The real liabilities are our mistreatment of employees, and how the reaction to lack of respect and trust takes form from them. The majority of the time that an employee does something bad to his or her workplace, it's an act of revenge or bitterness because they wronged and feel disrespected. Contrary to popular belief people do not cause mayhem and mischeif to others for no reason.
Agreed. The plethora of posts about how this is SOP and something to be expected amazes me. I have left my job twice this far, in good terms, and both times I was expected to stay in there until the last day, help with the transition, tidying up all loose ends and demonstrating to clients that the handover was smooth and safe. In both cases, aside from throwing a mini party and having personal talks with most co-workers to thank each other for long-time cooperation, I also sent emails to clients ensuring them that the resignation is in good terms and explaining them all the steps taken to ensure that their projects will not be affected, sometime visiting them to introduce the co-worker that would replace me on my former duties.
Yes, I could have done a lot of horrible things from ruining relationships, to deleting files, or even stealing knowledge and sensitive information. But I could have done these things before resigning anyway. And I knew a lot of stuff without access to the computers in the first place. So, it's more a matter of being a respectable and civil person, who feels that their former employer honoured them and is not likely to become a criminal beast the day after resignation. If my employer believed that the only thing stopping me from screwing up their business was that I didn't have a job elsewhere, I very much doubt they'd be employing me in the first place. Then again, please note that I live in Europe, and I understand that corporate culture here is on the average somewhat different thatn in the US.
I believe the point would not be to get people switching now from iPods to iPhones.
Apple has a perfect market for it in mobile phone devices. They are becoming extensions of people's hands, personal devices, and ultimately statements of style and/or status. (like cars, wristwatches, etc) Another particularity of the market is that advanced features (mp3, good cameras, mobile internet, etc) usually come out first on the hip 25-35yo devices. Nokia and S-E haven't yet managed to strike a design balance between hip and good-for-40yo-executive. And that's exactly where apple's product design strenth can be found. What's more, mobile phone purchasers tend to be very usability-conscious. Again, apple has top mindshare in usability perception.
So, would a hip-but-elegant, high-end tech, very usable phone that doubles as a portable media player be successful in the market? In the EU market, which I know better, yes it would do great. Is apple, following the ipod success, the company to inspire consumers that their product has these qualities? Absolutely.
A year ago, when I got my iPod, I thought: "these guys ought to making mobile phones".
They are not canibalizing the iPod market. They are going for Nokia's market head-on. And in a couple of years, when mobile phone storage will be in the dozens of gigabytes, then they will canibalize iPod because it will be under attack by Nokia, Samsung and S-E.
A fast moving consumer good only needs exposure and artificial value perception marketing. Completely unlike operating systems.
In the pepsi-coke case, the mere fact that the heaviest brand name in the world acknowledged pepsi as a comparable (a marketing blunder on their part) was enough to create consumer perception of equivalence/alternative, i.e. to position pepsi as a possible coke subsitute in consumer's minds. From there onwards, all that pepsi's marketing had to do would be to touch specific style/passion points on consumers and switch them over to build a base.
You don't sit an ponder, try to make an educated choice when picking up a beverage from the grocery store. You don't see it as a comittment. You don't expect huge differentiation in the result of its use. Even then, there are no risks involved.
One might say that a study like this would offer the same acknowledgement of rivalry/equivalence for linux by MS. Sure, the perception of subsitution quality does not exist in many decision makers' minds. (even though it is gaining mindshare in many other directions) But I doubt that the MS-directed marketing spin (which is what those decision makers will see) would play too much on this aspect.
Linux and OSS should not play marketing games on traditional brands' turf with conventional methods. Word-of-mouth, pull marketing and such tools are far superior in the long run, and they happen to be OSS's home ground. I say stick to them and capitalize on them. Don't waste money on the kind of marketing that's suitable for big corporations.
For the same reason you're guilty if you assist a criminal to escape the police.
