The real question is why do these people hate the US so much. One reason I've heard a lot lately is that the freedoms that the US stands for fly in the face of their strict religeous beliefs. They see the freedom and democracy that the US preaches as a horrible affront to their morality. They're attacking us because our way of life, and the fact that we are prosperous while living that way, is disolving the strict religeous fanatism of their countries. They see Western influence as being a horrible corruption that they must stamp out before it destroys what they believe in.
My personal opinion is that this is pure propaganda. It's precisely what politicians and the media would want you to believe. Why? Because this approach leads to an emotional response, rather than a rational one. And we all know how easy it is to manipulate people's emotions. This is an incredible opportunity for politicians to push their own agenda, and stirring up people's emotions is the first step in that direction (if you have trouble believing this, look closely at any statement made by any politician during the last week and notice the abundant use of metaphors and symbols, rather than logical reasoning in their speech). The real reason, IMHO, for this display of hatred towards the USA has to do with how SOME of the Middle-Eastern people perceive the interventions of the US in what they call "their own business". They see the US as a country that uses its superior military power to brutally impose its own selfish interests to anyone who might not agree. Whether this perception is accurate or not, it's beyond the scope of my argument. The fact is that it exists and it's leading to despicable acts of terrorism against innocent people like the one last Tuesday.
Now what US politicians seem to be trying to do is feed a constant stream of propaganda to the population, with the apparent purpose of getting the public to identify Afghanistan as "the enemy" and to believe, exactly like you stated, that these people hate the "American way of life itself", which, logically speaking, is nonsense. These people have probably no idea of how American live and what they believe in. How can they hate something they don't know? They're probably manipulated into mindless hostility towards Americans, the same way Americans seem now manipulated into mindless hostility towards Afghans. THIS CANNOT LEAD TO ANYTHING GOOD.
People, both Eastern and Western, need to wake up and realize there's no point in blindly hating each other. They need to see how their own leaders are turning them against each other, for who knows what reasons, and for once step up and put an end to all this. What the heck would be so wrong in Middle Easterners collaborating with the West in an effort to stop terrorism, and the West revising a couple of items on its foreign policy, especially the ones Arabs find the most sensitive?
Oh well. I'm still allowed to dream, aren't I?
Re:Assasination: what a GREAT idea
on
A New Kind of War
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Allow me to disagree. First, assasination won't make martyrs out of them. Sure, for them it's a great heroic thing to go down in flames taking a thousand "enemies" along and making the news worldwide. But to die in their own secret compound, killed by a silent bullet without even knowing what hit them? That doesn't sound very heroic. Second, fast and merciless assassination would save a LOT of time. In order to bring them to "open trial" you would first have to capture them, and that implies a whole diplomatic mess. By the time you manage to persuade (one way or another) governments like those of Afghanistan or Iraq to hand them over, they would have plenty of time to organize the next attack. If you just go after them with Rambo-style assassins ("if they catch you, we don't know you") you avoid the diplomatic hassle and you do essentially the same job a lot quicker and cleaner. With the added bonus that without their leaders, terrorists aren't worth much and certainly won't be capable of planning a second hit.
Political dissidents, you say? Nonsense. We would be going after *known* terrorists, people with quite a few claimed terrorist attacks on their records, not some guy who just opposes his country's government.
Well, I guess you *could* try them and put them in prison. But what do you do when, a few months later, 10 guys carrying concealed plastic containers walk into the Empire State building and threaten to release Serin gas (or Anthrax or whatever) all over Manhattan unless you let bin Laden or whoever is currently in jail walk away free? Not much you can do, eh?
No, these guys *must* die. And they must die in such a way as to discourage others from becoming terrorists: quietly and anonymously.
Erasing Afghanistan from the face of the Earth won't do you a bit of good. By the time your bombs hit Afghanistan, terrorists will be long gone. Terrorists are everywhere, and they're way more mobile than your bombers or troops. They can easily avoid attacks of this scale.
