Agreed, especially the part about "evident that such action is now considered normal." Isolated incidents aren't enough. It's the pattern of behavior throughout the company, especially one's own superiors, that matter.
I would add some more limitations: 1. Don't quit because of the actions of another division you have no contact with. 2. Instead of quitting, do the right thing until they fire you. Ex: As an NSA employee, instead of using exploits to install trojans, write-up an explanation of the exploit and ask your boss to submit it to CERT. Notify your boss's boss of what is happening. Report your orders to the ethics committee. As an police officer, instead of testifying that you stopped the person for a tail light out, testify that the FBI called you and told you to pull the car over and wouldn't say why. That forces things into the open. Only then would the courts get a chance to address it.
Years ago, the NSA used to help secure U.S. computer systems. They developed encryption, and fixed known security holes. They made SELinux. If the NSA offered to hire me to go to companes and help secure their software, I would take that job, regardless of what other divisions of the NSA do. That would be a chance to not only do the right thing, but to influence from within. Sometimes it is a stronger statement to stay and do the right thing, than to leave.
A personal example from my experience: I work for a company with about 50,000 employees. Even as I type this it sounds crazy huge to me. The company is actually a really good, moral company, in my opinion. My division, which probably has a few thousand employees, makes devices that detect cancer, bloodborne diseases, etc. The idea is to help hospitals detect things faster, and prescribe the proper antibiotics faster. It's a good company.
So last year I heard that a court ruled my employer was using anti-competitive practices to muscle into the market for syringes or something like that. It was a civil suit brought by a competitor. It was a product that is not made by my division so I don't even know who or where. So should I leave in protest? Should the janitors leave? Or the CEO's receptionist? Or the guy who comes out and fixes the piece of equipment that might save someone's life? Maybe it should just be the people in that other division. I honestly don't know. When the company sent out the email, I really wanted to know what exactly the company had done and who did it. I was angry. I wondered if they would address it at the company quarterly meetings. But I don't even know if it happened 10 years ago or 10 weeks ago. I don't know what country it even happened in. With a company with divisions in 10+ countries, and 50,000 employees, it might as well have been some other company that did it. I submit that quitting would have been silly.
Yeah, I was more highlighting the cases where you were lumping everyone in the FBI together, rather than making an actual quote. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
I'm not advocating it, I'm not condoning it, but I sure as fuck understand it.
Fine, it sure sounded like you were condoning it through your justifications. If that is the case, I withdraw my criticism. So given that statement, it makes me re-evaluate your intentions in the original post:
But you know what, it really boils down to "if these agencies are going to spy on us, often in violation of the law and our rights... and then use parallel construction to commit perjury, why should we care?"
I now see that you put that in quotes, as though the "us" was the voice of the hackers. I didn't understand that before. Fine. But hold on just a moment:
It's not like you can only target the people who do this stuff, and it's not like they give a shit.
So here you point out that the hackers couldn't target only the "bad ones" at the FBI. So you were saying that maybe the hack was the wrong thing to do, but if they are gonna hack, they might as well target the innocent people too. Am I misreading this? Because it sure sounds like justification for hurting innocent people.
Then later you say:
Especially when they show so little regard for us.
Here you are using your own voice. That "us" wasn't the hackers. This is your personal justification.
So, are they entitled to expect anything different?
Here you posit that the FBI is deserving of this. That's justification too.
Even in reply to my post, you reiterated your dislike of parallel reconstruction. But the hackers posted this list with the hashtag #freepalestine, not #parallelreconstruction. So you aren't understanding the hackers at all. You are applying your own motivations to their actions. Search your feelings my friend, deep down it sounds like you are glad this happened. You even bothered to reply to an AC who was just trying to say "Dammit hackers, this isn't fair! You hurt innocent people!" Almost any "understanding" at that point is justification for the hack.
