Curious.

Does your definition of "liberty" include forcing privately-owned and operated Web sites to carry and publish material that the proprietors may fundamentally disagree with?

Would the proprietors of these Web sites fall under your definition of "evil men that would do us harm" if they attempted to establish and enforce their own principles on their own private property?

There are a lot of places on Earth that have no functioning government (and therefore have no taxes). One would think that the the "taxation is theft" crowd would be flocking to these places en masse, but for some reason they are not. Interesting, that.

There was a point in time (and it's well over a decade past) where Slashdot was the definitive go-to site for smart discussions, both on technical topics as well as society in the larger sense. I use the word "discussions" very deliberately, because then (as now) the articles were really just a jumping-off point for a conversation. Nobody ever actually read the articles; why bother? You had a lot of very intelligent people gathered together to share their experiences and impart their knowledge. That was what made Slashdot what is was.

These days, I very rarely visit this site, and this particular conversation is a prime example of why this is. The grandparent post, which at the current time has a score of 4, suggests that the media establishment is made up of (among others) "angry lesbians and transsexuals." Now, I have no doubt that you personally find this type of discourse to be "in-depth, intelligent, and rational." But there are lots of decent people, people who were here very early on and still remember how great this place used to be, who have simply grown tired of this kind of thing.

Most of the intelligent conversation here has been replaced by spoutings so deranged that they make The Protocols of the Elders of Zion read like the owner's manual to a 1987 Buick Skylark. And I'm not just talking about trolls here (although they've been around since the early days as well.) Today, this kind of semiliterate gibbering is just as likely to have a score of 5 as it is to be at -1. Now, I know what you're thinking; I'm either a unwitting tool of the "SJW establishment" or (gasp! dare one think it?) an SJW myself, and I'm just having troubles coming to terms with the fact that the old rules have been usurped and it's now finally permissible to get out The Truth about minorities, women, gays, etc.

The truth of the matter is that I'm just a regular guy who occasionally thinks about how nice it would be to have the old Slashdot back, before it became dominated by angry, pear-shaped, basement-dwelling virgins. Now, to be fair, there were doubtless plenty of basement-dwelling virgins on 1998 Slashdot as well. It's just that the 2016 variant has made the site essentially intolerable and a hollow shell of its former self.

The nomination data for the Hugos has been released. You can very clearly see the effects of bloc voting with the Puppy nominees, but there's no evidence of such "clustering" for other nominated works. If there was an SJW voting bloc that just turned out to be not as effective as the Puppies' block, we'd see it in the data. We don't. The bloc just isn't there. And, hell, if the Hugo awards were really "corrupt" the way some of the more strident Puppies claimed -- if it was really a small group of people who just "chose" the nominees -- then the Puppy bloc wouldn't have been successful. A truly corrupt cabal would have just said, "Yeah, whatever, here's your stories about gay marrying dinosaurs."

And, yes, it's absolutely true that "No Award" came in ahead of all Puppy nominees save Guardians of the Galaxy. That's not a sign of a bloc, though, it's a sign of thousands of science fiction fans getting really, really pissed at the Puppies. I'm sorry, but Hoyt's claim boils down to "The fact that Hugo voters didn't give awards to works we gamed the system to get on the ballot proves they were gaming the system all along." No. No, it doesn't. It proves that Hugo voters don't like having the system gamed.

if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to fear
if you've something to hide, you shouldn't even be here

(techo beat)

=)

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

Ten years ago

When we inevitable lose the battle (the government does have a tendency to get their way in these things), do we get to reap the benefits of a total information society? I mean, will there be a searchable database where I can find out where I left my keys? That link to that awesome video i saw on sometube.com that i can't remember? If i remembered to feed the cat?

You know, this issue tends to draw nutcases of all stripes out of the woodwork, but the fact that there's a "white males are the real victims!" post sitting at "Score 5: Insightful" is to Slashdot's eternal shame.

The conventional wisdom that it's political suicide in Florida to support normalization of relations with Cuba just isn't true any longer. 56% of Americans in general support it. That number increases to 62% if you focus only on responses from the Hispanic/Latino community, and it increases to 63% if you just ask people from Florida.

Here's the poll.

The "angry Scarface extra" demographic in Florida is dying (both metaphorically and literally.) The times, they are a-changing.

While some of the proposed changes (e.g., better draw distance, more detail, etc.) aim to make the game better on modern hardware, it seems like adding things like "denser traffic" would have the effect of changing the gameplay itself. While denser traffic would certainly make the game's Southern California setting a little bit more realistic, I'm not sure that it would make the game more enjoyable. In particular, it seems like a change of this nature could make some of the game's high-speed chase missions and side events into a big pain in the ass.

The fact that you can do something doesn't necessarily mean that you should.

If the contents of my Facebook feed can be taken into consideration, one could reasonably make the argument that robots are smarter than humans right now.

I realize that you're dead, but you browsed the Internet while driving... on dialup? That's pretty hardcore.

The issue is not "intermittent Internet connectivity." Most of the people who are spun up on this are concerned about the principle of always-on DRM in general. Even if people had an iron-clad agreement with their ISP that they would provide them with five-nines uptime on my WAN connection, it doesn't change the basic principle that lots of people are miffed that their Internet connection is being used on a 24-hour basis to demonstrate that they are, in fact, not thieves.

Of course, this doesn't even address the fact that the most reliable Internet connection in the world is completely useless if the server(s) that you're attempting to connect to are down due to incompetence, unanticipated demand, DDoS attacks, etc.

While I agree with the last two sentences, it's worth noting two points which undercut your first two sentences rather dramatically:

(1) Taking BSD-licensed code and making a proprietary fork doesn't make the previous release magically go away; it makes a new fork. If I love the open source editor FooEdit and FooEdit has a vibrant community around it, then somebody else comes along and starts selling BarEdit based on their proprietary, closed source fork, I can either choose to switch to BarEdit and accept the risks, or keep using FooEdit. (And arguably that's not a binary proposition in the first place: I can switch to BarEdit and then switch back to FooEdit.) The worst case hypothetical is that somehow BarEdit's creation kills the FooEdit community, but in reality that seems very unlikely; in practice, I can't think of a single BSD-licensed project that this has happened to. Can you? Yes, it's possible that in my scenario BarEdit would get cool new features denied to FooEdit users, but if you're deliberately choosing your software based on its "openness" then you've already decided to forgo cool features that are only in proprietary software. Furthermore, you can hardly point to BarEdit and say, "those cool BarEdit-only features would be in FooEdit if only it had been under the GPL"; the more likely case is that BarEdit would simply never have existed.

(2) While the anonymous coward who responded with "ROFL" was perhaps unduly acerbic, his point is correct: an end user who can't debug and patch code is dependent on the developers to fix bugs regardless of the license the software she's using is under. As much as people don't like to hear this around these parts, I know an awful lot of end users who look for free software because it's free as in beer.

The murder of his wife was the straw that broke the camel's back, but for me, I started turning away from Reiser based on the sliminess of the Burke character he played in "Aliens". Of course, that "Mad About You" shit didn't help much, either.