Linus deserves recognition for the amount of work he has done; but as an operating system, Linux in my mind has always demonstrated the difference between popularity and quality. I wholeheartedly felt that Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson deserved the awards they received; but where Linus is concerned, I'm more ambivalent.
For me, Linux is popular, while *BSD is actually good. I can't motivate myself to install a Linux distribution, these days, and for two reasons.
a} In technical terms, I know of no distro in existence, which has close to the same level of overall quality as the BSDs. Comparitive Linux distributions are invariably a bloated, disorganised, opaque mess.
b} Linux developers are socially toxic, hubristic, juvenile adolescents; who are persistently unrepentant about the degree to which their code sucks. I would laugh about said developers' near-mindless obsession with modernity and false "innovation" purely for its' own sake, if said attitude did not make me so angry. Massive changes are made to the system, just because. Changes are not made with any real consideration for whether or not said changes are actually a good idea, but rather because any change is apparently seen as somehow being better than none at all. It is a completely irrational attitude.
I probably should not let my level of disgust with the current state of Linux as a whole, cloud my enthusiasm about Linus being recognised for his genuine tenacity and brilliance as a programmer. I've said before that the.01 release of the kernel was absolute poetry; but then, tragically, over the years both the Windows refugees and the cultic, authoritarian Leftist FSF vermin moved in, and the rest became history.
Linus should strongly consider riding off into the proverbial sunset before too long, I feel. Let him go out on a high note, and let history remember him favourably, before the malevolence of the likes of Lennart Poettering contaminates his legacy.
When will Dr. Evil be told to clean out his desk? You might not have figured out who the company's main liability is, yet; but the rest of us have known for years, now.
By the way, Windows 8 sucks; and although I intended XP to be my last Microshaft operating system, (after which I would have migrated to FreeBSD) thanks to the UEFI standard that you and the rest of the consortium of corporate supervillains implemented, that is no longer possible for me. If I want to use FreeBSD at all on new hardware these days, and I want full hardware support, I'm stuck doing so in vmWare under Windows.
a} Clueless psychopathic suits in management, who make impossible schedule demands, and have no programming background themselves.
b} The use of popular, but garbage programming languages. C++, PHP and Perl are probably the main three culprits here. Dishonourable mention also goes to XML, JavaScript, and the XHTML Document Object Model. I have never encountered a "Web application," yet, which wasn't a disorganised, bloated, CPU hogging abomination.
For the last two months I've been economically forced to use a dual core 1.5 ghz laptop with 2 gb of RAM, and it can only barely keep up with the inefficient, JavaScript-infested obscenity that the Web has become. Virtually none of said JavaScript ever provides truly valuable functionality, either; most of it is just trackers of various kinds.
It's also purely due to Capitalism; all of it. Why have Red Hat had Lennart try and force systemd, GNOME, and the rest of their corporate crapware on Linux users? Their desire for a corporate monopoly, that's why.
What caused the UNIX wars? Corporations wanting to add their own non-standard extensions, to ensure their coveted Unique Selling Positions.
There are times when transhumanists cause me to wax seriously nostalgic, for that magical bygone era, when society's answer to potentially extinction-inducing abominations, was to build a large, blazing pile of logs, and place the freak of nature in question, exactly at the center of it.
In most cases of course, when Muslims indulge in this type of behaviour, I consider it as barbaric and uncivilised as anyone else, but for some reason I'm willing to make an exception where transhumanism is concerned. There's just something about human/machine integration, and the erosion of privacy and control of our basic biological functions as a result, that causes me to want to reach for a torch and pitchfork.
Yeah, because its realistic for people to be their own code auditors for a whole OS, and for each install and update.
It is entirely realistic if you know what you are doing. My default FreeBSD install fits into 65 Mb of RAM.
As I have observed before on this site many times; narrow mindedness and aggression have a marked tendency to go together. The more ignorant a person is, the more adamant they usually are about expressing it.
Not all of us live according to argumentum ad novitatem.
My last few remaining microns of sympathy for Linux, evaporated not long ago when I read Lennart Poettering encouraging everyone around him, to throw POSIX under the bus. I'm aware that Linux developers have viewed the system's relationship with older UNIX, in roughly the same manner as a venereal disease since probably 2000; in a sense, it surprised me that it took that long for someone to actually come out and say it openly.
Linux has completely gone to shit; and not in the "yes it causes me to rage, but I'm still putting up with it," sense, but the "I now feel so much contempt and disgust for it that I've washed my hands, and can no longer be remotely bothered," sense.
