Why should we watch television? Television is just redundant, commercialized, censored drivel. Sitcoms have all gone from "Seinfeld" knockoffs to "Friends" knockoffs to being a mishmash of the two. Dramas are all attempts to recreate the intenisty of "ER" or the quirkiness of the long ago canceled "Picket Fences."
The most intelligent shows are now those that parody the others, such as "Family Guy" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," which are entirely hit-or-miss as there is quite a chance that the viewers may not have ever seen the other shows that are being made fun of, and have plots that are grounded in realities far separate from our own. "The Simpsons" could almost fit this deftinition as well, (Or at least last season could, it was going downhill for a while there.) were it not for the incredible writers who manage to successfully parody just about everything with plenty of outright jokes to round out the hilarity, and extra little inside gags here and there for the truly hardcore fans.
Nightly news cannot be trusted, as were learned from the coverage of this year's political party conventions, which treated protesters engaging in civil disobedience as horrible criminals because a few anarchists would taunt the police to incite violence that became all out police riots, ending in the gassing, beating, and jailing of hundreds of innocents while the media pimped the predetermined political nominees inside.
Cable has gone down the toilet, as superstations attempt to drag audiences away from the networks with similar content mostly based around endless reruns of popular shows and movies. Other channels have segregated themselves, breaking down into niches of related entertainment, but not offering similar competing channels (For example, we have ONE Sci-Fi channel on cable now, because they bought the rights to all the Sci-Fi that numerous other stations would show.). MTV and VH1 have all but abandoned music videos in favor of endlessly replaying their odd content that is best described as utter crap designed to attract attention away from the networks often far crappier crap.
This is why we go online. Everything one wants to see is online, from free books to goat snuff. I can get on top of the latest news about technology, listen to streaming music, and watch people bang sheep all at once, and sometimes even on the same website!
The net is taking entertainment to incredible heights, and the best part is that THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING!
There has been WAY too much bitching/whining/love/hate/etc. about all this KDE/Gnome/Sun thing. What people really need to do is take a step back and realize a few things.
1 - Not everyone likes everything. That's why Linux, and thus KDE/Gnome exist.
2 - Take a look at number one again. Then think about how if you can't keep everyone happy with everything, why not do both? This is where people need to really direct the attention. To hell with all the petty arguments/opinion pieces/etc., just focus on getting these people to provide more choice. Get Red Hat to offer KDE AND Gnome in a standard install. Get SuSE to do it. Get Sun to do it. Hell, get Microsoft to do it. Instead of this conquer and destroy attitude, how about embracing/cohabitating?
"all they showed were teenagers throwing bottles and getting the rubber bullets they deserved."
If you were surrounded by hundred of police in full riot gear who were arresting peaceful protesters left and right for just BEING there, wouldn't you fight back a little?
"It's nice to see political parties believe in freedom of software."
No they don't. They pay smart people to believe in it for them. What it really comes down to is who pays off the most people and kisses the most ass on Capitol Hill. This is why when the DOJ went after Intel for antitrust, Intel ran to Washington to make sure that their buddies in congress cleaned up the whole mess. Thsi is why when Sun and Netscape spent years buying off politicians while Micros~t was basking in the light of their ill-gotten gains, the government jumped all over Micros~t like white on rice.
And most of all, this is why after the next round of elections, Micros~t will be the US Government's best friend.
Politicians and their parties believe in money. Not free software.
First they start implanting them in criminals. Great. I can't wait to see how fast every journalist in America that isn't working for a mainstream, government censored news source gets arrested and ends up with one of these, so that the police can harass them even more than before.
Or what about all the political prisoners in Pennsylvania right now? The hundreds of people who protested at the RNC (Or were unlucky enough to be arrested for being on the streets with a cell phone.) and got thrown in jail and treated like major criminals with ludicrous bail amounts. If the government can do that, why not just chip them all to track their future attempts to protest the status quo.
This needs to be stopped, by any means necesscary.
The company I work for uses rather excessive flourescent lighting. If an employee doesn't liek it, he must get a doctor's note, bring it in, and wait about a month for someone to put darkening sleeves over the lights.
So I dealt with it the easy way. I stood up on my desk and unscrewed the bulbs. Nobody ever bothers to screw them back in, because they were obviously taken out on purpose.
