Since this is not yet documented, I figured I would mention this here now... we are experimenting with some very rudimentary keystroke navigation in the discussion2 system. We support both FPS style WASD keybindings, as well as the standard vi layout of HJKL. Down/Up will cycle you through next/previous comment chronologically... left/right will cycle you through next/previous in thread order. Holding SHIFT down while you press the navigation key will collapse the previous comment. And when you get to the end, pressing down or right will attempt to retrieve more comments if you want them.

What this means is that you can now use D2 to simulate most of the most popular viewing modes of the original discussion system. By dragging both the abbreviate & display sliders right next to each other you effectively remove abbreviated comments which simulates nested mode. By toggling comment retrieval order to 'Oldest First' and using up down, you can effectivel read the discussion from oldest to newest. And of course the default settings gives you the best comments first, providing a nice default view of discussions for most anonymous users (who rarely participate and we want to really show only the best comments).

You can also disable D2 in the comment prefs (the word 'prefs' in the floating dialog box) if you are logged in. Right now we're testing D2 for a large percentage of anonymous readers. As soon as we finish IE7 support we'll roll out D2 for the rest of the ACs.

Ron Paul has been getting a lot of attention as an "outsider" candidate, and in fact, even here at Slashdot I've seen a lot of Ron Paul in sigs.

So I decided to visit his web site and see what he's all about. Uhhhhhh... why is this guy getting so much geek attention? I can only assume that people are focusing on some single issue, and haven't checked what the guy actually *believes*. Much like people who support the Libertarian Party, actually, who have some seriously crackpot stuff in their platform. But I digress.

What's wrong with Ron Paul? Here's a sampling:

"So called free trade deals and world governmental organizations like the International Criminal Court (ICC), NAFTA, GATT, WTO, and CAFTA are a threat to our independence as a nation. They transfer power from our government to unelected foreign elites. [...] And a free America, with limited, constitutional government, would be gone forever." link

Sheesh. Sure, the value of trade deals is debatable, but the rhetoric above is just silly. "Gone FOREVER" OH NOOOOO!! Typical Politician fear-mongering, if not out-and-out crackpottery. So far, I'm not impressed.

I oppose legislation that increases the FDA's legal powers. FDA has consistently failed to protect the public from dangerous drugs, genetically modified foods, dangerous pesticides and other chemicals in the food supply. Meanwhile they waste public funds attacking safe, healthy foods and dietary supplements. link

Oh, geez. The FDA is certainly not perfect, but to say that the FDA "consistently" fails to protect the public from dangerous drugs is just a lie. If it wasn't for the FDA, we would be flooded with quack drugs. The Libertarian would say that the consumer should decide what's good and what's bad, but it's impractical for every citizen to have to review all the studies to know whether the thousands of drugs are effective or not. Again, I'll listen to how the FDA can be improved, but overblown words like the above don't give me confidence that there's any substance to the man.

And then, to top it off, he attacks *all* genetically modified foods broadly, showing that he has an anti-science agenda, and is completely ignorant of the issue.

I am committed to guaranteeing parity for home school diplomas and advancing equal scholarship consideration for students entering college from a home school environment. [...] I will veto any legislation that creates national standards or national testing for home school parents or students. link

I'm a supporter of home schooling, but let me get this straight. He wants home-schooled kids to have equal parity for diplomas, equal consideration for scholarships, yet doesn't think they should be be tested to see if they learned anything?? How is that supposed to work? And is the government going to force universities to accept home schooled kids with no testing?

The framers of the Constitution never in their worst nightmares imagined that the words, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech......." would be used to ban children from praying in school, prohibit courthouses from displaying the Ten Commandments, or prevent citizens from praying before football games. The original meaning of the First amendment was clear on these two points: The federal government cannot enact laws establishing one religious denomination over another, and the federal government cannot forbid mention of religion, including the Ten Commandments and references to God. link

First of all, he's being disingenuous here. Nowhere are children "banned" from praying in school. What is banned is the SCHOOL leading prayer. That he doesn't seem to understand this (or is lying about it) is incredibly worrisome.

