There's still a correlation. Correlation does NOT imply causation. The GP was just coming up with some causative theories, you've come up with some more. But just because there turns out to be no causation between the rise of videogames and crimes doesn't mean there's no correlation.
I didn't find it surprising either - most of the communities I"m on on LJ are almost entirely female. The most male-dominated one is like 10-15% male. Of course, I'm probably on comms that appeal more to women, but most of them aren't topics that are obviously feminine. My husband reads political blogs but doesn't have one himself; I have like three.
Why wouldn't that count as a blog? Since when does "blog" mean anything other than "web log," or "online log of your daily thoughts and activities?" Who decided that an online journal must meet some minimum requirement of eliteness to qualify as a "blog"??
Remember that "a blog" does not mean "a well-known blog" or "a blog that gets a lot of hits" or "a blog anyone but my three friends reads" or even "a blog that ANYONE reads." It just means any blog you write in - which includes everyone on LiveJournal and its children, plus the millions more on MySpace who use the blog function on there, plus blogger, wordpress, etc... 8% doesn't seem off at all to me. Hell, my MOM, who knows very little about computers, has a blog on 360.yahoo.com that she writes in once a month. My aunt and uncle, who are about as computer-savvy as she is, both have MySpace accounts and write in those blogs now and then.
Regular people blogging: It's more likely than you think!
Well, for one thing, once you post to/. you have no ability to go back and edit your post. If LJ finds a link that doesn't seem to have intended to go to a child porn site originally, they will notify the user and give them a couple days to go back and change the link -/. can't do that, so it seems less defensible to make users responsible for changed links. Plus, even if/. decided to take away your account if it's obvious that you knowingly linked to something bad, there's still anonymous posting.
The other issue is that they have been yanking paid (in some cases lifetime) accounts with no warning to the owner at all and no refunds. This is what got people really pissed. At least they're starting to realize that they should give people a chance to take it down before deleting the account.
As much as it pains me to help the wankers, I should point out that there's no "No Porn" rule. The problems have been with child porn. Specifically, if you draw a picture of 16-year-old Harry Potter performing unseemly acts with 35-year-old Severus Snape, is that child porn? LJ has been somewhat inconsistent with its definitions, so now people are worried they will carry those inconsistent definitions over to this, making it hard to tell what links are OK. Personally, I think we can all just give up our Snarry porn and live happily ever after, but apparently there are MANY PEOPLE (a few dozen) to whom this is a VITAL FORM OF EXPRESSION.
Great, now I get to read LJ pedo wank on/. too. Is there no escape?
The blog post in question states:
If there's any good news, current policy dictates that if LJAbuse is able to determine based on the content around your link that you initially posted to a "safe" site and that link has now been redirected, you will be contacted and asked to fix the link. They will most likely not use it as a "strike" against you in their shiny new "two strikes yer out policy" if LJAbuse decides that you didn't intend to link to a site LJ/6A thinks contains ToS-able content.
Which contradicts the comment quoted in the summary.
Of course, as sick as I am of the "LET ME TELL YOU INTERNETS IT IS HARD TO BE AN OPPRESSED HARRY POTTER FANFICCER", I do hope that LJ isn't really going to start kicking people out for old links.
I used to have a Barbie site that got a fair bit of traffic, and of course (this being the late 90s when a links page was a requisite for any site), I had a page of links to my other favorite Barbie sites. I once got a letter in the snail mail from a lady telling me what a horrible person I am for luring children in with Barbie stuff and then showing them porn. Sure enough, one of the doll domains had been bought out as a "doll" domain, and this lady for some reason thought that I had actually gone through the trouble of creating a site with all this info on doll collecting (and I'm sure 7-year-olds find listings of flaws discovered upon deboxing a doll fascinating) just to lure kids into a porn site. Oh, and that was the day I learned not to put my home address on my online resume.
Normal iPhone users are not going to be willing to go through a bunch of rigamarole to run programs on their devices.
Different hack. This one is to make it take any SIM card and work on any network. Plenty of people would love to get an iPhone and use it on their current plan, plenty more would love to use it internationally without AT&T's crazy prices.
a) He's seventeen. It's completely acceptable, nay, expected, for someone who is still a minor to be living with their parents. Not much of an insult there.
b) If that's the dorkiest guy you've ever seen? Man, you haven't met many real dorks, have you?
