I realize they won't work, but firmware should not be a core component of a hardware company
Except people who make routers are both a hardware and software company. As other people have said the main distiguishing factor in a router is the firmware. A router is an embedded computer. You seem to be under the impression that the hardware is all specialized and does all the functions of the router while the firmware is just some UI that you see. That's just simply not true. The hardware is dumb as rocks just like your computer. The firmware inside the router does just about ALL the functionality of the router.
Actually, in this case the lack of evidence is evidence itself. That is the ONLY way there could have been a flood is if we found the physical evidence for it. Logically this is "if and only iff". So: "there was a global flood" iff "there is geological evidence to support this".
This pre-supposes you believe in geology of course, and that our most basic knowledge of geology is right.
I guess there's nothing "wrong" with it, a moral sense of the word. There is something wrong in a "pursuit of knowledge" sense. There's something very wrong with pursuing ideas where you have no evidence that you're right, constantly ignore the considerable and ever mounting evidence that you're wrong, never find any evidence that you're right, and have already decided what you're going to find. There's something very very dishonest about that, and it has no place in science, or the pursuit of knowledge.
Finding new knowledge isn't just an exercise of going against the grain. These people are simply not scientists, but fanatics who clearly don't care about truth.
To write off the stories in the bible as absolute fiction is the LEAST scientific thing I can think of
Who's writing them off because they appear in the bible? I write them off because there's an enourmous amount of scientific evidence that there was no global flood. If there were such a MASSIVE geological event a mere 5000 some years ago, there would be a mountain of evidence that it happened. There is no such evidence, so the Noahs Ark flood didn't happen.
The Bible is not a science textbook. That said, it isn't inaccurate on scientific matters.
I think that's exactly what I'm trying to say. The problem is many people think it is, and are time and time again shown to be fools. The Catholic church made the same mistake about the sun revolving around the earth, and they later got their ass handed to them.
There are plenty of fossils buried in silt deposits in Nevada at altitudes where no river could possibly have been, in areas where the average rainfall is a mere fraction of an inch each year. Geology, right?
Plate tectonics. There's a ton of evidence discovered in just the last 40 years or so that the surface of the earth consists of a series of plates floating on magma. The plates move around very slowly and are the primary source of earthquakes. The land we now call Nevada had an entirely different climate a hundred million years ago because it was in a different place in relation to the equator. The mountains surrounding Nevada weren't there either and have been build up by colliding tectonic plates. It doesn't have anything to do with global floods.
Why is it, therefore, here at/. there is such open hatred for Judeo-Christian beliefs when just about anything else goes?
Well, I don't know about "anything else goes", but the open hatred of fairly tales in the bible is because they're quite obviously fair tales, backed up by tons of scientific evidence.
I'm not going to waste my time arguing the mounds of evidence, since you obviously don't believe in science at all. That's fine I guess, but don't be so surprised that a site for geeks who actually know something about science turn up their noses at ridiculous notions like Noahs Ark, Adam and Eve, etc.
It's pseudo-science because there's no evidence to support a global flood, and tons of evidence against it. There's this thing called geology that studies (among other things) rock layers around the world. Ever heard of it?
If you're trying to do science you don't get to make plausible claims just because you want to believe them. You need credible evidence, and in this case you'd need an enormous amount of evidence to explain why there's absolutely no evidence of a global flood several thousand years ago. These people have NONE of that. I saw the satelite photos on the history channel, and they're FAR less believeable than even the face on Mars pictures. (And that at least resembled a face). Do you believe in a flat earth too because the bible mentions the four corners of the earth?
Obviously the bible mentions things that actually happened. That gives no credence to the truth of fairly tales like Noah and the Ark and Adam and Eve.
It's like the comedian Harry Anderson said. The idea is to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.
I'm glad I'm not the only one underwhelmed. It looks like painted wood. The finish is rather flat, and the "details" looked glued on. Not worthy of being on slashdot, especially since this is just a promo for an auction.
Clay has somehow connected Linux with "the good". Linux ws some big, happy, hippy, peace lovin force against the evils of the world. Now that reality has set in and it's just a tool that frees you from closed standards, vendor lock in, etc, linux just isn't as hippy-dippy peacnik free-love anymore.
I hate cars too because of the simple interface. The morons at Ford made the thing so simple that dumb people can easily miss-use them! Damnit, if cars were just harder to use then all the problems would be solved.
The point is your blame is missdirected at Microsoft and Access where it should be applied towards your boss. Microsoft Word make typing and editing documents easy too.. do you blame Word for people that can't write? Dumb bastards, if only you had to hit 5 keys at once to type a character only the professionals would be writing, and these amatures that think it's easy would realize just how hard it is because of the difficulty of the inteface!
