Oh, so I have to avoid saying that I think that their model is trick, even when that is precisely the issue with all these fake "balance" media offerings? I have to cloak my question in the very euphamisms that validate the "balance" model that I challenge? (BTW: it's not a "spectrum", a linear distribution with extremes and a middle, either.)
The readers don't seem to have thought the question wasn't worth answering - far from it. The criteria for which questions to answer was "highest rated". The moderators rated my question a 5/5:
Moderation +4
70% Insightful
30% Interesting
17 of 246 comments almost 7%, were in the thread I started with that question.
The moderators in this "interview" story, answering the cherrypicked questions from the earlier setup story, agreed, with another 5/5 rating:
Moderation +3
70% Insightful
30% Interesting
There are 50 comments in this story as I post this reply, so even just my post in it, your response, and this reply constitute 6% of the interaction with this story. The 3 +1 moderations represent 3% of the interest.
So to answer your question: no, I don't seriously wonder why my question wasn't answered - and I never said I wondered. For one, as you noticed in the tone of my question, I don't think the Skewz.com people are anything but perpetuators of a media scam promoting "bilateral balance". For another, I think they did answer my question, by ignoring it despite its relevance and popular interest in it.
The connections are in the posts to which I'm replying. They're not just "general attacks", they're counterattacks to what some libertarian has attacked me with.
One problem with libertarians is that you don't properly distinguish between the specific and the general. Like when you just capitalized "Libertarianism": that's the specific ideology of the Libertarian Party, not the general ideology of the political philosophy.
That tendency to conflation also underwrites the thinking in that entire post you just made. I never said "well, [l]ibertariams support the free market, and this happened in a free market, so, ummm DEATH TO LIBERTARIANS!" or anything close. In fact, I pointed out that the market in which Virgin's making its grab is not free, just the most obvious way in which your contrived "summary" is unconnected to reality. But it is a self-serving oversimplification, from a libertarian, so of course I should dignify it with the respect of a logical response:P.
Libertarianism is political extremism, worshiping liberty while ignoring every other value, fetishizing a reductionist logic ad absurdum. I've had to deal with it for years, as generation after generation discovers Ayn Rand and "the virtue of selfishness" for itself, as if the world were brand new. There's as little chance of clear and reasoned debate about extremist libertarianism as there is about any other fundamentalism, as I've learned over and again for so long. No, it's much better to just laugh at it, because it's really better as a joke. Taking it seriously is just much too sad.
So what? All that means is that a better name for the foundation would be the "Linux Server Foundation". It's not their obligation to care about Desktop Linux, if it's not in their business interest to do so.
By the same token, they don't "own Linux". When there are people who care enough to improve Desktop Linux, they'll do it (as many are). That's how Linux works: it's Open Source not just to read, but to write with your patches. When those people make money off Desktop Linux, and form a "foundation", maybe they'll have the sense of proportion to call it the "Linux Desktop Foundation". There's already plenty of orgs with those interests. So what if "the" Linux Foundation isn't one of them? And who's got the right to tell them they should be?
Funny how this "interview" answered several questions, supposedly as the "highest rated", but just skipped answering the one that I asked (rated higher than many of those answered), 'Fake "Balance" (Score:5, Insightful)':
What is the point of providing only two "balancing" stories with "liberal" vs "conservative" biases, when neither "liberal" nor "conservative" are labels with any real meaning except propaganda buzzwords, when the two illusory groups agree on so much but also mutually exclude so much not falling under their convenient labels, and when there are so many other viewpoints? A point other than validating the grossest oversimplification of the world since "right brain / left brain" dumbed down psychology to meaningless twaddle, that is.
And when one or the other is just wrong, why dignify them as "balance"? What's the point of balancing lies against truth?
So I suppose we have our answer. the point of the fake "balance" that Skewz.com promotes, along with the rest of the "contrived controversy" gossip media, is entirely once of dumbed-down convenience. They're not interested in the story, in the facts, or even in "balance". They're interested in cherrypicking the story to suit their own agenda, which is mainly just increased conflict. To distract us from ever solving any problems, which would mean less demand for their "service".
