my commentary deals more with the act of *practicing* homosexuality vs. their orientation/preference. And we all know there are limits to how religion may be practiced. I may *choose* to be a member of a "religion" that advocates group suicide. We might all want to stand in a circle, point and gun at the head of the person on your right and when the "preacher" says, "Go!". We all pull the trigger (so we all get to go to heaven and get 70 philly-cheesesteak sandwiches or some such foolishness). I know it's a ridiculous example, however my point is there *are* limits placed on how one practices something they believe in.
At no time did I ever prospose that homosexuals weren't born with a predisposition to being homosexual. My post stated that PRACTICING homosexuality is a choice whereas blacks or asians or latinos or whomever have no such choice. Big difference.
You people really need to stop comparing homosexality with race or gender. It is truly an insult to blacks or asians or women or whomever... Like it or not, homosexuals CHOOSE to practice homosexuality. And I'm not arguing whether or not gays and lesbians are *born* with that predisposition. Scientists claim that many murderers and child rapists are born with a predisposition to commit their particular crimes however society doesn't tolerate these things. Practicing homosexuality is a choice, not a racial or gender trait.
Most of the people who are saying a closed driver API into the kernel would be a GOOD thing have Slashdot UIDs over 500,000. I think, somewhere along the line, "the message" has gotten lost. As I posted earlier, "Linux" is as much a philosophy as anything. It's about being open. It's about giving people the ability to make something they don't like into something they do. You can't do that with closed source software. I don't ever remember reading or hearing anywhere that the stated goal of "Linux" was to try and supplant every other Desktop and Server OS out there. I don't ever remember reading or hearing that "Linux" was going to be easy or accomodating for the casual user. Certainly, there are hundered of projects whos stated goals ARE to make the Desktop or Server distros of Linux easier to use. But people need to remember "Linux", at its most basic is about being free and open. If you want easy, get a Mac;)
Linux was, is and hopefully will always be "open". I don't want closed drivers in the kernel (even via an API layer) any more than I want a Sony rootkit masquerading as DRM. It isn't about "politics". It's about policy and philosophy. If the hardware doesn't work with Linux, don't buy the hardware/pester the vendor for an open driver, or don't run Linux.
When I go back and watch movies like "The Goonies" or "E.T." or "Cocoon" or even the first three "Star Wars" movies, I can't help but be caught up in that sense of wonder I felt when I first watched them. It just seems easier to suspend disbelief. Now, it might be because I watched these movies as a child/teenager, but I don't think so... Even "old" movies like "Rear Window" (greatest movie ever IMO) or "Casablanca" (ALSO the greatest movie ever;) which I didn't watch until I was much older seem to just draw you completely in and keep you entraced right up to the end. Maybe it IS the overkill with special effects or maybe it is just the shear glut of movies coming from Hollywood nowadays. But I don't think so... I think Woody Allen is right and somewhere along the way the art of crafting Hollywood movies has been diluted. Maybe "The Chronicles of Narnia" will get it right...
Do duplicate stories in some way, shape or form hurt you? Do they cause evil or bad fortune to descend upon you and your family? Do they offend your delicate sense of what is good and just in the universe? Do they cause you to have pimples on your ass? If you answered "No" to all the above questions, maybe you should quit your whiny-ass bitching about duplicate stories and contribute something meaninful to another discussion.
Spam is most certainly NOT Free Speech. Much like junk faxes, e-mail spam places most of the burden and cost of disposing of spam onto the receiver. Just because my front door faces the street doesn't mean anyone can come up to my door and try to sell me something or even try to just TELL me something. I can put up signs that say "No tresspassing" or "No solicitation" and because I OWN that property, you have to have permission to come onto my property or you are tresspassing. And I can assure you that if some fool started preaching loudly on the sidewalk adjacent to my lawn in the middle of the night, I would call the police an report it as disturbing the peace. They have the right to say or think it, but I have the right to choose not to be disturbed by it. Free Speech laws are intended to protect a person's right to think and speak without fear of government oppression. There are also laws to protect a person's right to privacy and personal possession. It is MY e-mail account. I pay for it. If I give someone my e-mail address, that, and ONLY that gives that person permission to send me e-mail. If I revoke that permission, that person should no longer be able to send me e-mail. Just because my mail account is open to anyone doesn't mean I have to tolerate unsolicited marketing. Spam isn't an act of Free Speech. It is an act of marketing or solicitation. There are plenty of laws that restrict the "rights" of marketers and solicitors. Spam should be no different.
