Aw, come on - you know as well as I do that "anyone good at rhetoric" loves nothing more than to hear himself talk.
You may be confusing rhetoric with "liking to argue and talk a lot." I'm reminded of the old saw, "I'd have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have time."
Meaning, someone with good native (or practiced) rhetorical skills is often the most succinct person in the room (or on the message board). If you have a good grasp on how your audience will digest what you hand them, you can keep it quick and to the point, in the way that will best serve to get your message/info across. Tidy, terse, rhetorically useful prose pushes the reader along the shortest path from uninformed to informed (or from unpersuaded to persuaded, etc).
The people who like to hear themselves talk are more often the intellectually rudderless vocabulary regurgitators, not the sharply insightful or subtly persuasive rhetoriticians.
Re:My cell phone goes to a lot of movies, I guess
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Polite Cell Phones
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· Score: 1
I prefer just flipping the switch on my Treo.
I can also easily disable the ringtone on my LG phone... but my point is that I sometimes forget to re-enable it after the movie (or dinner, or meeting, etc). By having a ring "snooze" control, it will be back to annoying me an hour later whether or not I remember to wake the audible ringer back up and miss some vital call in the wake of some meeting.
Poorly composed emails are not necessarily a symptom of fewer critical reasoning skills; I think they are more the result of a shift in focus during communication, from a single point of context (such as a letter or a book) to interactive, real time textual communication (such as email or instant messaging). When writing begins to feel more like speaking, the two forms of communication will blur. Interactive, conversational communication allows instant clarification, and does not require rigorous composition.
You're right! You should have just said, "You're wrong," and then I could have asked for some clarification.
Kidding, of course.
I think you're generally right. There are just too many variations, though, on the poor-emailing-skills theme to explore them all with one thesis in mind. I think the real problem with the really poor cases (of both writing AND reading such) is lack of attention span. Some people just can't hold a concept in their heads all the way to the second paragraph. It takes practice to stretch out and tune your linguistic/symbolic/conceptual input buffer, and very few younger people are getting that practice any longer. The biggest narrative arc they can handle is exactly as long as a music video. Sigh.
My cell phone goes to a lot of movies, I guess
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Polite Cell Phones
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If (as TFA suggests), monitoring the ambient light is an indication of cinema-ness, then my phone, which spends many hours in my coat pocket or in a flap-covered holster, must think I'm the most entertained guy in the world.
BTW, if they're going to allow scheduled ring times, I think that's great. But (especially relative to the movie scenario) a very short keystroke sequence that says "don't ring for the next 1/2/4 hours" would be used 100 times more often than TOD programmability, IMHO.
Hell, I even wrote some code using GFA Basic, which wasn't a bad little package, actually.
My first 386 wasn't far behind, though. I recall a friend of mine (who worked with big machines for EDS) saying, "What could you possibly need with an entire 386 at home?"
The English language (and even more so, in some other cases) is well equipped with nuanced words and structures that can accurately convey meaning, intent, tone, and information both simple and complex. Of course context is vital, but one of the most important considerations in any form of communication is an ability to preview what you're about to convey from the audience's point of view. When you send an e-mail to an informed co-worker, the circumstances surrounding the note probably make sense... but may not to the person to whom she forwards it.
Most folks simply don't have the skill, or take the time, to craft a message that carries its context with it. The ironic flip side to this is that when someone does take more time to write a more solid, contextually portable note, people not used to digesting that sort of thing presume it's either pretentious, condescending, or just verbose for the sake of verbosity. This is a cultural thing, and speaks to the continuing erosion in critical thinking skills and the obligation families feel to pass them along to children.
Anyone good with rhetoric knows how important it is to put yourself in your audience's shoes before opening your yap. The clearest communicators I know are the ones that are the most broadly exposed to the world at large, and take a deep breath before saying/typing anything, the better to ask themselves: will the person about to receive this e-mail get it? Five extra seconds can save hours of backpeddling, re-explaining something, or salvaging that business/personal relationship. But we've switched to celebrating speed and quantity of noise over quality of actual communication. This isn't going away any time soon, especially when entire generations are hitting their first email-enabled actual jobs thinking that "Dude" is an entire sentence.
The plague that is the use of "like" among teenagers (and stunted-growth adults) is at the heart of this. When some 16-year-old encounters a friend in the mall and says, "So, I was like..." and rolls eyes in a re-enactment of experiencing the emotions surrounding some other social interchange, the message gets across. That even works on the phone ("I was like, 'oh no you did-unt'"). But when all of the social warm-and-fuzzies that a young person feels happen without the need for a multi-syllable vocabulary, we can't wonder why they suck at both investing rich meaning in, and parsing full meaning from the written word.
What do corporations have to do with it?
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Can We Trust Google?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
There are plenty of "non-corporate" entities (in the sense that most people on slashdot use the term "corporate") that are in receipt of your private data and information about your history.
Your dentist's office? Your kids' family-run daycare facility? The obscure regional charity to whom you donate things (like money)? The alumni association that actually directly debits your checking account every quarter? The small professional newsletter that has all of your correspondence? The online forum that seems too small-time to worry about, but which knows every search string you've ever entered while engaged in some flame-war about USB vs. Firewire?
