This just in: malware propagators have learned that sending a mass e-mail that will grab the attention of anyone who reads it is the best way to spread malware. More at 11.
It's a joke. I'm taking a lighthearted jab at my fellow nerds (and myself). Just laugh, or if you don't find it funny, at least don't take it seriously.
Unless the whole toolchain is open source, the benefit of the program itself being open source is small.
That's not true at all. The toolchain doesn't need to be open source, it just needs to be freely available. It doesn't matter in the least if the Wii SDK is closed-source if Nintendo gives it away to anyone who wants a copy.
It is NOT a straw man. As much as I disagree with the GPL, it was Linus' prerogative to place his kernel under the terms of the GPL. If the Linux kernel was in the public domain, anyone could do anything they wanted with it, violating the wishes of the creator. That would be wrong.
For some reason, I can't stop thinking of this Flash cartoon I saw once about perpendicular hard drive recording, with cartoon dudes singing, "Get perpendicular! (Get perpendicular!)".
Equally valid question: what real good would having the source available do for anyone?
Hell, what good would having the program itself (without source) do for anyone? It's really old software, I just can't imagine it serving any real use other than as a "Neat, look at this old software" toy.
Er, I should clarify myself a bit, since the end of my paragraph was rather badly worded. We can't denounce only one party as a whole, we either have to denounce both, or evaluate candidates as individuals, regardless of party.
Please. All the last 8 years showed us is that Bush is a bad president, and, if you think so (I don't, but that's a bit irrelevant), that Gore would have been a good president. However, yesterday showed us that Democrats can produce candidates every bit as bad. In other words, we can't denounce a party as a whole: we either have to denounce both together, or evaluate the candidates as individuals.
This attitude that many/.'ers have that Democrats are somehow inherently superior to Republicans is insane. They're all the same lying, cheating politicians at heart.
I disagree on your definition of "lie", then. To me, a lie must be known to be not true by the person who originates or repeats it, else it is not a lie, merely an honest mistake. Intention means everything in this regard.
For example, at one point in time, the value of pi was not known as precisely as it is today. The mathematicians of ancient times gave the value as closely as they had figured it out, but although the information was wrong throughout the whole chain of those who repeated it (right down to the person who first calculated that value), it was not a lie.
Your fear is well-founded, but what else can be affected by this? Christianity gets along pretty well with every science except evolution (I know this wasn't always the case, but is today). History might be painted in a somewhat more favorable light to Christianity, but that's about the only other area I can see this affecting, and then not that much.
"Please vote in a way that will cause the worst candidate to be elected, so that things will become so bad that electoral reform will be passed"....
You have entirely misread my argument. I'm not saying that at all. What I'm saying is that people need to stop being defeatist about the third-party candidates, or we will never, ever, elect one.
Right now we're like an overweight person who decides to go on a diet (or anyone who tries to remove an unhealthy, but comfortable, habit). He likes the idea of losing weight a lot, understands that it's a lot healthier for himself in the long run, but then when he tries to eat healthy foods he doesn't like, and not eat healthy foods he does like, he realizes how unpleasant the process of change is. He says, "Ah, screw it", and goes back to his old ways.
This is how people act with third-party candidates. A lot of people like the idea of third parties, think it's better to have those extra options, but they get stuck in the early phases of this process. They see how few people are voting for third parties, think, "I'll just be one more vote, I won't make a dent in the system", and stick to the current ways. It's true that one person won't make a dent in the system, but the hope is that enough people are fed up with the choices that if they all bit the bullet, and stopped propping up the two-party system, we would have real change.
Will this ever happen? Realistically, probably not. People are entirely too unwilling to endure the period of time it's going to take for third parties to gain support, so they stick with the comfortable option. But in spite of that, I feel it's our duty to try to change things.
Also, you say "Please vote in a way that will cause the worst candidate to be elected...". That's based on a faulty assumption. You're assuming that most or all of the people will be coming from one of the political parties, when it could very well be a more even split, which wouldn't change the election much, or even be in the favor of your "lesser evil". There are plenty of Republican and Democrat voters, both, who are fed up with their choice of candidate, and would vote for a third party if they felt it was viable.
Not to mention that by the 3rd or 4th cycle of that process, the quality of leadership would be so bad that we might have a Mugabe-style thug government on our necks, and you've seen how well "political reform" is working in Zimbabwe these days.
