You may need citation. I don't need citation on things I've seen with my own eyes. That doesn't mean you should believe what I or anyone else on the Internet says. But it means I don't have to provide sources for my own experiences.
Life does not happen by reference. You can write 50 pages on Wikipedia about love or sex, I'd rather spend the evening experiencing it.
Does that mean you are wrong? Absolutely not. But neither am I.
Dual-SIM phones have been around for a long time. It's a niche market, but far from new.
But none of the ones I know about offer two crucial factors: a) ability to turn on/off the SIM cards (yes, you can remove them. I used to have two SIM cards for several years and switched between them, it's not something you really want to do unless you are as fanatical about seperating work and private life as I am).
b) an actual concept of two different domains, that extends to calendar, e-mail, etc.
Anyone who thinks that food does not affect your body and mind is clearly delusional. But likewise is everyone who thinks in monocausalities and simple, 2-step causality chains.
Hyperactivity is real, though exaggerated like most things in the thiiink ooof theee chiiiiiiiiiiiiiildren area. And changes in diet do have effects, though I'm not sure anyone knows for sure just what the causes are and what changes are required and which ones don't really do anything.
The USA spent years, trillions of $$$ - amounts where the interest on it could pay for the entire financial crisis - and hundreds of thousands of innocent lives (a few of them US soldiers) on this war thing......and here we are, essentially where we started with the Taliban, just with more of a mess?
The feature that I've been waiting for pretty much ever since mobile phones became common is the ability to run two sim cards in the same phone and have a switch that can turn either or both on/off.
I've always kept my work and private stuff seperate - e-mail, phone numbers, etc. - but if you don't want to carry two phones with you everywhere, that's actually very hard to do.
I would love a phone that allows me to tell it "I'm at work now" and then enables the work-related mail account, phone number, etc. - outside work hours, all work-related stuff goes to voicemail, server-side inbox, etc. and with no notification. And the reverse is just as important - "not available for private things now" can be a crucial setting (the people who might have reason to reach you anyways in case of emergencies would have your work phone number anyways).
So there are scenarios where you would want one enabled, but not the other. There are also scenarios where you would want both enabled, like when you're on the train during a business trip, or at your desk and don't mind getting private and/or work calls intermixed.
I would really, really love a phone that supports something like that. I fear the general trend is still getting the boundaries between work and private life blurred more and more. Most people have no idea what they're doing to themselves there. Been there, done that, seen others burn out - don't do this. And find gadgets that don't do it to you.
"good" is a relative measure. A code of 4 numbers can be good security for your garden shed, and passwords are entirely sufficient for most stuff online (really, how much security do your various forum accounts need? What's the threat level?).
Yes, making security hard is the wrong approach, it does make people circumvent it. No, dumbing it down so they use it, but it doesn't really provide any security anymore is the wrong answer, because it generates a false sense of security, and that is much worse then having no security, but knowing that you don't.
mobile TANs are a relative of two-factor authentication, as they employ a secondary channel to transmit the TAN. You could say it's something you know (the password or PIN you needed to set up the transaction) and something you have (the phone that gets the SMS with the TAN), but that's a simplification.
which was always seen by the screenwriters as anti-climactic.[9]" I agree, but they didn't go far enough!
Climax isn't a function of content, but of drama. Depending on how you tell the story, the scouring of the Shire could well have been a very climatic point. It is not unknown for good stories to have more than one climax.
While every is suggesting their favorite fiction authors, I personally don't read much fiction at all. What I do read a lot is scientific literature outside my own field. Broadening ones horizon is never a bad thing to do. And the stuff going on in other fields is no less fascinating than whatever yours is.
Then there's philosophy, politics, the whole social and psychological areas if you don't include them above (I didn't say natural sciences, but many of us geeks read it as that automatically). Just make sure the source is reliable, there's a lot of quacks in all areas that are hard to falsify. A good indicator is starting to read at the back and giving the bibliography a glance before buying the book. I've made it a habbit to not buy books without a bibliography unless it's fiction. So far, it's been a good heuristic. Eliminates all the idiots who think they discovered the secret to the universe in the laundry in their mothers basement (i.e. 90% of the self-help literature, 80% of pop-psychology, 70% of modern philosophy, etc.)
