The best part about it is finding out that "fanboi" is a racial slur. I honest to god had NO idea. I thought it was just an irritating spelling corruption like "sk8r boi." No mention of it on Wikipedia, or anything.
While I agree with you that age doesn't necessarily mean "suddenly desirous of much gore!" I think the GP's lava comment was referencing the first Super Mario Bros. game. At the end of every world, you could get past the boss one of two ways: Fire power, or hitting the axe-like thing to cause the bridge to fall out from under him. In the latter case, he fell into the lava.
And -- who are you to say how another person should spend their LEISURE time? Is his playing the Wii personally hurting you?
No?
Then FUCK OFF.
I seriously don't understand this predisposition people have against other people's entertainment. Do you watch sports? Aren't those games played by kids? What do YOU do for fun? Other than post stupid shit on/. anonymously, anyway. Too scared to post with an account? What -- not mature enough?
Seriously, what's an "adult" way to spend ones time? Jerking off to porn on the internet?
I disagree. Not with the part about competition being good, but that the PS3 failing will hurt consumers. No moreso than the Gamecube and N64 doing badly hurt consumers.
Sony has held the number one spot since the Playstation came out. By your argument, seeing Vista fail would be bad for consumers. Seeing Sony lose exclusivity and their #1 spot is NOT going to hurt consumers. It's going to level the playing field a bit more.
Nintendo went from the top dog to losing to Sony with the N64, and they came around with the Gamecube -- it didn't do as well as it should have because of the lost developer support. But then came along the Wii. Sometimes companies have to royally screw up before they come up with something good. Sony's mistake this generation is that they didn't really do anything. They just sort of made this really powerful machine and expected to float on their #1 spot. Maybe if they're having to fight to regain their place, they'll come out with something interesting and new.
As it is, the Playstation 3 isn't interesting. It's just powerful.
And, Sega failed miserably, and it didn't hurt the gaming industry much at all. There were still awesome games on the Super Nintendo, it didn't cost some ridiculous price, and neither did the games. Nintendo has dominated the handheld market, and the Gameboy has always had really interesting, addictive, and cheap games. The DS is innovative and cheap. They continue to dominate without any real competition there, and the market isn't hurting for fun games. Sony's dominance during the PS1/PS2 generations didn't stop fun games from coming out for Nintendo's systems (granted, almost all of them were first party games).
I don't think the PS3 will "fail." But I do think they're going to continue to get their butts handed to them. Their dominance is hopefully at an end, bringing us to a much more competitive market.
On a more personal note, after the way Sony has behaved over the last few years, I'm happy to see them getting stuffed into a locker by Nintendo.
I tried to connect to my home server from work to check my e-mail and found that the connection was slower than a 14.4k dialup modem. I ssh'd in, found the source of the traffic and promptly shut down all direct-to-Internet traffic from his machine and poof! No more link saturation!
One day, seemingly at random, sites would refuse to load, the internet was slow and sluggish. I thought it was just my provider sucking ass, because that occasionally happens. When, the next day, it didn't stop, I asked if anyone else plugged into the home network was downloading. The answers were all no. Another day passed, and I noticed that it only sucked ass when my sister's boyfriend had his laptop plugged in to the router. So when he leaves, he leaves the laptop plugged in and on. Why would he do this, I wonder? So I check his laptop, which isn't in any way secured from me accessing it physically.
He's got bittorrent going on, and he has no restriction on his upload speeds, and they are literally maxing out all of our available upload. I check the numbers, divide by three (the number of computers on the network), and set his maximum upload to half that through the client. Did the same for download: took the max, divided by three, gave him half. I never said anything to him, so for all I know, even now he's got a crappy upload speed. It's been over a year since I did this, since then, I've changed providers and more than doubled my available bandwidth. But the way I see it, he point blank lied to me about downloading using *my* connection and *my* net sucked until I figured out what it was. So I hope he's enjoying his 50kb/s maximum download in bittorrent.
Had I thought of it, I should have changed his screensaver to "marquee" and had it say "At least put up a screensaver password, numb nuts!"...And passworded it.
He posts anonymously on/. with his elitist attitude about entertainment, and that makes him mature.
