However, before the conservatives start celebrating, pay attention to this

In other words, you're stuck with him until you confirm someone to take his place. So if you hate him, the best thing you can do to get rid of him is to encourage the senate to actually hold a vote on his replacement. Even if the senate flips in November, they won't be able to push him out until they vote to approve someone else.

Eric Holder To Resign As Attorney General (source chosen because it has no paywall)

Some dumbass in Korea is desperately trying to gain access to my home system. In less than 6 hours, the system has made over 5,000 unsuccessful attempts to get in. I'm not sure if "phone book" is the right term or not, but they are going through a (very) long list of usernames and attempting to log in with them. One IP address the whole time, just not giving up.

Not that I expect it to make a difference, but I sent an email to their ISP.

This is an interesting change from the distributed attacks that I was used to seeing. Not sure if the two are related or not but I do seem to be seeing a larger number of attacks since being issued a new IP address at home.

Nothing engages (enrages?) the crowd here on slashdot like pointing out what a tool samzenpus is when he posts whackjob conservative FUD to the front page. My first comment has so far drawn twenty-six moderations. Of those 26, the tally is currently:

• 6 troll
• 5 flamebait
• 2 informative
• 9 insightful
• 1 interesting
• 1 funny
• 1 underrated
• And 1 insightful that was undone

What actually surprises me the most is that not one of those moderations were "overrated".

Although if I could ask anything to change here on slashdot, it would be that they give us a way to actually view all these moderations in a way other than having to read the poorly-formatted comments that they send to our slashdot "inboxes". Clicking on my comment tells almost nothing useful about how it was moderated.

A black man is gunned down by police for handling a toy gun in a Walmart. A gun that Walmart was selling.

http://www.vox.com/2014/9/24/6839953/video-john-crawford-walmart-police-beavercreek-ohio-toy-gun

But this white guy can carry a real, loaded rifle (and body armor) in front of a school, refuses to show ID to police and nothing happens.

http://politix.topix.com/story/14304-was-this-man-wrong-to-demonstrate-open-carry-in-front-of-a-high-school

Open Carry laws are clearly meant just for white people. Laws that only apply to one race are the definition of racist.

The article that this links to has nothing to do with wasting food. The point of the Seattle City Council's action is to get people to compost. You can throw as much food as you want in the compost, that is just fine. This goes with their earlier ordinances to encourage recycling, they are just trying to reduce the amount of material that is disposed of as "regular" trash.

This is in response to the atrociously miswritten Seattle Passes Laws To Keep Residents From Wasting Food. Even the worst editors on slashdot usually read at least a little ways in to an article before attempting to summarize it. However, once in a while samzenpus is so engrossed in beating off to fox news that he allows this kind of garbage to slip right in.

Well done, samzenpus. You showed us that just when we thought the front page crap here couldn't get any worse, you can still one up the crappiness. For those with short memories, I will remind us that he also posted these awful gems: NBC apologizes for editing Zimmerman 911 call

school sends child's lunch home after determining it unhealthy

Tesla will discontinue the Roadster

... and the cherry on the turd sundae:

California May Reduce Carbon Emissions By Banning Black Cars

I know I've missed plenty of great samzenpus failures along the way, but these are just some highlights. Really, why the fuck is this idiot an editor? I know some people who work for google, I'm sure they have a decent algorithm that could replace him.

I was shocked when Laurence Fishburne first showed up in those Capitol One commercials. He was so great in Pulp Fiction and the Matrix, I thought, oh no, is his career over already? And now Jennifer Garner (no doubt the daughter of Jim Rockford) is shilling for the same.

The creepiest is Matthew McConaughey driving around at night in a butt-ugly Lincoln SUV softly waxing sweet philosophical nothings to us.

The latest is (the now forgettable) Sarah Marshall and Punk'd Employee of the Month (who I just found out are married (to each other, I mean)) doing like a minute and a half mongo commercial where a Samsung Galaxy tablet is part of every aspect of their lives.

And just like that, poof, the shame and presumed damage to one's career for resorting to "acting" in TV commercials is now gone evidently.

It used to be just voices. Like I can never forget a face, I can pick out a famous actor's voice (I just can't remember names for shit). That way an actor could lend a brand some familiarity, without getting himself all soiled in it. For example I most recently heard a new spot with King Ralph as the voice of it. Have no idea what the product or service was, as in my case I'm usually distracted by the familiar voice.

Which I would think is even more of a down-side when they actually appear in the commercials. As in, the focus is on the spokesperson and not the product or service being pitched. When I see Flo (who, incidently, was in that Ben Stiller honeymoon movie before becoming Ms. Progressive) or Red, I think car insurance or Wendy's. When I think of Matthew McHowdoyouspellhisnameagain, I think of Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, not a dying carmaker division whose vehicles' front ends all look like hideous barn owl faces.

Funny how we didn't do anything about this problem. After Surgery, Surprise $117,000 Medical Bill From Doctor He Didnâ(TM)t Know (new york times, 9/20/2014).

Oh, wait. We didn't actually do anything - aside from handing out the largest government handout in the history of government - with the affordable care act. If you want to know who owns the congresspeople and senators that are supposed to represent you, look only as far as the insurance card(s) in your wallet.

