So that was the opinion of one of the founders. You didn't even say if you agree or disagree with anything he (or I) said.
Still I suppose your quotation was a more useful contribution than the negative mod points of wordless sock puppets. I would defend my case (after correcting the typos, obvious though they be), but as things stand I can just as well rest it.
Where do you think the line should be drawn - and why should I trust YOUR line over anybody else's ?
Uh... Because he has a nice gun and he can shoot you repeatedly if you don't trust him.
Seriously, that's exactly what some of the fabulous founders had in mind when they argued about the wording. They sincerely wanted to make sure the federal government could NOT win a civil war, so the feds would shut up about such problems as that slavery thing. They'd already had some nasty arguments about the topic, or have you forgotten about that 2/5 human thing?
Other founders thought differently, but back then they were still able to reach rational compromises. Maybe they were just lucky that political parties hadn't really been invented yet. The Democratic Party still hasn't figured it out, but the so-called Republican Party (not to be confused with a similarly named entity associated with Abe, Teddy, and Ike) seems to have perfected the art of putting Ps before Cs. Party politics, private profits, and personal power FIRST. Most have them can't even remember what country or Constitution are.
Back to the 2nd Amendment. We had that civil war after all. The pro-gun side lost. Get over it. Abe Lincoln and the Yankee bankers repealed the 2nd Amendment at the safe end of more and bigger guns. Interesting question regarding the degree to which FDR repealed the 10th. My pick for worst is still the 17th, but it's complicated to say why. The one we need now is the 25th, but after watching that bungled circle-jerk of a cabinet meeting, I've concluded our best hope is that Melania stabs him. #PresidentTweety would phuck up a wet dream.
Oh yeah, the original topic. Time to tie it all together, eh? America has become a house hopeless divided against itself. Maybe Abe said something on that topic, too, but what counts now is how Putin played us for fools. I disagree that America is full of racists, but there are too many of them and it doesn't matter that they are still a lunatic fringe. The Donald "won" based on a coalition of lots of lunatic fringes. The "rational" ones have noticed that they hate each other, but they each believe that Trump was speaking the truth to them and lying to everyone else.
P.S. Trump's underlying problem is his bankrupt status, same as it ever was. You only get bankrupt by borrowing money, but you aren't bankrupt as long as your creditors are willing to loan you some more money and believe you can pay it all back. Trump's creditors were American banks who cut him off years ago, but he was able to borrow from foreigners, especially Russian kleptocrats with lots of dirty money. Trump's tax returns will reveal that his "assets" are actually laundry fees.
I feel obliged to note that one of my highest priorities before messing with anything was to figure out the state of the backup system, even though the boss was screaming about other emergencies. It still took me a couple of days to figure out what was going on, or more precisely not going on as regards backups. Various parts of the system had been done by various people with various degrees of competence, all of whom left for various reasons.
Actually reminds me of two fellows I worked for briefly. Both of them were actually too small to have a separate CTO. In the first case I decided to leave as soon as I figured out the legal liability their main customer had incurred due to pirated software. There were actually two packages, and one of them was a database. The second case was a total shoestring operation and one of the first things I discovered was that their so-called daily backup processes were not actually backing up anything.
Now that reminds me of a third case, where they actually did have a CTO, in title if not in competence. While they did fire him, it was too late to save the company... It was one of the few things they'd done right while I was working there, but I decided to leave when one of the actually competent managers was fired, and they disappeared not long after that. (That was actually my last stint in a startup, and after that I just went back to safety in a big company for the rest of my career...)
I guess you [BradleyUffner] deserve the insightful mod, but you didn't dig deep enough. There's another "mistake" when Slashdot uses that framing of the disclosure of the information. My question is whether Slashdot's mistake was an innocent form of clickbait or symptomatic of a deeper and darker sickness. Here's a couple of darker theories:
One theory is that Slashdot has been invaded and largely destroyed by rightwing trolls and (paid?) thugs merely because it was there and a soft target. Not a juicy target these days, since it is obvious that the readership and participation are way down, but Putin's novice cyber-warriers have to start somewhere.
Another theory is worse. Maybe Slashdot's bad financial model and possible desperation from the new owners (of the debt?) are making it cheap and easy to bribe them to tilt the system in that direction.
Anyway, I think there is a fairly skilled liar at work here. The premise of this story is a high-level lie of framing. Reporting the truth about matters of public record to the media, even through an intermediary who has friends who are reporters, is NOT the same thing as leaking secret information. Trying to present the information in the "Leak" frame is a LIE, and no more truthful just because it is a "clever" Level 4 lie. In contrast, #PresidentTweety is a quite unskilled liar, usually operating at Levels 0 (self-contradiction) and 1 (counterfactual statements (where any fool can check the facts)). Quite rare that the Donald can even get as high as Level 2 (partial truth) as in his recent out-of-context attack on the Mayor of London.
The REAL issue here is whether or not Trump has committed impeachable offenses. I'm convinced he has, but it might be that his feeble attempts to obstruct justice are his most serious offenses since he got into the White House. That also depends on the definitions of "emoluments" and "bribery", and as regards bribery, the directions of the bribes. I'm not at all certain about what sorts of pre-White-House crimes would really carry forward as grounds for impeachment. I actually believe that Trump's most serious crimes are hidden in his tax returns and they involve money laundering for Putin and his cronies.