(Meta: I bothered to reply here because you replied to something I was saying in another thread - a good well-worded clarification about Sprint and network neutrality. So I take you to be a reasonable person worth engaging in discussion of. You worded your reply without the usual Slashdot "Well screw you you know nothing about hacking..." which I really appreciate in the current climate around here.)
these people... show so little regard for us.... when these agencies use Sting Rays, or commit perjury...not only can we not trust you bastards... So, are they entitled
Most of the people on that list aren't doing any of the the hings you complained about. You just lumped every individual law enforcement officer, undercover agent, secretary, and janitor who work for the FBI under one umbrella. This hack hurts the individuals more than the agency as a whole. It won't stop any of the things you listed. I hope my employer doesn't do something you don't like, because then me and 30,000 other innocent people who work for this company suddenly get on your shit list, and you think it is okay to release our personal data.
voted against differential pricing, ruling with immediate effect that all data prices must be equal, and that companies cannot offer cheaper rates than others for certain content
The decision makes sense, but the reasoning and naming is nonsensical. It is fine for data prices to be different, and it is fine for companies to offer cheaper rates than others. The issue is that they cannot offer a "partial" internet. They must offer the entire internet, or none at all. This would make more sense to be called "differential content."
Any vision into the naming here? It seems like it sends the wrong message. Or maybe this is a translation problem?
What if users could edit the story summary, like how StackOverflow works with answers? People post complaints about summaries all the time. Perhaps instead, there should be a system where moderators or some other class of people can edit summaries, and another can approve edits. Then Slashdot becomes the best source for story summaries.
That's not true. Go talk to a patent attorney who works in "industry" as you call it. I work for a Fortune 500 and I can tell you it is 99% trade secrets. Most things aren't worth patenting.
Oh no, clickbait has come to comments, not just headlines? lol
"Do you know what [your spouse | your children | Donald Trump | Julian Assange's mistress] is doing now? Go check it out!" Worse-yet, is someone will start moderating these kinds of posts as +1 Insightful even though they make absolutely no point at all.
So how do we fix this? Is this important enough to drop our current projects and go "Okay, we need this." I don't contribute to much open source (I have 2 young children) but maybe this cause is a worthy one.
Running an Android phone today, without relying on the Google stuff, is really hard. No store sells such a phone (except those cheap phones that replace it with the Amazon equivalents). You usually have to root the phone, and the manufacturers won't honor the warranty. You risk some hardware not working, not getting updates, etc.
Face it: The hand held phone industry is 100% vendor lock-in. They aren't like PCs where you still have Linux if you want to control your machine. Heck, even Windows and OS X don't try to lock you down the way Android, iOS, and Windows Mobile (or whatever it is called now) do.
There's a 5-million-fold difference between sequencing the genes of one cell, and sequencing the genes from every cell in a drop of blood. There are techniques to identify all the pathogens in a sample, but sequencing is not one of them.
It's BS. I did as the AC suggested, and Googled it. It looks like one of the women's best friend's mother's uncle's former roommate said something about Cuba one time. Or something silly like that.
What has most engaged the conspiracy theorists and Assange's more excitable defenders, however, are a few key incidents in Miss A career, in particular that she is said to have worked in the Swedish embassy in the US, and wrote her university thesis in 2007 on a vision of Cuba after the death of Castro.
This has led to widespread allegations that the woman is a CIA agent, planted as a honeytrap to bring down Assange. One blogger notes: "[Assange] just happens to meet a Swedish woman who just happens to have been publishing her work in a well-funded anti-Castro group that just happens to have links with a group led by a man at least one journalist describes as an agent of the CIA: the violent secret arm of America's foreign policy.
There are various more sensational articles, but none of those provide any evidence. This was the only article that seemed to explain the connection clearly.
Trade secret was not replaced by patent. They serve similar but purposes but have different trade-offs. If you talk to a IP attorney, they will tell you that most inventions and discoveries are kept as trade secrets.