Damn, people. It is *their* site. They can post dupes all they want. If you don't have anything positive to say about what has been posted (or already posted in the first article) move along to the next article. Damn bunch of whiny-ass, Slashdot bashin' wankers. I've yet to see a dupe that didn't provoke good discussion in both posts and I've been reading Slashdot for quite a while. It is a discussion site, not a professional journal. Shaddup, already.
I'm suprised nobody has mentioned this yet but how many times in the past year have you lost a TV remote or a cordless phone down in a couch? This is just one more device to get lost. Kids can carry them out of the room, dogs can bury them under the bed, overzealous parents might think the are "broken" and chuck them... I'm all for wireless but for SOME things it is nice to be able to just follow the cord and find the device. At least give people an option...
One of the things that dissapointed me about the AEx was the inability to stream to it from other audio sources. For instance... Living in Kentucky, I don't have a clear view of the southern sky so I can't get Direct TV, so I can't get NHL Center Ice, so I can't watch my beloved Colorado Avalanche. Luckily for me, nhl.com streams the radio broadcasts of all the games via Windows Media Player. That works great since I can listen to them on my Mac or my Windows box. We had an old laptop connected to the stereo and via wireless connection could listen to the games. After last season, the laptop died and after I heard about the AEx I thought that might be cheaper than buying a used laptop to replace the broken one. But obviously, you can't stream to the AEx from WMP, so I was out of luck. I know I can buy some other device to stream audio to the stereo but we do use iTunes on both our Macs and PCs so the AEx would fit well into our setup. The point to this long, boring post is that *if* we could stream any audio source from any Mac/PC to our stereos, we would probably buy two or three AEx's. Apple gets my money for the hardware and I get my NHL fix and we are all happy (well, maybe not the Apple lawers but I'm sure they won't go hungry:)
Other people have posted comments similar to yours. You just had fewer replies so I thought this would be a good place to post this. Judging by your UID (which is really the only thing I have to go on besides your comment), I'd say you haven't been "around" the community that long. Believe it or not, Slashdot , although a Geek news site in general, used to post mostly news about Linux and the Linux community. Also, you might be interested to know, the Linux "community" was actually a "community" in the true sense of the word. People used to actually know each other and events that occured in members personal lives were discussed much like you might discuss things that happen in the lives of your family or friends or co-workers. Over the years, the Slashdot user base has grown substantially and many users aren't familiar with the personal spirit that used to pervade typical discussions. Although this may not be "Stuff that matters" to you, it is still of interest to those of us that have followed Linux and Linus since the early years.
As a die-hard PC gamer, I really hope developers don't give up the PC platform in favor of dumbed-down console games. However, it occurs to me that the big loser in the PC to console game migration might be Microsoft. How many times do you hear someone make the comment that they keep a MS based PC around just for games? I currently use a PowerBook and a G4 and even on my x86 boxes, I run Linux. But I always keep a partition on my fastest x86 box installed with Windows, just so I can play x86 only games. So I wonder... Assuming that people are no longer tethered to the x86/Windows platform for gaming, could this be the beginning of the end of the MS stranglehold on the OS market?
I know that this will be worn out on this thread, but I'll be DAMN if I'm going to watch a half-ass attempt to recreate a classic sci-fi series that changes the gender of two of the main characters. That is just blatant pandering to try and interest different demographics. You wouldn't make Buck Rogers a woman and you wouldn't make Wonder Woman a man. I just don't see why people can't leave well enough alone. The original series was popular for a reason. Why change the formula?
Damn. I hope you put on your asbestos suit before you posted this question. You are going to get flamed BIG-TIME:) The "Free Internet", as you refer to it, was here long before your banner ads and attempts at commercialization. And regardless of what the doomsaying, non money-making web weenies say, it will be here long after you are gone. Take a hint from HBO... If you want to make money off your Internet investment, offer content that people are willing to pay for. Don't get mad when people find a way to bypass your bandwith-wasting banners ads. And don't bitch at Symantec. If people didn't ask for the feature, it wouldn't be incorporated into the product. But I DO agree with the position Symantec should probably make users aware of what their product is doing and give users a way to turn it on and off for specific sites.
