"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Maybe Gandi (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi#Disputed).
We're on the verge of the "you win" stage. Large companies and governments are adopting GNU/Linux and FOSS applications as their defaults. FOSS companies have been successful for years. Red Hat, Inc. was founded 19 years ago. IBM has fully embraced GNU/Linux, contributing code to projects and lawyers to the defense in the SCO case.
The Microsoft Halloween Documents started in August of 1998. Microsoft felt threatened at least 14 years ago. Back then it was just GNU/Linux, but now it's Android, LibreOffice, Chrome/Firefox, Postgres, Eclipse,... You better believe they're going to do whatever they think they can get away with to fight to keep their business alive. The only weapons Microsoft uses are acquisition, litigation and marketing.
TL;DR - apply extra critical reading skills when reading and responding to comments on threads like these.
"Change for the sake of change" is necessarily bad because if it weren't, it would be "change for the sake of improvement." Stasis is always better than deterioration. That's why "staying the same for the sake of staying the same" is a good thing. Either keep things the same or make them better. If you're changing something and it's not getting better, you're making it worse.
More importantly, if the change is additive (augmenting) rather than destructive (replacing) then it can only make things better. More choices or liberties are always better because the people may choose the best option to suit their current context. In this case, according to the linked article, the change is destructive. Something that worked well enough for people for 17 years is being removed in favor of something else. The something else is probably better in some cases, but definitely not always. This is one of the reasons some people (me) have an anti-Microsoft bias. They impose changes (start menu, ribbon, 'Metro',...) on their customers. Most companies do this. It's cheaper and easier for them and in most cases and they have no meaningful competition. Users' choices are "keep running unsupported software" or "use a worse tool". That's bad.
I know what you mean, but I object. If I say something ignorant I want someone who knows more about the subject to correct me.
If I didn't know the difference between a transmission and a differential, and I incorrectly referred to one as the other, I would want to be corrected. If I didn't know the difference between Africa the continent and the countries it contains, and made some broad over-generalization about conditions in Africa, I would want someone to set me straight. I can't give an example about whatever stuff I am ignorant about because I don't know them well enough to make examples out of them.
Apparently most people want to live in ignorance and admittedly people can live in ignorance and be functional members of society, but isn't it better to encourage each other to be better informed and to use our languages more accurately and precisely (and to know the difference)? Nothing is lost by knowing more. It's not good to be a dick about it, but we can educate each other without being dicks.
The Oneups (if they're still playing, last show was over a year ago) and Metroid Metal are also good game-themed bands. Given how popular PAX is, this plan is clearly viable.
having a sexually normal and healthy male and female psyche in the house is critical for raising healthy offspring
[citation needed]
gays cannot adequately provide that
[citation needed]
they are assaulted with messages from culture saying not only that it's ok to be feminine
You are implying that there is some harm in people with Y chromosomes displaying behaviors popularly associated with people who lack Y chromosomes. You will need to provide a citation defending that assertion. Good luck with that.
Or we could just, you know, do science and learn to overcome this parasite and any related phenomena. Then we'd get the benefits of cats (lower blood pressure, etc) without the negative side effect, AND we'd benefit from the increase in our knowledge.
And now the worst news of all for you: the HTML engine (or any other portion) of the browser can and often does contain exploitable unpatched vulnerabilities. So even if you disable JavaScript you can get infected.
I was going to call "citation needed", but then I Googled around and found an example.
The bottom, line the best way to protect yourself is honor the following three golder rules:
1. Keep your browser and OS updated with security fixes.
2. Don't visit suspicious websites and don't open suspicious email attachments.
3. Use a good antivirus that monitors your internet traffic.
Profit?
I'm not a fan of antivirus software, but otherwise I completely agree. Defense-in-depth is the only defense.
But there's too much weirdness about this case to just say "let's hold a trial like we normally would anyway." For my part, I think the extradition will proceed and I don't think he's going to make it to Sweden. He will be "lost" along the way and never heard from again. His supporters will say he was black-bagged (but no body will be found) and his detractors will say he escaped and staged it in such a way as to martyr himself.
