Giving an application a window icon in a sensible way

[Twisted]

Um, except that they are newsgroups. Eclipse runs them on a news server
just like any other newsgroup.

I can't find them in GG's list, which means I have no access to them,
whatever they are. Sorry.

At this point I
really think you just choose to shoot down every piece of advice given
to you simply because it was given to you by someone here, and because
you didn't think of it.

This is a sudden change of subject, back to the more usual drivel in
this thread.

I don't "shoot down" every piece of advice. Just because I don't
actually do everything any random usenetter tells me to do doesn't mean
I "shoot down" anything, or that I'm a bad person, or whatever the hell
else you seem to think it proves.

Registerwall, huh? Is that like a 'weblication'? You like using made-up
words I see.

It's a word in increasingly widespread usage to disparage Web sites
that lock content behind a site-specific registration, generally so
that they can harvest e-mail addresses and other marketing (or
marketable) data from their users, police (i.e. censor) their users, or
some other such nefarious purpose. (There are sometimes more benign
reasons, but most of these can be accomplished in less intrusive ways,
e.g. one can prevent the automated spamming of a forum with a captcha.)

True, someone made it up, but it wasn't me and it wasn't even recently.
(See also "paywall". I also didn't make up "weblication"...so you're 0
for 2 so far.)

It remains my policy to largely avoid registering anywhere, both
because every registration increases the risk of my e-mail address
being misused at some point, and because I only have a finite memory
for logins and passwords. In other newsgroups too, in the past, it's
been suggested by people that I register for some forum or whatnot
related to some piece of software that I use, apparently by morons
unable to think more than one move ahead -- I'd love to slaughter them
at chess -- and thereby realize that a) the software in question isn't
the only piece I use, b) the number I do use is surely enormous, and c)
no human being is known to be capable of memorizing even close to
300-odd login/password combinations, save a handful of
otherwise-profoundly-impaired savants, and that therefore d) their
expectation that I'll jump up and register right away is ludicrous. If
I did that on every such occasion I'd rapidly exhaust my memory
capacity and then I'd have to start blanket refusing any more such
requests anyway!

Don't, by the way, suggest the usual suspects:
* Saving the passwords and crap in a file. I'd soon need a full-blown
DBMS to keep track of them all and speedily retrieve one I needed. Most
of which would be used yearly or less often, making them not worth the
bloody effort to vgrep for. Besides, it's questionable security.
* Have the browser do it for me. Besides being questionable security,
I'd still lose all of them in the event of any kind of crash or move to
a new computer, since then they're no longer in some file whose name
and location I know and that can be moved and Just Work(tm). Most
likely, they'd be among the zillion other bits of personalization that
get buried in the Windows registry and thus evaporate in the event of
all kinds of crashes, reinstalls, and moves.
* Use the same password everywhere. That's *really* questionable
security. Besides, I'd still have to remember all the logins, since no
one login will turn out to have by some miracle gone unused at *every
single site requiring registration* until I came along...
* That the solution to this whole mess is a universal logon. That way
lies the end of freedom on the Internet as we know it, besides which,
it doesn't work as M$ found out with their "passport" BS. It's not hard
to see why, either. Every site requiring registration is doing so for
(at least) marketing purposes, and so the registration commonly asks
for various things their marketing department wants to know about
everyone in the world. Of course, a universal logon will mean signing
up at some centralized place (susceptible to centralized abuse), with a
centralized set of questionnaires for applicants to wade through. Of
course, the marketing departments of the corporations running every web
site in the world will insist on having their particular desires
satisfied, and so the set of questionnaires will be designed by
committee, a committee of hundreds of VPs of Marketing. The result will
probably have more checkboxes, personal questions whose fields are
marked "required", radio buttons, and other controls than either a) the
dashboard of the Space Shuttle or b) the application forms for a
$30,000 home mortgage. In fact, I know that the result will be this,
because the signup for an M$ Passport was actually even worse than what
I just described (to the point that they eventually were forced to make
a simpler way to sign up for just a Hotmail account again!)...and of
course the universal logon will be a huge pain in the ass to ditch and
replace if compromised, as well as being the beginning of net.fascism
as we hopefully will never know it...

