I sort of agree with you insofar as both parties have been captured by big business interests. Getting the big money out of politics would be a very good thing, though I don't see any easy path to doing so... However, there is a difference in relative priorities, and it is clear that the neo-GOP is completely focused on the money, whereas the old GOP had and the Democrats still have some other principles as well.
Since it is very clear that privacy considerations have zero traction with the current American government, we basically have two options: Can we evolve in a more constructive direction (which means the neo-GOP must be removed first of all), or does there have to be a violent revolution? It seems very clear that certain governments (especially in Europe) are deliberately trying to evolve in the direction of favoring individual rights and privacy. If you believe that freedom and democracy confer competitive advantages, and if you think they are linked to such rights as privacy, then you must conclude that they are moving in a constructive and more competitive direction.
Revolution? Well, sometimes violent revolutions cannot be avoided. The problem there is that the outcome is never certain. On the average, the new systems are better than the old ones--but that's a big historical average, and there are plenty of times when things get worse before they get better. The one thing certain about a real revolution is that lots of people get hurt, even killed. I don't like that, and you can't convince me it's the only way to make things better. We're human beings, not mindless beasts that can only evolve mindlessly.
Me, I'd prefer to believe that just getting back to the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights would be a big step forward after the last few years. Some of the real Republicans might work for that, but not the neo-GOP politicians that still control what's left of the GOP.
Each time I post/. sends that invitation. So why don't I hop over and help the meta-moderation? Quit nagging me. Why would anyone waste time on meta-moderation? At least I understand the moderators' motivations. They're just tin-plated dictators with delusions of godhood.
I'll believe they [the big companies and the government together in this case] are sincere about my privacy when they agree to store my personal information on *MY* disk space. Whenever they want to look at my personal information they need to tell me why, and I should have the right to say yea or nay to that request. Right now they claim that my personal information belongs to them, and there's no way for me to know anything about what they are doing with it.
In this case, my phone records should be stored on my own equipment, and if they need to doublecheck it, they can show probable cause and get a search warrant. The records can be signed to prevent me from tampering with them, but they have no good reason to own those records.
The *REAL* problem is that the Dubya's government and the big companies want to own our souls.
Picking on Google because of their prominence, but this is how Gmail could be designed to really respect my privacy by storing the data on my own computer. (This would also take care of the 2 GB limitation.)
The email and the indexes would live on my machine. When I reading some email with Gmail, it would scan the email and send only the appropriate keywords to Google, and they would respond with the appropriate ads to be displayed in the appropriate boxes on my computer--but they would not have any direct access to my email once I had received it.
This would actually open up a new field of backup services for email. Google could encrypt the email on my machine and backup only the encrypted data at their end. The encryption and decryption key need never be seen at their end--though of course I need to store them somewhere apart from the machine that is being backed up. They could also provide email syncing services in the same way without ever seeing the clear data that is being synced.
I'll believe they [the big companies and the government] are sincere about my privacy when they agree to store my personal information on *MY* disk space. Whenever they want to look at my personal information they need to tell me why, and I should have the right to say yea or nay to that request. Right now they claim that my personal information belongs to them, and there's no way for me to know anything about what they are doing with it.
In more detail, this should actually be implemented by my settings of my privacy preferences. Most requests would be handled routinely without my needing to consider them in detail. For example, if I'm requesting a loan from my bank and they want to check my credit history, then my privacy policy would be to check that it was really my bank and that I had really initiated the loan request, and then they could look at the required information. If they need to compile some summary statistics, I'd agree for them to look at some of my information long enough to tally it. Etc., etc.
If they need to make sure that I don't tamper with my data, they can sign it and put a checksum on it, and I won't be able to tamper with it. There are actually technologies that would still allow me to see what the information is even in that case. Actually, any technical problem you want to point at, I can refer you to the solutions. They are already published in the literature.
The *REAL* problem is that the companies want to own us.
Hmm... It's pretty hard to define work-related surfing. I don't think it was/., but some other non-official source where I first heard about a major business deal that had really large effects on my division of the company. That was several extra days of warning to help brace myself before the 'stuff' started officially hitting the fan.
With regards to this topic I'm kind of embarrassed to be so far behind the curve, since I live in Japan and I should have heard this story a day or two before it got to the/. grapevine via Scotland. I could even read bits of the Japanese newspapers on it... Not worth the effort for the sake of/., however.
Anyway, my basic feeling is that I would basically regard this as a waste of my taxpayer yen, even though I know a lot of office work (and not just in government offices) is just sitting around while nothing happens. Actually, I sort of approve of government officials not doing anything, and sometimes think we'd be better off if there were even fewer of them not doing it. Still, I think it would be better if they were filling their time by reading stuff more relevant to their actual jobs, though I might cut them a bit more slack if they were doing it in English and improving their English writing skills...
