Does anyone really give a shit what this particular group has to say?
Your elected representatives, who look to outfits like this guidance in turning file sharing in to a crime akin to detonating nail bombs on crowded busses.
That's a load of shit. If the police are personally arsed by the offense they will put their own effort into it.
Sure, and the kid could die from "accidentally" falling down the stairs while in custody. Is what you describe likely in this case, and if so, why?
Police don't send people to prison. They send people to court (effectively) and the court sends them to prison, which it may well do for political reasons as well as logistic ones. It's only called a "justice" system.
Yes, you're technically correct - the best kind of correct. I was of course speaking colloquially. Neither the police nor the courts send people to some place named "Federal Pound Me in the Ass Prison". Is this kid likely to go to prison for political reasons?
Odds are the kid chose his victim based on the high likelihood of getting away with it even if caught.
Sure, or he chose his victim because he thought he'd never be caught. Who knows? Asking that the kid receive counselling is a good idea, and it seems that his parents are taking things seriously. I don't know if the kid has a habit of antisocial behaviour. Hopefully the confrontation and some counselling will set him straight.
This sentence makes me think that, however vile the "troll" could have turned out to be, this wasn't an entirely black-versus-white situation. I suspect this guy was being a jerk back at anyone who was a jerk to him, and it escalated further than he thought it would.
It may not be as black and white as presented, but to extrapolate as you did is pure crystal ball gazing. On examining the entrails, I suspect that Traynor declined to involve the Gardai because Traynor had been conducting an affair with the kid's mother, which the kid threatened to reveal to the world. This would also explain why the kid was so aggressive.
Or perhaps Traynor had sometimes responded angrily, as many would do under similar circumstances, but had deliberately begun goading the kid in order to trap him.
Oddly heartwarming ending. It's awesome when people can take the high road and restrain themselves from lashing back at abusers, who do this stuff out of boredom, insecurity, and immaturity (or sometimes mental instability issues, alas). But recognizing that people do stupid regrettable crap, and that maybe their lives need not be ruined over it, and that maybe some good might come out of something bad... that's great strength and maturity. Kudos.
Oh come on. Police involvement is only going to ruin a life if the offence committed is so serious that disruption of their life is clearly warranted. It's not as if the police the are in the habit of sending kids to the fabled "Federal Pound Me in the Ass Prison" for being a bit mean. They're looking for serious harassment and threats, and certainly something beyond a random YouTube comment threatening to come there and kick someone's ass. This kid not only crossed the line in to Fucked Life Country. He gaily skipped across - waving his cock as he went. He clearly has issues that should not be dismissed as boyish pranks. The box of ashes is pretty messed-up, as is the threat to kill his girlfriend. All of this to someone who was a friend of the family? Yeah, that's regrettable and certainly should be dealt with to see what else this kid's been up to.
It's serendipity that the kid's parents are friends of the victim. If that were not the case, I'd see no reason at all to not get the Gardai take this pretty bloody seriously. Most likely, barring a track record for acting the cunt, he'd get a talking to and perhaps a caution. Had a kid in the UK harassing a friend of mine. Hacked some of his accounts (yeah, his passwords were terrible), and threatened to screw up the business he was running. I traced the guy quite easily because he'd left a pretty obvious footprint on the web, and we contacted his local police. Never heard again from the kid. Was he arrested? Probably not. Likely the police had a chat with his parents, who promptly pulled the plug on their little proto-neckbeard.
No, that's insulting. Good trolling seems to be a dying art these days. A good troll post says something that sounds plausible, and encourages responses. During the thread, it becomes less and less reasonable, but the aim is to make the other person say something unreasonable first or to make them waste a large amount of effort replying. If you want to see a good troll, read some of the threads started by roman_mir.
Truth! Good trolling divides communities because not everyone realises the game they're playing. This kid was trolling in the sense that demanding an ATM PIN at gunpoint could be considered to be "hacking".
The bulk of the books covering creation come from Jewish scripture, so these are Jewish myths. If it's something predominantly based on Christian scripture I'd describe them as bring Christian myths. Credit where credit's due.
the problem with this kind of TV is that it is giving us all the impression that suicides, shootings, etc all happen far more frequently than they may actually do. Your point about accounting is a good one - there is little balance in entertainment nowadays.
