Wow. I guess that's why, despite being a white male, I've consistently failed students who did not do the work. Its disappointing to fail 20% of a class, but it certainly happens.
But my example is nothing. All you have to do is look at the press: every now and then there's a kerfluffle about student cheating and all sections in a class will be failed. And the professors involved are usually white males.
The reality is that nearly any grading scheme is defensible as long as it is applied uniformly and consistently. Other students that complained stopped when presented with the "changing your grade would not be fair to the other students" argument -- I've only had the one who replied with "you should give everyone an A".
That student did seek retribution, but unfortunately for the student I had, naturally, been documenting the lack of work through the grading process and a separate student performance report.
I do have concerns along the lines you have raised. The standard for a "microaggression" seems to be "I was offended" or even "I thought someone else should have been offended". The other trendy label is "triggered" which similarly has no meaningful criteria or bar to reach. Still, I've never heard of either instance being used to argue for grades.
you do not need "laisre cintering" (or even laser cintering) to print metals (or metels). I've never printed plasstec, but I have printed plastic, wood, bronze and copper with my fused filament printer.
If you added in a couple of points to cover hunting and recreational shooting, I think that pretty much sums it up and illustrates nicely why there cannot be a technical solution to the problem.
It is extremely arrogant for you to put thoughts in the minds of people who are being killed to suit your political agenda. That is low, base rhetoric.
Do you believe "the other side" uses incidents for base rhetoric? Rise above them, don't stoop to their level.
Handguns are the typical home defense weapon. They are unsuitable for several reasons.
- accuracy is limited to non-existent. Shooting on a range has nothing whatsoever to do with shooting in a stressful situation. Any firearm is bad, but the only thing worse than a handgun is a derringer.
- threat to the environment. Every missed shot still goes somewhere and most calibers considered useful for home defense have significant penetration in a domestic environment. It is vanishingly unlikely to hit another person, but it is still possible.
- lethality is insufficient. I've been an aficionado of firearms for over thirty years so I am very familiar with all of the mythology that goes around gun circles as well as the belief system that justifies firearms as home defense.[1] The reality is that the trauma of a gunshot may temporarily "drop" someone (who will ultimately die from the wound), but adrenaline permits continued functioning.
- unsafe if available. In order to be useful during a midnight home invasion the firearm must be ready to hand and ready to use. Which means it is not locked in a gun safe with ammunition locked separately. Most deaths from "home defense" firearms come from accidental discharge where these rules are not followed.
If I was going to advocate for a firearm for home defense I would argue for a "shot pistol" -- you want a short enough barrel to not constrain the pellets to maximize spread. This helps to offset the accuracy issue. The rapid energy loss associated with pellets helps to reduce threat to the environment. Of course, you still have the issues of lethality and safety.
Shooting firearms is fun (I've put a *lot* of rounds down range and fired a pretty wide variety -- everything from a buffalo rifle to a derringer to various handguns, rifles, shotguns, submachine guns, assault rifles and machine guns. So I *know* it is fun to shoot. I also don't pretend that a handgun is good for home defense.
1) The funny thing is that many of these are contradictory -- like the urban mythology about criminals high on PCP ignoring tens (or even hundreds) of shots, and then believing that you are at risk from someone like that *and* believing you can shoot them fifty to a hundred times (with a weapon unlikely to hold more than eighteen rounds) before "they get you".
Just because you are ignorant of the English language doesn't mean everyone else is. And if you are unable to apply the definitions you look up then that brings into question your grasp of English overall. (And giving a fake definition for a word does not contribute to demonstrating your having a grasp on the language.)
oh yeah, I'd definitely mark microsoft.com, sony.com, apple.com, ford.com, etc., as spam. OTOH, google would just white list its friends so it wouldn't actually have any effect. But minor sites with unapproved content (and I do *not* mean piracy) would get slammed into oblivion by a network of reporting by interested parties (microsoft, sony, apple, ford, etc.).
The suggestion amounts to anonymous internet voting, one of the most trivially gamed systems ever thought up. The most obvious cheating is easy to detect or ignore, but anyone with resources (microsoft, sony, apple, ford, etc.) can make it infeasible or pay someone who can.