Two thoughts: 1) Really? Are they email notifications? If so, I probably turned those off 18 years ago and forgot about it. Maybe the notifications need to be somewhere else. Or maybe I've been missing out on something key, since I regularly scan my recent comments for new replies. I guess I've been doing it the hard way.
2) Notifications aren't sufficient anyway. Let me share a vision:
Stop thinking of Slashdot as a news site. Instead, consider it to be the exact inverse of StackOverflow. SO is focused on specific questions and specific answers, while cutting-off discussions. Slashdot is about impromptu discussions, with no end, based on current events "News for nerds, stuff that matters." If I just wanted news, there are 5 billion news aggregators out there. Heck, half the time Slashdot links to some other news aggregator or blog site anyway. It's gotten so meta that people make it a goal to find the "real" story and post a link to it. Some of this is about editors, but there is something bigger going on.
The joke on Slashdot is that nobody RTFAs. They come here and click on the comments. I do it too. It's because half the time, the story is garbage, or overblown, or misrepresented. I don't mean the Slashdot summary is wrong (it sometimes is), but that the news article itself is a troll. But this is a good thin, and it should be the focus of Slashdot. It has lots of really smart geeks who want to prove everyone else wrong. Lets use that! For example: There was a story something like "Germany produced half it's power from solar." I click the comments, and learn that really it was "For 45 minutes one summer day, Germany reduced the gas-fired plants down to almost zero. So baseline nuclear imported from outside the country + and solar was sufficient." Wow, that's very different. So in 3 minutes I'm already the local expert because I know the truth. I can debunk the overblown headline when someone brings it up over lunch. And with 15 more minutes of reading high-rated comments, I know what I'm talking about on what is baseload power versus peak and the economics of solar.
What if we could take the best rated comments, and aggregate them into a summary? Almost a real-time semi-automated Wikipedia? Ever read https://alterslash.org/ ? It kinda does that.
So now we get to the problem with notifications. Someone posts some revealing insightful thing about the article. Someone else posts a question like "Can you provide a link to that?" or "Hey, but what about this other thing..." and.... no replies. Because the incentive to reply is gone once the story is off the front page. The discussion got cut-off. Is there a way to change the site to be discussion-centric, where highly moderated threads stay up there and people are more inclined to see them and continue talking about them? I almost want a moderation of "+5 Nailed it" that applies to a whole thread. That's for comments that aren't snarky one-liners, they are those "Ohhh.... NOW I get it!" moments. Those times someone made you change your mind. That's what keeps me coming back.
On a similar vein, I want to be able to see all my comments, in context, for all time. I get into some discussion in real-life, where I think "I read about this on Slashdot, and I posted a reply that I feel like really explained the issue." I wanna find that again. I also want to see how much my positions have changed. I imagine running for office one day, and wanting to go back over my comments to understand why I thought something. It's almost a mind-map of my own thoughts and opinions.
Sometimes, I've thought about taking a comment and turning it into a blog entry or article on my own site. This is because there is an "answer sniping" mentality on Slashdot, which makes people try to limit their posts to a few minutes. So you can't always post the entirety of your thoughts. If you post within 5 minutes, odds on a +5 are good. If you post within 15 minutes, you probably
Sometimes there is an interesting discussion, but aftera bout 12 hours people move on to other articles. It would be great if there was a way to flag a discussion as worthy in some way that it invites people to continue it. Someties I reply to a comment and say "Why?" or "Hey, can you post more information on that?" But the system, being news-based, puts a damper on discussions that last longer than the duration that the item is newsworthy.
We have half the commenters complaining about the low quality of articles, and you 2 jump in asking for more articles. These two things are incompatible. If you want more stories on the front page, then start submitting content!
Many Youtube videos have already been taken down because they have mentioned the words "react" or "reaction" over this.
Do you have any links to show this? I did a search but failed to find anything to support that claim. Several others have posted it in this discussion too.
