While I agree with your central claim...

the major news media trends centrist.
its only according to the far right wing / Fox News...

Are you aware of the inherent hypocrisy of saying those things together?

The major news media trends in whatever direction will get them the most subscribers. That is frequently done by being *more* polarized than society as a whole, because most people appreciate being told things that align with their biases and don't like being told that issues are complicated or that their point of view isn't entirely correct.

Politicians, on the other hand, trend centrist. Most people will put up with a lot of stuff they don't like so like so long as they get a candidate who claims to agree with them on their few key issues, so the two non-trivial political parties divide the key issues between themselves and take the centrist view on everything else. Sure, they *blame* the other party when they compromise in a way their constituents won't like, but you rarely catch them actually going all out on a non-centrist view that isn't one of those few key issues; it costs them too much bargaining power on those issues for too little gain.

Why are you co-opting the term "trolling" - which historically had only negative connotations, and referred to actions such as inciting flamewars or consistently derailing online discussions and actively counteracting efforts to get them back on track - by conflating it with the (much older) term satire, which does neither of those things at all? Those aren't "crusades"-style examples, either; that's actually what the term has meant from its inception in this context of online discussion. Another (relatively minor, given the moderation system here) example is that flood of HOSTS file BS that came through here a few months back.

Seriously, trolling already had a definition (and it doesn't even approximate yours). There's no need to redefine it. What benefit do you obtain by attempting to paint trolling as a somehow more noble or victimized than it is? Do you just get you jollies out of calling what you do "trolling" despite it having a different, well-established, and considerably more positive definition already?

Are you trying to say "Don't call those people trolls; *I* am a troll and I'm not that bad" or something like that? Fine, call them griefers - that's another relatively well-established term, for people who want to cause pain rather than merely anger or confusion - but don't then try to pretend that trolling is some noble but misunderstood practice. It's not, and there's absolutely no benefit I can see to trying to make trolling as a whole more acceptable; it will just grant the real trolls legitimacy.

Or are you just attempting to divert the discussion from the subject of what the people mentioned in TFA are doing, and the harm it causes?

Um, no. Pastafarianism is satire, a parody of religion. It is *EXPLICITLY* that; it makes no claim to existing for any reason other than to demonstrate the stupidity and danger of religious public policy. Sure, there exist trolls who take it in other directions and act simply to piss people off or derail conversations - the characteristic actions of a troll, unless you have a better one to offer that isn't simply appropriating other concepts - but the organization as a whole does not engage in such behavior.

The thing I think you're missing is that trolling is a matter of intent. It's quite possible for a troll to argue in favor of something logical or even correct, but their intention is not to educate. Similarly, it's probably possible for somebody to genuinely believe (for whatever reason) that the moon landing was faked and make posts referencing that belief with the intention of demonstrating why a given idea won't work; such people are not trolls simply for making that claim.

Now, if the moonshot-deniers attempt to turn an entire discussion (that was about something else entirely) into one about the fake landing, against the wishes of the discussion participants, *that* would be trolling. Similarly, if somebody were to crash a discussion of theology and start telling people they're all wrong because the FSM is the One True God with the intention of riling up "those religious idiots" that would also be trolling. However, I'm not aware of any time that the so-called CotFSM, as an organization, has done any such thing. I'm also not aware of anybody who takes "pastafarianism" seriously enough to actually proselytize it as a religion. That would take a really serious case of Poe's Law, given that it is obviously and explicitly humorous and satirical.

Out of genuine curiosity:
Do you have even a *single* coherent and defensible argument for how any amount of trolling is actually beneficial to the purpose you mention? I mean, I'm not saying you can't possibly be right, but I don't see it. Society existed for millennia without anonymous forums wherein users could troll others without serious social consequences. Why is it "necessary" now?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

I can't tell for sure if that entire post was satire and you fell for it, or if the author of the post was the dupe, but either way Poe's Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law) clearly applies.

With that said, I'm not dismissing the claims that there are government employees who would work to derail conversations they don't like. However, I very much doubt it's responsible for any major portion of the behavior discussed in the article. Diverting sensitive topics? Yes. The kind of people who get modded Troll every day here on /. (and run rampant on sites without an effective moderation system)? No. There's no value in it for the gov, and there are (sadly) plenty of people who really are quite that worthless of human beings.

