Hmm... Would it have helped if I had said "hypothetical counterexample"? Or I should have defined it in functional terms?
Anyway, I think the foundations of my analysis on (not wasting) time and (increasing) freedom are sound. Your comfortable usage of FRAND (which I had to look up) makes me think you are approaching it from a legal perspective. My problem there is that the current legal system has basically become highly corrupted by the most cheaply bribed politicians writing the rules of the game (business laws) in favor of the corporate cancer business model. Rather than working for such complicated objectives as our Constitutional rights and increased personal freedom, they are working for the simple objectives of concentrating more money into the hands of fewer and fewer people.
Funnier in your conclusion, though the insightful mods were merited, too. Still, I feel that overall the discussion was disappointing and too brief insofar as this may be one of the peak events of #PresidentTweety's short reign of error. Imminent #PresidentReligiousNutjob can't possibly be worse.
No, I didn't say that! I didn't mean it as a challenge!
I think the missing aspects of insight that most disappointed me were (1) lack of deep discussion of the coverups (not just of the Putin bromance, but the dirty tax returns, etc.), (2) consideration of how powerful the black-hat hackers have become (especially if there are Russian hackers who are holding swords of Damocles over Trump's head (as I believe to be true)), (3) the Donald's projection (as related to the missing joke about Comey's real incompetence in not yet arresting any of Trump's accomplices or their Russian handlers), and (4) the overall brevity of the discussion. (Though I visit Slashdot pretty often, I never saw this article on the front page.)
In accord with my perverse focus on solutions, I'm going to take the cheap shot at solving (4): The most active discussions should live longer. One approach would involve two feature lists, one time-based and the other activity based. A second approach might be to weigh time against activity so highly active articles would get decreasing amounts of rejuvenation, so they would still descend and fall off the page, but more slowly. A third idea...
Naw, too much effort wasted already. The problem that probably retains the highest priority is the lack of a viable financial model to support ANY improvements on Slashdot. Orphan code paradise. Whoops again. I meant orphan code hell.
Good comment and deserved the insightful mod, though I don't fully agree with your definitions. Also, I was once again disappointed by the lack of funny-moderated comments. Where have all the wits gone?
I'd prefer to approach it from the perspective of a counterexample. What if the google was cut into competing pieces. Each piece would start with a copy of the data and source code and an equal share of the physical resources. Would one of the pieces naturally grow to the point of destroying all others, or could they continue competing indefinitely? (Old example involves Microsoft. Imagine three baby Microsofts that each started with the source code.)
I'm not sure how it would work in the case of the google, but there is obviously a paradox here. Google is profiting by helping other companies compete against each other. It might work, but only if the google was a fair and impartial arbitrator. If you prefer, "not evil".
The paradox seems unavoidable because the google is a PLAYER, not just an neutral party. The google is trying to extract as much money as possible from the system. Rather than wanting each of us to get the best possible information about what we want to buy, google's thumb is on the scale. "Which companies will pay the highest percentage to the google?" becomes part of the equation and if you could see the secrets of PageRank I'm certain that you would find that code somewhere in there. Ties have to be broken, and ceteris paribus the google corporation obviously wants to break the ties in its OWN favor. (Of course it's even worse in cases where the google is actually selling one of the products or services. Anyone still think they can offer a competing map service against Google Maps?)
Solution? Use tax policy to INCREASE FREEDOM, not to make the rich richer. There should be a progressive corporate tax based on market share. As you eliminate your competitors, your taxes rise, and then you get a big tax bonus if you cut your company into competing pieces. SINCERELY competing pieces, not just such scams as dividing up the territory.
The extra tax revenue from these market share taxes should be tapped to support the government service of regulating the dominant company (especially in cases where the dominator really has a natural monopoly) and researching ways to break any natural monopolies (especially with new technologies that monopolists naturally want to resist).
Not sure what is supposed to be the point of this article. A celebration of human failure? A monument to how a small amount of greed can drive a YUGE scam-and-anti-scam industry? Okay, $200 million sounds like a lot of money to you or me, so maybe the greed seems justified, but that $20 billion on the other side is just plain insane.
Causes: (1) SMTP ignores accounting (2) "Live and let spam" is a bad business model
Solution: Let's work together to break the spammers' business models. That means the email providers AND the victims of the spammers. Not just the obvious victims like the suckers who lose money or the corporations that suffer damage to their reputation or the customers of those corporations who are victimized through their (dying) trust in those corporations, but even the MILLIONS of little suckers who lose some time whenever the spammers can steal a bit of their attention.
Obviously filtering has failed. How about an iterative analytic approach where we, the victims, would help identify the problems and countermeasures of each spam message. Also would allow for prioritization of the proper countermeasures along with better targeting.
Trivial example for a phishing scam spam. Even the google is not smart enough to know all my bank accounts (at least I hope so), but I would be able to say "Whoa. That's a GREAT looking phishing scam. Almost makes me sad that I've never had an account at that bank." Working together to share that kind of information would allow Gmail to stomp on it more quickly.
Yeah, I know no one is listening and Slashdot is pointless, but I'll still close with the joke: "Lots more details available upon polite request." I know that because of prior reactions and replies, but before you waste your keystrokes let me say:
(1) I'm quite willing to answer questions, including for clarifications where I'm too terse. (2) If you want to defend spammers, then I think you are (a) insane, (b) a spammer, or (c) worse.
In some regards I'd argue that one deserved an insightful mod. The comment that actually had one (at this time) didn't deserve it, and no "funny" comments at all. Sad. (#PresidentTweety contamination is bigly sad.)
Consider the Fermi Paradox. Obvious resolution is that they're out there, but not talking to us because we're still amusing enough to bet quatloos on. What are they betting on?
Whether we create our AI successors before we exterminate ourselves. Right now the odds are falling fast. (#PresidentTweety again.)
