I'm quite serious. Read the text I supplied with the image. The "orbs" you refer to are not resolved images of the edges of stars, they are simply burned out areas on the camera's sensor as the atmosphere's lensing moves the stars around over the many seconds of the exposure. Those stars are points of light, no more.
The burnout on many star occurs because stars, in relation to one another, can be literally millions of times different in brightness. Comet Holmes, while large, is not nearly as bright as many of those stars at any one sensor location, hence is does not burn out the imager and you get a considerably more accurate representation of it. Likewise, the dimmest stars still appear as pinpoints because when they are lensed to a random location, one or two passes over a sensor site aren't enough to result in a bright reading - that only happens at the centroid of the focus, essentially right where the star actually is.
You have a device that delivers visual stimulation. If the stimulation isn't impressive visually, people aren't going to want to look at it.
For those sighted adults to whom this isn't impressive visually, the situation has revealed people who have a woefully insufficient education, or an inability to comprehend the information conveyed by that education. The only choices remaining are, should we continue to let them go about their business, should we attempt remedial education, or should we put them down as a simple matter of compassion?
Theoretically, if we had candidates that represented us instead of the interests of corporations and special interest groups, our right to vote would be worth a great deal.
However, since our choices are limited to list A of sycophants or list B of sycophants, I'm thinking the college kids have over-valued the vote.
We can't elect anyone worth much to the general population, we can't get them impeached when they break the laws, violate the constitution, torture, engage in warmaking, arrest without probable cause, hold people incommunicado without hearings for extended periods of time, make a huge industry out of imprisoning the population for personal choices about what intoxicants they prefer...
Yes, I'd say an ipod is worth considerably more than a vote is today. It shouldn't be; but here we are.
That's ridiculous. My flickr account also required me to change over to a yahoo ID a while back; took a few minutes, and it was no trouble at all. Also, it is trivial to make private albums, photos, etc. I've used that capability from both sides, as an invited guest and as a provider of restricted material. It works fine and is no problem to use or manage. These accusations are just nonsensical FUD, motive unknown.
I have a lot of fun with my flickr account; I share pics with my family, with random strangers, people in groups that share various interests, I even manage some groups myself. There are things that could certainly be improved, but all in all, it is a useful, interesting service and really doesn't deserve to be knocked by a bunch of uninformed untruths.
Smart people don't use slashdot moderation points to filter posts, because slashdot moderation is massively broken and constantly hides great posts. So there's no effect for the savvy slashdot reader. And I only concern myself with them. Certainly not with irrelevant AC interlopers like yourself who use obscenity and name calling instead of normal communications skills, and who have no sense of how slashdot actually works.
You know what? Rather than waste the space the troll occupied, I'd just as soon make an on topic remark and let people go from there. Respecting the space a FP clown claimed isn't built into my outlook, sorry.
We generally get fixes for real bugs out within 24 hours, unless the problem is traceable to the OS, the only factor really out of our immediate control. Even then, we do a quick evaluation to see if we can replace the OS function. Over the years, we've replaced quite a few of them, but rarely within 24 hours.
But we know our code backwards and forwards; I wrote the majority of the current codebase myself, and I can generally get to within a few lines of the problem just by a bug's description... the rest is a matter of minutes and testing. This app is very large - comparable to Photoshop in terms of feature count - but it is also very stable after 15 years of whack-a-bug and a continuous drive to make the internal structure as orderly and regular as possible.
It is my observation that the more programmers you have involved, the slower your turnaround time (for everything from bugs to features) will be. Likewise the larger the entity, the slower it will generally move. Almost every layer of management and corporate compartmenting disease will contribute to slowing down the process.
For the apps that I use that I have had the experience of reporting bugs, it is my general experience that bugs often are never fixed at all. One browser, "Omniweb", truly my favorite in terms of features, has bugs that make it essentially unusable for me. Crashing, slowing, lockups and so on - really serious problems. I've reported them, they never were fixed, in fact the software was never updated. Eventually, I just went back to firefox. Then as Leopard came out, after years of doing nothing, they released a "Leopard version" in which, perhaps, I might find those bugfixes if I looked... but as I say, I have moved on and no longer have any enthusiasm for the product. Slow bug repair (or ignoring them) is synonymous with telling your customers you really don't care what kind of experience they have with your software.
