No. You've deprived the reader of vital information needed to check your reporting, to understand potential bias, or to follow up for futher information.
you ivory-tower, moralizing fool.
if i'm a downtrodden, outcast geek in high school, and i post a rant to slashdot about all the bad things the "jocks" do, and my post appears in a book attached to a name that can be traced back to me, then what happens? the parents of the "jocks" in question contact my parents and threaten to sue for defamation of character, and the jocks in question wait for me after school and kick the shit out of me.
but i'm sure you think this is a worthwhile price to pay in exchange for some dilettante reader to be able to "check my reporting" or "understand potential bias". it doesn't take a world-shaking intellect to realize that an unhappy high-schooler will most likely exhibit some "bias" against the other kids who make his life a living hell.
not everyone can afford to have others "follow up for futher[sic] information." not everyone has the luxury of communicating by the rules of your namby-pamby academic discussion.
If I leave my keys in my unlocked car, it does not become public property.
you wanna play with this tired analogy? fine. but at least have the intellectual discipline to make an analogy that works.
imagine a special kind of parking space that "imprints" any car parked in it, and then, once that car is driven away, generates an identical car in the vacated space.
why shouldn't your car be "public property" under those conditions? no matter how many people get into your unlocked car and drive away, you'll still find your car waiting for you when you get back to it, because the parking space generates identical copies.
this is actually a useful and meaningful analogy wrt digital copies of data. the only work that has value is the work done by the person who originally created the car, and this person or persons should be compensated for their work. but who in their right mind would pay for a new car when they could simply take a copy generated by one of the parking spaces?
it's easy to imagine that under these circumstances car manufacturers and dealerships would want to demonize as "stealing" the act of getting a copy of a car from one of these parking spaces, or even to campaign in favor of tearing them all up. but would that make it wrong to take one of these cars? should we feel bad about depriving the middlemen of the automobile industry of their revenues gleaned from transmitting the fruits of someone else's labor to the consumers?
you may wonder what incentive the car designers would have to design new cars under such a system. if they only get paid once for each new car. the solution, of course, is patronage. the wealthy will be able to afford to hire car designers to build them custom automobiles, which will set them off from hoi polloi, who cannot afford such luxuries. the best car designers will find themselves courted assiduously by wealthy patrons, and i'm sure that some latter-day Donald Trump would be happy to pay a skilled designer's living expenses in exchange for exclusive use of his designs.
everyone's happy. wealthy consumers can have flashy custom cars, everybody else gets affordable transportation, and the artists get their bills paid. the only people who lose out are the middlemen, who, just like the icemen, are rendered obsolete by technological advance.
I'm assuming you image HDs, and don't have someone sitting there installing Winxx everytime you need a fresh computer.
heh. it's kinda painful to admit that the IT department of a major tech company is in such bad shape... let's just say that Messrs. Bolt, Beranek, and Newman would be pretty unhappy if they saw the state of the department i work in (disclaimer: i'm just a contractor!)
however, while this would be a good plan, it won't work here. users tend to ignore messages from IT if they don't feel that they are necessary (and yes, i can think of a few people in the department who couldn't be bothered to do the change described above).
Anyone that couldn't follow those instructions were fired.
this is an excellent plan. unfortunately, we have nowhere near the authority to enforce this.
the obvious thing to do in this situation is to let the people who won't follow directions just get screwed next time a virus comes around. however, we (the IT department) still take shit when they get into trouble, and we still have to waste time fixing them, so it's a bittersweet victory.
in short, the only way to know for sure that the problem has been fixed properly is for us to do it ourselves, and i'm sure this company is not the only one for which that is true.
i reiterate: recovering from a virus like this one is not trivial. releasing viruses like this one is not a good way to "highlight security weaknesses" or whatever.
i had already decided i wasn't going to pay for the cd. nothing was going to change that (the cd certainly wasn't going to get any better, and my musical scale of valuation wasn't going to change either). neither the artist nor the RIAA was going to make any money off of me.
once all of this is the case, how am i "forcing" an artist to lose money by pirating an mp3?
the only money they don't get is money they NEVER WOULD HAVE GOT IN THE FIRST PLACE. on the upside, they get a chance to present their work to me, and maybe it'll influence me positively enough that i'll buy their next cd.
the Jive Generator parodies the speech style of a certain subculture that existed in urban America several decades ago. (i might point out to you that the members of this subculture did NOT all belong to the same ethnic group.) are you asserting that American hipsters constitute a "race"?
