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Except you know that not to be the case, since as you are so keen to point out and apparently so eager to read and comment on all the Apple stories, the iPad's superior display has been widely reviewed to critical acclaim.

It's so sad to see a person reduced to a caricature. Your life must be so empty when you can't be a horse's ass about Apple, since it's clear you can't simply let go and move on with your life.

It's also worth noting that "jihad" != "terrorism", except in the mind of a poorly educated and/or un-insightful person.

I just want to be clear that I never intended to say you're using the word incorrectly. It's the style of its use I have issue with. It reminds me of people shouting 'terrorist' whenever a certain presidential candidate was mentioned. Frankly, that was not that long ago.

To such a person I might have indeed sounded "like those people", but apparently not to visitors here.

I think they accept it because they really don't like the RIAA. I'm not perfect. I'd love to pretend I'd practice what I preach 100% of the time, but I wouldn't have brought it up if you were describing Sony's attempts to thwart home-brew on the PSP.

I think you underestimate your fellow Slashdotters, which is possibly why you were modded as Troll; nobody likes being judged as ignorant, and much less so when it's not true.

I will be up front and tell you that I definitely do not think as highly of them as you do. That may ruffle a few feathers, but least I am not trying to BS my way out of claiming otherwise. However, I do not believe the troll mod was because I was saying anybody was ignorant. I think the Troll mod was because I was sucking the fun out of attaching a term to the RIAA that would turn public opinion against them. I do not believe that's the method to use to fight back against these guys. To me it's in the same spirit as "Godwin's Law" and it does not lose its strength just because the RIAA are a bunch of life-ruining jerks. It's hard, especially in recent years, to take a point seriously when you paint those who oppose you as a caricature of themselves.

This extreme-label approach only works in the short term. Once enough people start parroting it, other people get annoyed with hearing the same phrase over and over again and take a stand against it. This is how fanboys are created.

In the context, I suspect he'd mean draw nasty caricatures. But if you prefer we can just go say fuck Bhumibol Adulyadej. Fuck Bhumibol that fucker. Fuck him for now having his people change the laws. He might look all magnanimous occasionally pardoning someone for insulting him after they've done time or suffered long court cases but that just indicates how much of a problem there is. If he were really serious and couldn't get the law changed he'd just preemptively pardon everyone every single day. So fuck Bhumibol. Fuck his monarchy. Your royal highness Bhumibol Adulyadej, go fuck yourself and your censorship.

I can think of a few things that rhyme with Bhumibol, but I'm damned if I can come up with anything good for Adulyadej. Paging Tim Minchin, Tim Minchin to the yellow courtesy phone! We need an updated version of The Pope Song, STAT!

In the context, I suspect he'd mean draw nasty caricatures. But if you prefer we can just go say fuck Bhumibol Adulyadej. Fuck Bhumibol that fucker. Fuck him for now having his people change the laws. He might look all magnanimous occasionally pardoning someone for insulting him after they've done time or suffered long court cases but that just indicates how much of a problem there is. If he were really serious and couldn't get the law changed he'd just preemptively pardon everyone every single day. So fuck Bhumibol. Fuck his monarchy. Your royal highness Bhumibol Adulyadej, go fuck yourself and your censorship.

Yes. Look at it ... closely and in context (instead of the decapitated quotes floating around). You'll find more snark and in-jokes than anything else. Unfortunately, the caricature of the serious, humorless scientist is so prevalent in our culture that every little thing ever written or said in private conversation or correspondence is taken as a serious statement. Sad, but what can you do?

The largest problem with the Zino is that it is sold by Dell. Trying to find a real price for anything via its website is like visiting the worst caricature of a used car salesman possible.

'The Southerners should get rich, but the wealth extraction requires expertise they don't have (killing each other has been more fun down the centuries).

I was born in Charleston, South Carolina and currently live in Atlanta. Your absurd caricature is as ridiculous as it is insulting. BTW, fuck you very much you pompous arrogant ass.

That isn't really the question, though. The question isn't how people of a particular type will interact with technology X, the question is what sorts of people regular interaction with technology X, from early childhood up, will produce.

