I think this is a monster created by Social Media priorities and the lack of structure adopted by the choice of the blog as the main model for communication on web pages and social media sites. The abuse comes from the equal voice every respondent gets, and it reflects that fact that human beings need far more nuance than the blog is able to give then. The blog begins to fail in its human function after about 10 replies or so. It is fine for short one-off threads; maybe about 95% of what is in Facebook or Twitter, but really quickly falls apart if there is any lengthy discussion or contention.
Threading by Topic Change
The threading and sub-threading that is allowed in discussion fourms is an important filtering tool that users can employ to choose what they want to read. It was relatively easy to select threads in USENET newsgroups that were likely to meed your needs by avoiding subjects that were tagged as people responded to the,. A user could tag a particular thread as coming from respsonding to a troll, for example. Or a reader could decide that a thread containing 100 replies was low hanging fruit or too facile to read. The skill at setting new topics is that self-selection can direct readers to what they are interested in, That might include straying from their preconceptions as well.
Discussion needs more structure than a blog
There is a technical solution and it existed long before the web and blogs existed. It is the structure that existed in e-mail and discussion forums, notably USENET beginning in about 1985. Mark Zuckerberg is noted for having decided that unstructured Javascript Textareas was the perfered medium for communication, i.e. the blog, in social media. My guess is that the Big Data application for his CMS was the reason. He placed the priorities of software that likes to grep through text blocks as the data mining tool of choice for his business partners. This makes features like quoting from other postings and threading of posts unfavored. But this is the reason for the abuse of blogs. And the "abuse" of the blog may be no more than changing the subject or hijacking the thread, something that is natural for human discourse, such as in a speaking conversation or a debate. Such tactics and including offensive remarks and trolling were handled in the past by technical features such as changing the topic line and responding by context quote and replying in kind. It is because such tools had been stripped from the blog in most current social media sites that the tactics people use to try to manipulate each other in a conversation are a problem. They were not a problem in the past, So, I argue that the problem is due to business decisions and lack of imagination in the owners of web sites and that tools such as Reddit and Slashdot contain some of the solution.
Topics need to be Neutral, not Promoted
There is another piece. It is to remove the social media promotion of topics by making the subject hierarchy neutral to the content. The social media promotion of topics, whether done by an editorial board as on Slashdot or as a user promotion as on Reddit, still creates a problem in undue bias in the stories that get attention. Slashdot had a topic hierarchy, but it is a second key to the editorial promotion. The USENET newsgroup hierarchy is still better for its neutrality of subjects than any promotion scheme proposed by social media sites. I know USENET has a bad reputation for abuse of binary media, but that could easily be fixed by not allowing for binary postings and an alternative hierarchy, yet again, could be proposed to separate its web-based resurection from the old one. I really think that the USENET approach is ultimately the right answer to the failings of social media blogging.
Yeah, I like that. Conspiracy theorists often fail by assuming that people are too powerful or too smart. That is because they have a teleological assumption that it is intention that causes things to happen, not that we just bungle into things. This spills over into politics, too, we blame the President for things because the reality is just too hard to accept, that leaders often don't lead, that they are driven by events just like the rest of us. Consider that a main role of Christian moral belief is to fix blame, the assumption is that God told you the Right Way and you fail by not choosing that, the world becomes conveiently too simple. This is the same error as laying blame and thinking that intention is the cause of things. It is indeed dangerous that humans are not smart enough to see what is unintended consequence of their actions. It will probably lead to our extinction sooner or later, maybe sooner. Until then regard human affairs as a comedy of errors.
It is facile to blame civil service employees for corruption, noting the reduced pay they get as compared with equivalent private sector jobs, and to blame their management for not being current on technology and more current on agency politics, but remember, please, that Congress holds the purse strings. That was thought to be a prudent way to balance the self-interests of the civil servants and the executive branch in 1789, but what results is that the Congress is technically incompetent and also in other ways too. They are often babes in the woods about how to spend on programs and partly to protect their flawed judgement they have made the procurement process for technology a daunting and obstructive task. What this means that if you go to work in a government agency you are often dealing with yesterday's technology today, as if you stepped into a time machine. What engineer would want to work with unit record equipment from the 1960's except under duress or public service?
I payed Hell in 1977 while doing scientific programming at U.S. Geological Survey that they should adopt UNIX systems both for the productivity and the cost when the management had invested in a Honeywell MULTICS (!) system whose main compiled language was PL/1. They did begin to adopt UNIX late in my career there. I left in 1983 to work in the private sector.
Remember that it is far easier to hide things in private-sector businesses. Private-sector orgs claim that to have to disclose what the public-sector has to would put them at risk, yet much malfeasence and incompetence can be hidden. I think we have just seen this in auto makers hiding recalls. So, the bottom line doesn't always properly record inefficiency and stupidity, especially when accounting can be used to hide losses. It is creative destruction, technology that undermines entrenched organization that leads to change. People tend to be inertial. That have to be kicked by breakthroughs that make their way of doing things change suddenly. This is true of all operations, private business is not as different from public-sector work as you might think.
In fact, much of the government's inefficiency is due to the penny-wise and pound-foolish spending policies of Congress, which tends to be uncreatively conservative about spending that would really create efficiency. Go to any government office and look at their IT. It is like going back in time 20 or more years in time. That is due to an obstructive procurement process as set up by Congress. What you have to remember about Congress is that most of its members are incompetent, especially about technology, and yet technology is a huge part of the spending they approve. So, if you have ever worked for a government agency, you know that the conditions and the work techniques often revolve abound antiquated technology and the attendant organization problems it creates, not individual laziness. Working in such an environment, created by back-firing checks and balances written into the Constitution, is disheartening if you want to do a better job that gets more efficient and easier. The inertia in the system impedes your progress.
In the private sector one sees much better technology, generally, but there the problem is short-term thinking and failure often comes from half-baked executive decisions that ruin good ideas.
I hope that what happens on the way to realizing the pipe dreams of fat egos who raise capital in Silicon Valley pays off in unexpected ways. I know something about the math and Big Data uses for python and the many libraries its supports, and the interest in it at Google. I know that the Social Media applications are the most visible of these uses, and I don't approve of them, of Google and Facebook spying on its users to provide hints to target ads, but at the same time the technical tools they are using have far wider applications. There are really interesting scientific applications in areas like astronomy, which has a gargantian big data problem, using the same tools.
