I believe the correct way the call starts is "Excuse me, but are you the person who just called us to say you're heavily armed and going to kill everyone in your home?"
Most of the authors you cite wrote stories that aren't novels as we know them today: the stories were originally episodic serials written for publication in magazines. "Barely existed" certainly seems a fair description, most science fiction stories were not written as novels.
What pisses me off is that Slashdot doesn't show cartoons of fustakrakich slowly bleeding out after being strung up on a meathook. (Why the fetish of "Well, if it's offensive we MUST do it otherwise it's not free speech!"? It's stupid.)
BTW what does this topic have to do with censorship? The question is one of judgment, not law. It is entirely legal to do what terrorists want you to do: we haven't banned refusal to ride on an airplane for fear of a bomb, and it's entirely legal to post an ISIL video aimed at terrorizing ISIL's enemies.
The concentration camps weren't designed to terrorize an enemy, and the allies waited until the war was over. Two major differences between that case and this.
In this case Fox is literally doing exactly what an extremist terrorist-etc group wants them to do.
That and the sales staff really seemed to go downhill.
True story: needed an S-Video cable a few years ago, so I popped in, and asked what they had. They had one for, IIRC, $25. I... double taked, and asked if they had a lower cost cable.
I was told they don't stock lower cost S-Video cables because "those cheap ones" kept bursting into flames.
I pressed the issue.
Sales person kept with story, despite my obvious disbelief.
(Of course, someone will now tell me that the TFA reports that the major hit for Radio Shack that ultimately caused its bankruptcy was that giant class action suit about the $10 S-Video cables that kept catching fire...)
You're completely ignoring the fact Uber could act within the law. If it did, it would lose a competitive advantage it has in avoiding a regulatory environment designed to level the playing field between riders and drivers.
So yes, in this case, being banned for disobeying the law is not circular logic.
The 1920s in particular wasn't just about thinness but about lacking curves altogether. Even breasts, which is arguably the only "men look at them and think 'Great potential mother'" attribute mentioned, were deprecated and supposed to be flattened and hidden. The hip:waist ratio really was close on 1:1 during that period.
Except during the 1920s, when the ratio was closer to 1, and during Rueben's time when, well... and actually are you sure about that "the world over" thing? Or even in just America? I mean, look at different cultures within the US.
Definitions of physical beauty are constantly changing, and seem to be inherently based upon social, not biological, processes.
I'm sure that would work, why Disqus has that, and nobody's ever seen Disqus threads full of blatant trolling!;-)
Honestly, I think it's harder than most of Twitter's critics assume. One of the negatives about Gamergate is that they understand that virtually every moderation scheme can be gamed. GGAutoblocker, Randi Harper's well intentioned blocker for Twitter, causes fury and anger at Harper in part because it's one of the few times anyone's been able to find something effective that's hard to game, and unfortunately it demonstrates the problems more than anything else: it helps against GG. It could potentially help against the CoS. It would not, however, have ever helped Zelda Williams, and it would have been harder to put together pre-Gamergate against the same bunch of trolls.
But otherwise, GG has recognized that to effectively troll, you need a large group that can be coordinated, and you need them to engage in a mix of strategies, not just generic "You suck" comments. The successful (for GG) Arbcom verdict has been characterized as "Weaponized civility" - they recognized Wikipedia would put civility above all other policies, including WP:BLP (the policy that prevents Wikipedia from being sued into oblivion for libel), and coordinated a strategy designed to goad editors trying to enforce WP:BLP into being "uncivil."
It's smart. They're smart. Twitter is going to have to be very careful. Any simplistic solutions that can be gamed will be gamed. With the wrong solutions, it's likely that those trying to have adult debates on social issues are likely to get canned.
...which currently is a PITA, because you have to use a collection of third party hacks, and you need to know they exist. In reality, people using, say, the ggautoblocker use it after they became targets for sustained dogpiling based harassment, by which time it's a little late.
As others have pointed out it's HTML5. I guess some AdBlock/Noscript/etc type things will block it, but the usual advice to disable Flash doesn't apply.
I have, in the past, suggested Firefox et al should allow users to disable videos or make them click-to-play, only to be slapped down on the grounds that such, optional, configurable behavior would "break" HTML5 video and not be standards compliant. I'm not sure how that can be the case, but blocking pop-ups isn't, but there you go...
