...that makes it seem like you are in favor of an internet part full of child pornography.
Speaking personally, I am so fed up with the censorship, fear and repression taking place in our society in the name of fighting child pornography; that I would personally prefer to see an internet half full of child pornography before I see any more rollbacks of freedom along the lines this "Agreement".
The child porn excuse has long since lost its ability to outrage me into accepting even quite minor restrictions on liberties. Unfortunately, the general public seems so eager to become apoplectic that media outlets have essentially created an industry around giving people their daily outrage "fix". It's like Soma, except instead of making them happy all the time, they just get angry/outraged.
The effect is the same however, as people allow their emotions to overcome their reason, and we lose all ability to object or hold any kind of reasoned debate. It's like a Mass Panic, but in slow motion. Best to run with the herd, lest you get trampled.
The Common Joe wants to be able to pry, poke and be privy to the personal and intimate details of his neighbors, his employer/employees, his local representatives and clergy, friends, enemies, teenagers, celebrities, politicians, historical figures, and especially his spouse. He wants access to all this information so that he can can gleefully pour over it all in the confines of his basement.
This is what people actually want. If you need any further proof beyond the distribution of tabloid and gossips rags, as well as the scandal hungry state of modern television; then you are in denial.
What is true is that on average, men and women have different interests.
Now some people, yourself included, will probably turn around and say something like "Of course that's what I meant.". Well that's not what you said. And that's not what most people hear. Most people hear something akin to "Men and Women have different Organs". You should know this.
When people make statements like "Men and Women have Different Interests", what they are actually doing they are making a very strong statement about what men and women should be interested in, in the speakers own opinion of course. It almost always a fairly transparent attempt to browbeat those stepping out of line. A constant barrage of such statements, especially from "intellectuals", is a very daunting thing to hear for anyone whose interests happen to stray outside their "sex norm". The weight of societies' disapproval can be crushing.
This is actually quite tragic, because these statements are essentially akin to something like Intelligent Design. Unscientific, deliberately misleading, and laden with ulterior agenda's. It's not surprising, as the same people that think that Men/Women can't or shouldn't do X/Y are usually the same people that think evolution cannot explain the complexity of life. Every great female doctor, and every great male nurse, is a observable fact which falsifies the theory that men and women have different abilities or competences.
Suzan wants to study Physics. Jim wants to stay at home with his kids. Who are you to tell these people how to live their lives? How dare you attempt to badger and coerce people into conforming to your own view of how things should be. So what if Suzan is the only woman in the world in the sciences. So what is Jim is the only man in the world who stays at home with his children? People should be allowed to choose their own way of life, to find their own happiness, and existing conventions be danmed.
On the matter of quotas, I personally am opposed to such things. I do not see any essential difference between these methods and quotas universities once had on Jewish students. Selection should be based on merit, and without prejudice towards anyone's sex, race, creed, politics or origin.
If people want to see more women with science degrees, they need to stop using quotas and start finding ways of increasing the amount of women who earn places in science degree courses. This can be accomplished through advocacy programs, better schools and making higher education worthwhile financially. Trying to make modern employment less diametrically opposed to family life would also be a plus, for everyone.
But in fact, the single best way to increase the amount of women interested and competent in the sciences is to tell people with monochrome, rigid and prejudiced opinions about the world that they are wrong and should promptly Shut The Fuck Up and let other people get on with living their own lives.
Saying Usenet is "full of kiddie porn" is pretty much a lie.
You don't understand.
If there is even the possibility of child porn being present, then we have "Serious Cause For Concern".
If there is even the slightest amount of material that someone even thinks might be child pornography, then we have "Disturbing And Objectionable Materials Being Posted".
If there is actually some child pornography in any form, then we have "A Haven Of Depravity Full Of Obscene And Vile Depictions Of Abuse".
If you don't like entire internet protocols being tarnished in this manner, then you are a "Person Of Questionable Motivation".
And of course if the place is an actual child pornographer's hangout stuffed to the gills with the worst of material, then you have an "Private Gentlemens Club, For Pillars Of The Community".
In my opinion, one of the big coups waiting to happen on the internet is the co-opting of P2P clients into the TOR network. The big Bittorrent clients already offer a TOR client mode option. But what would happen if they started offering a TOR client/server option instead. We could see a vast increase in the size, and hopefully speed of the TOR network overnight. That is if any of the big Bittorrent clients were willing to pull it off.
