I was just having this conversation with a co-worker. It's the greatest strength and greatest weakness of the Internet. You can use it to find people who are into tabletop gaming, sports, photography, or any other interest you might have. Unfortunately, you can also use it to find people who agree with you in your hatred of GROUP A, that society would be great if we could turn back the clock to before emancipation, that nobody should offend anybody ever, or any other fringe group. And the same multiplier effect that lets one blogger take on a giant corporation can be used by a roving band of random kooks to harass a person for activities that society at large would find completely normal. (For example, a person I know is being harassed by white supremacists because she has 2 white kids and 2 black kids.)
The trick is figuring out how to prevent the abuse of the Internet's power while not limiting the good uses of its power. Unfortunately, I don't think this is solvable.
I'd second this. Reading the "disagree mod" and "factually incorrect mod" discussions, I wondered if it would be possible to tag posts like this and have the tags appear alongside the other mods.
For example:
The Earth is flat (+3 Insightful, -4 Factually Incorrect, -3 Disagree) by SomePoster Here is an overly long post explaining why the Earth is flat......
In the example above, the +3 Insightful is used for the actual moderation. So browsing at +3 would show this post. However, the "-4 Factually Incorrect, -3 Disagree" would show that 4 people think this isn't factually correct and 3 people disagreed, These might not factor into the actual mod score, but they could be displayed for context. Yes, this would be abused, but keeping it from affecting mod score and just having it be display only might limit this abuse.
Wow, I'm not even sure where to begin. This site runs into problems with civility at times but, compared to the bloodbath that is Reddit or god forbid YouTube,
And if you think those are bad, Twitter can be even worse. You can have mostly good conversations with people on Twitter and then have some troll come out of nowhere, harass you, and have Twitter shrug their shoulders because the person didn't explicitly threaten you with physical violence. A friend of a friend of mine on Twitter is currently battling white supremacist trolls who are attacking her because she's adopted two white kids and two black kids. I read some of these people's tweets and felt like I needed to scrub my eyeballs/brain afterwards. As bad as Slashdot can be sometimes, I highly doubt that people like this would last here.
Shoot... Meant to type Civilization. I used to do the same with SimCity, though. I'd build a city, purposely unleash a few dozen disasters on it, and then use cheat codes to give myself unlimited resources so I could rebuild.... only to wreck havoc on the city again.
I loved playing single-player games with cheat codes. I'd enter "It is a good day to die" into Warcraft (original - before all this "World Of" stuff) and would send a now immortal peon to take out the enemy's entire army. I'd also give myself unlimited money in SimCity and just buy out all the competing civilizations except for one city that I'd keep around to keep the game from ending. (I called that my "Microsoft Strategy.")
A friend of mine and I used to play a football video game back in the NES days. He would employ football strategy to plan his maneuvers, but i knew nothing of the game so I's just choose random plays and button mash. More often than not, I'd beat him because he couldn't figure out what my strategy was to make a counter to it. He'd plan a defense based on the most logical (to someone who knows football) offense, but I'd do something completely different and would win.
I really need to figure out a good way of digitizing an audio cassette tape my parents made when my sister and I were really young. Unfortunately, most solutions I've found so far would cost too much for one cassette recording lasting about 10 minutes.
You can also search Brink Link to find the pieces you want. I did this recently and wound up buying more bricks than I immediately needed because the per piece pricing and shipping cost were so low.
This is the key stumbling block for many. They might think they're being healthy by having whole wheat pasta with veggies, but they pile so much pasta on their plate that they wind up eating five servings instead of one. Then, they wonder why they aren't losing weight. Combine this with mindless eating (open bag of chips and "I'll just eat one... and another... and another... how did this bag get empty so quickly?") and people's best intentions can be thwarted.
This is why I recommend that people:
A) Pay close attention to food labels. That "one serving" bag of chips that you think is only 80 calories might actually have 2.5 servings in the bag. So you're actually eating 200 calories. (Yes, I realize the article was all about calories being a bad measurement, but the point remains valid. You think you're eating X but you're really eating 2.5*X.)
B) Get a food scale and weight their food. Yes, it can be annoying, but it helps you keep track of just how much you're eating. Going "by eye" is a good way to overeat.
