Anyone noticed that while Apple and Samsung are fighting each other in court, RIM stock is going up? Of course nobody will say that an obsolete, buggy device on an unreliably network is infringing on their patents. Quite brilliant: let the big boys beat each other down and step up as the safest choice for nervous enterprise customers.
>>>> We need to get our fracking industry going full bore >>> No... We need to get our bio-diesel industry going full bore >> No, we need to invest in something that we KNOW works and is relatively cheap and painless > We know nuclear fission reactors work, are relatively safe (I don't want to argue the point) & produce far less pollution
Clearly there is no way out of the alternative energy cluster fuck unless we bring in a dictator. I think the last experienced one alive is the dude from Haiti (Baby Doc Duvalier), someone should give him a call before oil becomes more expensive than champagne.
South Africa only has gold and diamonds, not oil. Also, South Africa doesn't have a state religion to hide behind. Any criticism of Saudi Arabia would be "anti-islamic" bigotry.
South Africa does not need a state religion to hide behind, they have a Hero (Mandela), a man with a stature so formidable that his ex-wife has been hiding in his shadow to commit crimes.
How can a crowd make a good decision: half of the voters are more stupid than the average.
Sorry to sabotage your joke, but that would be the median. If you have ten users, all of about the same moderate level of intelligence, and one really dumb, then 90% are above average.
This being facebook, of course, 90% is below average.
I was under the impression that the IQ of a large population is roughly calculated according to a normal distribution (basically a bell curve with a mean of 100), in which case half of the people are indeed below average, which is why a lot of IQ test results are given as a percentile rather than an arbitrary value. If the metric was wealth, height or any other value that is not relative to the group than your interpretation would be correct.
Now if anybody that subscribes to the efficient market hypothesis reads this they might disagree about wealth being a good example of a metric that is not relative to the group, and people with a strong background in evolutionary biology might disagree about the height example as well, but hopefully you get the idea.
Please don't take my interpretation for granted as I was usually involved in non-acamedic activities during stats lessons in college but how could I know then that I would need that knowledge now, it was not mentioned in the brochure.
Bullshit. The whole point of your proposed system is, according to yourself:
[...]
I've seen know-it-alls before, but it's the first time I meet someone who thinks he knows the meaning of a comment more than the person who made it (in this instance: me). You must be a hoot at dinner parties.
Since you bring again the concept of censorship in the discussion it is obvious you miss the whole point so I'll be the bigger man and concede that you are in your right to be wrong.
Maybe there is a missing dimension in the moderation system so people who just want to read comments from people who think exactly like them can do so without preventing actual discussions to go on.
That's a feature, not a bug. The whole point of a discussion forum is to discuss, not stroke anyone's ego with confirmations about how correct they are.
Try to ignore the reference in this thread that is making you so emotional (Obama? evolution? global warming?) and read my comment again. This time maybe you will understand that I was not advocating having only consensual comments appearing in the forum, but rather the opposite.
The problem that I describe about the moderation system is that people have no way to express their dislike about a comment that is different from flagging a comment that is purely junk. If there was a way to say: "this comment is junk" (like rude homosexual african-american bashing) but "that comment is not junk but I disagree with it" (like someone challenging linux as desktop os) it would be possible to have actual discussions and people could choose the level of dissension from the majority they are comfortable with. Right now if there is a story about Windows 8 and I read it a few hours after it's been released, I can either choose to hide all the junk comments but also miss the threads where someone dared say that Metro is a better design than the Apple GUI (and got modded down by fanbois), or I can display everything and be exposed to spam and crap like those long weird sex stories. This is not granular enough.
(Some people would put Reagan's SDI in that list but as a conspiracy theory buff I prefer to think it was all a master plan to push USSR to bankrupt itself by building a bigger arsenal)
The best estimates we have show that Soviet military spending was flat throughout the 80s
Who is "we"? Is the CIA now posting on Slashdot? I knew there was a conspiracy somewhere in that SDI thing.
200 m/s is about 7 times the speed of trap shooting. I guess it's a bit fast and it does not help that the sniper does not get to scream "pull" to control fire rate... but I'm sure a lot of people can do it, like Tom Berenger, or Ed Harris, or that guy from the last Rambo movie.
