Umm... no. Just plain no. Flamebait and troll are both defined by intent. They distinguish someone who wants to take part in the discussion (no matter how poorly they are articulating their position) from someone who just wants to make trouble. "Israel/Palestine has a right to exist" is neither flamebait nor troll. "Israelis/Palestinians are assholes" would be one of those. There is no "-1, Controversial and poorly argued" any more than there is a "-1, Disagree."
Yeah, I noticed that as soon as I started reading this thread. I know that pointing this out is probably useless, but from the moderation section of the Slashdot FAQ:
Flamebait: Comments whose sole purpose is to insult and enrage.
Troll: A Troll is similar to Flamebait, but slightly more refined. This is a prank comment intended to provoke indignant (or just confused) responses.
In other words, for a comment to be Flamebait or Troll, there has to be obvious intent on the part of the writer for it to be so. "I disagree" doesn't count. "It's all lies" or "this guy is a shill" or "it's all BS" don't count. "Everyone on Slashdot thinks it's wrong" doesn't count. "Anyone who would make a comment like this probably has three-ways with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer while torturing puppies and kittens and using pictures of Linus Torvalds as toilet paper" doesn't count. Those are all reasons to reply to the comment and point out the commenter's mental, moral, and genetic shortcomings, but they aren't reasons to lower the visibility of the comment to people reading the discussion. Whenever you mod something down merely because you disagree with it, you're announcing to everyone that you're not confident that your side of the issue can withstand open debate.
God yes. I remember when the QuickTimer player changed its volume control from a simple linear slider to a teeny *knob* that you had to rotate with a mouse. It was incredibly painful and easy to get wrong.
Beat me to it. It was one of the major items in the Interface Hall of Shame, though I can't find that page anymore.
I'm still searching for a VOIP app that doesn't try to mimic a cell phone. I guess I should be grateful they don't try and use a rotary dial interface.
Could be worse. You might have to talk into the mic and say "hello, central, get me Murray Hill 5-9975.":)
There should only be a warning label if there's something to warn against. Seems pretty simple to me. And the Prop. 37 advocates most certainly want this to be perceived as a warning label. Anyone to whom it matters can already seek out non-GMO food with no problem, and probably already does. This is, again, not about providing people with information, but convincing them that the information is important.
The market can operate just fine if GMO-free foods are labelled as such, and the cost (which goes way beyond the cost of the paper label itself) will be passed on to the people who care about it. This is, as I said, an attempt to convince the average consumer that there is a hazard, not to alleviate lack of knowledge among those who want to know.
"Hmm, there's a label on this about it being genetically modified. That must mean it's something bad."
No more so than the label "May contain nuts" on a box of chocolate covered almonds. It's not because it's bad, it's because it's a fact... and allowing the consumer to make an informed decision (even if "may contain nuts" on a box of chocolate covered almonds might treating a consumer like an idiot, it's still not misinformation).
Except that the reason for the "may contain nuts" label is that some people have dangerous allergic reactions to nuts. There's a known, legitimate hazard that is being warned against. There is no such hazard in the case of genetically-modified foods.
It's about convincing the average consumer that there's something bad about GMO foods. In the absence of a health hazard (which the FDA has said does not exist), the labeling burden is on those who care about it. We do not have "Contains animal products!", "Non-kosher!" or "Non-halal!" labels on foods; vegans, or observant Jews or Muslims, look for foods labelled as meeting their guidelines. Likewise, people who want to avoid GMO foods can buy from producers that label their foods as GMO-free. What the Prop. 37 folks want is for the people who don't currently care about GMO one way or the other to see a label and think "Hmm, there's a label on this about it being genetically modified. That must mean it's something bad."
And by the way, why does the headline read "California Wants Genetically Modified Foods To Be Labelled"? Shouldn't that be "Organic Farmers and Environmentalists Want Genetically Modified Foods To Be Labelled"?
1. Sell off almost all public land so that the right to assembly effectively no longer exists
... except that Jill Stein was not trespassing at the bank because she lacked someplace to hold an assembly. She could have voiced her opinion elsewhere just fine. She was trespassing because she wanted to embarrass the bank and draw attention to herself. Her desire to accomplish those goals did not entitle her to violate the rights of others. She had no more right to hold a protest inside the bank than the bank would have to conduct business in her living room.
