(Dr. Emmett Brown) "According to my calculations, the nature of the First Post directly influences the quality of the entire thread. When a really good First Post is made, the quality of the thread increases between 25-75%, because in most neutral (non flame bait) stories, once the "famous first slot" is taken, and then there are some five to seven good replies, trolls don't bother as much with low grade slots down farther in the chain. The improvements to the quality include a 20% drop in "Slashdot sux" comments too.
(/Dr. Emmett Brown)
Say what you like about those awesome back to the future movies, Doc Brown was awesome because his math was almost never wrong.
But maybe part of the flaw is using "boutique like locationing". Upscale mall branches, etc.
Most hobbyists wanting parts are men, right? Aren't we supposed to just want our parts and not overly care about the pretty cell phones?
Why not do the BJ's / Sam's Club approach to parts? Make it a little out of the way, and stock all the basics. Then if a real expert comes and stumps you, get really good at being a location for ordering parts.
By having it turned on, you're arguably approving it for "all audiences". This includes me, either via Anonymous hacking Google, or even Google just being evil and selling it.
The particular problem with this request is the duration. Someone was asking about college students and psych experiements - a lot of those are the day or even 1 week variety, where the student subconsciously knows "he needs to be on good behavior".
This is more like signing a waiver on Sept 1, getting your certificate to the campus bookstore, and then in February you decide to play a prank on the Dean... well... you signed the waiver, right? And yes, there isn't that much of a difference in concept between signing off for a "monitor anklet" or the browser. We aren't socially ready to be watched 24-7 with "digital interpretation of rules". Just think of mashing this up with the Copyright Brigade.
"Did you knowingly go to JustinBieberForever and download the UltraRareDrunkPartyEdition of his song, as evidenced to Google Log on Sat, January ___ 2012? You know that is an unauthorized copy, right? Pay up."
THAT's the curse. We're better than most at granular actions here on slashdot, but it's like that article where the entire first world breaks copyright a minimum of three times an hour or something.
And yes, in 1984 this would have been Tin Foil Hat territory, in 2012 with the SOPA-ACTA cousins, it's not. P.S. Smile for TomTom. We know that you went to that red light district. We will with-hold this information, for a fee...
You know what the last piece of this puzzle is, don't you? The one that brings about Mayan Dec21? (Lots of time left!) Anonymous Swipes/Google Traitor leaks *the entire database of what 30 million Chrome users surfed to for an entire year.*
I've been monitoring and cautioning against these sneakily worded Trojan Horses, (Chuck show, Quinn characeter "...For too long now. But not tonight, not again!" (remixed) "This time we have to quit being ostriches burying our heads in the sand. Once we know the true dark side of the digital age, and all the pain that shall flow, then maybe we'll put a halt to all these draconian laws, faced with 110 BILLION web surf transactions."
How about an alternate version of the plugin where *everybody* gets to see your search history? After all, you're edging close to the "I have nothing to hide" department, so as a medium-classic privacy advocate here, I reply "prove it".
If that suddenly changes things, then we're getting into "Oh, but I trust Google but I don't trust you". What about the government?
Remember, it also becomes a 1 stop shop for the government to buy the profiles in bulk.
The unfortunately beautiful evil logic of the Big Brother process is it's *always* stated as "So we can make shopping a bliss for you."
Then in a flash (say a month's worth of backroom deals) you get an example like the one earlier, "Insurance companies will use GPS Vendor satellite feeds to see that leadfoot habit of yours, so your insurance goes up," (and mild satire next) "A complimentary copy is sent to the cop on Highway 4 so he knows to try pulling you over."
So sorry, I'm taking the pessimist view on this. 7,000,000 site visits per person (20ish a day maybe). Yeah, tell me that's not juicy in the wrong hands.
We all know how the intelligence curve works, right? Really smart ranges get *more rare*, while Google's PageRank values *more common* results. So the link farm companies had their day building 100 sites that all link to each other with little else on it but a list of hit words.
