I dont know about sodul, but my wife pays taxes but cant vote because she's a resident alien with Finnish citizenship

The Constitution is perfectly fine. At any point in time, we could elect other people than the farktards we elect now (over and over again). It's a brilliant document that assures we all get the government we deserve.

0day implies that there is a --non public-- vulnerability and/or exploit out in the wild that has not yet been disclosed outside of relatively small private circles (nothing to do with the time between vuln and exploit). Its meaning has been lately bastardized to include "things for which we dont have a patch yet" - and it's that bastardization which creates scenarios that don't make "sense".

-all of them- deliberately misleads to sell. Fox only differs in that they're public explicit about their market niche / demographic. (This comes from someone who's watched staged media events :P ). Shrug.

I dont get why people single out Fox here. The whole media mess is a cross between a game of "telephone" where stories are single sourced and passed along from outlet to outlet losing fidelity over time, deliberate pandering for access, staged details for "clarity", deliberate playing down or up of details to meet advertising demands, shoddy fact checking, and - more than anything else - wild misrepresentation of stories through just reports not understanding what they're reporting on (they're entertainers after all).

These are all things I've personally encountered with multiple news outlets. Calling Fox out on it in particular is sort of ridiculous, IMO.

Really, it's both: IE should be avoided until there's a patch and yes, blaming one software package does give people who dont know any better or dont think about it a false sense of security when they switch. They're not mutually exclusive positions...

I just want to say this is my favorite Slashdot post in some time....

We know what happened to the Golgafrinchans

It's Disaster Area's stage in a parking orbit.

You're assuming two things:
1. The abbreviation isn't usually recognized
2. Everything needs to abbreviated
3. Misunderstandings stemming from shortness are any more prevalent in short form are any more common than those occurring in other typical informal written communication.

In the first case, there are many many examples of abbreviations being universally understood and evolving into regular lexicon. In the second, there are many things which -can- be concisely and clearly represented, as happens on twitter fairly often. Re number three: I couldn't prove a similarity in here, but I've certainly read a lot of bad, unclear crap on the net and it went on for -pages-.

I don't get it. What's the problem with grammar evolving to fit different mediums? Grammar evolves every day and always has. There's absolutely nothing that says the grammar we're using at this moment in time is any better at all. In fact, given the amount of data we're generating and the amount of processing we're going to need to do to it (as a society) to make it useful and accessible knowledge, short form communication is beneficial in many circumstances and should be encouraged. As time moves on, the practical etiquette of where it is and is not appropriate to use short form will develop. I love people who make the assumption that because this is how they're doing it now, this is how it should be done ;)

Twitter forces brevity and conciseness of communication which is often a beneficial attribute...and it's something which neither irc, nor email, or blogging do. RSS, which DOES shorten things, has a lot of fail when it comes to typical data sources (like blogs) which were not written with the intent of being short and so lose fidelity.

Twitter also can be used with built in sms on phones easily and quickly. Email can, too, but you have to select a distro ahead of time...which loses twitter's second communication value...reaching people you might not have thought were interested in the subject at hand through subscriptions. You can do this with irc in general channels, but most phones dont have built in irc clients and so doesn't and will never have the user base of a system that you can use in every SMS capable phone without additional application installs. You'll just never ever have the same kind of usebase in irc without a drastic, radical change in the market.

Finally, the irony of people biatching about how boring or useless twitter is have largely themselves to blame. If you know interesting people, they typically have interesting, useful things to say. If your friends are all doormats, well, theyre going to talk about what they had for breakfast today. And the weather. And etc.

If the only thing you focused on at Defcon were talks and panels, you sort of missed the point and the benefit of being there. The talks and panels are just excuses to get a bunch of smart people together to jam. Next time, stay after the talks and grab some of the speakers to chat. Find some of the parties, chat. Meet people, network, discuss ideas, drink heavily and relax.

I have to add: I'm not saying bad stuff isn't happening - it is and has been. Just the attribution to state actors is ridiculous speculation.

They're not credible. None of these reports has any concrete evidence as to who, what, where, why, or even always how. Mostly they get the "when" :) But even then, not always.

The attribution in these articles is like saying because someone made a threatening call to you from a payphone in chicago that the city of chicago was threatening you specifically. It COULD be, but it could also be someone who lives there but is just a guy with no affiliation with the city. It could also be someone who doesn't live there but is passing through. They could also be rerouting the call. And whichever of those actors it might be may be targeting you specifically, or they could just be randomly dialing numbers.

It's dumb FUD spreading.