Slashdot Mirror
ABC's 'People of the Year' - Bloggers
Sammy at Palm Addict writes "ABC News have declared Bloggers to be their 'People of the Year'. 'A blog - short for "web log" - is an online personal journal that covers topics ranging from daily life to technology to culture to the arts. Blogs have made such an impact this year that Merriam-Webster named it the word of the year. This week, their influence has become readily apparent.'"
My first award ever! *tears*
"E-mail" is our person of the year!
You like me, you really like me, you really really like me!
Distributed proteome folding @ WorldCommunityGrid.org
Team Slashdot - Members:#1 Run Time:#1 Points:#1 Results:#1
How hard is it to say Web Loggers?
And I'd like to thank the academy of other folks with too much time on their hands, who've made me what I am today.
'Sparrow.'
Matt Drudge's site could be considered to be a blog... that means bloggers have been influencing news events since at least 1998.
Like the blogging of Dan Rather.
This is /. News for nerds. Do we _really_ need to be told what a "blog" is? We do not have lack of long-term memory where we have to be told again and again the meaning of "blog". Save it for when you're writing to an audience that's first being introduced to the term. Stop insulting us.
[/rant]
Okay, now that I got that out of my system, I can start the new year fresh =D
If a blog is updated and nobody reads it, does it actually matter?
Off topic I know, but still...
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Livejournalers, apparently. "Gosh, my parents are so mean! They never let me stay up late!"
Yeah, that kind of thing matters so much we should give it a special kind of award.
Wait a second...
We're just realizing that some guy with a computer and an internet connection is doing our jobs better then we are.
I don't reply to ACs
happy new year 2005. lets hope the sadness and tragedies of 2004 will leave us, and a better year is awaiting us.
...it has a good side and a bad side. There's someone on Kuro5hin who's documented the dark side of Movable Type and, subsequently, Xanga weblogs. It turns out that in addition to "empowering" people's abilities to communicate, weblogs can also be used to stifle them, especially in the insidious case of Xanga. We always need to keep in mind how new technological advances have negative side-effects in addition to positive ones.
A blog - short for "web log"
Thank you SO MUCH for defining "blog." Everyone at Slashdot must have been very confused.
Is it me, or is the culture of celebrity-worship we live in producing a whole generation of celebrity wannabes? Look! Pics of me & friends drinking at Starbucks! Aren't we trendy?!!!
The people I observe aren't happy unless they're living a melodramatic existence (JUST LIKE ON TV!) or inflicting their lame "art" on the rest of the world. Grow the fuck up already, no one cares, and yes, the world will get along fine without you.
To paraphrase Bill Hicks, they're making us pay a high psychic toll.
Sorry for the rant, it's just New Year's Day blues or something.
for giving me this award, and my parents for buying my first computer, and...
Why bother?
Face it, 99% of all the blog material out there is shit (my own included). We need better blogging out there, not more of it!
They should have held up one or two exemplary examples of blogging done right - good content and timley information (and a lack of words like "dat", "ur", "OMG", "LOL", and "ROFLMAO")
<John Stewart>
Stop, please stop butchering language. You're hurting our vocabulary and you make yourself sound stupid
</John Stewart>
Well, ABC has their own version of "Rather." It's called "Jennings," not to be confused with a jeopardy-cracking tool called by the same name.
The only difference is that Jennings hasn't been caught like Rather has... yet. I do take comfort in the fact that this sort of thing comes eventually.
main(0)
Ahh yes, another year. It will be just like the last one except you're older!
And congrats to all the bloggers! While 99% of you are writing a bunch of crap, here's to the 1% that are actually creating a new medium instead of writing about what you had for lunch.
And congrats to Dave Winer, who never gets any respect!
And congrats to slashdot, one of the longest-running blogs that nobody actually calls a blog!
Bush is back in office. The Iraq war still rages. Non-business interests are losing ground in most intellectual property conflicts.
Yeah - I'd say the net effect of bloggers is... well, a lot of interest, but few positive results as of yet. Here's hoping next year is better.
Ryan Fenton
George Bush got Time's 'Person of the Year', so obviously the bar for this kind of thing is pretty low. :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I mean, yes bloggers have become a trend.... but 99,9% of the blogs I've read are absolutely senseless to anyone who doesn't know the people in question. You might say the same about homepages - 99,9% of those were useless to outsiders as well. And there's no easier to find the people who actually have something sensible to say. I'll just place this under "if you take a big enough sample, someone will have something interesting to say"... which kinda reminds me of slashdot, oh well ;)
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
philosophy, and not Zen Buddhism.
I should be modded up for this, but ACs don't seem to get modded up.
It's without a doubt that not all blogs are of the same weight, BUT...
Who or what will determine if your blog does matter? Page hits? Comments? Flames?
I guess it's all a popularity thing to me.
Need a color? Try 100 random colors
You know, it really is a shame as an Oregon logger to have the class "B" loggers, those seasonal employees being the most celebrated people of the year. Its a sad day for all of us who have real logging power.
-Alan
How about soliders, researchers, volunteers, or teachers?!
This way to the egress...
Before ABC News cleared-up what a "blog" was, I thought it was a medical name for constipation.
Glad they clarified that.
PS: HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Precisely. No talent clowns running software where they haven't the first clue of how it operates so, to camouflage there true scourge to humanity, they invent a hip synonym for "journal."
All those asshats can keep modding me down if they're so insecure but I'll still classify blogging as THE MOST OVER-RATED CONCEPT OF ALL TIME.
Laws are for people with no friends.
Happy new years to you too!
:/
I don't have friends to be with either
For a moment, I thought the title said 'blogger of the year', and my heart stopped momentarily as I thought, 'if they say Roland Piquepaille, I'm gonna be pissed.'
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
When will podcasters be the people of the year?
Wow. I never knew that. What a useful tidbit. +1 Informative to "Sammy at Palm Addict"!
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
"All these people keep bemoaning the fact that they can't communicate. If they can't communicate, the least they can do is SHUT UP." -- Tom Lerher
Dude, I hope you don't mention your nickname to women... or anybody for that matter.
Laws are for people with no friends.
Thanks for defining blog for me. I couldn't figure out what it meant until I went to the homepage of slashdot.
The Television Wiki
> I'll still classify blogging as THE MOST OVER-RATED CONCEPT OF ALL TIME.
Really? Visit a few high-quality news blogs on a daily basis, and suddenly you're bypassing the Mainstream Media, who have had a stranglehold on information dissemination for decades.
