Obligatory cynicism: I believe the only reason this ruling happened is the NSA found a way to technically comply with the ruling while still retaining the data. My guess is they will have a third party store it for them.
Hooray: keep the data, avoid the lawsuits, and keep raping our freedoms! A trifecta for America!
A sudden breakup of the plane would preclude any ACARS data indicating distress from being sent from the plane.
Yes, that was my point. ACARS isn't a distress signal, as far as I understand it. Receiving a constant log of position fixes via ACARS that ceases at approximately the same time and position that all ground-based radar systems lose track of the aircraft tends to strongly circumscribe the likely search radius. Bayesian statistics and all that.
I dunno. I realize things around here have somewhat changed; hell, I'm pretty new here, anyway. I would rather not be the "is this really news for nerds?" guy. Actually I haven't noticed that slogan printed on this site since certain changes were implemented.
Actually, the mandatory on-topicness for tech news on Slashdot died on 11 Sep 2001. That topic got thousands of posts from "the audience" (*cough*), and tech relevance forever after took a back seat to potential ad impressions for proposed content.
I know, I know, people always point to the "...stuff that matters" part of the slogan. However, that's a retcon construction, as proven by the fact that the content was on-topic for years before they chose to digress. It's like how the U.S. Constitution is basically now encompassed by the "General welfare means the federal government has an unlimited mandate to do whatever they want" and "everything is interstate commerce" retcons while practically everything else in the document is considered optional.
I guess it's refreshing that Dice ditched the slogan, since it hasn't been applicable in years.
I watched a documentary about Flight 447 (the Airbus flight that was lost off Brazil) and they mentioned that modern planes send tons of position and other data per flight. Seems the current system is called ACARS.
Anyway, from a probability perspective it seems highly unlikely that a plane would disappear from radar precisely at the time that a data transponder stopped sending position fixes, unless, you know, the plane crashed right there.
I mean, the media makes it sound like the search radius is "flight speed * remaining potential flight time at current fuel burn rate".
I can't find decent work. I apply for mid-level or even low-level NE roles, and get rejected because they think I'll be too expensive with my experience.
Have you ever considered lying on your resume? I have a friend who has a PhD in CS and leaves it off in order to find more opportunities for this exact reason.
What are they going to do, fire you because they later do a background search and find out you have *better* qualifications than you cited on your resume?
the first thing I did when I got Comcast was have them disable the wifi on there router and set it up so it runs as a bridge instead.
But... if it is their router, it is their network. Thus they can turn it back on at their pleasure.
I'm sure their WiFi-unilaterally-reenabled router will be encountering lots of WiFi traffic once it is wrapped in aluminum foil (or any other basic Faraday cage/signal attenuation approach).
It may be their router and their network, but it sure as hell isn't their site.
then i would wait a month or so when they were no longer avaialable, and resell them but at a higher price. see, when they're available then you can buy the same price anywhere so why pay more? but when they're unavaialbe you have to take the asking price or take a poop on the sidewalk.
Can't I do both?
He didn't say you had to take the asking price xor take a poop on the sidewalk. Common misunderstanding... go right ahead.
EU isn't a country, and yes, free speech is protected as a human right. You can insult famous people in Britain all you like, as long as you don't allege something about them which is not true. The problem is how Britain's libel laws favor ligitive rich accusers, but Britain is hardly the only places that favors rich, ligitive bastards.
I think the problem from most people's perspective is that historically the truth was not an affirmative defense against libel in Britain. I know there are many aspects of US culture that have others roll their eyes about, but this is one case where the situation was reversed.
Seems they had a new law go into effect in January, though. The blurb mentions truth as a defense, so perhaps things are improving over there.
And then suddenly fall like a rock tword a large uncaring abyss with the screams of a uncountable more poor souls filling my ears as we collectively rush onward to an inevitable shared oblivion: That's about packet loss?
I think the problem is that the STS boldly went where many other vehicles had gone before, but did it poorly and more expensively. It basically required a major overhaul after each flight and its design was heavily impeded by functionality requirements imposed by the Air Force that were never used in practice.
I suppose I would summarize your praise of the A-10 as tantamount to comparing an amazingly reliable, well-designed, and effective car (the A-10) to a classic Jaguar that's luxurious, expensive, and constantly broken (the Space Shuttle). Yes, the comparison can work, but it sends mixed messages.