No, I don't encrypt mail - anymore. Like most here, I tried for a good time, had my PGP key in my.sig and website online, fingerprint on business cards, etc. I think I sent about 5 PGP-encrypted mails and received the same number.
Reason: Nobody else used it.
So I went to the level that I could control. All the SMTP and IMAP traffic between myself and my server is encrypted, and if the other side supports TLS, so is any incoming and outgoing SMTP. It's not perfect, but it is better than giving up completely. Opportunistic encryption is the best option you have if you don't control the other side, and I believe that PGP should be a huge lesson in humility for us crypto-geeks. Because we don't control the other party, but we thought that we could/should.
It was actually an expansion, not a patch. Jesus explicitly says that he did not intend to replace the old teachings, only to complement them. He makes a couple specific corrections, but never has the guts to outright declare any parts null and void.
fanatics will just ignore anything that doesn't support their worldview regardless.
Fanatics need to start somewhere. Sure, the guy who buys the explosives and sends the young man to his death as a living bomb is the main asshole in the story. But without a life of religious indoctrination, that young man would've told the old geezer to go fuck himself instead of happily strapping a bomb to his chest.
It is very, very difficult to convince people of some batshit crazy nonsense out of thin air. It is a whole lot easier to convince them of a crazy fanatically extreme version of something they already believe in. And it is frighteningly easy to do so if that something contains teachings on accepting authority, believing in stuff you can't verify and all the other baggage of religion.
Yes, there are variations within every faith, as in every group that is sufficiently large and long-lived. But let's ignore the fringes, both the more reasonable and the batshit insane. Mainstream christianity accepts the holy bible as the word of god, more or less directly. It doesn't matter if they believe it was actually written by the guy or it was written by humans inspired by the holy spirit. They don't call it the holy bible for nothing.
And sure, they all ignore most of the nonsense crap that's in there. But it is still in there, waiting for the first fanatic to abuse it.
Really, I would take the whole "we're the good guys" attitude a lot more seriously if they would issue a bugfix for their holy book and do away with all the evil crap in there. But they don't. And that's why they are evil people.
The cosmetics industry is obviously a good starting point â" but what if the ban leaks over to product photography (I'm looking at you, Burger King), video gameplay demos, or a photographer's own works?"
All except the last would be a good thing.
This is a "truth in advertising" question. If your ad claims to show your product (or its result), then it should do so, otherwise you are deceiving.
The photographer does not show a product - the picture is the product, not whatever is on it. The model, the scenery, make-up, lighting, camera and Photoshop are all parts of the toolset he uses to create it.
In advertisement, the picture is not the product, it is about the product. If you know about levels of abstraction, it's really straightforward to see the difference and to understand why product advertisement should not be allowed to Photoshop the product itself. Everything else - fine. But that which you are selling should be as displayed.
Yes, I know what I'm talking about with National Socialism. Have you read "Mein Kampf", the book that outsold the fucking bible in Germany during the Third Reich? It was written well before the Nazis gained power and it lays out everything very openly. I've read it. Anyone who did that and didn't see the Holocaust coming is either stupid or subject to the various cognitive biases that change memories and protect our egos from the truth.
Like all ideologies, it is not pure evil. There's stuff about parents who can afford it should adopt kids who need it in there. But, like with religion, the underlying evil does, in the words of Hitchens, poison everything. The adoption part, for example, was intended so that there would be more pure-race arian children raised under good conditions. That's not an interpretation, that's just paraphrasing Hitler's own words because I don't have the book here and can't look up the actual quote.
And now explain to me how an ideology like christianity or islam, which contains extensive lists of which kinds of people you have to kill, and in which especially brutal ways, can be considered neutral in any non-perverted sense of the word.
and yet obviously none of those are going to be a perfect fit for me and 99,999 others
I never requested a perfect fit. Heck, I can't represent myself at 100%, because - surprise - circumstances and opinions can change over time.
