A famous, funny, and somewhat insightful joke to be sure, but I'd have to say that the vast majority of insightful, inspiring, bullshit-cutting dialog I've ever witness (or partaken in) has been on the internet. Check out the top of that blackboard--the comic was inspired by Unreal Tournament 2004, not +5 Insightful comments on slashdot. For all of the bullshit and flame wars out there, I think that anonymity inspires honesty and frankness that, while holding the potential to inspire personal attacks and general disruption, also holds the potential for real, unhindered communication in a way that most real-world communication sadly lacks. If a friend or coworker or member of my family says something stupid and shortsighted about (for instance) Iraq, most of the time I let it slide because it isn't worth the potential long-term consequences if they decide to take offense or otherwise become bothered by my response. Even less-divisive topics can be troublesome. I remember one time a somewhat-ditzy coworker of mine starting ranting about how sucralose (Splenda) was soooo unhealthy because she heard it contained chlorine, and I was like, "ummmmmmm...., so?" "Chlorine is bad for you!" "Well, chlorine bound up in a molecule isn't *inherently* harmful. In fact, you get far more chlorine from eating salt!" and somehow she took offense (ok, so maybe I laughed at her just a *little*. Couldn't help it.) Put a stopper on the entire conversation, and for a weeks afterwards she wasn't as friendly with me. Oh yeah, and I've probably alienated at least a dozen other coworkers with simple, non-confrontational, matter-of-fact statements regarding my (dis)belief in God and religion in general. (I'm not a completely insensative person, but I happened to be working with a ton of highly religious people and they kept asking me about my church and my prayers and stuff. And when I said "I don't believe in God" they usually asked why. So I told them.)
Anyway, you just don't have to worry about this kind of shit online. At any time you can walk away and find another forum (or hell, sometimes just another username) and never talk to those people ever again without any undesirable long-term consequences. Yeah, you can swing too far in the other direction and devolve into vicious, pointless flaming (safe in the knowledge that you don't personally know anyone involved) but on the whole I think there's more rational discussion on the net than in polite-and-politically-correct real life.
Joking aside, does it disturb anyone else that 16-17 year olds are being referred to as children and Mark Foley being called a pedophile? I dated a 16 year old when I was 20, and I'd be pretty pissed if anyone ever called me a pedophile (arguably, she was more mature than I was.) I think there's a big fat gray area between right and wrong here. Anyone who thinks that messing around with a 17 year old is the same as messing around with a 7 year old needs to have their head examined.
I'm not excusing anything the guy did, but by analogy if someone gets mugged, I don't think it's appropriate or fair to call the suspect a murderer or rapist.
And this, dear slashdotters, is why I will never become a subscriber. I'm not asking for the editors to analyze the article in detail, I'm not insisting on absolutely zero typoes, I just want them to actually skim the article long enough to realize when the submitter's summary has absolutely nothing to do with the article.
I don't know why I bother to mention it anymore, but would you people please stop using "FUD" as a synonym of "bullshit"? Just because you disagree with the assertion doesn't mean that the study's authors are purposefully and maliciously spreading "fear, uncertainty, and doubt" about math geeks.
"Unenforceable" isn't the right term. Minors are allowed to enter contracts all the time, and indeed many of them are enforceable. The thing is, minors are granted the power to nullify any contract they've previously agreed to, but they must be able to return whatever benefit they got out of it.
For example, if a minor buys a candy bar and then eats it (any cash transaction is a legal contract), she can't turn around and demand her money back. The contract is enforceable, and there's no legal way she can get her money back. However, if she decided she wasn't hungry she *could* come back the next day with the uneaten candy bar and receipt and demand her money back, and legally the store would have to comply, even if they had a "no returns on food items" policy.
As applicable to this situation, the minor is still bound by the EULA, but theoretically retains the right to return the video game (realistically, I'm not sure how easy this would be to pull off at your local Best Buy, and most people wouldn't bother to take them to court.) IANAL, so take this all with a grain of salt, but I have confirmed this info from several sources. There are probably other laws that affect a minors' contracts, but I'm pretty sure this is the basis, the default when no other law specifically prohibits/voids a contract with a minor.
Actually, this is a reasonably sensible decision and it has nothing to do with terrorism (or rather, it might. "Fighting terrorism" gets people re-elected, so maybe that's what they're claiming, but there's a sane, realistic reason as well.) If you were, say, a professional burglar and you found out that an elderly woman in a rich part of town is being rushed to the hospital, wouldn't that be a wonderfully useful piece of information? Likely her husband (if she has one) will be at the hospital all day and likely well into the night, leaving the house completely unguarded. Hell, there's probably a decent chance that in the panic and confusion, the house was left unlocked.
This is a rather direct and extreme example, but there are others. Basically, they're just trying to discourage people exploiting the 911 system for personal gain/amusement, whether they're criminals or ambulance-chasing lawyers or bored teenagers. Whether the effort they've made is effective or worth the convenience tradeoff is another matter entirely, but I think the concern itself is genuine.
Did you even read the GP's post? The point you utterly failed to grap is that sweeping accusations like "The site owners (the porn sites) make it easier to attack them as they support spam.[snip]" are wrong. Believe it or not, most adult site owners out there don't "support spam"--there just happens to be a EXTREMELY prolific minority. And even if the majority did support spam, that doesn't excuse blanket accusations that demonize the entire porn industry.
Is it really that much dumber sounding than "Firefox"? Or "Mozilla" for that matter? "Weasel" is a somewhat negative (and funny) sounding word, but other than that the name is no worse than several dozen other software names I can think of off the top of my head. Practically every name sounds goofy when you first hear it. When the name "Wii" was leaked, people were foaming at the mouth, saying it the stupid name alone would doom the console. Now it elicits mild annoyance at worst, and most people have either embraced it or gotten so used to it that it doesn't matter anymore.
I think that the underlying truth is if the underlying product is good enough then having a weird name really doesn't matter--in fact, if it's distinctive enough then it can actually be a good thing. That said, I think "weasel" might be a tad much--why not "Icebear" or some other single-syllable animal?
What an amazingly pointless out-of-context, overly-semantic quote. The point is, people will NOT pay 1.65 billion dollars for 1.65 billion dollars' worth of GOOG stock, period. They might not pay anywhere remotely that amount unless the stock is sold off very slowly and carefully (and at great risk.) This is distinct from hard currency, which does not drasticallylose value as you spend it, even if you spend great quantities all at once.
