I would prefer that all sites offer the option of registering with your real name via a charge to a real credit card, NOT a debit or gift card. The money could go to the site or even to a charity. Then, if I had registered in such a manner, I would have the option of filtering out all non-registered users and even threads proceeding from their comments. It should be easy to click a button to turn the filter on and off, directly within the reading interface.

Then I could block most of the trolls when I want and easily see other comments if I am willing to weed through the trolls.

All sites should have downvoting but also have mechanisms to detect and de-register malicious downvoters, whether working alone or as an organized mob. Unregistered people should not be able to downvote registered people.

Sites should also offer white-lists, both manual and automatic. Only someone with good karma or badges or whatever should be able to vote at all.

I'm seriously thinking of droppping /. And doing all of my forum messaging through StackExchange.

...and stop trying to take over the internet by adding proprietary extensions to said standards. Stop trying to push MS server or development products by tweaking the browser to work better with said products.

The browser wars are over. MS won the battle but is loosing the war. They need to drop the insurgency and learn to play nice if they want to play at all.

My grandkids will TELL you that they know the difference between games and real life. But then they play-fight a hell of a lot more rough than my brother & I did, partially because they are imitating the characters in their games, as is evidenced by the fact that they quote the games as they are literally kicking each other in the ribs as hard as they can. They compete to see who can make the closest imitation of some attack move while the "victim" endures the pain and risk of injury without complaint because the victims of the attacks in the games aren't really people so they don't / can't complain. Yes, they take turns being non-person punching bags because that is how it works in the games they spend every possible minute playing.

Now these are smart kids, aged 6 & 8, with normal empathy in other situations. But when they start acting out their games in "meat-space" they really do loose perspective and end up going overboard and often hurt one another.

My mom used to spend a lot of time explaining the whys and wherefores of everything she didn't want us to do. Bottom line? We stopped doing it just so we wouldn't have to listen to her drone on again.

Then you end up with a massive pile of disorganized crap written in a thousand different voices for a thousand different audiences. If a company can't be bothered to hire a good technical writer to create an organized, consistent documentation system then I am not interested in their product. If a FLOSS project can't/won't attract the same, then I figure their product is probably crap too.

If you truly believe your product is good but you won't invest in good documentation, then you are (at the worst) signing your projects death warrant or (at the least) "hiding your light under a bushel" and drastically limiting its success.

Even if a FLOSS project doesn't pay a single developer, if it can't attract a good technical writer then it should hire one if it ever hopes to really be taken seriously. Even if all those developers are just doing it for practice and don't expect to commercialize the project at all, good documentation will cause that project to rise to the top and really help build the professional reputations of those developers.

It's legal now. Unfortunately, almost none of the real-estate agencies have modernized and there is no real incentive to do so. I used to do some IT consulting work for a real-estate agency so I looked up all the legal stuff and offered to get them all set up. They weren't interested in anything other than nursing along their decrepit old PCs.

Not true. Bill Clinton signed a law making digital signatures as binding as "real" ones. I don't recall the rewuired formats or technologies, but I have "signed" many forms by just typing my name and typing "I agree."

What you aren't taking into account is that it can take years and hundreds of person-hours building up that social network in the first place. If you are new in town, just starting in an industry, or didn't spend four years at Stanford carefully planning who you partied with, then that whole "work your social network" rap is practically worthless.

Could you please tell us what field you are in and what kind of union you are a member of?

I was the IT manager of a hospital. The HIPAA rules apply. You can't repeat what you hear and you can't read what you weren't supposed to see. Seriously, learn to not even focus your eyes on private information. However, there is nothing wrong with using what you hear to help you make decisions about what you should do, such as leaving a business that is in financial trouble or setting aside some server space for that expansion someone is planning but didn't think to consult with IT about.

you go to where the volcano is if you want to study it as safely as possible.

I agree. I like tools but I prefer them to fully expose what they are doing and why. I don't want my tools to hide the complexity, just reduce the tedious redundancy of implementing that complexity.