So you're happy about poor people giving up their free speech while rich people don't.
I think I'd prefer to say that I recognize that people with more money traditionally have to make fewer tradeoffs in life. I'm not going to sit here and declare that I should be able to talk shit about my employer in a public forum and expect to do so with impunity, just like I'm not going to moan about how unfair it is that I have to go to work everyday while Paris Hilton is out shopping or driving an expensive car or videotaping herself sucking cock.
I'm not rich. I need money coming in so I can afford to pay my rent, put gas in my car and buy food. I'm prepared to make certain trade-offs in order to accomplish these things, because it sucks sleeping outside, walking and eating out of dumpsters.
Taking the position that these tradeoffs shouldn't exist is all well and good, but expecting people to take you seriously is something else.
Yeah, but can you retroactively add to the contract? That is, when they signed on (for their scholarships), was that restriction there, or anything remotely resembling it (for example, an NFL contract stating that you can't do dangerous activities, which could be applied to trying to do stupid things on a motorcycle, ala Kellan Winslow Jr.).
I don't know this for a fact, but I'm guessing that there is language in the scholarship agreement that allows the university to impose restrictions of this type. I mean, I'm guessing that Kent State might have a lawyer that they ran this past.
That aside, I don't see what the big deal is here. It's not as if this is being imposed as a requirement for attendance at the University, it's being instituted as a condition of accepting a free education in exchange for participation in an extra-curricular activity. If you as a student athlete find that unacceptible, you can always take out a loan like the rest of us did.
If you want to start talking about outrages related to athletic scholarships, this is the wrong end of the pool to start in.
Is your free speech for sale ? It is if you want to keep that scholarship. This is a great example of how growing economic inequality spills over into other aspects of life. A well off student can afford to take a stand on principle here.
Yeah, because we all know that in the real world there are no trade-offs like this. Now, if you'll excuse me I have a blog entry to write that's critical of my employer and mocks my boss. And why not? I mean, what could happen?
is this even legal? I would think that what an adult choses to do in their provate time is their business...
Adults can also choose to enter into contracts. Since these are students recieving athletic scholarships, my guess is that it's legal to say "if you want this free money, you can't use facebook". It's the same way that NFL teams can write contracts that forbid things like skydiving or riding motorcycles.
Not that I approve of the practice in this case -- it seems to me that banning social network sites so your jocks don't post up the stupid shit they do is attacking the problem from the completely wrong side. But this is a university system, so expecting them to do things that make sense is a tad unrealistic.
Also, I wonder what their model would do 450 million years ago when C02 levels were 10X what they are today, but the earth was extremely cold.
This was actually a result of an unrelated phenomenon (which I will call "the Skyshadow Effect" over and over again until people start calling it that). It's somewhat technical, but it essentially breaks down to a simple fact: The past was cold.
This is actually pretty obvious once you consider the evidence: Any time you complained to your dad as a kid about how cold it was in the house, he would respond by telling you about how cold it was when he was a kid, right? Blizzards, snow dozens of feet deep, etc. Try complaining to a grandparent, and the stories were even worse -- my grandpa Harry used to have to deal with wooly mammoths as he walked 203 miles to work each morning at 3:30 AM in Milwaukee*.
Carrying out a few simple calculations based on the Skyshadow Effect, we see that 450 million years ago must have been really cold. To give you an idea of what we're talking about, noon at the equator must have been nearly as cold as the inside of your car in the morning in January when the steering wheel is so cold it hurts through your gloves to grip. It was only this hugely increased amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere that allowed life on earth to continue -- any colder and it would have just sat inside with a mug of hot chocolate watching reruns of I Love Lucy.
* This is, of course, related to the supporting theories about how the past was (1) earlier in the day and (2) farther apart than in modern times, but as this is not strictly relevant to this discussion we'll leave it be for now.
