Here's today's winner:

bbexpressrental.com

Snowshoe spammer.

Spam levels are up lately, but not as bad as the httpd vulnerability attacks from China and Korea. They're working overtime right now.

Is it just me, or does Slashdot seem to be a bastion of misogyny, racism, and homophobia? I'm not talking about the simplistic trolls who just throw around offensive words. I'm talking about people who really, truly mean what they're saying and write passionate posts about just how much they hate women/feminazis, gays, and various racial/religious minorities. It's startling. Normally, I'd chalk most of those posts up to simple trolls, but... well... take a look.

The story that made me actually write this is about the revenge blog order. A man wrote a revenge blog, harassing his ex-girlfriend, and a judge ordered him to take it down. I figured most of the debate would center around free speech vs harassment (and I was mostly right), but a few misogynist threads popped up, too.

The first post that stuck out is actually relatively harmless. The guy says that he doesn't date women when he's unemployed, because he can't provide for them, if they get pregnant. Well... OK. That's a bit patriarchal. It's nice that he takes responsibility for his actions, but, like another poster, I was a bit struck by his flippant attitude toward women. I think we can assume, given his user name, that he was just trying for laughs, which perhaps backfired, giving some people the impression that he's a bit of a dumbass. Then again, it's entirely likely that he's also role-playing an erratic personality. In any case, nothing he said was misogynistic -- simply patronizing and a betrayed a bit of lack of respect for women, even as he seems to pride himself on his sense of responsibility.

I have certain sympathies with the radical feminists, and I think they are right about some things. I'm probably going to sound a bit like one right now, critiquing this post. It reeks of "men have been emasculated in our society, and now women/feminazis have all the power". Without actually saying anything specific, he insinuates that women are faking their fear, when they seek restraining orders, only to use them as offensively, as a weapon, against the poor men. This may very well be true, and I'm not saying that it can't happen, but it's a very dangerous POV that diminishes sympathy and compassion for victims of domestic violence. I find it disturbing. I will stop short of saying that he's actively sympathizing with actual abusers (his friends, who are the victims of these restraining orders), because I dislike when people make those kinds of assumptions about people. I'd also like to believe that, in his mind, at the very least, these guys are actually innocent of any wrong-doing and that he's not making excuses for their behavior.

There's another "men are powerless in today's society" post following that, decrying that men are now commonly scapegoated as the cause of all things bad in this world. He doesn't stop there, though. He also claims that they are essentially non-citizens in family law. While I understand that there are certain issues that we as a society still need to resolve (traditional gender roles dictate that the women raise children), instead of recognizing that strict gender roles are the problem, the poster turns his anger toward women, instead. This is not healthy. It's also deeply frustrating.

And this post seems to be saying that it's only the poor, emasculated men who have face the repercussions of the actions. The law does not apply equally to women, because that would be not be PC. At least, that's my reading of his post. I may have put a few words into his mouth. I don't understand where these people are coming from or why they believe the things that they believe. Did someone repeatedly hurt them, without repercussions? That sucks. I feel bad for you. But that does not mean that women are out to get you.

The emoticon on this post indicates that the poster was joking, but... come on! This is a really disturbing thing to say. You're taking the side of someone who broke a restraining order, wrote a revenge blog that violated the privacy of a mentally ill person, and then aggressively advertized it to her friends, family, and coworkers? You're saying what he did was a good thing, for the benefit of society? I understand it was supposed to be a joke, but I'm not laughing. I'm not claiming to have some kind of moral ground here, like I'm some kind of saint, as I can be an unrepentant asshole at times, but, seriously.... this is just wrong, and if an acknowledged asshole can see that it's wrong, you should know better, too. I'm astounded that my own lack of empathy is soundly trounced by others. This, more than any moral outrage, is what shocks me the most about this guy's post. But it's just a joke. Yeah, sure. Let's just give our implicit support to those who would harass the mentally ill.

Moving on. This post could simply be a troll. However, there are a lot of people out there who -- without any irony whatsoever -- use terms such as feminazi. While this poster showed admirable restraint, I think he got the point across, just the same, by characterizing the judge as a "neo-feminist windbag". He further asserts that "a lot of them [judges] are [neo-feminist windbags]". It would be nice if that were true. My fear is that he's just so much of a misogynist that it seems true, from his viewpoint.

And here's another "it's just a joke" post, in which the poster asserts that all Minnesota women are crazy. This isn't so bad, and I'd probably just write it off as a guy who's been unlucky in love trying to make a joke about it, but... again, he's taking the side of someone whose actions are indefensible. This guy hasn't actually asserted that what the guy did was right or in the public's best interest, but it's disturbing that he's making jokes at the expense of the victim. That post is quickly followed up by several others claiming that all women are crazy. Of course.

