There's a surprisingly strong movement, at least in the US, essentially claiming that it's "better" to rent almost anything. Rent your cable modem and get a free upgrade when DOCSIS 3 is retired. Lease your car and save on depreciation. Rent a house and save thousands on taxes and maintenance. These notions are so logically and economically flawed that it's hard not to imagine a (at best) disingenuous campaign, but maybe it goes along with the disposable-everything culture and inability to see past the next paycheck.

You're mistaken: Rockoon is so principled, he never uses any subsidized product. He obviously doesn't own a car, as the automotive industry itself has been bailed out far too often. Public transit is right out, obviously, He can't even bike, because the rubber subsidy means no tires. So, Rockoon walks everywhere on pure leather shoes, bought only from chain stores with over 1000 employees to avoid "small business" subsidies. He rents a house rather than accept the government subsidy on a mortgage. Even there, he has to sit in the dark to avoid subsidies on all forms of electrical generation. He eats no sugar, corn, wheat or dairy. He is fortunate to be able to wear wool clothes these days, because the cotton subsidy means no BVDs. But it's all worth it, to avoid selfishly taking money from other taxpayers.

Really, when you think about it, it's easy to understand why he's such an angry guy. If you spent your days in woolen underwear, you'd be a little irritable, too.

He was right at the time. He said that circa 1995, and it was mostly about Usenet. Usenet had a distributed system for maintaining discussions, somewhat like a BitTorrent for blogs. Even though individual servers could become quite large and popular, thus potentially gaining the power to filter, censor, or delete content, that content was simultaneously mirrored across multiple other servers. Users could therefore tell whether a particular server was censoring and switch to a different provider.

The web (as opposed to the net) is largely centralized. Economies of scale and growing bandwidth have largely quashed the ancient system local mirrors. Have largely allowed ad-supported commercial entities to replace more altruistic university-run services. The web can not route around censorship very well, and the web has killed off the internet services that can

At most state schools, the per student spending on undergraduate instruction has increased at very close to, or below, the rate of inflation over the past 10-20 years. This is really very impressive, considering the massive increase in enrollment over that time.

Meanwhile, the student cost to attend those schools has increased at 2-3x the rate of inflation. The difference is due to states, across the board, failing to increase education spending to meet the expansion and, in many cases, actually reducing education spending. Education is no longer considered a public benefit, and taxpayers refuse to pay for some other kid's schooling.

That is spin. Many of those Republicans - McConnell, McCain, Hatch, etc - opposed the bill not because the authorized data collection programs trample the rights of Americans, but because the restrictions placed on the NSA damage its ability to protect Americans. The Republican 'opposition' prefer more spying.

The Patriot act did not explicitly empower the bulk collection of communication metadata. That power was based on a broad interpretation of the text that the courts seem increasingly likely to deem illegal. In contrast, the "Freedom" act will require ISPs and phone companies to log and retain this metadata, and will explicitly allow NSA to demand that data based on 'reasonable articulable suspicion' going out two hops a named individual. So, if NSA has a 'reasonable suspicion' that someone might be bad, and that person googles "famous US landmarks," then NSA can ISPs provide data from anyone else who used google.

This may be a restriction over just having a desktop tool to query their own database, but the FISA not historically been much of an impediment. They're mostly just moving the data warehouse from NSA to the ISPs. ISPs that used not to log your every connection will now be required to. ISPs that used those logs only for technical troubleshooting will now be required to develop tools for identifying and connecting endpoints, in order to provide that data to the government upon request. They are certain to find commercial uses for that data to offset the costs.

So, the law that the NSA twisted to justify the bulk metadata program ended, but it was replaced with a law that explicitly authorizes bulk metadata collection and moves that collection to private companies that are not restricted by the 4th amendment. It's being sold to the public like a big curtailing of power, but it doesn't look that way to me

People like authoritarian, protective governments. They like for someone to focus their fear on a particular movement or group. They like to think that something is being done about that threat. They know they're not doing anything wrong and will be untouched by those protective measures. Even if there is some small consequence, the security is worth it.

These people don't speak, so you don't know they exist. They're part of the 95% of slashdot readers who have never posted a comment. They don't have strong opinions. They are good people, always ready with a smile and a wave, always ready to help a neighbor in need, and never asking for anything in return. They just want to go about their life, and a strong, protective government with visible police and pro-active defense is very comforting.

Just make sure you divest this regularly and diversify. You do not want to have both your job and your emergency/retirement savings to be dependent on the continued success of one company.

Starting a business is very risky, regardless of when you do it or what your skills are. In countries, like the US, without a social safety net to support those who try-but-fail, it is much better to try while it's not too big a lifestyle adjustment to live on rice and beans, while you can sleep in your car (tough to do with a 2-year-old), and while you can fall back on your parents should worse come to worst.

