Don't like the new layout, the editors screw up far too often, the polls have become eerily akin to the marketing polls that pop up from time to time in the right column on Facebook, and my list of complaints goes on - but for all of that, I stick around because at its heart Slashdot has been one tech geek's blog about stuff he finds interesting. With Rob gone though, I honestly don't know how much longer I'll be reading. Emo as it sounds, CmdrTaco is the heart of this place, and without him there is the very real possibility that it will become (even more of) a shell of what it once was. For now I'm gonna dutifully keep my homepage set to "http://slashdot.org" in Opera and Firefox, and hope it stays that way. We'll see.
Rob, thanks for all those years of doling out news for us nerds; as much as we all whine and bitch, I think I can safely speak for the majority when I say that in the end we still appreciate it. To conclude, only two words exist that adequately express the solemnity and gravity of this event:
Facebook allows you to communicate with almost anyone you have ever known, for free.
That certainly doesn't mean that users should be dissuaded from voicing satisfaction (or in this case, lack of) with its interface or the company's policies and implementations. Those who use Facebook are still customers, whether or not doing so is technically "free." Without customers, the service is nothing.
Good on Mr. Corbett. I've held the same view since Twitter came along. "Tweet," "tweeting," "tweeted" - all completely ridiculous words conjured up for no good reason. For that matter, however, I consider Twitter itself to be completely fucking ridiculous, so perhaps my bias runs deeper than simple grammar.
"... Of course, it is also possible that social media sites will elbow paleolithic media into oblivion, and Mr. Corbett will no longer have to worry about word use..."
Nice snarky little jab there, but I find the notion of social networking sites supplanting established mass media and news to be as far-fetched as it is reprehensible. Maybe they work on a grassroots level as a bit of a 'complement' to traditional news, but other than that I see no indication whatsoever of them holding their own vis-à-vis peer review, integrity, fact-checking or social responsibility. If this does indeed happen (personally I believe the submitter was just grasping at straws), I'll hold even less hope for humanity in general than I already do, and that ain't much.
If I remember correctly, corporate charters were revoked many times in the early days of the country.
Now that these beasts have grown so immensely and have their tentacles not only in our government but governments throughout the world, I imagine it barely happens anymore.
However that doesn't mean that BP management can't (or shouldn't) be held responsible. They deserve due process of course, but if, through litigation, criminal negligence (or malice) is determined to have taken place and they are found to have been the parties responsible, then they need to spend the rest of their lives in prison, a la Enron. Ken Lay was sentenced to 45 years for securities and wire fraud, for goodness sake. We're not talking about simple fraud here (though that may very well have taken place), we're talking about eleven potential homicides and the destruction of the entire gulf coast, and consequently the coastal environments/economies in at least four states.
Someone must be held to task for this mess.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started
on
Gulf Oil Leak Plugged?
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Why has this not been modded up yet?
Corporations - all profit, no responsibility. What's not to love, right?
What's sad is that what you consider to be sarcasm, someone else (possibly in a position of great authority and influence) actually considers to be logical argument. Our values have been skewed radically in this country. It is quite disillusioning.
As for the supposed outrageous subsidization of our public universities, I can only speak anecdotally. I'm in my senior year at the University of South Carolina, and I am honestly beginning to fear that I may not graduate on time, simply because certain required classes are now being cut due to lack of funding. Adjunct professors have all but disappeared in the last couple of semesters, and student organizations across the board are experiencing drastic budget cuts. Some haven't survived. Tuition here has been raised at a higher percentage than ever before, though the most recent hike was thankfully rather modest in comparison to previous ones. These economists can talk out of their asses all they want about how we're spending too many tax dollars on public higher education institutions, but what I'm seeing here on the ground, at least in the state I currently reside in, leads me to conclude the complete opposite.
If these people have something against federal educational grants (of which I am one of many thankful recipients), then they should make a specific argument against them, but they shouldn't lump our largely state-funded institutions in with that argument.
While I agree with the gist of your statement, I fail to understand how exactly you come by the following:
... can't get rid of them due to union rules and stuff...
How many Information Technology unions do you know of out there? So far as I'm aware there are precious few, and those which do exist maintain low membership (and therefore weak bargaining power) at best.
Also, as a bit of an aside, what does the nebulous "and stuff" that bolstered our hypothetical dittohead in his or her promotion from IT grunt to middle management consist of?
This may be a bit pedantic, but in a jury trial such as this the judge is the trier of law and the jury is the trier of fact. If this was a bench trial however, you'd be correct - the judge would try both fact and law.
