As a non-partisan message, I don't necessarily see a problem. For some of the propagandizers out there? We HAVE had problems with chemistry profs who spent an entire class period or two railing about Bush rather than teaching the subject they were supposed to be teaching. And then the ombuds got to deal with the ethics investigation when students (who had gone to the Dean about it) complained their papers and tests were being graded down for daring to confront the professor about propagandizing in class.
It turned out the prof was doing exactly that.:( Let's just say the chem Dean's office was treading really thin ice for QUITE a while after that, though the prof was pretty much immune since he had tenure.
In fact, I'd be greatly heartened to see any of these kids take an interest in any issue beyond their next exam.
If it were our kids doing this, I'd likely be a little easier on it. Unfortunately, we get the leftist crazy groups like Code Pinko coming in to mess up the kids' education instead.
I am empathetic to the issues you're presenting here. On the grounds of the university I work at, crime is very much an issue - usually, as far as I can tell, perpetrated by individuals not enrolled at the university. I hear you, and I don't think you're trolling.
That makes one... but thanks:)
But - what makes the camera response difficult for me is that such institutions, in my experience (which makes this just another fscking opinion), are *incapable* of setting and sticking to terms of reference for such a facility. Once the cameras are in place, people just can't help themselves in using them beyond a scope of a video record to be used to identify thieves in response to car break-ins, for example.
We don't just use them for a "video record" - we have 1-2 camera operators watching the array of cameras 24/7, ready to hit the CB and dispatch someone if they see something suspicious. That's the level of crime we have to deal with and the PD is really scared of being sued for "not being there quick enough" should something unfortunate happen.
The transition to surveillance devices is fast, not matter how big a stack of bibles were used in swearing that they would never be used that way. Once the facility is in place, there is *always* what sounds to be a reasonable context for going beyond the original terms of reference.
I believe that, in a free society, an individual has a reasonable expectation of proceeding through their day without being subject to arbitrary surveillance. If you remove that expectation, you take a significant step towards a functioning police state.
I'd love to agree with you - but in a lawsuit-happy society like ours, we had to weigh the potential downside, and one potential downside is a cop not getting there quick enough and some dead kid's family (quite possibly with money, we have a decently prestigious law school) trying to sue the university into oblivion for "not responding fast enough" to save their kid's life.
On the one hand, we have the risk that someone (and only the people in dispatch have access for watching the camera, though I suppose the recording could theoretically be requested/subpoenaed for some reason) could use them for nefarious means; on the other hand, well, it gets the PD on the scene faster and helps us avoid risk of lawsuits.
It's a lot easier to say "we did all we could" when you had the PD dispatched within 30 seconds of something happening on camera, rather than 5 minutes down the line when someone finally phoned it in (or worse yet, when someone found the dead body the next morning).
Well, HOW exactly "legals" get displaced? Because they are dumber and have lower grades or IQ score?
Actually, no - usually it's some moron in admissions trying to "promote diversity."
And what about kids from disadvantaged AMERICAN families? Poor families, families who emigrated legally, families who for whatever reason lived in shit-ass school systems like California's? I'd rather see them in than your so-called "favorable candidate for citizenship" any day.
Hell, the kids have already been fucked by the number of illegals packing in and ruining California's public school system, now you fuck them out of college too?
#1 - install this and have the fastest response time for cops that we possibly could. #2 - risk a MASSIVE FUCKING LAWSUIT by someone who was mugged, carjacked, raped, or god forbid the family of someone who was MURDERED when they claim we "didn't do enough" to prevent the crime or aid the victims.
Doesn't matter if we would have won the lawsuit, which is seriously in doubt (juries LOVE to hand out the money of "the government"), the cost of litigating alone would have been a pain, and likely any settlement would have included this kind of stuff anyways.
If they're undocumented, how do you know they are foreign-born?
When you apply to college, you have to submit various documents of identity. A simple identity check is enough to catch most of them, but thanks to "sensitive" morons like you we can't do it - and as a result we've had kids (and parents) screaming bloody murder because their SSN's were being used to apply for illegal aliens and some of the loan companies ran checks on the SSN in question and caught the fraud.
Accents? Okay, say you do "your papers please" on everyone with a foreign-sounding accent. Why do you want to track these people now? You just report undocumented students to Immigration, job done.
Better still: you don't let those who are undocumented - e.g. not citizens and not having a valid visa - enroll. Save the space in classes (we DO have limits on how many kids can get into each class each semester) for those who are entitled to be there.
So, what you're saying is there are no cameras in the white-dominated slums then?
