I personally have to debunk all of the ridiculous stories my wife's family mindlessly forwards around to each other without question....the latest was that Obama is Muslim.
Question for you: are they still thinking he's a Muslim while now also bitching about Reverend White? Some bloggers have been saying that at least the manufactured Reverend White controversy will debunk the rumors that Obama is a Muslim, but I don't give wingnuts that much credit.
For an exercise in application, try to write a pro-war piece. Most people would have an awful time trying.
Not in the mass market media you wouldn't. The people the media invites on their shows are entirely made up of one of two groups of people: unapologetic warmongers like Bill Kristol and John McCain, or people who completely supported the war and the surge but are now having some "buyers remorse" now that it's turned into a giant clusterfuck. The only complaints either of these groups have is that "mistakes were made."
But those who were right from the beginning in opposing the war are as excluded from the discussion now as they were in 2002. Remember last year when the media made a big deal of these "Iraq war critics" who were "no friends of the Administration" and were from "the liberal Brookings Institution" who loved the Surge? Well, uh, actually they were total hawks who supported the invasion every step of the way.
Contrast that to this ad put in the NY Times signed by 33 scholars against the invasion. Why aren't these people on talk shows now instead of Bill Krisol, who's only topped by Fred Kagen in being consistently wrong *everything*?
Just check out postings from Michelle Malkin or Hugh Hewitt sometime - they parrot the GOP talking points with marvelous consistency. Hell, White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett said of conservative bloggers:
I mean, talk about a direct IV into the vein of your support. It's a very efficient way to communicate. They regurgitate exactly and put up on their blogs what you said to them. It is something that we've cultivated and have really tried to put quite a bit of focus on.
It's not so much a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy as a herd of independent Kool Aid drinkers.
Hell, one of them is an editor right here on Slashdot; Pudge is the epitome of a Kool Aid drinking wingnut. The GOP has done backflips on party standards, but usually over the course of a decade, like how important military service is to serve as president when Bill Clinton was running against George H.W. Bush, vs when George W. Bush was running against McCain, Gore, and Kerry. If you think preferential treatment to get W into an Air Guard unit that would never see action and not bothering to show up for duty counts as "service", compare the wingnut response to Ruby Ridge (H.W. had been president for 3 1/2 years and in the White House for 11) to Waco (where Clinton had been in office for 38 days). But Pudge makes old school Republican hypocrisy obsolete - he can change standards between Republicans and Democrats so fast it would shatter the spine of Gumby:
One day he'll bitch about homosexuals "shoving gay marriage down our throats" and the next he'll bitch about regulations on home schooling. There's no libertarian Republican like a selective libertarian Republican. He'll call Barbra Boxer a liar for saying the invasion of Iraq was about "WMD, period" because the invasion was also based on violated U.N. Resolutions - even though almost all of said resolutions dealt with...WMD's. Yet less than a week later he'll talk about the Social Security crisis, nevermind that the "crisis" wouldn't come for almost 40 years, would still pay out 75% benefits, and could be completely prevented by as little as a 1% change in the tax code.
Aside from good cops covering for bad cops, there's also the slight problem that the majority of police work (issuing traffic citations, War on Drugs) sets it against normal people minding their own business, while not doing a whit to actually make you safer.
Much like Ross on Friends, you are a sissy-dick. A sissy at all the wrong times, and a dick at all the wrong times. If you want to bleat about "move to another country if you don't like the laws" and then turn around and grab your ankles the second a LEO looks your way, knock yourself out. But don't expect the rest of us to follow in your little bitch ways.
So preventing people from legally doing seriously harmful things affecting others is bad?
As Edward eloquently pointed out, we only arrest alcoholics when they break laws, not for getting drunk. If someone is sitting at home doing drugs, they aren't doing a thing to harm anyone else. And if they do end up harming others, it is most likely because of the War on Drugs, not in spite of it.