Unless you adopt the (almost certainly nonsensical) position that everybody is entirely born, not made, you have to concede some degree of environmental influence on people's eventual properties(the degree of that influence is certainly a matter of debate; but almost certainly isn't zero).

Now, I'm largely of the opinion that most of the "old media" types are basically whiny, nostalgic, curmugeons, who look back fondly on the days when we had "quality" and "gatekeepers"(that consisted largely of people like them deciding what did or didn't get printed). Some truly excellent stuff has, certainly, been printed; but most of print has always been yellow journalism, pulp novels, tabloids, picture books, and propaganda. The same shit as the internet; but less convenient. The other thing that irks me about the "old media" types is that many of them seem blind to the fact that much of what may have made their medium valuable(see any of the stuff about he value of the "fourth estate"/journalism to democracy) had already been gutted and sold for scrap by the rise of TV well before the internet was anything more than a research toy for a few tech-heads with university affiliations.

The internet is the new and shiny, and thus catches the flack; but, in many respects, the "old media" that it is busy killing is basically a shambling, undead, caricature of itself. A bunch of 24-hour talking heads opinion-driven shout-down shows, supine corporate mouthpiece newspapers, and parasitic journals selling scientists their own work at a fat markup. The "old media" types seem to make the mistake of assuming that the "new media" kiddies hate them and want to accelerate their demise because they are just juvenile vandals who wouldn't know a cogently expressed thought if it bit them in the ass, rather than considering the possibility that they are either ossified or rotten.

You're correct when it comes to script in europe, however chinese characters don't influence any other written languages languages, they are incorporated as they are to specify a specific meaning of a term. This is how they are used in both korean and japanese. Sure there's loanwords or patterns of joining terms that might be borrowed into other languages, but that's a grammatical or loanword influence.

Chinese characters are pictograms (ie. little pictures that convey a meaning independent of the spoken language) and alphabets are renderings of pronounciation .. it'd be like saying that a caricature of the queen of england influences the way the term 'Queen' is written.

"You write so poorly..."
"Your post is worded so well..."

So which is it? :-)

I did not call you ignorant for being Christian, but for displaying a limited world view. Let me respond first to the crux of your ignorance:

"Okay, fine, I can accept that you're an atheist, and you believe there's nothing wrong with porn.""

Here and at several other points in your post, you're trying to put ALL atheists into one big category where everyone thinks exactly the same, has the same morals and so on. To add insult to injury, you group people by what they *don't* believe in. That shows that your mindset is rather limited and you think only in caricatures.

Do you honestly believe that just because I agree with someone about religion, I'm going to agree about everything else too?

Really?

Do you agree with all religious people? Do you support gay marriage? Or not? Either way, you'll find religious people who disagree with you.

Sure, it's easy to go "Ick, naked people. WRONG!" I used to have such a view myself, until I grew up and found out that female sexual drive goes asymptotically to zero as they get settled into the relationship. And mine doesn't. Porn gives a nice release that all concerned parties (including the wife) are comfortable with. Maybe I should follow your Christian leaders who are caught with gay prostitutes? No thanks.

Ohh, wait... the prostitute-banging Christian leaders with millions of followers don't represent YOUR Christianity, right? Look who's suddenly able to differentiate now.

Do a little search for "porn use by Christians" and educate yourself a bit, OK?

And the gist of my post was that it's perfectly possible for someone with other views on religion to have rigid morals. If you've never met such people, your social circle is truly limited.

You carry this limitation into point 1 where you conflate a country's government, culture and its people. The Chinese culture is 5000 years old, the current government only 1/100 of that. The USA is a secular nation (as confirmed by the US Constitution). Most of the people, like in China, are religious. What's the contradiction, mac?

Then point 2: I could have phrased it better: persecution is not Christian-specific. But Catholics aren't Christians to begin with. Things like idol-worship is explicitly prohibited by the Bible.

Point 3: are you honestly unable to differentiate between a poster on Slashdot and the entire Chinese government? :-)

Point 4: your religion should not be obsessed with *my* sexuality

Now I know that I'm a little confrontational in how I phrase my opinion, but please don't let that stop you from deepening your world view.

