to far fewer sources of information, then a hybrid subscription + advertising model actually becomes quite plausible again. You have a few sources doing real investigative journalism (in the US, let's say that we are left with four daily newspapers - the Washington Post, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times) and those who care about the news subscribe to one of the four of them on their Kindles. Subscription costs can be lower, because: A) Newsprint makes up 20% of newspaper costs; B) They will gain subscribers at the cost of their defunct local competitors and their readers who used to use their free sites, and spread the fixed reporting costs across far more subscribers.
Seriously, once the Boston Globe goes out of business, are all the people in Boston who are used to reading the newspaper every day going to stop reading the news? Or are they going to find another newspaper to read? And when there are only 4 major newspapers, will those 4 still feed into the AP to provide free news through Internet feeds? Or will they decide to control their own business model?
Funny that, I know SIGINT (Australian signals intelligence) don't trust ANY form of drive erasure, with the cost of drives, they just burn them.
Considering the amount of budget these departments, why would they take the risk?
I'm not so sure the original poster is correct that the DoD is fine with 7 passes. Consider ISL 2007-01. It says that "Sanitization of memory and media is required when the memory or media is no longer needed to store classified information. Clearing is required before and after periods of processing as a method of ensuring need-to-know protection, and prior to maintenance."
And if you look at the matrix on page 19, overwriting is not acceptable for sanitization. Only degaussing or destruction are acceptable. It sounds like whoever disposed of this hard drive just did not follow guidelines, or that the drive was disposed of before ISL 2007-01 was released.
So far, as expected, every comment is about how stupid these old media dinosaurs are to repeat the mistakes of the RIAA/MPAA.
Let me ask a question. If the newspapers that create the AP content are going out of business, where will the content come from? And if everyone simply copies the AP articles without paying for it, where will the revenue stream come from to pay the writers?
I know, I know, everything on the Internet is a commodity now. But tell me - what happens when there is no one left to produce that commodity?
At some point the Slashdot crowd is going to have to face up to the fact that content producers need to get paid if they are going to continue producing. Just like movies - it's easy to criticize the MPAA, but who is going to pay the millions of dollars to shoot a major movie if everyone simply copies content without paying for it?
Since I don't have a subscription to one of the browser market stat vendors, and Google removed their browser stats in 2004, I don't know the answer to this question. But I doubt you do either. I can't prove that it's a significant number. But you can't prove that it's only a vocal minority of cranks either.
But we do know that: 1) There was a LOT of complaining about the AwesomeBar when it came out; 2) User experience can make a huge difference in market share (see, Apple) 3) At least some people have stuck with 2.0 because of it; 4) At least some people have switched to Opera because of it.
But the best proof we have that it's not just a small number of cranks? The fact that Mozilla decided to expend effort to allow people to go back to the old location bar in Firefox 3.5. If this were only important to a very small number of people, they would not have bothered. I'm sure they have lots of other code to write over at Mozilla. But they chose to dedicate resources and time to fix this. We may not have the statistics at our fingertips, I'm sure that Mozilla does track browser usage very closely, and knows exactly how their upgrade rates compared to previous upgrades.
So you can question my arguments, and I can question yours. But I think Mozilla's actions speak loudest of all.
This gets brought up every stinking time we discuss Firefox. But once again - oldbar does not get you totally back to the old location bar. There are still important differences. Yes, lots of people do not like Awesome Bar. Yes, many people are actually refusing to upgrade because of it.
What the hell does that mean? GM doesn't have oil company representatives on their board. If you'd like to see, I suggest you Google search GM's board and check out the board member bios.
Also, if oil companies are stopping GM from bringing electric cars to market, then how do you explain GM betting the ranch on the Volt? Wouldn't GM have *accepted* this argument that electric cars don't make sense, rather than defend their electric car project?
But hey, didn't stop this post from being modded to 5. I guess any paranoia about oil companies automatically gets modded up...
1) Putin did not address the economy well. Rising commodity prices addressed the Russian economy. No structural problems were addressed, and until they are, Russia will falter every time commodity prices go down. What happened to the scientific prowess of the Soviet Union? Putin has not restored that. Russia is not a leader in any high-tech industries, despite what Putin thinks.
