ClearChannel doesn't have the right to become a monopoly just by buying up all the stations it can. If all its competition suddenly decided to get out of the radio business and it became a monopoly by default, the government could regulate it since the odds are very high CC would abuse its power.
It was a troll, so why did you bite? You and fifteen other people who said the same thing before you did. Did you think you were adding something constructive that none of the other 15 had thought of? You had to read the troll to know what to say, so why didn't you read the responses below. You and everyone with your lame mental abilities are why trolls still live on/. Its just too easy to troll sometimes.
By posting "I'm a fool who doesn't read other posts" you are only showing your ignorance.
dunno what was in RJR's cigs, but these have all the taste of tobacco, with none of the nicotine because its been removed by genetic engineering. the genetic work was only completed in 2000.
The Quest cigs come in three types, 17% less nicotine, 58% less, and 100% less. The 17 and 58% ones are regular tobacco mixed with the new tobacco. Unlike herbal cigs, people can gradually lessen the addiction, while keeping the hand/mouth action they're used to.
Because the desire to do something with their smoking hand and have something in their mouth makes them think about smoking. If they're trying to quit and everyone around them is smoking, they can smoke nicotine-free cigs and blend right in. Some people hate the laws banning smoking in bars because they're mentally addicted to having a smoke with their beer. The new cigs wean smokers from the physical addiction. Once free they can try and stop the mental addiction to having a cig in hand/mouth.
What's unreasonable from keeping the public from copying your work and giving it to friends while you're trying to make money from it within a shorter time frame?
If you read the rest of my comment you'd understand that at the same bitrate mpeg-4 looks better than VCD. A VCD holds 1 hour of video. A mpeg-4 CD holds 2 hours of video at equal or slightly better quality. A 1 hour mpeg-4 CD looks even better than a 30 minute SVCD.
As Specialized Sworks already stated, mpeg4 has superior quality at the same bitrate. I can show you an episode of Friends in 240MB mpeg-1 and 110MB mpeg-4 and the quality is comparable. mpeg1 seems to capture details better, but the tiliing, or grid of squares that are compressed are clearly visible. mpeg-4 will hide the tiling better, but lose some detail. That same episode in mpeg-4 at 240MB would look almost broadcast perfect. All of this is at 352x240 resolution. At 640x480 mpeg-4 would need closer to 400MB to look broadcast quality.
When rotten bands have one good song I'll buy fifteen good songs from fifteen rotten bands and be happy. The bands will be happy too because they'll have actually gotten my money. I would never have bought their albums otherwise. Billy Idol is good enough that I'll still buy the entire album, or enough of it that Billy will get plenty of royalties. I will not buy a Prince album, but if the day comes when I can buy select songs, he'll be getting some of my money.
I don't suppose anyone renting the space twice has ever forgotten the gaffers tape again. Then remembering you charged for the entire first roll which you kept, hid the second roll since it was getting paid for in its entirety?
Stuff recorded in the 80s still sounds great. Equipment doesn't have to cost hundred of thousands of dollars for an album to be great. The content matters more.
My response wasn't clear. I mean that the arab media distorts the truth about everything american and israeli. http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm/include/detail/ storyid/179940.html
Al-jazeera is supposedly the least biased news source in arab media, but as you can read, it is hardly truthful. The text of the link above is below.
Live From Qatar: It's Jihad Television Posted Feb. 11, 2002 By Kenneth R. Timmerman
Al-Jazeera repeatedly has broadcast bin Laden diatribes to its primarily Arab audience. Media Credit: UPI Al-Jazeera repeatedly has broadcast bin Laden diatribes to its primarily Arab audience. For once, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher didn't mince words. "We've expressed our concerns about some of the kinds of things we've seen on their air, particularly inflammatory stories, totally untrue stories, things like that," he said at a daily briefing in early October 2001. "We would certainly like to see them tone down the rhetoric."
