Re:typical Doc Ruby
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Why is it that if you watch Fox News that you're politically unsophisticated or that you have a personal agenda that flies in the face of common sense?
Because Fox spreads misinformation, therefore Fox fans tend to be misinformed. People who are happy to be misinformed tend to be idiots. That's why.
This isn't just a general impression. Studies have shown that the more you watch Fox, the more likely you are to be misinformed on key political issues. See this PDF document.
it IS fair that Fox News is out there to balance the overwhelming liberal bias in the overall media.
Well, it depends where you put the centre ground. If you classify all sane people as being on the "liberal" left, and all the genocidal maniacs as being on the "conservative" right, then perhaps most non-Fox media is "liberal". But I don't think that's a fair place to put the dividing line.
I'd say that all networks with a systemic bias in favour of the establishment (see the Propaganda Model) must be classified as right-wing or at least centrist. This puts Fox at the extreme right, with other networks in the centre-right and centre, and alternative news sources such as Democracy Now at the left.
Further, I'm a Christian and I cannot vote for people that support the killing of innocent babies (abortion). Correction: you're against killing American babies, even when they are not babies but primitive unborn fetuses. You have no problem voting for people who kill large numbers of babies, teens, men, women and elderly, just as long as they are towel-heads.
I also hold a Master's Degree (MBA), so if you think that conservatives are uneducated, think again!
You can find examples of people who have passed through the education system, and yet still believe in gods, angels, fairies, aliens, homoeopathy, astrology, moon-landing conspiracies, feng shui, tarot cards, Iraqi WMDs, virgin birth, Fox impartiality, and cigarettes making you look cool. However, this doesn't stop the fact that such beliefs have a strong scientific correlation with having shit for brains (specific example given above).
If you're a "Fox News Republican" then, yes, hating the Democrats is a prerequisite for being considered unbiased.
The "notion" did say Fox News has bias (obvious to anyone honest who watches it, a nonneglibigle fraction of its audience). But it didn't say only Fox News has a bias.
You are the peddler of the strawman. You are likely a satisfied Fox News viewer.
Are you talking to me? You seem to be half reply to me, and half to the previous guy. Did you get mixed up?
The other poster said "Only Fox News has a bias, and CNN and NYT and all the others are fair and balanced?" which was a rhetorical question implying that ThinkFr33ly, Hassman and other "liberals" (i.e. sane people) like myself believe that only Fox is bad.
I replied, clarifying that we sane people recognise that all media have their bias, and Fox is a just particularly extreme example of absurdly blatant bias.
An Anonymous Coward (you?) then claimed that I had got mixed up (I hadn't), and also claimed that Hassman thought only Fox was biased (he didn't; he only said that it would be dumb to claim that hating the Republicans is a pre-requisite to being deemed unbiased on other TV networks). You then made a weird accusation of setting up a straw man, and then made an even weirder accusation of being a Fox fan.
Perhaps people are not clicking on the right buttons here, I don't know...
I've scanned through the many comments, and every one seems to be discussing the technical aspects of this weapon. Whilst this is may be inevitable on a "news for nerds" site, I think I need to remind you that this is a device for killing human beings — people like you, me, your parents, your friends.
I recently read a Slashdot article on alleged biochemical weapons in North Korea, and barely a comment regarded the exciting technical aspects of such weapons. The discussion was about how terrible it was that they existed.
All this is despite the fact that NK's weapons are purely defensive (they would doubtless love to annex SK, but they know that it would be suicide) and the USA's weapons are purely offensive (no power could hope to openly confront that country, which is currently engaged in the occupation of a conquered nation and is actively threatening to attack others).
Apart from that not being truthful, what you just said doesn't make any sense because the truth of the premises does not prevent an argument from being fallacious.
If I say "Bush's murderous policies are wrong; he looks like a chimp", then that is a fallacious ad hominem argument, despite the fact that his murderous policies are indeed wrong and he does look like a chimpanzee.
