Well, Gee. Do you suppose that could be that no-one ever enslaved Alabamans en masse or attempted to exterminate them in gas chambers. Institutionalise racism and anti-semitism are two of the greatest evils of the last 300 years. Jokes about Alabamans are understood to be jokes; jokes about Jews have been were the first step on the road to the gas chambers. That's why people are touchy about them.
Given that Southern Baptists practically run the country (badly) at the moment, if you're going to defend a persecuted minority, you might wish to consider choosing one that has actually been persecuted.
What?!? Is that a recommendation? Why would I want dreadful grammar, poor spelling, endless repitition and insanely wrong-headed ideas masquerading as fact?
I thought the creationist mob were blockheaded... then I went to sci.physics and met the relativity deniers. Wow.
But these loonies aren't unique to Usenet. Wikipedia has had its share of physics trolls and Fark is full of fundie creationists, many of whom believe Christians are a persecuted minority in America.
Sadly, the crank content on the sci.* groups is rather large. The virus/spam content in my daily inbox is many orders of magnitude larger.
Ain't that the truth. Fortunately, the persistent cranks don't need highly complicated Bayesian filtering to eliminate them from sight (except for one c**t on the uk.media.* groups who changes his user name every day. Prick).
Usenet requires tons of bandwidth and storage, and serving it needs decent server hardware.
That's true if your carrying binaries, but by modern standards, you don't need a huge amount of storage to serve the text groups, even if you take an unhealthy amount of alt.* groups.
Its democratic dream offers no defence against viruses, spammers, criminals, hucksters or deranged individuals.
Sure. Whatever. Except for the seedier binaries groups, there isn't an enormous amount of spam on Usenet anymore.
Rummaging about in Usenet is like slumming through the tenderloin district during the plague years -- your chances of catching a computer virus or a handful of invitations to unspeakable sexual acts is much greater than finding what you were looking for in the first place."
Err, no. Unless you're looking for binaries groups (i.e. porn or copied music), your chance of catching a virus from usenet is practically nil. The web is a homogenized monoculture (i.e. IE), whereas Usenet has a three of more big newsreaders (Outlook, Agent, AOL), and far more full featured small ones than there are web browsers. This makes targetting news readers considerably harder than web browsers.
And besides : suppose I want help with a particular facet of the Fortran standard. Where can I go and get an answer from the steering committee who drafted it? Well, either comp.lang.fortran or... well, nowhere, basically.
Having said that, more articles like this please. The last thing Usenet needs is another influx of rude, clueless newbies like the September-that-never-ended.
That's not a fallacy. It's a moral principle (unfashionable as moral principles are these days).
If you don't share that principle, that's OK. It means that I consider you a self-centred boob, and detrimental to a healthy, fair society, but I don't suppose you care about my opinion on that matter.
But please, please, please don't pretend that there's something "logical" in putting yourself before everyone else, because (despite what the Randroids tell) moral principles cannot be derived by logic -- you always have to start off with axioms that, essentially, define those principles.
Anyone seen this film (or read John Nash's work on Game theory)?
Or, indeed, read much of the evolutionary biology theory about how co-operative strategies can be both stable and near optimal in complex predator-prey models.
Of course, this being America, being asked to accept socialism and evolution would probably result in the meltdown of society.
Mostly, you get what your parents deserve. Why should I be penalised if my mother is a crack whore? That's not my fault, is it?
Simple fact is, the standard of living/health care/education of 99.9% of the the children in America is not attributable to the children. Children of the poor, are getting punished through accident of birth, not for any other reason.
There are dozens of different nationalities involved but the common denominator is they are Muslims.
I'll reiterate: many [but by no means all] of the rioters are Muslim, but that's mainly because they're North African, and North Africa is predominantly Muslim. These riots are not lead or motivated or incited by radical Islam in anyway, but by poverty.
Mate, I agree with you. I was disagreeing with the point about "pandering to Islamists". This isn't about radical Islam: it's about racism and poverty. Much like every inner city riot in the Western world has been, since Watts.