Boucher was not talking about the old Soviet Union, whose active-measures teams dreamed up wild conspiratorial stories about U.S. domination of the Third World and fed them to disinformation agents as "news." The culprit he was speaking of was the al-Jazeera TV satellite network, the proud creation of the emir of Qatar -- a U.S. ally in the Persian Gulf who has agreed to host U.S. Marine Expeditionary Units and allow U.S. fighter jets to base combat missions in his territory. Yet he finances the most vile anti-American and anti-Semitic propaganda imaginable.
During the first month after Sept. 11, al-Jazeera rebroadcast excerpts from a 1998 canned interview with Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden dozens of times -- sometimes several times in a day -- in which bin Laden called on Muslims to kill Americans, Christians and Jews. The prominence given to the bin Laden statements prompted an unusual public scolding from Secretary of State Colin Powell on Oct. 8, 2001, during a visit to Washington by Sheik Hamad bin-Khalifa al-Thani, the emir of Qatar. The emir shrugged off the criticism, claiming al-Jazeera was part of his plan to create a parliamentary system for his kingdom.
Al-Jazeera's Washington correspondent, Hafiz al-Mirazi, had a similar response. "When you have a 24-hour broadcast, there are a lot of empty holes," he tells INSIGHT, explaining the frequent replays of the bin Laden interview. "Many people didn't know who bin Laden was before September 11. We do no propaganda for bin Laden. When you put President [George W.] Bush on live television at a memorial for one-and-a-half hours, it's the same thing," he adds.
While few Americans would agree with that equivalence, al-Jazeera's record does not tally with al-Mirazi's account. Prior to Sept. 11, the satellite-TV network prominently featured bin Laden in its broadcasts, and regularly invited bin Laden friends and sympathizers onto the air. "They had become jihad television," says U.S. scholar of Islam Daniel Pipes.
Consider this July 10, 2001, broadcast called Opposite Direction, one of many al-Jazeera talk shows touted as presenting "balanced" opinion and "fair" comment. Host Faysal al-Qassem called the program "Bin Laden -- The Arab Despair and American Fear," and opened it like this:
"Good evening, dear viewers. Do you know how much Osama bin Laden weighs? That's what one of the Arab leaders at the recent summit in Amman asked. The answer is: No more than 50 kilograms [110 pounds]. In contrast, the average weight of the Arab leaders is at least 80 kilograms [176 pounds], not to mention the weight of the [Arab] armies and the huge budgets. Nevertheless, the slender bin Laden has made the greatest power in history shudder at the sound of his name, [while] the physical and material heavyweights arouse only America's pity and ridicule."
Balancing this view was Abd al-Bari 'Atwan, editor in chief of the pro-Iraqi London daily Al-Quds al-Arabi. The United States is "a terrorist regime that has killed innocent people since 1945 to this very moment," 'Atwan instructed viewers. "Bin Laden is a legitimate jihad fighter. Bin Laden has a work plan... to harass the U.S., to harm its presence in the region as much as he can."
The first caller to reach the "open" phone lines of the show happened to be al-Qaeda spokesman Suleiman Abu Gheith, calling from somewhere in Afghanistan. After a 10-minute speech in praise of his boss, he ended with a call for volunteers for "the holy jihad against the Jews and the Christians."
During the first two months of the war, al-Jazeera's Kabul correspondent -- a Syrian named Tasyeer Alouni, who traveled on a Spanish passport -- was the only foreign TV correspondent allowed to operate in Afghanistan by the Taliban. His wild-eyed reports alleging massive civilian casualties from the U.S. bombing campaign fed the Arab conspiracy mills and were picked up by CNN and other U.S. networks. The Pentagon says most of his claims simply were false.
Alouni's close working ties to Taliban leaders and al-Qaeda did not go unnoticed. The Kabul office was destroyed by rockets launched from U.S. warplanes. When Alouni reappeared on the air the next day, he whined that he had witnessed "scenes that, I'm sorry, I couldn't describe to anybody," and that he was "in deep psychological shock."