And then he doesn't seem to understand that freedom of religion means the government cannot advocate one religion over another, and in fact, should not be advocating religion at all. I don't feel like quoting more, but he then goes on to attack the idea of the separation of church and state. I think it's pretty clear that he's not going to be a big advocate of atheist rights.

This isn't everything I find disturbing. To be fair, I did see a lot I liked about the man (as I can say about any of the candidates, of any party). But as near as I can see, he is not deserving of the reputation that he seems to be building.

Can anyone tell me why they support Ron Paul, especially in light of the above?

The Ann Arbor party seemed to go great- lots of people packed Leopold Bros place, doing battle with barflies and football fans. It was somewhat bizarre watching obvious normal bar people try to figure out what this large crowd of 'different' people were all about. We handed out a ton of t-shirts, drank much alcohol, ate nachos etc. Our party had a great number of Slashdot and SourceForge staffers... all folks who have been with Slashdot for so many years it's hard to remember Slashdot without them. I'm not exactly sure how many people eventually showed up... a lot of our RSVPs didn't show, and a lot more didn't bother sign up at all, so I think the two balanced out.

For me personally these sorts of things are always difficult. I'm not very good at crowds. I can smile for a picture, but I'm perpetually nervous when surrounded by strangers who have certain expectations of me. There's a reason I live life behind a keyboard!

Further compounding matters lately is baby induced chronic sleep deprivation. Me want REM cycles. It's always nice to get out and have a beer. Kathleen & I get only so many hours "out" together now, gotta make each one count. The party attendees were all cool... and understanding that I was pretty tired.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who showed up... I've still got the california party later this week. Hopefully my throat heals up by then. The only real problem with this location was the acoustics... I had to shout to be heard, and stick my ear in front of people to hear them (baby crying has done some amount of hopefully temporary ear damage). My throat is raaaaw from yelling. Sucking on cough drops helps.

As for other parties, boxes have been shipped. Hopefully they have arrived to most places on time, although I think they were shipped on a slowish shipping option so I'm not sure. I know some folks got shirts on friday, but I'm sure the others will arrive monday or so. Also, keep in mind that we only had 700 shirts and 2300 attendees from 136 parties with more than 5 attendees. So obviously not every party is getting a box... when we sent out the bulk mail, we had over 100 replies, and I'm sure there was nowhere near enough to fill even that.

But shirts or not, I hope your parties go well. Remember to submit videos or pictures or whatever to anniversary at slashdot dot org for your chance at the $1k ThinkGeek gift certificate grand prize.

So if you only count anniversary parties with 5 or more attendees, we have 128 venues with a grand total of 2366 attendees. The largest parties include Pudge's in seattle with 129, mine in Ann Arbor with 194 and Hemos's in CA with 197.

I'm sure that there will be many RSVPs that no show, but still, that's still an awful lot of interest. We'll be shipping shirts to a good number of those parties, but we have triple the attendees to shirts available, so we'll see just how far we're able to spread the love. Emails will be going out to party planners in the next couple days to get postal addresses.

As we're nearing 100 signed up people for the A2 Slashdot anniversary party, we've changed the venue to Leopold Bros... it's just a block south from the other place and they can handle us. I've also got word that we'll be printing a few hundred extra shirts since there was already like 50 parties with 5+ people in attendance. We certainly won't have enough for everyone, but we'll make a good dent in it.

I will of course put this information into a story next reasonable chance I get for a story, but I figured at least I could get the word out there. The anniversary party entry on the official page has been updated with the new location & address.

The A2 party already has like 70 signed up. We're going to have to rethink venue or time I think if we really have that many people. Wait a few more days and see what we can work out. Keep reading in the party forum for info. We have 500 shirts to print and hand out... it'll be fun to see where they go.

more info as I get it. There will be notes on future stories as days get closer.

Disclaimer: I'm not a Libertarian, though I'm sympathetic to *some* of their ideas. A lot of them are crackpot, though.

