If the rates of conviction were remotely similar you might have a point. When people with similar criminal histories are up on the same charges, black folks are much, much more likey to be convicted than white folks. When sentenced black folks wil get longer sentences for the same convictions than white folks with similar histories. When corrected for economic background the stats are still skewed heavily against blacks, which suggests that race is the deciding factor rather than access to competent counsel.
It's pretty clear the criminal justice system in this country is ridiculously biased against black people.
Ditto. I loved my Kindle (first version, got it when it came out) but my iPad is much better for me because I tend to mark my books up to hell and gone which was possible but difficult to do with the Kindle.
I also use a lot of reference books, journals, etc. and again while the Kindle let me search, the search capability is much, much easier to work with on the iPad.
Now, if we could have an iPad with a full-color e-ink screen that was as good as the iPad 2 (but retina would be amazing) and just as responsive as the iPad is currently, with the ability to turn on and off backlighting - THAT would be something wonderful and completely compelling for me.
I've seen tons of comments here that I would absolutely consider racist that have been modded +5 insightful, so just saying "editors will check it out" doesn't mean anything to me. I've also seen comments that were insightful but happened to go against the groupthink modded to -1.
Further, given the... Quality... Of editing here, I don't know that I would feel any better with that system than with moderation allowing people to be put to -1. Worse, actually - it being deleted means nobody case it even if they want to.
The only time I could see a comment being justifiably deleted would be if it contained personally identifying information for someone other than the poster. But as soon as Slashdot starts going down the road of removing posts (rather than just down modding them) it's going to be a less interesting place.
Will it be like the "overrated" mod, which basically means, "I disagree with you and want to shut you up, but I'm too much of a chickenshit to risk internet karma points if other people disagree with me"?
I didn't say that you are against stem cell research, but that the behavior is similar to people freaking out over potential applications when the problem space isn't well understood yet.
We do not have a complete list of all the materials being used, we don't have anything but a fairly limited description. While I understand your concerns, I just can't get too bothered by hem because it's just some nebulous thing.
On the language, I don't disagree that it's not well done. In fact, I was so surprised that they would do that that I mentally swapped his with this to make it "exploits this bad behavior."
Now' regarding the utility of this articulate example of an approach to the problem of trying to identify predators and the specific point where they spring the trap: this specific attempt probably will not be particularly useful. It probably will return a ton of false positives. It probably is poorly designed, and it probably will be biased.. But it may help flesh out the problem space a bit more and yield some interesting ideas about how to approach that problem by getting a bunch of people involved and making it a competition.
No responsible, ethical researcher is going to take the results of this competition and try to do anything itch it other than use it for a source of ideas for some future avenues of inquiry. Believe it or not, most researchers really like having a career, and a good way to completely fuck that up is to develop a reputation for doing bad science and trying to push it as significant. I am looking at this particular thing as more or less equivalent to a focus group: you get ideas from it but you would be a fucking idiot to have to take the results as anything but fodder for brainstorming (so, I fully expect to see nancy grace talk about it as if it's iron clad proof of, well, something, if she hears of it).
I guess I just think its an interesting problem to think about and while I'm quite aware that this approach is quite flawed, I'm not particularly bothered by that since any real research proposal would have to be hellaciusly rigorous in order to pass even the barest level of scrutiny for peer review, and any actual practical applications that might come from real research would by and large need to be backed up by extensive replication of results before being paid attention.
Talking about applications of this is getting so far ahead of anything that its just not worth it for me. I mean, this thing, right now, is purely an exercise in feasibility - trying to extrapolate past that can be interesting, but it's so nebulous that having any firm opinion as to how things would go seems to me kind of ahead of things.
The Nancy Graces of the world don't need this to justify their behavior to themselves, nor do the people who insist smoke == fire, or any of the other sorts of people who would be predicted to abuse this. They don't need any justification because they see it EVERYWHERE. But for people who are actually interested in sorting this stuff out or understanding what's knowable, this could be pretty neat.
