When I see a comment like this one, I have to wonder why you bothered to post it. It's like you looked at a complex situation, noticed it was complex, and therefore concluded your "solution" is to not think about it. Maybe you could have reduced your comment to the first three words of your closing sentence?
Ah, here it is. This is the line that should be getting the positive mod points (that I never have to give). I found it on the search for "standard". Only one comment so far? (Sadly, I am not amazed.)
Yes, where communications between competing companies are important, OPEN standards are the key.
Let me go farther and suggest an implementation path: Pro-freedom taxation. Whenever any company becomes too dominant and starts eliminating competitors and reducing freedom, that company's taxes should increase. The short description is a progressive profits tax linked not to the size of the profit but to the market share. The role of the government should be as the impartial arbiter that studies the books to determine where the profits are coming from and which tax rates to apply to which parts of the profits (in contrast to today's government which has become a kind of investment bank for bribes slightly disguised as campaign contributions). This is NOT a penalty for success, but rather an incentive program to reproduce.
(There are cases of natural monopoly, by the way, but in those few cases the extra taxes are justified differently. (1) Regulation costs to make sure the monopoly isn't abused, and (2) Research on ways to break the monopoly. If you can give me a single example of a monopoly that you think is unbreakable, I'm sure I can give you 10 examples of fake monopolies defending themselves, often by bribing politicians to rig the game in their favor. I have yet to find a justified monopoly than cannot be circumvented or replaced in some way (and with an increase of freedom).)
I think this basic approach would work fine with Facebook, but there are additional complexities, so I'll illustrate with the simpler example of Microsoft. Imagine that Microsoft were divided into 3 competing companies that each started with a copy of all of the source code and 1/3 of the resources. Customers would now have real choices and the competing companies could evolve in different directions, but with standards to retain as much (or as little) compatibility as they wanted. You might buy your OS from the Windows company that emphasized privacy, while I could choose the one that runs fastest, while Apple could move closer to or farther from the open standards.
Surprisingly insightful branch and it even makes me wish I had a few mod points to share around, at least once in a while. Been many years since I've seen one...
Trying to put this in a clear positive light, it's about FREEDOM, but the root of the problem is that most people have very little understanding of it. For example, the big banks that JoeyRox mentioned think the most important freedom is to get rid of any regulations that interfere with greater profits. Microsoft thinks freedom should be which minor flavor of Microsoft software you use. Apple and the google and Exxon and Sony and IBM each have their own variations, but by now you should have noticed a unifying thread of freedom seen from a corporate perspective: It's the profits, stupid! They all worship at the same church:
"There is no gawd but Profit, and [corporate brand here] must be Profit's #1 prophet!"
Wrong. Freedom is a confusing thing, but it's mostly about choice. I've even refined my definition to a formula that can't even be displayed properly on Slashdot because of various implementation flaws... My sig has most of it, however.
Solutions! Get your fresh solutions here! At least I can join the "Freedom from Facebook (https://freedomfromfb.com/) campaign for the flank attack? Ya gotta start somewhere, eh?
Much more could be said, and I'm quite probably even known for my verbosity, but I'll close with the usual ADSAuPR, atAJG.
"Both times he wanted to know if there was a difference between HIV and HPV so I was able to explain that those are rarely confused with each other," Gates said.
Any moderately educated person should know the difference between HIV and HPV,...
If for no other reason than they're spelled differently.
You're overlooking Trump's poor spelling skills. Recent example of Trump's own wife, Melanie.
Just joking. I actually think that Freudian slip was another example of Trump's peculiar brand of humanism. Normal humanists of the nice brand care about other people, but Trump only cares about one human, himself.
I can't tell if that's supposed to be a joke or a suggestion for a poll. Or a reverse suggestion for a most-liked poll?
Seems to be a job for that user-driven polling software I was writing for that GE subsidiary so many years ago... Pretty sure the implementation language was FORTRAN, even though most of the real world had gone to C and Pascal by then. Pretty sure the system had BASIC, too, but not Gates' toy version.
You've got me curious about your "one thing", but I don't think any of them can get that upset with him so as to bother Trump. At some level they have to notice Trump is constantly contradicting himself, and whatever he promised them, he also promised some contradictory thing to someone else. They have to start from the state of denial and believe that he's lying to everyone else. Also, they have to believe he's just waiting for the right time to fulfill his only sincere promises, which must be the ones he made to them. (In this context "they" is whatever lunatic fringe that particular lunatic is fringing with.)
