I know the colours are unimportant..., I was just pokin' fun - Cheers

@Sagemind: The color of the boxes are unimportant to me. Yellow was just randomly chosen by me. They don't need to be any color at all, really. A simple box around each category will work. Also the boxes could be smaller if I put the title above the list instead of off to the side. Like I said, I did this in a hurry, so it could certainly look better.

@MrFisk: There's no controversy here (hence my removal of it from this post), and what you're discussing should be brought up in another thread.

Once again, the daily show is the only one that is covering this story correctly. They just avoided it for 3 weeks, then eventually talk about how it's an imaginary shit storm over someone's unimportant comments.

http://www.videosift.com/video/TDS-5-12-09-The-Pageant-of-the-Christ

Keith Olbermann kinda sucks. He's the anti Bill Oreilly.

Here's the reply I so meticulously crafted before the site was taken down (in my opinion a little too fast). Take it for what it's worth:


I am principally on jonny's side here, as the possible double-votes irk me to no end. Please don't take any hastened conclusions here before all the negative sides have been explored.

Burdturgler, you ask why we have to assume there will be double votes. Jonny has just provided an example with dft and Issykitty. I'm not wagging any finger here, but it shows how doublevoting might very well become an issue. In this case it has much more effect on user rankings than video rankings, and I believe that will be the biggest effect if this is implemented. Now if you like me believe that the videos rankings are more important you might be willing to pay that prize. But don't pretend that it's not an issue.

How doublevoting might affect the videos themselves is a murky issue, as I doubt that many people will have kronosposeidon's stamina to trek through all the >3000 pages of videos. The old videos that had hundreds of votes will likely not be affected much, as any doublevotes they might receive will be like drops in the ocean, and not all the say 280 voters will bother to dig it up and vote again. But for videos in the 10-50 range it might have a big effect. There is a huge difference between 20 and 40 in terms of perceived quality, so if a video is bumped that high it will give a skewed view of its quality as defined by the community.

A more immediate effect that I foresee if the vote counts are restored is this: Practically all the pqueued videos with 9 votes will get a visit from a friend that already voted for it pre-3/11, and get bumped into the sifted area. This will skew BOTH video rankings and user rankings. If you are ok with that, fine, but please take it into consideration.


The best solution as I see it is dystopianfuturetoday's suggestion: Let the old vote tallies be set as a threshold for the old videos that all new votes count towards, and which must be met before new votes start to pile on top. The effects I see from this is as follows:


- Videos with an awful lot of votes will practically never meet their threshold, and will retain their pre-3/11 vote counts indefinitely, unless their is a huge increase in membership.

- Videos with only a lot of votes will be similar, but might have a chance of meeting their threshold and becoming ordinary again if promoted.

- Videos with few votes and pqueued videos will have a big chance of meeting their threshold, so for all purposes they will be almost unaffected by the siftsplosion.

Videos that have not yet met their threshold should have this clearly stated on them, so people don't get confused as to why their voting doesn't work. Maybe they should even a small meter that shows its progress towards the threshold. I know I'm dumping a lot of coding work on lucky here now, but this is as I see it the most thorough way of salvaging our loss. I'm not able to vote in the poll for some reason, but count this as my vote.


Lastly, let me add that video rankings will always be biased towards newer videos, since there is substantial vote inflation as the membership increases. Also, I don't bother so much about the internal ranking of the most popular videos. A lot of votes IS a lot of votes, and it has proven its worth to the community just by getting so high. Bothering about the total vote tallies for these is therefore very unimportant, IMHO.

And a boon to you, burdturgler: With this solution you can promote The Dramatic Chipmunk again and again, until it surpasses The Infamous Ukulele video which will never reach its threshold!

