"It seems to me that the government isn't trying to control ideas, it is trying to compete in the market place of ideas.... It seems to me that it is the government's DUTY to release information if they think the news is reporting false information."
If they want to compete fairly in the marketplace of ideas, that's fine. But I don't think they are going to have their own internal watchdogs who are voraciously going after the facts and are going to ask tough questions. Certainly, they'll want to counter false information, but it would make their lives so much easier to spread propaganda. So it's one thing to go after 'the truth', but I have a feeling they will just be a stronger media spin department.
That's not a problem if you believe that everything is spin, and everybody has their own opinions and perspectives, and nobody's is better than the others'. I disagree -- I believe that some ideas and opinions are more accurate.
We can probably never get to the whole, complete truth. But I think we can get stories that are more accurate and complete than others. It's not just a game of who can tell a better story. There is an objective reality.
And a major problem is that the government an 'official' source and has 'experts'. When people hear those words, they turn off their critical thinking skills, and accept whatever the official expert tells them. After all, I'm not smarter or as smart as an expert, am I? So, if the military, or any other government organization, sets up a news arm, they get a free pass as the official source.
No, I don't think that the civil war fits either of my criteria.
The utter destruction of cities and massive *civilian* casualties of WWI and WWII are nothing compared to the military casualties of the American civil war. The American civil war were soldiers shooting at soldiers with hand-loaded rifles. There were gatling guns and canons, but they were used against armies, not cities and civilians. WWI and II were fought with tanks, planes, bombs, and also nuclear and chemical weapons. Sure, Sherman marches to the sea and burned down one city, Atlanta, but the torching of wooden buildings is quite different from thousands of firebombs falling randomly out of the sky, destroying entire cities and killing thousands of civilians in a matter hours.
When I say 'somebody else', I mean another culture, another language, another legal system that has no right in anyone's mind to claim that they are the legal ruling authority.
In the American civil war, there were people in both the North and the South that felt that the South had the legal right, under the constitution, to break away from the nation. There were also those in both the North and South who felt that the South didn't have a right to break away. It was an internal dispute, and reasonable people were in dispute about what the constitution meant, and what really was the legal right of states. There's no way you can argue the North was a foriegn power, any more than Cleveland and Cincinnati are foreign to each other.
Compare that with Hitler's invasion of Poland and France -- I doubt there were many in Poland or France who felt that Germany had rightly reclaimed their historical 'lebensraum', and deserved to rule their countries. They were another people, speaking another language, with a different culture, legal system, etc.
Regardless of how people felt about succession, there were still almost 100 years of shared history as a single country with a single, unified government and legal system. There was also a broadly shared culture and a common language. Yes, there were differences between the north and south, and also between cities, but it's nothing like in Europe were traveling forty minutes by train brings you to another country with another language, another government, another history, another cuisine, etc.
As far as memories are concerned, nobody alive today can remember the civil war. They weren't alive then. If you read a book, hear a re-telling, or watch a movie or documentary, you are imagining what it was like back then, not remembering. They know the history, but they are not remembering it. By contrast, there are still lots of people alive today -- although they are elderly, they lived through and thus can remember WWI and WWII. Their fathers fought in WWI and they hid in bomb shelters with their mother and siblings, and they went off to fight in WWII.
I think that given the 'post-9/11' world we live in, there is no way the US government is going to allow Seagate to sell encryption technology that is totally under user control. When they are chasing down terrorists, why would they want to rely on the suspect for the key? Just call up Seagate and get it.
What I meant to write was that 'we have never lost a war on our soil'.
For me, the implication is that the death, carnage, and destruction of war was never really imprinted on the American consciousness, which is why we willing to do stupid things like liberate the Iraqi people. Now 600,000 Iraqis are dead from our foolishness and arrogance, but our war is still just.
The civil war was a violent hammering out of our internal disagreements. We have never had a long, drawn out war with 'someone else' where our major cities were bombed out, and we were ruled by another government. The idea that that could happen, and after decades or centuries American culture and identity would survive and re-emerge, is totally absent from American consciousness. We have no sense of history. Our history books start with the pilgrims landing on Plymouth rock. What happened in the rest of the world may as well have happened in another universe.