We happen to be next to a rather unsavory "'hood" as the term is used. Lots of cars blaring gangsta rap, lots of gang activity, lots of drug deals, lots of problems.
perhaps you should instead take a closer look at your admissions office. Certainly they wouldn't be looking the other way just to get those massive federal subsidies per student enrolled...
Actually, the rapes and problems are committed less than 50% of the time by students, but it's devilishly hard to keep the neighbors from coming onto campus, even after we've had multiple gang shootouts at the basketball courts right between two dorm buildings. The administration is afraid of Jesse Jackson showing up and having another "march."
3. Keep an eye (or hundreds of them) focused on campus. Surveillance has become a boom industry nationally--one that now reaches deep into the heart of campuses. In fact, universities have witnessed explosive growth since 2001 in the electronic surveillance of students, faculty and campus workers. On ever more campuses, closed-circuit security cameras can track people's every move, often from hidden or undisclosed locations, sometimes even into classrooms.
I helped get this established on our campus. Why did we do it? It has nothing to do with "tracking everyone" and everything to do with crime. We have cameras on the parking lots because we kept having "neighbors" from the black-dominated slums nearby breaking into cars and carjacking people, and so they now have someone watching to dispatch a cop to a problem spot 24/7. We have cameras on buildings leading to classrooms, and even a few IN classrooms, because of people committing rapes and getting into fights.
5. Track foreign-born students; keep the undocumented out. Yeah. Because enforcing the law is a problem... how? The American Immigration Law Foundation estimates that only one in twenty undocumented immigrants who graduate high school goes on to enroll in a college--many don't go because they cannot afford the tuition but also because they have good reason to be afraid: ICE has deported a number of those who did make it to college, some before they could graduate. When every one that gets in displaces a legal citizen, legal resident, legal visa-holder who had the RIGHT to apply... yeah. I applaud such efforts.
I work on a University campus, so I know what's really going on. It's simple: too many people abused their "right" to free speech by making it impossible to hold classes, being rowdy and loud in the halls, preventing people from passing into buildings, etc. In essence, depriving the students of the very thing they paid for. End result? The university isn't about having "free speech all the time", it's where people pay for an education. So the Universities had to strike a balance, and they had to do something so that those who wanted to protest can do so, but WITHOUT DISRUPTING CLASSES.
You don't have the "right" to stand up and have a bitch-fest in a class you're signed up for, either - if you disrupt class, the professor has the right to order you out and call security if you don't leave. You don't have the "right" to prevent people from reaching classes either, and we had fuckwits from Code Pinko blockading the classrooms of engineering profs who had military service records and have some military research grants.
And that even includes the fuckwad professors who hold chemistry class bitching about Bush and why everyone should be antiwar, too. You want to protest them? Take it up w/ the Dean, in the student newspaper, in the courts, or on your own time - not in the class.
students at Hampton and Pace universities faced expulsion for handing out antiwar fliers, aka "unauthorized materials."
I don't care what you're doing - whether it's an anti-abortion flyer, a pro-abortion flyer, an antiwar flyer, a pro-war flyer, or an advertising for your frat/sorostitute group's drinking party. If you're trying to force it into people's hands, or putting it on their cars (which is what WE get all the time where I work)... no. If someone actively takes it from you? Fine. But you don't have the right to force crap into my hands and you don't have the right to fuck with my vehicle. And I'm 100% sure that's the bullcrap they are really referring to.
I also love this little gem: 1. Target dissidents. As the warfare state has triggered dissent, the campus has attracted increasing scrutiny--with student protesters in the cross hairs. The government's number-one target? Peace and justice organizations. I'd trust the guys writing this so-called "report" more if those so-called "peace and justice organizations" weren't fronts for communist groups (ANSWER, International Socialist Workers Party, etc), anarchist groups, blatant racial supremacist organizations (MEChA and La Raza, motto "For the race, everything, for other races, nothing"), or international terrorist/genocide groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.
I mean, really. We had a table of morons set up who were boldly collecting money that they admitted they'd be sending to Hezbollah. They should all have been deported for violating their visas - half of them had already dropped this semester's classes anyways, like they do every semester.
In the US, consumers were stuck with substandard, feature-stripped DVD recorders.
-Media problems Nothing would work with the next generation of media (I was given as a "gift" a co-worker's old one that takes 1X and nothing but 1X... the "replacement" took nothing but 4X, wouldn't even work with the legacy 1X disks she had left over). Companies like Philips were shit-poor about issuing firmware updates to use current media, instead trying to forced-obsolete their products and force people to shell out $700-800 to replace a 1-2 year old burner.
-Lack of hard drives and smart burning Not till the 4th generation did they include a hard drive to remove commercials before the data was burned, meaning if you record 2 hours of show you just recorded 40 minutes of wasted space. Trying to archive was a disaster with that going on.
