Now, you can instantly electronically commune with similarly disaffected souls.
You can, but no one cares to. Politics thrives on argument and dissention. There are even people who wander from message board to message board on the web, trying to stir up completely meaningly controversy -- and people love it! Sites like slashdot are not popular because people are interested in meeting like-minded individuals and thoughtfully discuss the world's problems. No, they are popular because people have an inborn desire to beat other opinions down.
That is the essence of politics. That is the essence of trolling.
If America starts acting like one of those second rate NATO countries that change government monthly, there might be less security and more unrest in the world, and that would be bad. No disagreement there. I'm sick of hearing how superior the European system is, on every subject from dentistry to particle physics. It's no accident that we build Fords, while they drive Fiats and Yugos.
In 1992, Perot got 19% of the popular vote. This was even after he dropped out of the race, got back in, and spouted on national TV about how the Black Panthers were out to get him.
American voters are not afraid to vote for the candidate they prefer. The fact of the matter is, very few likely voters prefer Nader.
It may seem otherwise on slashdot or just about any college campus. But that is just a tiny slice of the US Electorate.
Starting with Carter, the Democratic party has been infiltrated by Republicans. The real role of Gore is to hide the fact that the Democratic party no longer exists.
I guess you must have slept through Michael Dukakis.
I'll agree that Clinton and the like are not Real Democrats. But the Democrats are not gone so much as they are hibernating. It's just that the country has become so much more conservative during the 80's and the 90's that they have to put up these pseudo-Democrats in order to survive.
I don't blame them for it, but they have lost my vote.
makes no difference how it got there, it's in the consititution. some ppl worship the original document, but don't forget the original consititution recognizes slavery (obliquely) and does not contain the bill of rights.
i usually find the bottleneck with porn to be server-side. flaky as they are, the "free disk space" services have really revolutionised that part of the internet. between that and divx, i'm as happy as i can be without the real thing...
How can any libertarian vote Nader? The man is a socialist. This is clear from his (admittedly vague) platform, his statements, and every public action he has ever taken.
Not that I necessarily disagree with socialism... But it is less like libertarianism than the democrats or republicans.
Oh, and in case I didn't make it entirely clear...
The problem with the NYT story was that an FBI agent told them about the government's case and, having no other source, they believed him. They did not publish his name. They did publish Dr. Lee's name. In the story, the government's case against Dr. Lee was greatly exaggerated by the agent. It is not clear that, if the paper could have gotten another source, the story would have been much improved, since the Justice Department consistently misrepresented the evidence and the case to Justice Parker, right up to the plea bargain. The Justice Department is continuing to exaggerate aspects of the situation, such as the relevance of the data on the missing tapes, to the press and to the American people. I was personally very angry at the New York Times for their treatment of the matter *until* they printed the editorial and story about the plea bargain. They really did redeem themselves with that one. The New York Times was not complicit in the scapegoating, although the government did abuse their trusting nature.
And I can tell you, from now on they are going to think twice before providing government with an anonymous platform to abuse and harass the innocent.
1> The editorial page is a fucking prominent place. Especially in the New York Times.
2> The problem with the Wen Ho Lee story was allowing the FBI agent to be quoted without identifying himself.
Basing a story on a single unidentified source is a big problem these days. On the one hand, it brought Watergate to national prominence, and so was of great service to society.
But on the other hand, innocent people suspected of crimes like Dr. Wen Ho Lee and Richard Jewell unfairly suffer. The case of Dr. Lee is more troubling since the FBI agent basically played the NYT for all it was worth to further the Administration's scapegoating efforts.
But this is a problem for all journalism, not just for "new" or "old" media. Will you let Anonymous Cowards write stories for you, when they are the only source you have?
This is a serious problem, and it damages not only the NYT's credibility but also Slashdot's. The 'Red Hat Infested With Bugs' story on Slashdot is an example of this problem. A user submitted a story and it was published even though it was wrong. Red Hat and their employees suffered for it. I have seen no apology or correction from Slashdot. I think they are assuming that everyone who read the article saw from the discussion that it was wrong. But that is no attempt at a correction from Slashdot. Although the NYT story you cited caused greater injustice, they at least tried to do him what justice they could, both in the editorial and in the damning story about Parker's final words.
NYT is far from perfect, but Slashdot is nowhere close when it comes to credibility or accuracy, even on technical subjects.
no one who was really on the scene would ever say "blinkenlights". that was part of a line printer joke that was later misinterpreted by esr as some sort of "tribal" cant.