Both the Republicans and the Democrats are pretty bad. See: Obama and McCain, who were proved yesterday to just be one more iteration of "same guy, different parties". If we keep the system as it is, the quality of leadership is pretty damned likely to be as terrible as you paint anyway, so why on earth shouldn't we change while we can?
The thinking is basically this: if third-party candidates didn't exist, say McCain would get 45% of the vote, and Obama 55%. Now, if 11% of the public votes for third-party candidates (and all of those people would have been Obama supporters), McCain will win. The side effect of voting for a third-party candidate wasn't giving a vote to McCain, but taking a vote away from his closest competitor.
The numbers aren't the same, but this is what people are afraid of happening if they vote for a third-party candidate. They say, "Better to get Obama in office than vote for who I really want, and have McCain elected", so they ignore their real preference and vote for the R/D candidates, who will capture the vast majority of the vote. It's sort of a passing-the-buck thing: lots of people will say that they'd like to vote for a third-party candidate, but it's just a waste of their vote. The problem is, of course, as long as people persist in that thinking, third-party candidates will never gain prominence... ironically, their thinking that "third party = wasted vote" is what makes voting for a third party a waste.
It's frustrating as hell, and no one (ok, very few people) seems to be willing to try to gradually change the status quo, putting up with a time of bad elections in between, so we suffer with the two-party system. And probably always will, unless people start thinking more long-term with respect to the viability of third parties, or we change to a preferential voting system.
Indeed, it's an excellent tool for expressing the will of the people better. The real question is, how can we ever get this idea implemented? We've had our highly flawed vote methodology for 232 years, that's a lot of inertia to overcome.
That's the biggest question to me where voting methods are concerned, and I unfortunately have no ideas on the subject.
Simply stating that if everyone voted their conscience instead of participating in tactical voting is naive, and I suspect you know that.
Well, I have my doubts as to whether it's ever going to happen, but we have to try, in my opinion. Because if we ever could break the mentality of "a vote for a third party is a wasted vote", things would be a lot better. A new voting system is one good way to accomplish it, but failing that (because I have even more serious doubts about whether people would be open to such a drastic change), we're going to have to grit our teeth and put up with a certain period of seeing schmucks get elected if we ever want to change the status quo.
That's what we call a necessary evil. It's like cleaning your house when it's really messy: when you start, the house is a mess, but everything is shoved into corners, closets, and the like. To get that all organized, you have to pull it all out into the open, which makes the house way messier than it was before, but that mess is necessary to the goal of a clean house.
That's how it is with our political system right now. Will we see some real stinkers elected while we try to institute change? Yeah, probably. We can't let that deter us, though, we have to push through the increased mess, try to change people's way of thinking, and (hopefully) one day reach the goal of sane political parties. It's our best chance at improving our government.
I agree! I've read about alternative voting systems, and I really think that, although our current system is the simplest to execute, isn't nearly as fair as it could be. I'd really like to see something like what you outline put in place.
The hard part, of course, is getting it done, since people tend to be so adverse to change. I can only imagine how big the uproar would be if someone in power ever suggested doing this.
but this is the real world, and in this real world, most people are voting for one of two parties as these are the only two candidates with a real chance of getting elected
That's only true because people persist in that idiotic line of thinking. That's my whole point: if we ever want to break this stupid cycle, we need people to bite the bullet and vote for their real candidate of choice, knowing it's gonna be a while until society catches up with them. It's gonna suck watching your guy not get elected for a while, but the goal is to change the system, not to get one specific guy elected.
I'm perfectly well aware of how politics works in the US, I'm talking about changing it to work better.
A pink giraffe was living in my back yard last week. Prove me wrong.
That's not what he's saying. He's saying that claiming creationism is an outright lie requires proof of such a claim. You have to prove not only that it's false (which no one can do, anyway), but that the proponents of it spread it knowing it was false. If someone wishes to claim that people are lying, they gotta put their money where their mouth is, and show us some reasonable evidence that they were, in fact, lying.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems this line of research has certainly bottomed out.
For all of you who go "But 31k is fine in hickland"
You have an astoundingly broad conception of "hickland". Otherwise, though, you're right.
This just in: malware propagators have learned that sending a mass e-mail that will grab the attention of anyone who reads it is the best way to spread malware. More at 11.
Heh... is it bad that I sat staring at your post and its parent, trying to figure out why you were complimenting his network card, before I got it?
It's a joke. I'm taking a lighthearted jab at my fellow nerds (and myself). Just laugh, or if you don't find it funny, at least don't take it seriously.
