Trying to judge from this summary if I was involved... There was a quasi-fake account created using my name and email address. One so-called support person claimed it was created with a bug in the Android reader, but I'm not convinced and the "discussion" went on for some months without solving the problem in the obvious way. (Nuke the imposter and block the email address.) I gave up for a long time, but after a year tried again and escalated all the way up...
Suddenly the problem seems to have gone away, but Amazon got all quiet about it. There were three or four "phase transitions" over the 15 months the problem went on, but only two of them seemed to have clear angles for making money--but this article seems to have suggested a couple of angles that I hadn't considered. My latest theory was that it might be something like the Wells Fargo scam, creating fake accounts to boost some kind of internal accounting numbers. Based on dormant accounts?
Just for background, I had used Amazon around the year 2000. I had accounts on Amazon.com and one of the international Amazons, but after they abused my personal information, I stopped doing business with them. (Still reading lots of books, but NO plans to use Amazon EVER again.) However, at least one of the accounts still exists, and it is possible that some of the information from that account was used for the fake account--but Amazon refused to provide any details to prove (or disprove) it.
I'm not sure I believe them, but I've read claims that there will be many billions of IoT devices. Sometimes mitigation is not enough.
However, in practice I'd guess that a sophisticated attacker would individually test each of the zombies (obviously in an automated manner) to determine their network connectivity. That would probably detect any throttling, too, and allow the attacker to optimize the attacks themselves.
Just thought of another problem with your proposed solution: What if some IoT devices legitimately need larger amounts of bandwidth to accomplish whatever purpose justified the connectivity in the first place?
Trying to think of a construction alternative suggestion, but it's obviously a hard problem. In general, I think we need to go after their business models, and that will work if they are in it for the money and the money dries up. However, these days there are increasing numbers of bad actors working at the state level, and their funding is hard to touch from the outside... That means you need to target some other link in the chain. Tax the manufacturers in proportion to the vulnerability of the devices they make?
Maybe you could clarify your position with the same questions the other fellow ignored. What amount of profit would you regard as obscene? Also, do you understand natural monopoly?
However, mostly I feel like just saying "Drop me a line when you figure out this whole freedom thing." My basic position is that reduced freedom is an indicator of evil at work. If I had that freedom, I might well be satisfied with a superior PDA.
I'm not sure what your point is, but I was definitely NOT saying that there was something wrong with their strategy for making profits. My point would be more along the lines that large American companies are forced to become evil in the pursuit of increasing profits (and no amount of profit is ever a "solution" to their "problem of needing larger profits), which leaves us in the position of always choosing among evils, greater or lesser.
You focused on the google, but if you think "Don't be evil" is still relevant, then I think you aren't paying attention. I can't prove it, but I'm quite sure their de facto motto is along the lines of "All your attention are belong to us" (even though that makes it somewhat difficult to explain the google's ongoing support of attention-stealing (and reputation-abusing) spammers).
Do we need to rehash the reasons why? You might not have any sympathy for the suckers, or you might not care about attacks on corporate reputations and customers. You might not have any children for the spammers to target, but in that case I think I should extend my sympathies. You don't care about false positives that lose your actual email and you think your time spent with false negatives is too small to matter (and don't care about the multiplication of that time by the millions). You're still getting victimized by the general inefficiency the spammers impose on everyone. Or perhaps worst of all, the basic spammers create noise that helps mask the serious threats of the serious scammers, such as spear-phishermen and identity thieves.
It seems like all of the big email providers have adopted the motto of "Live and Let Spam." Obviously didn't work for Yahoo, did it? Whatever Microsoft paid for the Hotmail brand must have been written off for similar reasons. The google is the saddest case of all, but perhaps that was just the generalized result of dropping "Don't be evil" in favor of "All your attention are belong to us." Anyway, at this point I monitor all three and Gmail clearly has the worst filters, both for false positives and false negatives and for feebleness of their countermeasures. Proof? In the preferences of the spammers themselves, blessing Gmail with the most spam of all.
Doesn't have to be that way. The rational spammers do have economic models that could be attacked. Dropboxes can be nuked and external email services that provide the dropboxes can be pressured. Link shorteners can be subverted against the spammers. Lots of other countermeasures are possible, but the google don't care (and Yahoo can't afford to care and who cares about Outlook).
*sigh* Just venting again, but I really wish someone provided a really good email system, one with tools that would let me help fight the spammers. Why not convert some of the universal hatred of spammers into positive sentiments towards an email system that scares the spammers?
