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Rule #1

Pacers Digest is intended to be a place to discuss basketball without having to deal with the kinds of behaviors or attitudes that distract people from sticking with the discussion of the topics at hand. These unwanted distractions can come in many forms, and admittedly it can sometimes be tricky to pin down each and every kind that can rear its ugly head, but we feel that the following examples and explanations cover at least a good portion of that ground and should at least give people a pretty good idea of the kinds of things we actively discourage:

"Anyone who __________ is a liar / a fool / an idiot / a blind homer / has their head buried in the sand / a blind hater / doesn't know basketball / doesn't watch the games"

"People with intelligence will agree with me when I say that __________"

"Only stupid people think / believe / do ___________"

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"This thread is stupid / worthless / embarrassing"

"I'm going to take a moment to point and / laugh at PosterX / GroupOfPeopleY who thought / believed *insert though/belief here*"

"Remember when PosterX said OldCommentY that no longer looks good? "

In general, if a comment goes from purely on topic to something 'ad hominem' (personal jabs, personal shots, attacks, flames, however you want to call it, towards a person, or a group of people, or a given city/state/country of people), those are most likely going to be found intolerable.

We also dissuade passive aggressive behavior. This can be various things, but common examples include statements that are basically meant to imply someone is either stupid or otherwise incapable of holding a rational conversation. This can include (but is not limited to) laughing at someone's conclusions rather than offering an honest rebuttal, asking people what game they were watching, or another common problem is Poster X will say "that player isn't that bad" and then Poster Y will say something akin to "LOL you think that player is good". We're not going to tolerate those kinds of comments out of respect for the community at large and for the sake of trying to just have an honest conversation.

Now, does the above cover absolutely every single kind of distraction that is unwanted? Probably not, but you should by now have a good idea of the general types of things we will be discouraging. The above examples are meant to give you a good feel for / idea of what we're looking for. If something new or different than the above happens to come along and results in the same problem (that being, any other attitude or behavior that ultimately distracts from actually just discussing the topic at hand, or that is otherwise disrespectful to other posters), we can and we will take action to curb this as well, so please don't take this to mean that if you managed to technically avoid saying something exactly like one of the above examples that you are then somehow off the hook.

That all having been said, our goal is to do so in a generally kind and respectful way, and that doesn't mean the moment we see something we don't like that somebody is going to be suspended or banned, either. It just means that at the very least we will probably say something about it, quite possibly snipping out the distracting parts of the post in question while leaving alone the parts that are actually just discussing the topics, and in the event of a repeating or excessive problem, then we will start issuing infractions to try to further discourage further repeat problems, and if it just never seems to improve, then finally suspensions or bans will come into play. We would prefer it never went that far, and most of the time for most of our posters, it won't ever have to.

A slip up every once and a while is pretty normal, but, again, when it becomes repetitive or excessive, something will be done. Something occasional is probably going to be let go (within reason), but when it starts to become habitual or otherwise a pattern, odds are very good that we will step in.

There's always a small minority that like to push people's buttons and/or test their own boundaries with regards to the administrators, and in the case of someone acting like that, please be aware that this is not a court of law, but a private website run by people who are simply trying to do the right thing as they see it. If we feel that you are a special case that needs to be dealt with in an exceptional way because your behavior isn't explicitly mirroring one of our above examples of what we generally discourage, we can and we will take atypical action to prevent this from continuing if you are not cooperative with us.

Also please be aware that you will not be given a pass simply by claiming that you were 'only joking,' because quite honestly, when someone really is just joking, for one thing most people tend to pick up on the joke, including the person or group that is the target of the joke, and for another thing, in the event where an honest joke gets taken seriously and it upsets or angers someone, the person who is truly 'only joking' will quite commonly go out of his / her way to apologize and will try to mend fences. People who are dishonest about their statements being 'jokes' do not do so, and in turn that becomes a clear sign of what is really going on. It's nothing new.

