I'm curious about why one would consider this unethical?
Didn't see a good answer to this, so I'll take a crack at it.
The problematic issue I see is that there's no longer an ecosystem adapted to their presence to put them into. Perhaps you don't immediately see what problems it could possibly cause to reintroduce them to, say the Canadian plains, but people also didn't see how it could cause problems to introduce kudzu to the American South or rabbits to Australia. Both of those turned out to be an utter disaster.
Their living cousins, the Elephants are known to be an extremely destructive species. However, they've lived where they live now for millions of years, and the rest of the ecosystem has developed ways to deal with the destruction the Elephants cause. We don't really know if mammoths would have similar destructive behaviors, but if they do they are so much bigger that it would be tough to imagine the damage they could cause to an environment that is unused to them.
Introducing an animal into an environment that is unused to it is quite unethical. Its playing ecological Russian Roulette.
That's the bit that makes me disengage from the direct GamerGate vs Feminist conversation and approach the side issues that arise from it.
This right there tells me you've picked a "side". Men can be feminists too, you know. By many definitions, I'm one. However, no men have been getting attacked.
The premise seems to be that we're supposed to vocally engage and shame internet commenters who harass others.
The problem is that there's no help in doing so. Outrage is what they want, so if everyone on the board jumps in outrage, you've "fed the troll". However, standing by and letting someone abuse another human being is flat out evil. Its bad for not just the victim, but for your own soul as well.
That's why community self-moderation tools are so important. We need the ability to slap down and shut up miscreants. Modding their crap down to oblivion, often before their victim even sees it, is so superior to shouting back at them that it isn't even comparable.
You should reread the comment you posted, without your rage glasses on.
‘Games culture’ is a petri dish of people who know so little about how human social interaction and professional life works that they can concoct online ‘wars’ about
I've been a gamer for nearly 35 years now (from back in the day when we had to type the games in BASIC from books). This isn't talking about ME, its talking about the culture. Not only am I not offended, but from what I've seen, this is exactly right.
And even if I were to consider it a bit over the top, its nothing anywhere near as unacceptable as the treatment the "Gamergate" people have been meeting out in return.
To make matters worse, lets pretend I wasn't a gamer and was looking at this from the outside. We have two sides here. One side is claiming the other is being sexist and abusive, and the other side is responding with the same techniques used by crazed stalkers who get restraining orders put on them. Which side looks right to me?
Here's a crazy idea: Perhaps if we don't like how our community is being portrayed, we should attack the perpetrators, rather than the reporters?
I don't think so. People who have something worthwhile to say are usually intelligent and experienced enough to know that being abusive is counterproductive; so, if we got rid of all the abusers and the sites that thrive on them, what is left is actually the 1% or so that is worht spending time and money on - the part that was the actual, original purpose of the internet.
....which is precisely what user-moderation does. That's why user moderation is THE solution to this issue.
It may not be perfect, (for example, websites with predominantly male posters have a tendency to become the He-Man Woman Hater's club any time gender issues come up. Ahem.) but its the only solution that scales properly with the size of the forum's traffic.
This clearly means no net neutrality in the US. If Obama wanted net neutrality, he would oppose it and Republicans would then be for it
Someone mistakenly modded this as "funny" instead of insightful. In fact, this has already started to happen[not The Onion]. Here's a direct quote from Senator Ted Cruz today:
"Net Neutrality" is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government.
And here's a clarification his "spokesman" sent out:
Net neutrality puts gov't in charge of determining pricing, terms of service, and what products can be delivered. Sound like Obamacare much?
after all, they don't have an incentive to get you the best possible salary they can (even though they'l all say that), but they have the incentive to get you to accept an offer as fast as possible to bring in a constant stream of commissions.
This is the important point, and one that it took me a while to figure out. You're not paying them (I hope to God you aren't paying them), so they don't really represent you. Sure, their commission might be better if they got you an extra $10K a year, but if they have to try 3 times as many companies, that's three times as much work for them. They could have instead spent that extra time getting two more commissions.
That doesn't mean they are bad people. You just have to understand their motivations while you are dealing with them.