C) Write down what you eat. It could be a notebook or an app. (I prefer the MyFitnessPal app.) This helps cut down on mindless eating. And yes, write down EVERYTHING. You ate a few M&M's? Write it down. Cheating here or there (especially when you're just beginning) will lead to you overeating while your recorded food intake seems minimal.
The Government cannot simultaneously be incompetent and engage in these "vast conspiracies"
That's what always gets me about these conspiracy theorists. They claim that the government is incredibly competent at keeping a secret (most times across multiple administrations/Congresses). Yet, this same "incredibly competent at keeping secrets" government messes up in such a way that is obvious to your average conspiracy theorist of modest means. With a computer and some old news footage, they are able to "see past the government's cover-up" in simple ways that the super-conspiracy apparently forgot to cover themselves against.
As someone pointed out, he could have spliced in non-G-rating audio at a certain point. For example, at 5 hours and 47 minutes, a single curse word might be uttered. Then, at 7 hours and 23.5 minutes, perhaps he'd have XXX-rated audio play for 3 seconds.
If the censors still give the movie a G rating, then it's obvious that they didn't watch it all (either fast-forwarding through it or watching the first few hours and then stopping).
Like you said, it might work if the tests were good. Unfortunately, the tests are horrible. They are designed by big companies (Pearson until the end of this year) who have a vested interest in students failing so they can sell more products (courses, books, etc) to the students/teachers/administrators. The tests and scoring have no oversight. The testing companies put whatever questions they want in them and the books are supposed to be returned to the testing company to be graded and destroyed. Some questions have leaked out, however, by teachers risking their jobs to make the horribly confusing questions know. In one case in my younger son's school, four teachers decided to try solving one of the problems and they each got a different answer. If teachers with master's degrees can't solve an elementary school test question, what hope do the students have?
Then there's the political side of the equation. The teacher's union didn't endorse our governor in his re-election campaign and he's made it clear he's going to take it out on teachers. So he's taking actions not based on "this is what is best for students" but based on "this will hurt teachers which serves them right for not backing me."
I have no problem with trying to assess how well teachers are doing, but it's a complex problem and the politicians/testing companies are trying to implement a simple solution that benefits them and ultimately hurts students.
I know some of these people too. They refuse to change what they "believe" based on evidence. In fact, to them, science changing theories based on new facts is a weakness, not a strength. To them, religion keeping the same explanation ("God did it") no matter what the evidence is a strength and is a good reason to stick with Creationism over Evolution.
You can't argue with these people and you waste your time trying to.
Unfortunately, the politicians in my state (NY) decided they knew how to quantify a teacher's performance. They give the kids a big standardized test, have the test company grade the tests, and if the kids don't do as well as the state says the kids should do, the teacher is penalized. If this happens 3 years in a row, the teacher is fired. It doesn't matter if the teacher teaches special ed kids (who might not score as high) or honors kids (who, despite the state's model insisting they reach it, simply can't improve their 98% score to 106%). All teachers' jobs are tied to test scores. As a result, all class time gets devoted to learning how to take the test and kids aren't learning as much as they used to.
The problem is that science class - especially in a high school - isn't about teaching the entirety of the theory and where we have yet to dot the i's and cross the t's. It's about teaching the foundations so that kids can get up to speed with currently accepted scientific theory. They just don't have time to cover every little detail and scientific argument that exists.
This is the point that those who try to advocate for government and religion to be mixed fail to see. Let's say we took down Separation of Church and State. We let government policies be set based on religion. (We'll even make it "their" religion as opposed to some other subset of Christianity that they don't agree with or another religion entirely.) How long until "religion dictates the government actions" turns into "government dictates religion"? How long until our President is able to tell everyone that they aren't following the official state religion unless they believe X, Y, and Z and would be treated like a second-class citizen unless you fall in line?
Separation of Church and State protects religion from government just as much (if not more) than it protects government from religion.
I keep having this recurrent dream that Barry Goldwater is resurrected and saves the Republican Party from itself.
At this point, if Ronald Reagan came back to life and tried to run for political office, he'd be kicked out for being too liberal and for being a RINO.
