You CAN do a lot to criminal organizations without infiltration. Infiltration has a high cost, in the form of increased paranoia, tribality and possibly brutality in the infiltrated groups. This worsens crime, and lessens defection.
Also, infiltration has a cost in the other direction - what it does to police departments and infiltrators themselves. When the police get used to betraying people's trust as part of their job, they start doing that in other ways, too. Adopting such means really is a slippery slope.
You are the originator of Advogato, right? Raph Levien?
I think that the original moderation system on slashdot, and your efforts with Advogato, are among the best experiments that have been done with social media. So much of what has come after has just been better marketed, not better in any fundamental way. In particular, for quality of discussion concerns, the reddit/digg model of moderation is markedly inferior to slashdot's. But it has disappointed me that the fundamental insight of slashdot's insight (use of sortition to get more fair outcomes) and yours (robust metrics for trust) has not been extended upon.
Part of me wishes that Malda really wanted to, but was prevented by his evil corporate overlords, so that he maybe gets an opportunity for it now, haha. But whatever he decides to do, I'll be grateful for what he's done - and for what you've done, since you were one of the few who actually took a scientific approach to such issues.
Fairness (not the fairness doctrine) is needed because on the net, groups like "Devil Worshippers" tend to be grossly overrepresented due to their fanaticism.
Imagine that they decided to abolish elections, and just make decisions in parliament by voting among whoever decided to show up. Every citizen equally entitled to walk in and take a seat. And no pushing! That would make every citizen equal, right?
Of course not. People understand why that would be a bad idea - some people would get there early, have the resources to bus in their people continuously, etc. The advantaged would simply out-shout their opponents. Yet they don't seem to understand the problem of handling important public debate in a similar free-for-all, presistence-makes-right scenario.
Of course you'd rather have the net elites. You are part of the net elites (as am I).
But no, I'm not suggesting something like the fairness doctrine. That was fundamentally broken legislation (and not just because it was ruled unconstitutional). I'm suggesting that individual sites/forum systems, like disqus, reddit or slashdot for that matter, start experimenting with democratic moderation systems again, to counter one by one the advantages certain groups have in dominating the debate. It can be as simple as a max number on the amount of posts you get to make per day, or as complex as a demographic weighting system based on verified identities.
I think that users will gravitate to quality discussion forums, once we start to see systems that are genuinely superior.
For the Internet to be our liberator it must be decentralized and secure. No one agency must be able to control infrastructure like name resolution or authoritative certificate signing.
Yes. But this is by no means enough. You fear the threat of governments, but you aren't nearly afraid enough of the undemocratic tendencies in non-government entities.
Fact is, the internet is a place of great inequality. There are inequalities of technical skill, which favor certain classes. There are inequalities of money. There are inequalities of time. There are inequalities of dedication and conviction (fanaticism). There are even inequalities related to such mundane things as time zones, bandwith and latency.
The consequence of all this inequality, is that some people are a lot - and I mean a lot better at making themselves heard, at setting the agenda, at drawing up the ideological boundaries. As surely as in the offline world (only to some degree, other groups are advantaged there). From this inequality we will see new elites form, willing to defend their established influence at the expense of everyone else.
What we need to do, to save democracy, is to start working seriously not just for freedom of speech online (which we pretty much have already), but equality of speech - what the ancient Athenians called isegoria. So that we get representative discourse, not discourse dominated by net-elites who through their advantages manage to drown out moderate and opposing voices.
The answer is yes. It is evidence of the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the internet.
Some people on the internet have more power than others. It may be because they know how to forge SSL certificates, or just because they have the persistence, organization and time to post to forums all day long.
We're used to these people being "good guys" more often than not. Libertarian-ish, atheist-ish, free software-ish. But there's nothing natural about it. What sympathetic traits the emerging net elites happens to have, are probably just vestigal consequences of their relative sense of vulnerability and powerlessness in the offline world. Once they get used to their power, they will start abusing it more often and more brazenly, and selling out to offline authorities. So, it's not at all surprising to see pro-government hacking groups.
