Exactly. That pretty much agrees with the Wikipedia definition of troll as well. True trolls just jump in an post outrageous or inflammatory stuff to start fires. They usually don't stick around.
(Aside: I have no problem with people earnest about their political or religious positions. They can believe what they want).
However, as used here on Slashdot, just about any view opposed to the person with mod points can get you rated as a troll.
You can't tell the length of a chamber from a photograph of the surface. Its not at all clear that there is any enclosed space in this tube. It could have been that the un-collapsed section is in fact filled full of derbies. Until we can hit them with ground penetrating radar its probably guesswork.
You should feed trolls...with poison. Always calmly and rationally point out every hole in their logic until the ridiculousness of it is clear...and here's the challenging part...do it without losing your cool or resorting to personal insults. Just point out how stupid what they are saying really is.
That only works with some trolls, usually those that simply post out of ignorance. True haters, or politically motivated trolls actually gain traction the more you pile on. No publicity is bad publicity. You can't argue with a drive by shooting.
I've not seen any evidence that your approach has been particularly effective against a real Troll. One need only look to the years and years of slash dot being trolled by that GNAA troll. Nothing works with that troll, because the motivation is simply to troll.
Genuine trolls, OTOH, have disruption as their goal, and they will choose both their wording and the position they express to that end, rather than any desire for a sincere conversation
That's a rather over-broad assumption. You might decide, for example, that the most effective way to demolish the other side's argument, and cut through all the misleading crap they're spouting, is to troll them.
What you've described is usually an exercise in reductio ad absurdum, rather than a real troll. Trolls are simply there to enrage and run, not to induce rational thought.
All too often what is called trolling really isn't. At least not according to the wikipedia definition of a troll. On Slashdot you mostly get labeled troll simply for stating an unpopular view, such as supporting Microsoft, denigrating Apple, adhering to just about any political party.
You've asserted its possible to troll educationally, which, almost by definition can't be done, because to the very degree you are successful, it becomes that much less of a troll.
For the examples cited in the article, which were examples of drive-by-trolling more than the much more common uneducated trolling, or bigoted trolling, I fail to see the point. The drive-by-troll is not interested in discussion any more than the kid that eggs your car.
Then there is the bigoted (political / religious or hater) troll, which are usually totally intractable. Hardly worth your while. I've never seen a political troll change their mind in all the years I've watched them. Its pointless to even engage them, they will never concede a single point and the argument will be endless.
Uneducated trolling is another matter. These people need more information or correction, and occasionally are quite open to it. Its not necessary, or helpful to be an ass about it, just explain things and provide some links. Technical issues usually attract this kind of troll, and often its just a matter of showing how/where they are wrong.
So my little Triage of Trolls only leaves one class that is worth while to respond to.
Even in the best of cases, engaging them and drawing them out before you post your alternative viewpoint is simply a tactic, and not a very courageous one. The tactic is designed to make the other person state something that you can then jam down their throat, rather than engaging in an educational debate. Its as much of a troll as the original troll.
Heretofore, Libya has been very stable. For about 30 years.
Libya was so stable that our democratically elected president forgot that Libya actually had a constitution, used to hold elections, and he mistook Gaddafi for a legitimate ruler, who only NOW lost his legitimacy due to violence against his own people.
How long does it take to transmit a single packet's worth of electrons onto the wire?
Onto the wire?
Two computers sitting back to back with a fiber channel between them could not exchange enough data in that amount of time to complete even one trade.
The article is nebulous at best, spun from careless choice of words of someone trying to impress.
I suspect, given the vast numbers of computers involved, and the total transaction count over the course of the trading day, it seems possible you might be able to do some hocus pocus math and divide total trades world wide by the time available and come to ridiculous numbers like these.
Many of these trades happen between one brokerage and another over private networks, or between two accounts in the same brokerage, probably in the same computer farm. Given enough such farms you can see that the sheer volume of trades could be astoundingly high.
