Our genome is spaghetti code of the worst kind. If God exists, he is horrible coder.
Looking at the genome (or our brain) to understand how it works is kindof like looking at the end result of a neural net or genetic algorithm. The millions of random mutations get the right result based on the selection criteria (in this case survival). The animal world has plenty of extreme macroscopic examples of this whether it is extremely painful reproduction, deadly reproduction, insane impractical appendages, it doesn't really matter as long as your generation "wins". Some AI scientists have tried to reverse engineer relatively simple code generated by genetic algorithms and have found stuff that as far as they can tell shouldn't even work but exploits some small loophole in either the code, the hardware, or the selection criteria. When I was in HS, I did some GA stuff that failed miserably at midnight because the bots were taking advantage of minor variations in the random number generator and those assumptions failed as soon as the day changed. Our genome is this times a million. The number of flukes, switchbacks, random hacks, and things that shouldn't work but manage to because of some other random mutation is probably mind-boggling.
That is taught in high-schools, it is called Home Economics (home ec for short).
Home Ec is optional for most, primarily only taken by girls, and mostly a misnomer. I actually took home ec in high school and bizarrely enough it never covered any economics. It covered things like cooking, sewing, and setting a table.
My choice for an alternate math course would be economics; and I don't mean the monetary theory stuff, just basic budgeting and calculating loan amortizations. You would not believe how many people out there think they are financially responsible because they are making the minimum payment on their credit card debt every month.
This Exactly. Schools try to force students to pass courses at a certain level and skip more important skills to accomplish that. We would be much better off in both english and math to make sure the lower levels are well mastered before pursuing the higher levels for the sake of a high water mark. Many students are forced to read Shakespeare or into advanced grammer courses when they would be better served by more emphasis on the lower levels that they are still weak at. Many concepts like balancing a checkbook and calculating interest rates are never even covered in school unless you are developmentally disabled. Instead of focusing on "no child left behind" and forcing people to move up, we would be better off focusing on complete mastery at a given level before proceeding to the next level.
Caveat: I'm not a lawyer. But I don't see why this needs to be complicated.
But if you *were* a lawyer, you would instantly realize why everything needs to be complicated enough to need a lawyer. Everyone has to eat you know... Kind of like hammers wanting nails..
So it's a patch for an abandoned project that was also abandoned by the employer. Even if he released it without asking permission, it doesn't sound like anything that anyone is going to sue over and/or pay a lawyer for. It sounds like the plan was to eventually release it anyways. As long as there is no trade secrets in it, my guess is that even if you annoyed someone in the process of releasing it that they aren't going to be annoyed enough to follow thru with anything. Yes, everyone has to eat, including lawyers, so a company and/or lawyer is only going to pursue a case if there is money to be made somewhere.
People are flawed creatures capable of manufacturing more profitable iterations of themselves for the workplace.
What jobs are safest?
There is a secondary problem that people rarely talk about. The intermediate step between humans doing the work and full automation is "almost full automation" where humans are just a cog in the machine. You can see this in mcdonald's, in amazon warehouses, in manufacturing plants, and even in things like amazon turk. These "almost full automation" plants have horrible working conditions as the steps performed by the humans are repetitive, boring, and have to be done at high speed to keep up with the rest of the machine. My guess is that although mercedes-benz might have put humans back into the loop that you still wouldn't want to work at one of those jobs.
In Guatemala crisp $20 bills and $100 bills were the same but if there was so much as a crease in it they would hand it back and not accept it. I have no idea why as it's easy enough in the USA to exchange even damaged bills for good currency and you would think they would have no problem giving the slightly used bills to the next person in line.
Good for government, good for corporations, bad for citizens. My response is "oh hell no!". I commonly carry $100 bills for travel and they beat plastic hands down for incidental expenses.
I rarely even see $100 bills. Atms only give you $20 bills and for travel, I intentionally carry $20 bills as many places will not let you pay with $100 bills for small incidentals. $100 bills are nice for gifts but that's about all I ever use them for.
In case of a child who looks obviously lost? I don't think that's significantly higher. There are a lot of people who would want to help a lost child.
Yes, most people would be fine helping a lost child but they might not notice as most people go on with their day to day somewhat oblivious to their surroundings while a predator is actively looking and scanning the crowd and therefore are much more likely to notice them because they are looking for them. The odds are still really slim as stranger abductions are extremely rare but unless the person is in uniform and hired to scan the crowd, a predator (if present and in the area) will likely be the first person to spot a distressed child.