-steve
p.s. for someone who swears a lot, you do it in a remarkably wimpy fashion. would it kill you to type "fuck" and get it over with? Slap mah fro!
Is that suppoosed to be funny? Most people will find it really f*cking offensive and in very poor taste.
go smoke some more pot, PC-boy. that was "suppoosed" to be the Jive Generator, an august and venerable standby of geek humor. i suppose someone who still thinks the late '60s in America were the epitome of "cool" might find it offensive, though...
Well the easist way to contain it would be to not use Outlook, which is horribly insecure mail client. After i heard about this virus, i also changed the default action for double clicking a.vbs to edit instead of open. See how easy it could have been to prevent this?
yes, assuming that you're a moderately computer-savvy user (in which case you're less likely to be using Outlook anyway). but what if you're Joe Shmoe from Marketing who has no idea how to do this, and who will discard and ignore any emails he gets from IT (or, better yet, call the help desk and ask them to do it for him).
in a large corporation, it is a significant burden on the administrators to go around and touch every single user's machine just to change a default. even filtering the virus at the mail server comes with its own set of costs and problems.
the author of said virus should still burn in hell, even if only for a week or two.
Jon, please stop teaching kids that stealing is right!
ok, bucko, you've been shooting your mouth off for a while now.
i assume from your.sig that you have some association with Ambrosia Software. i hope my assumption is wrong, because i'm disappointed that such a puling whiner as you works for one of my favorite companies.
let me tell you about my own history with Ambrosia, which i think has some bearing on the discussion above:
i remember when Maelstrom came out. i downloaded it, thought it was pretty cool for the time, and played it a fair amount. then i found Chiral, and Swoop, and Apeiron (i was obsessed with Apeiron for about four months, and i've recently started playing Swoop again).
did i register any of these? no. they are decent games, some a bit better than decent, but not worth my money. after several months of playing Apeiron, i came to the realization that i wasn't ever going to like it enough to pay for it. so i found a serial number online and entered it into the registration app, so that i wouldn't have to see that annoying registration screen.
Avara was a cool concept and well executed, but a snore to play. The jury's still out on Barrack - i may yet register it someday.
i paid for Escape Velocity within a month of downloading it. it's a brilliant game that took my breath away the first time i played it. i also paid for Bubble Trouble, and it's still on my HD today.
now - do you think i should have felt ashamed of using Maelstrom, Chiral, Apeiron, Swoop, Avara, and Barrack (oh, and ColorSwitch Pro too) without paying for them? should i have felt guilty every time i used that software? dumbass. if Ambrosia had initiated a lawsuit against people who played their games without paying, i would have erased every one from my hard drive and never looked back - and i never would have stayed around long enough to discover Escape Velocity or Bubble Trouble, and Ambrosia would never have got any of my money.
the moral of the story: cracking down on "piracy" would not have helped Ambrosia (or any other provider) one bit. trying to force customers to pay for a product that they don't think is worth their money serves only to drive customers away.
the more people use your software (or listen to your music, or watch your movies, or whatever), the better off you are in the long run. mindshare! mindshare! as long as i was playing Ambrosia games, i was checking the website every week to see if a new add-on had been released, or if a new game was in development. my soul was filled with goodwill towards Ambrosia for giving me decent games that i could play for free, and i resolved that as soon as they released something really good, i would pay for it - and i did. if i had been stuck with crippled games, or if i had been plagued with pop-up windows that i couldn't get rid of, that goodwill would have vanished real fast, and that would have been the end of my interest in Ambrosia.
-steve
p.s. the end of this story is a dark one. the last two games Ambrosia released, Cythera and Ferazel's Wand, have been crippleware, which is a new policy for this company. i foolishly paid for Cythera before i had had enough experience with it, and i soon discovered that it was quite a stupid game. i'm still bitter about being cheated out of my $20. and i was planning on paying for Ferazel's Wand until i found out that the downloadable version only contained a small portion of the game, and that the full version would only be available on cd. so i downloaded a pirated copy instead - that's some more of my money Ambrosia could have had, if they had stuck with the policies that made me like them in the first place. oh well. sucks to be them.
