So saying that there is a problem at WP is the same as destroying the whole?
The only reason people complain is because they care about it. This is a real concern; I have absolutely no problem believing that there are abuses going on. The editors are human, and, even worse, they have a strong emotional stake in the project. That gives them a lot of motivation to do some "ends justifying the means" crap like banning someone they don't agree with.
The way for WP to solve the whole problem is to address the concerns not to do as you are doing, and pretend like they don't exist, or aren't relevant.
I'm sorry, did what you say have any content? All I got from your comment was, "We said it would fail and now it has, oh the humanity." You could have copy pasted that comment into any thread about anything failing, and it would have had all the same relevance.
It's not the idea. The idea was "everyone contributes, and everyone is equal." If that was still the idea, we wouldn't be hearing all these stories of editorial abuse, because things are now unequal, and that inequality is what's breeding all these problems.
Put a group in charge, and you're going to get abuse. That's just a fact. To get around this, most other organizations add some checks and balances, some oversight, some limitations on power. WP didn't do this, and now they're suffering for it.
I think a lot of it is the drug lobby. When I was a kid, you didn't get the hepatitis vaccine. I got mine on the way to college. Why? Because there was no need to get it. What are the odds of you getting hepatitis in this country? 1.5 per 100,000 and most of those are "high risk" people, because it's hard to catch without having sex with someone who has it, or using a dirty needle.
But now I've got my doctor telling me I have to get my infant kid vaccinated quick quick right now! He could get hep at any second!!! What a crock of crap. It's even less likely now than it was when I was a kid, because the infection rates are still dropping.
Likewise the chicken pox vaccine. The mortality from chicken pox is off the bottom of the chart, but none the less, unless I wanna home school my kid, I have to get them the shot.
I'm sure by next year, they're going to be calling for all infant girls to go ahead and get the hpv shot, because you can never be too careful about protecting your infant from STDs.
I think a lot of people are getting leery of having their kids turned into pincushions to meet an arbitrary timetable attached to low risk infections. I think it's 15 vaccinations before 1 year? Out of those, easily half could be pushed back a year or two or three (or 18 in the case or the 3 course goddamn hep vaccination), so why subject your kid to that kinda crap?
If you have some magic technique to find sockpuppets I'm sure we'd all like to hear it.
I just don't think there is an actual need. Supposedly anyone can edit WP, but apparently that just means anyone who edits it in a manner that the admin minority approves of.
Either the community can take care of itself, in which case there is no problem, or it can't, in which case the problem is insoluble. The solution is not for a self-appointed minority to wield police power with no oversight on flimsy pretexts. Far as I'm concerned, you're all sockpuppets.
And as for a "popular target" you (And by "you" I mean "you the administrators." You can't just say, "Hey that was the other guy, it has nothing to do with me!" when you're here defending the system) banned someone, and people checked up on it, and found you'd done it for obviously crappy reasons...You banned !! because that person was karma whoring (in your opinion) and because you were afraid they were building their credit to get into the sort of power position you're in. To me, that shows that you're worried about the abuse of the power position (which is what everyone in this thread is also worried about) which means you ought to be admitting that, yes, there are issues, and not just defending your rights to abusable power.
Security through Obscurity applies to a lot of things outside of crypto, though I'll grant you that's where the term was coined. If I hide a key under my doormat, that's "Security through Obscurity". If you hide your seeeecret methods for sock-detection, that's "Security through Obscurity". A non-crypto example is bayesian spam filtering; it's open, it's available, it's still effective at stopping spam. What are you afraid of releasing? Certainly in this case, insight into the "process" involved in identifing malicious users has been revealing.
Internet anonymity is something we all like to believe in, but if someone is sufficiently determined, they will find you out, and in this case, you're the people trying to break the user's anonymity! Talk about your hypocrisy! You dig down and figure out who the user is, then have to make this huge backpedal because it turns out you're outing the wrong person! Well done.
What you said is if you banned someone who typed "teh" instead of "the" more often than not, you'd be more likely to ban users who did that in the future in fear that they are "sock puppets" for the banned user. That's as flimsy as it gets. You're playing whack-a-mole with anonymous users, and it is a certainty that you're screwing innocent people along with good people.