Closing with a joke: Be careful what you wish for, Vladimir. How much money will you lose if Trump's dirty laundry gets unlaundered? The fall of the house of Trump could be costly--but I suppose you were too smart to trust the Donald with much money anyway.
If I ever had a mod point I'd give that an insightful, not a funny. The "flamebait" mods much have come from the insane Libertarian contingent. (I've yet to meet a Libertarian who actually understood much about freedom. Most of them are confusing it with one of the senses of "free beer", as in being so drunk as to act completely "freely" at other people's expense.)
Really disappointed to see the lack of funny book recommendations. Not surprised, however. This is today's Slashdot, after all. Talk about a target-rich environment.
The question is kind of interesting, but I think it's a loaded question like "Has Donald Trump stopped beating his wives yet?" or "Does the general strike against #PresidentTweety start on Thursday or is that just people calling in sick to watch the Comey testimony?" (See the latest Borowitz column at the New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/humor...)
Anyway, any excuse to write about books, eh? Just now reading an interesting book called Influence about how the compliance professions (mostly in sales and marketing) manipulate people. Rather surprised I've never heard of this guy before, though I've read a lot of related material in psychology.
I think we may have wasted time in this discussion before. Let me be clear that I think that trying to create improved discussion systems is NOT a wasteful use of time, but it seems wasted on Slashdot because the system is not evolving and improving (and I think that goes back to the lack of a good financial model).
For what extremely little it is worth, my thinking on the topic has evolved over time. I do see the logical connections to my earlier ideas, but now I think it should be reduced to essentially two icons, one representing your self perception (and linking to the profile you craft to describe yourself), while the other icon would capture how other people perceive you (and would be linked to more descriptive statistics and the data sources, allowing the external perception to be confirmed and studied as desired).
In terms of the final objective of having good discussions with the minimum amount of my time, my own usage pattern would be to use the external perception to guide my reading. People with sufficiently negative profiles would simply be invisible to me. You alluded to that with your mention of insincere trolls. In terms of deciding whose comments I want to see, I think "happy" would be the dimension I might give highest priority to. I think "happy" would be a better dimension than "funny" because it captures a similar idea, but in a less subjective way. If the comment left you feeling happy, it might because it was funny, but there are other reasons, too, whereas a "sad" post would also represent a relatively clear evaluation. (I think each dimension of assessment should have relatively clear poles.)
As noted before, I suffer from persistent delusions of grand solutions. However, I've also come to understand that the world changes at it's own pace.
Did I misunderstand something there? I raised a philosophic question, and you apparently responded that there is no philosophic question because your personal philosophy is "Greed is good" and there is nothing else to consider. (Only incidental that you project to Harvard.)
While I received the usual notification of the moderation, there was nothing about the mindless so-called reply. If that is a new feature of Slashdot rather than some old bug, then maybe it's a tiny bit of improvement? Glad to save my time. (Not the first time I've noticed this, but perhaps I only noticed this recently.)
Still needs the self-discrediting feature. Assuming they implemented some filter against wastes of the OP's time, then and if that filter is evaluated at the time of the mindless and annoying reply, then I think they should give that person (even though he's a probable troll) a warning that the post will probably never be seen by the ostensible addressee. If the person in question still insists on replying, then the reply should receive a preface to the effect: "This reply is apparently not a sincere attempt at dialog, since the author was notified that it would not be seen by the prior author of the post it seems to reply to." [Of course the "author" references should actually be resolved. In this example, "prior author" would be my handle.]
As I've noted before, I think the "troll" mod is meaningless. Too much a matter of opinion, but the relevant category of people whose posts I would never see (if Slashdot was that intelligent) would be authors who are negative on "sincerity" and negative on "politeness". I might be willing to offset that if they were high on some dimension like "thought-provoking". Hmm... That makes me speculate about another derived dimension of "consistency". Maybe assessing consistency would be easier based on conflicting moderations, and then I could choose to use that derived dimension to ignore them?
Over 400 comments, so it's what passes for a "popular" topic on today's Slashdot. Especially disappointed by the feeble attempts at humor, but maybe those funny mods were just examples of the latest craze among trolls, using "funny" mods to attack in a less obvious way. "Hey, just because YOU didn't appreciate the humor."
The obvious angle for insight did not seem to be touched at all. Of course I started by searching for comments modded as "insightful", and then I went through a bunch of keyword searches. Came up with nothing along the lines of my Subject: question.
In brief, if the Harvard people are just trying to cover their own ass (the university's collective ass?) by avoiding being linked with stupid posts on Facebook (or Slashdot), then it's a depressing kind of cowardice in what is supposed to be one of the leading institutions of America. ("Hey, but it's just a symptom of how America is LOSING", as the Trumpists would say.)
If the Harvard people are sincerely interested in protecting society from harm, then it's a completely different thing. Maybe they remember such moral disasters as that AG who defended torture for Dubya and that little Ted Cruz coward who were empowered to do much of their damage by their Harvard imprimaturs. I for one would not blame Harvard for seeking to avoid creating the next (and possibly worse, ITIP) Ted Cruz.