Oh and the A10 is the greatest plane EVAR, period, end of story. It's better than the goddamned Space Shuttle.:)
Don't get me wrong: I love the A-10 and think the F-35 should be cancelled immediately. That said, it isn't strong praise to compare the A-10 to the Space Shuttle. Perhaps comparing it to the Mustang, the Corsair, or "pretty much anything else but that design-by-committee STS debacle"?
1. The US Cemetery business model: "So, you're telling me I pay once and then you will tend my grave forever?" "Yes! Once we are full and are getting no further sales, we will pay for the upkeep through other people's donations (we're a church), or we have set up a trust fund that is absolutely secure (*cough*), or we're planning to pawn this off to the local taxpayers for maintenance once we go out of business (most likely)."
Hm, well I don't think they are a church, and I doubt the government will bail them out. So, what's the other model?
2. The DRM server model: "People paid us and trusted us to keep running our service, but we aren't making money anymore? Well, fuck it then... *yanks plug*"
You seem to be missing the point about how the public misinterprets and overattributes things to "teh new hotness".
Every thunderstorm is a derecho now, all hot summer days are global warming, El Nino... well, let's just leave it at the Chris Farley skit on SNL, "superstorms", and now any two sequential days around -18 C will be termed a polar vortex. Hell, and these are just *weather* terminology examples.
Frankly, I'm surprised you aren't a little more miffed about the ambiguity the public injects into what were previously precisely defined terms. Yes, the precise definition will probably remain in the scientific journals, but communicating in common discourse will become more difficult.
I'm not proposing restricting information, but rather pointing out that introducing new ideas is a double-edged sword.
It takes 9 hours to go from Omaha to Miami on Amtrack , and you can get a one way ticket for $275.
No, no it doesn't. You are just counting the first leg of the trip: Omaha to Chicago. *That* takes 9+ hours. It takes literally days worth of ass in the train seat to get to Miami from Omaha, because they shunt you from Omaha to Chicago to DC and then down to Miami. Don't neglect the major stopovers you can get hit with when transferring trains.
If you don't believe me, as yourself how an Amtrak train can travel the 1,400 mile Great Circle distance between those two cities in 9 hours. That would be equivalent to a magical Amtrak travelling between the cities, as the crow flies, at ~150 mph.
Dude: it takes *days* to take the train on that Amtrak route. You can leave Omaha tomorrow, at 5 AM, and arrive in Miami 2.5 days later... at 6 PM on 24 February. It's not going to get much better than that.
But hey, if you have a line on Great Circle bullet train routes in the US, by all means let me know. Would save me time over driving.
Conversely, taking Amtrak any appreciable distance is going to be painful: painfully long and painfully expensive (unless you don't mind spending days sleeping in your chair).
$1100+, one way, from the middle of the country (say, Omaha) to an endpoint on a different route (say, Miami). Takes about 3 full days to get there, if you're lucky enough to avoid being hit with a 12+ hour stopover someplace. Yes, that price includes roomettes, but like I said: who wants to spend three solid days (again, one way) confined & sleeping in a coach seat? BTW, this is the advance price.
It would be faster, cheaper, and more relaxing to drive, even if one had to rent a vehicle. Oh, and you can leave whenever you want and stop wherever you want, too.
Passenger rail in this country is a half-baked solution in search of a problem. This makes me sad, because I would prefer to use rail in order to avoid the TSA. I just can't take a week of additional travel time to do it.
Translation: "We'll put this aside for now because you caught us out and pitched a fit about it like the little criminals we believe you all to be, and we'll wait until you inevitably forget about it, then we'll re-word it, hide it in some other, completely unassociated legislation, where it'll be voted on in the middle of the night and passed, then signed into law quietly without so much as a whisper from the media."
Precisely: that's the common trope. Was I the only one struck by the fact that Snowden's revelations seemed to be the exact goals of the Total Information Awareness program? You know, the program that was so publicly canceled after the massive outcry?
"Maybe what they were really protesting was the name of the program! Let's just call it something else!"
It's shit like this that makes me unhappy to live in a representative democracy. At least in a dictatorship the rulers don't pretend that they are following the will of the populace. As we have all seen demonstrated repeatedly, in both of these "polar opposite forms" of government, the government does what it pleases no matter what the citizenry wants.
In the end, I decided that star death is not part of a 'planet's history', rather it is part of the star's history.