Because money is not, in and of itself, good? Their intentions may not have been evil - turns out it's not a dichotomy after all - but for their intentions to be *good* they would need to have intended greater benefit than harm. It's possible they did, in fact, intend that - and were just really, stupidly naïve (does Slashcode present that correctly?) - but I am having a hard time seeing it. Getting other people to give you money is not an inherently good thing. Producing something of greater value than the cost to produce it and thus enriching society is good, I would argue, but I'm not sure that's what they did here and I'm not even sure that's what they intended. The pursuit of wealth does not inherently produce a net positive value to the world.

I don't imagine either company has much room for dead weight. Firing the bottom N percent of the workforce every year (where N was occasionally 10%) has been standard practice at some very competitive companies in the past; it really strongly dis-incentivizes slacking off at work (like, reading /. in the middle of the day. Can you imagine?!?).

If your goal is job security, the government (or a similarly massive and bureaucratic monstrosity) is a good bet.
If your goal is to actually produce stuff, to get things done, then a place like SpaceX makes a lot of sense!

Me, I work at an in-between place; small, but not a startup any more. Minimal bureaucratic overhead, but no overwhelming need to keep costs minimal. Specifically, we do information security consulting; as long as we can find work for all our people, employees are how we make money in a very direct and linear sense. On the other hand, sometimes job scheduling falls through and, for reasons I cannot personally control, I find myself on the bench for a week. Thus, /.

Well, we do have prototype fusion (thermonuclear) power plants. You need a way to actually extract power from the plant, though. one of the standard ways to do that still is, and always has been, to use the heat it generates to boil water, and use the resulting steam to drive something. As far as I know, all nuclear (fission) power plants - not to be confused with RTGs - use steam turbines. It seems like the obvious approach if you're building a fusion plant, too.

Or the GP could just be wrong. That's possible, certainly.

Name and shame, dude. What the hell piece of software *WAS* that?

The power density is really nowhere close to a battery. Supercaps make sense for things where you actually need really massive charge and/or discharge spikes, over very short times. Think railguns, or a camera flash that can fire multiple times without needing to recharge between shots (if it charged enough to begin with), or possibly a smoothing system for charging batteries from a very spiky power source (hypothetically, this could scale to things like harvesting lightning, though at present that's not at all practical). They aren't practical for long-term storage, either due to energy density or due to their tendency to lose power over time pretty quickly.

A sufficiently large battery bank will have no problem with the charge speed of a photovoltaic array (which is actually rather slow). A small bank might reach saturation voltage - where the batteries are still charging but can't charge any *faster* or they'll take damage from overvolting - fairly quickly if fed by a large array, but that's not the real problem with a small bank; the real problem is not having enough storage capacity.

Expense is considerable, especially if you go with the low-maintenance options like gel-cells. However, supercaps are, at this time, not something you can buy a huge bank of at any price (certainly not the hemp-based ones). If you could get a meaningful capacity of the graphene ones it would probably cost many times as much. Maybe the hemp ones will change that, but don't hold your breath.

Maintenance is much less than it sounds. Wet-cells (typical lead-acid batteries) need topping up with water periodically, and occasionally may need equalization charges; the first can be done by a reminder to go do so every month, and the latter doesn't even need to be that often. Pretty much every other aspect of maintenance should be handled by a good enclosure for the batteries and a good charge controller. The controller costs a bit but you want one of the good ones anyhow; they perform DC-DC voltage conversion to take the output of the solar cells (which can easily be at least 25% higher voltage than the batteries will charge at) and down-convert it, extracting some extra current in the process (some energy is lost in this process, but it's typically a 10%-20% net positive for the 12V gel-cells my family uses). Speaking of gel-cells, those will save you on maintenance (at a cost of more money up front and a more severe voltage sensitivity that limits charge rate a bit harder). Such batteries are basically install-and-forget, but you'd need to be tremendously lazy for them to be worthwhile for a home installation; they are typically for marine usage (as my parents do) where never needing to open the cells (to add water) is a significant plus.

Can you (or anybody else) substantiate that claim? I'll admit that I never participated in the revolt - I've never actually been subjected to the beta site, because I always just browse from the homepage - but if they actually did that they should be smacked. It sounds like a more extreme reaction than I would expect, though.