Thats funny, cause with my customized mod options, your post ended up at -8. Gratz, your a douche.
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We need a new moderation option: -1 n00b
So why did you [Aranykai (1053846)] want to expose your stupidity? I'm not going to waste a foe ranking on you, but please feel free. In other words, a 7-digit user wants to criticize newbies in his sig (though you also meant "you're" for "your" in your inane body). That's almost as funny as Dubya trying to explain why blocking health insurance is somehow helpful to the affected children. (I included the quote just in case someone tells you how to make yourself look less stupid post facto.)
Frankly, based on your previous post, I'm quite honored to be in disagreement with you. I thought it was just a spineless third-rate lawyer on the theory that there are probably some lawyers on/. and that law-related threads might attract them. However, if you actually are a lawyer, then please add "stupid" to the list after "spineless". If you are actually a lawyer working for SCO, then I'd have to think up some new negative adjectives to include. So far only "witless" has come to mind...
If I thought the moderation system were curable by the current staff of/., I'd add a suggestion about using additional dimensions to make the ratings more meaningful. In this case, the hypergraph should be peaking in the flame dimension.
Do I know you, sir? You're handle is certainly familiar enough... Actually, if I do know you, then I retract the "sir".
And no, I do not read at -1 when I moderate because I do NOT play the game of moderation. "Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art." (Not sure I got the quote right, but not feeling motivated to check for/.'s sake.)
As regards the newsgroups, I sadly agree with you, whoever you are.
In another pig's eye. A corporation has *NO* brain and it creates *NOTHING*. It is the individuals within the corporation who do any actual thinking and any actual innovating. The notions that corporations are in somewhat similar to human beings or that corporations somehow deserve some of the rights accorded to humans are two of the most pernicious ones afflicting us, the actual human beings.
I'm not surprised you didn't want to put your name on such a stupid comment. My own settings actually ignore such stupid and anonymous cowards--but I stumbled across your post by accident as I checked something else.
So why did I reply? Because in your cowardly stupidity you have skirted around the edges of an actually important truth. It is possible that there is a 'higher form of intelligence' involved in corporations. However, from our perspective it would be more like the individual cells trying to understand what is going on with human intelligence in the creation of a novel. Yeah, the cells were involved, but they have no conception of what they contributed to. From that perspective, my current speculation is that perhaps the stock markets somehow express the higher level emergent intelligence--but my evidence is mostly negative. The stock prices surely don't seem to have any realistic relationships to the ostensible values of the companies. Google's market cap is over $100 billion? On what physical assets? Or even on what knowledge they actually own?
In a pig's eye, but thank you for making my point. Meta-moderation is *NEVER* off topic as long as/. asks about it in *EVERY* thread and and after *EVERY* posting. Of course YOU (the troll who marked it as off-topic) like the system. You're one of the BOFHs who is doing so much to make/. so worthless.
Re:Negative value reorganization of moderation?
on
Novell to SCO - Pay Up
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
After posting that/. sent me the famous and fabulous reminder:
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?
The premise of this question is that the moderation system has functioned properly. May I ask when that was? What I want now is a configuration setting so/. will stop asking me about meta-moderation. I've already expressed my meta-moderation opinion about the anonymous and elitist moderation system: It sucks. Quit bothering me about your god-d@mned worthless moderation system. I'd be unsurprised if 90% of the regular users would select such an option (excluding the moderating gamesters and the newbie suckers).
Go ahead and mod it off-topic--but it is *NOT*. Bad moderation pervades the entire/. system and therefore the topic of moderation (and meta-moderation) is never off-topic. Better some of the moderators should at least try to moderate some of the actually funny posts as funny, though such posts are far and few between these years.
My own pattern of/. usage is that I visit for a few weeks, get disgusted and bored and then I go away for a few months. This gives me a view of/. that is sort of like slow-motion photography. My main impression over the years is that "funny" mods are much less funny. Perhaps that's being imposed by external Bushevikian realities, but I think it's probably an internal thing, in that the funny people have mostly gotten disgusted with/. and quit using it. The second most likely hypothesis is that the mods are so bad that there are still some funny posts, but they aren't marked that way. Whatever the case, I still like humor--but/. is no longer a source.
I'm having a bit of trouble understanding this scenario. SCO's total market cap is now under $4 million. If that roughly represents the total value of the company, then where are they supposed to get the money to pay Novell? My understanding is that they owe Novell quite a bit more than that.
Anyway, the good part of this fiasco seems to be that it shows that IP blackmail is a lot riskier SCO thought it would be. I'm expecting IBM to pile on soon, just to make sure that SCO goes away and stops bothering them. Either that, or the guy with the wooden stake.
