By "global innovator" do you mean "will copy designs of companies from all over the globe"?;)
DISCLAIMER: I love the Galaxy II S and think the whole lawsuit farce is stupid.
Consider what Samsung has done for LCD technology. There are many other areas where they've innovated similarly. Apple's hardware "innovation" is basically deciding how to arrange the components they buy from the people who are actually doing new science, like Samsung.
Depends on what you consider kiddie porn. Way the hell back when, the JC Penny & Montgomery Wards catalogs used to print pictures of child models wearing underwear and pajamas. When the laws in the US started getting weird, those pictures disappeared. Seems somebody convinced the marketting department that said pics of child models could be used by pedophiles as porn. Being wary of their potential liability, the ads died. To me, it's all in the eye of the beholder. If you're searching out porn with a vengance, you'll find porn in anything you look at.
The western fashion and glamor industries have spent the last few decades building an female ideal based on looking like a child. Models strive to have essentially prepubescent bodies, and wrinkles, even normal facial features that normal teenagers have, must be blurred out with Photoshop or Botox. If Reddit is doing something that encourages illegal and unethical behavior, I'm glad they're changing that, but I highly doubt Reddit is a root cause. The causes are legal and backed by lobbying power, and every time people buy an issue of Cosmo or a "Barely Legal" DVD they're paying to spread the same unhealthy sexual views. Media targeting both men and women emphasize the sexiness of youth - when magazines are telling 23 year old women secrets to look 18 and movies are telling men that 18 is hotter than 19, it's no surprise that some people extrapolate and get the sense that 17 must be better yet.
1) The post to which I was referring asked to name "one product", and so I did just that.
2) I've read (and continue to read) a lot of patent literature. I appreciate that the reality is that a patent proprietor (or their attorney) will necessarily draft the description to contain the minimum possible amount of information required to meet the requirement of sufficiency of disclosure. However, the "central idea" must necessarily be elucidated in sufficient detail for the ordinary skilled person to work the invention (so "if you really know the science behind it" is exactly the point; they're not written to be understandable by the lay person). It only gets more obscure around the periphery, and as patents are legal documents there is a certain art to reading them to extract the information you require.
Anyway, this isn't a purely hypothetical argument. I referred to the patent literature more than once when working towards my doctorate in organic chemistry, and obtained very useful information from such sources more than once. Information which wasn't available elsewhere. A patent would never have been my first choice of reference material, because journal articles don't have that disclosure/trade secret tension which is inherent in a patent, but the patent literature was far from uselessly obfuscated.
Maybe I'm jaded by my current field. In the 5000 patents I read last quarter, something actually useful related to the central idea was decipherable in maybe 50-100, and that usually involved a team of 3 PhD experts in the topic working together for at least 10 minutes to sort the wheat from the chaff.
There's a lot of good information in process patents for the manufacture of pharmaceutical compounds which will ultimately see wider use in other products. Process chemists and engineers put an enormous amount of labour into devising the best way to carry out a particular chemical reaction, and those reaction conditions are described in the patent for the production of a given drug molecule. Such information is then incredibly useful for others working towards making similar molecules (or completely different molecules, but using the same transformation), be they other companies, academics, or students.
1) It's not just the world of pharmaceuticals. Look around you. Pretty much every material you see is the product of a ton of chemical engineering of some form or another, from polymer science to metallurgy. It's all complicated, and the work that goes into coming up with a patentable way to make your lightbulb last longer dwarfs the work going into things in the software patent world. But...
2) Patents on these processes or combinations of chemical properties are unbelievably vague. Let's say you find that toothpaste cures cancer if it contains 2.3% chocolate and is centrifuged at 3254 RPM for 17 seconds. Your patent will include these conditions in claims such as:
"The mixture must contain between 0 and 16% chocolate, 0 to 14% milk, 0 to 9% Windex, 0 to 40% action figures, 0 to 10% water, 0 to 12% ball bearings, and 0 to 6% of oysters, preferably between 0% and 5% of each." "The mixture must be agitated in order to produce a cancer curing effect. Suitable techniques include manual stirring, riding in the back of an old jeep, spinning, or vibration through a variety of sonicating techniques. Agitation must proceed for 2 to 90 seconds."
Seriously, go read some patent literature. Yes, if you really know the science behind it you can sometimes learn things, but most of the time the central ideas are heavily obfuscated.