1. It's a bit nit-picky.
2. It's only slightly shorter than War & Peace.
Seriously, remember back when you could read an entire article on one page instead of clicking through 20+ pages so the site could bump up the number of ad impressions they score? Man, that was great.
That's "true", so long as by "true" you mean "unsubstantiated" and "illogical" and "but a good soundbyte".
And let me say that, frankly, it pisses me off to see some goddamn motherfucking PENCILNECK professor from some goddamn pissant UC schoolwhining with his LITTLE BITCH MOUTH about how men in my generation at TOO GODDAMN VIOLENT AND CAN'T CONTROL OUR FUCKING TEMPER! AAAAAAAHH!!! AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHH!
Weird, I don't remember Fight Club being about a bunch of dorks
in headgear smacking each other with sticks until one of them
got a bloody nose while spouting poorly-paraphrased movie quotes
at some bored reporter.
Aside from which, I loved how they worked in this:
Earlier this month in Arlington, Texas, a high school student
who didn't want to participate was beaten so badly that he suffered
a brain hemorrhage and broken vertebrae. Six teenagers were arrested
after DVDs of the fight appeared for sale online.
So exactly when did "getting your ass kicked by a bunch of jerks"
turn into being "an unwilling Fight Club participant"? I suppose next
we'll be hearing about how Ken Lay and company were actually just
repeating what they learned by watching "Wall Street" at the executive
team-building offsite? Or how the well-abused Zonk and ScuttleMonkey
voodoo dolls on my desk are actually just a result of my having seen part of
"The Craft" one time on HBO?
How many other instances exist where scientists can identify the mechanism of a large-scale change, explain it, model it, have their predictions borne out, reach almost universal agreement in the scientific community and still have a large number of people yelling "That's unpossible!"?
Given that it's extremely unlikely that we'll see global CO2 emissions controlled anytime in the near future, I suspect it's probably time to start looking for alternative answers for how to control the overheating problem that we're encountering.
That said, I'd rather see something a little more organized like, say, a large solar shade positioned between the sun and the earth. It would be harder to implement, sure, but it would also be vastly easier to fine-tune -- if the scientists were a little bit off on their estimates of how much sunlight needed to be kept from reaching the earth, it's easier to retune a solar shade than to vaccuum up a lot of dust (or live through an accidental ice age).
Acting like a victim NEVER empowers the victim and only empowers the bullies.
Oh, I dunno... Were I a victim, I suspect that I'd find hundreds of thousands of dollars transfered out of the bully's bank account into mine rather empowering.
That aside, all the comments about the kid learning to laugh at himself strike me as being somewhat amusing -- they're commenting as it this wasn't a unique situation of humiliation accompanied by almost unimaginable publicity.
The entire internets are laughing at you? C'mon, learn to take a joke, kid! I mean, I was embarressed once at a party when the music and conversation suddenly all died down at the same time and I was still yelling and said the word "clitoris", and I got over it! It's almost exactly the same thing!
I consider myself to have a pretty thick skin, but if I ever managed to become the laughing stock of the entire internet I think it might get to me a little bit.
The guys who stole (er, "misappropriated" this video and stuck it on the net for the sole purpose of humiliating this poor kid deserve to be punished, IMO, and here in the civilized world the way that people are punished for stuff like this is money; it's not a perfect system, but it's the best we've come up with so far.
They're just lucky they're not in the US -- the MPAA would have come down on them like the wrath of God for messing with this kid's copyright on his original work.
...but it seems like the climber is the easy-ish part of a space elevator. If they were doing work with the carbon nanotubes, I'd be much more impressed.
I agree with your assessment. I should have been more specific in my original post -- I was referring to the sort of "computer voting" where the votes are stored in memory rather than in a physical form. Using computers as an aid to voting and a neutral error-checker isn't a bad idea at all once you reduct the inevitable technical issues to a minimum (hey! this thing's out of ink!).
Of course, there's always the segment of the population who'll mess up even the very simple process you've described (can you tell I've spent my morning conducting training?), but I suppose there's nothing to be done about that.
