I don't think that's what Chomsky was trying to say. I agree that the system is at fault, but to me that just means, for example, that you could change the system to a better one and the problem will be solved. But if you try to replace the entire population with good people, the situation would eventually devolve. Think of it like you're swapping new components into a malfunctioning device one at a time until it works, to figure out which component is faulty.
In my example, if you replaced the system with a better one, people like Steve Ballmer would not remain in their position where they have a disproportionately large influence on the rest of the population.
Now, imagine that you instead replaced the 'bad' people with good people, but the system remained the same. The problem would be solved temporarily, but the result would be unstable. The nature of the system is that it promotes people with very undesirable qualities to positions of power. A powerful job that only one person in a million can have is quite literally occupied by a one-in-a-million person. If the system selects this person for their underhandedness, and the ability to intimidate others and compromise ethics for the sake of business, the result can be quite a caricature.
And there's more than just selection going on, because the system is also training those bad qualities into people as they try to outdo each other in competition. Those that don't want to participate are disqualified, and those that do participate play a game of ethical chicken, where each player lowers his or her standards until all challengers refuse to go lower than the victor.
What you get is the lowest of the low in the highest position. It's a backwards system.
if you go to metacritic and compare DS to PSP you get a considerably higher number (and percentage) of games for the PSP rated highly.
Let's look at each list, sorted by score: DS and PSP. So, what's a good score? 85? Then the DS has 4 good games and the PSP has 3.
After subtracting two extra versions of Nintendogs from the DS's list:
80? DS: 8, PSP: 7
75? DS: 11, PSP: 11
70? DS: 20, PSP: 17
65? DS: 25, PSP: 21
You weren't comparing the averages scores between systems were you? That penalizes a system for games that you won't even be buying, operating under the assumption that you can't control which games you'll get. Even so, I've heard people talk like it's a valid criteria, so let's look at the results (again, after removing two duplicate Nintendogs scores of 84). The DS averages 69.03, and the PSP averages 70.13. Looks like the DS has mostly recovered by now from the early titles Ping Pals, Sprung, and Pokemon Dash.
Re:The Borg Jokes Are Dead
on
MS & Game Rentals
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The Microsoft Borg joke wasn't funny to begin with [...]
Perhaps some BSDers can tell us why the FreeBSD implementation is superior to the Linux one?
It's inferior. The command (mdmfs) is just a wrapper to call mdconfig, newfs, and mount. mdconfig itself is cool; it's a command to create a memory, swap, or file-backed device in/dev. Run mdconfig with the desired size, format the new device, then mount it. That's mdmfs. When a file is deleted, it doesn't know to free memory that the file occupied (though that memory will eventually be pushed to the swapfile).
Linux tmpfs allocates memory when files are created or appended to and frees memory when files are deleted. It would also be optimized for RAM instead of disk.
I probably would have gone for "off topic" due to the amount of time spent going off on a tangent. Your own perspective of what you and other Christians believe is on-topic, but why you believe it is off-topic, especially when it takes that long to say it.
Fortunately the alternative to rejecting the truth is an eternity in hell, so there is no need for me to get angry with you. Your choice is simple, Hell or the service of the God who created everything.
I assume you meant to write 'the consequence of rejecting the truth'. What is so fortunate about people like me going to hell? You're telling me that without intentionally harming anyone else, I'm bad and will go to hell. That sounds awfully self-righteous to me. Saying specifically that God knows I'm bad and am going to hell doesn't make you any less self-righteous because use of the word "knows" tells me that you believe it as well and carries the same message: "I know you are bad and going to hell."
That's interesting, but you didn't say who actually agreed to give it a high score in exchange for an early review. It's probably some no-name. Gamespot gave Driver a 7.7, so it's not them. IGN gave it a 9.7, but the review came out after the game's release, so it doesn't look like they took the deal.
Yeah, I've heard people say IGN is bad/biased so many times, from people that couldn't actually back it up, that I'm inclined to believe it's not true. If IGN was so biased, I think somebody would have produced a good argument by now.
When I ask for evidence of bias, everyone points to the amount of advertising on IGN, which I agree is annoying, but to bring that up is really just changing the subject. I'd actually be more suspicious of a review site that didn't have so many ads, because I'd question how they are making their money. More money from regular ads reduces the need to sell out the integrity of reviews.
