Same reason people transliterate Ess-Que-Ell into "Sequel"...It's quicker, and it sounds better.
Just my 2p as an oddball, but I've always pronounced SQL as "squirrel". It makes more sense to me at least, given that the acronym comes from Structured Query Language --> "SQuerL". Also seems to fit better in that squirrels are known for storing things away (and recent research suggests they remember far more and forget far less than we initially thought), whereas for "sequel" I find myself asking, "sequel to what?"
But this leads to another issue and that is pricing.
And that, my friends, is one of the two lemmas here -- those countries spearheading WTO efforts (mostly the US, no?) are very interested in worldwide price parity if at all possible. The other lemma, though, is that these same countries are completely uninterested in effective economic parity, whereby that USD $x00 charge for whatever product (Windows in this case) is effectively equivalent to RUB 100, or JPY 10000, or what have you, where that USD $100 / RUB 100 / JPY 10000 will buy you an equivalent amount of stuff in other countries.
This, to me, is the grand hypocrisy of all such world trade efforts of late -- "We'll charge you our prices, but we'll be damned if we see you become as wealthy as we are." Makes me want to spit.
To repeat hackstraw's very pointed and valid questions:
I'm not trolling, I'm really asking a question to see if there is a good answer.
Is there anything positive to say about Vista? Granted, I'm not a Windows user, and I get my info from slashdot, digg, and standard media outlets, and I saw Gates on the Daily Show, but seriously, is this a bundle of software that has any merit?
I hear about licenses not working. I hear about it being beta quality. I hear about it having OS X like features that just aren't as good. I hear about it ambiently consuming 10-20% of the CPU. I hear about all of the real features like WinFS that were abandoned.
Are there any honest or real positive opinions of this product?
Please, can someone make a case here? I too have seen only lukewarm "yeah, well, it's kinda okay" reviews, exactly the sort of damnation by faint praise that makes me want to run the other direction. Is there *any* compelling reason to get Vista? Aside from the patently illegal (but condoned by the corrupt US government) strong-arm tactics that effectively leave the majority of computer users with little choice (such as OEM Windows taxes)?
Not meaning to be too unbearably pedantic here, but it's pronounced "toe - say". Apparently the company was spun off from Toa Seiko in November of 1979, with its name most likely just a portmanteau of Toa Seiko --> To + Se. So it seems they've been around a goodly while. (For those able to read Japanese, a quick-and-dirty company history can be found here on the company's site.)
Not everyone has moved over, of course, but the CLI on OS X gets a whole lot more use than the one on Windows, I imagine.
<p crude="on">
Of course the CLI(t) on OSX gets a whole lot more use -- it's actually effective at getting things moving. Banging away on a CLI(t) that doesn't have any effect gets old after a while.
Forgive me, might be the sleep deprivation and caffeine doing funny things to my mind, but I read your bit above about creating content that is exposed to a large mass and the image that popped to my mind was a bunch of monkeys throwing poo at a rhinoceros.
Mind you, I don't mean to be a dick with my subject. You bring up some good points:
If I need to use specific software, and it runs easier on XP than on Vista, or runs on XP and not on Vista, then Vista is not an upgrade for my purposes, and there is no reason to purchase Vista. Whether or not Vista is an overall superior OS compared to XP doesn't matter for my purposes if Vista is inferior for my specific software needs.
But I don't think Microsoft gives the proverbial flying f**k at a rolling doughnut what your needs are as a user. Once Vista is out for good, i.e. once Dell & other computer resellers have Vista pre-loaded, good luck getting a new machine with XP on it.
I actually think this is partly why Microsoft makes it so difficult / expensive to get your hands on full Windows OS installation disks. The "system restore" disks or partitions that are often the only option with new machines are generally useless for anything but the machines they come with, thereby ensuring that Microsoft can force consumers to eat whatever Microsoft feels like dishing out. In this case, overpriced and apparently unfinished dog food labeled "Vista".
Why perms get mangled is beyond me, I don't seem to have that problem on my Linux systems...
Which is exactly why any self-respecting salon makes sure to use only Linux Haircare V05. Inferior products can leave your hair dry, unmanageable, and even mangled in the worst cases. Some people claim it's the hardware vendor's fault when perms get caught in a drive and mangled, but then why have we never heard about any such problems with Linux? Because Linux is the best for your hair! Some varieties even come with a money-back guarantee!