Not quite. Assisting an escape after a bank robbery is accessory to criminal activity. Breaking an employment contract is not crime. It is a matter of contract law, and, at best, can fall under tort legislation - a matter restricted between the contracting counterparts. Lawyers assist people break contracts all the time and there's nothing wrong about this. Now, if your lawyer assisted his client to escape from prison, or avoid arrest, now that would be another matter.
Linux *is* a communist-developed OS, in the Marxist sense of the word, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his means".
Another way to look at it, closer to the most fundamental aspect of marxist theory, is that the Free Software movement has the ultimate goal of the popularization of the means of production. Distribution of the means of production to the people is the exact goal of a marxist-based political system, and the exact opposite of a capitalist economy.
The article was funny. What disturbs me though, is that it's become a trend for every journalist who has no better idea for this week's article to try installing Linux and then have something funny to write about his experiences.
I'd like, for a change, to see some journalists try to install NT or Win98 on a virgin machine with a fresh, unpartitioned drive and the Microsoft cdrom. I'm not sure that would be a less eventful and tedious experience than Linux installation.
Besides, given the distro/version that this user is installing, I'd also appreciate seeing occasional articles of pisssed off journalist who can't install DOS and Win3.1 on a Linux machine.
I am not sure how being able to copy or move (depending on weather your holding cntrl or shft is either a difficult thing to understand or a knock on Windows. Rather simple and helpful feature if you ask me.
I never said that action modifier keys are a bad idea.. I just pointed out that the default action should be faithful to the interface metaphor. When I drag something somewhere else, I expect it to cease existing in the original location and be transferred to the new one.
Maybe it was the teacher:) j/k!
Perhaps, but one may not claim intuitiveness over a filesystem interface when it really takes a good teacher to show you how to copy or move a file.
It seems to me (any many others) that this is a wakeup call regarding how easy Linux (or any UNIX, for that matter) really is to a new user.
If the intent was to serve that purpose, naming the company that operated the usabilty study would not be necessary. In fact, we could rather have an article on Linux usabilty with a few anonymous accounts of similar incidents to demostrate its flaws.
I believe that while the usabilty debate sprouted over this issue, given the ease at which this debate comes out in about any discussion about Linux, it was peripheral in the context and the phrasing of the news article posted on the frontpage. The story concentrated on the fact that Microsoft performs usabilty studies that involve installation on games, with an emphasis on the questionable technical qualities of the test users.
From the point of view of "tales from tech support line" it is not particularly interesting. Not a monumentally dumb user, and certainly not a capturing question.
From the point of view of "Microsoft spying on Linux" it is not exactly breathtaking news that Microsoft might be playing around and doing tests on competitor products. I would bet my left hand that it's not the first or the last time they do this, and it's not even worth noting as a practice in this industry.
I can hardly consider this article "news".. I would more easily classify it as "gossip", given that I also have my doubts as to whether it is an admirable practice to publicize the contents of private support service calls.
Perhaps this article has given foot to an interesting discussion over UI issues.. but nevertheless this could have been achieved without introducing tabloid-style gossip headlines such as "Microsoft plays Linux games at work" What's next? "Microsoft runs out of sanitary paper?" or "Bill's X-lover reveals true nature of company name?"
You make a very fine point about the concept of an intuitive interface. Microsoft is trying to persuade everyone in the world that just because many people are mildly familiar with their interface, this makes it intuitive.
My father has spent some 20 years working with computers, most of them in a DOS environment. Recently he had to adapt to win95 and I was trying to teach him the basics. Now my father can issue 'arcane' commands like copy and mkdir and fdisk, and he has even mastered wildcards and such. He can program, and he can compile his own programs. Yet, it took him some thirty minutes to grasp the idea that "when I drag a file on another directory, the file is not moved, not copied, instead just a shortcut is created" After some frustration, he realized it'd be quicker to do it through the prompt, and he never used windows eplorer again since. Then I had to explain about shortcuts on the menus and desktop.. which eventually led to the question "can't I just add the damn directory to the $PATH??" Great fun!
Intuitive interface is an interface that provides you with an easy-to-grasp expectation as to what will happen when you do some action, and that fullfils that expectation. Well, I never really understood how that applies to Microsoft's interface. It harldy ever manages to do what I expect to happen.
