They are, unfortunately, perpetuating a myth about network neutrality which is completely wrong. Burger King has now hurt the network neutrality case. Every ISP, always has, and always will, offer varying speeds. That's not a violation of neutrality.
Is there intrinsic training value in having an ongoing maintenance project? Ex: Suppose you run the military. But there's no wars right now. But you know you need the best most experienced soldiers in your army. So you send soldiers on humanitarian missions, fighters on reconnaissance missions, subs to follow friendly craft, and run support missions against a small band of local outlaws. All this keeps your people in shape. Is there a similar value with NASA? Perhaps you would want to run missions to the ISS to keep the launch sites ready, add new modules to the ISS and do periodic repairs so that new engineers learn the best practices of the department. It is hard to put a dollar amount to that. I know that in engineering, you rarely want to hire a bunch of new employees to start a new project. You put them on maintenance projects first, then graduate them up to new development. Maybe the same applies to NASA?
I think the Russian Facebook ads are what got the public aware. But the problem runs older and deeper than that. "Fake news" isn't just about Russian propaganda. It includes American propaganda. I've had acquaintances and family members passing around articles about Bill Gates' secret eugenics mission, various causes of autism, cures for cancer, proof Obama was born in Kenya, etc.
Some time ago Slashdot linked to a study showing that users "like"d articles and shared them with others without ever even reading them. That's how the fake news goes viral. I am just glad that people are finally figuring it out.
When people see fake news, they don't feel like engaging with Facebook.
The problem here is that fake news makes people engage with Facebook *more*! They don't seem to know the difference! And now that someone told them they have been fooled, they want to blame the messenger instead of their own dang selves. I really hope this is a wake-up call to educators.
We aren't talking about people going to a news site. We are talking about people going to a news aggregator site. Nothing stops us from going to a different site for our news. That's an important distinction. The site gets its news from the users. So it naturally reflects what the users are sharing. That's all it should do.
We need to stop relying on social media companies and algorithms to apply human moral judgement to data. If my Mom shares a fake news article about how the president is secretly a martian invader who wants to eat children, then the system shouldn't judge it. It's up to the people around her to not click like and to not share it. It isn't up to the system to apply judgement.
. But, when Facebook accepts payment for advertisements, Facebook is responsible for that content.
Was the discussion about advertising content? I thought it was about fake news articles submitted by users. I suppose both are a problem. So then Facebook has to filter out news articles posted by ads. That still sounds like a slippery slope, although it does limit the scope. Maybe they just shouldn't allow political ads at all.
It says you can take an item then put it back later, so no need for speed. As for accuracy, bah, it can't know the weight of the package that accurately. I really am kinda curious how they would deal with this. But you know the scene I'm referring to? It would be kinda funny to see someone try. I wonder if you could put the weight into an old cookie package so it even looks the same. Heck, people do this today in real stores. Having worked at CompUSA years ago, there were stories of people returning cardboard boxes weighted with bricks, or with an old computer in it...
Facebook can't win here. If they spread fake news people blame them directly. And if they use a panel of experts than the experts are controlling the news people see. That's not good either. The article attacks them for the decision, saying it is marketing, but I think Facebook is right here. It isn't their job to be the news police.
This simply isn't Facebook's problem. The users are to blame, and this isn't a new problem. Just like Slashdot or Reddit or any other internet forum, the content is provided by the users and it is not the responsibility of Facebook to tell people that they are idiots. Studies show that people click like on things, and then repost them, without even reading the articles. And most people don't seem to be able to distinguish political fact from reality even if they do read the articles.
This problem happened before the internet. In the US, go to a grocery store and look at what news is available for purchase. It is 40% tabloids (AKA "fake news"), 40% celebrity gossup, 40% real news. Facebook is no different.
This is why come to Slashdot: there are educated people here, and debunkers here. I go straight to the discussion first because half the stories are garbage.
Very well-reasoned. You might be right about your interpretation of Damoore's thinking. Maybe it is flawed. Yet, I take issue with with one thing you said, and it really is the crux of this discussion:
he managed to write something that understandably offended a lot of people.
