Given that "80% of Americans have no net worth" (a bombastic statement in "Wall Street" that actually is not far from the truth); given that more than that percentage are too stupid to manage their finances such that they don't carry a credit card debt; given that in April 2003, about 80% of Americans believed the war in Iraq was a good idea (justified by what solid, verifiable evidence and sound philosophical principles? Who cares, let's bomb brown people and people who don't "talk Americuhn!!"); given that fully 60% believe in creationism; given that around 95% are mentally-retarded enough to believe in the mysticism that is a belief in the existence of a god (yes, I absolutely consider a belief in the mystical (God, ghosts, etc.) a form of mental retardation).... ...yes, I think these demonstrates that, quite easily, 80% or more of Americans can be wrong. People -- not just Americans, but all around the world -- have all kinds of asinine, stupid, misinformed beliefs, and the greater the role of religion in the society, the worse it gets. America, though a statutorily-secular nation (much to the consternation of American conservatives who don't bother to look-up the works of the Founding Fathers they claim to strongly support), is socially a strongly-Christian nation.

Frankly, as an American myself, it is clear to me that most of my fellow countrymen are mouth-breathing morons.

Consider the wisdom in this old quote:

"That which is right, is not always popular; that which is popular, is not always right."

Similarly, P.T. Barnum said it well:

"You'll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of Americans."

"It has nothing to do with freedom of the press - these organisations violated federal law."

Since when does a federal statute trump the Bill of Rights, specifically, the First Amendment?

Oh wait, it doesn't. (Except when either a judge decides the Constitution is quaint and/or decides they feel like legislating from the bench, or Americans permit their congressmen to run wild and write unconstitutional laws, or when the enforcement officers of our law allow themselves to enforce laws they know to be unconstitutional -- as the vast majority of federal laws are.)

Return to high school, take Civics 101, and try reading the documents on which this nation was founded.

The article misses one huge fact - Mr. Ellsberg is an American, Mr. Assange is not.

Why are you applying a nationalist distinction? What does one's "tribe", assigned merely by coincidence of birth and political boundary and time, have to do with *anything*?

Is Assange, by not being an American as Ellsberg is, somehow less-permitted to tell the truth than Ellsberg? If so, why the double-standard? If not, then what is the relevance of your tribalism - especially a borderless, open space like the Internet?

I suspect it has something to do with anti-foreign bias.

Assange's work has exposed the lies not only of the U.S., but other nations as well (Yemen, in covering-up attacks; China, in covering-up its position on N. Korea; the entire middle-east's position on Iran's nuclear program; etc.). It is predominantly an American-biased view, but that should be obvious given the source of the data he has published -- cables produced and collected by and for the U.S. government. The appearance of "anti-Americanism" is a first-order consequence of his release. But look beyond that, and you find it's rather fair -- to the extent that the U.S. is fair in its cable writings, that is.

And on that note, Assange's work has also demonstrated that U.S. diplomats -- their Hilary-demanded spying on the U.N. aside -- are largely doing serious, reasonable work, and producing sober, reasonable analyses -- exactly what I, as an American taxpayer, would demand of them for my money.

Math is hard; let's go hating America!

(Disclaimer: nobody needs - or should have - 450 ICBMs, not even us.)

This is where regulation meets the marketplace, and how proper regulations and policies can work together with market forces to drive sustainability. But, it does require forces outside the market (such as government regulation) to internalize those costs so that they get accounted for up front.

I agreed with you until you used the word "require". A free-market does not require a strictly-outside force to enforce internalization of externality costs, at least in theory.

Example: An externality of oil-discovery are accidents in the Gulf Coast, which result in billions of dollars in damages. If there is sufficient demand-side desire not to have such accidents occur, then suppliers will go to sufficient lengths to prevent them from happening, however desirable they may be for the purpose of profitability.

Now, of course, in practice you have vast information asymmetries (who outside of the supplier's management and engineering staff are aware of the firm's operational effectiveness & safety?), which such firms are happy to exploit (as BP did). And you have vast dry-gulches of long-term thinking; relatively-few people truly care enough about where their oil comes-from to care enough to check on firms' operational effectiveness, *even if* the transparency existed to do so. (I may be overly-pessimistic on this point though -- after all, how many people waste countless hours following each other's dinner plans on Twitter??)

