like you find in sites like Slashdot or Stackexchange. [...] the troll isn't going to get much satisfaction, as almost nobody sees their handiwork before someone mods it away.
As someone who was trolled aggressively on/. - you are mistaken. The/. system hides the trolling from the public, but the victim still gets the full dose. It makes it very hard to participate in the site.
When I go on a news site, I don't look for and I don't care for and I don't want random strangers commentary. I'm looking for journalistic articles, which at least in some newspapers is still a level above bloggers.
Frankly speaking, allowing the unwashed masses to add their zero-knowledge opinions to a carefully researched and fact-checked article makes it cheaper.
That said, many news sites are little more than organized multi-writer blogs these days, but I'm not talking about them. When you do real journalism, you should be ashamed to have your work displayed on the same page as Joe Doe from Montana writing "this is all nonsense, my cows love Mozart!".
When you stop using key figures as a guidance to reaching your goal and use them as goals in themselves, you've got a problem.
Frankly speaking, I don't give a fuck if a company is 5% white, 50% white or 99% white. While these numbers may be indicators of an underlying problem, they are just that - indicators. Just like running a company by consulting-think usually results in a bancrupt company, you have to go deeper than some numbers, and you should never make those numbers your actual goals. Many companies have been run into the ground by idiots who thought 4% profit margin is not enough and this consultant or that business insider says they need 5% and if it ruins the company to get that extra 1% then so be it...
What should matter is if there's any problem for anyone getting hired or promoted in Apple (or any other company) because of gender, skin colour or whatever else you want. Statistical numbers can give you a hint on where you might want to check, but in themselves, they are meaningless. They're just statistics.
and by never adopting a convenient method of hailing a cab for the increasing pool of people who use smartphones.
Where do you live? Here in Germany, we have MyTaxi and a couple others where you basically press a button on your smartphone, it hails a cab for you (it knows your position, if you've allowed it, so really you just press a button) and it even shows you where the taxi is, how far it's away and when it will arrive.
The great advantage of Uber is that because everyone has to sign up as a member of the system before getting rides, the company knows who the customers are,
...and thanks to their intense, careful background checking, it is guaranteed that nobody will ever sign up with a fake name.
...or rather, the lack of it. Right now, everything I hear about Uber and such is that it's so much cheaper.
Like in security, for example, you don't see where a lot of the money goes - until you have an emergency. Then suddenly, you know what it's for. Of course, the taxi business isn't perfect, and you can easily have a crappy cab driver one day and a great Uber driver the next.
But don't forget that once something is profitable and easy, the scumbags will come in, looking for a quick buck. Once that happens, I guess we'll read different Uber stories.
It's not an "ad hominem" to point out that your views are a typical reflection of the canonical view of history as taught in post-WWII Germany: "a complex diplomatic situation", "it was a powder keg", "irrational hatred". I think that's mainly a consequence of trying to avoid dealing too much with the history of Prussia.
In post-WW2 Germany, especially history class pretty much spends one year telling you that Germany was the bad guy and how horrible your grandparents were, to the point of inciting counter-actions by pupils because really after some months you can't hear it anymore.
You need to do a lot of reading beyond the German Gymnasium if you want to understand what's going on.
Welcome to my library, take a look around. You might notice most of the books are in english. The history section is over there...
I think you've been indoctrinated a little. I've talked with people from many, many countries about politics and history, and few of them have such a bad view of Germany as, yes, the Germans do.
No, that's not it, because Macs don't "just work", Apple marketing notwithstanding.
Trollish nonsense nonwithstanding, I've worked with DOS, Windows, Linux, Solaris, HP/UX, OpenBSD and some ancient VMS whose exact name I've forgotten. None of them worked as well and went out of my way as nicely as OS X does.
YMMV, but my experience is my experience, like it or not.
Sad as it is, you're not far from the truth. Sharks hate and love each other in equal parts, and when they find out someone under them fooled them, they do understand he's too dangerous to be there. But firing him can be dangerous, too - if he can fool you, who knows what else he's capable of? Making him an ally (temporarily, of course, there's no such thing as friendship among predators) is the wisest course of action.
That, in a nutshell, is why the biggest assholes get promoted instead of fired - because the ones making those decisions are the exact same kind of human trash.
