Neither the purpose nor the end result are about "collecting statistics." And affirmative action programs were in place LOOOONG before Clinton. Like with Kennedy in 1961 with executive order 10925 that government contractors "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin" , and Johnson in 1965 with executive order 11246.
Actually, it does make them less important if you're talking about statistical behaviors to define "normal." 1:1000 (or the newer stat of 1:500) is a lot more normal than 1:1,000,000,000.
Wen getting struck by lightning is not as rare, it's simply not normal.
there are probably a sizable number of people that are into bestiality as well, but don't say anything about it. If you do a google search for them, you'll find forums and such dedicated to it, but try asking any of them if they're out to anybody or open about it. Probably 99.99% of them will answer in the negative....
...
Gays and transexuals denounce them however just how they themselves have been denounced in the past.
It's not just the LGBTt who denounce bestiality. Where's the informed consent of the animal? Your comparison is ludicrous.
On another note, transsexualism is so main-stream that when I tell someone, it's like "Oh, okay." That includes doctors, nurses, and neighbors. And they all refer to me as female. The few who don't are family (you can pick your friends, but you can't pick your family) and some idiot that tried to get me to stop pointing out the illegality of a development project at a public meeting - and he had to take out paid display ads in the main news sections of the two largest newspapers apologizing.
So, given that it is now theoretically possible for a male-to-female transsexual to bear offspring via a transplanted ovum embedded in the abdomen and give birth by c-section, why can't you just admit that your definition is too limited?
We've known for a long time that sex starts and ends in the brain. Why not admit that gender is the same thing?
In this thread you post an answer about profit sharing schemes. Why not be up-front and say that this is a for-profit business that is going to rely on free labor (the pitfalls of which were pointed out here further down the page.
Our mission isn't to add to the cacophany of the news, but to organize it.
Let me fix that for the readers...
Our mission isn't to add to the cacophany of the news, but to profit from free labor.
And he got the same hard questions there - with lame responses that show this isn't even half thought-out.
It is bothering me that I have to even sign up to view anything on Infobitt.com. That already is sending me away since I refuse to blindly sign up for any service.
Ditto.
I have of course wondered what it would be like to do Infobitt with a wiki, and I considered setting a wiki up for that purpose. The bottom line is that wikis lack the potential reasons for using the Infobitt format in the first place--making it easier to compete as well as collaborate, making it possible to vote on small pieces of content (as well as the ordering of the content), etc.
In other words, wiki forces users to collaborate on the same extended piece of content. This has all sorts of great effects, if enough people are participating. But it makes it harder to make short fungible pieces of content, rearrange them by vote, and do contests to discover the best version of each type.
Contests? Welcome to Facebook games meets the news.
lsanger 9 days ago | link
Battling organized partisanship is a problem for down the road. My hope is that, by the time we deal with that, we'll have the funding and the personnel to code up a system that enables us to test out some technical solutions to this problem. There are lots of ideas...
Shouldn't this be figured out before, and not "down the road?"
We're considering doing a profit-sharing system, but I'm worried about the effect that will have on the community.
So why not some more (or at least SOME) info on the financial model???? It's obviously for-profit.
Another complaint about login being required:
But why you need people to log in to see about page? Just 1 static html page so I (not really me, because I spent a lot of time on that conversation anyway, but somebody, whatever) could decide if it's worth my time to sign up using real email account. It's, well, the point of about pages, to explain people what is that stuff they are looking at, and if they really want to go further. Scalability issues? That 1 static html page could be hosted anywhere, and, besides, if your servers aren't dying to host login page it wouldn't make very much difference anyway.
... and now some MOAH FACEBOOK:
We need to code the "like" feature as the first step to implementing this.
After more than a year and basic features missing?
We want to solve this problem by creating a separate homepage for each nationality
... like google news already does...
r perhaps simply by filtering the news in a certain clever way that I won't bother to describe
... probably because it doesn't exist yet...
the great thing about a big online community coming together to build Infobitt will be that we can indeed compare different sources. Perhaps your impressions of U.S. news is correct. Perhaps when stacked up directly with other reporting, you'll find it's not as bad as you think.