People say "if the US wanted to kill him, they would just kill him." The problem with that is that unless they can stage it in such a way where it might look like an escape, he definitely will become a martyr and it will mess up their proceedings elsewhere. Other people will say, "If he wanted to escape he would just escape." The problem there is that it would unravel everything he has worked for, personally and globally.
I would love to see Assange delivered safely to Sweden and tried. If he does make it to court in Sweden I have confidence that his trial will be fair. If he is found guilty I think four years in prison could be good for him (you are not above the law, Julian) and the rest of the world (he's not a mythical creature, folks). I just don't think it's going to happen.
One more thing: just because someone's an asshole doesn't mean they can't also do good things, and just because someone's nice doesn't mean they can't do awful things. People are complex.
Sounds like a happy ending to the story for you, but I wonder why you couldn't deal with this through your property manager? Surely a loud tenant is something they should deal with? Back in '92 my upstairs neighbor complained about my guitar playing to the apartment office. They asked me to use headphones or stop playing. I did just that because I didn't want to get kicked out.
Or are you in some sort of condo arrangement where everyone "owns" their portion of the building? In which place there must be some kind of condo union or something for managing these issues?
Seems like it shouldn't be a city issue unless the noise is loud enough to be disruptive to activity outside the building.
Furthermore, though the initial nuclear blast is highly visible, the ongoing damage is largely invisible. Folks visiting a blast site days or weeks later run a high risk of dramatically reducing their life expectancy and they won't know whether they are in danger unless they bring a Geiger counter with them. The damage from fire is short lived and obvious, but nuclear fallout is prolonged and difficult to detect.
Even more frightening for some, while fire must get through the skin and lungs to damage the rest of a person, some kinds of ionizing radiation penetrate the entire body, often resulting in reduced fertility and increased birth defects. Nuclear attacks don't just destroy buildings and kill those caught in the blast, they also attack future generations. In as much as we are machines for propagating our genes, this is the most terrifying aggression possible.
I agree with your conclusion, but wish to provide a different reason that you're right. You say, "Without me the crime wouldn't have happened," but that's not the deciding criterion. The reason you are at fault in this hypothetical scenario is because you made the choice to do harm to another. You have agency. You are responsible for your actions. The decision to do harm was yours. The decisions of all those who made your decision possible (the manufacturers who produced the tools) were not decisions which caused harm. They had no reasonable expectation that their actions would necessarily lead to you harming your victim.
To put this in terms of the classic crypt-analysis characters, if Alice makes knives, she has no reason to think doing so will harm Bob. If Charlie buys a knife from Alice, she has no reason to think he will do use it against Bob. If Alice wishes Bob to come to harm, she must attack him herself, rather than just making knives and hoping someone will eventually hate Bob as much as she does. On the other hand, if Eve is a known transgressor, especially fond of knives and hateful of Bob, and if Alice is known to hate Bob, then for Alice to provide Eve with a knife might be seen as evidence of Alice being partly culpable in Eve's attack on Bob. In this case it is not Alice's creating or providing the knife which is the crime, but her intent to use Eve to get to Bob and reasonably expecting it to work. More evidence of Alice's guilt would be if she refused to provide Bob with a knife to defend himself with.
Enabling others to do harm cannot be consistently criminalized because the world is a dangerous place and humans can always do each other harm. If we wish to criminalize enabling harmful actions we must prohibit all tools rope (a strangling hazard) and the wheel (which can be used to crush a person).
This is why all notions of property are arbitrary.
Could you give me my wallet, there in your pocket?
Will you do the same for me later? If so, yes, you may have the wallet in my pocket.
Just because you and I currently have an agreed on notion of property which says that the wallet in my pocket is mine doesn't mean we can't re-negotiate it right now, if it suits us both. If anyone could take my stuff at any time I might not have any food to eat at the end of the day. But if I can take anyone else's stuff too (without them minding), then that's not a problem any more.
I still prefer our current model (the wallet in my pants is mine) because I don't know who you are and don't trust you to support me when I need it, but I do share with the people I trust. The concept of property is not a fundamental trait of the universe. It is something some animals develop to optimize resource management. It is something which could always be improved. Its boundaries are negotiable and arbitrary.