Say a crack addict robs a store to buy his next fix. If drugs were legalized, they would be vastly cheaper, and he could get his fix without resorting to burglary. He could just run down to the gas station and buy a few grams the way a smoker stops by to get some cigarettes.
Because of the War on Drugs, addicts share needles, which helps spread disease. Because of the War on Drugs, addicts are less likely to see treatment, for fear of being arrested. Because of the War on Drugs, addicts are not likely to go to AA meetings because cops are free to sit in on them and use whatever you say against you. Because of the War on Drugs, a young black man is 100 times as likely to go to jail then graduate from college. Because of the War on Drugs, there is a huge black market. Why bust your ass in school and in the job market when you can make as much money in a few minutes by selling drugs?
Or, the short version: pick up a book on Prohibition. Did banning alcohol stop anyone from drinking it? No. It just created a black market and a lot of crime. And made criminals out of ordinary people minding their own business. The War on Drugs is nothing more than Prohibition 2.0.
There are crimes that everyone can agree on, which all basically boil down to violence or property. Then there's inventing criminals by outlawing things that aren't violent and don't have any effect on your property.
That second link has nothing to do with undercover or plainclothes cops. Yes, something bad happened, and it might have involved corrupt cops, but it's off-topic.
Um, hello? So megalomaniacs are fine and dandy as long as they in uniform?!? If anything those links should make you more concerned, not less, because these corrupt cops were operating right out in the open.
Politicians get corrupt far more often than undercover cops (by my own informal observation); should we ban our whole political system too?
If you're into stupid straw men, sure.
Maybe next time you can provide evidence that is actually relevant to the discussion.
Maybe next time you could pull your head out and not be a prick.
Free market jihaddists are as bad as fundamentalist Christians: they both think that this country was founded on their religion. Nowhere in the Constitution does it lay out the United States as a free market economy - instead it explicitly grants government eminent domain, the power to regulate interstate commerce, and to promote the general welfare and pass laws to that effect.
Socialism is flat-out better than capitalism when it comes to certain areas of the economy, most notably health care, and that's just a fact you're going to have to deal with.
Far easier to install hardware. USB support. DirectX so you could run games and (generally) not have them take down the entire system when they crashed.
Windows NT was a good operating system released in 1993, that is seven years before OS X.
Not in the usability department, it wasn't. Which is why I was saying Microsoft didn't have a stable and usable OS until Win2k.
Even windows 95 was superior to MacOS. It was not secure, but it had virtual memory and preemptive multitasking.
But it was poor you couldn't tell the difference, especially when 16 bit code was involved. And then you also had the twin cesspools of the registry and dlls to deal with.
Not in the usability department, unless you were lucky with your hardware. NT was like your bad ex-girlfriend on meth when it came to getting devices to work. Installing a nic in my first ATX box was a ritual of installing the card, installing the divers, unplugging and reinstalling the card, and an agnostic prayer or two to any deity that might be listening. And that was a PCI ne2000 card, about the most generic chipset on the planet. Once you had everything installed and working, NT was a rock next to Win9x and Mac OS, but it was a chore to get it there.
2000 fixed all that, and imo is the best OS that Microsoft ever released. Their only real subsequent improvement they've made is instant user switching.
Also, before that, I would easily have argued that 95/98/ME was better than OS9
And I could just as easily argued that's not the case. 9x might have had memory segmentation, it still suffered from registry and dll hell, and crashed faster than Amy Whinehouse on a bender. Hell, even if you left a stock install alone after bootup, Windows would crash after 49.7 days.
But all quibbling aside, my basic point is that it's silly to rag on Apple for having not a usable, secure, stable OS when nobody else really had one either - NT was a pain, and good luck with Linux or BSD.
I remember one implementing RAM compression and a swapfile, so that you wouldn't get "out of memory" errors by running out of physical RAM. (The "compression" was the interesting part, to me.)