Okay if that's how you feel. At what point would you regard the profits as harmful or even obscene?
I hope I'm not confusing you, but I'm also going to ask if you understand what a monopoly profit is? Also, do you understand the concept of a natural monopoly?
Pretty sure this is stretching you much too far, but if you understand the problems, do you have anything like a remotely constructive solution?
Well, I think you are projecting quite a bit there, but I certainly would admit to not being an expert in anything, though most of my career was spent supporting them.
However, before I waste any time on a probable troll, why don't you present your "link budget equations". At this point you have to convince me you have any credibility.
With regards to your first question about the $31 billion in revenue and the $22 billion in profits: The marginal profits seem a bit excessive. For example, they could put some of those profits into improving the security model.
Regarding your second question, you are touching the heart of the matter, but you don't seem to see the obvious. There are good business models that are aligned with the best interests of all of the people who are involved. There are also bad business models that increase the EVIL, and the google is going down the rathole. I think the good business models are oriented around making the world better and solving problems, but the google's business model is just more profit, and this is not a real problem with any possible solution. No matter how large the profit, there is a bigger number available. You can't cure greed with any amount of cash or booze.
One concrete example that addresses both of these topics would be to expose the developers' business models in Google Play. The developers should have the option to tell us how they plan to make money, and the google should be able to comment on the business model. This would allow us, the people who are interested in downloading apps, to have a better idea of the legitimacy of the apps. In most cases the developers should be able to pick from standard business models like "advertising" or "demo version of full feature app" and the google would just say something like "We confirm substantial advertising revenue" or "We confirm many downloads of the full app." (Out of time, but details on request.)
Not sure how to take your comment, but if I take it on it's face value, then the obvious question is "How can they keep it a secret? Or even maintain partial secrecy?"
It's like imagining there are hordes of voters who are working in secret to vote twice so they can affect elections. Someone would be sure to leak it. You can't have a secret conspiracy with too many people involved or it has to unravel when someone leaks the secret.
In the case of the 50-cent Party, the lack of secrecy doesn't matter. They want to increase the paranoia. Is he working for the 50-cent Party? Is he a sincere believer in the propaganda? Or is he maybe working on a portfolio to get hired by the 50-cent Party? Whichever the case, if you are a sincere dissident who posted something in public, then having noticed and noted your disagreeing comment, he's likely to pass your name up the chain.
It's Trump's emphasis on "defeat them quickly" that led me to the same conclusion. I don't think a few nuclear bombs will do that much damage, though they would still be war crimes. The real risk is that Trump bungles his "limited" nuclear attack and somehow sucks Pakistan or Israel into the mess... Given the Donald's record of bungling everything he touches, I wouldn't bet on a good outcome. There are some Trump supporters who would gladly welcome a permanent state of war with 1.6 billion Muslims.
On the Hillary thing, I don't even like her, but I don't see how to get to "dystopia" if she wins. Seems most likely that she'll pretty much stay the course, and we certainly haven't gotten to dystopia yet. I'd prefer her to change the course in a more positive direction, but I don't expect her to do it unless we give her a progressive Congress and they put the pressure on her. There used to be a time when that could have included some progressive Republicans, but they've been exterminated from today's so-called Republican Party.
On my Subject: question, I really have no idea. Too many years since I got one.
I think I'd give you a mod point for that, if I ever got one. However, it's rather shallow for "insightful" and there is no "obvious" mod...
My related question would be: How many of the Slashdot trolls are working for Palmer Luckey?
It's hard to believe anyone could be so sincerely ignorant or profoundly stupid, but easy to believe such people can't earn any money except by pretending to be insane. It's like the 50-cent Party run by the Chinese communists to stifle dissent on the Internet, but I bet Palmer pays better. He probably includes incentive bonuses for replies to the the trollage.
It's been quite obvious for a long time that much of the hatred of Hillary is insane or worse. I don't like her, but I basically dislike all lawyers. Looking at the evidence, there's nothing to hate there. Heck, I don't even hate the big dick Cheney, and I believe he has LOTS of blood on his hands, far beyond the most insane accusations against Hillary.
Ought to be a song about the artificial scarcity of Slashdot mod points. It's not like the moderation has as much value as an extremely small hill of beans.
Ditto on the mod points, and now I realize this comment already harvested the low hanging fruit of my comment... Sorry, I forgot what a trepan was.
Point of order on the (broken as usual) moderation system: The first mod point doesn't count properly? It takes two "funny" modes before the comment becomes "funny"?