The fact that they don't have a checking account with a balance $1.65 billion is beside the point.
It is precisely the point.
You seem to be under the (very much mistaken) impression that YouTube could turn around and sell 100% of that stock immediately, at full price. I'm not a veteran investor, but I can assure you that it does NOT work that way. Let me let you in on a little secret--there is no magical regulatory entity that decides on a stock's price... that would kind of be contrary to the concept of "free market", wouldn't it? The more stock YouTube tries to sell, the less money they're able to get for it due to the very simple laws of "supply and demand." They can sell it for X - 1 tick where X is the most recent GOOG price and they'll sell a few shares, but within minutes (tops) there will be someone out there undercutting them, selling at X - 2 ticks. Now, I'm sure GOOG is very liquid, but 1.65 billion is still a huge number. If they wanted to get anywhere close to their full money's worth, YouTube would have to sell at a very slow rate, and pray GOOG doesn't fall in
value in the meantime. I know Google is a favorite around here--I love 'em too--but most sane, long-term investors agree their stock is *obscenely* overvalued. Thus, it's actually quite a risk to sit there and slowly sell off GOOG stock over the course of lord knows how many years. With a relatively fast sell off (which still carries significant risk, given Google's particuarly pumped-up bubble), YouTube would inevitably end up with significantly less than 1.65 billion. How much less, I couldn't say--I wouldn't be too surprised if they lost as much as 25%-75% of it.
I couldn't say for sure--I'm not an economist or veteran investor--but I can DEFINITELY say for sure that 1.65 billion in stock does NOT equal 1.65 billion in hard cash. In the late 1990's, I remember at one point Bill Gates had a net worth in the vicinity of $115-120 billion. His current net worth is around $50 billion. I'm sure some of that was given to charity, sure, but most of it was lost when his stocks declined in value. Stocks do that. Cold, hard cash does not (except in the context of inflation and FOREX, but I'm getting rather tangential.)
...until you want to buy a laptop, that is. What the hell are you gonna do, build one from scratch? Buy one (for hundreds more) from one of the few small-time retailers that aren't subject to the M$ tax?
My completely spiteful answer is I hope that M$ loses as much money as possible through whatever means possible, including piracy and customers lost due to stupid and inaccurate anti-piracy measures such as this.
Why do I wish them so much ill, do you ask? Because I've probably bought around 6-8 copies of Windows that I will NEVER use. I was FORCED to buy them due to Microsoft's predatory marketing practices, which forbid all of the major OEMs (which have the best prices by far--even for desktops, nowadays it's usually significantly cheaper to wait for a good Dell deal than to build from scratch) from selling desktops and laptops without a copy of Windows.
Our justice system has failed us. They convicted MS of monopolistic practices and utterly failed to do anything about it, and I've indirectly paid hundreds of dollars in license fees I am NOT using (I use Linux exclusively, except for a single gaming box.) They include BULLSHIT, UNENFORCABLE crap like "you may not resell this OEM copy", even though this clearly violates the first sale doctrine, and yet shitheads like eBay go along with it and won't let you sell your OEM copies of Windows. And it gets even better--now many OEMs (like Dell) don't give you any reinstallation CDs--you don't even have the option to make your own, anymore. So, even if I did use Windows, I'd be forced to use a pirated copy when it comes time to reinstall windows (and don't give me that "it's stable now!" crap. I have XP and while it's lightyears ahead of 9x, you most certainly can NOT use it regularly for YEARS without experiencing significant slowdowns and other problems, often unresolvable by malware removal programs.)
So, in conclusion: fuck Microsoft. They've stolen hundreds of dollars from me personally (and God knows how much nationally or worldwide), so don't expect me play fair if and when I'm ever forced to use Vista in the future.
Re:No distro comes close to Mandriva for ease of u
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It's more like Mandrake of late 2003 (the more I think about it, the more I'm sure it was only 3 years ago) vs. Ubuntu of early 2005 (I tried Hoary as soon as it came out.) That's only 1.5 years' difference.
And I'm not blaming Mandriva for its mistakes from 3 years ago; I'm just asking why I should give it a second chance with Ubuntu as stable and easy to use as it is--what can it offer me that Ubuntu can't?
I was also addressing all those MEPIS/FC/Mandriva fans who are annoyed at the popularity of Ubuntu and can't see why it's more popular than their easy-to-use distro of choice. I'm aware that plenty of people have had problems with Ubuntu, but from my experience (with three different boxes, mind you) and observations, I think a greater percentage had success with it than with the alternatives.
Re:No distro comes close to Mandriva for ease of u
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Mandriva 2007 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
I'm glad it worked out for you, but I'm unconvinced that your experience is commonplace. Three (or was it four?) years ago, I tried to find a Linux distro that worked for me. I was fairly technically proficient, but I had no Unix experience and I didn't have the patience to spend more than a day (12~ hours) getting the basics to work. Red Hat (this was pre-FC) was first on my list--the installer inexplicably froze. Knoppix gave me all kinds of crap about my graphics card. I went down the list, including SuSe, Gentoo (with my expert best friend's guidance), Debian and Mandriva (or Mandrake, as it was then known), and every single one of them gave me major problems. Half of them wouldn't even make it through an entire install, and the rest refused to recognize a vital piece of hardware. Each time, I'd spend a most of the day screwing around on Google and IRC trying to get the sound card or the net connection to work, and then finally give up and move on to the next popular distro I could find--I did this for a week or two before finally giving up on Linux entirely. I wasn't just using a single problem box, btw--I tried installing them on my desktop, the family desktop, and my laptop and had the same horrible results.
A couple years pass, then lo and behold I hear about this new distro called Ubuntu. I fire it up, and EVERYTHING JUST FREAKING WORKS. Well, almost everything. I couldn't use my mouse 4 and 5 buttons nor disable tapclick on my laptop's touchpad nor get 3d acceleration to work with games like Tuxracer, but I was willing to live with minor crap like that until I could work out a solution--the important thing was, my computer was not horribly crippled--it FUNCTIONAL right out of the box, and so I had could afford to tinker with the details whenever I got around to them.