Let them pick a mother stranger to further reduce the risks.
And a white or Asian one, to reduce them still further.
(Is that racist? If so, the parent's comment is sexist.)
The parent's statement is at least true. A female is probably a safer pick than a male if you're worried about abduction as would an older person. And I would probably agree with the Asian but I'm not sure the white is a true statement. It's hard to find hard stats as most stats don't differentiate between strangers and acquaintances but there is very little statistical difference between blacks and whites when it comes to child abuse. On a side note, although women and asians are probably a safer pick than men for abductions, more women than men abuse their own children. Likewise as a percentage of the women who have to pay child support, there are more deadbeat women than deadbeat men. The problem with sexist and racist statements is like any stereotype they only hold in limited circumstances.
People would still take candy from strangers if we didn't drill it into them from a young age. Stupidity isn't limited to Wifi, it pervades everything people do.
This "drilling" does very little to actually stop abductions. First off, most abductions are not strangers but rather someone they already know. Secondly, they've done experiments and kids will readily go with someone with a puppy/kitten if they tell them they have more in the back of their van. The "don't talk to strangers" is completely silly. The one safety tip I try to teach my kids is that if they get lost to immediately walk up to the first stranger they see and ask for help. Don't wait for a stranger to come to you. If you pick the stranger then the odds of picking a bad person are slim to none but if they pick you then the odds of them being a bad person are significantly higher.
My guess is that the manufacturers really aren't going to care about pirating for basic replacement parts like battery covers. Once 3d scanners become more popular, if it's a popular item you could borrow from a friend or even get online and ask for a 3d scan of it. Battery covers although thought of as cheap need to have a fairly tight tolerance to fit correctly so winging it would probably take multiple attempts and/or an exacto knife. Even with a 3d file, my guess is that it might take multiple prints to tune it correctly to actually fit.
Not with any current cheap 3d printing technology, at least.
We have a six figure priced printer in the shop where I work, which is actual now several years old, and it can easily make the tolerances for Lego bricks, and with several materials. It would be a waste of money though even with the price of Lego bricks. Our is mainly used for things that can't easily be CNC milled or for non-critical parts when the CNC mills are backlogged.
I'm curious. What are the tolerances of your high dollar printer? What is the actual cost of printing a lego not counting the cost of the machine?
Can I print replacement battery covers with it? That would be pretty useful. The finish looks pretty good I wonder if the tolerances are good enough for the clips to work.
I've thought about this too. There are a lot of little things around the house that might be worth printing (or ordering printed from a "kinkos" type service). The biggest problem is that you need a 3d model of it before you can print it. Even if you have a 2nd one to copy, the 3d scanners aren't really good enough to do it without post editing. It would be great if manufacturers let you download battery cover 3d files like you can download printer drivers but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Take the part about the $20k average increase in the US? 40% increase is "slightly better"?? If the average increases then generally so would the highs and lows.
No, that's not how it would work at all. I'm not comparing 2 averages, I'm comparing the average to the median. To get everyone to the average, you can't just raise the people below up to the median, you have to lower the people above the median. So no, the highs wouldn't increase. The point was to lower the highs so everyone above the 50k point would drop down to 50k.
Why would you give 10k to a guy in india and 10k to me in the US? Of course that sounds lousy for me a good for him. You purposely devised this calculation to exclude cost of living from the equation to make it seem like there is not enough to go around.
That's why my second set of numbers looked at just the USA and it actually came out better than I thought it would with a family of 4 with 115k. My real point in those numbers was that the people who everyone complain about (the 0.1% who make millions of dollars a year) don't really affect the averages that much because they are really outliers. The top 0.1%ers own about 20% of the wealth in the USA. Yes, that's alot of money but divided equally among everyone else it would only increase the average wealth by about 20%. There is another 20% owned by the other 9/10ths of the 1%ers but that other 9/10s are the doctors, lawyers, and small business owners who are pulling in a household income of about 350-400k. Most of these households have 2 wage earners so it's really about 200k/year that is the cutoff to be in the 1% club.
There is plenty we can do to try to even out those numbers but in order to do it, it's going to take more than just taxing the top 0.1%ers.
