No. They are quite real, and it has nothing to do with anyone but their own personal need for a flat earth.
There is a major conference of them held periodically near me, and I had to go see what was up. It seems to be primarily a religious thing actually. These people really just can't handle the idea of a large, cold, arbitrary, and uncaring universe that they are simply not in the center of. They MUST believe in the flat earth, because no matter who you talked to or how byzantine and strained the rationalizations, it all came back to - in their minds - proof of God. Of a master plan, of the comfort of an ordered universe, one in which we have a defined purpose for being here, and that it was all put here for us. That's what a flat earth means to them. It was really that simple. Its not trolling, its existential fear.
The addition of crime prediction software to a system that doesn't currently require evidence of a crime even having occurred to convict is terrifying.
The UK system regularly imposes criminal penalties on those simply suspected of being the kind of person to commit a crime - no accusation of a crime needed.
This isn't going to help any.
I have been at the receiving end of these. They are far simpler and more biased than anyone would reasonably expect. They are likely the result of a self-styled 'expert', as they are certainly never vetted in any academic sense, and they show a lot of that person/teams biases.
They put the vast majority of the weighting on income and upbringing, meaning a minor non-violent criminal with a background of childhood poverty will be treated as much larger threat than a wealthy murderer.
Just for a bit of background, I shot someone. I have no delusions that the money and privilege of being a white professional with a lawyer changed my outcome in the courtroom and DA negotiation side. Were I poor and minority I likely would have been in the system for life. But beyond that, once into the system, the imbalance continued. On a threat scale of 0 to 100, I rated something like a 2. It was absurd. Mainly because the questions were weighted toward things like how long I had been at an address, and if I owned or rented. Also previous convictions REGARDLESS OF TYPE. I knocked all those questions out of the park. If some poor minority kid with little education and a few tickets and a minimum wage job who had recently changed apartments got caught with a joint, they would have scored something like at least a 50 as a baseline. Which means I got an immediate and almost unsupervised walk (not a day in jail, call in once a month), while our hypothetical joint owner would have been locked up with at least a medium threat rating.
TL,DR; This has nothing to do with AI, more what some white, educated social worker pulled from very flawed data filtered through their biases.
Seems like the ability to always know your location and/or shut off your ability to legally drive if you have unpaid tickets, warrants, or some other infraction is the only real advantage. I am sure banks will use this for people behind in payments too. I see no consumer advantage to this at all, but we get to pay extra for it.
I am sure I do not know every compound that could burn that color of blue, but all of the ones I do know of involve heavy metals.
That was quite a bit of bright blue flame. That blue was not simply arcing, there was clearly a significant amount of deflagration going on.
Betting ConEd will have nothing to say about it as usual, at least not until someone drags it out into the light despite their best efforts to cover it up. Enjoy all those heavy metals and PCB's there New Yorkers.
At some point, when your tool doesn't work anymore, most sane people start looking for another tool, rather than continuing to bash away ineffectively with their current one while making excuses.
That is a completely rational argument, but as such one that fails to grasp the basic underlying value of religion to the religious. Some people simply cannot handle the uncertainty and lack of defined purpose inherent in the random, infinite universe that the scientific worldview brings. It is the very continuity of religion that holds the value to them. The specific beliefs matter little, it is simply the need for some form of stable anchor of certainty and universal unchanging truth that brings value. If any fundamental tenets had to change, it would lose all value as a security blanket and be transitory like the rest of the cold scary universe. Hence why they work so hard to reconcile religion and observable reality in such byzantine and often absurd ways. Rigidity is required to preserve any value religion has.
PETA has had a nasty schism over it that may well turn into a full civil war. The members that primarily care about ethical treatment of animals welcome it. They are apparently a minority, however. Most seem VERY strongly opposed. The arguments I heard were that without cruelty being involved in the process, it weakens the arguments for the elimination of meat from society. Yes, that means much of PETA is not actually interested in animal suffering other than as another tool to eventually legislate mandatory veganism. Nutty as that sounds, that is where they see society going, and eliminating cruelty to animals removes what they see as a powerful tool for their agenda to bring society to more 'enlightened' age where meat consumption is a criminal act.
