(Blatantly stolen off Boingboing)

Okay, now this is absolute bullshit. It's stuff like this that drives me crazy.

During the pledge of allegiance recital at school, a kid decided to recite the Star Trek Pledge of Allegiance.

Mind you - nothing vulgar nor inappropriate, in fact, the ST PoA is something that quite nicely encapsulates the spirit of humanity.

And what happens? The kid gets suspended and the kid's Mom gets called to school. Not to mention, the kid gets a punishment of having to write the pledge 50 times.

The Mom's got the story in her blog.

"So, anyway. What did he do?" I picked at the hem of my sweatshirt, looked just to the right of her face. I couldn't meet her eyes. I felt nervous. I felt underdressed. I wondered where 8 was.
 
    So she told me what he did. And as she told me, I started to laugh. I didn't laugh a little, either, but I belly-laughed and grabbed my stomach. My son stood with his class this morning, put small right hand over heart, faced the American flag, and recited his own personal pledge of allegiance:
 
    I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United Federation of Planets, and to the galaxy for which it stands, one universe, under everybody, with liberty and justice for all species.
 
    "Mrs. Jaworski. This isn't humorous. The Pledge is an extremely important and patriotic moment each morning in the classroom. I am ashamed of your son's behavior, and I hope you are, too."

I'm at a loss for words. I hope that stupid principal and teacher get kicked out - if anything, that kid needs to be applauded for his spirit and creativity.

Damn!

I submitted this a while ago, but no idea if it has been accepted. Anyway, thought I'd preserve it here for posterity!

metlin write "A very crucial step in the procedure of decrypting today's commonly used encryption codes by Quantum Computers has been demonstrated by physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). According to a paper which was published in this month's Science, physicists at NIST were able to demonstrate a quantum version of Fourier Transform using electromagnetically trapped beryllium ions as qubits. This is a big step in Quantum Computing as well as its applications, since the quantum version of FT is the most crucial and final step in Shor's algorithm -- an algorithm for finding the "prime factors" of large numbers -- the prime numbers that when multiplied together produce a given number. Paper abstract available here."

Turns out I've been banned from home. No, it's not DHCP - it's a static IP, and one day I'm able to post and the other day I'm not. No particular reason, either - I had have two of my comments modded down, but then I had been modded up atleast double that many times.

So, I mailed moderation@slashdot.org. And what do I get? A blindingly brilliant and insightful mail from the Einstein reincarnate Robert Rozeboom -

"You have been downmodded too many times and are in timeout for a bit."

Wow! Hey, genius.

Anyway, I mailed him back telling him in extremely precise terms that I can post from elsewhere, just not from my home. Even though I've been modded up, not down, in the recent past.

No response yet. I wonder what else his blindingly awesome intellect is going to conjure up next.

I call you my son not cause you shine boy, but 'cause you are my own. You ain't too bright, boy.

>Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue.

I fear it's more like, "Democracy is 48 sheep and 52 wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Well armed sheep contesting the issue is, 'traitorous liberal domestic terrorism.'"

Gee!

Sometimes my powers of prescience startle me.

Just the one guy that I do not want elected Pope gets elected Pope.

Yeah, just what we need. Yet another hardliner right wing nut-job for a Pope. As if the world wasn't full of them already. Oh yeah, we need more of these folks. Absolutely. Yup.

I'll be surprised if the human race makes it very far.

Well, thanks to Ethelred Unraed for this one!

---

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

The Fireman's Manual.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Ayesha from "She", by H. Rider Haggard.

The last book you bought is:

The Egyptian Book of the Dead - (The Papyrus of Ani) by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge.

The last book you read:

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke.

What are you currently reading?

The Egyptian Book of the Dead - (The Papyrus of Ani) by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge.

Eight Lectures in Theoretical Physics by Max Planck.

Death of Chaos (part of the Saga of Recluce) by L.E. Modesitt Jr.

Five books you would take to a deserted island.

The collected journals of "Annalen Der Physik" - I'd die without having to do physics.

"The Bhagavad Gita", Hindu religious/philosophical codebook of sorts - every man needs to contemplate his existence :-)

"The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" - like EU said, everybody needs to laugh once in a while.

"Lord of the Rings by Tolkien" - what can I say? I've read this again and again and again since childhood, and it never seems to lose its charm!

Well, either the "Table of Integrals, Series and Products" by Gradshteyn and Ryzbik or "On The Shoulders of Giants" by Stephen Hawking.

---

Damn, didn't realize I was that lost a geek. :-/

Ah, yet another pristine example of the Slashdot groupthink.

For some odd reason, they cannot accept the fact that there maybe genuine folks out there who could use software patents.