"Linux -- for no more mangled perms!"
Actual counted ballots != All the ballots...
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 1
So the exit poll results are more accurate than the actual counted ballots. That's the premise of this book.
Actually, I think the premise is more that the exit poll results are more accurate than the actual counted ballots, because there were problems in how ballots were counted. As I think Stalin once famously said, it's not the votes that count, but who it is that counts the votes. And given that the divergence between exit polls and official results was apparently statistically significantly greater in those precincts that used no-paper-trail, highly-fudgeable, touch-screen voting machines, it looks pretty apparent that *something* dodgy was happening.
Okay, smart one, then try to find a single document describing hierarchy of internal OO.o objects - accessible from such scripts.
I know Python/Java/etc but I can't program anything for OO.o in it since DOM - main subject of programming - is documented nowhere.
VBS is shitty, but you can always record macro and correct it to your needs. For sake of experiment try to record macro in OO.o and see/correct the results. Even "steep" isn't proper adjective for the learning curve.
Thank you for making these points! I've had to use MSO with VBA for years due to in-house automation requirements (joy), and while the language isn't exactly fun:\, the DOMs and application APIs are immediately discoverable thanks to 1) generally extensive and useful documentation, and 2) autocomplete. So I can get something simple up and running usually inside of an hour.
Meanwhile, in OOo land, I've spent hours simply trying to dig through the documentation to figure out the hierarchy of objects and APIs for one frigging object. Who the hell wrote the API docs? I'm not familiar with Java, but the docs seem very Java-oriented -- is that terrible disconnected API soup a Java thing? I'm baffled. And frustrated enough (by other things as well*) that I've been unable to seriously recommend OOo.
* Lousy Asian-language support makes OOo a non-starter in my field of Japanese translation. It's galling, because OOo is sooo close to being a good idea, yet falls painfully far from the mark. <sigh.>
It's my hope that the developers will see this and create a suite that people can use. Most of them have used Word-Perfect or Microsoft Office and should not find it hard to see what we are talking about.(emphasis mine)
I'd like to agree with you, but my experience from followinga numberof bugs suggests otherwise. All of these are quite old, and prevent OOo from being much more useful than it presently is. Take the word-count issue, for instance: just about everyone I can think of that makes a living by writing absolutely fucking requires an accurate word count, configurable for different counts -- such as only the selected text, all text minus footnotes, all text everywhere in the document. And yet OOo does not seem to provide this. How blooming difficult can this be?
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) support in this area is completely non-existent. OOo is aware of double-byteness at some level, so why can't it discern CJK text from other types? Take the seventh paragraph from this page in Chinese as a good example. OOo seems to think the text has 7 "words" and 60 "characters". WTF is a "word" in this context? If I were to stretch the rules and actually count the Chinese words, I'd get something like 26, not 7. Hmm. But then, Chinese writers don't count words, they count characters (not including spaces). But then, OOo's "character" count is also useless in this regard, as we can't tell if this 60 "characters" includes spaces or not. Moreover, a lot of editors insist on having the Chinese character count and European word count -- this sample text includes two English words, so 60 "characters" here is beyond useless. AFIACT, no one dealing with CJK languages can use OOo exclusively for their business needs. And given a potential Chinese userbase of around a billion, that's a glaring shortfall.
Given that all of the bugs linked to above are easily handled by MSO (and if memory serves by WP), and that they have been languishing in OOo's bug tracker system for several years, I can only conclude that OOo devs either just don't give a shit, or that they are woefully ignorant of the competition's capabilities. I suspect it's a combination of the two -- coding this kind of functionality just isn't as sexy or fun as some of the other stuff, and so it's allowed to linger. And if this tendency continues (which is looking more and more likely as time passes), OOo will whither on the vine.
Forgive me, I am actually a bit bitter about this. I haven't the coding skills (nor time to acquire such skills) to help, or I'd just fix these damn issues myself. OOo is so close to useful. "OOo -- It's almost a good idea!" (TM) And therein lies some very intense frustration on the part of the OOo would-be userbase. Ah, well...
And where are the form marks -- the marks from the boards or whatever that were used to make the form for each block? Granted they'd probably be weathered off from the exposed surfaces, but they should still be there on protected surfaces.