Linux's developers these days, are a bunch of ivory tower elitists, who in reality have no idea what they are doing, but who have the attitude that everyone else using the system can just shut up and take what they are given, and if the rest of us don't like it, then that is just too damn bad. Lennart Poettering, again, is the main offender when it comes to this sort of thinking, but it has also always characterised the GNOME developers as well.
GNOME should have been recognised as a mess, and rewritten from scratch, before Canonical got hold of it. The problem there is that you have people who are using Microsoft Windows as their template, and so they think that making everything opaque and hard welded together, is somehow the "professional," way to do things. Graphical user interfaces don't *need* to be a bloated pile of shit; it's just that Windows is, and Linux people now are determined to copy Windows.
I've been learning about FORTH, recently; and about the idea of (in languages which are designed for it, at least) writing one function per file, and having said function consist of no more than 500 bytes each. FORTH was the product of an era in which programmers actually knew what they were doing; unlike today, when computer science graduates emerge from university with their heads densely packed full of bovine fecal matter, such as the idea that programs should be as long and complex as possible, rather than short and simple.
But there's no point. There's no point arguing with any of you. You'll just mod me down, and tell me that Ubuntu is great, and GNOME is superb, and Poettering is a genius. So go ahead. Have fun.
Please don't use the citation needed troll. Yes, the person you're responding to is a fairly typical brainwashed American, but that response implies that you are someone who doesn't believe anything, unless it comes to them second-hand.
Assange was chosen because of his sociopathic personality.
Agreed. Assange is a melodramatic narcissist. As much as he might be railing about the fact that the film will portray him negatively, I can assure everyone here that he probably also masturbates on a regular basis, to the thought that anyone associated with the government has made a film about him at all.
Assange is an archetypical grey hat. I used to know a few of them on IRC in the mid to late 1990s. They are sociopathic vermin, and completely without any vague semblance of honour; but because of the dependence we now have on computers, they think they are God.
If you are wondering whether or not to view either Assange or Snowden as legitimate, then I can tell you one very important detail. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, becomes prominent, viral, or in any way noticed on the Internet by accident. It never happens. "Organic," or grassroots Internet publicity is a lie. The only reason why anyone like Assange or Snowden becomes well known, is because it is arranged by the psychopaths. They want you to believe that anyone can become known, but I can assure you that the opposite is true. If you want publicity, you can't afford to seriously offend anyone, because you want the big people and the psychopaths to spend money on getting fake YouTube views for you, and all of the other dirty tactics they use.
You have to be a complete sellout morally, and you also have to be someone who they will find useful in some way. If you have both of those characteristics, then yes, they will make you famous; but they will also own you, and they will destroy you if you do anything that they do not like.
...is the fact that while Americans condemn Islamic barbarity, their own society is quite literally the most degenerate in human history.
The emphasis is different, of course. Islam focuses on preservation of the collective, or society, at the expense of the individual. America focuses on the preservation of the individual, at the expense of the collective.
Both are imbalanced; but what I find distressing is the fact that, as usual, Americans are only capable of identifying what is wrong with other cultures, rather than acknowledging the fact that, in many cases, entirely equally pathological elements exist within their own.
You might not have judges handing out sentences like this, no; but you do have school and shopping center shootings. The end result is inhumanity, either way.
Inclusion of women in everything, entirely for its' own sake, is politically correct at the moment. We need to take that kind of prevailing bias into account, when reading about "research," like this.
There have been numerous female authors who've written revisionist history in a number of other areas, such as historical witch burning and the influence of women in paleolithic societies in other areas. Most of it is unfalsifiable at best, and garbage at worst.
Do not believe any scientific research which claims results that are consistent with prevailing social biases. The reason why, is because such research is unfalsifiable, by definition. You cannot prove whether or not said bias was not involved, in obtaining the result.
SR users are not being busted now, so much because they broke the law when they did.
They are being arrested in order to scare the people who might otherwise set up the next SR equivalent site.
The pigs can not usually arrest more than a maximum of 5% of any given group; whether it be filesharing, drugs, or whatever else. The reason why is simple logistics; there are literally millions of people motivated to break the law, for every one person there is motivated to enforce it.
So they're not trying to arrest everyone who does it. What they're trying to do, is arrest a sufficiently large number, that the majority who they can not arrest, are sufficiently scared, that they cease engaging in the behaviour in question. Publically at least, that worked wonders with file sharing; eMule died practically overnight, once Razorback, one of the main servers in the eDonkey network was raided. It was only a single server, yet it was a sufficiently well-known one, that it sent everyone into a panic, so they all started uninstalling eMule and no longer using it. That is exactly what the pigs want.
