If a comment is worth having here, why not ding all of the moderation that marked it down at once? And if it is junk, why not reduce the moderation power of the users that marked it up?
Showing a specific moderation example gives you a bias, an anchor. It also diverts your attention away from the big issue and towards the small specifics. Think of the difference between "Do I want more comments like this here, or fewer?" and "Should this have been +1 Funny, or should it have been +1 Interesting instead?".
1 - agree about the quotes. Don't care about or want any other unicode.
4 - I hit the posting delay enough to be annoyed, and I've been excellent since excellent karma was invented.
9 - In my opinion, appending to comments is a bad idea. By letting them be final, the next reader can see exactly what a commenter was looking at when they were typing.
10 - Speak for yourself. I don't think I could estimate to within 5 years how long ago I turned sigs off. I forget for years at a time that such things even exist, usually until someone comments on mine.
One presumes that a simple query could find the sum and average of moderation for all comments attached to a given story. Heck, the sum of metamoderation for a story should be easy to fetch too.
Correlate those with the tags or something, and you should have a good idea of what kinds of stories are popular (lots of comments), which ones produce quality discussion (better net sum and/or average of moderation), and which ones get the blood pumping (inverse average of metamoderation).
Depends on a lot of stuff. There are groups of mods that will nuke certain things to oblivion if you catch them at the wrong time.
I'm looking at the SJW-squad mostly, but that's the one that I personally get notifications for. I can't rule out the existence of the opposite prospiracy, but I never see upvote storms when I mock The Narrative, just singletons.
I'd look elsewhere for caucus fraud (and there are already reports coming out). A conspiracy to cheat the coin tosses would be huge and impossible to keep quiet.
Where do you think the $25 aspirin came from? Medicare publishes how much they are willing to pay for a service code. The clinic then establishes a "cost" of double what Medicare will pay. Then your insurance company steps in and says "$50 for aspirin is insane, we'll only pay $35."
It isn't evenly distributed, and it isn't the only loss in the system.
The goal and result of the last 50 years of tinkering has been to completely destroy the pricing system in medicine. No one in any part of the system has any idea of what anything costs. That includes patients, doctors, nurses, administrators, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, researchers, etc.
Be extremely skeptical of any dollar figures you see related to mainstream medicine. None of them have any connection to reality.
Doctors are increasingly opting out of the system and working strictly for cash. Those doctors are surprisingly cheap, partly because they have very little administrative overhead, and partly because they have price signals in both directions that guide them towards efficiency.
The easiest solution is to get rid of these grants.
Don't get me wrong, with all of the imaginary rights the Supreme Court has been finding in the 14th amendment, the one I'd most like them to find is the right to a federal government that exclusively uses Free Software and open standards.
But I don't really have a lot of sympathy for this guy's difficulty in getting my tax money. He calls himself "The VAR guy", which strongly suggests that he's not asking for money to perform some obligation of the federal government as spelled out in the Constitution.
Here in the US, we mostly consider the socialists and communists to be on the left. And the Democrat party has been pushing everything in that direction as hard as they can, for at least the last century.
If the Democrat party has actually been moving right, they must be using a different spectrum than the collectivist-individualist scale commonly used today.
These are all micro. I'm talking about the origins of the species.
Also, these are a bit silly. Take the first one. Is the rate of mutation a prediction of evolutionary theory? Or is it just an observation? That you expect the next observation to be similar to the previous observations is hardly proof of anything.
Like I said, I'm not aware of any hard tests of evolution (regarding the origins of the species). I've seen lots of weak, squishy tests, but no hard ones.
I guess, in the absence of a competing theory, weak tests are "good enough", but they don't exactly fill me with confidence.
Funny. I haven't heard of any falsification test (for the universal theory) that didn't end with "Evolution decided not to do it that way" yet. What did I miss?
Since I'm not posting as AC, I should probably mention that I'm a bit religious, but not a literalist, and very much not a young-earther. I'm somewhat dubious on the Big Bang Theory (which is essentially "Fiat Lux" translated into secular terms) for scientific reasons, but don't have a preferred alternative.
Evolution on the smallest scale (bacteria, fruit flies, etc) can be seen almost with bare eyeballs. On the development of man, the evolution by small changes can be seen pretty well in the fossil record (but I chuckle at some of the steps attested by fragments that differ up and down by minute changes that appear, to me at least, within the normal variation).
Like a sheetrock wall, it looks totally solid as long as you only tap on the parts directly over a stud, but most of it is supported only by association with the strong parts of the theory.
On the topic of education, I support power only at the very lowest level. The community should be able to have the kinds of schools they want to have, without interference from any higher levels of government. The damage that the centralization of education causes the country is far in excess of any possible harm that could come from a few schools teaching wrong.