My strong and deep libertarian streak agrees with you completely.
I just like to bear in mind that turning 100% streaker is a nice theory of freedom, but embarassing when actually practiced (even if fun to watch flame out).
Well, Putin coming to power isn't the fault of our bad space program deals. Though they're of course related, as the KGB and space launches are part of the same industry in Russia.
Putin's succession after Yeltsin was in fact really due the KGB concocting the Chechen war to discredit Yeltsin (and democracy with him). It's documented quite explicitly and in great detail in Alexander "Polonium 210" Litvinenko's report _Blowing Up Russia_ (published right after he died from the KGB polonium poisoning). But that is tangential to the Russian giveaway space deals with first Clinton and then Bush.
Well, I don't think just taking advantage of the US and getting a better deal makes them the "bad guys" (except that it's bad for me and my country). The payments for launch services aren't really what I'm complaining about, either. It's how the US paid the Russians' share of the ISS as a direct subsidy, while the Russians blatantly blew off their engineering contributions to it (like whole module components delivered way late and faulty). Meanwhile, the Russians were launching their own private laser sail projects and others, with the money they saved, but without sharing their results with us.
Again, a bad deal at my expense (in both money and in opportunity cost).
Could be. Though I think that Americans just were easily able to simplify "Net Neutrality" into "still getting my stuff for free", when it's so obvious that the telcos and cablecos will just rip us off at any chance. All it took was for geeks to say that those Net barons were up to that, and Americans could easily see it would go down like that. They might even have clued into the sudden diversity of news stories on the Net, and refuse to go back to just the TV news echo chamber.
The cat is out of the bag. It's going to cost the telcos and cablecos a lot more than they expected to put it back in there.
Hahaha. I'm a rich guy who works only when I want to, because I worked hard at a smart company I started (and had some luck).
But thanks for showing the primitive logic at work among you defensive "libertarians". Or are you "Libertarians"? I can't keep your fake ideology and your fake political party clearly apart, because they're both mainly just excuses to indulge your greed (and shoot someone and get away with it).
It;s that last part that I'm saying, too. I never said we're paying too much in absolute dollars for our space budgets. We're spending way too little. We should reverse the budgets of the Pentagon and NASA (and leave the Pentagon and the CIA/NSA/etc to fund their own military/spook space programs). But as is implicit in your statement, the saving grace in our bad deals is only that they're relatively small. That's small consolation. So I'd rather see much bigger deals that are a lot better for us (and everyone else, by not funding bad buys).
Well, it's hard to know, because Russia's state capitalism ("fascism") is rolling in petrorubles, and finances quite a lot of secret space science and industry.
Russia also financed a successful laser-sail project into the outer Solar System while it was saving that money on the ISS (but getting the science to repurpose for its private agenda).
Again, what I would prefer would just have been a better deal. I think the cooperation is the best part, partly because it kept that engineering out of the hands of other, less manageable threats, like the states developing missile systems that are strong marketing for more Star Wars boondoggle. But the US should have gotten a lot more for its money.
For example, we could have paid Russia for its extra nukes to dismantle (and take custody of their explosive cores), and let them use the money to pay their share of the ISS (and the rest). There have been lots of better strategic deals, better for the both of us (and the rest of the world), though not for Putin's scary agenda.
Well, you've got the second act right, which is why my own "libertarian" attitude towards paying one's way agrees with you there.
But without those taxes and expenses, we wouldn't have got those wires, that Internet. Which is why I'm not really a "libertarian". And certainly not a member of the Libertarian Party, which is about has half-libertarian as I am.
Well, maybe in their imaginations. But that "libertarian" was hustling for exactly that kind of rigged market. Which is the only kind of market I've ever seen any "actual" libertarian hustle for in reality.
