Actually, I mostly admire and respect Al Gore, but you know what they say about the path to good intentions--it leads to spam. The problem is that Al did too good a job when he was helping to fund the development of the Internet. He kept telling them not to worry about the money, and he kept it flowing. When you think about it that way, you have to say the SMTP fantasy of free email is partly his fault.
Yeah, his intentions are still good, but that isn't always enough.
(Just for the record and risking the karma: If the will of the voters was the criterion (as it says in the law, even in Florida), then I'm sure Gore won Florida in 2000. On the other hand, no one really knows what differences that might have made... What we do know for sure is what happened: Dubya the miserable failure was not competent to prevent 9/11.)
I am quite aware that you can't post and mod in the same thread. I've seen a number of messages about canceled mod points.
It is possible that I misunderstood your karma burning story. As I thought you explained it, you posted and reposted the same point even though you knew it was going to elicit negative mods that would hurt your karma. You seemed to interpret it as some sort of victory when you got the last word. My interpretation of that part of it was simply that the thread had died and no one noticed your 'triumph'. Rereading your post and my reply, I am still unable to see anything that suggests I misunderstood your comment.
Your own use of negative mod points to censor posts is a different topic. You preferred to word it in terms of reducing the volume of posters you regard as too noisy. I see it as censorship of 'noise' you don't like.
I could say more, but this is now an old dead thread, and I'm pretty much bored with this visit to/. and will probably leave for a few more months. Maybe the new Al Gore thread will finally include a few amusing jokes? I have one, but it's old and boring...
Very thoughtful reply from a fairly senior contributor. Of course I do acknowledge that there are some intelligent users of/. I would like to reply briefly, but that seems impossible if I am going to address your issues properly.
Point one: If you find some reference in my writing unclear (though I try hard to balance clarity and complete references with brevity), then ask, and I will probably explain it, especially if it is germane to an ongoing discussion. However, the main problem there is that/. discussions are intrinsically transient and I tend to regard them as dead within a few hours. They continue to exist, but it's like the tree falling in the forest. (On the uber topic at hand, I certainly wish the presidential candidates would answer questions honestly.) Though your new Subject was a question, you didn't ask any non-rhetorical questions in your actual post.
Another aspect is that I have a time-lapse view of Slashdot. I visit for a while, then leave for a few months. When I return, my focus is on changes. In particular, I've been searching in vain for improvements. I suppose the loss of the Goatse guy might count as an improvement, but the only major change I've noticed is much less humor. The "funny" posts are mostly not funny, and they are also far fewer than on past visits. Given the paucity of "funny", perhaps the moderation system should be tweaked in that direction--but I regard that as a minor problem. Or perhaps it's seasonal?
Point two: I sort of agree that honest posts will generally be modded up--but only as long as you avoid mentioning certain opinions. My *MAIN* point is that mod points are very frequently used to prevent real discussion of issues. You are correct to describe karma as a game--but it is a game that is loaded against strong advocacy of unpopular positions without regard to their truth value or intrinsic merits. Negative mods are used to stifle discussion--and that is exactly what is being openly advocated by several posters in this case.
Your karma burning story only proves my point--and if you had actually felt your point was sufficiently important, then you would have been modded into oblivion. Here's my karma attack story. Several days *AFTER* posting a comment, I suddenly receive five or ten inexplicable and irrelevant negative mod points--on *OLD* posts. How would you explain that? (It hasn't happened recently, so maybe they put a patch over that particular abuse of the moderation system.) That you feel you had "the last word" when your post remains up strikes me as another tree falling in the forest, but in the middle of the night.
Your point #3 is very muddled, though you are apparently attempting to justify your use of negative mod points. Your attempt to justify the nuance of "overrated" is especially meaningless. In fact, "overrated" is a content-free criticism. *WHAT* aspect of the post is overrated? Perhaps you could clarify your interpretation of negative mods, but you mostly seem to be agreeing with me that they are effective for censorship without addressing any real issue. (Again I'm reminded of modern presidential politics. Perhaps the real problem is merely that/. is only an accurate reflection of the political sickness of American democracy? Should I do a push poll about your illegitimate black baby? Or was McCain's baby supposed to be oriental?)
Your fourth point is you read everything. Either you read *EXTREMELY* fast and you have a *LOT* of free time, or you are exaggerating. And if you did, you are completely ignoring the moderation system. If we take you at your word, you have just pronounced the moderation system hopelessly broken and claimed that you completely ignore it.
You stopped numbering your points after that, and I feel this reply is becoming too long, too. I'll try for greater brevity, and I do not mean to slight your thoughtful ideas.
I think you overestimate the size and significance of the/. "demograph". Another one
What, the poor baby doesn't have any mod points today? Or are you just so eager to prove my point about the intellectual bankruptcy of/. that you have to fall all over yourself saying nothing?
Excellent and highly thoughtful response to the greater improvement of/. and thank you for your additional evidence of my point about the censorious nature of "discussion" under the anonymous mod system.
Have you thought about applying for a position in the Bush administration? Dubya would love your style.
Been there, done that. Doesn't help. You didn't bother to mention a number of other tools and tweaks within/. that I've already tried and I can also tell you that they don't help.
There are a couple of potentially redeeming features of/. that give misleading hopes. Actually, one aspect is directly related to the official topic of this discussion, the hacking of elections, and especially presidential elections. The politicians frequently claim that they are also interested in encouraging substantial intellectual discussions of the real issues--but we probably agree that the reality is different. Some of the politicians are most interested in power, and others are more interested in money, and some of them have other motivations such as using the government to ram their religious beliefs down our throats, but any actual believers in democracy are quickly knocked out of the American political process. That's why we see so many of these vicious anything-goes elections.
