Thats the forum message about keeping your PMs safe. You could also say that there is nothing saying that when someone extends their arm to shake your hand, you can't spit in your hand before shaking theirs. There are certain things that are expected, such that when you send someone a private message, it is private. You can say whatever you want about there technically being nothing forcing you to obey social mores, but that doesn't mean you are shielded from the fallout of not abiding by them. When you send someone your shipping address, you expect them not to spread it around, but since there is no guarantee of PM privacy I suppose why not?

You are free to your own opinion on the matter, but it feels like a serious breach of trust to me. I'll take a quick scan through the last time there was a 200 page thread on this matter and what the fallout was.

I don't see why anyone cares in the slightest about DT feedback or not. Everyone here uses Minerjones for escrow whether you have +1000 or - 9999 as a feedback score.

It feels like the PTA is making threats and people are responding seriously to them.

side note, posting private messages has always been a big no no with the exception of scam accusation proof. I think the MNW blowout was the last time the topic was visited, but it was a mess. Don't really care about Bill buying an account, but posting PMs is far more untrustworthy in my opinion than a lot of things that people get tagged for.

Doesn't it at least somewhat come down to what the coin creators and buyers reasonably know about the BTC when acquiring them? If they are just buying coins off of an exchange, they should have no reason to believe that their coins have any sort of issue with them. If someone took stolen coins and sold them on the exchange, and the exchange sold them to you, its not much different than going to a convenience store and getting money used for drug trafficking at some point as change. If the coin creators found a shady partner that'll give them a deal on ill-gotten coins then its a concern, but as far as I and I'd assume most others care, only one or two chains of custody matter.

As a side note, I feel like owning Silk Road coins would be pretty neat. I wouldn't be surprised if they had a premium on them, like how a dollar bill stolen by Bonnie and Clyde is probably worth more than $1.

Tell that to the Soda Jerk 


I've already had drinks served by robots, its not really that exciting unless you build a really stupid inefficient robot. Take a soda fountain with coke in it, add rum, and you've got a rum and coke dispenser.

A state of nothingness doesn't mean there is absolutely nothing. Dark matter/energy accounts for approximately 70% of the matter and energy in the universe. Entropy increases chaotic state. A state where there is no matter and no time will increase in entropy until something happens. Though like I said its pretty abstract at that point because the laws of physics as we know them don't necessarily hold true before 10^-40 seconds after the big bang. Cats and dogs may have got along, Bitcoin doublers may not have been a scam, and mass could come from nothing. Its more likely that dark matter/energy had a role in it instead though.

You can also say that there was another universe that created this one. Humanity with a few hundred more years of technological and manufacturing development could recreate the big bang. We have a fair idea of how to do it, just not the energy.


Careful there, if you are using accelerated reference frames, 99.999% of the physics you know doesn't apply. General relativity is above my paygrade, but its such a complicated topic that most theories you see out there make a mistake there.

I can't tell if this thread is a joke or not. If it isn't, I'd be happy to walk through the proof with you. If you meant for this thread to go into off topic as a sort of joke, I'm not going to waste my time.

Keep in mind, any explanation I can provide only applies ~ 10^-40 seconds after the big bang. Anything before that is very heavily theory based, and above my ability to try and tell you what the most likely theory is. You can call it a result from preexisting alternate universes, god, dark matter, or a period of absolute nothingness where time itself did not exist. If you are fine with that, I can bring up what we can tell about the creation of the universe based on cosmic background radiation and redshift.

With regards to not knowing to check for plagiarism in 2015, I get where you are coming from, but I think thats just one of the risks of buying a used account. If a scammer sold their account before the scam accusation was made public, the new owner would get a raw deal from buying the account. I'd essentially equate it to Bill getting scammed by the account farmer, again assuming the story is true. There isn't really a way for the forum to handle it, rather than just saying, hey that sucks. I'm assuming you've read at least a handful of ban appeals where the people claim to have never done anything wrong, outraged about their false accusation, only to have someone skim through their posts, quote what got them banned, and then they go silent. Imagine what the hundreds of accounts banned for plagiarism would try if there was an inch to give regarding responsibility for actions made by an account.

My personal opinion assuming that there was a single case of plagiarism and we aren't all looking past another 15 offenses that weren't made public, is that the sig ban should stay in place and the 60 day ban should be removed. That said, with the people that are having their permabans removed, aren't they getting off with just signature bans? That leads me to believe there may be more going on than we see. Its tough to compare the punishment from 2015 to now. Sig spammers that plagiarized in 2015 just got nuked, but thats also because there weren't higher ranked members that plagiarized.