(I'm actually supportive of SystemD, joking aside, the concept makes a lot of sense and I've seen nothing in the implementation that suggests it's heading in the wrong direction. If Hubbard's able to get a similar project off the ground, then maybe it'll give the haters an alternative to jump to that doesn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.)
The CEO of Sears, Edward Lampert, is an Ayn Rand fan and the policies that lead to this mess are that he believed the various components of Sears should be competing with one another, rather than cooperating. If you feel this is a bad reading of Rand, take it up with him, not me. (I have never heard any good spoken of the gal's work on any literary, intellectual, or entertainment basis, so have avoided it personally and can't comment on it.)
I'm now "designing" something in my head that does all that. You load it with a coffee brick from time to time (it'll send an email when you're low), and obviously have to hook it up to the water, but otherwise it does the rest. Log in five minutes before you want coffee, enter how many mugs you'll want, and that's it.
Plus the ability to schedule them, obviously. And presumably some modern AI logic along the lines of "I see the in-laws are over, that means you'll want me to start making four cups of coffee right after you stop cooking, and also make four additional cups first thing in the morning."
Of course, if I think about this any more I'll need to consult this: http://xkcd.com/1205/
The best thing about FreeBSD are the FreeBSD Ports and how much commitment there is to make every possible application work on the system
That's awesome. Has systemd been ported yet? That's the only absolute must-have I have that's keeping me in GNU/Linux, if systemd is available on FreeBSD I'll switch over tonight.
This morning I woke up and knew that getting coffee would be a chore involving going over to the kitchen, setting everything up, waiting a few minutes, etc. I would like a coffee maker that truly is controllable from the web, right down to adding coffee grounds and adding water.
OTOH, web enabled coffee makers thus far appear to solely be about telling you if there's any left. Which I agree, is not really a killer app.
FWIW, thousands are out of work because of his religious fanaticism. Three or four years ago the various factions within Sears, unable to talk to or work with or collaborate with one another because of the Randian policies, were unable to negotiate extending opening times on Christmas Eve. Sears lost huge amounts of money, and had to shed a substantial number of stores - including our local former-K-Mart.
All because this idiot thinks children's clothing should compete with kitchen appliances. He's really that stupid.
MRAs have their "Judean People's Front" vs "People's Front of Judea" crap just like everyone else. There's a small, I'd say respectable, rump that actually doesn't consider itself an enemy of Feminism. There's also other groups that do, indeed, get to the extremes of thinking men are the oppressed minority. Redpillers most certainly do fit that category.
It's actually worse in the UK. It's kinda assumed that if you're male and want to do anything involved with children, you're suspect. You might be able to get the job, technically, but you probably will never take it that far.
True story: I have a friend who's an EMT. He feels awkward around children, knows there are differences in how you're supposed to handle certain emergencies involving them, and went to his superior asking for training.
And was told, flat out, no, if it ever happens that his ambulance has to administer emergency treatment on a child, they'll wait until a woman is available (hopefully one's on the crew!) to do it.
(Cue MRAs claiming this just shows its men who are the truly oppressed...)
It's a reference to a MRA board on... I think it's Reddit, but might be one of the *chans, called "The Red Pill". Supposedly a Matrix reference, from people who seriously think the world is actually run by women for women, and men don't actually have any say in anything, and that perceptions that it's not and that men (for the most part) run the world are actually a clever illusion from our gyno-overlords...
I believe the GP is essentially talking about the opposite situation.
That is: regardless of how happy you are with the Outlook client (I mostly like it FWIW), the underlying feature set, which is implemented server side, is very, very, good, and cannot be easily replicated by open standards - though they are getting better. (At the very minimum, filters still have to be implemented client side. Leaving that aside though, Exchange server is a one-stop-shop for all groupwary things, and there's a stunning amount of ignorance in the FOSS developer community when it comes to figuring out why that's important.)
Exchange's protocols are documented and Microsoft licenses them (including a one-off license to Google which is why there's an Exchange client in Mail.apk); the GP is suggesting though that this is probably not to Microsoft's long term benefit. The GP is suggesting Microsoft is building high quality supported clients so it can, ultimately, break the Exchange protocols in the longer term so that once the FOSS people wise up and build a good Exchange clone, they can't advertise, as a feature, that the server works with the clients everyone uses already.