The moral of the story is not to be afraid. Do not selfishly hold the attitude that you should stop, because even though they can barely enforce the law itself, you might be one of the 1-5% who gets hit by the poison ball. The fact of the matter is, that the more people break the law, the safer everyone breaking it is; not less. If less people are infringing, that means that the percentage of the total group that the pigs can arrest, goes up. That in turn means that if you are one of the people who is still infringing, when most other people have stopped, you are now more likely to get busted than you were before.
So people need to make more Silk Road clones. There also need to be more clones of the Pirate Bay. We need so many people copying files, and buying and selling drugs, that the authorities end up being completely overwhelmed.
In Diablo, the real problem was the loot itself. They were all random drops, and even the named epic drops had random stats.
To put it in perspective, there were about 30 different random attributes. All builds require 4-5 of these attibutes. All resist str/dex/int depending on class crit crit damage vitality If you dont have ALL of these abilities on most of your gear, you simply cannot complete end-game content.
If there is one thing I'm becoming exceptionally tired of, where RPGs are concerned, it is this scenario where the end game is the only thing anyone talks about. I've spent some time on the Borderlands 2 forums. That has a fairly long levelling game. Not months long, but getting to UVHM took me probably a month, playing on and off; I've got about 270 hours logged on Steam, now.
In said forums, however, whenever newbies tried to get advice about weapons, the only thing that anyone would answer them with, was information about end-game named uniques or legendaries, for the most part. There was precious little info offered about the manufacturing corporations, the different elemental damage types, etc; stuff that people needed to know for the whole game. There was also the usual bullshit insistence that some character builds were not "viable," for end game content, when I've been going through UVHM with a Survival Commando, (probably the class/spec combo which attracts the largest amount of shit) with no problem at all.
We have a couple of different problems here. The main one, is that forums in particular, and possibly these games in general, end up infested with a certain type of person who does not actually enjoy the game, and who is not there purely in order to play said game, but is motivated purely by a desire to be viewed as good at the game, for the purposes of ego gratification. It got to the point in the WoW forums where people were admitting that fairly openly.
The second problem, as an extension of the first, is that you have a very large number of frankly terrible players, in terms of their actual level of ability, who criticise the developers for adding talent trees to the game which are supposedly not "viable;" when again, said trees are usually fine. It will be the players themselves who suck, not the trees.
I'm not saying that D3 in particular was not an attrocious game; although I haven't played it myself, everyone I've spoken to about it, has consistently said it was terrible. At the same time, however, it needs to be acknowledged that the above problems do occur; particularly on forums.
The real problem is the fact that, at least as far as intelligence or exercising genuine self-responsibility is concerned, 95%+ of human beings are literally not worth the oxygen they breathe.
Almost every single brainless, technophobic fucking moron out there uses Facebook, and various other forms of centralised social networking. Even Eric Raymond, not long ago, started advocating Google+, and dared to actually become *indignant* about people warning him of what a corporate abomination it was.
Stop using Facebook. Start re-using public key encrypted Usenet, and p2p DCC chat nets with IRC as an entry point, which is what used to be done in the old days.
The feds literally were not able to touch that, which is the entire reason why all three IRC nets were DDoSed in January 2001. It wasn't a technology which they could easily control or monitor, so they simply wanted to destroy it. Then we got Twitter. Do you really consider that a fucking coincidence?
You might have noticed the degree of rage in this post. I've been getting banned more recently from virtually every forum other than 4chan, and there is a reason for that.
I. CANNOT. STAND. the continual, brainless fucking stupidity and myopia of the rest of my species, at this point. I can't stand the fact that you are all craven, gutless, stupid Good Germans, who don't want anything other than a giant nanny state to change your nappies and microwave your bottle.
This situation is NOT because of Google. It is not because of the NSA. It is not because of Verizon. It is because of YOU. If you are someone who uses ANY form of social media, YOU are to blame. YOU are part of the problem. No one else. YOU.
Is Wayland interested in being truly portable, (as in offering support for the BSDs, and making things sufficiently and open that it can be potentially used with as-yet undeveloped operating systems) or are they committed to pretending that Debian Linux is the only alternative to Windows that exists, a la Freedesktop.org?
a} A sane audio subsystem. b} Generally a lot less crap running in the background, at least by default. c} The BSDs are developed by adults, in general terms.
Before you respond to that last point critically, understand that I actually do know what I'm talking about. I've used Linux for ten years, and compiled both the Linux kernel and the GNU userland from source numerous times; and as a result, I am prepared to say with the authority that that gives me, that Linux is a steaming pile in technical terms, in comparison with FreeBSD.
Linus' foul mouth, more than anything else, is due to his consistent overestimation of his own importance. It's just arrogant, alpha wannabe bluster; and occasionally, as in the case with nVidia, it can be really destructive.