I didn't RTF study because acroread is incredibly slow on my work SUSE desktop, but if the 2.69x increase is from 100 in 1,000,000,000 to 269 in 1,000,000,000, then it's an insignificant difference and should not be the basis of legislation.
"*) There's a huge number of DSLRs at the protest - combined with iphone4, means nobody there is really starving."
By your logic there can be no legitimate complaint about poverty. If you can afford to complain you're not poor and have no right to complain. If you're poor but not complaining you're not really poor, or you'd be complaining.
I don't know how many, if any, of these protesters are claiming to be impoverished, but just because they found a way to acquire expensive cameras and phones (presumably with $50/mo plans) doesn't mean their points aren't valid.
Furthermore, from what I've read, it's not the depth of poverty of which they are complaining, but the disparity between the wealthiest and everyone else. Their own status is irrelevant. They may even be children of wealthy stock brokers for all we know. That wouldn't invalidate their message. What would invalidate their message would be if resources were in fact equitably distributed.
I disagree with the implied motivation of your hypothetical ("they shouldn't be able to protest if I think it costs me money or annoys me"), but what you described is already prohibited in most jurisdictions by jaywalking laws. Pedestrians must cross in crosswalks and must obey traffic lights. Protesters who violate those laws may be cited, and if they persist they may be detained.
If I had mod points I'd mod this interesting. I don't understand why the history of the submitter is relevant at all, and if it is why their profile isn't linked in the summary.
Posts that get modded down to -5 should automatically have their IPs revealed.
Point one: circumstantial evidence
Just because a network transaction occurs between two IPs doesn't mean the hosts currently behind those IPs or their users were responsible for the offensive transaction. Your request (expose IPs of offensive ACs) is the meatspace equivalent of "hate speech sent through the USPS should have the return addresses posted publicly."
Letters and cards sent from buildings, and IP packets sent from hosts are circumstantial evidence. Condemning the owners or residents of a building, or the user of a host by its mail or network traffic is short-sighted and unjust.
Point two: free speech
Words alone are not harmful. Speaking out against a class of people is a bad idea, but it must remain protected speech for slippery slope reasons. We draw the line at threats only because they announce a destructive intention, and even then we respond to threats less strongly than we do to action. This is fair. Saying "X is bad" is not actually harmful to X. Saying "I'm going to hurt X" announces an intention to do harm which should be dealt with. Saying "It would be a good idea to hurt X" is a grey area which must be judged within a context to determine which side of the line it falls on.
When we fail to defend free speech our society becomes more brittle at best, and we give away power to cheaters at worst.
Point three: gaming the system
It is not particularly difficult to amass an army of Slashdot accounts with moderation points such that a single person could decide to apply -10 moderation to a post at will. Your proposal would grant such an army the ability to lookup any slashdot poster's IP. Do you know who is most likely to have the time and impetus to do this? The kind of person who trolls slashdot with racist nonsense.
You are asking to give control of the privacy of every slashdot poster to the kind of person who has no reservations about acting anti-socially.
TL;DR - End the witch hunts. Trollers gonna troll.
Finally a slashdot article I can post authoritatively on.
I work at a non-profit HIV/AIDS research organization administrating their data management software. About 150 sites around the world fill out "Case Report Forms" (CRFs) and send them to us by either fax or email. About 15% of the 100k pages we receive in a month come in by phone fax. We are actively working to move them to email wherever possible because of its reliability and economy, but for some of our sites email faxing is not an option. The usual concerns mentioned already do not apply in these cases. Privacy is not a concern because the data is anonymized before it is sent to us for blinding and privacy purposes. Authenticity is not a problem because the originals can be pulled from the site should any data come into question, though in practice this never happens anyway. The reasons phone faxing is still popular are inertia and the ubiquity of phone service. Our African sites are willing to pay long distance prices to send us data by phone because it is harder/more expensive to get reliable Internet access to them. Even running IP over the phone lines they send faxes over is less practical than just sending us the phone faxes. Three of our sites phone fax their CRFs to a fourth site which relays those faxes to us by email. It sounds like a terrible idea, and it certainly has its problems, but it works well enough to not be the next problem worth solving.
