could make it a federal felony to use your blog, social media like MySpace and Facebook, or any other Web media 'to cause substantial emotional distress through "severe, repeated, and hostile" speech.'
So basically this would mean the end of Slashdot...
1. Spell it out in fine print on your resume or cover letter. "If you Google search for my name, you will turn up hits regarding a pedophile who happens to have the same name as me. This is not me."
2. If we just stopped using names and gave everyone a GUID we could avoid this kind of nonsense.
Any review coming from someone who thought "Wall-E" was a "perfect A" is automatically untrustworthy in my book. "Wall-E" was just a thinly-veiled social commentary (and an insulting one at that) disguised masquerading as a harmless kids movie. It should go in the exact same crap bin as "Happy Feet".
Kids (and their parents) go to animated movies to have a fun time, not to be preached to. Hollywood needs to stop using kids movies to preach an agenda.
That cluster could surely run enough web clients that you could create your own "Slashdot Effect". Just put a front-end web page on it with a simple URL submission box.
Is this because of the fact that Bill Gates has made the whole industry look nerdy? No, it's because they've heard all the horror stories IT admins have been telling for years about being undervalued and ignored by management, being driven crazy by dumb users, and meaningless but required certifications and training courses. IT basically sounds like a difficult, thankless, mind-numbing job, so why would anyone want it?
Process is worthless unless people follow its spirit to the letter, and no process can completely enforce 100% good behavior. I've been a professional software developer for over 10 years and it has become quite clear to me that the most important two factors in software development are selecting the right people to work on it and managing those people well.
First, I think you chose a poor example, because I think a vast majority of Slashdotters can't name a single "famous flautist", male OR female. Not true, I'm a great flatulist.
Yes, many become so jaded and skeptical that they shoot down new ideas before they have a chance to get fleshed out. That kind of skepticism is unhealthy and not conducive to creativity and invention.
There's an appropriate time and way to be skeptical, and that's part of what I meant when I said a "healthy dose" of skepticism. Ideally, a skeptic can not only verbalize all the problems he sees in a proposal, but suggest ways to address those problems without discarding the entire idea or its good intentions.
But suppose you have a grown adult who has already been raised in all the flawed ways you describe. How can you undo the damage and teach them to start having a healthy dose of skepticism?
My experience with kneeling chairs is that sitting in one for longer than about 5 minutes causes my knees and lower legs to go completely numb due to all the weight placed just below the knees. I've never understood how anyone could find them comfortable.
The fundamental principle behind them -- putting the lower spine into a more neutral position by letting your hip joints form a larger than 90-degree angle -- seems sound, but all it really does is move a bunch of weight from being supported by an area with lots of padding (your butt) to an area with none (your knees and chins).
Technically, only the government should ever be asking for your Social Security Number. No one else (doctors offices, businesses, lenders, etc) should ever be asking for it, even though they do. Whenever I'm asked, I provide only the last 4 digits, and if that's insufficient for their purposes, then I refuse to do business with them.
There were some hints of a way forward that might work for both the scientific community and the public, but the challenges appear significant. Challenges, such as, say, 75% or so of the general public being incredibly stupid and incapable of rational thought?
...a pirated copy does not usually equal a lost sale. Duh. That's what I've been saying for years. People pirate stuff because they wouldn't or couldn't buy it in the first place.
I'm not talking about counterfitting, which is entirely different in my mind from piracy. Counterfitting is when someone produces copies of a product and passes them off as the real deal for profit. Counterfitters should go to jail for trying to make a buck off someone else's hard work. Piracy is when someone snags a free and obviously unofficial copy for themselves and no one makes any money off the deal. Pirates should be left alone because they're not hurting anyone.
I'm an atheist who had the unpleasant misfortunate of growing up in a small super-Christian town outside of Houston, Texas.
In my experience, most people (both children and adults) who are dead-set against evolution don't understand the theory at all. They think it is saying that a monkey can magically and spontaneously turn into a human being. And they scoff at such a notion (as anyone would) and get deeply offended by it (as almost all people would, since almost all people think human beings are inherently superior to all other animals).
All the scientific community needs to do to educate the religious public (and reduce its defensiveness) is to stop portraying evolution as an example of "apes turning into people over time" and instead portray it as "environment killing off individuals who aren't built for survival". That's much less offensive to the average person's sensibilities, and it allows them to open their mind to the concept without automatically rejecting it up front.