Microsoft has always done this. I've been on Slashdot now about nine years and Microsoft has frequently astroturfed this place. And then every year or so there will be the quisling that Microsoft hires from the open source community to be in charge of whatever-they're-calling-their-Linux-lab-now, who will inevitably come here with an olive branch... dipped in arsenic. And let us never forget the level pro-SCO astroturfing that went on here in the day, and you still get a few of those old trolls making rude noises about Pamela Jones. Some, if not all of those guys were ultimately being paid by Microsoft, one way or the other (well, except Daniel Lyons, a fucktard of such incredible stupidity that he actually did it for free).
Wow, citation needed. In the real world we call a long list of accusations without any evidence to back it up bullshit. I'm open to the idea that you're right, but in my dozen years reading and half that time posting on Slashdot I've only seen this sort of claim presented as if it were self evident, but never backed up by an iota of evidence. So please, if it's true show me the evidence. If it's based on conspiracy theories, withdraw it.
Of course, (good) reverse osmosis cleans out a LOT more out of the water then just salt, e.g. bacteria, viruses.
Do you have a sense of how dramatically expensive RO is and how much cheaper it would be if 50% of the salt in seawater could be removed in a relatively low cost preliminary separation? Somehow most of the comments on this story, both positive and negative, seem to assume its main use needs to be as a desalinization gadget where you put the saltwater in one side and delicious drinking water comes out the other. That would be amusing but not particularly useful or realistic. The value of a separation technique is going to come in the form of energy and labor savings. If I talked about this tech at work I'd hear comments like, "imagine the RO fouling reduction!"
Shouldn't the vast global environmentalist "AGW" conspiracy have prevented these scientists from publishing their results? Isn't climate science controlled by a crowd that ensures their future prosperity by preventing dissenting opinions? How could this be?!
Most people (we are not all paragons of virtue) do that. The difference was that Jobs was apparently good at it.
The difference between SJ and most people, not referenced in his report but available from anyone who ever worked closely with him, was that SJ was addicted to backstabbing even when it would hurt him as well. Do a favor for SJ? Either disappear immediately or count on him going out of his way to hurt you.
SkyDrive is 25 gigs without having to do any of the hoop-jumping you did to get extra Dropbox space. I still use Dropbox because, ironically, I think it hooks into the Windows UI much better than SkyDrive. Google likes to make a splash in this sort of thing, usually offering more space in order to tempt users of the existing services they're mimicking. My prediction is 50-100 gigs of space from Google.
The last few months I have been doing some research into the trolling phenomenon on slashdot.org. In order to do this as thoroughly as possible, I have written both normal and troll posts, 1st posts, etc., both logged in and anonymously, and I have found these rather shocking results:
* More moderator points are being used to mod posts down than up. Furthermore, when modding a post up, every moderator seems to follow previous moderators in their choices, even when it's not a particularly interesting or clever post slashdot.org. There are a LOT more +5 posts than +3 or +4.
* Logged in people are modded down faster than anonymous cowards. Presumably these Nazi Moderators think it's more important to burn a user's existing karma, to silence that individual for the future, than to use the moderation system for what it's meant for : identifying "good" and "bad" posts (Notice how nearly all oppressive governments in the past and present do the same thing : marking individuals as bad and untrustworthy because they have conflicting opinions, instead of engaging in a public discussion about these opinions)
* Once you have a karma of -4 or -5, your posts have a score of -1 by default. When this is the case, no-one bothers to mod you down anymore. This means a logged in user can keep on trolling as much as he (or she) likes, without risking a ban to post on slashdot. When trolling as an anonymous user, every post starts at score 0, and you will be modded down to -1 ON EVERY POST. When you are modded down a certain number of times in 24 hour, you cannot post anymore from your current IP for a day or so. So, for successful trolling, ALWAYS log in.
* A lot of the modded down posts are actually quite clever, funny, etc., and they are only modded down because they are offtopic. Now, on a news site like slashdot, where the number of different topics of discussion can be counted on 1 hand, I must say I quite like the distraction these posts offer. But no, when the topic is yet another minor version change of the Linux kernel, they only expect ooohs and aaahs about this great feat of engineering. Look at the moderation done in this thread to see what I mean. Digging deep into the history of slashdot, I found this poll, which clearly indicates the vast majority does NOT want the moderation we have here today. 'nuff said.
Feel free to use this information to your advantage. I thank you for your time.
