We listened to your comments, and those of some of our users. We came around to your point of view that the bar was being set too high for new topic creation. And so we've changed the policy for new topic creation. See http://www.cogitooptimus.com/2007/02/11/new-rules- for-topic-creation/.
I think there's a larger point that you are missing. All of the entities listed in your second sentence are employees themselves. So employees (which includes "managers," "project leaders," and even "founders") writing about conditions in their company isn't societally recursive, while what you're suggesting would be.
Nobody -- HR manager, project leader, etc. -- is prohibited from registering on TrenchMice and rating their company.
http://www.trenchmice.com/account/compare compares the account levels, and it does say that a bronze account allows for topic creations... Maybe it needs to be clearer?
The scenario you raise is certainly possible. If that user finds absolutely nothing else to comment on in the entire site, then I agree with you that he/she won't be able to easily build up cred. OTOH, the site is seeded with lots of pacific northwest companies. So one would hope that the chances of this scenario happening are small for where the focus is now, and the answer is "just" to seed the database with topics for more cities. (Maybe, maybe not.)
No, you're wrong. A bronze account can create topics, and it's free.
What is true is that you can't create topics as a bronze account immediately. You need to build up your "cred rating" a little bit first, which you can do by posting scoops or comments that other members rate favorably.
With fuckedcompany.com, everything is anonymous and there's no peer review of what's submitted. And you don't get to choose what's on the front page. Joe Smith submits a story about Foobar Co., and you don't know who Joe is, what kind of credibility he has, or anything. That's a big difference.
True enough, good point. I have had many problems with customer service on cards issued by "First USA" or "MBNA" (I might have a couple of those letters mixed up...:-) ). They're atrocious.
Amex, OTOH, has been tremendous. "Yes sir, which charge did you want removed? No problem, sir."
Another moral is, never never never use PayPal. There are many stories of Paypal's lack of action, and worse, on bad deals from users who got screwed.
I've very happy your story ended well, but there are many other buyers who Paypal left holding the bag even though they used a credit card. Do a Google search for, "paypal sucks"...
AFAIC, if a seller won't use escrow or accept credit cards directly, then I only will do transactions for trivial amounts. If the transaction's for a large amount, I won't use Paypal, period.
I tried to get a startup off the ground last year, and failed partly because our product had features that were going to be in Longhornn. "Longhorn will be out in 2005, how will you compete"? Sigh...
The difficulty here is that the effort to get "public" information is part of how we have traditionally shielded our personal privacy.
To wit, if you live in LA and I live in Seattle, if there's a ton of information "public" about you in an LA courthouse, it's very hard for me to get at it. It may be legal for me to get at it, but it is harder. If you piss me off with a comment in a Usenet newsgroup, I can't easily start drilling into your life.
But if I can surf the web or run a program from my home and dig up information on you, it's far easier for me to harass you from afar.
There are valid arguments on both side of the issue. Yes, public information should be equally accessible to all. Yes, easy accessibility makes it easier for unscrupulous characters to get leverage on you from afar. Ever been stalked?
There have for some time been a plethora of web-based services allowing you do exactly the same kind of background checking, with the same level of business license verification. (Or non-verification, depending on your point of view...)
This is really more of a packaging / marketing / merchandising issue, than a technical or even a legal issue.
In fact, since surfing the web is much easier than installing software, I wonder if this product will cause any increase in the occasions of misuse of background checking. Anyone who wants to do it but shouldn't be able to, already can take a crack at it via the web.
Neat technology, but I'm getting a deja-Segaway feeling.
The cost/benefit between a 3D butler greeting you at the door that communicates with your PDA and whatnot, and a paper sign taped to the wall, is completely out of whack.
Applicable for some very complex and large social situations, yes. But don't sell your stock in magic markers yet.
I've yet to hear a cogent statement of the problem that electronic voting will fix.
Many of the statements sound similar to the first comments about office automation. Computing was introduced into the office "just because", without a lot of thought going into which procedures should be automated vs. eliminated entirely vs. left alone.
A paper ballot (be it punch card, pencil fill in, or what have you) can't crash, is a permanent record (yeah yeah, they can be destroyed, but so can anything made up of atoms. I'll drop a stack of paper from 5' and you drop a touch screen from 5', we'll see which one survives), and can't be easily intercepted or altered without evidence of tampering.
What problem are electronic voting advocates trying to solve?
