Most of the time you must choose between quality and quantity.

Having both has been known to occur ... for a little while ... but it's very rare.

Slashdot is odd. Most other places, jokes are considered good if they are clever, unexpected, witty, amusing, and most of all, ORIGINAL (around here, most jokes like that will offend someone's sacred cow and get modded as -1 Troll).

Here, jokes are most likely to be enjoyed, encountered, and/or modded up to +5 Funny if they are repetitive, predictable, expected, tiresome memes.

This pattern is so consistent and observable that I think a conclusion about it can be made: slashdot is filled with insecure (and perceived or real) outcasts who have a certain desperation to feel like they fit into a culture of likeminded people. If you view it that way, suddenly the irrational celebration of the ten millionth "sharks with lasers on their heads" joke makes sense. If you view it that way, the hostility they often show when you reject or even question their brand of humor also makes sense.

It's sort of like when you were in high school and the more "average" people suddenly adopted the mannerisms, gestures, and speech patterns of the latest big movie or TV show, all the time pretending that they have always expressed themselves that way. The terror of being an individual! No meme is too repetitive, no joke too lame if it offers even a phony escape from that!

I'll add, most of these controversies purportedly about "science" are really controversies about "the status quo that cherrypicks bits of science to lend itself credibility". Powerful men have defined reality for the proles long before they had any sort of science by which to claim legitimacy. "Scientific data proves it (and only an idiot would question THAT)" can be used (abused by dishonest people) in a manner very similar to "God told me I should rule over you!" The purpose is the same: "don't argue with me, accept it as truth".

If you want to see that in action, look at why aspartame as a food additive was originally not allowed, then why the FDA director was pressured out of the agency, and who replaced him and what his primary goal was (which was of course approving aspartame). That's what money does to what was formerly good science.

How do you read what he wrote and come up with that in response to it? Do you secretly believe everyone other than yourself is a moron?

It's like Slashdotters think it is weakness to try and understand what the other person believes and in what way it could be reasonable. It depends on the part where what the guy wrote must also be interpreted by the reader, and everything except rigorous mathematical formulae has multiple ways that it can be construed.

There actually are lots of problems with vaccines but you will never find this information without sincerely searching for it yourself, because there are too many monied interests who profit from a single view of the situation.

It's not as well known as it deserves to be, but the early Christians were actually a very diverse group. What we now call Gnosticism was representative of many if not most of them.

Sadly it was systematically stamped out, largely in part because there is such great power in organized religion and adherence to its dogmas.

Excluded, "non-canonical" books like the Gospel of Thomas, the Book of Enoch, and the Gospel of Judas are really fascinating to read.

That's both sad and amusing. Having read and learned about the Bible, I can tell you this much: the geneologies in Genesis and elsewhere are not complete and exhuastive. They do not claim to be complete and exhaustive. Nowhere in the Bible is it so much as implied that they are.

The standard ancient Hebrew practice of listing such geneologies is to list only the most famous/notable ancestors. More mediocre and lesser-known ancestors are left out deliberately because they were not considered worthy of mention. Thus there are large gaps of unknown time in the geneologies listed in Genesis and elsewhere. Nothing to the contrary is ever claimed. This fact is not even difficult to find out, except that it does depend on doing your own homework instead of letting the TV and the culture do the thinking for you. The main point of all the geneologies in the Bible is to establish that the line of King David was known (old testament) and is the same line from which Yeshua (new testament) is descended, which is important because various prophecies concerning the Messiah predicted this (e.g. Isaiah).

To infer some kind of final ultimate Age of Humanity or Age of The Earth from this is madness. The Bible never represents it as such, and anyone claiming it does is simply unfamiliar with the very book (and ancient Hebrew culture) they are claiming to understand. The Bible makes no claims whatsoever concerning things like how long ago Adam lived, how long ago Noah lived, how long ago the Flood was, etc.

Most self-described Christians don't know this and that's just plain fucking lazy, to be frank with you. You believe this is the WORD OF GOD and yet you can't be bothered to learn a few easily researched facts about it?? This is what happens when people always have some excuse for why they won't do their own thinking and their own learning.

If you are conducting the surveillance of me necessary to make that determination, then your surveillance is faulty. I merely gave an example scenario and I don't share this puerile urge to make everything into a personal matter. So I wrote in such a way that I made no claims about my own programming skill or lack thereof, in order to provide a hypothetical. What I wrote is equally true whether I've never seen a compiler before or whether I am an advanced expert.

The hostility you have makes you appear stupid because it prevents you from thinking of such things. After all, such things might make me seem reasonable and level-headed. That would be like giving aid and comfort to The Enemy, right?