... like google news already does...
These sorts of stories irritate a lot of us because we've (1) seen them too often before, and (2) if you were to pitch this on Shark Tank or Dragon's Den they'd ask you what your differentiators are, your revenue model, and why they shouldn't throw you out in the first 30 seconds.
The rules are the same as in the tank - "Don't tell us - show us." If you don't have something already up and running, you have nothing. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Unproven ideas are worth even less.
Since they "are still in early stages", how would you want them to differentiate themselves?
They already are "differentiated", if by that you mean pretty non-functional website that requires you to sign up (you've got to be kidding me) just to get a peek.
For once, "nothing to see here - move on" is dead on.
Traditional citizen journalism just gives people a platform to write articles and pretend to be journalists.
That's quite the broad brush you're tarring people with.
Google already tried a system where users ranked and commented on entries - it was pulled because people immediately gamed it.
We're not doing that. We're inviting people to find, rank, summarize both individual facts and stories (which we call bitts, which are made up of facts)
So, almost the same as citizen journalism, people get to decide what is and isn't news, how important it is, and write summaries of articles instead of the articles themselves. A distinction without a real difference, and also wide open to manipulation and trolling.
The reason slashdot is (still mostly) a success isn't because of the stories, but the comments. Some of the contents are written by people with detailed domain knowledge, and go much more in-depth wrt an article posted on the front page than your hypothetical user will ever glean from a news source.
It's funny that your users are going to be grabbing stories from the news media, while claiming that they don't do the job. Everyone will add their own built-in bias atop the story. More cacophony, not less.
People would rather read the news directly and form their own opinions. My prediction - this will fail, because it provides a "solution" that is ill-thought-out, depends on people not being too biased to have any cred (good luck with that), and addresses a non-existent problem (there are already plenty of tools that organize the news).
tl;dr: Yet another attempt to use other people's work (content and labor) to intermediate oneself in a process without any clear reason as to why, organization, funding and finance model, governance, editorial supervision (to control, for example, false or intentionally misleading stories posted by a group with an agenda), or illegal stories (such as identifying the minor victim in a sexual assault). Score: 5 bombs.
This is exactly what you said: "in terms of female, the definition is pretty straightforward: Must be capable of laying eggs or bearing offspring."
This would exclude infertile women.
So now, when you say "infertile women usually are just missing one or two elements but can otherwise bear children.", you know that the same applies to biological males - we're even working on womb transplants, as per one of my submissions that made it to the front page. John Brunner, in "Stand on Zanzibar" figured out that, with appropriate medical care, it would be possible to raise a foetus in a male by letting it embed in the abdominal cavity and attach to the large intestine for the blood supply. Successful abdominal pregnancies have already happened to women, so a womb isn't necessary.
So all that's really needed is a donor egg and some surgery, and a transsexual woman meets your qualification of "bearing offspring" (since women don't lay eggs). And it's probably going to happen sometime soon, because the demand is there.
The more we know, the more it challenges our "conventional wisdom."
The stalking cat story reminds me of all the people who say "What if you believed that one of your legs wasn't really yours? Should it be amputated just because you have this belief?"
The answer to that is very simple - we don't have a hundreds of thousands of people who believe that one of their legs is alien to their body. We do have hundreds of thousands of transsexuals. Even the APA now admits that being transsexual is not, in itself, a mental disorder, 40 years after giving the same treatment to gays and lesbians.
There are about 2,500 m2f reassignments per year just on us citiizens. Given that there are just under 4 million births per year in the US, that gives about 2 million boys born per year. So we're already looking at ratios of 1 in 1000 or more who will eventually opt for m2f srs - and some estimates put the number as low as 1:500 due to ever-increasing access and changing levels of acceptance creating a "cascade" effect.
We're everywhere, so it's not the same as Dennis Avner. It's pretty much sure that if you haven't been living in a cave, you've met some of us and used what we consider as correct pronouns - Miss, Misses, Ms, Madame - without realizing it.
