• Trollback!
• The List [VOTE]
• LA Confidential
• Is it troll or is it Memorex
• Food for dogs, Pate on platters
• Excessive Bad Stories
• Area Man Inadvertently Becomes Statistic
• Free Teh iPods

Trollback!

Yes folks, it's Slim Pickins this month, though while the pearls are fewer they shine just as bright. We blame not you, readers and participants, but ourselves, as our always-present eye on Slashdot got infected for a few weeks; you'll note a preponderance of late September postings. Open Source people often say that "many eyes make all bugs shallow", which while demonstrably false sure is fun to say. Even so, we always accept links to excellent postings from anywhere on the World Wide Internet at our e-cyberspace address, trollback at gmail dot com. So send us your favorites, and thanks for reading.

This month's topic icon is a ass. We don't really feel the need to qualify.

The List [VOTE]

"fuck me Santa!"

100|(-1,22,28,8%) Anonymous Coward | "IPv6: Not Ready For Prime Time"

I do not see IPv6 being accelerated with proxy servers - IPv6 deployment is already going as fast as it can.While IPv6 fixes many problems in IPv4, the developed world will not embrace IPv6 until many shortcomings in the protocol are addressed. As a Brown University grad student, the subject of IPv6 is what my disseration is upon. Allow me to include a few talking-points on what I've learned. Cisco routers suck at IPv6. Many of cisco's routers use the router's CPU to process IPv6 [cont]...

• 14AC, Awards:+14acct+3low+1acup+1bab+10mod

95|(1,17,36,22%) Anonymous Coward | "DHS"

I can't post non-anonymously as it could jeapordize my career. I work at a mid-level office position at the DHS (Department of Homeland Security). Several months ago papers started to circulate about how to effectively ban arial photoography to prevent precise measurement and targetting of sensitive targets (nuclear power plants, etc). If you live near a target like this you'll soon notice a large fenced area with a large white square building in the center. This building hides a [cont]...

• 10AC, Awards:+26acct+1acup+9mod

90|(2,12,40,10%) Anonymous Coward | "Good news? Bad news"

Wow, I can't believe people are so selfish that they'd risk the U.S.'s relations with another country just so they, and _possibly_ others, can see what happened. If the FBI wants documents classified, the FBI has a good reason. I don't want another 9/11 in the U.S. or a foreign country just because people want to see some documents.

• 6AC, Awards:+34acct+2low+14mod

84|(5,13,35,18%) mekkab | "Second rate!"

Great! A second-rate search engine buys a second rate MP3 player! News at 11!

• 11AC, Awards:+24acct+14mod

77|(5,8,27,25%) Dancin_Santa | "The WTO move is the prime incentive"

Joining the WTO would require Iran to abide by internationally agreed upon IP regulations (Bourne Convention) and the impact of suddenly enforcing copyright law against its citizens would be very heavy.Even limiting enforcement to the government computer systems would result in significant layouts of cash to Microsoft (and other software makers). Iran is simply not in a position to make that kind of investment.Likewise, it is difficult to see how Microsoft could do business with the r [cont]...

• 6AC, Awards:+21acct+1low+2bab+6mod

72|(-1,10,33,6%) Dancin_Santa | "Not spam"

First off, I fully agree with the Linux folks on this one and rebuff the MPAA demands. It is absolutely idiotic for this kind of action to be taken without even the slightest consideration of the actual infringement impossibilities of the software names.That said, I think there's a lot to be considered when choosing a software project name. One that quickly and accurately describes or at the very least gives a hint as to the functionality of the package is great. The kinds that the [cont]...

• 8AC, Awards:+25acct+1low+8mod

64|(0,8,20,19%) Dancin_Santa | "My Roomba doesn't take pictures"

And I can safely assume that it doesn't because I trust that no hackers have entered my home (except myself, of course) and altered the hardware to such an extent that paranoia regarding the hardware is necessary.I think that every time stories like this appear in the mainstream press, that hackers in general become more and more externalized from society. You start to change things such that you end up being your own 'Little Brother' with your prying eyes everywhere and soon enough y [cont]...

• 8AC, Awards:+12acct+2low+9mod

64|(-1,8,24,8%) Anonymous Coward | "Hmmm"

What happens when people start dying?

• 6AC, Awards:+19acct+1low+11mod

60|(2,9,24,14%) Three Headed Man | "As someone who actually used it..."

I had VoIP for about 3 weeks (early June to June 30) before I got too frustrated. It was down pretty frequently; not nearly as dependable as my AT&T line. I got an echo, and the sound quality never was as good as a phone. I just decided to stick to cellular access, and cancelled before I started another month of fees. I'm happy with AT&T.

• 7AC, Awards:+17acct+2bust+1low+10mod

50|(1,11,19,9%) FortKnox | "Front Page Material!"

Now this is what I call front page material. Any normal slashdot article would have about 50-100 comments by now. This one has 5 (4 of which are trolls). Anime should be in its own section, IMHO. Its only here because of Taco's love of it. I really don't consider it a 'nerdy' thing. Sure, lotsa geeks are anime fanboys, and some actually enjoy the plots and stuff in the movies, but it really doesn't fit in with technology and science in my opinion. So I say give it its own section s [cont]...

• 4AC, Awards:+15acct+1low+4mod

49|(5,9,13,3%) Sheetrock | "Conversely..."

My question is: Is this software as good as the ever-extensible Kwiki implementation?My question is: is there anything Microsoft can do that we won't question?Applaud them for their newfound approach to open source. More alternatives are always better. I'll bet this software does something Kwiki can't do.

• 4AC, Awards:+9acct+3low+4mod

48|(0,7,23,5%) rd_syringe | "Rules for this story"

I feel the need to lay out some ground rules before we go on:1.) Microsoft is somehow responsible for all third-party DLLs on a system. Their scanner must contain a self-sufficient, learning AI that just knows which DLLs to scan on any system in existence.2.) Mozilla was affected by this same vulnerability, but it's okay because it's Mozilla and not Microsoft.3.) When Mozilla's XUL bug was marked Confidential since 1999 only to be revealed earlier this year when exploits came out [cont]...

• 8AC, Awards:+15acct+1low+12mod

48|(0,6,19,10%) Sheetrock | "It's pretty amazing when you think about it."

Mars always seemed just out of reach when I first took interest in astrology. The planet most like our own in the solar system, it's the logical next step for our move off this planet as we begin to explore and colonize space and it's quite encouraging to see that this is a possibility -- although hopefully more success will be had with landing manned spacecraft on its surface.I suppose another thing I've always hoped to see was signs of life in the universe. Although we've discovere [cont]...

• 4AC, Awards:+15acct+4bab+6mod

45|(1,7,23,4%) Three Headed Man | "Cheap"

Nothing better. Maybe Solitare too.

• 5AC, Awards:+18acct+9mod

42|(-1,9,16,6%) Anton Anatopopov | "All of this could easily have been avoided."

It's obvious to anyone that this scenario could easily have been avoided. The issue here is the restrictive nature of the GPL. Had this code been released under the more flexible and free BSD license, none of these issues would arise.Stallman has set back the cause of quality free software by 20 years with his viral-like GPL, which infects everything it comes into contact with.Notice that Apple based their OS around the Darwin kernel, precisely because of the major problems inhera [cont]...

• 3AC, Awards:+13acct+7mod

40|(-1,8,14,5%) Sheetrock | "What's wrong with flexibility?"

I see a few comments in here questioning the logic or similarity of this project to the already failed thin-client model that was once promised to revolutionize business computing. It seems to me the point is not to put all the eggs in one handbag -- but quite the opposite; to increase the capability and flexibility of an already capable and flexible system. This isn't an end in itself, but rather a means to discover or fully realize other possibilities with Linux that hinge upon gre [cont]...

• 4AC, Awards:+10acct+1low+5mod

32|(5,5,17,3%) Dancin_Santa | "Your rationale vs. their rationale"

You want to put Debian on the systems because of the vast array of software available for it.They want to run IBM solutions because they can trust that the few apps that they actually want to run on the system will run with no trouble.The trouble here is that you want Debian on the systems for your own selfish reasons. They want to run their systems as reliably as possible. Since this is a business and not a college dorm room, the business case will always win out.Debian is a fine di [cont]...

• 4AC, Awards:+13acct+2mod

30|(5,8,12,2%) Sheetrock | "Re:But what about text to speech?"

Given that there is already a rudimentary text-to-speech package available for Linux, and now a speech-to-text package, perhaps the secret is to pipe one to the other in a closed loop until one learns how to enunciate and the other how to listen?

• 4AC, Awards:+8acct+1acup+4mod

29|(3,6,9,7%) Dancin_Santa | "Expect ISP rates to rise"

It seems like this is a good deal for everyone all around except that in the end VoIP is still another manifestation of the infinitely malleable POTS system. All those bits are travelling over the same wires as those expensive long distance calls are. The only difference is in who is paying for that bandwidth.With normal long distance calling, the burden is borne by the person making the call or the receiver in the case of a collect call. In VoIP, the burden is already being paid fo [cont]...

• 1AC, Awards:+8acct+5mod

23|(-1,7,8,2%) Anonymous Coward | "Solar Electricity"

I think I've read somewhere that solar panels cost more in energy to create than they ever produce. Is this correct? When I thought about it, it seemed entirely plausible, as there is a lot of steel in there that needs to be welded.On another note, I've also read that the Chinese were not responsible for chopsticks, although they were responsible for fortune cookies. Apparently chopsticks were invented just 200 years ago in San Francisco.Can anyone clear this up for me please? [cont]...

• 3AC, Awards:+5acct+7mod

12|(2,4,6,0%) SimianOverlord | "Just some thoughts"

A question we have to ask oursevles is why did the jenemy attack the WTC, when there were more politically explosive (White House) and economically important (NY stock exchange) targets? My best guess is that it was due to the underlying symbol of the twin towers.It's a well established fact of modern architecture that skyscrapers represent masculinity. I don't want to make it anymore explicit than that. The act of throwing up a huge public, tapering monument is very symbolic of what d [cont]...

• 3AC, Awards:+3acct+1mod

5|(2,2,2,0%) Anonymous Coward | "Re:FAA?"

When someone as prominent and as much an annoyance to the coporate capitalist power structure as Richard Stallman has a nearly fatal accident we SHOULD start asking if there is a conspiracy to murder him.The free software movement is in the crosshairs. Why do you think software patents have become such an issue recently? Did SCO come up with the idea of its copyright attack on Linux on its own all of a sudden? Some investor immediately gave it the cash infusion it needed to per [cont]...

• 1AC, Awards:+1acct+1mod

LA Confidential

CmdrTaco is going to be on television in LA, before his globe trotting lifestyle takes him to Google and universities worldwide to teach them how to build scaleable next generation Linux based websites. Additionally he notes that the few readers of his journal can send in email to get free tickets. Now, so can you. Plz snd pix thx.

Is it troll or is it Memorex?

This post over at dKos: is it good or is it whack? Either way, we're having fun watching the locals stick up for their local troll, er, satirist? We thought "oversampling" was some electronica nerd thing, but perhaps it's also the tool of the carpetbagger. Who knew.

Food for dogs, Pate on platters:

We couldn't help but chuckle at this last minute substitution. Let them eat cake!

Excessive Bad Stories:

What's the sound of one web site biting? Probably something akin to the collective groan that went up from this submission about eliminating "Pirate to Pirate" file sharing tools on a network. Shockingly absolutely no on-topic comments were posted, though to prove that denial isn't just the world we live in, Linux apologists kicked it up to 11 in this story about a company reversing its Linux migration. We're sure it was all the fault of Harvard MBA's, who are all uneducated, worthless jerks (+1, Informative).

Area Man Inadvertently Becomes Statistic:

Yes.

Free Teh iPods:

The long awaited successor to the Amazon affiliate link?

That's it for this month. As always, email your links to trollback at gmail dot com. Subscribe to Trollback Magazine by befriending; Slashdot will notify you of upcoming issues! And please remember,

....JOHN F KERRY
..... _ ._ ._ , _ ._.......
... (_ ' ( ` .)_. .__).....
..( ( .( .. ) . `) .) _)...
.(__ (_.. (_ . _) _) ,__)..
.....`~~`\ ' . /`~~`.......
.....,::: ; ..; :::,.......
....':::::::::::::::'......
_________/_____\___________
A MUSHROOM CLOUD
WAITING TO HAPPEN

• Trollback!
• The List [VOTE]
• We Want Negrodamus
• Selected Reading
• I Wanted to Be a Coward
• Daily WHAT?
• The Cathedral and the Bizarre
• The 10th Circle
• Hurricane-force Quickies

Trollback!

No apologies for the delay, dear readers, hurricane season is afoot and we've learned our lesson. For future reference, we present the following tips to publishing a successful online magazine during tropical storms:

1. Peapod does not deliver to disaster areas.
2. An Internet cafe in Sheboygan does actually beat a T1 line under water, no matter what your cousin told you.
3. "Like, totally staying up late, looting, smoking whatever, burning shit down" sounds a lot cooler than it actually is.
4. Floating, immobile animals not necessarily dead.
5. Apparently, shit floats.