I feel the same way about hammers. The damn things are so easy to use a moron can use them. My idiot boss fixes everything with hammers.
He fixes his TV with a hammer. Every time the picture goes on the fritz the idiot hits the damn thing with a hammer until the TV is either completely broken, or works again.
He pounds in screws and bolts with with a hammer, he pulls the out with a hammer. Geez buddy, ever heard of a screwdriver or wrench?
When he does pound nails with the hammer, he keeps pounding until the hammer is halfway through the wood, then expect me to fill it with wood putty!!
I think Access is great, for what it's intended for. It's perfect for small databases where someone would otherwise use flat files. It's also a great reporting tool to use to connect to other databases via ODBC.
The problems with Access is just that people often don't know what they're doing and create awfull legacy systems that they then expect to keep extending. That's a problem that lies between the keyboard and chair, not with Access.
If you want a database to complain about, complain about FileMaker Pro. It's an ugly, non-relational database that seems to ecourage people to make terrible, ugly systems.
MySQL still doesn't support triggers, and I like advantages of having support for varchars larger than 255 characters. Postgresql also supports the more standard method of an auto-number unique ID field of the sequence (and argueably more flexible). I _really_ like the flexibility of authentication that postgresql offers, though I haven't looked at MySQLs authentication as exensively.
MySQL has grown up a lot though. Given how primitive and featureless it used to be it's gotten much better where the differences between the two have become smaller.
Here's a question: why? All it's doing is giving the trolls publicity. All it's doing is making people think that gender is an issue, because if it wasn't an issue, why would such a firestorm exist? If it wasn't an issue, why wouldn't the trolls just get modded into oblivion and go ignored, like the GNAA trolls?
Are you complaining because you think gender isn't an issue, or because you really wish it wasn't? Obviously it is an issue for some people, otherwise people would do exactly what you're saying. Does anyone respond to the idiots posting about Stephen King being dead? Asking people to not to even respond ignores that fact that it's somewhat a contentious issue.
Personally I think it's a _boring_ issue. Then again most posts on slashdot that are of a non-technical nature are usually uninteresting.
Ok, so we have one guy who couldn't get one un-named sound card to work under Linux. All we know is it's "An utterly mainstream Intel Motherboard". Uhh, yah, thanks for the details so someone can replicate your findings, Fred.
The fact that there's onboard sound, or a soundcard that isn't supported by Linux just isn't too surprising. Why this gets posted as "news", or as "Linux's achilles heal" is beyond me. Is 'ol Fred going to buy a soundcard for his Mac, and then pronounce that lack of support for every soundcard to be the bain of the Macintosh?
I'm actually surprised sound support for Linux is as good as it is. The sound on my laptop worked out of the box when I installed RH9 on it, a first for me! There's also sound support for my N-Force motherboard. Sound support is actually something that's matured quite a bit in the last few years.
I won't say Linux is perfect. There's plenty of things to complain about as far as Linux desktop usage is concerned. My personal complaint is the fact that copy/paste support is still kind of crappy. I can copy/paste between emacs sessions (as long as they remain open), but I can't copy/paste from emacs to somewhere else. That's just pathetic. Windows has supported universal copy/paste since 3.1
Microsoft more or less got off from the Federal Government, chances of this suit succeeding are very slim.
Microsoft got off because the Bush administration was elected into office, not because they case against them was bad. Remember that they were actually found guilty?
I think the case was settled because MN needs cash right now because of the continued budget deficits. The fact that they decided to settle while the prosecution was still making its case (and before Microsoft even got a chance to defend itself) is pretty good evidence that MS thought they were going to lose. I only hope they didn't settle for software and coupons. MS should at least bleed a little cash for this.
Slashdot does not produce or report news. So, just as the editorial section of a newspaper, by default, gets to say whatever the editor wants to say, regardless of fact or spin - the same is true for a blog.
I guess I was imagining all those news stories that slashdot takes snippets from, the editors pick and choose, and all the book reviews, etc. As far as editorials being able to say whatever they please, that's simply wrong. Newspapers are still culpable for libelous statements. An editorial can't accuse someone of being a rapist unless it's true (or maybe if there's sufficient evidence that it's true).
As far as Slashdot goes, of course it reports news. The fact that they link to stories and only provide summaries is immaterial. The editors select stories from submissions and that's where the liability comes in. If slashdot posts a story that's libelous, expect slashdot to be sued up the ass. Could someone win on merely a linked story and summary? I don't know, but I still think there's some responsibility towards accuracy. We all know that the stories posted on slashdot are less reliable than the often very-innacurate newspapers, but this isn't really a question of "every news source is bad".