This post seems to be reinforcing the commonly held belief that men are constantly victimized by false accusations and unjustly punished by society, as a result. While nobody can deny that these false accusations happen and quite certainly do destroy the reputation of innocent people, it's yet another cliched, misogynist argument that appears constantly on the internet. If you listen to these people, you'll sometimes hear crazy statistics about how most rapes are actually false accusations. It's disturbing that society seems to believe that, in some certain cases, innocence needs to be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt (rather than proving guilt), but to actively attack the very victims of these crimes is inexcusable. Our compassion for the falsely accused should never turn into an attack on the legitimate victims. This poster, however, refrains from going any further than asserting that it's the accused that we need to be sympathetic to, especially if it's a man, rather than the accuser. The implicit characterization of the accusers, however, is that they are manipulative liars. This may very well be true in some cases, but, like I said, it's not a healthy attitude to have toward the accusers. Followups by the same poster reveal a deep misogyny that was hinted at by his original post. Unfortunate.

Infuriatingly, this poster invokes "blaming the victim". I thought perhaps the poster might be a bit on the progressive side, trying to point out that people are being wildly misogynistic in the comments. Not so. Instead, he takes the defense of the man. I understand that his argument is based on free speech, which is a legitimate argument, but framing it in terms of "blaming the victim" is just inexcusable. Apparently, to the anon, telling the truth can not be a form of harassment, even when it... nevermind. I'm just getting myself worked up again, and I've already covered this elsewhere. For what it's worth, the post itself does not betray any misogyny, though it does frustrate me to no end. The followups are more misogynistic, pointing out that women will, of course, be protected by the law, while men's concerns will be tossed aide. So, luckily, we still get our quota of misogyny.

This guy annoys the fuck out of me. I don't know why I haven't enemy listed him yet. He's an ignorant, misogynistic asshole. In fact, I think I'll do it now. I had a debate with him once over whether "women's night out" was sexist, and thus feminists were hypocritical for not opposing it. I thought maybe I could reach him, but apparently he's too far gone. Well, can you really blame people for ignoring my huge essays?

A simple troll.

LOLOLOL.

He's just telling it like it is.

More misogyny from gmhowell. He posted a link to a hilariously whiny Men's Rights Activist (MRA) web site once that made me laugh, until I realized it wasn't ironic. Disturbing. Still, his comments are amusingly whiny enough in themselves that I usually end up being amused, rather than outraged. Haven't enemy listed him yet. Could just be a troll, faking the misogyny, though. I haven't quite decided yet.

This is probably just a troll. It could be a kook, though. Normally, I'm pretty good at picking up on generic, garden variety trolls, but the legitimate, unending misogyny in these comments might have knocked by trolldar off a bit. I'm leaning toward legitimate kook, but it's got all the hallmarks of a troll.

I feel better for having gotten all this off my chest. I doubt anyone has read this, but it'd be gratifying to know that I'm not the only one who sees this as a real problem on Slashdot.

Adapted from a recent comment.

Slashdot has a long history of shrilling crying out doom and gloom, and it's been wrong on every occasion that I can remember. I don't blame someone for thinking that a paranoid rant on slashdot is total bunk. When RFID chips were first discussed on Slashdot, people worked themselves into a paranoid frenzy, suggesting that you microwave any clothes that you buy from a retail store, so that you destroy any errant RFID chips. I laughed then, and I'm laughing now, as I recall it. Slashdot has always had a loud paranoid wing, and most of us have learned to tune them out. Their first reaction is always to predict a wildly unlikely worst case scenario, then rant and scream about how we're headed toward some fascist police state, because their Pentium III has a serial number (that can be disabled in the BIOS). I've heard it all before, I wasn't impressed by it back in the late 90s, and I'm still not impressed with it. The Pentium III serial number, RFID, Vista's DRM, Trusted Computing... these have all been complete non-issues. I agree that there's deeply troubling potential, but let's face it:

1) People generally want authoritarianism. It makes them feel safe and secure, regardless of the reality. Ranting about how walled gardens are evil is just going to make all the Apple fanboys tune you out, rather than convincing them to ditch their iProduct.
2) Security, by design, reduces functionality and ease-of-use. People hate that. Thus, security is generally minimized, unless it's authoritarian in nature. In that case, refer back to the first point.
3) Most -- not all, but most -- authoritarian controls can be disabled. Occasionally, it requires some action that voids your warranty.

Once I realized these things, I stopped caring so much. When I heard XP was going to require activation, I thought it was going to change everything. When I heard that Vista was going to have all kinds of evil DRM, I thought that would finally kill off everything that I loved about PCs and turn them into locked-down consoles. When I heard that Windows 8 was going to have secure boot, I'd shrugged my shoulders and said, "So fucking what? Slashdot has been wrong about everything they've ever panicked about, and I'm not falling into that trap again."