Re:"Porn has made its way in there already"
on
Google Lively Review
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· Score: 1
I've wondered if there could be a market for "Christian porn" that addresses all the issues they have with it.
The trouble is that this sentiment doesn't point to a solution. Just how do you choose a good leader without having a huge bias toward those people who want the position? I personally have no idea.
You could try having a parliamentary system instead of using an executive presidential one. The latter model being the preferred choice of every tin-pot banana republic dictator for the last hundred years.
Basically, Americans need to have their leader brought before a parliament with the power to throw him out of office once a week. He needs to be shouted at and hounded by opposition members, and have all his policies and actions debated and discussed ad nauseum. It's actually a very good system and I don't know of a single dictator whose ever lasted under it (though they do usually end up scrapping it very early on).
Your system allows for an overreachingly powerful presidency. And now that's what you have, just like all those Latin American and African republics. I'm not saying the alternative is perfect. But the alternative is better than your current system. Unfortunately, baring a civil war or major military defeat, your constitution is not going to undergo the changes needed to obtain this outcome.
Call me dry, but while I do appreciate the positive effect on creativity of sci-fi, I think that actual scientific literature and even textbooks can be well worth reading, and yes even entertaining.
There's nothing wrong with a good popular science book. What about an introductory book to something like astronomy, cosmology, or quantum physics? A popular modern engineering book would be just about as amazing as most sci-fi novels, and plausible besides.
Sometimes, cutting out all that "drama" stuff can actually make some books better. For some people anyway.
Or how about cue some common sense? If I'm on your private property, I have no fucking rights over you or your property. It's your private property. You have the right to control who can be on it, or use it.
So if a shopkeep puts up one of those "No Blacks, No Irish" signs on their window, does that mean I shouldn't be allowed to go in?
By the way, where did the strawman about privatizing transit come from? I never mentioned it, and would never do so. I'm for publicizing a lot of utilities that are currently private.
It was part of the argument that a private love of cars should not be taken to mean that people do not want public transport, and investment in it.
Where I live, Ireland, successive governments have essentially based their transportation policies on just that outlook. As private car ownership went up, investment in public transport, and privatization, went up accordingly leading in part to a greater need for private ownership of cars. Basically, in a kind of negative feedback loop we ended up having a capitol city with no metro or tram system, and no rail link to the city airport, and ten mile tailbacks every morning. Dublin now has a tram system, which spends quite a bit of time stuck in traffic unsurprisingly.
Now this country is quite rural and relatively sparsely populated, which means that just about everyone _needs_ a car. However, simultaneously, people need a publicly funded, public transportation system, and successive governments here seem to have problems grasping that. I'm not sure what the situation in the US is like, but I can only assume that the "market-forces" brigade emphasizes the same "invisible hand" approach that leaves Dublin gridlocked every morning.
You clearly live in either a suburban or rural location, for which indeed, the car is king. For anyone who lives and works in an urban area, i.e. most of humanity, there is no better way to travel than on regular, efficient public transport. Japan leads the way in this. The idea of driving a car from a suburban or urban home to a city center is ludacrious.
That said, people will always have cars to take them were trains and buses don't go, which is fine. But this should not be seen as an excuse for governments to skimp on public transport, or worse to privatise public transport. Good public transport needs investment; cash investment, by the government. And that investment pays off _BIG_. Private investment in cars on the other hand, only leads to diminishing returns with every additional set of wheels on the roads.
I admit there may be some moral leeway concerning the constitutional rights of child molesters, dicators and mass murderers, but that's not the case here.
That makes you worse than any of those groups. Fairweather Freedom is worse than no freedom at all.
How is geometry underrated? Calculus starts with the study of low dimensional curves. Linear algebra is the study of simple geometrical transformations (rotations, translations, dilations) in high dimensional geometry. Functional analysis is basically the study of infinite dimensional flat geometry. Partial differential equations are implicit equations for small patches of curves and surfaces.
Having studied all of these fields, I can safely say that the average undergraduate curriculum or textbox in any of these areas contains only the barest minimum of geometry, despite the vast amount of geometry inherant in these subjects. This is down to two reasons.
First and foremost, is laziness. It is easier to thrown down a rote definition by dictate than it is to motivate, explain and build a framework in which those definitions make sense. The former is the preferred method, and essentially leads to mathematics by rote learning, which is not really mathematics at all. The latter is the correct method, and leads to real understanding. Geometry is a key part of this method of explaination, which is why you see so little of it around.