This is, of course, completely anecdotal but I've heard very similar stories from tons of other Ubuntu converts. I'm sure that distros like FC and MEPIS and Mandriva are AWESOME when they work properly; I'm sure that, when they actually WORKED out of the box, they offered a wonderful assortment of handy configuration GUIs and were just as functional as Ubuntu, but I would hazzard a guess that they simply were not as reliably functional out of the box, no tinkering and troubleshooting required. And I'm sure there are Ubuntu horror stories as well, but I think that the difference is in the probabilities--Ubuntu simply had a much better chance of actually WORKING for the non-expert user.
And given the open source nature of Linux, I'm sure that the other distros are catching up rapidly. Recently I've tried a few others, and they seemed to work nearly flawlessly, so perhaps Ubuntu doesn't have anything other than momentum going for it now. But really, in the OS world, that's all you need--just look at Windows, for fuck's sake.
So yeah, I'm sure Mandriva is great and all, but it had it's chance with me already, and it failed miserably. Why should I switch when I've already got a distro as complete and polished as Ubuntu 6.06? I'm not being confrontational here; it's a genuine question--what can Mandriva give me that Ubuntu can't?
What a load of horseshit. Canada's armed forces are something like the 14th strongest in the world--stronger than badasses like Iran and Israel, and their overall tech level is top notch. We could defeat them if we tried (assuming they didn't have any help from their other allies), but they're hardly relying on us for protection.
He's a fun fucking idea, why don't you actually pick up a book (or mouse) and learn something instead of regurgitating the same retarded, redneck drivel that gives the rest of us Americans such a bad name.
Errr, your comment is a tad ambiguous. A "man in the middle" attack is when an adversary can intercept and alter public keys; i.e. the term is usually used when discussing asymmetrical encryption and the importance of trusted digital certificates. Perhaps you meant to say "eavesdropping is very possible" instead?
Errr, did you even read the possibilities I mentioned? I didn't even mention surrendering Hawaii among them (though I suppose that would've been an option, too.) We could have contained them and blockcaded them after bombing their factories back to the stone age (which we had pretty much already done), or we could have signed a peace treaty that required them to make many concessions, yet stop short of complete occupation. Neither of these options can be reasonably termed "American surrender."
I do get your overall point--that at the time most Americans would not have been satisfied with anything other than unconditional Japan surrender--but that's hardly an excuse for the false dichotomy. Instead of saying "Little Boy and Fat Man (the bombs) saved Japanese and American lives, compared to the alternatives!", people need to start saying "Nukes were somewhat less devastating than the other options we had at our disposal for Japanese invasion/military annihilation." It shouldn't be a GIVEN that we absolutely HAD to destroy/invade/occupy Japan--just because the public at the time demanded it, doesn't mean we should warp reality to say that nukes saved anyone's life... they didn't; they just facilitated our conquest of Japan. Whether that conquest was justified is another matter entirely, but it was not a given.
Case in point. Japan started the fight and they would not surrender. Very conservative estimates of an invasion of Japan's homeland put American deaths at a million and Japanese deaths as a multiple of that. As horrific the destruction caused by the 2 atomic bombs, those bombs saved American and Japanese lives.
I find it slightly unsettling that this sentiment is so widespread. On the one hand, I do accept that the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are exaggerated (the firebombings of cities like Dresden and Tokyo were similarly devasting) and that by their very nature, very large-scale wars must be fought ruthlessly. On the otherhand, I hate the false dichotomy of "Well, obviously we HAD to conquor the Japanese, so it was either nuke 'em or invade 'em." Well no... no, those were not the only two choices. We had already bombed out a great deal of their infrastructure, and their navy was fairly decimated so we could have just surrounded the entire nation with a naval blockade and called it a day. Or, I'm sure they would have agreed to something less than a full surrender--perhaps an agreement that they'll pull out of the most of rest of Asia (might have had to give them a territory or two for appeasement) and then sign a cease-fire.
I'm not being an apologist for Japanese WWII aggression, but it's not like the kingdom of Hawaii peacefully decided to join the USA without any American coersion whatsoever... and as much as people nowadays like to compare 9/11 to Pearl Harbor, the two are NOTHING alike--the Japanese limited their attack strictly to military targets.
They weren't saints, not by a long shot (see: Rape of Nanking), but they weren't bloodthirsty psychopaths who absolutely needed to be eliminated at all costs. They fought much more viciously than we did (though I would argue perhaps that they only gave official sanction for what usually happened all the time in most Western armies anyway), they were more pragmatic and they didn't respect prisoners of war who didn't have the decency of committing suicide to avoid enemy capture, but don't confuse them with the Nazis--they weren't trying to exterminate anyone. The invasion of Germany was needed to stop the death camps, but where was it written that we MUST invade Japan, other than our sense of outrage at a single attack directed at a military target on an island that we all but conquored ourselves?
If you think the nukes were justified fine; hell, you may very well be right... just stop trying to pretend that we were presented with only two options, both of which involved driving Japan to an unconditional surrender.
The rest of your sentiment I generally agree with--nukes prevented World War III, and possibly World War IV and V as well. On the other hand, if many thousands of ICBMs/SLBMs were exchanged it could easily mean more deaths than all three of those hypothetical wars combined, so I don't think the benefits were so great as to render all hindsight risk analysis pointless--just because it worked for us once doesn't mean we should roll the dice again if, e.g. Iran gets nukes.
Way to miss the fucking point. The point is that below Hiler and Stalin and whatall you have ordinary Joes like you and me, and while their morality may sometimes be twisted (at least from our point of view) they still have the same basic, human desires that we do. This doesn't make the dictators any less monstrous, though perhaps it makes their subjects somewhat less so.
There's a huge difference between "taste" and obsenity.
Not really. Trying make my kids believe in fairy tales that promote hatred and bigotry and ignorance doesn't have a damn thing to do with taste in my eyes; it's simply obscene. And I'm sure plenty of uptight Christians believe the same thing about the word "fuck."
You're giving "hate speech" a bad name. There's a world of difference between religous programming saying "God is the savior" and hate speech like "All fags should be shot". Guess which one you'll hear on TV, and which one you wont...
