The legal restriction on "fire in a crowded room" is not due to a "clear negative effect", it's due to a "clear and present danger", which certainly hasn't been proven in the case of viewing pornography in public, and I think we can agree it'd be laughable to try.
There isn't any sound precedent I'm aware of that establishes any kind of freedom from speech. There are certainly limits on what circumstances you are entitled to subject others to your speech (you are not entitled to hold an audience hostage), but there are no "free from speech zones" in public. If a person is in a public space voluntarily, they do not have the right to operate in a bubble and be shielded from speech.
That's the principle of the law. Whether watching porn is a speech act is another question, but if it is, it is absolutely protected.
When so many of the changes can be utterly devastating, and ultimately can affect survival, I think calling concern over that (and dismissal of marginal improvements) "selfish"... is too stupid to warrant a serious response. Especially when considering that those who stand to be harmed the most (assuming only regional devastation and not a widespread crisis of survival) tend to be those who have contributed least to the change, it's like telling someone who lost their pension in 2008 to stop being selfish and celebrate the windfall for a few execs and fraudsters.
Who cares what caused it - we better look into how to change it back!
I think it would be even more foolish to try to "change it back" than it would be to just learn to adapt.
This is why it matters what caused it. We don't need to change anything "back" except our own behavior. If we are truly an adaptive species, we'd be wise to adapt to the system of life we depend on rather than adapt to the ways we're changing it.
What about all those areas that are going to become better farming land due to a warmer climate?
Yeah, and we can quit wearing sweaters in the wintertime! What a ridiculously opportunistic perspective for someone who isn't going to see the place they live under water or in permanent drought or any other number of changes that destroy life as most of us know it.
Don't worry, we're geeks. Content is more important to us than presentation, as long as it's understandable
Ahem! You misspelled "we're geeks. We constantly correct people for unimportant spelling and grammar errors even when it would be impossible for us to misunderstand the text".
I wonder if all of you who have such thorough knowledge (I assume you're telling the truth, I can't be bothered to fact-check) of Slashdot comment pages... I wonder if you realize that there's a whole world out there that has actual real atrocities and tragedies and plots and even shenanigans, none of which relates to "Score: -1 Insightful" on, let's face it, a news aggregator that reads more often like the Onion than like [pick any reputable source of any information].
I mean. I'm sure that there's real consequences from astroturfing on sites like Facespace and Linkedbook and Twitbay, and hell maybe even here on Slasheddit, but... did you know there's a system of media that indoctrinates millions of passive participants, that the best interaction you can have with it (CNN) is by inadvertently being paid to be one of five YouPorn commenters they routinely recycle, and that instead of software patents and copyright infringement, the fallout is dead bodies, refugees, birth defects, famine, plagues of deadly-treatable-untreated disease...
Seriously, I'm sure you mean well. Have you tried using your sleuthing talents for... something?
And most people who post here assume an air of authority they don't deserve. With the disclaimer's honesty, I'm more inclined than I would be otherwise to believe Xanny knows what they're talking about. But if I think about this too much I fear I'll find myself in an infinite loop.
Yes, now is a good time to point out the poster's anti-Semitism. Being able to make a distinction like that would go a long way for your credibility too.
Oh, I should pay more attention. You *are* khallow. Okay, so... why is it a "problem" if you're not a developer, you don't use it, and you supposedly ignore it? I don't understand your motivation for any of this.
Because, uh, you said you "can and will ignore it"? Do you even pay attention to what you post?
And IE continues to lose market share even after the introduction of IE 9. That tells me, they haven't worked out the problems with IE that kept people from using it.
Even taking that analysis at face value... okay, so? I don't see what that has to do with the discussion. Let's review:
khallow says IE9 is "yet another problem from Microsoft" (I think the meaning of "problem" is clear, and the discussion thus far had pertained to development and what IE9 means in that context) I say it's not a problem, explain why I think so, and explain why I think it should be celebrated... from a developer's perspective. You say you don't use it. I say I have to. You say you can and will ignore it. I ask why you're posting about something you're ignoring. You respond about usage share among end users?
For future reference... I don't really care what browser you use. I care about the improvements to IE9 because it's relevant to me. I don't really care if you care that I care about those improvements. Better?
That's nice for you. I develop websites, so I have to ensure they work properly across browsers, including the one that has nearly half of the world's users.
