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Comment Yeah, let's solve problems we made ourselves (Score 1, Interesting) 250

Yep. Let's invade some foreign countries and occupy them. Then when we get the extremist fallout following our actions, then let's try to solve it with more draconian actions! I would have had some level of sympathy for for targeting extremist material online (while I would still be against by principle) if UK was a country that had approached the 'War on Terror' in a humane way rather than going to war (and going to war on false premises as well...)

Comment In related news about cryptocurrency (Score -1, Troll) 209

The Dogecoin community wants to help the Jamaican bobsleigh team get to Sochi, and there is a donation up! http://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/1virfc/lets_send_the_jamaican_bobsled_team_to_the_winter/ I hope we will see a lot more of this in the coming years, people who have earned big on cryptocurrency and who ends up helping others with some of their earnings.

Comment Re:Goes along with the VMS announcement (Score 1) 243

To put the reliability into perspective. I was speaking with a VMS sysadmin when I was 19 years old, who exclaimed that he had support contracts on cluster with higher uptimes than I'd been alive.

It is a really, really rugged OS. The clustering has an elegance that I miss on Unices.

Comment Re:The New New York is Screw York (Score 1) 237

Most people - yes, even Wall Street - use public transit in NYC. The subway is way faster than a car. There is a reason that they are building a new 2nd Ave line, and it isn't for the poor people.

My issue with the trains is that we are in 2013 and they are still putting new cars out with conductors! Yes, a person paid (and paid more than a cop IIRC) to stand in a little booth and close the doors on the train. I won't even get into why they still have drivers, they can't even get rid of the conductor.

Have you considered the expense to the economy of a 15-minute NYC subway delay during rush hour? If a person can help any one of the bazillion little situations that arise, then the numbers out of the red pretty quickly.

Comment Re:Everyone open your firewalls (Score 1) 634

Yeah, it's totally ignorant to rip on Americans when their political incompetence - of the people, not the politicians - when this idiocy is holding the world ransom.Show yourself as a thinking nation and stop re-electing the Republicans who do this shit, then we'll talk about ripping on America being "ignorant".

Comment Re:Seriously? (Score 1, Insightful) 246

As long as the comments are clearly delineated from editorial content, I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to hold the paper responsible for the content of the comments.

How do you figure comments differ from the opinion column of newspapers, which have always very much been the editor's responsibility?

Newspapers are fundamentally different from forums like Slashdot or Reddit - they have a well-defined role in society not as bulletin boards, but as authorities, and part of why that is, is exactly that they have skilled journalists choosing what is fit to print. And this is why editors are public figures.

But there's better ways to prevent that than holding newspapers legally liable for comment content.

Yes, but they are not liable because incentivizing responsibility us a good way to deal with bile, they are liable for the content because their editor is publishing it on their site, a point which bears making.

Comment Re:Nice! (Score 3, Insightful) 246

No; what this does is hold newspaper editors legally responsible as editors for what they choose to include in their publication.

This is more likely to mean that anonymity (unless explicitly agreed in advance) in the comments fields will disappear.

This is a Good Thing, because those fields are cesspools, and online papers show little to no interest in preventing that. As long as they can have the angry idiots coming back to vent their spleen, they get ad revenue.

Essentially, the courts have forced newspapers to act more like journalistic institutions and less like businesses. I'm totally down with that.

Comment Re:Al? (Score 1) 211

"Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development."

Quoth an open letter by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, both of whom must be considered "founding fathers" of the Internet.

The full file is here: http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt

He did not do the engineering bit, nobody would think so. But... the internet was a government research project, FFS. If a politician said he took initiative to the creating a road, would he ever be confronted with people insisting on interpreting his statement to mean that he claimed to have built the road?

Giving the line that significance is frankly stupid. This trend of purposefully misunderstanding people is doing some serious damage to the intelligence of politics.

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