I don't have a problem with "Jesus is our savior", but just because dipshits like Jerry Falwell don't blatantly advocate violence doesn't make them any less obscene... on the contrary, it makes them much more insidious, much more dangerous because they cloak their hatred with pacifism and pseudo-love while preaching horseshit like '9/11 happened because of the homosexuals, feminists and abortionists.' (That's not an exaggeration--Falwell said it on national TV, and Pat Robertson publically agreed with his remarks.) I don't have a problem with positive, supportive, mind-my-own-damn-business Christianty, but I occasionally watch Christian TV or listen to Christian radio and I've yet to see/hear a single program that did not actively attack a common, positive type of non-Christian lifestyle. Usually, I don't have to listen for more than 5 minutes before I'm so sickened that I have to change the channel.
What the? Have you NEVER had cable TV? There are no standards, and yet all basic cable channels strictly self-censor, at least until very, very late at night.
My understanding is that most of the basic cable TV channels are broadcast over the air in certain parts of the country, and thus are subject to FCC nazi-ism. As I understand it, there's a provision called "safe habor" or something that allows them to air more explicit stuff at night. My argument wasn't that the majority of Americans subscribed to premium cable; it was that only premium cable was legally allowed to show completely uncensored stuff 24 hours a day, and the fact that they choose to do so proves that there's an economic incentive to do so (thus implying that the majority of the public is OK with it.) If what you say is true, then this might be flawed argument, but I rather doubt it. Late night on Cinemax and Showtime you'll see tons of softcore porn, complete with full frontal nudity (at the very least topless women.) On channels like the USA network, you see pseudo-softcore porn, where they go as far as they can without showing any actual nudity (or rather, this was the case a few years back--not sure if they're still doing it)--why would USA do this, unless they were forced to by the FCC? Surely there's a much bigger market for REAL softcore porn than pseudo-softcore porn... it's not like there are soccer moms out there letting their 9 year olds watch the corny, extremely suggestive dialog and women in microscopic bikinis who would be horrified if admist all the posing and innuendo one of them actually bared her nipples. It could conceivably be a problem with advertisers, I suppose, but I doubt it. I've yet to see a single instance of full, unobscured nudity on basic cable with a few very rare exceptions of the "special", pretentious, "artistic" type (similar to when NBC broadcast Schindler's List uncut.)
But regardless, this article is about radio and thus I'm primarily arguing about "obscene" speech, not sex/nudity ('cause god knows the FCC doesn't give a shit about violence.) Every single hard rock station I've ever listened to (across 6 states) has pushed the limits of "decency"--they most obviously are NOT trying to be a "family" station, and if the FCC restrictions were relaxed they would be cussing up a storm before you could say "fuck the fucking fuckers." Their "premium" cousins on XM and Sirius illustrate this nicely. Regardless of what you may think about "vulgar" speech, any linguist in
How the hell did this BS get modded up to +5? A park is a physical place, and its primary purpose is not for listening to music (or political rantings, or shock jocks, etc.) Yes, there's a good argument for laws against noise pollution in a public park. On the other hand, if you choose to tune into a very left-wing, hard rock station geared towards the younger crowd, that's your own damn choice. If you don't like the cussing then oh well, tune to something else. FM, AM and TV is FULL of (what I consider to be) hate speech--they call it "religious progamming"--but I don't complain because no one is FORCING me to listen to it. Your argument is completely absurd--different stations are by definition meant to cater to different tastes. My own tastes exclude the vast majority of programming on TV and on the radio, but that doesn't give me the right to tune to a channel I don't like and then say that we should change it because I don't like it.
And as I mentioned before, it's not like the majority of the public wants this type of censorship. If for-profit satellite radio companies like Sirius and XM thought they would lose money by airing uncensored songs, do you think they'd do it? Ditto for premium cable channels. When TV and radio stations are not FORCED to self-censor, they almost never self-censor (at best they self-censor only a portion of their channels, e.g. "family" channels), so I cannot see how you can argue that the FCC is only reflecting public desire--it's clear to anyone with half a brain that the public desires access to mature, uncensored programming.
But yes, swearing loudly in a small public space should be regulated, and if the FCC doesn't have the constitutional authority to do so, then we should have a constitutional convention and create an authority which can.
So swearing is the only thing that should be regulated, hmm? Hate speech is ok, personal attacks are ok, misinformation and logical fallacies and outright lies are ok, but god forbid I say the word "fuck"? You, sir, have one fucked-up system of priorities.
Music is art and when you censor a song like, say, Korn's Faget, you render it a shallow, laughable parody of itself... as if you took a picture of the Venus de Milo and obscured all but her face in the name of puritanism.
I consider music and (at least some) movies/television shows to be a form of art; I've never heard the term "censureship" applied to art--only "censorship."
I know its probably hard to imagine having kids, being a slashdotter and all (cue William Shatner at trekkie convention: "Have you ever kissed a girl..."). However, most people do at some point have children, and the last thing they want is to hear their toddler repeating "fuck, fuck, fuckety-fuck..." because they heard it on the radio. Or somewhat worse, having their daughters go bulimic on them because they're trying to look like some bare-chested floozy they saw on tv.
Not hard at all; in fact, I'll probably be a father within the next few years (after my girlfriend and I graduate from college.) I wouldn't be too bothered about the former (I'd tell my kid that using those words could bother other people, though), and the latter is just plain dumb (my daughter is going to turn bulimic because she saw a thin person naked? But not a thin person wearing clothes?) I WOULD, however, mind a great deal if my son or daughter turned into a close-minded, hateful, anti-love, anti-science, anti-gay Christian--not that all Christians are these things, mind you, just that many of them are and they have many vocal proponents on religious TV and religious radio. But I'm not arguing that we ban religious content from the airwaves--that would be censorship and it would be wrong. It's my responsibility as a parent to pay attention to what my kid watches and listens to, and it would be damned irresponsible of me to expect the government to do my job for me.
Premium cable and satellite radio have already demonstrated that the majority of people prefer uncensored music, TV and movies, so your "owned by the public" argument is unfounded--it's already quite clear that the majority of the public doesn't want censorship. Your "small subset" is actually the people who WANT censorship, not the people who are against it. (FYI: The Superbowl wardrobe malfunction "controversy" was in reality driven by a couple of very small special interest groups who organized large-scale letter writing campaigns.)
