The good news is that all of the really depraved things that we do to eachother as humans tend to be classified or erased in some fashion. As bad of a picture the "Facebook", "Porn", and "Financial" things paint, there is the great piles of human rights violations and genocide type things that tend to get wiped away in our history. Even as horrible as those things are, I think the worst is the various hidden dealings of the various nations that do their damndest to look away or otherwise find ways to benefit from those events.
So really, the only chance we have at painting at least a not as completely horrific picture is to save terabytes of porn on every drive we can find to skew the results.
I don't think that is the case at all. Take a large enough sampling of all of this data and we will be able to see how "important" it was to people. I would imagine that the very large assortment of "useless crap" would ultimately be able to build a much more detailed frame of reference for the less useless crap. Assuming that these future archeologists have a way to read and decode all of our data they probably also have a relatively efficient way of dredging through all of it and quickly categorizing it. This could actually provide more interesting information than we even know about ourselves. You could actually aggregate data and have a better chance of determining true human behaviors and preferences rather than relying on our current model of silly biased surveys.
I also think your assumption about their view of human sex is pretty flawed. "This race was wired to have extremely positive neurological feedback from sex, yet had a birth process of shoving something the size of a watermellon through a hole the size of a golf ball and then years of care before the offspring becomes survivably independant. It took them an aweful long time to figure out how to reliably enjoy the sex part without having to worry about the procreation part." Of course...that could also suggest that "furries" have retained some kind of genetic knowledge from their ancestors that screwing an animal is better because there are no problems afterwards.
This whole thing is seriously too stupid for words. I would personally file charges against everyone in the court...EVERYONE...for child molestation. 100:1 says that each and every one of the people in the room touched themselves in a sexual way before they were 18. Arrest them all, charge them with abuse, let them serve a few years, and then brand them for life as a sex offender.
I actually avoided the dev section because it specifically said don't ask those types of questions. If you think "RTFM" and eliteism is dead you should stop by a gentoo channel sometime. Don't get me wrong, it isn't like it is a bad project or all the people are assholes, but as a distro it tends to draw in a lot of the elitist pricks.
My personal favorite is the "RTFM" approach. Yes, users should read the documentation before asking too many detailed questions, but at the very least people could say "check section X out". However, more often than not, if I am just poking around a project and am curious I ask a few questions I don't have time to read pages and pages and pages of documentation plus a wiki and a mailing list just to find out a few high level generic things about the project's use or capabilities. I will get a 45 minute lecture about how they don't have time to answer everyones "dumb" questions and that I should quit bothering them and just go read the piles of scattered documentation to find my answer as if I was already an expert on their project and know exactly what to look for. All of the bitching and moaning about how they don't have time, but they DO have time to sit on IRC and berate users that ask questions that would only take a few minutes to answer.
There have been more than a few projects that I chose not to use based on the fact that the developer community was a bunch of asshats.
That is not even remotely the case. The MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops have a fairly large number of hardware features that go well beyond anything that standard PC laptops have. Magnetic power cables, front loading drives, better hardware shell construction by a long shot, ambient light sensors to drive the LCD dimming and backlighting keyboard... Hell, the older MacBooks had limited multitouch touchpads and the new ones are even more advanced. There is also the whole issue of having a unix based system that grandma can use without trouble and without crippling the power users that want to do unixy things. You can bitch about Apple as a company on a variety of issues, but their laptops increased price is WAY more than "just a logo".
This doesn't even touch the fact that OS X is OS X. There isn't OS X Home, Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, and Enterprise, Standard Server, Advanced Server, Datacenter, etc, etc, etc...all with their own artificial software limitations designed to force you into buying the next version up... "just a logo" indeed.
