"They say the new president of their country will be (Barack) Obama," noting that Obama rejects both the Bush administration's free trade agreement with Colombia and the current military aid program.
Always encouraging when our enemies are looking forward to, or at least encouraged by, a certain candidate's win. I'm also curious how it's apparently already been determined at certain levels of government that Obama will win the presidency.
Agreed. I kept thinking "I used to be a nice person. What the hell happened to me?" I wound up yelling at my boss and team lead, and then quitting the job.
I learned some valuable lessons in stress management, though, like how much stress I'm able to handle, how NOT to handle stress, and that it doesn't pay to run yourself into the ground for the sake of the job. Even the employer doesn't benefit, because your attitude and quality of work plummet.
At this point in my life, I'd see these mistakes a mile away and avoid them, but that was the first time I was ever in a job with that level of stress, and I can honestly and regretfully say that I didn't handle it very well.
Thanks for the advice. Definitely some good information. My problem is usually getting to bed to begin with, not so much sleeping once I'm there. That said, I'd probably sleep a helluva lot better if I even did half of that stuff.
After years of working in jobs where I'd get 3-5 hours of sleep in a night, I can say that I was one of these people. I had increased anxiety, was thinking significantly slower, had problems comprehending other people's speech, and a terrible memory to boot. As someone who was always very intelligent, this bothered the hell out of me because I felt like I'd dropped about 100 IQ points.
That's in addition to extreme irritability and just being a downright nasty person sometimes -- even to people I care about. I have relatives who have clinical depression, and I began exhibiting many of the same symptoms. I think this also has a lot to do with the fact that I was drinking copious amounts of coffee to try to make up for the sleep I wasn't getting. The weird part is that I knew it was happening and felt powerless to fix it.
It seems to take a long time (months) to recover from this. I've been working shorter hours and much closer to home now for about 7 months. Only recently have I begun feeling "normal" again -- last month or so. Over the past few months my mood has improved dramatically and I feel like I'm able to answer a question without an initial blank stare while I figure out what's being asked of me.
While I may not make the same money I used to, my quality of life is vastly improved. I'd only go back to what I was doing if I was really in dire straights.
William J. Briggs II, a lawyer representing the bank, said the decision "abdicated federal judicial authority to the Internet."
...presupposing that the federal judiciary ever had control over "the internet".
From the judge:
"The court is telling you, you can't rein this in," he added, "and I think that's a sad commentary."
Why is it a sad commentary, when a judiciary with questionable or no jurisdiction can't remove information from another country's computers? Okay, I can think of a few Think-Of-The-Children reasons, but really, this is where the censorship-as-damage principle really shines.
The judge didn't get it, still doesn't get it, and is only reversing his ruling because he's taken a bunch of flack over a futile effort that he knows he doesn't understand.
No. It's elitism when these guys have the power to greatly influence elections, decide when footage is something we "shouldn't see" (someone else mentioned the Hussein hanging), or otherwise decide which information they want the public to know or the perceptions they should have. There's a difference between doing a good job and abusing your pulpit.
Obviously a trained reporter can *report* better than an amateur, but there's not a lot of reporting going on nowadays. It's mostly "Hey, this happened. The next hour is my opinion and speculation presented as fact."
Air traffic control and news media are pretty different animals as well, so I'm not so sure your analogy flies, so to speak. Either way, if air traffic controllers spent 5% of their time controlling traffic and the other 95% arguing over whether Boeing or Airbus will win that big defense contract (or whatever), I'd say they weren't very good air traffic controllers either.
Not at all. My point was that the increased number of videos might have helped. That there were very few is the problem. It doesn't matter who took it, it's the fact that there was very little footage from few vantage points.
Again, the key here is, if it's important to you, do your own checking. If it's not, forget it and move on. The fact that lots of people are available to call BS actually *increases* the credibility of the article written by Bill Gates if the only people calling BS are obvious wackos. If someone provides a reasoned argument, it's up to you to investigate the truth of that argument as much as it is up to you to investigate Gates' article itself. The value is in the possibility of presenting the opposing viewpoint. As you've pointed out, you should not, ever, believe everything you read, but you shouldn't automatically discount the opinions of the general public either.