They were already doing DMCA takedowns of any videos they happened across that contained "React" in the title for alleged copyright violation.
Do you have any links to show this? I did a search but failed to find anything to support that claim. Several others have posted it in this discussion too.
The Register's article seems logical if you assume network neutrality meant something else. One of the biggest problems NN had is that some very powerful corporations tried to redefine NN to mean "no throttling" or some other such thing.
The quote that best sums it up the confusion is this:
The usual reasons for detecting witchcraft neutrality violations are absent. It isn’t compulsory. It isn’t a rent-seeking scheme. It isn’t constraining choice. It isn’t disadvantaging anyone;
Those things they listed aren't what a network neutrality violation is. (I have no idea what a "rent-seeking" scheme is. Can someone explain what they meant?)
Network neutrality is the principle that all information on the network is treated the same. That the service provider does not alter the content, throttle it, or limit it it. It doesn't matter whether or not those alterations/throttles/limits are optional or compulsory. The problem with service providers doing this is that they distort the market. They make people prefer certain video providers, social networking sites, online shopping services, or whatever they limit it to. It makes it so that companies can't fairly compete. People who use this plan are constrained in that, once they go above their limits, they can only access certain services. As opposed to normal users, who just pay for more bandwidth and can see everything; or see nothing at all.
The fact that it isn't compulsory is irrelevant. This is one of the most disconcerting things about neutrality violations: customers might actually *prefer* the non-neutral plans. If you told someone "I can give you the entire internet for $60/month" or "I can give you iTunes and Netflix for $1/month" you can bet that a lot of people will choose the latter option. And those companies would *love* it because the service provider just got a whole lot of people to stop using Google Play Music and Amazon Prime. And the ISP might not even need a kickback from those companies to do it Maybe they just wanted to limit their bandwidth consumption by setting up proxy servers - but they couldn't do it for the whole internet. So they offer a subset of the full internet, and *bam* they can save themselves and customers lots of money.
I thought Mark Klein was the whistleblower. He was the AT&T contractor who revealed that there was an NSA closet that all phone traffic was routed through. Although reading the Wikipedia article I can't tell who he revealed it to.
Cavendish was fiddling around with water and electricity, only he really knows why. For all we know he was trying to find a way to turn lead into gold or something weird like that. Then he noticed hydrogen and oxygen bubbles, strangely electro-polar, collecting around his electrical apparatus. Why? Nobody knew. Nobody figured it out for a looong time.
So where is the line between "fiddling around" and "science?"
This example becomes science as soon as someone asks "Why did this happen?" That starts the process of hypothesizing and testing and getting closer to an explanation. When someone says "scientific method" that doesn't mean it can't start with experimentation. But it can't be: experiment, hand-wave and throw jargon around, beg for money, repeat. At some point someone has to document what happened, ask "why," and create a theory. The quacks are the ones that don't ask why. They want instant gratification. Well science is hard! They have to do the real work! At least document what you did and what was surprising about it! Or they have to come up with an idea for the theory, and defer the math and science to others who knew those areas better.
someone claims to have spotted something strange that runs counter to that, you should send someone to their place to see if it's true
Absolutely! The ones called "quacks" either: never see anything strange, or claim that they have, but can't reproduce it. A hallmark of a quack is refusal to document their experiment so that it can be reproduced. Many of them build machines that do exactly what the established science says they will do. They are not creating new science, they are arguing established science with no experiments to back it up.
Slashdot Mirror
Detecting sarcasm online is like looking for a needle in a haystack when you don't know what a needle or hay is.
Awesome analogy.
Um, your own link (the first one) says that bar charts should always start at zero.
Yes, and the chart in question is not a bar chart. I think avandesande was referring to the line chart on page 10 of the PDF.
That chart is correct and follows best-practices. Only column charts must have the axis at zero.
It is okay not to start your y axis at zero
When should the y axis of a graph start at zero?
