If advertising didn't work, there wouldn't be so much of it.
Universities in.au, probably elsewhere as well, have been selling themselves increasingly for their job training and less for the concept of a liberal education for decades now.
Only a few go to university now to be simply educated, most are going to uni To Get A Job: it is an almost compulsory step between high school and any professional job. And most technical jobs. I wonder sometimes when more universities will go into more trade training, trying to steal business from technical schools. (As opposed to places like RMIT and Swinburn going the other way: technical colleges who became universities.)
And so, when university is sold as something which will get you a job, these expectations are built. Reasonably or not. (In my opinion, not.) But the trend is there, nonetheless.
A University education has gone from something needed for certain jobs, to something needed for certain classes of work, to a sine-qua-non of employment in entire sections of the workforce. And the universities have been competing with each other to advertise how good they are at giving an education which improves the student's chances of getting a job â" a good job, a desirable job â" advertising which might give the impression that such a job is practically guaranteed: that you go to this uni or that one not because of the education you get, but because of the job you are all but promised to walk into when you graduate. (Before you graduate, even, with graduate placements and the like.)
Personally, I think the uni sector would be better off selling the quality of the education itself, rather than expectations of the utilitarian results.
But I only work for a university, and as professional staff at that, so there is no hope that my opinion carries the slightest weight whatsoever.
Other parties do get seats based on various convoluted formulae, but it comes down to one of the big two is going to form government and get to be PM and choose a cabinet and set policy and all that.
So, yes, other parties do get a shot in parliament. But. Due to the insane nature of the calculations involved, and the politicking of who gets preferenced by whom, it's just as likely that tinpot insane parties (Family First, One Nation) are just as likely -- more likely to get seats than saner parties (Democrats.au, Greens). This is because Labor and Liberal see Democrats and Greens as their competition, and make deals to ensure that the loonies, who don't actually pose a real threat to them, get in instead.
What happens then is that because the public, given a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, tend to toss a coin, demographically speaking, so you get 48 seats to Labor, 47 to Liberal (in their eternal coalition with the Nationals) or vice versa, 1 to the Greens, and 3 to the Wingnut Think Of The Children Party. So for anything to pass, the ruling party has to make a deal with the wingnuts, which makes things even worse than they might otherwise be.
In my opinion, our best hope is for the Greens to have one seat, then three, then seven, then twenty, then 51 and government.
Baby steps. Baby steps. But in the meantime, we have to remind Labor that they were not elected in so much as Howard was voted out.
Ahh, yeah. Actually, we voted out the previous Government Most Likely To Censor The Intarwebs in favour of this lot, on the basis that of the two evils this one was lesser.
I mean, sure, I'd love a Greens-majority parliament -- I even voted that way -- but given achievable goals, getting RatBastard Howard the hell out of power was pretty good too.
Now we just have to convince our not-as-bad-as-the-other-lot parliamentarians exactly how stunningly bad this idea is, and that this was not one of the things they have a mandate for.
(Actually, that's one of the things that pisses me off most about the party-based government systems: you can't vote for specific policies, you either pick the Liberal package, or the Labor package (Labour/Tory, Dem/GOP, whatever). If one party is better than the other on most accounts, and has some really stupid ideas as well, then -- given that the other party has its own stupid ideas -- there's no way to tell them "Don't get cocky, we voted for you on the basis that you don't try that"... until it's too late. Or unless there is a huge popular outcry, which is what we're doing, so if you're going to bitch about us 'taking responsibility' for our government, then watch closely: this is what it looks like.)
I took the liberty of quickly marking up your text. Bold text is your text verbatim, italic text is marked for deletion.
I judge people by their usage use of grammar. I have a lower opinion (Lower than what? Maybe you meant 'low') of those [people] who choose not to use the language in the way that it is supposed (='prescribed', or 'supposed by someone'?) to be used. Your assertion that stylistic usage should be accepted as correct is pure bullshit. If you choose to speak the language in an incorrect manner incorrectly, even if it is a matter of style, then you are still speaking the language in an incorrect manner incorrectly. If I encounter you speaking incorrectly, I will think that you are an idiot. (or: "If I were to encounter you speaking incorrectly, I would think that you are an idiot.")
