This wasn't put in by the firehose. If your suggesting that Slashdot is simply cheer leading a portion of it's audience, and I shouldn't bitch about it, I would think your wrong. In almost everything else, they make an effort to be nutral.
You might be right. I still think we control kdawson more than he controls us, still based the majority of the replies replies to the retarded things he's posted in the past.
Nobody has claimed it stayed in the low level managment. It just didn't make it to senior levels. Mid level managment could have been fully aware and by the time uper management broke the story, they had already investigated the motivations and declared them to be "curiosity" oriented.
Then why was upper-level management clueless about it for so long after the story broke? Why are they now launching an investigation, if one was done earlier? I'm as suspicious of spin as anyone, but media spin doesn't explain why the high-level officers couldn't simply grab whatever report was filed months ago and say, "See here, we checked, they're not connected to foreigners or criminals or anything, and their testimony matches the evidence, this was clearly just a mistake and it has been corrected." Fine, maybe the reports (related to extremely important files) were lost, OK - that's still evidence of a poorly run organization.
You, probably convinced by the exact same same reporting that I am talking about, have formed some opinion of malfeasance in the state department which doesn't reflect reality.
Hah. It takes much more than Keith Olbermann's Special Comments to make me believe something. In this case I'm convinced by the administration's failure to produce convincing evidence of having done their jobs properly. If they'd done their jobs and knew it they could have said, "We already dealt with this, here's the proof." Instead they're launching an investigation - as though it takes a special task force to find a fairly recent report in what should be a well-organized secure storage facility.
If the sheriff or anyone got access to this information inappropriately, they would have been busted.
By whom? And who busts that guy if he's in on it too? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
If the information was used in politically motivated ways, they would be prosecuted.
When, before or after the media loudly destroys the man's political carreer (and then quietly appologizes for the mistake)? Again, what are the guarantees? We still don't know who actually leaked Valerie Plame's name to the press, and even if we did her career is finished anyway.
In other words, this fear mongering evel sheriff couldn't happen unless several steps in government positions where behind it. And to that end, you don't need RealID or anything else, if there is that much high level support for your actions, everything feared could be orchestrated without it.
Of course, the concern is that this reduces the number of people you need to have in on the scheme. If the information is in many separate places, the crooked sheriff needs connections (or dirt on employees) in each of those places. If it's all in one place, then all he needs is for whoever watches him to look away for a minute - perhaps distracted by all the other sheriffs he oversees, perhaps by a bribe or a blackmail threat. It dramatically lowers the bar for abuse, which is what the article is talking about.
And if the Firehose put the article in, I could agree with you. It didn't, it was posted directly.
That's not what I was asking. I was asking, "Are the editors deliberately marginalizing views contrary to their own, despite great support among the Slashdot readership?" Echoing our opinions for cash isn't stellar journalism, I agree, but neither is it a conspiracy to deceive.
Think about this. If Situation X happens and is reported as "X happened", h
Yes, because ignorant users that blame tech support don't exist in the Windows world... I mean, of course, the Windows world definitely has its ignorant users - lots of them! But the neat thing about Microsoft is that they've somehow infused their software with what appears to be a mild sedative of some sort.
So instead of assaulting technitians with barely bridled rage, they merely crowd about and suffocate them in silent despair.
It wouldn't be so bad if the politics introduced where neutral in the stories and the users take it from there. But all the stories are Evil Republicans, Baby Eating Bush, and so on.
Powers-that-be-bashing is always going to be the order of the day among a largely libertarian crowd. The editors are just clumsily following along with the trends we set. I could be wrong, I guess we could test that by picking out opposed stories that made it to the firehose, and see how their chances of hitting the front page relates to their rating from before.
Now if you want to talk about the mainstream media (where many of these stories come from), well, that's something different entirely. I can't really talk about it though since the only US news I watch is largely editorial since, well, that's pretty much all the US networks air. I get actual news from sources like the BBC since I find they do a better job of separating the statements "X happened" and the obligatory "Y is upset about it". And even that's not 100% objective (despite being factual).
This story which was originally about government employees and contract workers inappropriately accessing passport records of presidential candidates and how safe guards in place alerted the proper people so no damage was done and those responsible are being punished.
Yes, that was originally the story. Then we found out that the data was first accessed months ago, and that low-level management silenced the alarms (which, as you say, worked) and "dealth with it" before anyone with the authority to properly investigate got wind of it. Basically, the State Department's employees are either complete idiots, or they fear their bosses more than betraying the public's trust. Either way, whoever's in charge and their subordinates are responsible for allowing (if not fostering) such an environment.
Stories change as they are told, and the concerns raised by the State Department's apparent incompetence are now part of this story.
Instead it got hijacked and is now being used as a reason for not doing RealID and to blast the president over domestic spying because someone could inappropriately access the information.
Nothing is ever as simple as "X happened". Related issues are always going to be brought up and discussed. Most Western media sucks at bringing those issues up (not much time left for that once you're done sensationalizing, I fear). I'm glad the Ars article did it, and I'm glad it happens here.
Now all this and the original article never made it to slashdot until someone could put a spin on it to blast Bush for "anything possible" or "breathing".
From TFA (read it again if you think I've snipped too much, and all emphasis is, of course, mine):
State Department officials insisted... the contractors were motivated solely by "imprudent curiosity,"... Lawrence Eagleburger, who was George H. W. Bush's Secretary of State in 1992... told MSNBC, "It's pretty clear to me that this was not done for political purposes."
Regardless of whether the candidates' records were accessed with politics primarily in mind, the whole incident provides a vivid illustration of what's at stake in the current national debates over privacy and the limits of executive power.
... the major problem with Real ID is that local DMV and law enforcement officials will have access to an unprecedented amount of sensitive information on anyone with a Real ID... imagine all of that data in the hands of a crooked sheriff who's fighting off a reformist challenger...
The author isn't bashing Bush over RealID. He's pointing out that the RealID information will be even more accessible than the passport data, and arguing that if something as well-protected as a presidential candi
What's private about passport records? Replying here and not to the GP since I think this adds something to the parent's argument.
Oh, you can do a lot of nasty things with passport records besides ID theft. For instance, you can have your HR department datamine it to keep out, er, undesirables. And their children too, to the (oh, I don't know, let's say) tenth generation, just 'cuz. What, you've never met anyone that has a thing against immigrants, legal or otherwise?
I'll stop having something to hide when the rest of humanity stops judging people on their birth place, race, gender, and anything else they have no control over. That and when theives stop favoring the homes of those who've gone on vacation.
Don't ask why or apply logic, just accept the fact that we got a blow in for whatever we are supposed to support this week. Christ. This comes up often enough it deserves its own saying. Let's make it this: In Soviet Slashdot, groupthink posts you!
No, seriously, this just keeps coming up and it's retarded. Slashdot readers are anything but a representative sample of American (or any) society. Of course we don't reflect it, let alone the full range of the political (left-right) spectrum.
