I actually think that each of the subjective dimensions should be symmetric (on Facebook and even here on Slashdot), but the playing field should still be tilted in favor of the positive side. You want to make it easier for people to do and be good. In a simple implementation, clicking "Like" can be easy, while clicking "Dislike" can involve an extra step to say why.
However I think that Like-Dislike is basically a weak and almost meaningless dimension. In terms of meaning, I think you can argue that it should increase the general weight of a comment's positive ratings, but on its own there is little meaning to it. Therefore I think the better dimensions of sentiment should have clear meanings. Dimensions such as true-false (or informative-disinformative or valid-invalid) or funny-unfunny (to me). For example, if you say a comment is false, then you would have to indicate which part was false and why. (And if it turned out you are lying, then YOUR own reputation should suffer. More symmetry.)
(Bells and whistles in dimensional thinking for sentiments: I also think the dimensions should be able to evolve over time, and that the dimensions of earned public reputation should age to encourage people to act better and see their reputations gradually improve. People with earned negative reputations should be easier to filter against, thus allowing them to be as negative as they like for the (negative) benefit of people who actually want to spend their time that way. Also, a person who has an earned reputation in a particular dimension should get extra weight, as with a rating from a proven funny person (based on reactions from other people) counting more heavily in rating another comment as funny or unfunny.)
The clumsy, ad hoc, and poorly considered dimensions of Slashdot's moderation are an excellent example of how NOT to do it. Take that "troll" dimension, for example. (I wish someone would.) What is it supposed to mean? I think that the dimension may have a catchy label, but it lacks meaning. Some combination of "negative politeness" and "negative truth" combined with an earned reputation for "negative agreement"? (I think the general meaning on today's Slashdot is that a sock puppet has a mod point to burn, but that might be jealous projection since I never get a mod point.)
Basically just an ACK and agreement with the sentiments of both of you, but I would add that the fabulous founders actually did want "No, we won't let you" to be an acceptable response. Not the way the so-called Republicans apply it on Bolshevik principles, but along the lines of "When you don't know what to do, then you probably shouldn't do anything." Their idea was that the government should rationally discuss the options, and when they can achieve a pretty good consensus on how to tackle a problem, then they should go ahead and try, but if there isn't any clear consensus, then it generally wasn't too bad to wait until the problem and the solutions became more clear.
Instead we have reached the point where the ONLY concern of the GOP from day one of Obama's presidency was to stop him. Purely personal and political and to hell with the country and the Constitution. Today's GOP stands for and wants only three things: (1) Partisan politics, (2) Personal power, and (3) Private profits.
Yes, but... In such cases you're supposed to weigh the positive and negative probabilities. Seems to me like you're basically arguing in favor of cheap materials such as the consumable supplies for the space station. No major damage if they are lost, but large savings in the future if they are delivered to the space station.
In terms of the larger missions of reaching Mars or even revisiting the moon, I'm also a big believer in orbital staging. I think it makes much more sense to start from orbit after many small trips from the ground rather than trying to make one enormous effort directly from the ground. Most of the cost is the lift to orbit, and the bigger the lift the more eggs you are putting into the single basket.
You seem to be proving my point about the effectiveness of the decades of vilification and demonization? No one is perfect, not Hillary and not even whoever you did vote for, but #FatNixon least of all.
I think I, too, was effected to some degree, but I still saw good and sufficient positive reasons to support Hillary. However even I have to acknowledge that the negative reasons against Trump were heavier. MUCH heavier, and now I feel supported (even vindicated?) by the evidence of a year of AMAZING incompetence and his total failure to learn anything from his YUGE mistakes.
Not a normal market. If they are claiming a profit, then I have to dismiss it as creative bookkeeping combined with the eagerness of the customers. Perhaps it's simpler to put in in terms of buyers' and sellers' markets? A buyers' market is normal in that customers can shop around for the best prices from truly competitive options, and the best options will rise to the top. What we have now is a total sellers' market with an amount of launch payload that is far smaller than the demand. Whatever price SpaceX charges, they can find someone willing to pay for it--even if there are fundamental problems with their approach (and I remain convinced there are).
On the one hand, Musk is benefiting hugely from NASA's prior investments, which were NOT based on normal economics. On the other hand, Musk is also benefiting from Moore's Law and other general improvements in technology. Will these combine to produce spaceflight that is truly economically viable? I think your time frame of 1 to 2 years is way short.
So how much money have you invested in SpaceX? This seems to be a clear case where you should be asked if you have put any money where your keyboard is.