It is natural with users of an interface to get comfortable with it over time. But intuitiveness does not refer to that. It refers to making users comfortable with the interface without prior experience and habitual familiarity with it.
It's funny though. In the age of corporate memos leaking to the media, hype for everything from tacos to movies, Transmeta's (unintentionally?) pulled the greatest publicity stunt of all time: silence.
I think that's exactly what the original poster meant. Transmeta is an upstart company with some new idea in working.. perhaps a good idea. An announcement for their new project would hit the news with as much chance as any other technical announcement of being hot and discussed by many. Instead, they have Linus answering "I can't tell you it's a secret" to every interviewer asking him what he does for a living.. result: everybody knows transmeta before they even come out with a product in their hands. And what's more.. everybody is curious to see what Linus is been up to all this time. What better publicity could they possibly get?
I don't quite undeestand this.. so, you're telling me that if an organization, say the "wine tasting society of South Uzbekistan", comes out and gives and award to Alan Cox for his contribution to the Open Source community, from then on he will not be able to receive other awards from other bodies concerning the same topic? Or am I missing something here?
It's not just the fact that we were exposed to unix first that made us stick with it and love it. I personally believe that unix is popular in the academia and tends to get a grip on the students because it is an excellent learning environment.
Unix lets you look under the hood of things. Unix does not hide the technicalities of the system in favor of looking more friendly to computer-illiterate users. With the open source software that complements the unix xulture, students get their chance to draw upon a large knowledge base of programming. The availability of information, documentation and peer guidance help you learn new things quickly and deeply. All this creates a unique learning environment that simply cannot be matched by the mentality of the MS-Windows world.
Exposure is not enough. Even if MS gets the exposure to undergrads, it will still fail to provide them with the learning incentives and tools that unix does. And the geeks among them, will eventually find what they seek with some open source OS.
What's the damn point in having a "favourite programming language" in this? Or why do we have "favourite communications board" and "favourite game"? For that matter, why not include "favourite emulator" or "favourite man page viewer" as well???
The only reasonable purpose I could see behind an award set like this would be to give merit to people or groups or ideas that contribute to the causes of the Linux community. For example, I would see the point of giving out awards for "most original software", or "most effective project management", or for "most needed new software", or for "most valuable service to the community".. you get the drift.. The LJ awards merely collect some loosely dependable measure of popularity among arbitrary sets of tools for an arbitrary set of themes.
I would hope no slashdotters would be foolish enough to do that.
I've changed the password for "my" account and for those of the Fortune 100 company I work for to such things as "idiots.nsi", "nsi-criminals", etc.
You spent the time to change the passwords and now you tell everybody in/. some general directions (illustrated with examples) on how to guess the new ones? Cool!
Are you suggesting there are people who'd use their root passwd for a free web-based mail service login? They ought to be found and shot if they exist.
Suppose I'm a new artist. Signing the contract lets Sony control *my* use of my name as a URL. It'd be as easy as hell to have a friend go and register the relevant domain names in advance, and for the sake of typicality control them on my behalf. He hasn't signed any silly contract with Sony, so they can't really do anything about it.
Please note that you can turn everything OFF! If you don't like moderation or scores or karma, TURN THEM OFF! You won't even know they're there and it will be just like Slashdot was before all the moderation, at least for you based on your preferences.
The fact that you can customize your view of the discussion, doesn't necessarily mean that you can actually apply your desired degree of freedom to it. Free speech does not refer only to what you can see and what you can say.. but mostly to the mental state of confidence that you have the ability to say something as loud as anybody else can. Moderation up and downs the volume of each voice in here, and since its effects are available to anyone who wants it, the rest of us suffer the impact of this volume unequality whatever our setting are.
I'm not saying I disagree with moderation on/. After all it's Rob's site and he can do whatever he likes with it. I suspect that the reasoning behind his choices does not necessarily follow the spirit of freedom, but also of practicality.. which is good in a sense. But the point is, that./ is a censored discussion (Rob is trying his best though to make a censorship system that is as fair as possible to everybody) and it certainly isn't free. There is no scaling in freedom. There is no such thing as "some freedom" or "lotsa freedom". It's either there, or not. In./'s case, it's not.
