25 July: At 1030 BST Scotland Yard Commissioner Sir Ian Blair apologises to Mr de Menezes' family but says there will be no change to the police's "shoot-to-kill" policy.
I remember reading stories told by proud Brits about how their "Bobbies" didn't even carry a gun and the criminals respected that by not using guns either. But nowadays the British police apparently has a "shoot-to-kill" policy. I think even in the US (which struggles to become a police state ASAP) you may be detained, searched, ridiculed, but generally not shot-to-kill just because you look like a potential terrorists./me strikes Britain off the list of "to visit" places.:(
It makes sense 200 years ago, when most of every city was public property. However, in ever more capitalistic society the private property is encroaching on us. A place that was once a sanctuary for the Greek gods is now "private property". Today every parcel of land is owned by someone and especially in the cities every place where you can be is owned by someone.
Do you think you can go to a public park today and do anything you want, such as take pictures of sculptures? Turns out, you can't.
So you reasoning is deeply flawed. One, private property is not sacred. Two, some rules regarding private property that made sense 200 years ago don't make sense now and are actually harmful. Of course, you probably are too much of a believer in "sanctity of private property" to think about it rationally. But it's not your fault that you were brainwashed and you are hardly the only one with such problem.
A game is just a game. Someone will get his kicks from running over people, while others would just have fun driving around the levels in Rhinos with god mode-on while their friends watch (real example, 8-10 year old kids in a game club). Kids like games with cars, explosions and guns. That's normal, that's what they used to play for centuries (replace cars with horses and carriages for 19th century and earlier).
Little kids don't care about prostitutes, they don't care about drugs and other "bad" stuff. They don't care about "Hot Coffee" either, not today when they can get all the porn they wanted off the Internet for free.
The beauty of the GTA games is that they have something for everyone (I wonder, who is the target audience for the boring 30-minute trips in the SA, though). There is nothing wrong with letting kids play it, since they will most likely concentrate on things they already like.
The reason Apple locks the OS in the first place is stability.
And the reason your government wants to make every citizen carry a radiotransmitter with a GPS is to be able to locate them in case of a 911 call. Rrrrrright.
All Marketers are Liars and you just believed the Apple marketing team. Truth is that when you pay extra for the story that Apple sells.
The reality is that people don't need special hardware. A keyboard is a keyboard, a mouse is a mouse. You can pick the ones you really like for 20-50 bucks. An LCD monitor is an LCD monitor, the cheapest one is almost as good as the best one (of same size), unless you work in design or publishing.
And everything else is irrelevant, as long as it's functional, has the right drivers and doesn't have manufacturing defects or bad parts.
I don't care about the box, I don't see it most of the time. The only Apple thing I may be somewhat interested in is OS X and, frankly, I am not that much impressed with it. Most of the bells and whistles are just that - bells and whistles and most of them exist for Windows as well in the form of 3rd-party software. Now that I think of it, the OS doesn't really matter either - it's applications. And most of the applications are available for Windows. Yes, there are some neat Mac-exclusive apps, but there are probably only 5 of them that I may be interested in. Windows is the best for games and great for everything else. And I am not into any server/backend stuff, so I don't care about that *nix advantage.
Really, Apple doesn't give you anything tangible for that 200$ premium, it simply sells you a story about cool computers. If you decide that you need this story, you pay extra. If you don't, you buy something that does the job.
If the present spirit of the Olympics was present in Ancient Greece, Coubertin would simply not be allowed to use the registered trademark that rightly belonged to the Ancient Greeks.:) He would have had to call his games something else.
I am sure you remember how private individuals were prohibited from displaying trademarks belonging to the competitors of official sponsors. Which meant you can't drink Pepsi at Olympic games and the bottles with the offending product were confiscated by the security. And this practice was not just widespread in Athens, it was universal.
Another fallacy should be invoked, the slippery slope one, but I am actually not sure how fallacious it actually is...