Just an idea, but there might be very few unexposed surfaces that might have form marks, assuming a full wooden form was used for the first formed block and then the neighboring blocks were used for all but the exposed external surface.
Once again, an eloquent argument informed by extensive historical erudition, rather than the noisy platitudes one so often finds here at Slashdot. Thank you too for replying in more than just an emotional huff, which leaves you able to find agreement with your "opponent".
I'd agree, as there are two fields here that are extremely difficult -- voice recognition and machine translation -- which makes this all seem like so much pie in the sky. Anyone who's ever used voice recognition knows how spotty it can be, and anyone who's ever played with Babelfish (like this guy) knows how much humour can result. Now imagine these two lovely examples put to use on the battlefield, or at intel HQ, and some very unhappy possibilities arise.
I'm all a fan of research for learning's sake, but the article here makes it sound like we're going to get something Real Soon Now (TM), which I seriously doubt. All of which seems to lend credence to your statement:
It's really all about funding your academic buddies or whoever is going to be able to scratch you back in some way. It is very much an old boys network, with an emphasise on PR and not much about real science.
So yeah, "wow that would be handy", but don't anyone hold their breath.:p
As I just noted in another post, the current publicly available state of machine translation gives me little to fear as a professional translator. You note:
...with the only pitfall being poor grammer in the destination language...
I'd like to point out that "poor grammar" can often have disastrous consequences for the meaning. Take my previous example, "My dog has fleas." Babelfish's Japanese output is "Watashi no inu ni nomi ga aru." This backtranslates to "There is a chisel in my dog." The bolded word here is the kicker -- aru means "is / has / to be" depending on context, but is reserved mostly for inanimate subjects. Nomi is the subject here, which could be either "flea(s)" or "chisel(s)". When using aru, it becomes a chisel, an inanimate. Using correct grammar, Babelfish should have used iru, "is / has / to be" for *animate* subjects.
Let's take another example from Spanish. "I'm lost" should usually be translated as "Estoy perdido", using estoy to describe a transient state. With bad grammar, a translator (machine or otherwise) might use soy for permanent states, and produce "Soy perdido", which means something more like "I've lost my virginity." Woot!
Granted, context can make a lot of this much clearer, but it's still awfully muddy when bad grammar is thrown into the mix. Your comment suggests that poor grammar is a minor problem, but I'd beg to differ -- bad grammar can radically alter the meaning on the one hand, and it requires a full understanding of the context and intent of the source text to produce an accurate target, which is no mean feat in programming terms.
...it's just a matter of translation...
Which, happily enough given the complexity of the problem, leaves me pretty secure job-wise.:)
Seriously, try it. Input the sentence, "My dog has fleas." Go from English to Japanese, copy and paste the Japanese into the entry box, and translate back to English. "There is a chisel in my dog."
Just one of many reasons that I'm not that worried about my career as a Japanese - English translator.:P
Oh no, I agree, port security is a different issue and yes, IPv6 is indeed no magic bullet. My main point is simply that IPv6 makes it much easier for the whole peer-to-peer thing (and by peer-to-peer here, I mean much more than just P2P filesharing) that has the major media companies scared, so it makes sense that they wouldn't be exactly gung-ho to implement it. And as the GPP post notes, server connections via IPv4 NAT are much more limited than the straight-to-the-net possibilities found with IPv6.
Your quote completely sums up about 50% of the business reasons behind why ISPs are dragging their feet about implementing IPv6. Obviously, there's some overhead, which I count as the other 50%, but this particular 50% has to do with these two choice bits:
...the home user behind a NAT box has been relegated to the role of a consumer of Internet services.
and:
Sites with persistent, unrestricted Internet connections now constitute a privileged class, able to use the Internet in ways a consumer site cannot. They can set up servers, create new kinds of Internet services, establish peer to peer connections with other sites--employ the Internet in all of the ways it was originally intended to be used. We might term these sites "publishers" or "broadcasters", with the NATted/firewalled home users their consumers or audience.
Practically *everything* we've seen about the major media companies (which are increasingly also ISPs) is that they're struggling to force the internet into the TV paradigm. Unwittingly perhaps, but it seems that the NAT workaround has helped them do that. I'm not in the least surprised that these companies would do all they could to keep their audiences captive, and putting off IPv6 sure seems like part of that effort.
