what is clear today is that greenhouse gas emissions are one of the factors that contribute to climate change, and that the use of fossil fuels is a major source of these emissions
Well, there you go. While it's easy to demonize any large organization of people, I hope the critics of ExxonMobile will at least acknowledge that the Big Mean Evil Corporation DOES recognize the role its products play in global warming. This admission on their part represents a significant difference from the positions of the tobacco companies back during the 1970s regarding the impact of cigarette smoking on health.
Now if someone could just explain to me how ExxonMobile is responsible for the fact that the glaciers of North America have been melting and receding for the past 12,000 years, we'll be all set.
So, how would the ownership being private make any difference to the quality of education? It would probably just end up costing the government a lot more money, and a bunch of shonky institutions would spring up to suck off the government teat, with little concern for quality education.
Then how do you explain the fact that many private colleges and universities exist, and that these private institutions often provide a higher quality of education that the government-funded institutions? Furthermore, can you not see how private ownership of banks, shipping companies, hospitals, and other large institutions that serve the public almost always provide a higher quality of service that their government counterparts? What makes education so special that only governments can provide a high quality product?
Sorry, no everyone subscribes to your idea that facts should always be omitted because of political correctness.
It's not about political correctness -- it's about relevance. The author of this posting chose to omit many facts, such as the aide's weight, height, hair color, alma mater, home state, favorite color, and religious affiliation. Nevertheless, the author took the time to explicitly point out the aide's political affiliation, and I believe that choice was politically motivated. I fail to see how the aide's political affiliation -- regardless of what it is -- bears any relevance to the story at hand, except as a means of promoting stereotypes.
I bet if it a democrat you would be yelling about how this proves they are all idiots.
You would lose that bet, my friend. I think that mentioning the aide's political affiliation, whatever it may be, is immaterial to the story in question. I also believe the original poster only included this information to further a stereotype.
I do believe that Slashdot does have a 'liberal bias', otherwise I'd have lots and lots of more 'troll' and 'overrated' hits for many of my comments.
Shoot -- then I must be one-of-a-kind. I'm a software engineer but also a Conservative / Libertarian (because I find the logic of free will and free markets compelling. I also find the lucid arguments of Rousseau's The Social Contract and Bastiat's The Law appealing.) Nevertheless, I do not automatically mod down liberal views if they are presented with some level of logic, respect, and tact. I believe all views should be heard -- but I also believe that all discourse should be as civil as possible. I only react negatively to people who either attack those with whom they disagree or who insist on using superlatives and generalizations such as "every Republican" or "every Democrat" or "always" or "never", etc.
I just wanted you to know that some members of the Slashdot audience are right-wing conservatives who don't have a knee-jerk need to mod down liberals and Democrats. I actually look forward to reading articulate arguments from the "other" side as they help me to clarify my own opinions.
So, now linking to a publicly-accessible file on a web server is a copyright infringement? What if I simply publish the URL on my site but without the hyperlink? What if I publish the URL of an "unlinkable" file in the newspaper? How can telling people the LOCATION of information infringe on the rights of the copyright holder?
How does mentioning the political affiliation of the aide in question illuminate this story? It seems more likely that the poster included this bit of trivia as a means of reinforcing stereotypes.
I have several sites, and have found that the easiest way to obfuscate my e-mail address is to put REMOVETHISPART.com at the end (i.e., joeblow@mywebsite.REMOVETHISPART.com.) Most people seem capable of figuring it out, and no one has complained so far.
Number of countries invaded by Chavez: 1 (attempted) -- when he tried to overthrow the elected government of Venezuela in 1992.
Number of countries invaded by Bush: zero. All military interventions under the Bush administration have occurred with the support of the United States Congress.
And besides, this thread was about the quality of domestic life under Bush and Chavez, respectively, not about their foreign policies.
Chavez is considerably worse thanjust "not a saint". And comparing him to an elected President of the US is somewhat absurd. Anyone who thinks life in Venezuelaunder Chavez would be nicer than life in the United States under Bush should put their money where their mouth is and move there.
Ah, now I know why I feel a strange disturbance in the Force every time I visit Slashdot -- as if a million web designers cried out all at once and then suddenly went silent.
these are the only things politicians care about these days: money, media and votes
Based on my reading of history, that statement has been true for all time -- not just in "these days." For example, run this search or this search over at the Google New archive and notice how many results come back, and the dates that appear on the articles.
(I ran the second of these searches and came across these great quotes from 1864 and 340 BC):
Politicians are like the bones of a horse's foreshoulder--not a straight one in it.--Wendell Phillips, 1864.
