seacond

Well said. Except I'd make the following corrections:

  s/[(]yes.*exam.//;
  s/.flawed.//;
  $d

Interestingly, there's no "hard work" in taking a test you do not prepare for, e.g., an IQ test.

Maybe they fixate on maximums because those are what are used plea bargaining? Would you leave the possibility of 20 years in a federal prison (no matter how remote) to chance?

I think there's two villains. It's impossible for both of them to lose, but you can't blame people for being opposed to someone "winning" by being a villain.

Why was Zuckerberg going to Craigslist looking for work? Why did Zuckerberg want to do work for "known criminals"? The project Ceglia was trying to set up was an image database. Much like Facebook. I think if Paul Ceglia had a cleaner past and better judgment, he'd be collecting his (unearned?) share from Facebook in the same way that others, Winklevoss, etc., have collected.

The reason is the trail that Zuckerberg left behind him, screwing people over one after another, betraying their trust. The only person who could keep the damage under control is Zuckerberg. As others have said, other internet billionaires don't seem to have as many "forgotten co-founders" showing up for their "cut". The problem is particularly acute with Facebook. That's no coincidence.

The lesson here is you reap what you sow. Both Ceglia and Zuckerberg.

This sounds like interesting work. Indeed I think those submitting requests need to thnk carefully about how to make compelling arguments. I'm thankful for the work you and your team are doing. saurik: As I asked "Am I missing something here?", the answer is of course "I am", but I continue to learn. I'm glad to hear you're getting involved with this.

"Investors tend to have a herd mentality."

When I was typing out 1. I was thinking of the response that SOPA got. It seemed like it mobilised people to make phone calls and send emails. I think that had an impact. I'm just guessing here. In any case, it would be very interesting to see how LOC would respond to a surge in constituent participation in the DMCA exception process.

I thought the exception for DVD ripping was interesting. There are many references to "video quality" as a persuasive factor. This point might be useful in further requests for exceptions sent the Register.^1 Strategy: Complain about low quality. Apparently, screen captures are "not good enough" but Blu-Ray is "too good".

Under the exception individuals are entitled to extract a small portion of the DVD for commentary, criticism or educational purposes. What if enough individuals independently choose unique excerpts, so that together they cover the entire motion picture? Sites could be set up to catalog which portions of a DVD have already been extracted and reviewed. Commentary might be something as simple as subtitles of the type vlc or mplayer can handle; these are nothing more than text files - removing subtitles is a matter of not loading the text file. Then one simply downloads all the clips and combines them into the full film using ffmpeg.

Implausible? What do you think?

1. Why are people not organising mass mailing campaigns to the Register to seek DMCA exceptions? Am I missing something here? It seems like she only receives a relatively small number of requests for exceptions considering the large audience of people affected by her decisions.

"... it sells premium products at premium prices, and it never discounts."

Yeah, but the prices of those "products" (=Asian factory-made electronics, smaller form factor and reduced functionality) keep dropping. That is the nature of the computer business. And there's nothing Apple can do to stop it. Eventually we will reach "zero", or very close to it.

Maybe what this journalist is realising is that Apple the company may finally be seeing real competition in the "sexy hardware" space. They have historically been the only company to mass produce computers that "look cool" sitting on a desktop, even when they're turned off. They have never had any real competition in that space (=opinion). But now, as the price point and form factor have been significantly reduced (the price to own an Apple computer used to be a lot higher, I can recall it being over $1000 in the not-so-distant past), other companies might finally also be able to mass produce sexy-looking hardware that can compete.

Assuming that's true, and we're headed for "disposable" computers (i.e. ridiculously cheap), then what's left of Apple's reality distortion field? Maybe it's "Apple, the brand" that the journalist observes.

And what is that brand? Maybe it's partly "easy to use", as he suggests is a known characteristic of Apple products.

So, who can possibly compete with Apple on ease-of-use in a handheld computer? No one?

Hmmm, we'll see about that. Imagine a company that can offer the same simplicity, without greedy control freak attitude and imposing incessant hoop-jumping on its customers. And their computers look cool.

The point was they are tracking you, whether you want to be tracked or not. He seemed to think that's OK as long as the tracking wasn't "across the web".

In any event slacross the weblunti\l you do something \like od -An -tx1 /dev/urandom| of=/dev/urhdd bs=bignuml

And the way to game it is by posting "middlebrow dismissals".

As a poster I am often surprised by what gets upvoted. Everyone surely can see this: negativity is rewarded. It only reinforces in my mind that "karma" means little anymore.

You can get karma just by being dismissive. Look at the tone of some of the posters who consistently jump into the top spot, thanks to their "karma". I get tired of seeing those same monikers over and over^1; the comments are often rubbish. No matter how articulate and cogent their commetns may have been in the past, no one is 100% consistent; we should not have to read _everything_ they say. But it doesn't matter if they are on the mark from day to day because they get a top spot no matter what they contribute, based on accumulated karma. You are forced to read what they've said, no matter how silly it is.

1. Unless you need to contact someone, I find usernames and profiles to be about as useful as karma (=not very), but I doubt many others would share my view. My interest is in quality comments that offer useful information, not "reputations". People with great "reputations" often make some very dumb comments. Judging the quality of a comment by the author's username instead of its content is a fool's game. It's also a basis for the HN algorithm.