If you can hardly see anyone to your left, and the only people you see speaking on the right are far-right, you should seriously consider that you might not be in the middle.
It sounds like you are (or maybe were) a "country club republican". Don't worry if you've never been to a country club, it isn't an actual requirement.
The militia is the group of men capable of military service. Basically, the people you would call on for volunteers and conscripts if you needed to raise an army. The country has a huge advantage if many of them already know how to handle firearms.
At any rate, it is entirely clear that the people in "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" is the same the people in the 1st, 4th and 10th amendments.
It is even more clear that the founders understood that by natural law men had these rights in advance, and that the Bill of Rights was to compel the government to respect them. The Supreme Court has explicitly endorsed this view many times.
"The right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution; neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence." - United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875)
Also see Robertson v. Baldwin, 165 U.S. 275 (1897) and DC v. Heller 478 F. 3d 370, among others.
The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.
FORTRAN --"the infantile disorder"--, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
PL/I --"the fatal disease"-- belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.
11.5 tons seemed like a lot, and denormalized fractions still aren't common in the press, despite my many letters. Since I'm not familiar with the current slang terms, so I had to look it up. "21/2-ton" is apparently street lingo for 5,000 US pounds. For the international audience out there, that is about 75 Akkadian bitu, or nearly 12 million Roman siliqua.
Dictionaries memorialize common usage as an aid to readers. They offer no opinion on the correctness of word choices.
The inverse meaning of literally is common, but incorrect. Note that I am not normally in the prescriptive camp of linguistics. I do not consider formations that merely make one sound like an idiot to be incorrect, but I do consider formations that lose information to be incorrect.
Consider the present case. "wrote the book" is an expression that can mean either "wrote the book" or "knows enough that he could write a book". The use of the word "literally" could help distinguish the two cases here, but is instead used as an intensifier. Considering that the cliche in question is already quite superlative, adding an intensifier seems inflationary, and it actually diminishes her stature in the minds of the reader, as he will inevitably be disappointed when he finds out that the claim isn't true.*
Granted, the author of this is directly quoting someone, but should have chosen a different quote.
On a side note, I'm a bit surprised by the comments here. Was the slashdot readership not generally aware that large scale batch computation in the age before electronic computers was done by hordes of people (mostly women) called "computers"? It came up a couple of times in Cryptonomicon.
And what is with the sudden push to present the sexism of the recent past in comic book terms? (See Agent Carter, or Aquarius for examples of mustache-twirling melodrama-villain sexism. Mad Men has a bit too, but the other shows really turned it up to 11.) My theory is that actual sexism has become such a foreign concept in the modern west that writers today don't understand it at all, so they have to resort to caricature.
* I can't find a book by her, and nothing I've seen claims that she made significant contributions to any specific actual book. Anyone have a citation?
The oldest modern (=mentions using radar) textbook on the subject that I'm aware of is Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, published in 1971, and based on unstructured materials (including plenty of NASA papers) that the Air Force Academy had been collecting and using since around 1959.
C-SPAN provides a valuable service, mostly because they decide in advance what to cover, and then just sit back with the cameras rolling and the stream flowing.
NPR, not so much. If you don't think NPR isn't biased, it is because they are on your side.
The FBI maintains databases containing what they call "Criminal Justice Information" (CJI). Police departments access it using "Criminal Justice Information Systems" (CJIS) over a "Criminal Justice Data Network" (CJDN).
For your state to get access to these things, the state's top law enforcement agency has to enter into an agreement with the FBI. Part of the agreement involves providing access to local police departments, and getting them to agree to follow the same rulebook.
One of the rules is that "Criminal Justice Information", basically any information that comes from these systems, must be protected from disclosure.
What does that mean for body cameras? If the dispatcher reads anything out of CJIS over the air, and the body camera picks it up, it must be redacted. If the officer has a mobile data terminal, and his body camera catches a glimpse of CJI on the screen, it must be redacted. Hilariously, even if the information is well known publicly, it is still protected if it comes through CJIS. Insane, of course, and the states are trying like mad to negotiate a change on that point.
Sunshine laws generally allow government agencies to pass expenses down to requestors. Redaction is usually done by a pair of lawyers. $200 per hour isn't bad for a team.
Read the article. That is the part of the webpage below the banner. Then go back to my first post, and ask yourself which harassment I'm concerned with. With that in mind, ponder how likely I am to be triggered by "zomg! sexism!".
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for demonstrating his point. Now back in your cage.
I don't mind the current system.
If a comment is worth having here, why not ding all of the moderation that marked it down at once? And if it is junk, why not reduce the moderation power of the users that marked it up?
