This might be the scariest thing I've read on Slashdot all day. It betrays a fascist or oligarchical point of view, where the Leaders know best and the Public are ignorant rubes who must be led to a greater future against their will. It implies that it is right to control information or withold from the "skittish" public because it would just upset them and cause trouble.
I don't know where you're posting from, but in my country, the U.S., that goes against everything the country was founded on and stands for. We are a government for the people, by the people. The public rules the roost around here and if you don't like it you can move to Myanmar or North Korea or some other fascist state where daddy knows best.
Since 9/11 the U.S. federal government has become more and more fascist--seeing the need to control and limit information to the public for their own good, making decisions in isolation and resisting the efforts of others to inform or influence them. Opinions like the parents are wholly part of the problem and should be attacked wherever they are expressed.
I'm an adult citizen, responsible and free, and legally entitled to hear all sides and make my own decision about things, thanks.
The second-greatest success of the special interests and political elites was convincing the public that they are powerless to direct their own country. The greatest success was convincing them that they don't want to.
I lived in Alexandria, VA at the time and watched it over the air. I can't remember whether it was live national (Today show or something), or whether a local station just picked up the feed. Being so close to DC the local stations sometimes carried stuff like shuttle launches, snips of hearings, etc. that probably didn't make it on the air in other parts of the nation.
I too was home sick from school and I have the same memory--build up, lift off, disintegration, then semi-controlled chaos--cameras shifting, cutting to other cameras, stammering announcers ("obviously there's been a malfunction of some kind...").
That was a pretty heavy day, as I was a big fan of the space program and one of my earliest memories was the first shuttle launch on a little black and white TV (I was 5). It all came flooding back when I heard about Columbia.
It's much easier to hold deep depth of field with a wide angle lens than a normal or telephoto. With a 24 f4 lens I've hand-held shots with depth of field from a few feet in front of me to infinity. In addition the perspective of a wide angle view creates greater apparent depth in the image, so the bird and demonstrators would look farther apart in the print than they actually were.
Likewise a telephoto lens compresses perspective, and makes all the cool background shots possible that the paranoid poster refers to. A person does not have to be walking right in front of a huge poster of Saddam. With a 400mm lens the photographer can simply wait for someone to walk between him and a poster 100 feet away, and the compressed persepective makes the poster look huge in the background.
Resolution matters too. If there is a little bit of motion blur it is unlikely to show up in magazine or (especially) newspaper printings, because of the rather coarse dot pitch. So you can hand-hold at a much lower shutter speed than you would for fine art. I've hand-held a 24mm lens down to 1/8 sec. and gotten usable shots.
Ultimately the paranoid poster is undermined by the long history of photojournalism, which predates digital manipulation by many decades, and whose history includes many interesting shots like the one he descibed.
That requires accurate measurement of precipitation across (sometimes) many square miles of glacier - something we are not doing. So your 'control' is loose at best.
The precision of the data constrains the precision of the conclusion, yes that is true in all science. It does not necessarily invalidate all conclusions. Estimating your potential error is part of doing research.
No, this means that less snow is falling than is required to replenish the glacier. The historical average is meaningless in this instance.
Actually it does not necessarily mean that--did you read what I wrote? A glacier can shrink regardless of how much snow falls on it, if the rate of melting exceeds the rate of replenishment.
Further, the rate of down-valley movement, location of the terminus, location of firn line, and the shape of the glacier can tell you a lot about what is causing the retreat. A glacier with a low firn line, thin firn, and low rate of advance is probably retreating because of decreased precipitation. A glacier with a high firn line and high rate of advance, but retreating terminus and losing mass, is more likely to be retreating due to increased melting.
Certainly it's a clue that something is changing. The question confronting scientists is this; what is changing in the local enviroment and is it representative of a change in the global enviroment? Is is part of a trend? Is it part of a cycle? Once cannot simply say; "the glaciers are retreating! the sky is falling!"
All good questions if you are considering one glacier. But the data shows that alpine glaciers all over the world are retreating. The Global Glacier Mass Balance shows negative mass change for all but 3 of the years since 1960! There is simply no way you can ask if there is a global trend if you're aware of the data. It's blatantly obvious--across the world, alpine glaciers are in retreat.
