As long as we aren't physically endangering them we are protected by our right to question them. even if some panel of moderators or the police don't like it.
So are you saying that the balance of the law should be set in favor of the most obnoxious actor? That it should be okay if anyone wants to get up and yell questions at a candidate and let no one else ask any? What if multiple people decided to follow this tactic and started trying to yell over each other? Sooner or later one of them would attempt to, if I may use a term of the art, "avail themselves of self-help" to make sure that they were heard.
One of the major purposes of the law is to prevent people availing themselves of "self-help" (i.e. violence) to have their way. People are not allowed to be disruptive at a public forum to prevent situations where multiple people want to be disruptive as well as to serve the purpose of encouraging public forums to exist.
Your solution is unworkable because it would discourage public forums from existing in the first place due to safety concerns. Also, what candidate would want to subject themselves to every fringe lunatics' rant everywhere they go? They'd never be able to address the substantive issues if everyone with enough gumption to rant was allowed to, and if owners of a forum were prevented from stopping them from being disruptive.
The law is ultimately pragmatic. This is why you can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater, and it's why you can go around doing things like this.
The courts decide. If what he did did not constitute a disturbance, then he will be set free on those charges. Ultimately, Florida's statutes, its courts, and federal courts set those rules. Whether refusing to follow the rules of a debate and attempting to hijack it counts or not is up to them to ultimately decide.
However, officers have the discretion to arrest someone for what they suspect is a crime in statutes where the language is vague, and "public disturbance" is one of the single broadest catch-all charges -- broad enough that this person was by no means in a gray area. It was quite clear that the people running the debate felt that he was being disruptive by the fact that they turned off his mike and that he was preventing the public event from going forward.
The law has just as much interest in keeping public events from being disrupted as it does in preventing people from yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
He was talking to someone who wanted to reply to him, and enforcers tried to physically remove him from the discussion by force.
Just because Kerry stated that "his question was important to answer" doesn't mean that he was engaging him specifically in a debate nor that he wanted to. Plus, what was Kerry supposed to do, just ignore all his questions? That would've looked like he was running away from a critic; he had no choice but to (at least sort of) answer his questions.
Does that really matter? Would you rather the rule be that he gets taken away as soon as Kerry decides he doesn't want to answer him (putting Kerry in the bind that he has to keep answering his questions until he's done or effectively be responsible for the man's arrest if he continues to ask more questions), or simply that he never get taken away no matter how obnoxious he becomes in breaking the rules of the forum?
Where do you think the balance of the law on a public disturbance should be?
Since when police men mediate college debates in the U.S. telling people their time is up? Since 9-11? This is fucking laughable...My God, people, you are really confortable with a police state, aren't you? I'm actually used to a civilian with a microphone saying somebody's time is up.
They did; they cut his mike as anyone who watched the videos would know. The man refused to cooperate and kept yelling. Now what?
Fortunately, the US institutional design was the work of enlightened men and such an abuse typically will have its right unfolding in terms of consequences (like the guy suing whoever is reponsible for a hefty sum).
The man has absolutely no case. He was violently resisting arrest, and the police followed proper procedures for escalating the use of force without skipping over any steps. They attempted to remove him without cuffing him, they attempted to cuff him by physically restraining him when that didn't work, and then they tasered him after ample warning when physical restraint wasn't working.
The arrest was by the book, and it's easily seen that he wasn't tasered until it became necessary. I doubt that a jury would convict the officers once the laws were laid out before them, and the officers would mostly likely win an appeal if they were convicted. I'd hate to be his attorney; he's completely screwed based on the ample video evidence of his crimes.
I call BS. Are you telling me that six officers, having gone through training on how to subdue subjects via various means (bending hand forward, twisting arm behind and so on), can't overcome one person for the three seconds that are needed to cuff him? If that's the case then I can see why they used a taser.
I posted elsewhere about this. It's pretty clear that he was still unrestrained and struggling when they tasered him if you watch closely enough.
As for your second paragraph, I again state that it's better than hitting him with a baton. A taser directly incapacitates the muscles without causing any permanent damage in the vast majority of cases.
Does it say that you are just trying to enforce the rules of questioning, or does it say you are using jackboot thugs to control information and thought processes?