Maybe you're referring to some characters in an Ayn Rand novel. Those are all fiction.
All that is OK. What would have been better would have been if the US taxpayers weren't stuck with that ISS boondoggle, while Russia literally rockets past us. We didn't exactly get a "functioning space station". If we'd made a better deal, this new Russian "Orbital Construction Plant" could have been shared more with the US, instead of us just creating our own competition and trying to compete with a worse tool.
I'm all for human advancement. I just don't like being the one to pay for the other humans to advance, while we lag behind.
Am I ever glad that the US spent the last 15 years subsidizing Russia's space industry and wasting our time on that ISS boondoggle, so Russia could take the money and race past us with an actual worthwhile project in orbit.
TrollMods say connecting Bill Gates to Jack Abramoff to explain why DHS works for Gates is "Flamebait". Because, you know, telling the truth in front of Republicans is a dangerous way to get them to flame you, to cover up their crime wave.
I was cynical enough to believe that myself, that "Net Neutrality" would die an obscure inside baseball battle in which telcos easily rolled over a few geeks with a sense of history, economics and fair play. But then it turned out to be surprisingly popular and accessible to the public at large. I don't know how it happened, but it did.
It doesn't hurt to underestimate the public's attention span and insight into its self-interest, because it's usually absent, especially in the face of distracting entertainment. Unless by underestimating you ignore when it's available as a powerful ally. In Net Neutrality, this has somehow turned out to be the case. Let's not pass it up.
I paid to invent and build that Internet that Virgin Media is now holding hostage for charging ransom against the billing model that made it worth holding for ransom. That's not a "free market", except in the corporate handouts you "Libertarians" love to pretend is "free" because you'd love to be the next ripoff artist yourself.
So I'm not "fighting WW2", a ridiculous comment from yet another Anonymous Libertarian Coward. I'm trying to keep some corporate interloper from ruining something that's too important to ignore. And as a trivial side skirmish, I'm slapping down your nonsense about a "free market" that erupts across an open Internet only because it does have equal access.
This blatant confession by Virgin Media is the best news yet for the Net Neutrality movement. Because the main argument of the enemies of Net Neutrality (who are therefore the promoters of Net Doublecharge) has always been that "equal access is never threatened", while usually contradictorily also saying "unequal access will be necessary to pay for increased capacity". Now Virgin Media is just admitting that's all a bunch of BS, and they're so hellbent on destroying the equal access for everyone that they already do it.
This is an industry claiming we don't need our equal access protected. And now, at the same time, telling us that it's gone, and we're whining too much because they've already destroyed it.
The enemy has blinked. There now should follow a backlash that will guarantee that we don't continue to give away our most profitable, most strategic global asset, that the public paid to invent, and build and promote, to those crooks who will say anything to steal it. And evidently are now so arrogant that they'll even admit they've already stolen it. Even though they haven't, or at least not so much that we can't take it back.
You're right. And that is why the ISO is directing attention to this straw man open letter: it's a smokescreen to distract from the only important issue, that the process of standardizing OOXML was corrupted by Microsoft to make them more money and give them more control. And everyone knows it, so they're trying to connect the volume of controversy to something superficial instead, this noncontroversy over "personal attacks".
"Personal attacks" has increasingly been the whine of people trying to cover up actions and speech that they personally did wrong, when the attacks are on those acts and speech, not the "person" themself. It's a perversion of invoking the "ad hominem" fallacy accusation when all they're really entitled to claim is "don't look at me" (because they don't want to be accountable for their actions).
It's not just that the Boeing 787 Dreamliner may be unsafe or vulnerable to hacker attacks. At this point, it seems everyone would be happy for it to arrive in any state.
Well, if "everyone's" attitude towards the 787 is that they'll be happy for it to arrive unsafe mechanically or in IT security, then I will be even happier to take any other plane.