And I'll point that I did not say anything like "the sky is falling." I said alpine glaciers are retreating, and they're doing it in a way that points the finger at melting due to higher temps.
And in the Year Without A Summer there were hundred of reports of crops freezing, rivers frozen in unexpected places and times, etc... Layman's testimony is essentially meaningless as human memory is extremely plastic
Memory may be plastic but photographs and printed climbing route descriptions are not. I have a copy of Climbing Magazine from the early 90's with an article about climbing in Peru's Cordilla Blanco. Many of those routes are now unclimbable because what was clean ice and snow fields is now crumbly exposed rock. This is also occurring in the Alps, in North America, in New Zealand, in Africa (where the "snows of Kilimanjaro" are almost gone), and even in Asia, where the Khumbu glacier on Mt. Everest is in retreat.
If scientists were really as responsible as they claim - there would be calls from them for $MEGA dollars for increased research. There would be concrete plans being laid for a global monitoring network in order to provide the fine grained data we need. Instead we get articles about Kyoto and simulations. No wonder even intelligent people don't trust them anymore.
Uh, there ARE those calls and plans. The problem isn't that the scientists aren't ringing the warning bell, the problem is so-called "intelligent people" like yourself who refuse to educate yourself and who ignore the problem. Try digging a little deeper and caring a little more.
I know it's centrally important to those of a religious bent, because at their core most religions are origin stories--how we came to be here and why we're here.
But to scientists, the beginning of life is a small niche question--a sidebar to the evolution theory, not its basis. That is because science is the study of processes not the creation of stories or the finding of facts.
Most biologists base their studies on recent or current evidence, because there is more of it. It makes it easier to find and describe processes. Only a very small percentage of biologists devote their time to investigating the origin of life on earth. To most scientists it's an interesting question but not that important, because it's unlikely to shed insight on current processes.
The recent story of macro-evolution is available in current or recent evidence--the genomes of living creatures. Even if you completely ignore fossil evidence it is possible to find genetic commonalities between species that indicate common ancestors. With the fossil evidence it makes a very strong case.
If you want to understand climate as a whole and not just weather, you have to look at the geological systems that represent the balance of all the weather effects.
Good examples: alpine glaciers. The extent of an alpine glacier in any given year depends directly on how much snow falls on it (how much it grows) vs. how warm it has been (how fast it melts).
Alpine glaciers throughout the world are in retreat. This means that either less snow that recent historical average is falling on almost every glacier in the world, or almost every glacier in the world is melting faster than its recent historical average. But wait, you can measure precipitation separate from the glacier--you can control for that variable. And when you do so it becomes clear that for most glaciers the issue is a higher melting rate. Alpine glaciers are melting faster than they used to, all over the world. This is a pretty good clue that something is changing in the climate as a whole.
And, as an extra bonus, it's visible to the layman's naked eyes. In fact there have been hundreds of news stories over the last 5 years about the retreat of the glaciers world wide. Or you can just ask mountaineers or local villagers.
Are we causing it? That's a tougher nut to crack. We know of a mechanism that can contribute to greater global atmospheric heat storage--greenhouse gases. We also know that human systems create and store an unnatural amount of heat (car exhaust, AC exhaust, plus the urban "heat island" effect). And we know that global overall temperature is going up.
We'll probably never know the exact percentage of our responsibility vs. sunspots. But the point is we know there's a trend and we know we probably are contributing to it to some degree.
In fact the only social responsibility of a corporation is to deliver a consistent profit to its shareholders. This is a radically different statement, as a corporation can easily do things that will provide a profit in the short term, but kill the business in the medium to long term. Is this good for the shareholders? No, of course not.
Good business leaders understand this and that is why you see movements like the recent one to end quarterly earnings guidance. Good businesses make decisions that allow it provide consistent profits to its shareholders over a long time span.
Making a profit over the long term brings in all sorts of interesting questions like employee health, employee quality, employee loyalty, training costs, brand reputation, etc.
IMO Google is making a major brand sacrifice in the U.S. to do business in China. Is this a good idea? I have my doubts.
I love the idea of making lectures available the public. I recently found these lectures by Richard Feynman online, available for free, and I'm watching them as I get the chance. I hope to keep learning my entire life, and free online lectures will certainly help.
The motto is "do no evil", not "prevent any evil from being done."
