When did it become okay to define the statements of anyone with whom you do not agree as "bashing"?
Let me point you to a comment in my original post:
Katz should not be above criticism, of course, but the type of comments that are usually directed his way are very personal and tasteless.
I personally don't agree with everything Katz has to say either, and I've responded to some of his features with my criticisms.
As I've mentioned, criticism comes with the nature of his job. When I refer to bashing, I guess I'm talking about some of the things that Hemo discusses in his feature Thoughts from the furnace
Slashdot is all about the intercourse of ideas and thoughts. Some of the issues being debated are very emotional and personal in nature. I think it becomes very easy to devolve into mud-slinging barbarians at times, and lord knows that I've been guilty of going on the jihad at times.
The main reason I wrote the comment was that until I saw a picture of John with his dogs, and read the article about his family, I hadn't really thought of John as a person. I thought of him as this thing who periodically released an article. I think that is how most people think of him (and of each of us in general), which makes it easier to dehumanize him and treat him accordingly. I'm just trying to appeal to everyone to take a second and think about the human on the receiving end of our comments.
I understand that Keanu bashing has become a cottage industry recently, and I don't mean to jump on the bandwagon, but Keanu seriously disrupted my ability to concentrate on the movie itself with his horrible acting. Chalk it up to ADD or something, but I could not focus on the movie while watching him overact.
Keanu has a place in Hollywood. Anything in the Ted & Bill's Most Excellent Journey genre is his bag. Anything that remotely asks us to take him seriously takes a big risk.
Didn't mean to take away from the discussion about Matrix, but you really can't discuss the movie without talking about the acting, at least that's what I think.
It seems that Katz bashing is a favorite pasttime in this forum and I sincerely hope that this article does not become another open license for attack on Katz. There is quite a bit of the Pavlovian, knee-jerk, vitriol that makes its way into this forum and it really needs to stop.
Katz should not be above criticism, of course, but the type of comments that are usually directed his way are very personal and tasteless.
Someone pointed to an article that had a picture of Katz and contained a brief blurb on him. You know what? The guy is human. He is married and has a wife, daughter and two dogs. He lives in North Jersey, which is my neck of the woods, and is really no different than me or you. He just happens to be someone who writes for a living and whose topics are usually complex and controversial. He is not above interjecting his opinions because he is not a newspaper reporter; he is a writer who writes about issues that concern him.
Just remember, his daughter might be reading the comments about him.
Watching him learn martial arts was better than watching a Three Stooges marathon.
Re:Why Linux Supporters Should Be Excited About X-
on
More on the MS "X-Box"
·
· Score: 1
I'm confused. You think MS should be credited for competing? What's so noble about that? The only reason MS is offering this "open and free" development platform is because they have no choice. Sony and Sega have the market locked down. Microsoft's original plan to make the PC the premier gaming platform hasn't exactly panned out and they're not too happy about that.
MS is in this to make sure that developers work on MS platforms, using MS development products. They only care about openess and freedom when it's the only way to enter a market.
The pathology of victimization is an amazing sociological phenomenon! The extent to which victims become complicit, even helpful, in their own demise is truly astonishing. I'm reminded of the jews that were employed in concentration camps during WW2 to keep their brethren in line.
*Reminder to self -- research this subject*
You know why big business gets away with their historically shoddy treatment of the consumer? Because we make it easy for them. I imagine board meetings are only held so the board members can read comments like yours and laugh themselves into a tizzy. Oh, what a nice life they must live!
In Toshiba, we have an acknowledged act of negligence; Toshiba knowingly sold a defective product for years, the key word being knowingly. When pressed with a lawsuit, they did the honorable thing (probably a Japanese instinct, certaintly not big business) and settled for damages.
In you, and saddeningly a majority of the slashdot netizen, we have someone decrying what is essentially a mutually agreed upon rectification of an existing Toshiba liability. Why? So you the consumer can continue to squander hard-earned money on defective products? Where you picked up this solidarity with big business, I would love to know. I don't know about you but I tend to find myself more aligned with the consumers.
Let's see. I am now snippy, delusionary,troubled, a hypocritical bigot and an extremist-socialist-totalitarian freak, Did I miss anything?
I don't begrudge big business from making a buck. Heck, I don't begrudge them from making a billion bucks. I understand big business is there to make the shareholders happy. I have a problem when their mission conflicts with putting out quality and safe products.