The good of man must be the end of the science of politics.--Aristotle, circa 340 B.C
And look at Ford, look at Sony, look at a lot of other 'solid' brands that could seemingly do no wrong.... now battling survival.
I think you meant "battling for survival," but I like the way you put it. Especially in the case of Ford, it sometimes does seem like they're battling survival itself, and determined to overcome it at all costs.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is moving ahead this summer to shut down libraries, end public access to research materials and box up unique collections on the assumption that Congress will not reverse President Bush's proposed budget reductions.
Key phrase: the assumption that Congress will not reverse President Bush's proposed budget reductions. Keep in mind that (A) The EPA is closing the libraries due to budget reductions, (B) under the Constitution, The President does not report to Congress, nor does the President occupy a subordinate branch of government to Congress, nor does the President need Congressional approval for every action taken by the Executive branch, and (C) Congress could reopen the libraries by approving additional funding for them (something the President cannot do.)
Well just think about this. DRM is their way of saying "fork over your money, you'll get to use it on our terms."
Nothing wrong with that. That's the right our society confers on anybody who creates any work of art or information. These types of protections for content producers have existed since long before the digital age. You could not, for example, check out a copyrighted book from the library and make a photocopy of it in its entirety. Nor could you read the entire thing aloud over the radio without permission from the copyright holder. Those who hold the copyrights get to dictate how others will use their creations, when it comes to reproduction, performance, and distribution.
No one seems to complain that Flickr, for example, allows me to specify a license on my photographs that essentially says, "you'll get to use these photos on my terms." I wouldn't want them to remove the ability to license my photos even if someone did complain about "restrictive licensing."
It seems that those who complain the loudest about restrictive licensing are those who don't produce any creative content worth protecting.
DRM breaks otherwise valid products...
That, I believe, is really the heart of the problem. The main DRM issues on which the "community" should focus, in my opinion, arise from the sucky implementation of DRM, not from the principles underlying DRM. If someone ever gets the implementation right -- meeting the two goals of protecting your fair use rights while also protecting the content owner's copy rights, then we should all feel happy and move on to other issues, such as whether Al Gore and Dick Cheney are, in fact, robots. The answer to this issue, in short, is DRM that works, rather than no DRM at all.
You may loathe the fact that people want to protect distribution and performance of the creative content they own in order to make money from it, but the fact remains that recording equipment, engineers, producers, trucks, photographers, singers, writers, actors, CGI artists, etc., all cost money -- and no one is going to go into the movie or music business just to satisfy your desire for free entertainment.
MS is making a token move towards web standards (yes, they have an impressive list of fixes, but there are still another magnitude of quirks still around) to say just that 'we care about web standards, don't leave yet', in hopes that their floundering will keep people from jumping ship.
Wow! We have mindreaders here on Slashdot! It's good to know that at least some of the posters here have the ESP necessary to divine the motives behind other people's actions.
What I see is what I would have to call "image replacement" problems -- for example, where there should be an image of five yellow stars, I see the DVD cover for "Eight Below." The next time I log on to Netflix, the yellow srar image will appear correctly but some OTHER graphic replacement or interchange will occur. It usually applies to about 20% of the images on the site -- where there should be a graphical button, I see a DVD cover or some other image from the site. When I switch to IE, the site appears normal.
If Microsoft delivers with IE7, and that's a big if, then they will likely regain some market share.
I agree -- Personally, I love Firefox and will stick with it for the foreseeable future. My wife, my Dad, my sister, and my Mom, on the other hand, all visit web sites periodically that don't work completely right under Firefox -- especially their online banking sites, Netflix, and others. These three family members will likely switch back to IE7 if they perceive it to be stable, secure, fast, and easy to use. Heck -- even I use the IE-Tab Firefox extension to render some pages in IE because they don't work right in Firefox (such as Netflix and certain pages with embedded audio players.)
Voting is mandatory in something like 24 countries in the world. I agree whole-heartedly with the parent poster -- For the health of a Republic, voting should be a required civic responsibility, like paying your taxes, registering for the draft, and serving on juries. And, like those other responsibilities, failure to fulfill one's responsibility should be punishable by a fine.
Read The Social Contract by Rousseau if you'd like to learn more about the logic of mandatory voting. Basically, any government not elected by a majority of the people it purports to represent is inherently not legitimate. It does not have the consent of the governed. In order to assure that our government always has the consent of the governed, we need to require eligible voters to vote.
