The students' time is theirs to waste as they will. It's not the admissions staff's job to parent them. As for the university wasting time, it's paid for that time. And it's not even like they'd waste a lot letting some losers in - you know how attrition works, hardly anyone truly stupid makes it through the first month and most of the people that won't manage to pass are gone by the end of the first semester. I don't remember any idiots disrupting class from second year on when the material started to get really hard in my program. I imagine this would be even more true at a highly competitive big-name university.
Now, if we're talking about the situation where you've already let in all the exceptional applicants, and there's one seat left, and the choice is between a guy with grades at X level and a guy with grades at X level that did some really dumb things last year, then I wouldn't object to mining random data since it's pretty much a coin toss otherwise. But if this sort of data is valued anywhere near as much as past academic achievement, or the results of an entrance exam, or something like that, then I consider it pretty ridiculous.
Overall though I don't think we're really disagreeing with each other here. This just bothers me since it seems like a fairly stupid metric to be using at a university when you've got a person's academic history right there in front of you. I think the thing that I got stuck on is that you were talking about highly academic fields whereas I was thinking, "Hey, I know lots of people that cleaned up and went through some pretty intensive trades/management programs run through local colleges."
I was making a general reply to what struck me as an overly broad generic statement that I've heard from a lot of people which I don't believe to be true in real life. As for prestigious schools deciding who to admit, I'd hope they focus more on past academic achievement than on what people do with their weekends and birthday parties, or who they associate with.
As for the distinction between voluntary and involuntary change, well, I'm not really grasping the concept here. Pretty much all change at the human level is involuntary as far as I'm concerned. Nobody wants to turn their lives upside down just for the heck of it, they do it because circumstances force them to. Maybe you're talking about something else?
Do you think that they'd be drinking with their parents vs. their friends even if it were legalized?
No. But I think they would have been drinking with their parents before wandering off to drink with their friends, and that they might be going into those situations with a better understanding of what alcohol is and how it affects them.
Here's my experience: my parents let me drink a little every now and then when I was younger (~15/16), and they explained how tell when I'd had enough. Of course, later on (~16/17) I started going off drinking with my friends. Yeah, I got really drunk a few times. But I never got yelled at for it, in fact my parents laughed at me the first time I woke them up stumbling in late and then puking my guts out at 4AM. I ended up being the first one of the bunch to figure out the trick of having enough and no more. So I'm the one that remembers what happened when, and I'm the one that had the most fun at parties during those years, and I'm the one that stopped a lot of really reckless shit that might have caused some serious injuries or property damage. The rest of them didn't figure any of that out until a few years later.
Why? Because they were drinking to be rebellious, and all that wonderful crap. Freaking their parents out was something they were proud of, they bragged abobut it all the time. I heard about lots of (and witnessed a few) times when their parents would totally snap out on them and do pretty much anything except discussing it reasonably. They didn't care, that's what it was about to them. Establishing the boundaries between their free will and what their parents could make them do.
And no, I'm not somehow inherently more responsible than the rest of them - pretty much the instant the whole it's illegal/defy the parents/be a rebel thing expired they turned into normal people that drink socially and never drive drunk or try to set fire to things just because they're flammable. It's the whole prohibitionist shit seriously warping young people's minds - we need to stop doing it as a society.
If you're already partying and binge drinking in high school, I can't imagine yourself making a dramatic voluntary change in college.
That doesn't even begin to match up with what I've seen around me. Of my friends in high school there's a group of around 20 that were pretty heavy drinkers by the time they turned 18 (the legal age where I live). Oh, and they did a lot of drugs, too. And they skipped classes a lot, and half of them dropped out of school. They were pretty much your typical "gonna be a rock star" crowd (which is why I hung out with them - we all loved the same sort of music). By age 19/20 most of them were complete fuckups, as you'd expect, and I absolutely guarantee you that somewhere on the internet there are pictures of them doing some pretty fucked up shit.
And then they, for various reasons, grew up. Some got kicked out of home and had to cope. Others had kids and suddenly realized they had to care for them. Whatever the causes, within the next four years all but two had stopped the heavy partying, stopped doing drugs altogether, were working hard and paying rent on their little apartments. That was three years ago and every single one of them (except the two who will probably never have their shit together) have either trained into a trade, or gone back to school, or worked their way up to a management position in their companies. They own homes, and pay their bills every month. The ones with kids are either taking care of them themselves or (where the relationships fell apart) making regular support payments. None of them are living on welfare (not even the two who will probably be fighting their addictions till they die) or begging on the street or robbing people.
