He's already had a psychiatric review, on court order. Turns out he's sane, at least according to one psychiatrist. I think its more likely that he's a publicity whore. Sending a subpoena to the president smells of publicity stunt anyway. I mean, really, what can Bush of all people add to his case? Bush probably doesn't even know who this guy is.
Chances are the source code to their existing drivers have a lot of 3rd party licensed libraries, and may be covered by NDA. They'd probably have to pull a move like what Sun did with Java: release whats not covered, and let the open source developers fill in the missing (encumbered) pieces with a clean-room implementation.
So in short, no, they probably don't have driver code that they can just give out.
I've come to realize that a lot of upper managers just don't *get* employee morale. When morale is low, they typically try to do "fun" things like, blue jeans on Fridays, or in an extreme case throw in an extra vacation day or two. But often morale problems are indicative of serious problems with management and the work environment.
Coming down hard on innocent internet usage is one of those things that. to me, seems to be one of those that management just doesn't understand, and as a result it kills morale. Bullshit solutions that broadcast management's ignorance of the real issues in the workplace hurt more than help.
But then again, as I work in large companies more and more, I begin to realize that a lot of managers care more about appearances and promotions than doing a good job. It really sucks when you get one of those managers who are looking for a "magic bullet" solution that they can brag about to their superiors to advance their careers. Like implementing an internet filter to increase productivity.
Just so you know, Big Daddies won't actually attack you unless a) they have a Little Sister around or b) you attack them. I did the same thing as you, until I made a save game, screwed around, and found out that they wouldn't attack me.
I bought it on Friday night, US version. I also installed the demo from Steam too. I can check again just to be sure whenever I get home.
I remember my brother telling me that it installed a rootkit, and being super pissed off, then researching and finding out that, no, its not a rootkit, just a Windows service that does some tricks to make it a pita to uninstall. After that I did the scan and came up with nothing.
I'd classify it as DRM/malware, because it seems like its particularly nasty to get out of your system. But it doesn't behave like a rootkit, and thus far I haven't heard of any bad side effects, other than the usual DRM stuff.
If that were the case, then they should post the link without a summary or headline. The fact of the matter is, they do post summaries and headlines, and quite often they're inaccurate, and fairly often they're extremely accusatory. What I want is to not go to tech forums and see outright false information being spread because a story gets up on the Slashdot front page with blatantly false or spun information. The comments are not the same thing as making sure the story is valid in the first place.
And yes, no one site is perfect in this regard, but Slashdot has been, as of late, absolutely horrible with the spin.
Which would be significant if it was a rootkit in the first place. It isn't. And I used the exact same tools and process that the guy who found the SecuROM stuff did. Several other people with Steam have indicated that they didn't get hit with the SecuROM stuff.
Its worse than that. When the guy who detected it was corrected in his comments, he stated that he would get better hits if he called it a rootkit and then went on to say that he'd let the readers decide if it was really a rootkit.
The whole OMG ROOTKIT thing was nothing more than a publicity stuff. Yes its DRM, and yes it sucks, but its not a rootkit. And you don't get it if you buy it off of Steam either.
Sadly, I've noticed that Slashdot is very VERY bad about spreading disinformation and hyperbole. It'd be nice if the stories could be substantiated and checked for accuracy, especially considering the number of people who take anything posted on Slashdot as The One and Only Truth.
I don't know about that. It ran on medium-to-high settings pretty well on my year old computer. nVidia 7800 GT. The min specs say you can run it on a 6600. It was still beautiful on medium settings.
Theres a lot thats different about it. Its not a genre-shattering game, but it has enough creativity in enough places to deserve the credit. Setting, for one. Instead of yet-another-WW2-game, we have an underwater city set in the 1960's. That lends a lot to the atmosphere. The plot that follows is also well done.