The downside is that it will eventually destroy the circuits around the fixtures (For some reason it screws stuff up it the lights are powered with no or dead bulbs, and individual lights cannot be powered off.) but since I don't want them on any way, I don't really give a damn.
If someone at your company won't allow this, do it anyway, and tell them if they don't like it to either order darkening sleeves or fire you. Chances are that they will order the sleeves, and if they fire you over it, you shouldn't be working for such assholes anyway.
You need to educate the world on how things work. People need to realize that irregardless of what Reverend Bob says about sex being evil and corrupting young minds, little Johnny won't be harmed by looking at pics of people having anal sex on the internet.
Either that or explain to them all the downsides and futility.
And if worst comes to worse, refuse and resist. Make them fire you for not compromising your ideals. You won't be the first geek that this has happened to, nor will you be the last. Don't be afraid to make a stand.
And if all else fails, just give them printouts of Katz's blubbering on the subject, and they will likely become apathetic to the whole damned thing.
I know that this is -1, Offtopic, but, why the hell did this ever get tossed into a satellite TV bill in the first place? I mean, I know that riders on unrelated bills are common, but with all the work people in the US are doing to try and stop the corruption in Washington, why do things like this keep getting by?
Has anyone ever looked into how many BS laws get through this way? Hell, it might be worth giving up on fighting for certain causes that should be protected by common sense if more people just worked to stop shady politicians from tossing out these insane riders left and right!
"Certainly slavery was tolerated, and by some even considered "right". However, I would offer that it never was and never will be "right" to force individuals into slavery and treat them as property, no matter how many people are willing to tolerate it or think that its ok."
Right and wrong exist only within the bounds of morality, which is entirely relative within individuals/cultures/religions/nations/etc. Slavery might be wrong from some points of view, but in truth was never wrong in the greater scheme of things. People create a morality that suits their own purposes. EVERYTHING is right, because it exists. NOTHING can be wrong, because wrong is just a sentiment of arrogant people who truly believe that what they think matters.
No surprise here. This country is becoming a police state, and people are just going to let it happen.
The more stuff like this I see, the more I think of moving to Canada. America is a great place, but as far as experiences with police go, this guy was lucky. What happens as things get worse, the government regulates more and more things they shouldn't, and people try to speak up? Will they continue to abuse/arrest dissidents like they have been? Will lynch mobs be allowed to once again run free and just kill the opposition off?
And will they do it to me?
I love this country, but I don't know if putting up a fight is worth the consequences. All the freedom that America promise doesn't mean shit to me if I have to face a great risk of death/violence/imprisonment to get it.
Of course, that's really what the system wants me to think, isn't it?
Just about anything Apple does can probably be traced back to idiocy. These are the people who are trying to push their machines on high end gamers and artists, and yet insist on providing oddly shaped, undersized mice WITH ONLY ONE BUTTON.
Don't try to find logic in the things that Apple does. The people at Apple do things because they have a few bright engineers developing some stuff and a few dozen idiots managing everything.
This just sucks ass. The real Kenobi has become more powerful than you can ever imagine. And it sucks.
Man. First bones, then Obi-Wan.
Fuck.
Time to smoke some more weed.
"I wonder if the united states would ever bomb it's own people. Maybe I'll get to see it."
It happened in 1981. The Philedelphia police bombed black activists who refused to leave their house. The bombs wiped out an entire neighbourhood (Did I spell that incorrectly?).
The worst part is, the cops pretty much got away with it.
I love America, but the more I see hateful, violent resistance to peaceful, intelligent change, the more I like the idea of moving to Canada.
Humane: Nah. These guys have earned a beating many times over. Once somebody has it coming like this, it isn't inhumane.
Civil: What is civil? Just a word used to cover up the gilded evils of society. One way or another civility is just an excuse for wimps to try and worm their way out of things rather then just fighting it out. Sure losing a fight and getting beaten up sucks, but it's a hell of a lot more interesting than sitting around in court all the time.
Effective: If all these guys got a real good ass kicking, and it was made very clear that more ass kickings were in store, they would be too scared to keep making us mad.
I would make a better post, but no need to go karma whoring when Dungeon Dweller puts it so well.