Al-Jazeera -- which translates from Arabic as "the peninsula" -- was set up in Qatar by Sheik Hamad in 1996, barely one year after he toppled his father in a palace coup. In what appeared to be a daring move, the young emir abolished the Information Ministry and granted an annual $30 million subsidy to establish an "independent" news channel allegedly modeled after the British Broadcasting Corp. The 24-hour satellite news channel today reaches 35 million Arabs, including an estimated 150,000 in the United States. Despite climbing advertising revenues and the millions of dollars earned from syndicating its "exclusive" reports from Kabul and the bin Laden interviews (which go for $250,000 a pop, according to Managing Director Mohammed Jasem al Ali), the network remains financially and politically dependent on the emir's patronage.
During the last five years, al-Jazeera has tweaked the noses of Arab leaders from Kuwait to Algiers, but never Qatar, which does not allow its 200,000-odd citizens to have satellite dishes to receive critical views, but pipes al-Jazeera by cable into most homes. To some, this willingness to shock has spread a breath of freedom throughout the Arab world, which is used to controlled media and stale government propaganda. It also has enhanced the clout of the otherwise obscure emir, whose kingdom shares a massive offshore natural-gas field with Iran and is linked by a land bridge to Saudi Arabia. And it has won him protection from radical Islamists who might otherwise view his sheikdom as a ripe target.
Al-Jazeera also has gone easy on Saddam Hussein while whacking his opponents, in line with the emir's pro-Iraq line. Since taking power, the emir has encouraged wealthy Qatari citizens and royal relatives to make large donations to Iraq, including a business jet given personally to Saddam, according to former U.S. intelligence officers.
Shafeeq Ghabra, a Kuwaiti scholar who heads the Kuwait Information Office in Washington, felt the brunt of the network's political bias during a solo appearance he made on al-Jazeera after the short-lived "Desert Fox" bombing campaign against Iraq in December 1998. For two hours he was berated by 'Atwan, the pro-Iraqi journalist, and by hostile callers. The mood became so ugly that the Qatari foreign minister personally telephoned the show and put an end to the "debate."
Despite that experience, Ghabra remains circumspect: "Al-Jazeera is catering to the Arab street. It represents how they think and is a good reflection of what's going on. There is a lot of sensationalism. The street is emotional, and al-Jazeera caters to that. But it has also raised the bar for discussion in the public debate. Yes, they have a bias; but so does Fox News."
The United States prides itself on a free press. So what do we do when some element of the foreign press turns against us? The answer: flood the airwaves. Phase one of the U.S. counteroffensive has been to make administration officials available for interviews. But even here, they had to swim upstream against al-Jazeera's inherent bias. In her first appearance on the network, just nine days after the bombing campaign began on Oct. 7, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was bombarded with questions about U.S. support for Israel and the U.S. "failure" to restart the "peace process" before a single question about Afghanistan was raised.
Since then, the State Department has called out of retirement former U.S. ambassador Christopher Ross, a fluent Arabic speaker, and has booked him almost daily on Arab media outlets and the Voice of America's (VOA's) Arabic service to explain U.S. policy. "Before September 11, we didn't spend that much time on outreach," says Matt Lucenhop, a spokesman for the State Department's newly revamped Arab Media Outreach Office. "Since then, we realize that we have to reach publics in the region directly to get our message across."
The administration also has increased funding for the VOA under the stewardship of new director Robert Reilly, a cultural conservative and VOA veteran (see Picture Profile, p. 36). And at the urging of Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.) and others, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has launched a new Radio Free Afghanistan that has begun beaming local news directly into Afghanistan.
But what about al-Jazeera, which continues to spew lies and hatred? "We should bring pressure to bear on the government of Qatar to shut it down," Pipes tells Insight. "This must be part of an overall strategy that mobilizes all aspects of U.S. power -- military, economic, political, diplomatic, financial and economic. First, we must define the enemy, which is militant Islam. Second, we must define our goal, which should be to replace it wherever it exists, just as we did in Afghanistan."
Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for Insight magazine.
