LOL!!!! Oh, you're a fucking ignorant typical American fuckwad who knows jack about the world and still to this day thinks intervention in Iraq was somehow a good thing.... ?
Perhaps that's because in some cases the UN knew better?
Action wasn't needed in Iraq in 2003 at least, action in Iraq led to a few orders of magnitude more civilian deaths, and allowed Syria and Iran to spread their influence (Saddam was a major limiting factor on their power ambitions there). Note how the same time Iran started increasing it's nuclear ambitions was pretty much the exact same time the US and it's allies had crippled Iraqi military capabilities?
I agree UN inaction on some things is indeed a big problem, but similarly, US action on other things has been an even bigger problem. US action over the last decade has massively increased global instability when compared to UN inaction.
The problem is that the HFT folks are run by ultra-rich investment banks, and the other players, those you mention that have an incentive to end that behaviour, are the gullable folk who are customers of those banks and mistakenly assume they're doing the right thing for them.
Everyone else just has the sense to keep the fuck away from it altogether, because, like every other type of gambling, the house always wins.
Hence, following this thread to it's logical conclusion, the internet was invented and deployed by one of, or a combination of Taiwan, Kosovo, and the Vatican City?
Moral of the story? Never try and follow any argument on Slashdot to it's logical conclusion and cite that conclusion in future. People will look at you funny.
Well death changes the perception of people, whether that sticks or not depends as much on how the media decides to portray them.
Princess Dianna for example is now often seen as a perfect princess who never deserved what happened to her, but to this day I remember literally only a day or two before her death the newspapers were full of stories about how she'd sworn at two young girls who'd bumped into her and were excited they'd met a real princess and asked for her autograph. Before that there was story after story about how she was swapping boyfriends every week amongst other things.
The media still finds her a convient rallying point of how perfect she was/how evil the royal family is/whatever else they want to come up with when it suits, which is a far cry from how they portrayed her even up to the day before she died.
No, historically cybersex always meant two people chatting to each other by something like IRC or IM in a sexual manner.
You may be right that the media has hijacked the term and misused it because they didn't understand it, but it's definition was historically always pretty clear. See here for the original definition:
Yes, the problem in this particular case is that the majority of Philippino cam girls are underage, it's a major problem there.
That's why other comments in this thread don't apply, they're applying Western standards where a few people run the livelihoods of many. In this case it's about ruining the livelihoods of a handful to protect the many - that's the fundamental issue here, it's not the small scale problem it is in the West which is what some people seem to think with their rather ethnocentric world view.
Or maybe because I'm a normal person who doesn't obsess over such petty things on the internet I actually talk to people and know that the absolute vast majority of women on the planet could give about as much of a toss about jokes about how long women take to get ready as I and most other men could give about jokes women make about men leaving the toilet seat up and so forth?
Still, congratulations on painting every female who enjoys getting herself dressed up as a loser, I'm sure you're obviously a star with the ladies yourself with that attitude.
Honestly, parroting the extreme feminist mantra doesn't make you a good person, it just means you have as an extreme abnormal view as they do. Here's news for you, most of the population (by a massive margin) both male and female are quite happy to have a bit of sarcastic humour in their lives. I guess it sucks to be you if your life is that uninteresting and that lacking in humorous banter that you feel the need to attack anyone who dare add a little bit of humour to a discussion, but regardless, that's your choice, being a boring lifeless overly political correct old fuck isn't really for me, nor is it most people, so get over yourself.
I've seen him a few times since around the town centre and honestly, I think he's probably actually a pick-pocket or something, he always walks up to everyone and anyone talking as if he knows them getting pretty close, tries to put their arm around them as if they're his best mate etc.
The problem is this isn't like Europe where it's just the odd child being abused here and there amongst hundreds of adults doing it of their own free will.
This is a country where the problem has reached epidemic proportions, where the issue exists in the majority of cases and that's why they've had to take such extreme action on it.
Your argument works fine when you're talking about a handful of people ruining it for hundreds, but that's not the case in the Philippines.
Also, it was "underground" anyway because it was never legal to use children in these shows, the difference is now that law enforcement agencies have been granted more effective legal instruments to actually pursue these cases more effectively and to actually shut them down.