However, I would have prefered a more rational newspaper, one that doesn't dwell that much on "efforts by cultural communists to promote sexual activity and homosexual conduct among children". An anti-government newspaper is great, but a rational one that you could rely on is even better (if such thing even exist).
That's the beauty of this analogy. Even if you had a bad burrito, the intestines and athe body may have a disagreement, even a conflict, but the intestines still can't break free.
My humble opinion is that procedural textures (i.e. shaders) would be much easier to reuse. It probably doesn't make sense for a company to buy pre-made textures for its new game, because they would not mesh with the style well. But it should be relatively easy to design a professional shader with enough customizability that it can be easily added to any game.
Things like wood, metal, plastic, stone, grass, water, etc. can all be done once very well and then reused. This would help a lot to offset the huge costs of creating enough gameart for today's games.
A major US media conglomerate cannot break ranks with the establishment, because it's a part of it. Media in the US is essentially a part of a larger "power machine", just like the presidential administration. It can no more "break ranks with the regime" than your intestines can "break ranks with your body".
Why do people insist on solving every problem with technology? Why waste government money on fancy-shmancy GPS devices when the authorities can simply mandate the routes which every trustworthy citizen should following when going from home to work, from work to the mall and from the mall back home.
Actually, now that I think about it, this solution can be extended to protect the environment and decrease US dependence on foreign oil. While not go away with the "going" bit all together? If we combine work and home in a single location, the problem of tracking everyone (in case of a 911 emergency) becomes much easier. I even found a good name for these comfortable mixed business-residencial zones. We can call them labour sites. Or may be labour camps.
I have noticed a long time ago that Slashdot is just a cool place for luddites to hang out. It's funny that every anti-progress post dissing transhumanism is modded up so much.
People here really don't have much imagination. I don't really understand why they come here, may be just to bitch about stuff.
The problem with space spin-offs is that its proponents used several wrong examples (such as teflon or something) that has since been refuted. The opponents remember these refutations all too well and are not afraid to repeat them. And so it happens that most people discuss the urban legends instead of calculating the real economic impact (that includes weather, communications and navigation sats that you mentioned).
1) The economies of Eastern European countries have bean nicely recovered for decades. The transition to market capitalism brought increased inequality, but no economic miracles happened so far. Even the East Germany, the target of hundreds of billions of euros in dotations from the Western Germany doesn't look good, while losing everything that made people happy in socialist times. Google suicide rates for East Germany.
2) The threat of nuclear annihilation is mostly due to the US having huge nuclear arsenal and even planning to increase it. There is a reason why most people in the world consider the US the most dangerous country on Earth, not Iraq or Afganistan. Soviet Union never intended to start a nuclear war, it was always responding to the US developing a much greater nuclear capability. And terrorists are not interested in starting a nuclear war, all the stories are generated by US officials. Even North Korea is developing nuclear weapons only to protect itself from possible US attack.
You're right about the US getting unharmed out of the WW2, but your overall picture of the history appears skewed.
Hey, the Soviets build a better light bulb!" The fact is that they built many better light bulbs and mousetraps. Less attention was paid to consumer goods, obviously, so you may not be very familiar with them, but it doesn't mean there weren't many.
As for space, if you don't understand that the Soviets were "doing it better" with the Mir space station, then you are so horribly brainwashed that it's unlikely this can ever be undone.
Fact of the matter is, if the Soviets were doing it better, they'd still be running the show over there. Sadly the short-sightedness of Soviet leadership and the narrow scope of a communist agenda prevented any chance the USSR had of sustaining itself before the horse even left the gate.
You don't understand the reasons why Soviet Union collapsed at all and keep repeating the same unreasonable claim. Please, think a bit and try to come up with the answers to 2 questions that I asked in my previous post.
What you're missing here is the fact that nothing I have to say will do anything to influence your thinking, which really is the bottom line in any dispute.