It is indeed supposed to work that way, and I agree some system needs be in place. Eliminating spam is laudable, enforcing groupthink is not. If one is not careful it cuts both ways.
I have recently returned to/. after an absence of some years. An absence due mainly to it once reaching a point where the then-new moderation system became fully weaponized. From the looks of it, you were there too.
A good example would be the topic of His Divine Holiness Assange, God Emperor of Slashdot. That was especially toxic. No matter how well spoken or on point, any poster holding any reasonable observations, reservations, or for that matter any opinion other than overt worship being modded -5 Troll virtually instantly. Good way to trash years of Excellent Karma on an account older than yours by simply asking the wrong question. Hence the newish one.
I can only imagine (or hope) some of the shine has come off that particular deity, but/. weaponized groupthink is certainly still a danger on any topic. One that has in the past limited/. to an extremely narrow and rigid path. One I am hoping to find it still isn't on.
I find it humorous that you are discussing this topic in a forum that has been designed specifically to silence ideas that fall outside acceptable groupthink parameters.
Censorship is what groups really want, as long as its just limited to their personal flavor of it. Just like every other group. Hence the problem, of which this particular venue cannot speak to as being anything other than a part of that problem.
>how can you possibly look at martin's behavior and not at all consider zimmerman's behavior?
um, because only one of them was black. come on. the slashdot has a faction in it that is possibly more authoritarian, white, and afraid of blacks than any site i know of other than stormfront, even more than the freepers. i don't care what he facts were or what the behavior was, if the exact event occurred the opposite way (black man running down a stranger at night) they would claim the non-white being chased felt threatened and had every right to shoot the pursuer then, too. no matter how you rationalize it, the correct answer is to always shoot the black one. its just the way the i.t. community is. get over it.
Its pretty much replacing the Kopi Luwak. Someone figured out that the enzymes in the elephants system perform the same desired chemical changes even more effectively, and due to time spent digesting even more completely, while obviously offering the benefit of a massive increase in possible volume processed. All this, and from domesticated working animals that don't need to be force fed anything, as it is mixed in with their normal feed.
Better, more humane, and cheaper too. Where is the downside to that? (Well, other than it coming out of a mammals asshole anyway)
I design and manufacture 3d printers and even i see this as overblown BS to an embarrassing degree. 3d printers have great practical if very specific uses, but they will not save - much less even find use in - the third world, they are not and will never be self-replicating, and they won't pay for themselves in the average household anytime soon.
The hyperbole spewed by the almost religious sects that have sprung up around the reprap will be the undoing of 3d printing as a serious technology, or at least set it back a decade. I am a huge advocate of 3d printing, and these crazed reprap messiah types even creep me out.
the reason the gun grabbers love this idea so much (and it has come up every few years for decades) is not due to its function after you buy the gun.
of course you can remove it, they don't care. the point is to drive the purchase price of firearms so high it prevent the sale in the first place. of course, they will likely also want to likely add removing this device to the same laws as removing serial numbers - you know, to 'prevent crime' or some crap, but really its mainly about driving cost up.
Personally, I have only had to shoot one human being in my life, and it unluckily happened to be one where my strong hand was wrapped in bandages and a brace from injuries sustained shortly beforehand.
In my case, a weapons system equipped in this way would have failed to function. Same with any grit, ooze, or even water from rain, forget battery or electronics failure or any other environmental issue.
No way. Not even close.
They are all the same families, and the list is legit. You have to remember its a family business, not a church per se.
Not only are they all related, they are mostly lawyers. Old man Phelps finally got disbarred, but his offspring and in-laws are mainly lawyers too, and they file for the church now. Its a lawsuit mill, and its a family business.
The ones that go out and protest are only the bait to get either adverse crowd reactions and/or official denials of permits so that the lawyers can file suits against cities and universities for either failing to protect their people from crowd harassment or for 'violating their civil rights' for not giving into their usually pretty unreasonable protest demands as to exact time and location. They especially love universities, as invariably there are students that throw stuff at them or spray them with water, colleges are usually for more prone to settle than some other entities, and its a freebie two-fer anyway as there are usually city or county law enforcement involved as well in 'failing' to protect them from that, so they get two entities to sue for damages instead of just one.