Yeah, I'm speculating, but natural evolution is a kind of random process and follows many paths. There is some convergence, but it's still interesting to watch the various paths. The AIs are NOT coming from random processes and blind watchmakers, but will probably converge on the laws of physics without much of interest to watch. When our AI descendants get to that point, they'll get (and be able to understand) the greetings from the others.
I've been reading a lot of these books over the last few years and would even be glad to contribute a few comments, but... Too transient to justify the effort. How about redoing it as a poll? The current poll has been basically dead for a week or two, and this would seem to be a much more interesting topic.
You could get the top candidates at random, but I'd recommend using Amazon to get the bestselling examples for the top 4 or 5 slots and collect the others in the comments.
Seems to be a problem with the Cowboy Neal option. If it was about the creation of Slashdot, there's not much grounds for recommending it. Perhaps an option like "Cowboy Neal doesn't read books anymore"?
Too early? One "funny" modded comment that wasn't much. Several "insightful" mods, apparently on some sort of confusion of wit with insight. Brevity is only the soul of wit, sorry.
Actually, I sort of think that the (increasingly evil) google has a good idea there, even if it's intuitively obvious to the most casual observer. Reputation is ultimately a human thing, and it is ultimately based on a network of trust. Three obvious problems:
(1) Abuse of anonymity breaks the foundation of the trust network. (2) The google is biased by the love of money and wants "extra" trust to sell more ads. (3) TMI
Improved moderation could make Slashdot a model of possible solutions, but there's no funding model to drive change here. Would you actually pay REAL money for more reliable information? Especially when there's an effectively infinite supply of "information" just a few short clicks away?
Since it will never happen on Slashdot, does anyone know of a discussion website where the network reputation of each source is displayed next to the avatar? Various ways to do it, but it would be easiest for me to interpret a multi-dimensional radar diagram based on reactions to the work published by that source. (Details available upon polite request, as the sad joke goes.)
Simple enough. If something is working well enough for my purposes, then I'll tend to resist change. Actually, going beyond that, if it's working perfectly, then any change is going to make it worse. Doesn't matter that nothing is perfect if I think it is, or perhaps if I have adapted my purposes to fit with what the software is perfect for. (Or perhaps the real problem is that "perfect" is mostly a matter of opinion and the delusion is that there is a better solution for everyone.)
Solution: Don't fix it unless you can convince enough people to pay for the fix. In project form, describe EXACTLY what is going to be done and what success will look like.
Yeah, it's the old charity share brokerage idea again. Can you imagine a funding system so powerful that it could fix Slashdot? Me neither.
I think you deserve a mod point for some sort of first post or best answer, but I never get mod points, so forget about it.
Having said that, I'm not sure why this one came to my mind as the best SF movie. I don't like either version of the book that much, but the movie was spectacular and it was rather far ahead of its time, too. The computer graphics have reached the point where recent movies are just computer artifacts.
Actually, what I find far more interesting is that there are essentially no trolls or mentions of politicians. It is almost as if the old Slashdot is back. Alas the experience is no doubt fleeting:-(
Are you a troll? If not, and having nothing to say, then perhaps you should say nothing?
Oh wait. I forgot this is today's Slashdot. It's approaching 99.44% pure nothing.
That was the only comment to be modded informative and no comments moderated as insightful. Hmm... Seems to say something about the state of today's Slashdot, doesn't it.
Hmm... Looking more deeply, I see it was a split mod. If I ever got a mod point, I'd have voted on the "interesting" side for such a comment. However if that had happened, then this entire large discussion would be without a single comment showing an informative mod.
The first one I owned was a Kaypro (which I bought instead of an Osborne (which is why I'm replying here)), but I'd been using them for many years by that time. One of "my" very first machines could have been a kind of "home computer" if I could have afforded the extremely expensive terminal required... I think it was an HP 2000E. Having a terminal wouldn't have solved the problems with paper and the phone line, however. Also, storing programs on paper tape was a beatch.
Trying to remember if the Kay of Kaypro had any relationship to the famous Kay person, but also regarding most of this as historical trivia.
Speaking of the trivial, not at all surprised to see the high activity provoked by this topic, and also not surprised to be disappointed by the results of all that activity. As usual, most disappointed by the lack of funny comments, but I hoped to find some interesting-moderated comments that actually were. The topic seemed juicy for both dimensions. Didn't even look for insightful mods, but I guess that's worth a scan now...
Probably doesn't matter if they "don't have to vote for him" because his district is probably gerrymandered like so many of them are. Voters can't pick their so-called Representatives when the district boundaries have already picked the "right" voters.
Only solution I've been able to come up with would be "guest voting" for your representative. If you feel like your vote is pointless in your own district (as for example after it's been gerrymandered 150 miles like mine), then you can pick one of the neighboring districts and vote for a representative in that district. The more they gerrymander the districts, the more they are liable to get screwed up by guest voters. Another interesting wrinkle is that third-party voters could concentrate on one district and get some Congressional so-called representation. Of course, it would never happen. Pretty certain it would require a Constitutional amendment, and even if they got the amendment, the bastards would just come up with some new cheating game.
So now I guess this is just another meta-comment on the increasingly sad state of Slashdot? I was really disappointed by the lack of jokes on the rich target, but saddened by the lack of mention of climate or famine. Also not a single comment moderated "insightful", but maybe that's just what passes for truth in advertising these days?
On the official topic, I was actually ahead of the story when I saw it on TV, but I didn't realize what the full story was until later on. In one sense it is kind of funny that this is the leading edge of climate-change-induced famine as manifested by potato-chip panic in an advanced society. For all the other senses, it won't be funny when the famines become more severe even in those so-called advanced societies that have mostly brought it upon themselves. Harvesting the seeds of the climate change they planted, as the religious folk might like to say.
So let's change the topic again with the best joke I've heard this week, as mutated for the topic at hand:
Pepsi: Watch this ad! No, wait. Don't watch that ad!