I approach this fundamentally as a mathematician. If you have to save fuel for landing, then that is fuel you cannot use to boost the payload. If you have to design the engines for longer burns, then you have to trade off against other factors such as maximizing the thrust. If you have to add complexity to control the descent phase, then that creates more places for expensive failures. Perhaps most importantly, if you have to design everything more robustly to reduce the inspections and repairs, then you are boosting the dead weight. Maximizing the payload weight for the cost is always the key.
It's FAR too early for you to claim that this approach makes more economic sense than something like recovery with a parachute or a glider or perhaps even a capture helicopter to grab the parachute. We haven't seen enough failures (or successes) yet to have any basis to estimate the true costs. I actually think the best approach would involve an air-breathing launch platform that would carry a much smaller rocket. The launch platform would essentially be a large airplane that should be as safe and reusable as other large planes.
Why did you waste the time to write that totally unpersuasive post? I'm trying to imagine some flavor of the honest person who, basically due to projection, can't recognize a liar when he gets most thoroughly Trumped by the YUGEST. Or maybe some kind of rationalized defense against the cognitive dissonance?
Self-contradiction is the lowest level of lying. You don't even have to check the facts to know that at least part of it must be a lie. Just a bit of a logical joke, but self-contradictions are most interesting when one false statement is contradicted by another false statement. Can't do that with pairs of true statements (ceteris paribus).
I actually find it remarkable that #FatNixon contradicts himself so often and so quickly. However it's more remarkable that each of his supporters is convinced Trump is only lying when he disagrees with that supporter's favorite weirdness.
I mean I am not so rich that I don't have to consider carefully where I spend my money. I have concluded that Bernie (who I still largely agree with) had his campaign deliberately boosted by Putin's hackers as part of a divide-and-conquer strategy to weaken the Democratic Party. This was the flip side of their decision to support Trump's campaign.
Putin's goal was NOT to give America the best possible leadership, but rather to weaken Hillary so that she would only have a weak mandate. I think the actual victory of #FatNixon shocked Putin as much as anyone, but he certainly would have loved a civil war with Trump's supporters rejecting Hillary.
On the one hand, I'm not really following you here. On the other hand, I admit that my first vote for Bill Clinton was very much a vote AGAINST Dan Quayle. The second time was more complicated, but still largely a negative vote against what the GOP was becoming (or had already mostly become).
Between the two Clintons, I'd say I always liked Hillary better than Bill. Though in some ways I think they are quite similar, I think they are quite different at the highest level. I think Bill is a humanist who really puts people first, while Hillary is probably a materialist who puts material goods (including money as a token thereof) first. The most dangerous politicians tend to be idealists who put bad ideas first (like the Libertarians), though I suspect Obama (ditto Bernie) is an idealist with good ideas. That's why I didn't think #PresidentTweety would be so harmful, since he's mostly a humanist (of a sick and inverted sort) without the competence to be a serious materialst (except that the KGB pumped him full of dirty money).
In terms of the original story, I think idealists are also the easiest to con with fake news, which is why the evangelicals are such an important part of #PresidentTweety's base. Idealists already know what they want to believe, so if you say that, then they will follow you anywhere.
I'm not saying I believe ALL of the reports, but I definitely believe the consensus of the national security organizations. Also I believe that Putin's hackers were extremely strategic and leveraged a relatively small amount of funding extremely effectively. Finally, in the end the election result was so close that EVERY little bit was crucial for #FatNixon to claim the victory. In as sense you can argue that #PresidentTweety owes his occupancy of the White House to EVERY lunatic fringe that delivered on the order of 70,000 votes (though that's an oversimplification, since the real key is WHERE those votes were).
The punchline is that Trump never pays his debts. Suckers!
I'm ignoring Tablizer's branch because he seems to be feeding some AC troll. (Why do they bother? Why don't I care?)
On your [RazorSharp's] branch, I think I mostly disagree. I don't think principles have much to do with any of this self-destruction of the GOP, except for the one principle of "winning" at any cost. They are dedicated to the most basic and well established military principle: Divide and conquer. Not just the Democratic party, not just the public school system, but the nation itself at this point.
On this branch I just want to say I mostly agree with PhrostyMcByte on this branch, but I will clarify that I NEVER considered voting for Trump. I knew full well he would be terrible, though I didn't know he would become such a archetype that I can't figure out whether to describe him as #PresidentTweety or #FatNixon. (There's apparently some AC junk in there, but I can't see it.)
I'll just note that I basically agree with quantaman and Bernie Sanders more than wonkavader. However just because I agree with Bernie on more issues doesn't mean he would have been the better candidate or that he would not have been attacked at least as viciously as Hillary was attacked. I actually think that Hillary hatred had been pretty much maxed out by decades of vilification and demonization. She is kind of used to it by now. In contrast Bernie would have been totally inexperienced against that level of attack.
