At second thought, perhaps that was uncalled for, given that ID theft really is a serious problem. However, like several posters have already suggested, it does seem like you're overreacting. Shredding documents in particular is probably completely unnecessary. The likelyhood of someone actually going through your trash to find documents to use for ID theft is so low as to be neglectable.
The 750K figure and others mentioned in the Washington Post link probably includes people merely "taking" the identity but not "using" it. This could, for example, include script kiddies stealing databases with thousands and thousands of credit card numbers and personal info but doing nothing with it (or doing something, but only with small parts of it).
But it is true that one should keep an eye open. Here's what your favorite.gov recommends.
So did I. Loved it, even. Yet, as is often stated on Slashdot in discussions of other matters (mostly those concerning the RIAA or MPAA), noone has the right to make a profit. If people don't want these games, what can we do? Force them to want them? Remembering the Good Old Days is all too frequently a sign of a common and very dangerous disease called Nostalgia, and a known symptom of that condition is a refusal to acknowledge that what one likes about a certain thing may be more due to associations rather than its intrinsic nature. I'm sure people will root for Doom and Warcraft in much the same way in 20 years, while not bothering much for the titles we (as in me and other old-time farts) care for so deeply, or, for that matter, for the new ultra-hyper-flashy game that we can't even conceive of today.
With this I'm not saying that fighting to keep some culture alive is always vain and pointless, only that sometimes it might be a good idea to take a step back and ask why something should preserved. And then I don't mean preservation for historical purposes - believe me, history will never forget Pacman no matter how much it'll want to - but in the sense of actively trying to prevent these games from being removed from the everyday life of the everyday nerd.
I love these games, but things change, and I realize that the generation they are geared at now may not love them. I don't want to force my values on that generation. You probably didn't want your fathers' Elvis records, which is perfectly OK. But in the same way, you'll have to accept that your future son may not want to play Dig Dug. Even if it'd hurt.
Microsoft is probably the least able to produce this product. Translation software? Show us that you have this technology. (Yeah right.)
Microsoft Research actually employs some of the world's foremost experts in natural language processing. I say they're at least as likely as somebody else to come up with a viable product (though that is not to say that it is likely).
I had the idea to instantly translate char and IM three years ago, and even began planning an implementation. I never dreamed of it being patentable.
Take this! Now take that! Not so tough anymore, huh? And there's more where that came from! Here's one more for ya! C'mon, get up!
You may think I'm trying to portay the SCO-IBM dabble here, but it's actually more of a description of how I personally feel with regards to this neverending stream of similar Slashdot frontpage SCO-IBM Round SorryLostCountAlready stories.
We need an icon for this. And if we can have games.slashdot.org and mac.slashdot.org, why not an IBMandSCOfightitout.slashdot.org? And why even stop there? Maybe "news for nerds, stuff that matters" is a little to general these days? I propose "news about the SCO-IBM fight, stuff about the SCO-IBM fight." Maybe even the name Slashdot is in need of a revision? Poll-fodder, definitely.
PS. Yeah yeah, IBM is not even mentioned in the write up, but who cares? This is Slashdot, nobody reads further than the title anyway. What, they're not mentioned there either? Aw, I was exaggerating anyway: people don't read the title either.
Congratulations on your very pathetically worded flamebait. I've heard better from my 1-year-old nephew.
Even your 1-year-old nephew is embarrassed by your ignorance? This is worse than I thought.
Now on to the actual topic of DNA (which I really didn't feel like going to google for, since I happen to have a lot of better things to do with my time than read articles all day, interesting though they may be).
Like posting long uneducated comments to Slashdot about topics you're too lazy to read about?
But, just to enlighten myself, I went and read a couple articles. Now I can say with more certainty: "DNA in and of itself can't do calculations (well, that I know of... show me how and I'll believe you)." You see, as I said it and as I interpret the word "calculations," it refers more to basic (or complex) mathematical processes. The problem-solving going on using DNA is
1) not done by DNA, in and of itself. It requires heavy human intervention. Saying that the DNA is doing the calculations would be like saying that my paper and pencil do calculations. They can express problems and their solutions, but only with heavy intervention from me.
2) problem-solving, but not calculations. As was mentioned, the types of problems they are using DNA to solve are very difficult to express in mathematical terms (though not impossible). The way the problem is being solved using DNA is not what I would consider mathematical.