We're not just talking about Assange. We're talking about thousands of Americans who took to the streets last year to exercise their constitutional right to peaceably assemble. Over 7000 people have been arrested as part of OWS, including Presidential candidate Jill Stein.
To quote from the article you linked: "Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein and her running mate have been arrested at a sit-in at a Philadelphia bank over housing foreclosures." She was arrested for trespassing, not for anything she was saying. Given the refusal of most leftists to make distinctions like that -- the conflation of "expression" or "protest" with "speech", and the attitude that their cause is so righteous that it absolves them of any need to respect the rights of others -- I would expect that the vast majority of those 7000 were arrested for how they tried to convey their message, not what that message was. Your speech rights don't entitle you to stay on private property when you're not welcome there, or to prevent your fellow citizens from using public property (say, by blocking sidewalks), to disturb the peace, or to vandalize.
I like living in a post-WW2 horizontal city instead of a pre-WW2 vertical one.
Well bully for you. Live in your suburb then. Nobody's stopping you. Some people like the suburbs and see only the downside of the city, some people like the city and see only the downside of the suburbs. That's just part of life's rich tapestry.
Never said otherwise. Just giving my impression of SF from the days when I lived relatively nearby.
Why go to a bar? Is the sort of woman you'd meet in a BAR the sort you'd want to have a long term relationship with? And what does it say about her taste in getting picked up by a some dude in a bar?
Huh? What are you talking about? Where the hell else are you supposed to meet people if not in a bar? Would you prefer me to meet some losery loner on an online dating site or something?
If you mean strictly offline, then: college, work, concerts, convention for whatever hobby you have, politics, charity, or a social organization of some kind. That is to say, some gathering whose nature selects people with interests you share, some of whom might happen to be looking for someone, as opposed to a bar or similar venue, which selects for people who are looking for someone, some of whom might happen to share your interests. The same distinction applies to online activities: a dating site, vs. some online activity which brings together people and occasionally leads to love/friendship among the people involved. One of my coworkers at a previous job met his wife on a BBS via helping with computer accessibility for the blind. I know several couples who met each other via online anime fandom, and (indirectly) others who met via online games.
Maybe you'd prefer me to meet people in a fucking church!
That falls under the "social organization of some kind" category. I'm sure there are a few atheist equivalents, for those for whom that's an active interest rather than merely not having a religion.
Maybe living there is better than visiting, but every time I made the yearly drive to SF for the Software Development Expo, it was hell. Streets that seem nigh-vertical, an insane profusion of one-way streets -- in one case, two of them meeting in opposite directions at the top of a hill -- plus paying through the nose for parking. I was always glad to be back on I-80 and headed home.
Not intended as a flame, I know there are people who love SF, but I like living in a post-WW2 horizontal city instead of a pre-WW2 vertical one.
Leetspeek kiddies may see patterns in hex constants but people who have actual paying jobs
generally don't.
Really, because I use 0xdeadbeef as a magic constant all the time. In my paying job where I write code for a living.
0xdeadbeef isn't leetspeak, though -- it doesn't substitute numbers of letters, and for that matter it's spelled correctly.
I do think the "it's sexist" attitude is a rather silly, though. How many guys would to be offended or feel bad at seeing 0xB16BA115 somewhere in the code? Well, except for those who would think "I touched someone else's 0xB16BA115 with my cursor, does that make me gay?"
IIRC applescript had localized versions. There wasn't a problem in reading foreign scripts because keywords were translated (at one point keyword must be recognizable to the interpreter, that makes it relatively easy to translate them.
Perhaps this is a minor annoyance, but it sounds like this would increase the chances of identifier names being forbidden due to collision with reserved words. For example, instead of just "export" being reserved, you'd also have (among others) "exporter" for French support. Or so Google Translate tells me. Of course, this assumes that the interpreter supports various human languages without you having to tell it ahead of time which one you're using.
