It is also easy to confuse a conviction with what is merely a good set-up for a joke.

ECONOMIST: Boris Johnson is equipped with a reality-distortion field

Moreover, it is a mistake to confuse Russia's push to modernise its antiquated Soviet military with a renewal of the arms race.

ECONOMIST: On immigration, Russia, communists, the European Commission, Telstra, biofuels, IKEA, tea | The

But Dr Cassidy said it would be a mistake to confuse sentimentality with values.

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Meanwhile, the error all along, to which both Chinese policy makers and Western commentators seem to have fallen victim, has been to confuse a high degree of usefulness with indispensability.

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As a result, we would not expect the board to confuse performance over 3 months (a quarter) with 15 years (quindecennial).

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By entering certain strings of text into user input boxes on Web sites, cybercriminals are able to confuse their commands with data in a site's Structured Query Language (SQL) database and gain control of it, says Grossman.

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You would be unlikely to confuse Mitsubishi Motors's latest kei car with a Mercedes or a Lexus, but it does have plush seats and a roomy interior.

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The economic concept of free trade is a simple one, though economists tend to confuse it with numbers.

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In particular, there is a tendency to confuse the state of the car industry with the level of foreign investment, and the level of foreign investment with the state of the British economy as a whole.

ECONOMIST: Hard pounding

But to confuse such short-term, expediency-driven common interests with a durable strategic partnership is, for want of a better term, globaloney.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Globaloney

On the whole, members of this generation expect approbation, have weak basic skills and large knowledge gaps, confuse effort with quality, multitask, follow rules (occasionally to a fault), and blur the boundaries between their social and work lives.

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But he said people should not confuse the desire to get out of poverty and get a better standard of living with being a gross materialist.

CNN: Environmentalist: It's becoming a plastic world

With a nod toward Bayes theorem, Ludlow basically wants to confuse the advertisers trying to profile him and the algorithmic machines that are trying to make predictions about him by throwing lots of false information about himself onto their radars.

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Ironically a bug in the virus that makes it confuse printers with computers means that printers are likely to suddenly start churning out reams of paper, an obvious clue to office workers.

BBC: Bugbear virus threat increases