Lots of largely incoherent mumbling about free speech in this Slashdot discussion, but I doubt most (or perhaps any?) of them actually know what freedom is.
I guess it's funny that Slashdot 7-digit members are approaching the 5-million mark? But really, that spelling error was the only funny comment on the deep topic? Even acknowledging the intrinsic sadness of the topic, that's a new level of disappointment for Slashdot. Wasn't really expecting any insight, so no real disappointment there.
Feeling baffled by BS? Trump thinks you're merely DAZZLED!
Twitter is great for spreading BS. The complications of reality just don't fit into little tweets, but what's that got to do with the price of tea in China?
No brilliance in #PresidentTweety, just bankruptcy.. Let's shave Trump's tax returns with Occam's Razor, shall we?
If you can borrow money, you are NOT really bankrupt. There are times when an actually sharp businessman can play bankruptcy games and borrow more money and come out ahead. That is NOT what happened to Trump.
Trump's creditors, the American banks, refused to loan him more money after his first few bankruptcies. When your creditors are convinced you can't pay them back, then you are TRULY bankrupt. Trump was BROKE, not brilliant.
But wait. This was in the early 90s. The Soviet Union was collapsing and the YUGE state economy was being liquidated. More precisely, it was being STOLEN by kleptocratic politicians who could approve sweetheart deals. The quid pro quo was in the form of YUGE bribes. Suddenly they had YUGE money, but it was dirty money and needed to be laundered. (Read Putin's Kleptocracy for details.)
Tump's tax returns will eventually reveal that his assets are actually commissions for laundering that dirty money for Putin and his cronies.
Be careful what you wish for, Vladimir. The fall of the house of Trump is going to unlaunder a LOT of dirty money from Russia.
(No one knows how rich Putin is because all of his money is still dark. Low estimates make him one of the richest men in the world, but high estimates make him the richest. For now.)
No insult intended, but would you agree that your comment was "insightful"?
What I was looking for (after "funny" of course) was insightful analysis or discussion. Certainly didn't find any in the comments so moderated, and none of my other keywords found anything either...
My ekronomic (time uber money) analysis breaks things into three categories. Essential working time is quite small in advanced societies, so most of the working time goes into the other categories: investment and recreation. The guaranteed income essentially keeps the economy working by sustaining demand, though if you want your society to become more competitive in the future, you want to incentivize investment spending over recreation. However, even the recreation spending contributes to the economy.
This is just the elevator version. Details available upon polite request. On Slashdot? Polite? ROFLMAO.
The moderation system is HOPELESSLY broken until they add the ALWAYS-on-topic all-powerful "covfefe" mod!
Defend that, you Trumpists and associated sock puppets. (And they will, too.)
Actually, I think the saddest part is the lack of any positive movement. No chance of improvement, and perhaps even worse, no anticipation that the situation can get any better on Slashdot. Ever. If the trolls were capable of overcoming their own loser-ness, they would apparently "win" by fault and default.
What troll gave you the off-topic mod? Actually I came by to see if anyone had asked explicitly if trying to destroy the planet should count as grounds for impeachment? I actually think it might fit under "high crimes or misdemeanors" of some sort, but the fabulous founders couldn't cover EVERY base.
Unfortunately the real barrier to solving the #PresidentTweety problem is the so-called Republican congress-critters who put party politics, private profits, and personal power ahead of such trivialities as country and Constitution. Don't laugh, but I started calling them because I thought it would do more good than talking to a brick wall. ROFLMAO. All the way to our funeral.
If you study the google a bit, it seems obvious to me (after reading many of those books) that the extreme incentive policies could easily create the appearance of gender discrimination that reflect actual compensation results. To summarize briefly, if a particular googler is involved in an extremely successful project, then that googler will get obscenely more money than others, even though they are doing the same kind of work. I don't think this favors men because they are inherently more skilled, harder workers, or even luckier. The two most likely causes are related to gender, however: Willingness to take extreme risks and prioritization of work over life. On that basis, I think has two primary secrets they are trying to conceal here:
(1) How they protect losers from failure because they want to encourage risky behaviors. (And even with that insurance, I think women are more risk averse on average.)
(2) That work-life balance at the google is really a lie and the company is dominated in every way (including in compensation) by workaholics.
The strong incentive pay just makes it look worse and might make the google look more EVIL than it is. If that is possible. Makes me sad how the unbounded love of money turned the good google into such a monster. The motto of today's google: "All your attention are belong to us."
The ultimate threat is when people realize that all of the world's information has been prioritized to the BS info the advertisers are paying the google to shove down our throats by abusing our privacy and by raping our personal information. All in a futile quest to solve an unsolvable problem. There is no biggest number and there is no profit that is big enough to "solve" super-greed.
As usual, today's Slashdot has been disappointing, though at least it isn't evil as we measure the google. In particular I lament the lack of funny comments. However I just got the weird idea for units of EVIL measured in googlevils? Should be shorter, but something along those lines.