The original insinuation is that Texas isn't a bunch of flaming redneck fundamentalist assholes and that Kansas is. I can pull up far more redneck fundie news coming out of Texas than Kansas by a LONG shot. Additionally you might want to read up a bit more on that story since that was 1999. The folks that pulled that crap got the boot and that mess was rather quickly undone. Beyond that, not teaching evolution to high school students isn't exactly the same ballpark as trying to worm your way into being able to award Masters degrees in science for creationism. Further, according to the language it becomes far worse. I sure can't wait for special interest groups to start handing out advanced degrees with state seals on them...that will certainly make all the hot button topics more interesting.
I seem to remember some other Ballmer moments of insight on Apple. There was that interview where he was laughing about how the iPhone was junk and Windows Mobile is the bestest evar. He also had some pretty amusing comparisons and whatnot between the wildly successful iPods and the Zune. I mean really now...aside from not selling for crap...the whole mass suicide on New Years was amazing...Apple clearly is failing because they haven't managed to have all of their products of a given model crash at the same time...
Seriously...this guy has a long track record of saying absolutely moronic shit, why does anyone take anything he says seriously? He will fucking kill Google right?
Hey lets be fair. I like my tyrants honest. It really isn't about how things are so much different in the US as much as it is the sales pitch and packaging. A great deal of lipservice is paid to "opportunity" and "justice", and while there is certainly more of both than in many places of the world, the sales brochure indicates that there is an abundance of it when there really is not. Many places are much more honest about how little justice and opportunity is available for the poor.
Because a bunch of slashdotters are wondering why they can't buy any new tech at work (if they have a job still) or at home. No money, No Job, No Tech.
Funny...when I talked to AT&T they said tethering was an extra $30/month. The tethering has nothing to do with Apple other than AT&T screaming at them "Don't you dare let iPhone users tether!"
Incidentally AT&T lies through their damned teeth about this. They explicitly say that any form of tethering is impossible with the iPhone. Yet there are multiple apps for jailbroken phones that allow wifi tethering. There was even one that made it into the official App store until Apple removed it.
You just proved his point. The universe is tuned quite well to keep us contained in a tiny little area and kill us in an exceedingly wide variety of ways. We are built to breed faster than we are destroyed by all of these combined things. Even that whole "killed 1/3 of the population" plague thing didn't get us. Hell, at one point humans were an endangered species and we came back from the brink without a bunch of hippy animal activists making human preserves. This certainly is a great deal of evidence of a higher power. The unfortunate piece is that it seems this higher power rather enjoys fucking with us.
Humans have spent thousands and thousands of years perfecting ways to kill each other. Why would Skynet need any more reason beyond "Because I can" or "I was made that way".
Please. If they wanted to make things better they would just get Ballmer to throw the chairs with the employee still in them. No roads. No Pollution. And if we keep Ballmer busy all day maybe MS could actually work on competing on merit rather than strong arm tactics.
No...it says a lot about requiring certification fees and that in all likely hood and little about commercializing FOSS. In fact, it has pretty much nothing to do with commercializing FOSS unless you are talking about a market that has a government mandated certification process and a certification board dumb enough to let someone take the source code of a certified FOSS project and reeuse that code without forcing that organization to get their individual product certified. So...really what we are talking about here is insane certification requirements and behaviors brought on by government mandate...not FOSS commercialization. Nice try though.
The BEST I ever heard was from a Navy buddy. They sent some poor bastard out looking for fallopian tubes. He apparently got sent to a dozen places around the ship until finally someone sent him to medical. So he rolls into medical asking for fallopian tubes...turns out one of the docs, a female Major, wasn't terribly amused by this... So the joke ended in them getting ripped apart by a Major and them having to hold their breathes to avoid exploding in laughter.
I had "cable stretcher" and "prop wash" told to me and had to explain that both of those things actually DID exist.
Could be. I have not seen nearly as much of a track record of shithead behavior out of them as the other two. However, I don't exactly keep up on them either. Getting modded as flamebait for talking trash on PS/XBox is rather telling though. For all the bitching that is done here about those two corporate entities daring to insult their product lines (or those who purchase them) is "flamebait".