This is one in a series of "studies" I've seen saying this. What I don't understand is what the mechanism for causing this effect is supposed to be. It can't be absolute time, because then you'd find people with "normal" hours in certain time zones get this brain damage as well. If its lack of sunlight, then you'd see the same brain damage with people who live very far north, or in areas that don't get much sunlight like the Pacific Northwest and England (we can have fun joking, but its indisputable that lots of the world's smartest people live in these places). If it's changing your sleep patterns that causes the damage, then you'd see the same problem with frequent fliers. The simple solution there is to pick one shift and stick to it, which is decidedly not what I'm seeing suggested.
If it's not sunlight or switching, then there's simply no biological mechanism I can think of that would cause problems simply due to the values of numbers on a piece of machinery that humans invented a few hundred years ago.
I can however think of reasons why lots of people would love to grasp any possible pretense to argue against shift work. One should show much extra scrutiny for any heavily promoted "study" that tells people exactly what they want to hear.
Only if you are on 2nd shift. Third shift I've found works really well. You go home in the morning and get your 8ish of sleep in, and then you have the whole evening off to do typical "after work" stuff with friends and family, just like everyone else. The only real drawback is that this puts work at the end of your waking hours, instead of the beginning, so you aren't quite as fresh there.
So generally if I find shift work is required, I refuse 2nd and volunteer for 3rd.
..I could have sworn I heard Whole Lotta Love blasting out of the magnolia tree across the street.
Probably not. Blues uses mostly sharps and flats (eg: not the notes this article is talking about).
Most likely it was just John Cusack with a boom-box on the lawn trying to get his girl back. Stereotypical stalker. If it happens again, call the cops on him.
Its also quite possible that there would have been no shuttle at all without those jobs in Utah. Otherwise, why should the voters of Utah care about the shuttle? Its a pretty conservative state, and most of them would probably much rather the money was either saved or used for defense.
Pork barrel politics is how things (used to) get done.
As to the filibuster, keep in mind that the Dems changed the rules so you don't need that supermajority anymore.
Only for lower court (not Supreme Court) judicial nominees. And only because the amount of vacancies got to be alarming. The 2/3 majority to pass anything rule that we've all come to love over the past 10 years of Republican minority in the Senate is still in place, so never fear.
The 2013 shutdown came about because the House Republicans refused to do their job by producing a budget, sending negotiators to the joint House-Senate conference, and voting for the COMPROMISED budget.
It wasn't "refused" so much as it was couldn't. The tea party folks ran on not compromising with Democrats (particularly Obama), and once elected really were not capable of turning around and compromising. It turns out there are enough of those pledged no-compromisers in the Republican caucus that they can't get consensus among themselves for any budget whatsoever.
What they ended up passing was a gimmick law that gave automatic cuts if they couldn't pass a real budget later. The cuts were designed to be brain-dead stupid and painful to everyone, so they'd have an excuse to negotiate. However, it turned out that wasn't enough incentive for the no-compromisers, so we got the cuts.
Wow. If it was up to me, I'd bitch slap both parties. The problem isn't Democrats or Republicans, the problem is Democrats AND Republicans. Both parties are very incompetent.
It looks like the Republican plan to keep anything whatsoever from getting done, and then blame the other party for not being able to get anything done, is working spectacularly then. Bully for them.
Of course its a crappy way to run a country, but apparently that's not the goal these days.
Last week saw the Orbital Sciences Antares explosion on Tuesday, this fatal Virgin Galactic crash on Friday, and a plane crash in Wichita on Thursday that killed 4 (The pilot, and 3 in the building it crashed into).
Hopefully we have some good weeks ahead to balance this.
What about healthy 20-somethings whose affordable plans (called "junk plans" by liberals, but perfectly adequate coverage
You mean "liberals" like Consumer Reports?The junk plans, by definition were not perfectly adequate coverage. These were plans that had the victims giving money to insurance companies for basically no coverage at all. eg: hospitalization coverage with an annual limit of $2K a year. With typical visits costing 10's of thousands of dollars, that barely even qualifies as a coupon. The mini-meds, or "junk plans" were legitimate insurance in almost exactly the same that payday loans are legitimate loans. Essentially they were just scams aimed a poor people.
There's no way Comcast (or any cable company) will ever agree to that. The fact is that cable companies make most of their money off of large apartment buildings. That's where they get access to oodles of customers without having to lay hardly any cable at all. Rich neighborhoods, oddly enough, with their spread out property, tend to cost cable companies more money to service than they pay in.
