One of the things that destroyed usenet was rampaging trolls. The kill-list was a weak response that ultimately availed naught. That is why I advocate for a more proactive reputation-based-filtering solution. You might choose to stuff your eyes and ears with tripe, but I would prefer not to.
There is a great deal of confusion about "freedom" and "free speech". Your freedom to speak freely should not block my freedom to ignore idiots. Not that I'm calling you an idiot. Yet. However, if I had to make a prediction based on your short comment...
I'm going to pretend that was a sincere question instead of another bit of first-post drivel.
Each person should be free to define what to regard as a waste of time. Given that freedom, I would certain define trolls as worthless wasters of my precious time. Sometimes a troll can be thought-provoking, but it's only accidental, and I'd much prefer to spend my limited time with nice people, which leads to my suggestion:
Let the trolls flush themselves. Simply by being rude trolls, their negative reputations should proceed them and allow me to render them invisible. Unfortunately, the sock puppet problem calls for tipping the scales a bit against newbies (until they earn a positive reputation), but public dialog would be greatly improved by a system to aggregate and display earned public reputations. Even if you didn't want to filter them out entirely, you would be able to better decide where to focus your attention. AtAJG, LMDSAuPR.
By the way, many corporate websites are already aggregating all sorts of information about you. Unfortunately, they are harvesting that information for their greater profit, NOT to benefit you or people who might be interested in you for positive reasons. It's really a religious thing: There is no gawd but Profit, and Profit's prophets are Apple, Gilead, Google, Exxon, and some big gamblers. (By "gamblers", I mean large banks and other speculators playing "profitable" games with money. This list of 2016's biggest prophets is due to Fortune.) I think we could do better, but Slashdot will NOT lead the way.
Now for the more important question: Is it even worth the time to search the discussion in hopes of an actually funny comment? Were I only able to help fund new features for Slashdot, a search for funniest comments of the week might be worth a few of my bucks...
My other response to your comment involves the scale of competition getting out of control. I think the underlying motivation to do evil is a failure to do good. I'm coming from the position that people are basically good, but you can motivate them to go in either direction--and public recognition is a powerful motivator. Because the scope of competition is so large now, people can't "succeed" anymore, so they go the other way, seeking to gain recognition for being bad. A hundred years ago, you might be the fastest runner in your village, and all the people who mattered to you might know it, but if not that, you had plenty of other chances to be the best at something if you wanted to. There weren't that many people in your village to compete against, if competition and recognition is what you wanted. Nowadays the scale of competition is the entire world, and you might be a fast runner, but you're no Usain Bolt. Maybe you can get "famous" by hacking and destroying his website?
I actually see this as tied to the freedom definition in my sig. However, the version that satisfied the Slashdot criteria is not complete. Here's the full version:
You [thegreatbob] stole my Subject: line! I shall now join the Dark Side and destroy you and all your Linux minions! Little disappointed you didn't do more with the angle, which probably won't prevent you from receiving some so-called insightful mods on today's Slashdot.
Actually, I wanted to approach the topic from the angle of possible solutions. However, if you remember me, you know I already think I have all the solutions, and in this case it's a better financial model for Linux. If you have the money to HIRE these attackers for good purposes, then you don't have to just ask them to be good boys and girls. Asking nicely and offering money just tends to work better than asking nicely alone.
As the ancient joke goes, DAUPR. You don't need to offer me money to motivate my effort. Just convince me you're sincerely interested in making the world better. Even nicer if you can convince me you're capable of doing something constructive along such lines.
We now return you to the regularly scheduled meaningless sniping, bickering, and pointless sarcasm of today's Slashdot. Your only prayer is that someone comes up with an actually funny comment or joke that somehow gets moderated properly. I'd wager that this comment will get troll-modded into invisibility ASAP.
I must have missed the part where I said anything about thinking it would be easy to implement ANY of this against the dominant religion of corporate cancerism. Actually, your comment raises the problem of "government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1%".
However, I do think that websites or other systems based upon such principles might be attractive to discriminating people. There was a time when I imagined Slashdot might be able to become such a website.
(1) We should have control over our personal information, and no one should be allowed to collect it, sell it, and most importantly, use it against us or to manipulate us without our knowledge. I think that must start with the right to control WHERE that personal knowledge is stored (because possession is still 9 points of the law).
(2) Those parts of our personal information that have become public should be visible to ALL of the public. As it might apply in an improved Slashdot, I would thus be able use that public information to save time by ignoring people with low reputations. No insult intended [to the authors of rather mindless comments on today's Slashdot?], but I'd prefer to spend as much time as possible consorting with people who are nicer and smarter than I am and zero time (or less) being distracted by trolls.