When the editors post a good story, we get between two and five hundred posts discussing how and why this is alarming, what the possible implications may be, etc. Once moderation is applied we end up with a very high signal to noise ratio. Dissenting views are pretty much always modded up, except when they're trolls or flamebait (and even then, people often take the time to read them and reply). Other sources are often quoted or linked to, and those posts get modded up too. In other words, we get a good, interesting (possibly insightful, or informative, sometimes even funny) discussion.
When the editors post something stupid, we get between two and five hundred posts pointing out the error and ripping on the editor that put it on the front page. Occasionally, a thread or two spawns discussing some tangentially related subject that ends up being interesting on its own merrits.
As far as I'm concerned, the system is working as intended. Seriously, who would you rather discuss politics with? The Digg crowd? The people that leave comments on Youtube? Seriously, answer that question and go there. Then come back and tell us what you find.
Haven't you noticed slashdot becoming more of a political "tool" then a place to discuss news for nerds. No. Most of us are capable of independent thought. That's why we're all here, sharing our thoughts and adding the insights of others to our own. At the very least we're sharpening our ideas by arguing against those we disagree with.
The fact that we often agree in large numbers speaks more to the fact that we're a self-selected group than anything else. The fact that the editors pander to us says more about their lust for precious ad revenue than their political views. Not all herds are made of sheep. And even if they were, kdawson (it's him everyone bitches about, right? I honesty don't pay attention to the editors' names) sucks at playing sheep-dog.
I seriously think there is a conspiracy at Microsoft to make help files as useless as possible. It works fine for me, my colleagues, and other programmers I know. Maybe the installer got interrupted or something on your machine or your settings are messed up.
1. multi-gig installs, I know space is cheap these days but still. (Re)installing Visual Studio is rather painful exercise for this reason alone Uncheck the stuff you don't need or won't frequently access, like all the bundled MSDN articles, and the samples, and the "enterprise" tools, or whatever. Once you trim the install down to the languages you intend to use and the basic F1 documentation you can trim that down a fair bit.
I've got the VC# and VC++ 2008 Express editions (compilers, headers, static libraries, IDEs and documentation) installed on my system, and they take roughly 900 MB in total. It would probably be around 1GB if I had the Professional edition installed with the x64 stuff, the CRT source, and all the ATL headers (I'd give you the numbers off my 2005 Pro install, but it's bloated because I was lazy and just clicked "install everything" before going out to see a movie).
2. Often you don't end up going to the right place in the help file. I've found googling the specific class or method is generally more accurate I run into this problem very rarely, and almost all of times it happens it's because I hit F1 with my cursor in the middle of some macro/template heavy C/C++ code that the IDE just can't parse. Check that you haven't set the documentation filter (found above at the top of the contents and index tabs) to something that excludes the stuff you're looking for.
3. Online lookups for everything. The first time you hit F1 it asks you if you want it to search online before offline, offline before online, or offline only. The default is online before offline, and that's stupid, I agree. You can change it in Tools|Options. If it still does online searches all the time then make sure your documentation is correctly installed. And maybe check that you don't have the filter set to something silly that excludes whatever you F1'd.
Now you've got me all curious about whatever it is you have to say. I emailed you a quick one-liner, and either you don't check your email every day (which I doubt, since you're fairly active here), or your spam filter ate it. Subject is "[Slashdot] Re:Warning: the following post contains SATIRE".
Did you just compare a language C with a framework.NET? I was comparing the programming environment embodied by the language C with that of.NET. I thought the end of my sentence (the one you quoted) made that clear.
A quick way to get a GUI up and running in a hurry is to either use GTK+, wxWidget or QT4 for those who want to use c++ Don't know about QT4, but I've tried working with wxWidgets and GTK+, and it was nothing but pain. I ended up wasting too much time on the following:
digging into their code to get at unexposed Win32 features (behavior flags on some controls, lack of support for some features introduced in XP, etc)
chasing down memory leaks and dangling pointers (all sorts of corner cases involving widget ownership and lifetimes)
writing memory management code for the app's internals
sitting around waiting around for things to compile (a big C/C++ lib takes longer to link to than a big.NET assembly)
For the stuff I deal with,.NET addresses all of the above. Maybe that's all changed in the last year and a half, I don't know, I honestly haven't looked at them since switching to WinForms. I probably won't bother checking them out again unless our artists start using Linux, which is unlikely in the extreme.
Look, I'm not saying it's the One Solution to Rule Them All or anything, but I find the API to be clean and simple, and for what I do it is ideal.
My experiences with Java were painful, but they are out of date, so I'm only going to talk about.NET, which I actually use in my day-to-day work because it's actually the best tool for many of the jobs I do.
.NET and Java are both prime examples of object-oriented programming gone stupid. Their class libraries have become so utterly huge that it becomes damn near impossible for an individual developer to suitably grasp anything more than a small portion of them. Interestingly enough, an individual developer does not need to grasp anything more than a small portion of them. An individual developer needs to know the basics of the core class library and whatever else he needs to get his job done. The vastness of the ASP.NET (or whatever) libraries is not an impediment to one who does not use them.
Also, there is documentation, and Intellisense (freely available, now), and a naming convention that actually makes sense after a while. F1 isn't that hard to press.
Although they supposedly give more flexibility, something as essential as reading from and writing to a file becomes a hassle with.NET or Java. It's easy to get lost in whether we need a FileInputStream, or whether we should wrap a FileInputReader in a TextInputBuffer, and so forth. Give me fopen() any day Seriously? You actually found string[] lines = File.ReadAllLines( string path ); to be difficult? Or are you just talking out your ass?
Of course, there are more complicated examples, but that's usually because they're either years out of date (.NET 1.0), or just plain doing more.
OO was supposed to solve the problems of writing applications in languages like C, Pascal and Fortran. All it has done is brought in a new level of complexity that results in monstrosities like the Java and.NET standard class libraries. Meanwhile, the POSIX API offers just as much flexibility, but is far easier to work with. Not to mention that programs using it are far more efficient. Yeah? I find typing File[dot] and hunting through the fairly short list of methods easier than remembering what the valid values were for fopen's mode parameter are, and whether there was a platform-specific one I should be using to get the file-locking behavior I want. And file.Read(... ) is a lot neater than fread(..., file ). You can go on all you want about how I'm being lazy, but I have more important things to commit to memory than API entry points and the quirks of their parameters (like, say, the overall structure of my app, or the problem it's being written to solve). YMMV, of course.
As for plain C applications being more efficient, well, what exactly does that have to do with what methods are named and what namespaces they do (or do not) reside in? Second, that's not the point. Getting a quick GUI app up and running in a hurry is more what you'd use.NET for, something you can't even begin to do in C until you've sat around for a while thinking about fun things like memory management for shared resources.
