Every person has his own biases. A journalist's job is to minimize those biases as much as possible to present a fair and balanced perspective. Some groups of journalists (The New York Times, for example) are better at this than others (The Washington Times).
That being said, in every media organization there is a struggle between the people who produce the content (the editor and his team of editors and reporters) and the people who find ways to pay salaries and keep the lights on (the publisher and his team of accountants and salespeople). If the publisher had his way, they'd be selling "The Atlantic: The Breakfast Cereal" in every supermarket and prostituting the brand to push anything people are willing to pay them to push. If the editor had his way, there would be no ads, twice as much space for stories and three times as many reporters on staff. Ultimately they have to find a balance.
I've watched this play out at a major newspaper. I remember the publisher pleasantly announcing that the newspaper's home page would be replaced by a "portal" of advertising, with a small box readers could click on if they wanted to read news (a mutiny resulted and he left a few months later). And I remember hearing the top editor screaming "What the fuck is a pop-up ad doing on my home page?!" so loud we could hear it across the newsroom even though his door was closed (years later, they had to give in and allow pop-ups).
In the last 10-15 years, that balance has been shifting in favor of the publishers, because they're under pressure to find new sources of revenue to keep the lights on and pay everyone's salaries. Occasionally this results in the editor having to beat his head against the negotiating table because his choices are (a) allow sponsored content that is bullshit designed to look like facts written by his team, and hope it's a temporary band-aid as opposed to the "new normal," or (b) go out to the newsroom and tell his team they're out of a job.
"Advertorials" and "sponsored content" that masquerade as real news stories are a line that should not be crossed. There are no standards that make them OK. If your readers can't trust what you publish, you're done.
Is anyone outside of the teenage girl crowd even paying attention to Facebook announcements anymore?
Spotted: D knows V who is dating K who can send MZberg a message without having to pay $100. OMFG she is sooo connected!
If the paragraph above made sense to you, you probably were forced to watch an episode of Gossip Girl by someone you know. That person who forced you to watch Gossip Girl will be very excited by facebook's announcement.
It's a symbol that has been used for 66 years by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago to draw attention to the Global Thermonuclear War edition of the fiscal cliff. It started out at 7 minutes to midnight before the Cold War started and the hand was moved whenever they wanted to draw attention to moves by governments that the directors of the bulletin deemed good or bad with respect to the threat of a nuclear apocalypse. The furthest it has ever been from midnight was 17 minutes after the U.S. and U.S.S.R. signed START.
In 2007, with the Cold War long over and no nukes traded between India and Pakistan, people had become desensitized to minute changes (such as "we're moving the hand one minute closer to midnight because you haven't signed any new treaties promising to disarm additional weapons... So you'd better start signing treaties or we're going to scare people with our big symbolic clock") it was repurposed to also draw attention to climate issues that could also bring about apocalyptic scenarios.
Unfortunately, most people don't know that, and the clock has little meaning for the general public. Like the March of Dimes (which was founded to eradicate polio -- mission accomplished, and good luck getting a straight answer from them on where your money goes now...) it became a self-important PR Zombie in search of a purpose for its once-massive mobilization abilities. Climate change is important, but this is the 21st century. They need to find a more informative way to inform people, because no one knows what the hell a minute means in terms of the climate cliff. Tell them to use more sunblock and less freon... Something concrete. Not a meaningless abstract clock symbol.
When I was twelve,I helped my daddy set up an email server in our basement because some fool in China compromised a few diplomats' Gmail accounts. Well, this thing could compromise a coupla hundred accounts in Washington and New York and no one would know anything about it till it was all over.
So this guy is all about balancing machines. First he comes up with a two-wheeled unicycle that balances itself, now a machine that balances your diet for you. Does he do political machines? I could name a few hundred people in Washington who could use his help in that department.
You should create a mock up of a post to his wall, print it and send it via certified mail. Then wait for him to buy the USPS to close the security hole.
We applaud the ingenuity of the folks who worked this out and the hard work they did to document it. We’ll not guarantee these approaches will be there in future releases.
Translation: Thank you for carefully documenting how you jailbroke our new operating system. Your documentation will help us close that hole, even though it poses no security risk.
Microsoft was conducting research into the security of their devices versus Apple's. These findings concusively show that your data is more likely to be stolen on an Apple device. Therefore, Microsoft products are more secure.
No, that's actually what they were trying to do, but the test was a failure because it kept vaporizing the foil-wrapped popcorn target. It takes a lot of finesse to cook popcorn like that. Too much power and it vaporizes the target. Too little and it just reflects off the foil, then off other things, randomly finds a beam-splitter and distracts the entire team by inadvertently leading them to a beautician pool party.
Better visibility will be featured in new highway designs. As day dims into night, electric eyes automatically illuminate the road ahead.
