Not only do I have excellent Karma, but it seems that /. revived my previously deleted journals.

Assume with me, at least for the moment, that it is possible to build a just society through gradual progressive initiatives, rather than through revolution, and that enough cultural progress has been made that increases in democracy will translate into increases in social justice. Also, let us accept what I'll call the populist democratic thesis - regardless of leadership, even overtly democratic institutions will only function in a democratic way under orchestrated popular pressure.

  Given these assumptions, what should our policy priorities be?

Point 000504: (that's the inverse of 1984) This contrasts notably "worse is better" doctrine promulgated by certain types of revolutionary Trotskyist. In reference to the policies of the Party in 1984, which used general economic strangulation to keep the population quiescent and disorganized. Policies which will increase employment and economic growth, stimulate demand, and generally improve the economic situation of the populace tend to provide ordinary people with the time and energy they need to organize.

Democracy and Education: Republicans generally, and the Bush administration in particular, have orchestrated a major attack on the system of public education. In addition to defending this institution and reversing most of NCLB, we need to reduce class sizes and cycle younger teachers into the system. In addition to the economic benefits, John Dewey (in Democracy and Education) generally held that certain educational practices (diametrically opposed to those promoted by NCLB) can be radicalizing - with younger (and, socially at least, more liberal) teachers, motivated teachers with the resources and training to improve their students welfare, it will be. It's very nice that Obama *talks* about such a program, but: talk is cheap.

The Employee Free Choice Act: Labor unions are a major vehicle for reform, and, especially in the post-Reagan American political realignment, a platform to build longterm, broad based vehicles for coordinated popular action. The Reagan, Bush II (and to an extent, Clinton) administrations gutted union organizer protections in executive ways that will be difficult for Obama to reverse (assuming he even tries to do so - unfortunately not a given.) The employee free choice act would largely circumvent these, and effectively restore the right to form a union in this country. And now a brief plug: my aunt, who is a major supporter of the Employee Free Choice Act, is possibly-about to engage in a series of legal battles with her Republican opponent in US House OH-15. She's down by ~150 votes, but 2 years ago she gained 1,500 votes when the provisional ballots were counted, so when that happens, we expect her to take the lead, but the Repubs are trying to block the secretary of state from counting the ballots. Given that the employee free choice act is going to be a major battle, you should give her some money: http://www.actblue.com/page/kilroycountsvotes

  What are our other progressive priorities?

  We might also discuss Obama himself (who I think is more progressive than some of his rhetoric would indicate - but this doesn't matter) and the means by which activists can best exert pressure on their elected officials to execute a progressive agenda.

Pudge made a cool change in discussions- if you link to a comment deep inside a thread and click 'More' the sytem is much more intelligent about crawling down and retrieving children, and then parents and grandparents and so forth up the ancestry. So odds are you'll get more related comments sooner.

We now abbreviate journals in the firehose... so they are more like slashdot stories with a Read More link to the full text.

The big user facing change this week was structural: historically we had 2 different "skeletons" on Slashdot, but with this refresh we unified to a single one. This change simplifies maintenance for us quite a bit (maintaining the idle section and the firehose views of the same data was a royal pain).

You also will see some changes to the firehose.pl layout. We're playing with the tab layout a bit, moving some menus around and better integrating the core functions into the site chrome. It's a bit buggy atm, so feel free to email me if you see something wonky. We're extinguishing a few minor brush fires but there's no forest fires that we're aware of.

Zach knows the wind now. I saw him look at the window and see the leaves rustle. He then started making blowing noises. We blow the mobile over his crib whenever we change his diaper, so he knows the blowing noises move objects. But he's translated that to leaves hundreds of feet away through a window. Now I'm not saying he's a genius, but he's pretty awesome.

Yeah, really.

Only took that organization like five years to see what the rest of the football world sees... 'bout time!

So, once again, some right-winger has modded down one of my posts at the last second. At least it wasn't "overrated" this time.

  Those with a desire to slavishly serve the powerful are intrinsically dishonest - they can't help but game the system as hard as they can, it's simply an expression of their nature.

New job (back to consulting) and current client blocks 'social networks', so I may have to make my return here until the situation changes.

What really sucks is hurricane ike destroyed Cincinnati, and I've been without power at home since Sunday, so even if I wanted to blog on multiply, I can't...

Stay tuned, I suppose...

Steve Stivers

  In case this isn't obvious, I'd like the gag page to have a higher pagerank in response to a search for "Steve Stivers" than his actual homepage.

This won't significantly affect most of you, but we have been working on some meta mod changes. The most user visible change is that the UI we used to use was thrown out, and instead we are using one based on the firehose. Subscribers will see it when they go to the old metamod link although users can see it by going to this version of those hose

The first real change is that we've changed the meanings of the UI around. The old system is 'Fair' and 'Unfair' and the new system is '+' and '-'. The meanings are subtly different. You are no longer rating individual 'Insightful' or 'Troll' or whatever... you are now stating basically "Is this comment good or bad for you". Personally, since I find very few Score:5 funny comments to be actually really funny (and not just cliche memes) I '-' most of them. You are encouraged to be harsh if you don't actually think something is insightful or funny, call it such. The system encourages more of what you + and less of what you -.

You are also welcome now to do more than 10 m2 per day... however we internally have diminishing returns after 10, so you can do more, but they start to matter less and less.

There will undoubtedly be bugs so feel free to email me or vroom at slashdot if you find them. Probably next week or so we'll move this out to everyone, so your assistance is appreciated.