It's the usual sensationalism. The BBC published an article with a similar headline the other day, except more than anything the cybersex the BBC was referring to was not really cybersex as people classically know it - in other words, this story seems to stem from the fact the BBC reporter got a little confused about everything.
No, the law in question states that the type of online sex that is banned is that which is for profit or other similar gain. The reason for the law is because the Philippines has a major problem with children being forced into online sex shows and so forth.
That means it's got fuck all to do with two people typing or camming intimitately to each other in a private capacity. It's entirely about commercial for-profit shows.
This isn't to defend the law, but to add a bit of clarity to the discussion. When looked at in context it's no worse than for example, the UK's digital economy act and similar that have outlawed cartoon porn, and home made BDSM/rape fantasy shit even when distributed in a not-for profit manner.
True story: I got on the train on my commute on the way home the other week as normal and this homeless guy got on and was pestering people, saying hello, being all friendly, then asking for money. I think he genuinely was homeless because he smelt homeless, though of course that's by no means a scientific measure of homelessness I'm sure.
Anyway, he paid his train fair no problem, got off the train and... pulled an iPhone out of his pocket and answered it. Granted it was only an iPhone 4, but here in the UK, it seems even the homeless have cellphones now.
Presumably you'd have to rely on things like number of citations for comments if you were going to try something like that fully automated.
But I honestly think the only way to really do it would be to manually go through and calculate the ratio of demonstrably correct posts modded to +5, to subjective posts modded to +5, to demonstrably wrong posts modded to +5 or something like that.
Even then it's still not going to be easy and will still not exactly be entirely scientific. You'd also need a decent sample size, which is where my comment about it being prohibitively time consuming came in.
The Woz QA was largely a one off though wasn't it? When was the last time we got to ask questions of anyone of his calibre?
I agree regarding science articles, they're one of the few areas where Slashdot still does well, but computing articles? politics? They're just full of bollocks now.
I suppose it's possibly because both computing and politics are rife with fanboys, whereas science is less polluted by these sorts of mindless drones, but certainly the level of computing discussion has grossly declined. It's rare I find anything in a computing topic that has any real learning value now, and I'm pretty certain that's not because I've magically mopped up every bit of knowledge about every aspect of computing.
"He/she/it needs to provide proof for their claims."
But why would they? It's a silly thing to ask for, it may frustrate people but I doubt anyone has the care to write some code or something or do an analysis of a worthwhile sample of Slashdot stories to provide a comparison. We're not trying to prove the Higgs boson discovery valid or anything here are we? Asking someone to prove something so absurdly difficult and time consuming to prove is silly. He's just posting his opinion and to be fair, it's one shared by a lot of long term visitors to this site so it's not as if he is alone in voicing that opinion.
Well if you want evidence, then to me one example is how infrequently some of Slashdot's finest members post now. Go look at Carmack's account, or Woz's (though Woz's may be skewed by his recent special Q&A now) and compare to historic trends for them.
Honestly, you only have to look at the accounts of some of most historically interesting and insightful people to see they've long left. Pretending the evidence isn't there, doesn't mean it isn't.
Sure Slashdot has always had 'tard arguments, but the problem is that they used to be intermingled with posts from some of the industry's brightest. Nowadays those posts are massively more infrequent and most threads are 'tard arguments. Moderating has become far more political than ever before (and IMHO a massively marked decline in just the last 2 - 3 years alone).
The average level of intellect in Slashdot discussions has unquestionably declined from where it was between it's early days and maybe to about 2004 - 2005. The decline has certainly seemed to slow since then up until about 2 - 3 years ago, now the number of high UID accounts appearing, posting shill bollocks the second a story appears and seeing it magically modded up to +5 instantaneously has ballooned to the point of silliness.
Fuck, even APK has become a more regular occurence, if that in itself doesn't demonstrate a marked decrease in the average level of intellect on Slashdot I don't know what does, he alone must single handedly guarantee at least a drop of around 50 in terms of average IQ here.
Yeah, how dare Microsoft make their browser automatically reflect the user's preferences rather than browsers like Firefox that automatically set the options to not reflect the user's preferences!