Plenty of what the common people in the middle east hear is propaganda, half-truths, and lies spread by the private and state-run media. Much of this hate comes from the media there.
If Israel ceases to exist, will the common people suddenly decide to overthrow the Saudi monarchy that prevents the people from deciding if they should live under strict islamic law? Israel is not always the problem. It makes a good scapegoat, but you should question the corruption and non-democratic governments in the middle east that allow hate to foment.
I doubt the chicks or anyone carries tires. More likely the chicks would use a pallet jack. Even better, they'd roll them on the ground one at a time. Now to roll the tires and keep them from falling, they have to bend way over as they walk. If I was the security guard, and these chicks were beatiful enough to be called chicks, I'd be watching.
Radio has never done a thing for me, XM is gonna flop.
Aren't you insightful? The world must revolve around you because you think it does. Please, you don't like XM because you don't pay attention to what you're hearing, well plenty of other people do. I listen to what I like on the radio and turn it off when there's nothing I want to hear.
You don't understand because you didn't read the article or grep what it said. Very few people listened to FM before Abrams came along. He got people to listen to FM, but now FM exists primarily to make money for the station owners. FM is no longer about making the listeners happy, but getting enough targeted groups to listen to advertizing.
What Abrams is trying to do with XM is make the listeners happy so they won't mind paying for XM. Imagine driving and never wanting to change the station because you're sick to death of an overplayed song.
I wouldn't mind if XM killed the commercialization of FM and brought it back to what it used to be, deejays playing what they think listeners would like to hear. Not bloody likely though.
You go take your ten bucks and while you're at it, make copies of all your CD's or rip them all to.ogg or.mp3 and buy a mp3-HD unit for your car. Not everyone in America knows how to do this, or has the inclination though.
If I have a forum on my site, well its MY SITE. The forums are not a public place like a sidewalk. If my forums are part of a business, and some asshole is coming into them with false user accounts reapeatedly after I tell him to leave, then I should be able to sue him.
Ouch, you ratbastard. Care to explain why you posted at score 2 instead of 1 with some examples? I rather enjoy his Flinx series as you can see from part of my e-mail address.
The value will not increase indefinitely. Like many SNES games, as the system dies their price declines. As it becomes difficult to locate new copies the price goes up again. In time most every collector who wants a copy will acquire one and the price will decline again. Everything pre-NES was before I could ride a bike (age 5) and I don't remember them nor care about the games. The same will happen with the SNES in time. Do you think kids born in 1990 will be ebaying Contra III for a hundred dollars in ten years? I highly doubt it. Every gamer from that era probably has their copy already so there won't be much demand anymore. My personal target is a copy of Snatcher for the Sega CD for $40 or less. HEY how about that, ebay's got it for $33 and 18 hours left. I doubt it'll stay that low as most auctions end at about 55.
Re:One major DSL problem
on
DSL Rising
·
· Score: 2
You must live in a neighborhood whose power and phone lines haven't gone underground yet. Any smart city should get rid of its power poles when a street has sewer work done on it. My parents house had the entire street and sidewalk removed about ten years ago for sewer work. The poles went underground, and there's a new sidewalk and pavement now. Sure this will take several more decades, but when everything gets replaced you can be sure the phone and cable companies will lay decent quality lines.
if you have two cd or dvd drives on the same ide channel the two will fight and fuck up your burning. the cd-r drive doesn't have to be a master of the channel but its not a bad idea.
I was essentially fine. I probably could have rode a bike home. Not my bike though, my wheels were warped and the front fork broke. After the car hit me I extremely luckily landed exactly face down with almost no sliding. My knees, elbows, wrists, and nose all lost 1-3 layers of skin, but that was just cosmetic damage. A cop called an ambulance just to be sure.
No kidding. After getting hit on my bicycle, I sat on the side of the road for a few minutes waiting for the ambulance to arrive. I reached to wipe what I thought was sweat off my nose, and was shocked/horrified to feel warm, thick blood.