You say that no one has been affected by Toshiba's negligence. How do you know? Most of the people who are eligible for redress aren't even aware of the court decision yet. Toshiba will be placing full-page ads in papers to notify them. Even if no one steps forth and says "I was damaged in the following way..." , it doesn't prove that there weren't indeed damages. Because most of the computer industry has the same indifferent attitude that Toshiba does -- a couple of bugs won't kill ya, would ya like a service pak with them fries? -- there may well be people who realize they lost data but had no clue as to whom should be blamed.
The end result is Toshiba failed it's shareholders by not removing any potential liabilities that they were aware of. If Toshiba honestly was not aware of the problem, they would still be responisble for damages. But having prior knowledge makes it easy for me to feel no sympathy for them at all.
I wasn't attacking you. I do think, however, that you were attacking the tort system and the jury system based on this one case. I take offense to that. Show me the injustice of this case and maybe I'll come around to your side. It appears that your only objection is that no one was damaged by the bug. As I've mentioned previously, the product was faulty so Toshiba isn't being punished. They are merely doing what they should have done in the first place -- providing a quality replacement product (or voucher) at their expense.
It's kinda surprising to see that the majority of slashdot folks are brainwashed Reaganites who do nothing more than spout the Young Republican party line on all economic issues. As far as I'm concerned, big business is out to fuck me over. Anyone (consumers, class-action lawyers) who turns the table on them is akin to Harriet Tubman; they're setting us free from the oppressive reign of CEO's and CIO's and CFO's who don't give a rat's ass about anything but their next stock option.
I thought Perl did compile down to a byte-code level. That's what the Camel book says, at least. Since it's written by Larry, I would think it's accurate.
I wonder where these lawsuits are heading but I guess some will strike it rich (having suffered nothing at all to boot). These lawsuits show how unsufficient the jury system is for cases like this where the jury is likely to be clueless. If any of these manufacturers end up settling or losing the suit, then there might be some real problems for the entire industry.
Hmm. This guy isn't satisifed with submitting the story, he also has to offer us his wise prognostications on the deficiencies of the tort system as well. You know what? I'm not buying it.
Big business is always trying to scare us about the evils of seedy trial lawyers and stupid, uninformed jurors. You know what I'm more worried about? Big business cutting corners to make a buck at the expense of the product. They've been doing it for years. Now that it's catching up to them they want to start crying. Too bad. If they had been doing the right thing way back when, they wouldn't be in this position now.
think that the security for internet voting is something that needs to be proven before it can hit mainstream. When I say security, I also mean the possible rigging of votes... they have to come up with a sure-fire way to prevent anyone from rigging votes...
Pssst. Come here. I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Are you ready?
The current system ain't foolproof either. Now I have to kill you.
You make two completely erroneous supositions above.
First of all, how is internet voting going to lessen "voter apathy"? The problem isn't that people are apathetic to the idea of voting, it's that they don't care enough about the issues to vote, much less learn about the issues first. All internet voting will do is make it easier for the un-informed--the "stupid"--to vote.
I disagree. When it comes time to vote, I couldn't drag my girlfriend to the voter booth with all the wild horses on earth. She is a telecommunications analyst with a masters in librarian sciences. She is an accomplished writer as well, having had many articles pusblished in her trade magazines. She is clearly not stupid. She just does not give a damn about voting because she doesn't think her vote is important. She doesn't feel that she can make a difference with her vote.
There are many reasons why people vote. Sense of duty, faith in system, etc. Likewise, there are many reasons that people don't vote. To state that people don't vote because they are lazy or stupid is asinine and doesn't serve to foster useful debate.
What we need to do is make it harder to vote, make it so that only people who care AND are informed on the issues will be able to cast a ballot that counts.
Do you propose that we go back to limiting the vote to white landowners?
Unlike you, I have great confidence in my neighbors. It's kind of ironic that in slashdot, this supposed collection of forward thinking people who are part of the community of people changing the world, backwards ideas like this are expressed.
a Cedar Rapids newspaper editorial headline warned that Internet voting ''cheapens the value of the vote.'' But the thrust of the piece was that voters themselves were the problem. It demanded: ''How much farther must we stoop to make sure no citizen is forced to expend any effort to vote?''
This made me laugh. I imagine there were a lot of people, close to two hundred years ago, who had similar disdainful views when the vote was given to people who were not property owners. I'm sure there were some people in the south who were simply shocked that voter eligibility testing was abolished a couple of decades ago.
