They are claiming royalties on both SDRAM and DDR SDRAM. 3.5% on DDR and.075% on SDRAM. Sure those are paltry sums taken alone, but it may be enough to power the life support...
Paltry sums?!?!?
They're trying to claim 3.5% and.075% of a market that was anticipated to be $40 BILLION annually! Although most recent estimates are around $20 BILLION, that's not life support money, that's what sent their stock skyrocketing to around $125/share after splitting!
Paltry sums? Oh, wait, you're Bill Gates, aren't you?
In my company, for example, all of the tech guys use UNIX and all of the admin and sales use Windows. We have to interact with each other. If MS aren't going to allow it through their tools, it just means companies like mine will have to migrate to non-MS solutions for even the Windows machines. I just feel that MS are shooting themselves in the foot by taking this sort of approach.
Who do you think will have to change? The executives who make the decisions and run the company, or the workers under them?
In >99% of the companies, the executive decision is the one that gets acted on. And stupid or not, in most cases, the executives will what they like best, which is what they're familiar with, which is Microsoft products. Admin and sales aren't going to change for you. If MS & Unix become incompatible by MS actions, in most cases the execs will just order that the admin and production networks become separate because they don't want to look like weenies trying to relearn a system when they really don't even know Windows very well yet.
We've got to find a MUCH better answer than "the techs like it better".
Futurama is the best SF on tv today. Since it's a cartoon, they can do absolutely anything. Plus, aside from The Simpsons, it's probably the funniest show on the air. Sure, it's not pure SF, but they routinely address topics that the lamer SF shows are afraid to touch.
Any Science Fiction show that can find a coherent way to refer to a space-time problem as an "Intergalactic Wang-Dang Doodle" is pretty much the pinnacle of Science Fiction programming.
"Intergalactic Wang-Dang Doodle" makes about as much sense as the technobabble in the average Star Trek episode, and it's a thousand times more fun to say out loud.
Plus, when you say "Intergalactic Wang-Dang Doodle" in public instead of quoting some Star Trek technobabble, people just assume you're infinitely more hip than they are instead of ridiculing you as a total geek. (Well, maybe not...)
this whole ordeal really makes me question Shawn Fanning's sensibilities. He's a young millioinaire, and a pioneer to boot...he could drop out of the scene now, and live on as a legend in the world of technology...
but, instead, he dumps his money into a useless legal defense, and attempts to re-instate a totally useless service in competition with several more-than adequate replacements for the original, fully functional service. Why?
If I remember correctly, his uncle has a fat wad of cash invested in the company, so I would guess that he's under extreme family pressure to make the business work.
Check out the Sony DCR-PC110 - Mini-DV camcorder with 1152x864 still images. Can be had for ~$1400 US (watch out for the gray market cameras ~$1100 with no battery or warrantee). Although you're certainly correct that the still resolution is nothing to write home about, it's adequate for snapshots and vacation pictures.
I don't know where you take YOUR vacations, but to say 1152x864 is adequate for vacations is absolutely incorrect. When I'm going on vacation, I'm usually travelling far from home, on a trip I'll probably only make once in my life. I won't be able to re-shoot my vacation pictures, so high quality is FAR more important when on vacation. 1152x864 is completely inadequate.
It's perfect! All slashdotters believe you must own a PDA, even if you are a "poor student". They'll make suggestions til the cows come home, never once asking "why not just buy a notepad and a pencil".
Very good troll.
Nice troll yourself, BillyGoatThree.
I, like many many geeks out there, had incredible difficulty remembering appointments, test dates, assignment due dates, and even classes in the real world.
I tried using the notepad method, but before long, it was as jumbled as my perception of time. I tried using about a dozen personal organizers at great cost, but the simple fact is that they didn't appeal to me enough to use on a daily basis because they'd end up with a more eraser marks, cross-outs, smudges and scribbles than actual useful information. I love neatness, even if it is virtually unattainable for me.