Ah yes, but what about electronic voting with a paper trail, printed at the time of the vote. The voter then marks the paper to indicate that that vote is correct? Or even better, the ability to go back later on and see what your vote was, to ensure that it was not tampered with?
You can't allow people to check back on their vote -- it would allow people to sell their vote in a way that could be verified later.
As for the paper trail idea: Why make someone vote on a computer screen to produce a paper ballot? Keep It Simple, Stupid applies to methodologies and processes beyond programming and interfaces.
Obviously, computerized voting is a stupid, stupid idea. Whenever
this sort of issue comes up, I find it breaks down into two camps:
People who know shit about computers and people who don't. Electronic
voting scares the first group, while the second group looks at it blankly
and says shit like "Well, that's good 'cause computers don't make mistakes,
right?"
Aside from that, blame is also richly deserved on the part of the State
and Local morons who wrote their contracts with Diebold and other computer
voting firms in such a way that they let them restrict access to this
sort of vital information, as if verifying the results of an open election
somehow isn't really all that important.
Gimme the connect-the-line ballots any day. At the very least, they'd be
harder for the morons who deal with this sort of thing to fuck up.
This is absolutely true. I also believe, however, that there is a difference between having a student disagree with you in class and ending up as "Evil Liberal of the Week" on the No-Spin Zone.
It may not be illegal, but its likewise not a development that has any real positive connotations for the education process (unless we're viewing intimidating people with different ideas than out own as a "positive" now). In that respect, it's also not something that a group associated with a university should probably be involved with.
I have several levels of backups: A RAID-1, a pocket drive and burned DVDs.
Data initially gets stored on my Linux server, a 60 gig IDE RAID-1 that I set up a few years ago using a platform-agnostic controller (I forget who makes it).
For a while, I would just periodically cut backup DVDs of my important bits. I'd leave a copy and home and take a copy to work, figuring if anything ever happened to destroy both copies, getting my data back would be the least of my worries.
Burning DVDs, however, turns out to be a pain in the ass. So, I went out and bought a 100 gig Seagate pocket drive. Backing up to this is far less of a bit deal -- I periodically drag the folders before I go to bed and let it copy over my network while I sleep. Then I take that drive to work with me. Combined with the occassional DVD backup, I figure I'm golden.
Whoa, wait: President Bush abusing his power? No, you've got to be kidding me.
I can't believe it. After all, this is the guy who *wanted* to help
New Orleans but just couldn't because of those darn rules maybe being in
the way.
That aside: Bad week for the Neocons.
First, they're not allowed to torture people
anymore (not that we ever did, right? I mean, I'm sure the folks at those
secret CIA prisons in eastern Europe were Geneva Convention poster boys).
Then the PATRIOT act gets blocked so they have to go deal with those
darn activist judges to get warrants again. Now, people are acting like
the President can't override statute with an executive order! Next thing
you know, people will actually want leaders who follow the Constitution.
Heck, this keeps up and nobody'll want to be President
of the United States anymore - we're just takin' all the fun out of it.
I personally look forward to the day when the GOP has something to do with,
you know, conservatism again. "Spend responsibly" rolls off the tounge better
than "constant wanton abuse of power". Still, at least it was just violation of the basic agreement that forms the basis of our government and not, you know, a blowjob. Otherwise the nation might have to sit through another impeachment.
Anyhow, I wouldn't associate the Katz articles with this. Katz was a blowhard who was *clearly* here just to grab some material for a half-assed book that he could dine out on for a few months. His articles were long-winded, horrendously superficial looks at "geek culture". I remember one in particular where he bragged that he'd played his first game of Doom (cheat on, of course) -- yeah, that's great there Skippy. Glad you're here to tell us all about the state of modern geekdom.
This isn't that. This is something else.