I think not. Get with it ignoramus! It's DEAF. Not Deaf Dumb. They stopped using that misnomer in the 1910! Welcome to the '00s. Get with it because a lot of deaf people would be outraged by that.
"Deaf Dumb" != unable to hear
"Deaf" == unable to hear "Dumb" == unable to speak (i.e. "Mute") "Blind" == unable to see
and yes, Tommy did have all three of these problems.
Harvard might be dumb sometimes, but you gotta begrudge 'em some respect for refusing to cave in so far.
agreed on both counts.
i just got done sending a supportive email to Frank Steen, the head of computer services, and Harry Lewis, the dean of the college.
please do not spam or mailbomb these people. they are busy administrators who should be commended for behaving nobly (especially Lewis, who has a history of making heavy-handed, arbitrary decisions that have not always pleased the student body).
-steve
p.s. i do not know for sure that these two are responsible for the decision, but it's my best guess that they are.
I don't object to the downloading and playing of MP3 files, and I have downloaded a few myself, but it is something that too easily becomes an obsession, and that is what I object to, mostly because it is a waste of a good computer to fill the drive with music and do nothing but play music on it.
you arrogant, condescending fuck.
"a waste of a good computer"??!? who the hell do you think you are to tell me what is an appropriate use of my own machine? you probably think setiathome is a waste as well. do you go around deleting screensavers because they serve no useful purpose on a modern color monitor?
more seriously: has it occurred to you that perhaps the reason those students are not so concerned about their term papers is because they have already turned them in, and because they didn't actually learn anything or gain any benefit (other than their grades) from writing them? most of the papers i wrote in college were academic boondoggle (and i was a philosophy major, so i wrote plenty) - the experiences that actually helped me learn something were reading the original sources and discussing them with faculty, grad students, and my peers. perhaps these students value their music more than their papers because their music actually makes their lives happier and more valuable to them.
stop reading slashdot and go back to policing the computer lab, weenie. quick! i think i see some students playing Quake over there! stop them!
-steve
p.s. i'm not flaming you because you "disagree with the general opinion", whatever that means. i'm flaming you because you seem perfectly happy to impose your arbitrary set of priorities on others. you are "way off here."
No. Physical punishement is evil. It is more harmful to children than Quake, Doom, 18 years of TV, and all the kiddie pr0n you can find. You are dead wrong on that one, pal.
--snip--
/ is the cluestick whacking the . that is your head.
i hope i'm not the only one who found this juxtaposition amusing.
after reading this post, i thought you were simply trying to express your distaste for Jon Katz's writings. but as i progressed through the following posts, and you continued to whine and pule about moderating Jon down, it occurred to me that it was possible that you actually didn't know how to prevent yourself from accidentally soiling your eyeballs with The Abhorred Katz.
simple instructions follow:
1) click on the "preferences" link on the left side of the page, towards the top. it's right between the links labeled "rob's page" and "andover.net".
2) scroll down until you see a section entitled "Exclude Stories from the Homepage" (don't worry if you don't understand what all those big words mean). under the column marked "Author", find the button next to "JonKatz" and click it.
3) scroll ALLLLLLLLL the way down to the bottom of the page and click the button labeled "savehome". voila! you'll never have to read a story by Jon Katz again.
how to get back to the familiar Slashdot homepage after clicking "savehome" is left as an exercise for the reader.
-steve
p.s. oh, it's not enough to keep yourself from seeing Katz's posts, but you want to keep everyone else from seeing them too? hrm, can't help ya there, mr. ministry-of-truth.
The United States may be needing another war of independence in which guns would be very practical.
do me a favor, will ya? explain to me how "practical" your hunting rifles and shotguns and handguns will be when pitted against the artillery and armor and aircraft of a modern army, which is who you would be facing in any "war of independence."
c'mon, gun nuts - i'm serious. who out there really thinks that they and their hunting buddies could hold out against the U.S. Army for more than, say, 24 hours?
-steve
(yeah, so what if this is Inflammatory? i'm pretty freakin' Inflamed about seeing this same stupid argument over and over again. if you want to spout idiocy, that's fine, but to do so on a subject as important as firearms is just irresponsible.)
Let's compare the murder rate to Switzerland, where almost every adult male owns an assault rifle.
quoting this old saw seems to be a knee-jerk reaction whenever anyone brings up the topic of gun control. unfortunately, the reality of this particular Swiss policy is very different from how American gun enthusiasts imagine it.