So does water, iron, and air. Yes, modern society requires a small amount of gold but gold is only worth anything because of its scarcity and it's perceived value. You can see that taking place in the oil market right now. Yes, modern society needs oil to run and is willing to pay $100/barrel for it but if it's plentiful it loses much of its value. Like water, if water was scarce people would pay hundreds of dollars per gallon for it but it's not scarce so it's worth relatively little.
There is already enough wealth to eliminate poverty and inequality. It's just distributed and horded in such a way as that doesn't occur.
Wrong!!! Eliminate inequality, sure, but not to eliminate poverty. If you gave everyone on earth an equal salary, it would come out to about $10k / year per person which would make some people in africa really happy but is below the poverty line in the USA for a single person and barely above the poverty line for a family of 4.
If you take just the USA and gave everyone the same amount, their household income would be $72k which again is slightly better than the median household income of $51k but probably below what many slashdotters (especially those in high cost of living areas) are used to making. There are approximately 2.5 people per household so that comes out to 72/2.5 = 28.8k per year per person in the USA but this brings up another problem. How do you give everyone an "equal amount"? Is it based on the number of mouths to feed so a family of 4 now gets 115k/year while someone who is single gets $28k? If you look at people in poverty, many people are poor because of either large household size and/or a small number of wage earners in their household but good luck getting single childless professionals to work for $28k/year.
In conclusion, yes, there are some people who are filthy rich but as a percentage of the population, they are mostly insignificant and don't really affect the overall numbers that much even if you took all their money.
I watch as that post gets Up-Modded, called "Insightful", "Interesting", etc., while my post refuting the abovementioned gets either completely ignored, or worse yet, downmodded, DESPITE HAVING FACTUAL SUPPORT. THAT's what sucks. And it has gotten REALLY worse over the past few years.
Unfortunately, even the mod system doesn't really help mitigate the echo chamber. The mod system might even make the echo chamber worse when 60% of moderators agree with a comment and 40% disagree especially if they can't distinguish that a comment can be of a different opinion and still contribute.
Now watch as the ACs that have Mod Points Punish-Mod me from my currently Punish-Modded "Good" (down from "Excellent" in one day about a week ago) to "Poor". I'll keep you posted.
ACs don't get mod points. You have to be logged in and be a moderately active user to get mod points. Now a logged in user can post as an AC (although I'm suspect how anonymous it is because I've noticed that I can't comment as an AC and then mod my own post up) but someone who isn't logged in can't earn mod points.
If you don't want to the outcome of the game to be determined by referees and shot clocks, then you need to put enough points on board so that there's no doubt that you've won.
I coach a wrestling team and that is more or less exactly what I tell my team. If you don't put enough points on the board then you risk having the referee decided the match in a way not favorable to you. If that happens you have no one to blame but yourself. We insist on accountability and no whining. If it doesn't go our way we own it and figure out how to make sure we do better next time. If a bad call is made it is my job as the coach to try to get things set right but at the end of the day the goal is to leave no doubt as to the outcome even in the fact of bad calls.
I believe certain sports (tennis or soccer possibly, I don't follow sports) have rules in place that say that in order to win that you have to win by a certain margin (2 points or more) before you can be declared a winner. The Olympics has this problem where the "winner" of the race wins by a hundredth of a second which at that point it is basically a statistical fluke and within the margin of error of human reflexes and is basically luck of the draw not skill.
No this is like walking into a shop to browse, getting screeched at to buy shit and leaving with gonorrhoea. Then they have the gall to accuse people who wear ear defenders and condoms thieves.
And if that ever happened, would you come back in full body armor or would you just stay the hell away?
How is using *my* electricity, risking *my* computer's integrity, distracting *my* attention for *your* profit not abusing *my* resources?
This is like entering into a cage fight and then complaining about getting hurt. Noone makes you go to an ad-supported website and read their content. They aren't using your resources, you are using your own resources (and theirs) everytime you read their content. If you don't like it, stop reading their content but don't complain that they want to support the writers of that content. I have no problem with reasonable ads. I get most of my news from news.google.com which has a nice feature that lets me block providers. If I see an obnoxious ad or I reach the "10 article limit" on a particular site, I just permanently block that news site from my feed. If it's an important story then it will be reported by dozens of sites so blocking 20 or so sites isn't a big deal.