There were alligators sunning themselves on nearly every road we went down.
All of Central Florida is reclaimed swampland. Any body of water of any size (even in Orlando proper) has gators in it. That's why every swimming pool has a big metal cage around it. During mating season, they often invade the parking lots and get aggressive. Residents are advised to check under their cars from a distance before approaching.
I remember when I lived in Orlando reading a story in the local paper about how they have to do gator clearance before every shuttle launch. Basically they had guys with pickups whose job it was to round up all the gators in the area around the viewing area for the shuttle launches and release them several miles away. Some of these were more than 10 feet long.
Do you know WHY they use 40+ year old Russian engines? Because they are better than anything West has to offer... Russians had to blow up something like 30 rockets to get it right.
There's no such thing as "misspelling" an Arabic-transcribed word. They don't use the Latin-1 character set, and what they do use doesn't have a one-to-one mapping to it. Any supposed spelling using Latin-1 characters is just an approximation to how it is pronounced in Arabic. That's why you'd see all kinds of creative spellings for the name of the former despot of Libya back when he was alive too. (Gaddafi? Khadafi? Something with a Q perhaps?). So a person can do a good or bad job of rendering an Arabic word in Latin-1 characters, but there's generally no one "right" way to do it.
If you attack an industrial system at a utility and make a bunch of people sick or die, even if it was "unintentional" you should get life
...and you almost certainly would, with no changes required to current law. Well...I don't know about the UK, but in the USA if you cause the death of another human being, that's homicide. There's a spectrum from Involuntary Manslaughter up to Premeditated Murder. Using a poison or a machine to do it doesn't change anything.
So you can get rid of the "injuring people" argument. This law would only change what happens when nobody is physically harmed.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious about why one would consider this unethical?
Didn't see a good answer to this, so I'll take a crack at it.
The problematic issue I see is that there's no longer an ecosystem adapted to their presence to put them into. Perhaps you don't immediately see what problems it could possibly cause to reintroduce them to, say the Canadian plains, but people also didn't see how it could cause problems to introduce kudzu to the American South or rabbits to Australia. Both of those turned out to be an utter disaster.
Their living cousins, the Elephants are known to be an extremely destructive species. However, they've lived where they live now for millions of years, and the rest of the ecosystem has developed ways to deal with the destruction the Elephants cause. We don't really know if mammoths would have similar destructive behaviors, but if they do they are so much bigger that it would be tough to imagine the damage they could cause to an environment that is unused to them.
Introducing an animal into an environment that is unused to it is quite unethical. Its playing ecological Russian Roulette.
That's the bit that makes me disengage from the direct GamerGate vs Feminist conversation and approach the side issues that arise from it.
This right there tells me you've picked a "side". Men can be feminists too, you know. By many definitions, I'm one. However, no men have been getting attacked.
This is GamerGate vs. women, pure and simple.
Actually agree with the AC here. However, a flat forum doesn't do ostracism well. That's why they suck. Public forums need community moderation.
The premise seems to be that we're supposed to vocally engage and shame internet commenters who harass others.
The problem is that there's no help in doing so. Outrage is what they want, so if everyone on the board jumps in outrage, you've "fed the troll". However, standing by and letting someone abuse another human being is flat out evil. Its bad for not just the victim, but for your own soul as well.
That's why community self-moderation tools are so important. We need the ability to slap down and shut up miscreants. Modding their crap down to oblivion, often before their victim even sees it, is so superior to shouting back at them that it isn't even comparable.
Are you sure it's not only considered as such by a tiny but vocal and offensive minority?
It isn't the few deranged folks that truly make a situation evil. Its the great mass of ordinary people who quietly stand by and let it happen.
With that in mind, answer your own question.
I think I strained a muscle rolling my eyes at this.
"Yeah, that's right. She fell down the stairs, your honor." "My kids are just really clumsy, that's why they are in the hospital all the time."
That shit may work in court, but I'm not a court, and I can see quite clearly what's been going on here.
You should reread the comment you posted, without your rage glasses on.
‘Games culture’ is a petri dish of people who know so little about how human social interaction and professional life works that they can concoct online ‘wars’ about
I've been a gamer for nearly 35 years now (from back in the day when we had to type the games in BASIC from books). This isn't talking about ME, its talking about the culture. Not only am I not offended, but from what I've seen, this is exactly right.