(my source for this, incidentally, is a Swiss-German guy who lived with my family for a year. At the time he was in his early 20s, and a member of the defence force.)
it is true that members of the defence force are obliged to keep modern automatic rifles in their homes, so that they can have easy access to their weapons when the defence force is mustered (which happens periodically). on the other hand:
these weapons are not kept loaded. it is illegal to load one of these weapons without a direct order from an officer.
members of the defence force may not discharge their weapons except in case of national emergency or state of war. this includes, incidentally, home defence or self-defence. a member of the defence force who kills someone else with his gun will be treated in the courts exactly the same way as someone who killed someone else with an illegal weapon.
the ammunition for these weapons is very tightly controlled. at each muster, the troops have to present their ammo containers to their officers, who verify that the containers are unopened and contain the requisite number of rounds. the ammunition is not legally available to civilians. (according to my source, if you show up at a muster and don't have the right number of bullets in your ammo containers, you are not only removed from duty, but also subject to prosecution, regardless of what happened to the missing bullet.)
i feel like i'm being naive when i hope that this stupid argument will someday go away; unfortunately, the image of a Switzerland where everyone totes around an assault rifle is as alluring to gun nuts as Amsterdam is to potheads. unlike Amsterdam, however, the image of Switzerland is a MYTH.
Yes Microsoft put out some software you don't like. Big deal. Like most people here, you don't have to use it!
this is, in fact, not the case.
1) many people work for companies who insist on a standardized IT environment. this often means Microsoft products, leaving these people with no choice but to contend with 98/NT, Office, etc.
2) many/. readers work in tech support or systems administration. we may not be forced to use Microsoft products in our day to day lives, but we are often compelled to fix them when they break (which, as any sysadmin can tell you, is the worst part of dealing with them).
3) and the most significant reason why the above is not true: due to Microsoft's large market share and user base, they have no strong motivation to make their software compatible with others. thus, one often runs into real-life situations in which the only way to get something done is to use a Microsoft product, with all the unpleasantness that entails, or if there is some non-Microsoft way to get the job done, then nobody else will be able to read what you've done because they're all using non-compatible Microsoft products. issues like this one are what spurred the original antitrust investigation in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
No. You've deprived the reader of vital information needed to check your reporting, to understand potential bias, or to follow up for futher information.
you ivory-tower, moralizing fool.
if i'm a downtrodden, outcast geek in high school, and i post a rant to slashdot about all the bad things the "jocks" do, and my post appears in a book attached to a name that can be traced back to me, then what happens? the parents of the "jocks" in question contact my parents and threaten to sue for defamation of character, and the jocks in question wait for me after school and kick the shit out of me.
but i'm sure you think this is a worthwhile price to pay in exchange for some dilettante reader to be able to "check my reporting" or "understand potential bias". it doesn't take a world-shaking intellect to realize that an unhappy high-schooler will most likely exhibit some "bias" against the other kids who make his life a living hell.
not everyone can afford to have others "follow up for futher[sic] information." not everyone has the luxury of communicating by the rules of your namby-pamby academic discussion.
infamous idiot.
-steve
If I leave my keys in my unlocked car, it does not become public property.
you wanna play with this tired analogy? fine. but at least have the intellectual discipline to make an analogy that works.
imagine a special kind of parking space that "imprints" any car parked in it, and then, once that car is driven away, generates an identical car in the vacated space.
why shouldn't your car be "public property" under those conditions? no matter how many people get into your unlocked car and drive away, you'll still find your car waiting for you when you get back to it, because the parking space generates identical copies.
this is actually a useful and meaningful analogy wrt digital copies of data. the only work that has value is the work done by the person who originally created the car, and this person or persons should be compensated for their work. but who in their right mind would pay for a new car when they could simply take a copy generated by one of the parking spaces?
it's easy to imagine that under these circumstances car manufacturers and dealerships would want to demonize as "stealing" the act of getting a copy of a car from one of these parking spaces, or even to campaign in favor of tearing them all up. but would that make it wrong to take one of these cars? should we feel bad about depriving the middlemen of the automobile industry of their revenues gleaned from transmitting the fruits of someone else's labor to the consumers?
you may wonder what incentive the car designers would have to design new cars under such a system. if they only get paid once for each new car. the solution, of course, is patronage. the wealthy will be able to afford to hire car designers to build them custom automobiles, which will set them off from hoi polloi, who cannot afford such luxuries. the best car designers will find themselves courted assiduously by wealthy patrons, and i'm sure that some latter-day Donald Trump would be happy to pay a skilled designer's living expenses in exchange for exclusive use of his designs.
everyone's happy. wealthy consumers can have flashy custom cars, everybody else gets affordable transportation, and the artists get their bills paid. the only people who lose out are the middlemen, who, just like the icemen, are rendered obsolete by technological advance.