Well, for subscribers only this week at least. We have a half dozen minor bugs left in the TODO list, but if you are a paying subscriber you can test it out. It works best if you are using the keybindings to navigate. Pressing 'f' takes you to the next unread comment respecting thread order... so you can press that over and over again.

We also added a thing to 'collapse comments after reading' which I think I might turn of as a default setting soon. This is only usable for subscribers atm as well. But basically, as you navigate through a discussion, it collapses the comments you've read after you move on. This makes it really easy to navigate large discussions without having to scroll over 150 comments you've already read.

we're aware of a number of annoying bugs, but hopefully most of them will be squashed by Pudge for this weeks code refresh. If things are stable, we hope to roll this out for everyone rsn.

also my baby cut his first tooth yesterday. My furniture will never be ungnawed upon again.

Meh.

Firstly, let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the entire observable universe - you, me, this dinner party - is, indeed a simulation.

  It's probably true that this dinner party has been run through in its entirety, at least once. So in the sense that things inside the simulation are real - this dinner party is probably real.

  However, it's also probably true that whoever is running the simulation is going to choose interesting segments, and run them over and over again with slightly different parameters.

  The total simulation time of these small repeats probably greatly outweighs the simulation time of the entire age of the universe.

  So, while it's true that this dinner party is probably real, in each particular moment that we occupy, we are vastly more likely to be in some instantaneous slice of simulation - disconnected, in a sense, from everything that may have happened before or since - than in a continuous run that includes the entire dinner party.

  So the Buddha is probably right, most of the time. The only thing that exists is the now.

  If we assume that all of this is true, this also helps to explain why it is so difficult to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics.

  Relativity is a pretty straightforward simplifying assumption on large distance scales - if I want to simulate what happens in this room for the next 45 seconds, my simulation only needs to include a sphere, 90 light-seconds across, centered on the room. The simulation can shrink as it runs.

  Likewise, quantum mechanics is a simplifying assumption on small distance scales.

  If we assume that quantum mechanics are relativity are both kludges, tacked on at the last minute to save CPU cycles, maybe coded by different people looking at the problem from opposite ends, it makes sense that they don't reconcile cleanly or easily.

  Given that it's such a dirty hack, the universe probably was written in perl.

So as we've been migrating the system from the tired old D1 to the exciting and awesome new D2 a number of complaints have come up. I'm going to talk about a couple of them here because I'm really looking for feedback on THESE issues. Please only talk about these points or I will mod you offtopic or troll or something.

The issue is about the use of Flat/Threaded/Nested modes. D2 cleanly replaces both threaded and nested modes- you effectively get nested mode by bringing the 2 sliders together. And threaded mode is vastly more flexible because you can choose the level at which comments are abbreviated or displayed in full text. So users of those modes should be set (obviously there are other reasons not to use D2, I'm just talking about the layouts here tho)

What's left is flat mode, which has a number of sort options. Now flat mode is used by roughly 4% of our active population. When i think about flat mode, I think about 2 reasons you would have to use it:

1. I hate indenting and whitespace. I want a big vertical column now this isn't my bag, but I can understand it and even consider supporting it in D2. I think you sacrifice legibility, but this is a personal preference. It also would be easy to support in D2. Hell, you could probably do it in a greasemonkey script no problem.
2. It's easier to remember your place in flat mode This to me is the only reason to use flat mode- you can reload your page an hour later, find the last comment you read, and pick up where you left off.

Now I Would think that the only reason to use flat mode is #2... except that only a couple hundred Slashdot readers have the 'ignore threads' sort order enabled. So either they don't understand what they are doing, or #1 above is the real reason that they use flat mode.

So in a nutshell, the question I am asking in this journal is 'Why do you use flatmode?' Is it cosmetic? To more easily keep your place in a discussion? Something I'm just missing? We have plans to implement a read/unread state retention for discussions, so maybe would you migrate to a threaded view if that function exists? Or is it purely aesthetic... an irrational hatred of scrollbars and whitespace? :)

The reason this matters is that simply formatting the page flatly is easy. Probably a simple greasemonkey hack or maybe a few lines of CSS. But re-implementing the alternate sort is gonna take some work. And I'm ok with that... except that the logs say that nobody actually USES that sort... they ONLY are using flat mode for the cosmetic reasons.

Speak out! Stay on-topic or you WILL be moderated down.

Yes, yes yes! It has finally happened. According to slashfilm, Uwe Boll has mentioned that if an online petition gets to 1,000,000 votes he'll stop making movies. For all of humanity, please go sign this petition! Last I saw, it was only to 96,543... we need more signatures!

In-Place Posting is now live for all logged in users. Hopefully there are no surprises. We've found a number of very tiny bugs, but nothing show stopping. We'll leave the link up to the 'classic' reply form for a few weeks. Next week anonymous coward will get the new posting form... hopefully there are no surprises with that.

A few new keybindings aren't documented yet... v (end) t (top) [] change upper threshold and ,. change bottom threshold. Also 'r' opens the new reply box, m opens the mod total thingee.

The only major complaint so far is that the design changes consume a lot more whitespace. I have mixed feelings on the subject, but am aiming to strike a balance. We noticed 2 very clear places where the whitespace is excessive and hopefully that will be fixed RSN. But on the other hand, making deep threads visually clear, and drawing some attention to the 'reply' buttons is beneficial to everyone, so bare with us as we work to strike some sort of balance.