Bullshit. I've done a little web development for my personal site, and while IE9 is indeed much better than its predecessors, it's still not fully standards compliant, and renders things differently than Chrome and Firefox, requiring the use of CSS hacks to get things to look right. Firefox and Chrome, however, manage to have completely different rendering engines but still render things the same almost all the time.
Emphasis added. I've done quite a lot of web development for a lot of websites, and I've had to make similar concessions for every major browser. No browser is fully standards compliant, particularly with emerging standards. IE9 is far and away more interoperable than its predecessors, and it demonstrates that Microsoft clearly intends to be a part of the web rather than lose relevance. I don't know what's "bullshit" about my comment. I never claimed IE9 is perfect. It's just on the right track.
I'd add that it's clear with IE9 that Microsoft's corporate strategy has shifted. They can see clearly that mobile is (a huge part of) the future, and that the web is integral to that, and that they are not going to hijack the web with Silverlight or again with IE. They can only remain relevant by letting their very competent engineers, developers and programmers do a good job on IE.
Google seem to think IE9 is not as compatible as it could be.... almost all HTML5 features they have presented do not seem to work in IE9 but work fine in Chrome (unsurprisingly) but also in Firefox, Opera, etc.... with no problems...
Can you be more specific? Is there a paper published by Google, or an HTML5 showcase, or...?
None of the browsers fully implement HTML5, and each vendor tends to cherry pick the features they support when showcasing. Yes, IE9 is probably the most "behind" in HTML5/CSS3 support, but while I'd like to be able to use all these new features, I think it's hard to demonize IE9—for lacking support for new/evolving standards—in the same light as IE6-8 were demonized for actively breaking existing standards, each in their own special way. It just isn't the same thing.
A standard is what the majority think it is, and Google have the majority of the internets attention...
I think it's a lot less simple than this. Google's browser uses WebKit, which is also Apple's engine, and both contribute a lot to emerging standards, but both have mutual incompatibilities, and both have had to make corrections to adjust to other emerging standards (a good example is Mozilla's contributions to CSS3 gradients, which prompted WebKit to change its implementation). A lot of what you think is "standard" is still in flux, and the worst possible outcome would be for IE to support half-baked standards before they solidify, forcing the web to adopt those errors.
It's true to say that the IE team was conservative with its support for emerging standards. While I'd like the web to move faster, I think it's reasonable to commend them for being careful not to do the kind of damage they've done in the past.
IE9 is the only browser I regularly use that does not render a very few websites correctly...
Safari (my primary browser) renders a very few websites incorrectly too. So does Firefox, Chrome, IE 9. Of course, I develop websites for a living and have to test in all of these (as well as IE 7/8 usually), so I'm more likely to encounter incompatibilities than an end user. But they all definitely have mutual discrepancies.
usually because of some obscure setting deep down that is trying to protect me...and it takes more searching that I often care to do to turn it off...
Maybe, I can't really say because I don't know what you've encountered. My experience has been that IE9 struggles the most with sites that have custom code for IE 6-8 and don't properly exclude IE9 from the custom code.
Firefox, Opera, Chrome do not seem to have the same issues... ?
That's awesome for you. I don't know what to say, except that every discussion of every browser has people making similar claims.
IE9 breaks websites that work in IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox and Webkit-based browsers.
Just a hunch: the websites in question are improperly sniffing IE without excluding IE9 from their IE-specific code. Yes, there are incompatibilities between IE9 and other browsers (just as there are between any given browser and its competitors), but I don't think it's so horribly broken that IE 6-8 do better, without IE 6-8 getting serious hand-holding.
IE was, in fact, the most standards compliant browser at the time. But this was already covered, so I'll move on.
If it hadn't been for IE's "I know what you probably meant, you don't have to write even halfway decent HTML" bullshit we wouldn't have had a tenth of the web-nonsense we've had over the last 12 years.
First of all, the HTML spec from the beginning expected browsers to handle malformed markup. And it wasn't until the HTML5 spec began to form that there was any kind of specification of what to do with malformed markup. Every browser has to "know what you probably meant". The XHTML spec was meant to address this by requiring well-formedness, but it's hardly fair to expect IE 6 to have supported a mode that no one truly wanted (despite the proliferation of XHTML doctypes and XML-style self-closed tags, scarcely any site ever sent XML or XHTML headers) and wasn't specified until a few months before its release, and anyway XHTML never did address it and was eventually dropped in favor of, you guessed it, HTML5.