You stumped me. What's your joke? Another parody or self-parody on the proud ignorance? On it's surface it seems to be a hodgepodge of nihilism or anarchy or something.
I still can't figure out your intended sense of "joy". In some places you make it sound more like schadenfreude, but in other places it sounds more like a vegetative state.
Maybe I'm just repulsed too quickly to experience the emotion in question, even vicariously? For example, you mentioned Rushbaugh, but I can't tolerate more than a second or two of him before losing all joy or any semblance thereof.
Are you [1290638] really that ignorant, or just trying to reinforce my point? Maybe it's some sort of parody or self-parody?
If you are not trying to prove my point about such incurable ignorance, then I suggest you begin with some basic economic history of the stock market, trading companies, and limited liability corporations. None of which actually applies to the Trump so-called organization, by the way.
Alternatively, feel free to clarify your identity. If troll, then I have no time for nor interest in you.
I don't see what the "insightful" mod was for, though the mod did get me to look at the troll's comment. Lowest form of lie, Level 0 self-contradiction. Don't need to check anything to know that there's at least one lie there, though the example here was a case of two lies. (The impossible case is multiple true statements that are in contradiction.)
One of the things that is interesting about Trump is that he is a low-level liar. He often contradicts himself, sometimes within the same tweet. He frequently lies at Level 1, counterfactual statements, but any fool can check the facts.
The better liars, such as the lawyers and politicians, are mostly working at Level 2 of partial truth. That depends on knowing the whole truth and picking bits and pieces, but Trump rarely if ever gets that high. The most professional liars at Level 3 are using framing and various other techniques that render the truth itself meaningless. If you actually listen to a pro like Conway or Bannon you wind up wondering if the sky is actually blue or if the sun actually rose yesterday.
Interesting comment, but I never have the mod points to give. I used to get them from time to time, but that was many years ago. I think I pissed off Taco and and he put me on some kind of no-mod-points-for-you list...
Anyway, I think that's a confusing sense of "joy". My General Theory of Relatively Funny Stuff is that we laugh to learn. Normal people actually enjoy learning new things, and it's deeply linked to humor. So far I haven't been able to find a form of humor that is not linked in some way to learning stuff.
A few examples: Slapstick is funny because you are not the person getting hurt--but you are learning not to do those things by seeing the bad results. Children are always laughing because they are little learning machines, easily amused as they acquire new knowledge. Political humor depends upon knowing the political realities, which also explains why extremist right-wing humorists so often fail. Without reality they can't find the jokes. Since political humor is based on a contrast between the joke and the underlying reality, without the contrast the right-wing humorists can't make anyone laugh (though it is possible for honest conservatives to be funny).
Have you ever seen a video of Trump laughing? I haven't.
Trying to figure out what aspect of this story actually merits coverage on Slashdot.
It's the ignorance, stupid!
Kind of hard to tell in Trump's case since he is also quite stupid and has been sheltered and protected from the normal consequences of his stupidity. His father was only the first person to pump in money to cover the losses from Trump's bad decisions.
However I think it is much more significant that Trump doesn't care about what he doesn't know. I insist that Trump regards Bill Gates as admirable, for the money, if nothing else, but Trump still doesn't care enough to listen to him. Any moderately educated person should know the difference between HIV and HPV, but Trump doesn't know and doesn't care. Actually, given Trump's sexual peccadilloes (or perhaps you prefer to describe it as "raging libido"), it would even be normal self-protection to know a LOT about sexually transmitted diseases, but "Trump don't know and Trump don't care."
Not sure of the exact numbers, but there are a lot of proudly ignorant fools in America, and many of them voted for Trump precisely because they felt that Trump's disdainful attitude towards knowing things made him a true representative of their views, the kind of "leader" they wanted to follow. Scare quotes on "leader" because if you're ignorant you can't actually lead since you have no idea where you're going. Normal peasants like you and I would merely fail hard when we stumble blindly into holes, but Trump has always gotten more money to pull him out and hide his failures.
There's another option: Learning from mistakes. I actually think there is a tiny bit of evidence that Trump has learned two things along the way. That's why he doesn't gamble with his own money now. His bankruptcies didn't teach him how to be a better businessman, but they did teach him to take his own cut up front and to make sure the contracts allow him to walk away when projects fail.