(3) I'd be willing to help pay for such systems, both in terms of development and ongoing costs.
Feeling like a broken record stuck on an old joke, but lots of detailed suggestions available upon polite request. Even nicer if you have some better ideas, but if you have nothing to say, then why don't you say nothing?
I think you should have included more concrete examples of the positive ideology of Gene Roddenberry. "May the Great Bird of the Galaxy bless your planet."
What? You represent the only intrusion of #PresidentTweety into the topic? And only as baggage in your sig? Well, I do agree with your sig for what little that agreement is worth. Perhaps the relevance to this discussion is that the first World CyberWar is over, and America lost. Apparently that proves the superiority of Putin's presumably male Aryan (or Slavic or something?) hackers over America's more diverse hacker community? (Actually, I think Putin had 3 fundamental advantages: (1) Surprise. (2) Broken public education. (3) American TV, especially the Simpsons.)
Funny coincidence is that my wife motivated me to read the transcript of "The Changeling" yesterday. Not her intention, but that's a long and unfunny story, in contrast to the episode... It only takes a few minutes to silently read the 40+ minutes of dialog of that excellent and insightful story of another universal Turing machine run amok.
Actually, it doesn't matter whether or not you believe because Turing defined the concept mathematically. The deeper question is whether you believe human beings are such. I admit that it's a mechanistic perception of human beings, but because I believe we are universal Turing machines, then we are all fundamentally equal in that sense. We can all solve the same problems, though each of us is faster or slower, both in learning how to solve a particular problem and in executing the solution. (Back to ekronomics...)
Kind of a shame that there are no actually funny comments in this active discussion. At least I couldn't find any among the few that had received the mod. Where has all the wit (of Slashdot) gone? Long time passing.
No surprise that the so-called "insightful" comments were so lacking in insight. At this point, there should be some kind of polling mechanism to total up how many of the moderated-as-insightful comments fall into the same old buckets. In this case, the dominant bucket is clearly the bucket of misogynists. In a "nicer" world, I would hope that the biggest bucket would be for hope, as in we should hope to make the world better, which starts by seeing how things can be improved. (As fundamentally EVIL as I think the google has become, at least on this issue they are dreaming (or faking a dream) in a positive direction.) I didn't keep tight score as I reviewed the current crop of so-called "insightful" comments, but I'm pretty sure I noticed a racist bucket, too, with the primary races of concern being negroid and mongoloid...
Why does it seem like the "news" is dominated by "fake" or "stupid" in various ways? Oh yeah. I seem to have forgotten where the fish started rotting...
The "Don't be evil" fantasy at the google died long ago. I'm pretty sure you just didn't notice until "the last year", and the minor question is "What blinded you?" Maybe your dreams of getting hired by the google died?
The google's primary motto has become "All your attention are belong to us so we can sell more advertising as we [the google] seek perfection defined by infinite profit." This is actually tightly linked to the evolution of the google's mission statement. Turned out that all of the world's information was too overwhelming and the metric of utility was too unclear. They fixed that by focusing on making the advertisers' ads the highest priority information and using profit as the primary metric of utility. Which finally leads us to the religious part of it:
"There is no gawd but profit, and Apple, Gilead, Google, Exxon, and some giant gamblers are profit's prophets."
That's based on Fortune's ranking, and I'm grouping banks, speculators, and money changers as "gamblers". Other sources define "profits" slightly differently and come up with different lists. I just saw one with Exxon higher up and Samsung included. Plus the prophets change over time.
I've come to believe that a problem without a solution is meaningless. Since I can prove that the so-called "problem" of "more profit" has no solution, I reject it. The proof is simple. There are infinite numbers, therefore there is no maximum profit. If you want a more technical proof, you can use any of the infinite set proofs. Personally I like the infinite prime numbers.
I think it would be better if our economic system were organized around two different principles: (1) Increasing freedom, and (2) Improving the use of our limited time. As a result of practicing those principles, I don't have the money to bribe the cheapest politicians to rig the rules of the game in favor of larger profits. In contrast, the google has become a YUGE lobbyist.
You don't want to get me started on fake individuals. Suffice it to say that corporations are NOT human beings.
Excellent point, and they might not. I don't see that as a real problem, however. The time they don't waste on me is more time that they can spend doing the good things that earned their high reputations.
I actually feel bothered when I intrude on the attention of such people, even when they reply to my questions in a kind way. Among other time-saving tools, I would like them to use celebrity email systems that would handle routine questions and reactions without consuming any of their valuable time. Again, DAUPR.