And a fun one:
The most misleading charts of 2015: fixed
Agreed, especially the part about "evident that such action is now considered normal." Isolated incidents aren't enough. It's the pattern of behavior throughout the company, especially one's own superiors, that matter.
I would add some more limitations:
1. Don't quit because of the actions of another division you have no contact with.
2. Instead of quitting, do the right thing until they fire you. Ex: As an NSA employee, instead of using exploits to install trojans, write-up an explanation of the exploit and ask your boss to submit it to CERT. Notify your boss's boss of what is happening. Report your orders to the ethics committee. As an police officer, instead of testifying that you stopped the person for a tail light out, testify that the FBI called you and told you to pull the car over and wouldn't say why. That forces things into the open. Only then would the courts get a chance to address it.
Years ago, the NSA used to help secure U.S. computer systems. They developed encryption, and fixed known security holes. They made SELinux. If the NSA offered to hire me to go to companes and help secure their software, I would take that job, regardless of what other divisions of the NSA do. That would be a chance to not only do the right thing, but to influence from within. Sometimes it is a stronger statement to stay and do the right thing, than to leave.
A personal example from my experience: I work for a company with about 50,000 employees. Even as I type this it sounds crazy huge to me. The company is actually a really good, moral company, in my opinion. My division, which probably has a few thousand employees, makes devices that detect cancer, bloodborne diseases, etc. The idea is to help hospitals detect things faster, and prescribe the proper antibiotics faster. It's a good company.
So last year I heard that a court ruled my employer was using anti-competitive practices to muscle into the market for syringes or something like that. It was a civil suit brought by a competitor. It was a product that is not made by my division so I don't even know who or where. So should I leave in protest? Should the janitors leave? Or the CEO's receptionist? Or the guy who comes out and fixes the piece of equipment that might save someone's life? Maybe it should just be the people in that other division. I honestly don't know. When the company sent out the email, I really wanted to know what exactly the company had done and who did it. I was angry. I wondered if they would address it at the company quarterly meetings. But I don't even know if it happened 10 years ago or 10 weeks ago. I don't know what country it even happened in. With a company with divisions in 10+ countries, and 50,000 employees, it might as well have been some other company that did it. I submit that quitting would have been silly.
Wow, that's a nice hack job of a quote you did.
Yeah, I was more highlighting the cases where you were lumping everyone in the FBI together, rather than making an actual quote. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
I'm not advocating it, I'm not condoning it, but I sure as fuck understand it.
Fine, it sure sounded like you were condoning it through your justifications. If that is the case, I withdraw my criticism. So given that statement, it makes me re-evaluate your intentions in the original post:
But you know what, it really boils down to "if these agencies are going to spy on us, often in violation of the law and our rights ... and then use parallel construction to commit perjury, why should we care?"
I now see that you put that in quotes, as though the "us" was the voice of the hackers. I didn't understand that before. Fine. But hold on just a moment:
It's not like you can only target the people who do this stuff, and it's not like they give a shit.
So here you point out that the hackers couldn't target only the "bad ones" at the FBI. So you were saying that maybe the hack was the wrong thing to do, but if they are gonna hack, they might as well target the innocent people too. Am I misreading this? Because it sure sounds like justification for hurting innocent people.
Then later you say:
Especially when they show so little regard for us.
Here you are using your own voice. That "us" wasn't the hackers. This is your personal justification.
So, are they entitled to expect anything different?
Here you posit that the FBI is deserving of this. That's justification too.
Even in reply to my post, you reiterated your dislike of parallel reconstruction. But the hackers posted this list with the hashtag #freepalestine, not #parallelreconstruction. So you aren't understanding the hackers at all. You are applying your own motivations to their actions. Search your feelings my friend, deep down it sounds like you are glad this happened. You even bothered to reply to an AC who was just trying to say "Dammit hackers, this isn't fair! You hurt innocent people!" Almost any "understanding" at that point is justification for the hack.