Since DNA is theoretically capable of emulating a turing machine, it can compute whatever you could possibly come up with. Or in other words, you're just as full of shit as before. google: "turing machine" "dna computing". Try the third link.
DNA in and of itself can't do calculations (well, that I know of... show me how and I'll believe you).
Do a google already! DNA computing is not even particularly new, and you could damn well do your own research. Your diatribe is an embarrassment to the parent post, which was about a a field you apparently don't even know exists.
Re:what did she have to say besides looking good?
on
Aimee Deep Interview
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· Score: 2, Informative
How can she be naked and have hot grits down her pants?
Maybe that was why she removed them in the first place?
Re:what did she have to say besides looking good?
on
Aimee Deep Interview
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· Score: 3, Interesting
God bless this site, but for Bob's sake it's nothing but a bunch of 18 year old (physically or otherwise) boys spouting off on the legal issues of IP and occasionally even more weighty topics.
If there's one place that M. Nobody Inparticular can feel free to spout off like an authority on any topic, it's got to be slashdot.
So - not to get too serious - but is the problem that she's a girl?
No, the problem is that the pompous rants of the average 18 year old Slashdotter doesn't make the headlines - at best they get a +2, informative. Why should it be any different just because somebody's got a set of boobs?
I get enough of the obsession with sex at practically every other magazine, news site, TV channel etc. ad nauseam nowadays. Even the computer games magazines try to sell a few more issues with a hot chick on the cover, for Christ's sake. I want to believe Slashdot is an exception. I come here to read about tech, and to find this nonsensical celebrity worship over here as well just pisses me off.
Re:what did she have to say besides looking good?
on
Aimee Deep Interview
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I agree - this is ridiculous. There's a saying: "You used to be famous because you were somebody. Now you're somebody because you're famous."
Sure, we'd all like to see her naked and petrified with hot grits down her pants, and, like another poster said, lord have mercy on all the jokes that come with that name, but who on Slashdot could possibly care what an 18 year old poster girl has to say about the legal issues of IP?
> They complain about its "bloat", because they see it taking 10MB of their 256-MB machine's precious RAM, most of which is idle.
This is certainly not a worst case scenario, and you know it. That you adress the problem in this way furthermore attests that you don't know how X works. The answer isn't "blah! You don't need that RAM anyway" but "it doesn't use more RAM!" The reason it appears as if that's the case is that much of the memory it consumes is actually used by applications running on it, since X stores their pixmaps. Taken together X doesn't use more memory than other systems.
> They complain about it being "slow", which tells me that they have nothing better to do than play video games.
So, your counter argument here is that if people think X doesn't suit their needs, they have the wrong needs? I.e. there's nothing wrong with X, only with the people who use it. This is, as I'm sure you understand without me having to point it out to you, an inappropriate way of looking at things. By definition, X is bad if it doesn't suit the needs of its users. If the users want to play games, and X can't handle that, X needs to be rewritten or avoided rather than users must be trained to stop enjoying games.
Besides, many other apps have the same problems with X as games have. Still, the proper way to address this question is to say "X isn't really that slow. XFree86, on the other hand, is, and even that is getting better by every release." Again, you have no idea what you're talking about.
> X is many times better than anything else in the marketplace
Better at what? You don't say. Yet you have just, yourself, provided a lot of reasons for the contrary position.
> X is many years ahead of anything that Microsoft offers
You wouldn't know.
> it may be old, but so what? The Internet is old. Is that a reason to ditch the internet?
Ridiculous comparision. The Internet is not a piece of software. Besides, nobody wants to ditch X merely because it's old - they want to ditch it because they think it sucks. The talk about it being old is merely an excuse for it's suckiness.
> look beyond what 's good enough for the PC in your bedroom right now.
Why should I do that? That's precisely what I, and everybody else for that matter, care about.
> Find out what X is really about.
What is it about, why don't you tell me? According to you, it's not about suiting it's users' needs, and it's not about being good for their computers. Curiously, however, this is what people refer to when they say "X is bad." What you're saying is only that "yes, it's bad in the way everybody thinks it is, but that's not the way that matters. It's good in a lot of other ways, that people don't care about. And this is a very good reason for keeping it even for the people and purposes it doesn't fit." I understand that I'm repeating myself here, but all your "arguments" seem to be answerable in the same way. It's also amusing that, all your ranting notwithstanding, you haven't provided a single example of something X does good, but a lot of examples of things it does poorly.
> It's still leading-edge and is one of the advantages Linux has over its competitors.
