I adore /. for its purity of thought, its perfection of moderation that lets me see all the words writ by any who would write, even though most have little useful to say.

The egalitarianism of the moderation system is perfect in its design and execution. It's a beautiful thing. Some seven years I've read and subsumed every comment reading at -1, and learned quite more from the -1's than the +5's. Among other things I have the 2^8 days read in a row achievement, and that was just when I was logged in. You can be assured that if you've writ a comment on /. in the last seven years, it's likely I've read it. If you've been wondering if anybody bothered to read your work, rest easy.

Even though I've posted things when I was a drunk ass and would like to erase them, I appreciate that you can't take /. comments back or edit them once posted, and worked that to my advantage.

Today though, I have a different issue. Once upon a time at /. there was a particularly difficult user: twitter. Twitter's a guy. He's got issues, but he knows his shit and he's tapped into the tech vein that we crave.

/. is a good thing, but it has one thing I cannot in good conscience bear. Somebody on the /. staff has it in for the user "twitter", and unlimited modpoints such that even referencing the name "twitter" is proscribed. I'm not OK with that. twitter was an idiot sometimes, quite open about his sockpuppets, and gaming the /. system. He was also one of the most prolific posters of timely and interesting articles. Whether he was good or bad is irrelevant to me - that some moderator can transparently banish him so thoroughly that I dare not mention him for fear of being modded instantly from +5 to -1 just for mentioning him, is.

I'm an American, and this looks like prior restraint of speech to me.

I love me some /., but this is a game I won't play.

If /. can't bear the mention of twitter, maybe I should try Reddit. I hate the Redditor thing, but maybe it's better than a site that pretends to be purely open except that it can't bear "twitter". Reddit looks to me like a site more open to dissent than one that can't bear a twitter.

Not long ago we had the news of the "Wii Suicide" where an irresponsible gun owner lead to a toddler shooting and killing herself. Now this year we have a toddler killing a 5-year-old, likely again due to irresponsible gun ownership. Being as republicans will gladly bend over backwards to defend gun owners and guns, we will likely see this soon reported with the toddler as a "murderer".

To be blunt, I am saying that some people are simply not responsible enough to ever own a gun. It is not the fault of the gun, but rather the fault of stupid and irresponsible people who for bewildering reasons are carrying loaded weapons.

Apparently Glenn Beck is planning to vote for Michele Bachmann . We could file this under "least surprising news of the week", I suppose.

I haven't been reading slashdot regularly much lately, and now I see ... 503 errors. Back to https I go.

Why are comments in journal entry discussions available for moderation? The discussions are seldom long enough for it to have any meaningful impact; more often people use it as a way to try to suppress what others are saying, or to try to attack someone else's karma.

For the record, no I am not seeking for the petty moderations that one person just made on three of my JE discussion comments across two entries to be reversed. Both discussions have so few comments that it makes no meaningful difference regarding the comments viewed or not viewed, and it three moderations - even when two are flamebait and the other troll - won't move my karma one iota.

I'm just saying that moderation doesn't seem to serve a useful purpose in JE discussions. We've had this discussion before, though no slashdot employee has ever responded to it previously. Other members have suggested that perhaps it should be a toggle for the JE writer to allow or disallow moderation in the discussion of their JE (similar to how an author can do the same for comments). Personally I just don't see the purpose of JE comment moderation at all.

And yes, I fully expect that someone will respond either here as AC, or in a JE under a different name, about how someone has their whatever into whatever contortion. Go ahead.

"Teflon" Tim Pawlenty has had quite a year. After spending at least five years preparing to run for the GOP nomination for president, he quickly fizzled out and returned to his previous job of not governing Minnesota. He spent absurd gobs of money and now is endorsing Mitt Romney, which makes sense as Teflon Tim was the only candidate boring enough to make Mitt Romney look exciting.

So naturally, he should be excited to hear that he's been featured in a recent list at GQ magazine.

Except that list has him Number one on the list of the 25 least influential people.

Teflon Tim can derive some good news from this, though; number 25 is President Lawnchair. So indeed, he did beat Obama at something...

So the GOP is running Herman Cain into the ground for cheating on his wife. But who is benefiting from this? New Gingrich, who is far from a poster child for fidelity. Just ask his first wife how faithful he was ... you know, the one he served with divorce papers while she was hospitalized.