There are plenty of people who through simple incompetence (to say nothing of malice) can use or let go of information about you, your family, and your dealings with the world. "Corporations" actually have more at stake, in terms of their public reputation, stock price, etc., when they make a big mistake. A small-town doctor's office with copies of your checks, links to your prescription and insurance info, etc., is much less likely to be well firewalled or even thinking, beyond locking the closet with the file server, about true security.
To say nothing of the corner restaurant that recently hired some new waiter that's been mag-swiping credit cards after serving you your pasta. Dumb and unethical people operate at all levels of organization, both personally and professionally. I do hosting work for all sorts of individuals, groups, non-profits, and businesses. Believe me when I say that the larger businesses are way more focused on keeping your data battened down than are the others, even though things like messages and credit card numbers flow just as readily into the hands of the smaller, looser, less capable entities every day.
adware company offering incentives to execute botnet attacks
But they're not offering incentives to run botnet attacks. They're offering incentives to get their ads seen. And they usually have policies that expressly forbid that malware/spamming approach.
Look on the brightside. At least we know now what's driving the current administration
That is just freakin' genius, man. I mean, who could possibly have thought to make a political joke out of something like this? But what's really amazing is the novel way that you said it's the non-liberals who are the ones under the influence! I mean, the typical observer would assume that the half of the population that gets its political instruction and "news" from entertainment celebrities, MTV, and witless high school emo blogs might be the half that have the brains with the parasites. So, your shrewd take on it is just damn hysterical! Genius!
Actually, I don't think they make any particular claims about exactly how fast a particular movie will get to you, do they? Regardless, they're just like any business - they're trying to react to a new development without rocking the boat for their VAST majority of users who don't have time to watch two movies, every day, all month long.
There once was a jihaddi named Omar
Whose reach stretched just a little too-far.
His car bombs started losing their luster,
compared to a laser guided bunker-buster,
and Al Jazeera had to shop for a new war.
Who cares? It's their business. You surely don't think that they casually make decisions like this. Some guy that goes through a dozen movies a week (really, just stop for a second and actually think about that, ok?) is not their typical customer, and is probably just ripping movies as fast as he can blow the dust out of his DVD burner rack.
But it doesn't matter, because if there's really a large market for people who must have more than one DVD a day for $10 a month, somebody will address that market. But NetFlix, clearly the biggest player in that market, has already realized that they can't make it worth being in that business with people like that unless they do it somewhat less aggressively. Otherwise, they have to raise their prices on everyone, and the people who watch three or six movies a month then get to subsidize the uber-couch-potatos and the pirates.
Muslim leaders around the world have issued fatwa after fatwa condemning terrorism and calling for an end to suicide bombings, car bombings, bus bombs, subway bombs, and every other bombing short of another Uwe Boll film
The problem isn't that leaders "around the world" don't do that... the problem is that the leaders in the countries that are encouraging this, and sending money to do more of it, and celebrating it when it happens are not condemning it. What good does it do when some cleric in Malaysia says that some despondent, crazy Syrian kid shouldn't be listening to the non-stop encouragement to kill westerners? It's the people shouting the non-stop encouragement that have to change, and they don't want to. So the only option is to actually stop them, and the reaction from most governments in the Islamic world has been to be somewhat helpful, at best, while other people do it for them.
Do you really think that the collection of murderous bomb plotters that just "escaped" from a Yemeni prison were just such geniuses that they got out despite the best efforts of local government and religious leaders to keep them from running out and blowing up another ship? No. They got out through a tunnel to neighboring mosque. You know, one of those buildings run by Islamic religious leaders. You know, the ones that are not preaching peace? Those are the people that keep stirring this crap up, and make the embassy bombers, the hijackers, the journalist beheaders and the people that blow up kids in restaurants feel comfortable and morally correct. The religious leaders are the problem, and their peers aren't doing enough to showcase that hypocrisy to the world. Every time one of these pro-suicide clowns gets airtime on Al Jazeera, 100 more rational clerics should be screaming from the rooftops about how evil they are. Coverage differences does not account for the comparative silence from those quarters. You know it, they know it, and the people throwing firebombs at embassies over cartoons know it.
Mowing your mom's lawn might have a double meaning... I'd explain it but I have to go trim my bush
Listen, I've got to go next door and help lay some pipe, but I'd really appreciate it if you would help clear this up for me when you've got some time. Try to be brief, as I'm a busy guy. My wife wants to roast some poultry this weekend, so I've also got to go out the barn and choke the chicken. With all that on my plate, I tend to feel rushed, and end up eating quick food that's no good for me. Luckily my wife is looking out for me, and tends to hide the salami when I'm not looking.
Terrestial animals, including humans, can feel strong gradients in the air before thunderstorms.
My personal experience with this is that a very strong field actually causes your fine hairs to react to the field pattern, and you actually feel it as mechanical stimulation of the follicles. No doubt a truly mammoth field gradient would tangibly impact your nervous system to the point of being directly aware of it in some way, but that "hair standing on end" effect is something you can actually see. I was once doing an emergency dish repair on the roof of a commercial structure as a front came through (brilliant!), and seconds before lightning hit a radio mast about 20 yards away, the guys working with me were all pointing at each other's hair... which was actually standing up. The heavy hair, on their heads. We all hit the dirt (well, the gravel, on the roof), and kablooie, right next to us. I will never forget that one. Um, or get on a roof in a thunderstorm again, no matter how much a customer tells me they'll lose important accounting data transfer opportunities if they can't get their dish re-aligned.