People in power, or people satisfied with the status quo, regardless of whether the status quo is broken, are usually the most resistant to change. I remember when George Bush (daddy, not junior) tried to stymie legislation that would have allowed voters to register at State Motor Vehicle establishments! Can you imagine the irony? The leader of the free world fighting back the effort to make it easier for potential voters to register!
Bush wasn't a fan of the legislation because as far as he was concerned, this had no benefit for him personally. He was told that the majority of people who would take advantage of this opportunity would be immigrants, minorities and unemployed people; individuals who usually vote Democrat.
I'm not surprised that there is similar reluctance to open up the voting process to the internet. It is new and fraught with security issues. There are legitimate concerns that need to be ironed out. I do think however, that some people are really only concerned with the bottom line; who are these people that will be voting via the internet and are they like me?
Don't take this the wrong way but what was the point of your comment? It sounds like you have something on your mind that loosely relates to the Economist article,in a mostly ephemeral way, but your point didn't come across well. Or maybe you were in a rush or something ?!?
The best writers employ the tried and true adage of KISS -- Keep it simple stupid.
I do like the comment that says they should "start acting on Internet Time rather than Washington Time"..Struck me as supremely true.
They forget one thing. The people in Washington are nothing more than priveleged, spoiled little brats who don't give a rats ass about regular people. They will do anything to make their political point. See government shutdown of 1995.
When you have people like Helms, Burton, Armey, Delay, McConell, etc. making decisions, you can bet your ass that there will either be something in it for them or someone will get screwed.
1) Was your decision to host HRM's website on Redhat linux in part a political decision to support Open Source software?
2) What are your thoughts on the hotbed of capitalism's (USA) computing community finally coming back to the embrace the Open Source roots from whence the computing enviromnent originated?
Slashdot Mirror
When did it become okay to define the statements of anyone with whom you do not agree as "bashing"?
Let me point you to a comment in my original post:
Katz should not be above criticism, of course, but the type of comments that are usually directed his way are very personal and tasteless.
I personally don't agree with everything Katz has to say either, and I've responded to some of his features with my criticisms.
As I've mentioned, criticism comes with the nature of his job. When I refer to bashing, I guess I'm talking about some of the things that Hemo discusses in his feature Thoughts from the furnace
Slashdot is all about the intercourse of ideas and thoughts. Some of the issues being debated are very emotional and personal in nature. I think it becomes very easy to devolve into mud-slinging barbarians at times, and lord knows that I've been guilty of going on the jihad at times.
The main reason I wrote the comment was that until I saw a picture of John with his dogs, and read the article about his family, I hadn't really thought of John as a person. I thought of him as this thing who periodically released an article. I think that is how most people think of him (and of each of us in general), which makes it easier to dehumanize him and treat him accordingly. I'm just trying to appeal to everyone to take a second and think about the human on the receiving end of our comments.
I understand that Keanu bashing has become a cottage industry recently, and I don't mean to jump on the bandwagon, but Keanu seriously disrupted my ability to concentrate on the movie itself with his horrible acting. Chalk it up to ADD or something, but I could not focus on the movie while watching him overact.
Keanu has a place in Hollywood. Anything in the Ted & Bill's Most Excellent Journey genre is his bag. Anything that remotely asks us to take him seriously takes a big risk.
Didn't mean to take away from the discussion about Matrix, but you really can't discuss the movie without talking about the acting, at least that's what I think.
It seems that Katz bashing is a favorite pasttime in this forum and I sincerely hope that this article does not become another open license for attack on Katz. There is quite a bit of the Pavlovian, knee-jerk, vitriol that makes its way into this forum and it really needs to stop.
Katz should not be above criticism, of course, but the type of comments that are usually directed his way are very personal and tasteless.
Someone pointed to an article that had a picture of Katz and contained a brief blurb on him. You know what? The guy is human. He is married and has a wife, daughter and two dogs. He lives in North Jersey, which is my neck of the woods, and is really no different than me or you. He just happens to be someone who writes for a living and whose topics are usually complex and controversial. He is not above interjecting his opinions because he is not a newspaper reporter; he is a writer who writes about issues that concern him.
Just remember, his daughter might be reading the comments about him.
The movie was bad because of one reason:
Keanu
Watching him learn martial arts was better than watching a Three Stooges marathon.
