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Desktop PCs and printers:

Buggy whips and horse shoes?

Fat collars and bell bottoms?

Sextants and paper charts?

Obligatory

I have noticed a marked tendency for doomed businesses to attempt mergers with other equally doomed businesses.
And when it happens I always think of cartoon characters who have run off a cliff grabbing hold of other cartoon characters who have run off the same cliff.

that gave me violent tendencies was "Ninja Gaiden: Black" for the Xbox.

I got so freaking angry at that game I nearly threw my Xbox out of a window. Those save points were just cruel and unusual punishment.

However not limited to video games, online video games, particularly of the console variety with voice is the cause of stuff:

http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

I'm sure I'll get cursed for pointing out the emperor's winkie is flapping in the breeze but I'll be happy to answer that, its the "busted shitters" that frankly ruin Linux. oh Linux is a nice IDEA, kinda like how communism with everyone taking care of everyone else for the betterment of all is a nice idea, it just doesn't really work in practice.

For examples there is the docs that are at best an arcane list of CLI commands with fuck all explanation of what they are or at worst a "to do" placeholder, there is Pulseaudio which even the strongest Linux advocate will get the shivers just thinking about, there is the broken driver model which causes things that don't SEEM to be connected to seriously fuck each other up, which seems to hit pulse worse than most but wireless gets shat on frequently as well, there is the insane release schedule which obviously gives the developers ZERO time for regression testing or QA, not that they are gonna do that shit for free anyway, there are the bugs that have been around for years and will obviously NEVER be fixed, please see any distro bug trackers for quite a few, there is the badly inconsistent UI which I would argue is caused by developers just being itch scratchers since they aren't getting paid and therefor don't have to give a fuck what you think, therefor some programs behave like Windows, with Win hotkeys and Win layouts, many rip off Mac horribly which is fucking sad because OSX is a APPLICATION BASED NOT WINDOWS BASED therefor ripping it off for an OS based on Windows (the document format not the OS) makes no fucking sense, and finally there is the old school Unix conventions just to throw the occasional curveball, and finally there is the leaning on CLI as a crutch, whereas in OSX or Win 7 one could remove the CLI completely and have a 100% functional OS that I would argue more than 95% of the population would never even notice CLI was removed with Linux thanks to its actually being a server OS and NOT a desktop OS at heart if you remove CLI you've completely destroyed the OS and many distros won't even boot.

Now cue the nutjobs who will swear I'm secretly a M$ Ninja robot built by Cyberdyne and plugged into a computer under Redmond, coming off as nothing more than total losers when the simple fact is you can't change reality and numbers don't lie. To get Linux up to the same level as OSX and Windows will require north of 100 million dollars because NOBODY and I do mean NOBODY is gonna take on the above problems i named, because it will take years of boring as fuck lousy shitty work that nobody willl do for free which is the essence of the busted shitter dilemma. You see you can get humans to create for free, because we like to do this, what you can NOT get humans to do is come fix that turd filled busted overflowing crapper stinking up the joint for nothing and for every creative job that needs doing you have 100 that are the equivalent of the guy that cleans up the puke at the Chuck E Cheese.

Apple and MSFT have to pay millions upon millions of dollars to get their own busted shitters fixed, which is why you can take a bog standard desktop, install XP/Vista/7 RTM, update it through all those patches and service packs and have ALL the drivers 100% functional. Its not magic, its millions of dollars spent on regression testing and working with OEMs and first party drivers and a shitload of hard nasty thankless work that ends up with something people take for granted. With Linux because of all those busted shitters the support costs will bankrupt you which is why we retailers won't carry your product. I have several XP machines that have been in the field for over 8 years bug free, in fact the machine I'm typing this on is a circa 2004 AMD Sempron still running the default XP install that I kept when a customer traded it in because it was so low powered and quiet it made for a great nettop. Compare this to Linux where I've tried LTS to LTS, LTS to regular, and regular to regular and have YET to

Agreed. Devices don't emit pilot killing rays or anything like that, and loads of people almost certainly do not turn off their phone. I can practically guarantee that there is at least one "I'm above the rules" executive eating a Power Bar and keeping his Blackberry in his pocket until he can whip it back out again and answer all of the e-mails he's surely missed.