This line of thought crops up a lot, and Eurocentric commentators often wave the "Enlightenment" as a sort of mystical talisman without investigating very closely what, exactly, it was about the Enlightenment's interaction with Christianity that created modern civilization as it we know it today. Because on the face of it, the Enlightenment actually did very little to Christianity. The holy text didn't change. The leading institution of the faith didn't change. The number of faithful didn't change (or at least didn't until centuries afterwards).

So what, exactly did the Enlightenment accomplish that transformed Christianity from a backwards zealous militant ideology to what we know today? (And yes, the preceding sentence is a horrifically reductive caricature and I largely phrase it that way in order to paraphrase a certain way of thinking.) Well, empiricism diluted religion to the point where even if thinking people professed to be Christians, they were no longer stupid enough to actually take the written dictates of their faith all too seriously. That's it. That's all. It wasn't very revolutionary, or very difficult, and there was nothing about it that was particularly unique to Christianity or the West.

The same process is happening throughout the world, including in Islam, including in Turkey, where the cosmopolitan educated elite professes to be Muslim but finds a YouTube ban just as silly as we do. Trust me, Turkish college students want to be able to watch cute kitten videos. The problem is that the Turkey's highly federalized political structure gives disproportionate voice to fringe elements - imagine if that one Catholic dude who's always on TV bashing South Park could actually get courts to file injunctions on his behalf, and you've have an approximation of what is happening here.

Yes, we're assholes. Hilarious.

Basic rights shouldn't be dependent on friendliness. They should be respected at all times. Being nice is a better way to be than the American caricature you draw, but rights are rights, not privileges for the polite.

Assholes have rights, too.

I'm turning my face into a caricature of the Prophet.

Let me guess, you're into Free and Open Source Software, right?

Only an idiot like you would ever consider it a civilised action to make fun of people that are held in great esteem

Nobody should be above criticism, parody, caricatures or ridicule. That includes prophets. To me, your prophet is a nobody, or in the case of Islam, a barbaric warmongering pedophile. Criticizing him is the last we should do.

and a barbaric action to get angry about it.

Becoming angry is not barbaric, but turning the anger into violence or threats of violence is certainly barbaric. You are free to protest peacefully, with protest marches, letters-to-the-editor of newspapers, setting up protest websites, etc.

This has come up as an issue because of political cartoons referencing Mohammad for completely legitimate reasons. The nature of political cartoons as a speech medium basically requires caricatures or personifications of famous people in order to make a point. In the case of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, the point was the censorship of dialog about Muslim and how it relates to modern Danish living. Compare the outrage and censorship of those pieces, to how we treat other major public figures, and you'll find that a definite double standard is being applied. Christians, Jews, Hindus, etc deal with blasphemy all of the time in western cultures. Part of freedom of expression involves dealing productively with not liking what other people might say.

Which is not to say that political cartoons haven't become superficial in the last 30 years. But the medium requires pictograms, and the legitimate representations of those particular players is essential to the communication. If you can't draw Mohammad in a political cartoon, you can't critique Muslim culture.

I always wondered what percentage of the local population is represented by those people shown on TV burning the Danish flag demanding death to those who drew the caricatures. Just like some people from the Middle East and Central Asia I talked with had the mistaken belief that everyone in Europe is christian - and that all christians agree to the message of those caricatures -, many intelligent westerners view muslims as an unreasonable fanatic mass. Dozens of cameramen circling around other dozens of idiots burning some effigies won't give us a real picture of those people.

My ass crack is caricature of islam's prophet.

It already appears to be a caricature of the Prophet.

smarty pants, the real reason for banning FB in Bangladesh was the posting of caricature / satirical images of BD leaders. it's NOT, i repeat its NOT because of prophet Muhamad (pbuh) images. how? because the prophet's images were already on FB for a long time yet it wasn't banned in BD.
read a Bangladeshi news site before jumping to conclusion.

I'm turning my face into a caricature of the Prophet.