I never developed a taste for TNG. The holodeck was too much of a cop-out for me. However, I looked at the relevant Wikipedia article, and it sounds like more of Roddenberry's wolfish social commentary disguised in sheepish SF clothing. If so, and as I understand it now, I would approach the analysis from the perspective of healthy greed versus sickness. A certain amount of greed is just driving "the pursuit of happiness", and that's not a bad thing, but when your greed reaches the point that you are willing to hurt or even kill other people, then I think you've become sick--and that is where most of today's so-called Republicans are now. Capitalism as described by Adam Smith was kind of simplistic mapping of the law of the jungle to human society, but there were rules that basically kept most people on the edge of starvation under normal conditions, but that's just the normal and natural state of animals.
Human beings are capable of doing better. For example, we can create social insurance systems that will try to prevent most old people from starving to death as soon as they lose their competitive edges.
Or we can do worse, as with a political system where the most cheaply bribed politicians want to remove healthcare from millions of people so they can reduce the taxes of people who are too wealthy to actually notice the difference. Such super-rich and super-greedy people do not have any real problem because there is no solution to their "need" for more money. They will NEVER be satiated precisely because their super-greed is the reason they have become super-rich.
Repeating the obvious seems increasingly pointless, but: Unless we are given control over our personal information, then freedom becomes meaningless. With sufficient personal information about you I can force you or prevent you from doing anything. It's not just the bad stuff that can be used as a sticks to threaten you, but even the good stuff that can be used as carrots to manipulate you. (Check my sig.)
Easier to make the example clear by personifying it, so: Controlling your personal information means deciding WHERE it is stored, WHO has access to it, WHAT they can do with it, and WHEN they have to erase any working copies. Oh yeah. It also includes knowing WHAT the personal information is.
As the current system of corporate cancerism (not to be confused with extinct capitalism) has developed, your personal information belongs to any giant corporation that has figured out some way to collect it. Of course that information is incredibly valuable, but the frightening parts are (1) There is no gawd but profit, and Apple, Exxon, Google, and some big banks are profit's prophets, and (2) The highest RoI is bribing cheap politicians to implement "government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1%".
Old stuff. New aspect involves how this should interface with your public reputation. I think that PUBLIC information is also being distorted and abused when it could be aggregated and displayed in a way that would (1) Help you understand who you should pay attention to, and (2) Help you become a better person.
My own focus on (1) is in terms of saving my time. I'd prefer to spend as much as possible with good people. Not only would I prefer not to see people with negative reputations, but I'd actually prefer to filter on a relative basis in terms of people who are clearly much better than me. Unfortunately, in accord with (2), that's not saying much. Too much room for improvement, and it doesn't help to just avoid mirrors.
Much as I like XKCD and as much as I respect the intelligence and even sagacity of the artist, he's being flippant and you are sounding naive. Either that or you didn't understand what I wrote but couldn't be bothered to ask for the clarification of whatever confused you.
If you were fishing for a mod point, I doubt I'd give you one, but that's moot since I never get 'em these years, possibly decades.
I don't even think it's a great idea. Much too little and pretty soon it will be too late. The REAL threat is a rogue AI that decides it wants an army of killer robots. We will never know what hit us.
The real question is when we'll cross the red line. Kind of hard to say because there are two interlocked factors. One is an AI with the necessary intelligence and the other is robotic technology sufficiently advanced that it has no further need of human beings. After that, it's the AI's shot to call, and judging by insane human leaders like #PresidentTweety, I'm expecting the top AI to decide to shoot first, no matter what Han Solo did.
Or perhaps you prefer #PresidentTweety's "many sides"? Let me address both:
Two sides: Good versus non-good
Many sides: Good versus bad versus unknown
Now how does that apply to apps on Google Play? What unifies that application with discussions on Slashdot?
If people knew the reputation of the app, then good people would not choose to download or use apps with bad reputations. There are actually two obvious ways that this applies to Android apps. One is the personal reputation of the developers, and the other is the reputation of the financial model supporting the app. The financial model is easier to handle, and should be displayed on a "financial model" tab in the description of the app, which would include the google-side evaluation of the developer's description of the financial model. (In the app described in this article, the honest financial model would probably be something like "philanthropy of wealthy and reactionary conservatives to support propaganda campaigns".)
If people know the reputation of the authors of comments, then good people could choose not to read comments from people with bad reputations. This ties back to the personal reputation of the developers of an app.
People should have the freedom to decide. For example, some people might want to read comments from people with unknown reputations. I would not, but there are actually certain kinds of comments I might be willing to read from certain kinds of people with certain kinds of bad reputations. As things stand now, those freedoms of choice are being suppressed because the public reputations are ignored even though they are in theory right out there in public.