Okay. I'll ignore the ranting to focus on the one intelligent question you asked.
I'll turn it around: how do you suggest the rules of questioning be enforced when you have someone who isn't interested in letting the speaker actually answer their questions and who is just using the event as a political ranting opportunity?
What do you do when they refuse to play by the rules of civility?
Under what authority, under what law is it proper to try to prevent him from engaging in consensual debate in an open and public forum?
Causing a public disturbance. His mike had been cut-off, and he continued to yell. Just because Kerry was answering does not mean that he wasn't causing a disturbance. Furthermore, when he tried to break away and run around, he was no longer merely engaging in consensual debate.
(You can get an idea of how well he was received by the crowd in their initial reaction to him being led away.)
Why do you offer me a dichotomy of beating someone with stick or electrocuting him when he's an attention whore at a debate?
You're deliberately conflating two issues to attempt to create a false dichotomy:
Should he be removed from a venue for being "an attention whore" at a debate?
What kind of force should an officer use with a suspect who refuses to cooperate?
He is not being tasered for being "an attention whore." He is being tasered for trying to wrestle his way free of the police. The distinction is important. Had the cops just tasered him immediately before trying other means to lead him out, you would have a point. However, the police followed procedure to try lesser methods of force before resorting to the taser. It was his physical resistance to arrest that got him zapped.
My question to you was, "What should the police do when they have a suspect who refuses to let himself be arrested?" What is you answer to that?
Note that shortly before he was tasered (1:49-1:52 on the first link), he had his right arm free that an officer was trying to work into position to handcuff. He then lifts himself up to beg not to be "tased" on his other arm.
It's quite clear that they tasered him because they couldn't restrain him. Note that while he's being tasered, they work his arms into position and then release him from the pin they have on him. Afterwards, he's shown being led away with his hand cuffed behind his back.
If they were already cuffed behind his back, you couldn't have seen his right arm in front of his body before he tried to sit upright. While there is a possibility that he was cuffed in the six seconds before the shock was delivered, it's inconsistent with the motions of the cops during the shock (where they struggle with arms and then release).
Why do I have the feeling the internal review will come up with the answer that the police didn't use excessive force?
Because this was nearly a picture-perfect, by-the-book arrest. They followed all procedure properly and only used the taser in a situation in which (a) it was authorized, and (b) the subject was clearly warned that it would be a consequence of continuing to make their arrest otherwise impossible.
Anyone who even in the slightest bit familiar with police procedures as well as the difficult balance between the safety of the subject and the safety of the officers would come to the same conclusion.
Since when is being the center of attention punishable by taser?
It's not. However, violently resisting police who have no gentler means of subduing you is the real issue here. It's not being used as a means of punishment; it's being used as a tool to subdue.
There has to be a means for law enforcement to make sure the people face responsibility for their actions without being unduly injured in the process. Would you rather we return to the days using of nightsticks and fists to deal with people trying to wrestle themselves away?
Except tazers are not harmless and are quite painful. They could have just grabbed and cuffed the guy.
Did you watch the video? They had him on the ground and were trying to cuff him, but he was struggling against it. As you should be able to see, it's a lot harder for multiple people bigger than the person they're trying to arrest to actually cuff a guy. Watch the video. They can't get his arms into position even with a guy on each limb.
The lady warned him quite calmly that if he didn't stop resisting that they were going to have to taser him nearly a full minute before they did (see 1:10-1:20 on the first link).
Tasering him was the only way to make him stop struggling short of beating him senseless. Which method of incapacitating him would you prefer?
Frankly, I see nothing here but proper police procedure being followed. The cops:
Tried to gently lead him away. He tried to break free while continuing to cause a disturbance.
One officer brandishes a weapon but puts it away once he determines the student isn't an armed threat.
At this point it is clear that he isn't going to go peacefully.
Tried to pin him on the ground and cuff him in accordance with standard procedures for restraining a suspect who is putting up a struggle.
Warned him in advance that they'd have to taser him if he continued to resist. He did.
Tasered him just enough to get the cuffs on and then led him away.
Does anyone have a better suggestion of what to do with someone causing a public disturbance other than just not bother trying to prevent it?