The 1958 video doesn't show anything I would call an "electric eye," but the highway appears to glow in the dark. We have had "electric eyes" on streetlights for a while, with sensors that turn the lights on when it gets dark, but it always stuck with me that they didn't show any street lights in the video... the road itself seemed to be the light source.
It's an urban myth that "American's don't understand their own measuring systems." I don't really think it's a problem. Ask any American some of these questions, and nearly every one will give you the correct answer:
Q: "How many inches are in a foot?" A: "Twelve."
Q: "How many feet are in a mile?" A: "A lot."
Q: "How many votes constitute a consensus?" A: "More than we've got."
The point is that they know the answers that matter.
NASA seems to be taking a page from Nokia's book, selling off its property so it can lease it back from the new owner and raise money to buy time to reinvent itself as a smartphone maker. Turns out its much cheaper to put smartphones in orbit than people... Even the North Koreans are doing it.
Someday you'll be taking the Cape Canaveral tour with your grandkids, and as you pass the Vehicle Assembly Building, the tour guide will announce, "you see we leased this back from the country we sold it to. That way it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account."
Long before Betteridge came along, I was taught in journalism school that question marks in headlines are the hallmarks of journalists who lack integrity or proper writing skills.
A properly-constructed article makes every effort to present a balanced, unbiased story and allow the reader to form their own opinions. By using a question mark in the headline, the writer (or editor) is announcing that he has an opinion he wants you to hear and is making a provocation very similar to what we now call trolling. It's polarizing and pushes the reader to close his mind to defend his already-held opinions, regardless of whether the reader wants the answer to the question to be yes or no. Good journalism should open the reader's mind to new ideas and new perspectives. A poor journalist writes articles like opinion pieces, and doesn't even know he's doing it.
For writers, if you find yourself using a question mark in your headline, stop, go get some air, step out of your shoes, come back and re-read what you wrote from someone else's perspective to evaluate whether you are a journalist or an opinionated loudmouth.
For readers, when you see a publication that uses question marks in headlines, take it as a sign that the publication is poorly written, poorly edited, or significantly biased. And if you decide to continue reading it, read it with that information in mind. In this case, this is Slashdot, so you have to apply the "Watermelon Principle." When you eat watermelon, you don't eat the seeds. But you don't throw out the whole watermelon just because you're not going to eat the seeds. You eat the fruit and spit the seeds. Slashdot is kind of like that. So are a lot of things.
So people have a convenient, in-store way to share these new-fangled "physical" photos with others. And by share, I mean you go down to the store with your phone, they print the photo and hang it on the wall, and give the customer a stack of cards they can FedEx to their friends. The cards will contain the address of the store, so the friends can come visit and see their photo on the wall.
In other news, Martian authorities report that a rare Earth meteor has been discovered to contain 10 times as much fissionable material as found in previous Earth meteorites. The finding calls into question previous assumptions within the scientific community that Earth may contain little fissionable material and therefore was deemed unlikely to support life. Still, some Martians are asking tough questions: "How do you know it came from Earth? Where's your proof? How do we know you're not just trying to save your precious space budget when we have more important things to worry about, like climbing out of the so-called Fiscal Crater?"
We're still missing Kindle-like screens that can display text without beaming your eyes with light.
Don't you mean Kindle-like devices that can delete documents without your permission when the "owner" of that document doesn't want you to have it anymore?
Reduced paper in the office is fine, but taking paper away takes control and accountability away.
But even "paperwork reduction" is often counterproductive. My favorite example of this is the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, which every employer in the U.S. must fill out when hiring a new employee. It contains 1 page that actually needs to be filled out, 3 pages of instructions, and 1 page (page #3) that is 80% blank and contains absolutely nothing but a brief boilerplate statement that is mandated by the "Paperwork Reduction Act."
How many times have I read an opinion about an injustice on/. only to find out later it wasn't such an injustice? I notice OP didn't provide any URLs to let people make up their own minds.
Good point! How do we know his fiancée isn't Sarah Palin? If she is, the OP should be aware that Amazon is not a reference to Caribou Barbie, and those negative reviews are not a smear campaign, they're the opinions of people who don't know her personally but read her book and didn't like it.
If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must shut down these websites!
I thought the Chewbacca Defense involved speaking loudly and unintelligibly until the other side gives up in frustration. It "works" for most politicians.
Slashdot Mirror
Our media is constantly showing their biases.
Every person has his own biases. A journalist's job is to minimize those biases as much as possible to present a fair and balanced perspective. Some groups of journalists (The New York Times, for example) are better at this than others (The Washington Times).
