The moderation system made the difference
on
Handling the Loads
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Slashdot was also my primary source of background and first hand information, and it seems to be the only system that can handle a large number of comments and display them them in a useful and readable format.
Among all the useful slashdot features the moderation system seems to be the most important feature, and even if it is not balanced to deal with 2000+ articles, it still behaved pretty well, minor glitches aside.
Overall, slashdot and it's moderastion system helped me a least threefold to sustain this disaster:
It provided a huge low noise discussion forum by encouraging people to think what other readers might like, and by discouraging people to dump garbage into the system
It is very rewarding to post a comment and see it beeing moderated up; it was especially helpful in this case to see other people reading what I wrote, reducing the feeling of fear and powerlessness in this situation
The slashdot community, often critized for beeing somewhat narrow minded, and especially the moderators have clearly shown that they cover a large political and social spektrum, and few extreme lunatics write here, compared to other places on the internet.
Thank you all, the slashdot team, and everybody else who contributed to make the last days a bit easier to endure.
I wonder if you would change your mind the night said psycho breaks into your house, kills your children, and rapes your wife.
Fortunately this did not happen to me, but last year my father was killed by a psycho. A man climbed over the fence of his garden when he was ouside and started to shoot at him with a silenced gun. Fortunenately my father managed to get into the house and lock the door before he died mortally wounded with several hits in his chest, of which one penetrated his heart. The killer continued shooting through the looked door and through a window in order to kill my father's wife, who has closely witnessed the scene through the open, but lattice-secured window. She survived unharmed, but it's hard to describe and imagine the horror she went throught the last year after this event.
After a few months a suspect was arrested, who has yet to stand trial. The motiv is still unknown, however there is enough evidence for a 95% probability that this guy did it.
I had been thinking a lot about what I might do, of course I thought of revenge, and imagined how it would be to kill this guy, and what would be an appropriate punishment or treatment for such a person, and I imagined a lot of really bad things to do with guy.
However, the first thing that became clear to me was that by killing this guy myself I would become a murderer. Don't take me wrong, I wouldn't hesitate to kill in self defense or to stop someone who is trying to kill, but to kill someone if you don't have to is just plain murder.
I dont want to be a murderer; do you ?
I also thought about what punishment I would prefer for guy:
locked up for 20 years
life sentence
the death penalty.
I ended up with prefering 20 years or life, to give this guy the opportunity to think about what he has done for a long time, and of course to keep him away from society.
Nobody deserves to suffer from killing this guy; have you ever thought about what the executioners go through ?
And what damage it does to someones soul (emotional life) if he has to kill someone slow and intentionally ? How about the right of "Pursuit of Happiness" of the executioner ?
Regarding the "free room and board" I think that a country like the U.S. might easily afford that, and that the costs of an execution are probably much higher, in terms of money, and in terms of many human and social values.
I have seen and talked to people who served a 20 year sentence, and I did not fear any of them; they were just a shade of what they must have been 20 years before; and I talked to professionals working in judiciary, and they said that after 6 or 7 years in prison almost everyone starts to crack; there are very few that are either so strong or so sick that they are still dangerous after 20 years.
The real "punishment" component of the death penalty as practiced in the U.S. seems to be time in the death cell where the people are intentionally kept in the fear of beeing executed every single day by performing a kind of preparation ritual.
In case of terrorist who want to die you even reward these people, transforming them into immortal martyrs if you send them to your "hell", which is their heaven. You just get yourself a bit closer to hell.
I did not suggest to take away people's guns, I own hand guns myself and regularly rank in the best ten.357 Magnum marksmen in the country, and I agree with you that stricter gun control would not technically prevent terror; no technical or tactical measures can do that.
However, my point is that at least honestly trying to keep automatic weapons out of the hands of children in third world countries instead of selling gun manufacturing plants on loan to everybody and his brother might be one step to save a few lifes in a third world country, which in turn, may lead to less terror in maybe 20 or 30 years from now.
