Indeed, and what choice do you have when you're forced to use proprietary drivers because the companies won't share code.
Not everyone either a) is a programmer that knows what to do with the code or b) has the money to hire a programmer who knows what to do with the code. Not being able to use closed source software is a big fat restriction on the "freedom" for those kind of users. Furthermore, being a purchaser of software gives the non-coder some pull that they wouldn't have with an open source product. The user can say "I need feature X, and if you don't provide it, I'm going to your compeditor." Contrast that with trying the same thing with say, the Apache team.
I guess you haven't considered that most of the military won't fight against the citizens.
I guess you haven't realized that 1) a full blown civil war is just a liiittle unlikley, and 2) plenty of shit goes on right now that the NRA doesn't care about. For example, take the case of the young black man who's house was raided by cops who had the wrong address. One of the heavily armored officers burst into the man's bedroom, where his kid was also sleeping. The man would make Dirty Harry proud: he protected his child by grabbing his gun and shooting the intruder. The police should have been charged with breaking and entering, but since the man was black, and the officer who was shot (and later died) was white and the son of the sheriff, he's on death row.
Now, where the fuck was the NRA. This case was a poser child for justified use of force against law enforcement. They should have gotten the guy the best laywers available and demaned congressional hearings, but that didn't happen.
Ok, so for the moment let's assume old Ben was right. Now, what about people who give up nonessential liberty to obtain a reasonable amount of nontemporary safety?
Okay, want to find some examples of reasonable tradeoffs, because this Administration sure hasn't presented any. They can already spy on susptected terrorists as much as they want under FISA, but they don't even want to bother with getting retroactive warrants 72 hours after the fact. They'll spend hundreds of billions on a bogus war, and yet they'll ban liquids from carry on luggage rather than buy scanners to detect liquid explosives. They say the situation we're in is so bad that they have to conduct searches without warrants, and yet they refuse to stengthen security at ports and chemical plants.
And if something get's past them, they'll just blow it off as being a "local responsibility" a la Katrina, even though they've made security their national "platform" since 2001. The problem with Republicans today are they are complete sissy dicks, like Ross on friends. They are sissies at all the wrong times, and dicks at all the wrong times.
A more recent example - when that guy went on a shooting spree in the Jewish center in Seattle. The Jerusalem Post, BBC, and Fox News all quoted him as saying "I am an American Muslim and I am angry at Israel" before shooting. The CNN article didn't use the word "Muslim" once.
Completely fucking irrelevant. The only quote on CNN from him is "I'm going to surrender and I'm laying down my gun" to the police. It does, however, quote several city officials calling this a hate crime.
I suppose you were also one of those people complaining last fall about how Christians in this country were being oppressed when they walked into Target and found a "Happy Holidays" sign instead of "Merry Christmas".
I have a couple friends (and FOFs) who were there, and got sick from exposure from it still, even if it was old stuff.
"Usless as weapons" does not mean "harmless". Lots of things in this world are toxic and have to be properly disposed of. You can get sick from exposure to lead paint and asbestos, but that doesn't make them WMD's. I repeat: it's not a weapon of mass destruction if it's incapable of causing mass destruction.
Finally, if these really were WMD's, do you really think the Bush Administration wouldn't have been screaming about it from every rooftop? Of course they would have.
A certain amount of ignorance is forgivable, as Senator Fuckwit shot his mouth off about 500 chemical weapons found in Iraq. Of course, he was totally, completely wrong for reason's previously mentioned: chemical and biological weapons degrade over time. A drop of that sarin gas on your skin might have killed you in 1984, but if you'd have to liberally injest the stuff before getting a lethal dose twenty years later, it can no longer be considered a WMD. And anyone who continues to insist to the contrary, after knowing the facts, is a bald-faced liar.
The article is about the US, Japan and a whole swack of European countries (presuming that I can include Turkey as European). Okay, but what about the rest of the world?
"The rest of the world" is mostly third world countries, theocracies or dictatorships. Are you really going to give yourself a big pat on the back if you find out we're doing better than Congo or Iran?