RamDoubler? I believe that was made by Connectix, which made also made Soundjam (which was bought by Apple and became iTunes) and VirtualPC, which was bought by Microsoft. But yeah, I don't think OS X had swap until OS 8.5 or 9.
Hearing people whine about "Mac fanboys" is like hearing wingnuts complain about "far left" Democrats: they've never seen far left in their entire lives, unless they've gone on vacation to North Korea.
So let's see these great reviews of yours, devoid of any asshatery, and the Mac fanboys that unfairly got on your case.
In my mind, that means "We don't have problems, ever."
Exactly: in your mind.
God forbid that we should ever hold Apple accountable for the image I made up in my head.
There, fixed that for you. In my mind, you're a horrible person for not coming to my house to do my laundry and clean by bathroom, but I doubt that's going to carry much weight either.
Yeah--another generalization I have. Most liberals are uninformed idiots.
Aside from realities well known liberal bias, of course. Which is why wingnuts create their own reality where inconvenient facts are ignored, and consistency is for wimps.
Sure, because that's Microsoft, the most hated company around here. But it takes an extreme hardware issue for anyone to pay attention to quality control issues from HP or Dell, because nobody expects anything better from them.
Hmm. I thought there was an option in itunes to transfer files from an iPod to a computer, but I only see "Transfer purchases from ipodname", which only works for iTMS stuff. This is with an older iPod, not a touch though. Yes, very lame if you can't transfer the files back to a computer.
I provide contracted IT services to companies. Each and every single one of those 40 mac users were pretentious twats.
My Spider-sense detects a classic case of projection...
She kept dragging things off the laptop screen onto the projector. This had her totally fucking confused for 5 minutes. Several times I tried to explain what was going on, but she would cut me off and say "See--it's disappearing. Why is it on the projector and not on my laptop. It's broken."
Yes, because ignorant users that blame tech support don't exist in the Windows world...
I do have an unhealthy obsession with my Roomba, but it doesn't come close to the religious outrage that descends on my blog whenever / if-ever I say anything that doesn't approach worship of Apple.
Probable translation: you troll, and are shocked, shocked! when you get some responses.
There's a hidden folder named "iPod Control" on the iPod. Just copy the music folder out of that, and then into iTunes (or WMP or whatever) and it'll pull the song info from the ID3 tags.
I couldn't help noticing how Mac fanatics kept on touting their superior OS, until OS X came along, which fixed all of these problems that they never acknowledged having before.
Windows didn't have an ounces worth of usability and security until Windows 2k was released in February of 2000. When was Mac OS 10.0 released? September of 2000.
Same thing with the switch to Intel. They kept saying how superior their Power PC chip was, then with the switch to Intel they're saying its now working so much better. WTF?
Because the G4's and G5's were superior chips to the Pentium's, especially the P4. The problem is that IBM is a shitty fabber. They weren't able to deliver on what they promised (3 ghz G5's within a year of the release of the first Mac G5) much less continue PowerPC development. If IBM had kept up development and you could get a 3ghz dual core G6 in a laptop Apple never would have switched to Intel.
Because the tech press loves to run troll editorials because they know Apple users will run up their hit counters. You saw it first and most famously with John Dvorack, and now it looks like Fathead wants to be his successor.
And, because if five people have a problem with an Apple product, it gets reported on places like Slashdot. Whereas it takes a Dell literally exploding and starting on fire for anyone to notice.
Bigfoot is worse than the Linux zealots of ten years back.
I've never seen an actual, Kool Aid drinking fanboy here. Not a single one. And by "fanboy", I mean someone who gushes over flaws and is entirely devoid of logic. You will have a hard time, however, finding a story on Apple where there isn't at last one person complaining of pro-Apple group think. Even if half the highly moderated posts are calling Jobs a consummate asshole, like when they pulled the book iCon from Apple Store shelves.
Slashdot Mirror
I personally have to debunk all of the ridiculous stories my wife's family mindlessly forwards around to each other without question....the latest was that Obama is Muslim.