Showing a specific moderation example gives you a bias, an anchor. It also diverts your attention away from the big issue and towards the small specifics. Think of the difference between "Do I want more comments like this here, or fewer?" and "Should this have been +1 Funny, or should it have been +1 Interesting instead?".
1 - agree about the quotes. Don't care about or want any other unicode.
4 - I hit the posting delay enough to be annoyed, and I've been excellent since excellent karma was invented.
9 - In my opinion, appending to comments is a bad idea. By letting them be final, the next reader can see exactly what a commenter was looking at when they were typing.
10 - Speak for yourself. I don't think I could estimate to within 5 years how long ago I turned sigs off. I forget for years at a time that such things even exist, usually until someone comments on mine.
Kids these days got no respect.
This story seems to have dragged a bunch of 4s out of retirement. I'm impressed.
The data is here.
One presumes that a simple query could find the sum and average of moderation for all comments attached to a given story. Heck, the sum of metamoderation for a story should be easy to fetch too.
Correlate those with the tags or something, and you should have a good idea of what kinds of stories are popular (lots of comments), which ones produce quality discussion (better net sum and/or average of moderation), and which ones get the blood pumping (inverse average of metamoderation).
Depends on a lot of stuff. There are groups of mods that will nuke certain things to oblivion if you catch them at the wrong time.
I'm looking at the SJW-squad mostly, but that's the one that I personally get notifications for. I can't rule out the existence of the opposite prospiracy, but I never see upvote storms when I mock The Narrative, just singletons.
I'd look elsewhere for caucus fraud (and there are already reports coming out). A conspiracy to cheat the coin tosses would be huge and impossible to keep quiet.
As long as both candidates had a representative present, and neither objected, the tosses were fair enough, particularly for government work.
Where do you think the $25 aspirin came from? Medicare publishes how much they are willing to pay for a service code. The clinic then establishes a "cost" of double what Medicare will pay. Then your insurance company steps in and says "$50 for aspirin is insane, we'll only pay $35."
It isn't evenly distributed, and it isn't the only loss in the system.
The goal and result of the last 50 years of tinkering has been to completely destroy the pricing system in medicine. No one in any part of the system has any idea of what anything costs. That includes patients, doctors, nurses, administrators, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, researchers, etc.
Be extremely skeptical of any dollar figures you see related to mainstream medicine. None of them have any connection to reality.
Doctors are increasingly opting out of the system and working strictly for cash. Those doctors are surprisingly cheap, partly because they have very little administrative overhead, and partly because they have price signals in both directions that guide them towards efficiency.
The easiest solution is to get rid of these grants.
Don't get me wrong, with all of the imaginary rights the Supreme Court has been finding in the 14th amendment, the one I'd most like them to find is the right to a federal government that exclusively uses Free Software and open standards.
But I don't really have a lot of sympathy for this guy's difficulty in getting my tax money. He calls himself "The VAR guy", which strongly suggests that he's not asking for money to perform some obligation of the federal government as spelled out in the Constitution.
Here in the US, we mostly consider the socialists and communists to be on the left. And the Democrat party has been pushing everything in that direction as hard as they can, for at least the last century.
If the Democrat party has actually been moving right, they must be using a different spectrum than the collectivist-individualist scale commonly used today.
These are all micro. I'm talking about the origins of the species.
Also, these are a bit silly. Take the first one. Is the rate of mutation a prediction of evolutionary theory? Or is it just an observation? That you expect the next observation to be similar to the previous observations is hardly proof of anything.
Like I said, I'm not aware of any hard tests of evolution (regarding the origins of the species). I've seen lots of weak, squishy tests, but no hard ones.
I guess, in the absence of a competing theory, weak tests are "good enough", but they don't exactly fill me with confidence.
Funny. I haven't heard of any falsification test (for the universal theory) that didn't end with "Evolution decided not to do it that way" yet. What did I miss?
Since I'm not posting as AC, I should probably mention that I'm a bit religious, but not a literalist, and very much not a young-earther. I'm somewhat dubious on the Big Bang Theory (which is essentially "Fiat Lux" translated into secular terms) for scientific reasons, but don't have a preferred alternative.
Evolution on the smallest scale (bacteria, fruit flies, etc) can be seen almost with bare eyeballs. On the development of man, the evolution by small changes can be seen pretty well in the fossil record (but I chuckle at some of the steps attested by fragments that differ up and down by minute changes that appear, to me at least, within the normal variation).
Like a sheetrock wall, it looks totally solid as long as you only tap on the parts directly over a stud, but most of it is supported only by association with the strong parts of the theory.
On the topic of education, I support power only at the very lowest level. The community should be able to have the kinds of schools they want to have, without interference from any higher levels of government. The damage that the centralization of education causes the country is far in excess of any possible harm that could come from a few schools teaching wrong.