Let me out this in a different way - the people getting up in arms over potential abuses of this as yet hypothetical ability by entities who are willing to act amorally based on probably tenuous connections at best are pretty much the same as the people who are opposed to basic research into stem cells because they insist that the logical conclusion is that people will be murdering live born babies to harvest their precious bodily fluids. It entirely skips the steps wherein we rationally explore the space of a problem which is kind of necessary when thinking about potential applications for a technique that may address the problem.
That isn't a very persuasive link. Half of it talks about cold reading and much of the remaining half talks about a specific failure.
Given the trick budgets many law enforcement agencies have, I find it odd that they would waste their money on such things if it were found to be completely useless.
Mind you, I'm not saying this should be taken as gospel. I just think such tools can help suggest avenues of inquiry that might not immediately be available. It's everyone else who is jumping ninety steps ahead and insisting that they will be treated as word of god and abused to lock up everyone with a slightly dirty thought.
My guess is that it would be something like they have dealt with emergencies in the past without it' what new kinds of emergencies are happening now that are so different they require a cellphone? And maybe it's a wedge thing, too.
Why not just go whole hog and add all kinds of things - early warning systems, tractors and combines, cars, etc and so on. If the argument that something were handy but optional were enouh the Amish wouldn't be, well, Amish.
Doing business has changed and so the technology needed to do business has changed, but it gets emoyed only for business. Emergencies haven't changed, so the technology they will use to deal with emergencies doesn't need to change, either. You and I may not agree, but I have a sense neither of us is Amish so we don't get a say:)
Except it obviously isn't REQUIRED, as millions of people play, use the AH, and don't use add-ons.
You see it as a FLAW (and from al caps, I'm guessing you see it as a huge one) and that's certainly your right, but that doesn't mean that there aren't other people who have different views. My big issue with your post is you seem to think your experience is universal when it just simply isn't.
I don't have to give you a good reason why going with stacks is a good idea since I never made the argument that it is. The argument that I'm making is that going with stacks and a price-per-stack setup is a UI choice Blizzard made and one that, if a player doesn't like, can be changed by using addons. Blizzard designed their game to allow users to make their own choice about how e UI works by providing the ability to customize the UI with addons because they're bright enough to realize that some customers will make different choices.
I am not saying the default UI is perfect and without flaw, but I am saying that Blizzard designed the system to allow the use of addons to let the players have choices in how and whether they want to address the flaw, and because they have a way for players to fix what they may consider flaws (while other people may not see them as flaws) it's not a big deal for some default UI elements to be clunky.
I would much rather have the dev team focusing on making the game more fun rather than focusing on fiddle bits in the UI. Blizzard made what I consider the right choice here - open the game up for a kind of moddability and let the players have a huge range of choices, freeing up developer and designer resources from dicking around with the UI and leaving that to players to tweak.
As I said, I use a lot of addons and I personally find the default UI too be basically functional but really obnoxious in a tin of ways, but I differ from you in that I view it as a choice rather than some kind of horrible thing Blizzard inflicted on me. If there were no ability to write addons yeah, I would be bugged as hell. But there is so I'm not.
One last thing: I agree that the idea of putting up items as singletons instead of stacks would be more flexible, but ere are unintended consequences. Right now, the inefficiencies in using the AH actually serve to limit the amount that people who spend all day abusing the AH can do; making it easier to trade on the AH would also make it a lot easier for AH barons to drive up prices and control markets, making it harder for people who don't sit at the AH all day to use it. In fact, Blizzard even removed the functionality in the auction addons that would allow you to specify how many stacks would get bought and let the addon do it - you now have to click at least once per purchase, which slows othings down just enough to give other people a fitting chance.
With Blizzard, specifically, I'm willing to take those risks because of their past track record. As I said, I don't buy drm laden stuff except with Blizzard.
Blizzard added the ability to incorporate addons for people who want to customize UI elements that they want to swap. Addons are free and easily available from a number of places, and can be developed by anyone.
So no, that is the exact opposite of broken to me. It allows me greater choice to modify things to make them how I want them rather than how some designer decrees I must use them.
An extensible and modifiable design that allows everyone to make things just right for their own use is infinitely superior to a set design forcing people to use things in only one way.
It's baffling to me that you seem to have a problem with Blizzard acknowledging that their default UI might not work for everyone and allowing people to mod things to their own goal and would rather see people forced to use one UI instead.