What we need is an engine that gives smart answers, now How is Babby Formed type stuff. Problem is there might be only 5 copies of a good answer out there, and lots of junk ones.
Unfortunately, this includes me for the time being.
My experiences with uBuntu were a disaster. Some were upgrade problems, then driver support changed, semi-bricking one machine, etc etc.
I also never understood why I couldn't simply update Firefox, I kept getting error messages about newer versions of ____ file necessary. Sorry, Windows "just updates stuff".
When next I feel like foraging into linux land, maybe it will be Mint, or something, and I've been quietly itching to try Xfce or something as the manager.
Thank you for the nice long reply. Here's some notes.
When I said "class of greed that operates flawlessly legally", I meant it to be read:
class of greed that operates (flawlessly legally), and you came up with an answer to the equally interesting
class of greed that (operates flawlessly) legally, so that's a case of 'nice answer to something else'.
By that phrase I meant about the Executives of corporations clearly demonstrating greed by using loopholes etc, such that they didn't cross the legal line, but are acting maliciously against better humanistic interests. I'm the first to admit Americans have a fine standard of living, and the "outsource countries" are in conditions we wouldn't tolerate.
I drew a distinction between corruption that blatantly (seems to) defy the law, vs immoral actions that are technically in the letter of the law. If the corp found a loophole, they're safe until someone fixes the bad law, vs (seemingly) clearly breaking the law, and then the "influenced" judge magically just throws out the lawsuit/finds for the 'wrong side' with a Nelson HaHa like the IP proceedings of Texas.
"Professional means of influence" - that's the slippery part right there. Generally speaking, that influence consists of "I'll give you money, you write me a law, my boss pays me my cut of the profits he makes with the new law." That's the entrenched Good Ol' Boy network that's going to be hard to unravel.
The Prisoner's Dilemma is about a "short term" "narrowly rational" decision based on not trusting the other people to have enough synergy to push through the best solution for all. It's clearly about the lack of communication aspect, and I like your part about binding leadership. In the classic 4-square dilemma, both players end up in the "mildly crappy" scenario because they expect the other person to make an equally individualistic choice, when the best result "on the game board" is both players win and neither loses.
In the voting world, for once we managed to show that kind of unity to slow down SOPA, and the Euro countries woke up and are slowing down ACTA. Not perfect, but for once we made a start. For me, that's the true purpose of Social Media, it's the only cross-location communication method that lets the masses have the same amount of orchestration as the Washington crowd.
I have dreamed of a project of a site/system that takes every piece of legislation line by line with a social Like and DoNotWant, with comments, and maybe MetaMods, etc. Then that "minivote" becomes *applied to political action*. "Because the following Reps/Senators approved/voted down this bill, my opinion is to Like or DoNotWant that politician by X amount, and after some threshold, that means I will not vote for you next term." Voters would take the summary data to the polls with them, "remember you hate this guy because he did this and this and this."
So if a politician is willing to risk his job for x votes, "have at it, but you know what's coming".
As for the Canary thing, I can't recall exactly where I heard of the idea, maybe Bruce Schneier, but here's a close analogue. From this site about another topic, http://blog.urbaninsight.com/comment/1506
"Binary Canary is a web service that continually checks to see if a website is online and sends out alerts when it's not."
That was my point - It's a service that requires routine successes to stay silent, such as refreshing a page, and then when the action is not performed, (presumably because the operator is in custody) the Canary server sends out an alert. Yes, of course it's prone to Operator Forgetting, but for the highest levels of danger, the operator wouldn't forget, so when the Canary 'dies', people know that $hit Just Got Real.
Remember how they wanted to pull stuff OUT of Public Domain?
We can't have anything German! It might infect us with the same virus that created the world's ultimate terrorist! (Some portions of Godwin applies, see below for details.)
"Hi there. Nice GPL copyright-backed code you got there, that you're violating the license on. It would be a shame if you had to pay $375,000 per Copyrighted Work, aka each file in the 50,000 file package. The Choice Is Yours."