Style has nothing to do with grammar. A language would not be defined as such, were that not true. (or: "..., if that were not true.") The term "grammar" means "a set of rules that gives structure to a language."
As it is, I believe the biggest issue is pronounciation, not grammar. If someone says "Gimme dat," it is a grammatically correct mispronounciation of "Give me that." (Which is a grammatically incorrect variant of "Give that to me", but we know what you meant.) Poor speakers are the source of such lovely phrases as "Axe me a question" (Which is a correct variant in old and early English, found in Chaucer) and "Whaddup wid dat?"
Of course, I enjoy arguing for the sake of arguing, but I do have an opinion on this particular issue.
The exploit is a buffer overflow. It has existed forever, and has been the subject of textbook warnings since the RTM Great Worm. Writing any software that accepts unvetted data without checking for overflow is utterly unacceptable.
This should not be a patch; this should have been picked up by an automated lint program at the first code review.
I work in a university Computer Science department, spread over three levels of a medium sized building, with academics, students and admin staff all doing strange/horrible/terrifying things to their PCs which we few Tech Services people couldn't conceivably control.
Restrict user access, you say? Why yes! Why didn't we think of telling a senior Professor of Computer Science that he is not considered competant to install IQC on his own PC? Why didn't we think of becoming an expert in all software packages which any research postgrad might need to do their PhD?
Now we're stuck running around fighting fires, and asking people why they still haven't installed Win2K SP1!
And if the Geneva Convention were applicable to him, you might have a point.
The Geneva Convention is applicable to him. The Geneva Convention also is applicable to Pol Pot and Pinochet.
The Geneva Convention applies to everybody, no exeptions, ever, anywhere, no matter how heinous the crimes they might be charged with, even if they are guilty.
That's the whole point of the Geneva Convention.
Bush Jr knows shit about international law, and appears proud of it. His 'advisors' just don't care. But in law, neither ignorance nor apathy are defences.
The Romans had a perfectly good word for 'king': rex. This is cognate with words like rajah in Indic languages, righ/rí in Irish gaelic and the suffix '-ric' in Early German names like 'Alaric'. For political reasons, rex became disparaged after Rome became a republic. Thus, when Julius Caesar et al became effective kings of Rome, they could not call themselves that, so they used a perfectly acceptable military term: 'commander' imperator. Julius' surname later became synonymous with the position as well.
Thus in French you get Roy, derived directly from rex, which is found in England in Norman names like 'FitzRoy' (Son of the King). English imported many Latin words directly, so someone can be 'regal'. Imperator turned into Empereur (my spelling may be off, je ne parlez pas Français...) and 'Emperor', which was used as a rank of kingship over and above that of 'king'.
'Caesar' was borrowed into the Teutonic and Slavic lands, as you said, as Kaiser, Tsar (and Czar comes to mind also, but I am not sure from where. Hungary?).
'King' derives from the Germanic word which was 'cyning' in Anglo-Saxon, and is 'könig' or similar in many German and Scandinavian languages.
Mind you, that many of these terms are understandable, and even familiar, means that the chains of borrowing are extensive and convoluted.
How good were your studies on the history of English law, especially from the eighteenth century?
Did I not specifically say that, because the US legal system copied rather than inherited the laws on defamation (thank you for reminding me of that word, by the way), it was not the same as what I had just described?
You are not the world. Your laws are not the only laws. Other countries also have histories. And while I am not, never have been, and have no interest in ever studying law, I am a student of history. My post was one on the history of a law. The repeated IANAL was to make perfectly clear that while my statements may be valid about one period in time, they are almost certainly not any more, and anyone who took my statements as valid deserved what they would get if they tried it in court. Consider it a gift from a litigious culture, similar to warning labels like "Do not use this cigarette lighter near open flame".
While your statement is true in the US, and I will take your educated opinion over mine any day, it used not to be, and may not still in England and possibly parts of the Commonwealth.
I will accept that I did not make clear enough that this was my context. And I was wrong about Truth not being a defence. In the USA.
This is what a study of history does to you: it hammers home that there is more to the world than the here-and-now in your home town.
