I'll leave this here.

It then became co-opted by Republicans and enough right-wing extremists to drive away most moderates and all right-leaning Democrats.

Or more to the point: It became co-opted and taken over partially by Karl Rove and his cronies and then successfully painted by establishment Republicans and their Democratic peers as an extremist movement. All this because entrenched Republicans and Democrats neither want to be disrupted from their position of power or ousted by outsiders. Government by and for the government.

While third parties have historically done poorly in US elections, given how little functional difference there is between the two ruling parties, we're sorely in need of change.

Although my voter registration says "Republican," I have increasingly less and less respect for most "Republicans," including Karl Rove, Ann Coulter, many of the establishment incumbents, and dozens of others who happen to be as big (or bigger) spenders as their DNC compatriots they rail against. It's like someone else said earlier in the thread: It's not that either party is opposed to regulation, they just can't agree on what needs regulating.

This is probably true. There are extremists on both sides, but I suspect I'm just in a regretfully pessimistic mood. ;)

So... why single out Whole Foods and compare them with creationists?

Because it works, for the most part. It elicits an emotional response in readers who have an irrational hatred for people who happen to ascribe to creationism. Like most "editorialisms," it's a race for the bottom.

If this is the kind of crap Slashdot is going to keep posting, maybe it's time to go elsewhere.

I quit reading Slashdot regularly about a year or two ago for this exact reason and started reading HN instead. Unfortunately, I've noticed that the left-of-center outgassing from Slashdot and elsewhere has caused many of these other sites to express the same symptoms within a short few months. The tech community is, at large, an echo chamber of Leftist ideology and ideologues who suffer from various degrees of disdain, disgust, or hatred for any who holds beliefs that run counter to majority views. Any suggestion that minority opinions may be welcome is a ruse.

Watch my comment for illustrations to this effect; within a few days, it'll likely have replies confirming my suggestions by denigrating common scapegoats for societal ills (the "extreme right," global warming "denialists," religious believers, etc.) painting them as the most vile of scum. Or observe the sibling comment just prior to my posting that illustrates the condescending pretentiousness that is endemic to these discussions.

My motive in leaving Slashdot was the fault of vitriol I observed directed toward those whose comments I've enjoyed over the years (and friended them). It was depressing, to say the least, and reflected poorly on the Slashdot community. So, packing up and leaving for a while seemed the only option. Except that it's inescapable. You cannot go anywhere without encountering this sort of vitriol. Maybe it's the fault of society in its present state, maybe it's the fault of Internet discussion and what behavior it encourages. I don't know.

Fortunately, with the libertarian revival as of late, I've noticed some Slashdot threads improving in balance. Or maybe it's because of how I left my thresholds configured to filter out mostly the people I enjoy (who are still posting, thankfully).

Seriously, it's too abstract and invisible.

I agree. I think that's a tremendous part of it. I think your first statement hit the nail on the head though. Much of it is because people are too complacent or don't understand the implications of a massive surveillance state and the ills that such a monstrosity can bring upon our society. As long as they can eat and watch television, most people don't care what happens outside their own little bubble, and I think that's a damn shame.

If nothing else, it certainly explains why the US political climate is such as it is and why we continue to elect politicians who uphold the status quo, outright refusing to hold anyone accountable with regards to such constitutional violations. It's probably also at least partially to blame as to why our elected officials fail to agree with the assertion that extensive surveillance is a violation of the 4th Amendment (possibly others).

I don't know what the answer is, but I do think that at least a fraction of this responsibility should rest on the necks of the media giants. But it's almost as if they don't care either. Or maybe they're receiving threats/kickbacks to funnel information into the NSA.

Yeah I think the headline is a bit lame. It should read "most IT pros don't look at confidential info". I don't really have any interest in looking at confidential files when it's not required for the job. I also just have a personal sense of morality and honour that makes me want to live up to the responsibility that I have being able to do anything I want on the network.

