I'm a masochist. No, not of the sexual variety. Of the slashdot variety. For some reason, not only do I still continue to read this site, I click on links to stories about cars and phones. The raging stupidity and arrogance is amazing.

And yet I come back.

Does anything around here work anymore? I go to the zoo.pl page (uid changed to mine to protect the guilty) to try to change friend/foe/neutral status, and I get:

OK

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, admin@slashdot.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) Server at slashdot.org Port 80

I have to click in three different places to find the right link to let me do a JE.
I was gonna give a laundry list, but fuck it, it's just pissing in the wind. I figure Dice was able to buy it for, what, the price of one week of coffee at Starbucks?

http://perens.com/blog/2013/01/16/1/

This is my farewell to Slashdot. I once stated after seeing my submissions disappear faster than spam -- often while RED and bearing no negative tags -- that I'd leave Slashdot out of self-respect if it happened again. Although I made an exception or two afterwards, the time has now come. I do not waste my time to have even the effort of a summary squandered so aggressively whilst spam outlives my contributions. The title of this journal is due to the tendency for this to occur under the watch of Soulskill -- almost exclusively. Whether or not it has anything to do with any particular editor or not, I obviously cannot say with certainty. It has simply reached a point where I've come to expect it -- an unhealthy anticipation. Hopefully some of the 18 accepted submissions have helped to enrich things rather than otherwise; I definitely tried. As a final note to actual "friends"; my failure to reciprocate was Discordian in nature, and I was inclined only to friend my foes. For us Discordians must stick apart. Take care folks and keep the the excellent stories coming!

- Penurious Penguin

Intelligence:

Noun. (America, UK)

1. A collusive process whereby otherwise public information is made proprietary, assimilated and either (a) retained, or (b) reconstituted by the few for purposes of affecting the many

2. The art of making something seem more intelligent by obscuring the details necessary for thorough evaluation (See: esoterica)

3. A primary ingredient in propaganda

4. A private precursor to public ignorance

5. An expendable and valuable resource thought by oligarchs to produce results at a significantly-faster rate than wisdom, but with greater consequences and less predictable results on long-term scales

6. An industrialized, highly refined form of data-processing specially tailored for those deficient of intellect.

7. A misnomer, popular amongst uncreative pun enthusiasts (See Langley)

8. A theoretical state of mind thought by some to be obtainable by eliminating the thing itself

Via LXer: Steam Beta expands for another 5000!

Alright folks, I had to do it. And surely at least a few of the grumpy bastards on Slashdot could use a grin, or even a laugh. Have a listen to "Bill Gates" in a vicious rap-duel with "Steve Jobs".

Guns, meth, Russian Roulette, murder, and Belize -- Are you prepared to die?.
An interesting CNBC interview with John McAfee

Via LXer, Phoronix announces that Microsoft has released Skype 4.1 for Linux:

I think I'll let this one cool down a bit before upgrading anything.

Although a story on the subject of succession was posted on Slashdot yesterday, Ars Technica has one just out, which provides some additional insight and updates on the situation. 90,000 people is a pretty good start, considering it's a pretty new petition. Guess that's what the drones were for -- our leaders really look ahead!

I figured I'd submit this one last time (in journal) since the last two seem to have been rejected. I was quite intrigued by this device, especially since it appears to resolve some previously debated concerns regarding the openness of the Raspberry Pi. This final submission (via journal) is primarily in hopes of either receiving a comment (or two) as to why it is unworthy, or perhaps alternatively, some nods this time around. I was genuinely pleased to discover it, hence the persistence.

See Submission: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&type=submission&id=2350381

First, this first paragraph is not the submission. I am re-submitting the story below, but to journal this time. My reason for the second submission is exclusively because I observed the first one showing red consistently until it suddenly and rapidly disappeared altogether with no color change. It was still showing in the Firehose box to the left for a while, but not on the Firehose page (dubiously aka "Recent" page). I also observed a few other articles simultaneously disappear with far greater speed than I have ever noticed before; even spam lasts longer. I can imagine it being voted as offtopic, but I saw no added tags and it happened with peculiar speed. So there is my reason. See post below if desired:

"Shortly before midnight on October 15 â" initially surmised by some as a meteorite â" a large explosion occurred at a munitions facility near Camp Minden, Louisiana. Amongst those evacuated were hundreds of students and prisoners, though no fatalities have been reported. Doppler-images from the National Weather Service suggest the plume may have towered as high as 7,200 feet.