That matches up pretty well with what other people my age observed in their social circles, and even what older people I know remember of the "loser" crowd from when they were young. No, not everyone is going to turn their lives around, but in my experience and that of many others I know the vast majority of the people you'd have written off in high school as utter failures do manage to build a good respectable life for themselves in the end.
So no, I don't buy the whole "if you failed in high school you'll fail forever" mentality. People certainly do change, and I'd be pretty appalled if industry and educational institutions were to deny these good, solid, hardworking people a future because they did some dumb shit almost a decade ago.
Then again maybe social pressures are different enough where you live that everyone that parties hard in their youth does end up an alcoholic, I don't know, you'll have to enlighten us.
If the tech community makes enough buzz about this, it's likely that we can put the pin back in this grenade. Nobody is going to want to support violating the sanctity of The Internet in an important U.S. election year!
I'm assuming you're being serious. Everything that I've heard on TV and radio regarding what the typical voter is concerned about has nothing about the internet. Folks are voting on: the economy, taxes, abortion, the wars, our security, and whether or not the candidate believes in Jesus enough. No internet.
Good point. But there's a fairly simple way to make the voters care about the net. All we need to do is put lipstick on the Internet.
My understanding is they have the LHC linked to universities/research firms/supercomputers all over Europe simply in order to process the massive amount of data that thing generates. I might have read that wrong though. I've had nothing but trouble finding good information between the "BLACK HOLES, WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!", the idiot reporters doing "human interest" style pieces about it, and the incomprehensible (to me) physics-babble.
Actually, in the case of Freddie and Fannie, it's because the government values you not having to live through an economic recession to rival the great depression.
You have a point there. I'm not exactly disagreeing, but...
*But*, the government absolutely fucked up by letting F&F get so big...
...if the bailout isn't screaming, "We care more about big money than we care about you!" letting big money create the present mess certainly is. It's like, here they are setting up an entire police force to supervise the populace at large, lest Joe Random Public pirate a song (or heaven help us, a movie), but they had no problem leaving the people that control most of the nation's wealth alone to do whatever the fuck they want with all that money.
Other than that I agree with you.
But trust me, the way things are now, you'd rather the government stepped in to save F&F... the consequences to the alternative would've been devastating.
The consequences have been deferred, but I don't think they're really gone.
Never mind the welfare state, bogus economic incentives, economic stimulus packages, the wars on everything, and all the other things that get blamed for government overspending - how much economic failure can the government absorb before they're forced to either impose ridiculous taxes or massively devalue the currency? How does allowing bad management, and then not letting the market punish this sort of behavior, keep others from recklessly fucking up even more of the economy because, hey, their company is also too big to fail? There's a point where the healthy part of the economy won't be able to absorb the damage done by the rest, and if this trend doesn't reverse we're gonna find out what that point is in fairly short order.
Why should *my* tax dollars be used to boost the profits of *any* corporation?
Bear Stearns, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, the **AA's. If anything, they seem to be getting better at propping the big companies up before they collapse. And to answer your question, it's because your government values said corporations more than it values you or your tax dollars. And they value the companies more because a fancy dinner party and sponsorship for the party convention is worth much more than the votes of the small part of the population that both understands and cares about what's going on.
Re:More than scientific learning
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 5, Funny
That does it. I'm tagging this story 'stillalive'.
Oh, I think it sounds more like Google not paying up to the appropriate parties, now here's the threat of something unfortunate happening to their business.
I miss the days when casually discussing this sort of massive corruption would have shocked me and made me think, "no, it can't possibly be so, we live in the free world where everything is happy and good and we have justice..."
Well, some American companies are certainly making money off of the whole thing. It's just that the money isn't coming from where you think it is. Let me clarify. This isn't a war where the USA is looting Iraq (they've done a lot to that country, but looting isn't part of it). This is a war where one segment of the USA (the military industrial complex) is effectively looting the rest of the USA. And their government seems to take turns being too oblivious, evil, or simply too incompetent to do anything about it.
At the risk of getting the hook set in my mouth, I am going to dive in and take the big risk that you know that "Freedom of Speech" only refers to the law that Congress can't abridge it.
And that puts an interesting spin on what politicians mean when they say they want to privatize and deregulate everything because the government is just so bloated and inefficient.
That's true. I'm not going to argue with that statement.
A few nitpicks though, since I think you're (intentionally or otherwise) exaggerating this particular case:
...and buckets of urine back!
Who should we return the urine to indeed.