Everyone tech-savvy person I know who still use Windows do it because they need it to play games, something not easily done with X even for the few games that exist and are optimized for it. How exactly is this an advantage for Linux over its competitors?
> Does it need improvement? Of course, like pretty much everything that's used. But it's the best base we've got for building on.
You're missing the entire point. The arguments for ditching X is that its architecture simply isn't a very good one for the purposes it's now being used for. If anything at all is wrong with X, it is precisely it's base.
Still, I don't think we should ditch it. Yet, knowing nothing about it and just reading your post I would arrive at the opposite conclusion. You're just a zealot, obviously embracing Linux and X more to fit in with the Slashdot crowd than because you understand their real advantages. It's embarrassing and you are doing the community a disservice.
Am I the only one creeped out by the fact the author of vim is even remotely related to introducing people to computers and computing?
You vim zealots could try to imagine how you'd feel if RMS strolled around Uganda forcing people to talk about GNU/Clean Water and introucing them to C-x before showing the power switch.
Maybe these guys deserve attention, but not nearly as much as Engineers Without Borders. It may be considered trolling on Slashdot, but to most people it is obvious that there are more urgent problems for many of these countries/cities/villages than lack of Internet access.
Good for you. The first game I can recall dreaming of was Tetris, and I wasn't so lucky. Imagine being crushed by scores of gargantaun polyominoes to the sound of endlessly repetitive Russian folk music. I quote from a book about as uplifting as that experience: "The horror! The horror!"
I think many games have contributed to making me who I am, simply because most events that occur frequently during childhood (and let's say it's pretty fair to consider playing computer games to be one of them, at least in my case), even trivial ones, contribute greatly to one's personality.
I played lots of Sierra games during my first five years in computer land (the King's Quest and Space Quest series, mostly), and I believe they may have helped me develop some analytic skills (or perhaps the opposite - eat mushroom --> shrink? Look at amulet --> teleport home? The logic of Sierra is not always the logic of the real world).
I remember crying at the end of Another world (I was a sensitive child, what can I say?) and laughing my ass off when seeing the Michael Jackson Baby Drop Game for the first time. So there have been a game or two that elicited an emotional response, yes.
But as for finding a single game that somehow changed my outlook on life? Nope. Sorry. Next question.
The Segway was, according to tech gurus and investors worth billions of dollars, going to be one of the greatest inventions ever, on pair with the wheel and the fire. Eventually we would design cities to fit the needs of the Segway, and not the other way round, we were told.
This was two years ago. Now that it's finally here it can't even claim the Best of Show prize at the Embedded Systems Conference, an honor that instead goes to some unheard of gizmo called the Vocera Communications badge, which appears to be nothing more than a wearable intercom telephone with built in voice recognition.
That analogy doesn't really. I think what Linus says is more akin to:
I may disagree with you say, but I will defend to the death your right to prevent others from saying what they want to say, and as if that wasn't enough already, I'll let you do it with my software.
Re:just an engineer
on
Linus on DRM
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· Score: 4, Insightful
But there is no way to stay out of politics when you're the head of a project of this size and importance. Indeed there is no way to ever stay out of politics, regardless of the reality of your everyday life. All our lives is about politics, albeit for most on a much smaller scale. Whatever decision we make is to some extent a political one. Take, for example, that homeless bum you passed on your way to the office. Either you gave him money or you didn't. Not caring about it at all, or refusing to even contemplate the issue, must have resulted in the latter choice, which is also a political move. There is no way to be "neutral" here. Not making a choice is also a choice. As is, returning to the topic, offering people a choice. This is obvious in every other area of life, why isn't it here? Nobody would say that one is being neutral on the topic of gun control if one thinks everybody should be able to choose whether they want to have a gun or not, just to take one example.
This is what Linus seems to not be able to understand. Not caring about politics when your actions and choices have political consequences is also politics - the politics of "I don't care." If he says "I'll give you the choice of compling this into your kernel" that is in no way a neutral stand on anything.
I'm not blaming Linus for this. In fact, I think his attitude is refreshing. But it is dangerous to think that just because he considers himself neutral, that is what he is. I like him, but sometimes I wish he would just keep his mouth shut instead of opening it and proving how shallow he is.
Re:in case of slashdotting....
on
Linus on DRM
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
This is getting ridiculous. I know that everybody doesn't always read the linked stories, or even the whole write ups. But could we at least try to get as far as the second sentence before commenting? And besides, what possible point could there be to karmawhoring as an AC?