What we need is to construct good forums, where the inequalities of time, technical skill, persistence, organization are effectively countered. On a low level, it may be as simple as making a site robust against hacking. On a higher level, experimentation with democratic procedure is necessary (slashdot was a pioneer in this with their moderation system, sadly it hasn't been taken further either by them or other sites).
You CAN use your phone without a Google account, but that requires you do a lot of work setting it up yourself, with a replacement contacts app, replacement app store, replacement maps provider etc.
The reason they undermined Netscape was that they wanted to control web standards. They won the battle, but lost the war - they are no longer in a position to dictate proprietary extensions to the web through control of the browser. A page that only works in IE is no longer an option for developers.
(A page that only works on Windows, however, is still an option in a few contexts, and MS struggle to keep it that way).
I wouldn't bet on Ballmer's stupidity overriding his business sense.
To find what the writer actually communicated, I suppose you could give the text to a random sample of the target audience, and quiz them afterwards on the contents.
But that's not typically how it's done in literary criticism.
This is the real noteworthy thing in this article. (Robot grading essays is nonsense - sure, you get consistency, but you get consistency from wc -l as well)
But I think "pet students" isn't quite the problem. The problem may just as well that the professors try to compensate, knowing that they like you. As soon as you get a personal connection to your students, your capability to judge objectively is diminished, and it's not possible to compensate for (except by blinding, as WG do).
Kind of. You'd thought they have learned by now that making something accessible to first a few Americans, then all Americans, then Britons, then Singaporeans for some reason, then the rest of the world a couple of years down the road... is NOT the optimal way to exploit good PR.
> Also, it's been mentioned numerous times what kills console game profits is buying used games, as opposed to pirating.
It's been mentioned, and debunked. The game industry assumes two things that are completely wrong:
1. People who buy 50$ games today will still buy a 50$ game tomorrow - even if recouping 15$ by reselling it afterwards is impossible then.
2. People who buy a 20$ used game today will buy the game at full price tomorrow if that's all that's available.
Used game stores ensure fair pricing of games, and increases console game profitability by enabling price discrimination. Not to mention the visibility gains - but that may be a net negative if the game is overhyped and sucks.
This is a foot bullet by Capcom. Game companies can go into the aftermarket business themselves if they can't stand seeing other making money this way. It's no more an injustice against Capcom than a used car dealership is an injustice against Toyota.
"From my experience, I noticed, that nearly 100% of those things called "framework", are things that should be avoided. Works for me."
Works for you how, exactly? Not for writing games without any "framework", I'd wager.
You don't know what you're talking about. SDL provides only pretty low-level stuff - blitting, an event queue, joystick support etc. And you only init the things you use. If you want drawing primitives or text, you need separate libraries. Contrary to what the prune says, SDL is very well suited for its purpose (cross-platform, mostly 2d games), as it's popularity suggests.
Sam Lantinga, the architect and maintainer of SDL, was lead software engineer on a little game called World of Warcraft. I kind of trust the most senior person in the open source gaming world to know what he's doing.
> Someone figured out a way to troll Wikipedia. Piss off all the fans who are adding useful contributions to the articles. The other common tactic is to delete all the detailed info under the pretence of merging articles together and then claiming that the article is now too long and needs to be cut back drastically. All the effort people put in to documenting characters and events, even the minor ones, is destroyed.
And the problem is that in Wikipedia, this earns you status. All the old editors who had preservation of useful information as a priority have left, so the only way to gain approval and respect (and be allowed to control some topics of your own) is to engage in such shitty behavior. Ultimately, it's this way because Jimbo wants it to be: He doesn't want any sort of fan information on wikipedia, because he wants to move as much as possible over to his for-profit project Wikia.
> I ask because it's always possible to advertise to get other people involved, perhaps people more knowledgeable than either of you.