Maybe the Windows 8 secure boot will turn out to be a huge issue, and Linux will be locked out of 90% of all new brand name PCs, but I seriously doubt it. Every other time that Slashdot has panicked over DRM, trusted computing, or other initiatives, it's turned out to be a huge non-issue. If this does turn out to be a legitimate threat to Linux, open source, or the PC architecture, I'll deal with it then, rather than panicking about it now, like some slashbot version of Chicken Little.

p.s. I'm not saying we're not headed toward a fascist police state, but CPU serial numbers are not one of the warning signs of fascism. It may be indicative of a tolerance for fascism, but it is not, in and of itself, any barometer of political discourse.

Here's today's list:

allyournewnewsnow.info
yourbestcompetitionblog.info
allofurtopnewstoday.info
everythingaboutyourtopnewstoday.info

Snowshoe spammers.

Here's today's list:

humbackbo.com
kehumbleth.com
humagobos.com
kelowth.com
humagoboonline.com
humagobostore.com
humagoboshop.com
humagobosite.com
humagobotoday.com

Snowshoe spammer, blocked the Class C too.

Here's today's winner:

only1l.com

Snowshoe spammer.

Deleted a bunch of friends who haven't posted anything since 2005. Sucks, because some of them were skillful, subtle trolls or insightful commenters. Now I can fill up my enemy list with even more people! Not that it accomplishes much.

Here's today's list:

sandlappermedia.com
trashed-talk.com

Snowshoe spammers.

Reading an article about KVM being ported from Linux to a derivative of Solaris, I was intrigued by the claim that running Windows in this virtualization environment would be faster than running it on bare metal. I knew Windows was coded poorly, but is this for real? I suppose also that some tricks can be done if you know the workload, but I find it hard to believe that you'll see ten to fifty times better performance. Does anybody else envision running software ever faster by continuously virtualizing it until we reach the singularity?

Here's today's winner:

theonlinenewssite.com

Snowshoe spammer.

However much I despise closed source, proprietary software, occasionally I have to deal with it. And sometimes there isn't (currently) anything in the OSS world that fills the niche a closed source program might. Mathcad seems to be one of those: a closed source, Windows only "engineer's scratchpad" that is an interesting concept, and somebody must like it because it's been around a while. While Mathcad seems interesting for quickly prototyping and crunching out equations, the reusability and flexibility of it's "language" leaves much to be desired. For example, even though Mathcad has loops, I can't figure out how to make them work on a list of files. The only way to really automate Mathcad appears to be through COM or VBScript (including Excel), also not my ideal technologies of choice. But at least VB is Turing complete, so I started digging up examples of that.

Looking in some of the directories of Mathcad, though, I find .prolog and .lisp files. While I don't know much about Prolog, I'm pretty sure the .lisp files are for real, but Google searches and a quick perusal at the files themselves don't reveal much. There's also some MuPAD .mu files, but those don't seem to be of much use to me.

Does anyone know what the possibilities are for automating Mathcad via Prolog or LISP?

There's a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over -- and to let go. It means leaving what's over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving on, rather than out. The trick of retiring well may be the trick of living well. It's hard to recognize that life isn't a holding action, but a process. It's hard to learn that we don't leave the best parts of ourselves behind, back in the dugout or the office. We own what we learned back there. The experiences and the growth are grafted onto our lives. And when we exit, we can take ourselves along -- quite gracefully. -- Ellen Goodman

I probably shouldn't be indulging in such egotistical pastimes as writing what amounts to a "Dear John" letter to slashdot, but I had a few loose ends to tie up, so here goes.

To PopeRatzo: sorry I didn't get back to you earlier, and now that journal discussion is closed. Maybe I am seeing it through rose-colored glasses, but it seems that the number of submissions (and how many make it on the front page) from different firehoses (such as apple vs linux) leads me to believe slashdot is being inundated by Apple fanboys. It's too much for a Linux fan who remembers the heady early days of slashdot to take. In any case, I'm looking to move on to more Linux-y sites.

To everyone in general: I've seen far to many interesting articles in the firehose never go anywhere, only to be drowned out by Apple press releases. People here no longer seem to appreciate or even care about Freedom, and many who booed Microsoft now cheer Apple for the exact same practices. Even those who booed Microsoft now say "install Windows, it's what everyone knows and uses."

Gah. There's more, but I've made this too long already; check my first (and last submission), my comments, and my blog if you are curious; I'm going to try switching to other sources for tech news, and put more time into the blog and website. If nothing else, that should be a more worthwhile endeavor than shouting down the fanboys.

I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but the focus of slashdot has shifted away from open source software (Linux in particular). Anyone who doubts this is welcome to count the number of open source articles versus blatant slashvertisements. I guess my mistake was in thinking that "news for nerds, stuff that matters" was more truthful than "fair and balanced." In any case, it's a battle I don't have time to fight, so I'm wondering: what sites would you recommend as alternatives to slashdot? What's your favorite Linux news site? How about open source, or Debian? Can I find a site dedicated to important scientific advances, instead of the latest fashion trends?

Here's today's winner:

bluestyles.info

Snowshoe spammer.

Here's today's winners:

funtousa.info
smart-dns.net

Snowshoe spammer.