The WOT was one of the best series ever, for most of its run. Though I have to admit, I did give up on it a few books back, when I realized it took nearly the whole next book for me to get back up to speed on the myriad subplots, and that the series was progressing more and more slowly each book.
How can a series be one of the best series ever if it makes you give up part-way through it? Do you regularly abandon good series without finishing them?
I've read a few interviews where he said that the ending had basically been written for years...
My friends who read the WoT series and I always had a theory that he'd written the ending years ago, and that in some strange, literary mockery of Zeno's Paradox, he just wrote the plot half-way there each time he churned out a new book.
It certainly seemed like some sort of plot time-dilation was happening in the last few books by their accounts.
There's little consensus on the latter.
on
Science vs. Homeopathy
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The consensus is that breastfeeding is good, and circumcision isn't beneficial.
Re:All UK ciizens should be angry about this!
on
Science vs. Homeopathy
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Why? It's probably a lot cheaper than the other hospitals. Not to mention that at the very least it gives people a placebo effect and probably teaches them some reasonable lessons about respecting their body and respecting nature, which are valuable lessons.
The same exact thing could be said for tribal medicine men and other shamans. Should your government fund them as part of their healthcare system too?
Which reminds me, that "Head On" junk advertised on TV is homeopathic.
Wait! You mean those irritating ads are for something that isn't even real medicine? That's it! I no longer have any reason not to burn down their company for those awful ads.
Ar-son. Apply directly to the headquarters. Ar-son. Apply directly to the headquarters. Ar-son. Apply directly to the headquarters.
I'm sorry, but you're going to have to explain in detail to me how picking (in the heyday of both games) 1st or 2nd edition AD&D over Tunnels & Trolls shows any sort of sophistication. The old AD&D ruleset was a complete mess whereas T&T offered a much simpler and more playable set of rules.
Personally, I'd argue that a willingness to try games from less well-known publishers like Flying Buffalo instead of just following the mainstream shows a little more "geek sophistication." Besides, T&T is actually fun. Jar Jar never was.
For even mentioning that movie, your Geek Factor suffers a -10 hit.
You're RPG equivelant is now "Tunnels and Trolls", and your Star Wars equivelant is set to "Jar Jar".
Are you knocking Tunnels and Trolls? T&T was a great "beer and pretzels" game of yesteryear. The rules were dirt simple in comparison to the fantasy RPGs of its day, and it didn't take itself seriously. What other game has spells like "Take That, You Fiend," giant squirrels as dungeon monsters, and modules with names like "Rat on a Stick" where you could either kill the monsters or set up a fast-food franchise for them. The T&T games I played back in the day were a heck of a lot more fun than the old D&D games.
(Personally, given its age, I consider even knowing about T&T to be bonus geek points, but putting it in the same category as Jar Jar shows failure.)
Personally, I locked onto to the "graphically intense" part of that comment. Doesn't seem to me that thousands of stock-trend charts and graphs really count, unless you're making a terrible pun.
I know its not easy getting info on wireless chips, but time would be better spent working on something like that.
I'll ignore for a moment the fact that you're essentially making the same argument as "Why aren't all scientists (from solid-state physicists to cognitive neuroscientists) working on a cure for cancer instead of [perceived frivolous research in the news]?" You're ignoring the different kinds of expertise that go into a complex field of work like kernel development.
Instead, I'm just going to focus on your assertion that support for a few more wireless chipsets than the abundant choices we have today is more important than fixing problems in the most central and fundamental task of the kernel -- a task that even the most minimalist microkernels consider necessary to put into the microkernel.
This is simply hogwash. Scheduling affects every single part of the system, and it's a major factor in the perceived and real performance of a system. Fixes to the scheduler will affect how a user enjoys their system over the entire life of the system whereas a missing wireless driver affects them once -- at purchase time.
Furthermore, not all Linux systems have wireless networking. Adding more wireless drivers is going to be useless in nearly all server and most embedded uses. You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the purpose of Linux is to provide a good desktop or laptop experience. There are considerably more application domains that Linux operates in.
And frankly...
Just look at all the live CD's out there and how many can connect to wifi? Ubuntu and not much else.
