Unfortunately, the discussion was archived right as I posted the last comment. JavaRob, if you're out there and want to continue (or have the last word), the floor is yours!
A lovely Monarch female came and laid a few eggs on some milkweed in my garden. Now I have an egg and two caterpillars that I'm watching. More details to come, and maybe some pics if I can find a way to do it.
Well, some may have noticed: I don't write much in the slashdot journal system. And only sporadically on my other blog.
But, if you're interested, you can find it at
Why? Is is because it's eating into my work? Nah - I have plenty of long compiles that allow me to waste a few minutes here and there. Is it because I'm actually building a "Freaks" list? No way! The fact that some people find my honest opinions too insulting to bear is kind of amusing.
No, it's because I've started Acting My Age and becoming way, way too serious.
I am not at all like my Slashdot persona. I mean, my opinions and beliefs are the same - I've never once misrepresented those - but my personality is completely different. I'm a nice guy who likes to laugh, enjoy life, and have fun. I'm almost never this intense or serious in day-to-day life, but put me in front of a comment box and I go uber-professional and detail-oriented. Those are OK traits, sure, and it's nice to know that I'm capable of logical and serious discussion, but that's still not who I am.
I even get along brilliantly with people I disagree with. Although I'm a very staunch conservative, one of my long-time good friends is a deliberately homeless tree-hugger (I mean it - literally!) who's typically into paganism, environmentalism, socialism, and a lot of other isms that I don't really want any part of. We get along great, though, and although we disagree on pretty much everything we always have a fun time in the process. Not here, though. Oh, no. For some reason, I seem to lose the ability to parse gentle sarcasm when I come here and just have to respond in a pedantically exact manner.
So, why is that? I kind of blame Slashdot itself, and its "coverage" of the 2004 elections in particular. Despite our differences, we used to all pretty much get along before then. Now our little green corner of the 'net is hyper-politicized and angry, and you can't ask for a recommendation of a nice IDE drive without being lectured about the evils of magnetoresistive manufacturers and their harm to the third-world environment.
I'll make you a promise: if you promise to lighten up and begin enjoying the humor inherent in a population of nearly a million crotchety geeks from across the world, I'll do the same. In fact, as a token of good faith, I'll be the first to try. On the other hand, if I can't pull it off, then I'm out of here. Seriously. I enjoy life too much to be sucked down into a swirling pit of Seriousness and Thoughtful Deliberation.
Let's have fun again, shall we? Wish me luck.
So, I think it's only fair to tell people why I've added them to the list. I'm not going to bother with prior entries, but I will be explaining all new ones.
The first recent addition is killjoe. I've disagreed with some of his postings, but this quote is what pushed him from "people I sometimes disagree with" to "people I don't want to listen to":
As for me I think the days of the peaceful liberals are over. It's time we adopted the republitard tactics. Yes that means dragging them behind cars and crucifiying them alongside the highways.
As far as I'm concerned, people who make comments like that are ineligible for civil conversation.
This topic is an interesting example of poor adaptive techniques::we don't know the answer, but we think that you are crazy.
The posters, as of this journal, are essentially providing advice about how to treat allergies. Some of them even suggest that the submitter may be suffering from some sort of mental illness--some are even using rather crude names (not a huge surprise, really). But as of this journal, no one has made a single serious attempt to answer the question that was actually asked.
I think that we are seeing an interesting reaction of technophiles who are used to knowing the answers when faced with a question they don't have an answer for immediately--bash the asker.
I am enlightened to the nature of the posters, and saddened by the experience.
(NOTE:: I will say that some of the points made are indeed valid--if smells bother you so much, medical help is the first place to start, not expensive computer parts. That said, I wish I knew something to help you).
Woohoo! I got my first freak!
Actually, this may have been the case for a while, but you know how it is.
As a consequence, I am now adding my first journal, since it gives me really neat idea--someone should map all the relationships between people here on
Maybe I will work on that in my spare time, but I think a setup like TouchGraph has would be uber cool (but I don't do java, so some one else will need to do that).
Over and out.