I'm more than my chromosomes - and so is everyone else. Genes express themselves in different ways and people develop in different ways.
And good luck with the kidneys. This summer it looked like I might have had to donate one.
You're talking about a natural response to a disease. The natural response to AIDS is to eventually die. Right now we can put that date off, but that's it. AIDS isn't going to become like the common cold for a long, long time - and that would require natural selection to kill off all those who are susceptible to AIDS in the meantime. No thanks, Let's concentrate on finding a cure instead of letting the grim reaper kill off the weak +99% of the population.
That is hardly reassuring, since it won't happen in the lifetime of anyone alive today unless they reach 100 (if even then). And this will only apply to those whose immune system is strong enough that the virus slows down its replication speed to kill the host.
Until we develop a vaccine, be careful. Be very, very careful.
But over the long term, dead is still dead. So if it takes an extra 10 years to kill you...
When the virus encounters somebody with a particularly strong immune system, it sacrifices efficiency in replication to gradually overcome those defenses.
Sounds more like the ones that succeed will be super-bugs, same as every other infectious disease that we're combating that has developed resistance.
No, I just think that when you get kids young enough (like these), neither gender will have had much experience programming, so why not give them all a positive experience by making it 50-50? We're not talking about rectifying old wrongs - because we don't have a time machine and it can't be done. We're talking about a new generation that should be raised without discrimination wrt gender, and this kind of starts both genders off on the wrong foot, no?
You claimed that "in terms of female, the definition is pretty straightforward: Must be capable of laying eggs or bearing offspring."
So male animals that can change to females and bear offspring depending on the environment are now females according to your definition - even though their chromosomes have not changed.
And what about women who are infertile? They can't lay eggs or bear offspring. According to your "straightforward definition", they're men.
Affirmative action is almost entirely about data collection. What's discriminatory about data collection?
Affirmative action is not "almost about data collection."
Definition: an action or policy favoring those who tend to suffer from discrimination, especially in relation to employment or education; positive discrimination.
Their use of this law
Sticks in my craw.
But there's no law
like an old law,
And there's no whore
Like an old whore
Who defiles the Constitution
It's legal prostitution.
This overbroad law is a real overreach
But challenging it will be a real beach.
Even torture like waterboarding now is okay
'Cuz "any means" means whatever they say.
Burma Shave
So you're going to go by definitions in dictionaries that were written a couple of centuries ago? Our understanding has changed in the last 50 years.
Chromosomes don't cut it - there are animals that spontaneously change sex - even to the point of bearing offspring, when environmental conditions change - without changing their chromosomes. So your dictionary is wrong.
And it's the male seahorse who has the babies.
in terms of female, the definition is pretty straightforward: Must be capable of laying eggs or bearing offspring.
So as far as your definition is concerned, a woman who is infertile is really a man. You should tell your mom that after she finishes menopause - she'll straighten you out:-)
Take for example a previous slashdot summary whose TFA indicated that females develop higher literacy skills earlier than males.
Well, there we go - we now have proof that I was born with a female brain.
No surgery that presently exists is able to alter a male enough to make him anatomically female...at best it's just an external change in appearance
... and a clitoris that is, in 80% of all cases, capable of multiple orgasms. That's far from an external change in appearance. Fully functional, because sex starts in the brain. Jealous much?
The feelings of being the other gender come from the brain, not anywhere else. Please consider this: If you were in an accident that amputated your "package", would you not continue to insist that you are still a male, because your brain tells you so? Now let's go a step further - if in the future we can do brain transplants, and you're in a horrible accident, and the only spare corpsicle is female, would putting your brain in a female body suddenly make you feel that you are now a female? Or would you be hoping for a male corpsicle to turn up soon?
It's not as simple as most people make it. If it were, it would be easier for me to explain and for you to understand.
