Didn't overlook them at all. What makes you think they are astroturfing? They are presenting their own opinions in the belief it will be of benefit to the reader, not paid marketers astroturfing in the belief it will benefit themselves.
So you're saying "these guys are not astroturfers because they are not astroturfing. The other guys are obviously astroturfers, therefore I accused them of astroturfing."
It looks like the rest of your argument went off on a tangent attacking marketers, with the vague implication that anyone who has an opinion in support of Microsoft is one of its employees, before summarizing with "Microsoft's opinion is biased for itself. Therefore Slashdot is justified in being biased against it". Palm hitting face.
Furthermore, you seem to be arguing that because Microsoft is small sector of the tech community, therefore it should only have a small amount of support and the rest should be against it by default. That's not how opinions work. My quip is that opinion on Slashdot is obviously overwhelmingly against Microsoft, yet certain paranoid anti-MS posters are seeing astroturfers everywhere. I'm claiming Slashdot is biased. Not Microsoft. Unless my opinion has relegated my place to the shadowy masses representing Microsoft's position.
You were saying something about how some zealots call other people zealots just because they happened to have different opinions?
The speed of light is not constant when not in a vacuum, and the wavelength frequency conversion depends on the speed of the wave, not the speed of the wave in a vacuum. So, you can't convert the frequency in this article to wavelength without first knowing the properties of the medium the frequency was measured in.
This is why normal people go for dental checkups every year. None of your doctors, over twelve years of pain in your mouth, recommended that you should get a dentist to check it out?
I think you got the wrong moral out of this story.
Me unzipping on the sidewalk and taking a leak is the most natural thing possible. Actually it's more natural than breastfeeding, since there's no requirement of having popped out a baby recently. Anyone could do it any time, and there are in fact no good alternatives to disposing of bodily waste.
Now. Would you like to see me pissing on the street? What if I decided I'd like to post pictures of this totally natural act onto Facebook?
In fact, I'm more disturbed that this act could potentially get me a citation which would equate me with a child molester.
"Here in Canada" we have a charter of rights and freedoms, as a matter of fact, which -should- guarantee that every citizen in the country has equal rights and opportunity.
Don't twist my argument. My example was to show that different people in different countries have different moral grounds. Canada happens to have some similar things as the US due to similar culture, and as I said, have some dissimilar things as well. How about I protest your right to have guns?
Some morals go beyond boundaries, they're what join us together as human beings.
Wow, did you just single-handedly settle the absolute morals debate, and expected everyone to just go along with your assertion? The justification is that you believe this to be fact, thus everyone else should too? This is the exact underlying problem I'm attacking.
Secondly I find it absolutely laughable, and perhaps intentionally misleading that you would even -suggest- that the past few centuries have been in any way peaceful for the Western world (of which France is not considered a part, incidentally). Starting from the 18th century (a "few hundred" as you would put it), there have been over 40 major conflicts involving North America, either on its own soil or others (ones that you seem to have conveniently forgotten include both World Wars, the Vietnam and Korean Wars, and a few other blatantly obvious choices). Try reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_North_America to educate yourself, assuming that Wikipedia isn't censored where you live. We have -not- had stable governments for centuries and we've been through our own share of atrocities ("Here in Canada" we also had concentration camps for the Japanese during the second World War, which you also seem to have conveniently forgotten).
You missed my point completely, perhaps intentionally. It was not about peace or conflicts. Internal chaos is not the same as conflict against other countries. Let me simplify: - Government changes three times in the span of about thirty years, lots of people die, lots of people starve, lots of people homeless, not to mention all the opportunistic warlords making their own landgrab. - Chinese person: "Shit, this sucks. Let's pick a government and stick with it for a while and trust it to do the right thing." - After about another forty years of turmoil, things are finally starting to look up. - Government censorship. - Westerner: "HOLY FUCK THE GOVERNMENT IS CENSORING SHIT! OUR GOVERNMENT DOESN'T DO THAT, SO THAT AIN'T RIGHT! DOWN WITH THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT!" - Chinese person: "Well gee, I don't really give a damn about the censored stuff or very explicitly and loudly expressing my ideas about how the government sucks. Also, the economy's booming lately, and changing governments suck. Yay government!
To summarize, your way is not necessarily the best way, even if it is the only way you know. Other people in other countries have had different circumstances and came up with different methods to cope, and developed different value systems as a result. Learn to look at things from a different perspective, and deal with it.