I don't play enough FPSes to comment on whether the actual mechanics are innovative or not, but I'll take a stab at some of the things that I found nifty. They mixed in RPG-ish character upgrades, that you can buy using Adam. This Adam is obtained through either saving or harvesting the Little Sisters, which the summary touched on. You get less if you save the sisters. Theres also the Plasmids, which are magic or psychic like abilities. You can stun people, set them aflame, freeze them, and shock them. You can do nifty things like set a person on fire, so that they jump into a pool of water to douse themselves, then shocking them while they're in the water for extra damage.
Really, theres no one thing thats completely revolutionary about Bioshock. It just has the right settings, the right mechanics, the right plot, the right amount of tension, etc. in the right places. Its a very well put together game.
There was more to the game than that. Rapture was, in essense, an experiment in unfettered capitalism and self-interest. As the game goes on, you get to see how that influenced Rapture.
Also, I blasted through killing everyone, and later found out that I missed some items that I could have gained if I hadn't been so quick on the trigger finger.
Theres more to it than that, but it involves certain plot points, and I wouldn't want to ruin it for anyone. Your post makes it seem like you're still relatively early in the game, so I hope you enjoy it.
As far as the Big Daddy issue, that had to do with the figurines that came with the collectors edition, nothing in-game.
I have to say that the game was excellent. I'm already tempted to replay it.
Where I work, this kind of thing is caused by me going to business and saying "The spec says this, but that can mean either A or B. Which do we really want?" and the business, not wanting to make a commitment that reflects poorly on them, says "Make it configurable!"
The fix for that is more painful than it should be -- involves a bit of mucking around with the grub commandline -- but if you fixed it with hard drive cables, you should be able to set your BIOS to boot from one hard drive before the other anyway. I don't remember the exact commands for that.
I was using SATA hard drives, and there was a bios option for setting which sata drive booted when but... oddly enough it didn't work. Swapping the cables did the trick though. Grub was set up correctly, but I guess my particular BIOS just liked ignoring the options I set (or I made a stupid mistake, but swapping the cables is fairly painless, as its a screwless case and SATA).
sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-new
I installed the drivers through the GUI interface, but I guess it didn't update my xorg.config or something. I had to open up the system panel and specifically mark the video card to mine. After that, it worked like a dream.
It was working at the time of posting, but thanks for trying to help.:)
unlimited 1. not limited; unrestricted; unconfined: unlimited trade. 2. boundless; infinite; vast: the unlimited skies. 3. without any qualification or exception; unconditional.
They sold him a service advertised as unlimited, and when he passed some unknown boundary flagged his account (but didn't really flag him), put him in a run-around, and basically terminated his account without giving him proper recourse.
So they're no longer advertising it as unlimited? Fair enough. How about they tell us how much bandwidth we have? No? How in the world can you expect someone to avoid "abusing" the service if they won't tell us how much usage constitutes abuse?
No, this guy got the shaft. They were being outright evasive and dodgy, and punishing him for violating arbitrarily set limits that he wasn't aware of and had no way of figuring out. Thats completely and utterly unethical, and the fact that you're defending the behavior is repugnant.
When it comes to installing, Linux is much simpler and faster (and thus cheaper). When it comes to configuration, Linux is (again) easier and faster.
It really varies from person to person. Personally, Linux really really seems to hate me. I've never had it just work. Even Ubuntu.
I just put it on my main desktop computer, after moving my file server to it, and it involved unplugging and swapping around hard drive cables (it kept booting back into Windows, instead of using the Linux bootloader), and playing around with the video settings to get it to recognize my GeForce 7900 GT so I can use a resolution higher than 800x600.:(
Personally, I think I'm just cursed. My brothers both managed to use it without problems (well except an issue with a USB wireless adapter, but eh).
Once I get it installed and configured, however, I love how I can just hit the repositories for all my software, instead of having to download installers. I can select my full suite of software and then install it all with the click of a button. Nice. The number of choices available can be confusing though.