Anonymous cowards are... well, cowards.
I think that your results aren't shocking at all, nor are they interesting.
1) More of your posts are modded down than up because, as you say, you write troll posts. I have 10 posts modded up per post modded down, and yes, when I get modded down it's normally because I'm in a bad mood and decide to be a jerk.
2) Many moderators seem to read at +1, so they don't even see things that come from unmoderated ACs. Furthermore, when I moderate I tend not to bother modding down an AC for being off topic, for instance, because at 0 the AC probably won't be noticed enough to derail meaningful discussion. If a registered user with good karma posts something quite off topic, there's more of a reason to down moderate because at 2 it's more of a speed bump than the same post made by an AC at 0.
3) So? Why should anyone care?
4) This last point depends on your personal ability to evaluate whether things are clever, funny, etc. Based your post, I don't think you're likely to be a valuable resource in this regard.
It's almost like you're trying to insinuate that moderators act in some sort of diabolical cooperation. This obviously isn't the case. Slashdot uses crowd sourced moderation, which is what makes it Slashdot. More valued members of the community try to maintain the standards of that community. I actually think Slashdot moderation is one of the most functional things in the history of the internet.
My experience is as a scientist and probably is of limited value in other fields, but: I've seen places where the remote meeting culture centered on video conferencing and I've seen places where it instead centered on audio, with the video replaced by slides. The slides normally show useful experimental data or borderline useful financial data. The video normally shows bored people.
When an internal meeting has video it's generally a sign that the meeting doesn't actually need to happen - it's better done through a couple emails or a quick IRC-equivalent chat. Again, outside the world of a scientist I expect this to be different.
Maybe the problem is having a business model that is incompatible with sharing of information.
From the inception of the information revolution, information became easy to copy. It will be that way until you take away all computers and networks.
The real question - is there something we can do to reduce the damages these powerful industries do, while kicking and screaming on their way to irrelevance?
A bunch of phones were using mini-USB, including the RAZR, which is pretty small. There was really no reason to muddy the waters further with micro.
This has been previously discussed here. Supposedly the micro-USB design can handle something like 5-10x as many plug/unplug cycles as mini-USB before failure. I'll note that this doesn't match my experience, which includes 0 failures over dozens of mini-USB connectors in the last decade and now 4 or 5 failures of lightly used phone or tablet manufacturer-supplied micro-USB cables in the last few years. Maybe I'm just unlucky.
Even more than the failures, though, my complaint about micro is that it's a pain to plug it in without looking at it. When I go to sleep at night, I often turn off my light before plugging in my phone, and micro's a pain. Mini was fine.
With SOPA, they can take your site down if you link to (or, presumably, mention) megaupload.com. Think about that one for a minute.
Exactly, or even worse, SOPA lets them take your site down if one of your user-generated comments mentions of links to megaupload.com. Remember when it was popular to post the bluray key (if I'm remembering this correctly) on slashdot to spite Sony? Those posts are still accessible. There's no reason Sony couldn't or wouldn't use SOPA to shut down Slashdot. And hey, Google caches those posts, too!
How are you supporting the cause by not using Wikipedia? It's not the usage statistics that count, the whole thing is just to raise awareness. It doesn't matter if an already aware person continues to make use of it.
Besides, it seems to be working for me, maybe thanks to adblock..?
If you want to support the cause, call your senators and representative in the house. At least email.
How the fuck is this insightful when Apple has been the one keeping the price of content down traditionally? You forgetting the $1.99 and $2.99 RIAA was asking for, for single tracks?!
Dumbass.
You are ignorant. Apple raised the default ebook price when they entered the digital publishing market with the iPad. Amazon had set a very low ebook price and Apple colluded with publishers who were upset that Amazon was actually subsidizing the price by selling it below cost in order to raise ebook prices by 50%. With a large digital publishing alternative to Amazon, the publishers forced Amazon to raise prices by 50% as well. Thanks to Apple's meddling, most ebook prices went up by 50%. This was widely publicized when it happened - we even discussed it on Amazon.
So to reiterate, the GP is insightful because Apple's only previous digital publishing endeavor was based around Apple negotiating to raise all prices for ebooks by 50%.
There is a lot of room for another smartphone platform, IMO. Can't speak for WP7, because I haven't tried it, but the others all suffer from some combination of: closedness, privacy/security issues, poor performance, poor build quality, poor battery life, being dead.
