Math class - You get to perform caculations for how much P2P networks have defrauded artists.
But not any math that might lead to such evil knowlege as cryptography or programming. As we all know, knowing programming is evil because it circumvents DRM. Only software made by companies is DRM-trustable, and if those companies want you to know how it works, then they'll teach you when you join their workforce. Until then, learning it on your own is just the sort of rebellious attitude we don't allow around here, mister! Now delete that compiler off your PDA and go sit in the corner and think, put your headphones on, and listen to your copy of the site-licensed, school-board-approved band Du Jour.
Josie and the Pussycats was actually a documentary.
Hey, I learned about copyright law in school as a kid a few decades ago, too.
The simple little research paper, long a staple of classroom curriculums, requires telling students a little bit about what you can and can't do when you cite your source materials. And it requires understanding the difference between the fair use allowed in citing a work versus outright wholesale plagerism of that work.
Now, seeing as how the people pushing this crappy propaganda are trying to pretend there is no such thing as Fair Use provisions in copyright law, are they going to produce students who will be morally repusled from doing research papers? (Rather than in the past when they were merely being repulsed by general lethargy.)
The fact that you *have* to put forth effort to listen to something beyond Clear Channel is precisely *why* music sucks more now than it used to. Music from multiple sources means more variety of styles, and that means more gems hidden among the mediocre stuff.
It's not a case of being against piracy, though. It's a case of being against a school program that is lying to kids about what piracy actually entails (in such a way that it ends up including any kind of sharing of any sort).
Where am I located? Wisconsin, actually. All my life. I have never heard the speech pattern you seem to be implying is common here. Never. My friends, my family, my co-workers - NONE of them have ever said "Polly" that I can remember.
In Wisconsin we do tend to talk fast and cut words down to the minimum sounds needed to get the impression across, that's true - but "probly" is how I've always heard it done for that word, and sometimes I've even heard the 'L' left out, so it comes out as "Probby", but the 'b' is part of the distinctive consonant sound that identifies that word, more so than the 'L' is. If I'd heard someone say "prolly" (before I read your post that is), it would have confused me.
No, it's not good enough, since my very next sentence was: "But taken in context with the fact that they were a reply to the above post, they imply it." Lying by omission like that is not to be tolerated. Insisting upon honesty is not trolling.
I demonstrated that you've been arguing, for about a week now, with things that I did not say.
I'm sure you think you demonstrated this. But you've merely falsely claimed it. I've had to repeat the same crap over and over to get anything through the thickness of your skull. And you call me an ass.
Crap doesn't become more true by repeating it. Your post proves my accusation was 100% accurate.
I have never once *ever* heard anybody pronounce 'probably' without at least one 'b' sound. I've heard one of the 'b's dropped, as in "probly", and "prolaby", but never "prolly". Not once. Not ever.
I took a real typing course. That has no bearing on my complaints. Did you take *THIS* test to see what I was talking about before making that asinine comment? Did you?
This test does not allow you to just go forward and leave an error in place. It *requires* that you fix up the error before continuing, and every keypress which is not the right letter for the current cursor position is counted as an additional error. It is most certainly NOT a manual typewriter typing test for that reason, and it is NOT just counting the whole word as a single error. For example, If I am supposed to type: It was the best of times. and instead I screw up one letter and type this: It was the bust of times. That ends up getting counted as 11 errors instead of just one, because the cursor stopped on the 'e' in 'best' when I hit 'u', and expected me to try again until I got it before it would go on, so it ends up looking like this: It was the b I(type 'u') It was the b I(type 's') It was the b I(type 't') It was the b I(type ' ') It was the b I(type 'o') It was the b I(type 'f') It was the b I(type ' ') It was the b I(type 't') It was the b I(type 'i') It was the b I(type 'm') It was the b I(type 'e' - now it accepts because it's the letter 'e'.) It was the be I(type 's' - another error.)
When in reality I only typed one letter wrong. (Now, in reality I would be looking at the screen and catch it before it got that far, but the test messes up because what I am physically typing is actually something like this: It was the bust ofest of times. (because when I see the cursor has not moved, I have to type from that point on, and NOT use the backspace either, which is the natural reflex.
So the test only tests how good I am at typing into an interface that works like NO word processer or text editor out there.
You are wrong because I *DID* look up at the screen and not the keyboard. The problems were because my automatically learned tactile motions are faster than my visual noticing of the problem when an error occurs.