Slashdot Mirror
ClearChannel doesn't have the right to become a monopoly just by buying up all the stations it can. If all its competition suddenly decided to get out of the radio business and it became a monopoly by default, the government could regulate it since the odds are very high CC would abuse its power.
It was a troll, so why did you bite? You and fifteen other people who said the same thing before you did. Did you think you were adding something constructive that none of the other 15 had thought of? You had to read the troll to know what to say, so why didn't you read the responses below. You and everyone with your lame mental abilities are why trolls still live on /. Its just too easy to troll sometimes.
By posting "I'm a fool who doesn't read other posts" you are only showing your ignorance.
AC, I would like to ram a two foot sword up your ass because you deserve it and I get off on sadistic shit like that.
dunno what was in RJR's cigs, but these have all the taste of tobacco, with none of the nicotine because its been removed by genetic engineering. the genetic work was only completed in 2000.
The Quest cigs come in three types, 17% less nicotine, 58% less, and 100% less. The 17 and 58% ones are regular tobacco mixed with the new tobacco. Unlike herbal cigs, people can gradually lessen the addiction, while keeping the hand/mouth action they're used to.
Because the desire to do something with their smoking hand and have something in their mouth makes them think about smoking. If they're trying to quit and everyone around them is smoking, they can smoke nicotine-free cigs and blend right in. Some people hate the laws banning smoking in bars because they're mentally addicted to having a smoke with their beer. The new cigs wean smokers from the physical addiction. Once free they can try and stop the mental addiction to having a cig in hand/mouth.
What's unreasonable from keeping the public from copying your work and giving it to friends while you're trying to make money from it within a shorter time frame?
If you read the rest of my comment you'd understand that at the same bitrate mpeg-4 looks better than VCD. A VCD holds 1 hour of video. A mpeg-4 CD holds 2 hours of video at equal or slightly better quality. A 1 hour mpeg-4 CD looks even better than a 30 minute SVCD.
As Specialized Sworks already stated, mpeg4 has superior quality at the same bitrate. I can show you an episode of Friends in 240MB mpeg-1 and 110MB mpeg-4 and the quality is comparable. mpeg1 seems to capture details better, but the tiliing, or grid of squares that are compressed are clearly visible. mpeg-4 will hide the tiling better, but lose some detail. That same episode in mpeg-4 at 240MB would look almost broadcast perfect. All of this is at 352x240 resolution. At 640x480 mpeg-4 would need closer to 400MB to look broadcast quality.
When rotten bands have one good song I'll buy fifteen good songs from fifteen rotten bands and be happy. The bands will be happy too because they'll have actually gotten my money. I would never have bought their albums otherwise. Billy Idol is good enough that I'll still buy the entire album, or enough of it that Billy will get plenty of royalties. I will not buy a Prince album, but if the day comes when I can buy select songs, he'll be getting some of my money.
I don't suppose anyone renting the space twice has ever forgotten the gaffers tape again. Then remembering you charged for the entire first roll which you kept, hid the second roll since it was getting paid for in its entirety?
Stuff recorded in the 80s still sounds great. Equipment doesn't have to cost hundred of thousands of dollars for an album to be great. The content matters more.
My response wasn't clear. I mean that the arab media distorts the truth about everything american and israeli. http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm/include/detail/ storyid/179940.html
... to harass the U.S., to harm its presence in the region as much as he can."
Al-jazeera is supposedly the least biased news source in arab media, but as you can read, it is hardly truthful. The text of the link above is below.
Live From Qatar: It's Jihad Television
Posted Feb. 11, 2002
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
Al-Jazeera repeatedly has broadcast bin Laden diatribes to its primarily Arab audience.
Media Credit: UPI
Al-Jazeera repeatedly has broadcast bin Laden diatribes to its primarily Arab audience.
For once, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher didn't mince words. "We've expressed our concerns about some of the kinds of things we've seen on their air, particularly inflammatory stories, totally untrue stories, things like that," he said at a daily briefing in early October 2001. "We would certainly like to see them tone down the rhetoric."