That being said, in every media organization there is a struggle between the people who produce the content (the editor and his team of editors and reporters) and the people who find ways to pay salaries and keep the lights on (the publisher and his team of accountants and salespeople). If the publisher had his way, they'd be selling "The Atlantic: The Breakfast Cereal" in every supermarket and prostituting the brand to push anything people are willing to pay them to push. If the editor had his way, there would be no ads, twice as much space for stories and three times as many reporters on staff. Ultimately they have to find a balance.
I've watched this play out at a major newspaper. I remember the publisher pleasantly announcing that the newspaper's home page would be replaced by a "portal" of advertising, with a small box readers could click on if they wanted to read news (a mutiny resulted and he left a few months later). And I remember hearing the top editor screaming "What the fuck is a pop-up ad doing on my home page?!" so loud we could hear it across the newsroom even though his door was closed (years later, they had to give in and allow pop-ups).
In the last 10-15 years, that balance has been shifting in favor of the publishers, because they're under pressure to find new sources of revenue to keep the lights on and pay everyone's salaries. Occasionally this results in the editor having to beat his head against the negotiating table because his choices are (a) allow sponsored content that is bullshit designed to look like facts written by his team, and hope it's a temporary band-aid as opposed to the "new normal," or (b) go out to the newsroom and tell his team they're out of a job.
"Advertorials" and "sponsored content" that masquerade as real news stories are a line that should not be crossed. There are no standards that make them OK. If your readers can't trust what you publish, you're done.
Is anyone outside of the teenage girl crowd even paying attention to Facebook announcements anymore?
Spotted: D knows V who is dating K who can send MZberg a message without having to pay $100. OMFG she is sooo connected!
If the paragraph above made sense to you, you probably were forced to watch an episode of Gossip Girl by someone you know. That person who forced you to watch Gossip Girl will be very excited by facebook's announcement.
The space station looks like this.
This looks more like two trailers parked next to an inflatable igloo from a campy spy flick about Not-So-Secret Eskimo Intelligence agents.
Bonus points if you can find the part of the video where the caption describes the person on screen as the "Designer of the Doom" (misspelling Dome).
It's a symbol that has been used for 66 years by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago to draw attention to the Global Thermonuclear War edition of the fiscal cliff. It started out at 7 minutes to midnight before the Cold War started and the hand was moved whenever they wanted to draw attention to moves by governments that the directors of the bulletin deemed good or bad with respect to the threat of a nuclear apocalypse. The furthest it has ever been from midnight was 17 minutes after the U.S. and U.S.S.R. signed START.
In 2007, with the Cold War long over and no nukes traded between India and Pakistan, people had become desensitized to minute changes (such as "we're moving the hand one minute closer to midnight because you haven't signed any new treaties promising to disarm additional weapons... So you'd better start signing treaties or we're going to scare people with our big symbolic clock") it was repurposed to also draw attention to climate issues that could also bring about apocalyptic scenarios.
Unfortunately, most people don't know that, and the clock has little meaning for the general public. Like the March of Dimes (which was founded to eradicate polio -- mission accomplished, and good luck getting a straight answer from them on where your money goes now...) it became a self-important PR Zombie in search of a purpose for its once-massive mobilization abilities. Climate change is important, but this is the 21st century. They need to find a more informative way to inform people, because no one knows what the hell a minute means in terms of the climate cliff. Tell them to use more sunblock and less freon... Something concrete. Not a meaningless abstract clock symbol.
When I was twelve, I helped my daddy set up an email server in our basement because some fool in China compromised a few diplomats' Gmail accounts. Well, this thing could compromise a coupla hundred accounts in Washington and New York and no one would know anything about it till it was all over.
So this guy is all about balancing machines. First he comes up with a two-wheeled unicycle that balances itself, now a machine that balances your diet for you. Does he do political machines? I could name a few hundred people in Washington who could use his help in that department.
i love that guy, he's all about good tastes and how just fucking learning to cook can give your mouth a better time than jamming it full of lard
That's not comforting coming from someone with the username "kiddygrinder." In fact, please never comment on culinary matters again.
Given the hidden costs of having a Facebook account, I'd say anyone who has the ability to use this service has already paid enough for the privilege.
You should create a mock up of a post to his wall, print it and send it via certified mail. Then wait for him to buy the USPS to close the security hole.
Some people are more equal than others.
We applaud the ingenuity of the folks who worked this out and the hard work they did to document it. We’ll not guarantee these approaches will be there in future releases.
Translation: Thank you for carefully documenting how you jailbroke our new operating system. Your documentation will help us close that hole, even though it poses no security risk.
Microsoft was conducting research into the security of their devices versus Apple's. These findings concusively show that your data is more likely to be stolen on an Apple device. Therefore, Microsoft products are more secure.
No, that's actually what they were trying to do, but the test was a failure because it kept vaporizing the foil-wrapped popcorn target. It takes a lot of finesse to cook popcorn like that. Too much power and it vaporizes the target. Too little and it just reflects off the foil, then off other things, randomly finds a beam-splitter and distracts the entire team by inadvertently leading them to a beautician pool party.
