I wouldn't say it's "completely, totally, absolutely broken" but we know that our moderation system can benefit from a serious overhaul. We're actively working on major improvements. Stay tuned...
The version I heard (fifteen years ago) was with three programmers from different universities, talking about how their students are taught. The first two comments were "when a resource is free, we take advantage of it" and "when a resource is shared, we minimize its use." Same punchline.
Sorry about that. For whatever reason, techreview.com's server was redirecting readers back to an ad page on slashdot.org (?!). I updated the URL in the story to the printer-friendly one you gave (thanks).
No, that's not a dupe. A dupe is when Slashdot runs substantially the same story twice, typically over a period of a few days. What you've found is an interesting related story from over a year ago.
I've added it to this story's Related Links, so thanks... but it's not a dupe.
Meanwhile, for no good reason, here's some gorgeous stats porn on how Google (and Yahoo and MSN) crawled a sample website. The animations and closeups of the trees are very cool.
There's a difference between the 10,000 comments Slashdot gets a day, and the 20 stories we post.
Oh, and make that Greasemonkey extension configurable, and I bet a lot of people will use it. Plenty of people have pet peeves. Make it scan the tag list and the topic icon too!
We wouldn't have run this story if all we saw was 6 people on a Google discussion. We have confirmation that something's going on. But we don't know a whole lot about the scope, and we're hoping that readers will provide more data points.
First story, November 2005: "Disclic, through discount-licensing.com, this week began offering secondhand software licenses..."
Today's story, April 2006: "Sales of second-hand Microsoft software licences have doubled month-on-month since the market was opened in November 2005..."
A dupe is when we post the same story twice with no new news between the two stories. This is a followup -- thanks for bringing it to our attention, and I've added the November story to our Related Links section.
Tags were briefly (a few hours) made visible to all users due to a bug. I'm assuming that's what you all saw.
Our intent so far has been to only let the users who have tag-writing permission see the tags on stories. At some point we'll open it up to everyone, but for now it's still a closed beta.
You're not one of those users, apparently. Right now the way it's set up is that everyone with write access has read access and vice versa. This may change in the future.
Since it's not a dupe (first story: "set to go into orbit", second story "has gone into orbit"), tagging it as dupe is a great way to have the degree to which your tags will affect our system reduced.
Coal has on the order of 10,000 Btu/lb. So unless I misplaced a decimal, eight pounds of coal yields around 24 kWh, enough to not only power up a laptop, but run it for about 800 hours.
Once again a global-warming denier compares a decade of peer-reviewed scientific publications to... well, in this case, a talk given by a novelist.
Consensus is precisely how science advances. Scientific consensus is precisely what should inform us on scientific matters. It has nothing to do with avoiding debate, it is a signifier that the debate has already been held. Go read Kuhn or something.
Don't blame Democrats for the falloff in new nuclear plant construction. Nuclear plant construction fell to almost nothing during the Ford administration.
And you're joking about blocking ethanol, right? The only reason it's cost-effective now is a 55 cent per gallon subsidy. To pitch growing corn as the solution to global warming is pretty cynical; it's never going to be an effective way to reduce emissions substantially and its primary goal, as everyone knows, is wealth transfer to farmers.
You have a point there. As a card-carrying member of the environnmentalist left, I do support nuclear power and I hope to find any way to help persuade my fellow lefties to support it as well. Wish I knew how.
But there's a big difference between opposed to one particular means of power generation while supporting the overall goal of saving the environment from devastating change, and being part of a system designed to erode public support for science in general while misleading the nation on whether the devastating change is even happening at all. One is an honest disagreement about an issue. The other is twisting reality for political gain.
I'm sorry to hear that you think science should only be for "extreme lefties." If you don't put much stock in science, maybe you should go read something other than Slashdot.
Yes, really. A meta-study of peer-reviewed journals turned up no contrarian papers, 1994-2004. I'm sorry, but petitions aimed at getting publicity for a political agenda do not count as peer-reviewed papers. The 1997 Leipzig Declaration was expressly directed at whether action should be taken on a particular treaty, calling it "economically destructive" -- you understand the difference between this kind of petition and peer-reviewed science, right?
The sad fact is that since 1988, the contrarian position on global warming has been nothing more than a snow job by Republican politicians and Republican interests, especially right-wing "think tanks" paid to churn out talking points that benefit industry and politicians.
The depth of right-wing hackery is demonstrated not just by George W. Bush, but by George Will, who to this day denies
that anthropogenic global warming is real. His denials read like creationists flailing their tiny fists against 150 years of consensus on evolution. "One degree might be the margin of error" -- that is quite simply false.
To see George Will, the face of modern conservatism, in full petulant splendor, you have to
watch the video.
All he brings to the table -- all any global-warming denier can bring to the table -- is a snow job of out-of-context quotes from the 1970s about how some scientists thought the globe was cooling, not warming. Pretty sad. But that's one of the many differences between scientists and pundits. When new facts come to light, scientists change their minds.