If Fox are only showing car chases, shootings, hostage-takings etc, then those people who can't think critically about what they're watching will start to buy in to all this neo-conservative climate of fear bullshit. That's when we start to suspect our neighbours, and invite the government to indulge in warrantless wiretaps.
Bingo! Which is why we as a society would benefit from schools having a stronger emphasis on critical skills, statistics and probability, and perhaps some media studies. Understanding a little bit about how mass media works is useful for spotting the games they play. It'd never get to the point where we all become immune to silliness and bullshit. What we can hope for is that we reach a critical mass, so we're better equipped to look out for one another when we do fall for something.
Very true, thanks for clarifying that. The scripture is common to them, but taken very differently. One of the things I like about Judaeism is the culture of examination of the texts. Kind of amusing though how they seem to spend a great deal of time finding loopholes.
A lot of what happens in the U.S. appears to be satire. I along with a lot of people got taken in by the Romney airplane window thing. We've heard so many odd things from senior politicians and candidates that it's really not easy to discern the poes from the nutters. The U.S. has elected officials wasting time trying to push creationism in to the science class, obsession with abstinence only education, and this odd idea that universal health care is synonymous with Bolshevism.
Not saying we're perfect though. We have homeopathy and other crazy shit coming out of our earholes. We have vaccine denialism, denial of climate change, people who function daily in a modern society while still believing that an invisible guy in the sky is listening to their heaven-sent words, and organic/natural products being fetishised.
We have a Daily Mail led army of middle aged white guys, simultaneously angry and despondent, because immigrants and queers are giving their houses cancer. Had a discussion the other night with a long-term Daily Mail reader, and it was a Gish gallop of nonsense and generalisations. Not a good sign when someone hurls vitriol at a group called "them", without taking the time to clarify membership of this group (i.e. "pakis"), it's pretty clear that the Mail is strong in them. Fun fact: The reason why crime is running out of control in the UK (despite statistics showing a long trend of decline), is that police recruitment is focussing too much on gays and women, and should instead only have tall straight men (presumably white) on the beat.
A lot of this stuff doesn't really surface in public debate. A politician in the UK claiming that pregnancy resulting from rape probably isn't legitimate rape would be retiring to spend time with the family. The UK is generally secular, and religion tends to be more a personal and understated thing, so a politician pushing to have Jewish myths taught as science would largely be dismissed as some kind of nutter. In the U.S. there seems to be more support available for the extreme views. I'm writing as an outside, so do please correct me if I'm wrong here.
I'm a firm believer in freedom of speech, but there is still such a thing as having some taste, and having some common sense. Clearly this guy has, at the very least, poor judgement, and perhaps poor impulse control, and while I'm not going to lay 100% of the blame on him for the violence in the Middle East due to his ill-advised (and poorly produced, from what I hear) video, he certainly is guilty of being the catalyst.
That's very loaded language. He's not "guilty" of anything - at least in the context of the Islamic hissy-fit business. He is a catalyst, like that teacher who sparked an armed and angry lynch mob in Sudan.
Granted, his actions were provocative, while the teacher's were not. While his actions were inadvisable, 100% of the blame lies with the angry nutjobs and the rabble rousers. If we apportion any blame at all to this guy then we may as well issue mitigation points to anyone taking offence. If some guy in the street says that my mother is a scabby whore, should he share the blame if I were to then pull out a knife and cut out his liver? He's a factor in what happened, but what he did is rendered academic by my crazy response. Staying with that example, if I reacted so badly, is it possible that this reaction is based on more than just this single incident? There's way more happening here than just a bunch of cavemen getting worked up over a video.
If it was water than there should be evidence of life even if it is only bacterial life. Even if they only discover bacterial life than some of these religious nut will have some explaining to do.
They're well practiced in explaining this kind of thing away. There's plenty enough evidence on Earth to question, if not completely contradict, some of their claims.
They went through quite a few alternative solutions.
1) Ask criminals to copy ASIC on all emails and Facebook messages sent. It's about as effective as what they proposed, and will be way cheaper and less intrusive for the public.