Patents were supposed to encourage innovation, but modern patent law has evolved in a way that makes it more of a hindrance than a help. You basically have to have a large corporation and a battery of lawyers behind you to support your patent application, and the corporations aren't even interested unless they are very sure they can see a path to big profits. For the corporations the big attraction is that the patent grants them monopoly profits, and they could not care less about the social values (or harms) of the innovations themselves. From that purely monetary perspective it makes perfect sense to focus on the value of patents for blocking competitors and for lawsuits--though SCO showed that the strategy doesn't always work.
I think the fundamental problem is that the values of patents are too highly variable, and this variability has completely overwhelmed the simple-minded idea of a temporary monopoly. There are cases where it makes sense to motivate innovation by the exclusive monopoly, but almost never for the specific period of time that is hard-coded into patent law. Some patents should lapse more quickly, though of course the companies will argue they should last *MUCH* longer, and they have a lot of lobbying money to push with. Some patentable ideas are very quick and inexpensive to develop, while others take years and lots of money, but patent law doesn't really consider such trivia.
The bottom line dynamic is that most innovation has to start within an individual, but patents have become a team sport. If you aren't on the right team, it doesn't really matter how innovative your ideas are. You're very unlikely to succeed at the patent game without such a team.
I'm seriously thinking about it. It's possible that the machine will be so nice that I'll use it for my regular light duty stuff (email and basic surfing). Given the current state of the Internet, I actually feel like it's less likely that the donated machine will help the target kid, but it's supposed to be the thought that counts, eh?
However, I wish the twofer offer had a provision for donating the second machine if it's too far from tolerable for my uses. I can afford to donate the 400 bucks to charity...
I meant complete and self-contained in the sense that it is encapsulated within a single person, and that should of been obvious from the context. In addition, the rules for language expansion are basically well defined, though that's much closer into the area of art. Shakespeare was an example of someone who was extremely good at coining expressions that caught on quite well. In recent years I think I've seen a number of good ideas crash and burn partly because they were named badly (though in those cases the idea is very often quickly revived with a better label).
You write so poorly that it's really hard to guess if you have an actual point or if you're just trolling. Let me reiterate that my point is that most communication is crucially dependent upon large numbers of shared mental models. We do not have any direct access to what is going on inside other people's heads. We basically guess what kind of mental models they have, and we link to them using various words and sentences. We can't transmit any of our mental models directly into another person's head. When we want to give someone one of our mental models, we can only try to coax them into building a similar mental model on their own inside their own head, and we have to do that by using the existing mental models 'over there'.
Another interesting aspect is to consider how authors create their stories. In many cases they have a complete mental model of an alternative universe right there in their head, and they take slices from it to produce many stories from the same alternative reality... From the perspective of the original topic, when you try to translate those stories into some other language, you need to reconstruct that alternative universe from completely different components. I'm kind of amazed that anything can be translated... I think it would be impossible except that we are over-engineered to be able to create language, too.
I think it would be too much trouble to filter out mods and seriously troublesome to display the mods to everyone. I was just thinking that your moderation reports would also say who made the negative mods (and also the signed positive mods). However, in the example you cited, if this person is giving out lots of unfair mods, then there would be lots of very pointed complaints about them.
As far as infinite mod points go, power corrupts. How much corruption could you do with an infinite number of mod points? I'm doubtful anyone should have more than 10 times the number of mod points compared to the smallest number. (Well, I think newbies (possible sock puppets) and abusers should perhaps be at zero mod points. Perhaps a 30-day cooling off period?)
However, with regards to the original accusation of the racist joke, I tried to trace out the parent post, and I couldn't find anything that was nearly as racist as the joke I couldn't remember...
Hear, hear regarding moderation. I flip flop between the two main problems in terms of which one causes more abuses, the anonymity or the elitism of the process. Off topic, but I think the way it *SHOULD* work would involve two changes. First, negative mods should not be anonymous (and there should be a configuration setting to sign all of your mods). Second, everyone should have mod points, though some people deserve to have slightly more than other people.
On the topic of racist jokes, has this one been told yet?
What's the difference between heaven and hell? In heaven you have an American salary, a British house, Chinese food, and a... a... Dang. I really can't figure out or remember any plausible version of it. I remember that hell had a Chinese salary and German policeman, but there was a Frenchman in there somewhere. Or was he Swiss? Also, there was an American wife and British food and a Japanese house, too. I think it's a bad sign that I can remember lots of the things from joke hell, but I can't get a fourth or fifth match for the heaven part...
Captain Mayhem, the master of mangled jokes rides again!