Kind of boggles my mind that the google thinks they made $22 billion profit on $31 billion revenue from Android. Talk about magic money? Some kind of projection of the effects of Android's success on their stock prices? Already we're dealing with fantasy here.
However, my two primary reactions were sadness and amusement.
The sadness is at the loss of the google's innocence. I used to think they were sincere about the "Don't be evil" thing, but now they are just another giant EVIL company and the corporate motto has become "All your attention are belong to us." I can't decide whether I was a gullible fool or if the transition was just inevitable under the rules of the American business game as encoded into law by the most cheaply bribed politicians.
The amusement is from watching them battling it out. I think Apple is probably the least evil of the three companies, but I can't believe any of them are innocent babes in the woods. It would suit me fine if they all died in the arena of their stupendous greed, though I guess Oracle is the greediest and most evil, which probably means Oracle will win. (Omens of Trump?)
Do you think self-discrediting would help? It would involve a check before a reply, and if a reply will not be seen by the ostensible recipient, then the person (possibly a troll) would get a warning, and if the person insisted on replying anyway, then it would get marked with a prefix like: "Insincere post never seen by ostensible recipient."
I think that should be combine with easier ways to avoid seeing the time-wasting trollage. For example, I want a maturity filter to render young identities invisible. I wish I could see the exact stats for Slashdot, but I think that most sock puppets only live a few days, so a 3-month setting should keep most of them out of my sight.
(Then again, I think the entire moderation system should be simplified and made symmetric with karma.)
Your reading is improving, but perhaps I was not clear enough in my writing. Often I am not sufficiently sensitive to readers' context...
I was referring to accountability for war crimes. Actually, I regard it as kind of sad how many war criminals are never held to any account, but in most cases American actions are not even assessed on that scale. There is a reason justice is supposed to be blind. If it makes you feel any better, I think the evidence indicates that the actual number of victims of war crimes is decreasing, but they get more publicity these years. Then again, the batting average on convicting perpetrators seems about as low as ever.
When I was in the service I was trained in using weapons that could be used to commit war crimes. Willy Peter is not legal against personnel, but I think we still use it and there is no way to be sure where it lands. I regard myself as fortunate to have gotten my honorable before anything hit the fan, so to speak.
As regards Hillary, I don't much like her, but I cannot understand the extreme and irrational hatred. Objectively, her behavior is within what passes for the normal bounds of behavior for American politicians these days. In fact, given the amount of intense partisan scrutiny she has been subject to for so many decades, I'm convinced she has stayed in safer legal territory than most lawyers. The so-called Republicans certainly would have burned her by now if they could have found the tiniest bit of solid fuel. If she had gotten anywhere near the legal edge, they would have figured out some way to push her over. I don't even think her mistakes are worse than average, but at least she admits to some of them, which is the first step to learning from your mistakes.
I dislike Trump more, but just for being a slimy liar and con artist. Plenty of those running around these days, though the high-class scammers work in big banks like Wells Fargo. The Donald just seems like a low-class scammer inflated by a large infusion of his father"s cash. I do think he's potentially extremely dangerous, largely because I think he's too simpleminded for the real-world problems the president has to deal with. For example, I think his plan to defeat Daesh quickly must involve nuclear weapons, but it is quite likely he will bungle the job and drag Pakistan or Israel into the mess... Also, he is much too comfortable with bankruptcies to be trusted with the US Treasury.
I think you are talking about non-directional radio and TV broadcasts, but those signals will become unintelligible within a few light years. They would only lead to our detection by a civilization that had seeded the galaxy with detectors, and such a civilization would surely find it easier and more interesting to simply monitor the life-bearing planets more directly and close up.
My analysis assumes a large electromagnetic beacon (probably radio or laser) deliberately focused across the sky in a search pattern and with something on the order of a million watt power plant driving it. That kind of beacon would be detectable with roughly our level of technology and would permeate the entire Milky Way within 100,000 years.
No, that is not what I wrote. I'm going to give you a chance to read what I actually wrote and apologize. Or you might ask questions about any fancy words that you could not understand.
If you don't, then I'm going to simply dismiss you as another mindless troll. You might be even worse than that. For example, a troll of sufficient mindlessness but with legal capacity to vote for Trump against the survival of your own descendents.