Some people enjoy pointing out how "immature" or "childish" someone else is, or their choice of entertainment. Generally, in conversation, these people also point out how mature they are all the time -- it's insecurity, like those homophobic wankers who point out how "gay" this or that is all the time. Basic projection and insecurities.
To me, it's a true sign of creativity to make something enjoyable by different ages. It's very hard to make something that children can understand and enjoy that also captures the attention of adults. Anon probably hates on Harry Potter*, but it's "immature" entertainment that many people of varying ages enjoy. The Wii does this: People of all ages enjoy it. It's not aiming to be the same as other consoles. I think this pisses off fanboys of other consoles, like the Anon in this case.
Simple fact is, the Wii is selling, despite not being the elite graphical engine in the bunch. Because it appeals to a larger audience than the PS3 or X-Box (at the 1 year mark, see where the Wii stands compared to the 360 and PS3 sales -- November isn't that far off...). This doesn't mean the other consoles are bad (though I dislike Sony and think they really screwed up this generation), just different. Some people are just weird and have to hate anything that competes with their precious. Anon is, with all probability, a rabid Playstation fan who is extremely pissed that the little old Wii is kicking the snot out of the PS3. It's no longer "in" to hate on Nintendo -- grow up.
*I've never read a word of Harry Potter, myself, but I don't hate it.
psst, I don't own an X-Box, or a PS3, but if I was offered a choice of one free, I'd take the 360, and here's why: BioShock, Grand Theft Auto, the possibility of FF13 NOT being exclusive, oh, and so I'd get my MS Fanboy card so I'd be allowed in on the meetings where they decide what to bitch about Sony next.;)
Actually, it is, but it didn't make it into the finalists for whatever reason.
I understand that the Super Jesus statue basically made it there because of locals voting for it. I just don't find the Eiffel Tower, which is a glorified radio tower, all that impressive, either, which is what I initially replied to; it's a big metal stick. It's not even pretty, and they painted the thing brown. My argument was simply "Big Rock Jesus impresses me more than Big Radio Metal Stick."
I think both (and Rushmore) are too modern for a list containing things like Machu Picchu, the Colosseum, etc. Neuschwanstein Castle is the "newest" wonder in the final 21 to be extremely impressive, in my opinion.
Yeah but Super Jesus (not to be confused with Fire Jesus or Raccoon Jesus -- and tanooki Jesus is right out) is built out of stone, the Eiffel tower is built out of metal (too lazy to look up the exact composition). Carving something out of stone is a lot harder than putting together pieces of metal. Especially carving something out of stone and ending up with a seven hundred ton statue. Compared to a giant metal stick.
However, the list irritates me, but not because of Super Jesus. I'd have a different seven, with a few of these on it, were it up to me. But the way the list was handled in such a poor way? It just loses all appeal. If they want to make anything official, poll people in a more formal, less sleezy "you can SMS vote as much as you want!" sort of way. Plus, what's this honorary Wonder shit? Either the Pyramids weren't going to make it and someone bitched to them, or they were going to make it and someone didn't want them to be one of the official seven. Whichever way it happened, it was stupid.
Also, who actually HEARD of this thing? That's a problem, too. I should have been advised I could vote-stuff for Angkor Wat with all the other cheaters.
The Midwest feeds the nation, the South keeps values
South has a fair amount of food growing, too. Not to mention two major ports, and when the expansions are complete, the 2nd biggest oil refinery in the US -- in other words, making your gasoline. You can also see that the "poor" states tend to give more:
New Hampshire is ranked 50th based on how much they have versus how much they give. I'm actually kind of surprised; given the people I know in New Jersey, I figured it would be dead last.
Cotton, oranges, peanuts (try and avoid all food with peanut products...).
One of the reasons other states tend to use up more "federal aid": New England has relatively high property values and costs of living, so all the poor people are better off elsewhere. A few generations of that, and it's no wonder. You don't have the many welfare recipients because, y'know, you basically drove them out with high cost of living.
Believe me, there are just as many people who would gladly do without New England in the "poor" part of the country as there are people in New England who think they'd be better off without the rest of us.
(And, just to be a bit of an asshole here to go along with that stupid rant: We tried to leave once, asshole. You sent an army to keep us.)