As it stand now, Google is doing evil in China. If they didn't do business in China, they would not be doing evil. Yes, evil would still be done there by someone. But it wouldn't be Google.
It's easy to build justifications around what everyone else is doing. But if people and companies pay close attention to what they themselves are doing, and less to what everyone else is doing, the proper way forward becomes clear. The corporate poster child for this way of thinking is Patagonia.
The GP poster got the terminology wrong but the numbers right. If you sell stock for a profit you receive capital gains. These capital gains are now taxed at 15% due to the Bush tax cuts.
The dividend tax rate is also at 15%. This was done on purpose, to give companies more freedom in how they handle their profits. Since there is no tax difference, they are free to choose capital investment or dividend distribution.
Just like Slate, WashingtonPost.com is an independent subsidiary of the Washington Post Company. WashingtonPost.com licenses Post newspaper content in addition to developing its own content, and supports itself through advertising, partnerships, and online services (like WashingtonJobs.com). It's as "fat" as any other content-based, ad-supported Web company, i.e. not fat at all.
Attacking the person is relevant when the vector of attack is relevant to the topic. For instance if someone posted a long analysis of a Supreme Court ruling, it would be relevant (and not ad hominem) if I pointed out that they had been convicted twice of practicing law without a license. Qualifying the source is an integral part of critical thinking. That's not to say that the analysis itself will necessarily be wrong; but it will color how people analyze it, and how closely.
Now if the response had been something like "I don't believe Dave Winer because he is a registered Democrat", or "Dave Winer is a fat bastard who smells bad," that would be ad hominem.
"The reason was that shutting them all off together was just that it was the quickest way to remove the problematic ones that were starting to overwhelm our ability to get rid of them. But, you're right, there were lots of good posts, and over the next few days, we'll go back through them and restore the ones that did not violate our rules, though we're still going to leave comments off on that blog for the time being."
This is a snapshot cache of the board before it was shut down. Since the Post was hiding nasty comments as fast as it could prior to shutting down, this is not "a cache of all the original comments." This is simply a picture of all the comments that were not hidden at this point in time.
The only way to have obtained a cache of all the comments submitted would have been to somehow sniff them as they were submitted.
Understand that the Post blogs are set to post "live" without moderator approval. When you hit submit it goes live on the site. This is unlike their live chats, in which all comments/questions must be approved by a moderator to appear on the site.
As a result, once it becomes clear a blog is being targetted with nasty language, comments, etc, someone at Washington Post has to sit there reloading the page in admin mode, looking for comments to hide. When every refresh brings up 10 new nasty comments, it becomes very difficult to keep up without devoting a bunch of people to it.
The final numbers according the Post chat today was around 1000 comments total, hundreds nasty. But the important statistic in terms of their ability to deal with it is time--how many people they had to have checking the blog for how long. A newspaper Web site is not exactly a "fat" operation and I doubt they could afford to have 2-3 staff members sitting around refreshing and hiding all day, instead of their normal tasks.
The central problem with this entire stink is considering iPhoto as an RSS client. It is not an RSS client.
iPhoto is a Photocast client. It is only designed to accept and work with Photocasts. Note that I am capitalizing Photocast as it is a proprietary name for a propietary service.
As Sam Ruby points out here, Photocast feed generation hews closely enough to standards to allow any reasonably good RSS client to accept and interpret Photocasts. This is pretty close to what Jobs advertised in the keynote--anyone with an RSS client can subscribe to your Photocasts.
What he did not promise is that iPhoto is now a standards-compliant client for all RSS feeds. So I have a hard time understanding why it's being held to that standard.
Photocasts are available as feeds but are not in and of themselves standard-compliant feeds. Further, I don't see why they need to be. I can see why it would be nice and ideal, but that is a different conversation (what Apple "should" do vs. what Apple has "failed" to do).
We taped The Office last week but the tape ran out halfway through. So the next day I check on iTunes and sure enough, there was the episode. $2 and a few minutes later it was playing on my TV (and it looked great).
I guess I could have searched for a clean copy of it on IRC or BT, but I value my time pretty highly. To be a better value than $2, I would pretty much have to find it the instant I started looking. That's both a) pretty unlikely and b) exactly what happened on iTunes anyway.