Yes, C is valuable and it's still pretty much the best choice for writing tight, high-performance loops that do lots of pointer-manipulating, bit-twiddling evil - that's what I and every other sane programmer I know uses it for. But it's also a damn waste of my time to be using it to write Win32 GUIs for art tools. My time is more valuable than a few CPU cycles.
Right on spot. If we follow arrogant self-righteous logic to its logical conclucion, employers shouldn't hire anyone with a military background. Oh, I know, I could have gone much further. But picking on the military isn't my objective, so I didn't. It's not just the military, either - you can make similar "arguments" against other professions, and even extend it to issues of race, gender, and religion. My point was simply that employers shouldn't have the right to dig through people's history, and people shouldn't be expected to tell them everything about it, except in cases where there the position really requires it (public office, national defense contracts, etc).
And if you have friends coming from Irak, you know many of them lost something back there. Why hire potentially dangerous and disturbed people? As stupid as the logic of it is, a fair number of employers actually behave this way, from what I understand. I've heard lots of stories about unqualified people getting jobs ahead of ex-soldiers (who were qualified), for all sorts of BS reasons that ultimately come down to employers being "nervous" about their service. It just makes me mad. I mean I hate the war (and most US foreign policy) as much as anyone can without having experienced it first hand, but even I try to shut up about it and think of something encouraging to say when I talk to my friends (or anyone, really) in the Army.
Yeah, some of them are genuinely disturbed by what they've seen, and a very small minority of them were psychos in the first place, but that's no reason to make life tough for the rest of them. Similarly, the existence of murderers is no reason to wreck a man's life because he got too drunk one night and had to be dragged in off the streets by the police. People are just way too keen to lump others into simplistic and utterly stupid groups like "good" and "bad". Well, we're politically correct these days, so it's "good" and "at risk for being bad" - which at least treats the "bad" ones like the victims that society chose to will make of them.
I don't mean to be a dick here, particularly to a soldier, but I think you're wrong and I'm going to be sarcastic about it since I can't think of a better way to illustrate what I'm trying to say.
SATIRICAL COMMENTS FOLLOW
However, I fully respect the right of an employer to base the hiring decision on criminal history (or the lack thereof).
I have the additional benefit of being active duty military, and have some insight into the "reasons why" these background checks can be so critical to the hiring process (yes, the Navy is a job, just one with unique lifestyle requirements). And while we're being completely batshit ridiculous, I'm going to go out on a limb and make the assertion that companies should be allowed to (actually, according to what my friends in the US Army tell me, continue to) avoid hiring former military personelle for fear of angering anti-war and foreign customers, whether these individuals are qualified for the job or not.
Drug use, criminal activity, etc are personal choices Absolutely. Military service is a personal choice. Nobody has ever been forced into it by circumstances beyond their control, and everyone who has been in the military has been a rabid fan of all wars he (or she) has fought in, gleefully slaughtering their enemies and, I don't know, feasting on the flesh of their children. Yeah, you're all a pack of bloodthirsty mercenaries, just like anyone with any sort of criminal record is a psychotic murderer and pedophile.
And, like criminals, military personelle do not change, even long after their service has ended. Those who hate them are completely right to treat them and their families like shit for the rest of their lives.
END SATIRICAL COMMENTS
There's a reason many Western nations (I'd say "we", but I have no idea where you're from or what the laws outside my own nation are) have privacy and anti-discrimination laws, beyond recognizing basic human dignity - it allows people to put their past behind them and work towards being judged on the merrits of what they are right now. Reversing that trend is going to cause society a lot of pain as we marginalize more and more people, forcing them to "personally chose" either crime or perpetual welfare. Is that the society you want to serve and protect? Your comments regarding drugs indicate it isn't.
Companies can be (and have been) held liable in civil suits for the damaging actions of a dishonest employee in situations where the employer "should have considered" the employee's criminal background. Obviously, there's a rational case for keeping people who have a serious enough record out of high office and other positions of trust, but this sort of thinking is often taken far beyond protecting such positions from abuse. In the case the GP mentioned, if the guy was good enough (or the position sufficiently unimportant) to hire him on a temporary basis without a background check, then why should it be a problem later on when someone finally bothered to do some extra paperwork?
I mean, I get the whole "employer's freedom" thing, but there's a point where social stigmas become too damaging (to everyone) to just appeal to the goodness of people's hearts and trust the issue to solve itself.
People take pills. Their bodies absorb some of the medication, but the rest of it passes through and is flushed down the toilet. The wastewater is treated before it is discharged into reservoirs, rivers or lakes. Then, some of the water is cleansed again at drinking water treatment plants and piped to consumers. But most treatments do not remove all drug residue. That's just ridiculous, when you think about the number of "X milligram of ingredient Y" pills people must be taking for detectable amounts to be showing up in drinking water after being diluted and filtered that many times. Is the average American really on that many drugs? Or are these water companies just really bad at keeping sewage out of people's taps?
Hrm. I wonder how this compares to other developed nations...
While there's no seeming penalty, civil or criminal, there is a bigger penalty: ongoing confidence in government. You know, I used to wonder why Parlaimentary systems have votes of confidence. It always seemed like such a waste, calling an election and disolving the entire government, just because the ruling party and the opposition couldn't aggree on some line of the budget.
The last six years of US politics have explained it to me far better than any text or teacher ever could.
Their obsession with conformity has also graced them with the highest suicide rate in the world. Similarly, we could blame America's obsession with individuality for the highest school-shooting rate of any indsutrialized nation. Or we could blame it for the highest per-capita prison population in the world. We could even blame it for what seems to be the most spectacularly incompetent government in the world today, second only to the great tyrants of the Communist era in terms of the stupid shit they spout as truth and the misery they have inflicted. Heck, we could even blame it for obesity, since that seems to be one of the leading health issues in the USA - you hear that everyone, individuality is fattening!
Of course, those statement are completely unfounded, and moreover they're ridiculous, as is yours. Yes, there are obviously reasons for their high suicide rate, and some of these are cultural, but many are related to the recession that Japan has still not completely recovered from (you know, the one that neatly coincides with the massive spike in suicide rates that the media goes on and on about).
People miss the point of citing statistics like wealth and crime. Wealth and crime in it of themselves are worthless. Crime in particular is a silly stat to obsess over. [snip ridiculous exaggeration] The reason why we want wealth and low crime is to bring about happiness. When your pursuit of these things fail to produce more happiness, you are failing. You must be joking. Go ask the Russians how they feel about the relationship between wealth, the crime rate, and their own happiness. In fact, ask any Eastern European how they felt during the 1990's when there was barely enough food to go around, and when mafias (mafia as in armed thugs, not as in IP lawyers), and how that impacted their happiness. The pursuit of security and prosperity are part of the pursuit of happiness - they're practically prerequisites for any sort of wide-spread lasting happiness. And despite the fact that Japan's success in these fields hasn't made it the happiest nation in the world, it would certainly be worse off were they allowed to rot in favor of whatever you think leads to happiness.
