But that wasn't the question. The question was "Would you pay for a website without trolls?" and my response was that it's not possible.

Go back and re-read the whole conversation. People are astonishingly good at trolling. If you can't definitively identify them, they will ALWAYS find that rule loophole that enables them to troll. It's practically axiomatic.

Yes, that was exactly my point. When you are trying to define and identify trolls, you have to be 100% or the entire exercise is pointless. If you don't believe me, try moderating a message board sometime.

Ok, so a troll always presents an argument? They never just "ask an innocent question"? And, by your definition, all posters must post at least twice since they must "follow up" or they're automatically a troll. Do you see why it's so hard to create a 100% black-and-white set of rules that is always effective in identifying a troll? You've presented one possible identifier of a troll but there are dozens or even thousands of ways that someone can troll.

If they asked you to CC them or if they're in a position where they're likely to need those CC's, then perhaps they'll opt not to use the optional system being discussed.

And that's exactly my point. How do you prove "intent" on a message board? You have to be able to have black-and-white rules that say "This guy is posting a different and unpopular opinion but that guy is trying to stir up trouble." Those rules have to apply one hundred percent of the time because people are REALLY REALLY good at hiding intent and playing innocent when they're serious about trolling. In fact, the internet generally applauds the "masterful troll" who can hook as many people as possible. For all you know, I'm trolling you right now by leading you down a conversational path to an as-yet undisclosed end-game. There's just no way to know and that's why it's so hard to put a stop to it.

How is that solution any different than giving them the option to hand off their work to someone else while they're away? If you "give them the time..." then someone else still has to do their work while they sort through their vacation e-mail.

Until you can quantitatively define what a troll is, you can't do anything about it. Web forum moderators have been struggling with this question for as long as there have been online discussions.

FTFA: issues a reply to the sender that the person is out of the office and that the email will be deleted, while also offering the contact information of another employee for pressing matters.

and

the program — which is optional — has gone down well with the company’s German employees

Seriously, the idea is that you get to actually take a vacation and let someone else handle the load while you're away. That way, you're not coming back to work with twice the workload as when you left. For many companies, if you take a vacation, no one covers you. The work just piles up. It makes it hard to relax knowing that you've got a mountain of work to return to. No one is taking away "Out of Office" messages or breaking them for people who want to use them.

I've seen several comments here saying "Well, I'm just CC'ing people who need to be kept in the loop!" Ok, I get that. If it's that important, why don't you just wait until they get back and give them a short briefing? If it's not that important, why did you bother sending it in the first place?

  I, for one, applaud the effort to push back against the anti-vacation, anti-personal time culture.

Okay, I hope I've misunderstood you. I work in genomics research, and your post seems, on its face, misinformed at best. Are you seriously suggesting that the computer modeling common to physics and chemistry can be applied to biological systems? Even in the case of something as "simple" as a virus (which may consist of tens to hundreds of thousands of kb pairs, specifying dozens or hundreds of RNA transcripts), simply modeling the virus is meaningless. You would also have to completely model host organisms and their immediate environments. Not even the NSA has that kind of compute power. You're dealing with emergent behaviors in interdependent systems far beyond the scope of what computer modeling can handle. There is no "model it as a simple sphere" approach in biology that can yield meaningful results at this level. Until we can phone up whatever god you happen to believe in (if any), the only way to find out what changing a virus will do to the virus, is to change the virus. The information gained is valuable enough that it is worth the minor risk involved in gaining it.

That's been my exact experience. IPv6 is supposed to be dead simple (compared to IPv4) for home users. I am definitely not a home user and I still can't get it working with my ISP.

"Metadata" is a media buzzword designed to make you feel good about having your data monitored. They're still monitoring your conversations. Stop buying into their talking points. The headers of your e-mail are as much your data as the body of the e-mail.

CAs normally issue certs with 1-year validity. As they may not expire later than 2015-11-01, CAs will mostly stop issuing them on 2014-11-01. I guess you could ask them to cut a cert with a special, shorter lifetime but that would be hassle (and therefore extra cost).

Since when does the FCC have the power to "preempt" laws?