The only effective way I can see of getting rid of them is infiltrating their organizations, gathering as much intelligence about them as possible, then assasinating them one by one. No fussy and cumbersome war procedures, no large-scale military operations, no pointless delays with diplomatic BS; just a few elite troops of trained assassins, quiet, accurate and deadly.
It's called The social contract, and if I'm not mistaken it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who came up with the theory, expanding on certain ideas of Montesquieu and Locke.
People that don't understand why America becomes isolationist...look at how you act after we save you.
Har har. Go tell that to survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Kosovo. See how thankful they are to you for saving them.
I personally have had American bombers fly over my head on their way to Kosovo for a month, and every day I've had the shit scared out of me hearing reports of civilians killed by the bombs. But hey, I guess American innocent civilians are somehow more important than the innocent civilians in the rest of the world...
What's the world coming to?
on
Parrot: For Real
·
· Score: 3, Funny
As a long time Perl zealot, I'd like to take this opportunity to vigorously protest this move. Posts on both Perl and Python mailing lists suggest that there *is* going to be some compromise at language syntax level to accomodate the common runtime. From the Perl perspective it's like "well, Perl 6 was going to be fully OO anyway, so what difference are going to make a few concession in syntax"? Well, I strongly object! I mean, I spent so much time learning Perl so I could be different and write cool obfuscated "Japh" sigs, and NOW they're going to make Perl look and feel just like every other C# on the planet? I've had it! If THAT's gonna get implemented, I vow to completely abandon my Monk robe and to only code in Visual Basic! Brother Monks, I urge you to join me in my protest so that the despicable traitor Larry Wall will see the error of his ways and will hopefully change his mind about this Frankensteinian abomination! United we will succeed!
Now that would be a regrettable mistake. If the news sites are correct, these people are Islamic terrorists. They have nothing to lose and death does not scare them. They are organized and your war is not going to stop them. Before your military can find an annihilate them, they can and will do a lot more damage to American cities. War would only kill innocents, it won't touch terrorists the slightest bit.
OK, OK, you got me. The $_ was actually there when I pasted the code from the Emacs window, but just before I submitted I decided to take it out for added effect, as I know many non-Perl coders have, um, strong opinions about implicit variables. Vanity, I guess. But hey, it does work with strict and -w!:)
As for the unreadability part, try writing the equivalent of the above in C++ (or, god forbid, Java) and looking at the 10+ line resulting code you'll see why C++/Java coders at least might find unreadable what's otherwise perfectly fine Perl.
Maybe my brain does not "crash" completely when I go to sleep, but my conscience sure does. I also lose my perception of time. I'd say those are pretty serious bugs.:-)
I never said I blamed Perl. I just said it's what I happen to be coding in at the moment, and I'm loving every minute of it.:-) I know I should strive to make my code "readable", but the irresistible urge to type: join("",map{ucfirst }split(//,shift)); just to correct a spelling error in the database on-the-fly is simply overwhelming. I just can't help myself.:)
Nobody's saying it should be "crushed at all costs". I simply won't use it. And neither will, probably, all those who don't like the idea. For me at least, it's a little difficult to trust Microsoft with my personal data when I don't even trust them enough to have any of their software installed on my computers. It's not an emotional or religious issue: I just can't trust them.
You don't really have much of a long-term memory, do you? Either that, or you're really really young. I remember a time when every single motherfscking computer user out there knew how to work with the command line, because that was all there was. IBM PCs running DOS. And they all did it. Nobody thought it was difficult or anything. They just fscking did it. That was less than 10 years ago. Now how the heck did everyone suddenly go so mindbogglingly stupid during those few years, that we're now expected to design our hardware and software for retards? How the hell did that happen? Because, frankly, I don't want to work with software designed for retards. I expect the software I work with to respect my intellect and my ability to make full use of a complex tool, NOT dumb down the capabilities of the tool because I might have a problem understanding more than pretty pictures and buttons.
