Your example is easy though:

* Lindsey Lohan
-> Lohan was in a film called Mean Girls
-> Mean Girls stared Tina Fey
-> Tina Fey is popular with geeks and nerds for reasons which I'm not sure of, but they're there

There's your connection. :)

That's a rather board justification. Heck with that logic you can probably justify any story to appear on Slashdot no matter how distant it might be to tech, simply because of some tenuous connection to us geeks/nerds. I'm pretty sure you could find any story out there, complete irrelevant to the kinds of things Slashdot talk about, and it'd be possible to relate it to the typical Slashdot audience in some way. With standards that low, may as well use Slashdot as a dumping ground for any old story.

Ben, have you ever considered building Iron Man armor? Bonus points if it's an autonomic prehensile propulsion suit.

OT: VortexCortex, you have a very... odd manner in your posts. You write phrases such as "And still you humans teach your young", "Language has been saving your world from", and so on. Consistently you always try to distance yourself from the rest of humanity and the world, almost as if you don't want to acknowledge that you're human and live on this planet like the rest of us. Why? Are you embarrassed to be on of us? I'd really like to know.

You might be knowledgeable in various geeky areas but you don't have to be a dick about it. You're exhibiting various autistic characteristic which I share, but I on the other hand know the value in treating others with measured respect.

Only good news? That means it's MORE stable than the X server. Keep in mind that not everyone will have the desktop server crashing on them regularly, but at least in Windows it's nice to know that if it does, the video subsystem can be restarted automatically without your applications dying. In Linux that's not possible, so you don't have that parachute to use in an emergency.

They call this a "bribe" because there seems to be this assumption that open source developers write code purely out of the greatness of their heats, that this is the status quo, and that adding a financial incentive towards fixing bugs is morally wrong.

The biggest problem I have with a ton of open source software is that the really big issues (particularly usability, but even features to make some software on par with their proprietary counterparts) are either hard, boring, or both. Coding functionality like tables you can resize with your mouse like you can in MS Word, isn't as much fun as writing a Personas feature in LibreOffice to let you use Firefox personas in the UI.

People who code for a livelihood aren't guaranteed to make better code than open source developers. But they are motivated to do the messy shit to solve end-users issues, because there's money on the table.

Indeed, which is why I don't really pay much attention to what RMS says anymore. Sure, he's right most of the time, but since he doesn't provide realistic alternatives that will work (since a lot of the free software won't be satisfactory in terms of features or usability), his words are useless. RMS is about painting an ideal philosophy in a non-ideal world, and it means missing out on too much useful tech because most of it is developed by the very companies RMS is warning people about.

When stuck in a hard place, most people just deal. Free/open-source software has its own problems though, problems that RMS would rather people didn't notice. Fuck I hate that guy. All talk, no answers.

The thing that will really turn someone's head is if you question whether your Government is one of the "good guys". If it can be shown that, say, the US aren't the good guys, then and only then will it click in people's brains that perhaps all this collection of data on citizens might actually be cause for concern.

Yes, some Governments are worse than others, but it takes the first step in realizing that all Governments look out for themselves first and their citizens a distant second, before you realize why pervasive surveillance is a problem

Based on what? All of the people whose data Google has leaked?

Google doesn't have to have leaked data for people to be concerned about them. The act of Google building up a profile on someone, pressuring them at every stage into using that stupid Google+ service, not to mention having all that info ready to serve in case someone like the NSA feels noisy enough to request it, makes people feel a bit uncomfortable even if they've been a perfect little saint on the Internet.

I apparently don't pay as much attention to specific writers as you do, maybe other people don't either?

Some writers are well known for being very opinionated, or fanboyish, or flat out wrong but still employed for some reason. People then mention said writers in articles such as this, and passive readers like myself eventually learn the names of these writer due to exposure, even though I've only read maybe one or two of his articles in full (and yes he's a complete Microsoft fanboy, which makes it very easy to expose the various holes and hypocrisies of his articles, but that's an exercise for the bored).

Nah, he's not an idiot. I think it was more to do with the fact that Hedy contributed some very important techniques to the communications world that facilitated the development of mobile communications, where as Ashton's very knowledgeable about technological trends. Good for him, but put plainly he doesn't compare in terms of capability or contribution as what Hedy has, apart from the fact they're both (or were) actors.

Figure you should get plenty of eggs and toilet paper with a presentation like that. :)

Well isn't that what Halloween's about? Teaching kids revenge and causing damage if you don't get what you want? Arming your kids with a carton of eggs and if you don't get any lollies, you throw eggs at people's houses?

It's not like Photoshop doesn't have its own stupid idiosyncrasies. After using the GIMP for a while I went back to Photoshop for some extra work and realized that you can't just middle-click and pan the image around in PS like you can in GIMP. Sure, in PS you can hold down the spacebar and left-click-drag, but you can do that in the GIMP as well, it's just the GIMP has the middle-click-drag feature which is common in a lot of tools and for some reason isn't present in PS. I find that oddly amusing.

EA control a lot of the most popular gaming franchises (Sims, Battlefield, Mass Effect, various official sports titles) and from what I've read in forums, gamers will generally try to avoid facing the realities of the company they're dealing with if it means they can focus more on the game. That, and people don't think they'll have any problems. So they're ripe for abuse because they feel they must play the latest hot game rather than go without, or buy something else.

So no wonder this shit keeps happening. Gamers on a whole are sheep and don't push back hard enough because it's all about the games - not buying a game solely because of a company's dodgy behavior is apparently a dumb idea.