Recent Posts

3926

Living Room / Re: The case for and against Censorship on the forum

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 20, 2012, 11:50 PM »

I'm getting a Topic Locked error.

3927

Living Room / Re: The case for and against Censorship on the forum

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 20, 2012, 11:33 PM »

Good start Mouser.

Though there still aren't that many divisions.

Iain, sorry for your thread - that was just one of many signature topics that start these kinds of topic shifts, and very often with a "this is not appropriate" remark from someone, both owner and member.

Mouser, you need to decide if the Living Room itself can handle the heat, and really, or then if for fear of getting warnings everyone leaves the Living room for the Soap Box, that's a signal. If you put a quick guideline to save the Soap Box for topics *especially* expected to be controversial, then that helps avoid cheapening the Soap Box itself! Then all the usual Kitiez and Music Videos and stuff is classic Living Room faire, but religious topics are famously Soap Box.

Be careful, the Soap Box WILL get a little light trolling, but then that's someone pushing the edges to be sure the middle is safe.

3928

Living Room / Re: The case for and against Censorship on the forum

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 20, 2012, 11:12 PM »

The Tightly Controlled environments lead all to the discussions we just saw. The Power(s) That Be judge each post as Acceptible or Not Acceptible. You get a Disneyfied environment that's all warm and full of little marshmallow hearts, and who doesn't like marshmallow hearts? What's that? You don't? You Must Be A Terrorist! ... Sorry.

So then some percentage of people get tired of Pleasantville and want to actually wrestle with a topic. So they leave the Garden of Eden and hit any of the thousands of light to medium controlled venues. The owners of these places try a couple of different strategies to keep total ruin at bay. Slashdot uses Two Tiered Moderation, other places Vote Up and Down, while whole sets of other places just rely on judgement of the owner. That's what we have here.

The moderation strategy in its simplest is All or Nothing, sometimes with warnings. A better version is what we're leaning toward here, making the rest of the board fairly tightly modded but with the Living Room and even a Soap Box etc as pressure valves.

Then, just for completeness, are forums that have lost control and bad elements have crept in. They are important outliers of the Speech question, but only in a limited corner case sense.

So where I see this discussion is whether at a medium level Mouser starts to decide to delete any posts, and/or threaten with a warning, vs create a looser final enclave where they can go short of pure trolling.

Over to you all.

3929

Living Room / Re: The case for and against Censorship on the forum

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 20, 2012, 11:00 PM »

Good opening effort Iain, and I've seen your posts, you're one of the people I thought of who puts work into them! 

One of my amusing mini hobbies is to make semi-scientific charts and diagrams of stuff. There's one going on here. Consider a Tree diagram - either vertically or horozontally is fine - that starts out with The Communication Medium Subset Content Guidelines. Here, the Communication Medium is all of DC, but this analysis applies to basically anything, from public parks to malls.

Branch #1: Governmental vs Corporate

This means that "Free Speech" works profoundly differently in Government controlled Public Areas vs Company controlled venues. Not counting sleaziness, playing it straight up, Free Speech is all that stuff you learned in 5th grade. Say what you want, don't call Fire in a movie theater, no slander/libel/harmful intent/etc. Otherwise - THEORETICALLY - you can say what you want.

All the rules change in Company controlled. (Even if Mouser doesn't have a Biz name, it's still his ballpark, basically still Company controlled, such as a sole proprietorship.)  Then it's all TOS/Code of Conduct/etc. Put fairly simply, there is more censorship on all Company controlled venues. How much then goes into the branches below.

Branch #2: "Acceptible vs Not Acceptible".
I basically disposed of this for the Government areas above. For Company controlled areas, it's all about the Company's vision of what they are offering. This ranges all the way from zero monitored areas that can indeed include a bad trolling culture, yet even that is at the edges of the entire concept of speech. There are some ways to handle that, but nothing's perfect.

There's various ranges of light-medium moderation, with 1000 different styles. You get a medium-good environment.

Then there are tightly controlled environments doing the whole "Family Friendly thing Safe For Kids". AOL used to be famous for that, Facebook might be today.

3930

Living Room / Re: Thoughts in remembrance of the 6 million (est.) murdered in the Holocaust

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 20, 2012, 01:30 PM »

Would they still appear in the "new posts" at the bottom of the page?