There is still the idea that America *as it is now* is the sole light on the hill, the one beacon of freedom and democracy for the world. If America were to change in any way, it would no longer really be America, and thus any hope for the world would be extinguished.
This probably has a lot to do with out rivalry with Russia and the threat of nuclear annihilation -- at that time, the 'end of the United States' very well may have meant the end of the human race.
If they had made a stink about it, or, God forbid, raised the issue of the filibuster, the Tough on Terror Bush supporters would turn out in droves in the election and ensure a democrat defeat.
In order to win one of the houses, they have to remain *very very* quiet on security issues. If they so much as make a peep, they risk turning all of these tightly contested races over to the Republicans. They have to keep the focus on the economy, health care, and corruption.
Once they win one or both houses, then the impeachment and oversight can begin. If they happen not to win either house, however, expect four more years of absolutely nothing. They will have no power whatsoever, and the Republicans will have no reason to compromise with them.
The problem is, I think, is the perception among Americans that the United States is the only country that can keep peace in the world, and we have a moral obligation to do so.
It stems in part from having a relatively homogeneous population and only two close neighbors, both of whom have similar cultures. Also, it stems from being a major player in the winning sides of WWI and WWII, and winning our rivalry with the Soviet Union. I guess also that America is a young country and we have little to no sense of history. We've never lost a war, nor had to live under a repressive government (blacks notwithstanding). People think that if anything were to 'happen' to the United States, it would be the End of the World.
We haven't had single terrorist attack since 9/11. Not a single one.
All those terrorist are running scared, fighting us in Iraq, so we don't have to fight them here. That's why we haven't had a conviction of a single serious terrorist since 9/11.
I also have a special rock for sale that keeps you safe from tigers. Check out my website.
I don't know, this just feels kind of... well, I won't say it.
In your first response, you said the slashdot community was totally responsible, and if we wanted better questions, it was up to us to ask and mod them up. Then, in this response, you talk about how you can't please anyone in the questions you selected.
(The pool was about 30, by my count).
We may disagree on what you think was a good question, but earlier you were telling me it wasn't up to you *at all* -- you were just a conduit for the slashdot community, and then when I pointed out the discretion you had in select questions, it was, "I can't please everyone".
It's reasonable to say, "I automatically selected the 10 highest moded questions -- mod better questions" and it's also reasonable to say "I picked what I thought were the 10 best out of the 30 top-rated -- sorry you disagree", but it kind of irks me that I got two conflicting stories about how much control you had over which questions were presented. If this were some large corporation, I'd have some choice words to describe this behavior.
I guess I understand your point about poor spelling/grammar. Sometimes I'll walk into a bar or club with some friends, and if the clothes are too expensive, the lighting too weird, the music too pumping, I'll say "This isn't the place for me. These people aren't my people -- I'd have nothing to talk about with them" and I'll walk right back out.
In English, there are a few minor cases where the grammatical rules seem arbitrary and antiquated -- in the case of it's/its'/its, people just auto-correct it in their minds and get the proper meaning, and the only people who care are sticklers for tradition. We could easily move to a system where it's all 'its' and no meaning would be missed.
But for the other 99.99% of the time, grammar *is* sense itself. If you don't believe me, abandon a , at sentence look confusing word some rules when how order this mess I like becomes . just grammatical
When I complain about poor grammar, I'm not talking about it's/its/its' or your/you're, I'm talking about text that is so poorly written that it doesn't make sense, or it is totally ambiguous. The specifics of what is wrong is such text is grammar. When people encounter proper spelling/grammar, they don't even notice it. I wouldn't think that anyone would stop posting to slashdot because a summary had the proper use of its/its'/it's, for example. They would just read right through it and not even notice that there wasn't anything wrong.
You talk about 'grammarians' like they are some kind of boogeyman. But the fact is that you and I can only communicate right now because of grammar. Again, I'm not talking about stupid things like apostrophe rules, but word order and verb conjugation. You and I are acting as 'grammarians' whenever we write.
If incorrect spelling and poor grammar are what attract people to slashdot, do the editors tone it down when they get a perfectly correct story?