Not after I learned of their asshat behavior, Yes, Never
Now, my point is that for as much as people bitch and moan about Company X doing Evil Thing X hardly any of them actually quit buying their fucking products as a result. They instead rant and bitch and moan and then pay up. So...they cry that these asshat companies enlist the aid of government or other strong arm tactics to get their way, and then would rather someone else come swoop in and use strong arm tactics against them instead of just quit buying their fucking shit. I don't expect everyone to be perfect, or to deeply research the makers of every product that they purchase. However, this is slashdot and the antics of Sony and Microsoft are WELL known the this crowd...yet this same crowd continues to purchase the wares of the companies in question. If you know a company is up to know good then you shouldn't buy their shit and support it. I actually do have a rather lengthy "blacklist" of companies I avoid dealing with because of their antics. When they knock off the bullshit I buy their products again, when they pick up the bullshit I quit buying them. Market forces only fix things when people actually vote with their dollars.
I think Dow Chemicals is the scum of the earth too for their Bhopal thing. It is damned near impossible to track down every product that could be related to Dow, so I try to avoid their shit when it is obvious and I try to make other people aware of it.
So...in the end...fuck you. Learn how to take tongue in cheek humor and maybe some understanding that knowingly buying from companies with track records of being assholes and buying from companies without knowing their track records for being assholes isn't even remotely the same thing. The only way things will EVER get better is if people sound the alarm on shithead companies and then actually quit buying their products rather than finding lame justifications for filling those company coffers...
Slashdot Mirror
It is the only way to be sure!
The good news is that all of the really depraved things that we do to eachother as humans tend to be classified or erased in some fashion. As bad of a picture the "Facebook", "Porn", and "Financial" things paint, there is the great piles of human rights violations and genocide type things that tend to get wiped away in our history. Even as horrible as those things are, I think the worst is the various hidden dealings of the various nations that do their damndest to look away or otherwise find ways to benefit from those events.
So really, the only chance we have at painting at least a not as completely horrific picture is to save terabytes of porn on every drive we can find to skew the results.
I don't think that is the case at all. Take a large enough sampling of all of this data and we will be able to see how "important" it was to people. I would imagine that the very large assortment of "useless crap" would ultimately be able to build a much more detailed frame of reference for the less useless crap. Assuming that these future archeologists have a way to read and decode all of our data they probably also have a relatively efficient way of dredging through all of it and quickly categorizing it. This could actually provide more interesting information than we even know about ourselves. You could actually aggregate data and have a better chance of determining true human behaviors and preferences rather than relying on our current model of silly biased surveys.
I also think your assumption about their view of human sex is pretty flawed. "This race was wired to have extremely positive neurological feedback from sex, yet had a birth process of shoving something the size of a watermellon through a hole the size of a golf ball and then years of care before the offspring becomes survivably independant. It took them an aweful long time to figure out how to reliably enjoy the sex part without having to worry about the procreation part." Of course...that could also suggest that "furries" have retained some kind of genetic knowledge from their ancestors that screwing an animal is better because there are no problems afterwards.
This whole thing is seriously too stupid for words. I would personally file charges against everyone in the court...EVERYONE...for child molestation. 100:1 says that each and every one of the people in the room touched themselves in a sexual way before they were 18. Arrest them all, charge them with abuse, let them serve a few years, and then brand them for life as a sex offender.
The real problem is that many of the people who would vote for that person anyways probably WOULD think that legislation was filled with good ideas.
I am no fan of the modern right wing hate filled rhetoric, but I have heard some of the most patently head up the ass ideas from left wingers.
I actually avoided the dev section because it specifically said don't ask those types of questions. If you think "RTFM" and eliteism is dead you should stop by a gentoo channel sometime. Don't get me wrong, it isn't like it is a bad project or all the people are assholes, but as a distro it tends to draw in a lot of the elitist pricks.
