Reminds me of a quip from an Aussie acquaintance a few years ago: He said he was happy that Australia got the criminals and America got the religious groups.

Of course, that's not really relevant to this issue. Politicians anywhere should be assumed corrupt and on the take unless they can prove otherwise. And laws limiting the population's access to information about their government's inner workings are de-facto proof of the "otherwise".

Ah, but you forgot the extension to all US laws that applies in this case: "... except when a computer is involved."

A well-established principle in US (and most other) law is that if there's a computer involved, all precedent is forgotten, and the lessons of centuries of legal progress must be learned all over again.

That clause in the US constitution was there because so many previous governments had done exactly what the US government is now doing with "computerized" communication. The folks who wrote that constitution wanted to prevent the abuses that governments had always foisted on their citizens. But modern people seem to accept the "except when there's a computer involved" qualification, so all those old abuses are being re-implemented online, and we'll have to fight all those old battles again before such safeguards are extended to the digital parts of our modern world.

There; FTFY. ;-)

Heh. One of my favorite programming experiences is the numerous times that people have noticed the entries in some of my Makefiles that run various "man ..." commands, pipe the results to various little perl programs, and drop the output into various .c and/or .h files. "WTF; your code reads the online manuals to generate the code?" "Yeah; you got a problem with that?"

So we'd also conclude that the online man pages are in fact programs. Or actually, they're subroutines that just need a bit of preprocessing to convert them to the language in use on your project. Any competent perl (or python) programmer should be able to write such preprocessors. Extracting machine-readable information from human-readable documents was one of the original design goals of perl, and the python crowd also sees that as a significant niche for their favorite language.

Do you think some people here might have a problem with that? ;-)

Well, maybe, but not as fubar as trying to be compliant with all the various HTML "standards", including XHTML and MSHTML and iHTML and XML and ... ;-)

Anyway, I'd expect that HTML5 is following google's lead, and will be in Beta until all of us have shuffled off this mortal plane. It worked for google; it'll probably work for HTML5.

And so far, I've found that switching to HTML5 produces better compatibility than any other HTML version that various organizations and corporations have declared "standard". There are the usual insanities of trying to make pages work on MS browsers, of course, but if you're reasonable about dragging your feet WRT the newer HTML5 features, you tend to find that your pages work reasonably well with all the common browsers except IE6. (Well, OK -- and except for Safari on the iPhone. ;-)

Basically, the HTML5 gang has done a fairly good job of figuring out ways to thumb our noses at the corporate powers who are constantly trying to throw monkey wrenches into the Web's inner workings. Going with the HTML5 approach, and encouraging them to keep up the good work, is a feasible strategy to make things work about as well as we can expect in an environment of government and corporate sabotage attempts.

Actually, in my experience "completely reliable" withing the software industry means "delivering within the deadline imposed by technically-ignorant managers or customers". The developers rarely have any say on the schedule; they are just judged on whether they meet whatever random schedule someone else decided based on little or no knowledge of the roadblocks standing in the way of delivering what was wanted.

As someone else put it a while back: Most software schedules are decided by trimming the estimates until the developers respond by giggling. At that point, the managers making the schedule know that it's totally unachievable, so they stop decreasing their time estimates.

Well, I've read/heard a number of discussions of this (though usually measuring intelligence rather than "wisdom", whatever that is ;-); the general conclusion seems to be that the IQ of a group of humans is an inverse function of the number of people in the group. The actual function isn't really known, and there's evidence that it may be different for different groups (or different subject areas). I've seen numerous that "sum of IQs divided by the square root of the number of people" is roughly right in most cases. Others have argued for "max IQ divided by the number of people", but that usually seems to decay a bit too fast with increasing number. Still others have argued for an inverse log function rather than inverse square root, but it's not clear we have any data that can distinguish those.

It'd be interesting if we could actually find an accurate way to quantize this "group-think effect". Of course, if you're using IQ, it would help if you could find a good way to quantize that (in contrast with how our schools do it now ;-).

An added qualification is that sometimes you get a group "leader" that most group members follow, and in such cases, the leader's decisions are usually the group's, so the function is only slightly less that constant despite group size. And there's the special case when most of the group realizes that the leader is an idiot, so the group quickly becomes incapable of making decisions.

Nah; physics is much, much simpler than economics. Just ask any physicist. ;-)

Hmmm ... A quick check shows that it's actually on the order of a kilosmoot, if you take the obvious route of going south on Mass Ave, hanging a left on Comm Ave, and a right at Dahtmouth. That's quite a lot of hops, skips and jumps, at least for a normal-size human.

Someone oughta try it, though, and report the actual number of hop+skip+jump units it takes them to make the trip. Or maybe organize a team of people of different sizes, and report the mean of their counts.

It wouldn't be surprising if the Everglade kite learns to eat them. This is a local subspecies listed as "endangered", and its favorite food is Florida's largest native snail, the apple snail. If so, this may help the kite survive.

Actually, I was reading about it at google news just a few minutes ago, and slashdot tends to be a bit late to the party in reporting stories like this. I'd agree that it's a bit of a waste of bandwidth, disk space, etc. for /. to bother with it. Unless, of course, it turns out eventually that there's an interesting tech component to the story. It's likely that anyone interested in such "public interest" stories has a window open to one or more of the general news sources. So /. shouldn't bother.

OT prediction: If it turns out that the act was committed by an American nutjob, as with the Oklahoma City bombing the media and political system will quickly forget about it. If it turns out that it was done by a "furriner", we'll hear lots about those awful "terrists" for some time, everyone will make vicious pronouncements, and they won't forget about it. In either case, little if anything will be done that's relevant to preventing future such acts.

(But this is just based on history. I could be wrong, so stay tuned. ;-)

This is probably the most important thing to get across. The US population has been far more damaged by the likes of HUAC and the various secretive "intelligence" agencies than by any foreign bogeymen.

This isn't just a US problem, either. I've read a few comments from historians on the topic, saying that the data shows that during the last century, far more people (in the world as a whole) died due to their own government's actions than from any foreign soldiers or other attackers.

The data isn't nearly as good for previous centuries, but what data there is supports the claim for the rest of our history. The biggest danger everywhere comes from our own rulers, who rarely have our interests at heart.

In the on-topic case of network security, it's fairly clear that the primary interest of the US and all other governments is in controlling the communication of their own citizens.