I never would have finished my degree if it weren't for personal organizers. I bought a PalmPilot about a week after they came out, and I really believe I owe my degree, in part, to its developers.
Finally, have you priced refills for those paper-based personal organizers? If you buy a baseline Palm, you're in the black when you start your sophomore year!
Why aren't Florida residents allowed to participate?
To hold a sweepstakes or a contest in Florida, the company needs to post bond equal to the total cash value of ALL prizes offered to guarantee that the company can fufill it's promise of prizes.
Florida enacted a law requiring this after thousands of it's elderly residents were scammed by marketing companies promising them riches in contests and sweepstakes.
Thanks to this law, most contest promotion companies believe that the market available in Florida isn't worth the hassle or cost of putting the money up front, so Floridians can't win these promotions.
Yeah, that's exactly what springs to my mind when I try to come up with uses for a supercomputer the size of a PC. To run my coffee pot.
Finally I can actually make coffee at home; I've always wondered how they ran the coffee pot at 7-11 - where I buy all my coffee - but now I know: They use a supercomputer!
This also explains why Starbucks coffee is so expensive... they've been using these "hypercomputers" in a secret back room at each store.
I was speaking to a co-worker the other day about Sun's UltraSPARC III processor and he was telling me about CPU manufacturing in general.
To actually create a fabrication facility to make CPUs, it takes about 20 billion dollars. $20,000,000,000 dollars. That's more than most companies can afford. Even Intel couldn't make very many new fabrication plants.
Your coworker is prone to exaggeration.
AMD recently built a very large, first class, state of the art facility in Dresden, Germany, for roughly 20-25% of the figure he cited.
Assuming one didn't need a very large, first class, or state of the art facility, I would guess that a whole lot less could be spent to get a useful fab up and running. Perhaps even less than 10% of what AMD spent.
This business model is similar to "Invention Submission Corporation" (I think that's the name) that you see on late night TV and on the commercials during BattleBots! You know the one... "Invention Submission Corporation will help you patent your idea and submit it to business and industry..."
This is just another "screw the little guy" scam, only this one is "screw the little guy with high ideals" where ISC is "screw the little guy with high hopes".
You don't need some company to charge you to publish your ideas anymore. That's why setting up your own web page is so powerful, and why the World Wide Web is so empowering! For things JUST LIKE THIS! Set up a web page. Give it some relevant keywords. Get it included in the major search engines. That's all it really takes.
Sure it'd be nice to know you had your ideas somewhere that the USPTO is bound (or better yet, obligated!) to look. But we don't need to pay $20 a pop to do it.
But this DOES point out the need for a centralized database of ideas that shouldn't get patented. Sourceforge? Everything2? Anyone else interested in setting this up?
If you put all the effective crime schemes in one central repository, won't that make it easier for small-time crooks to find them and start inflicting suffering on society's weak and feeble? Won't this also increase the number of copycat crimes?
That's why they charge 99 bucks for it!!! That way YOU TOO can have the secret of making thousands, even millions of dollars on the internet!
Don't you watch ANY late night (or Sunday afternoon) television?
And I remember when late night and Sunday afternoon television used to be about black and white reruns and monster movies. I miss those days...
[snip...] Novell has the most advanced and useful system of file attributes I am aware of. For example, "create" and "write" are separate - this allows the creation of dead-drop boxes; folders where a user can create a file but cannot afterwards modify it. If you can't conceive a situation where you could put this to use, you are "thinking unix" to the point of wearing blinders. [...snip]
Oh, yeah? NAME ONE such situation!
"Please copy your FINAL weekly timesheets in the 'Payroll' directory."
"Save your final budget in the 02Budget directory for consolidation by 1:00 PM EST. No changes to your budget will be permitted after submission without explicit permission of the CFO."
What, are you like a hundred and seventy five years old? Did you bitch and moan when department stores started using Charles Dicken's stories as a marketing tool, too?
Did it bug you later when Walt Disney started to abuse intellectual property laws to support the marketing attached to his cartoons and movies?