-Lack of ability to access cable In order to screw people further, cable companies started altering the phase of their signal to work with only proprietary set-top boxes (my ATi All-In-Wonder got screwed by this too, thank you Time Warner and Comcrap for making my purchase worthless). Want a DVR or recording? Better get their one that's built to be able to handle the phase-shifted signals... and is "rented" to you. Digital cable's even worse, because few if any DVD recorders recognize it, making you try to do a set-top box pass-through (same issue if you have satellite) to set the channel or else pray it has codes for its remote-interceptor dongle to do the channel changing work.
Chances of getting a DVD burner unit cable of receiving component video or HD-quality? GOOD LUCK. The market's now been abandoned. If you want to do it, you build your own MythTV box or something.
The human eye isn't a 100% analog device either - it's a digital device which takes light sampling using rods (black/white luminance) and cones (color information) and sorts them together.
Damage the eye, and you can get a "blind spot" where all the rods and cones are defunct. Drop to low lighting conditions where there's not enough to activate the cones, and you switch to rod-only black and white "night vision" with the brain filling in what it *thinks* the color of something should be based on what you perceive objects to be.
The real problem is simply that human visual acuity isn't actually all that great. Can you tell the difference between a 480p and 720p image on your computer monitor? Probably, but you're sitting a foot and a half away from it.
From 10 feet away, you can *barely* distinguish a 480p image from a 720p image on a 30" set. Go up to a 60" set and you can barely tell between 720p and 1080i/p from the same distance.
Me? I have a 50" TV. My max viewing distance is 12 feet. My minimum is 8 feet. (I occasionally move the couch). It's a 720p native screen and that's just fine by me.
I've saved a number of people on the order of $1000 by showing them this graph at a local Best Buy and having them simply stand in front of a TV known to be getting an HD feed and step back and forth. The salesmonkeys hate me for it.
Elemental suits / IS Armor if you want. Tanks and Hovers and the rest, if you want. Participate in mixed-army fighting.
Mechs, if you want. Build your way up in the fights on Solaris...
Aerotech - in both the atmosphere, and in space battles where 'Mechs are mostly sitting ducks.
Or take over being a gunner in one of the naval-class Dropships or JumpShips...
Properly designed, this has so much amazing potential! Think about it - people are still playing Mechwarrior 2 and Mechwarrior 4 online today. Virtual World simpod sites are doing great now that they got them away from Dave & Buster's and into the hands of people who care about them and will do the maintenance, and they're about to release the updated version of Red Planet in a few months.
Think about how well the old Mechwarrior online "persistent universe" (Mechwarrior 3025, look it up, one of the first large-scale MMOs) was shaping up before MS pulled the licensing out from under it. Now consider how much 8 more years of hardware power can do for it.
They bill themselves as an encyclopedia. They engineered the site to be the first hit on as many searches as they can.
"With great power comes great responsibility" - like it or not, they ARE affecting perceptions every time someone comes to their "compilation". The mere fact that they are spurs on the groups that try to bias it.
As an example, I think we should have a higher tax on gasoline to drive down consumption
and therefore directly injure people who have to rely on it for their livelihoods beyond simply traveling to and from work - farmers, truckers, deliverymen, and so forth - who are probably making fucking close to minimum wage anyways.
Is this possible in our democracy? Not really. Everybody votes against anyone who would even suggest it.
And for good reason!
During World War II, there was mandatory recycling in a number of cities, and that has benefits, but people hated it, and it got repealed as soon as the war ended.
I've lived in a mandatory-recycling city, because Milwaukee and its surrounding suburbs all have that. You know what's funny about it? That's the only way to get it to happen. Where I live now, I'd love to recycle my glass and a lot of my paper, but I can't because without the government program it's not fucking profitable and there's no place around willing to take anything but scrap metal for recycling.
An absolute ruler has the ability to switch policy overnight.
And royally fuck up when they do, too.
If you could insure the whole "philosopher king" thing, make sure you have a person as absolute ruler who is both capable and worthy of it, then that would be by far the best system. Since you can't, we go with democracy, not because it's in any way better, but because it limits the possible harm that can come out of government toward the people. However democracy can't save the people from their own shortsightedness, and it's just damn inefficient.
"Democracy is the worst form of government... except for all the others." And we don't really have a democracy (you want that you need to go to a religious commune, or else Switzerland is the closest existing); we have a representative republic.
And even the representative republic royally fucks up when you have shitwads like Shrub who are more interested in the $$$ they're going to get from the drug gangs for keeping the border open and starting wars to keep the public's attention off of it.
