Why is this showing as "funny" when it apparently has more insightful mods? Something to do with the lack of a "stupid" mod category?
Regarding the content, the author apparently needs to learn that the past is not the present. However I'll continue looking for some comment that is actually funny or insightful.
I suppose if I ever saw a mod point to give I'd give this one a meta-interesting point. Not even a visible comment, but I found it by searching for the AC origin of the diversion of this discussion into stupidville.
So the burning question of the day is "Why are you playing with AC trolls?"
But the mod point would be for the interesting user number. What are the odds of getting 7 identical digits in a row?
Actually I should be interested in the 6-digit IDs, where the odds are 9 (excluding 0s) out of 999,999 = 0.000009 (but Slashdot has no overbar to be more precise).
Starting Score: 1 point Moderation 0
50% Funny
50% Overrated Extra 'Funny' Modifier +1 (Edit) Karma-Bonus Modifier +4 (Edit) Total Score: 5
That's what the details currently show. I think that means 4 moderation points, two funny and two overrated, and the result is that the comment showed up as moderated to be funny. On that basis, I looked at at the comment and searched for the humor.
The comment consisted of a long sentence repeated four times. Not funny.
Funny is the moderation and offensive is the waste of my time seeking humor on Slashdot. The moderation on Slashdot has become such a sick joke that they might as well turn it off.
Okay, I understand that you're too stupid to get the joke. So why are you braying like a jackass?
Oh yeah. I forgot. Because for you it's just another throwaway identity. After too many people notice what a feeble dweeb you are, you just throw it [identity 1608317] away and get a fresh sock puppet and start over as a fresh dweeb.
I'd try to explain, but you've already established your baseline and it would be boring and a waste of time. Looks to me like this "conversation" can be regarded as terminated.
Wow! An insightful mod that actually seems justified.
There is a solution here, and it could even begin with Slashdot. Isn't there a song about "Let it begin with me"?
What if there was a system to accumulate and display the characteristics of sources? In your comment, the key dimensions would be those related to trust. Low for a PR shill and high for a good journalist. In theory, there are still some trustworthy people in the government, and such a system would help distinguish them from the others...
The simplest way I can imagine to implement it would be with a second avatar icon. Slashdot doesn't use graphic avatars, but user names, so if Slashdot can't be enhanced in that way (and any enhancement to Slashdot seems less likely over time), it could be done with a second text link.
However, it's more clear to describe the idea in terms of avatar images, so that's how I'll describe it. Imagine the left avatar is however you want to represent yourself and it links to whatever profile information you want to share. Actually you don't need to imagine it because that's pretty much the standard approach on many websites.
So now imagine the second avatar image as a standardized representation of your public reputation based on how people have reacted to your public behaviors (such as comments and Likes). The version I like best would be a little radar diagram that shows how that person is seen on several key dimensions. Your [alvinrod's] comment was focused on trust, and something like "trustworthiness" or "honesty" would qualify as a key dimension to display.
With such a reputation avatar, you would be able to see at a glance just how much you should trust the comment (or link or whatever) in question. Or not trust it or even not see it. I admit that I would actually prefer to use such a system to save my limited time by rendering a LOT of time-wasting people invisible. I'll gladly wait to see them until AFTER they have improved their reputations.
Actually just a shadow of a much more complicated idea. For example, I didn't say anything about where the reputation avatar link would take you or how you should be able to weight the dimensions that matter to you...
By the way, I'm sure that the google and Facebook and other corporate cancers already do this. They collect our information and create highly detailed analyses of each of us. They just use those analyses for their own secretive purposes and don't share any of the information with the suckers who provided it. Par for the course in today's anti-freedom pro-greedom economy.
But too much time already, so I bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.
While I agree that the google has become quite EVIL this is another case of EVIL having no relation to the price of tea in China. I arrived at your comment early in my searches for humor or insight. I don't spend (= waste) much time searching for such on Slashdot these days. The wells have run dry over here...