Slashdot Mirror
A famous, funny, and somewhat insightful joke to be sure, but I'd have to say that the vast majority of insightful, inspiring, bullshit-cutting dialog I've ever witness (or partaken in) has been on the internet. Check out the top of that blackboard--the comic was inspired by Unreal Tournament 2004, not +5 Insightful comments on slashdot. For all of the bullshit and flame wars out there, I think that anonymity inspires honesty and frankness that, while holding the potential to inspire personal attacks and general disruption, also holds the potential for real, unhindered communication in a way that most real-world communication sadly lacks. If a friend or coworker or member of my family says something stupid and shortsighted about (for instance) Iraq, most of the time I let it slide because it isn't worth the potential long-term consequences if they decide to take offense or otherwise become bothered by my response. Even less-divisive topics can be troublesome. I remember one time a somewhat-ditzy coworker of mine starting ranting about how sucralose (Splenda) was soooo unhealthy because she heard it contained chlorine, and I was like, "ummmmmmm...., so?" "Chlorine is bad for you!" "Well, chlorine bound up in a molecule isn't *inherently* harmful. In fact, you get far more chlorine from eating salt!" and somehow she took offense (ok, so maybe I laughed at her just a *little*. Couldn't help it.) Put a stopper on the entire conversation, and for a weeks afterwards she wasn't as friendly with me. Oh yeah, and I've probably alienated at least a dozen other coworkers with simple, non-confrontational, matter-of-fact statements regarding my (dis)belief in God and religion in general. (I'm not a completely insensative person, but I happened to be working with a ton of highly religious people and they kept asking me about my church and my prayers and stuff. And when I said "I don't believe in God" they usually asked why. So I told them.)
Anyway, you just don't have to worry about this kind of shit online. At any time you can walk away and find another forum (or hell, sometimes just another username) and never talk to those people ever again without any undesirable long-term consequences. Yeah, you can swing too far in the other direction and devolve into vicious, pointless flaming (safe in the knowledge that you don't personally know anyone involved) but on the whole I think there's more rational discussion on the net than in polite-and-politically-correct real life.
Joking aside, does it disturb anyone else that 16-17 year olds are being referred to as children and Mark Foley being called a pedophile? I dated a 16 year old when I was 20, and I'd be pretty pissed if anyone ever called me a pedophile (arguably, she was more mature than I was.) I think there's a big fat gray area between right and wrong here. Anyone who thinks that messing around with a 17 year old is the same as messing around with a 7 year old needs to have their head examined.
I'm not excusing anything the guy did, but by analogy if someone gets mugged, I don't think it's appropriate or fair to call the suspect a murderer or rapist.
And this, dear slashdotters, is why I will never become a subscriber. I'm not asking for the editors to analyze the article in detail, I'm not insisting on absolutely zero typoes, I just want them to actually skim the article long enough to realize when the submitter's summary has absolutely nothing to do with the article.
I don't know why I bother to mention it anymore, but would you people please stop using "FUD" as a synonym of "bullshit"? Just because you disagree with the assertion doesn't mean that the study's authors are purposefully and maliciously spreading "fear, uncertainty, and doubt" about math geeks.
"Unenforceable" isn't the right term. Minors are allowed to enter contracts all the time, and indeed many of them are enforceable. The thing is, minors are granted the power to nullify any contract they've previously agreed to, but they must be able to return whatever benefit they got out of it.
For example, if a minor buys a candy bar and then eats it (any cash transaction is a legal contract), she can't turn around and demand her money back. The contract is enforceable, and there's no legal way she can get her money back. However, if she decided she wasn't hungry she *could* come back the next day with the uneaten candy bar and receipt and demand her money back, and legally the store would have to comply, even if they had a "no returns on food items" policy.
As applicable to this situation, the minor is still bound by the EULA, but theoretically retains the right to return the video game (realistically, I'm not sure how easy this would be to pull off at your local Best Buy, and most people wouldn't bother to take them to court.) IANAL, so take this all with a grain of salt, but I have confirmed this info from several sources. There are probably other laws that affect a minors' contracts, but I'm pretty sure this is the basis, the default when no other law specifically prohibits/voids a contract with a minor.
This explains SO much.
Actually, this is a reasonably sensible decision and it has nothing to do with terrorism (or rather, it might. "Fighting terrorism" gets people re-elected, so maybe that's what they're claiming, but there's a sane, realistic reason as well.) If you were, say, a professional burglar and you found out that an elderly woman in a rich part of town is being rushed to the hospital, wouldn't that be a wonderfully useful piece of information? Likely her husband (if she has one) will be at the hospital all day and likely well into the night, leaving the house completely unguarded. Hell, there's probably a decent chance that in the panic and confusion, the house was left unlocked.
This is a rather direct and extreme example, but there are others. Basically, they're just trying to discourage people exploiting the 911 system for personal gain/amusement, whether they're criminals or ambulance-chasing lawyers or bored teenagers. Whether the effort they've made is effective or worth the convenience tradeoff is another matter entirely, but I think the concern itself is genuine.
Did you even read the GP's post? The point you utterly failed to grap is that sweeping accusations like "The site owners (the porn sites) make it easier to attack them as they support spam.[snip]" are wrong. Believe it or not, most adult site owners out there don't "support spam"--there just happens to be a EXTREMELY prolific minority. And even if the majority did support spam, that doesn't excuse blanket accusations that demonize the entire porn industry.
Is it really that much dumber sounding than "Firefox"? Or "Mozilla" for that matter? "Weasel" is a somewhat negative (and funny) sounding word, but other than that the name is no worse than several dozen other software names I can think of off the top of my head. Practically every name sounds goofy when you first hear it. When the name "Wii" was leaked, people were foaming at the mouth, saying it the stupid name alone would doom the console. Now it elicits mild annoyance at worst, and most people have either embraced it or gotten so used to it that it doesn't matter anymore.
I think that the underlying truth is if the underlying product is good enough then having a weird name really doesn't matter--in fact, if it's distinctive enough then it can actually be a good thing. That said, I think "weasel" might be a tad much--why not "Icebear" or some other single-syllable animal?
