James Beam

30 more innocent kids and adults murdered in another school shooting makes me wonder if the NRA can say that guns dont kill people, can I say that smoking a cigarette is healthy?

After all, he was born in India

It seems the Y!A moderators are not particularly interested in moderating material that is not in the spirit of public forums. After being reported for calling a racist post racist, and noticing that my own reporting of the question had fallen on deaf ears, I contested the violation. The moderator gave me no more than a cut and paste answer and the offensive question still remains. If I wanted to be effective in helping to reduce the amount of offensive behavior observed in Y!A, what would you suggest is a good, legal way to do this?

As a long time user of public forums, I have had enough of posters that use anoniminity to offend users into replying with angry posts. I have ignored this practice for too long and all I want to do is find an effective way to help reduce this lowlife practice.

Recently, I found a two questions to be deeply offensive and racially villifying. They were almost identical in content, word for word and had been posted withing minutes of each other by the same user. Because they also had been written with an intent to attract angry responses, I reported them immediately. After some time I noticed that only one of them had been deleted but the other one still remains, gathering responses of other angry users who also offended by the question as well as some other users who have taken the chance to post racially insensetive and offensive answers.

I do not want to question the effectiveness of the reporting process, or the apparent lack of consistency, but this example is not an isolated one.

I do have a dislike of Trolls and racist postings and I have reported a lot of answers that I feel are outside the community guidelines and I am concerned that some of my reports may not have been successful before. How can we find out what our standing is?

We got insulation installed under the insulation rebate scheme in Australia.

Some weeks ago, we got a phone call from a company offering to install insulation under the rebate scheme. It was going to cost us nothing, so, ok...Not too hard to install batts. They came, installed the batts, I stuck my head up in the roof to check the work, all looked good from where I was, so, sign the paperwork and off they go. A fortnight later, I am running some cables in the roof and I notice that only half the roof space has been covered by batts and that the batts have been split in two to make them last longer. I rang this company to complain, they start sprouting some abstract rules at me, but after mentioning my local MP's office, he will send an "inspector" to attend immediately to assess. Looking on the net, it is now apparent that I should have checked a lot of things before contracting these guys to do the work, such as whether they were on the installer provider register for one thing and whether they used the imported formaldehyde batts for another. Anyway, I have signed the paperwork initially, so I slap myself on the forehead and say goodbye to a lot of my rights, but what else is available to me to make these guys to come back and do a proper job. And finally, how can I stop this bunch of cowboys from doing the same to others?

I am concerned that my account got hacked. I left a browser page open and logged into my yahoo account overnight and when I come back to it in the morning, there is an error screen telling me that I have been logged out because yahoo accounts cannot be logged in to different pc's at the same time. If I have been hacked, is there anything I can do to secure my account without deleting it?

With cricket fans crying out for good, entertaining cricket, do you think that this is a good strategy?

I have always wondered what it would be like if the ICC introduced a two, or even 3 tier league test system, so the top 5 teams would play each other twice home and twice away over a two year cycle, with the winner recieving a trophy and the 2 lowest teams being replaced by the 2 leaders of the next tier down. It would give teams like Canada, Scotland, Kenya and Holland a chance to be exposed to better opposition. I think it would generate interest and make the game more widespread.

I am interested in hearing your ideas.

If you read through forum after forum on any subject, it seems that no matter what is being discussed, somebody from the sanctuary of their own computer will go out of their way to be as offensive as they can to a minority group. As sure as day following night, they will then start a flame war, which will overtake the original discussion.

My questions are..

Do you think that this is how people really think, or is it just the thrill of causing a flame war?

Is there anything that can be done about it, without locking down the internet with censorship?

In three days on this site alone, I have seen somebody pretend to be a muslim woman and claim to be bashed by her husband on the grounds of religion, which got the usual protests, I have seen somebody say that ALL Australians are racist because there are no Indians in the national Cricket team, which amazingly had so much support!

At the end of the day, in a world of political correctness gone mad, take a look at what people are saying to each other on the internet, it seems like with the lack of mutual respect on display, we are going backwards, and fast, as a society.