Yeah, a parade of bots that lower the signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter even further (if that's even possible) is absolutely something that deserves encouragement.
I don't think there was that much forethought put into it, at least by the software guy. He seems like a useful idiot. Maybe the journalist who first planted the seed for this bot was thinking ahead to being able to write a story about big bad Twitter taking a shit all over the little guy trying to do good; it's hard to say.
According to the summary, this came about from a journalist actively asking if there was a way to vigilante censor people, and then this guy took it upon himself to write a bot to do it. He never thought at all about if there was a better way (monitor suspect account waiting for posts, digest posts, and auto-report). They both forgot that the only people allowed to "police" Twitter, is Twitter.
The guy who wrote it should have known better, and he gets what he deserves for violating the terms of use. The journalist should absolutely know better, as most journalists are champions of first amendment rights, and attempting to squelch arbitrary twitter accounts through spambot posting because you don't like what they say is censorship and harassment at best. Would this journalist appreciate it if someone out there decided that they didn't like what he writes about, and decided to flood various Internet services that host his content with spambot garbage?
It's sad that I have to put this disclaimer on here, but it's the direction Slashdot seems to have gone: This post is not about defending alleged "nazi sock puppet" twitter accounts, but rather about supporting Twitter's right to enforce their rules on their privately owned system without other people trying to take it upon themselves to do what nobody asked for, and is explicitly disallowed.
Personally, I'd be happy if Twitter vanished from the face of the Earth as the signal-to-noise ratio is so unbelievably low as to become indistinguishable from noise, and a colossal waste of electricity and storage hardware. But I also recognize that it's not for me to take it upon myself to make that happen. Unlike the two in the article.
This was what I was thinking when I read the headline - so they have a bot policy, and enforced it. I guess it's news because it was a "good" bot that was exposing alleged "impostors" from an arbitrary database of accounts that this guy doesn't like?
Still a violation of the terms of use, and subject to the resulting action.
Intolerance of race / sex / nationality / religion / etc, is a problem. Intolerance of different thought and freedom of expression is also a problem, albeit a different problem.
I could do without either, but I don't espouse violence as being an answer.
So all of a sudden it's "acceptable" to be violent towards someone because they have different views than you, but only if it's a certain subset of different views.
Yes, autocratic white supremecists are bad. No, that is not a free pass for committing assault. Grow up.
1) historical A member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party. 1.1) derogatory A person with extreme racist or authoritarian views. 1.2) A person who seeks to impose their views on others in a very autocratic or inflexible way.
Ok, you don't like Trump; we get it. But you don't just get to make shit up and call it facts. This is exactly how things get labeled "fake news" - inserting some absolute fucking bullshit into otherwise relevant information.
Low approval rating, historical Presidents, also according to Gallup: Harry S Truman: 22% Lyndon B Johnson: 35% Richard M Nixon: 24% Gerald Ford: 37% Jimmy Carter: 28% Ronald Reagan: 35% George H. W. Bush: 29% George W. Bush: 25% Barack Obama: 38%
Lowest Term approval rating averages, historical Presidents (still Gallup): Harry S Truman: 36.5% Richard M Nixon: 34.4% George W Bush: 36.5%
Equivalence makes it ok, all of a sudden? Because "they" did it, it's ok if "we" do it too? Is the US Department of State now being given it's guidance from a grade school playground?
Hint: invading sovereign countries because $REASON_NOT_OFFICIALLY_DECLARED_WAR isn't ok. Full stop. It doesn't matter who the fuck is President, what party he belongs to, or what gripe they have up their ass. It doesn't matter if the shitty President before did it. Doing it yourself is wrong, and makes you a shitty President too. Defending it by pointing to the same behavior from "the other guy" is at best hypocritical, and at the worst actually condoning this shit.
Pre-emptive invasion to find and destroy WMD that we fucking sold them and killing tens of thousands in the process is just as assholic as overthrowing other countries governments because protection of corporate^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H "national" interests is more important than the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the crossfire of a dick measuring contest with Russia. Which, by the way, we lost, and enabled Russia to go ahead and annex other neighboring territories without any real consequence.
Extra points for overthrowing other governments and then bitching as loud as possible about some other government allegedly "hacking" our election process because the favored candidate didn't win, like the CIA hasn't interfered in countless other countries' elections (or just outright overthrew elected governments in favor of friendly despots when the election didn't go "our way") since the 1950s.
If you can't see how there's anything wrong with all of this, and that people from both political parties are at fault, then you're part of the god damn problem.