That bit about "consistent with the economic interests of the United States, both domestically and abroad" sounds remarkably like "what's good for GM is good for America" -- except that, to my knowledge, Ford never tried to block sales of the Camaro by citing infringements of Mustang-related patents. Besides, I must have missed the part where biasing the US legal system in favor of the RIAA and MPAA, and constricting our network infrastructure to conform to those organizations' business models, is even slightly in America's overall economic interest.
I'm all for covering contingencies, but if a thousand years pass without the human race developing space flight capability that's safe and reliable enough for us to just pitch the waste into the Sun (or for us just to find a way to re-use the waste), we're a hopeless species anyway.
Copyright (and intellectual-property and Internet legislation in general) is one area where Republicans and Democrats are pretty much equal. Unfortunately for us, they're equally horrible. As a sampling, so far we've had:
The CDA, pushed primarily by a Democrats (Exon) in a Republican congress and signed by a Democratic president.
The DMCA, passed unanimously by 57 Republican and 43 Democratic senators, and signed by a Democratic president.
The CTEA, sponsored from beyond the grave by Republican Sonny Bono, likewise passed unanimously by the same Senate and by a Republican House, and signed by a Democratic president.
Prior to that, we had the Copyright Act of 1976, which among other things also extended the length of copyrights, passed by a Democratic congress and signed by a Republican president.
Copyright Renewal Act of 1992, passed by a Democratic congress, signed by a Republican president.
COICA, introduced by Patrick Leahy (Democrat), unanimously passed by a committee of both parties, blocked by Ron Wyden (Republican).
PIPA, exactly the same as above (though the committee members may have changed, I didn't check that).
SOPA, sponsored by our good friend Lamar, a Republican, but co-sponsored by members of both parties, backed by groups from associated with both parties and by ex-Clinton and ex-Bush 2.0 administration members.
So it's basically been a bipartisan buggerfest, for several decades, for almost as long as there's been consumer-available copying equipment.
I'm not against software patents on principle, as some folks are, but I'm more or less de facto against them because I have yet to see one even slightly deserving of enforcement. Maybe that's selection bias on my part. Anyone care to point out some software patents that involving something that actually should be patentable?
If by "lately" you mean "before most Slashdot users were born", then yes. Things designed by a committee tend to suck, regardless of what the things are. They tend to suck more the larger the committee is, and even more when the members of the committee have hugely divergent agendas.
Good results tend to occur when A starts doing something (or A and B agree to be compatible in some way), C observes the good results, and C decides to follow the example. Repeat for D, E, F, etc. If some existing behavior of C gets in the way of following the example, C has a strong incentive to ditch that behavior to achieve the observed good results.
Crappy results tend to occur when you sit A, B, C... Z down together. Even if they're all acting in good faith to get a desirable result, they're going to try to force the agreement to allow for whatever existing behaviors that they don't want to ditch, even if those behaviors get in the way of the stated goal. To cite one example, the Soviets insisted that the UN Convention on Genocide define genocide so that mass killings on an ethnic/religious basis counted but mass killings on a political or economic basis did not, so that Stalin's exterminations of the Kulaks could not be called genocide.
As it applies to internet freedom, the best thing to do is for people in basically-free countries to work to fix or avert the flaws, to make them more free (for example, the EU rejection of ACTA). Countries with freer policies will benefit, and other countries can either emulate them or forgo the benefits themselves. Signing an agreement about internet freedom including countries whose leaders are fundamentally hostile to freedom is at best a useless feel-good gesture, and worse, tends to water down the concept of freedom due to the compromises necessary to get the agreement signed.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm... no. Just plain no. Flamebait and troll are both defined by intent. They distinguish someone who wants to take part in the discussion (no matter how poorly they are articulating their position) from someone who just wants to make trouble. "Israel/Palestine has a right to exist" is neither flamebait nor troll. "Israelis/Palestinians are assholes" would be one of those. There is no "-1, Controversial and poorly argued" any more than there is a "-1, Disagree."
Yeah, I noticed that as soon as I started reading this thread. I know that pointing this out is probably useless, but from the moderation section of the Slashdot FAQ:
Flamebait: Comments whose sole purpose is to insult and enrage.