You hear this argument alot when commercial entities who utilize Linux are asked to abide by the criteria set forth in the GPL. While it may be "enough of a victory" in the sense that a commercial vendor is using Linux, it still defeats the purpose of the GPL. I think people need to be reminded sometimes that Open Source/Free Software/GNU/GPL's (or whatever you want to call it) reason for existence is *not* commercial adoption. Way "back in the day", we were interested in commercial adoption of Free Software because we knew that it was a better alternative. We knew that commercial adoption would greatly increase the number of people working on and *sharing* Free Software. But commercial adoption wasn't the main goal in and of itself. The main goal was to create a pool of sofware that wasn't controlled by a commercial entity. So, while it may be great that Linksys is creating products that use Free Software, it doesn't benefit the community that created that sofware if Linksys doesn't live up to their end of the agreement and help enrich the pool of software by giving back.
It's exactly this sort of logic that has prevented any meaningful progress in the War Against E-mail Spam. Even though you don't see it on your bill, E-mail spam DOES cost the end user in money and time, just like SMS spam. Spammers would have you believe that spam is "free" and of course their favorite argument, "It's easy to just hit delete". But, as many of us know, this argument is misleading. Certainly this line of thinking would have some validity if we just received one or two pieces of spam a day. However, the truth of the matter is that for someone who makes $20 or $30 an hour, a half an hour a day to wade through 100s of E-mail spams beccomes quite costly. All of the sudden, 10 or 20 SMS spams a day at $0.10 a pop look cheap in comparison. And this doesn't even begin to touch upon the added costs in equipment, bandwidth and personnel that ISPs have to procure to store, send/receive and try to stem the flood E-mail spam. Those costs almost certainly will be passed on to the customer as well. We need to try to get rid of ALL spam. Whether it's SMS, E-mail, dead tree, fax or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
my commentary deals more with the act of *practicing* homosexuality vs. their orientation/preference. And we all know there are limits to how religion may be practiced.
I may *choose* to be a member of a "religion" that advocates group suicide. We might all want to stand in a circle, point and gun at the head of the person on your right and when the "preacher" says, "Go!". We all pull the trigger (so we all get to go to heaven and get 70 philly-cheesesteak sandwiches or some such foolishness).
I know it's a ridiculous example, however my point is there *are* limits placed on how one practices something they believe in.
At no time did I ever prospose that homosexuals weren't born with a predisposition to being homosexual. My post stated that PRACTICING homosexuality is a choice whereas blacks or asians or latinos or whomever have no such choice. Big difference.
You people really need to stop comparing homosexality with race or gender. It is truly an insult to blacks or asians or women or whomever...
Like it or not, homosexuals CHOOSE to practice homosexuality. And I'm not arguing whether or not gays and lesbians are *born* with that predisposition. Scientists claim that many murderers and child rapists are born with a predisposition to commit their particular crimes however society doesn't tolerate these things.
Practicing homosexuality is a choice, not a racial or gender trait.
Most of the people who are saying a closed driver API into the kernel would be a GOOD thing have Slashdot UIDs over 500,000. I think, somewhere along the line, "the message" has gotten lost. ;)
As I posted earlier, "Linux" is as much a philosophy as anything. It's about being open. It's about giving people the ability to make something they don't like into something they do. You can't do that with closed source software. I don't ever remember reading or hearing anywhere that the stated goal of "Linux" was to try and supplant every other Desktop and Server OS out there. I don't ever remember reading or hearing that "Linux" was going to be easy or accomodating for the casual user. Certainly, there are hundered of projects whos stated goals ARE to make the Desktop or Server distros of Linux easier to use. But people need to remember "Linux", at its most basic is about being free and open.
If you want easy, get a Mac
Linux was, is and hopefully will always be "open". I don't want closed drivers in the kernel (even via an API layer) any more than I want a Sony rootkit masquerading as DRM.
It isn't about "politics". It's about policy and philosophy.
If the hardware doesn't work with Linux, don't buy the hardware/pester the vendor for an open driver, or don't run Linux.
wouldn't stars be "planets" as well?
to work everyday really doesn't have a DAMN thing to do with the TELECOMMUTING question, now does it...