TV shows on iTunes were definitely worth it for me. I can't say I'll be buying every show--more likely I'll just use it when I miss a show I wanted to see. For the cost of a Coke and candy bar I'll now be able to get it easily.
You would like Slashdot to retain a loose communal feeling, and it does--in the comments. That's the real, thriving online community, its clear strength vs. something like Digg. That's the informal part.
But Slashdot clearly distinguishes between the comments and the stories--I can moderate comments, for instance, but not stories. I can post comments directly, but not stories. Please understand that this is the basis for our complaints about spelling and grammar.
We all understand the community feeling and I doubt many people would demand that you copy edit every comment posted. We like the free flow of the community so much that we even put up with the GNAA and goatse stuff, let alone spelling errors in comments.
But the stories clearly occupy a different sociological space from the community of the site. They are the basis for the community discussions, not part of the community itself. In other words consider the story posting as existing in a neverland between the story itself and the community of Slashdot. To the story owners (say, CNN for instance), it's part of Slashdot. But to the community of Slashdot, the story posting is an extension of the story itself, not an integral part of the community. Emotionally, our response to the story posting is much closer to our response to the story, than it is to our response to a comment. Look at it graphically:
Slashdot community <===> Story posting <===> Story itself
Now imagine yourself living in this "lineland." If you live on either end, the other two appear to be pretty much the same thing (or at least very closely tied). So while the story posting looks like part of Slashdot to an external viewer, the story posting looks like an external object to those of us over here in the Slashdot community. That's why it fundamentally does not make sense to us to apply the same (low) quality expectations to the story posting that we do to comment postings. To us they are very different animals, and it makes more sense to apply the "story" level of expectations (i.e. those of a published professional story).
As you (correctly) note, the most important thing in the story posting is the story itself--not other links, not search engine traffic, not who posted it, etc.
Please--you changed your mind on the nofollow links for story submitters. Please change your mind on this. Spelling and grammar errors distract from the purpose of the story posting. And because the stories occupy a separate space from the site community, the errors do not add to the community feeling at all.
Web 2.0: Battle of the time-wasters
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Web 3.0
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Sneeringer's maxim of online communities: When users have the power to determine a site's content, the site's content will be determined primarily by those with the most time to waste.
Without some sort of editorial check, the signal to noise ratio of any community-driven online content continously drops. I've seen it on Usenet numerous times. I've seen it on sites like PhotoSig (where the most porn-ish images always get voted up regardless of quality), Boatertalk (where they had to create a whole new forum just for the trolls), and now Digg.
As the need for user filtering becomes more and more pronounced, the value of the site goes down. Why bother going to Digg for my tech news if I have to search the first 3 pages to find something new or interesting?
There are plenty of people out there who care about the sites they participate in and try to make them better. Unfortunately these tend to be busy people, since by nature they care and work hard. As a result their efforts can only be distributed over so many sites. That's why you get great deep discussions on Slashdot, and interesting and accurate content on Wikipedia, but you get mostly crap on most community Web sites. It's why the "Web 2.0" concept is fundamentally not scalable.
Step 1: The virus first attempts to identify the target machine.
Step 2: Upon doing so and diagnosing apprent weaknesses(???), the virus then packages the relevant position-independant code in an appropriate executable container (ELF for linux, PE for Windows, a.out or unibin for OS-X) and set the entry point. The virus then executes a found exploit(???), causing the offending computer to download the converted virus from the attacking computer
Step 3: Profit
More detail needed on those Step 2 vaguaries. Any virus works great if it can just magically find vulnerabilities and exploits by which to do its work. I'd have a lot more interest in your post if you could identify any specific vulnerabilities or exploits in OS X that would allow that scheme to succeed.
Just substitute "nations" for "warlords." The world is undeniably a place of limited resources (oil and potable water for instance), and nations exist to compete for those resources. I don't need to "prepare" for that reality--my fellow citizens and live I it, and make collective decisions every 2-4 years to make sure we are the biggest and baddest warlord in the world. We'll take the resources we want, by force if necessary. In case you couldn't guess by now I live in the United States.
Lovelock has a good point, but he thinks too small and too late. The world is already at war for limited resources, and the players are nations, not nickel-and-dime warlords.