I actually went through the Guangzhou airport a couple times in the last month or so, and you could already use WeChat to get on the free WiFi. I don't use WeChat so I used the little kiosk thing where it scans your passport and spits out a user / password, and then immediately connected to a VPN.
You can see through your pocket? That either makes you incredibly flexible as well as a superhero, or you didn't read.
Yes, I know you can have weather on your lock screen / notification center / home screen etc. But unless you have some kind of a harness that holds your phone in front of your face at all times with the screen on 24/7, you still have to actually lay hands on your phone.
I twist my wrist without my hands leaving the keyboard.
I'm not going to pretend to speak to what you find inconvenient or not, but the inconvenience of charging a smart watch is really quite overblown, especially if it's using inductive charging. It's one of those things that people worry about until they actually go to do it, and realize it's not a thing to worry about much at all.
Most people don't sleep with a wrist watch on, so they're taking it off every night anyway. Just take it off onto an inductive charging mat on the nightstand. Or if you are used to putting it into a watch box, get a watch box that is also a charger - that's what I did. Or a simple stand that you just drop it onto. And, my Apple Watch series 3 is only down to 75% at the end of the day anyway, so I don't even have to charge it every night like I do my phone.
Travel might be a bit of a thing because you would need to remember to bring another cable with you unless you can induction charge your phone too, but that's why I went with a watch box charger thing - it's no bigger than a cable plus plug-in DC converter USB wall wart, and offers some protection if you aren't wearing it. It also has a 5000 mAh battery in it so I can charge the watch or my phone from it on the go.
Keeping it charged is less work than I have to do with my Bulova automatic - I don't have to wind up and set the time on it if I go a day without wearing it. It's exactly the same as if I wear my Movado - I pick it up off the night stand and put it on my wrist. If you already wear a wrist watch, there's a good chance that charging a smart watch is exactly the same as you already do.
My Apple Watch series 3 (GPS only) battery lasts three days. I would like it to be longer, but this isn't the shit show generation 1 devices that couldn't even go 24 hours.
I wish I could fail to the tune of moving 14 million units in a year. And that's only from Apple - doesn't count the other players in the field.
Seriously, what is this attitude that unless you sell 100 million, it's a failure? That's an impossible success mark for anything to hit except the Apple iPhone and maybe Samsung Galaxy S.
How much of a text message does a smartwatch display legibly? You'd be surprised. And, it's a touchscreen that scrolls, if someone is sending you a novel of a message rather than a short message.
Stock ticker? And then what? In order to make a buy or sell you have to whip out the smartphone anyway or call up your adviser. Unless you are monitoring because you already put in limit orders, or something else that's a little beyond a simple buy / sell.
Temperature might be interesting, but it likely will not be the ambient temperature of the place you are at, but some measurement from some weather station. Doesn't help to make the point that it is too hot in the office. It's still nice to know the temperature outside without pulling phone out of the pocket, unlocking it, opening an app, waiting for it to load, then getting the temperature. Also, watch app for smart thermostat that does actually tell you the temperature inside, as well as allow you to adjust it.
I'm not saying that any of that justifies the price of what is essentially a remote screen on your wrist, but basically everyone I've met that has an Apple Watch over the last few years still loves it and has absolutely no buyer remorse whatsoever. Even though that's anecdotal, it's still a bit eye opening as I thought of it as rather useless myself.
If you don't like the "filtering" at the application level, use a different web site. You actually have choice at that level.
Lower down the stack, there's only so many options for physical connection, and the routing that provider gives. Which is the problem.
You are essentially advocating compulsory content publishing in the hopes of "neutrality." That is just as bogus as the idea of mandating a 50/50 time split on news networks to cover "both sides" - on some issues this makes sense, but on others it is ridiculously stupid; I don't need to hear from racists and bigots in a story about a parade of neo-nazi thugs marching through a town raising an arm and yelling insane ignorant shit.
Well, because it's settled Supreme Court precedence, you would probably need a constitutional amendment, and that takes a 2/3 majority in both chambers of Congress, plus ratification by 2/3 of the states. That won't happen.
Any simple law passed would become a football being punted between passing and repeal as the results of each election becomes known, making the availability of abortion a year-by-year ridiculous situation through attaching riders and amendments to muss-pass legislation as the dinosaurs that refuse to give it up continue making everyone's lives hell - look at the many reincarnations of the gag rule, and that's just a doctor TALKING about abortion .
We're better with the current situation than that possible scenario.
The administrative branch (usually) executes the laws Congress passes, as long as they are constitutional. The FCC, like all other pieces of the administration, derive their authority from duly passed legislation. Should the congress pass new laws (signed by the President, or with a veto override), the FCC must comply absent a court order from a Federal judge saying otherwise.