Tizen seems to approach at least some of these issues in a sensible manner.
For reference, WP7's got the same negative as the iPhone (closedness) but no enormous momentum to weight against it.
The constant litigation between Apple and [insert every other phone manufacturer] is not only holding back innovation
Really? Because I see a whole bunch of new phones at CES. Do you have any evidence that innovation is being held back, or is this just a gut "but it must be so" feeling?
There are/were a bunch of countries with Samsung tablet unavailability because of Apple-requested injunctions. It's usually hard to point at the status quo and make a good case for what would have been if only something else had happened, so I think that's pretty solid evidence for the GP's claim.
"One of the studies, which examined more than 1,000 adult patients at four hospitals, projected that the dose of radiation received in a single heart scan at age 40 would later result in cancer in 1 in 270 women and 1 in 600 men.
Risks were lower for those who received a head CT scan: 1 in 8,100 women and 1 in 11,080 men would likely develop cancer from the radiation, the study said."
These numbers don't have a direct translation for "Z Portal" cancer risk, but they're surprisingly high. Hopefully we get some very robust studies to examine the effects of the DHS scans in the near future. I guess it's too much to hope that the Department of Homeland Sarcoma would stop using the scanners until public and peer reviewed science exists to prove their safety.
If a paid corporate propagandist makes arguments, they're no less valid than if they're made by an impassioned grass roots crusader.
OMG LOL. Wait, you are serious? Slashdot is supposed to be like the Olympics; the joy is because you are watching amateurs at work, some of whom are at the top of their game, while they perform solely for the pleasure of the sport. If you say "well hey why not just let paid commenters have free reign and we won't even call them out for their shit" then you might as well just piss on the 100 year tradition of the Olympics, then move on to the NCAA and every other organization that recognizes the fact that in some cases, money RUINS things. No, we don't want paid fanboys trolling around on slashdot. It's bad enough that we have unpaid fanboys trolling around on slashdot.
I thought Slashdot was "supposed to be" like reality, where arguments exist even if we think it's unfair that they were supported by certain people. I believe that the moderation system separates the shill noise from the shill signal, if it exists.
I know it's usually ACs making this sort of comment, but I feel compelled to reply to one: ad hominem attacks with no real content do nothing to undermine the argument of the attacked. Even if DCTech made a new account and is paid by someone to argue against Google on Slashdot (quick, put on your tinfoil hat!), that doesn't make his arguments wrong. Slashdot discussions are usually moderated based on ideas and that's the way it should be. If a paid corporate propagandist makes arguments, they're no less valid than if they're made by an impassioned grass roots crusader. If you disagree, present an argument. If not, leave us alone.
Note the key words, "Google Kenya" - this is a branch office where some employee is taking a shortcut. This is hardly a condemnation of Google as a company unless and until it's demonstrated that this is either more than an isolated incident or was based on instructions received from corporate overlords.
As other responses pointed out, this went beyond Google Kenya, so your point is invalid. Moreover, even if it were simply Google Kenya, I find your attitude to be terribly naive. If we don't hold parent companies/politicians/military leaders/whatever responsible for the actions of their subordinates and default to the notion that every negative act is that of a rogue, corrupt underling, we nearly eliminate the concept of institutional responsibility. The burden of proof in this sort of situation should be on the institution - there's no reason to assume that an incident was out of line with company policy until proven otherwise.
what a pile of shit. It's easy enough to legislate against those things. Fuck this libertarian crap where we have to accommodate those with capital so they can continue to increase their capital at the expense of everyone else with less capital. It's a scam. Part of me wants it to continue to get worse because at some point (just think a decade more of stagnant middle class and regular (not accounting for recent dollar printing) inflation, we will swallow up another 20% of the middle class and over 60% of the population will essentially be in a state of indentured servitude. 40% are now. The next 20% won't take it so lightly. I'll join them as we dance in the entrails of the upper class. At that point we won't even care what happens next.
This AC has some insight. Too bad I spent 15 mod points just a few hours ago.
Slashdot Mirror
By "global innovator" do you mean "will copy designs of companies from all over the globe"? ;)
DISCLAIMER: I love the Galaxy II S and think the whole lawsuit farce is stupid.
Consider what Samsung has done for LCD technology. There are many other areas where they've innovated similarly. Apple's hardware "innovation" is basically deciding how to arrange the components they buy from the people who are actually doing new science, like Samsung.