A recipe against Governments murdering their own citizens is to get their responsible leader's and lock them up in a prison forever, and not to let them in power like Saddam Hussein for the sake of balancing power in the region and play games with them for a decade.
An international law and international courts IMHO is the best solution for that; however, the U.S. is the most important political opponent against such a solution and has even threated the international court to free U.S. citizens using its military if they would be tried. This U.S. "we are above international law, we are the international law" - attitude is probably today's largest obstacle to fight crime committed by people acting on behalf of governments.
Instead, the U.S. tries to be the Lawmaker, the Judge and the Police in one person, which alone is not a good idea. And keeping over 90% of the world population from participating in making these laws, and a not very nice track record of the U.S. as international citizen might explain the distrust in this self appointment even more.
It was in the middle of afternoon here in Germany when a colleague came into my office and told me that two planes crashed into the WTC in New York. I did not believe it, it sounded complete absurd and impossible. Maybe one plane, but two - impossible. I tried cnn.com, but it did not respond, however, slashdot responded and also already had the story. So we switched on the a video projector and tuned in CNN and could see towers burning on a 20-foot screen; it was almost like looking out of the window. After a few minutes more and more people silently appeared in the room until almost 30 people were silently watching the large screen. Just when I started to pray for the people trapped in the upper half of building 2, the "Pentagon burning" images came in, and the worst moment was when building 2 collapsed, probably killing a lot of people trapped above the impact floors. And I also felt really bad seeing the replay of impact 2 when I realized that the plane was full of people. I still feel sick when remembering that.
Driving home took me twice as long because many places like the U.S. Embassy and many Jewish places were heavily guarded and many streets were blocked.
I myself had my father murdered last year, and I feel with everybody who has lost relatives or friends in this brutal crime, who will live through moments of this day through next months again and again, and who will not enjoy a happy moment for long while. Everybody who has ever lost a loved one as result of criminal violence knows what I am talking about.
What can help is to find out who did it, why they did it, and what can be done that such a thing will never happen again.
Their analysts say Osama Bin Laden is Nr. 1 on the list of suspects.
Whoever will turn out to be behind this, it is very probable that he used Know-How that was originally created within some government secret agency like the KGB, the CIA, the Mossad or maybe a dozen other government funded agencies from around the world.
The USA has it's share in supporting "freedom fighters" against foreign rogue governments. The USA once even supported Osama Bin Laden when he organized the Rebellion in Afghanistan against the Russian occupation. Other examples of former U.S. friends are Sadam Hussein, who was supported in his war against Iran, the Contra in Nicaragua, and the UCK in Yugoslavia fighting against the Serbs. There are probably a few hundred groups and leaders supported worldwide by 'civilized' governments, many of them with the clear intention killing people to reach their political aims.
In the above and many other cases US agencies helped to spread weapons and guerrilla warfare techniques, and probably more important, it created shady organizations with capable leaders, structures and worldwide contacts with the primary purpose to spread terror and destruction.
The problem is, that after the war is won and the rogue government overthrown, these people, their weapons, their followers and their state of mind doesn't cease to exist.
Throw in some areas like Palestina, Afghanistan, Tchechenia, Africa and Middle/South America where children haven't been seen human rights or peace for the last 30 years, and you get a large supply of people who have nothing to loose except their miserable life, and get the chance to become eternal heroes within their society by blowing up themselves and taking as many as possible with them.
What can be done
No "civilized" country should sell any weapon to anyone without democratic legitimisation; even better, all international weapon trading should be simply forbidden, including hand guns
All secret agencies in "civilized" countries must be closer controlled to avoid creation of new guerrilla armies around the world
Anonymous Transfer and laundry of large sums of money must be controlled to dry up funding of weapon trade and funding of rouge groups
Every Individual connected with weapon trading or supporting guerrilla in a foreign country should be severely punished
Human rights must be honoured everywhere in the world, and everyone not honouring them should become outlawed
Fair International Trade and real substantial development support should help to create a reasonable level of wealth everywhere in the world
The problem with the above things is not that they require an idealistic world; the problem is, the would put many important and powerful people in the USA and other countries, Israel quite ahead, in the rogue camp.