Honestly, it's not that everyone else doesn't understand as you seem to think. It's that they do not care about such a piss-poor excuse because it's simply fucking stupid.
I don't care if they don't honour it if it's set by default to me, it just means that they'll be in breach of RIPA and the Data Protection Act here in the UK for tracking me and storing data without my consent, and I can hence submit a complaint to the necessary authorities. We'll see how quickly they oblige when they're facing the weight of the law.
Sure foreign companies may not care what national law of other nations says, but if they're based in countries that offer no legal protection against this sort of thing then why would anyone naively assume they'd ever honour such a preference anyway?
It's likely in the UK and Europe that any advertiser ignoring this would be in breach of the data protection act.
As you have to explicitly grant companies permission to store data on you should this reach the Information Commissioner's Office in the UK it would almost certainly go something like this:
"ICO: Did the user opt in to tracking?"
"Ad company: No."
"ICO: Then you're guilty of breaking the data protection act, enjoy my new powers to grant 6 figure fines."
The problem is browsers like Firefox have (as is usual for them) chosen to ignore the wishes of users and opt people in to tracking by default.
As a tool for protecting privacy directly it's meaningless regardless of what the advertisers say they will or wont do if it can simply be ignored. As a legal instrument for making it explicit as to whether someone has opted in to being tracked or not it's great, if all browsers adopt it it may even become legally binding in some countries over time.
This is one of those few times where Microsoft is actually doing the right thing for end users, though I suspect it's still for selfish reasons (i.e. to harm Google's ad revenue).
Well it's not bullshit, that is the reason, you're welcome to go read the history of it yourself if you want from your favourite source rather than just screaming "BS" without obviously having a clue.
But I agree with the gist of what you're saying, because most people misunderstand this they allow themselves to say things that aren't the whole truth. If you're asked a yes or no answer in court, and a yes or no answer wont suffice then the correct response is not to give an answer, but to alert the judge to the fact that answering said question with a mere yes or no answer would mean you were breaching your oath to tell the whole truth. Given that it's upto the judge to decide whether that's the case or not, and upto them to decide if you can then give a fuller answer or not.
That absolutely is the way the oath is the way it is though whether you like it or not, it's solid fact.
All of that is irrelevant, he was asked by the judge to list all previous cases he'd been involved in and he didn't mention this specific one. That's contempt of court, simple as that, it's a pretty clear cut case when someone is asked a simple question and doesn't.
Dating back many centuries this has been recognised as a problem in court that is hence punishable, it is in fact why British courts went from saying "I promise to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth" to saying "I promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" precisely because people tried to get away with missing bits out like this guy - i.e. not actually telling the whole truth.
Yes, their userbase has been growing, but in proportion to the growth of the overall smartphone market it's been a relative decline, and that is why although their userbase is growing, their marketshare is shrinking. So say the market is originally 1000 users in size, and RIM owns what, to make it easy, let's say 10% of that - 100 users, then the market grows by another 10% (100 users) and RIM gain 5 of those new users then yes, they now have 105 users instead of 100, but their share of the market has declined from 10% (which would be 110 users).
This is also why Apple's marketshare with the iPhone has been fairly static around the 17% - 20% mark for about 2 years now despite them achieving record sales each quarter- because the iPhones per-unit sales growth has been roughly proportional to the increase in size of the market.
I think it's only Android that's been consistently outperforming market growth, though maybe Windows Phone too, but that's because it was at a low starting point to begin with.
For what it's worth though, although I disagree with how positive you are towards RIM, I don't think things are going quite as well for them as you seem to think, I do still think they're a player that people shouldn't ignore. Even if they have 5% of marketshare still then that's a) Still 10s of millions of customers, and b) Still far more than Microsoft, despite it's marketing money, it's defacto take over of Nokia, and it's ability to strong-arm people based on it's existing Windows based ecosystems.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL!!!! Oh, you're a fucking ignorant typical American fuckwad who knows jack about the world and still to this day thinks intervention in Iraq was somehow a good thing.... ?
Perhaps that's because in some cases the UN knew better?