I would agree with your conclusion, and my opinion is that Bill should have reasonably checked for plagiarism/post quality. Im sure you recall how accounts were marketed back then, and post quality was always a factor. I remember playing with the account tool that everyone used and having it judge my post quality. While I agree that improving your post history is a good way to decrease the penalties, if you break a rule and you aren't caught you aren't punished. As soon as you get caught, you are likely to be punished. Will a moderator give you more consideration if you have 1 bad post for every 100 good? Certainly more so than someone with 10 posts with half of them being bad.

The risk as you said was that he would receive a temp ban, and he did. I'm not sure that it warrants a 60 day ban given the offense to contribution ratio, but thats if we operate under the assumption that there was only a single case of plagiarism in Bill's post history.

It technically was, we just called it spam at the time as it was not common with non newbie accounts. Account farmers were a problem even back then, and plagiarism itself wasn't uncommon. Account farmers had hundreds of accounts and they'd share posts in megathreads and places they could get away with it. Those accounts were nuked/banned, but none of them ever appealed because they knew exactly what they were doing.

I don't know for certain, but I wouldn't be surprised if Bill's account was one that slipped through the cracks, and later got flagged by the bot.

No, everyone still cared about plagiarism, it was still a ban if caught, but it wasn't very commonly done by non newbie accounts. Account buying in selling in 2015 was still frowned upon, but less so than now. Back before sig ads were as prevalent people were afraid that account buyers would use their accounts to scam. The more recent wave of resentment for account traders came about due to spam more than anything else and ended up getting bundled with being untrustworthy.

Not that I care one way or another about account buying/selling, especially since Bill Gator didn't have feedback from before they allegedly bought the account, but I don't think there is a statute of limitations on untrustworthy behavior. As I said before, its not like Bill bought an account with feedback already, so I personally don't think it says anything about their trustworthiness, but rules are applied on an account wide basis, otherwise the ban appeals would go back to trying the, "My dad's uncle's cousin's carpet cleaner was in my room the other day, and they made this post for me, pls unban me"

As far as I know, there is no leniency given for the, "my account was hacked, I bought the account, it was my brother on my account, etc etc" excuses. It may well be valid, but its far easier for the staff to just say, take care of your account, rather than taking on the duty of spending days playing detective to help out the 1 in 1000 that have a legitimate claim. Back when account buying/selling was a bit more acceptable, before account farmers became the nuisance they are today, checking over an account's posts was something everyone did before buying an account. If I recall, there was even a price tool that would tell you the quality of an account's posts and its value. That burden was always on the buyer, so maybe I'm not as sympathetic as I could be on the matter. Regardless, asking the moderators to cut you some slack is just going to result in tons of spammers asking for forgiveness with bogus reasons, so I can't see anyone wanting to set that precedent.

On a side note... there are three, maybe four on topic posts in this thread. This is getting pitiful, make your own thread if you want to take part in a circle jerk. Whether you like Bill or not, they made a real post asking a question, its not like a thread in off topic about some random nonsense where no one cares if you spam.

Climate change deniers take advantage of snippets of what climate scientists say, disregarding the rest. The whole idea that there isn't consensus on climate change in the scientific community comes from the responsible peer reviewing process where other climate scientists question every part of any findings for the sake of academic honesty. The biggest excuse used right now is that our data set is too small to make any scientifically significant judgement. Thats sort of true, but not so much in a way that supports the denial of climate change. If we saw a 20 degree shift in a matter of a single day, the same argument would stand. Academic honesty prevents real climate scientists from saying, we have calculated that in 9.17549 years the average temperature of the earth will increase by 0.19123 degrees. It allows them to say, we predict that in 9.17549 years considering the data that we've collected over the past 100 years, the average temperature of the earth will increase by 0.19123 degrees.

People then say, yeah but thats like just your prediction man, and then we end up with the problem we are in. Its not as critical of a matter at this time as some try to make it sound, but reversing climate change gets more difficult the further we keep spurring it on. We've got a handful of groups all fighting against each other right now. Real climate scientists, advocates for climate science who are making it worse by trying to appeal by sensationalizing and misinterpreting data to make it look more extreme, and climate change deniers who argue against the climate science advocates.



Nope, they cannot. You'll need teams of thermo/astrophysicists and engineers (to make the data interpretable) for that. We know the temperature of the universe to its creation with an error of 10^-35 seconds. Telling you exactly what temperature the earth should be is cake, you just need a team of people in the correct fields.