Nice rant, but like all hyperboles, it left reality far behind in the second sentence.
I've used DOS originally, then some Windows and hated it pretty much from the start, so I switched to Linux as soon as I heard about it, I think it was 1997 or so. Do you know why I've been a Mac users for about 10 years now? Because it simply works. I don't have to spend half of my time on just maintaining the system and searching for obscure failure cases. I love my iMac and my iPhone because they allow me to focus almost all of my time on actually doing the work that I want to do.
To most people in this world, computers are a tool. Just like cars. Most people who own a car use it to get from A to B. Some people own cars so they can tinker with them on the weekend and replace parts just because they can - but they are a tiny minority.
I love that I could get a system running from scratch, compile my own kernel and base tools and so on. I've done it and it was a great experience. At the same time, I'm very happy that I don't actually have to do it. I'm tired of tinkering with the machine, I have actual work I want to get done. I have places A and B that I want to get to.
that Apple has banned some of the most profitable types of app, [...] For example alternative web browsers
Uh... because web browsers are certainly the most profitable software outside the app store. It's a real shame that all those multi-billion dollar browser makers cannot port their cash cows to iOS. Why does Apple not realize that thousands of jobs depend on the sales of web browsers?
The App Store only rewards Zynga for this behaviour.
The App Store doesn't give a fuck. Users reward Zynga by flocking to their copycat games while at the same time complaining that all games have become the same and there's no innovation anymore.
There are two kinds of people who run servers without firewalls: Nitwits and professionals.
Nitwits do it because they think they don't need a firewall and it gives them a bit more performance or whatever.
Professionals do it when they know the conditions are right to justify it and they've made a risk assessment that confirms they are right. For example you run a high-traffic server that does exactly one thing on one port and the server software is robust - a firewall wouldn't do you any good, it's just additional security in case you open a port you didn't want to or such.
As the economics get tighter, it becomes much harder to support the lavish treatment that developers have given apps in the past, such as full-time staffs, offices, pixel-perfect custom designs of every screen, frequent free updates, and completely different iPhone and iPad interfaces.
This is why these app developers fail where Apple succeeds. They create apps for an environment they don't get. Apple is very much about this attention to detail in everything they do, and it's a huge part of why they are successful.
The "economics get tighter" argument is a strawman. Apple users are not the kind of people who drive to a different supermarket because the tomatoes are 5 cents cheaper there.
You think that people are looking for a 100% technical perfect solution that satisfies every nerd desire ever.
But non-geeks don't think like that, and politicians especially not. They live in an analog world. Where adding "murder = crime" to the lawbook does not remove all murders the same way that adding "deny from 192.168.0.2" to a firewall ruleset kills all packets from that source. They understand that their solutions are approximations and are full of holes.
To someone who understands the world as non-digital, filtering by source IP is perfectly fine even if he knows that VPNs exist. Because he also knows that 99% of the users don't use VPNs.
And especially for Google: They already do a lot of ad-related stuff based on your geolocation, so there's no technical reason why they can't show you the filtered or the unfiltered list based on that.
Oh, I'm sure believing that WWI and WWII happened because of irrational hatred is a comforting thought to Germans, but it's not true.
You're such a git. If you really think that Germany alone caused WW1, you've been spoon-fed too much propaganda. Yes, Germany started WW1, totally true. But at that time, half of Europe was waiting for an opportunity to kick this or that neighbours ass, which is largely why everyone jumped at the chance to have a war. At any other time in Europe's history, the assassination of some successor of some second-rate country would've barely made front-page news, let alone cause any diplomatic trouble.
And you illustrate that many Germans still hold the same kinds of beliefs.
"git" is not a strong enough word for you, but I can't think of a better one right now. Maybe you could try history and actual arguments instead of ad hominem attacks. And if you insist on attacking people you don't even know, you could try to at least make it somewhat funny or interesting instead of just boring and stupid.
Germans were motivated by the strong conviction that their culture, economy, and system of government was superior, in particular to the Anglo Saxon model, and that they had a moral duty to spread it across Europe.