I admit I didn't much like her personally, mostly because of the lawyer thing, but I respected her competence and think she would have kept the country moving in the correct direction. I had no reservations about voting for her against any of the so-called Republican candidates, let alone the monstrous #FatNixon. It would NOT have been a surprise if she backed off a bit from some of Obama's initiatives, but I actually think it more likely that she would have gone farther than he did, especially if she had had a solid Congressional majority behind her.
While I agree with your premise that educational results are not directly correlated with spending, your link does NOT address the problem I was talking about. I'm going to start on the premise that you are sincere and spend a bit of time clarifying what happened.
The public school system was divided and conquered. There is a small division of excellent public schools, but that is largely like a lottery for the parents who care a lot and who are not rich enough to send their kids to private schools. The bulk of the public schools were converted into obedience schools you wouldn't send your dog to. They also created escape hatches to allow as many students as possible escape from the public schools, sometimes with subsidies from public funds. Some of those students went to religious private schools or to home schooling, and of course the rich people have always had the option of elite private schools.
Your focus on performance is actually misleading. What that measures is how well those students have been indoctrinated to produce the correct answers. The important aspect of that kind of education is to narrow their minds so that they cannot conceive of questioning the "correct" answers. The real goal is to produce docile wage slaves and model prisoners (for the ones that wind up in prison), and the real test is that they obey the advertising for toothpaste or political candidates. This is the crop of mindless mushrooms we ourselves created (for Putin to harvest).
If I ever got a mod point to give, you'd get one for that. I think you made the main points better than my anecdotes below (which I was apparently composing at the same time).
Right now I'm reading What's the Matter with Kansas?, which covers much of the same territory. A bit dated, but I actually think most of these problems are actually based on the destruction of public education, which started decades ago, back when the rich real estate speculators realized they could cut their own property taxes by reducing the need for school budgets by first of all destroying the public schools.
I think this story (and the research it reports) is fundamentally misleading. In terms of psychological warfare, of course you need to target your victims carefully. Some targets like (or are suckers for) fake news, others not so much. Time for a bit of anecdotal evidence:
In general there are few so-called Republicans in my neck of the woods, but when I did meet a couple of them for beers before the election, I noticed that they had also been drinking the strange Kool-Aid, and hard. In particular, each of them thought Hillary was a demonic monster, but they were completely orthogonal about what was wrong with her. At the time I was mostly amused that they could believe such silly things. Looking back, I think that each of them had been successfully targeted with different flavors of fake news and the most interesting aspect is how they could be so unified in their hatred while being so divided in their peculiar reasoning.
Now in my own case, I think I was successfully targeted by a different kind of divide and conquer strategy. I was encouraged to get overly enthusiastic about Bernie to the point of firing my wallet at the wrong target. I can't prove it was done by the Russians, but I think I was quite probably targeted by pro-Bernie news and propaganda that helped divide the Democratic Party quite effectively. I never swallowed the anti-Hillary bait (beyond my basic dislike of lawyers), but I should have shot my wallet at a more useful target, perhaps the Democratic Party in Michigan?
The much more serious question is how much Putin's goons learned from the prior elections and how well they will apply those lessons going forward. Right now it looks like the Bolshevik Republicans are much more concerned with defending PARTY discipline than with defending the nation. (Kind of laughable if you know the history of the original Bolsheviks.)
Still anecdotal, but I miss the rational Republicans. Long time since I've spoken to one.
I think you [Frankzy] may be confusing some military testing with NASA's work. Do you have any citation to back that up?
Having said that, I am vaguely remembering that there may have been one Saturn V launch without a real payload, but the justification would be similar as with military testing. I do remember a lot of static testing, and much of that did consume the tested equipment.
By the way, the testing topic is linked to why I have doubts about the economic utility of the reusable boosters. They add a great deal of weight and complexity to the launch vehicles, but the costs of testing and repairing them for another flight are comparable to producing new equipment. I think it might be better to focus on ways of producing the new equipment less expensively for single use.
I also favor more emphasis on reducing the complexity, which links to the crucial question of the reliability of reused equipment. The Space Shuttle program gives us a bit of experimental data there. The failure rate was above 1%. Not so good.
Fixed that Subject for you [Scarletdown], though it was inherited. Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit for emphasis, but still...
I think your post was supposed to be humorous or insightful? However it's sort of on the end of the scale of my initial reaction, which was "Why waste the launch on interplanetary garbage?" In the end, the entire thing looks like a publicity stunt. Perhaps the biggest and technically most sophisticated publicity stunt in history, perhaps personally gratifying to Elon Musk, but fundamentally rather pointless.