When you hear people arguing for legislation that will curtail freedom of speech in the name of fairness and balance, you know that the right-wing lunatics are tiring of having 90% control of the media and want to extend it to 100%.
Let's put Google Earth in a time machine and send it back a few decades:
News reports say the French Resistance is using Google Earth to pinpoint vulnerable targets within bases in German-occupied France. Could Google be doing more to prevent this? Should they be doing more? They certainly could explain more. That might help some people understand that the wrong question is being asked.
The threat starts with EU businesses with no ethics selling parts and plans for nuclear reactors to extremist nations in the name of profit.
So EU companies have been selling power station parts and plans to the USA? I hadn't heard of that. I don't see how it increases America's threat to world peace.
When someone sponsors those who say they hate you and have the goal of seeing your nation wiped out you have to take seriously the fact that nuclear weapons are one of the best ways to accomplish that goal. I suppose so. By "take seriously" you mean "invade", right? In that case you are arguing for many countries to invade the US.
Or are you a supporter of state sponsored Terrorism as long as it is against the "agressors" of the United States?
Terrorism? I suppose you mean guerrilla warfare. Yeah, it's a good thing when waged against an aggressor; in that case it is called resistance. For example, if the USA's neighbours invaded, all the gun-nuts would join resistance militias and I'd support them in that. In the same way, I approve of the French resistance during the Nazi occupation, and the current Iraqi resistance against US occupation. Indian resistance against the British empire is another one I admire, in particular their pacifist resistance, though armed Indian resistance fighters were also heroes.
I don't really see the significance of the "state-sponsored" part. The French resistance was largely based in London, but I don't see that as affecting their legitimacy positively or negatively.
Iran is not a nuclear power. It does not even have nuclear power stations. The threat to the world derives from US politicians presenting such countries as a menace in order to be able to launch aggressive wars.
Since when do you need to pay money to protect a computer from adware? She should totally have blocked it. The article shows that she had ample opportunity to do so.
Not that she is the only one to blame. The school presumably has an administrator who set up the computer in the first place. Several people should be reprimanded and instructed in basic computer security practices.
The main point, however, is that nobody should face criminal charges or dismissal over this.
Wiseguy, the point of the person's question was not only to find out the age group involved, but also to point out that non-USAians (the vast majority of people) should not be forced to do research in order to understand things that should have been said in plain English ("12-13 years old") in the first place.
That is a good point, but be careful not to exaggerate. It does matter whether she is labelled a sex offender and avoids jail, or she is labelled a sex offender and gets four decades behind bars. I'm sure she'd choose the former.
She "faces forty years"? I'm sure that is purely theoretical. I can't see her getting any serious jail time. America is crazy but not that crazy.
However, I do imagine that she will be punished, and if the punishment is something more serious than a scolding for being a computer-retard, it will be excessive.
The difference between the IBC's 55,000 figure and the Lancet's 650,000 is partly due to the fact that the IBC excludes indirectly caused deaths (for which Bush is liable under international law), but mostly due to the fact that the IBC is an estimate of the deaths reported in English-language media, whereas the Lancet is an estimate of all deaths.
Since reporters in war zones generally have the ability to report no more than 10% of the casualties that occur, the two figures do not conflict significantly.
I was wondering when someone was going to make that worthless point.
On one hand we have English, Eskimos, Japanese, Ugandans, Peruvians, etc just using the ordinary name for their race or nation. On the other hand we have a minority of black people using "nigger" (whether misspelt or not) in an ironic fashion.
Anyone who cannot see the difference between these two phenomena is not intelligent enough to follow this debate.
Firstly, you are wrong in saying that I did not learn not to say "Eskimo". I did indeed learn as a child that some PC people wanted me to call Eskimos "Inuit", even the ones who are not Inuit, such as the Yup'ik.