Yes, they found some old stuff, but it had decayed to the point of being usless of a weapon. It's not a weapon of mass destruction if it can't cause mass destruction.
you'd have a REALLY hard time proving that. Businesses that buy 10's of thousands of machines at a time scrutinize very closely, yet none of those buy macs. I'd say all the major PC makers are more heavily scrutinized than Apple, just not by the press.
Oh, hardly. A major reason people buy PC's is because they are cheap, and if you buy something cheap, you aren't as surprised (or as angry) when something fails. I used to support and installation for my university, and every year they would buy a new batch of Dells. And every year, there would be a serious problem with one of the components - bad video cards, bad hard drives, bad DVD drives, and so on. My aunt is on her third Presario, as the first two would overhead so fast the machine would shut itself off before XP would finish booting - never saw that one on the front page of Slashdot. This is what you get when you buy from OEM's that get their parts from lowest-bidder-of-the-week suppliers. Wheras if you're paying more money for a "premium" product, you're going to be considerably more annoyed when something goes wrong. Like the Slashdot story on bulging Macbook battries, whereas it takes a PC battery exploding and starting on fire to even get noticed.
But anecdotes aside, Apple routinely rates well to excellent on Consumer Report's quality surveys. Nobody wrings their hands over the Q.C. control about the PC OEM's on the bottom of the list. Bam, proven.
Why can't they put a USB port in the cars instead, or even AUX inputs or stereo minijacks?
I've always hated how they are too cheap to spend a buck for a miniplug connector, but the advantage to integration is you can use the controls on the steering wheel, if you have them, to control the iPod.
If you're planning on buying a loaded tower, consider getting a devloper membership just to get the hardware discount, even if you can get the usual student discount. IIRC, the Student membership is $99 and the Select is $500 (I'd check but that page is down). For a tower with max out memory, hard drive space, 3 ghz Xeons, dual 30" displays, a Quadro gfx card, 16 gigs of memory, a couple extras and OS X Server:
However, my major beef with Apple is that it is rising to a monopoly and dictating who can play what and where.
How so?
I wouldn't care so much about the DRM if I actually had access to the music in my OS and if Apple licensed the format to other hardware suppliers (which of course, isn't really a good decision when you're in Apple's position, but still...).
Why not buy the cd's and rip them yourself?
Am I making any sense?
Not really. You can buy the same music found on the iTMS in other online stores or on a physical cd. You can buy other mp3 players that are similar in size to the iPod lineup, for similar or lesser prices. If you don't like Apple, there is nothing stopping you from having the same portable music experience with some other player while getting your music from some other source.
Bad analogy. Even with Apple's enormous marketshare, there is nothing stopping you from having the same experience with the same music for a similar price on a similarly sized player for an equal or lesser price.
Compare that to Windows. Are you a gamer? You need Windows. Planning on running a business? Need Office, and probably Windows. And so on.
Until Apple starts singing labels to exlusive contracts and you can't buy phiscal cd's and rip them yourself, this argument doesn't hold any water.
You flatly state that "The video game censorship law is just a symptom of a larger problem; the resurgence of social conservatism in the U.S." I'm sorry to say that whether you like it or not, you do have in the neighborhood of 300 million neighbors who all get a say in this representative republic.
So what? It's still social conservatives (or politicians pandering to social conservatives) passing these laws. This doesn't refute his point at all.
You also make the mistake of connecting your dissatisfaction of "the current administration" to the resurgence of social conservatism.
No, he's not. He's hoping the backlash against Bush will also take the "Moral Majority" down a peg or two.
Growing social conservatism isn't something that GW Bush introduced.
He didn't say it did.
This has been happening since Regan was voted in.
Before that, actually. Much of the current GOP comes from the stances of Goldwater and the rhetoric of Nixon.
Who knows how his behavior as President may have affected the social feelings of the population at large.
Actually we do know: Clinton had very high approval ratings thoughout the impeachment debacle and until the end of his presidency.
I'm very much a conservative.
And there are generally two kinds of conservatives: fiscal conservatives and social conservatives, and he was talking about the latter.
I should point out that Minnesota (I'm a resident of this state) has been a solid blue state (Democrat - DFL if you're from here) for as long as I can remember.