I can understand that they didn't want to spend too much money on a payload for a risky launch, but couldn't Musk decide to do something with the launch more useful than park his personal and very own car in a billion-year parking space? If I understand the situation correctly, they wasted quite a bit of technical effort for the next part of sending it to Mars, but why not use the entire thing for some constructive purpose? Perhaps consumables for the space station? Some sort of moderate complexity payload for the moon?
Don't get me wrong. I am somewhat impressed by the technology, but I'm also impressed by the waste. If NASA had launched a car, then I'm certain there would have been some criticism. (However I think most of the technology Musk used is just refining NASA's earlier research, and I'm not at all convinced of the economic value of recovering the boosters. Too soon to say on that count because there is nothing like a truly competitive market yet.)
Still can't decide whether or not you are a troll. You might be a sincere ideologue or fanatic of some sort. Perhaps you could not understand what I wrote, though you did not ask for clarification of such key notions as "prior secrecy" that you apparently did not grok. Or perhaps you simply lack the imagination to perceive your self-contradictions?
Whatever. I see no reason to continue the discussion along the lines of your reply, which seems basically irrelevant to my comment. I think I understand what you are repeating, and I think you're still incorrect. (Of course, I could also be mistaken in my interpretation, but if so then your repetitions were not enlightening.)
I was actually looking for more direct commentary on the hypocrisy of the so-called Republicans in suddenly becoming so concerned about the possible abuses of FBI investigations that might target themselves. The party discipline is amazing, spinning on a dime from "We're the law and order party" to "Gawd save us from law and order." The eternally disorganized Democratic Party can't ever figure out which way they are going on any issue, and there have always been plenty of Democratic critics of FISA and the FBI, but today's GOP can spin any which way, with virtually 100% support of THE Party Line per the latest instructions from FAUX "news".
Mostly says a lot about today's Slashdot that the mindless bit of drivel you [WaffleMonster] was responding to was heavily (troll-moderated) as insightful while your much deeper and thoughtful reply earned no moderation at all, and could only be discovered by accident.
However, as usual, I'm mostly disappointed by the lack of earned funny mods. Plenty of room for humorous commentary on this story, but evidently not on Slashdot.
I suspect that points more to an overall design feature of this type of surveillance system.
Sorry, had to fix that for you. If the goal wasn't to ignore the rule of law and do inappropriate things, the secret courts would have zero need to be secret in the first place.
Mostly trying to decide if you [green1] are sincere or just another troll. It's also possible that we are partly in agreement but you haven't thought some of these things through. I actually think secrecy is fundamentally bad, but there are times it is justified, mostly by prior secrecy. For example, if we already knew everything about the governmental criminals and their mechanisms for extracting revenge, then we wouldn't need any protection for whistleblowers, would we?
Actually came across your comment while searching for ANY mention of the "mission" part of the original story summary. In contrast to the FAKE threat of a search warrant that could have failed to find any real evidence of a crime, the REAL threat here is that #PresidentTweety will redefine the mission of the FBI. I'm sure he'd prefer to convert the FBI into his personal detective agency to handle such YUGE problems as getting embarrassingly cuckolded by one (or more) of his wives and girlfriends. (Stormy Daniels was smart to take the money and shut up, eh?)
We already know that the FBI did find REAL evidence of REAL crimes. If not, they could not have renewed the warrant. The main thing we don't know now is how much add and comfort America's REAL enemies will be able to get from the hints and clues exposed in this partisan hatchet job.
Really? That was your only contribution to this long discussion? It seems unlikely that your other comments were troll-modded into invisibility and that the sock puppets somehow completely overlooked this one. Then again, I only stumbled across it by accident.
I should have asked if you've read Phishing and Countermeasures by Jakobsson and Myers? I'm currently enjoying it, though it was sadly largely obsolete before the ink hit the dead trees...
Eh? I had no idea you [THAT Bruce] were hanging around Slashdot. The 4-digit ID is no surprise, but I should search for your other comments. I'd use a mod point to promote them if I ever got such, eh?
Anyway, in response I'll just reiterate part of my last comment on this story:
"Your [Trump supporters'] president is a crook."
Only a minor question as to what sort of crook. The sad reality is that today's Bolshevik so-called Republicans don't care and they will NEVER impeach #PresidentTweety no matter what crimes Mueller finds and what evidence and proof he provides. The GOP pols are NOT in it for the country or the Constitution. All they want is to take the money and run away. Ps before Cs. Partisan politics, personal power, and private profits are ALL they care about.
I want to close on an optimistic note, but it's so hard these days. The divide and conquer strategy has worked so well, especially against public education. I think America's only hope is an implosion triggered by the internal conflict between the so-called Republicans' REAL goal, which is government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1% and Trump's simpleminded goal, which is government of, by, and for the Donald.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually think that each of the subjective dimensions should be symmetric (on Facebook and even here on Slashdot), but the playing field should still be tilted in favor of the positive side. You want to make it easier for people to do and be good. In a simple implementation, clicking "Like" can be easy, while clicking "Dislike" can involve an extra step to say why.