 

[Twisted]

I've read some other threads that Twisted/Nebulous/whatever else has
been in - and from what I see, he gets in a huge argument in every
single one he posts in!

Might want to think about that, Twisted.

This is totally irrelevant here, net.stalker, and your behavior is rude
and uncalled-for. You have no business prying into any of my other
online affairs, for starters, and none of what goes on elsewhere is in
any way shape or form relevant in comp.lang.java.*, let alone to
"Giving an application a window icon..." specifically.

Go find something constructive to do.

 

[Twisted]

Hahaha, did you *really* just say 'net.stalking' ? What's next, LOL and
ROFL?
And it's not really nonsense. If it were nonsense, Google wouldn't have
provided that feature.

Google's intent was never to enable stalker-type behavior; that it did
so is an unfortunate, if predictable, side-effect of what it does.

I consider the mental stability suspect of anyone who either:
* Routinely googles himself -- what a narcissist! or
* When he/she gets into an argument with another person, googles that
other person so that they can drag guaranteeably-irrelevant issues from
some other place and time into the present argument, presumably for use
as ammunition against their target.

In the latter case, all of the following can reliably be inferred:
* The person is not above ad-hominem attacks. Googling their opponent,
rather than the subject matter under discussion, is a sure sign that
they are looking for ammunition with which to "argue against the
person" rather than argue the subject matter supposedly being debated.
* The person is either a nosy busybody, or desperate. Usually it's
someone who thinks they're losing the argument that you see reaching
for new weapons to use.
* The person's motives are hostile. If they are looking up their
opponent's past online activity, it can't possibly be for any purpose
relevant to the subject matter, so it can't possibly be to help with
that. If they feel the need to "help" with their opponent's psychology,
that very fact itself implies a hostile opinion regarding their
opponent. Most likely they feel the need to "hurt" with their
opponent's psychology, for whatever reason.

In this case I can infer that *your* motives are hostile, that you are
losing the argument and becoming desperate, and that you are not above
resorting to ad-hominem tactics, although most of this had become
apparent before now anyway.

 

[Twisted]

Is this the one that began with you asking .... I forget, but the
ensuing furor had much in common with this thread.

It wasn't one that began with *me* doing anything. Nor does anything I
may or may not have posted there have anything to do with either a)
java, b) application window icons, or c) the price of tea in China, so
it has no business in this thread regardless.

 

[Twisted]

If someone is trying to take over your computer via an HTML link...[snip]

None of which is applicable to the *other* matter, which is that I just
plain don't have the spare time for clicking on every single link I
see.

This raises the question of why you bother asking questions at all, if
you're most likely not going to care about the answer anyway.

How did you infer this? Clearly, the logic you used was
faulty...perhaps you wrongly assumed that the only possible answers
would all take the form of links instead of such old-fashioned things
as words?

There appears to be a general consensus on this newsgroup (and, indeed, in
others that I follow) that the asker must expect to have to do a bit
of legwork himself to get where he's going - no one else has the time
to lead him there by hand.

I don't think my legwork can be faulted here. I ended up discovering a
solution before anyone posted here with one; to do this I used google.
Read the start of this thread if you don't believe me.

It's when links of no evident relevance are posted that I won't follow
them. (So link posters should make the relevance evident, or say
something in their own words. I'm quite happy with responses like
"There's a detailed explanation of foobar at
http://www.foo.com/bar.html" since it's fairly obvious what to expect
at the link, and that the "what to expect" is relevant (assuming I
asked about foobar).