It's ok to use the code and do the minimum required!
The problem is the fact that anything else gets said. If that is what the license requires, then that is what the license requires. The stuff about, "being a big believer in free and open," is extraneous, subjective garbage; and is exactly the issue, here.
If I do what I am legally required to do, then I should neither be applauded for being a member of the cult, or condemned if I am not a member of it. If I am legally in compliance, then I should not have to know or care about the opinion of "the community," one way or the other.
If the opinion of "the community," matters, then put it in the license as something I am legally required to do. Otherwise they can and should shut the fuck up.
As another point, when you say that this is basic ethics, you make it sound as though you're talking about something universal; when in fact, you are not. You're talking about the ideology of one specific group of people; and said ideology for the most part doesn't have anything in common with how the rest of the population thinks, at all.
So in other words, you're damn right that I'm going to be pedantic to the point of legalism, and demand anyone else engaging in this conversation to do likewise.
That is not true at all. The GPL was devised for a very specific purpose and that purpose has been explained and discussed at work.
Then this should be made specific and overt. If a relevant or necessary demand is missing from the license, the license needs to be rewritten to include said demand.
The term, "spirit," by its' very nature, refers to something undefined, non-specific, and acorporeal. I'm surprised that anyone who identifies as an atheist in particular, would be comfortable with using it.
I say again; if there is a "spirit," or an "ethos," associated with the FSF or the GPL, and such has heretofore been implicit and "intuitive," then it should be made explicit, specific, and tangible, so that there can be no misunderstand, and no excuse.
My understanding of version 2 of the GPL, as the clearest example, was that if I modify the source code of a work governed by said license, I must make publically available, both the unmodified source code, AND the source code of my own modifications, to anyone who asks for it, as a condition of using/developing said work.
My understanding was not, however, that I am required to subscribe to any other belief, whether it be political, social, or in any other form, that may or may not be advocated by the Free Software Foundation.
In other words, if I use the GPL, I need to provide source with binaries. That's all.
I do not need to worship Richard Stallman as God. I do not need to subscribe to the philosophy of Karl Marx or Leon Trotsky in general terms. I don't need to believe Stallman's self-aggrandizing lies about how the very concept of source code availability supposedly originated with him, and did not exist before him. Hell, I don't even need to like him, or anyone else associated with the FSF, as people at all.
All I need to do, is provide source with binaries. That's it. Nothing else.
They've started doing that around here, now? I've been gone for a while. Given how fascist everything is getting everywhere else, it would be consistent.
I've got mod points today, and I figured that a good use of them would be beating the Stallmanite trolls into submission, who I knew would be infesting this thread. Unfortunately, there are far too many of them to be stopped by a measly five points.
The vitriol directed towards Aaron Swartz, additionally, is nothing short of disgusting. Until someone is able to offer me concrete proof to the contrary, I am going to continue to believe that Swartz was the victim of assassination by the American government. If you want to convince me that I am wrong in believing that, then as I said, you had better have an extremely compelling argument.
Jimmy Wales does not deserve induction into the Hall of Fame, either. Wikipedia has long since degenerated into a cess pit of pro-establishment pseudoskeptics, who ruthlessly delete anything which is not entirely in line with their agenda. Wales has also done absolutely nothing to try and restrain said people.
It's a strategy which attempts to rely on consumer apathy and inertia. From a moral perspective, it's terrible business practice, but if they get away with it, then it means more control for them.
The real problem with Microsoft, is the fact that they never learn, where this sort of thing is concerned. No matter how many times they get caught and prevented from doing the wrong thing, they just keep trying.
This is a good example of why, although I have a Twitter account, I never use it, for the most part. It's also why I am opposed to the concept of giant, faceless corporations like Google, Facebook, and Twitter being the developers of, and having control of, the applications which the majority of people on the Internet use.
Twitter in particular is a fascist, corporate usurpation of the decentralised and non-corporate ircII protocol. As far as I am concerned, every principled Internet user should boycott both the application and the corporation into non-existence. We need to bring back IRC, so that we can again have decentralised, non-corporate control of text-based chat.
I honestly hope a Twitter employee reads this. Fuck you. Truly and sincerely, fuck you, and every other individual who works for the company as well. It is companies like yours that have destroyed the Internet as it existed before 2000.
That has not been forgiven, and it will not be forgotten.
Slashdot Mirror
Linus deserves recognition for the amount of work he has done; but as an operating system, Linux in my mind has always demonstrated the difference between popularity and quality. I wholeheartedly felt that Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson deserved the awards they received; but where Linus is concerned, I'm more ambivalent.
