"It looks like the family of a Texas murder victim has rushed to settle with 12-year-old Timmy McGee, after serving him with a lawsuit on Monday. It looks like her single mother will be paying a $2,000 fine to the family for her son's cold-blooded killing, which he had thought was legal. Said Timmy: 'I am sorry for what I have done. I love humans and don't want to hurt the people I love.' What a relief this must be for families of murder victims everywhere."
On VoIP: "We've seen it time and time again, the government is not very good at handling technology. They inevitably screw it up. They overregulate and kill whatever was good to begin with. They should keep their grubby hands off!"
On Microsoft: "The government needs to DO SOMETHING about this EVIL MEGACORP already!!!"
On illegal file sharing: "Copyright law needs to be changed to fit the times, I should be able to copy whatever files I want, information wants to be free after all, and that's all this music and video stuff is anyway, information."
In summary: The government needs to do what's good for ME!! MEMEMEMEMEME!! Don't get me wrong, I love Slashdot and the people who post here - where else can I get comedy like this day after day!
"Hmm, we need to squeeze this G4 into a laptop somehow, hmm, well it's pin-compatible with the G3 but if we just slapped it inside the Pismo and shrunk a few parts down a little bit, where would be the fun in that?"
It's only on the rarest of occasions that I actually HEAR a whooshing sound when a point someone makes goes right over someone else's head. But this is one of those occasions.
"Following the news should be a priority." "People are making *bad* decisions." "They are not reacting to things that they should be reacting to." Hmm, sounds good - wait - bad decisions? What's a bad decision? Should be reacting to? What does "should" mean and who defines what it means? The answer is that it means whatever be-fan wants it to mean. Fuck that. Some people are going to vote for whichever candidate has the best tie. I don't like it any more than you do, but there is no way to filter these people out of the voting process without also infringing on others' rights. And I won't stand for that.
I'm glad you acknowledge that mainstream media does not do a very good job of covering this stuff. Politicians are lying bastards, and CNN/MSNBC/Fox News is not going to paint me an accurate picture of Howard Dean whether it's a week before the election or yesterday. So why should I even bother watching? "They may not do a good job in their coverage, but at least they will give you the name of a Dem presidential candidate." Fair enough, but your test does not test to see if people can accurately describe the candidates they name. If I learned of Dean from Fox News, while at the same time learning that he's (in FN's words) an arrogant communist spawn of Satan, I would still be able to pass your silly test, yet I would be even more disgraceful as a voter than someone who isn't political (and would fail your test) but is skilled at cutting through spin and media BS and voting responsibly.
Somehow it doesn't seem to me that "nyah nyah, you can't pass the test, so you can't vote, nyah nyah" is a realistic way to combat voter apathy. If you're upset about people not caring about the democratic process, why not channel this into a more constructive cause - a cause that would actually do something to help the situation rather than shut even more people out. Rather than spending money and effort administering poll tests, why not spend the same money and effort getting the word out on the candidates and their positions and encouraging people to study up and exercise their right to vote.
It's not a question of time, it's a question of priority. Everybody has time during the day for something of high priority, no matter what it is or how busy they are. The thing is that the 2004 election just isn't a very high priority for most people yet. Myself included. And I don't see why it should be. I DON'T CARE about it yet. It's not even 2004! There is an obituary section in the paper every single day, but I can't recall a single person listed in it, EVER, even if I may study their names. The reason I can't is because I don't care. And I won't START caring until these anonymous dead people start affecting my life. It's the same way with the Dem presidential candidates. They WILL be relevant to me in the future, at which point I will pay them more attention, but until then, I couldn't care less. And you want to take away my voting rights because of this! It's scary to think that your poll quiz would give favoritism to political junkies - most of whom are idiotic blind partisan cognitive dissonance poster children - over people who work and lead normal lives and skim the paper and watch the local news every now and then but let their attention drift when/if the 2004 campaign is mentioned 13 minutes in behind all the other, more important news.
I find it hard to believe you're afraid that "people have become terribly apolitical" when you endorse an idea that would make people MUCH MORE apolitical by shutting HUGE SWATHS - that's MILLIONS of otherwise eligible voters - out of the democratic process. Unless you are naive enough to think that a fear of losing their voting rights would stir them into complying with your ridiculous new rules. (Obviously it would stir a lot of people into something, but rather than encouraging them to play by your rules, I think it would more likely encourage them to hold your head up on a pike as a warning to anyone else who wants to fuck with their rights.)
