and Microsoft was soon to follow regarding the Xbox Next
Sure, the X-Box looks impressive, but I predict that the X-Box Next will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own one.
Bitching about what Microsoft does with their money is invalid as long as Microsoft earned it all fair and square.
What's that, you say? Monopoly? Abuse of power? Violation of the Sherman Act? Conviction in federal court? So they didn't earn it all fair and square?
Then let the bitching commence. I for one am simultaneously glad that such international charity efforts will be happening, and yet sad that Microsoft had to extort all that money in the first place. What if they had instead played fair to begin with, and left consumers (not to mention all the companies they crushed) with the choice about how to spend their own money? (No, Microsoft never held a gun to anyone's head and said "Buy Windows," but eliminating virtually all the competition is de facto the same.)
Uh... so what? Things in the public domain are not under copyright; everyone has an equal right to make use of them. Why exactly is it hypocritical, as you imply, to want to protect your copyright, while mining the public domain for ideas?
I don't approve of the way Hollywood is trying to protect their copyrights, but there's nothing hypocritical about both using public domain works, and caring about your copyright.
Churches almost invariably contain a layer over that "heart" consisting of dogmatic nonsense--and that's ignoring the churches, which is most of them, where the dogmatic nonsense is the heart of that church's existence. I don't like supporting such organizations.
The original poster's point is that no matter how much effort you put into it, humans are fallible and things will occasionally slip by. Yes, whoever was responsible should be torn a new asshole, but for everyone to be tearing their hair out and crying lamentations of woe is pointless. Shit does happen. Deal with it. Don't sit there wallowing in pity over it.
Hey, as long as you don't try to force anyone else to believe in that rather odd-sounding God of yours, or try to get legislation passed based on things he purportedly told your ancestors, more power to you:)
I worked with a guy who had a sign on his door, "Life is the only game in which the goal is to learn the rules." It somewhat applies here as well.
Clearly he never played Mao.:) Or Petals Around the Rose...
The previous sentence in the article you linked says that the average age of players is 29, which indicates the fact that most games kids play are purchased for them by their parents.
At any rate, you could adjust the GP's post to say "12-34" and the point would remain the same. Thirtysomething men aren't any less obsessed with tits and ass than teenagers are, they just have other things distracting them (and years to get used to the hormones).
They estimate that the US/EU/Japan together lose $80B/year. The Bush administration will take "whatever means are necessary" to force a change.
So if there was no piracy, then the entertainment industries of the US, EU, and Japan would have an additional $80 billion a year in income?
Yeah. If every single person who acquired a pirated copy had instead bought a legit copy. Prove that that would have happened, and I'll make up that $80 billion difference.
There is simply NO reasonable way to participate in this society without giving money to people we don't like. Just one of those unfortunate facts of existence.
True; it's nearly impossible to function in society without some of your money ending up in the pockets of people you revile, or whose politics you think are horrific. But if you do happen to find out that an author, store, or corporation turns out to have political beliefs (or personal practices, or business practices) that you find abhorrent, you have plenty of other options about where to spend your money. (True, you can only get Card's books from Card, but if you find Card abhorrent, you can either be a hypocrite and support him anyway, or you can suck it up and do without "Ender's Game.")
And actually, a rational member of society shouldn't want everyone to believe the same things. Groups, even the size of societies, are strengthened as a whole by dissent and difference of opinion. Homogenous societies are much weaker.
The bottom line is that the prohibition against exclusive homosexuality is not a recent, Christian phenomenon. It has been present in virtually all cultures, at all times, in all places. Even the Greeks, whom gay advocates like to cite as proof that rejection of homosexuality is not universal, did not practice anything like what todays gay movement advocates.
The point is that you can't find any culture, anywhere, that practiced the kind of homosexuality that gay rights folks advocate today.
While what you say is factually true (modulo my ignorance of history), the problem is that people use those historical facts to buttress the idea that gay people should not be allowed to practice the kind of homosexuality they do today, even though doing so is both argumentum ad antiquitatem ("It's right because it's always been that way") and argumentum ad numerum ("It's right because lots of people think it's right"). You don't agree with that logic, as you state at the end of your post. Do I have that right?
If your intent is to try to improve Slashdot, may I suggest that calling the editors "morons," saying that what they do is "idiotic," calling the site "miserable," and being generally hostile, both:
A) is not likely to get the editors to listen to you, and
B) does not indicate that you care about the site or want it to get better? It sounds like you just want an excuse to bitch and moan.
And before you take me to task over the way I'm going about it, note that I got YOU involved, now didn't I?