My personal favorite is the "RTFM" approach. Yes, users should read the documentation before asking too many detailed questions, but at the very least people could say "check section X out". However, more often than not, if I am just poking around a project and am curious I ask a few questions I don't have time to read pages and pages and pages of documentation plus a wiki and a mailing list just to find out a few high level generic things about the project's use or capabilities. I will get a 45 minute lecture about how they don't have time to answer everyones "dumb" questions and that I should quit bothering them and just go read the piles of scattered documentation to find my answer as if I was already an expert on their project and know exactly what to look for. All of the bitching and moaning about how they don't have time, but they DO have time to sit on IRC and berate users that ask questions that would only take a few minutes to answer.
There have been more than a few projects that I chose not to use based on the fact that the developer community was a bunch of asshats.
That is not even remotely the case. The MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops have a fairly large number of hardware features that go well beyond anything that standard PC laptops have. Magnetic power cables, front loading drives, better hardware shell construction by a long shot, ambient light sensors to drive the LCD dimming and backlighting keyboard... Hell, the older MacBooks had limited multitouch touchpads and the new ones are even more advanced. There is also the whole issue of having a unix based system that grandma can use without trouble and without crippling the power users that want to do unixy things. You can bitch about Apple as a company on a variety of issues, but their laptops increased price is WAY more than "just a logo".
This doesn't even touch the fact that OS X is OS X. There isn't OS X Home, Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, and Enterprise, Standard Server, Advanced Server, Datacenter, etc, etc, etc...all with their own artificial software limitations designed to force you into buying the next version up... "just a logo" indeed.
The original insinuation is that Texas isn't a bunch of flaming redneck fundamentalist assholes and that Kansas is. I can pull up far more redneck fundie news coming out of Texas than Kansas by a LONG shot. Additionally you might want to read up a bit more on that story since that was 1999. The folks that pulled that crap got the boot and that mess was rather quickly undone. Beyond that, not teaching evolution to high school students isn't exactly the same ballpark as trying to worm your way into being able to award Masters degrees in science for creationism. Further, according to the language it becomes far worse. I sure can't wait for special interest groups to start handing out advanced degrees with state seals on them...that will certainly make all the hot button topics more interesting.
I seem to remember some other Ballmer moments of insight on Apple. There was that interview where he was laughing about how the iPhone was junk and Windows Mobile is the bestest evar. He also had some pretty amusing comparisons and whatnot between the wildly successful iPods and the Zune. I mean really now...aside from not selling for crap...the whole mass suicide on New Years was amazing...Apple clearly is failing because they haven't managed to have all of their products of a given model crash at the same time...
Seriously...this guy has a long track record of saying absolutely moronic shit, why does anyone take anything he says seriously? He will fucking kill Google right?
well, like Kansas or something
Rather ironic that you mention ignorant Texans...
Have you visited this place...it is in Texas... http://www.creationevidence.org/
Everything in Texas is indeed bigger...unfortunately for the rest of us that includes egos and assholes.
Hey lets be fair. I like my tyrants honest. It really isn't about how things are so much different in the US as much as it is the sales pitch and packaging. A great deal of lipservice is paid to "opportunity" and "justice", and while there is certainly more of both than in many places of the world, the sales brochure indicates that there is an abundance of it when there really is not. Many places are much more honest about how little justice and opportunity is available for the poor.
Because a bunch of slashdotters are wondering why they can't buy any new tech at work (if they have a job still) or at home. No money, No Job, No Tech.
Funny...when I talked to AT&T they said tethering was an extra $30/month. The tethering has nothing to do with Apple other than AT&T screaming at them "Don't you dare let iPhone users tether!"
Incidentally AT&T lies through their damned teeth about this. They explicitly say that any form of tethering is impossible with the iPhone. Yet there are multiple apps for jailbroken phones that allow wifi tethering. There was even one that made it into the official App store until Apple removed it.