But people still believe thay are biased. It's like it has been repeated so many times that people just start believing it. They say "Everybody knows IGN is biased," which is really saying "If it's not true, why would people say it?" There is an answer to that. It's called the hostile media effect. Fanboys find it easier to attack the reviewer than admit that someone just didn't like their favorite game. People are going to attack critics by virtue of what a critic does, just like they attack the media. Regardless of which games get high scores and which games get low scores, being called biased will be a constant. The only variable is who does it.
User reviews, the alternative to sites like IGN, are practically worthless. People only review games they were willing to buy in the first place (or sometimes they didn't buy it and probably weren't qualified to review it), so that's a bias right from the start. Fanboyism can be an incentive for someone to give a system-exclusive title a high (or low) score. Additionally, the marketing of a game easily affects its review scores by determining who will buy and review the game in the first place. This effect can hurt unique games where potential buyers have less of an idea of what to expect, and are more likely to give a bad score. After all the biases that affect user scores are applied, there is one final filter: whether the person feels strongly enough about the game to write a review. For this reason, user reviews tend toward the highest possible score or the lowest possible score.
Just comparing IGN's review scores to reader review averages (or user reviews at some other site) shows who is more biased. User reviews almost always average higher scores. The only exceptions are the very highly rated games, where it takes only a few 9/10 ratings to lower the reader average below IGN's score.
No, the story in fact does not mention any illegal activity that the person performed. It only says that the guy used the WiFi point, then it goes off on a tangent about illegal uses of WAPs, giving the impression that any use of WiFi is illegal, omitting the fact that criminals have HACKED INTO CREDIT CARD DATABASES, replacing that with "using an unsecured Wi-Fi network."
They try to lead you to belief that Smith was downloading child porn. This is a sensationalist article, and this person should sue for defamation.
Going from memory on Word, there is no 'default'. But you can customize the menu to add 'Paste unformatted'. Then you can give it a keyboard shortcut such as Ctrl-Shift-V, or even change/remove the keyboard shortcut for Paste and give 'Paste unformatted' the Ctrl-V shortcut. Or it may have taken a macro.
In OpenOffice, there's 'Paste Special', but that brings up a dialog first. I don't see a predefined option to paste without formatting, but all you have to do to get one is record a macro. Then you can put it in a menu or assign a keyboard shortcut. Just go to Tools -> Configure, and find the macro you made under the "OpenOffice.org BASIC Macros" category and give it a menu and shortcut.
MSOffice will always assume the paste in Enhanced mode, which will take longer, as it's looking for formatting.
IF the source text is formatted. If it's copied from Notepad, then it's plain text. Read the article. What took so long is that it spent 22 minutes spellchecking.
870k is the total for this year. (I just quoted that number to point out what rate they are selling at.) The PSP launched in 2004 and probably sold plenty at launch. I recall seeing that the US and Japan sales figures were pretty close.
As for DS vs. PSP, what I heard was that the DS had a much better launch. After their launches, the PSP started slowly catching up, although it still has a long way to go. Then Nintedogs was released, and it boosted DS sales a lot. According to the link I gave earlier, the DS is still doing better, at least in Japan. The totals for this year say the PSP has sold a bit less than 1% more units than the DS, and that excludes the huge head start the DS got with its launch.
This doesn't make sense. According to The Magic Box, only 870,000 have been sold this year in Japan. That's only 174,000 per month, and I can't imagine that the demand is high enough in other parts of the world, especially not enough to make 2 million per month necessary.
He called the large portion of this country psychotic, not a large portion.
"A very large portion..."
That means he feels the majority of this country, at least all those who voted for Bush, are psychotic.
This looks to me like a classic personal-belief defense mechanism: Take offense at someone's statement as much as you can when you have an idealogical difference, and you can dismiss his or her point of view more easily.
Read the post again. There's no strong indication that he meant to refer to all Bush voters. "Majority" would have been a likely word choice if he did. Certainly, there are Bush supporters who do not have the characteristics mentioned, and some might even have a few things to say about those Bush supporters that do.
