>>The single challenge of this decade (in a slew of forms) is to figure out how to beat our own Prisoner's Dilemma to find something that can overrule authoritarian corruption.
Hmm, I'd say political organizing on Facebook might provide that medium, but that has scary issues in and of itself. (Facebook controlling politics? Ew.)
>>Master's Degrees are even worse than Bachelor's Degrees, though. It's well-known that the entire college system is a huge money-making scheme, and quality has gone down in favor of appealing to more students and drawing more money.
At the UC San Diego computer science department, I didn't know any Master's or PhD students that paid tuition. Maybe some did, I guess, but none of my friends. (If you TAed a class or worked for a professor, the school waived your tuition, and paid you about $18k/year, which was enough to live on comfortably in 2000.)
I felt like the BS program in CS was merely a very high level, very detail-light overview of the field. Hey, want to learn about parallel processing? You get a quarter of that. Compilers? Two quarters. Programming Languages? One quarter. Electrical Engineering? Two quarters (an even more high level, detail-light overview of the entire field). And so forth.
I was eager, eager, eager to get into the Master's program there so that I could study each of these topics in more detail. Sure, a MS is the new BS... but simply because it's impossible to get all the information you need in 4 years.
Which is fine, but tragic and thus doesn't really matter since the victories made for social equality have been done by flag bearers not the bleachers.
You want to be a flag bearer? It's more like being a martyr.
But since you feel so strongly about it, I invite you to post your real name, your job, and your positions on: 1) Abortion 2) Gay Rights 3) The War(s) 4) Immigration 5) Pornography 6) Religion
The sad fact of the matter is that there are people that feel very fanatically about each of these issues, on both sides, that will go out of their way to discriminate against you or, hell, even fire you if they know you stand opposed to them on these issues. That's why people keep their damn mouths shut about politics in the workplace and at parties.
It has the name, address, job, and occupation of every person in California that donated money to Prop 8 (the anti-gay marriage bill), and where they work. It is a blatant attempt at intimidation, and if you think it's hunky-dory, then think about if it had been the other way, with a map of every person who supported gay marriage on there. If it doesn't scare you, well, it should.
The exceptional bit of irony is that the creators of eightmaps.com have themselves remained anonymous.:p
I, also, am ambivalent on the effects of anonymity on the internet. Even here on Slashdot, the more turd-ridden posts are typically anonymous cowards, and they tend to get truculent when you refuse to waste an hour of your life writing a long response to what is essentially a brick wall. If someone wants references and hyperlinks to why I think EP is pseudoscience, I'm willing to do it for a named user, but not an AC.
That said, I don't think/. should do away with AC-ship. Even though I don't use it hardly at all, when people are in compromised or vulnerable positions, it allows them to exercise their freedom of speech that would otherwise be chilled by the permanence of information on the internet. Maybe there's a person on Slashdot that agrees with the mass-murdering-Norwegian that Cultural Marxism is an endemic problem in Europe - but they also know that if they ever post on the issue using any words except the harshest criticisms of his terrible actions, that he'd be in danger of being fired from his job (or not hired for his next one), that will chill his freedom of expression, and lead to the very repression of thought that Orwell wrote so well about.
Freedom is a double-edged sword, which is something our modern society (and, especially, leaders) has been having trouble wrapping their minds around. Everyone loves talking about freedom of speech and religion when it's their group (or an allied group) being persecuted, but as soon as "the hated other" gets repressed (whether it be Jews, or Christians, or Atheists, or Muslims, or Gays...) they tend to clam up, or worse, sympathize with it. Generalizing grossly, fundamentalist Christians loved it when that gay scout leader got fired, and gays loved it when Christian clerks at my local recorder's office got fired for wanting the gay-friendly clerks to oversee the gay marriage ceremonies. Likewise, we love it when anonymity is on our side, but hate and fear it when it is used by "the other". Unfortunately, hate and fear seem to be the order of the day in our modern society.
The ultimate result of all this is that people (or, at least the smart people) are afraid to say what they really mean, as their words will be captured forever by the Google/Wayback panopticon, and they may need to work someday with someone that believes strongly the other way. And, unfortunately, partisanship is so strong these days that people work not work with (or work with and then backstab) those that disagree with them politically. Anonymity is the solution to that.
"The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning." - Sir Winston Churchill
>>Can you provide a link to support your claim about "all the other network heads for their bias in reporting the news"?
Ann Coulter is a right-wing pitbull, but she makes a pretty good point attacking the NYT for hypocrisy on the issue (they've used hacked cell phones before, and defended their use): http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2011-07-20.html
>>So, Murdoch gets in trouble for committing crimes in two different countries
*Murdoch* didn't commit the crime. His son may have known, IIRC.
