Is anyone else creeped out by how hopeful some of the posters here seem to be about the possibility of the kid "going Columbine"?

I get it that many slashdotters feel they were abused by bullies when they were kids, but the fact is pretty much every kid ever has been picked on (and has bullied another kid) at some time in their childhood. Yeah, it sucks, and yeah, the authorities here should absolutely be taken out of positions where they can commit future injustices like this, but in no way, shape or form should revenge fantasies like "going Columbine" be casually thrown about as if yeah, that's something reasonable.

Yeah, it sucks that some of you were horribly treated when you were young, but get the fuck over it already. If you still get overwraught to the point where you fantasize about killing people at shit that happened 10 years ago on a playground, you have problems and you need to address them.

No, thinking otherwise is being informed. You really should educate yourself on the issue, if you're remotely intellectually honest.

Go down to any poverty law center and ask for some information on bias in police interactions, on bias in charging, bail and sentencing.

You're being literally prejudiced in your beliefs, I'm saying you should get some facts and make an assessment there. If you think being armed with facts is "gullible and stupid" then you're not capable of having a reasoned discussion.

Wow, you actually believe that black men are entirely responsible for the way the police treat them.

Maybe you should examine that belief.

You're absolutely right. We're far from equal.

Women make 4.6% of Fortune 500 CEOs despite being about 50% of the workforce.

Women make up 20% of the Senate, despite being about 50% of the population. Women make up 18.9% of the House of Representatives despite being about 50% of the population.

And don't get me started on race! Black men are vastly more likely to have an interaction with police, be arrested, held on higher bail, convicted more frequently and given longer sentences than white men when all other factors (socioeconomic and past criminal record) are accounted for. Estimates are that blacks make up a little over 13% of the US population but just over 40% of the prison population, and have sentences averaging more than 20% longer. Crimes that were predominantly seen as a "black" thing - like possession of crack cocaine - were given disproportionately higher sentences than possession of regular cocaine. Even for drugs that are in common use across races, black users of marijuana are vastly more likely to do jail time than white users of marijuana.

And that's just scratching the surface and going after easily obtainable numbers that took me 30 seconds to Google. There's inequality all over the place, and I'm really glad you agree with me that the US's claims of equality are horseshit. Being aware of the problem is the first step towards fixing it.

Also, you're more than welcome to start up a United Caucasian College Fund with all the exact same rights and protections the United Negro College Fund has as long as you follow all the exact same rules and regulations required by law. You'll probably have a lot of people rolling their eyes and calling you a doofus for doing it, but hey, knock yourself out.

Which is funny in a sad kind of way, because it leads to programs like this one. It's the circle of life, fueled by the angst of misogynists*.

There's a lot to criticize about the implementation of this program, but dipshits like the one we're talking about make it clear why some facets of the program have an appeal.

*Referring to the asshole we're referring to and his "women are tricky" as the misogynist.

Not so much, actually.

Most people leveling do it alone or maybe in a small group. No need to think about 90% of the abilities a class has while doing that because the leveling content needs to be tuned to people who are novices. Most people don't want - despite playing an MMO - to be forced to play with other people in a group at all times in order to level, so you can't touch this leveling content.

Most people leveling don't even set foot in a dungeon in WoW. A dungeon being fundamentally different than world questing, and yet still not requiring a player to be very good with their class or understand their class.

A tiny percentage of players set foot in a raid EVER, let alone while leveling - even with new things like a very content-tourist mode like the Looking for Raid feature that was added. Raid mechanics are fundamentally different than dungeons or world questing, so really, require you to play your class in a very different way than you would have experienced while leveling; abilities that seem pointless while leveling suddenly make sense to use, and patterns that made sense while leveling suddenly become counter to survival.

What IS true is that, if you want to raid you need to learn how to play your class. But, I don't think 20-100 hours of doing things that bear no real relation to how you will end up playing your class is the way to do it. Personally, I think the idea of having proving grounds (which they kind of do now) wherein the player is hand held by NPCs and given tons of feedback on how to play their specific class, what abilities to use and why, in game, would be the way to go.

"Hey, new paladin person in a tank role - I'm going to make that big guy over there very, very angry in a moment, and he can kill me but he won't hurt you as much, so I want you to press that flashing button on your screen - it's called a taunt - when he starts chasing me; it'll make him go after you, not me!" If you fail? "It's okay, fortunately we have people around who can make everything better when I get beaten to a pulp... Let's try this again..."

"Hey, priest type person in a healer role - I'm about to fight several small creatures that individually don't do much to me but hurt me slowly over time. Cast that spell that's flashing on me once every 10 seconds or so in order to throw a spell on me that will heal me up slowly over time."

"Hey, shooty damage type person, I'm going to beat up 4 things, but I want you to focus on hurting ONLY the one that is my primary target." "Hey, so these guys aren't stupid, they're going to try to hurt you - see that purple stuff on the floor over there? If it appears under you during the fight, MOVE AWAY FROM IT!"

Etc. and so on. Have people go through that, have it be so that a veteran player who is familiar with game mechanics could complete all the tasks in under an hour, but where a newbie player who knows nothing might wind up taking 10 hours or so to do the quests well enough, and you're good.