When I go back and watch movies like "The Goonies" or "E.T." or "Cocoon" or even the first three "Star Wars" movies, I can't help but be caught up in that sense of wonder I felt when I first watched them. It just seems easier to suspend disbelief. Now, it might be because I watched these movies as a child/teenager, but I don't think so... Even "old" movies like "Rear Window" (greatest movie ever IMO) or "Casablanca" (ALSO the greatest movie ever ;) which I didn't watch until I was much older seem to just draw you completely in and keep you entraced right up to the end.
Maybe it IS the overkill with special effects or maybe it is just the shear glut of movies coming from Hollywood nowadays. But I don't think so... I think Woody Allen is right and somewhere along the way the art of crafting Hollywood movies has been diluted.
Maybe "The Chronicles of Narnia" will get it right...
when the power goes out, I won't be able to get on the Internet...
Do duplicate stories in some way, shape or form hurt you? Do they cause evil or bad fortune to descend upon you and your family? Do they offend your delicate sense of what is good and just in the universe? Do they cause you to have pimples on your ass?
If you answered "No" to all the above questions, maybe you should quit your whiny-ass bitching about duplicate stories and contribute something meaninful to another discussion.
Spam is most certainly NOT Free Speech. Much like junk faxes, e-mail spam places most of the burden and cost of disposing of spam onto the receiver. Just because my front door faces the street doesn't mean anyone can come up to my door and try to sell me something or even try to just TELL me something. I can put up signs that say "No tresspassing" or "No solicitation" and because I OWN that property, you have to have permission to come onto my property or you are tresspassing. And I can assure you that if some fool started preaching loudly on the sidewalk adjacent to my lawn in the middle of the night, I would call the police an report it as disturbing the peace. They have the right to say or think it, but I have the right to choose not to be disturbed by it.
Free Speech laws are intended to protect a person's right to think and speak without fear of government oppression. There are also laws to protect a person's right to privacy and personal possession. It is MY e-mail account. I pay for it. If I give someone my e-mail address, that, and ONLY that gives that person permission to send me e-mail. If I revoke that permission, that person should no longer be able to send me e-mail. Just because my mail account is open to anyone doesn't mean I have to tolerate unsolicited marketing.
Spam isn't an act of Free Speech. It is an act of marketing or solicitation. There are plenty of laws that restrict the "rights" of marketers and solicitors. Spam should be no different.
Moderators need a new category:
-1 Dupe Bitcher
Damn, people. It is *their* site. They can post dupes all they want. If you don't have anything positive to say about what has been posted (or already posted in the first article) move along to the next article. Damn bunch of whiny-ass, Slashdot bashin' wankers.
I've yet to see a dupe that didn't provoke good discussion in both posts and I've been reading Slashdot for quite a while.
It is a discussion site, not a professional journal. Shaddup, already.
I'm suprised nobody has mentioned this yet but how many times in the past year have you lost a TV remote or a cordless phone down in a couch? This is just one more device to get lost. Kids can carry them out of the room, dogs can bury them under the bed, overzealous parents might think the are "broken" and chuck them...
I'm all for wireless but for SOME things it is nice to be able to just follow the cord and find the device. At least give people an option...
I thought the term "wanker" was British but I guess it must actually be Dutch...
Dude, the KDE police are going to get you. It should be:
*kough*
One of the things that dissapointed me about the AEx was the inability to stream to it from other audio sources. For instance... Living in Kentucky, I don't have a clear view of the southern sky so I can't get Direct TV, so I can't get NHL Center Ice, so I can't watch my beloved Colorado Avalanche. Luckily for me, nhl.com streams the radio broadcasts of all the games via Windows Media Player. That works great since I can listen to them on my Mac or my Windows box. We had an old laptop connected to the stereo and via wireless connection could listen to the games. After last season, the laptop died and after I heard about the AEx I thought that might be cheaper than buying a used laptop to replace the broken one. But obviously, you can't stream to the AEx from WMP, so I was out of luck. I know I can buy some other device to stream audio to the stereo but we do use iTunes on both our Macs and PCs so the AEx would fit well into our setup. :)
The point to this long, boring post is that *if* we could stream any audio source from any Mac/PC to our stereos, we would probably buy two or three AEx's. Apple gets my money for the hardware and I get my NHL fix and we are all happy (well, maybe not the Apple lawers but I'm sure they won't go hungry
Other people have posted comments similar to yours. You just had fewer replies so I thought this would be a good place to post this.
