When you have fair democratic decision making in a timely and open fashion, people live with the result. Maybe not happily, and maybe not without division, but life goes on.
Before you get too self-congratulatory, have a look at how the state of Kansas joined the USA. Then perhaps take a look at what happened a couple of years later when a "timely and open" election was fairly won by a candidate large parts of the country didn't want.
Democratic elections aren't some magic wand. Both sides have to have it within them to respect the results, even if it doesn't go the way they'd like it to.
Unlike Switzerland, though, the US doesn't have much in the way of official laws that deal with such political reorganization and redrawing of political boundaries
Not quite true. It doesn't come up much, but Article 4, Section 3 of the Constitution directly addresses this:
New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.
The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to Prejudice any Claims of the United States, or of any particular State.
So essentially if you want to change the territory of a US state, you have to get the agreement of Congress and the legislatures of all the states involved.
Not "computer scientists". Just C programmers. The first two languages designed, Fortran and Cobol, start at 1. Algol('68) and all the languages descended from or influenced by it let the programmer set the starting bound (this includes Ada, Pascal and all the other Wirth languages).
Pretty much every language that uses 0 as the only allowable starting index is either descended from C, or borrowed large amounts of its syntax from it. (Some BASICs use 0, but that language is so egregiously unstandardized that its tough to say anything about it with certainty).
offer to hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete to restart the PC (and lose all your unsaved data).
If you have a BSOD, your unsaved data is already gone. How you move on from there (Ctrl-Alt-Del, or the power switch, pulling the plug, sledgehammer, etc.) is simply a matter of preference.
Microsoft probably has somewhere between 6 and 20 thousand engineers working on device drivers
Are you sure? I know they make their own mice and keyboards. But for most devices, I get the impression they rely on the hardware manufacturers to write the drivers for their own devices.
The vast majority of that 20 billion is theoretical money based on Microsoft's current stock evaluation. If the bottom dropped out of that stock (say like actually happened to Apple in the 90's, or even, God forbid, Commodore), he would stand to lose all but a small percentage of that.
Secondly, libertarians are fine with government-run prisons. It's one of the few things we think government should actually do.
Which shows you right there how naïve some libertarians can be. The real-world effect of this is that kids who make dumb kid mistakes are now being sent to private prisons due to the judges having back-door deals with (or sometimes an outright financial stake in) the prisons in question.
Before you "not all" me, think about simple economics here. Any time you introduce the profit motive into something that should be run entirely for the public good, you automatically create crap like this. Its inevitable.
First off, no I won't pay directly for any web content. Nor will the general public at large (unless perhaps involves pron). You can remove that idea from your head right now. it won't work, because nobody will show up.
Secondly, you can't just magically fix trolling with a dumb barrier of some kind. It really takes a human to spot the difference between someone putting forth an honest opinion, and somebody trying to create chaos. Not only that, but trolls are inventive and creative, and can swamp even a seemingly large moderation team with damage to fix. So you need a surprisingly large team monitoring every nook and cranny of your website 24/7. There's just no way to do that, short of enlisting your users.
So the previous sentence is the key here: You have to enlist your users to keep your site usable. They generally want that, but they certainly aren't going to be inclined to provide a lot of help if they think they are already paying somebody else to do that job.
Right now the only decent known cure for Trolls is reputation-based postings and user moderation. Putting a paywall up front will drastically lower your moderator pool, which will just help trolls.
I once saw a troll make a racist statement about Canadians. Yup, I wouldn't have thought it possible either, but troll managed it.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was another Canadian.
Nope. Troll in question I believe hailed from Colorado, IIRC. He did it because the guy he wanted to bully wasn't female, or any ethnic or religious minority, so attacking "Canadians" was the best he could come up with.
He was a really nasty piece of work. He'd pick out victims, find out who they worked for, and call their employer and try to get them fired. If their employer did any work for the government, he'd call the government accounting office on them too. Posted full details of home addresses and any "dirt" he could dig up publicly online. You have just no idea how scary and upsetting this is until it happens to you. Its not something that can (or should be) "laughed off" or ignored.
Trolls are not trying to express their opinion, they are trying to create discord and distress. Anything they say is just a means to that end. They don't care about what they say, and will happily change their "opinion" if they see another that will cause even more distress.
I once saw a troll make a racist statement about Canadians. Yup, I wouldn't have thought it possible either, but troll managed it.
Ah. Never been under direct private attack on Slashdot before, so I wasn't aware they hadn't extended the system to personal messages. That's a shame. Still, its effectiveness on the public commenting system shows the concept's value.
There is apparently a new app (meaning only mobile?) called Blocktogether that auto-blocks any Twitter accounts that have been created within the last seven days.