The 'Church' makes up to several million dollars a year on the settlements to all the nuisance suits, and have hundreds going at any one time, more than 1000 concurrent ones at some points in the past. Its strictly a business model.
There have always been recognized limits to free speech. There are components of that here, especially as WBC doing this has been proven to be not political or religious speech, but simply a business model. They are lawsuit trolls. They go anywhere they can incite people, go to the nearest area to it that has an entity with deep pockets (like universities, etc), and attempt to 'protest' in the least practical and palatable manner, and then file suits against everyone involved. They had at one time roughly 1000 suits going in federal and state courts at any given time there for awhile, I am sure that hasn't changed any.
Its actually the wind that makes Mars dust safe. Whats so special about it is that its weathered. Just like Earth. With no weathering, the Moons dust looks a lot like Silica or Asbestos; It is sharp, jagged, and extremely destructive. It destroys the fibers of suits and eats seals; the Apollo stuff almost fell apart afterward, it wouldn't have lasted a couple more days. Add to that it slices up and eats lungs too. Good luck developing a habitat in an environment where any dust is extremely lethal to the occupants. There is just no way to effect living quarters with no cross-contamination. It would be difficult to live in a sterile cleanroom setting here on earth.
That Martian wind also distributes temperatures, you don't have the violent differentials of a vacuum. Mars actually has a lot of subtle benefits the more you look at them, the moon less.
Wearing a suit that fails daily? Good luck with that. We simply don't have the materials for a suit to keep people alive there for very long, nor the ability to give them a place to live out of that suit that won't kill them in short order. Forget the usual logistical and technical difficulties, the destructive/lethal nature of contact with the lunar soil itself is a problem we can't even solve at this point.
Mars is actually easier to explore/colonize. The moon is not only beyond our current technology to colonize, it is even beyond any theoretical technologies we can imagine. If anyone wants to argue that point, first come up with a suit and/or seal material that can survive more than 30 hours in the lunar environment. Then we will cover the actual difficult stuff.
Mars we can do right now. The moon is gone guys, let it go.
Even that is a fallacy. A myth of marketing. While true that a canon camera lens can be physically be mounted to any Canon, Nikon lens to Nikon body, etc, that doesn't mean they actually work. Many don't. Nikon has all sorts of levels of unintentional physical and intentional artificial firmware locking to prevent their own lenses from working on their cameras interchangeably. Canon doesn't gimp their cameras firmware, but physical issues still apply with lenses not meant to work on the pro cameras due to optical limitations. Even if you have a lens you can keep and move from a $500 to a $5000 body, by that point you ostensibly no longer desire to use those original plastic, slow, $100 amateur lenses on that pro body. The fact of the matter is that you have to dump your initial gear and lenses (often several times) on that upgrade treadmill, same brand or not. Assuming you even are one of the extraordinarily rare individuals that does eventually climb up into owning 5 figures of pro gear. The 'upgrade path' is a myth, and a useless one to almost every consumer even -IF- it were remotely true.
You have to understand that for some the gear itself is a religion. They own dozens of camera yet take no pictures. The brand is the thing. Even if OP wanted an SLR, Pentax makes far better entry level/consumer SLR's, and there are other companies as well. The mantra of CANON/NIKON is due solely to the fact they are the only two companies that make full-bore pro level products costing many thousands. Not that that should be relevant to someone wanting a consumer camera, but for the brand worshipers, having one of those two nameplates is the single most important aspect of camera ownership.
You have conservative Christian 'law schools' that focus specifically on teaching how to use and apply law toward the explicit agenda of moving it in the direction of biblical principles. By definition, they are designed to only turn out activists. It is their express stated intent, and the way those schools promote themselves as different from traditional law schools they compete with.
Is it any surprise then that the only real sizable pool of 'activist' judges are conservative/christian supremacist types?
I am stuck on 1 as well, and no longer get mod points either. I contributed for years and had stellar karma, then I said one factual but inconvenient thing. Now I am stuck on 1 point forever as well.
Actually, this is the first time I have contributed in a long time. The mod system did a very good job of driving me away from/. as a whole, which was probably its intended job the way it was constructed.