All the wealth and low crime in the world won't make a damned bit of difference if you are so miserable you throw yourself off a bridge. We covered this already. They make a great deal of difference to those who are poor, or are the victims of crime - whether they chose to kill themselves or not.
If the point of life is happiness, the Japanese fail spectacularly. No, they don't. War-torn African countries fail spectacularly. Iraq fails spectacularly. The former USSR failed spectacularly during the years following the Communist collapse (and parts of it still do). Japan is usually ranked somewhere between the top third and the top half of the any ranking of nations by happiness that I've ever seen. That's mediocre at worst, and most of what I've heard from the Japanese people I know and the members of my family that have visited Japan suggests that the reality is far better than that.
...their miserable and unhappy society... Look, if you want to call their populace miserable because the fraction of their population that commits suicide isn't quite as tiny as that of the other G8 countries despite it's aging population and recent economic troubles, and call their society a failure (which only belittles their incredible achievements), then I'm sorry but you're being an idiot. And so are those that modded you all the way to +5 Insightful.
No, I wouldn't have killed him. I would have killed the nearest person that doesn't know that would of != would've. Hey now. Threatening 95% of high school graduates doesn't solve anything.
How many of those billions in cash reserves would Microsoft have left over after they've paid the taxes on all of their IP? Well, let's see, we're talking about taxing a major corporation on the very instruments it uses to achieve, assert, and maintain its dominance in the market, so we need to consider the inevitability of the following:
eighteen "Innovation Incentive" tax exemptions
fifty eight "Media Growth" tax exemptions
the "Freedom to Create" tax exemption
the exemptions in the "Homegrown Artistry Act"
the "Lobbyists Are Nice People" tax exemption
the "I Play Golf With Bill Gates On Saturdays" tax exemption
the "I Play Golf With RIAA Execs On Sundays" tax exemptions
the "Other Congress Critters For Saturday And Sunday Golfing" tax exemptions
the "We're Running Out Of Interesting Names" series of tax exemptions
and a President that's hell-bent on cutting any tax he can pronounce the name of
I'm going to guess they can keep, say, everything but $0.02 (payment of which may be deferred without penalties or interest - see Section 32, entitled "The RIAA Paid Us To Do This", appended to a war funding bill).
That's not to say corporations don't pay taxes, they clearly do, but you just know that anything pointed directly at Microsoft's monopoly or big media's stranglehold on content and culture is going to be lobbied into nothingness before one of us can finish tagging the news on IP reform 'suddenoutbreakofcommonsense'.
There's a big difference between what the BBC does and what CNN does. CNN's ads come from third parties, meaning a big chunk of their revenue comes from third parties. So what do you think will happen to any story that makes their avertisers look bad? Do you think they'll run it as it is, or even at all? Hell no, they're going to water it down or pull it because they can't afford to piss off their prime customers (you didn't think that was the viewers, did you?).
Beyond that, they also have a very real need to attract more viewers, because having more viewers means they can charge more for advertising time. That's why the fluff stories take front and center, because those get ratings. That's also why their reports are phrased to be as shocking as they can possibly be (which is a shame, because frankly nothing says 'objective' like a calm, neutral, tone - and they seam to have thrown this right out).
The BBC may have its problems, but this is not one of them. Its money comes from the TV fee, and all they have to do to justify that is provide quality content, with no regard to making every single minute of air time as exciting and highly rated as possible.
As for the cross-advertising, well, there's less of it than there is paid advertising on any other source, it doesn't inerrupt programs as often, and isn't jarring as it fits within the theme of the existing content. So while it may irritate you, I don't think it's right to compare it to paid third-party advertising seen elsewhere - the results are worlds (or at least an ocean) apart.
Its a sad state of affairs when the only respectable news source in a country is a foreign one. I've found this to be the case for a long time, now. The difference is amazing, too. When I look at what news is in EU countries and what it is in North America (Canada's been going the way of the USA for quite some time now) it's shocking.
If I had to characterize it, it would be something like this:
US news source: Group A outraged that group B is outraged over what persons C and D said about event E. And now we turn to our Esteemed Expert, who will give us his oppinion. BBC: Event E occurred, description of event, persons C and D of group A comment, others disagree. Editorial elsewhere.
It's like our media has completely forgotten the distinction between news and editorial.
I've been listening to European radio since the start of the year and I'm constantly struck by how even countries like Bulgaria (formerly communist, still largely backwards, corrupt, etc) have news agencies that report even the most politically charged events in an objective tone (I said tone, I don't have any way to know if they're being selective about their content for dishonest reasons). When Putin visited Bulgaria in January to finalize the South Stream Pipeline the local news stations reported this: "Putin visits today. These roads closed for security reasons. X number of protestors assembled at location Y, say Z." The expert's opinions came later, on a different program. BBC reports after the deal was signed - the same. The only dramatic of inflamatory language is in quotes. I wish we had that here.
Anyone who played monkey island and now plays halo knows what I mean. Likewise, anyone who has seen truly great films and now sees "live free or die hard", or worse, "transformers", knows what I mean. The content has become stupider, not the media. You know, the dumb stuff has its place. It really does. If I come home burnt out and just want to get work off my mind 30 minutes of Halo does that perfectly. 30 minutes of anything that actually requires concentration would just piss me off when I'm in that state of mind.
This is the thing that pisses me off about the "video games are ruining America" crowd, they have no sense of proportion - casual gamers easily outnumber the hardcores ten to one. The problem is that the hardcores spend more money so they get all the attention, and people end up thinking there's this epidemic of millions of children playing video games eight hours a day, rotting away on the couch. No, there isn't, most of them play an average of 30-60 minutes a day if even that. But advertisers like to promote hardcore gamers because that sells product, and the media likes to run pieces by "concerned citizens" that demonize all gamers because, well, that sells their product.
And the smart content isn't even gone, it's just not getting its share of the marketing dollars. Look at games and movies that haven't been advertised all over the place and you might be surprised by what you find. But yeah, I know what you mean.
Meh. This is just more of the same "make a quick buck now, and the future be damned" mindset that's eroding the rest of our society. Promoting trash over quality content is right up there with dumbing down (many of) the schools, letting the infrastructure rot, and shipping as many jobs as possible overseas. Integrity, ethics, and community spirit seem to be dead, and that's so deeply ingrained these days that nothing short of a major shock (recession, war, etc) is going to fix it.
The grant of immunity is a corollary problem; the root problem is that the government would engage in a warrantless wiretap program to begin with, and until that is addressed we will continue to be short-changed on our rights as citizens. AFAIK, power is supposed to be divided in the USA. There are supposed to be many players and they are supposed to check each other. This should extend beyond the government. It's supposed to include the people (and the corporations) questioning government orders and refusing to comply with illegal orders. The problem isn't that some branch of the US government is corrupt - the US system is designed to cope with that sort of situation, it's that 90% of the power holders in the USA are playing along and letting them get away with it, something which is not supposed to happen.