This particular point has been gone over several times. Two of the buckets had dirty water in them, they were being used to flush toilets because there were a lot of people staying at the house and the occupants were trying to save water. The third (the one with the urine) came from an illegal apartment with no bathroom in it (thus the bucket of piss), and the occupant of that apartment was not found to have been connected with the planned protest.
And they probably just want their buckets back.
Look at this pictures of 'anarchists' attacking an RNC delegates
As for the pictures and the affidavit, let's not forget that the violent retards around the RNC were a tiny minority of those who went out to protest. A few random idiots at a protest doesn't constitute a long-running, organized, nation-wide campaign of intimidation, no matter what color clothing the asshats are wearing.
Somewhere in Russia an editor is probably busy polishing up a piece on the Minnneapolis raids. It is written in much the same tone as this one, and there's a lot of bold and italic text (assuming that's a common way to show emphasis with Cyrillic text) around the bits that deal with FBI involvement. Their politicians will use it to rally their people around their side of things just the same as our leaders will use this.
I demand a +5 Informative for whoever links that story.
And no, I'm not saying it makes either side right, or less wrong, or anything of the sort. I'm just making a sad-but-true observation. (And isn't it sad that I had to write that - that it wouldn't otherwise be obvious and understood?)
Well, reports quoting local police are not really trustworthy if local police "accidentally" shoots people.
Reports in general should be considered suspect. Especially given how happy even our media is about spewing propaganda.
In this case however I don't think there's much wrong with the report - it's the people they quoted that aren't trustworthy. And it's kind of interesting to see exactly what their excuse is, and how much (or rather how little) effort they put into it.
Reports quoting local police said Yevloyev had tried to seize a policeman's gun when he was being led to a vehicle. A shot was fired and Yevloyev was injured in the head.
Slashdot Mirror
The students' time is theirs to waste as they will. It's not the admissions staff's job to parent them. As for the university wasting time, it's paid for that time. And it's not even like they'd waste a lot letting some losers in - you know how attrition works, hardly anyone truly stupid makes it through the first month and most of the people that won't manage to pass are gone by the end of the first semester. I don't remember any idiots disrupting class from second year on when the material started to get really hard in my program. I imagine this would be even more true at a highly competitive big-name university.
Now, if we're talking about the situation where you've already let in all the exceptional applicants, and there's one seat left, and the choice is between a guy with grades at X level and a guy with grades at X level that did some really dumb things last year, then I wouldn't object to mining random data since it's pretty much a coin toss otherwise. But if this sort of data is valued anywhere near as much as past academic achievement, or the results of an entrance exam, or something like that, then I consider it pretty ridiculous.
Overall though I don't think we're really disagreeing with each other here. This just bothers me since it seems like a fairly stupid metric to be using at a university when you've got a person's academic history right there in front of you. I think the thing that I got stuck on is that you were talking about highly academic fields whereas I was thinking, "Hey, I know lots of people that cleaned up and went through some pretty intensive trades/management programs run through local colleges."
I was making a general reply to what struck me as an overly broad generic statement that I've heard from a lot of people which I don't believe to be true in real life. As for prestigious schools deciding who to admit, I'd hope they focus more on past academic achievement than on what people do with their weekends and birthday parties, or who they associate with.
As for the distinction between voluntary and involuntary change, well, I'm not really grasping the concept here. Pretty much all change at the human level is involuntary as far as I'm concerned. Nobody wants to turn their lives upside down just for the heck of it, they do it because circumstances force them to. Maybe you're talking about something else?
Do you think that they'd be drinking with their parents vs. their friends even if it were legalized?
No. But I think they would have been drinking with their parents before wandering off to drink with their friends, and that they might be going into those situations with a better understanding of what alcohol is and how it affects them.
Here's my experience: my parents let me drink a little every now and then when I was younger (~15/16), and they explained how tell when I'd had enough. Of course, later on (~16/17) I started going off drinking with my friends. Yeah, I got really drunk a few times. But I never got yelled at for it, in fact my parents laughed at me the first time I woke them up stumbling in late and then puking my guts out at 4AM. I ended up being the first one of the bunch to figure out the trick of having enough and no more. So I'm the one that remembers what happened when, and I'm the one that had the most fun at parties during those years, and I'm the one that stopped a lot of really reckless shit that might have caused some serious injuries or property damage. The rest of them didn't figure any of that out until a few years later.
