"Hmm...as I recall, Michael Moore had no problem getting his film out, and he even made > $100MM in the box office. Yet, when Sinclair was going to broacast a damning piece on Kerry, the Democrats went to the courts and managed to scare Sinclair into not airing it."
There's a bit of a difference there. Sinclair was broadcasting the documentary as a NEWS BROADCAST on major TV networks just before the elections. Michael Moore didn't. Nobody objected to viewing of Fahrenhype 9/11, which is a similar comparison. You're comparing apples to oranges.
"Oh, I also remember that the protestors at the Dem convention where put in cages, while the protestors in New York were allowed to do whatever they pleased (including beating a police officer)."
Well, how convenient for you to leave out the fact that in New York the NYPD stormtroopers arrested 1,500 protestors, several of which had done nothing wrong, except being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The arrests were made by cageing the protestors in street blocks with safety netting. The city ended up paying fines for the incident. Looks like both were treated just as badly.
While participating in partisan hackery, please try to get your facts straight.
"Everybody who votes, republican or democrat, feels the same way when their party's candidate loses. They can't believe that the other guy won. You're not expressing any new thoughts here, people on the other side felt the same way when Clinton got elected (how could this guy become president, etc)."
Good point.
However, I didn't feel like this about previous Republican presidents, even Bush Sr.
"You say that the country is more divided than before, but it's simply not true."
I wasn't talking of election results, for heaven's sake.
I was talking about the deep divide between the ideals of the American people, the right and the "left". People are VIOLENTLY disagreeing with each other to the point where anything the "other side" says is by definition wrong, stupid or a lie.
"In a country like the United States that was founded on the prinicpals of freedom, the president is selected through a process we call an "election"."
You missed the point perfectly demonstrating what is wrong with the current state of affairs in the US. I don't think it would do any good to explain the point to you either.
"Your side lost... get over it."
translation: I am right, you are wrong, just because "my side" lost. Again you demonstrate, perfectly, what is wrong with the country.
"The growing similarity between current Bush supporter thinking and many regimes we have called enemy in the past is highly disturbing."
I completely agree. I'm becoming increasingly alarmed by the intolerance to dissenting opinion by the Bush administration and their supporters. It's as if if you don't follow the party line, you're an Al-Qaeda recruit. That really worries me.
We've seen this time and time again when someone with high profile speaks against the administration or their policies. The response is more often than not some sort of personal attack on the person rather than replying to the criticism itself. I can't help but thinking the goal is to scare others from speaking against them.
They have even gotten as far as to, illegally, revealing the identity of a CIA operative just because her husband had the gall to speak against the administration.
Unfortunately we'll have 4 more years of that. One can only hope they don't really go all out with silencing critics. Or maybe they should - it'd be interesting to see the backlash.
"How can people care more about gay marriage (nobody is really concerned besides gays anyway) than unjustifiable wars, lies, damaging policies, etc.?"
Because the mantra for them is "Gays are pervs, Gays are bad, Gays will eat your babies" or whatever else they can come up with to scare the living daylights out of the bible thumpers.
The hatemongering and discrimination against homosexuals [1] by the majority of the Republicans is wrong, and it's amazing to see the goebbelslike propaganda tactics employed by the Republicans to ensure the votes of the bible thumping bigots is an awesome display of moral corruption. The hypocricy of it all stuns me.
1. I'm straight, btw, and happily married since last year
"I sincerely hope that he will take great steps to heal the wounds on this country inflicted by both the events of the past 4 years and a VERY bitter election."
Bush promised in 2000 that he would act as a president that would unite the country.
Four years later, and the country is even MORE divided than before, largely due to the acts of Mr. Bush and his administration during his presidency.
I believe as strongly as the Bush supporters believe Bush is the one man terrorist busting machine that he has no intention of ever acting as a unifier. You just need to listen to his rhetoric on any issue and you can not come to any other conclusion. It's always us against them, no matter the issue, small or large.
You can argue about everything else about his presidency, whether or not the war on Iraq was justified or not, or whether or not the economy is better off now than 4 years ago, but on the point of dividing the country, there is no argument. He has failed, miserably, in uniting the country.