If you can hardly see anyone to your left, and the only people you see speaking on the right are far-right, you should seriously consider that you might not be in the middle.
It sounds like you are (or maybe were) a "country club republican". Don't worry if you've never been to a country club, it isn't an actual requirement.
The militia is the group of men capable of military service. Basically, the people you would call on for volunteers and conscripts if you needed to raise an army. The country has a huge advantage if many of them already know how to handle firearms.
At any rate, it is entirely clear that the people in "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" is the same the people in the 1st, 4th and 10th amendments.
It is even more clear that the founders understood that by natural law men had these rights in advance, and that the Bill of Rights was to compel the government to respect them. The Supreme Court has explicitly endorsed this view many times.
"The right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution; neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence." - United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875)
Also see Robertson v. Baldwin, 165 U.S. 275 (1897) and DC v. Heller 478 F. 3d 370, among others.
Looks like the news from Rotherham, Cologne, Helsinki, Malmo, Stockholm, Paris, etc hasn't reached everyone yet.
EWD498 in PDF or HTML
Without guns, we'd become Europeans. You may get a chubby watching your wives and daughters get raped, but for the most part, we don't.
11.5 tons seemed like a lot, and denormalized fractions still aren't common in the press, despite my many letters. Since I'm not familiar with the current slang terms, so I had to look it up. "21/2-ton" is apparently street lingo for 5,000 US pounds. For the international audience out there, that is about 75 Akkadian bitu, or nearly 12 million Roman siliqua.
The crazy things you kids say these days.
Dictionaries memorialize common usage as an aid to readers. They offer no opinion on the correctness of word choices.
The inverse meaning of literally is common, but incorrect. Note that I am not normally in the prescriptive camp of linguistics. I do not consider formations that merely make one sound like an idiot to be incorrect, but I do consider formations that lose information to be incorrect.
Consider the present case. "wrote the book" is an expression that can mean either "wrote the book" or "knows enough that he could write a book". The use of the word "literally" could help distinguish the two cases here, but is instead used as an intensifier. Considering that the cliche in question is already quite superlative, adding an intensifier seems inflationary, and it actually diminishes her stature in the minds of the reader, as he will inevitably be disappointed when he finds out that the claim isn't true.*
Granted, the author of this is directly quoting someone, but should have chosen a different quote.
On a side note, I'm a bit surprised by the comments here. Was the slashdot readership not generally aware that large scale batch computation in the age before electronic computers was done by hordes of people (mostly women) called "computers"? It came up a couple of times in Cryptonomicon.
And what is with the sudden push to present the sexism of the recent past in comic book terms? (See Agent Carter, or Aquarius for examples of mustache-twirling melodrama-villain sexism. Mad Men has a bit too, but the other shows really turned it up to 11.) My theory is that actual sexism has become such a foreign concept in the modern west that writers today don't understand it at all, so they have to resort to caricature.
* I can't find a book by her, and nothing I've seen claims that she made significant contributions to any specific actual book. Anyone have a citation?
The oldest modern (=mentions using radar) textbook on the subject that I'm aware of is Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, published in 1971, and based on unstructured materials (including plenty of NASA papers) that the Air Force Academy had been collecting and using since around 1959.
C-SPAN provides a valuable service, mostly because they decide in advance what to cover, and then just sit back with the cameras rolling and the stream flowing.
NPR, not so much. If you don't think NPR isn't biased, it is because they are on your side.
The FBI maintains databases containing what they call "Criminal Justice Information" (CJI). Police departments access it using "Criminal Justice Information Systems" (CJIS) over a "Criminal Justice Data Network" (CJDN).
For your state to get access to these things, the state's top law enforcement agency has to enter into an agreement with the FBI. Part of the agreement involves providing access to local police departments, and getting them to agree to follow the same rulebook.
One of the rules is that "Criminal Justice Information", basically any information that comes from these systems, must be protected from disclosure.
What does that mean for body cameras? If the dispatcher reads anything out of CJIS over the air, and the body camera picks it up, it must be redacted. If the officer has a mobile data terminal, and his body camera catches a glimpse of CJI on the screen, it must be redacted. Hilariously, even if the information is well known publicly, it is still protected if it comes through CJIS. Insane, of course, and the states are trying like mad to negotiate a change on that point.
Sunshine laws generally allow government agencies to pass expenses down to requestors. Redaction is usually done by a pair of lawyers. $200 per hour isn't bad for a team.
You missed something important.
Read the article. That is the part of the webpage below the banner. Then go back to my first post, and ask yourself which harassment I'm concerned with. With that in mind, ponder how likely I am to be triggered by "zomg! sexism!".