For me, Linux is popular , while *BSD is actually good. I can't motivate myself to install a Linux distribution, these days, and for two reasons.
a} In technical terms, I know of no distro in existence, which has close to the same level of overall quality as the BSDs. Comparitive Linux distributions are invariably a bloated, disorganised, opaque mess.
b} Linux developers are socially toxic, hubristic, juvenile adolescents; who are persistently unrepentant about the degree to which their code sucks. I would laugh about said developers' near-mindless obsession with modernity and false "innovation" purely for its' own sake, if said attitude did not make me so angry. Massive changes are made to the system, just because . Changes are not made with any real consideration for whether or not said changes are actually a good idea, but rather because any change is apparently seen as somehow being better than none at all. It is a completely irrational attitude.
I probably should not let my level of disgust with the current state of Linux as a whole, cloud my enthusiasm about Linus being recognised for his genuine tenacity and brilliance as a programmer. I've said before that the .01 release of the kernel was absolute poetry; but then, tragically, over the years both the Windows refugees and the cultic, authoritarian Leftist FSF vermin moved in, and the rest became history.
Linus should strongly consider riding off into the proverbial sunset before too long, I feel. Let him go out on a high note, and let history remember him favourably, before the malevolence of the likes of Lennart Poettering contaminates his legacy.
When will Dr. Evil be told to clean out his desk? You might not have figured out who the company's main liability is, yet; but the rest of us have known for years, now.
By the way, Windows 8 sucks; and although I intended XP to be my last Microshaft operating system, (after which I would have migrated to FreeBSD) thanks to the UEFI standard that you and the rest of the consortium of corporate supervillains implemented, that is no longer possible for me. If I want to use FreeBSD at all on new hardware these days, and I want full hardware support, I'm stuck doing so in vmWare under Windows.
Insincerely yours,
Petrus
a} Clueless psychopathic suits in management, who make impossible schedule demands, and have no programming background themselves.
b} The use of popular, but garbage programming languages. C++, PHP and Perl are probably the main three culprits here. Dishonourable mention also goes to XML, JavaScript, and the XHTML Document Object Model. I have never encountered a "Web application," yet, which wasn't a disorganised, bloated, CPU hogging abomination.
For the last two months I've been economically forced to use a dual core 1.5 ghz laptop with 2 gb of RAM, and it can only barely keep up with the inefficient, JavaScript-infested obscenity that the Web has become. Virtually none of said JavaScript ever provides truly valuable functionality, either; most of it is just trackers of various kinds.
It's also purely due to Capitalism; all of it. Why have Red Hat had Lennart try and force systemd, GNOME, and the rest of their corporate crapware on Linux users? Their desire for a corporate monopoly, that's why.
What caused the UNIX wars? Corporations wanting to add their own non-standard extensions, to ensure their coveted Unique Selling Positions.
We must get rid of the suits.
There are times when transhumanists cause me to wax seriously nostalgic, for that magical bygone era, when society's answer to potentially extinction-inducing abominations, was to build a large, blazing pile of logs, and place the freak of nature in question, exactly at the center of it.
In most cases of course, when Muslims indulge in this type of behaviour, I consider it as barbaric and uncivilised as anyone else, but for some reason I'm willing to make an exception where transhumanism is concerned. There's just something about human/machine integration, and the erosion of privacy and control of our basic biological functions as a result, that causes me to want to reach for a torch and pitchfork.
Yeah, because its realistic for people to be their own code auditors for a whole OS, and for each install and update. It is entirely realistic if you know what you are doing. My default FreeBSD install fits into 65 Mb of RAM. As I have observed before on this site many times; narrow mindedness and aggression have a marked tendency to go together. The more ignorant a person is, the more adamant they usually are about expressing it. Not all of us live according to argumentum ad novitatem.
My last few remaining microns of sympathy for Linux, evaporated not long ago when I read Lennart Poettering encouraging everyone around him, to throw POSIX under the bus. I'm aware that Linux developers have viewed the system's relationship with older UNIX, in roughly the same manner as a venereal disease since probably 2000; in a sense, it surprised me that it took that long for someone to actually come out and say it openly.
Linux has completely gone to shit; and not in the "yes it causes me to rage, but I'm still putting up with it," sense, but the "I now feel so much contempt and disgust for it that I've washed my hands, and can no longer be remotely bothered," sense.
Linux's developers these days, are a bunch of ivory tower elitists, who in reality have no idea what they are doing, but who have the attitude that everyone else using the system can just shut up and take what they are given, and if the rest of us don't like it, then that is just too damn bad. Lennart Poettering, again, is the main offender when it comes to this sort of thinking, but it has also always characterised the GNOME developers as well.