In practice, you're right, and I fully agree with you; careful regulations can force externality internalization. The real trouble, then, is getting politicians to craft such legislation. The reality, unfortunately, is that their heads are up their asses and are corrupt beyond any possibility of usefulness. There are (many) days when I think we would be better-off with less regulation, and in its place, a vastly-expanded set of demand-side reporting/watchdog services (like Consumer Reports), as well as a cultural rejigger in which people return to voicing demand-side power, in the form of strikes, boycotts, and the like. (Of course, the problem with this libertarian idea is the cultural shift. That can't seriously happen until failures arise even more-catastrophic than the financial near-collapse of 2008, and even then, we're more-likely to go in the opposite direction anyway, towards more regulation...)

A fuel tax (Pigouvian tax) seems to me one of the most-sensible taxes, *assuming* (and with politicians, this is an enormous assumption) the taxed money is spent 100% on things that accelerates our adoption of renewable energy sources (wind, solar, tidal electricity, electric cars, etc.). Cap-and-trade never ought to have died in U.S. Congress. But, the trouble with real-world politics is that all of these sensible ideas that moderate economists create is that government cannot implement them unless:

1) voters become sensible (and regarding that likelihood, read Bryan Caplan's "The Myth of the Rational Voter")
2) you institute a non-democratic government, in which supposedly-wise technocrats make decisions without a care for what the rest of the public wants. For an historical example, see Soviet Russia, or for a less-extreme example, modern-day Singapore.

In the end, nobody and nothing works. Those of us under the age of 60 are pretty much all fucked -- by the threat of economic collapse, by global warming, by the threat of nuclear terrorism (or mere human error in the presence of nuclear weapons), by resource misuse and/or misallocation, and, so long as we are alive in the developed world, by the growth and modernization of the 1/3 of the world's populace that has heretofore lived in squalor (India and China) that feeds those population's acceptance of worsening work environments arising out of increased competition due to increased populations in the markets served -- regardless of whether we have a free-market or socialist or thoroughly-mixed economy, and regardless of whether we have a democratically-elected government.

As a libertarian (left-libertarian, formerly a right-libertarian) for several years, I disagree with you.

The vast majority of libertarians are right-libertarians -- the sort who hate unions precisely because they reduce the ability of a corporation to make a profit for its owners; unions act as their own inflationary pressure, after all, keeping wage increases higher than they would be (and these days, are) if people negotiated wages individually (as is true for 93% of all American workers), rather than collectively (the remaining 7%, who are unionized).

Even in my right-libertarian days, I was uncomfortable with that position. If as libertarians we claim to fear centralized power, "whether in the hands of government or anyone else" (Milton Friedman, "Free to Choose", last chapter), why not that of corporations? If we are so vehemently in favor of free market solutions, then why not the free-market solution to countering the negotiating power of the capitalists/management i.e. that of laborers/non-management bargaining collectively -- as has been done via a union?

Consider the force vectors in the marketplace, and the anti-union position becomes clearly unsustainable. Yet, it is the political-economic intellectual fashion of the last 30 years, thanks largely due to the right-libertarians (and unions' own corruption).

It's one reason why I am not a right-libertarian anymore. And it's why I think most of my counterparts in IT -- who tend to be blindly right-libertarians -- are morons, in this respect. Like the sheep we are, we slit our own throats at the alters of the corporations -- and sadly, governments too -- that we blindly declare, Rand-like, our gods.

And sometimes information leaks are not real national security issues.

And sometimes, human freedom trumps national security. In fact, it very-nearly always should. Unless the book contained precise, actionable instructions on how to take control of a Pentagon-controlled NBC weapon and launch it without anybody else in the military doing something about it, I don't see a reasonable justification for the book's destruction.

For that matter, even if it contained such information, the Pentagon ought not hide behind security-by-obscurity, but plug the goddamned hole cited in the book.

Here in the U.S., we like free speech; it is a foreign concept, in our degree of belief in the idea, to nearly all other nations, even western nations. We are permitted the freedom to comment on trials and state that we believe in somebody's guilt or innocence. Canada, OTOH, follows the less-free model you describe, in which such speech is considered "tampering".

Personally, I do not believe that speech which causes direct harm should, *necessarily*, be banned. That is a very dangerous idea -- who decides what is to be banned -- you? Or me? Or (in reality) some faceless politician who cares nothing about either of us except whether he will get our vote (or, convince us not to vote, leaving a -1 smaller pool of other voters to persuade in his direction)?