Oh no, that gets you punished for canvassing. If you're not someone high up, that is. Then your private mutual assistance mailing lists can be published, and nothing will come off it.
What wikipedia needs is a hate button. And liberal application of said button to any and all aspiring wikilawyers.
They didn't leave, they were hunted to extinction. And while they're "returning", the population they're coming from has probably been separated from the north Atlantic one for a longer time than since they were wiped out.
No, you're right, probably not. If we cause a mass extinction, wiping ourselves out in the process, that's just life going on, triggering the emergence of new species. Nothing to worry about. Anyway, we don't know and can't know and it's best not to think about.
Slow changes are good. Fast changes are bad. Biosystems aren't equipped to handle fast changes, unless they've happened predictably for a long time.
Especially in marine ecosystems, where there are several layers of predators (as opposed to on land where there's pretty much one), you can not expect to get back the same result if you reintroduce a species after having removed it for a hundred years.
But either way, you shouldn't worry about the whale. You should worry about the reason the whale is back.
> You can rent a car by the hour for those trips to IKEA.
Funny you should mention that. Don't IKEA have their own buses where you live? They do here. Free transport to and from the warehouse every hour. I wonder why large warehouses outside cities don't do that more often.
I don't think you should underestimate the indirect effects. There was of course no conspiracy to ditch trams in Norway, yet two of the three large tram cities got rid of them.
If you read the contemporary newspapers, you see why: it was top-down decisions, and the argument was always _trams are becoming old-fashioned. Buses are the future._ Now where did they get that idea? (which was, by the way, entirely wrong, despite its self-fulfilling character). By looking at other cities, abroad. Some of got rid of their trams for corrupt reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have the apparatus to infiltrate criminal organizations, you have the apparatus to infiltrate political organizations too.
You CAN do a lot to criminal organizations without infiltration. Infiltration has a high cost, in the form of increased paranoia, tribality and possibly brutality in the infiltrated groups. This worsens crime, and lessens defection.
Also, infiltration has a cost in the other direction - what it does to police departments and infiltrators themselves. When the police get used to betraying people's trust as part of their job, they start doing that in other ways, too. Adopting such means really is a slippery slope.
Criminal organizations with web-of-trust style group membership?
Well, if they're stupid enough to be on facebook, I don't think infiltration will be very necessary.
You are the originator of Advogato, right? Raph Levien?
I think that the original moderation system on slashdot, and your efforts with Advogato, are among the best experiments that have been done with social media. So much of what has come after has just been better marketed, not better in any fundamental way. In particular, for quality of discussion concerns, the reddit/digg model of moderation is markedly inferior to slashdot's. But it has disappointed me that the fundamental insight of slashdot's insight (use of sortition to get more fair outcomes) and yours (robust metrics for trust) has not been extended upon.
Part of me wishes that Malda really wanted to, but was prevented by his evil corporate overlords, so that he maybe gets an opportunity for it now, haha. But whatever he decides to do, I'll be grateful for what he's done - and for what you've done, since you were one of the few who actually took a scientific approach to such issues.
Fairness (not the fairness doctrine) is needed because on the net, groups like "Devil Worshippers" tend to be grossly overrepresented due to their fanaticism.
Imagine that they decided to abolish elections, and just make decisions in parliament by voting among whoever decided to show up. Every citizen equally entitled to walk in and take a seat. And no pushing! That would make every citizen equal, right?
Of course not. People understand why that would be a bad idea - some people would get there early, have the resources to bus in their people continuously, etc. The advantaged would simply out-shout their opponents. Yet they don't seem to understand the problem of handling important public debate in a similar free-for-all, presistence-makes-right scenario.
Of course you'd rather have the net elites. You are part of the net elites (as am I).