Good comment and deserves the insightful mod, even though you didn't address the underlying religious issue:
"There is no gawd but Profit, and the google wants to be Profit's #1 prophet."
Right now Apple holds the title (according to Fortune), but they are evil and cancerous in different ways. The noncancerous corporations have mostly been crushed out of the market or bought out and merged.
It amuses me to imagine there could be solution approaches. My current favorite would be a progressive tax on corporate profits, where the rate increases with market share. NOT a penalty to success, but rather an incentive to reproduce by fission, providing more competition, more choices, and more freedom for the human beings. The REAL human beings, not the legal fictions like corporate persons.
A couple of years ago, before my old friends who had joined google started ghosting me, we used to meet for a few beers from time to time. It was becoming pretty obvious that the evil thing was moot, and I realized the new motto was:
Probably means you're an old guy with little sensitivity to higher frequencies, or that you have a really cheap computer. Unless it's both.
What's annoying me is that I suggested the slider approach before I heard that the NY Times had created one. They should provide a numeric scale that you can use to compare your hearing to other people's or to compare one sound system to another.
I agree with you that this is one way to conceive of the problem. From the perspective you have chosen, EPR will allow you to control the scale by giving priority to the nicer people. Among all of the strangers you meet you could focus on the ones most deserving of your time and attention. Actually, that could be an interesting way to handle the visibility threshold: Set my current visibility so that I only see 100 people in each venue. (Staying below Dunbar's Number?) Long ago I actually formulated that aspect in terms of the scale of competition distorting our perceptions of good and bad. It was relatively easy to be the fastest runner in your village, or to excel in some way that your friend knew and appreciated, but now both of us know about Usain Bolt... (Or can look him up on the Web: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...)
However I probably wouldn't use EPR that way, since I'm not such a social person. I would probably just set it about twice as high as the default level to screen out more of the time-wasters. Then again, it would be tempting to ask for emphasis on the top 10% in certain dimensions... For example, perhaps the funniest people should attract more of my attention?
I'm not saying it would be easy. I think it has to be a multidimensional thing with orthogonal dimensions that also evolve over time. I also think the dimensions should be tilted towards niceness, in that it should be easier to say encouraging words while discouraging words should call for evidence or justification... And yet I cling to hope of a better world (soon enough for me to benefit).
There seem to be three primary candidates as explanations for your reply:
(1) You didn't understand what I wrote, but can't figure out how to write a relevant or useful question.
(2) You have infinite time and don't care how you spend it.
(3) You had nothing to say, but had to say something.
In Case (1), please feel free to ask for clarification. I certainly have to acknowledge being a poor writer. Too easy for me to think the implications are obvious even when the local context is insufficient. One of the secrets of good writing is to figure out how much context is required. Or perhaps I'm just a tad insensitive to the delicate sensibilities of the Slashdot audience?
Case (2) would be delusional, but you might be religious along those conventional lines.
I also considered "NOT a real penalty" as the Subject.
So let's start with the question of "Why?"
Because a fresh fake identity is extremely valuable. It starts out with the polite respect most of us accord to any stranger. The sock puppet loses nothing by getting nuked, but polite and civil discourse was destroyed first.
Solution approach: Use EPR (Earned Public Reputation) to make fake identities less valuable. Actually, the default visibility setting can be calibrated against the number of fake identities that are being created (among other factors). If visibility has to be earned by sustained niceness and if bad behaviors are remembered and suitably penalized (with reduced visibility), then the social environment would be greatly improved.
Yes, even on Slashdot. One way to think of EPR is as enhanced karma with teeth attached.
ADSAuPR, atAJG, but even better if you have a better solution or solution approach to discuss. The typical responses on Slashdot these years are just bits of shallow snark, sometimes followed by a trickle of ideas worth thinking about...
(I increasingly feel that's yet another time-related problem, mostly caused by the uniform cycle time of the top page. One solution there would be variable descent speeds, with more significant stories falling more slowly--but that presumes Slashdot had an economic model that actually supported sustained improvement. ( in Japanese.))
Slashdot Mirror
When I see a comment like this one, I have to wonder why you bothered to post it. It's like you looked at a complex situation, noticed it was complex, and therefore concluded your "solution" is to not think about it. Maybe you could have reduced your comment to the first three words of your closing sentence?