France and England barely avoided a war between themselves in 1904 and forged an alliance that Russia joined in 1907. You could have heard about it in history class if you hadn't been asleep, it was called the Entente and if you open your mouth to talk about WW1 and you forget to mention the Entente, you prove to everyone with some education that you're an idiot.
Together with everyones colonialism and increasing tensions due to colonial wars and growing military everywhere you got a complex diplomatic situation with several secret pacts (Italia and France, 1902, for example) that creates a situation that even serious historians call a powder keg and that they largely agree would have blown up sooner or later.
You attempt to simplify complex history to one source and one reason and one actor is typical of american movies where you always need a hero and a villain to tell the story, but it very, very rarely is appropriate to real life.
separates private and business life more strongly?
Yes. Most people don't care very much what their friends do as a job, and rarely know more about it than their profession. In reverse, they don't care about private life of people they work with.
Just two examples: When I talk to Russians, they are astonished that people would bring their wife or husbands to business events at all, while here in Germany it is normal that some business events explicitly tell that you can bring your significant other, if you want. Russians say "wtf?" if I tell them about things like "bring your kid to work" days.
About Putin: There was a portrait about him in a german magazine recently, listing his divorce, his fondness of hunting and ice hockey and a couple other things. For me there's nothing special about such a portrait of a politician. Russian reaction: "wtf it's his private life, why do they care?"
Just yesterday the Hague ruled against Russia to the tune of $50bn because Putin and his cronies did exactly this to Khodorkovsky with no regard to the shareholders that invested honestly ending up also as victims of their personal vendetta:
You don't even begin to understand what the difference between private life and business is.
Due to the questionable new owners of ABP, I've since changed to Edge.
Basically, the moment people tell you that there's such a thing as "acceptable advertisement" and that anyone except you, yourself can decide which it is, you know they've sold out. It's shorthand for "we will allow advertisement that pays us to let it through".
It's true that it is unique. Russians themselves say that St. Petersburg is half russian and half european. But I've also got russian friends I talk to, who are from Moscow, from small villages near the Ural mountains and other places within Russia.
It sounds like you've been won over by the facade of corrupt spending and wealth in touristy areas
You assume I was a tourist. I wasn't.
Russia is a huge country - the biggest on earth, in fact - and of course there are large differences between the various areas. I was in St. Petersburg as I said. It's probably one of the richer areas.
People don't love Putin because he's improved the country, they love him because like all dictators he's a master of propaganda and populism, or did you think all those photoshoots and the massive military parades each year and the nationalist rhetoric over Crimea were all just for his own personal scrapbook?
Russians don't care as much as we do. They separate private and business life a lot more strongly, from what I gather. Of course there's a lot of propaganda involved as well.
But you totally ignored that main argument I made. That no matter what you see Russia as today, compared to the very recent past it has improved dramatically, and those improvements started with Putin taking office. Whether its true or not, a lot of people see a connection.
You see, the scenario you outline isn't all that different from what happened at the beginning of the 20th century.
Except for two world wars, a totally changed global economical and political environment and, oh yes, the EU itself.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Europe was a mess of countries all out for blood, with century-old hatreds and politicians just waiting for an opportunity to start a war. Which is kind of exactly what happened just a few years into the 20th century.
Yeah... it would be absolutely the same... keep dreaming.
However, both on paper and from real-world experience, I dare to say that the judicative is the least troubled arm.
In most of Europe, the legislative and executive are pretty much identical and that bothers me to no end. Parliament passes laws and parliament elects the executive, and all the executives (ministers, etc.) are also members of parliament. These two arms are not seperated at all. The USA has the better system there, even though it is still imperfect in that the same parties exist in both.
If I were to re-write the political rules, I'd seperate the arms completely and make a law that political parties can be active in either the executive or the legistlative election processes, but not in both and any attempt to do so leads to immediate dissolution of the party in question with all assets seized and distributed to the poor.
Slashdot Mirror
like you find in sites like Slashdot or Stackexchange. [...] the troll isn't going to get much satisfaction, as almost nobody sees their handiwork before someone mods it away.
As someone who was trolled aggressively on /. - you are mistaken. The /. system hides the trolling from the public, but the victim still gets the full dose. It makes it very hard to participate in the site.
He is 100% correct.