Unless the whole toolchain is open source, the benefit of the program itself being open source is small.
That's not true at all. The toolchain doesn't need to be open source, it just needs to be freely available. It doesn't matter in the least if the Wii SDK is closed-source if Nintendo gives it away to anyone who wants a copy.
It is NOT a straw man. As much as I disagree with the GPL, it was Linus' prerogative to place his kernel under the terms of the GPL. If the Linux kernel was in the public domain, anyone could do anything they wanted with it, violating the wishes of the creator. That would be wrong.
Losing an 80 GB HD nearly broke my heart, I can't imagine what losing 1.5 TB would do...
/.: the only place where one gets a broken heart from a hard drive instead of the opposite sex.
For some reason, I can't stop thinking of this Flash cartoon I saw once about perpendicular hard drive recording, with cartoon dudes singing, "Get perpendicular! (Get perpendicular!)".
...I need a life.
gohan-saiyan.com
goku-saiyan.com
goten-saiyan.com
vegeta-saiyan.com
That isn't spam, that's a feature!
On a serious note, what the hell kind of spam are you getting from domains like that?
Got any real reason that this matters, or should we all applaud you for reaching new levels of pedantry?
(Spam doesn't count, anyone with a domain so easy to pull out of a hat as to be used as an example domain gets bombarded with spam already.)
Equally valid question: what real good would having the source available do for anyone?
Hell, what good would having the program itself (without source) do for anyone? It's really old software, I just can't imagine it serving any real use other than as a "Neat, look at this old software" toy.
murphy is unforgiven.
Damn straight he is... not one of us would ever forgive that fscker after all the trouble his stupid law has caused for us!
Er, I should clarify myself a bit, since the end of my paragraph was rather badly worded. We can't denounce only one party as a whole, we either have to denounce both, or evaluate candidates as individuals, regardless of party.
Please. All the last 8 years showed us is that Bush is a bad president, and, if you think so (I don't, but that's a bit irrelevant), that Gore would have been a good president. However, yesterday showed us that Democrats can produce candidates every bit as bad. In other words, we can't denounce a party as a whole: we either have to denounce both together, or evaluate the candidates as individuals.
This attitude that many /.'ers have that Democrats are somehow inherently superior to Republicans is insane. They're all the same lying, cheating politicians at heart.
I disagree on your definition of "lie", then. To me, a lie must be known to be not true by the person who originates or repeats it, else it is not a lie, merely an honest mistake. Intention means everything in this regard.
For example, at one point in time, the value of pi was not known as precisely as it is today. The mathematicians of ancient times gave the value as closely as they had figured it out, but although the information was wrong throughout the whole chain of those who repeated it (right down to the person who first calculated that value), it was not a lie.
Your fear is well-founded, but what else can be affected by this? Christianity gets along pretty well with every science except evolution (I know this wasn't always the case, but is today). History might be painted in a somewhat more favorable light to Christianity, but that's about the only other area I can see this affecting, and then not that much.
"Please vote in a way that will cause the worst candidate to be elected, so that things will become so bad that electoral reform will be passed"....
You have entirely misread my argument. I'm not saying that at all. What I'm saying is that people need to stop being defeatist about the third-party candidates, or we will never, ever, elect one.
Right now we're like an overweight person who decides to go on a diet (or anyone who tries to remove an unhealthy, but comfortable, habit). He likes the idea of losing weight a lot, understands that it's a lot healthier for himself in the long run, but then when he tries to eat healthy foods he doesn't like, and not eat healthy foods he does like, he realizes how unpleasant the process of change is. He says, "Ah, screw it", and goes back to his old ways.
This is how people act with third-party candidates. A lot of people like the idea of third parties, think it's better to have those extra options, but they get stuck in the early phases of this process. They see how few people are voting for third parties, think, "I'll just be one more vote, I won't make a dent in the system", and stick to the current ways. It's true that one person won't make a dent in the system, but the hope is that enough people are fed up with the choices that if they all bit the bullet, and stopped propping up the two-party system, we would have real change.
Will this ever happen? Realistically, probably not. People are entirely too unwilling to endure the period of time it's going to take for third parties to gain support, so they stick with the comfortable option. But in spite of that, I feel it's our duty to try to change things.