In any case, quite frankly, the overall quality and health of the entire forum's community is more important than any one troublesome user will ever be, regardless of exactly how a problem is exhibiting itself, and if it comes down to us having to make a choice between you versus the greater health and happiness of the entire community, the community of this forum will win every time.

Lastly, there are also some posters, who are generally great contributors and do not otherwise cause any problems, who sometimes feel it's their place to provoke or to otherwise 'mess with' that small minority of people described in the last paragraph, and while we possibly might understand why you might feel you WANT to do something like that, the truth is we can't actually tolerate that kind of behavior from you any more than we can tolerate the behavior from them. So if we feel that you are trying to provoke those other posters into doing or saying something that will get themselves into trouble, then we will start to view you as a problem as well, because of the same reason as before: The overall health of the forum comes first, and trying to stir the pot with someone like that doesn't help, it just makes it worse. Some will simply disagree with this philosophy, but if so, then so be it because ultimately we have to do what we think is best so long as it's up to us.

If you see a problem that we haven't addressed, the best and most appropriate course for a forum member to take here is to look over to the left of the post in question. See underneath that poster's name, avatar, and other info, down where there's a little triangle with an exclamation point (!) in it? Click that. That allows you to report the post to the admins so we can definitely notice it and give it a look to see what we feel we should do about it. Beyond that, obviously it's human nature sometimes to want to speak up to the poster in question who has bothered you, but we would ask that you try to refrain from doing so because quite often what happens is two or more posters all start going back and forth about the original offending post, and suddenly the entire thread is off topic or otherwise derailed. So while the urge to police it yourself is understandable, it's best to just report it to us and let us handle it. Thank you!

All of the above is going to be subject to a case by case basis, but generally and broadly speaking, this should give everyone a pretty good idea of how things will typically / most often be handled.

Rule #2

If the actions of an administrator inspire you to make a comment, criticism, or express a concern about it, there is a wrong place and a couple of right places to do so.

The wrong place is to do so in the original thread in which the administrator took action. For example, if a post gets an infraction, or a post gets deleted, or a comment within a larger post gets clipped out, in a thread discussing Paul George, the wrong thing to do is to distract from the discussion of Paul George by adding your off topic thoughts on what the administrator did.

The right places to do so are:

A) Start a thread about the specific incident you want to talk about on the Feedback board. This way you are able to express yourself in an area that doesn't throw another thread off topic, and this way others can add their two cents as well if they wish, and additionally if there's something that needs to be said by the administrators, that is where they will respond to it.

B) Send a private message to the administrators, and they can respond to you that way.

If this is done the wrong way, those comments will be deleted, and if it's a repeating problem then it may also receive an infraction as well.

Rule #3

If a poster is bothering you, and an administrator has not or will not deal with that poster to the extent that you would prefer, you have a powerful tool at your disposal, one that has recently been upgraded and is now better than ever: The ability to ignore a user.

When you ignore a user, you will unfortunately still see some hints of their existence (nothing we can do about that), however, it does the following key things:

A) Any post they make will be completely invisible as you scroll through a thread.

B) The new addition to this feature: If someone QUOTES a user you are ignoring, you do not have to read who it was, or what that poster said, unless you go out of your way to click on a link to find out who it is and what they said.

To utilize this feature, from any page on Pacers Digest, scroll to the top of the page, look to the top right where it says 'Settings' and click that. From the settings page, look to the left side of the page where it says 'My Settings', and look down from there until you see 'Edit Ignore List' and click that. From here, it will say 'Add a Member to Your List...' Beneath that, click in the text box to the right of 'User Name', type in or copy & paste the username of the poster you are ignoring, and once their name is in the box, look over to the far right and click the 'Okay' button. All done!

Rule #4

Regarding infractions, currently they carry a value of one point each, and that point will expire in 31 days. If at any point a poster is carrying three points at the same time, that poster will be suspended until the oldest of the three points expires.

Rule #5

When you share or paste content or articles from another website, you must include the URL/link back to where you found it, who wrote it, and what website it's from. Said content will be removed if this doesn't happen.