The point is, the New York times, which is criticizing Murdoch for this, is famous for using illegal means to acquire news stories. Except they're celebrated for it - we call them the Pentagon Papers, the Wikileaks scandal, and so forth.
I support firing Murdoch as soon as they fire all the other network heads for their bias in reporting the news as well, for slander, and for their unscrupulous and/or illegal acquisition of news sources.
>>The Creationists, ID-ists and the slew of others nutjobs all having their pound of flesh taught in the US school system seems to show that it certainly isn't simply a matter of getting the right teaching methods.
Yes, like in Creationist Texas that just voted 8 to 0 to reject Evolution! Oh, wait. It was 8 to 0 to support Evolution and reject ID.
Your paranoid hysteria is a bit overblown if IDers can't even get one vote in *Texas*. You're probably one of those folks that confused the proposals for changes to the history standards with actual changes.
While I'd agree that a slew of nujobs have their say in education, it's more the people who invent new teaching methodologies every year, and then force them on teachers, not your fantasy about the all-powerful Koch brothers rewriting textbooks.
Education is screwed up for a lot of reasons, but that's not one of them.
A drum of DDT, assuming it is still potent, would be worth more now than in the 70s due to the ban. Contrary to what most people think, DDT doesn't harm humans. It was banned due to its effects on birds.
Likewise, while asbestos caused lung disease if you get exposed to it, it actually is very effective at preventing fires.
My old landlord would love to find a box of Vioxx lying around, since only Vioxx and morphine worked for his arthritis of the spine, and morphine makes him sleep 2/3rds of the day.
His apartment also had asbestos, and we were probably exposed to it from the giant hole in the drywall and acoustic tiling caused by the property manager's egregious lack of maintainance, so it's not like I'm arguing the past was a paradise, but it's not always so cut and dried.
Sort of. I have a policy of not wasting time explaining things to anonymous cowards, since it's analogous to throwing your pearls before swine and all that.
>>Why would a Knight look like a hedgehog if the shafts hadn't penetrated? Is there evidence that the arrows were going fast enough to lodge themselves in the armour but not penetrate deep enough to hit the flesh and cause pain/bleeding?
That's basically what the reports say. They'd hit hard enough to punch in partway (with a direct shot) but not enough to injure or kill. Only shots that landed through the visor killed the knights. Some ended up bleeding from a lot of little punctures, though.
A number of French knights got through, actually, but the sharpened posts Henry IV ordered all the longbowmen to chop and carry protected the archers so that they could continue raining fire down on the foot infantry following the mounted knights.
>>Not all the French were killed crossing the field, at least once enough got through to force the Prince to request help from the King, who said this was a good chance to win his spurs.
Not that many were killed, actually, those that were in plate.
At Agincourt, the longbows hampered the heavy knights, but didn't kill them except in rare shots through the visor.
They reported French knights looking like hedgehogs. Armor works.
In any event, this study is quite stupid. They measured how much faster armor tires you out when running, and then concluded from it armor was a hindrance, in contradiction to all history.
>>He's saying that games don't need to be incredibly creative and new every time they get released,
At this E3 or maybe last year's, they did a side-by-side comparison of three of the shooters. Each had identical weapons on screen, with identical blood effects on the borders indicating health.
A bunch of Koreans doing Tae Bo while listening to Snap and collapsing a skyscaper around themselves would definitely get my vote for most amusing tragedy of the decade.
I see you're still firing on one cylinder there, jthill.
Could you please point out to me what you found so offensive with my friend's post? Here, I'll even quote it for you again:
Pretty much, all according to plan.
I can't help being jealous of these kids -- I imagine like many people here, being able to learn exactly at my own pace would have done a lot to keep me engaged in school.
I hope this catches on with public schools. It may be one of the most important shifts in education since... well, ever. Finally, technology in the classroom means something.
Are you implying that perhaps he *wouldn't* actually have wanted to be in one of these classes? Or that he secretly hopes it will *not* catch on in public schools?
Slashdot Mirror
If you read what the guy said, he suggested collecting the cleanup costs up front, and then refunding the difference to the company.
Of course, that would require some intelligence on the part of the state governments, which is unlikely to happen.
>>What makes you think that the publisher gets a cut of in-game sales?
I think his point was that they do at Gamestop, but not in-app.
*Apple* on the other hand might try to take a cut for in-App Store(tm) purchases.
>>The single challenge of this decade (in a slew of forms) is to figure out how to beat our own Prisoner's Dilemma to find something that can overrule authoritarian corruption.
Hmm, I'd say political organizing on Facebook might provide that medium, but that has scary issues in and of itself. (Facebook controlling politics? Ew.)
>>Master's Degrees are even worse than Bachelor's Degrees, though. It's well-known that the entire college system is a huge money-making scheme, and quality has gone down in favor of appealing to more students and drawing more money.