To recap: When the first defamation laws were written in England in the eighteenth century, they were deliberately written so that truth was not a defence. This is not true in modern USA. Whether this is true in modern England and Australia is something I do not know. Maybe someone does. A Lawyer, perhaps?
IANAL, but as I understand it the laws were written in England around the time of the first newspapers. The point was to protect 'decent people' (read: the rich and powerful) from damage to their reputation.
The way the laws were written, truth is no defence. You are guilty of libel/slander if you disseminate information about someone, whether or not it is true, which will cause damage to that person's reputation, whether or not you meant to do such damage. To add insult to injury, the burden of proof is reversed! If you are accused of libel/slander, you were (and probably still are) considered guilty until you can prove otherwise.
This was deliberately made a civil crime, not criminal, so that the state could wash its hands of libel/slander against poor or helpless people, as this was not the state's problem. If you want redress, sue them yourself! Can't afford to? Too F--ing bad!
IIRC, this was absorbed automatically into Australian Common Law, but was merely copied by the US Lawmakers, who made the new distinction between malicious and innocent libel. Truth is still no defence, but you can claim that you did not mean harm by it. Doesn't mean you'll win, though.
The original experiments were designed to test for life under a few likely scenarios. Remember that they were not sure if the life processes they found there would be based on the same chemistry as on Earth, so they came up with some good guesses, and sent them up.
(For those who remember the Cosmos series by Carl Sagan, there is a section on this where he mentions the experiment designed by his friend Wolf Vishniac, which IIRC was not one that was included on the Mars jaunts, but did discover life in Antarctic valleys previously thought sterile.)
There were three experiments. It was agreed that the likelyhood of life was so low that a positive in any one would be treated as evidence of living processes. Two were positive, the other was negative. Despite the undertakings before the mission, the single negative was treated as the official and definitive answer to the question "is there life on Mars". The other two were explained away as 'merely chemical processes'. (Of course, so are things like respiration and digestion.)
Given the current state of evidence, the best we can say as to life on Mars is 'maybe', and we need more experiments -- experiments where the rules aren't changed halfway through because the data is unexpected would be nice!
I actually own a copy of Let's Welcome Our Fathers from Space, which has the original star-of-david/swastika logo on the front cover.
There is a section in the introduction trying to justify this (IIRC, he claimed that both were solar symbols, and the swastika was just another symbol before Herr Hitler anyway, and everyone used it, and...) He is right in the technical sense, about the fylfot and its solar symbolism and ubiquity, but the German National Socialists have ruined it for everyone for quite a long time to come.
The museum looting story seems to have been overblown. During much of the looting of the museum, US forces were under fire from inside the museum and could not have prevented the looting without damaging the museum itself.
Oh,really?Try a news service which is not American. Because no-one could accuse USAtoday or the Wall Street Journal of being partisan.
You think that kind of infrastructure just gets restored overnight? Shit, we had a squirrel zap one of our transformers yesterday. The circuit has 100 families on it. It took the local power company 6 hours to get our power turned back on. Multiply that by a whole country...
That infrastructure would not have needed to be rebuilt overnight if it had not been targeted in the first place. (a war crime by international convention, by the way. Not that that has ever stopped the US army.) As things like water treatment plants and power stations were deliberately targeted, all civilian deaths as a result of their lack are the direct responsiblity of the army who destroyed them.
...
And also for the record, much of Iraq's long tradition of "civilization" has consisted of conquering and looting its neighbors.
Unlike the UK (Ireland, India, Australia, great chunks of Africa) or the USA? (Mexico, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Hawaii, the Phillipines, just from the top of my head, and in no particular order). Pot: meet Kettle.
Afghanistan is probably better off today than at any time since the start of the Soviet invasion.
Try it like this: Fox News is wrong for having opinions and reflecting them in communications. You are wrong for having opinions and reflecting them in communications. Dipshit.
Fox news professes to be a news organisation. This is demonstably untrue.
Rueters is a news agency. AFP is a news agency. The BBC is a news agency. All of these make concerted efforts to identify sources of bias and make corrections where necessary. Fox news does not. It is not only shameless in its presentation of propaganda as news, it is proud of this!