Multiple choice tests *can* be very well-done. They can be very difficult, they can test for deep-level understanding and reasoning rather than factual knowledge.
However, the few studies that have looked at standardized tests in the US have found that they absolutely, 100% do NOT do these things, and I'm sure the UK isn't much better, especially if they make them easier. Heck, in the US it's rare to find standardized tests that actually test for the same things that are listed in the state standards. The standards themselves these days are full of pretty language about understanding and reasoning and process skills, but the tests are almost entirely fact-regurgitation.
I will second this. One positive effect that voucher systems have had in some areas is that once private schools open themselves up to scrutiny by accepting vouchers, some have been found to be so deficient that parents realized that the "failing" public schools were actually better, pulled their kids out in droves, and the crappy private schools closed. Private does not mean better - research every school individually.
I hope pay phones don't go completely extinct. I would have been royally screwed a couple months ago without one - I managed to lock myself out of my house with no keys, cel phone, or cash. I did have my wallet, though, so I could go to a 7-11, buy a prepaid phone card, and call my husband from a pay phone. Otherwise I would have had to break a window to get inside. (Now I have spare keys hidden in the car - I'd actually gone to make them that day but got there a half hour after the hardware store closed.)
Okay then, they still get $0 from me. The math there is pretty easy. It's not like I cry myself to sleep at night for my lack of cable. If I were willing to pay $50 for the channels I want, I'd be paying it already, I could afford it. But they're not worth that much to me. If they use that model, Netflix will continue to get the money I'm willing to spend on video entertainment.
Well, they certainly could make more money off of me. Right now they get $0, whereas I'd be willing to pay $20-25 for 10-20 channels that I picked. Heck, I might even be able to convince my husband for that price, and he doesn't like TV. But I'm not willing to pay $50 for those plus another 80 I don't want.
Yeah, and far fewer publishers/production companies/etc willing to take the risk of financing art because they're less able to make a return on it. Fewer people able to make a living from their art, so fewer people having time to create art. But hey, the art that does get made would be free, sweet!
Well hey, maybe they'll do character development a la Michael Gambon. At least we can get a laugh out of watching crazed, drooling Dorothy rant and storm at everything she sees while rabid Toto attacks the munchkins.
And yeah, I really want my one friend who hasn't read any of the books to see the fourth and fifth movies (he's only seen the first couple) and tell me if he had any clue what the hell was going on, especially in #5.
I definitely had nightmares about the headless lady. That movie freaked me the hell out.
I'm actually not sure reading the book would have had the same effect, even at the same age - I could always picture the scary scenes as being more cartoony (and I imagine I probably would, and base it on the illustrations), whereas the movie definitely wasn't.
I've seen cheapo DVDs of cartoon versions of The Wizard of Oz and some of the others. I'm assuming these straight-to-video crap versions weren't enough of a threat to make MGM angry, but now if they *did* try to sue over it the fact that they didn't sue over those versions would probably hurt them.
NeoOffice was dead slow on my 700 MHz eMac running 10.3.9 - on a slower machine it would be unusable. It's a little better on this 1.25 GHz eMac I'm on now, but only a tiny bit. My Intel iMac at work, it's fine on. But on an older machine, NeoOffice reeeeally drags.
I've noticed that, too. If you like pump soap instead of bar soap, it's nearly impossible to get the non-antibacterial stuff. I have the non-resistance-causing alcohol-based sanitizer for when I want the antibacterial action (like after cleaning up dog poo), I want soap that is just SOAP! To get me clean, not healthy!
If you think a world that expects young women to kill their unborn children and spend the most vital years of their lives stuck in universities being professed at by their elders, so they can get meaningless jobs and finally wake to what they've been missing when their plumbing is just about worn out, when they need a surgeon just to get pregnant, when they are too old and tired to play with their kids if they do actually have one, if you think that is friendly to women, or men, or children, or anyone at all, you're the one that needs to have their head examined.
