There's no way of knowing how many lives have been ruined by arrests for rape, molestation, child porn, and other such crimes being publicized, then the person being released without charge. Retractions don't get nearly as much attention as arrest reports and news articles, meaning a person's name could forever be tied to a crime they did not commit and were not even charged with.

Another problem is when the media covers the disappearance of the latest missing blonde girl, and then gleefully trots out the name and mug shots of whoever gets arrested first. That person might be completely innocent, but the damage is done.

Before the Republican horde (all four of them on Slashdot) come swinging the mod hammer, I should issue a disclaimer: I'm more republican than I am democrat. It's just that when I picture shambling, brain-eating zombies, I associate them more with republicans. Slow-moving, consuming those who can't escape them, and they look old and dried up. Democrats are more like the "28 Days Later" zombies: rabid, fast moving, attacking anything that moves with a ferocity you have to see to believe.

So you're all mindless killing machines destroying everything you can get your hands on, you just do it in different ways, for different reasons.

NOW you can mod me down :)

I'd heard the Republicans were using computers now. Good to hear it confirmed in the wild.

"The internet" is a vague term and isn't even what the report is about. The report is about IT operations. Sure if you combined all the datacenters in the world their carbon footprint would be HUGE, but then...let's consider the alternative. Let's start by storing all those TPS reports on paper. Billions of reams of paper, probably. We're going to need boxes or file drawers and folders to put them in. And warehouses in which to store them, which we can build to replace the forests we cut down to make the paper. Then of course there's the cost of transporting all this stuff wherever it's needed...that's a lot of gasoline. E-mail would be a lot less wasteful, but hey....Greenpeace is chiding us about producing too much pollution with our e-mail. So we'll FedEx those papers. Jet planes aren't nearly as bad on the environment.

Seriously. There are bigger things they could be tackling. If anything, Greenpeace should be pushing for MORE dependence on networking and IT and a trying to draw the world away from relying so much on paper. Fix THAT problem, then talk about IT.

I've not played SC2 enough to consider myself good at it. That said, I only play when it's with friends. There's one guy I 2v2 with regularly; we've played maybe 80-90 games together, and last I looked had about a 3:1 win ratio. If I had more fun playing the game I'd bother to actually get better at it.

Back when I cared enough about Company of Heroes to play it competitively, I was in the top 100 players as both Americans and Wehrmacht (If you play CoH and know the players from a few years back, you'll know what it means when I say I was automatching against people like Kodachrome and 12azor....and winning half my matches). These days I just try goofy strategies that make my teammates say "what the HELL did you just do?" and my enemies cry loudly on GR.org about how whatever unit I spammed is so overpowered.

CoH prior to Opposing Fronts was a far superior game to StarCraft or StarCraft 2.

Company of Heroes isn't. Granted there are times in my games where I push the 150 CPM mark for a minute or two, that's during the most intense fighting when I'm trying to micromanage a half-dozen tanks while keeping my infantry in the fight and in good cover. My average CPM for CoH is something like 30-40, and that's counting one command for each unit in a group...so a group of 3 units hits 30 cpm with one command every 6 seconds.

My God. It's so beautiful. An excellent argument for a small amount of chance to be inserted in to StarCraft.

The Koreans would riot.

I despise StarCraft. I really, honestly do. This isn't some trolling to piss people off, this is me venting.

StarCraft is all about speed and memorization. In that way it's more like a side-scrolling fighting game, where the person who can execute the right combos at the right time wins. Wrong build order? You lose. Didn't mass enough units by the five minute mark? You lose. I play StarCraft 2 with some friends from time to time and I do reasonably well at it, but it's nowhere near as fun as other games. It feels more like a job. I have no desire to play it solo.

What really disappointed me from the start is how the game utterly lacks any sort of reward for solid tactical decisions. High ground? That's negated by simple line-of-sight. Every shot is a hit, and every hit scores exactly the same damage. Compare that to Total Annihilation which at least attempted to give some realism in how units move and fire and the effects of terrain. TA's engine was FAR superior to StarCraft.

