Who is it not acceptable to? and why can't those people make their own fork or simply not participate in the mailing list? (besides Sarah Sharp) If we were losing lots of talented developers because they just couldn't bear the mailing list, that would be a different story.
Honest question: how would you know if you were losing lots of talented developers? Not many people are going to speak up to let you know that your behavior is toxic. They'll just leave and take their skills elsewhere.
There is no absolute morality of the way things should be. There is what works. If you have a way to make something work better, no one is stopping you.
This isn't really related to the main discussion, but it's such a terrible attitude that I felt compelled to comment. Slavery works. Human experimentation works. Spying on every citizen in the country works. Morality matters. Being rude to people on a mailing list really isn't a big deal, morality-wise, but let's not go saying that the ends always justify the means.
Thanks to the Southern Strategy, conservatism and racism now go hand-in-hand in this country. The racists were cheering Trayvon's death, and are far more vile than Zimmerman could ever be. These same racists will tout this outcome as a victory over those damn libruls. They don't realize that they're the proverbial broken clocks in this instance.
The reason Y2K turned out not to be a big deal is because millions of programmers worked round the clock to fix their code in time. I would expect that people on Slashdot, of all places, would understand that.
Unfortunately, we won't get sufficient advanced warning of a major solar storm.
He admitted to his role in 9/11 several months before being captured, in an interview with Al Jazeera.
That in no way excuses torture, nor does it mean he's guilty of the dozens of other crimes that they tortured him into confessing to, but he was responsible for 9/11.
Congress can't do anything else, on account of the gridlock, so why not spend a few minutes voting on this?
And by the way, if you just indiscriminately vote out incumbents every cycle, you'll never get anyone good in office. You'll just get wave after wave of naive freshmen, easily exploited by lobbyists.
Blah, blah, blah. Keep stamping your little feet. Humanity is far, far, far better off now than we were a thousand years ago, and we're not gonna let your kind drag us backwards. If you try, we'll just lock you away in a little concrete box and forget about you. Progress marches on!
That in modern society, it's done by voting, and while the current system may not be ideal, it beats the hell out of rampaging armies raping and enslaving and murdering everyone in their way.
By that logic, all laws are "piracy", since they take money and weapons to enforce. When it comes down to it, it's impossible to have any laws if you don't ultimately have the threat of force to back them up. And if you have no laws, the strongest people will conquer the weak, set up kingdoms and empires, and make laws, just like they did in the beginning.
For the south, on the other hand, the notion to leave the union was driven by slavery
That part's right. Now, why did the South feel it was necessary to leave the union to preserve slavery? It was because the North was fighting to end slavery. The North was going to end slavery through peaceful means, and the South tried to secede to avoid that, which is what led to the war.
The simple fact is that, had the North lost, or not fought, millions of people would have been doomed to a life of slavery. It was a war worth fighting, and very different from this War on Terror nonsense we have now.
In the case of that war, yes, it was okay. It makes sense to temporarily allow the government to read your telegrams in order to permanently secure the freedom of four million slaves.
It was a temporary and partial loss of freedom in order to help win a far more fundamental freedom for others. The NSA spying, by contrast, seems to be permanent and of negligible benefit.
The article contains a quote offering a nice reminder of who Microsoft is really working for:
The goal, [Microsoft general manager David] Pann says, is to give advertisers access to consumers across a broader variety of their daily activities, not just when they’re overtly conducting a search.
I suppose that broader variety also includes gaming or watching movies.
Nothing like creating laws from emotion. Look how well that policy has been serving the USA for the past 100 years.
Dude, do you have any idea what life was like for the average American in 1913? We're a hell of a lot better off now.
And yeah, laws get passed on emotion. It may not be ideal, but that's democracy for you. People aren't computers, and wishing they were only serves to make you miserable.
If I'm being pursued by a strange man with a gun, you can bet your ass I'll try to knock him down and get his gun away from him. I'm not going to sit there passively, hoping that it's just an overzealous neighborhood watchman. Trayvon was trying to save his own life. Trayvon was exercising his right to self defense. Being chased by a man with a gun absolutely gives him a reasonable expectation that his life was in danger.
Buying a plastic gun online ain't so easy, and it's the plastic ones that make it easy for random nutjobs to assassinate anyone the voices tell them to.
