With the current economic situation, I for one welcome the change to electronic voting. It should open up new and exciting black market industries for a much more broad and diverse audience, and may even breathe some new life into Internet cafes (granted, they'll be a little seedier than before, but it's new business!). Imagine the jobs!



Really, though... I agree.

You clearly haven't been following the news. There is a secret extremist Canadian Christian denomination--the Order of the Burning Leaf--which seeks to undermine the sacred principles of democracy. In the last Parliament election, they changed two million votes to write-ins for "Rubber Moose," essentially disqualifying the votes (mostly because they couldn't agree which rubber moose was elected).

Quite a tragedy, and an obvious cause for alarm.

I think that's putting words in people's mouths in place of logically retorting to the points of dissenting arguments. Just because they don't think online voting is a good idea doesn't mean they're pro-oppression--it just means they don't agree.

I have always viewed sections of news sites that allow for two-way communication--such as this part--to be the place for neutrality to be flexible; the comments are where the discussion occurs, because we can argue back and forth on an equal playing field.

The primary news posts you see on the news listing pages are the information gatekeepers, and to get as much as we can out of the concepts they present, they should try as much as they can to remain neutral.

The news post is like raw materials, and the comments section is where we take what was in the post and make things out of it. The more you process and refine those materials before the participants on Slashdot can banter, argue, and debate the ideas into whatever they wish to build, the more you limit the creative possibilities.

It's a step toward groupthink. It's why we sneer when a politician skews information, or when a poster makes some incredible conjecture from a flimsy fact. The more we would let the root content of the site become heavily opinionated, the more it limits ideas and makes us more like the people we call narrow-minded and foolish.



On two asides: 1) I think MS's software has been getting flimsy for years, and it's an effect of their attempts to gain vertical market share. They want to control the raws, methods, means, and final products in an industry that is constantly diversifying and evolving. That strategy is gaining them a lot of enemies, especially since new enemies can appear and establish overnight.

And 2) It took me a long time to make an account, and judging from your account number, you remember the less fanboy'ed days as much as I do. But a lot of the cronyism set in because we stopped muting all of them, regardless of what they espoused.

If a fact is good enough to praise or curse, then the confidence in the logos should trump the need for any pathos. Hard data, when strong and convincing enough, carries more power, truth, and confidence than snide jabs--in fact, the spiteful comments detract from the communicator's credibility when they're reporting. When it's just the facts, that's news--that's when it's journalism. Otherwise, it's as good as a LiveJournal post.

I think it has more to do with wanting to see article descriptions that make an attempt at remaining neutral. Using "M$" is as charged and biased as saying "Linsux" or "crApple," and undermines the article post, making what would normally be a news post into an opinion editorial.

Many people want to make their own decisions, and not be told what to think of things before even investigating them. Isn't that kind of spirit how things like the OSS movement started, anyway--not being told what or how to do things, but doing them for themselves?

Funny enough, if it hadn't been so filled with trashy language, I think it would have been modded up.

That's a nice thought, but while the endgame looks bad to you, it looks like a natural progression to others. The failure of companies and industries during that time, and the "rescues" that will follow, will just be proof that the politicians are the only group capable of managing the country--after all, we voted for them, right? So they must be the best, brightest, and most capable of making the right decisions. Elect a few people to administrate, and let them appoint satellite rulers to administrate. By that model, it's entirely natural for anything of value to be administered by the State.

And I sincerely wish I said that in sarcasm, but that is exactly how I hear our situation explained to me time and time again by those that support this kind of system. And quite honestly, it's was crushingly depressing to have heard someone argue for the first time as it was every time, thereafter.

The other option is to stay and work through the chaos, building the network and strength to one day rebuild the hope and values that are being ground into the dirt.

I can't blame you for how you feel, though.

Look at the current economies of those two countries and ask yourself that, again.