The situation here on/. is somewhat different. The editors sure can't be in it for the money or the power, though I don't know about any religious lunacy there. I think the problem is that they have some good goals, and some good ideas, but they lost their focus in a couple of areas. I basically think the #1 problem on/. is tightly linked to what could be the #1 strength. Moderation is a good idea, but anonymous moderation is *NOT*. My guess is that this was a design decision they made when they had a very small user population, and they were concerned about revenge mods. As it works now, it's just the easy way for lazy cowards to effectively contradict and destroy any position that they can't actually address on the merits.
A simple example that's again linked to the presidential politics--and one of the most clear distinctions between the two parties. (Last I heard, most of the neo-GOP candidates were rejecting evolution.) A creationist is going to have a hard time debating against evolution on the merits of the science, but it's going to be easy to recognize posters who speak effectively in defense of evolution--and give them negative mods until they get frustrated and go away. (Most of the time I'm in the gone-away group, though I've known of/. for many years.)
Actually, I do have a fair bit to say on the topic of politics. In my university days I took a lot of directly related course such as demographics, history, computer science, and mathematics. I've continued to read on the topics since then, adding a lot of political science and some other fields, and I've even published a bit in related areas of computer security. Getting away from the writing and reading, I've participated in American politics for many years, even been a campaign volunteer, and more recently I've been able to observe a completely different political system up close, providing additional insight into the ugliness of politics around the world. (In some ways Florida in 2000 is a serious contender for the biggest election crime ever.)
However, the more carefully I present interesting or useful information, the more likely it becomes that my post will simply disappear into the black hole of negative mods. Why don't I feel motivated? Just because the more clearly I write the more certainly I will offend some cowardly anonymous moderator who will simply shoot my comment in the head with a truly meaningless "overrated" mod.
In engineering terms this is called negative dynamic stability. I suppose that the/. "editors" sincerely want to encourage substantive dialog and discussion, but they have created a framework where such non-trivial comments are most likely to be targeted for destruction. The harder you work to write well to contribute to/., the more likely it is that you are wasting your time.
That does not work very well. No wonder/. is becoming an increasingly minor anachronism while the rest of the Internet continues to grow and develop rapidly. It's called coasting to oblivion.
Amusingly enough, the thing I miss these years is the humor. Almost none left on/. these days. I'm not joking, even recursively. [Or am I?] I really appreciate humor, but I'm sadly humor impaired when it comes to producing jokes. Is the death of humor on/. due to the punitive moderation of +funny, or have the authentically interesting and humorous people simply been driven away by negative moderation? The ghosts of/. want to know why!
Now I predict that if I have made my comment clearly enough, a bunch of anonymous negative mods will be piled upon it, presumably destroying my karma and causing me to effectively disappear as a contributor to any future discussions. But you know what? Given the quality of the typical discussion on/., I see no reason to care.
Oh yeah. On the actual topic, it isn't the hacking, it's the gerrymandering. The largest bloc of voters are the ones who don't vote--because they have correctly understood that their votes have been gerrymandered away from them. Why should they vote when they can't affect the election? It's about as useless as writing a thoughtful but provocative post on/.
Not at all. I simply noticed and commented that/. is a waste of time pretending to be a discussion forum. If you disagree with that opinion or think that you have superior evidence or better reasoning, perhaps you could do something about it. Or perhaps you thought you could be moderated funny for that trivial comment?
For Slashdot's moderation system to function properly, we need as many users as possible to Meta-Moderate. You are currently eligible... why not hop over and help?
Is this nagging supposed to be an expression of thanks for my contribution? Shucks. Why don't I feel properly thankful for the invitation to waste more time "validating" a broken moderation system? Can you get it through your head that my point is that the moderation system is *NOT* functioning properly. It is a censorious poison that is destroying thoughtful discussion.
Then again, that's probably what some people like most about/., eh?
Gee, an announcement of a new distro! Is that an invitation to discussion? On/.?
An announcement of a new distro would certainly seem to be an invitation to discuss the features and merits and even compare them to other distros. Of course, if you do a good job of presenting your position, then people who disagree with you but who are too lazy or incompetent to say why they disagree will simply make make your position go away. After all, the negative mods are anonymous, so no one will ever know who the lazy cowards are, right?
Actually, I do have a fair bit to say on these topics. I was just testing two new distros last night, and I could say something about the features and problems I found. I do have a favorite distro and several years experience with it, and my company uses a different distro, and I've experimented with at least one one other (off the top of my head). Even though I don't know Mandriva, it would be reasonable to ask about various features in relation to Mandriva or to seek general advice about distro testing.
And the more carefully I present interesting or useful information, the more likely it becomes that my post will disappear into the black hole of negative mods. Why don't I feel motivated?
I could even go deeper than that to consider the question of freedom. Hint: It's about choice. Obviously there would be no freedom to pick OSes if Microsoft had its way, but within the Linux community the interesting question is how much choice is too much? At what point does excessive choice simply blind you to the possibilities?
I could easily contextualize any of these topics based on my experiences with the various distros. I might even be amusing with some of my dumb questions, or possibly be enlightened by unexpected wisdom--but most likely writing too clearly will offend some cowardly anonymous moderator who will simply shoot my comment in the head with a truly meaningless "overrated" mod.
In engineering terms this is called negative dynamic stability. I suppose that the/. "editors" might sincerely want to encourage dialog and discussion, but they have created a framework where such comments will be targeted for destruction. It does not work very well. No wonder/. is becoming an increasingly minor anachronism while the rest of the Internet continues to grow and develop rapidly. It's called coasting to oblivion.
