I think you might be conflating the terms "troll" and "asshole." If you show up to a subforum on SA and start actually trolling people by posting spam or a bunch of NSFL images or something, you'll get banned pretty much instantly.
That's not trolling, that's vandalism. Trolling is posting things for the sole purpose of inciting flamewars, or getting people to believe you were serious and react with disproportionate fervour.
Actually, the original post was submitted. As was pointed out above, this is not blogspam. It's a result of HN's policy that only original titles can be used. The original blog post has a title that isn't nearly as friendly to upvoting. It's a system that has its pros and cons, but it's what HN has decided to do.
Well, boingboing is festooned with ads and affiliate links. It's a business, after all.
The problem is not so much whether BB is blogspam[0] but that blogspam often has a better chance of getting up-voted on HN.
[0]: My view: There are many ads, but half the time there's some sensible additional commentary for the target post, so there's plausible value in exchange for the ads.
True. I've found many good and useful things there, but every so often they post something that is clearly dubious or a hoax. That's fine as things go; people make mistakes.
But when caught out they tend (to the extent I've seen) to either say nothing or to just delete the post, rather than make an effort to correct mistakes.
(On a related note, I'm amazed at the level of snark and bile in the some of the comments on Boing-boing; the nasty ones rival or out-do the worst of Youtube.)
In my spare time I like to generate some organic search traffic for "lung cancer" and "asbestos" and "mesothelioma" and click the AdWords. My Google stock has been going up as long as I've been doing this. /s
Tell me, was picking a company name that Google attempts to auto-correct a conscious choice? I couldn't get to your website just by searching for your company's name on my first try.
Follow up: About how long do you think it will take Google to recognize I am not making a spelling error and I am looking for your services?
>I think that is going to become a major issue in the future.
As hackers are fond of repeating: "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."
There are already huge surplus populations. This is in evidence in a brazen way in southern Europe as the crisis restructures economy and society and yet it is no less true in the USA.
One of the most pressing questions for contemporary liberalism is: What is to be done about these surplus populations? Switzerland has formulated one trajectory of response in the referendum for a basic income. Other wealthy countries take a different path towards control.
Consider this famous question posed by Michel Foucault: "Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" Are these not all ways in which we already deal with surplus populations?
As one method of social control, work, is becoming less and less available and more and more precarious the other methods of social control are on the rise. Pupils are staying in school longer. Ever increasing numbers of people are being sent to prison. Wars continue to be waged.
The workplace, the school, the barracks, the hospital, and the prison are not all just places. They are conditions.
The conditions that typify each are being sublimated throughout all of society and increasingly so. Leisure now often has a productive aspect, e.g., vaporous web browsing is monetized through ads. The panopticon was an innovation in prison design and now it is our experience everywhere.
The line between society and prison is blurring as more and people are under state control in the form of parole and probation. More generally, entire populations are having the conditions of prison thrust upon them through constant surveillance and the constant threat of search and seizure of their person, e.g., stop and frisk.
The future is bleak because the present is bleak. This bleakness just isn't evenly distributed - yet.
To innovate, in the HN sense of the word, is invariably to hasten this ongoing distribution. Every time the Internet eats an industry power and money is re-consolidated into the hands of fewer and fewer and the surplus population grows.
"Understood as a class, programmers occupy the same position today that the bourgeoisie did in 1848, wielding social and economic power disproportionate to their political leverage. In the revolutions of 1848, the bourgeoisie sentenced humanity to two more centuries of misfortune by ultimately siding with law and order against poor workers. Programmers enthralled by the Internet revolution could do even worse today: they could become digital Bolsheviks whose attempt to create a democratic utopia produces the ultimate totalitarianism.
On the other hand, if a critical mass of programmers shifts their allegiances to the real struggles of the excluded, the future will be up for grabs once more. But that would mean abolishing the digital as we know it—and with it, themselves as a class. Desert the digital utopia."
from Deserting the Digital Utopia: Computers against Computing[1]
This is great. I want to use this. Some improvements are needed:
- When searching Florida to Florida (so as to find roundtrip cruises) the cruises just says Miami Round Trip w/o giving any ideas of where it is going to stop, what region, etc. (see: http://cruisesheet.com/?from=Florida&to=Florida)
- No way to search within a time frame. Say I want to leave after November 18th but before December 12th. There is no way to do this search and sort by price.
- Clicking custom search goes nowhere
- I have not once been able to get the low price you list
Thanks for the feedback. This was just a weekend project, so I have a lot of improvements to make, but not a ton of spare time to dedicate to them. I'll get there, though.
The low price is double occupancy-- a few people have gotten stuck on that, so I have to make it clearer.
>especially for Bush is more than a stretch of reality.
I don't necessarily agree with your parent's assertion, but do you not remember the NYT beating the drums of war as loud as anyone in the lead up to Iraq?
This was the reason I stopped reading it. You have to remember that "over here" in Europe it was very clear how weak the case for going to war was even before the attack had started. I wonder if Colin Powell knew that he was throwing away his reputation that day.
Lately, I have found the Guardian much more informative.
But the guy above you heard that they are a liberal media organization, and a conservative media organization said that, so it must be true that the NYT are a bunch of pinko liberal hippies.
>The only secret is to [really] begin.
Nice one Moxie ;)