While we do hold that "just following orders" isn't a suitable defense for war crimes, I wonder if the balance between the moral/ethical breach of compliance vs. pressure applied by the government is the same in this case. (Do we actually know how much pressure or threat, if any, was used to get the telecoms to cooperate?) I'd see some merit to the argument that liability should be pushed back onto the government itself. That is (or should be) a topic for the courts to rule on. It is not for Congress to do the job of AT&T's legal team.
At any rate, I find it surprising that we would expect more backbone out of corporations dealing with the American government than we expect out of them when dealing with, say, the Chinese government. If we tolerate Google "playing by China's rules" when all they stand to lose is their entry into the Chinese market, then why would we expect better of AT&T when they would be running afoul of their home country's government? Well, why would you expect anyone to protest the wars, the civil rights abuses, the attempts to legislate morality, the awful fiscal policy, the wasted effort on security theater, the lack of any real border security, the decaying infrastructure, etc when they might run afoul of their home country's government? Corporations are supposed to be private endeavors. They're supposed to behave like "the people" when it comes to the way they deal with government.
And yes, I know, big business has been in bed with big government (and against "the people") for decades now. The point is that it's not supposed to work like that, and that this legislation threatens to close an opportunity to reverse some small part that.
What I'd like to see -- and you'll have to forgive me for any imprecision in the details here, as IANAL -- is a John Doe suit filed against the individual(s) within (for example) AT&T who actually made and authorized the decisions to compromise customers' privacy. Really? And how, exactly, are you going to get their names? Suing their directors at random won't work for the same reason the RIAA's random law suits don't, ultimately, work (and you wouldn't even have the advantage of being the large legal entity picking on a smaller one). The only thing there is to sue right now are the telcos themselves; individuals may be named as part of the discovery that would take place during the court proceedings but if they're given immunity then there's no way to reach that stage.
The auditory center of your brain has been found to be a copyright circumvention device. Such devices are illegal under the DMCA. Be advised that we will pursue the harshest penalty available: the removal of the aforementioned brain center, steralization (lest you disseminate this device), and a fine to the sum of everything you own plus everything you will ever earn.
Sincerely, The RIAA
PS: We also intend to have you jailed until the copyright of every piece of music you have ever infringed expires.
But direct3d isnt't directX10. In terms of technology, DirectX is nothing more than the group of Direct3D, DirectSound/XACT, and DirectInput/XInput. It used to include DirectDraw (which got rolled into Direct3D a while ago) and DirectShow (which is now considered an OS component and is no longer distributed as part of DirectX). Oh, and DirectPlay, but that died a long time ago, and good riddance to it. When MS's marketing drones speak of DirectX they always follow it with the version number of the most recently updated component, however, as it currently stands the most recent DirectX components are:
Direct3D 10 (D3D 9 still has current documentation as well)
DirectSound 8
XAct/XAudio/whatever (this is a confusingly named/versioned sound framework that's been around since the DX9 days and is probably implemented on top of DirectSound 8 - correct me if I'm wrong, sound is not my forte)
DirectInput 8
XInput (API that's parallel to DirectInput, been available since the DX9 days, exists to support the XBOX 360 controllers)
You'll have to explain what you mean about DX 10 being more than just D3D 10. The rest of it is identical to DX9 and is already supported on XP, except for the minor extensions to D3D9 I mentioned previously.
And MS knew full well gamers would equate directx10 with the new shader features of dx10-d3d, even though d3d shaders are only a small high profile part of directx10 that can in fact be easily backported to XP. Sorry to be somewhat pedantic, but the shaders are huge when it comes to 3D programming, and Shader Model 4.0 (the DX10 stuff) is a massive update. In fact, the changes are significant enough that I bought the whole "well, they need the new driver to do it all" line without question - right up to the day NVIDIA released the specs for the equivalent OpenGL extensions and confirmed that they would, indeed, be available in their XP drivers almost from day one.
The main issue in terms of multitasking is the desktop integration not the multitasking itself. I thought overlapping windows was enough to highlight the issue, but apparently not. Doing an OSX expose type of feature etc, for example, would still be out of reach for XP though, unless I'm still mistaken. That's correct. The old driver model supports multitasking just fine, it just doesn't let the OS hook it at the points necessary to implement Expose/Compiz type effects properly. This (and DRM) is why they rewrote the graphics stack, not the new features in D3D 10. The shiny desktop is not part of DirectX - and while it is tied to the new driver model it has nothing to do with D3D 10 (like I said, it runs on D3D9 + Vista extensions + hooks in the new kernel/drivers).
Slashdot Mirror
This wasn't put in by the firehose. If your suggesting that Slashdot is simply cheer leading a portion of it's audience, and I shouldn't bitch about it, I would think your wrong. In almost everything else, they make an effort to be nutral.
You might be right. I still think we control kdawson more than he controls us, still based the majority of the replies replies to the retarded things he's posted in the past.
Nobody has claimed it stayed in the low level managment. It just didn't make it to senior levels. Mid level managment could have been fully aware and by the time uper management broke the story, they had already investigated the motivations and declared them to be "curiosity" oriented.
Then why was upper-level management clueless about it for so long after the story broke? Why are they now launching an investigation, if one was done earlier? I'm as suspicious of spin as anyone, but media spin doesn't explain why the high-level officers couldn't simply grab whatever report was filed months ago and say, "See here, we checked, they're not connected to foreigners or criminals or anything, and their testimony matches the evidence, this was clearly just a mistake and it has been corrected." Fine, maybe the reports (related to extremely important files) were lost, OK - that's still evidence of a poorly run organization.
You, probably convinced by the exact same same reporting that I am talking about, have formed some opinion of malfeasance in the state department which doesn't reflect reality.
Hah. It takes much more than Keith Olbermann's Special Comments to make me believe something. In this case I'm convinced by the administration's failure to produce convincing evidence of having done their jobs properly. If they'd done their jobs and knew it they could have said, "We already dealt with this, here's the proof." Instead they're launching an investigation - as though it takes a special task force to find a fairly recent report in what should be a well-organized secure storage facility.
If the sheriff or anyone got access to this information inappropriately, they would have been busted.
By whom? And who busts that guy if he's in on it too? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
If the information was used in politically motivated ways, they would be prosecuted.
When, before or after the media loudly destroys the man's political carreer (and then quietly appologizes for the mistake)? Again, what are the guarantees? We still don't know who actually leaked Valerie Plame's name to the press, and even if we did her career is finished anyway.
In other words, this fear mongering evel sheriff couldn't happen unless several steps in government positions where behind it. And to that end, you don't need RealID or anything else, if there is that much high level support for your actions, everything feared could be orchestrated without it.