There's no way you can sugarcoat that for the parent of this thread.
I'm not trying to sugarcoat it, but I think you are doing the opposite (probably without realizing it). You recalled a quote incorrectly in a way that made it more offensive to you, and even your initial reply sort of missed the point for the sake of a personal attack, as I pointed out in my post.
Calling the large portion of this country "psychotic" just because they idiologically and politically disagree with you [...]
Saying that he called the people psychotic merely because of a disagreement is clearly misrepresenting his point of view. If you read what he said, he called those people psychotic for having what he saw as "megalomania, religious flagwaving egotism, and the 'membership' into the 'Big Fat Christian Gun-Toting Whiteman kicks the Worlds Ass' Society" as a source of pride. If you disagree, that's fine, argue away, but it's unethical to misrepresent his views.
The only psychotic thing is modding this parent as insightful.
And here you actually do call people psychotic over a disagreement (about how the post should be moderated), rather than a personality trait of the person in question.
There are really two arguments here:
a. It's a gay/liberal/$BUGBEAR conspiricy
b. it undermines "traditional family values"
Most everyone I know who is against gay marriage uses point b as their reasoning, and IMHO it is a valid argument. Whether or not "traditional family values" are a necessary or good thing may be debatable, but this is certainly no logical fallacy.
Let's assume that you need at least one eye to successfully poke the eye of another.
[...]
Thus, it is certainly possible for everyone to go blind in an eye for an eye world if we allow for an eye-poking rampage.
Who pokes out the eye of the last person? By the time there's a last person, everyone else is blind!
And this policy is from the same guy that promotes the "faith-based initiative." To ensure that no government money accidently happens to fund stem cell reasearch, he'll pull all funding from labs that do that research, but he pushes the opposite policy with respect to religion so he can promote it unconstitutionally. The stem cell policy undermines his case that he's not promoting the preaching itself and so it's not a violation.
Additional info: I found this article, which mentions specifically that the number was created afterwards:
"Fahrenheit 911" continues to make news:
The Gallup Poll reports only 38 percent of movie goers have a favorable impression of the controversial, anti-Bush film by Michael Moore, based on what they have heard and read about it. Republicans hate it by a six-to-one margin, while Democrats applaud it, four-to-one.
One scene in the propaganda-documentary that always draws chuckles from viewers features Florida GOP Rep. Porter Goss inviting people to call a "toll-free number" to voice their concerns about the Patriot Act. But the flick notes that no such number existed at the time and offered Goss' office number in its stead.
There is one now -- 1-877-858-9040 -- on the Web site of the House intelligence committee, which Goss chairs. A spokeswoman wouldn't say whether the deluge of calls to her boss' office contributed to the establishment of the toll-free line.
Despite its focus on GIs against the Iraq war, the Pentagon's Army and Air Force Exchange Service intends to distribute copies to U.S. bases worldwide.
Slashdot Mirror
You CAN do that! But you're limited to 2-player, and both players have to use one of the dual-controller configurations.
You're forgetting the order of operations.
!2*b is (!2)*b.
!2 equals 0.
0*b equals false.
2b || false == 2b
The answer is "2b".
I don't think that's what Chomsky was trying to say. I agree that the system is at fault, but to me that just means, for example, that you could change the system to a better one and the problem will be solved. But if you try to replace the entire population with good people, the situation would eventually devolve. Think of it like you're swapping new components into a malfunctioning device one at a time until it works, to figure out which component is faulty.
In my example, if you replaced the system with a better one, people like Steve Ballmer would not remain in their position where they have a disproportionately large influence on the rest of the population.
Now, imagine that you instead replaced the 'bad' people with good people, but the system remained the same. The problem would be solved temporarily, but the result would be unstable. The nature of the system is that it promotes people with very undesirable qualities to positions of power. A powerful job that only one person in a million can have is quite literally occupied by a one-in-a-million person. If the system selects this person for their underhandedness, and the ability to intimidate others and compromise ethics for the sake of business, the result can be quite a caricature.
And there's more than just selection going on, because the system is also training those bad qualities into people as they try to outdo each other in competition. Those that don't want to participate are disqualified, and those that do participate play a game of ethical chicken, where each player lowers his or her standards until all challengers refuse to go lower than the victor.