An example:

If I copy and paste an article from the Indianapolis Star website, I would post something like this:

http://www.linktothearticlegoeshere.com/article
Title of the Article
Author's Name
Indianapolis Star

Rule #6

We cannot tolerate illegal videos on Pacers Digest. This means do not share any links to them, do not mention any websites that host them or link to them, do not describe how to find them in any way, and do not ask about them. Posts doing anything of the sort will be removed, the offenders will be contacted privately, and if the problem becomes habitual, you will be suspended, and if it still persists, you will probably be banned.

The legal means of watching or listening to NBA games are NBA League Pass Broadband (for US, or for International; both cost money) and NBA Audio League Pass (which is free). Look for them on NBA.com.

Rule #7

Provocative statements in a signature, or as an avatar, or as the 'tagline' beneath a poster's username (where it says 'Member' or 'Administrator' by default, if it is not altered) are an unwanted distraction that will more than likely be removed on sight. There can be shades of gray to this, but in general this could be something political or religious that is likely going to provoke or upset people, or otherwise something that is mean-spirited at the expense of a poster, a group of people, or a population.

It may or may not go without saying, but this goes for threads and posts as well, particularly when it's not made on the off-topic board (Market Square).

We do make exceptions if we feel the content is both innocuous and unlikely to cause social problems on the forum (such as wishing someone a Merry Christmas or a Happy Easter), and we also also make exceptions if such topics come up with regards to a sports figure (such as the Lance Stephenson situation bringing up discussions of domestic abuse and the law, or when Jason Collins came out as gay and how that lead to some discussion about gay rights).

However, once the discussion seems to be more/mostly about the political issues instead of the sports figure or his specific situation, the thread is usually closed.

Rule #8

We prefer self-restraint and/or modesty when making jokes or off topic comments in a sports discussion thread. They can be fun, but sometimes they derail or distract from a topic, and we don't want to see that happen. If we feel it is a problem, we will either delete or move those posts from the thread.

Rule #9

Generally speaking, we try to be a "PG-13" rated board, and we don't want to see sexual content or similarly suggestive content. Vulgarity is a more muddled issue, though again we prefer things to lean more towards "PG-13" than "R". If we feel things have gone too far, we will step in.

Rule #10

We like small signatures, not big signatures. The bigger the signature, the more likely it is an annoying or distracting signature.

Rule #11

Do not advertise anything without talking about it with the administrators first. This includes advertising with your signature, with your avatar, through private messaging, and/or by making a thread or post.
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OT: MArk Cuban Blogs Video: for all you videophiles

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  • OT: MArk Cuban Blogs Video: for all you videophiles

    This should prolly be moved but to give the videophiles who don't go to the PUB etc a chance to see this...(from BlogMaverick)

    HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives and the future
    Posted Aug 21, 2004, 4:59 PM ET

    I love looking for ways to screw up conventional wisdom. Right now in the entertainment world, the conventional wisdom is that both sides on the HD DVD vs Blue Ray DVD will battle it out and a standard for HD on DVD will emerge. No one is trying to rush to a compromise because the big media companies want to squeeze as much money as they possibly can out the current DVD business cycle.

    Good. The longer it takes, the less chance any format of DVD has of having a place in the future of home entertainment. Don’t look now, but the price and size of hard drives have fallen like a rock, while capacities have soared, with no slowdown in site.

    Which leads to the question — What is the best way to distribute content? DVDs which will be limited in capacity to 9.4gbs on a single DVD for another year, and then after that 50gbs on a single disk for years to come after that, or rewritable media that can hold 2gb already in a device half the size of a pen, or in a hard drive that can hold 200GBs plus in a drive the size of your cell phone?

    Which device should content distributors like HDNet invest in ? DVD, knowing that the future standards will be locked for 7 to 10 years, or these storage devices that will grow in capacity, and shrink in size and price, not to mention the additional flexibility of being able to erase and rewrite the drives?

    It’s not a question being asked in many places, but it is something we are talking about at HDNet. The choices we and others in the industry make can have a big impact on the future of your home entertainment.