If a memo as cautiously written as this one, as well-substantiated with fact, is so offensive as to cause media outcry leading to a firing -- then there can be no rational discussion on the topic. Only the unemployed, with nothing to lose, will be able to discuss this. Disagreement would have been a valid response. This furor is not.
The now-infamous “Google memo,” written by engineer James Damore, argued against diversity initiatives at Google and said that female engineers were less capable of leading others.
They must be talking about a different memo. Because his memo did not does say that female engineers are less capable of leading. The closest thing I can find is this:
Women, on average, have more...extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness. This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.
James Damoore said nothing about women being less capable. Breaking it down, he is nicely say that women tend not to be assholes, and that assholes get leadership positions. Anyone looking at our current sitting president would be forced to agree with him.
If James Damoore gets 1 dollar for every every media outlet that slandered him like this, he could buy Google.
. those times of idle where i would scroll thru mindlessly are now spent observing the world around me and thinking about things that actually matter in my life.
Your post is fascinating because you didn't leave Facebook because of privacy concerns; you left Facebook because the tool just doesn't work! It's only purpose is to show you things that actually matter in your life, and it didn't.
I too am in the same situation. I stopped using Facebook because it showed me nothing other than pointless minutia about people I am vaguely acquainted with. My sister-in-law updated her status: She now has cappuccino! Oh wait, it's updated again: She bought a cute new hat! Sports team A defeated sports team B! No matter what I did to try and tweak the settings, 90% of what I got was completely unimportant to me. So I missed when my best friend signed-up to give a talk at a conference that I really wanted to go to, and when an another friend was holding a board game party, or another friend announced they were pregnant -- things that I would love to be notified of when I had a moment of down time -- those things were drowned out.
Facebook might be able to pull some of us in if they could provide that value. We might even overlook some of the privacy things if the tool actually was useful. My mom would love to know that my son competed in the Pinewood derby. So for now, I just use email. I control who sees what, and my friends control what they send me. It's great!
As-is, Facebook is not only advertising hell & a privacy nightmare, but it provides no value at all.
2FA has made me stop using my Google account. I previously used it for some Google groups. But now when I get an email saying that there is a new message there, I click the link to read it, and then give-up because I have to do some process that involves a text message and entering in a code. At that point I just close the window and forget about it. There are better forums out there that don't require such nonsense. I don't even know how they got my phone number in the first place - probably because I have an Android phone that uses the account.
On the other hand, I will happily use 2FA with my work VPN and my bank. There's something worth securing there. Google just set the bar too low. You want to send me a text message to confirm a comment on a YouTube video? No thanks.
People used to complain that they had to remember too many passwords to different services. So now, everyone logs into everything via Google or Facebook, which makes them 10x more vulnerable. So now we have to use 2FA to secure everything because it is such a treasure trove of data. We were better-off the old way.
Chrome says it is applying this to things like geolocation and encrypted media. Firefox says it applies to CSS color properties. Chrome explicitly ignored these rules on localhost, Firefox didn't.
Since the article at bleepingcomputer makes no sense, I went to Mozilla's site. It isn't much better. It says:
Effective immediately, all new features that are web-exposed are to be restricted to secure contexts. Web-exposed means that the feature is observable from a web page or server, whether through JavaScript, CSS, HTTP, media formats, etc. A feature can be anything from an extension of an existing IDL-defined object, a new CSS property, a new HTTP response header, to bigger features such as WebVR. In contrast, a new CSS color keyword would likely not be restricted to secure contexts.
What is "observable from a web page or server?" I get that they are trying to prevent information leakage, but this statement is overbroad. I call B.S. on it.
Mozilla programmers will not waste their time checking if HTTPS is enabled before supporting a new CSS property, or a new SVG feature. That would be a moronic waste of developer time. Heck, I bet they couldn't even implement that if they wanted to. Suppose their audio library or JPEG library or SVG library adds a new format or feature? Are they going to modify the library to check if the connection is secure then selectively disable that code? That would be somewhere between impossible and moronic.
