Forums

I've been a member of various on-line communities for a LONG time. Slashdot, Antionline, BSDForums, Digg, Reddit, various USENET groups and IRC channels, and I've ultimately found all of them lacking for one reason or another. SO, this is a request to see if anyone out there has found the perfect community... I'll go through why I don't like each of the above mentioned in the hopes that it helsp you identify what I'm looking for:

• Slashdot - tired and old. Content was lagging.
• Digg - whinos with a lefty bent.
• Reddit - too busy complaining about Digg
• Antionline - maturity was a foreign concept
• 4chan - see antionline
• craigslist - meh
• redhotpawn - too many egos
• IRC/Usenet - too many groups to actually participate in them all.

...so, what I'm looking for is a community that has a lot of different topics (like 4chan and craigslist) but without all the bs that comes with them. For instance, I don't want to discuss politics all day long. I'd like some tech, some weather, some culture, some current events, with a relatively conservative tone. Is that too much to ask for?

P.S. I've been quiet for a while and an explanation is forth-coming. Just not right now.

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Wachovia Posts $8.9 Billion Loss - NYTimes.com

Wachovia Posts $8.9 Billion Loss - NYTimes.com: "Its shares rose $1.19, or 9 percent, to $14.37 in afternoon trading."

Really? You can lose $8,900,000,000 -- IN A SINGLE QUARTER -- and have your shares go UP *9%*?!?

Stunning.

Maybe I don't get the economics behind the markets, but this strikes me as completely contrary. If General Motors comes out (as it has) and says that its posting a multi-billion quarterly loss, it gets PUMMELED on Wallstreet. Would someone with a better grasp on the economics at work here care to explain how this works?

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12 Babies die during vaccine trials in Argentina

12 Babies die during vaccine trials in Argentina

This is utterly tragic. I realize that progress has a price, but when that price is a human life, do you really think its worth paying? Its the same price we pay in war, and that is not something people embark on callously (except George Bush.)

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Encrypt the Entire Internet?

I saw an article on Reddit about members of The Pirate Bay wanting to encrypt all traffic on the Internet, end-to-end. This is an interesting idea on a number of levels that I'd like to explore: the practical, the legal, and the information security.

From a practical perspective, such an endeavor would require hurculean effort, to say the least. At a minimum, you're talking about adding a layer to every IP stack on every server and workstation on the planet (or at least those that "need" to participate in the encrypted Interweb.) This poses a number of challenges, to say the least. Not the least significant of which is how many other applications shim into the IP stack already, e.g. antivirus, intrusion detection, spyware, performance monitoring tools, etc. Interacting with all of these pre-existing shims will likely be hideously problematic. Supposing these obstacles can be navigated successfully, there remains the performance overhead that such a shim would invariably introduce and in turn the end-user satisfaction issue. This, of course, says nothing about the additional hurdles that Vista represents, but that's another matter altogether.

From a legal perspective, there are two-sides: those who want to protect their privacy and those who have a legal RIGHT to infringe on a persons privacy. Now, let me be clear: I'm in the camp of Believers who think that the right to infringe on a persons privacy is both necessary but HORRIBLY abused on a ROUTINE basis... so, my ramblings on this matter may need to be taken with a block of salt. That said, as for those who wish to protect their privacy I have two thoughts: if what you're doing is secretive there are already mechanisms in place to protect you, but if your secretive because what you're doing is illegal (e.g. kiddie pr0n) then you don't deserve privacy. Long-story short, encrypting the transport of data across the interweb will set law enforcement back a DECADE (and its already lagging horribly behind criminals.) I foresee any technology that prohibits law enforcement like this would as being legislated into oblivion, around the globe.

The perspectives from the information security world are slightly different, but they overlap somewhat with those of the perspective from the legal world. The basic issue is parallel to that of the LE world -- we can't do packet captures anymore. That makes our job harder. More than that though, it adds an element to the mix: non-repudiation. That is, if we DO get a capture (i.e. through a backdoor on the host from which we're trying to sniff traffic from), we can prove, with a high degree of certainty, that the traffic did come from the targeted host and that it could not ahve come from any other host -- because the cryptographic private keys would be unique (this is, mathematically, a misnomer, but it plays out in practical terms because of probability. I.e. if you take an infinite set -- all numbers -- and try to represent them in a finite set -- a cryptographic key -- you will have collisions, or instances of duplicate keys.) There is also the matter of "trust", i.e. can you trust a network shim conceived- and implemented-by people who's primary livelihood is on the "other side"? "Nay nay," as the great Jimmy Pardo would say.

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Baseball

Monday night I had the dubious honor of being the home-plate umpire at a little league baseball game... I had a front-row seat to six of the worst innings of baseball EVER played. I'll cut right to the chase: the final score was 22 to... wait for it... wait for it... 2! That's right, there was a TWENTY point spread.

These were 9 and 10 year old kids. The difference between skill-sets was absurd, especially in pitching. The "visiting" team's pitchers had mechanics while the "home" team was just playing catch, badly. Mechanics? I didn't even know what mechanics were when I was ten. For example, the "home" team's last pitcher -- I had to open the strike-zone to the point of where if the batter didn't have to dodge the pitch and it wasn't in the dirt or over the batter's head, it was a strike. It took this last "home" pitcher close to fifty pitches for him to get out of the inning and he didn't get any strike-outs. It was painful.

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Kids Rock!

Amanda (my wife) and I have four kids: we were blessed (so saith the Psalmist in Psalm 126) with three sons first and recently a daughter. Four out of five people that I introduce my family to seem to think in incredibly shallow terms because invariably they say say something to the effect of, "Oh, you finally got your girl!" Like its some sort of "congratulations", or like we had son number three hoping he'd be a girl and that we were disappointed that James is anything but who he is? No.

I realize that some people may find this difficult to believe, but there are those of us out there who view children -- regardless of sex, color or developmental disposition -- to be a precious gift from God. Those of us who do view children in such a light are not so shallow as to be hung-up on having one girl and one boy. We're grateful for any blessing God bestows on us.

SO, the next time you meet someone with lots of kids, don't think you'll be cute and say something ignorant like, "you know what causes that, don't you?" Such comments are not polite, original or funny -- making such comments only proves you to be an idiot and a stooge for the Culture of Death.

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Flock Media Plugins

I'm running Flock 2.0 (beta) and had heretofore been frustrated by my inability to get various multimedia plug-ins to work, until I discovered a slick little script that via the Flock forums. The script crawls your box and finds different media player plug-ins and makes the necessary links in your flock directory structure(s). This is pretty cool. Now, all my media bits work and some that didn't even work under Firefox!?! Wow. This is, of course, a Linux-only fix... if you're running Flock on Windows (God help you!) you're on your own.

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