And there already are mechanisms to ensure "minimal amounts" (whatever you mean by that) of voter responsibility. Citizenship tests for naturalized citizens, saturation media and word-of-mouth attention to the election come mid-late 2004 for the rest. Also, if you want to vote, you do have to register, AND trek down to the polling place and wait in line, which in itself weeds out most apathetic/apolitical people. I'm surprised to hear that you support "mechanisms to ensure government responsibility," given that support of this absurd election literacy test of yours would require blind faith in the government's innate good in order to prevent a wholesale slide into a one-party aristocracy.
However, if you can't name a single democratic presidential candidate, you haven't watched the news in the last month.
Either that, or I can remember what they look like but I can't recall any names at the time I happen to be asked the question, or I just change the channel or mute it every time they come on TV because I'm sick of hearing of the 2004 election when it's not even 2004 yet. Or maybe I work 12 hours a day to support a family and I don't have time to read the paper or watch the local news or subscribe to cable to watch CNN. (Yet I still know what I want out of a politician and I will get around to doing the necessary research before the election - and I have PLENTY of time to get around to that.) What I'm trying to get across is that there is a difference between "watching the news" and both remembering AND being able to recall, when prompted, selective arbitrarily chosen facts from the news. The key word there is "arbitrarily." Just look at what you said: "I see it perfectly acceptable to restrict someone's voting rights when they don't even show a minimal capability or desire to vote responsibly." Now think of how easy it would be for whichever party is in power to change the definition of words like "acceptable," "show," "minimal capability," "desire," and "responsibly" to fit their whims. What you'll ultimately end up with is a system where the question becomes biased and all responses that do not demonstrate favoratism for the ruling party disqualify one from voting. Poll literacy tests are inherently ANTI-DEMOCRATIC because their sole purpose is to disenfranchise a specific group of people. Yeah, I agree that watching/reading the news frequently and getting involved in politics is a good idea and that everybody should do it. But the moment you decide to make the ability to vote contingent upon passing a test for this, you're shooting your own democratic ideals in the head.
"If you can't name a single democratic presidential candiate, then you obviously don't watch the news. If you don't watch the news, you're not doing your duty as a citizen, and deserve whatever you get."
What the fuuuuuuck! Great logic there. Where is it written that if I don't watch the news, I'm not doing my duty as a citizen? Not being able to name a Dem presidential candidate 13 MONTHS BEFORE the election does NOT signify a minimal capability or desire to vote responsibly. Pop quiz, hotshot - here are some questions that involve highly important international and domestic affairs, and all the answers to them have been in the news recently. If you don't know the answers to any of them, you are obviously a brain-dead retarded moron who probably can't even walk and chew gum at the same time and therefore should not be allowed to vote, period. (According to you)
- Name one member of Israel's knesset, and name the majority and one minority party in the knesset. (IMPORTANT!) - Name the Palestinian prime minister and his relation to Arafat - Name the two most popular religions in Indonesia. - Of all the national missile defense tests to date, how many have been successes and how many have been failures? - Name the president/PM/leader of each of the following: US, Canada, Brazil, France, UK, Germany, Norway, Japan, China, Denmark, Myanmar, Libya, Ghana, Liberia, Argentina, Mexico, Australia, Greece, Chad. If you can't name the person, just give a synopsis of his party and his general position. - Name and summarize the position of every single candidate on the ballot for the US presidency, and also name their party. (After all, if you can't name every candidate, how do you know the one you're voting for is the best one for you?)
You're uninformed. I'm uninformed. Everybody is uninformed to some degree, but that doesn't prevent us from voting, nor should it.
Apple doesn't shun other platforms. QT is already available on the platforms that matter (Windows/Mac). Linux users don't need QT Player because they have Mplayer.
Anyway, can you imagine what the slashdot response would be if Apple were to port QuickTime Player to Linux? "Thanks a lot Apple for not making a Gnome version," or "thanks a lot for not making a KDE version," or "gee thanks, Apple, for forcing YOUR UGLY UI on us, and not allowing themeing, you FASCIST CORPORATE BASTARDS," or "GOD DAMN YOU APPLE, I can't control it via the command line," or "fucking apple idiots, how come you didn't make a special optimized RPM for my overclocked athlon running Redhat 8.0 with the low-latency kernel patch, you inconsiderate pricks."