Actually, the part that pisses me off is that there is almost no humor left on/. these days. I'm not joking, even recursively. [Or am I?] I do appreciate humor, but I'm sadly humor impaired when it comes to producing jokes. Is the death of humor on/. due to the punitive moderation of +funny, or have the authentically interesting and humorous people simply been completely bored (and negatively moderated) out of the place? The ghosts of/. want to know why! (That was supposed to be a joke about a tabloid newspaper advertisement, but I can't even remember the original ad, which makes it hard to imagine the joke.)
Now I predict that if I have made my comment clearly enough, a bunch of anonymous negative mods will be piled upon it, presumably destroying my karma and causing me to effectively disappear as a contributor to any future discussions. But you know what? Given the quality of the typical discussion on/., I see no reason to care.
Basically if you agree to use SMTP you are accepting that the email will be transmitted in the clear. Most people live with that because they don't even think about it. It sort of falls under the imaginary projection: "It's illegal to look at my snail mail, so my email must be safe." Whatever the legal status of email, it's pretty clear that the neo-GOPs do not feel that way about our personal information, which is where it connects to the original topic in terms of designing software so that it does not intrude on your privacy. Actually, I assume that the NSA is routinely copying all of my email, just on principle.
However, and even though I have *NOTHING* to hide (that I know about), I'm still unhappy with the idea of Gmail retaining long-term copies of all of it. I trust Google more than most companies, but not *THAT* much.
[And *NO* I still do not want to hop over to help with meta-moderation and *YES* I do want/. to stop asking me about it. The system is already wasting quite enough of my time, thank you.]
Really? You think you understand my position? They why is your presentation of it such a load of cr@p? I suppose that it depends on what sort of word games you want to play with "enemies", eh? It can't possibly be the case that you are so intellectually dishonest that you want to construct a straw man argument to set on fire.
In reality, and not just my reality, there are plenty of cases where different people have irresolvable conflicts of interests. The question is whether those conflicts can be mediated intelligently (with or without government assistance) or whether the only decision point is when one side finishes ripping the lungs out of the other. Animals don't get to think about such options. The faster deer doesn't worry about the one that got left behind, and the lion doesn't worry about the hyenas chased away from their kill. However, I do imagine that we are somewhat better than animals, and that we can even manage to continue evolving without dedicating our best efforts to being more vicious and bestial than the mindless beasts. If we don't learn to live together, then we shall surely die together. Technology itself is morally neutral on the question.
The jury is still out on the question. The long-term trends over the last few thousand years seem to agree with me, but that's not long enough. Maybe the real answer to the Fermi Paradox is that we will (and must) soon exterminate ourselves.
And what if the email is transmitted in the clear and passes by someone with a packet sniffer?
By the way, that relates to one of the nifty but little known features of Gmail. If you access Gmail with HTTPS instead of HTTP, then the entire connection stays encrypted. Most other Web-based email systems only attempt to encrypt the password exchange, and then go into the clear.
Though I can't prove it, I'm pretty sure that the email is stored in the clear on Gmail's servers. We know they are constantly searching and indexing your email for their advertising convenience, and that's most convenient to do if the email is in the clear.
Actually, you have me over an amusing barrel there. In one of those cases, I actually know how it can be used to abuse *YOU*. However, I cannot talk about it.
All I can say is that your lack of understanding or imagination is *NOT* going to protect you if such an agency actually existed...
Your thinking seems to be muddled. Protecting the security of information (as for backup services) or sharing information (via networks) do *NOT* require knowing what that information is. Google (or other companies) could support backup and information sharing services of personal information without ever having actual access to the information in question.
They [again referring to corporations and governments] don't want to do that because it is more convenient for them to collect, look at, exploit, and (in a worst case) even release your personal information. My original point was that the only real defense of privacy would be if we hold and control our own personal information, which could potentially take us back to the Bill of Rights. Especially in the case of a government, if the government wants access to our personal information, they should have to show why. As it stands now, the government can simply buy most of our personal data directly from the companies that 'own' it.
Actually, I still don't know how to send email via this system, but I'm pretty sure you would recognize me if you were the other jm, and your writing style doesn't match that closely (unless it's changed over the years).
As regards "taking advantage of the moderation", I only regard it as a slightly less random form of sampling. I don't have the time to read all of it, and my interest is in humor, so I sometimes scan for "funny" on the theory that a few of the actually funny posts may have been evaluated appropriately. Based on the mods my own posts have received, the probability is not very high.
I did meta-moderate for a while. As far as I could see, it was a total waste of my time, except as a different form of random sampling. The good point was that it would take me to comments on some topics that otherwise I'd never even look at. However, though I can't recall actually getting any useful data that way... I tried 'playing the meta-mod game' both ways. If I played it honestly, only about 1/3 of the mods were reasonable to the point where I could endorse them--but I never received the promised mod points. (Well, actually one time.) I also experimented with the theory that mod points were self-reinforcing, which meant that they go to agreeable meta-moderators. I eventually concluded meta-moderation was a total waste of time, and moderation is about 2/3 meaningless.
Wow and whoopie. I think I got a first post. Does that mean the tooth fairy will leave karma points under my pillow?
Anyway, I forgot to note that it is possible that the information society will cut both ways, not only against us, but also against the governments that want to abuse us. The most interesting example right now is actually in Myanmar, where the junta is apparently having additional problems with information leakage about the latest crackdowns.
I'm not sure how the NSA link was leaked. You'd think they should be more competent than to 'sign' so much of their work. However, in the future it will become even harder for them to hide their tracks. Query tools are advancing very rapidly, and the amount of data to be queried is increasing even more quickly...
If this is an accurate report, then they're probably scrubbing the Google indexes even as we speak. Also following up on the original documents to remove the references.