United: Ha! You call that a PR disaster?
Spicer: Hold my beer (and potato chips).
(#PresidentTweety: Great job, Spicy! That's the way to change the subject! Even better and cheaper than missiles and daisy cutters!)
The never-ending abrasion of the spirit of trolldom is apparently making my skin too thin and I initially overreacted against your comment when I should have thanked you for reminding me of Facebook. At the time I was composing the comment, I was actually thinking there was another humongous and recent company to mention, but I just couldn't recall Facebook and actually used Exxon as a substitute.
However I'm also feeling (perhaps again due to the abrasion?) that I should defend the inclusion of "retro" Exxon on two grounds: (1) There are various forms of cancer, and they are all fatal to their host, and Exxon is just an older form (that was partly "treated" by the breakup surgery on Standard Oil), and (2) Exxon was the first one I recognized (and I've been boycotting all things Exxon in the 30+ years since then). Or maybe I'm just straining the metaphor too hard?
Maybe I'm also unsure how evil Facebook is and how worthy it is of inclusion on the list of EVIL cancers? (Questioning my own thinking?) There is a real question about when the EVIL inflection point is reached. I'm pretty well convinced that any sufficiently large company will be forced by the rules of the crooked game in America to become an evil cancer, but has Facebook passed that point? Based on market cap, it would seem almost certain, but I regard stock price as fantasy, so the real value of Facebook remains unclear and it is possible that the company is much smaller than it seems, in which case the morality of the controlling people (mostly Zuckerberg in Facebook's case) is still relevant. What would happen if Zuckerberg actually erased all of our personal data (and destroyed Facebook)? (If he could, eh?)
Good comment and deserves the "insightful" mod. My thoughts are similar, though I'd appeal to first principles:
The original mission statement was overwhelming, but the original scanning project fit with the idea of all knowledge for everyone. The shite hit the fan when they tried to squeeze PROFITS out of it and their lust for profits conflicted with the vested interests and fantasy profits of the publishers. (Or maybe it wasn't so much the fantasy profits associated with the orphan works as the actual competition from public domain books against the fresh books, many of which are basically garbage that deserves to be crushed in the market.)
Anyway, back to the google's mission statement. They were overwhelmed by too much information and had to prioritize things. The profit motive drove them to focus on the most important information of all, the information in the ads that they get paid for. Making all the world's information available simply mutated into making the ads available and the metric of utility was reduced to the profits of the corporations that are paying the google corporation. Any benefit to actual human beings has become rather incidental.
Remember that old slogan about evil? That's mutated, too. The current slogan of the google is "All your attention are belong to us", but that's how most of the so-called successful corporate cancers feel these days. We're forced to pick on the basis of being manipulated (per my sig) or considering which flavor of cancer seems relatively less evil today.
Just a few examples, but beyond the google I'm especially aware of Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Exxon. Feel free to add your favorite corporate cancer here. (In particular I want to identify the the cancer playing games with my mouse. I thought the Comet cursor was dead and buried... Or maybe it's the NSA or the Russians?)
Yours [dskoll's] was one of the "insightful" moderated comments, even one of the more insightful ones, but it seems for rather small values of insight. A few mentions of "progressive taxation", but none moderated up. Just my delusion that Slashdot used to be much deeper in days of yore? Also funnier, and not one "funny" mod on this humor-rich target.
There are various principles for personal taxation. I favor progressive taxation that increases the tax burden on people who can afford it, mostly because they are getting most of the benefits from the civilization that the taxes pay for, but also because poor people are human, too, and their suffering should be reduced when possible.
It is obvious that the current principles of personal taxation in America are working to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. My interpretation of Ryan's proposed "tax reforms" is that the so-called Republicans have realized they can't squeeze any more blood out of the poor people, so they are going to squeeze more out of the people who aren't poor. Yet. Unfortunately, this will NOT solve the fake problem of the super-rich people. There is NO amount of money that would "solve" such greed.
Corporate taxation should also be considered in the broader topic of taxation. Obviously the current American tax system supports corporate cancerism with many industries collapsing to one or two companies. Capitalism requires meaningful competition (per my sig), but cancer worship is NOT capitalism.
I would like to propose a new principle of corporate taxation to increase human freedom. Progressive corporate taxation based on market share. Once a company's market share gets too high and starts reducing the customers' freedom, then its tax rates start rising. Don't think of it as a penalty for success. Rather the winners are being rewarded by being encouraged to reproduce and COMPETE with more choices. Going farther, I think there should be special tax incentives when a giant company divides itself into directly competing companies.
Rather than protecting a monopolist's profits by fighting against innovation and dangerous changes, the company's would be motivated to keep right on competing and innovating. In cases where there really is a natural monopoly, the extra taxes should mostly be invested in (1) carefully regulating the monoplist and (2) researching (and even investing in) ways to break the monopoly.
Lots more details available upon polite request, as the old joke goes.
Hmm... I guess I was hoping to see more "sea stories" like your [fwarren's] reply. More evidence that the old timers have left the Slashdot [building]?
Maybe that's related to the generally non-constructive attitude of today's Slashdot? I'm too focused on SOLUTIONS for the problems, but today's residual Slashdotters just want to grouse and vent spleen? (However I still think there are some paid trolls practicing or even trying to perfect their craft here.)
Anyway, I did remember a few more details of my own sea story. I was actually porting a 8-bit CP/M program from the S-100 box to a Kaypro. The underlying problem was that the S-100's had apparently been patched to prevent a certain kind of polling, but the Kaypro would get paralyzed by the busy waiting. So I wound up tracing into the code to find where the system call was and replaced it with the other call that wouldn't loop while polling.
Oh well. The topic has died by now, but I'll take one more look for "funny" comments...
Okay, now I understand your focus, but it was a minor point to me. I regard selling to the makers rather than the actual users to be one of the two major keys to Microsoft's success. The other one was ducking all liability in the EULA. Neither was original, but Microsoft perfected them.