None of these trades are settled in real time anyway, they are all carried in magnetic ink in computers. You can settle days later as long as you agree what the price was at the time the trade took place, so there is very little data to actually exchange in real-time. Representative trades are reported to the big boards just to give the market the sense of what is happening. Bulk trades at average prices are done after hours to even out the books and settle.
Yes, yes, yest, this is well known, and careful reading would have revealed I still use it as well.
I'm not sure the posturing is helpful here.
Make no mistake, its dying on the vine. It will not get any fixes, it does not handle some multiprocessor environments (or was it NSF, I forget the details), and it has no formal maintainers. (Opensuse project used to do this, but its largely frozen reiserfs where it is). You use it at the state it was in at the last release and it works well, but don't expect it to even appear in vary many future kernel releases.
You can get the source and maintain it yourself. And in truth it needs little maintainable as long as you use it where it excells. It need never die. But don't expect any enhancements. There are many reports of existing reiser partitions being totally unusable after upgrading to some Opensuse 11 versions.
Maybe because your initial post makes no sense what so ever.
The "existing copper wires" that ran into Japanese homes are the same copper wires that ran into American homes. There is no way you get more bandwidth out of the same two wires in Japan than anywhere else.
Higher density does NOT translate into shorter distances to the DSL head end (DSLAM). DSL is range limited, and Central Offices have to be located within about 18000 feet of the customer. To deliver anything like the speeds under discussion, you effectively have to be about 12000 feet range.
Density has very little to do with it. You have to build DSLAMs closer to the customer to make DSL work at high speed, and density actually makes that much more expensive to do.
The only practical way is fiber to the corner, or to the apartment building, then (maybe) copper to the home, using, . . . (wait for it) the same mini-DSLAMs I mentioned in my previous post.
There is no way you do this with original copper. There is no way you do this without fiber. There is no way you do this on the cheap using the same old copper to the CO.
Most recent subdivisions (20 years) in the US have copper to the homes, but Fiber to the gates. Some have fiber to the curb. Even subdivisions built much earlier have had their copper to the CO replaced in recent years with fiber. So even old subdivisions are now running on copper to the corner, then fiber to the CO. Most houses are less than a block from fiber. Well within DSL range at very high speeds.
This is also true in Japan.
Step out side you house. Look up and down the street, or maybe in the alley. You will see the green/gray telco distribution cabinet. There be fiber there. A mini DSLAM in that box can provide high speed DSL to every house on the block. There is a similar box in every Tokyo neighborhood.
So now that you know this, explain again why the same bandwidth in Tokyo is 1/3 the cost of Tacoma or Tallahassee.
But the article suggests he upgraded his way from dos5 all the way to win7. I still doubt that is possible without a good old fashion nuking in there somewhere.
But the other scary part is any random bus could have run over this guy any time in the past, and nobody seems to have been prepared for that.
One wonders how many other situations like this exist, where critical system tools are basically handled by one person, or a tiny group. This is the second time in the last few years where I've been made aware of such a thing. When Reiser went to prison an entire file system essentially died on the vine (yes I still use it on some machines). So apparently it happens more often than we expect.
The worrisome bit is that we probably don't have any good database of critical component maintainers and their backup maintainers. The guy who maintained that database probably DID get hit by a bus.
So you've never in your life had any electronic equipment catch fire? My what a sheltered life you have lived.
When your power supply blows up, your metal case contains the fire. Your cardboard case FEEDS the fire. Then your desk. Then your house.
One more person on this thread spouting 451 bullshit and I'm going to scream.
If this were safe and practical it would have been in the market 20 years ago. The simple fact of the matter is that a computer with a cardboard case could never be certified for sale, and Asus is aiming this at the home market simply because they can skirt all safety regs and avoid regulatory scrutiny.
c) Would a small fire inside a cardboard case affect structural integrity? The last thing you'd want after a fire is the added insult of a hard drive collapsing onto your motherboard....
Well from my prospective, that would be the least of the potential dangers.
Your case contained the fire.