I am aware that most debates are futile for the reasons you provide, but I am also aware that in some cases they can be fruitful. I am changing my mind quite often and although I cannot claim to be perfectly objective, I think I am rather good at accomodating new evidence. If you believe you are capable of this as well, our discussion may end with one of us changing his position at least to some extent.
I am saying that your position is wrong, because that's my current opinion. I am judging only by the facts and arguments that I already heard. Similarly, I haven't heard any rebuttals of my mains points from you. Still, I am open to the possibility that you will refute my main points and provide solid arguments in favour of capitalism. Then (after double-checking your evidence) I may change my position and agree that you are right.
any fact or point I bring forward to debate your position would be readily discounted by you as "western propaganda,"
I understand why you may be thinking so and I know that some people would behave exactly in that way, but it is not true in regards to me. But when you give an obviously inflated and obviously inaccurate number of 100 millions victims (which is unusual even among the Big Number school), I clamly state that this is indeed a piece of propaganda. Give me a different fact and I will try to objectively judge it.
You're also missing the fact that not everything is so truly black and white. Nope. But some things are. And please realise that it's not always possible to accomodate for the complexity of the reality in a discussion. Even though, I am aware that the history of Soviet Union (and its relations with the USA) is very complex, difficult, sometimes controversial and it's not easy to understand or describe it.
See, an truly innovative society doesn't have to rip-off, or lay foundations with, ideas from other nations. It comes up with its own. According to your personal definition of the innovative society, may be. According to the commonly accepted one - not.
Essay on propaganda in the early Soviet Union How exactly does that make Soviet Union not innovative? These very same skills (business organisation) that you are talking about were then copied by Japanese in 1940-1950s and then they were copied by the Americans in 1960-1980s (TQM, JIT, etc.). Does that make Japan or the United States less innovative? If you claim that a truly innovative society must not use ideas from other nations at all, but come up only with its own, then there are no innovative societies at all, even the US doesn't qualify. An alternative explanation is that your definition of "innovative society" is fundamentally flawed.
The death of copyright is really long overdue. It poisons people's minds. How do you like it - my sister goes to show me some photos from her mountain trip that her guide took. And she explicitly asks me not to distribute any copies, because the guy who took them said they are his intellectual property. How perverted is that?
You may be a nice fellow personally, but the whole system is corrupt. Market simply doesn't work for textbooks. There is really no reason to teach hydraulic engineering differently in Maine than in Montana. If you could just pick the best textbook and print one for every student in the country, who needs to learn hydraulics, that would be an order of magnitude cheaper.
It's not like there exist a free market today (the choice is usually dictated to students) and in any case there are many ways to select the best book without the market.
Personally I expect publishers to change and somehow cope with the reality of free unlimited information for every human on Earth. This is inevitable.
But I do believe that right now they serve some useful function (though most of them do their job very poorly) and I do realise that students aren't going to make it easyer for the publishers. I once saw a group of students scanning a textbook and then printing it on university printers to save the cost of photocopying. And that's students who didn't pay any tuition and even got a stipend. Cheap bastards.
But all this only proves that publishers need to change. You can't expect DRM to be your free ticket out of the current mess. As soon as handheld devices (tablets, PDAs and e-paper) are good enough, eBooks will become mainstream. As soon as they become mainstream, pirates will make ebook piracy part of their activities. And by the time it happens P2P will be ubiquitous, safe and fast. There is no way around it - publishers need to change now.
We're both equally brainwashed by the ideologies of our respective nations, so I'm letting this thing lie.
I am not. The simple fact of life is that in every dispute one person is usually more qualified than the other. Just because we hold different opinions doesn't mean they are equally valid. Usually (not always, but usually) there is some sort of truth and one side (at least one) is wrong.
In this particular case you are wrong. I cannot accurately judge your motivation, but your unwillingness (inability?) to even think that the competition between Soviet Union and the United States was not fair in terms of starting conditions is suspicious.
You can "let this thing lie", but in reality it's just an euphemism for "be stubborn and refuse to discuss this rationally". You are indeed brainwashed.