Why is slashdot wasting space on this uselessness? Someone in Germany is being an ass and that's news? You're not exactly being FORCED to read the full./ news. If you don't like an article, just bypass it. If you don't like any of them, then find a different site to get your news from.
I, for myself, read at +2, just because I don't have the time to dig through hundreds of posts, just to find a few gems.
So, if my reply to you in our little "conversation" here (in the sense that you make some comments on my post and expect some answers or elaboration on them) does not get moderated to score 2, you will never read it.
So you're telling me that you're not willing to hear me out unless a good few people give you reassurance that it is worth reading. Under those circumstances, do you expect me to spend my precious time and provide you with a well-thought reply to your - interesting - article?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to spark some silly flame or something. I'm just trying to give you a start point (perhaps, my startpoint) for some thought on how filtering (even when it is not forced to the recipient beyond their will) constitutes significant problems in the process of a communication, and consequently in the value that people place on that communication, thus critically affecting the quality of the resulting idea exchange.
And let me come now to what you said about shouting "the mayor is a turnip".. I don't need to shout "the mayor is a turnip" to prove to myself that I am free to do so. In fact, the only thing that I need is to feel that I am free to do so. The knowledge that if it becomes a necessity to shout about the mayor, I may do so.. and my fellow citizens will hear me (they may later decide they don't agree with me, but that's irrelevant) - this knowledge is what makes personal political freedom the most valuable asset of our civilization.
Suppose I decide that you are a turnip. (again, don't get me wrong.. just for the sake of the hypothetical argument) What's the point of shouting about it when you're likely not going to hear me and come back to me with the feedback that I need. (every complaint is an indirect request for feedback) And on your side.. how do you feel about the fact that some other people will decide whether or not you'll have the chance to know about and participate into a conversation on the topic of whether or not and how exactly you are a turnip...?
I hope that some good moderator here will do me tha favour to score this at +2, so you will end up reading it. If you do, I hope this gave you some things to think about.
The point is: do you post here to please other readers, or do you post here to voice your opinion?
A lot of the discussion so far about moderation has been based on the assumption that the reading pleasure of slashdot frequenters is of utmost importance. But perhaps it would be a good idea to reconsider this view. What's the point of devising new rules and methods of discussion just to make it more pleasant? There are plenty of unplaisant things that can be said, that still contribute to the value and the reality of a forum.
I would not call the moderation system censorship. But I wouldn't call slashdot a free speech forum either. Whether this sounds pleasing to Rob's ears or not, any system where there is the possibility of automated filtering based on criteria set by third parties,(other than the writer and the reader) any discussion environment where voices can be volumed up or volumed down at the discretion of some judges.. any such system is NOT free.
And lack of freedom is never a good sign. Perhaps Rob ought to look towards this direction for some answers as to why the quality of the discussions on slashdot is declining.
Ironic isn't it..? The majority of people here support free software, yet they cannot handle the more basic concept of free speech.
Slashdot Mirror
In many countries, this compensation is also at double the daily salary rate of the employee.
Agreed. The plethora of posts about how this is SOP and something to be expected amazes me. I have left my job twice this far, in good terms, and both times I was expected to stay in there until the last day, help with the transition, tidying up all loose ends and demonstrating to clients that the handover was smooth and safe. In both cases, aside from throwing a mini party and having personal talks with most co-workers to thank each other for long-time cooperation, I also sent emails to clients ensuring them that the resignation is in good terms and explaining them all the steps taken to ensure that their projects will not be affected, sometime visiting them to introduce the co-worker that would replace me on my former duties.