I am not a news organisation. I am an individual. I have a right to my opinions, and to freely express my opinions. So do the individuals who work for Fox news. But Fox news has a duty to either employ more than rabid fundamentalist Republicans, or to stop misrepresenting itself as an unbiased news source.
You are under the hugely erroneous opinion that the US will only rebuild what they destroyed. If so, there wouldn't be much money to spend.
The US will rebuild what it needs to, and not one brick more. Even when it is building schools and hospitals, I think it is more because of the PR than because of any inherant philanthropic impulse. (How is Afghanistan doing these days?)
You are also under the impression that we destroyed the entire country. Even pro Iraq sources don't/didn't even state that.
The Ministry of Oil is intact. The Museum is not. Even where bombs were not dropped, there are consequences when you invade a country. These are well known. Looting and riots are high up the list. Was no planning done here?...oh, hang on. Some planning was done, but it was only for 'worthy' targets. Like Oil. (When it comes to the looting of the Museum, which was witnessed by US soldiers who did nothing, the US command can claim only malice, apathy or incompetance.)
The US intends to rebuild their entire country, even if that is defined only to the point of stability and good oil capacity, that is far beyond what Iraq had for decades.
The US said the same about Afghanistan. I repeat: how are they doing these days? And for the record: Saudi Arabia is stable and has good oil output. If you think that is a good thing, try living under the Sauds. Stability and oil -- feh! What about hospitals? What about classrooms? What about restoring power and water supplies? And also for the record, Iraq has been a haven for education and civilisation for a thousand years. The Iraqi people are still, by-and-large, intelligent, educated, cultured and cosmopolitan. Where is maintaining that tradition in the list of what-must-be-done? Because without it you have just another fundamentalist theocracy. Without careful and thoughtful help right now that still could happen, as the mullahs and imams make their claims to the rights to secular power.
Your sincerity in having an open mind, taking in multiple credible sources, and independent thinking is NOT reflected in your post. Do better next time. I'm not saying the US are angels, but you're anti-hype is approaching the absurd.
He was making a reductio ad absurdum argument, by taking an argument and applying it with the same force but the opposite intent. This is a useful technique. It can be used to highlight all sorts of internalised bias. e.g., "The US was justified in invading Vietnam in order to protect it from itself" vs. "Vietnam would be justified in invading the US in order to protect it from itself". See how it works? Try it yourself on what comes out of Fox News sometime.
Slashdot Mirror
So... they've identified Asperger's as a factor in being bullied.
As an Aspie, may I say how wonderful it is that someone seems to have noticed.
If advertising didn't work, there wouldn't be so much of it.
Universities in .au, probably elsewhere as well, have been selling themselves increasingly for their job training and less for the concept of a liberal education for decades now.
Only a few go to university now to be simply educated, most are going to uni To Get A Job: it is an almost compulsory step between high school and any professional job. And most technical jobs. I wonder sometimes when more universities will go into more trade training, trying to steal business from technical schools. (As opposed to places like RMIT and Swinburn going the other way: technical colleges who became universities.)
And so, when university is sold as something which will get you a job, these expectations are built. Reasonably or not. (In my opinion, not.) But the trend is there, nonetheless.
A University education has gone from something needed for certain jobs, to something needed for certain classes of work, to a sine-qua-non of employment in entire sections of the workforce. And the universities have been competing with each other to advertise how good they are at giving an education which improves the student's chances of getting a job â" a good job, a desirable job â" advertising which might give the impression that such a job is practically guaranteed: that you go to this uni or that one not because of the education you get, but because of the job you are all but promised to walk into when you graduate. (Before you graduate, even, with graduate placements and the like.)
Personally, I think the uni sector would be better off selling the quality of the education itself, rather than expectations of the utilitarian results.
But I only work for a university, and as professional staff at that, so there is no hope that my opinion carries the slightest weight whatsoever.
Other parties do get seats based on various convoluted formulae, but it comes down to one of the big two is going to form government and get to be PM and choose a cabinet and set policy and all that.