This is not the kernel developers' problem. They've provided the functionality as evidenced by the fact that Ubuntu can do it. This is up to the distro developers to work on. Again, you make the mistake of assuming that all developers are equal and interchangeable and that they all have the same responsibilities in bringing the product to you, the unpaying customer.
Wow. Three troll mods after one funny mod for pointing out the hypocrisy of claiming that calling kilograms a unit of weight implies US pound-bias when everyone else in the world measures their weight in kilograms?
Yeesh. I doubt we had THAT tough of a crowd here last night. Someone had an axe to grind.
The kilogram is not a measure of weight, but mass. Silly pound-centric editors:p
Dear Metric Using Countries,
Please call us back when the majority of your citizens are measuring their weight in Newtons instead of Kilograms, and we'll consider addressing your charge of Pound-related bias.
Sincerely, The People of the United States of America
One good thing about all these things is that, pretty soon people will be so horrified by the user experience in the Windows, they will be pushed into adopting Linux.
Can you think of maybe one counter-example where intrusive advertising was forced on the mass market, and the mass market responded by forever rejecting that form of advertising in both that product and any future products?...Not just a highly sensitive portion of the market, but the market as a whole?
I can't.
Instead, this will probably just inure the public to intrusive ads while using a computer just like we've become used to ads in every other part of our lives.
After all it is the well integrated pop-up blocker that created the initial mass of downloads for Firefox.
This is true, but I wouldn't rest too much on the idea that Firefox downloads have been massive. Firefox accounts for around 10% of the market as opposed to the roughly 85% that Internet Explorer takes. Users have by and large not bought into the need for pop-up blockers, and if most people were using the blocker pushed onto them in XP SP2, then we wouldn't even see pop-up ads around anymore.
Never underestimate the willingness of the public to put up with ads when the alternative is to spend a little more money or make a trivial effort to defeat them.
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Some crazy guy with a sword in a mall and no pants? Sure taser him (been there, done that. On the safe side of the taser thankfully)
Off-topic, but I have to hear this story.
As long as we aren't physically endangering them we are protected by our right to question them. even if some panel of moderators or the police don't like it.
So are you saying that the balance of the law should be set in favor of the most obnoxious actor? That it should be okay if anyone wants to get up and yell questions at a candidate and let no one else ask any? What if multiple people decided to follow this tactic and started trying to yell over each other? Sooner or later one of them would attempt to, if I may use a term of the art, "avail themselves of self-help" to make sure that they were heard.
One of the major purposes of the law is to prevent people availing themselves of "self-help" (i.e. violence) to have their way. People are not allowed to be disruptive at a public forum to prevent situations where multiple people want to be disruptive as well as to serve the purpose of encouraging public forums to exist.
Your solution is unworkable because it would discourage public forums from existing in the first place due to safety concerns. Also, what candidate would want to subject themselves to every fringe lunatics' rant everywhere they go? They'd never be able to address the substantive issues if everyone with enough gumption to rant was allowed to, and if owners of a forum were prevented from stopping them from being disruptive.
The law is ultimately pragmatic. This is why you can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater, and it's why you can go around doing things like this.
Who decides what constitutes a disturbance?
The courts decide. If what he did did not constitute a disturbance, then he will be set free on those charges. Ultimately, Florida's statutes, its courts, and federal courts set those rules. Whether refusing to follow the rules of a debate and attempting to hijack it counts or not is up to them to ultimately decide.
However, officers have the discretion to arrest someone for what they suspect is a crime in statutes where the language is vague, and "public disturbance" is one of the single broadest catch-all charges -- broad enough that this person was by no means in a gray area. It was quite clear that the people running the debate felt that he was being disruptive by the fact that they turned off his mike and that he was preventing the public event from going forward.
The law has just as much interest in keeping public events from being disrupted as it does in preventing people from yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
He was talking to someone who wanted to reply to him, and enforcers tried to physically remove him from the discussion by force.
Just because Kerry stated that "his question was important to answer" doesn't mean that he was engaging him specifically in a debate nor that he wanted to. Plus, what was Kerry supposed to do, just ignore all his questions? That would've looked like he was running away from a critic; he had no choice but to (at least sort of) answer his questions.