So what? There are incompatibilities between any two versions of any software. You want to get semantic? Fine -- the only software that will work 100% like Office 2003 is Office 2003.
The fact remains that the only software that will work 100% like Microsoft Office is Microsoft Office. (Inter-version incompatibilities and all.)
This comment is moderated as Funny, but it has a point.
DRM is doomed to fail as a rights-protection mechanism, because at some point every content goes to analog, and can therefore be stolen at the digital::analog transition. But it does have an application in authenticating the "chain of evidence" in a case.
"The documents (from the engineers) really did not go into the kind of depth and detail that we already had," Readdy said, who faulted the two engineers' reports for their "superficial" analysis.
This one sentence bloew me away. A NASA manager faulting an engineer for being superficial is just so funny.
Virtually every NASA disaster (and certainly the most emotionally distressing ones, with a loss of life) can be traced to management and not technical decisions.
The "old school" hacker might answer that being a hacker isn't something to be ashamed of. If the company on the rest of the list was cool, then being on the list would also be cool. And most of the names on that list are pretty cool, IMHO.
Anyway, someone who really understands what they are doing (i.e. not a script kiddie, someone just cutting and pasting code) would be able to hide their tracks in any case -- regardless of whether they were on some list somewhere.
Prediction: You'll never see any of the kids written about in that NYT article in this hall of fame.
Yes, but telescopes on the ground are far easier to get to (physically, or on a network), cheaper per inch to build, and cheaper per inch to service. The TCO is way lower than something the size of a truck in orbit.
The downside that you've mentioned is a pretty big one.:-) But there's a very powerful argument to be made for ground-based systems if adaptive optics can do the job, for a reasonable cost.
Slashdot Mirror
We listened to your comments, and those of some of our users. We came around to your point of view that the bar was being set too high for new topic creation. And so we've changed the policy for new topic creation. See http://www.cogitooptimus.com/2007/02/11/new-rules- for-topic-creation/.
They could try. But if their information was incorrect, it should be "modded down" by the other users of the site.
The same question can be asked of slashdot. Yet many come here every day...
I think there's a larger point that you are missing. All of the entities listed in your second sentence are employees themselves. So employees (which includes "managers," "project leaders," and even "founders") writing about conditions in their company isn't societally recursive, while what you're suggesting would be.
Nobody -- HR manager, project leader, etc. -- is prohibited from registering on TrenchMice and rating their company.
http://www.trenchmice.com/account/compare compares the account levels, and it does say that a bronze account allows for topic creations... Maybe it needs to be clearer?
The scenario you raise is certainly possible. If that user finds absolutely nothing else to comment on in the entire site, then I agree with you that he/she won't be able to easily build up cred. OTOH, the site is seeded with lots of pacific northwest companies. So one would hope that the chances of this scenario happening are small for where the focus is now, and the answer is "just" to seed the database with topics for more cities. (Maybe, maybe not.)
Hmm. Do subpoenas fly like confetti at /.? Digg? Epinions.com? The scores of restaurant review websites?
No, you're wrong. A bronze account can create topics, and it's free.
What is true is that you can't create topics as a bronze account immediately. You need to build up your "cred rating" a little bit first, which you can do by posting scoops or comments that other members rate favorably.
With fuckedcompany.com, everything is anonymous and there's no peer review of what's submitted. And you don't get to choose what's on the front page. Joe Smith submits a story about Foobar Co., and you don't know who Joe is, what kind of credibility he has, or anything. That's a big difference.
True enough, good point. I have had many problems with customer service on cards issued by "First USA" or "MBNA" (I might have a couple of those letters mixed up... :-) ). They're atrocious.
Amex, OTOH, has been tremendous. "Yes sir, which charge did you want removed? No problem, sir."
Another moral is, never never never use PayPal. There are many stories of Paypal's lack of action, and worse, on bad deals from users who got screwed.
I've very happy your story ended well, but there are many other buyers who Paypal left holding the bag even though they used a credit card. Do a Google search for, "paypal sucks"...
AFAIC, if a seller won't use escrow or accept credit cards directly, then I only will do transactions for trivial amounts. If the transaction's for a large amount, I won't use Paypal, period.
I tried to get a startup off the ground last year, and failed partly because our product had features that were going to be in Longhornn. "Longhorn will be out in 2005, how will you compete"? Sigh...
The difficulty here is that the effort to get "public" information is part of how we have traditionally shielded our personal privacy.