Oh well. I guess that's why I use Linux and not Windows. You know what? Screw the "stupid cows". Who the hell feels the urge to cater to THEM anyway, besides proprietary software makers like Microsoft who have a lot of $$$ to gain from it? I sure don't. Why is everyone here so hung up on the idea that Linux should be brought to the "general public"? What do YOU have to gain if Linux gets dumbed down to the point of being usable by people with the IQ of cows?
What? I got AA fonts after "rpm -Uvh kde*" with KDE 2.2. I don't know about other distros, but with Redhat you can't get more "out of the box" than that. There's also a checkbox in the KDE "Fonts" control panel if you want to disable AA.
I'm SO sick of all this "Windows improves productivity" crap. How the fsck does "rebooting and/or reinstalling every time there's a problem" mean productivity? Let's see, at my company sales/accounting work on a custom application running under Linux, client/server with the clients being diskless computers booting off the network. Time required for adding an extra workstation to the network / replacing a faulty one: 30 seconds. Probability of random isolated errors due to software: 0, because everyone uses the exact same copy of the master filesystem which resides on the server. Everyone else uses Linux stand-alone workstations running StarOffice for office work, and they are quite productive because they have been trained to use StarOffice. Developers' workstations run Linux as well, and being Linux programmers, they're quite productive too. There's only ONE admin who takes care of everything and he's also very productive, since he has an army of shell and Perl scripts helping him. True, he may make more than your average MCSE, but then again, he's way more competent and efficient then an MCSE. Software costs are WAY down, so we can afford more and better quality hardware, any licensing or BSA-induced hassle is totally out of the question, and the average uptime on *workstations* is 3 months. So what exactly are you talking about, when you mention negative effects on end users?
Well, this only works with browsers that do not strictly obey the content-type header. The ones that do, like Konqueror, just display the HTML source (heh; vagina.rotten.com? now that's what I call an inspired name). So this isn't really a bug in Slashcode, this is only an exploit for stupid browsers that insist on rendering anything remotely resembling HTML.
Hey, I never said commercialization was bad. I said analysts incessantly spouting doom predictions are bad.:-) But anyway, communication does not necessarily mean putting up a web page. As you say, there are a lot of people who don't have the time or the resources to put up a web page, BUT they do participate in forums, or mailing lists or newsgroups or whatever. No matter how stressed and/or busy an intelligent man is, he always needs to communicate, and the Net is the perfect medium for this. The lazy and stupid consumer on the other hand, carefully avoids anything that may even remotely imply an intelectual effort, he just sits there and watches the pretty pictures, because that's what stupid lazy consumers generally do. You only need to browse mainstream magazines or watch mainstream TV to see what I mean.
And yes, companies getting 50% of the internet is not a problem. Hell, they can get as much of it as they want, as long as they don't try to push Free information off it...
I think what the article was trying to say was that statistically speaking, the Internet is commercial. I don't see any big surprises here. The overwhelming majority of consumers are too lazy or stupid to say something with any meaning for the rest of the world, therefore they don't *need* a mass communication tool. They need their daily fix of one-way mass communication directed at them, so their surfing habits are very likely to match their TV viewing habits - which is exactly what the article describes: most of them only surf commercial sites owned by those 4 corporations.
That, however, does not mean the internet itself is commercial. That would be a very stupid thing to say, if you only consider that a lot of governments have an internet presence, and governments are anything BUT commercial. The network itself is agnostic, it doesn't care if the packets running through it are commercial or not. We geeks use it for a lot of non-commercial stuff, but that doesn't count for someone who is looking exclusively at numbers. Joe Consumer counts, as he always did.
If they're at 5 they have been here too long and are simply karma whores
Funny you should say that. Given that you post at +2 and have a relatively low UID, I would have thought you knew better. Allow me to demonstrate: if you've been here for too long, your karma whoring days are long gone. Partly because it gets old, but mostly because even if you did care about karma at some point, if you're not a complete loser you're most probably at the cap by now. So why would you seek karma points then? You can't whore for something you can't get any more of.