Yes, I could have done a lot of horrible things from ruining relationships, to deleting files, or even stealing knowledge and sensitive information. But I could have done these things before resigning anyway. And I knew a lot of stuff without access to the computers in the first place. So, it's more a matter of being a respectable and civil person, who feels that their former employer honoured them and is not likely to become a criminal beast the day after resignation. If my employer believed that the only thing stopping me from screwing up their business was that I didn't have a job elsewhere, I very much doubt they'd be employing me in the first place. Then again, please note that I live in Europe, and I understand that corporate culture here is on the average somewhat different thatn in the US.
I believe the point would not be to get people switching now from iPods to iPhones.
Apple has a perfect market for it in mobile phone devices. They are becoming extensions of people's hands, personal devices, and ultimately statements of style and/or status. (like cars, wristwatches, etc) Another particularity of the market is that advanced features (mp3, good cameras, mobile internet, etc) usually come out first on the hip 25-35yo devices. Nokia and S-E haven't yet managed to strike a design balance between hip and good-for-40yo-executive. And that's exactly where apple's product design strenth can be found. What's more, mobile phone purchasers tend to be very usability-conscious. Again, apple has top mindshare in usability perception.
So, would a hip-but-elegant, high-end tech, very usable phone that doubles as a portable media player be successful in the market? In the EU market, which I know better, yes it would do great. Is apple, following the ipod success, the company to inspire consumers that their product has these qualities? Absolutely.
A year ago, when I got my iPod, I thought: "these guys ought to making mobile phones".
They are not canibalizing the iPod market. They are going for Nokia's market head-on. And in a couple of years, when mobile phone storage will be in the dozens of gigabytes, then they will canibalize iPod because it will be under attack by Nokia, Samsung and S-E.
A fast moving consumer good only needs exposure and artificial value perception marketing. Completely unlike operating systems.
In the pepsi-coke case, the mere fact that the heaviest brand name in the world acknowledged pepsi as a comparable (a marketing blunder on their part) was enough to create consumer perception of equivalence/alternative, i.e. to position pepsi as a possible coke subsitute in consumer's minds. From there onwards, all that pepsi's marketing had to do would be to touch specific style/passion points on consumers and switch them over to build a base.
You don't sit an ponder, try to make an educated choice when picking up a beverage from the grocery store. You don't see it as a comittment. You don't expect huge differentiation in the result of its use. Even then, there are no risks involved.
One might say that a study like this would offer the same acknowledgement of rivalry/equivalence for linux by MS. Sure, the perception of subsitution quality does not exist in many decision makers' minds. (even though it is gaining mindshare in many other directions) But I doubt that the MS-directed marketing spin (which is what those decision makers will see) would play too much on this aspect.
Linux and OSS should not play marketing games on traditional brands' turf with conventional methods. Word-of-mouth, pull marketing and such tools are far superior in the long run, and they happen to be OSS's home ground. I say stick to them and capitalize on them. Don't waste money on the kind of marketing that's suitable for big corporations.
For the same reason you're guilty if you assist a criminal to escape the police.
Not quite. Assisting an escape after a bank robbery is accessory to criminal activity. Breaking an employment contract is not crime. It is a matter of contract law, and, at best, can fall under tort legislation - a matter restricted between the contracting counterparts. Lawyers assist people break contracts all the time and there's nothing wrong about this. Now, if your lawyer assisted his client to escape from prison, or avoid arrest, now that would be another matter.
Another way to look at it, closer to the most fundamental aspect of marxist theory, is that the Free Software movement has the ultimate goal of the popularization of the means of production. Distribution of the means of production to the people is the exact goal of a marxist-based political system, and the exact opposite of a capitalist economy.
Nick Moraitakis
I'd like, for a change, to see some journalists try to install NT or Win98 on a virgin machine with a fresh, unpartitioned drive and the Microsoft cdrom. I'm not sure that would be a less eventful and tedious experience than Linux installation.
Besides, given the distro/version that this user is installing, I'd also appreciate seeing occasional articles of pisssed off journalist who can't install DOS and Win3.1 on a Linux machine.
Nick Moraitakis
Government-controlled gambling is just a special tax for people that can't do simple math..