Exactly this. I think the article headline was way too over-sensationalized (then again, this is Slashdot, right?). It could have also been titled "Most IT pros without personal integrity look at confidential info."

Big surprise there...

Beyond simply the moralistic reasons for not looking at information that one shouldn't be looking at to begin with there are also other possibilities including 1) not caring and 2) simply not wanting to know. Although, I do think it's rather disconcerting if an admin's job is to safeguard private info but snoops freely; that indicates to me a disturbing lack of self-control that has the potential to become harmful if not kept in check. While I personally see the privileges of a sysadmin as holding an extraordinarily high honor of trust and integrity, protecting data and assets as if they were his or her own, I realize that not everyone seems to agree. It's a shame, because I seem to remember there being a write up somewhere by one of the technology greats on the system administrator's code of conduct.

Reading through the responses to this article greatly disappoint me. It seems that there are some individuals who genuinely don't care about privacy. I wonder if they feel the same way about the TSA or border patrol check points? You know the type: If you're not doing anything illegal, why do you want your privacy?

I also stick with Steam for their insane and frequent sales, and their growing support for games in the various Humble Bundles. Its shocking the amount of cash I've split on random Steam impulse buys

This is a good reason to stick with Steam, and a good chunk of the reason why I refuse to go elsewhere anymore. The remainder had to so with the availability of indie games. Let's face it, there are a lot of indie developers who sell games through Steam and sometimes Steam alone.

Origin? No thanks, not with its horribly invasive nature, and the fact that it's an EA product. Screw that.

I'd like to see the poster you were replying to show statistics backing up his claim that Steam is losing customers in a "slow trickle," but I think he's simply repeating what he's been told. If anything, Steam is probably gaining sales. Every holiday, I buy up a bunch of game packs for family and friends as virtual stocking stuffers. I know I'm not alone.

Carry a jar of pickled brains.

If that's true, the Chinese government cares more about it's people than the American one.

The residents were probably party officials.

What's annoying about sudo and apt? You don't have to use sudo if you don't want to, adding a real root user is easy. But using sudo is good practice on any Linux system. And apt? Apt is one of the major reasons to use a debian based distro.

Having come from a BSD background as my first *nix-like OS exposure and later migrating to Gentoo for desktop use--and more recently to Arch, which I love--apt and friends seem spread out and feel somewhat inferior. They're not, of course, but given package managers I like, that's my opinion.

Fundamentally, of course, it's all very subjective; what's annoying to you might be reasonable to me and vice versa. I've become exceptionally fond of Arch and single-point-of-reference package managers like pacman (or emerge for those who still stick with Gentoo and maybe yum for Red Hat-based persuasions, though I don't know much about it). Single-point package managers arguably beat the requirement of installing extra apt-* packages for edge cases like reverse dependency resolution or discovering which file belongs to what package. While utilities like apt-file are easy to install, the package name isn't immediately obvious to newcomers, and sometimes the only way to figure out the best solution to a given package-related problem is to trawl forums, blogs, and mailing lists. I admit that this demonstrates the advantage of having everything in a single manpage (e.g. pacman), because it's feasible to figure out everything reasonably quickly without having to Google it; though, the obvious disadvantage for users accustomed to the "one action, one command" mindset is that dozens of command line options can potentially be intimidating. Also, not everyone agrees with the philosophy.

I won't hazard guessing what the OP's implications were, because apt isn't terribly annoying to use. It's just different. It's not the kind of different I like, and that's perfectly fine! apt is a better match for the way some people think; pacman/emerge/yum are better for others. And others still would rather stick with cd /usr/ports/$packagename && make && make install. Again, though, it's fundamentally a personal preference, with the exception of systems under your care. Then you should know everything you feasibly can. ;)

That said, I still blame Red Hat for the train wreck that is NetworkManager.

Don't try to bring climate change denial in here as though it somehow creates support for your viewpoint.

