Reuters Reports that a man wearing a Tee Shirt with a picture of Dubya and subtitled "World's number 1 terrorist" was ejected from a Quantas flight from Melbourne to London simply for his dress. Quantas' statement was that "comments made verbally or on a T-shirt which had the potential to offend other travelers or threaten the security of aircraft" would not be tolerated. Aside from the sticky issue of whether or not you have the right to not be offended, I'm having a hard time picturing something that could be printed on a shirt that threatened aircraft security...

On January 7th, Slashdot carried the story about the Gates Foundation's investment in a company whose toxic emissions are causing sickness in the very same town in which the foundation is distributing medicine and performing immunizations. Today, slashdot has a story announcing that the foundation will not be reviewing their investments because, well, it would be difficult. Naturally, I wrote a response to this article, asserting that it is proof that "Gates is not interested in philanthropy", and that instead the Gates foundation is there specifically to improve public relations.

I used the following paragraph from the story on idealog on this subject in my comment, which I find illustrative:

"Bill and Melinda oversee the investment of the foundation's endowment. In giving guidance to the investment managers, they have chosen not to get involved in ranking companies based upon factors such as their lending policies or environmental record. There are dozens of factors that could be considered, almost all of which are outside the foundation's areas of expertise. The issues involved are quite complex...Which social and political issues should be on the list?"

As we can all see, this is simply made up entirely of weasel words. "Chosen not to get involved" - that means "don't care". Why else wouldn't you get involved? "The issues involved are quite complex" means "this is too complicated for you mere mortals to understand, so don't question us.

I probably should have included this other short paragraph, because perhaps it is the more telling one:

"Shareholder activism is one factor that can influence corporate behavior. The foundation is a passive investor because we want to stay focused on our core issues."

Now let's look at this statement carefully because it very well may be the most important statement in the entire thing: it contains an admission that shareholder activism can influence corporate behavior but they want to be a "passive investor" (meaning you don't stand up for your beliefs, if indeed you have any) because... well, why? They want to stay focuses on their core issues? Apparently, the health of the people they claim they are trying to help is not a core issue for the Gates Foundation.

This last bit was embedded (and expounded upon) in my last comment on this topic. But ultimately what I have to wonder is this: Why are all these people so willing to defend the clearly hypocritical actions of the Gates Foundation? Is it simply because these people don't want to be confronted with the hypocrisy of driving their car which runs on oil paid for by the blood of both our soldiers and the civilians who they have been known to bomb, getting out and walking on their Nikes which are made with effective slave labor, children gluing them together and breathing in the fumes (in developed nations, they would be required to provide respirators or a fresh air supply) until their brain is the consistency of runny oatmeal, so that they can buy their fair-trade coffee at Starbucks?

The legions of the morally bankrupt are in control, folks. Run for the hills...

If you have caps lock on in windows, holding shift gets you the unshifted character. This is not true on OSX, at least not on the login screen. Which means if your keyboard goes bad, and your caps lock will not turn off, you cannot log in unless your password is made up of all capital letters.

Just another wonderful feature brought to you by the people who brought you a thousand dollar newton with a keyboard that looks like a kids' toy.

Over time it is becoming increasingly clear that Slashdot is going to hell. While this has always been true, it seems that we've crossed some threshold, reached some critical mass, where everything is going wrong. Mismoderation seems to have reached an all-time high; certainly complaints about it (mine included) have increased dramatically in the last couple of months. Editors can't edit, and never could. Advertisements from known spammers are all over the site. This isn't what I came here for!

So now it is time to bring up another site. A site which has editors that edit. A site which has a moderation system that works and is protected against abuse. A site which has a CSS design that doesn't fuck over your browser settings. A site in which the editors post stories from people in the order in which they are received rather than waiting for one of their friends to post a crappier version of a story they've veto'd five times already from other people.

THIS, therefore, is my cry for help. Help me find a site that fits the bill, and make it popular. Slashdot jumped the shark long ago and the management is uninterested in addressing its most grievous flaws - I suspect this is because fixing these problems would be suspiciously like work. Yet Slashdot is suspiciously like a commercial site today, and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that you should get something like service.

Tonight, Nintendo's new video game console enters the hands of the obsessive-compulsive Americans who have queued up for over 12 hours. I am not one of them. So to pass the time, I put "Wii" into Google image search. Twice. But one result disturbed me (see image): Why is Noddy with Shigeru Miyamoto?

Blyton will probably take me to court for this given an incident from 1999 where I compared Noddy (pics) to Pinocchio (article) on a web page and got a cease-and-desist.

The following is a letter I just sent to posting@slashdot.org regarding the post limit - on the occasion of hitting the 50 posts/day limit for the first time.

I've never taken the time to do this before, but I want to write in and speak out against the posting limit.

What the posting limit actually accomplishes is that it ensures that only the people with the least to say will be permitted to say it. I fail to see how allowing people to write sixty or seventy comments in a day is going to destroy slashdot. Perhaps all persons with a karma large enough for a karma bonus should be permitted to post as much as they like? The only reason I can see to not allow this is if you believe that the moderation system is useless.

The posting limit is much like the moderation restriction that does not allow you to comment and moderate in the same story. The idea of preventing abuse is a worthwhile one but you must consider the fact that people are not actually qualified to moderate discussions that they are not qualified to participate in - so by placing this restriction, you ensure that people are most likely to moderate the conversations they are in fact least qualified to moderate.

I hope that you will consider the negative implications of both of these strategies.

Letter says it all; your comments below.

Bayesian text classification is a statistical method of determining the probability that a message is in a given category. It works by making a database of how often each word occurs in messages from a corpus that are or aren't in the category, looking up this probability for each word in a given new message, and then using Bayes' theorem on the probabilities to predict how likely the message is to be in the category.

When applied to the corpus "e-mail" and the category "unsolicited bulk e-mail", the method is called Bayesian spam filtering. For example, words such as "Viagra", "mortgage", "Rolex", "Nigeria", and the like are likely to occur in spam, but some other words are more likely not to occur in spam. Many e-mail service providers applied Bayesian filtering to their customers' incoming e-mail and moved likely spam into a separate folder. This worked ... for a while.

After several months, spammers discovered ingenious techniques to defeat filters. First they disguised the operative words by "creatively" spelling them, Some spammers just misspelled key words: "Ciallis", "mortagee". Others randomly replaced letters with near-homoglyphs from l33tsp34k or from foreign languages: "Viagra" became "Wla9ra" or "\/ 1 A G R @", or "porno" might use a Greek omicron or Cyrillic o or replace the 'p' with the Greek rho or Cyrillic er, both of which look like a Latin 'p'. Anti-spam filters eventually began to check for such techniques and flag them specifically.

Later, spammers attacked the method by using innocuous words in e-mail in order to fool the filter into thinking that a message is not spam. First they used random sequences of letters. Filters blocked words with too many consonants for the target language. Then they used random dictionary words. Filters blocked too many long words in a row. Then they used sentences from literature, as seen in so-called Gutenberg spam and Hobbit spam. These techniques are intended to increase the spam probability of innocuous words, introducing noise into the database and causing the filter to misclassify messages.

However, not all people have the same words marked as not-spam. For instance, people on a constructed language mailing list are more likely to have linguistic jargon marked as not-spam, while people on a video game mailing list may have video game terminology marked as not-spam. Thus, a spammer could collect addresses from a newsgroup, a public web board, a public mailing list, or the contact page of a public web site, and associate each address with words that appear on the same page as the address. How will Bayesian filters block this? Can it be blocked at all?

I am currently metamoderating and I just got a chance to moderate a "Troll" mod on this comment. Those who are paying attention will notice that it is a reply to one of my comments. Why exactly am I permitted to metamod this? Seems like a bad idea. I don't get to metamod mods to my comments, right? This is only a step away...

I'm about to change my sig so I thought I'd like, put the inspiration up on here. Maybe I'll start using sigs that make sense.

The current sig is: "Free Mac Mini! End the injustice!" It was almost universally loved but it's now time for it to go away :)

This time the bullet cold rocked ya
A yellow ribbon instead of a swastika
Nothin' proper about ya propaganda
Fools follow rules when the set commands ya
Said it was blue
When ya blood was read
That's how ya got a bullet blasted through ya head

Blasted through ya head
Blasted through ya head

I give a shout out to the living dead
Who stood and watched as the feds cold centralized
So serene on the screen
You were mesmerised
Cellular phones soundin' a death tone
Corporations cold
Turn ya to stone before ya realise
They load the clip in omnicolour
Said they pack the 9, they fire it at prime time
Sleeping gas, every home was like Alcatraz
And mutha fuckas lost their minds

Just victims of the in-house drive-by
They say jump, you say how high
Just victims of the in-house drive-by
They say jump, you say how high

Run it!

Just victims of the in-house drive-by
They say jump, you say how high
Just victims of the in-house drive-by
They say jump, you say how high

Checka, checka, check it out
They load the clip in omnicolour
Said they pack the 9, they fire it at prime time
Sleeping gas, every home was like Alcatraz
And mutha fuckas lost their minds

No escape from the mass mind rape
Play it again jack and then rewind the tape
And then play it again and again and again
Until ya mind is locked in
Believin' all the lies that they're tellin' ya
Buyin' all the products that they're sellin' ya
They say jump and ya say how high
Ya brain-dead
Ya gotta fuckin' bullet in ya head

Just victims of the in-house drive-by
They say jump, you say how high
Just victims of the in-house drive-by
They say jump, you say how high

Uggh! Yeah! Yea!

Ya standin' in line
Believin' the lies
Ya bowin' down to the flag
Ya gotta bullet in ya head

Ya standin' in line
Believin' the lies
Ya bowin' down to the flag
Ya gotta bullet in ya head

A bullet in ya head
A bullet in ya head
A bullet in ya head
A bullet in ya head
A bullet in ya head
A bullet in ya head
A bullet in ya head
A bullet in ya head
A bullet in ya head!
A bullet in ya head!
A bullet in ya head!
A bullet in ya head!
A bullet in ya head!
A bullet in ya head!
A bullet in ya head!
Ya gotta bullet in ya fuckin' head!

Yeah!

Yeah!

Kill your television.

I figured that we need some way to be able to respond to each other without posting off-topic stuff in story comments. This is an approximation.

Post in here to talk about why you modded me up or down, post off-topic commentary, or just say hi.

Warning: Flash links

The old

Zero Wing + Engrish + Photoshop = All Your Base Are Belong To Us

Badgers + Mushrooms + Snake = Badgerx3

The new

From the creator of Badgerx3:
Weebles + Bob + 355/113 = Wobbl and Bob, now on DVD.

At least in Indiana.

In the United States, federal law defines "copyright infringement" in Title 17, United States Code, and state law defines "theft". For example, in the State of Indiana, Indiana Code 35-43-4 defines the crime of "theft" as "knowingly or intentionally exert[ing] unauthorized control over property of another person, with intent to deprive the other person of any part of its value or use". In turn:

a person's control over property of another person is "unauthorized" if it is exerted: [...] by transferring or reproducing:

• (A) recorded sounds; or
• (B) a live performance;

without consent of the owner of the master recording or the live performance, with intent to distribute the reproductions for a profit."

So yes, even pedants should recognize that some copyright infringements are considered theft. If you can come up with analogous laws in other U.S. states, please post the details in comments.

Others have said this before me so this will not be anything new. If you want something new, stop reading here. (And possibly, visit another site.) :)

Moderation is broken. You know it, and I know it. It's broken because people can use the moderation system to punish people for disagreeing with them without fear of retribution. The idea that metamoderation will keep people from moderating comments into oblivion because they don't like the person or they don't agree with them is quite simply flat wrong. People don't care, and will just moderate any way they like.

There are basically two problems with moderation. The first is that there are moderation choices for underrated and overrated. The use of any moderation choice suggests that you feel a comment is one or the other of these two - if you felt it was properly rated, you wouldn't need to moderate it, would you? The second is that the "Funny" mod does not change karma. Even if you don't think that being funny is a good enough reason for bumping someone's karma up a point, consider the following scenario: A comment is modded from Score: 2 (karma bonus) to Score: 5, Funny, with 100% of moderation using the "funny" mod. Next, it is modded down as being Overrated twice, and your karma drops two points. Then, it is modded back up to +5, Funny with two more funny mods, and then modded back down twice with Overrated. Consequence: The loss of four karma points.