Switching gears to the main story, I expect the quotes by Ana Marie Cox to be prime evidence in a future suit brought against her. It's perfect evidence that she knows she's flying by the seat of her pants and publishing stuff that's innacurate. That's just wildly irresponsible. Ms Cox acts as if the web is just gossiping with her gal-pals at the coffee shop where what she says isn't expected to be accurate. People who have a website with thousands of readers a day need to be held to an even higher standard of people who just post on discussion groups.
As a comparison, even posting innacurate news in a discussion group has been upheld as being illegal. Take for example the people that've been prosecuted for manipulating stock prices by posting lies in the Yahoo finance discussion groups. I wouldn't think these groups have any degree of accuracy "some guy told me X", but that hasn't really matered. I believe these cases were prosecuted based upon the intent of the stock-manipulators, but it still reflects on the importance of online news.
Everything in the world is always trying to influence on a "subconcious level". The kind of control you're talking about is an illusion.
its called, soap, water and YOUR HAND. (and if you are a real consumer purist you will have made your own soap =)
That's just disgusting. Shit is filled with dangerous bacteria that will get be seriously ill, and spreads disease. I don't want to spend my time scrubbing it from underneath my fingernails if I can buy a cheap "product" that saves me from that. Oh, but I suppose I'm just a robot influenced by advertising to think like that. Before advertising everyone loved using hands and soap to scrub shit. It's the evil corps that convinced us that shit was dirty and to use TP instead.
There are some things that basic wants and desires, and keeping your hands shit free in an easy way is one of them. You could possibly have an argument about women shaving armpits, but I'm still convinced that was part of some larger movement of culture and not just "evil advertising hypnotising us".
The point is that you, like most other Westerners, would never even consider filling this need with anything other than a product.
I suppose I could buy a bidet, oh but that would be a "product " and us damn westerners solve all problems with "products". Apparently the right way to live is like the Unabomber and be self sufficient not relying on others to do things more effectively. Part of living in a society is relying upon things other people produce.
Do you really like the idea that people will be more closed lip because of the potential for it to come back to bite you 30 years later? It's hard to say what will change between now and 30 years from now. Context changes over 30 years, so what you say now can easily be re-interpreted to mean something very different in 30 years. It's as if everyone has the potential to be a public figure and have everything they say be scrutinized throughout their entire life.
Who cares if I choose Charmin over Scotts toilet paper? It's really a minor decision in life that shouldn't take much consideration.
Thats a closedminded statement. Who cares? The people that make BILLIONS AND BILLIONS OF DOLLARS selling you bathroom supplies. Thats who. It doesnt matter to you, and they know that. Thats what directing you to a certain product has to be either unconcious, or have a very good argument.
Of course the companies care which toilet paper I choose, but it really has little effect elsewhere. Many people care about things I put no value on. The fact that other people put different values on things than me is really beside the point. The point is that peoples choice of toilet paper has little effect in the world, so I'm hardly concered at all if some advertisement affects this minor choice in my world. I guess maybe if I hear proctor and gamble rapes puppies, I might think twice about buying Charmin. But everything being equal, it's more of a burden on my to be concerned about such minor decisions.
We make a nearly infinite amount of choices every day. Which word do I use in this sentence? Do I eat chili, or go out to eat? Do I jump up the stairs, or tiptoe? If you become concerned about if "you" really made the choice (and weren't influence against your will), you'll surely go mad. Some decisions are less important than others. Which toilet paper to buy ranks below do I eat chili tonight for me. The fact that some evil corp is influencing that decision in some minor way doesn't really concern me, since I don't think it's an important decision.
But I think what you've said begs this comment to be repeated : On many levels the goal of advertising is not to get you to buy a certain product, its to get you to buy. Its to get you to want, to NEED. Having you choose a *particular brand* of a product is not the primary goal in a lot of cases. Thats why television is so dangerous and people launch campaigns against it : there is a concious and directed effort to increase consumption by shaping your thinking while you watch television. Ever wonder why you even need toilet paper in the first place? Didnt think so.
Sure, I generally agree that advertising often encourages people to think they need something. ALl too often people get burned on this and only feel relieved from a need by buying a product. I think the anti-TV crusaders are going down the wrong path though. Really what you should be doing is teaching people to self analyse. Why do you need that thing? Will it really give you what you think it will? TV isn't the cause of rampant consumerism, so getting people to watch less TV won't solve that problem. Getting people to wake up actually might.