Apple, with all their emphasis on customer experience, does this too. They've had bugs in hand for very long periods where they simply don't address them. If your bug isn't something they think will affect a lot of people, it isn't likely to be fixed. I've not yet purchased Leopard, preferring not to catch early-adopter syndrome bugs myself, but when I do, I would not be the least bit surprised to find you still can't refresh a remote share that's been changed by the remote OS; that the wifi differs hugely in compatibility between PPC and Intel hardware; that mail still hoses the sent mail box based on the return address; that shell fonts are poorly rendered; that shell ANSI compatibility is still broken; that the OS still provides locked-up beachballs at the most inconvenient moments; that the OS still puts the wrong things away on the HD when RAM gets tight, and consequently becomes massively unresponsive... Basically, Apple doesn't have good control of their OS, are unable to respond to bugs in a timely fashion, so much so that they triage out bugs based on report counts, and the common patter is that Apple provides a great customer experience. So while my own experience is that bug fixes are important and can be quick in turnaround, here's Apple showing us that you can make a complete thrash out of the entire bugfix issue and still come out smelling like roses. So is a few weeks too long? Probably not, if you have a good marketing department.:-)
it works just fine for what it's supposed to be doing.
Really? Note that your post, a perfectly reasonable contribution to the conversation, has been edited out of the conversation by remaining unmoderated at 1; thereby preventing anyone who actually uses the mod system to threshold what to read at anything over 1 from ever seeing what you have to say. If they have mod threshold set to 1, then mods above 1 have no effect upon what they see, and provide no benefit to them; only mods below 1 (0, -1) trim off posts.
The whole point of moderation is to allow the users to follow a thread without the noise of trolls and outright idiots. The moderation system has put your post right in the same bag with those people. Still feel good about it?
As the mod system is designed now, mod points are too scarce to mod up posts of simply average value (though it happens often by dint of the moderator agreeing with a post, always at the expense of much better posts because points are scarce.)
The metamod system could (potentially, if used well, which it isn't) stop bad mods after the fact. But it doesn't - it stops people whom the metamoderators disagree with. Even if it *did* stop bad mods, it never undoes the harm of an incorrect down-mod; hence a lost post remains lost forever to anyone who actually uses the point system for thresholding. And finally, the metamod system is way behind real time, and even if it worked perfectly, the posts would be lost because the conversation is, for all intents and purposes, already over. So clearly the metamod system is no answer at all.
The fact that moderation is anonymous allows moderators to run roughshod over a thread, unopposed, willy-nilly stomping on opinions they disagree with. What they *should* be doing is looking for quality posts, points well made, rational disagreements, humor, etc. But there is literally no mechanism whatsoever to enforce or even simply *encourage* such behavior because moderation is anonymous and if indeed the metamod system does do any knuckle-whacking, it is long afterwards and the damage is never undone, leaving the bad mod perfectly well satisfied as to the effects they had being just what they intended. If moderation were not anonymous, the community would quickly catch people who were systematically going after opinions; if moderation was eliminated when a moderator was disqualified in a thread, the community would have a way of preventing bad mods from interfering with and degrading the quality of, any particular topic.
Slashdot does indeed work. I'm here because of the users; they make it what it is. But in no wise can I agree that the moderation system is a good one. I've watched it for years and I know for a fact that it is outright broken.
Why not take a moment to look at my posting history and see if I'm doing something "seriously wrong"? My actions are right out there where you can see them. I enjoy slashdot immensely for the high density of smart users here, and I generally put considerable effort into my posts. There are some culture clashes, I'm a proponent of commercial software, including my own, and I think the current attitude towards intellectual property is childish, selfish and self-defeating, but I can and do defend my positions, and I never troll.
I never used moderation as a means of inflicting my opinion, and I've never used metamoderation that way, either. What I have done is regularly and consistently point out where slashdot's policies and mechanisms need work; and I have also pointed out when a story editor is being less than clever.
Some of slashdot's key problems are the various anonymous mechanisms used by the editors. They can (and do) go after members completely silently and without any oversight from the community or anyone else. I've seen it happen and there can be no doubt about it - whole groups of messages that extend many days in the past suddenly getting modded down in large numbers, far more than the pitiful five mod points any normal user receives from time to time; reasonable people losing moderation privileges without any possible excuse for it; stories that go red in the firehouse within hours and stay that way never posting, while stories of absolutely no value get posted right away.
I've even taken the time to write up suggestions for change (in my journal as well as in posts) with an eye towards constructive and productive change. Does that sound like someone who should have moderation taken away from them? Go on, look at my posting history and see. As far as I am concerned, the fact that they care enough to hobble my participation in moderation is just another sign that they are wrong and they know it.
So far, that post has an interesting, a flamebait, and an offtopic.
Pretty funny, really. We really do need an intelligence test for moderators.:-)
Re mod points, no, none for me either, not for many months now. Disagree with a slashdot luminary (or even policy) and you're toast for quite a while. Unfortunately, no one has applied an intelligence test to the process of becoming a slashdot luminary.