In fact I've taken issue with people not furnishing a link where one
would be obviously useful and relevant, for example people repeatedly
singing the praises of a tool while consistently never mentioning any
further-reading or download URLs, particularly where the tool's name is
short and generic enough to be an unlikely candidate for googling.
(Whether googling it works anyway being immaterial of course; if it
doesn't look like it has any realistic likelihood of producing useful
results, nobody can reasonably be expected to try it.)

Aside from that, the only other time I take issue with links is when
someone drops a cryptic URL into a discussion with no explanation of
what to expect at the other end and nothing to indicate that it might
be relevant, and then at some later time if they decide the URL was
ignored blowing up at someone for not clicking on it.

 

[Joe Attardi]

And it never once occurred to you that one of your opponents might have
discovered a way to engineer such an occurrence in order to stifle
dissenting opinions?

Not really. I don't wear a tinfoil hat, though, so the mind-control
rays might have gotten to me.

**** you. Now you've crossed a new line and more or less called me a
liar, and I have no other response to something like that; I won't
dignify it with a proper point-by-point rebuttal.

Oooooohhh, tough guy dropped the F-bomb! If you deduce from my post
that you are a liar, then so be it. I never uttered those words. And if
I were to label you as anything, "liar" is the furthest from my mind.

Whoopee. I don't have as much time to waste here (and you're already
wasting way too damn much of it, and not even giving me a choice in the
matter)

I'm not giving you a choice? You could always not respond.

eighty thousand browser tabs and fish around and google up references
to liberally sprinkle in my posts.

You are truly the master of hyperbole.

The post in question snapped "URLs can be to local files
too" rather bluntly as if this was some fact some backwards student
needed reminding of for the nth time, without bothering to read ahead.
How would *you* describe such a response?

Wow, are you serious? You read that much from one sentence? Twisted,
you give yourself too much credit.

I expect them to at least work, and (barring a single bug which their
test cases never triggered anyway) the one at issue here did.

As has been said many times before, "It just works" is a dangerous
practice in software development.

I was damn surprised when criticism was the result. And, of course,
annoyed, particularly when the criticisms called it "my" approach and
thereby implicitly criticized *me* and not just the approach itself.

I've already explained this but you chose to ignore it. It's easier to
type "your approach" than to type "the approach you found on sun.com
while googling and had to hack a third party class to get working". As
I've also said many times, it was a discussion. Yes, it was critical,
because the approach you found on sun.com while googling and had to
hack a third party class to get working (happy now?) is less than
optimal.

You are not the judge of what is "overly" defensive. See above re: your
jurisdiction, which as far as I can tell so far extends precisely as
far as the four exterior walls of your home and to the tip of your
nose, the same as mine.

OK, so you're not overly defensive?
"This is the approach I found and implemented"
"Hm, did you consider doing it this other way? It's typically the way
to solve this problem. Does your approach have any advantage?"
"What!? How dare you criticize me, who do you think you are!? Why are
you challenging my competence??!"

(Count your
postings to this thread and then double that to include every reply
that I was forced to make if I was to counteract some insult or
another, less the first couple that were non-insulting thus
response-optional. The result's gotta be in the neighborhood of 40 by
now. And counting.)

I'm sorry, is there a limit to how many replies I should post in a
given thread?

Either your memory is shorter
than a single posting (and you just implicitly attacked me for not
remembering *the whole thread word for word*) or you're a hypocrite.

OK, here we go again. Stop exaggerating. You KNOW I didn't attack you
for not remembering the whole thread word for word. I simply expected
you to at least remember the tone and content of the posts that put you
into this rage.

To recap: after my detailing of the solution I found online, there
were, almost immediately, responses insisting that I explain my choice
of approach, and detail its advantages. This is the kind of response
I'd expect to get in a class at school after doing something dumb or,
at best, questionable; not in a newsgroup where the post in question
was of a "nothing more needs to be done here, move along" nature
indicating that no further assistance was required. (And when it's my
project, of course, it is I, not you, who decides if further assistance
is required.)