3931

Living Room / Re: Thoughts in remembrance of the 6 million (est.) murdered in the Holocaust

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 20, 2012, 03:46 AM »

mouser has always said that he feels that dc is not the right place for political and religious subjects. He's often ignored, but that wish does keep most of those discussions in check, which is helpful imo. I dont consider that censorship.
I've never seen a post censored here in the sense of removed.

-tomos (April 20, 2012, 02:50 AM)

So far so good, but depending on how this development plays out, it could. But that is all I shall say. By now I have said what I wished to. The rest is up to you all.

3932

Living Room / Re: Thoughts in remembrance of the 6 million (est.) murdered in the Holocaust

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 20, 2012, 02:43 AM »

And somewhere in these last four or so posts comes the "diamond tip" of the problem. I like to view things on an slider scale. Per Renegade, if he thinks he's become too loud on those issues, and wants to slow down a little, then great! Per Wraith Part1, presuming that enough of the social discussions are indeed in Living Room, then someone who just wants to talk about software ... shouldn't be looking at the Living Room. They should ... wait for it ... Focus on the other *twelve* sections! Or, if they *still* want to go to the Living Room but yet not see these hot topics, then there's that subdivision thing, they shouldn't go the Soapbox Nook. "Don't go to the Soapbox Room and then complain that people are talking politics!"

We trust Mouser overall, but that Focus theme is sadly the legendary wedge used by other forces with agendas to begin censorship plans. "Let's keep Focus, let's keep it Family Friendly, let's keep it Pleasant." The best answer in my view is to make the wide-topic area less visible if we like, such as not in the public feed, or even on the "recent posts" down at the bottom, but still freely available.

3933

Living Room / Re: Thoughts in remembrance of the 6 million (est.) murdered in the Holocaust

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 19, 2012, 12:04 PM »

This is one of those cases where we might be able to use one more category, Other Discussions etc. There's value in getting this crew's opinions about any topic that isn't pure trolling, because y'all put more work into your posts than almost any other forum I've seen. Given our efforts to discuss the various censorship problems, it WOULD bother me (open mouth, insert foot moment coming up), "Oh, it's fine to refuse all censorship, until it hits YOUR pet topic, THEN it's "not appropriate".

That's precisely the profound fundamental problem with censorship - it starts with the edge cases of "not appropriate" and then according to people's agendas, slowly scope-creeps its way into people getting arrested for tweets.

3934

General Software Discussion / Re: Help me choose an online backup service

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 19, 2012, 11:21 AM »

Nice answer.

I'd seen that kind of info, but I was wondering about Mouser's remark that stopping and starting the process seemed to help.

3935

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Start Anywhere [Beta]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 19, 2012, 10:20 AM »

Heh - now it pops up a sort of "Tasks" menu first down by the task bar, then it moves to where the mouse cursor is.

But I just remembered, at work, I have Classic Shell installed, would that interfere with your program?

Cheers from the Resident Pest,

--Tao

3936

General Software Discussion / Re: MuPDF-based enhanced GUI

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 19, 2012, 08:43 AM »

I think it did for me, on my home machine it definitely felt like a noticeable difference. I don't mind Adobe Acrobat proper, if I actually have to work with a document. But if I am just going to read it, I like having other options.

3937

General Software Discussion / Re: Help me choose an online backup service

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 19, 2012, 07:36 AM »

CrashPlan was the best I found but I simply could not get over the insane memory use issues, so i dropped it after my 30 day trial.  However I may try it again at some point.

-mouser (April 16, 2012, 01:15 AM)

What about those "Memory Reclaimers" that used to be all the rage a few years ago? I know, I saw the articles that many/most of them didn't actually work but just fiddled with interconnected stats, but just suppose it's "just a memory leak bug", why not just use a utility that reclaims the memory as if it were stopped and started? Just set the mem-util settings so that it doesn't actually interfere with CrashPlan, etc.

3938

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Start Anywhere [Beta]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 19, 2012, 07:11 AM »

::Sigh::

I'm starting to be the walking edge case. This doesn't do anything on my 64 bit Windows 7 machine at work either with a dell mouse.

3939

General Software Discussion / Re: MuPDF-based enhanced GUI

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 19, 2012, 06:44 AM »

I haven't figured out the features you are asking. In a few days I'll switch my comp back to some other PDF reader - the extra second of load time saved isn't worth the super-minimalism.