Had it been cardboard your case would have FED the fire. If you had a wood desk, your desk would have ADDED FUEL to the fire. Soon you have a full fledged life threatening emergency happing while you are asleep upstairs in your bedroom, or (if at work) in the conference room down the hall.
But is that not the case in the US as well. I seem to recall reading about the state(s) owning much of the physical phone lines.
In a word: NO.
There are a tiny few places where governments (usually local) install their own municipal networks, but this is vanishingly small.
States often own the right of way, and grant or lease access to that land for fiber/cable routing, usually for a fee. Airwaves are owned by the federal government and leased to carriers.
But the physical cable plant and wires are universally corporate infrastructure.
In any testing lab you're already running motherboards on top of motherboard boxes,
Yeah, right. Good luck getting this certified by UL, or CSA or any certification lab. Even if you tinfoil the box for emissions, this could never be certified.
With another faux implementation deadline looming in May, the DHS is almost certain to issue a blanket extension of the compliance deadline again soon.
Smith, King, and Sensenbrenner don't want that to happen. They cite the arrest of Khalid Aldawsari in Texas as a reason for "immediate implementation of REAL ID."
So I predict a scheduled event in in May, about 15 days before the deadline. That should give enough time for sensational stories to be published, State Legislatures to be stampeded, and federal mandates to be imposed. Its time for the curtain to go up on another Act in the Security Theater.
Subtract that part from your rent, and add it to your Broadband bill.
To the extent that the city buildings do not break even with rents and require municipal subsidies, subtract that same PERCENTAGE of the subsidy and add that to your Broadband bill.
Then since your municipality does not pay property taxes to itself, or anyone else, find that same percent of the taxes that a private landlord would pay on a similar building, and add that to your broadband bill.
You can quickly see the tax payer is paying some (probably large) portion of your broadband bill, as well as your rent.
Now, I'm fine with that, if that's the system you voted for. I'm not trying to make a political argument here.
But its not a reasonable comparison to come quoting prices that are tax payer subsidized in comparison to service in the US where the such is not subsidized, but rather taxed all up and down the line. Your 100Meg service would cost well in excess of $150/month IF you could even get it in a residential building.
Wireless television streams ~19 Mbit/s == ~6000 gigabytes per month, per station. Wireless FM streams ~70 GB/month per station. Wireless AM == 13 GB/month per station.
Good point. This has been noticed before. Using a bi-directional general purpose network to stream video content to a device barely able to run long enough on its battery to finish a movie makes very little sense.
Several proposals have been put forth for OTA TV tuners in phones. Instead of running a transmitter, receiver, and processor intensive decoding, just toss in a receiver and tuner. Way cheaper. Way less power demanding.
Yes, you lose the on-demand capability, but probably 50% of what gets streamed these days would disappear by allowing OTA broadcasts to be seen where ever you happen to be.
I demand no such thing, but neither do I accept the fact that out of pocket costs can be reported without some reference to tax supported infrastructure.
But hey, thanks for the gratuitous swipe at my country.
Annnd... ta-da! Cisco provides the equipment/software that enables that traffic shaping.
And Ta-DA, another idiot seems to think no network improvement is needed, and points out the obvious.
Enjoy your data caps and crazy cell phone bills competing for bandwidth on that 1990's era cellular network. At all costs, lets make sure Cisco can't make any money. We will all just limp along with what we have.
Some wise guy makes a cheap shot, and all of smartphone and tablet users suffering ridiculous bandwidth caps and exorbitant prices are just supposed to nod our head in agreement?
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly.
That pretty much agrees with the Wikipedia definition of troll as well. True trolls just jump in an post outrageous or inflammatory stuff to start fires. They usually don't stick around.
(Aside: I have no problem with people earnest about their political or religious positions. They can believe what they want).
However, as used here on Slashdot, just about any view opposed to the person with mod points can get you rated as a troll.