If there is any area where I would like to see some hard response to, it is the effect on non-Silicon Valley residents in the San Francisco Bay Area, on jobs, on housing, and on infrastructure. The "hard" response would be for the public and elected officials to take a more critical look at the effects of capital investment for technology companies in the area. It seems like most politicians pretty much swoon when some business man says that he wants to spend billions on some venture in Silicon Valley. Given the limitations of land and resources, it is not unreasonable to begin to see the drawbacks of growth. I have been rooting against the advocates of "progress" here for some time. It delights me that the traffic and congestion problems for Levi Stadium haven't been worked out and I would not want to live anywhere near that disaster, and the same applies to many places in the South Bay.
Too much benefit of the doubt is given to investors, fat egos or not, and to the advocates for growth and not enough heed to the downside. We think that we shouldn't tell the rich how to spend their money as if by becoming rich they earned the right to order the rest of us around to their priorities for the region. We could decide that it is really better for us to tel then to take their business elsewhere, to Texas perhaps. I heard politicians chortling that they have persuaded Tesla to locate its megabattery plant in California rather than in Nevada or Texas. They haven't told us the risk of chemical toxics to employ 6500 people in our midst when maybe it would be better for us to have that work done out of state.
I used to think that, until package database corruption caused by repository changes forces me to completely re-install, then Linux becomes a problem. It becomes a problem with you ask a Linux novice to manually partition his drive so the can protect his files in a separate/home. something not done by default with he installs Linux so that when the package manager breaks after 18 months he has to re-install. This is too much work unless you have had UNIX system admin experience and to expect novices to tackle what should have been an option in the distro install is a big problem for Linux.
The design of class libraries by Sun Microsystems was such a disaster that the acquisition of Sun by Oracle seems most fitting as an idiot like Larry Ellison, could kill off the bad idea. That doesn't mean Java is dead, it means that it can fork and someone else will fix the disaster, or it means the the JRE will be an unchanging and silent platform under some better conceived language. I don't know if Julia is that answer or not, but something like that could extend the life of the JRE.
I doesn't surprise me at all that Oracle would squander what it got from Sun. I never thought much of Larry Ellison or his company, they have about as much imagination and creatively as a vegetable!
This is very dangerous. It is true that is comes from the nice-nice urge of most merchants not to offend customers, but in social media it has gotten out of hand. Sometimes it is intended, everybody must be nice and uncontroversial and avoid PR diasters, but this doesn't serve us will in the area of citizenship and civil discourse which have taken a beating due to the type of mass media and social media we have.
I place most of the blame for this on the blog, and on Mark Zuckerberg's idea of "Simple" UI design. It actually curtails communication and that is all at the behest of the Big Data application of Facebook and Google's business partners. It may be that they also really wish to suppress debate that supports democratic processes. that they are willing to suppress Free Speech to make a buck. The blog does not facilitate discussion. as proof go look at lengthy threads on Facebook, they really go anywhere and they frustrate their users. The reason is that they need far more structure than is allowed by the UI. We gave some of the needed structure here on Slashdot. One change I would make, and it would remove another big part of the Social Media suppression, it to make the topic hiererarchy less editorial either from an editorial staff or upmods by readers. I would restructure Slashdot more like a USENET newsgroup hiererarchy.
Business and the economy is based on the fact that a majority of people are stupid. If that weren't true than the informal fallacies in most advertising would be laughed off the air and out of print. "Stupid" means correctly unaware, so that very bright people can be stupid, since processing ability is not the same as knowledge. So,
the whole economy is based on people being lazy to some extant, to want convience and ease, and wishful thinking. That is why cons are common in business. Not all business is deceptive but much of it is or is based on subliminal messages. Think of how much appeal comes from the impression that someone offering a service rally cares about you more than getting their asking price, when the latter is really all they really care about. I am not being cynical. really, I am just stating that people operate on impressions that do not stand up to critical tests of motivation and that most people are not used to thinking critically.
Except of course of what does not reach your awareness and ability to analyze. And if by the design of the feed you are denied the time it takes for the mind to think it through. I have seen bright people suckered in by the way media operate and there is a great deal of technique that we are obviously not informed about which is meant to persuade and manipulate our thoughts, especially the subliminal rapid-fire responses of the Limbic System. These responses can take time to filter into consciousness and be censored by rational thought and deliberation, and the designers of every ad. every news show. and Social Media know that and more. The deregulation of the FCC started under the Reagan Administration is about opening the flood gates of subliminal persuasion. Now, the precepts of General Semantics, used in response to propaganda on the radio that began in the 1930's, should inform the Watchdogs of the Mind, and at least Descartes' Idols of the Mind were early attempts to point out the foibles of the mind, even and maybe especially people who are sure of their own minds need to be schooled in them.
I don't know if it is intentional of not but Al-Jezire does not have commercial breaks, or very many if you count their own promos, but because all their bills are paid for by the government and oil money their news feed runs without interruption. This means that a listener is not given the chance to deliberate through their 7/24 news cycle. I know of an intelligent person who is caught up in that news cycle for hours on end, especially on a big news day, and like CNN one can be glued to the stream if one is not careful. The best policy is to disconnect and take time to process. If I were designing media to manipulate I would try to entrain the listeners undevided attention so that the rational censors do not have time to filter out the sublinimal messaging.
Then, we are in deep trouble. I take most of what I see on Facebook with a grain of salt, especially since the blog format doesn't support analysis and discussion. It is intentionally designed not to. So, I read Facebook, even my "friends" and family with the view that everything is biased, especially by Facebook, and I don't reply. I think Facebook is self-limiting. The OP links said as much, The spam burden can't raise much more than it is now. Facebook will probably survive as long as it penetrates into developing markets via mobile devices, but its relevance to its long-time users, who may use it only to keep in tough with family, will decline over time.
Yes, maybe the most rationalistic and anti-social among us are the most susceptible to the manipulation since they think that their consciousness is sufficient to protect them from fraud. Unfortunately, most of their brain is spending time processing subliminal messages, which is how Fox News fires up the right-wingers. They have no knowledge of general semantics and are often deluded that they can't be conned. How may engineers would admit that they can be conned?