I also ignored Gamma Ray bursts, blackholes, etc.
No, Sol will never supernova, but the risk being referenced is that of a Near-Earth supernova. If a star like IK Pegasi B touched off, 150 light years away, it would have significant effects on us here.
If you want to throw out consideration of nearby supernovas as "not part of the planet's history" then I contend you need to throw out consideration of asteroid impacts as well. Both are proven significant, exogenous, cosmological influences on our planet.
Ah, but the ratings were never anonymous to begin with. This is a false dichotomy that you're presenting: I have a Google account that is associated with my Android app purchases.
Sure, but it's not an account that's connected to anything else. It's trivial to generate thousands of accounts like that.
I'm perplexed by your line of reasoning. Apparently, having the Google account that purchased the app is insufficient credentials to post a rating/comment, yet if that very same account were to create an empty Google Plus account then it's somehow magically legitimized?
I mean, I could create a false Google+ account that isn't connected to anyone else. I fail to see how this is an appreciably more daunting barrier to falsification of ratings than having a regular Google account that is associated with a payment transfer.
And before you ask, I am refusing to create a false Google+ account on principle.
Allowing anonymous ratings results in rating stuffing.
Ah, but the ratings were never anonymous to begin with. This is a false dichotomy that you're presenting: I have a Google account that is associated with my Android app purchases. What I refuse to do (and found spurious) is their insistence that I submit to joining Google+ in order to rate the applications that I have already purchased. My account was good enough for them to take my money, but apparently they haven't sunk their claws into me sufficiently to allow me to comment about my purchases.
The social network also facilitates allowing people to easily discover what their friends and acquaintances think of apps, which often provides more information than aggregated ratings by strangers, resulting in a better service.
That's nice in concept, but it ceases to be attractive when they are coercive about participation.
Anonymity encourages garbage comments, and requiring people to put their name on what they write makes most of them more thoughtful. Of course this also has the effect of silencing people who have reason to fear that their on-line comments may have negative real-world consequences for them.
I appreciate your cogent remarks; however, I would rather filter the drek than be forced to tender a true identity in order to participate. To wit, if Slashdot had a real name/identity policy in order to participate I wouldn't be here. In fact, I respawned my Slashdot account last year because my 10+ year old account had my real name in it and I want a lighter footprint on the internet.
I won't be joining Google+ or Facebook, and I realize that puts me in the minority. Notwithstanding, I enjoyed our discourse and hope that I reinforced the notion that pseudonymity does not necessarily reinforce the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
No, it really is a community. Dice wants an audience, and they think they can get it by destroying the community.
Oh, I concur. I thought the sarcasm was apparent... guess I should have used scare quotes. Anyhow, I feel like it is very patronizing/demeaning for them to refer to the community as an audience, as if we have never been anything more than consumers of their effluvia.
I mean, seriously, if we were nothing but an audience then how did "RTFA" become a meme on this site? That should have been a major clue that people aren't coming here for the out-of-date news, the poor editorial skill, and the dupe postings. Unfortunately, Dice management would require a serious application of the cluestick to understand this. That won't happen, so the community will die instead. I'm in for the boycott, though: it will be good practice for when I abandon the site permanently (it's not easy to go cold turkey after 15 years).
So, fuck Dice and fuck their supercilious attitude. I hope they are proud of what they will achieve with their course of action, but we all know they will be confused and blame something completely unrelated. They will blame anything but themselves and their actions.
But as TFA shows the sad thing is you WILL get COPD, doesn't matter how long ago you quit as you WILL get it if something else don't get you first. So if you are quitting do it because you don't want to be smelling like smoke or be out of breath, because if you have smoked more than a couple of years you might as well accept COPD is in your future regardless.
Yes, COPD is a serious disorder, but my concern with labeling it as inevitable (or worse, labeling it "terminal") is that it isn't universally true and it may cause people to avoid treatments or courses of action that might help their quality/quantity of life.
For anyone reading this at risk for COPD, read this. Lung function decline varies widely in COPD, and in many cases COPD may not progress at all. However, left untreated (or worse, if people believe that it doesn't matter if they continue to smoke once diagnosed) then the outcomes will be worse.
People can live for decades with high quality of life after a COPD diagnosis. Yes, COPD can be terminal, but it is much more likely to be so if you give up.