As far as the "why do you need toilet paper" thought, I _need_ toilet paper because I was raised in a culture where that's the thing we use to get shit off our asses. If I were raised somewhere else, I might use a magic Japanese toilet, or some bizzaro shells to remove the shit. If you've got some better way to remove shit from asses, bring it on. But the problem in selling your product is going to be mainly cultural, not advertising drilled into peoples heads that TP is the only way. Yah, yah, advertising influence the culture, but why doesn't all advertising suceeed then? There's much larger forces at work than simple programming of people through ads. It's far to complicated to address that in this post though (and I doubt I could even tackle that).
Sure, the goal of advertising is to make you feel familiar with a product so when I go into a store and make the 3 second decision of what brand to buy, I'm more likely to go with the familiar product than a generic.
I'm sure advertisers think they're trying to attatch an emotion to their product, but does anyone really feel emotional attatchment towards the brand of toilet paper they buy? People mostly make choices that are familiar, especially when most differences between products are more or less equal. For instance, I buy crest toothpaste because it's just what I grew up with, and I don't really see any differences between the different products (including price). I buy old-spice however because I like the smell of it. Food I'll generally buy the higher quality product because I value higher quality food more than I do price. Food is also something I'm more willing to take a risk on and figure out which product is higher quality since I buy food every week. "Didn't like that brand of diced tomatoes, try another". I suppose if you don't see any quality differences between diced tomatoes, you'd just buy the most familiar brand (or maybe the cheapest if you value savings) like my toothpaste example.
Is TV advertising really "brainwashing" though, as you suggest? (A very loaded term that I'm not sure has a very precise definition) I guess only if you really think the choices people make based on advertising really matter. Who cares if I choose Charmin over Scotts toilet paper? It's really a minor decision in life that shouldn't take much consideration. Is it brainwashing just because some advertisement tipped the scale that was otherwise equally balanced? Is consumerism really that important in life?
The only choice I can think of that's heavily influenced by advertising that really matters is pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceutical industry spends billions of dollars a year trying to get consumers to make decisions that a doctor should (in general) be making. The billions of dollars spent of marketing is one of the big reason prescription drugs are so damn expensive. They actually spend more on marketing and advertising than they do on R&D. They do it because it's effective, though there's no relationship between effectiveness of a drug, and how much mass advertising is pumped into it.
Even the doctors are hornswaggled by the whole thing. They have slimy pharmaceutical reps giving out marketroid pitches about their products. The biggest problem is there's little objective comparison for even the doctors to make good decisions on what drugs to prescribe. On top of that they have irrational patients wanting to be prescribed the "familiar" drugs they saw on the TV, and not the "cheap generic" or "knockoff" they 've never heard about. Nevermind that the unfamiliar drug is just as effective or more than the heavily advertised drug.
Sure, I guess if you redefine what people mean when they mention "short attention span". Usually this means an inability to concentrate on anything for more than a couple minutes. If something is unimportant, you filter it. The hallmark of the short attention span is when your brain says BORING!, or just zones out after only a few minutes concentration and you have to go on to something different. Actively filtering out unimportant details or subjects that just aren't interesting to you is different.
With that said, I think the arguments people have presented here about the album format dying out, containing mostly filler, etc are much more relevant to why random-play has become so much more popular. It doesn't have anything to do with "short attention spans" like the marketroid prof would have us believe. It has a lot more to do with the huge volume of music that people suddenly have the ability to carry around with them.
If you have 10,000 songs at your disposal, it'd be nice to have a mechanism where you stand a good chance of listening to all of them. You could do them all in some linear order, but eventually you'd be bored with the extremely regimented order in which the music is played. Random, or some kind of weighted random where recently played songs are less likely to be played is an excellent way to hear the stuff you might not normally pick.
So the "alpha state zombie" effect isn't true for say.. a movie, or a play? Your techno-geek explanation sounds nice, but I don't buy it without context. The same " At no time is there every a picture displayed on the screen" thing is true for a computer monitor, do I turn into an zombie when I surf the internet too?
The thing that's wrong about TV is that people have become too enamored with unreality. People get a very distored picture of the world through TV, and too many assume that it's real. The "news" is contains little content and all emotion. Then Oprah comes on spewing her further distored trash. I still watch TV of course, but in recent years the trash has overtaken anything of value.
The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities campus isn't even listed, even though they have most of the buildings covered by wireless. Other people seem surprised their institution is even listed, given that they have very limited wireless access.
Given major omissions like this, I take the survey with a very LARGE grain of salt. For some reason they base the survey on number of students, number of computers, and computer/student ratio. Sorry, but when I think of being "unwired", I think "what's the likelyhood that I can get a wireless connection in any given building? The number of people around me has little to do with that, and the number of computers in the university has almost nothing to do with that. Those might be important numbers to use in other surveys of techno-ability, but they're meaningless in a ranking of wireless access.