There has been a character limit for article headlines on the front page for ... well, I presume it's been there as long as slashdot has been in existence. For some part of that time, slashdot had editors who ... actually knew how to edit text (we long ago replaced them with people who randomly mash buttons in exchange for stock in dice.com).

Yesterday, there was an article that had a title that just couldn't fit under the limit. At least one comment pointed out that "rollout" was truncated to "rollo".

Now, we could have edited the headline to fit under the limit. Or we could have just buried the story as it wasn't relevant to the scope of slashdot anyways. Yet neither of those options were acceptable. So somehow a patch was devised to allow for this to make it to the front page with its full headline.

Don't try to tell me anymore that this site doesn't cater to a deeply conservative base. No sensible site would have gone to such lengths to get this crappy article up.

I had a little bit of downtime yesterday afternoon with my phone in my hand and decided to see how awful slashdot is with the default browser on Android. It is - as one might expect - rather bad. More so, the front page actually had conservative advertisements on the page (beyond the usual collection of conservative stories). The first ad was touting Paul Ryan being scheduled to appear at a conference about medicare and medicaid. Being as I was not logged in to slashdot through my phone at all, this appears to be part of the new default set of ads served up to newbies.

Well done, slashdot. Might as well cater to your own base. You wouldn't want people to think that other opinions are welcomed here or anything.

PS - I liked it better when we had ads for mail-order-brides on the front page. At least that was something that performs a useful service. The GOP can't claim that.

The situation in Ukraine should be causing conservatives to collectively blow their gaskets, except that most of them discarded logic long ago. Let's examine their beliefs on the matter. Many conservatives believe:

• That Obama is a communist (which is obviously wrong)
• That Marxist communism was the dominant philosophy for most of the existence of the USSR (also obviously wrong)
• That communism and fascism are in any meaningful way similar philosophically (also obviously wrong)
• That Vladimir Putin is attempting to reinstate communism in Russia (also completely and utterly wrong)

If we were to suspend reality long enough to pretend that those statement are not all pure crap, we then have a bigger situation in current events to address - Obama vs. Putin over Ukraine. If the two were philosophically aligned, why would they be so doggedly opposed to letting the other get an upper hand in the situation? Surely, two communists should be able to agree on how to take over a third country for Marxist happiness, should they not?

... and of course, President Lawnchair is building (another!) "coalition of the willing".

If you haven't dumped Comcast yet, you better hurry:

http://www.deepdotweb.com/2014/09/13/comcast-declares-war-tor/

Reports have surfaced (Via /r/darknetmarkets and another one submitted to us) that Comcast agents have contacted customers using Tor and instructed them to stop using the browser or risk termination of service. A Comcast agent named Jeremy allegedly called Tor an âoeillegal service.â The Comcast agent told its customer that such activity is against usage policies.
The Comcast agent then repeatedly asked the customer to tell him what sites he was accessing on the Tor browser. The customer refused to answer.
The next day the customer called Comcast and spoke to another agent named Kelly who reiterated that Comcast does not want its customers using Tor. The Comcast agent then allegedly told the customer:

"Users who try to use anonymity, or cover themselves up on the internet, are usually doing things that arenâ(TM)t so-to-speak legal. We have the right to terminate, fine, or suspend your account at anytime due to you violating the rules. Do you have any other questions? Thank you for contacting Comcast, have a great day."

On "Patriot Day" this year it occurred to me that 9/11 and Benghazi have some interesting parallels. Indeed these parallels, when considered in the context of how completely different the conservative responses to them are, are indicative of how much the conservative right has changed in the past decade-plus.

The fact that the latter event occurred on the anniversary of the former is not lost, although there is no evidence to support that being more than a coincidence.

One of the biggest parallels of the two events is that both were followed by large government investigations. The publication of the findings of one became an instant best seller at bookstores around the country and beyond. The release of the other was preceded by partisan rhetoric from people who were convinced it was a cover-up.

Both events were tried as calls for action by conservative presidents. 9/11 was used as justification for the invasion of two countries - one that was a likely hiding place for the person pegged as the "mastermind" of the attack, and one that had nothing to do with it whatsoever. Quickly as the war drum beat deafeningly loud anyone who dared to question those attacks was labeled as "Un-American" and prepared for tarring and feathering. When the conservative president at 1600 Pennsylvania during the Benghazi attack suggested we change something, he was met with a deafening chorus of "not so fast, we have to try to impeach you first!".

The success of the 9/11 attacks were blamed on "uh, ummm, whatever - we couldn't have possibly known this was going to happen". The success of the Benghazi attacks were blamed squarely on the POTUS and his cabinet.

The 9/11 attacks lead to massive changes - including mandatory anal probes - at airport security for all passengers. The Benghazi attacks lead to more partisan attacks aimed at the White House.

Reality Collapse

... not that we didn't see this coming. Too bad I'm bringing it up in the wrong crowd here.

Slashdot just informed me that recently 5 of my comments - all in different discussions - were up-modded "underrated". It seems an odd coincidence; perhaps someone had mod points they didn't know what to do with? (could it be related to this JE?