I'm not sure I really disagree with you, but to play devil's advocate the "problem" with such a position is the short life span of mobile devices. People expect to have a new one every two to three years and execs expect a new one every year.
Compare this to PCs which have a three to five year replacement cycle and, importantly, an often even longer software licensing term. I'm still using software on the desktop that I bought ten years ago, but the oldest carry over on mobile is just a few years.
In other words, I don't think there is any meaningfully entrenched base, either from the hardware side or the ecosystem.
"...it [cold fusion] may never work, hot fusion or even residential-grade fission is a lot closer than cold fusion will ever become."
Notice how you went from a negatively toned "it may never work" (which, in principle, is the same as saying the positively toned "it may work someday") to the implied "it will never work"?
The last part (about hot fusion, residential-grade fission) implies that none of them work and then states that their level of non-working is more than cold fusion will ever have. So there is implicit denial that cold fusion will ever work. Not exactly an open mind.
Not that I have read TFA, but based on the summary that attitude seems to be what TFA is about. That people have pre-judged anything labeled as "cold fusion" as "unworkable" at best and "fraudulent" at worst.
wow. posting is undoing my moderation and my apologies but I don't think my lone positive moderation is having any impact anyway. I just can't believe that your post is being bottomed out as a troll. Apparently the climate change deniers are even stronger here than I thought.
To anyone reading this: just because you don't believe in climate change and the fact that Florida is facing real consequences doesn't make PopeRatzo's post a troll.
To the person who replied with "3-5mm/year" and "flooding is caused by compaction resulting from pumping water out" -- care to explain how the limestone is compacting? Or do you really think that building houses, roads, etc., on silt actually works?
I've hit sites that have really stupid javascript created overlays to obscure the page so you have to see their advertisement. Really annoying on a phone or even a tablet, particularly when they manage to push the close widget off of the devices screen. Fortunately, I've discovered that (at least most of them) are defeated simply by canceling the page load as soon as the content appears. The page then presents just fine without having run the javascript to display the advertisement.
So much the #4. Yes, there are counterexamples*. But anyone who is actually interested in stealing stuff can put in the extremely modest effort to discover how to bypass Javascript protections.
Put it this way: if so many people can work out that they need to download a torrent application and then wade through torrent search results in order to pirate a movie I think anyone interested in plagiarism can work out turning off Javascript.
* my wife discovered that some of her online photographs had been "stolen". It was really kind of strange because they aren't -- themselves -- artistic (the art isn't in her photographs, but what is being photographed) and they were bulk included on a page consisting of numerous "stolen" images. A really diverse collection of images without any sort of theme or coherence. There was no evidence that it was anything other than the most casual of dragnets that swept up numerous images. Would it have been stopped by using a Javascript "protection"? Possibly. But really, who cares?
Actually there is a court tested exception where if you crack the "lock" yourself it is okay. It is using someone else's tool that will get you into trouble. The trivial case of the web-browser based "protection" gives a practical application of this.
Now, its a defense not immunity so it doesn't protect against a lawsuit. However, you shouldn't run afoul of the DMCA on that particular point.
While I generally agree with what you are saying, if you are able to break the DRM by yourself without recourse to a cracking tool made by someone else (such as the previously mentioned turning off javascript and then copying from a website) then that is defensible. I don't recall the court and don't have a citation handy, but that was the criteria employed by a judge in deciding a case.
In other words, using a library to crack dvd encryption would be a violation of the DMCA, but if you independently wrote a cracking tool then that could legally be used for your own purposes. Pretty much bullshit, but it does apply to the example you provide.
Related to the futility of web-based DRM, a long time ago a photographer once asked me how to prevent people from taking his photographs from his website and reposting them as their own. My answer was that you can't really prevent people from doing that, but if you branded the image (embedded logo in it) then saved it as a jpg with the lowest quality that would satisfy him it would mean that someone "stealing" the image would either retain the logo or have to be satisfied with lower quality. (He didn't like that, insisting that there had to be a way to prevent people from swiping the images, and wouldn't believe me that they were all trivially circumvented. It was unacceptable to him for there to be a visible logo in the image. Oh well.)
okay, maybe I'm dense. But if we take the 5% of the workforce at face value, where exactly do you think losing that many jobs will be absorbed? And, if they aren't employed, there are serious limits to how much social support they can receive. Which leads to starvation and homelessness.