3) Putin is asserting Russia's interests in a typically moronic Russian manner. That is to say, he is trying to set Russia up as a Great Power and an ideological competitor to the West. But it doesn't have the population, resources, or technology to do this, so all it is doing is spending its money wastefully on these vanity projects. I mean, take something like selling missiles to Syria. It gains Russia almost nothing (some small money in arms sales and close ties with an country that still leaves Russia without any real leverage in the Middle East), but Russia pursues it because it is a poke in the eye to America. Much of Russia's policy seems more geared towards annoying the US (to prove that Russia can do what it wants) than doing anything useful for Russia.
Let me put it this way. In 20 years, China and India will be rich and fully integrated into the global system. Russia, which 20 years ago was far ahead of both, will likely not be. For that, Putin needs to answer.
4) What Dell said is standard business/political talk. It's a polite way of asking, "Is there anything we can invest in that would make both of us rich?" That's why politicians go on foreign trips trying to drum up business from investors, and why countries fly their own investors overseas to meet with foreign countries to solidify relations. Even if there are no specific opportunities for Dell right now, it is incredibly stupid for Putin to respond this one. It just sends a message to foreign investors that they are not wanted in Russia (a message already sent by Putin's actions to seize foreign investments in Russia's oil). How does eliminating foreign investment help the Russian people?
I fail to see how a failure to address the real issue is representative of the American side of the Cold War. In case you didn't notice, America's economy grew massively throughout the Cold War, the highway system was built, the Internet was created, civilian space exploration stood up, civil rights and women's rights were achieved, etc. It's not like the US stood still during that time.
If the advice of foreign consultants was so bad - why has it worked fine for the other members of the Eastern bloc? If the fault is of the foreigners coming up telling Russia what to do, then how did Poland end up democratic and prosperous while Russia is autocratic and at the whim of oil/gas prices?
I've been using Mozilla since M12 or so, but the awesome bar drives me crazy. If I start typing "nytimes," I want it to find www.nytimes.com. I don't want it to find a blog entry whose title is "NYTimes Fails Again" or some page at the nytimes that I visited more recently than the homepage (like www.nytimes.com/oped/krugman14.html).
I know the sites I browse to. I just want Firefox to autocomplete to the domain. I don't need it to search my browser history for me, because I know where I want to go.
I'm not saying that the Awesome Bar is bad, or attacking people who do like it. I just don't like it, and I finally decided recently to downgrade back to 2.0. I hope Firefox 3.1 gives us a lot more control over how the Awesome Bar operates.
I'm hoping someone can help me understand a part of Tuft's response. They say, on page 4:
"Occasionally, only one MAC address comes up in the ARP database...Therefore, if the IP address in question does not serve a high volume of users, there is a reasonable probability that the single matched MAC address was, in fact, the computer at use at the time of the alleged infraction...However, any such identification lacks the reasonable technical certainty of DHCP described above, since it is technically possible that another unidentified user accessed the system and used the IP address without being recorded in the ARP database."
In what scenario would DHCP capture an "unidentified user" while ARP would not?
The summary contradicts itself. On the one hand, it suggests that the policy is not effective because real terrorists "claim to have lost their ID." But on the other hand, it says that people who claim to have lost their idea "undergo a pat-down and a hand search of [their] carry-on bag." I don't know - I think that a more rigorous search of terrorists would actually do a lot of good.
If the summary just said that terrorists would use fake IDs (which is what I would suspect they'd do), then the argument would hold water. I guess that Slashdot is so primed to dismiss everything TSA/the government does to fight terrorism that one doesn't even need to craft consistent arguments any more.
This is an inane argument. There is not a bit of evidence that Al Qaeda or any of the Islamic terrorist groups are trying to undermine America by eroding our civil liberties. You may not have noticed it, but Islamic terrorists are not exactly big libertarians. Religious fundamentalists tend not to be. The idea that they recognize the power of Jeffersonian ideals and are therefore trying to move us away from them is farcical.
If you want to argue that such erosion of civil liberties is bad for the United States, such a case can be made. But to argue that this was the terrorists' intent is to project your own beliefs onto them.
Actually, I did RTFA. The headline is "Hans Reiser Offers To Lead Cops to Nina's Body." And if Reiser said to the DA that he couldn't do it, they wouldn't be having these negotiations. The only way these negotiations can exist is if he can provide a body.
Why don't you show me where it says in the article that they are offering it to him - it actually sounds like he is offering that to them. Or please stop being so high and mighty about suggesting that others RTFA.