Depends on what you consider kiddie porn. Way the hell back when, the JC Penny & Montgomery Wards catalogs used to print pictures of child models wearing underwear and pajamas. When the laws in the US started getting weird, those pictures disappeared. Seems somebody convinced the marketting department that said pics of child models could be used by pedophiles as porn. Being wary of their potential liability, the ads died. To me, it's all in the eye of the beholder. If you're searching out porn with a vengance, you'll find porn in anything you look at.
The western fashion and glamor industries have spent the last few decades building an female ideal based on looking like a child. Models strive to have essentially prepubescent bodies, and wrinkles, even normal facial features that normal teenagers have, must be blurred out with Photoshop or Botox. If Reddit is doing something that encourages illegal and unethical behavior, I'm glad they're changing that, but I highly doubt Reddit is a root cause. The causes are legal and backed by lobbying power, and every time people buy an issue of Cosmo or a "Barely Legal" DVD they're paying to spread the same unhealthy sexual views. Media targeting both men and women emphasize the sexiness of youth - when magazines are telling 23 year old women secrets to look 18 and movies are telling men that 18 is hotter than 19, it's no surprise that some people extrapolate and get the sense that 17 must be better yet.
1) The post to which I was referring asked to name "one product", and so I did just that.
2) I've read (and continue to read) a lot of patent literature. I appreciate that the reality is that a patent proprietor (or their attorney) will necessarily draft the description to contain the minimum possible amount of information required to meet the requirement of sufficiency of disclosure. However, the "central idea" must necessarily be elucidated in sufficient detail for the ordinary skilled person to work the invention (so "if you really know the science behind it" is exactly the point; they're not written to be understandable by the lay person). It only gets more obscure around the periphery, and as patents are legal documents there is a certain art to reading them to extract the information you require.
Anyway, this isn't a purely hypothetical argument. I referred to the patent literature more than once when working towards my doctorate in organic chemistry, and obtained very useful information from such sources more than once. Information which wasn't available elsewhere. A patent would never have been my first choice of reference material, because journal articles don't have that disclosure/trade secret tension which is inherent in a patent, but the patent literature was far from uselessly obfuscated.
Maybe I'm jaded by my current field. In the 5000 patents I read last quarter, something actually useful related to the central idea was decipherable in maybe 50-100, and that usually involved a team of 3 PhD experts in the topic working together for at least 10 minutes to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Drugs.
There's a lot of good information in process patents for the manufacture of pharmaceutical compounds which will ultimately see wider use in other products. Process chemists and engineers put an enormous amount of labour into devising the best way to carry out a particular chemical reaction, and those reaction conditions are described in the patent for the production of a given drug molecule. Such information is then incredibly useful for others working towards making similar molecules (or completely different molecules, but using the same transformation), be they other companies, academics, or students.
1) It's not just the world of pharmaceuticals. Look around you. Pretty much every material you see is the product of a ton of chemical engineering of some form or another, from polymer science to metallurgy. It's all complicated, and the work that goes into coming up with a patentable way to make your lightbulb last longer dwarfs the work going into things in the software patent world. But...
2) Patents on these processes or combinations of chemical properties are unbelievably vague. Let's say you find that toothpaste cures cancer if it contains 2.3% chocolate and is centrifuged at 3254 RPM for 17 seconds. Your patent will include these conditions in claims such as:
"The mixture must contain between 0 and 16% chocolate, 0 to 14% milk, 0 to 9% Windex, 0 to 40% action figures, 0 to 10% water, 0 to 12% ball bearings, and 0 to 6% of oysters, preferably between 0% and 5% of each."
"The mixture must be agitated in order to produce a cancer curing effect. Suitable techniques include manual stirring, riding in the back of an old jeep, spinning, or vibration through a variety of sonicating techniques. Agitation must proceed for 2 to 90 seconds."
Seriously, go read some patent literature. Yes, if you really know the science behind it you can sometimes learn things, but most of the time the central ideas are heavily obfuscated.
Microsoft has always done this. I've been on Slashdot now about nine years and Microsoft has frequently astroturfed this place. And then every year or so there will be the quisling that Microsoft hires from the open source community to be in charge of whatever-they're-calling-their-Linux-lab-now, who will inevitably come here with an olive branch... dipped in arsenic. And let us never forget the level pro-SCO astroturfing that went on here in the day, and you still get a few of those old trolls making rude noises about Pamela Jones. Some, if not all of those guys were ultimately being paid by Microsoft, one way or the other (well, except Daniel Lyons, a fucktard of such incredible stupidity that he actually did it for free).
