Free speech allows him to write his own website, it doesn't allow him to break theirs.

Couldn't you argue his packets are simply speech? He's merely broadcasting a specific message to the network.

What's the difference between this and getting a million of your like-minded peers to call/fax complaints to a specific number?

(I'm playing a little bit of devil's advocate, but I'm given to understand there are cases that blur this line...)

New Hampshire Senate Election Phone Jamming Scandal. There's a book by the perp.

If it were a NON-POLITICAL DOS/bot attack, would anyone on Slashdot give a rat's ass if he went down for MORE than thirty months?

Yeah, since manslaughter doesn't get you more than two years these days.* And a hit and run might not even be something a DA wants to pursue vigorously. **

But you wanna see the system freak out? Show the people with money and clout that the system has holes, that there are people who can do things with technology that they don't understand.

OK, it's really not just a tech thing. Both our statutory punishments and our sentencing is messed up in this country. Unfortunately, it's in no small part because we're quite simply very very stupid about the issue politically: we like to vote for people who are "tough on crime," so I don't expect a lot of change.

* May not apply if you're not a police officer.
** May not apply if you're not wealthy.

... than "I don't like it."

HTTP has been repurposed far more than it should have been. Its lack of statefulness has resulted in horrible hacks like cookies and AJAX

AJAX? I can understand the cookie criticism, which TFA did a pretty good overview of, but AJAX's place is pretty much orthogonal to the issue of state. People resort to hacks *with* AJAX because browsers don't have a protocol with sessions, but even if we did, AJAX-like APIs and idioms would exist and continue to be used.

layout is still a huge hassle. CSS tries to bring in concepts from the publishing world, but they're not at all what we need for web layout

Layout -- even cross-platform layout -- is actually pretty easy if you use a subset of CSS positioning for the problems it's good at and tables for cases where it isn't.

A lot of people will claim otherwise, and they're wrong,

I predict a lot of the people who claim otherwise will do something you manage to neglect in their comment: provide justification for their statements. Perhaps you can try that your second time around instead of merely pounding your fist on the table about your personal opinion.

but JavaScript is a fucking horrible scripting language. It's even worse for writing anything significant.

Worse than what? How?

And no, it's absolutely nothing like Scheme (some JavaScript advocate always makes this stupid claim whenever the topic of JavaScript's horrid nature comes up).

It's enough like Scheme on at least two important fronts (functions as first class values, scoping rules) that it's false to say it's "nothing" like Scheme, and the related idioms that grow up around those common parts of the language are important to using it that it's a reasonable comparison, even with all the syntactic weight that JavaScript has and the missing features like macros and tail-call optimization.

the NoSQL movement, which arose solely because there are a lot of web "developers" who don't know how to use relational databases properly. I've seriously dealt with such "developers" and many of them didn't even know what indexes are!

A lack of programmer familiarity with the setup and querying of RDBMSs is a problem, and yes, set up properly, they can be pretty darn effective for a lot of situations some devs are using NoSQL solutions for, but saying the later are there "solely" for this reason is just as ignorant.

It's not as if most carriers have a reputation for really caring about customer privacy...

And I'm proud to be an American who gets just 5 mpg

Welcome to the real world, where economics is not a zero-sum game. Just because somebody has more doesn't mean somebody else has less. Peddle your Marxism elsewhere.

To explain why your invocation of the term "Marxism" is incorrectly connected to the idea that economics is a zero-sum game, I refer you to one of the finer comments on economics (and, specifically, Marx) that Slashdot has seen.

"There is nothing in Marxism implying that transactions are zero-sum. Marx himself, in his sections on economics, is practically orthodox Adam Smith..."

(Of course, like the term "Socialism", when most people use it in current political discourse, it may be that the poster doesn't mean anything particularly well-defined by it, it's just a convenient term for something Those Other People Who Are Wrong And Ruining Things believe).

Anyone with any reasonable intelligence is going to question the computer models moving forward, and ask you "how is this any different than global cooling in the 70s?"

Anyone with reading comprehension, the ability to use Google, and some cognitive skills that enable them to avoid certain intellectual event horizons is going to already be familiar with and likely satisfied by a number of available answers to "how is this any different than global cooling in the 70s?"

The only way to accomplish your goals is with term limits, public funding

It's actually easier and harder than restructuring campaign finance and service terms. Which is to say, while I completely agree with your statement that there are systemic problems, what you're talking is neither necessary nor sufficient to change.

