I don't think anyone objects to him having an opinion, or even being a wordy bastard.

What I object to is that /. seems to be his personal blog, where the editors allow him to bloviate on whatever crappy subject he feels the urge to opine on.

How would you feel if PBS just started televising some jackwagon's youtube diary? You'd probably wonder wtf happened to an information channel you respected.

Fantastic info, but I'd submit that part of the problem is ubiquity.
I have, at a quick guess, at least a DOZEN passwords that matter personally, and at least another dozen that are reasonably critical for work. Probably at least 200+ more that I don't substantially care about.
At least a couple of them are for systems that - for "security's" sake - require me to change the password every 90 days to a password I haven't used the last 6 times.
One system actually requires a password, then 2 layers deeper into the function, ANOTHER password, each with different rules about what's valid - the first accepts "." and spaces, the other doesn't, for example.
You could have a 128bit number as your password, and that would be hard to crack.
But the fact is that in the real world, you have to have either:
- something to write them down in
- a system to remember them, or an algorithm that you can apply to the site name or whatever that will give you your pw for that location.

Either one is vulnerable for precisely the same reasons they're useful.

Until we get absolute biometric systems - and such that can also ensure that the 'sample' tested is still attached to the live, willing human - in the words of an intelligent man: "there is no 'safe', only 'safer'".

"Should everything online be a cost-benefit analysis now?"
Yes. Is that clear enough?
If it is inconsequential, then sure, don't bother. But if it is something important to you, and you DON'T cost/benefit your choices, you're a fucking moron.

Sorry to be blunt, but there it is.

You can store your gold bullion on the front step if you want, I mean, it saves you all the work and all struggling to carry all that weight inside to your safe. I get it.

Are they still criminals for stealing it? Sure. And they should be prosecuted.

But then don't be whining and bitching that someone stole your gold because you were too lazy to put a little more effort into protecting it. Obviously, they valued your gold more than you did.

(And BTW, if you have naked selfies lying around in your house, I'd say the SAME THING: 1) they're criminals for B&E and stealing something that wasn't theirs, and 2) you're still an ignorant slut for leaving naked selfies lying around your house IF naked pictures of you floating around would bother you.)

So it's no longer "eat shit and die"?

I understand, downloading something pirated is illegal.

So do they also disqualify any person who has also committed speeding, jaywalking, underage consumption, or parking violations (or lies about having done so)?

Those too are all "crimes", clearly?

Perhaps the ubiquity of criminality says something about our society, or maybe more about the laws we've written to circumscribe citizen behavior.

Certainly excluding every person with a trivial illegality in their history will do 2 things for the FBI:
1) seriously reduce their potential employee pool, meaning those that get the jobs will get paid more (good for them), and
2) end up staffing the FBI with people that have led inhumanly-detached lives like beauty queens and the sorts of nearly-sociopathic weenies who have been cultivating themselves for public office since 3rd grade.

Of course, some people would say that yes, such interventions for SARS may have wasted $40 billion primarily because SARS wasn't really anything dangerous in the first place, just something ballooned into histrionic nonsense by a paranoid, risk-averse public and a government that likes very much scaring them.

This would be very much like building a giant armored and fenced barn when someone cried wolf.
Yes, at that point, those precautions would have been wasted. That doesn't ipso facto mean that such precautions now (when there really IS a dangerous fucking wolf out there) are overreacting in any way.

As long as you understand that your and my definition if data hog may not be synonymous?

http://grammarist.com/usage/ha...

How does one get the job of "editor" exactly?

This times a BILLION.
Just to have a crawlable time/date stamp on pages consistently....delightful.

IIRC there's a google command-line tag like sort:date or something that will give you freshest pages first, but i've never found it useful - dunno, maybe changing ad-content 'refreshes' page ages to the point of meaninglessness?

...you're suggesting a project announced to great fanfare on the web might not be realistic or even possible?

But...they have a website!

(Anyway, I'm sure the process of tearing their plan apart was actually a fairly interesting engineering exercise.)

Funny, I was going to say exactly the same thing...but focusing on the "US" bit.

If anyone thinks that China, Russia, Germany, Japan, France, UK, hell, even Brazil aren't doing *precisely* the same thing to the greatest extent of THEIR capabilities, they're idiots.

It's funny, and more than a little bit sad.

I'm an American, and proud to be one. I firmly believe that there IS an American Exceptionalism in a number of positive ways. But as I'm growing older, I have to admit - we just don't handle being a superpower very well.

I thought the postwar era of 'utterly thoughtless American "we won the war" bullshit hubris' ended with their noisy collapse in the 1960s. - the era of dumping radioactive dust at elementary schools to trace possible fallout patterns, giving LSD to mental patients, or a foreign policy shot through with arrogance and amoral choices.

Now, it seems again that we're returning to an era where the folks in Washington again see themselves as beholden to no one, responsible to no one, and capable of absolutely breathtaking hypocrisy and conceit without a trace of conscience or humility (or, for that matter, historical perspective).

For those outsiders observing the US: please note that we are talking exclusively about the US FEDERAL government, for the most part. That is (ever more) distinct from the United States as a nation, culture, and people. Not to say that the US states don't cheerfully do this sort of stuff too, but they are more immediately connected with both their victims and the voters (who are often the same group) and are thus managed more closely.

Obviously we need a Federal government; but personally the advantages of a stronger one (and there certainly are some) don't outweigh the concomitant dangers. Some of us believe - as did the Founding Fathers - that the task of American democracy is about constantly and assertively constraining the Federal government (not to eliminate it, to preclude the libertarian strawman that always seems to be dragged out at this point) to limit their functions narrowly to only needful roles, and NO FURTHER.

Perhaps - lacking a strong federal government - the United States couldn't so easily assert its desires on the international stage. Perhaps we forego some of the 'macht' of a superpower. But perhaps that isn't all bad. That power corrupts is a cliche, but never is it more evidently true than within the District of Columbia.

I've been kicking around the internet since before the web, since one was delighted by the capabilities of gophur, etc.
And:
"We've all experienced the frustration of trying to access information on websites, only to find that the data is trapped in outdated, difficult-to-read file formats and that metadata..."

Nope, not even once.

Nonsense.
There may be a lot of people who refuse to work for less than they +think+ they're worth, but that doesn't actually say anything about how much they're really worth.

If a business can get that talent for what they are willing to pay, then that's what it is actually worth.

Salaries are not about what you think you're worth or how much it cost to get that talent; they're about replaceability.

I believe that University of Colorado environmental studies professor Roger Pielke Jr.should start us off by reducing his carbon footprint to 3rd world levels as an example.