Slashdot Mirror
At second thought, perhaps that was uncalled for, given that ID theft really is a serious problem. However, like several posters have already suggested, it does seem like you're overreacting. Shredding documents in particular is probably completely unnecessary. The likelyhood of someone actually going through your trash to find documents to use for ID theft is so low as to be neglectable.
.gov recommends.
The 750K figure and others mentioned in the Washington Post link probably includes people merely "taking" the identity but not "using" it. This could, for example, include script kiddies stealing databases with thousands and thousands of credit card numbers and personal info but doing nothing with it (or doing something, but only with small parts of it).
But it is true that one should keep an eye open. Here's what your favorite
Is there anything else I should be doing?
Consider getting one of these.
So did I. Loved it, even. Yet, as is often stated on Slashdot in discussions of other matters (mostly those concerning the RIAA or MPAA), noone has the right to make a profit. If people don't want these games, what can we do? Force them to want them? Remembering the Good Old Days is all too frequently a sign of a common and very dangerous disease called Nostalgia, and a known symptom of that condition is a refusal to acknowledge that what one likes about a certain thing may be more due to associations rather than its intrinsic nature. I'm sure people will root for Doom and Warcraft in much the same way in 20 years, while not bothering much for the titles we (as in me and other old-time farts) care for so deeply, or, for that matter, for the new ultra-hyper-flashy game that we can't even conceive of today.
With this I'm not saying that fighting to keep some culture alive is always vain and pointless, only that sometimes it might be a good idea to take a step back and ask why something should preserved. And then I don't mean preservation for historical purposes - believe me, history will never forget Pacman no matter how much it'll want to - but in the sense of actively trying to prevent these games from being removed from the everyday life of the everyday nerd.
I love these games, but things change, and I realize that the generation they are geared at now may not love them. I don't want to force my values on that generation. You probably didn't want your fathers' Elvis records, which is perfectly OK. But in the same way, you'll have to accept that your future son may not want to play Dig Dug. Even if it'd hurt.
Use the question mark, Luke.
Microsoft is probably the least able to produce this product. Translation software? Show us that you have this technology. (Yeah right.)
Microsoft Research actually employs some of the world's foremost experts in natural language processing. I say they're at least as likely as somebody else to come up with a viable product (though that is not to say that it is likely).
I had the idea to instantly translate char and IM three years ago, and even began planning an implementation. I never dreamed of it being patentable.
Take this! Now take that! Not so tough anymore, huh? And there's more where that came from! Here's one more for ya! C'mon, get up!
You may think I'm trying to portay the SCO-IBM dabble here, but it's actually more of a description of how I personally feel with regards to this neverending stream of similar Slashdot frontpage SCO-IBM Round SorryLostCountAlready stories.
We need an icon for this. And if we can have games.slashdot.org and mac.slashdot.org, why not an IBMandSCOfightitout.slashdot.org? And why even stop there? Maybe "news for nerds, stuff that matters" is a little to general these days? I propose "news about the SCO-IBM fight, stuff about the SCO-IBM fight." Maybe even the name Slashdot is in need of a revision? Poll-fodder, definitely.
PS. Yeah yeah, IBM is not even mentioned in the write up, but who cares? This is Slashdot, nobody reads further than the title anyway. What, they're not mentioned there either? Aw, I was exaggerating anyway: people don't read the title either.
Congratulations on your very pathetically worded flamebait. I've heard better from my 1-year-old nephew.
Even your 1-year-old nephew is embarrassed by your ignorance? This is worse than I thought.
Now on to the actual topic of DNA (which I really didn't feel like going to google for, since I happen to have a lot of better things to do with my time than read articles all day, interesting though they may be).
Like posting long uneducated comments to Slashdot about topics you're too lazy to read about?
But, just to enlighten myself, I went and read a couple articles. Now I can say with more certainty: "DNA in and of itself can't do calculations (well, that I know of... show me how and I'll believe you)." You see, as I said it and as I interpret the word "calculations," it refers more to basic (or complex) mathematical processes. The problem-solving going on using DNA is
1) not done by DNA, in and of itself. It requires heavy human intervention. Saying that the DNA is doing the calculations would be like saying that my paper and pencil do calculations. They can express problems and their solutions, but only with heavy intervention from me.
2) problem-solving, but not calculations. As was mentioned, the types of problems they are using DNA to solve are very difficult to express in mathematical terms (though not impossible). The way the problem is being solved using DNA is not what I would consider mathematical.