^ Shut up disco, you're just jealous that no-one loves you and bitter that K won't let you suck his cock anymore (like a cheese grater so I hear, eeshk).

rasch, thank you so much for doing this post, it's really nice and made me smile tons, you've always been one of my favourites here, and brushed my advances off like a true gentleman

Thank you to everyone else too, if it wasn't for the high quality members here i'd have no chance talking my utter bullshit and filth and getting away with it. You guys are wicked, and this is the only place i've heard of with such a tight community and most definitely have never been a part of anything like this before. Took me a while to get comfortable with it, it's easy to write online stuff off as unimportant and the people you meet as just words on a screen, but i'm definitely swung.

laura, fisky, my15, thylan, schmawy always have been great support i've got all the time in the world for you people, cheers!
burdturgler, you're beyond cute, look forward to getting to know you more

And K. I'm done asking anyone else to marry me. rasch won't (must be a gay), all the others are scared of me . So don't worry babe, I have no choice but to settle for you. COME BAAAAACK!!

Nice post; it was a pleasure to read. Thanks.

In reply to this comment by Farhad2000:
Coming from you QM that's just hilarious, especially since you have said that my entire region should be nuked countless times. I mean the middle east doesn't really dictate shit in the world over the US. But it's cool you do have a valid point. Yes I was angry as well.

Regarding the litany of comments trying to understand why and how this person came to be this way, its simple, there is no real focus on the rights and civic responsibilities of the citizenry in the US. Before you all get railed up and say this was cut and pasted into a clip to make news BS, this point of view has been pushed around and expressed countless times, its like endemic now.

It's a given to be thought controlled into trusting your government, only through a seasoned analytical education looking at maybe just the last 50 years of political history can you readily understand how the US government in most cases works against it's citizenry rather then for it (bay of pigs, star wars, vietnam, watergate, countless shit form both sides of the aisle).

But we don't need analytical thought provoking education anymore, we need fact machines that are just enough to earn a GED and maybe work a computer to succeed. Half of your education now is based more around studying towards test taking rather then actual information or processing that information, since accumulation of facts is not the same as actually thinking through those.

I mean look at something like Discovery Channel, before you could actually watch that a learn something new about Quantum Physics or the Cuban revolution, now it's all a sitcom about busting some dumb fucking myth or Orange County bikers or some rebuild of some fucking car.

But it doesn't matter really though, for most people in the US the only place that exists for them is the US. That's why it's so easy to rally around bombing some poor third world nation from the bronze age back to the stone age, its so far and unimportant and our media paints such a nice picture of it.

This all connects back to belief and comfort, its comforting to let your blind belief in God or the FSM dictate your life, because then you aren't responsible for your actions, because then everything becomes preordained.

Think how comforting it is to know that God made 9/11 happen because America is a sinful nation... rather then a passive aggressor who has push into action countless covert and non covert military operations in Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan because it thought it was doing the right thing without actually thinking of possible blow back stemming from supporting religious nut case such as the Taliban.

What's easier to believe and swallow? God or Facts?

Yes there are many people in the US who are not like this person and are actually aware, and engage in educated discourse from both sides of the coin but really that doesn't count at all for me.

Because this person is demonstrating a total lack of BASIC FACTUAL knowledge about what has happened in this (once great) nation for the last 8 years. I mean seriously. WTF. That's just intolerable, its like decades later we will all do an about face and declare Bush some kind of great war hero, even though he terminated some of the most basic tenants of what make America a kick ass nation (no torture, haebus corpus, no spying on its own citizens and so on)

Coming from you QM that's just hilarious, especially since you have said that my entire region should be nuked countless times. I mean the middle east doesn't really dictate shit in the world over the US. But it's cool you do have a valid point. Yes I was angry as well.

Regarding the litany of comments trying to understand why and how this person came to be this way, its simple, there is no real focus on the rights and civic responsibilities of the citizenry in the US. Before you all get railed up and say this was cut and pasted into a clip to make news BS, this point of view has been pushed around and expressed countless times, its like endemic now.

It's a given to be thought controlled into trusting your government, only through a seasoned analytical education looking at maybe just the last 50 years of political history can you readily understand how the US government in most cases works against it's citizenry rather then for it (bay of pigs, star wars, vietnam, watergate, countless shit form both sides of the aisle).

But we don't need analytical thought provoking education anymore, we need fact machines that are just enough to earn a GED and maybe work a computer to succeed. Half of your education now is based more around studying towards test taking rather then actual information or processing that information, since accumulation of facts is not the same as actually thinking through those.

