From recent messages from Smitty, it appears that all of these values are now the property of progressives - or at the very least, conservatives oppose them:

• Actual independent, non-partisan agenda-free investigations into events
• Government representation of the people, elected by the people
• Having federal agencies do the job they are tasked with

I can see how conservatives would hate those ideas so much. That is, I can understand it, if they live in some sort of alternate up==down reality.

The Finns are definitely going to give you a run for your money if you play like you did today.

For reasons that are not abundantly clear (aside from the fact that they don't seem to have a better one), Benghazi seems to remain the most popular conspiracy theory for the conservatives. I will remind us in this JE though that there have already been two reports released, neither of which have been particularly kind to the administration:

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report on Benghazi

NY Times report on Benghazi

So we have two reports, one from the government and one that was from the media. Neither were kind to the administration, yet neither provided everything the conservatives wanted either. So how many investigations do they want? At what point will they be happy?

It appears the first answer is "enough to drive the president out of the white house", and the second is likely "only after the president and everyone with a "D" after their name is driven permanently from Washington DC".

You know... since I've written enterprise applications (singlehandedly, and no, I won't tell you which ones) that dwarf slashdot... I might be tempted to write a replacement, given how bad Beta is and how much people are complaining about it...

How would I do it? In the spirit of Open Source, I'd use PostgreSQL as a database backend, as MySQL or MariaDB is, in my humble opinion, inferior to PostgreSQL.

One reason is the syntax of PL-PGSQL vs. T-SQL. I hate T-SQL compared to PL-PGSQL (or just PL-SQL if I'm writing a Stored Proc for Oracle).

After that, I'd model the database to do what I want, and store what I want, and I'd ensure that the data was fully in 3rd Normal Form.

And if you bitch about joins, I'll hit you with a fucking sledgehammer.

After that, throwing up some PHP to format the page is an afterthought. The critical piece is getting the database right.

The database itself would need to be clustered to be able to scale with the load, and PostgreSQL does a pretty nice job of it.

Horrid.

Think I'm done with slashdot (again) for a while (again).

So I see Slashdot is heading towards another redesign, and there's a fair amount of folks fighting the good fight. While I wish you all the best in your current endeavor, I shan't participate or agitate.

Because the sad truth is, original flavour management already killed off this site almost ten years ago through sheer lack of giving a fuck, and Slashdot's first exodus happened, taking some of the best from this place. Worse, Taco and cronies decided that the best move after that was to spend too long slapping a coat of Web 2.0 all over the place, which had the net effect of getting rid of around half the people who had decided it stick it out. By the time Barry O. was inaugurated, the damage was well and truly done. The only people left were idiots, trolls and the precious few too lazy to jump ship.

So go ahead, flood FP stories with anti-beta comments, create alternative communities but remember: This is well-trod ground. Many before you have tried and failed. Moreover, there's nothing here left to save anyway.

Best of luck.

This hasn't happened in a while...

I suspect it may relate to one of the comments I posted in the discussion on the voter shortsightedness article as I haven't written much here that has gotten much attention lately, but that's just a guess.

5+ Years ago I warned people -- and got mocked by the assorted collection of fools we have for leftist trolls around here -- that if elected, Barack Obama was going to be an unmitigated disaster if elected President.

I WAS RIGHT.

From Fast and Furious to the sky high unemployment to the "recovery summer" that never happened to Benghazi to ObamaCare to the continual end runs around the constitution to illegally appointing people to the labor board to allowing a Nuclear Iran... and now in the SOTU he threatens to bypass Congress even more...

Like I said -- he's been a disaster.

The line for the libtrolls to kiss my ass starts to the left.

Since there seems to be at least one user here on slashdot, I figured this is a good place to file the bug report as I am not sure who the maintainer is.

Application: PudgeScript

Version: Unknown, presumably current?

Severity: Low-Moderate

Reproducibility: Uncertain

Description: The PudgeScript parser does not accurately recognize requests for information. See example where a request was not acknowledged. It appears that the current version might only recognize requests when they end with a question mark, however as the PudgeScript is supposed to emulate the activity of a person with training as a journalist, this is insufficient.