Well, at least Gingrich didn't lead the gang calling for the public execution of Bill Clinton after getting a BJ in the white house ... oh, wait, that was him.

Not only did he lead that gang, he was himself having another extramarital affair - this time cheating on his second wife (the one who he was sleeping with while still married to wife #1) - while leading it. And, of course, touting "conservative family values" at the same time.

Apparently a lot of people disagree with my my assessment that T-Mobile is about to start circling the drain that I made in the discussion on the story about AT&T dropping their acquisition bid for them. Although a fair number of people agree or are sympathetic to it, as well.

So far, I have seen records of at least 11 moderations on that one message:

• 3 overrated moderations (cowards...)
• 2 flamebait moderations (whatever...)
• 4 insightful moderations
• 1 interesting moderation
• 1 informative moderation

I enjoyed that at one point it was scored (+1, flamebait). Currently I see it as (+1, Insightful).

And no, I don't need you to go moderate it up. It didn't move my karma one iota and the discussion is stale now anyways (I posted the comment two days ago). I just think its funny that one comment drew that many moderations. I'm sure there are other comments that have drawn more, but this is a new record for me. The comment did manage to pull 12 replies as well, which is also pretty impressive for my comments here. If the replies are all from unique users, then that means at least 23 slashdot users saw my comment, which is likely a new record for me as well... Some times the traffic here has been so minimal I wasn't sure there were that many users left on this site.

I'm really getting annoyed by the +5 comments achievement thing. A long time ago I hit 2 to the 7th +5 comments. I'm sure I've had 128 more since then. Why don't I have the 2 to the 8th achievement? Is there a cap?

The new user interface increased the difficulty level considerably, but I think I've earned that 2 to the 8th achievement and I want it NOW.

Several weeks ago I picked up what looked like a good deal for inductive charging for my Wiimotes. A system made by Psyclone, marketed under the Duracell name, offered four batteries with a charging pad that could (theoretically) charge all four remotes simultaneously. All this for $20.

So I went for it. Yeah, caveat emptor, you get what you pay for, should known, etc...

This thing is a colossal pile of failure, but that isn't the worst. The company also sucks balls. I initially contacted them through their web site form to tell them that I received at least one bad battery right off the bat. They responded by sending me an email asking for my mailing address - from an address that doesn't take replies. I then tried the usual candidate addresses to try to reply to help@, service@, support@, and none of those accepted email either. So then I called them on the phone, at the number from their web page. Care to guess what you get there?

Voicemail. Regardless of when you call, you get a voicemail thanking you for calling and asking you to leave a message so they can call you back. At no point can you actually reach a live person through their phone system. I managed to get into the menu system and found "press 0 for the operator", which sounded great except that pressing 0 just sent me back to the voicemail greeting where I could leave a message again.

Thankfully I'm only out $20 on the charger and $4 on shipping. It sucks to lose that much money when you make as little money as I do, but I guess I'll just have to eat it. I did get a couple working batteries out of it at least.

The only season that may some day rival the NBA basketball season in terms of being absurdly long is the "Christmas" shopping season. Every year retailers push gift cards harder on us poor bastard customers. A while ago I started seeing a gift card in stores (thankfully nobody has bought one for me) that puzzles me.

The facebook gift card.

Can anyone tell me what the fuck you do with a facebook gift card? (and yeah, get off my lawn after you answer the question)

This journal entry exists to test the problem I have seen with the comments system in regards to comments posted in journal entries. Comments posted as replies to comments in JE discussions generate bad third links (going to firehose instead of the JE itself). I haven't had a comment posted in one of my own JEs in a while, this will allow me to test if that does or does not show the same bug.

I was amused years ago when GWB managed to fall off a Segway; which of course was supposed to be almost un-crashable. Now this week we saw the next "Texan" who wants to be president show us how to crash a segue.

I see that vantagec has added me to his foes list. I have no idea why. I also see that in over 10 years, he has written a total of 10 comments on slashdot (of which only two ever saw replies).

So apparently I have angered mediocrity?

I just received a "comment moderation" message telling me about 5 messages I posted in one discussion that were all moderated down. I posted more than 5 comments there, though. Being as at least one of them was heavily nested in a discussion, the moderations were not likely by chance.

So to reiterate - use your mod points somewhere else, dippy. You are not making any great point by attempting - and failing - to mod-bomb me. My karma is still excellent and you don't have any mod points. And you don't get them back if you comment in the thread to undo them, either.