I'd rather have good docs and bad tools instead of tools that claim to be ready for users that are poorly documented. I have just experienced yet another instance of bad documentation and indeed how developer choices contribute to both poor documentation and poor software.
FOSS and Linux eontail a lie. It is somewhat like a social media lie that a community can arrive at quality products just by the need they express and the solutions they generate. I have been using Ubuntu since 8.04 and my 12.04 just fell off the end of the repos, The means I get the "Untrusted Package" nonsense from the Soiftware Center for any new package I try to install. This is Cannonical's sneaky way to telling you that your need to reinstal; it isn't a matter of upgrade because the next rev. they allow you to use is 12,10, and that is not supported. Now this would not be so bad if they allowed/home to be in its own partition by default, but they don't help you with that. When Ubuntu installs, it needs a swap partition, so why can't it ask if there is a separate/home or make one?
There is a FOSS tool called recordmydesktop that claims to do desktop video capture with sound. It fails to capture sound at all on U. 12,04 and 14.04 installs I have. The documentation is a night mare because the program has a lousy interface is was a hacked command line tool with many many options, To get into sound on most Linux systems is a nightmare again because of complex command-line options. It is very hard to figure this stuff out and the way FOSS works if it gets on the Debian repositories it is propagated everywhere, Ubuntu, Mint, etc., etc., with no standards for utility and quality of documentation. That is why FOSS and Linux suck and suck even more as time goes on. My eyesight is failing and to read complex man pages and use command-line options is literally getting to be a pain. I am convinced that much of this is unecessary and is due to geeks not finishing what they started or not really dealing with proper choices in the first place.
Go to You Tube and look for a video that came from the SciPy 2013 Conference from Austin Texas entitled something like "Write Buggy Software". This describes the problem very well and the challenge not met by developers to write simple tools first and use bug reports to tell them who their users are and what they expect from the tool. Too often especially on the Debian repositories I down load something to try that disappoints because it either does not do what it claims or it is too complex to use. The developer has lost the forest for the trees because the underlying driver environment was buggy or he added too many choices each one of which multiplies the chance for bugs. He becomes overwealmed, having bitten off too much, and walks away, and yet the software remains on the repositories.
I am seriously consider leaving the world of Linux, I have used and managed early UNIX systems and nearly all Solaris systems, so I am not afraid of the command line. I just think that the systems ought to be more robust and easier to maintain in config. I am seriously thinking about getting rid of all of my Linux installs and getting a Mac as my main desktop. I have had a Mac before, OS X 10.4, Power PC Mac Mini, but that is a white elephant now, but I may get a current Mac Mini or a Macbook of some kind. The reason is that UNIX and BSD are still under the hood, and FOSS stuff installs there, I can get a Terminal when I want to use the shell, all true, but the big plus of OS X in my experience is that Apple has assured that an application it supports will install and configure reasonably on its hardware. My hint to Apple is that you can undercut poorly supported Debian derivative Linux installs by cutting the cost of Mac hardware by one half. Then it would become an attractive alternative to Linux and Microsoft Windows, and that the way in is that support of apps on a stable platform.
Sounds to me like the Carson Sink would be a good place to move Silicon Valley firms, too. Here, let me help you out, which way did you come in? Maybe then we could grow produce in Santa Clara Valley again, once they dig up all the concrete and knock down the tite-ups; hey wait for the next M. 7.2 quake on the Calavaras Fault, that'll help. But then you'd have to clean up all the Superfund Sites left by the electronics business before you could replant a single plum tree.
So, Carson Sink is a no-way-out drainage, water checks-in but doesn't check out; sounds good for Google and Facebook, Maybe it is better for charging batteries, Lake Mead power might be cheaper than PG&E. That might be good for all those toxins made by battery and electronics technology. Good Riddance.
On the other hand I do realize that although Big Data application for Social Media seem invasive and abusive, that the same tools are used by science to handle huge datasets, like those generated by synoptic telescopy for astronomers, one such project will generate 3 Tb a night for 10 years! Wouldn't it be nice if Lick Observatory could be used for spectroscopy when the lights of Silicon Valley go dim and fade?
Bias results. The FDA doesn't run very many independent tests. Congress doesn't fund it to conduct lots of testing on its own, so it has to rely on studies provided by the drug companies who are at the same time looking for their products to be approved by the FDA. That is a huge opportunity for bias. Actually, most federal regulators have this problem. Each Cabinet Secretary is charged with a built-in conflict of interest, The agency regulates an industry it also promotes and the special interests, industry lobbyists get s big influence by their access to Congress and the funding process, so they can effectively limit the effectiveness of the agency to conduct independent unbiased tests. The Conservative rap that government interfers with business is largely offset by the subsidies and access business groups get from government through legislation. I think this is most obvious at Agriculture. Corruption of the food supply is at least as serious as any problems with drug approvals, especially when chemical and agribusiness interests push food processing and substituting of profitable additives into the food supply. The mere substitution of corn syrup for beet and cane sugar because of a cost surge in the 1990s has huge unforseen implications not seen by testing procedures that give the benefit of the doubt to the business people seeking the approvals. That one change probably has led to the obesity epidemic we are seeing now because the way fructose is converted directly into fat was not known at the time. It was assumed that it was just a cheaper carbohydrate substitute, but it is not. The implication is that to the extant the FDA and Agriculture Department support that change and support the business plans of the processed food industry will drive the high cost of Medical Care for decades to come, including Medicare. If the government decided that the food processing industry has made a huge mistake that is going to cost the nation trillions, the reaction would be as serious as it was to tobacco companies. The problem is how much government really is in bed with business interests and not the advisories some Republicans claim they are.
This sounds to me like the trend in much of business and at root cause is the digital revolution itself. It enabled investors to micromanage the fortunes of companies who routinely cut customer service to please the markets. They also pressure the companies to show very short-term return on investment and completely forget the service they claim to provide.
There needs to be something like a purge of business and investment in the world which restores confidence in the products and services a company provides to its paying customers, not just its financial condition. I think this state of affairs is the fault of the world banking and finance system and the poor ethical examples set in markets and management and taught in business schools around the world. I would like to see the MBA and economics degrees depreciated against degrees in history and politics supported by training in ethics. A collapse of the current economic order and the resulting conflagration could have that effect at the cost of millions of lives, we have been down that road before, and to go down that road seems to be ingrained in the human condition that relies on short-term thinking and elitism. Classical education was supposed to address the human failings, but it was only for elites. Now, pragmatism has tainted the quality of people's training so that basic human decency is not taught. The behavior of Comcast agents is a moral failure in a place where leaders do not set an example and where people mistake ethics for moral authoritarians. That is why members of the clergy are often more prone to moral lapses than even business people, who already have loose principles.