Better visibility will be featured in new highway designs. As day dims into night, electric eyes automatically illuminate the road ahead.
The 1958 video doesn't show anything I would call an "electric eye," but the highway appears to glow in the dark. We have had "electric eyes" on streetlights for a while, with sensors that turn the lights on when it gets dark, but it always stuck with me that they didn't show any street lights in the video... the road itself seemed to be the light source.
Q: "How many inches are in a foot?"
A: "Twelve."
Q: "How many feet are in a mile?"
A: "A lot."
Q: "How many votes constitute a consensus?"
A: "More than we've got."
The point is that they know the answers that matter.
NASA seems to be taking a page from Nokia's book, selling off its property so it can lease it back from the new owner and raise money to buy time to reinvent itself as a smartphone maker. Turns out its much cheaper to put smartphones in orbit than people... Even the North Koreans are doing it.
Someday you'll be taking the Cape Canaveral tour with your grandkids, and as you pass the Vehicle Assembly Building, the tour guide will announce, "you see we leased this back from the country we sold it to. That way it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account."
Long before Betteridge came along, I was taught in journalism school that question marks in headlines are the hallmarks of journalists who lack integrity or proper writing skills.
A properly-constructed article makes every effort to present a balanced, unbiased story and allow the reader to form their own opinions. By using a question mark in the headline, the writer (or editor) is announcing that he has an opinion he wants you to hear and is making a provocation very similar to what we now call trolling. It's polarizing and pushes the reader to close his mind to defend his already-held opinions, regardless of whether the reader wants the answer to the question to be yes or no. Good journalism should open the reader's mind to new ideas and new perspectives. A poor journalist writes articles like opinion pieces, and doesn't even know he's doing it.
For writers, if you find yourself using a question mark in your headline, stop, go get some air, step out of your shoes, come back and re-read what you wrote from someone else's perspective to evaluate whether you are a journalist or an opinionated loudmouth.
For readers, when you see a publication that uses question marks in headlines, take it as a sign that the publication is poorly written, poorly edited, or significantly biased. And if you decide to continue reading it, read it with that information in mind. In this case, this is Slashdot, so you have to apply the "Watermelon Principle." When you eat watermelon, you don't eat the seeds. But you don't throw out the whole watermelon just because you're not going to eat the seeds. You eat the fruit and spit the seeds. Slashdot is kind of like that. So are a lot of things.
Leave it to the current zombified incarnation of Polaroid to simultaneously misspell FUBAR and fail at copying Apple's Genius Bar concept.
So people have a convenient, in-store way to share these new-fangled "physical" photos with others. And by share, I mean you go down to the store with your phone, they print the photo and hang it on the wall, and give the customer a stack of cards they can FedEx to their friends. The cards will contain the address of the store, so the friends can come visit and see their photo on the wall.
All-in-all, this is a step up if we didn't also arrest the person whose toothbrush it is.
They weren't arrested, just subjected to a cavity search.
(insert rimshot here)
In other news, Martian authorities report that a rare Earth meteor has been discovered to contain 10 times as much fissionable material as found in previous Earth meteorites. The finding calls into question previous assumptions within the scientific community that Earth may contain little fissionable material and therefore was deemed unlikely to support life. Still, some Martians are asking tough questions: "How do you know it came from Earth? Where's your proof? How do we know you're not just trying to save your precious space budget when we have more important things to worry about, like climbing out of the so-called Fiscal Crater?"
Don't worry. They still issue violations of the Verbal Morality Statute on slips of paper so you will have something to wipe your ass with.
We're still missing Kindle-like screens that can display text without beaming your eyes with light.
Don't you mean Kindle-like devices that can delete documents without your permission when the "owner" of that document doesn't want you to have it anymore?
Reduced paper in the office is fine, but taking paper away takes control and accountability away.
But even "paperwork reduction" is often counterproductive. My favorite example of this is the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, which every employer in the U.S. must fill out when hiring a new employee. It contains 1 page that actually needs to be filled out, 3 pages of instructions, and 1 page (page #3) that is 80% blank and contains absolutely nothing but a brief boilerplate statement that is mandated by the "Paperwork Reduction Act."
How many times have I read an opinion about an injustice on /. only to find out later it wasn't such an injustice? I notice OP didn't provide any URLs to let people make up their own minds.
Good point! How do we know his fiancée isn't Sarah Palin? If she is, the OP should be aware that Amazon is not a reference to Caribou Barbie, and those negative reviews are not a smear campaign, they're the opinions of people who don't know her personally but read her book and didn't like it.
If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must shut down these websites!
I thought the Chewbacca Defense involved speaking loudly and unintelligibly until the other side gives up in frustration. It "works" for most politicians.