...what grounds do they have for suing? I'm absolutely baffled. I mean, I know the US patent system is more geborken than the Swedish Chef himself, but how can NTP sue if the patents they're basing the case on have already been invalidated? Are things really that screwed up?
Reading the summary posting here, I'm seriously beyond baffled as to why in the devil's briefcase any business would have a Win98 machine hooked up to the internet these days as anything other than a honeypot. And to have multiple machines? With access to sensitive data? Come *on*, man, wtf were these people thinking? Egad. More to the point, *were* these people thinking?
Get them off the net completely.
Because they never should have been there in the first place.
Perhaps I shouldn't, but I find it interesting how that whole ChoicePoint mess and the FBI's involvement has gotten *zero* play in the mainstream US media, with all the networks firmly behind purported winner Calderón, who is conveniently enough in the Bush camp. Meanwhile, the very real concerns of vote fraud voiced by Obrador and his supporters are completely ignored. Not too dissimilar from how the situation in Venezuela was misrepresented as some fringe group seizing power. I recall reading NYTimes articles about Venezuela and slowly realizing that all the people quoted as being against Chavez were suspiciously upper class and urban.
Slashdot Mirror
Just my 2p as an oddball, but I've always pronounced SQL as "squirrel". It makes more sense to me at least, given that the acronym comes from Structured Query Language --> "SQuerL". Also seems to fit better in that squirrels are known for storing things away (and recent research suggests they remember far more and forget far less than we initially thought), whereas for "sequel" I find myself asking, "sequel to what?"
Anyway...
Seriously folks, I see nothing in the parent's post that's funny.
And that, my friends, is one of the two lemmas here -- those countries spearheading WTO efforts (mostly the US, no?) are very interested in worldwide price parity if at all possible. The other lemma, though, is that these same countries are completely uninterested in effective economic parity, whereby that USD $x00 charge for whatever product (Windows in this case) is effectively equivalent to RUB 100, or JPY 10000, or what have you, where that USD $100 / RUB 100 / JPY 10000 will buy you an equivalent amount of stuff in other countries.
This, to me, is the grand hypocrisy of all such world trade efforts of late -- "We'll charge you our prices, but we'll be damned if we see you become as wealthy as we are." Makes me want to spit.
To repeat hackstraw's very pointed and valid questions:
Please, can someone make a case here? I too have seen only lukewarm "yeah, well, it's kinda okay" reviews, exactly the sort of damnation by faint praise that makes me want to run the other direction. Is there *any* compelling reason to get Vista? Aside from the patently illegal (but condoned by the corrupt US government) strong-arm tactics that effectively leave the majority of computer users with little choice (such as OEM Windows taxes)?
Not meaning to be too unbearably pedantic here, but it's pronounced "toe - say". Apparently the company was spun off from Toa Seiko in November of 1979, with its name most likely just a portmanteau of Toa Seiko --> To + Se. So it seems they've been around a goodly while. (For those able to read Japanese, a quick-and-dirty company history can be found here on the company's site.)
Cheers...
<p crude="on">
Of course the CLI(t) on OSX gets a whole lot more use -- it's actually effective at getting things moving. Banging away on a CLI(t) that doesn't have any effect gets old after a while.
</p>
Forgive me, might be the sleep deprivation and caffeine doing funny things to my mind, but I read your bit above about creating content that is exposed to a large mass and the image that popped to my mind was a bunch of monkeys throwing poo at a rhinoceros.
I think it's time for my nap...
Mind you, I don't mean to be a dick with my subject. You bring up some good points:
But I don't think Microsoft gives the proverbial flying f**k at a rolling doughnut what your needs are as a user. Once Vista is out for good, i.e. once Dell & other computer resellers have Vista pre-loaded, good luck getting a new machine with XP on it.
I actually think this is partly why Microsoft makes it so difficult / expensive to get your hands on full Windows OS installation disks. The "system restore" disks or partitions that are often the only option with new machines are generally useless for anything but the machines they come with, thereby ensuring that Microsoft can force consumers to eat whatever Microsoft feels like dishing out. In this case, overpriced and apparently unfinished dog food labeled "Vista".
Which is exactly why any self-respecting salon makes sure to use only Linux Haircare V05. Inferior products can leave your hair dry, unmanageable, and even mangled in the worst cases. Some people claim it's the hardware vendor's fault when perms get caught in a drive and mangled, but then why have we never heard about any such problems with Linux? Because Linux is the best for your hair! Some varieties even come with a money-back guarantee!