I didn't insult you, I called your opinion stupid. You deserved that harsh comment - you have the right to offer your opinion, but should be ready that other people may make a public value judgment.
BTW, your post was OK, until you offered your opinion again.:) You see, noone actually called RSS "the second coming", so your statement is obvious, banal and irrelevant. What people called RSS is "cool technology with tons of uses for many people". Dissing it just because you don't need it is like dissing hygienic tampons because you are a guy. In other words, it's idiotic.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, Syndication being the key word. You can automatically move the news items around and do anything you want with them. You are no longer a hostage to the website designer.
For example, you can label stories as Todo or Check later in your mailer (such as M2), you can integrate stories from different sources in one interface, you can search many feeds at one, you can display the news in many innovative ways, from a newspaper-like interface to tag clouds. You can choose how often to read the new stories and not have to endure complex archive navigation at each site.
If you are only getting your information from a few sources, one or two mailing lists and a few sites, you can just read your e-mail from inbox, bookmark the sites and check them manually. But if you want to know everything about foobar and aren't content simply with visiting only www.foobarnews.com, only RSS can help.
RSS can provide you with the same level of service that used to cost real money (thousands of 000) when it was provided by marketing companies under the name of media monitoring.
RSS is the shadow of the future power of Semantic Web already available in one particular area - news and new materials online. It's not intended for reading only, it's intended for processing and organising. With RSS you can automatically process all kinds of content, from slashdot articles, to search alerts to CNN news, to articles on rarely updated niche site, to del.icio.us links and flickr photos. You don't have to do it manually, your browser (RSS reader) and a bunch of web apps can do it for you.
If you really don't see why RSS is important, your opionion is not even worth 2p. You should have politely asked "please explain to me, why am I missing here", not offered your opinion, which was uninformed and stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
25 July: At 1030 BST Scotland Yard Commissioner Sir Ian Blair apologises to Mr de Menezes' family but says there will be no change to the police's "shoot-to-kill" policy.
/me strikes Britain off the list of "to visit" places. :(
I remember reading stories told by proud Brits about how their "Bobbies" didn't even carry a gun and the criminals respected that by not using guns either. But nowadays the British police apparently has a "shoot-to-kill" policy. I think even in the US (which struggles to become a police state ASAP) you may be detained, searched, ridiculed, but generally not shot-to-kill just because you look like a potential terrorists.
It makes sense 200 years ago, when most of every city was public property. However, in ever more capitalistic society the private property is encroaching on us. A place that was once a sanctuary for the Greek gods is now "private property". Today every parcel of land is owned by someone and especially in the cities every place where you can be is owned by someone.
Do you think you can go to a public park today and do anything you want, such as take pictures of sculptures? Turns out, you can't.
So you reasoning is deeply flawed. One, private property is not sacred. Two, some rules regarding private property that made sense 200 years ago don't make sense now and are actually harmful. Of course, you probably are too much of a believer in "sanctity of private property" to think about it rationally. But it's not your fault that you were brainwashed and you are hardly the only one with such problem.
A game is just a game. Someone will get his kicks from running over people, while others would just have fun driving around the levels in Rhinos with god mode-on while their friends watch (real example, 8-10 year old kids in a game club). Kids like games with cars, explosions and guns. That's normal, that's what they used to play for centuries (replace cars with horses and carriages for 19th century and earlier).
Little kids don't care about prostitutes, they don't care about drugs and other "bad" stuff. They don't care about "Hot Coffee" either, not today when they can get all the porn they wanted off the Internet for free.
The beauty of the GTA games is that they have something for everyone (I wonder, who is the target audience for the boring 30-minute trips in the SA, though). There is nothing wrong with letting kids play it, since they will most likely concentrate on things they already like.
The reason Apple locks the OS in the first place is stability.
And the reason your government wants to make every citizen carry a radiotransmitter with a GPS is to be able to locate them in case of a 911 call. Rrrrrright.
