There is ground between a negative opinion and libel or slander.
And often the difference is in the truth and justification for the negative opionion, or negative information. Do you expect moderators to do investigative journalism for every potentially libelous claim made? Anything remotely resembling libel, no matter how justified, would just be censored if the host could be held responsible for all content.
Why would it be so hard to moderate posts before they go public? It'd take all of 10 seconds to read the average posting and scan it for libelous content.
Ok, if you want to be taken seriously, then demonstrate it wouldn't be hard. There are about 200 posts in this topic. Pretend you own this site. Now go through each post and decide on each one whether it is potentially libelous, since you will now be held accountable if it is later found out to actually be libelous. At 10 seconds a post, you should be done in about half an hour. I want to see what your list looks like.
Now multiply this effort for every newsgroup, every irc room, every online server with a chat box, every message forum, etc. Imagine what Slashdot would look like if they were worried about getting sued. The free flow of information would be dead, and the site would be a useless shell of it's former self.
Who said you can't have free conversations? All I'm saying is if you're going to broadcast something to thousands of people that you make sure it's legal first. And the net effect of that is that nothing critical would ever get posted. Slashdot would cease to exist. Chatrooms would cease to exist.
Like I said a dozen times before, wait until you're the victim of a joe-job before you go on about how people should have the right to say anything they want. I never said people should have the right to say anything they want. I'm not against libel laws. What I am against is shutting down open forums by requiring hosting providers to be responsible for everything said. You want a 1984 world to guarantee you safety. You feel that the law of the land should be written by the most victimized, regardless of the consequences.
Drinking and driving is illegal, yet people still do it. Libel is illegal, yet people still do it. The answer isn't to require 1984 by disallowing free discussion.
And I'm pro-individual rights, which includes the rights to live safely (free from ridicule, contempt, torment, etc). So, umm, people aren't allowed to ridicule other people? Why on earth are you reading Slashot?
People should be responsible for what they write, and people should be responsible for what they host. Your world sucks. It is impossible for moderators to determine libel of every post made. Nothing critical would get posted, ever, for fear of somebody suing over libel. A site like Slashdot would be useless. Chatrooms could not exist. Do you get it? If every single communication had to be approved by somebody, and require tracing of who said what, that would be an Orwellian 1984 world.
I'm sorry somebody joe jobbed you. Crime happens, and it sucks when it happens to you. The answer isn't to turn the world into an oppressive, sanitized-for-your-protection prison.
Last time I looked at the goatse.cx image was about 5 years ago, and it is still burned in my head. I know you said you wouldn't follow any links, but I think this comic depicts your pain amusingly: http://www.vgcats.com/othercomics/?strip_id=10
I got it from Wikipedia. It's safe. Trust me! No really, I'm not kidding, it's funny. Seriously, I'm not trying to fool you. Ah well, you'll never believe me:)
Oh get off it. Nobody is going to track down some idiot posting a joke bid via Tor. You May Talk Seriously and Sternly all you want, but it ain't gonna happen. And even if they did, they wouldn't hold him to a trillion dollar debt.
Why do we even have these fast things if we're not making use of even half their potential ? The post that I replied to already covered that. It's to be more productive coding. While you're sitting their spending all your time optimizing assembler, the other guy gets his stuff out the door with more features, and people don't care that it takes 10 megs to run the app instead of 200k, because they have gigs to play with. They don't care that it takes 200ms instead of 1ms.
It's all about tradeoffs. A good engineer chooses intelligently what tradeoffs to make. Sometimes optimization is called for, sometimes it isn't. In the environments where it matters, people optimize.
Sadly this isn't what's being ordered. What's sad is that anything should be ordered to the news media by people with strong ties to the government. The government orders that 50% of news be happy? And you think this would be a good thing?
What facts specifically do you think Gore is "fast and loose" with? I did a Google search, and the first page linked to has a pretty damning accusation, if true:
Take sea level rise for example. Gore spends a lot of time talking about how dramatic melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps that could raise sea level by 20 feet by 2100. He shows computer animated maps in which most of southern Florida, southern Manhattan, Shanghai, and Bangladesh are inundated. "Think of the impact of a couple hundred thousand refugees, and then imagine 100 million," says Gore. Of course his reference to the couple of hundred thousand refugees aims to evoke thoughts about the horrific experience of New Orleanians last year.
Well, the "consensus" of climate scientists as represented in the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is that sea level is likely to rise between 4 inches to 35 inches with a central value of 19 inches.
I see what your saying, and I agree with a lot of it. The world is getting more and more complex. The media does simplify and distort stuff, to a large extent. The average person is not well informed enough to be making decisions.