Never liked her much, but I really can't understand the strong negative feelings unless you've been drinking a lot of Palmer's poisonous cool-aid. Exactly what "piece of shit" things has she done? Unless you're saying that all of the professional politicians are similar turds, in which case I basically agree, but that isn't very helpful or constructive and doesn't lead directly to any solution but Shakespeare's.
Hillary is a lawyer, and I don't like much like 'em. Actually, her primary personal identity is probably "corporate lawyer", and I like them even less. I think she has a number of personal identities that I like much better, but on her list "lawyer" is probably the top. In terms of stopping the Donald, the frightening aspect is that "politician" or even "skilled campaigner" don't seem to be in her top 10, even though I'm convinced Bill's #1 is "politician", and it's probably one of Obama's top 3. I would much prefer someone who has "philosopher" or even "statesman" near the top, but that's not how American politics works these years.
It's possible that Hillary will do some great stuff if she's elected, and pretty unlikely she will do anything terrible. In Trump's case, we really have no idea, but clearly some of his ideas are really terrible, and there is strong evidence he is even more easily manipulated than Dubya was. I'm increasingly convinced that the Donald's secret plan for quickly defeating Daesh involves nuclear weapons. Just a few little ones. "Un-liberally", I don't think a highly limited nuclear strike is such a terrible thing in the big picture, though it will certainly qualify as a war crime, but when have American war crimes ever mattered much to the USA? I think the largest risk is actually global warming, and on that topic Trump doesn't know enough to give "a piece of shit".
I actually started my analysis of the Fermi Paradox from the other side. What if some civilization wanted to be noticed? Turns out to be a relatively minor problem, which strongly indicates that no one wants to be noticed. Alternatively, they tried it and got shut up quickly. Bottom line is that no one is trying right now (where now includes the 100,000 years it would take to span our galaxy--still an extremely small value of "now" on the galactic scale).
My position has evolved over the years, but I'm basically standing on the position that the synthetic intelligences (ASIs) that replace the naturally evolved intelligences like us are amused. They are watching and probably gambling quatloos on whether we create ASI successors before exterminating ourselves. Longer version at:
Do you think that ANY amount of profit would satisfy Amazon's unsolvable and fake problem. Greed is NOT a real problem and NO amount of money would satisfy them.
Thought experiment for clarification: Imagine you did 100% of your shopping via Amazon. Would Bezos be happy? No. To increase Amazon's profits of course he will try to redirect your shopping to the merchandise that gives him higher percentages. Once 100% of your money is going there, he'll just have to boost the prices some more.
Hey, what else can Amazon do? The greed is NEVER satiated.
My own reason for stopping my Amazon shopping (more than 10 years ago) was the abuse of my personal information.
Quite recently and for over a year, it appeared that I had become an Amazon customer again. Considering how long it took for them to respond to the imposter, my current theory is that Amazon has a Wells Fargo problem with fake accounts. My latest conspiracy theory is that some of their people are using the information of dormant customers to create fake business. Presumably some kind of commission or incentive system? However the only thing I am certain about is that Amazon suddenly got real quiet about it.
Super tinfoil hat time? If Amazon notices this post (and similar ones I've made), they will suddenly get back to me with a cock-and-bull story about what REALLY happened. They expect me to respond "Riiiiight."
Reflecting more upon that first reaction (and still disappointed with Slashdot these days), I think the regular surge pricing should apply because of the increased demand for Uber services, but there should be an evacuation area surcharge above that. However, it should actually depend on the kind of risk involved, and maybe you just need to balance it against what the Uber drivers are willing to face...
However, I think that part of the Evacuation Mode money should go to special insurance for losses related to trying to help out in the disaster. It's not really a pure-hearted Good Samaritan thing, because the drivers are doing it for the money. Actually, if you provide too much insurance coverage you might nudge people into taking insane risks, but there are real damages from such disasters.
Maybe in this particular case some of the extra money that Uber got from surge pricing should be donated to helping the victims? Not sure how to make that a policy thing.
(If this were not a dead topic, I'd go back through the comments to see if any ideas along those lines were suggested, but I don't remember anything, and I've already commented on what I perceive as the decline in quality of these discussions on Slashdot.)
Slashdot Mirror
Trying to judge from this summary if I was involved... There was a quasi-fake account created using my name and email address. One so-called support person claimed it was created with a bug in the Android reader, but I'm not convinced and the "discussion" went on for some months without solving the problem in the obvious way. (Nuke the imposter and block the email address.) I gave up for a long time, but after a year tried again and escalated all the way up...
