Thanks, this makes a lot of sense wrt to congressional pork. It may take $1m to bribe an politician, but $1b if you have to bribe their constituency as well.

Genuinely curious why you think this? It's been my understanding that there are strong ties between the government and the defense contractors, and the defense industry there is fairly shrouded in secrecy, making corruption easy to pull off. Do you think the Chinese government is more capable of taking an 'agile' approach to a space program than the US?

We will never be in a DBA bubble as long as data is king. For most companies, their database is an order of magnitude more valuable than their code base.

I think it's actually a little of each. Look at the apache POI project for supporting microsoft document formats in enterprise java apps. from wikipedia:

The name was originally an acronym for "Poor Obfuscation Implementation", referring humorously to the fact that the file formats seemed to be deliberately obfuscated, but poorly, since they were successfully reverse-engineered.

The other acronyms in the project, such as HSSF (horrible spreadsheet format) are equally revealing.

which is approximately 45 Solyndra scandals

Mod AC up. If anything, this incident shows that corporations are _at least_ as bad as the state when it comes to managing nuclear power. Nuclear may be scientifically safe and sound, but the lumbering bureaucracy (public or private) required to actually build and operate a plant guarantee that this type of disaster will keep happening for as long as this technology is in use.

Highlight middle click copy paste is a bloody UI abortion. I applaud any application that breaks this convention. From freedesktop.org:

• 1. It's inconsistent with Mac/Windows;
• 2. It's confusingly. Selecting anything overwrites the clipboard;
• 3. It's not efficient with a tool such as xclipboard;
• 4. You should be able to select text, then paste the clipboard over it, but that doesn't work if the selection and clipboard are the same;
• 5. The copy menu item is useless and does nothing, which is confusing;
• 6. If you think of PRIMARY as the current selection, cut doesn't make any sense since the selection simultaneously disappears and becomes the current selection.

I would like to add that this behavior completely takes over the middle mouse button, rendering the input useless except for this application which is only efficient in a very specific use case (you want to paste the thing you just highlighted)

Just a clarification, I don't think this scheme actually uses deep packet inspection. Comcast contracts MarkMonitor to monitor P2P networks for known infringing material. MarkMonitor's IP addresses are blocked by several popular P2P blocklists, including Bluetack so it's unlikeley that they'll catch many infringers except the low hanging fruit who aren't using blocklists or proxies. Another reason I don't think DPI is involved is because right after 6 strikes was implemented, I got a letter from Comcast specifically saying that they would not use deep packet inspection for this. Now I know that Comcast is slimy, but I don't think they'd reneg on such a specific customer promise so fast and voluntarily largely because of the two costs of DPI you touched on - the additional hardware/support for the program, and loss of goodwill among their customers.

Secondly, the 'pop-up' isn't actually a 'pop-up' per-se. They aren't actually interleaving javascript into your web pages to make a popup appear on a normal web page you'd browse to (how would you even do that?). Instead, they will serve a whole web page with the warning when you make an http request, which doesn't require DPI or but merely requires that they know you're visiting an http address, which they know from your port and/or url.

All in all, except for the marginal benefit to their NBC counterpart I don't see anything for comcast in this except to do the bare minimum so they can appear like they're helping to curb piracy to keep pressure off them from the government and IP lobbying groups. They know that their most active customers, the ones they can sell higher bandwidth to, are largely copyright infringers. But by doing this, they can appear to be doing something, because there is a significant amount of infringes who are using P2P and taking zero precautions so Comcast can come back and say 'yes we caught X bad guys, we are helping'

Whenever, the subject of vinyl comes up on Slashdot I am reminded of this: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhatAreRecords The joke is that old people make jokes about young people not recognizing vinyl.

Unfortunately even in DNB this is the case. I play strictly vinyl and have a couple hundred DNB plates - however fewer and fewer releases are coming out on wax. I have been purchasing for my new mix and many of the tunes I've been following I have discovered were digital only, or i couldn't find in a main distributor and had to buy through discogs. It varies greatly between labels, and Nu Urban, one of the biggest DnB vinyl distributors just went out of business. The sad fact is that between declining sales and the rising cost of pressing runs, fewer labels are willing to take the risk and put something out on wax - which is too bad because it is definitely the best for spinning - the interface is built right into the medium. If you play dnb please continue to buy vinyl! And Elements is a great night B)

The centerpiece of any hip hop studio is the sampler. There exists a very high quality open source sampler called linuxsampler but they are not included in any mainstream linux repos because of their bone-headed, legally invalid licence. So you have to build it from source, a painful process that I've never been able to do in under 2 hours. There is a lot of high quality foss studio software out there, but as long as developers keep dropping the ball like this we're going to see more reinventing of the wheel like this and not a lot of progress. An excellent foss program for beat-making I would recommend is qtractor, but it does not come with a sampler.

You're kidding me right? Not only was MD an abysmal format for what it was marketed as, it was terrible because of exactly the kind of cartoonishly-evil format restrictions that get Sony routinely bashed on here! If you were going to white-knight a Sony media format, you definitely should have picked a better one. MD was marketed primarily as a _recording_ medium, a cheaper replacement for DAT. But the content division wanted it to also be used for distribution, god only knows why (really, who in their right mind would pay more money for a bulkier (thicker) CD just for the plastic case, a fact the market made clear). So even though it was ostensibly for recording, they made it as difficult as possible to actually _get_ the audio you recorded onto your computer!

As another poster mentioned, you couldnt just rip the disk onto your computer, you had to trans-code (Hopefully you had one of those oh-so-ubiquitous optical spdif port on your sound card. MD computer drives were never allowed to be made). Granted, this was a digital transfer so there was no loss in quality, but you still had to sit it there in front of your computer for an hour re-recording the thing like a freaking cassette tape. Much later, they introduced a proprietary, windows-only software program that would transfer the disk to an audio file faster than 'real time' (i.e. like a freaking cdr that everyone was used to at that point). Never used it, always had mac or linux, but I heard it was awful. Keep in mind that this was all to prevent people from ripping commercial MD releases, making this flabbergasting piece of anti-technology in a 'recording' medium one of the worst and most salient examples of Sony's chronic double-think in their consumer electronics division that has led to market failure after market failure for Sony formats.

MD was simply a cash-grab with a garbage proprietary format that noone wanted, and a textbook case of Sony's content division crippling their electronics division. I should have coughed up a little more money and gotten a DAT machine, at least that format is still around, better quality, and more convenient than MD, even though its ~10 years older.

The speed of high capacity drives can matter a great deal depending on what the system is used for, and read/write speed is not just important for applications and the OS. Ask anyone who does realtime uncompressed video or multi-track audio recording.

Oh yeah. I forgot that 'Openness' is what makes or breaks products in the marketplace.

Oh god I wish! I would _LOVE_ for the app store to replace the dogs that are macports and fink. Ancient, unmaintained packages, sparse selection, and poor integration with mac's default programs make them pretty aggravating to use, especially considering the potential of FOSS on the mac. Admittedly, I doubt that the app store has the dependency-resolution that a full-fledged package manager needs in a modular unix environment, but at least the app store packages will be up-to-date and compatible with the system.