The likely objective of these measures is increasing media coverage of the fandom conflict, thereby adding to and further propagating a narrative of widespread discord and dysfunction in American society.
So it was the trolls who argued that it was a good movie?
Because I've yet to meet a person who thinks it is, so that clearly is not the majority opinion of the non-trolls (or at least the non-paid trolls).
This is only the past 10 years, because I'm lazy and this was fast to find. Note that the line goes up and down. If you pick a few years carefully, you can easily find both an increase and a decrease by several % somewhere within this period.
If you would look at the same line for Spain or Greece or Italy, I'm sure there would be a much more bleak picture.
Such a narrow perspective in so many answers. Turn on your brain, people !
Living in the 1st and living in the 2nd or 3rd world makes for a dramatic difference these days. Real wages in the west have stagnated or gone down for two decades now. But for the poor of the world - China alone is lifting 10 million people out of poverty every year. People in Africa who 20 years ago didn't know where their next bowl of food will come from now have smartphones.
If you are among the very poor of the world, the last decades were a good time, in general.
Our personal perspective in the USA and in Europe is quite different. We are witnessing the ongoing largest theft in human history, called the financial crisis, and we watch the rich getting richer and us getting poorer.
But on a global scale, we are just 1.5 billion, give or take a few. Everyone else becoming less poor statistically overcompensates for our misery.
You will always have a TV. It's a propaganda and population control instrument of such fundamental value that if it didn't exist already, someone would invent it.
There are plenty of stories of inventors without an army of lawyers losing their patented invention to some corporation which does have access to a medium-sized village of lawyers.
If you are a bit of a paranoid type, those stories give you plenty of a reason to not trust the patent system.
Though unless you are also a sociopath, you would leave a secure copy with someone you trust. If you are very distrustful, you can encrypt it and leave the key with yet another person, both not knowing who the other party is.
Though it is interesting that various factions can't seem to let go of the idea that one particular spot there was the "holy home of their religion"
Because when those religions came into existence, all religions were tribal religions. The christian and islamic idea that everyone can become a member is an innovation in the sphere of religion.
I agree that taking it all too seriously - self-important hubris - is probably the largest part of the problem. Overcompensated inferiority complexes?
I'm quite sure there is a strong correlation between strength of religious feelings and dick size, yes.
I disagree. The Middle East isn't complicated at all.
It's an area where several different tribes, cultures and religions are all mixed up. As long as everyone is tolerant of everyone else, they all profit from the exchange of ideas. Whenever some intolerant version of someones religion becomes dominant, things go to hell.
The primary problem being that the dominant religion for the last thousand years explicitly hates another major religion, and is explicitly intolerant of all the others, so it takes a bit more of the don't-take-it-too-serious approach to live a workable version of it. That's why things go to hell more often than elsewhere in the world, and more badly.
During the Cold War, the West meddled in various countries affairs to prevent that they become too friendly to Russia. This was a huge part of why Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and a bit later other countries as well slid into Islamism.
Once Islam had taken over, some smart people understood just to what degree they had fucked up and that Islamic countries can never be allowed to become rich, properous or influential. That is why Saudi Arabia... oh... wait... I'm afraid the smart people were busy doing other things and nobody realized just how serious the fuck-up was, until the wake-up call of 9/11. Then, finally, the sources and nests of islamic terrorism were wiped ou... wait, what? They attacked Iraq? The Saudis are still good friends? Ah, my mistake. It took until the Syrian war before... not? The Jemen war? Seriously? Still not?
In such case I will make careful decisions to not interfere with the so far successful course the company has taken.
The law is gameable. In fact, it is designed to be gameable. The vast majority of the law is written by lawyers, whose profession is to game the system. An ideal law would work without lawyers in all but the most obscure and difficult cases.
The company is successful this far, and not significantly interfering with its operation is the best kind of reasonable care that I can exercise. Since the position is an elected position and my strategy is communicated well in advance of the election, by voting for me shareholders express their explicit desire for me to act in the way that I outlined.
I went to Apple when the first Intel devices came out, because I thought "if that OS X everyone tells me good things about doesn't work for me, I'll just install Linux".
I never did. And I never looked back. And one of the reasons is that I saved countless hours of research and brainfucking. How much time I spent before figuring out just which notebook to buy, or just which components to upgrade in my PC? I've looked at the Android market now and then, just as I looked at the pre-smartphone smartphone market (Nokia Communicator, etc.) and the post-Palm Pilot PDA market. It's impossible to make a decision! There's a million devices with a billion tiny differences half of which they don't ever tell you unless you read them on obscure tech sites.