On a side note, I have no idea why you say I've been watching too many movies.
Seoul is definitely a very good example of building defense against low-tech attacks. The Iron Dome is impressive but if Israel's ennemies start doing like North Korea and dig tunnels under the DMZ it will be useless. So far the Americans in the Korean JSA have found (and closed) 3 tunnels, one of which was wide enough to allow a full-scale invasion.
People underestimate low-tech. The West Bank Barrier, which is basically a big wall, can be blamed from a humanitarian perspective, but from a security/military perspective it actually helped to drastically minimize the number of car and suicide bombings on the israeli territory; now the war is fought on the outskirts or directly in other countries (such as Lebanon) and the focus is on rockets, but 20 years ago the situation was totally different with bus or market bombs being typical.
History is full of successful low-tech solutions, like the barbed wire wall built by Mussolini's henchman (Graziani) in Libya that prevented the mujahideen to bring supplies to the resistance. History is also full of high-tech solutions that ended up being an expensive fiasco, like the Maginot Line. (Some people would put Reagan's SDI in that list but as a conspiracy theory buff I prefer to think it was all a master plan to push USSR to bankrupt itself by building a bigger arsenal).
As far as rockets are concerned, I'd be curious to see a cost analysis of the Iron Dome versus a shitload of snipers with high-powered rifles trying to shoot rockets as they fly over the territory. Just sayin'.
If there is a discussion about the theory of evolution and someone says: "carbon-14 dating is not reliable evidence because test results that don't fall in the range expected by the scientists who made the hypothesis are typically rejected" he will get modded down just the same as someone who goes on a long, weird diatribe about extra-terrestrials sex experiments and african-american homosexuals (usually in less politically-correct lingo).
That is the flaw of the moderation system; it's mostly statements that make consensus among the voting crowd that remain visible, everything else is modded down with no distinction between actual trolls, obvious spammers and dissenting voices. This is no different from Putin sending those rocker girls to the same jail where they hold common criminals and actual terrorists. Maybe there is a missing dimension in the moderation system so people who just want to read comments from people who think exactly like them can do so without preventing actual discussions to go on.
But, in some places, if I said "show me the evidence that Jesus was at least a historical person, let alone the son of god"... or "Why should I believe that Mohammed was the prophet of god"... there would be angry mobs ready to burn and stone me because I hurt their feelings.
You don't need to go far for that. Right here on Slashdot it happens. Granted it's only modding down, no actual burning occurs, but "Troll" is a label that appears to be applied quickly to someone who says things like: "did Obama and Gore really deserve a Nobel prize", or "if global warming is man-made, how come it also happens on Mars" even when the questions are completely in line with the thread. Same used to apply to someone saying that Apple is anything but perfect, however in recent years as it became more mainstream to own Apple products the discussion on that topic seems less emotional.
People are intolerant all over the place and on both sides of every issues. But ask anyone and they'll say that they, themselves, are not intolerant, because *they* are right and the other is a moron. This behavior is universal and thinking that it is limited to religious people is a demonstration of that.
If you know a good carrier that offers unlimited SMS and phone for $10, please share a link. The cheapest I've seen is around $25 and that's with low quality carriers where you get a good signal only if you are in spitting distance of their 3 towers.
Those carriers are cheap but it's hugely annoying to get out of range when driving to the airport or to drain the battery quicker because the phone keeps falling on and off the grid.
Because of all the downtime on Google docs, the communication with the C&C server is intermittent and therefore difficult to pinpoint by law enforcement. Security by instability.
IT should be there to offer training and provide guidance but in the end it's a support function, not a business driver. IT is there to support the sales staff, not school them or patronize them.
Nonsense. IT is there to provide infrastructure for data processing, and efficient data processing is a crucial business driver that can provide competitive advantage.
No it's not, it's merely a prerequisite, which makes IT at most an enabler, not a driver. And in most organization IT is not even an enabler, it's a cost center and in some cases a straightforward liability.
That means the IT department allocating their IT budget in a manner that maximizes organizational efficiency is to be expected; new productivity-enabling improvements to systems protection against security threats, and provisioning of local storage, over purchase of overpriced disk space on remote web site.