Seems pretty significant to me.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
I'm getting really sick of searching Google (and other search engines) for stuff only to find nothing but blog hits (usually from some self-glorifying twit with some catchy emo domain name) cluttering up the results.
Even worse is when it's the same "Trackback" crap, and none of the morons have bothered to retain the original article they were linked to, and it's link rotted.
Blogs *are* the most over-rated and overhyped thing of 2004.
According to BlogShares, the number of blogs has grown from 1 million to 2.3 million over the past 6 months. It seems like information overload. It also seems like the number of blogs isn't really relevant - most of the attention ends up being focused on a very few blogs run by people already in the media (like Instapundit).
PimpMyMazda.com - Crazy mods to a 2002 Mazda Protege DX.
No mention either of any of the government's actions that easily trump Rather. Liberal media my ass.
Soldiers, scientists, and other people that are providing services to humanity are probably shaking their heads at this, but meanwhile a thousand camgirl bloggers are saying "OMG Time called me "People of the Year!!" LOL OMG!!!"
Haha! - iqoags
A group of linguists declared "blog" to be a word they want stricken from the English language and I couldn't agree more.
:(
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6773907/
Other previous hated words:
metrosexual (2003) -- although it made a funny South Park plot
chad (2001) -- the little piece of paper that chose our President
paradigm (1994) -- sadly, still used in 99% of business presentations
- JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
"Dylan Verdi, an 11-year-old known as the world's youngest videoblogger, says she covers "things that I've seen that I like or that I've heard of, or just anything that happened to me that day that I'm thinking.""
"videoblogger?" great, another buzzword. I wonder what her "videoblog" is about - what 11 year old girls really like? Oh brother, that oughta be a hoot.
A chick named "Dylan?" Now that's a new one!
But *that* is something that Time considered worthy of "People of the Year?" An 11 year old with a video camera talking about what she likes? (they failed to link to the blog, though)
There are so many other people that are far more deserving of the title than effin *Bloggers* - blah.
For a while I thought blogs were stupid, but thats just because I had looked at live journal sites published by 15 year old girls. I like the services that blogger.com offer, and even use textamerica.com for its picture blogging service. I just wish I could have this all on my own domain and not be tied to a company that might not be around in 10 years. Are there any open source packages that I should check out? I've got experience with PHP.
Happy New Year
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
"But for Verdi, it is the simple pleasure of knowing that someone is listening that makes blogging worthwhile.
"On my blog it allows people to post comments, and I have gotten comment upon comment upon comment," she said. "It makes me feel really good that somebody else cares about what I have to say."
"
That pretty much sums it up - blogging for a feeling of self importance. Blogging turns people into serious attention whores. People start getting upset when nobody comments on their blog.
No wonder we're now seeing t-shirts that say "Go cry about it in your Livejournal."
There are so many blogs; trying to find anything good among the mix is nearly hopeless. There are literally millions of blogs and only one of me. What we need is some form of critiquing/editing to ensure the quality achieves a certain level.
"Save the internet, append -inurl:blog to all google searches!"
I don't know who had that in their post (it might have been in their signature), but I copied it down onto a sticky-note, and my internet experience has never been better.
A blog - short for "web log" - is an online personal journal that covers topics ranging from daily life to technology to culture to the arts.
Did we really need 'blog' defined in the blurb? This is Slashdot after all...
~Lake
uh, uh, uh...
It's significant that, out of a mountain of garbage, there are a few rare gems. Statistically, that will happen. It still doesn't change the reality of blogs. Like everything else in our society, blogs have been co-opted by the system. When a dork like Chris Matthews becomes a "hard" blogger, the party is over.
Laws are for people with no friends.
"If a blog is updated and nobody reads it, does it actually matter?"
Check back here in five years.
"This is why editors are valuable."
Tell that to proponents of the "new business model" that'll be 99% distribution carrying 100% crap.
Happy GNU/Year!
happy new year from us central time zone!
Roland Piquepaille.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
"Happy new years to you too!
:/"
I don't have friends to be with either
The rest of the forum can hug you, if you like?
Rupert? Is that you??
When the Web was introduced to the masses, everyone down to the last AOLer talked about building their own websites. But up until now many of those sites have been poorly updated piles of rubbish, a far cry from the web of individual voices and opinions around the world that many people thought the Web would bring.
So here we are in 2004, where blogers are now "people of the year" and when we look back at what's changed, it's almost nothing except for one thing: content management systems. You give people Frontpage or Dreamweaver, and they'll put out a poorly done site that's too complex for them to convienently update, but all of a sudden the simple blog-style of content management is introduced, and all of a sudden that vision of voices around the world is coming true. Was this the only thing we were missing the whole damn time?
I'm finding myself slightly stupified at the prospect that the only think keeping this vision from coming true is that we needed to take away the ability for users to make their own site, and then make the whole thing a little easier to update. We still have things like blogs about cats, so I'm not sure the content has become any better, but was this really all the user really needed? It boggles the mind.
> Blog is an idiotic term. How about going all the way and just writing 1337 crap like "6106"?
'Cause we're talking about 61095, not 61065.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Jebus, I hadn't even gotten to the blog aspect, I was just worried if the imagery from the "Palm Addict" would ever go away.
chad: Scraps or bits of paper, such as the perforated edges of paper for tractor feed printers or the tiny rectangles punched out from data cards.
In context, in what other ways could we shorten up "web log"? Wog? Elog? Leb? Gleb? My personal favorite is welo but it, unfortunately, is of the dual-syllable type...
The most important blog this year, bar none, was http://www.kevinsites.net/. You can't top it.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
fuck up
...Is the fact that politically-conservative blogs made a huge difference in the 2004 US Presidential campaign.
I cite two reasons for this:
1. Conservative blogs spread the message of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth "527" group far beyond what was possible in the past. I mean let's face it: because most media outlets ignored this 527 group, it took the power of conservative blogs to spread the message, along with conservative radio talk shows and the Fox News Channel. Of course, it didn't help the Kerry campaign that Senator Kerry reacted woefully too slowly to the charges of this group.
2. Conservative blogs in a matter of a few hours revealed that the Texas Air National Guard memos supposedly critical of President Bush's Texas ANG service that CBS News used were fraudulent. And it also made people much less trusting of the mainstream press and also why it may have hastened the decision of CBS News anchor Dan Rather to retire one year earlier than he originally planned.
