byerley

It's hard to not view this as whining about the failed gentrification of Reddit (especially with the biker bar analogy).

I'm struggling to think of any successful social network sites that are heavy-handed with moderation. Certainly twitter, facebook, ect. get the same accusations of harboring "unethical" groups.

There's probably not a good way to succinctly prove my capacity for empathy to you, but I think trying to link social grace and empathy is also incorrect in general.

Assume for the sake of argument that, as you suggested, you've identified a statement in the course of conversation that someone else might find offensive. What's your recourse and how does it benefit society?

If you've simply misinterpreted the person's meaning (which I'd argue is more often than not the case), you probably force them to spend time clarifying and maybe they endeavor to spend more time and effort to avoid similar misunderstanding in the future - all to avoid the hypothetical situation where they might have actually offended someone (who could have just asked for similar clarification).

Perhaps instead you've actually identified some unintentionally disclosed socially unacceptable bias that the person holds. The offense you've taken is still imaginary (I guess you'd argue it's actually empathetic) so chances are you're not in a good position to reshape that person's belief system - especially since hiding the belief in the first place suggests they know it's socially unacceptable. Rather, you're more likely just teaching the person to hide their bias more convincingly. I think most people find hidden bias much more insidious.

The best case, I suppose, is shaming some intentionally offensive statement. This one seems reasonable to me. However, if the statement was intentionally offensive, you probably didn't need the mental gymnastics to identify it in the first place.

I'm open to any counter-arguments you might have; I just thought I'd clarify my own stance since your accusation seemed a little harsh.

Can you elaborate on why spending time and effort to find offensiveness in things makes sense to you?

The concept seems so outlandish to me that I'm not sure how to word the question more politely, sorry.

The arguments to keep building it were almost as stupid as the arguments to stop building it.

I recall hateful accusations of "mismanagement" that boiled down to supplying liquor at a Christmas party. Drunk physicists... the horror. Oh, and the fact that our contribution to the ISS had roughly the same cost estimate meant... for some reason, that it was prudent to choose between to the two.

The consistent trend going all the way back to the Payne Fund Studies is that someone somewhere thinks they can show some alarmist correlation between media and behavior.

However, the trend always disappears once you've accounted for shoddy research and disregarded short-term effects (i.e. hormone responses). I could cherry-pick you some recent results; the most popular lately seem to be video games and violence or video games and sexism. It wouldn't be very convincing since you can ostensibly find a variety of papers that say exactly the opposite. I urge you to browse through the google scholar results and draw your own conclusions.

Please do note: I'm arguing a subtle distinction here between subconscious subversion and conscious consideration. After seeing a horrifying documentary about war, I might consciously change my philosophy on death because the source is reliable and the information is believable/consistent. However, seeing silly deaths in a video game can't influence me in the opposite way because the source is dismissible and the conclusion is fantastical.

So, to answer your second question in an unsatisfying way: I think it's clear that people change their own philosophies.

When are we going to accept the scientific evidence that video games (and movies before them (and books before them)) don't fundamentally change a person's philosophy? Books in particular are really good at helping you explore ideas and challenge your preconceived notions, but the subconscious effect is akin to hypnosis, completely incapable of making you do or believe something that you ordinarily wouldn't have.

Concern trolling makes for a good read I guess. People are wired to always be on the lookout for the next good thing to be concerned about.

I mostly meant anti-regulation.

I'm not sure we need strict laws regarding parking, public drinking, loosies, ect. Let alone aggressive enforcement.

I think parts of NYC are a good example of how enforcement can cause a more negative environment than the original activity.

As someone who fancies libertarianism but who's wary of its effectiveness in practice, I'm hoping we get to see this impromptu social experiment play out long enough to gather some useful statistics.

The North Korea link really confuses me.

How is a small country like North Korea capable of mounting such a sophisticated attack when they aren't even teaching their computer students about the Internet? - http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2014/12/07/suki-kims-exper...

Even if they specifically trained a hacking group, the talent pool would be tiny.

Stop buying bullshit narratives against state funded science.

Rocket test stands are not limited to a single rocket model. The choice in 2010 was to spend $57m finishing a project that will undoubtedly see future use, or to abandon a $292m investment with 0 return.

Look for SpaceX to jump on this opportunity since they already lease testing facilities from Stennis.

I sure hope the Feynman lectures from Caltech aren't next.

People seem really quick to forget that fundamental science endures and political correctness is fleeting. I wonder what the next world threatening catastrophe to make people remember will be.

I read it differently; "this stunt" is ambiguous in context.

In any case, I think you're misunderstanding the nature of the problem. The danger of "doxxing" is that people get overwhelmed by a flood of negative attention from many different people. In most cases, none of the "harassing" individuals actually do enough individual harassment to make the action illegal. You can't go after the doxxer because releasing the information was completely legal, and you can't go after the mob because none of the individuals have done enough to constitute a crime.

You could certainly go after a guy who sends a knife; pretty sure just mailing a knife is illegal in most places.

If repeating publicly known personal information is a crime, the printers of telephone directories must have really good lawyers.

If I unwittingly hurled innuendo I sincerely apologize and ask you to point it out so I can avoid doing so in the future.