I was talking about the case where you look at the available parties, immediately discard half of them as insane (usually minor parties anyways), check out the others and realize that none of them are even an acceptable fit.
Also, you ignore that in reality (i.e. aside from the rhetorics and the campaigns), the major parties in all western nations have become very hard to distinguish. We've had several switches between the major parties and their coalition partners here in Germany over the past 15-20 years. In real-life day-to-day politics, it barely mattered.
If your political view diverts from the status quo in more then details, chances are that throwing your vote at any of the major parties is a waste and won't change any of the things that are important to you. All you are doing is solidifying the status quo.
In the US, yes. In my country, there is no such line.
And no, I don't go with the wager, either. It's just another attempt to get people to vote for something they don't support through the false generation of bad conscious.
If you don't want a specific party or candidate to win, but you don't like the others either, the reasonable approach is not to give a dishonest, corrupt vote to someone you hate not quite so much, but to convince voters of the really, really bad choice to change their vote.
The english word for "atheist" outside the USA is... surprise... "atheist".
Of course we are here, and while living in the US as an atheist must be horrible from all I read, it's not like the rest of the world would be that much smarter. Smarter, yes. Much, no.
Germany (my country) has much less seperation of state and church, for example. The amount of influence the churches (catholic and protestant) wield over things from public television to schools, to laws(!!!) is ridiculous if you consider that most germans are religious on an average two days a year: Xmas and once if there's a funeral, marriage, etc.
We fight the same fight, just in different ways. There is more official cuddling up to the church and less bullshit christian-right open politics. But it was a newsworthy event when the first chancellor swore his oath of office just to the people and not on the bible. And that was just over 10 years ago.
Religion is like just about anything else. It can be used for good (e.g. helping the poor) or for evil (e.g. killing "heathens" who won't convert). In both cases, the credit or blame should go to the person doing the actions, not the religion itself.
I'll take you literally with the "just about anything else" part.
So National Socialism or Stalinist Communism really is a neutral concept, and it can be used for good or evil? The credit and blame should exclusively go to the respective followers, and nothing whatsoever is wrong about these ideas themselves?
You're crazy.
Religions are evil. People acting out their worst parts are really evil, but those bad parts are in there, whether or not people act them out. And as long as they are in there, knowing what we know about human nature, someone will act on them.
You can't seriously claim that a book with explicit instructions for murder is not evil in this time and culture. I don't care what good parts it has, just like working in a daycare center and giving alms to the poor doesn't and shouldn't protect you from being thrown in jails if you commit a crime.
There's instructions for murder right there in all the major holy books, and no amount of bullshit talk does away with it.
Even Buddhism has its extremists (Google for examples.)
The problem is that any philosophy that claims to have a God-given truth inevitably turns evil because you can't question God-given truth.
There's a non-sequitur in your argument. Buddhism doesn't have god-given truth, because it doesn't have a god. While the Buddha is revered, he's not considered god-like or omniscient.
You're right that Buddhism has its faults, too. But your argument is bad.
You are aware that this was highly illegal and there are several organisations to support atheists in the armed forces in the case of discrimination? Like the American Atheists or the Military Religious Freedom Foundation?
Consciously abstaining is the stupidest fucking thing imaginable. Vote for a third party, if you must, but better yet, vote for the less bad candidate.
I've spoken out against this for as long as I could vote, and no one has convinced me otherwise in 20 years (though I now vote - for the Pirate Party).
If you find a party or a candidate that suits you - fine. But if you don't, then voting for the least evil is not appropriate. It sends all kinds of wrong messages. Not only does it give the party you vote for a false sense of representation, it also tells everyone that the system is fine as it is, when it really isn't (because there is nobody in it who represents you).