3D printers are rare and expensive now. Give it ten or twenty years, and they'll be $40 in Walmart. At which point we'll need more invasive security to prevent our elected leaders, our business owners, our celebrities, etc., from getting killed every other week. It sucks, and I know it's not what Slashdot wants to hear, but it is what it is. There's no guarantee written into the universe's rulebook saying that things only ever get better.
Crazy people (i.e. the sort of people who commit random murders) aren't all that likely to machine their own gun. But if you make it as easy as a few key strokes on a PC, they're a lot more likely to do that.
3D printers, like many technologies, make it easier to kill other people. We've adapted to this sort of change before, and we'll do it again, but it will mean losing some more freedoms. It sucks, but that's just how it is. The laws of physics don't give a shit about our civilization or our freedoms. We have to constantly reshape our society to survive factors beyond our control. Unless you've got some plan that will make it so human beings stop wanting to kill each other, that means coming up with new types of security to deal with new threats.
So what's your theory on why Tom's Hardware would change their ranking system specifically to engineer a Firefox victory?
I know people joke about never reading TFA, but knee-jerk cynicism is no replacement for actual knowledge. If you're going to accuse someone of deceit, you really ought to at least check on who's making them claim in the first place.
It looks to me like he kept his promise, and people just didn't pay attention to what that promise was...
That means no more illegal wire-tapping of American citizens.
Because it's been made legal.
No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime.
But anyone they want to spy on is, by definition, "suspect".
No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war.
Sure, you can protest misguided wars and not be tracked for that. But there's probably other stuff they can track you for.
And so on. Obama voted for warrantless wiretaps just months before being elected in 2008. It was covered right here on Slashdot! If you're suprised by his stance now, it's only because you hadn't been paying attention.
Why are women so offended when they see over idealized, attractive women advertising products?
First of all, it contributes to the objectification of women. The pervasive idea in our society that women are pretty things to parade around, and if you're really successful, then you'll get one of your very own to show off to your friends. This hurts men too, by the way -- it pushes the idea that your value as a man is directly proportional to your ability to attract a beautiful woman.
Your analogy to using attractive men to sell, e.g., clothing doesn't work. In those cases, the message is "Buy our product, and look like this!" Booth babes aren't promoting that sort of message. They're just eye candy for the straight men.
Which brings me to the second point: even if a woman isn't offended, she still gets the message that she's not really wanted. When you so blatantly target your marketing towards men, it sends the message that your product isn't for women. (Yes, lesbians might enjoy the booth babes too, but they still know that they're not the target demographic.)
Conversely, the fact that it's not a problem to you doesn't mean it's not a problem to everyone else.
But this is Slashdot, a website dominated by young, wealthy, white men. So of course sexism is NEVER a problem. Ditto racism or classism or any other -ism. No matter what happens, you can always explain it away and get modded insightful by your peers.
No, we don't "know they will". We know that MS is using restrictive DRM in the XB1. We know that Sony is not using restrictive DRM in the PS4. The insinuations that they might add it later are nothing but FUD.
"Sure, your OS isn't going to steal your credit card information right now, but they might patch that in later!! Be afraid! Be angry!!!!"
And don't go accusing me of fanboyism. I'm not buying any next gen console -- I'm quite happy with PC gaming, thank you very much.
The Wikipedia article you link says the laws against insulting the king date back to 1908, long before American involvement. It goes on to say that they didn't start really enforcing the law heavily until 2006, long after any cold war meddling.
But you brilliantly wove the a couple truths together to create a magnificent lie: that the US is responsible for Thailand's laws against criticizing the monarch. Well done. I'd wager, by your current +5 Informative score, that quite a few people fell for it. It really goes to show that any lie can be believed, if only you throw in a couple unrelated hyperlinks to make it look official.
And it certainly helps if it's anti-American, since people just love to have a big scary villain to rage against.
Science does currently have an answer to the question of purpose and meaning. It is that our primitive brains made those concepts up. Luckily a well trained mind is sometimes able to identify biases such as these and rule them out during decision making.
Science doesn't say that AT ALL. Atheists say that, and then try to hide behind science to make their viewpoint seem like it has some weight to it. There is no mathematical formula, no physical laws, that say life is without meaning. Just smarmy people who like to pretend that they're knowledgeable about science.
Slashdot Mirror
Who is it not acceptable to? and why can't those people make their own fork or simply not participate in the mailing list? (besides Sarah Sharp) If we were losing lots of talented developers because they just couldn't bear the mailing list, that would be a different story.