Honestly, I vote pretty consistently on the Democrat side, but I actually WANT a good second choice. I don't consider a party that would put forward Trump or Cruz to be a good second party. It's certainly not one that's giving me a choice that I would be willing to pick. There are Republicans I would vote for. Sane Republicans whose conservative beliefs don't include "all science must be wrong because my god-book says so" or "we've got to shut down the Federal government completely - except for those portions that I can use to make sure that everyone follows the morals my religion says are important." Unfortunately, these Republicans get kicked out of the race early (if not kicked out of the party entirely).
At this point, I'm hoping that the Republican party splits in two. One half can go on to be the more moderate GOP with conservative principals but implemented in a sane manner. The other half can include the religious fundamentalists and loud-brash folks like Trump. This half can spiral out of control until it crashes and burns. Please, Republican party, kick out the loons because I actually DO want to seriously consider your candidates but I can't do that when Trump/Cruz are the front runners.
For me, the problem with the added original trilogy CGI effects were that they seemed to be added purposefully to draw our attention to them. Luke and company arrive as Mos Eisley. As they slow up, a big creature walks right in front of them - between them and the "camera" - obscuring our view of them. There is no reason story-wise for this obstruction. It's only there because Lucas decided he wanted us to say "Hey, look at that big creature. Lucas must be a genius for coming up with such a CGI creation." Instead, we wind up saying "Down in front! Get that thing out of our way so we can see the rest of the movie!!!"
This is the case in the prequels as well. In Episode 2, R2D2 and C3PO approach the droid factory and C3PO nears the edge. He's clearly Anthony Daniels wearing the suit. R2 bumps him over the edge and he manages to grab hold of a flying droid who plucks him up and shakes him loose. Now, he's clearly a fully CGI creation. There's a discontinuity between the two that jars you out of the story. (Not like there's much story to get jarred out of but that just means that keeping the audience immersed is much more important.) The scene could have been written to keep Anthony Daniels or a physical "stunt-C3PO" in it, but Lucas was so enamored with CGI that he just figured he'd use it for entire scenes to replace what the actors couldn't do. It came off looking like the movie was part-video game and not like the characters were actually still in the scenes.
Doesn't Microsoft often "donate" money to schools to help them set up computer equipment that will be running Microsoft software? This stipulation probably happens more often than we know thanks to back room dealings.
So yes, no one is writing a word processopr or computing sattelite trjaectories in scratch. but it cuts past the crap of languages (remebering syntax) but teaches you the abstract concepts just as a matter of course.
In college, one of my computer science professors told the class that everything we were learning would be obsolete by the time we graduated, but the concepts we learned would serve us for our entire careers. Sure enough, he was right. I don't code in C anyone (the language I used in college - I was the last class before they moved to C++), but I still use for loops, if-then statements, includes, etc. The syntax changes from language to language, but those core concepts have appeared in every language I've learned since college.
My kids have done the Code.org exercises (uses a language similar to Scratch) and it helps teach them the concepts behind programming. Everything else is just filling in the details of the individual languages.
We"re also living in a global market. Let's say the US banned strong encryption tomorrow. What's to stop someone in another country from posting the source code to a strong encryption scheme? How would you prevent people from downloading and using this? You'd need to implement a "Great US Firewall" and filter all encryption-related sites. Even if you were able to do this, all you'd wind up doing is making US businesses less secure than foreign businesses. More US business hackings would leave the (valid) impression that you should trust foreign companies over US-based ones and the economy would suffer.
Encryption opponents like to pretend like they can just have Congress pass a law and all that pesky encryption will vanish with no consequences. In reality, banning encryption would create a horrible mess for businesses and consumers.
In fact, the security line itself would make a great target for a terrorist. Pick a busy airport at a very busy time of year. Get a suitcase so it looks like you're going on a flight, walk to the security line and wait until you're in the middle of it. Once you've completed your task (and presumably you are dead, but that's not a problem for most terrorists), flights will be messed up for days in that airport. Time this with a couple of people in other airports and you'd mess up flights all over the country as people panic. (And then will come the "we've got to do something" legislation from politicians stripping away more of our freedom to "protect" us from everything.)
Same here. I have a few old phones without SIM cards that I let my kids use as Wi-Fi gaming devices. The phones boot up, connect to the Google Play and Amazon app stores, and run apps just fine. One phone displays a missing SIM warning when it boots, but that's the only difference.