But here are my initial thoughts on this topic, and then I'll rummage around a bit more to see if anyone shares them. Even better if someone has improved upon the ideas. Rarely happens lately, but hope dies slow.
(1) The googlers were glad to get an excuse to kill that turkey.
(2) The real reason Google+ failed was because they never figured out how to encourage mass migration from Facebook. The relatively easy part would have been harvesting a user's data from Facebook (with "relatively easy" based on the google earning the users' trust (even though the trendline is in the opposite direction)), but the migration steps got much harder after that and the EVIL powers that be today's google never saw the justification for the large investment in such complexities as remapping Facebook's data to a Google+ format or even providing a more Facebook-like interface for people who preferred such. Flexible user interfaces have actually become anathema to the google. Talk about your profit stiflers! (The google actually tried a flank attack, but without much sincerity. It would have taken some extremely large incentives to persuade Facebook to agree to the google-proposed standards for personal data storage (and portability).)
(3) The monopolistic advantage of the first mover makes the proposed solution of "other search engines and webmail providers" too weak.
(4) An actual solution approach would call for a pro-freedom anti-greedom economic system, while America is increasingly dedicated to the opposite.
(5) The main reason I write such things is to help me collect a list of key terms to search for since the Slashdot moderation system is so badly broken.
(6) I wish the owners of the Barney Google trademark would sue the google and take the name away from them.
I didn't say anything about limiting it to talk. I'd consider all of the evidence, and talk would weigh rather low on the list of evidence. Actually the most important factor would be the trend line of of the failure. For example, what if the early projects were huge failures while the more recent projects came close to succeeding?
The "talk is cheap" is a perfect description of how most crowdfunding websites seem to work these days. Writing up an appealing pitch is really important, though I think lucky timing is probably the most important factor in the highly "successful" collection of donations.
Which would you rather have? (1) A high salary as long as you work all your waking hours or (2) Half the work and half the pay while you're young enough to create nice memories for the rest of your life. If you would sincerely prefer Option (1), then mostly I just feel sorry for you. I think the economists have bamboozled you.
My view is that economists have bamboozled themselves, too. They count the money as a kind of joke. It's relatively easy to count money in the same way as it's easier to look under the street light for the lost wallet, even though the wallet was lost far away in some dark place. "The light's better here!" That's the old joke, but the economists jokes are more like "This stock is really worth $197.52 because the sucker who just bought it at that price believes the next sucker will pay $197.53 per share." The new joke is the market cap.
The main problem with time-based economics is that none of us really know how much time we have. Also there's a confusing equivalency in that we all experience time at the same rate no matter how much the results vary. My theory of ekronomics is still at the level of ontology, but I don't have time just now for another round of Ekronomics 101.
You seem to have ignored the condition I specified in the second paragraph, but in the #3 case that you prefer, the project-management support of the website should include helping less experienced people deliver the project. Remember that the website would be in an ideal position to accumulate lots of experience in supporting projects.
Still better if I were just mistaken and that there already is such a website that doesn't take their cut of the money and run away, which is my perception of Kickstarter and the others I've looked at.
I mostly agree with your description and most of your points, but the VCs are only interested in the money. My suggestion is targeted at people who want to do projects at a much lower level without worrying about whether everyone can get rich in the IPO or by selling out to a gigantic TLC or whatever. The donors would mostly be getting recognition on a list of donors and access to the products in the case of software. I actually think the programmers would generally budget their time a little bit below market value to compensate for getting the freedom to do what they want to do.
I'd even be willing to invest in such a website, but no if I were involved in any executive capacity.
So would you prefer to donate your money to (1) a project that has several programmers who have succeeded in prior projects, (2) a project whose programmers have a consistent record of failure, or (3) a project where the programmers have no reputation at all?
I say (2), subject to the condition that they can convince me that they have learned important lessons from their mistakes. Just too unlikely that projects in the (1) group would need or seek funding from any crowdfunding website. Nor do I like the gamble of (3).