Cats of the world rejoice!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I think there is alot of hype about bloggers over maybe not nothing, but certainly not anything substancial. The web has been used by individual people for a while now to express their views. Yes, there are now more people doing it, but it is not something that just came out of the blue this year. I consider myself to be pretty internet savy. And yet, when my dad asked me earlier this year if I had a blog, as he thought I must based on the hype he had heard, I told him no, I've mostly only heard about them on tv. I'm not saying blogging isn't a good thing, or that it isn't expanding, its just its not the explosion it is made out to be. And yes, as I'm sure someone will point out, I do now have a blog.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
"Kuro5hin: News for losers. People who don't matter."
They use bigger words than Slashdotters do.
Blob? You're right about the spelling error in a world of spelling errors but it provokes the question: Am I wrong? Maybe 61065 have a high correlation with 61095.
Laws are for people with no friends.
I mean really, who reads these things?
I'm an engineer and work with a bunch on technically savy people. I know of one one person who commonly reads blogs. He is a ultra conservative, very religious, weirdo who uses blogs as a way to confirm his own beliefs. Other than that cares.
Most of them are crap. The only ones I've ever come upon that are even a bit worthwhile are ones where people log cool techno projects. These aren't any different than written descriptions that have been on the web since it started. Nothing new here.
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-
And this coming year we'll see actions being taken against bloggers... get ready for word of 2005: "lawsuit".
My Linux - (L)ove (I)s (N)ever (U)tterly eXPensive
'You're fired!' on hit list in word ban campaign
(`blog' is on the list too. And rightfully so. In fact, it should be at the top of the list!)
(Not that I'd try to `ban' a word, but I *do* hate it. Almost as much as `surf' for clicking on web pages.)
Carrot Top shirtless! Someone's gotta get a life.
Google also sent a lot of traffic my way because of an entry I had which debunked a popular picture of a tanker sailing into a hurricane. If you search Google images for "hurricane photo" my enticing picture is on the bottom right. This one link was clicked 55,599 times by Google's users in 2004.
Some people find me interesting. I'm afraid many others find me randomly.
I prefer the term "online diary" myself.
Moll.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
The PowerLineBlog was chosen by Time Magazine as "Blog of the Year" perhaps in no small part due to PowerLine being a clearing house for Dan RaTHer's education about MS Word vs Typewriters
Perhaps like other less-frequent Slashdot readers, I am puzzled why anyone would want to $ub$cribe to $la$dot ;-);-);-) given that Slashdot continues to miss "BIG" news for nerds, stuff that matters stories like ... Mainstream Media vs Kid Internet and RaTHerGate
Right under the nose of the Slashdot Editors the really BIG story broke on the blogosphere back in August (SwiftVets) and many (e.g. Slashdot readers and the few $ub$criber$) were completely detached from the discussion of the long-term implications.
The more stereotypical SlashDot discussions at the time were about "BusHitler", raTHer (grin) than an informed discussion about the long-term impact of the internet on society.
From the Belmont Club blog ...
The undercard in the Kerry vs Swiftvets bout is Mainstream Media vs Kid Internet, two distinctly different fights, but both over information. The first is really the struggle over the way Vietnam will be remembered by posterity; ....
But the undercard holds a fascination of its own. The reigning champion, the Mainstream Media, has been forced against all odds to accept the challenge of an upstart over the coverage of the Swiftvets controversy. Joe Strupp at Editor and Publisher writes:
The article is a candid and unconscious description of the actual nature of news. It is not just raw information or pixels pushed onto a screen, but a system of semantic entities: an series of information objects, containing properties and methods containing embedded logic, set loose on society. The power of the Mainstream Media lay in the fact that they controlled the generation of news objects; how they arose, what they did, how they ran their course. They were the news object foundry; able to make them "type safe"; define what they could do, and what they could not. And that power was enormousYet for good or ill, the genie is out of the bottle. Before the Gutenberg printing press men knew the contents of the Bible solely through the prism of the professional clergy, who could alone afford the expensively hand copied books and who exclusively interpreted it. But when technology made books widely available, men could read the sacred texts for themselves and form their own opinions. And the world was never the same again.
I believe Juanita
http://www.ninjagear.net/
BUT - they say "on hiatus" right now. Grrr....
It's totally a blog. Pretty much the definition of a blog.
So many people here seem to want to reiterate that this is a site for "nerds". That we're supposed to make a difference. But in the same breath, they bash others for using "l33tsp34k" or net abbreviations. They'll bash a teen LJ user for posting their virtual diary, but put forth the fury of crap on their own site and tout it as a masterpiece. What's crap to you isn't crap to others.
/. used to have a pretty decent sense of community. About the only time you see people being a group is to bash M$ or team up for the new dsitributed.net project. Yes, we've always disagreed... that's part of a community. But either I've grown very old very quickly, the /. populace has becoem extremely immature, or the community has just broken down for no apparent reason.
As for blogging in and of itself, why could it be considered bad? If Xanga allows for these types of issues, perhaps the creators of Xanga need to be blamed, not the trend of blogging. Blogging can be such an interesting look into the lives of others. Some of you are so far into nerddom that you are antisocial and don't care what others think. That's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But those of us that are curious about other people, or... God forbid... outgoing or extroverted, blogs let us see what's on the other side... the other side of the bridge, the city, the state or the world. How can this ever be a bad thing?
Yes, yes... almost everyone that comes to this site knows what a blog is. Maybe somebody doesn't. Maybe they are a neo-nerd, fresh to the community. Are you ACTUALLY offended that the term was described in a quote on the front page? Seriously... some people need to get over themselves. There are plenty of things that occur, are said or are shown on the internet that I feel are ignorant or ill-advised. But generally (this post, of course, being an exception), I just let it go.
It's sad really...
Maybe the reason that bloggers are considered to be influential is because they are now doing the job (Some very well and some very badly) that used to be done by the Main Stream Media. The media has largely stopped serious reporting. More and more newspapers, radio and television stations are being gathered into fewer and fewer hands. The result is an almost complete lack of questioning anyone's Talking Points - much less the assumptions underlying them. If bloggers are more influential it's because the media is less so.
No talent clowns running software where they haven't the first clue of how it operates
I'm sorry, we have to take your car away from you now.
Oh, and your body. This won't hurt a bit.
All those asshats can keep modding me down if they're so insecure but I'll still classify blogging as THE MOST OVER-RATED CONCEPT OF ALL TIME.
You're what? Fourteen?
This will fly right over your head, but I'll say it anyway: CB radio.
Aaaaaanyway, a blog is just one (convenient) way to organise a web site. Blogs will spread out in style and features until they're just part of the web, indistinguishable from any other. And the web itself is spreading out into protocol soup, so that the internet is just one big blur of data. It's amazing that it works at all, let alone works so well.