However I think that Like-Dislike is basically a weak and almost meaningless dimension. In terms of meaning, I think you can argue that it should increase the general weight of a comment's positive ratings, but on its own there is little meaning to it. Therefore I think the better dimensions of sentiment should have clear meanings. Dimensions such as true-false (or informative-disinformative or valid-invalid) or funny-unfunny (to me). For example, if you say a comment is false, then you would have to indicate which part was false and why. (And if it turned out you are lying, then YOUR own reputation should suffer. More symmetry.)
(Bells and whistles in dimensional thinking for sentiments: I also think the dimensions should be able to evolve over time, and that the dimensions of earned public reputation should age to encourage people to act better and see their reputations gradually improve. People with earned negative reputations should be easier to filter against, thus allowing them to be as negative as they like for the (negative) benefit of people who actually want to spend their time that way. Also, a person who has an earned reputation in a particular dimension should get extra weight, as with a rating from a proven funny person (based on reactions from other people) counting more heavily in rating another comment as funny or unfunny.)
The clumsy, ad hoc, and poorly considered dimensions of Slashdot's moderation are an excellent example of how NOT to do it. Take that "troll" dimension, for example. (I wish someone would.) What is it supposed to mean? I think that the dimension may have a catchy label, but it lacks meaning. Some combination of "negative politeness" and "negative truth" combined with an earned reputation for "negative agreement"? (I think the general meaning on today's Slashdot is that a sock puppet has a mod point to burn, but that might be jealous projection since I never get a mod point.)
Basically just an ACK and agreement with the sentiments of both of you, but I would add that the fabulous founders actually did want "No, we won't let you" to be an acceptable response. Not the way the so-called Republicans apply it on Bolshevik principles, but along the lines of "When you don't know what to do, then you probably shouldn't do anything." Their idea was that the government should rationally discuss the options, and when they can achieve a pretty good consensus on how to tackle a problem, then they should go ahead and try, but if there isn't any clear consensus, then it generally wasn't too bad to wait until the problem and the solutions became more clear.
Instead we have reached the point where the ONLY concern of the GOP from day one of Obama's presidency was to stop him. Purely personal and political and to hell with the country and the Constitution. Today's GOP stands for and wants only three things: (1) Partisan politics, (2) Personal power, and (3) Private profits.
Yes, but... In such cases you're supposed to weigh the positive and negative probabilities. Seems to me like you're basically arguing in favor of cheap materials such as the consumable supplies for the space station. No major damage if they are lost, but large savings in the future if they are delivered to the space station.
In terms of the larger missions of reaching Mars or even revisiting the moon, I'm also a big believer in orbital staging. I think it makes much more sense to start from orbit after many small trips from the ground rather than trying to make one enormous effort directly from the ground. Most of the cost is the lift to orbit, and the bigger the lift the more eggs you are putting into the single basket.
You seem to be proving my point about the effectiveness of the decades of vilification and demonization? No one is perfect, not Hillary and not even whoever you did vote for, but #FatNixon least of all.
I think I, too, was effected to some degree, but I still saw good and sufficient positive reasons to support Hillary. However even I have to acknowledge that the negative reasons against Trump were heavier. MUCH heavier, and now I feel supported (even vindicated?) by the evidence of a year of AMAZING incompetence and his total failure to learn anything from his YUGE mistakes.
Not a normal market. If they are claiming a profit, then I have to dismiss it as creative bookkeeping combined with the eagerness of the customers. Perhaps it's simpler to put in in terms of buyers' and sellers' markets? A buyers' market is normal in that customers can shop around for the best prices from truly competitive options, and the best options will rise to the top. What we have now is a total sellers' market with an amount of launch payload that is far smaller than the demand. Whatever price SpaceX charges, they can find someone willing to pay for it--even if there are fundamental problems with their approach (and I remain convinced there are).
On the one hand, Musk is benefiting hugely from NASA's prior investments, which were NOT based on normal economics. On the other hand, Musk is also benefiting from Moore's Law and other general improvements in technology. Will these combine to produce spaceflight that is truly economically viable? I think your time frame of 1 to 2 years is way short.
So how much money have you invested in SpaceX? This seems to be a clear case where you should be asked if you have put any money where your keyboard is.
I approach this fundamentally as a mathematician. If you have to save fuel for landing, then that is fuel you cannot use to boost the payload. If you have to design the engines for longer burns, then you have to trade off against other factors such as maximizing the thrust. If you have to add complexity to control the descent phase, then that creates more places for expensive failures. Perhaps most importantly, if you have to design everything more robustly to reduce the inspections and repairs, then you are boosting the dead weight. Maximizing the payload weight for the cost is always the key.