Not to mention the website operators as well. If someone has ads on their site, the purpose is to help pay for the site operations. A program that removes the ads and replaces them with its own ads is just harmful to the website operators.
Slashdot Mirror
I was just having this conversation with a co-worker. It's the greatest strength and greatest weakness of the Internet. You can use it to find people who are into tabletop gaming, sports, photography, or any other interest you might have. Unfortunately, you can also use it to find people who agree with you in your hatred of GROUP A, that society would be great if we could turn back the clock to before emancipation, that nobody should offend anybody ever, or any other fringe group. And the same multiplier effect that lets one blogger take on a giant corporation can be used by a roving band of random kooks to harass a person for activities that society at large would find completely normal. (For example, a person I know is being harassed by white supremacists because she has 2 white kids and 2 black kids.)
The trick is figuring out how to prevent the abuse of the Internet's power while not limiting the good uses of its power. Unfortunately, I don't think this is solvable.
I'd second this. Reading the "disagree mod" and "factually incorrect mod" discussions, I wondered if it would be possible to tag posts like this and have the tags appear alongside the other mods.
For example:
The Earth is flat (+3 Insightful, -4 Factually Incorrect, -3 Disagree)
by SomePoster
Here is an overly long post explaining why the Earth is flat......
In the example above, the +3 Insightful is used for the actual moderation. So browsing at +3 would show this post. However, the "-4 Factually Incorrect, -3 Disagree" would show that 4 people think this isn't factually correct and 3 people disagreed, These might not factor into the actual mod score, but they could be displayed for context. Yes, this would be abused, but keeping it from affecting mod score and just having it be display only might limit this abuse.
And if you think those are bad, Twitter can be even worse. You can have mostly good conversations with people on Twitter and then have some troll come out of nowhere, harass you, and have Twitter shrug their shoulders because the person didn't explicitly threaten you with physical violence. A friend of a friend of mine on Twitter is currently battling white supremacist trolls who are attacking her because she's adopted two white kids and two black kids. I read some of these people's tweets and felt like I needed to scrub my eyeballs/brain afterwards. As bad as Slashdot can be sometimes, I highly doubt that people like this would last here.
Shoot... Meant to type Civilization. I used to do the same with SimCity, though. I'd build a city, purposely unleash a few dozen disasters on it, and then use cheat codes to give myself unlimited resources so I could rebuild.... only to wreck havoc on the city again.
I loved playing single-player games with cheat codes. I'd enter "It is a good day to die" into Warcraft (original - before all this "World Of" stuff) and would send a now immortal peon to take out the enemy's entire army. I'd also give myself unlimited money in SimCity and just buy out all the competing civilizations except for one city that I'd keep around to keep the game from ending. (I called that my "Microsoft Strategy.")
A friend of mine and I used to play a football video game back in the NES days. He would employ football strategy to plan his maneuvers, but i knew nothing of the game so I's just choose random plays and button mash. More often than not, I'd beat him because he couldn't figure out what my strategy was to make a counter to it. He'd plan a defense based on the most logical (to someone who knows football) offense, but I'd do something completely different and would win.
I really need to figure out a good way of digitizing an audio cassette tape my parents made when my sister and I were really young. Unfortunately, most solutions I've found so far would cost too much for one cassette recording lasting about 10 minutes.
You can also search Brink Link to find the pieces you want. I did this recently and wound up buying more bricks than I immediately needed because the per piece pricing and shipping cost were so low.
This is the key stumbling block for many. They might think they're being healthy by having whole wheat pasta with veggies, but they pile so much pasta on their plate that they wind up eating five servings instead of one. Then, they wonder why they aren't losing weight. Combine this with mindless eating (open bag of chips and "I'll just eat one... and another... and another... how did this bag get empty so quickly?") and people's best intentions can be thwarted.
This is why I recommend that people:
A) Pay close attention to food labels. That "one serving" bag of chips that you think is only 80 calories might actually have 2.5 servings in the bag. So you're actually eating 200 calories. (Yes, I realize the article was all about calories being a bad measurement, but the point remains valid. You think you're eating X but you're really eating 2.5*X.)
B) Get a food scale and weight their food. Yes, it can be annoying, but it helps you keep track of just how much you're eating. Going "by eye" is a good way to overeat.
