Damn, nice unbiased article there. If Mr Bozell wasn't such an ignorant jerk he'd know that Hugh Hefner is anything but a sleazy pornographer. He not only affected the way people perceived nudity, but he also popularized a way of life that was hardly known in the fifties
Brent Bozell is an ignorant jerk, but Hugh Hefner is no saint either. The way of life that he popularized was defined by greed and selfishness. His great insight was to tie sexuality to money and power. I am all for throwing off the shackles of moral expectation, but I would rather not replace them with the shackles of greed and excessive consumption
But whats the possible damage if one of these plants pulls a Chernobyl on us?
Well, the most significant damage would be to our understanding of physics, since there is no possible way that a fusion reactor can "run away" like a fission reactor can.
Think about it this way: for a fusion reaction to happen, the outside control is critically important: in typical designs, the control is provided by huge electromagnets (magnetic confinement) or by powerful lasers (intertial confinement). If the reaction did somehow get "out of control," the first thing that would happen is that the control systems would be destroyed, and there would be no way to keep the reaction going.
Compare this to a fission reactor, where the reaction can proceed without any outside control whatsoever (for example, the natural uranium reactor in Russia or wherever that was). That is why there is so much effort currently put into designing "passive safety systems" for fission reactors - which are basically hacks that make a fission reactor behave as if it could not work without outside control.
Honestly, if it were so easy to get a runaway fusion reaction (in non-bomb form), don't you think we would have achieved one by now?
Does anybody know the filtering methods they were using before they decided to toss everything to wind?
They had a team of 20 monkeys that would read the emails and determine if they were spam. Unfortunately, the monkeys are easily distracted, so anytime they got spam about banannas, they would lose focus. This lead to the backlog.
If it can cool a keg of beer, it can cool a graphics card or a CPU as well.
Slashdot has to be the only place where people think "sure, keeping my beer cold is nice and all, but what would really be neat is if I could use it to run my computer 3% faster."
I hope you realize the rest of the world says "sure, making a computer run 3% faster is neat and all, but it would really be nice if it could keep my beer cold"
Allright, I give up. Arguing with you is like arguing with a creationist: you are so sure that you are right, that you just keep repeating yourself, ignoring the faults in your logic.
This isn't interesting at all, it is simply pathetic.
Me: 1) Was your interpertation of his post accurate? Yes. When he claimed that Apple would make more songs non-burnable, you were right to point out this implied that some were currently non-burnable, which was not true. 2) Were you right in saying that his post was "blatently false"? No. Technically, Apple going from no non-burnable songs to some non-burnable songs could be considered "making more songs non-burnable". Therefore, his post was not "blatently false". It was misleading, and, again, you were right to correct this misleading aspect.
You: Except that it's not technically correct. Apple only restricts the burning of a single playlist. iTunes doesn't keep track of how often you burn a single song; you can burn that song as many times as you want in as many different playlist combinations as you want. So yes, it was blatantly false, as in obviously false. What do you think "blatantly" means, exactly?
Response:
His statement was that Apple could, in the future, make more songs non-burnable. As I showed previously, there is nothing false about this. It is misleading, becuase it implies that Apple currently distributes some non-burnable cd's, but there is nothing false, blatently or otherwise, about it. I have no idea what the distinction between burning a song and a playlist has to do with it, since the statement is about what Apple could do in the future, not what it does now.
Me: 3) Should people who give positive moderation to posts like this lose their moderation priviledges? No. The point in moderation is to facilitate an interesting and informative discussion. It is not to vote on the right answer, and it is not to actively promote one position. Even if he had made a factually false statement, moderators still should not lose their mod rights for modding it up. That punishment should be reserved for those who actively sabatoge a discussion, not for those who, in attempting to factilitate a discussion, make a mistake.
You: Ah, so if someone posts a litany of lies regarding Apple, Microsoft or Linux, it should be modded up as "interesting" or "insightful" to encourage discussion instead of modded down? This gets better and better all the time. Maybe I'll post something about how OpenOffice is $50 more retail than Microsoft Office and has compatibility issues, so only morons would buy it. I'll try and act surprised when I get modded down.
Response:
I never said innacurate statements should be modded up. I said that people should not lose their moderation rights for modding an innacurate statement. They are two totally different things. Surely you can see the difference?
Me: I have never backpeddled. My veiw from the start has been that you were right to correct him, and wrong to insist that people should lose moderation rights for modding him up. That is still my view.
You: Except that you accused me of slandering and therefore misrepresenting his statements. Whoops. Keep backpedaling; make sure you don't trip.
