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.

"Should" is pretty distinct from "is."

Oh, so you'd prefer it the way it is currently? (where GCHQ and the NSA get their hands on your packets)

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.

Who said anything about salinity change as the only thing doing the damage? The whole process ignores microscopic organisms from the intake to the filters to the osmosis process.

You might be able to push it up a little locally if you dump the salt in a harbor or something... soooo... don't do that. duh.

And that is exactly what they will do because it is the cheapest option that the lowest bid waste contractor has. It wouldn't be the first time humans created a toxic waste dump...

The water doesn't go away. You realize most of it ends up in your toilet, which leads back out (eventually) to sea (or at least the groundwater somewhere nearby)?

That's why Japan and the UK are laying an undersea cable across the pole. Unless you use satellites only (fat chance - latency sucks) anything going from north america to elsewhere is going to go through the US on it's way undersea.

They thought they were Right, and so they were just recording history.

I can see another aspect besides the waste in electricity... The microscopic life in the ocean that is the foundation of the food chain that will eventually lead to us is not considered in the environmental assessments. They are only worried about the higher multi-cellular life. The ocean is one of the most diverse places on Earth. I can see us fucking up that diversity much like we fucked up everything else we touched in nature.

Bring it to the bootloader, and use fastboot from the SDK. You can flash disk images this way (which you can get here, if you're well and truly stuck)

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.

Five hundred IT workers at SCE were cut, and many had to train their replacements.

It is at this point that I would tell them to piss up a rope and suck on the dry end until it was wet...

It just adds insult to injury to expect a person you tell you are firing that they have to train their replacement. If forced by contract I would do the bare minimum required by the contract. Nothing compels me to divulge everything. They are, after all, supposed to be qualified for the job right?

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.