My original post was somewhat sensationalist, but I believe my point stands. I don't care what the issue is, generally speaking there are a wealth of opinions, especially in this day of blogs and message boards. If you are looking for someone to quote that believes that McCain is a jerk, you should consider searching until you find something written in English. This is especially true if you happen to be writing an article for an actual newspaper.
If a proper quote can not be found, then the journalist should consider contacting someone over the phone or via email with the intent of getting a proper quote.
I a mothr of 5 n atlant a, GA. mc cain is a jurk nd nobudy shud vote 4 him [sic]
There are only two reasons why a journalist from the New York Times would use the above quote. The first reason is that the journalist is too lazy to find an intelligible quote. Quite frankly, that's the most likely reason that such a quote would appear in the paper.
The second reason is that the journalist is trying to ridicule the person making the quote (and through that person people that have a similar opinion). No one wants to see their demographic quoted in such a horrible fashion. To use your example there are almost certainly hundreds of thousands of people in Georgia that think McCain is a jerk. None of these people want to see their opinion expressed by someone so incredibly inarticulate.
I suppose that theoretically there is a third reason why you might quote someone in this fashion. It is possible that the journalist might be doing a piece entitled "Crack Whores Online." In such a story it might be appropriate to give a representative sample of the sort of horrible grammar that can be expected in that particular community.
I have yet to see anything intelligent written in "message board language." The only real reason to quote such tripe is to make fun of the writer's lack of education.
In short, this is not really a question of good journalism, it is a question of ethics. If you feel it is ethical to mock someone, then quote them verbatim. If you do not feel that this sort of treatment is ethical, then write about something else.
I agree that it is somewhat outrageous. Lots of people get drunk on occasion without any ill effects. However, as someone that has faced the pressures of actually hiring someone I can definitely say that it matters.
The real problem is that the costs of hiring the wrong person can be several times a person's annual salary. This isn't a problem if you are hiring someone to make fries at McDonald's, but it is a serious problem if you are hiring someone that is going to interact with customers (and what responsible position doesn't interact with customers these days). In cases where you don't personally know the people that are applying for the job even small negative details can make a big difference.
I'll grant that it's not particularly fair, but that doesn't change the reality of the situation. Your potential employers are going to scan the Internet for information about you, and it is in your best interest that the information that they find be the sort of thing that they are looking for in employees. You wouldn't show up to an interview intoxicated (I hope), and similarly you don't want your online presence to make it appear that you spend a lot of time drunk. That's just basic common sense.
If you are so drunk that your friends are inspired to take pictures of you, then it is likely that you have a drinking problem. Even if you don't have a drinking problem, you can't hardly blame potential employers for being concerned that you *may* have a drinking problem.
The reality is that employers often are dealing with very little hard information about a candidate, and hiring the wrong person can be a very expensive mistake. A Picture of you holding a beer while hanging out with friends is not a big deal. Heck, even several such pictures are not likely to be held against you. Pictures where you are clearly drunk, on the other hand, are likely to get you passed over for the job.
Have you ever gone to a dance club on "Ladies Night" and got in for free? You can bet that none of the men there were complaining that a lot of women were getting in for free.
This is the same idea applied to female physicists.
Historically, Muslim regimes have been very favorable to the science. That's no so much the case today, but blaming current Muslim regimes on the Koran is like blaming the industrial revolution on Christianity. It's a stretch, at best.
It's been a long time since I'd heard anyone describe nethack as being "fancy." Wait, until today I had never heard anyone describe nethack as being fancy.
I suppose it depends on the company. We always put something like "competitive compensation" or something similar.
Generally speaking, everyone even somewhat likely to care was part of the sharade. We had a spot we needed to fill, we had a person that we wanted to put in the slot, and we really didn't want to waste time interviewing a pile of random strangers. Advertising the job was just a formality. Hiring random strangers is a lot of work, and it's too easy to spend months interviewing and still end up with some guy that is only good at making stuff up during an interview.
