"so it's unlikely to make much difference unless you're planning to host a reasonably heavy server..."

Good Luck With That-

-1 google, your shiny is now worthless to me
"
Unless you have a written agreement with Google Fiber permitting you do so, you should not host any type of server using your Google Fiber connection
"
http://support.google.com/fiber/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2659981&topic=2440874&ctx=topic [google.com]

-1 google, your shiny is now worthless to me
"
Unless you have a written agreement with Google Fiber permitting you do so, you should not host any type of server using your Google Fiber connection
"
http://support.google.com/fiber/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2659981&topic=2440874&ctx=topic

Since I've been 'religiously' reading slashdot for over a decade now, incalculably more regularly than I've gone to church, shall I assume that slashdot is likely delivering me malware right now?

Seriously, since CmdrTaco left, and to be honest, many years prior to that and the recent SlashBI goodness, things have been going way downhill. This past year I've still skimmed each 600+ post global warming article, because it seems important enough, and the slashdot flamefests, despite the signal to noise ratio, sadly seem more intelligent than any other conversation on the topic. But threads like this, where every last highly moderated comment seems like nothing more than a troll-response bounty for the pageview-centric new management... Ehh. If there is one comment that breaks me of my slashdot religion, it was probably the first Score:5 comment on this thread- "Obama ate a a dog!". I guess the planet will just have to burn...

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/04/28/2214228/google-releases-fcc-report-on-street-view-probe

"There's also URPMI, the easiest package manager I've yet seen. Easier than pacman/yaourt, easier than apt-get."

Yes. URPMI is why I used and loved Mandrake... about a million years ago. Funny how in that sentence you fail to mention yum, which is exactly the thing that caused the rest of the RPM based distros to finally erase Mandrake's core advantage. It's been a long time since then. Mandrake is dead, let it R.I.P.

Disclaimer: While I did work at Keyhole(what became GoogleEarth) for 1.75 years back in 2k3, and while my older brother is Google's VP-Engineering, Geo division, I have had no significant insider knowledge or discussions about this, or anything related to it, since I left that job. I also would probably be written off as a delusional paranoid schizophrenic by many, but I'll refrain from shilling half a dozen interesting tidbits about myself here. Anyway, my comment is this:

"This would be evil if Google:

1) Collaborated with the government to alert the government about potential "illegal" activities being conducted"

Now, I will mention that it is public knowledge that the CIA through it's venture capital investment arm 'In-Q-Tel' did more or less save Keyhole from going under during the hard times of 2003ish, a year or two before they were acquired by google.

I honestly can't see how people, even the author of the parent comment, can ignore that angle of the parent comment. Do you really, in any universe after the last decade, think the CIA wouldn't start scratching their heads regarding the possibilities of a dragnet of roving signals intelligence vehicles canvasing the nation, neigh, the world?? I mean, Really??. Do you really think that if they had done something illegal, or debatably unconstitutional on that scale, that they couldn't succeed in getting it brushed under the rug, under the cover that it was just a couple silly engineers stretching some bounds? Really? If so, enjoy your lack of paranoia. Ignorance is bliss.

-dmc

Pessimistic Sci-Fi IMHO is an attempt, through social communication of complex ideas, to effect changes within society, that would have the result of turning the pessimistic author into a more optimistic person.

"Monotheism is evil itself."

You could be a troll, but I'll guess you're not, and respond to some of your anti-christianity, that, was expressed much as I probably would have expressed it 10 or 20 years ago when I was still a lifelong atheist.

As to the bible referring to people allegorically as 'sheep', yes. The bible speaks of people allegorically and parable-ly(parabolicly can't be right :)), in many ways. A whole lot of 'flocks' and 'sheeps', and perhaps more than that, as fields of crops and other such collections to be harvested by God. What you might interestingly trip out on, is how it is perhaps your belief, that in all the life in the universe, or perhaps an isolated pond of it here on earth, you believe that you are of the one single unique species that is not, effectively going to be harvested or otherwise feeding and providing needs of a larger ecosystem, so complex you're limited grey-matter faculties cannot even begin to fully comprehend.

As for your point about translations- translations are all we have, and if you think about it, the best we could have, so I'd advize you come to grips with that, and begin to appreciate translations, if imperfect and/or varying, rather than arrogantly cast them asside as unworthy of respect and educational value.

As to "the whole Christian promotion of ignorance with regards to Abortion/Global Warming etc"... Stereotype much? One of the key first things I learned as a christian when I became a christian, was how non-homogoneous (not a sexuality thing, read slowly) christians are as a whole. Once you, Phrogman, get to the point of spending more effort looking at how others might actually be people roughly as smart and decent as you despite their strange beliefs you clearly despise, you will see that Christians as a whole have incredibly varied personal positions with regards to Abortion/Global Warming, etc. Perhaps as much variance as non-christians. I mean, there was this whole roman catholic, protestant, martin luther, thing in history you might want to look up. Don't get me wrong, I had a similarly vile view of christianity 15 years ago. You might have a pretty different view 15 years from now. Even today, I'll certainly grant a kernel of truth within your second to last sentence. Maybe by the time you are willing to spend more time granting a kernel of truth in the teachings of various mainstream religions, you will agree that blindly hating christians is about as useless as blindly hating anti-christians.