I'd like to think that after 4 planes are slammed into American territory, transforming our country and much of the world into a police state, where $BILLIONS are transferred to these airlines to secure them and their systems, that their basic attitude would change to the point where mechanical and IT safety would be an absolute requirement, not a "nice to have" when a delivery schedule could be delayed.
But obviously the fake security ("simcurity") we've traded our money and our lives for is just another lie.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, so I have to avoid saying that I think that their model is trick, even when that is precisely the issue with all these fake "balance" media offerings? I have to cloak my question in the very euphamisms that validate the "balance" model that I challenge? (BTW: it's not a "spectrum", a linear distribution with extremes and a middle, either.)
The readers don't seem to have thought the question wasn't worth answering - far from it. The criteria for which questions to answer was "highest rated". The moderators rated my question a 5/5:
Moderation +4
70% Insightful
30% Interesting
17 of 246 comments almost 7%, were in the thread I started with that question.
The moderators in this "interview" story, answering the cherrypicked questions from the earlier setup story, agreed, with another 5/5 rating:
Moderation +3
70% Insightful
30% Interesting
There are 50 comments in this story as I post this reply, so even just my post in it, your response, and this reply constitute 6% of the interaction with this story. The 3 +1 moderations represent 3% of the interest.
So to answer your question: no, I don't seriously wonder why my question wasn't answered - and I never said I wondered. For one, as you noticed in the tone of my question, I don't think the Skewz.com people are anything but perpetuators of a media scam promoting "bilateral balance". For another, I think they did answer my question, by ignoring it despite its relevance and popular interest in it.
The connections are in the posts to which I'm replying. They're not just "general attacks", they're counterattacks to what some libertarian has attacked me with.
:P.
One problem with libertarians is that you don't properly distinguish between the specific and the general. Like when you just capitalized "Libertarianism": that's the specific ideology of the Libertarian Party, not the general ideology of the political philosophy.
That tendency to conflation also underwrites the thinking in that entire post you just made. I never said "well, [l]ibertariams support the free market, and this happened in a free market, so, ummm DEATH TO LIBERTARIANS!" or anything close. In fact, I pointed out that the market in which Virgin's making its grab is not free, just the most obvious way in which your contrived "summary" is unconnected to reality. But it is a self-serving oversimplification, from a libertarian, so of course I should dignify it with the respect of a logical response
Libertarianism is political extremism, worshiping liberty while ignoring every other value, fetishizing a reductionist logic ad absurdum. I've had to deal with it for years, as generation after generation discovers Ayn Rand and "the virtue of selfishness" for itself, as if the world were brand new. There's as little chance of clear and reasoned debate about extremist libertarianism as there is about any other fundamentalism, as I've learned over and again for so long. No, it's much better to just laugh at it, because it's really better as a joke. Taking it seriously is just much too sad.
So what? All that means is that a better name for the foundation would be the "Linux Server Foundation". It's not their obligation to care about Desktop Linux, if it's not in their business interest to do so.
By the same token, they don't "own Linux". When there are people who care enough to improve Desktop Linux, they'll do it (as many are). That's how Linux works: it's Open Source not just to read, but to write with your patches. When those people make money off Desktop Linux, and form a "foundation", maybe they'll have the sense of proportion to call it the "Linux Desktop Foundation". There's already plenty of orgs with those interests. So what if "the" Linux Foundation isn't one of them? And who's got the right to tell them they should be?
So I suppose we have our answer. the point of the fake "balance" that Skewz.com promotes, along with the rest of the "contrived controversy" gossip media, is entirely once of dumbed-down convenience. They're not interested in the story, in the facts, or even in "balance". They're interested in cherrypicking the story to suit their own agenda, which is mainly just increased conflict. To distract us from ever solving any problems, which would mean less demand for their "service".
"Skewz". Couldn't have named it better myself.
You're a liar. And I spent years running a profitable ISP.
The only truth in your post, Anonymous telco Coward, is when you admitted at the end that you "thought not". Indeed.
If you hone that political reasoning any tighter, you'll be indistinguishable from a penis pump ad.