Further, let's be rigorous in our thinking. What, precisely, is "direct harm"? Do tabloids cause "direct harm" to the reputation of individuals when scandals or nude photos are published? Surely to some degree. But, in the case of celebrities, do such postings in fact cause people to retain interest in those celebrities -- thereby maintaining the relevance of those people? Advertisers have a saying: "there is no such thing as bad publicity". Perhaps then, the very concept of "direct harm" does not even exist.

Even if it did exist, however, I would argue that there are people who *ought* to be "directly harmed" by speech. Who (among U.S.-friendly nations) can argue, at this point, that Osama bin Laden ought not be harmed for the attacks carried-out on 9/11 (where "harm" can mean anything from reputation damage, to imprisonment, to execution)?

Similarly, why should politicians, or anyone else, be immune to the "harm" of free speech? Speech is just that -- a set of words, communicated on some medium (text, speech, sign language, etc.). It makes no action on its own accord; that requires some non-speech decision process, completely-distinct from the process of communication.

So, then, what justification is there for *any* restriction of free speech? In theory, I would say there is none. In practice, I'm almost inclined to say the same. However, I give exception only to the most-obvious, damaging speech, where even a very small probability of action based on it creates a practically humanity-eliminating risk. So, the only speech I view as legitimate to restrict is communication of *specific*, *ACTIONABLE* information leading to mass-death, as well as fraud, which includes libel/slander (I include fraud because it degrades trust, and without trust, people cannot cooperate, and hence, cannot collectively accomplish anything... which is practically the same outcome as destroying humanity). Of actionable mass-death communication, the classic example IMO is that of communication of detonation codes of nuclear weapons...

In fairness, Reagan was a hack actor... with an economics undergrad degree, whereas most Hollywood acting talent - even today, 30 years later - has no degree at all.

Good President or bad, the man was at least, on paper, more-qualified to be President than most actors then or now.

Of course, isn't there a saying that "those who can, do, those who can't, go into politics" (to paraphrase "those who can, do, those who can't, teach")? :-)

...don't be such an early-adopter that you invest so much time in something (like Linux) that it's not (yet) profitable.

I remember seeing Linux consultancies go down the toilet 10 years ago because there wasn't enough of a market for them; perhaps now they are. But I shouldn't have spent so much time, at the time, learning Linux and FreeBSD, when there was piles more money to be made in the Windows & .NET world.

That said, the grass is starting to look greener on the Linux side again, in large part because Google is making it relevant both server-side and on mobile devices, and in part because programming still seems like fun there. In the MSFT world, it's all about slavish devotion to sometimes half-baked tools and half-baked requirements. There's more of a scientific & engineering culture in the Linux camp than the MSFT camp... (And I say that with deep personal and professional experience on both sides.)

Maybe I just want to be a coder in my personal time, and not also my professional time...

It might just be my configuration (installed Ruby 1.9.1 via MacPorts). Here's my Rails 3 install attempt:

bash-3.2# /opt/local/bin/gem1.9 install rails --version 3.0.0
Successfully installed rails-3.0.0
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for rails-3.0.0...
ERROR: While executing gem ... (Errno::ENOENT)
        No such file or directory - lib

The gem installed, but without docs. WTF.

I spent the last month fighting with Ruby 1.9.1 + RoR 2.3.8 on OS 10.6, trying to get it to connect to MySQL, Postgres, or Sqlite. The database connectors (mysql, pg, etc.) for all 3 failed. I wish I knew how to start fresh with Ruby and RoR on OSX, but I don't know where gem and MacPorts have installed everything. I might consider it again if:

1) I can use Ruby 1.9.[12], not the OSX-installed 1.8.7.
2) I had any idea how to wipe all the Ruby/RoR stuff without wiping/reinstalling OSX. I'm sure it's perhaps only a dozen commands, but I'm so tired of fighting with RoR dependencies that I gave-up a week ago.

In its place, I got Python + Django + Postgres working together in about 1 hour, including time required to find a couple nice tutorials, download the Django source, build it, install it, and configure it. I don't like the double-underscore "magic method" syntax I'm finding for e.g. filtering methods though, and prefer Ruby's lambda expressions instead (blame my C# + LINQ experience professionally)...