    Personally, I like putting content on rewritable drives. Let me tell you about how I personally made the USB Flash Drives work for me.

    I had a couple DVDs that I had PURCHASED, that I hadn’t had the chance to watch. I had a couple 512mb Flash Drives that I had bought specifically to test them out for video. I took the first movie, and using an encoder with compression (not going to tell you which one, don’t want to play favorites), I encoded the movies at DVD quality and saved the output onto each of the 512mb Flash Drives. I popped those tiny little puppies into my pockets and off I went to the plane. Keys, some money and my keychain flash drives in one pocket, phone in the other. No hassle, no fuss no muss.

    On the plane, I popped the first keychain drive into the USB Port. Got the ready signal, got prompted to open my video player, and watched a nice movie right from the keychain drive. On the way home, did the same thing with the other movie. I loved it. Far less space than DVDs. Could put them in my pocket instead of filling up my briefcase. I immediately went out and bought a 1gb keychain drive so I could hold 2 movies on 1 drive, in addition to my first 2 drives.

    After having such a great experience with putting my DVDs on the keychain drives, I decided to test HDNet content in HD. The keychain drives, even the 1gb didn’t have enough capacity to hold a full movie, so I tried just some of our promos. They were short enough that they would fit in 512mb, but long enough to let me see if it worked.

    I used a standard HDTV MPeg2 transport stream. The keychain drive wasn’t fast enough to allow me to pull the video directly. I had to copy it to my hard drive on my laptop, where it played with no prob, as it should.

    Since I was getting fired up about the possibility of putting HDNet content in a format that could be transportable and work easily with MediaCenter PCs, and in the not to distant future, USB or FireWire enabled TVs, PVRs and Setop boxes and even DVDs (yes, tvs with hard drives are right around the corner, and yes, all your CE devices with a future, will have storage and expansion ability), I decided to buy a portable 20gbs USB 2.0 drive that was about half the size of a pack of cigarettes. Cost me 150 bucks. I also bought an external 80gbs FireWire Drive for under 100 dollars. I loaded a full 2 hour movie on the cig sized drive, and all the episodes I had of our HDNet Word Report.

    Connected to my laptop, the cig drive couldn’t quite keep up. It had a couple hiccups, but it was close. If I had used any compression at all on it, no doubt it would have kept up no prob. After copying to my laptop hard drive, it played no problem at all.

    I connected the 80gb firewire drive to my HP Media Center PC and to my PC, it was fast enough to play without any problems. I loved it.

    I loved it, for a ton of reasons. Let me name a few.

    I know that the price per GBs of an external hard drive is now down under 50c. That price is going to fall further. A lot further as capacities increase. This time next year we should be talking about 1TB (that’s 1,000GBS) drives at 25c per GB or less. The increased capacity means not only that I can stick more HDNet movies or TV shows on a drive and sell them to consumers, but it also means that I can increase the quality of the picture substantially.

    What few people realize is that when we shoot something in HD for HDNet, the quality we capture the content at is far, far better than the picture quality that you see on your HDTV. We have to compress it to fit in the bandwidth defined by broadcast standards. That compression reduces the quality of the picture you see. Your TV can handle the quality we capture it at, but we don’t have a way to get it to your TV at that quality level — yet.

    Bigger cheaper hard drives gives HDNet the ability to use that additional storage to hold our content in uncompressed quality and increase the picture quality that you can see on your TV. A bunch. We can take advantage of new cameras to capture at better and better qualities, and of new compression schemes that approach future camera capabilities, only because we have ever expanding storage. That’s something DVDs will never have. So by delivering content on Hard Drives rather than DVDs, we will be able to continue to increase the picture quality for years to come.

    The other cool part is that the video playback devices that will be in your home over the next couple years will have the ability to connect via USB or Firewire to these drives. PVRs, Set top Boxes, Media Center PCs,even DVDs designed to play today’s DVDs and whatever future DVD standard is settled on, all will have the ability to connect to Hard Drives in some shape or fashion, or people wont buy them. There is going to be a big, big war to host your content in your house. Whoever does it the best, provides the most flexibility, and expandability at the best price, will win.