Second of all, exactly how is malformed markup the cause of "a tenth of the web-nonsense we've had over the last 12 years"? Can you elaborate on what, exactly, malformed markup has done to so severely damage the web? I hate bad code, but I really think the browsers (all of them) do a pretty admirable job of gracefully handling malformed markup.
I think (hope) we all know that "HTML5" isn't some monolithic thing, and that each "percent" isn't equally meaningful, and even that most of the tests for support only account for presence of certain features, not correctness. HTML5 is a continually evolving spec (in fact, it is planned to be a permanently evolving spec), and some of the requirements are quite specific but some are quite not.
IE 9 may not be as close to the bleeding edge as its competitors (the IE team would have us believe this is by design; I am skeptical of this design principle), but it made great strides to fix past interoperability errors and to become interoperable with a lot of new features, and it is also poised to be a platform for further growth in that direction.
Because IE 9 isn't a problem, and it strongly indicates that the IE team decided to build a truly modern browser rather than eventually leave the browser market a laughing stock. It's clear why they made this decision, as they need a competent web experience to gain anything in the mobile space, and they'll quickly become irrelevant if they can't compete there.
IE 9 is two things to celebrate: the first IE version built with real interoperability and respect for standards in mind, and a clear indication that Microsoft intends IE to be a platform on par with WebKit. If you have to worry about cross-browser compatibility, those are both great news. It's a shame you missed it when IE 9 came out.
And lest we get off into accusations of bias, I was a long time advocate of IE ditching Trident entirely (essentially becoming a UI shell, presumably around WebKit), and regularly said so whenever I encountered members of the IE team online. I honestly did not believe Trident was reparable. They have shown that it was.
required to be as un-biased as possible when reporting news
That's a BBC policy, but it doesn't address the expectations we should have of journalists. Nevertheless, the policy itself (if it is as worded, which I doubt) is at best implemented after the bias of omission, and at worst would result in a completely meaningless stream of non-news. The purpose of journalism is to provide information, illumination and context about important facts. Every facet of that pursuit is biased—determining which facts are important, determining what context should be included or discarded, determining what is illuminating about the topic or revelation being reported, and determining which information to include or omit—and it should be biased. The alternative to biased journalism is no meaningful journalism. This isn't a comment on human nature, it's a comment on the nature of information. There is simply too much information for journalism to be both unbiased and useful. A good journalist knows this and provides us a service by employing that knowledge judiciously.
Any bias and pushed viewpoints are from the submitter of the article to slashdot (arguably irrelevant to the actual article and just added to push their viewpoint further).
That is clearly not the case. Here is some text from the BBC article:
Google is facing scrutiny for the way its own services appear in its search results.
Last month, two senators called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether Google was exploiting the fact it had a majority of both search via PC and mobile devices.
"A key question is whether Google is using its market power to steer users to its own web products or secondary services and discriminating against other websites with which it competes," Senators Herb Kohl and Mike Lee wrote.
The Financial Times has also reported that the European Commission was examining claims that Google "downgrades some rival websites in its search results, while playing up its own services".
Here is relevant text from the summary:
Considering that European Commission is examining claims of Google downgrading rival websites and U.S. senators are calling FTC to inspect Google for unfair practices, the move comes at a surprising time.
The "biased" portion of the summary reflects the "unbiased" BBC article and provides some links for context. I know this is slashdot and we're not supposed to read the articles or even the summaries, even when pointing out details of either, but come on!
Whether someone who submits a link from an actual news source and adds their own biased commentary to slashdot is a Real journalist is also up for detate (but risks invoking the True Scottsman fallacy)
Here I think your doubt is especially relevant and important, but I should add that I wasn't interested in defending the summary submitter's journalistic credentials (I have no idea who the person is, and reposting an article to a news feed alone doesn't necessarily make one a Scottsman, True or otherwise), but instead I was interested in challenging the notion of "unbiased journalism", a thing that doesn't and shouldn't exist.
Journalism is necessarily directed by interest, and the questions asked are necessarily directed by distinct concerns about distinct details. The world is composed of innumerable facts, and to report all of them without discrimination is to completely undermine journalism. To be a journalist is, inherently, to discriminate between which facts are important and which facts are unimportant. That is by definition pushing a view.
Slashdot Mirror
The legal restriction on "fire in a crowded room" is not due to a "clear negative effect", it's due to a "clear and present danger", which certainly hasn't been proven in the case of viewing pornography in public, and I think we can agree it'd be laughable to try.