Suddenly the problem seems to have gone away, but Amazon got all quiet about it. There were three or four "phase transitions" over the 15 months the problem went on, but only two of them seemed to have clear angles for making money--but this article seems to have suggested a couple of angles that I hadn't considered. My latest theory was that it might be something like the Wells Fargo scam, creating fake accounts to boost some kind of internal accounting numbers. Based on dormant accounts?
Just for background, I had used Amazon around the year 2000. I had accounts on Amazon.com and one of the international Amazons, but after they abused my personal information, I stopped doing business with them. (Still reading lots of books, but NO plans to use Amazon EVER again.) However, at least one of the accounts still exists, and it is possible that some of the information from that account was used for the fake account--but Amazon refused to provide any details to prove (or disprove) it.
I'm not sure I believe them, but I've read claims that there will be many billions of IoT devices. Sometimes mitigation is not enough.
However, in practice I'd guess that a sophisticated attacker would individually test each of the zombies (obviously in an automated manner) to determine their network connectivity. That would probably detect any throttling, too, and allow the attacker to optimize the attacks themselves.
Just thought of another problem with your proposed solution: What if some IoT devices legitimately need larger amounts of bandwidth to accomplish whatever purpose justified the connectivity in the first place?
Trying to think of a construction alternative suggestion, but it's obviously a hard problem. In general, I think we need to go after their business models, and that will work if they are in it for the money and the money dries up. However, these days there are increasing numbers of bad actors working at the state level, and their funding is hard to touch from the outside... That means you need to target some other link in the chain. Tax the manufacturers in proportion to the vulnerability of the devices they make?
Maybe you could clarify your position with the same questions the other fellow ignored. What amount of profit would you regard as obscene? Also, do you understand natural monopoly?
However, mostly I feel like just saying "Drop me a line when you figure out this whole freedom thing." My basic position is that reduced freedom is an indicator of evil at work. If I had that freedom, I might well be satisfied with a superior PDA.
English is provably incomplete and ambiguous. Check Godel.
Then again, same is true of any sufficiently sophisticated computer language.
Surprised no mention in this branch, but that's today's Slashdot.
How to shoot yourself in the foot with WHICH:
Which foot shoot which bullet print which "ouch" signed ADA sigh "Hello foot"
"Why is your bandwidth limited?" asking Little Red Riding Hood
"The better to distribute the DDoS attacks, my dear" said the wolf in grandma's clothing.
You [wildstoo] seem to be missing the point of scalability.
I'm not sure what your point is, but I was definitely NOT saying that there was something wrong with their strategy for making profits. My point would be more along the lines that large American companies are forced to become evil in the pursuit of increasing profits (and no amount of profit is ever a "solution" to their "problem of needing larger profits), which leaves us in the position of always choosing among evils, greater or lesser.
You focused on the google, but if you think "Don't be evil" is still relevant, then I think you aren't paying attention. I can't prove it, but I'm quite sure their de facto motto is along the lines of "All your attention are belong to us" (even though that makes it somewhat difficult to explain the google's ongoing support of attention-stealing (and reputation-abusing) spammers).
Do we need to rehash the reasons why? You might not have any sympathy for the suckers, or you might not care about attacks on corporate reputations and customers. You might not have any children for the spammers to target, but in that case I think I should extend my sympathies. You don't care about false positives that lose your actual email and you think your time spent with false negatives is too small to matter (and don't care about the multiplication of that time by the millions). You're still getting victimized by the general inefficiency the spammers impose on everyone. Or perhaps worst of all, the basic spammers create noise that helps mask the serious threats of the serious scammers, such as spear-phishermen and identity thieves.
It seems like all of the big email providers have adopted the motto of "Live and Let Spam." Obviously didn't work for Yahoo, did it? Whatever Microsoft paid for the Hotmail brand must have been written off for similar reasons. The google is the saddest case of all, but perhaps that was just the generalized result of dropping "Don't be evil" in favor of "All your attention are belong to us." Anyway, at this point I monitor all three and Gmail clearly has the worst filters, both for false positives and false negatives and for feebleness of their countermeasures. Proof? In the preferences of the spammers themselves, blessing Gmail with the most spam of all.
Doesn't have to be that way. The rational spammers do have economic models that could be attacked. Dropboxes can be nuked and external email services that provide the dropboxes can be pressured. Link shorteners can be subverted against the spammers. Lots of other countermeasures are possible, but the google don't care (and Yahoo can't afford to care and who cares about Outlook).