And *NO*, I do *NOT* want to hop over there and waste my time doing meta-moderation!
I addressed this in more detail in another reply, but it sounds like it would be sufficient access for you to replicate your email system among a relatively small number of computers (which would also solve your email backup problem).
Okay, I'm correcting you because you got your facts wrong. You don't have to leave your computer on all day to receive non-Web-based email because the email is stored on servers until you receive it. Your point of confusion is apparently whether or not you want to be able to access that email from *ANY* computer that is connected to the Internet, or whether you should only be able to access that email from *YOUR* own computer. The question of whether or not your computer is turned on is purely specious. You can't read Gmail without turning on your computer.
The big problem with being able to read your personal email from anywhere is that it basically means that anyone else can do so, too. This is the part where privacy is threatened--but it makes the neo-GOP very happy to have complete access to all of your personal data.
As regards Gmail, there are several possible solutions, but I think people should be able to choose the privacy options they like. For example, one option would be to keep a certain amount of recent email on the Gmail servers so that it could be accessed from any computer. This might appeal to people who travel a lot without their own machines. The option I would prefer would be to download all of my mail to my specified computers. The Gmail end would have a list of my authorized computers and would hold the email in encrypted form only until each of those computers had downloaded its copy. My computers would be responsible for handling the indexing and searching locally, and I would also accept responsibility for my backups (by having more than one copy in this scenario). Other people might prefer only one copy, but with Google providing an encrypted backup for when they move to a new computer.
I basically agree with you. I think if the Founders had seen how it would work out, then they would have set up the kind of system that is used almost everywhere else in the world, where coalition governments are the norm. However, I'm doubtful that even coalition governments are the complete solution, because the real issues are more fluid than that.
In a sense, we're seeing competition between the various governmental systems. One of the characteristics of the American system is that the winner take all dynamics reduce politics to two parties that have very weak ideological bases. In contrast, the competitors are governments that are mostly run by coalitions that have strong ideological focuses on various issues. Looks to me like America started out with a big head start, but is now losing in the competition against quasi-united Europe.
However, we're getting rather far from the original topic of the article, and *NO*, I still don't want to hop over and help out with the meta-moderation.
What result are you talking about that you think I would not like? The premise was that my personal data should be stored locally. This used to be the default case. A 100 years ago, almost all of my personal data could only be obtained by asking me, since almost all records of my personal data were stored in my head. That's why the prohibition against involuntary self-incrimination was so important... If you have some argument against the Fifth Amendment, I'm curious what it might be--and I have a few highly personal and highly objectionable questions that I bet you don't want to answer.
The question of backup is a completely *DIFFERENT* aspect of software privacy. There are a number of possibilities that still consider privacy. For example, you could divide the files into multiple pieces with one of the encodings such that some number of pieces need to be collected before the decryption is possible, though the most common solution is to trust one entity to hold all of the backup. However, in either of those cases you can still encrypt the data that is being backed up and keep the decryption key locally or in a trusted escrow system.
Because you need to have it in the clear to do the searching. (Actually this is not strictly true. There are ways to search encrypted data, but not as effectively.) Right now the indexing and searching runs on Google's servers, but if the mail is on your local machine, then you'd also do the indexing and searching on your own machine.
It does get more complicated when you consider the funding aspects, which basically means advertising revenue in Google's case. However, the question here would be what needs to be paid for. The software design and implementation costs are unavoidable, but should I also be paying for Google's server capacity to do the searches when I have plenty of computing capacity right here to to my own searches?
A large part of Google's software design (per the main article) has to be concerned with making sure email doesn't leak to the wrong user, but moving the data to the users' computers simplifies that part of the design. You can't leak information you don't have.
I assume your last comment was supposed to be a joke. Me, I think the Bill of Rights was and still is a very good idea. Even a person who doesn't have "something to hide" can be manipulated and even enslaved with sufficient knowledge of that person's strengths and weaknesses.
I feel like saying "just so" and ending, but I'll continue by noting that government does have a number of legitimate purposes. Most importantly, governments should set the rules and make sure that all of the players continue to play by the rules. Governments must also mediate between the public and private interest because there are *LOTS* of cases where they are not the same. The quasi-rational libertarians admit that, but they claim it can be addressed by more complete information. Just too bad no one (short of God) has complete information, eh? There are always going to be cases where short-term private interests, for example my private interest to dump my garbage in the ocean or a company's private interest to emit sulfur dioxides, are going to trump the long-term public interests to have functioning oceans and clean air. We're not in 18th century Kansas anymore.
To me, freedom is about meaningful choice, and that means you need to have some real options and sufficient information to choice among them. I'm not sure what the minimum number of choices should be, but I feel like you need at least 4 or 5 of them to keep them competing against each other. (Yes, I think Microsoft should but cut into pieces and set against each other.) In a sense we have that kind of competition between governments, but to make it work on the individual level, we should be free to choose our government, and two thing all governments agree on is that they do *NOT* want the citizens choosing too freely and jumping from one government to a different one that seems better, and they do not want the people to go around changing the government to a different type. The American idea of balance of powers was a pretty clever innovation, and it worked for a long time and did a lot of good, but it looks like the "unitary executive" has finally killed it--while claiming to be "conservatives".
With regards to your proposed suggestion, I don't think it would work. Too many people would pick the same things, and you need balance.
Finally, to close with a twisted sort of joke: As He is described in most monotheistic religions, God has no freedom. If He is "omniscient" and "good", then He would know the full consequences of any action and He would always have to take the best option--and He would therefore have no freedom to choose otherwise. Freedom is in the limbo zone, where you know enough to make meaningful choices, but not so much that your choices are fully constrained.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I mostly admire and respect Al Gore, but you know what they say about the path to good intentions--it leads to spam. The problem is that Al did too good a job when he was helping to fund the development of the Internet. He kept telling them not to worry about the money, and he kept it flowing. When you think about it that way, you have to say the SMTP fantasy of free email is partly his fault.