To be fair, there are a shit-ton of people right here on slashdot who believe scientific theories in area X (where X = global warming, evolution, etc) are completely flawed, but accepted thanks to group-think. They tend to come out in global warming or evolution related articles. Also see: Electric Universe Guy.
I mean, when you hit compile, it generates and spews out a command line to a little text window. Which is fine, but it doesn't bother to actually parse that data and present it in a meaningful way. You end up scrolling through dozens of warnings (if you're not compiling with the equivilent of -ferror) to find relevant errors.
Huh? You're looking at the Output window, which shows the build output. Visual Studio does parse that into a list of errors and warnings, accessable from, the "Error List" window. You can turn off warnings in this window to just show the errors. Double clicking on the errors will take you to the correct source file and line that generated the error.
Oh, and then there's deployment. I worked for a while with some folks that had a C++ application that talked with the Microsoft SQL database and IIS. Their "push" procedure involved remote desktop to the server, clicking buttons to take down the server, pointing it at the maintenance site, creating a new directory in the file explorer, naming it correctly and copying the existing database files to it, copying over the newly compiled bits, testing it in situ and finally pointing the server back to the live site.
This took them between 3 and 6 hours, every Friday night. I asked them why they can't just write a shell script (or dos shell script, whatever the hell windows has) and they said that it would take too long to develop that. Idiots.
Yes, they're idiots. We do all of this automatically through NAnt. I'm pretty sure you can do this all through the command line if you're masochistic (quite frankly, the Windows command line sucks hairy balls). But theres seriously no excuse not to have deployment automated, especially if its taking several hours.
But thats not what I'm here to rant at you about. I'm here to rant about Visual Studio. Why, if the OS is called Windows, am I only allowed to have one of them in my development environment? I never got the MDI thing, but I routinely, on Mac OS, have 20 source files open and visible. Why does Visual Studio insist on cramming them into one single pane?
Theres a setting in Visual Studio that lets you switch to a windowed environment. Tools->Options->Environment->General->Window Layout->Multiple Documents. It still constrains those source code windows to the area of the parent window (Visual Studio's window), but you can pane them and everything. If what you want is to be able to drag the source code windows outside of the main Visual Studio window, then you can't do that. I would agree that it would be much nicer if you could. I prefer the tab layout, personally.
Gargh, its frustrating. Why can't the compiler take normal command line switches with meaningful names?
I use MSBuild to compile our app, and it takes command line switches. I'm not sure what kind of switches you are looking for, however. You don't get things like specific optimization switches, since those are in the project settings, but I typically build one of a set of pre-defined modes (Release, Debug, etc).
Since we're talking about the "development ecosystem", why does the command.com shell so completely fail at being useful?
cmd sucks. Big time. It would be nice if they could actually start pushing powershell, but thats unlikely to happen anytime soon. They should have put it in Vista, at the very least. Hopefully their next server product has it.
The debugger is even worse, hiding and showing things based on what it *thinks* I want to see. The only benefit it has over gdb on the command line is mixed assembly/source view, but at least with gdb I can quickly disassemble whatever I need to, not just where the PC is.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of any examples of the debugger hiding and showing me things. It pretty much shows me what I ask it to.
Its a shame that you're getting down-modded for it. I thought it was pretty obvious what you were getting at. However, science and challenges to it seem to be a hot-button issue here, so I expect that its a matter of knee-jerking.
I don't think Batman was trying to say that the methodology of science was wrong, but trying to draw parallels between that methodology and that of Wikipedia.
I'm not sure if its an apt comparison, however. My mother could edit an article on computer programming that I wrote, but she is by no means my peer in this area. In science, the people reviewing you generally have the background required to be able to accurately and meaningfully judge your results. The same isn't necessarily true of Wikipedia. In the same way, however, its better than the alternative. Wikipedia isn't perfect, but not much in life is.
I didn't imply that you said torturing people was justified. That's a real strawman. I was using it as an example.
Ok fair enough....