-steve
I'm assuming you image HDs, and don't have someone sitting there installing Winxx everytime you need a fresh computer.
heh. it's kinda painful to admit that the IT department of a major tech company is in such bad shape... let's just say that Messrs. Bolt, Beranek, and Newman would be pretty unhappy if they saw the state of the department i work in (disclaimer: i'm just a contractor!)
however, while this would be a good plan, it won't work here. users tend to ignore messages from IT if they don't feel that they are necessary (and yes, i can think of a few people in the department who couldn't be bothered to do the change described above).
Anyone that couldn't follow those instructions were fired.
this is an excellent plan. unfortunately, we have nowhere near the authority to enforce this.
the obvious thing to do in this situation is to let the people who won't follow directions just get screwed next time a virus comes around. however, we (the IT department) still take shit when they get into trouble, and we still have to waste time fixing them, so it's a bittersweet victory.
in short, the only way to know for sure that the problem has been fixed properly is for us to do it ourselves, and i'm sure this company is not the only one for which that is true.
i reiterate: recovering from a virus like this one is not trivial. releasing viruses like this one is not a good way to "highlight security weaknesses" or whatever.
-steve
But you ARE forcing artists to lose money.
sigh.
i had already decided i wasn't going to pay for the cd. nothing was going to change that (the cd certainly wasn't going to get any better, and my musical scale of valuation wasn't going to change either). neither the artist nor the RIAA was going to make any money off of me.
once all of this is the case, how am i "forcing" an artist to lose money by pirating an mp3?
the only money they don't get is money they NEVER WOULD HAVE GOT IN THE FIRST PLACE. on the upside, they get a chance to present their work to me, and maybe it'll influence me positively enough that i'll buy their next cd.
-steve
dude. seriously. get a grip.
the Jive Generator parodies the speech style of a certain subculture that existed in urban America several decades ago. (i might point out to you that the members of this subculture did NOT all belong to the same ethnic group.) are you asserting that American hipsters constitute a "race"?
-steve
p.s. for someone who swears a lot, you do it in a remarkably wimpy fashion. would it kill you to type "fuck" and get it over with? Slap mah fro!
Slap mah fro!
Is that suppoosed to be funny? Most people will find it really f*cking offensive and in very poor taste.
go smoke some more pot, PC-boy. that was "suppoosed" to be the Jive Generator, an august and venerable standby of geek humor. i suppose someone who still thinks the late '60s in America were the epitome of "cool" might find it offensive, though...
-steve
Well the easist way to contain it would be to not use Outlook, which is horribly insecure mail client. After i heard about this virus, i also changed the default action for double clicking a .vbs to edit instead of open. See how easy it could have been to prevent this?
yes, assuming that you're a moderately computer-savvy user (in which case you're less likely to be using Outlook anyway). but what if you're Joe Shmoe from Marketing who has no idea how to do this, and who will discard and ignore any emails he gets from IT (or, better yet, call the help desk and ask them to do it for him).
in a large corporation, it is a significant burden on the administrators to go around and touch every single user's machine just to change a default. even filtering the virus at the mail server comes with its own set of costs and problems.
the author of said virus should still burn in hell, even if only for a week or two.
-steve
Jon, please stop teaching kids that stealing is right!
.sig that you have some association with Ambrosia Software. i hope my assumption is wrong, because i'm disappointed that such a puling whiner as you works for one of my favorite companies.
ok, bucko, you've been shooting your mouth off for a while now.
i assume from your
let me tell you about my own history with Ambrosia, which i think has some bearing on the discussion above:
i remember when Maelstrom came out. i downloaded it, thought it was pretty cool for the time, and played it a fair amount. then i found Chiral, and Swoop, and Apeiron (i was obsessed with Apeiron for about four months, and i've recently started playing Swoop again).
did i register any of these? no. they are decent games, some a bit better than decent, but not worth my money. after several months of playing Apeiron, i came to the realization that i wasn't ever going to like it enough to pay for it. so i found a serial number online and entered it into the registration app, so that i wouldn't have to see that annoying registration screen.