I don't know how this is being spun in the US, but by and large the tension isn't religious. It's social and ethnic: poor blacks with their roots in French colonised Africa, objecting to the fact that France's agenda of social reform doesn't reach into their deeply marginalised slums.
That's pretty much it, folks.
If the American media want to blame this on their latest Islamist bogeyman, you might as well go the whole hog and blame the Watts and LA riots on radical Islam too...
"The worm exploits three vulnerabilities to propagate: the XML-RPC for PHP Remote Code Injection vulnerability; AWStats Rawlog Plugin Logfile Parameter Input Validation vulnerability; and Darryl Burgdorf's Webhints Remote Command Execution Vulnerability, according to Symantec's online description of the worm.
The XML-RPC flaw affects blogging, wiki and content management software and was discovered earlier this year. Patches are available for most systems. AWStats is a log analyzer tool; a fix for the flaw has been available since February. Darryl Burgdorf's Webhints is a hint generation script; no fixes are available for the script, according to Symantec's DeepSight Alert Services."
Oh, and (c) we know *just* a little bit more more about disease prevention than we did in 1918...
And we haven't just had an continent-wide armed conflict, resulting in a massive number of displaced people roaming Europe, with no possibility of quarantine, or even diagnosis.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, Gee. Do you suppose that could be that no-one ever enslaved Alabamans en masse or attempted to exterminate them in gas chambers. Institutionalise racism and anti-semitism are two of the greatest evils of the last 300 years. Jokes about Alabamans are understood to be jokes; jokes about Jews have been were the first step on the road to the gas chambers. That's why people are touchy about them.
Given that Southern Baptists practically run the country (badly) at the moment, if you're going to defend a persecuted minority, you might wish to consider choosing one that has actually been persecuted.
I'm suprised he finds the time, given the heavy load of muck raking biographies that he manages to write.
/ Summon Bevets.
And besides : suppose I want help with a particular facet of the Fortran standard. Where can I go and get an answer from the steering committee who drafted it? Well, either comp.lang.fortran or
Having said that, more articles like this please. The last thing Usenet needs is another influx of rude, clueless newbies like the September-that-never-ended.
If you don't share that principle, that's OK. It means that I consider you a self-centred boob, and detrimental to a healthy, fair society, but I don't suppose you care about my opinion on that matter.
But please, please, please don't pretend that there's something "logical" in putting yourself before everyone else, because (despite what the Randroids tell) moral principles cannot be derived by logic -- you always have to start off with axioms that, essentially, define those principles.
Of course, this being America, being asked to accept socialism and evolution would probably result in the meltdown of society.
Mostly, you get what your parents deserve.
Why should I be penalised if my mother is a crack whore? That's not my fault, is it?
Simple fact is, the standard of living/health care/education of 99.9% of the the children in America is not attributable to the children. Children of the poor, are getting punished through accident of birth, not for any other reason.
Mate, I agree with you. I was disagreeing with the point about "pandering to Islamists". This isn't about radical Islam: it's about racism and poverty. Much like every inner city riot in the Western world has been, since Watts.
That's pretty much it, folks.
If the American media want to blame this on their latest Islamist bogeyman, you might as well go the whole hog and blame the Watts and LA riots on radical Islam too...
Pointing out that Iraq didn't have WMD and banning Muslims from wearing headscarves in school qualifies as "pandering to Islamists" does it?
Go back to FauxNews, you unimformed pillock.
Chile. Nicaragua. The Phillippines. El Salvador.
And of course, propping up the South African Apartheid regime.
Essentially, anywhere is Central America with the gall to elect a socialist.
Who cares about the horrible degradation of the infrastructure when there are libertarian dogmas at stake?
They just care more about producing good work than licensing issues.
A constitutional republic is three Christian fundamentalists and a homosexual deciding on who can marry.
The world doesn't revolve around Copernicus, you know...
Gee, I wonder how SF fans ever got stereotyped as a bunch of pedantic dullards.
True, but it's considerably easier to get them to stop in case of emergency.
But it drastically increases your chance of saying 'virii', even though 'virii' isn't a word.