Bull. You have a Republican governor, a Republican Senator, half your Congressional delegation is Republican and half your state legislature is controlled by Republicans. That's pretty damn far from being "solid blue".
Just take a look at the soaring rates of obesity in this country (particularly among children and teens, and it's obvious that they can't be trusted.
Right, because teens buy all the groceries for the rest of their meals at home. Not. And they aren't going to get fat by eating a bag of potato chips and drinking a can of coke for their school lunch, either.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with being pro-active in your child's diet. This is a great idea.
I don't see it so much as being pro-active, but rather micromanaging. Get your kid used to eating good food at home in reasonable portions, and he wont eat as much junk food outside of it. Telling your high school age kid can and cannot have for lunch is just asking for rebellion. Parents need to pick their battles.
Besides we're talking about lunches at public schools, which should be reasonably healthy to begin with. If your school is handing out Weightgain 5000 at lunch, get it changed, like how many high schools have replaced Coke, Mt Dew and Pepsi with the diet versions or fruit juices.
During the depression, fiscal conservatives who opposed government support of the poor and elderly were characterized as inhumane. Today we're still dealing with the consequences of not taking their thoughts into consideration.
The hell we are. The U.S. is in a financial mess because of Reagan's and Bush II's massive tax cuts and deficit spending, not because of Social Security or Medicare.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, and what choice do you have when you're forced to use proprietary drivers because the companies won't share code.
Not everyone either a) is a programmer that knows what to do with the code or b) has the money to hire a programmer who knows what to do with the code. Not being able to use closed source software is a big fat restriction on the "freedom" for those kind of users. Furthermore, being a purchaser of software gives the non-coder some pull that they wouldn't have with an open source product. The user can say "I need feature X, and if you don't provide it, I'm going to your compeditor." Contrast that with trying the same thing with say, the Apache team.
I guess you haven't considered that most of the military won't fight against the citizens.
I guess you haven't realized that 1) a full blown civil war is just a liiittle unlikley, and 2) plenty of shit goes on right now that the NRA doesn't care about. For example, take the case of the young black man who's house was raided by cops who had the wrong address. One of the heavily armored officers burst into the man's bedroom, where his kid was also sleeping. The man would make Dirty Harry proud: he protected his child by grabbing his gun and shooting the intruder. The police should have been charged with breaking and entering, but since the man was black, and the officer who was shot (and later died) was white and the son of the sheriff, he's on death row.
Now, where the fuck was the NRA. This case was a poser child for justified use of force against law enforcement. They should have gotten the guy the best laywers available and demaned congressional hearings, but that didn't happen.
Ok, so for the moment let's assume old Ben was right. Now, what about people who give up nonessential liberty to obtain a reasonable amount of nontemporary safety?
Okay, want to find some examples of reasonable tradeoffs, because this Administration sure hasn't presented any. They can already spy on susptected terrorists as much as they want under FISA, but they don't even want to bother with getting retroactive warrants 72 hours after the fact. They'll spend hundreds of billions on a bogus war, and yet they'll ban liquids from carry on luggage rather than buy scanners to detect liquid explosives. They say the situation we're in is so bad that they have to conduct searches without warrants, and yet they refuse to stengthen security at ports and chemical plants.
And if something get's past them, they'll just blow it off as being a "local responsibility" a la Katrina, even though they've made security their national "platform" since 2001. The problem with Republicans today are they are complete sissy dicks, like Ross on friends. They are sissies at all the wrong times, and dicks at all the wrong times.
yeah, that extra 1.5" is an unbearable distance to reach..
Unless you have very long fingers, hitting the ESC key requires moving your whole left hand, as opposed to moving only your pinky 1/8 of an inch.
Otherwise lead paint, arsenic, asbestos, radon, old batteries and cow manure have to be considered WMD's, too.
A more recent example - when that guy went on a shooting spree in the Jewish center in Seattle. The Jerusalem Post, BBC, and Fox News all quoted him as saying "I am an American Muslim and I am angry at Israel" before shooting. The CNN article didn't use the word "Muslim" once.