Yeah, his intentions are still good, but that isn't always enough.
(Just for the record and risking the karma: If the will of the voters was the criterion (as it says in the law, even in Florida), then I'm sure Gore won Florida in 2000. On the other hand, no one really knows what differences that might have made... What we do know for sure is what happened: Dubya the miserable failure was not competent to prevent 9/11.)
I am quite aware that you can't post and mod in the same thread. I've seen a number of messages about canceled mod points.
/. and will probably leave for a few more months. Maybe the new Al Gore thread will finally include a few amusing jokes? I have one, but it's old and boring...
It is possible that I misunderstood your karma burning story. As I thought you explained it, you posted and reposted the same point even though you knew it was going to elicit negative mods that would hurt your karma. You seemed to interpret it as some sort of victory when you got the last word. My interpretation of that part of it was simply that the thread had died and no one noticed your 'triumph'. Rereading your post and my reply, I am still unable to see anything that suggests I misunderstood your comment.
Your own use of negative mod points to censor posts is a different topic. You preferred to word it in terms of reducing the volume of posters you regard as too noisy. I see it as censorship of 'noise' you don't like.
I could say more, but this is now an old dead thread, and I'm pretty much bored with this visit to
Very thoughtful reply from a fairly senior contributor. Of course I do acknowledge that there are some intelligent users of /. I would like to reply briefly, but that seems impossible if I am going to address your issues properly.
/. discussions are intrinsically transient and I tend to regard them as dead within a few hours. They continue to exist, but it's like the tree falling in the forest. (On the uber topic at hand, I certainly wish the presidential candidates would answer questions honestly.) Though your new Subject was a question, you didn't ask any non-rhetorical questions in your actual post.
/. is only an accurate reflection of the political sickness of American democracy? Should I do a push poll about your illegitimate black baby? Or was McCain's baby supposed to be oriental?)
/. "demograph". Another one
Point one: If you find some reference in my writing unclear (though I try hard to balance clarity and complete references with brevity), then ask, and I will probably explain it, especially if it is germane to an ongoing discussion. However, the main problem there is that
Another aspect is that I have a time-lapse view of Slashdot. I visit for a while, then leave for a few months. When I return, my focus is on changes. In particular, I've been searching in vain for improvements. I suppose the loss of the Goatse guy might count as an improvement, but the only major change I've noticed is much less humor. The "funny" posts are mostly not funny, and they are also far fewer than on past visits. Given the paucity of "funny", perhaps the moderation system should be tweaked in that direction--but I regard that as a minor problem. Or perhaps it's seasonal?
Point two: I sort of agree that honest posts will generally be modded up--but only as long as you avoid mentioning certain opinions. My *MAIN* point is that mod points are very frequently used to prevent real discussion of issues. You are correct to describe karma as a game--but it is a game that is loaded against strong advocacy of unpopular positions without regard to their truth value or intrinsic merits. Negative mods are used to stifle discussion--and that is exactly what is being openly advocated by several posters in this case.
Your karma burning story only proves my point--and if you had actually felt your point was sufficiently important, then you would have been modded into oblivion. Here's my karma attack story. Several days *AFTER* posting a comment, I suddenly receive five or ten inexplicable and irrelevant negative mod points--on *OLD* posts. How would you explain that? (It hasn't happened recently, so maybe they put a patch over that particular abuse of the moderation system.) That you feel you had "the last word" when your post remains up strikes me as another tree falling in the forest, but in the middle of the night.
Your point #3 is very muddled, though you are apparently attempting to justify your use of negative mod points. Your attempt to justify the nuance of "overrated" is especially meaningless. In fact, "overrated" is a content-free criticism. *WHAT* aspect of the post is overrated? Perhaps you could clarify your interpretation of negative mods, but you mostly seem to be agreeing with me that they are effective for censorship without addressing any real issue. (Again I'm reminded of modern presidential politics. Perhaps the real problem is merely that
Your fourth point is you read everything. Either you read *EXTREMELY* fast and you have a *LOT* of free time, or you are exaggerating. And if you did, you are completely ignoring the moderation system. If we take you at your word, you have just pronounced the moderation system hopelessly broken and claimed that you completely ignore it.
You stopped numbering your points after that, and I feel this reply is becoming too long, too. I'll try for greater brevity, and I do not mean to slight your thoughtful ideas.
I think you overestimate the size and significance of the
What, the poor baby doesn't have any mod points today? Or are you just so eager to prove my point about the intellectual bankruptcy of /. that you have to fall all over yourself saying nothing?
Excellent and highly thoughtful response to the greater improvement of /. and thank you for your additional evidence of my point about the censorious nature of "discussion" under the anonymous mod system.
Have you thought about applying for a position in the Bush administration? Dubya would love your style.
Been there, done that. Doesn't help. You didn't bother to mention a number of other tools and tweaks within /. that I've already tried and I can also tell you that they don't help.
/. that give misleading hopes. Actually, one aspect is directly related to the official topic of this discussion, the hacking of elections, and especially presidential elections. The politicians frequently claim that they are also interested in encouraging substantial intellectual discussions of the real issues--but we probably agree that the reality is different. Some of the politicians are most interested in power, and others are more interested in money, and some of them have other motivations such as using the government to ram their religious beliefs down our throats, but any actual believers in democracy are quickly knocked out of the American political process. That's why we see so many of these vicious anything-goes elections.