I've used Skyshadow for, what, seven years here on Slashdot (even before there was a formal account system). Before that, there were the BBSs I used to chat on in the mid-90's, and before that there was Q-Link back in the late 80's.
The point is that I've used the same handle for, what, 15+ years. A *lot* of people know me by this name. I'm nearly as attached to it as I am my own "real" name, which should be too surprising given that I've been trolling around with it for more than half my life at this point. I definately wouldn't take kindly to someone telling me I needed to change it, especially not some moron who couldn't find a better calling in life than being a GM in some MMORPG.
Why should the average person understand how their cell phone works?
Seriously, how is it stupidity to simply be ignorant of things that you don't need to know? I don't know how my digital camera works beyond a few of the basics (light shines on CCD, then... er... picture ends up on my flash card), that doesn't stop me from being a reasonably good photographer. I know how to use my camera, how to manipulate the aperture and the shutter time and the ISO to get the picture that I want. Isn't that what counts?
No person can be an expert on everything, and in my experience the people who try tend to be the real useless ones...
Slashdot Mirror
So you're happy about poor people giving up their free speech while rich people don't.
I think I'd prefer to say that I recognize that people with more money traditionally have to make fewer tradeoffs in life. I'm not going to sit here and declare that I should be able to talk shit about my employer in a public forum and expect to do so with impunity, just like I'm not going to moan about how unfair it is that I have to go to work everyday while Paris Hilton is out shopping or driving an expensive car or videotaping herself sucking cock.
I'm not rich. I need money coming in so I can afford to pay my rent, put gas in my car and buy food. I'm prepared to make certain trade-offs in order to accomplish these things, because it sucks sleeping outside, walking and eating out of dumpsters.
Taking the position that these tradeoffs shouldn't exist is all well and good, but expecting people to take you seriously is something else.
Yeah, but can you retroactively add to the contract? That is, when they signed on (for their scholarships), was that restriction there, or anything remotely resembling it (for example, an NFL contract stating that you can't do dangerous activities, which could be applied to trying to do stupid things on a motorcycle, ala Kellan Winslow Jr.).
I don't know this for a fact, but I'm guessing that there is language in the scholarship agreement that allows the university to impose restrictions of this type. I mean, I'm guessing that Kent State might have a lawyer that they ran this past.
That aside, I don't see what the big deal is here. It's not as if this is being imposed as a requirement for attendance at the University, it's being instituted as a condition of accepting a free education in exchange for participation in an extra-curricular activity. If you as a student athlete find that unacceptible, you can always take out a loan like the rest of us did.
If you want to start talking about outrages related to athletic scholarships, this is the wrong end of the pool to start in.
Is your free speech for sale ? It is if you want to keep that scholarship. This is a great example of how growing economic inequality spills over into other aspects of life. A well off student can afford to take a stand on principle here.
Yeah, because we all know that in the real world there are no trade-offs like this. Now, if you'll excuse me I have a blog entry to write that's critical of my employer and mocks my boss. And why not? I mean, what could happen?
is this even legal? I would think that what an adult choses to do in their provate time is their business...
Adults can also choose to enter into contracts. Since these are students recieving athletic scholarships, my guess is that it's legal to say "if you want this free money, you can't use facebook". It's the same way that NFL teams can write contracts that forbid things like skydiving or riding motorcycles.
Not that I approve of the practice in this case -- it seems to me that banning social network sites so your jocks don't post up the stupid shit they do is attacking the problem from the completely wrong side. But this is a university system, so expecting them to do things that make sense is a tad unrealistic.
This was actually a result of an unrelated phenomenon (which I will call "the Skyshadow Effect" over and over again until people start calling it that). It's somewhat technical, but it essentially breaks down to a simple fact: The past was cold.
This is actually pretty obvious once you consider the evidence: Any time you complained to your dad as a kid about how cold it was in the house, he would respond by telling you about how cold it was when he was a kid, right? Blizzards, snow dozens of feet deep, etc. Try complaining to a grandparent, and the stories were even worse -- my grandpa Harry used to have to deal with wooly mammoths as he walked 203 miles to work each morning at 3:30 AM in Milwaukee*.
