and then this earlier post about the british leaving behind colonies in such a good shape (because presumabley they weren't as corrupt as the french). don't make me laugh.
to colonise was a bad idea in the first place. i'm dutch. i'm not proud of what my great great grandparents did when colonising indonesia et al. you shouldn't be proud of you conquests either. leaving them in a state which is acceptable in *your* opinion is no excuse from taking thier land and resources in the first place. this exploitation is exactly the thing that made the western world rich, and thereby relatively stable...
i wouldn't say a number plate is the same thing (in terms of privacy) as a device, likely cryptographically 'secured', coupled to the electronics system of your car, allowing any officer to stop you when they please.
but i see your point. so far, number plates are registered to the owner of a car, so if someone else is driving your car, and break the law, you get the bill:\
i wouldn't be surprised at all if one day it'd be required to stick in your ID-key to be able to start the engine and drive... just a bit of an extension to the current plan, and so much more convenient for the law enforcement officer...
of course circumvention of this method would be as illegal as driving without number plates.
i don't know of people scraping their plates, i do know of tiny lasers built into the back of the car, near the plate, so that they cannot take a picture of your plate when you drive too fast. of course, also these are illegal.
okay fine, let's say this is going to happen. in order to selectively stop a car in heavy traffic, each car should have a unique identifier attached to it, else all traffic near the police car (including the police car itself, hehe) would be stopped, right?
we had these discussions on/. before (RFID etc), and personally, i think it's a bad thing to tag our citizens and/or their belongings.
i wish i was never tempted to start this discussion!
FYI elitist attitude and failure to see someone else's point of few just because you think they don't understand the meaning of a word is just downright unproductive discussion technique.
i know i shouldn't care so much, but i try to write in such a way that people understand what i am saying. if clarifying a point means to some people that i am trying defend myself while being 'wrong', without even listening to me explaining that that wasn't the original point, well... that is their problem. i guess i'm waisting my time here talking to them.
so yeah, what else is new:)
thing is, i was right, the original post was a huge troll and at the time modded up for no reason. now i don't mind getting modded down offtopic, as long as this type of post is not in my face when i browse at treshold 2. i don't even want to be modded up for being insightful about a troll -> it is offtopic to respond to it. in fact, ithink it's good that i'm modded down for this reason exactly. what boggles me is that some people find dictionary definition worthy of modding up. maybe i take this whole/. modding thing too seriously:)
i just see a little too much of an elitist attitude in this place. why not leave?/. is like the M$ of weblogs, there is no good alternative for lazy bastards like me to read news on geeky topics (and don't start mentioning K5, gosh, talk about elitism...). and believe me, i am looking for it!
I will capitalise my sentences, to make myself look more educated. You missed my point.
You also have a problem with logic. You say the thought of its racial sound didn't cross your mind, yet that's what concerns you: are you assuming that all "average" black people don't know the difference between Nigger and Niggardly? Who's the racist here?
No, this was not the thing that originally concerned me. I just cited the word 'niggardly' from the original post because it was the most obvious inflammatory word.
Not one line in my posts denied the fact that in etymology, the word 'niggardly' is not derived from 'nigger' (although I admit that I didn't look up if there was a link between the two or not). Actually, your post hands me a stick to beat the argument with:...but the root word is probably related.... Probably. Yes you read that very careful before you copy-pasted. Nonetheless, I agree it's not likely to be related. So, were this my original point, I would admit I was wrong, and yes I would have "shut up". But it was clearly not the point. I already explained this in the post you were replying to.
In my opinion, the properties that define a troll-post have a lot to do with the perception of the reader. This was what I was talking about, and not about the possible negative connotation of the word 'niggardly'. You and other people replying to me repeatedly missed the point completely.
Furthermore, I highly object to you calling me a racist because I state that in an average group of black people the word "niggardly" would likely be misunderstood. The same holds true for an average group of caucasians.
Absolute meanings of words are only relevant in a discussion between people who know the meaning of the word. Not everyone is educated and precise in their use of language, and many people are not native English speakers (writers). Thus, the average group of people (white or black) are likely to misinterprete this word.