Like I said before, I work for a small company now, and I don't have to worry about this sort of stuff. When I worked for a large corporation I tended to use advertisements that were ridiculously specific. Something like this:
Ideal candidate will have 2.5 years of experience in web development in Python specifically CherryPy with Zope Page Templates (SQLAlchemy experience a plus), and at least 5 years experience with the Wonderworks SCADA package. Manufacturing experience is required, experience in a food processing plant a definite bonus. If your last name happens to be O'Shea then this is the job for you.
OK, mentioning someone by name wouldn't have been appropriate, but hopefully you get the idea. However, I am pretty sure that I could have gotten away with almost anything that didn't make the company look bad. Including putting starting wages on the ridiculously low end of the scale. I certainly could have used something like this:
Starting wage is $9.25 an hour, or more, based on experience. Benefits available.
You've probably seen tons of ads like that. And no doubt Mr. O'Shea has enough experience to make substantially more than $9.25 an hour. In fact, he probably has enough experience to make precisely what we have budgeted for the new position.
Listen, I don't mean to be cynical, but hopefully this example does show the importance of making friends with your current co-workers. Most of your job offers are going to come from people that you have worked with before and who were impressed with you. I will also admit that I was involved in the hiring of one complete stranger that was very good (in many ways he was better than me). Of course, the first time we hired for the position we didn't even look at his resume. Instead we hired the wrong person, and then had to scramble when the person quit a few weeks later.
You'd be surprised how often people run ridiculous ads because the people doing the hiring already know who they want to hire, but corporate policy requires that they advertise the position.
I've done it.
Fortunately, these days I work at a much saner employer.
It does on my Debian stable box. There's actually a couple of scummvm games that are available in Debian (and Ubuntu). Besides "Beneath a Steel Sky" there's also "Flight of the Amazon Queen." I liked "Beneath a Steel Sky" better, but they were both fun.
What I really want is to figure out how to play my old copy of "Sam and Max Hit the Road."
It's plain and simple.. if you don't hold large property owners to the same constitutional standards as the governments whose power they equal, you have ushered feudalism in through the back door.
That's just crap. You can purchase your own hosting for your images for less than $5 a month. Heck, you can probably find hosting for free if you look around hard enough. The cost of hosting the images is less than the cost of getting online to look at the images.
Seriously, your whole argument is just ridiculous. It's essentially out of Monty Python's "The Holy Grail." Comparing Flickr.com to the government is nonsensical. Flickr can't put you in jail, it can't seize your assets, and it can't send soldiers to your house to seize your Star Wars action figure collection (well, maybe it can do that last bit, but not legally). All Flickr.com can do is remove your pictures from their site.
My experience has been that the Economics teachers are the ones that are most likely to completely screw you over.
I had several economics classes that required a cheap "workbook" with perforated sheets. The workbook had the written assignments on it and assignments that didn't come written on these perforated sheets were not graded. In other words, you had to purchase the workbook so that you could rip the pages out and do your homework on them. One of my professors did allow me to write VOID in black magic marker over the sheets (so they couldn't be reused) and then type up my answers. Not that anyone actually read the assignments. I started including text from my/. posts in the middle of my assignments in one class and I never failed to get full credit.
The sleaziest of the professors only sold his textbook and the workbook as a shrink-wrapped bundle. The combination was over $100, and the book store wouldn't buy the text book back because it was essentially worthless without the workbook. This particular professor even had the gall to say in class that the price of his textbook was competitive with other basic Economics textbooks. When the students in the class pointed out that these other textbooks had resale value (and a used market) the professor just smiled.
On the bright side it was a pretty good basic Economics text, although it did use inferior paper. I also have to admit that it was much easier to pay attention to an economics teacher that understood economics well enough to take advantage of the system.
The other professors that used this tactic at least had the common courtesy to unbundle the text and the workbook. My guess is that they did this primarily because they didn't write the text book. Still, spending $25 on a 50 page workbook that would have been more useful as a web page still felt like I was being robbed.
Actually, copyright is as much about control of the copyrighted material as it is about anything else. A perfect example is the GPL which uses copyright to guarantee source access to end users. There's no money involved, but the lawyers still get excited when someone distributes GPLed software illegally.