Whenever someone recommends mandatory voting, someone else always pulls out the "but then ignorant, uninformed people will vote" argument. This argument has several problems, not the least of which is that it relies on the assumption that a greater proportion of ignorant, uninformed people will vote when voting is mandatory than do so today. The proponents of the "voting should not be mandatory because more stupid people will vote" argument bear the burden of proof for this underlying assumption, but none of them has ever provided evidence to support it.
Mandatory voting, as well as mandatory service in the government, would go a long way toward improving the health of our Republic. Read Rousseau and see what he says about the hazards of people serving the government with their "purse instead of their person."
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there you go. While it's easy to demonize any large organization of people, I hope the critics of ExxonMobile will at least acknowledge that the Big Mean Evil Corporation DOES recognize the role its products play in global warming. This admission on their part represents a significant difference from the positions of the tobacco companies back during the 1970s regarding the impact of cigarette smoking on health.
Now if someone could just explain to me how ExxonMobile is responsible for the fact that the glaciers of North America have been melting and receding for the past 12,000 years, we'll be all set.
Then how do you explain the fact that many private colleges and universities exist, and that these private institutions often provide a higher quality of education that the government-funded institutions? Furthermore, can you not see how private ownership of banks, shipping companies, hospitals, and other large institutions that serve the public almost always provide a higher quality of service that their government counterparts? What makes education so special that only governments can provide a high quality product?
It's not about political correctness -- it's about relevance. The author of this posting chose to omit many facts, such as the aide's weight, height, hair color, alma mater, home state, favorite color, and religious affiliation. Nevertheless, the author took the time to explicitly point out the aide's political affiliation, and I believe that choice was politically motivated. I fail to see how the aide's political affiliation -- regardless of what it is -- bears any relevance to the story at hand, except as a means of promoting stereotypes.
You would lose that bet, my friend. I think that mentioning the aide's political affiliation, whatever it may be, is immaterial to the story in question. I also believe the original poster only included this information to further a stereotype.
Shoot -- then I must be one-of-a-kind. I'm a software engineer but also a Conservative / Libertarian (because I find the logic of free will and free markets compelling. I also find the lucid arguments of Rousseau's The Social Contract and Bastiat's The Law appealing.) Nevertheless, I do not automatically mod down liberal views if they are presented with some level of logic, respect, and tact. I believe all views should be heard -- but I also believe that all discourse should be as civil as possible. I only react negatively to people who either attack those with whom they disagree or who insist on using superlatives and generalizations such as "every Republican" or "every Democrat" or "always" or "never", etc.
I just wanted you to know that some members of the Slashdot audience are right-wing conservatives who don't have a knee-jerk need to mod down liberals and Democrats. I actually look forward to reading articulate arguments from the "other" side as they help me to clarify my own opinions.
Peace, brother. Peace.
So, now linking to a publicly-accessible file on a web server is a copyright infringement? What if I simply publish the URL on my site but without the hyperlink? What if I publish the URL of an "unlinkable" file in the newspaper? How can telling people the LOCATION of information infringe on the rights of the copyright holder?
How does mentioning the political affiliation of the aide in question illuminate this story? It seems more likely that the poster included this bit of trivia as a means of reinforcing stereotypes.
I have several sites, and have found that the easiest way to obfuscate my e-mail address is to put REMOVETHISPART.com at the end (i.e., joeblow@mywebsite.REMOVETHISPART.com.) Most people seem capable of figuring it out, and no one has complained so far.
Number of countries invaded by Chavez: 1 (attempted) -- when he tried to overthrow the elected government of Venezuela in 1992.
Number of countries invaded by Bush: zero. All military interventions under the Bush administration have occurred with the support of the United States Congress.
And besides, this thread was about the quality of domestic life under Bush and Chavez, respectively, not about their foreign policies.
I mean, after all, he may have been permanently traumatized by the Bonsai Kitten hoax.
Chavez is considerably worse than just "not a saint". And comparing him to an elected President of the US is somewhat absurd. Anyone who thinks life in Venezuela under Chavez would be nicer than life in the United States under Bush should put their money where their mouth is and move there.
Ah, now I know why I feel a strange disturbance in the Force every time I visit Slashdot -- as if a million web designers cried out all at once and then suddenly went silent.
As soon as Microsoft Update downloads and installs IE7 on every Windows machine with automatic updates enabled, this race will be over.
That is, unless you read Slashdot and change your preferences to mod Insightful and Informative comments +2.
Based on my reading of history, that statement has been true for all time -- not just in "these days." For example, run this search or this search over at the Google New archive and notice how many results come back, and the dates that appear on the articles.