When I go on a news site, I don't look for and I don't care for and I don't want random strangers commentary. I'm looking for journalistic articles, which at least in some newspapers is still a level above bloggers.
Frankly speaking, allowing the unwashed masses to add their zero-knowledge opinions to a carefully researched and fact-checked article makes it cheaper.
That said, many news sites are little more than organized multi-writer blogs these days, but I'm not talking about them. When you do real journalism, you should be ashamed to have your work displayed on the same page as Joe Doe from Montana writing "this is all nonsense, my cows love Mozart!".
When you stop using key figures as a guidance to reaching your goal and use them as goals in themselves, you've got a problem.
Frankly speaking, I don't give a fuck if a company is 5% white, 50% white or 99% white. While these numbers may be indicators of an underlying problem, they are just that - indicators. Just like running a company by consulting-think usually results in a bancrupt company, you have to go deeper than some numbers, and you should never make those numbers your actual goals. Many companies have been run into the ground by idiots who thought 4% profit margin is not enough and this consultant or that business insider says they need 5% and if it ruins the company to get that extra 1% then so be it...
What should matter is if there's any problem for anyone getting hired or promoted in Apple (or any other company) because of gender, skin colour or whatever else you want. Statistical numbers can give you a hint on where you might want to check, but in themselves, they are meaningless. They're just statistics.
You are right. I forgot that Uber doesn't support other payment methods and that there's no such thing as stolen credit cards.
and by never adopting a convenient method of hailing a cab for the increasing pool of people who use smartphones.
Where do you live? Here in Germany, we have MyTaxi and a couple others where you basically press a button on your smartphone, it hails a cab for you (it knows your position, if you've allowed it, so really you just press a button) and it even shows you where the taxi is, how far it's away and when it will arrive.
The great advantage of Uber is that because everyone has to sign up as a member of the system before getting rides, the company knows who the customers are,
...and thanks to their intense, careful background checking, it is guaranteed that nobody will ever sign up with a fake name.
...or rather, the lack of it. Right now, everything I hear about Uber and such is that it's so much cheaper.
Like in security, for example, you don't see where a lot of the money goes - until you have an emergency. Then suddenly, you know what it's for. Of course, the taxi business isn't perfect, and you can easily have a crappy cab driver one day and a great Uber driver the next.
But don't forget that once something is profitable and easy, the scumbags will come in, looking for a quick buck. Once that happens, I guess we'll read different Uber stories.
It's not an "ad hominem" to point out that your views are a typical reflection of the canonical view of history as taught in post-WWII Germany: "a complex diplomatic situation", "it was a powder keg", "irrational hatred". I think that's mainly a consequence of trying to avoid dealing too much with the history of Prussia.
In post-WW2 Germany, especially history class pretty much spends one year telling you that Germany was the bad guy and how horrible your grandparents were, to the point of inciting counter-actions by pupils because really after some months you can't hear it anymore.
You need to do a lot of reading beyond the German Gymnasium if you want to understand what's going on.
Welcome to my library, take a look around. You might notice most of the books are in english. The history section is over there...
I think you've been indoctrinated a little. I've talked with people from many, many countries about politics and history, and few of them have such a bad view of Germany as, yes, the Germans do.
No, that's not it, because Macs don't "just work", Apple marketing notwithstanding.
Trollish nonsense nonwithstanding, I've worked with DOS, Windows, Linux, Solaris, HP/UX, OpenBSD and some ancient VMS whose exact name I've forgotten. None of them worked as well and went out of my way as nicely as OS X does.
YMMV, but my experience is my experience, like it or not.
"bloggers with at least 3,000 daily readers must register with Roskomnadzor, the regulator that also oversees Russia's main media outlets."
Ironically, it also means that bloggers are now treated the same as journalists - isn't that what they've wanted for years? ;-)
Nice to see that paid shills are now downvoting factual statements about the market of their paycheck issuers competitors.
in fact, given the increased US involvement and the general unrest in the Middle East it probably pushed back their goals somewhat
Really? You've heard about this caliphate they are creating in what used to be Iraq before the US tore it to pieces?
If anything, I'd say 9/11 was a win/win for those involved.