"Linux -- for no more mangled perms!"
Actually, I think the premise is more that the exit poll results are more accurate than the actual counted ballots, because there were problems in how ballots were counted. As I think Stalin once famously said, it's not the votes that count, but who it is that counts the votes. And given that the divergence between exit polls and official results was apparently statistically significantly greater in those precincts that used no-paper-trail, highly-fudgeable, touch-screen voting machines, it looks pretty apparent that *something* dodgy was happening.
Thank you for making these points! I've had to use MSO with VBA for years due to in-house automation requirements (joy), and while the language isn't exactly fun :\, the DOMs and application APIs are immediately discoverable thanks to 1) generally extensive and useful documentation, and 2) autocomplete. So I can get something simple up and running usually inside of an hour.
Meanwhile, in OOo land, I've spent hours simply trying to dig through the documentation to figure out the hierarchy of objects and APIs for one frigging object. Who the hell wrote the API docs? I'm not familiar with Java, but the docs seem very Java-oriented -- is that terrible disconnected API soup a Java thing? I'm baffled. And frustrated enough (by other things as well*) that I've been unable to seriously recommend OOo.
* Lousy Asian-language support makes OOo a non-starter in my field of Japanese translation. It's galling, because OOo is sooo close to being a good idea, yet falls painfully far from the mark. <sigh.>
"OpenOffice.org -- it's almost a Good Idea!" TM
I'd like to agree with you, but my experience from following a number of bugs suggests otherwise. All of these are quite old, and prevent OOo from being much more useful than it presently is. Take the word-count issue, for instance: just about everyone I can think of that makes a living by writing absolutely fucking requires an accurate word count, configurable for different counts -- such as only the selected text, all text minus footnotes, all text everywhere in the document. And yet OOo does not seem to provide this. How blooming difficult can this be?
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) support in this area is completely non-existent. OOo is aware of double-byteness at some level, so why can't it discern CJK text from other types? Take the seventh paragraph from this page in Chinese as a good example. OOo seems to think the text has 7 "words" and 60 "characters". WTF is a "word" in this context? If I were to stretch the rules and actually count the Chinese words, I'd get something like 26, not 7. Hmm. But then, Chinese writers don't count words, they count characters (not including spaces). But then, OOo's "character" count is also useless in this regard, as we can't tell if this 60 "characters" includes spaces or not. Moreover, a lot of editors insist on having the Chinese character count and European word count -- this sample text includes two English words, so 60 "characters" here is beyond useless. AFIACT, no one dealing with CJK languages can use OOo exclusively for their business needs. And given a potential Chinese userbase of around a billion, that's a glaring shortfall.
Given that all of the bugs linked to above are easily handled by MSO (and if memory serves by WP), and that they have been languishing in OOo's bug tracker system for several years, I can only conclude that OOo devs either just don't give a shit, or that they are woefully ignorant of the competition's capabilities. I suspect it's a combination of the two -- coding this kind of functionality just isn't as sexy or fun as some of the other stuff, and so it's allowed to linger. And if this tendency continues (which is looking more and more likely as time passes), OOo will whither on the vine.
Forgive me, I am actually a bit bitter about this. I haven't the coding skills (nor time to acquire such skills) to help, or I'd just fix these damn issues myself. OOo is so close to useful. "OOo -- It's almost a good idea!" (TM) And therein lies some very intense frustration on the part of the OOo would-be userbase. Ah, well...
Just an idea, but there might be very few unexposed surfaces that might have form marks, assuming a full wooden form was used for the first formed block and then the neighboring blocks were used for all but the exposed external surface.
Cheers,
Once again, an eloquent argument informed by extensive historical erudition, rather than the noisy platitudes one so often finds here at Slashdot. Thank you too for replying in more than just an emotional huff, which leaves you able to find agreement with your "opponent".
Cheers!
Wow, someone who's actually read and understood history. Kudos to the parent poster.
So then, we have:
...and...
Talk about name-mangling... :)
I'd agree, as there are two fields here that are extremely difficult -- voice recognition and machine translation -- which makes this all seem like so much pie in the sky. Anyone who's ever used voice recognition knows how spotty it can be, and anyone who's ever played with Babelfish (like this guy) knows how much humour can result. Now imagine these two lovely examples put to use on the battlefield, or at intel HQ, and some very unhappy possibilities arise.