This month's topic icon is a wheelbarrow, always useful when you're digging shit. Somehow, we felt it was appropriate.

The List [VOTE]

Now with 400% more Voodoo.

462|(5,35,197,26%) Lostie | "Not the first time..."

This isn't the first time a huge company has made an embarassing translation error.There is that old classic when Ford introduced the Pinto in Brazil. After watching sales go nowhere, the company learned that Pinto is Brazilian slang for small penis. Ford pried the nameplates off all of the cars and substituted them with Corcel which means horse.

• 55AC, Awards:+143acct+8bust+7low+3acup+6bab+40mod

344|(5,59,104,30%) ObviousGuy | "The whole idea is crazy"

I don't get it.

• 33AC, Awards:+71acct+2bust+6low+34mod

321|(5,22,166,14%) Madison K | "Re:Aim a little lower...."

How about just respecting women? So many times I talk or I see another woman talk to you guys and your eyes just gloss over like you go into some standby mode until we finish. Then many of you keep right on as if we said nothing at all. Just a thought. Madison

• 88AC, Awards:+80acct+1bust+9low+1acup+1bab+27mod

316|(5,35,132,24%) USAPatriot | "Microsoft and Windows Topics Icons"

Of the list of slashdot topics [slashdot.org], only Microsoft and the Windows icons are of a derogatory and belittling nature. Why is it so hard that the editors can't use the appropriate icons for them? It's time this site starts to grow up.

• 50AC, Awards:+82acct+1bust+3low+2acup+44mod

238|(5,10,119,15%) Anonymous Coward | "There is a simple reason"

There are two simple reasons why microsoft does not incorporate these techniques into windows. Windows runs on many different pieces of hardware. Not all hardware supports the options that these accelerators need. Believe it or not, not everyone has an AGP video card. Linux is not faster as a desktop than windows. As the gnome and kde desktops are the main competition for Microsoft Windows, it does not make sense for microsoft to make windows as fast as it can, because Linux is [cont]...

• 28AC, Awards:+92acct+2bust+5low+1acup+31mod

200|(4,33,74,17%) Sanity | "News about how great Apple is, Stuff that Matters"

congrats to Apple for a job well doneDo Apple have to pay for all the free advertising and advocacy they geton Slashdot? I mean, lets take a look at some of the opinions youwon't hear on Slashdot (from here [downhillbattle.org]): It's too expensive Let's start simple: the iTunes Music Store is not a good value forcustomers. Apple says many users are buying whole albums for $8-$12each. That's less than the $16 store price, but used CDs at Amazon orebay cost $5, and those come with line [cont]...

• 24AC, Awards:+50acct+1bust+1low+1acup+1bab+31mod

178|(1,12,88,16%) Sheetrock | "One possible explanation"

Before getting all excited about this, it is worth noting the following:Photons have mass.An eclipse means less photons are emitted and reach the measurer.Ergo, gravitational effect.Although it is well known that if your effect has a name it instantly has more credibility, I'm a bit skeptical that this is the one that'll turn relativity on its ear (dark matter is another story...)

• 23AC, Awards:+66acct+2low+1acup+18mod

174|(3,38,72,10%) Exmet Paff Daxx | "What a week for women's rights"

Ten years after Demi Moore went for a million bucks, we've found a way to bring the objectification of women to a new level. The computer is apparently Larry Flynt's new meat grinder.It's sad to see the rate at which our runaway technological advances outstrip the advancement of society. In one hundred years we've developed flight, space travel, nuclear physics, gene therapy, and global digital communications networks, but we still can't get past treating women like property instead of [cont]...

• 25AC, Awards:+47acct+3low+13mod

155|(5,18,86,5%) Anonymous Coward | "Worst movie I've seen"

Goatse.cx: The Movie - Tagline: Opening Soon Near You

• 27AC, Awards:+60acct+1bust+2low+20mod

153|(5,22,69,9%) rd_syringe | "Article summary--uh, "recent mass migration?""

All the submitter did was link to a blog entry that listed a couple of public advisories and mentioned Mozilla. Apparently, when put through the Slashbot filter, that becomes recent mass migration away from MSIE?According to Google Zeitgeist [google.com], IE 6 hasn't dropped at all and is still massively slaughtering the competition. In fact, Slashdot's own browser statistics show that IE is the majority browser for people accessing this website! Also note that every year is th [cont]...

• 23AC, Awards:+46acct+2low+2acup+27mod

148|(-1,8,74,11%) Omnifarious | "Re:ext3 to reiser4 ?"

MD5 has been proven to have collisions. Use sha1sum, not md5sum. IMHO, the md5sum tool should be deprecated and removed from all future Linux distributions.

• 19AC, Awards:+55acct+2low+1acup+1bab+28mod

131|(0,27,60,5%) vuvewux | "Funny enough, I was planning on voting for Kerry."

I don't agree with most of the crap Bush believes in. For what it's worth, I think Bush is a sleazy, shady douchebag. And, save for the level-headed folk I see on Slashdot, I can't fucking stand Bush supporters and militant Republicans. I really hate those fucking pudgy, clean-shaven, uptight business suit republican twats on my campus. But my distaste for conservatives and Republicans pales in comparison to my distaste for whackjob liberals.The way the left-leaning have conducted [cont]...

• 28AC, Awards:+32acct+1bust+2low+1acup+1bab+9mod

126|(4,14,57,20%) rd_syringe | "Kinda sad..."

You basically admitted that nobody will use it because copyrights are enforced. Heaven forbid people respect copyrights. You know, like we demand with the GPL. I actually got accused of trolling the other day because of my sig.

• 13AC, Awards:+44acct+17mod

122|(4,1,79,5%) ron_ivi | "Re:Democracy.."

So who would be for reasonable copyright use? Badnarik [badnarik.org]?Just remember, unless the voting results in an exact tie, you're throwing your vote out anyway, so a vote for a third party candidate is as good as any.

• 13AC, Awards:+66acct+1bab+19mod

122|(2,8,70,4%) Zabu | "All the studies show"

Stroke victims prefer Bush.

• 14AC, Awards:+56acct+1bust+1bab+20mod

107|(3,3,65,4%) Anonymous Coward | "Re:Florida is going to sink anyway..."

They made Bush our president. They're just catching payback for the last 4 years from someone upstairs :)

• 15AC, Awards:+50acct+1bust+1low+2acup+16mod

104|(4,14,49,8%) FortKnox | "From memory"

I'm going off of memory, which may not be correct at all. But here are my assumptions:X-Chat is freeX-Chat may or may not be open sourceX-Chat borrows off of other GPL code What's the big deal? Its a free project that no one is getting money from. Now if it was a big corporation, trying to make a profit off of GPL'ed code, I'd see a problem, but this is just silly. The thing I notice most about GPL and open source in general is how many internal flame wars ensue. Just be happy thin [cont]...

• 9AC, Awards:+40acct+1low+11mod

101|(4,10,51,10%) Anonymous Coward | "Non-Moderated, not Slashdot"

PJ reckons: 'an astroturf campaign depends upon a non-moderated site Which, thankfully isn't slashdot. Most readers probably don't know this, but the editors have full control over moderation, and can use their unlimited mod points to mod stuff over and over again. It doesn't show up publicly, but editors have been doing this for quite some time.By doing this, they can trigger IP bans and therefore thwart these nefarious astroturfing campaigns. I trust the good editors here to [cont]...

• 20AC, Awards:+31acct+2low+24mod

75|(4,6,43,4%) fiannaFailMan | "Another terror alert?"

I smell the work of the GOP trying to get the geek vote.

• 21AC, Awards:+22acct+21mod

73|(5,17,28,6%) Exmet Paff Daxx | "This is probably a good thing."

People need to confront the DMCA, really see it for what it is. Right now, the law says thou shalt only play the movies in the way Hollywood prescribes, but it hasn't really internalized because so many people can use unlicensed software to do things like copy DVDs, play them without commercials, etc. I think the FBI needs to really crack down on anyone who violates the DMCA, by imprisoning everyone who copies a DVD for home use, especially rich and politically connected people. We co [cont]...

• 10AC, Awards:+18acct+2low+7mod

65|(1,10,34,7%) cubicledrone | "Oh good"

All Apple does invent one great product after another:iPodG5PowerbookOS XCinema Display(for openers)and they invest millions to make inexpensive music downloads available (at almost no profit). But they don't sell shovelboxes at $299 each, so let's kick Apple in the face again. Sounds great.

• 13AC, Awards:+21acct+1low+5mod

62|(2,10,27,5%) dasmegabyte | "Re:...EU software patents?"

Fuck you, man, thinkers got to eat. They shouldn't have to hope nobody else can figure out what they're doing and sell it better than they can (which wouldn't be hard...inventors are as bad at marketing as markeeters are at invention). And hey, we developed the same thing at the same time, what a coinky-dink isn't an excuse -- if it were, there'd be less impetus to publish ideas, resulting in less knowledge. Anybody could read the journals and claim coincidental development. It's [cont]...

• 5AC, Awards:+22acct+1bust+12mod

59|(3,18,24,3%) Exmet Paff Daxx | "This is not wise."

The most popular P2P software vendor is AOL, maker of AOL Instant Messenger which allows for direct file transfers between users of the service. It's important to keep in mind that the chairman of the FCC, Mike Powell, has a huge number of shares of AOL stock. So when you go after American P2P companies, you're going after Mike Powell's pocket, and in turn that means you're going to be invoking the wrath of Colin Powell.Like I said, not smart.By the way, did anyone know that Colin Powe [cont]...

• 8AC, Awards:+16acct+1low+5mod

58|(0,8,23,5%) hanssprudel | "A job well done indeed!"

Most of all, I would like to congratulate Apple on their fantastic use of the DMCA to crush free software developer writing applications (PlayFair) that can handle the formats in which they sell music. We like to commend such positive use of the DMCA here on Slashdot, so that perhaps more companies will start using the DMCA and attacking small developers!It is very important that companies like Apple help show the world that is completely possible to shove DRM down consumers throw [cont]...

• 9AC, Awards:+14acct+1bust+1low+9mod

55|(5,9,30,1%) Exmet Paff Daxx | "Nothing shocking about it."

Terrorism works. Terrorism causes fear, and the people whom terrorism works best on are those who fear the most and are most able to emphatize with victims. This has been aided by modern media, which is able to deliver maximum shock images instantly via a worldwide television network.I will be moderated down for saying this, but it's on-topic, it's factual, and it's my well reasoned opinion. Not good material for Slashdot, but my conscience dictates my actions.If we lived in a world of [cont]...

• 7AC, Awards:+23acct+6mod

54|(2,10,29,2%) Brandybuck | "Re:Why Harry?"

I used to work at a bookstore that occasionally sold controversial books. So let me tell you the difference between Christians and Muslems when it comes to sacrilege...When we sold Last Temptation of Christ, some Christians boycotted, some urged others to boycott, and some wrote letters to the newspapers. The author never had his life threatened. When we sold Satanic Verses, Muslems threatened us with bombings and death. The author of the book actually had to go into hiding, and is sti [cont]...

• 12AC, Awards:+17acct+9mod

53|(-1,11,22,5%) vuvewux | "Engineering?"

EE here. Please stop calling yourself Engineers, because you're not (B/M/PhD.Sc vs B/M/PhD.Eng), and you doing so degrades my trade.

• 7AC, Awards:+15acct+1bust+1low+8mod

52|(-1,9,22,9%) USAPatriot | "The Privacy Jihad"

I'm concerned that in these times, the privacy advocates and other luddites just want to block any technological advances towards thwarting terrorists and other evildoers.They want to shackle law enforcement in the name of privacy. It's clear that 'privacy concerns' have become a catch-all to dismantle any tool that may be useful to government agencies. I'm not saying they can't be used for evil, harassing the innocent isn't what its primarily used for. Evoking 'Big Brother' at eve [cont]...

• 6AC, Awards:+16acct+9mod

45|(5,12,18,4%) Anonymous Coward | "No..."

I am a windows developer of a small program with about 4000 users. Without spyware I would not be in business, since most people crack my s/w and dont pay after the trial.Thanks to spyware, I am still make a living.

• 11AC, Awards:+7acct+1acup+10mod

37|(4,10,16,3%) USAPatriot | "Good For Them"

Microsoft has decided not to rush a release just for the sake of releasing it. They want to get it right the first time. I congratulate them for doing the Right Thing and making sure they deliver a rock solid Service Pack for the millions of XP users out there.Before the slashdot editors and crowd crow over this delay, just remember the 503 errors and flakiness this site has experienced since maintenance was performed. Don't throw stones in glass houses, kids.

• 4AC, Awards:+12acct+5mod

35|(2,6,19,3%) Exmet Paff Daxx | "Let's get this straight."

A lawyer posted on Yahoo to protect his reputation, was attacked by a bunch of faceless Anonymous Cowards, and is angry because he can't determine their identity because Yahoo's moderation system won't filter them out?Sounds like your typical Slashdot user.I think among the Slashdot crowd it's of course common knowledge that Yahoo deletes comments all the time, just full time staff with unlimited moderation power [slashdot.org] to instantly IP ban anyone who disagrees too much - but wh [cont]...