    Next on my reasons to love this approach to distribution is that it basically kills off the “Piracy is going to kill us” threats from the big movie companies. Hard Drive storage is expanding far more quickly than upload or download speeds to our homes. The ability to use that hard drive storage to increase the quality and file size of a movie, makes it practically impossible to distribute it over the net. I have a question I always ask at speeches, and have asked for the last several years. I ask if anyone in the room has ever downloaded or uploaded a movie or TV show in HD quality to or from a P2P network. No one has ever raised their hand. That is in spite of the fact that HDTV has been in the clear, over the air since 1998. EVERY SINGLE SHOW that has ever been broadcast over the air, and continues to be broadcast today, could be picked up and copied by any of quite a few different, now under 200 dollar HD encode/decode cards and then put on the net. It hasn’t and won’t happen, because shipping around 18gbs per 2 hour movie isn’t going to be fast anytime soon. Make the file sizes bigger to accommodate better quality, and forgettaboutit.

    When we get to TB hard drives for under 250 dollars, we will be able to fit 50 movies in HD quality on that drive. More than ONE THOUSAND movies in DVD quality on that drive. The keychain drives will be able to hold an entire HD movie and cost under 20 dollars. That same keychain drive I talked about earlier, in the next 2 years or so, will be able to store a DVD and cost under 10 dollars. So which is the better way to deliver a movie or movies? On a DVD with a boring, lifeless future, or hard drives?

    Once the prices of a keychain drive get to a couple bucks for storage enough for a DVD quality movie, then it will be easy to distribute and sell to consumers. (Of course they will still be packaged in pain the *** plastic that no normal person can open right when they buy it, but that’s another issue.) The question will be who other than HDNet will be selling it that way. Will companies stick to DVDs because that’s the way they feel comfortable, or will they support a new medium?

    That’s a little question. The bigger question, the Billion Dollar question is how to deliver content on or to hard drives, regardless of size and capacity, in a way that consumers will enjoy it, and do it cost effectively today?

    Realize, that whatever happens in the next couple years, that you won’t be able to buy the newest releases and the biggest hits this way. There is no major media company who is going to disrupt their DVD cash cow to take a chance on a new business like this. The “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentally is big. But again, that’s a good thing for entrepreneurs with content. While they hope it won’t break, we can be out there trying to break it, and then they usually can’t fix it.

    So without the biggest hit movies, what is the best way to deliver content to homes and for travelers?

    We are looking at kiosks. Walk up to an airport kiosk, or a kiosk at a retail location. Pick the movies or shows or music they have available, pay for it via credit card, and wait a couple minutes while the content is copies from a server right there on the premises.

    We are looking at customizing it per user. Go online, pick the content you want. Pay for it, the next day your hard drive with all the movies, shows, music, whatever, shows up on your doorstep. You plug it in your MediaCenter PC, your DVD, PVR, whatever, and watch, listen and play.

    There is also the Netflix rental approach that could work as well. Pay 100 bucks for the first 200gbs external drive. Pay us 20 bucks a month, and we send you a new drive with the new goodies, and you send us back the one you just watched — Easy and breezy. Well, that is if consumers like working that way.

    Probably the best short term solution is to work with high end home theater installers. The best belong to CEDIA (www.cedia.org). They are the folks that are most capable of integrating Media Center PCs, Hard Drive based storage systems , HDTVs and all the media devices in your house. I can only guess that they would have a field day selling hard drives full of HD quality or better movies to their high end customers who want to truly enjoy their home theater systems.

    There are a lot of open ended questions and challenges in this, but that’s what makes business fun. What kind of device will be the content server in the home? Who will sell it? How will content be delivered, and by who? What will the pricing be? What will the business model be?

    A ton of questions. The good news is that none of the solutions involve good ole’ fashion DVDs, other than as an interim solution. That means there is one hell of an opportunity out there for HDNet and others — as long as we can execute.