What you get is the lowest of the low in the highest position. It's a backwards system.
Let's look at each list, sorted by score: DS and PSP. So, what's a good score? 85? Then the DS has 4 good games and the PSP has 3.
After subtracting two extra versions of Nintendogs from the DS's list:
80? DS: 8, PSP: 7
75? DS: 11, PSP: 11
70? DS: 20, PSP: 17
65? DS: 25, PSP: 21
You weren't comparing the averages scores between systems were you? That penalizes a system for games that you won't even be buying, operating under the assumption that you can't control which games you'll get. Even so, I've heard people talk like it's a valid criteria, so let's look at the results (again, after removing two duplicate Nintendogs scores of 84). The DS averages 69.03, and the PSP averages 70.13. Looks like the DS has mostly recovered by now from the early titles Ping Pals, Sprung, and Pokemon Dash.
It's inferior. The command (mdmfs) is just a wrapper to call mdconfig, newfs, and mount. mdconfig itself is cool; it's a command to create a memory, swap, or file-backed device in /dev. Run mdconfig with the desired size, format the new device, then mount it. That's mdmfs. When a file is deleted, it doesn't know to free memory that the file occupied (though that memory will eventually be pushed to the swapfile).
Linux tmpfs allocates memory when files are created or appended to and frees memory when files are deleted. It would also be optimized for RAM instead of disk.
For the record, I'm a FreeBSD user.
I probably would have gone for "off topic" due to the amount of time spent going off on a tangent. Your own perspective of what you and other Christians believe is on-topic, but why you believe it is off-topic, especially when it takes that long to say it.
I assume you meant to write 'the consequence of rejecting the truth'. What is so fortunate about people like me going to hell? You're telling me that without intentionally harming anyone else, I'm bad and will go to hell. That sounds awfully self-righteous to me. Saying specifically that God knows I'm bad and am going to hell doesn't make you any less self-righteous because use of the word "knows" tells me that you believe it as well and carries the same message: "I know you are bad and going to hell."
That's interesting, but you didn't say who actually agreed to give it a high score in exchange for an early review. It's probably some no-name. Gamespot gave Driver a 7.7, so it's not them. IGN gave it a 9.7, but the review came out after the game's release, so it doesn't look like they took the deal.
Also, what is your source?
Yeah, I've heard people say IGN is bad/biased so many times, from people that couldn't actually back it up, that I'm inclined to believe it's not true. If IGN was so biased, I think somebody would have produced a good argument by now.
When I ask for evidence of bias, everyone points to the amount of advertising on IGN, which I agree is annoying, but to bring that up is really just changing the subject. I'd actually be more suspicious of a review site that didn't have so many ads, because I'd question how they are making their money. More money from regular ads reduces the need to sell out the integrity of reviews.
But people still believe thay are biased. It's like it has been repeated so many times that people just start believing it. They say "Everybody knows IGN is biased," which is really saying "If it's not true, why would people say it?" There is an answer to that. It's called the hostile media effect. Fanboys find it easier to attack the reviewer than admit that someone just didn't like their favorite game. People are going to attack critics by virtue of what a critic does, just like they attack the media. Regardless of which games get high scores and which games get low scores, being called biased will be a constant. The only variable is who does it.
User reviews, the alternative to sites like IGN, are practically worthless. People only review games they were willing to buy in the first place (or sometimes they didn't buy it and probably weren't qualified to review it), so that's a bias right from the start. Fanboyism can be an incentive for someone to give a system-exclusive title a high (or low) score. Additionally, the marketing of a game easily affects its review scores by determining who will buy and review the game in the first place. This effect can hurt unique games where potential buyers have less of an idea of what to expect, and are more likely to give a bad score. After all the biases that affect user scores are applied, there is one final filter: whether the person feels strongly enough about the game to write a review. For this reason, user reviews tend toward the highest possible score or the lowest possible score.
Just comparing IGN's review scores to reader review averages (or user reviews at some other site) shows who is more biased. User reviews almost always average higher scores. The only exceptions are the very highly rated games, where it takes only a few 9/10 ratings to lower the reader average below IGN's score.