Did you get all worked out of shape when that marketing whore George Lucas almost accidentally made a kinda cool movie that totally redefined hollywood... not by redefining the western or science fiction, but by demonstrating to exactly what level art can whore for commerce?
Exactly how old are you, fuck nut?
I shouldn't respond to your flamebait, but I'm going to assume you were too busy playing with your Transformers to see the difference I was pointing out...
Before Transformers, there was plenty of children's entertainment, and YES, it did get used for marketing from time to time. But before Transformers, the children's entertainment had to be popular on its own merit before a line of toys based on it would be made. Transformers changed all that permanently, by combining marketing and entertainment together, with toys already on the shelf before most kids even saw the television program. Ingenious, wicked and effective.
Remember that there weren't any Star Wars toys available until AFTER the movie was popular in theatres. Yes, Lucas got a quick jump, ready to market the stuff, but the movie had to succeed first.
How old am I? I'm old enough to remember cartoon shows that didn't come with their own toys and popular children's toys that didn't come with their own cartoon show.
I see/. ModCops found something they disagree with. Marked as a troll in under a minute.
Dissention from the collective childhood warm-fuzzy remeniscence earns a "Troll" rating?
When I was a child, I was perceptive enough to see the inflection point where cartoons changed from entertainment tools to marketing tools. Seeing this disgusted me... Seeing a crowd of people who otherwise have excellent ability to see through marketing BS get lulled back into this stuff is really scary.
Does everyone in our society have a marketing button that can be pressed, or am I fooling myself thinking that vigilant people can make purely rational purchase decisions?
Maybe it's just me, but I hated Transformer, with a burning passion. Maybe it's because they were the first cartoons designed from the beginning as a marketing tool. Or maybe it's because they just didn't make any sense. You expect to suspend your belief watching a cartoon, but WTF was turning into a truck and back all about??? How stupid did those Japanese marketers and animators think American kids were back then? I only wish we hadn't proven them so right.
Count me out. This is just another foolish $10K I won't be spending.
My fear is that we, as Linux/Unix users, will start having a system that dictates to us how it is to be used as much as the Windows system does today. That is not something I want to see. If it's just a splash screen that can be disabled fine and dandy. But, if it is a splash screen that has to be there then it would bother me. I just don't understand why it is such an exciting and wonderful development in the first place. After all, it is just a splash screen, no?
Hey, that splash screen HAS to be there. After all, so many other packages are dependent on it, and good lord, it's not like we're going to give you the source code, dammit!
You were being a quite the little zealot for a while there.
If AMD are planning on redesigning the 32-bit emulation facilities for
Sledgehammer, does that mean a later release date for the chip? How
does that affect the likelihood of uptake for the new chip?
AMD's design, as reported so far, unlike Intel's design, does NOT use 32 bit emulation in the sense that your post implies.
From the latest I've seen, AMD's chip runs 32 bit code natively, on a pair of 32 bit cores that are capable of being operated together in 64 bit mode. There is no redesign of the emulation facilities because the Sledgehammer doesn't use it. That will be one prime advantage of the Hammer series of chips over Intel's 64 bit chips.
AMD & Transmeta's goal is to get a good, fast Sledgehammer emulator into the market well in advance of the actual Sledgehammer chip.
Please read the articles more carefully before posting.
What were they thinking? "Hey, let's design a failure mode into the kernel!"
Why couldn't it optionally enable features specific to a detected chip, starting with 386
as default?
This is just as bad as a BIOS that halts on any error. That's the kind of thing that makes remote server rebooting extremely dangerous. The system should be designed to work at all cost, and send errors to syslog if there is any reason for concern.
No, a BIOS that halts on any error is highly desirable for any production machine that deals with sensitive transactions. If there is an error on that type of machine, you WANT a halt. You don't want a system with a BIOS fault that'll hobble along corrupting the data set!