Japanese women were given equal right relatively recently
Perhaps women in Japan have had equal rights for fifty years, but here in America there still are not equal rights! For every dollar that a man is paid, a woman is paid only 75 sents.
This is an outrage and cannot continue. So if you are a woman, please vote for Gore... he is the only one who will pass laws to fix this problem! And if you are a man, please vote only once.
Yeah, I don't think averages are any better (or worse) than the slashdot increment style. I'm just appalled when someone suggests that computing an average is technically difficult. Apparently CmdrTaco said something like that in the irc log.
Anyway, maybe moderation is not supposed to be an objective ranking, but it is a very visible ranking, and directly influences the way people read and post. If it's job is to limit spam and extremely insulting remarks, it has done a good job.
I don't think it promotes intelligent discussion (whatever that may be), but I think to have that requires a certain amount of elitism and censorship. And who really wants to read intelligent discussion anyway?
"Repeatedly doing averages" does not take a lot of CPU power.
One way to do it is to store n, the number of people moderating the comment, and S, the sum of the assessed scores contributed by moderators. When a new moderator comes along and gives the post a score of A, you increment n->n+1, S->S+A. The average is S/n.
Another way is to store a histogram. This is a vector A[i], i=1..5 When a person gives the post a score s, you take A[s]++, and take a weighted average of A[i].
CPU use is trivial either way. It only gets expensive if everyone moderates. Then the expensive part is the database. Since everyone will be moderating, you presumably need to record for each person which posts have already been moderated.
I repeat: doing averages is trivial. Letting everyone moderate may not be, but that is an entirely separate matter.
I believe the real reason Rob does not seriously consider doing averages is because the sheer volume of email he would get bitching and moaning about the changes. I sympathise with him about that, and I actually think it is a good and valid reason not to change moderation in that way.
However, to claim that it is that much harder to compute a running average than to increment a number is incredibly ignorant. Either operation pales in comparison to the cost of a single database query.
Hmm... Ok, that clears things up a bit. I was misled a bit by this chat log that's been going round:
[22:04] <Signal_11> CmdrTaco: Is slashdot trying to become a respected news source, or is this just purely for fun and
you don't care how many people read it?
[22:04] *** Iron_SpermWhale (ronwalf@cloaked.umd.edu) has joined #kuro5hin
[22:05] <CmdrTaco> a really nice guy emailed me and said 'I miss how you used to talk about hurrying cuz youre late
for class'
[22:05] <drdink> CmdrTaco: can I start flaming you about not updating tacohell?
[22:05] <CmdrTaco> Sig:Yes.
[22:05] <CmdrTaco> Sig:All of the above. And none.
[22:05] <hemos_> Sig: Both.
Anyway, you don't need to reply to this. I suppose I was just misinterpreting something that had been said hurriedly on IRC. I ought to take more to heart what that judge said about the delete key.
Professionalism means treating people in a civil manner, when possible.
Journalistic integrity means making a reasonable effort to tell the truth, to represent others' opinions fairly, and most importantly, to own up for the mistakes that you do make. It is also vitally important to separate fact from opinion.
The "places" which do have journalistic integrity do not go on about how much or little they have.
That is a quite accurate summary. Sig11 is a reasonably intelligent guy who happens to have a slightly skewed view of reality.
Sig11's posts really are admired by a great deal of the slashdot crowd. Sig11 misinterprets this. He thinks his karma means he personally is important. What is really means is that his style is acceptable and his opinions appealing to a sizable demographic.
Now, both Taco and Sig11 keep expressing this idea that slashdot somehow "means something" because of its numerous and persistent readership. But what this really means is that a number of people like to gossip, flame, and troll. That's it. As far as maintaining reader goes, all that matters about the stories is that they keep the conversation moving.
So Rob's almost, but not quite right. Karma is not meaningless. But it is worthless. And these is this fearful symmetry between Sig11's karma and the popularity of slashdot itself. A lot of people do read slashdot. Many are obsessed by it. It does mean something. But it is really quite worthless.