Perhaps slashdot should implement a requirement for writing a cogent, unique paragraph before it allows a user to have mod points. Then, if they also change the moderation to be accountable (no longer anonymous, and no longer scarce -- see Kuro5in.org for moderation technology that actually works), it might have a chance at being useful in the sense that one could actually use it to filter messages, instead of being relegated to endlessly observe people use mod points in place of actually expressing a counter opinion.
Then again, slashdot could continue on with completely broken moderation. I could see that as a possibility, given the existing sample set.
If you're not responsible, please forward to the appropriate person. Thank you.
Would you support custom mods to MySQL to fix slashdot's pernicious anonymous moderation problem?(*)
If MySQL can't be made to work, would you support a move to PostgreSQL?
If neither of those can be made to work, would you consider ritual suicide in atonement?
Thank you for your kind attention to this matter.
(*) This problem manifests as many inappropriately moderated (and unmoderated) posts in each slashdot discussion, making it absolutely impossible to read any discussion unless your threshold is set to -1 or you are willing to put up with a disjointed set of posts, apparently unrelated to each other (and sometimes the subject at hand), while also knowing with absolute certainly you're missing many good, on-topic or otherwise high quality posts. One presumes that at this late date, with absolutely no attention from those people running slashdot, that the problem must be something they don't understand about the site (such as the complex and very difficult to understand idea that working moderation would help the userbase), and so devolves upon a technical person.
...because 99.9999% of the things you want to get to are not in the local area — no matter where you are — if you're like 99.9999% of the rest of the people on the net. I don't even get my news from a US outlet, because they can't be trusted on the one hand, and because they would rather cover Britney Spears news than actual world events or even national US events. What am I going to do for news with only a local network?
Nonsense. It is a straightforward result of the 4th amendment. Specifically: How do you explain that the constitution explicitly says you are to be secure in your papers? Do you somehow think this means that the content of the papers is not covered, but the paper itself is to be secure from... what, fire? Mold? Confiscation by a paper envelope manufacturer?
Look here: The only thing that makes "papers" valuable, gives them a need to be secure, is what is on them. Your thoughts, ideas, messages, financial state, etc. We're not talking about unused Kleenex here. We're talking about what is on the paper when we say papers, not just the paper itself. It is entirely disingenuous to argue that the founders did not mean to protect information about your private life from the government. It is patently, blatantly, and undeniably obvious that is exactly what they meant to do.
Easy does not mean OK. Until any free person understands that, they're literally dangerous to this society.
It is very clear that even if it is easy to do, the government may not search your communications. The generalization to telephone communications is both natural and appropriate, as is the generalization to electronic communications. Email isn't very useful any longer due to the pathological neglect of the government, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be covered by the same blanket as your physical mail and your other papers are, regardless if the "paper' is vellum, papyrus, pressed wood pulp, stone tablets, or packets.
Constitutional limits were placed on government because it was the authors experience that governments without limits had a dependable history of abusing the citizens. These limits do indeed make it more difficult for the government to do the legitimate jobs that are assigned to it; this was known right up front. If course it'd be easier to apprehend criminals if we knew everything about everybody. But that also opens the door to other problems, and the authors of the constitution took care to explicitly prevent this. Or so they thought. They didn't anticipate the legal system as it stands today, I think that's safe to say. Nor the arguments put forth by those who think it is the government's job to protect/forbid them from everything ranging from failure to use a seatbelt to enemies that are not even known to specifically exist, no matter what the cost might be in liberty.
It has NOTHING to do with Google. If the government wants to change what privacy means to THEM, they need a constitutional amendment. Unless they simply want to continue to trample the document, which I wouldn't doubt for a moment.
If a story looks like a dup to me, I just don't read it. On the other hand, slashdot's completely broken moderation forces me to read everything, unless I want to miss some really good posts. So if they were going to fix anything, I'd say moderation is where to put the effort, priority #1.
As for the story, someone has to provide access to the net. Distributing it so that people get it from wifi puts the load - and the bill - on the people with the connections. As long as the Internet pipes are a commercial traffic system, unlike the highways, which are taxpayer funded (via the gas taxes, to some degree) traffic systems, "free" access always devolves upon one set of private individuals, for the benefit of others. That's fine if you feel like donating, but as we know from the history of downloading music, the ratio of freeloaders to voluntary payers is horrific and the payers take the majority of the load.
I'm of the mind that like the highways, data "highways" have turned out to be essential to commerce, education and communications - and because of this, the government should manage them with an equally-shared tax among the citizens; and since unlike the highways, the intertubes don't wear out proportional to traffic, bandwidth should not be a significant factor. Our (meaning, the US) network structure should be rebuilt to carry about a million times what it carries now anyway, and removing it from the private sector seems like a good time to get that done. Probably cost a few days of "Iraq war equivalent funding." (that's hand waving, but surely, we could afford it.)