Then again, this would require the FAA, the airlines, and/or the government listening to scientific data and common sense. The fact that the TSA exists is a testament to the fact that they actually care very little about a scientific approach.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22

Oh lord, another one. Tsk tsk tsk you hate to see a FOSSies get infected with Voldemort syndrome but there ya go, another poor victim of such a horrible disease who will now end up looking like this poor bastard. So won't you please give to the "Save a FOSSie America" or SOFA fund, currently located in a shoebox next to where RMS squats on the MIT campus? Remember folks, just because FOSSies are free doesn't mean you should waste 'em, no matter how irritating they are.

And I hate to break the news to ya sparky, but nobody WANTED Windows on Itanic, or SPARC, or PA-RISC, or MIPS because without WINDOWS PROGRAMS Windows makes no damned sense at all! It would be like porting it so the NT kernel could run Plan 9, WTF? What good is it? It isn't good for anything which is what MSFT is finding out in the mobile space. Ever try winPhone 7? I have, its nice, but why should I want it when both Android and iOS have more apps, more support, and in the case on Android dozens more units to choose from? What sells Windows is Windows programs, not the kernel, not the "look and feel' of the desktop, just Windows programs. And THAT is why WinARM is gonna go down into the same garbage can where all those copies of NT for those other arches went because without the ability to run Windows programs (the best Itanic could do was the speed on a Pentium II when running Windows programs in x86 emulation when the average x86 was approaching 3GHz) then there simply isn't a point.

And please get treatment for your Voldemort syndrome, a mind is a terrible thing to waste and I hear that stuff spreads like the clap.

Penny Arcade has a good take on this subject.

If you're happy with that comparison, then let me ask you this: Have you ever been stuck in traffic and noticed that the cars around you are pretty much the same cars around you for the entire time? No? Well then next time, have a look. Now imagine that one of them is radiating enough EM interference to knock your cell phone (With a range of what, two miles?) off the air.

Sure, politely asking them to tone it down may not work, but that's where you start, and that doesn't harm anyone else. If they are enough of a douche to not take the hint, then you have some fun with them. I've driven people off the bus before, just by smiling at them in the "right" way. Generally I don't have to resort to much more than getting a few people around them to actually turn around and LOOK.

How are the replies here any different than asking someone (Perhaps not so politely) to tone it down?

And have you ever had a discussion in person that has gone the same way as one on the Internet? You are aware of John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, right?

People care about privacy in the same way they always have, when it affects them. They don't want the world to know they were out walking with their mistress, but they don't care if people know they were walking with their wife.

It's hard for people to understand what is wrong with their browsing habits being collected automatically, especially when they don't see how it affects them. And a lot of people have no problem declaring to the world their strange fetishes.

If you have properly protected your electronics, you should be fine.

You should consider Goole- then.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/7/25

"Anonymous" has a whole history of legal public protest prior https://whyweprotest.net/anonymous-scientology/ , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chanology prior to any yarns about 4chan,

Before the whole scientology thing there was plenty of people on 4chan busy with hacking, they just didn't style themselves as "Anonymous". It's the scientology protests which started the whole "Anonymous is legion" thing. Their offline activities before that were mostly benign flashmobs dressed up in various types of topical (for 4chan at least) getup and in far smaller numbers simply "for the lulz".

You can argue about "Anonymous predating 4chan" as much as you like, but the culture of the collective is drenched in the memes and culture of that site and was so since it's inception. This however doesn't mean that they are exclusive to 4chan, just that if you go back in time you'll find the roots of the collective there. Note that I'm not saying that all of 4chan is the collective "Anonymous", as the opinions on the group there are divided.

handful of geniuses and legion of idiots or any other ludicrous mass media distortions.