My hope is that this is just a badly worded press release.
The article title is "No One Wants Your Used Clothes Anymore" however, the article provides no evidence to back-up that headline. Instead, it cites a single company that recycled fabric into blankets for disaster relief. So a more accurate headline would be "This One Company Doesn't Want Your Used Clothes Anymore." Recycling has never been about making things cheaper, it is about minimizing our environmental footprint. As many posters have commented, thrift stores are booming and donation boxes are popping up everywhere. The article also claims that "Fashion trends are accelerating, new clothes are becoming as cheap as used ones" but provides no evidence at all of clothing prices going down.
I'm not going to defend the EC, but I must point out that your criticisms are based on an oversimplified definition of democracy. "1 person 1 vote" is too narrow, and thus you are misjudging the electoral college.
Greece, for example, believed that rotating offices was one of the key concerns of a democracy. So they had lots of different offices and councils. Some positions were filled by drawing lots.
some states are fundamentally worth more than others
This is one of the biggest problems with direct democracy. The EC actually tries to combat this problem be counterweighting less populous states.
significance of ones vote to one's geographic area, which is irrational and can in the end used to manipulate the result by either side.
It is not irrational at all. The Greeks had local governing bodies and large and small bodies. The intention here was to make sure that geographic areas were represented. They knew that 1 person 1 vote was too simple, and could result in tyranny of the majority. The EC is yet another way to address this problem.
This seems to be the way we make decisions on frameworks these days. Survey what is most popular and pick that, in the hopes that someone will still be using it and supporting in 3 years. This isn't a good thing. It makes me think of the Has open source changed the world? and npm spam flag discussions. Open source is fine, but we need some commercial entities standing behind these things. We have really good infrastructure and really good tools. But now we need stability. We can't have frameworks changing this fast, and minor errors causing the entire world's IT infrastructure to hiccup.
Some suggestions if you are creating an important commercial product or web site: * Keep a local package cache (npm, nuget, rpm, deb, apt, yum, MSI,...) * Don't lock-in to any infrastructure that you aren't paying for (CDNs, "free" cloud services, "free" email services) * Give back to the open-source community, don't just siphon from it (or it won't be there in the future)
This sounds like politics not law. I doubt they cannot be liable for environmental damages if they were following the environmental regulations. If anything, NYC is liable for not setting sufficient environmental laws to prevent the damage. There is definitely precedent for regulatory bodies to be sued if they knew their regulations were not sufficient. This sounds similar to how a boat captain cannot be sued for mishaps so long as the ship was up to standards and the captain didn't do anything negligent. Basically: If you followed the regulations, you are not liable. Even stranger is that, of course, since CO2 build-up in NYC can happen because of fossil fuels burnt in London, the entire case is completely out the window.
As for the whole divestment thing, that's done all the time and isn't even newsworthy. That's the other reason I suspect someone is just starting an early re-election campaign.
There are lots of other places in the world that do what ThosLives suggests. One approach is to take all the votes, then setup representation that is proportional to the votes. Suppose a state with 10 representatives that gets 60% dems and 30% repubs and 10% green. You will have 6 democrats 3 republicans and 1 green. Then you need a way to pick individual representatives out of the pool. The trade-off is you get less accurate local representation, but it is immunte from gerrymandering and increases the likelihood of multiple parties sharing power. That last one is real big in many European nations. (And many of those nations are similar in size to US states, so it can work on that kind of scale.)
...they asked for a cake, selected out of a catalog of cakes that the baker provides.
If that is the case, then I agree with you. I'm really having a hard time finding a good source of the facts. I suppose I could read the court filings, but I'm more interested in the philosophy. On that part, I think we agree. It's not okay to discriminate on the who, just the what.
Slashdot Mirror
They are, unfortunately, perpetuating a myth about network neutrality which is completely wrong. Burger King has now hurt the network neutrality case. Every ISP, always has, and always will, offer varying speeds. That's not a violation of neutrality.