Is it too early to be disappointed in Slashdot again? Maybe someone will post a funny joke that actually gets some funny mod points? Ditto insightful, eh? Even an actually interesting or informative comment? Not holding my breath. Short summary: No such luck yet (and including keyword searches).
Ever hear the old philosophy joke: "If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear it, does it still make a sound?"
The equivalent question for today's feeble article is: "If a corporation's AI botches your diagnosis and there is no one to sue, does your death still matter?"
You may safely anticipate that the EULA will protect the AI from liability much more than it protects the patient from mistakes or software glitches, no matter how egregious and flagrant. Actually, the hierarchy of protection will probably go something like (1) Corporation that created the AI, (2) Corporation that is licensing the AI, (3) The hospital corporation, (4) The doctors who use the AI, and so on. They may remember to include the patient somewhere in there, or maybe not.
Compare to Dr Mayo's motto: "The best interest of the patient is the only interest to be considered..." The current incorporated Mayo Clinic still mentions patients on the website, but I couldn't find such a strong form.
Not sure what the trigger was, but I recently realized that individuals don't count now. It's only the biggest corporations and political parties that matter. I had still been clinging to some delusions from my "respect for the individual" days, but now the individual is just a cog, and the only question is which cog can do the job most cheaply before being discarded. Trigger might have been the book Hitlerland, which has NO relation to #PresidentTweety, since it was published some years ago. Not even sure if I want to recommend it, though it's still bothering me...
While I have direct reservations about charity business models, both for large and small donors, in this case the use of a charity business model in the WikiLeaks case would require consideration of how to make sure the accounts would not get frozen. From the perspective of the powerful people with secrets to hide, what WikiLeaks wanted to do could seem as threatening as a terrorist attack. From what I've read, I think that Assange started with that perspective, but didn't really think it through.
The fact that the bank accounts of WikiLeaks could be frozen when he knew that he was cultivating enemies who would want to freeze those accounts is one form of a bad economic model.
erm. There are a lot of happy parents that would disagree with you on this.
Eh? Where did that come from?
Oh. Found it. Per my settings, I mostly don't see the ACs. Not all of them are trolls, but even when they aren't, they tend to be wasting my time. Having dug up the actual parent of your reply, I'll just say I think you [Cederic] are just wasting your time by feeding an obvious troll. No detectable interest in a rational discussion there.
Quite serendipitously and tangentially, there is an actual issue touched there. After all these years, I'm still wondering if Assange was set up. It is possible that his real crime was the invention of stealthing, and in that case the critical legal issue is how the Swedish legal system addresses undefined crimes. One version of the nationalistic joke is "In America [but you can swap countries in accord with fashion trends or your actual prejudices], everything is permitted unless it is explicitly forbidden, while in Germany everything is forbidden unless it is explicitly permitted." A typical punchline might be "And in France, everything is required [or expected?] as long as it is explicitly forbidden." What do the laws of Sweden say?
Depending on when Assange got on their radar, it is quite possible he was targeted years ago. By whom? I'd say by any powerful person or nation with secrets to hide, which seems to provide plenty of suspects. Depends on someone's prediction that the very idea of WikiLeaks was a sufficient threat to worry about.
If targeted, then they would have accumulated targeting data about Assange. For example, they could have found out about his philosophy related to eugenics and his belief in his own superior genes and duty to reproduce. Combine that with some data about the kind of women he's interested in and details of his schedule and the schedules of suitable women, and something could be arranged. Add in a bit of patience and there's no need to expose anything to any of the actual participants in the "crime", especially when none of them knew there was a crime involved.
No, I'm not actually ready to say that Assange was set up, but it's like my sig says, coercion counts. I really like that freedom thing.
Trying to imagine how Assange can see "victory" in any part of his situation. While he started with nice ideals, at this point he has been transformed into a "useful idiot", though it would still make a lot of powerful people quite happy to see him punished well beyond indefinite imprisonment in an embassy.
Still seems to me to be an economic problem at heart. Largely based on a couple of books about WikiLeaks, I think it was the lack of a viable economic model that led them (though mostly just Assange) to where they are now. Competing economic models of journalism are equally bad or worse. Consider the eyeballs-for-advertisers model that produces disaster porn like CNN and clickbait websites. Worse than that is the paid propaganda model of FAUX "news", rightwing listen-to-a-nut-talking radio, and Alt-Right websites. The vestiges of mainstream journalism are now engaged in a last-newspaperman-standing strategy, and I think journalism still loses, regardless of whether the last paper standing is the "venerable" NY Times or the Washington Post. (I think the LA Times is already on the ropes and the Boston Globe was never a real contender, though the last paper might be some dark horse like the tainted WSJ.)
Assange is no longer part of any solution, so he must be part of the precipitate.
If this is still the first post, it says something about the state of the Slashdot, eh?
Slashdot Mirror
So that was the opinion of one of the founders. You didn't even say if you agree or disagree with anything he (or I) said.
Still I suppose your quotation was a more useful contribution than the negative mod points of wordless sock puppets. I would defend my case (after correcting the typos, obvious though they be), but as things stand I can just as well rest it.
Where do you think the line should be drawn - and why should I trust YOUR line over anybody else's ?