Another AC diversion, eh? Let me make some attempt to intrude in a more constructive direction. Or has "constructive" become a dirty word on today's Slashdot? (Only your AC troll knows for sure?)
Project management is hard, but Kickstarter doesn't care. They just take their cut without regard to results. From the Kickstarter perspective it's great if the project blows past its goal.
In terms of a constructive solution, I wish there were a crowdfunding website that EARNED its cut by providing project management support. Please let me know if such exists, but I've visited LOTS of them and haven't detected such an approach.
Let me try to make that more concrete: The imaginary website would vet the proposals before seeking funding. The proposals would have to be complete in terms of schedule, budget, resources (including people), such oft-forgotten factors as adequate testing, and success criteria. I actually think the success criteria are the most important part of project management. In exchange for doing that work, the website would EARN a percentage for providing the project management support, which should include evaluating the finished projects against their success criteria and reporting the results to all of the donors and to the public.
This approach would actually relate to MEPR, in that proposals involving people who have earned high reputations should be more attractive for funding. However I've already spent too much time on this topic for now, so I bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Yeah, but I had to think for a second. The real value of this breach is that the hackers have some non-anonymous identities to abuse. If they were professional hackers, perhaps working for Russia or NK, then part of the motivation was limitations in what they can already do with fake identities (AKA sock puppets). Essentially it's a value proposition, where a real identity is much more valuable than a fake identity. It would be interesting to ask the hackers how much more valuable.
My initial reaction is that we need more data, especially about the timing. Facebook's response suggests that this attack may have begun months ago. If so, and if the hackers actually had millions of identities to play with, then we know they have been extremely careful in what they are doing with them. If they had engaged in any wholesale abuse, then Facebook would have been deluged with reports of suspicious activities.
Okay. Only more deluged than usual, but I still think it would have shown up more quickly.
But identity abuse is built on the foundation of fake identities of the anonymous stripe. I'm still advocating MEPR as the approach that could do the most to save Facebook from itself. It could even work on Slashdot, but there's no chance Slashdot could gather the resources to implement it. ADSAuPR, atAJG.
One more wrinkle from the vast world of Facebook abuse: Have the Facebook (and Twitter?) trolls started pre-blocking the people (like me) who advocate blocking trolls rather than playing with them? A block-first strategy? To evade detection or confuse the issue? It seems likely that Facebook notices accounts that get blocked too much, so perhaps the trolls have started a new rigging of the system, possibly even sharing lists of identities for mass blocking by sock puppets.
If my final speculation is approximately correct, then one of the most important forms of data the hackers could have obtained from the reported account breaches would have been the lists of blocked users. This is the kind of data that they could use quite surreptitiously to figure out (1) Who is blocking them and (2) How the blocking patterns are related to sock puppet attrition, the better to protect their hordes.
Actually didn't find any insightful comment that addressed the political reasons they are trying it now. Really bad, even dictatorial, reasons.
Anti-trust is a better reason, but I think there should be some improvements in the rationale. Here's my suggestion:
Pro-freedom anti-greedom taxation to make it natural for monopolies to reward themselves by reproducing rather than just growing like insane cancers. Implementation is simple: Progressive taxation of profits based on market share. If a company becomes too dominant, it actually can increase its retained profits by dividing itself into competing companies. The fundamental goal should be to seek at least 3 to 5 competitors to choose from in each market niche.
In the cases of legitimately natural monopolies the high taxes should pay for careful regulation of the monopoly and research to break the monopoly. DSAuPR, atAJG.
I know it wasn't that much because I was rather aware of money in those days. Worked my way through school. Rupp did start some major tuition increases, but now I realize that you have again failed to read what I actually wrote.
If you are trying to be annoying, then you are succeeding. If not, then I suggest you work on your reading comprehension.
In either case, there is no discussion here. Your handle is ringing a bell which makes me think we have had a similar exchange recently, though it's hard to be sure since such failed communication "exchanges" seem to be par for Slashdot now.