Only one thing will really change this: the general population of the united states is going to have to take a different attitude towards law enforcement and terrorism than we have now.

Right now we're a country largely full of people who firmly believe that they'll never be unfairly accused of a crime, that FBI and the police are always good guys, that abuses of power are rare, but that the world is a thicket of bad people who are just waiting to get them, and that we're just too soft on criminals, and if we didn't have all these pesky legal technicalities in place, by God, we could get some *real* justice meted out and finally be safe.

Count on it: this very election cycle, there's going to be people running as "tough on crime" and "protecting America against terrorists." Opposing candidates who actually care about due process and understand the principles behind why we have it are going to be characterized as "soft." And you know what? It. Will. Work.

We have people in power who compromise civil liberties because we not only don't kick up a storm when they happen, but because we have have an electorate that actively wants them eroded.

Right. Because that's worked so well. Keep in mind that these refer to apps that made it through the vetting process.

Knees jerking much? The parent mentioned Mozilla's add-ons, not Apple's App Store.

Also, you should note that the stories you're linking to are about the hacking of iTMS accounts for the abuse of a community rating system, rather than rogue spyware apps stealing personal data.

I personally don't know whether Apple's approval process or Mozilla's add-on review process has a better or worse record or screening out such things, but if you're going to go all "linky! looky! Apple has apps with these problems too!" you should make sure that you're talking about the same thing as the article. Or the parent comment you're responding to.

It was actually Adam de Boor who discussed JavaScript.

And while JavaScript has its warts, all in all, it's a pretty nice language. If gmail is 400k+ lines of code in JavaScript, it would have been well over a million (if not four million) in Java.

Oh, so he's pushing a competing product and denigrating his competition?

"Product" is a pretty poor word choice for something that's given away in the way Go is. Pike doesn't really have much more to gain than *you* do from the adoption of Go and reduced use of C++ and Java.

Nothing to see here, I think.

Only if the substance of his criticism doesn't hold up. My experience suggests his objections are apt, and I might add that a casual dismissal of work by Rob Pike and Ken Thompson reflects more on you than them.

They hate it for the same reason that the music industry hates the Internet, they lose control of the marketplace and are unable to charge a premium for intangibles.

It's not "a premium for intangibles." It's the opportunity to get get paid for your time vs the expectation that you'll work for free unless your work is utilized.

What do you do? You an IT worker like most of the site? Let's say you troubleshoot systems -- how about we say that you don't get anything old fashioned like a salary or an hourly wage anymore: instead, you'll compete with others to see who can find/fix the problem first. The person who does that gets paid a flat rate. Everyone else gets nothing. Or, let's say you write code. You and one hundred other coders provide to spec. First one gets something, everyone else doesn't. No messy employee-employer relationship -- that stuff is for communists and music industry racketeers, right? Just pure market transactions. Beautiful, right? Certainly nothing you could have any complaint against -- in fact, if you really believe in your comment, truly and deeply, back it up: suggest that arrangement to your employer tomorrow.

After all, you wouldn't want to be like a music industry dinosaur, and frankly, if you're drawing either a salary or hourly wage off of it, you're exactly as much like the music industry as a graphic designer.

Does a government agency examine...

How about the other entities mentioned in the summary (let alone TFA) -- patients and, more importantly, *doctors*? If not them -- who should review them?

After all, nothing can possibly be safe until it is certified as such by the government. Just ask hundreds of thousands of people who died while the drugs that could have saved them were waiting for the FDA approval. They are pretty safe now.

FDA approval works roughly about as well as "self-regulation" works, since the FDA more or less reviews studies provided by the industry.

Though it's worth noting this is probably at the upper bound of effectiveness of self-regulation, since under the FDA they're actually required to submit something that can convincingly pass for a study in order to receive approval.

You've more or less just forwarded the theory that popularity is the primary indicator of value, and oddly, most people understand that it's a problematic one (if at no other time than when their viewpoint is unpopular).

But, if no one actually wants to read it, in what sense is it "important"?

The vast majority of people don't want to read about the physics of electromagnetism, the architecture of microprocessors, and the details of TCP/IP networking.

In what sense are these things important?

The thing is, in this arena, we're lucky: *this* stuff is something you can farm out to the subpopulation of society who is interested or sees other value in reading about these things, and with that information and the right paycheck, by and large they'll produce products and services that everyone else can use without having to understand more than marginal details about what's going on.

Not every arena works that way. Particularly in a democracy. And/or when there are people who have a vested interest in making sure things are misunderstood.