So unless someone just up and goes to Mars tomorrow or it doesn't count?
Apollo 13 wasn't NASA's first launch, or even it's 20th successful launch.
This is going to be an iterative process, just like going to the Moon was. You can't just go and stab Old Glory in the dirt; you first have to learn how to do it, each step at a time. Learn to go to orbit, learn to rendezvous, learn to maneuver, learn to dock, learn to navigate by star position, develop hardware, etc. Only then can you put it all together to do the extraordinary.
The phone doesn't run off mains power when plugged into the wall. It still runs from the battery, and the battery charger circuit is running to fill the battery. Two separate loops.
If the battery cannot deliver the voltage necessary for the phone to run at full power with full stability, they would still need to throttle it in order to have an acceptable user experience.
You are assuming those are the choices. Batteries that age put out less voltage throughout the discharge. If the voltage supplied to the CPU isn't sufficient to run it at full power, you get random reboots, corrupt data, etc.
Lower the CPU power, increase tolerance of lower voltage, increase stability of the whole device. So, how about this choice:
1. Accept performance degradation. 2. Have a phone that is unstable, rebooting when power draw is highest (phone calls) and possibly fucking over your data 3. Have a battery service.
I agree that Apple should have done some notification to the user when this "limp mode" was engaged, but a lot of people are preening about it being some kind of nefarious marketing scheme to get people to buy new phones, when it could just be an honest attempt to maintain stability on an aging device to keep existing customers happy. The proper move probably would have been to throw a notification that your iPhone is in need of a battery service, click here to schedule one, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, a parade of bots that lower the signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter even further (if that's even possible) is absolutely something that deserves encouragement.
If you didn't notice, I'm being sarcastic.
I don't think there was that much forethought put into it, at least by the software guy. He seems like a useful idiot. Maybe the journalist who first planted the seed for this bot was thinking ahead to being able to write a story about big bad Twitter taking a shit all over the little guy trying to do good; it's hard to say.
According to the summary, this came about from a journalist actively asking if there was a way to vigilante censor people, and then this guy took it upon himself to write a bot to do it. He never thought at all about if there was a better way (monitor suspect account waiting for posts, digest posts, and auto-report). They both forgot that the only people allowed to "police" Twitter, is Twitter.
The guy who wrote it should have known better, and he gets what he deserves for violating the terms of use. The journalist should absolutely know better, as most journalists are champions of first amendment rights, and attempting to squelch arbitrary twitter accounts through spambot posting because you don't like what they say is censorship and harassment at best. Would this journalist appreciate it if someone out there decided that they didn't like what he writes about, and decided to flood various Internet services that host his content with spambot garbage?
It's sad that I have to put this disclaimer on here, but it's the direction Slashdot seems to have gone: This post is not about defending alleged "nazi sock puppet" twitter accounts, but rather about supporting Twitter's right to enforce their rules on their privately owned system without other people trying to take it upon themselves to do what nobody asked for, and is explicitly disallowed.
Personally, I'd be happy if Twitter vanished from the face of the Earth as the signal-to-noise ratio is so unbelievably low as to become indistinguishable from noise, and a colossal waste of electricity and storage hardware. But I also recognize that it's not for me to take it upon myself to make that happen. Unlike the two in the article.
This was what I was thinking when I read the headline - so they have a bot policy, and enforced it. I guess it's news because it was a "good" bot that was exposing alleged "impostors" from an arbitrary database of accounts that this guy doesn't like?
Still a violation of the terms of use, and subject to the resulting action.
To be fair, they are both "the problem."
Intolerance of race / sex / nationality / religion / etc, is a problem.
Intolerance of different thought and freedom of expression is also a problem, albeit a different problem.
I could do without either, but I don't espouse violence as being an answer.
So all of a sudden it's "acceptable" to be violent towards someone because they have different views than you, but only if it's a certain subset of different views.
Yes, autocratic white supremecists are bad. No, that is not a free pass for committing assault. Grow up.
Correct. All racists are not Nazis, but damn near all Nazis are racists.
It's possible to be a racist and not believe in nationalism and autocratic rule.
Merriam-Webster can suck it. Oxford gets it better.
Nazi
NOUN plural nazis
1) historical A member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party.
1.1) derogatory A person with extreme racist or authoritarian views.
1.2) A person who seeks to impose their views on others in a very autocratic or inflexible way.
This might be one of the best summaries I've seen.