GNOME should have been recognised as a mess, and rewritten from scratch, before Canonical got hold of it. The problem there is that you have people who are using Microsoft Windows as their template, and so they think that making everything opaque and hard welded together, is somehow the "professional," way to do things. Graphical user interfaces don't *need* to be a bloated pile of shit; it's just that Windows is, and Linux people now are determined to copy Windows.
I've been learning about FORTH, recently; and about the idea of (in languages which are designed for it, at least) writing one function per file, and having said function consist of no more than 500 bytes each. FORTH was the product of an era in which programmers actually knew what they were doing; unlike today, when computer science graduates emerge from university with their heads densely packed full of bovine fecal matter, such as the idea that programs should be as long and complex as possible, rather than short and simple.
But there's no point. There's no point arguing with any of you. You'll just mod me down, and tell me that Ubuntu is great, and GNOME is superb, and Poettering is a genius. So go ahead. Have fun.
Citation needed.
Please don't use the citation needed troll. Yes, the person you're responding to is a fairly typical brainwashed American, but that response implies that you are someone who doesn't believe anything, unless it comes to them second-hand.
You wouldn't want us to think that, would you?
I also think Assange is an attention whore and mostly self-serving.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI4O8byPw7g
Your comment caused me to go and look this song up, and listen to it. ;)
Assange was chosen because of his sociopathic personality.
Agreed. Assange is a melodramatic narcissist. As much as he might be railing about the fact that the film will portray him negatively, I can assure everyone here that he probably also masturbates on a regular basis, to the thought that anyone associated with the government has made a film about him at all.
Assange is an archetypical grey hat. I used to know a few of them on IRC in the mid to late 1990s. They are sociopathic vermin, and completely without any vague semblance of honour; but because of the dependence we now have on computers, they think they are God.
If you are wondering whether or not to view either Assange or Snowden as legitimate, then I can tell you one very important detail. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, becomes prominent, viral, or in any way noticed on the Internet by accident. It never happens. "Organic," or grassroots Internet publicity is a lie. The only reason why anyone like Assange or Snowden becomes well known, is because it is arranged by the psychopaths. They want you to believe that anyone can become known, but I can assure you that the opposite is true. If you want publicity, you can't afford to seriously offend anyone, because you want the big people and the psychopaths to spend money on getting fake YouTube views for you, and all of the other dirty tactics they use.
You have to be a complete sellout morally, and you also have to be someone who they will find useful in some way. If you have both of those characteristics, then yes, they will make you famous; but they will also own you, and they will destroy you if you do anything that they do not like.
...is the fact that while Americans condemn Islamic barbarity, their own society is quite literally the most degenerate in human history.
The emphasis is different, of course. Islam focuses on preservation of the collective, or society, at the expense of the individual. America focuses on the preservation of the individual, at the expense of the collective.
Both are imbalanced; but what I find distressing is the fact that, as usual, Americans are only capable of identifying what is wrong with other cultures, rather than acknowledging the fact that, in many cases, entirely equally pathological elements exist within their own.
You might not have judges handing out sentences like this, no; but you do have school and shopping center shootings. The end result is inhumanity, either way.
Inclusion of women in everything, entirely for its' own sake, is politically correct at the moment. We need to take that kind of prevailing bias into account, when reading about "research," like this.
There have been numerous female authors who've written revisionist history in a number of other areas, such as historical witch burning and the influence of women in paleolithic societies in other areas. Most of it is unfalsifiable at best, and garbage at worst.
Do not believe any scientific research which claims results that are consistent with prevailing social biases. The reason why, is because such research is unfalsifiable, by definition. You cannot prove whether or not said bias was not involved, in obtaining the result.
SR users are not being busted now, so much because they broke the law when they did.
They are being arrested in order to scare the people who might otherwise set up the next SR equivalent site.
The pigs can not usually arrest more than a maximum of 5% of any given group; whether it be filesharing, drugs, or whatever else. The reason why is simple logistics; there are literally millions of people motivated to break the law, for every one person there is motivated to enforce it.
So they're not trying to arrest everyone who does it. What they're trying to do, is arrest a sufficiently large number, that the majority who they can not arrest, are sufficiently scared, that they cease engaging in the behaviour in question. Publically at least, that worked wonders with file sharing; eMule died practically overnight, once Razorback, one of the main servers in the eDonkey network was raided. It was only a single server, yet it was a sufficiently well-known one, that it sent everyone into a panic, so they all started uninstalling eMule and no longer using it. That is exactly what the pigs want.
