Cap'n Refsmmat

Indeed. But the last time we tried the system, people could get one negative reputation from YT and seven positives and still end up with negative points. Of course, if we have turned off negative points, that's different. A system running that way would certainly provide a greater reward to people for their good posts. I'm just not sure if we should allow negative points. It proved to be a problem the last time we tried.

Well, that makes me feel better about the disclaimer, then.

Why?

The system is based on "reputation power," how many points you can give other people, and those are based on your number of points and your postcount and time spent on SFN. I have already adjusted the system so people should be fairly equal in reputation power, by making the system want 1000 posts before awarding another reputation power point, etc. You also cannot give points to the same person twice in a row.

The thing is that it takes nearly no funding. A talented-and-gifted program in one of the towns I lived in gave the same curriculum to the students (exactly the same), but the teachers simply encouraged more thought in homework assignments and class discussions. It doesn't take much to help a gifted student.

They shouldn't have to go to private schools or sit at home and learn by themselves. The government is supposed to supply a good education system, and it is failing for some people. In some places, there is something called a Gifted and Talented program, or Academic Challenge, or whatever they decide to name it, where students are actually encouraged to learn independently and think. Other places satisfy government requirements for the program by allowing students to take a class that prepares them for the Academic Decathlon competition. The fact is that public schools are capable of getting the interest of the advanced students, it's just that they don't try.

If you have $6.5 billion, you could try to do a Saturn V sort of design.

Sounds like the title of a spam email. "See famous physicist float!"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/6589301.stm We don't need to get people up to par. We need to set par higher. I've always thought that American schools are slowed down by people who are "below par." People who learn quickly (like me) don't need to spend three class periods on one concept, and should be allowed to move along, but the schools don't allow for that sort of thing. I'd be happier if Congress allocated more money to gifted and talented student programs so the bright people can get brighter. It will benefit everybody.

Life increases entropy by emitting heat.

You do not see anything. There is nothing there to see. Move along. (Seriously, though, you can see it, but you can't yet use it. Only staff can so far.)

I'm not sure I'd rather like a gunfight in a crowded environment any more than a massacre. Untrained civilians (students, even) may well end up shooting the wrong person, getting themselves shot, or drawing things out into a bloody gunfight that might just kill more people than otherwise. If you're going to give guns to people to help them prevent massive killings from occurring, you'd have to give them appropriate training, too.

The problem is that you're defining "good doctor" etc. in your own terms, which may not reflect what most others believe. ("I don't care if my doctor knows biology, I care if he knows what's wrong with me!")

Hopefully we'll have an email address set up sometime to let you email all the staff. Otherwise, use the Contact and Admin or Moderator thread in the Announcements forum and pick a person. We can then handle the problem internally.

We'll ask people to stop before we give them warning points or anything. There's also a convenient link to a description of most of the logical fallacies available right there in the rules, so we can point people to that.

Ad hominem circumstantial.

We have yet again revised the forum policy on SFN, producing a shorter, more concise, and generally more readable version of them that we hope will make things easier on us. Take a quick glance through it so you become familiar with our rules. Here it is: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/announcement.php?f=51&a=14

Normally, FF would timeout and give up... Blank white page?

There is no blue star.

rofl, no idea how that happened. Have to resync postcounts sometime, I guess.

What sort of errors do you get?

That's irrelevant for yeast, which reproduces through mitosis.

This thread was created after that problem occurred.

With some CSS and some images, I guess we could make a darker/different style sometime. The trash can serves a special purpose in the Speculations forum, which is explained in the announcement there. We could make a "testing" forum though.

What do you dislike about it? What do you think we should change?