The movie industry doesn't have to claim that they are losing money. They simply have to point out that someone else is distributing their copyrighted material illegally.
Now, I'm not a fan of the MPAA, and I am certainly not a fan of the RIAA, but I do believe that copyright has its place. For example, if TelevisionHead (a band I hopefully just made up), started distributing Radiohead's music as their own (or even without Radiohead's permission) copyright would be there to make sure the real owners received some justice.
Oh please. Most people are not effected by copyright law in the slightest. Sure, someday black helicopters might swoop down every time someone sings "Happy Birthday" at their backyard birthday party, but I personally doubt it. Until that time, please check the histrionics at the door.
The reality of the situation is that you really have to work at it to run afoul of copyright law. This particular individual basically ran a commercial bootlegging operation. He paid for and administered a server and recruited people with a lot of bandwidth. Now he's going to prison. If he was smarter he would have plead guilty and ended up with a 5 month sentence, like his compatriots, instead of a possible 10 year sentence. Either this guy is several sandwiches short of a picnic, or he got some spectacularly bad legal advice. He apparently hoped that the jury would feel that his crimes were justified or some such crap.
It would appear that the average jury member in the U.S. disagrees with that sentiment.
Now, you can try and equate what this guy did with me singing along with the new Coldplay album while I drive to work, but that's simply not realistic. I'm not going to end up in this guys shoes because I made a dvd slideshow with "The Luckiest" as background music.
Personally, I think that any sort of web development that is browser dependent misses the entire point of web development.
Sure, if you are doing Intranet apps you can just mandate Internet Explorer. Of course, that means you are relying on Microsoft not to break your application with new versions of their browser. It also means that you have effectively locked your application to PCs running Windows. That may not even be such a bad idea until you want to access your application from something that isn't a PC running Windows (like, say, an iPhone). Or perhaps you are outfitting a new call center and you could save a pile of cash using Linux-based thin-clients. Even worse, your CEO might insist on a new Apple laptop since those are all the rage.
I would be willing to bet that web standards are going to be even more important in the future. Heck, even Microsoft is beginning to see the light. Newer versions of their software work much better with non-IE browsers than was previously the case. Over time I think that it is very likely that Windows will lose its dominant grip on the desktop.
I could be wrong, of course. It is entirely possible that IE will end up dominating all web browsing in the near future. In which case people that develop and deploy IE-only sites will be sitting pretty.
This is like trying to convince someone to use a pen instead of opening a vein with a razor so that they can write with their own blood. Clearly this guy enjoys the pain of using Internet Explorer.
Seriously, Firefox is faster, uses less memory, has tons of cool add-ons, and it is less likely to attract mal-ware. Heck, it even has a cooler name and logo. Even over a modem Firefox is worth the download.
So far bigstrats arguments for IE have been things like "I filter out ads in my head," and "I don't mind wasting time waiting for Internet Explorer." Wow, that sounds like a nifty deal. I think I'll switch to IE too.
Guns are basically ancient technology. Many of our "current" designs date back to the early 1900s. If we were to round up every gun in private ownership in the United States, including guns that are currently in the hands of criminals, and then if we were to somehow magically stop new weapons manufactured overseas from entering the United States, criminals would still have guns. They might have to manufacture them, but that's hardly a difficult requirement. Heck, a double-barrel shotgun is a simple enough device that most high-school machine shops have the required tools to make one.
A firearm is simply too useful a tool to criminals for them to go without.
Not to mention the fact that there is basically no way to remove the millions and millions of guns that are currently in circulation in the U.S. (even if such a round-up were legal). Nor is there a way to keep people from smuggling more guns into the country.
The firearm genie is firmly out of the bottle at this point.
Slashdot Mirror
My original post was somewhat sensationalist, but I believe my point stands. I don't care what the issue is, generally speaking there are a wealth of opinions, especially in this day of blogs and message boards. If you are looking for someone to quote that believes that McCain is a jerk, you should consider searching until you find something written in English. This is especially true if you happen to be writing an article for an actual newspaper.