There isn't any sound precedent I'm aware of that establishes any kind of freedom from speech. There are certainly limits on what circumstances you are entitled to subject others to your speech (you are not entitled to hold an audience hostage), but there are no "free from speech zones" in public. If a person is in a public space voluntarily, they do not have the right to operate in a bubble and be shielded from speech.
That's the principle of the law. Whether watching porn is a speech act is another question, but if it is, it is absolutely protected.
When so many of the changes can be utterly devastating, and ultimately can affect survival, I think calling concern over that (and dismissal of marginal improvements) "selfish"... is too stupid to warrant a serious response. Especially when considering that those who stand to be harmed the most (assuming only regional devastation and not a widespread crisis of survival) tend to be those who have contributed least to the change, it's like telling someone who lost their pension in 2008 to stop being selfish and celebrate the windfall for a few execs and fraudsters.
Who cares what caused it - we better look into how to change it back!
I think it would be even more foolish to try to "change it back" than it would be to just learn to adapt.
This is why it matters what caused it. We don't need to change anything "back" except our own behavior. If we are truly an adaptive species, we'd be wise to adapt to the system of life we depend on rather than adapt to the ways we're changing it.
What about all those areas that are going to become better farming land due to a warmer climate?
Yeah, and we can quit wearing sweaters in the wintertime! What a ridiculously opportunistic perspective for someone who isn't going to see the place they live under water or in permanent drought or any other number of changes that destroy life as most of us know it.
Don't worry, we're geeks. Content is more important to us than presentation, as long as it's understandable
Ahem! You misspelled "we're geeks. We constantly correct people for unimportant spelling and grammar errors even when it would be impossible for us to misunderstand the text".
I wonder if all of you who have such thorough knowledge (I assume you're telling the truth, I can't be bothered to fact-check) of Slashdot comment pages... I wonder if you realize that there's a whole world out there that has actual real atrocities and tragedies and plots and even shenanigans, none of which relates to "Score: -1 Insightful" on, let's face it, a news aggregator that reads more often like the Onion than like [pick any reputable source of any information].
I mean. I'm sure that there's real consequences from astroturfing on sites like Facespace and Linkedbook and Twitbay, and hell maybe even here on Slasheddit, but... did you know there's a system of media that indoctrinates millions of passive participants, that the best interaction you can have with it (CNN) is by inadvertently being paid to be one of five YouPorn commenters they routinely recycle, and that instead of software patents and copyright infringement, the fallout is dead bodies, refugees, birth defects, famine, plagues of deadly-treatable-untreated disease...
Seriously, I'm sure you mean well. Have you tried using your sleuthing talents for... something?
And most people who post here assume an air of authority they don't deserve. With the disclaimer's honesty, I'm more inclined than I would be otherwise to believe Xanny knows what they're talking about. But if I think about this too much I fear I'll find myself in an infinite loop.
Yes, now is a good time to point out the poster's anti-Semitism. Being able to make a distinction like that would go a long way for your credibility too.
Oh, I should pay more attention. You *are* khallow. Okay, so... why is it a "problem" if you're not a developer, you don't use it, and you supposedly ignore it? I don't understand your motivation for any of this.
Why shouldn't I post about it?
Because, uh, you said you "can and will ignore it"? Do you even pay attention to what you post?
And IE continues to lose market share even after the introduction of IE 9. That tells me, they haven't worked out the problems with IE that kept people from using it.
Even taking that analysis at face value... okay, so? I don't see what that has to do with the discussion. Let's review:
khallow says IE9 is "yet another problem from Microsoft" (I think the meaning of "problem" is clear, and the discussion thus far had pertained to development and what IE9 means in that context)
I say it's not a problem, explain why I think so, and explain why I think it should be celebrated... from a developer's perspective.
You say you don't use it.
I say I have to.
You say you can and will ignore it.
I ask why you're posting about something you're ignoring.
You respond about usage share among end users?
For future reference... I don't really care what browser you use. I care about the improvements to IE9 because it's relevant to me. I don't really care if you care that I care about those improvements. Better?
Then why are you posting in a thread about it?
That's nice for you. I develop websites, so I have to ensure they work properly across browsers, including the one that has nearly half of the world's users.
Yes, it's more interoperable than its predecessors, but it's still pretty far behind the other ones.
I'm sure you can demonstrate this. Seriously, I think the claim is pretty extraordinary and deserves real evidence.