From that perspective, the obvious response would be for Ubuntu to have gone after makers. My suggestion regarding small donors would be unlikely to help there, though I do think that a superior and real-user-driven OS would have some advantages to offer to the makers. Going after the makers needs major marketing with really big donors behind it. Perhaps Mark Shuttleworth should have focused there when he had the chance? However, I admit that I'm not optimistic given how little success the google had with their Chromebooks... (Do they still exist?)
Well, a barely insightful comment there, but seriously disappointed by the lack of "funny" comments on this target-rich topic. Or is my memory fooling me about how much fun and laughter we had back then?
However, the one that was missing from the article and so far not here in the Slashdot comments is something I would call "depth of control". In the days before magic black boxes we could actually understand how our computers worked from top to bottom. One example I remember involved debugging an application program. Can't even remember if it was 8 or 16 bits (though it was running on an S-100 system that had two CPUs and could actually run both), but I remember my debugging actually went into the OS and I wound up "fixing" it by replacing one OS call in the application executable with a closely related call. I think the rise of the black boxes began with the Mac but didn't triumph until Microsoft went mousing along ca Windows 95 or 2000.
Might be I've lost my marbles or intestinal fortitude, but I wouldn't even try it with any of the machines I'm using these days. Not even the tiny harmless-looking little smartphones.
Black boxes to the right of them, Black boxes to the left of them, Black boxes in front of them...
Wow, I'm dazzled by your mind reading capabilities. Not to be compared with your screen reading skills. Perhaps you should reread what I actually wrote and clarify how your response is related to my actual words rather than what you think you read directly out of my mind? It's not that I mind going there (though at this point I'd mostly have to guess where you think you're going), but mostly a lack of justification.
Right now I mostly regard your reply as an example of having nothing to say, but insisting on saying it anyway. Then again, my reply is too close for comfort. The proximal problem is that by the time I return again, the entire topic will probably have expired...
Summarizing today's news story, wealthy and somewhat benevolent Mark Shuttlesworth doesn't appreciate some of the criticism his projects have received, notwithstanding his mixed generosity. I say mixed because part of the plan was to make money, too (though I think he's donated way more money than he's earned on this Ubuntu thing). His real unhappiness is probably that he feels his generosity is insufficiently appreciated.
I actually agree with Mr Shuttlesworth that much of the criticism was unjustified, but I have two responses: (1) Some of the criticism was merited and (2) What else could they contribute?
Response (1) is about the biggest problem with the big donor model of charity (even if Ubuntu has some non-charitable aspects). Sometimes the big donor makes a mistake. In general the big donors don't just throw in the big money and go away. You can say it's a matter of trust or accountability or whatever, but they stay involved. In the specific case of Ubuntu, the development priorities have sometimes gone a bit astray. Obviously the shell kerfuffles are examples, but the low priority on Japanese language support has actually been the main recommendation barrier in my case. I'd like to encourage people to adopt Ubuntu, but (after using the OS for many years (probably since Dapper Drake in 2006)) I still can't.
Response (2) is really about frustration. At least I don't see what other alternative most of the potential users of Ubuntu have. Some of the top programmers presumably have Mr Shuttlesworth's ear and can influence things, but most of us are on the outside. Way on the outside. I actually think that many of the problems with Ubuntu are ultimately due to programmer-driven decisions. Good programmers want to do fancy things. They want to push the envelope and develop fancy features for fancy hardware. Or maybe it's just my problem that I have other things to do with my time or that I'm too cheap to buy new computers fast enough?
I need to disclaim that I feel some frustration and disappointment with Ubuntu, too. I had hopes that it would become a dominant desktop OS, but it never did. It's not like there weren't major opportunities. For example that Vista fiasco. It's just that Ubuntu never filled any of the big vacuums. However, I mostly didn't care that much, so I never even investigated the details. I just observed the results.
(By the way, I do think there is at least one possible solution. Are you brave enough to ask me about the Charity Share Brokerage for small donors? Hint: Kickstarter and Indiegogo aren't there yet, but maybe that idea could be fixed...)
Anyway, things sometimes turn out for the better, at least when the term is long enough. Turns out the desktop OS doesn't matter that much anymore. Maybe Linux won out after all, but via the backdoor leading to Android smartphones? Still a bit of the big donor problem, but at least the google seems more competent than evil. For now. I recommend Dogfight on the smartphone war, but maybe you have a good book to recommend? (Yeah, I'm sure there are some interesting blogs and webpages, too, but mostly I find them as half-baked as this selfsame noddie.)
Since some projects produce huge profits and others don't, the people involved with the the lucky projects get much more money.
There was a similar management craze in the late 90s: Small Business Units. The idea was to allocate resources (IT, facilities, etc.) according to how much each business unit brought in.
But here's the problem with profit-driven compensation: they give an incentive to take risk, not to manage risk. That's how lots of people lost their pension money and how Uber is burning billions every quarter. It's more gambling than pursuit of a solid business model.
Well I can easily give you the official google line on that part: Don't punish failure. They want their employees to tackle tough and ambitious projects.
Of course the REAL-world problem is that most truly challenging projects fail. That's not a big problem for a small startup that just declares bankruptcy, but it's a huge problem for a giant corporation with shareholders and all that jazz. That's why (1) most innovation is done by small companies (that define success by being acquired by giant companies) and (2) the google restructured itself into this Alphabet thing to isolate the risks.
Separate problem, but reviewing the moderation of this discussion, we might not want to go there. Oh, wait. Why would I care what the moderators think? (Especially since it's so obvious they mostly aren't thinking, but just venting their own inability to contribute.) I tend to think all these things are interrelated. Obviously it's significant if men are also more willing to take the big risks on "tough and ambitious projects" where the big gambles can produce the giant profits (once in a while). Should be added to my original list?
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... Would it have helped if I had said "hypothetical counterexample"? Or I should have defined it in functional terms?