3940

Living Room / Re: Stop CISPA - Petition

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 19, 2012, 06:43 AM »

It's a whack-a-mole strategy trying to defeat these ongoing bills. Governments will keep sending them down the pike and they will pass under the guise of terrorism or some excuse. But politicians and judges know where the money is -- corporations -- and this is yet another example of corporations writing your laws. Are there any congressmen who are tech literate, or are we doomed to suffer the consequences of their ignorance?

-zridling (April 19, 2012, 02:20 AM)

Oh Oh Oh! I know this one!
http://en.wikipedia..../wiki/Space_Invaders

Just change the name and the graphics! That would be a fun little retro-but-modern program! 

3941

General Software Discussion / Re: Mousinity

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 19, 2012, 06:40 AM »

It's interesting to me too.

The big test is if it behaves on double monitors.

Edit: It does! So this will be one more useful widget, because I have two 24" monitors at work and that "trek across the screen" really does get noticeable.

Edit#2: Almost. On one of my screens it doesn't wrap from bottom to top. But it's still cute!

3942

Basic / Re: What flavors of basic?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 17, 2012, 03:08 PM »

any version of basic is fine.

-mouser (September 09, 2008, 09:59 AM)

Haha! I'll have to look at the assignments! I have half a mind to do them in Commodore BASIC! 

3943

Living Room / Re: Mari0 - very nice game :)

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 16, 2012, 05:45 PM »

Heh luv the domain name more : )

3944

Screenshot Captor / Re: [Feature Request] Grab Region to Capture Mouse Cursor

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 16, 2012, 08:31 AM »

I set up the second Beta at both home and work, so with the new tray click features it's undergoing live testing starting today!

3945

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Start Anywhere [Beta]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 15, 2012, 12:57 PM »

Seems to work here in a Windows XP VM.  TaoPhoenix, is your middle mouse button set to send the default middle button message?  As in, you don't have your middle mouse button set to something custom in your mouse software, do you?

-skwire (April 15, 2012, 12:02 PM)

Well, it was set to "Middle-Click". When I clicked "restore defaults" its actual default is some kind of Instant Viewer.

3946

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Start Anywhere [Beta]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 15, 2012, 11:41 AM »

Hi there. I'm on Win XP.

3947

Living Room / Re: Cute jokes' thread

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 15, 2012, 11:39 AM »

Youtube's suggestions are funny. I got into the B movie section which actually has whole movies on it.

So now I'm giggling about a movie that could be entitled "Donation Horror". (It would work best as a total spoof of B- horror.)

"Once upon a time, Mouser decided not to put ads on the site. No, he didn't want to be all Web 2.5. So he made it into a fundraiser again. Little did he know, when he repaired that server outage a few weeks back crossed a wire into a Klein 4th dimensional loop, and set off a deep evil force all over DC - but yet it slumbered.

It awoke when the fundraiser began. At first, all seemed well. The original goal was $5,000. It was achieved, and everyone was happy.

But the money kept coming in. Mouser thanked  everyone, sniffles of gratitude lurking in his countenance as he imagined what new improvements he could now afford...

But the money continued to come in. It just wouldn't stop. For the Donation Beast Essence was now hungry! However, no one knew this yet. Mouser set a new bonus goal, of $7,000. That was also achieved. More cheering, more pictures of cats. Yay!

The money flowed, like the biblical rivers of blood. Soon local color news stories began to pop up - people simply couldn't stop donating! From all over the country, a phenomenon had arisen... a desperate compulsion to donate!

Now panicking, Mouser called the authorities. He was afraid he was sounding like a crazed lunatic, but fortunately the police were already beginning to get reports. ...

To be continued...

Muahahaaaa!!!

3948

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: Farr Alias: Ixquick & Startpage Search

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 15, 2012, 08:44 AM »

I thought they were the same - one is a company and one is a brand?

https://startpage.co.../eng/aboutstartpage/

"Startpage by Ixquick"

3949

Official Announcements / Re: The DonationCoder 2012 Fundraiser Has Begun!

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 15, 2012, 08:42 AM »

And it's over! We win 1 internets! Break out the kittiez!

3950

Screenshot Captor / Re: [Feature Request] Grab Region to Capture Mouse Cursor

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 14, 2012, 11:49 PM »

There's a second beta out there! And it looks like it works! So barring any fluke results, that's why Mouser beat the Resident Pest! (me). All hail Mouser! Okay, I'll quiet down now!