This is the part that puzzles me. What planet other than earth do you know of that can sustain life?
Don't know of any planets in the life band (where water can reasonably exist in stable liquid form... there may be other bands that are useful to life, I simply stick with what I understand) around a sun except for one, this one. Out of that sample of one, 100% have intelligent life. Now, you share this info - you know of the surface details of exactly one planet in the life band, and (apparently) your conclusion is that there aren't any others that might share those details. I look at the universe and in a very large number of solar systems (which we DO already know often have planets), the odds of other planets falling into the life zone are pretty decent (we know of one other as of last week, I believe) and so given those similarities, I simply presume that broadly speaking, there will be ridiculously high numbers of others. One of the things this planet has had for a long time is a huge variety of life in a fairly broad range of zones. I expect that's reasonably likely to happen. After all, it happened here.
This implies that if life does spring into existence on a particular planet, then it will 100% certainly evolve into an intelligent life form?
Not at all. It simply says that life *can* evolve to a stage we'd call intelligent, technological. It's an objective fact, you can't get away from it. I don't expect every planet that is suitable to develop life, at least, not without some supporting evidence. Some of them will, though - I'm not guessing here, I *know* this is true, because one of them did. I'm standing on it, and so are you.
You get life, intelligence and quartz and they will most likely discover radio.
More like life, intelligence, copper, iron and galena (or anything else that will serve as a basic and trivially discovered rectifier.) Quartz is most often used for extreme frequency stabilization (as compared to what you need to discover radio) and quite advanced bandwidth control; no need for it just to discover radio. As an aside, when us old dodderers talk about "crystal radios", we're talking about crystals other than quartz, for instance galena, where a tiny wire (a "cat's whisker") is positioned (and re-positioned, etc.) on the crystal surface until a region that serves as a diode is found. Received AM modulated RF is fed to this. That gives you half an AM signal, which you drop onto some capacitance to reconstruct the envelope of the AM waveform, and then you drive a set of headphones with it. And again, those can be just copper wire, iron, and any material stiff enough to form a diaphragm. For us, that is. Of course, ET may not be able to perceive sound waves. Now we can have a whole new argument.:-)
The magical part is how raw elements supposedly formed themselves into a cell which not only started living, but reproducing as well.
Nothing magical implied about it. You're here, ergo, cells began to live. It always amuses me to see when people don't know the specifics of some event, the first thing they do is proclaim MAGIC! We have never, ever found *any* magical event. So re-examine why you want to attribute any unknown event to it, please. It makes no sense; there's no reason to go there.
Beyond this, I can't get you any further in your question.
I am unaware of having asked any questions in the post you replied to. I described a specific question as nonsensical, that's all.
As for that "agnostic" thing, you're either a theist (you hold a belief in a god or gods) or you're an atheist (you're without such a belief.) Agnosticism is not a 3rd position; it's a cognitive dead end.
I think that making up things to supposedly explain other things we don't know the answer for is a much poorer choice than waiting to see if we can actually figure out an answer from objective facts. That accounts for all evidence-free postulates that are by their very nature untestable. The concept of god or gods is one of these.
I think it is very likely that we as individuals, and even likely as a race, will never know the answers to some questions, and further, that some questions are by their very nature nonsensical, or perhaps "silly" would be more appropriate. I don't object to people asking such questions, I just think they're bonkers for expecting an answer, or even being inclined towards the idea that there is one. One question that exemplifies this silliness and may help you to understand what I am saying is "Why are we here?" in the deep philosophical sense of intent and cause outside our own interactions with the physical world.
Further, I think that the opinion of those who make things up and then follow them isn't all that important to me, certainly not important enough for me to make up, or take up, any collection of ideas and call them "god." I am careful of such folk because they have shown they can be violent, however.
My outlook is confidence based; My goal is to hold from very low confidence to very high confidence in various propositions. I try not to pursue or belabor that outlook which I perceive as "belief", because it seems to be primarily a gateway to errors I only end up having to work my way out of later.
Science - both the method and the resulting body of knowledge - appeals to me because I see it as also confidence based; it uses interlocking confidences to build a structure of remarkable usefulness and resilience, in my view. It is willing to, even designed to, completely reset those confidence values when needed. My reaction to perceiving that resilience, along with its ability to change according to the logical dictates of objective fact, is that of having found something that operates just the way I always imagined learning should work.
This is what I aspire to, that is, it is a high level summary of how I'd like to live every moment. Like most people, I have better days and worse days, and I certainly find myself blocked at many mental junctures by not having enough mental horsepower to get from here to there even on my best days.
There's no guarantee the aliens, if SETI finds any, will be friendly. We could very well encounter a warlike, conquering species (think Klingon, Borg, or Goa'uld) and bring about the enslavement or complete eradication of our species.