Anyway, I think the foundations of my analysis on (not wasting) time and (increasing) freedom are sound. Your comfortable usage of FRAND (which I had to look up) makes me think you are approaching it from a legal perspective. My problem there is that the current legal system has basically become highly corrupted by the most cheaply bribed politicians writing the rules of the game (business laws) in favor of the corporate cancer business model. Rather than working for such complicated objectives as our Constitutional rights and increased personal freedom, they are working for the simple objectives of concentrating more money into the hands of fewer and fewer people.
Funnier in your conclusion, though the insightful mods were merited, too. Still, I feel that overall the discussion was disappointing and too brief insofar as this may be one of the peak events of #PresidentTweety's short reign of error. Imminent #PresidentReligiousNutjob can't possibly be worse.
No, I didn't say that! I didn't mean it as a challenge!
I think the missing aspects of insight that most disappointed me were (1) lack of deep discussion of the coverups (not just of the Putin bromance, but the dirty tax returns, etc.), (2) consideration of how powerful the black-hat hackers have become (especially if there are Russian hackers who are holding swords of Damocles over Trump's head (as I believe to be true)), (3) the Donald's projection (as related to the missing joke about Comey's real incompetence in not yet arresting any of Trump's accomplices or their Russian handlers), and (4) the overall brevity of the discussion. (Though I visit Slashdot pretty often, I never saw this article on the front page.)
In accord with my perverse focus on solutions, I'm going to take the cheap shot at solving (4): The most active discussions should live longer. One approach would involve two feature lists, one time-based and the other activity based. A second approach might be to weigh time against activity so highly active articles would get decreasing amounts of rejuvenation, so they would still descend and fall off the page, but more slowly. A third idea...
Naw, too much effort wasted already. The problem that probably retains the highest priority is the lack of a viable financial model to support ANY improvements on Slashdot. Orphan code paradise. Whoops again. I meant orphan code hell.
Good comment and deserved the insightful mod, though I don't fully agree with your definitions. Also, I was once again disappointed by the lack of funny-moderated comments. Where have all the wits gone?
I'd prefer to approach it from the perspective of a counterexample. What if the google was cut into competing pieces. Each piece would start with a copy of the data and source code and an equal share of the physical resources. Would one of the pieces naturally grow to the point of destroying all others, or could they continue competing indefinitely? (Old example involves Microsoft. Imagine three baby Microsofts that each started with the source code.)
I'm not sure how it would work in the case of the google, but there is obviously a paradox here. Google is profiting by helping other companies compete against each other. It might work, but only if the google was a fair and impartial arbitrator. If you prefer, "not evil".
The paradox seems unavoidable because the google is a PLAYER, not just an neutral party. The google is trying to extract as much money as possible from the system. Rather than wanting each of us to get the best possible information about what we want to buy, google's thumb is on the scale. "Which companies will pay the highest percentage to the google?" becomes part of the equation and if you could see the secrets of PageRank I'm certain that you would find that code somewhere in there. Ties have to be broken, and ceteris paribus the google corporation obviously wants to break the ties in its OWN favor. (Of course it's even worse in cases where the google is actually selling one of the products or services. Anyone still think they can offer a competing map service against Google Maps?)
Solution? Use tax policy to INCREASE FREEDOM, not to make the rich richer. There should be a progressive corporate tax based on market share. As you eliminate your competitors, your taxes rise, and then you get a big tax bonus if you cut your company into competing pieces. SINCERELY competing pieces, not just such scams as dividing up the territory.
The extra tax revenue from these market share taxes should be tapped to support the government service of regulating the dominant company (especially in cases where the dominator really has a natural monopoly) and researching ways to break any natural monopolies (especially with new technologies that monopolists naturally want to resist).
Not sure what is supposed to be the point of this article. A celebration of human failure? A monument to how a small amount of greed can drive a YUGE scam-and-anti-scam industry? Okay, $200 million sounds like a lot of money to you or me, so maybe the greed seems justified, but that $20 billion on the other side is just plain insane.
Causes:
(1) SMTP ignores accounting
(2) "Live and let spam" is a bad business model
Solution:
Let's work together to break the spammers' business models. That means the email providers AND the victims of the spammers. Not just the obvious victims like the suckers who lose money or the corporations that suffer damage to their reputation or the customers of those corporations who are victimized through their (dying) trust in those corporations, but even the MILLIONS of little suckers who lose some time whenever the spammers can steal a bit of their attention.
Obviously filtering has failed. How about an iterative analytic approach where we, the victims, would help identify the problems and countermeasures of each spam message. Also would allow for prioritization of the proper countermeasures along with better targeting.
Trivial example for a phishing scam spam. Even the google is not smart enough to know all my bank accounts (at least I hope so), but I would be able to say "Whoa. That's a GREAT looking phishing scam. Almost makes me sad that I've never had an account at that bank." Working together to share that kind of information would allow Gmail to stomp on it more quickly.
Yeah, I know no one is listening and Slashdot is pointless, but I'll still close with the joke: "Lots more details available upon polite request." I know that because of prior reactions and replies, but before you waste your keystrokes let me say:
(1) I'm quite willing to answer questions, including for clarifications where I'm too terse.
(2) If you want to defend spammers, then I think you are (a) insane, (b) a spammer, or (c) worse.
In some regards I'd argue that one deserved an insightful mod. The comment that actually had one (at this time) didn't deserve it, and no "funny" comments at all. Sad. (#PresidentTweety contamination is bigly sad.)
Consider the Fermi Paradox. Obvious resolution is that they're out there, but not talking to us because we're still amusing enough to bet quatloos on. What are they betting on?
Whether we create our AI successors before we exterminate ourselves. Right now the odds are falling fast. (#PresidentTweety again.)