But the alleged purpose of this test is NOT to make you learn, but to test what level you are currently at - which is why inflating the penalty for detrimental behaviour is the wrong thing to do.
Call me nuts, but I'd listen to Forbes over any silly online tech rag any day of the week.
Which means, I guess, that you don't mind when someone lies about which product is being talked about in an article. AIX is not Linux. This is the reason the article was slanted. It claimed that an AIX licensing issue is somehow relevant in some way to the Linux lawsuit. That's a bit like saying if a Ford Bronco has a rollover problem, that this implies a Ford Escort has the same danger and you should never use one.
My biggest problem with split keyboards is that their choice of which half to put the middle keys into does not match my learned typing patterns. I like to hit most of the middle keys like the '6', 'y', 'h', and 'j' with my left hand. This isn't the official pattern, but it works on computer keyboards well because the right hand has so many other keys to deal with on the side, and it has to be used for arrow keys and so on. It helps to have the left hand take a few keys over on it's side of the keyboard. But, Microsoft Natural Keyboard makes that impossible, and I end up with the jarring "thud" of hitting the flat plastic case where the key should be - which jars and stops my typing speed in a mentally halting way - kind of like assuming there was one more step in a flight of stairs when there wasn't.
TypingPal was also terrible because it assumed any attempt to hit backspace was an invalid key and marked you accordingly - which meant that one error became two since everyone used to typing on a computer has an unstoppable instant backspace reflex. Also, other automatic reflex actions became errors as well - like hitting space twice after ending a sentence with a period - since the source text has only one space between sentences, that extra space was a "mistake". Also, sometimes it wrapped the cursor to the start of the next line as soon as you hit the end of a previous line. Other times it did not. Thus you had to watch where the cursor went or end up with an "error" from hitting return when you weren't supposed to.
Also, the tendency of the interface to not do what my reflexes expected it to do was a source of cognative dissonance that added more errors - like when backspace didn't visually do anything, I'd hit the key again several more times by reflex before my brain caught up and stopped me, and this results in losing precious seconds to stop and think.
Typing is a reflex action - but these tests ruin this by turning it into a congative one by making the interface not work as you'd expect it to, so you have to always stop and not be "in the groove" where you type unthinkingly.
My speed with the test was - 62 words per minute, with 17 errors (really only about 4 errors, but each error resulted in three or four others being counted since I keep on typing the rest of the word before I notice the cursor isn't advancing and so the stupid test thinks I'm trying (and failling) to finally get that letter right when really I'm just typing the rest of the word.)
I guess that a more real-world test would put my speed at about 65 WPM after errors are accounted for (probably about 80 WPM raw, with 15 WPM lossage from backspacing. I backspace a lot, which is why an input tool that makes backspacing fail to operate the way it naturally should gives me a low score. Not only does the backspacing itself penalize me (understandable), but the cognative dissonance that breaks my stride when the interface behaves in a crippled fashion wrecks my speed far more than that.).
Typing test.com was terrible, just terrible. For one thing the interface assumed that it is impossible to correct a word that has been completed. Since I am a typist who usually gets a word ahead before figuring out a mistake, this meant that I was disallowed from backspacing to correct misspellings. I lost precious seconds trying to figure out what was broken with the backspace key at first. Secondly, once I got off by one word by accidentally omitting it, it marked every single word thereafter as wrong, since it was comparing them one-by-one with the off-by-one word from the sample text. So one error became thirdy errors, and again because of the lack of backspacing once you space to the next word, it was impossible to fix this.
I think the clever java applet just got in the way. I'd have performed faster without the fancy backspace-eliminator and color markup that kept distracting my eyes. Just a dumb CGI script with a big textarea element to type into and a script on the backend that splits the text into one-word lines and uses 'diff' to find the mistakes would have been better. At least it wouldn't be confused by off-by-one mistakes that way.
Next time try reading more than just the first sentence. The poster explained this already. It takes longer to eyeball the word letter by letter to check its spelling than it does to just recognize what word it is and have the typist's own memory spit out the spelling of it through his fingers.
But all that matters is the sum total of 'user accepted' words in the stream of letters, divided by how long it took to type them. If a typist has to use the backspace a lot, that means he's un-typing the last thing and trying again, and so it should not incur an additional penalty. The fact that he has to type the word again is it's own penalty enough. If one person types 40 words in a minute, it doesn't matter whether that was 40 perfectly correct words with no backspacing or whether that was 40 words, ten of which had to be retyped a second time (so he acutally typied 50 words in total, but backspaced 10 of them.) Either way the software should give the same score.