I'm confused. You think MS should be credited for competing? What's so noble about that? The only reason MS is offering this "open and free" development platform is because they have no choice. Sony and Sega have the market locked down. Microsoft's original plan to make the PC the premier gaming platform hasn't exactly panned out and they're not too happy about that.
MS is in this to make sure that developers work on MS platforms, using MS development products. They only care about openess and freedom when it's the only way to enter a market.
This confirms Australias status as the "Global Village Idiot"
No. Those Foster's commercials do.
Put another privacy right on the barbie, eh mates?
;>)
that if the plane ain't in flight, you don't gain membership to the mile-high club ;>)
It isn't all about an easy buck - there are more things to life than that. Believe it or not.
Try telling that to big business.
The pathology of victimization is an amazing sociological phenomenon! The extent to which victims become complicit, even helpful, in their own demise is truly astonishing. I'm reminded of the jews that were employed in concentration camps during WW2 to keep their brethren in line.
*Reminder to self -- research this subject*
You know why big business gets away with their historically shoddy treatment of the consumer? Because we make it easy for them. I imagine board meetings are only held so the board members can read comments like yours and laugh themselves into a tizzy. Oh, what a nice life they must live!
In Toshiba, we have an acknowledged act of negligence; Toshiba knowingly sold a defective product for years, the key word being knowingly. When pressed with a lawsuit, they did the honorable thing (probably a Japanese instinct, certaintly not big business) and settled for damages.
In you, and saddeningly a majority of the slashdot netizen, we have someone decrying what is essentially a mutually agreed upon rectification of an existing Toshiba liability. Why? So you the consumer can continue to squander hard-earned money on defective products? Where you picked up this solidarity with big business, I would love to know. I don't know about you but I tend to find myself more aligned with the consumers.
Let's see. I am now snippy, delusionary,troubled, a hypocritical bigot and an extremist-socialist-totalitarian freak, Did I miss anything?
I don't begrudge big business from making a buck. Heck, I don't begrudge them from making a billion bucks. I understand big business is there to make the shareholders happy. I have a problem when their mission conflicts with putting out quality and safe products.
You say that no one has been affected by Toshiba's negligence. How do you know? Most of the people who are eligible for redress aren't even aware of the court decision yet. Toshiba will be placing full-page ads in papers to notify them. Even if no one steps forth and says "I was damaged in the following way..." , it doesn't prove that there weren't indeed damages. Because most of the computer industry has the same indifferent attitude that Toshiba does -- a couple of bugs won't kill ya, would ya like a service pak with them fries? -- there may well be people who realize they lost data but had no clue as to whom should be blamed.
The end result is Toshiba failed it's shareholders by not removing any potential liabilities that they were aware of. If Toshiba honestly was not aware of the problem, they would still be responisble for damages. But having prior knowledge makes it easy for me to feel no sympathy for them at all.
I wasn't attacking you. I do think, however, that you were attacking the tort system and the jury system based on this one case. I take offense to that. Show me the injustice of this case and maybe I'll come around to your side. It appears that your only objection is that no one was damaged by the bug. As I've mentioned previously, the product was faulty so Toshiba isn't being punished. They are merely doing what they should have done in the first place -- providing a quality replacement product (or voucher) at their expense.
Amen brother, preach on!
It's kinda surprising to see that the majority of slashdot folks are brainwashed Reaganites who do nothing more than spout the Young Republican party line on all economic issues. As far as I'm concerned, big business is out to fuck me over. Anyone (consumers, class-action lawyers) who turns the table on them is akin to Harriet Tubman; they're setting us free from the oppressive reign of CEO's and CIO's and CFO's who don't give a rat's ass about anything but their next stock option.
I thought Perl did compile down to a byte-code level. That's what the Camel book says, at least. Since it's written by Larry, I would think it's accurate.
That's awesome, dude !
If they force you to fill out those forms just give them garbage answers.
I give them none@ofyourdamnbusiness.com as my email address all the time.
I wonder where these lawsuits are heading but I guess some will strike it rich (having suffered nothing at all to boot). These lawsuits show how unsufficient the jury system is for cases like this where the jury is likely to be clueless. If any of these manufacturers end up settling or losing the suit, then there might be some real problems for the entire industry.
Hmm. This guy isn't satisifed with submitting the story, he also has to offer us his wise prognostications on the deficiencies of the tort system as well. You know what? I'm not buying it.