Do you really think all people everywhere would want the exact same things in a UI?
Actually, that's not really how the Amish relationship with technology works. They don't eschew technology because it is technology, but rather they eschew some technology because they feel it doesn't facilitate community/interpersonal relationships with people or a relationship with god, or, even if it does, in some cases the disadvantages are not worth it. When technology doesn't impinge on those things and if it is sufficiently needful they use it.
I met an Amish who owns a computer and uses a cellphone for his work. Doesn't have them in his home, doesn't carry the phone with him all the time, but he uses them.
Use auctionator and those issues go away. It's free and trivial to install and use.
While WoW has integrated many addons into their core UI, they also added the ability to use addons for things where users want to customize their UI even more, so there's really no reason to settle for the stock UI if some element of it doesn't work for you.
I think that rather than plan to keep the servers up forever, I could see them release a patch that would allow LAN play if it were true that they had to close down for some reason" or, failing that, to at least patch it to remove the must be online part.
Blizzard has by and large done alright by me - I don't like the drm they are using now but they are the one studio that releases and supports their games well enough for me to put up with it.
If people want to abuse something like this, they don't even need to do this kind of experiment to abuse it. Simply grep a chat log for words you don't like and go to town. It seems like you're missing the actual point of this, which is to actually refine that process to weed out a lot more false positives, which would lead to LESS abuse than a system which would return more (incorrect) hits.
And you can, in fact, label something predatory while doing research into it if predatory behavior is exactly what you are looking for. They aren't looking for someone who propositions someone, they aren't looking for someone who just hits on someone,but rather someone approaching another person in a predatory fashion with the intent to manipulate and abuse that person into providing sexual favors, or however they are operationalizing the concept of "predatory." The label may only apply within their research, but it's a perfectly valid thing to do.
And, once more, you are missing the point: the point of this is to tel the people who may come off as predators from the ones who are actually predators. To actually label FEWER people predators who aren't really predatory and MORE people who are predatory. I don't see why that part is so hard to get - I mean, again, if you just wanted to return as many hits as possible why not just decide any use of certain terms is predatory and call it a day?
You started to get at it yourself - you think this will be full of false positives, and my entire point is that they're trying to find a way to return fewer false positives than might otherwise be returned by any other method of analysis currently used and abused to flag chat logs and other communications. If you are so bugged by false positives being returned then you ought to be happy that this is an attempt to reduce those. You can't possibly be naive enough to assume that communications aren't already being monitored (on some public forums, at least) in some kind of less discerning fashion, so it is sort of baffling why you would be so upset about something that might return fewer but higher quality hits.
The only way I could see this being abused isn't in the fashion you see,but in the idea that if I were found, in studies, to have a really high rate of success when looking at historical data, but the historical data they used for the initial calibration were flawed in some way. Then you might have a situation where people believe this type of system flagging behavior is more compelling evidence than it actually is. Kind of like if someone decided that their being probable cause for a stop by police was sufficient to convict in court.
Nothing you have said makes this any less stupid. They forbade bringing an opebottle of baby formula on, but there is nothing against a strange electronic device of unknown purpose onto a plane? Really?
I mean, I know they are in the slow class and are only able to identify threats in retrospect, but really, this is pretty dumb.
If I were trying to protect something I would make a point of making the most stringent security measures the first line of defense, not the last. If this thing was scary enough to make very well trained flight crew freak out the TSA agents screening it should have been pissing their pants.
Also, a sticker with a barcode should have been applied to this strange object indicating the TSA cleared it. I mean, Jesus, it's not hard to imagine a situation in which someone might fly with something weird and how to indicate that this weird thing had been inspected...
No, it's entirely the fault of the person behaving badly.
Google takes steps to accou t for people like this, but the system isn't and cannot be perfect. Blaming the tools people use to commit crimes - even if just "in a small way" - shifts blame from the actual responsible party.
If I get a gun and shoot someone, is that, even I a small way, Smith & Wessons fault for making the gun? The dealers fault for selling it to me? The ammo makers fault for selling me the funds? The victims vault for being in a situation where I could shoot them? No. It would be my fault because I am the person who did something wrong. Without me the crime wouldn't have happened, period, full stop.