A far better link is this one: http://www.moonsociety.org/reports/ISRO_Lavatube_Discovery.html
You can't tell the length of a chamber from a photograph of the surface. Its not at all clear that there is any enclosed space in this tube. It could have been that the un-collapsed section is in fact filled full of derbies. Until we can hit them with ground penetrating radar its probably guesswork.
You should feed trolls...with poison. Always calmly and rationally point out every hole in their logic until the ridiculousness of it is clear...and here's the challenging part...do it without losing your cool or resorting to personal insults. Just point out how stupid what they are saying really is.
That only works with some trolls, usually those that simply post out of ignorance. True haters, or politically motivated trolls actually gain traction the more you pile on. No publicity is bad publicity. You can't argue with a drive by shooting.
I've not seen any evidence that your approach has been particularly effective against a real Troll. One need only look to the years and years of slash dot being trolled by that GNAA troll. Nothing works with that troll, because the motivation is simply to troll.
Genuine trolls, OTOH, have disruption as their goal, and they will choose both their wording and the position they express to that end, rather than any desire for a sincere conversation
That's a rather over-broad assumption. You might decide, for example, that the most effective way to demolish the other side's argument, and cut through all the misleading crap they're spouting, is to troll them.
What you've described is usually an exercise in reductio ad absurdum, rather than a real troll. Trolls are simply there to enrage and run, not to induce rational thought.
All too often what is called trolling really isn't. At least not according to the wikipedia definition of a troll. On Slashdot you mostly get labeled troll simply for stating an unpopular view, such as supporting Microsoft, denigrating Apple, adhering to just about any political party.
You've asserted its possible to troll educationally, which, almost by definition can't be done, because to the very degree you are successful, it becomes that much less of a troll.
For the examples cited in the article, which were examples of drive-by-trolling more than the much more common uneducated trolling, or bigoted trolling, I fail to see the point. The drive-by-troll is not interested in discussion any more than the kid that eggs your car.
Then there is the bigoted (political / religious or hater) troll, which are usually totally intractable. Hardly worth your while. I've never seen a political troll change their mind in all the years I've watched them. Its pointless to even engage them, they will never concede a single point and the argument will be endless.
Uneducated trolling is another matter. These people need more information or correction, and occasionally are quite open to it. Its not necessary, or helpful to be an ass about it, just explain things and provide some links. Technical issues usually attract this kind of troll, and often its just a matter of showing how/where they are wrong.
So my little Triage of Trolls only leaves one class that is worth while to respond to.
Even in the best of cases, engaging them and drawing them out before you post your alternative viewpoint is simply a tactic, and not a very courageous one. The tactic is designed to make the other person state something that you can then jam down their throat, rather than engaging in an educational debate. Its as much of a troll as the original troll.
Heretofore, Libya has been very stable. For about 30 years.
Libya was so stable that our democratically elected president forgot that Libya actually had a constitution, used to hold elections, and he mistook Gaddafi for a legitimate ruler, who only NOW lost his legitimacy due to violence against his own people.
Closest, not closets....
Dude, I'm not the parent.
When I see these pedantic corrections on an internet discussion site, it just hits a nerve with me -
Dude: he was correcting HIS OWN ERROR.
LEARN to read before you try posting.
How long does it take to transmit a single packet's worth of electrons onto the wire?
Onto the wire?
Two computers sitting back to back with a fiber channel between them could not exchange enough data in that amount of time
to complete even one trade.
The article is nebulous at best, spun from careless choice of words of someone trying to impress.
I suspect, given the vast numbers of computers involved, and the total transaction count over the course of the trading day, it seems possible you might be able to do some hocus pocus math and divide total trades world wide by the time available and come to ridiculous numbers like these.
Many of these trades happen between one brokerage and another over private networks, or between two accounts in the same brokerage, probably in the same computer farm. Given enough such farms you can see that the sheer volume of trades could be astoundingly high.
None of these trades are settled in real time anyway, they are all carried in magnetic ink in computers. You can settle days later as long as you agree what the price was at the time the trade took place, so there is very little data to actually exchange in real-time. Representative trades are reported to the big boards just to give the market the sense of what is happening. Bulk trades at average prices are done after hours to even out the books and settle.