Troll: A Troll is similar to Flamebait, but slightly more refined. This is a prank comment intended to provoke indignant (or just confused) responses.
In other words, for a comment to be Flamebait or Troll, there has to be obvious intent on the part of the writer for it to be so. "I disagree" doesn't count. "It's all lies" or "this guy is a shill" or "it's all BS" don't count. "Everyone on Slashdot thinks it's wrong" doesn't count. "Anyone who would make a comment like this probably has three-ways with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer while torturing puppies and kittens and using pictures of Linus Torvalds as toilet paper" doesn't count. Those are all reasons to reply to the comment and point out the commenter's mental, moral, and genetic shortcomings, but they aren't reasons to lower the visibility of the comment to people reading the discussion. Whenever you mod something down merely because you disagree with it, you're announcing to everyone that you're not confident that your side of the issue can withstand open debate.
God yes. I remember when the QuickTimer player changed its volume control from a simple linear slider to a teeny *knob* that you had to rotate with a mouse. It was incredibly painful and easy to get wrong.
Beat me to it. It was one of the major items in the Interface Hall of Shame, though I can't find that page anymore.
I'm still searching for a VOIP app that doesn't try to mimic a cell phone. I guess I should be grateful they don't try and use a rotary dial interface.
Could be worse. You might have to talk into the mic and say "hello, central, get me Murray Hill 5-9975." :)
There should only be a warning label if there's something to warn against. Seems pretty simple to me. And the Prop. 37 advocates most certainly want this to be perceived as a warning label. Anyone to whom it matters can already seek out non-GMO food with no problem, and probably already does. This is, again, not about providing people with information, but convincing them that the information is important.
The market can operate just fine if GMO-free foods are labelled as such, and the cost (which goes way beyond the cost of the paper label itself) will be passed on to the people who care about it. This is, as I said, an attempt to convince the average consumer that there is a hazard, not to alleviate lack of knowledge among those who want to know.
No more so than the label "May contain nuts" on a box of chocolate covered almonds. It's not because it's bad, it's because it's a fact... and allowing the consumer to make an informed decision (even if "may contain nuts" on a box of chocolate covered almonds might treating a consumer like an idiot, it's still not misinformation).
Except that the reason for the "may contain nuts" label is that some people have dangerous allergic reactions to nuts. There's a known, legitimate hazard that is being warned against. There is no such hazard in the case of genetically-modified foods.
It's about convincing the average consumer that there's something bad about GMO foods. In the absence of a health hazard (which the FDA has said does not exist), the labeling burden is on those who care about it. We do not have "Contains animal products!", "Non-kosher!" or "Non-halal!" labels on foods; vegans, or observant Jews or Muslims, look for foods labelled as meeting their guidelines. Likewise, people who want to avoid GMO foods can buy from producers that label their foods as GMO-free. What the Prop. 37 folks want is for the people who don't currently care about GMO one way or the other to see a label and think "Hmm, there's a label on this about it being genetically modified. That must mean it's something bad."
And by the way, why does the headline read "California Wants Genetically Modified Foods To Be Labelled"? Shouldn't that be "Organic Farmers and Environmentalists Want Genetically Modified Foods To Be Labelled"?
... except that Jill Stein was not trespassing at the bank because she lacked someplace to hold an assembly. She could have voiced her opinion elsewhere just fine. She was trespassing because she wanted to embarrass the bank and draw attention to herself. Her desire to accomplish those goals did not entitle her to violate the rights of others. She had no more right to hold a protest inside the bank than the bank would have to conduct business in her living room.
We're not just talking about Assange. We're talking about thousands of Americans who took to the streets last year to exercise their constitutional right to peaceably assemble. Over 7000 people have been arrested as part of OWS, including Presidential candidate Jill Stein.
To quote from the article you linked: "Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein and her running mate have been arrested at a sit-in at a Philadelphia bank over housing foreclosures." She was arrested for trespassing, not for anything she was saying. Given the refusal of most leftists to make distinctions like that -- the conflation of "expression" or "protest" with "speech", and the attitude that their cause is so righteous that it absolves them of any need to respect the rights of others -- I would expect that the vast majority of those 7000 were arrested for how they tried to convey their message, not what that message was. Your speech rights don't entitle you to stay on private property when you're not welcome there, or to prevent your fellow citizens from using public property (say, by blocking sidewalks), to disturb the peace, or to vandalize.