My vote is all I have in a representative democracy. I will give it only to someone who I want to be represented by. I'm not falling for these attempts to give me a bad feeling about withholding my vote when there is nobody I trust with it. In fact, I would wish there was a "none of the above" option on the ballot, I would have used it for almost 20 years. As there isn't, abstaining is the only option I have to express myself in an election.
I am not responsible for bad people coming to power - the people who voted them in are, and nobody else.
Look, I didn't write that there should be no references.
But references alone do not make a good article, and references do not equal knowledge. I can easily write a WP-style article about UFOs, the conspiracy that murdered JFK and was really behind 9/11, the secret hiding place of Hitler who is, of course, still alive and a hundred other total-bullshit topics and have enough references in them to satisfy every WP bot and editor.
And yet we know that all this is bullshit because of all the other evidence that exists. And that is why the jealous guarding of WP articles that goes on is a disaster.
The WP guidelines are - mostly - good as they are written, but not as they are executed. NPOV is a great guideline. It's insanity if you apply it to mean giving every side to a topic the same space, no matter how disproven and ludicrous it is. Even notability is a good idea, if you use it to remove articles about the 5000th porn star who had one movie, but of course that's not the articles that get deleted.
Likewise, "no original research" is a good idea if it means that WP should be an encyclopedia, not a publishing platform. But when you can't correct an article about a topic where you are a world-famous expert, because the references to your own published works get disqualified as original research - that's one of the insanities in execution that I'm talking about and that drive excellent people away from WP.
The editor - pfft, who cares? A better editor will bring in more know-nothing idiots who couldn't be arsed before because it took almost as much effort as tying your shoes to learn the editor. Like everything WP has done over the past years, it does nothing to solve the real problems of the platform.
Slashdot Mirror
You may need citation. I don't need citation on things I've seen with my own eyes. That doesn't mean you should believe what I or anyone else on the Internet says. But it means I don't have to provide sources for my own experiences.
Life does not happen by reference. You can write 50 pages on Wikipedia about love or sex, I'd rather spend the evening experiencing it.
Does that mean you are wrong? Absolutely not. But neither am I.
No, it isn't.
Dual-SIM phones have been around for a long time. It's a niche market, but far from new.
But none of the ones I know about offer two crucial factors:
a) ability to turn on/off the SIM cards (yes, you can remove them. I used to have two SIM cards for several years and switched between them, it's not something you really want to do unless you are as fanatical about seperating work and private life as I am).
b) an actual concept of two different domains, that extends to calendar, e-mail, etc.
Anyone who thinks that food does not affect your body and mind is clearly delusional. But likewise is everyone who thinks in monocausalities and simple, 2-step causality chains.
Hyperactivity is real, though exaggerated like most things in the thiiink ooof theee chiiiiiiiiiiiiiildren area. And changes in diet do have effects, though I'm not sure anyone knows for sure just what the causes are and what changes are required and which ones don't really do anything.
So, let me get this straight:
The USA spent years, trillions of $$$ - amounts where the interest on it could pay for the entire financial crisis - and hundreds of thousands of innocent lives (a few of them US soldiers) on this war thing... ...and here we are, essentially where we started with the Taliban, just with more of a mess?
The feature that I've been waiting for pretty much ever since mobile phones became common is the ability to run two sim cards in the same phone and have a switch that can turn either or both on/off.
I've always kept my work and private stuff seperate - e-mail, phone numbers, etc. - but if you don't want to carry two phones with you everywhere, that's actually very hard to do.
I would love a phone that allows me to tell it "I'm at work now" and then enables the work-related mail account, phone number, etc. - outside work hours, all work-related stuff goes to voicemail, server-side inbox, etc. and with no notification.
And the reverse is just as important - "not available for private things now" can be a crucial setting (the people who might have reason to reach you anyways in case of emergencies would have your work phone number anyways).
So there are scenarios where you would want one enabled, but not the other. There are also scenarios where you would want both enabled, like when you're on the train during a business trip, or at your desk and don't mind getting private and/or work calls intermixed.
