In the 1997/1998 timeframe, the difference was that the submissions were pretty good, so rubberstamping worked OK. There were still frequent omissions and inaccuracies, but this was further handled by the commentary being exceedingly high quality. Frequently someone working on the technology, project, or software, would chime in with clarification and because comment counts were low the signal would get through the noise.

So no, the "editors" really were never that, but the system worked decently when it was a smaller user base of more knowledgable players. Then as the slide towards uselessness and hostile users began, accounts, scoring, moderation, metamoderation, and so on were all instituted, but there's really no overcoming ignorance in volume.

Wow, this apologia is +5 insightful. I guess this shows how the Slashdot mass falls on this issue.

Now you really sound racist.

There is cultural shift over time in what terms are considered appropriate. This particular shift occurred about 45 years ago.

Oh, the entire culture was obsessed with torture and killing. Do you realize how racist this sounds?

However, this is really a barn-door closing operation. They have committed an enormous breach of trust. This is the start of a many year climb to become acceptable to purchase again.

Waterfox has already embedded malware in its downloads by choice. Steer clear.

I would countersuggest 1999.

FWIW, I think that's a mistake. Why trust the opaque "encryption" feature of the application like Excel or acrobat when you can use something well-proven?

Unless you only want to dissuade casual observation, in which case any number of simple methods may work that involve no encryption.

Your point stands, but are you aware of Classic Theme Restorer extension? It undoes most of the australis idiocy.

I guess I'm happy this won't affect me as their failure to ship a win64 binary has me on nightlies already on windows, and on Linux I end up building my own half the time and can turn this shit off.

That said, I'm starting to tire of firefox's bad decisions of the month.

I disagree.

That's the reasonable, but minority scenario. A lot of times they want you to solve their relatively arbitrary and ridiculous problem in a very short timescale.

I give very very simple problems and hope the candidate makes small mistakes that I can watch them figure out. Sometimes they just ace them and I don't learn much but I can ask another.

A coworker asks candidates to implement the 8 queens solution using an actual computer. He doesn't care about the difference between someone who knows the answer and someone who has never considered the problem before, but expects in 90 minutes that a programmer should be able to get it working even if he has to give a few hints.

Those are what I consider somewhat reasonable questions.

However, most of my peers ask code golf questions bout C++ minutiae, or baroque algorithms questions for unusual application domains and seems to think candidates who can't rattle of answers don't know how to program. That's been the majority case at other companies I've worked at as well.

Expletives aren't "dirty". Using them doesn't make you "bad". Removing them from your vocabulary is a choice that you're free to make, but the better choice is to do better editing.

You have to show that the information is intended to cause harm as the intent, and it generally has to be false. This means that a lot of things that get called libel in the UK aren't in the US (typically things that are true!).

It also means the burden of demonstration in the US is quite high. Demonstrating intent is in some cases quite difficult.

In this sort of case, the intent is fairly easy to show, and the reckless disregard for the veracity along with the falseness is easy to show. However the cost of prosecution to the individual is prohibitive, and the actors are frequently legion by the time the problem becomes big.

As always, troubleshooting capacity comes, primarily, from personality type, not from training. Training can help, but it can't substitute.

Yes, I wasn't disagreeing, only commenting on how bad the current state of affairs is.

Oakland is so redlined that my local loop is over 3 miles long. AT&T one day fucked up the loop. They've never fixed it. DSL speeds went from 1MB to 300Kbps.