Furthermore, the execution of PudgeScript shown in that example forgot to accuse me of lying. This may be a bug as well.

I have a troll that is replying to most - but not all - of my comments. Since they seem to want to be recognized for their efforts I thought I would show that all of my comments are not hard to find. Go ahead, go nuts. Get it out of your system.

This is why I stopped paying attention to conservatives long ago: Breathless hype of impending doom, but as you investigate, you find that no matter what technical truth is contained in these overhyped claims, the reality always turns out to be underwhelming at best.

I got my first taste of it back in the late 90s when the big conspiracy theory of the day was FEMA's apparently limitless power during a crisis. Clinton, busy with Lewinskygate, and on his way out, was just waiting for one good disaster in order to unleash FEMA and some sort of New World Order. And then you find out it's just boilerplate shit about responsibility, chain of command, and agency co-operation in order to better respond during an emergency.

And so we come to Dictator Obama and his Fascist Regime, Executive Orders flying out as as fast as his army of statist apparatchiks can churn them out, making a mockery of the Greatest Democracy in the world, like no other politician in the history of ever.

Don't believe the hype.

To be fair though, shame on me. I'm the one got excited then disappointed. No point in blaming the howler monkeys for being the usual idiots on this one.

I suddenly am being followed by a troll that likes to spout the same nonfactual nonsense that was thrown at me in years past. I wonder if the troll is an AC for the person who keeps down-moderating me in JE discussions. Either way they aren't very good at what they're doing. They really aren't even very good at wasting my time.

Abortion in America leaves the United States with a body count comparable to the most bloodthirsty regimes in history. Hitler was a piker compared to the acolytes of Margaret Sanger.

The Prophetic Sanger

The REAL Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger and the KKK

In a previous journal entry, I used the term "in-vitro" where I meant "in utero". I went back and fixed it.

Apparently, the bus ride to Austin and subsequent March For Life made me more tired then I realized. Still -- if it changes just one mind and saves just one life, it's all worth it.

Had he survived his birth, he'd have been 3 months old today. As a result, I'm completely numb and probably won't be posting much over the next week or two. Just in case anyone thought it was going to be another 3 year sabbatical for me.

Slashdot's fake conservative really went for a long setup on this joke.. Really, really, really long. And with a few mini-jokes in it as well - really, a pretty good show there friend.

I'll start with the first mini-joke, as it is right in the title. He calls his joke "The Scientific Pro-Life Argument"; the problem though is that there is quite nearly no valid science in his argument anywhere.

After all, his bit about

Applies as well to an embryo as it does to the skin cells that you wash off in the bathroom. Or the cells from your respiratory tract that you literally sneezed out the last time you had a cold. Or any of a number of other living cells that we regularly shed as part of our daily existence. In short, there is nothing special about that list; he posted it to make the conservative anti-abortion argument look silly (and it did a pretty good job there).

He follows up with this logical failure:

Which, presumably, was chosen just to show how conservatives can make themselves look more ridiculous when trying to sound scientific than they already look when they just embrace their ignorance.

It goes well with his interesting term

Which should basically mean "people who love to stop". And who runs around with giant stop signs to proclaim their political stance?

He also included an obligatory political jab as the conservative stance is often to assume that the reader isn't smart enough to figure out on their own who the favored audience is:

Even though that has nothing to do with the matter at all.

He then pretended to be knowledgeable on medical ethics - and of course advocated for forcing the stance of a conservative male on the population of the entire world - while also pushing an unsupported line about the effects on the mother.

So what was the final punchline? It appears to be primarily the notion that conservatives support redefining "science" to push their agenda (while simultaneously doing everything they can to prevent funding of scientific research, mind you) on topics that they refuse to actually become well versed on. There were a few others buried in there but by and large this seems to be much like when a certain radio host claimed to be educated in "the sciences" before repeatedly shoving his foot in his mouth on pretty much every scientific matter he could think of to lecture his audience on.

By the way, friend, if you're reading this you forgot something. Namely, you didn't have a bestiality / homosexuality / anal sex / genetic inferiority line in there. I know it's been a while since you've been here to put on your act, so I thought I'd mention it to you as a service to help you get your act back up to par sooner. Good luck.