If someone is a former smoker, consider this to be encouragement to exercise *now* to improve your cardiovascular health. Even if you do develop COPD in the future, you will have built up a reserve of better than average lung function. Also, note that high BMI (obesity) is the strongest predictor of rapid lung function decline in COPD, so... draw the obvious conclusion.
I'm hardly surprised that EA is doing something mendacious and evil; but it's a trifle gutsy to overtly game Google's rating system.
Meh, one good coercive scam deserves another. I just checked my Google Play app and attempted to rate an app (never had tried before). Lo and behold, rating apps requires Google Plus and all ratings will be linked to one's public profile.
No thanks. EA and Google deserve each other.
Oh, and Dice belongs with them for their plans to destroy this community^Waudience.
I, for one, give people the benefit of the doubt when they say, "OK, WE HEARD YOU!"
Words are not actions, and corporations are certainly not people. Perhaps that was the disconnect?
Besides, whatever the large banner print gaveth, the corporate doublespeak took away. You did read the message to "the audience" that the banner linked to, right?
Have you ever worked for a company large enough to have an HR department? If so, then you will know how to translate what they said into what they actually mean. They don't want a community like we have, they want an audience they can monetize. The Beta is designed to make that shift happen. They have been ignoring the feedback for months. If they were going to heed it they would have done so by now.
Here's an allegory: did you ever see the website JumpTheShark.com? It was a Wiki-type online community that rated when various television shows had reached their inflection point (a reference to the infamous Happy Days episode where Fonzi jumped over a shark lagoon on waterskis). Anyhow, it was acquired by TV Guide after a few years. It was "monetized" by ripping it apart, throwing away everything related to the community, and turning it into an Entertainment Tonight blog type clone complete with "Shark Bites" news updates. That is the type of future that Dice envisions for Slashdot.
We may not be able to divert the inexorable fate of this community being ground into dust by corporate managers at Dice (or whoever they pawn this site off to in the future), but a boycott will at least be retaliation in the only form they can understand: reduced revenue. This boycott will let them observe how committed this community is, or whether we can be safely flushed away like they were planning to do anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Obligatory cynicism: I believe the only reason this ruling happened is the NSA found a way to technically comply with the ruling while still retaining the data. My guess is they will have a third party store it for them.
Hooray: keep the data, avoid the lawsuits, and keep raping our freedoms! A trifecta for America!
A sudden breakup of the plane would preclude any ACARS data indicating distress from being sent from the plane.
Yes, that was my point. ACARS isn't a distress signal, as far as I understand it. Receiving a constant log of position fixes via ACARS that ceases at approximately the same time and position that all ground-based radar systems lose track of the aircraft tends to strongly circumscribe the likely search radius. Bayesian statistics and all that.
I dunno. I realize things around here have somewhat changed; hell, I'm pretty new here, anyway. I would rather not be the "is this really news for nerds?" guy. Actually I haven't noticed that slogan printed on this site since certain changes were implemented.
Actually, the mandatory on-topicness for tech news on Slashdot died on 11 Sep 2001. That topic got thousands of posts from "the audience" (*cough*), and tech relevance forever after took a back seat to potential ad impressions for proposed content.
I know, I know, people always point to the "...stuff that matters" part of the slogan. However, that's a retcon construction, as proven by the fact that the content was on-topic for years before they chose to digress. It's like how the U.S. Constitution is basically now encompassed by the "General welfare means the federal government has an unlimited mandate to do whatever they want" and "everything is interstate commerce" retcons while practically everything else in the document is considered optional.
I guess it's refreshing that Dice ditched the slogan, since it hasn't been applicable in years.
Fuck Beta.
I watched a documentary about Flight 447 (the Airbus flight that was lost off Brazil) and they mentioned that modern planes send tons of position and other data per flight. Seems the current system is called ACARS.
Anyway, from a probability perspective it seems highly unlikely that a plane would disappear from radar precisely at the time that a data transponder stopped sending position fixes, unless, you know, the plane crashed right there.
I mean, the media makes it sound like the search radius is "flight speed * remaining potential flight time at current fuel burn rate".
I think so, too. I gotta punch deck... well, maybe I will go through my withdrawal in a coffin hotel first.
I can't find decent work. I apply for mid-level or even low-level NE roles, and get rejected because they think I'll be too expensive with my experience.
Have you ever considered lying on your resume? I have a friend who has a PhD in CS and leaves it off in order to find more opportunities for this exact reason.