"Reverse-discrimination" is an oxymoron. It is a nonsensical term that makes no sense whatsoever. The reverse of discrimination is tolerance. Discrimination is discrimination regardless of the recipient's age, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, et cetera. I understand the point that is being made, but that is no reason to create an utterly ridiculous, almost non-sequitur-like phrase. Being that you've put it in quotations yourself I do not know what you make of it, and my statement is not assuming either way. I have simply noticed this absurdity repeated on news channels and in other venues recently, and it appears to be gaining a sort of traction. Honestly, if Stephen Colbert satirizes it, that should say something.
Does Slashdot suddenly have an icon for McDonalds, of all things? All fast food is shit, but McDonalds is the king of shit. Why did someone decide to take the time, whether it was a minute or an hour, to create an icon for that shithole? Just resize a stock photo of some fat-ass walking down the street and call it a day.
Being a PPC Linux user, you should understand that unless a piece of software specifically offers a PPC download alongside the 'regular' (x86) one, well, it most likely ain't available for PPC. For some reason you seem not to.
I am a student at the University of South Carolina, and I actually had the pleasure of seeing Colbert speak when he came to the USC "Horseshoe" to accept the key to the city of Columbia from the mayor, who also declared him "South Carolina's Favorite Son." His speech was, of course, all tongue-in-cheek. He promised to destroy the state of Georgia if elected, if I remember correctly.
Incidentally, Mayor Cole also declared October 28th to be "Stephen Colbert Day," so everybody should be getting ready to buy a bunch of beer and throw "Colbert Report" marathons.
As a homebrewer, I agree. I know it would be great to be able to age an Imperial Stout or other high alcohol beer in 30 minutes as opposed to six months. I would be able to try some new styles that I haven't yet (barleywine, et cetera) simply because I haven't had the time or patience needed to let the extended aging process complete.
The USSR was not communist. A communist country has never been in existence. The closest the human race has ever come were the basic "share and share alike" systems of nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes thousands of years ago, where private property meant nothing and the community as a whole owned everything collectively. "Communist government," in fact, is an oxymoron, because communism is classless. You have to have anarchy to have a truly classless system. Communism is a utopian ideal that the human race will have to grow into in an evolutionary manner if it is ever to actually be realised.
The USSR, while certainly not communist, did not fit the definition of socialism either. Socialism and democracy share a reciprocal relationship, and you can never truly have one without the other. Perhaps the USSR was somewhat democratic in the beginning, around the time of the first Five Year Plan, when the worker's councils still had a say in the economy, but it never really got anywhere after that, and when Stalin came to power as a full-on dictator, it was right out the window. The USSR was a planned economy, but it sure as hell wasn't planned by the people, it was planned by Stalin and the bureaucratic elite. I think of it as a form of state capitalism, but some don't agree with me on that.
Sorry for the pedantry. I just wanted to try to clarify what communism is and isn't.
Weren't working out for who, exactly? More than likely it was pressure from radio stations, bars, et cetera for regulation on an increasingly out of control royalty scheme put forth by the cartel of the Big Four. So what did this government do? Regulated it for the labels, not for the people who are getting gouged to hell and back on what, in my opinion, is backward and stupid anyway. Royalties simply for playing a song? Hell, why doesn't Penguin start charging people every time they read the books they publish? Because that would be insane and nobody would deal with it for long. So why do we still deal with the same shit from this government-sponsored cartel?
There is no excuse for taking the life of another, but that is universal. State sanctioned murder is still murder. Murdering Reiser for murdering his wife may satisfy some sort of carnal urge, but in the long run it does nothing for anyone. Let him sit in prison for the next fifteen years and worry about whether or not he will ever be parolled. He could end up there for life, and life in prison is far more hellish than a quick end via chair or injection. Either way, murdering someone for murdering someone is circular logic and does nothing. Gandhi was quite right.
... the most socialist policy that i have ever read...coming just shy to that of marxism...
You have no idea what you are talking about. Let us get one thing straight right from the start: I am a socialist. Obama will not be getting my vote, because regardless of his campaign rhetoric, his platform is in fact the same capitalist, pro-corporation shit that I see every four years. I thought for a short while that he may be different (though not socialist by any means), but suddenly he's changed from wanting to throw out NAFTA and CAFTA to this vague notion of "renegotiation." He also voted for the FISA bill and telecom immunity. None of that represents anything but the same old shit that I've come to expect from our bought and paid for government.
Now a little lesson for you. Socialism is not a welfare state. Socialism is democratic control of the economy under the people who perform the real work and provide us with everything we have: the workers. Nothing more, nothing less. Any enactment of socialism would require a permanent revolution at this point, due to how deep these multinational corporations have burrowed themselves into governments all over the world.