No, but apparently you link your mental models of "culture" and "language" in what I regard as an odd way.
A human language is a complete and self-contained system consisting of very large numbers of models of various concepts. Part of what "cow" means to me *IS* the other mental models that it links to, and if forms a completely unique network, not just within a culture, but within each individual.
The part that I'm most interested in these days is the lines between hardware and software in our mental modeling. For example "purple" is to a great degree some kind of hardware-linked model that activates when certain wavelengths of light strike our eyes, but "purple cow" is a software construct of a completely different sort.
Whatever you do, don't think about the purple cow, unless you are one.
Let me guess. You're an American, right? You think the only language that needs to survive is American English, right? Why should you have to deal with any of those ugly alien thoughts, especially the new and different ones.
Me, I don't think any of us have a perfect understanding of anything. Actually, one way to interpret Godel's theorem is to say that no language can do that. The various perspectives and representations all have some degree of validity and invalidity--but comparing them and thinking about the differences is especially interesting and sometimes even useful. As Dijkstra said (at least once), he found it very useful to try to translate any new idea into his other language. If he discovered that there were problems in the translation, it often signified that there was something wrong with his conception.
Perhaps a simple example will help clarify the point of how the data compression works for communication by language. If I say "cow" to you, I activate an entire group of mental models in your mind. They might include hamburgers or milkshakes or your childhood days on a farm. However, the main model should be a particular kind of largish animal. What happens if you say the word "cow" to someone from India? Well, even if he's fluent in English, he's likely to trigger quite a different set of mental models. Where you thought of "hamburgers" he may link to "sacred". If he isn't so fluent in English, the first step is likely to be a translation to some other language and the linked mental models are likely to be quite different from anything you were expecting.
Those other mental models are not wrong, but they are different. Some of them may work better for certain purposes than others, but that's the way of all problem solving. My theory is that asking the right question is about 90% of the work needed for finding the correct answer.
Hear, hear, and the low ranking is yet another tribute to the borkenness (sic) of the moderation system. However, this is a case where it is the elitism of the moderation system rather than its anonymity is causing the failure.
Returning to the topic at hand: An economic problem can only be meaningfully addressed on its own terms. SMTP pretends that email is free, but the sordid reality is that email is *NOT* free and never has been free--but the pretense allows the spammers to continue to imagine that they are dividing their costs by zero. If you are working on that dysfunctional economic model, then of course you should *ALWAYS* send out another million spams. If you catch one more sucker your RoI on zero is infinite.
The thing that amazes me about spam is that so much of it is clearly illegal and yet it is so clearly public and visible. Surely you've seen the recent spam with the counterfeit watch scammer who warns you that the Internet is full of scammers. You just can't trust any scammer except him? No, he should be arrested and charged with felony chutzpah.
Who told you to put a space before the question mark? It's wrong for English, though it common in certain European languages.
It might have been reasonable to complain about the lack of a space after the colon in the Subject: line, but that's a chronic/. problem. Look at every "Score:" line.
Quite a hot topic, eh? Yet I see over 200 comments and searching says that the word "religion" apparently hasn't been mentioned once? Amazing. It is *NOT* a coincidence that America is the most religious of the rich nations and also the very same one that is finding itself with increasing problems in finding enough people who want to pursue "anti-religious" scientific careers. What the OP is noticing and reporting is that other nations are not unwilling to pick our brains and get the knowledge that is still present in our universities. However, in a few years I doubt we'll have much to offer them in that regard.
At least immigration was mentioned in the discussion. A lot of America's wealth was created by science and technology--and a whole lot of that was created by first and second generation immigrants. Yeah, the same kind of immigrants the current politicians are increasingly determined to keep out of the country. Speaking as a grandchild of immigrants and as an immigrant myself, I believe the experience of moving to and living in a different society is extremely thought-provoking and educational all by itself. No wonder so many ambitious immigrants and their inspired-by-their-parents children have been technical leaders and innovators.
My deeper theory is that the real story of the wealth of America is mostly that land is wealth. That was a great thing for 'creating wealth' when all you had to do was kick a few injuns off the land, but those days are long gone. Now pretty much all of the wealth has been converted, and there isn't any more free land. No 'new wealth' coming from that source. Right now the Americans are mostly just selling their wealth off to clever foreigners, including a lot of the best land.
Or maybe those foreigners aren't so clever after all? They're taking the payments in dollars...
Linux will never 'take off' until the Linux people stop answering almost every question with the equivalent of "Go in the kitchen and cook it yourself." Most people just want to at a tasty Linux sandwich, and they have no aspirations to be master chefs.
As far as I know, Ubuntu is the only distro that mostly understands this. Just a coincidence that it's the most popular desktop?