What are they going to do, fire you because they later do a background search and find out you have *better* qualifications than you cited on your resume?
Seriously, why do OSs have to grow enough to nix the advances in hardware, both in size and speed?
Gates' Law
the first thing I did when I got Comcast was have them disable the wifi on there router and set it up so it runs as a bridge instead.
But... if it is their router, it is their network. Thus they can turn it back on at their pleasure.
I'm sure their WiFi-unilaterally-reenabled router will be encountering lots of WiFi traffic once it is wrapped in aluminum foil (or any other basic Faraday cage/signal attenuation approach).
It may be their router and their network, but it sure as hell isn't their site.
then i would wait a month or so when they were no longer avaialable, and resell them but at a higher price. see, when they're available then you can buy the same price anywhere so why pay more? but when they're unavaialbe you have to take the asking price or take a poop on the sidewalk.
Can't I do both?
He didn't say you had to take the asking price xor take a poop on the sidewalk. Common misunderstanding... go right ahead.
EU isn't a country, and yes, free speech is protected as a human right. You can insult famous people in Britain all you like, as long as you don't allege something about them which is not true. The problem is how Britain's libel laws favor ligitive rich accusers, but Britain is hardly the only places that favors rich, ligitive bastards.
I think the problem from most people's perspective is that historically the truth was not an affirmative defense against libel in Britain. I know there are many aspects of US culture that have others roll their eyes about, but this is one case where the situation was reversed.
Seems they had a new law go into effect in January, though. The blurb mentions truth as a defense, so perhaps things are improving over there.
And then suddenly fall like a rock tword a large uncaring abyss with the screams of a uncountable more poor souls filling my ears as we collectively rush onward to an inevitable shared oblivion:
That's about packet loss?
No. It's about Beta.
I think the problem is that the STS boldly went where many other vehicles had gone before, but did it poorly and more expensively. It basically required a major overhaul after each flight and its design was heavily impeded by functionality requirements imposed by the Air Force that were never used in practice.
I suppose I would summarize your praise of the A-10 as tantamount to comparing an amazingly reliable, well-designed, and effective car (the A-10) to a classic Jaguar that's luxurious, expensive, and constantly broken (the Space Shuttle). Yes, the comparison can work, but it sends mixed messages.
YMMV.
Oh and the A10 is the greatest plane EVAR, period, end of story. It's better than the goddamned Space Shuttle. :)
Don't get me wrong: I love the A-10 and think the F-35 should be cancelled immediately. That said, it isn't strong praise to compare the A-10 to the Space Shuttle. Perhaps comparing it to the Mustang, the Corsair, or "pretty much anything else but that design-by-committee STS debacle"?
I perceive two potential business models:
1. The US Cemetery business model:
"So, you're telling me I pay once and then you will tend my grave forever?"
"Yes! Once we are full and are getting no further sales, we will pay for the upkeep through other people's donations (we're a church), or we have set up a trust fund that is absolutely secure (*cough*), or we're planning to pawn this off to the local taxpayers for maintenance once we go out of business (most likely)."
Hm, well I don't think they are a church, and I doubt the government will bail them out. So, what's the other model?
2. The DRM server model:
"People paid us and trusted us to keep running our service, but we aren't making money anymore? Well, fuck it then... *yanks plug*"
You seem to be missing the point about how the public misinterprets and overattributes things to "teh new hotness".
Every thunderstorm is a derecho now, all hot summer days are global warming, El Nino... well, let's just leave it at the Chris Farley skit on SNL, "superstorms", and now any two sequential days around -18 C will be termed a polar vortex. Hell, and these are just *weather* terminology examples.
Frankly, I'm surprised you aren't a little more miffed about the ambiguity the public injects into what were previously precisely defined terms. Yes, the precise definition will probably remain in the scientific journals, but communicating in common discourse will become more difficult.
I'm not proposing restricting information, but rather pointing out that introducing new ideas is a double-edged sword.
It takes 9 hours to go from Omaha to Miami on Amtrack , and you can get a one way ticket for $275.
No, no it doesn't. You are just counting the first leg of the trip: Omaha to Chicago. *That* takes 9+ hours. It takes literally days worth of ass in the train seat to get to Miami from Omaha, because they shunt you from Omaha to Chicago to DC and then down to Miami. Don't neglect the major stopovers you can get hit with when transferring trains.