Nick Moraitakis
I never said that action modifier keys are a bad idea.. I just pointed out that the default action should be faithful to the interface metaphor. When I drag something somewhere else, I expect it to cease existing in the original location and be transferred to the new one.
Maybe it was the teacher :) j/k!
Perhaps, but one may not claim intuitiveness over a filesystem interface when it really takes a good teacher to show you how to copy or move a file.
Nick Moraitakis
If the intent was to serve that purpose, naming the company that operated the usabilty study would not be necessary. In fact, we could rather have an article on Linux usabilty with a few anonymous accounts of similar incidents to demostrate its flaws.
I believe that while the usabilty debate sprouted over this issue, given the ease at which this debate comes out in about any discussion about Linux, it was peripheral in the context and the phrasing of the news article posted on the frontpage. The story concentrated on the fact that Microsoft performs usabilty studies that involve installation on games, with an emphasis on the questionable technical qualities of the test users.
Nick Moraitakis
From the point of view of "Microsoft spying on Linux" it is not exactly breathtaking news that Microsoft might be playing around and doing tests on competitor products. I would bet my left hand that it's not the first or the last time they do this, and it's not even worth noting as a practice in this industry.
I can hardly consider this article "news".. I would more easily classify it as "gossip", given that I also have my doubts as to whether it is an admirable practice to publicize the contents of private support service calls.
Perhaps this article has given foot to an interesting discussion over UI issues.. but nevertheless this could have been achieved without introducing tabloid-style gossip headlines such as "Microsoft plays Linux games at work" What's next? "Microsoft runs out of sanitary paper?" or "Bill's X-lover reveals true nature of company name?"
Nick Moraitakis
My father has spent some 20 years working with computers, most of them in a DOS environment. Recently he had to adapt to win95 and I was trying to teach him the basics. Now my father can issue 'arcane' commands like copy and mkdir and fdisk, and he has even mastered wildcards and such. He can program, and he can compile his own programs. Yet, it took him some thirty minutes to grasp the idea that "when I drag a file on another directory, the file is not moved, not copied, instead just a shortcut is created" After some frustration, he realized it'd be quicker to do it through the prompt, and he never used windows eplorer again since. Then I had to explain about shortcuts on the menus and desktop.. which eventually led to the question "can't I just add the damn directory to the $PATH??" Great fun!
Intuitive interface is an interface that provides you with an easy-to-grasp expectation as to what will happen when you do some action, and that fullfils that expectation. Well, I never really understood how that applies to Microsoft's interface. It harldy ever manages to do what I expect to happen.
It is natural with users of an interface to get comfortable with it over time. But intuitiveness does not refer to that. It refers to making users comfortable with the interface without prior experience and habitual familiarity with it.
Nick Moraitakis
I think that's exactly what the original poster meant. Transmeta is an upstart company with some new idea in working.. perhaps a good idea. An announcement for their new project would hit the news with as much chance as any other technical announcement of being hot and discussed by many. Instead, they have Linus answering "I can't tell you it's a secret" to every interviewer asking him what he does for a living.. result: everybody knows transmeta before they even come out with a product in their hands. And what's more.. everybody is curious to see what Linus is been up to all this time. What better publicity could they possibly get?
Nick Moraitakis
Nick Moraitakis
Unix lets you look under the hood of things. Unix does not hide the technicalities of the system in favor of looking more friendly to computer-illiterate users. With the open source software that complements the unix xulture, students get their chance to draw upon a large knowledge base of programming. The availability of information, documentation and peer guidance help you learn new things quickly and deeply. All this creates a unique learning environment that simply cannot be matched by the mentality of the MS-Windows world.
Exposure is not enough. Even if MS gets the exposure to undergrads, it will still fail to provide them with the learning incentives and tools that unix does. And the geeks among them, will eventually find what they seek with some open source OS.
Nick Moraitakis
Nick Moraitakis
The only reasonable purpose I could see behind an award set like this would be to give merit to people or groups or ideas that contribute to the causes of the Linux community. For example, I would see the point of giving out awards for "most original software", or "most effective project management", or for "most needed new software", or for "most valuable service to the community".. you get the drift.. The LJ awards merely collect some loosely dependable measure of popularity among arbitrary sets of tools for an arbitrary set of themes.