I anticipate that all of our sites will move to IP based data delivery (mostly email with some Electronic Data Coordination) within two to five years as Internet access becomes more ubiquitous. For now it is a mistake to underestimate how well POTS works in third-world countries.
Preventing mistakes is nice, but the best reason to delegate resource control is code clarity. Allocating and freeing resources is something that has to be done all the time, like moving data in and out of registers in a CPU. We didn't move from ASM to C just to save us from mistakes in register allocation. We did it to save us from tedium and allow us to focus on new problems once we'd figured out how to generalize the old ones enough to hand them off to compilers. Memory and handle allocation is a solved problem. There are multiple competing solutions (reference counting, mark and sweep, etc), but it doesn't matter much which one your compiler/library/interpreter uses because unless you're writing a compiler/library/interpreter, that's not what your project is about.
So yes, humans are fallible, but taking control out of their hands is not the greatest benefit of higher level languages. The greatest benefit is increases in expressiveness.
Clearly Wikipedia fills a niche. The next step is a p2p model.
Participants run a "shared reality documentation store" on their machines to host documents and media they endorse and a "shared reality documentation client" proxy service which behaves like a web site and queries the stores. It's like FreeNet without trying to preserve anonymity.
Instead of edit wars there would be multiple documents on the same subject competing for popularity. Looking up "Evolution" you'd get dozens of results. The top two would be endorsed by 90% of the well-liked network participants and would represent the two dominant views on the subject. Individuals' search results could be adjusted to take their own moderations into account. That is, if Alice tend to disagree with Bob, the meaning of Bob's input is reversed in the context of Alice's searches.
Users would be pseudonymous but (like Slashdot) would have some sort of aggregate "good citizen" metric based on past behavior as judged by their peers. Users could browse the public behaviors of their peers and assign valuations to actions, including other people's "moderation". I might hate your article endorsements but love your moderation. For people not interested in that kind of granularity, users could have the option to just like or dislike another user (like the friend/foe system here). Users would not be required to provide CPU and disk space to be considered good users, but their decisions about how much to contribute would be public and could be used to make automatic or manual judgments.
Articles would scores would be based on some function of the scores of the users who had endorsed them. Participants can only delete articles from their own store and then campaign for others to delete it from theirs. There would be no global "notability" threshold, only a cumulative score based on users' moderation actions.
This is basically how the internet works already, lobbyists and pending legislation not withstanding. The main difference here is formalization and making a uniform UI which non-techies would enjoy using.
(Yes, I realize this is a fairly raw and flawed proposal. I'm hoping someone will see the valuable parts of it and make it happen.)
Do you log details of blocked pre-fetches? Do you have data on what portion of blocked pre-fetches were then followed by real visitors? You say "My sites show up plenty fast enough on demand for my visitors,..." but does that apply well to heavily bandwidth-constrained users? Modems may be old-fashioned, but mobile and wireless users still frequently get poor network performance. Do you have data on how fast all of your visitors download your pages?
You may well have done all the analysis and come up with the best cost-vs-benefit balanced solution, but I would worry about premature optimization in a situation like this. Pre-fetching doesn't exist at random. It solves a real problem and your defeating of the mechanism has real costs which are less obvious to you than they are to some of your visitors.
If you have done this analysis, it would make an interesting read and you should submit it as a/. story.
What I'd like to see are RICO prosecutions where the otherwise "legitimate" entities who claim ignorance get prosecuted. I think you'd quickly end up with a lot more self-policing by the passive beneficiaries.
Oh god please no. Don't give service providers an excuse to discriminate against potentially illegal activity. I do not want VISA, MasterCard, Quest, Comcast, FedEx or UPS guessing at my true purposes when I use their services and then blocking me if I trip their "illicit activity" filter.
"Innocent until proven guilty" is a good idea. Let's stick with that, please?
Slashdot Mirror
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Maybe Gandi (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi#Disputed).