Why? Because they were drinking to be rebellious, and all that wonderful crap. Freaking their parents out was something they were proud of, they bragged abobut it all the time. I heard about lots of (and witnessed a few) times when their parents would totally snap out on them and do pretty much anything except discussing it reasonably. They didn't care, that's what it was about to them. Establishing the boundaries between their free will and what their parents could make them do.
And no, I'm not somehow inherently more responsible than the rest of them - pretty much the instant the whole it's illegal/defy the parents/be a rebel thing expired they turned into normal people that drink socially and never drive drunk or try to set fire to things just because they're flammable. It's the whole prohibitionist shit seriously warping young people's minds - we need to stop doing it as a society.
If you're already partying and binge drinking in high school, I can't imagine yourself making a dramatic voluntary change in college.
That doesn't even begin to match up with what I've seen around me. Of my friends in high school there's a group of around 20 that were pretty heavy drinkers by the time they turned 18 (the legal age where I live). Oh, and they did a lot of drugs, too. And they skipped classes a lot, and half of them dropped out of school. They were pretty much your typical "gonna be a rock star" crowd (which is why I hung out with them - we all loved the same sort of music). By age 19/20 most of them were complete fuckups, as you'd expect, and I absolutely guarantee you that somewhere on the internet there are pictures of them doing some pretty fucked up shit.
And then they, for various reasons, grew up. Some got kicked out of home and had to cope. Others had kids and suddenly realized they had to care for them. Whatever the causes, within the next four years all but two had stopped the heavy partying, stopped doing drugs altogether, were working hard and paying rent on their little apartments. That was three years ago and every single one of them (except the two who will probably never have their shit together) have either trained into a trade, or gone back to school, or worked their way up to a management position in their companies. They own homes, and pay their bills every month. The ones with kids are either taking care of them themselves or (where the relationships fell apart) making regular support payments. None of them are living on welfare (not even the two who will probably be fighting their addictions till they die) or begging on the street or robbing people.
That matches up pretty well with what other people my age observed in their social circles, and even what older people I know remember of the "loser" crowd from when they were young. No, not everyone is going to turn their lives around, but in my experience and that of many others I know the vast majority of the people you'd have written off in high school as utter failures do manage to build a good respectable life for themselves in the end.
So no, I don't buy the whole "if you failed in high school you'll fail forever" mentality. People certainly do change, and I'd be pretty appalled if industry and educational institutions were to deny these good, solid, hardworking people a future because they did some dumb shit almost a decade ago.
Then again maybe social pressures are different enough where you live that everyone that parties hard in their youth does end up an alcoholic, I don't know, you'll have to enlighten us.
Not if you play so much that you forget to eat.
I loved those books. The whole time I couldn't help thinking, "What an awesome future, tragic that it's only fiction."
If the tech community makes enough buzz about this, it's likely that we can put the pin back in this grenade. Nobody is going to want to support violating the sanctity of The Internet in an important U.S. election year!
I'm assuming you're being serious. Everything that I've heard on TV and radio regarding what the typical voter is concerned about has nothing about the internet. Folks are voting on: the economy, taxes, abortion, the wars, our security, and whether or not the candidate believes in Jesus enough. No internet.
Good point. But there's a fairly simple way to make the voters care about the net. All we need to do is put lipstick on the Internet.
however, i'm not so sure that Podophile is the best name for a website.
Best marketing pitch ever: iPod - so awesome, you'll molest it for hours.
My understanding is they have the LHC linked to universities/research firms/supercomputers all over Europe simply in order to process the massive amount of data that thing generates. I might have read that wrong though. I've had nothing but trouble finding good information between the "BLACK HOLES, WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!", the idiot reporters doing "human interest" style pieces about it, and the incomprehensible (to me) physics-babble.
Actually, in the case of Freddie and Fannie, it's because the government values you not having to live through an economic recession to rival the great depression.
You have a point there. I'm not exactly disagreeing, but...
*But*, the government absolutely fucked up by letting F&F get so big...
...if the bailout isn't screaming, "We care more about big money than we care about you!" letting big money create the present mess certainly is. It's like, here they are setting up an entire police force to supervise the populace at large, lest Joe Random Public pirate a song (or heaven help us, a movie), but they had no problem leaving the people that control most of the nation's wealth alone to do whatever the fuck they want with all that money.
Other than that I agree with you.
But trust me, the way things are now, you'd rather the government stepped in to save F&F... the consequences to the alternative would've been devastating.
The consequences have been deferred, but I don't think they're really gone.