• 4AC, Awards:+15acct+5mod

27|(0,7,8,5%) after | "What about 5001?"

Why must Slashdot get all excited when a number like 5000 pops up? I don't understand why everyone is so excited about numbers. I took my 500th shit this month, you dont hear me calling the press do you?What about the 5001st book? Will that also yeild a news item?

• 2AC, Awards:+6acct+1bust+7mod

22|(4,8,8,4%) Exmet Paff Daxx | "Way to turn the tables on M$!"

Micro$oft gives out millions of dollars to catch people who exploit bugs in their browser! Now Linux gives out cash directly to people who find the bugs, rewarding engineers instead of snitches. I hope the major news outlets cover the huge difference in paradigm here- good cop instead of bad cop.Everyone failed my last Gmail invite challenge, and I'm up to three invites, so here's a new one: there are sixteen factual errors in this article [nytimes.com]. I'll give you one for free: Bus [cont]...

• 3AC, Awards:+5acct+1mod

22|(3,2,12,1%) Have Blue | "Re:Interesting timing.."

Maybe the passengers upset with the terrorists' plans to crash them into the Internet.

• 2AC, Awards:+10acct+2bust+8mod

19|(5,4,7,6%) Anonymous Coward | "A word if I may:"

Gentlemen, the time has come for a serious discussion on whether ornot to continue using Perl for serious programming projects. As I willexplain, I feel that Perl needs to be retired, much the same way thatFortran, Cobol and Java have been. Furthermore, allow me to be so boldas to suggest a superior replacement to this outdated language.To give you a little background on this subject, I was recently askedto develop a client/server project on a Unix platform for a Fortune500 compan [cont]...

• 2AC, Awards:+6acct+3mod

17|(5,7,7,1%) orangesquid | "Re:Very Easy"

Not if your car is a webserver. That's like having a car with a big sign that says LOOK IN THE WINDOWS! THERE'S COOL STUFF INSIDE THIS CAR! Of course some people are bound to try the handle, at least to get a closer look. I attempt anonymous ftp logins and try /pub URLs on webservers all the time, as well as ascending to the parent directory and such. Sometimes I find some really neat stuff that way. I'm not about to attempt a root login, but, it's human nature [cont]...

• 3AC, Awards:+4acct+1mod

9|(-1,1,5,1%) Anonymous Coward | "What really happened to Zeitgeist"

I'm a google enginer in an unrelated department. I can shed light on what actully happened. While I could get fired, I want all Linux Zealots to take note.Zeitgeist has freqently been used by pragmatists to show that Linux is not redy for the desktop based on the user agents presented during a search. If it were ready, more people would send user agent Mozila/Linux. 1% of all browsers is below the margin of error.A common rasponse to Zeitgeist is that Linux users set there bro [cont]...

• 4AC, Awards:+2acct+1mod

We Want Negrodamus

An alert reader alerted us to this profoundly poor appraisal of the iPod by Slashdot's preeminent portly prognosticator:

"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

• -Cmdrtaco, on the iPod

Unsurprisingly, he seems to be getting called on it now and then. To be fair, hindsight is 20/20. Looking back, writing a million reader site in an interpreted language probably wasn't the best idea - it might scale poorly.

Selected Reading

While there's a lot of good stuff in this month's List, we wanted to direct reader's attention to this highly rated comment suggesting gene therapy as the cure for liberalism, Slashdot's millionth comment, and the best retort you never saw.

I Wanted to Be a Coward

Lest we get burned again, we point you in the direction of this suspiciously non-anonymous post about a user... by the same user. Remember kids, you can check "post anonymously" in your preferences.

Daily WHAT?

Apparently Rusty of the busted-bridge site has come to consensus with CmdrTaco: k5 is a failure. Rusty's new bid for fame is a site called "DailyKos", which is "untrollable" because they have an ex-military administrator deleting accounts and posts in true Free Republic style. An alert reader, however, points out that nothing is impossible.

The Cathedral and the Bizarre

If Microsoft sometimes has obtuse development practices, it is highly probable that they are merely learning from the leader. With developers like that, who needs espionage? [cache]

The 10th Circle

We think this journal entry should be required reading for Slashdot moderators. Feel free to email the admins and suggest that it be added to the moderator guidelines.

Hurricane-force Quickies

September marked the continuing success of the lame filter's War on ASCII Art, Gnome Developers and their secret Adequacy ties, and a boot stomping on a Slashdot comment, forever. If you're going to use a banned script to read Slashdot, you should archive your journal first. Here's a script that reads Slashdot to do it.

That's it for this month. As always, email your links to trollback at gmail dot com. Subscribe to Trollback Magazine by befriending; Slashdot will notify you of upcoming issues! And please remember,

....MODBOMBING IS JIHAD
..... _ ._ ._ , _ ._.......
... (_ ' ( ` .)_. .__).....
..( ( .( .. ) . `) .) _)...
.(__ (_.. (_ . _) _) ,__)..
.....`~~`\ ' . /`~~`.......
.....,::: ; ..; :::,.......
....':::::::::::::::'......
_________/_____\___________
DECAPITATE JUNIS AFGHANISTAN

• Trollback!
• We've got Gmail!
• Jews in Spaaaaaaaaaace!
• The List [VOTE]
• We're perverted!
• Netcraft confirms it: USENET is dying
• Failing it like a porn star
• You dare to succeed?
• I'd like a Meximelt and a Jackito, please
• The "Moon": A Ridiculous Liberal Myth
• Slashdot Gold
• Lifetime Achievement Award
• I, HBT
• (secret)
• Quickies

Trollback!

This July had some marvelous things to offer. Scantily clad young redheads! Stripping schoolgirls! Slashbots, however, are far more interested in arguing online - bad for them but GOOD FOR TROLLBACK! So without further ado, the Trollback editorial staff is proud to present our roundup for the month of July, 2004.

We've got Gmail!

For a solid gigabyte of righteous trolling feedback, we've decided to go with Gmail.NET as our single-source e-mail solutions provider. Give us a ring at trollback@gmail.com!

Jews in Spaaaaaaaaaaace!

We have to tip our collective hat to the ongoing efforts of Baldrson, who got his tidy little article about Spaceplane-2 posted to Slashdot's front page this month. As with his other front page stories, Baldrson also managed to get a link to his website included, featuring enthusiastic information about rocketry, science, racial superiority, the nonexistence of the Holocaust and some handy facts about how killing the Jews is a great idea, along with that fantastic mug shot. Congratulations go to Simoniker for upping the Pagerank(tm)(R) of one of America's premier Neonazi crackpots.

The List [VOTE]

Well here it is, this month's hand picked list of links, scored by an arbitrary closed-source mechanism we call Voodoo. Some of you may note that the number of direct replies to a comment as reported by Trollback is wildly different than the count reported in a user's comment summary. Is it whack? No, yuo. We've hand-checked this anomoly a number of times now, and believe it or not Slashdot's Perl scripts incorrectly count the number of direct replies. It's true. Keep in mind we also discount replies by the author of the post in question. We thought about reporting this bug but the last guy to try that hasn't gotten very far. In short: we're right, they're wrong, and nothing's new! Slashdot dealt everyone a straight flush this month by introducing a shit-flavored color scheme to match their content - and we've tinted our List to match. Enjoy.

458|(4,63,188,15%) Real Troll Talk | "Microsoft are lying to us"

People choose, replied Hachamovitch (IE lead engineer). Hundreds of millions of people actively use Windows and they get to choose. Nothing in Windows as it ships keeps them from downloading other software that extends their browsing experience (e.g. the Google or Ebay toolbars) or changes it (e.g. an alternative browser).No they don't. Maybe I do, but I'm a computer expert.My mom certainly has no clue that there even IS anything other than IE to use. Most of our mothers probably don [cont]...

• 47AC, Awards:+142acct+3bust+7low+2acup+58mod

267|(5,5,122,31%) Sheetrock | "Isn't this illegal?"

I thought most (if not all) DVDs come with a warning about not being used for public performances.

• 29AC, Awards:+93acct+3low+2acup+42mod

210|(5,28,85,22%) FortKnox | "Firefox"

Note that this does not mean that they are replacing IE with FireFox. Good, cause firefox has render problems on slashdot all the time (where as IE doesn't). I don't think its firefox, either, cause it doesn't happen on any other site I go to.

• 15AC, Awards:+70acct+2low+1bab+18mod

185|(0,17,78,23%) britneys 9th husband | "Careful"

We humans aren't going to have any immunity to these microbes that have been isolated for 500000 years. I hope whoever's studying these lakes takes appropriate precautions against both accidental release and theft by terrorist organizations.

• 10AC, Awards:+68acct+1bust+1bab+30mod

171|(3,34,62,18%) Real Troll Talk | "This is great because it's Google"

Nothing was greater than when Google bought out Delphi and took over the largest USENET archive of all-time.Google always does things the right way without ruining the user experience or their wallets.In Google We Trust...(P.S. I have three Gmail invites anyone up for one -- I already gave away 5 to friends/family?)

• 17AC, Awards:+45acct+5bust+1low+26mod

161|(0,9,89,7%) bje2 | "Re:Old Ben said it best"

Except that in Ben's time people weren't flying airplanes into skyscrapers...

• 24AC, Awards:+66acct+1bust+4low+22mod

152|(-1,20,74,6%) Squeezer | "whats the problem with the patriot act?"

i don't see what the problem is. there haven't been any cases of abuse. if you don't want to be spied upon, then don't do suspicious things. how has the patriot act directly affected you?

• 31AC, Awards:+43acct+1bust+2low+1acup+15mod

128|(5,17,48,6%) circletimessquare | "i didn't like the demonization of fusion"

i liked the movie, but i did not like the demonization of fusion in spider man iiin a world of smog and wars fought over oil prices (pro-iraq war people: read why iraq invaded kuwait, anti-iraq war people: read why us invaded iraq) we do not need an ultra-pop movie demonizing one of the few technologies which could save us from the petroleum agein spider man ii, fusion can go chernobyl, this is a fallacyif something goes wrong with a fusion reaction, it just fizzles out, it can NE [cont]...

• 12AC, Awards:+36acct+7low+13mod

125|(2,6,66,12%) Milo of Kroton | "Why Censor?"

Really, is only naked women or men. In Mozilla Firebird, I have setted it to Block images from goat.cx (not visit!) and if my kids pictures of naked people find, fine. I did as child. I run linux but don't need this. As friend said You Americans are so puritanical!

• 22AC, Awards:+44acct+4low+14mod

121|(-1,9,49,26%) Anonymous Coward | "Obligatory"

But as both the company behind this TDA, Novinit, and myself are French, I decided to investigate You misspelled surrender.

• 15AC, Awards:+34acct+1bust+3low+15mod

108|(5,8,50,26%) Real Troll Talk | "I don't believe the news anymore these days"

How can we TRUST the big bully corporations to tell us the truth?After F9/11, I just don't trust anyone with $ any more.

• 19AC, Awards:+31acct+1low+1acup+16mod

93|(5,15,29,15%) Exmet Paff Daxx | "I remain: Unafraid, Undeterred."

Mod me down as troll, but I'm about to speak the truth. Ubiquitous surveillance? There are cameras covering every inch of the city I walk in. Massive government analysis? A huge database called MATRIX contains all my financial and medical records, searchable by federal agents. I have to give my SSN, despite the law, to every two-bit huckster who asks for it, to buy a house, a car, a plane ticket, you name it.And you know what? I don't care. Because I've made a choice to deal with this [cont]...

• 10AC, Awards:+19acct+3low+11mod

62|(5,11,27,6%) Anonymous Coward | "Actually Tolkien was a Genius, read on..."

Here's a brief explanation for beginners of Tolkien's mythology and worldscape: Q: Is LoTR really based on Christian Mythology?A: Yes. Tolkien wanted to demonstrate that even the mentally and physically challenged were capable of success and that therefore we should love everyone, regardless of their defects.Q: So who represents the mentally and physically challenged?A: Well obviously the hobbits are the physically challenged ones here, but the central mentally challenged figure i [cont]...

• 10AC, Awards:+18acct+2low+5mod

56|(-1,9,24,11%) Anonymous Coward | "Huh?"

How do you make money in a job working on a free operating system? Just wondering.

• 9AC, Awards:+16acct+9mod

55|(2,14,27,8%) Lover's Arrival, The | "Help"

I have gentoo on my computer. You might think this is good, but its bad. My ex-boyfriend was a big gentoo-lover, in fact he was a developer for it or something. But now he's left me, and all that's left of him are some books and the impact he made on my computer.I would love to be able to use linux more, I am taking a course in community college and my boyfriend was wonderful for helping me out with that but when I told him that I hated him developing for gentoo all the time (he even f [cont]...

• 17AC, Awards:+10acct+5mod

55|(1,9,23,2%) Sheetrock | "Space science isn't something you can do in a jar."