On a kind of related tangent, this is exactly the reason, in my experience, for a lot of Middle- and Far-East resentment against the US. Americans are on this moral high horse and tries to push their own values and standards onto everybody else, which is especially ridiculous considering all the hypocritical bullshit that goes on in America. You know what I'm talking about.
Yes, we do take the side of idealistic students clamouring for rights and liberty, because it's the same thing that we are clamouring for every day.
Clamour in your own country? Fine. That's the value system your society has decided to adopt. Quit judging other countries' value systems.
Anyway, you have to realize that Chinese values are fundamentally different from your own. "The Right Thing", to you, might mean freedom of expression, the right to bear arms, etc., but that's not true of all people. Here in Canada, we believe The Right Thing is gays should be allowed to marry, and nobody should walk around packin'. In China, people believe The Right Thing is a centralized, stable government.
Personally, I find it easy to understand the sentiments of the people you mentioned who believed Tiananmen was a case of "tough shit", because given China's chaotic political history, especially in the recent past, organized, stable government is a top priority for many people. And you can't blame them, given the shit they had to suffer through with unstable governments. Many people today still remember said shit, and deems it important to pass these values, namely avoiding said shit, down to the next generation. And the protestors were challenging those very values - the main goal behind the protest was further government reforms, and sought to basically remove the Party from power. In essence, completely disrupting the stable government that China had suffered through three or four periods of complete chaos for.
Obviously Westerners, when presented with the two sides, take the side of the idealistic students clamouring for rights and liberty, since you've enjoyed the luxuries of stable government for centuries. I mean, when was the last major revolution in the Western world? The French Revolution? The availability of these luxuries means that you no longer rank them as high as someone who's lived through several turbulent governments would, and instead prioritize further luxuries like the freedoms I mentioned above. Well, when you look at those freedoms from the perspective of someone who just came out of the feudal age, they're really not that essential to life. So you must understand why they don't rank as high on the list of priorities for a Chinese person.
Way to conveniently overlook the fact that China, in its current incarnation, never had democracy, and is doing just fine without it.
It irks me that democracy has become such a buzzword, placed on a pedestal as some sort of basic human allowance. But it's really not the best form of government, and some would argue that it's not even a good one. Most countries that claim to be democratic don't even directly implement it.
Care to justify your assertion that they don't like it this way? Your own beliefs regarding free speech, etc., are not valid justification for what other people may believe.
As hard as it may be to believe for jaded Americans, the majority of the Chinese actually approve of and trust their government. I say this because it seems in America, people whine and bitch about being forced to choose the lesser of two evils, whereas in China people generally tend to be content with whoever Congress deems suitable to elect.
I'm Chinese, and I don't believe Taiwan is governed by the PRC in any way. I'm guessing you weren't trying to imply that the Taiwanese privately believe they're governed by the PRC.
Freedom and liberty once gained, are real and comparatively easy to protect. On the other hand, if you do not have them, they're really hard to get. Yet people at all levels of society are willing to die for them, repeatedly, across generations. I cite any of the magna carta, various revolutions, abolishment of slavery, suffrage, and eventually black civil rights as just a few examples of obstacles the US (and western world in general) has fought on its way to get where it is now.
Wealth and security once gained, are real and comparatively easy to protect. On the other hand, if you do not have them, they're really hard to get. Yet people at all levels of society are willing to die for them, repeatedly, across generations. I cite "the rich get richer".
I think you're under the impression that I'm knocking freedom and liberty. I'm not. I'm criticizing your claim that those are better than communism, in terms of their merit as ideals.
Wealth for all, in itself, is self contradictory. Wealth is a relative term. One can be wealthy only compared to another. If a few are wealthy and a few are not, it follows, no one is secure. This is also pretty well covered in history.
I think you need to re-examine the communist manifesto. Wealth doesn't necessarily mean that someone is wealthier than somebody else. The point of communism is everyone should be equally wealthy.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm, Sony is Japanese. And that Ericsson was probably made in China.
Didn't overlook them at all. What makes you think they are astroturfing? They are presenting their own opinions in the belief it will be of benefit to the reader, not paid marketers astroturfing in the belief it will benefit themselves.
So you're saying "these guys are not astroturfers because they are not astroturfing. The other guys are obviously astroturfers, therefore I accused them of astroturfing."