Having to retype words is it's own penalty already if you just look at the sum totals at the end.
One of my big problems with typing tests is that they always test me by having me type gibberish instead of actual language. When I'm trying to type "this is a sentence I'm supposed to be typing", I am mentally parsing that as 9 items to pay close attention to - each one being one word. When I type "asiwq ia x oenypskq s2d poddoiaq of ma hoipsn", I am parsing 9 items, each of which consist of sus-parts (letters), and it's a total of 37 items to mentally pay close attention to, and If I go too fast I'll lose my place in the stream. So it turns the task into a mental keeping-track-of-things test instead of a typing skills test, and thus the speed is always slower than it would be with natural typing.
Plus, they always test how fast you type when you copy data by eyeballing it, which adds perception into the mix. I can type a LOT faster when I'm composing my own text than when I'm copying someone else's text.
Once your typing speed is above a certain medium level, then the limiting factor of the tests is always other associated skills not directly related to typing - like concentration and quick perception.
We can argue all day long whether the ones that piloted the planes were dumb
If you are under the impression that this is what the conversation was about, you are mistaken. Not once has your oponnent made this claim. You claimed that the ability to fly those jets like they did is proof of their intelligence. He was pointing out that this is actually not as hard as you are making it out to be. That doesn't say anything about how dumb or smart the terrorists were - just that you can't make that judgement based on this particular task.
This seems like another attempt to make ourselves feel better about the situation by belittling the enemy.
It is not belittling to honestly point out how easy a task is. The 9/11 plot in general was very complex and well ordered. Just the task of picking the right flights so their normal path wouldn't be too far from New york, and getting the timing right, and keeping the groups of people organized, was very hard. But, the part that involved hands on the controls flying a jet to the tallest buildings in the biggest city in the vacinity, that you can see from a great distance in the air was the easiest part of that whole plot. It wouldn't even require navigational instruments of any kind.
What makes a pilot's license hard to get is not the basic flying stuff. Just like a driver's license, the majority of the time is spent on the legal stuff and the prep stuff (and unlike a car there's a lot to learn about how to navigate). The actual act of pointing the plane in the direction you want it to go isn't hard. A few weeks playing in a simulator would be enough for that.
I was not disputing what Columbus or his contemporaries should or should not do. I was disputing (and ONLY disputing) the stated idea that "most" of Columbus's contemporaries would expect Columbus to be taking a journey across a such a large body of undifferntiated sea.
Your first participation was arguing against the following post:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=115925&thres ho ld=0&commentsort=3&tid=160&mode=thread&cid=9814017
Which said:
I don't think it's fair to say that "Columbus could be fairly sure to encounter habitable land."
You objected to this point, but this point was not about whether or not it was reasonable to suspect land existed. It was about whether or not it would be reasonable to expect to Columbus to encounter it.
You are correct that your own words did not actually state what I say they stated. But taken in context with the fact that they were a reply to the above post, they imply it. Just like the statements "Yes." or "No." mean different things depending on what they are a response to, so too do your posts.
And if this occurs again, try not to call me an ass
"Loser pays" needs to have a reasonable cap or it just ends up making the "my lawyer is more expensive than your lawyer" argument even more effective than it already is. If you think you have a good case, and only a 20% chance of losing, are you willing to take that risk if that 20% chance will result in losing a few thousand dollars? Probably - but what if it's a 20% chance that you'll have to pay for a team of Microsoft's Lawyers salaries for a year? Not so ignorable a risk anymore...
The "loser pays" plan is usually implemented in countries where Lawyers don't command nearly as large a salary as they do here.
And on Kerry vs Ashcroft: Compare apples to apples - potential presidents to potential presidents, or potential cabinet members to potential cabinet members.
If you have problems with Ashcroft's civil liberties record, don't vote for his group just because Kerry is even worse - go third party.
When it comes to feeding the trolls, I do not subscribe to the commonly held philosophy that the right approach to liars is to let their lies stand unopposed in public places. That just allows their damage to spread. Regardless of whether they are lying for fun or lying for damage, the result is damaging either way.
And I don't know who Seth Finklestien is, and so whether this is that person or some other has no bearing on my decision to reply.
Slashdot Mirror
Math class - You get to perform caculations for how much P2P networks have defrauded artists.