If you didn't want any more assistance, advice, discussion, or
whatever, why did you keep coming back to the thread? Oh, right,
because everyone was attacking you.

I would, at that point, have welcomed anything neutral (or better) and
constructive. Unfortunately, not even "neutral" was in the offing;
every response, *every last damn one of them* suggested, in front of an
audience, that I was doing something dumb; several of them challenged
me explicitly to provide evidence against such a claim.

You are being completely absurd. Nobody challenged you. Asking what an
advantage is is not a challenge. It's a DISCUSSION. That's what this
newsgroup is for, DISCUSSION. Plenty of posts were neutral. As for the
ones that suggested you were doing something dumb, well, it is because
you are doing something dumb.

If that isn't rude I don't know what is; basically what we had was "if
you don't quickly prove otherwise I will conclude that you're stupid
and everyone reading this is then advised to draw the same conclusion".

No, that's the generalization you made.

This is rather as if I'd done something innocuous and someone suddenly
unsheathed a sword and said "Engarde!", with a lunge sure to follow
shortly if I didn't take defensive actions.

*yawn* More hyperbole

I posted the details. Civilly and mainly to let people know the
original question wasn't in need of answering by anyone here after all.
That's courteous; I could have just been quiet and potentially left
someone busily researching away on my behalf, unaware that it was a
waste of time for them to continue.

Next thing I know: schoolteacher-type responses testing me, like "What
are the advantages of your approach?" I didn't come here to be lectured
at or, worse, asked patronizing questions! I'm six years out of
university, not some grade-school kid taking remedial math classes!

You sure don't act like it.

Grrrr!

Oooh! Growling over the Internets!

Why were "we" discussing it at all, once I made the post indicating I
had a working solution? Certainly not with the intention of solving the
problem, given that it no longer needed solving. I definitely did
nothing specifically to invite continued discussion. That doesn't mean
I wouldn't have welcomed a constructive response, but what I got was a
questioning/doubtful one, followed closely by an outright incredulous
one.

You sir, are an idiot. The initial responses were plenty constructive.
They suggested alternatives and offered reasons why the approach you
found on sun.com while googling and had to hack a third party class to
get working was problematic. Instead of taking these into account, you
took them as some kind of challenge to your intelligence. So in this
case, you are certainly a liar, because you reacted with great
hostility to perfectly constructive responses.

Because my competence had been publicly called into question it was my
responsibility to respond and set the record straight.

A responsibility to your ego, maybe.

To the poster
who'd asked what the advantages of "my" approach were, I responded with
not one but five that applied at least to the specific case in
question. (Later, it emerged that the other approach is superior in a
broad class of cases *not* including that one.) At no time did I
personally attack anyone; my responses were either statements or
questions of a largely factual nature.

Your responses didn't attack anyone, no. But they had a very sarcastic
tone, which isn't taken kindly on Usenet groups. That is why things
spiraled downward quickly after that.

And it is you who is "so self-important to keep this going as is". You
have not had your honor, competence, or anything of the sort
questioned; you could walk away from this right now without losing
anything. On the other hand, that choice is denied me every time
someone posts something that claims that I did anything wrong. I must
then respond and explain why that isn't true, or else continue to be
perceived as wrong by whoever sees the posting in question. (I think I
can safely assume that the worst of the people posting such things will
never be convinced, unfortunately.)

While you say you have a responsibility to respond and explain why the
people "challenging" you are wrong, you still haven't said why the
disagreements are untrue. The only reason you've given for not trying
the getResource approach is that you're too damned lazy to learn
something new like Ant. And frankly, although I have taken some of your
overstatements of how long it takes to learn such things as
exaggeration, perhaps it calls your competence into question.

I can only imagine the can of worms I've opened with that one, but oh
well.

Why do they -- why do *you* want
this? Why do you seem bound and determined to have some disparaging
claim about me be the last word in this thread? Especially when you
must realize by now that it is futile; I will not allow it to happen
and it is easily within my power to prevent your victory condition.