Fuck Silicon Valley and Fuck Stanford! What started out as electronics and computers has deteriorated into a Social Media Scam driven by prejudiced recruiters and racists paid for by unscrupulous investors and venture capitalists. It is plutocracy and elitism of the kind that led millionaires to build lavish mansions on the Peninsula long before there was any electronics.
I live in the Bay Area, was born here and live at the north end of Silicon Valley and am rooting against its interests, against the boosters in the city governments and the state. I wish Rick Perry had lured some of the spoiled brats to Texas, they are spoiling it for "normal' people. Even Fuck U.C. for contributing to the elitism to what extant a public university can do along side a private one, creating an exceptional class who think more of themselves than they should. There needs to be far greater humility than there is and I surly hope that the overblown egos of this area will get laid low, even it it is just a property value crash. I laugh at Livy Stadium possibly not having enough infrastructure, transportation and parking to host 49'er games without causing grid lock in Santa Clara. It serves the idiots who run Silicon Valley to suffer a big crunch. When business people realize that poor management of growth and infrastructure really does hurt productivity, like it did in 1999 and 2000 when commutes were starting to cut into hours at work of all workers in SV, then they will start to look elsewhere, even Texas, and when that happens I will be happy since the Republicans have always been first advocating for growth even if it creates crunches and elites. Maybe Texas deserves Silicon Valley. In any case, nature may get the last word as SV lives on shakey ground. The Bay Area is a pull-apart basin in the San Andreas Transform system.
I had my first contact with Windows 8.1 last week. I had helped a friend install python 2.7 from Active State on her system and was trying to use the python.org documentation with Python. I couldn't cut and paste snippets from the doc into the Interpreter. The browser, firefox, seems to open in a different environment and unless I couldn't find the clipbord, the mechanics was not at all clear. Windows 8.1 looks like a single process OS trying to fake being multiitasking, not like every Linux system I have seen since 1995 and every UNIX system I've seen since 1986.
It may be that you would go from Linux to Win 8.1 because phone OS and interfaces are so crippled compared to desktop, and you like the simplicity of a smartphone menu until you want to do something not available as an app. Why not wait a while until desktop OS run in smart phone form factors with a good network hub on them so you can attach desktop peripherals including a display? Maybe, you can beat on the smart phone people to do projected keyboards, which exist, and projected displays, which don't as yet. Maybe Ubuntu's phone is no answer, but with the right hardware, the size of the device shouldn't matter, you could run Linux on one even if Unity is not the preferred mobile interface.
Yeah, Ronald Reagan relied on the fact that political memory only lasts two generations or less than 60 years, and then old mistakes get repeated, especially under his skilled use of simpleton propaganda and well financed lies. I am referring to his undermining of the Air Traffic Controllers Union in 1983 and his oversimplification of the value of deregulation, for which we are paying mightily now. It is one of the factors behind the bimodal income distribution which was predicted by his critics in 1982. We should re-examine why David Stockman left his admin. that year. But the Great Communicator as Reagan was called was a Great Liar. If those of you too young to know what I am talking about, need a history lesson, as do many of you who can't seem to remember U.S. History from 1890-1940, or British history in the 19th Century. Sweat Shops were real, massive exploitation of salleried workers by tycoons, today's entrapaneurs, was very real, and liars like Reagan and lately Mitt Romney and hundreds of High Tech entrapaneurs and Libertarians repeat the lie because they want to exploit you.
We could put a stop to this, but first we need to become conscious of the universality of humans taking unfair advantage and that political ideology and rhetoric is no antidote, only cover for the base motive. A world in which such urges that appear in any one of us, if given the power, is discouraged, is better than accepting the lies of one side of the tendency. So a completely unregulated economy is not the answer, nor is a totally regulated one. We are just going to have to accept the conflict between the opposed interests, and unlike the Roberts Court, tipping the balance to one group against the other is not going to help, in fact it is going to destroy the entire system beginning with the U.S. Constitution, which, in case you are unaware, is on very shaky grounds because of it.
It is too bad that people end up literally at a dead end, but on the other hand it is choices they make which leads them there, so if they choose a high-stress, artificial enviornment driven by investors who end up taking advantage and lives, they are largely themselves to blame, especially if they ascribe to Randian myths about bering responsible for their actions, or is that responsible to no one but their own lust?
I have become jaded by the whole experience of Silly Con Man Valley, as I live in it and dislike what it has become, in part what it always has been, a haven for spoiled elitists, some very bright people for sure, but also many fools who imagine themselves wise that may only be intelligent. They may be the willing pawns of lessor folk, diminished by their craven urges and darker motives. I am hoping that the whole place caves in on itself, maybe literally shaken to its core, and shattered of its illusion of value, very much aided by boosterism of elected officials like Ed Lee and Chuck Reed, and the Mercury News over promoting the value of the work done by the firms here and resulting in obscene real estate values. But I know that all of this rests on unstable ground.
And less than Ubuntu Unity, if that is possible. I had resisted having anything to do with Windows 8 because Metro Sucked, and now I know that is true, having had to struggle with it today on a laptop. Thank God I didn't buy a machine with it preinstalled, I'd just nuke it along with secure boot and just use BIOS boot and boot a Linux. (I know that some Linux plays with Secure Boot.).
Windows 8 still feels like a single-process machine. I couldn't even cut and paste snippets from the browser into Idle (Python) such as I could do in any Linux system and because the OS is so slow, the pointer kept vanishing for minutes at a time, bogus. Windows 8 seems to isolate apps in their own desktops and not support clipboards between them.
So, I hope that if Windows is to be simplified that M$ has the wisdom to not use Metro as the standard. Can the end of M$ be that far off? We can hope.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the fault of Social Media, itself
I think this is a monster created by Social Media priorities and the lack of structure adopted by the choice of the blog as the main model for communication on web pages and social media sites. The abuse comes from the equal voice every respondent gets, and it reflects that fact that human beings need far more nuance than the blog is able to give then. The blog begins to fail in its human function after about 10 replies or so. It is fine for short one-off threads; maybe about 95% of what is in Facebook or Twitter, but really quickly falls apart if there is any lengthy discussion or contention.