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I sort of agree with you insofar as both parties have been captured by big business interests. Getting the big money out of politics would be a very good thing, though I don't see any easy path to doing so... However, there is a difference in relative priorities, and it is clear that the neo-GOP is completely focused on the money, whereas the old GOP had and the Democrats still have some other principles as well.
Since it is very clear that privacy considerations have zero traction with the current American government, we basically have two options: Can we evolve in a more constructive direction (which means the neo-GOP must be removed first of all), or does there have to be a violent revolution? It seems very clear that certain governments (especially in Europe) are deliberately trying to evolve in the direction of favoring individual rights and privacy. If you believe that freedom and democracy confer competitive advantages, and if you think they are linked to such rights as privacy, then you must conclude that they are moving in a constructive and more competitive direction.
Revolution? Well, sometimes violent revolutions cannot be avoided. The problem there is that the outcome is never certain. On the average, the new systems are better than the old ones--but that's a big historical average, and there are plenty of times when things get worse before they get better. The one thing certain about a real revolution is that lots of people get hurt, even killed. I don't like that, and you can't convince me it's the only way to make things better. We're human beings, not mindless beasts that can only evolve mindlessly.
Me, I'd prefer to believe that just getting back to the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights would be a big step forward after the last few years. Some of the real Republicans might work for that, but not the neo-GOP politicians that still control what's left of the GOP.
Each time I post /. sends that invitation. So why don't I hop over and help the meta-moderation? Quit nagging me. Why would anyone waste time on meta-moderation? At least I understand the moderators' motivations. They're just tin-plated dictators with delusions of godhood.
I'll believe they [the big companies and the government together in this case] are sincere about my privacy when they agree to store my personal information on *MY* disk space. Whenever they want to look at my personal information they need to tell me why, and I should have the right to say yea or nay to that request. Right now they claim that my personal information belongs to them, and there's no way for me to know anything about what they are doing with it.
In this case, my phone records should be stored on my own equipment, and if they need to doublecheck it, they can show probable cause and get a search warrant. The records can be signed to prevent me from tampering with them, but they have no good reason to own those records.
The *REAL* problem is that the Dubya's government and the big companies want to own our souls.
Picking on Google because of their prominence, but this is how Gmail could be designed to really respect my privacy by storing the data on my own computer. (This would also take care of the 2 GB limitation.)
The email and the indexes would live on my machine. When I reading some email with Gmail, it would scan the email and send only the appropriate keywords to Google, and they would respond with the appropriate ads to be displayed in the appropriate boxes on my computer--but they would not have any direct access to my email once I had received it.
This would actually open up a new field of backup services for email. Google could encrypt the email on my machine and backup only the encrypted data at their end. The encryption and decryption key need never be seen at their end--though of course I need to store them somewhere apart from the machine that is being backed up. They could also provide email syncing services in the same way without ever seeing the clear data that is being synced.
I'll believe they [the big companies and the government] are sincere about my privacy when they agree to store my personal information on *MY* disk space. Whenever they want to look at my personal information they need to tell me why, and I should have the right to say yea or nay to that request. Right now they claim that my personal information belongs to them, and there's no way for me to know anything about what they are doing with it.
In more detail, this should actually be implemented by my settings of my privacy preferences. Most requests would be handled routinely without my needing to consider them in detail. For example, if I'm requesting a loan from my bank and they want to check my credit history, then my privacy policy would be to check that it was really my bank and that I had really initiated the loan request, and then they could look at the required information. If they need to compile some summary statistics, I'd agree for them to look at some of my information long enough to tally it. Etc., etc.
If they need to make sure that I don't tamper with my data, they can sign it and put a checksum on it, and I won't be able to tamper with it. There are actually technologies that would still allow me to see what the information is even in that case. Actually, any technical problem you want to point at, I can refer you to the solutions. They are already published in the literature.
The *REAL* problem is that the companies want to own us.
Hmm... It's pretty hard to define work-related surfing. I don't think it was /., but some other non-official source where I first heard about a major business deal that had really large effects on my division of the company. That was several extra days of warning to help brace myself before the 'stuff' started officially hitting the fan.
/. grapevine via Scotland. I could even read bits of the Japanese newspapers on it... Not worth the effort for the sake of /., however.
With regards to this topic I'm kind of embarrassed to be so far behind the curve, since I live in Japan and I should have heard this story a day or two before it got to the
Anyway, my basic feeling is that I would basically regard this as a waste of my taxpayer yen, even though I know a lot of office work (and not just in government offices) is just sitting around while nothing happens. Actually, I sort of approve of government officials not doing anything, and sometimes think we'd be better off if there were even fewer of them not doing it. Still, I think it would be better if they were filling their time by reading stuff more relevant to their actual jobs, though I might cut them a bit more slack if they were doing it in English and improving their English writing skills...