2) Have the Internet burn a daily DVD of the entire contents, which will then be sent to ASIC to be stored in boxes. Estimated physical storage space required for first 3 months: New Zealand.
3) Have vagina-cams installed in all female residents of Australia in case they happen to be naked at the home of someone considering fraud, and positioned in such a way that the camera catches the content of the suspect's screen.
4) Require that all Internet communication stop at the ISP level, who will then print it and send it on to the ISP of the person to whom it's address, with a copy being posted to ASIC.
5) Crime is committed only by the living. Kill everyone.
6) Receive funding to have ASIC agents stationed in every home, to sit behind computer users. Agent will periodically tap the user on the shoulder, and ask "Whatcha doin'?"
Number 4 was the preferred option. Greg Tanzer prefers reading personal emails on his tablet while relaxing in a hotel room full of semi-naked pre-teen girls. Having to carry around print-outs was out of the question.
Well, it's already begun, but it's another interesting example of how the police state develops. In an established democracy it's kind of difficult to simply introduce something akin to the Stasi - that worries people.
The trick is to grant unreasonable powers to a group that doesn't appear to have much to do with the average citizen (such as ASIC), or instead give it to a group with what people see as a very specific remit to act only in certain areas (TSA). In the case of ASIC, why should the average guy in the street worry about those stock exchange guys having this power - it's not as if they'll be using to snoop on regular guys. With the TSA, turning airports in to constitution free zones, people are fine with that because they think it's only happening in airports, when in fact they're spilling out in to other aspects of transport. Get people used to presenting documents at airports, train stations and state borders, and before long you'll be able to stop them anywhere and do it. Same with intrusive physical searches. When stopped on a random road, the patriotic dad will proudly hum "God Bless the USA" as his daughter allows a former Wall*Mart shelf stacker with a badge to get his hands down her pants in the name of security and freedom.
Asking for such a broad and patently unjustified ability to snoop has no place in a modern democracy. Ship them out to an embassy near to a country such as North Korea or Iran - in the hope that they'll defect to a place where their Orwellian urges can be sated.
The OSS movement shouldn't care about what other people think. Software is created and put out in the wild in the hope that others will benefit. Whether a particular class of people use it or not is typically irrelevant (unless they are the target of the software). The only people who are likely to greatly care about this are the people trying to make money off of open source software.
Is there an problem in trying to make off of open source software?
So when was the last time you actually needed that Java-plugin in your browser?
About an hour ago. Still plenty of enterprise applications reliant upon Java. For home use, never. My only personal usage of Java comes from a Java remake of Dungeon Master.
It'd be a stretch to see the minority vagina phobia of the western fundamentalists (and their like-minded fundie immigrant friends) translate in to a broad movement to abort girls. Not impossible, but pretty unlikely for the foreseeable future.
The fact that they would get a good percentage of it wrong comes to no surprise. CNN, for instance, has mentioned Linux on air maybe two times in the last decade. Meanwhile, they can't go two minutes without mentioning Apple.
Ever had the impression that a mainstream television news station probably isn't catering to you. Doesn't mean they get a free pass to make silly blunders, but it does explain why they might not be devoting much airtime to stuff about which most people don't give a shit. I'd like to see a more general interest in all things techie - fucking beats celebrities and sports any day. What I don't expect though is for a channel to get much in the way of advertising by covering the Unity/Gnome 3 controversy or the mass exodus from XFree86.
As well as pulling numbers out of your arse, you appear to have a major chip on your shoulder regarding reporters. Sweeping generalisations, such as considering all reporting to be bad, and that all reporters are arrogant fucks, leaves me thinking that your choice of username was not conceived with a sense of irony. There are shitty dishonest reporters and there are excellent reporters, with a hell of a lot in between.
Or, assuming Slashcode provides its admins with absolutely no search capabilities, there's this fancy new search engine thing that's even better than Altavista!
yet Google bows down the the wishes of the French gov and censors searches for Nazi paraphernalia in France. And thats just one example i can use, im sure there is many more. Why the double standard?