Slashdot Mirror
No. They are quite real, and it has nothing to do with anyone but their own personal need for a flat earth. There is a major conference of them held periodically near me, and I had to go see what was up. It seems to be primarily a religious thing actually. These people really just can't handle the idea of a large, cold, arbitrary, and uncaring universe that they are simply not in the center of. They MUST believe in the flat earth, because no matter who you talked to or how byzantine and strained the rationalizations, it all came back to - in their minds - proof of God. Of a master plan, of the comfort of an ordered universe, one in which we have a defined purpose for being here, and that it was all put here for us. That's what a flat earth means to them. It was really that simple. Its not trolling, its existential fear.
The addition of crime prediction software to a system that doesn't currently require evidence of a crime even having occurred to convict is terrifying. The UK system regularly imposes criminal penalties on those simply suspected of being the kind of person to commit a crime - no accusation of a crime needed. This isn't going to help any.
I have been at the receiving end of these. They are far simpler and more biased than anyone would reasonably expect. They are likely the result of a self-styled 'expert', as they are certainly never vetted in any academic sense, and they show a lot of that person/teams biases. They put the vast majority of the weighting on income and upbringing, meaning a minor non-violent criminal with a background of childhood poverty will be treated as much larger threat than a wealthy murderer. Just for a bit of background, I shot someone. I have no delusions that the money and privilege of being a white professional with a lawyer changed my outcome in the courtroom and DA negotiation side. Were I poor and minority I likely would have been in the system for life. But beyond that, once into the system, the imbalance continued. On a threat scale of 0 to 100, I rated something like a 2. It was absurd. Mainly because the questions were weighted toward things like how long I had been at an address, and if I owned or rented. Also previous convictions REGARDLESS OF TYPE. I knocked all those questions out of the park. If some poor minority kid with little education and a few tickets and a minimum wage job who had recently changed apartments got caught with a joint, they would have scored something like at least a 50 as a baseline. Which means I got an immediate and almost unsupervised walk (not a day in jail, call in once a month), while our hypothetical joint owner would have been locked up with at least a medium threat rating. TL,DR; This has nothing to do with AI, more what some white, educated social worker pulled from very flawed data filtered through their biases.
At driver expense, of course.
Seems like the ability to always know your location and/or shut off your ability to legally drive if you have unpaid tickets, warrants, or some other infraction is the only real advantage. I am sure banks will use this for people behind in payments too. I see no consumer advantage to this at all, but we get to pay extra for it.
I am sure I do not know every compound that could burn that color of blue, but all of the ones I do know of involve heavy metals. That was quite a bit of bright blue flame. That blue was not simply arcing, there was clearly a significant amount of deflagration going on. Betting ConEd will have nothing to say about it as usual, at least not until someone drags it out into the light despite their best efforts to cover it up. Enjoy all those heavy metals and PCB's there New Yorkers.
At some point, when your tool doesn't work anymore, most sane people start looking for another tool, rather than continuing to bash away ineffectively with their current one while making excuses.
That is a completely rational argument, but as such one that fails to grasp the basic underlying value of religion to the religious. Some people simply cannot handle the uncertainty and lack of defined purpose inherent in the random, infinite universe that the scientific worldview brings. It is the very continuity of religion that holds the value to them. The specific beliefs matter little, it is simply the need for some form of stable anchor of certainty and universal unchanging truth that brings value. If any fundamental tenets had to change, it would lose all value as a security blanket and be transitory like the rest of the cold scary universe. Hence why they work so hard to reconcile religion and observable reality in such byzantine and often absurd ways. Rigidity is required to preserve any value religion has.
PETA has had a nasty schism over it that may well turn into a full civil war. The members that primarily care about ethical treatment of animals welcome it. They are apparently a minority, however. Most seem VERY strongly opposed. The arguments I heard were that without cruelty being involved in the process, it weakens the arguments for the elimination of meat from society. Yes, that means much of PETA is not actually interested in animal suffering other than as another tool to eventually legislate mandatory veganism. Nutty as that sounds, that is where they see society going, and eliminating cruelty to animals removes what they see as a powerful tool for their agenda to bring society to more 'enlightened' age where meat consumption is a criminal act.