The second method is related to the first. It has to do with the fact that after so many decades of poor textbooks devoid of geometrical meaning, very few people are actually aware of the geometry aspect of their fields, and write their textbooks accordingly. I'm sure not a few slashdotters went through a linear algebra course in which the only picture, if any, was to do with the solution of two, two variable simultaneous equations somewhere in the first lecture. In reality, linear algebra was developed from its outset, by this man, to be a method for solving problems in geometry via algebraic techniques. Most if not all standard techniques in linear algebra can not only be interpreted as a geometric method, but are essentially incomprehensible otherwise.
Classic example of the dearth of geometry in mathematics textbooks, and something relevant to this discussion, is the almost universal definition of "contravariant" and "covariant" tensors in general relativity/differential geometry textbooks. The usual "....whose coordinates transform according to the rule...." definition is essentially useless and betrays the authors incompetence and robs the reader of any real understanding of the topic. Contravariance and Covariance in fact have nothing to do with coordinate transformations of any kind and have far more fundamental origins, best revealed through basic geometric pictures. Try this book for an example of how things should be done.
Come on Taco... proper English (or at least something seemingly like it) isn't that hard...
Taco's use of "like" was proper and correct.
Despite "like's" notoriety in the hands, or mouths, of US teenagers, it is an effective and useful phrase and can enhance communication in both the written and spoken word. Specifically, it serves as a short pause in the sentence which adds emphasis to the words that come directly after it. It's practically a form of punctuation. Watch this.
"I am really hungry!" "I am like, really hungry."
Which sentence better communicates that the speaker or writer is very hungry? The overloading of the exclamation mark in written english leaves the first sentence ambiguous. We don't really know if the speaker is hungry, or just excited about being hungry, or just excited. The second sentence makes the speakers meaning clear without the use of any exclamation mark.
Slang is usually derided and frowned upon by supposedly superior english speakers and writers, the kind of people who pronounce "hyperbole" as "hyperbowlly". These people would have us remove critical phrases like "OK" from our vocabulary, despite the fact that cannot come up with any adequate replacement.
In the end, the judge didn't order Shoemaker to pay a monetary sanction, but he did order the Virginia lawyer to attend ethics training and directed his court clerk to notify the Virginia State Bar so that it could consider disciplinary action on its own.
I'm sure that if I pulled the same stunt against a lawyer or anyone with access to lawyers, I'd be facing a hell of a lot more than an opportunity to doodle at an "ethics training" course. He'll probably just learn how to act ethical now while remaining a charlatan.
One law for them. Another for the rest of us. Don't forget it.
Slashdot Mirror
Or indeed, mention of anyone, anywhere actually using "cloud computing".
He's not scared. He just wants to see his side "win", by very violently killing "bad guys".
Absolutely! Give the Lord of Darkness some credit. He transcodes to AAC and plays them backwards on his Mac.
Speaking personally, I am so fed up with the censorship, fear and repression taking place in our society in the name of fighting child pornography; that I would personally prefer to see an internet half full of child pornography before I see any more rollbacks of freedom along the lines this "Agreement".
The child porn excuse has long since lost its ability to outrage me into accepting even quite minor restrictions on liberties. Unfortunately, the general public seems so eager to become apoplectic that media outlets have essentially created an industry around giving people their daily outrage "fix". It's like Soma, except instead of making them happy all the time, they just get angry/outraged.
The effect is the same however, as people allow their emotions to overcome their reason, and we lose all ability to object or hold any kind of reasoned debate. It's like a Mass Panic, but in slow motion. Best to run with the herd, lest you get trampled.
The Common Joe does not want privacy.
The Common Joe wants to be able to pry, poke and be privy to the personal and intimate details of his neighbors, his employer/employees, his local representatives and clergy, friends, enemies, teenagers, celebrities, politicians, historical figures, and especially his spouse. He wants access to all this information so that he can can gleefully pour over it all in the confines of his basement.
This is what people actually want. If you need any further proof beyond the distribution of tabloid and gossips rags, as well as the scandal hungry state of modern television; then you are in denial.
Because it is misleading and/or wrong.
What is true is that on average, men and women have different interests.
Now some people, yourself included, will probably turn around and say something like "Of course that's what I meant.". Well that's not what you said. And that's not what most people hear. Most people hear something akin to "Men and Women have different Organs". You should know this.