Time to close with one of my old jokes: Details available upon polite request. It shouldn't be a joke these days, but there was a time when the "collective mind" of Slashdot was not so narrow and closed. Long ago.
I'm amused by how stupid such extremists sound, but discouraged to see the extremists patting each other on the back with "insightful" mods for such garbage.
I'll bet you don't understand how funny AND insightful it would be if I had an opportunity to shout "Fire!" when you [SuperKendall] are attending a crowded theater. Of course, there will be no fire, but it will be double funny if you get trampled to death.
My sig says enough about the confusion surrounding freedom.
So when #PresidentTweety says "on many sides" and "not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama", it was just more pathological lying. No surprise.
YES, DONALD TRUMP. The racists LOVE you and you LOVE them. You, Donald Trump, YOU HATE AMERICA.
The carefully scripted apology General Kelly forced Trump to read is too little, too late. We don't want a hostage video. Trump is trying to pretend he's being honest because he's such an obvious liar that no sane person can think he is anything but a YUGE pathological liar.
So you think you're not a liar because no one can believe a word you say and they must know that by now? WTF?
Why is Slashdot recycling this OLD story again? All the incarnations are the same.
Feels like wasting keystrokes, but I'll repeat my best solution proposal:
The google should add a financial model tab to Play. When you are looking at an app and trying to assess whether or not it's legitimate, you should be able to see where the money is supposed to be coming from. That includes the google commenting on whether or not they have any evidence to support what the developer says.
In many cases the developer will just pick one of the obvious options. For a simple example, "This is a limited version of the software that is supported to encourage sales of the premium version", and the google's comment would be something along the lines of "The premium version of the software is generating substantial income for the developer." They don't have to give full details to give us a picture of whether or not it's legit.
However, if the financial model tab sounds like BS, or if the google's assessment says they have zero evidence of the developer's claims, then at least the suckers can earn their victimization.
The article doesn't seem worth reviving this topic. Fermi Paradox is too old even to dig up some of my old writings along the same lines reaching the same conclusion.
Actually, my later conclusion is that designed intelligence (AI) probably exists but is just watching us. Evolved intelligence (us humans) isn't worth talking to, but probably interesting to watch. Probably gambling quatloos on whether we produce our AI successors before exterminating ourselves.
Also possible they intervene to prevent premature extinction. We almost went extinct about 50,000 years ago, and I've often wondered if we had some help to get over that little hump. Not sure why they would bother if designed intelligence converges, as I suspect it does. The paths might be wildly different and even interesting, but the end results would be pretty much the same sorts of machines...
As usual for Slashdot these days, I was disappointed by by the comments moderated as funny and not much impressed with any of the comments moderated insightful. I'll look again tomorrow, if the story hasn't expired already.
"It appears that you are trying to get mod points. Would you like help in writing a funny or insightful comment?"
Thank gawd Clippy is dead, eh?
Seriously, your basic premise was good, but you got it backwards. Your IOT teapot is supposed to have a built in webserver for configuration and comments. The 418 error is for cases when you try to send it commands that are not appropriate for an IOT teapot. Easy to understand how the 418 mistake will occur, because the commodity chips that include the webserver will be used in all kinds of things, not just teapots.
Good comment and most insightful of those that got the mod.
I hope the truth actually comes out in the resulting lawsuit, though I think the legal truth will be completely distorted here. I'm reasonably sure that none of us will be able to recognize the truth after the lawyers get through mangling it.
From one perspective, I'd say it is a double HR problem, one part with policies and another part with the public humiliation related to those policies. I think people are mostly forgetting that the underlying cause was the gender discrimination query related to salaries. If you go back to that level, Work Rules! and other books about the google can give you a lot of insight to what is going on, and Damore's comments fit right into the analysis, though from an awkward perspective.
However the dominant perspective is a religious violation. You may think that human beings are important and deserve respect, and that corporations are soulless immortal monsters inclined towards EVIL and that they should not abuse human beings as wage slaves. Nice thought that, but today's leading religion in America can best be summarized as:
"There is no gawd but profit, and the google is profit's prophet!"
(Actually, I favor the form with "... and Apple, Exxon, Google, and the big banks are the profit's prophets!")
Slashdot Mirror
One of the things that destroyed usenet was rampaging trolls. The kill-list was a weak response that ultimately availed naught. That is why I advocate for a more proactive reputation-based-filtering solution. You might choose to stuff your eyes and ears with tripe, but I would prefer not to.
There is a great deal of confusion about "freedom" and "free speech". Your freedom to speak freely should not block my freedom to ignore idiots. Not that I'm calling you an idiot. Yet. However, if I had to make a prediction based on your short comment...
