It's not a theory, it's a known and well-researched consequence of direct democracy

Well then they need to do more research because I have been on Slashdot now for decades I think, and I'm telling you how THIS SYSTEM works. Anyone can judge quite simply and easily for themselves by reading a large number of articles at the -1 level and see how many good but against the grain posts are modded down, vs. sheer and utter crap that no-one wants to see.

Not to mention that just like every time a complaint about "direct democracy" is trotted out, it's invariably against a system that is not a direct democracy. Not everyone can moderate all the time, and the moderation frequency is itself moderated in mysterious ways by meta-moderation.

Is there any analysis that shows the rewards of big data are not meeting the risk (ie dismantling the intrinsic built-in trust of a civilised society and the govts we elect to serve us)?

A more cynical person might suggest that dismantling the trust is the reward some people seek. Divide and conquer is an old, venerable tactic used by both current and would-be tyrants everywhere.

This post will get modded down because it is entirely individual, insightful, conflicts with herd-think and does not massage egos with a straight-forward conclusion that supports an already established and unfounded viewpoint.

It starts out modded down because your anonymous status is incorrectly conflated with low value by the site's basic posting and default reading mechanisms.

Somehow the story moderating system (firehose) fails

Somehow? Are you not aware that firehose is advisory only, and that the rankings attained in it have no effect upon which stories post?

It's correct. Slashdot's moderators routinely downrate good posts on the basis of "disagree", and the system itself hides good conversations, muzzles the moderators, incorrectly presumes anonymity is a bad thing for posts (wrong), while assuming anonymity is a good thing for moderators (wrong again), and does nothing effective about moderation abuse. The best thing you can say about it is that it can be ignored if you properly configure your browsing options. By far the best way to read slashdot is at -1. I've been doing it for years.

Your kid has a right not to get molested right?

Yes, everyone has a right to physical security.

The ability to enforce that right goes down significantly if you can't find out about people in your neighborhood who have molested kids in the past (especially given that child molesters have the highest recidivism rate of any major criminal group).

No, it doesn't. What the heck would I do with that information? Go pre-emptively shoot people I think might be dangerous?

Just because we haven't done a great job of enforcing that right in the past doesn't mean that privacy rights magically trump it.

You're the one who seems to think your paranoia trumps actual rights people have.

Well, someone has to have insurance.

Sure, but that should be the company I bought the car from, factored into the price. It's the software the car maker provided making the driving choices, why should I be responsible in any way for the choices it makes.

Yes larger population could in theory tromp down a smaller one.

But generally a larger population is more complacent and less likely to do anything, where a smaller population is more vigorous.

I've voiced some unpopular opinions here. Yes sometimes I'm modded down. But pretty often I'm also modded up, so on average I feel the result is actually pretty fair - over time my voice is heard, despite blips of silence.

Read at -1 for a bit before you truly claim that down-moderation is not needed... or at least if not down, some people just need an off switch.

I think a combination of user moderation along with a handful of overseers that address the more egregious moderation abuses by the mobs, would be the way to go.

OXYMORON ALERT: "Military Morality"

Not at all. Every institution needs some kind of morality to guide its actions. One can debate whether a particular institution should exist, altough in our current level of development it seems unlikely we could do without military, and of course even in a completely peaceful one we'd still need personnel and equipment for difficult or dangerous missions, such as search and rescue; but once one does, it needs rules about what's desirable or acceptable and what's not.

But then again, I guess posting edgy slogans is less demanding than identifying specific problems, evaluating possible fixes to them, or even discussing the ethics of national defence in general.

Evidence points to this guy having committed armed robbery against other pharmacies on at least 4 other occasions, in addition to drawing a firearm against police officers when caught. Take this into consideration before you start to blame guns, cops etc. for him dying.

Hmm. You left out the 16-year prison sentence the guy already had behind him for "sexual abuse and robbery convictions", which seems odd for someone genuinely defending the police here. You also jump to the rather ridiculous conclusion that there's a "PC leftist crowd" ready to condemn the police for shooting an armed nutcase who pulled a gun on them. Are you simply a troll hoping to initiate a left-right tribal battle over what seems a pretty clear case of a violent career criminal making his final mistake?

That said, we could once again blame the War on Drugs, which makes it profitable to rob damn painkillers at gunpoint. If people who want high could get high legally, and people who want to get completely messed up could do so in licensed places with medical and security staff, we wouldn't have to deal with this kind of shit. Nor would places like Mexico need to deal with their derived problems.

Agreed, and they failed to compare their analysis of various computer process times (cache, memory, hard disk, network, etc.) to various human component times, starting with a single neural pulse.

Their failure goes far deeper than that: they wrote a paper and went on with their business. Presumably they get responses at some point, and then write a response, and so on.

People engage in multiple conversations in vastly different timescales all the time. All it means is that you do something else when waiting for a response. And our current non-intelligent computers have already mastered this art: the very computer I'm writing this on waits a virtual eternity between my keystrokes. And the same goes for disk read/write requests, network requests, etc.

This problem was solved long ago, by man and nature both: just use memory to store the context and interpret the reply in the stored context when it arrives.

Really THIS got modded insightful.

Because the truth is insightful; get over it.

Jobs died October 5, 2011

It takes a long time to wind down a big suit and come to an agreement.

The Republicans will never allow this to happen. They love how their laws have ruined innovation in the US

You misspelled "Democrat".

But really the word you should have used is "statist", which can be found in both Democrat and Republicn camps. The reason you keep voting for failure is that you've not discerned that candidates matter more than party.

Problem is convincing a PHB that the seasoned veteran who knows the codebase extremely well is worth the cost compared to a H-1B

The the companies problem though, not the seasoned veteran - because the seasoned veteran is already considering several job offers from people who do realize that value.