Can't immediately find the Slashdot story, but this was mentioned a few years ago:

http://www.i-shovel.com/

If it's so self-evidently logical that the OP is wrong, why did you feel the need to enlighten us with an explanation of why he was wrong? Was it a waste of time, or did you possibly impart some knowledge that wouldn't have been passed on if the original statement had never been made? You did EXACTLY what should be done, instead of moderating an opinion into oblivion and leaving it unanswered, you replied and refuted it. THAT is the way that Slashdot comments are fruitful, not by abusing the moderation system.

For the record, I don't believe YOUR post deserves to be modded down, either. I'm sorry to see that it's been done, and I fear it might have been induced by my reply.

In my opinion, Flamebait and Troll are actions of intention. When I moderate down, I try to discern the intention of the poster -- were they attempting to incite something? Did they or should they have known better? Even if they were trying to incite something, do they have a legitimate point that CAN be replied to in an informative way?

Of course, more often I more try to find a good point-counterpoint thread and upmod both sides.

And we've all learned something from that conversation, right? That's why we should be encouraging opinions that differ from ours, not encouraging moderators to silence them. It provokes good discussion.

No, he doesn't. He deserves to have a logical and thoughtful refutation of his opinion posted in reply. I'm so sick of (-1, Disagree).

As a Christian, I often find myself cringing at dogmatic statements such as this from some of my fellow Christians. I'm glad (and, I suppose, somewhat dismayed) to see that it's not just "us".

Pretty much, yes. It's war; war is an ugly "us-or-them" fight to the death where a nation's very existence is on the line. That's why it must be avoided at all costs. Unfortunately, the US hasn't been very good at that of late.

In the case of Japan, while I don't take any pleasure out of the usage of nuclear weapons, in the end Japan was the aggressor. If you start a fist fight by punching me and I hit you over the head with a fire extinguisher, yes that's "cheating" in a fist fight, but I didn't ask for the fight.

No, I have existed solely at the Federal level, although from what I can gather by friends who have and do work in state government, it's not all that different, at least in my state (MD).

I'm surprised that there aren't any provisions for small-value credit card purchases that can be approved at a lower level. *shrug*

I really do hope it works out well, in all sincerity. I have my doubts, but like R2D2, I have been known to make mistakes... from time to time...

But have you ever (and I'm quite serious about this) worked on a government project where acquisitions are made, to understand the kind of "We'll get what we want, it's just a matter of the right amount of paperwork" shenanigans that go on? And as such, do you honestly think the CIO of any agency will actually care?

I'm also curious -- the legislation that others quoted doesn't make any mention of the size of the acquisition. Does this mean that every credit card purchase of software will require such justification to be sent to the CIO? And if so, do you honestly expect anything other than copy and paste boilerplate explanations that will be so numerous and repetitive as to be essentially meaningless?

Perhaps those issues are addressed, but to be honest, it seems like one of those "sounds like a great idea" measures that will increase the amount of paperwork that people have to get their jobs done, and at best will only provide some technical person a little bit of fodder to demonstrate to management that his suggestion to use some sort of free software to accomplish the task isn't completely off the mark.

...

Yeah, but once you've convinced the GOP of that then you have to go and convince the Dems. It'd probably be more efficient to teach both wings of the party at the same time.

I'm not a bad kisser. It's just that I have an unreliable network connection! Why did they have to use UDP for this?!

I hear slashcode locked your cat in your bedroom as well.

I'm glad you understand all "cloud" technologies and how they relate everyone else's business case and can perform the risk analysis for them. Saves us all a lot of work.

Counter-intuitively, Verizon and Verizon Wireless are different companies. Verizon owns a controlling share of Verizon Wireless, but a huge chunk of VZW is owned by Vodafone. (VZW is actually a DBA (Doing Business As), the company's real name is Cellco Parnership. Go figure.)

Oh, that's very much the case here in the US as well. To the point of being obnoxious.

I still opt for paper bills and mail in checks for the folks who don't take credit cards.

Perhaps it's because someone at Verizon Wireless was bothered at how much they were paying for credit/debit card transaction fees, and figured this was the way to recoup that cost.