Threading by Topic Change
The threading and sub-threading that is allowed in discussion fourms is an important filtering tool that users can employ to choose what they want to read. It was relatively easy to select threads in USENET newsgroups that were likely to meed your needs by avoiding subjects that were tagged as people responded to the,. A user could tag a particular thread as coming from respsonding to a troll, for example. Or a reader could decide that a thread containing 100 replies was low hanging fruit or too facile to read. The skill at setting new topics is that self-selection can direct readers to what they are interested in, That might include straying from their preconceptions as well.
Discussion needs more structure than a blog
There is a technical solution and it existed long before the web and blogs existed. It is the structure that existed in e-mail and discussion forums, notably USENET beginning in about 1985. Mark Zuckerberg is noted for having decided that unstructured Javascript Textareas was the perfered medium for communication, i.e. the blog, in social media. My guess is that the Big Data application for his CMS was the reason. He placed the priorities of software that likes to grep through text blocks as the data mining tool of choice for his business partners. This makes features like quoting from other postings and threading of posts unfavored. But this is the reason for the abuse of blogs. And the "abuse" of the blog may be no more than changing the subject or hijacking the thread, something that is natural for human discourse, such as in a speaking conversation or a debate. Such tactics and including offensive remarks and trolling were handled in the past by technical features such as changing the topic line and responding by context quote and replying in kind. It is because such tools had been stripped from the blog in most current social media sites that the tactics people use to try to manipulate each other in a conversation are a problem. They were not a problem in the past, So, I argue that the problem is due to business decisions and lack of imagination in the owners of web sites and that tools such as Reddit and Slashdot contain some of the solution.
Topics need to be Neutral, not Promoted
There is another piece. It is to remove the social media promotion of topics by making the subject hierarchy neutral to the content. The social media promotion of topics, whether done by an editorial board as on Slashdot or as a user promotion as on Reddit, still creates a problem in undue bias in the stories that get attention. Slashdot had a topic hierarchy, but it is a second key to the editorial promotion. The USENET newsgroup hierarchy is still better for its neutrality of subjects than any promotion scheme proposed by social media sites. I know USENET has a bad reputation for abuse of binary media, but that could easily be fixed by not allowing for binary postings and an alternative hierarchy, yet again, could be proposed to separate its web-based resurection from the old one. I really think that the USENET approach is ultimately the right answer to the failings of social media blogging.
Yeah, I like that. Conspiracy theorists often fail by assuming that people are too powerful or too smart. That is because they have a teleological assumption that it is intention that causes things to happen, not that we just bungle into things. This spills over into politics, too, we blame the President for things because the reality is just too hard to accept, that leaders often don't lead, that they are driven by events just like the rest of us. Consider that a main role of Christian moral belief is to fix blame, the assumption is that God told you the Right Way and you fail by not choosing that, the world becomes conveiently too simple. This is the same error as laying blame and thinking that intention is the cause of things. It is indeed dangerous that humans are not smart enough to see what is unintended consequence of their actions. It will probably lead to our extinction sooner or later, maybe sooner. Until then regard human affairs as a comedy of errors.
It is facile to blame civil service employees for corruption, noting the reduced pay they get as compared with equivalent private sector jobs, and to blame their management for not being current on technology and more current on agency politics, but remember, please, that Congress holds the purse strings. That was thought to be a prudent way to balance the self-interests of the civil servants and the executive branch in 1789, but what results is that the Congress is technically incompetent and also in other ways too. They are often babes in the woods about how to spend on programs and partly to protect their flawed judgement they have made the procurement process for technology a daunting and obstructive task. What this means that if you go to work in a government agency you are often dealing with yesterday's technology today, as if you stepped into a time machine. What engineer would want to work with unit record equipment from the 1960's except under duress or public service?
I payed Hell in 1977 while doing scientific programming at U.S. Geological Survey that they should adopt UNIX systems both for the productivity and the cost when the management had invested in a Honeywell MULTICS (!) system whose main compiled language was PL/1. They did begin to adopt UNIX late in my career there. I left in 1983 to work in the private sector.
Remember that it is far easier to hide things in private-sector businesses. Private-sector orgs claim that to have to disclose what the public-sector has to would put them at risk, yet much malfeasence and incompetence can be hidden. I think we have just seen this in auto makers hiding recalls. So, the bottom line doesn't always properly record inefficiency and stupidity, especially when accounting can be used to hide losses. It is creative destruction, technology that undermines entrenched organization that leads to change. People tend to be inertial. That have to be kicked by breakthroughs that make their way of doing things change suddenly. This is true of all operations, private business is not as different from public-sector work as you might think.
In fact, much of the government's inefficiency is due to the penny-wise and pound-foolish spending policies of Congress, which tends to be uncreatively conservative about spending that would really create efficiency. Go to any government office and look at their IT. It is like going back in time 20 or more years in time. That is due to an obstructive procurement process as set up by Congress. What you have to remember about Congress is that most of its members are incompetent, especially about technology, and yet technology is a huge part of the spending they approve. So, if you have ever worked for a government agency, you know that the conditions and the work techniques often revolve abound antiquated technology and the attendant organization problems it creates, not individual laziness. Working in such an environment, created by back-firing checks and balances written into the Constitution, is disheartening if you want to do a better job that gets more efficient and easier. The inertia in the system impedes your progress.
In the private sector one sees much better technology, generally, but there the problem is short-term thinking and failure often comes from half-baked executive decisions that ruin good ideas.
I hope that what happens on the way to realizing the pipe dreams of fat egos who raise capital in Silicon Valley pays off in unexpected ways. I know something about the math and Big Data uses for python and the many libraries its supports, and the interest in it at Google. I know that the Social Media applications are the most visible of these uses, and I don't approve of them, of Google and Facebook spying on its users to provide hints to target ads, but at the same time the technical tools they are using have far wider applications. There are really interesting scientific applications in areas like astronomy, which has a gargantian big data problem, using the same tools.