Slashdot Mirror
I spent some time researching this but it just took too long. I'd love an easily-usable directory of government-owned netblocks.
The public is a fairly skittish beast,
This might be the scariest thing I've read on Slashdot all day. It betrays a fascist or oligarchical point of view, where the Leaders know best and the Public are ignorant rubes who must be led to a greater future against their will. It implies that it is right to control information or withold from the "skittish" public because it would just upset them and cause trouble.
I don't know where you're posting from, but in my country, the U.S., that goes against everything the country was founded on and stands for. We are a government for the people, by the people. The public rules the roost around here and if you don't like it you can move to Myanmar or North Korea or some other fascist state where daddy knows best.
Since 9/11 the U.S. federal government has become more and more fascist--seeing the need to control and limit information to the public for their own good, making decisions in isolation and resisting the efforts of others to inform or influence them. Opinions like the parents are wholly part of the problem and should be attacked wherever they are expressed.
I'm an adult citizen, responsible and free, and legally entitled to hear all sides and make my own decision about things, thanks.
The second-greatest success of the special interests and political elites was convincing the public that they are powerless to direct their own country. The greatest success was convincing them that they don't want to.
Next week's future!
I lived in Alexandria, VA at the time and watched it over the air. I can't remember whether it was live national (Today show or something), or whether a local station just picked up the feed. Being so close to DC the local stations sometimes carried stuff like shuttle launches, snips of hearings, etc. that probably didn't make it on the air in other parts of the nation.
I too was home sick from school and I have the same memory--build up, lift off, disintegration, then semi-controlled chaos--cameras shifting, cutting to other cameras, stammering announcers ("obviously there's been a malfunction of some kind...").
That was a pretty heavy day, as I was a big fan of the space program and one of my earliest memories was the first shuttle launch on a little black and white TV (I was 5). It all came flooding back when I heard about Columbia.
It's much easier to hold deep depth of field with a wide angle lens than a normal or telephoto. With a 24 f4 lens I've hand-held shots with depth of field from a few feet in front of me to infinity. In addition the perspective of a wide angle view creates greater apparent depth in the image, so the bird and demonstrators would look farther apart in the print than they actually were.
Likewise a telephoto lens compresses perspective, and makes all the cool background shots possible that the paranoid poster refers to. A person does not have to be walking right in front of a huge poster of Saddam. With a 400mm lens the photographer can simply wait for someone to walk between him and a poster 100 feet away, and the compressed persepective makes the poster look huge in the background.
Resolution matters too. If there is a little bit of motion blur it is unlikely to show up in magazine or (especially) newspaper printings, because of the rather coarse dot pitch. So you can hand-hold at a much lower shutter speed than you would for fine art. I've hand-held a 24mm lens down to 1/8 sec. and gotten usable shots.
Ultimately the paranoid poster is undermined by the long history of photojournalism, which predates digital manipulation by many decades, and whose history includes many interesting shots like the one he descibed.
That requires accurate measurement of precipitation across (sometimes) many square miles of glacier - something we are not doing. So your 'control' is loose at best.
The precision of the data constrains the precision of the conclusion, yes that is true in all science. It does not necessarily invalidate all conclusions. Estimating your potential error is part of doing research.
No, this means that less snow is falling than is required to replenish the glacier. The historical average is meaningless in this instance.
Actually it does not necessarily mean that--did you read what I wrote? A glacier can shrink regardless of how much snow falls on it, if the rate of melting exceeds the rate of replenishment.
Further, the rate of down-valley movement, location of the terminus, location of firn line, and the shape of the glacier can tell you a lot about what is causing the retreat. A glacier with a low firn line, thin firn, and low rate of advance is probably retreating because of decreased precipitation. A glacier with a high firn line and high rate of advance, but retreating terminus and losing mass, is more likely to be retreating due to increased melting.
Certainly it's a clue that something is changing. The question confronting scientists is this; what is changing in the local enviroment and is it representative of a change in the global enviroment? Is is part of a trend? Is it part of a cycle? Once cannot simply say; "the glaciers are retreating! the sky is falling!"
All good questions if you are considering one glacier. But the data shows that alpine glaciers all over the world are retreating. The Global Glacier Mass Balance shows negative mass change for all but 3 of the years since 1960! There is simply no way you can ask if there is a global trend if you're aware of the data. It's blatantly obvious--across the world, alpine glaciers are in retreat.