Yes, yes, yest, this is well known, and careful reading would have revealed I still use it as well.
I'm not sure the posturing is helpful here.
Make no mistake, its dying on the vine. It will not get any fixes, it does not handle some multiprocessor environments (or was it NSF, I forget the details), and it has no formal maintainers. (Opensuse project used to do this, but its largely frozen reiserfs where it is). You use it at the state it was in at the last release and it works well, but don't expect it to even appear in vary many future kernel releases.
You can get the source and maintain it yourself. And in truth it needs little maintainable as long as you use it where it excells. It need never die. But don't expect any enhancements. There are many reports of existing reiser partitions being totally unusable after upgrading to some Opensuse 11 versions.
Jeez. Why do I have to keep repeating myself?
Maybe because your initial post makes no sense what so ever.
The "existing copper wires" that ran into Japanese homes are the same copper wires that ran into American homes.
There is no way you get more bandwidth out of the same two wires in Japan than anywhere else.
Higher density does NOT translate into shorter distances to the DSL head end (DSLAM). DSL is range limited, and Central Offices have to be located within about 18000 feet of the customer. To deliver anything like the speeds under discussion, you effectively have to be about 12000 feet range.
Density has very little to do with it. You have to build DSLAMs closer to the customer to make DSL work at high speed, and density actually makes that much more expensive to do.
The only practical way is fiber to the corner, or to the apartment building, then (maybe) copper to the home, using, . . . (wait for it) the same mini-DSLAMs I mentioned in my previous post.
There is no way you do this with original copper. There is no way you do this without fiber. There is no way you do this on the cheap using the same old copper to the CO.
Most recent subdivisions (20 years) in the US have copper to the homes, but Fiber to the gates. Some have fiber to the curb. Even subdivisions built much earlier have had their copper to the CO replaced in recent years with fiber. So even old subdivisions are now running on copper to the corner, then fiber to the CO. Most houses are less than a block from fiber. Well within DSL range at very high speeds.
This is also true in Japan.
Step out side you house. Look up and down the street, or maybe in the alley. You will see the green/gray telco distribution cabinet. There be fiber there. A mini DSLAM in that box can provide high speed DSL to every house on the block. There is a similar box in every Tokyo neighborhood.
So now that you know this, explain again why the same bandwidth in Tokyo is 1/3 the cost of Tacoma or Tallahassee.
But the article suggests he upgraded his way from dos5 all the way to win7.
I still doubt that is possible without a good old fashion nuking in there somewhere.
But the other scary part is any random bus could have run over this guy any time in the past, and
nobody seems to have been prepared for that.
One wonders how many other situations like this exist, where critical system tools are basically handled by one person, or a tiny group. This is the second time in the last few years where I've been made aware of such a thing. When Reiser went to prison an entire file system essentially died on the vine (yes I still use it on some machines). So apparently it happens more often than we expect.
The worrisome bit is that we probably don't have any good database of critical component maintainers and their backup maintainers. The guy who maintained that database probably DID get hit by a bus.
Since the smallest disk you need for windows 7 could not possibly be handled by dos or windows 1.0, the whole thing looks contrived to me.
So you've never in your life had any electronic equipment catch fire?
My what a sheltered life you have lived.
When your power supply blows up, your metal case contains the fire.
Your cardboard case FEEDS the fire. Then your desk. Then your house.
One more person on this thread spouting 451 bullshit and I'm going to scream.
If this were safe and practical it would have been in the market 20 years ago.
The simple fact of the matter is that a computer with a cardboard case could never be certified for sale, and Asus is aiming
this at the home market simply because they can skirt all safety regs and avoid regulatory scrutiny.
c) Would a small fire inside a cardboard case affect structural integrity? The last thing you'd want after a fire is the added insult of a hard drive collapsing onto your motherboard....
Well from my prospective, that would be the least of the potential dangers.
Your case contained the fire.