At the UC San Diego computer science department, I didn't know any Master's or PhD students that paid tuition. Maybe some did, I guess, but none of my friends. (If you TAed a class or worked for a professor, the school waived your tuition, and paid you about $18k/year, which was enough to live on comfortably in 2000.)
I felt like the BS program in CS was merely a very high level, very detail-light overview of the field. Hey, want to learn about parallel processing? You get a quarter of that. Compilers? Two quarters. Programming Languages? One quarter. Electrical Engineering? Two quarters (an even more high level, detail-light overview of the entire field). And so forth.
I was eager, eager, eager to get into the Master's program there so that I could study each of these topics in more detail. Sure, a MS is the new BS... but simply because it's impossible to get all the information you need in 4 years.
You want to be a flag bearer? It's more like being a martyr.
But since you feel so strongly about it, I invite you to post your real name, your job, and your positions on:
1) Abortion
2) Gay Rights
3) The War(s)
4) Immigration
5) Pornography
6) Religion
The sad fact of the matter is that there are people that feel very fanatically about each of these issues, on both sides, that will go out of their way to discriminate against you or, hell, even fire you if they know you stand opposed to them on these issues. That's why people keep their damn mouths shut about politics in the workplace and at parties.
You want to see something scary? Click here - http://www.eightmaps.com/
It has the name, address, job, and occupation of every person in California that donated money to Prop 8 (the anti-gay marriage bill), and where they work. It is a blatant attempt at intimidation, and if you think it's hunky-dory, then think about if it had been the other way, with a map of every person who supported gay marriage on there. If it doesn't scare you, well, it should.
The exceptional bit of irony is that the creators of eightmaps.com have themselves remained anonymous. :p
Excellent post.
I, also, am ambivalent on the effects of anonymity on the internet. Even here on Slashdot, the more turd-ridden posts are typically anonymous cowards, and they tend to get truculent when you refuse to waste an hour of your life writing a long response to what is essentially a brick wall. If someone wants references and hyperlinks to why I think EP is pseudoscience, I'm willing to do it for a named user, but not an AC.
That said, I don't think /. should do away with AC-ship. Even though I don't use it hardly at all, when people are in compromised or vulnerable positions, it allows them to exercise their freedom of speech that would otherwise be chilled by the permanence of information on the internet. Maybe there's a person on Slashdot that agrees with the mass-murdering-Norwegian that Cultural Marxism is an endemic problem in Europe - but they also know that if they ever post on the issue using any words except the harshest criticisms of his terrible actions, that he'd be in danger of being fired from his job (or not hired for his next one), that will chill his freedom of expression, and lead to the very repression of thought that Orwell wrote so well about.
Freedom is a double-edged sword, which is something our modern society (and, especially, leaders) has been having trouble wrapping their minds around. Everyone loves talking about freedom of speech and religion when it's their group (or an allied group) being persecuted, but as soon as "the hated other" gets repressed (whether it be Jews, or Christians, or Atheists, or Muslims, or Gays...) they tend to clam up, or worse, sympathize with it. Generalizing grossly, fundamentalist Christians loved it when that gay scout leader got fired, and gays loved it when Christian clerks at my local recorder's office got fired for wanting the gay-friendly clerks to oversee the gay marriage ceremonies. Likewise, we love it when anonymity is on our side, but hate and fear it when it is used by "the other". Unfortunately, hate and fear seem to be the order of the day in our modern society.
The ultimate result of all this is that people (or, at least the smart people) are afraid to say what they really mean, as their words will be captured forever by the Google/Wayback panopticon, and they may need to work someday with someone that believes strongly the other way. And, unfortunately, partisanship is so strong these days that people work not work with (or work with and then backstab) those that disagree with them politically. Anonymity is the solution to that.
"The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning."
- Sir Winston Churchill
>>Can you provide a link to support your claim about "all the other network heads for their bias in reporting the news"?
Ann Coulter is a right-wing pitbull, but she makes a pretty good point attacking the NYT for hypocrisy on the issue (they've used hacked cell phones before, and defended their use):
http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2011-07-20.html
>>So, Murdoch gets in trouble for committing crimes in two different countries
*Murdoch* didn't commit the crime. His son may have known, IIRC.
The point is, the New York times, which is criticizing Murdoch for this, is famous for using illegal means to acquire news stories. Except they're celebrated for it - we call them the Pentagon Papers, the Wikileaks scandal, and so forth.
I support firing Murdoch as soon as they fire all the other network heads for their bias in reporting the news as well, for slander, and for their unscrupulous and/or illegal acquisition of news sources.
>>And frankly I don't care if Intel calls it Shaka Zulu parallel
Well.... I'd think it was awesome.
Hell, my Master's is even in parallel processing.