And even if I were to consider it a bit over the top, its nothing anywhere near as unacceptable as the treatment the "Gamergate" people have been meeting out in return.
To make matters worse, lets pretend I wasn't a gamer and was looking at this from the outside. We have two sides here. One side is claiming the other is being sexist and abusive, and the other side is responding with the same techniques used by crazed stalkers who get restraining orders put on them. Which side looks right to me?
Here's a crazy idea: Perhaps if we don't like how our community is being portrayed, we should attack the perpetrators, rather than the reporters?
I don't think so. People who have something worthwhile to say are usually intelligent and experienced enough to know that being abusive is counterproductive; so, if we got rid of all the abusers and the sites that thrive on them, what is left is actually the 1% or so that is worht spending time and money on - the part that was the actual, original purpose of the internet.
....which is precisely what user-moderation does. That's why user moderation is THE solution to this issue.
It may not be perfect, (for example, websites with predominantly male posters have a tendency to become the He-Man Woman Hater's club any time gender issues come up. Ahem.) but its the only solution that scales properly with the size of the forum's traffic.
This clearly means no net neutrality in the US. If Obama wanted net neutrality, he would oppose it and Republicans would then be for it
Someone mistakenly modded this as "funny" instead of insightful. In fact, this has already started to happen[not The Onion]. Here's a direct quote from Senator Ted Cruz today:
"Net Neutrality" is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government.
And here's a clarification his "spokesman" sent out:
Net neutrality puts gov't in charge of determining pricing, terms of service, and what products can be delivered. Sound like Obamacare much?
after all, they don't have an incentive to get you the best possible salary they can (even though they'l all say that), but they have the incentive to get you to accept an offer as fast as possible to bring in a constant stream of commissions.
This is the important point, and one that it took me a while to figure out. You're not paying them (I hope to God you aren't paying them), so they don't really represent you. Sure, their commission might be better if they got you an extra $10K a year, but if they have to try 3 times as many companies, that's three times as much work for them. They could have instead spent that extra time getting two more commissions.
That doesn't mean they are bad people. You just have to understand their motivations while you are dealing with them.
This is one in a series of "studies" I've seen saying this. What I don't understand is what the mechanism for causing this effect is supposed to be. It can't be absolute time, because then you'd find people with "normal" hours in certain time zones get this brain damage as well. If its lack of sunlight, then you'd see the same brain damage with people who live very far north, or in areas that don't get much sunlight like the Pacific Northwest and England (we can have fun joking, but its indisputable that lots of the world's smartest people live in these places). If it's changing your sleep patterns that causes the damage, then you'd see the same problem with frequent fliers. The simple solution there is to pick one shift and stick to it, which is decidedly not what I'm seeing suggested.
If it's not sunlight or switching, then there's simply no biological mechanism I can think of that would cause problems simply due to the values of numbers on a piece of machinery that humans invented a few hundred years ago.
I can however think of reasons why lots of people would love to grasp any possible pretense to argue against shift work. One should show much extra scrutiny for any heavily promoted "study" that tells people exactly what they want to hear.
Shift work wrecks your social life.
Only if you are on 2nd shift. Third shift I've found works really well. You go home in the morning and get your 8ish of sleep in, and then you have the whole evening off to do typical "after work" stuff with friends and family, just like everyone else. The only real drawback is that this puts work at the end of your waking hours, instead of the beginning, so you aren't quite as fresh there.
So generally if I find shift work is required, I refuse 2nd and volunteer for 3rd.
..I could have sworn I heard Whole Lotta Love blasting out of the magnolia tree across the street.
Probably not. Blues uses mostly sharps and flats (eg: not the notes this article is talking about).
Most likely it was just John Cusack with a boom-box on the lawn trying to get his girl back. Stereotypical stalker. If it happens again, call the cops on him.
Its also quite possible that there would have been no shuttle at all without those jobs in Utah. Otherwise, why should the voters of Utah care about the shuttle? Its a pretty conservative state, and most of them would probably much rather the money was either saved or used for defense.
Pork barrel politics is how things (used to) get done.
As to the filibuster, keep in mind that the Dems changed the rules so you don't need that supermajority anymore.
Only for lower court (not Supreme Court) judicial nominees. And only because the amount of vacancies got to be alarming. The 2/3 majority to pass anything rule that we've all come to love over the past 10 years of Republican minority in the Senate is still in place, so never fear.
