"Threat of force?"

I hear the WIPO has storm troopers now who bust down your door, slap you, then go back to the office and email ICANN, "Hey, transfer that domain to this other guy."

Yhl. Yhbt. Hand.

It tends to be liberal groups freaking out over harmless GMOs or cell phone radiation.

One could be overly critical and call that "bad spec," because the test case wasn't in the spec. But you can't get a perfect spec any more than you can get perfectly bug-free software.

More appropriately the cause is "real life" and "human beings." Digital software does not map perfectly to analog reality. Expecting perfect spec or perfect software is madness (except in Sparta, natch).

His problem is that his contracts are ending too early. Bugs, testing, and changes to the spec are part of the software development cycle. My contracts (the good ones, anyway) extend past go-live. A contract should include planning, development, dev testing, training, and user testing, and he's leaving out those last two parts.

Do you know why they call it the Xbox One? Because you take one look at it, turn 360 degrees and walk away.

(Insert ASCII trollface here)

http://ycharts.com/companies/YHOO/cash_on_hand

About $3 billion in cash and short term investments. While that ain't just walkin-around money, sinking a third of what you've got into something that 1) isn't currently profitable and 2) your press release about the acquisition announces your plan is to "do nothing with it" is head-assplode crazy. If I had stock in Yahoo I'd be dumping it about now.

Yes, my GeoCities page back in 1996/7 was a fan site for Decent II that I updated exactly twice. Also, it had a different background texture for each page, terrible midi files of Jimi Hendrix songs (why?!?!) and animated gifs I made of spaceships blowing up. It was terrible, but in retrospect, awesome in its terribleness.

Also, you need replacements to sustain the user base. For a site that started for college-aged users, the demographics of facebook are aging. Teens/students don't want to be on FaceBook because their parents (and grandparents) are on FaceBook.

You're not wrong, but I had to laugh at the idea of "ruining" GeoCities. That sort of implies that at one time GeoCities was not ruinous, and then became so.

Traditional stock valuation methods kind of assume your company isn't a fad that could implode in a heartbeat. There's nothing to think Tumblr has survivability better than say, MySpace. Yes, I can see paying a billion for something that generates 100 million a year...if there's a good reason to think that asset will last more than 10 years. Free-to-use websites that generate 100 million a year for more than a decade are unicorns.

I am fascinated by your ideas, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Long form here: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3763073&cid=43763153 but yeah, you're right. And GWB was right. "They hate us for our freedoms." So we got rid of our freedoms. America was great because it was good. The terrorists wanted to destroy American greatness, and they did it, because we stopped being good.

"America is great because America is good, and when it ceases to be good it will cease to be great."

Of course America has made mistakes. But I always believed they were honest mistakes, by people who wanted to do good, but were wrong, or misguided, and we would eventually feel shame about these mistakes and work to correct them. Think Japanese internment camps, segregation. Awful things that show the inherent goodness of America by their correction.

The day that idea died for me was the day in 2005 when Alberto Gonzalez's DOJ letters became public. That we're going to use mealy-mouth lawyer words to call obvious torture "not torture." That's pretty much it. Game over. We are not the good guys anymore, who can make any claim to a moral high ground.

The slippery slope is so far above us we can't even see it anymore. Of course all the PATRIOT Act powers that were "just supposed to be for terrorists" got used for regular criminal investigations of drug dealers. And then we've got Obama assassinating people with drones, and it takes a Rand Paul filibuster to get the White House to say "meh, maybe we won't launch missiles at Americans on American soil." Of course a few weeks later some bombs go off in Boston and even Paul changes his mind and says its just fine to shoot missiles from the sky at a robber fleeing a liquor store. The RoboCop dystopia isn't even tongue-in-cheek anymore. At least the ED-209 told you to drop your weapon before it shot you anyway.

Oh and when the criminal bomber was caught (allegedly, etc etc) we've got John McCain recommending "enemy combatant" status so we can indefinitely detain and torture him. When that happened I had just finished reading McCain's memoir, "Faith of my Fathers" a large part of which is about his own imprisonment and torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese and I had a really tough time reconciling the man in the book with the man on the TV screen.

Our "rights" don't really exist anymore, because the state can just lawyer language them away. Of course you have a right to a fair trial! Unless you're an "enemy combatant." Cruel and unusual punishment? Torture? Absolutely forbidden! Thankfully waterboarding and sleep deprivation aren't torture, they're "enhanced interrogate techniques." And of course you're secure from search and seizure of your papers where you have a reasonable expectation of privacy. However, your email doesn't necessarily count as "papers," and they're stored on somebody else's server. And while you may assert a reasonable expectation of privacy over your email, the DOJ says you don't, so they can just read your email as they want, because they get to decide your level of expectation for you.

So today, that the FBI want a backdoor into our communications? Not surprising in the least. I'd be surprised if they didn't. Par for the course.

And now, thanks to this post, I'm probably on a watch list somewhere.

In America today, a foreigner with a radio device "accidentally" operating on military frequencies would win a lovely all-expense paid vacation to Cuba.

You're right, and stupidly we've been installing metal detectors instead of gun detectors in airports. The only way to be sure we're safe now is a full body cavity search before you can get on a plane.

Remember, you only don't want a federal employee probing your anus if you have something to hide. You don't have anything to hide, do you, citizen?