Wish this had been modded up. In addition to the above, BlockTogether also automatically shares block-lists (so if anyone of your "friends" using the app blocks someone, everyone else using it will also block them). The daily-N-word victim I was talking about was raving about it the other day. Now only the first person Mr. Racist trolls with his fresh account ever has to see his crap.
Its kind of a neat idea to implement a reputation-based user moderation system entirely from outside Twitter (since Twitter hasn't been doing the job).
They belong on personal blogs, or on Twitter or Tumblr or Reddit, where individuals build a full, searchable body of work and can be judged accordingly
This bit right here tells me the author doesn't know much about Twitter. Twitter has an almost identical problem. One person I follow (who happens to at least front as an African-American female), has a dedicated Twitter stalker who makes new accounts every day just so he can make sure she gets to greet each new day with a tweet calling her the N-word. Rape threats are endemic there for identified females too. A "searchable body of work" is only a concern for those of us who care about our reputation. Trolls don't care in the slightest.
The only even partial cure I know of for crap like this is reputation-based user moderation, like you find in sites like Slashdot or Stackexchange. This at least allows the manifold eyes of your readers to do some of their own policing, and provides for much more prompt cleanup. A dedicated troll can create a hopeless amount of soul-killing destruction for one or two poor beleaguered individuals. But against a community of hundreds (or more) moderators, the amortized work is manageable. More importantly, the troll isn't going to get much satisfaction, as almost nobody sees their handiwork before someone mods it away.
If you have an online commenting system, you really need a user moderation system to back it up. I'd suggest Discourse, but there are probably other drop-in solutions available.
Well then, there should be some job openings at Space-X
Not in those two cities there aren't. And even if every engineer happily picked up stakes and left their homes for new jobs in other states, what does that do to the rest of the community that suddenly loses all those high paying jobs? Housing prices drop, the local service industry takes a hit (possibly causing more job losses). In general less money is flowing around the district, hurting the local economy, which hurts everyone. Losing lots of high-paying jobs in a community is a BFD. Ask anyone from Detroit, if you don't believe me.
The congressmen in question are Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), and Cory Gardner (R-Colo.).
SpaceX is "competing" (or rather beating the pants off of) a Lockheed Martin / Boeing joint operation called United Launch Alliance (ULA). From their webpage:
ULA program management, engineering, test, and mission support functions are headquartered in Denver, Colo. Manufacturing, assembly and integration operations are located at Decatur, Ala., and...
This is essentially congressmen performing constituent services for their district, albeit in the most cynical way possible.
Does anyone know anything to back up the genius claims being made about Scorpion?
I know he's made it onto the Slashdot front page without having accomplished anything much more in his life than I or half a dozen other folks of my generation can boast. My grades were similar to his, I also had a really high IQ on some bogus test when I was a kid. I don't remember exactly how my ACM programming teams did, but 90 of 250 sounds roughly in the right ballpark. I've done NASA work, and know at least one way to "hack" some of their systems. Yet, I seriously doubt you'll ever see an article about me up on the Slashdot front page (and if you do, most likely it means I screwed something up epicly).
So clearly he's at the least a genius at self-promotion.
This is a cautionary tale about the fundamental unreliability of human knowledge.
Precisely. If you think no "respected published author " ever did this exact same thing (got drunk and added a fabricated "fact" to one of their books), you are kidding yourself. This incident just shows how an incorrect fact can be made correct by mass citation.
An acquaintance of mine (a "first nation" tribal member) several decades ago got one of the elders drunk, and convinced him of a story he made up on the spot about a supposed ancient tribal sacred place. By the time the guy sobered up the next day, he was convinced this story was true. It got all kinds of coverage, there's now a monument there, and of course it now has a Wikipedia page and everything. In this case Wikipedia did absolutely nothing wrong, other than believing their multiple sources.
people talk about compuer programming or a certain type of programming as being especially lucrative,
The thing is, its not really. The degree programs for CS and engineering are relatively difficult. For that amount of work in college, stay a couple of extra years and get yourself a medical or law degree. Then for roughly the same amount of work in the real world, your earning potential is far greater. You get a lot more respect too.
If money is what you are after, that is.
Programming is really only a good choice for those who enjoy programming.
Slashdot Mirror
When you have fair democratic decision making in a timely and open fashion, people live with the result. Maybe not happily, and maybe not without division, but life goes on.
Before you get too self-congratulatory, have a look at how the state of Kansas joined the USA. Then perhaps take a look at what happened a couple of years later when a "timely and open" election was fairly won by a candidate large parts of the country didn't want.
Democratic elections aren't some magic wand. Both sides have to have it within them to respect the results, even if it doesn't go the way they'd like it to.