The problem WoW has - and most MMO's have - is that the designers assumed that other players would give solid feedback to people on their teams in dungeons and so on. Unfortunately, most people are assholes and not willing to take any time with newbies to straighten them out. Since the playerbase by and large won't help other people learn, there needs to be an in game process for it.

tl;dr: There needs to be a way to teach people how to play their class, but the current way of doing it (leveling) doesn't teach them anything that is actually relevant.

I agree with your idea that we're looking at the wrong populations, and actually would suggest that "e-sport" people aren't "gamers" but rather "people who play obsessively".

Look at the population of people who play a single game obsessively, then look at the population of people who play said game at the competitive level, and I'm sure any demographic gaps would disappear almost completely.

I don't know, but it seems important enough to some people to make the distinction, and it's reasonably easy to accommodate them if they ask, so why not just roll with it?

If you honestly think the people who want to rob tourists need to see you using glass in order to know you're a tourist, you've probably never been more than 100 miles from where you were born, let alone a foreign country. Trust me, tourists are obvious, and you can ALWAYS figure out their economic status very easily without judging their headgear.

Only an absolute fucking idiot would steal a device that will destroy itself (except for functions related to calling the police to report itself stolen and help them locate it), and only an absolute fucking idiot would do that with a device that is expensive enough for the theft of it to be a major crime, and only an absolute fucking idiot would rob a tourist bringing the wrath of their local authorities down on them HARD. The only people who harm tourists aren't doing it for petty shit like robbing them of a (soon to be useless) item like glass.

Much more likely is someone will spot you in glass and think "Oh, look, an asshole."

What's funny is that the person you are quoting barely even mentions the TECH mishap - he sums it up as "numerous huge IT errors" but then goes on a rant about things that have NOTHING to do with the fucked up launch of healthcare.gov, but you want to claim that other people can't seem to separate their politics from their ability to assess the success or failure of a tech project. What the ever loving fuck does someone saying there will be doctor shortages, or a 2% tax, have to do with the website sucking? Nothing. Stop projecting your partisanship onto other people.

Personally I hate the ACA because it isn't single payer and all it will wind up doing is delaying actual healthcare reform in this country by decades while simultaneously keeping a useless industry alive. In any case, this story isn't about politics, it's about tech fuckups in 2013. So:

As an IT project, Healthcare.gov was an abortion. You had project management that was behaving in a fairly schizophrenic fashion (namely, political leadership who were battling over the ACA trying to repeal/defend it) leading to delays in starting implementation, you had incompetent contractors hired to put it out, you had incompetent developers building it (my god, the amount of pointless data streaming up and down was staggering, the front end code we could see was incompetent at best, the whole mess was completely non-performant) and then to top it off, as a post-mortem it seems that most were trying to assign blame and score political gotcha points and throwing up all kinds of irrelevant shit rather than just dealing with reality and trying to do a solid job implementing the law of the land.

I do agree there can be no doubt that Healthcare.gov is the absolute biggest fuck-up of the year.

Though my vote for worst tech issue of the year definitely goes to the NSA stuff - I'll take a thousand shitty websites over big brother any day.

If the shoe and underpants bombers had been intending to actually succeed, they would have gone to a lavatory to set their bombs off, they would not have done what they did in plain sight of other passengers. It's not really reasonable to think that the intent of either of those incidents was to actually take a plane down, since if it was, they would have been instructed to go to a toilet to do it.

The idea behind those "attacks" was to get us to enact even more incredibly stupid security tactics, and they succeeded perfectly.

Totally, because as history has shown time and time again, only people who were really great in a particular subject as kids go on to bring anything great into the world, and there has never, ever, not even once, been someone who was initially thought to be very bad at a subject who later became a true giant in the field.

I just assume people willing to stick around in an abusive environment must have low self-esteem and/or be REALLY bad at what they do, to the point where they feel they couldn't get involved elsewhere.

Even if we take your reasoning as valid, it's still pretty icky; you're advocating for it being a good thing to have projects stuffed with people willing to accept a ration of shit as some kind of ideological purity test.

Think about how absolutely fucked up that is for a second.

Your problem is you imagine somehow that hurling abuse at people is effective at getting them to be better at their job.

There's a difference between a thin skin and not wanting to work in an environment where people feel like being an asshole and abusing people for making mistakes is a virtue.

Honestly, every time a story like this pops up here, I have to think most of the folks here have Stockholme Syndrome and miss being bullied when they were kids, given how willingly they support abuse in the workplace.

For what it's worth, when I make a mistake at work, I'm already beating myself up much more effectively than my co-workers could, so them being assholes wouldn't add anything. Much better would be working together to identify and fix the problem and then to put a plan in place to help avoid similar issues from happening in the future.

But hey, if it works for you - if you honestly feel like taking abuse is some kind of virtue in the workplace, or something that is completely unavoidable - then far be it from me or anyone else to suggest there might be a better way.

The person I was responding to said that it was impossible to take control of a plane since 9/11, PERIOD. It is not. People have taken control of planes. Whether or not they got what they wanted as a result is not relevant - they took control of the plane in, according to you, at least 2 cases, even if they were arrested on the ground.

The OP didn't make any claims about US airlines or anything else - just that hijackings since 9/11 are impossible PERIOD, which is demonstrably false as you have just agreed.