David : Hey, you recognize a good thing when you saw it, and I'm grateful for the parody. Anything we can use to detract from what support MSNBC may actually have. There is close to nothing at all at that network that is anything but detestable as far as I am concerned. About Bill Gates, prematurely senile, another case of someone going overboard for his wife's proclivities. For sure, his dedication to charity efforts, mostly in Africa, can hardly be faulted. However, what most strikes me is how unoriginal his approach has been and what a waste of his talents his life has become since about the year 2000. And somehow Gates never seems to have heard of the adage, give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime. Gates has done the opposite, simply giving away tons of stuff, teaching nothing to the many Africans his foundation helps. Well, to his great credit he actually is helping. Terrific. Others don't do that much. Still, it seems to me that he would have been far more useful had he created some way to computerize African economies and their educational systems than simply shoveling stuff at local populations. But, and in contrast to others, and I'm thinking about people here at RC.org, Gates never seems to have explored the world of ideas before he fell under his wife's ultra-Catholic feelings about charity. Hence, Gates has been unable to think critically about MSNBC or many other things. In a way the best parallel has been to Michael Jordan the 3 years he was a baseball player. A complete waste of his talents since he was a 2nd rate baseball player vs being a one-in-a-million basketball player. In Jordan's case he took his father's BAD advice to play baseball as some sort of Holy Grail to live for. HUGE mistake. I deeply loved my late father but at no time that I can recall did I heed his advice when, objectively, it was unwise, and it really could be unwise. Jordan's dad, in all likelihood, a decent and good man, nonetheless didn't know what he was talking about and cost his son several years of professional achievement and millions of dollars. Melissa Gates seems to have wanted her husband to re-invent himself as Mother Teresa. Utterly stupid, in my humble opinion. Really stupid. Incredibly stupid. But what is the protection against making such dumb decisions as Gates made ? I don't have a good answer. Thinking back I know for a fact that some of my decisions in past years were influenced in unfortunate ways by values of women in my life at different times. The trade off was that those values sometimes were the best thing that ever happened to me in terms of influence. But not always, and sometimes the result was very bad for me. Yet at the time I could not make necessary distinctions. Pussy will do that to a man. Maybe this is one of life's necessities, a way to learn that otherwise would never happen. But it sure would be helpful to avoid stupid decisions like those. Billy ========================================= 4/5/2012 7:00:10 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, [email protected] writes:
Mark Levin usually uses MSLSD (which may be even more fitting). Sometimes he uses MSDNC, specifically when Debbie Whatshername Sheisskopf (D-FL) is on. So, yep, you caught me stealing. MSNBC started as a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC. It used to be msnbc.com, now it is msnbc.msn.com. So basically a sub-domain of Microsoft Network (MSN). I hope that Bill is enjoying the guilt by association. David _ "Free speech is meant to protect unpopular speech. Popular speech, by definition, needs no protection."—Neal Boortz On 4/5/2012 12:20 AM, [email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected]) wrote: Strictly as copy editor stuff , did you borrow "MSDNC" or is that your original ? Terrific parody of MSNBC, wherever it comes from. Billy -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4/4/2012 9:51:16 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, [email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected]) writes: You're shocked by the lack of fact vetting by the MSM?? Hell, I COUNT ON IT. Like NBC altering Zimmerman 911 phone call tapes. They tend to manufacture "facts," also known as making shit up. What's the credibility of an NBC reporter these days?? It's as underwater as parts of the housing market. Welcome to MSDNC. David _ "Free speech is meant to protect unpopular speech. Popular speech, by definition, needs no protection."—Neal Boortz On 4/4/2012 1:03 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote: Hi Billy, On Apr 3, 2012, at 7:49 PM, [email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected]) wrote: In any case the Reuters story, and others like it, is where I get my narrative from. I can easily grant some of your criticisms. However, I also feel that Reuters, etc, is / are basically right. I have no idea what your sources are. Newspapers like the Washington Post, who actually investigate the issue rather than merely repeating Hollywood soundbites: _http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/how-much-does-online-pi racy-really-cost-the-economy/2012/01/05/gIQAXknNdP_blog.html_ (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/how-much-does-online-piracy-really-co st-the-economy/2012/01/05/gIQAXknNdP_blog.html) For example, the Motion Picture Association of America estimates that piracy costs the U.S. movie industry some $20.5 billion per year. But Julian Sanchez scrutinizes these figures and finds they don’t hold up. After you remove all the double-counting and restrict the focus solely to American users — which is the only thing SOPA addresses, anyway — then, he notes, those industry-estimated losses come to just $446 million per year (“roughly the amount grossed globally by Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel”). And even those numbers might not be right. The Government Accountability Office has raised further questions and concerns about the copyright industry’ s claims of losses here. Part of the difficulty here is that it’s not always easy to tally up the true costs of piracy. For instance, if a person illegally downloads a movie or song that he never would’ve downloaded otherwise, then it’s not clear what the losses actually amount to (the benefits, by contrast, are fairly clear). Is it a problem? Yes. Is it on the scale Hollywood likes to complain about? Almost certainly not. Shockingly, mainline journalists have once again failed to actually vet the facts they repeat with such confidence... -- Ernie P. More analysis: _http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d10423.pdf_ (http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d10423.pdf) _http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/how-copyright-industries-con-congress/_ (http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/how-copyright-industries-con-congress/) _http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/10/dodgy-digits-behind-the-war -on-piracy.ars_ (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/10/dodgy-digits-behind-the-war-on-piracy.ars) If you pay any attention to the endless debates over intellectual property policy in the United States, you'll hear two numbers invoked over and over again, like the stuttering chorus of some Philip Glass opera: 750,000 and $200 to $250 billion. The first is the number of U.S. jobs supposedly lost to intellectual property theft; the second is the annual dollar cost of IP infringement to the U.S. economy. These statistics are brandished like a talisman each time Congress is asked to step up enforcement to protect the ever-beleaguered U.S. content industry. And both, as far as an extended investigation by Ars Technica has been able to determine, are utterly bogus. -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community _<[email protected]>_ (mailto:[email protected]) Google Group: _http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism_ (http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism) Radical Centrism website and blog: _http://RadicalCentrism.org_ (http://radicalcentrism.org/) -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