Apple made it easy. There's two desktop systems each in 3 configurations (small, medium, large, easy to get) and there's two lines of notebooks. Here you are. There's one line of smartphones, with 2 or 3 different memory sizes.
I loved my MacBook Pro. I still love my MacBook Air despite it's getting aged. My Mac Mini was a wonderful media station and later got used as a simple desktop computer (for web and email), and I love both my iMacs, the old one which is still doing great despite being ancient now and the new one from last year which is just amazing.
And while I sometimes think a "gamer version" with a VR-ready high performance graphics card setup would be great, I don't really miss it that much, and I wouldn't want Apple to deliver 20 different lines with 50 different options.
And the iPhone? I don't want an XS-RPT-6SX. I want an iPhone. Mine is the SE because I prefer the smaller form factor. A choice of size and a choice of memory, that is a good strategy. I don't need an additional option of gold and diamonds (people who want that buy Vertu anyway). Or of colourful plastic (people who want that buy Huwai anyway).
Apple under Steve Jobs put itself in its own market, and that made it successful. It intentionally did not try to compete with everyone else. Todays shareholders need to understand that despite its size, Apple can not take on everyone else in every segment of every market. It needs to be its own market, that is what it is good at.
I hereby volunteer to become one of the additional two directors.
I promise to miss all meetings and never vote on anything I'm not legally obliged to vote on (in which case I'll abstain), so that my addition to the board makes no difference whatsoever.
I'll even do it for free (necessary expenses paid, please, but I want nothing for my own pocket).
If the SEC gives you the finger, give it two fingers back. I'm sure it will be at most minutes until someone else adds "me too" to this comment, and there you have your two additional directors, with nothing actually changing.
Let me tell you the story of the Pirate Party in Germany. I was a member, so this is inside perspective:
Once upon a time, a german Pirate Party was founded, and got rapid interest. It growed quickly and the timing was right. New surveilance laws brought public interest to the party topics, and it had some success at elections as well as a media interest far larger than its single-digit election percents would justify.
But it was growing in both success and popularity. Some hopeful observers started to give it chances to enter the german parliament (which has a 5% treshold). It did successfully enter multiple local and state parliaments.
Then the trolls took over. Suddenly all these topics of equal rights and protection of minorities and proper language and genderism and what else you have was on the agenda, and in a tense internal vote even entered the party platform. The original concept of the Pirate Party - digital civil rights - became a side note. A lot of weirdos made career inside the party, and the tools they used to edge out the original pirates was the same as the CoC. Wordings, language, conduct. It was the end of the Pirate Party. Nobody is talking about them anymore, and the last national election got them 0.4 % of the votes, which is their worst result ever and an 82% loss compared to the previous election.
These things have become tools for people with completely different agendas. None of the Pirate Party trolls had any history of making anyones life better. There are certainly causes worth fighting for and there are certainly cases where improper language, prejudices and such are harming people and there are people who stand up for them and help those affected. But the vast majority of social justice warriors have no such history. They have nothing under their belt where their actions actually made the life of an actual person better. Theirs war is in the abstract. "women are harmed by..." - which woman exactly, when exactly and how exactly?
---
We nerds are susceptible to this kind of arguing because we can think abstractly and don't think it unusual. That is why social justice warriors thrive in the academic environment. In a farming village, nobody would take them seriously, because people are interested in actual milk from actual cows, not milking theory.
Look for actual harm to actual people, or ask for references of where these warriors managed actual benefits to actual people with their demands and actions. If they cannot provide evidence of either, disregard their bullshit and call it for what it is.
It still pains when I think of the takeover and destruction of the German Pirate Party. Please don't let the same happen to the Linux kernel. Keep out the trolls.
Every machine can be overridden, tricked, hijacked and manipulated with an efficiency that's unheard of in the realm of human-operated traditional weaponry.
It isn't really all that difficult to buy, bribe, threaten or convince a human.
The difference is scale. Humans are polymorphic, so they are not exact copies of each other and the identical exploit will work on one, but not others. So you need to customize your exploit for each of them, which makes mass hacks difficult. That is the reason social engineering works, but is rarely used large-scale.
It's not luck that 75% of the respondents were German.
The petition was widely shared on german speaking social media. Other countries may have been less aggressive in that regard.
the Germans see democracy as inefficient and illogical.
"the Germans" includes me and I disagree with that statement. So please be more clear who you mean. The government? The administration? The people? The secret Nazi underground which still runs everything from their Inner Earth hiding spot?