I think Apple's programmers have better things to do than listen to cheap geeks whine about shit.
You should this, you should that. If we ban everyone who can't name a Dem presidential candidate 13 months before the fucking election, does that mean we also have to ban the self-righteous elitist knobheads (like yourself) who don't understand the concept of taxation without representation? If so then I'm all for it.
A million people around the world could boycott and the RIAA would barely feel it. And nobody is scaring people into buying music. They're scaring people into not infringing on copyrights. There is a difference. (You have the option of not listening to, and not paying for, the RIAA's music)
Because I don't want _any_ application kill/suspend any other without my explicit "order" to do so ?
Why not? This would be a setting that around 99% of mplayer's users would find preferable. How about "if you don't want it as a default, just put it into your ~/.mplayer/config and forget about it," seeing as how loads of mplayer users are probably coming from Windows/Mac environments in which something so stupid and/or highly specialized as that would never be the default. These is a video player we're dealing with here, not a god damn philosophy of the civil liberties of software processes.
Re:Other recent releases: Totem, GNOME 2 media pla
on
MPlayer 1.0Pre1 Is Here
·
· Score: 1, Funny
Now the million dollar question: Why isn't this the default?
At its primary goal, Mozilla never really did succeed. Opening the Navigator suite's source code was Netscape's last flailing hope against IE's obvious future domination of the desktop, and it didn't work. Netscape had a majority market share then, and has around what, 5% now? Mozilla is a good cross-platform browser and all, so I guess you could say it's successful in that way, but if the Mozilla Project ever wanted to be successful against MS, they should have narrowed their scope and focused on a kickass Windows/Mac Netscape 5.0 rather than reinventing the wheel (in the case of XUL), inventing new wheels (in the case of Bugzilla), and making sure their browser ran on every obscure platform under the sun. (Who the cares whether or not Mozilla runs on HP-UX besides like 23 people on the entire earth?)
Slashdot Mirror
No.
Yes, go after the supply. It's working great in the war on drugs
I thought the RIAA was an evil fascist megacorp that barely gave a dime to its artists? Make up your mind slashmorons.
"It looks like the family of a Texas murder victim has rushed to settle with 12-year-old Timmy McGee, after serving him with a lawsuit on Monday. It looks like her single mother will be paying a $2,000 fine to the family for her son's cold-blooded killing, which he had thought was legal. Said Timmy: 'I am sorry for what I have done. I love humans and don't want to hurt the people I love.' What a relief this must be for families of murder victims everywhere."
Nobody likes girls named Alexa :(
On Microsoft: Enforce the laws!!
On mass copyright infringement (er, file sharing): Don't enforce the laws!!
Your voice is sexy. Are you available?
That's a good idea, but first you will have to explain how to get a monosyllabic word out of "voip."
What's this? A comment that makes sense? You're not wanted here, go back to Plastic or wherever you came from.
On VoIP: "We've seen it time and time again, the government is not very good at handling technology. They inevitably screw it up. They overregulate and kill whatever was good to begin with. They should keep their grubby hands off!"
On Microsoft: "The government needs to DO SOMETHING about this EVIL MEGACORP already!!!"
On illegal file sharing: "Copyright law needs to be changed to fit the times, I should be able to copy whatever files I want, information wants to be free after all, and that's all this music and video stuff is anyway, information."
In summary: The government needs to do what's good for ME!! MEMEMEMEMEME!! Don't get me wrong, I love Slashdot and the people who post here - where else can I get comedy like this day after day!
"Hmm, we need to squeeze this G4 into a laptop somehow, hmm, well it's pin-compatible with the G3 but if we just slapped it inside the Pismo and shrunk a few parts down a little bit, where would be the fun in that?"
They can fit a 160kbps mp3 into an 80k AAC just as well, so who cares about ogg? And what does games using ogg internally have to do with the iPod?
It's only on the rarest of occasions that I actually HEAR a whooshing sound when a point someone makes goes right over someone else's head. But this is one of those occasions.
"Following the news should be a priority." "People are making *bad* decisions." "They are not reacting to things that they should be reacting to." Hmm, sounds good - wait - bad decisions? What's a bad decision? Should be reacting to? What does "should" mean and who defines what it means? The answer is that it means whatever be-fan wants it to mean. Fuck that. Some people are going to vote for whichever candidate has the best tie. I don't like it any more than you do, but there is no way to filter these people out of the voting process without also infringing on others' rights. And I won't stand for that.