So what is the ultimate goal here. Is Wikkipedia really an open encyclopedia accessible to everyone or id it an exclusive club of yes men attempting to push some hidden agenda.
"Yes." For a lot of topics, Der Fuehrer Jimbo or one of his cronies probably don't give a rat's ass. So they wind up leaving those alone, at which point other dynamics (also here) come into play.
And if it is even remotely the second, I could see how exposing the corruption would be a serious things. It threatens the validity of the agenda. But I have to ask, if there is no agenda, then why would corrupt practices be something of interest.
Corrupt practices should be of interest on the basis that they're corrupt, but also because everything has real-world implications. Articles on a country have real implications - they can impact tourism, they can impact politics, they can impact how people view the country. Articles on a political dispute, or a political leader, can have a formative impact on how they are viewed, especially as Wikipedia has hit so high in its search rankings seeing as it's essentially one gigantic fucking linkfarm (that gives out no bump to anyone else now that they implemented external-link "nofollow" tags).
Psychological research for decades has shown what ought to be pretty obvious - the first impression someone gets about something is always the strongest, and absent a massive shock or mound of evidence, will always have more impact on thought patterns than later information. Wikipedia, by virtue of being engineered to hit high in the search rankings, is the first place most people will get information on a given random topic.
That makes it important.
And if there is an agenda, what might it be? I know they have had slanted coverage of politically charged events. Things like one paragraph somewhat hidden on other pages explaining the real problems with the Katrina response and three quarters of the main article focusing on the government, Bush and how evil they are. But I doubt their motivation is purely political.
Depends what article and who you're asking. A number of $cientologists work to bias the hell out of $cientology articles - hiding what the Cult of $cientology wants hidden from view, such as the fact that the "Oxford Capacity Analysis" (their rigged personality test) has nothing to do with Oxford University for example. A rather sizable group of Arabs work to whitewash and control any article related to Islam and regularly war over the Israel/Palestinian issue... the trick is getting yourself entrenched and acquiring allies who are equally fanatical on some other topic that you don't really give a rat's ass about. You scratch their back, they scratch yours... and at the end of the day, the result is that most of the administrators on the site aren't set up about making a better encyclopedia, but keeping an article under their control and helping their new "friends" do the same on theirs.
Check out This page as one example. What do we see? A user named OrangeMike, who just "happens" to be a well-known Democrat operative in Milwaukee and longstanding friend of communist mayor Frank Zeidler comes along and starts whitewashing articles that mention his friend, and abuses his connections to other admins to get his opponents banned. The situation is almost a textbook example of what Parker Peters refers to.
If you look at every one of these cases, who keeps popping up? It's the same group of editors - David Gerard, JayJG, JzG, SlimVirgin, etc... all with the blessing of Der Fuehrer Jimbo.
SECOND - Interesting emails have come to me. They are transcripts of the private "discussion" surrounding the banning of anyone who disagrees with abusive administrators in general on wikien-l, and in particular, my own ban - which was placed, not for the lying reasons they gave, but because I was making sense, I had exposed their lies and abuses, and they knew that I had the proper evidence on a CheckUser that they had deliberately lied about. They source to David Gerard, and my analysis was spot-on; he was the genesis of the banning campaign, which is no surprise, as he's always been the most totalitarian, corrupt, hotheaded, and completely worthless representative of any of the Wikipedia and Wikien-l higher-ups.
Such is the Wikipedia way, the way that exists in most totalitarian states; if you are not right, you simply kill the messenger. They are doing their level best to do this, to this day. That they are trying to close off and shutter anyone who exposes them, and further hiding their back channels to hide their misdeeds, is plenty of proof.
If Der Fuehrer Jimbo did bother to pop up on Slashdot as a few posters have wished he would, what would he say? It'd doubtlessly be the same thing he says on Wikipedia as he goes around threatening to ban anyone who exposes the abuses of his buddy clique as a so-called "troll."
Do they always have a review of a game the given week it's out? Maybe not. Can you wait? Probably. Will they do a better job saying what's good and bad about the game? Likely.
As a general rubric wherever you go, if a site isn't willing to say "rent this before buying it" or "only for genre fans" as a recommendation, you shouldn't trust their reviews.
They list it as "Compatible"... which means it'll run.
It's REALLY BIZARRE to play though, since every light source in the level can be seen through the walls... something in their emulated video code is really messed up.
Slashdot Mirror
As a non-partisan message, I don't necessarily see a problem. For some of the propagandizers out there? We HAVE had problems with chemistry profs who spent an entire class period or two railing about Bush rather than teaching the subject they were supposed to be teaching. And then the ombuds got to deal with the ethics investigation when students (who had gone to the Dean about it) complained their papers and tests were being graded down for daring to confront the professor about propagandizing in class.