Yea, you picked on a high profile target, which turned out to be stupid, there was uproar and it was overturned. And I'm sure you never banned someone who was innocent-seeming before. Of course, we'd never know.
Shrug. I like how you respect to the utmost the privacy of your users (and, incidentally, yourselves) and not that of the people who are apparently so outraged at what's been written about them that they issue death threats. Anyway, death threats are a reality on the internet. I've gotten death threats here, and more than a few times.
Coming to Slashdot and arguing "Security through Obscurity" is stupid. It doesn't work. Pass that information to your contributors, and they'll do a better job of finding the people who're gaming the system than your little "Black Chamber".
I was going to down mod you, but I couldn't think of one that was appropriate.
Writing a justification of why you tend to take down users based on your suspicions is not a good way to gain credibility. You admit you act with flimsy evidence, but then you say, "Oh but we're doing it for the good of the whole, and you'd agree with us if only you could be trusted to know what we know."
Frankly it's horseshit, and I'm not surprised people are raising hell about it. It shows you have authority without oversight, and that you believe most of the users can't be trusted with oversight. For a supposedly "democratic" project, that sounds an awful lot like autocracy or facism. If you control the information that people need to be able to form accurate opinions, you are controlling them. That's the end of the story. It doesn't matter why you do it.
Now governments do this all the time, and they tend to be able to get away with it because they hold information that can cost people their lives. Moreover the government is set up in such a way that it watches itself, and is still accountable to the people.
Who are you accountable to? No one but yourselves, and we see here how that works. You make decisions based on information that you don't share with the community. People post damaging false info on Wikipedia all the time...What's the problem with having some damaging true information available? At least it's true.
It's almost amusing to watch power corrupt. You pitch democracy, you pitch community. But you concentrate power, you act unilaterally, and you withhold needed information from the community. That is neither democracy or community.
Unions are cute and all, but if other people outside the union are willing and capable of doing the work for less, you better learn to starve. Lot of union people have been learning that lesson lately.
But no one who knows the difference would go to Best Buy for tech support anyway. Either you know enough to know that they're crap, or you know so little that everyone is the same to you, and you won't be able to tell if someone is screwing you over or helping you out.
A lot of people will gop to Best Buy, just because they see some dingy little local shop,a nd some big shiny store, and they immediately think bigger must be better, so as far as they're concerned, they ARE going to the nice place.
Meh. It's all about their crappy hiring practices. If you're going to have employees dealing with sensitive information, you're going to have to do more than promote morons off the sales floor, and you're going to have to pay a decent wage, and get managers who have clue, and run audits and all the crap professional shops do.
Are they going to do that? Goes without saying, the answer is no. Running a group of techies, especially bench techs, is like herding teenagers. They're all going to think they're smarter than you, they're all going to know the "right way" to do everything, and they're not going to listen to some low tech Bob whose community college associates degree entitles him to a big sexy manager job at best buy.
Just another example of a big corporation trying to expand into a field it doesn't know a damn thing about.
I agree. Beyond agreeing, I think it would be cool, and useful as well. Might help you match up with people online outside of your immediate social circle by the fact that they tend to have similar achievements.
I wouldn't mind something that showed up in my profile, kinda like a reverse "achievements" system..."Oh I see satanicpuppy got the 'Little Sista Slaughta' achievement for killing 50 little sisters."
Anyway, benevolent in general doesn't mean anything about benevolence toward any one thing in particular. If you take that argument against a fundie, they'll say, "God works in mysterious ways."
It is a planet...That's a hell of a lot of atmosphere to strip.
Moreover as the ground temperature rises, you have more things transitioning to gas phase, and more gases means more atmosphere...Lot of the dense stuff will be more resistant to being stripped as well. Without knowing the amounts of various things that could have been stripped, as well as the pressure over time...If the planet had massive water oceans like earth, it could be that they stayed liquid for quite a long time if the atmospheric pressure were high enough.
That doesn't address the problem of the lack of a strong planetary magnetic field, and the damage that allows the sun to do to its atmosphere. Evidence suggests that Venus once had plenty of liquid water...We can determine that because it's still boiling off into space.
Even if we controlled the greenhouse effect and fixed the atmosphere (wouldn't be surprised if these were strongly related as temperature and pressure are certainly related, even on a planetary scale, so a more moderate temp should lower the number of volatiles in gas phase, and reduce atmospheric density), we're still going to have to deal with the fact that the atmosphere's extreme exposure to the solar wind is going to cause some merry havok.