Never mind the welfare state, bogus economic incentives, economic stimulus packages, the wars on everything, and all the other things that get blamed for government overspending - how much economic failure can the government absorb before they're forced to either impose ridiculous taxes or massively devalue the currency? How does allowing bad management, and then not letting the market punish this sort of behavior, keep others from recklessly fucking up even more of the economy because, hey, their company is also too big to fail? There's a point where the healthy part of the economy won't be able to absorb the damage done by the rest, and if this trend doesn't reverse we're gonna find out what that point is in fairly short order.
Why should *my* tax dollars be used to boost the profits of *any* corporation?
Bear Stearns, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, the **AA's. If anything, they seem to be getting better at propping the big companies up before they collapse. And to answer your question, it's because your government values said corporations more than it values you or your tax dollars. And they value the companies more because a fancy dinner party and sponsorship for the party convention is worth much more than the votes of the small part of the population that both understands and cares about what's going on.
That does it. I'm tagging this story 'stillalive'.
Oh, I think it sounds more like Google not paying up to the appropriate parties, now here's the threat of something unfortunate happening to their business.
I miss the days when casually discussing this sort of massive corruption would have shocked me and made me think, "no, it can't possibly be so, we live in the free world where everything is happy and good and we have justice..."
Well, given the number of abstinence-only christian chicks that get pregnant at a very young age, I'd say you have a point.
Who hasn't done something goofy and thought in retrospect wished they hadn't done it (not necessarily something criminal).
Those that didn't get caught?
Well, some American companies are certainly making money off of the whole thing. It's just that the money isn't coming from where you think it is. Let me clarify. This isn't a war where the USA is looting Iraq (they've done a lot to that country, but looting isn't part of it). This is a war where one segment of the USA (the military industrial complex) is effectively looting the rest of the USA. And their government seems to take turns being too oblivious, evil, or simply too incompetent to do anything about it.
I won't eat anything that casts a shadow!
What the fuck do you eat then? Vampiric lettuce?!
At the risk of getting the hook set in my mouth, I am going to dive in and take the big risk that you know that "Freedom of Speech" only refers to the law that Congress can't abridge it.
And that puts an interesting spin on what politicians mean when they say they want to privatize and deregulate everything because the government is just so bloated and inefficient.
Not all activists are the same though.
That's true. I'm not going to argue with that statement.
A few nitpicks though, since I think you're (intentionally or otherwise) exaggerating this particular case:
...and buckets of urine back!
Who should we return the urine to indeed.
This particular point has been gone over several times. Two of the buckets had dirty water in them, they were being used to flush toilets because there were a lot of people staying at the house and the occupants were trying to save water. The third (the one with the urine) came from an illegal apartment with no bathroom in it (thus the bucket of piss), and the occupant of that apartment was not found to have been connected with the planned protest.
And they probably just want their buckets back.
Look at this pictures of 'anarchists' attacking an RNC delegates
As for the pictures and the affidavit, let's not forget that the violent retards around the RNC were a tiny minority of those who went out to protest. A few random idiots at a protest doesn't constitute a long-running, organized, nation-wide campaign of intimidation, no matter what color clothing the asshats are wearing.
[Insert "so, do you know Bob/Joe/Cathy from Canada?" Jokes here]
Hey! I knew Cathy. But then again, everybody did.
The Land of the Free
Errrm.. You mean Land of the Fee.
That's a very common typo. I mean, the keys are right next to each other...
Nono. You're dead on. That's exactly how this is going to be (has been?) presented in Russia.
Somewhere in Russia an editor is probably busy polishing up a piece on the Minnneapolis raids. It is written in much the same tone as this one, and there's a lot of bold and italic text (assuming that's a common way to show emphasis with Cyrillic text) around the bits that deal with FBI involvement. Their politicians will use it to rally their people around their side of things just the same as our leaders will use this.
I demand a +5 Informative for whoever links that story.
And no, I'm not saying it makes either side right, or less wrong, or anything of the sort. I'm just making a sad-but-true observation. (And isn't it sad that I had to write that - that it wouldn't otherwise be obvious and understood?)
Well, reports quoting local police are not really trustworthy if local police "accidentally" shoots people.
Reports in general should be considered suspect. Especially given how happy even our media is about spewing propaganda.
In this case however I don't think there's much wrong with the report - it's the people they quoted that aren't trustworthy. And it's kind of interesting to see exactly what their excuse is, and how much (or rather how little) effort they put into it.
[for an unspecified reason]
A BBC article on this says:
Reports quoting local police said Yevloyev had tried to seize a policeman's gun when he was being led to a vehicle. A shot was fired and Yevloyev was injured in the head.