The word "geniuses" is clearly oversensational, but I would say that the analogy is mostly apt. What better a way to describe a few kids smart enough not to get caught (YMMV, see lulzsec) while egging on other kids voluntarily running DoS tools on their computers? It's mob mentality on the internet, nothing more and nothing less. Hell, if you gather enough of the "legion of idiots" in a room you'll get the same mentality, which is why 4chan is no longer welcome at conventions.

Whether it's a dead tree work by a short run minor publisher and a desperate author or a web site eventually you just start to ignore them as pointless.

I find it amusing that in this day and age people (especially journalists) still don't "get" how online communities work. Take real world behavior, add a layer of "anonymity", et voila instant greater internet fuckwad theory to a certain extent. Sure, not every online community is like this, but if it is convinced it can act without impunity you will get the exact same phenomenon as "Anonymous" eventually.

No need to show footage of a van exploding, no terrorist cells, just people being dicks.

The only thing that should ever be challenged is, government investigative agents seeking to gain promotion by destroying the lives of unskilled teenagers with claims of terrorism and threats to vital infrastructure with the hoodoo of "Anonymous".

I agree that the reaction to this whole thing is drawn out of proportion, but the reaction to most things seems drawn out of proportion these days. While I don't think that just being a dick warrants punishment, there's obvious cases where the law can step in: harassment phonecalls (often including death threats), participating in DDoS attacks, actually hacking servers, etc... I think that the justice system should use common sense in their approach to the lesser things (eg. community service), and for the more egregious offenses a more severe punishment. But letting it slide just because they are "unskilled teenagers" is simply silly, because the last thing these unskilled kids need is confirmation that they can actually do these things without impunity.

I refuse to believe that the average 15 year old downloading LOIC doesn't stop to think about what they're doing and make a moral choice. But I also refuse to believe that we should punish them beyond a (albeit serious) slap on the wrist.

I'd give Pogson a break Barbara if he was just a zealot, but Voldemort syndrome? there is NO excuse for that. Voldemort syndrome actually makes FOSS users look like a bunch of tinfoil hatters and makes it the punchline of jokes. I mean would it REALLY cause the end of civilization if he wrote MSFT or even MS? but not once, not once has he been able to write anything but "M$" or "The OTHER OS" like they are listening to his thoughts through the walls. the LAST thing FOSS needs is another Twitter.

And while I would like to think there would be room for a proprietary Linux frankly the "free as in beer" tards would have such a damned screaming shitfit it would never happen. i mean what was Xandros' crimes? it signed a deal that would give it access to the Exchange and Sharepoint protocols along with access to MSFT tech like AD and GPO backend protocols, that's it. And anyone with a brain would know that for a business OS having the ability to use Exchange and AD is pretty much a must have. Instead the community destroyed what as your friend found out was the only really sanely designed linux I had ever seen, it all "just worked" without "pulling a Gnome" and restricting the user. you had full CLI,could run apt-get and use any app, it just had sane defaults so you didn't need to if you didn't want to. it even had on first startup a "behavior" choice which would make the OS respond to Windows,Mac, or Linux conventions when it came to things like right click so it was simple to convert users. I used to have a Xandros laptop I'd hand to a client to use while i worked on site, just so the person whose machine I was fixing wouldn't be completely down for the day ya know? i had not once needed to spend a single minute teaching them "The Linux way' because it all "just worked". it would detect the AD, ask for a login, plug it into an AD network and it would be up and running faster than XP.