And yet I'd argue that has always been the case. Still, I believe the system self-organizes, and while there are failures, it largely succeeds. Just look at the world around you, and the achievements human society have made. The thing that scares me is the that as technology gets more powerful the damage any single person can do increases (and this was my fear before 9/11). Eh, but whatever, I've got a life to live. Thanks for the conversation:)
But, but, the pipleline will stall! My God, think of the pipeline! And the cache, what about the cache! Think of all those poor CPU cycles being wasted. Just wasted!
Then you sound like any of the thousands of young arrogant liberal bloggers out there that think they have the total right to spew their libby rhetoric about like a popping, infected boil. I think it is tremendously funny how when a liberal-minded (oxymoron?) person rants and raves [..] And who is ranting and raving now?
Preview helps. But anyways, I looked at the HTML source to get the original formatting.
I don't buy your argument. When I look at the microscopic scale, easy access to information has made my life so much more convenient and made me more informed. You might argue that having millions and millions of people contributing to a network would result in a vast sea of useless information, one where you could never find what you were interested in. And yet Google, Wikipedia, word of mouth, whatever -- the information magically found a way to organize itself in a useful manner. Apply that across the board, and people are in general more informed and productive.
Obviously the system is working, to a great extent. It hasn't devolved into some nightmare dystopia, despite all the ranting that goes on. Look back at all of history -- is the common person better or worse off?
Sony has a lot to do to recover their image. Nintendo turned it around, Sony can too. Heck, Sony even has the benefit of seeing what works. Now if only they'd decide to think about it. Instead, we get BS like this. I agree, they haven't learned from their mistakes, despite what Phil Harrison talked about in his interview.
Yes...and despite that, they still sold more in the first two days than the Wii or the 360 did in their respective first months. They sold more because they had more to sell. Once the initial demand sold through, sales plummeted.
"Selling more" is a far more meaningful success than "perceived internet public opinion." Indeed, and they aren't selling more -- look at the March NPD numbers. Sony has lost this round. Really.
I know a few people thinking about getting a PS3, and it's not really the price issue that's holding them back but the content. If $600 is no big deal for you when buying a game console, and you read Slashdot, I'm guessing you are a well-payed techie with lots of free spending money, and your friends are too. Sony needs people outside of this niche. I've read lots of forum posts from people who want to buy a PS3 but are waiting for more games and a price drop. I'm thinking they could sell a lot more at $400, but I don't think they can afford to sell them at this price, even 6 months from now.
Lots of commercial enterprises use the GPL for reasons like this; they have valuable assets they want to give away (in the from of source code), but they don't want their competitors using it to screw them over--they want the world to benefit, and they themselves might benefit from seeing improvements to their code. That's the GPL.
This isn't exactly true. Lots of companies are using the GPL so they can sell their code under a closed license to commerical companies that cannot use the GPL. MySQL and Trolltech being the most obvious examples.
You'd want to take some steps to ensure that it at least STAYS free, right?
LGPL is a good solution for that. The open code written by you stays open, but can be used by closed code. It gives commercial companies a reason to use your code and give back, without having to give up all their code.
NoOneInParticular's reply to you is right. You are wrong on this issue. Statically linking only requires that you give a way for recipiient to recompile the binary with a modified LGPL portion. It doesn't require you to release your source.
If you want to profit from your work, use the GPL. I'm glad to see you mention this GPL tactic being used by commercial companies. It's pretty stealthy, and a lot of people haven't caught on.
LGPL has no real advantage over the GPL. Sure it does. In general I don't like the GPL because of it's viral nature. However, I like the idea that if others improve your code then you get the improvements, but without trying to take over surrounding code. It really isn't that hard to draw the line between third party and first party code. As a developer I'm inclined to use LGPL code and give back, but not so with GPL.
BSD is the "real" free license. I think public domain is the "real" license. BSD requires you to carry around a lengthy copyright notice, and you have to do that for each BSD codebase you use. I prefer a "just use the fucking code, I don't care" attitude than BSDs "credit me, credit me!" attitude.
There are always going to be niche markets that serve people who KNOW quality and service
There are also markets where people buy more expensive stuff not because they KNOW it is better, but because they THINK it is better because it is higher priced. The problem is lack of consumer information, and it is very hard to overcome. Even when you do the research, there's often precious little to go by. The article states the case pretty well:
"All these signals have their problems. Even product reviews, which should be as comprehensive as the Tweakers' Secustick review, rarely are. Many firewall comparison reviews focus on things the reviewers can easily measure, like packets per second, rather than how secure the products are. In IDS comparisons, you can find the same bogus "number of signatures" comparison. Buyers lap that stuff up; in the absence of deep understanding, they happily accept shallow data.
With so many mediocre security products on the market, and the difficulty of coming up with a strong quality signal, vendors don't have strong incentives to invest in developing good products. And the vendors that do tend to die a quiet and lonely death."