I was just thinking about this today during my ruminescing aboutthe crazy and sometimes haphazard ways in which spaceflight and NASA has returned benefits to our society against adversity from folks not unlike Van Allen. In it's own way, this is comparable to the battleagainst entrenched interests that new theories must undergo beforethey become the accepted norm.Take, for example, the struggle of Galileo against the church topermit society to recognize the fact that the world is roun [cont]...

• 5AC, Awards:+18acct+1low+7mod

51|(2,4,28,12%) Viol8 | "Spaceship One isn't even a space ship"

Its an aircraft with a rocket motor attached. Real spaceships can't use wings to slow themselves down and manuouveaure because there is no air to do it in! I'm sorry if I sound churlish but this whole enterprise to me smacks more of someones ego than anything practical. When they've solved the problems of manourveuring in a vacuum , long duration human life support (an O2 cylinder doesn't really count) , proper re-entry from near orbital speeds (which are required for any useful f [cont]...

• 4AC, Awards:+24acct+5mod

48|(4,8,20,4%) 91degrees | "The DMCA explicitely permits reverse engineering"

I have no idea why people who haven't even read the legislation keep making comments that are plain incorrect. The only time reverse engineering is illegal under the DMCA is when it is used for making infringing copies.

• 3AC, Awards:+17acct+1low+5mod

47|(-1,8,18,7%) BWJones | "It's about the music....."

I've been watching this whole thing unfold for some time now and paid attention to the overtures Real was making to Apple some time ago. Basically issue here is that the folks who designed the iPod and the iTunes music store really cared about the music, whereas Real is concerned with making money by delivering media rather than caring anything about the media per se. Let me repeat that for the folks at Real........It's about the music.

• 3AC, Awards:+15acct+1low+1acup+9mod

46|(1,6,21,9%) AvantLegion | "Die already!"

What's your problem, CS?It's way past time to die!BSD died nice and gracefully - why won't you go? Are you too good for your destiny?

• 2AC, Awards:+19acct+8mod

46|(-1,8,25,5%) The Pim | "tall tales"

In 1996, he developed a solar-powered pump powerful enough to lift water from wells up to 20 metres deep. His invention is widely used in his home province of Wardak and the neighbouring province of Logar as well.One atmosphere of pressure is about 10 meters of water. You can't pump water any higher than that. I smell exaggeration.

• 10AC, Awards:+15acct+6mod

46|(0,10,22,7%) Exmet Paff Daxx | "Re: Killing Muslims"

Just kill some muslims and take their oil! They'll only use it for terrorism anyway!I'm pretty sure the parent post was meant as a joke, but this is actually a serious business. The reason for this guy's adventure, and other adventures into alternative energy sources, is very real: Prince Bandar and his Saudi friends are currently in control of America via a proxy named George Bush. If you've seen Farenheit 9/11 you know what I'm talking about. At last night's convention John Kerry add [cont]...

• 9AC, Awards:+13acct+5mod

45|(-1,6,24,5%) CatKnight | "WMD"

Great, now we have yet another form of weapon of mass destruction. Terrorists could cook up a batch of prions and dump it in a water or food supply, thus killing off lots of people a short period of time later. Ahh, the miracles of modern science.

• 5AC, Awards:+19acct+1bust+9mod

43|(-1,7,19,5%) Noose For A Neck | "Burt Rutan does not matter."

You know what really irritates me these days is the sheer pomposity of the name SpaceShip One. Hello? It's not a spaceship. It's an airplane. They did not even get close to entering orbit. They have done nothing to solve the re-entry problem. It's an (ugly-looking) airplane with a rocket strapped to the back that can't even take off on its own power.So why is Burt Rutan suddenly the go-to guy for all things space-related - what's he going to do, drop payloads off in the high atmos [cont]...

• 4AC, Awards:+15acct+6mod

41|(5,4,28,3%) AKAImBatman | "Work harder"

Personally, I download Open Source software. Warez and Crackz are great for teenagers, but I don't really have time or energy for this stuff. If an Open Source piece of software does the job, I'll use it. If only a commerical piece of software does the job, I'll buy it. Unfortuately for software makers, I'm buying less and less. Either the product has to be REALLY good, or it has to do something no other product does. e.g. My last few purchases were WMA Recorder, PalmBasket, and Budget [cont]...

• 11AC, Awards:+17acct+2mod

32|(-1,5,9,7%) Anonymous Coward | "I'm so lonely"

It's been almost two months since graduation, and I'm still living on campus, by myself, in a hundred twenty square foot single. I haven't left the building in more than three weeks. Perhaps the Chinese delivery place will wonder why I stopped calling. More likely, they won't even notice, and wouldn't care if they did. My so-called friends packed up and left without saying goodbye, and the only phone call I've answered since then was a wrong number; the other party hung up immedia [cont]...

• 4AC, Awards:+5acct+2bust+2low+5mod

30|(5,8,13,6%) Sheetrock | "BOINC has issues..."

We've tried deploying BOINC before for distributed biologic research on our internal workstations to create an informal cluster of sorts, with dissatisfying results. While BOINC is considered the provolone cheese of the distributed computing industry, we found that it behaves in a somewhat inconsistent manner.For one thing, on most of the workstations BOINC would appear to work very quickly on the data only to crash out well before the computation was created. Indeed, sometimes it wo [cont]...

• 4AC, Awards:+9acct+3mod

25|(4,6,13,4%) Milo of Kroton | "It do Work here"

Government can't switch to Linux or even free software, people say. Well, such has done München (Munich you say) here in my country. I am professional involved with some of people who are with the project involved, and it is as they are accorded going smooth move, exlax as you Americans say.

• 9AC, Awards:+4acct+3mod

21|(3,6,11,1%) Dozix007 | "Many ways to get around GPL"

There are sadly many ways to get around GPL. One being the method they use by offering to ship the source only. This can be done in many different shapes to get around anything. You simply charge an irrate fee for packaging, documentation, or something of the sort. There are a few liscences that will not allow this, sadly they are not widely used.

• 5AC, Awards:+6acct+1mod

20|(0,6,11,1%) the_2nd_coming | "Re:P3 CPUs?"

umm, you have a Xeon system based off the P3, not a P3 duely since the P3 is incapable of duel proc setups.

• 8AC, Awards:+3acct+3mod

20|(5,1,6,1%) Sheetrock | "Proof that technology (not legislation) works."

Part of the secret to the success of the Internet is in allowing unfettered communication between endpoints. While I am to some degree concerned about the technical approach to solving the spam problem, because of the collateral consequences it may have, it does not raise the spectre of 1st Amendment violation that anti-spam legislation does.That Microsoft is taking part is to their credit. Finally the Internet at large is going to actually try to apply a solution to spam at the sour [cont]...

• 1AC, Awards:+5acct+2low+1mod

14|(2,5,6,3%) trifakir | "cDc and 2600"

Cool, all the old geeks. I shall admit that I've always been sympathetic to the cause of the good hackers who fight for freedom of speach and all these liberties, many of your ancestors had died for...But on the other side, I wonder where is now and for them the border of what is allowed and what is not. Is this hackers ethics they define something too murky or it is non-existing at all? How do we prevent the proceedings about the Distributed Password Cracking API from their confe [cont]...

• 2AC, Awards:+4acct+1mod

The GNAA is there!

Last month's GNAA coup involved getting some interesting screenshots posted on a couple high-profile Mac sites, promoting plenty of... discussion. For firsthand coverage visit the official GNAA press releases here and here.

We're perverted!

One of the best "trolling definitions" ever seen popped up here:

Sometimes trolls feel that they serve a community purpose, by shaking things up, stirring up discussion, playing the DevilsAdvocate, by being the CourtJesters, but they really aren't. They are a perversion of all those purposes.

In short, folks, you'd be better off if editor moderation on Slashdot was still a secret. For our part, we're pretty impressed that a site which encourages ignoring trolls has devoted nearly an entire book to the subject of trolls.

Netcraft confirms it: USENET is dying

All the same, an alert reader pointed out that the fish are still biting.

Failing it like a porn star

Note to would-be trollerization specialists: when scraping the bottom of the barrel with that random right-wing crapflood, don't paste your real username in when posting AC. Real or faked, it's funny either way.

Update: Trollback investigates. This cache appears to show that OverlordQ was a Slashdot subscriber as of May, 2004, predating this comment (which includes a link to subscribe). We find this highly inconclusive, not to mention insulting - giving money to Rob Malda is totally unacceptable - but as always, the final decision belongs to our dear readers. HTH, HAND.

You dare to succeed?

Trollback enjoyed the treatment of a capitalist trying to make money by patenting his invention when he tried to post to Slashdot. Stuff that matters to people who don't? Almost certainly.

I'd like a Meximelt and a Jackito, please

Is it real? Is it a plane? Is it a French Fraud or a Freedom Swindle? Trollback isn't taking bets, but we'd totally fail it if we didn't mention Michael's dangerous liasons with a very shady weblog and its assertion that the escrow paramid built on the "Jackito TDA" is too legit to quit. It's a fraud!. No it's not!. Yes it is! Huh? They've posted a low resolution movie of an oversize grayscale mockup prototype of the device, and that's proof enough for us.

The "Moon": A Ridiculous Liberal Myth

It's true. Now you and other god-fearing Americans can fight back with this commemorative T-shirt. Let's see how those gun grabbers like it when we blow their observation platform clear out of the sky.

Slashdot Gold!

For this month's blast from the past, we thought we'd rally the party faithful with one of the best documented examples of outright lying from Slashteam. Jamie McCarthy used his iron wit to lay the smack down with a fearsome Simpsons reference a few years back when denying that he wrote the censorware code in Slash. You doubt the Trollback? Check the author of comments.pl(line 522), the portion of Slashcode that halts posting based on some very questionable "math". But is it Censorware? Jamie confirms it - Censorware!!

Lifetime Achievement Award

While Mike Miller is certainly on the road to greatness in trolling, it's well past time we honored Michael Moore for a lifetime of successful trolling. Fat, ugly, and wildly rich, Moore's romp past $100 million in bites shows a rich flair for capitalism, karma whoring and specious reasoning. Without even mentioning brand name biters such as Guiliani, we feel pretty safe in saying that Michael's Voodoo is permanently off the map. In his recent book, "Stupid White Men", Moore asserted that because of the assymetrical opportunity structure in place in America he would never hire anyone who wasn't black ever again. We're not entirely sure, but Trollback suspects that this marked the birth of the GNAA.

I, HBT

A monumental work of trolling hit the box office this weekend as director Alex Proyas released his Isaac Asimov "adaptation" to the enjoyment of ignorant buffoons nationwide. Asimov spent his entire lifetime creating a world of fiction in which robots were not the dystopic, soulless horrors of his contemporaries but rather a failsafe, harmless aid to mankind. Since Asimov had invested forty years of his life facing off against literary technophobia, Proyas saw fit to honor him with a movie based on Asimov's books in which evil, murderous robots controlled by a central hive-mind engage in a terrifying quest to enslave mankind. Released to general acclaim and the muted background death-shriek of Asimov fanboys everywhere, Proyas's feat establishes him as the newest Fresh Prince of Hollywood trolling. Well done, Alex.

A license to steal

You've made it to the end of Trollback! For our faithful readers, we have a gift. Ever tried to read the darling magazine of granola munchers everywhere, Salon , but been stopped short by their draconian money-grubbing subscription scheme? Trollback has no idea how a communist magazine like Salon could be so craven as to attempt such a capitalist undertaking, but we intend to set them straight. Right then: http://www.salon.com/news/cookie.html. Visiting that URL gives you the "free day pass" cookie, opening all content on the site for 24 hours if you accept the cookie. Three cheers for bad web design! Four cheers for Trollback!

Quickies:

Trollback apologizes for missing this total gem in May, A license to cyber-surf, the total nonexistence of piracy, retarded Slashbot loose in Best Buy, USENET troll kicks Hawking ass, the stench of death, Slashdot's ASCII filter performing admirably, proof that Mozilla developers bumble security holes too, the return of the ring, and the return of the Apple thing, and not truly a troll but we liked the use of "Gay AIDS" and Caps Lock.

That's it for this month. As always, email your links to trollback at gmail dot com. Subscribe to Trollback Magazine by befriending; Slashdot will notify you of upcoming issues! And please remember,

..MODBOMBING IS TERRORISM
..... _ ._ ._ , _ ._.......
... (_ ' ( ` .)_. .__).....
..( ( .( .. ) . `) .) _)...
.(__ (_.. (_ . _) _) ,__)..
.....`~~`\ ' . /`~~`.......
.....,::: ; ..; :::,.......
....':::::::::::::::'......
_________/_____\___________
FREE JUNIS FROM AFGHANI503 SERVICE DOES NOT SCALE

• Format change for Trollback
• Flamewar 9/11
• Spider-Man 2 Reviewed (Reviewed)
• I can watch ICANNWATCH
• Sheetrock 2 Reviewed
• The List
• OSnews: Hotbed of Agreement

Format change for Trollback

You may notice some formatting changes this month; someone yelled rotate and we all switched desks. This month marks the return of Voodoo, our answer to Karma and a numerical approximation of just how black your magic truly is. Here's a breakdown of the new scheme:

Voodoo|(Score,Direct Replies,Total Replies,Percentage of Story) Name | Subject

Comment text summarized

Number of anonymous comments AC, Awards +stuff

The story percentage is the fraction of comments in the story which are nested under the linked comment. If you managed to Parent 50% of the discussion in the story, you'll see 50% here, and your Voodoo score will reflect this. Voodoo is also influenced by the +awards section, which we decline to further elaborate on. Our system for measuring Voodoo must not fall into the hands of crack reverse engineers such as Jamie McCarthy (played brilliantly by Ben Affleck) so for deciphering this section, you're on your own. Suffice it to say that every factor available is taken into account.
Note: Voodoo is calculated from a browser-cached version of the page, not by scripted interaction with the site. That means that late replies may be missed by our scoring system. Complaints? Let us know what you think of the new system by voting in our poll.

