I've always left the ads on for Slashdot, mostly because Slashdot's ads aren't annoying.
Now, for sites like Slate, or CNN, I use Adblock quite regularly, mostly because they love the FMV-With-Blasting-Audio ads and the "hey look it's a giant fucking flash video covering the article up, now hunt for the close icon that we camouflaged somewhere vaguely near one of the four corners to get it to fucking go away" ads.
A student can do better on hard questions than easy ones simply by being of the type to mess up frequently on the "eliminate two and guess the most likely" multiple-guess strategy when they can *quickly* eliminate two, and then actually do the hard work of solving the problem down to one answer on the hard ones.
A student who gets a reality check after a low initial grade, and works their ass off, is going to hopefully do better on their next test.
Now, if this extends to the entire class, then you know there was cheating - but you still can't eliminate the possibility of catching innocent students from the following pattern in your dragnet, particularly when you have a large (say, 100+-student "seminar" type class like most intro-level college courses) sample size.
You don't want the kids texting while they are in the test? Make them hand in the cell phones and turn their pockets out. Hang a video camera and save the tape so you can go back and look for suspicious behavior if you think someone cheated during the test. But don't rely on a giant witch-hunting setup where you accuse students of cheating simply because their responses didn't "fit pattern."
Oil gets subsidized to a certain degree. But if you really want to see massive subsidies and protectionist, fucked-up tariffs and other governmental screwups at work, you need to look at the corn lobby. For the past five years, corn subsidies have been $37b; oil subsidies only $14b.
The end result is our diet is fucked up (way, way too much chemically incorrect HFCS), and regular sugar being way more expensive than it should be.
Plus, because corn is subsidized, all the farmers grow corn (which actually is a shit-poor source of energy once you calculate the net gain post-processing) instead of something better.
There is no real world situation where we encounter Polar Express level-of-competence simulacra and our life is threatened if we make an incorrect decision
Today, yes.
In evolutionary past... there are lots of illnesses that cause people's minds to degrade (animal minds, too). The most common one that comes to mind is rabies, which also makes people and animals move in a somewhat zombielike, jerky fashion.
In the modern world, identifying a rabid animal isn't quite as needed, since vaccinations have helped to slow the spread of the disease via "herd immunity" even to the "wild", feral animals that live in many cities and urban areas. Go back a century or more, on the other hand, and identifying it early - in livestock, working dogs, and wild animals - was a much more necessary skill. Hell, identifying an infected food animal is important so as not to eat it.
And then there's African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), leprosy, Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob, transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (aka "kuru", "laughing sickness"), and other "prion" diseases.
There is no consumer grade service competition in my area. As a result, even the shit-poor "entry level" Comcrap offering they want $85/month for. "Business class" in my area is $300+ because Comcrap has a monopoly on that, too.
That'd be great if any one of them actually offered a real, trustworthy way to tell how much bandwidth you were using.
Comcrap promised to provide that two years ago when they started throttling people and saying you had a "250GB/month limit", and where is it? FUCKING VAPORWARE, that's where.
But they're not talking about that, are they? They don't want my streaming video to interfere with their other customers' VOIP calls... which would seem to suggest that they don't actually have the capacity to deliver their Unlimited****** (up to) 10Mbps** that they sold to everyone in my neighborhood.
They don't give a crap about anyone's VOIP calls.
What they care about is degrading a competing service - Youtube, Hulu, Netflix streaming - to the point where, out of frustration, many customers will pay through the nose for their shitty-quality monopolist "video on demand" cable services instead.
This is the kind of argument the religious fundies love to make all the time right before they shut down any speech they don't like - such as someone pointing out the ugly truths about $cientology, or the Mormon Cult, or the Pedoprophet Mohammed, or the Catholics, or the Baptists, or any other group like that.
Let the Baptists get control of your area and see what kind of crap they come up with for blue laws and the banning of dance clubs. Then remember how you got there.
If you let someone censor speech, they WILL censor speech. The point is to stop that from happening. In an arena where the government has either created, or allowed, monopolies to develop, we then need net-neutrality regulation to prevent speech from being squelched.
Or you trust business : you can choose (for a little more money probably, yes, deal with it) a better provider, additionally you can build something yourself
Obviously you live in an alternate reality or on another continent.
Here in the Americas, 90% of the populace is royally fucked for any sort of competition. We live in areas where even if there used to be competition, all the ISP's have gotten into little collusion agreements. My area used to have Verizon, Time Warner, and Comcast all competing for cable service: TW and Comcrap both went into "charge under cost" to drive Verizon out, then entered into an agreement where TW agreed to pull out of half my state in exchange for Comcrap pulling out of the other half. End result: now TW and Comcrap, each in the other half of the state, rape the consumer up the ass with monopoly-level pricing.
profit, as it has the market forces to help keep it in check.