Completely fucking irrelevant. The only quote on CNN from him is "I'm going to surrender and I'm laying down my gun" to the police. It does, however, quote several city officials calling this a hate crime.
I suppose you were also one of those people complaining last fall about how Christians in this country were being oppressed when they walked into Target and found a "Happy Holidays" sign instead of "Merry Christmas".
Actually not true
Yes, it is.
I have a couple friends (and FOFs) who were there, and got sick from exposure from it still, even if it was old stuff.
"Usless as weapons" does not mean "harmless". Lots of things in this world are toxic and have to be properly disposed of. You can get sick from exposure to lead paint and asbestos, but that doesn't make them WMD's. I repeat: it's not a weapon of mass destruction if it's incapable of causing mass destruction.
Finally, if these really were WMD's, do you really think the Bush Administration wouldn't have been screaming about it from every rooftop? Of course they would have.
A certain amount of ignorance is forgivable, as Senator Fuckwit shot his mouth off about 500 chemical weapons found in Iraq. Of course, he was totally, completely wrong for reason's previously mentioned: chemical and biological weapons degrade over time. A drop of that sarin gas on your skin might have killed you in 1984, but if you'd have to liberally injest the stuff before getting a lethal dose twenty years later, it can no longer be considered a WMD. And anyone who continues to insist to the contrary, after knowing the facts, is a bald-faced liar.
The article is about the US, Japan and a whole swack of European countries (presuming that I can include Turkey as European). Okay, but what about the rest of the world?
"The rest of the world" is mostly third world countries, theocracies or dictatorships. Are you really going to give yourself a big pat on the back if you find out we're doing better than Congo or Iran?
Yes, they found some old stuff, but it had decayed to the point of being usless of a weapon. It's not a weapon of mass destruction if it can't cause mass destruction.
you'd have a REALLY hard time proving that. Businesses that buy 10's of thousands of machines at a time scrutinize very closely, yet none of those buy macs. I'd say all the major PC makers are more heavily scrutinized than Apple, just not by the press.
Oh, hardly. A major reason people buy PC's is because they are cheap, and if you buy something cheap, you aren't as surprised (or as angry) when something fails. I used to support and installation for my university, and every year they would buy a new batch of Dells. And every year, there would be a serious problem with one of the components - bad video cards, bad hard drives, bad DVD drives, and so on. My aunt is on her third Presario, as the first two would overhead so fast the machine would shut itself off before XP would finish booting - never saw that one on the front page of Slashdot. This is what you get when you buy from OEM's that get their parts from lowest-bidder-of-the-week suppliers. Wheras if you're paying more money for a "premium" product, you're going to be considerably more annoyed when something goes wrong. Like the Slashdot story on bulging Macbook battries, whereas it takes a PC battery exploding and starting on fire to even get noticed.
But anecdotes aside, Apple routinely rates well to excellent on Consumer Report's quality surveys. Nobody wrings their hands over the Q.C. control about the PC OEM's on the bottom of the list. Bam, proven.
I'd take one of those and two Dumi Knightlys.
Why can't they put a USB port in the cars instead, or even AUX inputs or stereo minijacks?
I've always hated how they are too cheap to spend a buck for a miniplug connector, but the advantage to integration is you can use the controls on the steering wheel, if you have them, to control the iPod.
You can build a way nicer machine for way less and almost anything is better than X Server. This is kinda like crack this MAC fannishness I guess.
OEM machines are more expensive than do-it-yourself computers? What's your next big revelation, that the world is round?
If you're planning on buying a loaded tower, consider getting a devloper membership just to get the hardware discount, even if you can get the usual student discount. IIRC, the Student membership is $99 and the Select is $500 (I'd check but that page is down). For a tower with max out memory, hard drive space, 3 ghz Xeons, dual 30" displays, a Quadro gfx card, 16 gigs of memory, a couple extras and OS X Server:
Regular price: $18,332
Student price: $16,003
Devloper price: $15,144
So by getting a Select membership for $500, you save over $2,600 over the regular price and $1,800 over the student price.
Borrowing something is directly equivalent to buying something at zero cost, then selling it back at zero cost.
Not when both parties have permanent copies, it isn't.