If you don't believe me, as yourself how an Amtrak train can travel the 1,400 mile Great Circle distance between those two cities in 9 hours. That would be equivalent to a magical Amtrak travelling between the cities, as the crow flies, at ~150 mph.
Dude: it takes *days* to take the train on that Amtrak route. You can leave Omaha tomorrow, at 5 AM, and arrive in Miami 2.5 days later... at 6 PM on 24 February. It's not going to get much better than that.
But hey, if you have a line on Great Circle bullet train routes in the US, by all means let me know. Would save me time over driving.
Conversely, taking Amtrak any appreciable distance is going to be painful: painfully long and painfully expensive (unless you don't mind spending days sleeping in your chair).
$1100+, one way, from the middle of the country (say, Omaha) to an endpoint on a different route (say, Miami). Takes about 3 full days to get there, if you're lucky enough to avoid being hit with a 12+ hour stopover someplace. Yes, that price includes roomettes, but like I said: who wants to spend three solid days (again, one way) confined & sleeping in a coach seat? BTW, this is the advance price.
It would be faster, cheaper, and more relaxing to drive, even if one had to rent a vehicle. Oh, and you can leave whenever you want and stop wherever you want, too.
Passenger rail in this country is a half-baked solution in search of a problem. This makes me sad, because I would prefer to use rail in order to avoid the TSA. I just can't take a week of additional travel time to do it.
Translation: "We'll put this aside for now because you caught us out and pitched a fit about it like the little criminals we believe you all to be, and we'll wait until you inevitably forget about it, then we'll re-word it, hide it in some other, completely unassociated legislation, where it'll be voted on in the middle of the night and passed, then signed into law quietly without so much as a whisper from the media."
Precisely: that's the common trope. Was I the only one struck by the fact that Snowden's revelations seemed to be the exact goals of the Total Information Awareness program? You know, the program that was so publicly canceled after the massive outcry?
"Maybe what they were really protesting was the name of the program! Let's just call it something else!"
It's shit like this that makes me unhappy to live in a representative democracy. At least in a dictatorship the rulers don't pretend that they are following the will of the populace. As we have all seen demonstrated repeatedly, in both of these "polar opposite forms" of government, the government does what it pleases no matter what the citizenry wants.
I considered it, but not all stars go supernova.
In the end, I decided that star death is not part of a 'planet's history', rather it is part of the star's history.
I also ignored Gamma Ray bursts, blackholes, etc.
No, Sol will never supernova, but the risk being referenced is that of a Near-Earth supernova. If a star like IK Pegasi B touched off, 150 light years away, it would have significant effects on us here.
If you want to throw out consideration of nearby supernovas as "not part of the planet's history" then I contend you need to throw out consideration of asteroid impacts as well. Both are proven significant, exogenous, cosmological influences on our planet.
Ah, but the ratings were never anonymous to begin with. This is a false dichotomy that you're presenting: I have a Google account that is associated with my Android app purchases.
Sure, but it's not an account that's connected to anything else. It's trivial to generate thousands of accounts like that.
I'm perplexed by your line of reasoning. Apparently, having the Google account that purchased the app is insufficient credentials to post a rating/comment, yet if that very same account were to create an empty Google Plus account then it's somehow magically legitimized?
I mean, I could create a false Google+ account that isn't connected to anyone else. I fail to see how this is an appreciably more daunting barrier to falsification of ratings than having a regular Google account that is associated with a payment transfer.
And before you ask, I am refusing to create a false Google+ account on principle.
Allowing anonymous ratings results in rating stuffing.
Ah, but the ratings were never anonymous to begin with. This is a false dichotomy that you're presenting: I have a Google account that is associated with my Android app purchases. What I refuse to do (and found spurious) is their insistence that I submit to joining Google+ in order to rate the applications that I have already purchased. My account was good enough for them to take my money, but apparently they haven't sunk their claws into me sufficiently to allow me to comment about my purchases.
The social network also facilitates allowing people to easily discover what their friends and acquaintances think of apps, which often provides more information than aggregated ratings by strangers, resulting in a better service.
That's nice in concept, but it ceases to be attractive when they are coercive about participation.
Anonymity encourages garbage comments, and requiring people to put their name on what they write makes most of them more thoughtful. Of course this also has the effect of silencing people who have reason to fear that their on-line comments may have negative real-world consequences for them.