Though just as with the people who mod bomb me in the other direction, mod points are likely more effectively used elsewhere. It also isn't likely to bring people to read those comments as the discussions they were in are teetering on extinction.

But hey, to each their own. If someone has mod points they can use them as they please.

Yes, that was plural. One other is that I'm deeply misanthropic. No, not like the Leftie kind. I'm totally with the Left on the belief that people can't be trusted to make the right decisions. But my religion (which is a reference point to my politics, and not one in the same), or my God, commands me to love and forgive others for their failings [if only I could apply that to myself!], and to recognize that despite being highly flawed, my species (i.e. not realy about race, or gender, or other, for me, although I have my prejudices) that I despise so much was made in the image of God and unlike the rest of creation possess cores that will live on past this very beautiful and at the same time very ugly physical world.

So I've never been like for example my sister when she was in college (studying biology/chemistry at UC Berkeley) who wanted to invent something that would, as she put it, wipe out all the human beings so that the animals could live in peace. Nor am I like more adult-thinking Lefties, in feeling that the masses should be enslaved in some sense, for their own good (and that of the earth, and fairness/some universal cosmic karma I guess, etc.)

But though I'm not as bad as maybe around 1/3rd of Americans who are solid Left, it's still something I want to work on.

And then another would be the constant mini-digressions, that I'm prone to, that can be seen in the first couple of paragraphs here. I think this condition of mine manifests itself, in my writing, in lots of parenthetical clauses, and lots of commas, to break up the subthoughts of a thought, and to separate out the hyperlinked if you will related illuminating or context-adding pieces to a thought.

You see, if I don't try really hard to control it, I'm naturally an incoherent mess. So that's another I continously try to work on.

But it's also this second one that leads me to the third and last one I can think of, which is the real topic of this JE. (!)

I constantly get caught up in my own little world, in my head.

From a work performance aspect, I think I was born to be a programmer because I can get in the zone quickly, and get in deep. And I think I create stuff expressed in a way that makes sense, and is robust.

But from a soft skills aspect of work performance, it hurts me badly.

1) In meetings I'm constantly zoning out. My mind frequently wanders back to the issues at hand in the quiet, individual, at-my-desk part of my job. Sometimes unnoticed by me the conversation has meandered to something I've worked on and a question gets posed to me all of sudden, requiring the context of what has transpired so far to interpret. This is hugely embarassing, and is not so swell for my career.

I don't know what to do about this except just try to remember to stay focused on all the floundering around and illogic that the idiots I work with do in meetings, and probably in their own minds.

2) Now I don't think everyone is an idiot of course, and I actually like some of the idiots I work with, because they're nice (goes a long way with me/I can overlook a lot with that), and so my frustration and disappointment with another manifestation of this condition. So I'm deep in thought in what I'm doing, and someone comes by at the end of the (or their) day just to be friendly and social and say goodnight. Like a slug I often just mumble uh-huh or something.

This really hurts, because I don't want to be that way, I'm not really that way when I'm, well, of a fully conscious (of my surroundings) mindset. I really like to socialize with the nice people (who are so few (in today's working world in general?)), I'm just not my "normal" self when I'm engrossed in something. So I come across as a cretan, and so undoubtedly also affecting my working relationships and success.

3) The final aspect of this is that so much time or such frequent trips to my own little world, also coincides with an unhealthy amount of introspection. Don't get me wrong, I treasure my introspective abilities, in a land of what I think are mostly oblivious dullards. But in the workplace, and sometimes in social situations, I would really like some effing obliviousness, as far as internal that is.

Because one deadly way this manifests is in, broadly, public speaking. My somewhat proneness to anxiety attacks are physiological and not psychological, it seems to me, so that's not really part of what I'm talking about here. But examining my voice and my self for cues of it, worrying about if or how much it's coming across, really makes me dysfunctional in orally presenting.

Because of this I dropped most every course in college that included a speech, because I know how my body freaks out (while mentally I'm not worrying about anything, except my body freaking out!). I.e. it's not a preparedness thing, about knowing my topic well enough, or anything like that.

But whatever it is, this also holds me back (as another example I can totally block during a job interview, on something I know full well), and I don't know what to do about that. My mind wants to zone out and focus inward, at the most inopportune times, and it means I don't get to convey to the team everything that I want to about something I've done or researched, and it means I can sometimes just stop, and then the anxiety builds as I can't get myself to focus on getting back to where I was because I'm stuck in worrying about how long it's going to take for me to regain focus! (Usually it's an external stimulus that snaps me back to the task at hand, like someone speaking or otherwise some kind of noise.)

I don't have ADHD or whatever, as I can almost always get myself to sit and read a book and study something for long periods of time. I get engrossed in a movies.

So I'm normal, yet I also grapple with being normal. I don't know how people switch so fast, between deep thinking and social awareness, and how they think and communicate* at the same time without their minds being violently distracted by related thoughts.

*Maybe that programming involves being constantly mindful of related concerns is why I can think and communicate to a computer at the same time.

[Edit: Hit the wrong button while checking for typos; regret if this means redundant notifications get sent out by this system.]