If there is any area where I would like to see some hard response to, it is the effect on non-Silicon Valley residents in the San Francisco Bay Area, on jobs, on housing, and on infrastructure. The "hard" response would be for the public and elected officials to take a more critical look at the effects of capital investment for technology companies in the area. It seems like most politicians pretty much swoon when some business man says that he wants to spend billions on some venture in Silicon Valley. Given the limitations of land and resources, it is not unreasonable to begin to see the drawbacks of growth. I have been rooting against the advocates of "progress" here for some time. It delights me that the traffic and congestion problems for Levi Stadium haven't been worked out and I would not want to live anywhere near that disaster, and the same applies to many places in the South Bay.
Too much benefit of the doubt is given to investors, fat egos or not, and to the advocates for growth and not enough heed to the downside. We think that we shouldn't tell the rich how to spend their money as if by becoming rich they earned the right to order the rest of us around to their priorities for the region. We could decide that it is really better for us to tel then to take their business elsewhere, to Texas perhaps. I heard politicians chortling that they have persuaded Tesla to locate its megabattery plant in California rather than in Nevada or Texas. They haven't told us the risk of chemical toxics to employ 6500 people in our midst when maybe it would be better for us to have that work done out of state.
I used to think that, until package database corruption caused by repository changes forces me to completely re-install, then Linux becomes a problem. It becomes a problem with you ask a Linux novice to manually partition his drive so the can protect his files in a separate /home. something not done by default with he installs Linux so that when the package manager breaks after 18 months he has to re-install. This is too much work unless you have had UNIX system admin experience and to expect novices to tackle what should have been an option in the distro install is a big problem for Linux.
If you don't use a slide rule, you have no right to complain, least of all about the difference beteen precision and accuracy :-)
The design of class libraries by Sun Microsystems was such a disaster that the acquisition of Sun by Oracle seems most fitting as an idiot like Larry Ellison, could kill off the bad idea. That doesn't mean Java is dead, it means that it can fork and someone else will fix the disaster, or it means the the JRE will be an unchanging and silent platform under some better conceived language. I don't know if Julia is that answer or not, but something like that could extend the life of the JRE.
I doesn't surprise me at all that Oracle would squander what it got from Sun. I never thought much of Larry Ellison or his company, they have about as much imagination and creatively as a vegetable!
This is very dangerous. It is true that is comes from the nice-nice urge of most merchants not to offend customers, but in social media it has gotten out of hand. Sometimes it is intended, everybody must be nice and uncontroversial and avoid PR diasters, but this doesn't serve us will in the area of citizenship and civil discourse which have taken a beating due to the type of mass media and social media we have.
I place most of the blame for this on the blog, and on Mark Zuckerberg's idea of "Simple" UI design. It actually curtails communication and that is all at the behest of the Big Data application of Facebook and Google's business partners. It may be that they also really wish to suppress debate that supports democratic processes. that they are willing to suppress Free Speech to make a buck. The blog does not facilitate discussion. as proof go look at lengthy threads on Facebook, they really go anywhere and they frustrate their users. The reason is that they need far more structure than is allowed by the UI. We gave some of the needed structure here on Slashdot. One change I would make, and it would remove another big part of the Social Media suppression, it to make the topic hiererarchy less editorial either from an editorial staff or upmods by readers. I would restructure Slashdot more like a USENET newsgroup hiererarchy.
Business and the economy is based on the fact that a majority of people are stupid. If that weren't true than the informal fallacies in most advertising would be laughed off the air and out of print. "Stupid" means correctly unaware, so that very bright people can be stupid, since processing ability is not the same as knowledge. So, the whole economy is based on people being lazy to some extant, to want convience and ease, and wishful thinking. That is why cons are common in business. Not all business is deceptive but much of it is or is based on subliminal messages. Think of how much appeal comes from the impression that someone offering a service rally cares about you more than getting their asking price, when the latter is really all they really care about. I am not being cynical. really, I am just stating that people operate on impressions that do not stand up to critical tests of motivation and that most people are not used to thinking critically.
Except of course of what does not reach your awareness and ability to analyze. And if by the design of the feed you are denied the time it takes for the mind to think it through. I have seen bright people suckered in by the way media operate and there is a great deal of technique that we are obviously not informed about which is meant to persuade and manipulate our thoughts, especially the subliminal rapid-fire responses of the Limbic System. These responses can take time to filter into consciousness and be censored by rational thought and deliberation, and the designers of every ad. every news show. and Social Media know that and more. The deregulation of the FCC started under the Reagan Administration is about opening the flood gates of subliminal persuasion. Now, the precepts of General Semantics, used in response to propaganda on the radio that began in the 1930's, should inform the Watchdogs of the Mind, and at least Descartes' Idols of the Mind were early attempts to point out the foibles of the mind, even and maybe especially people who are sure of their own minds need to be schooled in them.
I don't know if it is intentional of not but Al-Jezire does not have commercial breaks, or very many if you count their own promos, but because all their bills are paid for by the government and oil money their news feed runs without interruption. This means that a listener is not given the chance to deliberate through their 7/24 news cycle. I know of an intelligent person who is caught up in that news cycle for hours on end, especially on a big news day, and like CNN one can be glued to the stream if one is not careful. The best policy is to disconnect and take time to process. If I were designing media to manipulate I would try to entrain the listeners undevided attention so that the rational censors do not have time to filter out the sublinimal messaging.
Then, we are in deep trouble. I take most of what I see on Facebook with a grain of salt, especially since the blog format doesn't support analysis and discussion. It is intentionally designed not to. So, I read Facebook, even my "friends" and family with the view that everything is biased, especially by Facebook, and I don't reply. I think Facebook is self-limiting. The OP links said as much, The spam burden can't raise much more than it is now. Facebook will probably survive as long as it penetrates into developing markets via mobile devices, but its relevance to its long-time users, who may use it only to keep in tough with family, will decline over time.
Yes, maybe the most rationalistic and anti-social among us are the most susceptible to the manipulation since they think that their consciousness is sufficient to protect them from fraud. Unfortunately, most of their brain is spending time processing subliminal messages, which is how Fox News fires up the right-wingers. They have no knowledge of general semantics and are often deluded that they can't be conned. How may engineers would admit that they can be conned?
Hey, this has the same run-on form as the last posting by AC. Could it be the same guy? Interesting how some people leave a rhetorical signature.