Honest question: how would you know if you were losing lots of talented developers? Not many people are going to speak up to let you know that your behavior is toxic. They'll just leave and take their skills elsewhere.
There is no absolute morality of the way things should be. There is what works. If you have a way to make something work better, no one is stopping you.
This isn't really related to the main discussion, but it's such a terrible attitude that I felt compelled to comment. Slavery works. Human experimentation works. Spying on every citizen in the country works. Morality matters. Being rude to people on a mailing list really isn't a big deal, morality-wise, but let's not go saying that the ends always justify the means.
Thanks to the Southern Strategy, conservatism and racism now go hand-in-hand in this country. The racists were cheering Trayvon's death, and are far more vile than Zimmerman could ever be. These same racists will tout this outcome as a victory over those damn libruls. They don't realize that they're the proverbial broken clocks in this instance.
The reason Y2K turned out not to be a big deal is because millions of programmers worked round the clock to fix their code in time. I would expect that people on Slashdot, of all places, would understand that.
Unfortunately, we won't get sufficient advanced warning of a major solar storm.
He admitted to his role in 9/11 several months before being captured, in an interview with Al Jazeera.
That in no way excuses torture, nor does it mean he's guilty of the dozens of other crimes that they tortured him into confessing to, but he was responsible for 9/11.
Congress can't do anything else, on account of the gridlock, so why not spend a few minutes voting on this?
And by the way, if you just indiscriminately vote out incumbents every cycle, you'll never get anyone good in office. You'll just get wave after wave of naive freshmen, easily exploited by lobbyists.
Blah, blah, blah. Keep stamping your little feet. Humanity is far, far, far better off now than we were a thousand years ago, and we're not gonna let your kind drag us backwards. If you try, we'll just lock you away in a little concrete box and forget about you. Progress marches on!
That in modern society, it's done by voting, and while the current system may not be ideal, it beats the hell out of rampaging armies raping and enslaving and murdering everyone in their way.
By that logic, all laws are "piracy", since they take money and weapons to enforce. When it comes down to it, it's impossible to have any laws if you don't ultimately have the threat of force to back them up. And if you have no laws, the strongest people will conquer the weak, set up kingdoms and empires, and make laws, just like they did in the beginning.
What if I think it's right and just to build the best society that's realistically possible?
As you said:
For the south, on the other hand, the notion to leave the union was driven by slavery
That part's right. Now, why did the South feel it was necessary to leave the union to preserve slavery? It was because the North was fighting to end slavery. The North was going to end slavery through peaceful means, and the South tried to secede to avoid that, which is what led to the war.
The simple fact is that, had the North lost, or not fought, millions of people would have been doomed to a life of slavery. It was a war worth fighting, and very different from this War on Terror nonsense we have now.
In the case of that war, yes, it was okay. It makes sense to temporarily allow the government to read your telegrams in order to permanently secure the freedom of four million slaves.
It was a temporary and partial loss of freedom in order to help win a far more fundamental freedom for others. The NSA spying, by contrast, seems to be permanent and of negligible benefit.
It certainly looks that way.
The article contains a quote offering a nice reminder of who Microsoft is really working for:
The goal, [Microsoft general manager David] Pann says, is to give advertisers access to consumers across a broader variety of their daily activities, not just when they’re overtly conducting a search.
I suppose that broader variety also includes gaming or watching movies.
Nothing like creating laws from emotion. Look how well that policy has been serving the USA for the past 100 years.
Dude, do you have any idea what life was like for the average American in 1913? We're a hell of a lot better off now.
And yeah, laws get passed on emotion. It may not be ideal, but that's democracy for you. People aren't computers, and wishing they were only serves to make you miserable.
If I'm being pursued by a strange man with a gun, you can bet your ass I'll try to knock him down and get his gun away from him. I'm not going to sit there passively, hoping that it's just an overzealous neighborhood watchman. Trayvon was trying to save his own life. Trayvon was exercising his right to self defense. Being chased by a man with a gun absolutely gives him a reasonable expectation that his life was in danger.
Buying a plastic gun online ain't so easy, and it's the plastic ones that make it easy for random nutjobs to assassinate anyone the voices tell them to.