But there has been a Republican pattern, from 1988, when James Hansen went before the U.S. Senate to explain that he was "99 percent" certain that global warming was real and that it was to some extent caused by humans, to earlier this year
when the Bush administration's appointee tried to muzzle the very same James Hansen on the very same issue. Over and over we see partisan politics as the opposition to actual science. By arguing that any action on global warming would destroy our economy (not true -- carbon emission per GDP dollar has gone down dramatically since 1970 while productivity has boomed), Republicans play the issue as a political weapon, forcing Democrats to adopt moderate positions. Remember Bush's campaign ad making fun of Kerry for even considering a gasoline tax?
And who suffers? We are already in the midst of the Sixth Extinction,
and though the first effects of global warming are just beginning to be felt, it's about to slam the ecosystem like a freight train. The only hope we have is that technology will take a quantum leap soon enough to allow us to effectively change planetary climate, on a scale we can't today engineer. But that's a crap shoot, a total unknown (much like
global dimming,
by the way, which we also know next to nothing about, and which if part of a natural cycle may mean global warming is going to get much, much worse over the next century). We need to do something besides hope.
It seems that it's too late to halt global warming's effects, thanks largely to fifteen years of Republican dissembling, but maybe if we start now we can mitigate to some extent the horrific human death, disease and displacement that will be everyday news on our grandchildren's planet. All we can do is start now. Maybe if these poll numbers are accurate, finally, finally we may be able to help.
What you also leave out that a large portion of the increased debt was the direct result of the Democratic Congress' spending habits: they passed budgets that totalled about $200 billion (in constant dollars) more than Reagan asked for. It's nothing to sneeze at, and that $200 billion number doesn't even take into consideration the cumulative impact: when Congress spent $50 billion more than Reagan requested in 1982, that $50 billion was included in 1983's request. To which Congress added $35 billion more. And so on.
Could you post the actual budget figures to back up your claims.
Here's some commentary on Reagan's budget deficits and his Congress's role, from a genuine conservative:
Congress has passed every balanced budget he has submitted. Congress has quarreled with him a bit about the composition of spending, but not much about the amount. The first Reagan budget was essentially Carter's. The eighth was a product of the Reagan-Congress "summit" following the October 1987 stock market convulsion. The middle six budgets tell Reagan's story. Those budgets produced deficits totaling $1.1 trillion. The budgets Reagan sent to Congress proposed 13/14ths of that total. Congress added a piddling $90 billion, just $15 billion a year.
As Pat Moynihan has said, something fundamental happened in American governance when a conservative Republican administration produced deficits of $200 billion -- and nothing happened. Nothing, that is, dramatic and immediately visible. Much happened in the way of silent rot as we mortgaged much of our future vitality. But for the political class, the event was a splendid liberation: all the rules were repealed. It was a particularly perverse event coming from conservatives: there were no longer restraints, practical or moral, on government spending. Under Reagan the interest component of the budget has more than doubled to 14 percent. The fiscal 1989 interest cost -- a regressive transfer of wealth to buyers of government bonds -- exceeds $150 billion. That is more than the combined budgets of nine departments -- Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Interior, Justice, Labor, State, Transportation.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the suggestions. We'll be allowing all that and more, I think. And under/overrated will probably go away, yes.
I wouldn't say it's "completely, totally, absolutely broken" but we know that our moderation system can benefit from a serious overhaul. We're actively working on major improvements. Stay tuned...
The version I heard (fifteen years ago) was with three programmers from different universities, talking about how their students are taught. The first two comments were "when a resource is free, we take advantage of it" and "when a resource is shared, we minimize its use." Same punchline.
Sorry about that. For whatever reason, techreview.com's server was redirecting readers back to an ad page on slashdot.org (?!). I updated the URL in the story to the printer-friendly one you gave (thanks).
Fixed, thanks.
I've added it to this story's Related Links, so thanks... but it's not a dupe.
Meanwhile, for no good reason, here's some gorgeous stats porn on how Google (and Yahoo and MSN) crawled a sample website. The animations and closeups of the trees are very cool.
There's a difference between the 10,000 comments Slashdot gets a day, and the 20 stories we post.
Oh, and make that Greasemonkey extension configurable, and I bet a lot of people will use it. Plenty of people have pet peeves. Make it scan the tag list and the topic icon too!
Yeah, it actually is :)
We wouldn't have run this story if all we saw was 6 people on a Google discussion. We have confirmation that something's going on. But we don't know a whole lot about the scope, and we're hoping that readers will provide more data points.
That's not a dupe.
First story, November 2005: "Disclic, through discount-licensing.com, this week began offering secondhand software licenses..."
Today's story, April 2006: "Sales of second-hand Microsoft software licences have doubled month-on-month since the market was opened in November 2005..."