Action wasn't needed in Iraq in 2003 at least, action in Iraq led to a few orders of magnitude more civilian deaths, and allowed Syria and Iran to spread their influence (Saddam was a major limiting factor on their power ambitions there). Note how the same time Iran started increasing it's nuclear ambitions was pretty much the exact same time the US and it's allies had crippled Iraqi military capabilities?
I agree UN inaction on some things is indeed a big problem, but similarly, US action on other things has been an even bigger problem. US action over the last decade has massively increased global instability when compared to UN inaction.
The problem is that the HFT folks are run by ultra-rich investment banks, and the other players, those you mention that have an incentive to end that behaviour, are the gullable folk who are customers of those banks and mistakenly assume they're doing the right thing for them.
Everyone else just has the sense to keep the fuck away from it altogether, because, like every other type of gambling, the house always wins.
Hence, following this thread to it's logical conclusion, the internet was invented and deployed by one of, or a combination of Taiwan, Kosovo, and the Vatican City?
Moral of the story? Never try and follow any argument on Slashdot to it's logical conclusion and cite that conclusion in future. People will look at you funny.
Well death changes the perception of people, whether that sticks or not depends as much on how the media decides to portray them.
Princess Dianna for example is now often seen as a perfect princess who never deserved what happened to her, but to this day I remember literally only a day or two before her death the newspapers were full of stories about how she'd sworn at two young girls who'd bumped into her and were excited they'd met a real princess and asked for her autograph. Before that there was story after story about how she was swapping boyfriends every week amongst other things.
The media still finds her a convient rallying point of how perfect she was/how evil the royal family is/whatever else they want to come up with when it suits, which is a far cry from how they portrayed her even up to the day before she died.
So that they can take the sites themselves offline, and hence remove the revenue stream incentive for the criminals driving this.
This is nothing unusual, every Western country already takes sites that profit from paedophilia offline where they can with similar laws.
No, historically cybersex always meant two people chatting to each other by something like IRC or IM in a sexual manner.
You may be right that the media has hijacked the term and misused it because they didn't understand it, but it's definition was historically always pretty clear. See here for the original definition:
http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/cybersex?showCookiePolicy=true
Yes, the problem in this particular case is that the majority of Philippino cam girls are underage, it's a major problem there.
That's why other comments in this thread don't apply, they're applying Western standards where a few people run the livelihoods of many. In this case it's about ruining the livelihoods of a handful to protect the many - that's the fundamental issue here, it's not the small scale problem it is in the West which is what some people seem to think with their rather ethnocentric world view.
Or maybe because I'm a normal person who doesn't obsess over such petty things on the internet I actually talk to people and know that the absolute vast majority of women on the planet could give about as much of a toss about jokes about how long women take to get ready as I and most other men could give about jokes women make about men leaving the toilet seat up and so forth?
Still, congratulations on painting every female who enjoys getting herself dressed up as a loser, I'm sure you're obviously a star with the ladies yourself with that attitude.
Honestly, parroting the extreme feminist mantra doesn't make you a good person, it just means you have as an extreme abnormal view as they do. Here's news for you, most of the population (by a massive margin) both male and female are quite happy to have a bit of sarcastic humour in their lives. I guess it sucks to be you if your life is that uninteresting and that lacking in humorous banter that you feel the need to attack anyone who dare add a little bit of humour to a discussion, but regardless, that's your choice, being a boring lifeless overly political correct old fuck isn't really for me, nor is it most people, so get over yourself.
...and then there was more trolling.
The 3rd type is "Naked pics".
I've seen him a few times since around the town centre and honestly, I think he's probably actually a pick-pocket or something, he always walks up to everyone and anyone talking as if he knows them getting pretty close, tries to put their arm around them as if they're his best mate etc.
The problem is this isn't like Europe where it's just the odd child being abused here and there amongst hundreds of adults doing it of their own free will.
This is a country where the problem has reached epidemic proportions, where the issue exists in the majority of cases and that's why they've had to take such extreme action on it.
Your argument works fine when you're talking about a handful of people ruining it for hundreds, but that's not the case in the Philippines.