Of course, the concern is that this reduces the number of people you need to have in on the scheme. If the information is in many separate places, the crooked sheriff needs connections (or dirt on employees) in each of those places. If it's all in one place, then all he needs is for whoever watches him to look away for a minute - perhaps distracted by all the other sheriffs he oversees, perhaps by a bribe or a blackmail threat. It dramatically lowers the bar for abuse, which is what the article is talking about.
And if the Firehose put the article in, I could agree with you. It didn't, it was posted directly.
That's not what I was asking. I was asking, "Are the editors deliberately marginalizing views contrary to their own, despite great support among the Slashdot readership?" Echoing our opinions for cash isn't stellar journalism, I agree, but neither is it a conspiracy to deceive.
Think about this. If Situation X happens and is reported as "X happened", h
So instead of assaulting technitians with barely bridled rage, they merely crowd about and suffocate them in silent despair.
It wouldn't be so bad if the politics introduced where neutral in the stories and the users take it from there. But all the stories are Evil Republicans, Baby Eating Bush, and so on.
Powers-that-be-bashing is always going to be the order of the day among a largely libertarian crowd. The editors are just clumsily following along with the trends we set. I could be wrong, I guess we could test that by picking out opposed stories that made it to the firehose, and see how their chances of hitting the front page relates to their rating from before.
Now if you want to talk about the mainstream media (where many of these stories come from), well, that's something different entirely. I can't really talk about it though since the only US news I watch is largely editorial since, well, that's pretty much all the US networks air. I get actual news from sources like the BBC since I find they do a better job of separating the statements "X happened" and the obligatory "Y is upset about it". And even that's not 100% objective (despite being factual).
This story which was originally about government employees and contract workers inappropriately accessing passport records of presidential candidates and how safe guards in place alerted the proper people so no damage was done and those responsible are being punished.
Yes, that was originally the story. Then we found out that the data was first accessed months ago, and that low-level management silenced the alarms (which, as you say, worked) and "dealth with it" before anyone with the authority to properly investigate got wind of it. Basically, the State Department's employees are either complete idiots, or they fear their bosses more than betraying the public's trust. Either way, whoever's in charge and their subordinates are responsible for allowing (if not fostering) such an environment.
Stories change as they are told, and the concerns raised by the State Department's apparent incompetence are now part of this story.
Instead it got hijacked and is now being used as a reason for not doing RealID and to blast the president over domestic spying because someone could inappropriately access the information.
Nothing is ever as simple as "X happened". Related issues are always going to be brought up and discussed. Most Western media sucks at bringing those issues up (not much time left for that once you're done sensationalizing, I fear). I'm glad the Ars article did it, and I'm glad it happens here.
Now all this and the original article never made it to slashdot until someone could put a spin on it to blast Bush for "anything possible" or "breathing".
From TFA (read it again if you think I've snipped too much, and all emphasis is, of course, mine):
State Department officials insisted ... the contractors were motivated solely by "imprudent curiosity," ... Lawrence Eagleburger, who was George H. W. Bush's Secretary of State in 1992 ... told MSNBC, "It's pretty clear to me that this was not done for political purposes."
Regardless of whether the candidates' records were accessed with politics primarily in mind, the whole incident provides a vivid illustration of what's at stake in the current national debates over privacy and the limits of executive power.
... the major problem with Real ID is that local DMV and law enforcement officials will have access to an unprecedented amount of sensitive information on anyone with a Real ID ... imagine all of that data in the hands of a crooked sheriff who's fighting off a reformist challenger ...
The author isn't bashing Bush over RealID. He's pointing out that the RealID information will be even more accessible than the passport data, and arguing that if something as well-protected as a presidential candi
Oh, you can do a lot of nasty things with passport records besides ID theft. For instance, you can have your HR department datamine it to keep out, er, undesirables. And their children too, to the (oh, I don't know, let's say) tenth generation, just 'cuz. What, you've never met anyone that has a thing against immigrants, legal or otherwise?
I'll stop having something to hide when the rest of humanity stops judging people on their birth place, race, gender, and anything else they have no control over. That and when theives stop favoring the homes of those who've gone on vacation.
No, seriously, this just keeps coming up and it's retarded. Slashdot readers are anything but a representative sample of American (or any) society. Of course we don't reflect it, let alone the full range of the political (left-right) spectrum.
When the editors post a good story, we get between two and five hundred posts discussing how and why this is alarming, what the possible implications may be, etc. Once moderation is applied we end up with a very high signal to noise ratio. Dissenting views are pretty much always modded up, except when they're trolls or flamebait (and even then, people often take the time to read them and reply). Other sources are often quoted or linked to, and those posts get modded up too. In other words, we get a good, interesting (possibly insightful, or informative, sometimes even funny) discussion.
When the editors post something stupid, we get between two and five hundred posts pointing out the error and ripping on the editor that put it on the front page. Occasionally, a thread or two spawns discussing some tangentially related subject that ends up being interesting on its own merrits.
As far as I'm concerned, the system is working as intended. Seriously, who would you rather discuss politics with? The Digg crowd? The people that leave comments on Youtube? Seriously, answer that question and go there. Then come back and tell us what you find. Haven't you noticed slashdot becoming more of a political "tool" then a place to discuss news for nerds. No. Most of us are capable of independent thought. That's why we're all here, sharing our thoughts and adding the insights of others to our own. At the very least we're sharpening our ideas by arguing against those we disagree with.
The fact that we often agree in large numbers speaks more to the fact that we're a self-selected group than anything else. The fact that the editors pander to us says more about their lust for precious ad revenue than their political views. Not all herds are made of sheep. And even if they were, kdawson (it's him everyone bitches about, right? I honesty don't pay attention to the editors' names) sucks at playing sheep-dog.
I've got the VC# and VC++ 2008 Express editions (compilers, headers, static libraries, IDEs and documentation) installed on my system, and they take roughly 900 MB in total. It would probably be around 1GB if I had the Professional edition installed with the x64 stuff, the CRT source, and all the ATL headers (I'd give you the numbers off my 2005 Pro install, but it's bloated because I was lazy and just clicked "install everything" before going out to see a movie). 2. Often you don't end up going to the right place in the help file. I've found googling the specific class or method is generally more accurate I run into this problem very rarely, and almost all of times it happens it's because I hit F1 with my cursor in the middle of some macro/template heavy C/C++ code that the IDE just can't parse. Check that you haven't set the documentation filter (found above at the top of the contents and index tabs) to something that excludes the stuff you're looking for. 3. Online lookups for everything. The first time you hit F1 it asks you if you want it to search online before offline, offline before online, or offline only. The default is online before offline, and that's stupid, I agree. You can change it in Tools|Options. If it still does online searches all the time then make sure your documentation is correctly installed. And maybe check that you don't have the filter set to something silly that excludes whatever you F1'd.
Now you've got me all curious about whatever it is you have to say. I emailed you a quick one-liner, and either you don't check your email every day (which I doubt, since you're fairly active here), or your spam filter ate it. Subject is "[Slashdot] Re:Warning: the following post contains SATIRE".
