Hell, I think voting is kind of pointless, but I was trying to limit myself to just Internet activism.

Regardless, I finally voted again, in 2012, after 20 years of boycotting the voting booth. It felt as pointless as ever, but I got a nice sticker that says I voted.

I agree that it seems that way, at first. However, it seems unlikely to actually affect meaningful change. More likely, it will either be ignored or eliminated. A petition has just as much chance of scaring politicians into changing their behavior, and it doesn't bring about connotations of vigilantism and what I suspect will come to be known as "Internet terrorism".

Signing Internet petitions is only marginally less useless and pointless than harassing government employees. In fact, if I made a list of the most pointless activism on Internet, they would be:

1. Printing form letters and mailing them to Congresspeople
2. Writing e-mails to Congresspeople
3. Signing Internet petitions
4. Complaining loudly on Internet forums
5. Hacking and vandalism
6. Publishing a batshit crazy manifesto
7. DDOSing the government
8. Sending death threats via e-mail

That's in vague order of (comparatively) least pointless to most pointless.

We shouldn't have to click on the links, just to understand what the summary is about.

"Will donglegate affect your decision to attend pycon?"
vs
"Will the controversy over alleged sexism affect your decision to attend pycon?"

Hmm. Good point. Next time, I'll remember to ramp up the emotional content.

Opinions are cheap. Reporters cost money.

Increasingly, people only seem to care about being outraged, anyway. Just look at all the blogs out there -- they're basically nothing more than "outrage of the day" articles, cynically designed to appeal to shallow, emotional outbursts. Slashdot is often guilty of this, as well. I'm not sure whether this trend took hold in Old Media or New Media first, but it has totally dominated New Media, and now the Old Media are struggling to stay relevant, by showing they can be just as fluffy and reactionary as the New Media. In some ways, I think this is just a natural progression of trends started in the 1990s. Hell, maybe it started a lot earlier than that, but that's when I remember things getting worse. My parents would probably say it started around 60s or 70s.

I got cyberspace, cyberwarfare, virtual, and cyber command.

Also: "begs the question" does not mean what you think it means.

Thank you for starting us off with a whiny, misogynist rant. Now that that's taken care of, maybe we can move on to discussing the more important topics.

You have to admit that we do tend to be a bit eccentric, at best.

I'd be curious to see what percentage of low-UID Slashdotters have been professionally diagnosed with mental illness. To be fair, it's probably not much worse than the goons at Something Awful.

Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown... the mysterious. The unexplainable. That is why you are here. And now, for the first time, we are bringing to you, the full story of what happened on that fateful day. We are bringing you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimony, of the miserable souls, who survived this terrifying ordeal. The incidents, the places. My friend, we cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts of grave robbers from outer space?

I was actually pleasantly surprised by their prices. $79 really isn't all that bad. I remember these keyboards costing more than that, back in the 1980s, and inflation means that this is actually a huge bargain. Then again, everything but the Commodore 64 was overpriced as hell, back in those days.

So what? You found a group of second wave feminists that are anti-porn, with their positions exaggerated by a sensationalist story.

It's not like that's a rare occurrence. For decades, Andrea Dworkin was dogged by the urban myth that she said "all sex is rape".

There are socially conservative feminists (first and second wave), socially liberal feminists (third wave), and lots of splinter groups that are somewhere in between. There is bitter, intense in-fighting between these groups, and there are quite a few feminists who'd agree with you that anti-porn crusaders have given feminism a bad name.

For what it's worth, the current vanguard is actually quite tolerant of porn. They generally call themselves "sex positive feminists".

Paraphrasing Madeleine Albright: "What's the point of having such a powerful military, if we never use it?"

It's there, so we use it. If it weren't there, we wouldn't be using it.