Uh... Because he has a nice gun and he can shoot you repeatedly if you don't trust him.
Seriously, that's exactly what some of the fabulous founders had in mind when they argued about the wording. They sincerely wanted to make sure the federal government could NOT win a civil war, so the feds would shut up about such problems as that slavery thing. They'd already had some nasty arguments about the topic, or have you forgotten about that 2/5 human thing?
Other founders thought differently, but back then they were still able to reach rational compromises. Maybe they were just lucky that political parties hadn't really been invented yet. The Democratic Party still hasn't figured it out, but the so-called Republican Party (not to be confused with a similarly named entity associated with Abe, Teddy, and Ike) seems to have perfected the art of putting Ps before Cs. Party politics, private profits, and personal power FIRST. Most have them can't even remember what country or Constitution are.
Back to the 2nd Amendment. We had that civil war after all. The pro-gun side lost. Get over it. Abe Lincoln and the Yankee bankers repealed the 2nd Amendment at the safe end of more and bigger guns. Interesting question regarding the degree to which FDR repealed the 10th. My pick for worst is still the 17th, but it's complicated to say why. The one we need now is the 25th, but after watching that bungled circle-jerk of a cabinet meeting, I've concluded our best hope is that Melania stabs him. #PresidentTweety would phuck up a wet dream.
Oh yeah, the original topic. Time to tie it all together, eh? America has become a house hopeless divided against itself. Maybe Abe said something on that topic, too, but what counts now is how Putin played us for fools. I disagree that America is full of racists, but there are too many of them and it doesn't matter that they are still a lunatic fringe. The Donald "won" based on a coalition of lots of lunatic fringes. The "rational" ones have noticed that they hate each other, but they each believe that Trump was speaking the truth to them and lying to everyone else.
P.S. Trump's underlying problem is his bankrupt status, same as it ever was. You only get bankrupt by borrowing money, but you aren't bankrupt as long as your creditors are willing to loan you some more money and believe you can pay it all back. Trump's creditors were American banks who cut him off years ago, but he was able to borrow from foreigners, especially Russian kleptocrats with lots of dirty money. Trump's tax returns will reveal that his "assets" are actually laundry fees.
I feel obliged to note that one of my highest priorities before messing with anything was to figure out the state of the backup system, even though the boss was screaming about other emergencies. It still took me a couple of days to figure out what was going on, or more precisely not going on as regards backups. Various parts of the system had been done by various people with various degrees of competence, all of whom left for various reasons.
Actually reminds me of two fellows I worked for briefly. Both of them were actually too small to have a separate CTO. In the first case I decided to leave as soon as I figured out the legal liability their main customer had incurred due to pirated software. There were actually two packages, and one of them was a database. The second case was a total shoestring operation and one of the first things I discovered was that their so-called daily backup processes were not actually backing up anything.
Now that reminds me of a third case, where they actually did have a CTO, in title if not in competence. While they did fire him, it was too late to save the company... It was one of the few things they'd done right while I was working there, but I decided to leave when one of the actually competent managers was fired, and they disappeared not long after that. (That was actually my last stint in a startup, and after that I just went back to safety in a big company for the rest of my career...)
I guess you [BradleyUffner] deserve the insightful mod, but you didn't dig deep enough. There's another "mistake" when Slashdot uses that framing of the disclosure of the information. My question is whether Slashdot's mistake was an innocent form of clickbait or symptomatic of a deeper and darker sickness. Here's a couple of darker theories:
One theory is that Slashdot has been invaded and largely destroyed by rightwing trolls and (paid?) thugs merely because it was there and a soft target. Not a juicy target these days, since it is obvious that the readership and participation are way down, but Putin's novice cyber-warriers have to start somewhere.
Another theory is worse. Maybe Slashdot's bad financial model and possible desperation from the new owners (of the debt?) are making it cheap and easy to bribe them to tilt the system in that direction.
Anyway, I think there is a fairly skilled liar at work here. The premise of this story is a high-level lie of framing. Reporting the truth about matters of public record to the media, even through an intermediary who has friends who are reporters, is NOT the same thing as leaking secret information. Trying to present the information in the "Leak" frame is a LIE, and no more truthful just because it is a "clever" Level 4 lie. In contrast, #PresidentTweety is a quite unskilled liar, usually operating at Levels 0 (self-contradiction) and 1 (counterfactual statements (where any fool can check the facts)). Quite rare that the Donald can even get as high as Level 2 (partial truth) as in his recent out-of-context attack on the Mayor of London.
The REAL issue here is whether or not Trump has committed impeachable offenses. I'm convinced he has, but it might be that his feeble attempts to obstruct justice are his most serious offenses since he got into the White House. That also depends on the definitions of "emoluments" and "bribery", and as regards bribery, the directions of the bribes. I'm not at all certain about what sorts of pre-White-House crimes would really carry forward as grounds for impeachment. I actually believe that Trump's most serious crimes are hidden in his tax returns and they involve money laundering for Putin and his cronies.
Closing with a joke: Be careful what you wish for, Vladimir. How much money will you lose if Trump's dirty laundry gets unlaundered? The fall of the house of Trump could be costly--but I suppose you were too smart to trust the Donald with much money anyway.
