It sort of means "selling" (see many stories at The Register for example). Its usual context is often where something is sold at a knock-down price, or in a wheeler-dealer context (as in antique auction programme Flog It!).
The usage here is leaning more towards the "promoting" side of selling, rather than the transactional side that "flogging" would normally emphasise. Example sentence: "He flogged the dodgy TV down the market". Not really the right word for putting weight behind a campaign.
With T-shirts like this one, Nintendo certainly seem to be moving away from their family-friendly reputation. Yes it's authorised, I read about it in the official mag.
Note: the official mag sucks, buy n-Revolution instead.
So what were the launch issues and bugs with the... Jaguar
Cybermorph and Trevor McFur come to mind here. You know, now I mention them both together, it looks like Atari were aiming at a Star(Fox|Wing) knock-off, but at the last minute stuck the furries in space* into their own R-Type knock-off.
* If you make a search on that phrase, I am not responsible for the results.
To be clear, I'm not advocating an attack on *all* untrue statements, as that would, of course, cause issues on who gets to decide the truth. I'm strictly discussing personal attacks, as seen in the linked article. Are you suggesting, say, that if I made a webpage, say, "BillyBlaze ate my hamster", and it wasn't an obvious parody, you shouldn't have the right to get it taken down, despite the fact I've never owned a hamster, and (I presume) you've never eaten one? If so, how far would you personally let it slide against a site spreading lies against you before you'd want to take action?
Your "cycle of censorship" as confirmation reminds me of a letter to a popular science magazine I saw once. The author had noted that NASA wasn't suing people that claimed the moon landings were a hoax, which was clearly proof enough - NASA surely wouldn't let its pride be insulted like this. The magazine's reply was that if NASA had being suing people, the same people would be screaming "cover up".
On your education point, I propose a new song to be sung in school:
Things written on the Internet might be lies, Things written on the Internet might be lies, Things written on the Internet might be lies, Pictures can be altered, And quotes from people who misheard, Things written on the Internet might be lies.
If you're trying to persuade politicians to give everyone static IPs, I have a much better way to argue it:
Static IPs provide a valuable deterrent to digital crime by easily identifying the perpetrators. These crimes could include hacking attempts on important national infrastructure.
You're with static IPs, or you're with the terrorists!
Incitement to commit offences is quite often illegal, so placing credit card details in a "let's get this person" post is likely to be prosecutable one way or another. Requiring somebody to cancel all their cards, re-set up any CATs***, etc. is a clear example of actual harm being caused to somebody, though "causing somebody a bit of inconvenience" itself may not be illegal.
It's fairly ridiculous to claim that people exploiting flaws in reality**** aren't responsible for their actions. My point is that people can cause harm to others with what they say, and _ideally_ they should be held account for it*. I also point out a bunch of problems if this is attempted to be done without causing more harm than good. I'm not claiming to have the magic formula that achieves this goal.
* And this means stuff like "organising a mob to make 200 phone calls to their house", not "calling them a big doodie head". Clearly, some judgement needs to be exercised**
** And by this, I don't mean "Wow, the courts sure are a great place to solve all of this, and certainly won't result in deep pockets silencing people". I mean that people actually have to do some thinking here, as I'm not talking in absolutes.
*** Continuous Authority Transactions, e.g. monthly payments for a subscription
**** I'm including things like banks and credit cards here, even though some people may make the philosophical argument that they are artificial constructs. By "reality", I mean "the universe that we live in" rather than some ideal world where doing bad things to people isn't possible.
The person that is affected by a bunch of people believing an online attack on them is not the mob, it is the subject of these attacks. So, the *problem* is that a bunch of stupid people can affect other people. Whether the solution causes its own problems is another matter.
My point about protecting whistleblowers was about the desired result of any solution, rather than suggesting this should be the aim of a solution. To put it another way, I was saying that while identifying all people all the time would (theoretically) solve people anonymously posting other people's personal details (as the perpetrators could be identified), it would also prevent the whistleblowers. So, a solution of this nature would not be desirable.