Slashdot Mirror
I realize they won't work, but firmware should not be a core component of a hardware company
Except people who make routers are both a hardware and software company. As other people have said the main distiguishing factor in a router is the firmware. A router is an embedded computer. You seem to be under the impression that the hardware is all specialized and does all the functions of the router while the firmware is just some UI that you see. That's just simply not true. The hardware is dumb as rocks just like your computer. The firmware inside the router does just about ALL the functionality of the router.
Actually, in this case the lack of evidence is evidence itself. That is the ONLY way there could have been a flood is if we found the physical evidence for it. Logically this is "if and only iff". So:
"there was a global flood" iff "there is geological evidence to support this".
This pre-supposes you believe in geology of course, and that our most basic knowledge of geology is right.
I guess there's nothing "wrong" with it, a moral sense of the word. There is something wrong in a "pursuit of knowledge" sense. There's something very wrong with pursuing ideas where you have no evidence that you're right, constantly ignore the considerable and ever mounting evidence that you're wrong, never find any evidence that you're right, and have already decided what you're going to find. There's something very very dishonest about that, and it has no place in science, or the pursuit of knowledge.
Finding new knowledge isn't just an exercise of going against the grain. These people are simply not scientists, but fanatics who clearly don't care about truth.
To write off the stories in the bible as absolute fiction is the LEAST scientific thing I can think of
Who's writing them off because they appear in the bible? I write them off because there's an enourmous amount of scientific evidence that there was no global flood. If there were such a MASSIVE geological event a mere 5000 some years ago, there would be a mountain of evidence that it happened. There is no such evidence, so the Noahs Ark flood didn't happen.
The Bible is not a science textbook. That said, it isn't inaccurate on scientific matters.
I think that's exactly what I'm trying to say. The problem is many people think it is, and are time and time again shown to be fools. The Catholic church made the same mistake about the sun revolving around the earth, and they later got their ass handed to them.
There are plenty of fossils buried in silt deposits in Nevada at altitudes where no river could possibly have been, in areas where the average rainfall is a mere fraction of an inch each year. Geology, right?
Plate tectonics. There's a ton of evidence discovered in just the last 40 years or so that the surface of the earth consists of a series of plates floating on magma. The plates move around very slowly and are the primary source of earthquakes. The land we now call Nevada had an entirely different climate a hundred million years ago because it was in a different place in relation to the equator. The mountains surrounding Nevada weren't there either and have been build up by colliding tectonic plates. It doesn't have anything to do with global floods.
They laughed at Einstein... but they also laughed at bozo the clown.
And actually, I don't think they really laughed at Einstein.
Why is it, therefore, here at
Well, I don't know about "anything else goes", but the open hatred of fairly tales in the bible is because they're quite obviously fair tales, backed up by tons of scientific evidence.
I'm not going to waste my time arguing the mounds of evidence, since you obviously don't believe in science at all. That's fine I guess, but don't be so surprised that a site for geeks who actually know something about science turn up their noses at ridiculous notions like Noahs Ark, Adam and Eve, etc.
It's pseudo-science because there's no evidence to support a global flood, and tons of evidence against it. There's this thing called geology that studies (among other things) rock layers around the world. Ever heard of it?
If you're trying to do science you don't get to make plausible claims just because you want to believe them. You need credible evidence, and in this case you'd need an enormous amount of evidence to explain why there's absolutely no evidence of a global flood several thousand years ago. These people have NONE of that. I saw the satelite photos on the history channel, and they're FAR less believeable than even the face on Mars pictures. (And that at least resembled a face). Do you believe in a flat earth too because the bible mentions the four corners of the earth?
Obviously the bible mentions things that actually happened. That gives no credence to the truth of fairly tales like Noah and the Ark and Adam and Eve.
It's like the comedian Harry Anderson said. The idea is to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.
I'm glad I'm not the only one underwhelmed. It looks like painted wood. The finish is rather flat, and the "details" looked glued on. Not worthy of being on slashdot, especially since this is just a promo for an auction.
Clay has somehow connected Linux with "the good". Linux ws some big, happy, hippy, peace lovin force against the evils of the world. Now that reality has set in and it's just a tool that frees you from closed standards, vendor lock in, etc, linux just isn't as hippy-dippy peacnik free-love anymore.
I hate cars too because of the simple interface. The morons at Ford made the thing so simple that dumb people can easily miss-use them! Damnit, if cars were just harder to use then all the problems would be solved.