We're on the verge of the "you win" stage. Large companies and governments are adopting GNU/Linux and FOSS applications as their defaults. FOSS companies have been successful for years. Red Hat, Inc. was founded 19 years ago. IBM has fully embraced GNU/Linux, contributing code to projects and lawyers to the defense in the SCO case.
The Microsoft Halloween Documents started in August of 1998. Microsoft felt threatened at least 14 years ago. Back then it was just GNU/Linux, but now it's Android, LibreOffice, Chrome/Firefox, Postgres, Eclipse, ... You better believe they're going to do whatever they think they can get away with to fight to keep their business alive. The only weapons Microsoft uses are acquisition, litigation and marketing.
TL;DR - apply extra critical reading skills when reading and responding to comments on threads like these.
"Change for the sake of change" is necessarily bad because if it weren't, it would be "change for the sake of improvement." Stasis is always better than deterioration. That's why "staying the same for the sake of staying the same" is a good thing. Either keep things the same or make them better. If you're changing something and it's not getting better, you're making it worse.
More importantly, if the change is additive (augmenting) rather than destructive (replacing) then it can only make things better. More choices or liberties are always better because the people may choose the best option to suit their current context. In this case, according to the linked article, the change is destructive. Something that worked well enough for people for 17 years is being removed in favor of something else. The something else is probably better in some cases, but definitely not always. This is one of the reasons some people (me) have an anti-Microsoft bias. They impose changes (start menu, ribbon, 'Metro', ...) on their customers. Most companies do this. It's cheaper and easier for them and in most cases and they have no meaningful competition. Users' choices are "keep running unsupported software" or "use a worse tool". That's bad.
I hope that answers your question.
I know what you mean, but I object. If I say something ignorant I want someone who knows more about the subject to correct me.
If I didn't know the difference between a transmission and a differential, and I incorrectly referred to one as the other, I would want to be corrected. If I didn't know the difference between Africa the continent and the countries it contains, and made some broad over-generalization about conditions in Africa, I would want someone to set me straight. I can't give an example about whatever stuff I am ignorant about because I don't know them well enough to make examples out of them.
Apparently most people want to live in ignorance and admittedly people can live in ignorance and be functional members of society, but isn't it better to encourage each other to be better informed and to use our languages more accurately and precisely (and to know the difference)? Nothing is lost by knowing more. It's not good to be a dick about it, but we can educate each other without being dicks.
The Oneups (if they're still playing, last show was over a year ago) and Metroid Metal are also good game-themed bands. Given how popular PAX is, this plan is clearly viable.
having a sexually normal and healthy male and female psyche in the house is critical for raising healthy offspring
[citation needed]
gays cannot adequately provide that
[citation needed]
they are assaulted with messages from culture saying not only that it's ok to be feminine
You are implying that there is some harm in people with Y chromosomes displaying behaviors popularly associated with people who lack Y chromosomes. You will need to provide a citation defending that assertion. Good luck with that.
Sure, we could do that ...
Or we could just, you know, do science and learn to overcome this parasite and any related phenomena. Then we'd get the benefits of cats (lower blood pressure, etc) without the negative side effect, AND we'd benefit from the increase in our knowledge.
Just sayin'.
And now the worst news of all for you: the HTML engine (or any other portion) of the browser can and often does contain exploitable unpatched vulnerabilities. So even if you disable JavaScript you can get infected.
I was going to call "citation needed", but then I Googled around and found an example.
The bottom, line the best way to protect yourself is honor the following three golder rules:
1. Keep your browser and OS updated with security fixes.
2. Don't visit suspicious websites and don't open suspicious email attachments.
3. Use a good antivirus that monitors your internet traffic.
Profit?
I'm not a fan of antivirus software, but otherwise I completely agree. Defense-in-depth is the only defense.
But there's too much weirdness about this case to just say "let's hold a trial like we normally would anyway." For my part, I think the extradition will proceed and I don't think he's going to make it to Sweden. He will be "lost" along the way and never heard from again. His supporters will say he was black-bagged (but no body will be found) and his detractors will say he escaped and staged it in such a way as to martyr himself.