Presumably you were clamouring to have him removed when he gassing Kurds and slaughtering Iranian youth? Probably not...
That's quite an ability you have, there, to read my mind and all. Presumably, since you're worried about Iraqi civilians, you were worried at the time, and knew, even better than the world's intel agencies all about about the depths of his civilian-killing practices?
The issues is not whether freedom/democaracy or whatever is established in Iraq
That's pretty telling, I must say. That you equate freedom, democracy, and "whatever" is fascinating. Freedom and democracy are critical to the Iraqi people, and to everyone else in that region. It's the only way they can shake off the absurd, festering cultural baggage that is the militant, theocratic Islamic extremist movement. Fear of democracy and personal liberty is exactly why the jihadii wingnuts from the surrounding countries are doing what they can to make such liberty and actual representative governments seem expensive (in innocent civilian lives taken by suicide bombers) unattractive in Iraq... because it's contagious. Just like in Eastern Europe.
But it is amazing to see how Saddam's evilness only became an issue when GWB needed a reason to invade
Became an issue? For whom was he not already an issue? I guess he wasn't yet an issue for people that didn't care if he invaded Kuwait, and didn't care if he threw out UN inspectors, and didn't care if he (with help) scammed the UN's oil for food program, and didn't care if he was shooting at patroling aircraft for years, and never really changed his posture, really, at all, despite the agreements he signed. His military ran camps that trained a likely 2000+ foreign fighters and terror recruits, including the jihaddis that everyone was so sure would want nothing to do with his regime. In the wake of 9/11, with it plain that groups like Al Queda would be looking for another place to set up shop (having been rousted from Afghanistan's Taliban-run vacation spot), it became that much more urgent to dispense with the lingering, increasingly corrupt and unstable arms market that was Saddam's regime. Do you really think that people even slightly aware of what goes on in the middle east weren't reading about his ongoing and overt, advertised funding of terrorist groups? I wasn't waiting for some reason for the US to finish removing that guy from the oil-funded international scene... I was wondering what took so long.
Islam is in a dangerous phase right now, and understanding it and how to influence its context makes a whole lot more sense than just marching into a country without a strategy and expecting to win.
What an empty, pointless platitude that is. Saying that "Islam" is anything is like saying that "the West" is something, or that "Buddhists" are something. Islam isn't in a "dangerous phase," militant theocratic Islamists are just showing what they really believe and actually trying to act on it. They have been for years and are looking for weak spots in the world to exploit. Like the Sudan, or Indonesia, or Afghanistan (woops! they blew that one) or Iraq (they're going to blow that one, too... swearing to behead voters, and blowing up crowds of kids just isn't winning over the local hearts and minds the way they seem to be thinking it magically would). This isn't a new, or just-now phase... it's a specific subset of a culture trying to create and exploit chaos so that they don't have to reconcile the fact that their wretchedly retrograde flavor of fundamentalist social structure can't coexist with the open communication, education, and personal liberties that people in that part of the world are beginning to taste and demand.
If you really know what's going on in Iraq, answer this question: how many civilians have died since March 2003?
Nice trick question. Tell you what: I'll take a stab at the answer after you assign percent
keep in mind that the war was started supposedly to eliminate WMD's
No, the war started when the same guy who got at least a million people killed in another (zero-gain) war with a neighboring country then decided to invade Kuwait and line up tanks for a move in Saudi Arabia. He was pushed out of Kuwait (but not without lobbing a few missles over Jordan's head into Israel just out of spite), and then signed surrender terms which he then steadfastly refused to honor up until years later (and a more serious military operation) when he was pulled out of a hole in the ground. You know: little things like refusing to disclose to where he shipped the observed tons and tons of chemical weapons (looks like Syria has them), or like taking weekly (and often daily) missle/AAA shots at the aircraft patroling the no-fly zones (you know, the no-fly zones in place to keep him from using is own aircraft to bomb and gas - with those amazingly lethal, for being non-existent, chemical weapons - any more entire villages in the majority-populated areas of his country that so hated him and his cronies). Or, you know, continuing to build the long-range missles he agreed not to build, right up until he was thrown out.
not to improve the lives of women and "daughters"
Pay attention. I was responding to another post's implication that just because he (Sadddam) was "secular," as opposed to the theocratic Taliban/Al Queda team, that he was therefor not so bad. Read the actual comment more carefully.
Just be honest... the thousands of innocent Iraqi dead will thank you for it
Presumably you're not too worried about the hundreds of thousands (at least) that he continued to kill strictly because of their political/tribal affiliation or willingness to engage in actual criticism. Ask yourself under what circumstances, and by whom, innocent Iraqis are deliberately killed (hint: by religious zealots like Zarqawi that loudly proclaim democracy to be "un-Islamic" and really don't like the idea of it spreading to places like Syria, which just got bitch-slapped by the Lebanese on the same topic).
A quagmire is when the years roll by and you're not accomplishing anything whatsoever in terms of eliminating, demoralizing, or dissuading the opposing forces.