I have studied foreign languages and spent time in foreign countries. I would think that poor spelling and grammar would turn off non-English speakers -- they couldn't understand the summaries!
There have been several times where the first couple of posts are "Can someone please translate? Summary doesn't make sense" "What poster meant to write was..." or "Text is ambiguous, WTF?" And some of these complainers are presumably native English speakers. Of course, we probably never hear from the people who say "Today at slashdot, all of the articles made sense and had no spelling errors. It was too intimidating for me -- I could never expect to reach that standard in my posts, so I will never visit that site again." So we have a selection bias in the people who complain about editing.
Also, the grammar and spelling policy doesn't explain dupes, mislinked stories, or stories without links.
OK, that may be true, but is removing dupes, correcting links, and fixing text really ruining the spirit of slashdot?
I doubt it -- people can find wrong links, poor writing, and grammatical errors almost anywhere on the internet. I think people come to slashdot for the same reason I do -- the discussion. Good editing won't hurt that at all.
Thanks for responding personally and giving me a platform. I will try to air my griefs without being inflammatory or insulting, just informative.
I admit that I am kind of frustrated with slashdot editing and it kind of boiled over today. It is unfair to blame you for all of the dupes or problematic summaries.
For the record, *I* didn't come up with any of the questions, nor did *I* have any hand in moderating them, nor did *I* have any hand in selecting 10 of the highest moderated questions. However, I think that *you* did have a hand in selecting the final 10 questions, yet you are putting all responsibility onto the slashdot community. I don't know for certain, but I'll tell you why I think this.
How big was the pool of the highest moderated questions that you selected the 10 from? Did you literally pick the 10 highest moderated questions? If that was the case, then the slashdot community really does deserve the blame for the lousy questions.
If not, then blaming the slashdot community for lousy questions that you selected is abdicating your responsibility as an editor. It was your job to separate the wheat from the chaff. You exercised discretion and, I would argue, chose poorly.
The fact that you said it was hard to pick 10 tells me that you didn't simply select the 10 highest moderated questions -- that would have been easy. It tells me that you looked through a pool of questions, and chose some over others. I am not trying to be insulting, but if you had discretion over questions, and also have over 20 years experiencing editing, how did you pick out two yes/no questions? This is something that I learned in the third grade. Maybe you had a bad day? Maybe you didn't give it your 110% this time around? That doesn't mean you are a bad person, or not otherwise a good editor. I just wish that, if you did exercise discretion over which 10 questions were finally selected, you would own up and say that you could have chosen better questions, and not blame the slashdot community. You say you know how to do interview questions properly, but you let us down and selected bad questions.
I'm just fed up with the lack of professionalism in editing. Misspellings, dupes, poor grammar, confusing summaries, missing links, wrongly referenced links, etc. To my knowledge, the editing staff have never said "We are aware of this, we are working on improving things". I think the idea is that the staff is satisfied with the quality level. There seems to be not much editing going on, just acceptance of submissions. I understand that selecting what to run is about half of a traditional editors' job. Actually editing text of a reporter, or author, to correct and improve, is the legitimate purview of an editor. I don't understand how you have 20 years of experience as a reporter, but don't think it's an editor's place to 'fix' text. Or maybe that's just not the job of a slashdot editor.
My understanding is that Commander Taco wants slashdot to remain the sort of late-nineties small internet discussion board, and the appropriate level of editing. The reality has sort of outpaced Taco's vision; slashdot has become one of the most influential sounding boards on the internet. Oftentimes when we are discussion major changes in the open-source world, we will have replies from the very owners of those open-source projects. I don't think that Taco's mindset matches reality, but he is in charge, and the decision is made not to improve the editing.
I think slashdot discussions will be studied when historians and academics being to analyze the phenomenon of internet discourse. I predict people will be reading about slashdot 500 years from now.
Perhaps my complaint is with the title 'editor'. It has too much historical baggage from the print media. It implies certain things. Pick a new title if you aren't going to do the job of a traditional editor. Or post a manifesto in the FAQ of what it is exactly that a slashdot editor does, and why they don't do
Because articles had a good accuracy at the time of measurement, is there any guarantee that they haven't been since edited, and their accuracy thusly lowered?