People say "if the US wanted to kill him, they would just kill him." The problem with that is that unless they can stage it in such a way where it might look like an escape, he definitely will become a martyr and it will mess up their proceedings elsewhere. Other people will say, "If he wanted to escape he would just escape." The problem there is that it would unravel everything he has worked for, personally and globally.
I would love to see Assange delivered safely to Sweden and tried. If he does make it to court in Sweden I have confidence that his trial will be fair. If he is found guilty I think four years in prison could be good for him (you are not above the law, Julian) and the rest of the world (he's not a mythical creature, folks). I just don't think it's going to happen.
One more thing: just because someone's an asshole doesn't mean they can't also do good things, and just because someone's nice doesn't mean they can't do awful things. People are complex.
"BTW mods; there is nothing wrong with the occasional question from our simian relatives."
Questions from the subjects are prejudicial to good simian discipline.
Order requires credible threat of force, so I spank my monkey constantly.
That's reasonable, but I exhort you to exercise caution to ensure you don't rustle your monkey's jimmies.
You mean MOS Technology 6502.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6502
Sounds like a happy ending to the story for you, but I wonder why you couldn't deal with this through your property manager? Surely a loud tenant is something they should deal with? Back in '92 my upstairs neighbor complained about my guitar playing to the apartment office. They asked me to use headphones or stop playing. I did just that because I didn't want to get kicked out.
Or are you in some sort of condo arrangement where everyone "owns" their portion of the building? In which place there must be some kind of condo union or something for managing these issues?
Seems like it shouldn't be a city issue unless the noise is loud enough to be disruptive to activity outside the building.
Furthermore, though the initial nuclear blast is highly visible, the ongoing damage is largely invisible. Folks visiting a blast site days or weeks later run a high risk of dramatically reducing their life expectancy and they won't know whether they are in danger unless they bring a Geiger counter with them. The damage from fire is short lived and obvious, but nuclear fallout is prolonged and difficult to detect.
Even more frightening for some, while fire must get through the skin and lungs to damage the rest of a person, some kinds of ionizing radiation penetrate the entire body, often resulting in reduced fertility and increased birth defects. Nuclear attacks don't just destroy buildings and kill those caught in the blast, they also attack future generations. In as much as we are machines for propagating our genes, this is the most terrifying aggression possible.
dammit
s/Eve/Mallory/g
I agree with your conclusion, but wish to provide a different reason that you're right. You say, "Without me the crime wouldn't have happened," but that's not the deciding criterion. The reason you are at fault in this hypothetical scenario is because you made the choice to do harm to another. You have agency. You are responsible for your actions. The decision to do harm was yours. The decisions of all those who made your decision possible (the manufacturers who produced the tools) were not decisions which caused harm. They had no reasonable expectation that their actions would necessarily lead to you harming your victim.
To put this in terms of the classic crypt-analysis characters, if Alice makes knives, she has no reason to think doing so will harm Bob. If Charlie buys a knife from Alice, she has no reason to think he will do use it against Bob. If Alice wishes Bob to come to harm, she must attack him herself, rather than just making knives and hoping someone will eventually hate Bob as much as she does. On the other hand, if Eve is a known transgressor, especially fond of knives and hateful of Bob, and if Alice is known to hate Bob, then for Alice to provide Eve with a knife might be seen as evidence of Alice being partly culpable in Eve's attack on Bob. In this case it is not Alice's creating or providing the knife which is the crime, but her intent to use Eve to get to Bob and reasonably expecting it to work. More evidence of Alice's guilt would be if she refused to provide Bob with a knife to defend himself with.
Enabling others to do harm cannot be consistently criminalized because the world is a dangerous place and humans can always do each other harm. If we wish to criminalize enabling harmful actions we must prohibit all tools rope (a strangling hazard) and the wheel (which can be used to crush a person).
This is why all notions of property are arbitrary.
Could you give me my wallet, there in your pocket?
Will you do the same for me later? If so, yes, you may have the wallet in my pocket.
Just because you and I currently have an agreed on notion of property which says that the wallet in my pocket is mine doesn't mean we can't re-negotiate it right now, if it suits us both. If anyone could take my stuff at any time I might not have any food to eat at the end of the day. But if I can take anyone else's stuff too (without them minding), then that's not a problem any more.