Further I believe that he has done so because that is his true nature. He calls it being steadfast, I call it a stubborn inability to make compromises whether due to his ideology (right-wing Christian), partisan hackery (Republicans are right, Democrats are wrong, no matter what) or just plain lack of diplomatic skills.
To me this is more of an issue than anything else, it goes to the heart of what Mr. Bush is like and how he governs.
In a country like the United States that was founded on the principals of freedom, free exchange of ideas and diversity among other things, it is truly unbeliavable someone like Mr. Bush could ever become a president.
"However, banner advertising is like TV advertising. Its "presence"."
X10 went out of business. That's how effective "presence" was. Who the hell cares, if "everyone" knows about it. Clearly it didn't work.
Google, on the other hand, generated about $800M in revenue in the last quarter. From what I've read that's almost entirely advertising revenue. DoubleClick, on the other hand, made $81M in their last quarter.
Google is the new guard, highly targeted ads that actually work. DoubleClick is the old guard, banner ads, spam and other annoying crap nobody ever likes to see. No wonder Google is kicking their ass.
The click-through-rates on Google AdWords compared to DoubleClick's garbage are astronomical.
Welcome to the world of international law enforcement on crimes committed over the Internet.
Perps: in Russia Victims: UK and US
Victim contacts Scotland Yard or the FBI. If they have time, they'll investigate and figure out the perp is quite likely in Russia, but they can't be sure, because they used an anonymous proxy in South Korea. It's now about 3 months after the incident.
They contact the South Korean network with the open proxy. They answer after a month or two saying they didn't keep logs. Pass go, do not go to prison.
They then contact the Russian authorities. The Russians answer you have no proof this falls under Russian jurisdiction, and even if you did, you have failed to show how which Russian law was broken, and even if you did prove Russian law was broken, the punishment under Russian law is 5 months probation, and no, we will not extradite the criminal to the US or UK.
We're now at 5 - 6 months after the incident.
That's assuming it's not the Russian mafia, who really doesn't give a shit whether or not the Russian cops bust them for $7K extortion scam.
That SanDisk player is priced that way because it's a SanDisk's attempt of creating a loss leader to pump up sales of their other products.
It's a poor example, although probably the best priced, of iPod Photo's competition, which, I believe, is way ahead of iPod Photo.
There are several personal media players with video playing capabilities out there with much, much better features (audio, pictures, video) and compatible pricing (if not at $50 a pop).
The iPod Photo will still, of course, sell well, because certain people will buy anything Apple produces no matter what it is. I think iPod Photo is way overpriced for its features, though the size of the hard drive might make it usable as a portable hard drive with a mp3/aac player.
The only truly interesting feature, from a technical point of view, is the ability to display the pictures in a TV set directly from the device. I'm not so sure it's very useful in the long term without video capabilities, but still.
Are you going to hold it against someone who plays Hitler on a movie, too?
It's good vs. evil, pure and simple. Some things are more evil, some are less. You're reading what I wrote like a devil's reading the bible. I find THAT extremely offensive.
Personally I would like to have the opportunity play a anti-commerce, net-nazi communist one of these days. Would make the spammers who call me that quite happy, and maybe I'd get to do, if not in reality, things to spammers that I think about sometimes.
Why does roleplaying as a nazi, slave trader, or any other "evil" character for purely entertainment purposes make someone sick?
To me it's just a classic good vs. evil situation, the more evil, the more interesting the situation is.
It's the same thing as when asked actors and actresses generally agree that playing evil characters is much more rewarding and, yes, fun, because they get to express themselves more than playing a do-gooder, generally speaking.
Would Star Wars have been the same without Darth Vader, an archetype of evil? No, it would have not. His presence made the movie much more entertaining, by far. Does that make George Lucas sick? Don't answet that...:)
It seems to me that the data these people are using is/was acquired partly in the United States and about US residents/companies. That would make everything they do with that part of the data subject to US laws, IMHO. Same applies to data they acquired from European Union countries and residents.
Or am I wrong? Sounds like a monumental loophole that should've been blocked.
