Q. The President of the United States of America flies a fighter plane against alien ships.
A. So what's your point? Admittedly with your current draft-dodging coward of a president, I can understand your skepticism (if you're not American, I apologise for that).
Our current draft-dodging coward of a President was actually trained as a fighter pilot (in a unit that had no realistic chance of seeing combat, but that's hardly relevant to whether he could fly a fighter plane if he needed to.)
At the time the film was made, the previous President had been an actual combat fighter pilot. So no, not unrealistic at all. Although if someone told me that either of the Bushes would be an effective pilot in combat during their presidencies, years after having flown anything at all, I'd be a bit skeptical.
My point remains the same. The House (through their committee) defeated the idea of net neutrality, not the bill it was being attached to. They will continue to defeat the concept of net neutrality being made into law. There's absolutely nothing the Senate can do about it, so writing to your Senator is a waste of time. The way our legislature works, neither chamber can pass a law the other one absolutely refuses to accept.
In any case, from what I've heard there's not much support in the Senate for net neutrality, either, and if you think Senators are more likely than Representatives to switch their positions based on public opinion when Senate races require a lot more money from special interests to run, you're probably way too naive about the political process in this country. Unless Microsoft decides they care enough about this issue to outbribe the telecomms (err, sorry "out-lobby"), there's about 0 chance of this passing.
And you assume "low wages" are bad. Care to explain why, logically? As a competitor, I might like that the largest employer in my region pays low wages so I don't have to pay high wages to compete, so you can't assume that to be true.
Note that I actually hate Wal-Mart, and don't shop there. I just can't stand to see someone presenting such a horrible view about what "logic" is. A proposition is not "logical" just because you believe it to be true. And you can never attack the logic of an argument by attacking the truth of its premises. Whether a given argument is logically valid or not is completely independent of the factual content of its premises.
While an organization's leadership may want Fox to become a fastfood service, it's highly unlikely that it could survive that transition. That being said, are you any more right than the OP? (in that an organization's purpose is whatever the leadership decide it is).
If Rupert Murdoch decides that Fox News has the purpose of transforming itself from a cable news network to a fast food service, then that's Fox News' new purpose.
Whether or not Murdoch would have to be a complete idiot to do so, and whether or not they'd be successful at it is sort of irrelevant.
Lots of businesses fail all of the time. Their purpose was to make money, even if they failed horribly at it. One would be stretching definitions a bit if one claimed that the "purpose" of any failed business was to fail.
A news organization's purpose is to inform, not to proffer an opinion.
Wrong. In your opinion, a news organization's purpose should be to inform. In fact, any organization's purpose is whatever the leaders of that organization decide it is. The purpose of Fox News (along with the other, so-called "liberal" members of the corporate media) is to make a profit for their parent corporation. They do this by getting high ratings to drive up their advertising rates, and they've found that more people want to watch if you state opinions that match the viewers' own than if you just try to inform them.
Unless I've been living under a rock, Wal-Mart is, without a shred of bias, bad by many objective definitions of the word.
I hope the rock you're living under is comfortable.
"Bad" is not a judgement that can be applied to anything objectively "without a shred of bias". "Bad" is an inherently subjective judgement.
By the way, bringing up slavery is a nice demonstration of a logical fallacy. Now stop literally committing murder and genocide by continuing to post on Slashdot.
Oddly enough, the Hitler article seems to be more NPOV to me than what the person mentioning Hitler seems to want the Walmart article to be.
If someone rewrote the Hitler article to include a 50 page essay on why Hitler was the most horrible person of all time and removed most of the actual historical details of his life, that'd be a problem. Same deal if every single account of something oppressive he did was followed by an exposition of the views of people who'd criticized him for it at the time or since.
I would posit that maybe 1% of native English speakers would parse the sentence as you claim it "is" parsed, and that about as many native English speakers use the word "nor" as use the word "whom".
Yes. But only in the same way we're violating the power companies' right to property when we tell them that they're not allowed to charge the telecomms and cable companies for all the traffic going through those wires they stuck up on all of the power companies' big, expensive, wooden poles.
And the same way we're violating my property rights by not allowing me to charge the power companies rent for the parts of my property they've stuck those poles into.
Oh wait, am I not buying into Ayn Rand's syphilitic delusion of corporate self-reliance?
with companies such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and many others competing against the well funded Telecommunications lobbysts.
Ah, yes. Your monopoly profits at work -- ON BOTH SIDES!
Neither Google, Yahoo, nor Microsoft has a monopoly in Internet services (and Microsoft's monopoly in the desktop OS market is completely irrelevant to their involvement with MSN). They didn't build their businesses by using taxpayer money and eminent domain.
Even where Microsoft does have a monopoly, at least they achieved it in the free market rather than having the government mandate that only Windows could be installed on everyone's computer.