Well done. You'd have a mod point from me, if I had them to give today.
Ok, you don't like Trump; we get it. But you don't just get to make shit up and call it facts. This is exactly how things get labeled "fake news" - inserting some absolute fucking bullshit into otherwise relevant information.
Trump approval rating, according to Gallup: 38%
Low approval rating, historical Presidents, also according to Gallup:
Harry S Truman: 22%
Lyndon B Johnson: 35%
Richard M Nixon: 24%
Gerald Ford: 37%
Jimmy Carter: 28%
Ronald Reagan: 35%
George H. W. Bush: 29%
George W. Bush: 25%
Barack Obama: 38%
Lowest Term approval rating averages, historical Presidents (still Gallup):
Harry S Truman: 36.5%
Richard M Nixon: 34.4%
George W Bush: 36.5%
Source: http://news.gallup.com/poll/11...
Trump is an orange douchebag, but not (yet) the "lowest approval rating...ever." Not even within 10 percentage points.
Equivalence makes it ok, all of a sudden? Because "they" did it, it's ok if "we" do it too? Is the US Department of State now being given it's guidance from a grade school playground?
Hint: invading sovereign countries because $REASON_NOT_OFFICIALLY_DECLARED_WAR isn't ok. Full stop. It doesn't matter who the fuck is President, what party he belongs to, or what gripe they have up their ass. It doesn't matter if the shitty President before did it. Doing it yourself is wrong, and makes you a shitty President too. Defending it by pointing to the same behavior from "the other guy" is at best hypocritical, and at the worst actually condoning this shit.
Pre-emptive invasion to find and destroy WMD that we fucking sold them and killing tens of thousands in the process is just as assholic as overthrowing other countries governments because protection of corporate^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H "national" interests is more important than the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the crossfire of a dick measuring contest with Russia. Which, by the way, we lost, and enabled Russia to go ahead and annex other neighboring territories without any real consequence.
Extra points for overthrowing other governments and then bitching as loud as possible about some other government allegedly "hacking" our election process because the favored candidate didn't win, like the CIA hasn't interfered in countless other countries' elections (or just outright overthrew elected governments in favor of friendly despots when the election didn't go "our way") since the 1950s.
If you can't see how there's anything wrong with all of this, and that people from both political parties are at fault, then you're part of the god damn problem.
The same way you deal with a fire in a building with several hundred tons of coal, or a warehouse filled with oil barrels?
Nice FUD. It turns out that energy-dense materials are energetic, no matter what form.
Answer: on-demand bitcoin mining! Use up all the extra generation and get paid twice to do it!
I actually went through the Guangzhou airport a couple times in the last month or so, and you could already use WeChat to get on the free WiFi. I don't use WeChat so I used the little kiosk thing where it scans your passport and spits out a user / password, and then immediately connected to a VPN.
I guess they are making it more official now.
You can see through your pocket? That either makes you incredibly flexible as well as a superhero, or you didn't read.
Yes, I know you can have weather on your lock screen / notification center / home screen etc. But unless you have some kind of a harness that holds your phone in front of your face at all times with the screen on 24/7, you still have to actually lay hands on your phone.
I twist my wrist without my hands leaving the keyboard.
I'm not going to pretend to speak to what you find inconvenient or not, but the inconvenience of charging a smart watch is really quite overblown, especially if it's using inductive charging. It's one of those things that people worry about until they actually go to do it, and realize it's not a thing to worry about much at all.
Most people don't sleep with a wrist watch on, so they're taking it off every night anyway. Just take it off onto an inductive charging mat on the nightstand. Or if you are used to putting it into a watch box, get a watch box that is also a charger - that's what I did. Or a simple stand that you just drop it onto. And, my Apple Watch series 3 is only down to 75% at the end of the day anyway, so I don't even have to charge it every night like I do my phone.
Travel might be a bit of a thing because you would need to remember to bring another cable with you unless you can induction charge your phone too, but that's why I went with a watch box charger thing - it's no bigger than a cable plus plug-in DC converter USB wall wart, and offers some protection if you aren't wearing it. It also has a 5000 mAh battery in it so I can charge the watch or my phone from it on the go.
Keeping it charged is less work than I have to do with my Bulova automatic - I don't have to wind up and set the time on it if I go a day without wearing it. It's exactly the same as if I wear my Movado - I pick it up off the night stand and put it on my wrist. If you already wear a wrist watch, there's a good chance that charging a smart watch is exactly the same as you already do.
[Citation Needed]
My Apple Watch series 3 (GPS only) battery lasts three days. I would like it to be longer, but this isn't the shit show generation 1 devices that couldn't even go 24 hours.