Slashdot Mirror
And often the difference is in the truth and justification for the negative opionion, or negative information. Do you expect moderators to do investigative journalism for every potentially libelous claim made? Anything remotely resembling libel, no matter how justified, would just be censored if the host could be held responsible for all content.
Why would it be so hard to moderate posts before they go public? It'd take all of 10 seconds to read the average posting and scan it for libelous content.Ok, if you want to be taken seriously, then demonstrate it wouldn't be hard. There are about 200 posts in this topic. Pretend you own this site. Now go through each post and decide on each one whether it is potentially libelous, since you will now be held accountable if it is later found out to actually be libelous. At 10 seconds a post, you should be done in about half an hour. I want to see what your list looks like.
Now multiply this effort for every newsgroup, every irc room, every online server with a chat box, every message forum, etc. Imagine what Slashdot would look like if they were worried about getting sued. The free flow of information would be dead, and the site would be a useless shell of it's former self.
Drinking and driving is illegal, yet people still do it. Libel is illegal, yet people still do it. The answer isn't to require 1984 by disallowing free discussion.
I'm sorry somebody joe jobbed you. Crime happens, and it sucks when it happens to you. The answer isn't to turn the world into an oppressive, sanitized-for-your-protection prison.
I'll second the Anonymous Coward. Digg is awful. Slashdot is far from perfect, but Digg?
I got it from Wikipedia. It's safe. Trust me! No really, I'm not kidding, it's funny. Seriously, I'm not trying to fool you. Ah well, you'll never believe me
Oh get off it. Nobody is going to track down some idiot posting a joke bid via Tor. You May Talk Seriously and Sternly all you want, but it ain't gonna happen. And even if they did, they wouldn't hold him to a trillion dollar debt.
Even easier is to not click on tiny urls. It was a neat idea, but I'd rather people just post the full link.
It's all about tradeoffs. A good engineer chooses intelligently what tradeoffs to make. Sometimes optimization is called for, sometimes it isn't. In the environments where it matters, people optimize.
Funny :) I actually have a libertarian bent myself, but sadly the Libertarian party is full of extremists.
Your reply was very good. I doubt it'll have any impact on fyngyrz, but good attempt nonetheless.
I see what your saying, and I agree with a lot of it. The world is getting more and more complex. The media does simplify and distort stuff, to a large extent. The average person is not well informed enough to be making decisions.
:)
And yet I'd argue that has always been the case. Still, I believe the system self-organizes, and while there are failures, it largely succeeds. Just look at the world around you, and the achievements human society have made. The thing that scares me is the that as technology gets more powerful the damage any single person can do increases (and this was my fear before 9/11). Eh, but whatever, I've got a life to live. Thanks for the conversation
But, but, the pipleline will stall! My God, think of the pipeline! And the cache, what about the cache! Think of all those poor CPU cycles being wasted. Just wasted!
Didn't he already give himself powers to rule by decree? What would it take to arrive?
Preview helps. But anyways, I looked at the HTML source to get the original formatting.
I don't buy your argument. When I look at the microscopic scale, easy access to information has made my life so much more convenient and made me more informed. You might argue that having millions and millions of people contributing to a network would result in a vast sea of useless information, one where you could never find what you were interested in. And yet Google, Wikipedia, word of mouth, whatever -- the information magically found a way to organize itself in a useful manner. Apply that across the board, and people are in general more informed and productive.
Obviously the system is working, to a great extent. It hasn't devolved into some nightmare dystopia, despite all the ranting that goes on. Look back at all of history -- is the common person better or worse off?
Better luck next round, Sony.
This isn't exactly true. Lots of companies are using the GPL so they can sell their code under a closed license to commerical companies that cannot use the GPL. MySQL and Trolltech being the most obvious examples.
You'd want to take some steps to ensure that it at least STAYS free, right?LGPL is a good solution for that. The open code written by you stays open, but can be used by closed code. It gives commercial companies a reason to use your code and give back, without having to give up all their code.
NoOneInParticular's reply to you is right. You are wrong on this issue. Statically linking only requires that you give a way for recipiient to recompile the binary with a modified LGPL portion. It doesn't require you to release your source.
There are also markets where people buy more expensive stuff not because they KNOW it is better, but because they THINK it is better because it is higher priced. The problem is lack of consumer information, and it is very hard to overcome. Even when you do the research, there's often precious little to go by. The article states the case pretty well:
"All these signals have their problems. Even product reviews, which should be as comprehensive as the Tweakers' Secustick review, rarely are. Many firewall comparison reviews focus on things the reviewers can easily measure, like packets per second, rather than how secure the products are. In IDS comparisons, you can find the same bogus "number of signatures" comparison. Buyers lap that stuff up; in the absence of deep understanding, they happily accept shallow data.
With so many mediocre security products on the market, and the difficulty of coming up with a strong quality signal, vendors don't have strong incentives to invest in developing good products. And the vendors that do tend to die a quiet and lonely death."