And what does he mean by "After the initial set up of the laptop"? What exactly did he do? Couldn't it just mean that the security software he is using to do the scan or the media he is using is infected? I just think this sounds fishy until he's verified it with a completely different set of tools.
EDIT: Sorry for scaring people. Listen, I HATE keyloggers and other invasive software. Here:
My point was that I can see a legit need for low-level auditing by whoever owns the PC. Including such a package that's turned off by default, might be better than forcing a worried parent to sift through 12 keyloggers on Google, half of which are malware, a quarter of which don't work, in order to find out if her 12-year-old is composing YouTube dances and uploading them to 4chan.
Someone who desires to keep track of a user's key strokes, for example a corporation. This is coming from someone who consents to monitoring every day.
While I agree it is not good for the singular, non-ignorant person, I'm sure there's a massive market for "Corporate Consumers" who'd like to save a buck instead of spending effort configuring a system.
About having the capability of auditing, I suppose it saves production costs to have one laptop with a switch, as opposed to two laptops with slight hardware or software differences.
I'm surprised you're getting voted up. As much as I disagree with most of the privacy agenda, a lot of their fights are the only thing stopping us from turning Orwellian.
Nothing to hide is pretty arbitrary, too; you mean you have nothing to hide under our current laws. So sure, let them bring the cameras in. Then they'll rewrite the law and you'll suddenly have something to hide.
Yes it was sarcastic. As other commenters said, it's a very common and senseless rhetoric used by anti-privacy politicians. Applying it to an extreme example (like camera in your home) was meant to demonstrate how daft such a stance is.
But I disagree, I think it was a very good spot for it: In my mind, some of the best irony is when it's nearly indistinguishable from truth. So I will take the swinging karma as a complement :D
His comment is not spam.
His comment caused discussion.
His comment is an opinion, not a false fact.
There are no personal attacks of any kind in his comment, and his language is fine.
His argument is simply unpopular.
None of your responses indicate any of the usual legitimate reasons for downvoting.
So why the downvotes? Do you really want HN to be an echo chamber instead of an arena of civil discussion?
I actually believe that it's okay to use voting to express whether you agree or disagree with a point. Where's the harm?
I think that the experience of reading HN is enhanced when there's contrast between popular and unpopular ideas. If a post is unpopular, it doesn't mean that I don't read it. If anything, I might pay more attention to it.
In some cases its lack of popularity might spark more debate; like it has in this case.
I don't believe down-voting discourages discussion .. I'd argue it often provokes it.
Not that I have been able to figure out the magic that gets you the ability to downvote, but I don't really feel the need.
But indeed it sinks discussions, since the points are one the ways (not the only one) to sort comments.
Not that I'm really worried about it one way or another, though.
This is a bad point of view and is what is leading to the degradation of HN as a place for people who see the world through a different lens. We have already lost a lot of beautiful minds due to heard voting. Downvoating is for items that do not belong on HN, nothing more nothing less. If you downvote because you do not agree with an idea you are actively suppressing discussion, no matter how strongly you disagree. Many time from people more brilliant that ourselves.
On HN people I've found that many people use voting to signal whether they agree (or disagree) with something. If that wasn't the case, I'd see my karma rise - rather than rise, fall and fluctuate.
As far as I can tell, if something shouldn't be on HN, we have the ability to flag a post.
I can agree that a post shouldn't needless be hammered into negative space, just as a person's point of view shouldn't be needlessly trampled on in meat-space. But I think that down-voting in general has found a place.
We can say that it might be better to never down-vote - but many users have the ability, and it's a regular practice. Neglecting the fact is a little like ignoring the fact the emperor is wearing no clothes.
You cannot flag comments downvoting is there to discourage, trolls and abuse.
We can say that it might be better to never down-vote - but many users have the ability, and it's a regular practice. Neglecting the fact is a little like ignoring the fact the emperor is wearing no clothes.
I am well aware of that and it has lead to a decline in the standard that HN used to be (while my account may not reflect it I have been around here for a long time, and witnessed the decline first hand). It has been complained about on HN ad nasium. No one is neglecting the fact that it happens, I am just stating that doing so makes HN a worse place the results are obvious and have already lead to some valuable people leaving.
I think the decline is largely due to a rise in meta-discussion about HN and a rise in articles which are mainly designed to self-promote their authors.
I apologise for playing my part in the first ... ;P
Thank you, you learn something new every day.
Really this is all silly, if you upvote for agreement, why not the opposite?
For the record, I personally believe that you're right.
That being said, I strongly believe that if a system is being misused, it is the system not the users which are at fault. In this case, my first suggestion (doubtless in need of refinement) is that there should be prominent agree/disagree buttons on every post to allow everyone to express their opinion, and then a separate "flag" link for people to mark spam or useless comments.
I rarely ignore the comments at the bottom of a page - in fact, sometimes the least interesting comments are those that are highest ranked.
What's the difference between having upvote / downvote buttons and agree / disagree buttons?
But although the system never makes posts inaccessible (to do so would, I'm sure, elicit complaints of "censorship"), it does, if you're using a normally configured browser, grey out negative-voted comments so that they require deliberate effort to read (by -4, you need to highlight them with the mouse). It moves lower-voted posts down the page: even if you have time to read every post, which many people don't, you probably lose focus and pay less attention by the time you get down there. And it reduces the karma of people who make downvoted posts, which some people probably care about (e.g. because they lose/don't get the ability to downvote) and some people probably don't, but which is clearly intended as discouragement.
I think it's clear that the system is designed with the assumption that posts that get downvoted are posts that it intends to discourage. (And I think it's agreed for purposes of this discussion that spam and useless comments are deserving of discouragement in a way that comments one happens to disagree with are not.)
I wonder if this kind of metric is used in ycombinator interviews?
From a UI perspective, there are tradeoffs. Multiple vote options means better sorting, more thorough meaning. It also means more confusion and more work.
Also, instead of single vote tallies, has there been social experimentation with preferential voting systems on comments? (This still has the problem of needing more than one flavor of preference.)
Downvoting posts you disagree with amounts to an attempt to suppress contrary opinion.
You should focus on upvoting. Downvotes should be reserved for abusive, trolling, or spam comments.
That said, I didn't downvote him, I simply didn't vote. I don't feel a need to vote on everything, and that extends to downvoting.
Yup, there are. Here: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(A clear deviation of the guidelines deserves a downvote, a clear compliance does not. Like any law, there is a grey area in between requiring some amount of judgement. But these guidelines still stand to ground the discussion around what is/isn't a "usual, legitimate" reason for downvoting.)
Worried parents?! Now you're really getting dangerous. I hope you think long and hard before having children if this is the kind of treatment you expect to give them. If you have a 12 year old who is already uploading "dances" (?) to YT/chans, you have much bigger problems than a computer or the internet (hint: mirror).
* When told that did not make sense, SS personnel relented and escalated the incident to one of the support supervisors.
The supervisor who spoke with me was not sure how this software ended up in the new laptop thus put me on hold. He confirmed that yes, Samsung did knowingly put this software on the laptop to, as he put it, "monitor the performance of the machine and to find out how it is being used."*
http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/sec/2011/040411sec1....
Just playing devil's advocate here but I wouldn't trust a "support supervisor" to know what he's talking about. He could be talking about the task manager for all we know. He could be just saying whatever he thinks will make this dude get off the phone so he can go grab lunch.