Kids spend 16 years being taught to follow instructions and wait for guidance from anointed leaders. 16 years being prepared to trade the majority of their labor value for the false security of a "regular" paycheck. The sooner they try to take initiative and responsibility for their own success, the better. If they fail, at worst they'll appreciate that there's more to running a successful organization than the armchair CEOs seem to think. At best, they'll learn from their failure, start over, and be succeed on the second or third try.

I coach a lot of non-native speakers on presentations. Having the exact text of their key idea, written out as a complete sentence, is essentially subtitling their own presentation. It's a way to get information to the audience, even when the verbal presentation is completely incomprehensible to some of the audience, and it may make it easier to decipher spoken words that are not written out. The slides should not be a complete transcript of the presentation, but there are definitely circumstances where reading some of the slide is highly valuable.

Most of those presentations are going to be unpleasant for the audience, regardless of visual aids, but duplicating the information visually and verbally allows at least a minimum of actual communication.

In most of the world, "Powerpoint" is shorthand for presentation software, in the same way that Kleenex is shorthand for facial tissue or Hoover is shorthand for vacuum cleaner. I suspect there are few people who could even tell you the name of Apple's presentation software, let alone any ways in which it is fundamentally different from Microsoft's.

What they really hate is that people making presentations are bad at presentations. But that sounds personal and mean and is a good way to get your target audience to think you're not talking to them, but to some other group of people who don't communicate well.

Second, they hate that powerpoint (or Keynote or Impress) disguises bad presentations in good form. A good presentation has a narrative - a logical flow of ideas - and bullet points are a good shorthand for that flow. Bullet lists can also be a collection of random words. Connection diagrams can be a good way to illustrate the relationships among complex topics, or they can be a disordered collection of random words.

If you're critiquing a presentation (not the slides, but the presentation), and it's a disordered pile of shit, you can ask the presenter to try to identify the main ideas, put them in order, and focus on them. This sounds like "make and follow a bullet-point list," and it's completely useless if the presenter can not distinguish main ideas from details.

Presentation software (Powerpoint, Keynote, Prezi, whatever) allows bad presenters to fill in a lot of shiny graphics and animation. These take up a lot of time, feel like work, and make bad presentations superficially resemble great presentations. The presenter can feel like they've spent tremendous effort making a visual display, which is much easier that organizing their thoughts and content for clear communication. The presenter can look at their slides next to a high-impact, model presentation and see that it contains many of the same elements. The bad presenter is thus able to go through the same motions as the good presenter.

When Newegg includes a 1px image from criteo.com, criteo is no longer a 3rd party. When newegg directs "promotions.newegg.com" to edgesuite.net, then edgesuite is no longer a 3rd party (and in a way that is much more difficult for even clever ad blocking software to detect).

The point they're trying to raise here is that including all of those web-bugs and their associated cookies does impact the visitor experience, and FF has a system to reduce it. You can take this from the user perspective: here's an easy way to speed up the web, without having to figure out which of the adblocking plug ins are really legit. You can look at it from the host perspective: if web bugs make your whole web site feel much slower, then maybe the analytics aren't worth it. There are a lot of people who just don't think about why their internet is slow. Every time someone stands up and says it takes longer to load all the ads on most pages than the actual content, a few more people will understand the cost of "free' web pages.

Say what you like, but it certainly seems clear to me that progress in criminal investigations happens much faster when moneyed or attractive people are involved. Like Atlanta police managing to capture a serial killer days after he shot a white woman, but months after he shot a bunch of homeless guys.

In DC, where 2/3 killings goes unsolved, where DNA testing was suspend last month over 'inadequate' procedures, and where 15-20% of open cases have untested DNA evidence, they manage to test and return results from a pizza in under a week and arrest the suspect the next day.

Seriously, if you think police apply exactly the same resources and intensity to the killing of Joe Biden's neighbor as to multiple kidnappings in Tremont, you're being naive.

Not reporting security breaches makes perfect sense. How many stories have we seen here about people being arrested or sued for reporting security holes or breaches? Work groups (public or private) tend to shun people who 'rock the boat,' and reporting unsafe work practices is definitely rocking the boat. I don't know why TFA focuses on public sector, but I'd put pretty long odds on private company employees having a much better report rate.

The time-of-flight for light in air/vacuum from NYC to DC is about 1.2ms. In fiber, about 1.7 ms. Travel time for the photons is not the long part of the trip.

Long range microwave towers are spaced 25-40 miles apart, so that NYC-DC route needs 6-9 hops. Optical fiber may have repeaters every 20 km, or 18 light-electicity-light conversions along that route, although high-power, single mode fiber may allow up to 50 miles between stations (5 stations DC-NYC).

But there isn't a dedicated DC-NYC pipe: data goes from DC to Baltimore to Philadelphia... There's routing around within each urban center. I have ping times of 10-15 ms within my metro and 100+ms to cities on the same coast. The speed of photons is not a meaningful part of that latency.