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.

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.

I'm thinking the the US takes its commercial computer security so casually, the Chinese get a head start by hacking the repository with all the details involved with the fab plant. At this point, China has the engineers and materials scientists capable of reverse manufacturing critical equipment, and can buy previous generation tools from European companies.

Lenovo still has to follow US export laws, and Lenovo can simply be embargoed. I don't think Lenovo even produces computers with Xeon CPUs (unless they come from the outdated China fab plant).

Chinese workers are still cheaper than to develop & implement a packaging robot? I find it hard to believe, but that's probably the case.

IIRC Apple constructs its MacPro's in the US.

You're also under the mistaken impression that the Chinese can't just steal the technological details from US fab plants, and then make an acceptable copy purely for their military research division.

Lenovo still has to abide by US commerce regulations if it wants to sell its products in the US. (Which is currently its most lucrative way to stay in existence.) Frankly, I doubt Lenovo even has a license to buy Xeon chips. What I don't get is what is stopping a European export company from buying the computers in small numbers, and shipping it over to an Eastern European company that does no business in the US, and have them send the chips to China?

And why is this even an irritant to China. There is no time savings from a computation unique to a Xeon chip, that cannot be replicated by a supercomputer cluster with software higher precision emulation. Its just more work and higher energy consumption costs.

The soonest way China gets SOTA computing chips is to provide the chips from US factories. (And then the Chinese build the tools to nuke said factories.) Let them develop their own competing technology. That at least gives a 10-20 year window where the US is "safe" from higher tech nukes. Handing it over to them for a profit gives zero time window.

Because too many people still associate coding with Computer Science, and are not taught Software Engineering.

Computer Science is all about the languages and the algorithms: how to make the computer count, how to make it sort, how to normalize data, etc. Software engineering is about the whys of design principles and design patterns. It's about testability, quality, readability, maintainability. It's about development methodologies. Almost anyone can write a sequential list of instructions, but unless they understand modularity, complexity, coupling, cohesion, they will not produce effectively maintainable code. They still think that because they passed a coding class that they're a coder, so they produce a crappy pile of hard-coded inappropriate dependencies, and then build more stuff that depends on the badly designed stuff, and then they wonder why programming sucks.

If we taught every child in the "Intro to Coding" class using Test Driven Development, we'd be teaching them to be the very first consumers of the code they write, and they'd quickly feel the consequences of making their own poor choices. They'd learn to course correct early, instead of struggling like so many of the questioners asking about homework problems on Stack Overflow. Instead of waiting to teach TDD as an advanced graduate level course, we'd have a lot more people who "get it". Or we'd quickly weed out the people who are incapable of ever getting it. Either way, everyone would be better off than we are.

A heartbeat can theoretically be traced, at least to the last RF transmitter in the chain. If that's WiFi, it's a few hundred meters at most. If it's typical home automation, it's 20 meters or so. So, if the Evil Midnight Bomber is being watched, the messages originating from him could be noticed. It's definitely not the stealthiest of options.

Yes, a transmitter putting out a watt or two would lead to the needle in the haystack scenario, but the bad guys aren't doing that yet.

Not disagreeing with you, but I was looking more towards situations in meatspace. Such as areas that are not accessible by roads. Which would be rural villages not in the US, or "wild" areas like Alaska or Northern Canada.