Avara was a cool concept and well executed, but a snore to play. The jury's still out on Barrack - i may yet register it someday.
i paid for Escape Velocity within a month of downloading it. it's a brilliant game that took my breath away the first time i played it. i also paid for Bubble Trouble, and it's still on my HD today.
now - do you think i should have felt ashamed of using Maelstrom, Chiral, Apeiron, Swoop, Avara, and Barrack (oh, and ColorSwitch Pro too) without paying for them? should i have felt guilty every time i used that software? dumbass. if Ambrosia had initiated a lawsuit against people who played their games without paying, i would have erased every one from my hard drive and never looked back - and i never would have stayed around long enough to discover Escape Velocity or Bubble Trouble, and Ambrosia would never have got any of my money.
the moral of the story: cracking down on "piracy" would not have helped Ambrosia (or any other provider) one bit. trying to force customers to pay for a product that they don't think is worth their money serves only to drive customers away.
the more people use your software (or listen to your music, or watch your movies, or whatever), the better off you are in the long run. mindshare! mindshare! as long as i was playing Ambrosia games, i was checking the website every week to see if a new add-on had been released, or if a new game was in development. my soul was filled with goodwill towards Ambrosia for giving me decent games that i could play for free, and i resolved that as soon as they released something really good, i would pay for it - and i did. if i had been stuck with crippled games, or if i had been plagued with pop-up windows that i couldn't get rid of, that goodwill would have vanished real fast, and that would have been the end of my interest in Ambrosia.
-steve
p.s. the end of this story is a dark one. the last two games Ambrosia released, Cythera and Ferazel's Wand, have been crippleware, which is a new policy for this company. i foolishly paid for Cythera before i had had enough experience with it, and i soon discovered that it was quite a stupid game. i'm still bitter about being cheated out of my $20. and i was planning on paying for Ferazel's Wand until i found out that the downloadable version only contained a small portion of the game, and that the full version would only be available on cd. so i downloaded a pirated copy instead - that's some more of my money Ambrosia could have had, if they had stuck with the policies that made me like them in the first place. oh well. sucks to be them.
I think not. Get with it ignoramus! It's DEAF. Not Deaf Dumb. They stopped using that misnomer in the 1910! Welcome to the '00s. Get with it because a lot of deaf people would be outraged by that.
"Deaf Dumb" != unable to hear
"Deaf" == unable to hear
"Dumb" == unable to speak (i.e. "Mute")
"Blind" == unable to see
and yes, Tommy did have all three of these problems.
go beat somebody else with your PC stick.
-steve
Harvard might be dumb sometimes, but you gotta begrudge 'em some respect for refusing to cave in so far.
agreed on both counts.
i just got done sending a supportive email to Frank Steen, the head of computer services, and Harry Lewis, the dean of the college.
please do not spam or mailbomb these people. they are busy administrators who should be commended for behaving nobly (especially Lewis, who has a history of making heavy-handed, arbitrary decisions that have not always pleased the student body).
-steve
p.s. i do not know for sure that these two are responsible for the decision, but it's my best guess that they are.
I don't object to the downloading and playing of MP3 files, and I have downloaded a few myself, but it is something that too easily becomes an obsession, and that is what I object to, mostly because it is a waste of a good computer to fill the drive with music and do nothing but play music on it.
you arrogant, condescending fuck.
"a waste of a good computer"??!? who the hell do you think you are to tell me what is an appropriate use of my own machine? you probably think setiathome is a waste as well. do you go around deleting screensavers because they serve no useful purpose on a modern color monitor?
more seriously: has it occurred to you that perhaps the reason those students are not so concerned about their term papers is because they have already turned them in, and because they didn't actually learn anything or gain any benefit (other than their grades) from writing them? most of the papers i wrote in college were academic boondoggle (and i was a philosophy major, so i wrote plenty) - the experiences that actually helped me learn something were reading the original sources and discussing them with faculty, grad students, and my peers. perhaps these students value their music more than their papers because their music actually makes their lives happier and more valuable to them.
stop reading slashdot and go back to policing the computer lab, weenie. quick! i think i see some students playing Quake over there! stop them!