Well then, Iraq is not a quagmire. Communications intercepted to/from Evil Clowns like Zarqawi indicate that the insurgency is actually pretty desperate about the lack of wider Islamic support for their car bombing campaign, and are having a harder time raising cash and willing suiciders. Many of their mid-level managers are getting wacked, too, which takes a lot of the fun out of it.
They're especially upset (the insurgents) because damn if, despite promises to behead anyone that votes, the Iraqi people just keep on going, in the many millions, to the polls and doing things like ratifying a constitution, naming their own parliment, and so on.
I think we can all see from real-world examples such as Wal-mart how necessary this is. Corporations are out to make a dollar, the only reason they have in the current market to keep their workforce diversified is to avoid getting sued. Hopefully this will make sure that more subtle discrimination is kept in check.
What nonsense. If a corporation was only hiring people "to make a dollar," then they'd only hire the most effective, efficient people possible. You know, hiring people based on their actual merit. For that matter, if "making a dollar" is partly accomplished by lowering your overhead, then hiring the people willing to work for the least (in non-demanding retail positions, for example) would also be standard practice... and based on demographics, that would disporportionately result in the hiring of minorities and recent immigrants. So, no need to worry about quotas, right?
Or, am I confused about what you think is the "subtle discrimination" as it relates to how a corporation "makes a buck?" How, in your view, does discrimination help a large corporation actually make a buck? Or are you making a very sly, dubious, stealthy comment implying that minorities aren't as able to help an employer make a buck? Make some damn sense, or be more honest about your biases.
>>I also like to grab a shotgun and tromp around...
~Ok, this part is rant
But I meant it! And, anyone that focuses as much as you do on the difference between older and newer electronics (no vacuum tubes, finally!) in the context of whether or not things have much changed in the last 1000 years... well, you've obviously seen my rant and raised me one.:-)
Science and Engineering are really all that separate us from what we were 50 years ago. They are the roots of our society, and I think it is blantantly 'wrong' to discredit them in schools in favor of religion.
Certainly true. That being said, I'd have to expand a bit on what has changed in 50 years or so. Specifically, the enormous exposure/access to information is setting up some huge cultural changes. The speed with which information travels around the globe is outreaching the ability for some cultures to take a deep breath and deal with it (um, see the reaction in certain circles to some Danish political cartoons... sheesh). But more importantly, I think that technology has, for wide swaths of the US (and Euro) middle class created a life that is so easy, so free from challenging physical work, so comparitively free from the casual diseases and ailments that used to terrorize our grandparents... that our cultural "buzz" has shifted from learning (early in life) the way to be a responsible productive person to, basically, how to be a perpetual adolescent. And like all adolescents, the lack of critical thinking skills (lasting well into middle age instead of briefly in life) creates some ugly distortions in world views, logical processing of new or dubious assertions, and so on. Basically, people have it so easy that they've dulled their inate capacity to see and understand causality in all but the most obvious cases ("Damn! I've dropped my beer while playing with my Xbox, and it's possible that Bush is not to blame. Maybe.").
There wouldn't be any "medeival-minded religious zealots" running around killing people if the US hadn't invaded
Well, that's true. At least, they wouldn't be running around in Iraq. They'd be running around in Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, etc. And of course Afghanistan, where they (the Taliban) had the whole country to themselves, and decided to let Al Queda use it for a playground. You remember the fine things they did there, like shooting women at lunchtime in the town square for offenses such as teaching their daughters to read. Sure, Saddam had no problem with daughters being taught to read, but he also had no problem gassing whole villages full of daughters, invading neighboring countries, lobbing missiles into Israel, starting a war that killed over a million people, regularly (and publicly) sending cash to friendly outfits such as Hamas and Hezbollah expressly in support of suicide bombers' families, and so on. Yes, that was just rosy, that picture. To say nothing of having his ground forces use anti-aircraft weapons against the aircraft enforcing the terms of his surrender when he was forced to give up his attempt to annex Kuwait. Secular? Who cares? A monomaniacal mass murdering aggressor that refuses to abide by his surrender terms and corruptly (well, with UN help, of course) corruptly skims billions of dollars of palace-building and weapons-buying cash off of the money intended to feed and care for his population is your idea of a just-fine situation?
Most Iraqis today -- even those here in N. America -- prefer Sadam over the US for running of the country.
Nice baseless, context-less, no-reference assertion, there! Who cares how many people do or don't want the US running Iraq? The US doesn't want the US running Iraq, either. That's the whole point of supporting the elections (in which a greater portion of the Iraqi population continually votes than even do in the US). That's the whole point of rapidly building up the Iraqi law enforcement and armed forces. Guess you're not paying attention to those areas where anti-insurgent patrols are now solely being conducted by Iraqi units? It's changing, whether it bothers your world view or not to know it. And of course, you might even check with what the people there, and in Afghanistan think. They are among the most optimistic people in the world about their economies and their futures.
Many AOL subscribers use ONLY the web-based front end to the service (including mail, news, file transfer stuff, etc). Actually works pretty well, including the mail front end, which is very similar to the interfaces provided by the big three portals.
Slashdot Mirror
You: Annoyed by lucid correction of your fallacious connection of rhetoric with hot air.
Me: Still willing to point out that while good rhetoric is succinct, not all terseness (even that which is "down to a science") is constuctive.