Look, it took only a decade of pressure and a public petition with a majority reminiscent of old soviet style elections to strong-arm our politicians into doing one simple thing right.
There may still be hope for this planet. At this speed, somewhere around 2350 they will decide that climate change is actually a bad thing and they ought to do something about it.
Ah, the "you only have a right to speak up if you are in this group which I now arbitrarily defined to exclude you".
Newsflash: Slavery is by far not an exclusive black/white thing. The only reason you think so is because your mind is limited to American history and your mental map has "here be dragons" written on everything outside the USA.
Millions of white people were slaves as well, predominently in the Barbary Coast slave trades. This at least you should know even from your limited perspective, because it was the US navy that put an end to that, the first international intervention of a still fresh nation.
Go out there and get offended more often! Expand your comfort zone. Understand that people are, look, act, think different and what you think means "hey there" can mean "I fucked your mother" in another cultures unofficial sign language. Also, what you think is a really rude gesture actually means "have a nice day, hope to see you again soon".
Slavery as a reality of life is a terrible thing that we abolished and good riddance. And the places in the world that still have it should get our support in getting rid of it, too.
Master/slave as a metaphor for a technical relation is no more offensive than calling the white and black water pipes in your house by those names, which are not racist and have nothing to do with skin colour.
If someone is reminded that their great-great-grandfathers came to America as slaves, and because of that has their feelings hurt, they should work on being no so easily hurt. Life can be hell if you get hurt so easily. Also, without the slave trade, you would be living somewhere in Africa today, are you sure you'd prefer that?
But some people apparently have no other hobbies and looking for reasons to be hurt by something and constructing causes of emotional harm seems to fit them.
Slashdot Mirror
The likely objective of these measures is increasing media coverage of the fandom conflict, thereby adding to and further propagating a narrative of widespread discord and dysfunction in American society.
So it was the trolls who argued that it was a good movie?
Because I've yet to meet a person who thinks it is, so that clearly is not the majority opinion of the non-trolls (or at least the non-paid trolls).
Anecdotes can change the behaviour of people, and my comment was about how these stories can influence an inventor to act the way this guy did.
So +100 bubble points for completely missing the point.
A better statistic, Germany (which is the best performer in Europe, everyone else is considerably worse):
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Pre...
This is only the past 10 years, because I'm lazy and this was fast to find. Note that the line goes up and down. If you pick a few years carefully, you can easily find both an increase and a decrease by several % somewhere within this period.
If you would look at the same line for Spain or Greece or Italy, I'm sure there would be a much more bleak picture.
Such a narrow perspective in so many answers. Turn on your brain, people !
Living in the 1st and living in the 2nd or 3rd world makes for a dramatic difference these days. Real wages in the west have stagnated or gone down for two decades now. But for the poor of the world - China alone is lifting 10 million people out of poverty every year. People in Africa who 20 years ago didn't know where their next bowl of food will come from now have smartphones.
If you are among the very poor of the world, the last decades were a good time, in general.
Our personal perspective in the USA and in Europe is quite different. We are witnessing the ongoing largest theft in human history, called the financial crisis, and we watch the rich getting richer and us getting poorer.
But on a global scale, we are just 1.5 billion, give or take a few. Everyone else becoming less poor statistically overcompensates for our misery.
You will always have a TV. It's a propaganda and population control instrument of such fundamental value that if it didn't exist already, someone would invent it.
There are plenty of stories of inventors without an army of lawyers losing their patented invention to some corporation which does have access to a medium-sized village of lawyers.
If you are a bit of a paranoid type, those stories give you plenty of a reason to not trust the patent system.
Though unless you are also a sociopath, you would leave a secure copy with someone you trust. If you are very distrustful, you can encrypt it and leave the key with yet another person, both not knowing who the other party is.
Though it is interesting that various factions can't seem to let go of the idea that one particular spot there was the "holy home of their religion"
Because when those religions came into existence, all religions were tribal religions. The christian and islamic idea that everyone can become a member is an innovation in the sphere of religion.
I agree that taking it all too seriously - self-important hubris - is probably the largest part of the problem. Overcompensated inferiority complexes?
I'm quite sure there is a strong correlation between strength of religious feelings and dick size, yes.
I disagree. The Middle East isn't complicated at all.
It's an area where several different tribes, cultures and religions are all mixed up. As long as everyone is tolerant of everyone else, they all profit from the exchange of ideas. Whenever some intolerant version of someones religion becomes dominant, things go to hell.