Is there intrinsic training value in having an ongoing maintenance project? Ex: Suppose you run the military. But there's no wars right now. But you know you need the best most experienced soldiers in your army. So you send soldiers on humanitarian missions, fighters on reconnaissance missions, subs to follow friendly craft, and run support missions against a small band of local outlaws. All this keeps your people in shape. Is there a similar value with NASA? Perhaps you would want to run missions to the ISS to keep the launch sites ready, add new modules to the ISS and do periodic repairs so that new engineers learn the best practices of the department. It is hard to put a dollar amount to that. I know that in engineering, you rarely want to hire a bunch of new employees to start a new project. You put them on maintenance projects first, then graduate them up to new development. Maybe the same applies to NASA?
I think the Russian Facebook ads are what got the public aware. But the problem runs older and deeper than that. "Fake news" isn't just about Russian propaganda. It includes American propaganda. I've had acquaintances and family members passing around articles about Bill Gates' secret eugenics mission, various causes of autism, cures for cancer, proof Obama was born in Kenya, etc.
Oooh! I just found this article on the history of fake news.
Some time ago Slashdot linked to a study showing that users "like"d articles and shared them with others without ever even reading them. That's how the fake news goes viral. I am just glad that people are finally figuring it out.
When people see fake news, they don't feel like engaging with Facebook.
The problem here is that fake news makes people engage with Facebook *more*! They don't seem to know the difference! And now that someone told them they have been fooled, they want to blame the messenger instead of their own dang selves. I really hope this is a wake-up call to educators.
No. Because they get modded down. And they get modded down by the users of the site, not by the admins. That's the key.
We aren't talking about people going to a news site. We are talking about people going to a news aggregator site. Nothing stops us from going to a different site for our news. That's an important distinction. The site gets its news from the users. So it naturally reflects what the users are sharing. That's all it should do.
We need to stop relying on social media companies and algorithms to apply human moral judgement to data. If my Mom shares a fake news article about how the president is secretly a martian invader who wants to eat children, then the system shouldn't judge it. It's up to the people around her to not click like and to not share it. It isn't up to the system to apply judgement.
It's the old adage "garbage in, garbage out."
. But, when Facebook accepts payment for advertisements, Facebook is responsible for that content.
Was the discussion about advertising content? I thought it was about fake news articles submitted by users. I suppose both are a problem. So then Facebook has to filter out news articles posted by ads. That still sounds like a slippery slope, although it does limit the scope. Maybe they just shouldn't allow political ads at all.
It says you can take an item then put it back later, so no need for speed. As for accuracy, bah, it can't know the weight of the package that accurately. I really am kinda curious how they would deal with this. But you know the scene I'm referring to? It would be kinda funny to see someone try. I wonder if you could put the weight into an old cookie package so it even looks the same. Heck, people do this today in real stores. Having worked at CompUSA years ago, there were stories of people returning cardboard boxes weighted with bricks, or with an old computer in it...
Facebook can't win here. If they spread fake news people blame them directly. And if they use a panel of experts than the experts are controlling the news people see. That's not good either. The article attacks them for the decision, saying it is marketing, but I think Facebook is right here. It isn't their job to be the news police.
This simply isn't Facebook's problem. The users are to blame, and this isn't a new problem. Just like Slashdot or Reddit or any other internet forum, the content is provided by the users and it is not the responsibility of Facebook to tell people that they are idiots. Studies show that people click like on things, and then repost them, without even reading the articles. And most people don't seem to be able to distinguish political fact from reality even if they do read the articles.
This problem happened before the internet. In the US, go to a grocery store and look at what news is available for purchase. It is 40% tabloids (AKA "fake news"), 40% celebrity gossup, 40% real news. Facebook is no different.
This is why come to Slashdot: there are educated people here, and debunkers here. I go straight to the discussion first because half the stories are garbage.
Why did nobody use JPEG2000? It is notably better than JPEG. Both had patent issues, but that hasn't held-up open adoption of the JPEG format.
Very well-reasoned. You might be right about your interpretation of Damoore's thinking. Maybe it is flawed. Yet, I take issue with with one thing you said, and it really is the crux of this discussion:
he managed to write something that understandably offended a lot of people.