So you define productivity-enablement as using local storage instead of a "remote web site"? That's pretty weak, especially since SF and other SaaS/IaaS are in high demand specifically because in many organizations the local staff is not agile enough or is simply too expensive.
It's worth noting that companies waste storage like crazy in Salesforce. Give your sales staff free reign, and you'll easily use that space up on PDF's, gigantic image assets for email designs that change every other day, etc.
The role of IT is to take care of the monster, not tame it. When IT takes action to bring down storage "waste" (be it in SF or in mailboxes) on its own, it's like having the office administrator go around making sure people use both sides of the pages in notebooks and that people stop doodling on post-its while taking calls because it's waste.
Did you ever work in a company where facilities people decided that lights should be motion-sensor-activated after 6pm? Or a company where cafeteria people decided that there is no need to stock both milk and cream for coffee? Or a company where architects found out that by shrinking parking stalls just a few inches they could fit a few more cars in the underground parking? If you expect the sales staff to put links in emails instead of files attachments or if you want to impose a quota on mailboxes you have fallen for the same flawed logic as facilities people, cafeteria people and architects. You lost sight of the value chain and you miscalculate what is and what is not true waste.
IT should be there to offer training and provide guidance but in the end it's a support function, not a business driver. IT is there to support the sales staff, not school them or patronize them. If IT believes that a business process is suboptimal and should be addressed, there is a chain of command for that; you prepare a nice spreadsheet with itemized expenses and you run that up the chain. If the person in charge determines that the waste is in fact unacceptable, he/she will initiate a change.
$3000 per year = about $12 per working day. One can probably save more by shopping for a better long-distance calls provider than by making noise about those rascals in sales who make too many PDFs.
It looks expensive but a SMS is like a phone call, it can transit across a few telcos and maybe an aggregator or two in between. So that 10 cents is split between many players who have an expensive infrastructure to maintain (including databases where the message is often stored for a long time, and can be read by lots of bored developers or sysadmins).
Still cheaper than a postcard for something faster and with the same level of confidentiality (i.e: none).
Data like that might be very valuable to TPTB and also to people with not-so-nice intentions.
This story is about France, a near-bankrupt country where people cannot encrypt stuff unless the government can decrypt it, and where you go to jail for making a racist joke in public, while the poor people in suburbs are burning cars and throwing rocks at the cops. In Paris many people don't lock their cars to avoid damage to windows when thieves do their regular rounds (on their way to gang-rape schoolgirls). In this context I would say that someone using the time people turn off home theaters to do harm is a long shot.
> [..] John Marshall, an independent aviation-safety consultant who spent 26 years in the Air Force before overseeing Delta's safety.
If instead they had hired someone who spent 26 years in the Delta Force before overseeing Air safety maybe I would not have to step in bare socks on a mat covered with foot sweat while holding my pants at the security checks in airports since all terrorists would have been Chuck Norrised.
This raises the cost and time to train new fliers in an era when pay cuts and more-demanding schedules already have made the profession less attractive.
Golly....if only there was something the airlines could do to make being a pilot more attractive.
Creative suggestion: give them a share of the iPads stolen from honest people by TSA agents (aka: the terrorist tax).
Many of the "informed" people who appear in the video mention the Daily Show as a source for news. So bash Fox News as much as you want, but clearly (Everything - Fox News) is not doing such a good job of informing people either. Those people don't know who is Nancy Pelosi or who controls the Congress, but they know who got 50k worth of clothes or who has a pregnant teenager. Proud, informed voters.
My first post in this thread was a joke but it is now clear that Obama is like Muhammad, if you make a single reference to him that is not a praise all the cult members go nuts. This is beyond sad because the people with an ideology and a church are supposed to be the Republicans. You people behave exactly like O'Reilly who labeled anyone who disagreed with Bush as "anti-american". Shame on you.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone noticed that while Apple and Samsung are fighting each other in court, RIM stock is going up? Of course nobody will say that an obsolete, buggy device on an unreliably network is infringing on their patents. Quite brilliant: let the big boys beat each other down and step up as the safest choice for nervous enterprise customers.