Why does this apply to women, but not men? It's great for men to be stuck in universities and get meaningless jobs? Sure, their plumbing doesn't wear out as quickly, but they eventually need Viagra instead of a surgeon and they're no more able to keep up with small children into their 50s and 60s than women are.
women will sit behind desks pushing papers around, suckle off the hard physical labour of men, giving men nothing that they value in return,
And there are PLENTY of men who do this, too. What percentage of the male population is doing that "hard physical labor" and what percentage are middle managers? You're treating men just as unfairly as you're treating women by saying that it's fine for them to have mindless, meaningless jobs when they could also be caring for their children. If a woman has a fulfilling job that contributes to society and her husband is a random manager in a pencil-making company, why wouldn't society be better served by HIM quitting and raising their children?
unlike math, English (or whatever your native language may be) is something you are constantly exposed to, and you will use it every single day of your life
But most English classes at the high school level are about analyzing stories and novels as much as (if not more than) they are about writing and speaking skills. As much as I read, do I EVER analyze what I'm reading the way I was taught to in AP English? Not at all. In fact, as a theater major, I basically had to learn an entirely different set of text analysis skills that have proven far more useful than anything I learned or used in a Lit class. So why should high school students be required to take literature classes?
Slashdot Mirror
There's still a correlation. Correlation does NOT imply causation. The GP was just coming up with some causative theories, you've come up with some more. But just because there turns out to be no causation between the rise of videogames and crimes doesn't mean there's no correlation.
I didn't find it surprising either - most of the communities I"m on on LJ are almost entirely female. The most male-dominated one is like 10-15% male. Of course, I'm probably on comms that appeal more to women, but most of them aren't topics that are obviously feminine. My husband reads political blogs but doesn't have one himself; I have like three.
Why wouldn't that count as a blog? Since when does "blog" mean anything other than "web log," or "online log of your daily thoughts and activities?" Who decided that an online journal must meet some minimum requirement of eliteness to qualify as a "blog"??
Regular people blogging: It's more likely than you think!
Well, for one thing, once you post to /. you have no ability to go back and edit your post. If LJ finds a link that doesn't seem to have intended to go to a child porn site originally, they will notify the user and give them a couple days to go back and change the link - /. can't do that, so it seems less defensible to make users responsible for changed links. Plus, even if /. decided to take away your account if it's obvious that you knowingly linked to something bad, there's still anonymous posting.
The other issue is that they have been yanking paid (in some cases lifetime) accounts with no warning to the owner at all and no refunds. This is what got people really pissed. At least they're starting to realize that they should give people a chance to take it down before deleting the account.
As much as it pains me to help the wankers, I should point out that there's no "No Porn" rule. The problems have been with child porn. Specifically, if you draw a picture of 16-year-old Harry Potter performing unseemly acts with 35-year-old Severus Snape, is that child porn? LJ has been somewhat inconsistent with its definitions, so now people are worried they will carry those inconsistent definitions over to this, making it hard to tell what links are OK. Personally, I think we can all just give up our Snarry porn and live happily ever after, but apparently there are MANY PEOPLE (a few dozen) to whom this is a VITAL FORM OF EXPRESSION.
The blog post in question states:
If there's any good news, current policy dictates that if LJAbuse is able to determine based on the content around your link that you initially posted to a "safe" site and that link has now been redirected, you will be contacted and asked to fix the link. They will most likely not use it as a "strike" against you in their shiny new "two strikes yer out policy" if LJAbuse decides that you didn't intend to link to a site LJ/6A thinks contains ToS-able content.
Which contradicts the comment quoted in the summary.
Of course, as sick as I am of the "LET ME TELL YOU INTERNETS IT IS HARD TO BE AN OPPRESSED HARRY POTTER FANFICCER", I do hope that LJ isn't really going to start kicking people out for old links.
I used to have a Barbie site that got a fair bit of traffic, and of course (this being the late 90s when a links page was a requisite for any site), I had a page of links to my other favorite Barbie sites. I once got a letter in the snail mail from a lady telling me what a horrible person I am for luring children in with Barbie stuff and then showing them porn. Sure enough, one of the doll domains had been bought out as a "doll" domain, and this lady for some reason thought that I had actually gone through the trouble of creating a site with all this info on doll collecting (and I'm sure 7-year-olds find listings of flaws discovered upon deboxing a doll fascinating) just to lure kids into a porn site. Oh, and that was the day I learned not to put my home address on my online resume.
Different hack. This one is to make it take any SIM card and work on any network. Plenty of people would love to get an iPhone and use it on their current plan, plenty more would love to use it internationally without AT&T's crazy prices.
b) If that's the dorkiest guy you've ever seen? Man, you haven't met many real dorks, have you?
No, but as I said, I had no cash on me. I bought the prepaid card with my debit card.