Response:
Why do you write this after I wen't through a long discussion of how his post was misleading, not false? If you can find something in his post that is false, then I will retract my accusation of slander. Otherwise, calling his post blatently false, when it is merely misleading is slander.
You: What a load of horse shit. You yourself admitted that his statements were incorrect. Your big beef appears to be with my use of the word "blatantly," which is a matter of subjective opinion as to how obvious the falsity of his statements were. For some reason, you seem to think that the word "blatant" means something other than what it means -- obvious and conspicuous. I thought it was fairly obvious; you didn't.
Response:
I never admitted that his statements were incorrect, merely misleading. All of this is beside the point though, which is whether someone should lose the ability to moderate if they modded up a post that was incorrect. Forget I ever used the slander line, because I could care less whether you slandered him or not.
Allright, lets break it down. This really is not that complicated. There are three issues: whether your interpertation of his post was accurate, whether you were correct in saying that his statement was "blatently false", and whether people who mod posts like his up should lose their moderation rights. Lets take them one at a time.
1) Was your interpertation of his post accurate? Yes. When he claimed that Apple would make more songs non-burnable, you were right to point out this implied that some were currently non-burnable, which was not true.
2) Were you right in saying that his post was "blatently false"? No. Technically, Apple going from no non-burnable songs to some non-burnable songs could be considered "making more songs non-burnable". Therefore, his post was not "blatently false". It was misleading, and, again, you were right to correct this misleading aspect.
3) Should people who give positive moderation to posts like this lose their moderation priviledges? No. The point in moderation is to facilitate an interesting and informative discussion. It is not to vote on the right answer, and it is not to actively promote one position. Even if he had made a factually false statement, moderators still should not lose their mod rights for modding it up. That punishment should be reserved for those who actively sabatoge a discussion, not for those who, in attempting to factilitate a discussion, make a mistake.
Now, for some other stuff:
Give me a break; people who can't differentiate mistruths and FUD from facts should be given moderation points? That's a difficult position to defend.
That is not a difficult position to defend. Why have a moderation system at all if only "enlightened" people get to mod? A system like that is invariable skewed towards the view of the "enlightened," which may not represent the views of the unwashed masses at all. If the point of moderation was to pick out the right answer, a system like that might work. However, the point in moderation is to produce interesting discussions. Besides, if you are willing to go that far, why allow the "non-enlightened" to post at all? Why not just give posting rights to those who can pass a computer test or who have a college degree?
As to your backpedaling on your prior statements
I have never backpeddled. My veiw from the start has been that you were right to correct him, and wrong to insist that people should lose moderation rights for modding him up. That is still my view.
You explicitly accused me of slandering, meaning that you took issue with how I interpreted what he said.
Not true. You slandered him when you said that his post was "blatently false," which is independent of your interpertation of his post. Therefore, the rest of that paragraph of yours is meaningless.
The implications of what he said are perfectly open to criticism and correction. If you're going to dispute my interpretation of his statements, feel free to do so.
If you honestly dispute the implication that they're already flagging files as non-burnable, then please have your head examined. It's clear to anyone what he was trying to say.
I have not disputed your interpertation of his post, nor have I ever expressed any desire to do so. As I have said repeatedly, you were right to correct him. My objection is only to your insistence that those who modded him up should lose mod rights.
No, you blithering idiot. The policy is that people who mod posts up which contain blatantly false information shouldn't be mods. Is that such a difficult concept for you to grasp?
There was nothing blatently false in the post you slandered. All of your objections were to the tone or the implications of what he said, not the facts themselves. If you had intelligently corrected him, I would have had no problem. My objection is that you feel that anyone who thought his post was worth reading should lose their moderation privlidges. Not because he was wrong, but because he was too negative towards Apple.
And what in my post makes me a "blithering idiot"? I can understand if you disagree with it, but I don't think it was idiotic at all, and it definitely wasn't blithering.
I hope I can see the moderation of your post in the meta-mod panel just so I can make sure whatever imbecile modded you as "insightful" never gets mod points again.
So your policy is that only people who agree with you should be able to moderate? I bet that would generate a real interesting discussion.
Re:I like the lowtech charme of camphones.
on
Camera Phone Tips
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· Score: 1
Wow, looking at your pictures provided the best arguement yet that cell-phone cameras are a bad bad bad idea.
Grandparent: When it was revealed the Apple sold a $300 super-walkman that needed a $100 exchange for a refurbished iPod & battery after a year...
