"Everything was going great, until the bank manager sprayed me in the face with his DNA!"

I don't see how your solution changes that, though. Assuming it's implemented properly, wouldn't the ideas that already get their big break still make it through the screening alongside others that wouldn't have, and then be subject to the whims of the people? It seems like all you'd be doing is having a layer of bureaucracy to do what the Salganik effect already does. So as an example, in the current, free-range internet, there'd be a million potential memes, of which 20,000 qualify as "good enough" for the Salganik effect, and then two or three get their big break. In your proposed system, the jury would examine the million possible memes, whittle them down to probably around 20,000, then release them to the greater public, and then two or three would get the big break from there. Extra effort for similar results.

You also have to account for the fact that people do not like being told what to believe in. You suggest sites like Reddit start doing this - wouldn't Redditors cry censorship, and simply move to a site that didn't? A jury system works in real-life courts because it's difficult to move to a different country when a jury hands down a verdict you don't like (think of the outrage after the Casey Anthony acquittal, for instance). All it would take would be one high-profile "hey look how great my idea was, and the jury voted it down!" for people to start switching over to a Reddit-Sans-Jury, and we'd be back where we started.

So you have a system that's ineffective on both sides. If it skews too lenient, then it would simply slice out the fraction of bad memes that would already be ignored. If it skews too draconian, then people will simply go to a different website.

Yes, random chance is a factor in which grassroots campaigns take hold. Luck is a factor in everything. Luck is a factor in Mr. Haselton's proposed solution as well (basically extending the "internet jury duty" idea he's pushed in many other posts) - if this campaign had been reviewed by 20 random internet-users who just so happen to be militant anti-feminists, then it would've been killed on the spot.

The luck factor of a success can be minimized by actually being better than the alternatives. In the Salganik study, though the popular songs were chosen randomly, they were chosen randomly from the better subset of songs. No "world" chose a crappy song to be popular. And that study was on a very subjective medium - how good or bad a song was. In something that is generally more agreed-upon, such as "rape is bad", the luck factor is understandably much diminished.

So just because a success has a luck factor involved, that's not a reason to cast doubt on the veracity of the success. If you run a simulated NFL season a million times, certainly the same team will not win the Super Bowl all million times. When an actual team then does win the Super Bowl, does that take away from their victory, that part of it came from luck? No.

Thomas writes opinions as often as any other justice. His famed silence only applies during oral arguments. And he's hardly the first "silent" justice - it's simply made more prominent by how verbose his colleagues are.

The "new" layer is between the stroma and Descemet's membrane (behind the stroma). Since LASIK and most other refractive procedures modify and reshape the stroma, they wouldn't even touch this layer. Corneal transplants, though, would be affected. A full-thickness transplant can take up to a year to recover from, since, among other reasons, there are no blood vessels in the cornea to aid healing. Partial-thickness transplants still take something like six weeks. Here's hoping this new knowledge can help speed those recovery times.

Actually, the translation of that particular passage is a rather interesting affair. The Hebrew word in question, the one that the King James Version translates as "have dominion", is "radah". Radah can mean "to rule", but it's really the verb form of "the point where the roots meet the stem", or in other words, "(to be) the center of strength". It's where we get the English words "radicle", the first root of a plant, as well as "radius", "radiate", and "radical", which all have definitions that relate to a defined center point. Genesis 1:26 says that man is the center of strength of the world. If you want to interpret that as "rule", that works, but it's a focus much more on the responsibility side of ruling, rather than the power side. As a counterpoint, take a look a few verses earlier at Gen. 1:16, where he sets the sun and moon to rule the sky: "God made the two great lights, he made the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night; he made the stars also." The word here translated as "to govern", "lememselet", is a much stronger declaration of rulership than "radah". Man doesn't get to lememselet the world, he gets to radah the world.

Africa and the Middle East won't be taking many manufacturing jobs until they can stop being in a state of constant war. If your factory gets blown up, it really doesn't matter how cheap the labor is.

I came here to say this too. I would much rather put a sperm-impenetrable barrier in my vas deferens (a vasectomy without the "snip-snip"), resulting in no fertility, than cook my balls with a laser, resulting in merely reduced fertility.

He said duck tape. It's rather more expensive than duct tape, since they have to catch and render the ducks.

Oh lord, I can hear it now. "They don't even have to immigrate anymore to take our jobs!"

There don't seem to be many people asking questions, so I'll bite.

What exactly is Personal Audio? Your website is slashdotted, so I can't find what you make or what your business model is. But you claim not to be a patent troll. You're even willing to come to a hive of kneejerking anti-patent-trolls and answer our questions to try and convince us of this. So, if you're not one, why not? What do you make? What do you sell? What do you do?

All these comments and nobody has yet commented on "Miltary" robots? Slashdot, I'm ashamed of you!

Who needs a restore function? You can restore the entire internet with a camera and a cat.

Was Goering even shown onscreen in either of those movies? I haven't seen Schindler's List in a long time, but in Downfall he was only talked about, as he was not in Berlin at the time.

IIRC courts have ruled in the past that metadata does not require a warrant. Of course, this brouhaha might create some political impetus to change that.