C) Write down what you eat. It could be a notebook or an app. (I prefer the MyFitnessPal app.) This helps cut down on mindless eating. And yes, write down EVERYTHING. You ate a few M&M's? Write it down. Cheating here or there (especially when you're just beginning) will lead to you overeating while your recorded food intake seems minimal.
That's what always gets me about these conspiracy theorists. They claim that the government is incredibly competent at keeping a secret (most times across multiple administrations/Congresses). Yet, this same "incredibly competent at keeping secrets" government messes up in such a way that is obvious to your average conspiracy theorist of modest means. With a computer and some old news footage, they are able to "see past the government's cover-up" in simple ways that the super-conspiracy apparently forgot to cover themselves against.
As someone pointed out, he could have spliced in non-G-rating audio at a certain point. For example, at 5 hours and 47 minutes, a single curse word might be uttered. Then, at 7 hours and 23.5 minutes, perhaps he'd have XXX-rated audio play for 3 seconds.
If the censors still give the movie a G rating, then it's obvious that they didn't watch it all (either fast-forwarding through it or watching the first few hours and then stopping).
Like you said, it might work if the tests were good. Unfortunately, the tests are horrible. They are designed by big companies (Pearson until the end of this year) who have a vested interest in students failing so they can sell more products (courses, books, etc) to the students/teachers/administrators. The tests and scoring have no oversight. The testing companies put whatever questions they want in them and the books are supposed to be returned to the testing company to be graded and destroyed. Some questions have leaked out, however, by teachers risking their jobs to make the horribly confusing questions know. In one case in my younger son's school, four teachers decided to try solving one of the problems and they each got a different answer. If teachers with master's degrees can't solve an elementary school test question, what hope do the students have?
Then there's the political side of the equation. The teacher's union didn't endorse our governor in his re-election campaign and he's made it clear he's going to take it out on teachers. So he's taking actions not based on "this is what is best for students" but based on "this will hurt teachers which serves them right for not backing me."
I have no problem with trying to assess how well teachers are doing, but it's a complex problem and the politicians/testing companies are trying to implement a simple solution that benefits them and ultimately hurts students.
I know some of these people too. They refuse to change what they "believe" based on evidence. In fact, to them, science changing theories based on new facts is a weakness, not a strength. To them, religion keeping the same explanation ("God did it") no matter what the evidence is a strength and is a good reason to stick with Creationism over Evolution.
You can't argue with these people and you waste your time trying to.
Unfortunately, the politicians in my state (NY) decided they knew how to quantify a teacher's performance. They give the kids a big standardized test, have the test company grade the tests, and if the kids don't do as well as the state says the kids should do, the teacher is penalized. If this happens 3 years in a row, the teacher is fired. It doesn't matter if the teacher teaches special ed kids (who might not score as high) or honors kids (who, despite the state's model insisting they reach it, simply can't improve their 98% score to 106%). All teachers' jobs are tied to test scores. As a result, all class time gets devoted to learning how to take the test and kids aren't learning as much as they used to.
The problem is that science class - especially in a high school - isn't about teaching the entirety of the theory and where we have yet to dot the i's and cross the t's. It's about teaching the foundations so that kids can get up to speed with currently accepted scientific theory. They just don't have time to cover every little detail and scientific argument that exists.
This is the point that those who try to advocate for government and religion to be mixed fail to see. Let's say we took down Separation of Church and State. We let government policies be set based on religion. (We'll even make it "their" religion as opposed to some other subset of Christianity that they don't agree with or another religion entirely.) How long until "religion dictates the government actions" turns into "government dictates religion"? How long until our President is able to tell everyone that they aren't following the official state religion unless they believe X, Y, and Z and would be treated like a second-class citizen unless you fall in line?
Separation of Church and State protects religion from government just as much (if not more) than it protects government from religion.
At this point, if Ronald Reagan came back to life and tried to run for political office, he'd be kicked out for being too liberal and for being a RINO.
