So far, your post is the only one I've found here that even attempts to talk about the article's actual topic. ;-)

The rest of it seems to be various theological and/or political and/or sociological arguments that have nothing whatsoever to do with the Internet's effects on society. I was sorta hoping to find such a discussion, but I guess this crowd isn't up to it these days.

I'd just add that religion has always required "belief", i.e., accepting a particular package of ideas without requiring any evidence, and continuing in a religion requires carefully ignoring any evidence that contradicts it. This hasn't changed with the Internet. It "merely" supplies a lot more evidence (and a lot more disinformation) than any previous communication mechanism we've had. But you can ignore its information exactly like you ignore information from any other source. It's not really all that difficult.

Well, I didn't mention the propaganda on /. because it didn't occur to me that anyone would think it special. The astroturfers and other propagandists have been here since before I had an account, and a lot of their work is so blatant that it's hard to miss. So it's not that the propaganda here didn't occur to me; it's more like I thought it such a cheap shot that I'd be criticized (and possibly downloaded) for wasting reader time by mentioning something so obvious.

Not that there's anything about this that's special to /. either. A growing and well-known problem on sites to attempt to collect ratings of various sorts from users is that companies pay their people to spend time watching such sites and flooding the rating system with bogus positive ratings and reviews. Companies routinely set up hundreds or thousands of accounts for this purpose.

This goes back to the early days of online forums. An especially clumsy one showed up back in the 1980s, when a lot of BBs, newsgroups, etc. found that any occurrence of the string "Armenia" in any message would trigger the automated submission of thousands of bot-generated messages from Turkish extremists, filling up disk systems and making the site useless until they were purged.

The propagandists have gotten a bit more subtle since then, but they've always been with us. /. has had them since the early days of 5- and 6-digit id numbers.

And "blase" (only one 's', and the 'e' really should have an acute accent, but /. garbles it ;-) isn't really the right word. It's more like we need to acknowledge that propaganda is and will remain "part of the landscape". Rather than get all excited about it, we should be quietly working to limit the junk, and try to find ways to get the real info more visible. Exposing propaganda is most useful if it's done in a matter-of-fact manner, rather than as a shouting match.

Yeah, that was pretty much my reaction, too.

A more to-the-point approach might be: Any school class described as "science" should include teaching scientific methodology, in a way that's understandable by the students at that grade level. This should include opportunities to apply the methods in situations that the students can understand.

One long-standing problem with the way that most school textbooks do this is by teaching only "the experimental method" as the way that science works. This has been widely criticized by presenting an obvious counter-example: Astronomers have never used experimental methods, but astronomy is generally considered one of the hardest of the "hard sciences" (in both senses of the term "hard' ;-). This is often used as a primary example explaining why you must teach scientific methods (plural). It's a big, complex subject, and different methods are used in different scientific fields. We can do lab experiments with bacteria or fungi; we can't (yet) with planets or stars.

But the phrase "critical thinking" isn't much used by scientists. Rather, you should try to teach the scientific meanings of terms like "conjecture", "hypothesis", and "theory", which in scientific jargon aren't polysyllabic synonyms for "guess". Figuring out how to produce understanding of such terms would go a long way toward fixing the problems with the way schools teach science these days. It'd also confound the religious folks who dismiss evolution as "just a theory".

Heh. I've known a number of scientists who do magic as a hobby. All of them have talked about being bemused and saddened by the number of people who refuse to accept that they're being fooled by trickery, and insist that the "magic show" was real even when the magician tries to deny the reality.

It doesn't help to say that they can show people how the trick is done. The believers won't pay attention, and might actively interfere with the explanation, to maintain their beliefs. Explaining takes time, and requires the cooperative attention of the audience. Schools are quite likely to have the same kind of problems if their science teachers try to explain the trickery behind pseudo-science.

It's an interesting demo of how belief in magic and pseudo-science can maintain a hold on willing victims. Even when the trickster wants to be open and honest about it.

What does Snowden have to do with this? I haven't seen his name associated with it before.

This isn't criticism; maybe he is involved; I don't know. Can you give a few cites that explain the link?

"Yawn" indeed. What baffles me is how anyone think this differs from any other propaganda campaigns throughout human history. It is because it's "on a computer", which means that most people will forget all precedent and pretend that it's something new?

In particular, the mass media here and everywhere else has always cooperated with the wishes of the people in power. That's part of the price of staying in business, regardless of what your local laws (or Constitutions) might say. The distribution of information is rapidly moving online, so of course the same medium becomes part of the distribution system for propaganda. Every government (and every marketing organization) in the world is hard at work trying to control what we can read here.

Why are we pretending that this is somehow new and unprecedented?

It has always been true that we need to learn to be skeptical of essentially everything anyone tells us. People are always trying to trick us into believing things for their own profit, and most people don't care if those things are true, only whether they can profit from others believing them.

So yeah: "Yawn."

Yeah, this is a standard cop-out, but if you think about it briefly, it's rather illogical. We only get one government; we couldn't possibly all deserve exactly that government.

In fact, most of us don't "deserve" the government we've got. The political system (mostly bought and paid for by the one or two percent that we hear about but rarely have even met) is to a great degree "fixed", and isn't anything that most of us deserve.

Not to mention all of its victims in other parts of the world who have had no say whatsoever in the makeup of our government.

So what are you doing to change this? ;-)

Until the Chinese actually try to live on the moon for any period. Horrible temperature profile, little to no water excepting maybe at the poles, some of the nastiest dust in existence getting in to everything, hard vacuum.

Mars is a paradise compared to the Moon which is why if you are talking about a colony it makes a lot more sense than the moon or just about anywhere else in our solar system Only problem is the transit time.

Chances of NASA sending an astronaut anywhere are approximately zero at this point so whether is ethical or not is kind of a moot point.

That's a good idea in general, considering its history of problems.

Maybe what we need is a push to persuade browser makers to link to perl and python implementations. Those are both much better languages for the purposes that JS was invented, and they're both completely open-source.

Actually, the right way to do it would be to replace all the embedded browsers' languages with tools for communicating efficiently with an arbitrary language plugin. Then we could use any programming language we like, including languages that haven't been developed yet. But what are the chances that we could persuade all the major browser makers to implement something as (conceptually ;-) simple as that?

Well, I wouldn't call it idiotic. It could be the start of a useful feature for the visually impaired. What seems to be missing is a way to disable it. I've poked around a bit, and didn't find any controls. It has the usual sound level widget, which works for the current window, but when I refresh or open a new discussion window/tab, the sound is back up where it was.

Anyone know how to turn it off?

It's because it includes the phrase "on a computer".

You see, in addition to their computational uses, computers also have a "human memory erasure" capability. When you bring a computer near humans working with any old technology, all memory of that technology is erased, and the humans have to learn about its use from scratch.

This is a well-known phenomenon in the field of patent law, and is a major source of income for patent lawyers. And for the companies that manufacture the old technology, which becomes patentable when in proximity to a computer.

Yeah, your post is pretty much bullshit. A CS degree from Harvard isn't worth anything more than any other college. They aren't known for their science or engineering program. One from MIT is worth more due to their reputation in the field, but no more so than a couple of other top schools like UC-Berkley or UIUC which are public (or Stanford which isn't)..

Basically there's 3 tiers of degrees. The elite CS schools (about the top 5-6) earn bonus points, but more is expected from you. Then there's a middle tier of about a dozen schools with a good reputation but not up to the elite. It may help you get to an interview, but gives you no bonus points once there. Everything else just lumps together in the yes he has a degree box.

Please note that online degrees, MOOC certs, University of Phoenix type schools, fall under no degree at all.