I... don't necessarily agree, FWIW. Partly I disagree because the documented protocols are not the protocols the official clients use anyway, so a working Exchange clone would be using undocumented protocols to support the official Outlook clients anyway, but mostly I disagree because Microsoft shouldn't care much - it's licensing the protocol for clients, there's no reason why it couldn't use the same licensing to restrict or extract money from third party servers too.
In the mean time, may I repeat my call to the FOSS community to learn a little more about the subject. In particular, can you please learn about LDAP. Clue: if you don't understand why LDAP is relevant here, and think I'm talking about address books or something similar, you definitely haven't read enough about it.
As a liberal/left winger, I have to say I'm disappointed that so many on "our side" has made GMO our Global Warming. It's one of the most awesome technologies ever developed, and it has so much potential to improve the world.
Female mosquitoes aren't going to breed more because of this. Part of what makes mosquitoes so unpleasant is that their breeding mechanism is awkward and requires, for example, blood - our blood - to work. Finding a partner to breed with is the last of their worries.
As a result, what this boils down to is:
Status quo: virtually all females will breed with a regular mosquito, lifestyle unchanged.
Changed to: sizable numbers of females will breed with a GMO mosquito instead of a regular mosquito.
If plan works, enough females will go with the GMO, and breed shorter lifespan mosquitoes of their own, resulting in a (probably temporary, alas) reduction in the mosquito population. If the plan fails, either because the altered genes fail to do their job, or because females avoid the GMO mosquitoes somehow, NOTHING IS DIFFERENT.
What's the issue here? What can actually go wrong that's worse than the status quo? What scenario are you seeing that could happen as a result of this particular project? It's not like this is something out of a Michael Crichton novel. "We think we can reduce the mosquito population by releasing this RADIOACTIVE MOSQUITOS into the population! Their UNTESTED RANDOM GENETIC DIFFERENCES will render the entire population dead within the week! Also let's breed the mosquitos with FROGS just beforehand! Nothing could possibly go wrong!"
We know the generic differences. We know what we're releasing are otherwise regular mosquitos. This is not that terrible novel.
As someone who has good medical reasons to fear mosquito bites more than most, I sincerely hope this works. And I applaud them for trying.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe the correct way the call starts is "Excuse me, but are you the person who just called us to say you're heavily armed and going to kill everyone in your home?"
Most of the authors you cite wrote stories that aren't novels as we know them today: the stories were originally episodic serials written for publication in magazines. "Barely existed" certainly seems a fair description, most science fiction stories were not written as novels.
What pisses me off is that Slashdot doesn't show cartoons of fustakrakich slowly bleeding out after being strung up on a meathook. (Why the fetish of "Well, if it's offensive we MUST do it otherwise it's not free speech!"? It's stupid.)
BTW what does this topic have to do with censorship? The question is one of judgment, not law. It is entirely legal to do what terrorists want you to do: we haven't banned refusal to ride on an airplane for fear of a bomb, and it's entirely legal to post an ISIL video aimed at terrorizing ISIL's enemies.
It's just poor judgment to do either.
The concentration camps weren't designed to terrorize an enemy, and the allies waited until the war was over. Two major differences between that case and this.
In this case Fox is literally doing exactly what an extremist terrorist-etc group wants them to do.
That and the sales staff really seemed to go downhill.
True story: needed an S-Video cable a few years ago, so I popped in, and asked what they had. They had one for, IIRC, $25. I... double taked, and asked if they had a lower cost cable.
I was told they don't stock lower cost S-Video cables because "those cheap ones" kept bursting into flames.
I pressed the issue.
Sales person kept with story, despite my obvious disbelief.
(Of course, someone will now tell me that the TFA reports that the major hit for Radio Shack that ultimately caused its bankruptcy was that giant class action suit about the $10 S-Video cables that kept catching fire...)
You're completely ignoring the fact Uber could act within the law. If it did, it would lose a competitive advantage it has in avoiding a regulatory environment designed to level the playing field between riders and drivers.
So yes, in this case, being banned for disobeying the law is not circular logic.
The 1920s in particular wasn't just about thinness but about lacking curves altogether. Even breasts, which is arguably the only "men look at them and think 'Great potential mother'" attribute mentioned, were deprecated and supposed to be flattened and hidden. The hip:waist ratio really was close on 1:1 during that period.