Academia has time-tested and well-understood methods for citing references. When you look up a reference in a book or periodical, you are likely to encounter the exact same text that the author who cited the text read. Is there the same 'guarantee' for wikipedia articles? I understand that you can reference particular edits of wikipedia articles. It will take time for understanding of that principle to sink in to the collective mind of academia.
And wikipedia is itself in a state of flux*; who knows if the edit history will be available into the future? To geeks, it makes sense that this feature would remain, but the general computing public, and academia itself, is still paper oriented, and has a paucity of imagination that will hinder wikipedia.
* In the recent past, 'wikipedia' made the decision not to include original research. I thought that this was a feature of wikipedia, but instead wikipedia apparently wants to be more like a traditional encyclopedia. I have realized since that I thought of wikipedia as sort of the authoritative 'index' of the internet, perhaps like everything2; for any topic or reference you might come across on the internet, you would go to wikipedia to learn everything you would want to know about it. I guess now wikipedia will dump the loads of pop culture information that it contains. Any article about the Transformers, for example, is likely to be original research. Hopefully it will go somewhere, rather than waste all of the work that everyone has done. PopWiki, anyone?
"Yes, the answer was essentially 'no', but he could have said 'no, and here's why:'"
That's why, as an interviewer, you don't ask yes-or-no questions; you ask 'who', 'what', 'when', 'where', 'why', and 'how'. It's the responsibility of the interviewer to get information out of the interviewee. I put the blame solely on the editor using kid gloves. What should have slashdot expected from an MS rep? It's another example of the cluelessness and unprofessionalism of the slashdot editors.
I'm just really frustrated with slashdot 'editing' at this point. We have been getting dupes and lousy, misspelled, confusing, and inaccurate summaries for years, but now we are offered a survey on what we think of the css re-design. Know what I think? Edit the f8cking* articles!!!
I've willing to ignore all of that, but then we get this interview where the editor claims it was so hard to pick a 'mere ten' questions, and two of them were crappy 'yes/no' questions. And then some BS about the interviewee being busy. Well, all the other interviews dangle out there unanswered for weeks at a time. Why do we have to hear about how this MS guy was really busy this week? It just comes off to me as apologetical -- we should be reverential to this MS guy for taking the time to entertain the questions. Hey, we are your customer! And it was so hard to pick ten questions. How about getting an editor with real editing, journalistic, or interviewing experience? Jesus Cripes.
On the bright side, maybe inline spell-checking in Firefox 2.0 will help comments and summaries be freer from misspellings;)
*BTW 'f8cking' is apparently not a misspelling in FF 2.0.
"Picking a mere 10 of those questions was not easy..."
Sure was. Here is the first question:
"Would you like to make available IE on other operating systems? "
What? What? WHAT!?
A 'yes or no' question for an interview? Asking if MS wants to port their application to another operating system? I'll bet all of the questions posted looked equally good.
Oh, and Dean is real busy -- "his schedule has been tight this week" Who cares and why does this belong in the summary? Why is Roblimo carrying Dean's water?
Thanks, Dean, for finding time in your busy schedule to answer the questions like you agreed to. Sorry we couldn't think up any worthwhile questions!
Slashdot Mirror
"It seems to me that the government isn't trying to control ideas, it is trying to compete in the market place of ideas. ... It seems to me that it is the government's DUTY to release information if they think the news is reporting false information."
If they want to compete fairly in the marketplace of ideas, that's fine. But I don't think they are going to have their own internal watchdogs who are voraciously going after the facts and are going to ask tough questions. Certainly, they'll want to counter false information, but it would make their lives so much easier to spread propaganda. So it's one thing to go after 'the truth', but I have a feeling they will just be a stronger media spin department. That's not a problem if you believe that everything is spin, and everybody has their own opinions and perspectives, and nobody's is better than the others'. I disagree -- I believe that some ideas and opinions are more accurate.
We can probably never get to the whole, complete truth. But I think we can get stories that are more accurate and complete than others. It's not just a game of who can tell a better story. There is an objective reality.