If a memo as cautiously written as this one, as well-substantiated with fact, is so offensive as to cause media outcry leading to a firing -- then there can be no rational discussion on the topic. Only the unemployed, with nothing to lose, will be able to discuss this. Disagreement would have been a valid response. This furor is not.
I picture a thief sitting standing in front of a store shelf with a bag of sand in one hand, and a bag of cookies in the other.
The now-infamous “Google memo,” written by engineer James Damore, argued against diversity initiatives at Google and said that female engineers were less capable of leading others.
They must be talking about a different memo. Because his memo did not does say that female engineers are less capable of leading. The closest thing I can find is this:
Women, on average, have more...extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness. This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.
James Damoore said nothing about women being less capable. Breaking it down, he is nicely say that women tend not to be assholes, and that assholes get leadership positions. Anyone looking at our current sitting president would be forced to agree with him.
If James Damoore gets 1 dollar for every every media outlet that slandered him like this, he could buy Google.
. those times of idle where i would scroll thru mindlessly are now spent observing the world around me and thinking about things that actually matter in my life.
Your post is fascinating because you didn't leave Facebook because of privacy concerns; you left Facebook because the tool just doesn't work! It's only purpose is to show you things that actually matter in your life, and it didn't.
I too am in the same situation. I stopped using Facebook because it showed me nothing other than pointless minutia about people I am vaguely acquainted with. My sister-in-law updated her status: She now has cappuccino! Oh wait, it's updated again: She bought a cute new hat! Sports team A defeated sports team B! No matter what I did to try and tweak the settings, 90% of what I got was completely unimportant to me. So I missed when my best friend signed-up to give a talk at a conference that I really wanted to go to, and when an another friend was holding a board game party, or another friend announced they were pregnant -- things that I would love to be notified of when I had a moment of down time -- those things were drowned out.
Facebook might be able to pull some of us in if they could provide that value. We might even overlook some of the privacy things if the tool actually was useful. My mom would love to know that my son competed in the Pinewood derby. So for now, I just use email. I control who sees what, and my friends control what they send me. It's great!
As-is, Facebook is not only advertising hell & a privacy nightmare, but it provides no value at all.
2FA has made me stop using my Google account. I previously used it for some Google groups. But now when I get an email saying that there is a new message there, I click the link to read it, and then give-up because I have to do some process that involves a text message and entering in a code. At that point I just close the window and forget about it. There are better forums out there that don't require such nonsense. I don't even know how they got my phone number in the first place - probably because I have an Android phone that uses the account.
On the other hand, I will happily use 2FA with my work VPN and my bank. There's something worth securing there. Google just set the bar too low. You want to send me a text message to confirm a comment on a YouTube video? No thanks.
People used to complain that they had to remember too many passwords to different services. So now, everyone logs into everything via Google or Facebook, which makes them 10x more vulnerable. So now we have to use 2FA to secure everything because it is such a treasure trove of data. We were better-off the old way.
Chrome says it is applying this to things like geolocation and encrypted media. Firefox says it applies to CSS color properties. Chrome explicitly ignored these rules on localhost, Firefox didn't.
Since the article at bleepingcomputer makes no sense, I went to Mozilla's site. It isn't much better. It says:
Effective immediately, all new features that are web-exposed are to be restricted to secure contexts. Web-exposed means that the feature is observable from a web page or server, whether through JavaScript, CSS, HTTP, media formats, etc. A feature can be anything from an extension of an existing IDL-defined object, a new CSS property, a new HTTP response header, to bigger features such as WebVR. In contrast, a new CSS color keyword would likely not be restricted to secure contexts.
What is "observable from a web page or server?" I get that they are trying to prevent information leakage, but this statement is overbroad. I call B.S. on it.
Mozilla programmers will not waste their time checking if HTTPS is enabled before supporting a new CSS property, or a new SVG feature. That would be a moronic waste of developer time. Heck, I bet they couldn't even implement that if they wanted to. Suppose their audio library or JPEG library or SVG library adds a new format or feature? Are they going to modify the library to check if the connection is secure then selectively disable that code? That would be somewhere between impossible and moronic.