Also, it was "underground" anyway because it was never legal to use children in these shows, the difference is now that law enforcement agencies have been granted more effective legal instruments to actually pursue these cases more effectively and to actually shut them down.
It's the usual sensationalism. The BBC published an article with a similar headline the other day, except more than anything the cybersex the BBC was referring to was not really cybersex as people classically know it - in other words, this story seems to stem from the fact the BBC reporter got a little confused about everything.
No, the law in question states that the type of online sex that is banned is that which is for profit or other similar gain. The reason for the law is because the Philippines has a major problem with children being forced into online sex shows and so forth.
That means it's got fuck all to do with two people typing or camming intimitately to each other in a private capacity. It's entirely about commercial for-profit shows.
This isn't to defend the law, but to add a bit of clarity to the discussion. When looked at in context it's no worse than for example, the UK's digital economy act and similar that have outlawed cartoon porn, and home made BDSM/rape fantasy shit even when distributed in a not-for profit manner.
No problem.
"it worries me how much mental energy they were putting into something as simple as getting dressed"
Well half the human race seems to be able to manage making getting dressed a multi-hour ordeal so it's far from unusual.
That half would of course, be the female half.
True story: I got on the train on my commute on the way home the other week as normal and this homeless guy got on and was pestering people, saying hello, being all friendly, then asking for money. I think he genuinely was homeless because he smelt homeless, though of course that's by no means a scientific measure of homelessness I'm sure.
Anyway, he paid his train fair no problem, got off the train and... pulled an iPhone out of his pocket and answered it. Granted it was only an iPhone 4, but here in the UK, it seems even the homeless have cellphones now.
Presumably you'd have to rely on things like number of citations for comments if you were going to try something like that fully automated.
But I honestly think the only way to really do it would be to manually go through and calculate the ratio of demonstrably correct posts modded to +5, to subjective posts modded to +5, to demonstrably wrong posts modded to +5 or something like that.
Even then it's still not going to be easy and will still not exactly be entirely scientific. You'd also need a decent sample size, which is where my comment about it being prohibitively time consuming came in.
The Woz QA was largely a one off though wasn't it? When was the last time we got to ask questions of anyone of his calibre?
I agree regarding science articles, they're one of the few areas where Slashdot still does well, but computing articles? politics? They're just full of bollocks now.
I suppose it's possibly because both computing and politics are rife with fanboys, whereas science is less polluted by these sorts of mindless drones, but certainly the level of computing discussion has grossly declined. It's rare I find anything in a computing topic that has any real learning value now, and I'm pretty certain that's not because I've magically mopped up every bit of knowledge about every aspect of computing.
"He/she/it needs to provide proof for their claims."
But why would they? It's a silly thing to ask for, it may frustrate people but I doubt anyone has the care to write some code or something or do an analysis of a worthwhile sample of Slashdot stories to provide a comparison. We're not trying to prove the Higgs boson discovery valid or anything here are we? Asking someone to prove something so absurdly difficult and time consuming to prove is silly. He's just posting his opinion and to be fair, it's one shared by a lot of long term visitors to this site so it's not as if he is alone in voicing that opinion.
Well if you want evidence, then to me one example is how infrequently some of Slashdot's finest members post now. Go look at Carmack's account, or Woz's (though Woz's may be skewed by his recent special Q&A now) and compare to historic trends for them.
Honestly, you only have to look at the accounts of some of most historically interesting and insightful people to see they've long left. Pretending the evidence isn't there, doesn't mean it isn't.
Sure Slashdot has always had 'tard arguments, but the problem is that they used to be intermingled with posts from some of the industry's brightest. Nowadays those posts are massively more infrequent and most threads are 'tard arguments. Moderating has become far more political than ever before (and IMHO a massively marked decline in just the last 2 - 3 years alone).
The average level of intellect in Slashdot discussions has unquestionably declined from where it was between it's early days and maybe to about 2004 - 2005. The decline has certainly seemed to slow since then up until about 2 - 3 years ago, now the number of high UID accounts appearing, posting shill bollocks the second a story appears and seeing it magically modded up to +5 instantaneously has ballooned to the point of silliness.