Secondly, "nigger" is a slang term that was invented as an insult and (more importantly) has always been used exclusively as in insult ever since. It is an offensive alternative to the standard English term.
"Eskimo", on the other hand, is the standard English term for a referent that has no other word to describe it. There is no evidence that it was invented as an insult, and (more importantly) it is absolutely clear that it is never used as an insult today. It is also used unironically as a self-descriptor by many of the people in question. It is on a par with words such as "Korean", "Indian", etc.
You can't make it offensive by constantly claiming that it is offensive. You PC weirdos cannot make "Eskimo", "niggardly", "picnic", "spook" or any other word offensive. You don't have that power.
"Eskimo" means "raw meat eater", does it? So that makes it a bad name? "Inuit" just means "people", which is nonsensical in its lack of specificity. Of the two, I'd say the former is much superior, if you insist on going by etymology.
In reality, however, the etymology of "Eskimo" is unknown, so you are spluttering indignant nonsense.
In English, "Eskimo" is quite simply the ordinary, neutral and innocuous term for those natives of the frozen North. Along with "Yup'ik", "Eskimo" is the preferred self-descriptor for the Western Eskimos. Eastern Eskimos are free to prefer the term "Inuit".
You should also note that the previous commentator was not saying that Brits are more educated in general (your misunderstanding of this point is clearly the basis for your violently xenophobic outburst). Instead, he was making a point about people who watch the TV programme QI (sadly viewable only in the UK as far as I am aware), which you might have realised if you had read his post properly.
This person may have been joking about running Firefox with Wine, but in reality there can be good reasons for doing so. For example, there are plugins (notably Flash) that don't have the same support for Linux as they do for Windows.
However, personally, I think that if I am going to go so far as to emulate a Windows browser on Linux, I might as well go the whole hog and make it IE.
You're right and wrong. Wine has trouble reproducing the whole IE7 interface on Linux, so what you see there is the IE7 engine within an IE6 window. That means there is no tabbed browsing, but as you can see from the CSS implementation, the important features of IE7 for web developers are there.
Give the ies4linux project a couple more months and they will have full IE7 support.
Slashdot Mirror
Because Fox spreads misinformation, therefore Fox fans tend to be misinformed. People who are happy to be misinformed tend to be idiots. That's why.
This isn't just a general impression. Studies have shown that the more you watch Fox, the more likely you are to be misinformed on key political issues. See this PDF document.
it IS fair that Fox News is out there to balance the overwhelming liberal bias in the overall media.Well, it depends where you put the centre ground. If you classify all sane people as being on the "liberal" left, and all the genocidal maniacs as being on the "conservative" right, then perhaps most non-Fox media is "liberal". But I don't think that's a fair place to put the dividing line.
I'd say that all networks with a systemic bias in favour of the establishment (see the Propaganda Model) must be classified as right-wing or at least centrist. This puts Fox at the extreme right, with other networks in the centre-right and centre, and alternative news sources such as Democracy Now at the left.
Further, I'm a Christian and I cannot vote for people that support the killing of innocent babies (abortion). Correction: you're against killing American babies, even when they are not babies but primitive unborn fetuses. You have no problem voting for people who kill large numbers of babies, teens, men, women and elderly, just as long as they are towel-heads. I also hold a Master's Degree (MBA), so if you think that conservatives are uneducated, think again!You can find examples of people who have passed through the education system, and yet still believe in gods, angels, fairies, aliens, homoeopathy, astrology, moon-landing conspiracies, feng shui, tarot cards, Iraqi WMDs, virgin birth, Fox impartiality, and cigarettes making you look cool. However, this doesn't stop the fact that such beliefs have a strong scientific correlation with having shit for brains (specific example given above).
The "notion" did say Fox News has bias (obvious to anyone honest who watches it, a nonneglibigle fraction of its audience). But it didn't say only Fox News has a bias.
You are the peddler of the strawman. You are likely a satisfied Fox News viewer.