Editors are an artifact of the, for lack of a better term, "non-interactiveness" of traditional media. They are supposed to act as the filter on behalf of the general public, but, as it turns out, editors have their own opinions and world views. Only by allowing the general public to comment on the news will all sides be expressed. You'll have mouth-breathers from the Republican, Democratic, Libertarian, Communist, Socialist, Green, and Martian parties all jumping in, and that will give you a much better feel for the different perspectives on the issue. You remain free to form your own opinion.
The fact is that the age of unbiased news is very likely gone forever. The only other method is to take all the bias and try to come up with a reasonable approximation of the truth. Editors are not on your side any more than Bill O'Reilly is.
True as that may be, at least the footage exists and has been shown. If we rely on a few organizations to take said footage, the quality might be better, but the money shot might be completely missing. What if there were 300 amateur video cameras at the JFK assassination? Would this bit be in Wikipedia? Maybe, maybe not, but the odds certainly increase for "maybe not".
President Johnson created the Warren Commission--chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren--to investigate the assassination. It concluded that Oswald was the lone assassin, but this remains disputed by some scholars and eyewitnesses. Gallup Polls taken since the mid-1960s have consistently shown that approximately 80% of the American people did not believe the Commission's findings.[citation needed] Conspiracy theories about the assassination and supposed cover-up have been put forward and have become commonplace in popular culture.
The difference is the knowledge base and they number of eyes. You don't personally know everything about everything. If someone more knowledgeable on the topic comes along and points out that something is BS, they've now flagged something you might not have noticed. You can then go find out more for yourself.
As a regular Slashdot reader, I've gotten pretty good at picking out asshats, trolls, and people who have no idea what they're talking about. The advantage here is that you have someone suggesting to you that X might not be true, and, if their opinion is worth considering, will make an attempt at backing up the assertion. You then have something to go on to do your own research. With regular news outlets, you have little opportunity for someone to suggest that an aspect of the story is flawed.
You don't need to believe the poster, but at least be open-minded enough to consider it. If it's important to you, go check what they're saying. If it's not, then who cares whether you believe them or not?
Granted, comment sections on news sites don't normally tend to draw the high-brow crowds, but when a topic is of great interest, it will draw better comments. This is especially important if the news story itself contains major bias, misinformation, or missing information. Unfortunately, I've seen comment sections where people said "It seems like my earlier post was removed, but...". Censorship of the comments completely defeats the purpose.
Besides, they're usually at the bottom of the page, and are easy to ignore. If you don't like them, you are not required to read them.
No one in the loop to catch them? Do you read the/. comments? Readers regularly point out bad summaries, dupes, outright lies, and argue both sides of the story. That's the power of user-driven content. Not only does it not go unchallenged, it is posted with the expectation that it will be challenged by everyone in the world. When was the last time CNN let you publicly and instantly comment on the air about their TV broadcast?
The incredible inaccuracy of eye witness accounts is well known. It is also a truism that the camera lies; a singe perspective can be dangerous.
Which is exactly why the news media has so much power. They choose the shots that say what they want them to say. Socially-driven content will contain multiple perspectives from multiple sources. It is therefore easier to compare and find the truth -- even if an individual perspective is incorrect.
There's a helluva lot to be said for people interested in journalism to be able to earn a living from it, to earn respect for doing a good job, and for having an organisation that can support them, mentor them as they learn their trade, and get them direct access to the highest politicians in their country.
That may be true, and I'm not saying necessarily that major media has no place at all. I'm just saying that socially-driven news sites are a necessary competition, supplement, and counter-agent.