If you disagree with the 5% of the workforce, or the assertion that autonomous driving will eliminate truckers, then say so. But in the US longterm unemployment leads to starvation (lack of income to buy food, limits on how much someone can "leech" via foodstamps), homelessness (lack of income to pay rent) and death (lack of income to pay for medical insurance).
To avoid these fairly obvious results there must be at least one of 1) new job opportunities and 2) social support.
Now, I'm not saying I agree with any of the basic assertions made by the GP, but *if* you had 5% (and more) of the workforce unemployable -- that is a problem the US system is not designed to handle. Unemployment, on a large scale, is (relatively) steady -- but that is the product of churn, not constancy of unemployment for any given person. Permanently unemployed individuals are the exception, not the norm.
My recollection is that Lucas was tired of Star Wars by the time Return of the Jedi came around and just wanted things to end. So he junked the plans he had had for another trilogy (with Luke's and Leia's children) and wrapped up loose ends by killing the love triangle (she's your sister, Luke!) and killing the emperor. The wookie to ewok transformation was an utterly transparent marketing ploy and their war against the storm troopers was laughably unbelievable. (At the same time, cuteness factor aside, I don't see it being that much different than the serials Lucas was trying to emulate.)
As for the first trilogy, I didn't say that Anakin was my cup of tea. But anyone who doesn't understand the innate appeal to young boys doesn't understand them.
I take it you are completely unaware of the environment in which Star Wars was created. You might want to take a look at other movies and previous space opera.
What Lucas actually wanted to do was Flash Gordon, but he got laughed out of the room and someone else got to make that one. But Lucas really wanted to do a Flash Gordon space opera, he had really enjoyed the serials as a kid.
Now, watch those serials and you will see some of what Star Wars was trying to be. Except that Lucas did it better (no surprise, those serials were not exactly high budget productions and were old when Star Wars was new). In fact, Star Wars was phenomenal. No other scifi movie had been as epic as it was. The fact that it is a hodge podge of Flash Gordon, Hidden Fortress (e.g., c3po and r2d2 on tattoine), Doc Smith's Lensman, etc., is beside the point. No one else had made a movie like Star Wars yet.
Maybe its because I was old enough to actually remember Star Wars when it came out, but people who were little kids are the ones who seem to have the most issue with it.
BTW: my son loves Star Wars and likes the originals as well as the prequels. The reason he likes the prequels more is very simple: the first one stars a little boy. Little kids care less about flash than fun so the gorgeous cgi is wasted on him. Luke was young, but Anakin was close enough in age for him to project himself on to very well.
um... what do you think you were replying to? I'm confused, or was it just you?
GP said an ICE (internal combustion engine, you know, like the one in your 2010 Hyundai that gets 38mpg) can do it in a non-stop run. GP referred to a 300 mile trip. You say "a steady 70 mph" so that would be a little more than four hours -- amazingly right in the 4-5 hours that GP cited.
BTW: I'll raise your "532 miles non-stop" with a 1000+ mile two quick stops (5 minutes) for fuel. Over the thousand miles I averaged around 70 mph (including stops, construction, slow traffic). My range was only around 350 miles per tank, not your glorified 532 miles (btw: do you *really* get that far between refuelings, or do you find that in practice you can't actually run the tank dry).
Anecdotally, misery increases (relative) longevity. Why? I suppose because it loves company.
Not that I haven't known people who were happy to a ripe old age (I would think 95 counts as that), but of the vanishingly small set of the population with which I am acquainted, the span of life following a critical health set back is shortest for those who are happiest. For example, I knew a woman who had a couple of months to live but managed to turn it into years. Who knew that smearing shit on the walls from colostomy to upset your daughter could bring more life!
Of the people I've known, happiness/misery wasn't about absolute longevity, but longevity relative to a critical health issue.
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Wow. I guess that's why, despite being a white male, I've consistently failed students who did not do the work. Its disappointing to fail 20% of a class, but it certainly happens.