Parent: Wait... Did you see a battery door on the floor model or something? At what point did the salesman tell you about a cheap battery replacement program? Oh, you thought, "I payed $BIGDOLLARS for something and now you owe me the world.
This is exactly what makes the Apple Nuts so annoying - refusal to concede that Apple could ever do anything wrong. I think the ipod is great, and it is a very innovative product. Apple should be commended for revolutionizing the mp3 player market. That doesn't excuse the fact that the battery system was very poorly designed, and Apple overcharged to get a replacement battery that users shouldn't have needed so soon anyway.
You should take a clue from the Microsoft Nuts. They tend to be more pragmatic (of course, you have to be when you are trying to defend Microsoft products). They would say something like "Sure Windows 98 crashed all the time and was really buggy, at least it didn't require propretary hardware to run on" or "Microsoft didn't need to imbed a web browser in the OS, but it does save me alot of trouble installing one by myself"
The Tooth Fair does not exist. The existence of the Tooth Fairy does not depend in any way (pro or con) on popular opinion of the Tooth Fairy. Just because I cannot prove that the Tooth Fairy does not exist, I am not going assume she does. I will use logic and reason to make the best guess I can as to her existence. And unless anyone has any compelling evidence to show me, I currently am pretty convinced that the Tooth Fair does not exist.
Oh, and feel free to substutite God for the Tooth Fairy in the above paragraph. The meaning is the same.
Posting this concept on Slashdot is easy. Doing it is a whole different matter...
Mod the parrent down as a troll... nothing to see here.
I love it. Pure, honest intellectual fascism. Basically, you say "Your suggestion is impractical, so you should be modded down, and nobody should even see your idea."
I don't have any problems with your objections to his idea, but why insist that he should be modded troll for saying something that you disagree with?
Slashdot Mirror
Exploitive erotic channels such as Playboy TV are on digital cable or digital satellite.
Just so we are clear, does Playboy exploit the women who pose or the idiots who pay for it?
Yeah but the really good stuff just wont get shown by the pussy US networks
How do I get the pussy US network?
Were you being sarcastic? If so, nevermind. I am an idiot.
Damn, nice unbiased article there. If Mr Bozell wasn't such an ignorant jerk he'd know that Hugh Hefner is anything but a sleazy pornographer. He not only affected the way people perceived nudity, but he also popularized a way of life that was hardly known in the fifties
Brent Bozell is an ignorant jerk, but Hugh Hefner is no saint either. The way of life that he popularized was defined by greed and selfishness. His great insight was to tie sexuality to money and power. I am all for throwing off the shackles of moral expectation, but I would rather not replace them with the shackles of greed and excessive consumption
But whats the possible damage if one of these plants pulls a Chernobyl on us?
Well, the most significant damage would be to our understanding of physics, since there is no possible way that a fusion reactor can "run away" like a fission reactor can.
Think about it this way: for a fusion reaction to happen, the outside control is critically important: in typical designs, the control is provided by huge electromagnets (magnetic confinement) or by powerful lasers (intertial confinement). If the reaction did somehow get "out of control," the first thing that would happen is that the control systems would be destroyed, and there would be no way to keep the reaction going.
Compare this to a fission reactor, where the reaction can proceed without any outside control whatsoever (for example, the natural uranium reactor in Russia or wherever that was). That is why there is so much effort currently put into designing "passive safety systems" for fission reactors - which are basically hacks that make a fission reactor behave as if it could not work without outside control.
Honestly, if it were so easy to get a runaway fusion reaction (in non-bomb form), don't you think we would have achieved one by now?
Does anybody know the filtering methods they were using before they decided to toss everything to wind?
They had a team of 20 monkeys that would read the emails and determine if they were spam. Unfortunately, the monkeys are easily distracted, so anytime they got spam about banannas, they would lose focus. This lead to the backlog.
What? you have never gotten bananna spam before?
If it can cool a keg of beer, it can cool a graphics card or a CPU as well.
Slashdot has to be the only place where people think "sure, keeping my beer cold is nice and all, but what would really be neat is if I could use it to run my computer 3% faster."
I hope you realize the rest of the world says "sure, making a computer run 3% faster is neat and all, but it would really be nice if it could keep my beer cold"
Allright, I give up. Arguing with you is like arguing with a creationist: you are so sure that you are right, that you just keep repeating yourself, ignoring the faults in your logic.
This isn't interesting at all, it is simply pathetic.
