Cap'n Refsmmat

While I think that profit is not the only motive for further production -- perhaps "hey look it got 23,000 views" encourages some people -- I'll go with this. Assume we have a perfect situation where the consumer does not pay the producer and the producer, in fact, has no idea that the consumer is consuming the material -- so the consumption provides no other possible motive to the producer. Consumption is totally decoupled from production. In a situation like that, I'd think of child porn as like goatse (for those of you who don't know goatse, it's an extremely disturbing image. just don't search for it, ever): I'd rather not see it, and I'd rather not meet whoever made it, but I'm not going to crusade to make looking at it illegal. But I think the total disconnect between consumer and producer does not exist.

If you are going to base your entire argument on this one opinion you should not be surprised when people disagree with the argument. Can you substantiate this assumption? After all, paying for the images gives the producer an extra motive to produce them. Think of it this way: the producers of regular pornography probably enjoy watching their videos. But would they be producing nearly as much if they didn't get paid for it? Probably not. It makes it a job rather than a hobby. Now, not knowing any child pornography producers, I do not know whether they consider it a hobby or a job. It could be either way. So assuming one position or the other is rather unfounded.

Content management system.

My mother is a professional translator whose job involves typing several thousand words a day. She finds the only good keyboard to be the IBM Model M -- so her keyboard is about fifteen years old right now and still going strong. On the other hand, I love the keyboard on this MacBook. So it all depends on what you're used to.

MediaWiki, for example, is the software used by Wikipedia, and it has provisions for "Sysop" users ("system operator") who have the power to lock pages from editing, ban users, and generally keep things under control. On this forum, users can create content and upload files, moderators can remove or edit it if necessary, and administrators can stop the moderators if there's a serious problem.

What would have happen if the US had not dropped the bomb and did not invade the main Japanese islands? There wasn't much left of the Japanese fleet to reach out and attack the Allies.

I am totally buying this album on iTunes.

Must we be so patronizing?

[hide]4100[/hide]

That's an idea we've tossed around before and never gotten around to implementing. It seems like it would work very well.

I already tampered with settings to reduce total rep power awarded, although more adjustments are probably needed. However, as part of my new hint-dropping campaign, I will say that the rep system may improve dramatically relatively soon.

People start with 10 rep points. The trick is that some members have a rep power greater than 10, meaning they can remove all ten in one shot.

Indeed. In-thread moderation is what I'm striving for -- sitting in the back and handing out infractions just doesn't work. The impersonal nature of the system, with its automated PMs and arbitrary "points", simply scared people rather than encouraging them to make better posts. Today I'll reset negative reputations to the default value. I hope reputations will be a positive resource for the community.

The infraction system has been disabled because we believe it to be ineffective as a way of improving behavior. Mods do still have the ability to give negative rep but I'm not sure we'll use it as a disciplinary measure. Infractions just pissed people off and then banned them. Neg rep seems to be the same, minus the banning.

Nope. Those were most common from people with a good bit of rep themselves.

I just checked to see who it is (now that I actually noticed the yellow text) and I'm not very surprised. I'm rather disappointed in how negative rep is turning out. In the negative rep comments I've read there is nothing useful that couldn't have just been put in the thread, and most negative reps are just "you're wrong. roar," basically. So I just disabled the negative reputation system. Sorry, but it was causing more harm than good.

Okay, look. Stop reading into each other's motives. What is happening here is dr.syntax believes primal therapy works and iNow believes that it is completely unsupported by any scientific evidence. iNow does have a point; there is no scientific evidence to suggest primal actually works. (You may quote Dr. Janov as much as you'd like, but that doesn't make him right.) If you would step back a moment, I think you'll see that it is not iNow controlling discussions. The moderator staff makes its own decisions and iNow does not decide them for us.

dr.syntax, here's the trouble. You advocate primal therapy so much and yet the evidence -- as iNow and others have pointed out -- suggests it does not work. By "evidence" I mean studies of its effectiveness, not "Dr. Oz says it doesn't work." You seem to value Dr. Janov's opinions highly and that's fine, but there is a boundary between his opinions and the facts. The facts are that tests have been made of primal therapy that show it has little benefit. The fact is that nobody -- you, Dr. Janov or otherwise -- has provided any evidence to the contrary. I understand that you believe highly in the value of primal therapy, and you have faith in Dr. Janov's opinions. But you must convince us that your faith is justifiable. In the several previous threads on the subject, you never did. Starting a new discussion with no new information doesn't help.

I believe this thread is about why mankind craves violence so much. Can we talk about that, please?

Indeed. Graphics cards, for example, use fundamentally different CPU types than a regular processor. They're optimized for very specific massively parallel operations. Replacing them with a generalized CPU is not going to be efficient. Have you ever tried using a computer that had no graphics card and had to use software rendering? It's painful.

There's a difference between being a "yes man" when you're giving the government advice and being a "yes man" when you're speaking to the public. The former is bad; the latter not so much. The issue was with Prof. Nutt not being the latter.

Sorry, there's a 6 hour limit. We occasionally get people who go back and make all of their posts blank just to annoy us. Although vB now allows us to see post revision histories, it'd be annoying to have to go back through manually and fix those sorts of things.

There's a difference between what he believes as an adviser and what he should say when speaking to the public. I think ajb is advocating that Prof. Nutt give his advice to the government as much as he'd like, but avoid going out to the public and saying "the government is wrong!" on the side.

As far as I know it's the server edition. There's no graphical interface, as we do it all through SSH, so either way there's not much of a "desktop."