But my example is nothing. All you have to do is look at the press: every now and then there's a kerfluffle about student cheating and all sections in a class will be failed. And the professors involved are usually white males.
The reality is that nearly any grading scheme is defensible as long as it is applied uniformly and consistently. Other students that complained stopped when presented with the "changing your grade would not be fair to the other students" argument -- I've only had the one who replied with "you should give everyone an A".
That student did seek retribution, but unfortunately for the student I had, naturally, been documenting the lack of work through the grading process and a separate student performance report.
I do have concerns along the lines you have raised. The standard for a "microaggression" seems to be "I was offended" or even "I thought someone else should have been offended". The other trendy label is "triggered" which similarly has no meaningful criteria or bar to reach. Still, I've never heard of either instance being used to argue for grades.
you do not need "laisre cintering" (or even laser cintering) to print metals (or metels). I've never printed plasstec, but I have printed plastic, wood, bronze and copper with my fused filament printer.
If you added in a couple of points to cover hunting and recreational shooting, I think that pretty much sums it up and illustrates nicely why there cannot be a technical solution to the problem.
mod +1 insightful, -1 depressing
It is extremely arrogant for you to put thoughts in the minds of people who are being killed to suit your political agenda. That is low, base rhetoric.
Do you believe "the other side" uses incidents for base rhetoric? Rise above them, don't stoop to their level.
flamebait, really? Someone must be uncomfortable with the number of deaths each year due to unsafely housed firearms...
Handguns are the typical home defense weapon. They are unsuitable for several reasons.
- accuracy is limited to non-existent. Shooting on a range has nothing whatsoever to do with shooting in a stressful situation. Any firearm is bad, but the only thing worse than a handgun is a derringer.
- threat to the environment. Every missed shot still goes somewhere and most calibers considered useful for home defense have significant penetration in a domestic environment. It is vanishingly unlikely to hit another person, but it is still possible.
- lethality is insufficient. I've been an aficionado of firearms for over thirty years so I am very familiar with all of the mythology that goes around gun circles as well as the belief system that justifies firearms as home defense.[1] The reality is that the trauma of a gunshot may temporarily "drop" someone (who will ultimately die from the wound), but adrenaline permits continued functioning.
- unsafe if available. In order to be useful during a midnight home invasion the firearm must be ready to hand and ready to use. Which means it is not locked in a gun safe with ammunition locked separately. Most deaths from "home defense" firearms come from accidental discharge where these rules are not followed.
If I was going to advocate for a firearm for home defense I would argue for a "shot pistol" -- you want a short enough barrel to not constrain the pellets to maximize spread. This helps to offset the accuracy issue. The rapid energy loss associated with pellets helps to reduce threat to the environment. Of course, you still have the issues of lethality and safety.
Shooting firearms is fun (I've put a *lot* of rounds down range and fired a pretty wide variety -- everything from a buffalo rifle to a derringer to various handguns, rifles, shotguns, submachine guns, assault rifles and machine guns. So I *know* it is fun to shoot. I also don't pretend that a handgun is good for home defense.
1) The funny thing is that many of these are contradictory -- like the urban mythology about criminals high on PCP ignoring tens (or even hundreds) of shots, and then believing that you are at risk from someone like that *and* believing you can shoot them fifty to a hundred times (with a weapon unlikely to hold more than eighteen rounds) before "they get you".
"Without going into detail..."
In other words, you don't offer any evidence to evaluate. You don't like them, that is fine. Many spammers do not.
Just because you are ignorant of the English language doesn't mean everyone else is. And if you are unable to apply the definitions you look up then that brings into question your grasp of English overall. (And giving a fake definition for a word does not contribute to demonstrating your having a grasp on the language.)
oh yeah, I'd definitely mark microsoft.com, sony.com, apple.com, ford.com, etc., as spam. OTOH, google would just white list its friends so it wouldn't actually have any effect. But minor sites with unapproved content (and I do *not* mean piracy) would get slammed into oblivion by a network of reporting by interested parties (microsoft, sony, apple, ford, etc.).
The suggestion amounts to anonymous internet voting, one of the most trivially gamed systems ever thought up. The most obvious cheating is easy to detect or ignore, but anyone with resources (microsoft, sony, apple, ford, etc.) can make it infeasible or pay someone who can.
ah, if only I had mod points...