Since DNA is theoretically capable of emulating a turing machine, it can compute whatever you could possibly come up with. Or in other words, you're just as full of shit as before. google: "turing machine" "dna computing". Try the third link.
DNA in and of itself can't do calculations (well, that I know of... show me how and I'll believe you).
Do a google already! DNA computing is not even particularly new, and you could damn well do your own research. Your diatribe is an embarrassment to the parent post, which was about a a field you apparently don't even know exists.
How can she be naked and have hot grits down her pants?
Maybe that was why she removed them in the first place?
God bless this site, but for Bob's sake it's nothing but a bunch of 18 year old (physically or otherwise) boys spouting off on the legal issues of IP and occasionally even more weighty topics.
If there's one place that M. Nobody Inparticular can feel free to spout off like an authority on any topic, it's got to be slashdot.
So - not to get too serious - but is the problem that she's a girl?
No, the problem is that the pompous rants of the average 18 year old Slashdotter doesn't make the headlines - at best they get a +2, informative. Why should it be any different just because somebody's got a set of boobs?
I get enough of the obsession with sex at practically every other magazine, news site, TV channel etc. ad nauseam nowadays. Even the computer games magazines try to sell a few more issues with a hot chick on the cover, for Christ's sake. I want to believe Slashdot is an exception. I come here to read about tech, and to find this nonsensical celebrity worship over here as well just pisses me off.
I agree - this is ridiculous. There's a saying: "You used to be famous because you were somebody. Now you're somebody because you're famous."
Sure, we'd all like to see her naked and petrified with hot grits down her pants, and, like another poster said, lord have mercy on all the jokes that come with that name, but who on Slashdot could possibly care what an 18 year old poster girl has to say about the legal issues of IP?
Spare me.
Well, you can decompile every binary programm at least to assembler code
Because of the equivalence of this problem to the halting problem, this is not strictly true.
> They complain about its "bloat", because they see it taking 10MB of their 256-MB machine's precious RAM, most of which is idle.
This is certainly not a worst case scenario, and you know it. That you adress the problem in this way furthermore attests that you don't know how X works. The answer isn't "blah! You don't need that RAM anyway" but "it doesn't use more RAM!" The reason it appears as if that's the case is that much of the memory it consumes is actually used by applications running on it, since X stores their pixmaps. Taken together X doesn't use more memory than other systems.
> They complain about it being "slow", which tells me that they have nothing better to do than play video games.
So, your counter argument here is that if people think X doesn't suit their needs, they have the wrong needs? I.e. there's nothing wrong with X, only with the people who use it. This is, as I'm sure you understand without me having to point it out to you, an inappropriate way of looking at things. By definition, X is bad if it doesn't suit the needs of its users. If the users want to play games, and X can't handle that, X needs to be rewritten or avoided rather than users must be trained to stop enjoying games.
Besides, many other apps have the same problems with X as games have. Still, the proper way to address this question is to say "X isn't really that slow. XFree86, on the other hand, is, and even that is getting better by every release." Again, you have no idea what you're talking about.
> X is many times better than anything else in the marketplace
Better at what? You don't say. Yet you have just, yourself, provided a lot of reasons for the contrary position.
> X is many years ahead of anything that Microsoft offers
You wouldn't know.
> it may be old, but so what? The Internet is old. Is that a reason to ditch the internet?
Ridiculous comparision. The Internet is not a piece of software. Besides, nobody wants to ditch X merely because it's old - they want to ditch it because they think it sucks. The talk about it being old is merely an excuse for it's suckiness.
> look beyond what 's good enough for the PC in your bedroom right now.
Why should I do that? That's precisely what I, and everybody else for that matter, care about.
> Find out what X is really about.
What is it about, why don't you tell me? According to you, it's not about suiting it's users' needs, and it's not about being good for their computers. Curiously, however, this is what people refer to when they say "X is bad." What you're saying is only that "yes, it's bad in the way everybody thinks it is, but that's not the way that matters. It's good in a lot of other ways, that people don't care about. And this is a very good reason for keeping it even for the people and purposes it doesn't fit." I understand that I'm repeating myself here, but all your "arguments" seem to be answerable in the same way. It's also amusing that, all your ranting notwithstanding, you haven't provided a single example of something X does good, but a lot of examples of things it does poorly.
> It's still leading-edge and is one of the advantages Linux has over its competitors.