However, my major beef with Apple is that it is rising to a monopoly and dictating who can play what and where.
How so?
I wouldn't care so much about the DRM if I actually had access to the music in my OS and if Apple licensed the format to other hardware suppliers (which of course, isn't really a good decision when you're in Apple's position, but still...).
Why not buy the cd's and rip them yourself?
Am I making any sense?
Not really. You can buy the same music found on the iTMS in other online stores or on a physical cd. You can buy other mp3 players that are similar in size to the iPod lineup, for similar or lesser prices. If you don't like Apple, there is nothing stopping you from having the same portable music experience with some other player while getting your music from some other source.
Bad analogy. Even with Apple's enormous marketshare, there is nothing stopping you from having the same experience with the same music for a similar price on a similarly sized player for an equal or lesser price.
Compare that to Windows. Are you a gamer? You need Windows. Planning on running a business? Need Office, and probably Windows. And so on.
Until Apple starts singing labels to exlusive contracts and you can't buy phiscal cd's and rip them yourself, this argument doesn't hold any water.
Guess we'll have to read you mind more clearly next time, because it wasn't mentioned in your original post.
Two Chicks at the same time? You'd need a million dollars to hook that up. Chicks dig a dude with money.
Bastard, you beat me to it. *fumes*
You missed one.
6. Even "good" cops will look the other way if a "bad" cop is committing perjury or breaking the law.
You flatly state that "The video game censorship law is just a symptom of a larger problem; the resurgence of social conservatism in the U.S." I'm sorry to say that whether you like it or not, you do have in the neighborhood of 300 million neighbors who all get a say in this representative republic.
So what? It's still social conservatives (or politicians pandering to social conservatives) passing these laws. This doesn't refute his point at all.
You also make the mistake of connecting your dissatisfaction of "the current administration" to the resurgence of social conservatism.
No, he's not. He's hoping the backlash against Bush will also take the "Moral Majority" down a peg or two.
Growing social conservatism isn't something that GW Bush introduced.
He didn't say it did.
This has been happening since Regan was voted in.
Before that, actually. Much of the current GOP comes from the stances of Goldwater and the rhetoric of Nixon.
Who knows how his behavior as President may have affected the social feelings of the population at large.
Actually we do know: Clinton had very high approval ratings thoughout the impeachment debacle and until the end of his presidency.
I'm very much a conservative.
And there are generally two kinds of conservatives: fiscal conservatives and social conservatives, and he was talking about the latter.
I should point out that Minnesota (I'm a resident of this state) has been a solid blue state (Democrat - DFL if you're from here) for as long as I can remember.
Bull. You have a Republican governor, a Republican Senator, half your Congressional delegation is Republican and half your state legislature is controlled by Republicans. That's pretty damn far from being "solid blue".
Just take a look at the soaring rates of obesity in this country (particularly among children and teens, and it's obvious that they can't be trusted.
Right, because teens buy all the groceries for the rest of their meals at home. Not. And they aren't going to get fat by eating a bag of potato chips and drinking a can of coke for their school lunch, either.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with being pro-active in your child's diet. This is a great idea.
I don't see it so much as being pro-active, but rather micromanaging. Get your kid used to eating good food at home in reasonable portions, and he wont eat as much junk food outside of it. Telling your high school age kid can and cannot have for lunch is just asking for rebellion. Parents need to pick their battles.
Besides we're talking about lunches at public schools, which should be reasonably healthy to begin with. If your school is handing out Weightgain 5000 at lunch, get it changed, like how many high schools have replaced Coke, Mt Dew and Pepsi with the diet versions or fruit juices.
I think the stereotype is that fathers are irresponsible when present, assuming they are around at all and not just running off with a mistress.
Which is interesting considering that women cheat as often as men, initiate 80% of divorces and commit the majority of child abuse.
During the depression, fiscal conservatives who opposed government support of the poor and elderly were characterized as inhumane. Today we're still dealing with the consequences of not taking their thoughts into consideration.
The hell we are. The U.S. is in a financial mess because of Reagan's and Bush II's massive tax cuts and deficit spending, not because of Social Security or Medicare.