Slashdot Mirror
[citation]
Wen getting struck by lightning is not as rare, it's simply not normal.
there are probably a sizable number of people that are into bestiality as well, but don't say anything about it. If you do a google search for them, you'll find forums and such dedicated to it, but try asking any of them if they're out to anybody or open about it. Probably 99.99% of them will answer in the negative. ...
It's not just the LGBTt who denounce bestiality. Where's the informed consent of the animal? Your comparison is ludicrous.
On another note, transsexualism is so main-stream that when I tell someone, it's like "Oh, okay." That includes doctors, nurses, and neighbors. And they all refer to me as female. The few who don't are family (you can pick your friends, but you can't pick your family) and some idiot that tried to get me to stop pointing out the illegality of a development project at a public meeting - and he had to take out paid display ads in the main news sections of the two largest newspapers apologizing.
As I mentioned earlier, it still wouldn't, at least not in this context anyways.
Why, Your definition was exactly this:
"in terms of female, the definition is pretty straightforward: Must be capable of laying eggs or bearing offspring."
The reason that chromosomal testing was dropped from the Olympics was a series of embarrassments, including ruling that one woman who later gave birth was a man. More on the history of genetic testing and why it is not authoritative.
So, given that it is now theoretically possible for a male-to-female transsexual to bear offspring via a transplanted ovum embedded in the abdomen and give birth by c-section, why can't you just admit that your definition is too limited?
We've known for a long time that sex starts and ends in the brain. Why not admit that gender is the same thing?
We're considering doing a profit-sharing system, but I'm worried about the effect that will have on the community.
... and ...
Can't do profit-sharing w/o profits.
He who does not work shall not eat," is a core principle of Lenin's version of socialism
Actually, its from the Bible - 2 Thessalonians 3:10
For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.
There is nothing new under the sun ... including the statement "There is nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9).
In this thread you post an answer about profit sharing schemes. Why not be up-front and say that this is a for-profit business that is going to rely on free labor (the pitfalls of which were pointed out here further down the page.
Our mission isn't to add to the cacophany of the news, but to organize it.
Let me fix that for the readers ...
Our mission isn't to add to the cacophany of the news, but to profit from free labor.
And he got the same hard questions there - with lame responses that show this isn't even half thought-out.
It is bothering me that I have to even sign up to view anything on Infobitt.com. That already is sending me away since I refuse to blindly sign up for any service.
Ditto.
I have of course wondered what it would be like to do Infobitt with a wiki, and I considered setting a wiki up for that purpose. The bottom line is that wikis lack the potential reasons for using the Infobitt format in the first place--making it easier to compete as well as collaborate, making it possible to vote on small pieces of content (as well as the ordering of the content), etc.
In other words, wiki forces users to collaborate on the same extended piece of content. This has all sorts of great effects, if enough people are participating. But it makes it harder to make short fungible pieces of content, rearrange them by vote, and do contests to discover the best version of each type.
Contests? Welcome to Facebook games meets the news.
lsanger 9 days ago | link
Battling organized partisanship is a problem for down the road. My hope is that, by the time we deal with that, we'll have the funding and the personnel to code up a system that enables us to test out some technical solutions to this problem. There are lots of ideas...
Shouldn't this be figured out before, and not "down the road?"
We're considering doing a profit-sharing system, but I'm worried about the effect that will have on the community.
So why not some more (or at least SOME) info on the financial model???? It's obviously for-profit.
Another complaint about login being required:
But why you need people to log in to see about page? Just 1 static html page so I (not really me, because I spent a lot of time on that conversation anyway, but somebody, whatever) could decide if it's worth my time to sign up using real email account. It's, well, the point of about pages, to explain people what is that stuff they are looking at, and if they really want to go further. Scalability issues? That 1 static html page could be hosted anywhere, and, besides, if your servers aren't dying to host login page it wouldn't make very much difference anyway.
We need to code the "like" feature as the first step to implementing this.
After more than a year and basic features missing?