I'm not sure I really disagree with you, but to play devil's advocate the "problem" with such a position is the short life span of mobile devices. People expect to have a new one every two to three years and execs expect a new one every year.
Compare this to PCs which have a three to five year replacement cycle and, importantly, an often even longer software licensing term. I'm still using software on the desktop that I bought ten years ago, but the oldest carry over on mobile is just a few years.
In other words, I don't think there is any meaningfully entrenched base, either from the hardware side or the ecosystem.
"...it [cold fusion] may never work, hot fusion or even residential-grade fission is a lot closer than cold fusion will ever become."
Notice how you went from a negatively toned "it may never work" (which, in principle, is the same as saying the positively toned "it may work someday") to the implied "it will never work"?
The last part (about hot fusion, residential-grade fission) implies that none of them work and then states that their level of non-working is more than cold fusion will ever have. So there is implicit denial that cold fusion will ever work. Not exactly an open mind.
Not that I have read TFA, but based on the summary that attitude seems to be what TFA is about. That people have pre-judged anything labeled as "cold fusion" as "unworkable" at best and "fraudulent" at worst.
wow. posting is undoing my moderation and my apologies but I don't think my lone positive moderation is having any impact anyway. I just can't believe that your post is being bottomed out as a troll. Apparently the climate change deniers are even stronger here than I thought.
To anyone reading this: just because you don't believe in climate change and the fact that Florida is facing real consequences doesn't make PopeRatzo's post a troll.
To the person who replied with "3-5mm/year" and "flooding is caused by compaction resulting from pumping water out" -- care to explain how the limestone is compacting? Or do you really think that building houses, roads, etc., on silt actually works?
I've hit sites that have really stupid javascript created overlays to obscure the page so you have to see their advertisement. Really annoying on a phone or even a tablet, particularly when they manage to push the close widget off of the devices screen. Fortunately, I've discovered that (at least most of them) are defeated simply by canceling the page load as soon as the content appears. The page then presents just fine without having run the javascript to display the advertisement.
So much the #4. Yes, there are counterexamples*. But anyone who is actually interested in stealing stuff can put in the extremely modest effort to discover how to bypass Javascript protections.
Put it this way: if so many people can work out that they need to download a torrent application and then wade through torrent search results in order to pirate a movie I think anyone interested in plagiarism can work out turning off Javascript.
* my wife discovered that some of her online photographs had been "stolen". It was really kind of strange because they aren't -- themselves -- artistic (the art isn't in her photographs, but what is being photographed) and they were bulk included on a page consisting of numerous "stolen" images. A really diverse collection of images without any sort of theme or coherence. There was no evidence that it was anything other than the most casual of dragnets that swept up numerous images. Would it have been stopped by using a Javascript "protection"? Possibly. But really, who cares?
Actually there is a court tested exception where if you crack the "lock" yourself it is okay. It is using someone else's tool that will get you into trouble. The trivial case of the web-browser based "protection" gives a practical application of this.
Now, its a defense not immunity so it doesn't protect against a lawsuit. However, you shouldn't run afoul of the DMCA on that particular point.
While I generally agree with what you are saying, if you are able to break the DRM by yourself without recourse to a cracking tool made by someone else (such as the previously mentioned turning off javascript and then copying from a website) then that is defensible. I don't recall the court and don't have a citation handy, but that was the criteria employed by a judge in deciding a case.
In other words, using a library to crack dvd encryption would be a violation of the DMCA, but if you independently wrote a cracking tool then that could legally be used for your own purposes. Pretty much bullshit, but it does apply to the example you provide.
Related to the futility of web-based DRM, a long time ago a photographer once asked me how to prevent people from taking his photographs from his website and reposting them as their own. My answer was that you can't really prevent people from doing that, but if you branded the image (embedded logo in it) then saved it as a jpg with the lowest quality that would satisfy him it would mean that someone "stealing" the image would either retain the logo or have to be satisfied with lower quality. (He didn't like that, insisting that there had to be a way to prevent people from swiping the images, and wouldn't believe me that they were all trivially circumvented. It was unacceptable to him for there to be a visible logo in the image. Oh well.)
must be making the rounds. That's what my wife said...
okay, maybe I'm dense. But if we take the 5% of the workforce at face value, where exactly do you think losing that many jobs will be absorbed? And, if they aren't employed, there are serious limits to how much social support they can receive. Which leads to starvation and homelessness.