It is indeed supposed to work that way, and I agree some system needs be in place. Eliminating spam is laudable, enforcing groupthink is not. If one is not careful it cuts both ways. I have recently returned to /. after an absence of some years. An absence due mainly to it once reaching a point where the then-new moderation system became fully weaponized. From the looks of it, you were there too.
A good example would be the topic of His Divine Holiness Assange, God Emperor of Slashdot. That was especially toxic. No matter how well spoken or on point, any poster holding any reasonable observations, reservations, or for that matter any opinion other than overt worship being modded -5 Troll virtually instantly. Good way to trash years of Excellent Karma on an account older than yours by simply asking the wrong question. Hence the newish one.
I can only imagine (or hope) some of the shine has come off that particular deity, but /. weaponized groupthink is certainly still a danger on any topic. One that has in the past limited /. to an extremely narrow and rigid path. One I am hoping to find it still isn't on.
Just noting that your comment was modded down. That is all.
I find it humorous that you are discussing this topic in a forum that has been designed specifically to silence ideas that fall outside acceptable groupthink parameters. Censorship is what groups really want, as long as its just limited to their personal flavor of it. Just like every other group. Hence the problem, of which this particular venue cannot speak to as being anything other than a part of that problem.
>how can you possibly look at martin's behavior and not at all consider zimmerman's behavior? um, because only one of them was black. come on. the slashdot has a faction in it that is possibly more authoritarian, white, and afraid of blacks than any site i know of other than stormfront, even more than the freepers. i don't care what he facts were or what the behavior was, if the exact event occurred the opposite way (black man running down a stranger at night) they would claim the non-white being chased felt threatened and had every right to shoot the pursuer then, too. no matter how you rationalize it, the correct answer is to always shoot the black one. its just the way the i.t. community is. get over it.
Its pretty much replacing the Kopi Luwak. Someone figured out that the enzymes in the elephants system perform the same desired chemical changes even more effectively, and due to time spent digesting even more completely, while obviously offering the benefit of a massive increase in possible volume processed. All this, and from domesticated working animals that don't need to be force fed anything, as it is mixed in with their normal feed. Better, more humane, and cheaper too. Where is the downside to that? (Well, other than it coming out of a mammals asshole anyway)
I design and manufacture 3d printers and even i see this as overblown BS to an embarrassing degree. 3d printers have great practical if very specific uses, but they will not save - much less even find use in - the third world, they are not and will never be self-replicating, and they won't pay for themselves in the average household anytime soon. The hyperbole spewed by the almost religious sects that have sprung up around the reprap will be the undoing of 3d printing as a serious technology, or at least set it back a decade. I am a huge advocate of 3d printing, and these crazed reprap messiah types even creep me out.
the reason the gun grabbers love this idea so much (and it has come up every few years for decades) is not due to its function after you buy the gun. of course you can remove it, they don't care. the point is to drive the purchase price of firearms so high it prevent the sale in the first place. of course, they will likely also want to likely add removing this device to the same laws as removing serial numbers - you know, to 'prevent crime' or some crap, but really its mainly about driving cost up.
Personally, I have only had to shoot one human being in my life, and it unluckily happened to be one where my strong hand was wrapped in bandages and a brace from injuries sustained shortly beforehand. In my case, a weapons system equipped in this way would have failed to function. Same with any grit, ooze, or even water from rain, forget battery or electronics failure or any other environmental issue. No way. Not even close.
They are all the same families, and the list is legit. You have to remember its a family business, not a church per se. Not only are they all related, they are mostly lawyers. Old man Phelps finally got disbarred, but his offspring and in-laws are mainly lawyers too, and they file for the church now. Its a lawsuit mill, and its a family business. The ones that go out and protest are only the bait to get either adverse crowd reactions and/or official denials of permits so that the lawyers can file suits against cities and universities for either failing to protect their people from crowd harassment or for 'violating their civil rights' for not giving into their usually pretty unreasonable protest demands as to exact time and location. They especially love universities, as invariably there are students that throw stuff at them or spray them with water, colleges are usually for more prone to settle than some other entities, and its a freebie two-fer anyway as there are usually city or county law enforcement involved as well in 'failing' to protect them from that, so they get two entities to sue for damages instead of just one. The 'Church' makes up to several million dollars a year on the settlements to all the nuisance suits, and have hundreds going at any one time, more than 1000 concurrent ones at some points in the past. Its strictly a business model.