And a major problem is that the government an 'official' source and has 'experts'. When people hear those words, they turn off their critical thinking skills, and accept whatever the official expert tells them. After all, I'm not smarter or as smart as an expert, am I? So, if the military, or any other government organization, sets up a news arm, they get a free pass as the official source.
Of course, I could of told you that.
128 nails is more nails than anyone will ever need.
No, I don't think that the civil war fits either of my criteria.
The utter destruction of cities and massive *civilian* casualties of WWI and WWII are nothing compared to the military casualties of the American civil war. The American civil war were soldiers shooting at soldiers with hand-loaded rifles. There were gatling guns and canons, but they were used against armies, not cities and civilians. WWI and II were fought with tanks, planes, bombs, and also nuclear and chemical weapons. Sure, Sherman marches to the sea and burned down one city, Atlanta, but the torching of wooden buildings is quite different from thousands of firebombs falling randomly out of the sky, destroying entire cities and killing thousands of civilians in a matter hours.
When I say 'somebody else', I mean another culture, another language, another legal system that has no right in anyone's mind to claim that they are the legal ruling authority.
In the American civil war, there were people in both the North and the South that felt that the South had the legal right, under the constitution, to break away from the nation. There were also those in both the North and South who felt that the South didn't have a right to break away. It was an internal dispute, and reasonable people were in dispute about what the constitution meant, and what really was the legal right of states. There's no way you can argue the North was a foriegn power, any more than Cleveland and Cincinnati are foreign to each other.
Compare that with Hitler's invasion of Poland and France -- I doubt there were many in Poland or France who felt that Germany had rightly reclaimed their historical 'lebensraum', and deserved to rule their countries. They were another people, speaking another language, with a different culture, legal system, etc.
Regardless of how people felt about succession, there were still almost 100 years of shared history as a single country with a single, unified government and legal system. There was also a broadly shared culture and a common language. Yes, there were differences between the north and south, and also between cities, but it's nothing like in Europe were traveling forty minutes by train brings you to another country with another language, another government, another history, another cuisine, etc.
As far as memories are concerned, nobody alive today can remember the civil war. They weren't alive then. If you read a book, hear a re-telling, or watch a movie or documentary, you are imagining what it was like back then, not remembering. They know the history, but they are not remembering it. By contrast, there are still lots of people alive today -- although they are elderly, they lived through and thus can remember WWI and WWII. Their fathers fought in WWI and they hid in bomb shelters with their mother and siblings, and they went off to fight in WWII.
I think that given the 'post-9/11' world we live in, there is no way the US government is going to allow Seagate to sell encryption technology that is totally under user control. When they are chasing down terrorists, why would they want to rely on the suspect for the key? Just call up Seagate and get it.
You think that Seagate wouldn't have a copy of your key?
You are correct.
What I meant to write was that 'we have never lost a war on our soil'.
For me, the implication is that the death, carnage, and destruction of war was never really imprinted on the American consciousness, which is why we willing to do stupid things like liberate the Iraqi people. Now 600,000 Iraqis are dead from our foolishness and arrogance, but our war is still just.
The civil war was a violent hammering out of our internal disagreements. We have never had a long, drawn out war with 'someone else' where our major cities were bombed out, and we were ruled by another government. The idea that that could happen, and after decades or centuries American culture and identity would survive and re-emerge, is totally absent from American consciousness. We have no sense of history. Our history books start with the pilgrims landing on Plymouth rock. What happened in the rest of the world may as well have happened in another universe.
There is still the idea that America *as it is now* is the sole light on the hill, the one beacon of freedom and democracy for the world. If America were to change in any way, it would no longer really be America, and thus any hope for the world would be extinguished.
This probably has a lot to do with out rivalry with Russia and the threat of nuclear annihilation -- at that time, the 'end of the United States' very well may have meant the end of the human race.
"I wouldn't be surprised if he just had some sort of undiagnosed dyslexia or reading disorder."
I think so too. Bush the Elder seemed to have similar problems when he would go off script, though not as bad as his son.