Are you talking to me? You seem to be half reply to me, and half to the previous guy. Did you get mixed up?
The other poster said "Only Fox News has a bias, and CNN and NYT and all the others are fair and balanced?" which was a rhetorical question implying that ThinkFr33ly, Hassman and other "liberals" (i.e. sane people) like myself believe that only Fox is bad.
I replied, clarifying that we sane people recognise that all media have their bias, and Fox is a just particularly extreme example of absurdly blatant bias.
An Anonymous Coward (you?) then claimed that I had got mixed up (I hadn't), and also claimed that Hassman thought only Fox was biased (he didn't; he only said that it would be dumb to claim that hating the Republicans is a pre-requisite to being deemed unbiased on other TV networks). You then made a weird accusation of setting up a straw man, and then made an even weirder accusation of being a Fox fan.
Perhaps people are not clicking on the right buttons here, I don't know...
That was great.
I've scanned through the many comments, and every one seems to be discussing the technical aspects of this weapon. Whilst this is may be inevitable on a "news for nerds" site, I think I need to remind you that this is a device for killing human beings — people like you, me, your parents, your friends.
I recently read a Slashdot article on alleged biochemical weapons in North Korea, and barely a comment regarded the exciting technical aspects of such weapons. The discussion was about how terrible it was that they existed.
All this is despite the fact that NK's weapons are purely defensive (they would doubtless love to annex SK, but they know that it would be suicide) and the USA's weapons are purely offensive (no power could hope to openly confront that country, which is currently engaged in the occupation of a conquered nation and is actively threatening to attack others).
Wow, what a lunatic.
All media have their bias, and Fox is a particularly extreme example of barrel-scraping journalistic integrity.
Apart from that not being truthful, what you just said doesn't make any sense because the truth of the premises does not prevent an argument from being fallacious.
If I say "Bush's murderous policies are wrong; he looks like a chimp", then that is a fallacious ad hominem argument, despite the fact that his murderous policies are indeed wrong and he does look like a chimpanzee.
That's got to be the most nauseating ad hominem attack on progressive thought that I have seen so far on Slashdot.
When you hear people arguing for legislation that will curtail freedom of speech in the name of fairness and balance, you know that the right-wing lunatics are tiring of having 90% control of the media and want to extend it to 100%.
I replied to what you said.
So EU companies have been selling power station parts and plans to the USA? I hadn't heard of that. I don't see how it increases America's threat to world peace.
When someone sponsors those who say they hate you and have the goal of seeing your nation wiped out you have to take seriously the fact that nuclear weapons are one of the best ways to accomplish that goal. I suppose so. By "take seriously" you mean "invade", right? In that case you are arguing for many countries to invade the US. Or are you a supporter of state sponsored Terrorism as long as it is against the "agressors" of the United States?Terrorism? I suppose you mean guerrilla warfare. Yeah, it's a good thing when waged against an aggressor; in that case it is called resistance. For example, if the USA's neighbours invaded, all the gun-nuts would join resistance militias and I'd support them in that. In the same way, I approve of the French resistance during the Nazi occupation, and the current Iraqi resistance against US occupation. Indian resistance against the British empire is another one I admire, in particular their pacifist resistance, though armed Indian resistance fighters were also heroes.
I don't really see the significance of the "state-sponsored" part. The French resistance was largely based in London, but I don't see that as affecting their legitimacy positively or negatively.
Iran is not a nuclear power. It does not even have nuclear power stations. The threat to the world derives from US politicians presenting such countries as a menace in order to be able to launch aggressive wars.
Since when do you need to pay money to protect a computer from adware? She should totally have blocked it. The article shows that she had ample opportunity to do so.
Not that she is the only one to blame. The school presumably has an administrator who set up the computer in the first place. Several people should be reprimanded and instructed in basic computer security practices.
The main point, however, is that nobody should face criminal charges or dismissal over this.