And I'll point that I did not say anything like "the sky is falling." I said alpine glaciers are retreating, and they're doing it in a way that points the finger at melting due to higher temps.
And in the Year Without A Summer there were hundred of reports of crops freezing, rivers frozen in unexpected places and times, etc... Layman's testimony is essentially meaningless as human memory is extremely plastic
Memory may be plastic but photographs and printed climbing route descriptions are not. I have a copy of Climbing Magazine from the early 90's with an article about climbing in Peru's Cordilla Blanco. Many of those routes are now unclimbable because what was clean ice and snow fields is now crumbly exposed rock. This is also occurring in the Alps, in North America, in New Zealand, in Africa (where the "snows of Kilimanjaro" are almost gone), and even in Asia, where the Khumbu glacier on Mt. Everest is in retreat.
If scientists were really as responsible as they claim - there would be calls from them for $MEGA dollars for increased research. There would be concrete plans being laid for a global monitoring network in order to provide the fine grained data we need.
Instead we get articles about Kyoto and simulations. No wonder even intelligent people don't trust them anymore.
Uh, there ARE those calls and plans. The problem isn't that the scientists aren't ringing the warning bell, the problem is so-called "intelligent people" like yourself who refuse to educate yourself and who ignore the problem. Try digging a little deeper and caring a little more.
Not to most biologists anyway.
I know it's centrally important to those of a religious bent, because at their core most religions are origin stories--how we came to be here and why we're here.
But to scientists, the beginning of life is a small niche question--a sidebar to the evolution theory, not its basis. That is because science is the study of processes not the creation of stories or the finding of facts.
Most biologists base their studies on recent or current evidence, because there is more of it. It makes it easier to find and describe processes. Only a very small percentage of biologists devote their time to investigating the origin of life on earth. To most scientists it's an interesting question but not that important, because it's unlikely to shed insight on current processes.
The recent story of macro-evolution is available in current or recent evidence--the genomes of living creatures. Even if you completely ignore fossil evidence it is possible to find genetic commonalities between species that indicate common ancestors. With the fossil evidence it makes a very strong case.
If you want to understand climate as a whole and not just weather, you have to look at the geological systems that represent the balance of all the weather effects.
Good examples: alpine glaciers. The extent of an alpine glacier in any given year depends directly on how much snow falls on it (how much it grows) vs. how warm it has been (how fast it melts).
Alpine glaciers throughout the world are in retreat. This means that either less snow that recent historical average is falling on almost every glacier in the world, or almost every glacier in the world is melting faster than its recent historical average. But wait, you can measure precipitation separate from the glacier--you can control for that variable. And when you do so it becomes clear that for most glaciers the issue is a higher melting rate. Alpine glaciers are melting faster than they used to, all over the world. This is a pretty good clue that something is changing in the climate as a whole.
And, as an extra bonus, it's visible to the layman's naked eyes. In fact there have been hundreds of news stories over the last 5 years about the retreat of the glaciers world wide. Or you can just ask mountaineers or local villagers.
Are we causing it? That's a tougher nut to crack. We know of a mechanism that can contribute to greater global atmospheric heat storage--greenhouse gases. We also know that human systems create and store an unnatural amount of heat (car exhaust, AC exhaust, plus the urban "heat island" effect). And we know that global overall temperature is going up.
We'll probably never know the exact percentage of our responsibility vs. sunspots. But the point is we know there's a trend and we know we probably are contributing to it to some degree.
In fact the only social responsibility of a corporation is to deliver a consistent profit to its shareholders. This is a radically different statement, as a corporation can easily do things that will provide a profit in the short term, but kill the business in the medium to long term. Is this good for the shareholders? No, of course not.
Good business leaders understand this and that is why you see movements like the recent one to end quarterly earnings guidance. Good businesses make decisions that allow it provide consistent profits to its shareholders over a long time span.
Making a profit over the long term brings in all sorts of interesting questions like employee health, employee quality, employee loyalty, training costs, brand reputation, etc.
IMO Google is making a major brand sacrifice in the U.S. to do business in China. Is this a good idea? I have my doubts.