Haha, wow, way to be over-dramatic. A victory condition? It's a
discussion group, not a battle royale. *rolls eyes*


If this were an isolated incident, Twisted, I could see. But any other
discussion thread I've read from you in other groups has had a common
theme; someone disagreed with you and you got completely hostile.

 

[wesley.hall]

Anyway, I have absolute proof now -- a post by foobarbazqux (apparently
a PofN sockpuppet by the way) quite definitely contained code designed
to trick GG into thinking I wanted to crosspost my response. It only
showed me the name of one bogus extra destination group, but it
evidently spammed an unknown but large number of others, since the
limit in question was hit again almost immediately thereafter.

Twisted, I really do find myself hoping you really are a very clever
troll, because some of things you post are simply beyond belief!

The response was crossposted to 'alt.usenet.kooks' because the poster
clearly belives that you are a 'kook'. The definition of which
(according the a.u.k FAQ) is...

"A TRUE net.kook has a special fascination derived from his/her/its
utter ineffability. Their behavior is irrational, if not downright
weird, but they are seldom merely boring."

.... a description that seems scarying acurate right now.

A simple crosspot (especially one done by somebody else) is not going
to flag you for a block. Another poster has explained that they too
have been affected by this blocking system during heated flurry posts.
Nobody outside google knows the exact rule that you are tripping but it
is clear to everyone else that this is what is happening.

You seem to be a master of the fallacy. You look for X, ignore occams
razor, find Y and therefore assume that X = Y. The fact that you
repeatedly mention 'logic' in your posts is amusing on this basis.

In total seriousness, if you really are believing what you are posting
and are not just some talented troll, I strongly recommend that you
consider seeking help for your paranoia. It really isn't normal to
build these conspiracy theories based on your own ego and really could
be a sign of bigger pyschological problems. You will, of course, accuse
me of taking a cheap shot, but It really isn't normal to be this
paranoid.

 

[blmblm]

(e-mail address removed) wrote:

[ snipped portion of Twisted's earlier post restored ]

It wasn't one that began with *me* doing anything.

My mistake, then. Your description sounded a lot like a thread
that began with your posting a question and continued -- well,
much as you described. On a quick search of Google's archives, the
one that matches my recollection has a subject line of "interesting
thing to try to do", but it has only 396 posts, not 500+, so perhaps
you meant a different thread. Can you easily provide information
that would help me locate the thread you *did* mean?

Nor does anything I
may or may not have posted there have anything to do with either a)
java, b) application window icons, or c) the price of tea in China, so
it has no business in this thread regardless.

Very true. So why did you mention comp.text.tex? I'm simply
responding to your comments, in a previous post, about that
newsgroup.

 

[Joe Attardi]

I can't find them in GG's list, which means I have no access to them,
whatever they are. Sorry.

Eclipse runs a separate news server where they host their newsgroups

Don't, by the way, suggest the usual suspects:
* Saving the passwords and crap in a file. I'd soon need a full-blown
DBMS to keep track of them all and speedily retrieve one I needed. Most
of which would be used yearly or less often, making them not worth the
bloody effort to vgrep for. Besides, it's questionable security.

That is a tough one. My solution is to use an app on my smartphone that
contains all my passwords, which in turn are protected by a strong
master password. This approach isn't for everyone, of course, but it
does work for me.