Because blocking nutjobs (and some serious collectors) from buying Nazi underpants is probably not perceived as being the loss of a serious human right. Personally though I'd disagree. The best test of freedom of speech and expression is in how it treats people with unpleasant/unpopular views. While I'd say it should be completely legal for some some angry twat to walk the streets dressed as Colonel Klink, the history associated with Nazi imagery means that there should be a far lower bar when determining the potential to threaten or stir unrest. Whether someone feels insulted or upset should be irrelevant, and as we become more multicultural, we'd better develop thicker skins and societies that don't expect the law to protect individual sensibilities.
No organisation or person are perfectly consistent. Google, while not being a paragon of virtue, has behaved more ethically than many other companies do (and would have done) in similar situations. Criticise them when they drop the ball, but don't expect corporations to behave as if on a godly mission for justice and fair play.
With very little modification, your text could easily be used as a description in a classy wine menu.
"Buckfast is a wild gambit, a tilting rook amidst a mired swamp of strange and temperamental creatures. It's like blindly striking a smoking electro-piñata filled by Alan Turing, Douglas Adams and Nietzsche -- and Gates, Torvalds and Jobs are screeching so loudly in the background, you consider striking yourself instead. In truth, such endeavors require a rare form of derangement, a harmonious blend of neo-technical madness and erstwhile sentiment; undertones of autumn plum married with public toilet and despair."
lets face, Steam is no loss to this world, lets hope MS does finally manage to kill that piece of DRM laced piece of crap. I so wish I didn't need Steam, but some of the games only work with their walled garden, I don't think jumping from one walled garden to another is great but at this point it is hard to imagine them being worse than valve.
The term "walled garden". I do not think it means what you think it means.
Most Amiga games worked that way. It was a pain in the arse that I was happy to leave behind when I moved to systems where hard drive installs were the norm. The disc thing came back with consoles, but then consoles are kind of single use devices. On a computer, I don't want to have to reboot this thing when I want to spend 20 minutes shooting zombies. Also, it's kind of useful to be able to tab to my browser, or a chat application. Even consoles have been moving away, with hard drive installable games and electronic downloads. Games on a dedicated disc makes as much sense as reviving Atari 2600 style cartridges.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone really give a shit what this particular group has to say?
Your elected representatives, who look to outfits like this guidance in turning file sharing in to a crime akin to detonating nail bombs on crowded busses.
http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Debate-over-Internet-piracy-legislation-heats-up-2576620.php
That's a load of shit. If the police are personally arsed by the offense they will put their own effort into it.
Sure, and the kid could die from "accidentally" falling down the stairs while in custody. Is what you describe likely in this case, and if so, why?
Police don't send people to prison. They send people to court (effectively) and the court sends them to prison, which it may well do for political reasons as well as logistic ones. It's only called a "justice" system.
Yes, you're technically correct - the best kind of correct. I was of course speaking colloquially. Neither the police nor the courts send people to some place named "Federal Pound Me in the Ass Prison". Is this kid likely to go to prison for political reasons?
Odds are the kid chose his victim based on the high likelihood of getting away with it even if caught.
Sure, or he chose his victim because he thought he'd never be caught. Who knows? Asking that the kid receive counselling is a good idea, and it seems that his parents are taking things seriously. I don't know if the kid has a habit of antisocial behaviour. Hopefully the confrontation and some counselling will set him straight.
This sentence makes me think that, however vile the "troll" could have turned out to be, this wasn't an entirely black-versus-white situation. I suspect this guy was being a jerk back at anyone who was a jerk to him, and it escalated further than he thought it would.
It may not be as black and white as presented, but to extrapolate as you did is pure crystal ball gazing. On examining the entrails, I suspect that Traynor declined to involve the Gardai because Traynor had been conducting an affair with the kid's mother, which the kid threatened to reveal to the world. This would also explain why the kid was so aggressive.
Or perhaps Traynor had sometimes responded angrily, as many would do under similar circumstances, but had deliberately begun goading the kid in order to trap him.
Oddly heartwarming ending. It's awesome when people can take the high road and restrain themselves from lashing back at abusers, who do this stuff out of boredom, insecurity, and immaturity (or sometimes mental instability issues, alas). But recognizing that people do stupid regrettable crap, and that maybe their lives need not be ruined over it, and that maybe some good might come out of something bad... that's great strength and maturity. Kudos.