The primary problem being that the dominant religion for the last thousand years explicitly hates another major religion, and is explicitly intolerant of all the others, so it takes a bit more of the don't-take-it-too-serious approach to live a workable version of it. That's why things go to hell more often than elsewhere in the world, and more badly.
Uh, you did read the part of my posting that you didn't quote, where I'm literally saying the exact same thing?
It's a bit more complicated than that.
During the Cold War, the West meddled in various countries affairs to prevent that they become too friendly to Russia. This was a huge part of why Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and a bit later other countries as well slid into Islamism.
Once Islam had taken over, some smart people understood just to what degree they had fucked up and that Islamic countries can never be allowed to become rich, properous or influential. That is why Saudi Arabia... oh... wait... I'm afraid the smart people were busy doing other things and nobody realized just how serious the fuck-up was, until the wake-up call of 9/11. Then, finally, the sources and nests of islamic terrorism were wiped ou... wait, what? They attacked Iraq? The Saudis are still good friends? Ah, my mistake. It took until the Syrian war before... not? The Jemen war? Seriously? Still not?
That was not social engineering, it was propaganda. Similar, but not the same thing.
In such case I will make careful decisions to not interfere with the so far successful course the company has taken.
The law is gameable. In fact, it is designed to be gameable. The vast majority of the law is written by lawyers, whose profession is to game the system. An ideal law would work without lawyers in all but the most obscure and difficult cases.
The company is successful this far, and not significantly interfering with its operation is the best kind of reasonable care that I can exercise. Since the position is an elected position and my strategy is communicated well in advance of the election, by voting for me shareholders express their explicit desire for me to act in the way that I outlined.
This.
I went to Apple when the first Intel devices came out, because I thought "if that OS X everyone tells me good things about doesn't work for me, I'll just install Linux".
I never did. And I never looked back. And one of the reasons is that I saved countless hours of research and brainfucking. How much time I spent before figuring out just which notebook to buy, or just which components to upgrade in my PC? I've looked at the Android market now and then, just as I looked at the pre-smartphone smartphone market (Nokia Communicator, etc.) and the post-Palm Pilot PDA market. It's impossible to make a decision! There's a million devices with a billion tiny differences half of which they don't ever tell you unless you read them on obscure tech sites.
Apple made it easy. There's two desktop systems each in 3 configurations (small, medium, large, easy to get) and there's two lines of notebooks. Here you are. There's one line of smartphones, with 2 or 3 different memory sizes.
I loved my MacBook Pro. I still love my MacBook Air despite it's getting aged. My Mac Mini was a wonderful media station and later got used as a simple desktop computer (for web and email), and I love both my iMacs, the old one which is still doing great despite being ancient now and the new one from last year which is just amazing.
And while I sometimes think a "gamer version" with a VR-ready high performance graphics card setup would be great, I don't really miss it that much, and I wouldn't want Apple to deliver 20 different lines with 50 different options.
And the iPhone? I don't want an XS-RPT-6SX. I want an iPhone. Mine is the SE because I prefer the smaller form factor. A choice of size and a choice of memory, that is a good strategy. I don't need an additional option of gold and diamonds (people who want that buy Vertu anyway). Or of colourful plastic (people who want that buy Huwai anyway).
Apple under Steve Jobs put itself in its own market, and that made it successful. It intentionally did not try to compete with everyone else. Todays shareholders need to understand that despite its size, Apple can not take on everyone else in every segment of every market. It needs to be its own market, that is what it is good at.
I'm a shareholder.
I hereby volunteer to become one of the additional two directors.
I promise to miss all meetings and never vote on anything I'm not legally obliged to vote on (in which case I'll abstain), so that my addition to the board makes no difference whatsoever.
I'll even do it for free (necessary expenses paid, please, but I want nothing for my own pocket).
If the SEC gives you the finger, give it two fingers back. I'm sure it will be at most minutes until someone else adds "me too" to this comment, and there you have your two additional directors, with nothing actually changing.
The CoC is a poison pill.
Let me tell you the story of the Pirate Party in Germany. I was a member, so this is inside perspective:
Once upon a time, a german Pirate Party was founded, and got rapid interest. It growed quickly and the timing was right. New surveilance laws brought public interest to the party topics, and it had some success at elections as well as a media interest far larger than its single-digit election percents would justify.
But it was growing in both success and popularity. Some hopeful observers started to give it chances to enter the german parliament (which has a 5% treshold). It did successfully enter multiple local and state parliaments.