So let me tell you, as a socialist, that the idea of Obama being some sort of Marxist savior for the working classes in this country is, in short, fucking laughable.
I hate to reply to my own post, but I forgot to mention something. Around the same time I began taking weight-loss and calories seriously, I also started drinking at least one cup of green tea per day. It does many good things like provide antioxidants, but it will also eventually raise your metabolism a bit, meaning you burn more calories even when sitting around doing nothing. Of course, walking everywhere the majority of the time and doing other forms of cardio will raise your metabolism much more, but I really think that the green tea gives me a bit of a metabolic boost. If anything, it perks me up at the beginning of the day and gets me going, so it is worth it either way, really.
If you live in the city, my best advice is to not drive anywhere within a ten-mile radius. Walk pretty much everywhere you go and over time you will start shedding the pounds. I was slightly overweight when I first moved here (5' 11" and around 180lbs). It has been slightly under a year now, and I am down to 158lbs. Granted I am also vegetarian and I count calories (it all boils down to calories in/calories out) and do about 50 crunches each morning, but walking wherever I go (including to buy groceries if you are a bachelor like me) has made a world of difference. Also, if you live in an apartment building with elevators, use the stairs. I do, and I've found that it is actually faster most of the time than sitting there wasting your time waiting.
Most of all, whatever plan you choose, stick with it. The weight does not just come off a week or two after you begin. If you do it right, you should expect to see a pound or two drop every couple of weeks at most, and sometimes you will go a month without seeing a noticeable change. It takes patience, more than anything else, to lose the love handles.
This would be shitty news to wake up to any day, but it's even worse on your birthday.
Along with Bill Hicks, George Carlin was my absolute favorite comedian. What they did was much more than just comedy, though. The reason I loved George so much, just as with Bill, was because, in the process of making you laugh so hard, they also made you think. George had the ability to make you see how ridiculous certain things really were, even if you didn't want to.
Slashdot Mirror
"Good night, and good luck..."
Don't like the new layout, the editors screw up far too often, the polls have become eerily akin to the marketing polls that pop up from time to time in the right column on Facebook, and my list of complaints goes on - but for all of that, I stick around because at its heart Slashdot has been one tech geek's blog about stuff he finds interesting. With Rob gone though, I honestly don't know how much longer I'll be reading. Emo as it sounds, CmdrTaco is the heart of this place, and without him there is the very real possibility that it will become (even more of) a shell of what it once was. For now I'm gonna dutifully keep my homepage set to "http://slashdot.org" in Opera and Firefox, and hope it stays that way. We'll see.
Rob, thanks for all those years of doling out news for us nerds; as much as we all whine and bitch, I think I can safely speak for the majority when I say that in the end we still appreciate it. To conclude, only two words exist that adequately express the solemnity and gravity of this event:
OMG!!! PONIES!!11
Facebook allows you to communicate with almost anyone you have ever known, for free.
That certainly doesn't mean that users should be dissuaded from voicing satisfaction (or in this case, lack of) with its interface or the company's policies and implementations. Those who use Facebook are still customers, whether or not doing so is technically "free." Without customers, the service is nothing.
Good on Mr. Corbett. I've held the same view since Twitter came along. "Tweet," "tweeting," "tweeted" - all completely ridiculous words conjured up for no good reason. For that matter, however, I consider Twitter itself to be completely fucking ridiculous, so perhaps my bias runs deeper than simple grammar.
"... Of course, it is also possible that social media sites will elbow paleolithic media into oblivion, and Mr. Corbett will no longer have to worry about word use..."
Nice snarky little jab there, but I find the notion of social networking sites supplanting established mass media and news to be as far-fetched as it is reprehensible. Maybe they work on a grassroots level as a bit of a 'complement' to traditional news, but other than that I see no indication whatsoever of them holding their own vis-à-vis peer review, integrity, fact-checking or social responsibility. If this does indeed happen (personally I believe the submitter was just grasping at straws), I'll hold even less hope for humanity in general than I already do, and that ain't much.
If I remember correctly, corporate charters were revoked many times in the early days of the country.
Now that these beasts have grown so immensely and have their tentacles not only in our government but governments throughout the world, I imagine it barely happens anymore.
However that doesn't mean that BP management can't (or shouldn't) be held responsible. They deserve due process of course, but if, through litigation, criminal negligence (or malice) is determined to have taken place and they are found to have been the parties responsible, then they need to spend the rest of their lives in prison, a la Enron. Ken Lay was sentenced to 45 years for securities and wire fraud, for goodness sake. We're not talking about simple fraud here (though that may very well have taken place), we're talking about eleven potential homicides and the destruction of the entire gulf coast, and consequently the coastal environments/economies in at least four states.