-1 is just some funny sh1t. +5 is just bliss ignorance
You may be occasionally right about the later part, but I'll take a "+5, Funny" over a "-1, Troll" anyday. A "+5, Funny" is always funny, but a "-1, Troll" is in most cases just another lame goatse.cx link. As for the -1's being funny... well, I'm not that easily amused.
What's wrong with their motto? I thought all nerds hate Windows.:) No really, of course they're as Linux-biased as they get, as they readily admit it themselved. Nothing wrong with that. Slashdot is not the New York Times and it will never be. It's not even a newspaper, even though they have Jon Katz on staff (or maybe *because* they have Jon Katz on staff?) - it's just a weblog. AFAIK no one from the Slashdot editorial team ever claimed to be objective, or even that what they're doing is journalism. So where's the problem? It's a weblog, it's free, if you don't like it, just move on. There are tens of thousands of weblogs on the web to choose from.
Read at -1. Find out what THEY don't want you to know!
Oh *please*. Slashdot at -1 is like a cross between a kindergarten, a federal prison and a mental institution. No thanks.
For you, as a consumer, this should make no difference whatsoever. True, you can't have "great things about Windows" as a topic on Slashdot without being flamed to a crisp, but what's stopping you to go discuss it in a Windows forum? That crowd should be pretty receptive to such a discussion, and you get the best of both worlds.
<sarcasm>
Well, in practice this may not work since all Windows users are pathetic losers who can't even spell "intelligent", let alone have an intelligent conversation about something, but hey, it sounds good in theory.
</sarcasm>
::/me ducks under the deluge of "-1, Flamebait"'s::
FINALLY, someone who gets the point. And an AC no less. Thank you , Mr. Anonymous Coward. THANK YOU! I put ONE lousy metaphor in my post, just to make a point, and instead of someone debating the actual argument, I have 20 people start explaining to me how horsepower is irrelevant for a car. OF COURSE IT'S IRRELEVANT, dammit! That's why I picked the damn example. Because MHz and HP are alike, in that they are quite irrelevant. But even so, being a geek who likes to know things I won't buy a car whose manufacturer does not disclose the horsepower factor, and I won't buy a processor that has no MHz indication on it, or inside the package, or on AMD's website, or wherever they damn well want to put it, just LET ME KNOW THE CLOCK SPEED OF THE BITCH or I won't buy it. Sheesh...:-)
Slashdot Mirror
My personal opinion is that this is pure propaganda. It's precisely what politicians and the media would want you to believe. Why? Because this approach leads to an emotional response, rather than a rational one. And we all know how easy it is to manipulate people's emotions. This is an incredible opportunity for politicians to push their own agenda, and stirring up people's emotions is the first step in that direction (if you have trouble believing this, look closely at any statement made by any politician during the last week and notice the abundant use of metaphors and symbols, rather than logical reasoning in their speech). The real reason, IMHO, for this display of hatred towards the USA has to do with how SOME of the Middle-Eastern people perceive the interventions of the US in what they call "their own business". They see the US as a country that uses its superior military power to brutally impose its own selfish interests to anyone who might not agree. Whether this perception is accurate or not, it's beyond the scope of my argument. The fact is that it exists and it's leading to despicable acts of terrorism against innocent people like the one last Tuesday.
Now what US politicians seem to be trying to do is feed a constant stream of propaganda to the population, with the apparent purpose of getting the public to identify Afghanistan as "the enemy" and to believe, exactly like you stated, that these people hate the "American way of life itself", which, logically speaking, is nonsense. These people have probably no idea of how American live and what they believe in. How can they hate something they don't know? They're probably manipulated into mindless hostility towards Americans, the same way Americans seem now manipulated into mindless hostility towards Afghans. THIS CANNOT LEAD TO ANYTHING GOOD.
People, both Eastern and Western, need to wake up and realize there's no point in blindly hating each other. They need to see how their own leaders are turning them against each other, for who knows what reasons, and for once step up and put an end to all this. What the heck would be so wrong in Middle Easterners collaborating with the West in an effort to stop terrorism, and the West revising a couple of items on its foreign policy, especially the ones Arabs find the most sensitive?