When people make statements like "Men and Women have Different Interests", what they are actually doing they are making a very strong statement about what men and women should be interested in, in the speakers own opinion of course. It almost always a fairly transparent attempt to browbeat those stepping out of line. A constant barrage of such statements, especially from "intellectuals", is a very daunting thing to hear for anyone whose interests happen to stray outside their "sex norm". The weight of societies' disapproval can be crushing.
This is actually quite tragic, because these statements are essentially akin to something like Intelligent Design. Unscientific, deliberately misleading, and laden with ulterior agenda's. It's not surprising, as the same people that think that Men/Women can't or shouldn't do X/Y are usually the same people that think evolution cannot explain the complexity of life. Every great female doctor, and every great male nurse, is a observable fact which falsifies the theory that men and women have different abilities or competences.
Suzan wants to study Physics. Jim wants to stay at home with his kids. Who are you to tell these people how to live their lives? How dare you attempt to badger and coerce people into conforming to your own view of how things should be. So what if Suzan is the only woman in the world in the sciences. So what is Jim is the only man in the world who stays at home with his children? People should be allowed to choose their own way of life, to find their own happiness, and existing conventions be danmed.
On the matter of quotas, I personally am opposed to such things. I do not see any essential difference between these methods and quotas universities once had on Jewish students. Selection should be based on merit, and without prejudice towards anyone's sex, race, creed, politics or origin.
If people want to see more women with science degrees, they need to stop using quotas and start finding ways of increasing the amount of women who earn places in science degree courses. This can be accomplished through advocacy programs, better schools and making higher education worthwhile financially. Trying to make modern employment less diametrically opposed to family life would also be a plus, for everyone.
But in fact, the single best way to increase the amount of women interested and competent in the sciences is to tell people with monochrome, rigid and prejudiced opinions about the world that they are wrong and should promptly Shut The Fuck Up and let other people get on with living their own lives.
Nonsense! Terrorists and civilians aren't people!
We can give you closure, if you cut us a deal.
You don't understand.
If there is even the possibility of child porn being present, then we have "Serious Cause For Concern".
If there is even the slightest amount of material that someone even thinks might be child pornography, then we have "Disturbing And Objectionable Materials Being Posted".
If there is actually some child pornography in any form, then we have "A Haven Of Depravity Full Of Obscene And Vile Depictions Of Abuse".
If you don't like entire internet protocols being tarnished in this manner, then you are a "Person Of Questionable Motivation".
And of course if the place is an actual child pornographer's hangout stuffed to the gills with the worst of material, then you have an "Private Gentlemens Club, For Pillars Of The Community".
Does blocking them?
In my opinion, one of the big coups waiting to happen on the internet is the co-opting of P2P clients into the TOR network. The big Bittorrent clients already offer a TOR client mode option. But what would happen if they started offering a TOR client/server option instead. We could see a vast increase in the size, and hopefully speed of the TOR network overnight. That is if any of the big Bittorrent clients were willing to pull it off.
There isn't, for you see, The Lord Provides.
Just like regular TV!
You could try having a parliamentary system instead of using an executive presidential one. The latter model being the preferred choice of every tin-pot banana republic dictator for the last hundred years.
Basically, Americans need to have their leader brought before a parliament with the power to throw him out of office once a week. He needs to be shouted at and hounded by opposition members, and have all his policies and actions debated and discussed ad nauseum. It's actually a very good system and I don't know of a single dictator whose ever lasted under it (though they do usually end up scrapping it very early on).
Your system allows for an overreachingly powerful presidency. And now that's what you have, just like all those Latin American and African republics. I'm not saying the alternative is perfect. But the alternative is better than your current system. Unfortunately, baring a civil war or major military defeat, your constitution is not going to undergo the changes needed to obtain this outcome.
And these types are to be distinguished how exactly?
Call me dry, but while I do appreciate the positive effect on creativity of sci-fi, I think that actual scientific literature and even textbooks can be well worth reading, and yes even entertaining.
There's nothing wrong with a good popular science book. What about an introductory book to something like astronomy, cosmology, or quantum physics? A popular modern engineering book would be just about as amazing as most sci-fi novels, and plausible besides.
Sometimes, cutting out all that "drama" stuff can actually make some books better. For some people anyway.
So if a shopkeep puts up one of those "No Blacks, No Irish" signs on their window, does that mean I shouldn't be allowed to go in?