:( Let's just say the chem Dean's office was treading really thin ice for QUITE a while after that, though the prof was pretty much immune since he had tenure.
It turned out the prof was doing exactly that.
In fact, I'd be greatly heartened to see any of these kids take an interest in any issue beyond their next exam.
If it were our kids doing this, I'd likely be a little easier on it. Unfortunately, we get the leftist crazy groups like Code Pinko coming in to mess up the kids' education instead.
They were leading chants of it at the May Day rallies last year. And they were DEFINITELY local La Raza and MEChA leaders doing it from the stage.
I am empathetic to the issues you're presenting here. On the grounds of the university I work at, crime is very much an issue - usually, as far as I can tell, perpetrated by individuals not enrolled at the university. I hear you, and I don't think you're trolling.
:)
That makes one... but thanks
But - what makes the camera response difficult for me is that such institutions, in my experience (which makes this just another fscking opinion), are *incapable* of setting and sticking to terms of reference for such a facility. Once the cameras are in place, people just can't help themselves in using them beyond a scope of a video record to be used to identify thieves in response to car break-ins, for example.
We don't just use them for a "video record" - we have 1-2 camera operators watching the array of cameras 24/7, ready to hit the CB and dispatch someone if they see something suspicious. That's the level of crime we have to deal with and the PD is really scared of being sued for "not being there quick enough" should something unfortunate happen.
The transition to surveillance devices is fast, not matter how big a stack of bibles were used in swearing that they would never be used that way. Once the facility is in place, there is *always* what sounds to be a reasonable context for going beyond the original terms of reference.
I believe that, in a free society, an individual has a reasonable expectation of proceeding through their day without being subject to arbitrary surveillance. If you remove that expectation, you take a significant step towards a functioning police state.
I'd love to agree with you - but in a lawsuit-happy society like ours, we had to weigh the potential downside, and one potential downside is a cop not getting there quick enough and some dead kid's family (quite possibly with money, we have a decently prestigious law school) trying to sue the university into oblivion for "not responding fast enough" to save their kid's life.
On the one hand, we have the risk that someone (and only the people in dispatch have access for watching the camera, though I suppose the recording could theoretically be requested/subpoenaed for some reason) could use them for nefarious means; on the other hand, well, it gets the PD on the scene faster and helps us avoid risk of lawsuits.
It's a lot easier to say "we did all we could" when you had the PD dispatched within 30 seconds of something happening on camera, rather than 5 minutes down the line when someone finally phoned it in (or worse yet, when someone found the dead body the next morning).
Well, HOW exactly "legals" get displaced? Because they are dumber and have lower grades or IQ score?
Actually, no - usually it's some moron in admissions trying to "promote diversity."
And what about kids from disadvantaged AMERICAN families? Poor families, families who emigrated legally, families who for whatever reason lived in shit-ass school systems like California's? I'd rather see them in than your so-called "favorable candidate for citizenship" any day.
Hell, the kids have already been fucked by the number of illegals packing in and ruining California's public school system, now you fuck them out of college too?
That may be true, but we had two options:
#1 - install this and have the fastest response time for cops that we possibly could.
#2 - risk a MASSIVE FUCKING LAWSUIT by someone who was mugged, carjacked, raped, or god forbid the family of someone who was MURDERED when they claim we "didn't do enough" to prevent the crime or aid the victims.
Doesn't matter if we would have won the lawsuit, which is seriously in doubt (juries LOVE to hand out the money of "the government"), the cost of litigating alone would have been a pain, and likely any settlement would have included this kind of stuff anyways.
If they're undocumented, how do you know they are foreign-born?
When you apply to college, you have to submit various documents of identity. A simple identity check is enough to catch most of them, but thanks to "sensitive" morons like you we can't do it - and as a result we've had kids (and parents) screaming bloody murder because their SSN's were being used to apply for illegal aliens and some of the loan companies ran checks on the SSN in question and caught the fraud.
Accents? Okay, say you do "your papers please" on everyone with a foreign-sounding accent. Why do you want to track these people now? You just report undocumented students to Immigration, job done.
Better still: you don't let those who are undocumented - e.g. not citizens and not having a valid visa - enroll. Save the space in classes (we DO have limits on how many kids can get into each class each semester) for those who are entitled to be there.
So, what you're saying is there are no cameras in the white-dominated slums then?
We happen to be next to a rather unsavory "'hood" as the term is used. Lots of cars blaring gangsta rap, lots of gang activity, lots of drug deals, lots of problems.
perhaps you should instead take a closer look at your admissions office. Certainly they wouldn't be looking the other way just to get those massive federal subsidies per student enrolled...