Me:
1) Was your interpertation of his post accurate? Yes. When he claimed that Apple would make more songs non-burnable, you were right to point out this implied that some were currently non-burnable, which was not true. 2) Were you right in saying that his post was "blatently false"? No. Technically, Apple going from no non-burnable songs to some non-burnable songs could be considered "making more songs non-burnable". Therefore, his post was not "blatently false". It was misleading, and, again, you were right to correct this misleading aspect.
You:
Except that it's not technically correct. Apple only restricts the burning of a single playlist. iTunes doesn't keep track of how often you burn a single song; you can burn that song as many times as you want in as many different playlist combinations as you want. So yes, it was blatantly false, as in obviously false. What do you think "blatantly" means, exactly?
Response:
His statement was that Apple could, in the future, make more songs non-burnable. As I showed previously, there is nothing false about this. It is misleading, becuase it implies that Apple currently distributes some non-burnable cd's, but there is nothing false, blatently or otherwise, about it. I have no idea what the distinction between burning a song and a playlist has to do with it, since the statement is about what Apple could do in the future, not what it does now.
Me:
3) Should people who give positive moderation to posts like this lose their moderation priviledges? No. The point in moderation is to facilitate an interesting and informative discussion. It is not to vote on the right answer, and it is not to actively promote one position. Even if he had made a factually false statement, moderators still should not lose their mod rights for modding it up. That punishment should be reserved for those who actively sabatoge a discussion, not for those who, in attempting to factilitate a discussion, make a mistake.
You:
Ah, so if someone posts a litany of lies regarding Apple, Microsoft or Linux, it should be modded up as "interesting" or "insightful" to encourage discussion instead of modded down? This gets better and better all the time. Maybe I'll post something about how OpenOffice is $50 more retail than Microsoft Office and has compatibility issues, so only morons would buy it. I'll try and act surprised when I get modded down.
Response:
I never said innacurate statements should be modded up. I said that people should not lose their moderation rights for modding an innacurate statement. They are two totally different things. Surely you can see the difference?
Me:
I have never backpeddled. My veiw from the start has been that you were right to correct him, and wrong to insist that people should lose moderation rights for modding him up. That is still my view.
You:
Except that you accused me of slandering and therefore misrepresenting his statements. Whoops. Keep backpedaling; make sure you don't trip.
Response:
Why do you write this after I wen't through a long discussion of how his post was misleading, not false? If you can find something in his post that is false, then I will retract my accusation of slander. Otherwise, calling his post blatently false, when it is merely misleading is slander.
You:
What a load of horse shit. You yourself admitted that his statements were incorrect. Your big beef appears to be with my use of the word "blatantly," which is a matter of subjective opinion as to how obvious the falsity of his statements were. For some reason, you seem to think that the word "blatant" means something other than what it means -- obvious and conspicuous. I thought it was fairly obvious; you didn't.
Response:
I never admitted that his statements were incorrect, merely misleading. All of this is beside the point though, which is whether someone should lose the ability to moderate if they modded up a post that was incorrect. Forget I ever used the slander line, because I could care less whether you slandered him or not.
Allright, lets break it down. This really is not that complicated. There are three issues: whether your interpertation of his post was accurate, whether you were correct in saying that his statement was "blatently false", and whether people who mod posts like his up should lose their moderation rights. Lets take them one at a time.
1) Was your interpertation of his post accurate? Yes. When he claimed that Apple would make more songs non-burnable, you were right to point out this implied that some were currently non-burnable, which was not true.
2) Were you right in saying that his post was "blatently false"? No. Technically, Apple going from no non-burnable songs to some non-burnable songs could be considered "making more songs non-burnable". Therefore, his post was not "blatently false". It was misleading, and, again, you were right to correct this misleading aspect.
3) Should people who give positive moderation to posts like this lose their moderation priviledges? No. The point in moderation is to facilitate an interesting and informative discussion. It is not to vote on the right answer, and it is not to actively promote one position. Even if he had made a factually false statement, moderators still should not lose their mod rights for modding it up. That punishment should be reserved for those who actively sabatoge a discussion, not for those who, in attempting to factilitate a discussion, make a mistake.
Now, for some other stuff:
Give me a break; people who can't differentiate mistruths and FUD from facts should be given moderation points? That's a difficult position to defend.
That is not a difficult position to defend. Why have a moderation system at all if only "enlightened" people get to mod? A system like that is invariable skewed towards the view of the "enlightened," which may not represent the views of the unwashed masses at all. If the point of moderation was to pick out the right answer, a system like that might work. However, the point in moderation is to produce interesting discussions. Besides, if you are willing to go that far, why allow the "non-enlightened" to post at all? Why not just give posting rights to those who can pass a computer test or who have a college degree?