The USA e.g. would have to face that killing imprisoned people, even convicted criminals, is not justice, but a crime against humanity.
And just hearing about some explosions in Kabul, it seems that the US Government has a long way to go, and to learn some more lessons. I do not have any sympathy for those lunatics in Afghanistan, but they are a result of cold war superpower games and did not chose their fate, and the killing of innocent people does not justify the killing other innocent people.
Another thing from history that many people in the U.S. are not aware of:
Terrorism works.
Especially in rich countries where life is highly valued, and people have a lot to loose they are easily scared by terrorist attacks, even if the real danger is statistically marginal compared to tobacco or traffic, the perceived danger is large enough to change a society.
And you can not stop terrorist attacks by people who are willing to sacrifice their life; just look to Israel these days.
You can not stop terror by killing people, as you can not cure your AIDS by fucking a virgin, as believed by many people in Africa and Asia.
Some predictions for the future:
Someone guilty will be found, probably Ben Ladin
Bombs will be thrown by the US Military, and more innocent people will be killed
A lot of annoying and expensive security measures will be taken
Civil Rights will be restricted in the U.S. and other civilized country
More innocent people will be killed in the U.S. by terrorist attacks
Finally, the terrorists will not achieve their ultimate goals and be hunted down and isolated from their environment;
to achieve this, compromises will be made to dry up the particular terror breeding grounds, like creating more wealth and stability in these regions
the fear of terrorism will have impact on political decisions, and in the long term US politicians will be more careful because of this fear
After this bad day I hope that today's events will be a unique experience in my life, and not the begin of a new era of terror and war.
I had to deal with such situations several times and on both sides under German Law and Jurisdiction, and from the talks with many lawyers I learned:
Know How is yours, and you can do with it as you please. Trade Secrets are confidential, but only for a limited time (how long depends, but rarely longer than two years).
In general the difference between a trade secret and Know How seems to be that trade secrets will be worthless after a short time.
The IMHO correct ratio behind (German) law favouring the individual labourer is that you can not rip out a part of your brain if you leave, and a company is not allowed to own a human beeing or even parts of it, at least in Germany.
In Germany the courts also refer to "inevitable disclosure", but they interpret it that you can not be held liable for something inevitable.
It is also ruled that any non-compete clause must be compensated with at least 50% of the last monthly salary for every month it shall be valid.
So here the rule seems to be simple: You can base your career on know how, but you should be very careful with short term gains you achieve just because you have fresh insider information from you previous employer.
IMO this is no real probleam as long as the capacity of storage media keep falling.
Every ten years you can store about 100 times as much data for the same price in nearly the same time.
It is no problem today to keep everything someone has written in his whole life on a laptop, buy a new one every 5 years and use ten percent of the disk for *everything* that was on the last machine.
And if there will be a demand for offline long term storage media, it will be met.
Or in case of books, you can still print them out or even engrave them into platinum sheets if you think your writing deserves it and you are willing to pay for it.
I can't believe that the WAP-Forum acts so stupid, and that they really have acknowledged this patent; I could not found anything about it on their Website. If they did, someone really stupid or bribed has acted there.
I browsed the Patent and it describes in detail an architecture of a graphical user interface framework where multiple classes of dynamic viewers can be used due to an abstract definition of all the user interface elements. (MacOS, Windows, JAVA, JAVAScript, Postscript-RIPs and every HTML-Renderer do usually have an architecture with the same pattern, which is basically the model-view-controller pattern (MVC), dating back to the 1970'.)
As far as I understand the US patent system you can always get a claim for something if you make your claims narrow and specific enough, but then it is easy for someone else to get around the patent by changing just a detail.