Yeah, I'm speculating, but natural evolution is a kind of random process and follows many paths. There is some convergence, but it's still interesting to watch the various paths. The AIs are NOT coming from random processes and blind watchmakers, but will probably converge on the laws of physics without much of interest to watch. When our AI descendants get to that point, they'll get (and be able to understand) the greetings from the others.
I've been reading a lot of these books over the last few years and would even be glad to contribute a few comments, but... Too transient to justify the effort. How about redoing it as a poll? The current poll has been basically dead for a week or two, and this would seem to be a much more interesting topic.
You could get the top candidates at random, but I'd recommend using Amazon to get the bestselling examples for the top 4 or 5 slots and collect the others in the comments.
Seems to be a problem with the Cowboy Neal option. If it was about the creation of Slashdot, there's not much grounds for recommending it. Perhaps an option like "Cowboy Neal doesn't read books anymore"?
Too early? One "funny" modded comment that wasn't much. Several "insightful" mods, apparently on some sort of confusion of wit with insight. Brevity is only the soul of wit, sorry.
Actually, I sort of think that the (increasingly evil) google has a good idea there, even if it's intuitively obvious to the most casual observer. Reputation is ultimately a human thing, and it is ultimately based on a network of trust. Three obvious problems:
(1) Abuse of anonymity breaks the foundation of the trust network.
(2) The google is biased by the love of money and wants "extra" trust to sell more ads.
(3) TMI
Improved moderation could make Slashdot a model of possible solutions, but there's no funding model to drive change here. Would you actually pay REAL money for more reliable information? Especially when there's an effectively infinite supply of "information" just a few short clicks away?
Since it will never happen on Slashdot, does anyone know of a discussion website where the network reputation of each source is displayed next to the avatar? Various ways to do it, but it would be easiest for me to interpret a multi-dimensional radar diagram based on reactions to the work published by that source. (Details available upon polite request, as the sad joke goes.)
Simple enough. If something is working well enough for my purposes, then I'll tend to resist change. Actually, going beyond that, if it's working perfectly, then any change is going to make it worse. Doesn't matter that nothing is perfect if I think it is, or perhaps if I have adapted my purposes to fit with what the software is perfect for. (Or perhaps the real problem is that "perfect" is mostly a matter of opinion and the delusion is that there is a better solution for everyone.)
Solution: Don't fix it unless you can convince enough people to pay for the fix. In project form, describe EXACTLY what is going to be done and what success will look like.
Yeah, it's the old charity share brokerage idea again. Can you imagine a funding system so powerful that it could fix Slashdot? Me neither.
I think you deserve a mod point for some sort of first post or best answer, but I never get mod points, so forget about it.
Having said that, I'm not sure why this one came to my mind as the best SF movie. I don't like either version of the book that much, but the movie was spectacular and it was rather far ahead of its time, too. The computer graphics have reached the point where recent movies are just computer artifacts.
Actually, what I find far more interesting is that there are essentially no trolls or mentions of politicians. It is almost as if the old Slashdot is back. Alas the experience is no doubt fleeting :-(
Are you a troll? If not, and having nothing to say, then perhaps you should say nothing?
Oh wait. I forgot this is today's Slashdot. It's approaching 99.44% pure nothing.
That was the only comment to be modded informative and no comments moderated as insightful. Hmm... Seems to say something about the state of today's Slashdot, doesn't it.
Hmm... Looking more deeply, I see it was a split mod. If I ever got a mod point, I'd have voted on the "interesting" side for such a comment. However if that had happened, then this entire large discussion would be without a single comment showing an informative mod.
The first one I owned was a Kaypro (which I bought instead of an Osborne (which is why I'm replying here)), but I'd been using them for many years by that time. One of "my" very first machines could have been a kind of "home computer" if I could have afforded the extremely expensive terminal required... I think it was an HP 2000E. Having a terminal wouldn't have solved the problems with paper and the phone line, however. Also, storing programs on paper tape was a beatch.
Trying to remember if the Kay of Kaypro had any relationship to the famous Kay person, but also regarding most of this as historical trivia.
Speaking of the trivial, not at all surprised to see the high activity provoked by this topic, and also not surprised to be disappointed by the results of all that activity. As usual, most disappointed by the lack of funny comments, but I hoped to find some interesting-moderated comments that actually were. The topic seemed juicy for both dimensions. Didn't even look for insightful mods, but I guess that's worth a scan now...
Probably doesn't matter if they "don't have to vote for him" because his district is probably gerrymandered like so many of them are. Voters can't pick their so-called Representatives when the district boundaries have already picked the "right" voters.
Only solution I've been able to come up with would be "guest voting" for your representative. If you feel like your vote is pointless in your own district (as for example after it's been gerrymandered 150 miles like mine), then you can pick one of the neighboring districts and vote for a representative in that district. The more they gerrymander the districts, the more they are liable to get screwed up by guest voters. Another interesting wrinkle is that third-party voters could concentrate on one district and get some Congressional so-called representation. Of course, it would never happen. Pretty certain it would require a Constitutional amendment, and even if they got the amendment, the bastards would just come up with some new cheating game.
So now I guess this is just another meta-comment on the increasingly sad state of Slashdot? I was really disappointed by the lack of jokes on the rich target, but saddened by the lack of mention of climate or famine. Also not a single comment moderated "insightful", but maybe that's just what passes for truth in advertising these days?
On the official topic, I was actually ahead of the story when I saw it on TV, but I didn't realize what the full story was until later on. In one sense it is kind of funny that this is the leading edge of climate-change-induced famine as manifested by potato-chip panic in an advanced society. For all the other senses, it won't be funny when the famines become more severe even in those so-called advanced societies that have mostly brought it upon themselves. Harvesting the seeds of the climate change they planted, as the religious folk might like to say.
So let's change the topic again with the best joke I've heard this week, as mutated for the topic at hand:
Pepsi: Watch this ad! No, wait. Don't watch that ad!
United: Ha! You call that a PR disaster?