What an amazingly pointless out-of-context, overly-semantic quote. The point is, people will NOT pay 1.65 billion dollars for 1.65 billion dollars' worth of GOOG stock, period. They might not pay anywhere remotely that amount unless the stock is sold off very slowly and carefully (and at great risk.) This is distinct from hard currency, which does not drasticallylose value as you spend it, even if you spend great quantities all at once.
The fact that they don't have a checking account with a balance $1.65 billion is beside the point.
It is precisely the point.
You seem to be under the (very much mistaken) impression that YouTube could turn around and sell 100% of that stock immediately, at full price. I'm not a veteran investor, but I can assure you that it does NOT work that way. Let me let you in on a little secret--there is no magical regulatory entity that decides on a stock's price... that would kind of be contrary to the concept of "free market", wouldn't it? The more stock YouTube tries to sell, the less money they're able to get for it due to the very simple laws of "supply and demand." They can sell it for X - 1 tick where X is the most recent GOOG price and they'll sell a few shares, but within minutes (tops) there will be someone out there undercutting them, selling at X - 2 ticks. Now, I'm sure GOOG is very liquid, but 1.65 billion is still a huge number. If they wanted to get anywhere close to their full money's worth, YouTube would have to sell at a very slow rate, and pray GOOG doesn't fall in value in the meantime. I know Google is a favorite around here--I love 'em too--but most sane, long-term investors agree their stock is *obscenely* overvalued. Thus, it's actually quite a risk to sit there and slowly sell off GOOG stock over the course of lord knows how many years. With a relatively fast sell off (which still carries significant risk, given Google's particuarly pumped-up bubble), YouTube would inevitably end up with significantly less than 1.65 billion. How much less, I couldn't say--I wouldn't be too surprised if they lost as much as 25%-75% of it.
I couldn't say for sure--I'm not an economist or veteran investor--but I can DEFINITELY say for sure that 1.65 billion in stock does NOT equal 1.65 billion in hard cash. In the late 1990's, I remember at one point Bill Gates had a net worth in the vicinity of $115-120 billion. His current net worth is around $50 billion. I'm sure some of that was given to charity, sure, but most of it was lost when his stocks declined in value. Stocks do that. Cold, hard cash does not (except in the context of inflation and FOREX, but I'm getting rather tangential.)
Link? Specs? I don't see any laptops on their official site.
...until you want to buy a laptop, that is. What the hell are you gonna do, build one from scratch? Buy one (for hundreds more) from one of the few small-time retailers that aren't subject to the M$ tax?
My completely spiteful answer is I hope that M$ loses as much money as possible through whatever means possible, including piracy and customers lost due to stupid and inaccurate anti-piracy measures such as this.
Why do I wish them so much ill, do you ask? Because I've probably bought around 6-8 copies of Windows that I will NEVER use. I was FORCED to buy them due to Microsoft's predatory marketing practices, which forbid all of the major OEMs (which have the best prices by far--even for desktops, nowadays it's usually significantly cheaper to wait for a good Dell deal than to build from scratch) from selling desktops and laptops without a copy of Windows.
Our justice system has failed us. They convicted MS of monopolistic practices and utterly failed to do anything about it, and I've indirectly paid hundreds of dollars in license fees I am NOT using (I use Linux exclusively, except for a single gaming box.) They include BULLSHIT, UNENFORCABLE crap like "you may not resell this OEM copy", even though this clearly violates the first sale doctrine, and yet shitheads like eBay go along with it and won't let you sell your OEM copies of Windows. And it gets even better--now many OEMs (like Dell) don't give you any reinstallation CDs--you don't even have the option to make your own, anymore. So, even if I did use Windows, I'd be forced to use a pirated copy when it comes time to reinstall windows (and don't give me that "it's stable now!" crap. I have XP and while it's lightyears ahead of 9x, you most certainly can NOT use it regularly for YEARS without experiencing significant slowdowns and other problems, often unresolvable by malware removal programs.)
So, in conclusion: fuck Microsoft. They've stolen hundreds of dollars from me personally (and God knows how much nationally or worldwide), so don't expect me play fair if and when I'm ever forced to use Vista in the future.
It's more like Mandrake of late 2003 (the more I think about it, the more I'm sure it was only 3 years ago) vs. Ubuntu of early 2005 (I tried Hoary as soon as it came out.) That's only 1.5 years' difference.
And I'm not blaming Mandriva for its mistakes from 3 years ago; I'm just asking why I should give it a second chance with Ubuntu as stable and easy to use as it is--what can it offer me that Ubuntu can't?
I was also addressing all those MEPIS/FC/Mandriva fans who are annoyed at the popularity of Ubuntu and can't see why it's more popular than their easy-to-use distro of choice. I'm aware that plenty of people have had problems with Ubuntu, but from my experience (with three different boxes, mind you) and observations, I think a greater percentage had success with it than with the alternatives.
I'm glad it worked out for you, but I'm unconvinced that your experience is commonplace. Three (or was it four?) years ago, I tried to find a Linux distro that worked for me. I was fairly technically proficient, but I had no Unix experience and I didn't have the patience to spend more than a day (12~ hours) getting the basics to work. Red Hat (this was pre-FC) was first on my list--the installer inexplicably froze. Knoppix gave me all kinds of crap about my graphics card. I went down the list, including SuSe, Gentoo (with my expert best friend's guidance), Debian and Mandriva (or Mandrake, as it was then known), and every single one of them gave me major problems. Half of them wouldn't even make it through an entire install, and the rest refused to recognize a vital piece of hardware. Each time, I'd spend a most of the day screwing around on Google and IRC trying to get the sound card or the net connection to work, and then finally give up and move on to the next popular distro I could find--I did this for a week or two before finally giving up on Linux entirely. I wasn't just using a single problem box, btw--I tried installing them on my desktop, the family desktop, and my laptop and had the same horrible results.
A couple years pass, then lo and behold I hear about this new distro called Ubuntu. I fire it up, and EVERYTHING JUST FREAKING WORKS. Well, almost everything. I couldn't use my mouse 4 and 5 buttons nor disable tapclick on my laptop's touchpad nor get 3d acceleration to work with games like Tuxracer, but I was willing to live with minor crap like that until I could work out a solution--the important thing was, my computer was not horribly crippled--it FUNCTIONAL right out of the box, and so I had could afford to tinker with the details whenever I got around to them.