Wow, citation needed. In the real world we call a long list of accusations without any evidence to back it up bullshit. I'm open to the idea that you're right, but in my dozen years reading and half that time posting on Slashdot I've only seen this sort of claim presented as if it were self evident, but never backed up by an iota of evidence. So please, if it's true show me the evidence. If it's based on conspiracy theories, withdraw it.
Of course, (good) reverse osmosis cleans out a LOT more out of the water then just salt, e.g. bacteria, viruses.
Do you have a sense of how dramatically expensive RO is and how much cheaper it would be if 50% of the salt in seawater could be removed in a relatively low cost preliminary separation? Somehow most of the comments on this story, both positive and negative, seem to assume its main use needs to be as a desalinization gadget where you put the saltwater in one side and delicious drinking water comes out the other. That would be amusing but not particularly useful or realistic. The value of a separation technique is going to come in the form of energy and labor savings. If I talked about this tech at work I'd hear comments like, "imagine the RO fouling reduction!"
Shouldn't the vast global environmentalist "AGW" conspiracy have prevented these scientists from publishing their results? Isn't climate science controlled by a crowd that ensures their future prosperity by preventing dissenting opinions? How could this be?!
Most people (we are not all paragons of virtue) do that. The difference was that Jobs was apparently good at it.
The difference between SJ and most people, not referenced in his report but available from anyone who ever worked closely with him, was that SJ was addicted to backstabbing even when it would hurt him as well. Do a favor for SJ? Either disappear immediately or count on him going out of his way to hurt you.
SkyDrive is 25 gigs without having to do any of the hoop-jumping you did to get extra Dropbox space. I still use Dropbox because, ironically, I think it hooks into the Windows UI much better than SkyDrive. Google likes to make a splash in this sort of thing, usually offering more space in order to tempt users of the existing services they're mimicking. My prediction is 50-100 gigs of space from Google.
The last few months I have been doing some research into the trolling phenomenon on slashdot.org. In order to do this as thoroughly as possible, I have written both normal and troll posts, 1st posts, etc., both logged in and anonymously, and I have found these rather shocking results:
* More moderator points are being used to mod posts down than up. Furthermore, when modding a post up, every moderator seems to follow previous moderators in their choices, even when it's not a particularly interesting or clever post slashdot.org. There are a LOT more +5 posts than +3 or +4.
* Logged in people are modded down faster than anonymous cowards. Presumably these Nazi Moderators think it's more important to burn a user's existing karma, to silence that individual for the future, than to use the moderation system for what it's meant for : identifying "good" and "bad" posts (Notice how nearly all oppressive governments in the past and present do the same thing : marking individuals as bad and untrustworthy because they have conflicting opinions, instead of engaging in a public discussion about these opinions)
* Once you have a karma of -4 or -5, your posts have a score of -1 by default. When this is the case, no-one bothers to mod you down anymore. This means a logged in user can keep on trolling as much as he (or she) likes, without risking a ban to post on slashdot. When trolling as an anonymous user, every post starts at score 0, and you will be modded down to -1 ON EVERY POST. When you are modded down a certain number of times in 24 hour, you cannot post anymore from your current IP for a day or so. So, for successful trolling, ALWAYS log in.
* A lot of the modded down posts are actually quite clever, funny, etc., and they are only modded down because they are offtopic. Now, on a news site like slashdot, where the number of different topics of discussion can be counted on 1 hand, I must say I quite like the distraction these posts offer. But no, when the topic is yet another minor version change of the Linux kernel, they only expect ooohs and aaahs about this great feat of engineering. Look at the moderation done in this thread to see what I mean.
Digging deep into the history of slashdot, I found this poll, which clearly indicates the vast majority does NOT want the moderation we have here today. 'nuff said.
Feel free to use this information to your advantage. I thank you for your time.
Anonymous cowards are... well, cowards.
I think that your results aren't shocking at all, nor are they interesting.
1) More of your posts are modded down than up because, as you say, you write troll posts. I have 10 posts modded up per post modded down, and yes, when I get modded down it's normally because I'm in a bad mood and decide to be a jerk.