Global cooling is a real thing, its just localized and improperly described by nearly anyone that has a half understanding of it. The area that I live in is technically experiencing global cooling due to equilibrium conditions modeled by adiabatic/isotherm curves resulting from emission shielding from atmospheric debris (dust mixing with vapors). Essentially just how weather forecasts are predicted but with corrections that allow them to be stretched out longer term. Taking a guess here, but I'd say that less than 1/10,000th of the world's population is being effected by global cooling. Its kind of one of those fringe cases.

I'm going to call you on that one. I have yet to see a single plagiarism case where a casual poster of the forum came here, accidentally plagiarized, and was punished. If people have plagiarized, it was because they came here with the intention to spam. I have zero sympathy for those so called "good posters" that got caught and had signature bans. If you are sufficiently talented to hide your spam in a way that never rouses any suspicion, I have no qualms with you, but I still wouldn't call you a good poster.

Just to be clear, I'm claiming that 100% of people that plagiarize did so to boost their post count intentionally with the intention of escaping detection. That means that they did not value their post enough to read a topic, come up with a somewhat insightful response, and reply. Rather they found a relevant post somewhere else and responded with no thought put in to furthering a discussion.

Sooooo.... why would you make a thread instead of just PMing in a few days if thats what you decided to do? If you make a thread and just say, this thread is only for this one specific person, you are obviously going to get other people responding. How is making a thread demanding someone's attention on the off chance they happen across it any better than a PM?

It takes about 2 minutes, and maybe 15-30 seconds of upkeep whenever you think about it. Just remove default trust, add a couple individual people that you feel you can trust their feedback, and then add or remove a name as needed. You don't need to worry about having the best possible list that encompasses everyone that you'd like to set as trustworthy. If you are browsing through and see a post from someone you missed, just update it.

My point about statistics was just that living in fear of dogs is the same as living in fear of school shootings. If we were discussing the danger of living in the city, I would have chosen my phrasing more carefully.

I'm in a gun unfriendly area now, but I grew up out in the sticks where every kid went through hunters safety as a manner of coming of age tradition. I do think that the entire debate is moot, at least from the direction we are approaching it now. I think there are a few incorrect assumptions with thinking that everyone carrying guns is a good idea, but thats not super relevant. Funny enough, I was going to look up the statistics on the locations of school shootings just to have something to reference with my next thought, but I really couldn't find any that were reliable. Every list that I found included too many or too few details to actually be useful. I believe that school shooting locations have very little to do with state gun laws. Given that the data was inconclusive, it appears that both California and Texas are towards the top of the list for number of school shootings. Funny though, both states have massive populations and plenty of congested hell cities (cough Chicago, Baltimore, Atlanta, New York). I'm taking a blind guess at this, but I suppose Texas and California each probably account for ~10% of non snow related car crashes too, guess that makes them unsafe to drive in.

I am ABSOLUTELY in agreement that there is a correlation between over medication of children and incidents. Besides the obvious effect that antidepressants and such have strong side effects on adolescents, its another important indicator. Medication is not a treatment for mental health problems. There are very few cases where someone is just born with a chemical imbalance, and a pill just fixes that. Tossing someone a pill doesn't fix the problem, you need to get to the root of the problem or the pill doesn't do anything. I see the rate of medication as a sign that some parents are shirking the well being of their kids and ignoring critical warning signs that can evolve into mental health problems. I'm not saying that sad kids are the cause of all of our problems, we made it through the grunge era, but it definitely lends credence to my thoughts on dealing with mental health before anything else.

*edit* sorry missed your point about training. A handful of companies have tried the, "we aren't making anyone do anything, they are doing it of their own free will" defense, and it never seems to work out. Employees that don't want to volunteer are pressured into doing so because they become less job competitive. A guy who volunteers to work an extra 10 hours without being paid will have an advantage over the guy who doesn't volunteer, so when budget cuts come along, guess who's staying? As a result, the guy who doesn't want to volunteer will end up doing so. There are laws for this reason to keep employers from manipulating their employees into nonpaid overtime. Its been a major problem in transportation and medical fields.

Well, it is speculation on my end, I cannot fathom not requiring the training I mentioned before, but your guess is as good as mine at this point.

Armed amateurs are more dangerous than mass murders. The number of accidents prone to happen from millions of armed amateurs is surely higher. As much as its played up as an imminent threat to the existence of humanity, the chances of being involved in a school shooting are still statistically insignificant.  The numbers of them occurring is certainly increasing, but as I mentioned before, I think there are far better methods available to reduce them than removing guns. I support people's rights to own guns, but there is a time and place for everything. I don't think that turning the country back into a Clint Eastwood western movie is the solution. Going to the grocery store should not become an arms race.