Again, this was not my original point at all. My orginal point was to tell the stupid troll to get a life, or at least improve the quality of his moderator-deception schemes. Saying someone is 'niggardly' is similar to calling him a 'cheap bastard', which is in my opinion quite strong language for no apparent reason. A hallmark of your average troll. Explain to me where this logic is flawed, and I will admit I am wrong and "shut up".
I will not ask you to tell me you were wrong. I will not tell you your logic is flawed, or attack you on the use of capitalisation in your posts. I would like to suggest you do the same and keep this discussion decent.
(One more Offtopic, I wonder how long it will take me to descent from Excellent to Good)
i know the word and the use for it, and i feel it is ridiculous and flame-inducing language.
any dictionary (online even) will give you synonyms for words like these. it was used to invoke a negative response, and never did i say anything else about the use of this word than it being rude.
you, and the anonymous reply-er presume i misinterpreted the word because of it's 'racial sound'. that thought didn't even cross my mind.
let me put it this way: common sense tells me that, even if it does not have an officially documented racial association, this word can be offensive to people who percieve this word as being linked to skin color.
no-one would say "niggardly" in an average group of black people, and expect to be treated with respect. and rightfuly so! being etymologically correct and being considerate are two different things.
now mod me OT again. rightfully so. i just wanted to clarify that you and the other poster were overinterpreting my post quite a bit, without me giving you any reason to do so.
Why are the large vendors of the Linux community such as IBM, Redhat, and SuSe being so niggardly?
i know i shouldn't respond to a troll, but niggardly? what is that about?
you know, in a good troll-post you don't give away obvious clues that you are a troll. instead, you are just being rude. if you had some sense of self-respect (as far as trolls have this, i think it's just childish behaviour) you would word your post such, that people would not recognise you as a troll, and mod you interesting or insightful, or funny.
now you are just sad and even unsuccesful at posting a well-thought out, intelligent troll to mess with the signal to noise ratio a bit and earn respect in the inner circle of professional troll-posters.
man, you are lower than a troll. it makes me wish for a (-5 ignorant idiot) moderation.
those are screenshots of the prereleases of fedora core 1
just like the trollpost above... i wonder how much attention the moderators are spending on verification of the links.
Re:Very Important -- Please Note.. (Time/Screensho
on
Fedora Core 2 Schedule Up
·
· Score: 2, Informative
nice way to increase karma, very professional
especially the MOD THIS UP part is hilarious. slaughter.edu... very funny.
this guy is a very impolite, crap-posting troll
check his recent posts (especially the insults written in CAPS). i don't care if this costs me (offtopic, troll, whatever) karma, please mod parent according to his behaviour.
you *do* realise that the only valid point made in the article was that you are part of a minority? i love freedom of choice and free software, like you. i like to tinker and tweek with my desktop and have options, like you. because our attitude is not ubiquitous, we should accept that we need to cater the majority, and make a linux desktop which is a (dumbed down) compromise. something xandros, lindows et al are attempting.
there are/have been niches in the windows world that attempt(ed) to make an alternative to the explorer interface. but they never became a majority, because for most people it just works.
people who are different from us are the people who make linux on the desktop succeed.
i recognise some points joel was trying to make from real life, i just disagree with his style of writing. too polarised. just like the community he is making fun of. everyone knows/. isn't exactly the most neutral unbiased piece of journalism in this world;) he attempts to have more of a journalistic flair with his site however, so it looks more stupid on him when he is biased...
The very fact that the Unix world is so full of self-righteous cultural superiority, "advocacy," and slashdot-karma-whoring sectarianism while the Windows world is more practical ("yeah, whatever, I just need to make a living here") stems from a culture that feels itself under siege, unable to break out of the server closet and hobbyist market and onto the mainstream desktop.
i think the article shows a bit of a polarised image. okay, i see the point of OS advocates being too tech-oriented, but we also have someefforts that really try to aim at end users, more or less succesfull. allright, it's not as easy as using MacOSX, but it's quite close in many aspects. and quite usable for the novice, especially in the distributions that try to make it simple (xandros, lindows, etc)
linux on the desktop? very possible. a lot more likely than the writer of this article would like us to believe IMHO
tell me about it... i am a molecular/cell biologist
i know about Bacillus antracis (though i won't bother to spellcheck the name now;) )
but a kit with the things on plasmid (i presume) is a bit over the top don't you think? it made me wonder then... anyway now, with the sequence probably available at some genomics site (or is that protected too?) it would be a few dyas work to clone and express the (gene encoding the) toxin.