Not to mention the fact that half the folks do not know the difference between patents and copyrights or the requirements and pre-requisites for getting the patent.

Nope, but we will however say things like, "I doubt you have ever been involved in a court case, never mind a patent infringement lawsuit." and mod-down those whom we disagree with rather than argue.

Bah, am just ranting. Fucking asshats.

But why oh why can't people see that there MAY be someone out there for whom something maybe beneficial? Perhaps it doesn't agree with your worldview, but that doesn't make it wrong.

Am serious here - am I the only one who seems to think that perhaps there is another side to things, too? It's disappointing to see one sided and biased arguments.

Okay, so a lot of you do know that am very picky about movie adaptations of books. So perhaps you should take this with a pinch of salt - but if you're indeed a big fan of Douglas Adams, I'd strongly advise you to NOT watch the movie.

I was in the theatre the other night to watch Constantine (which btw, was a good movie). And they show the trailer of the movie adaptation of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

It does not even look or feel anything like the books and a lot of it looks *SO* ridiculous that it grates on you. I could go on ranting about how they've changed a lot of things, but that probably doesn't make a difference -- what *does* make a difference is that they have made the humour very obvious and flagrant, almost like a standup comedy rather than the subtle PG Woodehouse-ish British humour that Douglas Adams was so famous for.

There are so many points that really are painful - Zaphod's second head comes upwards out of his tummy, Marvin looks *SO* ridiculous (white little thing), Trillian looks like a housewife and not an astrophysicist, Arthur is a short stocky guy and Ford Prefect cracks black humour jokes - if they can be called that. And they all talk in *AMERICAN* accents, for cryin' out loud. Vogons look like something George Lucas would create and the book is shown on a bloody LCD screen.

And the way the dialogues were rendered, nothing would make sense to folks who've not have read the book. While I do know that the movie did have Douglas Adams' blessing, am sure he's probably spinning in his grave.

Man, they're killing ALL my favourite works - Isaac Asimov, JRR Tolkien, Douglas Adams....

DAMN YOU!!!! Can't you guys just let the bloody books be? Can't you create something new rather than copying works of art and screwing them over? DAMN YOU ASSHOLES.

Update

Seems like I've been banned (yet again) for bad posting and am not even gonna try and do something about it. Bah. Maybe because a lot of my previous comments got modded down :-(

Will reply to ya'll when I get back my "Right to Post" (TM).

What do I even say to this one?

A couple of teen-girls decided to be nice and distribute cookies to their neighbours in an act of kindness. And they get sued.

The worst part? The neighbour who sued them won the case for medical damages worth $900. Just how rotten can we get?

Lesson, kids. Please do not be kind to neighbours. Or for that matter, anyone.

Update: Allen Zadr has written a rant on the topic.

You know, you ought to let people post on some of your more interesting journal entries. =)

• Glaciers swim - like meat.
• In and Out - More meat than you can shake butter at. A stick of butter.
• of meat that looks like genitalia. - or vice versa.

More useful stuff!:

Fill in the blanks: a loaf of ___, a container of ___, and a stick of ___.

Something that is fun to say: "the angry man has tiny genitals."

$ stty sane

Well, I came home to India a couple of weeks ago to my home-city of Chennai, and it so happened that this is one of the places badly hit by the Tsunami.

While it is definitely sad that the whole Tsunami thing happened, the way aid organizations, world governments and others are handling this is really quite disgusting.

It's become a blame-game of trying to find whom to blame - and nobody seems to care about the facts and how to prevent such things from happening again.

The thing is that this region has never experienced Tsunamis before. I've experienced a few small Earthquakes as a kid on several coastal cities in India, but we've never had to worry about Tsunamis. And for the most part, Chennai has been protected by Sri Lanka which bears the brunt of most of the tectonic activity in the ocean.

So the government did not feel that an early warning system was economically justifiable (the exact words that they used) - until now. And now, they're trying to find people to blame for this whole event.

This is a natural disaster, and natural disasters happen. You cannot really do anything and merely warning systems will not suffice. One needs to tell people where to go and what to do.

Mere warnings will result in rioting and looting and mass panic, and would genuinely cause more loss of lives than no warning at all. We need a system in place which can really handle this through proper procedures, channels and processes -- not merely just a warning system.

I wish our politicians understood this -- now you can be fairly sure that for the next N years, any tectonic activity around the oceans will be considered as Tsunamis and there would be mass panic.

We also need to worry about another thing - the spread of epidemics. We're scared of approaching the beaches of Chennai for the simple reason that these places had (and still have) a lot of carcasses and the whole place is rotting. The government needs to take care that the areas are well protected from any unwanted spread of disease.