* That the solution to this whole mess is a universal logon. That way
lies the end of freedom on the Internet as we know it, besides which,
it doesn't work as M$ found out with their "passport" BS. It's not hard
to see why, either. Every site requiring registration is doing so for
(at least) marketing purposes, and so the registration commonly asks
for various things their marketing department wants to know about
everyone in the world. Of course, a universal logon will mean signing
up at some centralized place (susceptible to centralized abuse), with a
centralized set of questionnaires for applicants to wade through. Of
course, the marketing departments of the corporations running every web
site in the world will insist on having their particular desires
satisfied, and so the set of questionnaires will be designed by
committee, a committee of hundreds of VPs of Marketing. The result will
probably have more checkboxes, personal questions whose fields are
marked "required", radio buttons, and other controls than either a) the
dashboard of the Space Shuttle or b) the application forms for a
$30,000 home mortgage. In fact, I know that the result will be this,
because the signup for an M$ Passport was actually even worse than what
I just described (to the point that they eventually were forced to make
a simpler way to sign up for just a Hotmail account again!)...and of
course the universal logon will be a huge pain in the ass to ditch and
replace if compromised, as well as being the beginning of net.fascism
as we hopefully will never know it...

Wow. You really are a kook.

 

[Joe Attardi]

This is totally irrelevant here, net.stalker, and your behavior is rude
and uncalled-for.

Reading posts in a public, unmoderated newsgroup is hardly stalking.
Nor is it rude.

You have no business prying into any of my other
online affairs, for starters, and none of what goes on elsewhere is in
any way shape or form relevant in comp.lang.java.*, let alone to
"Giving an application a window icon..." specifically.

It is very relevant, actually. It shows that you enjoy getting into
fights with people. And it's not prying when it's publicly available!

Go find something constructive to do.

I dunno, this is pretty entertaining.

 

[Joe Attardi]

Google's intent was never to enable stalker-type behavior; that it did
so is an unfortunate, if predictable, side-effect of what it does.

Again, it's NOT stalking. It's reading messages that are publicly
available.

I consider the mental stability suspect of anyone who either:
* Routinely googles himself -- what a narcissist! or

Right, because there are no legitimate reasons to google yourself:
* Curious about old usenet postings you made years ago
* Curious if your name is being used out there somewhere

* When he/she gets into an argument with another person, googles that
other person so that they can drag guaranteeably-irrelevant issues from
some other place and time into the present argument, presumably for use
as ammunition against their target.

It's not irrelevant, simpleton. It's perfectly relevant when it shows
how you turn pretty much every Usenet discussion you are in into a huge
argument.

In this case I can infer that *your* motives are hostile, that you are
losing the argument and becoming desperate, and that you are not above
resorting to ad-hominem tactics, although most of this had become
apparent before now anyway.

Yes, I'm losing the argument. That's why everybody here is in agreement
that you are a troll. Please.

 

[Tom Forsmo]

If you had given it a shot you would have found this free nntp server, I
found it on the first google search i performed...

It may either a) have not existed at the time the ISP/GG woes began, b)
failed some of my criteria, or c) not happened to be findable with the
queries I used. Those factors may have changed in the interim (I'm
assuming that a) if true did in fact change )...

http://news.aioe.org/

A cursory examination curiously fails to reveal any apparent flaws,
which would seem to be a first. What's its likely longevity?

If I have reason to suppose it's not brand-new and perhaps fairly
ephemeral, or on some kind of downward spiral, I'll probably now switch
to it; thanks.

[Suggestion of something insulting snipped]

Oops. Spoke too soon. I take back the "thanks" part.

Sorry, who are you? I replied to Twisted and now nebulous99 has
answered. That means I can only assume you have morhped to get away from
your, by now, infamous handle.

tom

 

[Tor Iver Wilhelmsen]

None of which is applicable to the *other* matter, which is that I just
plain don't have the spare time for clicking on every single link I
see.

But you have time to argue with people who made the MISTAKE of trying
to help you?

 

[Oliver Wong]

You yourself implied earlier in this thread that you did it!

I think he was joking.

- Oliver

 

[Oliver Wong]

[Sorry if the thread follow-up path is a bit broken, but my newsserver seems
to be having difficulties with this thread]

Twisted:

Me:
Twisted:

What would you call it, then?

I see this is a direct question stated at me, but there isn't enough context
for me to recall what I had originally suggested you did, so I don't know.