/. is somewhat different. The editors sure can't be in it for the money or the power, though I don't know about any religious lunacy there. I think the problem is that they have some good goals, and some good ideas, but they lost their focus in a couple of areas. I basically think the #1 problem on /. is tightly linked to what could be the #1 strength. Moderation is a good idea, but anonymous moderation is *NOT*. My guess is that this was a design decision they made when they had a very small user population, and they were concerned about revenge mods. As it works now, it's just the easy way for lazy cowards to effectively contradict and destroy any position that they can't actually address on the merits.
/. for many years.)
There are a couple of potentially redeeming features of
The situation here on
A simple example that's again linked to the presidential politics--and one of the most clear distinctions between the two parties. (Last I heard, most of the neo-GOP candidates were rejecting evolution.) A creationist is going to have a hard time debating against evolution on the merits of the science, but it's going to be easy to recognize posters who speak effectively in defense of evolution--and give them negative mods until they get frustrated and go away. (Most of the time I'm in the gone-away group, though I've known of
Actually, I do have a fair bit to say on the topic of politics. In my university days I took a lot of directly related course such as demographics, history, computer science, and mathematics. I've continued to read on the topics since then, adding a lot of political science and some other fields, and I've even published a bit in related areas of computer security. Getting away from the writing and reading, I've participated in American politics for many years, even been a campaign volunteer, and more recently I've been able to observe a completely different political system up close, providing additional insight into the ugliness of politics around the world. (In some ways Florida in 2000 is a serious contender for the biggest election crime ever.)
/. "editors" sincerely want to encourage substantive dialog and discussion, but they have created a framework where such non-trivial comments are most likely to be targeted for destruction. The harder you work to write well to contribute to /., the more likely it is that you are wasting your time.
/. is becoming an increasingly minor anachronism while the rest of the Internet continues to grow and develop rapidly. It's called coasting to oblivion.
/. these days. I'm not joking, even recursively. [Or am I?] I really appreciate humor, but I'm sadly humor impaired when it comes to producing jokes. Is the death of humor on /. due to the punitive moderation of +funny, or have the authentically interesting and humorous people simply been driven away by negative moderation? The ghosts of /. want to know why!
/., I see no reason to care.
/.
However, the more carefully I present interesting or useful information, the more likely it becomes that my post will simply disappear into the black hole of negative mods. Why don't I feel motivated? Just because the more clearly I write the more certainly I will offend some cowardly anonymous moderator who will simply shoot my comment in the head with a truly meaningless "overrated" mod.
In engineering terms this is called negative dynamic stability. I suppose that the
That does not work very well. No wonder
Amusingly enough, the thing I miss these years is the humor. Almost none left on
Now I predict that if I have made my comment clearly enough, a bunch of anonymous negative mods will be piled upon it, presumably destroying my karma and causing me to effectively disappear as a contributor to any future discussions. But you know what? Given the quality of the typical discussion on
Oh yeah. On the actual topic, it isn't the hacking, it's the gerrymandering. The largest bloc of voters are the ones who don't vote--because they have correctly understood that their votes have been gerrymandered away from them. Why should they vote when they can't affect the election? It's about as useless as writing a thoughtful but provocative post on
I'm not saying it's impossible within SMTP. Or what is your intended point?
Not at all. I simply noticed and commented that /. is a waste of time pretending to be a discussion forum. If you disagree with that opinion or think that you have superior evidence or better reasoning, perhaps you could do something about it. Or perhaps you thought you could be moderated funny for that trivial comment?
Is this nagging supposed to be an expression of thanks for my contribution? Shucks. Why don't I feel properly thankful for the invitation to waste more time "validating" a broken moderation system? Can you get it through your head that my point is that the moderation system is *NOT* functioning properly. It is a censorious poison that is destroying thoughtful discussion.
Then again, that's probably what some people like most about /., eh?
Gee, an announcement of a new distro! Is that an invitation to discussion? On /.?
/. "editors" might sincerely want to encourage dialog and discussion, but they have created a framework where such comments will be targeted for destruction. It does not work very well. No wonder /. is becoming an increasingly minor anachronism while the rest of the Internet continues to grow and develop rapidly. It's called coasting to oblivion.
/. these days. I'm not joking, even recursively. [Or am I?] I do appreciate humor, but I'm sadly humor impaired when it comes to producing jokes. Is the death of humor on /. due to the punitive moderation of +funny, or have the authentically interesting and humorous people simply been completely bored (and negatively moderated) out of the place? The ghosts of /. want to know why! (That was supposed to be a joke about a tabloid newspaper advertisement, but I can't even remember the original ad, which makes it hard to imagine the joke.)
/., I see no reason to care.
An announcement of a new distro would certainly seem to be an invitation to discuss the features and merits and even compare them to other distros. Of course, if you do a good job of presenting your position, then people who disagree with you but who are too lazy or incompetent to say why they disagree will simply make make your position go away. After all, the negative mods are anonymous, so no one will ever know who the lazy cowards are, right?
Actually, I do have a fair bit to say on these topics. I was just testing two new distros last night, and I could say something about the features and problems I found. I do have a favorite distro and several years experience with it, and my company uses a different distro, and I've experimented with at least one one other (off the top of my head). Even though I don't know Mandriva, it would be reasonable to ask about various features in relation to Mandriva or to seek general advice about distro testing.
And the more carefully I present interesting or useful information, the more likely it becomes that my post will disappear into the black hole of negative mods. Why don't I feel motivated?
I could even go deeper than that to consider the question of freedom. Hint: It's about choice. Obviously there would be no freedom to pick OSes if Microsoft had its way, but within the Linux community the interesting question is how much choice is too much? At what point does excessive choice simply blind you to the possibilities?