No, the story in fact does not mention any illegal activity that the person performed. It only says that the guy used the WiFi point, then it goes off on a tangent about illegal uses of WAPs, giving the impression that any use of WiFi is illegal, omitting the fact that criminals have HACKED INTO CREDIT CARD DATABASES, replacing that with "using an unsecured Wi-Fi network."
They try to lead you to belief that Smith was downloading child porn. This is a sensationalist article, and this person should sue for defamation.
Going from memory on Word, there is no 'default'. But you can customize the menu to add 'Paste unformatted'. Then you can give it a keyboard shortcut such as Ctrl-Shift-V, or even change/remove the keyboard shortcut for Paste and give 'Paste unformatted' the Ctrl-V shortcut. Or it may have taken a macro.
In OpenOffice, there's 'Paste Special', but that brings up a dialog first. I don't see a predefined option to paste without formatting, but all you have to do to get one is record a macro. Then you can put it in a menu or assign a keyboard shortcut. Just go to Tools -> Configure, and find the macro you made under the "OpenOffice.org BASIC Macros" category and give it a menu and shortcut.
IF the source text is formatted. If it's copied from Notepad, then it's plain text. Read the article. What took so long is that it spent 22 minutes spellchecking.
870k is the total for this year. (I just quoted that number to point out what rate they are selling at.) The PSP launched in 2004 and probably sold plenty at launch. I recall seeing that the US and Japan sales figures were pretty close.
As for DS vs. PSP, what I heard was that the DS had a much better launch. After their launches, the PSP started slowly catching up, although it still has a long way to go. Then Nintedogs was released, and it boosted DS sales a lot. According to the link I gave earlier, the DS is still doing better, at least in Japan. The totals for this year say the PSP has sold a bit less than 1% more units than the DS, and that excludes the huge head start the DS got with its launch.
This doesn't make sense. According to The Magic Box, only 870,000 have been sold this year in Japan. That's only 174,000 per month, and I can't imagine that the demand is high enough in other parts of the world, especially not enough to make 2 million per month necessary.
But the chips without DRM won't be able to play media or run the software everyone's used to. Most people will just buy "official" stuff.
"A very large portion..."
This looks to me like a classic personal-belief defense mechanism: Take offense at someone's statement as much as you can when you have an idealogical difference, and you can dismiss his or her point of view more easily.
Read the post again. There's no strong indication that he meant to refer to all Bush voters. "Majority" would have been a likely word choice if he did. Certainly, there are Bush supporters who do not have the characteristics mentioned, and some might even have a few things to say about those Bush supporters that do.
I'm not trying to sugarcoat it, but I think you are doing the opposite (probably without realizing it). You recalled a quote incorrectly in a way that made it more offensive to you, and even your initial reply sort of missed the point for the sake of a personal attack, as I pointed out in my post.
Saying that he called the people psychotic merely because of a disagreement is clearly misrepresenting his point of view. If you read what he said, he called those people psychotic for having what he saw as "megalomania, religious flagwaving egotism, and the 'membership' into the 'Big Fat Christian Gun-Toting Whiteman kicks the Worlds Ass' Society" as a source of pride. If you disagree, that's fine, argue away, but it's unethical to misrepresent his views.
And here you actually do call people psychotic over a disagreement (about how the post should be moderated), rather than a personality trait of the person in question.
Am I the only one who expected to see that followed by "walk into a bar"?
Punish cheaters!
Uh, did you totally miss the part about "Fallacy: Appeal to Tradition"?
Now I know the destiny of the last person. He will be king!
Many of the quotes you gave only refer to weapons programs, or in some other way show that the person being quoted only saw Iraq as a future threat.
Wait a minute...
Who pokes out the eye of the last person? By the time there's a last person, everyone else is blind!
And this policy is from the same guy that promotes the "faith-based initiative." To ensure that no government money accidently happens to fund stem cell reasearch, he'll pull all funding from labs that do that research, but he pushes the opposite policy with respect to religion so he can promote it unconstitutionally. The stem cell policy undermines his case that he's not promoting the preaching itself and so it's not a violation.
Additional info: I found this article, which mentions specifically that the number was created afterwards: