The Librarian is nominated by the President, and our current one is over 80 years old.

Obama will probably be appointing a new Librarian of Congress, as well as several Supreme Court justices.

Hey... I voted for Jill Stein.

Of course it's biased in the way that it's stated. Many of the statements on the quiz are very strongly worded, with an extreme bias toward some political viewpoint. That's how they tell how far along the axis (left/right, authoritarian/libertarian) to put you. If you agree with the highly biased statements, you get labeled as an ideologue. If you disagree with them, you get moved back to the center.

However, I generally agree with you that Political Compass is somewhat biased toward European sensibilities. Also, the test is not a good measure of extremism. If you answer extremist left and extremist right answers positively, you get placed in the center, along with all the wishy-washy moderates.

How did you score? I'm usually in the (-7, -7) range, but recently I seem to have been radicalized and end up even more deeply into anarchist territory (-9, -9).

You're crazy. Here's an unbiased view of the 2012 American Presidential election. He's clearly an authoritarian, right-wing politician. Jill Stein was the only major left-wing candidate, and she was center-left.

You're right about the extremists and the nutjobs, who seem to be controlling the Republican party these days, but there are a lot of moderates that can be swayed over to the Republican side, given a strong enough issue. The Republicans tried their hardest to manufacture one with Benghazi, but nobody cared. Releasing dangerous terrorists back into the wild? That could really take hold.

I agree with you. He should stop compromising with nutjobs and extremists, grow a spine, and finally do something liberal. However, doing so could very well throw the 2016 election. The Democratic Party would rather hold on to power than do the right thing. That's why I vote with the Greens, even if they are nutjob hippies. Out of all the nutjobs out there, I think I probably agree with those nutjobs the most.

But Slashdot bans people based on IP address. Does that mean that Slashdot itself is ignorant?

It's not just Internet-connected infrastructure. In many cases, people took the proper precautionary steps, but weren't actively paranoid. To protect your infrastructure today, you really do need to be paranoid. People bring in gadgets infected with malware, plug the malware-infected gadget into a PC, and the PC infects every system on the network. OK, so you ban people from bringing in gadgets, and now you remove all secretarial PCs from the main network. Maybe you even disable every USB port and force people to use PS/2 keyboards and mice. Well, the next infection comes in from a contractor who installs software directly from the manufacturer. If the hackers know that you use Flash and/or Java in your company's intranet, it's not inconceivable that they manage to infect Flash or Java. I mean, we're talking about nation states here. They can do whatever the fuck they want, and money is not much of an issue.

Somewhere along the line, people with resources a hundred times greater than yours will come up with a line of attack that you didn't defend against. And if you protect against everything obvious, who knows what the crazy fuckers will do? If I were on the Iranian nuclear power commission, I'd probably give the Americans and Israelis a semi-obvious backdoor to my network, just so that they don't send in black ops teams. I'm not saying that I think the Americans and Israelis would be so stupid, but, then again, these people probably grew up watching James Bond movies. They probably think that shit is exciting.

Exactly the opposite. I would be incredibly surprised if it weren't popular. That's exactly my point. It plays into the socioeconomic demographics of Slashdot so well, there's no way that Slashdot would ever let this story go, without it taking up a month's worth of analysis by outraged bloggers. Why do they obsess over this guy, and not over all the others that come before him? That's what my post is about: do they identify with him or is there a deeper reason?

Still, a truly cynical person would point out that nothing ever changes unless the middle class can be mobilized, making cases like this very important. Social justice for the poor is impossible, unless the middle class is also being persecuted.

Yeah, seriously. It's like a bunch of buzzwords arranged together in random order. I'm very surprised that they resisted using the buzzword du jour, "crowdsource".

Yeah, it reminds me of Missing white woman syndrome, a strange media bias that over-represents attractive, young, upper-middle class woman, in cases of abduction. Swartz obviously wasn't a missing white woman, but a similar medias bias comes into play. People cast him as an innocent martyr, squashed under the boot of an authoritarian system, ignoring all of the victims that weren't upper-middle class, professional males.

You can look at it as media bias, racism, classism, tribalism, or a combination of all of the above. I guess I consider it "all of the above".

Seeing as how there's only a single submitter, your use of a plural pronoun seems to indicate that you advocate a "singular they".

I find your heresy to be an abomination.

So? There's nothing wrong with that.

Out of all the problems in the summary, I'm surprised that you attacked it for something that's not even truly wrong.

Ron Paul is a member.

Not obtuse. Just an elitist. Elitism isn't always a bad thing, in my opinion, but it does lead you to discount the usefulness of user-submitted content, even when that content is quite useful. The IMDB, Wikipedia, Newegg, and Amazon can be tremendously useful, as long as you keep in mind their limitations and drawbacks. Elitists can't see anything but the limitations and drawbacks, while populists refuse to admit there are any.

Amazingly, it's still around. It's at bbs.iscabbs.com now, I believe. Visiting it is like going back in time to 1995. The same exact people are having the same exact arguments that they were 15-20 years ago. I think it's some form of Hell for all involved.