What we have now is corporate cancerism. ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Ah, here it is. This is the line that should be getting the positive mod points (that I never have to give). I found it on the search for "standard". Only one comment so far? (Sadly, I am not amazed.)
Yes, where communications between competing companies are important, OPEN standards are the key.
Let me go farther and suggest an implementation path: Pro-freedom taxation. Whenever any company becomes too dominant and starts eliminating competitors and reducing freedom, that company's taxes should increase. The short description is a progressive profits tax linked not to the size of the profit but to the market share. The role of the government should be as the impartial arbiter that studies the books to determine where the profits are coming from and which tax rates to apply to which parts of the profits (in contrast to today's government which has become a kind of investment bank for bribes slightly disguised as campaign contributions). This is NOT a penalty for success, but rather an incentive program to reproduce.
(There are cases of natural monopoly, by the way, but in those few cases the extra taxes are justified differently. (1) Regulation costs to make sure the monopoly isn't abused, and (2) Research on ways to break the monopoly. If you can give me a single example of a monopoly that you think is unbreakable, I'm sure I can give you 10 examples of fake monopolies defending themselves, often by bribing politicians to rig the game in their favor. I have yet to find a justified monopoly than cannot be circumvented or replaced in some way (and with an increase of freedom).)
I think this basic approach would work fine with Facebook, but there are additional complexities, so I'll illustrate with the simpler example of Microsoft. Imagine that Microsoft were divided into 3 competing companies that each started with a copy of all of the source code and 1/3 of the resources. Customers would now have real choices and the competing companies could evolve in different directions, but with standards to retain as much (or as little) compatibility as they wanted. You might buy your OS from the Windows company that emphasized privacy, while I could choose the one that runs fastest, while Apple could move closer to or farther from the open standards.
As usual, I bid you adieu with ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Surprisingly insightful branch and it even makes me wish I had a few mod points to share around, at least once in a while. Been many years since I've seen one...
Trying to put this in a clear positive light, it's about FREEDOM, but the root of the problem is that most people have very little understanding of it. For example, the big banks that JoeyRox mentioned think the most important freedom is to get rid of any regulations that interfere with greater profits. Microsoft thinks freedom should be which minor flavor of Microsoft software you use. Apple and the google and Exxon and Sony and IBM each have their own variations, but by now you should have noticed a unifying thread of freedom seen from a corporate perspective: It's the profits, stupid! They all worship at the same church:
"There is no gawd but Profit, and [corporate brand here] must be Profit's #1 prophet!"
Wrong. Freedom is a confusing thing, but it's mostly about choice. I've even refined my definition to a formula that can't even be displayed properly on Slashdot because of various implementation flaws... My sig has most of it, however.
Solutions! Get your fresh solutions here! At least I can join the "Freedom from Facebook (https://freedomfromfb.com/) campaign for the flank attack? Ya gotta start somewhere, eh?
Much more could be said, and I'm quite probably even known for my verbosity, but I'll close with the usual ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Z^-3
"Both times he wanted to know if there was a difference between HIV and HPV so I was able to explain that those are rarely confused with each other," Gates said.
Any moderately educated person should know the difference between HIV and HPV, ...
If for no other reason than they're spelled differently.
You're overlooking Trump's poor spelling skills. Recent example of Trump's own wife, Melanie.
Just joking. I actually think that Freudian slip was another example of Trump's peculiar brand of humanism. Normal humanists of the nice brand care about other people, but Trump only cares about one human, himself.
I can't tell if that's supposed to be a joke or a suggestion for a poll. Or a reverse suggestion for a most-liked poll?
Seems to be a job for that user-driven polling software I was writing for that GE subsidiary so many years ago... Pretty sure the implementation language was FORTRAN, even though most of the real world had gone to C and Pascal by then. Pretty sure the system had BASIC, too, but not Gates' toy version.
Z^-2
You've got me curious about your "one thing", but I don't think any of them can get that upset with him so as to bother Trump. At some level they have to notice Trump is constantly contradicting himself, and whatever he promised them, he also promised some contradictory thing to someone else. They have to start from the state of denial and believe that he's lying to everyone else. Also, they have to believe he's just waiting for the right time to fulfill his only sincere promises, which must be the ones he made to them. (In this context "they" is whatever lunatic fringe that particular lunatic is fringing with.)