Does the fact that they like Buffy excuse any immoral actions they take? I think you are being disingenuous and trying to do a little propagandizing yourself. It looks as though you are trying to build sympathy for Big Brother.
Wait, what? You just said....
Give it a rest. Implying that its not surprising for CIA employees to have interests outside of work.
I'm saying, why even mention that people in the CIA are real people? Do you really think we are all so childish as to completely demonize everyone we disagree with?
Yes, absolutely 100%, I do believe that the average Slashdot user is childish enough to demonize people they disagree with. Are you new here? Peruse any political or Microsoft related topic for examples. Or how about the Novell thing? Or hell, the team working on Mono.
Hell, to some degree, dehumanization of those who differ from you is pretty common. See: racism, classism, nationalism, religion, etc. In that vein, I think its valuable to have reminders that if you prick them, they'll bleed just like you.
"I'm just saying, don't be surprised if the same guy who tries to manipulate the public's understanding, also likes Buffy."
Why even point out the blazingly obvious like that? What is your motivation?
His motivation was that someone thought that it was odd that the CIA had interests outside of the CIA, and this was silly.
If you want to dig deeper than that, don't you think its valuable to understand that these people are doing their jobs for some reason other than simply enjoying doing unethical things? Its not about building sympathy for people who do bad things, but challenging the whole "Well they're just different from us mentality. Its been pretty much bullshit ever since it was first used. People are complex, and its far too often that people simplify them and dehumanize them as a way of coping with the lack of understanding and empathy. People also like to think that people that do bad things are simply different than them on some fundamental level, because otherwise they have the potential for evil within them.
"Criminals are just bad people." "Republicans are greedy and evil!" "They deserved to get bombed because they support terrorism." And so on, and so on. Hell, even Hitler wanted to help his country, yet most people just assume he was satan incarnate. This may seem obvious to you, but to a lot of people, like many Slashdot users, its not.
You're reading a hell of a lot into his post that just isn't there. What's your motivation?
Slashdot Mirror
He's already had a psychiatric review, on court order. Turns out he's sane, at least according to one psychiatrist. I think its more likely that he's a publicity whore. Sending a subpoena to the president smells of publicity stunt anyway. I mean, really, what can Bush of all people add to his case? Bush probably doesn't even know who this guy is.
Chances are the source code to their existing drivers have a lot of 3rd party licensed libraries, and may be covered by NDA. They'd probably have to pull a move like what Sun did with Java: release whats not covered, and let the open source developers fill in the missing (encumbered) pieces with a clean-room implementation.
So in short, no, they probably don't have driver code that they can just give out.
I've come to realize that a lot of upper managers just don't *get* employee morale. When morale is low, they typically try to do "fun" things like, blue jeans on Fridays, or in an extreme case throw in an extra vacation day or two. But often morale problems are indicative of serious problems with management and the work environment.
Coming down hard on innocent internet usage is one of those things that. to me, seems to be one of those that management just doesn't understand, and as a result it kills morale. Bullshit solutions that broadcast management's ignorance of the real issues in the workplace hurt more than help.
But then again, as I work in large companies more and more, I begin to realize that a lot of managers care more about appearances and promotions than doing a good job. It really sucks when you get one of those managers who are looking for a "magic bullet" solution that they can brag about to their superiors to advance their careers. Like implementing an internet filter to increase productivity.
Well as an update, looks like I was wrong. They slipped it in there sometime.
Just so you know, Big Daddies won't actually attack you unless a) they have a Little Sister around or b) you attack them. I did the same thing as you, until I made a save game, screwed around, and found out that they wouldn't attack me.
I bought it on Friday night, US version. I also installed the demo from Steam too. I can check again just to be sure whenever I get home.
I remember my brother telling me that it installed a rootkit, and being super pissed off, then researching and finding out that, no, its not a rootkit, just a Windows service that does some tricks to make it a pita to uninstall. After that I did the scan and came up with nothing.