Boucher was not talking about the old Soviet Union, whose active-measures teams dreamed up wild conspiratorial stories about U.S. domination of the Third World and fed them to disinformation agents as "news." The culprit he was speaking of was the al-Jazeera TV satellite network, the proud creation of the emir of Qatar -- a U.S. ally in the Persian Gulf who has agreed to host U.S. Marine Expeditionary Units and allow U.S. fighter jets to base combat missions in his territory. Yet he finances the most vile anti-American and anti-Semitic propaganda imaginable.
During the first month after Sept. 11, al-Jazeera rebroadcast excerpts from a 1998 canned interview with Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden dozens of times -- sometimes several times in a day -- in which bin Laden called on Muslims to kill Americans, Christians and Jews. The prominence given to the bin Laden statements prompted an unusual public scolding from Secretary of State Colin Powell on Oct. 8, 2001, during a visit to Washington by Sheik Hamad bin-Khalifa al-Thani, the emir of Qatar. The emir shrugged off the criticism, claiming al-Jazeera was part of his plan to create a parliamentary system for his kingdom.
Al-Jazeera's Washington correspondent, Hafiz al-Mirazi, had a similar response. "When you have a 24-hour broadcast, there are a lot of empty holes," he tells INSIGHT, explaining the frequent replays of the bin Laden interview. "Many people didn't know who bin Laden was before September 11. We do no propaganda for bin Laden. When you put President [George W.] Bush on live television at a memorial for one-and-a-half hours, it's the same thing," he adds.
While few Americans would agree with that equivalence, al-Jazeera's record does not tally with al-Mirazi's account. Prior to Sept. 11, the satellite-TV network prominently featured bin Laden in its broadcasts, and regularly invited bin Laden friends and sympathizers onto the air. "They had become jihad television," says U.S. scholar of Islam Daniel Pipes.
Consider this July 10, 2001, broadcast called Opposite Direction, one of many al-Jazeera talk shows touted as presenting "balanced" opinion and "fair" comment. Host Faysal al-Qassem called the program "Bin Laden -- The Arab Despair and American Fear," and opened it like this:
"Good evening, dear viewers. Do you know how much Osama bin Laden weighs? That's what one of the Arab leaders at the recent summit in Amman asked. The answer is: No more than 50 kilograms [110 pounds]. In contrast, the average weight of the Arab leaders is at least 80 kilograms [176 pounds], not to mention the weight of the [Arab] armies and the huge budgets. Nevertheless, the slender bin Laden has made the greatest power in history shudder at the sound of his name, [while] the physical and material heavyweights arouse only America's pity and ridicule."
Balancing this view was Abd al-Bari 'Atwan, editor in chief of the pro-Iraqi London daily Al-Quds al-Arabi. The United States is "a terrorist regime that has killed innocent people since 1945 to this very moment," 'Atwan instructed viewers. "Bin Laden is a legitimate jihad fighter. Bin Laden has a work plan
The first caller to reach the "open" phone lines of the show happened to be al-Qaeda spokesman Suleiman Abu Gheith, calling from somewhere in Afghanistan. After a 10-minute speech in praise of his boss, he ended with a call for volunteers for "the holy jihad against the Jews and the Christians."
During the first two months of the war, al-Jazeera's Kabul correspondent -- a Syrian named Tasyeer Alouni, who traveled on a Spanish passport -- was the only foreign TV correspondent allowed to operate in Afghanistan by the Taliban. His wild-eyed reports alleging massive civilian casualties from the U.S. bombing campaign fed the Arab conspiracy mills and were picked up by CNN and other U.S. networks. The Pentagon says most of his claims simply were false.
Alouni's close working ties to Taliban leaders and al-Qaeda did not go unnoticed. The Kabul office was destroyed by rockets launched from U.S. warplanes. When Alouni reappeared on the air the next day, he whined that he had witnessed "scenes that, I'm sorry, I couldn't describe to anybody," and that he was "in deep psychological shock."