Flamewar 9/11

As we noted in last month's issue, class C subnet bans are in effect for anyone whose posts consist of "Bad Behavior". What is "Bad Behavior"? Well according to pudge, anyone who asks is a "doo doo head" [sic]. Trollback decided to fact check pudge's assertion:

[trollback@dotnetenabled faq]$ pwd
/cvs/slash/plugins/FAQSlashdot/faq
[trollback@dotnetenabled faq]$ cvs update
cvs update: Updating .
P com-mod.shtml
[trollback@dotnetenabled faq]$ grep -i "bad behavior" *
[trollback@dotnetenabled faq]$

Unsurprisingly, pudge has no idea what he's talking about. So what exactly is "Bad Behavior" on Slashdot? Turns out, "Bad Behavior" means, among other things, being a Republican, not entirely trusting Michael Moore, or asserting that self-described Op-Eds are Op-Eds. This is made abundantly clear in the most deliberate (and successful) troll of the month.

CmdrTaco decided that this month, "News for Nerds" included reviewing a highly charged political movie and noting that it "speaks much truth", on the front page. This is the guy who won't post stories on Slashdot about Slashdot because it's not "News for Nerds". This 3200+ comment flamefest generated all the histrionics you'd expect, with one interesting caveat: anyone who questioned Moore's impartiality was moderated Troll, and thereby subnet banned from the site. This is, in a nutshell, the very definition of "Bad Behavior" - disagreeing with CmdrTaco's politics. To quote from their beloved FAQ:

"The Slashdot Editors have unlimited mod points, and we have no problem using them."

Bad Behavior indeed. Here's a quick guide to understanding how bad the problem is:

1. Edit your comment preferences
2. Set the following "Reason Modifiers":
   Insightful: -6
   Offtopic: -6
   Interesting: -6
   Flamebait: +6
   Funny: -6
   Troll: +6
   Informative: -6
   Redundant: -6
3. Set your browsing mode to 4,Threaded,Highest Scores First

Now click on the F911 story. You will basically only be reading Republican points of view now; these are the only people who got moderated down. In a story which was basically an open invitation to political discussion, with a highly polarized electorate, the political faction that agreed with the editors was moderated up, while the political faction that disagreed, no matter how calmly presented, was moderated Troll/Flamebait and banned from posting to the site. And moderation is anonymous, so we'll never know who did it.

Now and then trollback gets email from people who don't understand why we publish our magazine. We don't want to come down on either side of the F-911 debate (except perhaps to say that we consider Mr. Moore living proof that you can troll for a living) but we do think that trying to use Perl to silence your political opposition might not be Fair & Balanced. Blatant flamebait posted as a story? Your political opposition moderated out of sight and IP blocked from posting? And remember, it's not censorship!
Vive le resistance!

Update: An alert reader has pointed out that while nearly every anti-Moore poster was modbombed into a subnet ban, pro-Moore posters who linked to the websites of holocaust deniers as evidence escaped the carpet bombing. Yes indeedy, Stuff that Matters.


Spider-Man 2 Reviewed Reviewed

Bonch got his review of Spiderman 2 posted to the front page of Slashdot, the only comment being "Thanks to bonch for this review". Sadly no one remembered to thank Google for not being consulted, as this review had been written and posted the day before at Chud.com. As legions of Slashbots began to moan about the plagiarism, the story stayed unedited on the front page until it reached the very bottom, at which point a retraction was posted. Bonch wins Trollback's Bayesian Filter Food Award this month, proving once again what an effective anti-trolling tool a Bayes filter would be.

I can watch ICANNWATCH

Near and dear to our hearts is ICANNWATCH, a Slash-based site devoted to meticulously monitoring ICANN for signs of abuse. Now, we love an Internet crank as much as anybody, but unlike Slashdot, we're pretty sure that ICANN's ethics are unassailable. Nevertheless, it seems they've got a problem over there with something called "Anonymous Posting". Switch to -1 Nested to see some of the best...

Sheetrock 2 Reviewed

Yes it's true, Sheetrock is back. Posting from behind enemy subnet lines, you'll note he found a way to keep his powder dry and make an appearance in this month's List.

The List, now with voting!

198|(2,17,84,7%) AKAImBatman | "Tactical Flexibility"

What I'd like to know is, what kind of tactical advantage does a railgun bring? Sure, it can hit a target some 200+ miles out, but so can a missile. Missiles also have the advantage of being self-guided. All this thing is, is a way to build a more powerful battleship. And yet, the U.S. has put all of its Battleships on active reserve. In their place, they've been deploying missile carriers at a lower cost and higher degree of flexibility.In short, what does the railgun bring to a Real [cont]...

• 18AC, Awards:+67acct+7low+5bab+20mod

175|(4,5,86,15%) Lyssa Watson | "Just Great..."

A key benefit of the e-Plate is that the tag provides an encrypted and secure ID code which is registered in the UK Ministry of Transport's vehicle database. This code prevents tampering, cloning, or other forms of fraud that can currently happen with camera-based systems. Additionally, the e-Plate is designed to shatter if anyone tries to remove or otherwise tamper with it, and the tag can be programmed to transmit a warning if any attempt is made to dislodge the plate. They said tha [cont]...

• 16AC, Awards:+70acct+6low+25mod

161|(5,10,85,7%) adequacy | "In the land of empty tanks"

Cyclists are gods.Fuckin bring it on.

• 12AC, Awards:+74acct+4low+12mod

159|(5,29,73,10%) Anonymous Coward | "This is another reason why C should be deprecated"

Gentlemen, the time has come for a serious discussion on whether or not to continue using C for serious programming projects. As I will explain, I feel that C needs to be retired, much the same way that Fortran, Cobol and Perl have been. Furthermore, allow me to be so bold as to suggest a superior replacement to this outdated language.To give you a little background on this subject, I was recently asked to develop a client/server project on a Unix platform for a Fortune 500 compan [cont]...

• 35AC, Awards:+39acct+4bust+1low+19mod

131|(1,9,73,10%) Anonymous Coward | "Re:Absolutely Stupid!"

DVDs are manufactured with recyclable plastic. It's your fault if you buy this and don't recycle it. Only you can prevent forest fires.

• 13AC, Awards:+60acct+1low+22mod

119|(2,14,41,17%) Tim_F | "Correct me if I'm wrong"

But an F/OSS hacker has taken a company's proprietary work and made it available for free, even giving it a similar name.Why is this a good thing?If F/OSS developers want to speed up Linux, the corporate environment is where they should be looking. By doing this they have enabled corporations to get something for free which could cause a company (and a lot of potential Linux users) to go out of business.How are the developers supposed to feed their children if they're unemployed? [cont]...

• 12AC, Awards:+29acct+2low+1bab+12mod

119|(4,14,47,23%) Sheetrock | "Worth it?"

While the iPos looks nice, and admittedly has the best interface of all the MP3 players (owing to the simple design Macintosh has become a master of), is it worth dropping a couple hundred on it? I've heard of two design flaws now -- both of which they seem less than inclined to fix beyond a short period of ownership -- and have noticed that PDAs in a similar price range can do MP3, video, and even word processing. If it was reliable I'd buy one tomorrow, but are they yet? [cont]...

• 6AC, Awards:+41acct+1low+12mod

114|(0,22,53,4%) Anonymous Coward | "Sorry, no."

Java Faster Than C++?No, it isn't. It's much slower.I wrote a program that simply counts to 10000 and then quits. Time from double-clicking the icon until when the program exits: C++: 0.5 secondsJava: 20 seconds How hard is that?

• 15AC, Awards:+38acct+1low+15mod

91|(3,10,46,3%) b.foster | "The lesson to be learned here"

...is to hire a good lawyer. Hint: a lawyer who advises you to settle when you have done nothing wrong is not a good lawyer. Most lawyers are too lazy to take cases that they do not understand, which explains why so many tech-related cases wind up costing the protagonist money. This is even worse in the criminal law arena, because these lazy attorneys can cost an innocent man his freedom. IMHO there is no excuse for this, but it happens every day. Case in point: my roommate [cont]...

• 7AC, Awards:+39acct+1low+6mod

87|(3,15,33,3%) Exmet Paff Daxx | "Overturn Betamax?"

My reading of the bill is that the law would not overturn Betamax so much as explicitly prevent Betamax from being applied to digital media. Betamax and VHS were both analog formats with cumulative degradation, that is, a copy of a copy was degraded, and at enough generations the quality would be unusable. Perfect digital copies, however, do not have this limitation, and it is merely common sense that they should be covered by a different law. Betamax was a Supreme Court decision, and [cont]...

• 10AC, Awards:+23acct+4low+7mod

83|(0,23,38,3%) Exmet Paff Daxx | "Typical liberal court"

Despite the first amendment, there are restrictions on what you can say in America. Now, I understand that this bill is not worded as well as it could have been. A sensible restriction would be self-classification of pornographers into a .XXX TLD, with jail time and other punishments only for those who attempt to sneak into .COM and others. This would allow respectable ISPs such as AOL to block all pornographers simply by blocking [cont]...

• 12AC, Awards:+26acct+6mod

77|(2,10,41,7%) WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWX | "That's cool"

It's good to see Microsoft trying to get on board with at least the spirit of Open Source.

• 11AC, Awards:+30acct+9mod

65|(-1,7,23,7%) Dozix007 | "I Love Terminal Emulators"

I can't count the number of times a Terminal Emulator has either saved me from boredom, or prevented me from booting into Windows. Nothing like playing Crusader or Warcraft II in Linux.

• 7AC, Awards:+16acct+1bust+3low+1acup+14mod

61|(1,9,24,2%) Midnight Thunder | "Luckily this is the US"

Luckily this is the US, otherwise we would be considering sanctions and maybe even sending UN inspectors.I know this sounds like a troll, but just think about it for two minutes.

• 7AC, Awards:+17acct+2low+10mod

53|(2,8,25,20%) Milo of Kroton | "Is not"

Faster importantless? With 64 bit processing power for all available by athlon 64 made available that works with 64 bit yes immdiately we would switch. These chip make futiliity. Why make processors of like these new when you can improve on 64 bit? The battle is to will be lost to Athlon without 64 bit competition by.

• 11AC, Awards:+14acct+7mod

39|(0,7,18,7%) Exmet Paff Daxx | "Confirmed: Architect not a verb"

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=architect : 1. One who designs and supervises the construction of buildings or other large structures.2. One that plans or devises: a country considered to be the chief architect of war in the Middle East.I mean, it's not even a second meaning. It's just plain English abuse. I hope this Zdziarski guy's paper is decent, since he's pretty tripped my spam filter from the gate.

• 9AC, Awards:+9acct+8mod

37|(0,4,13,56%) Anonymous Coward | "Important note:"

The passing lane is for passing, and the law of the passing lane is this: Slower Traffic Always Yields To Overtaking Traffic. She couldn't pass you, because overtaking on the right is illegal. By blocking the passing lane, you've gone ahead and blocked the entire freeway to anyone who obeys the law.You were in the wrong, she did the right thing. If it were me, I'd have shot you.FYI.

• 2AC, Awards:+11acct+1bab+1mod

34|(3,8,11,3%) Milo of Kroton | "Yes, fast"

But what cost? Only government would want new technology this fast, maybe your NSA, that around codebreaking.

• 3AC, Awards:+8acct+1bust+1broken+5mod

32|(3,8,17,5%) Milo of Kroton | "Greatness!"

I am for cannot waiting able frequency to this have! I too am so greatness compression going to get. I am ask: can use this games? UT2k4 is good. It is very big game however maybe some for people. Can this technology fast enough for gaming be?

• 12AC, Awards:+5acct+4mod

30|(-1,9,11,1%) Sheetrock | "Go back to basics?"

This brings up a complaint I've got with the way the industry works nowadays.

As a programmer, I feel the continual march of progress in computing has beenhampered as of late because of a major misconception in some segments of thesoftware industry. Some would argue that the process of refinement byiterative design, which is the subject of many texts in the field -- extremeprogramming being the most recent -- demonstrates that applying the theory ofevolution to coding is the most ef [cont]...

• 6AC, Awards:+5acct+1low+1mod

29|(-1,5,14,2%) Exmet Paff Daxx | "That is correct."