Does that really matter? Would you rather the rule be that he gets taken away as soon as Kerry decides he doesn't want to answer him (putting Kerry in the bind that he has to keep answering his questions until he's done or effectively be responsible for the man's arrest if he continues to ask more questions), or simply that he never get taken away no matter how obnoxious he becomes in breaking the rules of the forum?
Where do you think the balance of the law on a public disturbance should be?
Since when police men mediate college debates in the U.S. telling people their time is up? Since 9-11? This is fucking laughable...My God, people, you are really confortable with a police state, aren't you? I'm actually used to a civilian with a microphone saying somebody's time is up.
They did; they cut his mike as anyone who watched the videos would know. The man refused to cooperate and kept yelling. Now what?
Fortunately, the US institutional design was the work of enlightened men and such an abuse typically will have its right unfolding in terms of consequences (like the guy suing whoever is reponsible for a hefty sum).
The man has absolutely no case. He was violently resisting arrest, and the police followed proper procedures for escalating the use of force without skipping over any steps. They attempted to remove him without cuffing him, they attempted to cuff him by physically restraining him when that didn't work, and then they tasered him after ample warning when physical restraint wasn't working.
The arrest was by the book, and it's easily seen that he wasn't tasered until it became necessary. I doubt that a jury would convict the officers once the laws were laid out before them, and the officers would mostly likely win an appeal if they were convicted. I'd hate to be his attorney; he's completely screwed based on the ample video evidence of his crimes.
I call BS. Are you telling me that six officers, having gone through training on how to subdue subjects via various means (bending hand forward, twisting arm behind and so on), can't overcome one person for the three seconds that are needed to cuff him? If that's the case then I can see why they used a taser.
I posted elsewhere about this. It's pretty clear that he was still unrestrained and struggling when they tasered him if you watch closely enough.
As for your second paragraph, I again state that it's better than hitting him with a baton. A taser directly incapacitates the muscles without causing any permanent damage in the vast majority of cases.
Does it say that you are just trying to enforce the rules of questioning, or does it say you are using jackboot thugs to control information and thought processes?
Okay. I'll ignore the ranting to focus on the one intelligent question you asked.
I'll turn it around: how do you suggest the rules of questioning be enforced when you have someone who isn't interested in letting the speaker actually answer their questions and who is just using the event as a political ranting opportunity?
What do you do when they refuse to play by the rules of civility?
Causing a public disturbance. His mike had been cut-off, and he continued to yell. Just because Kerry was answering does not mean that he wasn't causing a disturbance. Furthermore, when he tried to break away and run around, he was no longer merely engaging in consensual debate.
(You can get an idea of how well he was received by the crowd in their initial reaction to him being led away.)
Why do you offer me a dichotomy of beating someone with stick or electrocuting him when he's an attention whore at a debate?
You're deliberately conflating two issues to attempt to create a false dichotomy:
- Should he be removed from a venue for being "an attention whore" at a debate?
- What kind of force should an officer use with a suspect who refuses to cooperate?
He is not being tasered for being "an attention whore." He is being tasered for trying to wrestle his way free of the police. The distinction is important. Had the cops just tasered him immediately before trying other means to lead him out, you would have a point. However, the police followed procedure to try lesser methods of force before resorting to the taser. It was his physical resistance to arrest that got him zapped.My question to you was, "What should the police do when they have a suspect who refuses to let himself be arrested?" What is you answer to that?
Note that shortly before he was tasered (1:49-1:52 on the first link), he had his right arm free that an officer was trying to work into position to handcuff. He then lifts himself up to beg not to be "tased" on his other arm.
It's quite clear that they tasered him because they couldn't restrain him. Note that while he's being tasered, they work his arms into position and then release him from the pin they have on him. Afterwards, he's shown being led away with his hand cuffed behind his back.
If they were already cuffed behind his back, you couldn't have seen his right arm in front of his body before he tried to sit upright. While there is a possibility that he was cuffed in the six seconds before the shock was delivered, it's inconsistent with the motions of the cops during the shock (where they struggle with arms and then release).
Why do I have the feeling the internal review will come up with the answer that the police didn't use excessive force?