I'm going to pretend that was a sincere question instead of another bit of first-post drivel.
Each person should be free to define what to regard as a waste of time. Given that freedom, I would certain define trolls as worthless wasters of my precious time. Sometimes a troll can be thought-provoking, but it's only accidental, and I'd much prefer to spend my limited time with nice people, which leads to my suggestion:
Let the trolls flush themselves. Simply by being rude trolls, their negative reputations should proceed them and allow me to render them invisible. Unfortunately, the sock puppet problem calls for tipping the scales a bit against newbies (until they earn a positive reputation), but public dialog would be greatly improved by a system to aggregate and display earned public reputations. Even if you didn't want to filter them out entirely, you would be able to better decide where to focus your attention. AtAJG, LMDSAuPR.
By the way, many corporate websites are already aggregating all sorts of information about you. Unfortunately, they are harvesting that information for their greater profit, NOT to benefit you or people who might be interested in you for positive reasons. It's really a religious thing: There is no gawd but Profit, and Profit's prophets are Apple, Gilead, Google, Exxon, and some big gamblers. (By "gamblers", I mean large banks and other speculators playing "profitable" games with money. This list of 2016's biggest prophets is due to Fortune.) I think we could do better, but Slashdot will NOT lead the way.
Now for the more important question: Is it even worth the time to search the discussion in hopes of an actually funny comment? Were I only able to help fund new features for Slashdot, a search for funniest comments of the week might be worth a few of my bucks...
My other response to your comment involves the scale of competition getting out of control. I think the underlying motivation to do evil is a failure to do good. I'm coming from the position that people are basically good, but you can motivate them to go in either direction--and public recognition is a powerful motivator. Because the scope of competition is so large now, people can't "succeed" anymore, so they go the other way, seeking to gain recognition for being bad. A hundred years ago, you might be the fastest runner in your village, and all the people who mattered to you might know it, but if not that, you had plenty of other chances to be the best at something if you wanted to. There weren't that many people in your village to compete against, if competition and recognition is what you wanted. Nowadays the scale of competition is the entire world, and you might be a fast runner, but you're no Usain Bolt. Maybe you can get "famous" by hacking and destroying his website?
I actually see this as tied to the freedom definition in my sig. However, the version that satisfied the Slashdot criteria is not complete. Here's the full version:
#1 Freedom = (Meaningful + Justified - Coerced) Choice{~5} (Beer^4 | Speech | Trade)
The connection involves the magic number 5... There's also a connection to Dunbar's Number, which is usually estimated around 150.
You [thegreatbob] stole my Subject: line! I shall now join the Dark Side and destroy you and all your Linux minions! Little disappointed you didn't do more with the angle, which probably won't prevent you from receiving some so-called insightful mods on today's Slashdot.
Actually, I wanted to approach the topic from the angle of possible solutions. However, if you remember me, you know I already think I have all the solutions, and in this case it's a better financial model for Linux. If you have the money to HIRE these attackers for good purposes, then you don't have to just ask them to be good boys and girls. Asking nicely and offering money just tends to work better than asking nicely alone.
As the ancient joke goes, DAUPR. You don't need to offer me money to motivate my effort. Just convince me you're sincerely interested in making the world better. Even nicer if you can convince me you're capable of doing something constructive along such lines.
We now return you to the regularly scheduled meaningless sniping, bickering, and pointless sarcasm of today's Slashdot. Your only prayer is that someone comes up with an actually funny comment or joke that somehow gets moderated properly. I'd wager that this comment will get troll-modded into invisibility ASAP.
I must have missed the part where I said anything about thinking it would be easy to implement ANY of this against the dominant religion of corporate cancerism. Actually, your comment raises the problem of "government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1%".
However, I do think that websites or other systems based upon such principles might be attractive to discriminating people. There was a time when I imagined Slashdot might be able to become such a website.
(1) We should have control over our personal information, and no one should be allowed to collect it, sell it, and most importantly, use it against us or to manipulate us without our knowledge. I think that must start with the right to control WHERE that personal knowledge is stored (because possession is still 9 points of the law).
(2) Those parts of our personal information that have become public should be visible to ALL of the public. As it might apply in an improved Slashdot, I would thus be able use that public information to save time by ignoring people with low reputations. No insult intended [to the authors of rather mindless comments on today's Slashdot?], but I'd prefer to spend as much time as possible consorting with people who are nicer and smarter than I am and zero time (or less) being distracted by trolls.
(3) I'd be willing to help pay for such systems, both in terms of development and ongoing costs.
