You barely survived bullying, so you should know better than most that many people don't. That's plenty of reason not to tolerate bullying.

Look at it this way: survival of the fittest is already being changed by modern medicine; would you withhold penicillin from a child with pneumonia because he's too weak to survive? By extension, we owe the same level of concern to people with psychological problems.

No, it's pre-crime if they've done no harm at the time they're banned.

The triggers or flags the algorithm recognizes are not themselves the offenses. They are just attributes of posts from people who in the past have exhibited similar early behavior; this algorithm knows how to recognize that pattern.

Let's say that you categorize a thousand historical troll posts, and study their metrics (I'm going to make up some fake metrics here for example.) The average number of posts before they actually get to spewing the bile might be 15. Of those 15, an average of two of them might contain the misspelled phrase "your wrong". Another indicator might be writing five posts within the first hour of registering a new ID. None of those posts contain an actual troll message, but 75% of the time someone matches that behavior, they will have written a troll by their 10th-20th post.

Pre-crime would be banning people based on matching this pattern without waiting for the actual troll post to be made. It would ban 100% of pattern-matchers, but of those, only 75% would statistically have gone on to actually troll. The other 25% would be unfairly banned for their poor spelling and bad timing.

While I believe that people who are less sensitive tend to thrive more than others, I don't agree that "thicker skin" is a workable solution. Too many people have fragile emotional states and simply don't have the neural hardware psychological capacity required to dismiss the hate and insults that often happen on line. There have been some high-profile suicides among teens who were attacked online, and who knows how many people remove themselves from public comment because of the hate they've received? For safety reasons I don't think society should completely abrogate the forums to the trolls.

Does that not mean some people are overly sensitive? Sure. But just as we shouldn't velour-line the internet to cater to absolutely every person with a psychological disorder; we also don't have to tolerate the diarrhea that spews forth from the trolls. We don't have to draw a hard-and-fast line on the ground, either, and define "these words are always 100% bad in 100% of situations". Instead, we should be welcoming humans in the loop, asking them to pass judgment when needed. That gets us to a more fluid state than full automation. It also lets the user choose. Don't like the judgment process on Slashdot? Don't hang out on Slashdot.

I know full automated filtering is the holy grail of internet forum moderation, but as soon as you deploy a filter it becomes a pass/fail test for the trolls, who quickly learn to adapt and evade it. Human judges can adapt, too, and are about the only thing that can; there are simply too few for the volume of trolls out there. A tool like this might help them scale this effort to YouTube volumes.

Better idea: Encrypt the data, stick it on SD cards, and then mail them to random people. Be sure to email yourself with their addresses just in case you ever need to get the data back. Imagine the thrill they'll get from receiving a brand new 64 GB SD card in the mail for free!

Then again, maybe that's not such a good idea. But it is still more reliable than cloud storage. :-D

I think it would actually have gone much harder for SpaceX if a F9 had exploded before Antares. Orbital is not going anywhere and will get another chance to send their payload to the Space Station. The investors in SpaceX aren't going to be flighty, and neither Air Force nor NASA are going to close the game because of an explosion, given their history.

ULA doesn't have much chance to use an explosion to their benefit without dredging up the status of their Russian engines, the multiple Delta explosions and the old Atlas one.

A Falcon 9 launch will fail. This is a given in rocket science. Remember the history of Falcon 1. They have planned to survive such a situation.

I only review products I buy, "verified purchase" appears in the review. The problem is, every time I submit a 1 or 2 star review with a description of why, it gets rejected. The bad review has to be stripped down to something so simple that it's not accurate anymore. And no, I'm not using colorful language in the rejected reviews. The whole review system seems to be designed only for greater sales.

Really? I write positively blistering reviews on occasion, and I've never had a review rejected. There must be something about your reviews that causes problems—if not colorful language, then perhaps inaccurate facts, hyperbole, bad spelling/grammar, violation of rules about mentioning prices, call to action for a competing website....

Why fly like an airplane when your mission is only to get to the ground in a soft landing? It makes the spacecraft more complicated. And it's no bargain if you have an airplane-like craft with no go-around capability like the Space Shuttle.

No building have room for elevators if they needed runways.

Please come down from whatever overheated state you're running. He did address what you wrote.

Yes, there can be unknowns. Fixing that sort of stuff is how we got from the Wright Flier to the 747.

What I don't think is likely is that the first stage will come down and they will find out sorry, there's space-rot we didn't know about before and reusability just isn't a possibility. Especially after lots of experience with the Space Shuttle.

If they do that, they've been holding back more work than I think they can. Only the first stage can be landed at present. The second stage would need a heat shield to come back.

Well, the Mounties haven't shown up at the border to haul away the G-men, so if I were Canadian I wouldn't place any faith in that treaty to keep myself out of harm's way.

If it looks like toilet paper and is used like toilet paper, it's worth the same as toilet paper.

Well, the Mounties haven't shown up at the border to haul away the G-men, so I wouldn't place any faith in that treaty to keep out of harm's way. If it looks like toilet paper and is used like toilet paper, it's worth the same as toilet paper.

How about calling it Fireball XL5. :-)

If ULA has the slightest bit of sense they will announce on Monday that they are pursuing re-usability. But the last I heard was that they would pursue cheaper disposable elements.

If SpaceX actually lands on the barge and flies the first stage to orbit again it's a really big deal, because it radically changes the economics of getting to space. No matter what the payload is for this demonstration. I don't know if they would get that far with this first stage, but no doubt with a later one.

So, is there anything which has overcome the double tassel distribution which programming has always had?

For literally decades, it's been "these people get it, these people don't" with very little in the middle.

Have we fixed this? Have we found way to teach it which prevent this? Have we even explained it?

The thing is, the same people who have trouble with programming also have trouble with other varieties of logical thinking. We need to be teaching kids the necessary reasoning skills at a young age while their brains are still flexible enough to learn them.

At a high level, programming a computer is essentially the same thing as explaining how to perform a task, albeit teaching the task to an incredibly naïve and pedantic student with a very limited vocabulary. I wonder how we could possibly mimic such an environment in the real world in such a way that young kids can learn programming skills before they have the discipline to actually write code? After all, there aren't any incredibly naïve and pedantic people with a very limited vocabulary in primary schools, are there?

I think you see where I'm going with this. Want more programmers? Start by taking two preschool classes and teaching them different tasks that involve repeating certain actions. Then pair them up so that the kids in one class have to teach the kids in the other class how to do those tasks and vice versa. Maybe even have one kid teach several kids at a time and instruct the other kids to try to find ways to misinterpret what the teacher is saying.

Over the years, make the tasks more and more complex, and require that the students write down the instructions, then give the piece of paper to someone else to perform those instructions, and let the students watch in horror as the instructions are followed to the letter, resulting in completely unexpected results. Then have them adjust those instructions and try again.

The end result will be programmers, complete with appropriate levels of disdain for clueless people.