So why did you [Aranykai (1053846)] want to expose your stupidity? I'm not going to waste a foe ranking on you, but please feel free. In other words, a 7-digit user wants to criticize newbies in his sig (though you also meant "you're" for "your" in your inane body). That's almost as funny as Dubya trying to explain why blocking health insurance is somehow helpful to the affected children. (I included the quote just in case someone tells you how to make yourself look less stupid post facto.)
Frankly, based on your previous post, I'm quite honored to be in disagreement with you. I thought it was just a spineless third-rate lawyer on the theory that there are probably some lawyers on /. and that law-related threads might attract them. However, if you actually are a lawyer, then please add "stupid" to the list after "spineless". If you are actually a lawyer working for SCO, then I'd have to think up some new negative adjectives to include. So far only "witless" has come to mind...
If I thought the moderation system were curable by the current staff of /., I'd add a suggestion about using additional dimensions to make the ratings more meaningful. In this case, the hypergraph should be peaking in the flame dimension.
Do I know you, sir? You're handle is certainly familiar enough... Actually, if I do know you, then I retract the "sir".
/.'s sake.)
And no, I do not read at -1 when I moderate because I do NOT play the game of moderation. "Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art." (Not sure I got the quote right, but not feeling motivated to check for
As regards the newsgroups, I sadly agree with you, whoever you are.
In another pig's eye. A corporation has *NO* brain and it creates *NOTHING*. It is the individuals within the corporation who do any actual thinking and any actual innovating. The notions that corporations are in somewhat similar to human beings or that corporations somehow deserve some of the rights accorded to humans are two of the most pernicious ones afflicting us, the actual human beings.
I'm not surprised you didn't want to put your name on such a stupid comment. My own settings actually ignore such stupid and anonymous cowards--but I stumbled across your post by accident as I checked something else.
So why did I reply? Because in your cowardly stupidity you have skirted around the edges of an actually important truth. It is possible that there is a 'higher form of intelligence' involved in corporations. However, from our perspective it would be more like the individual cells trying to understand what is going on with human intelligence in the creation of a novel. Yeah, the cells were involved, but they have no conception of what they contributed to. From that perspective, my current speculation is that perhaps the stock markets somehow express the higher level emergent intelligence--but my evidence is mostly negative. The stock prices surely don't seem to have any realistic relationships to the ostensible values of the companies. Google's market cap is over $100 billion? On what physical assets? Or even on what knowledge they actually own?
In a pig's eye, but thank you for making my point. Meta-moderation is *NEVER* off topic as long as /. asks about it in *EVERY* thread and and after *EVERY* posting. Of course YOU (the troll who marked it as off-topic) like the system. You're one of the BOFHs who is doing so much to make /. so worthless.
After posting that /. sent me the famous and fabulous reminder:
The premise of this question is that the moderation system has functioned properly. May I ask when that was? What I want now is a configuration setting so /. will stop asking me about meta-moderation. I've already expressed my meta-moderation opinion about the anonymous and elitist moderation system: It sucks. Quit bothering me about your god-d@mned worthless moderation system. I'd be unsurprised if 90% of the regular users would select such an option (excluding the moderating gamesters and the newbie suckers).
Go ahead and mod it off-topic--but it is *NOT*. Bad moderation pervades the entire /. system and therefore the topic of moderation (and meta-moderation) is never off-topic. Better some of the moderators should at least try to moderate some of the actually funny posts as funny, though such posts are far and few between these years.
My own pattern of /. usage is that I visit for a few weeks, get disgusted and bored and then I go away for a few months. This gives me a view of /. that is sort of like slow-motion photography. My main impression over the years is that "funny" mods are much less funny. Perhaps that's being imposed by external Bushevikian realities, but I think it's probably an internal thing, in that the funny people have mostly gotten disgusted with /. and quit using it. The second most likely hypothesis is that the mods are so bad that there are still some funny posts, but they aren't marked that way. Whatever the case, I still like humor--but /. is no longer a source.
I'm having a bit of trouble understanding this scenario. SCO's total market cap is now under $4 million. If that roughly represents the total value of the company, then where are they supposed to get the money to pay Novell? My understanding is that they owe Novell quite a bit more than that.
Anyway, the good part of this fiasco seems to be that it shows that IP blackmail is a lot riskier SCO thought it would be. I'm expecting IBM to pile on soon, just to make sure that SCO goes away and stops bothering them. Either that, or the guy with the wooden stake.
P.S. The innovation that /. needs is to dump the metamoderation and fix the moderation. No patents available there.