Good run-on sentence. Do you write legalese? Please redraft as separate sentences. This will make your argument much easier to follow.
I'd rather have good docs and bad tools instead of tools that claim to be ready for users that are poorly documented. I have just experienced yet another instance of bad documentation and indeed how developer choices contribute to both poor documentation and poor software.
FOSS and Linux eontail a lie. It is somewhat like a social media lie that a community can arrive at quality products just by the need they express and the solutions they generate. I have been using Ubuntu since 8.04 and my 12.04 just fell off the end of the repos, The means I get the "Untrusted Package" nonsense from the Soiftware Center for any new package I try to install. This is Cannonical's sneaky way to telling you that your need to reinstal; it isn't a matter of upgrade because the next rev. they allow you to use is 12,10, and that is not supported. Now this would not be so bad if they allowed /home to be in its own partition by default, but they don't help you with that. When Ubuntu installs, it needs a swap partition, so why can't it ask if there is a separate /home or make one?
There is a FOSS tool called recordmydesktop that claims to do desktop video capture with sound. It fails to capture sound at all on U. 12,04 and 14.04 installs I have. The documentation is a night mare because the program has a lousy interface is was a hacked command line tool with many many options, To get into sound on most Linux systems is a nightmare again because of complex command-line options. It is very hard to figure this stuff out and the way FOSS works if it gets on the Debian repositories it is propagated everywhere, Ubuntu, Mint, etc., etc., with no standards for utility and quality of documentation. That is why FOSS and Linux suck and suck even more as time goes on. My eyesight is failing and to read complex man pages and use command-line options is literally getting to be a pain. I am convinced that much of this is unecessary and is due to geeks not finishing what they started or not really dealing with proper choices in the first place.
Go to You Tube and look for a video that came from the SciPy 2013 Conference from Austin Texas entitled something like "Write Buggy Software". This describes the problem very well and the challenge not met by developers to write simple tools first and use bug reports to tell them who their users are and what they expect from the tool. Too often especially on the Debian repositories I down load something to try that disappoints because it either does not do what it claims or it is too complex to use. The developer has lost the forest for the trees because the underlying driver environment was buggy or he added too many choices each one of which multiplies the chance for bugs. He becomes overwealmed, having bitten off too much, and walks away, and yet the software remains on the repositories.
I am seriously consider leaving the world of Linux, I have used and managed early UNIX systems and nearly all Solaris systems, so I am not afraid of the command line. I just think that the systems ought to be more robust and easier to maintain in config. I am seriously thinking about getting rid of all of my Linux installs and getting a Mac as my main desktop. I have had a Mac before, OS X 10.4, Power PC Mac Mini, but that is a white elephant now, but I may get a current Mac Mini or a Macbook of some kind. The reason is that UNIX and BSD are still under the hood, and FOSS stuff installs there, I can get a Terminal when I want to use the shell, all true, but the big plus of OS X in my experience is that Apple has assured that an application it supports will install and configure reasonably on its hardware. My hint to Apple is that you can undercut poorly supported Debian derivative Linux installs by cutting the cost of Mac hardware by one half. Then it would become an attractive alternative to Linux and Microsoft Windows, and that the way in is that support of apps on a stable platform.
I've heard that the it was inkjet cartridges that kept HP in business for so long :-)
Sounds to me like the Carson Sink would be a good place to move Silicon Valley firms, too. Here, let me help you out, which way did you come in? Maybe then we could grow produce in Santa Clara Valley again, once they dig up all the concrete and knock down the tite-ups; hey wait for the next M. 7.2 quake on the Calavaras Fault, that'll help. But then you'd have to clean up all the Superfund Sites left by the electronics business before you could replant a single plum tree.
So, Carson Sink is a no-way-out drainage, water checks-in but doesn't check out; sounds good for Google and Facebook, Maybe it is better for charging batteries, Lake Mead power might be cheaper than PG&E. That might be good for all those toxins made by battery and electronics technology. Good Riddance.
On the other hand I do realize that although Big Data application for Social Media seem invasive and abusive, that the same tools are used by science to handle huge datasets, like those generated by synoptic telescopy for astronomers, one such project will generate 3 Tb a night for 10 years! Wouldn't it be nice if Lick Observatory could be used for spectroscopy when the lights of Silicon Valley go dim and fade?
Bias results. The FDA doesn't run very many independent tests. Congress doesn't fund it to conduct lots of testing on its own, so it has to rely on studies provided by the drug companies who are at the same time looking for their products to be approved by the FDA. That is a huge opportunity for bias. Actually, most federal regulators have this problem. Each Cabinet Secretary is charged with a built-in conflict of interest, The agency regulates an industry it also promotes and the special interests, industry lobbyists get s big influence by their access to Congress and the funding process, so they can effectively limit the effectiveness of the agency to conduct independent unbiased tests. The Conservative rap that government interfers with business is largely offset by the subsidies and access business groups get from government through legislation. I think this is most obvious at Agriculture. Corruption of the food supply is at least as serious as any problems with drug approvals, especially when chemical and agribusiness interests push food processing and substituting of profitable additives into the food supply. The mere substitution of corn syrup for beet and cane sugar because of a cost surge in the 1990s has huge unforseen implications not seen by testing procedures that give the benefit of the doubt to the business people seeking the approvals. That one change probably has led to the obesity epidemic we are seeing now because the way fructose is converted directly into fat was not known at the time. It was assumed that it was just a cheaper carbohydrate substitute, but it is not. The implication is that to the extant the FDA and Agriculture Department support that change and support the business plans of the processed food industry will drive the high cost of Medical Care for decades to come, including Medicare. If the government decided that the food processing industry has made a huge mistake that is going to cost the nation trillions, the reaction would be as serious as it was to tobacco companies. The problem is how much government really is in bed with business interests and not the advisories some Republicans claim they are.
This sounds to me like the trend in much of business and at root cause is the digital revolution itself. It enabled investors to micromanage the fortunes of companies who routinely cut customer service to please the markets. They also pressure the companies to show very short-term return on investment and completely forget the service they claim to provide.