Turning off "Halt On Error" is a great option in BIOSes that support it for hobbyists and non-critical remote systems as you describe, but to the degree that a BIOS can have a default, it should ALWAYS default to halt on error, even during failure of the BIOS itself.
This is strictly pro-Slashdot FUD. Signed drivers are the second best thing that's come to my box recently (Windows 2000 being first). You don't know how good it feels to take a look at a video card driver, see that it's not signed and say "hey, do I really want to support this? It probably won't run."
Sounds like another case of Microsoft saying "We're the best basket for all your eggs!" without addressing the fact that not everyone wants all their eggs in one basket!.
Consider this: The MS-approved Nvidia drivers are OK, but they cause my system to crash occasionally. But Nvidia has proven TO ME more reliable, more responsive, and more able than Microsoft in delivering stable, high performance drivers for their cards.
With this "feature", I wouldn't have the option to choose to trust Nvidia over Microsoft! I SHOULD BE ABLE TO CHOOSE WHO TO TRUST! Microsoft is welcome to say to me "You can trust us", but they shouldn't be able to say "If you trust us, you must trust ONLY us."
THAT'S why crap like this IS a big issue, and why it's worth posting on the front page in a sensationalistic manner!
A lot of people I know (the ones who don't know computers anyway) don't even read the error messages that pop up. I can't count the times that someone as said "It's not working, there was an error." And every time, when I ask what it said, they responded very defensively that they didn't read it.
Well, it's no wonder because everyone's been conditioned to think of Windows error messages as something only a senior Windows programmer working at MS would understand, and no one ever found useful. I can't count the number of times I've seen "Error in FOOBAR.DLL at 0E132:12592" or the like, or called Microsoft (back when they actually pretended to support their products) and told them the exact error message ony to be told "reboot the system, it'll go away".
With Windows error messages, the faster you can dismiss them, the faster you can reboot the farging machine and get back to work. These messages have been so very useless for so very long that no one ever believes that they could offer any useful information anymore.
I agree that if one does not understand the issues he should leave the decisions to more capable hands, but the overall system would undoubtedly be better off if representation were higher and the uninformed did not vote.
As far as I can tell from your response, you would not only prefer to be the only one to vote, you would also prefer to be the only one to exist.
What I meant before was that if you don't value opinions besides your own you might be happier in a fascist state.
Not at all, not at all. But I'm completely and shamlessly dropping the false pretense of wanting to put my destiny in the hands of everyone else. I want my opinions to matter more, much more, than those disinterested or less interested who have to be prodded incessantly every election season to stop in at the neighborhood polling station for a few minutes.
Read the original post again. I'm all for mobilizing voters and getting the vote out. But to mobilize just any doofus out there isn't what I want... why should I want those potentially in opposition of my view mobilized to neutralize my vote out of some sort of civic duty, when I can focus my efforts on those who agree?
Generalized "get out the vote" campaigns are a goofy waste of time and money, unless you have insight into the demographics of the non-voters and expect them to vote your way if you get them to the polls.
Get out the vote messages are also an integral part of the two party system of control because Joe Sixpack, who can't be bothered to vote unless someone convinces him it's a good idea, "ain't votin' for some guy I never heard of."
To hell with that! If you're not voting in agreement with me, I'd rather not see your face at the polls! Can you say you sincerely feel differently deep inside? I don't see how you can if you care deeply about the results of this election.
The encouragment is not for people to vote stupidly but rather to consider the issues most important to them and vote in spite of the general attitude that a single vote won't change anything.
The more proportional the representation is, the better the system works. While the general
public may not be well educated, as a whole, their votes are the best available measure to minimize the extent to which government agents act on their own behalfs.
I don't see how you equate this with fascism, much less "FASCISM". I'm not forcing anyone to vote nor am I forcing anyone to stay away from the polls. But what I am saying is that if you can't find the will inside you to vote without being prodded about it every election season, stay home. I'll mobilize myself and encourage those I agree with and nobody else.