Only till some asshatted megaconglomerate comes in and runs in an area at under-cost until they drive out all competition, then jack the rates and fuck the consumers as a monopoly.
See also: the shitty situation most of America is stuck in for ISP service. There *IS* no real competition.
But the problem with NOT having government regulation is that the monopolies fuck the consumer just as hard then.
Look at all the places in the US where cable companies have a monopoly, simply because they managed to raise the barrier to entry high and entered into collusion agreements with other companies to pull out (my area used to have TW, Comcast, and Verizon for cable TV options, now we're stuck with Comcrap only because they ran Verizon out by running under cost and then TW "traded" us away by promising to pull out of our city if Comcrap pulled out of another city on the other side of the state).
Now look at what precisely Comcrap has been trying to do: block off streaming video from Youtube, Hulu, and Netflix to force people in their monopoly-areas to pay more for Comcrap's crappy shitty "video on demand" cable service instead.
No. In this case, we need government regulation. The trick is making sure it's the *right* regulation and properly enforced.
If Comcrap defines Youtube and Hulu as "unwanted" because their video offerings conflict with Comcrap's crappy, underfilled, looks-like-crap streaming video and extortionately-priced cable tv "services", your statement makes no sense at all.
And that's pretty much what Comcrap and TW have been setting up to do.
He's a comedian. That means that other people - the uneducated masses mostly - find him humorous.
It does not necessarily follow that he actually has a developed sense of humor, merely that he happened upon enough catchphrases that the yokels would hyuk-hyuk to over and over again to make a career of it. Kind of like Jeff Foxworthy if JF stole Mister Rogers' wardrobe.
I suppose you're in full support of monopoly cable providers like Comcrap to block off all sites like this from their subscriber base.
And you're of course in full support of monopoly cable providers like Comcrap or TW deciding to try to extort companies like Google or Hulu to "pay for more access" merely because a large segment of their subscribers access Google or Hulu services.
Just think - every cable provider, every DNS provider, could be just as fucking locked off as people behind the "great firewall of china" are now, and you'd probably love it, huh?
I find myself wishing he'd stick to topics like this rather than his usual left-wing diatribes.
Sigh. I suppose the one thing we can expect a comedian-by-trade to understand is the need not just for government to respect free speech, but government to work to ensure that mega-giganto-corporations can't simply squish out everyone else's freedom of speech by drowning them out. Which at this point, thanks to a collection of bought-off Supreme Court boobs, may require constitutional amendment itself.:(
Remember the way Facebook treated the "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" event.
The idea that Facebook is a company that will actually try to protect free speech is pure nonsense. They'll bend over to appease the illegitimate Chinese regime in a heartbeat. Good luck having a "human rights for China" page, unless your definition of "human rights" is "throwing anyone who disagrees with the Chinese Communist Party into a work gulag".
When I bought a house, with an FHA loan, I was informed that the loans are only "temporarily" run through FHA and that it'd be sold to a bank within 3 months.
When I found out BofA bought my home loan, I cringed. They're nothing but assholes, the crap I went through when they bought out MBNA and acquired my main credit card was unbelievable.
They recently started fucking around with the interest rates (fortunately the one on the house payment is fixed!) on cards, and they tried to stick an $80 "security" monthly payment to my escrow when, the month after paying yearly property tax, the escrow went a few cents under $50.
Yeah. "Bank of America" needs to get their asses kicked.
In other words, what you're saying is that what gay men - or at least, the gay men running the fashion industry - are into is a body type that looks like a prepubescent boy.
The BMI charts were made assuming you were a WASP farmer, predisposed to being relatively lean. The types whose shoulder joint is roughly as deep as their ribcage.
Take a look at BMI if you look at more eastern european populations (the ones who have "barrel chest" rather than "thin rectangle" ribcages) and contrast.
Actually, one might argue that there is a real social problem in female body image (and judging from the proliferation of drugs intended to increase penis size, male as well) in western society.
It could further be argued that much of this has to do with both the "soft porn" of the fashion industry, and the exaggerated bodies of "hard core" porn as well.
To have realistic body portrayals - perhaps not the morbidly obese, unless you're someone with a fetish for that, but not "Olive Oyl and Brutus" caricature-bodies either - regain the mainstream spotlight might not be such a bad thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always left the ads on for Slashdot, mostly because Slashdot's ads aren't annoying.
Now, for sites like Slate, or CNN, I use Adblock quite regularly, mostly because they love the FMV-With-Blasting-Audio ads and the "hey look it's a giant fucking flash video covering the article up, now hunt for the close icon that we camouflaged somewhere vaguely near one of the four corners to get it to fucking go away" ads.