If a proper quote can not be found, then the journalist should consider contacting someone over the phone or via email with the intent of getting a proper quote.
I a mothr of 5 n atlant a, GA. mc cain is a jurk nd nobudy shud vote 4 him [sic]
There are only two reasons why a journalist from the New York Times would use the above quote. The first reason is that the journalist is too lazy to find an intelligible quote. Quite frankly, that's the most likely reason that such a quote would appear in the paper.
The second reason is that the journalist is trying to ridicule the person making the quote (and through that person people that have a similar opinion). No one wants to see their demographic quoted in such a horrible fashion. To use your example there are almost certainly hundreds of thousands of people in Georgia that think McCain is a jerk. None of these people want to see their opinion expressed by someone so incredibly inarticulate.
I suppose that theoretically there is a third reason why you might quote someone in this fashion. It is possible that the journalist might be doing a piece entitled "Crack Whores Online." In such a story it might be appropriate to give a representative sample of the sort of horrible grammar that can be expected in that particular community.
I have yet to see anything intelligent written in "message board language." The only real reason to quote such tripe is to make fun of the writer's lack of education.
In short, this is not really a question of good journalism, it is a question of ethics. If you feel it is ethical to mock someone, then quote them verbatim. If you do not feel that this sort of treatment is ethical, then write about something else.
I agree that it is somewhat outrageous. Lots of people get drunk on occasion without any ill effects. However, as someone that has faced the pressures of actually hiring someone I can definitely say that it matters.
The real problem is that the costs of hiring the wrong person can be several times a person's annual salary. This isn't a problem if you are hiring someone to make fries at McDonald's, but it is a serious problem if you are hiring someone that is going to interact with customers (and what responsible position doesn't interact with customers these days). In cases where you don't personally know the people that are applying for the job even small negative details can make a big difference.
I'll grant that it's not particularly fair, but that doesn't change the reality of the situation. Your potential employers are going to scan the Internet for information about you, and it is in your best interest that the information that they find be the sort of thing that they are looking for in employees. You wouldn't show up to an interview intoxicated (I hope), and similarly you don't want your online presence to make it appear that you spend a lot of time drunk. That's just basic common sense.
If you are so drunk that your friends are inspired to take pictures of you, then it is likely that you have a drinking problem. Even if you don't have a drinking problem, you can't hardly blame potential employers for being concerned that you *may* have a drinking problem.
The reality is that employers often are dealing with very little hard information about a candidate, and hiring the wrong person can be a very expensive mistake. A Picture of you holding a beer while hanging out with friends is not a big deal. Heck, even several such pictures are not likely to be held against you. Pictures where you are clearly drunk, on the other hand, are likely to get you passed over for the job.
Maybe Malda really liked the movie "Old Yeller".
Bravo. That was well done.
Have you ever gone to a dance club on "Ladies Night" and got in for free? You can bet that none of the men there were complaining that a lot of women were getting in for free.
This is the same idea applied to female physicists.
Historically, Muslim regimes have been very favorable to the science. That's no so much the case today, but blaming current Muslim regimes on the Koran is like blaming the industrial revolution on Christianity. It's a stretch, at best.
Atheism is a religion like making fun of people for collecting stamps is a hobby.
There, I fixed that for you.
You can always read slashdot in Emacs/Gnus.
It's been a long time since I'd heard anyone describe nethack as being "fancy." Wait, until today I had never heard anyone describe nethack as being fancy.
I suppose it depends on the company. We always put something like "competitive compensation" or something similar.
Generally speaking, everyone even somewhat likely to care was part of the sharade. We had a spot we needed to fill, we had a person that we wanted to put in the slot, and we really didn't want to waste time interviewing a pile of random strangers. Advertising the job was just a formality. Hiring random strangers is a lot of work, and it's too easy to spend months interviewing and still end up with some guy that is only good at making stuff up during an interview.