As I said before when I was defending gun ownership, guns are just a tool of convenience. If school shootings became difficult due to sentry turrets or whatever else, people would just move onto the next most convenient method. You don't stop shooters by shooting them first, you stop them from deciding to become shooters in the first place. I'm not the sort to point fingers and blame violent movies or video games or anything else, but just something to think about. Most countries in the world normalize sex rather than violence. A movie will receive a higher rating due to violent content rather than sexual content, whereas in the US, its the reverse. I'm not claiming thats the cause of anything, just a portion of my basis for being against normalizing violence. You shouldn't need a gun to feel safe in public, you should feel safe knowing that unreasonable violence is a statistical outlier, and the majority of people will be able to receive treatment for whatever would drive them to commit violence in the first place.

I'm not sure about that. Assuming that the option was viable, formal military and police training would still probably require a few more pieces to be legal. In many jurisdictions, police officers are required to have liability insurance policies to cover them from being sued into oblivion when they make a mistake that their department wont cover. I think it would probably be a hard sell to get a policy without extensive ongoing training. I can't imagine teachers wouldn't be required to have one if they were allowed to carry guns.


You can't legally have an employee undergo unpaid work related training, so the school board would need to cover that or be at risk of lawsuits. I don't know for certain that the state would have to pay for everything, but based on employment laws, I can say with relative certainty that teachers wouldn't be allowed to provide for themselves.

You can't just put a responsible gun owner in charge of protecting lives, they need to be thoroughly trained so they don't put those lives they are responsible for at greater risk. Google says police academy training costs around $5k and takes 840 hours, followed by field training with a senior officer, and certification exams before officers are allowed to uphold public safety. Again, realistically assuming that the idea is plausible, teachers would need to go through similar if not greater levels of training as police officers as dealing with minors is not a simple situation. I'm sure there are specialization certifications on how to deal with violence around minors. Lets also not forget the routine psychological analysis, not sure what that costs, but I'm sure its cheap. There is a reason that someone you are trusting your life to is required to jump through so many hoops, otherwise they pose a risk to your safety. Even if you think the regulations are stupid, thats not the point of what we are discussing. I could be pro teachers with guns, but that wouldn't change anything I've said so far so its just my interpretation of the legal impossibilities that stand in the way.


I'm not accusing anyone of bringing it up, but I just wanted to mention it in case the conversation would have otherwise gone in this direction. Vigilantism is the worst possible solution. I would bet my life that under absolutely no circumstances would teachers simply be allowed to bring guns to school at their own discretion. It is such a huge legal liability that we are better off talking about nearly anything else.

Quoting for future use when I need to prove that others agree with me to my wife.

Dirty jokes aside, perhaps the fix to this problem is to allow merit sources to pick whether to use their forum given merits or earned smerits? I ran into this problem when playing around with the April fools thread. I had kind of forgotten that I need to drain my forum given merits before I'm free to do what I want with my other 400 earned smerits that I should be free to waste however I want.

It doesn't matter if the benefit is worth it, there just wont be funding for it. If we can't get kids dry erase markers, you think a comptroller is going to allocated part of the budget to pay for guns? The federal government cares even less about public schools than the state, even if it wasn't a political hurdle, it would still be a financial one. Teachers don't get paid all that much, you would have to offer them significant compensation for their additional overtime work as well. Lets not forget the mandatory psychological screenings, and stricter standards for background checks. Police officers also own firearms outside of work, but they aren't allowed to bring their own from home. All of their maintenance, ammo, shots fired etc are accounted for. I don't imagine the laws would give teachers fewer restrictions on firearm use than police officers.

There are a lot of real considerations before just getting straight to the ideological, good guy with a gun beats bad guy with a gun. How many teachers are going to open themselves up to the liability? Good teacher with a gun misses and shoots a student for example, are they guilty of manslaughter because they haven't undergone years of psychological training to prevent them from misfiring when in the heat of the moment? Just being good at a firing range isn't the same as having someone shooting back at you.  As far as I know, most middle/high schools already have an on duty police officer to deal with sexual misconduct, drugs, fights, etc. It would be easier to keep them trained to the same standard as beat cops, so you don't have the same thing that happened in Lakeland.

Even assuming arming teachers was a good idea, the policy would be too controversial to enact. You aren't going to get that kind of reform without it being an overwhelming majority vote. I don't imagine having 50% of students removed from school by their parents, and non stop teachers strikes would be that great for school systems.