My strong and deep libertarian streak agrees with you completely.
I just like to bear in mind that turning 100% streaker is a nice theory of freedom, but embarassing when actually practiced (even if fun to watch flame out).
Well, Putin coming to power isn't the fault of our bad space program deals. Though they're of course related, as the KGB and space launches are part of the same industry in Russia.
Putin's succession after Yeltsin was in fact really due the KGB concocting the Chechen war to discredit Yeltsin (and democracy with him). It's documented quite explicitly and in great detail in Alexander "Polonium 210" Litvinenko's report _Blowing Up Russia_ (published right after he died from the KGB polonium poisoning). But that is tangential to the Russian giveaway space deals with first Clinton and then Bush.
Well, I don't think just taking advantage of the US and getting a better deal makes them the "bad guys" (except that it's bad for me and my country). The payments for launch services aren't really what I'm complaining about, either. It's how the US paid the Russians' share of the ISS as a direct subsidy, while the Russians blatantly blew off their engineering contributions to it (like whole module components delivered way late and faulty). Meanwhile, the Russians were launching their own private laser sail projects and others, with the money they saved, but without sharing their results with us.
Again, a bad deal at my expense (in both money and in opportunity cost).
Could be. Though I think that Americans just were easily able to simplify "Net Neutrality" into "still getting my stuff for free", when it's so obvious that the telcos and cablecos will just rip us off at any chance. All it took was for geeks to say that those Net barons were up to that, and Americans could easily see it would go down like that. They might even have clued into the sudden diversity of news stories on the Net, and refuse to go back to just the TV news echo chamber.
The cat is out of the bag. It's going to cost the telcos and cablecos a lot more than they expected to put it back in there.
Hahaha. I'm a rich guy who works only when I want to, because I worked hard at a smart company I started (and had some luck).
But thanks for showing the primitive logic at work among you defensive "libertarians". Or are you "Libertarians"? I can't keep your fake ideology and your fake political party clearly apart, because they're both mainly just excuses to indulge your greed (and shoot someone and get away with it).
It;s that last part that I'm saying, too. I never said we're paying too much in absolute dollars for our space budgets. We're spending way too little. We should reverse the budgets of the Pentagon and NASA (and leave the Pentagon and the CIA/NSA/etc to fund their own military/spook space programs). But as is implicit in your statement, the saving grace in our bad deals is only that they're relatively small. That's small consolation. So I'd rather see much bigger deals that are a lot better for us (and everyone else, by not funding bad buys).
Well, it's hard to know, because Russia's state capitalism ("fascism") is rolling in petrorubles, and finances quite a lot of secret space science and industry.
Russia also financed a successful laser-sail project into the outer Solar System while it was saving that money on the ISS (but getting the science to repurpose for its private agenda).
Again, what I would prefer would just have been a better deal. I think the cooperation is the best part, partly because it kept that engineering out of the hands of other, less manageable threats, like the states developing missile systems that are strong marketing for more Star Wars boondoggle. But the US should have gotten a lot more for its money.
For example, we could have paid Russia for its extra nukes to dismantle (and take custody of their explosive cores), and let them use the money to pay their share of the ISS (and the rest). There have been lots of better strategic deals, better for the both of us (and the rest of the world), though not for Putin's scary agenda.
Well, you've got the second act right, which is why my own "libertarian" attitude towards paying one's way agrees with you there.
But without those taxes and expenses, we wouldn't have got those wires, that Internet. Which is why I'm not really a "libertarian". And certainly not a member of the Libertarian Party, which is about has half-libertarian as I am.
Well, maybe in their imaginations. But that "libertarian" was hustling for exactly that kind of rigged market. Which is the only kind of market I've ever seen any "actual" libertarian hustle for in reality.
Maybe you're referring to some characters in an Ayn Rand novel. Those are all fiction.