Just for me personally, if I put some code I wrote out in a forum, I expect someone to use it other than myself. Someone asks a question, I throw out a chunk of code, we're done. I don't care where it ends up. Likewise if I find an example that someone has put on the web when I was searching for something to do that exact thing, I'll grab it and adapt it to my use on the principle that that's what it's there for.
Forums can be kind of a greyer area. I once had a guy who was maintaining a system I wrote put a decent chunk of my code in a forum; source code, mind you, not just a script. It was a whole program, and while I never sold that particular piece to do anything by itself, it was a part of a product I did make a decent bit of money on, and a pretty clear-cut breach of my IP for some joker to just post it (they'd signed a contract dealing with redistribution, so it was in writing).
I called them, they apologized, disciplined the guy, and hired me to do the change he'd been trying to do (he'd posted the code trying to get someone to tell him what it did), and paid me at a higher rate. I let it slide because it wasn't a big deal (non-critical code), and they dealt with it to my satisfaction.
If, at some later date, I'd found that code verbatim in someone else's system, I might have mentioned it to them, as an aside, but I wouldn't have tried to claim damages or make them remove it. At that point it is WAY too difficult to trace provenance, and hard to prove any sort of knowing violation. It had been released, I'd taken it up from the people who released it, it was done.
In short: If someone releases code with no license attached and you use it and it turns out later it was licensed you're going to have to deal with the consequences of that. If it turns out it wasn't licensed (or was BSD licensed) you're in the clear, even if it was a case like mine where the code was released by a party that wasn't authorized to release it.
The internet is a nice tool to keep from re-inventing the wheel, but if you take anything more than a little subroutine, you better know what rights you have with regards to it because it can seriously bite you in the ass.
It's easy to say enhanced IQ for everone is a good thing, but I'm not sure it is. High IQ actually tends to be destabilizing for society...Buncha damn smartasses thinking they know better than everyone else;)
The point is, we can't know what effect widespread adoption of even benign-seeming enhancements will have on society. It's easy to think that everyone will be smarter, healthier, prettier, and longer-lived, but the reality may make that pretty horrible.
Ideally, those strong stock that you've preserved would then be bred to other stock in an attempt to pass favorable traits among living animals...You wouldn't (hopefully) just breed up a herd of identical animals...That would leave you in a bad position in a lot of ways.
Consider all the rational improvements that could be made through genetic improvements: we could increase tendencies to be smart, scientific, responsible, just, good-natured, conscientious, or whatever other characteristics are found to have genetic inputs.
And we could increase the tendencies to be dumb, obedient, hard working, and short-lived, thereby making us into the people that governments and corporations would dream us to be.
Do you really want to start going down that road? I don't like companies messing casually with plant genomes...Do you really want to jack some patented gene sequences into your kids? If they breed is it going to violate someone's copyright?
I think you should look at the definition of Eugenics before you start talking about animal cloning because it doesn't apply to that...Unless you're being cute and saying that all animals (including humans) are equal, in which case I think you'll find that you're in complete agreement with PETA, which is, I doubt, what you want.
As for the rest, you can shove your trollish delusions up your ass until I actually say any of those things.
If people really cared that much about GM food, it'd have to be, you know, labeled. Thanks to the GM lobby, most people have already been eating GM foods for years. I have a problem with GM foods, but it's more about the problem with the modified plants cross-pollenating with unmodified plants, and corrupting unmodified seed lines, as well as the crappy business policies of companies like Monsanto.
I don't have any particular opinion about human cloning, except for the fact that I don't see any actual point in it. Animal cloning is done to strengthen the breed, technically, so either we're advocating some kind of eugenics, which is just inherently a bad idea, or we're catering to people's mistaken desire to have a genetic duplicate of a dead person, which is also a pretty bad idea.
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So saying that there is a problem at WP is the same as destroying the whole?
The only reason people complain is because they care about it. This is a real concern; I have absolutely no problem believing that there are abuses going on. The editors are human, and, even worse, they have a strong emotional stake in the project. That gives them a lot of motivation to do some "ends justifying the means" crap like banning someone they don't agree with.