And I agree that Grub and most of the underpinnings have frankly gotten just dumb, what these guys are cooking up is frankly more of a hindrance than a help. And again the fundamental problem is how to pay for the work? How do you pay for the focus groups and QA and regression testing required to bring everything up to a point that while the home user can run it the power user and admins don't feel hamstringed? I truly believe Canonical is gonna be the final straw, after they close their doors any thought of Linux having a prayer on the desktop will be finally dead, well except for pogson whom I'm sure will think "Its a vast conspiracy to keep GNU away from the masses!" while ignoring in the end its the busted shitter problem, in the end the shitty jobs just don't get done. Vista was a pig so the users didn't buy, MSFT got the feedback and built Win 7 which runs great even on netbooks. there just isn't that kind of positive feedback in F/LOSS. I mean how do you tell a dev working for free 'What you are doing isn't helping, it doesn't follow the GUI conventions, its got too many bugs, and it relies too much on CLI and its help files are poorly written"? Answer you don't, they say "take it or leave it" which is why you end up with a shit sandwich, because the devs say 'hey you want a free sandwich?" and when you say yes hand you a turd on bread and say 'No complaining now, because its free". Well a shit sandwich is still shit, like Joe Rogan said "If someone hand you a sandwich that is 95% shit and 5% ham, would you call it a ham sandwich?".

In the end users don't care WHY it don't work, all they care about is their wireless is broke, or their sound is now static, or their GUI doesn't have the options they require. Hell even Nichols admits the new GUIs are shit, and I NEVER thought he'd have a bad word to say about F/LOSS. But you have yourself a great weekend Barbara.

That makes 3 of you.

Necessary but funny: in regards to spoilification...

That you and your friends stop playing that video game and have a different hobby.

After seeing this I had to post the penny arcade, since it actually deals with space combat, or at least in a sense ;).
comic link

Why I believe it will look exactly like this:

http://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/i-M8XxLDd/0/L/i-M8XxLDd-L.jpg

Sorry, that's just a bad idea.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/5/23/

If I could mod this up any farther I would. How, on Slashdot of all places, this point isn't made in the first five comments (after the obligatory sarcastic first comment) is absolutely beyond me.

The concept of owning the game as a component of it's purchased value is the single major argument against this type of blatant money grabbing. Recently, Tycho recently made a point on Penny-Arcade that no one seems to complain about Steam having this exact same business model. And that in fact, digital distribution has an even more unforgiving consumer contract. You cannot resell digital copies AT ALL, even handicapped versions of them. Where's all the internet vitriol for Steam?

I believe the answer to that lies in the comment above. You can get good games on Steam at MUCH reduced prices. Sure, if I want Skyrim on release day, it will be $59.99. But six months later? We can likely pick it up, un-handicapped, for likely half the cost. A lot of these price reductions are done according to demand (shocking I know), so maybe Skyrim wasn't the best example. But still: try going into Walmart a year after an A1 title is released and see how much the price as come down.

And lastly, Origin is like some horrific mutant child of the worst of both models. Want to buy the vanilla Sims 3 on Origin four years after launch? Congratulations! It's been reduced to only $30! This makes me wonder, how much of this is ALL game companies, and how much of this is just EA?

. Like Skyrim....

Gabe @ Penny Arcade says the game is *better* than Skyrim.

http://penny-arcade.com/2012/01/27

Personally, I don't care if every disc sold comes with a free blowjob, I won't be buying it.

I predict unintended consequences

I've had it. I liked the idea of requesting gamer journalists to refuse to cover E3 as long as the ESA supported SOPA, but I don't think that's enough anymore. If E3 is abandoned en mass then the ESA could easily die. They need to be turned into a public example to everyone else. This needs to become a year without E3.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/05

Here are some blacked-out webcomics:

• Questionable Content
• Ctrl+Alt+Del
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
• The Oatmeal (this one will be hard to take a screenshot of, as it's an animation)
• Dinosaur Comics
• Something Positive
• Nedroid

Incidentally, half of these I hadn't even heard of before today; I only know of them now because they chose to protest SOPA! Also, Penny Arcade isn't blacked out but has an anti-SOPA banner, and XKCD hasn't updated yet.

Oblig. Penny Arcade:
http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/04/13

Let me preface this by saying that your response really sounds like a case of the GIFT. Calm down, guy!

If might be eliminating 2D digital projection out in the middle of nowhere where you have only one theater for 100 miles, but in civilization, it's not happening at all.