Amigo, you're calling me on what you consider a logic error, and I'm not a professional. It's the social aspect that makes this work. If the original commenter asserts something fallacious, he can be called on it. Contrast that with the news networks, who are deliberately misleading and well-paid to be so.
That's exactly my point. As long as the news is no better than Joe Blow, we may as well listen to Joe Blow. At least Joe isn't paid a million a year to advance an agenda.
There's a difference between an amateur stating or including their opinion and being a professional who spins for a living. The latter are much more practiced and much more convincing, to the point that many people accept O'Reilly's or Anderson Cooper's opinion as fact, most times without question. There's this implicit trust of the talking head in the suit that shouldn't exist. If news were created by obvious amateurs, perhaps more people would take it with a grain of salt.
I don't really get this elitism when it comes to the press. Why is it that somebody with a video camera of first-person experience is considered a monkey? Why are the highly-paid monkeys a thousand miles away, who are taking their lines from teleprompters more qualified than the monkey who was there? Because there might be grammar mistakes? Not everyone is an English major, but that doesn't make them a monkey.
One can only hope that this is the future of news. News nowadays is nothing but pundits and propaganda. Individuals have their opinions too, but they're not professional spin machines. Any bias will probably be much more obvious to people with broken bullshit detectors. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Depending on your political point of view, you might think I'm referring specifically to MSNBC, Fox, or CNN. Fact is, I'm talking about all of them.
No it isn't. What I saw is that kind of response for issues that likely only affected me, and only in odd use cases. They weren't major -- just a pain in the butt. There was no production system down, and I didn't pay them a cent. It couldn't be more different.
Or, if you have decent communication skills, talk to the developers who can usually fix it very quickly. A few years ago, I was having trouble getting FreeTDS to compile on an *old* Solaris platform (not a common target in the least). I worked with the developers, James and Freddy, I think, and they were astonishingly responsive. In fact, at times I was the one slowing down the process. They had the bug investigated and patched in a day or two. Unbelievable. That could never have happened with closed-source software.
Another time I ran into a minor SQLAlchemy bug having to do with Postgres domains column types. I reported it along with some sample code to reproduce the error, and it was fixed in the next release a couple weeks later.
It's that kind of responsiveness that's the reason I'm a FOSS fanatic. I get so frustrated with closed off-the-shelf software! Yes, FOSS is sometimes a little rough around the edges or incomplete, but it's always improving and the authors have always been responsive to my problems -- even if it was a PEBKAC error. Can't say the same for closed source.
You sound like you'd be happier with Technocrat.net. Decidedly fewer trolls and 12 year old fanboiz there. I lurk, but don't really post much.Give it a shot.
Slashdot Mirror
Pick up the pieces, Humpty Dumpty, it's not Open Source.
From http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080305/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/colombia_farc_laptop
Always encouraging when our enemies are looking forward to, or at least encouraged by, a certain candidate's win. I'm also curious how it's apparently already been determined at certain levels of government that Obama will win the presidency.
Agreed. I kept thinking "I used to be a nice person. What the hell happened to me?" I wound up yelling at my boss and team lead, and then quitting the job.
I learned some valuable lessons in stress management, though, like how much stress I'm able to handle, how NOT to handle stress, and that it doesn't pay to run yourself into the ground for the sake of the job. Even the employer doesn't benefit, because your attitude and quality of work plummet.
At this point in my life, I'd see these mistakes a mile away and avoid them, but that was the first time I was ever in a job with that level of stress, and I can honestly and regretfully say that I didn't handle it very well.
Thanks for the advice. Definitely some good information. My problem is usually getting to bed to begin with, not so much sleeping once I'm there. That said, I'd probably sleep a helluva lot better if I even did half of that stuff.
After years of working in jobs where I'd get 3-5 hours of sleep in a night, I can say that I was one of these people. I had increased anxiety, was thinking significantly slower, had problems comprehending other people's speech, and a terrible memory to boot. As someone who was always very intelligent, this bothered the hell out of me because I felt like I'd dropped about 100 IQ points.