I could easily contextualize any of these topics based on my experiences with the various distros. I might even be amusing with some of my dumb questions, or possibly be enlightened by unexpected wisdom--but most likely writing too clearly will offend some cowardly anonymous moderator who will simply shoot my comment in the head with a truly meaningless "overrated" mod.
In engineering terms this is called negative dynamic stability. I suppose that the
Actually, the part that pisses me off is that there is almost no humor left on
Now I predict that if I have made my comment clearly enough, a bunch of anonymous negative mods will be piled upon it, presumably destroying my karma and causing me to effectively disappear as a contributor to any future discussions. But you know what? Given the quality of the typical discussion on
Basically if you agree to use SMTP you are accepting that the email will be transmitted in the clear. Most people live with that because they don't even think about it. It sort of falls under the imaginary projection: "It's illegal to look at my snail mail, so my email must be safe." Whatever the legal status of email, it's pretty clear that the neo-GOPs do not feel that way about our personal information, which is where it connects to the original topic in terms of designing software so that it does not intrude on your privacy. Actually, I assume that the NSA is routinely copying all of my email, just on principle.
/. to stop asking me about it. The system is already wasting quite enough of my time, thank you.]
However, and even though I have *NOTHING* to hide (that I know about), I'm still unhappy with the idea of Gmail retaining long-term copies of all of it. I trust Google more than most companies, but not *THAT* much.
[And *NO* I still do not want to hop over to help with meta-moderation and *YES* I do want
Really? You think you understand my position? They why is your presentation of it such a load of cr@p? I suppose that it depends on what sort of word games you want to play with "enemies", eh? It can't possibly be the case that you are so intellectually dishonest that you want to construct a straw man argument to set on fire.
In reality, and not just my reality, there are plenty of cases where different people have irresolvable conflicts of interests. The question is whether those conflicts can be mediated intelligently (with or without government assistance) or whether the only decision point is when one side finishes ripping the lungs out of the other. Animals don't get to think about such options. The faster deer doesn't worry about the one that got left behind, and the lion doesn't worry about the hyenas chased away from their kill. However, I do imagine that we are somewhat better than animals, and that we can even manage to continue evolving without dedicating our best efforts to being more vicious and bestial than the mindless beasts. If we don't learn to live together, then we shall surely die together. Technology itself is morally neutral on the question.
The jury is still out on the question. The long-term trends over the last few thousand years seem to agree with me, but that's not long enough. Maybe the real answer to the Fermi Paradox is that we will (and must) soon exterminate ourselves.
And what if the email is transmitted in the clear and passes by someone with a packet sniffer?
By the way, that relates to one of the nifty but little known features of Gmail. If you access Gmail with HTTPS instead of HTTP, then the entire connection stays encrypted. Most other Web-based email systems only attempt to encrypt the password exchange, and then go into the clear.
Though I can't prove it, I'm pretty sure that the email is stored in the clear on Gmail's servers. We know they are constantly searching and indexing your email for their advertising convenience, and that's most convenient to do if the email is in the clear.
Actually, you have me over an amusing barrel there. In one of those cases, I actually know how it can be used to abuse *YOU*. However, I cannot talk about it.
All I can say is that your lack of understanding or imagination is *NOT* going to protect you if such an agency actually existed...
Your thinking seems to be muddled. Protecting the security of information (as for backup services) or sharing information (via networks) do *NOT* require knowing what that information is. Google (or other companies) could support backup and information sharing services of personal information without ever having actual access to the information in question.
They [again referring to corporations and governments] don't want to do that because it is more convenient for them to collect, look at, exploit, and (in a worst case) even release your personal information. My original point was that the only real defense of privacy would be if we hold and control our own personal information, which could potentially take us back to the Bill of Rights. Especially in the case of a government, if the government wants access to our personal information, they should have to show why. As it stands now, the government can simply buy most of our personal data directly from the companies that 'own' it.
Actually, I still don't know how to send email via this system, but I'm pretty sure you would recognize me if you were the other jm, and your writing style doesn't match that closely (unless it's changed over the years).
As regards "taking advantage of the moderation", I only regard it as a slightly less random form of sampling. I don't have the time to read all of it, and my interest is in humor, so I sometimes scan for "funny" on the theory that a few of the actually funny posts may have been evaluated appropriately. Based on the mods my own posts have received, the probability is not very high.
I did meta-moderate for a while. As far as I could see, it was a total waste of my time, except as a different form of random sampling. The good point was that it would take me to comments on some topics that otherwise I'd never even look at. However, though I can't recall actually getting any useful data that way... I tried 'playing the meta-mod game' both ways. If I played it honestly, only about 1/3 of the mods were reasonable to the point where I could endorse them--but I never received the promised mod points. (Well, actually one time.) I also experimented with the theory that mod points were self-reinforcing, which meant that they go to agreeable meta-moderators. I eventually concluded meta-moderation was a total waste of time, and moderation is about 2/3 meaningless.
Wow and whoopie. I think I got a first post. Does that mean the tooth fairy will leave karma points under my pillow?
Anyway, I forgot to note that it is possible that the information society will cut both ways, not only against us, but also against the governments that want to abuse us. The most interesting example right now is actually in Myanmar, where the junta is apparently having additional problems with information leakage about the latest crackdowns.
I'm not sure how the NSA link was leaked. You'd think they should be more competent than to 'sign' so much of their work. However, in the future it will become even harder for them to hide their tracks. Query tools are advancing very rapidly, and the amount of data to be queried is increasing even more quickly...
If this is an accurate report, then they're probably scrubbing the Google indexes even as we speak. Also following up on the original documents to remove the references.