Whoa.. I am pretty pretentious myself. Time to abandon structure. Random disjoint comments for the rest of this post. Rob doesn't want to run a "meta" section, since only he could run it and he doesn't have time. This is why executive structure was invented. Done right, it multiplies a single person's effectiveness tenfold by subordinating tasks. It doesn't mean surrendering all creative control, unless you are a lousy manager. But if he doesn't learn to subordinate tasks to different people, of course he won't have time to do the essential things. What he's doing is really fine for slashdot as it is anyway. People don't mind so much the rules changing on them, retractions being clumsy to nonexistent, a general level of paranoia, and so on. These things are fine for a gossip and flaming site. But no one is going to respect slashdot as a credible source of information or informed discussion so long as these problems exist. But since Taco wants the site to remain his toy, and not run it in a professional manner, it will remain basically as it is. I'm not saying that's wrong. That just happens to be the way it is.
And anyway, gossip and flames are more interesting to people like me than informed and thoughtful discussion could ever be. It got me to write this long-winded crappy post, didn't it?
This is incorrect. They don't aspire to be unprofessional, but they do honestly believe that this is a grand experiment in a new kind of journalism. They want slashdot to be a relevant news and discussion site read by thousands. They also want it to be some site thrown together and tightly controlled by CmdrTaco and Hemos. But these goals are turning out to be somewhat incompatible.
and they've tried very hard to get the rest of the industry to believe that Red Hat === Linux. I can't necessarily fault them for that; they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, and such microsoft-like tactics are the best way to build the RedHat brand.
Hey: at least they didn't take the stock-ticker symbol LNUX.
Before tending to their splinters, may I respectfully suggest you look to your own eye?
But when different (GNU/)Linux distributions can't run each others' binaries, you have exactly the same situation the Linux company chiefs say they won't allow to happen: effective forking of Linux. Really, this is a bit much! Distributions already don't usually run each other's packages "out of the box," as it were. Not to mention that in an operating system which spans so many architectures, *partial* binary incompatibility is really not so great a concern!
Although I understand you have a personal interest in this software, please keep in mind that it is GPLed. It is extremely disingenuous for you first to release it the public for general use, then to turn around and so harshly criticise someone for the crime of taking you up on your offer!
Slashdot Mirror
You may think 2" by 2" is too small a shoe to be useful, but actually many infants and small children use these shoes.
Now, you can instantly electronically commune with similarly disaffected souls.
You can, but no one cares to. Politics thrives on argument and dissention. There are even people who wander from message board to message board on the web, trying to stir up completely meaningly controversy -- and people love it! Sites like slashdot are not popular because people are interested in meeting like-minded individuals and thoughtfully discuss the world's problems. No, they are popular because people have an inborn desire to beat other opinions down.
That is the essence of politics. That is the essence of trolling.
If America starts acting like one of those second rate NATO countries that change government monthly, there might be less security and more unrest in the world, and that would be bad. No disagreement there. I'm sick of hearing how superior the European system is, on every subject from dentistry to particle physics. It's no accident that we build Fords, while they drive Fiats and Yugos.
Me: Kicking your ass is good.
ps. So maybe the best candidate will not win. That's democracy. That's life. Suck it up.
Bullshit.
In 1992, Perot got 19% of the popular vote. This was even after he dropped out of the race, got back in, and spouted on national TV about how the Black Panthers were out to get him.
American voters are not afraid to vote for the candidate they prefer. The fact of the matter is, very few likely voters prefer Nader.
It may seem otherwise on slashdot or just about any college campus. But that is just a tiny slice of the US Electorate.
Starting with Carter, the Democratic party has been infiltrated by Republicans. The real role of Gore is to hide the fact that the Democratic party no longer exists.
I guess you must have slept through Michael Dukakis.
I'll agree that Clinton and the like are not Real Democrats. But the Democrats are not gone so much as they are hibernating. It's just that the country has become so much more conservative during the 80's and the 90's that they have to put up these pseudo-Democrats in order to survive.
I don't blame them for it, but they have lost my vote.
makes no difference how it got there, it's in the consititution. some ppl worship the original document, but don't forget the original consititution recognizes slavery (obliquely) and does not contain the bill of rights.
the prob is that moore's law just ain't giving out like it used to. if we were on schedule, these systems would be low end...
what the manufacturers need is a little cheerleading drill. come on intel... who's your daddy...
i usually find the bottleneck with porn to be server-side. flaky as they are, the "free disk space" services have really revolutionised that part of the internet. between that and divx, i'm as happy as i can be without the real thing...
How can any libertarian vote Nader? The man is a socialist. This is clear from his (admittedly vague) platform, his statements, and every public action he has ever taken.
Not that I necessarily disagree with socialism... But it is less like libertarianism than the democrats or republicans.