Come on guys, if they're going to abuse copyright law, abuse it back, preferably with a big gun case that sets precedent. "No, you don't get to "withdraw your case. You get to pay me X BILLION dollars! Or - your choice - you can go fix it in Congress so that copyright damages are back down to $20 per work, like it should be."
Let's say corruption is "correlated with greed". I would like to point out the class of greed that operates flawlessly legally, like Chinese labor rates and Foxconn (sp?) hiring *100,000* new workers who are *glad* to go there. As legal as it gets - and the offshoring greed is immense. 100,000 workers is something like 1/2000th of the entire working US population. (Your numbers may vary.)
Yes you can rally people both around malice, and against malice. K Street in Washington is rallied around malice. The Internet Blackout Day against SOPA was rallying against malice. The trouble is, the people perpetrating the malice are signing documents like "privacy makes you a terrorist", which doesn't leave a lot of legal ways to respond.
Your next thing about hating and herds is called the Prisoner's Dilemma. The "1%" are all in the same 100 lunch clubs, they have it all orchestrated on their side. The 99% then squabble among themselves, trying to fix it all, but... well,... it's harder to both orchestrate by the numbers, and with plenty of disadvantages to boot. Occupy Wall Street was laughed off by the media but it was one of the Protests of the Year, followed by (yes, mild) Internet Blackout Day. The fundmental problem is how to "beat the Prisoner's Dilemma so that we gain force in unity."
As for "construed as evil", corruption is the social version of "division by zero". An amusing thought experiment would be to point a gun at a mathematician's head and give him a flawed proof of something absurd. It contains a Division by Zero. Of course he will protest. "Do it." "But it's illegal!" (Gun Goes Click.) "Okay!" "Now sign the proof."
Once you cross the line it becomes Alice in Wonderland, at which point it doesn't make sense to bother caring anymore. Life becomes a Canary Test. "Today I was not abused by either the Govt or a Corp."
Well, yes. I am. Because the college class pace for that subject is easily twice as fast as I can really get around the ideas, so then rather than risk a "humanities" class trashing my grades I just... didn't take it. I just bought the books on my own and I peruse them at my leisure.
"Set in a dystopian future; pure sociology" - this was exactly the squabble back around the 60's with "Science" fiction vs "Speculative" fiction, where the latter category picked up non-hard-science stories. But then the "hard SF" writers got a little grumpy that "their label" was diluted, like you see the AC posts saying "slashdot is dead" today.
Oh, we have the tech - this one is handled on the legal side, with some good ol xenophobia/______.
Imagine if we were allowed to go shopping in "Privacy" suits. You could order stylish outfits that look like Master Chief. Sure, there would be different styles of suits, so it's that "pseudonym anonymity" theme, and some people are good at remembering voices, but it wouldn't readily be "sellable data".
That, and we need the credit card to be like a 1-sided swiss account that the bank would know, but not the shop keepers.
Slashdot Mirror
It's worse than that Jim, not only do they not know anything, they get more fun out of posting "Who is X" rather than looking it up.
Please do. Help End the Dumb First Post meme.
(Dr. Emmett Brown) "According to my calculations, the nature of the First Post directly influences the quality of the entire thread. When a really good First Post is made, the quality of the thread increases between 25-75%, because in most neutral (non flame bait) stories, once the "famous first slot" is taken, and then there are some five to seven good replies, trolls don't bother as much with low grade slots down farther in the chain. The improvements to the quality include a 20% drop in "Slashdot sux" comments too.
(/Dr. Emmett Brown)
Say what you like about those awesome back to the future movies, Doc Brown was awesome because his math was almost never wrong.
There were lots of hot fags in the ancient Mesopotamian City of Ur.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh
"Geoooooooooooooooge Jetson! Get back to work!"
Honorable mentions:
Captain Kirk: "Khooooooooooooooooooooon"
Loooooooooooooooooooong Cat is Loooooooooooooooong.
