Buffy?
Xena?
Lara Croft?
Ok, I'll grant a weak maybe on Lara Croft, but the first two as role models, nope sorry.
I haven't seen a lot of Lara Croft so I can't comment there, but the other two are clearly extreme strong female role models. Why would you think otherwise?
The reason we don't have M2 of 'over' and 'under' is that you don't have the same context as the moderator.
There's an inconsistency though: "redundant" mods do go to M2 and the metamoderator doesn't have the same context in those cases either, at least not without doing a lot more work than seems reasonable.
You create a "CmdrTaco" and get away with it. Good for you. But now you're complaining because you got caught!?!
...
But does it give someone the right to argue that "because I've gotten away with it for so long, it's legal"? No.
There are two problems. First, the name is not clearly in breech. "Cmdr" is not a title. It can be interpreted as an abbreviation of a title, but it is certainly not a common one. The second problem is the name was in use for a long time which gives the appearance that it is accepted by Blizzard. The elapsed time also indicates that the name is not a significant problem, i.e. a lot of people saw it and did not complain. Therefore it appears that the harm in changing it now outweighs the good.
And no doubt the Aussie definition of an optimist is an opening batsman with sunblock on his nose!
I saw Andrew Symonds wearing sunblock on his lips in a recent game. Would have been perfectly reasonable had they being playing anywhere other than the Telstra Dome!
So what has changed about the Slashdot audience that leads you to think that those reasons are not valid?
Mainly, it's the sheer size of the user community. As I said near the end of my previous post, with the current size of the Slashdot community, topics can easily receive hundreds, if not thousands, of comments and moderations within minutes of appearance.
That's an argument for reducing the ratio of moderations to comments, either by reducing the number of moderations or by increasing the upper limit of scores so that more moderations are required per post. But increasing the number of available moderations (by allowing everyone to moderate once) won't help - it'll make things worse.
That's all beside my point though. The current moderation system is designed on the premise that the average quality of moderations made by the Slashdot audience will be pretty similar to the average quality of posts, i.e. pretty poor. So the system tries to encourage high quality moderations - scarcity of points means moderators will value them more and hopefully use them more carefully, metamoderation provides checks and balances that weed out poor moderators, inability to post and moderate the same story removes a prime motivation for abuses, etc. You're advocating removing all those aspects of the system so either you need some other techniques to improve the quality of moderation or you must believe that something about the audience has changed to make those restrictions no longer necessary. I was trying to get your thoughts on the later (though I hadn't refined my thinking enough to articulate it clearly).
One other point, you are assuming in your example that all moderation would be upward. This may not necessarily be true. I could as easily say it would only take 12 other readers to moderate a +10 post down to -2.
Actually I wasn't, I was just using the upper limit because it makes a better example. I'd expect more available points to tend to push scores to both ends of the scale. However, it doesn't really matter if there are a lot of posts at the minimum level, in fact that's a positive effect. But if we end up with a lot of posts at upper limit it is a problem - we've lost differentiation between those posts and we've reduced the utility of the threshold. If I understand you correctly that is just the effect you're looking to avoid.
The error in your thinking results, once again, from your belief that most moderation should be upward, rather than downward. I still believe that, ideally, a more open, wider system would have the statistical effect of reducing the individual weight of each moderation.
I don't think it'll work. There are two ways to look at moderating a post. You can either say "is this post better than average?" (or better than some arbitrary threshold of "goodness"), if so mod it up (and vice versa). Or you can say "does this post deserve the score it has now?", if not moderate it in the direction necessary to improve the situation. The first way will result in scores regularly hitting the limits. You want everyone to moderate the second way. I don't think they will unless the system enforces it (e.g. by getting people to nominate what they think the score should be a la IMDB).
No I didn't "misword" that. Read the FAQ. "'Moderators cannot participate in the same discussion as both amoderator and a poster." While it is certainly possible to post in a previously moderated discussion, your moderation points are removed from that discussion, or at least, they *should* under the current system.