Rice has a huge endowment. I think it's second highest on a per student basis. Before he died Rice was supposed to be the third richest man in America (or perhaps the world). No close relatives, so all his money went to the school (after his murderers were caught and the fake will was canceled).
That's why I went there for my first degree. I was accepted by an Ivy League school, too, but Rice seemed the better value. They were still transitioning from the will-breaking that allowed them to charge tuition in the first place. (That was the same thing that allowed them to accept nonwhite students, by the way. I'm pretty sure the will also specified men, but somehow they allowed women anyway, even before they broke the will?)
Having said that, I'm not too overall impressed by President Leebron, whom I've met once or twice. I think his real priority is to get the money for a law school, which is the last thing Rice (or America) needs. Overall I feel like only the Hack and President Rupp were really putting undergraduate education first, but the other recent presidents have been pushing for growth and research and various other priorities.
Not sure I should confess this one, but... In one of the early email systems I programmed, I made a little mistake in how names were handled. Had to do with a search function in the database that I was using, but no question about who messed up and I have met the enemy...
Under certain cases the email system would deliver email to the intended recipient and to someone else...
Suffice it to say that I don't want to go too far into the details. I don't think there was any serious damage, but I learned a lot about the importance of adequate testing, and some more besides.
Regarding email that's misaddressed to me, the most common cases involve Gmail where people assume (definitely making an "ass") that their friend uses the default name on Gmail. Not that my name is common, but there are more than you think and I was the first one to to sign up for Gmail. What really pisses me off is when they propagate the incorrect address to entire groups of fools and then the email keeps drifting in for months.
The worst problem is still the spammers, however. My primary email is not Gmail, but it's "catchy" enough to fall into the dictionary attacks.
Doesn't everyone have a personal database app to answer such crucial questions? Seriously, I should port it from the current CGI/PERL to something more reasonable and more smartphone friendly. Here is the answer for this month:
For the year 2018 (in another live link, though sorted by title using a special book-title ordering function (to ignore leading "A ", "An " or "The ")) the current answer is 98:
With a suitable regex, I can even answer such peculiar questions as "How many books did I finish on the 15 day of the month?" The current answer is 116 (for the entire database going back to 1971).
Seriously, can anyone point me at a good Python source I could modify to achieve something less kludgy?
Unusual that I posted before searching the existing comments, but I'll do that now... Especially interested in funny books.
Am I confused? Is this the same story getting recycled, some kind of dup, or was there some kind of "event" that resulted in the deletion of a bunch of comments? I can see where it might have triggered a troll attack of some kind, so perhaps it was cleaned up and reposted?
Per one of my longer comments in this discussion, I think you are confused. There are some queries where a truth exists and the google should be strongly biased in favor of that truth and other queries where the google results should be more explicit about the state of confusion in the results.
Actually, I'll go one step beyond that earlier comment and say that I believe the old anti-evil google would actively push in favor of the truth even at risk of giving offense, but the modern google doesn't care and will do anything to sell the ads. This is especially sad, even paradoxical, insofar as the old google earned its reputation (and value) as a kind of oracle because it insisted on pushing the truth even though people had more freedom to use other search engines in those days, but now that the google has pretty much dominated search and become a truly cancerous corporation, the google has largely abandoned the quest for truth that led to their near-monopoly status.
That's near the bottom, but I can even explain what happened. I changed "the google" as a corporate reference that called for "at" to the personal reference "googlers", which now calls for the preposition "of".
Slashdot Mirror
Why is this showing as "funny" when it apparently has more insightful mods? Something to do with the lack of a "stupid" mod category?
Regarding the content, the author apparently needs to learn that the past is not the present. However I'll continue looking for some comment that is actually funny or insightful.
I suppose if I ever saw a mod point to give I'd give this one a meta-interesting point. Not even a visible comment, but I found it by searching for the AC origin of the diversion of this discussion into stupidville.