Methinks Maher is just an inconstant rebel.
Oh, and in case I didn't make it entirely clear...
The problem with the NYT story was that an FBI agent told them about the government's case and, having no other source, they believed him. They did not publish his name. They did publish Dr. Lee's name. In the story, the government's case against Dr. Lee was greatly exaggerated by the agent. It is not clear that, if the paper could have gotten another source, the story would have been much improved, since the Justice Department consistently misrepresented the evidence and the case to Justice Parker, right up to the plea bargain. The Justice Department is continuing to exaggerate aspects of the situation, such as the relevance of the data on the missing tapes, to the press and to the American people. I was personally very angry at the New York Times for their treatment of the matter *until* they printed the editorial and story about the plea bargain. They really did redeem themselves with that one. The New York Times was not complicit in the scapegoating, although the government did abuse their trusting nature.
And I can tell you, from now on they are going to think twice before providing government with an anonymous platform to abuse and harass the innocent.
1> The editorial page is a fucking prominent place. Especially in the New York Times.
2> The problem with the Wen Ho Lee story was allowing the FBI agent to be quoted without identifying himself.
Basing a story on a single unidentified source is a big problem these days. On the one hand, it brought Watergate to national prominence, and so was of great service to society.
But on the other hand, innocent people suspected of crimes like Dr. Wen Ho Lee and Richard Jewell unfairly suffer. The case of Dr. Lee is more troubling since the FBI agent basically played the NYT for all it was worth to further the Administration's scapegoating efforts.
But this is a problem for all journalism, not just for "new" or "old" media. Will you let Anonymous Cowards write stories for you, when they are the only source you have?
This is a serious problem, and it damages not only the NYT's credibility but also Slashdot's. The 'Red Hat Infested With Bugs' story on Slashdot is an example of this problem. A user submitted a story and it was published even though it was wrong. Red Hat and their employees suffered for it. I have seen no apology or correction from Slashdot. I think they are assuming that everyone who read the article saw from the discussion that it was wrong. But that is no attempt at a correction from Slashdot. Although the NYT story you cited caused greater injustice, they at least tried to do him what justice they could, both in the editorial and in the damning story about Parker's final words.
NYT is far from perfect, but Slashdot is nowhere close when it comes to credibility or accuracy, even on technical subjects.
that's "anally retentive" to you buster
no one who was really on the scene would ever say "blinkenlights". that was part of a line printer joke that was later misinterpreted by esr as some sort of "tribal" cant.
Japanese women were given equal right relatively recently
Perhaps women in Japan have had equal rights for fifty years, but here in America there still are not equal rights! For every dollar that a man is paid, a woman is paid only 75 sents.
This is an outrage and cannot continue. So if you are a woman, please vote for Gore... he is the only one who will pass laws to fix this problem! And if you are a man, please vote only once.
Shit, I used the wrong form of "its."
Ok, now I'm quitting slashdot for good. My brain has been damaged enough.
Yeah, I don't think averages are any better (or worse) than the slashdot increment style. I'm just appalled when someone suggests that computing an average is technically difficult. Apparently CmdrTaco said something like that in the irc log.
Anyway, maybe moderation is not supposed to be an objective ranking, but it is a very visible ranking, and directly influences the way people read and post. If it's job is to limit spam and extremely insulting remarks, it has done a good job.
I don't think it promotes intelligent discussion (whatever that may be), but I think to have that requires a certain amount of elitism and censorship. And who really wants to read intelligent discussion anyway?
"Repeatedly doing averages" does not take a lot of CPU power.
One way to do it is to store n, the number of people moderating the comment, and S, the sum of the assessed scores contributed by moderators. When a new moderator comes along and gives the post a score of A, you increment n->n+1, S->S+A. The average is S/n.
Another way is to store a histogram. This is a vector A[i], i=1..5 When a person gives the post a score s, you take A[s]++, and take a weighted average of A[i].
CPU use is trivial either way. It only gets expensive if everyone moderates. Then the expensive part is the database. Since everyone will be moderating, you presumably need to record for each person which posts have already been moderated.
I repeat: doing averages is trivial. Letting everyone moderate may not be, but that is an entirely separate matter.
I believe the real reason Rob does not seriously consider doing averages is because the sheer volume of email he would get bitching and moaning about the changes. I sympathise with him about that, and I actually think it is a good and valid reason not to change moderation in that way.