I am in a bad mood this morning so I would like to opine that the explosion in weblogs is due to the mainstream news media becoming so inept, distorted and lame that ordinary idiots realise they could do the job themselves.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Bloggers can do good work, but there is no institutional/programatic/architectural assurance that they're telling the truth.
.max
Bloggers can post anything they want, w/o refutation, or consequence (barring libel suit, natch)-- there's no way to proximally refute a blog's BS. Journalists, at least, are held to some standard, and their outlets -- papers, magazines, networks, have to at least occasionally genuflect at the altar of veracity. A journalist who lies and is caught becomes unemployed; not so the blogger, who can spew and rave unchallenged.
A much better modality than blogging is usenet news.
Their influence is overwhelming me. Please stop it.
142 comments and no mention of blogger's biggest kill- perhaps when their importance was proven beyond a doubt.
I'm sure you'll all remember that a week or two before the election, Dan Rather went on 60 minutes with a story about how Bush allegedly got special treatment when he was in the air national guard. To prove this, CBS posted PDF's of supporting memos, 'from' the 70's, on their website.
Within hours, someone mentioned on freerepublic that the documents looked like they came from microsoft word.
Over the 12 hours, Littlegreenfootballs.com , with the help of powerlineblog.com blew the lid off the story.
Here's a detailed analysis later put together by a guy who pretty much wrote the book on computer typesetting: Dr. Newcomer
Bloggers showed that CBS had aired a story based on piss-poor forgeries made with MS Word 2003 default settings within hours, and then let so many people know about it so rapidly that there was no turning back for Rather and 60 minutes. His retirement this spring was announced within a month of this fiasco, IIRC.
Now, regardless of what you happen to think of Bush (Dr. Newcomer was a Kerry fan), basing a story on fabricated evidence is inexcusable. Basing it on such obvious forgeries is beyond inexcusable, and reaches into incredibly stupidity.
Bloggers busted 60 minutes on this. Huge story. And I'm suprised I'm the first one posting it.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Congratulations to Hindrocket, The Big Trunk, and Deacon for producing such an excellent blog.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
" Wow. THAT WAS SO FREAKING COOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
O___O I WAS ON ABC NEWS! I REPRESENTED BLOGGERS AS PERSONS OF THE YEAR!!!!!! I'M TYPING IN ALL CAPS!!!!!! HOLY COW!!!!!!!!
o.o; Oh.My.God. That was soooooooooooo cool! ^____^ My sister said she felt like she was going to pee in her pants after she saw it. XD I cried a little. That was so cooooool! :P
And they played hide! Okay, it was the backround, and only a little, but hey.
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!
Bloggers rule!"
Now, here are the givens that too many Slashdotters won't admit to:
You want to tell me you popped out of your mother's womb and started coding Perl before you could crawl? Please. We have all ascended a tech learning curve -- and the smart ones are continually looking for new ones to climb. Blogging is in its infancy in terms of both form and tools -- it will evolve for the same reasons you're not still coding COBOL -- people, left to themselves, will find increasinly efficient ways to communicate and transmit information.
But you know what? That big issue of finding a community of one's own isn't limited to geeks -- it's indicative of the prevasive loneliness that may be one of the most dominant characteristics of modern, first-world society.
And blogs have had a huge impact on that.
Today, there are thousands (perhaps millions) of interconnected online communities centered around blogs. No, they're not running FUDforum or other bulletin board software, but they still fit the core definitions of a community, whether online or off. Millions of people are learning more about how the internet works and information that was isolated is increasingly communal and (wait for it, RMS...) free.How can that be a bad thing?
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
As Homer J would say, it must have been a pretty slow year!
am i so busy
that i don't have time to say
one more syllable
-w
Is Slashdot a 'blog?
--
make install -not war
Here in Brazil, people tend to shorten "fotolog" or "photolog" as... "flog". It is fair to suppose 99.5 percent of them have no idea of what it means in english. X_X
Circumcision is child abuse.
I enjoy some blogs, although I have to admit that the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty bad. Here's a few which I personally find interesting and read regularly. I'm a neuro, space, and robotics geek, so the list is biased as such.
* Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) News: The most thorough spaceflight blog around, focusing on reusable systems.
* NASA Watch: A well-known site with regular critiques of NASA.
* Free Republic: Like slashdot, but for ultra-conservatives. I sometimes like to go there to get a better understanding of what goes through the heads of people who think differently from me.
* Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log: "Quantum fluctuations in space, science, and exploration"
* Democratic Underground: The extreme left's version of Free Republic.
* Instapundit: The slashdot-equivalent of political weblogging, with a somewhat libertarian slant. Known for causing "Instalanches" on innocent web servers, analogous to "Slashdottings."
* Daily Kos: Probably the most influential liberal blog.
* Transterrestrial Musings: a libertarian space analyst who helped me understand why it's possible to be intelligent and support the war in Iraq at the same time. He sometimes posts some fantastic satires.
* theferrett's livejournal: sometimes writes some very insightful and well-composed essays
* spacexploration livejournal community: Space-related miscellany and discussion.
* politicsforum livejournal community: Sometimes has some pretty intelligent political discussion.
* robots.net: Robotics news
* Space Politics: "Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway"
* Rocket Man Blog: Rarely updated, but has very insightful and informed analysis of spaceflight and rocketry.
* Howard Lovy's NanoBot: Nanotechnology news and commentary
"Among the 22 expressions on the "List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness" are "blog," "sale event," "body wash" and "zero percent APR financing.""
Story here
Somehow I don't see them[ABCnews] showcasing any blog resembling the criteria of effects they state, and crap like --This year, for the first time, bloggers were permitted-- sounds like the clatter of hooves it is. What is the USA now? Mugabie's playland!?! Freepress + Permits !cool
But one should hardly be surprised at this. This is a company(s) that runs or feeds into ~4500 radio stations, has a news site, ~10 broadcast stations [all heavy news content engines], in the largest market areas, and has such key assets such as the Discovery[eioeios] etc, etc. Generating, manufacturing, and provoking news is what they do. Bloggers just regurgitate it [right?]. They hope as earned assets. But there it all goes a little sour on them.
Only on page two do they hint of those pesky "bedroom journalist" who might note their own trial balloons. Hello Jay Ingram! Plug any bogus missile systems lately? Was that one, here's a towel.