There needs to be something like a purge of business and investment in the world which restores confidence in the products and services a company provides to its paying customers, not just its financial condition. I think this state of affairs is the fault of the world banking and finance system and the poor ethical examples set in markets and management and taught in business schools around the world. I would like to see the MBA and economics degrees depreciated against degrees in history and politics supported by training in ethics. A collapse of the current economic order and the resulting conflagration could have that effect at the cost of millions of lives, we have been down that road before, and to go down that road seems to be ingrained in the human condition that relies on short-term thinking and elitism. Classical education was supposed to address the human failings, but it was only for elites. Now, pragmatism has tainted the quality of people's training so that basic human decency is not taught. The behavior of Comcast agents is a moral failure in a place where leaders do not set an example and where people mistake ethics for moral authoritarians. That is why members of the clergy are often more prone to moral lapses than even business people, who already have loose principles.
Fuck Silicon Valley and Fuck Stanford! What started out as electronics and computers has deteriorated into a Social Media Scam driven by prejudiced recruiters and racists paid for by unscrupulous investors and venture capitalists. It is plutocracy and elitism of the kind that led millionaires to build lavish mansions on the Peninsula long before there was any electronics.
I live in the Bay Area, was born here and live at the north end of Silicon Valley and am rooting against its interests, against the boosters in the city governments and the state. I wish Rick Perry had lured some of the spoiled brats to Texas, they are spoiling it for "normal' people. Even Fuck U.C. for contributing to the elitism to what extant a public university can do along side a private one, creating an exceptional class who think more of themselves than they should. There needs to be far greater humility than there is and I surly hope that the overblown egos of this area will get laid low, even it it is just a property value crash. I laugh at Livy Stadium possibly not having enough infrastructure, transportation and parking to host 49'er games without causing grid lock in Santa Clara. It serves the idiots who run Silicon Valley to suffer a big crunch. When business people realize that poor management of growth and infrastructure really does hurt productivity, like it did in 1999 and 2000 when commutes were starting to cut into hours at work of all workers in SV, then they will start to look elsewhere, even Texas, and when that happens I will be happy since the Republicans have always been first advocating for growth even if it creates crunches and elites. Maybe Texas deserves Silicon Valley. In any case, nature may get the last word as SV lives on shakey ground. The Bay Area is a pull-apart basin in the San Andreas Transform system.
I had my first contact with Windows 8.1 last week. I had helped a friend install python 2.7 from Active State on her system and was trying to use the python.org documentation with Python. I couldn't cut and paste snippets from the doc into the Interpreter. The browser, firefox, seems to open in a different environment and unless I couldn't find the clipbord, the mechanics was not at all clear. Windows 8.1 looks like a single process OS trying to fake being multiitasking, not like every Linux system I have seen since 1995 and every UNIX system I've seen since 1986.
It may be that you would go from Linux to Win 8.1 because phone OS and interfaces are so crippled compared to desktop, and you like the simplicity of a smartphone menu until you want to do something not available as an app. Why not wait a while until desktop OS run in smart phone form factors with a good network hub on them so you can attach desktop peripherals including a display? Maybe, you can beat on the smart phone people to do projected keyboards, which exist, and projected displays, which don't as yet. Maybe Ubuntu's phone is no answer, but with the right hardware, the size of the device shouldn't matter, you could run Linux on one even if Unity is not the preferred mobile interface.
Yeah, Ronald Reagan relied on the fact that political memory only lasts two generations or less than 60 years, and then old mistakes get repeated, especially under his skilled use of simpleton propaganda and well financed lies. I am referring to his undermining of the Air Traffic Controllers Union in 1983 and his oversimplification of the value of deregulation, for which we are paying mightily now. It is one of the factors behind the bimodal income distribution which was predicted by his critics in 1982. We should re-examine why David Stockman left his admin. that year. But the Great Communicator as Reagan was called was a Great Liar. If those of you too young to know what I am talking about, need a history lesson, as do many of you who can't seem to remember U.S. History from 1890-1940, or British history in the 19th Century. Sweat Shops were real, massive exploitation of salleried workers by tycoons, today's entrapaneurs, was very real, and liars like Reagan and lately Mitt Romney and hundreds of High Tech entrapaneurs and Libertarians repeat the lie because they want to exploit you.
We could put a stop to this, but first we need to become conscious of the universality of humans taking unfair advantage and that political ideology and rhetoric is no antidote, only cover for the base motive. A world in which such urges that appear in any one of us, if given the power, is discouraged, is better than accepting the lies of one side of the tendency. So a completely unregulated economy is not the answer, nor is a totally regulated one. We are just going to have to accept the conflict between the opposed interests, and unlike the Roberts Court, tipping the balance to one group against the other is not going to help, in fact it is going to destroy the entire system beginning with the U.S. Constitution, which, in case you are unaware, is on very shaky grounds because of it.
It is too bad that people end up literally at a dead end, but on the other hand it is choices they make which leads them there, so if they choose a high-stress, artificial enviornment driven by investors who end up taking advantage and lives, they are largely themselves to blame, especially if they ascribe to Randian myths about bering responsible for their actions, or is that responsible to no one but their own lust?
I have become jaded by the whole experience of Silly Con Man Valley, as I live in it and dislike what it has become, in part what it always has been, a haven for spoiled elitists, some very bright people for sure, but also many fools who imagine themselves wise that may only be intelligent. They may be the willing pawns of lessor folk, diminished by their craven urges and darker motives. I am hoping that the whole place caves in on itself, maybe literally shaken to its core, and shattered of its illusion of value, very much aided by boosterism of elected officials like Ed Lee and Chuck Reed, and the Mercury News over promoting the value of the work done by the firms here and resulting in obscene real estate values. But I know that all of this rests on unstable ground.
And less than Ubuntu Unity, if that is possible. I had resisted having anything to do with Windows 8 because Metro Sucked, and now I know that is true, having had to struggle with it today on a laptop. Thank God I didn't buy a machine with it preinstalled, I'd just nuke it along with secure boot and just use BIOS boot and boot a Linux. (I know that some Linux plays with Secure Boot.).
Windows 8 still feels like a single-process machine. I couldn't even cut and paste snippets from the browser into Idle (Python) such as I could do in any Linux system and because the OS is so slow, the pointer kept vanishing for minutes at a time, bogus. Windows 8 seems to isolate apps in their own desktops and not support clipboards between them.
So, I hope that if Windows is to be simplified that M$ has the wisdom to not use Metro as the standard. Can the end of M$ be that far off? We can hope.