This is what I've found to be frightening about his work. I 'get' a lot of it. No drugs, no altered states. It just makes sense to me.

This worries me sometimes.

Seconded. I'd mod you up if I could. If this does pass we'll essentially be nationalizing the newspapers. Didn't we decide that that was a bad idea with the phone company? Of course, given how that turned out I'm not certain if that's a condemnation or an endorsement.

We could certainly do worse than the BBC though and we likely would.

I do suspect the demographics you use here though. I don't really see that much difference between the age groups.

Probably true. It has become a media society and it has yet to fully grasp the consequences of that.

Ahh, yes, and I could have said they're people once more and made a chorus line.

Blah.

No. What we need is a dose of reality. The police generally aren't abusive thugs and they aren't paragons either. They're people and people and people sometimes abuse power when tempted to do so. The problem is the attitude we seem to have that there can be only two sides to every problem. Either you are for police power or for the criminals, or so the 'thinking' goes. As long as we have that choice we'll go for police power even past the point where it's really wise to do so.

They come from both sides, in my experience. They just tend to focus on different targets in the early stages. True leftists do in fact defend civil liberties as do true conservatives, unfortunately it's quite likely they both may be a minority in their own movements.

This is true, and it is, in fact, a significant part of what drove people away from the left in the 70's and 80's. Tolerance is fine and good but tolerating people who view tolerance as weakness to be exploited in any and all ways available is unwise.

I've had emu and elk before. They're both quite good if done right as is venison. The Parent ids right though. You do need to know how to cook it to have it done right though. Well, that or know someone that does.

True, it's not at all well established to people who actually think it's important to understand what's happening before they act but it is 'well established' to the woo woos that seriously discuss the 'alien conspiracy' and what ever Bigfoot has done lately and such. The above post mentioning neonicotinoids is correct. We have the solution, now it's just a matter of verification and implementation. Well, that and opposing the paid mercenaries of the pesticide corps who want to keep making the stuff.

Alsa was rock solid on this computer with Ubuntu 7.04. With PulseAudio in 8.x sound was completely useless. 9.10 was fixable and now works reasonably well but it still goes into a fugue state from time to time. Did they remove the drivers for Nvidea's onboard sound? I ended up having to get an ancient C-Media card to get it working again and that's in Alsa emulation mode. It was a cheap enough fix but I'd like to get the onboard sound working as it would improve airflow to my graphics card.

That's modern patent law for you. There's a reason why most patent-holding trusts are owned by lawyers.

"Hey nice idea there, it'd be a shame if something unfortunate happened wouldn't it?"

True that. Our local DSL provider is CenturyLink which is just the old Verizon crap after a couple of name changes. Verizon was famous locally for delivering service that failed from 3 pm to 1 am and always when it rained. They recently got a friend to change their service and we ended up having to go through a mess to get them to drop their charges when it failed to work.

In this area cable beats them easily not just in speed but service and reliability. I really don't know how they stay in business unless its just by taking advantage of the 'Internet is always flaky' crowd. Apparently they decided that the old name change and run an ad campaign routine is more profitable than fixing the network. That's why we left them years ago.

It's Slashdot: Arguments for people who are bored and have nothing better to do right now.

Ok, ok, seriously, it is an opinion site. We're not deciding policy here. Relax.

My problems with the iPad have much more to do with the fact that it seems to be trying to be too much, rather than too little. I like the concept and I like the physical implementation but the battery life is going to be a problem. It's bad enough to need batteries to read books to begin with, but 10-12 hours on a charge makes it useless on a hike. Good battery life for a reader begins in days, not hours. Sure I can plug it in if I'm not hiking, but I can do that with anything and chances are good that I don't want to carry a charger around with me anyway.

For stuff like ssh and other admin duties I'll use a netbook or even my old pda. A pda is as usable as an iPad for this and it's smaller too. For everything else the netbook just works better. It's not good enough a reader to pull me off of a purpose built reader nor is it good enough at the rest to pull me off of my current gear.

They're also talking about 15$ for books. That's a pretty hefty mark up from the $7-$9 that I usually pay now for new books let alone the price of a used one.

I've never understood the need to jailbreak a device that's working properly. Why bother? I don't really care about the argument over freedom vs. walled gardens because if I want to do something that Jobs don't allow I'll have the sense to do it on something else.