I would really, really love a phone that supports something like that. I fear the general trend is still getting the boundaries between work and private life blurred more and more. Most people have no idea what they're doing to themselves there. Been there, done that, seen others burn out - don't do this. And find gadgets that don't do it to you.
"good" is a relative measure. A code of 4 numbers can be good security for your garden shed, and passwords are entirely sufficient for most stuff online (really, how much security do your various forum accounts need? What's the threat level?).
Yes, making security hard is the wrong approach, it does make people circumvent it. No, dumbing it down so they use it, but it doesn't really provide any security anymore is the wrong answer, because it generates a false sense of security, and that is much worse then having no security, but knowing that you don't.
mobile TANs are a relative of two-factor authentication, as they employ a secondary channel to transmit the TAN. You could say it's something you know (the password or PIN you needed to set up the transaction) and something you have (the phone that gets the SMS with the TAN), but that's a simplification.
Like all things personal, it depends.
For me, I could do without the phone functionality of my iPhone, but not without the PDA functions and I would hate to lose mobile Internet.
If all you do with yours is making phone calls, by all means get a dumb phone. Don't think that your answer is the right answer for others, though.
which was always seen by the screenwriters as anti-climactic.[9]" I agree, but they didn't go far enough!
Climax isn't a function of content, but of drama. Depending on how you tell the story, the scouring of the Shire could well have been a very climatic point. It is not unknown for good stories to have more than one climax.
While every is suggesting their favorite fiction authors, I personally don't read much fiction at all. What I do read a lot is scientific literature outside my own field. Broadening ones horizon is never a bad thing to do. And the stuff going on in other fields is no less fascinating than whatever yours is.
Then there's philosophy, politics, the whole social and psychological areas if you don't include them above (I didn't say natural sciences, but many of us geeks read it as that automatically). Just make sure the source is reliable, there's a lot of quacks in all areas that are hard to falsify. A good indicator is starting to read at the back and giving the bibliography a glance before buying the book. I've made it a habbit to not buy books without a bibliography unless it's fiction. So far, it's been a good heuristic. Eliminates all the idiots who think they discovered the secret to the universe in the laundry in their mothers basement (i.e. 90% of the self-help literature, 80% of pop-psychology, 70% of modern philosophy, etc.)
I wonder why nobody has mentioned TLS/SSL so far.
No, I don't encrypt mail - anymore. Like most here, I tried for a good time, had my PGP key in my .sig and website online, fingerprint on business cards, etc. I think I sent about 5 PGP-encrypted mails and received the same number.
Reason: Nobody else used it.
So I went to the level that I could control. All the SMTP and IMAP traffic between myself and my server is encrypted, and if the other side supports TLS, so is any incoming and outgoing SMTP. It's not perfect, but it is better than giving up completely. Opportunistic encryption is the best option you have if you don't control the other side, and I believe that PGP should be a huge lesson in humility for us crypto-geeks. Because we don't control the other party, but we thought that we could/should.
The New Testament was largely a bugfix
It was actually an expansion, not a patch. Jesus explicitly says that he did not intend to replace the old teachings, only to complement them. He makes a couple specific corrections, but never has the guts to outright declare any parts null and void.
fanatics will just ignore anything that doesn't support their worldview regardless.
Fanatics need to start somewhere. Sure, the guy who buys the explosives and sends the young man to his death as a living bomb is the main asshole in the story. But without a life of religious indoctrination, that young man would've told the old geezer to go fuck himself instead of happily strapping a bomb to his chest.
It is very, very difficult to convince people of some batshit crazy nonsense out of thin air. It is a whole lot easier to convince them of a crazy fanatically extreme version of something they already believe in. And it is frighteningly easy to do so if that something contains teachings on accepting authority, believing in stuff you can't verify and all the other baggage of religion.
You are dodging the point.
Yes, there are variations within every faith, as in every group that is sufficiently large and long-lived. But let's ignore the fringes, both the more reasonable and the batshit insane. Mainstream christianity accepts the holy bible as the word of god, more or less directly. It doesn't matter if they believe it was actually written by the guy or it was written by humans inspired by the holy spirit. They don't call it the holy bible for nothing.
