It's interesting, but I hear a lot of people on slashdot and in tech and gaming publishing refer to themselves as "libertarian" even though, as someone who follows politics in the US pretty closely, I can tell that they usually are not.
I once read an article on ign.com about game resellers and copyright protection, where they writer actually said that he was for keeping the current copyright system (status-quo) because he "tended to be libertarian on these issues."
I would think a libertarian would want to get rid of copyrights altogether and let the markets decided. But what do I know.
I'm not sure there really is a political "side" that slashdotters tend to fit into properly - if anything they tend to be more conservative about trying new things, they don't want to necessarily change things that for them don't seem broken - hence the status-quo comment - but they tend to be progressive on social issues, especially obvious wedge issues, and tend to favor fairness - and these ideas tend to be considered more liberal.
I'm not a fan of protesting, which IMO is just a bunch of people, sparing a little time and effort as possible, standing around whining with signs in their hands. An activity that is easily ignored.
If you want to make a real difference in American politics, learn how our two party systems works, learn from the history or the rise of the conservative right and other influential groups, and realize that the way to make a difference, is to organize and build influence in one of the two national parties. Democrats are frankly in need of such influence.
Most of us seem perfectly willing to play around with all that flamable liquid right now.;-)
With appropriate safety precautions in place, I don't see why this couldn't be just as easy and safe as filling up with gasoline.
> The 99% of user do NOT care what cpu they use, so it makes no sense to create a line of machine for more then one processor company.
It makes sense if you want to force your vendor to compete with another vendor(s), to drive down price, or drive up performance and features. It also removes your reliance on one vendor's whims. If one vendor can't (or won't) deliver, you can always use another.
This is similar to how the open standard Jabber/XMPP protocol and google talk (based on said protocol) works.
In Jabber clients, your IM name looks a lot like an email address, so that the server knows what server to send a particular message to. So for example, if you have a jabber.org IM account, and you want to talk to someone on a Google Talk account, you can just add username@gmail.com to your buddy list (or in reverse, you can add username@jabber.org to your GTalk buddy list).
My business runs a Jabber server (wildfire), which is quite happily able to send and receive messages from Google Talk and other Jabber/XMPP servers. I find this convenient, because my email address looks exactly the same as my IM name.
It should actually be possible for the big players (Yahoo, AOL, MS) to create a backend that uses this open standard to communicate with all the other Jabber servers and Google Talk - even if they still want to use their own proprietary front end (which I would be ok with, since I would just use my personal jabber account to communicate with friends and family on those other networks). They would just need to add the ability to use email style IM names, and then assign special meaning to them (e.g. use the jabber server to server protocol when one of those IM names is encountered). From the other side, if I wanted to add an AIM account to my Jabber account, I would just need to add @aim.com (or aol.com or whatever they choose) or a hotmail.com email address, or a yahoo.com email address to my buddy list.
With all the complaining they do about people using unofficial IM clients on their networks (lost ad revenue, with added overhead to support all those users), you'd think they would welcome this kind of opportunity.
This is a great question. There are many css2 and css3 features that have been missing for quite a while, and it would be great to see some support for these technologies added to the web dev's tool kit (@font-face and rgba are two examples that come to mind).
Slashdot Mirror
It's interesting, but I hear a lot of people on slashdot and in tech and gaming publishing refer to themselves as "libertarian" even though, as someone who follows politics in the US pretty closely, I can tell that they usually are not. I once read an article on ign.com about game resellers and copyright protection, where they writer actually said that he was for keeping the current copyright system (status-quo) because he "tended to be libertarian on these issues." I would think a libertarian would want to get rid of copyrights altogether and let the markets decided. But what do I know. I'm not sure there really is a political "side" that slashdotters tend to fit into properly - if anything they tend to be more conservative about trying new things, they don't want to necessarily change things that for them don't seem broken - hence the status-quo comment - but they tend to be progressive on social issues, especially obvious wedge issues, and tend to favor fairness - and these ideas tend to be considered more liberal.
I'm not a fan of protesting, which IMO is just a bunch of people, sparing a little time and effort as possible, standing around whining with signs in their hands. An activity that is easily ignored. If you want to make a real difference in American politics, learn how our two party systems works, learn from the history or the rise of the conservative right and other influential groups, and realize that the way to make a difference, is to organize and build influence in one of the two national parties. Democrats are frankly in need of such influence.
Most of us seem perfectly willing to play around with all that flamable liquid right now. ;-)
With appropriate safety precautions in place, I don't see why this couldn't be just as easy and safe as filling up with gasoline.
> The 99% of user do NOT care what cpu they use, so it makes no sense to create a line of machine for more then one processor company. It makes sense if you want to force your vendor to compete with another vendor(s), to drive down price, or drive up performance and features. It also removes your reliance on one vendor's whims. If one vendor can't (or won't) deliver, you can always use another.
This is similar to how the open standard Jabber/XMPP protocol and google talk (based on said protocol) works.
In Jabber clients, your IM name looks a lot like an email address, so that the server knows what server to send a particular message to. So for example, if you have a jabber.org IM account, and you want to talk to someone on a Google Talk account, you can just add username@gmail.com to your buddy list (or in reverse, you can add username@jabber.org to your GTalk buddy list).
My business runs a Jabber server (wildfire), which is quite happily able to send and receive messages from Google Talk and other Jabber/XMPP servers. I find this convenient, because my email address looks exactly the same as my IM name.
It should actually be possible for the big players (Yahoo, AOL, MS) to create a backend that uses this open standard to communicate with all the other Jabber servers and Google Talk - even if they still want to use their own proprietary front end (which I would be ok with, since I would just use my personal jabber account to communicate with friends and family on those other networks). They would just need to add the ability to use email style IM names, and then assign special meaning to them (e.g. use the jabber server to server protocol when one of those IM names is encountered). From the other side, if I wanted to add an AIM account to my Jabber account, I would just need to add @aim.com (or aol.com or whatever they choose) or a hotmail.com email address, or a yahoo.com email address to my buddy list.
With all the complaining they do about people using unofficial IM clients on their networks (lost ad revenue, with added overhead to support all those users), you'd think they would welcome this kind of opportunity.
This is a great question. There are many css2 and css3 features that have been missing for quite a while, and it would be great to see some support for these technologies added to the web dev's tool kit (@font-face and rgba are two examples that come to mind).