That situation is hardly comparable to "program that searches users hard drives."
Legalities aside, this should very well be a public relations nightmare for them, and so of course they want to distance themselves. The fact they're likely to get away with it only irks me slightly less than the original story.
You could get child pornography through Kazaa, too. Does that mean it's being "hosted" by Kazaa?
Also, it's not as simple as you claim, anyway: You have to download the torrent, run the torrent file in your bittorrent client of choice, let it download, and THEN you get your child porn. Assuming, of course, that TPB has torrents of child porn. I've yet to see any evidence of that, but then, I'm not about to go looking for child porn, either.
I've been using Linux in a dual boot setup since January of last year. Early January, somewhere around 11-12th or so. Despite being dual boot, I spend very little time in Windows at all -- a few hours every month, tops. I installed Slackware at first, and that lasted until mid-August. My printer inexplicably stopped working, and I couldn't get it to start again. I tried searching for why, I used Google, forums, everything, and nothing seemed to work. After a few hours and getting fed up, I simply backed up my data and installed Ubuntu.
I've not regretted the decision in almost a year. Everything I do, I can do in Linux, with the exception of a few games (and I haven't poked around much with making WINE work). I like OpenOffice enough to use it, I like Firefox, and GAIM (now pidgin) was the client I used in Windows for instant messaging anyway. Thunderbird works for my mail client. The add/remove programs menu, and Synaptic, make life easy. There is pretty much a program for everything. MythTV likes my TV-tuner, and so the little TV I still watch, I watch at my convenience. Of the desktop environments, I like Gnome (sorry, Linus), so Ubuntu defaulting to it was a plus.
The biggest pain was getting X to the right resolution because it defaulted to 1024x768, and I prefer 1280x1024 (it's also the native resolution of my monitor). I had to edit a text file, which is about as complicated as it got. Having spent almost eight months in Slackware, however, made this something of a breeze. Oh, and the printer that inexplicably refused to work in Slackware? Ubuntu detected it and all I had to do was pick the model from a list. The default install had nearly everything I needed/wanted. This is not something Windows can come close to. Upgrades were easy, too. Going from 6.06 to 6.10, then 7.04 was simple. I had to force it to let me upgrade from 6.06, because it was LTS (Long Term Support) and the default option is for an LTS release not to upgrade versions. It had security updates, however, for all the applications I installed via the provided means. And "forcing" it to version-upgrade was easy to do and the support website had a simple guide for it.
Now, this is just my personal experience, and my hardware works with Linux (something I made sure of before buying any of it), so I've not had any problems with that. Up until I got fed up and decided I was sick of obscure fixes in Slackware, I had very little problems with it. I have, however, had frustratingly annoying problems with drivers in Windows.
A developer earning 50-60k up here is considered middle-upper class. He can afford a house on his own, along with all the latest tech toys. Try that in Redmond... yeah right!
Maybe, but in most parts of the US, that would be true, too, so it's not really a good argument on it's own since they're already moving away from Redmond. They could probably find a cheaper spot to put an R&D place if they wanted to move developers.
No, it isn't the "only" comment that reflects that -- nor, in fact, was it the only thread I mentioned.
If you don't think there are people on/. who act like this only happens in the US every time someone tries to censor something, you're not really paying attention.
Also, the point that corporations are more important than people doesn't really hold based on the fact it was just one ISP that buckled, and the government was not involved.
Yeah, man. How fuckin' dare people decide they don't want to support someone who is mouthing off!
I can't believe that's your example. The Dixie Chicks? They pissed off their fan base. A majority of their audience was from the US South, which was mostly pro-Bush*, during a war that most of the US South supported*, and they pissed on him in another country. Then when people got angry about it, they just aggravated the issue by badmouthing their fans. (For the record, I was never and will never be a country fan, so I was more or less just amused to watch the whiny bints flail around a bit and look stupid.)
No one has an obligation to support famous people, especially famous people who say things they don't like. But they are VERY free to say whatever they want -- just as I am free to call them stupid bitches for it. Besides, they've won awards since their statements and the fall out. Not exactly shunned by the US Music Industry. Just because you have free speech doesn't mean anyone is required to like or support what you say. They, too, have the right to free speech.