No kidding.
A student can do better on hard questions than easy ones simply by being of the type to mess up frequently on the "eliminate two and guess the most likely" multiple-guess strategy when they can *quickly* eliminate two, and then actually do the hard work of solving the problem down to one answer on the hard ones.
A student who gets a reality check after a low initial grade, and works their ass off, is going to hopefully do better on their next test.
Now, if this extends to the entire class, then you know there was cheating - but you still can't eliminate the possibility of catching innocent students from the following pattern in your dragnet, particularly when you have a large (say, 100+-student "seminar" type class like most intro-level college courses) sample size.
You don't want the kids texting while they are in the test? Make them hand in the cell phones and turn their pockets out. Hang a video camera and save the tape so you can go back and look for suspicious behavior if you think someone cheated during the test. But don't rely on a giant witch-hunting setup where you accuse students of cheating simply because their responses didn't "fit pattern."
I'm not sure quite what you are referring to.
Oil gets subsidized to a certain degree. But if you really want to see massive subsidies and protectionist, fucked-up tariffs and other governmental screwups at work, you need to look at the corn lobby. For the past five years, corn subsidies have been $37b; oil subsidies only $14b.
The end result is our diet is fucked up (way, way too much chemically incorrect HFCS), and regular sugar being way more expensive than it should be.
Plus, because corn is subsidized, all the farmers grow corn (which actually is a shit-poor source of energy once you calculate the net gain post-processing) instead of something better.
There is no real world situation where we encounter Polar Express level-of-competence simulacra and our life is threatened if we make an incorrect decision
Today, yes.
In evolutionary past... there are lots of illnesses that cause people's minds to degrade (animal minds, too). The most common one that comes to mind is rabies, which also makes people and animals move in a somewhat zombielike, jerky fashion.
In the modern world, identifying a rabid animal isn't quite as needed, since vaccinations have helped to slow the spread of the disease via "herd immunity" even to the "wild", feral animals that live in many cities and urban areas. Go back a century or more, on the other hand, and identifying it early - in livestock, working dogs, and wild animals - was a much more necessary skill. Hell, identifying an infected food animal is important so as not to eat it.
And then there's African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), leprosy, Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob, transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (aka "kuru", "laughing sickness"), and other "prion" diseases.
Actually, the effect would have worked just fine if they'd only used it for Clu. After all, Clu was supposed to be a corrupted, visual simulation.
The problem is, they used the effect for that first "Sam as a kid" scene as well, which just didn't look right.
Nope. Not the way it works.
There is no consumer grade service competition in my area. As a result, even the shit-poor "entry level" Comcrap offering they want $85/month for. "Business class" in my area is $300+ because Comcrap has a monopoly on that, too.
See also: you're an idiot.
Use World of Warcraft with regularity and you'll be over 20GB in no time.
That'd be great if any one of them actually offered a real, trustworthy way to tell how much bandwidth you were using.
Comcrap promised to provide that two years ago when they started throttling people and saying you had a "250GB/month limit", and where is it? FUCKING VAPORWARE, that's where.
But they're not talking about that, are they? They don't want my streaming video to interfere with their other customers' VOIP calls... which would seem to suggest that they don't actually have the capacity to deliver their Unlimited****** (up to) 10Mbps** that they sold to everyone in my neighborhood.
They don't give a crap about anyone's VOIP calls.
What they care about is degrading a competing service - Youtube, Hulu, Netflix streaming - to the point where, out of frustration, many customers will pay through the nose for their shitty-quality monopolist "video on demand" cable services instead.
This is the kind of argument the religious fundies love to make all the time right before they shut down any speech they don't like - such as someone pointing out the ugly truths about $cientology, or the Mormon Cult, or the Pedoprophet Mohammed, or the Catholics, or the Baptists, or any other group like that.
Let the Baptists get control of your area and see what kind of crap they come up with for blue laws and the banning of dance clubs. Then remember how you got there.
If you let someone censor speech, they WILL censor speech. The point is to stop that from happening. In an arena where the government has either created, or allowed, monopolies to develop, we then need net-neutrality regulation to prevent speech from being squelched.
Or you trust business : you can choose (for a little more money probably, yes, deal with it) a better provider, additionally you can build something yourself
Obviously you live in an alternate reality or on another continent.
Here in the Americas, 90% of the populace is royally fucked for any sort of competition. We live in areas where even if there used to be competition, all the ISP's have gotten into little collusion agreements. My area used to have Verizon, Time Warner, and Comcast all competing for cable service: TW and Comcrap both went into "charge under cost" to drive Verizon out, then entered into an agreement where TW agreed to pull out of half my state in exchange for Comcrap pulling out of the other half. End result: now TW and Comcrap, each in the other half of the state, rape the consumer up the ass with monopoly-level pricing.
profit, as it has the market forces to help keep it in check.