It was part of the argument that a private love of cars should not be taken to mean that people do not want public transport, and investment in it.
Where I live, Ireland, successive governments have essentially based their transportation policies on just that outlook. As private car ownership went up, investment in public transport, and privatization, went up accordingly leading in part to a greater need for private ownership of cars. Basically, in a kind of negative feedback loop we ended up having a capitol city with no metro or tram system, and no rail link to the city airport, and ten mile tailbacks every morning. Dublin now has a tram system, which spends quite a bit of time stuck in traffic unsurprisingly.
Now this country is quite rural and relatively sparsely populated, which means that just about everyone _needs_ a car. However, simultaneously, people need a publicly funded, public transportation system, and successive governments here seem to have problems grasping that. I'm not sure what the situation in the US is like, but I can only assume that the "market-forces" brigade emphasizes the same "invisible hand" approach that leaves Dublin gridlocked every morning.
You clearly live in either a suburban or rural location, for which indeed, the car is king. For anyone who lives and works in an urban area, i.e. most of humanity, there is no better way to travel than on regular, efficient public transport. Japan leads the way in this. The idea of driving a car from a suburban or urban home to a city center is ludacrious.
That said, people will always have cars to take them were trains and buses don't go, which is fine. But this should not be seen as an excuse for governments to skimp on public transport, or worse to privatise public transport. Good public transport needs investment; cash investment, by the government. And that investment pays off _BIG_. Private investment in cars on the other hand, only leads to diminishing returns with every additional set of wheels on the roads.
That makes you worse than any of those groups. Fairweather Freedom is worse than no freedom at all.
Don't forget the sewers! There's something that we should all hope is never be left to the vagaries of mysterious "market forces".
Having studied all of these fields, I can safely say that the average undergraduate curriculum or textbox in any of these areas contains only the barest minimum of geometry, despite the vast amount of geometry inherant in these subjects. This is down to two reasons.
First and foremost, is laziness. It is easier to thrown down a rote definition by dictate than it is to motivate, explain and build a framework in which those definitions make sense. The former is the preferred method, and essentially leads to mathematics by rote learning, which is not really mathematics at all. The latter is the correct method, and leads to real understanding. Geometry is a key part of this method of explaination, which is why you see so little of it around.
The second method is related to the first. It has to do with the fact that after so many decades of poor textbooks devoid of geometrical meaning, very few people are actually aware of the geometry aspect of their fields, and write their textbooks accordingly. I'm sure not a few slashdotters went through a linear algebra course in which the only picture, if any, was to do with the solution of two, two variable simultaneous equations somewhere in the first lecture. In reality, linear algebra was developed from its outset, by this man, to be a method for solving problems in geometry via algebraic techniques. Most if not all standard techniques in linear algebra can not only be interpreted as a geometric method, but are essentially incomprehensible otherwise.
Classic example of the dearth of geometry in mathematics textbooks, and something relevant to this discussion, is the almost universal definition of "contravariant" and "covariant" tensors in general relativity/differential geometry textbooks. The usual "....whose coordinates transform according to the rule...." definition is essentially useless and betrays the authors incompetence and robs the reader of any real understanding of the topic. Contravariance and Covariance in fact have nothing to do with coordinate transformations of any kind and have far more fundamental origins, best revealed through basic geometric pictures. Try this book for an example of how things should be done.
Taco's use of "like" was proper and correct.
Despite "like's" notoriety in the hands, or mouths, of US teenagers, it is an effective and useful phrase and can enhance communication in both the written and spoken word. Specifically, it serves as a short pause in the sentence which adds emphasis to the words that come directly after it. It's practically a form of punctuation. Watch this.
"I am really hungry!"
"I am like, really hungry."
Which sentence better communicates that the speaker or writer is very hungry? The overloading of the exclamation mark in written english leaves the first sentence ambiguous. We don't really know if the speaker is hungry, or just excited about being hungry, or just excited. The second sentence makes the speakers meaning clear without the use of any exclamation mark.
Slang is usually derided and frowned upon by supposedly superior english speakers and writers, the kind of people who pronounce "hyperbole" as "hyperbowlly". These people would have us remove critical phrases like "OK" from our vocabulary, despite the fact that cannot come up with any adequate replacement.
English is evolving. Learn to live with it.
Moronic? It is the most powerful rhetorical device of our time. Essentially, these days, you're a fool not to use it.
One law for them. Another for the rest of us. Don't forget it.