It's FAR too early for you to claim that this approach makes more economic sense than something like recovery with a parachute or a glider or perhaps even a capture helicopter to grab the parachute. We haven't seen enough failures (or successes) yet to have any basis to estimate the true costs. I actually think the best approach would involve an air-breathing launch platform that would carry a much smaller rocket. The launch platform would essentially be a large airplane that should be as safe and reusable as other large planes.
Do you have any citation to support that claim? On it's face it appears to be even more ridiculous than parking a car in orbit.
Why did you waste the time to write that totally unpersuasive post? I'm trying to imagine some flavor of the honest person who, basically due to projection, can't recognize a liar when he gets most thoroughly Trumped by the YUGEST. Or maybe some kind of rationalized defense against the cognitive dissonance?
Self-contradiction is the lowest level of lying. You don't even have to check the facts to know that at least part of it must be a lie. Just a bit of a logical joke, but self-contradictions are most interesting when one false statement is contradicted by another false statement. Can't do that with pairs of true statements (ceteris paribus).
I actually find it remarkable that #FatNixon contradicts himself so often and so quickly. However it's more remarkable that each of his supporters is convinced Trump is only lying when he disagrees with that supporter's favorite weirdness.
You [4697521] are obviously insane. Is that sufficient rebuttal? Please don't bother me again.
I mean I am not so rich that I don't have to consider carefully where I spend my money. I have concluded that Bernie (who I still largely agree with) had his campaign deliberately boosted by Putin's hackers as part of a divide-and-conquer strategy to weaken the Democratic Party. This was the flip side of their decision to support Trump's campaign.
Putin's goal was NOT to give America the best possible leadership, but rather to weaken Hillary so that she would only have a weak mandate. I think the actual victory of #FatNixon shocked Putin as much as anyone, but he certainly would have loved a civil war with Trump's supporters rejecting Hillary.
On the one hand, I'm not really following you here. On the other hand, I admit that my first vote for Bill Clinton was very much a vote AGAINST Dan Quayle. The second time was more complicated, but still largely a negative vote against what the GOP was becoming (or had already mostly become).
Between the two Clintons, I'd say I always liked Hillary better than Bill. Though in some ways I think they are quite similar, I think they are quite different at the highest level. I think Bill is a humanist who really puts people first, while Hillary is probably a materialist who puts material goods (including money as a token thereof) first. The most dangerous politicians tend to be idealists who put bad ideas first (like the Libertarians), though I suspect Obama (ditto Bernie) is an idealist with good ideas. That's why I didn't think #PresidentTweety would be so harmful, since he's mostly a humanist (of a sick and inverted sort) without the competence to be a serious materialst (except that the KGB pumped him full of dirty money).
In terms of the original story, I think idealists are also the easiest to con with fake news, which is why the evangelicals are such an important part of #PresidentTweety's base. Idealists already know what they want to believe, so if you say that, then they will follow you anywhere.
I'm not saying I believe ALL of the reports, but I definitely believe the consensus of the national security organizations. Also I believe that Putin's hackers were extremely strategic and leveraged a relatively small amount of funding extremely effectively. Finally, in the end the election result was so close that EVERY little bit was crucial for #FatNixon to claim the victory. In as sense you can argue that #PresidentTweety owes his occupancy of the White House to EVERY lunatic fringe that delivered on the order of 70,000 votes (though that's an oversimplification, since the real key is WHERE those votes were).
The punchline is that Trump never pays his debts. Suckers!
I'm ignoring Tablizer's branch because he seems to be feeding some AC troll. (Why do they bother? Why don't I care?)
On your [RazorSharp's] branch, I think I mostly disagree. I don't think principles have much to do with any of this self-destruction of the GOP, except for the one principle of "winning" at any cost. They are dedicated to the most basic and well established military principle: Divide and conquer. Not just the Democratic party, not just the public school system, but the nation itself at this point.
On this branch I just want to say I mostly agree with PhrostyMcByte on this branch, but I will clarify that I NEVER considered voting for Trump. I knew full well he would be terrible, though I didn't know he would become such a archetype that I can't figure out whether to describe him as #PresidentTweety or #FatNixon. (There's apparently some AC junk in there, but I can't see it.)
I'll just note that I basically agree with quantaman and Bernie Sanders more than wonkavader. However just because I agree with Bernie on more issues doesn't mean he would have been the better candidate or that he would not have been attacked at least as viciously as Hillary was attacked. I actually think that Hillary hatred had been pretty much maxed out by decades of vilification and demonization. She is kind of used to it by now. In contrast Bernie would have been totally inexperienced against that level of attack.