So, yes, other parties do get a shot in parliament. But. Due to the insane nature of the calculations involved, and the politicking of who gets preferenced by whom, it's just as likely that tinpot insane parties (Family First, One Nation) are just as likely -- more likely to get seats than saner parties (Democrats.au, Greens). This is because Labor and Liberal see Democrats and Greens as their competition, and make deals to ensure that the loonies, who don't actually pose a real threat to them, get in instead.
What happens then is that because the public, given a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, tend to toss a coin, demographically speaking, so you get 48 seats to Labor, 47 to Liberal (in their eternal coalition with the Nationals) or vice versa, 1 to the Greens, and 3 to the Wingnut Think Of The Children Party. So for anything to pass, the ruling party has to make a deal with the wingnuts, which makes things even worse than they might otherwise be.
In my opinion, our best hope is for the Greens to have one seat, then three, then seven, then twenty, then 51 and government.
Baby steps. Baby steps. But in the meantime, we have to remind Labor that they were not elected in so much as Howard was voted out.
Ahh, yeah. Actually, we voted out the previous Government Most Likely To Censor The Intarwebs in favour of this lot, on the basis that of the two evils this one was lesser.
I mean, sure, I'd love a Greens-majority parliament -- I even voted that way -- but given achievable goals, getting RatBastard Howard the hell out of power was pretty good too.
Now we just have to convince our not-as-bad-as-the-other-lot parliamentarians exactly how stunningly bad this idea is, and that this was not one of the things they have a mandate for.
(Actually, that's one of the things that pisses me off most about the party-based government systems: you can't vote for specific policies, you either pick the Liberal package, or the Labor package (Labour/Tory, Dem/GOP, whatever). If one party is better than the other on most accounts, and has some really stupid ideas as well, then -- given that the other party has its own stupid ideas -- there's no way to tell them "Don't get cocky, we voted for you on the basis that you don't try that"... until it's too late. Or unless there is a huge popular outcry, which is what we're doing, so if you're going to bitch about us 'taking responsibility' for our government, then watch closely: this is what it looks like.)
Sturgeon's Law states that 90% of SF is shit. Well, >99% of software is.
Or, "Sturgeon's Law is recursive".
I took the liberty of quickly marking up your text. Bold text is your text verbatim, italic text is marked for deletion.
I judge people by their usage use of grammar. I have a lower opinion (Lower than what? Maybe you meant 'low') of those [people] who choose not to use the language in the way that it is supposed (='prescribed', or 'supposed by someone'?) to be used. Your assertion that stylistic usage should be accepted as correct is pure bullshit. If you choose to speak the language in an incorrect manner incorrectly, even if it is a matter of style, then you are still speaking the language in an incorrect manner incorrectly. If I encounter you speaking incorrectly, I will think that you are an idiot. (or: "If I were to encounter you speaking incorrectly, I would think that you are an idiot.")
Style has nothing to do with grammar. A language would not be defined as such, were that not true. (or: "..., if that were not true.") The term "grammar" means "a set of rules that gives structure to a language."
As it is, I believe the biggest issue is pronounciation, not grammar. If someone says "Gimme dat," it is a grammatically correct mispronounciation of "Give me that." (Which is a grammatically incorrect variant of "Give that to me", but we know what you meant.) Poor speakers are the source of such lovely phrases as "Axe me a question" (Which is a correct variant in old and early English, found in Chaucer) and "Whaddup wid dat?"
Of course, I enjoy arguing for the sake of arguing, but I do have an opinion on this particular issue.
HTH, HAND.
There are some important differences between dogs and wolves, that even stand up under metaphor.
Let me see your 'Eek!', and raise you a FUCK!
I had hoped for better since Mr Luddite^WAlston got promoted sideways.
I guess I didn't expect better, but I had hoped.
"Any science which can be distinguished from magic is insufficiently advanced."
The exploit is a buffer overflow. It has existed forever, and has been the subject of textbook warnings since the RTM Great Worm. Writing any software that accepts unvetted data without checking for overflow is utterly unacceptable.
This should not be a patch; this should have been picked up by an automated lint program at the first code review.