Big business is always trying to scare us about the evils of seedy trial lawyers and stupid, uninformed jurors. You know what I'm more worried about? Big business cutting corners to make a buck at the expense of the product. They've been doing it for years. Now that it's catching up to them they want to start crying. Too bad. If they had been doing the right thing way back when, they wouldn't be in this position now.
think that the security for internet voting is something that needs to be proven before it can hit mainstream. When I say security, I also mean the possible rigging of votes... they have to come up with a sure-fire way to prevent anyone from rigging votes...
Pssst. Come here. I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Are you ready?
The current system ain't foolproof either. Now I have to kill you.
You make two completely erroneous supositions above.
First of all, how is internet voting going to lessen "voter apathy"? The problem isn't that people are apathetic to the idea of voting, it's that they don't care enough about the issues to vote, much less learn about the issues first. All internet voting will do is make it easier for the un-informed--the "stupid"--to vote.
I disagree. When it comes time to vote, I couldn't drag my girlfriend to the voter booth with all the wild horses on earth. She is a telecommunications analyst with a masters in librarian sciences. She is an accomplished writer as well, having had many articles pusblished in her trade magazines. She is clearly not stupid. She just does not give a damn about voting because she doesn't think her vote is important. She doesn't feel that she can make a difference with her vote.
There are many reasons why people vote. Sense of duty, faith in system, etc. Likewise, there are many reasons that people don't vote. To state that people don't vote because they are lazy or stupid is asinine and doesn't serve to foster useful debate.
What we need to do is make it harder to vote, make it so that only people who care AND are informed on the issues will be able to cast a ballot that counts.
Do you propose that we go back to limiting the vote to white landowners?
Unlike you, I have great confidence in my neighbors. It's kind of ironic that in slashdot, this supposed collection of forward thinking people who are part of the community of people changing the world, backwards ideas like this are expressed.
a Cedar Rapids newspaper editorial headline warned that Internet voting ''cheapens the value of the vote.'' But the thrust of the piece was that voters themselves were the problem. It demanded: ''How much farther must we stoop to make sure no citizen is forced to expend any effort to vote?''
This made me laugh. I imagine there were a lot of people, close to two hundred years ago, who had similar disdainful views when the vote was given to people who were not property owners. I'm sure there were some people in the south who were simply shocked that voter eligibility testing was abolished a couple of decades ago.
People in power, or people satisfied with the status quo, regardless of whether the status quo is broken, are usually the most resistant to change. I remember when George Bush (daddy, not junior) tried to stymie legislation that would have allowed voters to register at State Motor Vehicle establishments! Can you imagine the irony? The leader of the free world fighting back the effort to make it easier for potential voters to register!
Bush wasn't a fan of the legislation because as far as he was concerned, this had no benefit for him personally. He was told that the majority of people who would take advantage of this opportunity would be immigrants, minorities and unemployed people; individuals who usually vote Democrat.
I'm not surprised that there is similar reluctance to open up the voting process to the internet. It is new and fraught with security issues. There are legitimate concerns that need to be ironed out. I do think however, that some people are really only concerned with the bottom line; who are these people that will be voting via the internet and are they like me?
Don't take this the wrong way but what was the point of your comment? It sounds like you have something on your mind that loosely relates to the Economist article,in a mostly ephemeral way, but your point didn't come across well. Or maybe you were in a rush or something ?!?
The best writers employ the tried and true adage of KISS -- Keep it simple stupid.
I do like the comment that says they should "start acting on Internet Time rather than Washington Time"..Struck me as supremely true.
They forget one thing. The people in Washington are nothing more than priveleged, spoiled little brats who don't give a rats ass about regular people. They will do anything to make their political point. See government shutdown of 1995.
When you have people like Helms, Burton, Armey, Delay, McConell, etc. making decisions, you can bet your ass that there will either be something in it for them or someone will get screwed.
Free beer for the best guest
;>) I should have said free beer for best guess
I always have free beer for the best female guests
I wish I could be around 200 years from now to hear someone go "They were using silicon wafers for what?"
:>)
Speaking of silicon, I guess the valley will have to come up with a new name. Free beer for the best guest
1) Was your decision to host HRM's website on Redhat linux in part a political decision to support Open Source software?
2) What are your thoughts on the hotbed of capitalism's (USA) computing community finally coming back to the embrace the Open Source roots from whence the computing enviromnent originated?
Okay, I'll take you up on it!
It would help if I had something to say...