So the burning question of the day is "Why are you playing with AC trolls?"
But the mod point would be for the interesting user number. What are the odds of getting 7 identical digits in a row?
Actually I should be interested in the 6-digit IDs, where the odds are 9 (excluding 0s) out of 999,999 = 0.000009 (but Slashdot has no overbar to be more precise).
Starting Score: 1 point
Moderation 0
50% Funny
50% Overrated
Extra 'Funny' Modifier +1 (Edit)
Karma-Bonus Modifier +4 (Edit)
Total Score: 5
That's what the details currently show. I think that means 4 moderation points, two funny and two overrated, and the result is that the comment showed up as moderated to be funny. On that basis, I looked at at the comment and searched for the humor.
The comment consisted of a long sentence repeated four times. Not funny.
Funny is the moderation and offensive is the waste of my time seeking humor on Slashdot. The moderation on Slashdot has become such a sick joke that they might as well turn it off.
Okay, I understand that you're too stupid to get the joke. So why are you braying like a jackass?
Oh yeah. I forgot. Because for you it's just another throwaway identity. After too many people notice what a feeble dweeb you are, you just throw it [identity 1608317] away and get a fresh sock puppet and start over as a fresh dweeb.
I'd try to explain, but you've already established your baseline and it would be boring and a waste of time. Looks to me like this "conversation" can be regarded as terminated.
Wow! An insightful mod that actually seems justified.
There is a solution here, and it could even begin with Slashdot. Isn't there a song about "Let it begin with me"?
What if there was a system to accumulate and display the characteristics of sources? In your comment, the key dimensions would be those related to trust. Low for a PR shill and high for a good journalist. In theory, there are still some trustworthy people in the government, and such a system would help distinguish them from the others...
The simplest way I can imagine to implement it would be with a second avatar icon. Slashdot doesn't use graphic avatars, but user names, so if Slashdot can't be enhanced in that way (and any enhancement to Slashdot seems less likely over time), it could be done with a second text link.
However, it's more clear to describe the idea in terms of avatar images, so that's how I'll describe it. Imagine the left avatar is however you want to represent yourself and it links to whatever profile information you want to share. Actually you don't need to imagine it because that's pretty much the standard approach on many websites.
So now imagine the second avatar image as a standardized representation of your public reputation based on how people have reacted to your public behaviors (such as comments and Likes). The version I like best would be a little radar diagram that shows how that person is seen on several key dimensions. Your [alvinrod's] comment was focused on trust, and something like "trustworthiness" or "honesty" would qualify as a key dimension to display.
With such a reputation avatar, you would be able to see at a glance just how much you should trust the comment (or link or whatever) in question. Or not trust it or even not see it. I admit that I would actually prefer to use such a system to save my limited time by rendering a LOT of time-wasting people invisible. I'll gladly wait to see them until AFTER they have improved their reputations.
Actually just a shadow of a much more complicated idea. For example, I didn't say anything about where the reputation avatar link would take you or how you should be able to weight the dimensions that matter to you...
By the way, I'm sure that the google and Facebook and other corporate cancers already do this. They collect our information and create highly detailed analyses of each of us. They just use those analyses for their own secretive purposes and don't share any of the information with the suckers who provided it. Par for the course in today's anti-freedom pro-greedom economy.
But too much time already, so I bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.
While I agree that the google has become quite EVIL this is another case of EVIL having no relation to the price of tea in China. I arrived at your comment early in my searches for humor or insight. I don't spend (= waste) much time searching for such on Slashdot these days. The wells have run dry over here...
But here are my initial thoughts on this topic, and then I'll rummage around a bit more to see if anyone shares them. Even better if someone has improved upon the ideas. Rarely happens lately, but hope dies slow.
(1) The googlers were glad to get an excuse to kill that turkey.