Had it been cardboard your case would have FED the fire. If you had a wood desk, your desk would have ADDED FUEL to the fire. Soon you have a full fledged life threatening emergency happing while you are asleep upstairs in your bedroom, or (if at work) in the conference room down the hall.
But is that not the case in the US as well. I seem to recall reading about the state(s) owning much of the physical phone lines.
In a word: NO.
There are a tiny few places where governments (usually local) install their own municipal networks, but this is vanishingly small.
States often own the right of way, and grant or lease access to that land for fiber/cable routing, usually for a fee.
Airwaves are owned by the federal government and leased to carriers.
But the physical cable plant and wires are universally corporate infrastructure.
In any testing lab you're already running motherboards on top of motherboard boxes,
Yeah, right. Good luck getting this certified by UL, or CSA or any certification lab.
Even if you tinfoil the box for emissions, this could never be certified.
Quote from TFA:
With another faux implementation deadline looming in May, the DHS is almost certain to issue a blanket extension of the compliance deadline again soon.
Smith, King, and Sensenbrenner don't want that to happen. They cite the arrest of Khalid Aldawsari in Texas as a reason for "immediate implementation of REAL ID."
So I predict a scheduled event in in May, about 15 days before the deadline. That should give enough time for sensational stories to be published, State Legislatures to be stampeded, and federal mandates to be imposed. Its time for the curtain to go up on another Act in the Security Theater.
and the federal govt, for the most part..do not have the information from my DL immediately upon query.
You, sir, are delusional.
There is not one federal police agency that can not get your DL info from any state in under 12 seconds flat.
Ok, WHAT PERCENTAGE of your rent goes to that?
Subtract that part from your rent, and add it to your Broadband bill.
To the extent that the city buildings do not break even with rents and require municipal subsidies, subtract that same PERCENTAGE of the subsidy and add that to your Broadband bill.
Then since your municipality does not pay property taxes to itself, or anyone else, find that same percent of the taxes that a private landlord would pay on a similar building, and add that to your broadband bill.
You can quickly see the tax payer is paying some (probably large) portion of your broadband bill, as well as your rent.
Now, I'm fine with that, if that's the system you voted for. I'm not trying to make a political argument here.
But its not a reasonable comparison to come quoting prices that are tax payer subsidized in comparison to service in the US where the such is not subsidized, but rather taxed all up and down the line. Your 100Meg service would cost well in excess of $150/month IF you could even get it in a residential building.
Trivia:
Wireless television streams ~19 Mbit/s == ~6000 gigabytes per month, per station. Wireless FM streams ~70 GB/month per station. Wireless AM == 13 GB/month per station.
Good point.
This has been noticed before. Using a bi-directional general purpose network to stream video content to a device barely able to run long enough on its battery to finish a movie makes very little sense.
Several proposals have been put forth for OTA TV tuners in phones. Instead of running a transmitter, receiver, and processor intensive decoding, just toss in a receiver and tuner. Way cheaper. Way less power demanding.
Yes, you lose the on-demand capability, but probably 50% of what gets streamed these days would disappear by allowing OTA broadcasts to be seen where ever you happen to be.
Oh, yeah, what was I thinking. Of course metal clad computers NEVER burn up, so cardboard ones are perfectly safe.
I demand no such thing, but neither do I accept the fact that out of pocket costs can be reported without
some reference to tax supported infrastructure.
But hey, thanks for the gratuitous swipe at my country.
Annnd ... ta-da! Cisco provides the equipment/software that enables that traffic shaping.
And Ta-DA, another idiot seems to think no network improvement is needed, and points out the obvious.
Enjoy your data caps and crazy cell phone bills competing for bandwidth on that 1990's era cellular network.
At all costs, lets make sure Cisco can't make any money. We will all just limp along with what we have.
Some wise guy makes a cheap shot, and all of smartphone and tablet users suffering ridiculous bandwidth caps and exorbitant prices are just supposed to nod our head in agreement?
You sir, are an idiot.