We were talking about the Internet, so I thought this would kind of be implied. It would be possible to stop a lot of problems online if we could come up with a secure way to link Internet-based accounts to individual people. It would also cause a whole host of other problems, which is why I didn't say this should be the solution. My point was simply that any solution offered shouldn't prevent "good"* anonymous speech.
I certainly wasn't suggesting that speakers, once identified, have the *right* to spread lies. To take examples from the article, people are having their phone numbers, boss's phone number, and credit card details posted. Pretty much anywhere, posting somebody else's credit card details would be illegal, and it would be perfectly reasonable to expect somebody doing that to get arrested for it. So, the other fork of the dilemma is, if people are going to behave in this manner, there needs to be a way to deal with this.
I don't think anyone has the right to spread lies, but the problem is, there is no agreement on what the truth is. I'd be delighted if people calling their horoscopes "accurate", for example, were prosecuted under the Trades Description Act, as "pulled them out of a hat" is probably closer to the facts. What we don't want is a Ministry Of Truth that goes around enforcing any deviation from their version of the truth. Especially as the Ministry of Information would now be telling us there were WMDs in Iraq, what insurgents?, etc. In fact, I'd go as far as suggesting that posting Blair's address on the Internet would be perfectly reasonable.****
As I point out many times, everything is a compromise. We have to let be large portions of lies in order to protect the rights of other people to say things that would be denied under a "truth-only" society. So, we have the compromise of libel, slander, harassment, data protection**, etc. that chips away at specific acts of speech that cause harm. Just like "X... but on the Internet!" shouldn't be patentable, "Y... but on the Internet!" should still be prosecutable***.
Finally, with regards to your "huffing kittens" remark... this shows it's fully possible to disagree with somebody, take a dig at them, and not ruin their life in the process.
* I hesitated to use this word, as it could invoke the old "free speech means people you disagree with, too" principle. Be clear I don't mean "the free speech I like". I could also have said "legal", causing people to remind me the law isn't the judge of what's right and what isn't. I could also have said "non-harmful", but plenty of hate speech is clearly harmful and not the stuff we are discussing here. I hope people will understand that I mean that I'm desiring a minimal impact.
** Well, in Europe, anyway.
*** Yes, I know somebody can come up with a nice counter-example, but here I mean the harmful acts under discussion, not "Where Y is shooting somebody and on the Internet you're just drawing red pixels on a photo".
Your suggestion that we should take information from anonymous and semi-anonymous posts with a pinch of salt is a good one, unfortunately most people are stupid and believe anything they read. Anonymous postings CAN cause real damage to a person's reputation.
There clearly need to be protections in place, so people can speak "anonymously" where this has public benefit, e.g. whistleblowers, people being more open with the truth, etc. This should not, however, mean people should be free to spread malicious lies.
I'll tell you how I currently view SuSE... I've used it since 8.1, and I can say that 10.1 is the worst revision in a long time. They tried to bolt together YaST with some other junk, and ended up with a whole pile of junk that doesn't work very well. SuSE was always a KDE-biased distro, and I can't imagine its popularity with Gnome users going up now Ubuntu is around. However, the powers-that-be have replaced KDE-based components (like SuSEWatcher) with GTK-based ones.
This move seems insane - it's like marrying a serial killer. Every Microsoft partner thinks they aren't going to be treated like the last lot were. Novell also seems the type to pick the wrong partners (United Linux anyone?).
While the European eco-label scheme has resulted in far more efficient products, so much so that they've had to supplement the A-G ratings with A+ and A++ for some device types, you'll get some people who simply don't get it. Like the person who wrote into the Metro free paper recently to complain about plans to prevent climate change, saying the "green fascists" were coming to take our standby buttons. If people seriously consider having to stand up to turn off the TV is worth protesting, then no amount of carrot is going to work.
It would cost in both the size of the unit, and in power consumption. If the power use went up, then WiiConnect24 would have to go, and that's part of the overall strategy (as non-gamers may try the other channels before the game channels, and get comfortable with the Wiimote).
I'm sure HD was discussed - certainly sites like 1080up.org* sprung up to argue the case. However, there was no way Nintendo could enter a prolonged battle based on subsidised ever-more-powerful consoles** when both Sony and Microsoft can rely on other divisions to pump in the cash until one of the other players in the market folds. Nintendo had to take the market in another direction.