However, to claim that it is that much harder to compute a running average than to increment a number is incredibly ignorant. Either operation pales in comparison to the cost of a single database query.
Hmm... Ok, that clears things up a bit. I was misled a bit by this chat log that's been going round:
[22:04] <Signal_11> CmdrTaco: Is slashdot trying to become a respected news source, or is this just purely for fun and
you don't care how many people read it?
[22:04] *** Iron_SpermWhale (ronwalf@cloaked.umd.edu) has joined #kuro5hin
[22:05] <CmdrTaco> a really nice guy emailed me and said 'I miss how you used to talk about hurrying cuz youre late
for class'
[22:05] <drdink> CmdrTaco: can I start flaming you about not updating tacohell?
[22:05] <CmdrTaco> Sig:Yes.
[22:05] <CmdrTaco> Sig:All of the above. And none.
[22:05] <hemos_> Sig: Both.
Anyway, you don't need to reply to this. I suppose I was just misinterpreting something that had been said hurriedly on IRC. I ought to take more to heart what that judge said about the delete key.
You've misinterpreted what dboyles said.
Professionalism means treating people in a civil manner, when possible.
Journalistic integrity means making a reasonable effort to tell the truth, to represent others' opinions fairly, and most importantly, to own up for the mistakes that you do make. It is also vitally important to separate fact from opinion.
The "places" which do have journalistic integrity do not go on about how much or little they have.
They show by example.
That is a quite accurate summary. Sig11 is a reasonably intelligent guy who happens to have a slightly skewed view of reality.
Sig11's posts really are admired by a great deal of the slashdot crowd. Sig11 misinterprets this. He thinks his karma means he personally is important. What is really means is that his style is acceptable and his opinions appealing to a sizable demographic.
Now, both Taco and Sig11 keep expressing this idea that slashdot somehow "means something" because of its numerous and persistent readership. But what this really means is that a number of people like to gossip, flame, and troll. That's it. As far as maintaining reader goes, all that matters about the stories is that they keep the conversation moving.
So Rob's almost, but not quite right. Karma is not meaningless. But it is worthless. And these is this fearful symmetry between Sig11's karma and the popularity of slashdot itself. A lot of people do read slashdot. Many are obsessed by it. It does mean something. But it is really quite worthless.
Whoa.. I am pretty pretentious myself. Time to abandon structure. Random disjoint comments for the rest of this post.
Rob doesn't want to run a "meta" section, since only he could run it and he doesn't have time. This is why executive structure was invented. Done right, it multiplies a single person's effectiveness tenfold by subordinating tasks. It doesn't mean surrendering all creative control, unless you are a lousy manager. But if he doesn't learn to subordinate tasks to different people, of course he won't have time to do the essential things. What he's doing is really fine for slashdot as it is anyway. People don't mind so much the rules changing on them, retractions being clumsy to nonexistent, a general level of paranoia, and so on. These things are fine for a gossip and flaming site. But no one is going to respect slashdot as a credible source of information or informed discussion so long as these problems exist. But since Taco wants the site to remain his toy, and not run it in a professional manner, it will remain basically as it is. I'm not saying that's wrong. That just happens to be the way it is.
And anyway, gossip and flames are more interesting to people like me than informed and thoughtful discussion could ever be. It got me to write this long-winded crappy post, didn't it?
This is incorrect. They don't aspire to be unprofessional, but they do honestly believe that this is a grand experiment in a new kind of journalism. They want slashdot to be a relevant news and discussion site read by thousands. They also want it to be some site thrown together and tightly controlled by CmdrTaco and Hemos. But these goals are turning out to be somewhat incompatible.
and they've tried very hard to get the rest of the industry to believe that Red Hat === Linux. I can't necessarily fault them for that; they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, and such microsoft-like tactics are the best way to build the RedHat brand.
Hey: at least they didn't take the stock-ticker symbol LNUX.
Before tending to their splinters, may I respectfully suggest you look to your own eye?
But when different (GNU/)Linux distributions can't run each others' binaries, you have exactly the same situation the Linux company chiefs say they won't allow to happen: effective forking of Linux. Really, this is a bit much! Distributions already don't usually run each other's packages "out of the box," as it were. Not to mention that in an operating system which spans so many architectures, *partial* binary incompatibility is really not so great a concern!
Although I understand you have a personal interest in this software, please keep in mind that it is GPLed. It is extremely disingenuous for you first to release it the public for general use, then to turn around and so harshly criticise someone for the crime of taking you up on your offer!