Movie companies would do (empahsis added) a much better job if they stopped trying to squash any sort of piracy, and focused more on providing what people want, in the form they want, when they want it, at a convenient price
Really? For like $20 a month, you have ad-free Hulu and Netflix. That's like a huge portion of content right there. How much more do you need before you can call "won" on the "can stream whatever I want from home for cheap"
I would gladly pay $20 a month to stream "whatever I want". I would even be ok with $20 per month plus ads. hulu + netflix + amazon prime is nowhere close to full coverage. For one, there is a lot of overlap and secondly, they just don't have that many desirable titles. Even adding redbox in for the new releases and you still have crappy coverage. Full amazon is a little better but many shows are $2 per 30 minute episode. $20 per month (or $1 per hour) would be the place where I would just pay it and forget it if I could get full coverage of all new releases and old releases. Until then, I'm going to continue to piece together redbox,amazon prime, the public library, used dvds and whatever else I can find to fit my budget.
The people who end up in these jobs generally need them.
They are just trying to make a living.
Actual robocalls on the other hand...
The goal isn't to "take it out" on the human caller. The goal is to make it unprofitable for the telemarketing company to continue. Most of my "telemarketing" calls these days tend to be complete scams too in which case when they are trying to install a virus on your computer and/or steal your money then they deserve it but even if they are an honest employee working for an honest telemarketing company (assuming that exists), the only way to reduce the amount of calls is to make it unprofitable which is what a system like this is designed to do.
Right, because there's totally no way you could record your own phrases.
Before anyone gets carried away by how fucking brilliant I am, I'd considered building a telemarketer tormentor using Astrerix. It never got past the beermat stage, but we thought of that problem and solved it before we'd even finished the first beer.
I saw this on kickstarter and considered supporting it until I saw that it was a subscription service. I have zero interest in a subscription service. Now if it was a consumer device for $50 (or an android/iphone app) then I would consider it especially if it allowed some customization and/or had randomization.
I know most people probably hate paid posts but I understand that they are a necessary evil. I actually don't mind them much and I like that they are differentiated from regular posts and I occasionally see one that is interesting but why are comments disabled? Allowing comments would allow discussions on the topic at hand and would allow advertisers to see what people actually think. Sure, you might have more people posting stupid comments but I think there could still be some good conversations on some of the paid posts.
Slashdot Mirror
Our genome is spaghetti code of the worst kind. If God exists, he is horrible coder.
Looking at the genome (or our brain) to understand how it works is kindof like looking at the end result of a neural net or genetic algorithm. The millions of random mutations get the right result based on the selection criteria (in this case survival). The animal world has plenty of extreme macroscopic examples of this whether it is extremely painful reproduction, deadly reproduction, insane impractical appendages, it doesn't really matter as long as your generation "wins". Some AI scientists have tried to reverse engineer relatively simple code generated by genetic algorithms and have found stuff that as far as they can tell shouldn't even work but exploits some small loophole in either the code, the hardware, or the selection criteria. When I was in HS, I did some GA stuff that failed miserably at midnight because the bots were taking advantage of minor variations in the random number generator and those assumptions failed as soon as the day changed. Our genome is this times a million. The number of flukes, switchbacks, random hacks, and things that shouldn't work but manage to because of some other random mutation is probably mind-boggling.
That is taught in high-schools, it is called Home Economics (home ec for short).
Home Ec is optional for most, primarily only taken by girls, and mostly a misnomer. I actually took home ec in high school and bizarrely enough it never covered any economics. It covered things like cooking, sewing, and setting a table.
My choice for an alternate math course would be economics; and I don't mean the monetary theory stuff, just basic budgeting and calculating loan amortizations. You would not believe how many people out there think they are financially responsible because they are making the minimum payment on their credit card debt every month.
This Exactly. Schools try to force students to pass courses at a certain level and skip more important skills to accomplish that. We would be much better off in both english and math to make sure the lower levels are well mastered before pursuing the higher levels for the sake of a high water mark. Many students are forced to read Shakespeare or into advanced grammer courses when they would be better served by more emphasis on the lower levels that they are still weak at. Many concepts like balancing a checkbook and calculating interest rates are never even covered in school unless you are developmentally disabled. Instead of focusing on "no child left behind" and forcing people to move up, we would be better off focusing on complete mastery at a given level before proceeding to the next level.
Caveat: I'm not a lawyer. But I don't see why this needs to be complicated.
But if you *were* a lawyer, you would instantly realize why everything needs to be complicated enough to need a lawyer. Everyone has to eat you know...