Nick Moraitakis
I've changed the password for "my" account and for those of the Fortune 100 company I work for to such things as "idiots.nsi", "nsi-criminals", etc.
You spent the time to change the passwords and now you tell everybody in /. some general directions (illustrated with examples) on how to guess the new ones? Cool!
Nick Moraitakis
Nick Moraitakis
Nick Moraitakis
The fact that you can customize your view of the discussion, doesn't necessarily mean that you can actually apply your desired degree of freedom to it. Free speech does not refer only to what you can see and what you can say.. but mostly to the mental state of confidence that you have the ability to say something as loud as anybody else can. Moderation up and downs the volume of each voice in here, and since its effects are available to anyone who wants it, the rest of us suffer the impact of this volume unequality whatever our setting are.
I'm not saying I disagree with moderation on /. After all it's Rob's site and he can do whatever he likes with it. I suspect that the reasoning behind his choices does not necessarily follow the spirit of freedom, but also of practicality.. which is good in a sense. But the point is, that ./ is a censored discussion (Rob is trying his best though to make a censorship system that is as fair as possible to everybody) and it certainly isn't free. There is no scaling in freedom. There is no such thing as "some freedom" or "lotsa freedom". It's either there, or not. In ./'s case, it's not.
Nick Moraitakis
Nick Moraitakis
So, if my reply to you in our little "conversation" here (in the sense that you make some comments on my post and expect some answers or elaboration on them) does not get moderated to score 2, you will never read it.
So you're telling me that you're not willing to hear me out unless a good few people give you reassurance that it is worth reading. Under those circumstances, do you expect me to spend my precious time and provide you with a well-thought reply to your - interesting - article?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to spark some silly flame or something. I'm just trying to give you a start point (perhaps, my startpoint) for some thought on how filtering (even when it is not forced to the recipient beyond their will) constitutes significant problems in the process of a communication, and consequently in the value that people place on that communication, thus critically affecting the quality of the resulting idea exchange.
And let me come now to what you said about shouting "the mayor is a turnip".. I don't need to shout "the mayor is a turnip" to prove to myself that I am free to do so. In fact, the only thing that I need is to feel that I am free to do so. The knowledge that if it becomes a necessity to shout about the mayor, I may do so.. and my fellow citizens will hear me (they may later decide they don't agree with me, but that's irrelevant) - this knowledge is what makes personal political freedom the most valuable asset of our civilization.
Suppose I decide that you are a turnip. (again, don't get me wrong.. just for the sake of the hypothetical argument) What's the point of shouting about it when you're likely not going to hear me and come back to me with the feedback that I need. (every complaint is an indirect request for feedback) And on your side.. how do you feel about the fact that some other people will decide whether or not you'll have the chance to know about and participate into a conversation on the topic of whether or not and how exactly you are a turnip...?
I hope that some good moderator here will do me tha favour to score this at +2, so you will end up reading it. If you do, I hope this gave you some things to think about.
The point is: do you post here to please other readers, or do you post here to voice your opinion?
A lot of the discussion so far about moderation has been based on the assumption that the reading pleasure of slashdot frequenters is of utmost importance. But perhaps it would be a good idea to reconsider this view. What's the point of devising new rules and methods of discussion just to make it more pleasant? There are plenty of unplaisant things that can be said, that still contribute to the value and the reality of a forum.
I would not call the moderation system censorship. But I wouldn't call slashdot a free speech forum either. Whether this sounds pleasing to Rob's ears or not, any system where there is the possibility of automated filtering based on criteria set by third parties,(other than the writer and the reader) any discussion environment where voices can be volumed up or volumed down at the discretion of some judges.. any such system is NOT free.
And lack of freedom is never a good sign. Perhaps Rob ought to look towards this direction for some answers as to why the quality of the discussions on slashdot is declining.
Ironic isn't it..? The majority of people here support free software, yet they cannot handle the more basic concept of free speech.