But no, I'm not suggesting something like the fairness doctrine. That was fundamentally broken legislation (and not just because it was ruled unconstitutional). I'm suggesting that individual sites/forum systems, like disqus, reddit or slashdot for that matter, start experimenting with democratic moderation systems again, to counter one by one the advantages certain groups have in dominating the debate. It can be as simple as a max number on the amount of posts you get to make per day, or as complex as a demographic weighting system based on verified identities.
I think that users will gravitate to quality discussion forums, once we start to see systems that are genuinely superior.
Yes. But this is by no means enough. You fear the threat of governments, but you aren't nearly afraid enough of the undemocratic tendencies in non-government entities.
Fact is, the internet is a place of great inequality. There are inequalities of technical skill, which favor certain classes. There are inequalities of money. There are inequalities of time. There are inequalities of dedication and conviction (fanaticism). There are even inequalities related to such mundane things as time zones, bandwith and latency.
The consequence of all this inequality, is that some people are a lot - and I mean a lot better at making themselves heard, at setting the agenda, at drawing up the ideological boundaries. As surely as in the offline world (only to some degree, other groups are advantaged there). From this inequality we will see new elites form, willing to defend their established influence at the expense of everyone else.
What we need to do, to save democracy, is to start working seriously not just for freedom of speech online (which we pretty much have already), but equality of speech - what the ancient Athenians called isegoria. So that we get representative discourse, not discourse dominated by net-elites who through their advantages manage to drown out moderate and opposing voices.
The answer is yes. It is evidence of the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the internet.
Some people on the internet have more power than others. It may be because they know how to forge SSL certificates, or just because they have the persistence, organization and time to post to forums all day long.
We're used to these people being "good guys" more often than not. Libertarian-ish, atheist-ish, free software-ish. But there's nothing natural about it. What sympathetic traits the emerging net elites happens to have, are probably just vestigal consequences of their relative sense of vulnerability and powerlessness in the offline world. Once they get used to their power, they will start abusing it more often and more brazenly, and selling out to offline authorities. So, it's not at all surprising to see pro-government hacking groups.
What we need is to construct good forums, where the inequalities of time, technical skill, persistence, organization are effectively countered. On a low level, it may be as simple as making a site robust against hacking. On a higher level, experimentation with democratic procedure is necessary (slashdot was a pioneer in this with their moderation system, sadly it hasn't been taken further either by them or other sites).
You CAN use your phone without a Google account, but that requires you do a lot of work setting it up yourself, with a replacement contacts app, replacement app store, replacement maps provider etc.
The reason they undermined Netscape was that they wanted to control web standards. They won the battle, but lost the war - they are no longer in a position to dictate proprietary extensions to the web through control of the browser. A page that only works in IE is no longer an option for developers.
(A page that only works on Windows, however, is still an option in a few contexts, and MS struggle to keep it that way).
I wouldn't bet on Ballmer's stupidity overriding his business sense.
To find what the writer actually communicated, I suppose you could give the text to a random sample of the target audience, and quiz them afterwards on the contents.
But that's not typically how it's done in literary criticism.
This is the real noteworthy thing in this article. (Robot grading essays is nonsense - sure, you get consistency, but you get consistency from wc -l as well)
But I think "pet students" isn't quite the problem. The problem may just as well that the professors try to compensate, knowing that they like you. As soon as you get a personal connection to your students, your capability to judge objectively is diminished, and it's not possible to compensate for (except by blinding, as WG do).
Kind of. You'd thought they have learned by now that making something accessible to first a few Americans, then all Americans, then Britons, then Singaporeans for some reason, then the rest of the world a couple of years down the road ... is NOT the optimal way to exploit good PR.
> Also, it's been mentioned numerous times what kills console game profits is buying used games, as opposed to pirating.
It's been mentioned, and debunked. The game industry assumes two things that are completely wrong:
1. People who buy 50$ games today will still buy a 50$ game tomorrow - even if recouping 15$ by reselling it afterwards is impossible then.