ah well.
blah
and blah
anyway, as i said, no clue whether it was just some urban legend or the truth...
well, AI advances will likely not happen. it was a nice idea, but it's just not 'trendy' anymore...
one problem might be that good ideas need a certain technological context. a visionary might have some brilliant ideas, but none of them viable at a given time, thus never recognised as such.
essentialy i agree with your argument, but i worded it differently. science nowadays, more than ever, is pushed by (media?) attention towards 'trendy' subjects. very much oriented on the short-term benefits, thereby killing innovation.
maybe the very transient nature of the world today stifles innovation... bigger better faster more! we don't have time to innovate, we need to make money NOW!
well... one could also argue that the overload of information nowadays makes any idea harder to find. the notion that a good idea is hard to recognise remains. nowadays it's just surrounded by more stupid^H^H^H^H^H^H inviable ideas.
the haystack is getting bigger, where's the friggin' needle?
Slashdot Mirror
blah blah blah
the british government is so stable and great
reality check:
IRA
FALKLANDS
and then this earlier post about the british leaving behind colonies in such a good shape (because presumabley they weren't as corrupt as the french). don't make me laugh.
to colonise was a bad idea in the first place. i'm dutch. i'm not proud of what my great great grandparents did when colonising indonesia et al. you shouldn't be proud of you conquests either. leaving them in a state which is acceptable in *your* opinion is no excuse from taking thier land and resources in the first place. this exploitation is exactly the thing that made the western world rich, and thereby relatively stable...
so very fucking right you are. i'd donate 4 points of my karma just to mod this +5 Insightful
(on or two points will go anyway because of offtopic or whatever *grin*)
i wouldn't say a number plate is the same thing (in terms of privacy) as a device, likely cryptographically 'secured', coupled to the electronics system of your car, allowing any officer to stop you when they please.
:\
but i see your point. so far, number plates are registered to the owner of a car, so if someone else is driving your car, and break the law, you get the bill
i wouldn't be surprised at all if one day it'd be required to stick in your ID-key to be able to start the engine and drive... just a bit of an extension to the current plan, and so much more convenient for the law enforcement officer...
of course circumvention of this method would be as illegal as driving without number plates.
i don't know of people scraping their plates, i do know of tiny lasers built into the back of the car, near the plate, so that they cannot take a picture of your plate when you drive too fast. of course, also these are illegal.
it reminds me of the "if your computer were a car" analogy that was popular some years ago.
if it weren't such a serious issue it'd be funny...
okay fine, let's say this is going to happen. in order to selectively stop a car in heavy traffic, each car should have a unique identifier attached to it, else all traffic near the police car (including the police car itself, hehe) would be stopped, right?
/. before (RFID etc), and personally, i think it's a bad thing to tag our citizens and/or their belongings.
we had these discussions on
just a thought
18 or not, dreadlocks or not, i think he did a great job! i have a big respect for this guy.
:)
and the dreadlocks: well, look at alan cox. maybe kernel maintainers *should* look a bit different as compared to "ordinary" people
i mean, they're not exactly salesmen or lawyers or anything, right?
the kernel driver is closed source, as well as the X drivers (GL stuff)
what you compile is basically a wrapper around the kernel driver.
(thus causing the troll to disappear into a puff of logic)
:)
are you referring to bertrand russels story a metaphysicains nightmare? that'd be funny, viewing a troll as the devil himself
for chrissakes drop it
:)
/. modding thing too seriously :)
/. is like the M$ of weblogs, there is no good alternative for lazy bastards like me to read news on geeky topics (and don't start mentioning K5, gosh, talk about elitism...). and believe me, i am looking for it!
i wish i was never tempted to start this discussion!