(Meta: I bothered to reply here because you replied to something I was saying in another thread - a good well-worded clarification about Sprint and network neutrality. So I take you to be a reasonable person worth engaging in discussion of. You worded your reply without the usual Slashdot "Well screw you you know nothing about hacking..." which I really appreciate in the current climate around here.)
these people ... show so little regard for us.... when these agencies use Sting Rays, or commit perjury...not only can we not trust you bastards... So, are they entitled
Most of the people on that list aren't doing any of the the hings you complained about. You just lumped every individual law enforcement officer, undercover agent, secretary, and janitor who work for the FBI under one umbrella. This hack hurts the individuals more than the agency as a whole. It won't stop any of the things you listed. I hope my employer doesn't do something you don't like, because then me and 30,000 other innocent people who work for this company suddenly get on your shit list, and you think it is okay to release our personal data.
voted against differential pricing, ruling with immediate effect that all data prices must be equal, and that companies cannot offer cheaper rates than others for certain content
The decision makes sense, but the reasoning and naming is nonsensical. It is fine for data prices to be different, and it is fine for companies to offer cheaper rates than others. The issue is that they cannot offer a "partial" internet. They must offer the entire internet, or none at all. This would make more sense to be called "differential content."
Any vision into the naming here? It seems like it sends the wrong message. Or maybe this is a translation problem?
That depends on how you define sequencing. PCR amplification of specific DNA sequences,
PCR is definitely not sequencing. I wasn't aware of anyone doing PCR then sequencing - when is that done?
What if users could edit the story summary, like how StackOverflow works with answers? People post complaints about summaries all the time. Perhaps instead, there should be a system where moderators or some other class of people can edit summaries, and another can approve edits. Then Slashdot becomes the best source for story summaries.
That's not true. Go talk to a patent attorney who works in "industry" as you call it. I work for a Fortune 500 and I can tell you it is 99% trade secrets. Most things aren't worth patenting.
Oh no, clickbait has come to comments, not just headlines? lol
"Do you know what [your spouse | your children | Donald Trump | Julian Assange's mistress] is doing now? Go check it out!"
Worse-yet, is someone will start moderating these kinds of posts as +1 Insightful even though they make absolutely no point at all.
So how do we fix this? Is this important enough to drop our current projects and go "Okay, we need this." I don't contribute to much open source (I have 2 young children) but maybe this cause is a worthy one.
Running an Android phone today, without relying on the Google stuff, is really hard. No store sells such a phone (except those cheap phones that replace it with the Amazon equivalents). You usually have to root the phone, and the manufacturers won't honor the warranty. You risk some hardware not working, not getting updates, etc.
Face it: The hand held phone industry is 100% vendor lock-in. They aren't like PCs where you still have Linux if you want to control your machine. Heck, even Windows and OS X don't try to lock you down the way Android, iOS, and Windows Mobile (or whatever it is called now) do.
There's a 5-million-fold difference between sequencing the genes of one cell, and sequencing the genes from every cell in a drop of blood. There are techniques to identify all the pathogens in a sample, but sequencing is not one of them.
It's BS. I did as the AC suggested, and Googled it. It looks like one of the women's best friend's mother's uncle's former roommate said something about Cuba one time. Or something silly like that.
http://www.theguardian.com/med...
What has most engaged the conspiracy theorists and Assange's more excitable defenders, however, are a few key incidents in Miss A career, in particular that she is said to have worked in the Swedish embassy in the US, and wrote her university thesis in 2007 on a vision of Cuba after the death of Castro.
This has led to widespread allegations that the woman is a CIA agent, planted as a honeytrap to bring down Assange. One blogger notes: "[Assange] just happens to meet a Swedish woman who just happens to have been publishing her work in a well-funded anti-Castro group that just happens to have links with a group led by a man at least one journalist describes as an agent of the CIA: the violent secret arm of America's foreign policy.