Oh well. I'm still allowed to dream, aren't I?
Allow me to disagree. First, assasination won't make martyrs out of them. Sure, for them it's a great heroic thing to go down in flames taking a thousand "enemies" along and making the news worldwide. But to die in their own secret compound, killed by a silent bullet without even knowing what hit them? That doesn't sound very heroic. Second, fast and merciless assassination would save a LOT of time. In order to bring them to "open trial" you would first have to capture them, and that implies a whole diplomatic mess. By the time you manage to persuade (one way or another) governments like those of Afghanistan or Iraq to hand them over, they would have plenty of time to organize the next attack. If you just go after them with Rambo-style assassins ("if they catch you, we don't know you") you avoid the diplomatic hassle and you do essentially the same job a lot quicker and cleaner. With the added bonus that without their leaders, terrorists aren't worth much and certainly won't be capable of planning a second hit.
Political dissidents, you say? Nonsense. We would be going after *known* terrorists, people with quite a few claimed terrorist attacks on their records, not some guy who just opposes his country's government.
Well, I guess you *could* try them and put them in prison. But what do you do when, a few months later, 10 guys carrying concealed plastic containers walk into the Empire State building and threaten to release Serin gas (or Anthrax or whatever) all over Manhattan unless you let bin Laden or whoever is currently in jail walk away free? Not much you can do, eh?
No, these guys *must* die. And they must die in such a way as to discourage others from becoming terrorists: quietly and anonymously.
Erasing Afghanistan from the face of the Earth won't do you a bit of good. By the time your bombs hit Afghanistan, terrorists will be long gone. Terrorists are everywhere, and they're way more mobile than your bombers or troops. They can easily avoid attacks of this scale.
The only effective way I can see of getting rid of them is infiltrating their organizations, gathering as much intelligence about them as possible, then assasinating them one by one. No fussy and cumbersome war procedures, no large-scale military operations, no pointless delays with diplomatic BS; just a few elite troops of trained assassins, quiet, accurate and deadly.
It's called The social contract, and if I'm not mistaken it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who came up with the theory, expanding on certain ideas of Montesquieu and Locke.
As a long time Perl zealot, I'd like to take this opportunity to vigorously protest this move. Posts on both Perl and Python mailing lists suggest that there *is* going to be some compromise at language syntax level to accomodate the common runtime. From the Perl perspective it's like "well, Perl 6 was going to be fully OO anyway, so what difference are going to make a few concession in syntax"? Well, I strongly object! I mean, I spent so much time learning Perl so I could be different and write cool obfuscated "Japh" sigs, and NOW they're going to make Perl look and feel just like every other C# on the planet? I've had it! If THAT's gonna get implemented, I vow to completely abandon my Monk robe and to only code in Visual Basic! Brother Monks, I urge you to join me in my protest so that the despicable traitor Larry Wall will see the error of his ways and will hopefully change his mind about this Frankensteinian abomination! United we will succeed!
:-)
Now that would be a regrettable mistake. If the news sites are correct, these people are Islamic terrorists. They have nothing to lose and death does not scare them. They are organized and your war is not going to stop them. Before your military can find an annihilate them, they can and will do a lot more damage to American cities. War would only kill innocents, it won't touch terrorists the slightest bit.
And if I'm not mistaken, you should also change the "Protocol" option to IMPS/2.
OK, OK, you got me. The $_ was actually there when I pasted the code from the Emacs window, but just before I submitted I decided to take it out for added effect, as I know many non-Perl coders have, um, strong opinions about implicit variables. Vanity, I guess. But hey, it does work with strict and -w!:)
As for the unreadability part, try writing the equivalent of the above in C++ (or, god forbid, Java) and looking at the 10+ line resulting code you'll see why C++/Java coders at least might find unreadable what's otherwise perfectly fine Perl.