(2) The real reason Google+ failed was because they never figured out how to encourage mass migration from Facebook. The relatively easy part would have been harvesting a user's data from Facebook (with "relatively easy" based on the google earning the users' trust (even though the trendline is in the opposite direction)), but the migration steps got much harder after that and the EVIL powers that be today's google never saw the justification for the large investment in such complexities as remapping Facebook's data to a Google+ format or even providing a more Facebook-like interface for people who preferred such. Flexible user interfaces have actually become anathema to the google. Talk about your profit stiflers! (The google actually tried a flank attack, but without much sincerity. It would have taken some extremely large incentives to persuade Facebook to agree to the google-proposed standards for personal data storage (and portability).)
(3) The monopolistic advantage of the first mover makes the proposed solution of "other search engines and webmail providers" too weak.
(4) An actual solution approach would call for a pro-freedom anti-greedom economic system, while America is increasingly dedicated to the opposite.
(5) The main reason I write such things is to help me collect a list of key terms to search for since the Slashdot moderation system is so badly broken.
(6) I wish the owners of the Barney Google trademark would sue the google and take the name away from them.
Time's up, but I bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.
I didn't say anything about limiting it to talk. I'd consider all of the evidence, and talk would weigh rather low on the list of evidence. Actually the most important factor would be the trend line of of the failure. For example, what if the early projects were huge failures while the more recent projects came close to succeeding?
The "talk is cheap" is a perfect description of how most crowdfunding websites seem to work these days. Writing up an appealing pitch is really important, though I think lucky timing is probably the most important factor in the highly "successful" collection of donations.
Z^-1
Thanks, that sounds like a highly promising lead and I'm pretty sure that I've never looked at it before. The name certainly doesn't ring a bell.
Which would you rather have? (1) A high salary as long as you work all your waking hours or (2) Half the work and half the pay while you're young enough to create nice memories for the rest of your life. If you would sincerely prefer Option (1), then mostly I just feel sorry for you. I think the economists have bamboozled you.
My view is that economists have bamboozled themselves, too. They count the money as a kind of joke. It's relatively easy to count money in the same way as it's easier to look under the street light for the lost wallet, even though the wallet was lost far away in some dark place. "The light's better here!" That's the old joke, but the economists jokes are more like "This stock is really worth $197.52 because the sucker who just bought it at that price believes the next sucker will pay $197.53 per share." The new joke is the market cap.
The main problem with time-based economics is that none of us really know how much time we have. Also there's a confusing equivalency in that we all experience time at the same rate no matter how much the results vary. My theory of ekronomics is still at the level of ontology, but I don't have time just now for another round of Ekronomics 101.
You seem to have ignored the condition I specified in the second paragraph, but in the #3 case that you prefer, the project-management support of the website should include helping less experienced people deliver the project. Remember that the website would be in an ideal position to accumulate lots of experience in supporting projects.
Still better if I were just mistaken and that there already is such a website that doesn't take their cut of the money and run away, which is my perception of Kickstarter and the others I've looked at.
"I'm an idealist, not an executive, Jim."
I mostly agree with your description and most of your points, but the VCs are only interested in the money. My suggestion is targeted at people who want to do projects at a much lower level without worrying about whether everyone can get rich in the IPO or by selling out to a gigantic TLC or whatever. The donors would mostly be getting recognition on a list of donors and access to the products in the case of software. I actually think the programmers would generally budget their time a little bit below market value to compensate for getting the freedom to do what they want to do.
I'd even be willing to invest in such a website, but no if I were involved in any executive capacity.
So would you prefer to donate your money to (1) a project that has several programmers who have succeeded in prior projects, (2) a project whose programmers have a consistent record of failure, or (3) a project where the programmers have no reputation at all?
I say (2), subject to the condition that they can convince me that they have learned important lessons from their mistakes. Just too unlikely that projects in the (1) group would need or seek funding from any crowdfunding website. Nor do I like the gamble of (3).
Another AC diversion, eh? Let me make some attempt to intrude in a more constructive direction. Or has "constructive" become a dirty word on today's Slashdot? (Only your AC troll knows for sure?)
