Larry Lessig may have withdrawn from the special election in California, but hope for a geek or nerd in Congress has been renewed. Bill Foster, Ph.D., a particle physicist from Fermilab, beat perennial GOP hopeful Jim Oberweis in a special election to fill the seat vacated by former House Speaker Dennis Hastert.

The Newsmap, profiled on Slashdot in 2004 is / was a flash-based news aggregator that graphically conveyed the freshness and importance of headlines based on Google News data. Until Google decided to block it after four years of building a loyal following. The author is mounting a campaign to lobby for its reinstatement.

Can somebody please explain the point of the Backslash section? I mean, I understand Slashback is a place to submit follow-ups and not have them be dismissed by the editors and readers as duplicate stories. But why have a separate story highlighting certain peoples' comments?

Isn't that what moderation is for? If you're worried that a rated-five comment doesn't draw enough reader attention, or provide enough reward to the poster, then maybe the moderation system should be tweaked somehow.

Ordinarilly, I'd just disble the section if I felt it wasn't of interest to me. But I figured I'd sound off (to no one in particular) about this before doing so, because I can't imagine I'm the only one who feels Backslash is a waste of bandwidth and editors' time.

P.S., I'd much rather have Slashback as a stand-alone section. And more of it.

P.P.S., I never thought about writing a journal entry here before... but now that I've cracked it open, I can see the value in having a place to show-off story submissions to your friends, even ones that got rejected, and a way to prove you scopped a person whose post was accepted on the same topic.