Fuck, even APK has become a more regular occurence, if that in itself doesn't demonstrate a marked decrease in the average level of intellect on Slashdot I don't know what does, he alone must single handedly guarantee at least a drop of around 50 in terms of average IQ here.
Yeah, how dare Microsoft make their browser automatically reflect the user's preferences rather than browsers like Firefox that automatically set the options to not reflect the user's preferences!
Honestly, it's not that everyone else doesn't understand as you seem to think. It's that they do not care about such a piss-poor excuse because it's simply fucking stupid.
I don't care if they don't honour it if it's set by default to me, it just means that they'll be in breach of RIPA and the Data Protection Act here in the UK for tracking me and storing data without my consent, and I can hence submit a complaint to the necessary authorities. We'll see how quickly they oblige when they're facing the weight of the law.
Sure foreign companies may not care what national law of other nations says, but if they're based in countries that offer no legal protection against this sort of thing then why would anyone naively assume they'd ever honour such a preference anyway?
It's likely in the UK and Europe that any advertiser ignoring this would be in breach of the data protection act.
As you have to explicitly grant companies permission to store data on you should this reach the Information Commissioner's Office in the UK it would almost certainly go something like this:
"ICO: Did the user opt in to tracking?"
"Ad company: No."
"ICO: Then you're guilty of breaking the data protection act, enjoy my new powers to grant 6 figure fines."
The problem is browsers like Firefox have (as is usual for them) chosen to ignore the wishes of users and opt people in to tracking by default.
As a tool for protecting privacy directly it's meaningless regardless of what the advertisers say they will or wont do if it can simply be ignored. As a legal instrument for making it explicit as to whether someone has opted in to being tracked or not it's great, if all browsers adopt it it may even become legally binding in some countries over time.
This is one of those few times where Microsoft is actually doing the right thing for end users, though I suspect it's still for selfish reasons (i.e. to harm Google's ad revenue).
Well it's not bullshit, that is the reason, you're welcome to go read the history of it yourself if you want from your favourite source rather than just screaming "BS" without obviously having a clue.
But I agree with the gist of what you're saying, because most people misunderstand this they allow themselves to say things that aren't the whole truth. If you're asked a yes or no answer in court, and a yes or no answer wont suffice then the correct response is not to give an answer, but to alert the judge to the fact that answering said question with a mere yes or no answer would mean you were breaching your oath to tell the whole truth. Given that it's upto the judge to decide whether that's the case or not, and upto them to decide if you can then give a fuller answer or not.
That absolutely is the way the oath is the way it is though whether you like it or not, it's solid fact.
All of that is irrelevant, he was asked by the judge to list all previous cases he'd been involved in and he didn't mention this specific one. That's contempt of court, simple as that, it's a pretty clear cut case when someone is asked a simple question and doesn't.
Dating back many centuries this has been recognised as a problem in court that is hence punishable, it is in fact why British courts went from saying "I promise to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth" to saying "I promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" precisely because people tried to get away with missing bits out like this guy - i.e. not actually telling the whole truth.
Yes, their userbase has been growing, but in proportion to the growth of the overall smartphone market it's been a relative decline, and that is why although their userbase is growing, their marketshare is shrinking. So say the market is originally 1000 users in size, and RIM owns what, to make it easy, let's say 10% of that - 100 users, then the market grows by another 10% (100 users) and RIM gain 5 of those new users then yes, they now have 105 users instead of 100, but their share of the market has declined from 10% (which would be 110 users).
This is also why Apple's marketshare with the iPhone has been fairly static around the 17% - 20% mark for about 2 years now despite them achieving record sales each quarter- because the iPhones per-unit sales growth has been roughly proportional to the increase in size of the market.
I think it's only Android that's been consistently outperforming market growth, though maybe Windows Phone too, but that's because it was at a low starting point to begin with.
For what it's worth though, although I disagree with how positive you are towards RIM, I don't think things are going quite as well for them as you seem to think, I do still think they're a player that people shouldn't ignore. Even if they have 5% of marketshare still then that's a) Still 10s of millions of customers, and b) Still far more than Microsoft, despite it's marketing money, it's defacto take over of Nokia, and it's ability to strong-arm people based on it's existing Windows based ecosystems.