This is, of course, completely anecdotal but I've heard very similar stories from tons of other Ubuntu converts. I'm sure that distros like FC and MEPIS and Mandriva are AWESOME when they work properly; I'm sure that, when they actually WORKED out of the box, they offered a wonderful assortment of handy configuration GUIs and were just as functional as Ubuntu, but I would hazzard a guess that they simply were not as reliably functional out of the box, no tinkering and troubleshooting required. And I'm sure there are Ubuntu horror stories as well, but I think that the difference is in the probabilities--Ubuntu simply had a much better chance of actually WORKING for the non-expert user.
And given the open source nature of Linux, I'm sure that the other distros are catching up rapidly. Recently I've tried a few others, and they seemed to work nearly flawlessly, so perhaps Ubuntu doesn't have anything other than momentum going for it now. But really, in the OS world, that's all you need--just look at Windows, for fuck's sake.
So yeah, I'm sure Mandriva is great and all, but it had it's chance with me already, and it failed miserably. Why should I switch when I've already got a distro as complete and polished as Ubuntu 6.06? I'm not being confrontational here; it's a genuine question--what can Mandriva give me that Ubuntu can't?
What a load of horseshit. Canada's armed forces are something like the 14th strongest in the world--stronger than badasses like Iran and Israel, and their overall tech level is top notch. We could defeat them if we tried (assuming they didn't have any help from their other allies), but they're hardly relying on us for protection.
He's a fun fucking idea, why don't you actually pick up a book (or mouse) and learn something instead of regurgitating the same retarded, redneck drivel that gives the rest of us Americans such a bad name.
Errr, your comment is a tad ambiguous. A "man in the middle" attack is when an adversary can intercept and alter public keys; i.e. the term is usually used when discussing asymmetrical encryption and the importance of trusted digital certificates. Perhaps you meant to say "eavesdropping is very possible" instead?
By your powers combined, I am CAPTAIN COMMANDLINE !
Errr, did you even read the possibilities I mentioned? I didn't even mention surrendering Hawaii among them (though I suppose that would've been an option, too.) We could have contained them and blockcaded them after bombing their factories back to the stone age (which we had pretty much already done), or we could have signed a peace treaty that required them to make many concessions, yet stop short of complete occupation. Neither of these options can be reasonably termed "American surrender."
I do get your overall point--that at the time most Americans would not have been satisfied with anything other than unconditional Japan surrender--but that's hardly an excuse for the false dichotomy. Instead of saying "Little Boy and Fat Man (the bombs) saved Japanese and American lives, compared to the alternatives!", people need to start saying "Nukes were somewhat less devastating than the other options we had at our disposal for Japanese invasion/military annihilation." It shouldn't be a GIVEN that we absolutely HAD to destroy/invade/occupy Japan--just because the public at the time demanded it, doesn't mean we should warp reality to say that nukes saved anyone's life... they didn't; they just facilitated our conquest of Japan. Whether that conquest was justified is another matter entirely, but it was not a given.
Case in point. Japan started the fight and they would not surrender. Very conservative estimates of an invasion of Japan's homeland put American deaths at a million and Japanese deaths as a multiple of that. As horrific the destruction caused by the 2 atomic bombs, those bombs saved American and Japanese lives.
I find it slightly unsettling that this sentiment is so widespread. On the one hand, I do accept that the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are exaggerated (the firebombings of cities like Dresden and Tokyo were similarly devasting) and that by their very nature, very large-scale wars must be fought ruthlessly. On the otherhand, I hate the false dichotomy of "Well, obviously we HAD to conquor the Japanese, so it was either nuke 'em or invade 'em." Well no... no, those were not the only two choices. We had already bombed out a great deal of their infrastructure, and their navy was fairly decimated so we could have just surrounded the entire nation with a naval blockade and called it a day. Or, I'm sure they would have agreed to something less than a full surrender--perhaps an agreement that they'll pull out of the most of rest of Asia (might have had to give them a territory or two for appeasement) and then sign a cease-fire.
I'm not being an apologist for Japanese WWII aggression, but it's not like the kingdom of Hawaii peacefully decided to join the USA without any American coersion whatsoever... and as much as people nowadays like to compare 9/11 to Pearl Harbor, the two are NOTHING alike--the Japanese limited their attack strictly to military targets.
They weren't saints, not by a long shot (see: Rape of Nanking), but they weren't bloodthirsty psychopaths who absolutely needed to be eliminated at all costs. They fought much more viciously than we did (though I would argue perhaps that they only gave official sanction for what usually happened all the time in most Western armies anyway), they were more pragmatic and they didn't respect prisoners of war who didn't have the decency of committing suicide to avoid enemy capture, but don't confuse them with the Nazis--they weren't trying to exterminate anyone. The invasion of Germany was needed to stop the death camps, but where was it written that we MUST invade Japan, other than our sense of outrage at a single attack directed at a military target on an island that we all but conquored ourselves?
If you think the nukes were justified fine; hell, you may very well be right... just stop trying to pretend that we were presented with only two options, both of which involved driving Japan to an unconditional surrender.
The rest of your sentiment I generally agree with--nukes prevented World War III, and possibly World War IV and V as well. On the other hand, if many thousands of ICBMs/SLBMs were exchanged it could easily mean more deaths than all three of those hypothetical wars combined, so I don't think the benefits were so great as to render all hindsight risk analysis pointless--just because it worked for us once doesn't mean we should roll the dice again if, e.g. Iran gets nukes.
Way to miss the fucking point. The point is that below Hiler and Stalin and whatall you have ordinary Joes like you and me, and while their morality may sometimes be twisted (at least from our point of view) they still have the same basic, human desires that we do. This doesn't make the dictators any less monstrous, though perhaps it makes their subjects somewhat less so.
There's a huge difference between "taste" and obsenity. Not really. Trying make my kids believe in fairy tales that promote hatred and bigotry and ignorance doesn't have a damn thing to do with taste in my eyes; it's simply obscene. And I'm sure plenty of uptight Christians believe the same thing about the word "fuck."
You're giving "hate speech" a bad name. There's a world of difference between religous programming saying "God is the savior" and hate speech like "All fags should be shot". Guess which one you'll hear on TV, and which one you wont...