If I was a politician, of any party, I wouldn't agree to be interviewed by ANY of these partisan "journalists" either, especially the ones who are representing the "opposite" view. Nothing good would ever come out of talking to someone like Carlson, if you're running for public office as a non-republican.
Nothing of the sort will happen, and if it does it will have nothing to do with offsourcing or work visa programs.
In fact experts predict a severe labor shortage within the next decade primarily because the baby boom generation is about to start retiring. Another contributing fact is that US colleges are turning up less comp.sci (and related) graduates than before.
I'm also going to argue that a fair share of the now unemployed "software professionals" working during the bubble years are not software professionals at all, but opportunists, who wanted to cash in on the next Big Thing while having practically no skills to do so. I certainly had the "pleasure" of working with many of them. I didn't enjoy babysitting them. It's GOOD that these people no longer do software work.
Meanwhile RIAA would still sell CDs to other retailers at current prices.
This can NOT be viewed as a good thing. If Walmart gets what they want, the independent record store will dissappear everywhere where Walmart is. They simply won't be able to compete, their revenues will continue to drop until they go out of business.
And since Walmart is well known for exercising "editorial control" over goods sold at Walmart, you will no longer be able to buy any records with explicit lyrics or controversial topics. Certain types of music will simply dissappear or become even more expensive in areas where Walmart dominates.
There's nothing spineless about admitting to making mistakes, quite the contrary.
Additionally, if you can demonstrate what you've learnt from those mistakes by answering a simple question "how would you have corrected it", that would show wizdom as well. It would most definitely impress me.
I can understand why it's so difficult for Bush to do that, though. It's hard to grow a spine after all those years of having your daddy bail you out of difficult situations.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hmm...as I recall, Michael Moore had no problem getting his film out, and he even made > $100MM in the box office. Yet, when Sinclair was going to broacast a damning piece on Kerry, the Democrats went to the courts and managed to scare Sinclair into not airing it."
There's a bit of a difference there. Sinclair was broadcasting the documentary as a NEWS BROADCAST on major TV networks just before the elections. Michael Moore didn't. Nobody objected to viewing of Fahrenhype 9/11, which is a similar comparison. You're comparing apples to oranges.
"Oh, I also remember that the protestors at the Dem convention where put in cages, while the protestors in New York were allowed to do whatever they pleased (including beating a police officer)."
Well, how convenient for you to leave out the fact that in New York the NYPD stormtroopers arrested 1,500 protestors, several of which had done nothing wrong, except being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The arrests were made by cageing the protestors in street blocks with safety netting. The city ended up paying fines for the incident. Looks like both were treated just as badly.
While participating in partisan hackery, please try to get your facts straight.
"Go ask the people who were screaming about the 2000 election, non-stop, since it was over. Bush's opposition has torn this country apart."
So if they would just shut the hell up, the country would not be divided?
Uh.
"Everybody who votes, republican or democrat, feels the same way when their party's candidate loses. They can't believe that the other guy won. You're not expressing any new thoughts here, people on the other side felt the same way when Clinton got elected (how could this guy become president, etc)."
Good point.
However, I didn't feel like this about previous Republican presidents, even Bush Sr.
"You say that the country is more divided than before, but it's simply not true."
I wasn't talking of election results, for heaven's sake.
I was talking about the deep divide between the ideals of the American people, the right and the "left". People are VIOLENTLY disagreeing with each other to the point where anything the "other side" says is by definition wrong, stupid or a lie.
"In a country like the United States that was founded on the prinicpals of freedom, the president is selected through a process we call an "election"."
You missed the point perfectly demonstrating what is wrong with the current state of affairs in the US. I don't think it would do any good to explain the point to you either.
"Your side lost... get over it."
translation: I am right, you are wrong, just because "my side" lost. Again you demonstrate, perfectly, what is wrong with the country.
Your side won...get over it.
"The growing similarity between current Bush supporter thinking and many regimes we have called enemy in the past is highly disturbing."
I completely agree. I'm becoming increasingly alarmed by the intolerance to dissenting opinion by the Bush administration and their supporters. It's as if if you don't follow the party line, you're an Al-Qaeda recruit. That really worries me.