If this patent would be challenged, a broad interpretation of the claims would not hold, so I think even GeoWorks position is has a quite narrow and specific interpretation of the claims.
I do not know how close the WAP-Specs are to the stuff described in the patent, but the scandal might be that some precise specs have been smuggled into the standard so that now the claims can be made, without necessity for doing so.
If the WAP-Forum will not handle this situation cleanly, this might kill the whole consortium.
Holding a patent means that you can interdict entirely to use a technology for commercial purposes.
Slashdot Mirror
Among all the useful slashdot features the moderation system seems to be the most important feature, and even if it is not balanced to deal with 2000+ articles, it still behaved pretty well, minor glitches aside.
Overall, slashdot and it's moderastion system helped me a least threefold to sustain this disaster:
It provided a huge low noise discussion forum by encouraging people to think what other readers might like, and by discouraging people to dump garbage into the system
It is very rewarding to post a comment and see it beeing moderated up; it was especially helpful in this case to see other people reading what I wrote, reducing the feeling of fear and powerlessness in this situation
The slashdot community, often critized for beeing somewhat narrow minded, and especially the moderators have clearly shown that they cover a large political and social spektrum, and few extreme lunatics write here, compared to other places on the internet.
Thank you all, the slashdot team, and everybody else who contributed to make the last days a bit easier to endure.
p.
Fortunately this did not happen to me, but last year my father was killed by a psycho. A man climbed over the fence of his garden when he was ouside and started to shoot at him with a silenced gun. Fortunenately my father managed to get into the house and lock the door before he died mortally wounded with several hits in his chest, of which one penetrated his heart. The killer continued shooting through the looked door and through a window in order to kill my father's wife, who has closely witnessed the scene through the open, but lattice-secured window. She survived unharmed, but it's hard to describe and imagine the horror she went throught the last year after this event.
After a few months a suspect was arrested, who has yet to stand trial. The motiv is still unknown, however there is enough evidence for a 95% probability that this guy did it.
I had been thinking a lot about what I might do, of course I thought of revenge, and imagined how it would be to kill this guy, and what would be an appropriate punishment or treatment for such a person, and I imagined a lot of really bad things to do with guy.
However, the first thing that became clear to me was that by killing this guy myself I would become a murderer. Don't take me wrong, I wouldn't hesitate to kill in self defense or to stop someone who is trying to kill, but to kill someone if you don't have to is just plain murder.
I dont want to be a murderer; do you ?
I also thought about what punishment I would prefer for guy:
locked up for 20 years
life sentence
the death penalty.
I ended up with prefering 20 years or life, to give this guy the opportunity to think about what he has done for a long time, and of course to keep him away from society.
Nobody deserves to suffer from killing this guy; have you ever thought about what the executioners go through ?
And what damage it does to someones soul (emotional life) if he has to kill someone slow and intentionally ? How about the right of "Pursuit of Happiness" of the executioner ?
Regarding the "free room and board" I think that a country like the U.S. might easily afford that, and that the costs of an execution are probably much higher, in terms of money, and in terms of many human and social values.
I have seen and talked to people who served a 20 year sentence, and I did not fear any of them; they were just a shade of what they must have been 20 years before; and I talked to professionals working in judiciary, and they said that after 6 or 7 years in prison almost everyone starts to crack; there are very few that are either so strong or so sick that they are still dangerous after 20 years.
The real "punishment" component of the death penalty as practiced in the U.S. seems to be time in the death cell where the people are intentionally kept in the fear of beeing executed every single day by performing a kind of preparation ritual.
In case of terrorist who want to die you even reward these people, transforming them into immortal martyrs if you send them to your "hell", which is their heaven. You just get yourself a bit closer to hell.
p.
I did not suggest to take away people's guns, I own hand guns myself and regularly rank in the best ten .357 Magnum marksmen in the country, and I agree with you that stricter gun control would not technically prevent terror; no technical or tactical measures can do that.