All Marketers are Liars and you just believed the Apple marketing team. Truth is that when you pay extra for the story that Apple sells.
The reality is that people don't need special hardware. A keyboard is a keyboard, a mouse is a mouse. You can pick the ones you really like for 20-50 bucks. An LCD monitor is an LCD monitor, the cheapest one is almost as good as the best one (of same size), unless you work in design or publishing.
And everything else is irrelevant, as long as it's functional, has the right drivers and doesn't have manufacturing defects or bad parts.
I don't care about the box, I don't see it most of the time. The only Apple thing I may be somewhat interested in is OS X and, frankly, I am not that much impressed with it. Most of the bells and whistles are just that - bells and whistles and most of them exist for Windows as well in the form of 3rd-party software. Now that I think of it, the OS doesn't really matter either - it's applications. And most of the applications are available for Windows. Yes, there are some neat Mac-exclusive apps, but there are probably only 5 of them that I may be interested in. Windows is the best for games and great for everything else. And I am not into any server/backend stuff, so I don't care about that *nix advantage.
Really, Apple doesn't give you anything tangible for that 200$ premium, it simply sells you a story about cool computers. If you decide that you need this story, you pay extra. If you don't, you buy something that does the job.
If the present spirit of the Olympics was present in Ancient Greece, Coubertin would simply not be allowed to use the registered trademark that rightly belonged to the Ancient Greeks. :) He would have had to call his games something else.
I am sure you remember how private individuals were prohibited from displaying trademarks belonging to the competitors of official sponsors. Which meant you can't drink Pepsi at Olympic games and the bottles with the offending product were confiscated by the security. And this practice was not just widespread in Athens, it was universal.
Another fallacy should be invoked, the slippery slope one, but I am actually not sure how fallacious it actually is...
However, I would have prefered a more rational newspaper, one that doesn't dwell that much on "efforts by cultural communists to promote sexual activity and homosexual conduct among children". An anti-government newspaper is great, but a rational one that you could rely on is even better (if such thing even exist).
Thanks for the link. It's like I just saw a live flying Dodo bird. ;) Very interesting.
That's the beauty of this analogy. Even if you had a bad burrito, the intestines and athe body may have a disagreement, even a conflict, but the intestines still can't break free.
My humble opinion is that procedural textures (i.e. shaders) would be much easier to reuse. It probably doesn't make sense for a company to buy pre-made textures for its new game, because they would not mesh with the style well. But it should be relatively easy to design a professional shader with enough customizability that it can be easily added to any game.
Things like wood, metal, plastic, stone, grass, water, etc. can all be done once very well and then reused. This would help a lot to offset the huge costs of creating enough gameart for today's games.
A major US media conglomerate cannot break ranks with the establishment, because it's a part of it. Media in the US is essentially a part of a larger "power machine", just like the presidential administration. It can no more "break ranks with the regime" than your intestines can "break ranks with your body".
Why do people insist on solving every problem with technology? Why waste government money on fancy-shmancy GPS devices when the authorities can simply mandate the routes which every trustworthy citizen should following when going from home to work, from work to the mall and from the mall back home.
Actually, now that I think about it, this solution can be extended to protect the environment and decrease US dependence on foreign oil. While not go away with the "going" bit all together? If we combine work and home in a single location, the problem of tracking everyone (in case of a 911 emergency) becomes much easier. I even found a good name for these comfortable mixed business-residencial zones. We can call them labour sites. Or may be labour camps.
I have noticed a long time ago that Slashdot is just a cool place for luddites to hang out. It's funny that every anti-progress post dissing transhumanism is modded up so much.
People here really don't have much imagination. I don't really understand why they come here, may be just to bitch about stuff.
The problem with space spin-offs is that its proponents used several wrong examples (such as teflon or something) that has since been refuted. The opponents remember these refutations all too well and are not afraid to repeat them. And so it happens that most people discuss the urban legends instead of calculating the real economic impact (that includes weather, communications and navigation sats that you mentioned).