For the stuff I deal with,
Look, I'm not saying it's the One Solution to Rule Them All or anything, but I find the API to be clean and simple, and for what I do it is ideal.
//in System.IO.Filepublic static string[] ReadAllLines(string path)
{
return ReadAllLines(path, Encoding.UTF8);
}
.NET and Java are both prime examples of object-oriented programming gone stupid. Their class libraries have become so utterly huge that it becomes damn near impossible for an individual developer to suitably grasp anything more than a small portion of them. Interestingly enough, an individual developer does not need to grasp anything more than a small portion of them. An individual developer needs to know the basics of the core class library and whatever else he needs to get his job done. The vastness of the ASP.NET (or whatever) libraries is not an impediment to one who does not use them.Also, there is documentation, and Intellisense (freely available, now), and a naming convention that actually makes sense after a while. F1 isn't that hard to press. Although they supposedly give more flexibility, something as essential as reading from and writing to a file becomes a hassle with
Of course, there are more complicated examples, but that's usually because they're either years out of date (.NET 1.0), or just plain doing more. OO was supposed to solve the problems of writing applications in languages like C, Pascal and Fortran. All it has done is brought in a new level of complexity that results in monstrosities like the Java and
As for plain C applications being more efficient, well, what exactly does that have to do with what methods are named and what namespaces they do (or do not) reside in? Second, that's not the point. Getting a quick GUI app up and running in a hurry is more what you'd use
Yes, C is valuable and it's still pretty much the best choice for writing tight, high-performance loops that do lots of pointer-manipulating, bit-twiddling evil - that's what I and every other sane programmer I know uses it for. But it's also a damn waste of my time to be using it to write Win32 GUIs for art tools. My time is more valuable than a few CPU cycles.
Yeah, some of them are genuinely disturbed by what they've seen, and a very small minority of them were psychos in the first place, but that's no reason to make life tough for the rest of them. Similarly, the existence of murderers is no reason to wreck a man's life because he got too drunk one night and had to be dragged in off the streets by the police. People are just way too keen to lump others into simplistic and utterly stupid groups like "good" and "bad". Well, we're politically correct these days, so it's "good" and "at risk for being bad" - which at least treats the "bad" ones like the victims that society chose to will make of them.
SATIRICAL COMMENTS FOLLOW However, I fully respect the right of an employer to base the hiring decision on criminal history (or the lack thereof). I have the additional benefit of being active duty military, and have some insight into the "reasons why" these background checks can be so critical to the hiring process (yes, the Navy is a job, just one with unique lifestyle requirements). And while we're being completely batshit ridiculous, I'm going to go out on a limb and make the assertion that companies should be allowed to (actually, according to what my friends in the US Army tell me, continue to) avoid hiring former military personelle for fear of angering anti-war and foreign customers, whether these individuals are qualified for the job or not. Drug use, criminal activity, etc are personal choices Absolutely. Military service is a personal choice. Nobody has ever been forced into it by circumstances beyond their control, and everyone who has been in the military has been a rabid fan of all wars he (or she) has fought in, gleefully slaughtering their enemies and, I don't know, feasting on the flesh of their children. Yeah, you're all a pack of bloodthirsty mercenaries, just like anyone with any sort of criminal record is a psychotic murderer and pedophile.
And, like criminals, military personelle do not change, even long after their service has ended. Those who hate them are completely right to treat them and their families like shit for the rest of their lives.
END SATIRICAL COMMENTS
There's a reason many Western nations (I'd say "we", but I have no idea where you're from or what the laws outside my own nation are) have privacy and anti-discrimination laws, beyond recognizing basic human dignity - it allows people to put their past behind them and work towards being judged on the merrits of what they are right now. Reversing that trend is going to cause society a lot of pain as we marginalize more and more people, forcing them to "personally chose" either crime or perpetual welfare. Is that the society you want to serve and protect? Your comments regarding drugs indicate it isn't. Companies can be (and have been) held liable in civil suits for the damaging actions of a dishonest employee in situations where the employer "should have considered" the employee's criminal background. Obviously, there's a rational case for keeping people who have a serious enough record out of high office and other positions of trust, but this sort of thinking is often taken far beyond protecting such positions from abuse. In the case the GP mentioned, if the guy was good enough (or the position sufficiently unimportant) to hire him on a temporary basis without a background check, then why should it be a problem later on when someone finally bothered to do some extra paperwork?
I mean, I get the whole "employer's freedom" thing, but there's a point where social stigmas become too damaging (to everyone) to just appeal to the goodness of people's hearts and trust the issue to solve itself.
People take pills. Their bodies absorb some of the medication, but the rest of it passes through and is flushed down the toilet. The wastewater is treated before it is discharged into reservoirs, rivers or lakes. Then, some of the water is cleansed again at drinking water treatment plants and piped to consumers. But most treatments do not remove all drug residue. That's just ridiculous, when you think about the number of "X milligram of ingredient Y" pills people must be taking for detectable amounts to be showing up in drinking water after being diluted and filtered that many times. Is the average American really on that many drugs? Or are these water companies just really bad at keeping sewage out of people's taps?
Hrm. I wonder how this compares to other developed nations...
The last six years of US politics have explained it to me far better than any text or teacher ever could.
Of course, those statement are completely unfounded, and moreover they're ridiculous, as is yours. Yes, there are obviously reasons for their high suicide rate, and some of these are cultural, but many are related to the recession that Japan has still not completely recovered from (you know, the one that neatly coincides with the massive spike in suicide rates that the media goes on and on about). People miss the point of citing statistics like wealth and crime. Wealth and crime in it of themselves are worthless. Crime in particular is a silly stat to obsess over. [snip ridiculous exaggeration] The reason why we want wealth and low crime is to bring about happiness. When your pursuit of these things fail to produce more happiness, you are failing. You must be joking. Go ask the Russians how they feel about the relationship between wealth, the crime rate, and their own happiness. In fact, ask any Eastern European how they felt during the 1990's when there was barely enough food to go around, and when mafias (mafia as in armed thugs, not as in IP lawyers), and how that impacted their happiness. The pursuit of security and prosperity are part of the pursuit of happiness - they're practically prerequisites for any sort of wide-spread lasting happiness. And despite the fact that Japan's success in these fields hasn't made it the happiest nation in the world, it would certainly be worse off were they allowed to rot in favor of whatever you think leads to happiness. All the wealth and low crime in the world won't make a damned bit of difference if you are so miserable you throw yourself off a bridge. We covered this already. They make a great deal of difference to those who are poor, or are the victims of crime - whether they chose to kill themselves or not. If the point of life is happiness, the Japanese fail spectacularly. No, they don't. War-torn African countries fail spectacularly. Iraq fails spectacularly. The former USSR failed spectacularly during the years following the Communist collapse (and parts of it still do). Japan is usually ranked somewhere between the top third and the top half of the any ranking of nations by happiness that I've ever seen. That's mediocre at worst, and most of what I've heard from the Japanese people I know and the members of my family that have visited Japan suggests that the reality is far better than that.
