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Comment Re:Meet the 36 People Who Run Wikipedia (Poorly) (Score 1) 140

It's a totally free resource if all you do is read it and don't contribute. If you do contribute then you've helped to pay for it with your time and effort and, in my opinion, have every right to be upset when some scummy admin comes along and reverts your edit because... something. Oftentimes it's that ridiculous "encyclopedic" requirement, other times it's more self-serving.

The real marvel of Wikipedia is that it has managed to thrive despite its editors.

Comment Re:Not worth it ? (Score 1) 594

If that's a real question, then to answer: it's really about income/wealth inequality. If dude has so much money that he can waste it so frivolously, then he shouldn't have that much money in the first place. People take the resentment which that generates and project it onto the activity itself, or onto the rich dude, when it's really the circumstance that they're upset about.

Comment Re:Gamer Gate Why ? (Score 1) 164

I'm vaguely aware of what it was, but don't see how it would ever relate to mine or really anyone's enjoyment of video games.

Well... Since you asked (sorta): a large part about it is related to the lack of any sort of integrity among games journalists. This impacts your enjoyment of games by influencing what games you hear about and play, and which games make money and thus which developers make further games. It also influences developers in a slightly more subtle way - aspects of really popular games will work their way into other games as developers play them and possibly enjoy those parts, or possibly just think that including those parts will make them more money.

Comment Re:For everything there is a season (Score 2) 228

Whenever you find yourself saying, "Bureaucrats are so stupid. This catastrophe has such an obvious solution, why aren't people doing it the way I tell them to?" you really need to stop and think - "... Maybe there's some angle to this that I'm missing?"

The fact is, we tried your idea with SARS - it didn't help much, and the cost from reduced trade was in the tens of billions of dollars. The present danger just doesn't warrant that kind of drastic action. Moreover, visas don't mean shit - the only people who have taken the disease to other countries are medical personnel from those countries. Citizens who don't need visas.

Also: whenever you find yourself saying, "This catastrophe has an obvious solution, if only political correctness wasn't getting in the way." It's time to stop and reconsider where you're getting your information. This has nothing to do with political correctness. If someone is telling you that it does, what they're trying to do is take advantage of the situation to push their own agenda.

Comment Re:Steve Jobs' products changed the world? (Score 3, Insightful) 181

The iPhone was junk when it was released. There was nothing about the device itself that was really new, nothing that it could do which you couldn't do as well or better on another phone, it couldn't run any kind of non-Apple software (and still can't run anything which isn't expressly approved by Apple), and it cost six hundred dollars with contract.

What turned the iPhone into something important was not the revolutionary device, the device was not revolutionary, it was the widespread belief that this was something important. In other words, marketing. It was the belief that made sales and created the customer base, it was the belief that brought all those developers, and it was belief that made people put up with the idea of a completely closed ecosystem - the idea that it was okay to buy something which wouldn't really belong to you even after your purchase. Again, not a revolutionary idea, but something that Apple's extraordinary marketing power could make happen. That was the new thing, the game changer.

Comment Re:Obama the Nobel Prize Winner? (Score 1) 53

disappointed they didn't influence Obama

This is missing the intent. The prize was given to Obama, not to influence him but to influence the people around him. It was basically an endorsement of his campaign promises, a statement: "People elsewhere in the world like what this guy is saying, or at least it's a big improvement. You, as a country, could stand to move in this direction."

Maybe they underestimated just how partisan politics are here, but instead of encouraging people to support Obama's stated goals (e.g.: closing Guantanamo - a big campaign promise) it just caused them to deride the prize and, to some extent, the opinions of the rest of the world. Just look at how people talk about the UN. China went the same way: for many years they talked about how they were being slighted because no Chinese person in China had ever won a Nobel prize. Then when Liu Xiaobo won it in 2010 they turned against the prize altogether, dismissing it as unimportant.

Comment Re:Yep (Score 1) 116

Tablet focused design is why Flash isn't as ubiquitous as it once was and why javascript has gotten (slightly) less annoying. It is certainly not the reason why Yahoo is shuttering is web directory.

Comment Re:Out of the frying pan... (Score 2) 192

Yes, you are wrong. Back in 2007 AMD started releasing developer documentation and support for the development of open source drivers. This is the "Radeon" driver that you may see in repositories, and it's pretty good at this point. I don't know if 3D is fully supported, but for desktop stuff it's stable. That's in contrast to the Nouveau open source driver for Nvidia cards, which is reverse engineered.

What you may be thinking of are the closed source drivers for Linux: Nvidia's closed Linux driver is better than AMD's. AMD's used to be notoriously bad, but it's gotten better over time. To my knowledge it's still not as good as Nvidia's, but they're both usable at this point.

Comment Re:I dunno about LEDs, but CFLs don't last (Score 1) 602

It was just a matter of setting efficiency standards, if they just banned incandescents then we'd be stuck with some equally inefficient option. By setting fairly rigorous standards they keep the focus on the important part without dictating how that goal should be met. The fact that this precludes one particular outdated technology is a feature of that technology, not the legislation.

If you want to invent a futuristic super-efficient incandescent bulb then you're welcome to do so. The fact that you can't isn't because the man is holding you down, it's because incandescent bulbs are horrible.

Comment Re:Proprietary (Score 1) 64

customers choose graphics card first, then a screen that works with that card

I don't think that's true, a monitor will outlast a video card by years and years. The difference between G-sync and Adaptive Sync is that if people start buying monitors with Adaptive Sync Nvidia will start supporting them. Everybody wins. (except Nvidia's bean counters)

Comment Re:I dunno about LEDs, but CFLs don't last (Score 1) 602

we got screwed by the government forcing them on us

Like most complaints about the government that I see on Slashdot, this never happened. They set energy efficiency standards for lightbulbs, that's it. Some companies decided to meet those requirements with CFLs, some with LEDs, some with high efficiency incandescents.

Also, CFLs aren't new, they've been around for decades. This wasn't a matter of needing further development time, this was a matter of poor quality. Probably not the conspiracy that the article is speculating about, but who knows.

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