(I ran the second of these searches and came across these great quotes from 1864 and 340 BC):
I think you meant "battling for survival," but I like the way you put it. Especially in the case of Ford, it sometimes does seem like they're battling survival itself, and determined to overcome it at all costs.
Isn't this called "radio"?
No one seems to complain that Flickr, for example, allows me to specify a license on my photographs that essentially says, "you'll get to use these photos on my terms." I wouldn't want them to remove the ability to license my photos even if someone did complain about "restrictive licensing."
It seems that those who complain the loudest about restrictive licensing are those who don't produce any creative content worth protecting.
That, I believe, is really the heart of the problem. The main DRM issues on which the "community" should focus, in my opinion, arise from the sucky implementation of DRM, not from the principles underlying DRM. If someone ever gets the implementation right -- meeting the two goals of protecting your fair use rights while also protecting the content owner's copy rights, then we should all feel happy and move on to other issues, such as whether Al Gore and Dick Cheney are, in fact, robots. The answer to this issue, in short, is DRM that works, rather than no DRM at all.
You may loathe the fact that people want to protect distribution and performance of the creative content they own in order to make money from it, but the fact remains that recording equipment, engineers, producers, trucks, photographers, singers, writers, actors, CGI artists, etc., all cost money -- and no one is going to go into the movie or music business just to satisfy your desire for free entertainment.
MS is making a token move towards web standards (yes, they have an impressive list of fixes, but there are still another magnitude of quirks still around) to say just that 'we care about web standards, don't leave yet', in hopes that their floundering will keep people from jumping ship.
Wow! We have mindreaders here on Slashdot! It's good to know that at least some of the posters here have the ESP necessary to divine the motives behind other people's actions.
This story act like a collectively recognized cue for making MS vs. Mozilla jokes, same with other topics that appeare at regular intervals.
Here's a way to make every Slashdot discussion seem smarter and more interesting (assuming you are a registered and signed-in Slashdot user):
- Go to the top of the page and click Preferences
- Click Comments (between "Homepage" and "Messages".)
- Scroll down and configure your settings thusly:
- Display Mode: Threaded
- Sort Order: Highest Scores First
- Threshold: 2:Score +2
- Reparent highly rated comments: checked
- Reason Modifier: Insightful +2; Informative +1; Flamebait -1; Troll -1 (This is the key that makes the whole thing work)
- Karma Bonus: +1
- Click Save (very important!)
Voila!What I see is what I would have to call "image replacement" problems -- for example, where there should be an image of five yellow stars, I see the DVD cover for "Eight Below." The next time I log on to Netflix, the yellow srar image will appear correctly but some OTHER graphic replacement or interchange will occur. It usually applies to about 20% of the images on the site -- where there should be a graphical button, I see a DVD cover or some other image from the site. When I switch to IE, the site appears normal.
If Microsoft delivers with IE7, and that's a big if, then they will likely regain some market share.
I agree -- Personally, I love Firefox and will stick with it for the foreseeable future. My wife, my Dad, my sister, and my Mom, on the other hand, all visit web sites periodically that don't work completely right under Firefox -- especially their online banking sites, Netflix, and others. These three family members will likely switch back to IE7 if they perceive it to be stable, secure, fast, and easy to use. Heck -- even I use the IE-Tab Firefox extension to render some pages in IE because they don't work right in Firefox (such as Netflix and certain pages with embedded audio players.)
...and wrap it in cellophane?
Voting is mandatory in something like 24 countries in the world. I agree whole-heartedly with the parent poster -- For the health of a Republic, voting should be a required civic responsibility, like paying your taxes, registering for the draft, and serving on juries. And, like those other responsibilities, failure to fulfill one's responsibility should be punishable by a fine.
Read The Social Contract by Rousseau if you'd like to learn more about the logic of mandatory voting. Basically, any government not elected by a majority of the people it purports to represent is inherently not legitimate. It does not have the consent of the governed. In order to assure that our government always has the consent of the governed, we need to require eligible voters to vote.
Whenever someone recommends mandatory voting, someone else always pulls out the "but then ignorant, uninformed people will vote" argument. This argument has several problems, not the least of which is that it relies on the assumption that a greater proportion of ignorant, uninformed people will vote when voting is mandatory than do so today. The proponents of the "voting should not be mandatory because more stupid people will vote" argument bear the burden of proof for this underlying assumption, but none of them has ever provided evidence to support it.
Mandatory voting, as well as mandatory service in the government, would go a long way toward improving the health of our Republic. Read Rousseau and see what he says about the hazards of people serving the government with their "purse instead of their person."