Except during the 1920s, when the ratio was closer to 1, and during Rueben's time when, well... and actually are you sure about that "the world over" thing? Or even in just America? I mean, look at different cultures within the US.
Definitions of physical beauty are constantly changing, and seem to be inherently based upon social, not biological, processes.
I'm sure that would work, why Disqus has that, and nobody's ever seen Disqus threads full of blatant trolling! ;-)
Honestly, I think it's harder than most of Twitter's critics assume. One of the negatives about Gamergate is that they understand that virtually every moderation scheme can be gamed. GGAutoblocker, Randi Harper's well intentioned blocker for Twitter, causes fury and anger at Harper in part because it's one of the few times anyone's been able to find something effective that's hard to game, and unfortunately it demonstrates the problems more than anything else: it helps against GG. It could potentially help against the CoS. It would not, however, have ever helped Zelda Williams, and it would have been harder to put together pre-Gamergate against the same bunch of trolls.
But otherwise, GG has recognized that to effectively troll, you need a large group that can be coordinated, and you need them to engage in a mix of strategies, not just generic "You suck" comments. The successful (for GG) Arbcom verdict has been characterized as "Weaponized civility" - they recognized Wikipedia would put civility above all other policies, including WP:BLP (the policy that prevents Wikipedia from being sued into oblivion for libel), and coordinated a strategy designed to goad editors trying to enforce WP:BLP into being "uncivil."
It's smart. They're smart. Twitter is going to have to be very careful. Any simplistic solutions that can be gamed will be gamed. With the wrong solutions, it's likely that those trying to have adult debates on social issues are likely to get canned.
As others have pointed out it's HTML5. I guess some AdBlock/Noscript/etc type things will block it, but the usual advice to disable Flash doesn't apply.
I have, in the past, suggested Firefox et al should allow users to disable videos or make them click-to-play, only to be slapped down on the grounds that such, optional, configurable behavior would "break" HTML5 video and not be standards compliant. I'm not sure how that can be the case, but blocking pop-ups isn't, but there you go...
Awesome!
(I'm actually supportive of SystemD, joking aside, the concept makes a lot of sense and I've seen nothing in the implementation that suggests it's heading in the wrong direction. If Hubbard's able to get a similar project off the ground, then maybe it'll give the haters an alternative to jump to that doesn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.)
The CEO of Sears, Edward Lampert, is an Ayn Rand fan and the policies that lead to this mess are that he believed the various components of Sears should be competing with one another, rather than cooperating. If you feel this is a bad reading of Rand, take it up with him, not me. (I have never heard any good spoken of the gal's work on any literary, intellectual, or entertainment basis, so have avoided it personally and can't comment on it.)
I'm now "designing" something in my head that does all that. You load it with a coffee brick from time to time (it'll send an email when you're low), and obviously have to hook it up to the water, but otherwise it does the rest. Log in five minutes before you want coffee, enter how many mugs you'll want, and that's it.
Plus the ability to schedule them, obviously. And presumably some modern AI logic along the lines of "I see the in-laws are over, that means you'll want me to start making four cups of coffee right after you stop cooking, and also make four additional cups first thing in the morning."
Of course, if I think about this any more I'll need to consult this: http://xkcd.com/1205/
Yeah, mine has a timer, but that does mean setting it up the night before...
In other news, squiggleslash wins award for "Most lazy person".
That's awesome. Has systemd been ported yet? That's the only absolute must-have I have that's keeping me in GNU/Linux, if systemd is available on FreeBSD I'll switch over tonight.
This morning I woke up and knew that getting coffee would be a chore involving going over to the kitchen, setting everything up, waiting a few minutes, etc. I would like a coffee maker that truly is controllable from the web, right down to adding coffee grounds and adding water.
OTOH, web enabled coffee makers thus far appear to solely be about telling you if there's any left. Which I agree, is not really a killer app.
FWIW, thousands are out of work because of his religious fanaticism. Three or four years ago the various factions within Sears, unable to talk to or work with or collaborate with one another because of the Randian policies, were unable to negotiate extending opening times on Christmas Eve. Sears lost huge amounts of money, and had to shed a substantial number of stores - including our local former-K-Mart.
All because this idiot thinks children's clothing should compete with kitchen appliances. He's really that stupid.
