I'm just pointing things out and asking the question. Your response seems to be "In my opinion, it's not so".

I posted specific examples so that people could discuss the issues and point out problems with the conclusion. Several, in fact.

You took the most vulnerable example and framed it in a "conspiracy theorist" context, and used it to frame the entire position.

That's fine, it's a good use of rhetoric, but it adds nothing new to the conversation other than "in my opinion...".

Would you care to formulate a response with examples and/or references that explain *why* raising the question is more damaging than anything the sock puppets could do?

Because looking at the chemical plant explosion hoax and Acorn hoax would indicate ro me that sock puppets can have an enormous negative effect on public opinion and government policy.

Acorn was brought down specifically to stop its voter registration drives, which is on its face an attack against the freedom of democracy.

It's really, *really* hard for me to see how "be careful of sock puppets" can rise to that level of damage.

Care to explain?

I've often wondered about certain comment threads on slashdot. Framing certain actions as "hijacking the conversation for propaganda purposes" seems to hit the Bayesian priors higher than just "a lot of people really feel that way".

The conversations attached to Uber articles are weird, not at all what one would expect.

The recent one about California raising the minimum wage was suspect: affecting roughly 2.4% of wage earners, you would expect posts like "has no effect because costs are passed on to consumers", "raising everyone's wages make costs rise to compensate", and so on to be roundly debunked by the first person to google some numbers.

It's worse around election time. In a presidential election year, about 6 weeks beforehand we start to get framing posts - some of which are quite insidious. "I agree with him on *that* issue, but everything else he stands for is batshit crazy". It seemed like every response to a Ron Paul was that way: his immediate position is OK, but it puts the "batshit crazy" idea into people's minds with no supporting evidence.

...and it's starting to happen for Rand Paul as well.

Then there's the visibility-massaging techniques: posting an opinion that's not *quite* right just to get people to respond so that text further down gets pushed below the fold where no one can see it. Posting a definition that's not *quite* right so that people argue the definition back and forth and avoid the core issues, and of course modding things down.

I sometimes monitor certain posts and see them modded down... only to see them modded up a few hours later. That indicates to me that there are people trying to promote an agenda with the moderation system, but get overruled by the general population.

In addition to participating in the conversation, take a step back and look at the overall context of the conversation some time. Instead of just responding, think about the reasoning behind *why* the person made the post that they did.

It is sometimes quite enlightening.

Voting against the Patriot act was a good thing, but everything else Bernie Sanders he stands for is just batshit crazy.

That's a useful technique - agreeing or conceding the immediate issue, while making nebulous unsupported statements about everything else. Look to see this for the next year or so. "I agree with him on this issue, but everything else is crazy".

...problem is, that "agreeing on this one issue" seems to happen a lot. Like, for most issues.

Who do you recommend as an alternative? (And did they, by any chance, support the Patriot act?)

The Huffington Post was live updating the proceedings, and said this:

Rand Paul stated that the Freedom Act will likely get passed on Tuesday.

Wait... did we win or not? Isn't this just a 2-day repreive?

It could be "Shaka, when the walls fell!"

A valid question, and I like a well-turned metaphor ("it was a wine red sea"), but wasn't there a Star Trek episode essentially mocking that sort of usage?

When out president says something is "our Sputnik moment", the Tamarians would understand perfectly.

This could be "The river Temarc in winter!"

That's a nice, pithy saying, and true in all respects.

What if I want to post innocuous things, but don't want people to *misinterpret* what I'm saying?

Alternate: What if I want to post innocuous things, but don't want people to invent subtext where there is none?

Have you ever tried to write to a public audience? There's a reason why the President's "State of the Union" speech takes a lot of effort, and even then people bend the meanings of the words in extreme ways to justify bizarre interpretations.

Waiting to hear your pithy response.

Generally speaking, yes... so long as you are still within the effect range.

The germicidal effect comes from an absorption band in DNA. This is (like everything else) a bell curve, where the effect drops off either side of the peak.

This diagram is a good visual.

Note that commonly available UV emitters (including UV lasers and LEDs and the quantum dots mentioned in the article) are so far out of the effective range to be completely ineffective.

And anything that is effective is pretty dangerous to use, so be careful taking one apart.

Peak effectiveness for sterilization is around 264 nanometers. DNA has a specific absorption at that wavelength, so light at this frequency destroys DNA.

This wavelength is in the UV-C band, which is the radiation blocked by the ozone layer, which is one reason people are concerned about ozone: it protects us from DNA-damaging radiation.

Mercury emits UV at around 254, which is close enough to the DNA absorption peak to have good effect. A fluorescent bulb without phosphor and UV-transparent glass will work.

The wavelengths cited in the post, 377nm, are too long for germicidal effect. If the work can be extended, it would result in much more efficient germicidal bulbs by generating wavelengths closer to optimal, and because quantum dots are generally very efficient.