It looks like the rest of your argument went off on a tangent attacking marketers, with the vague implication that anyone who has an opinion in support of Microsoft is one of its employees, before summarizing with "Microsoft's opinion is biased for itself. Therefore Slashdot is justified in being biased against it". Palm hitting face.
Furthermore, you seem to be arguing that because Microsoft is small sector of the tech community, therefore it should only have a small amount of support and the rest should be against it by default. That's not how opinions work. My quip is that opinion on Slashdot is obviously overwhelmingly against Microsoft, yet certain paranoid anti-MS posters are seeing astroturfers everywhere. I'm claiming Slashdot is biased. Not Microsoft. Unless my opinion has relegated my place to the shadowy masses representing Microsoft's position.
You were saying something about how some zealots call other people zealots just because they happened to have different opinions?
You conveniently overlooked all the content free posts deriding Microsoft that get modded through the heavens. Who are those guys astroturfing for?
M$ astroturfers.
Right, because /. is FULL of those. As made apparent by the overwhelming bias of opinion in Microsoft's favour.
I think they call it iodine.
The speed of light is not constant when not in a vacuum, and the wavelength frequency conversion depends on the speed of the wave, not the speed of the wave in a vacuum. So, you can't convert the frequency in this article to wavelength without first knowing the properties of the medium the frequency was measured in.
That only happens when you choose to install updates automatically. I'm not sure where you said no in this process. Silence is consent! :P
The sad thing is, this poop gets modded up.
Wouldn't /not/ aborting them be hindering their trip to heaven?
I think you got the wrong moral out of this story.
Huh? How is urinating in public a health hazard? Urine is sterile.
Now. Would you like to see me pissing on the street? What if I decided I'd like to post pictures of this totally natural act onto Facebook?
In fact, I'm more disturbed that this act could potentially get me a citation which would equate me with a child molester.
...Why is this modded troll?
Huh? Your NDA prevents you from telling people about how well software everyone else has access to runs on your hardware?
"Here in Canada" we have a charter of rights and freedoms, as a matter of fact, which -should- guarantee that every citizen in the country has equal rights and opportunity.
Don't twist my argument. My example was to show that different people in different countries have different moral grounds. Canada happens to have some similar things as the US due to similar culture, and as I said, have some dissimilar things as well. How about I protest your right to have guns?
Some morals go beyond boundaries, they're what join us together as human beings.
Wow, did you just single-handedly settle the absolute morals debate, and expected everyone to just go along with your assertion? The justification is that you believe this to be fact, thus everyone else should too? This is the exact underlying problem I'm attacking.
Secondly I find it absolutely laughable, and perhaps intentionally misleading that you would even -suggest- that the past few centuries have been in any way peaceful for the Western world (of which France is not considered a part, incidentally). Starting from the 18th century (a "few hundred" as you would put it), there have been over 40 major conflicts involving North America, either on its own soil or others (ones that you seem to have conveniently forgotten include both World Wars, the Vietnam and Korean Wars, and a few other blatantly obvious choices). Try reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_North_America to educate yourself, assuming that Wikipedia isn't censored where you live. We have -not- had stable governments for centuries and we've been through our own share of atrocities ("Here in Canada" we also had concentration camps for the Japanese during the second World War, which you also seem to have conveniently forgotten).
You missed my point completely, perhaps intentionally. It was not about peace or conflicts. Internal chaos is not the same as conflict against other countries. Let me simplify:
- Government changes three times in the span of about thirty years, lots of people die, lots of people starve, lots of people homeless, not to mention all the opportunistic warlords making their own landgrab.
- Chinese person: "Shit, this sucks. Let's pick a government and stick with it for a while and trust it to do the right thing."
- After about another forty years of turmoil, things are finally starting to look up.
- Government censorship.
- Westerner: "HOLY FUCK THE GOVERNMENT IS CENSORING SHIT! OUR GOVERNMENT DOESN'T DO THAT, SO THAT AIN'T RIGHT! DOWN WITH THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT!"
- Chinese person: "Well gee, I don't really give a damn about the censored stuff or very explicitly and loudly expressing my ideas about how the government sucks. Also, the economy's booming lately, and changing governments suck. Yay government!
To summarize, your way is not necessarily the best way, even if it is the only way you know. Other people in other countries have had different circumstances and came up with different methods to cope, and developed different value systems as a result. Learn to look at things from a different perspective, and deal with it.