Universal health care has been traditionally an idea that Libertarians despise, because it's directly against the Libertarian ideal of personal responsibility, and not "stealing" from others to support oneself. In this small essay, I'm going to argue that Universal Health Care *is* necessary to a free Libertarian-style society.

First, let me say that for most of my life, I've been adamantly against Universal Health Care, primarily because I don't trust the governmen not to screw it up. I still believe this, but I've come to believe that UHC is necessary anyway.

The reason is because modern UHC is not directly subject to market forces, hence the reason health care costs are completely out of control in the U.S. The underlying reason is health insurance. Once people stopped paying directly for health care, they stopped caring what it cost. In fact, they had an incentive to get the *most expensive* health care. Why not? "The insurance company is paying for it." And the Doctors certainly have no incentive to keep costs down. Might as well order a few extra tests. The result of this are costs spiralling ever upward.

Now, Libertarian think tanks are aware of this, and their solution was the idea of "medical savings accounts", where people (in essence) get a refund for not using health care. This is a really weak incentive. It helps a little, but it still doesn't address the fundamental corruption of market forces. That this is the best the Libertarians can come up with ought to tell you how impossible it is to fix.

So given that market forces can't work, and in fact people are getting bankrupted every day by health costs, the only solution is really for the government to step in, as inefficient as that can be.

So, even if that's the only solution, why do I say this should be a "Libertarian Ideal"? Let me first start with what most Libertarians think the government *should* do. One of the most fundamental functions of government is to provide a legally level playing field, for example, contract law. Most (hopefully all, but you never know) Libertarians wouldn't argue that contract judges should be privatized. There needs to be a relatively fair legal environment for business.

So how does UHC fit into this? One of the fundamental tenants of Libertarianism is the idea of personal responsibility, that in the end, one should take care of oneself through hard work.

And that's the crux: someone *can't* take care of oneself if they are not physically capable of it. It's unreasonable to say to someone, "I realize that your leg is broken, so work harder so you'll have the money to fix your leg." People cannot be productive without being physically healthy, just like people can't be productive without a reasonable legal environment.

Note that health care is different from other items, say, food. If I'm hungry, it's *is* reasonable to say, "go out and work, so you can afford to buy food." Physical health is a very different idea. It can actually *prevent* the Libertarian ideal of working to support oneself.

So, just like a stable legal system is necessary for a healthy capitalistic society, so is a healthy workforce capable of working to support themselves.

Well, not really a conspiracy.

Continuing my recent habit of posting a journal entry every two years or so, I thought I'd share my experience with aspartame-induced headaches.

For a few years, I've been having on-and-off chronic headaches. They felt right behind my eyes, and I seemed to also be somewhat sensitive to bright lights. Sometimes it would be a dull throb, but every so often I get real ball-busters that lasted for over a day that meds just didn't make go away. I pretty much attributed it to getting older. It was annoying, but not life threatening.

Now, I'd heard a lot about aspartame conspiracies, and like most conspiracies, I figured it was all a bunch of crap, along the same lines as "multiple chemical sensitivity" and the like (no offense to people with legitimate allergies).

One day, I was reading along, and I saw a post (it may even have been on Slashdot) where someone said they had been having chronic headaches for a long time that went away when they stopped drinking Aspartame. The guy didn't seem like a looney, so I thought it was worth a try. Anything to get rid of them!

I started drinking water every day, rather than my usual diet sodas. Within a week, there was a noticeable drop in the incidence of headaches, and NO occurances of bad headaches. After a month, I had had only a few incidences of headaches, and still NO bad ones, which was pretty much unprecedented. It's been probably six months now, and my headache problem is pretty much gone. I still get headaches occasionally, but it's a much more normal rate, and not nearly the severity. Still haven't had a ball-buster since I stopped drinking it.

Now, I'm still not an Aspartame looney who wants it banned. Some people go into anaphylactic shock with peanuts, that doesn't mean we should ban peanuts. It just happens to have that effect on me, and doesn't for millions of other people. But it should be common knowledge that it CAN happen to certain people.