Yes you did:-) You said "given that under the current system, I cannot participate in commenting on a topic in which I have previously participated in moderating". That's strictly incorrect. You can comment, the previous moderations just get undone. And it does w
I do not disagree that the limitations that currently exist had solid reasons for their implementation at the time they were initially implemented. What I disagree with is the inferred conclusion that those reasons are still valid.
So what has changed about the Slashdot audience that leads you to think that those reasons are not valid?
"Too many moderations"? I don't see how that is possible, except for from a purely pragmatic standpoint of the cost of running sufficient computing power to calculate all the moderations.
Do you agree that good comments tend to continue to be moderated up until they reach the limit? If yes than clearly allowing more moderations will simply mean more comments reach the limit sooner. At the extreme end of this process every comment would end up either a -1 or a +5. In practice a lot of comments would still get ignored but I am sure that virtually all comments that are currently ending up +3 would instead end up +5.
I have yet to see any story in Slashdot end up with more +5 comments than +4 comments, certainly not "most stories".
You're not paying attention. This story has more +5 comments than +4 comments. As I write this the threshold dropdown shows "4: 33" and "5: 22" i.e. 11 +4 comments and 22 +5 comments. Almost all the stories currently on the frontpage also have more +5s than +4s.
Plus, in a "-2 to +10" system, statistically, it would take approximately twice as many moderation points to move a comment up one level on the scale, precisely because of the "many simultaneous moderations" effect, or at least it should in a system where moderation points are not as scarce as they are in the current system. Yes, if I think a particular post is worthwhile, then probably my sentiment is shared by many others--but exactly how many others?
But you're talking about far more than doubling the number of moderators so there will be far more points on a per post basis to go around. Infact your saying there should be one point per logged in user per post. So it would only take 9 other logged in readers to agree with you to move a post from 0 to 10. Currently the number of agreeing readers has to be much higher than that because most of them can't moderate and those that can only have a few points to hand out to many good posts. You're advocating flooding the system with points, which can only lead to the scores tending to extremes.
Assume there is no "well written counterpoint" to a post I believe to be less than useful to the community. How then should I proceed, given that under the current system, I cannot participate in commenting on a topic in which I have previously participated in moderating?
I'll assume you merely misworded that, as I'm sure you know that you can post in a discussion you have moderated (you can't moderate a discussion you've posted in). So you can either post and forfeit any moderations you've made so far (if you feel strongly enough about making a correction) or you can save your points until someone else posts a correction. If no one corrects the poster then perhaps the correction wasn't worth making?
Why does it seem to be inconceivable that I may wish to comment in one area of comments and moderate in another, all within the same parent topic?
I'm not saying that to want to moderate and post is inconceivable at all (where did you get that impression?). But how are you going to prevent abuses? You may be morally above moderating down your opponent in a debate or flamewar but I assure you most people are not.
I disagree, as well, with your characterization of the utility of negative moderation.... My initial motivation for my original post was the number of posts I have seen containing clearly incorrect information that have received upward moderation
Would it not be more effective to allow moderation to all posts but one's own? Why isn't the moderation system open to all logged in users at all times? Why are we limited to five moderation points at a time?... Why are we limited to single point changes?
All these limitations are there for solid reasons. If you could moderate in stories that you've posted in you are able to moderate down people who reply to you with posts you don't agree with. If all logged in users can moderate then there would be too many moderations and therefore too many highly rated posts (the ratio between mod points and posts to moderate determine the percentage of +4-5 posts). Same reason for limiting moderators to 5 points, plus it prevents individual moderators having too much control over a particular story.
Why is the moderation scale limited to -1 through +5?... I submit that changing the moderation system to -2 to +10 would result in a more accurate characterization of the relative quality level of the posts I see.
The scale is limited to -1 to +5 because that is about all that's useful. In fact I'd say there is little difference between +4 and +5 and would consider dropping the +5. Because moderation is done by many people independently but more or less simultaneously posts have a tendency to get repeatedly moderated in the same way. If you think a particular post is worthwhile then probably so do many other people. That's why you see many more +5s than +4s in most stories. Making the scale -2 to +10 would simply result in a lot of +10s and very few +7 to +9s. And what is the point anyway? What exactly does the difference between a +6 and a +7 tell you?
most of my own moderation tends to be downward, as I personally feel it is of more value to the community for me to down-mod those posts which I feel do not deserve a 4 or 5 rating.