Actually it's about ethics in True Scotsmanism ;-)
MRAs have their "Judean People's Front" vs "People's Front of Judea" crap just like everyone else. There's a small, I'd say respectable, rump that actually doesn't consider itself an enemy of Feminism. There's also other groups that do, indeed, get to the extremes of thinking men are the oppressed minority. Redpillers most certainly do fit that category.
It's actually worse in the UK. It's kinda assumed that if you're male and want to do anything involved with children, you're suspect. You might be able to get the job, technically, but you probably will never take it that far.
True story: I have a friend who's an EMT. He feels awkward around children, knows there are differences in how you're supposed to handle certain emergencies involving them, and went to his superior asking for training.
And was told, flat out, no, if it ever happens that his ambulance has to administer emergency treatment on a child, they'll wait until a woman is available (hopefully one's on the crew!) to do it.
(Cue MRAs claiming this just shows its men who are the truly oppressed...)
It's a reference to a MRA board on... I think it's Reddit, but might be one of the *chans, called "The Red Pill". Supposedly a Matrix reference, from people who seriously think the world is actually run by women for women, and men don't actually have any say in anything, and that perceptions that it's not and that men (for the most part) run the world are actually a clever illusion from our gyno-overlords...
I believe the GP is essentially talking about the opposite situation.
That is: regardless of how happy you are with the Outlook client (I mostly like it FWIW), the underlying feature set, which is implemented server side, is very, very, good, and cannot be easily replicated by open standards - though they are getting better. (At the very minimum, filters still have to be implemented client side. Leaving that aside though, Exchange server is a one-stop-shop for all groupwary things, and there's a stunning amount of ignorance in the FOSS developer community when it comes to figuring out why that's important.)
Exchange's protocols are documented and Microsoft licenses them (including a one-off license to Google which is why there's an Exchange client in Mail.apk); the GP is suggesting though that this is probably not to Microsoft's long term benefit. The GP is suggesting Microsoft is building high quality supported clients so it can, ultimately, break the Exchange protocols in the longer term so that once the FOSS people wise up and build a good Exchange clone, they can't advertise, as a feature, that the server works with the clients everyone uses already.
I... don't necessarily agree, FWIW. Partly I disagree because the documented protocols are not the protocols the official clients use anyway, so a working Exchange clone would be using undocumented protocols to support the official Outlook clients anyway, but mostly I disagree because Microsoft shouldn't care much - it's licensing the protocol for clients, there's no reason why it couldn't use the same licensing to restrict or extract money from third party servers too.
In the mean time, may I repeat my call to the FOSS community to learn a little more about the subject. In particular, can you please learn about LDAP. Clue: if you don't understand why LDAP is relevant here, and think I'm talking about address books or something similar, you definitely haven't read enough about it.
I'm thinking that some organizations don't even need to scour social media for this.
Amazon, for example, already has my name and three transactions they can use.
Or am I missing something?
As a liberal/left winger, I have to say I'm disappointed that so many on "our side" has made GMO our Global Warming. It's one of the most awesome technologies ever developed, and it has so much potential to improve the world.
Then nothing is different.
Female mosquitoes aren't going to breed more because of this. Part of what makes mosquitoes so unpleasant is that their breeding mechanism is awkward and requires, for example, blood - our blood - to work. Finding a partner to breed with is the last of their worries.
As a result, what this boils down to is:
Status quo: virtually all females will breed with a regular mosquito, lifestyle unchanged.
Changed to: sizable numbers of females will breed with a GMO mosquito instead of a regular mosquito.
If plan works, enough females will go with the GMO, and breed shorter lifespan mosquitoes of their own, resulting in a (probably temporary, alas) reduction in the mosquito population. If the plan fails, either because the altered genes fail to do their job, or because females avoid the GMO mosquitoes somehow, NOTHING IS DIFFERENT.
What's the issue here? What can actually go wrong that's worse than the status quo? What scenario are you seeing that could happen as a result of this particular project? It's not like this is something out of a Michael Crichton novel. "We think we can reduce the mosquito population by releasing this RADIOACTIVE MOSQUITOS into the population! Their UNTESTED RANDOM GENETIC DIFFERENCES will render the entire population dead within the week! Also let's breed the mosquitos with FROGS just beforehand! Nothing could possibly go wrong!"
We know the generic differences. We know what we're releasing are otherwise regular mosquitos. This is not that terrible novel.
As someone who has good medical reasons to fear mosquito bites more than most, I sincerely hope this works. And I applaud them for trying.