Your assumption is incorrect. I don't live in the middle of nowhere. I have observed this in every movie theater I have attended in my area.

the majority are unaffected and don't care about your complaints.

Well, that's true. The majority doesn't seem to be clamoring for 2D digital projection; just some of my film-buff friends.

Have you tried organizing a petition to take to the manager at the movie theater stating that X number of people will simply stop going if they don't provide 2D digital as well as 3D?

No, but I have voted with my wallet and avoided new films because of it. I'm watching more "new" movies at home. I'm sure such a petition would fail, though, given how little most people care. Where do you get this idea that everything we don't like must be protested?

[GoDaddy CEO] Adelman said “I’ll take that back to our legislative guys, but I agree that’s an important step.” But when pressed, he said “We’re going to step back and let others take leadership roles.” He felt that the public statement removing their support would be sufficient for now....

You're right, he does sound totally unrepentant. That sounds nothing like an erudite rendition of "You have the power Mike Please make it stop". Yep, definitely not repentant, and definitely NOT spoken by an asshole, and definitely not withdrawing their previously public support of SOPA. </sarcasm>

People who have been proven right time after time, such as Snopes or the Bad Astronomy guy, are frequently cited as rebuttals.

Having an internet-wide identity, such as Open ID (and specifically not FaceBook or a government supplied ID), allowing people to gain reputation, and override other peoples' posts, or at least be placed higher, is really the only way to do this everywhere.

Just as with slashdot moderation, it will be possible to game the system, if you respond rationally everywhere except one issue where you feel strongly about. And it would be nice if your reputation could be classified so that you can have a good reputation on some subjects, but automatically junkpiled on other topics.

As it stands, fact checkers who don't have an axe to grind are the only voices of reason, and you basically have to educate people about the fact checker being cited, but not so much that it looks like you are unquestioning of their lack of bias.

Making the internet personal again, so you are talking with actual people (virtually, not their real identities necessarily). Not arguing with text on a page.

or does Apple have that patented too.

In this case, Penny Arcade has the prior art.

A third-party tool that was horrible, to be sure, but again, where's your citation that they blamed the users and ever said what you put in quotes?

Unfortunately, hes NOT lying, and that quote was from a fairly high up executive...
Mr. THOMAS HESSE (President, Sony BMG Global Digital Business): Most people, I think, don't even know what a Rootkit is, so why should they care about it?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4989260

That quote isnt itself a crime, but it certainly is a poor attempt to defend their actions, and kind of indicates Sony's relationship with its customers.

If you want to know the reasons basically everyone on the internet hates sony, you can start by reading Maddox's take on it (which is pretty spot on, despite the crudity of it). Long story short,

1. They shut down Lik-Sang. Wonderful, now I cant buy Hori controllers anymore. The irony of it is that apparently even Sony employees were importing thru LikSang
2. They had the whole rootkit debacle mentioned above, which they handled with the grace of an elephant and about as much tact as Maddox. I think they eventually released a tool to remove the kit, which ended up either causing further problems or not actually fixing the broken CD drives it created. (Windows reinstall necessary). Mark Russinovich has a writeup on the whole thing, but the NPR link above summarizes it pretty well.
3. Part of Sony is Sony BMG, which is part of the RIAA that everyone on the internet loves so much.
4. They started removing features from the PS3 from iteration 2 on (USB ports, etc), which is always a way to make your customers love you.
5. They got the crap hacked out of them, and then denied the severity of it, resulting in two rather spot (and hillarious) on Penny Arcade comics. They also posted a...post... on it which basically sums it up: They lack the ability to communicate in a meaningful way with their customers.
6. Theyre behind Blu-Ray, and its encryption, which again is super duper popular with normal slashdot folks.

Not all of those are crimes (blu-ray), but when you add them together you get the impression that Sony doesnt even really pretend to care about its customers, and really is your stereotypical faceless monster of a corporation. They barely even have a cool-factor to offset it, like Nintendo can pull off.