I don't agree with that practice and I doubt it has the effect you're hoping. If 3 people have moderated a post up to +5 then your -1 is just going to result in someone else putting it back to +5. You would do a greater service by moderating up a well written counterpoint.
I also think that we need a "-2, Incorrect" moderation type for posts that contain information that is just downright wrong, and perhaps a "+2, Definitive" moderation type for stellar examples.
Errors should be pointed out in comments, not anonymously punished in moderation. That is why there is no "incorrect" moderation. If you are moderating and don't want to post you should moderate up a well written clarification. Negative moderations should be reserved for flames, trolls, and off-topic posts.
I've read the FAQ section on moderation many times, and it still leaves me a bit disappointed. As a 5-digit UID Slashdotter (just a little way over 15 bits at #33785), I've seen Slashdot go through many different phases
You don't seem to have a good understanding of why the moderation system works as it is. That's a little suprising given that you have been here for a long time and have apparently been thinking about it. It works because moderators have little individual power, moderators can be disqualified if they consistently moderate poorly (as defined by the community), and the ratio of points to posts is carefully controlled.
You also don't seem to have thought through the consequences of the changes you propose. In particular everything you've come up with seems to suggest that you want more power in moderation (removal of restrictions on amount of moderation, +/-2 moderations, etc) but if you had that so would everyone else. So in practice, at best, the result would be simply a magnification of what we have now (i.e. no improvement in quality or differentiation between scores), at worst everything would end up at -1 or +5 (-2 or +10 on your new scale). Your suggestions
A lot of things that might have been done in the past are exegerated or made up. Thats how history works. Thats why I would be double careful to believe it. It might be doable nowadays, but I really doubt it was doable then.
Obviously you're not going to change your opinion just because some guy on the net thinks you're wrong. That's fine. However I will say that you haven't given any convincing reason for being so sure that Archimedes' Burning Mirrors never happened. From my point of view there is no reason not to believe it - everything stacks up in favour of it actually happening:
The physics is reasonable,
Archimedes was a towering genius who invented several weapons for use in the siege - there is no reason to believe he could not have invented the device,
The lower reflectivity of bronze (vs modern mirrors) can be easily accounted for by increasing the number of mirrors,
Any difficulties in aiming at the anchored ships can be mitigated by increasing the number of people aiming the mirrors,
There is no reason to believe the mirrors would have been difficult to manufacture - the Greeks regularly coated shields with bronze at the time,
Multiple accounts of the incident are recorded, and while none are first person accounts and they differ in the details they are consistent in two respects: that Archimedes constructed a weapon from mirrors and that he used the weapon successfully to burn ships.
On the outer, convex side, not the inner side that the guy was talking about.
Sure, but if they can coat the outside they could coat the inside. It still makes all your sarcasm about the fact that the shields were wooden rather irrelevant.
You need a bit more of bronze than just some coins.
You only need a very thin layer of bronze over a wooden backing. And the Greeks are known to have coated their shields in that way so it is an obvious thing for them to do. How much aluminium do you think goes into a modern mirror?
Because in the given situation at the given time it is more than unlikely that it would have ever succeeded.
According to you. But you sound like yet another member of the Slashdot Naysayers and Cynics Brigade looking to discount every claimed acheivement. Are you actually qualified to make that judgement? Plenty of well informed people have concluded that it is plausible and it's been experimentally shown to be plausible. And that it is well recorded in ancient literature is also reasonable evidence - or do you believe that those historians pulled such an outlandish concept out of the air?
The greek round shields, also (incorrectly) known as Hoplon were made of _wood_.
If you read that link you know that later hoplon shields were often coated in a thin layer of bronze. However I agree that the shape of the typical hoplon shield would be inappropriate for use as a reflector.
You seem to assume that a greek city had a large factory, capable of cranking up 500 parabolic mirrors just like that.
No, I'm assumming that the city described by Cicero as "the greatest Greek city and the most beautiful of them all", was capable of producing a large number of flat pieces of bronze. I note they also managed to build Archimedes' other inventions, e.g. the Claw.