1) The economies of Eastern European countries have bean nicely recovered for decades. The transition to market capitalism brought increased inequality, but no economic miracles happened so far. Even the East Germany, the target of hundreds of billions of euros in dotations from the Western Germany doesn't look good, while losing everything that made people happy in socialist times. Google suicide rates for East Germany.
2) The threat of nuclear annihilation is mostly due to the US having huge nuclear arsenal and even planning to increase it. There is a reason why most people in the world consider the US the most dangerous country on Earth, not Iraq or Afganistan. Soviet Union never intended to start a nuclear war, it was always responding to the US developing a much greater nuclear capability. And terrorists are not interested in starting a nuclear war, all the stories are generated by US officials. Even North Korea is developing nuclear weapons only to protect itself from possible US attack.
You're right about the US getting unharmed out of the WW2, but your overall picture of the history appears skewed.
forgot to add:
Hey, the Soviets build a better light bulb!"
The fact is that they built many better light bulbs and mousetraps. Less attention was paid to consumer goods, obviously, so you may not be very familiar with them, but it doesn't mean there weren't many.
As for space, if you don't understand that the Soviets were "doing it better" with the Mir space station, then you are so horribly brainwashed that it's unlikely this can ever be undone.
Fact of the matter is, if the Soviets were doing it better, they'd still be running the show over there. Sadly the short-sightedness of Soviet leadership and the narrow scope of a communist agenda prevented any chance the USSR had of sustaining itself before the horse even left the gate.
You don't understand the reasons why Soviet Union collapsed at all and keep repeating the same unreasonable claim. Please, think a bit and try to come up with the answers to 2 questions that I asked in my previous post.
What you're missing here is the fact that nothing I have to say will do anything to influence your thinking, which really is the bottom line in any dispute.
I am aware that most debates are futile for the reasons you provide, but I am also aware that in some cases they can be fruitful. I am changing my mind quite often and although I cannot claim to be perfectly objective, I think I am rather good at accomodating new evidence. If you believe you are capable of this as well, our discussion may end with one of us changing his position at least to some extent.
I am saying that your position is wrong, because that's my current opinion. I am judging only by the facts and arguments that I already heard. Similarly, I haven't heard any rebuttals of my mains points from you. Still, I am open to the possibility that you will refute my main points and provide solid arguments in favour of capitalism. Then (after double-checking your evidence) I may change my position and agree that you are right.
any fact or point I bring forward to debate your position would be readily discounted by you as "western propaganda,"
I understand why you may be thinking so and I know that some people would behave exactly in that way, but it is not true in regards to me. But when you give an obviously inflated and obviously inaccurate number of 100 millions victims (which is unusual even among the Big Number school), I clamly state that this is indeed a piece of propaganda. Give me a different fact and I will try to objectively judge it.
You're also missing the fact that not everything is so truly black and white.
Nope. But some things are. And please realise that it's not always possible to accomodate for the complexity of the reality in a discussion. Even though, I am aware that the history of Soviet Union (and its relations with the USA) is very complex, difficult, sometimes controversial and it's not easy to understand or describe it.
See, an truly innovative society doesn't have to rip-off, or lay foundations with, ideas from other nations. It comes up with its own.
According to your personal definition of the innovative society, may be. According to the commonly accepted one - not.
Essay on propaganda in the early Soviet Union
How exactly does that make Soviet Union not innovative? These very same skills (business organisation) that you are talking about were then copied by Japanese in 1940-1950s and then they were copied by the Americans in 1960-1980s (TQM, JIT, etc.). Does that make Japan or the United States less innovative? If you claim that a truly innovative society must not use ideas from other nations at all, but come up only with its own, then there are no innovative societies at all, even the US doesn't qualify. An alternative explanation is that your definition of "innovative society" is fundamentally flawed.