A third-party tool that was horrible, to be sure, but again, where's your citation that they blamed the users and ever said what you put in quotes?

Unfortunately, hes NOT lying, and that quote was from a fairly high up executive...
Mr. THOMAS HESSE (President, Sony BMG Global Digital Business): Most people, I think, don't even know what a Rootkit is, so why should they care about it?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4989260

That quote isnt itself a crime, but it certainly is a poor attempt to defend their actions, and kind of indicates Sony's relationship with its customers.

If you want to know the reasons basically everyone on the internet hates sony, you can start by reading Maddox's take on it (which is pretty spot on, despite the crudity of it). Long story short,

1. They shut down Lik-Sang. Wonderful, now I cant buy Hori controllers anymore. The irony of it is that apparently even Sony employees were importing thru LikSang
2. They had the whole rootkit debacle mentioned above, which they handled with the grace of an elephant and about as much tact as Maddox. I think they eventually released a tool to remove the kit, which ended up either causing further problems or not actually fixing the broken CD drives it created. (Windows reinstall necessary). Mark Russinovich has a writeup on the whole thing, but the NPR link above summarizes it pretty well.
3. Part of Sony is Sony BMG, which is part of the RIAA that everyone on the internet loves so much.
4. They started removing features from the PS3 from iteration 2 on (USB ports, etc), which is always a way to make your customers love you.
5. They got the crap hacked out of them, and then denied the severity of it, resulting in two rather spot (and hillarious) on Penny Arcade comics. They also posted a...post... on it which basically sums it up: They lack the ability to communicate in a meaningful way with their customers.
6. Theyre behind Blu-Ray, and its encryption, which again is super duper popular with normal slashdot folks.

Not all of those are crimes (blu-ray), but when you add them together you get the impression that Sony doesnt even really pretend to care about its customers, and really is your stereotypical faceless monster of a corporation. They barely even have a cool-factor to offset it, like Nintendo can pull off.

A third-party tool that was horrible, to be sure, but again, where's your citation that they blamed the users and ever said what you put in quotes?

Unfortunately, hes NOT lying, and that quote was from a fairly high up executive...
Mr. THOMAS HESSE (President, Sony BMG Global Digital Business): Most people, I think, don't even know what a Rootkit is, so why should they care about it?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4989260

That quote isnt itself a crime, but it certainly is a poor attempt to defend their actions, and kind of indicates Sony's relationship with its customers.

If you want to know the reasons basically everyone on the internet hates sony, you can start by reading Maddox's take on it (which is pretty spot on, despite the crudity of it). Long story short,

1. They shut down Lik-Sang. Wonderful, now I cant buy Hori controllers anymore. The irony of it is that apparently even Sony employees were importing thru LikSang
2. They had the whole rootkit debacle mentioned above, which they handled with the grace of an elephant and about as much tact as Maddox. I think they eventually released a tool to remove the kit, which ended up either causing further problems or not actually fixing the broken CD drives it created. (Windows reinstall necessary). Mark Russinovich has a writeup on the whole thing, but the NPR link above summarizes it pretty well.
3. Part of Sony is Sony BMG, which is part of the RIAA that everyone on the internet loves so much.
4. They started removing features from the PS3 from iteration 2 on (USB ports, etc), which is always a way to make your customers love you.
5. They got the crap hacked out of them, and then denied the severity of it, resulting in two rather spot (and hillarious) on Penny Arcade comics. They also posted a...post... on it which basically sums it up: They lack the ability to communicate in a meaningful way with their customers.
6. Theyre behind Blu-Ray, and its encryption, which again is super duper popular with normal slashdot folks.

Not all of those are crimes (blu-ray), but when you add them together you get the impression that Sony doesnt even really pretend to care about its customers, and really is your stereotypical faceless monster of a corporation. They barely even have a cool-factor to offset it, like Nintendo can pull off.

Here's what I think is going on here: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/06/27

I can also check Slashdot on the shitter, so I've got that going for me.