You can get UV bulbs for your furnace that stick into the plenum and disinfect the air as it blows past. You might be able to run one of these from an inverter while hiking. Be sure to cover the bulb and be *very* careful not to look at it when it's on.

I'd like to hear what the economists here think should be done about Greece.

"Soverign debt is not like personal debt!"

That's what the economists on this very blog say, when discussing US debt. It doesn't matter how far into debt the US is, anyone can see this by comparing our debt to our GDP: the latter number is really big, while the debt is really small.

See? You can't just say getting into debt is bad, because the two are entirely different.

I'd like to hear what the Slashdot economists think should be done about Greece.

Luxury!

I remember putting the boot card at the front of my deck, placing it in the card reader, and pressing the "load" button on a system with 4K of core memory(*).

Who'd have thought 40 years ago, we'd all be sitting here drinking chateau de chatillon.

(*) That part's actually true. I started on an IBM-1130, predecessor to the IBM-360.

A lot of people think online voting is the next big thing, but the problem is actually very hard to do online.

To do it right requires a "proctored" setting where the person is guaranteed to be alone, and unobserved (including video recording).

If you can't guarantee that the person is alone, then they can be coerced into voting a specific way. If you can't guarantee that the person isn't observed, then the person can sell their vote.

Video recording hasn't been addressed yet, but with the current system a voter can record their vote as proof of how they voted, and so vote selling is possible. It's functionally the same as being observed, just time shifted.

Add in the requirements for recounts and verification, and physical ballots in a proctored environment is the simple solution.

I've seen mathematical solutions that make tampering statistically impossible. The system injects a large portion of non-human votes in a cryptographically secure way such that it doesn't change the actual outcome, but it's impossible for a hacker to change votes due to the statistical likelihood that he'll change one of the non-human votes and be detected.

Even with these systems, you still need a proctored environment that guarantees anonymous and unobserved voting.

And on the subject of interviewing companies, here's my response to Elon Musk:

The North Pole.

You lay a rifle on the surface of a [perfectly] spherical planet with no atmosphere. Firing the rifle, due to the curvature of the planet the bullet goes some distance and then falls to the ground. As you increase the muzzle velocity of the bullet, the point if impact gets further and further from the rifle.

If the planet has an acceleration of 10m/(s^2), what velocity must the bullet have to go around the planet and hit the gun in the stock?

(NB: This is a trick question, but Elon Musk is an actual rocket scientist.)

Oh, and for the record, the puzzle that Elon Musk asks is:

1) Older than dirt
2) The answer is common knowledge (hence, not a good puzzle to ask)
3) Has more than one correct answer
4) Is being asked wrong.

The actual full text of the puzzle should read something like: "A hunter walks [South... West... North... ends up in the same spot] and sees a bear. What color was the bear? (This version has only one answer.)

Here's one that *you* can ask during an interview.

You need to order weights for a 2-pan balance to weigh objects. The objects all weigh integral ounces (ie - no fractions), and the weights are all integral ounces.

What is the minimum *number of weights* you can use that lets you weigh anything up to 100 ounces?

(NB: the answer isn't 7.)

I really, *really* dislike hearing brain teasers in an interview.

Not because I don't like puzzles (I do), not because it's not a good way to judge the candidate (it is, in a sense), but because it shows up the deficiencies of the interviewer and the company.

Most of the time, the interviewer isn't into puzzles. They just looked something up on the internet, got a list of "here's a puzzle to ask the candidate", and mindlessly ask the question(*).

And when this happens, I answer the puzzle and then ask the interviewer my own puzzle, and see how they react.

Invariably, the answer is "I don't know. What's the answer?" within 3 seconds.

I don't want to work for someone like that, I don't want to work for a *company* that would hire someone like that, life's too short to spend time working amid thinkless drones.

A really bad company is when the VP or someone sticks his head in the door with a "hey, just wanted to see how it's going. Can you answer this question for me?" thing. I keep a chinese block puzzle in my pocket (that I invented) for this exact situation: I write down his answer on the whiteboard, hand him the puzzle, and say "if you can't disassemble this and reassemble it before the day is over, I don't want to work here".

Polite and reasonable interviews don't get this level of response, but turnabout is fair play. Ask me about my experience, ask me to solve a typical problem from the job description, get a feel for how well I work with others... these are reasonable.

But ask me why sewer caps are round, and you'll have to prove why you're company is good enough for me to work there. While you're interviewing me, I'm also interviewing *you*.

If everyone was more aggressively responsive to these types of games, companies wouldn't play them.

(*) Once, just once, I got into a real discussion of puzzles with the interviewer, I've got no problem with that. So long as it's not mindless bingo-card checkmarking, it's OK.