Bullshit. I've done a little web development for my personal site, and while IE9 is indeed much better than its predecessors, it's still not fully standards compliant, and renders things differently than Chrome and Firefox, requiring the use of CSS hacks to get things to look right. Firefox and Chrome, however, manage to have completely different rendering engines but still render things the same almost all the time.
Emphasis added. I've done quite a lot of web development for a lot of websites, and I've had to make similar concessions for every major browser. No browser is fully standards compliant, particularly with emerging standards. IE9 is far and away more interoperable than its predecessors, and it demonstrates that Microsoft clearly intends to be a part of the web rather than lose relevance. I don't know what's "bullshit" about my comment. I never claimed IE9 is perfect. It's just on the right track.
I'd add that it's clear with IE9 that Microsoft's corporate strategy has shifted. They can see clearly that mobile is (a huge part of) the future, and that the web is integral to that, and that they are not going to hijack the web with Silverlight or again with IE. They can only remain relevant by letting their very competent engineers, developers and programmers do a good job on IE.
Google seem to think IE9 is not as compatible as it could be .... almost all HTML5 features they have presented do not seem to work in IE9 but work fine in Chrome (unsurprisingly) but also in Firefox, Opera, etc. ... with no problems ...
Can you be more specific? Is there a paper published by Google, or an HTML5 showcase, or...?
None of the browsers fully implement HTML5, and each vendor tends to cherry pick the features they support when showcasing. Yes, IE9 is probably the most "behind" in HTML5/CSS3 support, but while I'd like to be able to use all these new features, I think it's hard to demonize IE9—for lacking support for new/evolving standards—in the same light as IE6-8 were demonized for actively breaking existing standards, each in their own special way. It just isn't the same thing.
A standard is what the majority think it is, and Google have the majority of the internets attention ...
I think it's a lot less simple than this. Google's browser uses WebKit, which is also Apple's engine, and both contribute a lot to emerging standards, but both have mutual incompatibilities, and both have had to make corrections to adjust to other emerging standards (a good example is Mozilla's contributions to CSS3 gradients, which prompted WebKit to change its implementation). A lot of what you think is "standard" is still in flux, and the worst possible outcome would be for IE to support half-baked standards before they solidify, forcing the web to adopt those errors.
It's true to say that the IE team was conservative with its support for emerging standards. While I'd like the web to move faster, I think it's reasonable to commend them for being careful not to do the kind of damage they've done in the past.
IE9 is the only browser I regularly use that does not render a very few websites correctly...
Safari (my primary browser) renders a very few websites incorrectly too. So does Firefox, Chrome, IE 9. Of course, I develop websites for a living and have to test in all of these (as well as IE 7/8 usually), so I'm more likely to encounter incompatibilities than an end user. But they all definitely have mutual discrepancies.
usually because of some obscure setting deep down that is trying to protect me ...and it takes more searching that I often care to do to turn it off ...
Maybe, I can't really say because I don't know what you've encountered. My experience has been that IE9 struggles the most with sites that have custom code for IE 6-8 and don't properly exclude IE9 from the custom code.
Firefox, Opera, Chrome do not seem to have the same issues ... ?
That's awesome for you. I don't know what to say, except that every discussion of every browser has people making similar claims.
IE9 breaks websites that work in IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox and Webkit-based browsers.
Just a hunch: the websites in question are improperly sniffing IE without excluding IE9 from their IE-specific code. Yes, there are incompatibilities between IE9 and other browsers (just as there are between any given browser and its competitors), but I don't think it's so horribly broken that IE 6-8 do better, without IE 6-8 getting serious hand-holding.
IE was, in fact, the most standards compliant browser at the time. But this was already covered, so I'll move on.
If it hadn't been for IE's "I know what you probably meant, you don't have to write even halfway decent HTML" bullshit we wouldn't have had a tenth of the web-nonsense we've had over the last 12 years.
First of all, the HTML spec from the beginning expected browsers to handle malformed markup. And it wasn't until the HTML5 spec began to form that there was any kind of specification of what to do with malformed markup. Every browser has to "know what you probably meant". The XHTML spec was meant to address this by requiring well-formedness, but it's hardly fair to expect IE 6 to have supported a mode that no one truly wanted (despite the proliferation of XHTML doctypes and XML-style self-closed tags, scarcely any site ever sent XML or XHTML headers) and wasn't specified until a few months before its release, and anyway XHTML never did address it and was eventually dropped in favor of, you guessed it, HTML5.