Actually, the rapes and problems are committed less than 50% of the time by students, but it's devilishly hard to keep the neighbors from coming onto campus, even after we've had multiple gang shootouts at the basketball courts right between two dorm buildings. The administration is afraid of Jesse Jackson showing up and having another "march."
3. Keep an eye (or hundreds of them) focused on campus. Surveillance has become a boom industry nationally--one that now reaches deep into the heart of campuses. In fact, universities have witnessed explosive growth since 2001 in the electronic surveillance of students, faculty and campus workers. On ever more campuses, closed-circuit security cameras can track people's every move, often from hidden or undisclosed locations, sometimes even into classrooms.
I helped get this established on our campus. Why did we do it? It has nothing to do with "tracking everyone" and everything to do with crime. We have cameras on the parking lots because we kept having "neighbors" from the black-dominated slums nearby breaking into cars and carjacking people, and so they now have someone watching to dispatch a cop to a problem spot 24/7. We have cameras on buildings leading to classrooms, and even a few IN classrooms, because of people committing rapes and getting into fights.
5. Track foreign-born students; keep the undocumented out.
Yeah. Because enforcing the law is a problem... how?
The American Immigration Law Foundation estimates that only one in twenty undocumented immigrants who graduate high school goes on to enroll in a college--many don't go because they cannot afford the tuition but also because they have good reason to be afraid: ICE has deported a number of those who did make it to college, some before they could graduate.
When every one that gets in displaces a legal citizen, legal resident, legal visa-holder who had the RIGHT to apply... yeah. I applaud such efforts.
I work on a University campus, so I know what's really going on. It's simple: too many people abused their "right" to free speech by making it impossible to hold classes, being rowdy and loud in the halls, preventing people from passing into buildings, etc. In essence, depriving the students of the very thing they paid for. End result? The university isn't about having "free speech all the time", it's where people pay for an education. So the Universities had to strike a balance, and they had to do something so that those who wanted to protest can do so, but WITHOUT DISRUPTING CLASSES.
You don't have the "right" to stand up and have a bitch-fest in a class you're signed up for, either - if you disrupt class, the professor has the right to order you out and call security if you don't leave. You don't have the "right" to prevent people from reaching classes either, and we had fuckwits from Code Pinko blockading the classrooms of engineering profs who had military service records and have some military research grants.
And that even includes the fuckwad professors who hold chemistry class bitching about Bush and why everyone should be antiwar, too. You want to protest them? Take it up w/ the Dean, in the student newspaper, in the courts, or on your own time - not in the class.
students at Hampton and Pace universities faced expulsion for handing out antiwar fliers, aka "unauthorized materials."
I don't care what you're doing - whether it's an anti-abortion flyer, a pro-abortion flyer, an antiwar flyer, a pro-war flyer, or an advertising for your frat/sorostitute group's drinking party. If you're trying to force it into people's hands, or putting it on their cars (which is what WE get all the time where I work)... no. If someone actively takes it from you? Fine. But you don't have the right to force crap into my hands and you don't have the right to fuck with my vehicle. And I'm 100% sure that's the bullcrap they are really referring to.
I also love this little gem:
1. Target dissidents. As the warfare state has triggered dissent, the campus has attracted increasing scrutiny--with student protesters in the cross hairs. The government's number-one target? Peace and justice organizations.
I'd trust the guys writing this so-called "report" more if those so-called "peace and justice organizations" weren't fronts for communist groups (ANSWER, International Socialist Workers Party, etc), anarchist groups, blatant racial supremacist organizations (MEChA and La Raza, motto "For the race, everything, for other races, nothing"), or international terrorist/genocide groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.
I mean, really. We had a table of morons set up who were boldly collecting money that they admitted they'd be sending to Hezbollah. They should all have been deported for violating their visas - half of them had already dropped this semester's classes anyways, like they do every semester.
Ok, the KISS song was a good choice.
"The Seeker"? Please. Can I get some Tommy out here?
they included some DECENT songs by said artists.
I mean, come on - "Same Old Song and Dance" is the best Aerosmith they could get? SHAME.
Seriously, there are SO many better songs out there.
In the US, consumers were stuck with substandard, feature-stripped DVD recorders.
-Media problems
Nothing would work with the next generation of media (I was given as a "gift" a co-worker's old one that takes 1X and nothing but 1X... the "replacement" took nothing but 4X, wouldn't even work with the legacy 1X disks she had left over). Companies like Philips were shit-poor about issuing firmware updates to use current media, instead trying to forced-obsolete their products and force people to shell out $700-800 to replace a 1-2 year old burner.