Just got, and used, 15 mod points today. Though admittedly it had been a while since I'd gotten any.

And nothing you can say will change my view of it.

Ah, the characteristic sign of the truly irrational. I actually agree with a good part of what you said in that post, but with that last line you lose all credibility to having a reason-based argument. If no reason could change your mind, then your mind is, by definition, unreasonable (not based in reason).

I'm also curious how you expect to fund the essential portions of the government. The "required for living" stuff like a military strong enough to prevent invasion (not to be confused with what the US actually has), and the critical portions of the government apparatus (like employing the people who decide what those voluntary taxes should be, and the infrastructure to collect and count the votes or otherwise implement the method of selecting said government), and so on; that also costs money, you know?

Do you charge it only to the people who use "products or services that are NOT required for living" and let them - the ones with disposable income - pay more than the fair value of those products and services in order to support the freeloaders who benefit without cost? Or do you institute a tax on things like property (in the sense of shelter and a place you can secure as your own) and, when somebody points out that many such things are actually *more* "required for living" than a monetary income, put your fingers in your ears and go "LALALALALALALA" over and over again until they go away?

Oh, and if you *do* plan to collect the entire tax base off optional services, how do you prevent somebody from setting up a non-government business that provides the same product or service but costs less (because it doesn't have to bear the overhead of also running a country)? Do you make competing with the voluntary-tax services illegal (no for-profit prisons, say)? Do you allow competition on the basis that the government is inherently more efficient and will win in the free market? Do you allow competition but cripple the private businesses by not allowing them privileges that the government has (say, the right to forcibly detain or injure people) and thus force those who want effective services to pay their taxes to the government anyhow?

I'm sincerely curious whether you've thought of any of this before, or have answers now. Your post suggested that yes, you have an answer for all the questions... but it also seems self-contradictory and I wonder how you plan to resolve such issues.

USB keyboards work fine. Bluetooth ones too, assuming they have the BT support working (last I heard it wasn't working in Android yet, but maybe in some desktop Linux distro it is...). The touch / type keyboards use an interface that apparently confuses Linux, though.

That... is bullshit, actually. I've got one of the original Surface RTs (from work, to hack on it and learn the platform) - the ones that released with the already-slightly-aged Tegra 3 - and it's jailbroken so it can run third-party desktop apps. The performance isn't going to rival my 8-core 4GHz desktop, but it beats the old convertible clamshell tablet from ~2008 (Core 2 Duo ULV, 1.2GHz, upgraded to 4GB of RAM) on some tasks, and it's good enough for a lot of stuff.

I can write, compile, and run C# on it (using Notepad++ or Vim or a VS knockoff), do web app testing (using Fiddler or using IKVM as a Java runtime to run Burp Suite), play Flash games, and also play various old games using open-source re-implementations of their runtimes (Baldur's Gate on GemRB and so on) and also old DOS games on DOSBox. I can even run some old Windows (x86) software through a dynamic retranslation layer; it's not fast but it runs Heroes of Might and Magic 3 just fine (and that layer was one guy's part-time project for a few months, not a effort with many resources behind it).

The Surface is also is thinner and weighs far less, while still being much more durable (seriously, the things are nigh-indestructible; people have had them fly off the roof of the car and get driven over buy another vehicle but still be fully functional). It has much more battery life than the old machine did when it was new, including when running desktop apps or things like Skype. Would I have preferred a similarly-designed ATOM chip? Yeah, probably. On the other hand, I'd also like it if Microsoft hadn't tried their damnedest to cripple the platform (RT 8.1 contained an absurd amount of work aimed at defeating the jailbreak, and the inability to domain-join the device made it much less useful in the workplace where somebody might actually want that kind of lockdown).

Uh, you use MSVC (the Visual Studio compiler), the same as almost everybody else writing code for Windows does?

It would actually be nice if GCC or Clang supported targeting NT/Win32/ARM (Windows RT or WP8) as it would make porting open-source code a lot easier - some of it was never meant to be run through MSVC and requires substantial work - but so far I haven't seen any sign of that happening except the VLC team making noises about either implementing that support themselves or maybe just modifying the VLC codebase to be MSVC-compatible.