As to your backpedaling on your prior statements
I have never backpeddled. My veiw from the start has been that you were right to correct him, and wrong to insist that people should lose moderation rights for modding him up. That is still my view.
You explicitly accused me of slandering, meaning that you took issue with how I interpreted what he said.
Not true. You slandered him when you said that his post was "blatently false," which is independent of your interpertation of his post. Therefore, the rest of that paragraph of yours is meaningless.
The implications of what he said are perfectly open to criticism and correction. If you're going to dispute my interpretation of his statements, feel free to do so.
If you honestly dispute the implication that they're already flagging files as non-burnable, then please have your head examined. It's clear to anyone what he was trying to say.
I have not disputed your interpertation of his post, nor have I ever expressed any desire to do so. As I have said repeatedly, you were right to correct him. My objection is only to your insistence that those who modded him up should lose mod rights.
No, you blithering idiot. The policy is that people who mod posts up which contain blatantly false information shouldn't be mods. Is that such a difficult concept for you to grasp?
There was nothing blatently false in the post you slandered. All of your objections were to the tone or the implications of what he said, not the facts themselves. If you had intelligently corrected him, I would have had no problem. My objection is that you feel that anyone who thought his post was worth reading should lose their moderation privlidges. Not because he was wrong, but because he was too negative towards Apple.
And what in my post makes me a "blithering idiot"? I can understand if you disagree with it, but I don't think it was idiotic at all, and it definitely wasn't blithering.
I hope I can see the moderation of your post in the meta-mod panel just so I can make sure whatever imbecile modded you as "insightful" never gets mod points again.
So your policy is that only people who agree with you should be able to moderate? I bet that would generate a real interesting discussion.
Wow, looking at your pictures provided the best arguement yet that cell-phone cameras are a bad bad bad idea.
I mean, what if I had a pair of smart shoes that were attached to a motorcycle...
Then you would have a really hard time picking up chicks.
Grandparent: When it was revealed the Apple sold a $300 super-walkman that needed a $100 exchange for a refurbished iPod & battery after a year ...
Parent: Wait... Did you see a battery door on the floor model or something? At what point did the salesman tell you about a cheap battery replacement program? Oh, you thought, "I payed $BIGDOLLARS for something and now you owe me the world.
This is exactly what makes the Apple Nuts so annoying - refusal to concede that Apple could ever do anything wrong. I think the ipod is great, and it is a very innovative product. Apple should be commended for revolutionizing the mp3 player market. That doesn't excuse the fact that the battery system was very poorly designed, and Apple overcharged to get a replacement battery that users shouldn't have needed so soon anyway.
You should take a clue from the Microsoft Nuts. They tend to be more pragmatic (of course, you have to be when you are trying to defend Microsoft products). They would say something like "Sure Windows 98 crashed all the time and was really buggy, at least it didn't require propretary hardware to run on" or "Microsoft didn't need to imbed a web browser in the OS, but it does save me alot of trouble installing one by myself"
haven't you heard of the fucking First Amendment?
Is that the amendment that says the right to free sex shall not be infringed?
What? There is no Flying Purple People Eater? My existence is meaningless.
The Tooth Fair does not exist. The existence of the Tooth Fairy does not depend in any way (pro or con) on popular opinion of the Tooth Fairy. Just because I cannot prove that the Tooth Fairy does not exist, I am not going assume she does. I will use logic and reason to make the best guess I can as to her existence. And unless anyone has any compelling evidence to show me, I currently am pretty convinced that the Tooth Fair does not exist.
Oh, and feel free to substutite God for the Tooth Fairy in the above paragraph. The meaning is the same.
Posting this concept on Slashdot is easy. Doing it is a whole different matter ...
Mod the parrent down as a troll... nothing to see here.
I love it. Pure, honest intellectual fascism. Basically, you say "Your suggestion is impractical, so you should be modded down, and nobody should even see your idea."
I don't have any problems with your objections to his idea, but why insist that he should be modded troll for saying something that you disagree with?
So would this be: In Soviet Israel, Windows Runs Linux?
Four years old, and he can still jump around do all those backflips? That is amazing.
Who the hell would patent Clippy? That thing is annoying. And now we are gonna have him in the CPU?
I see you are trying to push onto the stack. Would you like help with that?
You mean The Core?
"Still and all" - what does that mean? It means the submitter is a moron.