Basically _that_ is the whole problem.
Actually the whole problem seems to be that you think they use parabolic mirrors.
Good so they need bronze, highly polished. First you need to get enough of that. They probably used most they could find (there was no deep core mining then) for armour and weapons.
They used bronze for everything. That's why it is known as the bronze age. If they were short of available bronze they could always have melted down some coins.
please try it out, with just 120 0.33 m^2 plates. I am sure, 100% sure, you will not succeed. Not even a motionless dry wood.
Who said anything about 120 0.33m^2 plates? To adjust for the lower reflectivity of bronze simply increase the size and number of reflectors. The practicality of the idea has been proven more than once (e.g. see here for reports of successful demostrations in 1747 and 1973). There are claims that the same technique was used by Proclus in 514. Why are you so sure that it never happened?
Ships are not motionless. They move up/down, left/right, forward/backward. You have constantly adept the aim of your sunbeam. Thats really hard, even with technology nowadays.
It's really not. You simply need larger mirrors and a larger group of people. Both this group and Mythbusters tried to do this with a very minimal setup and minimal redundancy. If they can set fire to a stationary target with 120 1 sq ft mirrors then e.g. 500 3 sq ft mirrors should be easily effective, even if 75% of the mirrors are off target. The Greek army would have had no difficulty in supply far more men than that.
It's also possible that the ships were a lot more flammable than the mockups used in the tests, if they were caulked with pitch (it is not known if they were or not).
Unless you meant to say that parents should take an active part in their children's day-to-day activities, which I completely agree with.
Are you suggesting that parents should sit with their kids for every minute of computer use? Because I don't see any other level of involvement that is going to be effective.
The Opteron instruction set is a superset of the Xeon instruction set. The Opteron does have instruction which the Xeons don't such as 3DNow, 3DNow+.
There is no such thing as code (outside of ring 0) which will run on a Xeon but not run on an Opteron.
Right, but you have to take the actual implementation into account. The Xeon will have different optimizations, strengths, and weaknesses when compared to the Opteron. Code which is designed to run as efficiently as possible on a Xeon might not be so efficient on an Opteron.
Lets see a Tivo with 2 tuners which does it's job damn well 24x7 for $99 or a $1000+ dollar desktop which won't be up 24x7....
Depends what you want. If a $99 Tivo does everything you need then you'd be stupid to buy the PC. But if you want to use the device for more then the PC may be way to go. E.g. my MythTV box does:
PVR with dual tuners, including features that are no longer available on Tivo like automatic commercial flagging and export to DVD
MP3 server
Video server, including DTS and Dolby Digital passthrough to my AV receiver via SPDIF
MAME
Region-free DVD player (which doesn't allow DVDs to restrict access to controls like FF during the piracy warning)
Web server for remote control of PVR
Web server for personal wiki
The $99 Tivo doesn't compare, especially since you can't buy them where I live.
Whedon simply didn't get the difference between a solar system, a group of stars with solar systems, and a galaxy.
That's extremely condescending. Insulting even. He a SF fan and has worked in SF for years. It is ridiculous to suppose that he doesn't know what a galaxy is or somehow confused galaxy and solar system. You're talking about one of the very few people to have made a movie or TV show set in space that correctly has no sound in space.
The line "we terraformed a whole galaxy of new earths" (assuming that is accurate) could simply be using "galaxy" in the sense of an "impressive collection".
He may have been straightened out later.
If that were the case the script would have been changed. Whedon is renowned for his attention to detail and this is not a TV episode that must be written and shot in a matter of days where such a mistake might go uncorrected due to time constraints. Dozens of people would have seen that script in time to make such a correction.
I was butting my head on this for a while: after all, if the new solar system was colonized by Earth, then - bloody hell! - they had interstellar drives. For hundreds of millons of passengers.
...
What happened to the mighty starships? What happened to the Terran supertransports?
Why "hundreds of millions"? It could have been a much smaller number. Interstellar travel is via sub-lightspeed transports, probably taking generations to reach their target. Those ships may or may not be still around - nothing's stated one way or the other and we have been shown very little of the "core" planets. It's all but irrelevant to these stories anyway - the solar system is effectively isolated in a universe where interstellar communication takes years and intersteller transport takes decades or centuries.