You stumped me. What's your joke? Another parody or self-parody on the proud ignorance? On it's surface it seems to be a hodgepodge of nihilism or anarchy or something.
I still can't figure out your intended sense of "joy". In some places you make it sound more like schadenfreude, but in other places it sounds more like a vegetative state.
Maybe I'm just repulsed too quickly to experience the emotion in question, even vicariously? For example, you mentioned Rushbaugh, but I can't tolerate more than a second or two of him before losing all joy or any semblance thereof.
Are you [1290638] really that ignorant, or just trying to reinforce my point? Maybe it's some sort of parody or self-parody?
If you are not trying to prove my point about such incurable ignorance, then I suggest you begin with some basic economic history of the stock market, trading companies, and limited liability corporations. None of which actually applies to the Trump so-called organization, by the way.
Alternatively, feel free to clarify your identity. If troll, then I have no time for nor interest in you.
I don't see what the "insightful" mod was for, though the mod did get me to look at the troll's comment. Lowest form of lie, Level 0 self-contradiction. Don't need to check anything to know that there's at least one lie there, though the example here was a case of two lies. (The impossible case is multiple true statements that are in contradiction.)
One of the things that is interesting about Trump is that he is a low-level liar. He often contradicts himself, sometimes within the same tweet. He frequently lies at Level 1, counterfactual statements, but any fool can check the facts.
The better liars, such as the lawyers and politicians, are mostly working at Level 2 of partial truth. That depends on knowing the whole truth and picking bits and pieces, but Trump rarely if ever gets that high. The most professional liars at Level 3 are using framing and various other techniques that render the truth itself meaningless. If you actually listen to a pro like Conway or Bannon you wind up wondering if the sky is actually blue or if the sun actually rose yesterday.
Z^-1
Interesting comment, but I never have the mod points to give. I used to get them from time to time, but that was many years ago. I think I pissed off Taco and and he put me on some kind of no-mod-points-for-you list...
Anyway, I think that's a confusing sense of "joy". My General Theory of Relatively Funny Stuff is that we laugh to learn. Normal people actually enjoy learning new things, and it's deeply linked to humor. So far I haven't been able to find a form of humor that is not linked in some way to learning stuff.
A few examples: Slapstick is funny because you are not the person getting hurt--but you are learning not to do those things by seeing the bad results. Children are always laughing because they are little learning machines, easily amused as they acquire new knowledge. Political humor depends upon knowing the political realities, which also explains why extremist right-wing humorists so often fail. Without reality they can't find the jokes. Since political humor is based on a contrast between the joke and the underlying reality, without the contrast the right-wing humorists can't make anyone laugh (though it is possible for honest conservatives to be funny).
Have you ever seen a video of Trump laughing? I haven't.
Trying to figure out what aspect of this story actually merits coverage on Slashdot.
It's the ignorance, stupid!
Kind of hard to tell in Trump's case since he is also quite stupid and has been sheltered and protected from the normal consequences of his stupidity. His father was only the first person to pump in money to cover the losses from Trump's bad decisions.
However I think it is much more significant that Trump doesn't care about what he doesn't know. I insist that Trump regards Bill Gates as admirable, for the money, if nothing else, but Trump still doesn't care enough to listen to him. Any moderately educated person should know the difference between HIV and HPV, but Trump doesn't know and doesn't care. Actually, given Trump's sexual peccadilloes (or perhaps you prefer to describe it as "raging libido"), it would even be normal self-protection to know a LOT about sexually transmitted diseases, but "Trump don't know and Trump don't care."
Not sure of the exact numbers, but there are a lot of proudly ignorant fools in America, and many of them voted for Trump precisely because they felt that Trump's disdainful attitude towards knowing things made him a true representative of their views, the kind of "leader" they wanted to follow. Scare quotes on "leader" because if you're ignorant you can't actually lead since you have no idea where you're going. Normal peasants like you and I would merely fail hard when we stumble blindly into holes, but Trump has always gotten more money to pull him out and hide his failures.
There's another option: Learning from mistakes. I actually think there is a tiny bit of evidence that Trump has learned two things along the way. That's why he doesn't gamble with his own money now. His bankruptcies didn't teach him how to be a better businessman, but they did teach him to take his own cut up front and to make sure the contracts allow him to walk away when projects fail.
Trump has never learned that truth matters.