You just proved his point. The universe is tuned quite well to keep us contained in a tiny little area and kill us in an exceedingly wide variety of ways. We are built to breed faster than we are destroyed by all of these combined things. Even that whole "killed 1/3 of the population" plague thing didn't get us. Hell, at one point humans were an endangered species and we came back from the brink without a bunch of hippy animal activists making human preserves. This certainly is a great deal of evidence of a higher power. The unfortunate piece is that it seems this higher power rather enjoys fucking with us.
Humans have spent thousands and thousands of years perfecting ways to kill each other. Why would Skynet need any more reason beyond "Because I can" or "I was made that way".
You know...and here I was wondering where genocide, rape, murder, and so on rate on his scale if any type of bandwidth trotteling is "EVIL".
Yes, but it would also put the strong arming to much better use.
Please. If they wanted to make things better they would just get Ballmer to throw the chairs with the employee still in them. No roads. No Pollution. And if we keep Ballmer busy all day maybe MS could actually work on competing on merit rather than strong arm tactics.
and that in all likely hood
Brain apparently shifted gears on me and I didn't notice before I hit submit.
No...it says a lot about requiring certification fees and that in all likely hood and little about commercializing FOSS. In fact, it has pretty much nothing to do with commercializing FOSS unless you are talking about a market that has a government mandated certification process and a certification board dumb enough to let someone take the source code of a certified FOSS project and reeuse that code without forcing that organization to get their individual product certified. So...really what we are talking about here is insane certification requirements and behaviors brought on by government mandate...not FOSS commercialization. Nice try though.
The BEST I ever heard was from a Navy buddy. They sent some poor bastard out looking for fallopian tubes. He apparently got sent to a dozen places around the ship until finally someone sent him to medical. So he rolls into medical asking for fallopian tubes...turns out one of the docs, a female Major, wasn't terribly amused by this... So the joke ended in them getting ripped apart by a Major and them having to hold their breathes to avoid exploding in laughter.
I had "cable stretcher" and "prop wash" told to me and had to explain that both of those things actually DID exist.
Could be. I have not seen nearly as much of a track record of shithead behavior out of them as the other two. However, I don't exactly keep up on them either. Getting modded as flamebait for talking trash on PS/XBox is rather telling though. For all the bitching that is done here about those two corporate entities daring to insult their product lines (or those who purchase them) is "flamebait".
Not after I learned of their asshat behavior, Yes, Never
Now, my point is that for as much as people bitch and moan about Company X doing Evil Thing X hardly any of them actually quit buying their fucking products as a result. They instead rant and bitch and moan and then pay up. So...they cry that these asshat companies enlist the aid of government or other strong arm tactics to get their way, and then would rather someone else come swoop in and use strong arm tactics against them instead of just quit buying their fucking shit. I don't expect everyone to be perfect, or to deeply research the makers of every product that they purchase. However, this is slashdot and the antics of Sony and Microsoft are WELL known the this crowd...yet this same crowd continues to purchase the wares of the companies in question. If you know a company is up to know good then you shouldn't buy their shit and support it. I actually do have a rather lengthy "blacklist" of companies I avoid dealing with because of their antics. When they knock off the bullshit I buy their products again, when they pick up the bullshit I quit buying them. Market forces only fix things when people actually vote with their dollars.
I think Dow Chemicals is the scum of the earth too for their Bhopal thing. It is damned near impossible to track down every product that could be related to Dow, so I try to avoid their shit when it is obvious and I try to make other people aware of it.
So...in the end...fuck you. Learn how to take tongue in cheek humor and maybe some understanding that knowingly buying from companies with track records of being assholes and buying from companies without knowing their track records for being assholes isn't even remotely the same thing. The only way things will EVER get better is if people sound the alarm on shithead companies and then actually quit buying their products rather than finding lame justifications for filling those company coffers...
Seriously...I can do street view with Google. Why can't I "street" view the kernel and roam around? Google maps indeed...