Aw, come on - you know as well as I do that "anyone good at rhetoric" loves nothing more than to hear himself talk.
You may be confusing rhetoric with "liking to argue and talk a lot." I'm reminded of the old saw, "I'd have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have time."
Meaning, someone with good native (or practiced) rhetorical skills is often the most succinct person in the room (or on the message board). If you have a good grasp on how your audience will digest what you hand them, you can keep it quick and to the point, in the way that will best serve to get your message/info across. Tidy, terse, rhetorically useful prose pushes the reader along the shortest path from uninformed to informed (or from unpersuaded to persuaded, etc).
The people who like to hear themselves talk are more often the intellectually rudderless vocabulary regurgitators, not the sharply insightful or subtly persuasive rhetoriticians.
I prefer just flipping the switch on my Treo.
I can also easily disable the ringtone on my LG phone... but my point is that I sometimes forget to re-enable it after the movie (or dinner, or meeting, etc). By having a ring "snooze" control, it will be back to annoying me an hour later whether or not I remember to wake the audible ringer back up and miss some vital call in the wake of some meeting.
Poorly composed emails are not necessarily a symptom of fewer critical reasoning skills; I think they are more the result of a shift in focus during communication, from a single point of context (such as a letter or a book) to interactive, real time textual communication (such as email or instant messaging). When writing begins to feel more like speaking, the two forms of communication will blur. Interactive, conversational communication allows instant clarification, and does not require rigorous composition.
You're right! You should have just said, "You're wrong," and then I could have asked for some clarification.
Kidding, of course.
I think you're generally right. There are just too many variations, though, on the poor-emailing-skills theme to explore them all with one thesis in mind. I think the real problem with the really poor cases (of both writing AND reading such) is lack of attention span. Some people just can't hold a concept in their heads all the way to the second paragraph. It takes practice to stretch out and tune your linguistic/symbolic/conceptual input buffer, and very few younger people are getting that practice any longer. The biggest narrative arc they can handle is exactly as long as a music video. Sigh.
If (as TFA suggests), monitoring the ambient light is an indication of cinema-ness, then my phone, which spends many hours in my coat pocket or in a flap-covered holster, must think I'm the most entertained guy in the world.
BTW, if they're going to allow scheduled ring times, I think that's great. But (especially relative to the movie scenario) a very short keystroke sequence that says "don't ring for the next 1/2/4 hours" would be used 100 times more often than TOD programmability, IMHO.
Hell, I even wrote some code using GFA Basic, which wasn't a bad little package, actually.
My first 386 wasn't far behind, though. I recall a friend of mine (who worked with big machines for EDS) saying, "What could you possibly need with an entire 386 at home?"
The English language (and even more so, in some other cases) is well equipped with nuanced words and structures that can accurately convey meaning, intent, tone, and information both simple and complex. Of course context is vital, but one of the most important considerations in any form of communication is an ability to preview what you're about to convey from the audience's point of view. When you send an e-mail to an informed co-worker, the circumstances surrounding the note probably make sense... but may not to the person to whom she forwards it.
Most folks simply don't have the skill, or take the time, to craft a message that carries its context with it. The ironic flip side to this is that when someone does take more time to write a more solid, contextually portable note, people not used to digesting that sort of thing presume it's either pretentious, condescending, or just verbose for the sake of verbosity. This is a cultural thing, and speaks to the continuing erosion in critical thinking skills and the obligation families feel to pass them along to children.
Anyone good with rhetoric knows how important it is to put yourself in your audience's shoes before opening your yap. The clearest communicators I know are the ones that are the most broadly exposed to the world at large, and take a deep breath before saying/typing anything, the better to ask themselves: will the person about to receive this e-mail get it? Five extra seconds can save hours of backpeddling, re-explaining something, or salvaging that business/personal relationship. But we've switched to celebrating speed and quantity of noise over quality of actual communication. This isn't going away any time soon, especially when entire generations are hitting their first email-enabled actual jobs thinking that "Dude" is an entire sentence.
The plague that is the use of "like" among teenagers (and stunted-growth adults) is at the heart of this. When some 16-year-old encounters a friend in the mall and says, "So, I was like..." and rolls eyes in a re-enactment of experiencing the emotions surrounding some other social interchange, the message gets across. That even works on the phone ("I was like, 'oh no you did-unt'"). But when all of the social warm-and-fuzzies that a young person feels happen without the need for a multi-syllable vocabulary, we can't wonder why they suck at both investing rich meaning in, and parsing full meaning from the written word.
There are plenty of "non-corporate" entities (in the sense that most people on slashdot use the term "corporate") that are in receipt of your private data and information about your history.
Your dentist's office? Your kids' family-run daycare facility? The obscure regional charity to whom you donate things (like money)? The alumni association that actually directly debits your checking account every quarter? The small professional newsletter that has all of your correspondence? The online forum that seems too small-time to worry about, but which knows every search string you've ever entered while engaged in some flame-war about USB vs. Firewire?
There are plenty of people who through simple incompetence (to say nothing of malice) can use or let go of information about you, your family, and your dealings with the world. "Corporations" actually have more at stake, in terms of their public reputation, stock price, etc., when they make a big mistake. A small-town doctor's office with copies of your checks, links to your prescription and insurance info, etc., is much less likely to be well firewalled or even thinking, beyond locking the closet with the file server, about true security.