Question for you: are they still thinking he's a Muslim while now also bitching about Reverend White? Some bloggers have been saying that at least the manufactured Reverend White controversy will debunk the rumors that Obama is a Muslim, but I don't give wingnuts that much credit.
For an exercise in application, try to write a pro-war piece. Most people would have an awful time trying.
Not in the mass market media you wouldn't. The people the media invites on their shows are entirely made up of one of two groups of people: unapologetic warmongers like Bill Kristol and John McCain, or people who completely supported the war and the surge but are now having some "buyers remorse" now that it's turned into a giant clusterfuck. The only complaints either of these groups have is that "mistakes were made."
But those who were right from the beginning in opposing the war are as excluded from the discussion now as they were in 2002. Remember last year when the media made a big deal of these "Iraq war critics" who were "no friends of the Administration" and were from "the liberal Brookings Institution" who loved the Surge? Well, uh, actually they were total hawks who supported the invasion every step of the way.
Contrast that to this ad put in the NY Times signed by 33 scholars against the invasion. Why aren't these people on talk shows now instead of Bill Krisol, who's only topped by Fred Kagen in being consistently wrong *everything*?
Hell, one of them is an editor right here on Slashdot; Pudge is the epitome of a Kool Aid drinking wingnut. The GOP has done backflips on party standards, but usually over the course of a decade, like how important military service is to serve as president when Bill Clinton was running against George H.W. Bush, vs when George W. Bush was running against McCain, Gore, and Kerry. If you think preferential treatment to get W into an Air Guard unit that would never see action and not bothering to show up for duty counts as "service", compare the wingnut response to Ruby Ridge (H.W. had been president for 3 1/2 years and in the White House for 11) to Waco (where Clinton had been in office for 38 days). But Pudge makes old school Republican hypocrisy obsolete - he can change standards between Republicans and Democrats so fast it would shatter the spine of Gumby:
One day he'll bitch about homosexuals "shoving gay marriage down our throats" and the next he'll bitch about regulations on home schooling. There's no libertarian Republican like a selective libertarian Republican. He'll call Barbra Boxer a liar for saying the invasion of Iraq was about "WMD, period" because the invasion was also based on violated U.N. Resolutions - even though almost all of said resolutions dealt with...WMD's. Yet less than a week later he'll talk about the Social Security crisis, nevermind that the "crisis" wouldn't come for almost 40 years, would still pay out 75% benefits, and could be completely prevented by as little as a 1% change in the tax code.
What is it about Apple fans who think that because there are fewer viruses written for their OS, it is not a problem if Apple releases buggy code?
Straw man. Yawn.
they will eventually be forced to significantly adjust their terrible attitude in terms of security.
As much as Grover Norquist needs to stop being such a big spending socialist, yes.
... at the point of a gun, 'cause that's how Socialism operates.
Not any more so than capitalism. Yawn.
Aside from good cops covering for bad cops, there's also the slight problem that the majority of police work (issuing traffic citations, War on Drugs) sets it against normal people minding their own business, while not doing a whit to actually make you safer.
Much like Ross on Friends, you are a sissy-dick. A sissy at all the wrong times, and a dick at all the wrong times. If you want to bleat about "move to another country if you don't like the laws" and then turn around and grab your ankles the second a LEO looks your way, knock yourself out. But don't expect the rest of us to follow in your little bitch ways.
I'll field this one :)
Thanks, but he seems pretty set on being an uptight twit more interested in being tough than effective. Must be a neocon...
So preventing people from legally doing seriously harmful things affecting others is bad?
As Edward eloquently pointed out, we only arrest alcoholics when they break laws, not for getting drunk. If someone is sitting at home doing drugs, they aren't doing a thing to harm anyone else. And if they do end up harming others, it is most likely because of the War on Drugs, not in spite of it.
Say a crack addict robs a store to buy his next fix. If drugs were legalized, they would be vastly cheaper, and he could get his fix without resorting to burglary. He could just run down to the gas station and buy a few grams the way a smoker stops by to get some cigarettes.