Maybe I just hate highschool so much I can't not hate Buffy.
That's kind of odd given that the show is essentially a metaphor for the idea that highschool is literally hell for a lot of attendees. That should have resonated with you to some degree.
On the other hand, I was exposed to it indirectly by being married to a Buffy addict, and even they had to agree the show really sucked for the last several seaons.
Over exposure to something will often galvanise your feelings, whatever those feelings are.
Why would they react any differently than they have been? They've known that the internet is a great advertising medium, and this is just another way of advertising. They're still going to be against the distribution of the whole movie, though.
I don't see their position changing at all.
Right. The stupid thing is that they're even against distribution of the advertising. You'd think they'd want people to download trailers and watch them over and over again, but instead they try to prevent downloads by streaming the video.
New video cards have H.264 hardware decoding built in.
You mean the nVidia 7800 series, available for the low, low price of what, $500+? People are looking for entire HTPC setups for less than that. And the driver that supports H.264 decoding is still in beta (though nVidia's drivers are usually pretty good, even at beta level).
ATI have made announcements but aren't shipping anything, right?
Slashdot Mirror
That's an argument for reducing the ratio of moderations to comments, either by reducing the number of moderations or by increasing the upper limit of scores so that more moderations are required per post. But increasing the number of available moderations (by allowing everyone to moderate once) won't help - it'll make things worse.
That's all beside my point though. The current moderation system is designed on the premise that the average quality of moderations made by the Slashdot audience will be pretty similar to the average quality of posts, i.e. pretty poor. So the system tries to encourage high quality moderations - scarcity of points means moderators will value them more and hopefully use them more carefully, metamoderation provides checks and balances that weed out poor moderators, inability to post and moderate the same story removes a prime motivation for abuses, etc. You're advocating removing all those aspects of the system so either you need some other techniques to improve the quality of moderation or you must believe that something about the audience has changed to make those restrictions no longer necessary. I was trying to get your thoughts on the later (though I hadn't refined my thinking enough to articulate it clearly).
Actually I wasn't, I was just using the upper limit because it makes a better example. I'd expect more available points to tend to push scores to both ends of the scale. However, it doesn't really matter if there are a lot of posts at the minimum level, in fact that's a positive effect. But if we end up with a lot of posts at upper limit it is a problem - we've lost differentiation between those posts and we've reduced the utility of the threshold. If I understand you correctly that is just the effect you're looking to avoid.
I don't think it'll work. There are two ways to look at moderating a post. You can either say "is this post better than average?" (or better than some arbitrary threshold of "goodness"), if so mod it up (and vice versa). Or you can say "does this post deserve the score it has now?", if not moderate it in the direction necessary to improve the situation. The first way will result in scores regularly hitting the limits. You want everyone to moderate the second way. I don't think they will unless the system enforces it (e.g. by getting people to nominate what they think the score should be a la IMDB).
Yes you did :-) You said "given that under the current system, I cannot participate in commenting on a topic in which I have previously participated in moderating". That's strictly incorrect. You can comment, the previous moderations just get undone. And it does w
So what has changed about the Slashdot audience that leads you to think that those reasons are not valid?
Do you agree that good comments tend to continue to be moderated up until they reach the limit? If yes than clearly allowing more moderations will simply mean more comments reach the limit sooner. At the extreme end of this process every comment would end up either a -1 or a +5. In practice a lot of comments would still get ignored but I am sure that virtually all comments that are currently ending up +3 would instead end up +5.
You're not paying attention. This story has more +5 comments than +4 comments. As I write this the threshold dropdown shows "4: 33" and "5: 22" i.e. 11 +4 comments and 22 +5 comments. Almost all the stories currently on the frontpage also have more +5s than +4s.
But you're talking about far more than doubling the number of moderators so there will be far more points on a per post basis to go around. Infact your saying there should be one point per logged in user per post. So it would only take 9 other logged in readers to agree with you to move a post from 0 to 10. Currently the number of agreeing readers has to be much higher than that because most of them can't moderate and those that can only have a few points to hand out to many good posts. You're advocating flooding the system with points, which can only lead to the scores tending to extremes.