Someone must be held to task for this mess.
Why has this not been modded up yet?
Corporations - all profit, no responsibility. What's not to love, right?
What's sad is that what you consider to be sarcasm, someone else (possibly in a position of great authority and influence) actually considers to be logical argument. Our values have been skewed radically in this country. It is quite disillusioning.
As for the supposed outrageous subsidization of our public universities, I can only speak anecdotally. I'm in my senior year at the University of South Carolina, and I am honestly beginning to fear that I may not graduate on time, simply because certain required classes are now being cut due to lack of funding. Adjunct professors have all but disappeared in the last couple of semesters, and student organizations across the board are experiencing drastic budget cuts. Some haven't survived. Tuition here has been raised at a higher percentage than ever before, though the most recent hike was thankfully rather modest in comparison to previous ones. These economists can talk out of their asses all they want about how we're spending too many tax dollars on public higher education institutions, but what I'm seeing here on the ground, at least in the state I currently reside in, leads me to conclude the complete opposite.
If these people have something against federal educational grants (of which I am one of many thankful recipients), then they should make a specific argument against them, but they shouldn't lump our largely state-funded institutions in with that argument.
While I agree with the gist of your statement, I fail to understand how exactly you come by the following:
... can't get rid of them due to union rules and stuff...
How many Information Technology unions do you know of out there? So far as I'm aware there are precious few, and those which do exist maintain low membership (and therefore weak bargaining power) at best.
Also, as a bit of an aside, what does the nebulous "and stuff" that bolstered our hypothetical dittohead in his or her promotion from IT grunt to middle management consist of?
... the judge is the trier of facts ...
This may be a bit pedantic, but in a jury trial such as this the judge is the trier of law and the jury is the trier of fact. If this was a bench trial however, you'd be correct - the judge would try both fact and law.
"Reverse-discrimination" is an oxymoron. It is a nonsensical term that makes no sense whatsoever. The reverse of discrimination is tolerance. Discrimination is discrimination regardless of the recipient's age, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, et cetera. I understand the point that is being made, but that is no reason to create an utterly ridiculous, almost non-sequitur-like phrase. Being that you've put it in quotations yourself I do not know what you make of it, and my statement is not assuming either way. I have simply noticed this absurdity repeated on news channels and in other venues recently, and it appears to be gaining a sort of traction. Honestly, if Stephen Colbert satirizes it, that should say something.
Does Slashdot suddenly have an icon for McDonalds, of all things? All fast food is shit, but McDonalds is the king of shit. Why did someone decide to take the time, whether it was a minute or an hour, to create an icon for that shithole? Just resize a stock photo of some fat-ass walking down the street and call it a day.
Good thinking! I hear the Debian maintainers are planning on upgrading to KDE 4.0 sometime in 2013.
Being a PPC Linux user, you should understand that unless a piece of software specifically offers a PPC download alongside the 'regular' (x86) one, well, it most likely ain't available for PPC. For some reason you seem not to.
... those who are smart enough to shut down personal systems when not in use ...
Yeah. Halving the life of your hard drive by constantly shutting down and booting up. Now that's what I call smart.
I am a student at the University of South Carolina, and I actually had the pleasure of seeing Colbert speak when he came to the USC "Horseshoe" to accept the key to the city of Columbia from the mayor, who also declared him "South Carolina's Favorite Son." His speech was, of course, all tongue-in-cheek. He promised to destroy the state of Georgia if elected, if I remember correctly.
Incidentally, Mayor Cole also declared October 28th to be "Stephen Colbert Day," so everybody should be getting ready to buy a bunch of beer and throw "Colbert Report" marathons.
As a homebrewer, I agree. I know it would be great to be able to age an Imperial Stout or other high alcohol beer in 30 minutes as opposed to six months. I would be able to try some new styles that I haven't yet (barleywine, et cetera) simply because I haven't had the time or patience needed to let the extended aging process complete.
The USSR was not communist. A communist country has never been in existence. The closest the human race has ever come were the basic "share and share alike" systems of nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes thousands of years ago, where private property meant nothing and the community as a whole owned everything collectively. "Communist government," in fact, is an oxymoron, because communism is classless. You have to have anarchy to have a truly classless system. Communism is a utopian ideal that the human race will have to grow into in an evolutionary manner if it is ever to actually be realised.