I think what we really need to do is just beat the bastards. Physically. We need to track down Jack Valenti, his little crew of bitches, as well as the execs of all the movie studios that fund the MPAA, and KICK THEIR ASSES. To hell with lawyers, these guys are just being assholes and it's high time we got this problem sorted out like real men would.
1- The greedy, asshole lawyers who exploit our legal system with cases like this? 2- The record industry for fucking us over and over again? 3- Moronic judges who just go ahead and support huge companies?
Dude, people were charging for pr0n online LONG before most geeks even had access thru work, much less home. I remember back when people used to use net enabled BBS's to sell pr0n to all us 2400 BPS modem users, and it was nothing new then.
Aside from legal issues, paranoid conspiracy theories, etc., has anyone considered that the guys at Micro$oft are jsut trying to do the right thing for once?
Sure people like Gates and Balmer are megalomanical incarnations of evil, but not everyone at Micro$oft is bad. Is it possible that somewhere in the chain of command there was a good guy that stepped back, took a long look, and realized that trying to add proprietary stuff to Kerberos was just a shitty thing to do?
When Micro$oft does things like this, try not to be such dicks about it. If people encourage them to keep open things open, and allow for interopability, and on top of that come up with some sort of positive response, maybe Micro$oft will start doing this sort of thing more often.
Wow... just think of the possibilities. I, for one, am all about using this for a marijuana legalization campaign in an arena where the mainstream media isn't in control.
Imagine the extra latency this creates added to the insane latency of RDRAM. This might have some nice applications, but not in the coming server market of Intel chipset based P-III Xeon mobos that need Rambus modules to avoid the problems that come from using SDRAM in RDRAM mobos. Talk about poor performance.
The upside is that, when combined with those nice upcoming DDR/Athlon servers, where an extra few nanoseconds won't be nearly as bad, this could be a decent option, if the data one is using can lends itself to compression well.
The downside is that we sure as hell can't expect to see this used to cut costs on high end video cards. Damn.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should we watch television? Television is just redundant, commercialized, censored drivel. Sitcoms have all gone from "Seinfeld" knockoffs to "Friends" knockoffs to being a mishmash of the two. Dramas are all attempts to recreate the intenisty of "ER" or the quirkiness of the long ago canceled "Picket Fences."
The most intelligent shows are now those that parody the others, such as "Family Guy" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," which are entirely hit-or-miss as there is quite a chance that the viewers may not have ever seen the other shows that are being made fun of, and have plots that are grounded in realities far separate from our own. "The Simpsons" could almost fit this deftinition as well, (Or at least last season could, it was going downhill for a while there.) were it not for the incredible writers who manage to successfully parody just about everything with plenty of outright jokes to round out the hilarity, and extra little inside gags here and there for the truly hardcore fans.
Nightly news cannot be trusted, as were learned from the coverage of this year's political party conventions, which treated protesters engaging in civil disobedience as horrible criminals because a few anarchists would taunt the police to incite violence that became all out police riots, ending in the gassing, beating, and jailing of hundreds of innocents while the media pimped the predetermined political nominees inside.
Cable has gone down the toilet, as superstations attempt to drag audiences away from the networks with similar content mostly based around endless reruns of popular shows and movies. Other channels have segregated themselves, breaking down into niches of related entertainment, but not offering similar competing channels (For example, we have ONE Sci-Fi channel on cable now, because they bought the rights to all the Sci-Fi that numerous other stations would show.). MTV and VH1 have all but abandoned music videos in favor of endlessly replaying their odd content that is best described as utter crap designed to attract attention away from the networks often far crappier crap.
This is why we go online. Everything one wants to see is online, from free books to goat snuff. I can get on top of the latest news about technology, listen to streaming music, and watch people bang sheep all at once, and sometimes even on the same website!
The net is taking entertainment to incredible heights, and the best part is that THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING!
/flameon
There has been WAY too much bitching/whining/love/hate/etc. about all this KDE/Gnome/Sun thing. What people really need to do is take a step back and realize a few things.
1 - Not everyone likes everything. That's why Linux, and thus KDE/Gnome exist.
2 - Take a look at number one again. Then think about how if you can't keep everyone happy with everything, why not do both? This is where people need to really direct the attention. To hell with all the petty arguments/opinion pieces/etc., just focus on getting these people to provide more choice. Get Red Hat to offer KDE AND Gnome in a standard install. Get SuSE to do it. Get Sun to do it. Hell, get Microsoft to do it. Instead of this conquer and destroy attitude, how about embracing/cohabitating?