Al-Jazeera -- which translates from Arabic as "the peninsula" -- was set up in Qatar by Sheik Hamad in 1996, barely one year after he toppled his father in a palace coup. In what appeared to be a daring move, the young emir abolished the Information Ministry and granted an annual $30 million subsidy to establish an "independent" news channel allegedly modeled after the British Broadcasting Corp. The 24-hour satellite news channel today reaches 35 million Arabs, including an estimated 150,000 in the United States. Despite climbing advertising revenues and the millions of dollars earned from syndicating its "exclusive" reports from Kabul and the bin Laden interviews (which go for $250,000 a pop, according to Managing Director Mohammed Jasem al Ali), the network remains financially and politically dependent on the emir's patronage.
During the last five years, al-Jazeera has tweaked the noses of Arab leaders from Kuwait to Algiers, but never Qatar, which does not allow its 200,000-odd citizens to have satellite dishes to receive critical views, but pipes al-Jazeera by cable into most homes. To some, this willingness to shock has spread a breath of freedom throughout the Arab world, which is used to controlled media and stale government propaganda. It also has enhanced the clout of the otherwise obscure emir, whose kingdom shares a massive offshore natural-gas field with Iran and is linked by a land bridge to Saudi Arabia. And it has won him protection from radical Islamists who might otherwise view his sheikdom as a ripe target.
Al-Jazeera also has gone easy on Saddam Hussein while whacking his opponents, in line with the emir's pro-Iraq line. Since taking power, the emir has encouraged wealthy Qatari citizens and royal relatives to make large donations to Iraq, including a business jet given personally to Saddam, according to former U.S. intelligence officers.
Shafeeq Ghabra, a Kuwaiti scholar who heads the Kuwait Information Office in Washington, felt the brunt of the network's political bias during a solo appearance he made on al-Jazeera after the short-lived "Desert Fox" bombing campaign against Iraq in December 1998. For two hours he was berated by 'Atwan, the pro-Iraqi journalist, and by hostile callers. The mood became so ugly that the Qatari foreign minister personally telephoned the show and put an end to the "debate."
Despite that experience, Ghabra remains circumspect: "Al-Jazeera is catering to the Arab street. It represents how they think and is a good reflection of what's going on. There is a lot of sensationalism. The street is emotional, and al-Jazeera caters to that. But it has also raised the bar for discussion in the public debate. Yes, they have a bias; but so does Fox News."
The United States prides itself on a free press. So what do we do when some element of the foreign press turns against us? The answer: flood the airwaves. Phase one of the U.S. counteroffensive has been to make administration officials available for interviews. But even here, they had to swim upstream against al-Jazeera's inherent bias. In her first appearance on the network, just nine days after the bombing campaign began on Oct. 7, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was bombarded with questions about U.S. support for Israel and the U.S. "failure" to restart the "peace process" before a single question about Afghanistan was raised.
Since then, the State Department has called out of retirement former U.S. ambassador Christopher Ross, a fluent Arabic speaker, and has booked him almost daily on Arab media outlets and the Voice of America's (VOA's) Arabic service to explain U.S. policy. "Before September 11, we didn't spend that much time on outreach," says Matt Lucenhop, a spokesman for the State Department's newly revamped Arab Media Outreach Office. "Since then, we realize that we have to reach publics in the region directly to get our message across."
The administration also has increased funding for the VOA under the stewardship of new director Robert Reilly, a cultural conservative and VOA veteran (see Picture Profile, p. 36). And at the urging of Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.) and others, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has launched a new Radio Free Afghanistan that has begun beaming local news directly into Afghanistan.
But what about al-Jazeera, which continues to spew lies and hatred? "We should bring pressure to bear on the government of Qatar to shut it down," Pipes tells Insight. "This must be part of an overall strategy that mobilizes all aspects of U.S. power -- military, economic, political, diplomatic, financial and economic. First, we must define the enemy, which is militant Islam. Second, we must define our goal, which should be to replace it wherever it exists, just as we did in Afghanistan."
Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for Insight magazine.
Plenty of what the common people in the middle east hear is propaganda, half-truths, and lies spread by the private and state-run media. Much of this hate comes from the media there.
If Israel ceases to exist, will the common people suddenly decide to overthrow the Saudi monarchy that prevents the people from deciding if they should live under strict islamic law? Israel is not always the problem. It makes a good scapegoat, but you should question the corruption and non-democratic governments in the middle east that allow hate to foment.
I doubt the chicks or anyone carries tires. More likely the chicks would use a pallet jack. Even better, they'd roll them on the ground one at a time. Now to roll the tires and keep them from falling, they have to bend way over as they walk. If I was the security guard, and these chicks were beatiful enough to be called chicks, I'd be watching.
Radio has never done a thing for me, XM is gonna flop.
Aren't you insightful? The world must revolve around you because you think it does. Please, you don't like XM because you don't pay attention to what you're hearing, well plenty of other people do. I listen to what I like on the radio and turn it off when there's nothing I want to hear.
You don't understand because you didn't read the article or grep what it said. Very few people listened to FM before Abrams came along. He got people to listen to FM, but now FM exists primarily to make money for the station owners. FM is no longer about making the listeners happy, but getting enough targeted groups to listen to advertizing.
.ogg or .mp3 and buy a mp3-HD unit for your car. Not everyone in America knows how to do this, or has the inclination though.
What Abrams is trying to do with XM is make the listeners happy so they won't mind paying for XM. Imagine driving and never wanting to change the station because you're sick to death of an overplayed song.
I wouldn't mind if XM killed the commercialization of FM and brought it back to what it used to be, deejays playing what they think listeners would like to hear. Not bloody likely though.
You go take your ten bucks and while you're at it, make copies of all your CD's or rip them all to
If I have a forum on my site, well its MY SITE. The forums are not a public place like a sidewalk. If my forums are part of a business, and some asshole is coming into them with false user accounts reapeatedly after I tell him to leave, then I should be able to sue him.
Ouch, you ratbastard. Care to explain why you posted at score 2 instead of 1 with some examples? I rather enjoy his Flinx series as you can see from part of my e-mail address.
The value will not increase indefinitely. Like many SNES games, as the system dies their price declines. As it becomes difficult to locate new copies the price goes up again. In time most every collector who wants a copy will acquire one and the price will decline again. Everything pre-NES was before I could ride a bike (age 5) and I don't remember them nor care about the games. The same will happen with the SNES in time. Do you think kids born in 1990 will be ebaying Contra III for a hundred dollars in ten years? I highly doubt it. Every gamer from that era probably has their copy already so there won't be much demand anymore. My personal target is a copy of Snatcher for the Sega CD for $40 or less. HEY how about that, ebay's got it for $33 and 18 hours left. I doubt it'll stay that low as most auctions end at about 55.
You must live in a neighborhood whose power and phone lines haven't gone underground yet. Any smart city should get rid of its power poles when a street has sewer work done on it. My parents house had the entire street and sidewalk removed about ten years ago for sewer work. The poles went underground, and there's a new sidewalk and pavement now. Sure this will take several more decades, but when everything gets replaced you can be sure the phone and cable companies will lay decent quality lines.
if you have two cd or dvd drives on the same ide channel the two will fight and fuck up your burning. the cd-r drive doesn't have to be a master of the channel but its not a bad idea.
I was essentially fine. I probably could have rode a bike home. Not my bike though, my wheels were warped and the front fork broke. After the car hit me I extremely luckily landed exactly face down with almost no sliding. My knees, elbows, wrists, and nose all lost 1-3 layers of skin, but that was just cosmetic damage. A cop called an ambulance just to be sure.
No kidding. After getting hit on my bicycle, I sat on the side of the road for a few minutes waiting for the ambulance to arrive. I reached to wipe what I thought was sweat off my nose, and was shocked/horrified to feel warm, thick blood.
So besides editors, who is lower than you that still posts?