Project management is hard, but Kickstarter doesn't care. They just take their cut without regard to results. From the Kickstarter perspective it's great if the project blows past its goal.
In terms of a constructive solution, I wish there were a crowdfunding website that EARNED its cut by providing project management support. Please let me know if such exists, but I've visited LOTS of them and haven't detected such an approach.
Let me try to make that more concrete: The imaginary website would vet the proposals before seeking funding. The proposals would have to be complete in terms of schedule, budget, resources (including people), such oft-forgotten factors as adequate testing, and success criteria. I actually think the success criteria are the most important part of project management. In exchange for doing that work, the website would EARN a percentage for providing the project management support, which should include evaluating the finished projects against their success criteria and reporting the results to all of the donors and to the public.
This approach would actually relate to MEPR, in that proposals involving people who have earned high reputations should be more attractive for funding. However I've already spent too much time on this topic for now, so I bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Big Subject, eh? Can I justify it?
Yeah, but I had to think for a second. The real value of this breach is that the hackers have some non-anonymous identities to abuse. If they were professional hackers, perhaps working for Russia or NK, then part of the motivation was limitations in what they can already do with fake identities (AKA sock puppets). Essentially it's a value proposition, where a real identity is much more valuable than a fake identity. It would be interesting to ask the hackers how much more valuable.
My initial reaction is that we need more data, especially about the timing. Facebook's response suggests that this attack may have begun months ago. If so, and if the hackers actually had millions of identities to play with, then we know they have been extremely careful in what they are doing with them. If they had engaged in any wholesale abuse, then Facebook would have been deluged with reports of suspicious activities.
Okay. Only more deluged than usual, but I still think it would have shown up more quickly.
But identity abuse is built on the foundation of fake identities of the anonymous stripe. I'm still advocating MEPR as the approach that could do the most to save Facebook from itself. It could even work on Slashdot, but there's no chance Slashdot could gather the resources to implement it. ADSAuPR, atAJG.
One more wrinkle from the vast world of Facebook abuse: Have the Facebook (and Twitter?) trolls started pre-blocking the people (like me) who advocate blocking trolls rather than playing with them? A block-first strategy? To evade detection or confuse the issue? It seems likely that Facebook notices accounts that get blocked too much, so perhaps the trolls have started a new rigging of the system, possibly even sharing lists of identities for mass blocking by sock puppets.
If my final speculation is approximately correct, then one of the most important forms of data the hackers could have obtained from the reported account breaches would have been the lists of blocked users. This is the kind of data that they could use quite surreptitiously to figure out (1) Who is blocking them and (2) How the blocking patterns are related to sock puppet attrition, the better to protect their hordes.
Actually didn't find any insightful comment that addressed the political reasons they are trying it now. Really bad, even dictatorial, reasons.
Anti-trust is a better reason, but I think there should be some improvements in the rationale. Here's my suggestion:
Pro-freedom anti-greedom taxation to make it natural for monopolies to reward themselves by reproducing rather than just growing like insane cancers. Implementation is simple: Progressive taxation of profits based on market share. If a company becomes too dominant, it actually can increase its retained profits by dividing itself into competing companies. The fundamental goal should be to seek at least 3 to 5 competitors to choose from in each market niche.
In the cases of legitimately natural monopolies the high taxes should pay for careful regulation of the monopoly and research to break the monopoly. DSAuPR, atAJG.
I know it wasn't that much because I was rather aware of money in those days. Worked my way through school. Rupp did start some major tuition increases, but now I realize that you have again failed to read what I actually wrote.
If you are trying to be annoying, then you are succeeding. If not, then I suggest you work on your reading comprehension.
In either case, there is no discussion here. Your handle is ringing a bell which makes me think we have had a similar exchange recently, though it's hard to be sure since such failed communication "exchanges" seem to be par for Slashdot now.
In conclusion: "Go away, son, ya bother me."