Kind of like hammers wanting nails..
So it's a patch for an abandoned project that was also abandoned by the employer. Even if he released it without asking permission, it doesn't sound like anything that anyone is going to sue over and/or pay a lawyer for. It sounds like the plan was to eventually release it anyways. As long as there is no trade secrets in it, my guess is that even if you annoyed someone in the process of releasing it that they aren't going to be annoyed enough to follow thru with anything. Yes, everyone has to eat, including lawyers, so a company and/or lawyer is only going to pursue a case if there is money to be made somewhere.
The threshold for profitable robotic replacement does keep dropping.
People are flawed creatures capable of manufacturing more profitable iterations of themselves for the workplace.
What jobs are safest?
There is a secondary problem that people rarely talk about. The intermediate step between humans doing the work and full automation is "almost full automation" where humans are just a cog in the machine. You can see this in mcdonald's, in amazon warehouses, in manufacturing plants, and even in things like amazon turk. These "almost full automation" plants have horrible working conditions as the steps performed by the humans are repetitive, boring, and have to be done at high speed to keep up with the rest of the machine. My guess is that although mercedes-benz might have put humans back into the loop that you still wouldn't want to work at one of those jobs.
In Guatemala crisp $20 bills and $100 bills were the same but if there was so much as a crease in it they would hand it back and not accept it. I have no idea why as it's easy enough in the USA to exchange even damaged bills for good currency and you would think they would have no problem giving the slightly used bills to the next person in line.
Good for government, good for corporations, bad for citizens. My response is "oh hell no!". I commonly carry $100 bills for travel and they beat plastic hands down for incidental expenses.
I rarely even see $100 bills. Atms only give you $20 bills and for travel, I intentionally carry $20 bills as many places will not let you pay with $100 bills for small incidentals. $100 bills are nice for gifts but that's about all I ever use them for.
In case of a child who looks obviously lost? I don't think that's significantly higher. There are a lot of people who would want to help a lost child.
Yes, most people would be fine helping a lost child but they might not notice as most people go on with their day to day somewhat oblivious to their surroundings while a predator is actively looking and scanning the crowd and therefore are much more likely to notice them because they are looking for them. The odds are still really slim as stranger abductions are extremely rare but unless the person is in uniform and hired to scan the crowd, a predator (if present and in the area) will likely be the first person to spot a distressed child.
Let them pick a mother stranger to further reduce the risks.
And a white or Asian one, to reduce them still further.
(Is that racist? If so, the parent's comment is sexist.)
The parent's statement is at least true. A female is probably a safer pick than a male if you're worried about abduction as would an older person. And I would probably agree with the Asian but I'm not sure the white is a true statement. It's hard to find hard stats as most stats don't differentiate between strangers and acquaintances but there is very little statistical difference between blacks and whites when it comes to child abuse. On a side note, although women and asians are probably a safer pick than men for abductions, more women than men abuse their own children. Likewise as a percentage of the women who have to pay child support, there are more deadbeat women than deadbeat men. The problem with sexist and racist statements is like any stereotype they only hold in limited circumstances.
People would still take candy from strangers if we didn't drill it into them from a young age. Stupidity isn't limited to Wifi, it pervades everything people do.
This "drilling" does very little to actually stop abductions. First off, most abductions are not strangers but rather someone they already know. Secondly, they've done experiments and kids will readily go with someone with a puppy/kitten if they tell them they have more in the back of their van.
The "don't talk to strangers" is completely silly. The one safety tip I try to teach my kids is that if they get lost to immediately walk up to the first stranger they see and ask for help. Don't wait for a stranger to come to you. If you pick the stranger then the odds of picking a bad person are slim to none but if they pick you then the odds of them being a bad person are significantly higher.
My guess is that the manufacturers really aren't going to care about pirating for basic replacement parts like battery covers. Once 3d scanners become more popular, if it's a popular item you could borrow from a friend or even get online and ask for a 3d scan of it. Battery covers although thought of as cheap need to have a fairly tight tolerance to fit correctly so winging it would probably take multiple attempts and/or an exacto knife. Even with a 3d file, my guess is that it might take multiple prints to tune it correctly to actually fit.
FTFY:
Not with any current cheap 3d printing technology, at least.