BMW parts are much harder to fence, as car thieves steal cars for their parts, and the market is entirely an economy of scale. The more popular a car, the more the car is worth. Which is why BMW has never made the most stolen car list [cnn.com]. The parts to a Honda Accord, for instance, are worth a lot more and are easier to sell.Of course, stealing an iPod from a BMW doesn't mean you have to steal the whole car, just smash the window. This will be a huge boon to radio thieves, as the [cont]...

• 5AC, Awards:+9acct+5mod

25|(4,5,7,1%) Exmet Paff Daxx | "Ugh"

I wonder if they have plans to move this into other, higher quality vehicles in the future? While I admit that BMW's are very expensive and prestigous, independent car reviews like Consumer Reports always give them the lowest possible marks for reliability, a key indicator of quality. Any chance they're going to port this to high quality makes such as Nissan, Honda or (the king of reliability) Toyota?Before anyone flames me -1 Troll or something, here's a link [consumerreports.org] to [cont]...

• 0AC, Awards:+7acct+1low+2mod

18|(-1,2,12,6%) hkhanna | "Steve Wozniack's Son"

Steve Wozniack's son and I got in a fight at a Jack-In-The-Box in Los Gatos, California last year. He told me to go back to Iraq (I have brown skin color).I would have kicked the shit out of him but he had a bunch of his buddies from Los Gatos High there and I only had a couple friends with me. The cops showed up really soon so it was all over anyway.

• 8AC, Awards:+4acct+4mod

OSnews: Hotbed of Agreement

OSnews, a highly moderated forum, is pretty much troll-proof. We think. On the other hand, there might be some exceptions. An alert reader has sent in the following links:

• "I do all my Perl hacking in Visual Studio"
• "The anonymous glibc developer"
• "whoever this "Havoc" is"
• "The year of the Linux desktop"
• "XP does all this stuff for me"
• "Freebsd is (dying) for losers"
• "Root exploits!"

Coming next month: The GNAA captures some truly unbelievable screenshots!

That's it for this month. As always, email your links to trollback at ziplip dot com. Subscribe to Trollback Magazine by befriending; Slashdot will notify you of upcoming issues! And please remember,

..MODBOMBING IS TERRORISM
..... _ ._ ._ , _ ._.......
... (_ ' ( ` .)_. .__).....
..( ( .( .. ) . `) .) _)...
.(__ (_.. (_ . _) _) ,__)..
.....`~~`\ ' . /`~~`.......
.....,::: ; ..; :::,.......
....':::::::::::::::'......
_________/_____\___________
FREE JUNIS FROM AFGHANISTAN

Well, this is not so much a post about our Criminal-in-Chief, so much as it is a place to put links to interesting news blurbs that I don't want clogging up my bookmarks. News that the "liberal media" covers up or just doesn't cover. You know, like Georgie's links to the Bin Ladens? That whole illegal war on false pretenses thing. How many of our "allies," such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, are breeding grounds for fundamental Islamists ripe for terrorism? BLAH!

If TrollBack seems a little late to you, please understand that the best things in life take time. When was the last time you saw Quickies? Exactly.

Please remember that the TrollBack team welcomes guest editors and content. Send us an email if you're interested in helping.

As the Greatest Generation finally gets a Memorial in Washington D.C., we here at TrollBack find ourselves mourning the passing of fallen comrades. Cmdr Stalin has passed a new subnet banning decree, signalling the end of such greats as SCO$699FeeTroll. Slashdot trolls will rise from the ashes of fascism to circumvent their subnet bans and post again.

(Ban)-ana Monkeys

The IP ban code has been given a new set of very sharp teeth, causing many everyday Slashdot users to get IP banned. Most of these people will just quietly leave, but a small fraction are figuring out that they can still post journal entries on the subject. Here's a small sampler:

• illuminata: 'I can't post because of too many negative moderations that were done by some people who don't like what I have to say.'
• October_30th: 'This must be the longest ban I've ever been subjected to. A week or so short of a month already.'
• Mirko: 'So, here's the deal : I will deactivate the Slashdot ad blocker (do you really sell stuff to Swiss people, anyway ?!) until I can post again.'

  To follow this up, we have a priceless response in which the Swiss guy's grammar is mocked. Yes, Slashdot mocked someone else's use of English - a foreign national, to boot. We just can't make this stuff up: 'We will get back to you when we are done "Thinking of it."'

• YAJoe: 'According to Slashdot, my IP address has had several bad posts and therefore I cannot post again. To them, I am a bad egg.'
• monstroyer: 'Slashdot took a page from the entertainment industry and banned this account because I have too much karma and paid a subscriber bonus. Now that's service!'
• pluvius: 'I just noticed that I'm no longer able to post anonymously because of "excessive bad posting on my subnet or IP."'
• Cyrax: 'im reading a article decide to post a comment and boom i get this crap "Due to excessive bad posting..."'
• Bajanman: 'Well, it looks like I'm blocked for good here at slashdot.org.'
• sulli: 'I posted two cheap flames. Maybe three. I knew slashdot was getting strict, but damn.'
• Benna: 'It was a perfectly reasoned opinion and certainly not a troll. I thought slashdot stood for free speech but apperently not.'

These are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg: you can find more diaries on the topic.

If you're an unaffiliated, non-trolling Slashbot who got banned for posting something truthful about Microsoft, the DMCA, or any other Kool-Aid laden topic at Slashdot, take a moment to share your story in the comments of this diary. For those who are wondering how the new IP ban code works, it's just a simple change to an old system. Basically if you get moderated down by any moderator, they put a posting ban on the entire class C network you posted from, and if it happens more than once, the ban can last for months. Many people who are angry at 'the jerk on my network who got me banned' are unaware that the 'jerk' is probably them. Look in your history: do you have a single post at -1? That's probably why you can't post.

Some of you may be thinking "you mean I can ban an entire dorm of nerds, or my company, or an entire cable modem block, just by posting goatse links a few times?". The answer, in short, is yes. Troublemakers have been handed a new form of troublemaking: just visit a network with a lot of Slashdot users, go on an anonymous posting spree, and you can get them shipped off to Gauntanamo for months. If you're intending to use a proxy to get its subnet banned, please be aware that they don't proxy scan you if you post logged in, so use a fresh account.

In other news, we can finally tell (sometimes) when editors are moderating a story. Moderators can now moderate posts down from -1 to -1 (-1 + -1 = -1, Slashdot math, etc). This allows the editors to put IP bans on users posting at -1. Here's coverage, and here's a race condition in Slashcode.

Robbie the Slashbot

After careful consideration, we here at Trollback have decided on a new Mascot: Robbie the Slashbot, pictured upper right. Robbie won out because despite his total lack of a brain, he's managed to get his right arm in the air for a healthy Sig Heil. Robbie knows that BSD isn't dying, Linux is the best operating system and Osama bin Laden was probably a freedom fighter. Welcome, Robbie! Here at Slashdot, you're among friends. Lots of them.

The List

(0,5,20) ObviousGuy | Why doesn't Unix die?
(4,14,36) bonch | I'll come right out and say it
(-1,8,32) ObviousGuy | CS has very little to do with math
(3,10,22) ObviousGuy | International relations
(2,7,30) ObviousGuy | Well, yes..
(2,6,7) ObviousGuy | Well, yes..
(4,23,58) Ckwop | A few suggestions
(3,6,14) ObviousGuy | Microsoft does what it does best
(5,6,51) ObviousGuy | Reinventing X?
(4,10,19) Debian Troll's Best | Article puts it all in perspective
(5,5,8) Anonymous Coward | As an insider for Microsoft
(3,6,7) Debian Troll's Best | Re:Turing was also...
(5,19,136) palndron | How is this different?
(1,10,44) tacobot | Before anyone spouts off at the mouth
(3,9,40) Power Everywhere | 10-15 years?
(5,13,20) Hanna's Goblin Toys | SO cool.
(-1,8,27) Exmet Paff Daxx | Fantastic
(5,19,58) Power Everywhere | Let me tell you how it differs.
(2,25,351) Vokbain | Your civil rights called...
(5,27,70) Noose For A Neck | I never understood the Bittorrent thing...
(4,10,53) Noose For A Neck | Already in use
(-1,6,10) Noose For A Neck | Anybody have a bittorrent link?
(4,5,13) Noose For A Neck | Good to see them in headlines again
(-1,11,23) dnoyeb | Hype
(0,6,26) USAPatriot | Beat The Chinese
(-1,6,12) Debian Troll's Best | FUD not a serious threat to Linux at this stage
(0,11,47) A. Pizmo Clam | Ho Hum
(-1,6,40) Exmet Paff Daxx | That's nice.
(4,72,334) Anonymous Coward | Fuck you America
(-1,6,18) Anonymous Coward | You GOTTA read this: WARNING!!!
(1,5,8) Anonymous Coward | iPod and UFS
(1,8,31) Tuvai | How Lovely

Honourable Mentions

• Last measure is used educationally in a story on hijacking web browsers.
• Tarantolato slips a link to an extreme fundamentalist website into his submission about Inferno OS, generating a good deal of offtopic/offended churn in the comments.
• In a story on embedding ascii art in ICMP, the inevitable happens.

Veni, Vedi, Wiki

Let's take a stroll down amnesia lane. In June of 2003, Hemos & CmdrTaco settled down with a few mixed drinks and a keyboard to discuss Slashdot on IRC. When a Slashdot reader asked what they thought of the Wiki concept, they had this to say:

<Questions> erigol asks: Have you considered setting up a slashdot Wiki, since Wiki's are, like, the rage, and stuff.
<CmdrTaco> Wiki is silly. Not scalalble.
<hemos> Wiki's make me want to guage my eyes out.
<hemos> gouge, even.
<CmdrTaco> They're fun for small groups.
<hemos> No, I like the idea.
<CmdrTaco> Slashdot is for millions.
<hemos> And yeah, for smaller groups is great.
<hemos> But we spent the 3 years scaling up to this level of users
<CmdrTaco> Thats the thing that people don't understand

Strangely, just 6 months later, a site called Wikipedia blew by Slashdot so fast that it nearly knocked them off the Internet, utilizing only unscaleable Wiki technology. As Slashdot continues to decline, Wikipedia now has nearly doubled Slashdot's Alexa traffic ranking. Strangely in only a few years, a site not for millions blew millions past a site for millions. Pretty confusing, even to a Slashbot. Trollback has not yet learned how this amazing event took place, but we encourage you to write CmdrTaco to find out.

That's it for this month! See you in two weeks, sanity permitting.

[Befriend TrollBack and get notified of upcoming issues]

It's time to tell the truth. I am a 55 year-old man. My name is Andy Kaufman, and I live in New York City.

I am sincerely sorry to everyone for all my lies.

--Andy

Welcome to TrollBack for April 2004. April started off rather slowly, with The List picking up a number of the strongest submissions in the last few days. We'd like to welcome USAPatriot to TrollBack. TrollBack regrettably did not see any posts that were made last month by this user, although if we had we would have had these posts [1, 2, 3] in The List.

TrollBack would like to welcome back b.foster and Lover's Arrival, The to TrollBack; it has been far too long between posts for these two legends, and we hope to see more material for next month's issue. Thanks to some fan-whoring last month by an anonymous TrollBack fan, we have a number of new readers that we'd like to welcome.

Answering the Mail Bag

We had a few emails in the past month we'd like to take some time to answer. The letters have been edited slightly.

Letter #1: Encyclopedia Article on Slashdot Trolling

As someone who reads (and infrequently writes for) the Wikipedia (1), but regularly reads Slashdot, I feel you are a rather respected (wellknown at least) part of our community which is covered quite extensively in the Wikipedia under "Slashdot" (2), "Slashdot subculture" (3), and "Slashdot trolling phenomena" (4). What this is only lacking is any real mention of you. You can directly contribute any information about yourself into the articles using the "Edit this Page" links on the pages. I'm in no way affiliated with the management of the wikipedia, but I feel that the article(s) could stand to benefit from additional information regarding your work.

Regards,

Thank you for your letter. We notice that link 4 is a 'featured article candidate' on Wikipedia, which presumably means it will make the next edition of Brittanica. We'd like to suggest that the wikipedia definition of the Slashdot Troll 'community' is quite different to the what many of the purist trolls might define. For something a little more grounded in history, TrollBack suggests the following reading materials as a starting point on any wikipedia definition: The Slashdot Troll FAQs written by spiralx, jsm, and an Anonymous Coward.

As far as a mention for TrollBack goes, perhaps something along the lines of being Slashdot's best known alternative publication. The TrollBack team likes to think they have made a positive contribution to the community, particularly in recording moments that might otherwise be lost and forgotten about as the drudgery of Slashdot's normal programming continues.

Letter #2: Dear TrollBack

Dear TrollBack,

I tried to follow Pan T. Hose's posting this month. Unfortunately my favorite Mensa Babe, PhysicsGenius, tps12, Professor Collins, Amsterdam Vallon and Boromir son of Faram haven't posted anything this month (oh God, how I miss them!), so I've got only links to Pan T. Hose's texts. (I've read lots of great comments by ObviousGuy lately but I haven't saved the links.) So here are my favorite ones, some of which you might consider including in the next issue of TrollBack.