Now, if you meant to say, "tools like google let people do this kind of thing more easily, I wonder if there is a way to limit the harm bad actors can do without crippling tht tool" then that's one thing. But fault? No, sorry, that's entirely on the person who decided to do the behavior in question.
Well, first of all, this is not something that's being rolled out rit now, but an attempt to discern whether seeing predators with this limited information is possible and, if so, whether it could be automated. So I don't really have much to say about it being rolled out to ISPs as a thing that is used to flag people, and won't bother getting into that discussion since its fruitless. I don't care about practical implementations of this at this point because I can't see into the future and know how it might be implemented, especially when it isn't even known if it would work yet.
Secondly, predatory behaviors are nothing like the dating behaviors you describe. A predator by definition is trying to manipulate and use another person for their own gain without regard for the safety or well-being of the other person, and employing intentional deception to present whatever image the other person needs to see in order to make their manipulation happen. I won't speak for anyone else, but predatory behaviors and dating behaviors are massively different, the point of them is different, and the genuineness of them is completely different. The neat trick is, as this whole competition/experiment/project is intended to do, is to discern the cases where it is hard to make a determination. I don't know how I can be any more clear on that.
Finally, you talk about being a better parent as if that would be some kind of panacea for the problem. The fact is, not everyone will be a better parent, and saying "well, just be better" is pretty much useless. Not everyone will be a better parent, so if there are ways to build in useful ways to actually protect kids who have the bad luck to be born to shitty parents, it may well be better than just saying fuck it and leaving them to fate. We have a lot of such safeguards in society for when people fuck up or misbehave that are intended to minimize the harm that comes due to bad actors.
Getting parents to be more involved in their kids lives, and in ways that are actually good is ONE factor, but certainly not the only one. Plenty of people who have been model parents have had bad shit happen to their kids proves that.
Mind you, I'm not going all "think of the children" here, or advocating some stupid scheme for protecting kids regardless of the costs, I just think this is a neat experiment that might lead to some neat things and is worth seeing what happens. Has nothing to do with applications of this.
See, the great thing about experiments/projects like this is that they can help us understand if our gut instinct about whether or not something can work or not is actually correct.
As I said, I also am skeptical about how well this could possibly work, but it's definitely think its an interesting problem to look at be ause if it IS possible, despite our mutual skepticism, that's pretty damn neat and can lead to learning more things.
Some of the most interesting bits of knowledge we have came about by asking "pointless" questions and doing "pointless" experiments that people said couldn't work.
I don't disagree that involved parents would do a lot to prevent these issues, but I am realistic enough to know that many parents simply don't bother, and that children want to have privacy and will find ways to get it.
Further, your comment ignores the real fact that kids excel at getting themselves into trouble and getting around parental restrictions especially when they don't think the restrictions make sense. A kid who has been manipulated by an adult to think its ok to cam or take pics is probably also going to be pretty to manipulate into thinking that their parents are just being overprotective and that it's totally ok in this case to temporarily borrow the webcam or whatever. That's kind of the point I was making about how these people work.
Except this is proof that the TSA completely fucked up and didn't do their job. If the device was such that it would terrify (much more highly trained than the TSA goons) air crew, what the holy fuck was it doing on the plane in the first place, let alone in the cabin or outside of a container in cargo, with the power source disconnected?
What also pisses me off is that the passengers were the ones who were taken away and interrogated. I wonder: Did the TSA agents who fucked up also get taken into custody and subjected to interrogation?
If not, why not? Either through intent or incompetence they allowed this to happen. If it was intent, then they're clearly abetting terrorists, and if they're incompetent they shouldn't have jobs anymore.
Those aren't the people I'm referring to. The ones I was describing tend to work as analysts/profilers for law enforcement/forensic environments, or, ironically, the people those individuals are trying to understand and find.
I'm not talking about "The Mentalist" or "Lie to Me" type things - I had just assumed that people would grasp that I'm not talking about clowns doing party tricks.
Slashdot Mirror
If the rates of conviction were remotely similar you might have a point. When people with similar criminal histories are up on the same charges, black folks are much, much more likey to be convicted than white folks. When sentenced black folks wil get longer sentences for the same convictions than white folks with similar histories. When corrected for economic background the stats are still skewed heavily against blacks, which suggests that race is the deciding factor rather than access to competent counsel.