Like I said before, I work for a small company now, and I don't have to worry about this sort of stuff. When I worked for a large corporation I tended to use advertisements that were ridiculously specific. Something like this:
Ideal candidate will have 2.5 years of experience in web development in Python specifically CherryPy with Zope Page Templates (SQLAlchemy experience a plus), and at least 5 years experience with the Wonderworks SCADA package. Manufacturing experience is required, experience in a food processing plant a definite bonus. If your last name happens to be O'Shea then this is the job for you.
OK, mentioning someone by name wouldn't have been appropriate, but hopefully you get the idea. However, I am pretty sure that I could have gotten away with almost anything that didn't make the company look bad. Including putting starting wages on the ridiculously low end of the scale. I certainly could have used something like this:
Starting wage is $9.25 an hour, or more, based on experience. Benefits available.
You've probably seen tons of ads like that. And no doubt Mr. O'Shea has enough experience to make substantially more than $9.25 an hour. In fact, he probably has enough experience to make precisely what we have budgeted for the new position.
Listen, I don't mean to be cynical, but hopefully this example does show the importance of making friends with your current co-workers. Most of your job offers are going to come from people that you have worked with before and who were impressed with you. I will also admit that I was involved in the hiring of one complete stranger that was very good (in many ways he was better than me). Of course, the first time we hired for the position we didn't even look at his resume. Instead we hired the wrong person, and then had to scramble when the person quit a few weeks later.
You'd be surprised how often people run ridiculous ads because the people doing the hiring already know who they want to hire, but corporate policy requires that they advertise the position.
I've done it.
Fortunately, these days I work at a much saner employer.
It does on my Debian stable box. There's actually a couple of scummvm games that are available in Debian (and Ubuntu). Besides "Beneath a Steel Sky" there's also "Flight of the Amazon Queen." I liked "Beneath a Steel Sky" better, but they were both fun.
What I really want is to figure out how to play my old copy of "Sam and Max Hit the Road."
Good times.
apt-get install beneath-a-steel-sky
It's plain and simple.. if you don't hold large property owners to the same constitutional standards as the governments whose power they equal, you have ushered feudalism in through the back door.
That's just crap. You can purchase your own hosting for your images for less than $5 a month. Heck, you can probably find hosting for free if you look around hard enough. The cost of hosting the images is less than the cost of getting online to look at the images.
Seriously, your whole argument is just ridiculous. It's essentially out of Monty Python's "The Holy Grail." Comparing Flickr.com to the government is nonsensical. Flickr can't put you in jail, it can't seize your assets, and it can't send soldiers to your house to seize your Star Wars action figure collection (well, maybe it can do that last bit, but not legally). All Flickr.com can do is remove your pictures from their site.
Help Help, I'm being repressed...
My experience has been that the Economics teachers are the ones that are most likely to completely screw you over.
I had several economics classes that required a cheap "workbook" with perforated sheets. The workbook had the written assignments on it and assignments that didn't come written on these perforated sheets were not graded. In other words, you had to purchase the workbook so that you could rip the pages out and do your homework on them. One of my professors did allow me to write VOID in black magic marker over the sheets (so they couldn't be reused) and then type up my answers. Not that anyone actually read the assignments. I started including text from my /. posts in the middle of my assignments in one class and I never failed to get full credit.
The sleaziest of the professors only sold his textbook and the workbook as a shrink-wrapped bundle. The combination was over $100, and the book store wouldn't buy the text book back because it was essentially worthless without the workbook. This particular professor even had the gall to say in class that the price of his textbook was competitive with other basic Economics textbooks. When the students in the class pointed out that these other textbooks had resale value (and a used market) the professor just smiled.
On the bright side it was a pretty good basic Economics text, although it did use inferior paper. I also have to admit that it was much easier to pay attention to an economics teacher that understood economics well enough to take advantage of the system.
The other professors that used this tactic at least had the common courtesy to unbundle the text and the workbook. My guess is that they did this primarily because they didn't write the text book. Still, spending $25 on a 50 page workbook that would have been more useful as a web page still felt like I was being robbed.