Oh come on. Police involvement is only going to ruin a life if the offence committed is so serious that disruption of their life is clearly warranted. It's not as if the police the are in the habit of sending kids to the fabled "Federal Pound Me in the Ass Prison" for being a bit mean. They're looking for serious harassment and threats, and certainly something beyond a random YouTube comment threatening to come there and kick someone's ass. This kid not only crossed the line in to Fucked Life Country. He gaily skipped across - waving his cock as he went. He clearly has issues that should not be dismissed as boyish pranks. The box of ashes is pretty messed-up, as is the threat to kill his girlfriend. All of this to someone who was a friend of the family? Yeah, that's regrettable and certainly should be dealt with to see what else this kid's been up to.
It's serendipity that the kid's parents are friends of the victim. If that were not the case, I'd see no reason at all to not get the Gardai take this pretty bloody seriously. Most likely, barring a track record for acting the cunt, he'd get a talking to and perhaps a caution. Had a kid in the UK harassing a friend of mine. Hacked some of his accounts (yeah, his passwords were terrible), and threatened to screw up the business he was running. I traced the guy quite easily because he'd left a pretty obvious footprint on the web, and we contacted his local police. Never heard again from the kid. Was he arrested? Probably not. Likely the police had a chat with his parents, who promptly pulled the plug on their little proto-neckbeard.
No, that's insulting. Good trolling seems to be a dying art these days. A good troll post says something that sounds plausible, and encourages responses. During the thread, it becomes less and less reasonable, but the aim is to make the other person say something unreasonable first or to make them waste a large amount of effort replying. If you want to see a good troll, read some of the threads started by roman_mir.
Truth! Good trolling divides communities because not everyone realises the game they're playing. This kid was trolling in the sense that demanding an ATM PIN at gunpoint could be considered to be "hacking".
The bulk of the books covering creation come from Jewish scripture, so these are Jewish myths. If it's something predominantly based on Christian scripture I'd describe them as bring Christian myths. Credit where credit's due.
the problem with this kind of TV is that it is giving us all the impression that suicides, shootings, etc all happen far more frequently than they may actually do. Your point about accounting is a good one - there is little balance in entertainment nowadays.
If Fox are only showing car chases, shootings, hostage-takings etc, then those people who can't think critically about what they're watching will start to buy in to all this neo-conservative climate of fear bullshit. That's when we start to suspect our neighbours, and invite the government to indulge in warrantless wiretaps.
Bingo! Which is why we as a society would benefit from schools having a stronger emphasis on critical skills, statistics and probability, and perhaps some media studies. Understanding a little bit about how mass media works is useful for spotting the games they play. It'd never get to the point where we all become immune to silliness and bullshit. What we can hope for is that we reach a critical mass, so we're better equipped to look out for one another when we do fall for something.
Very true, thanks for clarifying that. The scripture is common to them, but taken very differently. One of the things I like about Judaeism is the culture of examination of the texts. Kind of amusing though how they seem to spend a great deal of time finding loopholes.
A lot of what happens in the U.S. appears to be satire. I along with a lot of people got taken in by the Romney airplane window thing. We've heard so many odd things from senior politicians and candidates that it's really not easy to discern the poes from the nutters. The U.S. has elected officials wasting time trying to push creationism in to the science class, obsession with abstinence only education, and this odd idea that universal health care is synonymous with Bolshevism.
Not saying we're perfect though. We have homeopathy and other crazy shit coming out of our earholes. We have vaccine denialism, denial of climate change, people who function daily in a modern society while still believing that an invisible guy in the sky is listening to their heaven-sent words, and organic/natural products being fetishised.
We have a Daily Mail led army of middle aged white guys, simultaneously angry and despondent, because immigrants and queers are giving their houses cancer. Had a discussion the other night with a long-term Daily Mail reader, and it was a Gish gallop of nonsense and generalisations. Not a good sign when someone hurls vitriol at a group called "them", without taking the time to clarify membership of this group (i.e. "pakis"), it's pretty clear that the Mail is strong in them. Fun fact: The reason why crime is running out of control in the UK (despite statistics showing a long trend of decline), is that police recruitment is focussing too much on gays and women, and should instead only have tall straight men (presumably white) on the beat.