Actually, we do have a pretty good guarantee. It's called "tens (or more) of light years of distance" and the energy budget, not to mention time, to cross that to even begin to bother us. Physics seems to be pretty solid; I'd bet on it. There's no indication at all that anyone is likely to be able to pester us, or that they'd have any such motivation sufficient to overcome the obstacles. Or technology, for that matter.
Why should we presume space will be any different?
Because it is different. Crossing space isn't like crossing a continent, or even a sea. Not even remotely similar.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm quite serious. Read the text I supplied with the image. The "orbs" you refer to are not resolved images of the edges of stars, they are simply burned out areas on the camera's sensor as the atmosphere's lensing moves the stars around over the many seconds of the exposure. Those stars are points of light, no more.
The burnout on many star occurs because stars, in relation to one another, can be literally millions of times different in brightness. Comet Holmes, while large, is not nearly as bright as many of those stars at any one sensor location, hence is does not burn out the imager and you get a considerably more accurate representation of it. Likewise, the dimmest stars still appear as pinpoints because when they are lensed to a random location, one or two passes over a sensor site aren't enough to result in a bright reading - that only happens at the centroid of the focus, essentially right where the star actually is.
For those sighted adults to whom this isn't impressive visually, the situation has revealed people who have a woefully insufficient education, or an inability to comprehend the information conveyed by that education. The only choices remaining are, should we continue to let them go about their business, should we attempt remedial education, or should we put them down as a simple matter of compassion?
It looks exactly like this.
That's a shot with a 50mm portrait lens - no telescope, no magnification, nothing. The comet is plainly visible as an orb, yes, just as the sun is.
Theoretically, if we had candidates that represented us instead of the interests of corporations and special interest groups, our right to vote would be worth a great deal.
However, since our choices are limited to list A of sycophants or list B of sycophants, I'm thinking the college kids have over-valued the vote.
We can't elect anyone worth much to the general population, we can't get them impeached when they break the laws, violate the constitution, torture, engage in warmaking, arrest without probable cause, hold people incommunicado without hearings for extended periods of time, make a huge industry out of imprisoning the population for personal choices about what intoxicants they prefer...
Yes, I'd say an ipod is worth considerably more than a vote is today. It shouldn't be; but here we are.
That's ridiculous. My flickr account also required me to change over to a yahoo ID a while back; took a few minutes, and it was no trouble at all. Also, it is trivial to make private albums, photos, etc. I've used that capability from both sides, as an invited guest and as a provider of restricted material. It works fine and is no problem to use or manage. These accusations are just nonsensical FUD, motive unknown.
I have a lot of fun with my flickr account; I share pics with my family, with random strangers, people in groups that share various interests, I even manage some groups myself. There are things that could certainly be improved, but all in all, it is a useful, interesting service and really doesn't deserve to be knocked by a bunch of uninformed untruths.
Slashdot needs a "-1, FUD" mod. :-/
Smart people don't use slashdot moderation points to filter posts, because slashdot moderation is massively broken and constantly hides great posts. So there's no effect for the savvy slashdot reader. And I only concern myself with them. Certainly not with irrelevant AC interlopers like yourself who use obscenity and name calling instead of normal communications skills, and who have no sense of how slashdot actually works.
You know what? Rather than waste the space the troll occupied, I'd just as soon make an on topic remark and let people go from there. Respecting the space a FP clown claimed isn't built into my outlook, sorry.
Great news. :-)
My apologies. I didn't write it as a link, so I didn't test it. Mea culpa. Thank you for the correction.
We generally get fixes for real bugs out within 24 hours, unless the problem is traceable to the OS, the only factor really out of our immediate control. Even then, we do a quick evaluation to see if we can replace the OS function. Over the years, we've replaced quite a few of them, but rarely within 24 hours.
But we know our code backwards and forwards; I wrote the majority of the current codebase myself, and I can generally get to within a few lines of the problem just by a bug's description... the rest is a matter of minutes and testing. This app is very large - comparable to Photoshop in terms of feature count - but it is also very stable after 15 years of whack-a-bug and a continuous drive to make the internal structure as orderly and regular as possible.
It is my observation that the more programmers you have involved, the slower your turnaround time (for everything from bugs to features) will be. Likewise the larger the entity, the slower it will generally move. Almost every layer of management and corporate compartmenting disease will contribute to slowing down the process.
For the apps that I use that I have had the experience of reporting bugs, it is my general experience that bugs often are never fixed at all. One browser, "Omniweb", truly my favorite in terms of features, has bugs that make it essentially unusable for me. Crashing, slowing, lockups and so on - really serious problems. I've reported them, they never were fixed, in fact the software was never updated. Eventually, I just went back to firefox. Then as Leopard came out, after years of doing nothing, they released a "Leopard version" in which, perhaps, I might find those bugfixes if I looked... but as I say, I have moved on and no longer have any enthusiasm for the product. Slow bug repair (or ignoring them) is synonymous with telling your customers you really don't care what kind of experience they have with your software.