But not any math that might lead to such evil knowlege as cryptography or programming. As we all know, knowing programming is evil because it circumvents DRM. Only software made by companies is DRM-trustable, and if those companies want you to know how it works, then they'll teach you when you join their workforce. Until then, learning it on your own is just the sort of rebellious attitude we don't allow around here, mister! Now delete that compiler off your PDA and go sit in the corner and think, put your headphones on, and listen to your copy of the site-licensed, school-board-approved band Du Jour.
Josie and the Pussycats was actually a documentary.
Hey, I learned about copyright law in school as a kid a few decades ago, too.
The simple little research paper, long a staple of classroom curriculums, requires telling students a little bit about what you can and can't do when you cite your source materials. And it requires understanding the difference between the fair use allowed in citing a work versus outright wholesale plagerism of that work.
Now, seeing as how the people pushing this crappy propaganda are trying to pretend there is no such thing as Fair Use provisions in copyright law, are they going to produce students who will be morally repusled from doing research papers? (Rather than in the past when they were merely being repulsed by general lethargy.)
The fact that you *have* to put forth effort to listen to something beyond Clear Channel is precisely *why* music sucks more now than it used to. Music from multiple sources means more variety of styles, and that means more gems hidden among the mediocre stuff.
It's not a case of being against piracy, though. It's a case of being against a school program that is lying to kids about what piracy actually entails (in such a way that it ends up including any kind of sharing of any sort).
Where am I located? Wisconsin, actually. All my life. I have never heard the speech pattern you seem to be implying is common here. Never. My friends, my family, my co-workers - NONE of them have ever said "Polly" that I can remember.
In Wisconsin we do tend to talk fast and cut words down to the minimum sounds needed to get the impression across, that's true - but "probly" is how I've always heard it done for that word, and sometimes I've even heard the 'L' left out, so it comes out as "Probby", but the 'b' is part of the distinctive consonant sound that identifies that word, more so than the 'L' is. If I'd heard someone say "prolly" (before I read your post that is), it would have confused me.
No, it's not good enough, since my very next sentence was: "But taken in context with the fact that they were a reply to the above post, they imply it." Lying by omission like that is not to be tolerated. Insisting upon honesty is not trolling.
I demonstrated that you've been arguing, for about a week now, with things that I did not say.
I'm sure you think you demonstrated this. But you've merely falsely claimed it.
I've had to repeat the same crap over and over to get anything through the thickness of your skull. And you call me an ass.
Crap doesn't become more true by repeating it. Your post proves my accusation was 100% accurate.
I have never once *ever* heard anybody pronounce 'probably' without at least one 'b' sound. I've heard one of the 'b's dropped, as in "probly", and "prolaby", but never "prolly". Not once. Not ever.
I took a real typing course. That has no bearing on my complaints. Did you take *THIS* test to see what I was talking about before making that asinine comment? Did you?
This test does not allow you to just go forward and leave an error in place. It *requires* that you fix up the error before continuing, and every keypress which is not the right letter for the current cursor position is counted as an additional error. It is most certainly NOT a manual typewriter typing test for that reason, and it is NOT just counting the whole word as a single error. For example, If I am supposed to type:
It was the best of times.
and instead I screw up one letter and type this:
It was the bust of times.
That ends up getting counted as 11 errors instead of just one, because the cursor stopped on the 'e' in 'best' when I hit 'u', and expected me to try again until I got it before it would go on, so it ends up looking like this:
It was the b I(type 'u')
It was the b I(type 's')
It was the b I(type 't')
It was the b I(type ' ')
It was the b I(type 'o')
It was the b I(type 'f')
It was the b I(type ' ')
It was the b I(type 't')
It was the b I(type 'i')
It was the b I(type 'm')
It was the b I(type 'e' - now it accepts because it's the letter 'e'.)
It was the be I(type 's' - another error.)
When in reality I only typed one letter wrong. (Now, in reality I would be looking at the screen and catch it before it got that far, but the test messes up because what I am physically typing is actually something like this:
It was the bust ofest of times.
(because when I see the cursor has not moved, I have to type from that point on, and NOT use the backspace either, which is the natural reflex.
So the test only tests how good I am at typing into an interface that works like NO word processer or text editor out there.
You are wrong because I *DID* look up at the screen and not the keyboard. The problems were because my automatically learned tactile motions are faster than my visual noticing of the problem when an error occurs.