Patents were supposed to encourage innovation, but modern patent law has evolved in a way that makes it more of a hindrance than a help. You basically have to have a large corporation and a battery of lawyers behind you to support your patent application, and the corporations aren't even interested unless they are very sure they can see a path to big profits. For the corporations the big attraction is that the patent grants them monopoly profits, and they could not care less about the social values (or harms) of the innovations themselves. From that purely monetary perspective it makes perfect sense to focus on the value of patents for blocking competitors and for lawsuits--though SCO showed that the strategy doesn't always work.
I think the fundamental problem is that the values of patents are too highly variable, and this variability has completely overwhelmed the simple-minded idea of a temporary monopoly. There are cases where it makes sense to motivate innovation by the exclusive monopoly, but almost never for the specific period of time that is hard-coded into patent law. Some patents should lapse more quickly, though of course the companies will argue they should last *MUCH* longer, and they have a lot of lobbying money to push with. Some patentable ideas are very quick and inexpensive to develop, while others take years and lots of money, but patent law doesn't really consider such trivia.
The bottom line dynamic is that most innovation has to start within an individual, but patents have become a team sport. If you aren't on the right team, it doesn't really matter how innovative your ideas are. You're very unlikely to succeed at the patent game without such a team.
My own crank? Sounds like a boss I worked for some years ago...
How complicated will it be to get a suitable crank? I'm wondering if there will be a big market for accessories for this thing.
I'm seriously thinking about it. It's possible that the machine will be so nice that I'll use it for my regular light duty stuff (email and basic surfing). Given the current state of the Internet, I actually feel like it's less likely that the donated machine will help the target kid, but it's supposed to be the thought that counts, eh?
However, I wish the twofer offer had a provision for donating the second machine if it's too far from tolerable for my uses. I can afford to donate the 400 bucks to charity...
I meant complete and self-contained in the sense that it is encapsulated within a single person, and that should of been obvious from the context. In addition, the rules for language expansion are basically well defined, though that's much closer into the area of art. Shakespeare was an example of someone who was extremely good at coining expressions that caught on quite well. In recent years I think I've seen a number of good ideas crash and burn partly because they were named badly (though in those cases the idea is very often quickly revived with a better label).
You write so poorly that it's really hard to guess if you have an actual point or if you're just trolling. Let me reiterate that my point is that most communication is crucially dependent upon large numbers of shared mental models. We do not have any direct access to what is going on inside other people's heads. We basically guess what kind of mental models they have, and we link to them using various words and sentences. We can't transmit any of our mental models directly into another person's head. When we want to give someone one of our mental models, we can only try to coax them into building a similar mental model on their own inside their own head, and we have to do that by using the existing mental models 'over there'.
Another interesting aspect is to consider how authors create their stories. In many cases they have a complete mental model of an alternative universe right there in their head, and they take slices from it to produce many stories from the same alternative reality... From the perspective of the original topic, when you try to translate those stories into some other language, you need to reconstruct that alternative universe from completely different components. I'm kind of amazed that anything can be translated... I think it would be impossible except that we are over-engineered to be able to create language, too.
I think it would be too much trouble to filter out mods and seriously troublesome to display the mods to everyone. I was just thinking that your moderation reports would also say who made the negative mods (and also the signed positive mods). However, in the example you cited, if this person is giving out lots of unfair mods, then there would be lots of very pointed complaints about them.
As far as infinite mod points go, power corrupts. How much corruption could you do with an infinite number of mod points? I'm doubtful anyone should have more than 10 times the number of mod points compared to the smallest number. (Well, I think newbies (possible sock puppets) and abusers should perhaps be at zero mod points. Perhaps a 30-day cooling off period?)
However, with regards to the original accusation of the racist joke, I tried to trace out the parent post, and I couldn't find anything that was nearly as racist as the joke I couldn't remember...
Hear, hear regarding moderation. I flip flop between the two main problems in terms of which one causes more abuses, the anonymity or the elitism of the process. Off topic, but I think the way it *SHOULD* work would involve two changes. First, negative mods should not be anonymous (and there should be a configuration setting to sign all of your mods). Second, everyone should have mod points, though some people deserve to have slightly more than other people.
On the topic of racist jokes, has this one been told yet?
What's the difference between heaven and hell? In heaven you have an American salary, a British house, Chinese food, and a... a... Dang. I really can't figure out or remember any plausible version of it. I remember that hell had a Chinese salary and German policeman, but there was a Frenchman in there somewhere. Or was he Swiss? Also, there was an American wife and British food and a Japanese house, too. I think it's a bad sign that I can remember lots of the things from joke hell, but I can't get a fourth or fifth match for the heaven part...
Captain Mayhem, the master of mangled jokes rides again!