(Waiting for somebody to tell me to go with what I know and use C# in Mono on OSX instead. :P )

http://robocode.sourceforge.net/

Write Java or .NET code to destroy other bots! I haven't played/coded-for this game in several years, but I know somebody with the exact same problem as the Ask Slashdot poster... And the game is genuinely a LOT of fun, as there are lots of other bots freely-available to compete-against, some of which are pretty sophisticated (implement statistical targeting, a genetic algorithm, etc.).

See also IBM's introduction to it way back in 2002 -- which was around the same time a previous Slashdot article pointed me towards the game: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-robocode/

I never in my life thought I would say anything like the following, but.... You are exactly the sort of immigrant who makes the case for never allowing immigrants to vote (immigrants who become citizens, and hence, eligible to vote in federal elections, not just qualifying local and state elections). People like you come here and destroy the native culture.

Personally, I favor very low barriers to immigration -- verifications that the immigrant is not a violent criminal, but beyond that... Come on in. You shouldn't have to have jumped through hoops.

You are aware that ID cards have, historically, been used to murder people, right? In Iraq, until Saddam Hussein was killed by the U.S., ID cards were used to track those who dissented with him and torture them - including at Abu Gharaib. In former East Germany, the Stasi secret police used them to do essentially the same thing.

Conceptually, ID cards serve no purpose except to give individuals a way to lose: a way to lose their privilege to drive, or to earn a living, should they misplace the card; a way to lose their civil freedoms when they cannot prove to Officer Not-So-Friendly that they are who they say they are; a way, even, to lose their physical life when said officer decides they are not a "true American", and hence, are not privileged to the same rights as citizens.

The U.S. was not founded by people who trusted their government, or anybody else's. People like you who come here and trust ours -- which is no more trustworthy than any other in history -- at the very least ought never to be allowed to vote in any significant election here.

There are plenty of other nations you can live in where the level of trust in government is more to your liking; some of them are even nice places to live (arguably nicer than much of the U.S.).

"War as a video game; what better way to raise the ultimate soldier?" - Solid Snake

the company appears to be a model not only for proper disaster recovery response, but also for ethical corporate behavior

Why is giving away for free something of value (I assume) "ethical behavior"? Is charging a fee for work performed "unethical"?

Those religions which claim to be peaceful are never truly so; they cannot be, for they would not survive in a competitive landscape. Just as a genetic line which is not passed-on from one generation to the next, information -- which includes religious beliefs, texts, conventions, etc. -- dies-out if it is not propagated. Hence, conversion of new followers -- new suckers -- is necessary for any religion's survival.

Jainism and Buddhism are less-bad than the larger religions (Christianity, Islam, etc.), in that they take a more-outwardly passive stance than those religions. But that is probably due in part to the relatively-fewer followers; no sense in raising the ire of other religions whose members might try to stomp them out if they become too uppity. You're right that those religions don't seem to breed dangerous psychos like other, larger religions do.

But, less-bad though they are in a physical sense and in the sense of preserving individual freedom from others' religion, they are just as bad in the sense of intellectual integrity. Belief in that which can neither be proven nor disproven to exist is a leap of logic. It is a belief in the unscientific; a belief in the mystic. No religion is any different from a cult - the only distinction made is of organization size and influence over the government bureaucrats creating such labels.

Scientology is an evil borderline-criminal enterprise, but they are useful in one way: they are well-known to be a fully-artificial religion (created on a bet that a religion could not be created and garner members), yet L. Ron Hubbard's claims about the religion's foundation are as laughable as those of any other major religion. Scientology holds a mirror up to the world's religions and says "see? your dogma is just as absurd as ours!"

I view religion as a symbol of prehistory; a leftover from knuckle-dragging times when man did not understand things, and so invented stories in explanation. It may have been necessary at one time to brainwash people, especially the masses of under-educated, stupid people, into not eating diseased food (Islam and Judaism's prohibition of pork, which likely was under-cooked and sparked fears among its consumers, for a time) and fighting ("thou shalt not kill") and having babies without being able to care for them (considering adultery a sin).

But given the preponderance of different, competing religions, and given that their bodies of knowledge are largely, if not entirely, fiction, and that we know better than the lies told by all religions, I think we would be better overall without them.