If you don't agree with me and can't be bothered to get off your couch one or two days a year, stay put, I'll make your political decisions for you by being overrepresented in the election process.
Slashdot Mirror
Paltry sums?!?!?
They're trying to claim 3.5% and .075% of a market that was anticipated to be $40 BILLION annually! Although most recent estimates are around $20 BILLION, that's not life support money, that's what sent their stock skyrocketing to around $125/share after splitting!
Paltry sums? Oh, wait, you're Bill Gates, aren't you?
Who do you think will have to change? The executives who make the decisions and run the company, or the workers under them?
In >99% of the companies, the executive decision is the one that gets acted on. And stupid or not, in most cases, the executives will what they like best, which is what they're familiar with, which is Microsoft products. Admin and sales aren't going to change for you. If MS & Unix become incompatible by MS actions, in most cases the execs will just order that the admin and production networks become separate because they don't want to look like weenies trying to relearn a system when they really don't even know Windows very well yet.
We've got to find a MUCH better answer than "the techs like it better".
Any Science Fiction show that can find a coherent way to refer to a space-time problem as an "Intergalactic Wang-Dang Doodle" is pretty much the pinnacle of Science Fiction programming.
"Intergalactic Wang-Dang Doodle" makes about as much sense as the technobabble in the average Star Trek episode, and it's a thousand times more fun to say out loud.
Plus, when you say "Intergalactic Wang-Dang Doodle" in public instead of quoting some Star Trek technobabble, people just assume you're infinitely more hip than they are instead of ridiculing you as a total geek. (Well, maybe not...)
Futurama is the greatest show on television.
but, instead, he dumps his money into a useless legal defense, and attempts to re-instate a totally useless service in competition with several more-than adequate replacements for the original, fully functional service. Why?
If I remember correctly, his uncle has a fat wad of cash invested in the company, so I would guess that he's under extreme family pressure to make the business work.
I don't know where you take YOUR vacations, but to say 1152x864 is adequate for vacations is absolutely incorrect. When I'm going on vacation, I'm usually travelling far from home, on a trip I'll probably only make once in my life. I won't be able to re-shoot my vacation pictures, so high quality is FAR more important when on vacation. 1152x864 is completely inadequate.
I suspect most other people will feel the same.
Very good troll.
Nice troll yourself, BillyGoatThree.
I, like many many geeks out there, had incredible difficulty remembering appointments, test dates, assignment due dates, and even classes in the real world.
I tried using the notepad method, but before long, it was as jumbled as my perception of time. I tried using about a dozen personal organizers at great cost, but the simple fact is that they didn't appeal to me enough to use on a daily basis because they'd end up with a more eraser marks, cross-outs, smudges and scribbles than actual useful information. I love neatness, even if it is virtually unattainable for me.
I never would have finished my degree if it weren't for personal organizers. I bought a PalmPilot about a week after they came out, and I really believe I owe my degree, in part, to its developers.
Finally, have you priced refills for those paper-based personal organizers? If you buy a baseline Palm, you're in the black when you start your sophomore year!
To hold a sweepstakes or a contest in Florida, the company needs to post bond equal to the total cash value of ALL prizes offered to guarantee that the company can fufill it's promise of prizes.
Florida enacted a law requiring this after thousands of it's elderly residents were scammed by marketing companies promising them riches in contests and sweepstakes.
Thanks to this law, most contest promotion companies believe that the market available in Florida isn't worth the hassle or cost of putting the money up front, so Floridians can't win these promotions.
Finally I can actually make coffee at home; I've always wondered how they ran the coffee pot at 7-11 - where I buy all my coffee - but now I know: They use a supercomputer!
This also explains why Starbucks coffee is so expensive... they've been using these "hypercomputers" in a secret back room at each store.
To actually create a fabrication facility to make CPUs, it takes about 20 billion dollars. $20,000,000,000 dollars. That's more than most companies can afford. Even Intel couldn't make very many new fabrication plants.
Your coworker is prone to exaggeration.