Apple, with all their emphasis on customer experience, does this too. They've had bugs in hand for very long periods where they simply don't address them. If your bug isn't something they think will affect a lot of people, it isn't likely to be fixed. I've not yet purchased Leopard, preferring not to catch early-adopter syndrome bugs myself, but when I do, I would not be the least bit surprised to find you still can't refresh a remote share that's been changed by the remote OS; that the wifi differs hugely in compatibility between PPC and Intel hardware; that mail still hoses the sent mail box based on the return address; that shell fonts are poorly rendered; that shell ANSI compatibility is still broken; that the OS still provides locked-up beachballs at the most inconvenient moments; that the OS still puts the wrong things away on the HD when RAM gets tight, and consequently becomes massively unresponsive... Basically, Apple doesn't have good control of their OS, are unable to respond to bugs in a timely fashion, so much so that they triage out bugs based on report counts, and the common patter is that Apple provides a great customer experience. So while my own experience is that bug fixes are important and can be quick in turnaround, here's Apple showing us that you can make a complete thrash out of the entire bugfix issue and still come out smelling like roses. So is a few weeks too long? Probably not, if you have a good marketing department. :-)
Really? Note that your post, a perfectly reasonable contribution to the conversation, has been edited out of the conversation by remaining unmoderated at 1; thereby preventing anyone who actually uses the mod system to threshold what to read at anything over 1 from ever seeing what you have to say. If they have mod threshold set to 1, then mods above 1 have no effect upon what they see, and provide no benefit to them; only mods below 1 (0, -1) trim off posts.
The whole point of moderation is to allow the users to follow a thread without the noise of trolls and outright idiots. The moderation system has put your post right in the same bag with those people. Still feel good about it?
As the mod system is designed now, mod points are too scarce to mod up posts of simply average value (though it happens often by dint of the moderator agreeing with a post, always at the expense of much better posts because points are scarce.)
The metamod system could (potentially, if used well, which it isn't) stop bad mods after the fact. But it doesn't - it stops people whom the metamoderators disagree with. Even if it *did* stop bad mods, it never undoes the harm of an incorrect down-mod; hence a lost post remains lost forever to anyone who actually uses the point system for thresholding. And finally, the metamod system is way behind real time, and even if it worked perfectly, the posts would be lost because the conversation is, for all intents and purposes, already over. So clearly the metamod system is no answer at all.
The fact that moderation is anonymous allows moderators to run roughshod over a thread, unopposed, willy-nilly stomping on opinions they disagree with. What they *should* be doing is looking for quality posts, points well made, rational disagreements, humor, etc. But there is literally no mechanism whatsoever to enforce or even simply *encourage* such behavior because moderation is anonymous and if indeed the metamod system does do any knuckle-whacking, it is long afterwards and the damage is never undone, leaving the bad mod perfectly well satisfied as to the effects they had being just what they intended. If moderation were not anonymous, the community would quickly catch people who were systematically going after opinions; if moderation was eliminated when a moderator was disqualified in a thread, the community would have a way of preventing bad mods from interfering with and degrading the quality of, any particular topic.
Slashdot does indeed work. I'm here because of the users; they make it what it is. But in no wise can I agree that the moderation system is a good one. I've watched it for years and I know for a fact that it is outright broken.
Why not take a moment to look at my posting history and see if I'm doing something "seriously wrong"? My actions are right out there where you can see them. I enjoy slashdot immensely for the high density of smart users here, and I generally put considerable effort into my posts. There are some culture clashes, I'm a proponent of commercial software, including my own, and I think the current attitude towards intellectual property is childish, selfish and self-defeating, but I can and do defend my positions, and I never troll.
I never used moderation as a means of inflicting my opinion, and I've never used metamoderation that way, either. What I have done is regularly and consistently point out where slashdot's policies and mechanisms need work; and I have also pointed out when a story editor is being less than clever.
Some of slashdot's key problems are the various anonymous mechanisms used by the editors. They can (and do) go after members completely silently and without any oversight from the community or anyone else. I've seen it happen and there can be no doubt about it - whole groups of messages that extend many days in the past suddenly getting modded down in large numbers, far more than the pitiful five mod points any normal user receives from time to time; reasonable people losing moderation privileges without any possible excuse for it; stories that go red in the firehouse within hours and stay that way never posting, while stories of absolutely no value get posted right away.