I wish I could fail to the tune of moving 14 million units in a year. And that's only from Apple - doesn't count the other players in the field.
Seriously, what is this attitude that unless you sell 100 million, it's a failure? That's an impossible success mark for anything to hit except the Apple iPhone and maybe Samsung Galaxy S.
How much of a text message does a smartwatch display legibly? You'd be surprised. And, it's a touchscreen that scrolls, if someone is sending you a novel of a message rather than a short message.
Stock ticker? And then what? In order to make a buy or sell you have to whip out the smartphone anyway or call up your adviser. Unless you are monitoring because you already put in limit orders, or something else that's a little beyond a simple buy / sell.
Temperature might be interesting, but it likely will not be the ambient temperature of the place you are at, but some measurement from some weather station. Doesn't help to make the point that it is too hot in the office. It's still nice to know the temperature outside without pulling phone out of the pocket, unlocking it, opening an app, waiting for it to load, then getting the temperature. Also, watch app for smart thermostat that does actually tell you the temperature inside, as well as allow you to adjust it.
I'm not saying that any of that justifies the price of what is essentially a remote screen on your wrist, but basically everyone I've met that has an Apple Watch over the last few years still loves it and has absolutely no buyer remorse whatsoever. Even though that's anecdotal, it's still a bit eye opening as I thought of it as rather useless myself.
You forgot:
4) Don't buy anything battery powered, because they will all eventually have issues like this where the battery ages.
Seriously, you're acting like you've never had anything battery powered that works worse than brand new after a year or two. Oh, the outrage!
If you don't like the "filtering" at the application level, use a different web site. You actually have choice at that level.
Lower down the stack, there's only so many options for physical connection, and the routing that provider gives. Which is the problem.
You are essentially advocating compulsory content publishing in the hopes of "neutrality." That is just as bogus as the idea of mandating a 50/50 time split on news networks to cover "both sides" - on some issues this makes sense, but on others it is ridiculously stupid; I don't need to hear from racists and bigots in a story about a parade of neo-nazi thugs marching through a town raising an arm and yelling insane ignorant shit.
Well, because it's settled Supreme Court precedence, you would probably need a constitutional amendment, and that takes a 2/3 majority in both chambers of Congress, plus ratification by 2/3 of the states. That won't happen.
Any simple law passed would become a football being punted between passing and repeal as the results of each election becomes known, making the availability of abortion a year-by-year ridiculous situation through attaching riders and amendments to muss-pass legislation as the dinosaurs that refuse to give it up continue making everyone's lives hell - look at the many reincarnations of the gag rule, and that's just a doctor TALKING about abortion .
We're better with the current situation than that possible scenario.
Yes.
The administrative branch (usually) executes the laws Congress passes, as long as they are constitutional. The FCC, like all other pieces of the administration, derive their authority from duly passed legislation. Should the congress pass new laws (signed by the President, or with a veto override), the FCC must comply absent a court order from a Federal judge saying otherwise.
So unless someone just up and goes to Mars tomorrow or it doesn't count?
Apollo 13 wasn't NASA's first launch, or even it's 20th successful launch.
This is going to be an iterative process, just like going to the Moon was. You can't just go and stab Old Glory in the dirt; you first have to learn how to do it, each step at a time. Learn to go to orbit, learn to rendezvous, learn to maneuver, learn to dock, learn to navigate by star position, develop hardware, etc. Only then can you put it all together to do the extraordinary.
The phone doesn't run off mains power when plugged into the wall. It still runs from the battery, and the battery charger circuit is running to fill the battery. Two separate loops.
If the battery cannot deliver the voltage necessary for the phone to run at full power with full stability, they would still need to throttle it in order to have an acceptable user experience.
You are assuming those are the choices. Batteries that age put out less voltage throughout the discharge. If the voltage supplied to the CPU isn't sufficient to run it at full power, you get random reboots, corrupt data, etc.
Lower the CPU power, increase tolerance of lower voltage, increase stability of the whole device. So, how about this choice:
1. Accept performance degradation.
2. Have a phone that is unstable, rebooting when power draw is highest (phone calls) and possibly fucking over your data
3. Have a battery service.
I agree that Apple should have done some notification to the user when this "limp mode" was engaged, but a lot of people are preening about it being some kind of nefarious marketing scheme to get people to buy new phones, when it could just be an honest attempt to maintain stability on an aging device to keep existing customers happy. The proper move probably would have been to throw a notification that your iPhone is in need of a battery service, click here to schedule one, etc.