I mean look at something like Discovery Channel, before you could actually watch that a learn something new about Quantum Physics or the Cuban revolution, now it's all a sitcom about busting some dumb fucking myth or Orange County bikers or some rebuild of some fucking car.

But it doesn't matter really though, for most people in the US the only place that exists for them is the US. That's why it's so easy to rally around bombing some poor third world nation from the bronze age back to the stone age, its so far and unimportant and our media paints such a nice picture of it.

This all connects back to belief and comfort, its comforting to let your blind belief in God or the FSM dictate your life, because then you aren't responsible for your actions, because then everything becomes preordained.

Think how comforting it is to know that God made 9/11 happen because America is a sinful nation... rather then a passive aggressor who has push into action countless covert and non covert military operations in Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan because it thought it was doing the right thing without actually thinking of possible blow back stemming from supporting religious nut case such as the Taliban.

What's easier to believe and swallow? God or Facts?

Yes there are many people in the US who are not like this person and are actually aware, and engage in educated discourse from both sides of the coin but really that doesn't count at all for me.

Because this person is demonstrating a total lack of BASIC FACTUAL knowledge about what has happened in this (once great) nation for the last 8 years. I mean seriously. WTF. That's just intolerable, its like decades later we will all do an about face and declare Bush some kind of great war hero, even though he terminated some of the most basic tenants of what make America a kick ass nation (no torture, haebus corpus, no spying on its own citizens and so on)

http://election08.videosift.com/talk/That-One-John-McCain-Much-Ado-About-Nothing

this is perpetuating unimportant junk.
when YOU PEOPLE (not referring to blacks) chop the country/constituion i love to bits, i reserve my right to complain

This member of the public is bat-shit insane and I remember thinking so at the time.

Looking back on this incident, with knowledge that we now have, shows that the British were justified in sinking the Belgrano.

The Argentine government has conceded that the sinking of the Belgrano was "a legal act of war".

Admiral Enrique Molina Pico, head of the Argentine Navy in the 1990s, wrote in a letter to an Argentinian newspaper that the Belgrano was part of an operation that posed a real threat to the British task force, that it was holding off for tactical reasons, and that being outside of the exclusion zone was unimportant as it was a warship on a tactical mission.

I'm upvoting, not because he did that in a particularly good way, but because of the content of what he was saying.

He was saying that you should not treat people like shit because you think that they are unimportant 'service' people. Treat everyone with respect, not because they may turn out to be someone of note, but because YOU would like to be treated that way.

She would appear to be one of those people who believe the universe revolves around their bloated ego. And she needs to be taken down a notch or too.

I don't like his use of 'whore' though, not cool at all, and not even used with context, as she did nothing sexual at all.

But for the main message... upvote.

>> ^BillOreilly:
4 minutes of "the economy is bad." well, we kinda already knew that, thanks for sharing



Yeah, why should we be discussing the insanity of the current economic crisis that is as of today affecting every market on the planet, and threatening every sector of our economy, which interestingly has been designed by the very same people who are advising a current major party presidential candidate, when we could be talking about Rezko and Lipstick and other Extremely Important Stuff??

You're right. This is just sooooo unimportant.

>> ^swampgirl:
^No David you're not getting it. What I mean is the media (not Gibson..he was too nice really) should press the issues to her, but they've got to stop w/ the hockey mom/gun totin redneck crap. That's all. It only makes them act 'elite' and puts down the average jane and joe. They are who you want to make happy for their vote right?


I'm probably getting more angry than is healthy or useful, but it's not that I don't get it, it's that I don't agree. The media is protected by first amendment rights; they can say whatever they want, which includes unrealistic caricatures and exagerrations of the candidates (see various comedy shows for examples). Running for high public office makes you a magnet for ridicule, not immune to it, and getting sniped on petty and unimportant things is part of the process for all of the candidates.