>>>> We need to get our fracking industry going full bore
>>> No... We need to get our bio-diesel industry going full bore
>> No, we need to invest in something that we KNOW works and is relatively cheap and painless
> We know nuclear fission reactors work, are relatively safe (I don't want to argue the point) & produce far less pollution
Clearly there is no way out of the alternative energy cluster fuck unless we bring in a dictator. I think the last experienced one alive is the dude from Haiti (Baby Doc Duvalier), someone should give him a call before oil becomes more expensive than champagne.
South Africa only has gold and diamonds, not oil. Also, South Africa doesn't have a state religion to hide behind. Any criticism of Saudi Arabia would be "anti-islamic" bigotry.
South Africa does not need a state religion to hide behind, they have a Hero (Mandela), a man with a stature so formidable that his ex-wife has been hiding in his shadow to commit crimes.
Too bad hell is a fictitious place
Clearly you have never visited Laramie, Wyoming, especially during the winter (which lasts about 10.5 months out there)
Sorry to sabotage your joke, but that would be the median. If you have ten users, all of about the same moderate level of intelligence, and one really dumb, then 90% are above average.
This being facebook, of course, 90% is below average.
I was under the impression that the IQ of a large population is roughly calculated according to a normal distribution (basically a bell curve with a mean of 100), in which case half of the people are indeed below average, which is why a lot of IQ test results are given as a percentile rather than an arbitrary value. If the metric was wealth, height or any other value that is not relative to the group than your interpretation would be correct.
Now if anybody that subscribes to the efficient market hypothesis reads this they might disagree about wealth being a good example of a metric that is not relative to the group, and people with a strong background in evolutionary biology might disagree about the height example as well, but hopefully you get the idea.
Please don't take my interpretation for granted as I was usually involved in non-acamedic activities during stats lessons in college but how could I know then that I would need that knowledge now, it was not mentioned in the brochure.
How can a crowd make a good decision: half of the voters are more stupid than the average.
Tell us more, Dear Leader.
I guess only people in the other half can tell that it was a joke, making it a self-fulfilling humorous prophecy.
How can a crowd make a good decision: half of the voters are more stupid than the average.
Bullshit. The whole point of your proposed system is, according to yourself:
[...]
I've seen know-it-alls before, but it's the first time I meet someone who thinks he knows the meaning of a comment more than the person who made it (in this instance: me). You must be a hoot at dinner parties.
Since you bring again the concept of censorship in the discussion it is obvious you miss the whole point so I'll be the bigger man and concede that you are in your right to be wrong.
That's a feature, not a bug. The whole point of a discussion forum is to discuss, not stroke anyone's ego with confirmations about how correct they are.
Try to ignore the reference in this thread that is making you so emotional (Obama? evolution? global warming?) and read my comment again. This time maybe you will understand that I was not advocating having only consensual comments appearing in the forum, but rather the opposite.
The problem that I describe about the moderation system is that people have no way to express their dislike about a comment that is different from flagging a comment that is purely junk. If there was a way to say: "this comment is junk" (like rude homosexual african-american bashing) but "that comment is not junk but I disagree with it" (like someone challenging linux as desktop os) it would be possible to have actual discussions and people could choose the level of dissension from the majority they are comfortable with. Right now if there is a story about Windows 8 and I read it a few hours after it's been released, I can either choose to hide all the junk comments but also miss the threads where someone dared say that Metro is a better design than the Apple GUI (and got modded down by fanbois), or I can display everything and be exposed to spam and crap like those long weird sex stories. This is not granular enough.
(Some people would put Reagan's SDI in that list but as a conspiracy theory buff I prefer to think it was all a master plan to push USSR to bankrupt itself by building a bigger arsenal)
The best estimates we have show that Soviet military spending was flat throughout the 80s
Who is "we"? Is the CIA now posting on Slashdot? I knew there was a conspiracy somewhere in that SDI thing.
200 m/s is about 7 times the speed of trap shooting. I guess it's a bit fast and it does not help that the sniper does not get to scream "pull" to control fire rate... but I'm sure a lot of people can do it, like Tom Berenger, or Ed Harris, or that guy from the last Rambo movie.