If you disagree with the 5% of the workforce, or the assertion that autonomous driving will eliminate truckers, then say so. But in the US longterm unemployment leads to starvation (lack of income to buy food, limits on how much someone can "leech" via foodstamps), homelessness (lack of income to pay rent) and death (lack of income to pay for medical insurance).
To avoid these fairly obvious results there must be at least one of 1) new job opportunities and 2) social support.
Now, I'm not saying I agree with any of the basic assertions made by the GP, but *if* you had 5% (and more) of the workforce unemployable -- that is a problem the US system is not designed to handle. Unemployment, on a large scale, is (relatively) steady -- but that is the product of churn, not constancy of unemployment for any given person. Permanently unemployed individuals are the exception, not the norm.
ah, point taken.
My recollection is that Lucas was tired of Star Wars by the time Return of the Jedi came around and just wanted things to end. So he junked the plans he had had for another trilogy (with Luke's and Leia's children) and wrapped up loose ends by killing the love triangle (she's your sister, Luke!) and killing the emperor. The wookie to ewok transformation was an utterly transparent marketing ploy and their war against the storm troopers was laughably unbelievable. (At the same time, cuteness factor aside, I don't see it being that much different than the serials Lucas was trying to emulate.)
As for the first trilogy, I didn't say that Anakin was my cup of tea. But anyone who doesn't understand the innate appeal to young boys doesn't understand them.
I take it you are completely unaware of the environment in which Star Wars was created. You might want to take a look at other movies and previous space opera.
What Lucas actually wanted to do was Flash Gordon, but he got laughed out of the room and someone else got to make that one. But Lucas really wanted to do a Flash Gordon space opera, he had really enjoyed the serials as a kid.
Now, watch those serials and you will see some of what Star Wars was trying to be. Except that Lucas did it better (no surprise, those serials were not exactly high budget productions and were old when Star Wars was new). In fact, Star Wars was phenomenal. No other scifi movie had been as epic as it was. The fact that it is a hodge podge of Flash Gordon, Hidden Fortress (e.g., c3po and r2d2 on tattoine), Doc Smith's Lensman, etc., is beside the point. No one else had made a movie like Star Wars yet.
Maybe its because I was old enough to actually remember Star Wars when it came out, but people who were little kids are the ones who seem to have the most issue with it.
BTW: my son loves Star Wars and likes the originals as well as the prequels. The reason he likes the prequels more is very simple: the first one stars a little boy. Little kids care less about flash than fun so the gorgeous cgi is wasted on him. Luke was young, but Anakin was close enough in age for him to project himself on to very well.
um... what do you think you were replying to? I'm confused, or was it just you?
GP said an ICE (internal combustion engine, you know, like the one in your 2010 Hyundai that gets 38mpg) can do it in a non-stop run. GP referred to a 300 mile trip. You say "a steady 70 mph" so that would be a little more than four hours -- amazingly right in the 4-5 hours that GP cited.
BTW: I'll raise your "532 miles non-stop" with a 1000+ mile two quick stops (5 minutes) for fuel. Over the thousand miles I averaged around 70 mph (including stops, construction, slow traffic). My range was only around 350 miles per tank, not your glorified 532 miles (btw: do you *really* get that far between refuelings, or do you find that in practice you can't actually run the tank dry).
Anecdotally, misery increases (relative) longevity. Why? I suppose because it loves company.
Not that I haven't known people who were happy to a ripe old age (I would think 95 counts as that), but of the vanishingly small set of the population with which I am acquainted, the span of life following a critical health set back is shortest for those who are happiest. For example, I knew a woman who had a couple of months to live but managed to turn it into years. Who knew that smearing shit on the walls from colostomy to upset your daughter could bring more life!
Of the people I've known, happiness/misery wasn't about absolute longevity, but longevity relative to a critical health issue.