It's pretty clear the criminal justice system in this country is ridiculously biased against black people.
Ditto. I loved my Kindle (first version, got it when it came out) but my iPad is much better for me because I tend to mark my books up to hell and gone which was possible but difficult to do with the Kindle.
I also use a lot of reference books, journals, etc. and again while the Kindle let me search, the search capability is much, much easier to work with on the iPad.
Now, if we could have an iPad with a full-color e-ink screen that was as good as the iPad 2 (but retina would be amazing) and just as responsive as the iPad is currently, with the ability to turn on and off backlighting - THAT would be something wonderful and completely compelling for me.
Except it doesn't.
I've seen tons of comments here that I would absolutely consider racist that have been modded +5 insightful, so just saying "editors will check it out" doesn't mean anything to me. I've also seen comments that were insightful but happened to go against the groupthink modded to -1.
Further, given the ... Quality... Of editing here, I don't know that I would feel any better with that system than with moderation allowing people to be put to -1. Worse, actually - it being deleted means nobody case it even if they want to.
The only time I could see a comment being justifiably deleted would be if it contained personally identifying information for someone other than the poster. But as soon as Slashdot starts going down the road of removing posts (rather than just down modding them) it's going to be a less interesting place.
What constitutes a flaggable comment?
Will it be like the "overrated" mod, which basically means, "I disagree with you and want to shut you up, but I'm too much of a chickenshit to risk internet karma points if other people disagree with me"?
I didn't say that you are against stem cell research, but that the behavior is similar to people freaking out over potential applications when the problem space isn't well understood yet.
We do not have a complete list of all the materials being used, we don't have anything but a fairly limited description. While I understand your concerns, I just can't get too bothered by hem because it's just some nebulous thing.
On the language, I don't disagree that it's not well done. In fact, I was so surprised that they would do that that I mentally swapped his with this to make it "exploits this bad behavior."
Now' regarding the utility of this articulate example of an approach to the problem of trying to identify predators and the specific point where they spring the trap: this specific attempt probably will not be particularly useful. It probably will return a ton of false positives. It probably is poorly designed, and it probably will be biased.. But it may help flesh out the problem space a bit more and yield some interesting ideas about how to approach that problem by getting a bunch of people involved and making it a competition.
No responsible, ethical researcher is going to take the results of this competition and try to do anything itch it other than use it for a source of ideas for some future avenues of inquiry. Believe it or not, most researchers really like having a career, and a good way to completely fuck that up is to develop a reputation for doing bad science and trying to push it as significant. I am looking at this particular thing as more or less equivalent to a focus group: you get ideas from it but you would be a fucking idiot to have to take the results as anything but fodder for brainstorming (so, I fully expect to see nancy grace talk about it as if it's iron clad proof of, well, something, if she hears of it).
I guess I just think its an interesting problem to think about and while I'm quite aware that this approach is quite flawed, I'm not particularly bothered by that since any real research proposal would have to be hellaciusly rigorous in order to pass even the barest level of scrutiny for peer review, and any actual practical applications that might come from real research would by and large need to be backed up by extensive replication of results before being paid attention.
Talking about applications of this is getting so far ahead of anything that its just not worth it for me. I mean, this thing, right now, is purely an exercise in feasibility - trying to extrapolate past that can be interesting, but it's so nebulous that having any firm opinion as to how things would go seems to me kind of ahead of things.
The Nancy Graces of the world don't need this to justify their behavior to themselves, nor do the people who insist smoke == fire, or any of the other sorts of people who would be predicted to abuse this. They don't need any justification because they see it EVERYWHERE. But for people who are actually interested in sorting this stuff out or understanding what's knowable, this could be pretty neat.
Let me out this in a different way - the people getting up in arms over potential abuses of this as yet hypothetical ability by entities who are willing to act amorally based on probably tenuous connections at best are pretty much the same as the people who are opposed to basic research into stem cells because they insist that the logical conclusion is that people will be murdering live born babies to harvest their precious bodily fluids. It entirely skips the steps wherein we rationally explore the space of a problem which is kind of necessary when thinking about potential applications for a technique that may address the problem.