Honestly, I vote pretty consistently on the Democrat side, but I actually WANT a good second choice. I don't consider a party that would put forward Trump or Cruz to be a good second party. It's certainly not one that's giving me a choice that I would be willing to pick. There are Republicans I would vote for. Sane Republicans whose conservative beliefs don't include "all science must be wrong because my god-book says so" or "we've got to shut down the Federal government completely - except for those portions that I can use to make sure that everyone follows the morals my religion says are important." Unfortunately, these Republicans get kicked out of the race early (if not kicked out of the party entirely).
At this point, I'm hoping that the Republican party splits in two. One half can go on to be the more moderate GOP with conservative principals but implemented in a sane manner. The other half can include the religious fundamentalists and loud-brash folks like Trump. This half can spiral out of control until it crashes and burns. Please, Republican party, kick out the loons because I actually DO want to seriously consider your candidates but I can't do that when Trump/Cruz are the front runners.
For me, the problem with the added original trilogy CGI effects were that they seemed to be added purposefully to draw our attention to them. Luke and company arrive as Mos Eisley. As they slow up, a big creature walks right in front of them - between them and the "camera" - obscuring our view of them. There is no reason story-wise for this obstruction. It's only there because Lucas decided he wanted us to say "Hey, look at that big creature. Lucas must be a genius for coming up with such a CGI creation." Instead, we wind up saying "Down in front! Get that thing out of our way so we can see the rest of the movie!!!"
This is the case in the prequels as well. In Episode 2, R2D2 and C3PO approach the droid factory and C3PO nears the edge. He's clearly Anthony Daniels wearing the suit. R2 bumps him over the edge and he manages to grab hold of a flying droid who plucks him up and shakes him loose. Now, he's clearly a fully CGI creation. There's a discontinuity between the two that jars you out of the story. (Not like there's much story to get jarred out of but that just means that keeping the audience immersed is much more important.) The scene could have been written to keep Anthony Daniels or a physical "stunt-C3PO" in it, but Lucas was so enamored with CGI that he just figured he'd use it for entire scenes to replace what the actors couldn't do. It came off looking like the movie was part-video game and not like the characters were actually still in the scenes.
Doesn't Microsoft often "donate" money to schools to help them set up computer equipment that will be running Microsoft software? This stipulation probably happens more often than we know thanks to back room dealings.
In college, one of my computer science professors told the class that everything we were learning would be obsolete by the time we graduated, but the concepts we learned would serve us for our entire careers. Sure enough, he was right. I don't code in C anyone (the language I used in college - I was the last class before they moved to C++), but I still use for loops, if-then statements, includes, etc. The syntax changes from language to language, but those core concepts have appeared in every language I've learned since college.
My kids have done the Code.org exercises (uses a language similar to Scratch) and it helps teach them the concepts behind programming. Everything else is just filling in the details of the individual languages.
We"re also living in a global market. Let's say the US banned strong encryption tomorrow. What's to stop someone in another country from posting the source code to a strong encryption scheme? How would you prevent people from downloading and using this? You'd need to implement a "Great US Firewall" and filter all encryption-related sites. Even if you were able to do this, all you'd wind up doing is making US businesses less secure than foreign businesses. More US business hackings would leave the (valid) impression that you should trust foreign companies over US-based ones and the economy would suffer.
Encryption opponents like to pretend like they can just have Congress pass a law and all that pesky encryption will vanish with no consequences. In reality, banning encryption would create a horrible mess for businesses and consumers.
In fact, the security line itself would make a great target for a terrorist. Pick a busy airport at a very busy time of year. Get a suitcase so it looks like you're going on a flight, walk to the security line and wait until you're in the middle of it. Once you've completed your task (and presumably you are dead, but that's not a problem for most terrorists), flights will be messed up for days in that airport. Time this with a couple of people in other airports and you'd mess up flights all over the country as people panic. (And then will come the "we've got to do something" legislation from politicians stripping away more of our freedom to "protect" us from everything.)
Same here. I have a few old phones without SIM cards that I let my kids use as Wi-Fi gaming devices. The phones boot up, connect to the Google Play and Amazon app stores, and run apps just fine. One phone displays a missing SIM warning when it boots, but that's the only difference.
Everyone knows that you should always be yourself. Unless you can be Batman, then be Batman.
*backdoor account access granted, Batman*
Not to mention the website operators as well. If someone has ads on their site, the purpose is to help pay for the site operations. A program that removes the ads and replaces them with its own ads is just harmful to the website operators.