To wit, if you live in LA and I live in Seattle, if there's a ton of information "public" about you in an LA courthouse, it's very hard for me to get at it. It may be legal for me to get at it, but it is harder. If you piss me off with a comment in a Usenet newsgroup, I can't easily start drilling into your life.
But if I can surf the web or run a program from my home and dig up information on you, it's far easier for me to harass you from afar.
There are valid arguments on both side of the issue. Yes, public information should be equally accessible to all. Yes, easy accessibility makes it easier for unscrupulous characters to get leverage on you from afar. Ever been stalked?
There have for some time been a plethora of web-based services allowing you do exactly the same kind of background checking, with the same level of business license verification. (Or non-verification, depending on your point of view...)
This is really more of a packaging / marketing / merchandising issue, than a technical or even a legal issue.
In fact, since surfing the web is much easier than installing software, I wonder if this product will cause any increase in the occasions of misuse of background checking. Anyone who wants to do it but shouldn't be able to, already can take a crack at it via the web.
Neat technology, but I'm getting a deja-Segaway feeling.
The cost/benefit between a 3D butler greeting you at the door that communicates with your PDA and whatnot, and a paper sign taped to the wall, is completely out of whack.
Applicable for some very complex and large social situations, yes. But don't sell your stock in magic markers yet.
What I learned during the boom years was to not trust anything I read in "Fast Company".
They were a significant part of the hype engine for those years, and it's slightly galling for them to pose as a source of wisdom for the ages.
I've yet to hear a cogent statement of the problem that electronic voting will fix.
Many of the statements sound similar to the first comments about office automation. Computing was introduced into the office "just because", without a lot of thought going into which procedures should be automated vs. eliminated entirely vs. left alone.
A paper ballot (be it punch card, pencil fill in, or what have you) can't crash, is a permanent record (yeah yeah, they can be destroyed, but so can anything made up of atoms. I'll drop a stack of paper from 5' and you drop a touch screen from 5', we'll see which one survives), and can't be easily intercepted or altered without evidence of tampering.
What problem are electronic voting advocates trying to solve?
So what? There are incompatibilities between any two versions of any software. You want to get semantic? Fine -- the only software that will work 100% like Office 2003 is Office 2003.
The fact remains that the only software that will work 100% like Microsoft Office is Microsoft Office. (Inter-version incompatibilities and all.)
Because the only software that will be 100% compatible with Microsoft Office is Microsoft Office.
This is the billionth time this opinion has been voiced in /. over the last two days. Why is it moded as Informative?
This comment is moderated as Funny, but it has a point.
DRM is doomed to fail as a rights-protection mechanism, because at some point every content goes to analog, and can therefore be stolen at the digital::analog transition. But it does have an application in authenticating the "chain of evidence" in a case.
"The documents (from the engineers) really did not go into the kind of depth and detail that we already had," Readdy said, who faulted the two engineers' reports for their "superficial" analysis.
This one sentence bloew me away. A NASA manager faulting an engineer for being superficial is just so funny.
Virtually every NASA disaster (and certainly the most emotionally distressing ones, with a loss of life) can be traced to management and not technical decisions.
The "old school" hacker might answer that being a hacker isn't something to be ashamed of. If the company on the rest of the list was cool, then being on the list would also be cool. And most of the names on that list are pretty cool, IMHO.
Anyway, someone who really understands what they are doing (i.e. not a script kiddie, someone just cutting and pasting code) would be able to hide their tracks in any case -- regardless of whether they were on some list somewhere.
Prediction: You'll never see any of the kids written about in that NYT article in this hall of fame.
Crawlers by John Shirley was much better. It will scare your socks off.
Actually, many of the stories in the last few months have been about President Bush talking about going back
:-) I'd pay for him to go, though. One way.
I didn't know that Bush was ever there.
I yearn for the days when we as a people were excited about discovery for Discovery's Sake. Sigh.
Every time I see "2001: A Space Odyssey", I get depressed. We won't have what seemed reasonable in 1968 for 2001 until the year 3000, at this rate.
Yes, but telescopes on the ground are far easier to get to (physically, or on a network), cheaper per inch to build, and cheaper per inch to service. The TCO is way lower than something the size of a truck in orbit.
:-) But there's a very powerful argument to be made for ground-based systems if adaptive optics can do the job, for a reasonable cost.
The downside that you've mentioned is a pretty big one.