Because of the War on Drugs, addicts share needles, which helps spread disease. Because of the War on Drugs, addicts are less likely to see treatment, for fear of being arrested. Because of the War on Drugs, addicts are not likely to go to AA meetings because cops are free to sit in on them and use whatever you say against you. Because of the War on Drugs, a young black man is 100 times as likely to go to jail then graduate from college. Because of the War on Drugs, there is a huge black market. Why bust your ass in school and in the job market when you can make as much money in a few minutes by selling drugs?
Or, the short version: pick up a book on Prohibition. Did banning alcohol stop anyone from drinking it? No. It just created a black market and a lot of crime. And made criminals out of ordinary people minding their own business. The War on Drugs is nothing more than Prohibition 2.0.
There are crimes that everyone can agree on, which all basically boil down to violence or property. Then there's inventing criminals by outlawing things that aren't violent and don't have any effect on your property.
That second link has nothing to do with undercover or plainclothes cops. Yes, something bad happened, and it might have involved corrupt cops, but it's off-topic.
Um, hello? So megalomaniacs are fine and dandy as long as they in uniform?!? If anything those links should make you more concerned, not less, because these corrupt cops were operating right out in the open.
Politicians get corrupt far more often than undercover cops (by my own informal observation); should we ban our whole political system too?
If you're into stupid straw men, sure.
Maybe next time you can provide evidence that is actually relevant to the discussion.
Maybe next time you could pull your head out and not be a prick.
Free market jihaddists are as bad as fundamentalist Christians: they both think that this country was founded on their religion. Nowhere in the Constitution does it lay out the United States as a free market economy - instead it explicitly grants government eminent domain, the power to regulate interstate commerce, and to promote the general welfare and pass laws to that effect.
Socialism is flat-out better than capitalism when it comes to certain areas of the economy, most notably health care, and that's just a fact you're going to have to deal with.
Far easier to install hardware. USB support. DirectX so you could run games and (generally) not have them take down the entire system when they crashed.
Windows NT was a good operating system released in 1993, that is seven years before OS X.
Not in the usability department, it wasn't. Which is why I was saying Microsoft didn't have a stable and usable OS until Win2k.
Even windows 95 was superior to MacOS. It was not secure, but it had virtual memory and preemptive multitasking.
But it was poor you couldn't tell the difference, especially when 16 bit code was involved. And then you also had the twin cesspools of the registry and dlls to deal with.
MacOS pre OSX was utter shit.
So was Windows. Which was the point.
and NT was already a good OS before that.
Not in the usability department, unless you were lucky with your hardware. NT was like your bad ex-girlfriend on meth when it came to getting devices to work. Installing a nic in my first ATX box was a ritual of installing the card, installing the divers, unplugging and reinstalling the card, and an agnostic prayer or two to any deity that might be listening. And that was a PCI ne2000 card, about the most generic chipset on the planet. Once you had everything installed and working, NT was a rock next to Win9x and Mac OS, but it was a chore to get it there.
2000 fixed all that, and imo is the best OS that Microsoft ever released. Their only real subsequent improvement they've made is instant user switching.
Also, before that, I would easily have argued that 95/98/ME was better than OS9
And I could just as easily argued that's not the case. 9x might have had memory segmentation, it still suffered from registry and dll hell, and crashed faster than Amy Whinehouse on a bender. Hell, even if you left a stock install alone after bootup, Windows would crash after 49.7 days.
But all quibbling aside, my basic point is that it's silly to rag on Apple for having not a usable, secure, stable OS when nobody else really had one either - NT was a pain, and good luck with Linux or BSD.
I remember one implementing RAM compression and a swapfile, so that you wouldn't get "out of memory" errors by running out of physical RAM. (The "compression" was the interesting part, to me.)