I admit I didn't much like her personally, mostly because of the lawyer thing, but I respected her competence and think she would have kept the country moving in the correct direction. I had no reservations about voting for her against any of the so-called Republican candidates, let alone the monstrous #FatNixon. It would NOT have been a surprise if she backed off a bit from some of Obama's initiatives, but I actually think it more likely that she would have gone farther than he did, especially if she had had a solid Congressional majority behind her.
While I agree with your premise that educational results are not directly correlated with spending, your link does NOT address the problem I was talking about. I'm going to start on the premise that you are sincere and spend a bit of time clarifying what happened.
The public school system was divided and conquered. There is a small division of excellent public schools, but that is largely like a lottery for the parents who care a lot and who are not rich enough to send their kids to private schools. The bulk of the public schools were converted into obedience schools you wouldn't send your dog to. They also created escape hatches to allow as many students as possible escape from the public schools, sometimes with subsidies from public funds. Some of those students went to religious private schools or to home schooling, and of course the rich people have always had the option of elite private schools.
Your focus on performance is actually misleading. What that measures is how well those students have been indoctrinated to produce the correct answers. The important aspect of that kind of education is to narrow their minds so that they cannot conceive of questioning the "correct" answers. The real goal is to produce docile wage slaves and model prisoners (for the ones that wind up in prison), and the real test is that they obey the advertising for toothpaste or political candidates. This is the crop of mindless mushrooms we ourselves created (for Putin to harvest).
If I ever got a mod point to give, you'd get one for that. I think you made the main points better than my anecdotes below (which I was apparently composing at the same time).
Right now I'm reading What's the Matter with Kansas? , which covers much of the same territory. A bit dated, but I actually think most of these problems are actually based on the destruction of public education, which started decades ago, back when the rich real estate speculators realized they could cut their own property taxes by reducing the need for school budgets by first of all destroying the public schools.
I think this story (and the research it reports) is fundamentally misleading. In terms of psychological warfare, of course you need to target your victims carefully. Some targets like (or are suckers for) fake news, others not so much. Time for a bit of anecdotal evidence:
In general there are few so-called Republicans in my neck of the woods, but when I did meet a couple of them for beers before the election, I noticed that they had also been drinking the strange Kool-Aid, and hard. In particular, each of them thought Hillary was a demonic monster, but they were completely orthogonal about what was wrong with her. At the time I was mostly amused that they could believe such silly things. Looking back, I think that each of them had been successfully targeted with different flavors of fake news and the most interesting aspect is how they could be so unified in their hatred while being so divided in their peculiar reasoning.
Now in my own case, I think I was successfully targeted by a different kind of divide and conquer strategy. I was encouraged to get overly enthusiastic about Bernie to the point of firing my wallet at the wrong target. I can't prove it was done by the Russians, but I think I was quite probably targeted by pro-Bernie news and propaganda that helped divide the Democratic Party quite effectively. I never swallowed the anti-Hillary bait (beyond my basic dislike of lawyers), but I should have shot my wallet at a more useful target, perhaps the Democratic Party in Michigan?
The much more serious question is how much Putin's goons learned from the prior elections and how well they will apply those lessons going forward. Right now it looks like the Bolshevik Republicans are much more concerned with defending PARTY discipline than with defending the nation. (Kind of laughable if you know the history of the original Bolsheviks.)
Still anecdotal, but I miss the rational Republicans. Long time since I've spoken to one.
I think you [Frankzy] may be confusing some military testing with NASA's work. Do you have any citation to back that up?
Having said that, I am vaguely remembering that there may have been one Saturn V launch without a real payload, but the justification would be similar as with military testing. I do remember a lot of static testing, and much of that did consume the tested equipment.
By the way, the testing topic is linked to why I have doubts about the economic utility of the reusable boosters. They add a great deal of weight and complexity to the launch vehicles, but the costs of testing and repairing them for another flight are comparable to producing new equipment. I think it might be better to focus on ways of producing the new equipment less expensively for single use.
I also favor more emphasis on reducing the complexity, which links to the crucial question of the reliability of reused equipment. The Space Shuttle program gives us a bit of experimental data there. The failure rate was above 1%. Not so good.
Fixed that Subject for you [Scarletdown], though it was inherited. Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit for emphasis, but still...
I think your post was supposed to be humorous or insightful? However it's sort of on the end of the scale of my initial reaction, which was "Why waste the launch on interplanetary garbage?" In the end, the entire thing looks like a publicity stunt. Perhaps the biggest and technically most sophisticated publicity stunt in history, perhaps personally gratifying to Elon Musk, but fundamentally rather pointless.
