I've been convinced for some time now that Jesse Jackson and his ilk do not truly represent the people they claim to stand for. Their position on this issue makes absolutely no sense.

The only feasible explanation I can imagine is that they are abusing the trust of the gullible in an attempt bring the force of public opinion down against Title II designation for broadband.

Title II seems the sanest answer available for our current situation, as we have seen it succeed at reigning in other natural monopolies for 80 years at this point. Why this push didn't come 15 years ago is a mystery to me.


Aside: the fact that this is part of the conversation all of a sudden means that the man behind the propaganda curtain is now actively trying to influence *your* thoughts on the issue. Watch carefully to see how they paint this across the media.

It seems obvious to me that public education in this country is about quashing free thought and breeding compliance. Critical thinking, of course, runs counter to this goal. This is a political and economic travesty, and one of the most important issues facing the nation today. End federal funding for schooling and this gets much better in short order.

Video is a format which perhaps will make it easier for content creators to quickly throw something up onto he web. Most of the time, however, that's just what it will be: throw up. Crafting a quality video requires a significant time investment as well as skills and tools that your content creators likely will not have. Furthermore, for the end user (an employee at your company that requires training) video will be less than ideal because it is a poor format for learning and reference: - you cannot consume video at your own pace, only at the pace of the creator - you cannot scan the contents - you cannot easily jump to a particular section of content - referring back to the video to find information is an infuriating chore I would suggest that your desire to make the training wiki video-based is misguided. A text based step by step with diagrams and bulleted lists is a cleaner, better, more user-friendly format for training and documentation.

Actually my ultimate fear in this scenario has nothing to do with what I can "force people to listen to" as you put it. It has everything to do with what Facebook might decide we shouldn't hear.

And, who knows, maybe Facebook actually is capable and willing to implementing a sane, thoughtful moderation system. I just don't have faith that they ever will.

OTOH, I wouldn't doubt for a second that they prioritized items in your newsfeed based on who paid them advertising dollars. And in the same vein, I wouldn't doubt if they used a fancy new "moderation" system to simply block content they didn't want their users to see.

Call me cynical, but I just don't see Facebook adopting a sane moderation system, like for example anything that approximates slashcode.

Their equivalent of "moderation" would better resemble censorship. They would simply hide the thoughts and comments they don't think you would like. Of course, it would be for your own good...

There were many people producing their own content on the Internet before big business saw a profit in it. To frame them all as pasty-faced nerds is disingenuous and obviously false. These were ordinary people exchanging ideas and sharing whatever they felt was worth sharing. This was, and still is, the crux of the Internet's greatness.

The kind of content you mention is the kind of content that does not utilize the unique interpersonal capabilities of the Internet. That stuff is ordinary mass media content that has moved to the Internet only because the corporations producing it were losing their readership and revenue to the Internet (see previous paragraph.) They came here to fight for our eyeballs and our opinions because we chose to ignore them in favor of communicating with each other.

Advertising, as irritating as it can be, can help us to distinguish between content motivated by money (probably distributed by a giant corporation with an ulterior motive of keeping you suckling at their teat while feeding you politically slanted pseudo-news) and content motivated by some other impetus. For me, content that is laden with irritating advertisements practically screams "don't listen to me! I'm a scumbag!"

I'd much rather hear from ordinary people who have enough respect for me to tell their story without trying to monetize me. Lucky for us, plenty of those people still exist on the Internet.

(properly formatted this time)

There were many people producing their own content on the Internet before big business saw a profit in it. To frame them all as pasty-faced nerds is disingenuous and obviously false. These were ordinary people exchanging ideas and sharing whatever they felt was worth sharing. This was, and still is, the crux of the Internet's greatness. The kind of content you mention is the kind of content that does not utilize the unique interpersonal capabilities of the Internet. That stuff is ordinary mass media content that has moved to the Internet only because the corporations producing it were losing their readership and revenue to the Internet (see previous paragraph.) They came here to fight for our eyeballs and our opinions because we chose to ignore them in favor of communicating with each other. Advertising, as irritating as it can be, can help us to distinguish between content motivated by money (probably distributed by a giant corporation with an ulterior motive of keeping you suckling at their teat while feeding you politically slanted pseudo-news) and content motivated by some other impetus. For me, content that is laden with irritating advertisements practically screams "don't listen to me! I'm a scumbag!" I'd much rather hear from ordinary people who have enough respect for me to tell their story without trying to monetize me. Lucky for us, plenty of those people still exist on the Internet.

It's a non-story. Just regular schmoozing. Though the fact that regular schmoozing is a non-story might be a story in and of itself...

The takeaway here is that Comcast is in bed with industry regulators. While we all knew this already, we shouldn't allow that fact to cloud our judgement about the obviously unacceptable state of current affairs.

