I don't think this guy should do jail time but I DO think he should be kicked out of Harvard (and given an automatic F for the class he was trying to avoid finals for. The incident should also be on his record but no fine or time. Being kicked out of Harvard and a felony on his record should be enough to ruin his future and indicate what kind of scumbag he is.

A good analogy but I don't think "the bacteria is insightful to economics" is more than just an analogy. I highly doubt looking at a staph infection will help you find the next fortune 500 company that is just starting in someones garage. While both systems want to use "limited resources" the behavior of those resources and methods of aquiring them behave radically differently.

I would simply argue that it would hurt the show. Male fictional characters should stay male. If you want a show about a strong female- start a NEW show about a strong female character. I don't want the show addressing:
-The whole idea of a man trapped inside a woman's body.
-Is the new doctor attracted to men or women?

Please let the show just be cheap sci-fi and not about social re-engineering.

It is simple. The fifth ammendment is the right not to be tortured. If you won't talk, the government doesn't have the right to MAKE you talk. I love living in a country where the citizen's are not allowed to be tortured when the police think you are guilty.

Or perhaps it could be that people don't want to hit a cop now that they know that there is video proof. In some jurisdictions, assaults on police officer charges go nowhere in court (but are supposed to come with real jail time).

I'm not saying that for love of Nielsen (because shows I've loved got screwed by the ratings system), but basically, TV shows have two models for monetization outside of PBS:

1: Give the shows away over the air and sell ads to pay for it.

2: Sell access to the channel at a premium and make the shows worthy of the premium.

The first covers all network TV and virtually all of basic cable - even though the cable companies pay to carry the basic cable channels. The second covers HBO, Showtime, etc. In the premium model, they might care about non-traditional ways of engaging with content. Because it increases interest and loyalty, thereby driving up demand for the channel - which either can result in a better deal for the channel or more subscribers.

But for a traditional channel, all they care about is the ads, who views them, when they are viewed, and if they are viewed. Looking up info on IMDB doesn't help them, ordering the season on DVD is a nice bonus but not essential, browsing the show website doesn't help them. TV channels sell ads, and they want to sell them to the right people at the right times. Viagra ads don't run during Bugs Bunny cartoons. Breakfast cereal ads don't run during Matlock (just to use obvious examples). Cadillac doesn't advertise on a WWE show, but Kia might. They want to know who the audience is and how big it is. DVRs don't help them that much, though they are awesome for us.

The fragmentation of the TV market and the explosion of channels makes it exponentially tougher to handle the advertiser-based market properly, but still the Nielsen data is the most useful metric that they have. It needs to be updated for the modern era for sure, but it still provides the raw data needed to sustain the ad-based model.

This. SPF is fine as something you can use to tag messages and increase their filter score. If they lack a valid SPF there's a slightly higher risk it's spam. But to block based on SPF records is just goofy. It's a good idea, but nowhere near universally adopted and there's plenty of valid reasons why mail would go through a different source.

On my own mail server, I add 1 to the scoring, with tag at 3.5 and block at 5.5. Those have worked pretty well (I use Kerio Connect, which has a Spamassassin-based system).

The US has an advantage in missile defense compared to many nations - the places from which you'd launch a missile at the US are distant, and it takes a lot of resources to attack them from a distance. Plus there's a lot of ground to target, but relatively little to defend. Defending NYC, Washington, LA, etc. from a distance of thousands of miles isn't as hard as defending Tel Aviv from 150 miles away, or defending Seoul from Pyongyang.

Sure, you can overwhelm a defense system, but it's cheap to make enough rockets to overwhelm a system when they don't have to travel 5000 or more miles. And at this point outside of the US and (to an extent) Russia, though there are plenty of nuclear powers there aren't a lot of missiles that can travel that far with any kind of payload and hit a target.

Those sort of missiles are expensive to build, expensive to operate, and very expensive to maintain.

So it's a vulnerability in the WRT54GL (and maybe the related routers) running mainly older firmware - it's a pretty old router model as are its cousins. And from watching the exploit video, it's a local vulnerability - not one you can exercise against the WAN port. So it looks like not such a big deal. After all, 98% of those just have the default password anyways.

If the more advanced gear (like the RV routers and such) have this issue then I might be concerned. But I don't have enough info yet to worry or not.

I'll shop locally, and I'll shop online. Depends on what for. I like to go to bookstores and buy books. I try and stick to the independents when I do so - but I also buy some of my more obscure books, new releases, or e-books online from Amazon. The same holds true for most other purchases. Mostly I use Amazon (or a similar vendor) to buy things that I would otherwise get at a big box retailer. That works pretty well.

The exception is clothing - there isn't much I get from brick & mortar retailers in general. I buy my sportcoats from Jos. A Bank in a nearby strip mall, otherwise I get shirts mainly from LL Bean online and everything else I use for clothes I pretty much order from Duluth Trading. They both have stores, but since I live in Massachusetts rather than Minnesota or Maine, it's a pain to go to them (yes, LL Bean has other stores, but they don't have nearly as much selection).

I'm lucky that we have a downtown with a very good and diverse shopping district, and we can get a lot of the things we want from local merchants at reasonable prices. Yes, I can get better prices online much of the time, but I still like to hand over money for my goods when feasible.

I was a frequent poster, submitter, and reader back in the day. I used the journals before moving to these newfangled things called blogs. I still post, though not that often anymore - no longer being a desk jockey the spare time isn't around to participate like it used to be. But even with all the changes, Slashdot is still the place I go for my all-in-one-place scan of tech news, still the most interesting place to go and get perspective on the story, and still one of the most informative communities out there.

I hope I'm still reading the site daily in 15 more years.

Our son is going into 5th grade. He's attending a public school that has a 190-day school year with an extended 8-3 day, and they go to school until late July, only getting 5-6 weeks of summer vacation. In compensation for the long July in school, they get a vacation week in late October and another one in the beginning of June that other kids don't get.

For the most part, he loves it. And when he and his schoolmates get back to school, there seems to be less time getting kids back up to speed than there is at the conventional schools here in town. Overall results trend better here as well, and we've got a lot of overall issues in the system here outside of our school. Within reason, I think an extended day/extended year model is ideal for most learning situations, but not necessarily universal. I don't think school should be fully year-round, there should be some sort of summer break. But the 2+ month summer vacation is a relic of this country's agricultural roots, and it certainly could go away without causing a problem.

Glad I got 4 packages of them through Woot last year, then. My 10-year old son is smart enough to not eat them, and also capable of making cool things and shapes with them. I'm pretty sure they won't be fatal.

I always thought that the palm pilot was a great idea, but if it had phone functionality, it would be perfect. Blackberry never saw this idea too well. When Apple finally figured it out, Blackberry was dead man walking.

This is MS's way of reminding other companies that a partnership with Microsoft is merily a list of companies that MS can label as suckers.