Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
from the what's-in-a-name dept
I've always thought it was ironic that schools these days preach tolerance to kids, while at the same time enforcing zero-tolerance policies on their behaviour. This week's most insightful comment, courtesy of an anonymous commenter, sums up the problem with such policies:
Here's what I understand about "zero tolerance" - it appears to be an alternative to CRITICAL THINKING and LOGIC.
My question back to you is "if these administrators cannot be trusted to apply critical thinking and logic, then what in the fuck are they doing TEACHING OUR CHILDREN?"
Earlier this week, we asked the community for suggestions about what "lobbyists" could start calling themselves, since they apparently want a rebranding. Though we expected mostly funny responses, it turns out that one anonymous suggestion is our second most insightful comment of the week:
Government Purchasing Agent.
For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from Violynne, pointing out that the MPAA is being very disingenuous about legitimate TV-watching options:
The MPAA also lied about that access, as video streaming requires users to have a registered cable account to view them.
My wife tried to watch Hell on Wheels and was denied because we're on AT&T U-Verse, which (at the time she visited the site) was not an option for us.
This morning, she tried to access the site now that AT&T U-Verse is one of the "partner" options, but apparently, it must have been added recently as the option is still not available for AT&T U-Verse customers.
Sound familiar? HBO Go, Xfinity, etc... all require people to pay $150+ cable bill just to stream a show that they can't get because they don't have cable.
Nice try, MPAA. Try telling the public the truth, for once.
Next, we've got John Fenderson, who points out that even the unrealistic and exaggerated reasons offered for NSA surveillance don't actually justify it:
If all his scaremongering comes to pass, my reaction would certainly not be to embrace further intrusion by the NSA or anyone else. It would be to raise holy hell about companies and agencies placing critical systems on the internet at all.
The way it's supposed to work is this: critical systems are not on the internet. For example, systems that allow access to data such as the NYT website, are not actually reaching into the company's working database. It's using a copy devoted to the public-facing access. The idea is that even if the public-facing system is 100% compromised and destroyed, nothing of real importance has been lost as there is no way to get to internal systems from the public-facing ones, and all that was there was a copy of the data being offered up.
This has all been established best practice for longer than the internet itself has been open to the public. If a company or agency is failing to adhere to best practices, the solution isn't further encroachment on everyone's privacy, but to punish the company or agency for their idiotic practices.
Over on the funny side, we start with an anonymous comment, once again offering a new name to an existing organization. This time, it's a fresh new brand for The Independent newspaper after it published an editorial espousing trust in the government's decrees about what to report and what not to:
The Co-Dependent
In second place, we've got another anonymous comment, this time offering a new way of reading Keith Alexander's claims of transparency at the NSA:
He is pretty transparent
I mean, we can see through his lies and all.
Since it's a week with a lot of rebranding and redefining going on, we'll close out the editor's choice with two more candidates. First, we've got I'm_Having_None_Of_It with another one for the newspaper:
Why are they calling themselves "The Independent" when "The Establishment" would be more appropriate?
And, finally, an anonymous commenter with an excellent option for lobbyists:
Wealth Transfer Facilitators (WTFs)
That's all for this week, folks! See you tomorrow.
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Is fascinating really, is almost like we are driven by emotional bias. Even at national levels you can see countries with varying amounts of emotional drive for different reasons, defending perceived minorities, defending children, defending women, punishing women, punishing infidels, pushing out others that are not the same as them.
Is ugly, mostly ends badly and it is perpetuated by media everywhere that tells people to trust their emotions mostly because the people who produce those medias are ones that depend on emotions and understanding of them to make a living, others use it as a weapon like religious fanatics or the angry people who feel persecuted and see racism, chauvinism, feminism or many other ism's out there.
No I am not immune to it, I have my emotional bias, I know they are a problem and for the most part I like to believe I have identified the majority of them and I am working on it forever, it takes decades to control such things, when you start you fail frequently and with time they start getting spaced for longer.
Of course that assuming that xenophobes, feminists, religious fanatics, machomen, rapists and others ist's have all the same underlying mechanism, uncontrollable emotions.
Still feel free to disagree, I am no expert. But I feel like we still didn't reach the age of reason yet.
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spell check
not to nit pick really, I know it's Sunday an all, but I think it's "report" not "repot" (chrome has free spell check) although if they did repot themselves they might see through lies told to them by Governments :)
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Re: spell check
hate to love "works perfect for typos like I hate sex"
report to repot "just to fuck with you"
Don't be evil? Sorry I cannot help it, it's just too fun.
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Law Purchasing Agent
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Re: spell check
Not to nit pick really, I know it's Sunday and all, but I think it's "and all" not "an all" :)
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Counting seeders is a way to see rates of adoption of something, at least that is how I viewed them when looking for what was hot on torrent networks, but they can be used to signal others things with other data, for scientific data it could be used to signal integrity of data, for law drafting it could signal rates of approval.
Imagine you take a photo from a leaf and find that leaf on a database and search for its uses, history and much more, and while in dreamland imagine people drafting laws all over the world and putting them on a public database that everyone has access or one that have all the laws in the world, where everyone has access to it and can translate those into other languages for everyone(thinking of Aaron now).
Those are just dreams about now because nobody bothered to bring them to reality yet, they are not impossible though the data is all out there, just waiting to be collected, the same platform could be used to store film, music, plant pathology, human pathology, chemical compounds information, physics, how to's, news, biographies, genealogies, GIS info, criminality occurrences, court rulings, historical weather data from million of points of collection, insect photos with location information, animal sightings, violence sightings, protests or any kind of information that could probably have at least one person interested.
Now I wonder if this would be humanities brain with us all being neurons.
Happy Sunday folks.
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Re:
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