Unlike Switzerland, though, the US doesn't have much in the way of official laws that deal with such political reorganization and redrawing of political boundaries
Not quite true. It doesn't come up much, but Article 4, Section 3 of the Constitution directly addresses this:
New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.
The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to Prejudice any Claims of the United States, or of any particular State.
So essentially if you want to change the territory of a US state, you have to get the agreement of Congress and the legislatures of all the states involved.
It is recent computer scientists that started
Not "computer scientists". Just C programmers. The first two languages designed, Fortran and Cobol, start at 1. Algol('68) and all the languages descended from or influenced by it let the programmer set the starting bound (this includes Ada, Pascal and all the other Wirth languages).
Pretty much every language that uses 0 as the only allowable starting index is either descended from C, or borrowed large amounts of its syntax from it. (Some BASICs use 0, but that language is so egregiously unstandardized that its tough to say anything about it with certainty).
offer to hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete to restart the PC (and lose all your unsaved data).
If you have a BSOD, your unsaved data is already gone. How you move on from there (Ctrl-Alt-Del, or the power switch, pulling the plug, sledgehammer, etc.) is simply a matter of preference.
Microsoft probably has somewhere between 6 and 20 thousand engineers working on device drivers
Are you sure? I know they make their own mice and keyboards. But for most devices, I get the impression they rely on the hardware manufacturers to write the drivers for their own devices.
Unless you literally meant "6<engineers<20000".
The vast majority of that 20 billion is theoretical money based on Microsoft's current stock evaluation. If the bottom dropped out of that stock (say like actually happened to Apple in the 90's, or even, God forbid, Commodore), he would stand to lose all but a small percentage of that.
Then there's Bing, who's only claim to fame is being the world's greatest search engine. For. Porn.
Wait... it is? Seriously? I've got a friend who actually cares about this. I'll "let him know".
Given how incredibly hard it sucks at looking up technical information, I suspect it would be awesome in porn.
with some new features like function return type deduction,
Hey, K&R C had function return type deduction back in the 70's .
...of course it always guessed "int", but IT HAD IT.
Ack. Sorry. Meant this for the GP. Clearly I'm in violent agreement with the parent.
Secondly, libertarians are fine with government-run prisons. It's one of the few things we think government should actually do.
Which shows you right there how naïve some libertarians can be. The real-world effect of this is that kids who make dumb kid mistakes are now being sent to private prisons due to the judges having back-door deals with (or sometimes an outright financial stake in) the prisons in question.
Before you "not all" me, think about simple economics here. Any time you introduce the profit motive into something that should be run entirely for the public good, you automatically create crap like this. Its inevitable.
First off, no I won't pay directly for any web content. Nor will the general public at large (unless perhaps involves pron). You can remove that idea from your head right now. it won't work, because nobody will show up.
Secondly, you can't just magically fix trolling with a dumb barrier of some kind. It really takes a human to spot the difference between someone putting forth an honest opinion, and somebody trying to create chaos. Not only that, but trolls are inventive and creative, and can swamp even a seemingly large moderation team with damage to fix. So you need a surprisingly large team monitoring every nook and cranny of your website 24/7. There's just no way to do that, short of enlisting your users.
So the previous sentence is the key here: You have to enlist your users to keep your site usable. They generally want that, but they certainly aren't going to be inclined to provide a lot of help if they think they are already paying somebody else to do that job.
Right now the only decent known cure for Trolls is reputation-based postings and user moderation. Putting a paywall up front will drastically lower your moderator pool, which will just help trolls.
I once saw a troll make a racist statement about Canadians. Yup, I wouldn't have thought it possible either, but troll managed it.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was another Canadian.
Nope. Troll in question I believe hailed from Colorado, IIRC. He did it because the guy he wanted to bully wasn't female, or any ethnic or religious minority, so attacking "Canadians" was the best he could come up with.
He was a really nasty piece of work. He'd pick out victims, find out who they worked for, and call their employer and try to get them fired. If their employer did any work for the government, he'd call the government accounting office on them too. Posted full details of home addresses and any "dirt" he could dig up publicly online. You have just no idea how scary and upsetting this is until it happens to you. Its not something that can (or should be) "laughed off" or ignored.
Real trolls are serious business.
No. There is a fundamental difference.
Trolls are not trying to express their opinion, they are trying to create discord and distress. Anything they say is just a means to that end. They don't care about what they say, and will happily change their "opinion" if they see another that will cause even more distress.
I once saw a troll make a racist statement about Canadians. Yup, I wouldn't have thought it possible either, but troll managed it.
Trolls don't have opinions, they have strategies.
Ah. Never been under direct private attack on Slashdot before, so I wasn't aware they hadn't extended the system to personal messages. That's a shame. Still, its effectiveness on the public commenting system shows the concept's value.