Also, you say "Please vote in a way that will cause the worst candidate to be elected...". That's based on a faulty assumption. You're assuming that most or all of the people will be coming from one of the political parties, when it could very well be a more even split, which wouldn't change the election much, or even be in the favor of your "lesser evil". There are plenty of Republican and Democrat voters, both, who are fed up with their choice of candidate, and would vote for a third party if they felt it was viable.
Not to mention that by the 3rd or 4th cycle of that process, the quality of leadership would be so bad that we might have a Mugabe-style thug government on our necks, and you've seen how well "political reform" is working in Zimbabwe these days.
Both the Republicans and the Democrats are pretty bad. See: Obama and McCain, who were proved yesterday to just be one more iteration of "same guy, different parties". If we keep the system as it is, the quality of leadership is pretty damned likely to be as terrible as you paint anyway, so why on earth shouldn't we change while we can?
The thinking is basically this: if third-party candidates didn't exist, say McCain would get 45% of the vote, and Obama 55%. Now, if 11% of the public votes for third-party candidates (and all of those people would have been Obama supporters), McCain will win. The side effect of voting for a third-party candidate wasn't giving a vote to McCain, but taking a vote away from his closest competitor.
The numbers aren't the same, but this is what people are afraid of happening if they vote for a third-party candidate. They say, "Better to get Obama in office than vote for who I really want, and have McCain elected", so they ignore their real preference and vote for the R/D candidates, who will capture the vast majority of the vote. It's sort of a passing-the-buck thing: lots of people will say that they'd like to vote for a third-party candidate, but it's just a waste of their vote. The problem is, of course, as long as people persist in that thinking, third-party candidates will never gain prominence... ironically, their thinking that "third party = wasted vote" is what makes voting for a third party a waste.
It's frustrating as hell, and no one (ok, very few people) seems to be willing to try to gradually change the status quo, putting up with a time of bad elections in between, so we suffer with the two-party system. And probably always will, unless people start thinking more long-term with respect to the viability of third parties, or we change to a preferential voting system.
Indeed, it's an excellent tool for expressing the will of the people better. The real question is, how can we ever get this idea implemented? We've had our highly flawed vote methodology for 232 years, that's a lot of inertia to overcome.
That's the biggest question to me where voting methods are concerned, and I unfortunately have no ideas on the subject.
Simply stating that if everyone voted their conscience instead of participating in tactical voting is naive, and I suspect you know that.
Well, I have my doubts as to whether it's ever going to happen, but we have to try, in my opinion. Because if we ever could break the mentality of "a vote for a third party is a wasted vote", things would be a lot better. A new voting system is one good way to accomplish it, but failing that (because I have even more serious doubts about whether people would be open to such a drastic change), we're going to have to grit our teeth and put up with a certain period of seeing schmucks get elected if we ever want to change the status quo.
That's what we call a necessary evil. It's like cleaning your house when it's really messy: when you start, the house is a mess, but everything is shoved into corners, closets, and the like. To get that all organized, you have to pull it all out into the open, which makes the house way messier than it was before, but that mess is necessary to the goal of a clean house.
That's how it is with our political system right now. Will we see some real stinkers elected while we try to institute change? Yeah, probably. We can't let that deter us, though, we have to push through the increased mess, try to change people's way of thinking, and (hopefully) one day reach the goal of sane political parties. It's our best chance at improving our government.
I agree! I've read about alternative voting systems, and I really think that, although our current system is the simplest to execute, isn't nearly as fair as it could be. I'd really like to see something like what you outline put in place.
The hard part, of course, is getting it done, since people tend to be so adverse to change. I can only imagine how big the uproar would be if someone in power ever suggested doing this.
but this is the real world, and in this real world, most people are voting for one of two parties as these are the only two candidates with a real chance of getting elected
That's only true because people persist in that idiotic line of thinking. That's my whole point: if we ever want to break this stupid cycle, we need people to bite the bullet and vote for their real candidate of choice, knowing it's gonna be a while until society catches up with them. It's gonna suck watching your guy not get elected for a while, but the goal is to change the system, not to get one specific guy elected.
I'm perfectly well aware of how politics works in the US, I'm talking about changing it to work better.
A pink giraffe was living in my back yard last week. Prove me wrong.
That's not what he's saying. He's saying that claiming creationism is an outright lie requires proof of such a claim. You have to prove not only that it's false (which no one can do, anyway), but that the proponents of it spread it knowing it was false. If someone wishes to claim that people are lying, they gotta put their money where their mouth is, and show us some reasonable evidence that they were, in fact, lying.