And sure, they all ignore most of the nonsense crap that's in there. But it is still in there, waiting for the first fanatic to abuse it.
Really, I would take the whole "we're the good guys" attitude a lot more seriously if they would issue a bugfix for their holy book and do away with all the evil crap in there. But they don't. And that's why they are evil people.
The cosmetics industry is obviously a good starting point â" but what if the ban leaks over to product photography (I'm looking at you, Burger King), video gameplay demos, or a photographer's own works?"
All except the last would be a good thing.
This is a "truth in advertising" question. If your ad claims to show your product (or its result), then it should do so, otherwise you are deceiving.
The photographer does not show a product - the picture is the product, not whatever is on it. The model, the scenery, make-up, lighting, camera and Photoshop are all parts of the toolset he uses to create it.
In advertisement, the picture is not the product, it is about the product. If you know about levels of abstraction, it's really straightforward to see the difference and to understand why product advertisement should not be allowed to Photoshop the product itself. Everything else - fine. But that which you are selling should be as displayed.
You are crazy.
Yes, I know what I'm talking about with National Socialism. Have you read "Mein Kampf", the book that outsold the fucking bible in Germany during the Third Reich? It was written well before the Nazis gained power and it lays out everything very openly. I've read it. Anyone who did that and didn't see the Holocaust coming is either stupid or subject to the various cognitive biases that change memories and protect our egos from the truth.
Like all ideologies, it is not pure evil. There's stuff about parents who can afford it should adopt kids who need it in there. But, like with religion, the underlying evil does, in the words of Hitchens, poison everything. The adoption part, for example, was intended so that there would be more pure-race arian children raised under good conditions. That's not an interpretation, that's just paraphrasing Hitler's own words because I don't have the book here and can't look up the actual quote.
And now explain to me how an ideology like christianity or islam, which contains extensive lists of which kinds of people you have to kill, and in which especially brutal ways, can be considered neutral in any non-perverted sense of the word.
Too bad your book seems to be full of pictures and not reasons.
I prefer mine, where I can explain why I act or think the way I do.
and yet obviously none of those are going to be a perfect fit for me and 99,999 others
I never requested a perfect fit. Heck, I can't represent myself at 100%, because - surprise - circumstances and opinions can change over time.
I was talking about the case where you look at the available parties, immediately discard half of them as insane (usually minor parties anyways), check out the others and realize that none of them are even an acceptable fit.
Also, you ignore that in reality (i.e. aside from the rhetorics and the campaigns), the major parties in all western nations have become very hard to distinguish. We've had several switches between the major parties and their coalition partners here in Germany over the past 15-20 years. In real-life day-to-day politics, it barely mattered.
If your political view diverts from the status quo in more then details, chances are that throwing your vote at any of the major parties is a waste and won't change any of the things that are important to you. All you are doing is solidifying the status quo.
There's another way: The write-in line.
In the US, yes. In my country, there is no such line.
And no, I don't go with the wager, either. It's just another attempt to get people to vote for something they don't support through the false generation of bad conscious.
If you don't want a specific party or candidate to win, but you don't like the others either, the reasonable approach is not to give a dishonest, corrupt vote to someone you hate not quite so much, but to convince voters of the really, really bad choice to change their vote.
The english word for "atheist" outside the USA is... surprise... "atheist".
Of course we are here, and while living in the US as an atheist must be horrible from all I read, it's not like the rest of the world would be that much smarter. Smarter, yes. Much, no.
Germany (my country) has much less seperation of state and church, for example. The amount of influence the churches (catholic and protestant) wield over things from public television to schools, to laws(!!!) is ridiculous if you consider that most germans are religious on an average two days a year: Xmas and once if there's a funeral, marriage, etc.
We fight the same fight, just in different ways. There is more official cuddling up to the church and less bullshit christian-right open politics. But it was a newsworthy event when the first chancellor swore his oath of office just to the people and not on the bible. And that was just over 10 years ago.