Maybe I'm off track here.
But maybe part of the flaw is using "boutique like locationing". Upscale mall branches, etc.
Most hobbyists wanting parts are men, right? Aren't we supposed to just want our parts and not overly care about the pretty cell phones?
Why not do the BJ's / Sam's Club approach to parts? Make it a little out of the way, and stock all the basics. Then if a real expert comes and stumps you, get really good at being a location for ordering parts.
Yes, I'm glad someone finally noticed.
Now we don't even start the fp with "Dupe" anymore. They're getting good page hit value out of their stories now.
Actually, that would work pretty well, but it will never happen.
"Your private information is copyrighted to you, subject to the penalties of the copyright laws if they sell it to all their ad partners."
Hi there.
There's one more finesse.
By having it turned on, you're arguably approving it for "all audiences". This includes me, either via Anonymous hacking Google, or even Google just being evil and selling it.
The particular problem with this request is the duration. Someone was asking about college students and psych experiements - a lot of those are the day or even 1 week variety, where the student subconsciously knows "he needs to be on good behavior".
This is more like signing a waiver on Sept 1, getting your certificate to the campus bookstore, and then in February you decide to play a prank on the Dean ... well ... you signed the waiver, right? And yes, there isn't that much of a difference in concept between signing off for a "monitor anklet" or the browser. We aren't socially ready to be watched 24-7 with "digital interpretation of rules". Just think of mashing this up with the Copyright Brigade.
"Did you knowingly go to JustinBieberForever and download the UltraRareDrunkPartyEdition of his song, as evidenced to Google Log on Sat, January ___ 2012? You know that is an unauthorized copy, right? Pay up."
THAT's the curse. We're better than most at granular actions here on slashdot, but it's like that article where the entire first world breaks copyright a minimum of three times an hour or something.
And yes, in 1984 this would have been Tin Foil Hat territory, in 2012 with the SOPA-ACTA cousins, it's not. P.S. Smile for TomTom. We know that you went to that red light district. We will with-hold this information, for a fee...
You know what the last piece of this puzzle is, don't you? The one that brings about Mayan Dec21? (Lots of time left!) Anonymous Swipes/Google Traitor leaks *the entire database of what 30 million Chrome users surfed to for an entire year.*
I've been monitoring and cautioning against these sneakily worded Trojan Horses,
(Chuck show, Quinn characeter "...For too long now. But not tonight, not again!" (remixed) "This time we have to quit being ostriches burying our heads in the sand. Once we know the true dark side of the digital age, and all the pain that shall flow, then maybe we'll put a halt to all these draconian laws, faced with 110 BILLION web surf transactions."
Here's one way to rephrase the discussion.
How about an alternate version of the plugin where *everybody* gets to see your search history? After all, you're edging close to the "I have nothing to hide" department, so as a medium-classic privacy advocate here, I reply "prove it".
If that suddenly changes things, then we're getting into "Oh, but I trust Google but I don't trust you". What about the government?
Remember, it also becomes a 1 stop shop for the government to buy the profiles in bulk.
The unfortunately beautiful evil logic of the Big Brother process is it's *always* stated as "So we can make shopping a bliss for you."
Then in a flash (say a month's worth of backroom deals) you get an example like the one earlier, "Insurance companies will use GPS Vendor satellite feeds to see that leadfoot habit of yours, so your insurance goes up," (and mild satire next) "A complimentary copy is sent to the cop on Highway 4 so he knows to try pulling you over."
So sorry, I'm taking the pessimist view on this. 7,000,000 site visits per person (20ish a day maybe). Yeah, tell me that's not juicy in the wrong hands.
"But won't someone think of the Products!"
I'm more annoyed at the wording - "In the post ____ era, the world will never be the same."
Some notes:
We all know how the intelligence curve works, right? Really smart ranges get *more rare*, while Google's PageRank values *more common* results. So the link farm companies had their day building 100 sites that all link to each other with little else on it but a list of hit words.