The point is your blame is missdirected at Microsoft and Access where it should be applied towards your boss. Microsoft Word make typing and editing documents easy too.. do you blame Word for people that can't write? Dumb bastards, if only you had to hit 5 keys at once to type a character only the professionals would be writing, and these amatures that think it's easy would realize just how hard it is because of the difficulty of the inteface!
Stupid wanking hammers! They should all die!
I think Access is great, for what it's intended for. It's perfect for small databases where someone would otherwise use flat files. It's also a great reporting tool to use to connect to other databases via ODBC.
The problems with Access is just that people often don't know what they're doing and create awfull legacy systems that they then expect to keep extending. That's a problem that lies between the keyboard and chair, not with Access.
If you want a database to complain about, complain about FileMaker Pro. It's an ugly, non-relational database that seems to ecourage people to make terrible, ugly systems.
MySQL still doesn't support triggers, and I like advantages of having support for varchars larger than 255 characters. Postgresql also supports the more standard method of an auto-number unique ID field of the sequence (and argueably more flexible). I _really_ like the flexibility of authentication that postgresql offers, though I haven't looked at MySQLs authentication as exensively.
MySQL has grown up a lot though. Given how primitive and featureless it used to be it's gotten much better where the differences between the two have become smaller.
Here's a question: why? All it's doing is giving the trolls publicity. All it's doing is making people think that gender is an issue, because if it wasn't an issue, why would such a firestorm exist? If it wasn't an issue, why wouldn't the trolls just get modded into oblivion and go ignored, like the GNAA trolls?
Are you complaining because you think gender isn't an issue, or because you really wish it wasn't? Obviously it is an issue for some people, otherwise people would do exactly what you're saying. Does anyone respond to the idiots posting about Stephen King being dead? Asking people to not to even respond ignores that fact that it's somewhat a contentious issue.
Personally I think it's a _boring_ issue. Then again most posts on slashdot that are of a non-technical nature are usually uninteresting.
Ok, so we have one guy who couldn't get one un-named sound card to work under Linux. All we know is it's "An utterly mainstream Intel Motherboard". Uhh, yah, thanks for the details so someone can replicate your findings, Fred.
The fact that there's onboard sound, or a soundcard that isn't supported by Linux just isn't too surprising. Why this gets posted as "news", or as "Linux's achilles heal" is beyond me. Is 'ol Fred going to buy a soundcard for his Mac, and then pronounce that lack of support for every soundcard to be the bain of the Macintosh?
I'm actually surprised sound support for Linux is as good as it is. The sound on my laptop worked out of the box when I installed RH9 on it, a first for me! There's also sound support for my N-Force motherboard. Sound support is actually something that's matured quite a bit in the last few years.
I won't say Linux is perfect. There's plenty of things to complain about as far as Linux desktop usage is concerned. My personal complaint is the fact that copy/paste support is still kind of crappy. I can copy/paste between emacs sessions (as long as they remain open), but I can't copy/paste from emacs to somewhere else. That's just pathetic. Windows has supported universal copy/paste since 3.1
Microsoft more or less got off from the Federal Government, chances of this suit succeeding are very slim.
Microsoft got off because the Bush administration was elected into office, not because they case against them was bad. Remember that they were actually found guilty?
I think the case was settled because MN needs cash right now because of the continued budget deficits. The fact that they decided to settle while the prosecution was still making its case (and before Microsoft even got a chance to defend itself) is pretty good evidence that MS thought they were going to lose. I only hope they didn't settle for software and coupons. MS should at least bleed a little cash for this.
Slashdot does not produce or report news. So, just as the editorial section of a newspaper, by default, gets to say whatever the editor wants to say, regardless of fact or spin - the same is true for a blog.
I guess I was imagining all those news stories that slashdot takes snippets from, the editors pick and choose, and all the book reviews, etc. As far as editorials being able to say whatever they please, that's simply wrong. Newspapers are still culpable for libelous statements. An editorial can't accuse someone of being a rapist unless it's true (or maybe if there's sufficient evidence that it's true).
As far as Slashdot goes, of course it reports news. The fact that they link to stories and only provide summaries is immaterial. The editors select stories from submissions and that's where the liability comes in. If slashdot posts a story that's libelous, expect slashdot to be sued up the ass. Could someone win on merely a linked story and summary? I don't know, but I still think there's some responsibility towards accuracy. We all know that the stories posted on slashdot are less reliable than the often very-innacurate newspapers, but this isn't really a question of "every news source is bad".