2) Many moderators seem to read at +1, so they don't even see things that come from unmoderated ACs. Furthermore, when I moderate I tend not to bother modding down an AC for being off topic, for instance, because at 0 the AC probably won't be noticed enough to derail meaningful discussion. If a registered user with good karma posts something quite off topic, there's more of a reason to down moderate because at 2 it's more of a speed bump than the same post made by an AC at 0.
3) So? Why should anyone care?
4) This last point depends on your personal ability to evaluate whether things are clever, funny, etc. Based your post, I don't think you're likely to be a valuable resource in this regard.
It's almost like you're trying to insinuate that moderators act in some sort of diabolical cooperation. This obviously isn't the case. Slashdot uses crowd sourced moderation, which is what makes it Slashdot. More valued members of the community try to maintain the standards of that community. I actually think Slashdot moderation is one of the most functional things in the history of the internet.
My experience is as a scientist and probably is of limited value in other fields, but: I've seen places where the remote meeting culture centered on video conferencing and I've seen places where it instead centered on audio, with the video replaced by slides. The slides normally show useful experimental data or borderline useful financial data. The video normally shows bored people.
When an internal meeting has video it's generally a sign that the meeting doesn't actually need to happen - it's better done through a couple emails or a quick IRC-equivalent chat. Again, outside the world of a scientist I expect this to be different.
Maybe the problem is having a business model that is incompatible with sharing of information.
From the inception of the information revolution, information became easy to copy. It will be that way until you take away all computers and networks.
The real question - is there something we can do to reduce the damages these powerful industries do, while kicking and screaming on their way to irrelevance?
I'm sorry, if you want Congressman Smith to listen to you please insert $100k to his campaign every other year like the entertainment industry does: http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/industries.php?cycle=2008&type=C&cid=N00001811&newMem=N&recs=20
A bunch of phones were using mini-USB, including the RAZR, which is pretty small. There was really no reason to muddy the waters further with micro.
This has been previously discussed here. Supposedly the micro-USB design can handle something like 5-10x as many plug/unplug cycles as mini-USB before failure. I'll note that this doesn't match my experience, which includes 0 failures over dozens of mini-USB connectors in the last decade and now 4 or 5 failures of lightly used phone or tablet manufacturer-supplied micro-USB cables in the last few years. Maybe I'm just unlucky.
Even more than the failures, though, my complaint about micro is that it's a pain to plug it in without looking at it. When I go to sleep at night, I often turn off my light before plugging in my phone, and micro's a pain. Mini was fine.
With SOPA, they can take your site down if you link to (or, presumably, mention) megaupload.com. Think about that one for a minute.
Exactly, or even worse, SOPA lets them take your site down if one of your user-generated comments mentions of links to megaupload.com. Remember when it was popular to post the bluray key (if I'm remembering this correctly) on slashdot to spite Sony? Those posts are still accessible. There's no reason Sony couldn't or wouldn't use SOPA to shut down Slashdot. And hey, Google caches those posts, too!
How are you supporting the cause by not using Wikipedia? It's not the usage statistics that count, the whole thing is just to raise awareness. It doesn't matter if an already aware person continues to make use of it.
Besides, it seems to be working for me, maybe thanks to adblock..?
If you want to support the cause, call your senators and representative in the house. At least email.
How the fuck is this insightful when Apple has been the one keeping the price of content down traditionally? You forgetting the $1.99 and $2.99 RIAA was asking for, for single tracks?!
Dumbass.
You are ignorant. Apple raised the default ebook price when they entered the digital publishing market with the iPad. Amazon had set a very low ebook price and Apple colluded with publishers who were upset that Amazon was actually subsidizing the price by selling it below cost in order to raise ebook prices by 50%. With a large digital publishing alternative to Amazon, the publishers forced Amazon to raise prices by 50% as well. Thanks to Apple's meddling, most ebook prices went up by 50%. This was widely publicized when it happened - we even discussed it on Amazon.
So to reiterate, the GP is insightful because Apple's only previous digital publishing endeavor was based around Apple negotiating to raise all prices for ebooks by 50%.
There is a lot of room for another smartphone platform, IMO. Can't speak for WP7, because I haven't tried it, but the others all suffer from some combination of: closedness, privacy/security issues, poor performance, poor build quality, poor battery life, being dead.
Tizen seems to approach at least some of these issues in a sensible manner.
For reference, WP7's got the same negative as the iPhone (closedness) but no enormous momentum to weight against it.