However, my point is that at least honestly trying to keep automatic weapons out of the hands of children in third world countries instead of selling gun manufacturing plants on loan to everybody and his brother might be one step to save a few lifes in a third world country, which in turn, may lead to less terror in maybe 20 or 30 years from now.
A recipe against Governments murdering their own citizens is to get their responsible leader's and lock them up in a prison forever, and not to let them in power like Saddam Hussein for the sake of balancing power in the region and play games with them for a decade.
An international law and international courts IMHO is the best solution for that; however, the U.S. is the most important political opponent against such a solution and has even threated the international court to free U.S. citizens using its military if they would be tried. This U.S. "we are above international law, we are the international law" - attitude is probably today's largest obstacle to fight crime committed by people acting on behalf of governments.
Instead, the U.S. tries to be the Lawmaker, the Judge and the Police in one person, which alone is not a good idea. And keeping over 90% of the world population from participating in making these laws, and a not very nice track record of the U.S. as international citizen might explain the distrust in this self appointment even more.
p.
Driving home took me twice as long because many places like the U.S. Embassy and many Jewish places were heavily guarded and many streets were blocked.
I myself had my father murdered last year, and I feel with everybody who has lost relatives or friends in this brutal crime, who will live through moments of this day through next months again and again, and who will not enjoy a happy moment for long while. Everybody who has ever lost a loved one as result of criminal violence knows what I am talking about.
What can help is to find out who did it, why they did it, and what can be done that such a thing will never happen again.
Jane's has some professional assessment of who might be capable and has a motive for doing such a thing.
Their analysts say Osama Bin Laden is Nr. 1 on the list of suspects.
Whoever will turn out to be behind this, it is very probable that he used Know-How that was originally created within some government secret agency like the KGB, the CIA, the Mossad or maybe a dozen other government funded agencies from around the world.
The USA has it's share in supporting "freedom fighters" against foreign rogue governments. The USA once even supported Osama Bin Laden when he organized the Rebellion in Afghanistan against the Russian occupation. Other examples of former U.S. friends are Sadam Hussein, who was supported in his war against Iran, the Contra in Nicaragua, and the UCK in Yugoslavia fighting against the Serbs. There are probably a few hundred groups and leaders supported worldwide by 'civilized' governments, many of them with the clear intention killing people to reach their political aims.
In the above and many other cases US agencies helped to spread weapons and guerrilla warfare techniques, and probably more important, it created shady organizations with capable leaders, structures and worldwide contacts with the primary purpose to spread terror and destruction.
The problem is, that after the war is won and the rogue government overthrown, these people, their weapons, their followers and their state of mind doesn't cease to exist.
Throw in some areas like Palestina, Afghanistan, Tchechenia, Africa and Middle/South America where children haven't been seen human rights or peace for the last 30 years, and you get a large supply of people who have nothing to loose except their miserable life, and get the chance to become eternal heroes within their society by blowing up themselves and taking as many as possible with them.
What can be done
No "civilized" country should sell any weapon to anyone without democratic legitimisation; even better, all international weapon trading should be simply forbidden, including hand guns
All secret agencies in "civilized" countries must be closer controlled to avoid creation of new guerrilla armies around the world
Anonymous Transfer and laundry of large sums of money must be controlled to dry up funding of weapon trade and funding of rouge groups
Every Individual connected with weapon trading or supporting guerrilla in a foreign country should be severely punished
Human rights must be honoured everywhere in the world, and everyone not honouring them should become outlawed
Fair International Trade and real substantial development support should help to create a reasonable level of wealth everywhere in the world
The problem with the above things is not that they require an idealistic world; the problem is, the would put many important and powerful people in the USA and other countries, Israel quite ahead, in the rogue camp.
The USA e.g. would have to face that killing imprisoned people, even convicted criminals, is not justice, but a crime against humanity.
And just hearing about some explosions in Kabul, it seems that the US Government has a long way to go, and to learn some more lessons. I do not have any sympathy for those lunatics in Afghanistan, but they are a result of cold war superpower games and did not chose their fate, and the killing of innocent people does not justify the killing other innocent people.
