So do you believe that the editorial staff of the New York Times should be prosecuted as enemies of the US? They are the ones who actually published the leaks in the US, not Manning.

No, that's the one of the three simple tropes used by unthinking people to criticize the protests. The three are:

1) that these are just dirty bored privileged kids interested in sex, drugs, and partying

2) that the protestors have no demands at all, and therefore have nothing important to say

3) that they are just jealous of those with money and want to steal from them

If you take the time to actually investigate what is going on, you will see that none of these are true as a whole (even if FoxNews can find an idiot protestor that seems to prove otherwise). Think about it: if your generalization were true, you would not see thousands of people protesting in hundreds of cities across the nation. It may be hard for you to believe, but most people dont want to steal from you. They dont want want to steal from the rich any more than flat tax people want to steal from the poor.

The protestors are not upset that some people are richer than they are. They are upset because there is something deeply wrong with this country. Our nation is moving more and more towards a third-world system in which it is getting harder and harder for the have-nots to better their position. Wealth is becoming concentrated in the hands of just a few, not because they are the hardest workers (news flash: they are not), but because the system was bent in their favor from the beginning. And the political system is becoming an insular closed-loop in which politicians are unwilling to make any kind of significant change that would push us out of this mess, lest they reduce the flow of money to their campaigns.

The protestors dont want your money. They want a fair system, in which hard-working people can support themselves and raise a family with relative ease. They want a system that encourages a strong middle class, so that we dont have a situation in which the top few percent pay most of the taxes and politicians wont listen to the rest. They dont want to freeload -- they want the American dream. We can have that country again. But its going to require people paying attention to big dreamers, who make a lot of irritating noise about changing the status quo.

How about sports team fans? I hear Yankees fans gather in message boards, declare a unifying ideology, and even have a logo/banner that they identify themselves with, even in public. There are several official clubs, and spokesmen often issue their rants and decrees on a network of blogs and twitter accounts. They are like a multi-headed hydra. You can try to stop some of their leaders, but other Yankees fans will just pop up to take their place!!!

I actually did RTFP and you are not quite as right as you blithely assert. The parent poster was correct.

Actually, the algorithm makes heuristic decisions which add information based on an understanding of the human visual system and assumptions about the problem space (it works well on hand-drawn cartoons, but not on down-sampled photos). For instance, they have heuristics for deciding which neighboring pixel fields should be attached to a pixel "island" by one of its four corners. In the original image, its completely ambiguous. In their enhanced version, its explicit. They are adding information based on background semantic knowledge.

Actually, its not as impossible as you state. A low-res image of a face has two sets of information: the pixels themselves, and all of the constraints imposed by the fact that the image is of a face. There might be an infinite set of objects which could have generated a given pixel field, but there is a smaller infinity of faces that could generate said pixel field. So an image enhancer which understood it was looking at a face might be able to fill in some of the details. If it can deduce information about the lighting in the room, it might do even better. Such an image enhancer would be using semantic knowledge to add detail to the initial visual information....(drum beat)...just like your brain does! Computers might theoretically be able to do it better. So its just not as bone-head simple as you make it out to be.

Your analogy is indeed good. But it actually serves to undermine your point. The people who released the documents to the public are...(get ready)... the journalists and reporters! Wikileaks supplied a few select organizations with the cables, then reprinted them after the New York Times and others published them widely. So it appears that the "blind idiot apologist" here is you. Why is your anger directed at Wikileaks, and not the people who did the real "harm" of releasing this information to the public? Could it be that you are just buying into the propaganda and FUD that has been relentlessly spread by the government and others since this incident took place?

Let's hope they post it WikiLeaks-style. That would mean they spend months coordinating with journalists to redact names and other information that might put individuals' lives at risk. Then, they would only release a few select important parts of the material in a completely responsible manner.

Of course, that is not what the editors and poster were trying to convey by 'WikiLeaks' style. Why insert this useless anti-free-speech FUD into the story?

Actually, that's the first intelligent response I have seen to the DDOS=sit-in analogy. You have a very good point. In some ways this is much closer to a sit-in in which participants actually handcuff themselves to objects in the business. Its still not an attack.

Analogies between the real and virtual world are bound to be flawed. But calling it a hacker attack is extremely misleading to a public that imagines the attackers are breaking in to computers and damaging them or stealing data. Despite the analogy's flaws "sit-in" is much more accurate than "attack."

Your argument is based on an incorrect analogy. No property is being damaged here. Space (bandwidth space) is being taken up by protesters in order to prevent other legitimate activity. This is how protests have functioned for decades. Perhaps you believe that people in the civil-rights movement should have taken less aggressive tactics so that we wouldn't have had to end segregation so quickly, eh?

Yes, these protesters are actively interfering with businesses. This is one of the lowest imaginable crimes. They must be jailed and punished just like the lunch-counter sit-in protesters who actively interfered with businesses in the sixties. So selfish!

Yes, its not 'hacking' and these are not 'attacks' and there is no 'war.' Those are loaded terms, and they are being used in order to make it seem like this is not an ethical politically-motivated action. Participants are not stealing or damaging property. They are simply taking up bandwidth. This is firmly in the tradition of passive resistance, in which protesters enter a business or property and simply take up space to prevent business from occurring (i.e., lunch counter sit-ins). The terms we should be using are 'protest' or 'online sit-in' and the hackers should be called 'protesters.'

Slashdot editors: please stop calling these 'attacks.'

These are not attacks. This is not a war. A politically motivated DDOS is exactly analogous in form and function to a lunch counter sit-in. These should be called 'protests' or 'online sit-ins.' Use of the words like 'war' and 'attack' only fuels a belief that there is no justified ethical motivation for these protests.

Its probably because you are self-filtering information that contradicts your own opinion. There are in fact many examples of information in these documents that the American public has a right to know. Here is a clear cut example:

The United States has been knowingly lying to the American public about its participation in military strikes in Yemen. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley in answered "No" to the question "Is the U.S. involved in any military operations in Yemen?" But the documents reveal the answer was a lie. Crowly was not misinformed. He was lying. Dont you believe that US citizens have a right to know when killing is being done in their name?

A good article with several links, and fascinating audio: http://www.salon.com/news/wikileaks/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2010/12/08/wikileaks/

Bad design -- there is no reason to embed display-control strings in the character set. Is there a "start-italics" character? No, of course not. Software should keep track of hyphenation positions the same way it keeps track of other formatting positions.

Actually, they are orthogonal categories. Some things are art, some are vandalism, some are neither, and some are both.