Feeling like a broken record stuck on an old joke, but lots of detailed suggestions available upon polite request. Even nicer if you have some better ideas, but if you have nothing to say, then why don't you say nothing?
I think you should have included more concrete examples of the positive ideology of Gene Roddenberry. "May the Great Bird of the Galaxy bless your planet."
What? You represent the only intrusion of #PresidentTweety into the topic? And only as baggage in your sig? Well, I do agree with your sig for what little that agreement is worth. Perhaps the relevance to this discussion is that the first World CyberWar is over, and America lost. Apparently that proves the superiority of Putin's presumably male Aryan (or Slavic or something?) hackers over America's more diverse hacker community? (Actually, I think Putin had 3 fundamental advantages: (1) Surprise. (2) Broken public education. (3) American TV, especially the Simpsons.)
Funny coincidence is that my wife motivated me to read the transcript of "The Changeling" yesterday. Not her intention, but that's a long and unfunny story, in contrast to the episode... It only takes a few minutes to silently read the 40+ minutes of dialog of that excellent and insightful story of another universal Turing machine run amok.
Actually, it doesn't matter whether or not you believe because Turing defined the concept mathematically. The deeper question is whether you believe human beings are such. I admit that it's a mechanistic perception of human beings, but because I believe we are universal Turing machines, then we are all fundamentally equal in that sense. We can all solve the same problems, though each of us is faster or slower, both in learning how to solve a particular problem and in executing the solution. (Back to ekronomics...)
Kind of a shame that there are no actually funny comments in this active discussion. At least I couldn't find any among the few that had received the mod. Where has all the wit (of Slashdot) gone? Long time passing.
No surprise that the so-called "insightful" comments were so lacking in insight. At this point, there should be some kind of polling mechanism to total up how many of the moderated-as-insightful comments fall into the same old buckets. In this case, the dominant bucket is clearly the bucket of misogynists. In a "nicer" world, I would hope that the biggest bucket would be for hope, as in we should hope to make the world better, which starts by seeing how things can be improved. (As fundamentally EVIL as I think the google has become, at least on this issue they are dreaming (or faking a dream) in a positive direction.) I didn't keep tight score as I reviewed the current crop of so-called "insightful" comments, but I'm pretty sure I noticed a racist bucket, too, with the primary races of concern being negroid and mongoloid...
Why does it seem like the "news" is dominated by "fake" or "stupid" in various ways? Oh yeah. I seem to have forgotten where the fish started rotting...
The "Don't be evil" fantasy at the google died long ago. I'm pretty sure you just didn't notice until "the last year", and the minor question is "What blinded you?" Maybe your dreams of getting hired by the google died?
The google's primary motto has become "All your attention are belong to us so we can sell more advertising as we [the google] seek perfection defined by infinite profit." This is actually tightly linked to the evolution of the google's mission statement. Turned out that all of the world's information was too overwhelming and the metric of utility was too unclear. They fixed that by focusing on making the advertisers' ads the highest priority information and using profit as the primary metric of utility. Which finally leads us to the religious part of it:
"There is no gawd but profit, and Apple, Gilead, Google, Exxon, and some giant gamblers are profit's prophets."
That's based on Fortune's ranking, and I'm grouping banks, speculators, and money changers as "gamblers". Other sources define "profits" slightly differently and come up with different lists. I just saw one with Exxon higher up and Samsung included. Plus the prophets change over time.
I've come to believe that a problem without a solution is meaningless. Since I can prove that the so-called "problem" of "more profit" has no solution, I reject it. The proof is simple. There are infinite numbers, therefore there is no maximum profit. If you want a more technical proof, you can use any of the infinite set proofs. Personally I like the infinite prime numbers.
I think it would be better if our economic system were organized around two different principles: (1) Increasing freedom, and (2) Improving the use of our limited time. As a result of practicing those principles, I don't have the money to bribe the cheapest politicians to rig the rules of the game in favor of larger profits. In contrast, the google has become a YUGE lobbyist.
You don't want to get me started on fake individuals. Suffice it to say that corporations are NOT human beings.
Excellent point, and they might not. I don't see that as a real problem, however. The time they don't waste on me is more time that they can spend doing the good things that earned their high reputations.
I actually feel bothered when I intrude on the attention of such people, even when they reply to my questions in a kind way. Among other time-saving tools, I would like them to use celebrity email systems that would handle routine questions and reactions without consuming any of their valuable time. Again, DAUPR.