Me:
[Fictional story about Einstein]

Twisted:

That is quite different from what you were originally suggesting --
for one thing it makes it quite clear that Einstein doesn't agree with
the claim that it's "all nonsense".

Yes, exactly. Saying "Ok, fine." does not nescessarily mean agreement.

For another, a closer comparison would
be with someone actually publicly calling Einstein himself an idiot,
rather than just disparaging his theories.

So change the story to:

Eistein is giving a lecture. Some guy says "Einstein, you're an idiot".
Einstein says "Ok, I respect your freedom to consider me an idiot. If you do
not wish to hear my theories, feel free to leave the lecture hall, but there
are 200 other scientists here who seem to be interested in hearing about it,
so for their benefit, I'd like to continue my explanation uninterrupted."
And then he goes on, doing what he was doing before the interruption, as if
nothing had happened.

Twisted:

Twisted:
What planet are you from?
Earth.

Twisted: Twisted:
OK, I take that back. What *universe* are you from?

I only know of one, and it's unnamed.

Because on *any*
planet in *this* one, game theory and other basic truths of
mathematics must hold invariant, and one of the commonest rules of
games is that if you walk away from an unfinished game other than in
an agreed draw, it constitutes a forfeit.

Depends on whether everyone's playing the same game, I guess.

Also, in *this* universe, if two soldiers in
foxholes are popping up and spraying machine-gun fire at one another,
and then (without a negotiated cease-fire) one of them just gets up
and starts walking off, he's liable to get a bullet in his back.

Yeah, but if that soldier happens to be Superman (or otherwise
invulnerable to bullets), what does he care if he gets shot in the back?

I guess in the game you're playing, if someone insults you on USENET,
you lose points, and if you reply, defending yourself, you gain points.
Something like that, right?

In the game I'm playing, if I'm happy, then I win points. If I'm sad,
angry, or otherwise unhappy, I lose points.

So in your game, the winning strategy seems to be to post as much as you
can, defending yourself from everything, and never admitting having done
anything wrong. This strategy probably doesn't take into account Google's
posting limits, so you might have to adjust it a bit, sacrificing some posts
to defend from "weaker" insults, in order to be able to make posts defending
against the "stronger" insults.

In my game, the winning strategy is not to get sad, angry, or otherwise
unhappy when someone insults me. And so far, I'm winning. =)

But surely you draw the line where someone doesn't just think you're
dumb, but starts trying to convince everyone else that as well? Then
you just have to intervene, either to stop him or to provide their
audience with an alternative theory and some evidence to support it
and refute your opponent's.

Not really. Let's say someone calls me an idiot on Usenet, because (s)he
claims that I said such and such a thing, or that I did such and such a
thing. Now someone else reads this post. This person can, generally
speaking, have one of the following reactions:

(*) They actually believe it. In which case the person is too easily
swayed, believing anything they read on the Internet. I don't really care
what people of this type think of me. They are free to consider me to be an
idiot, if they want.
(*) They don't believe it. Perhaps these people have known me
personally, or seen my previous actions, and judge that I am probably not an
idiot. I don't have to defend myself to restore my image in these peoples
minds.
(*) They are skeptical, but open to the idea. In which case, they will
probably ask me for my side of the story (perhaps in private, over e-mail),
thus providing me with ample opportunity to defend myself.
(*) They really don't care. In which case, any defense I present will be
simimilarly met with an "I don't care" attitude, and so again, I don't have
to defend myself to restore my (non-existant) image in these peoples minds.

In all cases, I don't need to defend myself, unless specifically asked
to do so.

Me:

Apparently, that they saw it?

If you have a point, now is the time.

So you didn't agree to anything else? I.e. you didn't agree that the
monster actually exists?

Point is, if you say "I think you're an idiot", and I say "Ok", I'm
agreeing that you think I'm an idiot. I'm not nescessarily agreeing that I
am an idiot.