We want to solve this problem by creating a separate homepage for each nationality
... like google news already does ...
r perhaps simply by filtering the news in a certain clever way that I won't bother to describe
... probably because it doesn't exist yet ...
the great thing about a big online community coming together to build Infobitt will be that we can indeed compare different sources. Perhaps your impressions of U.S. news is correct. Perhaps when stacked up directly with other reporting, you'll find it's not as bad as you think.
... like google news already does ...
These sorts of stories irritate a lot of us because we've (1) seen them too often before, and (2) if you were to pitch this on Shark Tank or Dragon's Den they'd ask you what your differentiators are, your revenue model, and why they shouldn't throw you out in the first 30 seconds.
The rules are the same as in the tank - "Don't tell us - show us." If you don't have something already up and running, you have nothing. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Unproven ideas are worth even less.
Since they "are still in early stages", how would you want them to differentiate themselves?
They already are "differentiated", if by that you mean pretty non-functional website that requires you to sign up (you've got to be kidding me) just to get a peek.
For once, "nothing to see here - move on" is dead on.
Traditional citizen journalism just gives people a platform to write articles and pretend to be journalists.
That's quite the broad brush you're tarring people with.
Google already tried a system where users ranked and commented on entries - it was pulled because people immediately gamed it.
We're not doing that. We're inviting people to find, rank, summarize both individual facts and stories (which we call bitts, which are made up of facts)
So, almost the same as citizen journalism, people get to decide what is and isn't news, how important it is, and write summaries of articles instead of the articles themselves. A distinction without a real difference, and also wide open to manipulation and trolling.
The reason slashdot is (still mostly) a success isn't because of the stories, but the comments. Some of the contents are written by people with detailed domain knowledge, and go much more in-depth wrt an article posted on the front page than your hypothetical user will ever glean from a news source.
It's funny that your users are going to be grabbing stories from the news media, while claiming that they don't do the job. Everyone will add their own built-in bias atop the story. More cacophony, not less.
People would rather read the news directly and form their own opinions. My prediction - this will fail, because it provides a "solution" that is ill-thought-out, depends on people not being too biased to have any cred (good luck with that), and addresses a non-existent problem (there are already plenty of tools that organize the news).
tl;dr: Yet another attempt to use other people's work (content and labor) to intermediate oneself in a process without any clear reason as to why, organization, funding and finance model, governance, editorial supervision (to control, for example, false or intentionally misleading stories posted by a group with an agenda), or illegal stories (such as identifying the minor victim in a sexual assault). Score: 5 bombs.
This is exactly what you said: "in terms of female, the definition is pretty straightforward: Must be capable of laying eggs or bearing offspring."
This would exclude infertile women.
So now, when you say "infertile women usually are just missing one or two elements but can otherwise bear children.", you know that the same applies to biological males - we're even working on womb transplants, as per one of my submissions that made it to the front page. John Brunner, in "Stand on Zanzibar" figured out that, with appropriate medical care, it would be possible to raise a foetus in a male by letting it embed in the abdominal cavity and attach to the large intestine for the blood supply. Successful abdominal pregnancies have already happened to women, so a womb isn't necessary.
So all that's really needed is a donor egg and some surgery, and a transsexual woman meets your qualification of "bearing offspring" (since women don't lay eggs). And it's probably going to happen sometime soon, because the demand is there.
The more we know, the more it challenges our "conventional wisdom."
The stalking cat story reminds me of all the people who say "What if you believed that one of your legs wasn't really yours? Should it be amputated just because you have this belief?"
The answer to that is very simple - we don't have a hundreds of thousands of people who believe that one of their legs is alien to their body. We do have hundreds of thousands of transsexuals. Even the APA now admits that being transsexual is not, in itself, a mental disorder, 40 years after giving the same treatment to gays and lesbians.
There are about 2,500 m2f reassignments per year just on us citiizens. Given that there are just under 4 million births per year in the US, that gives about 2 million boys born per year. So we're already looking at ratios of 1 in 1000 or more who will eventually opt for m2f srs - and some estimates put the number as low as 1:500 due to ever-increasing access and changing levels of acceptance creating a "cascade" effect.