Another thing from history that many people in the U.S. are not aware of:
Terrorism works.
Especially in rich countries where life is highly valued, and people have a lot to loose they are easily scared by terrorist attacks, even if the real danger is statistically marginal compared to tobacco or traffic, the perceived danger is large enough to change a society.
And you can not stop terrorist attacks by people who are willing to sacrifice their life; just look to Israel these days.
You can not stop terror by killing people, as you can not cure your AIDS by fucking a virgin, as believed by many people in Africa and Asia.
Some predictions for the future:
Someone guilty will be found, probably Ben Ladin
Bombs will be thrown by the US Military, and more innocent people will be killed
A lot of annoying and expensive security measures will be taken
Civil Rights will be restricted in the U.S. and other civilized country
More innocent people will be killed in the U.S. by terrorist attacks
Finally, the terrorists will not achieve their ultimate goals and be hunted down and isolated from their environment;
to achieve this, compromises will be made to dry up the particular terror breeding grounds, like creating more wealth and stability in these regions
the fear of terrorism will have impact on political decisions, and in the long term US politicians will be more careful because of this fear
After this bad day I hope that today's events will be a unique experience in my life, and not the begin of a new era of terror and war.
Lets make this world a better place.
p.
I had to deal with such situations several times and on both sides under German Law and Jurisdiction, and from the talks with many lawyers I learned:
Know How is yours, and you can do with it as you please. Trade Secrets are confidential, but only for a limited time (how long depends, but rarely longer than two years).
In general the difference between a trade secret and Know How seems to be that trade secrets will be worthless after a short time.
The IMHO correct ratio behind (German) law favouring the individual labourer is that you can not rip out a part of your brain if you leave, and a company is not allowed to own a human beeing or even parts of it, at least in Germany.
In Germany the courts also refer to "inevitable disclosure", but they interpret it that you can not be held liable for something inevitable.
It is also ruled that any non-compete clause must be compensated with at least 50% of the last monthly salary for every month it shall be valid.
So here the rule seems to be simple: You can base your career on know how, but you should be very careful with short term gains you achieve just because you have fresh insider information from you previous employer.
IMO this is no real probleam as long as the capacity of storage media keep falling.
Every ten years you can store about 100 times as much data for the same price in nearly the same time.
It is no problem today to keep everything someone has written in his whole life on a laptop, buy a new one every 5 years and use ten percent of the disk for *everything* that was on the last machine.
And if there will be a demand for offline long term storage media, it will be met.
Or in case of books, you can still print them out or even engrave them into platinum sheets if you think your writing deserves it and you are willing to pay for it.
Peace and Prosperity
Pavel
I can't believe that the WAP-Forum acts so stupid, and that they really have acknowledged this patent; I could not found anything about it on their Website. If they did, someone really stupid or bribed has acted there.
I browsed the Patent and it describes in detail an architecture of a graphical user interface framework where multiple classes of dynamic viewers can be used due to an abstract definition of all the user interface elements. (MacOS, Windows, JAVA, JAVAScript, Postscript-RIPs and every HTML-Renderer do usually have an architecture with the same pattern, which is basically the model-view-controller pattern (MVC), dating back to the 1970'.)
As far as I understand the US patent system you can always get a claim for something if you make your claims narrow and specific enough, but then it is easy for someone else to get around the patent by changing just a detail.
If this patent would be challenged, a broad interpretation of the claims would not hold, so I think even GeoWorks position is has a quite narrow and specific interpretation of the claims.
I do not know how close the WAP-Specs are to the stuff described in the patent, but the scandal might be that some precise specs have been smuggled into the standard so that now the claims can be made, without necessity for doing so.
If the WAP-Forum will not handle this situation cleanly, this might kill the whole consortium.
Holding a patent means that you can interdict entirely to use a technology for commercial purposes.
Just my 0.02 Euro