On a side note, I have no idea why you say I've been watching too many movies.
Seoul is definitely a very good example of building defense against low-tech attacks. The Iron Dome is impressive but if Israel's ennemies start doing like North Korea and dig tunnels under the DMZ it will be useless. So far the Americans in the Korean JSA have found (and closed) 3 tunnels, one of which was wide enough to allow a full-scale invasion.
People underestimate low-tech. The West Bank Barrier, which is basically a big wall, can be blamed from a humanitarian perspective, but from a security/military perspective it actually helped to drastically minimize the number of car and suicide bombings on the israeli territory; now the war is fought on the outskirts or directly in other countries (such as Lebanon) and the focus is on rockets, but 20 years ago the situation was totally different with bus or market bombs being typical.
History is full of successful low-tech solutions, like the barbed wire wall built by Mussolini's henchman (Graziani) in Libya that prevented the mujahideen to bring supplies to the resistance. History is also full of high-tech solutions that ended up being an expensive fiasco, like the Maginot Line. (Some people would put Reagan's SDI in that list but as a conspiracy theory buff I prefer to think it was all a master plan to push USSR to bankrupt itself by building a bigger arsenal).
As far as rockets are concerned, I'd be curious to see a cost analysis of the Iron Dome versus a shitload of snipers with high-powered rifles trying to shoot rockets as they fly over the territory. Just sayin'.
If there is a discussion about the theory of evolution and someone says: "carbon-14 dating is not reliable evidence because test results that don't fall in the range expected by the scientists who made the hypothesis are typically rejected" he will get modded down just the same as someone who goes on a long, weird diatribe about extra-terrestrials sex experiments and african-american homosexuals (usually in less politically-correct lingo).
That is the flaw of the moderation system; it's mostly statements that make consensus among the voting crowd that remain visible, everything else is modded down with no distinction between actual trolls, obvious spammers and dissenting voices. This is no different from Putin sending those rocker girls to the same jail where they hold common criminals and actual terrorists. Maybe there is a missing dimension in the moderation system so people who just want to read comments from people who think exactly like them can do so without preventing actual discussions to go on.
But, in some places, if I said "show me the evidence that Jesus was at least a historical person, let alone the son of god" ... or "Why should I believe that Mohammed was the prophet of god" ... there would be angry mobs ready to burn and stone me because I hurt their feelings.
You don't need to go far for that. Right here on Slashdot it happens. Granted it's only modding down, no actual burning occurs, but "Troll" is a label that appears to be applied quickly to someone who says things like: "did Obama and Gore really deserve a Nobel prize", or "if global warming is man-made, how come it also happens on Mars" even when the questions are completely in line with the thread. Same used to apply to someone saying that Apple is anything but perfect, however in recent years as it became more mainstream to own Apple products the discussion on that topic seems less emotional.
People are intolerant all over the place and on both sides of every issues. But ask anyone and they'll say that they, themselves, are not intolerant, because *they* are right and the other is a moron. This behavior is universal and thinking that it is limited to religious people is a demonstration of that.
If you know a good carrier that offers unlimited SMS and phone for $10, please share a link. The cheapest I've seen is around $25 and that's with low quality carriers where you get a good signal only if you are in spitting distance of their 3 towers.
Those carriers are cheap but it's hugely annoying to get out of range when driving to the airport or to drain the battery quicker because the phone keeps falling on and off the grid.
Because of all the downtime on Google docs, the communication with the C&C server is intermittent and therefore difficult to pinpoint by law enforcement. Security by instability.
IT should be there to offer training and provide guidance but in the end it's a support function, not a business driver. IT is there to support the sales staff, not school them or patronize them.
Nonsense. IT is there to provide infrastructure for data processing, and efficient data processing is a crucial business driver that can provide competitive advantage.
No it's not, it's merely a prerequisite, which makes IT at most an enabler, not a driver. And in most organization IT is not even an enabler, it's a cost center and in some cases a straightforward liability.
That means the IT department allocating their IT budget in a manner that maximizes organizational efficiency is to be expected; new productivity-enabling improvements to systems protection against security threats, and provisioning of local storage, over purchase of overpriced disk space on remote web site.