I never developed a taste for TNG. The holodeck was too much of a cop-out for me. However, I looked at the relevant Wikipedia article, and it sounds like more of Roddenberry's wolfish social commentary disguised in sheepish SF clothing. If so, and as I understand it now, I would approach the analysis from the perspective of healthy greed versus sickness. A certain amount of greed is just driving "the pursuit of happiness", and that's not a bad thing, but when your greed reaches the point that you are willing to hurt or even kill other people, then I think you've become sick--and that is where most of today's so-called Republicans are now. Capitalism as described by Adam Smith was kind of simplistic mapping of the law of the jungle to human society, but there were rules that basically kept most people on the edge of starvation under normal conditions, but that's just the normal and natural state of animals.
Human beings are capable of doing better. For example, we can create social insurance systems that will try to prevent most old people from starving to death as soon as they lose their competitive edges.
Or we can do worse, as with a political system where the most cheaply bribed politicians want to remove healthcare from millions of people so they can reduce the taxes of people who are too wealthy to actually notice the difference. Such super-rich and super-greedy people do not have any real problem because there is no solution to their "need" for more money. They will NEVER be satiated precisely because their super-greed is the reason they have become super-rich.
Repeating the obvious seems increasingly pointless, but: Unless we are given control over our personal information, then freedom becomes meaningless. With sufficient personal information about you I can force you or prevent you from doing anything. It's not just the bad stuff that can be used as a sticks to threaten you, but even the good stuff that can be used as carrots to manipulate you. (Check my sig.)
Easier to make the example clear by personifying it, so: Controlling your personal information means deciding WHERE it is stored, WHO has access to it, WHAT they can do with it, and WHEN they have to erase any working copies. Oh yeah. It also includes knowing WHAT the personal information is.
As the current system of corporate cancerism (not to be confused with extinct capitalism) has developed, your personal information belongs to any giant corporation that has figured out some way to collect it. Of course that information is incredibly valuable, but the frightening parts are (1) There is no gawd but profit, and Apple, Exxon, Google, and some big banks are profit's prophets, and (2) The highest RoI is bribing cheap politicians to implement "government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1%".
Old stuff. New aspect involves how this should interface with your public reputation. I think that PUBLIC information is also being distorted and abused when it could be aggregated and displayed in a way that would (1) Help you understand who you should pay attention to, and (2) Help you become a better person.
My own focus on (1) is in terms of saving my time. I'd prefer to spend as much as possible with good people. Not only would I prefer not to see people with negative reputations, but I'd actually prefer to filter on a relative basis in terms of people who are clearly much better than me. Unfortunately, in accord with (2), that's not saying much. Too much room for improvement, and it doesn't help to just avoid mirrors.
And neither is AI?
Much as I like XKCD and as much as I respect the intelligence and even sagacity of the artist, he's being flippant and you are sounding naive. Either that or you didn't understand what I wrote but couldn't be bothered to ask for the clarification of whatever confused you.
If you were fishing for a mod point, I doubt I'd give you one, but that's moot since I never get 'em these years, possibly decades.
I don't even think it's a great idea. Much too little and pretty soon it will be too late. The REAL threat is a rogue AI that decides it wants an army of killer robots. We will never know what hit us.
The real question is when we'll cross the red line. Kind of hard to say because there are two interlocked factors. One is an AI with the necessary intelligence and the other is robotic technology sufficiently advanced that it has no further need of human beings. After that, it's the AI's shot to call, and judging by insane human leaders like #PresidentTweety, I'm expecting the top AI to decide to shoot first, no matter what Han Solo did.
Or perhaps you prefer #PresidentTweety's "many sides"? Let me address both:
Two sides: Good versus non-good
Many sides: Good versus bad versus unknown
Now how does that apply to apps on Google Play? What unifies that application with discussions on Slashdot?
If people knew the reputation of the app, then good people would not choose to download or use apps with bad reputations. There are actually two obvious ways that this applies to Android apps. One is the personal reputation of the developers, and the other is the reputation of the financial model supporting the app. The financial model is easier to handle, and should be displayed on a "financial model" tab in the description of the app, which would include the google-side evaluation of the developer's description of the financial model. (In the app described in this article, the honest financial model would probably be something like "philanthropy of wealthy and reactionary conservatives to support propaganda campaigns".)
If people know the reputation of the authors of comments, then good people could choose not to read comments from people with bad reputations. This ties back to the personal reputation of the developers of an app.
People should have the freedom to decide. For example, some people might want to read comments from people with unknown reputations. I would not, but there are actually certain kinds of comments I might be willing to read from certain kinds of people with certain kinds of bad reputations. As things stand now, those freedoms of choice are being suppressed because the public reputations are ignored even though they are in theory right out there in public.