We have a six figure priced printer in the shop where I work, which is actual now several years old, and it can easily make the tolerances for Lego bricks, and with several materials. It would be a waste of money though even with the price of Lego bricks. Our is mainly used for things that can't easily be CNC milled or for non-critical parts when the CNC mills are backlogged.
I'm curious. What are the tolerances of your high dollar printer? What is the actual cost of printing a lego not counting the cost of the machine?
Can I print replacement battery covers with it? That would be pretty useful. The finish looks pretty good I wonder if the tolerances are good enough for the clips to work.
I've thought about this too. There are a lot of little things around the house that might be worth printing (or ordering printed from a "kinkos" type service). The biggest problem is that you need a 3d model of it before you can print it. Even if you have a 2nd one to copy, the 3d scanners aren't really good enough to do it without post editing. It would be great if manufacturers let you download battery cover 3d files like you can download printer drivers but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Take the part about the $20k average increase in the US? 40% increase is "slightly better"?? If the average increases then generally so would the highs and lows.
No, that's not how it would work at all. I'm not comparing 2 averages, I'm comparing the average to the median. To get everyone to the average, you can't just raise the people below up to the median, you have to lower the people above the median. So no, the highs wouldn't increase. The point was to lower the highs so everyone above the 50k point would drop down to 50k.
Why would you give 10k to a guy in india and 10k to me in the US? Of course that sounds lousy for me a good for him. You purposely devised this calculation to exclude cost of living from the equation to make it seem like there is not enough to go around.
That's why my second set of numbers looked at just the USA and it actually came out better than I thought it would with a family of 4 with 115k. My real point in those numbers was that the people who everyone complain about (the 0.1% who make millions of dollars a year) don't really affect the averages that much because they are really outliers. The top 0.1%ers own about 20% of the wealth in the USA. Yes, that's alot of money but divided equally among everyone else it would only increase the average wealth by about 20%. There is another 20% owned by the other 9/10ths of the 1%ers but that other 9/10s are the doctors, lawyers, and small business owners who are pulling in a household income of about 350-400k. Most of these households have 2 wage earners so it's really about 200k/year that is the cutoff to be in the 1% club.
There is plenty we can do to try to even out those numbers but in order to do it, it's going to take more than just taxing the top 0.1%ers.
Gold has intrinsic value to humans.
So does water, iron, and air. Yes, modern society requires a small amount of gold but gold is only worth anything because of its scarcity and it's perceived value. You can see that taking place in the oil market right now. Yes, modern society needs oil to run and is willing to pay $100/barrel for it but if it's plentiful it loses much of its value. Like water, if water was scarce people would pay hundreds of dollars per gallon for it but it's not scarce so it's worth relatively little.
There is already enough wealth to eliminate poverty and inequality. It's just distributed and horded in such a way as that doesn't occur.
Wrong!!! Eliminate inequality, sure, but not to eliminate poverty. If you gave everyone on earth an equal salary, it would come out to about $10k / year per person which would make some people in africa really happy but is below the poverty line in the USA for a single person and barely above the poverty line for a family of 4.
If you take just the USA and gave everyone the same amount, their household income would be $72k which again is slightly better than the median household income of $51k but probably below what many slashdotters (especially those in high cost of living areas) are used to making.
There are approximately 2.5 people per household so that comes out to 72/2.5 = 28.8k per year per person in the USA but this brings up another problem. How do you give everyone an "equal amount"? Is it based on the number of mouths to feed so a family of 4 now gets 115k/year while someone who is single gets $28k? If you look at people in poverty, many people are poor because of either large household size and/or a small number of wage earners in their household but good luck getting single childless professionals to work for $28k/year.
In conclusion, yes, there are some people who are filthy rich but as a percentage of the population, they are mostly insignificant and don't really affect the overall numbers that much even if you took all their money.
I watch as that post gets Up-Modded, called "Insightful", "Interesting", etc., while my post refuting the abovementioned gets either completely ignored, or worse yet, downmodded, DESPITE HAVING FACTUAL SUPPORT.
THAT's what sucks. And it has gotten REALLY worse over the past few years.
Unfortunately, even the mod system doesn't really help mitigate the echo chamber. The mod system might even make the echo chamber worse when 60% of moderators agree with a comment and 40% disagree especially if they can't distinguish that a comment can be of a different opinion and still contribute.
Now watch as the ACs that have Mod Points Punish-Mod me from my currently Punish-Modded "Good" (down from "Excellent" in one day about a week ago) to "Poor". I'll keep you posted.