I still prefer our current model (the wallet in my pants is mine) because I don't know who you are and don't trust you to support me when I need it, but I do share with the people I trust. The concept of property is not a fundamental trait of the universe. It is something some animals develop to optimize resource management. It is something which could always be improved. Its boundaries are negotiable and arbitrary.
I didn't RTF study because acroread is incredibly slow on my work SUSE desktop, but if the 2.69x increase is from 100 in 1,000,000,000 to 269 in 1,000,000,000, then it's an insignificant difference and should not be the basis of legislation.
"*) There's a huge number of DSLRs at the protest - combined with iphone4, means nobody there is really starving."
By your logic there can be no legitimate complaint about poverty. If you can afford to complain you're not poor and have no right to complain. If you're poor but not complaining you're not really poor, or you'd be complaining.
I don't know how many, if any, of these protesters are claiming to be impoverished, but just because they found a way to acquire expensive cameras and phones (presumably with $50/mo plans) doesn't mean their points aren't valid.
Furthermore, from what I've read, it's not the depth of poverty of which they are complaining, but the disparity between the wealthiest and everyone else. Their own status is irrelevant. They may even be children of wealthy stock brokers for all we know. That wouldn't invalidate their message. What would invalidate their message would be if resources were in fact equitably distributed.
I disagree with the implied motivation of your hypothetical ("they shouldn't be able to protest if I think it costs me money or annoys me"), but what you described is already prohibited in most jurisdictions by jaywalking laws. Pedestrians must cross in crosswalks and must obey traffic lights. Protesters who violate those laws may be cited, and if they persist they may be detained.
(IANAL)
If I had mod points I'd mod this interesting. I don't understand why the history of the submitter is relevant at all, and if it is why their profile isn't linked in the summary.
Posts that get modded down to -5 should automatically have their IPs revealed.
Point one: circumstantial evidence
Just because a network transaction occurs between two IPs doesn't mean the hosts currently behind those IPs or their users were responsible for the offensive transaction. Your request (expose IPs of offensive ACs) is the meatspace equivalent of "hate speech sent through the USPS should have the return addresses posted publicly."
Letters and cards sent from buildings, and IP packets sent from hosts are circumstantial evidence. Condemning the owners or residents of a building, or the user of a host by its mail or network traffic is short-sighted and unjust.
Point two: free speech
Words alone are not harmful. Speaking out against a class of people is a bad idea, but it must remain protected speech for slippery slope reasons. We draw the line at threats only because they announce a destructive intention, and even then we respond to threats less strongly than we do to action. This is fair. Saying "X is bad" is not actually harmful to X. Saying "I'm going to hurt X" announces an intention to do harm which should be dealt with. Saying "It would be a good idea to hurt X" is a grey area which must be judged within a context to determine which side of the line it falls on.
When we fail to defend free speech our society becomes more brittle at best, and we give away power to cheaters at worst.
Point three: gaming the system
It is not particularly difficult to amass an army of Slashdot accounts with moderation points such that a single person could decide to apply -10 moderation to a post at will. Your proposal would grant such an army the ability to lookup any slashdot poster's IP. Do you know who is most likely to have the time and impetus to do this? The kind of person who trolls slashdot with racist nonsense.
You are asking to give control of the privacy of every slashdot poster to the kind of person who has no reservations about acting anti-socially.
TL;DR - End the witch hunts. Trollers gonna troll.
Finally a slashdot article I can post authoritatively on.
I work at a non-profit HIV/AIDS research organization administrating their data management software. About 150 sites around the world fill out "Case Report Forms" (CRFs) and send them to us by either fax or email. About 15% of the 100k pages we receive in a month come in by phone fax. We are actively working to move them to email wherever possible because of its reliability and economy, but for some of our sites email faxing is not an option. The usual concerns mentioned already do not apply in these cases. Privacy is not a concern because the data is anonymized before it is sent to us for blinding and privacy purposes. Authenticity is not a problem because the originals can be pulled from the site should any data come into question, though in practice this never happens anyway. The reasons phone faxing is still popular are inertia and the ubiquity of phone service. Our African sites are willing to pay long distance prices to send us data by phone because it is harder/more expensive to get reliable Internet access to them. Even running IP over the phone lines they send faxes over is less practical than just sending us the phone faxes. Three of our sites phone fax their CRFs to a fourth site which relays those faxes to us by email. It sounds like a terrible idea, and it certainly has its problems, but it works well enough to not be the next problem worth solving.