Because this was nearly a picture-perfect, by-the-book arrest. They followed all procedure properly and only used the taser in a situation in which (a) it was authorized, and (b) the subject was clearly warned that it would be a consequence of continuing to make their arrest otherwise impossible.
Anyone who even in the slightest bit familiar with police procedures as well as the difficult balance between the safety of the subject and the safety of the officers would come to the same conclusion.
Since when is being the center of attention punishable by taser?
It's not. However, violently resisting police who have no gentler means of subduing you is the real issue here. It's not being used as a means of punishment; it's being used as a tool to subdue.
There has to be a means for law enforcement to make sure the people face responsibility for their actions without being unduly injured in the process. Would you rather we return to the days using of nightsticks and fists to deal with people trying to wrestle themselves away?
Did you watch the video? They had him on the ground and were trying to cuff him, but he was struggling against it. As you should be able to see, it's a lot harder for multiple people bigger than the person they're trying to arrest to actually cuff a guy. Watch the video. They can't get his arms into position even with a guy on each limb.
The lady warned him quite calmly that if he didn't stop resisting that they were going to have to taser him nearly a full minute before they did (see 1:10-1:20 on the first link).
Tasering him was the only way to make him stop struggling short of beating him senseless. Which method of incapacitating him would you prefer?
Frankly, I see nothing here but proper police procedure being followed. The cops:
- Tried to gently lead him away. He tried to break free while continuing to cause a disturbance.
- One officer brandishes a weapon but puts it away once he determines the student isn't an armed threat.
- At this point it is clear that he isn't going to go peacefully.
- Tried to pin him on the ground and cuff him in accordance with standard procedures for restraining a suspect who is putting up a struggle.
- Warned him in advance that they'd have to taser him if he continued to resist. He did.
- Tasered him just enough to get the cuffs on and then led him away.
Does anyone have a better suggestion of what to do with someone causing a public disturbance other than just not bother trying to prevent it?I always find it sad when the guy who misses the joke and retells the joke like he's the one that's clever gets the mod points.
With xmame, I have thousands of classic arcade games at my fingertips.
Yeah, but what if you'd like to have some decent games to play without breaking the law?
The WOT was one of the best series ever, for most of its run. Though I have to admit, I did give up on it a few books back, when I realized it took nearly the whole next book for me to get back up to speed on the myriad subplots, and that the series was progressing more and more slowly each book.
How can a series be one of the best series ever if it makes you give up part-way through it? Do you regularly abandon good series without finishing them?
I've read a few interviews where he said that the ending had basically been written for years...
My friends who read the WoT series and I always had a theory that he'd written the ending years ago, and that in some strange, literary mockery of Zeno's Paradox, he just wrote the plot half-way there each time he churned out a new book.
It certainly seemed like some sort of plot time-dilation was happening in the last few books by their accounts.
The consensus is that breastfeeding is good, and circumcision isn't beneficial.
Actually, there's no consensus on the latter. First, circumcision is actually beneficial in helping to prevent HIV by removing tissue that acts as an easy point of entry. Second, a small (40 person) study was performed that showed that strongly suggests that sensitivity is not significantly impaired in circumcised men despite commonly held beliefs to the contrary.
Why? It's probably a lot cheaper than the other hospitals. Not to mention that at the very least it gives people a placebo effect and probably teaches them some reasonable lessons about respecting their body and respecting nature, which are valuable lessons.
The same exact thing could be said for tribal medicine men and other shamans.
Should your government fund them as part of their healthcare system too?
Which reminds me, that "Head On" junk advertised on TV is homeopathic.
Wait! You mean those irritating ads are for something that isn't even real medicine? That's it! I no longer have any reason not to burn down their company for those awful ads.
Ar-son. Apply directly to the headquarters.
Ar-son. Apply directly to the headquarters.
Ar-son. Apply directly to the headquarters.
I'm sorry, but you're going to have to explain in detail to me how picking (in the heyday of both games) 1st or 2nd edition AD&D over Tunnels & Trolls shows any sort of sophistication. The old AD&D ruleset was a complete mess whereas T&T offered a much simpler and more playable set of rules.