    I also wanted to add just a couple of comments, questions, remarks.

    1. Why haven’t the Media Center PC companies and the cable and satellite industry gotten together to put set top box capability in mediacenter PCs? People who buy media center PCs, might want to use them as media centers, and given that cable and satellite deliver the media, doesn’t it make sense to combine the two? It would cut customer costs for all involved significantly.

    2. Why aren’t Media Center PCs promoting the fact that they can play HD files and shipping with Demo and samples to show them off? All of them can. I just bought a new HP Media Center PC, and it didn’t come with squat to show off what it can do. It works great, but I had to figure out all of its capabilities. A showcase would make it a far better solution.

    3. The biggest decision facing HD cable and satellite distributors today is quality vs quantity. Right now most are looking at using compression to squeeze more channels into the existing space they have rather than squeeze a better picture into the same bandwidth that channels take today. The reason it’s a huge decision is that once they decide to fit in more channels, they can’t go back. You can’t all the sudden decide you need 15mbs per channel to deliver a picture that compares to a competitor’s better picture after compressing down to 6or 8mbs per channel.

    4. In a world of multiple Terrabye drives, is VOD a good business? One of the things I learned at broadcast.com is that when you give thousands of choices on demand, people go to the little things that they couldn’t find anywhere else. The sailing fan will choose the show about sailing over the blockbuster movie because they can’t get the sailing show anywhere else. Or maybe they choose both. The problem is that when people all choose different things at the same time, its a huge bandwidth hog. Thousands of choices, thousands of people using different movies, particularly when the expectation is for HD quality, and there is a huge problem. The cost of delivery per movie if the system is used a lot is incredible. Unicasting DVD or higher quality video is an incredibly inefficient business. (Unicasting is where there is one connection per user to the movie being shown. Each user has to have his own bandwidth, they cant’ share streams) It’s why movie delivery over the net will never be a big business.

    I know bandwidth on your own network is cheaper than the net, but when hard disk storage costs 25c per GB, and falls fast from there, unicast won’t be the best way to go.

    The real solution for VOD is TIVO/PVR from the main office. PVR customers are becoming trained that when you fill up the hard drive, you have to delete something to get something. Put some PVR software on the front end, and allow users to pick from a menu of content that they can add. Then overnight, they are multicast the content , whether its via cable or satellite, it’s saved to the hard drive. If they watch it, they get billed for it and everyone is happy, and distributors maximize their revenue per bit.

    Ok, I’m HD worn out — for now. Thanks for letting me core dump some of the things that have been on my mind re HD and the future.
    Ever notice how friendly folks are at a shootin' range??.

  • #2
    Re: OT: MArk Cuban Blogs Video: for all you videophiles

    Apparently a new disc caleed holographic versatile disc is able to store 1 terabyte of data which is about 1000 gb which is enough for more than 80 hours of high definition tv if you take that 1 hour of high definition takes about 12 gb . It might make blue ray disc obsolete even before it hits the market. See more about it http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=18087

    Holographic recording technology records data on discs in the form of laser interference fringes, enabling existing discs the same size as today's DVDs to store as much as one terabyte of data (200 times the capacity of a single layer DVD), with a transfer speed of one gigabyte per second (40 times the speed of DVD). This approach is rapidly gaining attention as a high-capacity, high-speed data storage technology for the age of broadband.

    [edit=81=1093625798][/edit]

    Comment


    • #3
      Re: OT: MArk Cuban Blogs Video: for all you videophiles

      Wow! I'd not heard about HVDs before. 1 TB! Wow.

      Comment


      • #4
        Re: OT: MArk Cuban Blogs Video: for all you videophiles

        Don't buy ANYTHING...It's out of date.


        I have a friend looking for a Laser disk player. His is burnt up...but he still likes his Laser disc movies.


        ah.. so quaint....a laser disk....ancient.
        Ever notice how friendly folks are at a shootin' range??.

        Comment

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