Everyone tech-savvy person I know who still use Windows do it because they need it to play games, something not easily done with X even for the few games that exist and are optimized for it. How exactly is this an advantage for Linux over its competitors?
> Does it need improvement? Of course, like pretty much everything that's used. But it's the best base we've got for building on.
You're missing the entire point. The arguments for ditching X is that its architecture simply isn't a very good one for the purposes it's now being used for. If anything at all is wrong with X, it is precisely it's base.
Still, I don't think we should ditch it. Yet, knowing nothing about it and just reading your post I would arrive at the opposite conclusion. You're just a zealot, obviously embracing Linux and X more to fit in with the Slashdot crowd than because you understand their real advantages. It's embarrassing and you are doing the community a disservice.
Am I the only one creeped out by the fact the author of vim is even remotely related to introducing people to computers and computing?
You vim zealots could try to imagine how you'd feel if RMS strolled around Uganda forcing people to talk about GNU/Clean Water and introucing them to C-x before showing the power switch.
Maybe these guys deserve attention, but not nearly as much as Engineers Without Borders. It may be considered trolling on Slashdot, but to most people it is obvious that there are more urgent problems for many of these countries/cities/villages than lack of Internet access.
And your by your rudeness. The joke is not obvious to everyone, mind you.
The nice part was - I never died...
Good for you. The first game I can recall dreaming of was Tetris, and I wasn't so lucky. Imagine being crushed by scores of gargantaun polyominoes to the sound of endlessly repetitive Russian folk music. I quote from a book about as uplifting as that experience: "The horror! The horror!"
to the rave party crowd.
I think many games have contributed to making me who I am, simply because most events that occur frequently during childhood (and let's say it's pretty fair to consider playing computer games to be one of them, at least in my case), even trivial ones, contribute greatly to one's personality.
I played lots of Sierra games during my first five years in computer land (the King's Quest and Space Quest series, mostly), and I believe they may have helped me develop some analytic skills (or perhaps the opposite - eat mushroom --> shrink? Look at amulet --> teleport home? The logic of Sierra is not always the logic of the real world).
I remember crying at the end of Another world (I was a sensitive child, what can I say?) and laughing my ass off when seeing the Michael Jackson Baby Drop Game for the first time. So there have been a game or two that elicited an emotional response, yes.
But as for finding a single game that somehow changed my outlook on life? Nope. Sorry. Next question.
See this comment and get over yourself.
The Segway was, according to tech gurus and investors worth billions of dollars, going to be one of the greatest inventions ever, on pair with the wheel and the fire. Eventually we would design cities to fit the needs of the Segway, and not the other way round, we were told.
This was two years ago. Now that it's finally here it can't even claim the Best of Show prize at the Embedded Systems Conference, an honor that instead goes to some unheard of gizmo called the Vocera Communications badge, which appears to be nothing more than a wearable intercom telephone with built in voice recognition.
Makes you wonder...
But there is no way to stay out of politics when you're the head of a project of this size and importance. Indeed there is no way to ever stay out of politics, regardless of the reality of your everyday life. All our lives is about politics, albeit for most on a much smaller scale. Whatever decision we make is to some extent a political one. Take, for example, that homeless bum you passed on your way to the office. Either you gave him money or you didn't. Not caring about it at all, or refusing to even contemplate the issue, must have resulted in the latter choice, which is also a political move. There is no way to be "neutral" here. Not making a choice is also a choice. As is, returning to the topic, offering people a choice. This is obvious in every other area of life, why isn't it here? Nobody would say that one is being neutral on the topic of gun control if one thinks everybody should be able to choose whether they want to have a gun or not, just to take one example.
This is what Linus seems to not be able to understand. Not caring about politics when your actions and choices have political consequences is also politics - the politics of "I don't care." If he says "I'll give you the choice of compling this into your kernel" that is in no way a neutral stand on anything.
I'm not blaming Linus for this. In fact, I think his attitude is refreshing. But it is dangerous to think that just because he considers himself neutral, that is what he is. I like him, but sometimes I wish he would just keep his mouth shut instead of opening it and proving how shallow he is.
This is getting ridiculous. I know that everybody doesn't always read the linked stories, or even the whole write ups. But could we at least try to get as far as the second sentence before commenting? And besides, what possible point could there be to karmawhoring as an AC?
I'm an "Oppenheimer", and I refuse to play politics with Linux
Is that "Oppenheimer" as in the head of the most politically motivated science program of all time?