The constant litigation between Apple and [insert every other phone manufacturer] is not only holding back innovation
Really? Because I see a whole bunch of new phones at CES. Do you have any evidence that innovation is being held back, or is this just a gut "but it must be so" feeling?
There are/were a bunch of countries with Samsung tablet unavailability because of Apple-requested injunctions. It's usually hard to point at the status quo and make a good case for what would have been if only something else had happened, so I think that's pretty solid evidence for the GP's claim.
Don't forget Dow Chemical at #2, nearly twice as large as DuPont in terms of revenue.
Wow!
BASF still exists? To me BASF is this, and I haven't heard them since. :)
BASF is the largest chemical company in the world - more than twice the size of DuPont. 2010 revenues were almost 64 billion €.
"One of the studies, which examined more than 1,000 adult patients at four hospitals, projected that the dose of radiation received in a single heart scan at age 40 would later result in cancer in 1 in 270 women and 1 in 600 men.
Risks were lower for those who received a head CT scan: 1 in 8,100 women and 1 in 11,080 men would likely develop cancer from the radiation, the study said."
These numbers don't have a direct translation for "Z Portal" cancer risk, but they're surprisingly high. Hopefully we get some very robust studies to examine the effects of the DHS scans in the near future. I guess it's too much to hope that the Department of Homeland Sarcoma would stop using the scanners until public and peer reviewed science exists to prove their safety.
If a paid corporate propagandist makes arguments, they're no less valid than if they're made by an impassioned grass roots crusader.
OMG LOL. Wait, you are serious? Slashdot is supposed to be like the Olympics; the joy is because you are watching amateurs at work, some of whom are at the top of their game, while they perform solely for the pleasure of the sport. If you say "well hey why not just let paid commenters have free reign and we won't even call them out for their shit" then you might as well just piss on the 100 year tradition of the Olympics, then move on to the NCAA and every other organization that recognizes the fact that in some cases, money RUINS things. No, we don't want paid fanboys trolling around on slashdot. It's bad enough that we have unpaid fanboys trolling around on slashdot.
I thought Slashdot was "supposed to be" like reality, where arguments exist even if we think it's unfair that they were supported by certain people. I believe that the moderation system separates the shill noise from the shill signal, if it exists.
DCTech, did you just create a new account?
I know it's usually ACs making this sort of comment, but I feel compelled to reply to one: ad hominem attacks with no real content do nothing to undermine the argument of the attacked. Even if DCTech made a new account and is paid by someone to argue against Google on Slashdot (quick, put on your tinfoil hat!), that doesn't make his arguments wrong. Slashdot discussions are usually moderated based on ideas and that's the way it should be. If a paid corporate propagandist makes arguments, they're no less valid than if they're made by an impassioned grass roots crusader. If you disagree, present an argument. If not, leave us alone.
Note the key words, "Google Kenya" - this is a branch office where some employee is taking a shortcut. This is hardly a condemnation of Google as a company unless and until it's demonstrated that this is either more than an isolated incident or was based on instructions received from corporate overlords.
As other responses pointed out, this went beyond Google Kenya, so your point is invalid. Moreover, even if it were simply Google Kenya, I find your attitude to be terribly naive. If we don't hold parent companies/politicians/military leaders/whatever responsible for the actions of their subordinates and default to the notion that every negative act is that of a rogue, corrupt underling, we nearly eliminate the concept of institutional responsibility. The burden of proof in this sort of situation should be on the institution - there's no reason to assume that an incident was out of line with company policy until proven otherwise.
what a pile of shit. It's easy enough to legislate against those things. Fuck this libertarian crap where we have to accommodate those with capital so they can continue to increase their capital at the expense of everyone else with less capital. It's a scam. Part of me wants it to continue to get worse because at some point (just think a decade more of stagnant middle class and regular (not accounting for recent dollar printing) inflation, we will swallow up another 20% of the middle class and over 60% of the population will essentially be in a state of indentured servitude. 40% are now. The next 20% won't take it so lightly. I'll join them as we dance in the entrails of the upper class. At that point we won't even care what happens next.
This AC has some insight. Too bad I spent 15 mod points just a few hours ago.
This verses the USA, where we blame the 'internal enemy': The other political party.
Yeah... It works just as well for us as it works for Russia.
Reality check: when American spacecraft malfunction, do Rs and Ds blame each other? No? Then it's not comparable.