If they had made a stink about it, or, God forbid, raised the issue of the filibuster, the Tough on Terror Bush supporters would turn out in droves in the election and ensure a democrat defeat.
In order to win one of the houses, they have to remain *very very* quiet on security issues. If they so much as make a peep, they risk turning all of these tightly contested races over to the Republicans. They have to keep the focus on the economy, health care, and corruption.
Once they win one or both houses, then the impeachment and oversight can begin. If they happen not to win either house, however, expect four more years of absolutely nothing. They will have no power whatsoever, and the Republicans will have no reason to compromise with them.
The problem is, I think, is the perception among Americans that the United States is the only country that can keep peace in the world, and we have a moral obligation to do so.
It stems in part from having a relatively homogeneous population and only two close neighbors, both of whom have similar cultures. Also, it stems from being a major player in the winning sides of WWI and WWII, and winning our rivalry with the Soviet Union. I guess also that America is a young country and we have little to no sense of history. We've never lost a war, nor had to live under a repressive government (blacks notwithstanding). People think that if anything were to 'happen' to the United States, it would be the End of the World.
We haven't had single terrorist attack since 9/11. Not a single one.
All those terrorist are running scared, fighting us in Iraq, so we don't have to fight them here. That's why we haven't had a conviction of a single serious terrorist since 9/11.
I also have a special rock for sale that keeps you safe from tigers. Check out my website.
After we saved your asses from Hitler, and Hitler's father back in WWI, it'd be the least you could do!
Who says Americans don't remember history?
I don't know, this just feels kind of... well, I won't say it.
In your first response, you said the slashdot community was totally responsible, and if we wanted better questions, it was up to us to ask and mod them up. Then, in this response, you talk about how you can't please anyone in the questions you selected. (The pool was about 30, by my count). We may disagree on what you think was a good question, but earlier you were telling me it wasn't up to you *at all* -- you were just a conduit for the slashdot community, and then when I pointed out the discretion you had in select questions, it was, "I can't please everyone".
It's reasonable to say, "I automatically selected the 10 highest moded questions -- mod better questions" and it's also reasonable to say "I picked what I thought were the 10 best out of the 30 top-rated -- sorry you disagree", but it kind of irks me that I got two conflicting stories about how much control you had over which questions were presented. If this were some large corporation, I'd have some choice words to describe this behavior.
I guess I understand your point about poor spelling/grammar. Sometimes I'll walk into a bar or club with some friends, and if the clothes are too expensive, the lighting too weird, the music too pumping, I'll say "This isn't the place for me. These people aren't my people -- I'd have nothing to talk about with them" and I'll walk right back out.
In English, there are a few minor cases where the grammatical rules seem arbitrary and antiquated -- in the case of it's/its'/its, people just auto-correct it in their minds and get the proper meaning, and the only people who care are sticklers for tradition. We could easily move to a system where it's all 'its' and no meaning would be missed.
But for the other 99.99% of the time, grammar *is* sense itself. If you don't believe me, abandon a , at sentence look confusing word some rules when how order this mess I like becomes . just grammatical
When I complain about poor grammar, I'm not talking about it's/its/its' or your/you're, I'm talking about text that is so poorly written that it doesn't make sense, or it is totally ambiguous. The specifics of what is wrong is such text is grammar. When people encounter proper spelling/grammar, they don't even notice it. I wouldn't think that anyone would stop posting to slashdot because a summary had the proper use of its/its'/it's, for example. They would just read right through it and not even notice that there wasn't anything wrong.
You talk about 'grammarians' like they are some kind of boogeyman. But the fact is that you and I can only communicate right now because of grammar. Again, I'm not talking about stupid things like apostrophe rules, but word order and verb conjugation. You and I are acting as 'grammarians' whenever we write.
If incorrect spelling and poor grammar are what attract people to slashdot, do the editors tone it down when they get a perfectly correct story?