The way for WP to solve the whole problem is to address the concerns not to do as you are doing, and pretend like they don't exist, or aren't relevant.
I'm sorry, did what you say have any content? All I got from your comment was, "We said it would fail and now it has, oh the humanity." You could have copy pasted that comment into any thread about anything failing, and it would have had all the same relevance.
It's not the idea. The idea was "everyone contributes, and everyone is equal." If that was still the idea, we wouldn't be hearing all these stories of editorial abuse, because things are now unequal, and that inequality is what's breeding all these problems.
Put a group in charge, and you're going to get abuse. That's just a fact. To get around this, most other organizations add some checks and balances, some oversight, some limitations on power. WP didn't do this, and now they're suffering for it.
I think a lot of it is the drug lobby. When I was a kid, you didn't get the hepatitis vaccine. I got mine on the way to college. Why? Because there was no need to get it. What are the odds of you getting hepatitis in this country? 1.5 per 100,000 and most of those are "high risk" people, because it's hard to catch without having sex with someone who has it, or using a dirty needle.
But now I've got my doctor telling me I have to get my infant kid vaccinated quick quick right now! He could get hep at any second!!! What a crock of crap. It's even less likely now than it was when I was a kid, because the infection rates are still dropping.
Likewise the chicken pox vaccine. The mortality from chicken pox is off the bottom of the chart, but none the less, unless I wanna home school my kid, I have to get them the shot.
I'm sure by next year, they're going to be calling for all infant girls to go ahead and get the hpv shot, because you can never be too careful about protecting your infant from STDs.
I think a lot of people are getting leery of having their kids turned into pincushions to meet an arbitrary timetable attached to low risk infections. I think it's 15 vaccinations before 1 year? Out of those, easily half could be pushed back a year or two or three (or 18 in the case or the 3 course goddamn hep vaccination), so why subject your kid to that kinda crap?
Would the Alliance laptop not be able to boot unless it outnumbered the Horde laptops 2 to 1? ;)
If you have some magic technique to find sockpuppets I'm sure we'd all like to hear it.
I just don't think there is an actual need. Supposedly anyone can edit WP, but apparently that just means anyone who edits it in a manner that the admin minority approves of.
Either the community can take care of itself, in which case there is no problem, or it can't, in which case the problem is insoluble. The solution is not for a self-appointed minority to wield police power with no oversight on flimsy pretexts. Far as I'm concerned, you're all sockpuppets.
And as for a "popular target" you (And by "you" I mean "you the administrators." You can't just say, "Hey that was the other guy, it has nothing to do with me!" when you're here defending the system) banned someone, and people checked up on it, and found you'd done it for obviously crappy reasons...You banned !! because that person was karma whoring (in your opinion) and because you were afraid they were building their credit to get into the sort of power position you're in. To me, that shows that you're worried about the abuse of the power position (which is what everyone in this thread is also worried about) which means you ought to be admitting that, yes, there are issues, and not just defending your rights to abusable power.
Security through Obscurity applies to a lot of things outside of crypto, though I'll grant you that's where the term was coined. If I hide a key under my doormat, that's "Security through Obscurity". If you hide your seeeecret methods for sock-detection, that's "Security through Obscurity". A non-crypto example is bayesian spam filtering; it's open, it's available, it's still effective at stopping spam. What are you afraid of releasing? Certainly in this case, insight into the "process" involved in identifing malicious users has been revealing.
Internet anonymity is something we all like to believe in, but if someone is sufficiently determined, they will find you out, and in this case, you're the people trying to break the user's anonymity! Talk about your hypocrisy! You dig down and figure out who the user is, then have to make this huge backpedal because it turns out you're outing the wrong person! Well done.
People LOVE to believe that the Nazi's were at any time a majority.
Turns out, however, that a sufficiently motivated and brutal minority can cow the majority.
What you said is if you banned someone who typed "teh" instead of "the" more often than not, you'd be more likely to ban users who did that in the future in fear that they are "sock puppets" for the banned user. That's as flimsy as it gets. You're playing whack-a-mole with anonymous users, and it is a certainty that you're screwing innocent people along with good people.
Yea, you picked on a high profile target, which turned out to be stupid, there was uproar and it was overturned. And I'm sure you never banned someone who was innocent-seeming before. Of course, we'd never know.