That's in addition to extreme irritability and just being a downright nasty person sometimes -- even to people I care about. I have relatives who have clinical depression, and I began exhibiting many of the same symptoms. I think this also has a lot to do with the fact that I was drinking copious amounts of coffee to try to make up for the sleep I wasn't getting. The weird part is that I knew it was happening and felt powerless to fix it.
It seems to take a long time (months) to recover from this. I've been working shorter hours and much closer to home now for about 7 months. Only recently have I begun feeling "normal" again -- last month or so. Over the past few months my mood has improved dramatically and I feel like I'm able to answer a question without an initial blank stare while I figure out what's being asked of me.
While I may not make the same money I used to, my quality of life is vastly improved. I'd only go back to what I was doing if I was really in dire straights.
From the judge:
Why is it a sad commentary, when a judiciary with questionable or no jurisdiction can't remove information from another country's computers? Okay, I can think of a few Think-Of-The-Children reasons, but really, this is where the censorship-as-damage principle really shines.
The judge didn't get it, still doesn't get it, and is only reversing his ruling because he's taken a bunch of flack over a futile effort that he knows he doesn't understand.
You would think it'd be that John Locke, but there's no philosophy about it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke_(Lost)
No. It's elitism when these guys have the power to greatly influence elections, decide when footage is something we "shouldn't see" (someone else mentioned the Hussein hanging), or otherwise decide which information they want the public to know or the perceptions they should have. There's a difference between doing a good job and abusing your pulpit.
Obviously a trained reporter can *report* better than an amateur, but there's not a lot of reporting going on nowadays. It's mostly "Hey, this happened. The next hour is my opinion and speculation presented as fact."
Air traffic control and news media are pretty different animals as well, so I'm not so sure your analogy flies, so to speak. Either way, if air traffic controllers spent 5% of their time controlling traffic and the other 95% arguing over whether Boeing or Airbus will win that big defense contract (or whatever), I'd say they weren't very good air traffic controllers either.
Not at all. My point was that the increased number of videos might have helped. That there were very few is the problem. It doesn't matter who took it, it's the fact that there was very little footage from few vantage points.
Again, the key here is, if it's important to you, do your own checking. If it's not, forget it and move on. The fact that lots of people are available to call BS actually *increases* the credibility of the article written by Bill Gates if the only people calling BS are obvious wackos. If someone provides a reasoned argument, it's up to you to investigate the truth of that argument as much as it is up to you to investigate Gates' article itself. The value is in the possibility of presenting the opposing viewpoint. As you've pointed out, you should not, ever, believe everything you read, but you shouldn't automatically discount the opinions of the general public either.
Editors are an artifact of the, for lack of a better term, "non-interactiveness" of traditional media. They are supposed to act as the filter on behalf of the general public, but, as it turns out, editors have their own opinions and world views. Only by allowing the general public to comment on the news will all sides be expressed. You'll have mouth-breathers from the Republican, Democratic, Libertarian, Communist, Socialist, Green, and Martian parties all jumping in, and that will give you a much better feel for the different perspectives on the issue. You remain free to form your own opinion.
The fact is that the age of unbiased news is very likely gone forever. The only other method is to take all the bias and try to come up with a reasonable approximation of the truth. Editors are not on your side any more than Bill O'Reilly is.
The difference is the knowledge base and they number of eyes. You don't personally know everything about everything. If someone more knowledgeable on the topic comes along and points out that something is BS, they've now flagged something you might not have noticed. You can then go find out more for yourself.
As a regular Slashdot reader, I've gotten pretty good at picking out asshats, trolls, and people who have no idea what they're talking about. The advantage here is that you have someone suggesting to you that X might not be true, and, if their opinion is worth considering, will make an attempt at backing up the assertion. You then have something to go on to do your own research. With regular news outlets, you have little opportunity for someone to suggest that an aspect of the story is flawed.
You don't need to believe the poster, but at least be open-minded enough to consider it. If it's important to you, go check what they're saying. If it's not, then who cares whether you believe them or not?