One should also think that any bloggers that riff off rosebuds might be "right out" too. Oops. Not a trace of those bloggers who might make fun of their corporate groups foolish move to trade a potential 125 million in tax write-offs for the Second Fat Man's 250 Million or Moore[sic]. Did I miss the bag. Put it in cold water, it will stop the fabric from staining.
Did I have a point? Naw, just a fun chance to take the piss out of their[ABCnews] attempt to appropriate our thunder [ok, so we bang on tinfoil sheets, yell rude words, and flash the lights. But it works for us].
To both readers and writers --Temba, his arms wide & Mirab, his sails unfurled!
Actually, the classic question is "If a tree falls in the woods and there's nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound".
Your misquote asked "If X happens, but a property of X is not observed, does X happen?"; in this case, either the statement "X has happened" is questionable (meaning that X may not have happened at all, thus no observation), or the question is redundant since X DID happen, as stated in the question itself. This question is not philosophical, merely lacking self-referential logic.
Besides, why should whether or not someone HEARS the tree falling determine it's state, since it would be possible for a deaf person to SEE the tree falling without hearing a thing. In fact, since fallen trees are to be found in the vast majority of forests (where people are rather few and far between), I would contend that the transition of state from upright to fallen does not rely in the slightest on anybody seeing or hearing the event, making the question entirely pointless as a thought exercise. Anyway, testing by empirical means is very staright forward: survey a forest, close it to the public, come back ten years later and see if any trees have fallen. See, not a philosophical question at all, but one that can be answered by simple experimental observation.
Anyway, the point of the original question is to ask "does a phenomenon that relies on human senses for verification exist when there are no humans present to sense the phenomenon".
The answer to the real question is really quite simple (although pedantic): No. A tree falling will cause vibrations in air molecules, that is fairly certain. "Sound" is the name given to the perceptions caused by air vibrations stimulating our ears (just like "colour" is the name given to our perception of different wavelengths of light). So without ears to perceive the air vibrating, there is no "sound". QED.
And yes, technically the "speed of sound" is a misnomer, it should be "the speed of wave propagation through air" (the speed at which an acoustic wave propagates is determined by the density of the medium, for those lacking basic physics).
Journal writers have been doing this long before blogging was corrupted from the "web log" term it was originally given. Why not name all those who keep journals People of the Year?
And why wouldn't the American's be people of the year?
Fags.
surely, you mr. prime minister, wouldn't openly admit to preferring "gay dick to the face and neck" on the internets?
You are one sick puppy.
I think scientists have talked about paradigms a long time before 1994, and for good reasons. I can understand its overuse in business presentations though, as I'm annoyed by buzzwords in general.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
What tragedies were those?
Oh, I remember now, Rodney Dangerfield and Jerry Orbach died. Also, Roland PicklePail continued to spam^Wsubmit articles to Slashdot that contain links to his blog, and Michael "The Sims" Simms continued to accept them. Oh, yeah, and that depraved murdering douchebag stole the US presidential election. Again. Also, some about a tsunami somewhere that killed a few million people blah blah blah.
I don't have a problem with blogs as such, it's the incessant hype surrounding them that puts me off. Some of the extravagant claims made about them (changing the face of journalism) simply don't stand up to scrutiny.
The enormous hype surrounding blogs doesn't help anyone, least of all bloggers. And let's keep things in perspective with regard to the influence of blogging. Self-absorbed bloggers might think the Web is beginning to revolve around the whole blogging phenomenon, but that simply isn't the case (thank goodness). Here's a snip from a BBC report on blogging:
Here's the full BBC article (which is a lot more positive than you might think from the above quote): The Year in Issues: Role of the blog.
Yeah, because so many Live Journalers have reporters and researches out in the field collecting hard news.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Technically Slashdot is a mass blog. Fark is somewhat like a blog, but the headlines are not really enough to qualify it as such. Slashdot is very influential. Even if it is just the sheer number of smoking servers in our wake, /. has changed the web.
Not a sentence!
Oh, you sleazy motherfucker.
(BTW - I feel I should be modded up for pointing out this blatant attempt at reverse psychology. Or should I?)
Happy New Year everybody!
Yes, and a tip of my hat to the bloggers who kept the traitor from becoming President!
J. F. Kerry was THE Mancurian Candidate.
And all bloggers ought to thank Jerry Pournelle for starting the original blog, although back then he called it a daybook. His site still has his original content going back many many years.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/#blog
http://www.tshirtjunkie.com/
While the scope may be bigger, I was putting updates/info in .plan files before some of these "bloggers" were born. Perhaps someone should show them [the] finger before they get the idea they are doing something new...
(ok, so i'm grumpy on day 1 of 2005 here in the us)
Mind the gap...
While blogs have had an influence, it is because of their amplification of [various strata of] public opinion, not necessarily because of journalistic integrity. They were the medium through which we found out the most about the Ohio/Florida vote irregularities. We bloggers seem to have the odd ability to respond to something en masse to get a story heard on the news that otherwise might be ignored.
Do you suppose Bev Harris or the moral community in the U.S. would have made ANY progress without an online horde drumming up publicity for the common-sense notion that votes should be counted? From the stonewalling the issue has received, I think not.
Bloggers are a symptom, not some glorious revolution. If the media was doing its job, none of us [politically oriented bloggers] would bother.
Ok, I understand now. In order for my displeasure with blogs to be taken as the argument of an adult, I must shroud it in emo/Victorian passive-aggressive prose.
Fsck you.
As for CB radio, nobody tried to say that CB radio changed the way information is disseminated and how opinions are formed in the general public. Sure, it's like CB. That's not the problem. It's the over-rated part. Everyone should acknowledge that blogs are like CB radio and happily go back to whatever they were doing.
Laws are for people with no friends.
Nonsense.
Deliberate lies, misrepresentation and lies by omission happen every single day all throughout the Big Media without penalty. --The most effective lies being those which the journalists have themselves been sold on. There is a LOT of state mind-control and propaganda going on. Most of what people see in Big Media is designed to manipulate and control and weave falsehoods.
Now, it is of course true, as you point out, that no single source on the web can be automatically trusted. However. . , an individual with information is able to post without restriction, through blogs or other means. And when the reader takes the responsibility of cross-referencing information and above all, THINKING for his or herself, then a picture of the true objective reality can begin to emerge where blind faith in Big Media makes such a thing much, much less likely.
-FL
Let me translate the Slashdot moderation menu into English:
The whole thing stunk to high heaven and nearly everybody bought it because they had been trained to believe that the talking heads on TV were smart and wise and good rather than being a bunch of state-owned propaganda dupes. -Amazingly, this was all largely done in the same style of tactical manipulation employed by other great psychopathic power mongers throughout history.