Once a person can understand what evolution is, and see countless of examples of it at work in the world, then their mind can begin to open to seeing that humans aren't immune to it, and that it must be true for all living things.
First, as others have already pointed out, the goal of any online personals business is to sell memberships and/or online advertising space, not to successfully match people up. When people finally find a good relationship, they don't need the site anymore, so they stop coming back, which is bad for business. So the goal of the online personals business is to keep people desperate, unmatched, signed up, and trying.
Second, this guy isn't solving the right problem. Writing up a detailed solution to the wrong problem is no help to anyone.
One serious problem with online personals is the gender gap: 95% men, 5% women. Most of the men are pissed off because they can't get women to respond to them. Most of the women are pissed off because they are bombarded daily with hundreds of messages from desperate men. When faced with something that isn't working, women tend to just give up while men tend to obsessively keep trying in hopes that it will work. So the women get frustrated and leave the site, while the men get frustrated and keep trying even more desperately. The gender gap widens and persists.
Plus, women are generally less open than men to the idea of trying online personals in the first place. Most women tend to see introvert, antisocial men as somehow flawed or undesirable, and since they figure that's the type of man who would mostly have to use an online personals site, they conclude that there are no desirable men to be found in online personals. Most women also tend to be unreasonably paranoid, believing (incorrectly) that their odds of meeting a serial-killer rapist are automatically 1000x higher online than in real life.
Another serious problem with online personals is the spam: 95% of female profiles are fake, posted by spammers to advertise pornographic web sites.
The only way to make a personals site work is to address the real problems. You have to eliminate the spam by having real human site operators review every single profile that gets posted. And you have to close the gender gap by attacking two fronts: permit fewer men to try the site, and get more women to try the site. The first one is easy: don't let a man sign up for the site if it would make the site "man-heavy". But the second one is extremely difficult: I don't have any idea how you'd convince women that their paranoia is excessive and that their preconceived notions about shy or antisocial men are wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
could make it a federal felony to use your blog, social media like MySpace and Facebook, or any other Web media 'to cause substantial emotional distress through "severe, repeated, and hostile" speech.'
So basically this would mean the end of Slashdot...
1. Spell it out in fine print on your resume or cover letter. "If you Google search for my name, you will turn up hits regarding a pedophile who happens to have the same name as me. This is not me."
2. If we just stopped using names and gave everyone a GUID we could avoid this kind of nonsense.
People will buy a modern console and the console version of a game just to avoid these kinds of hassles.
PC game makers don't care if DRM causes them to lose PC game sales, because they'll make up for it on the console side.
For even more silly fun, write the idea up as a program, and then patent the program!
Any review coming from someone who thought "Wall-E" was a "perfect A" is automatically untrustworthy in my book. "Wall-E" was just a thinly-veiled social commentary (and an insulting one at that) disguised masquerading as a harmless kids movie. It should go in the exact same crap bin as "Happy Feet".
Kids (and their parents) go to animated movies to have a fun time, not to be preached to. Hollywood needs to stop using kids movies to preach an agenda.
What should (or can) a software company do when it cannot even break even because more people are pirating than purchasing its product?
That cluster could surely run enough web clients that you could create your own "Slashdot Effect".
Just put a front-end web page on it with a simple URL submission box.
Skynet.
Process is worthless unless people follow its spirit to the letter, and no process can completely enforce 100% good behavior. I've been a professional software developer for over 10 years and it has become quite clear to me that the most important two factors in software development are selecting the right people to work on it and managing those people well.
The way you talk must drive your significant other nuts.
Yes, many become so jaded and skeptical that they shoot down new ideas before they have a chance to get fleshed out. That kind of skepticism is unhealthy and not conducive to creativity and invention.
There's an appropriate time and way to be skeptical, and that's part of what I meant when I said a "healthy dose" of skepticism. Ideally, a skeptic can not only verbalize all the problems he sees in a proposal, but suggest ways to address those problems without discarding the entire idea or its good intentions.
So then how can you teach or persuade a "Normal" person (as you described) to see the value in analytical thinking? Is it even possible?