See, we didn't need to know that ... it's like being a Twitter Shitter; some things are best kept to yourself. :-P

Just because it's internet doesn't mean you can do whatever you want and there are no consequences.

Be that as it may it doesn't stop a lot of people from acting otherwise.

... Corporate p0wnership of your election process. Countrywide/BofA and the bank and wall street bailouts. Not one bailout bankster in jail. ...

Wait a minute..."p0wnership"? "Bankster"? Where have you been since Penny Arcade last saw you?

Bowel movements

Twitter has that covered.

Extra Credits, a regular lecture on game industry topics with funny pictures hosted by Penny Arcade addressed this issue a while back. I found it very illuminating.

http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/consoles-are-the-new-coin-op

Doesn't address the problem of "downmodding old posts" though. Set it to 10 days, and 9-day-old posts will be the targets. Set it to even 24 hours, and you'll just see direct attacks.

The problems of Slashdot's moderation system are:

1) Encouragement of mining.
- Random distribution of modpoints encourages sockpuppet/"mining" accounts in order to collect large numbers of mod points at certain users' disposal.
- "You can't mod a discussion you posted in" encourages the keeping of sockpuppets for moderation simply to be able to mod in the same discussions that interest you to read/post in.

2) Ease of targeting.
- Ability to see other users' long past posts = easy way to find and target old posts for purposes of a massive downmod attack to karma.

3) Incentives to downmod versus upmod
- If you upmod, you feel good about promoting good discourse: this does not apply to most Slashdotters, especially modpoint miners, on the basis of John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
- If you downmod, you commit a direct attack on someone. You decrease their karma, you decrease the visibility of their post (directly attacking their words), and as something I didn't know about till the parent poster pointed it out, you apparently also can be hit with a temp ban: "Also, if a single user is moderated down several times in a short time frame, a temporary ban will be imposed on that user... a cooling off period if you will. It lasts for 72 hours, or more for users who have posted a ton." Therefore, if you go after someone's old posts, with a slew of modpoints from sockpuppet accounts established only to have more tickets in the modpoint lotto, you can actually ban them as described above by the parent poster.

I can't see how anyone can justify this as a good thing for Slashdot's discussions. I don't care what side you are on in a discussion, either side - or both side - having access to ban buttons is just not going to be helpful. Human nature says they're not using it on the trolls, they're using it to try to silence the other side.

4) Ineffectiveness of metamoderation
- Metamoderation only covers a small sampling of the moderated posts, and only results in a very slight uptick to the percentage chance that an account will get modpoints again sooner. Further, metamoderation pulls from the same group of people that are generally moderating, meaning that downmods produced by polarized bury brigade members are relatively likely to be reviewed by other bury brigade members (who are interested in metamodding, unlike the general posting populace).

Kamiza's point below is absolutely spot-on; the solution to bury brigades is to take away their weapons.

obligatory Penny Arcade?

In other words you have nothing but your fanboi bullshit and trolling but fear not because Penny Arcade even made a strip about you. Like your uniform BTW. Now go compile something while the men have a conversation, kay?

As for TFA it makes sense, they want to get some of Nintendo's casual gaming customers to go with their Call Of Warfare Modern Duty ones so hiring some guys that have cool ideas to expand the product line simply makes good business sense. Perhaps you could even use this device to help the handicapped, like using someone's limited range of motion to allow them to type or surf, and of course as we saw with Wii Fit there is a good market for those that want to get in shape. If MSFT wants the Kinect to succeed the best way to do it is to make sure it has a ton of uses and it sounds like that is what they are trying to do with TFA.

Actually I hate to burst your bubble (and notice how I got modded down for showing the true numbers? Apparently some here don't like looking in the mirror none) but here is a little secret most don't know: Windows HP is free to OEMs so your bragging about being "free as in beer"? really pointless as is the GP. you see there is this thing called "trialware" that the OEMs are PAID to install, the cost of Windows minus this trialware on Windows HP comes out to a NEGATIVE number, therefor Windows? Costs nothing.