And *NO*, I do *NOT* want to hop over there and waste my time doing meta-moderation!
I addressed this in more detail in another reply, but it sounds like it would be sufficient access for you to replicate your email system among a relatively small number of computers (which would also solve your email backup problem).
Okay, I'm correcting you because you got your facts wrong. You don't have to leave your computer on all day to receive non-Web-based email because the email is stored on servers until you receive it. Your point of confusion is apparently whether or not you want to be able to access that email from *ANY* computer that is connected to the Internet, or whether you should only be able to access that email from *YOUR* own computer. The question of whether or not your computer is turned on is purely specious. You can't read Gmail without turning on your computer.
The big problem with being able to read your personal email from anywhere is that it basically means that anyone else can do so, too. This is the part where privacy is threatened--but it makes the neo-GOP very happy to have complete access to all of your personal data.
As regards Gmail, there are several possible solutions, but I think people should be able to choose the privacy options they like. For example, one option would be to keep a certain amount of recent email on the Gmail servers so that it could be accessed from any computer. This might appeal to people who travel a lot without their own machines. The option I would prefer would be to download all of my mail to my specified computers. The Gmail end would have a list of my authorized computers and would hold the email in encrypted form only until each of those computers had downloaded its copy. My computers would be responsible for handling the indexing and searching locally, and I would also accept responsibility for my backups (by having more than one copy in this scenario). Other people might prefer only one copy, but with Google providing an encrypted backup for when they move to a new computer.
I basically agree with you. I think if the Founders had seen how it would work out, then they would have set up the kind of system that is used almost everywhere else in the world, where coalition governments are the norm. However, I'm doubtful that even coalition governments are the complete solution, because the real issues are more fluid than that.
In a sense, we're seeing competition between the various governmental systems. One of the characteristics of the American system is that the winner take all dynamics reduce politics to two parties that have very weak ideological bases. In contrast, the competitors are governments that are mostly run by coalitions that have strong ideological focuses on various issues. Looks to me like America started out with a big head start, but is now losing in the competition against quasi-united Europe.
However, we're getting rather far from the original topic of the article, and *NO*, I still don't want to hop over and help out with the meta-moderation.
What result are you talking about that you think I would not like? The premise was that my personal data should be stored locally. This used to be the default case. A 100 years ago, almost all of my personal data could only be obtained by asking me, since almost all records of my personal data were stored in my head. That's why the prohibition against involuntary self-incrimination was so important... If you have some argument against the Fifth Amendment, I'm curious what it might be--and I have a few highly personal and highly objectionable questions that I bet you don't want to answer.
The question of backup is a completely *DIFFERENT* aspect of software privacy. There are a number of possibilities that still consider privacy. For example, you could divide the files into multiple pieces with one of the encodings such that some number of pieces need to be collected before the decryption is possible, though the most common solution is to trust one entity to hold all of the backup. However, in either of those cases you can still encrypt the data that is being backed up and keep the decryption key locally or in a trusted escrow system.
Because you need to have it in the clear to do the searching. (Actually this is not strictly true. There are ways to search encrypted data, but not as effectively.) Right now the indexing and searching runs on Google's servers, but if the mail is on your local machine, then you'd also do the indexing and searching on your own machine.
It does get more complicated when you consider the funding aspects, which basically means advertising revenue in Google's case. However, the question here would be what needs to be paid for. The software design and implementation costs are unavoidable, but should I also be paying for Google's server capacity to do the searches when I have plenty of computing capacity right here to to my own searches?
A large part of Google's software design (per the main article) has to be concerned with making sure email doesn't leak to the wrong user, but moving the data to the users' computers simplifies that part of the design. You can't leak information you don't have.
I assume your last comment was supposed to be a joke. Me, I think the Bill of Rights was and still is a very good idea. Even a person who doesn't have "something to hide" can be manipulated and even enslaved with sufficient knowledge of that person's strengths and weaknesses.
I feel like saying "just so" and ending, but I'll continue by noting that government does have a number of legitimate purposes. Most importantly, governments should set the rules and make sure that all of the players continue to play by the rules. Governments must also mediate between the public and private interest because there are *LOTS* of cases where they are not the same. The quasi-rational libertarians admit that, but they claim it can be addressed by more complete information. Just too bad no one (short of God) has complete information, eh? There are always going to be cases where short-term private interests, for example my private interest to dump my garbage in the ocean or a company's private interest to emit sulfur dioxides, are going to trump the long-term public interests to have functioning oceans and clean air. We're not in 18th century Kansas anymore.
To me, freedom is about meaningful choice, and that means you need to have some real options and sufficient information to choice among them. I'm not sure what the minimum number of choices should be, but I feel like you need at least 4 or 5 of them to keep them competing against each other. (Yes, I think Microsoft should but cut into pieces and set against each other.) In a sense we have that kind of competition between governments, but to make it work on the individual level, we should be free to choose our government, and two thing all governments agree on is that they do *NOT* want the citizens choosing too freely and jumping from one government to a different one that seems better, and they do not want the people to go around changing the government to a different type. The American idea of balance of powers was a pretty clever innovation, and it worked for a long time and did a lot of good, but it looks like the "unitary executive" has finally killed it--while claiming to be "conservatives".
With regards to your proposed suggestion, I don't think it would work. Too many people would pick the same things, and you need balance.
Finally, to close with a twisted sort of joke: As He is described in most monotheistic religions, God has no freedom. If He is "omniscient" and "good", then He would know the full consequences of any action and He would always have to take the best option--and He would therefore have no freedom to choose otherwise. Freedom is in the limbo zone, where you know enough to make meaningful choices, but not so much that your choices are fully constrained.