I work in a university Computer Science department, spread over three levels of a medium sized building, with academics, students and admin staff all doing strange/horrible/terrifying things to their PCs which we few Tech Services people couldn't conceivably control.
Restrict user access, you say? Why yes! Why didn't we think of telling a senior Professor of Computer Science that he is not considered competant to install IQC on his own PC?
Why didn't we think of becoming an expert in all software packages which any research postgrad might need to do their PhD?
Now we're stuck running around fighting fires, and asking people why they still haven't installed Win2K SP1!
+5 Insightful my eye.
The Geneva Convention applies to everybody, no exeptions, ever, anywhere, no matter how heinous the crimes they might be charged with, even if they are guilty.
That's the whole point of the Geneva Convention.
Bush Jr knows shit about international law, and appears proud of it. His 'advisors' just don't care. But in law, neither ignorance nor apathy are defences.
And of course, the legitimate son of the king was called 'prince'.
The Romans had a perfectly good word for 'king': rex. This is cognate with words like rajah in Indic languages, righ/rí in Irish gaelic and the suffix '-ric' in Early German names like 'Alaric'. For political reasons, rex became disparaged after Rome became a republic. Thus, when Julius Caesar et al became effective kings of Rome, they could not call themselves that, so they used a perfectly acceptable military term: 'commander' imperator. Julius' surname later became synonymous with the position as well.
Thus in French you get Roy, derived directly from rex, which is found in England in Norman names like 'FitzRoy' (Son of the King). English imported many Latin words directly, so someone can be 'regal'. Imperator turned into Empereur (my spelling may be off, je ne parlez pas Français...) and 'Emperor', which was used as a rank of kingship over and above that of 'king'.
'Caesar' was borrowed into the Teutonic and Slavic lands, as you said, as Kaiser, Tsar (and Czar comes to mind also, but I am not sure from where. Hungary?).
'King' derives from the Germanic word which was 'cyning' in Anglo-Saxon, and is 'könig' or similar in many German and Scandinavian languages.
Mind you, that many of these terms are understandable, and even familiar, means that the chains of borrowing are extensive and convoluted.
I remember reading somewhere that TeX's tabular commands were a powerful influence in the design of the HTML table markup.
Samuel Pepys didn't write in cursive.
He wrote his diaries in shorthand.
Thought you might be interested.
Well done, sir, and more power to you.
How good were your studies on the history of English law, especially from the eighteenth century?
Did I not specifically say that, because the US legal system copied rather than inherited the laws on defamation (thank you for reminding me of that word, by the way), it was not the same as what I had just described?
You are not the world. Your laws are not the only laws. Other countries also have histories. And while I am not, never have been, and have no interest in ever studying law, I am a student of history. My post was one on the history of a law. The repeated IANAL was to make perfectly clear that while my statements may be valid about one period in time, they are almost certainly not any more, and anyone who took my statements as valid deserved what they would get if they tried it in court. Consider it a gift from a litigious culture, similar to warning labels like "Do not use this cigarette lighter near open flame".
While your statement is true in the US, and I will take your educated opinion over mine any day, it used not to be, and may not still in England and possibly parts of the Commonwealth.
I will accept that I did not make clear enough that this was my context. And I was wrong about Truth not being a defence. In the USA.
This is what a study of history does to you: it hammers home that there is more to the world than the here-and-now in your home town.
To recap: When the first defamation laws were written in England in the eighteenth century, they were deliberately written so that truth was not a defence. This is not true in modern USA. Whether this is true in modern England and Australia is something I do not know. Maybe someone does. A Lawyer, perhaps?
IANAL, but as I understand it the laws were written in England around the time of the first newspapers. The point was to protect 'decent people' (read: the rich and powerful) from damage to their reputation.
The way the laws were written, truth is no defence. You are guilty of libel/slander if you disseminate information about someone, whether or not it is true, which will cause damage to that person's reputation, whether or not you meant to do such damage. To add insult to injury, the burden of proof is reversed! If you are accused of libel/slander, you were (and probably still are) considered guilty until you can prove otherwise.
This was deliberately made a civil crime, not criminal, so that the state could wash its hands of libel/slander against poor or helpless people, as this was not the state's problem. If you want redress, sue them yourself! Can't afford to? Too F--ing bad!
