News and hoaxes

1998-10-21T00:00:00-07:00

When I wake up and Jack is gone, I shouldn't get too excited. Jack can come back. Jack came back a little before 6 AM. He makes wierd noises when he's asleep. Probably hard for him to sleep when I've just woken up.

Anyway, the last week has brought some rivalry between a few "news" services on the web. The main reason was for an article printed about an MP3 virus. Beta News first posted the article. Dimension Music made a reference to this article. According to Dimension Music's Spyed, he wanted to see how many people would buy the story, and that later he'd post a lesson. The lesson was, not to trust every news source. Rather before buying into a story, try to see if it even makes sense. An MP3 virus doesn't make sense, because MP3s are read, not executed. Spyed is a smart person and I believe what he posted was true, that he was just doing a test. Unfortunately a lot of people bought the story. Spyed later apologized for this trick. In the meantime BetaNews updated their site informing people that it was a hoax. Spyed later apologizes for making BetaNews sound like an unreliable news source. This is all great. I later go to a new site, Acid Sounds. This is after reading a nice article posted on Dimesnion Music by Spyed:

Today (once again) DimensionMusic posted inaccurate information on its site. This time they warned people about a new virus floating around in Id3 tags, called "Bloat." I really don't know where Spyed (the Webmaster) made this one up, considering Mp3s cant transfer viruses (as they aren't executables), nor can Id3 tags. At any rate, pay no attention to this prank. There's nothing to worry about!

Today however they noticed the nice flow of traffic as a result of Dimension Music telling people to visit and they have this to say:

Finally, a reliable source (Dimension Music), has reported on the current status of the next Sonique release.

I have a problem with this. News is good. Opinions are good. Putting opinions into news you report is somewhat iffy. It's okay if you're writing an article and then at the end put your thoughts at the end. It's not a good thing when your opinion of something changes and you do not explain why. This makes your opinion sound like crap. Anyway, when you visit a news site, professional or not, keep a few things in mind. Make sure yo understand what is being said. Make sure the article makes sense. If you see something that doesn't make sense, find out more information. The Internet is great because there's always a few sources of information on news topics. When you see opinions written into articles, do not take them as your own. Those are opinions of the writer of the article. Come up with your own opinion. It may just happen that it's the same, but you need to come up with this on your own. Opinions often change based on pidly little things. Base your opinions on what you observe and can verify.

My opinion: For the record, all the news services I have mentioned are to my knowledge very reliable. If they do make a mistake I can look somewhere else to find the truth, or a day or two later they'll post a correction. Actually I'm not sure about Acid Sounds. It's too new.

Effective arguments

1998-05-25T00:00:00-07:00

I see this happening within my group of friends. What tends to happen, is they will do something. Some type of authority will tell them to stop and their best argument is that what they are doing is some type of alternative to 'typical' behavior, like drinking, etc. You can look at any action in this way and justify a lot of stuff. Let's say somebody annoys me. I could antagonize them and justify this by saying, well it's better than killing them. These types of arguments do not work. For example, Tag is not an alternative to drinking beer. Holding discussions in prohibitted areas is not an alternative to doing drugs. If you want people to give you any credibility, do not always think of your actions as an alternative to something. If someone says you shouldn't play tag, don't just complain how you are "at least not getting drunk." Try to come up with some type of rational argument and say that if anything. The truth is a park ranger would probably rather have you drinking beer somewhere just because his job is to keep the park safe for children (even if there are no children around) not to prevent underage drinking.

Dave Dash

News and hoaxes

Effective arguments