Dear friends,
Due to rampant abuse of my server by non-friends (over 1700 comments in two days, that I had to delete one-by-one), I hereby curtail your freedom of speech here at barnson.org. The following phrases are now on the “forbidden topics” list, and including them in a comment will result in your comment being deleted without anyone ever reading them:
- “texas hold em”
- “texas holdem”
- “poker”
- “blackjack”
Sorry, guys, but this means that comments about last night’s poker game will also be off-limits. Legitimate posters have used these words, erm, let me count… ZERO times since the dawn of the web site 🙂 With the exception of “blackjack”, which I’ve used precisely once.
Ways you could get around this ban and still talk about the forbidden topics:
- “texas hold men”
- “texas cold phlegm”
- “poke her”
- “black jack”
You be creative 😉
Note that this only applies to comments. If you wish to start a thread, since only people I’ve promoted to “honorary Barnson” are allowed to post front-page news, you’re welcome to use those terms.
Of course, that may prove very frustrating to anybody who replies to you!
It was either this or forbid anonymous posting entirely, and I find anonymous posters entirely too entertaining to want to do that…
I’m trying to figure out a better way to handle them, but as of the moment I’m writing this, they are pushing about one spam every single second all through the night. There’s no way I can keep up with their swarm of thousands of automated robot-posting poorly-maintained-and-exploited Windows boxes without doing something drastic.
Oh, by the way…
If you’re a regular around here, and you don’t seem to have permission to post a blog, let me know, and I’ll promote you to a “Barnson”. I think I’ve gotten every one, but you never know…
(You can check by looking underneath your logged-in name on the left-hand side. If you have a “create content” menu option, then you’re a Barnson. If you don’t, then you aren’t.)
—
Matthew P. Barnson
What about one of those
What about one of those handy numeric-image generators, so people can confirm that they’re real people…
Captcha
They are called “Captchas”. My principle beef with them is that, while they eliminate scripters from exploiting you, they also ban blind people.
I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with that.
—
Matthew P. Barnson
Weighing the risks
I would think that the following two points apply:
1) I think that amount of hackers with malevolent intent are much greater than the legitimate blind posters to your site.
2) A blind person can ask a seeing person for help on a captcha,
I think we should invent a braille monitor for PCs. Seriously, sort of like those toys with a bunch of thin wires that form the shape of what you press into them. If we could make a screen like that and have it emulate text (in the beginning) we could make a mint and help blind people across the world. Altruistic AND profitable!!
If this has already been done, I apologize, but it doesn’t sound THAT hard.
While I’m stream-of-counsciousnessing, couldn’t you come up with some RGB-Braille converter to give blind people a concept of color. Like a relief map of sorts.
My $.02 Weed
I think that RGB thingie
I think that RGB thingie would only be helpful for people who could once see, but then lost their sight.
What’s the point of being able to differentiate between something that’s read and something that’s blue if you have no idea what red and blue are?
A hundred dollars to the person who can explain color to someone who’s never seen.
Arthur Rowan Brother Katana of Reasoned Discussion Rebel Leader and Dance Instructor for the Unitarian Jihad
You Do It With Temperature
Rowan, you do it with temperature. You explain that red is equal to something hot. Put something cool in the hand and explain blue.
Contact me via my account and I’ll let you know where to send the $100.
What is color anyway
Isn’t color simply the way we percieve a small section of the electro-magnetic spectrum? So color is theoretically just a frequency of EM energy. If we were to map the colors to say different heights on a braille surface, sort of like a topographical map, then they’ve at least be able to determine differentiation in colors.
They’d never know what exactly color was, but they could know when we were talking about yellow versus blue when “reading” a picture of a flower.
Send $50 to Graber and $50 to me 🙂 My $50.02 Weed
Wow… both two excellent
Wow… both two excellent scientific answers. I suppose I should have been clearer with my request… I was more thinking of a way that would let the blind *experience* color in the same way that we do. We could tell them that red is hot and blue is cold, but how to we translate the emotional impact of bright neon green, or the particular blue of the sky? Will the blind ever be able to join in the debate of whether black ever goes with brown (I say, yes, by the way)?
However, it’s entirely my fault that my instructions weren’t clear, so I’ll live up to my end of the bargain. 50 bucks to each of you…
Let’s see, the fifties are the ones with George Washington on them, right? Sorry, I’m an actor, I don’t get a good glimpse of actual money too often…
Arthur Rowan Brother Katana of Reasoned Discussion Rebel Leader and Dance Instructor for the Unitarian Jihad