I don't have a problem with "Jesus is our savior", but just because dipshits like Jerry Falwell don't blatantly advocate violence doesn't make them any less obscene... on the contrary, it makes them much more insidious, much more dangerous because they cloak their hatred with pacifism and pseudo-love while preaching horseshit like '9/11 happened because of the homosexuals, feminists and abortionists.' (That's not an exaggeration--Falwell said it on national TV, and Pat Robertson publically agreed with his remarks.) I don't have a problem with positive, supportive, mind-my-own-damn-business Christianty, but I occasionally watch Christian TV or listen to Christian radio and I've yet to see/hear a single program that did not actively attack a common, positive type of non-Christian lifestyle. Usually, I don't have to listen for more than 5 minutes before I'm so sickened that I have to change the channel.
What the? Have you NEVER had cable TV? There are no standards, and yet all basic cable channels strictly self-censor, at least until very, very late at night.
My understanding is that most of the basic cable TV channels are broadcast over the air in certain parts of the country, and thus are subject to FCC nazi-ism. As I understand it, there's a provision called "safe habor" or something that allows them to air more explicit stuff at night. My argument wasn't that the majority of Americans subscribed to premium cable; it was that only premium cable was legally allowed to show completely uncensored stuff 24 hours a day, and the fact that they choose to do so proves that there's an economic incentive to do so (thus implying that the majority of the public is OK with it.) If what you say is true, then this might be flawed argument, but I rather doubt it. Late night on Cinemax and Showtime you'll see tons of softcore porn, complete with full frontal nudity (at the very least topless women.) On channels like the USA network, you see pseudo-softcore porn, where they go as far as they can without showing any actual nudity (or rather, this was the case a few years back--not sure if they're still doing it)--why would USA do this, unless they were forced to by the FCC? Surely there's a much bigger market for REAL softcore porn than pseudo-softcore porn... it's not like there are soccer moms out there letting their 9 year olds watch the corny, extremely suggestive dialog and women in microscopic bikinis who would be horrified if admist all the posing and innuendo one of them actually bared her nipples. It could conceivably be a problem with advertisers, I suppose, but I doubt it. I've yet to see a single instance of full, unobscured nudity on basic cable with a few very rare exceptions of the "special", pretentious, "artistic" type (similar to when NBC broadcast Schindler's List uncut.)
But regardless, this article is about radio and thus I'm primarily arguing about "obscene" speech, not sex/nudity ('cause god knows the FCC doesn't give a shit about violence.) Every single hard rock station I've ever listened to (across 6 states) has pushed the limits of "decency"--they most obviously are NOT trying to be a "family" station, and if the FCC restrictions were relaxed they would be cussing up a storm before you could say "fuck the fucking fuckers." Their "premium" cousins on XM and Sirius illustrate this nicely. Regardless of what you may think about "vulgar" speech, any linguist in
How the hell did this BS get modded up to +5? A park is a physical place, and its primary purpose is not for listening to music (or political rantings, or shock jocks, etc.) Yes, there's a good argument for laws against noise pollution in a public park. On the other hand, if you choose to tune into a very left-wing, hard rock station geared towards the younger crowd, that's your own damn choice. If you don't like the cussing then oh well, tune to something else. FM, AM and TV is FULL of (what I consider to be) hate speech--they call it "religious progamming"--but I don't complain because no one is FORCING me to listen to it. Your argument is completely absurd--different stations are by definition meant to cater to different tastes. My own tastes exclude the vast majority of programming on TV and on the radio, but that doesn't give me the right to tune to a channel I don't like and then say that we should change it because I don't like it.
And as I mentioned before, it's not like the majority of the public wants this type of censorship. If for-profit satellite radio companies like Sirius and XM thought they would lose money by airing uncensored songs, do you think they'd do it? Ditto for premium cable channels. When TV and radio stations are not FORCED to self-censor, they almost never self-censor (at best they self-censor only a portion of their channels, e.g. "family" channels), so I cannot see how you can argue that the FCC is only reflecting public desire--it's clear to anyone with half a brain that the public desires access to mature, uncensored programming.
But yes, swearing loudly in a small public space should be regulated, and if the FCC doesn't have the constitutional authority to do so, then we should have a constitutional convention and create an authority which can.
So swearing is the only thing that should be regulated, hmm? Hate speech is ok, personal attacks are ok, misinformation and logical fallacies and outright lies are ok, but god forbid I say the word "fuck"? You, sir, have one fucked-up system of priorities.
Music is art and when you censor a song like, say, Korn's Faget, you render it a shallow, laughable parody of itself... as if you took a picture of the Venus de Milo and obscured all but her face in the name of puritanism.
I consider music and (at least some) movies/television shows to be a form of art; I've never heard the term "censureship" applied to art--only "censorship."
I know its probably hard to imagine having kids, being a slashdotter and all (cue William Shatner at trekkie convention: "Have you ever kissed a girl..."). However, most people do at some point have children, and the last thing they want is to hear their toddler repeating "fuck, fuck, fuckety-fuck..." because they heard it on the radio. Or somewhat worse, having their daughters go bulimic on them because they're trying to look like some bare-chested floozy they saw on tv.
Not hard at all; in fact, I'll probably be a father within the next few years (after my girlfriend and I graduate from college.) I wouldn't be too bothered about the former (I'd tell my kid that using those words could bother other people, though), and the latter is just plain dumb (my daughter is going to turn bulimic because she saw a thin person naked? But not a thin person wearing clothes?) I WOULD, however, mind a great deal if my son or daughter turned into a close-minded, hateful, anti-love, anti-science, anti-gay Christian--not that all Christians are these things, mind you, just that many of them are and they have many vocal proponents on religious TV and religious radio. But I'm not arguing that we ban religious content from the airwaves--that would be censorship and it would be wrong. It's my responsibility as a parent to pay attention to what my kid watches and listens to, and it would be damned irresponsible of me to expect the government to do my job for me.
Premium cable and satellite radio have already demonstrated that the majority of people prefer uncensored music, TV and movies, so your "owned by the public" argument is unfounded--it's already quite clear that the majority of the public doesn't want censorship. Your "small subset" is actually the people who WANT censorship, not the people who are against it. (FYI: The Superbowl wardrobe malfunction "controversy" was in reality driven by a couple of very small special interest groups who organized large-scale letter writing campaigns.)