Maybe my brain does not "crash" completely when I go to sleep, but my conscience sure does. I also lose my perception of time. I'd say those are pretty serious bugs. :-)
I never said I blamed Perl. I just said it's what I happen to be coding in at the moment, and I'm loving every minute of it. :-) I know I should strive to make my code "readable", but the irresistible urge to type: join("",map{ucfirst }split(//,shift)); just to correct a spelling error in the database on-the-fly is simply overwhelming. I just can't help myself. :)
My software is so ugly it's beautiful. I'm coding in Perl these days. :)
Nobody's saying it should be "crushed at all costs". I simply won't use it. And neither will, probably, all those who don't like the idea. For me at least, it's a little difficult to trust Microsoft with my personal data when I don't even trust them enough to have any of their software installed on my computers. It's not an emotional or religious issue: I just can't trust them.
You don't really have much of a long-term memory, do you? Either that, or you're really really young. I remember a time when every single motherfscking computer user out there knew how to work with the command line, because that was all there was. IBM PCs running DOS. And they all did it. Nobody thought it was difficult or anything. They just fscking did it. That was less than 10 years ago. Now how the heck did everyone suddenly go so mindbogglingly stupid during those few years, that we're now expected to design our hardware and software for retards? How the hell did that happen? Because, frankly, I don't want to work with software designed for retards. I expect the software I work with to respect my intellect and my ability to make full use of a complex tool, NOT dumb down the capabilities of the tool because I might have a problem understanding more than pretty pictures and buttons.
Oh well. I guess that's why I use Linux and not Windows. You know what? Screw the "stupid cows". Who the hell feels the urge to cater to THEM anyway, besides proprietary software makers like Microsoft who have a lot of $$$ to gain from it? I sure don't. Why is everyone here so hung up on the idea that Linux should be brought to the "general public"? What do YOU have to gain if Linux gets dumbed down to the point of being usable by people with the IQ of cows?
What? I got AA fonts after "rpm -Uvh kde*" with KDE 2.2. I don't know about other distros, but with Redhat you can't get more "out of the box" than that. There's also a checkbox in the KDE "Fonts" control panel if you want to disable AA.
I'm SO sick of all this "Windows improves productivity" crap. How the fsck does "rebooting and/or reinstalling every time there's a problem" mean productivity? Let's see, at my company sales/accounting work on a custom application running under Linux, client/server with the clients being diskless computers booting off the network. Time required for adding an extra workstation to the network / replacing a faulty one: 30 seconds. Probability of random isolated errors due to software: 0, because everyone uses the exact same copy of the master filesystem which resides on the server. Everyone else uses Linux stand-alone workstations running StarOffice for office work, and they are quite productive because they have been trained to use StarOffice. Developers' workstations run Linux as well, and being Linux programmers, they're quite productive too. There's only ONE admin who takes care of everything and he's also very productive, since he has an army of shell and Perl scripts helping him. True, he may make more than your average MCSE, but then again, he's way more competent and efficient then an MCSE. Software costs are WAY down, so we can afford more and better quality hardware, any licensing or BSA-induced hassle is totally out of the question, and the average uptime on *workstations* is 3 months. So what exactly are you talking about, when you mention negative effects on end users?
Well, this only works with browsers that do not strictly obey the content-type header. The ones that do, like Konqueror, just display the HTML source (heh; vagina.rotten.com? now that's what I call an inspired name). So this isn't really a bug in Slashcode, this is only an exploit for stupid browsers that insist on rendering anything remotely resembling HTML.
Hey, I never said commercialization was bad. I said analysts incessantly spouting doom predictions are bad. :-) But anyway, communication does not necessarily mean putting up a web page. As you say, there are a lot of people who don't have the time or the resources to put up a web page, BUT they do participate in forums, or mailing lists or newsgroups or whatever. No matter how stressed and/or busy an intelligent man is, he always needs to communicate, and the Net is the perfect medium for this. The lazy and stupid consumer on the other hand, carefully avoids anything that may even remotely imply an intelectual effort, he just sits there and watches the pretty pictures, because that's what stupid lazy consumers generally do. You only need to browse mainstream magazines or watch mainstream TV to see what I mean.