At no point did I say that anyone should or shouldn't work on this project. Re-read it yourself if you doubt I know what I wrote. To paraphrase: what I said is that it's an unusually important project and therefore the work involves higher stakes. No one is really going to care very much if you screw up a free single-player solitaire game. If you screw up SSL, that can impact many other people in negative ways. By saying that I am hardly keeping competent people from their jobs, though it's flattering that you would ascribe to me such power.

This isn't difficult to acknowledge; at least, it certainly shouldn't be. Is there something about saying it that makes you so angry? Were you built up by praise you didn't really earn and are coming to realize how fragile a foundation that really is, or what (by means of my "platitudes")? Beware of hating someone for no good reason, someone who means well by you and wants good things for you. It's one of the more toxic ways you can pollute yourself.

Ever heard of the principle of non-resistance? If he really was trolling then my post will affect him more than it could affect anyone else.

I don't really think he was. I think he made an emotional outburst reflecting his view of an unpleasant (but improving) situation. That can seem like trolling especially when it turns into a big story (among techies anyway) like this did. But I don't claim to know his heart and I could be wrong, in which case the above applies.

Public schooling was never intended to encourage curiosity and deep understanding. People like that would be too difficult to manipulate via advertising, PR, carefully cherry-picked news, and other forms of propaganda. No one in politics or business wants that.

That's the old-school view, in which one's self-esteem is based on achievement of some kind. Those who achieve little or nothing had low self-esteem and this was a principal incentive to identify one's own weaknesses and overcome them with directed effort. The extreme form is Japanese students throwing themselves off buildings (etc.) because their grades didn't quite measure up, making them nobodies.

The newer view is that everyone is a special snowflake. No matter what. The extreme form is shown by the public schools that play soccer without keeping score, because scoring implies winners and losers and that might hurt someone's feelings.

I mostly agree with you in that actions have consequences and you should accept the consequences of your own actions. Otherwise nothing really matters and there is no reason to improve yourself and you turn into one of these "perpetual victims" who never take responsibility for anything while simultaneously wondering why nothing ever changes. But that should be tempered with the fact that some mistakes are much more preventable (less understandable) than others, and as Orlando Battista once said, an error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.

There's no reason to metaphorically crucify someone for an honest mistake, but certainly there is going to be a reaction to it and people aren't going to like it. That's to be expected. It's reasonable to expect someone to accept that and yes, it is an incentive to learn something from the experience and be more careful in the future. If I were a programmer and found that completely unacceptable, I could always choose not to work on such an important project critical to the security of so many.

As an aside: I think replying to you is much more edifying than being like the cowards who modded you down to -1 without once putting forth their own viewpoint which they clearly think is superior. There's too much of that going on at this site. There is no "-1 Disagree" mod for a reason.

Yes the "logic" used by many in this thread is specious at best.

Premise: when there are many eyes looking at open source, it leads to more bugs getting fixed.

Faulty reasoning (of too many people): this project didn't have many eyes, therefore the premise is false. Herp derp.

Correct reasoning: when the condition of "many eyes" was met, the premise is shown to be true.

Conclusion: some people dislike Open Source for ideological reasons and saw this as a chance to take cheap shots at it and show everyone how clever they are ... and failed because of faulty reasoning. Just like what you see in politics - if you happen not to like something, it must be BAD!! and cannot possibly have merits that you simply don't value.

I know this is an old thread ... but I really don't like Pulseaudio.

I never installed it on my Gentoo system. On my Mint systems, removing Pulseaudio is one of my first post-installation steps.

If I want to play sound over a network I export a read-only filesystem containing my media to the machines on my LAN (Samba does this nicely). Then I can play video and anything else over the network too, in a transparent way. I've never seen a single benefit of running Pulseaudio but I have seen lots of difficult-to-resolve problems. It's just useless bloat to me. I have a much better time using straight ALSA.

Welcome to the Internet.

A person or two mentioned Conway's Game of Life. Unless I specifically say so, I am not binding myself to only mentioning that one thing and never moving on to any related ideas which happen to be outside its scope. And I didn't specifically say so. Therefore I see no value in pointing that out.

Am I the only one who thinks the entire notion of a "class-action lawsuit" was a bad idea?

If a company materially harms 250,000 individuals, let them defend against 250,000 individual lawsuits. That would be a massive disincentive against harming people. Having to pay lawyers for that many separate lawsuits would be a lot more like the predicament (during a standard isolated case) of the one individual trying to have a legal battle against a huge multination corporation. Seems fair to me.

Plus in many class-action lawsuits, only the lawyers really win. The former customers might get a $10 coupon or something like that.