I'm all a fan of research for learning's sake, but the article here makes it sound like we're going to get something Real Soon Now (TM), which I seriously doubt. All of which seems to lend credence to your statement:
So yeah, "wow that would be handy", but don't anyone hold their breath. :p
As I just noted in another post, the current publicly available state of machine translation gives me little to fear as a professional translator. You note:
I'd like to point out that "poor grammar" can often have disastrous consequences for the meaning. Take my previous example, "My dog has fleas." Babelfish's Japanese output is "Watashi no inu ni nomi ga aru." This backtranslates to "There is a chisel in my dog." The bolded word here is the kicker -- aru means "is / has / to be" depending on context, but is reserved mostly for inanimate subjects. Nomi is the subject here, which could be either "flea(s)" or "chisel(s)". When using aru, it becomes a chisel, an inanimate. Using correct grammar, Babelfish should have used iru , "is / has / to be" for *animate* subjects.
Let's take another example from Spanish. "I'm lost" should usually be translated as "Estoy perdido", using estoy to describe a transient state. With bad grammar, a translator (machine or otherwise) might use soy for permanent states, and produce "Soy perdido", which means something more like "I've lost my virginity." Woot!
Granted, context can make a lot of this much clearer, but it's still awfully muddy when bad grammar is thrown into the mix. Your comment suggests that poor grammar is a minor problem, but I'd beg to differ -- bad grammar can radically alter the meaning on the one hand, and it requires a full understanding of the context and intent of the source text to produce an accurate target, which is no mean feat in programming terms.
Which, happily enough given the complexity of the problem, leaves me pretty secure job-wise. :)
Cheers,
Seriously, try it. Input the sentence, "My dog has fleas." Go from English to Japanese, copy and paste the Japanese into the entry box, and translate back to English. "There is a chisel in my dog."
Just one of many reasons that I'm not that worried about my career as a Japanese - English translator. :P
Oh no, I agree, port security is a different issue and yes, IPv6 is indeed no magic bullet. My main point is simply that IPv6 makes it much easier for the whole peer-to-peer thing (and by peer-to-peer here, I mean much more than just P2P filesharing) that has the major media companies scared, so it makes sense that they wouldn't be exactly gung-ho to implement it. And as the GPP post notes, server connections via IPv4 NAT are much more limited than the straight-to-the-net possibilities found with IPv6.
Cheers,
Your quote completely sums up about 50% of the business reasons behind why ISPs are dragging their feet about implementing IPv6. Obviously, there's some overhead, which I count as the other 50%, but this particular 50% has to do with these two choice bits:
and:
Practically *everything* we've seen about the major media companies (which are increasingly also ISPs) is that they're struggling to force the internet into the TV paradigm. Unwittingly perhaps, but it seems that the NAT workaround has helped them do that. I'm not in the least surprised that these companies would do all they could to keep their audiences captive, and putting off IPv6 sure seems like part of that effort.
...what grounds do they have for suing? I'm absolutely baffled. I mean, I know the US patent system is more geborken than the Swedish Chef himself, but how can NTP sue if the patents they're basing the case on have already been invalidated? Are things really that screwed up?
Reading the summary posting here, I'm seriously beyond baffled as to why in the devil's briefcase any business would have a Win98 machine hooked up to the internet these days as anything other than a honeypot. And to have multiple machines? With access to sensitive data? Come *on*, man, wtf were these people thinking? Egad. More to the point, *were* these people thinking?
Because they never should have been there in the first place.
Who in the devil's briefcase ever says, "advertise to me on television"???? I am absolutely mystified by this. WTF???
(...with the possible exception of late-night ads for questionable, shall we say, "personal services"...)
Perhaps I shouldn't, but I find it interesting how that whole ChoicePoint mess and the FBI's involvement has gotten *zero* play in the mainstream US media, with all the networks firmly behind purported winner Calderón, who is conveniently enough in the Bush camp. Meanwhile, the very real concerns of vote fraud voiced by Obrador and his supporters are completely ignored. Not too dissimilar from how the situation in Venezuela was misrepresented as some fringe group seizing power. I recall reading NYTimes articles about Venezuela and slowly realizing that all the people quoted as being against Chavez were suspiciously upper class and urban.
Things that make you go, "hmm..."