In any case, I've seen the whole "improved graphics" thing many times over before, from colour displays created by cellophane upwards. It doesn't excite me any more. From what I've seen of Wii, it looks like great fun, and that should be enough. After all, people are already writing their Virtual Console shopping lists, an area where modern graphics are in short supply...
* This now just points at an official Wii site. ** Point taken in your title about "isn't underpowered except...", but making it HD would have led to more unfavourable power comparisons
Let us take two ways of writing up news stories, and see if you can spot which one is less biased:
1) Home Office releases new asylum figures, showing X applications last year. This is a change of Y% from last year. Overall, Z% of applications were accepted.
2) SOFT TOUCH BRITAIN FLOODED WITH BOGUS ASYLUM APPLICATIONS AS SYSTEM DROWNS IN CHAOS.
~~~~
1) Pedophile sentenced to X years in jail. Due to sentencing guidelines, they are eligible for parole within Y years.
2) JUDGE PASSES LENIENT SENTENCE: PEDOPHILE COULD BE FREE IN Y YEARS
News sources can be more or less biased. The Daily Mail is well-known for making sure its stories are all biased a certain way for a certain market. It's fair to call this propaganda, up against other sources with more fact-based reporting. The "all sources are biased" gambit is a distraction, to try to convince people that sources with deliberate bias are no worse than ones which aim for neutrality, but are obviously "biased" in the eyes of those that would prefer an "improved" selection of facts.
Slashdot Mirror
It sort of means "selling" (see many stories at The Register for example). Its usual context is often where something is sold at a knock-down price, or in a wheeler-dealer context (as in antique auction programme Flog It!).
The usage here is leaning more towards the "promoting" side of selling, rather than the transactional side that "flogging" would normally emphasise. Example sentence: "He flogged the dodgy TV down the market". Not really the right word for putting weight behind a campaign.
Sorry to disappoint you there if you thought I was going to provide a link to hot Nintendo porn. You'll just have to find that yourself.
With T-shirts like this one, Nintendo certainly seem to be moving away from their family-friendly reputation. Yes it's authorised, I read about it in the official mag.
Note: the official mag sucks, buy n-Revolution instead.
Why? Ask The Straight Dope. (Text on page is NSFW)
Come on... that surely comes from the very old joke, "No, nurse, I said prick his boil".
Typical Slashdot dupe, we picked our side months ago! Wii it is!
Cybermorph and Trevor McFur come to mind here. You know, now I mention them both together, it looks like Atari were aiming at a Star(Fox|Wing) knock-off, but at the last minute stuck the furries in space* into their own R-Type knock-off.
* If you make a search on that phrase, I am not responsible for the results.
This doesn't work in Konqueror... the results flash up for a second then disappear. Oh well.
1 and 2 are not mutually exclusive...
To be clear, I'm not advocating an attack on *all* untrue statements, as that would, of course, cause issues on who gets to decide the truth. I'm strictly discussing personal attacks, as seen in the linked article. Are you suggesting, say, that if I made a webpage, say, "BillyBlaze ate my hamster", and it wasn't an obvious parody, you shouldn't have the right to get it taken down, despite the fact I've never owned a hamster, and (I presume) you've never eaten one? If so, how far would you personally let it slide against a site spreading lies against you before you'd want to take action?
Your "cycle of censorship" as confirmation reminds me of a letter to a popular science magazine I saw once. The author had noted that NASA wasn't suing people that claimed the moon landings were a hoax, which was clearly proof enough - NASA surely wouldn't let its pride be insulted like this. The magazine's reply was that if NASA had being suing people, the same people would be screaming "cover up".
On your education point, I propose a new song to be sung in school:
Things written on the Internet might be lies,
Things written on the Internet might be lies,
Things written on the Internet might be lies,
Pictures can be altered,
And quotes from people who misheard,
Things written on the Internet might be lies.
(This is evidence on why I'm not a rock star)
So, under your world view, is breaking into computer systems OK if they have flaws in them, as long as you just look around a bit?