The USSR, while certainly not communist, did not fit the definition of socialism either. Socialism and democracy share a reciprocal relationship, and you can never truly have one without the other. Perhaps the USSR was somewhat democratic in the beginning, around the time of the first Five Year Plan, when the worker's councils still had a say in the economy, but it never really got anywhere after that, and when Stalin came to power as a full-on dictator, it was right out the window. The USSR was a planned economy, but it sure as hell wasn't planned by the people, it was planned by Stalin and the bureaucratic elite. I think of it as a form of state capitalism, but some don't agree with me on that.
Sorry for the pedantry. I just wanted to try to clarify what communism is and isn't.
... the former systems just weren't working out.
Weren't working out for who, exactly? More than likely it was pressure from radio stations, bars, et cetera for regulation on an increasingly out of control royalty scheme put forth by the cartel of the Big Four. So what did this government do? Regulated it for the labels, not for the people who are getting gouged to hell and back on what, in my opinion, is backward and stupid anyway. Royalties simply for playing a song? Hell, why doesn't Penguin start charging people every time they read the books they publish? Because that would be insane and nobody would deal with it for long. So why do we still deal with the same shit from this government-sponsored cartel?
Or, you could buy a cell phone.
Yeah. As a college student, let me tell you about all those times I've typed out lecture notes in class on my cell phone. Oh, wait.
There is no excuse for taking the life of another, but that is universal. State sanctioned murder is still murder. Murdering Reiser for murdering his wife may satisfy some sort of carnal urge, but in the long run it does nothing for anyone. Let him sit in prison for the next fifteen years and worry about whether or not he will ever be parolled. He could end up there for life, and life in prison is far more hellish than a quick end via chair or injection. Either way, murdering someone for murdering someone is circular logic and does nothing. Gandhi was quite right.
... the most socialist policy that i have ever read...coming just shy to that of marxism ...
You have no idea what you are talking about. Let us get one thing straight right from the start: I am a socialist. Obama will not be getting my vote, because regardless of his campaign rhetoric, his platform is in fact the same capitalist, pro-corporation shit that I see every four years. I thought for a short while that he may be different (though not socialist by any means), but suddenly he's changed from wanting to throw out NAFTA and CAFTA to this vague notion of "renegotiation." He also voted for the FISA bill and telecom immunity. None of that represents anything but the same old shit that I've come to expect from our bought and paid for government.
Now a little lesson for you. Socialism is not a welfare state. Socialism is democratic control of the economy under the people who perform the real work and provide us with everything we have: the workers. Nothing more, nothing less. Any enactment of socialism would require a permanent revolution at this point, due to how deep these multinational corporations have burrowed themselves into governments all over the world.
So let me tell you, as a socialist, that the idea of Obama being some sort of Marxist savior for the working classes in this country is, in short, fucking laughable.
The difference being that there weren't lynch mobs and cross burnings and midnight murders for 100 years after women gained their right to vote.
Hmm. Perhaps people (read: corporations) who have an entire army of lawyers at their disposal?
I hate to reply to my own post, but I forgot to mention something. Around the same time I began taking weight-loss and calories seriously, I also started drinking at least one cup of green tea per day. It does many good things like provide antioxidants, but it will also eventually raise your metabolism a bit, meaning you burn more calories even when sitting around doing nothing. Of course, walking everywhere the majority of the time and doing other forms of cardio will raise your metabolism much more, but I really think that the green tea gives me a bit of a metabolic boost. If anything, it perks me up at the beginning of the day and gets me going, so it is worth it either way, really.
If you live in the city, my best advice is to not drive anywhere within a ten-mile radius. Walk pretty much everywhere you go and over time you will start shedding the pounds. I was slightly overweight when I first moved here (5' 11" and around 180lbs). It has been slightly under a year now, and I am down to 158lbs. Granted I am also vegetarian and I count calories (it all boils down to calories in/calories out) and do about 50 crunches each morning, but walking wherever I go (including to buy groceries if you are a bachelor like me) has made a world of difference. Also, if you live in an apartment building with elevators, use the stairs. I do, and I've found that it is actually faster most of the time than sitting there wasting your time waiting.
Most of all, whatever plan you choose, stick with it. The weight does not just come off a week or two after you begin. If you do it right, you should expect to see a pound or two drop every couple of weeks at most, and sometimes you will go a month without seeing a noticeable change. It takes patience, more than anything else, to lose the love handles.
This would be shitty news to wake up to any day, but it's even worse on your birthday.
Along with Bill Hicks, George Carlin was my absolute favorite comedian. What they did was much more than just comedy, though. The reason I loved George so much, just as with Bill, was because, in the process of making you laugh so hard, they also made you think. George had the ability to make you see how ridiculous certain things really were, even if you didn't want to.
So long, George. You're irreplaceable.