Apparently, large explosions are not uncommon in the Minden area. In 2006 an explosion resulted in over 1000 people being evacuated, and as recently as 2011 1000lbs of black powder exploded."

Primary Url: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/10/16/mystery-explosion-shatters-windows-lights-sky-in-louisiana/

I feel old, guys. I feel like the old man sysadmin with the Unix Beard and suspenders (which I continually think of as a halloween costume, less and less ironically). My coworkers are all... what would have been slashdotters had they not found digg or reddit, or whatever it was.

These are "kids" who grew up with linux. (They're all 30.) But they don't have the base knowledge that I expect them to have. They only know bash. They mostly know Ubuntu and Red Hat, although the one 'sysadmin' type dude knows virtual machines with Xen, and seems to know what he's doing most of the time.

I figured I'd pick up python, because I ordered a raspberry pi, and it seems that's what all the cool kids are doing. (I get along fine with shell and perl for most of whatever it is I do around here.) The advice I got from one of my coworkers was that I should "uninstall the IDE." IDE? For python? Seriously? It's interpreted, you use a goddamned text editor. Apparently that's one of the 'tips' from "Learning Python the Hard Way." (I'm reading Programming Python on my nook, FWIW. And I'm already yelling at it, as the examples are how to create a database from your filesystem with pickle, because seriously, if you're managing peoples' salaries, you don't want your data in flat files, or necessarily in a readable format to your other employees. But that's my cross to bear.)

When I got home, I started ranting about that to the Benny. Frothing at the mouth kind of ranting like I used to be able to do. Who uses a goddamned IDE for an interpreted language!? There's no "I" for your "DE". When you're writing C, in a complex environment, sure. When you're writing Obj-C for your iPhone app of the year, fine. You have libraries, you have interdependencies, you have reasons to have a debugger and a compiler. Python is interpreted. There's no need for these things.

Goddamned kids these days. In my day, we had emacs and vi, and flamewars about both. There was no IDE for writing shell scripts. There was no IDE for perl. There wasn't even really decent tab completion! We used 'more' instead of 'less'. We knew how to pipe things to awk and grep. We used which instead of locate. And we liked it, damnit!

I'm running OpenNMS on Ubuntu at work, using vi (technically vim) to edit all the xml files and java.properties style files. I don't run KDE, Gnome, or any other desktop on the damned thing. It's a server, for pete's sake. Not that it's lacking RAM or CPU for me to run that, but because I'm old, and old-school. Some of my coworkers (and I use that word loosely, as I'm a department of one) run linux on the desktop ... not because all the tools are there and work, necessarily, but because our IT group doesn't know how to deal with linux, and they can get away with it.

First, this is NOT a submission. I was not aware of any other way to ask an informal question, so I've posted to /journal.

After making several comments on Slashdot today, I later checked for replies directly on the article's front page and discovered one of my comments appearing out of context. An image of this thread here(1) , shows I had responded to an AC who had replied to one of my comments. The AC's comment is clearly visible and it can be viewed by its ID here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3146679&cid=41472221, where you will see my reply, stupid or not, but in context.

In this image(2),

you can see that the threshold for displaying comments is set to Full, which still left the AC comment invisible while viewing its child-comment (my comment).

Image (1) was captured from within my user-account options, which automatically loads all comments for single threads. What I failed to realize is that to see all comments on the article page, I needed to click the Load All Comments option. See here(3). Yes, I know, eureka.

But without selecting the Load All Comments option, my comment is displayed without its parent, appearing as if I've responded to another user. Below is a [mis]representation of my comment as it would presumably appear to all other Slashdot users, regardless of their settings and whether logged in or not: See(4)

  It is unlikely that most Slashdot users select the Load All Comments option -- apparently resulting in some comments appearing completely out of context, almost guaranteeing they will be moderated as "Troll" or "Offtopic". It seems unreasonable for a parent-comment to be invisible when viewing its child-comment simply because the parent is rated zero or below (- 1). As I believe is well-illustrated by the images linked herein, such a protocol can corrupt otherwise normal or higher-rated comments. Has it always been this way? Is this more sensible than I realize? Do I have a point? Is this the cost of replying to ACs? Or am I missing something?

Thanks to whoever burned five.