I love the idea of making lectures available the public. I recently found these lectures by Richard Feynman online, available for free, and I'm watching them as I get the chance. I hope to keep learning my entire life, and free online lectures will certainly help.
The motto is "do no evil", not "prevent any evil from being done."
As it stand now, Google is doing evil in China. If they didn't do business in China, they would not be doing evil. Yes, evil would still be done there by someone. But it wouldn't be Google.
It's easy to build justifications around what everyone else is doing. But if people and companies pay close attention to what they themselves are doing, and less to what everyone else is doing, the proper way forward becomes clear. The corporate poster child for this way of thinking is Patagonia.
"Change starts with you."
The GP poster got the terminology wrong but the numbers right. If you sell stock for a profit you receive capital gains. These capital gains are now taxed at 15% due to the Bush tax cuts.
The dividend tax rate is also at 15%. This was done on purpose, to give companies more freedom in how they handle their profits. Since there is no tax difference, they are free to choose capital investment or dividend distribution.
Just like Slate, WashingtonPost.com is an independent subsidiary of the Washington Post Company. WashingtonPost.com licenses Post newspaper content in addition to developing its own content, and supports itself through advertising, partnerships, and online services (like WashingtonJobs.com). It's as "fat" as any other content-based, ad-supported Web company, i.e. not fat at all.
snowwrestler is not a reliable source
Attacking the person is relevant when the vector of attack is relevant to the topic. For instance if someone posted a long analysis of a Supreme Court ruling, it would be relevant (and not ad hominem) if I pointed out that they had been convicted twice of practicing law without a license. Qualifying the source is an integral part of critical thinking. That's not to say that the analysis itself will necessarily be wrong; but it will color how people analyze it, and how closely.
Now if the response had been something like "I don't believe Dave Winer because he is a registered Democrat", or "Dave Winer is a fat bastard who smells bad," that would be ad hominem.
They hid them. They did not delete them.
From the chat today (emphasis mine):
"The reason was that shutting them all off together was just that it was the quickest way to remove the problematic ones that were starting to overwhelm our ability to get rid of them. But, you're right, there were lots of good posts, and over the next few days, we'll go back through them and restore the ones that did not violate our rules, though we're still going to leave comments off on that blog for the time being."
This is a snapshot cache of the board before it was shut down. Since the Post was hiding nasty comments as fast as it could prior to shutting down, this is not "a cache of all the original comments." This is simply a picture of all the comments that were not hidden at this point in time.
The only way to have obtained a cache of all the comments submitted would have been to somehow sniff them as they were submitted.
Understand that the Post blogs are set to post "live" without moderator approval. When you hit submit it goes live on the site. This is unlike their live chats, in which all comments/questions must be approved by a moderator to appear on the site.
As a result, once it becomes clear a blog is being targetted with nasty language, comments, etc, someone at Washington Post has to sit there reloading the page in admin mode, looking for comments to hide. When every refresh brings up 10 new nasty comments, it becomes very difficult to keep up without devoting a bunch of people to it.
The final numbers according the Post chat today was around 1000 comments total, hundreds nasty. But the important statistic in terms of their ability to deal with it is time--how many people they had to have checking the blog for how long. A newspaper Web site is not exactly a "fat" operation and I doubt they could afford to have 2-3 staff members sitting around refreshing and hiding all day, instead of their normal tasks.
The central problem with this entire stink is considering iPhoto as an RSS client. It is not an RSS client.
iPhoto is a Photocast client. It is only designed to accept and work with Photocasts. Note that I am capitalizing Photocast as it is a proprietary name for a propietary service.
As Sam Ruby points out here, Photocast feed generation hews closely enough to standards to allow any reasonably good RSS client to accept and interpret Photocasts. This is pretty close to what Jobs advertised in the keynote--anyone with an RSS client can subscribe to your Photocasts.
What he did not promise is that iPhoto is now a standards-compliant client for all RSS feeds. So I have a hard time understanding why it's being held to that standard.
Photocasts are available as feeds but are not in and of themselves standard-compliant feeds. Further, I don't see why they need to be. I can see why it would be nice and ideal, but that is a different conversation (what Apple "should" do vs. what Apple has "failed" to do).
Holes! define who vee are, und vhere vee are going.
We taped The Office last week but the tape ran out halfway through. So the next day I check on iTunes and sure enough, there was the episode. $2 and a few minutes later it was playing on my TV (and it looked great).