What we need is an engine that gives smart answers, now How is Babby Formed type stuff. Problem is there might be only 5 copies of a good answer out there, and lots of junk ones.
Unfortunately, this includes me for the time being.
My experiences with uBuntu were a disaster. Some were upgrade problems, then driver support changed, semi-bricking one machine, etc etc.
I also never understood why I couldn't simply update Firefox, I kept getting error messages about newer versions of ____ file necessary. Sorry, Windows "just updates stuff".
When next I feel like foraging into linux land, maybe it will be Mint, or something, and I've been quietly itching to try Xfce or something as the manager.
Just wait till they hook it so that they can give you more ads.
"You liked Fettucini Alfredo, did you know we also do Spicy Southwest Macaroni and Cheese?"
Thank you for the nice long reply. Here's some notes.
When I said "class of greed that operates flawlessly legally", I meant it to be read:
class of greed that operates (flawlessly legally),
and you came up with an answer to the equally interesting
class of greed that (operates flawlessly) legally,
so that's a case of 'nice answer to something else'.
By that phrase I meant about the Executives of corporations clearly demonstrating greed by using loopholes etc, such that they didn't cross the legal line, but are acting maliciously against better humanistic interests. I'm the first to admit Americans have a fine standard of living, and the "outsource countries" are in conditions we wouldn't tolerate.
I drew a distinction between corruption that blatantly (seems to) defy the law, vs immoral actions that are technically in the letter of the law. If the corp found a loophole, they're safe until someone fixes the bad law, vs (seemingly) clearly breaking the law, and then the "influenced" judge magically just throws out the lawsuit/finds for the 'wrong side' with a Nelson HaHa like the IP proceedings of Texas.
"Professional means of influence" - that's the slippery part right there. Generally speaking, that influence consists of "I'll give you money, you write me a law, my boss pays me my cut of the profits he makes with the new law." That's the entrenched Good Ol' Boy network that's going to be hard to unravel.
The Prisoner's Dilemma is about a "short term" "narrowly rational" decision based on not trusting the other people to have enough synergy to push through the best solution for all. It's clearly about the lack of communication aspect, and I like your part about binding leadership. In the classic 4-square dilemma, both players end up in the "mildly crappy" scenario because they expect the other person to make an equally individualistic choice, when the best result "on the game board" is both players win and neither loses.
In the voting world, for once we managed to show that kind of unity to slow down SOPA, and the Euro countries woke up and are slowing down ACTA. Not perfect, but for once we made a start. For me, that's the true purpose of Social Media, it's the only cross-location communication method that lets the masses have the same amount of orchestration as the Washington crowd.
I have dreamed of a project of a site/system that takes every piece of legislation line by line with a social Like and DoNotWant, with comments, and maybe MetaMods, etc. Then that "minivote" becomes *applied to political action*. "Because the following Reps/Senators approved/voted down this bill, my opinion is to Like or DoNotWant that politician by X amount, and after some threshold, that means I will not vote for you next term." Voters would take the summary data to the polls with them, "remember you hate this guy because he did this and this and this."
So if a politician is willing to risk his job for x votes, "have at it, but you know what's coming".
As for the Canary thing, I can't recall exactly where I heard of the idea, maybe Bruce Schneier, but here's a close analogue. From this site about another topic, http://blog.urbaninsight.com/comment/1506
"Binary Canary is a web service that continually checks to see if a website is online and sends out alerts when it's not."
That was my point - It's a service that requires routine successes to stay silent, such as refreshing a page, and then when the action is not performed, (presumably because the operator is in custody) the Canary server sends out an alert. Yes, of course it's prone to Operator Forgetting, but for the highest levels of danger, the operator wouldn't forget, so when the Canary 'dies', people know that $hit Just Got Real.
Regards,
--Tao
Remember how they wanted to pull stuff OUT of Public Domain?
We can't have anything German! It might infect us with the same virus that created the world's ultimate terrorist!
(Some portions of Godwin applies, see below for details.)