I'm glad you acknowledge that mainstream media does not do a very good job of covering this stuff. Politicians are lying bastards, and CNN/MSNBC/Fox News is not going to paint me an accurate picture of Howard Dean whether it's a week before the election or yesterday. So why should I even bother watching? "They may not do a good job in their coverage, but at least they will give you the name of a Dem presidential candidate." Fair enough, but your test does not test to see if people can accurately describe the candidates they name. If I learned of Dean from Fox News, while at the same time learning that he's (in FN's words) an arrogant communist spawn of Satan, I would still be able to pass your silly test, yet I would be even more disgraceful as a voter than someone who isn't political (and would fail your test) but is skilled at cutting through spin and media BS and voting responsibly.
Somehow it doesn't seem to me that "nyah nyah, you can't pass the test, so you can't vote, nyah nyah" is a realistic way to combat voter apathy. If you're upset about people not caring about the democratic process, why not channel this into a more constructive cause - a cause that would actually do something to help the situation rather than shut even more people out. Rather than spending money and effort administering poll tests, why not spend the same money and effort getting the word out on the candidates and their positions and encouraging people to study up and exercise their right to vote.
It's not a question of time, it's a question of priority. Everybody has time during the day for something of high priority, no matter what it is or how busy they are. The thing is that the 2004 election just isn't a very high priority for most people yet. Myself included. And I don't see why it should be. I DON'T CARE about it yet. It's not even 2004! There is an obituary section in the paper every single day, but I can't recall a single person listed in it, EVER, even if I may study their names. The reason I can't is because I don't care. And I won't START caring until these anonymous dead people start affecting my life. It's the same way with the Dem presidential candidates. They WILL be relevant to me in the future, at which point I will pay them more attention, but until then, I couldn't care less. And you want to take away my voting rights because of this! It's scary to think that your poll quiz would give favoritism to political junkies - most of whom are idiotic blind partisan cognitive dissonance poster children - over people who work and lead normal lives and skim the paper and watch the local news every now and then but let their attention drift when/if the 2004 campaign is mentioned 13 minutes in behind all the other, more important news.
I find it hard to believe you're afraid that "people have become terribly apolitical" when you endorse an idea that would make people MUCH MORE apolitical by shutting HUGE SWATHS - that's MILLIONS of otherwise eligible voters - out of the democratic process. Unless you are naive enough to think that a fear of losing their voting rights would stir them into complying with your ridiculous new rules. (Obviously it would stir a lot of people into something, but rather than encouraging them to play by your rules, I think it would more likely encourage them to hold your head up on a pike as a warning to anyone else who wants to fuck with their rights.)
And there already are mechanisms to ensure "minimal amounts" (whatever you mean by that) of voter responsibility. Citizenship tests for naturalized citizens, saturation media and word-of-mouth attention to the election come mid-late 2004 for the rest. Also, if you want to vote, you do have to register, AND trek down to the polling place and wait in line, which in itself weeds out most apathetic/apolitical people. I'm surprised to hear that you support "mechanisms to ensure government responsibility," given that support of this absurd election literacy test of yours would require blind faith in the government's innate good in order to prevent a wholesale slide into a one-party aristocracy.
Either that, or I can remember what they look like but I can't recall any names at the time I happen to be asked the question, or I just change the channel or mute it every time they come on TV because I'm sick of hearing of the 2004 election when it's not even 2004 yet. Or maybe I work 12 hours a day to support a family and I don't have time to read the paper or watch the local news or subscribe to cable to watch CNN. (Yet I still know what I want out of a politician and I will get around to doing the necessary research before the election - and I have PLENTY of time to get around to that.) What I'm trying to get across is that there is a difference between "watching the news" and both remembering AND being able to recall, when prompted, selective arbitrarily chosen facts from the news. The key word there is "arbitrarily." Just look at what you said: "I see it perfectly acceptable to restrict someone's voting rights when they don't even show a minimal capability or desire to vote responsibly." Now think of how easy it would be for whichever party is in power to change the definition of words like "acceptable," "show," "minimal capability," "desire," and "responsibly" to fit their whims. What you'll ultimately end up with is a system where the question becomes biased and all responses that do not demonstrate favoratism for the ruling party disqualify one from voting. Poll literacy tests are inherently ANTI-DEMOCRATIC because their sole purpose is to disenfranchise a specific group of people. Yeah, I agree that watching/reading the news frequently and getting involved in politics is a good idea and that everybody should do it. But the moment you decide to make the ability to vote contingent upon passing a test for this, you're shooting your own democratic ideals in the head.