A lot of this stuff doesn't really surface in public debate. A politician in the UK claiming that pregnancy resulting from rape probably isn't legitimate rape would be retiring to spend time with the family. The UK is generally secular, and religion tends to be more a personal and understated thing, so a politician pushing to have Jewish myths taught as science would largely be dismissed as some kind of nutter. In the U.S. there seems to be more support available for the extreme views. I'm writing as an outside, so do please correct me if I'm wrong here.
I'm a firm believer in freedom of speech, but there is still such a thing as having some taste, and having some common sense. Clearly this guy has, at the very least, poor judgement, and perhaps poor impulse control, and while I'm not going to lay 100% of the blame on him for the violence in the Middle East due to his ill-advised (and poorly produced, from what I hear) video, he certainly is guilty of being the catalyst.
That's very loaded language. He's not "guilty" of anything - at least in the context of the Islamic hissy-fit business. He is a catalyst, like that teacher who sparked an armed and angry lynch mob in Sudan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_teddy_bear_blasphemy_case
Granted, his actions were provocative, while the teacher's were not. While his actions were inadvisable, 100% of the blame lies with the angry nutjobs and the rabble rousers. If we apportion any blame at all to this guy then we may as well issue mitigation points to anyone taking offence. If some guy in the street says that my mother is a scabby whore, should he share the blame if I were to then pull out a knife and cut out his liver? He's a factor in what happened, but what he did is rendered academic by my crazy response. Staying with that example, if I reacted so badly, is it possible that this reaction is based on more than just this single incident? There's way more happening here than just a bunch of cavemen getting worked up over a video.
If it was water than there should be evidence of life even if it is only bacterial life. Even if they only discover bacterial life than some of these religious nut will have some explaining to do.
They're well practiced in explaining this kind of thing away. There's plenty enough evidence on Earth to question, if not completely contradict, some of their claims.
They went through quite a few alternative solutions.
1) Ask criminals to copy ASIC on all emails and Facebook messages sent. It's about as effective as what they proposed, and will be way cheaper and less intrusive for the public.
2) Have the Internet burn a daily DVD of the entire contents, which will then be sent to ASIC to be stored in boxes. Estimated physical storage space required for first 3 months: New Zealand.
3) Have vagina-cams installed in all female residents of Australia in case they happen to be naked at the home of someone considering fraud, and positioned in such a way that the camera catches the content of the suspect's screen.
4) Require that all Internet communication stop at the ISP level, who will then print it and send it on to the ISP of the person to whom it's address, with a copy being posted to ASIC.
5) Crime is committed only by the living. Kill everyone.
6) Receive funding to have ASIC agents stationed in every home, to sit behind computer users. Agent will periodically tap the user on the shoulder, and ask "Whatcha doin'?"
Number 4 was the preferred option. Greg Tanzer prefers reading personal emails on his tablet while relaxing in a hotel room full of semi-naked pre-teen girls. Having to carry around print-outs was out of the question.
Well, it's already begun, but it's another interesting example of how the police state develops. In an established democracy it's kind of difficult to simply introduce something akin to the Stasi - that worries people.
The trick is to grant unreasonable powers to a group that doesn't appear to have much to do with the average citizen (such as ASIC), or instead give it to a group with what people see as a very specific remit to act only in certain areas (TSA). In the case of ASIC, why should the average guy in the street worry about those stock exchange guys having this power - it's not as if they'll be using to snoop on regular guys. With the TSA, turning airports in to constitution free zones, people are fine with that because they think it's only happening in airports, when in fact they're spilling out in to other aspects of transport. Get people used to presenting documents at airports, train stations and state borders, and before long you'll be able to stop them anywhere and do it. Same with intrusive physical searches. When stopped on a random road, the patriotic dad will proudly hum "God Bless the USA" as his daughter allows a former Wall*Mart shelf stacker with a badge to get his hands down her pants in the name of security and freedom.
Asking for such a broad and patently unjustified ability to snoop has no place in a modern democracy. Ship them out to an embassy near to a country such as North Korea or Iran - in the hope that they'll defect to a place where their Orwellian urges can be sated.
The OSS movement shouldn't care about what other people think. Software is created and put out in the wild in the hope that others will benefit. Whether a particular class of people use it or not is typically irrelevant (unless they are the target of the software). The only people who are likely to greatly care about this are the people trying to make money off of open source software.