I can understand that they didn't want to spend too much money on a payload for a risky launch, but couldn't Musk decide to do something with the launch more useful than park his personal and very own car in a billion-year parking space? If I understand the situation correctly, they wasted quite a bit of technical effort for the next part of sending it to Mars, but why not use the entire thing for some constructive purpose? Perhaps consumables for the space station? Some sort of moderate complexity payload for the moon?
Don't get me wrong. I am somewhat impressed by the technology, but I'm also impressed by the waste. If NASA had launched a car, then I'm certain there would have been some criticism. (However I think most of the technology Musk used is just refining NASA's earlier research, and I'm not at all convinced of the economic value of recovering the boosters. Too soon to say on that count because there is nothing like a truly competitive market yet.)
Still can't decide whether or not you are a troll. You might be a sincere ideologue or fanatic of some sort. Perhaps you could not understand what I wrote, though you did not ask for clarification of such key notions as "prior secrecy" that you apparently did not grok. Or perhaps you simply lack the imagination to perceive your self-contradictions?
Whatever. I see no reason to continue the discussion along the lines of your reply, which seems basically irrelevant to my comment. I think I understand what you are repeating, and I think you're still incorrect. (Of course, I could also be mistaken in my interpretation, but if so then your repetitions were not enlightening.)
I was actually looking for more direct commentary on the hypocrisy of the so-called Republicans in suddenly becoming so concerned about the possible abuses of FBI investigations that might target themselves. The party discipline is amazing, spinning on a dime from "We're the law and order party" to "Gawd save us from law and order." The eternally disorganized Democratic Party can't ever figure out which way they are going on any issue, and there have always been plenty of Democratic critics of FISA and the FBI, but today's GOP can spin any which way, with virtually 100% support of THE Party Line per the latest instructions from FAUX "news".
Mostly says a lot about today's Slashdot that the mindless bit of drivel you [WaffleMonster] was responding to was heavily (troll-moderated) as insightful while your much deeper and thoughtful reply earned no moderation at all, and could only be discovered by accident.
However, as usual, I'm mostly disappointed by the lack of earned funny mods. Plenty of room for humorous commentary on this story, but evidently not on Slashdot.
I suspect that points more to an overall design feature of this type of surveillance system.
Sorry, had to fix that for you. If the goal wasn't to ignore the rule of law and do inappropriate things, the secret courts would have zero need to be secret in the first place.
Mostly trying to decide if you [green1] are sincere or just another troll. It's also possible that we are partly in agreement but you haven't thought some of these things through. I actually think secrecy is fundamentally bad, but there are times it is justified, mostly by prior secrecy. For example, if we already knew everything about the governmental criminals and their mechanisms for extracting revenge, then we wouldn't need any protection for whistleblowers, would we?
Actually came across your comment while searching for ANY mention of the "mission" part of the original story summary. In contrast to the FAKE threat of a search warrant that could have failed to find any real evidence of a crime, the REAL threat here is that #PresidentTweety will redefine the mission of the FBI. I'm sure he'd prefer to convert the FBI into his personal detective agency to handle such YUGE problems as getting embarrassingly cuckolded by one (or more) of his wives and girlfriends. (Stormy Daniels was smart to take the money and shut up, eh?)
We already know that the FBI did find REAL evidence of REAL crimes. If not, they could not have renewed the warrant. The main thing we don't know now is how much add and comfort America's REAL enemies will be able to get from the hints and clues exposed in this partisan hatchet job.
Really? That was your only contribution to this long discussion? It seems unlikely that your other comments were troll-modded into invisibility and that the sock puppets somehow completely overlooked this one. Then again, I only stumbled across it by accident.
I should have asked if you've read Phishing and Countermeasures by Jakobsson and Myers? I'm currently enjoying it, though it was sadly largely obsolete before the ink hit the dead trees...
Eh? I had no idea you [THAT Bruce] were hanging around Slashdot. The 4-digit ID is no surprise, but I should search for your other comments. I'd use a mod point to promote them if I ever got such, eh?
Anyway, in response I'll just reiterate part of my last comment on this story:
"Your [Trump supporters'] president is a crook."
Only a minor question as to what sort of crook. The sad reality is that today's Bolshevik so-called Republicans don't care and they will NEVER impeach #PresidentTweety no matter what crimes Mueller finds and what evidence and proof he provides. The GOP pols are NOT in it for the country or the Constitution. All they want is to take the money and run away. Ps before Cs. Partisan politics, personal power, and private profits are ALL they care about.
I want to close on an optimistic note, but it's so hard these days. The divide and conquer strategy has worked so well, especially against public education. I think America's only hope is an implosion triggered by the internal conflict between the so-called Republicans' REAL goal, which is government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1% and Trump's simpleminded goal, which is government of, by, and for the Donald.