We're everywhere, so it's not the same as Dennis Avner. It's pretty much sure that if you haven't been living in a cave, you've met some of us and used what we consider as correct pronouns - Miss, Misses, Ms, Madame - without realizing it.
I'm more than my chromosomes - and so is everyone else. Genes express themselves in different ways and people develop in different ways.
And good luck with the kidneys. This summer it looked like I might have had to donate one.
You're talking about a natural response to a disease. The natural response to AIDS is to eventually die. Right now we can put that date off, but that's it. AIDS isn't going to become like the common cold for a long, long time - and that would require natural selection to kill off all those who are susceptible to AIDS in the meantime. No thanks, Let's concentrate on finding a cure instead of letting the grim reaper kill off the weak +99% of the population.
That is hardly reassuring, since it won't happen in the lifetime of anyone alive today unless they reach 100 (if even then). And this will only apply to those whose immune system is strong enough that the virus slows down its replication speed to kill the host.
Until we develop a vaccine, be careful. Be very, very careful.
But over the long term, dead is still dead. So if it takes an extra 10 years to kill you ...
When the virus encounters somebody with a particularly strong immune system, it sacrifices efficiency in replication to gradually overcome those defenses.
Sounds more like the ones that succeed will be super-bugs, same as every other infectious disease that we're combating that has developed resistance.
No, I just think that when you get kids young enough (like these), neither gender will have had much experience programming, so why not give them all a positive experience by making it 50-50? We're not talking about rectifying old wrongs - because we don't have a time machine and it can't be done. We're talking about a new generation that should be raised without discrimination wrt gender, and this kind of starts both genders off on the wrong foot, no?
The problem is when he hits on a woman, and she says, BTW, I used to be a guy, and he gets all phobic.
So male animals that can change to females and bear offspring depending on the environment are now females according to your definition - even though their chromosomes have not changed.
And what about women who are infertile? They can't lay eggs or bear offspring. According to your "straightforward definition", they're men.
Affirmative action is almost entirely about data collection. What's discriminatory about data collection?
Affirmative action is not "almost about data collection."
Definition: an action or policy favoring those who tend to suffer from discrimination, especially in relation to employment or education; positive discrimination.
Their use of this law
Sticks in my craw.
But there's no law
like an old law,
And there's no whore
Like an old whore
Who defiles the Constitution
It's legal prostitution.
This overbroad law is a real overreach
But challenging it will be a real beach.
Even torture like waterboarding now is okay
'Cuz "any means" means whatever they say.
Burma Shave
Affirmative action has its' own problems, and is also discriminatory.
Maybe the original griefer is Bennett and he doesn't like competition? After all, he hasn't weighed in yet :-)
So you're going to go by definitions in dictionaries that were written a couple of centuries ago? Our understanding has changed in the last 50 years.
Chromosomes don't cut it - there are animals that spontaneously change sex - even to the point of bearing offspring, when environmental conditions change - without changing their chromosomes. So your dictionary is wrong.
And it's the male seahorse who has the babies.
in terms of female, the definition is pretty straightforward: Must be capable of laying eggs or bearing offspring.
So as far as your definition is concerned, a woman who is infertile is really a man. You should tell your mom that after she finishes menopause - she'll straighten you out :-)
Given that this person was born with a male brain
Do you have proof of that?
Take for example a previous slashdot summary whose TFA indicated that females develop higher literacy skills earlier than males.
Well, there we go - we now have proof that I was born with a female brain.
No surgery that presently exists is able to alter a male enough to make him anatomically female...at best it's just an external change in appearance
The feelings of being the other gender come from the brain, not anywhere else. Please consider this: If you were in an accident that amputated your "package", would you not continue to insist that you are still a male, because your brain tells you so? Now let's go a step further - if in the future we can do brain transplants, and you're in a horrible accident, and the only spare corpsicle is female, would putting your brain in a female body suddenly make you feel that you are now a female? Or would you be hoping for a male corpsicle to turn up soon?
It's not as simple as most people make it. If it were, it would be easier for me to explain and for you to understand.