3D printers are rare and expensive now. Give it ten or twenty years, and they'll be $40 in Walmart. At which point we'll need more invasive security to prevent our elected leaders, our business owners, our celebrities, etc., from getting killed every other week. It sucks, and I know it's not what Slashdot wants to hear, but it is what it is. There's no guarantee written into the universe's rulebook saying that things only ever get better.
Crazy people (i.e. the sort of people who commit random murders) aren't all that likely to machine their own gun. But if you make it as easy as a few key strokes on a PC, they're a lot more likely to do that.
3D printers, like many technologies, make it easier to kill other people. We've adapted to this sort of change before, and we'll do it again, but it will mean losing some more freedoms. It sucks, but that's just how it is. The laws of physics don't give a shit about our civilization or our freedoms. We have to constantly reshape our society to survive factors beyond our control. Unless you've got some plan that will make it so human beings stop wanting to kill each other, that means coming up with new types of security to deal with new threats.
So what's your theory on why Tom's Hardware would change their ranking system specifically to engineer a Firefox victory?
I know people joke about never reading TFA, but knee-jerk cynicism is no replacement for actual knowledge. If you're going to accuse someone of deceit, you really ought to at least check on who's making them claim in the first place.
It looks to me like he kept his promise, and people just didn't pay attention to what that promise was...
That means no more illegal wire-tapping of American citizens.
Because it's been made legal.
No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime.
But anyone they want to spy on is, by definition, "suspect".
No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war.
Sure, you can protest misguided wars and not be tracked for that. But there's probably other stuff they can track you for.
And so on. Obama voted for warrantless wiretaps just months before being elected in 2008. It was covered right here on Slashdot! If you're suprised by his stance now, it's only because you hadn't been paying attention.
Why do their opinions matter more than those of anyone else? Why do naysayers get to decide?
Why are they less important than anyone else? Why do the yaysayers get to decide?
Why are women so offended when they see over idealized, attractive women advertising products?
First of all, it contributes to the objectification of women. The pervasive idea in our society that women are pretty things to parade around, and if you're really successful, then you'll get one of your very own to show off to your friends. This hurts men too, by the way -- it pushes the idea that your value as a man is directly proportional to your ability to attract a beautiful woman.
Your analogy to using attractive men to sell, e.g., clothing doesn't work. In those cases, the message is "Buy our product, and look like this!" Booth babes aren't promoting that sort of message. They're just eye candy for the straight men.
Which brings me to the second point: even if a woman isn't offended, she still gets the message that she's not really wanted. When you so blatantly target your marketing towards men, it sends the message that your product isn't for women. (Yes, lesbians might enjoy the booth babes too, but they still know that they're not the target demographic.)
We have a culture that endorses the objectification of women
Yup, and it won't improve unless we challenge it every now and then.
Conversely, the fact that it's not a problem to you doesn't mean it's not a problem to everyone else.
But this is Slashdot, a website dominated by young, wealthy, white men. So of course sexism is NEVER a problem. Ditto racism or classism or any other -ism. No matter what happens, you can always explain it away and get modded insightful by your peers.
No, we don't "know they will". We know that MS is using restrictive DRM in the XB1. We know that Sony is not using restrictive DRM in the PS4. The insinuations that they might add it later are nothing but FUD.
"Sure, your OS isn't going to steal your credit card information right now, but they might patch that in later!! Be afraid! Be angry!!!!"
And don't go accusing me of fanboyism. I'm not buying any next gen console -- I'm quite happy with PC gaming, thank you very much.
The Wikipedia article you link says the laws against insulting the king date back to 1908, long before American involvement. It goes on to say that they didn't start really enforcing the law heavily until 2006, long after any cold war meddling.
But you brilliantly wove the a couple truths together to create a magnificent lie: that the US is responsible for Thailand's laws against criticizing the monarch. Well done. I'd wager, by your current +5 Informative score, that quite a few people fell for it. It really goes to show that any lie can be believed, if only you throw in a couple unrelated hyperlinks to make it look official.
And it certainly helps if it's anti-American, since people just love to have a big scary villain to rage against.
Science does currently have an answer to the question of purpose and meaning. It is that our primitive brains made those concepts up. Luckily a well trained mind is sometimes able to identify biases such as these and rule them out during decision making.
Science doesn't say that AT ALL. Atheists say that, and then try to hide behind science to make their viewpoint seem like it has some weight to it. There is no mathematical formula, no physical laws, that say life is without meaning. Just smarmy people who like to pretend that they're knowledgeable about science.