What about the idea that Spamhaus, by being a blacklist, is denying service to all sorts of websites itself? Why is a DDOS attack that much different from what they do every day?

I mean, sure, they block a lot of spam, but what about all the times someone's domain gets blacklisted and it's not spam? And yeah, I realize domain admins opt in to use their blacklists.

It still does not change the fact it's a denial of service, coming from a self-appointed body that is in no better position to judge what is and is not spam than anyone else.

A real common tactic with political campaigns is to sign up for the opponents mailing list on an AOL account, wait for them to send you an email, then complain you are receiving spam. AOL turns around and gets that domain blacklisted. Then it takes time and resources to resolve the issue.

I just don't see much of a difference.

Yeah, the server may be impressive by some people's standards, but it's going to be outclassed by newer / faster machines. Just don't get too attached.

The school my daughter attended got rid of a bunch of old 486s in 2001, which I brought home to build a beowulf cluster. Networked 32 of the things into a single, massive computer with all this computing power... it was the most exciting thing I had done in a while.

It was fascinating thinking I could do such a thing, but there were all these issues: fuses started blowing / the air was so dry my lips were chapping / the power bill went up by 400 dollars that month / hardware would mysteriously die and screw up the whole cluster / there was no software support / it took up an entire room in the house / my dog kept peeing on the machines at the bottom / etc.

Still, I was able to turn it into the world's most computationally expensive, clunky web server. It was outstanding for local development, but it was impossible to get it to work with the router for external network access.

It was hard to get rid of it, the machines were in my house for 2 years until I decided to move and had to leave them behind. It's so easy to get attached to obsolete machinery because of that personal connection to it.

Seriously, give your wife a safe word for when it's time to break ties with the thing. Ultimately, it is cool, but it's either going to become an unhealthy obsession or a thing on your shelf.

I have a weird feeling this is going to lead to an invalidation of GW's trademark on the phrase Space Marine in the first place. There are so many examples of prior art it's not even funny, not to mention the fact there are actually real-life space marines these days. I don't think you can trademark a class of things.

Their trademark is limited to protection for tabletop games, it does not enjoy a universal application. For them to assert they own trademark rights outside of that context is not actually valid. I mean, if someone else was making tabletop miniatures and calling them Space Marines, I could see that as something they would want to take action against.

But an ebook? This will have the Internet up in arms!

Slashdot does not sling FUD, users do. Every time a new iPhone comes out, Android users make fun of it, and vice versa.

The thing to remember about Slashdot is this is where the tribes collide. Most of the self-reinforcing opinions people share does not make sense. The valuable points get modded to the top, and the trolls mark themselves anonymous. It's not a bad thing to get bent out of shape about, some remarkable conversations emerge from the variety of opinions.

That said, I own an iPad, a Nexus 7, a Galaxy Note II, and a Blackberry Playbook (along with some other tablets I have accumulated). I can tell you about the relative strengths and weaknesses of each one without needing to say something bad about the others.

There's a great irony to the debates that happen on Slashdot, which is that it's all just technology. These devices are mostly obsolete within a few months after they are released, and OS updates do little to make them future proof. Deciding on a personal mobile device / platform is really just a way of saying who you plan to spend money with on future upgrades.

Trying to remember where I heard this, but there was something similar with the old HP laserjet printers.

I think there was a time when it was considered good practice to put backdoors like this into internet connected devices. I think the reasoning was that every device needed to have a universal password.

But yeah, this is a pretty crazy issue to have.

I think it's less about clueless reporters and more about corporate PR. Google wants people to think the phone is in demand, and they pollenate various news outlets with the story. There are enough people in the world who have no idea what rooting an Android device is that this sounds like something interesting, when really it's not. At some point, they can score more points by issuing additional news releases stating the first ones are bogus and the phone was designed to act that way.

It's easy to understand why this sounds like news when you think about all the hype that existed around people trying to unlock the iPhone. That was an actual struggle, there were potential legal issues, there were risks involved in phones bricking, there were shady hackers from all over the world coming together to make things happen, etc. With an Android phone, there's really just a setting called Developer Mode and some company-supported terminal applications for doing what you need to do.

It's all a cycle... *sigh*

The fact the phone has been rooted is not news in the sense that this was a significant or difficult accomplishment. It is news in the sense that people are doing things with it, and this fact really just serves to build people's perceptions that the product is popular.

Let's face it, the majority of people who will hear this fact are not going to understand that this is a non-achievement, or that the phone was actually designed to allow people to do this. The small number of people who actually understand what rooting an Android device really means are not the target for a story like this, it aims to affect the opinions of people who are trying to decide if they want a Nexus. It makes them think the phone is in demand from others, which increases the perceived value of the device.

Take the story back a few years, substitute an iPhone and a company that wants their devices to operate strictly in a walled garden, and you have a real story to be told. This is just PR.

The sales numbers probably don't matter as much as the perception that everyone wants it. I know we all want to know these numbers, but they don't really matter when it comes to building demand around a product.

The market impact of scarcity is not strictly measured in terms of sales price, retail or otherwise. In device markets, scarcity is a driver in consumer decisions and perception, the reason you want your device to be hard to get is because people will want it more (since everyone else wants it). This is the reason businesses spend so much building PR around their products and finding ways to get people to talk about them.

Think about the HP Touchpad and WebOS for a moment. Technical issues aside, the reason it did not sell was that no one else was buying it. No one wanted a product where support night not exist in a couple years.

After HP was faced with a lack of market adoption, they killed the line, which just reinforced people's perceptions that it was not a good product to begin with. This also reinforced people's perceptions that the iPad was indomitable, as this was a big company making a big push to get a foothold in a new market.

Perception is a lot more important than number of devices sold when it comes to driving adoption in a market, which is what opens the door to achieving pricing power. Number of units sold is really useful as a number on sales calls and earnings reports, it shows how profitable a business is based on sales.

For that matter, if the cockroach engages in biomimicry, isn't it possible that people are simply not noticing it because of it's similarities to it's poisonous cousin?

Nature kind of happens, the fact is we don't always notice.

So... much... to... argue... with... there...

If you really want to argue who invented the smartphone market, it was Danger. Say all you want about Palm, but the Sidekick was the device that really proved the model for apps on mobile devices. I mean this in the sense of apps as opposed to applications, where you have over the air updates for the system. The market for smartphones would not be a tenth of what it is were that not the case. Had they not sold out to Microsoft, the smartphone world would be a very different place to day.

The OP does appear to understand what innovation is. Innovation !== features enhancements, however, which are often a natural product of ongoing R&D that make their way into a product. Apple using a retina display is a feature enhancement, Apple building one in the first place is innovation. As you said, this was Samsung.

In regards to the design of the iPad, Jonathan Ives did not have the original idea for it. There were prototype drawings from the 80s describing very similar devices. Just because Apple was able to make the push to actually build the thing and mass-market it does not really mean the company conceived of the device completely from scratch.

I mean, citing the iPad and iPhone as examples of innovation is all well and good, if we were talking about how innovative they were in 2007. It's 2012 now, where are the new products and ideas that are going to make the world more efficient and exciting than it was before? I know they have made bids to get involved in automobile manufacturing, televisions and other consumer electronics, and other verticals. Innovation in these areas would be magnificent to see.

Instead, there are no new products this year, and there is a lot of talk about reducing their line (there is still talk Mac Pros may be going away altogether in the next year or so). you look at Samsung, you see a company that is involved in every major area of consumer manufacturing. They have a strong defense business as well, and their semiconductor unit continues to keep creating new things all the time. Apple is a little too concerned about their stock price to try anything new anymore. I don't see them as capable of producing disruptive technology so long as the fundamentals of their business model discourage risk in their major product lines.

What we are seeing it not technology innovation, it's more like business model innovation.

I always marvel at the calm, reasoned tone ACs approach situations with, and the perspective their comments can lend an otherwise troubling issue.

You don't get to 500 million users without understanding the contents of every message. Text data mining is actually one of the simplest things to implement and can provide a wealth of attitudinal data about products and services.

My Facebook rep has gone into some of their programs for targeted display of ads. I haven't asked her too much about how it would work, but the message she keeps driving home with me is that they can target ads based on how much someone likes something. She says this is based on more than what someone clicks on.