Yes, mostly on the order of shooting down your various claims. You got me working against you. That doesn't really qualify as success in getting/. changed the way you want it.
but they'll still have an operating system with lurking landmine bugs that will crash in exactly the same way for some other product next week.
This is exactly why Microsoft includes Minesweeper with Windows -- so you can get rid of those "landmine" bugs! Minesweeper is really just an intuitive debugging interface.
Okay, maybe this is just too obvious, but since you apparently hate this site so much ("every idiotic thing", "moron editors", "they seem to have taken a liking to stupid braindead bloggers", "this miserable site"), why are you still posting here? Masochism? Stupidity? Lack of ability or desire to find anywhere better to go?
So, basically your argument here is that Slashdot is a worthless wannabe news aggregator and there's no conceivably good reason to come here since I could get better context and more accurate information from Google News?
If you want to make shit up and pretend that I said it, then yeah, sure, go ahead. My actual argument is that/. is really about the discussions; the stories provide a springboard for those discussions. Providing substantially more background in the stories isn't worth the time of the submitters, the editors, or (because most readers are at least passingly familiar with the issues) most of the readership.
if they want me to go out to various sites and read things for my informational pleasures so that I keep coming back to give them ad revenue then they better damn well tell me what I'm clicking through to BEFORE I CLICK THROUGH TO IT
You seem to be asking for a summary of what each link goes to, rather than, you know, clicking on the link and reading it. God forbid!
As if that weren't bad enough, in case you haven't noticed lately, the editors have shown an amazing inability as of late to tell the difference between legit stories, and troll and astroturfing "stories"
When troll or astroturf stories show up, they get debunked/revealed in the discussion. Since the point of/. is the discussions, what's the problem? And can you give me a few examples of such stories? I want to make sure we're thinking about the same thing.
I suppose, however, you don't have a problem with blind-clicking through links.
Blind click-through on this one, please.
I don't think you even know what you mean by "blind-clicking." Presumably it means "clicking on a link without knowing where it goes." Well, see, there's this handy little status bar at the bottom of my browser window -- yours, too, I'll wager -- that, when you mouseover a link, tells you what site it goes to. And if that isn't helpful enough, usually the content of the link itself gives some clue what the link goes to.
And/. stories don't really link to NSFW stuff like goatse. You seem to be saying that because I'd click on a/. story link without carefully analyzing it or knowing in advance exactly what it links to, that I'd blindly click on a goatse link that some random joe posts in a discussion thread. Are you mad? *looks at username* Oh. Huh.
Before I read any of the linked text, I should know the basics about what's going on, who Ubisoft is, and who Costikyan is.
In the time you spent writing your post, you could have Googled the information you were looking for, rather than wasting everyone's time listening to you whine, and remaining ignorant.
Slashdot stories are not going to suddenly get longer because people like you refuse to put out a little effort.
If you're going to claim to post news articles with information in them
I don't see where the editors claim that the stories posted on Slashdot are comprehensive news articles. The tagline "News for Nerds" is colloquial at best; nobody ever confuses Slashdot with a "real" news site like CNN. Slashdot has always gotten 99% of its stories from user submissions where they link to other websites. Expecting it to change because you're too lazy to hit Google is absurd.
I love how everything that is critical (no matter how just the claims are and how well they are written) gets modded down here.
Bullshit. Not all do, but plenty of critical posts end up at +5. Shit, the one you're replying to is at +3 right now. Maybe I should complain about the number of worthless anti-Slashdot whine posts like yours that get modded up.
If it is part of a natural cycle, then there is no "proof" that changing our pollution will do anything.
Specifically, that changing our pollution will do anything about the climate. Pollution has other effects on the human race, like increasing respiratory diseases, cancer, damaging our food supplies, tainting water, general ecological chaos, etc. I know this may seem obvious to some, but a lot of people will pretend that because global warming may not be caused by humans, therefore it's okay to have a smog-spewing, gas-guzzling SUV. For example.
If only there was some kind of website that enabled people to, somehow, make use of an engine that would automatically search through the approximately googol pages on the Internet. If only!
federal officials are developing government-wide identification card standards for federal employees and contractors to prevent terrorists, criminals and other unauthorized people from getting into government buildings and computer systems.
Yeah. I'm sure that this new ID card will "prevent terrorists, criminals and other unauthorized people from getting into government buildings and computer systems."
I smell someone trying to convince people that security can be had in a product, rather than requiring constant vigilance, like it really does.