AMD recently built a very large, first class, state of the art facility in Dresden, Germany, for roughly 20-25% of the figure he cited.
Assuming one didn't need a very large, first class, or state of the art facility, I would guess that a whole lot less could be spent to get a useful fab up and running. Perhaps even less than 10% of what AMD spent.
This is just another "screw the little guy" scam, only this one is "screw the little guy with high ideals" where ISC is "screw the little guy with high hopes".
You don't need some company to charge you to publish your ideas anymore. That's why setting up your own web page is so powerful, and why the World Wide Web is so empowering! For things JUST LIKE THIS! Set up a web page. Give it some relevant keywords. Get it included in the major search engines. That's all it really takes.
Sure it'd be nice to know you had your ideas somewhere that the USPTO is bound (or better yet, obligated!) to look. But we don't need to pay $20 a pop to do it.
But this DOES point out the need for a centralized database of ideas that shouldn't get patented. Sourceforge? Everything2? Anyone else interested in setting this up?
Denver is no surprise at all to me. Clandestine forwarding from that point to the Colorodo Springs area would be trivial.
That's why they renamed them "PC-Cards".
That's why they charge 99 bucks for it!!! That way YOU TOO can have the secret of making thousands, even millions of dollars on the internet!
Don't you watch ANY late night (or Sunday afternoon) television?
And I remember when late night and Sunday afternoon television used to be about black and white reruns and monster movies. I miss those days...
"Please copy your FINAL weekly timesheets in the 'Payroll' directory."
"Save your final budget in the 02Budget directory for consolidation by 1:00 PM EST. No changes to your budget will be permitted after submission without explicit permission of the CFO."
Tribes? :)
Or [H]ard|OCP... www.hardocp.com (Search their forum. I don't know which site picked it up first, but I think I saw it at Kyle's site first.)
I shouldn't respond to your flamebait, but I'm going to assume you were too busy playing with your Transformers to see the difference I was pointing out...
Before Transformers, there was plenty of children's entertainment, and YES, it did get used for marketing from time to time. But before Transformers, the children's entertainment had to be popular on its own merit before a line of toys based on it would be made. Transformers changed all that permanently, by combining marketing and entertainment together, with toys already on the shelf before most kids even saw the television program. Ingenious, wicked and effective.
Remember that there weren't any Star Wars toys available until AFTER the movie was popular in theatres. Yes, Lucas got a quick jump, ready to market the stuff, but the movie had to succeed first.
How old am I? I'm old enough to remember cartoon shows that didn't come with their own toys and popular children's toys that didn't come with their own cartoon show.
Dissention from the collective childhood warm-fuzzy remeniscence earns a "Troll" rating?
When I was a child, I was perceptive enough to see the inflection point where cartoons changed from entertainment tools to marketing tools. Seeing this disgusted me... Seeing a crowd of people who otherwise have excellent ability to see through marketing BS get lulled back into this stuff is really scary.
Does everyone in our society have a marketing button that can be pressed, or am I fooling myself thinking that vigilant people can make purely rational purchase decisions?
I still hate the friggin things.
Count me out. This is just another foolish $10K I won't be spending.
Hey, that splash screen HAS to be there. After all, so many other packages are dependent on it, and good lord, it's not like we're going to give you the source code, dammit!
You were being a quite the little zealot for a while there.
AMD's design, as reported so far, unlike Intel's design, does NOT use 32 bit emulation in the sense that your post implies.
From the latest I've seen, AMD's chip runs 32 bit code natively, on a pair of 32 bit cores that are capable of being operated together in 64 bit mode. There is no redesign of the emulation facilities because the Sledgehammer doesn't use it. That will be one prime advantage of the Hammer series of chips over Intel's 64 bit chips.
AMD & Transmeta's goal is to get a good, fast Sledgehammer emulator into the market well in advance of the actual Sledgehammer chip.
Please read the articles more carefully before posting.