The death of copyright is really long overdue. It poisons people's minds. How do you like it - my sister goes to show me some photos from her mountain trip that her guide took. And she explicitly asks me not to distribute any copies, because the guy who took them said they are his intellectual property. How perverted is that?
You may be a nice fellow personally, but the whole system is corrupt. Market simply doesn't work for textbooks. There is really no reason to teach hydraulic engineering differently in Maine than in Montana. If you could just pick the best textbook and print one for every student in the country, who needs to learn hydraulics, that would be an order of magnitude cheaper.
It's not like there exist a free market today (the choice is usually dictated to students) and in any case there are many ways to select the best book without the market.
Personally I expect publishers to change and somehow cope with the reality of free unlimited information for every human on Earth. This is inevitable.
But I do believe that right now they serve some useful function (though most of them do their job very poorly) and I do realise that students aren't going to make it easyer for the publishers. I once saw a group of students scanning a textbook and then printing it on university printers to save the cost of photocopying. And that's students who didn't pay any tuition and even got a stipend. Cheap bastards.
But all this only proves that publishers need to change. You can't expect DRM to be your free ticket out of the current mess. As soon as handheld devices (tablets, PDAs and e-paper) are good enough, eBooks will become mainstream. As soon as they become mainstream, pirates will make ebook piracy part of their activities. And by the time it happens P2P will be ubiquitous, safe and fast. There is no way around it - publishers need to change now.
We're both equally brainwashed by the ideologies of our respective nations, so I'm letting this thing lie.
I am not. The simple fact of life is that in every dispute one person is usually more qualified than the other. Just because we hold different opinions doesn't mean they are equally valid. Usually (not always, but usually) there is some sort of truth and one side (at least one) is wrong.
In this particular case you are wrong. I cannot accurately judge your motivation, but your unwillingness (inability?) to even think that the competition between Soviet Union and the United States was not fair in terms of starting conditions is suspicious.
You can "let this thing lie", but in reality it's just an euphemism for "be stubborn and refuse to discuss this rationally". You are indeed brainwashed.
I didn't insult you, I called your opinion stupid. You deserved that harsh comment - you have the right to offer your opinion, but should be ready that other people may make a public value judgment.
:) You see, noone actually called RSS "the second coming", so your statement is obvious, banal and irrelevant. What people called RSS is "cool technology with tons of uses for many people". Dissing it just because you don't need it is like dissing hygienic tampons because you are a guy. In other words, it's idiotic.
BTW, your post was OK, until you offered your opinion again.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, Syndication being the key word. You can automatically move the news items around and do anything you want with them. You are no longer a hostage to the website designer.
For example, you can label stories as Todo or Check later in your mailer (such as M2), you can integrate stories from different sources in one interface, you can search many feeds at one, you can display the news in many innovative ways, from a newspaper-like interface to tag clouds. You can choose how often to read the new stories and not have to endure complex archive navigation at each site.
If you are only getting your information from a few sources, one or two mailing lists and a few sites, you can just read your e-mail from inbox, bookmark the sites and check them manually. But if you want to know everything about foobar and aren't content simply with visiting only www.foobarnews.com, only RSS can help.
RSS can provide you with the same level of service that used to cost real money (thousands of 000) when it was provided by marketing companies under the name of media monitoring.
RSS is the shadow of the future power of Semantic Web already available in one particular area - news and new materials online. It's not intended for reading only, it's intended for processing and organising. With RSS you can automatically process all kinds of content, from slashdot articles, to search alerts to CNN news, to articles on rarely updated niche site, to del.icio.us links and flickr photos. You don't have to do it manually, your browser (RSS reader) and a bunch of web apps can do it for you.
If you really don't see why RSS is important, your opionion is not even worth 2p. You should have politely asked "please explain to me, why am I missing here", not offered your opinion, which was uninformed and stupid.
Have you tried this program? No. Then please don't comment on its quality, ok?
This tool can strip all the bloat from Microsoft generated HTML to the bare essentials of HTML 2.0. And I am sure you can run it under wine.