Replying to myself: It's heading for Sun-Earth L2, not Earth-Luna. I sit corrected.

...but it's not L2, at least as described in the summary. The Earth-Luna L2 point is just 64500 km further out from Earth than the center of Luna, less than 1/6 of the Earth-Luna distance.

Data openness != application openness

You can't use your fix to post right now, in this thread, today. But you can use your fix in the future in three different ways.

1) Submit a patch to the Slashdot code. It will find its way into production eventually.

2) Submit a patch to the Slashdot code, and when it's committed, run it on your own servers. If better unicode support matters to enough people, your service will pull users away from Slashdot.

3) Fork the Slashdot code, proceed as in (2).

What's to stop someone from releasing the source of a "cloud" application? In point of fact, a great deal of the "cloud" infrastructure -- e.g., several web servers -- is already open. The question of where an app happens to be running is irrelevant to the question of whether it is open/free.

Yes, I certainly want my personal data tracked and stored by 200 small-to-medium businesses that don't understand net security rather than one company with the knowledge and resources to do it well. I feel safer already!

I find it useful to think in terms of two axes, atheism-theism and agnosticism-gnosticism.

The theism axis addresses the question of whether god (however defined) exists, as if that question were answerable as a matter of objective fact.

The gnosticism axis addresses the question of whether it is possible for a human being to *know* definitively that god either does or does not exist.

So, for example, Richard Dawkins is a gnostic atheist, while C. S. Lewis was an agnostic theist.

How is keeping a journalist alive "political ends"?

How is it not? You're using policy tools (choosing to conceal the truth) to influence decision-making and behavior by others (the kidnappers and allied groups). Hard to imagine a more political end.

Political decisions often (perhaps more often than not, at the national level) end up resulting in life-or-death outcomes. Even something as mundane as highway funding is a life-or-death issue. Lower funding leads to more dangerous roads, marginally increasing the rate of fatal accidents. Politicians and the public see it as a 0.7% increase in a statistic on a chart, but a lot of real people very much like you died horribly to make that little bump happen.

In the end, everything in politics comes down to relative-value judgments. Is it worth spending a billion dollars to improve the highways, or should we spend that billion on early education? Should we value freedom of expression on Wikipedia more highly than increased risk to an individual reporter, or vice versa? These are hard ethical problems. People of good intent can honestly arrive at differing solutions to them.

I suppose you could combine the ideas behind display ads and CAPTCHA -- "To navigate to the next page, please select what color the shirt in the HBO ad above is."

Shit, maybe I should patent that.

The key issue here is "right" versus "practical capability". A site owner has the right to demand that you watch ads on the site. But there is no practical way to enforce that policy. Thus the current quagmire.

Yeah, but they at least used to be, and that's what I was thinking of.

Oh, yes, no argument there. If I caught a glimpse of those aircraft flying way too low, with no other information, I'd, ahem, become somewhat perturbed myself.

Ah, crap, I was thinking F-14 while I was reading F-16. Good catch.

Except that F-16s have a pretty short operational range, so unless New Jersey has seceded from the Union and declared war on New York, or Al Qaeda has hijacked an aircraft carrier and stationed it off Long Island, they're probably ours.

Perhaps we should extend the robots.txt format to support a price-to-index attribute.