*sigh* Just venting again, but I really wish someone provided a really good email system, one with tools that would let me help fight the spammers. Why not convert some of the universal hatred of spammers into positive sentiments towards an email system that scares the spammers?
Okay if that's how you feel. At what point would you regard the profits as harmful or even obscene?
I hope I'm not confusing you, but I'm also going to ask if you understand what a monopoly profit is? Also, do you understand the concept of a natural monopoly?
Pretty sure this is stretching you much too far, but if you understand the problems, do you have anything like a remotely constructive solution?
Well, I think you are projecting quite a bit there, but I certainly would admit to not being an expert in anything, though most of my career was spent supporting them.
However, before I waste any time on a probable troll, why don't you present your "link budget equations". At this point you have to convince me you have any credibility.
With regards to your first question about the $31 billion in revenue and the $22 billion in profits: The marginal profits seem a bit excessive. For example, they could put some of those profits into improving the security model.
Regarding your second question, you are touching the heart of the matter, but you don't seem to see the obvious. There are good business models that are aligned with the best interests of all of the people who are involved. There are also bad business models that increase the EVIL, and the google is going down the rathole. I think the good business models are oriented around making the world better and solving problems, but the google's business model is just more profit, and this is not a real problem with any possible solution. No matter how large the profit, there is a bigger number available. You can't cure greed with any amount of cash or booze.
One concrete example that addresses both of these topics would be to expose the developers' business models in Google Play. The developers should have the option to tell us how they plan to make money, and the google should be able to comment on the business model. This would allow us, the people who are interested in downloading apps, to have a better idea of the legitimacy of the apps. In most cases the developers should be able to pick from standard business models like "advertising" or "demo version of full feature app" and the google would just say something like "We confirm substantial advertising revenue" or "We confirm many downloads of the full app." (Out of time, but details on request.)
Not sure how to take your comment, but if I take it on it's face value, then the obvious question is "How can they keep it a secret? Or even maintain partial secrecy?"
It's like imagining there are hordes of voters who are working in secret to vote twice so they can affect elections. Someone would be sure to leak it. You can't have a secret conspiracy with too many people involved or it has to unravel when someone leaks the secret.
In the case of the 50-cent Party, the lack of secrecy doesn't matter. They want to increase the paranoia. Is he working for the 50-cent Party? Is he a sincere believer in the propaganda? Or is he maybe working on a portfolio to get hired by the 50-cent Party? Whichever the case, if you are a sincere dissident who posted something in public, then having noticed and noted your disagreeing comment, he's likely to pass your name up the chain.
It's Trump's emphasis on "defeat them quickly" that led me to the same conclusion. I don't think a few nuclear bombs will do that much damage, though they would still be war crimes. The real risk is that Trump bungles his "limited" nuclear attack and somehow sucks Pakistan or Israel into the mess... Given the Donald's record of bungling everything he touches, I wouldn't bet on a good outcome. There are some Trump supporters who would gladly welcome a permanent state of war with 1.6 billion Muslims.
On the Hillary thing, I don't even like her, but I don't see how to get to "dystopia" if she wins. Seems most likely that she'll pretty much stay the course, and we certainly haven't gotten to dystopia yet. I'd prefer her to change the course in a more positive direction, but I don't expect her to do it unless we give her a progressive Congress and they put the pressure on her. There used to be a time when that could have included some progressive Republicans, but they've been exterminated from today's so-called Republican Party.
On my Subject: question, I really have no idea. Too many years since I got one.
I think I'd give you a mod point for that, if I ever got one. However, it's rather shallow for "insightful" and there is no "obvious" mod...
My related question would be: How many of the Slashdot trolls are working for Palmer Luckey?
It's hard to believe anyone could be so sincerely ignorant or profoundly stupid, but easy to believe such people can't earn any money except by pretending to be insane. It's like the 50-cent Party run by the Chinese communists to stifle dissent on the Internet, but I bet Palmer pays better. He probably includes incentive bonuses for replies to the the trollage.
It's been quite obvious for a long time that much of the hatred of Hillary is insane or worse. I don't like her, but I basically dislike all lawyers. Looking at the evidence, there's nothing to hate there. Heck, I don't even hate the big dick Cheney, and I believe he has LOTS of blood on his hands, far beyond the most insane accusations against Hillary.
Ought to be a song about the artificial scarcity of Slashdot mod points. It's not like the moderation has as much value as an extremely small hill of beans.
Ditto on the mod points, and now I realize this comment already harvested the low hanging fruit of my comment... Sorry, I forgot what a trepan was.