Why couldn't it optionally enable features specific to a detected chip, starting with 386 as default?
This is just as bad as a BIOS that halts on any error. That's the kind of thing that makes remote server rebooting extremely dangerous. The system should be designed to work at all cost, and send errors to syslog if there is any reason for concern.
No, a BIOS that halts on any error is highly desirable for any production machine that deals with sensitive transactions. If there is an error on that type of machine, you WANT a halt. You don't want a system with a BIOS fault that'll hobble along corrupting the data set!
Turning off "Halt On Error" is a great option in BIOSes that support it for hobbyists and non-critical remote systems as you describe, but to the degree that a BIOS can have a default, it should ALWAYS default to halt on error, even during failure of the BIOS itself.
Sounds like another case of Microsoft saying "We're the best basket for all your eggs!" without addressing the fact that not everyone wants all their eggs in one basket!.
Consider this: The MS-approved Nvidia drivers are OK, but they cause my system to crash occasionally. But Nvidia has proven TO ME more reliable, more responsive, and more able than Microsoft in delivering stable, high performance drivers for their cards.
With this "feature", I wouldn't have the option to choose to trust Nvidia over Microsoft! I SHOULD BE ABLE TO CHOOSE WHO TO TRUST! Microsoft is welcome to say to me "You can trust us", but they shouldn't be able to say "If you trust us, you must trust ONLY us."
THAT'S why crap like this IS a big issue, and why it's worth posting on the front page in a sensationalistic manner!
Well, it's no wonder because everyone's been conditioned to think of Windows error messages as something only a senior Windows programmer working at MS would understand, and no one ever found useful. I can't count the number of times I've seen "Error in FOOBAR.DLL at 0E132:12592" or the like, or called Microsoft (back when they actually pretended to support their products) and told them the exact error message ony to be told "reboot the system, it'll go away".
With Windows error messages, the faster you can dismiss them, the faster you can reboot the farging machine and get back to work. These messages have been so very useless for so very long that no one ever believes that they could offer any useful information anymore.
As far as I can tell from your response, you would not only prefer to be the only one to vote, you would also prefer to be the only one to exist.
What I meant before was that if you don't value opinions besides your own you might be happier in a fascist state.
Not at all, not at all. But I'm completely and shamlessly dropping the false pretense of wanting to put my destiny in the hands of everyone else. I want my opinions to matter more, much more, than those disinterested or less interested who have to be prodded incessantly every election season to stop in at the neighborhood polling station for a few minutes.
Read the original post again. I'm all for mobilizing voters and getting the vote out. But to mobilize just any doofus out there isn't what I want... why should I want those potentially in opposition of my view mobilized to neutralize my vote out of some sort of civic duty, when I can focus my efforts on those who agree?
Generalized "get out the vote" campaigns are a goofy waste of time and money, unless you have insight into the demographics of the non-voters and expect them to vote your way if you get them to the polls.
Get out the vote messages are also an integral part of the two party system of control because Joe Sixpack, who can't be bothered to vote unless someone convinces him it's a good idea, "ain't votin' for some guy I never heard of."
To hell with that! If you're not voting in agreement with me, I'd rather not see your face at the polls! Can you say you sincerely feel differently deep inside? I don't see how you can if you care deeply about the results of this election.
The encouragment is not for people to vote stupidly but rather to consider the issues most important to them and vote in spite of the general attitude that a single vote won't change anything.
The more proportional the representation is, the better the system works. While the general public may not be well educated, as a whole, their votes are the best available measure to minimize the extent to which government agents act on their own behalfs.
I don't see how you equate this with fascism, much less "FASCISM". I'm not forcing anyone to vote nor am I forcing anyone to stay away from the polls. But what I am saying is that if you can't find the will inside you to vote without being prodded about it every election season, stay home. I'll mobilize myself and encourage those I agree with and nobody else .
If you don't agree with me and can't be bothered to get off your couch one or two days a year, stay put, I'll make your political decisions for you by being overrepresented in the election process.