If I ever had a mod point I'd give that an insightful, not a funny. The "flamebait" mods much have come from the insane Libertarian contingent. (I've yet to meet a Libertarian who actually understood much about freedom. Most of them are confusing it with one of the senses of "free beer", as in being so drunk as to act completely "freely" at other people's expense.)
Really disappointed to see the lack of funny book recommendations. Not surprised, however. This is today's Slashdot, after all. Talk about a target-rich environment.
The question is kind of interesting, but I think it's a loaded question like "Has Donald Trump stopped beating his wives yet?" or "Does the general strike against #PresidentTweety start on Thursday or is that just people calling in sick to watch the Comey testimony?" (See the latest Borowitz column at the New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/humor...)
Anyway, any excuse to write about books, eh? Just now reading an interesting book called Influence about how the compliance professions (mostly in sales and marketing) manipulate people. Rather surprised I've never heard of this guy before, though I've read a lot of related material in psychology.
I think we may have wasted time in this discussion before. Let me be clear that I think that trying to create improved discussion systems is NOT a wasteful use of time, but it seems wasted on Slashdot because the system is not evolving and improving (and I think that goes back to the lack of a good financial model).
For what extremely little it is worth, my thinking on the topic has evolved over time. I do see the logical connections to my earlier ideas, but now I think it should be reduced to essentially two icons, one representing your self perception (and linking to the profile you craft to describe yourself), while the other icon would capture how other people perceive you (and would be linked to more descriptive statistics and the data sources, allowing the external perception to be confirmed and studied as desired).
In terms of the final objective of having good discussions with the minimum amount of my time, my own usage pattern would be to use the external perception to guide my reading. People with sufficiently negative profiles would simply be invisible to me. You alluded to that with your mention of insincere trolls. In terms of deciding whose comments I want to see, I think "happy" would be the dimension I might give highest priority to. I think "happy" would be a better dimension than "funny" because it captures a similar idea, but in a less subjective way. If the comment left you feeling happy, it might because it was funny, but there are other reasons, too, whereas a "sad" post would also represent a relatively clear evaluation. (I think each dimension of assessment should have relatively clear poles.)
As noted before, I suffer from persistent delusions of grand solutions. However, I've also come to understand that the world changes at it's own pace.
Did I misunderstand something there? I raised a philosophic question, and you apparently responded that there is no philosophic question because your personal philosophy is "Greed is good" and there is nothing else to consider. (Only incidental that you project to Harvard.)
While I received the usual notification of the moderation, there was nothing about the mindless so-called reply. If that is a new feature of Slashdot rather than some old bug, then maybe it's a tiny bit of improvement? Glad to save my time. (Not the first time I've noticed this, but perhaps I only noticed this recently.)
Still needs the self-discrediting feature. Assuming they implemented some filter against wastes of the OP's time, then and if that filter is evaluated at the time of the mindless and annoying reply, then I think they should give that person (even though he's a probable troll) a warning that the post will probably never be seen by the ostensible addressee. If the person in question still insists on replying, then the reply should receive a preface to the effect: "This reply is apparently not a sincere attempt at dialog, since the author was notified that it would not be seen by the prior author of the post it seems to reply to." [Of course the "author" references should actually be resolved. In this example, "prior author" would be my handle.]
As I've noted before, I think the "troll" mod is meaningless. Too much a matter of opinion, but the relevant category of people whose posts I would never see (if Slashdot was that intelligent) would be authors who are negative on "sincerity" and negative on "politeness". I might be willing to offset that if they were high on some dimension like "thought-provoking". Hmm... That makes me speculate about another derived dimension of "consistency". Maybe assessing consistency would be easier based on conflicting moderations, and then I could choose to use that derived dimension to ignore them?
Over 400 comments, so it's what passes for a "popular" topic on today's Slashdot. Especially disappointed by the feeble attempts at humor, but maybe those funny mods were just examples of the latest craze among trolls, using "funny" mods to attack in a less obvious way. "Hey, just because YOU didn't appreciate the humor."
The obvious angle for insight did not seem to be touched at all. Of course I started by searching for comments modded as "insightful", and then I went through a bunch of keyword searches. Came up with nothing along the lines of my Subject: question.
In brief, if the Harvard people are just trying to cover their own ass (the university's collective ass?) by avoiding being linked with stupid posts on Facebook (or Slashdot), then it's a depressing kind of cowardice in what is supposed to be one of the leading institutions of America. ("Hey, but it's just a symptom of how America is LOSING", as the Trumpists would say.)
If the Harvard people are sincerely interested in protecting society from harm, then it's a completely different thing. Maybe they remember such moral disasters as that AG who defended torture for Dubya and that little Ted Cruz coward who were empowered to do much of their damage by their Harvard imprimaturs. I for one would not blame Harvard for seeking to avoid creating the next (and possibly worse, ITIP) Ted Cruz.
Lots of largely incoherent mumbling about free speech in this Slashdot discussion, but I doubt most (or perhaps any?) of them actually know what freedom is.