Essentially, the moderation system has become a tool by which users can punish people for comments with which they disagree, or simply being someone they don't like, without fear of any recrimination. Hence, I suggest the following band-aids on the system:

1. Remove the "Funny" moderation or make it add 1 to your karma score.
2. Remove the "Overrated" and "Underrated" options, which add nothing to the system.

There are other ideas which I've been kicking around. For instance, delete the karma kap, but make it harder to gain karma and easier to lose karma when you have over 50 points. For example, from 51-100 points, require two positive moderations to gain a single karma point (award half-points) and from 101 points onward, also remove two karma points for each negative moderation. If you do this, it might be worth it to re-expose the karma score.

Other than that, the only way to really fix moderation is to have someone look at the users who employ the greatest negative moderation and determine if they are moderating fairly or not. If they are not, then their powers of moderation should be taken away permanently.

If you can't trust someone to post and moderate under the same story, how can you trust them to moderate at all?

That does it.

People often discuss several clique web sites that require some sort of invitation before essential parts of the site become available. I'm not a Freemason; I'm not big on secret societies. I try to ignore those sites to the extent that I can because I don't want to jump in head-first without testing the waters.

Advogato

In my spare time, I maintain free software for PC and Game Boy Advance and am in the middle of writing an ambitious GBA programming tutorial. However, I'm not entirely sure that the projects I maintain have a high enough profile in the general interest community to attract the "certifications" that allow me to write anywhere but inside my own profile page. Free software advocates seem to prefer to certify people who design their software to run natively on popular free software operating systems that run on PC hardware. However, though I do make an effort to use cross-platform toolkits, I currently do not and cannot test my PC software on any platform but Microsoft Windows. I can't just switch to GNU/Linux because it has no drivers for peripherals that I own, and I cannot afford to purchase new compatible peripherals. I can't just dual-boot because I have processes that don't like to be started and stopped every hour with downtime. Therefore, it appears I'm not the model free software developer that Advogato is shooting for.

MetaFilter

MetaFilter doesn't accept new users because it wants the community to remain small, that is, not much over 17,000 members. The administrator discovered that not only does the MeFi system eat copious amounts of valuable traffic and computing resources, but also the MeFi format itself doesn't scale past that many members for at least two reasons: things would drop off a reasonably-sized front page too quickly, and it would take too much labor to clean up inevitable dupes. It appears that the administrator wants erroneous information to persist uncorrected on comment pages and wants prospective new users to migrate to competing sites such as MonkeyFilter. Likewise, people who found Kuro5hin locked-down for several months were driven to Hulver's site instead.

Orkut

This is the biggie. Orkut is a purportedly popular by-invitation-only social networking web site. From what I've gathered in comments to this Slashdot story, Orkut is just a big bulletin board, not much better than a Yahoo! Group and much slower and less stable. Second, it's said to be full of Brazilians who refuse to use English in communities designated as English-speaking. Third, be prepared to delete Portuguese spam from your internal private message mailbox. Finally, for all I can tell, it might not even exist; it could just be an elaborate hoax, as broad and deep from the outside as EA's old Majestic immersive game.

Oh, and the name "Orkut" means something not safe for work in Finnish.

Gmail

Other than the increased storage space, is there really anything significant that Gmail provides that other popular web mail doesn't? Does it warrant switching e-mail providers from SpamCop?

Here's an invite code. Or here's a site that doesn't need an invite code. Just try the site, and if you can't get the hang of it, quit.

I value my time. Between participating in online communities [S] [G] [D] [B] [N], exercising at a local gym, writing free software, and babysitting, I feel that I may already be spreading myself too thinly. In fact, I have had to become nearly inactive in several communities [K] [U] [P] [T] [R], to the point where some administrators have even deleted my account one or more times.

Perhaps when somebody decides that one of these communities wants me, by sending me a well-reasoned explanation of what I could get out of a membership, such as job leads in northeast Indiana, then I'll decide that I want the community. If you wish to contact me privately, feel free to do so.

Someone let me know just precisely how this is flamebait. Clearly there are people who do not deserve mod points who are getting them these days...