Sad as it is, you're not far from the truth. Sharks hate and love each other in equal parts, and when they find out someone under them fooled them, they do understand he's too dangerous to be there. But firing him can be dangerous, too - if he can fool you, who knows what else he's capable of? Making him an ally (temporarily, of course, there's no such thing as friendship among predators) is the wisest course of action.
That, in a nutshell, is why the biggest assholes get promoted instead of fired - because the ones making those decisions are the exact same kind of human trash.
Nice rant, but like all hyperboles, it left reality far behind in the second sentence.
I've used DOS originally, then some Windows and hated it pretty much from the start, so I switched to Linux as soon as I heard about it, I think it was 1997 or so. Do you know why I've been a Mac users for about 10 years now? Because it simply works. I don't have to spend half of my time on just maintaining the system and searching for obscure failure cases. I love my iMac and my iPhone because they allow me to focus almost all of my time on actually doing the work that I want to do.
To most people in this world, computers are a tool. Just like cars. Most people who own a car use it to get from A to B. Some people own cars so they can tinker with them on the weekend and replace parts just because they can - but they are a tiny minority.
I love that I could get a system running from scratch, compile my own kernel and base tools and so on. I've done it and it was a great experience. At the same time, I'm very happy that I don't actually have to do it. I'm tired of tinkering with the machine, I have actual work I want to get done. I have places A and B that I want to get to.
that Apple has banned some of the most profitable types of app, [...] For example alternative web browsers
Uh... because web browsers are certainly the most profitable software outside the app store. It's a real shame that all those multi-billion dollar browser makers cannot port their cash cows to iOS. Why does Apple not realize that thousands of jobs depend on the sales of web browsers?
The App Store only rewards Zynga for this behaviour.
The App Store doesn't give a fuck. Users reward Zynga by flocking to their copycat games while at the same time complaining that all games have become the same and there's no innovation anymore.
There are two kinds of people who run servers without firewalls: Nitwits and professionals.
Nitwits do it because they think they don't need a firewall and it gives them a bit more performance or whatever.
Professionals do it when they know the conditions are right to justify it and they've made a risk assessment that confirms they are right. For example you run a high-traffic server that does exactly one thing on one port and the server software is robust - a firewall wouldn't do you any good, it's just additional security in case you open a port you didn't want to or such.
As the economics get tighter, it becomes much harder to support the lavish treatment that developers have given apps in the past, such as full-time staffs, offices, pixel-perfect custom designs of every screen, frequent free updates, and completely different iPhone and iPad interfaces.
This is why these app developers fail where Apple succeeds. They create apps for an environment they don't get. Apple is very much about this attention to detail in everything they do, and it's a huge part of why they are successful.
The "economics get tighter" argument is a strawman. Apple users are not the kind of people who drive to a different supermarket because the tomatoes are 5 cents cheaper there.
You think that people are looking for a 100% technical perfect solution that satisfies every nerd desire ever.
But non-geeks don't think like that, and politicians especially not. They live in an analog world. Where adding "murder = crime" to the lawbook does not remove all murders the same way that adding "deny from 192.168.0.2" to a firewall ruleset kills all packets from that source. They understand that their solutions are approximations and are full of holes.
To someone who understands the world as non-digital, filtering by source IP is perfectly fine even if he knows that VPNs exist. Because he also knows that 99% of the users don't use VPNs.
And especially for Google: They already do a lot of ad-related stuff based on your geolocation, so there's no technical reason why they can't show you the filtered or the unfiltered list based on that.
Oh, I'm sure believing that WWI and WWII happened because of irrational hatred is a comforting thought to Germans, but it's not true.
You're such a git. If you really think that Germany alone caused WW1, you've been spoon-fed too much propaganda. Yes, Germany started WW1, totally true. But at that time, half of Europe was waiting for an opportunity to kick this or that neighbours ass, which is largely why everyone jumped at the chance to have a war. At any other time in Europe's history, the assassination of some successor of some second-rate country would've barely made front-page news, let alone cause any diplomatic trouble.
And you illustrate that many Germans still hold the same kinds of beliefs.
"git" is not a strong enough word for you, but I can't think of a better one right now. Maybe you could try history and actual arguments instead of ad hominem attacks. And if you insist on attacking people you don't even know, you could try to at least make it somewhat funny or interesting instead of just boring and stupid.