All that is OK. What would have been better would have been if the US taxpayers weren't stuck with that ISS boondoggle, while Russia literally rockets past us. We didn't exactly get a "functioning space station". If we'd made a better deal, this new Russian "Orbital Construction Plant" could have been shared more with the US, instead of us just creating our own competition and trying to compete with a worse tool.
I'm all for human advancement. I just don't like being the one to pay for the other humans to advance, while we lag behind.
Am I ever glad that the US spent the last 15 years subsidizing Russia's space industry and wasting our time on that ISS boondoggle, so Russia could take the money and race past us with an actual worthwhile project in orbit.
Moderation -1
100% Flamebait
TrollMods say connecting Bill Gates to Jack Abramoff to explain why DHS works for Gates is "Flamebait". Because, you know, telling the truth in front of Republicans is a dangerous way to get them to flame you, to cover up their crime wave.
I was cynical enough to believe that myself, that "Net Neutrality" would die an obscure inside baseball battle in which telcos easily rolled over a few geeks with a sense of history, economics and fair play. But then it turned out to be surprisingly popular and accessible to the public at large. I don't know how it happened, but it did.
It doesn't hurt to underestimate the public's attention span and insight into its self-interest, because it's usually absent, especially in the face of distracting entertainment. Unless by underestimating you ignore when it's available as a powerful ally. In Net Neutrality, this has somehow turned out to be the case. Let's not pass it up.
I paid to invent and build that Internet that Virgin Media is now holding hostage for charging ransom against the billing model that made it worth holding for ransom. That's not a "free market", except in the corporate handouts you "Libertarians" love to pretend is "free" because you'd love to be the next ripoff artist yourself.
So I'm not "fighting WW2", a ridiculous comment from yet another Anonymous Libertarian Coward. I'm trying to keep some corporate interloper from ruining something that's too important to ignore. And as a trivial side skirmish, I'm slapping down your nonsense about a "free market" that erupts across an open Internet only because it does have equal access.
This blatant confession by Virgin Media is the best news yet for the Net Neutrality movement. Because the main argument of the enemies of Net Neutrality (who are therefore the promoters of Net Doublecharge) has always been that "equal access is never threatened", while usually contradictorily also saying "unequal access will be necessary to pay for increased capacity". Now Virgin Media is just admitting that's all a bunch of BS, and they're so hellbent on destroying the equal access for everyone that they already do it.
This is an industry claiming we don't need our equal access protected. And now, at the same time, telling us that it's gone, and we're whining too much because they've already destroyed it.
The enemy has blinked. There now should follow a backlash that will guarantee that we don't continue to give away our most profitable, most strategic global asset, that the public paid to invent, and build and promote, to those crooks who will say anything to steal it. And evidently are now so arrogant that they'll even admit they've already stolen it. Even though they haven't, or at least not so much that we can't take it back.
You're right. And that is why the ISO is directing attention to this straw man open letter: it's a smokescreen to distract from the only important issue, that the process of standardizing OOXML was corrupted by Microsoft to make them more money and give them more control. And everyone knows it, so they're trying to connect the volume of controversy to something superficial instead, this noncontroversy over "personal attacks".
"Personal attacks" has increasingly been the whine of people trying to cover up actions and speech that they personally did wrong, when the attacks are on those acts and speech, not the "person" themself. It's a perversion of invoking the "ad hominem" fallacy accusation when all they're really entitled to claim is "don't look at me" (because they don't want to be accountable for their actions).
Well, if "everyone's" attitude towards the 787 is that they'll be happy for it to arrive unsafe mechanically or in IT security, then I will be even happier to take any other plane.
I'd like to think that after 4 planes are slammed into American territory, transforming our country and much of the world into a police state, where $BILLIONS are transferred to these airlines to secure them and their systems, that their basic attitude would change to the point where mechanical and IT safety would be an absolute requirement, not a "nice to have" when a delivery schedule could be delayed.
But obviously the fake security ("simcurity") we've traded our money and our lives for is just another lie.
It doesn't matter. You "Libertarians" are all the same, like spam.