Z^-1
Good comment and deserves the insightful mod, even though you didn't address the underlying religious issue:
"There is no gawd but Profit, and the google wants to be Profit's #1 prophet."
Right now Apple holds the title (according to Fortune), but they are evil and cancerous in different ways. The noncancerous corporations have mostly been crushed out of the market or bought out and merged.
It amuses me to imagine there could be solution approaches. My current favorite would be a progressive tax on corporate profits, where the rate increases with market share. NOT a penalty to success, but rather an incentive to reproduce by fission, providing more competition, more choices, and more freedom for the human beings. The REAL human beings, not the legal fictions like corporate persons.
A couple of years ago, before my old friends who had joined google started ghosting me, we used to meet for a few beers from time to time. It was becoming pretty obvious that the evil thing was moot, and I realized the new motto was:
"All your attention are belong to the google."
Details at 11.
Probably means you're an old guy with little sensitivity to higher frequencies, or that you have a really cheap computer. Unless it's both.
What's annoying me is that I suggested the slider approach before I heard that the NY Times had created one. They should provide a numeric scale that you can use to compare your hearing to other people's or to compare one sound system to another.
I agree with you that this is one way to conceive of the problem. From the perspective you have chosen, EPR will allow you to control the scale by giving priority to the nicer people. Among all of the strangers you meet you could focus on the ones most deserving of your time and attention. Actually, that could be an interesting way to handle the visibility threshold: Set my current visibility so that I only see 100 people in each venue. (Staying below Dunbar's Number?) Long ago I actually formulated that aspect in terms of the scale of competition distorting our perceptions of good and bad. It was relatively easy to be the fastest runner in your village, or to excel in some way that your friend knew and appreciated, but now both of us know about Usain Bolt... (Or can look him up on the Web: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...)
However I probably wouldn't use EPR that way, since I'm not such a social person. I would probably just set it about twice as high as the default level to screen out more of the time-wasters. Then again, it would be tempting to ask for emphasis on the top 10% in certain dimensions... For example, perhaps the funniest people should attract more of my attention?
I'm not saying it would be easy. I think it has to be a multidimensional thing with orthogonal dimensions that also evolve over time. I also think the dimensions should be tilted towards niceness, in that it should be easier to say encouraging words while discouraging words should call for evidence or justification... And yet I cling to hope of a better world (soon enough for me to benefit).
Thanks for asking. ADSAuPR, atAJG stands for Additional Detailed Suggestions Available upon Polite Request, as the Ancient Joke Goes.
Want to ask? I'm still suffering from delusions of grand solutions.
There seem to be three primary candidates as explanations for your reply:
(1) You didn't understand what I wrote, but can't figure out how to write a relevant or useful question.
(2) You have infinite time and don't care how you spend it.
(3) You had nothing to say, but had to say something.
In Case (1), please feel free to ask for clarification. I certainly have to acknowledge being a poor writer. Too easy for me to think the implications are obvious even when the local context is insufficient. One of the secrets of good writing is to figure out how much context is required. Or perhaps I'm just a tad insensitive to the delicate sensibilities of the Slashdot audience?
Case (2) would be delusional, but you might be religious along those conventional lines.
In Case (3), too much said already.
I also considered "NOT a real penalty" as the Subject.
So let's start with the question of "Why?"
Because a fresh fake identity is extremely valuable. It starts out with the polite respect most of us accord to any stranger. The sock puppet loses nothing by getting nuked, but polite and civil discourse was destroyed first.
Solution approach: Use EPR (Earned Public Reputation) to make fake identities less valuable. Actually, the default visibility setting can be calibrated against the number of fake identities that are being created (among other factors). If visibility has to be earned by sustained niceness and if bad behaviors are remembered and suitably penalized (with reduced visibility), then the social environment would be greatly improved.
Yes, even on Slashdot. One way to think of EPR is as enhanced karma with teeth attached.
ADSAuPR, atAJG, but even better if you have a better solution or solution approach to discuss. The typical responses on Slashdot these years are just bits of shallow snark, sometimes followed by a trickle of ideas worth thinking about...
(I increasingly feel that's yet another time-related problem, mostly caused by the uniform cycle time of the top page. One solution there would be variable descent speeds, with more significant stories falling more slowly--but that presumes Slashdot had an economic model that actually supported sustained improvement. ( in Japanese.))