Is there an problem in trying to make off of open source software?
So when was the last time you actually needed that Java-plugin in your browser?
About an hour ago. Still plenty of enterprise applications reliant upon Java. For home use, never. My only personal usage of Java comes from a Java remake of Dungeon Master.
I'd wonder if having a net worth of around 100 million dollars would help the process?
This should give Lynx a jump in usage.
It'd be a stretch to see the minority vagina phobia of the western fundamentalists (and their like-minded fundie immigrant friends) translate in to a broad movement to abort girls. Not impossible, but pretty unlikely for the foreseeable future.
Hows the food at the Ecuadorian embassy?
The fact that they would get a good percentage of it wrong comes to no surprise. CNN, for instance, has mentioned Linux on air maybe two times in the last decade. Meanwhile, they can't go two minutes without mentioning Apple.
Ever had the impression that a mainstream television news station probably isn't catering to you. Doesn't mean they get a free pass to make silly blunders, but it does explain why they might not be devoting much airtime to stuff about which most people don't give a shit. I'd like to see a more general interest in all things techie - fucking beats celebrities and sports any day. What I don't expect though is for a channel to get much in the way of advertising by covering the Unity/Gnome 3 controversy or the mass exodus from XFree86.
As well as pulling numbers out of your arse, you appear to have a major chip on your shoulder regarding reporters. Sweeping generalisations, such as considering all reporting to be bad, and that all reporters are arrogant fucks, leaves me thinking that your choice of username was not conceived with a sense of irony. There are shitty dishonest reporters and there are excellent reporters, with a hell of a lot in between.
Or, assuming Slashcode provides its admins with absolutely no search capabilities, there's this fancy new search engine thing that's even better than Altavista!
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=slashdot+ny+times+data+centers
yet Google bows down the the wishes of the French gov and censors searches for Nazi paraphernalia in France. And thats just one example i can use, im sure there is many more. Why the double standard?
Because blocking nutjobs (and some serious collectors) from buying Nazi underpants is probably not perceived as being the loss of a serious human right. Personally though I'd disagree. The best test of freedom of speech and expression is in how it treats people with unpleasant/unpopular views. While I'd say it should be completely legal for some some angry twat to walk the streets dressed as Colonel Klink, the history associated with Nazi imagery means that there should be a far lower bar when determining the potential to threaten or stir unrest. Whether someone feels insulted or upset should be irrelevant, and as we become more multicultural, we'd better develop thicker skins and societies that don't expect the law to protect individual sensibilities.
No organisation or person are perfectly consistent. Google, while not being a paragon of virtue, has behaved more ethically than many other companies do (and would have done) in similar situations. Criticise them when they drop the ball, but don't expect corporations to behave as if on a godly mission for justice and fair play.
What have I done!
With very little modification, your text could easily be used as a description in a classy wine menu.
"Buckfast is a wild gambit, a tilting rook amidst a mired swamp of strange and temperamental creatures. It's like blindly striking a smoking electro-piñata filled by Alan Turing, Douglas Adams and Nietzsche -- and Gates, Torvalds and Jobs are screeching so loudly in the background, you consider striking yourself instead. In truth, such endeavors require a rare form of derangement, a harmonious blend of neo-technical madness and erstwhile sentiment; undertones of autumn plum married with public toilet and despair."
lets face, Steam is no loss to this world, lets hope MS does finally manage to kill that piece of DRM laced piece of crap. I so wish I didn't need Steam, but some of the games only work with their walled garden, I don't think jumping from one walled garden to another is great but at this point it is hard to imagine them being worse than valve.
The term "walled garden". I do not think it means what you think it means.
Most Amiga games worked that way. It was a pain in the arse that I was happy to leave behind when I moved to systems where hard drive installs were the norm. The disc thing came back with consoles, but then consoles are kind of single use devices. On a computer, I don't want to have to reboot this thing when I want to spend 20 minutes shooting zombies. Also, it's kind of useful to be able to tab to my browser, or a chat application. Even consoles have been moving away, with hard drive installable games and electronic downloads. Games on a dedicated disc makes as much sense as reviving Atari 2600 style cartridges.