And the Big Media pushed and sold this bullshit. 'Freedom Fries', anybody? (Does everybody still hate the French for not being as gullible? Nobody likes to be shown up as stupid after the fact, so I bet most people do still hate the French.)
Anyway, my point is. .
The ONLY place I was seeing the opposing message in any force during those horrible 'watching a train-wreck in slow-motion' days was on the Web, --primarily through individuals posting their views and research on simple web-pages and discussion groups. Like Slashdot.
-FL
There is a fascinating aspect to the whole Rathergate story that doesn't seem to get mentioned: The blogs that broke the Rathergate story are all biased, frothing pieces of crap. And yet, they still broke what may be the most important story of the year.
...) were not the good ones. They are, to be frank, pretty crappy blogs. (For those of you on the right who disagree, LGF and Powerline are about the equivalent of Atrios in terms of intelligent insight - which is very near zero.)
There are very very few blogs that are actually intelligent. And those tend to be run by people who do real reporting as their day job. But the blogs that broke Rathergate (Powerline, LGF
Yet, even though these blogs are crappy, or maybe because of it, they managed to show how utterly incompetent our Big Media and Semi-Big Media are. I think the most important moral of this story is that engagement and argument is intrinsically good for democracy, even if the arguments are flawed and illogical.
Spare us the Rush talking points, neo-con boy. The media does the bidding of the corporate owners of the media, not the political point of view of the way it's entry level employees tend to lean.
The corporate media pretended the United States was the only country in the world where exit polls don't work. Explain again how the laws of math change when you cross into US territory?
Only FAUX News would call coverage casualties of war "leftist."
The story had all the facts right. Dubya did get preferential treatment to get in the Guard to get out of Vietnam.
Oh... yeah... you forgot about that, huh?
...bloggers are only one of ABC's "people of the year." Others include the Spiridellis Brothers and Joseph Darby.
And John F Kerry actually served in the Viet Cong not the US Navy.
Republicans lie, lie a lot, and lie badly... even when it's unnecessary.
That's their biggest weakness. They just can't stop.
Nobody ever said they weren't biased- unlike rather and crew, however, they're honest about it.
Moreover, just becase the blogs don't fit YOUR BIAS, doesn't mean they're crap.
But the rest of your comment is more or less accurate about big media.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Granted, I don't think that Bloggers deserve to be nominated as "People of the Year" -- it's much too wide a designation. It's like saying that all people who keep a personal diary are spectacular. That's just too silly to think about.
What really gets me is all of the people complaining about blogs cluttering up Google with irrelevant content and, boiling it all down, the attitude that the internet should only be for geeks and nerds. Give me a break. Just because people don't have the same opinion, computer knowledge and skills as you, they shouldn't be publishing what they write? In a completely free, you-only-have-to-read-it-if-you-want-to way, no less. For crying out loud, it's not like bloggers are spamming your personal email account with the day-to-day chronicle of their lives.
If we extend that kind of reasoning, public resources like the local library would suffer from a serious scarcity of resources. Does anybody else remember their English teachers poo-pooing all novels that weren't regarded as "classics"? What would happen if only those with a masters degree in English were allowed to rate the books that went into the library as suitable? Should we only have access to Faust, while Lord of the Rings is stripped from the shelves?
A search through my local library's database for A Tale of Two Cities will yield everything from the Dickens novel all the way to Iraq the Land by April Fast. How dare a non-Dickens novel come up in that search! It was totally irrelevant to what I was looking for.
Give up on the attitude, people. "One man's trash is another man's treasure" doesn't just apply to your hockey card collection.
Moreover, just becase the blogs don't fit YOUR BIAS, doesn't mean they're crap.
Those blogs (LGF, Powerline) are crap, and it has nothing to do with my biases. They post completely one-sided information mixed with delusional rantings. Just because a I don't agree with a blog, doesnt mean I lose the right to judge it objectively. As I mentioned above, Atrios agrees with my political biases, but I consider his blog crap too.
I agree with you that it is good to have blogs with their biases upfront. The point in my previous post was that even one-sided, conspiratorial blogs could do a better job at presenting truth to the public then our current media.
Those blogs (LGF, Powerline) are crap, and it has nothing to do with my biases. They post completely one-sided information mixed with delusional rantings.C
I wasn't aware that a blog needed to be two sided. I think you're the one that's delusional.
Remember those?
Rove had them produced knowing the issue would come up, and eventually turn to the charges made by this individual in question. The statements had been on the record since the 2000 election.
AgainThe proof was the list of names serving on that unit's roster. The whole unit was full of the children of the most privileged Texans. Sons of the most wealthy. Superstar athletes. It was the champaign unit of champaign units. The only way anyone got in was through favors. Rove didn'tknow that 60 Minutes would be the convenient patsy. He just knew someone out there would do it.
Unlike you republicans who believe any stupid suggestion a snakehandler orders you to believe in without question, progressives understand that nobody can have all these "coincidences" always benefit someone. This many "conincidences" in a row means the "coincidences" are being arranged.
The only reason Republicans hate Clinton so much is because he got head that they don't get. Republican wives are to pious to do anything but lay still on their back in the dark in silence for a proper missionary mounting.
Remember those exit polls the Bush State Department used aas proof of election fraud in Ukraine?
Ohhhh....look at the republican squirm when American fatalities are mentioned. Fatalities caused by piss poor planning and execution of a military occupation by the Commander-in-Chief. All the casualties are the Commander-in-Chief's fault. The coffins. The beheadings. The burned contractors. ALL OF THEM. You cannot occupy a country the size of Iraq with a for ce that small. The Pentagon told Bush that, and Bush ordered the campaign started anyway. The situation is going to hell in handbasket in Iraq just like it did in Vietnam... for the same reason as Vietnam. NOT ENOUGH TROOPS ON THE GROUND.
All right, I'll bite at the troll.
As far as the vote in Ukraine goes, they didn't have months worth of polling to compare the exit polls to. We did, and the exit polls were way off, as I mentioned in another post.
Fine. You claim that we have poor planning. However, I have 2 questions to ask you, and until you can answer them, I won't accept your claim that we have poor planning. If the planning is poor, what would you have done differently? Now, you mention more troops, but that brings me to my second question (although it's more an extension of the first question): What would more troops do? I mean, it's not like throwing more troops at a problem will magically solve it, just like throwing money at a problem won't solve it (although some democrats seem to think so). Troops aren't engaged in actual offensive operations, they're being attacked. More troops means more targets to be attacked. I don't see how sending more trooops over there will necessarily improve the situation.