"If you can't name a single democratic presidential candiate, then you obviously don't watch the news. If you don't watch the news, you're not doing your duty as a citizen, and deserve whatever you get."
What the fuuuuuuck! Great logic there. Where is it written that if I don't watch the news, I'm not doing my duty as a citizen? Not being able to name a Dem presidential candidate 13 MONTHS BEFORE the election does NOT signify a minimal capability or desire to vote responsibly. Pop quiz, hotshot - here are some questions that involve highly important international and domestic affairs, and all the answers to them have been in the news recently. If you don't know the answers to any of them, you are obviously a brain-dead retarded moron who probably can't even walk and chew gum at the same time and therefore should not be allowed to vote, period. (According to you)
- Name one member of Israel's knesset, and name the majority and one minority party in the knesset. (IMPORTANT!)
- Name the Palestinian prime minister and his relation to Arafat
- Name the two most popular religions in Indonesia.
- Of all the national missile defense tests to date, how many have been successes and how many have been failures?
- Name the president/PM/leader of each of the following: US, Canada, Brazil, France, UK, Germany, Norway, Japan, China, Denmark, Myanmar, Libya, Ghana, Liberia, Argentina, Mexico, Australia, Greece, Chad. If you can't name the person, just give a synopsis of his party and his general position.
- Name and summarize the position of every single candidate on the ballot for the US presidency, and also name their party. (After all, if you can't name every candidate, how do you know the one you're voting for is the best one for you?)
You're uninformed. I'm uninformed. Everybody is uninformed to some degree, but that doesn't prevent us from voting, nor should it.
Anyway, can you imagine what the slashdot response would be if Apple were to port QuickTime Player to Linux? "Thanks a lot Apple for not making a Gnome version," or "thanks a lot for not making a KDE version," or "gee thanks, Apple, for forcing YOUR UGLY UI on us, and not allowing themeing, you FASCIST CORPORATE BASTARDS," or "GOD DAMN YOU APPLE, I can't control it via the command line," or "fucking apple idiots, how come you didn't make a special optimized RPM for my overclocked athlon running Redhat 8.0 with the low-latency kernel patch, you inconsiderate pricks."
I think Apple's programmers have better things to do than listen to cheap geeks whine about shit.
You should this, you should that. If we ban everyone who can't name a Dem presidential candidate 13 months before the fucking election, does that mean we also have to ban the self-righteous elitist knobheads (like yourself) who don't understand the concept of taxation without representation? If so then I'm all for it.
A million people around the world could boycott and the RIAA would barely feel it. And nobody is scaring people into buying music. They're scaring people into not infringing on copyrights. There is a difference. (You have the option of not listening to, and not paying for, the RIAA's music)
similar
How do you type that shit so fast?
Why not? This would be a setting that around 99% of mplayer's users would find preferable. How about "if you don't want it as a default, just put it into your ~/.mplayer/config and forget about it," seeing as how loads of mplayer users are probably coming from Windows/Mac environments in which something so stupid and/or highly specialized as that would never be the default. These is a video player we're dealing with here, not a god damn philosophy of the civil liberties of software processes.
Now the million dollar question: Why isn't this the default?
At its primary goal, Mozilla never really did succeed. Opening the Navigator suite's source code was Netscape's last flailing hope against IE's obvious future domination of the desktop, and it didn't work. Netscape had a majority market share then, and has around what, 5% now? Mozilla is a good cross-platform browser and all, so I guess you could say it's successful in that way, but if the Mozilla Project ever wanted to be successful against MS, they should have narrowed their scope and focused on a kickass Windows/Mac Netscape 5.0 rather than reinventing the wheel (in the case of XUL), inventing new wheels (in the case of Bugzilla), and making sure their browser ran on every obscure platform under the sun. (Who the cares whether or not Mozilla runs on HP-UX besides like 23 people on the entire earth?)
Mozilla: Geekish success, real worldish failure