And yes, companies getting 50% of the internet is not a problem. Hell, they can get as much of it as they want, as long as they don't try to push Free information off it...
I think what the article was trying to say was that statistically speaking, the Internet is commercial. I don't see any big surprises here. The overwhelming majority of consumers are too lazy or stupid to say something with any meaning for the rest of the world, therefore they don't *need* a mass communication tool. They need their daily fix of one-way mass communication directed at them, so their surfing habits are very likely to match their TV viewing habits - which is exactly what the article describes: most of them only surf commercial sites owned by those 4 corporations.
That, however, does not mean the internet itself is commercial. That would be a very stupid thing to say, if you only consider that a lot of governments have an internet presence, and governments are anything BUT commercial. The network itself is agnostic, it doesn't care if the packets running through it are commercial or not. We geeks use it for a lot of non-commercial stuff, but that doesn't count for someone who is looking exclusively at numbers. Joe Consumer counts, as he always did.
Palm and Handspring have both received regulatory approval for three new wireless devices
And according to this article, the approval has been immediately retracted by request. Nice try...
If they're at 5 they have been here too long and are simply karma whores
Funny you should say that. Given that you post at +2 and have a relatively low UID, I would have thought you knew better. Allow me to demonstrate: if you've been here for too long, your karma whoring days are long gone. Partly because it gets old, but mostly because even if you did care about karma at some point, if you're not a complete loser you're most probably at the cap by now. So why would you seek karma points then? You can't whore for something you can't get any more of.
-1 is just some funny sh1t. +5 is just bliss ignorance
You may be occasionally right about the later part, but I'll take a "+5, Funny" over a "-1, Troll" anyday. A "+5, Funny" is always funny, but a "-1, Troll" is in most cases just another lame goatse.cx link. As for the -1's being funny... well, I'm not that easily amused.
And that's exactly why nobody buys their cars. :-)
What's wrong with their motto? I thought all nerds hate Windows. :) No really, of course they're as Linux-biased as they get, as they readily admit it themselved. Nothing wrong with that. Slashdot is not the New York Times and it will never be. It's not even a newspaper, even though they have Jon Katz on staff (or maybe *because* they have Jon Katz on staff?) - it's just a weblog. AFAIK no one from the Slashdot editorial team ever claimed to be objective, or even that what they're doing is journalism. So where's the problem? It's a weblog, it's free, if you don't like it, just move on. There are tens of thousands of weblogs on the web to choose from.
Read at -1. Find out what THEY don't want you to know!
Oh *please*. Slashdot at -1 is like a cross between a kindergarten, a federal prison and a mental institution. No thanks.
For you, as a consumer, this should make no difference whatsoever. True, you can't have "great things about Windows" as a topic on Slashdot without being flamed to a crisp, but what's stopping you to go discuss it in a Windows forum? That crowd should be pretty receptive to such a discussion, and you get the best of both worlds.
::/me ducks under the deluge of "-1, Flamebait"'s::
<sarcasm> Well, in practice this may not work since all Windows users are pathetic losers who can't even spell "intelligent", let alone have an intelligent conversation about something, but hey, it sounds good in theory. </sarcasm>
Hey, I guess it's alot like the Mhz
:-)
FINALLY, someone who gets the point. And an AC no less. Thank you , Mr. Anonymous Coward. THANK YOU! I put ONE lousy metaphor in my post, just to make a point, and instead of someone debating the actual argument, I have 20 people start explaining to me how horsepower is irrelevant for a car. OF COURSE IT'S IRRELEVANT, dammit! That's why I picked the damn example. Because MHz and HP are alike, in that they are quite irrelevant. But even so, being a geek who likes to know things I won't buy a car whose manufacturer does not disclose the horsepower factor, and I won't buy a processor that has no MHz indication on it, or inside the package, or on AMD's website, or wherever they damn well want to put it, just LET ME KNOW THE CLOCK SPEED OF THE BITCH or I won't buy it. Sheesh...