You want to claim that we have poor planning? Fine. Give me more substantive evidence of it other than things aren't going perfectly. Nothing's perfect; just because we have casualties doesn't necessarily mean it's poor planning.
the folk singer from the Kingston Trio.
I vote to stricken the term 'wiki'. But I am not a facist, and I have no right to tell others not to use this word, wiki.
can't we come up with a better word?
The following is meant to be funny and is obvious flame bait:
Why do we call a useless collection of unedited and incomplete ideas that are probably stolen from somewhere else a 'wiki'?
end of obvious flame baitI like the idea of a wiki, I just hate the word itself. I appreciate the effort, but I hate the word. I guess maybe I think that it somehow disrespects a belief system. Tell me I am wrong
I also hate the shameless promotion of the on-line encylopedia that uses 'wiki' in it's name. Though the encylopedia is probably alright.
You can't. You know it's ludicrous to even suggest that the entry level employees of any industry set corporate policy.
The corporate CEOs and boards set the editorial policy and hire the editors to follow their editorial policy. They editors assign what stories will and will not be covered. The editors go over every single word of every story before it ever get broadcast or printed. The corporate media want to get bigger and continues to act in it's self interest by supporting the political far right.
So, you think morale is more important than telling the TRUTH. It's okay for your govenment to lie on an issue not involving state secrets as long as it gets a small advantage for your government. I'll remember you think that way. It's not okay for MY govenment to lie to me about the truth.
Kerry by 20 in PA? Ridiculous. Your quoting what a couple of blogs posted. CNNs properly weighed exit polls that were up all night election night showed showed Kerry leading PA, but a lot closer than that riduculous number you pulled off a blog to distort the truth.
Right now, Republicans think even John McCain and Alan Spector are "liberally biased" so it's a wee bit ridiculous to accept any of their definitions on any subject. Here's some historical context. Dwight Eisenhower's top income tax rate was 87%. Goldwater did not offer any suggestions of cutting the top tax rate in his 1964 campaign against Johnson. Nixon's top income tax rate was 60%. Bill Clinton's was 39 1/2%.
That's right. Economically, Bill Clinton was way to the RIGHT OF BARRY GOLDWATER.
add google to the mix.
Don't call me a troll when I caught you attempting to fake a blog post exit poll number and pretend it was a real exit poll figure. The properly weighed exit polls were up on CNN's website all election night, showed a Kerry win. The only wild numbers were the blog number distortion you tried to introduce to the discussion.
IF you are going to invade and occupy a country, you have to have the troops to both assault, and to later hold teritory. US forces are sufficient to take any area in Iraq, but we cannot hold anything consitantly but about 2/3s of Baghdad. The rest of Iraq keeps on getting rotating assaults, where the enemy forces melt away before the attack, and move back in after the forces leave. You should only have to fight for a territory once. We've taken Iraq 2 to 3 times over now. The same think we did in Vietnam. We never lost a single battle in the whole Vietnam war, yet we lost the war. Why? We didn't have the troops to hold and guard territory after we took it. There's no point in assaulting an objective if you are going to have orders cut for the force to leave in two weeks and leave no garrison forces behind sufficent to continue to keep the enemy out of the objective.
10 years ago that was impossible.
Teenagers reading about other teenagers, adults reading about the anxieities of teenagers (getting thus aquainted with trends their own children may be involved with and perhaps gaining a better understanding of their problems) all just one click away.
The positives (and negatives of course) are incredibly powerful. To dismiss them so casualy shows a lack of understanding of how things were just a few years ago.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Lets isolate ourselves in the basement.
We are not worth the attention we can get from others.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Please...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You are so cute and fluffy.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Yeah, I vote for those in Guantanamo Bay or Abu Garib "detention centers"....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
When neo-cons have no evidence to support their far right wing positions, they pull out their main weapon, the personal insult.
They know they can't win through logic and reasoning, so they resort to trying to be louder and ruder.
By the way, Occam left a message for you. If the roulette wheel comes up red 3,4,5 times in a row, it's probably a coincidence. If it comes up red 600-700 times in a row, the roulette wheel is fixed. When "coincidences" always break one way, someone is tilting the table to make sure it happens that way. 60,000 recorded voting irregularities recorded in Ohio. 60,000 benefiting Bush.
Occam says take his razor away from you before you hurt yourself with it.
First, you're making the wrong assumption that rich people are conservative. I'm sorry, but that's just plain wrong. Look at this. Yes, I know it's from Rush Limbaugh, but I won't accept an ad hominem attack on him. An anecdote: in my state, Wyoming, only one county went for Kerry: Teton county, home of Jackson Hole, which is where all the rich, out-of-state people live. Teton county has about 15,000 residents and 20,000 people employed there (because people can't afford to live there, so they have to commute). Next, journalists are liberals, and they decide what to report. I think it should open some eyes when you have ABC saying they need to hold Bush to a higher standard of truth than Kerry, or when you have the Newsweek editor or publisher (I can't remember which) saying that positive coverage of Kerry is worth 15% (later revised downward to 5%). Sorry, but the data don't fit your proposed explanation, so the explanation has to be wrong.
I think it's important to tell the whole truth. The media never mentions when we open schools, when we open hospitals, when we improve infrastructure, or anything else like that. The media is only telling one side of the Iraq story, and it's the side designed to harm American morale. Why don't they start reporting on the good things that are happening over there as well?
The Kerry by 20 in PA came from early numbers, and Karl Rove was even quoted mentioning it. They had Kerry tied in North Carolina. However, when the exit polls vary far from months of previous polling, that's got to be pretty telling.
John McCain is liberal relative to most other republicans; the same is true with Arlen Spector. However, in general, they're centrists. That final remark was food for thought. Next, Bill Clinton raised the top income tax rate from George H.W. Bush. Also, economically speaking, Bill Clinton is a moderate, and Barry Goldwater was a social conservative (and a nutcase in my opinion. 1964 was the last time that Wyoming went Democrat). Goldwater suggested doing nothing with the taxes, Clinton raised them. However, this whole analogy is flawed: you're comparing apples to oranges here. Furthermore, Bush made the income tax system MORE progressive. Crunch the numbers instead of relying on baseless allegations about how Bush is only taking care of the wealthy.
Paradigm is from greek paradeigma which means pattern or example. Its been with us for over 2000 years.
The great-grandparent post was a troll. The other thing you have to take into consideration here is sampling error. Ukraine was a much different story.