I appreciate your cogent remarks; however, I would rather filter the drek than be forced to tender a true identity in order to participate. To wit, if Slashdot had a real name/identity policy in order to participate I wouldn't be here. In fact, I respawned my Slashdot account last year because my 10+ year old account had my real name in it and I want a lighter footprint on the internet.
I won't be joining Google+ or Facebook, and I realize that puts me in the minority. Notwithstanding, I enjoyed our discourse and hope that I reinforced the notion that pseudonymity does not necessarily reinforce the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
No, it really is a community. Dice wants an audience, and they think they can get it by destroying the community.
Oh, I concur. I thought the sarcasm was apparent... guess I should have used scare quotes. Anyhow, I feel like it is very patronizing/demeaning for them to refer to the community as an audience, as if we have never been anything more than consumers of their effluvia.
I mean, seriously, if we were nothing but an audience then how did "RTFA" become a meme on this site? That should have been a major clue that people aren't coming here for the out-of-date news, the poor editorial skill, and the dupe postings. Unfortunately, Dice management would require a serious application of the cluestick to understand this. That won't happen, so the community will die instead. I'm in for the boycott, though: it will be good practice for when I abandon the site permanently (it's not easy to go cold turkey after 15 years).
So, fuck Dice and fuck their supercilious attitude. I hope they are proud of what they will achieve with their course of action, but we all know they will be confused and blame something completely unrelated. They will blame anything but themselves and their actions.
But as TFA shows the sad thing is you WILL get COPD, doesn't matter how long ago you quit as you WILL get it if something else don't get you first. So if you are quitting do it because you don't want to be smelling like smoke or be out of breath, because if you have smoked more than a couple of years you might as well accept COPD is in your future regardless.
Yes, COPD is a serious disorder, but my concern with labeling it as inevitable (or worse, labeling it "terminal") is that it isn't universally true and it may cause people to avoid treatments or courses of action that might help their quality/quantity of life.
For anyone reading this at risk for COPD, read this. Lung function decline varies widely in COPD, and in many cases COPD may not progress at all. However, left untreated (or worse, if people believe that it doesn't matter if they continue to smoke once diagnosed) then the outcomes will be worse.
People can live for decades with high quality of life after a COPD diagnosis. Yes, COPD can be terminal, but it is much more likely to be so if you give up.
If someone is a former smoker, consider this to be encouragement to exercise *now* to improve your cardiovascular health. Even if you do develop COPD in the future, you will have built up a reserve of better than average lung function. Also, note that high BMI (obesity) is the strongest predictor of rapid lung function decline in COPD, so... draw the obvious conclusion.
I'm hardly surprised that EA is doing something mendacious and evil; but it's a trifle gutsy to overtly game Google's rating system.
Meh, one good coercive scam deserves another. I just checked my Google Play app and attempted to rate an app (never had tried before). Lo and behold, rating apps requires Google Plus and all ratings will be linked to one's public profile.
No thanks. EA and Google deserve each other.
Oh, and Dice belongs with them for their plans to destroy this community^Waudience.
I, for one, give people the benefit of the doubt when they say, "OK, WE HEARD YOU!"
Words are not actions, and corporations are certainly not people. Perhaps that was the disconnect?
Besides, whatever the large banner print gaveth, the corporate doublespeak took away. You did read the message to "the audience" that the banner linked to, right?
Have you ever worked for a company large enough to have an HR department? If so, then you will know how to translate what they said into what they actually mean. They don't want a community like we have, they want an audience they can monetize. The Beta is designed to make that shift happen. They have been ignoring the feedback for months. If they were going to heed it they would have done so by now.
Here's an allegory: did you ever see the website JumpTheShark.com? It was a Wiki-type online community that rated when various television shows had reached their inflection point (a reference to the infamous Happy Days episode where Fonzi jumped over a shark lagoon on waterskis). Anyhow, it was acquired by TV Guide after a few years. It was "monetized" by ripping it apart, throwing away everything related to the community, and turning it into an Entertainment Tonight blog type clone complete with "Shark Bites" news updates. That is the type of future that Dice envisions for Slashdot.
We may not be able to divert the inexorable fate of this community being ground into dust by corporate managers at Dice (or whoever they pawn this site off to in the future), but a boycott will at least be retaliation in the only form they can understand: reduced revenue. This boycott will let them observe how committed this community is, or whether we can be safely flushed away like they were planning to do anyway.