StarCraft is a clickfest, the closest thing RTS has to an arcade game. And it's tainted the whole genre.

So StarCraft was a dominant game when the World Cyber Games started. That doesn't mean it originated the idea of "esports" (a term I LOATHE by the way). I was playing in for-money Quake tournaments two years before StarCraft came out.

You see overcomplicated. I see multipurpose. Sure you could build a high-speed color sorter that is much smaller and more efficient, but this guy built something that could be used for a lot more than sorting colored blocks. As a proof of concept and early prototype, it's quite good.

Parker Brothers' "Aggravation" is a family tradition. Simple mechanics + a small degree of strategy, so it is accessible to young players and fun for adults as well.

The even horizontal distribution greatly increases your search times. It would be far more optimal if you were to divide your documents into separate stacks. This way if you know which stack a document is in, your search is limited to a fraction of the total. Knowing approximately when you last used it narrows the search even more, allowing you to bypass more recently-used documents. Given enough use, your most-used documents will filter to the top, optimizing your searches by grouping your most-needed papers at the beginning of your search.

"If you were in Joe User's department, which solution would you prefer?"

Oh I'd love Joe's solution. And then when Joe was out sick for a week and the server went down, I'd hate it. And my boss would pull a fit about it. He'd gripe to his higher-ups and a big to-do would be made over "the server being down" with the crucial information that it's Joe's Server being lost along the way. By Friday VPs are dragging IT personnel into meetings to discuss why my department's mission-critical server has been down for a week. IT the has to explain why Joe has a server that's not managed by IT and answer hours of stupid, repetitive questions that prevent them from actually getting any work done.

I kid you not, I've seen almost this very scenario play out, more than once. Information is lost as it moves through the chain and the complaint takes on a life of its own, so that when it does finally come down on the heads of IT, we waste valuable time trying to convince the overeducated buffoons hired to run the place that 1) we know what the hell we're doing, and 2) this is someone else's fault because we weren't allowed to set and/or enforce good network policies.

These policies aren't dreamed up by IT crews with nothing else to do. We are tight-fisted with our networks because if we aren't, WE are the ones who pay the price. Not the suits, not the workers, and not Joe "This is MY server" User.

As has been said: if you don't want to operate under the umbrella of IT, use online services or host your own outside of work.

Here's the thing: he doesn't describe any sort of action by the IT department that would indicate they were unwilling to provide the service. They simple "don't." Not "won't" or "can't" or "will in two years", just it "doesn't offer" the service he wants.

Networks serve people, that is true enough. But without careful planning, proper execution, and rigorous monitoring and maintenance, they serve us very poorly and can even inflict harm by allowing breaches of security. Allowing users a free pass with a "sequestered unsecure network" where they can do whatever they want almost always results in more and more users jumping on that network, as they see it as being unrestricted and "just easier". A few dozen mismanaged servers, scores of personal laptops, and every smartphone owned by a user who knows how to set up wifi ends up on that beast. IT ends up with a hundred unhappy users because your "user-friendly" unsecure network is crippled by idiocy. And who gets blamed? IT, of course!

The answer doesn't lie in a draconian set of IT policies either. Somewhere in the middle is the idea that when a department head sees a need for a service, they can approach IT through the proper channels, tell them what they're looking for, and work together to implement a solution in a timely manner. In this particular case, he should have taken his test product to IT and asked for help putting it into service. They could look for potential problems, more practical solutions, and deploy it in such a way that everyone is happy.

And if the IT crew just immediately shot him down, he'd at least have some clout when he put up a fight, whereas now IT could simply say "he plugged in a rogue server and asked us to make the network less secure so he could use it" and put an end to the debate.

My employment (aka my source of money) is put at risk when someone else plugs a server into my network that might open up the entire network to intrusion. Your reckless behavior can impact my ability to make money. This has nothing to do with God complexes and everything to do with making sure IT doesn't take the fall for incompetency elsewhere.

Wow. I couldn't write that last sentence with a straight face. We take the fall for other people's incompetencies all the time.