-ShakaUVM
>>The Creationists, ID-ists and the slew of others nutjobs all having their pound of flesh taught in the US school system seems to show that it certainly isn't simply a matter of getting the right teaching methods.
Yes, like in Creationist Texas that just voted 8 to 0 to reject Evolution! Oh, wait. It was 8 to 0 to support Evolution and reject ID.
Your paranoid hysteria is a bit overblown if IDers can't even get one vote in *Texas*. You're probably one of those folks that confused the proposals for changes to the history standards with actual changes.
While I'd agree that a slew of nujobs have their say in education, it's more the people who invent new teaching methodologies every year, and then force them on teachers, not your fantasy about the all-powerful Koch brothers rewriting textbooks.
Education is screwed up for a lot of reasons, but that's not one of them.
A drum of DDT, assuming it is still potent, would be worth more now than in the 70s due to the ban. Contrary to what most people think, DDT doesn't harm humans. It was banned due to its effects on birds.
Likewise, while asbestos caused lung disease if you get exposed to it, it actually is very effective at preventing fires.
My old landlord would love to find a box of Vioxx lying around, since only Vioxx and morphine worked for his arthritis of the spine, and morphine makes him sleep 2/3rds of the day.
His apartment also had asbestos, and we were probably exposed to it from the giant hole in the drywall and acoustic tiling caused by the property manager's egregious lack of maintainance, so it's not like I'm arguing the past was a paradise, but it's not always so cut and dried.
>>But you're a lazy ass in general
Sort of. I have a policy of not wasting time explaining things to anonymous cowards, since it's analogous to throwing your pearls before swine and all that.
>>Why would a Knight look like a hedgehog if the shafts hadn't penetrated? Is there evidence that the arrows were going fast enough to lodge themselves in the armour but not penetrate deep enough to hit the flesh and cause pain/bleeding?
That's basically what the reports say. They'd hit hard enough to punch in partway (with a direct shot) but not enough to injure or kill. Only shots that landed through the visor killed the knights. Some ended up bleeding from a lot of little punctures, though.
A number of French knights got through, actually, but the sharpened posts Henry IV ordered all the longbowmen to chop and carry protected the archers so that they could continue raining fire down on the foot infantry following the mounted knights.
>>Not all the French were killed crossing the field, at least once enough got through to force the Prince to request help from the King, who said this was a good chance to win his spurs.
Not that many were killed, actually, those that were in plate.
At Agincourt, the longbows hampered the heavy knights, but didn't kill them except in rare shots through the visor.
They reported French knights looking like hedgehogs. Armor works.
In any event, this study is quite stupid. They measured how much faster armor tires you out when running, and then concluded from it armor was a hindrance, in contradiction to all history.
I've written long posts on it before, but don't feel like repeating myself.
Consider the following: if you can use a theory to prove any proposition, there is a problem with your theory.
You want a theory that can explain everything, not anything.
Company Motto: "FEEL the stability of a BiPod!"
>>Your very first sentence managed to pack in multiple blatant faults
What faults?
>>combining raw nonsense (swapping the lecture/practice sites somehow gives up control you later say they don't have)
Your statement is nonsense.
>>with an unwarranted implicit generalization from some teachers you know to all teachers.
No, fucktard. I work with school districts. A lot of them. Around the country.
>>He's saying that games don't need to be incredibly creative and new every time they get released,
At this E3 or maybe last year's, they did a side-by-side comparison of three of the shooters. Each had identical weapons on screen, with identical blood effects on the borders indicating health.
It was quite depressing.
>>If my objection had been to what your bud posted, I'd have answered his post.
Which is why you flamed me twice for it, obviously. Oh, wait.
You don't make the slightest amount of sense, and can't even put together an argument about what, exactly, you're objecting to in my posts.
>>Tesla's earthquake machine was an exercise routine?
He had The Power.
A bunch of Koreans doing Tae Bo while listening to Snap and collapsing a skyscaper around themselves would definitely get my vote for most amusing tragedy of the decade.
I see you're still firing on one cylinder there, jthill.
Could you please point out to me what you found so offensive with my friend's post? Here, I'll even quote it for you again:
Pretty much, all according to plan.
I can't help being jealous of these kids -- I imagine like many people here, being able to learn exactly at my own pace would have done a lot to keep me engaged in school.
I hope this catches on with public schools. It may be one of the most important shifts in education since... well, ever. Finally, technology in the classroom means something.
Are you implying that perhaps he *wouldn't* actually have wanted to be in one of these classes? Or that he secretly hopes it will *not* catch on in public schools?
Or are you just a fucking moron?
I doubt that chart has been updated since these findings, and I doubt that 4% Neanderthal DNA will result in noticeable skeletal changes.
The very fact these genes survived though MEANS that they improved the fitness of their offspring.
>>I doubt the average person is aware that a password can include symbols
That's why my passwords are always: ******!