There have always been recognized limits to free speech. There are components of that here, especially as WBC doing this has been proven to be not political or religious speech, but simply a business model. They are lawsuit trolls. They go anywhere they can incite people, go to the nearest area to it that has an entity with deep pockets (like universities, etc), and attempt to 'protest' in the least practical and palatable manner, and then file suits against everyone involved. They had at one time roughly 1000 suits going in federal and state courts at any given time there for awhile, I am sure that hasn't changed any.
Its actually the wind that makes Mars dust safe. Whats so special about it is that its weathered. Just like Earth. With no weathering, the Moons dust looks a lot like Silica or Asbestos; It is sharp, jagged, and extremely destructive. It destroys the fibers of suits and eats seals; the Apollo stuff almost fell apart afterward, it wouldn't have lasted a couple more days. Add to that it slices up and eats lungs too. Good luck developing a habitat in an environment where any dust is extremely lethal to the occupants. There is just no way to effect living quarters with no cross-contamination. It would be difficult to live in a sterile cleanroom setting here on earth. That Martian wind also distributes temperatures, you don't have the violent differentials of a vacuum. Mars actually has a lot of subtle benefits the more you look at them, the moon less.
Wearing a suit that fails daily? Good luck with that. We simply don't have the materials for a suit to keep people alive there for very long, nor the ability to give them a place to live out of that suit that won't kill them in short order. Forget the usual logistical and technical difficulties, the destructive/lethal nature of contact with the lunar soil itself is a problem we can't even solve at this point.
Mars is actually easier to explore/colonize. The moon is not only beyond our current technology to colonize, it is even beyond any theoretical technologies we can imagine. If anyone wants to argue that point, first come up with a suit and/or seal material that can survive more than 30 hours in the lunar environment. Then we will cover the actual difficult stuff. Mars we can do right now. The moon is gone guys, let it go.
Even that is a fallacy. A myth of marketing. While true that a canon camera lens can be physically be mounted to any Canon, Nikon lens to Nikon body, etc, that doesn't mean they actually work. Many don't. Nikon has all sorts of levels of unintentional physical and intentional artificial firmware locking to prevent their own lenses from working on their cameras interchangeably. Canon doesn't gimp their cameras firmware, but physical issues still apply with lenses not meant to work on the pro cameras due to optical limitations. Even if you have a lens you can keep and move from a $500 to a $5000 body, by that point you ostensibly no longer desire to use those original plastic, slow, $100 amateur lenses on that pro body. The fact of the matter is that you have to dump your initial gear and lenses (often several times) on that upgrade treadmill, same brand or not. Assuming you even are one of the extraordinarily rare individuals that does eventually climb up into owning 5 figures of pro gear. The 'upgrade path' is a myth, and a useless one to almost every consumer even -IF- it were remotely true.
You have to understand that for some the gear itself is a religion. They own dozens of camera yet take no pictures. The brand is the thing. Even if OP wanted an SLR, Pentax makes far better entry level/consumer SLR's, and there are other companies as well. The mantra of CANON/NIKON is due solely to the fact they are the only two companies that make full-bore pro level products costing many thousands. Not that that should be relevant to someone wanting a consumer camera, but for the brand worshipers, having one of those two nameplates is the single most important aspect of camera ownership.
You have conservative Christian 'law schools' that focus specifically on teaching how to use and apply law toward the explicit agenda of moving it in the direction of biblical principles. By definition, they are designed to only turn out activists. It is their express stated intent, and the way those schools promote themselves as different from traditional law schools they compete with. Is it any surprise then that the only real sizable pool of 'activist' judges are conservative/christian supremacist types?
I am stuck on 1 as well, and no longer get mod points either. I contributed for years and had stellar karma, then I said one factual but inconvenient thing. Now I am stuck on 1 point forever as well. Actually, this is the first time I have contributed in a long time. The mod system did a very good job of driving me away from /. as a whole, which was probably its intended job the way it was constructed.