There is apparently a new app (meaning only mobile?) called Blocktogether that auto-blocks any Twitter accounts that have been created within the last seven days.
Wish this had been modded up. In addition to the above, BlockTogether also automatically shares block-lists (so if anyone of your "friends" using the app blocks someone, everyone else using it will also block them). The daily-N-word victim I was talking about was raving about it the other day. Now only the first person Mr. Racist trolls with his fresh account ever has to see his crap.
Its kind of a neat idea to implement a reputation-based user moderation system entirely from outside Twitter (since Twitter hasn't been doing the job).
Other people (even terrible trolls) exist in real life. I value learning their opinions,
Trolls don't have opinions, they have strategies.
They belong on personal blogs, or on Twitter or Tumblr or Reddit, where individuals build a full, searchable body of work and can be judged accordingly
This bit right here tells me the author doesn't know much about Twitter. Twitter has an almost identical problem. One person I follow (who happens to at least front as an African-American female), has a dedicated Twitter stalker who makes new accounts every day just so he can make sure she gets to greet each new day with a tweet calling her the N-word. Rape threats are endemic there for identified females too. A "searchable body of work" is only a concern for those of us who care about our reputation. Trolls don't care in the slightest.
The only even partial cure I know of for crap like this is reputation-based user moderation, like you find in sites like Slashdot or Stackexchange. This at least allows the manifold eyes of your readers to do some of their own policing, and provides for much more prompt cleanup. A dedicated troll can create a hopeless amount of soul-killing destruction for one or two poor beleaguered individuals. But against a community of hundreds (or more) moderators, the amortized work is manageable. More importantly, the troll isn't going to get much satisfaction, as almost nobody sees their handiwork before someone mods it away.
If you have an online commenting system, you really need a user moderation system to back it up. I'd suggest Discourse, but there are probably other drop-in solutions available.
I'm not sure if the idea of a contributor license as you suggest is in the spirit of open source
Perhaps you should share your qualms with the good folks over at the Free Software Foundation, since they insist on them as well.
This is roughly the same logic I used to hear about seat belts back in the 70's.
Well then, there should be some job openings at Space-X
Not in those two cities there aren't. And even if every engineer happily picked up stakes and left their homes for new jobs in other states, what does that do to the rest of the community that suddenly loses all those high paying jobs? Housing prices drop, the local service industry takes a hit (possibly causing more job losses). In general less money is flowing around the district, hurting the local economy, which hurts everyone. Losing lots of high-paying jobs in a community is a BFD. Ask anyone from Detroit, if you don't believe me.
The congressmen in question are Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), and Cory Gardner (R-Colo.).
SpaceX is "competing" (or rather beating the pants off of) a Lockheed Martin / Boeing joint operation called United Launch Alliance (ULA). From their webpage:
ULA program management, engineering, test, and mission support functions are headquartered in Denver, Colo. Manufacturing, assembly and integration operations are located at Decatur, Ala., and...
This is essentially congressmen performing constituent services for their district, albeit in the most cynical way possible.
Does anyone know anything to back up the genius claims being made about Scorpion?
I know he's made it onto the Slashdot front page without having accomplished anything much more in his life than I or half a dozen other folks of my generation can boast. My grades were similar to his, I also had a really high IQ on some bogus test when I was a kid. I don't remember exactly how my ACM programming teams did, but 90 of 250 sounds roughly in the right ballpark. I've done NASA work, and know at least one way to "hack" some of their systems. Yet, I seriously doubt you'll ever see an article about me up on the Slashdot front page (and if you do, most likely it means I screwed something up epicly).
So clearly he's at the least a genius at self-promotion.
Wouldn't just about any biometric allow identical twins full access to each other's stuff?
This is a cautionary tale about the fundamental unreliability of human knowledge.
Precisely. If you think no "respected published author " ever did this exact same thing (got drunk and added a fabricated "fact" to one of their books), you are kidding yourself. This incident just shows how an incorrect fact can be made correct by mass citation.
An acquaintance of mine (a "first nation" tribal member) several decades ago got one of the elders drunk, and convinced him of a story he made up on the spot about a supposed ancient tribal sacred place. By the time the guy sobered up the next day, he was convinced this story was true. It got all kinds of coverage, there's now a monument there, and of course it now has a Wikipedia page and everything. In this case Wikipedia did absolutely nothing wrong, other than believing their multiple sources.
Surely this kind of thing happens all the time.
people talk about compuer programming or a certain type of programming as being especially lucrative,
The thing is, its not really. The degree programs for CS and engineering are relatively difficult. For that amount of work in college, stay a couple of extra years and get yourself a medical or law degree. Then for roughly the same amount of work in the real world, your earning potential is far greater. You get a lot more respect too.
If money is what you are after, that is.
Programming is really only a good choice for those who enjoy programming.