If you're trying to persuade politicians to give everyone static IPs, I have a much better way to argue it:
Static IPs provide a valuable deterrent to digital crime by easily identifying the perpetrators. These crimes could include hacking attempts on important national infrastructure.
You're with static IPs, or you're with the terrorists!
I suggest you use Google®-brand search to check your claims in future, because Pfizer has sued people sending out Viagra spam.
Incitement to commit offences is quite often illegal, so placing credit card details in a "let's get this person" post is likely to be prosecutable one way or another. Requiring somebody to cancel all their cards, re-set up any CATs***, etc. is a clear example of actual harm being caused to somebody, though "causing somebody a bit of inconvenience" itself may not be illegal.
It's fairly ridiculous to claim that people exploiting flaws in reality**** aren't responsible for their actions. My point is that people can cause harm to others with what they say, and _ideally_ they should be held account for it*. I also point out a bunch of problems if this is attempted to be done without causing more harm than good. I'm not claiming to have the magic formula that achieves this goal.
* And this means stuff like "organising a mob to make 200 phone calls to their house", not "calling them a big doodie head". Clearly, some judgement needs to be exercised**
** And by this, I don't mean "Wow, the courts sure are a great place to solve all of this, and certainly won't result in deep pockets silencing people". I mean that people actually have to do some thinking here, as I'm not talking in absolutes.
*** Continuous Authority Transactions, e.g. monthly payments for a subscription
**** I'm including things like banks and credit cards here, even though some people may make the philosophical argument that they are artificial constructs. By "reality", I mean "the universe that we live in" rather than some ideal world where doing bad things to people isn't possible.
The person that is affected by a bunch of people believing an online attack on them is not the mob, it is the subject of these attacks. So, the *problem* is that a bunch of stupid people can affect other people. Whether the solution causes its own problems is another matter.
My point about protecting whistleblowers was about the desired result of any solution, rather than suggesting this should be the aim of a solution. To put it another way, I was saying that while identifying all people all the time would (theoretically) solve people anonymously posting other people's personal details (as the perpetrators could be identified), it would also prevent the whistleblowers. So, a solution of this nature would not be desirable.
We were talking about the Internet, so I thought this would kind of be implied. It would be possible to stop a lot of problems online if we could come up with a secure way to link Internet-based accounts to individual people. It would also cause a whole host of other problems, which is why I didn't say this should be the solution. My point was simply that any solution offered shouldn't prevent "good"* anonymous speech.
I certainly wasn't suggesting that speakers, once identified, have the *right* to spread lies. To take examples from the article, people are having their phone numbers, boss's phone number, and credit card details posted. Pretty much anywhere, posting somebody else's credit card details would be illegal, and it would be perfectly reasonable to expect somebody doing that to get arrested for it. So, the other fork of the dilemma is, if people are going to behave in this manner, there needs to be a way to deal with this.
I don't think anyone has the right to spread lies, but the problem is, there is no agreement on what the truth is. I'd be delighted if people calling their horoscopes "accurate", for example, were prosecuted under the Trades Description Act, as "pulled them out of a hat" is probably closer to the facts. What we don't want is a Ministry Of Truth that goes around enforcing any deviation from their version of the truth. Especially as the Ministry of Information would now be telling us there were WMDs in Iraq, what insurgents?, etc. In fact, I'd go as far as suggesting that posting Blair's address on the Internet would be perfectly reasonable.****
As I point out many times, everything is a compromise. We have to let be large portions of lies in order to protect the rights of other people to say things that would be denied under a "truth-only" society. So, we have the compromise of libel, slander, harassment, data protection**, etc. that chips away at specific acts of speech that cause harm. Just like "X... but on the Internet!" shouldn't be patentable, "Y... but on the Internet!" should still be prosecutable***.
Finally, with regards to your "huffing kittens" remark... this shows it's fully possible to disagree with somebody, take a dig at them, and not ruin their life in the process.
* I hesitated to use this word, as it could invoke the old "free speech means people you disagree with, too" principle. Be clear I don't mean "the free speech I like". I could also have said "legal", causing people to remind me the law isn't the judge of what's right and what isn't. I could also have said "non-harmful", but plenty of hate speech is clearly harmful and not the stuff we are discussing here. I hope people will understand that I mean that I'm desiring a minimal impact.