As to the further ancestors of this thread, and Jesus wielding a whip in the temple. First, I imagine one could wield a whip and drive people and/or animals from an area, without actually inflicting violent contact with humans (I'm inexperienced with cattle to know if warning shots are sufficient there). Next, the beginning of christian humility for some might be to reflect on, in context, the story of Jesus getting angry in the temple on that occasion. It's pretty remarkable, as there really aren't that many stories in the bible of Jesus getting angry. One could take that as a cue to meditate on the story in particular. Clearly it is an interesting example of the kind of vitriol animosity towards the established mainstream religion of the day, and how it was practiced, that you Phrogman, could perhaps appreciate in a 'through the looking glass' sort of way.

"
It would offend them for me to say that Religion was invented
"

My christian (36yo, atheist for the first 27 or so) response to this would be don't go (pre-)judging them too quickly. Maybe you aren't, maybe you know them well enough, but if I were you, or had been you when I was younger, my advice now is, say it. They sound like overall/more-or-less decent folk if you've bothered to continue hanging out with them despire your disbelief. As a christian, I'm advocating that more christians do what they can to expose themselves to others real beliefs, in a core non-judgemental ('judge not...') way, rather than what has historically, and is still the case in greater and lesser degrees in many christians, i.e. anything that looks even the slightest bit remotely to be in the same vein as the midevil catholic church's use of torture[1] devices to terroristicly coerce and compel false 'confessions of belief' (either directly, or indirectly). Most of us older folks remember the sodomy laws(any homosexual sex, at points in the past, even oral sex amongst married heterosexual couples) that were until relatively historicly recently, on the books and enforced in texas, kansas(my home state), etc. All due to the worst sort of impulses in people to control minorities and those different from them, due to their selective interpretation of one particular translation, of a particular collection of books, that despite those qualifiers, present a groundwork for anyone on the planet beginning to understand the 'mainstream'(or rather, one healthy and unarguably significant fraction of it) human cultural history of the last couple thousand years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture#Roman_Catholic_Church

"The fact that it is possible - maybe a 0.001% chance - that an innocent person might be caught up in something like this is remote enough to most people to completely discount it happening. Not. Important. For. Them."

This is the thing. It'll happen. It took royalty getting caught up in the Murdoch phone hacking thing, but now that cat is starting to come out of the bag. I think it's safe to say that the U.K. has a more evolved, through experience, and more enlightened view of the dangers of digital network communications security these days than they did in the ugly post-9/11 big brother (cities blanketed with 24/7 video surveillance, etc...) phase. Before the Murdoch thing, the govt could hammer away the company line (that you quote above, i.e. the threats will never hit those you know or care about, any more than lightning and car crashes do). But now after seeing the top eschelon of the paragons of terrorist-fighting elite professional police, succumb to simple bribery for tabloid exploitation purposes to further enrich the owner of FOX news??

Things evolve, technology, perceptions. People learn. They aren't as stupid, both now and in the future, as the above sentiment suggests you believe.

"
Me? Sure, if I'm walking a street alone (especially in New Orleans) and I see some black teen males walking behind me or coming near me...I keep a very wary eye out on them, and often will cross to the other side of the road and keep an eye out for my options to get to safety in case of a mugging.
"

This is where you _really_ lost me. As the current end of page +5 comment suggests, the real deciding factor for my near-instinctual threat-level meters is based fairly colorblindedly on subtler things than race, mostly towards wealth. Though if the others appear wealthy and young, say 20-25ish, I'll admit that if black, and if otherwise ambiguous (behavior/bodylanguage-wise), I may think of the perhaps valid stereotype of blacks likelier to be in the mid-low level drug dealing enterprise, than whites, whom I would chalk up more probability of just having rich parents. (and the drug association, unfortunately with prohibition, being often a gateway to broader disprespect for the more victimful laws as well as the victimless ones). Unfortunately this legitimate stereotype is a race-class hybrid issue. But my core point was- walking down a sketch neighborhood street, if you see 3 20 year olds, I think you may be paying more attention than you realize to how wealthy they appear, and how they behave/bodylanguage, and making possibly racially(racist?) based socioeconomic real-time threat guesstimates. Or maybe you just are that racist. Or just need to think it more through. I.e. 'gang-banger clothes'? Is that equivalent to 'rags', or you thinking more blatant synchronized bandanas. Ok, I guess I must concede minor point to you on the overt latter, in that, one can hedge their actions on the belief that an obvious race-homogenous clearly branded gang, will be on average over incidences, more of a threat if you are not of the same race as them. But even if I see a saw a group of blue eyed whites like myself in an overtly branded race-homogonous gang of 3+ members on the street... you know what... I'm not sure I can see feeling any less threatened there, but that might be an outlyer for obvious reasons...

I'm still waiting to see some sort of apology or april fools cover for this story, but maybe it is a continued significant downturn in advertising standards at slashdot, along the lines of my recent complaint/submission about the 'sugar daddy dating' advertising - http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=30347589 - that I got flooded with (~50%, cookieless, fresh profile front page view coverage). That seemed to only last a week or two, either because of a one-off ad-buy coincidence, or slashdot(or parent) exerting some better advertising discretion. Dunno. I'd love to bash this article, but I'm really too stunned to believe it wasn't an accident or late april fools thing. Although I did find this thread educational, if in fact the statements about digg having massive reduction in readership is true. Never having gotten on that bandwagon, I'm nonetheless surprised to hear it taking a serious kuro5hin like turn. Certainly if this video isn't just a freak one time thing, it is what could finally do slashdot in. I just can't believe they'd be so stupid as to just walk that obvious road. Maybe it's a secret ploy to run away all the cookieless viewers who aren't trackable and therefore worth as much as advertisees. I.e. if you browse logged in typically, you filter the editor, otherwise, you are driven away by advertisements. Culling the herd to focus on those valuable trackable advertisees. Bwa ha ha ha..... (sorry, just had to give into the advertising paranoia there for a bit...)

>>Red Hat doesn't operate like an "open source" company.
>> They're making money precisely because they operate as close to a proprietary company as possible without violating the GPL.

> Um, yes it does.

Actually, and I speak from a highly relevent perspective here, I'd like to point out that you are both wrong. RedHat is neither black nor white on this issue. They surf the grey area profitably. But I'll give them credit for surfing the gray, mostly on toward the better side. Yes, they do actually go a long way (in many ways) beyond what the GPL requires. And lots of people appreciate that. But both they and CentOS, will choose to take gray paths that inhibit the easy full harnessing of the source code in ideal form, without going through a path that requires one of those organizations to both have their logo all over the distro, and go through their compilation and distribution servers as part of your experience with the 'open source code distribution'. I've personally spent months of my own unemployed time trying to remedy this situation, such that anyone can easily leverage the nice srpms that RH provides, without having to deal with either CentOS or RedHat's logos and compilation servers (really, a $350 modern netbook can compile all of *EL-6.X in about a week, not something that demands dependence on an external corporation's servers).

Anyway, props to RH for getting their share of the $$ pie. And seemingly in less insidious ways than advertising companies have leveraged open source software to get their massive share of the $$ pie.

+1 "Or it just means that they've realised trying to track people who search for the censored terms is likely to be more effective if the searches give results - whereas previously people didn't bother searching because they knew the results were censored."

Probably using efficient technologies purchased or 'liberated' from U.S. companies, that knew _exactly_ what they were selling and how it was likely to be used by a government with the track history of the Tiananmen Square* Massacre (*OK China, let's call it the region of land 1 square mile with it's center at Tiananmen Square Massacre). Let alone the history of Orwellianly covering up that 'unhistory'.

I agree, this is a good step forward. But there are miles to go (and almost as much with the U.S. gubernment over here... One can hope that it literally is a problem of a generational technical divide, and that perhaps a more educated/high-tech-experienced generation will enact better social laws/structure around maturing technology, but... seeing how far we've strayed from using the older tech as a good 'analog' for applying laws and protections to new tech... and you'd best do more than hope)

"However, I think the idea that firefox will become irrelevant if they do not make their way onto mobile is dubious, because desktops will remain the primary means of computing, for many reasons."

I can't claim to have read the entire comment, but this is close enough to the comment I was going to make. Basically, I see mobile phones, and their presently non-desktop OSs as a temporary thing. I mean, can't we all agree, that 20 years from now, we'll probably be wearing some device on our body, smaller than current mobile phones, but more powerful than our current desktops? While mozilla's strategy here may be the right one, I don't think it's ridiculous to believe that they could just sit the whole android/iOS era out, and wait for the day when mobile phone computing devices effectively re-integrate with the traditional desktop devices. Eh... just a kind of zen thought that occasionally just sitting and doing nothing is a more effective strategy to conserve energy and sanity, than chasing some new fad and wasting your energy in the process.

"Believe it or not, the way to fix the problem is to create more sweat shops in China."

You have been infected with an evil meme. You propose fixing something evil, by expanding it. There is another answer- Buy less shit you don't need. And when your gut reaction is that you really need that new smartphone. Think again. If you still think you need it, THINK AGAIN. But that is only part of the solution. The other part, is to use any and every means necessary to secure all the citizen's of the world, those rights enshrined in the first ammendment to the constitution of the United States of America. When all citizen's have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the freedom to become journalists exposing harsh working conditions, then THAT will be the foundation that solves this problems. More sweatshops is NOT the answer. More freedom of speech, and freedom to redress grievences with your government and employers, is the answer.