ACs don't get mod points. You have to be logged in and be a moderately active user to get mod points. Now a logged in user can post as an AC (although I'm suspect how anonymous it is because I've noticed that I can't comment as an AC and then mod my own post up) but someone who isn't logged in can't earn mod points.
If you don't want to the outcome of the game to be determined by referees and shot clocks, then you need to put enough points on board so that there's no doubt that you've won.
I coach a wrestling team and that is more or less exactly what I tell my team. If you don't put enough points on the board then you risk having the referee decided the match in a way not favorable to you. If that happens you have no one to blame but yourself. We insist on accountability and no whining. If it doesn't go our way we own it and figure out how to make sure we do better next time. If a bad call is made it is my job as the coach to try to get things set right but at the end of the day the goal is to leave no doubt as to the outcome even in the fact of bad calls.
I believe certain sports (tennis or soccer possibly, I don't follow sports) have rules in place that say that in order to win that you have to win by a certain margin (2 points or more) before you can be declared a winner. The Olympics has this problem where the "winner" of the race wins by a hundredth of a second which at that point it is basically a statistical fluke and within the margin of error of human reflexes and is basically luck of the draw not skill.
No this is like walking into a shop to browse, getting screeched at to buy shit and leaving with gonorrhoea. Then they have the gall to accuse people who wear ear defenders and condoms thieves.
And if that ever happened, would you come back in full body armor or would you just stay the hell away?
How is selling ads "abusing" them?
How is using *my* electricity, risking *my* computer's integrity, distracting *my* attention for *your* profit not abusing *my* resources?
This is like entering into a cage fight and then complaining about getting hurt. Noone makes you go to an ad-supported website and read their content. They aren't using your resources, you are using your own resources (and theirs) everytime you read their content. If you don't like it, stop reading their content but don't complain that they want to support the writers of that content. I have no problem with reasonable ads. I get most of my news from news.google.com which has a nice feature that lets me block providers. If I see an obnoxious ad or I reach the "10 article limit" on a particular site, I just permanently block that news site from my feed. If it's an important story then it will be reported by dozens of sites so blocking 20 or so sites isn't a big deal.
Really? For like $20 a month, you have ad-free Hulu and Netflix. That's like a huge portion of content right there. How much more do you need before you can call "won" on the "can stream whatever I want from home for cheap"
I would gladly pay $20 a month to stream "whatever I want". I would even be ok with $20 per month plus ads. hulu + netflix + amazon prime is nowhere close to full coverage. For one, there is a lot of overlap and secondly, they just don't have that many desirable titles. Even adding redbox in for the new releases and you still have crappy coverage. Full amazon is a little better but many shows are $2 per 30 minute episode. $20 per month (or $1 per hour) would be the place where I would just pay it and forget it if I could get full coverage of all new releases and old releases. Until then, I'm going to continue to piece together redbox,amazon prime, the public library, used dvds and whatever else I can find to fit my budget.
The people who end up in these jobs generally need them.
They are just trying to make a living.
Actual robocalls on the other hand...
The goal isn't to "take it out" on the human caller. The goal is to make it unprofitable for the telemarketing company to continue. Most of my "telemarketing" calls these days tend to be complete scams too in which case when they are trying to install a virus on your computer and/or steal your money then they deserve it but even if they are an honest employee working for an honest telemarketing company (assuming that exists), the only way to reduce the amount of calls is to make it unprofitable which is what a system like this is designed to do.
Right, because there's totally no way you could record your own phrases.
Before anyone gets carried away by how fucking brilliant I am, I'd considered building a telemarketer tormentor using Astrerix. It never got past the beermat stage, but we thought of that problem and solved it before we'd even finished the first beer.
I saw this on kickstarter and considered supporting it until I saw that it was a subscription service. I have zero interest in a subscription service. Now if it was a consumer device for $50 (or an android/iphone app) then I would consider it especially if it allowed some customization and/or had randomization.
I know most people probably hate paid posts but I understand that they are a necessary evil. I actually don't mind them much and I like that they are differentiated from regular posts and I occasionally see one that is interesting but why are comments disabled? Allowing comments would allow discussions on the topic at hand and would allow advertisers to see what people actually think. Sure, you might have more people posting stupid comments but I think there could still be some good conversations on some of the paid posts.