A dupe is when we post the same story twice with no new news between the two stories. This is a followup -- thanks for bringing it to our attention, and I've added the November story to our Related Links section.
(when it was only open to subscribers, it read differently :)
Our intent so far has been to only let the users who have tag-writing permission see the tags on stories. At some point we'll open it up to everyone, but for now it's still a closed beta.
You're not one of those users, apparently. Right now the way it's set up is that everyone with write access has read access and vice versa. This may change in the future.
You're right. I'll readjust tag parameters shortly. Thanks for the heads-up.
Since it's not a dupe (first story: "set to go into orbit", second story "has gone into orbit"), tagging it as dupe is a great way to have the degree to which your tags will affect our system reduced.
Coal has on the order of 10,000 Btu/lb. So unless I misplaced a decimal, eight pounds of coal yields around 24 kWh, enough to not only power up a laptop, but run it for about 800 hours.
Once again a global-warming denier compares a decade of peer-reviewed scientific publications to ... well, in this case, a talk given by a novelist.
Consensus is precisely how science advances. Scientific consensus is precisely what should inform us on scientific matters. It has nothing to do with avoiding debate, it is a signifier that the debate has already been held. Go read Kuhn or something.
Don't blame Democrats for the falloff in new nuclear plant construction. Nuclear plant construction fell to almost nothing during the Ford administration.
And you're joking about blocking ethanol, right? The only reason it's cost-effective now is a 55 cent per gallon subsidy. To pitch growing corn as the solution to global warming is pretty cynical; it's never going to be an effective way to reduce emissions substantially and its primary goal, as everyone knows, is wealth transfer to farmers.
You have a point there. As a card-carrying member of the environnmentalist left, I do support nuclear power and I hope to find any way to help persuade my fellow lefties to support it as well. Wish I knew how.
But there's a big difference between opposed to one particular means of power generation while supporting the overall goal of saving the environment from devastating change, and being part of a system designed to erode public support for science in general while misleading the nation on whether the devastating change is even happening at all. One is an honest disagreement about an issue. The other is twisting reality for political gain.
I'm sorry to hear that you think science should only be for "extreme lefties." If you don't put much stock in science, maybe you should go read something other than Slashdot.
Yes, really. A meta-study of peer-reviewed journals turned up no contrarian papers, 1994-2004. I'm sorry, but petitions aimed at getting publicity for a political agenda do not count as peer-reviewed papers. The 1997 Leipzig Declaration was expressly directed at whether action should be taken on a particular treaty, calling it "economically destructive" -- you understand the difference between this kind of petition and peer-reviewed science, right?
The sad fact is that since 1988, the contrarian position on global warming has been nothing more than a snow job by Republican politicians and Republican interests, especially right-wing "think tanks" paid to churn out talking points that benefit industry and politicians.
The depth of right-wing hackery is demonstrated not just by George W. Bush, but by George Will, who to this day denies that anthropogenic global warming is real. His denials read like creationists flailing their tiny fists against 150 years of consensus on evolution. "One degree might be the margin of error" -- that is quite simply false.
To see George Will, the face of modern conservatism, in full petulant splendor, you have to watch the video. All he brings to the table -- all any global-warming denier can bring to the table -- is a snow job of out-of-context quotes from the 1970s about how some scientists thought the globe was cooling, not warming. Pretty sad. But that's one of the many differences between scientists and pundits. When new facts come to light, scientists change their minds.
But there has been a Republican pattern, from 1988, when James Hansen went before the U.S. Senate to explain that he was "99 percent" certain that global warming was real and that it was to some extent caused by humans, to earlier this year when the Bush administration's appointee tried to muzzle the very same James Hansen on the very same issue. Over and over we see partisan politics as the opposition to actual science. By arguing that any action on global warming would destroy our economy (not true -- carbon emission per GDP dollar has gone down dramatically since 1970 while productivity has boomed), Republicans play the issue as a political weapon, forcing Democrats to adopt moderate positions. Remember Bush's campaign ad making fun of Kerry for even considering a gasoline tax?
And who suffers? We are already in the midst of the Sixth Extinction, and though the first effects of global warming are just beginning to be felt, it's about to slam the ecosystem like a freight train. The only hope we have is that technology will take a quantum leap soon enough to allow us to effectively change planetary climate, on a scale we can't today engineer. But that's a crap shoot, a total unknown (much like global dimming, by the way, which we also know next to nothing about, and which if part of a natural cycle may mean global warming is going to get much, much worse over the next century). We need to do something besides hope.
It seems that it's too late to halt global warming's effects, thanks largely to fifteen years of Republican dissembling, but maybe if we start now we can mitigate to some extent the horrific human death, disease and displacement that will be everyday news on our grandchildren's planet. All we can do is start now. Maybe if these poll numbers are accurate, finally, finally we may be able to help.
Here's some commentary on Reagan's budget deficits and his Congress's role, from a genuine conservative:
Stay tuned...