Here is another little dirty secret nobody wants to mention. Try looking up the "profits" for the Dell ubuntu division, you won't find the numbers anywhere, why? its actually simple its because with all the money they have to spend making ubuntu work they are in the red and if anyone thought about it they'd see why. Not only do they lose the trialware which as I pointed out for home users actually makes them money or allows them to lower the cost per unit, but with ubuntu they have to hire their own dev team AND run their own repo, because if they don't then this happens.

But please, waste your mod points and go back to standing in a circle patting yourselves on the back for what a "success" your 1.7 percent is, I'm sure MSFT and Apple are both grateful for it. You allow them to split the market and rake in massive profits, hell i'm surprised they don't send the Linux community a big old cake as a thanks. i'm sure it would be moist and delicious. But no matter how you stomp your feet or act like this guy black does not equal white, up does not equal down, and straw does not equal gold. It has been twenty damned years and you are LITERALLY lower than the margin for error in most polls. Do you really only want to be a hobbyist OS? We retailers have been begging for changes that would make it useful for the masses and instead we find a community full of shit flinging "Go back to windblowz LOL" trolls. Why do you think we ignore you? It is because YOU DO NOT LISTEN. If you ignore the train barreling down the track you deserve to get hit, try not to make a mess when that iShiny coming down the tracks followed by the 4 o'clock WinTrain runs your ass down, okay?

Check out John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Basically, when you give a person some degree of anonymity and an audience, they tend to turn into an asshole.

Oh please! Its a shock word, how about you look at how many times the word faggot or cock smoker is used while you're at it? The ONLY thing it proves is Gabe is right and his theory is sound, that's it.

What, you don't want an automated orange juice bot? You don't know what you're missing,

I found this to be a nice look at skyrim. Also, oblig. Penny Arcade.

Anonymous is in over their heads.

I keep hearing this phrase, over and over... and it seems to have joined the other myths, such as "BSD is dead".

xkcd references are great, but I think Penny Arcade may be more relevant in this context.

As relevant here as it was nine years ago: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/7/22/
(no big MS fan myself but come on typing "M$" for "MS" is no more mature than "Open Sores" in place of "Open Source")

The trouble with this issue is that there is genuine merit on boths of the argument. Anonymous posting does have advantages in some contexts and whistleblowing in the public interest is a time-honoured tradition. On the other hand, I'm a great believer that with freedom comes responsibility, and effective anonymity by definition removes all accountability for someone's actions. As others have amusingly noted, without any need to act responsibly, a significant number of people won't, which in everyday life spoils things for everyone else.

I'm not sure whether the proposals here strike exactly the right balance, but it seems to me that neither absolute free speech/total anonymity nor automatic public naming of everyone is a viable way forward.

The usual argument for the former is something about disproportionate powers to penalise an identifiable critic. In reality, the government/legal system should be protecting those people against unjust retribution in most cases. If the government is itself the target of the criticism and is sufficiently corrupt to try to silence justified criticism through dubious means then you need a lot more than free speech to fix your problem. Consider the events of the past year in Egypt, Libya, Syria and Iran.

The usual argument for the latter is something about taking responsibility, but neglects the important benefits of privacy to free and constructive discussions on difficult subjects, such as those mentioned by the Mumsnet reps in recent BBC coverage of this topic. There is no need to force someone to disclose their identity to the entire world unless they are actually doing something wrong, and there should be due process to discover that just like any other legal action.

If we accept that a middle ground is necessary to strike as fair a balance as possible between competing but incompatible legitimate positions here, then the big question becomes how to deal with actions that can potentially have an immediate impact and spread rapidly causing irreparable damage, but which may be doing so legitimately, before any court action can reach a useful conclusion. Some sort of safe harbour/temporary hold system seems to be working better than anything we had before in the broadly similar context of copyright infringement, so I don't think that's an absurd place to start.