The moral of the story is not to be afraid. Do not selfishly hold the attitude that you should stop, because even though they can barely enforce the law itself, you might be one of the 1-5% who gets hit by the poison ball. The fact of the matter is, that the more people break the law, the safer everyone breaking it is; not less. If less people are infringing, that means that the percentage of the total group that the pigs can arrest, goes up. That in turn means that if you are one of the people who is still infringing, when most other people have stopped, you are now more likely to get busted than you were before.
So people need to make more Silk Road clones. There also need to be more clones of the Pirate Bay. We need so many people copying files, and buying and selling drugs, that the authorities end up being completely overwhelmed.
Possibly slightly offtopic; but is there any legal avenue that could be persued, towards the eventual goal of having the NSA abolished?
In Diablo, the real problem was the loot itself. They were all random drops, and even the named epic drops had random stats.
To put it in perspective, there were about 30 different random attributes. All builds require 4-5 of these attibutes.
All resist
str/dex/int depending on class
crit
crit damage
vitality
If you dont have ALL of these abilities on most of your gear, you simply cannot complete end-game content.
If there is one thing I'm becoming exceptionally tired of, where RPGs are concerned, it is this scenario where the end game is the only thing anyone talks about. I've spent some time on the Borderlands 2 forums. That has a fairly long levelling game. Not months long, but getting to UVHM took me probably a month, playing on and off; I've got about 270 hours logged on Steam, now.
In said forums, however, whenever newbies tried to get advice about weapons, the only thing that anyone would answer them with, was information about end-game named uniques or legendaries, for the most part. There was precious little info offered about the manufacturing corporations, the different elemental damage types, etc; stuff that people needed to know for the whole game. There was also the usual bullshit insistence that some character builds were not "viable," for end game content, when I've been going through UVHM with a Survival Commando, (probably the class/spec combo which attracts the largest amount of shit) with no problem at all.
We have a couple of different problems here. The main one, is that forums in particular, and possibly these games in general, end up infested with a certain type of person who does not actually enjoy the game, and who is not there purely in order to play said game, but is motivated purely by a desire to be viewed as good at the game, for the purposes of ego gratification. It got to the point in the WoW forums where people were admitting that fairly openly.
The second problem, as an extension of the first, is that you have a very large number of frankly terrible players, in terms of their actual level of ability, who criticise the developers for adding talent trees to the game which are supposedly not "viable;" when again, said trees are usually fine. It will be the players themselves who suck, not the trees.
I'm not saying that D3 in particular was not an attrocious game; although I haven't played it myself, everyone I've spoken to about it, has consistently said it was terrible. At the same time, however, it needs to be acknowledged that the above problems do occur; particularly on forums.
The real problem is the fact that, at least as far as intelligence or exercising genuine self-responsibility is concerned, 95%+ of human beings are literally not worth the oxygen they breathe.
Almost every single brainless, technophobic fucking moron out there uses Facebook, and various other forms of centralised social networking. Even Eric Raymond, not long ago, started advocating Google+, and dared to actually become *indignant* about people warning him of what a corporate abomination it was.
Stop using Facebook. Start re-using public key encrypted Usenet, and p2p DCC chat nets with IRC as an entry point, which is what used to be done in the old days.
The feds literally were not able to touch that, which is the entire reason why all three IRC nets were DDoSed in January 2001. It wasn't a technology which they could easily control or monitor, so they simply wanted to destroy it. Then we got Twitter. Do you really consider that a fucking coincidence?
You might have noticed the degree of rage in this post. I've been getting banned more recently from virtually every forum other than 4chan, and there is a reason for that.
I. CANNOT. STAND. the continual, brainless fucking stupidity and myopia of the rest of my species, at this point. I can't stand the fact that you are all craven, gutless, stupid Good Germans, who don't want anything other than a giant nanny state to change your nappies and microwave your bottle.
This situation is NOT because of Google. It is not because of the NSA. It is not because of Verizon. It is because of YOU. If you are someone who uses ANY form of social media, YOU are to blame. YOU are part of the problem. No one else. YOU.
Is Wayland interested in being truly portable, (as in offering support for the BSDs, and making things sufficiently and open that it can be potentially used with as-yet undeveloped operating systems) or are they committed to pretending that Debian Linux is the only alternative to Windows that exists, a la Freedesktop.org?
I could think of a couple of reasons.
a} A sane audio subsystem.
b} Generally a lot less crap running in the background, at least by default.
c} The BSDs are developed by adults, in general terms.
Before you respond to that last point critically, understand that I actually do know what I'm talking about. I've used Linux for ten years, and compiled both the Linux kernel and the GNU userland from source numerous times; and as a result, I am prepared to say with the authority that that gives me, that Linux is a steaming pile in technical terms, in comparison with FreeBSD.