Point of order on the (broken as usual) moderation system: The first mod point doesn't count properly? It takes two "funny" modes before the comment becomes "funny"?
You need a headphone jack like you need a hole in the head.
(Low hanging fruit, but no one picked it yet?)
Kind of boggles my mind that the google thinks they made $22 billion profit on $31 billion revenue from Android. Talk about magic money? Some kind of projection of the effects of Android's success on their stock prices? Already we're dealing with fantasy here.
However, my two primary reactions were sadness and amusement.
The sadness is at the loss of the google's innocence. I used to think they were sincere about the "Don't be evil" thing, but now they are just another giant EVIL company and the corporate motto has become "All your attention are belong to us." I can't decide whether I was a gullible fool or if the transition was just inevitable under the rules of the American business game as encoded into law by the most cheaply bribed politicians.
The amusement is from watching them battling it out. I think Apple is probably the least evil of the three companies, but I can't believe any of them are innocent babes in the woods. It would suit me fine if they all died in the arena of their stupendous greed, though I guess Oracle is the greediest and most evil, which probably means Oracle will win. (Omens of Trump?)
Do you think self-discrediting would help? It would involve a check before a reply, and if a reply will not be seen by the ostensible recipient, then the person (possibly a troll) would get a warning, and if the person insisted on replying anyway, then it would get marked with a prefix like: "Insincere post never seen by ostensible recipient."
I think that should be combine with easier ways to avoid seeing the time-wasting trollage. For example, I want a maturity filter to render young identities invisible. I wish I could see the exact stats for Slashdot, but I think that most sock puppets only live a few days, so a 3-month setting should keep most of them out of my sight.
(Then again, I think the entire moderation system should be simplified and made symmetric with karma.)
Your reading is improving, but perhaps I was not clear enough in my writing. Often I am not sufficiently sensitive to readers' context...
I was referring to accountability for war crimes. Actually, I regard it as kind of sad how many war criminals are never held to any account, but in most cases American actions are not even assessed on that scale. There is a reason justice is supposed to be blind. If it makes you feel any better, I think the evidence indicates that the actual number of victims of war crimes is decreasing, but they get more publicity these years. Then again, the batting average on convicting perpetrators seems about as low as ever.
When I was in the service I was trained in using weapons that could be used to commit war crimes. Willy Peter is not legal against personnel, but I think we still use it and there is no way to be sure where it lands. I regard myself as fortunate to have gotten my honorable before anything hit the fan, so to speak.
As regards Hillary, I don't much like her, but I cannot understand the extreme and irrational hatred. Objectively, her behavior is within what passes for the normal bounds of behavior for American politicians these days. In fact, given the amount of intense partisan scrutiny she has been subject to for so many decades, I'm convinced she has stayed in safer legal territory than most lawyers. The so-called Republicans certainly would have burned her by now if they could have found the tiniest bit of solid fuel. If she had gotten anywhere near the legal edge, they would have figured out some way to push her over. I don't even think her mistakes are worse than average, but at least she admits to some of them, which is the first step to learning from your mistakes.
I dislike Trump more, but just for being a slimy liar and con artist. Plenty of those running around these days, though the high-class scammers work in big banks like Wells Fargo. The Donald just seems like a low-class scammer inflated by a large infusion of his father"s cash. I do think he's potentially extremely dangerous, largely because I think he's too simpleminded for the real-world problems the president has to deal with. For example, I think his plan to defeat Daesh quickly must involve nuclear weapons, but it is quite likely he will bungle the job and drag Pakistan or Israel into the mess... Also, he is much too comfortable with bankruptcies to be trusted with the US Treasury.
I think you are talking about non-directional radio and TV broadcasts, but those signals will become unintelligible within a few light years. They would only lead to our detection by a civilization that had seeded the galaxy with detectors, and such a civilization would surely find it easier and more interesting to simply monitor the life-bearing planets more directly and close up.
My analysis assumes a large electromagnetic beacon (probably radio or laser) deliberately focused across the sky in a search pattern and with something on the order of a million watt power plant driving it. That kind of beacon would be detectable with roughly our level of technology and would permeate the entire Milky Way within 100,000 years.
And yet, we haven't detected any.
No, that is not what I wrote. I'm going to give you a chance to read what I actually wrote and apologize. Or you might ask questions about any fancy words that you could not understand.