Only till some asshatted megaconglomerate comes in and runs in an area at under-cost until they drive out all competition, then jack the rates and fuck the consumers as a monopoly.
See also: the shitty situation most of America is stuck in for ISP service. There *IS* no real competition.
But the problem with NOT having government regulation is that the monopolies fuck the consumer just as hard then.
Look at all the places in the US where cable companies have a monopoly, simply because they managed to raise the barrier to entry high and entered into collusion agreements with other companies to pull out (my area used to have TW, Comcast, and Verizon for cable TV options, now we're stuck with Comcrap only because they ran Verizon out by running under cost and then TW "traded" us away by promising to pull out of our city if Comcrap pulled out of another city on the other side of the state).
Now look at what precisely Comcrap has been trying to do: block off streaming video from Youtube, Hulu, and Netflix to force people in their monopoly-areas to pay more for Comcrap's crappy shitty "video on demand" cable service instead.
No. In this case, we need government regulation. The trick is making sure it's the *right* regulation and properly enforced.
"block unwanted traffic entirely."
If Comcrap defines Youtube and Hulu as "unwanted" because their video offerings conflict with Comcrap's crappy, underfilled, looks-like-crap streaming video and extortionately-priced cable tv "services", your statement makes no sense at all.
And that's pretty much what Comcrap and TW have been setting up to do.
He's a comedian. That means that other people - the uneducated masses mostly - find him humorous.
It does not necessarily follow that he actually has a developed sense of humor, merely that he happened upon enough catchphrases that the yokels would hyuk-hyuk to over and over again to make a career of it. Kind of like Jeff Foxworthy if JF stole Mister Rogers' wardrobe.
Yeah.
I suppose you're in full support of monopoly cable providers like Comcrap to block off all sites like this from their subscriber base.
And you're of course in full support of monopoly cable providers like Comcrap or TW deciding to try to extort companies like Google or Hulu to "pay for more access" merely because a large segment of their subscribers access Google or Hulu services.
Just think - every cable provider, every DNS provider, could be just as fucking locked off as people behind the "great firewall of china" are now, and you'd probably love it, huh?
I find myself wishing he'd stick to topics like this rather than his usual left-wing diatribes.
Sigh. I suppose the one thing we can expect a comedian-by-trade to understand is the need not just for government to respect free speech, but government to work to ensure that mega-giganto-corporations can't simply squish out everyone else's freedom of speech by drowning them out. Which at this point, thanks to a collection of bought-off Supreme Court boobs, may require constitutional amendment itself. :(
Remember the way Facebook treated the "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" event.
The idea that Facebook is a company that will actually try to protect free speech is pure nonsense. They'll bend over to appease the illegitimate Chinese regime in a heartbeat. Good luck having a "human rights for China" page, unless your definition of "human rights" is "throwing anyone who disagrees with the Chinese Communist Party into a work gulag".
When I bought a house, with an FHA loan, I was informed that the loans are only "temporarily" run through FHA and that it'd be sold to a bank within 3 months.
When I found out BofA bought my home loan, I cringed. They're nothing but assholes, the crap I went through when they bought out MBNA and acquired my main credit card was unbelievable.
They recently started fucking around with the interest rates (fortunately the one on the house payment is fixed!) on cards, and they tried to stick an $80 "security" monthly payment to my escrow when, the month after paying yearly property tax, the escrow went a few cents under $50.
Yeah. "Bank of America" needs to get their asses kicked.
In other words, what you're saying is that what gay men - or at least, the gay men running the fashion industry - are into is a body type that looks like a prepubescent boy.
Do go on...
It all depends on what the definition of "is" is.
Full credit for that distinction given to Bubba Clinton...
No shit.
The BMI charts were made assuming you were a WASP farmer, predisposed to being relatively lean. The types whose shoulder joint is roughly as deep as their ribcage.
Take a look at BMI if you look at more eastern european populations (the ones who have "barrel chest" rather than "thin rectangle" ribcages) and contrast.
SGU was "beating a dead horse."
Then again so was SGA.
And so were the last few seasons of the first series.
Actually, one might argue that there is a real social problem in female body image (and judging from the proliferation of drugs intended to increase penis size, male as well) in western society.
It could further be argued that much of this has to do with both the "soft porn" of the fashion industry, and the exaggerated bodies of "hard core" porn as well.
To have realistic body portrayals - perhaps not the morbidly obese, unless you're someone with a fetish for that, but not "Olive Oyl and Brutus" caricature-bodies either - regain the mainstream spotlight might not be such a bad thing.