Second of all, exactly how is malformed markup the cause of "a tenth of the web-nonsense we've had over the last 12 years"? Can you elaborate on what, exactly, malformed markup has done to so severely damage the web? I hate bad code, but I really think the browsers (all of them) do a pretty admirable job of gracefully handling malformed markup.
I think (hope) we all know that "HTML5" isn't some monolithic thing, and that each "percent" isn't equally meaningful, and even that most of the tests for support only account for presence of certain features, not correctness. HTML5 is a continually evolving spec (in fact, it is planned to be a permanently evolving spec), and some of the requirements are quite specific but some are quite not.
IE 9 may not be as close to the bleeding edge as its competitors (the IE team would have us believe this is by design; I am skeptical of this design principle), but it made great strides to fix past interoperability errors and to become interoperable with a lot of new features, and it is also poised to be a platform for further growth in that direction.
Safari is on Linux now? /pedant
Because IE 9 isn't a problem, and it strongly indicates that the IE team decided to build a truly modern browser rather than eventually leave the browser market a laughing stock. It's clear why they made this decision, as they need a competent web experience to gain anything in the mobile space, and they'll quickly become irrelevant if they can't compete there.
IE 9 is two things to celebrate: the first IE version built with real interoperability and respect for standards in mind, and a clear indication that Microsoft intends IE to be a platform on par with WebKit. If you have to worry about cross-browser compatibility, those are both great news. It's a shame you missed it when IE 9 came out.
And lest we get off into accusations of bias, I was a long time advocate of IE ditching Trident entirely (essentially becoming a UI shell, presumably around WebKit), and regularly said so whenever I encountered members of the IE team online. I honestly did not believe Trident was reparable. They have shown that it was.
required to be as un-biased as possible when reporting news
That's a BBC policy, but it doesn't address the expectations we should have of journalists. Nevertheless, the policy itself (if it is as worded, which I doubt) is at best implemented after the bias of omission, and at worst would result in a completely meaningless stream of non-news. The purpose of journalism is to provide information, illumination and context about important facts. Every facet of that pursuit is biased—determining which facts are important, determining what context should be included or discarded, determining what is illuminating about the topic or revelation being reported, and determining which information to include or omit—and it should be biased. The alternative to biased journalism is no meaningful journalism. This isn't a comment on human nature, it's a comment on the nature of information. There is simply too much information for journalism to be both unbiased and useful. A good journalist knows this and provides us a service by employing that knowledge judiciously.
Any bias and pushed viewpoints are from the submitter of the article to slashdot (arguably irrelevant to the actual article and just added to push their viewpoint further).
That is clearly not the case. Here is some text from the BBC article:
Google is facing scrutiny for the way its own services appear in its search results.
Last month, two senators called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether Google was exploiting the fact it had a majority of both search via PC and mobile devices.
"A key question is whether Google is using its market power to steer users to its own web products or secondary services and discriminating against other websites with which it competes," Senators Herb Kohl and Mike Lee wrote.
The Financial Times has also reported that the European Commission was examining claims that Google "downgrades some rival websites in its search results, while playing up its own services".
Here is relevant text from the summary:
Considering that European Commission is examining claims of Google downgrading rival websites and U.S. senators are calling FTC to inspect Google for unfair practices, the move comes at a surprising time.
The "biased" portion of the summary reflects the "unbiased" BBC article and provides some links for context. I know this is slashdot and we're not supposed to read the articles or even the summaries, even when pointing out details of either, but come on!
Whether someone who submits a link from an actual news source and adds their own biased commentary to slashdot is a Real journalist is also up for detate (but risks invoking the True Scottsman fallacy)
Here I think your doubt is especially relevant and important, but I should add that I wasn't interested in defending the summary submitter's journalistic credentials (I have no idea who the person is, and reposting an article to a news feed alone doesn't necessarily make one a Scottsman, True or otherwise), but instead I was interested in challenging the notion of "unbiased journalism", a thing that doesn't and shouldn't exist.
I wish for the deaths of people I don't like! I'm different from them in some way, but I would be hard pressed to explain how!
Journalism is necessarily directed by interest, and the questions asked are necessarily directed by distinct concerns about distinct details. The world is composed of innumerable facts, and to report all of them without discrimination is to completely undermine journalism. To be a journalist is, inherently, to discriminate between which facts are important and which facts are unimportant. That is by definition pushing a view.