I'd classify it as DRM/malware, because it seems like its particularly nasty to get out of your system. But it doesn't behave like a rootkit, and thus far I haven't heard of any bad side effects, other than the usual DRM stuff.
If that were the case, then they should post the link without a summary or headline. The fact of the matter is, they do post summaries and headlines, and quite often they're inaccurate, and fairly often they're extremely accusatory. What I want is to not go to tech forums and see outright false information being spread because a story gets up on the Slashdot front page with blatantly false or spun information. The comments are not the same thing as making sure the story is valid in the first place.
And yes, no one site is perfect in this regard, but Slashdot has been, as of late, absolutely horrible with the spin.
Which would be significant if it was a rootkit in the first place. It isn't. And I used the exact same tools and process that the guy who found the SecuROM stuff did. Several other people with Steam have indicated that they didn't get hit with the SecuROM stuff.
I installed over steam, did a search for the SecuROM stuff, and came up negative.
Its worse than that. When the guy who detected it was corrected in his comments, he stated that he would get better hits if he called it a rootkit and then went on to say that he'd let the readers decide if it was really a rootkit.
The whole OMG ROOTKIT thing was nothing more than a publicity stuff. Yes its DRM, and yes it sucks, but its not a rootkit. And you don't get it if you buy it off of Steam either.
Sadly, I've noticed that Slashdot is very VERY bad about spreading disinformation and hyperbole. It'd be nice if the stories could be substantiated and checked for accuracy, especially considering the number of people who take anything posted on Slashdot as The One and Only Truth.
I don't know about that. It ran on medium-to-high settings pretty well on my year old computer. nVidia 7800 GT. The min specs say you can run it on a 6600. It was still beautiful on medium settings.
Theres a lot thats different about it. Its not a genre-shattering game, but it has enough creativity in enough places to deserve the credit. Setting, for one. Instead of yet-another-WW2-game, we have an underwater city set in the 1960's. That lends a lot to the atmosphere. The plot that follows is also well done.
I don't play enough FPSes to comment on whether the actual mechanics are innovative or not, but I'll take a stab at some of the things that I found nifty. They mixed in RPG-ish character upgrades, that you can buy using Adam. This Adam is obtained through either saving or harvesting the Little Sisters, which the summary touched on. You get less if you save the sisters. Theres also the Plasmids, which are magic or psychic like abilities. You can stun people, set them aflame, freeze them, and shock them. You can do nifty things like set a person on fire, so that they jump into a pool of water to douse themselves, then shocking them while they're in the water for extra damage.
Really, theres no one thing thats completely revolutionary about Bioshock. It just has the right settings, the right mechanics, the right plot, the right amount of tension, etc. in the right places. Its a very well put together game.
There was more to the game than that. Rapture was, in essense, an experiment in unfettered capitalism and self-interest. As the game goes on, you get to see how that influenced Rapture.
Also, I blasted through killing everyone, and later found out that I missed some items that I could have gained if I hadn't been so quick on the trigger finger.
Theres more to it than that, but it involves certain plot points, and I wouldn't want to ruin it for anyone. Your post makes it seem like you're still relatively early in the game, so I hope you enjoy it.
As far as the Big Daddy issue, that had to do with the figurines that came with the collectors edition, nothing in-game.
I have to say that the game was excellent. I'm already tempted to replay it.
Where I work, this kind of thing is caused by me going to business and saying "The spec says this, but that can mean either A or B. Which do we really want?" and the business, not wanting to make a commitment that reflects poorly on them, says "Make it configurable!"
I was using SATA hard drives, and there was a bios option for setting which sata drive booted when but... oddly enough it didn't work. Swapping the cables did the trick though. Grub was set up correctly, but I guess my particular BIOS just liked ignoring the options I set (or I made a stupid mistake, but swapping the cables is fairly painless, as its a screwless case and SATA).
sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-newI installed the drivers through the GUI interface, but I guess it didn't update my xorg.config or something. I had to open up the system panel and specifically mark the video card to mine. After that, it worked like a dream.