We've seen this time and time again when someone with high profile speaks against the administration or their policies. The response is more often than not some sort of personal attack on the person rather than replying to the criticism itself. I can't help but thinking the goal is to scare others from speaking against them.
They have even gotten as far as to, illegally, revealing the identity of a CIA operative just because her husband had the gall to speak against the administration.
Unfortunately we'll have 4 more years of that. One can only hope they don't really go all out with silencing critics. Or maybe they should - it'd be interesting to see the backlash.
"How can people care more about gay marriage (nobody is really concerned besides gays anyway) than unjustifiable wars, lies, damaging policies, etc.?"
Because the mantra for them is "Gays are pervs, Gays are bad, Gays will eat your babies" or whatever else they can come up with to scare the living daylights out of the bible thumpers.
The hatemongering and discrimination against homosexuals [1] by the majority of the Republicans is wrong, and it's amazing to see the goebbelslike propaganda tactics employed by the Republicans to ensure the votes of the bible thumping bigots is an awesome display of moral corruption. The hypocricy of it all stuns me.
1. I'm straight, btw, and happily married since last year
"I sincerely hope that he will take great steps to heal the wounds on this country inflicted by both the events of the past 4 years and a VERY bitter election."
Bush promised in 2000 that he would act as a president that would unite the country.
Four years later, and the country is even MORE divided than before, largely due to the acts of Mr. Bush and his administration during his presidency.
I believe as strongly as the Bush supporters believe Bush is the one man terrorist busting machine that he has no intention of ever acting as a unifier. You just need to listen to his rhetoric on any issue and you can not come to any other conclusion. It's always us against them, no matter the issue, small or large.
You can argue about everything else about his presidency, whether or not the war on Iraq was justified or not, or whether or not the economy is better off now than 4 years ago, but on the point of dividing the country, there is no argument. He has failed, miserably, in uniting the country.
Further I believe that he has done so because that is his true nature. He calls it being steadfast, I call it a stubborn inability to make compromises whether due to his ideology (right-wing Christian), partisan hackery (Republicans are right, Democrats are wrong, no matter what) or just plain lack of diplomatic skills.
To me this is more of an issue than anything else, it goes to the heart of what Mr. Bush is like and how he governs.
In a country like the United States that was founded on the principals of freedom, free exchange of ideas and diversity among other things, it is truly unbeliavable someone like Mr. Bush could ever become a president.
"However, banner advertising is like TV advertising. Its "presence"."
X10 went out of business. That's how effective "presence" was. Who the hell cares, if "everyone" knows about it. Clearly it didn't work.
Google, on the other hand, generated about $800M in revenue in the last quarter. From what I've read that's almost entirely advertising revenue. DoubleClick, on the other hand, made $81M in their last quarter.
Looks like "presence" doesn't really pay.
Google is the new guard, highly targeted ads that actually work. DoubleClick is the old guard, banner ads, spam and other annoying crap nobody ever likes to see. No wonder Google is kicking their ass.
The click-through-rates on Google AdWords compared to DoubleClick's garbage are astronomical.
"The mass media convey the opinion of the majority of people"
It's not supposed to be like this. The mass media was supposed to question things, to probe and investigate.
Cue Jon Stewart on Crossfire...
Welcome to the world of international law enforcement on crimes committed over the Internet.
Perps: in Russia
Victims: UK and US
Victim contacts Scotland Yard or the FBI. If they have time, they'll investigate and figure out the perp is quite likely in Russia, but they can't be sure, because they used an anonymous proxy in South Korea. It's now about 3 months after the incident.
They contact the South Korean network with the open proxy. They answer after a month or two saying they didn't keep logs. Pass go, do not go to prison.
They then contact the Russian authorities. The Russians answer you have no proof this falls under Russian jurisdiction, and even if you did, you have failed to show how which Russian law was broken, and even if you did prove Russian law was broken, the punishment under Russian law is 5 months probation, and no, we will not extradite the criminal to the US or UK.
We're now at 5 - 6 months after the incident.
That's assuming it's not the Russian mafia, who really doesn't give a shit whether or not the Russian cops bust them for $7K extortion scam.