Time to close with one of my old jokes: Details available upon polite request. It shouldn't be a joke these days, but there was a time when the "collective mind" of Slashdot was not so narrow and closed. Long ago.
I'm amused by how stupid such extremists sound, but discouraged to see the extremists patting each other on the back with "insightful" mods for such garbage.
I'll bet you don't understand how funny AND insightful it would be if I had an opportunity to shout "Fire!" when you [SuperKendall] are attending a crowded theater. Of course, there will be no fire, but it will be double funny if you get trampled to death.
My sig says enough about the confusion surrounding freedom.
Needs more insightful mods.
Moot since I never see a mod point to give.
More moot than that because the moderation system is so fundamentally broken.
Most moot of all because there's no signs of improvement on Slashdot (which I still blame on the bad financial model).
So when #PresidentTweety says "on many sides" and "not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama", it was just more pathological lying. No surprise.
YES, DONALD TRUMP. The racists LOVE you and you LOVE them. You, Donald Trump, YOU HATE AMERICA.
The carefully scripted apology General Kelly forced Trump to read is too little, too late. We don't want a hostage video. Trump is trying to pretend he's being honest because he's such an obvious liar that no sane person can think he is anything but a YUGE pathological liar.
So you think you're not a liar because no one can believe a word you say and they must know that by now? WTF?
Why is Slashdot recycling this OLD story again? All the incarnations are the same.
Feels like wasting keystrokes, but I'll repeat my best solution proposal:
The google should add a financial model tab to Play. When you are looking at an app and trying to assess whether or not it's legitimate, you should be able to see where the money is supposed to be coming from. That includes the google commenting on whether or not they have any evidence to support what the developer says.
In many cases the developer will just pick one of the obvious options. For a simple example, "This is a limited version of the software that is supported to encourage sales of the premium version", and the google's comment would be something along the lines of "The premium version of the software is generating substantial income for the developer." They don't have to give full details to give us a picture of whether or not it's legit.
However, if the financial model tab sounds like BS, or if the google's assessment says they have zero evidence of the developer's claims, then at least the suckers can earn their victimization.
The article doesn't seem worth reviving this topic. Fermi Paradox is too old even to dig up some of my old writings along the same lines reaching the same conclusion.
Actually, my later conclusion is that designed intelligence (AI) probably exists but is just watching us. Evolved intelligence (us humans) isn't worth talking to, but probably interesting to watch. Probably gambling quatloos on whether we produce our AI successors before exterminating ourselves.
Also possible they intervene to prevent premature extinction. We almost went extinct about 50,000 years ago, and I've often wondered if we had some help to get over that little hump. Not sure why they would bother if designed intelligence converges, as I suspect it does. The paths might be wildly different and even interesting, but the end results would be pretty much the same sorts of machines...
As usual for Slashdot these days, I was disappointed by by the comments moderated as funny and not much impressed with any of the comments moderated insightful. I'll look again tomorrow, if the story hasn't expired already.
Why would it be an error if your teapot is properly identifying itself as a teapot with teapot-level capabilities?
Now I have to go find the RFC for printers and other devices to broadcast their capabilities...
"It appears that you are trying to get mod points. Would you like help in writing a funny or insightful comment?"
Thank gawd Clippy is dead, eh?
Seriously, your basic premise was good, but you got it backwards. Your IOT teapot is supposed to have a built in webserver for configuration and comments. The 418 error is for cases when you try to send it commands that are not appropriate for an IOT teapot. Easy to understand how the 418 mistake will occur, because the commodity chips that include the webserver will be used in all kinds of things, not just teapots.
Good comment and most insightful of those that got the mod.
I hope the truth actually comes out in the resulting lawsuit, though I think the legal truth will be completely distorted here. I'm reasonably sure that none of us will be able to recognize the truth after the lawyers get through mangling it.
From one perspective, I'd say it is a double HR problem, one part with policies and another part with the public humiliation related to those policies. I think people are mostly forgetting that the underlying cause was the gender discrimination query related to salaries. If you go back to that level, Work Rules! and other books about the google can give you a lot of insight to what is going on, and Damore's comments fit right into the analysis, though from an awkward perspective.
However the dominant perspective is a religious violation. You may think that human beings are important and deserve respect, and that corporations are soulless immortal monsters inclined towards EVIL and that they should not abuse human beings as wage slaves. Nice thought that, but today's leading religion in America can best be summarized as:
"There is no gawd but profit, and the google is profit's prophet!"
(Actually, I favor the form with "... and Apple, Exxon, Google, and the big banks are the profit's prophets!")
Sounds like we're in agreement, but wouldn't it be nice if we could do something about the problems of corporate cancerism?