My hope is that this is just a badly worded press release.
The article title is "No One Wants Your Used Clothes Anymore" however, the article provides no evidence to back-up that headline. Instead, it cites a single company that recycled fabric into blankets for disaster relief. So a more accurate headline would be "This One Company Doesn't Want Your Used Clothes Anymore." Recycling has never been about making things cheaper, it is about minimizing our environmental footprint. As many posters have commented, thrift stores are booming and donation boxes are popping up everywhere. The article also claims that "Fashion trends are accelerating, new clothes are becoming as cheap as used ones" but provides no evidence at all of clothing prices going down.
Huffington Post isn't very useful as a citation.
Then provide a better one.
Direct (not anecdotal) experience says that...
Your direct experience is exactly what "anecdotal" means.
fundamentally undemocratic
I'm not going to defend the EC, but I must point out that your criticisms are based on an oversimplified definition of democracy. "1 person 1 vote" is too narrow, and thus you are misjudging the electoral college.
Greece, for example, believed that rotating offices was one of the key concerns of a democracy. So they had lots of different offices and councils. Some positions were filled by drawing lots.
some states are fundamentally worth more than others
This is one of the biggest problems with direct democracy. The EC actually tries to combat this problem be counterweighting less populous states.
significance of ones vote to one's geographic area, which is irrational and can in the end used to manipulate the result by either side.
It is not irrational at all. The Greeks had local governing bodies and large and small bodies. The intention here was to make sure that geographic areas were represented. They knew that 1 person 1 vote was too simple, and could result in tyranny of the majority. The EC is yet another way to address this problem.
This seems to be the way we make decisions on frameworks these days. Survey what is most popular and pick that, in the hopes that someone will still be using it and supporting in 3 years. This isn't a good thing. It makes me think of the Has open source changed the world? and npm spam flag discussions. Open source is fine, but we need some commercial entities standing behind these things. We have really good infrastructure and really good tools. But now we need stability. We can't have frameworks changing this fast, and minor errors causing the entire world's IT infrastructure to hiccup.
Some suggestions if you are creating an important commercial product or web site: ...)
* Keep a local package cache (npm, nuget, rpm, deb, apt, yum, MSI,
* Don't lock-in to any infrastructure that you aren't paying for (CDNs, "free" cloud services, "free" email services)
* Give back to the open-source community, don't just siphon from it (or it won't be there in the future)
On topics like this, it is because they are afraid of lawsuits.
This sounds like politics not law. I doubt they cannot be liable for environmental damages if they were following the environmental regulations. If anything, NYC is liable for not setting sufficient environmental laws to prevent the damage. There is definitely precedent for regulatory bodies to be sued if they knew their regulations were not sufficient. This sounds similar to how a boat captain cannot be sued for mishaps so long as the ship was up to standards and the captain didn't do anything negligent. Basically: If you followed the regulations, you are not liable. Even stranger is that, of course, since CO2 build-up in NYC can happen because of fossil fuels burnt in London, the entire case is completely out the window.
As for the whole divestment thing, that's done all the time and isn't even newsworthy. That's the other reason I suspect someone is just starting an early re-election campaign.
There are lots of other places in the world that do what ThosLives suggests. One approach is to take all the votes, then setup representation that is proportional to the votes. Suppose a state with 10 representatives that gets 60% dems and 30% repubs and 10% green. You will have 6 democrats 3 republicans and 1 green. Then you need a way to pick individual representatives out of the pool. The trade-off is you get less accurate local representation, but it is immunte from gerrymandering and increases the likelihood of multiple parties sharing power. That last one is real big in many European nations. (And many of those nations are similar in size to US states, so it can work on that kind of scale.)
...they asked for a cake, selected out of a catalog of cakes that the baker provides.
If that is the case, then I agree with you. I'm really having a hard time finding a good source of the facts. I suppose I could read the court filings, but I'm more interested in the philosophy. On that part, I think we agree. It's not okay to discriminate on the who, just the what.