Spicer: Hold my beer (and potato chips).
(#PresidentTweety: Great job, Spicy! That's the way to change the subject! Even better and cheaper than missiles and daisy cutters!)
The never-ending abrasion of the spirit of trolldom is apparently making my skin too thin and I initially overreacted against your comment when I should have thanked you for reminding me of Facebook. At the time I was composing the comment, I was actually thinking there was another humongous and recent company to mention, but I just couldn't recall Facebook and actually used Exxon as a substitute.
However I'm also feeling (perhaps again due to the abrasion?) that I should defend the inclusion of "retro" Exxon on two grounds: (1) There are various forms of cancer, and they are all fatal to their host, and Exxon is just an older form (that was partly "treated" by the breakup surgery on Standard Oil), and (2) Exxon was the first one I recognized (and I've been boycotting all things Exxon in the 30+ years since then). Or maybe I'm just straining the metaphor too hard?
Maybe I'm also unsure how evil Facebook is and how worthy it is of inclusion on the list of EVIL cancers? (Questioning my own thinking?) There is a real question about when the EVIL inflection point is reached. I'm pretty well convinced that any sufficiently large company will be forced by the rules of the crooked game in America to become an evil cancer, but has Facebook passed that point? Based on market cap, it would seem almost certain, but I regard stock price as fantasy, so the real value of Facebook remains unclear and it is possible that the company is much smaller than it seems, in which case the morality of the controlling people (mostly Zuckerberg in Facebook's case) is still relevant. What would happen if Zuckerberg actually erased all of our personal data (and destroyed Facebook)? (If he could, eh?)
Good comment and deserves the "insightful" mod. My thoughts are similar, though I'd appeal to first principles:
The original mission statement was overwhelming, but the original scanning project fit with the idea of all knowledge for everyone. The shite hit the fan when they tried to squeeze PROFITS out of it and their lust for profits conflicted with the vested interests and fantasy profits of the publishers. (Or maybe it wasn't so much the fantasy profits associated with the orphan works as the actual competition from public domain books against the fresh books, many of which are basically garbage that deserves to be crushed in the market.)
Anyway, back to the google's mission statement. They were overwhelmed by too much information and had to prioritize things. The profit motive drove them to focus on the most important information of all, the information in the ads that they get paid for. Making all the world's information available simply mutated into making the ads available and the metric of utility was reduced to the profits of the corporations that are paying the google corporation. Any benefit to actual human beings has become rather incidental.
Remember that old slogan about evil? That's mutated, too. The current slogan of the google is "All your attention are belong to us", but that's how most of the so-called successful corporate cancers feel these days. We're forced to pick on the basis of being manipulated (per my sig) or considering which flavor of cancer seems relatively less evil today.
Just a few examples, but beyond the google I'm especially aware of Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Exxon. Feel free to add your favorite corporate cancer here. (In particular I want to identify the the cancer playing games with my mouse. I thought the Comet cursor was dead and buried... Or maybe it's the NSA or the Russians?)
Yours [dskoll's] was one of the "insightful" moderated comments, even one of the more insightful ones, but it seems for rather small values of insight. A few mentions of "progressive taxation", but none moderated up. Just my delusion that Slashdot used to be much deeper in days of yore? Also funnier, and not one "funny" mod on this humor-rich target.
There are various principles for personal taxation. I favor progressive taxation that increases the tax burden on people who can afford it, mostly because they are getting most of the benefits from the civilization that the taxes pay for, but also because poor people are human, too, and their suffering should be reduced when possible.
It is obvious that the current principles of personal taxation in America are working to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. My interpretation of Ryan's proposed "tax reforms" is that the so-called Republicans have realized they can't squeeze any more blood out of the poor people, so they are going to squeeze more out of the people who aren't poor. Yet. Unfortunately, this will NOT solve the fake problem of the super-rich people. There is NO amount of money that would "solve" such greed.
Corporate taxation should also be considered in the broader topic of taxation. Obviously the current American tax system supports corporate cancerism with many industries collapsing to one or two companies. Capitalism requires meaningful competition (per my sig), but cancer worship is NOT capitalism.
I would like to propose a new principle of corporate taxation to increase human freedom. Progressive corporate taxation based on market share. Once a company's market share gets too high and starts reducing the customers' freedom, then its tax rates start rising. Don't think of it as a penalty for success. Rather the winners are being rewarded by being encouraged to reproduce and COMPETE with more choices. Going farther, I think there should be special tax incentives when a giant company divides itself into directly competing companies.
Rather than protecting a monopolist's profits by fighting against innovation and dangerous changes, the company's would be motivated to keep right on competing and innovating. In cases where there really is a natural monopoly, the extra taxes should mostly be invested in (1) carefully regulating the monoplist and (2) researching (and even investing in) ways to break the monopoly.
Lots more details available upon polite request, as the old joke goes.
Typo there:
s/S-100's had/S-100's OS had/
Hmm... I guess I was hoping to see more "sea stories" like your [fwarren's] reply. More evidence that the old timers have left the Slashdot [building]?
Maybe that's related to the generally non-constructive attitude of today's Slashdot? I'm too focused on SOLUTIONS for the problems, but today's residual Slashdotters just want to grouse and vent spleen? (However I still think there are some paid trolls practicing or even trying to perfect their craft here.)
Anyway, I did remember a few more details of my own sea story. I was actually porting a 8-bit CP/M program from the S-100 box to a Kaypro. The underlying problem was that the S-100's had apparently been patched to prevent a certain kind of polling, but the Kaypro would get paralyzed by the busy waiting. So I wound up tracing into the code to find where the system call was and replaced it with the other call that wouldn't loop while polling.
Oh well. The topic has died by now, but I'll take one more look for "funny" comments...
Okay, now I understand your focus, but it was a minor point to me. I regard selling to the makers rather than the actual users to be one of the two major keys to Microsoft's success. The other one was ducking all liability in the EULA. Neither was original, but Microsoft perfected them.