It was working at the time of posting, but thanks for trying to help. :)
Anonymous Coward, how did he abuse the service?
unlimited
1. not limited; unrestricted; unconfined: unlimited trade.
2. boundless; infinite; vast: the unlimited skies.
3. without any qualification or exception; unconditional.
They sold him a service advertised as unlimited, and when he passed some unknown boundary flagged his account (but didn't really flag him), put him in a run-around, and basically terminated his account without giving him proper recourse.
So they're no longer advertising it as unlimited? Fair enough. How about they tell us how much bandwidth we have? No? How in the world can you expect someone to avoid "abusing" the service if they won't tell us how much usage constitutes abuse?
No, this guy got the shaft. They were being outright evasive and dodgy, and punishing him for violating arbitrarily set limits that he wasn't aware of and had no way of figuring out. Thats completely and utterly unethical, and the fact that you're defending the behavior is repugnant.
A little internet research and tinkering has solved all my problems. :) But my point is that, yes, some of us have to spend time to get Linux working.
It really varies from person to person. Personally, Linux really really seems to hate me. I've never had it just work. Even Ubuntu.
I just put it on my main desktop computer, after moving my file server to it, and it involved unplugging and swapping around hard drive cables (it kept booting back into Windows, instead of using the Linux bootloader), and playing around with the video settings to get it to recognize my GeForce 7900 GT so I can use a resolution higher than 800x600. :(
Personally, I think I'm just cursed. My brothers both managed to use it without problems (well except an issue with a USB wireless adapter, but eh).
Once I get it installed and configured, however, I love how I can just hit the repositories for all my software, instead of having to download installers. I can select my full suite of software and then install it all with the click of a button. Nice. The number of choices available can be confusing though.
To be fair, there are a shit-ton of people right here on slashdot who believe scientific theories in area X (where X = global warming, evolution, etc) are completely flawed, but accepted thanks to group-think. They tend to come out in global warming or evolution related articles. Also see: Electric Universe Guy.
I mean, when you hit compile, it generates and spews out a command line to a little text window. Which is fine, but it doesn't bother to actually parse that data and present it in a meaningful way. You end up scrolling through dozens of warnings (if you're not compiling with the equivilent of -ferror) to find relevant errors.
Huh? You're looking at the Output window, which shows the build output. Visual Studio does parse that into a list of errors and warnings, accessable from, the "Error List" window. You can turn off warnings in this window to just show the errors. Double clicking on the errors will take you to the correct source file and line that generated the error.
Oh, and then there's deployment. I worked for a while with some folks that had a C++ application that talked with the Microsoft SQL database and IIS. Their "push" procedure involved remote desktop to the server, clicking buttons to take down the server, pointing it at the maintenance site, creating a new directory in the file explorer, naming it correctly and copying the existing database files to it, copying over the newly compiled bits, testing it in situ and finally pointing the server back to the live site. This took them between 3 and 6 hours, every Friday night. I asked them why they can't just write a shell script (or dos shell script, whatever the hell windows has) and they said that it would take too long to develop that. Idiots.
Yes, they're idiots. We do all of this automatically through NAnt. I'm pretty sure you can do this all through the command line if you're masochistic (quite frankly, the Windows command line sucks hairy balls). But theres seriously no excuse not to have deployment automated, especially if its taking several hours.
But thats not what I'm here to rant at you about. I'm here to rant about Visual Studio. Why, if the OS is called Windows, am I only allowed to have one of them in my development environment? I never got the MDI thing, but I routinely, on Mac OS, have 20 source files open and visible. Why does Visual Studio insist on cramming them into one single pane?