On a kind of related tangent, this is exactly the reason, in my experience, for a lot of Middle- and Far-East resentment against the US. Americans are on this moral high horse and tries to push their own values and standards onto everybody else, which is especially ridiculous considering all the hypocritical bullshit that goes on in America. You know what I'm talking about.
Yes, we do take the side of idealistic students clamouring for rights and liberty, because it's the same thing that we are clamouring for every day.
Clamour in your own country? Fine. That's the value system your society has decided to adopt. Quit judging other countries' value systems.
Freedom
Uh, tank guy didn't get run over.
Anyway, you have to realize that Chinese values are fundamentally different from your own. "The Right Thing", to you, might mean freedom of expression, the right to bear arms, etc., but that's not true of all people. Here in Canada, we believe The Right Thing is gays should be allowed to marry, and nobody should walk around packin'. In China, people believe The Right Thing is a centralized, stable government.
Personally, I find it easy to understand the sentiments of the people you mentioned who believed Tiananmen was a case of "tough shit", because given China's chaotic political history, especially in the recent past, organized, stable government is a top priority for many people. And you can't blame them, given the shit they had to suffer through with unstable governments. Many people today still remember said shit, and deems it important to pass these values, namely avoiding said shit, down to the next generation. And the protestors were challenging those very values - the main goal behind the protest was further government reforms, and sought to basically remove the Party from power. In essence, completely disrupting the stable government that China had suffered through three or four periods of complete chaos for.
Obviously Westerners, when presented with the two sides, take the side of the idealistic students clamouring for rights and liberty, since you've enjoyed the luxuries of stable government for centuries. I mean, when was the last major revolution in the Western world? The French Revolution? The availability of these luxuries means that you no longer rank them as high as someone who's lived through several turbulent governments would, and instead prioritize further luxuries like the freedoms I mentioned above. Well, when you look at those freedoms from the perspective of someone who just came out of the feudal age, they're really not that essential to life. So you must understand why they don't rank as high on the list of priorities for a Chinese person.
Way to conveniently overlook the fact that China, in its current incarnation, never had democracy, and is doing just fine without it.
It irks me that democracy has become such a buzzword, placed on a pedestal as some sort of basic human allowance. But it's really not the best form of government, and some would argue that it's not even a good one. Most countries that claim to be democratic don't even directly implement it.
Care to justify your assertion that they don't like it this way? Your own beliefs regarding free speech, etc., are not valid justification for what other people may believe.
As hard as it may be to believe for jaded Americans, the majority of the Chinese actually approve of and trust their government. I say this because it seems in America, people whine and bitch about being forced to choose the lesser of two evils, whereas in China people generally tend to be content with whoever Congress deems suitable to elect.
Oops, make that "terrorism".
Why, so the NSA could listen in on my lines and nail me for espionage?
I'm Chinese, and I don't believe Taiwan is governed by the PRC in any way. I'm guessing you weren't trying to imply that the Taiwanese privately believe they're governed by the PRC.
You're thinking of Hong Kong. Taiwan is not governed by the PRC in any way.
Our culture?
Who is this "our" you speak of?
You think thieves are stupid because only the stupid ones get caught.
Freedom and liberty once gained, are real and comparatively easy to protect. On the other hand, if you do not have them, they're really hard to get. Yet people at all levels of society are willing to die for them, repeatedly, across generations. I cite any of the magna carta, various revolutions, abolishment of slavery, suffrage, and eventually black civil rights as just a few examples of obstacles the US (and western world in general) has fought on its way to get where it is now.
Wealth and security once gained, are real and comparatively easy to protect. On the other hand, if you do not have them, they're really hard to get. Yet people at all levels of society are willing to die for them, repeatedly, across generations. I cite "the rich get richer".
I think you're under the impression that I'm knocking freedom and liberty. I'm not. I'm criticizing your claim that those are better than communism, in terms of their merit as ideals.
Wealth for all, in itself, is self contradictory. Wealth is a relative term. One can be wealthy only compared to another. If a few are wealthy and a few are not, it follows, no one is secure. This is also pretty well covered in history.
I think you need to re-examine the communist manifesto. Wealth doesn't necessarily mean that someone is wealthier than somebody else. The point of communism is everyone should be equally wealthy.