Shrug. I like how you respect to the utmost the privacy of your users (and, incidentally, yourselves) and not that of the people who are apparently so outraged at what's been written about them that they issue death threats. Anyway, death threats are a reality on the internet. I've gotten death threats here, and more than a few times.
Coming to Slashdot and arguing "Security through Obscurity" is stupid. It doesn't work. Pass that information to your contributors, and they'll do a better job of finding the people who're gaming the system than your little "Black Chamber".
You're not convincing me.
I was going to down mod you, but I couldn't think of one that was appropriate.
Writing a justification of why you tend to take down users based on your suspicions is not a good way to gain credibility. You admit you act with flimsy evidence, but then you say, "Oh but we're doing it for the good of the whole, and you'd agree with us if only you could be trusted to know what we know."
Frankly it's horseshit, and I'm not surprised people are raising hell about it. It shows you have authority without oversight, and that you believe most of the users can't be trusted with oversight. For a supposedly "democratic" project, that sounds an awful lot like autocracy or facism. If you control the information that people need to be able to form accurate opinions, you are controlling them. That's the end of the story. It doesn't matter why you do it.
Now governments do this all the time, and they tend to be able to get away with it because they hold information that can cost people their lives. Moreover the government is set up in such a way that it watches itself, and is still accountable to the people.
Who are you accountable to? No one but yourselves, and we see here how that works. You make decisions based on information that you don't share with the community. People post damaging false info on Wikipedia all the time...What's the problem with having some damaging true information available? At least it's true.
It's almost amusing to watch power corrupt. You pitch democracy, you pitch community. But you concentrate power, you act unilaterally, and you withhold needed information from the community. That is neither democracy or community.
And gets your job sent overseas.
Unions are cute and all, but if other people outside the union are willing and capable of doing the work for less, you better learn to starve. Lot of union people have been learning that lesson lately.
But no one who knows the difference would go to Best Buy for tech support anyway. Either you know enough to know that they're crap, or you know so little that everyone is the same to you, and you won't be able to tell if someone is screwing you over or helping you out.
A lot of people will gop to Best Buy, just because they see some dingy little local shop,a nd some big shiny store, and they immediately think bigger must be better, so as far as they're concerned, they ARE going to the nice place.
Not much you can do about it.
Meh. It's all about their crappy hiring practices. If you're going to have employees dealing with sensitive information, you're going to have to do more than promote morons off the sales floor, and you're going to have to pay a decent wage, and get managers who have clue, and run audits and all the crap professional shops do.
Are they going to do that? Goes without saying, the answer is no. Running a group of techies, especially bench techs, is like herding teenagers. They're all going to think they're smarter than you, they're all going to know the "right way" to do everything, and they're not going to listen to some low tech Bob whose community college associates degree entitles him to a big sexy manager job at best buy.
Just another example of a big corporation trying to expand into a field it doesn't know a damn thing about.
I agree. Beyond agreeing, I think it would be cool, and useful as well. Might help you match up with people online outside of your immediate social circle by the fact that they tend to have similar achievements.
I wouldn't mind something that showed up in my profile, kinda like a reverse "achievements" system..."Oh I see satanicpuppy got the 'Little Sista Slaughta' achievement for killing 50 little sisters."
No big deal.
If Candide didn't do it, nothing will.
Anyway, benevolent in general doesn't mean anything about benevolence toward any one thing in particular. If you take that argument against a fundie, they'll say, "God works in mysterious ways."
It is a planet...That's a hell of a lot of atmosphere to strip.
Moreover as the ground temperature rises, you have more things transitioning to gas phase, and more gases means more atmosphere...Lot of the dense stuff will be more resistant to being stripped as well. Without knowing the amounts of various things that could have been stripped, as well as the pressure over time...If the planet had massive water oceans like earth, it could be that they stayed liquid for quite a long time if the atmospheric pressure were high enough.
Too many variables.
That doesn't address the problem of the lack of a strong planetary magnetic field, and the damage that allows the sun to do to its atmosphere. Evidence suggests that Venus once had plenty of liquid water...We can determine that because it's still boiling off into space.