Yes, but I think it's safe to say that after a conviction and then Reiser providing the body, it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet some people on Slashdot continue to assume Reiser's innocence! Take, for example, a post above, currently modded 5, which says, "Glad I'm not in the US, getting life in prison for something that has way too many loose ends, just isn't right."
Way too many loose ends? Reiser said he had nothing to do with the murder, now he's saying he knows where the body is. Sorry folks, but if he hadn't killed her, he wouldn't have any idea where the body is.
The fact that such a post was modded up shows exactly the grandparents' point, which is that Slashdot (and all we geeks who think so highly of our intelligence) is just as tribal as everyone else.
There's a high correlation between abusers and child porn owners, but no known causation that I'm aware of. This is the funniest thing I've read on Slashdot in AGES. Yeah, I can't think of any possible causation between viewing child porn and engaging in abuse of children.
Obviously, there's not a 1 to 1 relation, but to pretend that you can't think of a connection - well, you're either an idiot, or you have more chutzpah than I can imagine.:)
This happened to me a few weeks ago. It's a repugnant practice - and I am far from a knee-jerk, anti-corporate person. But just because my friend made the mistake of looking up our domain using NSI, and we needed it in a rush, we were forced to buy it from NSI, even though we could have gotten it for a fraction of the cost somewhere else.
The service that registrars provide is so basic, if someone can charge NSI's prices, it means that there is a market failure.
That's absurd - this has nothing to do with Microsoft, because Microsoft is not a player in federal government IT consulting. The major players are IBM, Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton, etc. Microsoft has nothing to do with this.
What I suspect is that EPA blew a whistle without realizing that - due to this agreement in place between federal agencies - it would cut IBM out of new federal work altogether. That's almost certainly overkill - no one wants to take one of the major players out of the game just because of corruption at tiny, inconsequential EPA (sorry guys, but EPA is a very small fish in federal government).
I think Apple has been coasting on its reputation for UI and its success with the iPod UI ever since Jobs came back, rather than any actual work they have been doing with MacOS UI. I used to own a Mac, and thought the interface was fantastic, but I really thought that MacOS X was a step backwards in the interface.
Just enough time to post about it.:) Harvard Business Review carried an article within the last year which talked about the difficulty of designing simple products for consumers. One of the problems they found was that consumers always SAY that they want more features, but then IN PRACTICE are happier with products that are simple to use and do a few features well.
This may seem common sense, but there was actually a study done to confirm this bias, and, frankly, common sense isn't always so common. That goes a long way to explaining why Apple is doing well again - Jobs is basically dictating how you use the computer, and although that does not seem like a good thing, most users actually appreciate the elimination of the extra complexity they don't need.
Slashdot Mirror
If I said that all content must be charged for regardless of type or quality, I'd be a nut. Yet on Slashdot we regularly have people saying that no content should be charged for, which is just as crazy.
The Internet has changed the game. There are many types of content which you used to be able to charge for that you no longer can. For example, there is almost no sports coverage you can charge for because there are 10 zillion sports fans will to provide almost as good coverage for free.
But there is plenty of content that "charity and love" have not and will not ever produced. Open source projects have produced amazing operating systems, servers, etc. - but have not yet produced a single World of Warcraft or Wii Sports. We've seen a lot of funny YouTube videos, but no one is producing the next Batman movie for free and posting it to YouTube.
It's amazing that the same people who say that the advertisers should pay for the whole system are also the ones trying to cut advertising out of their feed - who use AdBlock, who listen to XM because they can't stand constant advertisements, who use DVRs to skip past ads, and who get movies on NetFlix because watching them on TV have too many ads. And the same people who also think that the prices of media content - like DVDs - are way too high and need to come down.
Well, guess what. Free content and no ads means no content. Free content and ads means a LOT of advertising. You want the next movie you see to be interrupted by an ad every 2 minutes?
A lot of people on Slashdot want to eat their cake and have it too. Content should be free and supported by ads - but we should get to block/skip ads!
Do me a favor and call me when someone posts a home-made movie on YouTube that is, I dunno, let's say 10% as well-made, written, and acted as Star Trek.
People are willfully misrepresenting what Diller is saying. Diller is a media executive. He's not talking about Slashdot or your blog. Believe me, Diller doesn't give a shit if you keep posting reviews of local restaurants or Linux tips on your own web site, just like media executives 20 years ago wouldn't give a shit about a local church newsletter.