I guess it's funny that Slashdot 7-digit members are approaching the 5-million mark? But really, that spelling error was the only funny comment on the deep topic? Even acknowledging the intrinsic sadness of the topic, that's a new level of disappointment for Slashdot. Wasn't really expecting any insight, so no real disappointment there.
Ekronomics 101. 'Nuff said.
Okay, I'll say a bit more. http://www.timewellspent.io/ is interesting and relevant in various ways.
Feeling baffled by BS? Trump thinks you're merely DAZZLED!
Twitter is great for spreading BS. The complications of reality just don't fit into little tweets, but what's that got to do with the price of tea in China?
No brilliance in #PresidentTweety, just bankruptcy.. Let's shave Trump's tax returns with Occam's Razor, shall we?
If you can borrow money, you are NOT really bankrupt. There are times when an actually sharp businessman can play bankruptcy games and borrow more money and come out ahead. That is NOT what happened to Trump.
Trump's creditors, the American banks, refused to loan him more money after his first few bankruptcies. When your creditors are convinced you can't pay them back, then you are TRULY bankrupt. Trump was BROKE, not brilliant.
But wait. This was in the early 90s. The Soviet Union was collapsing and the YUGE state economy was being liquidated. More precisely, it was being STOLEN by kleptocratic politicians who could approve sweetheart deals. The quid pro quo was in the form of YUGE bribes. Suddenly they had YUGE money, but it was dirty money and needed to be laundered. (Read Putin's Kleptocracy for details.)
Tump's tax returns will eventually reveal that his assets are actually commissions for laundering that dirty money for Putin and his cronies.
Be careful what you wish for, Vladimir. The fall of the house of Trump is going to unlaunder a LOT of dirty money from Russia.
(No one knows how rich Putin is because all of his money is still dark. Low estimates make him one of the richest men in the world, but high estimates make him the richest. For now.)
No funny comments, except maybe a couple of the ones modded insightful. Not even a joke about destroying the planet as a possibly impeachable offense.
Winners: Russia, Saudi Arabia, and China. Losers: Rest of the world unless China saves the day.
Disappointing discussion. No humor and no consideration of the potential use of the new law for censorship.
No insult intended, but would you agree that your comment was "insightful"?
What I was looking for (after "funny" of course) was insightful analysis or discussion. Certainly didn't find any in the comments so moderated, and none of my other keywords found anything either...
My ekronomic (time uber money) analysis breaks things into three categories. Essential working time is quite small in advanced societies, so most of the working time goes into the other categories: investment and recreation. The guaranteed income essentially keeps the economy working by sustaining demand, though if you want your society to become more competitive in the future, you want to incentivize investment spending over recreation. However, even the recreation spending contributes to the economy.
This is just the elevator version. Details available upon polite request. On Slashdot? Polite? ROFLMAO.
The moderation system is HOPELESSLY broken until they add the ALWAYS-on-topic all-powerful "covfefe" mod!
Defend that, you Trumpists and associated sock puppets. (And they will, too.)
Actually, I think the saddest part is the lack of any positive movement. No chance of improvement, and perhaps even worse, no anticipation that the situation can get any better on Slashdot. Ever. If the trolls were capable of overcoming their own loser-ness, they would apparently "win" by fault and default.
What troll gave you the off-topic mod? Actually I came by to see if anyone had asked explicitly if trying to destroy the planet should count as grounds for impeachment? I actually think it might fit under "high crimes or misdemeanors" of some sort, but the fabulous founders couldn't cover EVERY base.
Unfortunately the real barrier to solving the #PresidentTweety problem is the so-called Republican congress-critters who put party politics, private profits, and personal power ahead of such trivialities as country and Constitution. Don't laugh, but I started calling them because I thought it would do more good than talking to a brick wall. ROFLMAO. All the way to our funeral.
If you study the google a bit, it seems obvious to me (after reading many of those books) that the extreme incentive policies could easily create the appearance of gender discrimination that reflect actual compensation results. To summarize briefly, if a particular googler is involved in an extremely successful project, then that googler will get obscenely more money than others, even though they are doing the same kind of work. I don't think this favors men because they are inherently more skilled, harder workers, or even luckier. The two most likely causes are related to gender, however: Willingness to take extreme risks and prioritization of work over life. On that basis, I think has two primary secrets they are trying to conceal here:
(1) How they protect losers from failure because they want to encourage risky behaviors. (And even with that insurance, I think women are more risk averse on average.)
(2) That work-life balance at the google is really a lie and the company is dominated in every way (including in compensation) by workaholics.
The strong incentive pay just makes it look worse and might make the google look more EVIL than it is. If that is possible. Makes me sad how the unbounded love of money turned the good google into such a monster. The motto of today's google: "All your attention are belong to us."
The ultimate threat is when people realize that all of the world's information has been prioritized to the BS info the advertisers are paying the google to shove down our throats by abusing our privacy and by raping our personal information. All in a futile quest to solve an unsolvable problem. There is no biggest number and there is no profit that is big enough to "solve" super-greed.
As usual, today's Slashdot has been disappointing, though at least it isn't evil as we measure the google. In particular I lament the lack of funny comments. However I just got the weird idea for units of EVIL measured in googlevils? Should be shorter, but something along those lines.