Granted, comment sections on news sites don't normally tend to draw the high-brow crowds, but when a topic is of great interest, it will draw better comments. This is especially important if the news story itself contains major bias, misinformation, or missing information. Unfortunately, I've seen comment sections where people said "It seems like my earlier post was removed, but...". Censorship of the comments completely defeats the purpose.
Besides, they're usually at the bottom of the page, and are easy to ignore. If you don't like them, you are not required to read them.
No one in the loop to catch them? Do you read the /. comments? Readers regularly point out bad summaries, dupes, outright lies, and argue both sides of the story. That's the power of user-driven content. Not only does it not go unchallenged, it is posted with the expectation that it will be challenged by everyone in the world. When was the last time CNN let you publicly and instantly comment on the air about their TV broadcast?
Which is exactly why the news media has so much power. They choose the shots that say what they want them to say. Socially-driven content will contain multiple perspectives from multiple sources. It is therefore easier to compare and find the truth -- even if an individual perspective is incorrect.
That may be true, and I'm not saying necessarily that major media has no place at all. I'm just saying that socially-driven news sites are a necessary competition, supplement, and counter-agent.
Amigo, you're calling me on what you consider a logic error, and I'm not a professional. It's the social aspect that makes this work. If the original commenter asserts something fallacious, he can be called on it. Contrast that with the news networks, who are deliberately misleading and well-paid to be so.
That's exactly my point. As long as the news is no better than Joe Blow, we may as well listen to Joe Blow. At least Joe isn't paid a million a year to advance an agenda.
There's a difference between an amateur stating or including their opinion and being a professional who spins for a living. The latter are much more practiced and much more convincing, to the point that many people accept O'Reilly's or Anderson Cooper's opinion as fact, most times without question. There's this implicit trust of the talking head in the suit that shouldn't exist. If news were created by obvious amateurs, perhaps more people would take it with a grain of salt.
I don't really get this elitism when it comes to the press. Why is it that somebody with a video camera of first-person experience is considered a monkey? Why are the highly-paid monkeys a thousand miles away, who are taking their lines from teleprompters more qualified than the monkey who was there? Because there might be grammar mistakes? Not everyone is an English major, but that doesn't make them a monkey.
One can only hope that this is the future of news. News nowadays is nothing but pundits and propaganda. Individuals have their opinions too, but they're not professional spin machines. Any bias will probably be much more obvious to people with broken bullshit detectors. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Depending on your political point of view, you might think I'm referring specifically to MSNBC, Fox, or CNN. Fact is, I'm talking about all of them.
No it isn't. What I saw is that kind of response for issues that likely only affected me, and only in odd use cases. They weren't major -- just a pain in the butt. There was no production system down, and I didn't pay them a cent. It couldn't be more different.
Or, if you have decent communication skills, talk to the developers who can usually fix it very quickly. A few years ago, I was having trouble getting FreeTDS to compile on an *old* Solaris platform (not a common target in the least). I worked with the developers, James and Freddy, I think, and they were astonishingly responsive. In fact, at times I was the one slowing down the process. They had the bug investigated and patched in a day or two. Unbelievable. That could never have happened with closed-source software.
Another time I ran into a minor SQLAlchemy bug having to do with Postgres domains column types. I reported it along with some sample code to reproduce the error, and it was fixed in the next release a couple weeks later.
It's that kind of responsiveness that's the reason I'm a FOSS fanatic. I get so frustrated with closed off-the-shelf software! Yes, FOSS is sometimes a little rough around the edges or incomplete, but it's always improving and the authors have always been responsive to my problems -- even if it was a PEBKAC error. Can't say the same for closed source.
You sound like you'd be happier with Technocrat.net. Decidedly fewer trolls and 12 year old fanboiz there. I lurk, but don't really post much.Give it a shot.
Holy shit. The Carlyle Group is the Illuminati! ;-)