* Despite being "solid red states" most of them have Democratic representatives or Senators, and Bush's support is far from unanimous.
I'm going to get moderated to all hell for this, but I don't care: After arguing in three or four threads in the last few weeks about how "it's not just the US" doing things like this, I'd just like to say a few words:
I TOLD YOU SO.
Politicians the world over love this do-nothing regulation of the things that "offend" their poor widdle voters and their sensibilities. "Violent porn? How dare they!" What's next, scat? Then what, facials, because they're degrading and might encourage men to treat women like objects? Yes, this is a slippery slope argument, but the reason cited was that these sorts of things trigger unbalanced minds. I could care less about violent porn, it's not my bag. I've been hearing for decades that porn causes rape: Apply the argument against violent porn to regular porn, and it won't be long before some bright MP suggests banning all internet porn because it might trigger someone to rape.
Which is a load of bollocks, because if everyone who looked at porn committed a rape, well... all of slashdot's readers would be making license plates right now and desperately clinging to the soap.
If someone is bent enough that seeing images is going to cause them to act on their fantasies, why is it only violent porn that will trigger them? What about violent media in general? Whose to say they won't catch an episode of the BBC's Spooks and act on the Plot of the Week? There are always going to be loons out there and we can't really effectively ban everything that might set them off without turning the world into a very damn boring place. They also make up a small percent of the population, so why are we going to let them ruin things for everyone else?
Slashdot Mirror
The best part about it is finding out that "fanboi" is a racial slur. I honest to god had NO idea. I thought it was just an irritating spelling corruption like "sk8r boi." No mention of it on Wikipedia, or anything.
What if all the major record labels decided they would no longer publish songs with profanity in them?
Please, let them. The more they alienate customers, the sooner they'll lose power.
While I agree with you that age doesn't necessarily mean "suddenly desirous of much gore!" I think the GP's lava comment was referencing the first Super Mario Bros. game. At the end of every world, you could get past the boss one of two ways: Fire power, or hitting the axe-like thing to cause the bridge to fall out from under him. In the latter case, he fell into the lava.
And -- who are you to say how another person should spend their LEISURE time? Is his playing the Wii personally hurting you?
/. anonymously, anyway. Too scared to post with an account? What -- not mature enough?
No?
Then FUCK OFF.
I seriously don't understand this predisposition people have against other people's entertainment. Do you watch sports? Aren't those games played by kids? What do YOU do for fun? Other than post stupid shit on
Seriously, what's an "adult" way to spend ones time? Jerking off to porn on the internet?
I disagree. Not with the part about competition being good, but that the PS3 failing will hurt consumers. No moreso than the Gamecube and N64 doing badly hurt consumers.
Sony has held the number one spot since the Playstation came out. By your argument, seeing Vista fail would be bad for consumers. Seeing Sony lose exclusivity and their #1 spot is NOT going to hurt consumers. It's going to level the playing field a bit more.
Nintendo went from the top dog to losing to Sony with the N64, and they came around with the Gamecube -- it didn't do as well as it should have because of the lost developer support. But then came along the Wii. Sometimes companies have to royally screw up before they come up with something good. Sony's mistake this generation is that they didn't really do anything. They just sort of made this really powerful machine and expected to float on their #1 spot. Maybe if they're having to fight to regain their place, they'll come out with something interesting and new.
As it is, the Playstation 3 isn't interesting. It's just powerful.
And, Sega failed miserably, and it didn't hurt the gaming industry much at all. There were still awesome games on the Super Nintendo, it didn't cost some ridiculous price, and neither did the games. Nintendo has dominated the handheld market, and the Gameboy has always had really interesting, addictive, and cheap games. The DS is innovative and cheap. They continue to dominate without any real competition there, and the market isn't hurting for fun games. Sony's dominance during the PS1/PS2 generations didn't stop fun games from coming out for Nintendo's systems (granted, almost all of them were first party games).
I don't think the PS3 will "fail." But I do think they're going to continue to get their butts handed to them. Their dominance is hopefully at an end, bringing us to a much more competitive market.
On a more personal note, after the way Sony has behaved over the last few years, I'm happy to see them getting stuffed into a locker by Nintendo.