RamDoubler? I believe that was made by Connectix, which made also made Soundjam (which was bought by Apple and became iTunes) and VirtualPC, which was bought by Microsoft. But yeah, I don't think OS X had swap until OS 8.5 or 9.
Hearing people whine about "Mac fanboys" is like hearing wingnuts complain about "far left" Democrats: they've never seen far left in their entire lives, unless they've gone on vacation to North Korea.
So let's see these great reviews of yours, devoid of any asshatery, and the Mac fanboys that unfairly got on your case.
In my mind, that means "We don't have problems, ever."
Exactly: in your mind.
God forbid that we should ever hold Apple accountable for the image I made up in my head.
There, fixed that for you. In my mind, you're a horrible person for not coming to my house to do my laundry and clean by bathroom, but I doubt that's going to carry much weight either.
Yeah--another generalization I have. Most liberals are uninformed idiots.
Aside from realities well known liberal bias, of course. Which is why wingnuts create their own reality where inconvenient facts are ignored, and consistency is for wimps.
Sure, because that's Microsoft, the most hated company around here. But it takes an extreme hardware issue for anyone to pay attention to quality control issues from HP or Dell, because nobody expects anything better from them.
Hmm. I thought there was an option in itunes to transfer files from an iPod to a computer, but I only see "Transfer purchases from ipodname", which only works for iTMS stuff. This is with an older iPod, not a touch though. Yes, very lame if you can't transfer the files back to a computer.
I provide contracted IT services to companies. Each and every single one of those 40 mac users were pretentious twats.
My Spider-sense detects a classic case of projection...
She kept dragging things off the laptop screen onto the projector. This had her totally fucking confused for 5 minutes. Several times I tried to explain what was going on, but she would cut me off and say "See--it's disappearing. Why is it on the projector and not on my laptop. It's broken."
Yes, because ignorant users that blame tech support don't exist in the Windows world...
I do have an unhealthy obsession with my Roomba, but it doesn't come close to the religious outrage that descends on my blog whenever / if-ever I say anything that doesn't approach worship of Apple.
Probable translation: you troll, and are shocked, shocked! when you get some responses.
There's a hidden folder named "iPod Control" on the iPod. Just copy the music folder out of that, and then into iTunes (or WMP or whatever) and it'll pull the song info from the ID3 tags.
I couldn't help noticing how Mac fanatics kept on touting their superior OS, until OS X came along, which fixed all of these problems that they never acknowledged having before.
Windows didn't have an ounces worth of usability and security until Windows 2k was released in February of 2000. When was Mac OS 10.0 released? September of 2000.
Same thing with the switch to Intel. They kept saying how superior their Power PC chip was, then with the switch to Intel they're saying its now working so much better. WTF?
Because the G4's and G5's were superior chips to the Pentium's, especially the P4. The problem is that IBM is a shitty fabber. They weren't able to deliver on what they promised (3 ghz G5's within a year of the release of the first Mac G5) much less continue PowerPC development. If IBM had kept up development and you could get a 3ghz dual core G6 in a laptop Apple never would have switched to Intel.
You only said OS X is less reliable than Windows (which is a laugh) and complain about mice.
Why are Mac fans so quick to see bias everywhere?
Because the tech press loves to run troll editorials because they know Apple users will run up their hit counters. You saw it first and most famously with John Dvorack, and now it looks like Fathead wants to be his successor.
And, because if five people have a problem with an Apple product, it gets reported on places like Slashdot. Whereas it takes a Dell literally exploding and starting on fire for anyone to notice.
Bigfoot is worse than the Linux zealots of ten years back.
I've never seen an actual, Kool Aid drinking fanboy here. Not a single one. And by "fanboy", I mean someone who gushes over flaws and is entirely devoid of logic. You will have a hard time, however, finding a story on Apple where there isn't at last one person complaining of pro-Apple group think. Even if half the highly moderated posts are calling Jobs a consummate asshole, like when they pulled the book iCon from Apple Store shelves.