Then the trolls took over. Suddenly all these topics of equal rights and protection of minorities and proper language and genderism and what else you have was on the agenda, and in a tense internal vote even entered the party platform. The original concept of the Pirate Party - digital civil rights - became a side note. A lot of weirdos made career inside the party, and the tools they used to edge out the original pirates was the same as the CoC. Wordings, language, conduct. It was the end of the Pirate Party. Nobody is talking about them anymore, and the last national election got them 0.4 % of the votes, which is their worst result ever and an 82% loss compared to the previous election.
These things have become tools for people with completely different agendas. None of the Pirate Party trolls had any history of making anyones life better. There are certainly causes worth fighting for and there are certainly cases where improper language, prejudices and such are harming people and there are people who stand up for them and help those affected. But the vast majority of social justice warriors have no such history. They have nothing under their belt where their actions actually made the life of an actual person better. Theirs war is in the abstract. "women are harmed by ..." - which woman exactly, when exactly and how exactly?
---
We nerds are susceptible to this kind of arguing because we can think abstractly and don't think it unusual. That is why social justice warriors thrive in the academic environment. In a farming village, nobody would take them seriously, because people are interested in actual milk from actual cows, not milking theory.
Look for actual harm to actual people, or ask for references of where these warriors managed actual benefits to actual people with their demands and actions. If they cannot provide evidence of either, disregard their bullshit and call it for what it is.
It still pains when I think of the takeover and destruction of the German Pirate Party. Please don't let the same happen to the Linux kernel. Keep out the trolls.
Every machine can be overridden, tricked, hijacked and manipulated with an efficiency that's unheard of in the realm of human-operated traditional weaponry.
It isn't really all that difficult to buy, bribe, threaten or convince a human.
The difference is scale. Humans are polymorphic, so they are not exact copies of each other and the identical exploit will work on one, but not others. So you need to customize your exploit for each of them, which makes mass hacks difficult. That is the reason social engineering works, but is rarely used large-scale.
Everyone knows the secret Nazi underground is on the Moon.
That, obviously, is the secret Nazi overground. We believe in redundancy.
It's not luck that 75% of the respondents were German.
The petition was widely shared on german speaking social media. Other countries may have been less aggressive in that regard.
the Germans see democracy as inefficient and illogical.
"the Germans" includes me and I disagree with that statement. So please be more clear who you mean. The government? The administration? The people? The secret Nazi underground which still runs everything from their Inner Earth hiding spot?
Look, it took only a decade of pressure and a public petition with a majority reminiscent of old soviet style elections to strong-arm our politicians into doing one simple thing right.
There may still be hope for this planet. At this speed, somewhere around 2350 they will decide that climate change is actually a bad thing and they ought to do something about it.
I watched 2 minutes of that and it seems very clear to me that it's a staged act. And look, it worked, it got those two clowns free publicity!
And seriously, why not just use less loaded terms like Client and Server?
We use Client/Server - and it means something else.
Or Active, Backup, and Passive?
We use those as well, and they mean something else.
This is a brilliant answer, cutting down to the actual problem.
Ah, the "you only have a right to speak up if you are in this group which I now arbitrarily defined to exclude you".
Newsflash: Slavery is by far not an exclusive black/white thing. The only reason you think so is because your mind is limited to American history and your mental map has "here be dragons" written on everything outside the USA.
Millions of white people were slaves as well, predominently in the Barbary Coast slave trades. This at least you should know even from your limited perspective, because it was the US navy that put an end to that, the first international intervention of a still fresh nation.
Why is this even a topic of discussion ?
Go out there and get offended more often! Expand your comfort zone. Understand that people are, look, act, think different and what you think means "hey there" can mean "I fucked your mother" in another cultures unofficial sign language. Also, what you think is a really rude gesture actually means "have a nice day, hope to see you again soon".
Slavery as a reality of life is a terrible thing that we abolished and good riddance. And the places in the world that still have it should get our support in getting rid of it, too.
Master/slave as a metaphor for a technical relation is no more offensive than calling the white and black water pipes in your house by those names, which are not racist and have nothing to do with skin colour.
If someone is reminded that their great-great-grandfathers came to America as slaves, and because of that has their feelings hurt, they should work on being no so easily hurt. Life can be hell if you get hurt so easily. Also, without the slave trade, you would be living somewhere in Africa today, are you sure you'd prefer that?
But some people apparently have no other hobbies and looking for reasons to be hurt by something and constructing causes of emotional harm seems to fit them.