Is it too early to be disappointed in Slashdot again? Maybe someone will post a funny joke that actually gets some funny mod points? Ditto insightful, eh? Even an actually interesting or informative comment? Not holding my breath. Short summary: No such luck yet (and including keyword searches).
Ever hear the old philosophy joke: "If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear it, does it still make a sound?"
The equivalent question for today's feeble article is: "If a corporation's AI botches your diagnosis and there is no one to sue, does your death still matter?"
You may safely anticipate that the EULA will protect the AI from liability much more than it protects the patient from mistakes or software glitches, no matter how egregious and flagrant. Actually, the hierarchy of protection will probably go something like (1) Corporation that created the AI, (2) Corporation that is licensing the AI, (3) The hospital corporation, (4) The doctors who use the AI, and so on. They may remember to include the patient somewhere in there, or maybe not.
Compare to Dr Mayo's motto: "The best interest of the patient is the only interest to be considered..." The current incorporated Mayo Clinic still mentions patients on the website, but I couldn't find such a strong form.
Not sure what the trigger was, but I recently realized that individuals don't count now. It's only the biggest corporations and political parties that matter. I had still been clinging to some delusions from my "respect for the individual" days, but now the individual is just a cog, and the only question is which cog can do the job most cheaply before being discarded. Trigger might have been the book Hitlerland , which has NO relation to #PresidentTweety, since it was published some years ago. Not even sure if I want to recommend it, though it's still bothering me...
As additional evidence, I note the sudden horde of negative mods on the branch. Just par for the brokenness of Slashdot, unfortunately.
While I have direct reservations about charity business models, both for large and small donors, in this case the use of a charity business model in the WikiLeaks case would require consideration of how to make sure the accounts would not get frozen. From the perspective of the powerful people with secrets to hide, what WikiLeaks wanted to do could seem as threatening as a terrorist attack. From what I've read, I think that Assange started with that perspective, but didn't really think it through.
The fact that the bank accounts of WikiLeaks could be frozen when he knew that he was cultivating enemies who would want to freeze those accounts is one form of a bad economic model.
You [974911] are a flaming troll and must be using a herd of sock puppets to self-moderate your own incoherent tripe.
erm. There are a lot of happy parents that would disagree with you on this.
Eh? Where did that come from?
Oh. Found it. Per my settings, I mostly don't see the ACs. Not all of them are trolls, but even when they aren't, they tend to be wasting my time. Having dug up the actual parent of your reply, I'll just say I think you [Cederic] are just wasting your time by feeding an obvious troll. No detectable interest in a rational discussion there.
Quite serendipitously and tangentially, there is an actual issue touched there. After all these years, I'm still wondering if Assange was set up. It is possible that his real crime was the invention of stealthing, and in that case the critical legal issue is how the Swedish legal system addresses undefined crimes. One version of the nationalistic joke is "In America [but you can swap countries in accord with fashion trends or your actual prejudices], everything is permitted unless it is explicitly forbidden, while in Germany everything is forbidden unless it is explicitly permitted." A typical punchline might be "And in France, everything is required [or expected?] as long as it is explicitly forbidden." What do the laws of Sweden say?
Depending on when Assange got on their radar, it is quite possible he was targeted years ago. By whom? I'd say by any powerful person or nation with secrets to hide, which seems to provide plenty of suspects. Depends on someone's prediction that the very idea of WikiLeaks was a sufficient threat to worry about.
If targeted, then they would have accumulated targeting data about Assange. For example, they could have found out about his philosophy related to eugenics and his belief in his own superior genes and duty to reproduce. Combine that with some data about the kind of women he's interested in and details of his schedule and the schedules of suitable women, and something could be arranged. Add in a bit of patience and there's no need to expose anything to any of the actual participants in the "crime", especially when none of them knew there was a crime involved.
No, I'm not actually ready to say that Assange was set up, but it's like my sig says, coercion counts. I really like that freedom thing.
Trying to imagine how Assange can see "victory" in any part of his situation. While he started with nice ideals, at this point he has been transformed into a "useful idiot", though it would still make a lot of powerful people quite happy to see him punished well beyond indefinite imprisonment in an embassy.
Still seems to me to be an economic problem at heart. Largely based on a couple of books about WikiLeaks, I think it was the lack of a viable economic model that led them (though mostly just Assange) to where they are now. Competing economic models of journalism are equally bad or worse. Consider the eyeballs-for-advertisers model that produces disaster porn like CNN and clickbait websites. Worse than that is the paid propaganda model of FAUX "news", rightwing listen-to-a-nut-talking radio, and Alt-Right websites. The vestiges of mainstream journalism are now engaged in a last-newspaperman-standing strategy, and I think journalism still loses, regardless of whether the last paper standing is the "venerable" NY Times or the Washington Post. (I think the LA Times is already on the ropes and the Boston Globe was never a real contender, though the last paper might be some dark horse like the tainted WSJ.)
Assange is no longer part of any solution, so he must be part of the precipitate.
If this is still the first post, it says something about the state of the Slashdot, eh?