Where do you see that we're retaking the country multiple times? Do you want to suggest that we need to populate the country with marines, enough to hold the ENTIRE country under martial law? There's always going to be places where the enemy will hide, we can't realistically be in them all at the same time. So what if they go back to a place where they've been before. That doesn't necessarily make them harder to kill, and I don't see how holding those places will make it easier to win.
We lost Vietnam due to lack of public support here at home. A more appropriate analogy would be post-World War II, where the media were saying the exact same things about Germany then as they are about Iraq now.
I wasn't aware that a blog needed to be two sided. I think you're the one that's delusional.
I never said that a blog needs to be two-sided, and if you think I did, you are the delusional one.
I did imply that good bloggers use logic and reason rather than judging everything with regards to their predetermined biases. For instance, the second article on LGF right now (King County) is about how it appears that there might have been democratic voter fraud in Washington. Compare that to about a month ago, when nearly every other headline on LGF was something to the effect of Idiotic Liberal Moonbats are crying about Election Fraud even though there is Absolutely No Possible Way that It Happened. Back in reality, we know there is a good possibility that some election fraud did happen. I wouldn't put it past the Dems or the Repubs to do whatever it takes to win.
Bask to the issue of one-sidedness: there is a big difference in quality between a one-sided blog, such as LGF, and an intelligent, thoughtful blog, such as AndrewSullivan's. All blogs take a side on an issue, but the good ones are consistent and insightful, whereas the bad ones are reactionary and partisan. I have absolutely no qualms about classifying LGF and Powerline in the second catagory.
"This year, for the first time, bloggers were permitted to cover the national political conventions firsthand."
er, doesn't it fall under freedom of speech? I can cover whatever I like? Talk about anything I like?
Rush Limbaugh's oxycontin-soaked rants are not evidence. They are fiction. Bad fiction. Presenting evidence from one county in Wyoming IS NOT AN INDICATION OF A TREND when the vast, vast majority of wealthy surburban communities in the US break seriously Conservative. The fact that you are trying to apply one Wyoming county's results to the nation as a whole shows how willing you are to distort anything to attempt to fit what you want to spin.
Journalists as a whole are as liberal as the college eduacated population is. The further up the decision-making tree you go, the more conservative it becomes. Progressives are weeded out, Conservatives are promoted to management by the corporate management of media companies.
There's a reason why the smarter people are, the more progressive they are. The more intelligent one is, the more one is able to pick-apart the neo-con lies.
The Kerry by 20 numbers comes from a couple of blogs. That's it. You are lying your ass off by claiming it's anything more than what it was... a couple of blog posts. The CNN.com exit poll numbers posted on election night after being properly weighed after the polls closed showed that Kerry won.
The whole truth is that the infrastructure (schools, hospitals, utilities) is in far worse shape now in Iraq than at any point in the last 30 years. More power outages. Fewer kids in school. Fewer medicines. Less medical equipment. The truth is there's 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians and the country is in worse shape than before Saddam took power in the 70's.
Nomatter how much you try to spin and distort things, you can't change the facts.
Also...Here's the REAL CBO numbers on the Bush tax cuts...
"Since 2001, President Bush's tax cuts have shifted federal tax payments from the richest Americans to a wide swath of middle-class families, the Congressional Budget Office has found, a conclusion likely to roil the presidential election campaign.
The CBO study, due to be released today, found that the wealthiest 20 percent, whose incomes averaged $182,700 in 2001, saw their share of federal taxes drop from 64.4 percent of total tax payments in 2001 to 63.5 percent this year. The top 1 percent, earning $1.1 million, saw their share fall to 20.1 percent of the total, from 22.2 percent.
Over that same period, taxpayers with incomes from around $51,500 to around $75,600 saw their share of federal tax payments increase. Households earning around $75,600 saw their tax burden jump the most, from 18.7 percent of all taxes to 19.5 percent...."
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5689001/
CNN.com had complete properly weighed exit polls available election night on the CNN web site. Stop pretending we are talking about a couple of blog post. The exit poll that CNN had posted after the polls closed was THE COMPLETE exit poll, properly weighed, sampling errors removed. It was a far, far better more complete exit poll than the GOP held up as evidence in the Ukraine, and it said Kerry won.
You do not have to hold an entire country under martial law to provide forces necessary to effectively police it. The fact that you would suggest such a thing shows how clueless you are on the subject. W. Germany and Japan were only under martial law for short periods after the end of WW 2, and their occupations are considered the model to work from. Go do some research on the history of military occupations. Come back when you're at least remotely literate on the subject.
The military experts at the Pentagon said we'd need a minimum of a force double the size that was sent to Iraq. The civilian chickenhawks who never served in the military, or the ones like Bush that hummed a few bars and faked it, told the military experts they were wrong... and disaster ensued.
Content management makes beauty even easier to achieve for the uninitiated user, because all you have to do is plug a different stylesheet into the page and zing zang it's lovely.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
So what's the next step? What would be better than blogs? Figure that out, and then go out and build it.
My suggestion: think about the wikipedia, think about factcheck.org, and think about seti-online, and start connecting the dots.
Ah, but most hard research (drug research, etc.) is done by third parties, which journalists then "report" on. That very same research is just as available for bloggers to report on as well.
Frankly, I don't see modern journalism doing much (or any) more research than modern bloggers.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
CNN.com had complete properly weighed exit polls.
/.'s forums (my email's public). Also, I had a response typed to your previous post, but I don't feel like re-typing it as it's 1:30 a.m. now and I need to get some sleep. In any case, come back when you learn a little bit more about debating and how to find the real argument in something, rather than act as if something purpously riddiculous were totally serious, and then ignore the real meat of the argument.
So, we're supposed to trust CNN, a liberally-biased organization, that they were able to properly weight the exit polls? That, in and of itself, looks like a pretty weak spot in using their exit polls, and provides an explanation for why they've been wrong: the country's demographics have changed for the Conservative, and CNN hasn't caught on/is in denial.
OK, you totally missed the point here. I was exaggerating to mock your point. Of course I realize you don't need continual martial law; however, your post seemed to imply that we needed it (keeping the military in an area in force after we've cleared it out sounds a lot like martial law). Lastly, you never addressed the real points behind the my previous post.
OK, let's get this straight: SOME experts at the Pentagon said we'd need double the troops that we have. Let's not forget that the media was saying the exact same thing about Germany in 1945/46 as they are about Iraq now.
Anyway, I suggest continuing this argument by email so as not to pollute