** Well, in Europe, anyway.
*** Yes, I know somebody can come up with a nice counter-example, but here I mean the harmful acts under discussion, not "Where Y is shooting somebody and on the Internet you're just drawing red pixels on a photo".
**** Yes, this one's a joke.
Your suggestion that we should take information from anonymous and semi-anonymous posts with a pinch of salt is a good one, unfortunately most people are stupid and believe anything they read. Anonymous postings CAN cause real damage to a person's reputation.
There clearly need to be protections in place, so people can speak "anonymously" where this has public benefit, e.g. whistleblowers, people being more open with the truth, etc. This should not, however, mean people should be free to spread malicious lies.
Is it just me, or do you not find it strange that you "blogged" to complain about a stupid "blogoword"?
I'll tell you how I currently view SuSE... I've used it since 8.1, and I can say that 10.1 is the worst revision in a long time. They tried to bolt together YaST with some other junk, and ended up with a whole pile of junk that doesn't work very well. SuSE was always a KDE-biased distro, and I can't imagine its popularity with Gnome users going up now Ubuntu is around. However, the powers-that-be have replaced KDE-based components (like SuSEWatcher) with GTK-based ones.
This move seems insane - it's like marrying a serial killer. Every Microsoft partner thinks they aren't going to be treated like the last lot were. Novell also seems the type to pick the wrong partners (United Linux anyone?).
My interest in Kubuntu has just shot up.
While the European eco-label scheme has resulted in far more efficient products, so much so that they've had to supplement the A-G ratings with A+ and A++ for some device types, you'll get some people who simply don't get it. Like the person who wrote into the Metro free paper recently to complain about plans to prevent climate change, saying the "green fascists" were coming to take our standby buttons. If people seriously consider having to stand up to turn off the TV is worth protesting, then no amount of carrot is going to work.
It would cost in both the size of the unit, and in power consumption. If the power use went up, then WiiConnect24 would have to go, and that's part of the overall strategy (as non-gamers may try the other channels before the game channels, and get comfortable with the Wiimote).
I'm sure HD was discussed - certainly sites like 1080up.org* sprung up to argue the case. However, there was no way Nintendo could enter a prolonged battle based on subsidised ever-more-powerful consoles** when both Sony and Microsoft can rely on other divisions to pump in the cash until one of the other players in the market folds. Nintendo had to take the market in another direction.
In any case, I've seen the whole "improved graphics" thing many times over before, from colour displays created by cellophane upwards. It doesn't excite me any more. From what I've seen of Wii, it looks like great fun, and that should be enough. After all, people are already writing their Virtual Console shopping lists, an area where modern graphics are in short supply...
* This now just points at an official Wii site.
** Point taken in your title about "isn't underpowered except...", but making it HD would have led to more unfavourable power comparisons
Yeah, it was like this car I was in once. The control for the windscreen wiper was a button on the dashboard, but the heating was operated by a dial.
Let us take two ways of writing up news stories, and see if you can spot which one is less biased:
1) Home Office releases new asylum figures, showing X applications last year. This is a change of Y% from last year. Overall, Z% of applications were accepted.
2) SOFT TOUCH BRITAIN FLOODED WITH BOGUS ASYLUM APPLICATIONS AS SYSTEM DROWNS IN CHAOS.
~~~~
1) Pedophile sentenced to X years in jail. Due to sentencing guidelines, they are eligible for parole within Y years.
2) JUDGE PASSES LENIENT SENTENCE: PEDOPHILE COULD BE FREE IN Y YEARS
News sources can be more or less biased. The Daily Mail is well-known for making sure its stories are all biased a certain way for a certain market. It's fair to call this propaganda, up against other sources with more fact-based reporting. The "all sources are biased" gambit is a distraction, to try to convince people that sources with deliberate bias are no worse than ones which aim for neutrality, but are obviously "biased" in the eyes of those that would prefer an "improved" selection of facts.
Now, call me pedantic, but that's four words.
I await your no doubt pre-planned sarcastic reply.
Maybe, because occasionally, a post can get modded down, even if it does bash Microsoft and praise Apple?