In post-Soviet Russia, operating system boots you!
I like living in a post-WW2 horizontal city instead of a pre-WW2 vertical one.
Well bully for you. Live in your suburb then. Nobody's stopping you. Some people like the suburbs and see only the downside of the city, some people like the city and see only the downside of the suburbs. That's just part of life's rich tapestry.
Never said otherwise. Just giving my impression of SF from the days when I lived relatively nearby.
Why go to a bar? Is the sort of woman you'd meet in a BAR the sort you'd want to have a long term relationship with? And what does it say about her taste in getting picked up by a some dude in a bar?
Huh? What are you talking about? Where the hell else are you supposed to meet people if not in a bar? Would you prefer me to meet some losery loner on an online dating site or something?
If you mean strictly offline, then: college, work, concerts, convention for whatever hobby you have, politics, charity, or a social organization of some kind. That is to say, some gathering whose nature selects people with interests you share, some of whom might happen to be looking for someone, as opposed to a bar or similar venue, which selects for people who are looking for someone, some of whom might happen to share your interests. The same distinction applies to online activities: a dating site, vs. some online activity which brings together people and occasionally leads to love/friendship among the people involved. One of my coworkers at a previous job met his wife on a BBS via helping with computer accessibility for the blind. I know several couples who met each other via online anime fandom, and (indirectly) others who met via online games.
Maybe you'd prefer me to meet people in a fucking church!
That falls under the "social organization of some kind" category. I'm sure there are a few atheist equivalents, for those for whom that's an active interest rather than merely not having a religion.
Maybe living there is better than visiting, but every time I made the yearly drive to SF for the Software Development Expo, it was hell. Streets that seem nigh-vertical, an insane profusion of one-way streets -- in one case, two of them meeting in opposite directions at the top of a hill -- plus paying through the nose for parking. I was always glad to be back on I-80 and headed home.
Not intended as a flame, I know there are people who love SF, but I like living in a post-WW2 horizontal city instead of a pre-WW2 vertical one.
Apparently Beavis and Butthead have somehow learned to code, and they're working at Microsoft.
"Huhhuh, huhhuh. Check it out, Beavis: 0xB16B00B5."
"Heheheheh. Uhh... I don't get it."
"It says 'big boobs', dumbass!"
"Oh yeah. Heheheheh. That's pretty cool. Heheheh! Boobs rule!"
"Boobs kick ass."
"Heheheheh! You said 'ass.'"
"Whoa! Windows 7 is a chick!"
"Maybe we can score!"
"Huhuhuh. Bathe her, and bring her to me. Huhuhuhuh."
Leetspeek kiddies may see patterns in hex constants but people who have actual paying jobs generally don't.
Really, because I use 0xdeadbeef as a magic constant all the time. In my paying job where I write code for a living.
0xdeadbeef isn't leetspeak, though -- it doesn't substitute numbers of letters, and for that matter it's spelled correctly.
I do think the "it's sexist" attitude is a rather silly, though. How many guys would to be offended or feel bad at seeing 0xB16BA115 somewhere in the code? Well, except for those who would think "I touched someone else's 0xB16BA115 with my cursor, does that make me gay?"
IIRC applescript had localized versions. There wasn't a problem in reading foreign scripts because keywords were translated (at one point keyword must be recognizable to the interpreter, that makes it relatively easy to translate them.
Perhaps this is a minor annoyance, but it sounds like this would increase the chances of identifier names being forbidden due to collision with reserved words. For example, instead of just "export" being reserved, you'd also have (among others) "exporter" for French support. Or so Google Translate tells me. Of course, this assumes that the interpreter supports various human languages without you having to tell it ahead of time which one you're using.