Switching gears to the main story, I expect the quotes by Ana Marie Cox to be prime evidence in a future suit brought against her. It's perfect evidence that she knows she's flying by the seat of her pants and publishing stuff that's innacurate. That's just wildly irresponsible. Ms Cox acts as if the web is just gossiping with her gal-pals at the coffee shop where what she says isn't expected to be accurate. People who have a website with thousands of readers a day need to be held to an even higher standard of people who just post on discussion groups.
As a comparison, even posting innacurate news in a discussion group has been upheld as being illegal. Take for example the people that've been prosecuted for manipulating stock prices by posting lies in the Yahoo finance discussion groups. I wouldn't think these groups have any degree of accuracy "some guy told me X", but that hasn't really matered. I believe these cases were prosecuted based upon the intent of the stock-manipulators, but it still reflects on the importance of online news.
Everything in the world is always trying to influence on a "subconcious level". The kind of control you're talking about is an illusion.
its called, soap, water and YOUR HAND. (and if you are a real consumer purist you will have made your own soap =)
That's just disgusting. Shit is filled with dangerous bacteria that will get be seriously ill, and spreads disease. I don't want to spend my time scrubbing it from underneath my fingernails if I can buy a cheap "product" that saves me from that. Oh, but I suppose I'm just a robot influenced by advertising to think like that. Before advertising everyone loved using hands and soap to scrub shit. It's the evil corps that convinced us that shit was dirty and to use TP instead.
There are some things that basic wants and desires, and keeping your hands shit free in an easy way is one of them. You could possibly have an argument about women shaving armpits, but I'm still convinced that was part of some larger movement of culture and not just "evil advertising hypnotising us".
The point is that you, like most other Westerners, would never even consider filling this need with anything other than a product.
I suppose I could buy a bidet, oh but that would be a "product " and us damn westerners solve all problems with "products". Apparently the right way to live is like the Unabomber and be self sufficient not relying on others to do things more effectively. Part of living in a society is relying upon things other people produce.
Do you really like the idea that people will be more closed lip because of the potential for it to come back to bite you 30 years later? It's hard to say what will change between now and 30 years from now. Context changes over 30 years, so what you say now can easily be re-interpreted to mean something very different in 30 years. It's as if everyone has the potential to be a public figure and have everything they say be scrutinized throughout their entire life.
Who cares if I choose Charmin over Scotts toilet paper? It's really a minor decision in life that shouldn't take much consideration.
Thats a closedminded statement. Who cares? The people that make BILLIONS AND BILLIONS OF DOLLARS selling you bathroom supplies. Thats who. It doesnt matter to you, and they know that. Thats what directing you to a certain product has to be either unconcious, or have a very good argument.
Of course the companies care which toilet paper I choose, but it really has little effect elsewhere. Many people care about things I put no value on. The fact that other people put different values on things than me is really beside the point. The point is that peoples choice of toilet paper has little effect in the world, so I'm hardly concered at all if some advertisement affects this minor choice in my world. I guess maybe if I hear proctor and gamble rapes puppies, I might think twice about buying Charmin. But everything being equal, it's more of a burden on my to be concerned about such minor decisions.
We make a nearly infinite amount of choices every day. Which word do I use in this sentence? Do I eat chili, or go out to eat? Do I jump up the stairs, or tiptoe? If you become concerned about if "you" really made the choice (and weren't influence against your will), you'll surely go mad. Some decisions are less important than others. Which toilet paper to buy ranks below do I eat chili tonight for me. The fact that some evil corp is influencing that decision in some minor way doesn't really concern me, since I don't think it's an important decision.
But I think what you've said begs this comment to be repeated : On many levels the goal of advertising is not to get you to buy a certain product, its to get you to buy. Its to get you to want, to NEED. Having you choose a *particular brand* of a product is not the primary goal in a lot of cases. Thats why television is so dangerous and people launch campaigns against it : there is a concious and directed effort to increase consumption by shaping your thinking while you watch television. Ever wonder why you even need toilet paper in the first place? Didnt think so.
Sure, I generally agree that advertising often encourages people to think they need something. ALl too often people get burned on this and only feel relieved from a need by buying a product. I think the anti-TV crusaders are going down the wrong path though. Really what you should be doing is teaching people to self analyse. Why do you need that thing? Will it really give you what you think it will? TV isn't the cause of rampant consumerism, so getting people to watch less TV won't solve that problem. Getting people to wake up actually might.