Most of the media is doing what it has always done, and Palin is playing the politics of victimization, but the McCain/Palin ticket is busy stirring up controversy with one hand while trying to suppress it with the other and blaming others in the process. I haven't heard the "redneck" slight on any but the most outrageous posts on Internet chat sites. The "gun totin'" image is a smokescreen that distracts from the discussion of environmental issues, just as the campaign throws the "sexist" jab at anyone criticizing Palin for any reason. Who is spreading the "hockey mom" image more than anyone else? Sarah Palin herself.

Bottom line -- You are being lied to. The media is trying to do their job. You can argue that they have not been doing their job well (and I would), but this idea that the news media has been taking cheap shots is primarily a smear tactic by the McCain/Palin ticket to drum up controversy and drive the Rovian politics of divisiveness and fear. That's why I get angry; it's a citizens duty to stand up and say "this is a bunch of crap and I'm sick of it." Instead of criticizing the message (which can't be stopped), look deeper at what's being said, who's saying it, and encourage others to do the same.

You are both equally unimportant as the rest of us in the greater scheme of things...but congrats anyway and keep up the good work

>> ^Jinx:
>> ^GeeSussFreeK:Words.
Hey, nice post.
I read a thing a year or so ago about a new technology that enabled production of much cheaper and more efficient solar panels, but I can't seem to find any information on it now, so I wonder if it was just a pipe dream or something.
If I remember correctly the panels were paper thin and flexible, like laminated card, were durable to weather but eventually required replacing after 6 months or so of use. They were also supposed to be vastly superior in efficiency and their production allowed them to be "printed" en masse, and sold at approximately one dollar per metre square.
Obviously I was very excited about this. People could turn every south facing wall into a solar panel relatively cheaply and if the efficiency was as high as the article boasted you'd probably be able to light, heat and power most of the appliances in your house on your own energy. Alas, no cheap solar power yet.
Anyway, if all of Earths energy (with the exception of Geothermal, Nuclear and The Tides?) comes from the sun, be it stored in ancient pressurised plant matter or firewood, it would seem to make sense to find a good of way of tapping energy straight from the source.


Ya, little blurbs like that are usually kinda PR moves by certain solar research foundations to generate a flow of funds to their particular areas. Not saying thats a bad thing mind you, but its kinda a red herring. I say that because paper thin sheets of silica are not going to generate that much electrical power.

That said, it isn't unimportant. I think all of us have seen the caution signs and help phones on the road sides with the solar pannel coming off the top...very useful in that kind of aplication where low amparage is needed.

The problem is...well, at least with my house of nerds, is we use....a cubic butt ton of power (standard SI unit, look it up!). Mutiple computers, projector, game systems...a cornicopia of electronic wonders suck up a lot of juice. There is no way a paper thin PV cell is going to generate enough power to do all the work required of it...even if I coated my whole house with them.

Like I mentioned before, the energy generated is from the amount of "work" the photon has to do as it travles through the substrate. Unless they are doing some magic that I haven't become aware of (like nano tube redirection which was still theoretical last I heard) those paper thing sheets have a limited applications. Movement is good, so being able to cheaply produce those things is good, and my lead to further discoveries down the line, but it is mainly a red herring it seems.

Like I said before, I have the highest hopes for PV cells than anything else I have seen. And combining it with more effective means of electrolysis is very smart indeed. Hats off to them for all their work. Hopefully, PV technology is blessed with "bright" ideas. But I really think its got a long long road ahead of it...think of it this way, it is THE most researched green tech of the past 40 years, and yet, we are still only as far as we are...which is bare minimum public use this make solar panda sad indeed, but hopefully, he will be basking in the glow of nearly infinite energy!

/rant!

(there most likely a mass typoes here as its 1am...clean those up in the morrow)

Upvote for posting appropriately unimportant scene, and advising us to skip this and watch it on DVD. You certainly don't watch this flick for the story or acting.

As a childhood fan, I was relatively happy with the movie, aside from the protracted lame attempts at humor (like Bumblebee pissing on John Turturo) and the stupidity of the Macguffin. Not to mention the retardation of the climax where Shia LaBoeuf beats Megatron and Starscream in a race up a skyscraper... this guy is amazing; between that and the ability to swing on jungle vines at 45MPH he's practically Batman.