Thank you for your letter. TrollBack misses these accounts as well, and if the account holders are reading, perhaps they might consider a come back. It should be noted that Boromir son of Faram is tps12's follow-on account. tps12 stopped posting when he had 1337 comments to his name. TrollBack would also like to backup this letter's mention of ObviousGuy. ObviousGuy has been carrying TrollBack for a few publications now, and it is appreciated.

Elsewhere

Over at Kuro5hin, the proverbial hit the fan in a major way in April. It seems accurate to suggest that in the past few months, K5 has been chock full of meta-wankery and whining about so-called crapflooders. Rusty pulled the plug on new account creation and anonymised any account that posted a photo-shopped photo involving his wife.

As could be expected when you're the recipient of whining and bitching, Rusty kept a low profile. So the site with the highest meta-overhead of any popular nerd site saw an article titled 'Where is Rusty?' voted up rapidly to the front-page. Momochrome summed the whole situation up in a single comment that turned the tables back on those who have created the most noise of late.

A fair amount of anguish has been expressed over the lack of a comment search feature in scoop that worked well. In this very story, localroger suggested that the answer to scoop's comment searching was to generate a flat file that consisted of all words that had been posted in all comments to date, with comment ids associated with each instance of said word. In order to ensure this superb search strategy ran as fast as possible, it was to be implemented using assembly language. At that stage of events, localroger was completely serious about it.

Realising he had been cut to pieces, localroger decided that he'd try and get some credibility back with a follow-on story, this time as a troll. That story got voted to section. Shortly after the story got section, localroger posted a diary where he bragged about his brilliance. Shoeboy's comment sums localroger up in a few short sentences.

Slashdot Math

As reported first in 31337, slashdot math struck again this month, with a comment that is 30% Underrated + 20% Insightful + 20% Interesting == +5 Funny. As 31337 gets flushed of old posts, we think we should preserve some of the most insightful meta-commentary ever seen:

Could the figure be made less helpful?

One possibility might be to eliminate 'Score:' as a number entirely and instead represent it with a smudge of color made up of smudges of various colors as chosen by the moderators.

This brings with it a multitude of advantages, not the least of which is the reduction of the point modifier system for mod attributes (such as 'Interesting') to a color wheel, but also the potential to alienate the colorblind portion of the community. Best of all, if the new moderation system follows a subtractive color mixing model most comments will be rated 'brownish', which coincides quite nicely with my online experiences and posting history.

There's been a lot of change to the moderation system of late. Many of you may have noticed that being moderated up as Funny doesn't raise your Karma. This means that a post that 100 moderators think is Funny and 100 moderators think is Overrated will bounce between 4 and 5 100 times, lowering your karma by one each time. The result? In one post you can go from +50 (Excellent) to -50 (Terrible). This is progress. +1 Funny is now a weapon. There's also a huge penalty to anyone whose post is first moderated up a bunch, then moderated down a bunch. This happens most often when people point out spelling errors in stories; later, the spelling error is fixed by editors and the original poster is moderated down. So you lose 50 karma because you helped an editor fix a spelling mistake. You've also lost a bundle of moderation tokens.

CmdrTaco has had a busy month by all indications, given a recent spate of journal activity. In between his attempts to purchase a high resolution Tivo to see bad television more perfectly defined, he's been sharing a lot of his brainstorming about how to "fix" that which he considers not broken: The Moderation System. Some of you who have been following the story for years may recognise many of his new insights as your own comments, shot down years ago by Rob as items that "won't scale" and resurrected as innovations on his yellow legal pad. There's talk of bringing back trusted moderators (though this time his AI will do the selection for him, no blacklist required), talk of de-gaming the system by removing all the scores, and a small trickle of two-year-old "unscaleable" common sense lifted straight from user feedback to the Post of Doom.

Finally, it has been proposed that Slashcode could use Bayesian Filtering to identify troll posts on slashdot. We'd like to help the slashteam waste their time by identifying trolling legends to feed into the filter. This month's nominee is Sheetrock, truly a Slashdot icon.

Bayesian Filter Food Award

TrollBack would like to present a special tribute to TrollBack regular Sheetrock, who never ceases to amaze the team with the quality of posts made. TrollBack has featured 30 posts by Sheetrock in the previous 13 editions of Trollback. The decision to confer an inaugural award to Sheetrock came with this post, which shall forever be known as the "Great Wall of China through Japan" post. TrollBack will now provide a short review of 5 select posts that we love, and we're sure you will too.

• The original chopstick post.
• The original intelligent design post.
• Why doesn't windows have an auto-update feature?
• The spittoon post.
• The great wall of China through Japan post.

When TrollBack nearly folded a distant 15 months ago, Sheetrock wrote a moving eulogy, and a special place in TrollBack's heart for Sheetrock was found. The award's prize is a permanent listing in TrollBack's friends section. A round of applause for this gentleman, please, and an acceptance speech if you're reading, Sheetrock.

The List

(-1,7,18) ObviousGuy | Take an object, leave an object
(5,14,51) conner_bw | Sigh.
(-1,3,3) Lover's Arrival, The | My husband used to play Neverwinter nights
(2,10,51) dolo666 | Linux Changelog Email Publishing
(5,4,4) Debian Troll's Best | How would Google manage a 100K-node cluster?
(5,6,9) Debian Troll's Best | Asian-language localized UNIX tools
(-1,14,32) Anonymous Coward | DATUM not data
(1,4,7) Sheetrock | Time for something new?
(3,19,26) ObviousGuy | Do we need this kind of humor here?
(0,15,44) b.foster | Python's dirty little secret
(-1,7,36) USAPatriot | More Leftist Propaganda
(5,15,24) USAPatriot | Excellent
(4,4,120) Anonymous Coward | *MAGNETIC* fans in my PC?
(5,14,61) Sheetrock | Sadly...
(5,18,28) USAPatriot | Stupid
(4,7,8) Anonymous Coward | We're banning Yo-yos
(1,5,8) Debian Troll's Best | Any system software updates also?
(-1,8,18) Sheetrock | A consideration.
(-1,6,16) Samir Gupta | On Xbox's lack of success in Japan
(-1,13,33) Mr. Darl McBride | A link on swbell.net? Oh, that'll last.
(1,21,42) Sheetrock | Fantastic.
(5,18,) timecop | What Lies Ahead for Linux...

Honourable Mentions

• Freston gets a big bite
• Ascii Enactment Players provides slashbots with a DRM flowchart
• This month's affirmative action award goes to the AC who posted this over and over again.
• A one line throw-away comment starts a mammoth Israel flame-war.

Amnesia Lane

Finally, we'd like to take you back down amnesia lane. This month, we feature the infamous Shoeboy vs Merlyn episode that took place on slashdot back in April 2001.

Merlyn is a 'perl monk', which means he is a perl expert and likes to engage in relations with camels. Merlyn had been fired and taken through the courts by Intel, after it caught him cracking passwords in a self-appointed security review without authorisation to do so. Slashdot featured a story about how he had been taken to the cleaners and lost an appeal. You'd think that being a master of password security, you'd set your slashdot password to something half reasonable. Apparently not.

In a crushing irony, his slashdot account password at that time was "slashdot" and was guessed by Shoeboy. Shoeboy had a fetish (and probably still does) for Larry Wall's daughter, and proceeded to make a few posts as Merlyn saying that having become a criminal, he'd never be able to settle down with Heidi an lead a peaceful life.

Many of Merlyn's friends jumped to his defence: coward! defamation! insulting! Remove the offending posts! Merlyn tried denying his password was slashdot when the account was returned, but was quickly corrected [1, 2]. Shoeboy was accused of being an asshole, but defended his actions. 'You're not going to press criminal charges?' was shoeboy's cheeky response. Shoeboy, as it turned out, did not 'crack' any password, and was lucky that Merlyn had spent a fortune in the courts already.

That's it for this month!

[Befriend TrollBack and get notified of upcoming issues]

That's right, assmasters, it is that one special time of year when the slashdot front-page consists entirely of one tired lame gag after another. Luckily, the Trollback team have put together another issue of your favourite publication.

April fools is a bizarre day on slashdot. It is just about the only time you'll find an editor post a story suggesting that ESR is full of hot air. Sadly, they stop short of suggesting that ESR is an arrogant gas baron. Surely that is the most on-topic discussion to be had on April 1.

The List is chock full of funny gags this issue; perhaps Trollback is front-page material?

Harvard is the new Mensa

The mensa line has been used to great effect by trolling legends Krapangor and Mensa Babe. Slashbots just hate elitism, even if it is central to their open source zealotry. Trollback is proud to provide you with the complete posting history of the Harvard character that some of you may have seen posting during March.

The character actually started out rather slowly back in February, but had a great outing at the beginning of March, which is featured in The List. The next outing was a re-post of the February post, but this time it had success. It was at this time when the character was corrected: Harvard refers to its Teaching Assistants as Teaching Fellows.

The early success brought laziness as the Harvard poster took a turn for the weeds [1, 2, 3] - although there were always good bites to be had. The poster was quickly back on the spoke though, with a comment making unfounded accusations against unfounded accusations that had a good bite from the article's submitter and even a joke about Harvard wankers. This was followed up with another entry in The List, discussing why Qt is not his favorite toolkit.

With all the negative feedback our intrepid poster from Harvard had received, he felt a bit depressed, and wanted to know why was he not liked. He wanted to recommend that other people did not make the same mistake one of his students did when the student tried to write a BIOS based on Debian Linux. He also did his best Dan Quayle impression.

He finished his expedition posting as someone who was in Harvard Law.

Remember: if you're having success posting anonymously, please report your successes to 31337, or alternatively email the Trollback team.

Make Windows your Foe

If anything is true about the Slashbot, it is the hatred they have for Windows and Microsoft, despite doing all they can to create a clone operating system. This month saw an attack led by the crapflooder users.pl, posting early into many stories to get the user windows in lots of foe lists. The writeup in windows' journal tells the sad story of what has happened so far.

Elsewhere

Over at K5, the user IndianaTroll has been keeping a record of interesting events on K5 that are troll-related in his diary. We applaud the effort made my IndianaTroll to keep a record of these events; the team has registered TrollBack on K5, but we feel the quality of K5 trolls is lacking except for the right wing maniacs Ray Megard, Adam Rightmann, and sellison. We'd like to pay special mention to Ray; every one of his posts is a work of art. Slashdot could really do with a good right-wing manic post now and again. If you've spotted one lately, please reply to this diary and share the joy.

The List

(-1,22,40) Anonymous Coward | Unit tests are a bad idea
(3,17,112) krog | Why shell?
(3,51,165) Sheetrock | Not the only person against Grand Theft Auto
(-1,7,51) Anonymous Coward | Re:EV1
(1,18,38) Overly Critical Guy | Question
(1,11,18) valence | BIOS = Built-in Operating System
(-1,10,20) ObviousGuy | No clamor
(-1,10,31) ObviousGuy | I am not for these laws at all
(1,8,28) ObviousGuy | Yep, they're out of ideas
(-1,9,17) ObviousGuy | Fraud? Really?
(3,11,92) ultrabot | MySql
(4,15,27) Anonymous Coward | Bad Patents?
(-1,4,7) mao che minh | Re:Canada: Socially Advanced
(-1,3,4) Sheetrock | Atmospheric phenomenon?
(0,12,16) Anonymous Coward | Qt is not my favorite toolkit
(2,29,113) ObviousGuy | Power Power Power
(-1,17,39) egg troll | IPv6: Not Ready For Prime Time
(0,12,38) ObviousGuy | Follow the money
(0,7,13) Anonymous Coward | We can catch the worm's author
(-1,2,12) Anonymous Coward | My success with OpenBSD
(-1,21,147) Anonymous Coward | HOW TO BE AN AMERICAN! FUCK AMERICA! FRANCE RULES!

Honourable mentions

• Ascii Enactment Players makes another post.
• Overly Critical Guy implodes.
• Sheetrock suggests that slashcode is a powerhouse. +5 Insightful. Not even a hint of a funny mod; perhaps CmdrTaco was on the right track with NOT moderation after all.
• An AC, perhaps aided with a subscription, gets the most insightful post in a story with the first post.
• Not content with his description of Dungeons and Dragons players last month, ObviousGuy comes up with a new slogan for AOL.
• Slashbots provide insight into the female mind.

Amnesia Lane

Finally, we'd like to take you back down amnesia lane. Trollback will try and make amnesia lane a regular feature from now on.

Adequacy.org announced this month that they have released their archive of slashdot troll outings pre-adequacy.org to the drooling masses. The headcheese archive is a database of the various adequacy accounts that were used and the post they made in the name of trolling. They have conveniently provided the world with a top-ten list of their most successful posts; the top-20 direct replies table is a trolling how-to.

That's it for this month!

Hey, those weapons of mass destruction must be somewhere! I'll check under the couch... noo, not there. Hah hah.

Real funny, 600+ dead, thousands wounded, crippled or mentally scarred for life. Yep, real funny. Guess the joke's on us for believing the Bush administration's weapons of mass deception. What's the Bush campaign slogan, 4 more years of lies?