If you don't, then I'm going to simply dismiss you as another mindless troll. You might be even worse than that. For example, a troll of sufficient mindlessness but with legal capacity to vote for Trump against the survival of your own descendents.
Never liked her much, but I really can't understand the strong negative feelings unless you've been drinking a lot of Palmer's poisonous cool-aid. Exactly what "piece of shit" things has she done? Unless you're saying that all of the professional politicians are similar turds, in which case I basically agree, but that isn't very helpful or constructive and doesn't lead directly to any solution but Shakespeare's.
Hillary is a lawyer, and I don't like much like 'em. Actually, her primary personal identity is probably "corporate lawyer", and I like them even less. I think she has a number of personal identities that I like much better, but on her list "lawyer" is probably the top. In terms of stopping the Donald, the frightening aspect is that "politician" or even "skilled campaigner" don't seem to be in her top 10, even though I'm convinced Bill's #1 is "politician", and it's probably one of Obama's top 3. I would much prefer someone who has "philosopher" or even "statesman" near the top, but that's not how American politics works these years.
It's possible that Hillary will do some great stuff if she's elected, and pretty unlikely she will do anything terrible. In Trump's case, we really have no idea, but clearly some of his ideas are really terrible, and there is strong evidence he is even more easily manipulated than Dubya was. I'm increasingly convinced that the Donald's secret plan for quickly defeating Daesh involves nuclear weapons. Just a few little ones. "Un-liberally", I don't think a highly limited nuclear strike is such a terrible thing in the big picture, though it will certainly qualify as a war crime, but when have American war crimes ever mattered much to the USA? I think the largest risk is actually global warming, and on that topic Trump doesn't know enough to give "a piece of shit".
I actually started my analysis of the Fermi Paradox from the other side. What if some civilization wanted to be noticed? Turns out to be a relatively minor problem, which strongly indicates that no one wants to be noticed. Alternatively, they tried it and got shut up quickly. Bottom line is that no one is trying right now (where now includes the 100,000 years it would take to span our galaxy--still an extremely small value of "now" on the galactic scale).
My position has evolved over the years, but I'm basically standing on the position that the synthetic intelligences (ASIs) that replace the naturally evolved intelligences like us are amused. They are watching and probably gambling quatloos on whether we create ASI successors before exterminating ourselves. Longer version at:
https://ello.co/shanen0/post/v...
Again hoping for "funny" or "insightful" comments at Slashdot, but it's a young article, soon to become an obsolete article...
Duh.
Do you think that ANY amount of profit would satisfy Amazon's unsolvable and fake problem. Greed is NOT a real problem and NO amount of money would satisfy them.
Thought experiment for clarification: Imagine you did 100% of your shopping via Amazon. Would Bezos be happy? No. To increase Amazon's profits of course he will try to redirect your shopping to the merchandise that gives him higher percentages. Once 100% of your money is going there, he'll just have to boost the prices some more.
Hey, what else can Amazon do? The greed is NEVER satiated.
My own reason for stopping my Amazon shopping (more than 10 years ago) was the abuse of my personal information.
Quite recently and for over a year, it appeared that I had become an Amazon customer again. Considering how long it took for them to respond to the imposter, my current theory is that Amazon has a Wells Fargo problem with fake accounts. My latest conspiracy theory is that some of their people are using the information of dormant customers to create fake business. Presumably some kind of commission or incentive system? However the only thing I am certain about is that Amazon suddenly got real quiet about it.
Super tinfoil hat time? If Amazon notices this post (and similar ones I've made), they will suddenly get back to me with a cock-and-bull story about what REALLY happened. They expect me to respond "Riiiiight."
Reflecting more upon that first reaction (and still disappointed with Slashdot these days), I think the regular surge pricing should apply because of the increased demand for Uber services, but there should be an evacuation area surcharge above that. However, it should actually depend on the kind of risk involved, and maybe you just need to balance it against what the Uber drivers are willing to face...
However, I think that part of the Evacuation Mode money should go to special insurance for losses related to trying to help out in the disaster. It's not really a pure-hearted Good Samaritan thing, because the drivers are doing it for the money. Actually, if you provide too much insurance coverage you might nudge people into taking insane risks, but there are real damages from such disasters.
Maybe in this particular case some of the extra money that Uber got from surge pricing should be donated to helping the victims? Not sure how to make that a policy thing.
(If this were not a dead topic, I'd go back through the comments to see if any ideas along those lines were suggested, but I don't remember anything, and I've already commented on what I perceive as the decline in quality of these discussions on Slashdot.)