IIRC, this was absorbed automatically into Australian Common Law, but was merely copied by the US Lawmakers, who made the new distinction between malicious and innocent libel. Truth is still no defence, but you can claim that you did not mean harm by it. Doesn't mean you'll win, though.
Again, IANAL.
Anyone who calls himself a "power user" without a gun to his head is an idiot.
The original experiments were designed to test for life under a few likely scenarios. Remember that they were not sure if the life processes they found there would be based on the same chemistry as on Earth, so they came up with some good guesses, and sent them up.
(For those who remember the Cosmos series by Carl Sagan, there is a section on this where he mentions the experiment designed by his friend Wolf Vishniac, which IIRC was not one that was included on the Mars jaunts, but did discover life in Antarctic valleys previously thought sterile.)
There were three experiments. It was agreed that the likelyhood of life was so low that a positive in any one would be treated as evidence of living processes. Two were positive, the other was negative. Despite the undertakings before the mission, the single negative was treated as the official and definitive answer to the question "is there life on Mars". The other two were explained away as 'merely chemical processes'. (Of course, so are things like respiration and digestion.)
Given the current state of evidence, the best we can say as to life on Mars is 'maybe', and we need more experiments -- experiments where the rules aren't changed halfway through because the data is unexpected would be nice!
I actually own a copy of Let's Welcome Our Fathers from Space, which has the original star-of-david/swastika logo on the front cover.
There is a section in the introduction trying to justify this (IIRC, he claimed that both were solar symbols, and the swastika was just another symbol before Herr Hitler anyway, and everyone used it, and...) He is right in the technical sense, about the fylfot and its solar symbolism and ubiquity, but the German National Socialists have ruined it for everyone for quite a long time to come.
a news service which is not American. Because no-one could accuse USAtoday or the Wall Street Journal of being partisan.
That infrastructure would not have needed to be rebuilt overnight if it had not been targeted in the first place. (a war crime by international convention, by the way. Not that that has ever stopped the US army.) As things like water treatment plants and power stations were deliberately targeted, all civilian deaths as a result of their lack are the direct responsiblity of the army who destroyed them.
Unlike the UK (Ireland, India, Australia, great chunks of Africa) or the USA? (Mexico, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Hawaii, the Phillipines, just from the top of my head, and in no particular order). Pot: meet Kettle.
Oh, really ?
Rueters is a news agency. AFP is a news agency. The BBC is a news agency. All of these make concerted efforts to identify sources of bias and make corrections where necessary. Fox news does not. It is not only shameless in its presentation of propaganda as news, it is proud of this!
I am not a news organisation. I am an individual. I have a right to my opinions, and to freely express my opinions. So do the individuals who work for Fox news. But Fox news has a duty to either employ more than rabid fundamentalist Republicans, or to stop misrepresenting itself as an unbiased news source.
Apples and oranges.
The Ministry of Oil is intact. The Museum is not. Even where bombs were not dropped, there are consequences when you invade a country. These are well known. Looting and riots are high up the list. Was no planning done here?
The US said the same about Afghanistan. I repeat: how are they doing these days? And for the record: Saudi Arabia is stable and has good oil output. If you think that is a good thing, try living under the Sauds. Stability and oil -- feh! What about hospitals? What about classrooms? What about restoring power and water supplies?
And also for the record, Iraq has been a haven for education and civilisation for a thousand years. The Iraqi people are still, by-and-large, intelligent, educated, cultured and cosmopolitan. Where is maintaining that tradition in the list of what-must-be-done? Because without it you have just another fundamentalist theocracy. Without careful and thoughtful help right now that still could happen, as the mullahs and imams make their claims to the rights to secular power.
He was making a reductio ad absurdum argument, by taking an argument and applying it with the same force but the opposite intent. This is a useful technique. It can be used to highlight all sorts of internalised bias. e.g., "The US was justified in invading Vietnam in order to protect it from itself" vs. "Vietnam would be justified in invading the US in order to protect it from itself". See how it works? Try it yourself on what comes out of Fox News sometime.