So you define productivity-enablement as using local storage instead of a "remote web site"? That's pretty weak, especially since SF and other SaaS/IaaS are in high demand specifically because in many organizations the local staff is not agile enough or is simply too expensive.
It's worth noting that companies waste storage like crazy in Salesforce. Give your sales staff free reign, and you'll easily use that space up on PDF's, gigantic image assets for email designs that change every other day, etc.
The role of IT is to take care of the monster, not tame it. When IT takes action to bring down storage "waste" (be it in SF or in mailboxes) on its own, it's like having the office administrator go around making sure people use both sides of the pages in notebooks and that people stop doodling on post-its while taking calls because it's waste.
Did you ever work in a company where facilities people decided that lights should be motion-sensor-activated after 6pm? Or a company where cafeteria people decided that there is no need to stock both milk and cream for coffee? Or a company where architects found out that by shrinking parking stalls just a few inches they could fit a few more cars in the underground parking? If you expect the sales staff to put links in emails instead of files attachments or if you want to impose a quota on mailboxes you have fallen for the same flawed logic as facilities people, cafeteria people and architects. You lost sight of the value chain and you miscalculate what is and what is not true waste.
IT should be there to offer training and provide guidance but in the end it's a support function, not a business driver. IT is there to support the sales staff, not school them or patronize them. If IT believes that a business process is suboptimal and should be addressed, there is a chain of command for that; you prepare a nice spreadsheet with itemized expenses and you run that up the chain. If the person in charge determines that the waste is in fact unacceptable, he/she will initiate a change.
$3000 per year = about $12 per working day. One can probably save more by shopping for a better long-distance calls provider than by making noise about those rascals in sales who make too many PDFs.
It should be ~$700 per MB, not per KB.
It looks expensive but a SMS is like a phone call, it can transit across a few telcos and maybe an aggregator or two in between. So that 10 cents is split between many players who have an expensive infrastructure to maintain (including databases where the message is often stored for a long time, and can be read by lots of bored developers or sysadmins).
Still cheaper than a postcard for something faster and with the same level of confidentiality (i.e: none).
The main "problem" I see is that more expensive, more capable networks (cellular and wifi) are already so pervasive.
Note to self: dump RIM stock!
Data like that might be very valuable to TPTB and also to people with not-so-nice intentions.
This story is about France, a near-bankrupt country where people cannot encrypt stuff unless the government can decrypt it, and where you go to jail for making a racist joke in public, while the poor people in suburbs are burning cars and throwing rocks at the cops. In Paris many people don't lock their cars to avoid damage to windows when thieves do their regular rounds (on their way to gang-rape schoolgirls). In this context I would say that someone using the time people turn off home theaters to do harm is a long shot.
> [..] John Marshall, an independent aviation-safety consultant who spent 26 years in the Air Force before overseeing Delta's safety.
If instead they had hired someone who spent 26 years in the Delta Force before overseeing Air safety maybe I would not have to step in bare socks on a mat covered with foot sweat while holding my pants at the security checks in airports since all terrorists would have been Chuck Norrised.
Golly....if only there was something the airlines could do to make being a pilot more attractive.
Creative suggestion: give them a share of the iPads stolen from honest people by TSA agents (aka: the terrorist tax).
Air travel prices go up, demand goes down until they match. The riff-raff will have to travel Greyhound.
This plan is already in motion, that's why the TSA has started to search "the bus people".
Did you see that video (How Obama Got Elected in 2008): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm1KOBMg1Y8
Many of the "informed" people who appear in the video mention the Daily Show as a source for news. So bash Fox News as much as you want, but clearly (Everything - Fox News) is not doing such a good job of informing people either. Those people don't know who is Nancy Pelosi or who controls the Congress, but they know who got 50k worth of clothes or who has a pregnant teenager. Proud, informed voters.
My first post in this thread was a joke but it is now clear that Obama is like Muhammad, if you make a single reference to him that is not a praise all the cult members go nuts. This is beyond sad because the people with an ideology and a church are supposed to be the Republicans. You people behave exactly like O'Reilly who labeled anyone who disagreed with Bush as "anti-american". Shame on you.