Personally, I'd argue that a willingness to try games from less well-known publishers like Flying Buffalo instead of just following the mainstream shows a little more "geek sophistication." Besides, T&T is actually fun. Jar Jar never was.
For even mentioning that movie, your Geek Factor suffers a -10 hit.
You're RPG equivelant is now "Tunnels and Trolls", and your Star Wars equivelant is set to "Jar Jar".
Are you knocking Tunnels and Trolls? T&T was a great "beer and pretzels" game of yesteryear. The rules were dirt simple in comparison to the fantasy RPGs of its day, and it didn't take itself seriously. What other game has spells like "Take That, You Fiend," giant squirrels as dungeon monsters, and modules with names like "Rat on a Stick" where you could either kill the monsters or set up a fast-food franchise for them. The T&T games I played back in the day were a heck of a lot more fun than the old D&D games.
(Personally, given its age, I consider even knowing about T&T to be bonus geek points, but putting it in the same category as Jar Jar shows failure.)
Personally, I locked onto to the "graphically intense" part of that comment.
Doesn't seem to me that thousands of stock-trend charts and graphs really count, unless you're making a terrible pun.
I know its not easy getting info on wireless chips, but time would be better spent working on something like that.
I'll ignore for a moment the fact that you're essentially making the same argument as "Why aren't all scientists (from solid-state physicists to cognitive neuroscientists) working on a cure for cancer instead of [perceived frivolous research in the news]?" You're ignoring the different kinds of expertise that go into a complex field of work like kernel development.
Instead, I'm just going to focus on your assertion that support for a few more wireless chipsets than the abundant choices we have today is more important than fixing problems in the most central and fundamental task of the kernel -- a task that even the most minimalist microkernels consider necessary to put into the microkernel.
This is simply hogwash. Scheduling affects every single part of the system, and it's a major factor in the perceived and real performance of a system. Fixes to the scheduler will affect how a user enjoys their system over the entire life of the system whereas a missing wireless driver affects them once -- at purchase time.
Furthermore, not all Linux systems have wireless networking. Adding more wireless drivers is going to be useless in nearly all server and most embedded uses. You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the purpose of Linux is to provide a good desktop or laptop experience. There are considerably more application domains that Linux operates in.
And frankly...
Just look at all the live CD's out there and how many can connect to wifi? Ubuntu and not much else.
This is not the kernel developers' problem. They've provided the functionality as evidenced by the fact that Ubuntu can do it. This is up to the distro developers to work on. Again, you make the mistake of assuming that all developers are equal and interchangeable and that they all have the same responsibilities in bringing the product to you, the unpaying customer.
Wow. Three troll mods after one funny mod for pointing out the hypocrisy of claiming that calling kilograms a unit of weight implies US pound-bias when everyone else in the world measures their weight in kilograms?
Yeesh. I doubt we had THAT tough of a crowd here last night. Someone had an axe to grind.
The kilogram is not a measure of weight, but mass. Silly pound-centric editors :p
Dear Metric Using Countries,
Please call us back when the majority of your citizens are measuring their weight in Newtons instead of Kilograms, and we'll consider addressing your charge of Pound-related bias.
Sincerely,
The People of the United States of America
One good thing about all these things is that, pretty soon people will be so horrified by the user experience in the Windows, they will be pushed into adopting Linux.
...Not just a highly sensitive portion of the market, but the market as a whole?
Can you think of maybe one counter-example where intrusive advertising was forced on the mass market, and the mass market responded by forever rejecting that form of advertising in both that product and any future products?
I can't.
Instead, this will probably just inure the public to intrusive ads while using a computer just like we've become used to ads in every other part of our lives.
After all it is the well integrated pop-up blocker that created the initial mass of downloads for Firefox.
This is true, but I wouldn't rest too much on the idea that Firefox downloads have been massive. Firefox accounts for around 10% of the market as opposed to the roughly 85% that Internet Explorer takes. Users have by and large not bought into the need for pop-up blockers, and if most people were using the blocker pushed onto them in XP SP2, then we wouldn't even see pop-up ads around anymore.
Never underestimate the willingness of the public to put up with ads when the alternative is to spend a little more money or make a trivial effort to defeat them.