FYI elitist attitude and failure to see someone else's point of few just because you think they don't understand the meaning of a word is just downright unproductive discussion technique.
i know i shouldn't care so much, but i try to write in such a way that people understand what i am saying. if clarifying a point means to some people that i am trying defend myself while being 'wrong', without even listening to me explaining that that wasn't the original point, well... that is their problem. i guess i'm waisting my time here talking to them.
so yeah, what else is new
thing is, i was right, the original post was a huge troll and at the time modded up for no reason. now i don't mind getting modded down offtopic, as long as this type of post is not in my face when i browse at treshold 2. i don't even want to be modded up for being insightful about a troll -> it is offtopic to respond to it. in fact, ithink it's good that i'm modded down for this reason exactly. what boggles me is that some people find dictionary definition worthy of modding up. maybe i take this whole
i just see a little too much of an elitist attitude in this place. why not leave?
funny guy :)
:) you just made me smile!
give it up, it wasn't even about the word's meaning itself... you can guess what it was about, but you'd likely be wrong... mr. trolling4dollars
greetings, well-educated man
I could go on I suppose but it's losing its appeal and presumably boring anyone who manages to read this far. Please let the thread die.
ok, fine, whatever.
Allright 'arrogance",
...but the root word is probably related.... Probably. Yes you read that very careful before you copy-pasted. Nonetheless, I agree it's not likely to be related. So, were this my original point, I would admit I was wrong, and yes I would have "shut up". But it was clearly not the point. I already explained this in the post you were replying to.
I will capitalise my sentences, to make myself look more educated. You missed my point.
You also have a problem with logic. You say the thought of its racial sound didn't cross your mind, yet that's what concerns you: are you assuming that all "average" black people don't know the difference between Nigger and Niggardly? Who's the racist here?
No, this was not the thing that originally concerned me. I just cited the word 'niggardly' from the original post because it was the most obvious inflammatory word.
Not one line in my posts denied the fact that in etymology, the word 'niggardly' is not derived from 'nigger' (although I admit that I didn't look up if there was a link between the two or not). Actually, your post hands me a stick to beat the argument with:
In my opinion, the properties that define a troll-post have a lot to do with the perception of the reader. This was what I was talking about, and not about the possible negative connotation of the word 'niggardly'. You and other people replying to me repeatedly missed the point completely.
Furthermore, I highly object to you calling me a racist because I state that in an average group of black people the word "niggardly" would likely be misunderstood. The same holds true for an average group of caucasians.
Absolute meanings of words are only relevant in a discussion between people who know the meaning of the word. Not everyone is educated and precise in their use of language, and many people are not native English speakers (writers). Thus, the average group of people (white or black) are likely to misinterprete this word.
Again, this was not my original point at all. My orginal point was to tell the stupid troll to get a life, or at least improve the quality of his moderator-deception schemes. Saying someone is 'niggardly' is similar to calling him a 'cheap bastard', which is in my opinion quite strong language for no apparent reason. A hallmark of your average troll. Explain to me where this logic is flawed, and I will admit I am wrong and "shut up".
I will not ask you to tell me you were wrong. I will not tell you your logic is flawed, or attack you on the use of capitalisation in your posts. I would like to suggest you do the same and keep this discussion decent.
(One more Offtopic, I wonder how long it will take me to descent from Excellent to Good)
yeah right.
i know the word and the use for it, and i feel it is ridiculous and flame-inducing language.
any dictionary (online even) will give you synonyms for words like these. it was used to invoke a negative response, and never did i say anything else about the use of this word than it being rude.
you, and the anonymous reply-er presume i misinterpreted the word because of it's 'racial sound'. that thought didn't even cross my mind.
let me put it this way: common sense tells me that, even if it does not have an officially documented racial association, this word can be offensive to people who percieve this word as being linked to skin color.
no-one would say "niggardly" in an average group of black people, and expect to be treated with respect. and rightfuly so! being etymologically correct and being considerate are two different things.
now mod me OT again. rightfully so. i just wanted to clarify that you and the other poster were overinterpreting my post quite a bit, without me giving you any reason to do so.
