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Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement

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Re: Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement

#171

Post by MichaelGG »

babs474 wrote: post #19

Very cool, I love this approach as it is very similar to how my (now defunct) unedditreddit app worked and how a clever app called socialfixer for facebook works. Two thoughts. 1. You are not unblockable. My app was removed from the chrome app store after reddit complained, no review process, no appeals, good luck even communicating with google. Installing an app not from the appstore is almost impossible for a non-s…

> That idea taken to the extreme will lead to computers become opaque devices ala a TV, rather than the hackable playground they are now.

Which is funny, seeing how Tivo got into the end-to-end experience on TV.

Re: Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement

#172

Post by eropple »

dnautics wrote: post #170
eropple wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He got into Yale and you're wondering what advantages he has? Let's set aside for a second the high-end schools' tendency towards legacy admissions, which clearly isn't going to be biased towards the children of the upper class who are certainly not predominantly white and loaded (that smell is not the dog, folks, it's sarcasm). Have you seen the demographics of Yale[1]? Even just racial demographics put WTFs to this…

Nobody issues this diatribe about Sonia Sotomayor, and she went to Yale. I would welcome it if you started doing this.

See [4] and try harder.

Re: Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement

#173

Post by raldi »

daeken wrote: post #168
Shish2k wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am a monkey As a side note, it would be really useful if there was some way of quoting context that didn't trivially lend itself to forging context... (though admittedly that's a much smaller problem).

Simple solution: store the comment revisions, and when you go to a reply, allow the user to see the revision that was active when the reply was posted.

Simpler solution: Leave things the way they are. It doesn't make sense to dramatically increase your storage costs and UI complexity over a feature 99% of your users don't care about and a substantial number will actually be annoyed by.

You have bigger fish to fry.

Re: Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement

#174

Post by wfn »

iamdave wrote: post #61
superpatosainz wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sir, if I preoperly recall, that's exactly how you discard premises. Taking a premise and applying it to a more extreme situation just battletests it. It's done in justice and law courses, etc. "If the common good justifies killing X agent, then it must be ok for a doctor to kill a patient in their sleep, take his organs and save three people with his two kidneys and heart." Also, what Yale did wasn't right, and the…

"If the common good justifies killing X agent, then it must be ok for a doctor to kill a patient in their sleep, take his organs and save three people with his two kidneys and heart." Isn't that a variation of a semantic shift fallacy? [1] --- [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change

Just an FYI: that wiki link does not seem to lead to an article about the fallacy in question, or any kind of fallacy for that matter. You might have been thinking about the continuum fallacy[1], false equivocation, straw man, or red herring. In any regard, I agree that the reasoning in question falls within the bounds of one or other informal fallacies[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy

Re: Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement

#175

Post by jbcurtin2 »

babs474 wrote: post #19

Very cool, I love this approach as it is very similar to how my (now defunct) unedditreddit app worked and how a clever app called socialfixer for facebook works. Two thoughts. 1. You are not unblockable. My app was removed from the chrome app store after reddit complained, no review process, no appeals, good luck even communicating with google. Installing an app not from the appstore is almost impossible for a non-s…

Here is a repo I posted a django addon that packages and installs plugins. Only supports chrome right now. https://github.com/jbcurtin/Deployment

Re: Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement

#176

Post by arg01 »

csense wrote: post #165
lvs wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this revision. It's important to frame your fight in terms of intellectual freedom within the academy, which is perhaps a conceptual framework your faculty can comprehend. Yale does not have any de facto obligation with regard to your free speech, legally or contractually speaking. Unfortunately, our society generally permits speech to be legal cause for termination/dismissal in private institutions (e.g…

> legal cause for termination/dismissal in private institutions In the US, under at-will employment, an employee "can be dismissed by an employer...without having to establish 'just cause' for termination..." [1] If you'd prefer a different standard because this rule sounds harsh against employees, think for a moment from a company's standpoint: If you know the law won't make it easy for you fire someone, you'll be r…

I would just like to point out that it can also have a negative affect on job liquidity. For instance why would I move, at expense to myself, for a job if there is a reasonable chance of being fired for something unrelated to my work and with little recourse. It also means I'm less likely to disagree with the boss because something going bad for the company is not as bad as me getting fired from my point of view.

Fair enough to say 'that these show bigger issues with the company and you'd be better off elsewhere' but it doesn't stop companies like these existing and minimising the cost to them isn't something I particularly support.

Re: Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement

#177

Post by aridiculous »

ricardobeat wrote: post #74

I partially agree with the university's reasoning on this; displaying course ratings like it's a food menu is disencouraging thought, not something you expect from an academic environment, and it can't have a good outcome regarding course selection. They just should have found a better way to combat that instead of brute force.

I agree that interface decisions are political. If you allow students to sort by workload, you're sending the wrong message about academics.

Or at least what a minority (I, included) believes academics to be about. The cynic in me is OK with YBB+ and its food menu ethos: most of the academic system has been turned into an exchange already, so might as well be publicly honest about it. That way, real scholarly students can avoid places like Yale at the undergraduate level, and go to places that actually still know what real education means.

Re: Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement

#178

Post by pjmlp »

judk wrote: post #157
Morphling wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because the Extension is removed from the "play store" doesn't mean it's unattainable. You can still distribute Chrome Extensions from a third party site, of course they can take steps to get your take it off of your site, but one would assume that college students who want to use this could simply share it via email or simply on a USB stick.

Nope. http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/07/chrome-on-windows-to-start-...

There will be always the alternative of writing a pure desktop application for such things.

Re: Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement

#179

Post by pjmlp »

erichurkman wrote: post #126
cynwoody wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Installing an app not from the appstore is almost impossible for a non-savvy user. I would post a video demonstrating step-by-step how to install non-approved apps in Chrome. Download the app. Open chrome://extensions. Tick Developer mode. Drag the app from your Download folder to the extensions page. Enjoy those nicely summarized ratings! Actually, here are two existing videos on the subject: https://www.youtube.c…

Just be aware that your instructions may have to change soon; Google is slated to start blocking all local extensions unless users install the Dev or Canary channel builds on Windows [1]. [1] http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/11/07/google-block-local-c...

There will be always the alternative of writing a pure desktop application for such things.

Re: Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement

#180

Post by pjmlp »

ilaksh wrote: post #55

Make it a userscript instead of a Chrome extension and then Google can't block it from their store because it will be distributed openly. http://http://userscripts.org/ http://userscripts.org/about/installing

Or better yet, do a desktop app.
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