I anticipate that all of our sites will move to IP based data delivery (mostly email with some Electronic Data Coordination) within two to five years as Internet access becomes more ubiquitous. For now it is a mistake to underestimate how well POTS works in third-world countries.
Preventing mistakes is nice, but the best reason to delegate resource control is code clarity. Allocating and freeing resources is something that has to be done all the time, like moving data in and out of registers in a CPU. We didn't move from ASM to C just to save us from mistakes in register allocation. We did it to save us from tedium and allow us to focus on new problems once we'd figured out how to generalize the old ones enough to hand them off to compilers. Memory and handle allocation is a solved problem. There are multiple competing solutions (reference counting, mark and sweep, etc), but it doesn't matter much which one your compiler/library/interpreter uses because unless you're writing a compiler/library/interpreter, that's not what your project is about.
So yes, humans are fallible, but taking control out of their hands is not the greatest benefit of higher level languages. The greatest benefit is increases in expressiveness.
Clearly Wikipedia fills a niche. The next step is a p2p model.
Participants run a "shared reality documentation store" on their machines to host documents and media they endorse and a "shared reality documentation client" proxy service which behaves like a web site and queries the stores. It's like FreeNet without trying to preserve anonymity.
Instead of edit wars there would be multiple documents on the same subject competing for popularity. Looking up "Evolution" you'd get dozens of results. The top two would be endorsed by 90% of the well-liked network participants and would represent the two dominant views on the subject. Individuals' search results could be adjusted to take their own moderations into account. That is, if Alice tend to disagree with Bob, the meaning of Bob's input is reversed in the context of Alice's searches.
Users would be pseudonymous but (like Slashdot) would have some sort of aggregate "good citizen" metric based on past behavior as judged by their peers. Users could browse the public behaviors of their peers and assign valuations to actions, including other people's "moderation". I might hate your article endorsements but love your moderation. For people not interested in that kind of granularity, users could have the option to just like or dislike another user (like the friend/foe system here). Users would not be required to provide CPU and disk space to be considered good users, but their decisions about how much to contribute would be public and could be used to make automatic or manual judgments.
Articles would scores would be based on some function of the scores of the users who had endorsed them. Participants can only delete articles from their own store and then campaign for others to delete it from theirs. There would be no global "notability" threshold, only a cumulative score based on users' moderation actions.
This is basically how the internet works already, lobbyists and pending legislation not withstanding. The main difference here is formalization and making a uniform UI which non-techies would enjoy using.
(Yes, I realize this is a fairly raw and flawed proposal. I'm hoping someone will see the valuable parts of it and make it happen.)
Do you log details of blocked pre-fetches? Do you have data on what portion of blocked pre-fetches were then followed by real visitors? You say "My sites show up plenty fast enough on demand for my visitors, ..." but does that apply well to heavily bandwidth-constrained users? Modems may be old-fashioned, but mobile and wireless users still frequently get poor network performance. Do you have data on how fast all of your visitors download your pages?
You may well have done all the analysis and come up with the best cost-vs-benefit balanced solution, but I would worry about premature optimization in a situation like this. Pre-fetching doesn't exist at random. It solves a real problem and your defeating of the mechanism has real costs which are less obvious to you than they are to some of your visitors.
If you have done this analysis, it would make an interesting read and you should submit it as a /. story.
Oh god please no. Don't give service providers an excuse to discriminate against potentially illegal activity. I do not want VISA, MasterCard, Quest, Comcast, FedEx or UPS guessing at my true purposes when I use their services and then blocking me if I trip their "illicit activity" filter.
"Innocent until proven guilty" is a good idea. Let's stick with that, please?