Rice has a huge endowment. I think it's second highest on a per student basis. Before he died Rice was supposed to be the third richest man in America (or perhaps the world). No close relatives, so all his money went to the school (after his murderers were caught and the fake will was canceled).
That's why I went there for my first degree. I was accepted by an Ivy League school, too, but Rice seemed the better value. They were still transitioning from the will-breaking that allowed them to charge tuition in the first place. (That was the same thing that allowed them to accept nonwhite students, by the way. I'm pretty sure the will also specified men, but somehow they allowed women anyway, even before they broke the will?)
Having said that, I'm not too overall impressed by President Leebron, whom I've met once or twice. I think his real priority is to get the money for a law school, which is the last thing Rice (or America) needs. Overall I feel like only the Hack and President Rupp were really putting undergraduate education first, but the other recent presidents have been pushing for growth and research and various other priorities.
Not sure I should confess this one, but... In one of the early email systems I programmed, I made a little mistake in how names were handled. Had to do with a search function in the database that I was using, but no question about who messed up and I have met the enemy...
Under certain cases the email system would deliver email to the intended recipient and to someone else...
Suffice it to say that I don't want to go too far into the details. I don't think there was any serious damage, but I learned a lot about the importance of adequate testing, and some more besides.
Regarding email that's misaddressed to me, the most common cases involve Gmail where people assume (definitely making an "ass") that their friend uses the default name on Gmail. Not that my name is common, but there are more than you think and I was the first one to to sign up for Gmail. What really pisses me off is when they propagate the incorrect address to entire groups of fools and then the email keeps drifting in for months.
The worst problem is still the spammers, however. My primary email is not Gmail, but it's "catchy" enough to fall into the dictionary attacks.
Doesn't everyone have a personal database app to answer such crucial questions? Seriously, I should port it from the current CGI/PERL to something more reasonable and more smartphone friendly. Here is the answer for this month:
http://shanenj.tripod.com/cgi-...
Only five so far, but that's a live link and I may finish another 5 before the end of the month.
For last month, the answer is nine books:
http://shanenj.tripod.com/cgi-...^.{44}1808&searchfields=all&sensecase=nocase&sorttype=none&datetype=comp&numorname=authnums
For the year 2018 (in another live link, though sorted by title using a special book-title ordering function (to ignore leading "A ", "An " or "The ")) the current answer is 98:
http://shanenj.tripod.com/cgi-...
With a suitable regex, I can even answer such peculiar questions as "How many books did I finish on the 15 day of the month?" The current answer is 116 (for the entire database going back to 1971).
Seriously, can anyone point me at a good Python source I could modify to achieve something less kludgy?
Unusual that I posted before searching the existing comments, but I'll do that now... Especially interested in funny books.
Am I confused? Is this the same story getting recycled, some kind of dup, or was there some kind of "event" that resulted in the deletion of a bunch of comments? I can see where it might have triggered a troll attack of some kind, so perhaps it was cleaned up and reposted?
Per one of my longer comments in this discussion, I think you are confused. There are some queries where a truth exists and the google should be strongly biased in favor of that truth and other queries where the google results should be more explicit about the state of confusion in the results.
Actually, I'll go one step beyond that earlier comment and say that I believe the old anti-evil google would actively push in favor of the truth even at risk of giving offense, but the modern google doesn't care and will do anything to sell the ads. This is especially sad, even paradoxical, insofar as the old google earned its reputation (and value) as a kind of oracle because it insisted on pushing the truth even though people had more freedom to use other search engines in those days, but now that the google has pretty much dominated search and become a truly cancerous corporation, the google has largely abandoned the quest for truth that led to their near-monopoly status.
I hate typos some more.
s/dismay at/dismay of/
That's near the bottom, but I can even explain what happened. I changed "the google" as a corporate reference that called for "at" to the personal reference "googlers", which now calls for the preposition "of".
I hate typos.
s/ensured/ensued/