It's strange how trolls are capable of making you answer them, even when knowing very well you shouldn't and are only feeding them. There is little reasoning nor argumentation possible with a true troll; mostly they go 'blahblah' mixed with some provocative crap.
"Don't feed the trolls" is something that should be enshrined on slashdot, somewhere.
And yet... I also think some of those trolls are just people that react out of anger or some other emotional response. They often lack the ability of either responding in an eloquent way (not comming out of their words, not knowing how to write it), or they just feel powerless to argument something in a rational way (mostly because, somewhere deep down, they realise their arguments are purely based on emotions, not rational reasoning).
It's funny to see how some ppl revert to basic trolling, once they realise they don't have a leg to stand on.
Of course, I have been accused of being a troll myself, sometimes (mostly when I try to make a funny remark that some moderater didn't think was funny
I personally never reverted to a 'blahblah - all what you say is BS' sort of response when I was argumenting something, however. I think all responses to me deserve an equal thoughtful response back, according to what the worth of that response was. (Ofcourse, troll-flamebaits do not deserve much, in this regard).
But that has nothing to do whether people agree with me or not (though I may question their reasoning for reaching a particular conclusion). In fact, on one of my more succesfull posts, about human space-exploration, I got some really useful responses, even though I did not, or not always completely agreed with their line of reasoning (at which point I always try to demonstrate where a contradiction is apparent).
Sometimes, this has to do with the basic premise one takes, and those are the most difficult ones to counter. For instance, in the above example, if one starts with the premise that the ratio cost/science output or the economic benefit of spacetravel as being of overruling importance above all other possible goals and considerations, one can very rationally argument that human spacetravel should be abolished.
Are they wrong, then? Well, their reasoning is not. It makes perfect sense, even. But only if you accept the basic tenet they started with.
This is fundamentally different then an error in reasoning, which can be pointed out fairly easily (and is the common mistake of ppl that try to argument purely on emotional drives). Such contradictions in ones' reasoning lead to internal contradictions, which makes the argumentation itself worthless, and even hypocritical, when persevered.
With 'premise-errors' it's something else; the error there can not be demonstrated through logic reasoning, since it is a proposition upon which an argument is based or from which a conclusion is drawn. The only thing possible here, is to either agree on a particular premise, or agreeing that other premises are possible, and look at the conclusions one can make on those.
Ah well...the trolls won't care either way
Want to post anonymously but verifiably? That is, do you want to be able to say things that you don't want traceable back to yourself, but you do want interested parties to be able to verify that multiple posts originate from the same person?
Right now, Anonymous Coward (AC) posts are stored without any identifying information. This means that while you may divulge some important information, another person can reply to your post, claiming to be you, and contradict your statements. Example:
You: I have proof that my company is making toxic waste.
Reply from twit: And no matter what you hear, I was not fired from my last job for making false accusations!
With common software, this is almost trivially easy. The idea is to post as an AC but always sign your messages with the same GPG ID. The advantage is that you can still be an AC when it's important, but interested observers can verify whether other a given set of posts come from you.
If you want do this, here's how:
Now people interested in such things can verify that all of your posts originate from the same person, even though they can't determine who that person is.
This isn't exactly a brilliant invention on my part; all of the pieces already existed in usable form. However, I've never seen anyone actually do this, and I thought it might be a useful idea for someone.
Caveats:
A Note To Slashdot Editors
I'm not writing this to be a pain in the butt, honest - this seems like a legitimate need that I think needed to be addressed. This specific implemention relies on the idea of <ecode> tags keeping the contents in pristine condition. If people start using this, please don't change ecode's functionality so that old signed posts are broken.
A giant extra helping of karma to the authors if you add code to detect signed messages, keep a list of key IDs that've been used, assign a serial number to each one, and print that serial number in the message header of each signed message. Then, casual visitors could see that a string of messages were all signed by "Slashdot authed AC #243", although responsibilty for actual verification would still lie with interested end-users.
I always kill "Overrated" in meta-moderation. Always. Keep that in mind, would you?
8 Catfish = 1 Octo-puss