Theres a setting in Visual Studio that lets you switch to a windowed environment. Tools->Options->Environment->General->Window Layout->Multiple Documents. It still constrains those source code windows to the area of the parent window (Visual Studio's window), but you can pane them and everything. If what you want is to be able to drag the source code windows outside of the main Visual Studio window, then you can't do that. I would agree that it would be much nicer if you could. I prefer the tab layout, personally.
Gargh, its frustrating. Why can't the compiler take normal command line switches with meaningful names?
I use MSBuild to compile our app, and it takes command line switches. I'm not sure what kind of switches you are looking for, however. You don't get things like specific optimization switches, since those are in the project settings, but I typically build one of a set of pre-defined modes (Release, Debug, etc).
Since we're talking about the "development ecosystem", why does the command.com shell so completely fail at being useful?
cmd sucks. Big time. It would be nice if they could actually start pushing powershell, but thats unlikely to happen anytime soon. They should have put it in Vista, at the very least. Hopefully their next server product has it.
The debugger is even worse, hiding and showing things based on what it *thinks* I want to see. The only benefit it has over gdb on the command line is mixed assembly/source view, but at least with gdb I can quickly disassemble whatever I need to, not just where the PC is.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of any examples of the debugger hiding and showing me things. It pretty much shows me what I ask it to.
Can someone please desc
Its a shame that you're getting down-modded for it. I thought it was pretty obvious what you were getting at. However, science and challenges to it seem to be a hot-button issue here, so I expect that its a matter of knee-jerking.
I don't think Batman was trying to say that the methodology of science was wrong, but trying to draw parallels between that methodology and that of Wikipedia.
I'm not sure if its an apt comparison, however. My mother could edit an article on computer programming that I wrote, but she is by no means my peer in this area. In science, the people reviewing you generally have the background required to be able to accurately and meaningfully judge your results. The same isn't necessarily true of Wikipedia. In the same way, however, its better than the alternative. Wikipedia isn't perfect, but not much in life is.
Ok fair enough....
Does the fact that they like Buffy excuse any immoral actions they take? I think you are being disingenuous and trying to do a little propagandizing yourself. It looks as though you are trying to build sympathy for Big Brother.Wait, what? You just said....
Give it a rest. Implying that its not surprising for CIA employees to have interests outside of work.
I'm saying, why even mention that people in the CIA are real people? Do you really think we are all so childish as to completely demonize everyone we disagree with?Yes, absolutely 100%, I do believe that the average Slashdot user is childish enough to demonize people they disagree with. Are you new here? Peruse any political or Microsoft related topic for examples. Or how about the Novell thing? Or hell, the team working on Mono.
Hell, to some degree, dehumanization of those who differ from you is pretty common. See: racism, classism, nationalism, religion, etc. In that vein, I think its valuable to have reminders that if you prick them, they'll bleed just like you.
"I'm just saying, don't be surprised if the same guy who tries to manipulate the public's understanding, also likes Buffy." Why even point out the blazingly obvious like that? What is your motivation?His motivation was that someone thought that it was odd that the CIA had interests outside of the CIA, and this was silly.
If you want to dig deeper than that, don't you think its valuable to understand that these people are doing their jobs for some reason other than simply enjoying doing unethical things? Its not about building sympathy for people who do bad things, but challenging the whole "Well they're just different from us mentality. Its been pretty much bullshit ever since it was first used. People are complex, and its far too often that people simplify them and dehumanize them as a way of coping with the lack of understanding and empathy. People also like to think that people that do bad things are simply different than them on some fundamental level, because otherwise they have the potential for evil within them.
"Criminals are just bad people." "Republicans are greedy and evil!" "They deserved to get bombed because they support terrorism." And so on, and so on. Hell, even Hitler wanted to help his country, yet most people just assume he was satan incarnate. This may seem obvious to you, but to a lot of people, like many Slashdot users, its not.
You're reading a hell of a lot into his post that just isn't there. What's your motivation?
You offended the cult of Apple by insinuating that the iPhone was anything less than perfect. Thats why you got marked troll.
You forgot LittleBigWorld. Shame!