There are various more sensational articles, but none of those provide any evidence. This was the only article that seemed to explain the connection clearly.
Trade secret was not replaced by patent. They serve similar but purposes but have different trade-offs. If you talk to a IP attorney, they will tell you that most inventions and discoveries are kept as trade secrets.
Two thoughts:
1) Really? Are they email notifications? If so, I probably turned those off 18 years ago and forgot about it. Maybe the notifications need to be somewhere else. Or maybe I've been missing out on something key, since I regularly scan my recent comments for new replies. I guess I've been doing it the hard way.
2) Notifications aren't sufficient anyway. Let me share a vision:
Stop thinking of Slashdot as a news site. Instead, consider it to be the exact inverse of StackOverflow. SO is focused on specific questions and specific answers, while cutting-off discussions. Slashdot is about impromptu discussions, with no end, based on current events "News for nerds, stuff that matters." If I just wanted news, there are 5 billion news aggregators out there. Heck, half the time Slashdot links to some other news aggregator or blog site anyway. It's gotten so meta that people make it a goal to find the "real" story and post a link to it. Some of this is about editors, but there is something bigger going on.
The joke on Slashdot is that nobody RTFAs. They come here and click on the comments. I do it too. It's because half the time, the story is garbage, or overblown, or misrepresented. I don't mean the Slashdot summary is wrong (it sometimes is), but that the news article itself is a troll. But this is a good thin, and it should be the focus of Slashdot. It has lots of really smart geeks who want to prove everyone else wrong. Lets use that! For example: There was a story something like "Germany produced half it's power from solar." I click the comments, and learn that really it was "For 45 minutes one summer day, Germany reduced the gas-fired plants down to almost zero. So baseline nuclear imported from outside the country + and solar was sufficient." Wow, that's very different. So in 3 minutes I'm already the local expert because I know the truth. I can debunk the overblown headline when someone brings it up over lunch. And with 15 more minutes of reading high-rated comments, I know what I'm talking about on what is baseload power versus peak and the economics of solar.
What if we could take the best rated comments, and aggregate them into a summary? Almost a real-time semi-automated Wikipedia? Ever read https://alterslash.org/ ? It kinda does that.
So now we get to the problem with notifications. Someone posts some revealing insightful thing about the article. Someone else posts a question like "Can you provide a link to that?" or "Hey, but what about this other thing..." and.... no replies. Because the incentive to reply is gone once the story is off the front page. The discussion got cut-off. Is there a way to change the site to be discussion-centric, where highly moderated threads stay up there and people are more inclined to see them and continue talking about them? I almost want a moderation of "+5 Nailed it" that applies to a whole thread. That's for comments that aren't snarky one-liners, they are those "Ohhh.... NOW I get it!" moments. Those times someone made you change your mind. That's what keeps me coming back.
On a similar vein, I want to be able to see all my comments, in context, for all time. I get into some discussion in real-life, where I think "I read about this on Slashdot, and I posted a reply that I feel like really explained the issue." I wanna find that again. I also want to see how much my positions have changed. I imagine running for office one day, and wanting to go back over my comments to understand why I thought something. It's almost a mind-map of my own thoughts and opinions.
Sometimes, I've thought about taking a comment and turning it into a blog entry or article on my own site. This is because there is an "answer sniping" mentality on Slashdot, which makes people try to limit their posts to a few minutes. So you can't always post the entirety of your thoughts. If you post within 5 minutes, odds on a +5 are good. If you post within 15 minutes, you probably
Sometimes there is an interesting discussion, but aftera bout 12 hours people move on to other articles. It would be great if there was a way to flag a discussion as worthy in some way that it invites people to continue it. Someties I reply to a comment and say "Why?" or "Hey, can you post more information on that?" But the system, being news-based, puts a damper on discussions that last longer than the duration that the item is newsworthy.