That isn't a very persuasive link. Half of it talks about cold reading and much of the remaining half talks about a specific failure.
Given the trick budgets many law enforcement agencies have, I find it odd that they would waste their money on such things if it were found to be completely useless.
Mind you, I'm not saying this should be taken as gospel. I just think such tools can help suggest avenues of inquiry that might not immediately be available. It's everyone else who is jumping ninety steps ahead and insisting that they will be treated as word of god and abused to lock up everyone with a slightly dirty thought.
My guess is that it would be something like they have dealt with emergencies in the past without it' what new kinds of emergencies are happening now that are so different they require a cellphone? And maybe it's a wedge thing, too.
Why not just go whole hog and add all kinds of things - early warning systems, tractors and combines, cars, etc and so on. If the argument that something were handy but optional were enouh the Amish wouldn't be, well, Amish.
Doing business has changed and so the technology needed to do business has changed, but it gets emoyed only for business. Emergencies haven't changed, so the technology they will use to deal with emergencies doesn't need to change, either. You and I may not agree, but I have a sense neither of us is Amish so we don't get a say :)
Except it obviously isn't REQUIRED, as millions of people play, use the AH, and don't use add-ons.
You see it as a FLAW (and from al caps, I'm guessing you see it as a huge one) and that's certainly your right, but that doesn't mean that there aren't other people who have different views. My big issue with your post is you seem to think your experience is universal when it just simply isn't.
I don't have to give you a good reason why going with stacks is a good idea since I never made the argument that it is. The argument that I'm making is that going with stacks and a price-per-stack setup is a UI choice Blizzard made and one that, if a player doesn't like, can be changed by using addons. Blizzard designed their game to allow users to make their own choice about how e UI works by providing the ability to customize the UI with addons because they're bright enough to realize that some customers will make different choices.
I am not saying the default UI is perfect and without flaw, but I am saying that Blizzard designed the system to allow the use of addons to let the players have choices in how and whether they want to address the flaw, and because they have a way for players to fix what they may consider flaws (while other people may not see them as flaws) it's not a big deal for some default UI elements to be clunky.
I would much rather have the dev team focusing on making the game more fun rather than focusing on fiddle bits in the UI. Blizzard made what I consider the right choice here - open the game up for a kind of moddability and let the players have a huge range of choices, freeing up developer and designer resources from dicking around with the UI and leaving that to players to tweak.
As I said, I use a lot of addons and I personally find the default UI too be basically functional but really obnoxious in a tin of ways, but I differ from you in that I view it as a choice rather than some kind of horrible thing Blizzard inflicted on me. If there were no ability to write addons yeah, I would be bugged as hell. But there is so I'm not.
One last thing: I agree that the idea of putting up items as singletons instead of stacks would be more flexible, but ere are unintended consequences. Right now, the inefficiencies in using the AH actually serve to limit the amount that people who spend all day abusing the AH can do; making it easier to trade on the AH would also make it a lot easier for AH barons to drive up prices and control markets, making it harder for people who don't sit at the AH all day to use it. In fact, Blizzard even removed the functionality in the auction addons that would allow you to specify how many stacks would get bought and let the addon do it - you now have to click at least once per purchase, which slows othings down just enough to give other people a fitting chance.
And that doesn't make the TSA look better either.
My thinking is the TSA simply didn't find it, given their track record, and the flight crew knows damn wel how incompetent those guys are.
With Blizzard, specifically, I'm willing to take those risks because of their past track record. As I said, I don't buy drm laden stuff except with Blizzard.
Blizzard added the ability to incorporate addons for people who want to customize UI elements that they want to swap. Addons are free and easily available from a number of places, and can be developed by anyone.
So no, that is the exact opposite of broken to me. It allows me greater choice to modify things to make them how I want them rather than how some designer decrees I must use them.
An extensible and modifiable design that allows everyone to make things just right for their own use is infinitely superior to a set design forcing people to use things in only one way.
It's baffling to me that you seem to have a problem with Blizzard acknowledging that their default UI might not work for everyone and allowing people to mod things to their own goal and would rather see people forced to use one UI instead.