However, the few studies that have looked at standardized tests in the US have found that they absolutely, 100% do NOT do these things, and I'm sure the UK isn't much better, especially if they make them easier. Heck, in the US it's rare to find standardized tests that actually test for the same things that are listed in the state standards. The standards themselves these days are full of pretty language about understanding and reasoning and process skills, but the tests are almost entirely fact-regurgitation.
I will second this. One positive effect that voucher systems have had in some areas is that once private schools open themselves up to scrutiny by accepting vouchers, some have been found to be so deficient that parents realized that the "failing" public schools were actually better, pulled their kids out in droves, and the crappy private schools closed. Private does not mean better - research every school individually.
I hope pay phones don't go completely extinct. I would have been royally screwed a couple months ago without one - I managed to lock myself out of my house with no keys, cel phone, or cash. I did have my wallet, though, so I could go to a 7-11, buy a prepaid phone card, and call my husband from a pay phone. Otherwise I would have had to break a window to get inside. (Now I have spare keys hidden in the car - I'd actually gone to make them that day but got there a half hour after the hardware store closed.)
Okay then, they still get $0 from me. The math there is pretty easy. It's not like I cry myself to sleep at night for my lack of cable. If I were willing to pay $50 for the channels I want, I'd be paying it already, I could afford it. But they're not worth that much to me. If they use that model, Netflix will continue to get the money I'm willing to spend on video entertainment.
Well, they certainly could make more money off of me. Right now they get $0, whereas I'd be willing to pay $20-25 for 10-20 channels that I picked. Heck, I might even be able to convince my husband for that price, and he doesn't like TV. But I'm not willing to pay $50 for those plus another 80 I don't want.
Yeah, and far fewer publishers/production companies/etc willing to take the risk of financing art because they're less able to make a return on it. Fewer people able to make a living from their art, so fewer people having time to create art. But hey, the art that does get made would be free, sweet!
And yeah, I really want my one friend who hasn't read any of the books to see the fourth and fifth movies (he's only seen the first couple) and tell me if he had any clue what the hell was going on, especially in #5.
I'm actually not sure reading the book would have had the same effect, even at the same age - I could always picture the scary scenes as being more cartoony (and I imagine I probably would, and base it on the illustrations), whereas the movie definitely wasn't.
I've seen cheapo DVDs of cartoon versions of The Wizard of Oz and some of the others. I'm assuming these straight-to-video crap versions weren't enough of a threat to make MGM angry, but now if they *did* try to sue over it the fact that they didn't sue over those versions would probably hurt them.
NeoOffice was dead slow on my 700 MHz eMac running 10.3.9 - on a slower machine it would be unusable. It's a little better on this 1.25 GHz eMac I'm on now, but only a tiny bit. My Intel iMac at work, it's fine on. But on an older machine, NeoOffice reeeeally drags.
I've noticed that, too. If you like pump soap instead of bar soap, it's nearly impossible to get the non-antibacterial stuff. I have the non-resistance-causing alcohol-based sanitizer for when I want the antibacterial action (like after cleaning up dog poo), I want soap that is just SOAP! To get me clean, not healthy!
I think the question is whether you mean a fifth of a dollar/euro (20 cents) or a fifth of a cent, which is what you wrote.
Why does this apply to women, but not men? It's great for men to be stuck in universities and get meaningless jobs? Sure, their plumbing doesn't wear out as quickly, but they eventually need Viagra instead of a surgeon and they're no more able to keep up with small children into their 50s and 60s than women are.
women will sit behind desks pushing papers around, suckle off the hard physical labour of men, giving men nothing that they value in return,
And there are PLENTY of men who do this, too. What percentage of the male population is doing that "hard physical labor" and what percentage are middle managers? You're treating men just as unfairly as you're treating women by saying that it's fine for them to have mindless, meaningless jobs when they could also be caring for their children. If a woman has a fulfilling job that contributes to society and her husband is a random manager in a pencil-making company, why wouldn't society be better served by HIM quitting and raising their children?
But most English classes at the high school level are about analyzing stories and novels as much as (if not more than) they are about writing and speaking skills. As much as I read, do I EVER analyze what I'm reading the way I was taught to in AP English? Not at all. In fact, as a theater major, I basically had to learn an entirely different set of text analysis skills that have proven far more useful than anything I learned or used in a Lit class. So why should high school students be required to take literature classes?