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040325/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_broadcasters_1

Bush Pokes Some Fun During Media Dinner
Thu Mar 25,12:31 AM ET Add White House - AP to My Yahoo!

By SIOBHAN McDONOUGH, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - President Bush (news - web sites) poked fun at his staff, his Democratic challenger and himself Wednesday night at a black-tie dinner where he hobnobbed with the news media.

Bush put on a slide show, calling it the "White House Election-Year Album" at the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association 60th annual dinner, showing himself and his staff in some decidedly unflattering poses.

There was Bush looking under furniture in a fruitless, frustrating search. "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere," he said.

There was Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites), a frequent butt of gentle Bush ribbing, holding his fingers a few inches apart. Bush said, "Whenever you ask him a question, he replies, 'Let's see what my little friend says.'"

And there was Bush again, in an odd contortion in front of his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites). He said he was trying to explain to her the foreign policy of Democratic challenger John Kerry (news - web sites).

Bush showed himself playing cards on Air Force One and cracked that he was on his way to an international summit and using a special deck to help him bone up on the names of the leaders he was about to meet.

His slide show segued into a somber ending, showing a group of special forces troops in Afghanistan (news - web sites) at the site where they buried a piece of the fallen World Trade Center in commemoration of the dead from Sept. 11.

The late NBC News reporter David Bloom, who died in April from an apparent blood clot while covering the Iraq (news - web sites) war, was remembered. His wife, Melanie, talked of her husband's passion for journalism.

About 1,500 guests attended the dinner.

1. They see faces everywhere.
2. They are biodegradable.
3. Base 10 zeroes excite them.

Here's a little something to excite you:

1. 1 Million - Congrats to Archie Binnie!
2. 2 Million - Congrats to Anonymous Coward!
3. 3 Million - Congrats to ronc_LAemigre!
4. 4 Million - Congrats to Anonymous Coward!
5. 5 Million - Congrats to jefu!
6. 6 Million - Congrats to The Bungi!
7. 7 Million - Congrats to nytmare!
8. 8 Million - Congrats to Anonymous Coward!
9. 9 Million - To be announced soon
10. 10 Million - To be announced soon

Thanks to India for inventing the base 10 zero. Where would we be without it?

Don't worry, no Republican will be arrested for computer crime. We are, after all, Republicans.

http://cryptome.org/judiciary-sys.htm

Trollback is well aware of your penchant for man-sex, but usually we are heartened to see that you can drag yourselves away long enough to post a month worth of trolling gold. Not this time; it seems that you and Bubba were having too much fun to keep up to last month's high standards.

The unfailingly entertaining CmdrTaco

In the event of a short list, Trollback can always fall back on reviewing the previous month of CmdrTaco diaries and slashdot goings-on.

CmdrTaco shares his harrowing tale of having a block of ice thrown at his car, narrowly escaping an icy death. It was while still in shock that a confused CmdrTaco came up with what was thought impossible: a way to make moderation even more like a game. Welcome to the idea of NOT moderation. We can see no possible confusion arising from a meta-mod reversing the effects of a NOT moderation meted out by a user to reverse an initial moderation.

As a warm-up for the coding this moderation change will involve, Taco decided he would change the comment history page to be cleaner and clearer. After all, a list of comments in date order is overwhelmingly complex.

Give a 'hacker' a Mac and they become an amateur designer. Welcome to the new system of grouped comments, which may or may not tell you which story they are attached to, leading to a page of inconsistently presented data in no useful order. Fortunately, he explains how preposterous it is to say the page is cluttered: there is less text, therefore it is less cluttered. We stand corrected. As always with feature changes, most of the feedback is "pretty cool" - selective memory at work, although there is a way to turn the new grouping method off.

Fyodor the Black-Hat and Slashdot

Fyodor revoked SCO's license to redistribute nmap, which counts as something news-worthy on slashdot. Slashbots were reminded of why Fyodor is a black-hat, not a white-hat freedom fighter as slashbots like to think he is. The GPL zealots rejoiced, as someone was using the GPL to shake their tiny fist at SCO. Fortunately, an anonymous coward, probably scared of putting himself and his company at risk from being hacked, posted the truth behind fyodor's questionable use of the GPL.

While we're briefly on the subject of SCO, we'd like to thank the SCO$699FeeTroll for regularly reminding slashbots to pay their licensing fees.

James A C Joyce

Congratulations to James A C Joyce, who got four controversial stories posted in February, passing Trollaxor's previous record of three.

Two of the controversial stories are in fact written for Vlad. Don't Be So Fucking Fat is a motivational weight loss guide, while Why C Is Not My Favourite Programming Language is a list of the things that makes understanding C hard, and why he chooses to now study in the arts.

The most controversial article was surprisingly voted to the front page of K5, causing quite a stir in web-log circles was the unprecedented Why your Movable Type blog must die. James' diary around the time makes for good reading, as he discovers web-loggers/lamers linking to his story [1, 2, 3].

K5 Ascii Enactment Players comes to Slashdot

Proving the sort of quality code that makes up the lameness filters, AEP has arrived at Slashdot. Regulars will be aware of his works on K5, and hopefully we will see a similar quality of work here. Trollback presents two small golden nuggets for your review: [1, 2].

It is a challenge to get good quality ascii art past the lameness filter. Even timothy struggled with ascii art back in the day. After 250 revisions of the ascii art filter, the editors have succeeded in gagging their own ascii art, but not the trolls.

Jimmy O'Leary madness

After getting a special mention in the previous edition of Trollback, Jimmy O'Leary madness reached a two-month high for the month of February. When CmdrTaco posted the story "Saturn Rings But No Spokes" - you can probably guess what happened. We salute whoever got the first post on that story, keeping Jimmy mania alive.

The List

(2,9,15) Freston Youseff | Pretty amazing
(5,10,33) Chess_the_cat | Re:Not all Advertisers win
(3,9,15) Sheetrock | After looking at the possible solutions
(-1,5,15) Anonymous Coward | Re:Death to magnetic stripes
(3,8,13) Srividya | Will this last very long?
(3,18,48) Samuel Duncan | Law-abiding citizens
(-1,17,35) Samuel Duncan | "generics"
(2,15,41) bonch | The reasons geeks don't get laid
(1,11,27) Tirel | i call bullshit
(5,7,13) Debian Troll's Best | Other ways to improve Linux security?
(4,13,113) ObviousGuy | Really? Infamous?
(3,6,16) Sheetrock | Sounds interesting.
(3,36,149) Can it run Linux | Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Post)
(2,18,21) Srividya | Unfortunate, but unlikely in the future.
(2,5,6) Anonymous Coward | "Consumers" have no "rights"
(0,10,30) ObviousGuy | Cemeteries are landfills
(-1,12,35) Amsterdam Vallon | Slashdot is an international site
(2,19,149) Tirel | huh
(0,12,28) Tirel | small article nitpick
(-1,7,37) Anonymous Coward | Not bad, but...
(5,9,11) Clockwurk | Re:Injunction?
(3,17,44) Chess_the_cat | 2+2=3
(3,11,14) Sheetrock | A friend came up with an amazing analogy...

[If Trollback has missed anyone, please submit a comment.]

Honourable Mentions

• A joke about BSD and Gentoo users is -1 Funny. It must have struck a nerve.
• Calyptos has absolutely no sense of humour, even if the joke is lame.
• ObviousGuy shares a short history of Dungeons and Dragons with us. He is the target of a rather pathetic troll-bust.
• Ballmer visited last November and fondled donkeys. Chortle-chortle.
• Cecil bites on a troll and tries to tell said troll that they lost.

Finally, we'd like to bring your attention to one of the greatest sids on slashdot: sid 3903. Take a walk down amnesia lane and recall a day when you could post ascii art boobies, naked Jackie Chan, and shemales. Remember the VA Linux / Slash-dot giveaways, and the time when chrisd bit. Recall the early days after VA bought andover.net for nearly US$1b. Lastly, remember the trolls.

That's it for this month!

RESUME

GEORGE W. BUSH

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington, DC 20520

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE:

  Law Enforcement:
  I was arrested in Kennebunkport, Maine, in 1976 for driving under the influence of alcohol. I pled guilty, paid a fine, and had my driver's
license suspended for 30 days. My Texas driving record has been "lost" and is not available.

  Military:
  I joined the Texas Air National Guard and went AWOL. I refused to take a drug test or answer any questions about my drug use. By joining the
Texas Air National Guard, I was able to avoid combat duty in Vietnam.

  College:
  I graduated from Yale University with a low C average. I was a cheerleader.

  PAST WORK EXPERIENCE:

  I ran for U.S. Congress and lost. I began my career in the oil business in Midland, Texas in 1975. I bought an oil company, but couldn't find
any oil in Texas. The company went bankrupt shortly after I sold all my stock.

I bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in a sweetheart deal that took land using taxpayer money. With the help of my father and our friends in the oil industry (including Enron CEO Ken Lay), I was elected governor of Texas.

  ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS GOVERNOR OF TEXAS

  I changed Texas pollution laws to favor power and oil companies, making Texas the most polluted state in the Union. During my tenure, Houston replaced Los Angeles as the most smog-ridden city in America. I cut taxes and bankrupted the Texas treasury to the tune of billions in borrowed money.

  I set the record for the most executions by any governor in American history.

  With the help of my brother, the governor of Florida, and my father's appointments to the Supreme Court, I became President after losing by over 500,000 votes.

  ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS PRESIDENT:

  I am the first President in U.S. history to enter office with a criminal record.

  I invaded and occupied two countries at a continuing cost of over one billion dollars per week.

  I spent the U.S. surplus and effectively bankrupted the U.S. Treasury.

  I shattered the record for the largest annual deficit in U.S. history.

  I set an economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12-month period.

  I set the all-time record for most foreclosures in a 12-month period.

  I set the all-time record for the biggest drop in the history of the U.S. stock market. In my first year in office, over 2 million Americans
lost their jobs and that trend continues every month.

  I'm proud that the members of my cabinet are the richest of any administration in U.S. history. My "poorest" millionaire Condoleeza Rice has a Chevron oil tanker named after her.

  I set the record for most campaign fund-raising trips by a U.S. President.

  I am the all-time U.S. and world record-holder for receiving the most corporate campaign donations.

  My largest lifetime campaign contributor, and one of my best friends, Kenneth Lay, presided over the largest corporate bankruptcy fraud in
U.S. History, Enron.

  My political party used Enron private jets and corporate attorneys to assure my success with the U.S. Supreme Court during my election
decision.

  I have protected my friends at Enron and Halliburton against investigation or prosecution. More time and money was spent
investigating the Monica Lewinsky affair than has been spent investigating one of the biggest corporate rip-offs in history.

  I presided over the biggest energy crisis in U.S. history and refused to intervene when corruption involving the oil industry was revealed. I presided over the highest gasoline prices in U.S. history.

  I changed the U.S. policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded government contracts.

  I appointed more convicted criminals to administration than any President in U.S. history.

  I created the Ministry of Homeland Security, the largest bureaucracy in the history of the United States government.

  I've broken more international treaties than any President in U.S. history.

  I am the first President in U.S. history to have the United Nations remove the U.S. from the Human Rights Commission.

  I withdrew the U.S. from the World Court of Law.

  I refused to allow inspector's access to U.S. "prisoners of war" detainees and thereby have refused to abide by the Geneva Convention

  I am the first President in history to refuse United Nations election inspectors (during the 2002 U.S. election).

  I set the record for fewest numbers of press conferences of any President since the advent of television.

  I set the all-time record for most days on vacation in any one-year period. After taking off the entire month of August, I presided over the worst security failure in U.S. history.

  I garnered the most sympathy for the U.S. after the World Trade Center attacks and less than a year later made the U.S. the most hated country
in the world, the largest failure of diplomacy in world history.

  I have set the all-time record for most people worldwide to simultaneously protest me in public venues (15 million people), shattering the record for protests against any person in the history of mankind.

  I am the first President in U.S. history to order an unprovoked, pre-emptive attack and the military occupation of a sovereign nation. I
did so against the will of the United Nations, the majority of U.S. citizens, and the world community.

  I have cut health care benefits for war veterans and support a cut in duty benefits for active duty troops and their families - in wartime.

  In my State of the Union Address, I lied about our reasons for attacking Iraq and then blamed the lies on our British friends.

  I am the first President in history to have a majority of Europeans (71%) view my presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and security.

  I am supporting development of a nuclear "Tactical Bunker Buster," a WMD.

  I have so far failed to fulfill my pledge to bring Osama Bin Laden [sic] to justice.

  RECORDS AND REFERENCES:

  All records of my tenure as governor of Texas are now in my father's library, sealed and unavailable for public view.

  All records of SEC investigations into my insider trading and my bankrupt companies are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view.

  All records or minutes from meetings that I, or my Vice-President, attended regarding public energy policy are sealed in secrecy and
unavailable for public review.

  PLEASE CONSIDER MY EXPERIENCE WHEN VOTING IN 2004.

  PLEASE SEND THIS TO EVERY VOTER YOU KNOW.

What a clever play on words I made ;-)

Next journal topic: Coming soon!