The usual suspects - closed thread(s) that is

http://www.city-data.com/forum/religion-philosophy/

Actually a nice discussion place on these subjects. Spent quite a bit of time doing some random reading on both the Christian and Atheism sections and have yet to find a rude post where a member attacks another....
Makes me wonder why the usual suspects cant behave the same here

One thing for sure, I could not find a posting from the Grim Reaper yet

 

funny part is I was at a top hat party just last Saturday night

and

I have a clamp just like that one.

 

I've watched a few discussion forums fail when moderators "expanded" their offerings to included "bilge" type of areas, for their members. Animosities can't not be prevented from carrying over and spilling into general and subject specific areas of the forum and this is when things fall apart. These forums are then forced to install "profanity catchers" and have to actively constrain and censer post after post. The moderator spend the majority of their day chasing down boneheads with an ax to grind, rather then the business of running a boat design forum. I'm in complete agreement with Jeff in regard to not having or permitting these types of discussion, particularly in light of the other sites available, to find folks screaming at the top of their lungs, on things they probably don't fully understand. In a side thought, maybe *********** should be allowed, maybe only naked people on boats. Okay, maybe not, as this opens the door to members, posting their home pictures and I frankly don't want to see some of these guys naked.

 

You can never win a religious or political argument. It is not possible. So I avoid these types of endevors. AL LA, why bother.

 

Don't do it. The outcome will be bad.

My involvement with the net predates the WWW phase and mass use; I worked for CSIRO Division of Computing Research back in the day. We used to have Usenet newsgroups, largely unmoderated, relatively low traffic, self-policing and software that enabled one to kill (ignore) threads and users.

Increase in traffic saw the numbers of posters soar (AOL - A**holes On Line) who knew no bounds of decency. Abuse substituted for argument. Spam attacks. Signal/noise ratio went through the floor. Mass retreat to moderated forums such as this one.

Why repeat failure?

PDW

 

Wow, that post takes me back. Those were the good old days of using Gopher and stuff like that. Usenet was such a fantastic way to learn. One had the freedom to do anything online, but with that freedom came a sense of responsibility.

Once the Aholes Online showed up with their modem pools, it was all over.

I still remember firing up Mosaic for the first time on my Sparc Station and seeing the kind of stuff we are typing in right now for the first time. Well, they were mostly all static pages, but wow!

 

if the threads are boating only, how come there is a long running thread about the world coming to an end and the next global depression. it is not a boating topic .

 

How about "The Head"?

 

Yeah, us old farts have the sense of history because we lived through it.

Don't tell me, you started off programming in FORTRAN 4 on mainframes.... I was on Cyber supercomputers, 64 bit machines way back then. I remember a Fujitsu sales guy saying proudly that they now had a bolt-on floating point processor that gave 64 bit double precision floating point calcs. We just looked at him & said that for us, that was single precision, we had 128 bit double precision.

Lot of bits gone by since then. I find programming in Java on my Macbook a lot more productive than those days.

I still have a pile of SPARC hardware here at home. I have no use for it any more since I decommissioned the last site running my old database system (all Java & Postgres now) but it seems *wrong* to take it all to the recycling centre.

PDW

 

Taking that stuff to be recycled would be *so* wrong! Have you seen any of the auctions where a working piece of history fetches big dollars?

I'm only a moderately old timer. You have me beat on computers, although FORTRAN on VT100 terminals was required learning for a computer science minor in college for me. (as was C++)

So, I can only relate to your memory with my later, but still somewhat early plunge into computers.

I started when I was in very early grade school on a Sinclair ZX81 when you already had your professional career well underway. I would program simple video games and word processors and stuff and wire up home made game controllers to the ports using direct memory access to see if a button had been pressed. Mostly it was all in BASIC back then, as a child.

My SPARC Station was given to me to use in the NASA lab I worked in. It was US Govt property. That's where I first saw Mosaic. Those were really great times. The world of computers was just getting mainstream enough that people had heard of them.

I definitely agree though... putting something together in an instant on a MacBook using ready made JAVA classes sure is a bit more productive, but where's the love!?!

I'm writing from a MacBook as well. Ever open up the terminal when you first started using OSX just for old times sake? There's a fine copy of Emacs on board!

 

Economics and environmental concerns I'd say are directly relevant to those of us hoping to retire back to the water some day. No money no boat. Alter the oceans climate both above and below the surface and you definitely alter the type of boat your going to need in any given area. Religion might have absolutely nothing to do with it. Politics might only effect it a little. But economics and climate has a huge relevance to design, I can't picture water conditions being anything but relevant, and they are ultimately dependent on climate.

All in all though everyone gets bent once in a while. Its just the way of things. Best you can hope for is to minimize it, and try to stick to the subject at hand.

ps
interesing post Cat
I've got my original brick phone from the late 80s, charger, extra battery and all. I keep it as a desk ornament, hadn't considered that it might be worth anything

 

programming stories - WOW I have forgotten most of what I learnt - I started in WAIT (Now Curtin U, in Perth WA) as a business information systems (computing) student in 1977 as a mature student - My love was assembler and binary level work...

 

I remember learning how to program in basic when I was a first year student, that and playing pong and thinking wow, this is sooooo cool

 

Nobody else said it, so I will..


That was a damn good movie

 

Fully concur.

I can screech wail and throw abuse as good as the next person, but it is all heated and serves no purpose. My views on such subjects are as subjective and objective as others, but will it solve anything..no!!! Other than a fun evening with mates down the pub, which is where "light banter" exchanging such arguments should be.... But on a forum for boats and marine related...nah. Plenty of other places for that.

I wouldn't go into the Houses of Parliament for a discussion on "shall I have round bilge or hard chine". Similarly I would not go into LR in London or RINA's HQ and start debating "gun control" or "Israel's right to exist or not".

The is a boating forum, lets keep it that way.