That SanDisk player is priced that way because it's a SanDisk's attempt of creating a loss leader to pump up sales of their other products.
It's a poor example, although probably the best priced, of iPod Photo's competition, which, I believe, is way ahead of iPod Photo.
There are several personal media players with video playing capabilities out there with much, much better features (audio, pictures, video) and compatible pricing (if not at $50 a pop).
The iPod Photo will still, of course, sell well, because certain people will buy anything Apple produces no matter what it is. I think iPod Photo is way overpriced for its features, though the size of the hard drive might make it usable as a portable hard drive with a mp3/aac player.
The only truly interesting feature, from a technical point of view, is the ability to display the pictures in a TV set directly from the device. I'm not so sure it's very useful in the long term without video capabilities, but still.
Are you going to hold it against someone who plays Hitler on a movie, too?
It's good vs. evil, pure and simple. Some things are more evil, some are less. You're reading what I wrote like a devil's reading the bible. I find THAT extremely offensive.
Personally I would like to have the opportunity play a anti-commerce, net-nazi communist one of these days. Would make the spammers who call me that quite happy, and maybe I'd get to do, if not in reality, things to spammers that I think about sometimes.
Why does roleplaying as a nazi, slave trader, or any other "evil" character for purely entertainment purposes make someone sick?
:)
To me it's just a classic good vs. evil situation, the more evil, the more interesting the situation is.
It's the same thing as when asked actors and actresses generally agree that playing evil characters is much more rewarding and, yes, fun, because they get to express themselves more than playing a do-gooder, generally speaking.
Would Star Wars have been the same without Darth Vader, an archetype of evil? No, it would have not. His presence made the movie much more entertaining, by far. Does that make George Lucas sick? Don't answet that...
People don't kill people, guns do.
Get a car player that has a line input jack, and plug your favorite ogg player on it. Piece of cake.
For search engines...
Walmart "burns" books.
The laws are already there. Too bad they are not enforced.
It seems to me that the data these people are using is/was acquired partly in the United States and about US residents/companies. That would make everything they do with that part of the data subject to US laws, IMHO. Same applies to data they acquired from European Union countries and residents.
Or am I wrong? Sounds like a monumental loophole that should've been blocked.
If I was a politician, of any party, I wouldn't agree to be interviewed by ANY of these partisan "journalists" either, especially the ones who are representing the "opposite" view. Nothing good would ever come out of talking to someone like Carlson, if you're running for public office as a non-republican.
Nothing of the sort will happen, and if it does it will have nothing to do with offsourcing or work visa programs.
In fact experts predict a severe labor shortage within the next decade primarily because the baby boom generation is about to start retiring. Another contributing fact is that US colleges are turning up less comp.sci (and related) graduates than before.
I'm also going to argue that a fair share of the now unemployed "software professionals" working during the bubble years are not software professionals at all, but opportunists, who wanted to cash in on the next Big Thing while having practically no skills to do so. I certainly had the "pleasure" of working with many of them. I didn't enjoy babysitting them. It's GOOD that these people no longer do software work.
Meanwhile RIAA would still sell CDs to other retailers at current prices.
This can NOT be viewed as a good thing. If Walmart gets what they want, the independent record store will dissappear everywhere where Walmart is. They simply won't be able to compete, their revenues will continue to drop until they go out of business.
And since Walmart is well known for exercising "editorial control" over goods sold at Walmart, you will no longer be able to buy any records with explicit lyrics or controversial topics. Certain types of music will simply dissappear or become even more expensive in areas where Walmart dominates.
Welcome to Fahrenheit 451 21st century style.
Again, he wasn't asked if the war on Iraq was a mistake. He was asked about ANY mistakes.
lol, glad to be of service.
There's nothing spineless about admitting to making mistakes, quite the contrary.
Additionally, if you can demonstrate what you've learnt from those mistakes by answering a simple question "how would you have corrected it", that would show wizdom as well. It would most definitely impress me.
I can understand why it's so difficult for Bush to do that, though. It's hard to grow a spine after all those years of having your daddy bail you out of difficult situations.