-steve
p.s. i'm not flaming you because you "disagree with the general opinion", whatever that means. i'm flaming you because you seem perfectly happy to impose your arbitrary set of priorities on others. you are "way off here."
No. Physical punishement is evil. It is more harmful to children than Quake, Doom, 18 years of TV, and all the kiddie pr0n you can find. You are dead wrong on that one, pal.
--snip--
/ is the cluestick whacking the . that is your head.
i hope i'm not the only one who found this juxtaposition amusing.
-steve
Is there anyway to mod Jon down?
dumbfuck.
after reading this post, i thought you were simply trying to express your distaste for Jon Katz's writings. but as i progressed through the following posts, and you continued to whine and pule about moderating Jon down, it occurred to me that it was possible that you actually didn't know how to prevent yourself from accidentally soiling your eyeballs with The Abhorred Katz.
simple instructions follow:
1) click on the "preferences" link on the left side of the page, towards the top. it's right between the links labeled "rob's page" and "andover.net".
2) scroll down until you see a section entitled "Exclude Stories from the Homepage" (don't worry if you don't understand what all those big words mean). under the column marked "Author", find the button next to "JonKatz" and click it.
3) scroll ALLLLLLLLL the way down to the bottom of the page and click the button labeled "savehome". voila! you'll never have to read a story by Jon Katz again.
how to get back to the familiar Slashdot homepage after clicking "savehome" is left as an exercise for the reader.
-steve
p.s. oh, it's not enough to keep yourself from seeing Katz's posts, but you want to keep everyone else from seeing them too? hrm, can't help ya there, mr. ministry-of-truth.
The United States may be needing another war of independence in which guns would be very practical.
do me a favor, will ya? explain to me how "practical" your hunting rifles and shotguns and handguns will be when pitted against the artillery and armor and aircraft of a modern army, which is who you would be facing in any "war of independence."
c'mon, gun nuts - i'm serious. who out there really thinks that they and their hunting buddies could hold out against the U.S. Army for more than, say, 24 hours?
-steve
(yeah, so what if this is Inflammatory? i'm pretty freakin' Inflamed about seeing this same stupid argument over and over again. if you want to spout idiocy, that's fine, but to do so on a subject as important as firearms is just irresponsible.)
quoting this old saw seems to be a knee-jerk reaction whenever anyone brings up the topic of gun control. unfortunately, the reality of this particular Swiss policy is very different from how American gun enthusiasts imagine it.
(my source for this, incidentally, is a Swiss-German guy who lived with my family for a year. At the time he was in his early 20s, and a member of the defence force.)
it is true that members of the defence force are obliged to keep modern automatic rifles in their homes, so that they can have easy access to their weapons when the defence force is mustered (which happens periodically). on the other hand:
i feel like i'm being naive when i hope that this stupid argument will someday go away; unfortunately, the image of a Switzerland where everyone totes around an assault rifle is as alluring to gun nuts as Amsterdam is to potheads. unlike Amsterdam, however, the image of Switzerland is a MYTH.
-steve
Not true. It IS just instructions on how to make a bomb.
If you want the materials, you need a computer with a working compiler/assembler/etc.
-steve
"personal vanity" skews the scientific process so much that it deserves two mentions in the same list?
heh, those wacky scientists.
-steve
Yes Microsoft put out some software you don't like. Big deal. Like most people here, you don't have to use it!
/. readers work in tech support or systems administration. we may not be forced to use Microsoft products in our day to day lives, but we are often compelled to fix them when they break (which, as any sysadmin can tell you, is the worst part of dealing with them).
this is, in fact, not the case.
1) many people work for companies who insist on a standardized IT environment. this often means Microsoft products, leaving these people with no choice but to contend with 98/NT, Office, etc.
2) many
3) and the most significant reason why the above is not true: due to Microsoft's large market share and user base, they have no strong motivation to make their software compatible with others. thus, one often runs into real-life situations in which the only way to get something done is to use a Microsoft product, with all the unpleasantness that entails, or if there is some non-Microsoft way to get the job done, then nobody else will be able to read what you've done because they're all using non-compatible Microsoft products. issues like this one are what spurred the original antitrust investigation in the first place.
-steve
(remove EEEEEP to reply)