That said, one of my very good friends from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands got married in Car Nicobar. Her husband is in the Air Force and apparently an entire Air Force base has been wiped off Car Nicobar. I've not been able to get through to her or her family (who are in Port Blair). I can only hope they're alright.

Update: Well, to make matters worse Andaman & Nicobar Islands have been experiencing even more quakes and tremors, and that's been scaring people from continuing with the rescue/clean-up effort. And no news yet from my friend :-/

For the past few days, Firefox on Windows XP would freeze everytime I opened up Slashdot. I wasn't exactly sure why or how, and thought it was a problem with Firefox, and would kill it.

And _then_ I realized that Slashdot has actually started embedding a Java Applet in the ads, and this freezes up FF on Windows.

I mentioned this in passing in this post, and it looks like I'm not the only one who's subjected to this.

I usually like the ads that Slashdot puts up and feel bad about blocking them -- but if Slashdot continues this, I simply don't care. Between my browser freezing up and me losing a good minute everytime I see Slashdot and blocking the ads, I'd simply block the ads. And no, I'm not going to disable Java on FF just because Taco & Co. decide to be retarded enough and add something ridiculous like this.

What next? Are we gonna have one of those ridiculous click-the-monkey ads?

Click the jumping monkey!
Click the jumping monkey!
Click the jumping monkey!

That'll be the day I'll definitely leave Slashdot.

Update

I guess someone did take notice that the Java ads are a big pain, and I don't see them anymore. Yay!

Good job, guys. And thanks!

I came across a user with the following sig today -

"Support the First Amendment: Read at -1."

Couldn't agree more :-) And that is why I sometimes troll, mehearties. Not to cause harm. Not to plunder and pillage the oh-so-innocent Slashdot editors. But to speak freely as I would want to. To show them how fucked up their system is.

They try to shut the trolls up by more restrictions. And by tightening the screws. But -- they forget that it would only make the serious trolls strike back.

Slashdot is becoming SO hypocritic by the day.

Look at it. It's become so bad that even expressing one's opinion is wrong. Moderation has become something where if the moderator does not agree with you, you're modded down.

I thought that was exactly what Slashdot's moderation system sought to prevent?

Consider Mac articles -- any anti-mac post gets modded flamebait, no matter how relevant. Consider science articles -- inevitably, the classic stemcell topic shall come up and people will flame away. The classic creationists vs. evolution argument. Or the science vs. religion ones.

Although I've been often at the end of benefitting from these (pro-Slashbot-think) --- I was really quite surprised at the amount of prejudice that goes into moderating these things.

Just because I disagree with someone does not mean they would have to be modded down. If anything, their opinons are just as valuable and interesting as mine.

A poster, who shalt remain unnamed said this - "Any pro-Bush post gets modded down. This place is seething with left-wing liberal hippies, who see conspiracy in every nook and corner."

I was like, duh, you're over-reacting. And then guess what? I realized he wasn't - more often than not, offtopic anti-Bush posts are left unmodded while the pro-Bush guys get modded down to oblivion -- hmmm, isn't that a little unfair?

(note -- I don't really side with either, I'm merely observing and nothing more)

What's happening, Slashdot?

Noise to signal ratio is on the rise. Moderation is so broken and haphazard these days. Prejudice and groupthink prevails, rather than commonsense. Dupes everywhere. The Over-rated and Under-rated mods are so frequently abused. Editors who do not listen to the comments we send in, even if you are a subscriber and point out an error during the preview.

Mmmm. Matt Damon! Fuck yeah!

Two comments of mine have been mod-bombed to glory.

Here they are - one and two.

Just look at the Over-rated mods. Blatant fucking abuse, both were at +4. Kinda smart that they choose the funnies, because funny is an opinion unlike something like interesting or informative. Bleh.

Until Slashdot fixes this, I'm going to mark ALL Over-rated and Under-rated mods on Meta-mod (unless there's a very good reason not to) as Unfair.

I think this offending comment is the cause of it.

And now, Slashdot doesn't let me post anon - why? Apparently because there's a lot of bad posting from my IP. WTF?

FUCK. Karma down the drain.

Update (updating in JE for obvious reasons)

FK tells me that there are no Overrated and Underrated in M2 - great, now that he mentions it he's right. Absolutely brilliant and wonderful.

Yay, why do I feel this seething rage? What the hell were Taco and gang thinking of anyway? Funny, maybe Signal 11 did have a point or two about the moderation system.

F.Grump -- both were modded up to +4, and in a matter of 5-10 minutes, they were modded down to 0 and 1, each.

Well, I do sleep. Not without company though :-p