Oh, and I don't think it was caffeine that was doing it. I drank a couple of diet cokes a day, but mostly I drank diet Sprite specifically because I don't like a lot of caffeine. My caffeine intake is pretty much zero now, but I've been drinking caffeine for a long time (a LOT back in my 20s) and I never got headaches from it.

If you're having chronic headaches and drink a lot of diet soda like I did, it's worth a try to see if you have the same effect. And I used to pretty hate drinking water, but I got used to it, so I'm okay with it now.

Speaking of water, I also don't buy into the silly "water is better for you anyway" nonsense. Liquid is liquid, your body uses it the same way. And by the way, that "Eight 8-oz glasses of water a day" thing is totally wrong as well, but that's another journal entry (there is ZERO evidence that drinking more water leads to more health).

If any of you are using an iPhone and are willing to help test out some Slashdot handheld crap, shoot me off a note... my email is the same address as always, and if you can't guess it, you probably can't help anyway ;) I've built a stylesheet and Tim put together a few little options that we think will make a few bits of Slashdot look nice on an iPhone (or really most lower resolution displays) but unfortunately none of us actually HAVE one yet... so anyway, let us know. Or if you work at Apple, send us freebies dammit!

The discussion2 system had 2 notable changes in this weeks code refresh that I'd love to hear feedback on (use email if you can't post here). The first is Scott's very excellent new draggable slider control. Everyone mostly figured out the slider tool before, but it was very unresponsive... but no longer! It has some layout niggles under some browsers, but it functions properly in most of them.

Equally exciting is new dynamic updating... the old code actually transferred the full discussion and displayed/hid content as requested by your settings. Thew new code properly requests comments as needed, and when needed. This cuts page sizes dramatically for people reading with filters turned up very high. It also puts us a few stone throws away from a 'refresh' button which can just add newly posted comments in place. There's some work to be done yet, but it's made a lot of progress. I hope you like it.

We've tested everything under most of our most common browsers... if you're curious they are very roughly FF2 38%, FF1.5 19%, IE7 8%, Safari 7%, Opera 3%. Missing from our compatibility list is IE6 with 13% of our traffic. Fixing IE6 is non-trivial and we'd certainly take patches... but since the IE6 population lost a point or two last month anyway, and fixing the code is pretty substantial, we'll probably be focusing our development time on the larger and growing platforms (FF2 and IE7 obviously being the most important).

Anyway, merry-whatever-you-believe to everyone out there. I'm spending my holidays the same as always- driving from family gathering to family gathering. Roads suck but the person I like being with most is in the car too, so it doesn't matter.

If you have enabled the Discussion2 beta, you will notice a number of confusingly titled links appearing in comments. These control expansion/contraction of threads in several different ways. They are confusingly titled because we want you to try each of them and let us know which ones you like best without concerning yourself explicitly with how they work.

You can email your feedback to me (try d2 at cmdrtaco dot net) or some of you can actually post here.

I think next week will have a patch with a number of D2 changes (including some results from this experiment hopefully) so your help is really appreciated.

As web applications grow more and more featureful, I slowly find myself replacing desktop apps with web apps. This really makes a lot of navigation on the desktop a real pain in the ass. Example: Gmail. It's probably open in a tab right now. Not sure which one... occasionally we accidentallly close tabs. But if I use quicksilver to open 'gmail' it will open a NEW tab every time. Same if I use the gmail notifier.

Applications each open individually, and they know that they get focused when activated/launched whatever. But effectively firefox may (or may NOT!) actually encapsulate 2-3 different applications... spreadsheets, email, or say, the bookmarks that I use to maintain Slashdot's submissions bin.