Linus' foul mouth, more than anything else, is due to his consistent overestimation of his own importance. It's just arrogant, alpha wannabe bluster; and occasionally, as in the case with nVidia, it can be really destructive.
Is it sexist that male strippers exist?
If the answer is no, then it isn't sexist that booth babes exist either.
It's ok to use the code and do the minimum required!
The problem is the fact that anything else gets said. If that is what the license requires, then that is what the license requires. The stuff about, "being a big believer in free and open," is extraneous, subjective garbage; and is exactly the issue, here.
If I do what I am legally required to do, then I should neither be applauded for being a member of the cult, or condemned if I am not a member of it. If I am legally in compliance, then I should not have to know or care about the opinion of "the community," one way or the other.
If the opinion of "the community," matters, then put it in the license as something I am legally required to do. Otherwise they can and should shut the fuck up.
As another point, when you say that this is basic ethics, you make it sound as though you're talking about something universal; when in fact, you are not. You're talking about the ideology of one specific group of people; and said ideology for the most part doesn't have anything in common with how the rest of the population thinks, at all.
So in other words, you're damn right that I'm going to be pedantic to the point of legalism, and demand anyone else engaging in this conversation to do likewise.
That is not true at all. The GPL was devised for a very specific purpose and that purpose has been explained and discussed at work.
Then this should be made specific and overt. If a relevant or necessary demand is missing from the license, the license needs to be rewritten to include said demand.
The term, "spirit," by its' very nature, refers to something undefined, non-specific, and acorporeal. I'm surprised that anyone who identifies as an atheist in particular, would be comfortable with using it.
I say again; if there is a "spirit," or an "ethos," associated with the FSF or the GPL, and such has heretofore been implicit and "intuitive," then it should be made explicit, specific, and tangible, so that there can be no misunderstand, and no excuse.
My understanding of version 2 of the GPL, as the clearest example, was that if I modify the source code of a work governed by said license, I must make publically available, both the unmodified source code, AND the source code of my own modifications, to anyone who asks for it, as a condition of using/developing said work.
My understanding was not, however, that I am required to subscribe to any other belief, whether it be political, social, or in any other form, that may or may not be advocated by the Free Software Foundation.
In other words, if I use the GPL, I need to provide source with binaries. That's all.
I do not need to worship Richard Stallman as God. I do not need to subscribe to the philosophy of Karl Marx or Leon Trotsky in general terms. I don't need to believe Stallman's self-aggrandizing lies about how the very concept of source code availability supposedly originated with him, and did not exist before him. Hell, I don't even need to like him, or anyone else associated with the FSF, as people at all.
All I need to do, is provide source with binaries. That's it. Nothing else.
They've started doing that around here, now? I've been gone for a while. Given how fascist everything is getting everywhere else, it would be consistent.
I've got mod points today, and I figured that a good use of them would be beating the Stallmanite trolls into submission, who I knew would be infesting this thread. Unfortunately, there are far too many of them to be stopped by a measly five points.
The vitriol directed towards Aaron Swartz, additionally, is nothing short of disgusting. Until someone is able to offer me concrete proof to the contrary, I am going to continue to believe that Swartz was the victim of assassination by the American government. If you want to convince me that I am wrong in believing that, then as I said, you had better have an extremely compelling argument.
Jimmy Wales does not deserve induction into the Hall of Fame, either. Wikipedia has long since degenerated into a cess pit of pro-establishment pseudoskeptics, who ruthlessly delete anything which is not entirely in line with their agenda. Wales has also done absolutely nothing to try and restrain said people.
It's a strategy which attempts to rely on consumer apathy and inertia. From a moral perspective, it's terrible business practice, but if they get away with it, then it means more control for them.
The real problem with Microsoft, is the fact that they never learn, where this sort of thing is concerned. No matter how many times they get caught and prevented from doing the wrong thing, they just keep trying.
This is a good example of why, although I have a Twitter account, I never use it, for the most part. It's also why I am opposed to the concept of giant, faceless corporations like Google, Facebook, and Twitter being the developers of, and having control of, the applications which the majority of people on the Internet use.
Twitter in particular is a fascist, corporate usurpation of the decentralised and non-corporate ircII protocol. As far as I am concerned, every principled Internet user should boycott both the application and the corporation into non-existence. We need to bring back IRC, so that we can again have decentralised, non-corporate control of text-based chat.
I honestly hope a Twitter employee reads this. Fuck you. Truly and sincerely, fuck you, and every other individual who works for the company as well. It is companies like yours that have destroyed the Internet as it existed before 2000.
That has not been forgiven, and it will not be forgotten.