I tried to connect to my home server from work to check my e-mail and found that the connection was slower than a 14.4k dialup modem. I ssh'd in, found the source of the traffic and promptly shut down all direct-to-Internet traffic from his machine and poof! No more link saturation!
...And passworded it.
One day, seemingly at random, sites would refuse to load, the internet was slow and sluggish. I thought it was just my provider sucking ass, because that occasionally happens. When, the next day, it didn't stop, I asked if anyone else plugged into the home network was downloading. The answers were all no. Another day passed, and I noticed that it only sucked ass when my sister's boyfriend had his laptop plugged in to the router. So when he leaves, he leaves the laptop plugged in and on. Why would he do this, I wonder? So I check his laptop, which isn't in any way secured from me accessing it physically.
He's got bittorrent going on, and he has no restriction on his upload speeds, and they are literally maxing out all of our available upload. I check the numbers, divide by three (the number of computers on the network), and set his maximum upload to half that through the client. Did the same for download: took the max, divided by three, gave him half. I never said anything to him, so for all I know, even now he's got a crappy upload speed. It's been over a year since I did this, since then, I've changed providers and more than doubled my available bandwidth. But the way I see it, he point blank lied to me about downloading using *my* connection and *my* net sucked until I figured out what it was. So I hope he's enjoying his 50kb/s maximum download in bittorrent.
Had I thought of it, I should have changed his screensaver to "marquee" and had it say "At least put up a screensaver password, numb nuts!"
He posts anonymously on /. with his elitist attitude about entertainment, and that makes him mature.
Some people enjoy pointing out how "immature" or "childish" someone else is, or their choice of entertainment. Generally, in conversation, these people also point out how mature they are all the time -- it's insecurity, like those homophobic wankers who point out how "gay" this or that is all the time. Basic projection and insecurities.
To me, it's a true sign of creativity to make something enjoyable by different ages. It's very hard to make something that children can understand and enjoy that also captures the attention of adults. Anon probably hates on Harry Potter*, but it's "immature" entertainment that many people of varying ages enjoy. The Wii does this: People of all ages enjoy it. It's not aiming to be the same as other consoles. I think this pisses off fanboys of other consoles, like the Anon in this case.
Simple fact is, the Wii is selling, despite not being the elite graphical engine in the bunch. Because it appeals to a larger audience than the PS3 or X-Box (at the 1 year mark, see where the Wii stands compared to the 360 and PS3 sales -- November isn't that far off...). This doesn't mean the other consoles are bad (though I dislike Sony and think they really screwed up this generation), just different. Some people are just weird and have to hate anything that competes with their precious. Anon is, with all probability, a rabid Playstation fan who is extremely pissed that the little old Wii is kicking the snot out of the PS3. It's no longer "in" to hate on Nintendo -- grow up.
*I've never read a word of Harry Potter, myself, but I don't hate it.
psst, I don't own an X-Box, or a PS3, but if I was offered a choice of one free, I'd take the 360, and here's why: BioShock, Grand Theft Auto, the possibility of FF13 NOT being exclusive, oh, and so I'd get my MS Fanboy card so I'd be allowed in on the meetings where they decide what to bitch about Sony next. ;)
yeah man... it's lacking so many features people are having to buy twice as many Wii's and PS3s to make up!
that must explain the sales numbers.
(yeah, this'll ding my karma, but it was totally worth it.)
Actually, it is, but it didn't make it into the finalists for whatever reason.
I understand that the Super Jesus statue basically made it there because of locals voting for it. I just don't find the Eiffel Tower, which is a glorified radio tower, all that impressive, either, which is what I initially replied to; it's a big metal stick. It's not even pretty, and they painted the thing brown. My argument was simply "Big Rock Jesus impresses me more than Big Radio Metal Stick."
I think both (and Rushmore) are too modern for a list containing things like Machu Picchu, the Colosseum, etc. Neuschwanstein Castle is the "newest" wonder in the final 21 to be extremely impressive, in my opinion.
Neither do the HR bitches.