But suppose you have a grown adult who has already been raised in all the flawed ways you describe. How can you undo the damage and teach them to start having a healthy dose of skepticism?
Replace "widely-scattered bits under and unbalanced tree" with "dead wives," and then I think you've got it.
Damnit, I meant shins, not chins. If you have more than one chin, they are probably all well-padded anyway.
My experience with kneeling chairs is that sitting in one for longer than about 5 minutes causes my knees and lower legs to go completely numb due to all the weight placed just below the knees. I've never understood how anyone could find them comfortable.
The fundamental principle behind them -- putting the lower spine into a more neutral position by letting your hip joints form a larger than 90-degree angle -- seems sound, but all it really does is move a bunch of weight from being supported by an area with lots of padding (your butt) to an area with none (your knees and chins).
You're kidding, right? Haven't you seen all the Anonymous Cowards he's spawned?
Technically, only the government should ever be asking for your Social Security Number. No one else (doctors offices, businesses, lenders, etc) should ever be asking for it, even though they do. Whenever I'm asked, I provide only the last 4 digits, and if that's insufficient for their purposes, then I refuse to do business with them.
...a pirated copy does not usually equal a lost sale. Duh. That's what I've been saying for years. People pirate stuff because they wouldn't or couldn't buy it in the first place.
I'm not talking about counterfitting, which is entirely different in my mind from piracy. Counterfitting is when someone produces copies of a product and passes them off as the real deal for profit. Counterfitters should go to jail for trying to make a buck off someone else's hard work. Piracy is when someone snags a free and obviously unofficial copy for themselves and no one makes any money off the deal. Pirates should be left alone because they're not hurting anyone.
I'm an atheist who had the unpleasant misfortunate of growing up in a small super-Christian town outside of Houston, Texas.
In my experience, most people (both children and adults) who are dead-set against evolution don't understand the theory at all. They think it is saying that a monkey can magically and spontaneously turn into a human being. And they scoff at such a notion (as anyone would) and get deeply offended by it (as almost all people would, since almost all people think human beings are inherently superior to all other animals).
All the scientific community needs to do to educate the religious public (and reduce its defensiveness) is to stop portraying evolution as an example of "apes turning into people over time" and instead portray it as "environment killing off individuals who aren't built for survival". That's much less offensive to the average person's sensibilities, and it allows them to open their mind to the concept without automatically rejecting it up front.
Once a person can understand what evolution is, and see countless of examples of it at work in the world, then their mind can begin to open to seeing that humans aren't immune to it, and that it must be true for all living things.
First, as others have already pointed out, the goal of any online personals business is to sell memberships and/or online advertising space, not to successfully match people up. When people finally find a good relationship, they don't need the site anymore, so they stop coming back, which is bad for business. So the goal of the online personals business is to keep people desperate, unmatched, signed up, and trying.
Second, this guy isn't solving the right problem. Writing up a detailed solution to the wrong problem is no help to anyone.
One serious problem with online personals is the gender gap: 95% men, 5% women. Most of the men are pissed off because they can't get women to respond to them. Most of the women are pissed off because they are bombarded daily with hundreds of messages from desperate men. When faced with something that isn't working, women tend to just give up while men tend to obsessively keep trying in hopes that it will work. So the women get frustrated and leave the site, while the men get frustrated and keep trying even more desperately. The gender gap widens and persists.
Plus, women are generally less open than men to the idea of trying online personals in the first place. Most women tend to see introvert, antisocial men as somehow flawed or undesirable, and since they figure that's the type of man who would mostly have to use an online personals site, they conclude that there are no desirable men to be found in online personals. Most women also tend to be unreasonably paranoid, believing (incorrectly) that their odds of meeting a serial-killer rapist are automatically 1000x higher online than in real life.
Another serious problem with online personals is the spam: 95% of female profiles are fake, posted by spammers to advertise pornographic web sites.
The only way to make a personals site work is to address the real problems. You have to eliminate the spam by having real human site operators review every single profile that gets posted. And you have to close the gender gap by attacking two fronts: permit fewer men to try the site, and get more women to try the site. The first one is easy: don't let a man sign up for the site if it would make the site "man-heavy". But the second one is extremely difficult: I don't have any idea how you'd convince women that their paranoia is excessive and that their preconceived notions about shy or antisocial men are wrong.