To say nothing of the corner restaurant that recently hired some new waiter that's been mag-swiping credit cards after serving you your pasta. Dumb and unethical people operate at all levels of organization, both personally and professionally. I do hosting work for all sorts of individuals, groups, non-profits, and businesses. Believe me when I say that the larger businesses are way more focused on keeping your data battened down than are the others, even though things like messages and credit card numbers flow just as readily into the hands of the smaller, looser, less capable entities every day.
adware company offering incentives to execute botnet attacks
But they're not offering incentives to run botnet attacks. They're offering incentives to get their ads seen. And they usually have policies that expressly forbid that malware/spamming approach.
Look on the brightside. At least we know now what's driving the current administration
That is just freakin' genius, man. I mean, who could possibly have thought to make a political joke out of something like this? But what's really amazing is the novel way that you said it's the non-liberals who are the ones under the influence! I mean, the typical observer would assume that the half of the population that gets its political instruction and "news" from entertainment celebrities, MTV, and witless high school emo blogs might be the half that have the brains with the parasites. So, your shrewd take on it is just damn hysterical! Genius!
Actually, I don't think they make any particular claims about exactly how fast a particular movie will get to you, do they? Regardless, they're just like any business - they're trying to react to a new development without rocking the boat for their VAST majority of users who don't have time to watch two movies, every day, all month long.
There once was a jihaddi named Omar
Whose reach stretched just a little too-far.
His car bombs started losing their luster,
compared to a laser guided bunker-buster,
and Al Jazeera had to shop for a new war.
Thank you. I'll be here all week.
Their profits or their customers?
Who cares? It's their business. You surely don't think that they casually make decisions like this. Some guy that goes through a dozen movies a week (really, just stop for a second and actually think about that, ok?) is not their typical customer, and is probably just ripping movies as fast as he can blow the dust out of his DVD burner rack.
But it doesn't matter, because if there's really a large market for people who must have more than one DVD a day for $10 a month, somebody will address that market. But NetFlix, clearly the biggest player in that market, has already realized that they can't make it worth being in that business with people like that unless they do it somewhat less aggressively. Otherwise, they have to raise their prices on everyone, and the people who watch three or six movies a month then get to subsidize the uber-couch-potatos and the pirates.
Muslim leaders around the world have issued fatwa after fatwa condemning terrorism and calling for an end to suicide bombings, car bombings, bus bombs, subway bombs, and every other bombing short of another Uwe Boll film
The problem isn't that leaders "around the world" don't do that... the problem is that the leaders in the countries that are encouraging this, and sending money to do more of it, and celebrating it when it happens are not condemning it. What good does it do when some cleric in Malaysia says that some despondent, crazy Syrian kid shouldn't be listening to the non-stop encouragement to kill westerners? It's the people shouting the non-stop encouragement that have to change, and they don't want to. So the only option is to actually stop them, and the reaction from most governments in the Islamic world has been to be somewhat helpful, at best, while other people do it for them.
Do you really think that the collection of murderous bomb plotters that just "escaped" from a Yemeni prison were just such geniuses that they got out despite the best efforts of local government and religious leaders to keep them from running out and blowing up another ship? No. They got out through a tunnel to neighboring mosque. You know, one of those buildings run by Islamic religious leaders. You know, the ones that are not preaching peace? Those are the people that keep stirring this crap up, and make the embassy bombers, the hijackers, the journalist beheaders and the people that blow up kids in restaurants feel comfortable and morally correct. The religious leaders are the problem, and their peers aren't doing enough to showcase that hypocrisy to the world. Every time one of these pro-suicide clowns gets airtime on Al Jazeera, 100 more rational clerics should be screaming from the rooftops about how evil they are. Coverage differences does not account for the comparative silence from those quarters. You know it, they know it, and the people throwing firebombs at embassies over cartoons know it.
Mowing your mom's lawn might have a double meaning... I'd explain it but I have to go trim my bush
Listen, I've got to go next door and help lay some pipe, but I'd really appreciate it if you would help clear this up for me when you've got some time. Try to be brief, as I'm a busy guy. My wife wants to roast some poultry this weekend, so I've also got to go out the barn and choke the chicken. With all that on my plate, I tend to feel rushed, and end up eating quick food that's no good for me. Luckily my wife is looking out for me, and tends to hide the salami when I'm not looking.
I get it, OK? Whew.
Dude, I don't think mowing your mom's lawn is something you want to jump up and take credit for.
Listen, if that's what I have to do to be sure I get my share of her multi-billion dollar estate, then that's what I'll do.
For crying out loud, it was a joke! Today's secret words are "self-deprecating" and "irony," in case you didn't get the memo.
My personal collection of cells can actually mow my Mom's entire lawn.
Terrestial animals, including humans, can feel strong gradients in the air before thunderstorms.
My personal experience with this is that a very strong field actually causes your fine hairs to react to the field pattern, and you actually feel it as mechanical stimulation of the follicles. No doubt a truly mammoth field gradient would tangibly impact your nervous system to the point of being directly aware of it in some way, but that "hair standing on end" effect is something you can actually see. I was once doing an emergency dish repair on the roof of a commercial structure as a front came through (brilliant!), and seconds before lightning hit a radio mast about 20 yards away, the guys working with me were all pointing at each other's hair... which was actually standing up. The heavy hair, on their heads. We all hit the dirt (well, the gravel, on the roof), and kablooie, right next to us. I will never forget that one. Um, or get on a roof in a thunderstorm again, no matter how much a customer tells me they'll lose important accounting data transfer opportunities if they can't get their dish re-aligned.