The 2013 shutdown came about because the House Republicans refused to do their job by producing a budget, sending negotiators to the joint House-Senate conference, and voting for the COMPROMISED budget.
It wasn't "refused" so much as it was couldn't. The tea party folks ran on not compromising with Democrats (particularly Obama), and once elected really were not capable of turning around and compromising. It turns out there are enough of those pledged no-compromisers in the Republican caucus that they can't get consensus among themselves for any budget whatsoever.
What they ended up passing was a gimmick law that gave automatic cuts if they couldn't pass a real budget later. The cuts were designed to be brain-dead stupid and painful to everyone, so they'd have an excuse to negotiate. However, it turned out that wasn't enough incentive for the no-compromisers, so we got the cuts.
Wow. If it was up to me, I'd bitch slap both parties. The problem isn't Democrats or Republicans, the problem is Democrats AND Republicans. Both parties are very incompetent.
It looks like the Republican plan to keep anything whatsoever from getting done, and then blame the other party for not being able to get anything done, is working spectacularly then. Bully for them.
Of course its a crappy way to run a country, but apparently that's not the goal these days.
If parts survived on impact, surely both pilots could have parachuted to safety?
One pilot did just that, although he was still injured. The other one (who they are now blaming for the accident it looks like), didn't make it.
Slashdot, where I RTFA, so you don't have to!
Last week saw the Orbital Sciences Antares explosion on Tuesday, this fatal Virgin Galactic crash on Friday, and a plane crash in Wichita on Thursday that killed 4 (The pilot, and 3 in the building it crashed into).
Hopefully we have some good weeks ahead to balance this.
What about healthy 20-somethings whose affordable plans (called "junk plans" by liberals, but perfectly adequate coverage
You mean "liberals" like Consumer Reports?The junk plans, by definition were not perfectly adequate coverage. These were plans that had the victims giving money to insurance companies for basically no coverage at all. eg: hospitalization coverage with an annual limit of $2K a year. With typical visits costing 10's of thousands of dollars, that barely even qualifies as a coupon. The mini-meds, or "junk plans" were legitimate insurance in almost exactly the same that payday loans are legitimate loans. Essentially they were just scams aimed a poor people.
There's no way Comcast (or any cable company) will ever agree to that. The fact is that cable companies make most of their money off of large apartment buildings. That's where they get access to oodles of customers without having to lay hardly any cable at all. Rich neighborhoods, oddly enough, with their spread out property, tend to cost cable companies more money to service than they pay in.
There were alligators sunning themselves on nearly every road we went down.
All of Central Florida is reclaimed swampland. Any body of water of any size (even in Orlando proper) has gators in it. That's why every swimming pool has a big metal cage around it. During mating season, they often invade the parking lots and get aggressive. Residents are advised to check under their cars from a distance before approaching.
I remember when I lived in Orlando reading a story in the local paper about how they have to do gator clearance before every shuttle launch. Basically they had guys with pickups whose job it was to round up all the gators in the area around the viewing area for the shuttle launches and release them several miles away. Some of these were more than 10 feet long.
Do you know WHY they use 40+ year old Russian engines? Because they are better than anything West has to offer... Russians had to blow up something like 30 rockets to get it right.
Make that 31.
There's no such thing as "misspelling" an Arabic-transcribed word. They don't use the Latin-1 character set, and what they do use doesn't have a one-to-one mapping to it. Any supposed spelling using Latin-1 characters is just an approximation to how it is pronounced in Arabic. That's why you'd see all kinds of creative spellings for the name of the former despot of Libya back when he was alive too. (Gaddafi? Khadafi? Something with a Q perhaps?). So a person can do a good or bad job of rendering an Arabic word in Latin-1 characters, but there's generally no one "right" way to do it.
If you attack an industrial system at a utility and make a bunch of people sick or die, even if it was "unintentional" you should get life
...and you almost certainly would, with no changes required to current law. Well...I don't know about the UK, but in the USA if you cause the death of another human being, that's homicide. There's a spectrum from Involuntary Manslaughter up to Premeditated Murder. Using a poison or a machine to do it doesn't change anything.
So you can get rid of the "injuring people" argument. This law would only change what happens when nobody is physically harmed.