[dayglored]

Hi All,

You'll pardon me for not joining in these festivities more than I did way above. Unfortunately this thread has taken a familiar turn and I have nothing to add but this meta-observation:

There's an old joke, that among professional comedians, all the standard jokes had become so well known that they were simply cataloged and indexed by number. The pros no longer bothered to tell the jokes -- they just refer to them by number. (I'm sure you remember the rest of this joke and punchline, so I'll just refer to it by number... "47". [Ha ha ha ha...])

Anyway, these threads could be streamlined considerably, with no appreciable loss of content, if we had a catalog of statements and responses, and simply chose the appropriate one for our comment posts. Think of the time saved!

I hereby submit some initial suggestions for the catalog/index:

1. Neutral statement.
2. Snarky pro statement.
3. Snarky con statement.
4. Mild pro argument.
5. Mild con argument.
6. Direct attack.
7. Firm defense.
8. Statement strongly supported by the facts.
9. Statement only loosely supported by the facts.
10. Statement having no particular relation to the facts.
11. Impassioned appeal to authority.
12. Impassioned appeal to conservative principles.
13. Impassioned appeal to logic.
14. Impassioned appeal to Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer, or Steve Reeves.
15. Impassioned defense.
16. Ad hominem attack.
17. Ad hominem defense.
18. Statement about how the prior opposing statement was BS.
19. Statement about how the statement about the prior opposing statement was even bigger BS.
20. Statement about how the other person misrepresents the facts.
21. Statement about how the other person wouldn't know a fact if it bit him/her on the arse.

You get the idea... of course, we'd want to branch out from the above "generic" comments, and include some that are specific to certain topics... but I'm not going there at the moment...

Cheers! :)

[Richard Kimball]

Rule 34

[dayglored]

OBTW, my FRiends, lest anyone wonder, this part of my comment:

...these threads could be streamlined considerably, with no appreciable loss of content...

does not refer to tech threads, or Apple threads, or Windows threads, or Linux threads, per se. It refers to threads (like this one) in which the reference article is crap and was posted merely to incite a flamewar. Provocative crap threads are a waste of bandwidth rivaled only by the Teletubbies.

I recognize that some tech-illiterate folks will believe everything they read on the internet, including Secunia's inflammatory, misleading, and self-serving claim, and they don't research such claims to see if they hold water. So not everyone is to be faulted for not immediately calling BS on these contrivances. But they can be faulted for gullibility.

[for-q-clinton]

True.