Slashdot Mirror
Riiight. Because as we all know, conservative bloggers never do anything wrong, and are all open-minded!
News for you, buddy: Being fucked up is pretty well spread across the entire political spectrum.
(Thanks, Simpsons!)
That's odd. When I looked at it just now, it says "valuable hostage". I guess they changed it?
Bitching about what Microsoft does with their money is invalid as long as Microsoft earned it all fair and square.
What's that, you say? Monopoly? Abuse of power? Violation of the Sherman Act? Conviction in federal court? So they didn't earn it all fair and square?
Then let the bitching commence. I for one am simultaneously glad that such international charity efforts will be happening, and yet sad that Microsoft had to extort all that money in the first place. What if they had instead played fair to begin with, and left consumers (not to mention all the companies they crushed) with the choice about how to spend their own money? (No, Microsoft never held a gun to anyone's head and said "Buy Windows," but eliminating virtually all the competition is de facto the same.)
Uh... so what? Things in the public domain are not under copyright; everyone has an equal right to make use of them. Why exactly is it hypocritical, as you imply, to want to protect your copyright, while mining the public domain for ideas?
I don't approve of the way Hollywood is trying to protect their copyrights, but there's nothing hypocritical about both using public domain works, and caring about your copyright.
Churches almost invariably contain a layer over that "heart" consisting of dogmatic nonsense--and that's ignoring the churches, which is most of them, where the dogmatic nonsense is the heart of that church's existence. I don't like supporting such organizations.
The original poster's point is that no matter how much effort you put into it, humans are fallible and things will occasionally slip by. Yes, whoever was responsible should be torn a new asshole, but for everyone to be tearing their hair out and crying lamentations of woe is pointless. Shit does happen. Deal with it. Don't sit there wallowing in pity over it.
Despite your church's relatively liberal religio-socio-political beliefs, there's still that whole "God exists" thing which kills it for me. :)
And how exactly does you posting on Slashdot solve these problems?
I've got this black friend, Mr. Kettle, whom you might be interested in meeting.
Sequel coming soon:
The Naked Gun 44 1/4: Nordberg Gets The Chair
Q: What do you do with 100 lawyers buried up to their necks in sand?
A: Get more sand.
And another:
Scientists are now reporting that they've started using lawyers instead of rats in their experiments. They gave three reasons why:
1. There are now more lawyers than rats.
2. The scientists don't get as attached to the lawyers.
3. There are some things even a rat won't do.
The previous sentence in the article you linked says that the average age of players is 29, which indicates the fact that most games kids play are purchased for them by their parents.
At any rate, you could adjust the GP's post to say "12-34" and the point would remain the same. Thirtysomething men aren't any less obsessed with tits and ass than teenagers are, they just have other things distracting them (and years to get used to the hormones).
Yeah. If every single person who acquired a pirated copy had instead bought a legit copy. Prove that that would have happened, and I'll make up that $80 billion difference.
And actually, a rational member of society shouldn't want everyone to believe the same things. Groups, even the size of societies, are strengthened as a whole by dissent and difference of opinion. Homogenous societies are much weaker.
A) is not likely to get the editors to listen to you, and
B) does not indicate that you care about the site or want it to get better? It sounds like you just want an excuse to bitch and moan.
Yes, mostly on the order of shooting down your various claims. You got me working against you. That doesn't really qualify as success in gettingOkay, maybe this is just too obvious, but since you apparently hate this site so much ("every idiotic thing", "moron editors", "they seem to have taken a liking to stupid braindead bloggers", "this miserable site"), why are you still posting here? Masochism? Stupidity? Lack of ability or desire to find anywhere better to go?
And /. stories don't really link to NSFW stuff like goatse. You seem to be saying that because I'd click on a /. story link without carefully analyzing it or knowing in advance exactly what it links to, that I'd blindly click on a goatse link that some random joe posts in a discussion thread. Are you mad? *looks at username* Oh. Huh.
Slashdot stories are not going to suddenly get longer because people like you refuse to put out a little effort.
I don't see where the editors claim that the stories posted on Slashdot are comprehensive news articles. The tagline "News for Nerds" is colloquial at best; nobody ever confuses Slashdot with a "real" news site like CNN. Slashdot has always gotten 99% of its stories from user submissions where they link to other websites. Expecting it to change because you're too lazy to hit Google is absurd.Yeah. I'm sure that this new ID card will "prevent terrorists, criminals and other unauthorized people from getting into government buildings and computer systems."
I smell someone trying to convince people that security can be had in a product, rather than requiring constant vigilance, like it really does.