Yeah but Super Jesus (not to be confused with Fire Jesus or Raccoon Jesus -- and tanooki Jesus is right out) is built out of stone, the Eiffel tower is built out of metal (too lazy to look up the exact composition). Carving something out of stone is a lot harder than putting together pieces of metal. Especially carving something out of stone and ending up with a seven hundred ton statue. Compared to a giant metal stick.
However, the list irritates me, but not because of Super Jesus. I'd have a different seven, with a few of these on it, were it up to me. But the way the list was handled in such a poor way? It just loses all appeal. If they want to make anything official, poll people in a more formal, less sleezy "you can SMS vote as much as you want!" sort of way. Plus, what's this honorary Wonder shit? Either the Pyramids weren't going to make it and someone bitched to them, or they were going to make it and someone didn't want them to be one of the official seven. Whichever way it happened, it was stupid.
Also, who actually HEARD of this thing? That's a problem, too. I should have been advised I could vote-stuff for Angkor Wat with all the other cheaters.
The Midwest feeds the nation, the South keeps values
n erosity.php?year=2004
South has a fair amount of food growing, too. Not to mention two major ports, and when the expansions are complete, the 2nd biggest oil refinery in the US -- in other words, making your gasoline. You can also see that the "poor" states tend to give more:
http://www.catalogueforphilanthropy.org/cfp/db/ge
New Hampshire is ranked 50th based on how much they have versus how much they give. I'm actually kind of surprised; given the people I know in New Jersey, I figured it would be dead last.
Cotton, oranges, peanuts (try and avoid all food with peanut products...).
One of the reasons other states tend to use up more "federal aid": New England has relatively high property values and costs of living, so all the poor people are better off elsewhere. A few generations of that, and it's no wonder. You don't have the many welfare recipients because, y'know, you basically drove them out with high cost of living.
Believe me, there are just as many people who would gladly do without New England in the "poor" part of the country as there are people in New England who think they'd be better off without the rest of us.
(And, just to be a bit of an asshole here to go along with that stupid rant: We tried to leave once, asshole. You sent an army to keep us.)
That situation is hardly comparable to "program that searches users hard drives."
Legalities aside, this should very well be a public relations nightmare for them, and so of course they want to distance themselves. The fact they're likely to get away with it only irks me slightly less than the original story.
That, I won't argue about blocking. But TPB itself, I don't see any justification for blocking.
You could get child pornography through Kazaa, too. Does that mean it's being "hosted" by Kazaa?
Also, it's not as simple as you claim, anyway: You have to download the torrent, run the torrent file in your bittorrent client of choice, let it download, and THEN you get your child porn. Assuming, of course, that TPB has torrents of child porn. I've yet to see any evidence of that, but then, I'm not about to go looking for child porn, either.
"Ubuntu with a new slogan: The Linux for gay people (tm)"
you think you're kidding: http://gaybuntu.com/
Not exactly direct from Ubuntu, but hey, it's there.
Everyone knows the *real* gay distro is Gentoo, though. (kidding, kidding!)
I just got mine a month ago. I have only purchased one thing other than wii points cards since getting it, and that was Zelda.
I have a nunchuk. It came with the system.
Well, I'm a different poster, but:
I've been using Linux in a dual boot setup since January of last year. Early January, somewhere around 11-12th or so. Despite being dual boot, I spend very little time in Windows at all -- a few hours every month, tops. I installed Slackware at first, and that lasted until mid-August. My printer inexplicably stopped working, and I couldn't get it to start again. I tried searching for why, I used Google, forums, everything, and nothing seemed to work. After a few hours and getting fed up, I simply backed up my data and installed Ubuntu.
I've not regretted the decision in almost a year. Everything I do, I can do in Linux, with the exception of a few games (and I haven't poked around much with making WINE work). I like OpenOffice enough to use it, I like Firefox, and GAIM (now pidgin) was the client I used in Windows for instant messaging anyway. Thunderbird works for my mail client. The add/remove programs menu, and Synaptic, make life easy. There is pretty much a program for everything. MythTV likes my TV-tuner, and so the little TV I still watch, I watch at my convenience. Of the desktop environments, I like Gnome (sorry, Linus), so Ubuntu defaulting to it was a plus.