As far as the "why do you need toilet paper" thought, I _need_ toilet paper because I was raised in a culture where that's the thing we use to get shit off our asses. If I were raised somewhere else, I might use a magic Japanese toilet, or some bizzaro shells to remove the shit. If you've got some better way to remove shit from asses, bring it on. But the problem in selling your product is going to be mainly cultural, not advertising drilled into peoples heads that TP is the only way. Yah, yah, advertising influence the culture, but why doesn't all advertising suceeed then? There's much larger forces at work than simple programming of people through ads. It's far to complicated to address that in this post though (and I doubt I could even tackle that).
Sure, the goal of advertising is to make you feel familiar with a product so when I go into a store and make the 3 second decision of what brand to buy, I'm more likely to go with the familiar product than a generic.
I'm sure advertisers think they're trying to attatch an emotion to their product, but does anyone really feel emotional attatchment towards the brand of toilet paper they buy? People mostly make choices that are familiar, especially when most differences between products are more or less equal. For instance, I buy crest toothpaste because it's just what I grew up with, and I don't really see any differences between the different products (including price). I buy old-spice however because I like the smell of it. Food I'll generally buy the higher quality product because I value higher quality food more than I do price. Food is also something I'm more willing to take a risk on and figure out which product is higher quality since I buy food every week. "Didn't like that brand of diced tomatoes, try another". I suppose if you don't see any quality differences between diced tomatoes, you'd just buy the most familiar brand (or maybe the cheapest if you value savings) like my toothpaste example.
Is TV advertising really "brainwashing" though, as you suggest? (A very loaded term that I'm not sure has a very precise definition) I guess only if you really think the choices people make based on advertising really matter. Who cares if I choose Charmin over Scotts toilet paper? It's really a minor decision in life that shouldn't take much consideration. Is it brainwashing just because some advertisement tipped the scale that was otherwise equally balanced? Is consumerism really that important in life?
The only choice I can think of that's heavily influenced by advertising that really matters is pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceutical industry spends billions of dollars a year trying to get consumers to make decisions that a doctor should (in general) be making. The billions of dollars spent of marketing is one of the big reason prescription drugs are so damn expensive. They actually spend more on marketing and advertising than they do on R&D. They do it because it's effective, though there's no relationship between effectiveness of a drug, and how much mass advertising is pumped into it.
Even the doctors are hornswaggled by the whole thing. They have slimy pharmaceutical reps giving out marketroid pitches about their products. The biggest problem is there's little objective comparison for even the doctors to make good decisions on what drugs to prescribe. On top of that they have irrational patients wanting to be prescribed the "familiar" drugs they saw on the TV, and not the "cheap generic" or "knockoff" they 've never heard about. Nevermind that the unfamiliar drug is just as effective or more than the heavily advertised drug.
Sure, I guess if you redefine what people mean when they mention "short attention span". Usually this means an inability to concentrate on anything for more than a couple minutes. If something is unimportant, you filter it. The hallmark of the short attention span is when your brain says BORING!, or just zones out after only a few minutes concentration and you have to go on to something different. Actively filtering out unimportant details or subjects that just aren't interesting to you is different.
With that said, I think the arguments people have presented here about the album format dying out, containing mostly filler, etc are much more relevant to why random-play has become so much more popular. It doesn't have anything to do with "short attention spans" like the marketroid prof would have us believe. It has a lot more to do with the huge volume of music that people suddenly have the ability to carry around with them.
If you have 10,000 songs at your disposal, it'd be nice to have a mechanism where you stand a good chance of listening to all of them. You could do them all in some linear order, but eventually you'd be bored with the extremely regimented order in which the music is played. Random, or some kind of weighted random where recently played songs are less likely to be played is an excellent way to hear the stuff you might not normally pick.
So the "alpha state zombie" effect isn't true for say.. a movie, or a play? Your techno-geek explanation sounds nice, but I don't buy it without context. The same " At no time is there every a picture displayed on the screen" thing is true for a computer monitor, do I turn into an zombie when I surf the internet too?
The thing that's wrong about TV is that people have become too enamored with unreality. People get a very distored picture of the world through TV, and too many assume that it's real. The "news" is contains little content and all emotion. Then Oprah comes on spewing her further distored trash. I still watch TV of course, but in recent years the trash has overtaken anything of value.
The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities campus isn't even listed, even though they have most of the buildings covered by wireless. Other people seem surprised their institution is even listed, given that they have very limited wireless access.
Given major omissions like this, I take the survey with a very LARGE grain of salt. For some reason they base the survey on number of students, number of computers, and computer/student ratio. Sorry, but when I think of being "unwired", I think "what's the likelyhood that I can get a wireless connection in any given building? The number of people around me has little to do with that, and the number of computers in the university has almost nothing to do with that. Those might be important numbers to use in other surveys of techno-ability, but they're meaningless in a ranking of wireless access.