Why are the large vendors of the Linux community such as IBM, Redhat, and SuSe being so niggardly?
i know i shouldn't respond to a troll, but niggardly? what is that about?
you know, in a good troll-post you don't give away obvious clues that you are a troll. instead, you are just being rude. if you had some sense of self-respect (as far as trolls have this, i think it's just childish behaviour) you would word your post such, that people would not recognise you as a troll, and mod you interesting or insightful, or funny.
now you are just sad and even unsuccesful at posting a well-thought out, intelligent troll to mess with the signal to noise ratio a bit and earn respect in the inner circle of professional troll-posters.
man, you are lower than a troll. it makes me wish for a (-5 ignorant idiot) moderation.
sorry, i was just so annoyed by the obvious troll from amsterdam vallon (at the moment at +4), who linked the same screenshots as you....
i automatically assumed the worst about your post. my apologies.
those are screenshots of the prereleases of fedora core 1
just like the trollpost above... i wonder how much attention the moderators are spending on verification of the links.
nice way to increase karma, very professional
especially the MOD THIS UP part is hilarious. slaughter.edu... very funny.
this guy is a very impolite, crap-posting troll
check his recent posts (especially the insults written in CAPS). i don't care if this costs me (offtopic, troll, whatever) karma, please mod parent according to his behaviour.
this was because they built mozilla from scratch. without using the old code.
you are so funny, i am laughing my brains out. this is one of the most amusing trollposts i've read :)
sorry if you were serious (although that is hard to believe).
(cutie pi.... grin)
you *do* realise that the only valid point made in the article was that you are part of a minority? i love freedom of choice and free software, like you. i like to tinker and tweek with my desktop and have options, like you. because our attitude is not ubiquitous, we should accept that we need to cater the majority, and make a linux desktop which is a (dumbed down) compromise. something xandros, lindows et al are attempting.
/. isn't exactly the most neutral unbiased piece of journalism in this world ;) he attempts to have more of a journalistic flair with his site however, so it looks more stupid on him when he is biased...
there are/have been niches in the windows world that attempt(ed) to make an alternative to the explorer interface. but they never became a majority, because for most people it just works.
people who are different from us are the people who make linux on the desktop succeed.
i recognise some points joel was trying to make from real life, i just disagree with his style of writing. too polarised. just like the community he is making fun of. everyone knows
The very fact that the Unix world is so full of self-righteous cultural superiority, "advocacy," and slashdot-karma-whoring sectarianism while the Windows world is more practical ("yeah, whatever, I just need to make a living here") stems from a culture that feels itself under siege, unable to break out of the server closet and hobbyist market and onto the mainstream desktop.
i think the article shows a bit of a polarised image. okay, i see the point of OS advocates being too tech-oriented, but we also have some efforts that really try to aim at end users, more or less succesfull. allright, it's not as easy as using MacOSX, but it's quite close in many aspects. and quite usable for the novice, especially in the distributions that try to make it simple (xandros, lindows, etc)
linux on the desktop? very possible. a lot more likely than the writer of this article would like us to believe IMHO
tell me about it... i am a molecular/cell biologist
;) )
i know about Bacillus antracis (though i won't bother to spellcheck the name now
but a kit with the things on plasmid (i presume) is a bit over the top don't you think? it made me wonder then... anyway now, with the sequence probably available at some genomics site (or is that protected too?) it would be a few dyas work to clone and express the (gene encoding the) toxin.
ah well.
blah
and blah
anyway, as i said, no clue whether it was just some urban legend or the truth...
of some kit one of my teachers always told about
:\
one could get it on the internet (hoax or truth? no clue)
it was called 'be your own god' and contained all kinds of materials to clone genes for bacterial toxins and stuff. anthrax a go-go
anyways i suspect that, if it ever was available, it won't be now, given the whole 9-11 situation and the anthrax scares and all...
well, AI advances will likely not happen. it was a nice idea, but it's just not 'trendy' anymore...
:)
one problem might be that good ideas need a certain technological context. a visionary might have some brilliant ideas, but none of them viable at a given time, thus never recognised as such.
essentialy i agree with your argument, but i worded it differently. science nowadays, more than ever, is pushed by (media?) attention towards 'trendy' subjects. very much oriented on the short-term benefits, thereby killing innovation.
maybe the very transient nature of the world today stifles innovation... bigger better faster more! we don't have time to innovate, we need to make money NOW!
hehe i sound like a friggin' anti-capitalist
well... one could also argue that the overload of information nowadays makes any idea harder to find. the notion that a good idea is hard to recognise remains. nowadays it's just surrounded by more stupid^H^H^H^H^H^H inviable ideas.
the haystack is getting bigger, where's the friggin' needle?