Germans were motivated by the strong conviction that their culture, economy, and system of government was superior, in particular to the Anglo Saxon model, and that they had a moral duty to spread it across Europe.
France and England barely avoided a war between themselves in 1904 and forged an alliance that Russia joined in 1907. You could have heard about it in history class if you hadn't been asleep, it was called the Entente and if you open your mouth to talk about WW1 and you forget to mention the Entente, you prove to everyone with some education that you're an idiot.
Together with everyones colonialism and increasing tensions due to colonial wars and growing military everywhere you got a complex diplomatic situation with several secret pacts (Italia and France, 1902, for example) that creates a situation that even serious historians call a powder keg and that they largely agree would have blown up sooner or later.
You attempt to simplify complex history to one source and one reason and one actor is typical of american movies where you always need a hero and a villain to tell the story, but it very, very rarely is appropriate to real life.
separates private and business life more strongly?
Yes. Most people don't care very much what their friends do as a job, and rarely know more about it than their profession. In reverse, they don't care about private life of people they work with.
Just two examples: When I talk to Russians, they are astonished that people would bring their wife or husbands to business events at all, while here in Germany it is normal that some business events explicitly tell that you can bring your significant other, if you want. Russians say "wtf?" if I tell them about things like "bring your kid to work" days.
About Putin: There was a portrait about him in a german magazine recently, listing his divorce, his fondness of hunting and ice hockey and a couple other things. For me there's nothing special about such a portrait of a politician. Russian reaction: "wtf it's his private life, why do they care?"
Just yesterday the Hague ruled against Russia to the tune of $50bn because Putin and his cronies did exactly this to Khodorkovsky with no regard to the shareholders that invested honestly ending up also as victims of their personal vendetta:
You don't even begin to understand what the difference between private life and business is.
Due to the questionable new owners of ABP, I've since changed to Edge.
Basically, the moment people tell you that there's such a thing as "acceptable advertisement" and that anyone except you, yourself can decide which it is, you know they've sold out. It's shorthand for "we will allow advertisement that pays us to let it through".
It's true that it is unique. Russians themselves say that St. Petersburg is half russian and half european. But I've also got russian friends I talk to, who are from Moscow, from small villages near the Ural mountains and other places within Russia.
It sounds like you've been won over by the facade of corrupt spending and wealth in touristy areas
You assume I was a tourist. I wasn't.
Russia is a huge country - the biggest on earth, in fact - and of course there are large differences between the various areas. I was in St. Petersburg as I said. It's probably one of the richer areas.
People don't love Putin because he's improved the country, they love him because like all dictators he's a master of propaganda and populism, or did you think all those photoshoots and the massive military parades each year and the nationalist rhetoric over Crimea were all just for his own personal scrapbook?
Russians don't care as much as we do. They separate private and business life a lot more strongly, from what I gather. Of course there's a lot of propaganda involved as well.
But you totally ignored that main argument I made. That no matter what you see Russia as today, compared to the very recent past it has improved dramatically, and those improvements started with Putin taking office. Whether its true or not, a lot of people see a connection.
You see, the scenario you outline isn't all that different from what happened at the beginning of the 20th century.
Except for two world wars, a totally changed global economical and political environment and, oh yes, the EU itself.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Europe was a mess of countries all out for blood, with century-old hatreds and politicians just waiting for an opportunity to start a war. Which is kind of exactly what happened just a few years into the 20th century.
Yeah... it would be absolutely the same... keep dreaming.
I agree with your main point, btw.
However, both on paper and from real-world experience, I dare to say that the judicative is the least troubled arm.
In most of Europe, the legislative and executive are pretty much identical and that bothers me to no end. Parliament passes laws and parliament elects the executive, and all the executives (ministers, etc.) are also members of parliament. These two arms are not seperated at all. The USA has the better system there, even though it is still imperfect in that the same parties exist in both.
If I were to re-write the political rules, I'd seperate the arms completely and make a law that political parties can be active in either the executive or the legistlative election processes, but not in both and any attempt to do so leads to immediate dissolution of the party in question with all assets seized and distributed to the poor.