No, but apparently you link your mental models of "culture" and "language" in what I regard as an odd way.
A human language is a complete and self-contained system consisting of very large numbers of models of various concepts. Part of what "cow" means to me *IS* the other mental models that it links to, and if forms a completely unique network, not just within a culture, but within each individual.
The part that I'm most interested in these days is the lines between hardware and software in our mental modeling. For example "purple" is to a great degree some kind of hardware-linked model that activates when certain wavelengths of light strike our eyes, but "purple cow" is a software construct of a completely different sort.
Whatever you do, don't think about the purple cow, unless you are one.
Let me guess. You're an American, right? You think the only language that needs to survive is American English, right? Why should you have to deal with any of those ugly alien thoughts, especially the new and different ones.
Me, I don't think any of us have a perfect understanding of anything. Actually, one way to interpret Godel's theorem is to say that no language can do that. The various perspectives and representations all have some degree of validity and invalidity--but comparing them and thinking about the differences is especially interesting and sometimes even useful. As Dijkstra said (at least once), he found it very useful to try to translate any new idea into his other language. If he discovered that there were problems in the translation, it often signified that there was something wrong with his conception.
Perhaps a simple example will help clarify the point of how the data compression works for communication by language. If I say "cow" to you, I activate an entire group of mental models in your mind. They might include hamburgers or milkshakes or your childhood days on a farm. However, the main model should be a particular kind of largish animal. What happens if you say the word "cow" to someone from India? Well, even if he's fluent in English, he's likely to trigger quite a different set of mental models. Where you thought of "hamburgers" he may link to "sacred". If he isn't so fluent in English, the first step is likely to be a translation to some other language and the linked mental models are likely to be quite different from anything you were expecting.
Those other mental models are not wrong, but they are different. Some of them may work better for certain purposes than others, but that's the way of all problem solving. My theory is that asking the right question is about 90% of the work needed for finding the correct answer.
Hear, hear, and the low ranking is yet another tribute to the borkenness (sic) of the moderation system. However, this is a case where it is the elitism of the moderation system rather than its anonymity is causing the failure.
Returning to the topic at hand: An economic problem can only be meaningfully addressed on its own terms. SMTP pretends that email is free, but the sordid reality is that email is *NOT* free and never has been free--but the pretense allows the spammers to continue to imagine that they are dividing their costs by zero. If you are working on that dysfunctional economic model, then of course you should *ALWAYS* send out another million spams. If you catch one more sucker your RoI on zero is infinite.
The thing that amazes me about spam is that so much of it is clearly illegal and yet it is so clearly public and visible. Surely you've seen the recent spam with the counterfeit watch scammer who warns you that the Internet is full of scammers. You just can't trust any scammer except him? No, he should be arrested and charged with felony chutzpah.
Who told you to put a space before the question mark? It's wrong for English, though it common in certain European languages.
/. problem. Look at every "Score:" line.
It might have been reasonable to complain about the lack of a space after the colon in the Subject: line, but that's a chronic
Quite a hot topic, eh? Yet I see over 200 comments and searching says that the word "religion" apparently hasn't been mentioned once? Amazing. It is *NOT* a coincidence that America is the most religious of the rich nations and also the very same one that is finding itself with increasing problems in finding enough people who want to pursue "anti-religious" scientific careers. What the OP is noticing and reporting is that other nations are not unwilling to pick our brains and get the knowledge that is still present in our universities. However, in a few years I doubt we'll have much to offer them in that regard.
At least immigration was mentioned in the discussion. A lot of America's wealth was created by science and technology--and a whole lot of that was created by first and second generation immigrants. Yeah, the same kind of immigrants the current politicians are increasingly determined to keep out of the country. Speaking as a grandchild of immigrants and as an immigrant myself, I believe the experience of moving to and living in a different society is extremely thought-provoking and educational all by itself. No wonder so many ambitious immigrants and their inspired-by-their-parents children have been technical leaders and innovators.
My deeper theory is that the real story of the wealth of America is mostly that land is wealth. That was a great thing for 'creating wealth' when all you had to do was kick a few injuns off the land, but those days are long gone. Now pretty much all of the wealth has been converted, and there isn't any more free land. No 'new wealth' coming from that source. Right now the Americans are mostly just selling their wealth off to clever foreigners, including a lot of the best land.
Or maybe those foreigners aren't so clever after all? They're taking the payments in dollars...
Linux will never 'take off' until the Linux people stop answering almost every question with the equivalent of "Go in the kitchen and cook it yourself." Most people just want to at a tasty Linux sandwich, and they have no aspirations to be master chefs.
As far as I know, Ubuntu is the only distro that mostly understands this. Just a coincidence that it's the most popular desktop?