This email clearly shows a cordial relationship between the correspondents. It should be illegal for corporations to make this kind of offer to a regulator, and it should be illegal for a regulator to have any kind of social contact with industry lobbyists. Hell, a meeting between regulators and lobbyists can't even rightly be framed as a business meeting, because private corporations don't have any business negotiating terms when it comes to legislative oversight. If private industry has something to say to the legislature, or if the legislature needs guidance from private industry, the exchange should occur in an open forum without need of gifts or galavanting.

If this doesn't count as a conflict of interest for the regulators in question, what does? Those "rules folks" ought to have a damn similar opinion about that dinner...

Word of mouth still does and always will involve real contact with real people. This kind of "public" online "review" is nothing more than a vehicle for revenue. Can anyone say "Astroturf?"

You do seem to be stupid and incompetent (your words,) but not because you don't agree with the GP. Rather, it is because of the ridiculous arguments you are making:

"But the recession was not the bank's fault â" rather it is that of the politicians, who forced banks (with the threat of "discrimination" lawsuits) to give money to unqualified borrowers."

First of all, the article you link says nothing to support your claims of forcing or discrimination or even lawsuits. The closest the article gets to supporting your claims is to state that "rules of spending" were "loosened" for the banks by the politicians. How can you not see at this point that the banks (and the other giant corporations) are the ones wagging the dog here? They bribe politicians through so-called lobbying in order to bring about the loosening and tightening of rules that suit their favor. That much is plain as day! And you can't argue that these particular loosened loan rules didn't favor the banks. Obviously the banks stood to benefit, which they did, greatly and at taxpayer expense.

Now, to your credit I will say that blame for the recession can't be laid fully on the banks: each of us is also at fault for failing to lynch (literally or metaphorically) the bigwig asshats (meaning bankers and politicians, I don't discriminate) who are continuously allowed to pull this shit and get away with it.

"Nope. It was not the banks doing the forging â" it was the applicants. Bank-employees may have looked the other way, but the actual forgery was done by the customers."

"May have looked the other way," as you put it, implies that bank employees were complicit in the forgery, which they were. So why use this statement argue that they weren't forging income numbers? They were further "loosening the rules" and they should have known better.

Did you know that it is a bank's responsibility to assess the creditworthiness of it's debtors? If they make a bad investment on a homeowner and the loan isn't repaid, that's money that they lose! As you pointed out, this is their bread and butter business. They knew what they were doing here, and they used the government's new generously low (bribe-induced) requirements to help themselves unload what they knew to be bad loans on Fannie Mae.

.

This is how the system works, folks! Isn't it wonderful? Truly, We The People need to step in and clean house if we want these shenanigans to cease. Arguing about whether it was a bank's fault or a government's fault is meaningless. From the perspective of common people, the banks are the government and the government is the banks. They both have a vested interest in working together to milk us like we are livestock, which they do.

I fail to see a downside to this. When a clear need arises, congress will act. When there is no need, they won't cross the line. Sounds pretty good to me.

What we have now is politicians bowing to corporate interests and lining their pockets behind closed doors to the detriment of common folk. You don't think gridlock is preferable to that?

The American civil war was about much more than slavery--in fact, the slavery thing was pretty much just a PR tool Lincoln used to solidify public opinion in the north. The real issues were about state's rights, self governance, secession, and consolidation of federal power. It's good to know that mass "education" is successfully keeping people confused about this.

I read "Exotic Hardons" at first haha. What a headliner!

I seem to remember hearing they had already cracked SSL among all of the recent revelations.

Either way, this is obviously a PR move. It should give nobody any high hope for Google's intentions...

Bitter vituperation towards the failed beta, even after it's gone, may do as much to drive away readership as the beta

2 things:

A First, on the bitter vituperation, as one who quite unabashedly shared my thoughts about how and why the new design was/is bad: much of the speech was strongly voiced, but it was simply the truth. If Dice kills the site layout and function, I will stop coming here. That's not a threat so much as a fact that I feel dice should be privy to. I don't want them to kill the site, and I'm sure they don't want me to leave. Bluntly pointing out the lose-lose seemed to me the most direct way to communicate my feelings and affect change.

As an addendum to the above point, there is something in the culture here (and not just here) where humor and bravado is acceptable and even expected. Perhaps you have not been properly acculturated to Slashdot geek, subspecies of Internet geek. By your very presence here you should know what to expect in this regard.

B Second, Dice failed hard on this gambit. They didn't even bother to try at "reading the wind" so to speak. Hopefully they have learned from this and will at least make an attempt to understand the community before making fools of themselves in the future.

You can say that the community reaction harms the site's image, and that might even be true. On the whole though, the community doesn't care about Slashdot's image. We have this space, and it is ours, and it is good. Only Dice is concerned with image because they are trying to figure out how to grow us and monetize us. This is the ugly truth behind the whole situation, and I posit this is where where much of the "bitter" response really came from. It's creepy and sad to see a culture that you love slowly destroyed by a soulless entity that doesn't care about you or your community so much as it cares about using you and shaping you into something profitable.

In this instance, by failing to read the wind, Dice bared this truth to all of us; reminded us that this community isn't really ours so much as it is theirs. Absolutely that was a hurt to the community.