The OP probably included that with the expectation that moderators might not carefully follow his argument and instead offer a positive mod simply on the premise that he's opposed to "climate deniers" and so are they. I conclude this based partly on the fact that he even goes so far as to use very similar language to that echoed frequently in the climate change debates here on Slashdot such as (quoting immediately from his post) "'what is the effect', 'how do we mitigate it', and 'how certain are we of the linkage'." There's no attempt provide evidence supporting the claim that video games might cause ASD (instead, he chooses to indirectly mock anyone who might disagree) and almost coincidentally, neither does Professor Greenfield provide evidence. mevets ought to be modded down for intellectual dishonesty and attempting to implicitly tie causation to something that has yet to be supported by research findings.

Given that his post is currently at +4, Insightful, the tactic of tacking on a statement relating disputes with video game-caused ASD to climate change "deniers" in order to attract sympathetic moderators seems to be working and that is unfortunate.

take a look a apple... marketing wizards. you may love their products, or hate it, but their growth and sales tell the story for itself. this may not end up to be such a good move for AMD in the long run.

The problem is vastly different, as many posters here are pointing out: AMD has (had?) a lousy marketing department.

The illustration you're making is apples (heh) to oranges. Apple has an extremely strong and talented marketing wing--so much so that the actual real world quality of their products almost doesn't matter (much). AMD is quite the opposite. Their marketing department has dropped the ball and pretty much failed the company.

Considering how much higher quality Intel chips have been the last two years, they don't even need to bribe anyone.

That's true.

The unfortunate truth for Intel, though, is that their chips have historically been fairly overpriced in contrast with comparable offerings from AMD. Of course, AMD is beaten into a pulp by Intel's high end offerings and can't even compete in that market segment, but I can't think of anyone much who'd fork out $1,000+ for a desktop processor unless they had a business-related reason to or had more money than sense. Certainly not in this economy clime.

I recently spent a fair bit less than $200 on a CPU upgrading my desktop to AMD's then near top of the line offering. Sure, it wasn't near as capable as Intel's chips (and I've historically always purchased Intel CPUs), but the problem is that Intel's comparable offering was over $100 more expensive--never mind how much more expensive Intel motherboards were. I'm not a regular gamer, I often write code in my spare time, and I have no real need for anything ridiculously fast (just more cores). I did want something reasonably future-proof without breaking the bank, which is why I went with AMD for the first time ever. I know of at least one friend of mine who recently did the same thing. I've been extremely pleased with the results.

On the other hand, I know of someone in my circle of acquaintances who purportedly forked out almost $4,000 to build an Intel rig with their latest CPU offering at the time. Yet, in spite of the investment, he never played anything other than WoW on his hardware. To each his own, mind you, but it seemed like something of a waste to me. He had his reasons, and that's fine.

I expect Intel to continue dropping the price on their low- to medium-end offerings in order to compete, but I also don't expect to see them drop very far since 1) the low end has tighter profit margins and 2) Intel has volume (in terms of production capabilities) plus market share in their favor--don't expect that combination to allow for much generosity on their behalf.

To my untrained eye, I have a hard time seeing how they could sue over the logo. It looks nothing like the Apple Computer, Inc. logo! I realize your intentions were to attempt to absolve Apple of wrongdoing, but I think that link has succeeded in helping me decide that this suit is/was even more petty than I gleaned from TFA.

Yes, there's the issue of trademark dilution, but I think this is far beyond ridiculous.

Maybe they learned the lesson about rare earth mining, but wanna bet the same situation will have to be repeated in a dozen fields before there are any larger changes in technology policy.

That's also a possibility, and I suspect the Chinese were banking on two things: 1) our complacency with increase price pressure on rare earths and 2) the length of time and start up costs for restarting mining operations. Both of these will only benefit the Chinese, and in the time #2 takes, they'll be able to decide just how much to subsidize their exports and have time to restart their own mining operations to push the price back down.