-Lack of hard drives and smart burning
Not till the 4th generation did they include a hard drive to remove commercials before the data was burned, meaning if you record 2 hours of show you just recorded 40 minutes of wasted space. Trying to archive was a disaster with that going on.
-Lack of ability to access cable
In order to screw people further, cable companies started altering the phase of their signal to work with only proprietary set-top boxes (my ATi All-In-Wonder got screwed by this too, thank you Time Warner and Comcrap for making my purchase worthless). Want a DVR or recording? Better get their one that's built to be able to handle the phase-shifted signals... and is "rented" to you. Digital cable's even worse, because few if any DVD recorders recognize it, making you try to do a set-top box pass-through (same issue if you have satellite) to set the channel or else pray it has codes for its remote-interceptor dongle to do the channel changing work.
Chances of getting a DVD burner unit cable of receiving component video or HD-quality? GOOD LUCK. The market's now been abandoned. If you want to do it, you build your own MythTV box or something.
The human eye isn't a 100% analog device either - it's a digital device which takes light sampling using rods (black/white luminance) and cones (color information) and sorts them together.
Damage the eye, and you can get a "blind spot" where all the rods and cones are defunct. Drop to low lighting conditions where there's not enough to activate the cones, and you switch to rod-only black and white "night vision" with the brain filling in what it *thinks* the color of something should be based on what you perceive objects to be.
The real problem is simply that human visual acuity isn't actually all that great. Can you tell the difference between a 480p and 720p image on your computer monitor? Probably, but you're sitting a foot and a half away from it.
From 10 feet away, you can *barely* distinguish a 480p image from a 720p image on a 30" set.
Go up to a 60" set and you can barely tell between 720p and 1080i/p from the same distance.
Me? I have a 50" TV. My max viewing distance is 12 feet. My minimum is 8 feet. (I occasionally move the couch). It's a 720p native screen and that's just fine by me.
I've saved a number of people on the order of $1000 by showing them this graph at a local Best Buy and having them simply stand in front of a TV known to be getting an HD feed and step back and forth. The salesmonkeys hate me for it.
wasn't this supposed to beat Daikatana to market?
Be able to pilot... all of the above.
Elemental suits / IS Armor if you want. Tanks and Hovers and the rest, if you want. Participate in mixed-army fighting.
Mechs, if you want. Build your way up in the fights on Solaris...
Aerotech - in both the atmosphere, and in space battles where 'Mechs are mostly sitting ducks.
Or take over being a gunner in one of the naval-class Dropships or JumpShips...
Properly designed, this has so much amazing potential! Think about it - people are still playing Mechwarrior 2 and Mechwarrior 4 online today. Virtual World simpod sites are doing great now that they got them away from Dave & Buster's and into the hands of people who care about them and will do the maintenance, and they're about to release the updated version of Red Planet in a few months.
Think about how well the old Mechwarrior online "persistent universe" (Mechwarrior 3025, look it up, one of the first large-scale MMOs) was shaping up before MS pulled the licensing out from under it. Now consider how much 8 more years of hardware power can do for it.
They bill themselves as an encyclopedia.
They engineered the site to be the first hit on as many searches as they can.
"With great power comes great responsibility" - like it or not, they ARE affecting perceptions every time someone comes to their "compilation". The mere fact that they are spurs on the groups that try to bias it.
As an example, I think we should have a higher tax on gasoline to drive down consumption
and therefore directly injure people who have to rely on it for their livelihoods beyond simply traveling to and from work - farmers, truckers, deliverymen, and so forth - who are probably making fucking close to minimum wage anyways.
Is this possible in our democracy? Not really. Everybody votes against anyone who would even suggest it.
And for good reason!
During World War II, there was mandatory recycling in a number of cities, and that has benefits, but people hated it, and it got repealed as soon as the war ended.
I've lived in a mandatory-recycling city, because Milwaukee and its surrounding suburbs all have that. You know what's funny about it? That's the only way to get it to happen. Where I live now, I'd love to recycle my glass and a lot of my paper, but I can't because without the government program it's not fucking profitable and there's no place around willing to take anything but scrap metal for recycling.
An absolute ruler has the ability to switch policy overnight.
And royally fuck up when they do, too.
If you could insure the whole "philosopher king" thing, make sure you have a person as absolute ruler who is both capable and worthy of it, then that would be by far the best system. Since you can't, we go with democracy, not because it's in any way better, but because it limits the possible harm that can come out of government toward the people. However democracy can't save the people from their own shortsightedness, and it's just damn inefficient.
