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Comment Re:Republican convention Rule 40 (Score 1) 428

I'm glad to see that republicans have an ad hoc rule to fix things after the fact, but why don't Americans fix this and other problems at the source by switching to instant-runoff voting everywhere?

We'd love to. Unfortunately, a run-off system takes power away from the 2 parties that have power, so no politicians will support it. So despite what people want, or what's good for democracy, it will never happen.

Same thing with gerrymandering. It disrupts true democracy, but the powers-that-be don't care. They care about power more than they care about representing our people.

Comment Re:Not even the worst game on the platform... (Score 1) 157

A title screen wasn't anything new, all the games I made (early 80's TRS-80 color) had title screens as did most of everyone else's. Not sure why the 2600 didn't have them.

Mainly because of ROM space restraints. Putting in a nice title graphic could quickly use up your precious ROM space. More ROM space required more ROM chips, which, when the atari first game out, were somewhat expensive per-unit, so Atari made less profit off of each cartridge (and/or had to charge more). . Particularly if you got above the 4K limit, which meant you had to introduce extra circuitry in the cartridge to handle bank switching, which would raise the price further.

By later in the atari's life, these presumably became significantly cheaper, so more games had title screens.

Submission + - Notepad++ Leaves SourceForge (notepad-plus-plus.org)

An anonymous reader writes: SourceForge was a good place; unfortunately, sometimes good places don't last.

Recently SF hijacked its hosted projects to distribute their wrapped crapware:

        SourceForge grabs GIMP for Windows' account, wraps installer in bundle-pushing adware
        Black “mirror”: SourceForge has now taken over Nmap audit tool project
        What happened to Sourceforge? The full story between VLC and Sourceforge

Obviously, the paid component per installation system is one of their important income generating scams. I would be fine with that, if they were the actual owners of the legitimate software. The real problem is, they are polluting these open source software installations for the purpose of filling their pockets by this scam, and worst of all, without even notifying the authors/creators of this software, while the creators are struggling against such parasitic software in order to keep their installers cleaner and safer.

Such a shameless policy should be condemned, and the Notepad++ project will move entirely out of SourceForge.

I humbly request that Notepad++ users not encourage such scams, and educate others not to download any software from SourceForge. I request as well that the project owners on SourceForge move out of SourceForge, in order to preserve the purpose of the Open Source Community and encourage the works of true authors/creators.

Comment Re:The review, it does something... as does sandbo (Score 1) 74

What we really need is the ability to turn on and off specific permissions by app. Perhaps with the ability to limit internet permission to certain IPs/URLs per app. That would solve most of the problem.

This is the #1 reason why I install cyanogenmod on every phone I use. It lets you deny/approve individual permissions per app.

Comment Re:Least common denominator (Score 1) 161

Java allowed developers to write programs with GUIs that ran on six different OSes. It has been almost two decades since this worked well, and I have yet to encounter a single Java program with a GUI that I want to use. In every case, a native application for the platform I am using is significantly better.

Many developers (including myself) would consider Jetbrains' IDEs to be some of the best development tools available today. They are written in java.

Just because you've encountered a lot of garbage, doesn't mean that it's all garbage.

Comment Re:Have Both (Score 1) 567

Seriously, most of todays screens are so big that you can fit 2 pages side-by-side, which is a lot more convenient than one page at a time in portrait mode. Ditto for individual windows. Rotating them into portrait mode will cause neck strain as you have to tilt your head back to properly see the top.

Have you tried it? I have two 24" monitors, one portrait, one landscape. I use it for writing code, where having more vertical space is really helpful. My eyes are even with the center of the portrait monitor, and I don't get neck strain at all. Things on the very top and very bottom of the screen aren't quite as comfortable to look at, but general those are things that only require occasional glances (IDE menus, status bar, etc). Overall, I find it incredibly useful, and quite comfortable.

Sure, it may not be for everyone, but why state negative assumptions about something that you haven't tried?

Comment Re:iMessage isn't bad... (Score 1) 136

GoogleTalk is deprecated and its XMPP federation is broken. Hangouts does not support XMPP, the protocol is proprietary. This is the reason I use neither, I stopped using GT when federation stopped working and I refuse to use Hangouts unless I can use my own client. I never stopped using IRC and it is the only IM service I use today.

I receive all my hangouts messages in pidgin using XMPP, so somehow it works.

(I'm not saying they have it all working correctly. I've never completely understood the mess that is voice/hangouts/google talk/etc. But I do know that when I get a hangouts message, it appears both on my phone and in pidgin via XMPP)

Comment Re:Go to church? (Score 1) 447

But there was another study where atheist couples are less likely to divorce (if they get married) than Christian - does this mean that Christian couples that don't go to church are most likely doomed?

Yeah, that wouldn't surprise me. While there can be valid reasons for Christians to not attend church, I'd guess that the vast majority of that class of people are folks who claim to have a faith, but either haven't really thought through if they REALLY believe what their faith suggests, or are just too lazy/uncommitted to actually take any sort of action based on their beliefs. Both of which would point towards character traits that could be detrimental to surviving the challenges associated with marriage.

Comment No More Bennett (Score 5, Interesting) 253

Why, slashdot, why, do you let this guy post this nonsense? It almost makes me miss John Katz.

Ok, time for an off-topic side story. Feel free to mod me off-topic, but I can't resist.

My kids (6 years old) came home with a book list of books they were supposed to get from the library and read. One of them was about some Dogs from some farm. So my wife comes home with the book from the library. As I start reading it, I notice the author's name: John Katz. That can't be the same John Katz can it? Turns out, yes. John Katz, after moving on from posting drivel on slashdot, is now writing children's books. And my school district was making my children read them. There's no escape!

So I'm pretty sure, once slashdot finally gets the message that nobody here cares a lick about what Bennett Hassleton thinks, he'll turn up somewhere else equally miserable.

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