I've even taken the time to write up suggestions for change (in my journal as well as in posts) with an eye towards constructive and productive change. Does that sound like someone who should have moderation taken away from them? Go on, look at my posting history and see. As far as I am concerned, the fact that they care enough to hobble my participation in moderation is just another sign that they are wrong and they know it.
So far, that post has an interesting, a flamebait, and an offtopic.
Pretty funny, really. We really do need an intelligence test for moderators. :-)
Re mod points, no, none for me either, not for many months now. Disagree with a slashdot luminary (or even policy) and you're toast for quite a while. Unfortunately, no one has applied an intelligence test to the process of becoming a slashdot luminary.
Perhaps slashdot should implement a requirement for writing a cogent, unique paragraph before it allows a user to have mod points. Then, if they also change the moderation to be accountable (no longer anonymous, and no longer scarce -- see Kuro5in.org for moderation technology that actually works), it might have a chance at being useful in the sense that one could actually use it to filter messages, instead of being relegated to endlessly observe people use mod points in place of actually expressing a counter opinion.
Then again, slashdot could continue on with completely broken moderation. I could see that as a possibility, given the existing sample set.
(*) This problem manifests as many inappropriately moderated (and unmoderated) posts in each slashdot discussion, making it absolutely impossible to read any discussion unless your threshold is set to -1 or you are willing to put up with a disjointed set of posts, apparently unrelated to each other (and sometimes the subject at hand), while also knowing with absolute certainly you're missing many good, on-topic or otherwise high quality posts. One presumes that at this late date, with absolutely no attention from those people running slashdot, that the problem must be something they don't understand about the site (such as the complex and very difficult to understand idea that working moderation would help the userbase), and so devolves upon a technical person.
Nonsense. It is a straightforward result of the 4th amendment. Specifically: How do you explain that the constitution explicitly says you are to be secure in your papers? Do you somehow think this means that the content of the papers is not covered, but the paper itself is to be secure from... what, fire? Mold? Confiscation by a paper envelope manufacturer?
Look here: The only thing that makes "papers" valuable, gives them a need to be secure, is what is on them. Your thoughts, ideas, messages, financial state, etc. We're not talking about unused Kleenex here. We're talking about what is on the paper when we say papers, not just the paper itself. It is entirely disingenuous to argue that the founders did not mean to protect information about your private life from the government. It is patently, blatantly, and undeniably obvious that is exactly what they meant to do.
Easy does not mean OK. Until any free person understands that, they're literally dangerous to this society.
It is very clear that even if it is easy to do, the government may not search your communications. The generalization to telephone communications is both natural and appropriate, as is the generalization to electronic communications. Email isn't very useful any longer due to the pathological neglect of the government, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be covered by the same blanket as your physical mail and your other papers are, regardless if the "paper' is vellum, papyrus, pressed wood pulp, stone tablets, or packets.
Constitutional limits were placed on government because it was the authors experience that governments without limits had a dependable history of abusing the citizens. These limits do indeed make it more difficult for the government to do the legitimate jobs that are assigned to it; this was known right up front. If course it'd be easier to apprehend criminals if we knew everything about everybody. But that also opens the door to other problems, and the authors of the constitution took care to explicitly prevent this. Or so they thought. They didn't anticipate the legal system as it stands today, I think that's safe to say. Nor the arguments put forth by those who think it is the government's job to protect/forbid them from everything ranging from failure to use a seatbelt to enemies that are not even known to specifically exist, no matter what the cost might be in liberty.
It has NOTHING to do with Google. If the government wants to change what privacy means to THEM, they need a constitutional amendment. Unless they simply want to continue to trample the document, which I wouldn't doubt for a moment.
If a story looks like a dup to me, I just don't read it. On the other hand, slashdot's completely broken moderation forces me to read everything, unless I want to miss some really good posts. So if they were going to fix anything, I'd say moderation is where to put the effort, priority #1.
As for the story, someone has to provide access to the net. Distributing it so that people get it from wifi puts the load - and the bill - on the people with the connections. As long as the Internet pipes are a commercial traffic system, unlike the highways, which are taxpayer funded (via the gas taxes, to some degree) traffic systems, "free" access always devolves upon one set of private individuals, for the benefit of others. That's fine if you feel like donating, but as we know from the history of downloading music, the ratio of freeloaders to voluntary payers is horrific and the payers take the majority of the load.
I'm of the mind that like the highways, data "highways" have turned out to be essential to commerce, education and communications - and because of this, the government should manage them with an equally-shared tax among the citizens; and since unlike the highways, the intertubes don't wear out proportional to traffic, bandwidth should not be a significant factor. Our (meaning, the US) network structure should be rebuilt to carry about a million times what it carries now anyway, and removing it from the private sector seems like a good time to get that done. Probably cost a few days of "Iraq war equivalent funding." (that's hand waving, but surely, we could afford it.)