However, your other contentions don't make any sense to me. Everyone is entitled to their identity; rather, the contention was that devaluing her internet identity wasn't worth the financial gain. The internet makes new identities trivial to acquire and Sarkeesian's wasn't of any particular value before the controversy so I don't think there's any logic there.

Similarly, no one suggested that you should find credibility in anonymity. I tried very hard to make my argument stand on its own by excluding any evidence not verifiable through third parties.

So $159k - $16k (kickstarter cut) - 738 sticker packs ($2k?) - 216 postcards ($0.2k?) - 51 DVDs ($0.2k?) - production ($6k?)

That's still $135k

Seems like a pretty decent chunk of change (especially considering that she's still taking donations on http://www.feministfrequency.com/ and getting paid for speaking - both hinging on her continued relevance in the media)

I also think you're forgetting that she can simply change identities online if she wishes (anonymity protects the good guys too!).

Anonymous death threats made against celebrities aren't new (twitter is just a new, highly public, medium). No one can say with certainty she's not in physical danger, but no one can say with certainty she's not going to be struck by lightning either.

Are you suggesting "rightwing talk radio and the goldbugs" don't get similar death threats? As far as I can tell they do.

I don't care to conjecture about the frequency or origination of the threats because I don't think there's enough information and, frankly, it's not that important.

I can tell you I'd happily endure electronic harassment for that much money, especially with experts telling me there's no risk of physical harm.

"If you are able to insert in a publication the name of a nonexistent author in a publication, who will guarantee that even the scientific contents have been examined with care?"

Reviewers are typically asked to disregard the authors of a submission,

"Your review should be directed at the paper, not the author" - Jay Smith, "The Task of the Referee", 1990

Scientists can get away with not considering the authors precisely because they base their evaluation on careful examination of the contents. This is a better example of selective attention than it is of lapses in scientific review.

I don't think I've ever misread that style (usually the function being called makes it obvious), but it relies on short-circuit evaluation which doesn't carry over to a lot of languages - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-circuit_evaluation

C is particularly dangerous because it will normally short-circuit, but the standard doesn't require it and in rare cases the compiler will optimize it out.

Your downvote gripes(a quick check of my profile would show I'm not even capable) are almost as obnoxious as your willful misinterpretation of my my original comment.

I never said Milgram's work was beyond reproach, just that I found the unjustified spin of the original article annoying. Fromm is also making more of a philosophical argument against experimental psychology as a whole. He references Milgram's experiment as "one of the most highly regarded experiments in the field of aggression". I'm not sure why you think it's a biting criticism.

I find something deeply annoying about journalists using pop-psychology to criticize real psychology.

Yes, you can probably poke some holes in his quantitative interpretation of obedience (it's hard to condense human dialogue/action into a single metric), but it was good fundamental psychology that warranted repetition/variation.

Published science often contains a limited narrative because even scientists have trouble reading through many pages of technical detail without proper motivation. To suggest that narrative makes Milgram's work art rather than science is an unjustified insult.

I view bug bounties as more of a conscious nod towards responsible disclosure than anything else. I sincerely doubt anyone could make a competitive living off of bug bounty programs (even accounting for the legal grey area of selling vulnerabilities) so the economic incentive argument seems really silly to me.

In contrast, if you've ever tried to responsibly disclose a vulnerability and gotten a threat from the legal department in response (still common practice in a lot of companies), a bug bounty program can be a very encouraging show of good faith.

I know this is a serious site for serious people, but I lost it at the "irate Joe's" explanation.

No,

This has been looked at pretty extensively before. Confusingly enough, a lot of the research was done by the creators of BGPmon (http://bgpmon.netsec.colostate.edu/ - same name, concept, and primary functionality with no connection between the two as far as I can tell).

The solution is easy enough, secured peering to prevent hijacking, and a centralized certification process to prevent rogue AS's. We've known this stuff for a good decade now, but the exploitation has never been serious enough to overcome push-backs on the costs (both in terms of hardware and reachability issues) from ISPs.

And, even if you use a side-channel to distribute keys between the sender and receiver (to encrypt the data safely), the header absolutely has to be plain-text. Governments and companies scraping email meta-data is already a huge problem.

A protocol closer to Tor would make for much more secure email distribution, but it would also require a complete protocol rewrite. Potential death of email from a back-end point of view at least.

Elected officials can certainly be two-faced.

However, I think criticizing their decisions while everyone is still in the information gathering stages is taking vigilance way too far. Politicians are people too and you have to give them a fair shake at doing their job before you can lament the result.

I can't understand this author's spin. The memo -

http://coffman.house.gov/sites/coffman.house.gov/files/docum...

is a request to NASA for un-redacted information about the SpaceX failures. They're not asking for an investigation or delays (as far as I can tell), they just want disclosure. How is making failure information public going to slow down progress?

Actually, it does in this case. People seem to forget that in climate science (like cosmology, ect.), you can't use the normal scientific method because you can't really do meaningful experiments, just observations.

What you do instead, is look at available information, intuit an explanation, then systematically compare the implications to known results. If all goes well, you might then do a simulation or predict other effects that can be observed. However, the process is very dissimilar to other fields of science.

Thanks for the recommendation btw, enjoyed it very much.

I'm struggling to think of a scantily clad female FPS character, but it's not really my genre of choice. Can you give some examples?

I always thought of it as more of a fantasy/RPG issue.