I'll assume you merely misworded that, as I'm sure you know that you can post in a discussion you have moderated (you can't moderate a discussion you've posted in). So you can either post and forfeit any moderations you've made so far (if you feel strongly enough about making a correction) or you can save your points until someone else posts a correction. If no one corrects the poster then perhaps the correction wasn't worth making?
I'm not saying that to want to moderate and post is inconceivable at all (where did you get that impression?). But how are you going to prevent abuses? You may be morally above moderating down your opponent in a debate or flamewar but I assure you most people are not.
All these limitations are there for solid reasons. If you could moderate in stories that you've posted in you are able to moderate down people who reply to you with posts you don't agree with. If all logged in users can moderate then there would be too many moderations and therefore too many highly rated posts (the ratio between mod points and posts to moderate determine the percentage of +4-5 posts). Same reason for limiting moderators to 5 points, plus it prevents individual moderators having too much control over a particular story.
The scale is limited to -1 to +5 because that is about all that's useful. In fact I'd say there is little difference between +4 and +5 and would consider dropping the +5. Because moderation is done by many people independently but more or less simultaneously posts have a tendency to get repeatedly moderated in the same way. If you think a particular post is worthwhile then probably so do many other people. That's why you see many more +5s than +4s in most stories. Making the scale -2 to +10 would simply result in a lot of +10s and very few +7 to +9s. And what is the point anyway? What exactly does the difference between a +6 and a +7 tell you?
I don't agree with that practice and I doubt it has the effect you're hoping. If 3 people have moderated a post up to +5 then your -1 is just going to result in someone else putting it back to +5. You would do a greater service by moderating up a well written counterpoint.
Errors should be pointed out in comments, not anonymously punished in moderation. That is why there is no "incorrect" moderation. If you are moderating and don't want to post you should moderate up a well written clarification. Negative moderations should be reserved for flames, trolls, and off-topic posts.
You don't seem to have a good understanding of why the moderation system works as it is. That's a little suprising given that you have been here for a long time and have apparently been thinking about it. It works because moderators have little individual power, moderators can be disqualified if they consistently moderate poorly (as defined by the community), and the ratio of points to posts is carefully controlled.
You also don't seem to have thought through the consequences of the changes you propose. In particular everything you've come up with seems to suggest that you want more power in moderation (removal of restrictions on amount of moderation, +/-2 moderations, etc) but if you had that so would everyone else. So in practice, at best, the result would be simply a magnification of what we have now (i.e. no improvement in quality or differentiation between scores), at worst everything would end up at -1 or +5 (-2 or +10 on your new scale). Your suggestions
It would be nice if those problems went away, but I can't see it happening.
It's also possible that the ships were a lot more flammable than the mockups used in the tests, if they were caulked with pitch (it is not known if they were or not).
- PVR with dual tuners, including features that are no longer available on Tivo like automatic commercial flagging and export to DVD
- MP3 server
- Video server, including DTS and Dolby Digital passthrough to my AV receiver via SPDIF
- MAME
- Region-free DVD player (which doesn't allow DVDs to restrict access to controls like FF during the piracy warning)
- Web server for remote control of PVR
- Web server for personal wiki
The $99 Tivo doesn't compare, especially since you can't buy them where I live.The line "we terraformed a whole galaxy of new earths" (assuming that is accurate) could simply be using "galaxy" in the sense of an "impressive collection".
If that were the case the script would have been changed. Whedon is renowned for his attention to detail and this is not a TV episode that must be written and shot in a matter of days where such a mistake might go uncorrected due to time constraints. Dozens of people would have seen that script in time to make such a correction. Why "hundreds of millions"? It could have been a much smaller number. Interstellar travel is via sub-lightspeed transports, probably taking generations to reach their target. Those ships may or may not be still around - nothing's stated one way or the other and we have been shown very little of the "core" planets. It's all but irrelevant to these stories anyway - the solar system is effectively isolated in a universe where interstellar communication takes years and intersteller transport takes decades or centuries.ATI have made announcements but aren't shipping anything, right?