The biggest pain was getting X to the right resolution because it defaulted to 1024x768, and I prefer 1280x1024 (it's also the native resolution of my monitor). I had to edit a text file, which is about as complicated as it got. Having spent almost eight months in Slackware, however, made this something of a breeze. Oh, and the printer that inexplicably refused to work in Slackware? Ubuntu detected it and all I had to do was pick the model from a list. The default install had nearly everything I needed/wanted. This is not something Windows can come close to. Upgrades were easy, too. Going from 6.06 to 6.10, then 7.04 was simple. I had to force it to let me upgrade from 6.06, because it was LTS (Long Term Support) and the default option is for an LTS release not to upgrade versions. It had security updates, however, for all the applications I installed via the provided means. And "forcing" it to version-upgrade was easy to do and the support website had a simple guide for it.
Now, this is just my personal experience, and my hardware works with Linux (something I made sure of before buying any of it), so I've not had any problems with that. Up until I got fed up and decided I was sick of obscure fixes in Slackware, I had very little problems with it. I have, however, had frustratingly annoying problems with drivers in Windows.
So has everybody el$e, in case you've been in a hole for the past seven years.
Fuck, Dell doesn't have an S in it. =/
A developer earning 50-60k up here is considered middle-upper class. He can afford a house on his own, along with all the latest tech toys. Try that in Redmond... yeah right!
Maybe, but in most parts of the US, that would be true, too, so it's not really a good argument on it's own since they're already moving away from Redmond. They could probably find a cheaper spot to put an R&D place if they wanted to move developers.
No, it isn't the "only" comment that reflects that -- nor, in fact, was it the only thread I mentioned.
/. who act like this only happens in the US every time someone tries to censor something, you're not really paying attention.
If you don't think there are people on
Also, the point that corporations are more important than people doesn't really hold based on the fact it was just one ISP that buckled, and the government was not involved.
Yeah, man. How fuckin' dare people decide they don't want to support someone who is mouthing off!
I can't believe that's your example. The Dixie Chicks? They pissed off their fan base. A majority of their audience was from the US South, which was mostly pro-Bush*, during a war that most of the US South supported*, and they pissed on him in another country. Then when people got angry about it, they just aggravated the issue by badmouthing their fans. (For the record, I was never and will never be a country fan, so I was more or less just amused to watch the whiny bints flail around a bit and look stupid.)
No one has an obligation to support famous people, especially famous people who say things they don't like. But they are VERY free to say whatever they want -- just as I am free to call them stupid bitches for it. Besides, they've won awards since their statements and the fall out. Not exactly shunned by the US Music Industry. Just because you have free speech doesn't mean anyone is required to like or support what you say. They, too, have the right to free speech.
* Despite being "solid red states" most of them have Democratic representatives or Senators, and Bush's support is far from unanimous.
You probably should have checked the "post anonymously" button...
I wasn't arguing for or against facials, just using them as an example of something these nanny-state censorship artists might go after.
I'm going to get moderated to all hell for this, but I don't care: After arguing in three or four threads in the last few weeks about how "it's not just the US" doing things like this, I'd just like to say a few words:
I TOLD YOU SO.
Politicians the world over love this do-nothing regulation of the things that "offend" their poor widdle voters and their sensibilities. "Violent porn? How dare they!" What's next, scat? Then what, facials, because they're degrading and might encourage men to treat women like objects? Yes, this is a slippery slope argument, but the reason cited was that these sorts of things trigger unbalanced minds. I could care less about violent porn, it's not my bag. I've been hearing for decades that porn causes rape: Apply the argument against violent porn to regular porn, and it won't be long before some bright MP suggests banning all internet porn because it might trigger someone to rape.
Which is a load of bollocks, because if everyone who looked at porn committed a rape, well... all of slashdot's readers would be making license plates right now and desperately clinging to the soap.
If someone is bent enough that seeing images is going to cause them to act on their fantasies, why is it only violent porn that will trigger them? What about violent media in general? Whose to say they won't catch an episode of the BBC's Spooks and act on the Plot of the Week? There are always going to be loons out there and we can't really effectively ban everything that might set them off without turning the world into a very damn boring place. They also make up a small percent of the population, so why are we going to let them ruin things for everyone else?