Carrying out a few simple calculations based on the Skyshadow Effect, we see that 450 million years ago must have been really cold. To give you an idea of what we're talking about, noon at the equator must have been nearly as cold as the inside of your car in the morning in January when the steering wheel is so cold it hurts through your gloves to grip. It was only this hugely increased amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere that allowed life on earth to continue -- any colder and it would have just sat inside with a mug of hot chocolate watching reruns of I Love Lucy.
* This is, of course, related to the supporting theories about how the past was (1) earlier in the day and (2) farther apart than in modern times, but as this is not strictly relevant to this discussion we'll leave it be for now.
2. It's only slightly shorter than War & Peace.
Seriously, remember back when you could read an entire article on one page instead of clicking through 20+ pages so the site could bump up the number of ad impressions they score? Man, that was great.
The guy wanted to find out what it would feel like to have his ass kicked. I suspect he's about it find out.
And let me say that, frankly, it pisses me off to see some goddamn motherfucking PENCILNECK professor from some goddamn pissant UC school whining with his LITTLE BITCH MOUTH about how men in my generation at TOO GODDAMN VIOLENT AND CAN'T CONTROL OUR FUCKING TEMPER! AAAAAAAHH!!! AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHH!
Seriously.
Aside from which, I loved how they worked in this:
Earlier this month in Arlington, Texas, a high school student who didn't want to participate was beaten so badly that he suffered a brain hemorrhage and broken vertebrae. Six teenagers were arrested after DVDs of the fight appeared for sale online.
So exactly when did "getting your ass kicked by a bunch of jerks" turn into being "an unwilling Fight Club participant"? I suppose next we'll be hearing about how Ken Lay and company were actually just repeating what they learned by watching "Wall Street" at the executive team-building offsite? Or how the well-abused Zonk and ScuttleMonkey voodoo dolls on my desk are actually just a result of my having seen part of "The Craft" one time on HBO?
You forgot making gigantic swiss cheese.
How many other instances exist where scientists can identify the mechanism of a large-scale change, explain it, model it, have their predictions borne out, reach almost universal agreement in the scientific community and still have a large number of people yelling "That's unpossible!"?
That said, I'd rather see something a little more organized like, say, a large solar shade positioned between the sun and the earth. It would be harder to implement, sure, but it would also be vastly easier to fine-tune -- if the scientists were a little bit off on their estimates of how much sunlight needed to be kept from reaching the earth, it's easier to retune a solar shade than to vaccuum up a lot of dust (or live through an accidental ice age).
Oh, I dunno... Were I a victim, I suspect that I'd find hundreds of thousands of dollars transfered out of the bully's bank account into mine rather empowering.
That aside, all the comments about the kid learning to laugh at himself strike me as being somewhat amusing -- they're commenting as it this wasn't a unique situation of humiliation accompanied by almost unimaginable publicity.
The entire internets are laughing at you? C'mon, learn to take a joke, kid! I mean, I was embarressed once at a party when the music and conversation suddenly all died down at the same time and I was still yelling and said the word "clitoris", and I got over it! It's almost exactly the same thing!
The guys who stole (er, "misappropriated" this video and stuck it on the net for the sole purpose of humiliating this poor kid deserve to be punished, IMO, and here in the civilized world the way that people are punished for stuff like this is money; it's not a perfect system, but it's the best we've come up with so far.
They're just lucky they're not in the US -- the MPAA would have come down on them like the wrath of God for messing with this kid's copyright on his original work.
A space bird.
...but it seems like the climber is the easy-ish part of a space elevator. If they were doing work with the carbon nanotubes, I'd be much more impressed.
Of course, there's always the segment of the population who'll mess up even the very simple process you've described (can you tell I've spent my morning conducting training?), but I suppose there's nothing to be done about that.