Umm, the bill isn't to allow the telecomm companies to screw the people, it's to prevent them from doing so. The fact that the House defeated it means that it's dead, and we're screwed. Writing to your Senator, even if for the first time in history a Senator actually cares what the voters think, will have absolutely no effect whatsoever.
This is not like a situation where the House approves some awful bill and we can hope the Senate defeats it.
I was talking about legal requirements. The government doesn't care if you have ID when you do any of the things you mention.
And I buy stuff with credit cards, rent videos, and even got a large cashiers check from my bank without showing any photo ID. My library card I got online. no ID there, either.
Apple's already building iSight cameras into the displays on their computers. Granted it's easier to cover the lens of the built-in camera than to cover your entire screen (especially if you still wanted to see the screen), but they've already got cameras you can't disconnect from the computer.
NOT supplying your identification is sufficient suspicion that you have done something to hide
Maybe in the minds of the cops and even of the legislators who wrote the stop-and-identify statutes. Not in the mind of the Supreme Court justices who ruled that such reasoning is invalid and a violation of the 4th Amendment.
I'm not claiming the probability of contracting AIDS in your scenario is 0, just that it's lower than 1.
Actually, the odds that one of the prostitutes you'd choose to have sex with are lower than 1. When you factor in the odds of a man contracting AIDS from a woman who has it, which are considerably lower than the other way around, your "You have AIDS--guaranteed" is even less guaranteed.
They cannot hold you until they identify you unless they have a reasonable suspicion that you've done something illegal. The Supreme Court has been very clear on this. Several states have had their "stop-and-identify" statutues thrown out as violations of the 4th Amendment because they allowed the police to detain people for no reason just because they didn't have ID.
Granted, you should carry ID just in case you come under reasonable suspicion of doing something illegal (even something as trivial as jaywalking could, I imagine, turn into something of a legal nightmare if the officer citing you can't establish your identity to know who to write the ticket to), but you absolutely, positively, can't be forced to produce identification without a good reason.
This is like lining up 16 Nigerian hookers, two at a time , and asking you you to screw one and see if you get AIDS. Well, statistically one in four has AIDS, so by the 16th hooker, you have AIDS -- guaranteed.
Your intelligence and grasp of statistics is truly staggering. Would you consider authoring the next edition of the statistics textbook my publishing company puts out? The current author has a PhD, but no matter how often we beat him and give him electrical shocks, he insists that if 25% of Americans have trait X, and I randomly grab 4 people off the street, I'm not guaranteed to get one person with trait X. Obviously he's not as brilliant as you. kthx!
Well, sure, but they can't arrest me without probable cause I've committed a crime just because I've got no ID card. They can't even write me a ticket for not having an ID card.
Even though we don't have a national ID card, we do need to carry identification around all of the time.
No we don't. If you're not driving a car, attempting to buy alcohol or cigarettes, or boarding a plane (and possibly, since 9/11, any other form of mass transit), you absolutely don't "need" to carry identification at all times.
Just so you know, you don't actually have to read every single article on Slashdot. If the topic doesn't interest you, you can just skip it.
I don't use Linux. I couldn't care less about the latest Linux release. Do I comment on every one pointing out that not all geeks use Linux? No. If Slashdot only posted articles that would interest every single person reading the site, there wouldn't be a single article here.
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A. So what's your point? Admittedly with your current draft-dodging coward of a president, I can understand your skepticism (if you're not American, I apologise for that).
Our current draft-dodging coward of a President was actually trained as a fighter pilot (in a unit that had no realistic chance of seeing combat, but that's hardly relevant to whether he could fly a fighter plane if he needed to.)
At the time the film was made, the previous President had been an actual combat fighter pilot. So no, not unrealistic at all. Although if someone told me that either of the Bushes would be an effective pilot in combat during their presidencies, years after having flown anything at all, I'd be a bit skeptical.
And you could argue that the Internet includes a piece of paper I have sitting on my desk. You'd be wrong either way.
And, more importantly, why didn't I make that revenue when I sent the message in the first place?
In any case, from what I've heard there's not much support in the Senate for net neutrality, either, and if you think Senators are more likely than Representatives to switch their positions based on public opinion when Senate races require a lot more money from special interests to run, you're probably way too naive about the political process in this country. Unless Microsoft decides they care enough about this issue to outbribe the telecomms (err, sorry "out-lobby"), there's about 0 chance of this passing.
Note that I actually hate Wal-Mart, and don't shop there. I just can't stand to see someone presenting such a horrible view about what "logic" is. A proposition is not "logical" just because you believe it to be true. And you can never attack the logic of an argument by attacking the truth of its premises. Whether a given argument is logically valid or not is completely independent of the factual content of its premises.