I'm not exactly sure how to deal with this. I imagine this problem will only grow if good web applications continue to replace desktop applications.

one of the many emails I get on an almost daily basis is email requests to be included on the slashdot supporters list. I read these emails, and every few weeks filter out the junk links (SEO spam etc) and add a few to the list. I try to include only links that look like they are actual people. I'm not crazy picky, but I don't include really obvious stuff. Some folks get annoyed if I don't choose there link, but here's a recent one that really kind of blew my mind. I won't tell you the domain name for obvious reasons, but this guy emailed me 3-4 times over the course of a few days. Finally today I got this one:

Subj:Please don't fuck people around, thanks

Now he rambles a bit, but regardless, I don't need rudeness in my inbox, so I finally reply to this guy. He'd send me like 4 messages, so I figured I'd tell him to stop it. I simply wrote

I am not going to link you back. that is very rude.

This was like 4 hours ago. And keep in mind that the preceding message was the only one I wrote. These all came from him in rapid succession:

Yes thanks,
how about not naswering on my prevoius e-mails ?

How about FUCK DMOZ.ROG ?
Sorry
But i don't know any more who is more Crude, or Rude
any way thanks for your answer ...

followed by...

Thanks, your button has been removed.
At least i don't need to play a prostitute in order to get a link on your
site.

And minutes later he links me one of the entries on the supporters page that his site is better than. But then the truth comes out:

If i did not wrote that subject would you answer me than ?
I apologize, i stop smoking now in 5 weeks :-)

Ok, so that explains it. He quit smoking. That sucks. Must be rough. But then he needs to further clarify:

PLEASE IS THERE A WAY I CAN APOLOGIZE FOR THIS ?
I'm on the web since 1997 ...
I'm sorry ...
I'm 43 years old (married + 4 children)
I have stopped smoking last 5 weeks, this might have reduced my patience ...
Thank You.
This is my last e-mail and i will be not bothering you.

Now I actually kind of feel bad about all of this. I mean, not like baby punching bad, but at least an aww thats unfortunate. Until I get...

OK i understand, you hate muslims ...

WTF?! Muslims? When did that come into it? It's pretty clear that this guy's english is not his first language, but who am I to judge? My english is my first language and I'm barely literate. But somehow this guy has determined that I hate his religion, even tho I didn't even know what it was. But wait, that's not all:

OK i think you are a Spam filter not a human right ?
If I use "Fu*ck" word you react directly ...
OR are you Serbian and hate Albanians ?

and most recently:

Probaly you don't know what APOLOGIZE is.

Poor spam filter.

Mind you all of these messages were sent minutes apart- when I was out picking my car up from the shop! But it doesnt' end. While writing this journal entry I got

OK i see you hate Jews,
I'm half jewish ...
but i can't hep

Now wait a minute, I thought he was muslim. And I was serbian? I'm very confused as to who I hate atm. But I'll end this with his last message

Hmm in no way i can trigger any other answer ?!

I guess this is the closest thing to triggering any answer I can think of.

Over the last few months, the office has become home to a variety of creatures. It started when samzenpus brought in a turtle. He found this poor creature stuck in road tar. He saved the thing from certain death, cleaned the tar off him and dropped him in an aquarium. Soon after Hemos brought in an old tank to put in some salt water fish. Not to be outdone I finally fulfilled a childhood fantasy by getting a pet Ball Python that i have named Col. Tubesnake.

He's doing well. He's been eating his mice like a good little snake. This morning he didn't seem interested in the mouse tho, which i understand. I've been giving him frozen feeder mice from the pet shop which don't seem to do much for his hunter instincts. This time I warmed the thing on my coffee cup heater thingee and got it a lot warmer then before and tossed it in the tank. He struck almost before the mouse hit the ground. Snakes kick ass. The question is who will be the first to get a scorpion or tarantula.

Random popular culture notes: Aaron Sorkin's new Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip premiered earlier this week and has a lot of potential. Good cast, and of course since Sorkin is basically my jesus, I really hope the show comes together. Tonight is the premiere of The Office. Not much else on network TV worth watching this season, which I guess leaves me time to farm for herbs and raid in warcraft and wish the expansion would come out.