Don't know of any planets in the life band (where water can reasonably exist in stable liquid form... there may be other bands that are useful to life, I simply stick with what I understand) around a sun except for one, this one. Out of that sample of one, 100% have intelligent life. Now, you share this info - you know of the surface details of exactly one planet in the life band, and (apparently) your conclusion is that there aren't any others that might share those details. I look at the universe and in a very large number of solar systems (which we DO already know often have planets), the odds of other planets falling into the life zone are pretty decent (we know of one other as of last week, I believe) and so given those similarities, I simply presume that broadly speaking, there will be ridiculously high numbers of others. One of the things this planet has had for a long time is a huge variety of life in a fairly broad range of zones. I expect that's reasonably likely to happen. After all, it happened here.
Not at all. It simply says that life *can* evolve to a stage we'd call intelligent, technological. It's an objective fact, you can't get away from it. I don't expect every planet that is suitable to develop life, at least, not without some supporting evidence. Some of them will, though - I'm not guessing here, I *know* this is true, because one of them did. I'm standing on it, and so are you.
More like life, intelligence, copper, iron and galena (or anything else that will serve as a basic and trivially discovered rectifier.) Quartz is most often used for extreme frequency stabilization (as compared to what you need to discover radio) and quite advanced bandwidth control; no need for it just to discover radio. As an aside, when us old dodderers talk about "crystal radios", we're talking about crystals other than quartz, for instance galena, where a tiny wire (a "cat's whisker") is positioned (and re-positioned, etc.) on the crystal surface until a region that serves as a diode is found. Received AM modulated RF is fed to this. That gives you half an AM signal, which you drop onto some capacitance to reconstruct the envelope of the AM waveform, and then you drive a set of headphones with it. And again, those can be just copper wire, iron, and any material stiff enough to form a diaphragm. For us, that is. Of course, ET may not be able to perceive sound waves. Now we can have a whole new argument. :-)
Nothing magical implied about it. You're here, ergo, cells began to live. It always amuses me to see when people don't know the specifics of some event, the first thing they do is proclaim MAGIC! We have never, ever found *any* magical event. So re-examine why you want to attribute any unknown event to it, please. It makes no sense; there's no reason to go there.
I am unaware of having asked any questions in the post you replied to. I described a specific question as nonsensical, that's all.
As for that "agnostic" thing, you're either a theist (you hold a belief in a god or gods) or you're an atheist (you're without such a belief.) Agnosticism is not a 3rd position; it's a cognitive dead end.
Ok, NASA, and your proof is... ?
Hoo, boy. Ok.
I think that making up things to supposedly explain other things we don't know the answer for is a much poorer choice than waiting to see if we can actually figure out an answer from objective facts. That accounts for all evidence-free postulates that are by their very nature untestable. The concept of god or gods is one of these.
I think it is very likely that we as individuals, and even likely as a race, will never know the answers to some questions, and further, that some questions are by their very nature nonsensical, or perhaps "silly" would be more appropriate. I don't object to people asking such questions, I just think they're bonkers for expecting an answer, or even being inclined towards the idea that there is one. One question that exemplifies this silliness and may help you to understand what I am saying is "Why are we here?" in the deep philosophical sense of intent and cause outside our own interactions with the physical world.
Further, I think that the opinion of those who make things up and then follow them isn't all that important to me, certainly not important enough for me to make up, or take up, any collection of ideas and call them "god." I am careful of such folk because they have shown they can be violent, however.
My outlook is confidence based; My goal is to hold from very low confidence to very high confidence in various propositions. I try not to pursue or belabor that outlook which I perceive as "belief", because it seems to be primarily a gateway to errors I only end up having to work my way out of later.
Science - both the method and the resulting body of knowledge - appeals to me because I see it as also confidence based; it uses interlocking confidences to build a structure of remarkable usefulness and resilience, in my view. It is willing to, even designed to, completely reset those confidence values when needed. My reaction to perceiving that resilience, along with its ability to change according to the logical dictates of objective fact, is that of having found something that operates just the way I always imagined learning should work.
This is what I aspire to, that is, it is a high level summary of how I'd like to live every moment. Like most people, I have better days and worse days, and I certainly find myself blocked at many mental junctures by not having enough mental horsepower to get from here to there even on my best days.
Actually, we do have a pretty good guarantee. It's called "tens (or more) of light years of distance" and the energy budget, not to mention time, to cross that to even begin to bother us. Physics seems to be pretty solid; I'd bet on it. There's no indication at all that anyone is likely to be able to pester us, or that they'd have any such motivation sufficient to overcome the obstacles. Or technology, for that matter.
Because it is different. Crossing space isn't like crossing a continent, or even a sea. Not even remotely similar.