But the alleged purpose of this test is NOT to make you learn, but to test what level you are currently at - which is why inflating the penalty for detrimental behaviour is the wrong thing to do.
Call me nuts, but I'd listen to Forbes over any silly online tech rag any day of the week.
Which means, I guess, that you don't mind when someone lies about which product is being talked about in an article. AIX is not Linux. This is the reason the article was slanted. It claimed that an AIX licensing issue is somehow relevant in some way to the Linux lawsuit. That's a bit like saying if a Ford Bronco has a rollover problem, that this implies a Ford Escort has the same danger and you should never use one.
My biggest problem with split keyboards is that their choice of which half to put the middle keys into does not match my learned typing patterns. I like to hit most of the middle keys like the '6', 'y', 'h', and 'j' with my left hand. This isn't the official pattern, but it works on computer keyboards well because the right hand has so many other keys to deal with on the side, and it has to be used for arrow keys and so on. It helps to have the left hand take a few keys over on it's side of the keyboard. But, Microsoft Natural Keyboard makes that impossible, and I end up with the jarring "thud" of hitting the flat plastic case where the key should be - which jars and stops my typing speed in a mentally halting way - kind of like assuming there was one more step in a flight of stairs when there wasn't.
"Prolly" lacks a "B" sound. So, no it is not a phonetic spelling of "probably".
TypingPal was also terrible because it assumed any attempt to hit backspace was an invalid key and marked you accordingly - which meant that one error became two since everyone used to typing on a computer has an unstoppable instant backspace reflex. Also, other automatic reflex actions became errors as well - like hitting space twice after
ending a sentence with a period - since the source text has only one space between sentences, that extra space was a "mistake". Also, sometimes it wrapped the cursor to the start of the next line as soon as you hit the end of a previous line. Other times it did not. Thus you had to watch where the cursor went or end up with an "error" from hitting return when you weren't supposed to.
Also, the tendency of the interface to not do what my reflexes expected it to do was a source of cognative dissonance that added more errors - like when backspace didn't visually do anything, I'd hit the key again several more times by reflex before my brain caught up and stopped me, and this results in losing precious seconds to stop and think.
Typing is a reflex action - but these tests ruin this by turning it into a congative one by making the interface not work as you'd expect it to, so you have to always stop and not be "in the groove" where you type unthinkingly.
My speed with the test was - 62 words per minute, with 17 errors (really only about 4 errors, but each error resulted in three or four others being counted since I keep on typing the rest of the word before I notice the cursor isn't advancing and so the stupid test thinks I'm trying (and failling) to finally get that letter right when really I'm just typing the rest of the word.)
I guess that a more real-world test would put my speed at about 65 WPM after errors are accounted for (probably about 80 WPM raw, with 15 WPM lossage from backspacing. I backspace a lot, which is why an input tool that makes backspacing fail to operate the way it naturally should gives me a low score. Not only does the backspacing itself penalize me (understandable), but the cognative dissonance that breaks my stride when the interface behaves in a crippled fashion wrecks my speed far more than that.).
Typing test.com was terrible, just terrible. For one thing the interface assumed that it is impossible to correct a word that has been completed. Since I am a typist who usually gets a word ahead before figuring out a mistake, this meant that I was disallowed from backspacing to correct misspellings. I lost precious seconds trying to figure out what was broken with the backspace key at first. Secondly, once I got off by one word by accidentally omitting it, it marked every single word thereafter as wrong, since it was comparing them one-by-one with the off-by-one word from the sample text. So one error became thirdy errors, and again because of the lack of backspacing once you space to the next word, it was impossible to fix this.
I think the clever java applet just got in the way. I'd have performed faster without the fancy backspace-eliminator and color markup that kept distracting my eyes. Just a dumb CGI script with a big textarea element to type into and a script on the backend that splits the text into one-word lines and uses 'diff' to find the mistakes would have been better. At least it wouldn't be confused by off-by-one mistakes that way.
Next time try reading more than just the first sentence. The poster explained this already. It takes longer to eyeball the word letter by letter to check its spelling than it does to just recognize what word it is and have the typist's own memory spit out the spelling of it through his fingers.