Think about it.
"all they showed were teenagers throwing bottles and getting the rubber bullets they deserved."
If you were surrounded by hundred of police in full riot gear who were arresting peaceful protesters left and right for just BEING there, wouldn't you fight back a little?
"It's nice to see political parties believe in freedom of software."
No they don't. They pay smart people to believe in it for them. What it really comes down to is who pays off the most people and kisses the most ass on Capitol Hill. This is why when the DOJ went after Intel for antitrust, Intel ran to Washington to make sure that their buddies in congress cleaned up the whole mess. Thsi is why when Sun and Netscape spent years buying off politicians while Micros~t was basking in the light of their ill-gotten gains, the government jumped all over Micros~t like white on rice.
And most of all, this is why after the next round of elections, Micros~t will be the US Government's best friend.
Politicians and their parties believe in money. Not free software.
No good can come of this. None.
First they start implanting them in criminals. Great. I can't wait to see how fast every journalist in America that isn't working for a mainstream, government censored news source gets arrested and ends up with one of these, so that the police can harass them even more than before.
Or what about all the political prisoners in Pennsylvania right now? The hundreds of people who protested at the RNC (Or were unlucky enough to be arrested for being on the streets with a cell phone.) and got thrown in jail and treated like major criminals with ludicrous bail amounts. If the government can do that, why not just chip them all to track their future attempts to protest the status quo.
This needs to be stopped, by any means necesscary.
The company I work for uses rather excessive flourescent lighting. If an employee doesn't liek it, he must get a doctor's note, bring it in, and wait about a month for someone to put darkening sleeves over the lights.
So I dealt with it the easy way. I stood up on my desk and unscrewed the bulbs. Nobody ever bothers to screw them back in, because they were obviously taken out on purpose.
The downside is that it will eventually destroy the circuits around the fixtures (For some reason it screws stuff up it the lights are powered with no or dead bulbs, and individual lights cannot be powered off.) but since I don't want them on any way, I don't really give a damn.
If someone at your company won't allow this, do it anyway, and tell them if they don't like it to either order darkening sleeves or fire you. Chances are that they will order the sleeves, and if they fire you over it, you shouldn't be working for such assholes anyway.
I never said that the laws were bad. Just that things would be better if they were different :)
Has anyone considered that there still just aren't enough linux users out there who want to play games in linux to push up the sales volume?
You need to educate the world on how things work. People need to realize that irregardless of what Reverend Bob says about sex being evil and corrupting young minds, little Johnny won't be harmed by looking at pics of people having anal sex on the internet.
Either that or explain to them all the downsides and futility.
And if worst comes to worse, refuse and resist. Make them fire you for not compromising your ideals. You won't be the first geek that this has happened to, nor will you be the last. Don't be afraid to make a stand.
And if all else fails, just give them printouts of Katz's blubbering on the subject, and they will likely become apathetic to the whole damned thing.
I know that this is -1, Offtopic, but, why the hell did this ever get tossed into a satellite TV bill in the first place? I mean, I know that riders on unrelated bills are common, but with all the work people in the US are doing to try and stop the corruption in Washington, why do things like this keep getting by?
Has anyone ever looked into how many BS laws get through this way? Hell, it might be worth giving up on fighting for certain causes that should be protected by common sense if more people just worked to stop shady politicians from tossing out these insane riders left and right!
"Certainly slavery was tolerated, and by some even considered "right". However, I would offer that it never was and never will be "right" to force individuals into slavery and treat them as property, no matter how many people are willing to tolerate it or think that its ok."
Right and wrong exist only within the bounds of morality, which is entirely relative within individuals/cultures/religions/nations/etc. Slavery might be wrong from some points of view, but in truth was never wrong in the greater scheme of things. People create a morality that suits their own purposes. EVERYTHING is right, because it exists. NOTHING can be wrong, because wrong is just a sentiment of arrogant people who truly believe that what they think matters.
No surprise here. This country is becoming a police state, and people are just going to let it happen.