"...with his sons Random and Xtra..."

Many of the things he says I agree with, others I don't. I think that's the thing with computing. Everyone's tastes are at least slightly different. We don't all want exactly the same things.

I think the big failure is programmers' inability to bring these desired advances, like what Plan 9 achieved, to a wider audience. I mean, he says he had this wondwerful environment at Bell Labs, but almost no one outside of Bell Labs gets to experience that pleasure. Why not? They open sourced it too late? I'm not sure I buy that. It's still better than UNIX, so what's changed? It's like there's some assumption that people just don't deserve anything better, and there's no point in working towards it. Except if you're at Bell Labs.

We're stuck with old UNIX, with all of its historical cruft. Like him, I've just learned to cope with it. (It's funny he's complaining about argv limits (see 2004 Slashdot interview). That seems to suggest he likes to compose super long argv's. No? Maybe he does not like xargs? I never did. But then I've seen similarly unexplainable limits in the Plan 9 port to UNIX. Why can't I have a Plan 9 sed command file with a very large number of commands?)

We could certainly have better. Perhaps it's simply a matter of getting behind the right projects, instead of just following the money and being lazy... working at Google and buying MacBook Pros. That's sort of like giving up. Complacency.

Honestly, "grep'ing the web" just doesn't sound all that "amazing" to me. I don't care how many servers they have running, Google is not Bell Labs.

It's funny how the KISSMetrics guy thinks (thought?) he was doing absolutely nothing wrong. Let's go out to the internet-using public and ask random people, "Do you mind of KISSMetrics tracks you across the web, even if you have cookies turned off?"

Alas, it seems in this case the only people who are aware of KISSMetrics' wrongdoing are security researchers (i.e., curious nerds), lawyers and some journalists. Perhaps if the general public knew, there would be a law.

What the blog author implies is that _being scrappy_ is a founder's greatest asset. Assuming we agree with this, then does being broke always lead to being scrappy? If yes, then I guess we could say being broke is, indirectly, a founder's greatest asset. If no, then the argument falls well short of being taken seriously. No one who is broke wants to be broke. And no one who is wealthy wants to be broke.

Is there no value to a computer beyond graphics and 3D?

It's fascinating to see people who would seem to be aligned with the RPi's goals getting hostile toward the RPi Foundation. Why is this? My (probably wrong) guess on the psychology at work is that it is not the lack of much forward progress in this project (unquestionably, they have made _some_ forward progress by making the RPi, regardless of whether it is "enough"), but it is the idea of "stealing someone else's fire". It threatens people whose devoted purpose is to fight for what they perceive as the impossible: a totally open device or those whose mission it is only to complain about the lack of openness in devices (cf. actually willing to make sacrafices to use an open device). It steals their fire. The more open things become, even if only a little more open, the less they have to fight for or complain about. Their devoted purpose starts to deflate. It's less important.

And I would guess there are also those who just can't stand to see any sort of change. When the "impossible" starts to seem eventually possible, it's disorienting for them.

My understanding of this announcement is that it's directed at people who are trying to port other OS's to the RPi. Having this code makes their work easier. What if I do not use Linux much? What if I am not insistent on using my computer only as a TV set or a game console? What if my usage is text-based? What if I just want to run another OS on the Pi? Would I consider making this userland code available a definite step forward?

Solution: Get rid of voting. Order the comments randomly.

I've never understood the point behind anonymous voting.^1 What value does it add?

1. But some people, think of them what you will, have tried to use voting as a way to be more convincing when pandering to advertisers, e.g., Facebook "Likes".

Assuming we were the intelligent, high brow readers you would hope would be reading your forum, then wouldn't we be smart enough to see that voting adds nothing, except a source of amusement (as the silliest comments or those from random members with "high karma" rise to the top)? Intelligent people do not need a "karma system". They can take in all available information and separate the wheat from the chaf on their own. (No need for someone else, someone else's algorithm, to manipulate the order of comments.)

Seems to be some conflation in this thread. Are DKIM and authentication (PGP) really comparable in practice?

Here's my take: DKIM is an attempt by _third parties_ (i.e. "email providers", not the author or the recipient of the message) to control who can send email (but guess what? anyone can send email, go figure). On the other hand, authentication (PGP) is an attempt to allow senders to sign messages and receivers to verify signatures (no third parties needed).

Bob printed his PGP public key on a card and gave it to Alice when they had lunch. He then signed an email message the following week using PGP and sent it to Alice. But Bob's "email provider" decided to block Bob's message because Bob didn't pay money to someone for the use of a "domain name" and Bob's "email provider" thought his email was "spam" because he hadn't been "authorized" (by paying money for use of a domain name) to send email.

"a _few_ other places"

I think you are being very diplomatic. :)

But seriously, this cleverness attribution error might be a big problem with large players like Google. Forum posters, blogs and the digital versions of mainstream media all seem convinced Google is somehow special. That they know what they are doing, at every turn. Assuming some silly mistakes is a "test". It's a potentially harmful meme: people assuming ideas like "genius" or "utmost comptetence" without requiring any proof.

Blind faith followers take note, because here we have _proof_ that Google makes mistakes too. Silly ones at that.