Presumably you were clamouring to have him removed when he gassing Kurds and slaughtering Iranian youth? Probably not...
That's quite an ability you have, there, to read my mind and all. Presumably, since you're worried about Iraqi civilians, you were worried at the time, and knew, even better than the world's intel agencies all about about the depths of his civilian-killing practices?
The issues is not whether freedom/democaracy or whatever is established in Iraq
That's pretty telling, I must say. That you equate freedom, democracy, and "whatever" is fascinating. Freedom and democracy are critical to the Iraqi people, and to everyone else in that region. It's the only way they can shake off the absurd, festering cultural baggage that is the militant, theocratic Islamic extremist movement. Fear of democracy and personal liberty is exactly why the jihadii wingnuts from the surrounding countries are doing what they can to make such liberty and actual representative governments seem expensive (in innocent civilian lives taken by suicide bombers) unattractive in Iraq... because it's contagious. Just like in Eastern Europe.
But it is amazing to see how Saddam's evilness only became an issue when GWB needed a reason to invade
Became an issue? For whom was he not already an issue? I guess he wasn't yet an issue for people that didn't care if he invaded Kuwait, and didn't care if he threw out UN inspectors, and didn't care if he (with help) scammed the UN's oil for food program, and didn't care if he was shooting at patroling aircraft for years, and never really changed his posture, really, at all, despite the agreements he signed. His military ran camps that trained a likely 2000+ foreign fighters and terror recruits, including the jihaddis that everyone was so sure would want nothing to do with his regime. In the wake of 9/11, with it plain that groups like Al Queda would be looking for another place to set up shop (having been rousted from Afghanistan's Taliban-run vacation spot), it became that much more urgent to dispense with the lingering, increasingly corrupt and unstable arms market that was Saddam's regime. Do you really think that people even slightly aware of what goes on in the middle east weren't reading about his ongoing and overt, advertised funding of terrorist groups? I wasn't waiting for some reason for the US to finish removing that guy from the oil-funded international scene... I was wondering what took so long.
Islam is in a dangerous phase right now, and understanding it and how to influence its context makes a whole lot more sense than just marching into a country without a strategy and expecting to win.
What an empty, pointless platitude that is. Saying that "Islam" is anything is like saying that "the West" is something, or that "Buddhists" are something. Islam isn't in a "dangerous phase," militant theocratic Islamists are just showing what they really believe and actually trying to act on it. They have been for years and are looking for weak spots in the world to exploit. Like the Sudan, or Indonesia, or Afghanistan (woops! they blew that one) or Iraq (they're going to blow that one, too... swearing to behead voters, and blowing up crowds of kids just isn't winning over the local hearts and minds the way they seem to be thinking it magically would). This isn't a new, or just-now phase... it's a specific subset of a culture trying to create and exploit chaos so that they don't have to reconcile the fact that their wretchedly retrograde flavor of fundamentalist social structure can't coexist with the open communication, education, and personal liberties that people in that part of the world are beginning to taste and demand.
If you really know what's going on in Iraq, answer this question: how many civilians have died since March 2003?
Nice trick question. Tell you what: I'll take a stab at the answer after you assign percent
keep in mind that the war was started supposedly to eliminate WMD's
No, the war started when the same guy who got at least a million people killed in another (zero-gain) war with a neighboring country then decided to invade Kuwait and line up tanks for a move in Saudi Arabia. He was pushed out of Kuwait (but not without lobbing a few missles over Jordan's head into Israel just out of spite), and then signed surrender terms which he then steadfastly refused to honor up until years later (and a more serious military operation) when he was pulled out of a hole in the ground. You know: little things like refusing to disclose to where he shipped the observed tons and tons of chemical weapons (looks like Syria has them), or like taking weekly (and often daily) missle/AAA shots at the aircraft patroling the no-fly zones (you know, the no-fly zones in place to keep him from using is own aircraft to bomb and gas - with those amazingly lethal, for being non-existent, chemical weapons - any more entire villages in the majority-populated areas of his country that so hated him and his cronies). Or, you know, continuing to build the long-range missles he agreed not to build, right up until he was thrown out.
not to improve the lives of women and "daughters"
Pay attention. I was responding to another post's implication that just because he (Sadddam) was "secular," as opposed to the theocratic Taliban/Al Queda team, that he was therefor not so bad. Read the actual comment more carefully.
Just be honest... the thousands of innocent Iraqi dead will thank you for it
Presumably you're not too worried about the hundreds of thousands (at least) that he continued to kill strictly because of their political/tribal affiliation or willingness to engage in actual criticism. Ask yourself under what circumstances, and by whom, innocent Iraqis are deliberately killed (hint: by religious zealots like Zarqawi that loudly proclaim democracy to be "un-Islamic" and really don't like the idea of it spreading to places like Syria, which just got bitch-slapped by the Lebanese on the same topic).