2. People who buy a 20$ used game today will buy the game at full price tomorrow if that's all that's available.
Used game stores ensure fair pricing of games, and increases console game profitability by enabling price discrimination. Not to mention the visibility gains - but that may be a net negative if the game is overhyped and sucks.
This is a foot bullet by Capcom. Game companies can go into the aftermarket business themselves if they can't stand seeing other making money this way. It's no more an injustice against Capcom than a used car dealership is an injustice against Toyota.
Nintendo: Evil Mercenaries 3D
"From my experience, I noticed, that nearly 100% of those things called "framework", are things that should be avoided. Works for me."
Works for you how, exactly? Not for writing games without any "framework", I'd wager.
You don't know what you're talking about. SDL provides only pretty low-level stuff - blitting, an event queue, joystick support etc. And you only init the things you use. If you want drawing primitives or text, you need separate libraries. Contrary to what the prune says, SDL is very well suited for its purpose (cross-platform, mostly 2d games), as it's popularity suggests.
Sam Lantinga, the architect and maintainer of SDL, was lead software engineer on a little game called World of Warcraft. I kind of trust the most senior person in the open source gaming world to know what he's doing.
> Someone figured out a way to troll Wikipedia. Piss off all the fans who are adding useful contributions to the articles. The other common tactic is to delete all the detailed info under the pretence of merging articles together and then claiming that the article is now too long and needs to be cut back drastically. All the effort people put in to documenting characters and events, even the minor ones, is destroyed.
And the problem is that in Wikipedia, this earns you status. All the old editors who had preservation of useful information as a priority have left, so the only way to gain approval and respect (and be allowed to control some topics of your own) is to engage in such shitty behavior. Ultimately, it's this way because Jimbo wants it to be: He doesn't want any sort of fan information on wikipedia, because he wants to move as much as possible over to his for-profit project Wikia.
> I ask because it's always possible to advertise to get other people involved, perhaps people more knowledgeable than either of you.
Oh no, that gets you punished for canvassing. If you're not someone high up, that is. Then your private mutual assistance mailing lists can be published, and nothing will come off it.
What wikipedia needs is a hate button. And liberal application of said button to any and all aspiring wikilawyers.
Bon appetite!
Ballast water tanks are certainly a problem, but they're not a new invention.
They didn't leave, they were hunted to extinction. And while they're "returning", the population they're coming from has probably been separated from the north Atlantic one for a longer time than since they were wiped out.
No, you're right, probably not. If we cause a mass extinction, wiping ourselves out in the process, that's just life going on, triggering the emergence of new species. Nothing to worry about. Anyway, we don't know and can't know and it's best not to think about.
Nature is hard, let's go shopping!
Slow changes are good. Fast changes are bad. Biosystems aren't equipped to handle fast changes, unless they've happened predictably for a long time.
Especially in marine ecosystems, where there are several layers of predators (as opposed to on land where there's pretty much one), you can not expect to get back the same result if you reintroduce a species after having removed it for a hundred years.
But either way, you shouldn't worry about the whale. You should worry about the reason the whale is back.
And there were just those two threats, five years ago, eh? No. You need to get your information from other people than Andrew Bolt. Followup to TFA:
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/opinion/editorial/general/change-of-attitude-needed-as-debate-overheats/2194216.aspx?storypage=3
> You can rent a car by the hour for those trips to IKEA.
Funny you should mention that. Don't IKEA have their own buses where you live? They do here. Free transport to and from the warehouse every hour. I wonder why large warehouses outside cities don't do that more often.
I don't think you should underestimate the indirect effects. There was of course no conspiracy to ditch trams in Norway, yet two of the three large tram cities got rid of them.
If you read the contemporary newspapers, you see why: it was top-down decisions, and the argument was always _trams are becoming old-fashioned. Buses are the future._ Now where did they get that idea? (which was, by the way, entirely wrong, despite its self-fulfilling character). By looking at other cities, abroad. Some of got rid of their trams for corrupt reasons.