* Except NYCL!
Initial thread over.
Of course there's lots of further issues to talk about, but you nailed it - control, not artists.
"Waah, we can't just send means letters and watch stuff vanish!"
You almost had it AC, but according to the Suspicious Activities flyer from today, paraphrased, buying a $200 stereo in cash makes you a terrorist.
It has to be easy on the tech side, it's being blocked on the legal side, to have name-blind credit cards.
I second this.
"Hi there. Nice GPL copyright-backed code you got there, that you're violating the license on. It would be a shame if you had to pay $375,000 per Copyrighted Work, aka each file in the 50,000 file package. The Choice Is Yours."
Come on guys, if they're going to abuse copyright law, abuse it back, preferably with a big gun case that sets precedent. "No, you don't get to "withdraw your case. You get to pay me X BILLION dollars! Or - your choice - you can go fix it in Congress so that copyright damages are back down to $20 per work, like it should be."
Hi there. Nice reply. Here's some notes.
Let's say corruption is "correlated with greed". I would like to point out the class of greed that operates flawlessly legally, like Chinese labor rates and Foxconn (sp?) hiring *100,000* new workers who are *glad* to go there. As legal as it gets - and the offshoring greed is immense. 100,000 workers is something like 1/2000th of the entire working US population. (Your numbers may vary.)
Yes you can rally people both around malice, and against malice. K Street in Washington is rallied around malice. The Internet Blackout Day against SOPA was rallying against malice. The trouble is, the people perpetrating the malice are signing documents like "privacy makes you a terrorist", which doesn't leave a lot of legal ways to respond.
Your next thing about hating and herds is called the Prisoner's Dilemma. The "1%" are all in the same 100 lunch clubs, they have it all orchestrated on their side. The 99% then squabble among themselves, trying to fix it all, but ... well, ... it's harder to both orchestrate by the numbers, and with plenty of disadvantages to boot. Occupy Wall Street was laughed off by the media but it was one of the Protests of the Year, followed by (yes, mild) Internet Blackout Day. The fundmental problem is how to "beat the Prisoner's Dilemma so that we gain force in unity."
As for "construed as evil", corruption is the social version of "division by zero". An amusing thought experiment would be to point a gun at a mathematician's head and give him a flawed proof of something absurd. It contains a Division by Zero. Of course he will protest. "Do it." "But it's illegal!" (Gun Goes Click.) "Okay!" "Now sign the proof."
Once you cross the line it becomes Alice in Wonderland, at which point it doesn't make sense to bother caring anymore. Life becomes a Canary Test. "Today I was not abused by either the Govt or a Corp."
Well, yes. I am. Because the college class pace for that subject is easily twice as fast as I can really get around the ideas, so then rather than risk a "humanities" class trashing my grades I just ... didn't take it. I just bought the books on my own and I peruse them at my leisure.
"Set in a dystopian future; pure sociology" - this was exactly the squabble back around the 60's with "Science" fiction vs "Speculative" fiction, where the latter category picked up non-hard-science stories. But then the "hard SF" writers got a little grumpy that "their label" was diluted, like you see the AC posts saying "slashdot is dead" today.
Oh, we have the tech - this one is handled on the legal side, with some good ol xenophobia/______.
Imagine if we were allowed to go shopping in "Privacy" suits. You could order stylish outfits that look like Master Chief. Sure, there would be different styles of suits, so it's that "pseudonym anonymity" theme, and some people are good at remembering voices, but it wouldn't readily be "sellable data".
That, and we need the credit card to be like a 1-sided swiss account that the bank would know, but not the shop keepers.
Maybe the adults need to take over Halloween.
It's worse than that Jim!
They hired an evil professor to design an entire literature class about How To Implement Big Brother.
1984
Animal Farm
Brave New World
Minority Report
Fahrenheit 451
Harrison Bergeron (short story)
Your choice of five more.
Maybe some cop porn would make up for it though.
We need the services of Jeff Foxworthy on this one!