What Diller is talking about are things that are not so easily produced by "a thousand people putting out far more content for nothing." And the truth is, 1,000 people putting out content for nothing are still not going to produce Up!, or put out a daily newspaper with world-wide investigative reporting.
His point is that there are too many of those "premium content" services chasing too few advertising dollars to be free. Just like cable or print newspapers, we're going to need to move to a mixed advertising and fee-for-service model.
Are a lot of local newspapers going out of business because the Internet has destroyed the model of simply reprinting the AP feed in order to sell classified ads? Absolutely. You can get the AP feed from tons of web sites, and classified ads have been taken over by Craigslist.
Maybe AP content will continue to be free on the web, if enough web sites see a traffic boost from it worth the cost of subscribing, then the cost of generating AP content can be kept low by spreading it across many web sites, and end users won't have to bear it.
But Diller is absolutely right that premium content will be paid for one way or another. There is simply no model right now that supports the free distribution of movies that cost $140 million to make and would additional require huge amounts of bandwidth to distribute. There is no model that will support free access to quality content like the Christian Science Monitor, The Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker, or Wall Street Journal.
Music may be an exception to this. Bands may make enough money from touring to view albums as free advertising. And music production has come down so much in cost that there may be enough people creating music that the supply essentially prevents anyone from charging for it.
Nevertheless, I think Diller is absolutely right that we are moving away from the free model for many types of content. The free content to generate advertising model has been tried twice now, and it's failed miserably both times.
This is impressive. Not only didn't you read the RTFA - which doesn't discourage people from blogging, but instead interviews someone who has successfully created a career from blogging - you didn't even RTFS, which is attacking the WSJ for saying that you can make money just from ad-blogging
Jesus. Forget about engaging brain before posting. Engage eyes before posting!
Do you understand that it's a long, painful death for all newspapers right now? And that includes all those newspapers whose web sites are free to the public (the New York Times almost closed the Boston Globe last week!).
Murdoch - who has built a multi-billion empire from a start in newspapers - may actually understand the newspaper business better than you do. My guess is that he is counting on most newspapers to go out of business. The advertising model is simply not profitable enough to support most newspapers. Once the news industry has shaken down to far fewer sources of information, then a hybrid subscription + advertising model actually becomes quite plausible again. You have a few sources doing real investigative journalism (in the US, let's say that we are left with four daily newspapers - the Washington Post, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times) and those who care about the news subscribe to one of the four of them on their Kindles. Subscription costs can be lower, because: A) Newsprint makes up 20% of newspaper costs; B) They will gain subscribers at the cost of their defunct local competitors and their readers who used to use their free sites, and spread the fixed reporting costs across far more subscribers.
Seriously, once the Boston Globe goes out of business, are all the people in Boston who are used to reading the newspaper every day going to stop reading the news? Or are they going to find another newspaper to read? And when there are only 4 major newspapers, will those 4 still feed into the AP to provide free news through Internet feeds? Or will they decide to control their own business model?
I'm not so sure the original poster is correct that the DoD is fine with 7 passes. Consider ISL 2007-01. It says that "Sanitization of memory and media is required when the memory or media is no longer needed to store classified information. Clearing is required before and after periods of processing as a method of ensuring need-to-know protection, and prior to maintenance."
And if you look at the matrix on page 19, overwriting is not acceptable for sanitization. Only degaussing or destruction are acceptable. It sounds like whoever disposed of this hard drive just did not follow guidelines, or that the drive was disposed of before ISL 2007-01 was released.
So far, as expected, every comment is about how stupid these old media dinosaurs are to repeat the mistakes of the RIAA/MPAA.
Let me ask a question. If the newspapers that create the AP content are going out of business, where will the content come from? And if everyone simply copies the AP articles without paying for it, where will the revenue stream come from to pay the writers?
I know, I know, everything on the Internet is a commodity now. But tell me - what happens when there is no one left to produce that commodity?
At some point the Slashdot crowd is going to have to face up to the fact that content producers need to get paid if they are going to continue producing. Just like movies - it's easy to criticize the MPAA, but who is going to pay the millions of dollars to shoot a major movie if everyone simply copies content without paying for it?
Since I don't have a subscription to one of the browser market stat vendors, and Google removed their browser stats in 2004, I don't know the answer to this question. But I doubt you do either. I can't prove that it's a significant number. But you can't prove that it's only a vocal minority of cranks either.