I guess I could have searched for a clean copy of it on IRC or BT, but I value my time pretty highly. To be a better value than $2, I would pretty much have to find it the instant I started looking. That's both a) pretty unlikely and b) exactly what happened on iTunes anyway.
TV shows on iTunes were definitely worth it for me. I can't say I'll be buying every show--more likely I'll just use it when I miss a show I wanted to see. For the cost of a Coke and candy bar I'll now be able to get it easily.
But Slashdot clearly distinguishes between the comments and the stories--I can moderate comments, for instance, but not stories. I can post comments directly, but not stories. Please understand that this is the basis for our complaints about spelling and grammar.
We all understand the community feeling and I doubt many people would demand that you copy edit every comment posted. We like the free flow of the community so much that we even put up with the GNAA and goatse stuff, let alone spelling errors in comments.
But the stories clearly occupy a different sociological space from the community of the site. They are the basis for the community discussions, not part of the community itself. In other words consider the story posting as existing in a neverland between the story itself and the community of Slashdot. To the story owners (say, CNN for instance), it's part of Slashdot. But to the community of Slashdot, the story posting is an extension of the story itself, not an integral part of the community. Emotionally, our response to the story posting is much closer to our response to the story, than it is to our response to a comment. Look at it graphically:Now imagine yourself living in this "lineland." If you live on either end, the other two appear to be pretty much the same thing (or at least very closely tied). So while the story posting looks like part of Slashdot to an external viewer, the story posting looks like an external object to those of us over here in the Slashdot community. That's why it fundamentally does not make sense to us to apply the same (low) quality expectations to the story posting that we do to comment postings. To us they are very different animals, and it makes more sense to apply the "story" level of expectations (i.e. those of a published professional story).
As you (correctly) note, the most important thing in the story posting is the story itself--not other links, not search engine traffic, not who posted it, etc.
Please--you changed your mind on the nofollow links for story submitters. Please change your mind on this. Spelling and grammar errors distract from the purpose of the story posting. And because the stories occupy a separate space from the site community, the errors do not add to the community feeling at all.
Sneeringer's maxim of online communities: When users have the power to determine a site's content, the site's content will be determined primarily by those with the most time to waste.
Without some sort of editorial check, the signal to noise ratio of any community-driven online content continously drops. I've seen it on Usenet numerous times. I've seen it on sites like PhotoSig (where the most porn-ish images always get voted up regardless of quality), Boatertalk (where they had to create a whole new forum just for the trolls), and now Digg.
As the need for user filtering becomes more and more pronounced, the value of the site goes down. Why bother going to Digg for my tech news if I have to search the first 3 pages to find something new or interesting?
There are plenty of people out there who care about the sites they participate in and try to make them better. Unfortunately these tend to be busy people, since by nature they care and work hard. As a result their efforts can only be distributed over so many sites. That's why you get great deep discussions on Slashdot, and interesting and accurate content on Wikipedia, but you get mostly crap on most community Web sites. It's why the "Web 2.0" concept is fundamentally not scalable.
Step 1: The virus first attempts to identify the target machine.
Step 2: Upon doing so and diagnosing apprent weaknesses (???), the virus then packages the relevant position-independant code in an appropriate executable container (ELF for linux, PE for Windows, a.out or unibin for OS-X) and set the entry point. The virus then executes a found exploit (???), causing the offending computer to download the converted virus from the attacking computer
Step 3: Profit
More detail needed on those Step 2 vaguaries. Any virus works great if it can just magically find vulnerabilities and exploits by which to do its work. I'd have a lot more interest in your post if you could identify any specific vulnerabilities or exploits in OS X that would allow that scheme to succeed.
Just substitute "nations" for "warlords." The world is undeniably a place of limited resources (oil and potable water for instance), and nations exist to compete for those resources. I don't need to "prepare" for that reality--my fellow citizens and live I it, and make collective decisions every 2-4 years to make sure we are the biggest and baddest warlord in the world. We'll take the resources we want, by force if necessary. In case you couldn't guess by now I live in the United States.
Lovelock has a good point, but he thinks too small and too late. The world is already at war for limited resources, and the players are nations, not nickel-and-dime warlords.