A quagmire is when the years roll by and you're not accomplishing anything whatsoever in terms of eliminating, demoralizing, or dissuading the opposing forces.
Well then, Iraq is not a quagmire. Communications intercepted to/from Evil Clowns like Zarqawi indicate that the insurgency is actually pretty desperate about the lack of wider Islamic support for their car bombing campaign, and are having a harder time raising cash and willing suiciders. Many of their mid-level managers are getting wacked, too, which takes a lot of the fun out of it.
They're especially upset (the insurgents) because damn if, despite promises to behead anyone that votes, the Iraqi people just keep on going, in the many millions, to the polls and doing things like ratifying a constitution, naming their own parliment, and so on.
I think we can all see from real-world examples such as Wal-mart how necessary this is. Corporations are out to make a dollar, the only reason they have in the current market to keep their workforce diversified is to avoid getting sued. Hopefully this will make sure that more subtle discrimination is kept in check.
What nonsense. If a corporation was only hiring people "to make a dollar," then they'd only hire the most effective, efficient people possible. You know, hiring people based on their actual merit. For that matter, if "making a dollar" is partly accomplished by lowering your overhead, then hiring the people willing to work for the least (in non-demanding retail positions, for example) would also be standard practice... and based on demographics, that would disporportionately result in the hiring of minorities and recent immigrants. So, no need to worry about quotas, right?
Or, am I confused about what you think is the "subtle discrimination" as it relates to how a corporation "makes a buck?" How, in your view, does discrimination help a large corporation actually make a buck? Or are you making a very sly, dubious, stealthy comment implying that minorities aren't as able to help an employer make a buck? Make some damn sense, or be more honest about your biases.
>>I also like to grab a shotgun and tromp around...
:-)
~Ok, this part is rant
But I meant it! And, anyone that focuses as much as you do on the difference between older and newer electronics (no vacuum tubes, finally!) in the context of whether or not things have much changed in the last 1000 years... well, you've obviously seen my rant and raised me one.
Science and Engineering are really all that separate us from what we were 50 years ago. They are the roots of our society, and I think it is blantantly 'wrong' to discredit them in schools in favor of religion.
Certainly true. That being said, I'd have to expand a bit on what has changed in 50 years or so. Specifically, the enormous exposure/access to information is setting up some huge cultural changes. The speed with which information travels around the globe is outreaching the ability for some cultures to take a deep breath and deal with it (um, see the reaction in certain circles to some Danish political cartoons... sheesh). But more importantly, I think that technology has, for wide swaths of the US (and Euro) middle class created a life that is so easy, so free from challenging physical work, so comparitively free from the casual diseases and ailments that used to terrorize our grandparents... that our cultural "buzz" has shifted from learning (early in life) the way to be a responsible productive person to, basically, how to be a perpetual adolescent. And like all adolescents, the lack of critical thinking skills (lasting well into middle age instead of briefly in life) creates some ugly distortions in world views, logical processing of new or dubious assertions, and so on. Basically, people have it so easy that they've dulled their inate capacity to see and understand causality in all but the most obvious cases ("Damn! I've dropped my beer while playing with my Xbox, and it's possible that Bush is not to blame. Maybe.").
Thanks for being a thoughtful correspondent.
There wouldn't be any "medeival-minded religious zealots" running around killing people if the US hadn't invaded
Well, that's true. At least, they wouldn't be running around in Iraq. They'd be running around in Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, etc. And of course Afghanistan, where they (the Taliban) had the whole country to themselves, and decided to let Al Queda use it for a playground. You remember the fine things they did there, like shooting women at lunchtime in the town square for offenses such as teaching their daughters to read. Sure, Saddam had no problem with daughters being taught to read, but he also had no problem gassing whole villages full of daughters, invading neighboring countries, lobbing missiles into Israel, starting a war that killed over a million people, regularly (and publicly) sending cash to friendly outfits such as Hamas and Hezbollah expressly in support of suicide bombers' families, and so on. Yes, that was just rosy, that picture. To say nothing of having his ground forces use anti-aircraft weapons against the aircraft enforcing the terms of his surrender when he was forced to give up his attempt to annex Kuwait. Secular? Who cares? A monomaniacal mass murdering aggressor that refuses to abide by his surrender terms and corruptly (well, with UN help, of course) corruptly skims billions of dollars of palace-building and weapons-buying cash off of the money intended to feed and care for his population is your idea of a just-fine situation?
Most Iraqis today -- even those here in N. America -- prefer Sadam over the US for running of the country.
Nice baseless, context-less, no-reference assertion, there! Who cares how many people do or don't want the US running Iraq? The US doesn't want the US running Iraq, either. That's the whole point of supporting the elections (in which a greater portion of the Iraqi population continually votes than even do in the US). That's the whole point of rapidly building up the Iraqi law enforcement and armed forces. Guess you're not paying attention to those areas where anti-insurgent patrols are now solely being conducted by Iraqi units? It's changing, whether it bothers your world view or not to know it. And of course, you might even check with what the people there, and in Afghanistan think. They are among the most optimistic people in the world about their economies and their futures.
Many AOL subscribers use ONLY the web-based front end to the service (including mail, news, file transfer stuff, etc). Actually works pretty well, including the mail front end, which is very similar to the interfaces provided by the big three portals.