But we do know that:
1) There was a LOT of complaining about the AwesomeBar when it came out;
2) User experience can make a huge difference in market share (see, Apple)
3) At least some people have stuck with 2.0 because of it;
4) At least some people have switched to Opera because of it.
But the best proof we have that it's not just a small number of cranks? The fact that Mozilla decided to expend effort to allow people to go back to the old location bar in Firefox 3.5. If this were only important to a very small number of people, they would not have bothered. I'm sure they have lots of other code to write over at Mozilla. But they chose to dedicate resources and time to fix this. We may not have the statistics at our fingertips, I'm sure that Mozilla does track browser usage very closely, and knows exactly how their upgrade rates compared to previous upgrades.
So you can question my arguments, and I can question yours. But I think Mozilla's actions speak loudest of all.
This gets brought up every stinking time we discuss Firefox. But once again - oldbar does not get you totally back to the old location bar. There are still important differences. Yes, lots of people do not like Awesome Bar. Yes, many people are actually refusing to upgrade because of it.
What the hell does that mean? GM doesn't have oil company representatives on their board. If you'd like to see, I suggest you Google search GM's board and check out the board member bios.
Also, if oil companies are stopping GM from bringing electric cars to market, then how do you explain GM betting the ranch on the Volt? Wouldn't GM have *accepted* this argument that electric cars don't make sense, rather than defend their electric car project?
But hey, didn't stop this post from being modded to 5. I guess any paranoia about oil companies automatically gets modded up...
1) Putin did not address the economy well. Rising commodity prices addressed the Russian economy. No structural problems were addressed, and until they are, Russia will falter every time commodity prices go down. What happened to the scientific prowess of the Soviet Union? Putin has not restored that. Russia is not a leader in any high-tech industries, despite what Putin thinks.
3) Putin is asserting Russia's interests in a typically moronic Russian manner. That is to say, he is trying to set Russia up as a Great Power and an ideological competitor to the West. But it doesn't have the population, resources, or technology to do this, so all it is doing is spending its money wastefully on these vanity projects. I mean, take something like selling missiles to Syria. It gains Russia almost nothing (some small money in arms sales and close ties with an country that still leaves Russia without any real leverage in the Middle East), but Russia pursues it because it is a poke in the eye to America. Much of Russia's policy seems more geared towards annoying the US (to prove that Russia can do what it wants) than doing anything useful for Russia.
Let me put it this way. In 20 years, China and India will be rich and fully integrated into the global system. Russia, which 20 years ago was far ahead of both, will likely not be. For that, Putin needs to answer.
4) What Dell said is standard business/political talk. It's a polite way of asking, "Is there anything we can invest in that would make both of us rich?" That's why politicians go on foreign trips trying to drum up business from investors, and why countries fly their own investors overseas to meet with foreign countries to solidify relations. Even if there are no specific opportunities for Dell right now, it is incredibly stupid for Putin to respond this one. It just sends a message to foreign investors that they are not wanted in Russia (a message already sent by Putin's actions to seize foreign investments in Russia's oil). How does eliminating foreign investment help the Russian people?
I fail to see how a failure to address the real issue is representative of the American side of the Cold War. In case you didn't notice, America's economy grew massively throughout the Cold War, the highway system was built, the Internet was created, civilian space exploration stood up, civil rights and women's rights were achieved, etc. It's not like the US stood still during that time.
If the advice of foreign consultants was so bad - why has it worked fine for the other members of the Eastern bloc? If the fault is of the foreigners coming up telling Russia what to do, then how did Poland end up democratic and prosperous while Russia is autocratic and at the whim of oil/gas prices?
I've been using Mozilla since M12 or so, but the awesome bar drives me crazy. If I start typing "nytimes," I want it to find www.nytimes.com. I don't want it to find a blog entry whose title is "NYTimes Fails Again" or some page at the nytimes that I visited more recently than the homepage (like www.nytimes.com/oped/krugman14.html).
I know the sites I browse to. I just want Firefox to autocomplete to the domain. I don't need it to search my browser history for me, because I know where I want to go.
I'm not saying that the Awesome Bar is bad, or attacking people who do like it. I just don't like it, and I finally decided recently to downgrade back to 2.0. I hope Firefox 3.1 gives us a lot more control over how the Awesome Bar operates.