We have half the commenters complaining about the low quality of articles, and you 2 jump in asking for more articles. These two things are incompatible. If you want more stories on the front page, then start submitting content!
Many Youtube videos have already been taken down because they have mentioned the words "react" or "reaction" over this.
Do you have any links to show this? I did a search but failed to find anything to support that claim. Several others have posted it in this discussion too.
They were already doing DMCA takedowns of any videos they happened across that contained "React" in the title for alleged copyright violation.
Do you have any links to show this? I did a search but failed to find anything to support that claim. Several others have posted it in this discussion too.
The Register's article seems logical if you assume network neutrality meant something else. One of the biggest problems NN had is that some very powerful corporations tried to redefine NN to mean "no throttling" or some other such thing.
The quote that best sums it up the confusion is this:
The usual reasons for detecting witchcraft neutrality violations are absent. It isn’t compulsory. It isn’t a rent-seeking scheme. It isn’t constraining choice. It isn’t disadvantaging anyone;
Those things they listed aren't what a network neutrality violation is. (I have no idea what a "rent-seeking" scheme is. Can someone explain what they meant?)
Network neutrality is the principle that all information on the network is treated the same. That the service provider does not alter the content, throttle it, or limit it it. It doesn't matter whether or not those alterations/throttles/limits are optional or compulsory. The problem with service providers doing this is that they distort the market. They make people prefer certain video providers, social networking sites, online shopping services, or whatever they limit it to. It makes it so that companies can't fairly compete. People who use this plan are constrained in that, once they go above their limits, they can only access certain services. As opposed to normal users, who just pay for more bandwidth and can see everything; or see nothing at all.
The fact that it isn't compulsory is irrelevant. This is one of the most disconcerting things about neutrality violations: customers might actually *prefer* the non-neutral plans. If you told someone "I can give you the entire internet for $60/month" or "I can give you iTunes and Netflix for $1/month" you can bet that a lot of people will choose the latter option. And those companies would *love* it because the service provider just got a whole lot of people to stop using Google Play Music and Amazon Prime. And the ISP might not even need a kickback from those companies to do it Maybe they just wanted to limit their bandwidth consumption by setting up proxy servers - but they couldn't do it for the whole internet. So they offer a subset of the full internet, and *bam* they can save themselves and customers lots of money.
I thought Mark Klein was the whistleblower. He was the AT&T contractor who revealed that there was an NSA closet that all phone traffic was routed through. Although reading the Wikipedia article I can't tell who he revealed it to.
then there wouldn't be civil fines.
It sounds like you are against all civil fines. So what do you propose as the alternative?
Cavendish was fiddling around with water and electricity, only he really knows why. For all we know he was trying to find a way to turn lead into gold or something weird like that. Then he noticed hydrogen and oxygen bubbles, strangely electro-polar, collecting around his electrical apparatus. Why? Nobody knew. Nobody figured it out for a looong time.
So where is the line between "fiddling around" and "science?"
This example becomes science as soon as someone asks "Why did this happen?" That starts the process of hypothesizing and testing and getting closer to an explanation. When someone says "scientific method" that doesn't mean it can't start with experimentation. But it can't be: experiment, hand-wave and throw jargon around, beg for money, repeat. At some point someone has to document what happened, ask "why," and create a theory. The quacks are the ones that don't ask why. They want instant gratification. Well science is hard! They have to do the real work! At least document what you did and what was surprising about it! Or they have to come up with an idea for the theory, and defer the math and science to others who knew those areas better.
someone claims to have spotted something strange that runs counter to that, you should send someone to their place to see if it's true
Absolutely! The ones called "quacks" either: never see anything strange, or claim that they have, but can't reproduce it. A hallmark of a quack is refusal to document their experiment so that it can be reproduced. Many of them build machines that do exactly what the established science says they will do. They are not creating new science, they are arguing established science with no experiments to back it up.