That bit about "consistent with the economic interests of the United States, both domestically and abroad" sounds remarkably like "what's good for GM is good for America" -- except that, to my knowledge, Ford never tried to block sales of the Camaro by citing infringements of Mustang-related patents. Besides, I must have missed the part where biasing the US legal system in favor of the RIAA and MPAA, and constricting our network infrastructure to conform to those organizations' business models, is even slightly in America's overall economic interest.
I'm all for covering contingencies, but if a thousand years pass without the human race developing space flight capability that's safe and reliable enough for us to just pitch the waste into the Sun (or for us just to find a way to re-use the waste), we're a hopeless species anyway.
COICA, introduced by Patrick Leahy (Democrat), unanimously passed by a committee of both parties, blocked by Ron Wyden (Republican).
Ron Wyden is a Democrat, not Republican.
You are correct. My bad. Must have been focusing on the wrong end of "D-OR".
Copyright (and intellectual-property and Internet legislation in general) is one area where Republicans and Democrats are pretty much equal. Unfortunately for us, they're equally horrible. As a sampling, so far we've had:
The CDA, pushed primarily by a Democrats (Exon) in a Republican congress and signed by a Democratic president.
The DMCA, passed unanimously by 57 Republican and 43 Democratic senators, and signed by a Democratic president.
The CTEA, sponsored from beyond the grave by Republican Sonny Bono, likewise passed unanimously by the same Senate and by a Republican House, and signed by a Democratic president.
Prior to that, we had the Copyright Act of 1976, which among other things also extended the length of copyrights, passed by a Democratic congress and signed by a Republican president.
Copyright Renewal Act of 1992, passed by a Democratic congress, signed by a Republican president.
COICA, introduced by Patrick Leahy (Democrat), unanimously passed by a committee of both parties, blocked by Ron Wyden (Republican).
PIPA, exactly the same as above (though the committee members may have changed, I didn't check that).
SOPA, sponsored by our good friend Lamar, a Republican, but co-sponsored by members of both parties, backed by groups from associated with both parties and by ex-Clinton and ex-Bush 2.0 administration members.
So it's basically been a bipartisan buggerfest, for several decades, for almost as long as there's been consumer-available copying equipment.
I'm pretty sure Rampant is referring to this scene from Revenge of the Nerds.
I'm not against software patents on principle, as some folks are, but I'm more or less de facto against them because I have yet to see one even slightly deserving of enforcement. Maybe that's selection bias on my part. Anyone care to point out some software patents that involving something that actually should be patentable?
If by "lately" you mean "before most Slashdot users were born", then yes. Things designed by a committee tend to suck, regardless of what the things are. They tend to suck more the larger the committee is, and even more when the members of the committee have hugely divergent agendas.
Good results tend to occur when A starts doing something (or A and B agree to be compatible in some way), C observes the good results, and C decides to follow the example. Repeat for D, E, F, etc. If some existing behavior of C gets in the way of following the example, C has a strong incentive to ditch that behavior to achieve the observed good results.
Crappy results tend to occur when you sit A, B, C... Z down together. Even if they're all acting in good faith to get a desirable result, they're going to try to force the agreement to allow for whatever existing behaviors that they don't want to ditch, even if those behaviors get in the way of the stated goal. To cite one example, the Soviets insisted that the UN Convention on Genocide define genocide so that mass killings on an ethnic/religious basis counted but mass killings on a political or economic basis did not, so that Stalin's exterminations of the Kulaks could not be called genocide.
As it applies to internet freedom, the best thing to do is for people in basically-free countries to work to fix or avert the flaws, to make them more free (for example, the EU rejection of ACTA). Countries with freer policies will benefit, and other countries can either emulate them or forgo the benefits themselves. Signing an agreement about internet freedom including countries whose leaders are fundamentally hostile to freedom is at best a useless feel-good gesture, and worse, tends to water down the concept of freedom due to the compromises necessary to get the agreement signed.
Obama is Protestant of some flavor. Romney is a Mormon. Which religion inspired a movie and TV series about a "rag-tag fugitive fleet" of humans fighting killer robots in outer space? I rest my case.
The article didn't explain why Nigeria, instead of (say) Kenya or Uganda -- or Sri Lanka or Bolivia or Uzbekistan.