That isn't very useful. How do I convince people that what I actually
say I believe, but thinking I believe a random bunch of other things
is liable to mean being mistaken?

I think there are multiple ambiguous parsetrees for this question, so
I'm not sure what you're asking.

For that matter, why are they inventing
various beliefs to attribute to me to begin with?

Misunderstandings happen.

Yes, but the logic-deficient personages in question posting here seems
like a tribe of pygmies asking for (or worse, actually giving)
game-playing tips in rec.games.basketball.

If they provide valuable or useful advice, what's wrong with the
advice-providers being pygmies? Or if they want to learn some game-playing
tips, what's wrong with the persons asking for advice being pygmies?

You fail to appreciate a certain problem there -- *you* not agreeing
that silence implies assent doesn't change the minds of the people who
think it *does*, and take your silence when accused of idiocy (or
whatever) as tantamount to an admission of guilt. You may well not
care what the people calling you an idiot think, but you're making it damn
easy for them to convince everyone else that you are by letting them
try unopposed!

Maybe you and I disagree about the number of people who believe that
silence implies assent.

- Oliver

 

[Oliver Wong]

The only "assumptions" I make
are the guesses we all make given that none of us are omniscient.

Not all of us make guesses whenever we don't know something. Some of us
try to learn more about a given topic before forming an opinion on it.

- Oliver

 

[Oliver Wong]

Entirely beside the point. An *unfamiliar* file extension generally
means "little point in trying", since it usually leads to the save
as... dialog and no clue what to do with the resulting file, or else to
the "You are missing a required plugin" message (exact details
regarding the latter vary by browser) and no idea what plugin or where
it can be found or even whether one exists for that data type.

First of all, when you say an "unfamiliar file extension", do you mean
unfamiliar to you, or unfamiliar to the OS on your computer?

Secondly, if your webbrowser is unable to open jnlp files, try
re-installing the Java plugin for your browser. If that doesn't fix it,
please state the name of your browser so that browser-specific advice may be
given.

- Oliver

 

[Oliver Wong]

(e-mail address removed) wrote:
[Blatant insult snipped]

Well, there's progress -- instead of slyly insinuating it you come
right out and say it. At least it proves that you are trying to do
exactly what people kept insisting to me you were not trying to do, and
therefore proves one point in my favor...

Oh, and Oliver? So much for your supposition that maybe he didn't truly
mean to insult me.

Didn't I make that "supposition" before the above posts were made?

Also, I'm not a psychologist, but could it be that perhaps you started
fishing for insults, because it's less painful for you to receive those
insults than to acknowledge that you might have been wrong about other
people's intentions? The former allows you to externalize the blame ("They
said I'm stupid, but really it's them who's stupid") while the latter does
not ("I was wrong about other people's intent, but really... uh...").

- Oliver

 

[Oliver Wong]

Oh, do they? Routed to /dev/null, or actually going somewhere? Do they
have a proper email address I could use instead? Web forms *are* a
rather fragile medium for composing a message, after all -- which is
why I consider the attacks to have created a threat of catastrophic
data loss. Whereas my email client has such nice options as "keep a
copy", "save draft", automatic retries if the smtp server fails to
respond, and various other means to make recovery easy if the message
bounces or seems to fall on deaf ears (or /dev/null).

Sometimes I'll read a blog, and I want to post a long reply-comment.
However, you can't e-mail your replies, you have to use a webform.

So what I do is type the reply in some other text editor (e.g. notepad),
and then copy and paste it into the form and submit it. That way, if
anything goes wrong, I still have my original text.

- Oliver

 

[Oliver Wong]

Whose control is it in, and at what email address or (toll-free!) phone
number can I contact them immediately and be assured that my complaint
will be read or listened to in its entirety, considered carefully, and
acted on in a just manner?

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
phone: (650) 253-0000
fax: (650) 253-0001

- Oliver