More than half of yesterday's discussion revolved around IE support. We PLAN IE support, we're just not knocking ourselves out to get that done while everything else is in flux. IE7 is definitely a priority. Not sure about 6. It really depends on how far we get, and when IE7 comes out, and how busted their javascript really is. patches would rock- this is all client side stuff and I bet someone with IE and a debugger could get some compatibiltiy in for any browser without that much effort, none of us are IE experts tho, so I'd rather we spend time on new functions.

The way D2 was rolled out for testing was that we actually had two discussion systems in place for awhile. One was a University of Michigan Research project written by nate. We used that as a rough framework to build our system. Subscribers got our system. Odd numbered users got our system, even got ours. Nate's system was given to a few hundred users, while ours was given to an ever growing number of readers that we rolled out over the course of a couple months. This is how we roll out many functions that aren't ready for prime time. Giving everythign to everyone all at once has performance issues for us. A slower rollout makes sure that we can work the kinks out before we give it ultimately to anonymous users.

If you use the handheld/low bandwidth options, the floaty control widget can cause problems. We know. It's on the list, but since only a tiny percentage of users are using those modes, it's not a top priority. The fix is relatively simple: the floaty needs a toggle from top to side. The code has a widget for a top floaty, but it's an older version. Basically I want to make the side floaty work properly (drag & drop instead of clickable for example) then redesign it to work up top and add the toggle. But that problem is easy to solve.

A VERY key point that a few users got is that this doesn't solve the problem that the old system has in favoring older threads. There is no good solution to this, short of randomizing top level comments. The REAL solution is to rework the scoring system to re-value threads with more granularity then -1..5. That of course is the plan.

As for one-click moderation, this is a baby step for us. The new moderation system is vastly different then the old one... and in-place moderation was critical to make it work.

A number of readers commented on the highest comments first not existing in this system... thats true, but you can fake it reasonably well. By setting the threshold fairly high, and hiding a good number of comments you can easily filter to score:4 or score:5 comments. Admittedly that doesn't give you 5s then 4s then 3s, but for mature discussions there are already dozens of comments. The new moderation will aim to address this problem in more detail, but I think a high enough threshold is BETTER then simply sorting by score becaause it's possible for you to navigate up or down without a page load when you do find a comment that you think might be worthy of further research.

As for patches, tf23 and a few others noted that we don't provide much in the way of direction. Well thats kinda true- the SF project page has tons of feature requests. If you emailed me and asked for my opinions on any of those features i'd tell you. I simply reject all feature requests that are worthless. Some of them are low priority, or things that I just wouldn't use for Slashdot. I read the mailing list- although I have little to say there. I've learned that if I'm not paying people, I don't usually get what I want for Slashdot, and thats fine. Code what you think works for your stuff. But if you want it on Slashdot, ask me how it should work or if it's crazy. Sometimes I reject ideas becasue our hardware can't handle extra queries. Other times I reject them because they have serious social issues or I decide that cluttering the UI isn't worth it for a tiny percentage of users who want a function. But there's a lot of fairly obvious stuff that could be fixed. I mentioned a number of things in the story I posted yesterday too. And a lot of that stuff is totally in the javascript- no downloading and installing slashcode to test even required.

Anyway the feedback on D2 is mostly favorable. I'm disappointed that the bulk of the discussion yesterday focused on the fact that we've chosen to beta test on the single browser used by most of our readers and worry about compatibility later. It meant I got less real feedback then I might like. But I think that's always the case- if there is one glaring issue, readers can't see past it to talk about the hundred other issues that are honestly more helpful...

What's interesting to me is figuring out how users can navigate this datastructure intelligently. What does it MEAN to expand a thread. To collapse a thread? Do I need siblings? Do I need expand-all? I don't want 35 buttons... where is the line between needless clutter and the necessary UI? Interesting problems to solve. Fun stuff. What's tough is that some readers want everything and the kitchen sink, but most users will find 3-4 buttons sufficient (and others will think 2 is intimidating). We have to balance minimalism, functionality, and hardware limitations. I find it enjoyable.