If Rupert Murdoch decides that Fox News has the purpose of transforming itself from a cable news network to a fast food service, then that's Fox News' new purpose.
Whether or not Murdoch would have to be a complete idiot to do so, and whether or not they'd be successful at it is sort of irrelevant.
Lots of businesses fail all of the time. Their purpose was to make money, even if they failed horribly at it. One would be stretching definitions a bit if one claimed that the "purpose" of any failed business was to fail.
Online phishing is already a violation of those very same federal wire fraud laws. This doesn't seem to be slowing it down.
Wrong. In your opinion, a news organization's purpose should be to inform. In fact, any organization's purpose is whatever the leaders of that organization decide it is. The purpose of Fox News (along with the other, so-called "liberal" members of the corporate media) is to make a profit for their parent corporation. They do this by getting high ratings to drive up their advertising rates, and they've found that more people want to watch if you state opinions that match the viewers' own than if you just try to inform them.
I hope the rock you're living under is comfortable.
"Bad" is not a judgement that can be applied to anything objectively "without a shred of bias". "Bad" is an inherently subjective judgement.
By the way, bringing up slavery is a nice demonstration of a logical fallacy. Now stop literally committing murder and genocide by continuing to post on Slashdot.
If someone rewrote the Hitler article to include a 50 page essay on why Hitler was the most horrible person of all time and removed most of the actual historical details of his life, that'd be a problem. Same deal if every single account of something oppressive he did was followed by an exposition of the views of people who'd criticized him for it at the time or since.
I would posit that maybe 1% of native English speakers would parse the sentence as you claim it "is" parsed, and that about as many native English speakers use the word "nor" as use the word "whom".
Yes. But only in the same way we're violating the power companies' right to property when we tell them that they're not allowed to charge the telecomms and cable companies for all the traffic going through those wires they stuck up on all of the power companies' big, expensive, wooden poles.
And the same way we're violating my property rights by not allowing me to charge the power companies rent for the parts of my property they've stuck those poles into.
Oh wait, am I not buying into Ayn Rand's syphilitic delusion of corporate self-reliance?
Ah, yes. Your monopoly profits at work -- ON BOTH SIDES!
Neither Google, Yahoo, nor Microsoft has a monopoly in Internet services (and Microsoft's monopoly in the desktop OS market is completely irrelevant to their involvement with MSN). They didn't build their businesses by using taxpayer money and eminent domain.
Even where Microsoft does have a monopoly, at least they achieved it in the free market rather than having the government mandate that only Windows could be installed on everyone's computer.
This is not like a situation where the House approves some awful bill and we can hope the Senate defeats it.
Only if the person programming the English to formal logic translator was an idiot.
And I buy stuff with credit cards, rent videos, and even got a large cashiers check from my bank without showing any photo ID. My library card I got online. no ID there, either.
Apple's already building iSight cameras into the displays on their computers. Granted it's easier to cover the lens of the built-in camera than to cover your entire screen (especially if you still wanted to see the screen), but they've already got cameras you can't disconnect from the computer.
Maybe in the minds of the cops and even of the legislators who wrote the stop-and-identify statutes. Not in the mind of the Supreme Court justices who ruled that such reasoning is invalid and a violation of the 4th Amendment.
I'm not claiming the probability of contracting AIDS in your scenario is 0, just that it's lower than 1.
Actually, the odds that one of the prostitutes you'd choose to have sex with are lower than 1. When you factor in the odds of a man contracting AIDS from a woman who has it, which are considerably lower than the other way around, your "You have AIDS--guaranteed" is even less guaranteed.
Granted, you should carry ID just in case you come under reasonable suspicion of doing something illegal (even something as trivial as jaywalking could, I imagine, turn into something of a legal nightmare if the officer citing you can't establish your identity to know who to write the ticket to), but you absolutely, positively, can't be forced to produce identification without a good reason.
Your intelligence and grasp of statistics is truly staggering. Would you consider authoring the next edition of the statistics textbook my publishing company puts out? The current author has a PhD, but no matter how often we beat him and give him electrical shocks, he insists that if 25% of Americans have trait X, and I randomly grab 4 people off the street, I'm not guaranteed to get one person with trait X. Obviously he's not as brilliant as you. kthx!
Well, sure, but they can't arrest me without probable cause I've committed a crime just because I've got no ID card. They can't even write me a ticket for not having an ID card.
No we don't. If you're not driving a car, attempting to buy alcohol or cigarettes, or boarding a plane (and possibly, since 9/11, any other form of mass transit), you absolutely don't "need" to carry identification at all times.
I don't use Linux. I couldn't care less about the latest Linux release. Do I comment on every one pointing out that not all geeks use Linux? No. If Slashdot only posted articles that would interest every single person reading the site, there wouldn't be a single article here.