I have studied foreign languages and spent time in foreign countries. I would think that poor spelling and grammar would turn off non-English speakers -- they couldn't understand the summaries! There have been several times where the first couple of posts are "Can someone please translate? Summary doesn't make sense" "What poster meant to write was..." or "Text is ambiguous, WTF?" And some of these complainers are presumably native English speakers. Of course, we probably never hear from the people who say "Today at slashdot, all of the articles made sense and had no spelling errors. It was too intimidating for me -- I could never expect to reach that standard in my posts, so I will never visit that site again." So we have a selection bias in the people who complain about editing.
Also, the grammar and spelling policy doesn't explain dupes, mislinked stories, or stories without links.
OK, that may be true, but is removing dupes, correcting links, and fixing text really ruining the spirit of slashdot?
I doubt it -- people can find wrong links, poor writing, and grammatical errors almost anywhere on the internet. I think people come to slashdot for the same reason I do -- the discussion. Good editing won't hurt that at all.
Robin -
Thanks for responding personally and giving me a platform. I will try to air my griefs without being inflammatory or insulting, just informative.
I admit that I am kind of frustrated with slashdot editing and it kind of boiled over today. It is unfair to blame you for all of the dupes or problematic summaries.
For the record, *I* didn't come up with any of the questions, nor did *I* have any hand in moderating them, nor did *I* have any hand in selecting 10 of the highest moderated questions. However, I think that *you* did have a hand in selecting the final 10 questions, yet you are putting all responsibility onto the slashdot community. I don't know for certain, but I'll tell you why I think this.
How big was the pool of the highest moderated questions that you selected the 10 from? Did you literally pick the 10 highest moderated questions? If that was the case, then the slashdot community really does deserve the blame for the lousy questions.
If not, then blaming the slashdot community for lousy questions that you selected is abdicating your responsibility as an editor. It was your job to separate the wheat from the chaff. You exercised discretion and, I would argue, chose poorly.
The fact that you said it was hard to pick 10 tells me that you didn't simply select the 10 highest moderated questions -- that would have been easy. It tells me that you looked through a pool of questions, and chose some over others. I am not trying to be insulting, but if you had discretion over questions, and also have over 20 years experiencing editing, how did you pick out two yes/no questions? This is something that I learned in the third grade. Maybe you had a bad day? Maybe you didn't give it your 110% this time around? That doesn't mean you are a bad person, or not otherwise a good editor. I just wish that, if you did exercise discretion over which 10 questions were finally selected, you would own up and say that you could have chosen better questions, and not blame the slashdot community. You say you know how to do interview questions properly, but you let us down and selected bad questions.
I'm just fed up with the lack of professionalism in editing. Misspellings, dupes, poor grammar, confusing summaries, missing links, wrongly referenced links, etc. To my knowledge, the editing staff have never said "We are aware of this, we are working on improving things". I think the idea is that the staff is satisfied with the quality level. There seems to be not much editing going on, just acceptance of submissions. I understand that selecting what to run is about half of a traditional editors' job. Actually editing text of a reporter, or author, to correct and improve, is the legitimate purview of an editor. I don't understand how you have 20 years of experience as a reporter, but don't think it's an editor's place to 'fix' text. Or maybe that's just not the job of a slashdot editor.
My understanding is that Commander Taco wants slashdot to remain the sort of late-nineties small internet discussion board, and the appropriate level of editing. The reality has sort of outpaced Taco's vision; slashdot has become one of the most influential sounding boards on the internet. Oftentimes when we are discussion major changes in the open-source world, we will have replies from the very owners of those open-source projects. I don't think that Taco's mindset matches reality, but he is in charge, and the decision is made not to improve the editing.
I think slashdot discussions will be studied when historians and academics being to analyze the phenomenon of internet discourse. I predict people will be reading about slashdot 500 years from now.
Perhaps my complaint is with the title 'editor'. It has too much historical baggage from the print media. It implies certain things. Pick a new title if you aren't going to do the job of a traditional editor. Or post a manifesto in the FAQ of what it is exactly that a slashdot editor does, and why they don't do
Because articles had a good accuracy at the time of measurement, is there any guarantee that they haven't been since edited, and their accuracy thusly lowered?
Academia has time-tested and well-understood methods for citing references. When you look up a reference in a book or periodical, you are likely to encounter the exact same text that the author who cited the text read. Is there the same 'guarantee' for wikipedia articles? I understand that you can reference particular edits of wikipedia articles. It will take time for understanding of that principle to sink in to the collective mind of academia.