Actually, copyright is as much about control of the copyrighted material as it is about anything else. A perfect example is the GPL which uses copyright to guarantee source access to end users. There's no money involved, but the lawyers still get excited when someone distributes GPLed software illegally.
The movie industry doesn't have to claim that they are losing money. They simply have to point out that someone else is distributing their copyrighted material illegally.
Now, I'm not a fan of the MPAA, and I am certainly not a fan of the RIAA, but I do believe that copyright has its place. For example, if TelevisionHead (a band I hopefully just made up), started distributing Radiohead's music as their own (or even without Radiohead's permission) copyright would be there to make sure the real owners received some justice.
Oh please. Most people are not effected by copyright law in the slightest. Sure, someday black helicopters might swoop down every time someone sings "Happy Birthday" at their backyard birthday party, but I personally doubt it. Until that time, please check the histrionics at the door.
The reality of the situation is that you really have to work at it to run afoul of copyright law. This particular individual basically ran a commercial bootlegging operation. He paid for and administered a server and recruited people with a lot of bandwidth. Now he's going to prison. If he was smarter he would have plead guilty and ended up with a 5 month sentence, like his compatriots, instead of a possible 10 year sentence. Either this guy is several sandwiches short of a picnic, or he got some spectacularly bad legal advice. He apparently hoped that the jury would feel that his crimes were justified or some such crap.
It would appear that the average jury member in the U.S. disagrees with that sentiment.
Now, you can try and equate what this guy did with me singing along with the new Coldplay album while I drive to work, but that's simply not realistic. I'm not going to end up in this guys shoes because I made a dvd slideshow with "The Luckiest" as background music.
Personally, I think that any sort of web development that is browser dependent misses the entire point of web development.
Sure, if you are doing Intranet apps you can just mandate Internet Explorer. Of course, that means you are relying on Microsoft not to break your application with new versions of their browser. It also means that you have effectively locked your application to PCs running Windows. That may not even be such a bad idea until you want to access your application from something that isn't a PC running Windows (like, say, an iPhone). Or perhaps you are outfitting a new call center and you could save a pile of cash using Linux-based thin-clients. Even worse, your CEO might insist on a new Apple laptop since those are all the rage.
I would be willing to bet that web standards are going to be even more important in the future. Heck, even Microsoft is beginning to see the light. Newer versions of their software work much better with non-IE browsers than was previously the case. Over time I think that it is very likely that Windows will lose its dominant grip on the desktop.
I could be wrong, of course. It is entirely possible that IE will end up dominating all web browsing in the near future. In which case people that develop and deploy IE-only sites will be sitting pretty.
I got coal. I think it was mined in Pennsylvania.
Go America!
Now that's a valid reason for using IE. I figured that such a thing must exist.
This is like trying to convince someone to use a pen instead of opening a vein with a razor so that they can write with their own blood. Clearly this guy enjoys the pain of using Internet Explorer.
Seriously, Firefox is faster, uses less memory, has tons of cool add-ons, and it is less likely to attract mal-ware. Heck, it even has a cooler name and logo. Even over a modem Firefox is worth the download.
So far bigstrats arguments for IE have been things like "I filter out ads in my head," and "I don't mind wasting time waiting for Internet Explorer." Wow, that sounds like a nifty deal. I think I'll switch to IE too.
Guns are basically ancient technology. Many of our "current" designs date back to the early 1900s. If we were to round up every gun in private ownership in the United States, including guns that are currently in the hands of criminals, and then if we were to somehow magically stop new weapons manufactured overseas from entering the United States, criminals would still have guns. They might have to manufacture them, but that's hardly a difficult requirement. Heck, a double-barrel shotgun is a simple enough device that most high-school machine shops have the required tools to make one.
A firearm is simply too useful a tool to criminals for them to go without.
Not to mention the fact that there is basically no way to remove the millions and millions of guns that are currently in circulation in the U.S. (even if such a round-up were legal). Nor is there a way to keep people from smuggling more guns into the country.
The firearm genie is firmly out of the bottle at this point.
I'm actually a minty green.