The more stuff like this I see, the more I think of moving to Canada. America is a great place, but as far as experiences with police go, this guy was lucky. What happens as things get worse, the government regulates more and more things they shouldn't, and people try to speak up? Will they continue to abuse/arrest dissidents like they have been? Will lynch mobs be allowed to once again run free and just kill the opposition off?
And will they do it to me?
I love this country, but I don't know if putting up a fight is worth the consequences. All the freedom that America promise doesn't mean shit to me if I have to face a great risk of death/violence/imprisonment to get it.
Of course, that's really what the system wants me to think, isn't it?
Just about anything Apple does can probably be traced back to idiocy. These are the people who are trying to push their machines on high end gamers and artists, and yet insist on providing oddly shaped, undersized mice WITH ONLY ONE BUTTON.
Don't try to find logic in the things that Apple does. The people at Apple do things because they have a few bright engineers developing some stuff and a few dozen idiots managing everything.
This just sucks ass. The real Kenobi has become more powerful than you can ever imagine. And it sucks. Man. First bones, then Obi-Wan. Fuck. Time to smoke some more weed.
"I wonder if the united states would ever bomb it's own people. Maybe I'll get to see it."
It happened in 1981. The Philedelphia police bombed black activists who refused to leave their house. The bombs wiped out an entire neighbourhood (Did I spell that incorrectly?).
The worst part is, the cops pretty much got away with it.
I love America, but the more I see hateful, violent resistance to peaceful, intelligent change, the more I like the idea of moving to Canada.
Humane: Nah. These guys have earned a beating many times over. Once somebody has it coming like this, it isn't inhumane.
Civil: What is civil? Just a word used to cover up the gilded evils of society. One way or another civility is just an excuse for wimps to try and worm their way out of things rather then just fighting it out. Sure losing a fight and getting beaten up sucks, but it's a hell of a lot more interesting than sitting around in court all the time.
Effective: If all these guys got a real good ass kicking, and it was made very clear that more ass kickings were in store, they would be too scared to keep making us mad.
I would make a better post, but no need to go karma whoring when Dungeon Dweller puts it so well.
I think what we really need to do is just beat the bastards. Physically. We need to track down Jack Valenti, his little crew of bitches, as well as the execs of all the movie studios that fund the MPAA, and KICK THEIR ASSES. To hell with lawyers, these guys are just being assholes and it's high time we got this problem sorted out like real men would.
Apple has this coming after that stunt they pulled with e-machines.
Nice point.
Not to many people can pull of sarcasm well online. I commend you.
1- The greedy, asshole lawyers who exploit our legal system with cases like this? 2- The record industry for fucking us over and over again? 3- Moronic judges who just go ahead and support huge companies?
I would post something along these lines, but this guy has it all wrapped up.
Now why isn't this a 5 yet?
"All pr0n would be free ;-) "
Dude, people were charging for pr0n online LONG before most geeks even had access thru work, much less home. I remember back when people used to use net enabled BBS's to sell pr0n to all us 2400 BPS modem users, and it was nothing new then.
Aside from legal issues, paranoid conspiracy theories, etc., has anyone considered that the guys at Micro$oft are jsut trying to do the right thing for once?
Sure people like Gates and Balmer are megalomanical incarnations of evil, but not everyone at Micro$oft is bad. Is it possible that somewhere in the chain of command there was a good guy that stepped back, took a long look, and realized that trying to add proprietary stuff to Kerberos was just a shitty thing to do?
When Micro$oft does things like this, try not to be such dicks about it. If people encourage them to keep open things open, and allow for interopability, and on top of that come up with some sort of positive response, maybe Micro$oft will start doing this sort of thing more often.
Wow... just think of the possibilities. I, for one, am all about using this for a marijuana legalization campaign in an arena where the mainstream media isn't in control.
Imagine the extra latency this creates added to the insane latency of RDRAM. This might have some nice applications, but not in the coming server market of Intel chipset based P-III Xeon mobos that need Rambus modules to avoid the problems that come from using SDRAM in RDRAM mobos. Talk about poor performance.
The upside is that, when combined with those nice upcoming DDR/Athlon servers, where an extra few nanoseconds won't be nearly as bad, this could be a decent option, if the data one is using can lends itself to compression well.
The downside is that we sure as hell can't expect to see this used to cut costs on high end video cards. Damn.