Religion is like just about anything else. It can be used for good (e.g. helping the poor) or for evil (e.g. killing "heathens" who won't convert). In both cases, the credit or blame should go to the person doing the actions, not the religion itself.
I'll take you literally with the "just about anything else" part.
So National Socialism or Stalinist Communism really is a neutral concept, and it can be used for good or evil? The credit and blame should exclusively go to the respective followers, and nothing whatsoever is wrong about these ideas themselves?
You're crazy.
Religions are evil. People acting out their worst parts are really evil, but those bad parts are in there, whether or not people act them out. And as long as they are in there, knowing what we know about human nature, someone will act on them.
You can't seriously claim that a book with explicit instructions for murder is not evil in this time and culture. I don't care what good parts it has, just like working in a daycare center and giving alms to the poor doesn't and shouldn't protect you from being thrown in jails if you commit a crime.
There's instructions for murder right there in all the major holy books, and no amount of bullshit talk does away with it.
Even Buddhism has its extremists (Google for examples.)
The problem is that any philosophy that claims to have a God-given truth inevitably turns evil because you can't question God-given truth.
There's a non-sequitur in your argument. Buddhism doesn't have god-given truth, because it doesn't have a god. While the Buddha is revered, he's not considered god-like or omniscient.
You're right that Buddhism has its faults, too. But your argument is bad.
You are aware that this was highly illegal and there are several organisations to support atheists in the armed forces in the case of discrimination? Like the American Atheists or the Military Religious Freedom Foundation?
Consciously abstaining is the stupidest fucking thing imaginable. Vote for a third party, if you must, but better yet, vote for the less bad candidate.
I've spoken out against this for as long as I could vote, and no one has convinced me otherwise in 20 years (though I now vote - for the Pirate Party).
If you find a party or a candidate that suits you - fine. But if you don't, then voting for the least evil is not appropriate. It sends all kinds of wrong messages. Not only does it give the party you vote for a false sense of representation, it also tells everyone that the system is fine as it is, when it really isn't (because there is nobody in it who represents you).
My vote is all I have in a representative democracy. I will give it only to someone who I want to be represented by. I'm not falling for these attempts to give me a bad feeling about withholding my vote when there is nobody I trust with it. In fact, I would wish there was a "none of the above" option on the ballot, I would have used it for almost 20 years. As there isn't, abstaining is the only option I have to express myself in an election.
I am not responsible for bad people coming to power - the people who voted them in are, and nobody else.
is he delusional, or is he just trying to build buzz for his company's products the best he can?"
Yes, he is.
Next question?
Seriously? This is news? "Exec claims competitors products suck." - yeah, that never happens...
Look, I didn't write that there should be no references.
But references alone do not make a good article, and references do not equal knowledge. I can easily write a WP-style article about UFOs, the conspiracy that murdered JFK and was really behind 9/11, the secret hiding place of Hitler who is, of course, still alive and a hundred other total-bullshit topics and have enough references in them to satisfy every WP bot and editor.
And yet we know that all this is bullshit because of all the other evidence that exists. And that is why the jealous guarding of WP articles that goes on is a disaster.
The WP guidelines are - mostly - good as they are written, but not as they are executed. NPOV is a great guideline. It's insanity if you apply it to mean giving every side to a topic the same space, no matter how disproven and ludicrous it is. Even notability is a good idea, if you use it to remove articles about the 5000th porn star who had one movie, but of course that's not the articles that get deleted.
Likewise, "no original research" is a good idea if it means that WP should be an encyclopedia, not a publishing platform. But when you can't correct an article about a topic where you are a world-famous expert, because the references to your own published works get disqualified as original research - that's one of the insanities in execution that I'm talking about and that drive excellent people away from WP.
The editor - pfft, who cares? A better editor will bring in more know-nothing idiots who couldn't be arsed before because it took almost as much effort as tying your shoes to learn the editor. Like everything WP has done over the past years, it does nothing to solve the real problems of the platform.