From that perspective, the obvious response would be for Ubuntu to have gone after makers. My suggestion regarding small donors would be unlikely to help there, though I do think that a superior and real-user-driven OS would have some advantages to offer to the makers. Going after the makers needs major marketing with really big donors behind it. Perhaps Mark Shuttleworth should have focused there when he had the chance? However, I admit that I'm not optimistic given how little success the google had with their Chromebooks... (Do they still exist?)
Well, a barely insightful comment there, but seriously disappointed by the lack of "funny" comments on this target-rich topic. Or is my memory fooling me about how much fun and laughter we had back then?
However, the one that was missing from the article and so far not here in the Slashdot comments is something I would call "depth of control". In the days before magic black boxes we could actually understand how our computers worked from top to bottom. One example I remember involved debugging an application program. Can't even remember if it was 8 or 16 bits (though it was running on an S-100 system that had two CPUs and could actually run both), but I remember my debugging actually went into the OS and I wound up "fixing" it by replacing one OS call in the application executable with a closely related call. I think the rise of the black boxes began with the Mac but didn't triumph until Microsoft went mousing along ca Windows 95 or 2000.
Might be I've lost my marbles or intestinal fortitude, but I wouldn't even try it with any of the machines I'm using these days. Not even the tiny harmless-looking little smartphones.
Black boxes to the right of them,
Black boxes to the left of them,
Black boxes in front of them...
Apologies to Lord Tennyson.
Wow, I'm dazzled by your mind reading capabilities. Not to be compared with your screen reading skills. Perhaps you should reread what I actually wrote and clarify how your response is related to my actual words rather than what you think you read directly out of my mind? It's not that I mind going there (though at this point I'd mostly have to guess where you think you're going), but mostly a lack of justification.
Right now I mostly regard your reply as an example of having nothing to say, but insisting on saying it anyway. Then again, my reply is too close for comfort. The proximal problem is that by the time I return again, the entire topic will probably have expired...
Summarizing today's news story, wealthy and somewhat benevolent Mark Shuttlesworth doesn't appreciate some of the criticism his projects have received, notwithstanding his mixed generosity. I say mixed because part of the plan was to make money, too (though I think he's donated way more money than he's earned on this Ubuntu thing). His real unhappiness is probably that he feels his generosity is insufficiently appreciated.
I actually agree with Mr Shuttlesworth that much of the criticism was unjustified, but I have two responses: (1) Some of the criticism was merited and (2) What else could they contribute?
Response (1) is about the biggest problem with the big donor model of charity (even if Ubuntu has some non-charitable aspects). Sometimes the big donor makes a mistake. In general the big donors don't just throw in the big money and go away. You can say it's a matter of trust or accountability or whatever, but they stay involved. In the specific case of Ubuntu, the development priorities have sometimes gone a bit astray. Obviously the shell kerfuffles are examples, but the low priority on Japanese language support has actually been the main recommendation barrier in my case. I'd like to encourage people to adopt Ubuntu, but (after using the OS for many years (probably since Dapper Drake in 2006)) I still can't.
Response (2) is really about frustration. At least I don't see what other alternative most of the potential users of Ubuntu have. Some of the top programmers presumably have Mr Shuttlesworth's ear and can influence things, but most of us are on the outside. Way on the outside. I actually think that many of the problems with Ubuntu are ultimately due to programmer-driven decisions. Good programmers want to do fancy things. They want to push the envelope and develop fancy features for fancy hardware. Or maybe it's just my problem that I have other things to do with my time or that I'm too cheap to buy new computers fast enough?
I need to disclaim that I feel some frustration and disappointment with Ubuntu, too. I had hopes that it would become a dominant desktop OS, but it never did. It's not like there weren't major opportunities. For example that Vista fiasco. It's just that Ubuntu never filled any of the big vacuums. However, I mostly didn't care that much, so I never even investigated the details. I just observed the results.
(By the way, I do think there is at least one possible solution. Are you brave enough to ask me about the Charity Share Brokerage for small donors? Hint: Kickstarter and Indiegogo aren't there yet, but maybe that idea could be fixed...)
Anyway, things sometimes turn out for the better, at least when the term is long enough. Turns out the desktop OS doesn't matter that much anymore. Maybe Linux won out after all, but via the backdoor leading to Android smartphones? Still a bit of the big donor problem, but at least the google seems more competent than evil. For now. I recommend Dogfight on the smartphone war, but maybe you have a good book to recommend? (Yeah, I'm sure there are some interesting blogs and webpages, too, but mostly I find them as half-baked as this selfsame noddie.)
Z^3
Since some projects produce huge profits and others don't, the people involved with the the lucky projects get much more money.
There was a similar management craze in the late 90s: Small Business Units. The idea was to allocate resources (IT, facilities, etc.) according to how much each business unit brought in.
But here's the problem with profit-driven compensation: they give an incentive to take risk, not to manage risk. That's how lots of people lost their pension money and how Uber is burning billions every quarter. It's more gambling than pursuit of a solid business model.
Well I can easily give you the official google line on that part: Don't punish failure. They want their employees to tackle tough and ambitious projects.
Of course the REAL-world problem is that most truly challenging projects fail. That's not a big problem for a small startup that just declares bankruptcy, but it's a huge problem for a giant corporation with shareholders and all that jazz. That's why (1) most innovation is done by small companies (that define success by being acquired by giant companies) and (2) the google restructured itself into this Alphabet thing to isolate the risks.
Separate problem, but reviewing the moderation of this discussion, we might not want to go there. Oh, wait. Why would I care what the moderators think? (Especially since it's so obvious they mostly aren't thinking, but just venting their own inability to contribute.) I tend to think all these things are interrelated. Obviously it's significant if men are also more willing to take the big risks on "tough and ambitious projects" where the big gambles can produce the giant profits (once in a while). Should be added to my original list?