Do you really think all people everywhere would want the exact same things in a UI?
Actually, that's not really how the Amish relationship with technology works. They don't eschew technology because it is technology, but rather they eschew some technology because they feel it doesn't facilitate community/interpersonal relationships with people or a relationship with god, or, even if it does, in some cases the disadvantages are not worth it. When technology doesn't impinge on those things and if it is sufficiently needful they use it.
I met an Amish who owns a computer and uses a cellphone for his work. Doesn't have them in his home, doesn't carry the phone with him all the time, but he uses them.
Use auctionator and those issues go away. It's free and trivial to install and use.
While WoW has integrated many addons into their core UI, they also added the ability to use addons for things where users want to customize their UI even more, so there's really no reason to settle for the stock UI if some element of it doesn't work for you.
I think that rather than plan to keep the servers up forever, I could see them release a patch that would allow LAN play if it were true that they had to close down for some reason" or, failing that, to at least patch it to remove the must be online part.
Blizzard has by and large done alright by me - I don't like the drm they are using now but they are the one studio that releases and supports their games well enough for me to put up with it.
If people want to abuse something like this, they don't even need to do this kind of experiment to abuse it. Simply grep a chat log for words you don't like and go to town. It seems like you're missing the actual point of this, which is to actually refine that process to weed out a lot more false positives, which would lead to LESS abuse than a system which would return more (incorrect) hits.
And you can, in fact, label something predatory while doing research into it if predatory behavior is exactly what you are looking for. They aren't looking for someone who propositions someone, they aren't looking for someone who just hits on someone,but rather someone approaching another person in a predatory fashion with the intent to manipulate and abuse that person into providing sexual favors, or however they are operationalizing the concept of "predatory." The label may only apply within their research, but it's a perfectly valid thing to do.
And, once more, you are missing the point: the point of this is to tel the people who may come off as predators from the ones who are actually predators. To actually label FEWER people predators who aren't really predatory and MORE people who are predatory. I don't see why that part is so hard to get - I mean, again, if you just wanted to return as many hits as possible why not just decide any use of certain terms is predatory and call it a day?
You started to get at it yourself - you think this will be full of false positives, and my entire point is that they're trying to find a way to return fewer false positives than might otherwise be returned by any other method of analysis currently used and abused to flag chat logs and other communications. If you are so bugged by false positives being returned then you ought to be happy that this is an attempt to reduce those. You can't possibly be naive enough to assume that communications aren't already being monitored (on some public forums, at least) in some kind of less discerning fashion, so it is sort of baffling why you would be so upset about something that might return fewer but higher quality hits.
The only way I could see this being abused isn't in the fashion you see,but in the idea that if I were found, in studies, to have a really high rate of success when looking at historical data, but the historical data they used for the initial calibration were flawed in some way. Then you might have a situation where people believe this type of system flagging behavior is more compelling evidence than it actually is. Kind of like if someone decided that their being probable cause for a stop by police was sufficient to convict in court.
Nothing you have said makes this any less stupid. They forbade bringing an opebottle of baby formula on, but there is nothing against a strange electronic device of unknown purpose onto a plane? Really?
I mean, I know they are in the slow class and are only able to identify threats in retrospect, but really, this is pretty dumb.
If I were trying to protect something I would make a point of making the most stringent security measures the first line of defense, not the last. If this thing was scary enough to make very well trained flight crew freak out the TSA agents screening it should have been pissing their pants.
Also, a sticker with a barcode should have been applied to this strange object indicating the TSA cleared it. I mean, Jesus, it's not hard to imagine a situation in which someone might fly with something weird and how to indicate that this weird thing had been inspected...
No, it's entirely the fault of the person behaving badly.
Google takes steps to accou t for people like this, but the system isn't and cannot be perfect. Blaming the tools people use to commit crimes - even if just "in a small way" - shifts blame from the actual responsible party.
If I get a gun and shoot someone, is that, even I a small way, Smith & Wessons fault for making the gun? The dealers fault for selling it to me? The ammo makers fault for selling me the funds? The victims vault for being in a situation where I could shoot them? No. It would be my fault because I am the person who did something wrong. Without me the crime wouldn't have happened, period, full stop.