I'm hoping someone can help me understand a part of Tuft's response. They say, on page 4:
"Occasionally, only one MAC address comes up in the ARP database...Therefore, if the IP address in question does not serve a high volume of users, there is a reasonable probability that the single matched MAC address was, in fact, the computer at use at the time of the alleged infraction...However, any such identification lacks the reasonable technical certainty of DHCP described above, since it is technically possible that another unidentified user accessed the system and used the IP address without being recorded in the ARP database."
In what scenario would DHCP capture an "unidentified user" while ARP would not?
The summary contradicts itself. On the one hand, it suggests that the policy is not effective because real terrorists "claim to have lost their ID." But on the other hand, it says that people who claim to have lost their idea "undergo a pat-down and a hand search of [their] carry-on bag." I don't know - I think that a more rigorous search of terrorists would actually do a lot of good.
If the summary just said that terrorists would use fake IDs (which is what I would suspect they'd do), then the argument would hold water. I guess that Slashdot is so primed to dismiss everything TSA/the government does to fight terrorism that one doesn't even need to craft consistent arguments any more.
This is an inane argument. There is not a bit of evidence that Al Qaeda or any of the Islamic terrorist groups are trying to undermine America by eroding our civil liberties. You may not have noticed it, but Islamic terrorists are not exactly big libertarians. Religious fundamentalists tend not to be. The idea that they recognize the power of Jeffersonian ideals and are therefore trying to move us away from them is farcical.
If you want to argue that such erosion of civil liberties is bad for the United States, such a case can be made. But to argue that this was the terrorists' intent is to project your own beliefs onto them.
Actually, I did RTFA. The headline is "Hans Reiser Offers To Lead Cops to Nina's Body." And if Reiser said to the DA that he couldn't do it, they wouldn't be having these negotiations. The only way these negotiations can exist is if he can provide a body.
Why don't you show me where it says in the article that they are offering it to him - it actually sounds like he is offering that to them. Or please stop being so high and mighty about suggesting that others RTFA.
Yes, but I think it's safe to say that after a conviction and then Reiser providing the body, it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet some people on Slashdot continue to assume Reiser's innocence! Take, for example, a post above, currently modded 5, which says, "Glad I'm not in the US, getting life in prison for something that has way too many loose ends, just isn't right."
Way too many loose ends? Reiser said he had nothing to do with the murder, now he's saying he knows where the body is. Sorry folks, but if he hadn't killed her, he wouldn't have any idea where the body is.
The fact that such a post was modded up shows exactly the grandparents' point, which is that Slashdot (and all we geeks who think so highly of our intelligence) is just as tribal as everyone else.
Obviously, there's not a 1 to 1 relation, but to pretend that you can't think of a connection - well, you're either an idiot, or you have more chutzpah than I can imagine.
This happened to me a few weeks ago. It's a repugnant practice - and I am far from a knee-jerk, anti-corporate person. But just because my friend made the mistake of looking up our domain using NSI, and we needed it in a rush, we were forced to buy it from NSI, even though we could have gotten it for a fraction of the cost somewhere else.
The service that registrars provide is so basic, if someone can charge NSI's prices, it means that there is a market failure.
That's absurd - this has nothing to do with Microsoft, because Microsoft is not a player in federal government IT consulting. The major players are IBM, Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton, etc. Microsoft has nothing to do with this.
What I suspect is that EPA blew a whistle without realizing that - due to this agreement in place between federal agencies - it would cut IBM out of new federal work altogether. That's almost certainly overkill - no one wants to take one of the major players out of the game just because of corruption at tiny, inconsequential EPA (sorry guys, but EPA is a very small fish in federal government).
I think Apple has been coasting on its reputation for UI and its success with the iPod UI ever since Jobs came back, rather than any actual work they have been doing with MacOS UI. I used to own a Mac, and thought the interface was fantastic, but I really thought that MacOS X was a step backwards in the interface.
Just enough time to post about it. :) Harvard Business Review carried an article within the last year which talked about the difficulty of designing simple products for consumers. One of the problems they found was that consumers always SAY that they want more features, but then IN PRACTICE are happier with products that are simple to use and do a few features well.
This may seem common sense, but there was actually a study done to confirm this bias, and, frankly, common sense isn't always so common. That goes a long way to explaining why Apple is doing well again - Jobs is basically dictating how you use the computer, and although that does not seem like a good thing, most users actually appreciate the elimination of the extra complexity they don't need.