But all that matters is the sum total of 'user accepted' words in the stream of letters, divided by how long it took to type them. If a typist has to use the backspace a lot, that means he's un-typing the last thing and trying again, and so it should not incur an additional penalty. The fact that he has to type the word again is it's own penalty enough. If one person types 40 words in a minute, it doesn't matter whether that was 40 perfectly correct words with no backspacing or whether that was 40 words, ten of which had to be retyped a second time (so he acutally typied 50 words in total, but backspaced 10 of them .) Either way the software should give the same score.
Having to retype words is it's own penalty already if you just look at the sum totals at the end.
One of my big problems with typing tests is that they always test me by having me type gibberish instead of actual language. When I'm trying to type "this is a sentence I'm supposed to be typing", I am mentally parsing that as 9 items to pay close attention to - each one being one word. When I type "asiwq ia x oenypskq s2d poddoiaq of ma hoipsn", I am parsing 9 items, each of which consist of sus-parts (letters), and it's a total of 37 items to mentally pay close attention to, and If I go too fast I'll lose my place in the stream. So it turns the task into a mental keeping-track-of-things test instead of a typing skills test, and thus the speed is always slower than it would be with natural typing.
Plus, they always test how fast you type when you copy data by eyeballing it, which adds perception into the mix. I can type a LOT faster when I'm composing my own text than when I'm copying someone else's text.
Once your typing speed is above a certain medium level, then the limiting factor of the tests is always other associated skills not directly related to typing - like concentration and quick perception.
We can argue all day long whether the ones that piloted the planes were dumb
If you are under the impression that this is what the conversation was about, you are mistaken. Not once has your oponnent made this claim. You claimed that the ability to fly those jets like they did is proof of their intelligence. He was pointing out that this is actually not as hard as you are making it out to be. That doesn't say anything about how dumb or smart the terrorists were - just that you can't make that judgement based on this particular task.
This seems like another attempt to make ourselves feel better about the situation by belittling the enemy.
It is not belittling to honestly point out how easy a task is. The 9/11 plot in general was very complex and well ordered. Just the task of picking the right flights so their normal path wouldn't be too far from New york, and getting the timing right, and keeping the groups of people organized, was very hard. But, the part that involved hands on the controls flying a jet to the tallest buildings in the biggest city in the vacinity, that you can see from a great distance in the air was the easiest part of that whole plot. It wouldn't even require navigational instruments of any kind.
What makes a pilot's license hard to get is not the basic flying stuff. Just like a driver's license, the majority of the time is spent on the legal stuff and the prep stuff (and unlike a car there's a lot to learn about how to navigate). The actual act of pointing the plane in the direction you want it to go isn't hard. A few weeks playing in a simulator would be enough for that.
I was not disputing what Columbus or his contemporaries should or should not do. I was disputing (and ONLY disputing) the stated idea that "most" of Columbus's contemporaries would expect Columbus to be taking a journey across a such a large body of undifferntiated sea.
Your first participation was arguing against the following post:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=115925&thre
Which said:
You objected to this point, but this point was not about whether or not it was reasonable to suspect land existed. It was about whether or not it would be reasonable to expect to Columbus to encounter it.
You are correct that your own words did not actually state what I say they stated. But taken in context with the fact that they were a reply to the above post, they imply it. Just like the statements "Yes." or "No." mean different things depending on what they are a response to, so too do your posts.
And if this occurs again, try not to call me an ass
I apologise for my honesty.
"Loser pays" needs to have a reasonable cap or it just ends up making the "my lawyer is more expensive than your lawyer" argument even more effective than it already is. If you think you have a good case, and only a 20% chance of losing, are you willing to take that risk if that 20% chance will result in losing a few thousand dollars? Probably - but what if it's a 20% chance that you'll have to pay for a team of Microsoft's Lawyers salaries for a year? Not so ignorable a risk anymore...
The "loser pays" plan is usually implemented in countries where Lawyers don't command nearly as large a salary as they do here.
And on Kerry vs Ashcroft: Compare apples to apples - potential presidents to potential presidents, or potential cabinet members to potential cabinet members.
If you have problems with Ashcroft's civil liberties record, don't vote for his group just because Kerry is even worse - go third party.
If you cannot respect other people's life, liberty, and property:
Then you're a corporation.
When it comes to feeding the trolls, I do not subscribe to the commonly held philosophy that the right approach to liars is to let their lies stand unopposed in public places. That just allows their damage to spread. Regardless of whether they are lying for fun or lying for damage, the result is damaging either way.
And I don't know who Seth Finklestien is, and so whether this is that person or some other has no bearing on my decision to reply.