Now, if you meant to say, "tools like google let people do this kind of thing more easily, I wonder if there is a way to limit the harm bad actors can do without crippling tht tool" then that's one thing. But fault? No, sorry, that's entirely on the person who decided to do the behavior in question.
Well, first of all, this is not something that's being rolled out rit now, but an attempt to discern whether seeing predators with this limited information is possible and, if so, whether it could be automated. So I don't really have much to say about it being rolled out to ISPs as a thing that is used to flag people, and won't bother getting into that discussion since its fruitless. I don't care about practical implementations of this at this point because I can't see into the future and know how it might be implemented, especially when it isn't even known if it would work yet.
Secondly, predatory behaviors are nothing like the dating behaviors you describe. A predator by definition is trying to manipulate and use another person for their own gain without regard for the safety or well-being of the other person, and employing intentional deception to present whatever image the other person needs to see in order to make their manipulation happen. I won't speak for anyone else, but predatory behaviors and dating behaviors are massively different, the point of them is different, and the genuineness of them is completely different. The neat trick is, as this whole competition/experiment/project is intended to do, is to discern the cases where it is hard to make a determination. I don't know how I can be any more clear on that.
Finally, you talk about being a better parent as if that would be some kind of panacea for the problem. The fact is, not everyone will be a better parent, and saying "well, just be better" is pretty much useless. Not everyone will be a better parent, so if there are ways to build in useful ways to actually protect kids who have the bad luck to be born to shitty parents, it may well be better than just saying fuck it and leaving them to fate. We have a lot of such safeguards in society for when people fuck up or misbehave that are intended to minimize the harm that comes due to bad actors.
Getting parents to be more involved in their kids lives, and in ways that are actually good is ONE factor, but certainly not the only one. Plenty of people who have been model parents have had bad shit happen to their kids proves that.
Mind you, I'm not going all "think of the children" here, or advocating some stupid scheme for protecting kids regardless of the costs, I just think this is a neat experiment that might lead to some neat things and is worth seeing what happens. Has nothing to do with applications of this.
See, the great thing about experiments/projects like this is that they can help us understand if our gut instinct about whether or not something can work or not is actually correct.
As I said, I also am skeptical about how well this could possibly work, but it's definitely think its an interesting problem to look at be ause if it IS possible, despite our mutual skepticism, that's pretty damn neat and can lead to learning more things.
Some of the most interesting bits of knowledge we have came about by asking "pointless" questions and doing "pointless" experiments that people said couldn't work.
I don't disagree that involved parents would do a lot to prevent these issues, but I am realistic enough to know that many parents simply don't bother, and that children want to have privacy and will find ways to get it.
Further, your comment ignores the real fact that kids excel at getting themselves into trouble and getting around parental restrictions especially when they don't think the restrictions make sense. A kid who has been manipulated by an adult to think its ok to cam or take pics is probably also going to be pretty to manipulate into thinking that their parents are just being overprotective and that it's totally ok in this case to temporarily borrow the webcam or whatever. That's kind of the point I was making about how these people work.
Grr, submitted too quick:
The answers to all my questions are that the TSA is useless, incompetent and corrupt in its entirety.
Except this is proof that the TSA completely fucked up and didn't do their job. If the device was such that it would terrify (much more highly trained than the TSA goons) air crew, what the holy fuck was it doing on the plane in the first place, let alone in the cabin or outside of a container in cargo, with the power source disconnected?
What also pisses me off is that the passengers were the ones who were taken away and interrogated. I wonder: Did the TSA agents who fucked up also get taken into custody and subjected to interrogation?
If not, why not? Either through intent or incompetence they allowed this to happen. If it was intent, then they're clearly abetting terrorists, and if they're incompetent they shouldn't have jobs anymore.
Yes, please insert the word "damn near" between "are" and "unambiguous."
The perils of posting from a virtual keyboard without haptic feedback.
Those aren't the people I'm referring to. The ones I was describing tend to work as analysts/profilers for law enforcement/forensic environments, or, ironically, the people those individuals are trying to understand and find.
I'm not talking about "The Mentalist" or "Lie to Me" type things - I had just assumed that people would grasp that I'm not talking about clowns doing party tricks.