...their miserable and unhappy society... Look, if you want to call their populace miserable because the fraction of their population that commits suicide isn't quite as tiny as that of the other G8 countries despite it's aging population and recent economic troubles, and call their society a failure (which only belittles their incredible achievements), then I'm sorry but you're being an idiot. And so are those that modded you all the way to +5 Insightful.Hahaha. Bravo, sir. Bravo!
I'm going to guess they can keep, say, everything but $0.02 (payment of which may be deferred without penalties or interest - see Section 32, entitled "The RIAA Paid Us To Do This", appended to a war funding bill).
That's not to say corporations don't pay taxes, they clearly do, but you just know that anything pointed directly at Microsoft's monopoly or big media's stranglehold on content and culture is going to be lobbied into nothingness before one of us can finish tagging the news on IP reform 'suddenoutbreakofcommonsense'.
There's a big difference between what the BBC does and what CNN does. CNN's ads come from third parties, meaning a big chunk of their revenue comes from third parties. So what do you think will happen to any story that makes their avertisers look bad? Do you think they'll run it as it is, or even at all? Hell no, they're going to water it down or pull it because they can't afford to piss off their prime customers (you didn't think that was the viewers, did you?).
Beyond that, they also have a very real need to attract more viewers, because having more viewers means they can charge more for advertising time. That's why the fluff stories take front and center, because those get ratings. That's also why their reports are phrased to be as shocking as they can possibly be (which is a shame, because frankly nothing says 'objective' like a calm, neutral, tone - and they seam to have thrown this right out).
The BBC may have its problems, but this is not one of them. Its money comes from the TV fee, and all they have to do to justify that is provide quality content, with no regard to making every single minute of air time as exciting and highly rated as possible.
As for the cross-advertising, well, there's less of it than there is paid advertising on any other source, it doesn't inerrupt programs as often, and isn't jarring as it fits within the theme of the existing content. So while it may irritate you, I don't think it's right to compare it to paid third-party advertising seen elsewhere - the results are worlds (or at least an ocean) apart.
If I had to characterize it, it would be something like this:
US news source: Group A outraged that group B is outraged over what persons C and D said about event E. And now we turn to our Esteemed Expert, who will give us his oppinion.
BBC: Event E occurred, description of event, persons C and D of group A comment, others disagree. Editorial elsewhere.
It's like our media has completely forgotten the distinction between news and editorial.
I've been listening to European radio since the start of the year and I'm constantly struck by how even countries like Bulgaria (formerly communist, still largely backwards, corrupt, etc) have news agencies that report even the most politically charged events in an objective tone (I said tone, I don't have any way to know if they're being selective about their content for dishonest reasons). When Putin visited Bulgaria in January to finalize the South Stream Pipeline the local news stations reported this: "Putin visits today. These roads closed for security reasons. X number of protestors assembled at location Y, say Z." The expert's opinions came later, on a different program. BBC reports after the deal was signed - the same. The only dramatic of inflamatory language is in quotes. I wish we had that here.
This is the thing that pisses me off about the "video games are ruining America" crowd, they have no sense of proportion - casual gamers easily outnumber the hardcores ten to one. The problem is that the hardcores spend more money so they get all the attention, and people end up thinking there's this epidemic of millions of children playing video games eight hours a day, rotting away on the couch. No, there isn't, most of them play an average of 30-60 minutes a day if even that. But advertisers like to promote hardcore gamers because that sells product, and the media likes to run pieces by "concerned citizens" that demonize all gamers because, well, that sells their product.
And the smart content isn't even gone, it's just not getting its share of the marketing dollars. Look at games and movies that haven't been advertised all over the place and you might be surprised by what you find. But yeah, I know what you mean.
Meh. This is just more of the same "make a quick buck now, and the future be damned" mindset that's eroding the rest of our society. Promoting trash over quality content is right up there with dumbing down (many of) the schools, letting the infrastructure rot, and shipping as many jobs as possible overseas. Integrity, ethics, and community spirit seem to be dead, and that's so deeply ingrained these days that nothing short of a major shock (recession, war, etc) is going to fix it.
And yes, I know, big business has been in bed with big government (and against "the people") for decades now. The point is that it's not supposed to work like that, and that this legislation threatens to close an opportunity to reverse some small part that. What I'd like to see -- and you'll have to forgive me for any imprecision in the details here, as IANAL -- is a John Doe suit filed against the individual(s) within (for example) AT&T who actually made and authorized the decisions to compromise customers' privacy. Really? And how, exactly, are you going to get their names? Suing their directors at random won't work for the same reason the RIAA's random law suits don't, ultimately, work (and you wouldn't even have the advantage of being the large legal entity picking on a smaller one). The only thing there is to sue right now are the telcos themselves; individuals may be named as part of the discovery that would take place during the court proceedings but if they're given immunity then there's no way to reach that stage.
Dear sir:
The auditory center of your brain has been found to be a copyright circumvention device. Such devices are illegal under the DMCA. Be advised that we will pursue the harshest penalty available: the removal of the aforementioned brain center, steralization (lest you disseminate this device), and a fine to the sum of everything you own plus everything you will ever earn.
Sincerely,
The RIAA
PS: We also intend to have you jailed until the copyright of every piece of music you have ever infringed expires.
You'll have to explain what you mean about DX 10 being more than just D3D 10. The rest of it is identical to DX9 and is already supported on XP, except for the minor extensions to D3D9 I mentioned previously. And MS knew full well gamers would equate directx10 with the new shader features of dx10-d3d, even though d3d shaders are only a small high profile part of directx10 that can in fact be easily backported to XP. Sorry to be somewhat pedantic, but the shaders are huge when it comes to 3D programming, and Shader Model 4.0 (the DX10 stuff) is a massive update. In fact, the changes are significant enough that I bought the whole "well, they need the new driver to do it all" line without question - right up to the day NVIDIA released the specs for the equivalent OpenGL extensions and confirmed that they would, indeed, be available in their XP drivers almost from day one. The main issue in terms of multitasking is the desktop integration not the multitasking itself. I thought overlapping windows was enough to highlight the issue, but apparently not. Doing an OSX expose type of feature etc, for example, would still be out of reach for XP though, unless I'm still mistaken. That's correct. The old driver model supports multitasking just fine, it just doesn't let the OS hook it at the points necessary to implement Expose/Compiz type effects properly. This (and DRM) is why they rewrote the graphics stack, not the new features in D3D 10. The shiny desktop is not part of DirectX - and while it is tied to the new driver model it has nothing to do with D3D 10 (like I said, it runs on D3D9 + Vista extensions + hooks in the new kernel/drivers).