Of course. I think she should simply be reprimanded for being too ignorant to block the adware. No more than that.
Wiseguy, the point of the person's question was not only to find out the age group involved, but also to point out that non-USAians (the vast majority of people) should not be forced to do research in order to understand things that should have been said in plain English ("12-13 years old") in the first place.
That is a good point, but be careful not to exaggerate. It does matter whether she is labelled a sex offender and avoids jail, or she is labelled a sex offender and gets four decades behind bars. I'm sure she'd choose the former.
She "faces forty years"? I'm sure that is purely theoretical. I can't see her getting any serious jail time. America is crazy but not that crazy.
However, I do imagine that she will be punished, and if the punishment is something more serious than a scolding for being a computer-retard, it will be excessive.
You are half right.
The difference between the IBC's 55,000 figure and the Lancet's 650,000 is partly due to the fact that the IBC excludes indirectly caused deaths (for which Bush is liable under international law), but mostly due to the fact that the IBC is an estimate of the deaths reported in English-language media, whereas the Lancet is an estimate of all deaths.
Since reporters in war zones generally have the ability to report no more than 10% of the casualties that occur, the two figures do not conflict significantly.
I was wondering when someone was going to make that worthless point.
On one hand we have English, Eskimos, Japanese, Ugandans, Peruvians, etc just using the ordinary name for their race or nation. On the other hand we have a minority of black people using "nigger" (whether misspelt or not) in an ironic fashion.
Anyone who cannot see the difference between these two phenomena is not intelligent enough to follow this debate.
False analogy.
Firstly, you are wrong in saying that I did not learn not to say "Eskimo". I did indeed learn as a child that some PC people wanted me to call Eskimos "Inuit", even the ones who are not Inuit, such as the Yup'ik.
Secondly, "nigger" is a slang term that was invented as an insult and (more importantly) has always been used exclusively as in insult ever since. It is an offensive alternative to the standard English term. "Eskimo", on the other hand, is the standard English term for a referent that has no other word to describe it. There is no evidence that it was invented as an insult, and (more importantly) it is absolutely clear that it is never used as an insult today. It is also used unironically as a self-descriptor by many of the people in question. It is on a par with words such as "Korean", "Indian", etc.
You can't make it offensive by constantly claiming that it is offensive. You PC weirdos cannot make "Eskimo", "niggardly", "picnic", "spook" or any other word offensive. You don't have that power.
"Eskimo" means "raw meat eater", does it? So that makes it a bad name? "Inuit" just means "people", which is nonsensical in its lack of specificity. Of the two, I'd say the former is much superior, if you insist on going by etymology.
In reality, however, the etymology of "Eskimo" is unknown, so you are spluttering indignant nonsense.
In English, "Eskimo" is quite simply the ordinary, neutral and innocuous term for those natives of the frozen North. Along with "Yup'ik", "Eskimo" is the preferred self-descriptor for the Western Eskimos. Eastern Eskimos are free to prefer the term "Inuit".
You should also note that the previous commentator was not saying that Brits are more educated in general (your misunderstanding of this point is clearly the basis for your violently xenophobic outburst). Instead, he was making a point about people who watch the TV programme QI (sadly viewable only in the UK as far as I am aware), which you might have realised if you had read his post properly.
People collecting for murderers and their families should not be allowed to claim any kind of charitable status.
This person may have been joking about running Firefox with Wine, but in reality there can be good reasons for doing so. For example, there are plugins (notably Flash) that don't have the same support for Linux as they do for Windows. However, personally, I think that if I am going to go so far as to emulate a Windows browser on Linux, I might as well go the whole hog and make it IE.
You're right and wrong. Wine has trouble reproducing the whole IE7 interface on Linux, so what you see there is the IE7 engine within an IE6 window. That means there is no tabbed browsing, but as you can see from the CSS implementation, the important features of IE7 for web developers are there. Give the ies4linux project a couple more months and they will have full IE7 support.