And wikipedia is itself in a state of flux*; who knows if the edit history will be available into the future? To geeks, it makes sense that this feature would remain, but the general computing public, and academia itself, is still paper oriented, and has a paucity of imagination that will hinder wikipedia.
* In the recent past, 'wikipedia' made the decision not to include original research. I thought that this was a feature of wikipedia, but instead wikipedia apparently wants to be more like a traditional encyclopedia. I have realized since that I thought of wikipedia as sort of the authoritative 'index' of the internet, perhaps like everything2; for any topic or reference you might come across on the internet, you would go to wikipedia to learn everything you would want to know about it. I guess now wikipedia will dump the loads of pop culture information that it contains. Any article about the Transformers, for example, is likely to be original research. Hopefully it will go somewhere, rather than waste all of the work that everyone has done. PopWiki, anyone?
One liberal democrat calls for the arrest of an innocent; therefore, all liberal democrats are authoritarians.
One liberal democrat was once a member of the KKK; therefore, all liberal democrats are white supremacists.
"Yes, the answer was essentially 'no', but he could have said 'no, and here's why:'"
That's why, as an interviewer, you don't ask yes-or-no questions; you ask 'who', 'what', 'when', 'where', 'why', and 'how'. It's the responsibility of the interviewer to get information out of the interviewee. I put the blame solely on the editor using kid gloves. What should have slashdot expected from an MS rep? It's another example of the cluelessness and unprofessionalism of the slashdot editors.
Crap! You are right. I was blinded by frustration. Erg.
No, my starting score has been 2 for several years now. Look at this post -- it is at 2, with no mods whatsoever.
Here's a question, with some background:
I have excellent karma. By default, my posts start at +2.
At first, the parent was modded down -1, Troll. Then it went up to +3, Insightful. At the time of this post, it is at 1, Troll.
Here's the breakdown:
Starting Score: 1 point
Moderation 0
50% Troll
30% Interesting
20% Insightful
Extra 'Troll' Modifier 0
Total Score: 1
Why did my starting score change to 1? Why can't slashdot editors act transparently?
Yes, I use Windows OSes for desktop computers exclusively, and I develop websites for IE users.
I'm just really frustrated with slashdot 'editing' at this point. We have been getting dupes and lousy, misspelled, confusing, and inaccurate summaries for years, but now we are offered a survey on what we think of the css re-design. Know what I think? Edit the f8cking* articles!!!
;)
I've willing to ignore all of that, but then we get this interview where the editor claims it was so hard to pick a 'mere ten' questions, and two of them were crappy 'yes/no' questions. And then some BS about the interviewee being busy. Well, all the other interviews dangle out there unanswered for weeks at a time. Why do we have to hear about how this MS guy was really busy this week? It just comes off to me as apologetical -- we should be reverential to this MS guy for taking the time to entertain the questions. Hey, we are your customer! And it was so hard to pick ten questions. How about getting an editor with real editing, journalistic, or interviewing experience? Jesus Cripes.
On the bright side, maybe inline spell-checking in Firefox 2.0 will help comments and summaries be freer from misspellings
*BTW 'f8cking' is apparently not a misspelling in FF 2.0.
No, the problem lies with the editor picking crappy questions, or not fixing questions that could have been better.
First question:
Q. "Would you like to make available IE on other operating systems?"
A. "No." [abbrev]
But it was so hard picking just ten questions! Plus, Dean was really busy !
"Picking a mere 10 of those questions was not easy..."
Sure was. Here is the first question:
"Would you like to make available IE on other operating systems? "
What? What? WHAT!?
A 'yes or no' question for an interview? Asking if MS wants to port their application to another operating system? I'll bet all of the questions posted looked equally good.
Oh, and Dean is real busy -- "his schedule has been tight this week" Who cares and why does this belong in the summary? Why is Roblimo carrying Dean's water?
Thanks, Dean, for finding time in your busy schedule to answer the questions like you agreed to. Sorry we couldn't think up any worthwhile questions!