Even if we controlled the greenhouse effect and fixed the atmosphere (wouldn't be surprised if these were strongly related as temperature and pressure are certainly related, even on a planetary scale, so a more moderate temp should lower the number of volatiles in gas phase, and reduce atmospheric density), we're still going to have to deal with the fact that the atmosphere's extreme exposure to the solar wind is going to cause some merry havok.
Just for me personally, if I put some code I wrote out in a forum, I expect someone to use it other than myself. Someone asks a question, I throw out a chunk of code, we're done. I don't care where it ends up. Likewise if I find an example that someone has put on the web when I was searching for something to do that exact thing, I'll grab it and adapt it to my use on the principle that that's what it's there for.
Forums can be kind of a greyer area. I once had a guy who was maintaining a system I wrote put a decent chunk of my code in a forum; source code, mind you, not just a script. It was a whole program, and while I never sold that particular piece to do anything by itself, it was a part of a product I did make a decent bit of money on, and a pretty clear-cut breach of my IP for some joker to just post it (they'd signed a contract dealing with redistribution, so it was in writing).
I called them, they apologized, disciplined the guy, and hired me to do the change he'd been trying to do (he'd posted the code trying to get someone to tell him what it did), and paid me at a higher rate. I let it slide because it wasn't a big deal (non-critical code), and they dealt with it to my satisfaction.
If, at some later date, I'd found that code verbatim in someone else's system, I might have mentioned it to them, as an aside, but I wouldn't have tried to claim damages or make them remove it. At that point it is WAY too difficult to trace provenance, and hard to prove any sort of knowing violation. It had been released, I'd taken it up from the people who released it, it was done.
In short: If someone releases code with no license attached and you use it and it turns out later it was licensed you're going to have to deal with the consequences of that. If it turns out it wasn't licensed (or was BSD licensed) you're in the clear, even if it was a case like mine where the code was released by a party that wasn't authorized to release it.
The internet is a nice tool to keep from re-inventing the wheel, but if you take anything more than a little subroutine, you better know what rights you have with regards to it because it can seriously bite you in the ass.
Yep. The classic example is: All philosophers are men. Aristotle was a philosopher. Therefore Aristotle was a man.
Perhaps if we're obscure and pretentious enough, no one will want to spy on us! Brillant!
The world changes. Learn to live with it.
It's easy to say enhanced IQ for everone is a good thing, but I'm not sure it is. High IQ actually tends to be destabilizing for society...Buncha damn smartasses thinking they know better than everyone else ;)
The point is, we can't know what effect widespread adoption of even benign-seeming enhancements will have on society. It's easy to think that everyone will be smarter, healthier, prettier, and longer-lived, but the reality may make that pretty horrible.
Ideally, those strong stock that you've preserved would then be bred to other stock in an attempt to pass favorable traits among living animals...You wouldn't (hopefully) just breed up a herd of identical animals...That would leave you in a bad position in a lot of ways.
Therefore, to strengthen the species.
Consider all the rational improvements that could be made through genetic improvements: we could increase tendencies to be smart, scientific, responsible, just, good-natured, conscientious, or whatever other characteristics are found to have genetic inputs.
And we could increase the tendencies to be dumb, obedient, hard working, and short-lived, thereby making us into the people that governments and corporations would dream us to be.
Do you really want to start going down that road? I don't like companies messing casually with plant genomes...Do you really want to jack some patented gene sequences into your kids? If they breed is it going to violate someone's copyright?
I think you should look at the definition of Eugenics before you start talking about animal cloning because it doesn't apply to that...Unless you're being cute and saying that all animals (including humans) are equal, in which case I think you'll find that you're in complete agreement with PETA, which is, I doubt, what you want.
As for the rest, you can shove your trollish delusions up your ass until I actually say any of those things.
If people really cared that much about GM food, it'd have to be, you know, labeled. Thanks to the GM lobby, most people have already been eating GM foods for years. I have a problem with GM foods, but it's more about the problem with the modified plants cross-pollenating with unmodified plants, and corrupting unmodified seed lines, as well as the crappy business policies of companies like Monsanto.
I don't have any particular opinion about human cloning, except for the fact that I don't see any actual point in it. Animal cloning is done to strengthen the breed, technically, so either we're advocating some kind of eugenics, which is just inherently a bad idea, or we're catering to people's mistaken desire to have a genetic duplicate of a dead person, which is also a pretty bad idea.