You can't allow people to check back on their vote -- it would allow people to sell their vote in a way that could be verified later.
As for the paper trail idea: Why make someone vote on a computer screen to produce a paper ballot? Keep It Simple, Stupid applies to methodologies and processes beyond programming and interfaces.
Aside from that, blame is also richly deserved on the part of the State and Local morons who wrote their contracts with Diebold and other computer voting firms in such a way that they let them restrict access to this sort of vital information, as if verifying the results of an open election somehow isn't really all that important.
Gimme the connect-the-line ballots any day. At the very least, they'd be harder for the morons who deal with this sort of thing to fuck up.
It may not be illegal, but its likewise not a development that has any real positive connotations for the education process (unless we're viewing intimidating people with different ideas than out own as a "positive" now). In that respect, it's also not something that a group associated with a university should probably be involved with.
Data initially gets stored on my Linux server, a 60 gig IDE RAID-1 that I set up a few years ago using a platform-agnostic controller (I forget who makes it).
For a while, I would just periodically cut backup DVDs of my important bits. I'd leave a copy and home and take a copy to work, figuring if anything ever happened to destroy both copies, getting my data back would be the least of my worries.
Burning DVDs, however, turns out to be a pain in the ass. So, I went out and bought a 100 gig Seagate pocket drive. Backing up to this is far less of a bit deal -- I periodically drag the folders before I go to bed and let it copy over my network while I sleep. Then I take that drive to work with me. Combined with the occassional DVD backup, I figure I'm golden.
Oh, gee, if there's a *book* about it, then that makes it all better.
That aside: Bad week for the Neocons.
First, they're not allowed to torture people anymore (not that we ever did, right? I mean, I'm sure the folks at those secret CIA prisons in eastern Europe were Geneva Convention poster boys). Then the PATRIOT act gets blocked so they have to go deal with those darn activist judges to get warrants again. Now, people are acting like the President can't override statute with an executive order! Next thing you know, people will actually want leaders who follow the Constitution. Heck, this keeps up and nobody'll want to be President of the United States anymore - we're just takin' all the fun out of it.
I personally look forward to the day when the GOP has something to do with, you know, conservatism again. "Spend responsibly" rolls off the tounge better than "constant wanton abuse of power". Still, at least it was just violation of the basic agreement that forms the basis of our government and not, you know, a blowjob. Otherwise the nation might have to sit through another impeachment.
Anyhow, I wouldn't associate the Katz articles with this. Katz was a blowhard who was *clearly* here just to grab some material for a half-assed book that he could dine out on for a few months. His articles were long-winded, horrendously superficial looks at "geek culture". I remember one in particular where he bragged that he'd played his first game of Doom (cheat on, of course) -- yeah, that's great there Skippy. Glad you're here to tell us all about the state of modern geekdom.
This isn't that. This is something else.
I've used Skyshadow for, what, seven years here on Slashdot (even before there was a formal account system). Before that, there were the BBSs I used to chat on in the mid-90's, and before that there was Q-Link back in the late 80's.
The point is that I've used the same handle for, what, 15+ years. A *lot* of people know me by this name. I'm nearly as attached to it as I am my own "real" name, which should be too surprising given that I've been trolling around with it for more than half my life at this point. I definately wouldn't take kindly to someone telling me I needed to change it, especially not some moron who couldn't find a better calling in life than being a GM in some MMORPG.
That's worth a Slashdot post.
Seriously, how is it stupidity to simply be ignorant of things that you don't need to know? I don't know how my digital camera works beyond a few of the basics (light shines on CCD, then... er... picture ends up on my flash card), that doesn't stop me from being a reasonably good photographer. I know how to use my camera, how to manipulate the aperture and the shutter time and the ISO to get the picture that I want. Isn't that what counts?
No person can be an expert on everything, and in my experience the people who try tend to be the real useless ones...