"Democracy is the worst form of government... except for all the others." And we don't really have a democracy (you want that you need to go to a religious commune, or else Switzerland is the closest existing); we have a representative republic.
And even the representative republic royally fucks up when you have shitwads like Shrub who are more interested in the $$$ they're going to get from the drug gangs for keeping the border open and starting wars to keep the public's attention off of it.
So what is the ultimate goal here. Is Wikkipedia really an open encyclopedia accessible to everyone or id it an exclusive club of yes men attempting to push some hidden agenda.
"Yes."
For a lot of topics, Der Fuehrer Jimbo or one of his cronies probably don't give a rat's ass. So they wind up leaving those alone, at which point other dynamics (also here) come into play.
And if it is even remotely the second, I could see how exposing the corruption would be a serious things. It threatens the validity of the agenda. But I have to ask, if there is no agenda, then why would corrupt practices be something of interest.
Corrupt practices should be of interest on the basis that they're corrupt, but also because everything has real-world implications. Articles on a country have real implications - they can impact tourism, they can impact politics, they can impact how people view the country. Articles on a political dispute, or a political leader, can have a formative impact on how they are viewed, especially as Wikipedia has hit so high in its search rankings seeing as it's essentially one gigantic fucking linkfarm (that gives out no bump to anyone else now that they implemented external-link "nofollow" tags).
Psychological research for decades has shown what ought to be pretty obvious - the first impression someone gets about something is always the strongest, and absent a massive shock or mound of evidence, will always have more impact on thought patterns than later information. Wikipedia, by virtue of being engineered to hit high in the search rankings, is the first place most people will get information on a given random topic.
That makes it important.
And if there is an agenda, what might it be? I know they have had slanted coverage of politically charged events. Things like one paragraph somewhat hidden on other pages explaining the real problems with the Katrina response and three quarters of the main article focusing on the government, Bush and how evil they are. But I doubt their motivation is purely political.
Depends what article and who you're asking. A number of $cientologists work to bias the hell out of $cientology articles - hiding what the Cult of $cientology wants hidden from view, such as the fact that the "Oxford Capacity Analysis" (their rigged personality test) has nothing to do with Oxford University for example. A rather sizable group of Arabs work to whitewash and control any article related to Islam and regularly war over the Israel/Palestinian issue... the trick is getting yourself entrenched and acquiring allies who are equally fanatical on some other topic that you don't really give a rat's ass about. You scratch their back, they scratch yours... and at the end of the day, the result is that most of the administrators on the site aren't set up about making a better encyclopedia, but keeping an article under their control and helping their new "friends" do the same on theirs.
Check out This page as one example. What do we see? A user named OrangeMike, who just "happens" to be a well-known Democrat operative in Milwaukee and longstanding friend of communist mayor Frank Zeidler comes along and starts whitewashing articles that mention his friend, and abuses his connections to other admins to get his opponents banned. The situation is almost a textbook example of what Parker Peters refers to.
A short time later, after questions of his conduct are removed from >his Adminship candidacy page by his abusive-a
Look at how they operate. Parker Peters did a fantastic job writing it up: http://parkerpeters.livejournal.com/
If you look at every one of these cases, who keeps popping up? It's the same group of editors - David Gerard, JayJG, JzG, SlimVirgin, etc... all with the blessing of Der Fuehrer Jimbo.
If Der Fuehrer Jimbo did bother to pop up on Slashdot as a few posters have wished he would, what would he say? It'd doubtlessly be the same thing he says on Wikipedia as he goes around threatening to ban anyone who exposes the abuses of his buddy clique as a so-called "troll."
Hit a few places that don't fuck around with ads and deadlines. Penny Arcade, Glide Underground, GamerDad, Curmudgeon Gamer and the like.
Do they always have a review of a game the given week it's out? Maybe not. Can you wait? Probably. Will they do a better job saying what's good and bad about the game? Likely.
As a general rubric wherever you go, if a site isn't willing to say "rent this before buying it" or "only for genre fans" as a recommendation, you shouldn't trust their reviews.
They list it as "Compatible"... which means it'll run.
It's REALLY BIZARRE to play though, since every light source in the level can be seen through the walls... something in their emulated video code is really messed up.
Like immigrants, the ones that make it to our shores tend to be the top half of the quality bell curve.
You haven't looked outside recently or gone by a Home Depot to see the crap that came up from Mexico, I see.
has about as much to do with the original story (or even modern revisions) as I, Robot had to do with the novel or even Asimov's creation.
And it'll probably be just as shitty a movie too.
It was a HELL of a great game. Didn't precisely mirror the movie, but damn fun to play... over and over again.
Far too few games are fun to play over and over again these days. Most of them are "ok I'm done, now what?"