Judging by your UID (which is really the only thing I have to go on besides your comment), I'd say you haven't been "around" the community that long. Believe it or not, Slashdot , although a Geek news site in general, used to post mostly news about Linux and the Linux community. Also, you might be interested to know, the Linux "community" was actually a "community" in the true sense of the word. People used to actually know each other and events that occured in members personal lives were discussed much like you might discuss things that happen in the lives of your family or friends or co-workers.
Over the years, the Slashdot user base has grown substantially and many users aren't familiar with the personal spirit that used to pervade typical discussions. Although this may not be "Stuff that matters" to you, it is still of interest to those of us that have followed Linux and Linus since the early years.
As a die-hard PC gamer, I really hope developers don't give up the PC platform in favor of dumbed-down console games. However, it occurs to me that the big loser in the PC to console game migration might be Microsoft. How many times do you hear someone make the comment that they keep a MS based PC around just for games? I currently use a PowerBook and a G4 and even on my x86 boxes, I run Linux. But I always keep a partition on my fastest x86 box installed with Windows, just so I can play x86 only games. So I wonder... Assuming that people are no longer tethered to the x86/Windows platform for gaming, could this be the beginning of the end of the MS stranglehold on the OS market?
Listening to some of those Japanese samples, I can't help but think this technology will make its way into Final Fantasy very quickly.
I know that this will be worn out on this thread, but I'll be DAMN if I'm going to watch a half-ass attempt to recreate a classic sci-fi series that changes the gender of two of the main characters. That is just blatant pandering to try and interest different demographics. You wouldn't make Buck Rogers a woman and you wouldn't make Wonder Woman a man. I just don't see why people can't leave well enough alone. The original series was popular for a reason. Why change the formula?
Damn. I hope you put on your asbestos suit before you posted this question. You are going to get flamed BIG-TIME :)
The "Free Internet", as you refer to it, was here long before your banner ads and attempts at commercialization. And regardless of what the doomsaying, non money-making web weenies say, it will be here long after you are gone.
Take a hint from HBO... If you want to make money off your Internet investment, offer content that people are willing to pay for. Don't get mad when people find a way to bypass your bandwith-wasting banners ads. And don't bitch at Symantec. If people didn't ask for the feature, it wouldn't be incorporated into the product. But I DO agree with the position Symantec should probably make users aware of what their product is doing and give users a way to turn it on and off for specific sites.
You hear this argument alot when commercial entities who utilize Linux are asked to abide by the criteria set forth in the GPL. While it may be "enough of a victory" in the sense that a commercial vendor is using Linux, it still defeats the purpose of the GPL. I think people need to be reminded sometimes that Open Source/Free Software/GNU/GPL's (or whatever you want to call it) reason for existence is *not* commercial adoption. Way "back in the day", we were interested in commercial adoption of Free Software because we knew that it was a better alternative. We knew that commercial adoption would greatly increase the number of people working on and *sharing* Free Software. But commercial adoption wasn't the main goal in and of itself. The main goal was to create a pool of sofware that wasn't controlled by a commercial entity.
So, while it may be great that Linksys is creating products that use Free Software, it doesn't benefit the community that created that sofware if Linksys doesn't live up to their end of the agreement and help enrich the pool of software by giving back.
BlackHat = Evil hacker/cracker
Whitehat= Good hacker/cracker
RedHat = Linux Distro
Asshat = Spammer
Cool. I like it.
Right. Like any self-respecting Linux user is going to use ANY software named, "BILL".
It's exactly this sort of logic that has prevented any meaningful progress in the War Against E-mail Spam. Even though you don't see it on your bill, E-mail spam DOES cost the end user in money and time, just like SMS spam. Spammers would have you believe that spam is "free" and of course their favorite argument, "It's easy to just hit delete". But, as many of us know, this argument is misleading. Certainly this line of thinking would have some validity if we just received one or two pieces of spam a day. However, the truth of the matter is that for someone who makes $20 or $30 an hour, a half an hour a day to wade through 100s of E-mail spams beccomes quite costly. All of the sudden, 10 or 20 SMS spams a day at $0.10 a pop look cheap in comparison. And this doesn't even begin to touch upon the added costs in equipment, bandwidth and personnel that ISPs have to procure to store, send/receive and try to stem the flood E-mail spam. Those costs almost certainly will be passed on to the customer as well.
We need to try to get rid of ALL spam. Whether it's SMS, E-mail, dead tree, fax or whatever.