After running without being logged in for quite a while, today someone else tried to login to my account. So I received an email from the friendly people at Slashdot and I decided to log in again.

Actually, not being logged has been starting to piss me off. I've posted many AC comments, but I was never able to find them back. We'll see how it goes. I don't have time anymore for the full-on Slashdot addiction, but the occasional comment has to be posted.

For those doing scientific experiments on Slashdot and are interested to learn about these issues; it's pretty damn rare for a post to be (a) late to the game and (b) by an AC to be moderated up at all, let alone to +5. Yet if the same person (for example me) posts using a 'Good Karma' account, with the accompanying +1 bonus, all of a sudden the (one would think relatively similar) posts get modded up to +5 quite frequently.

What this exactly demonstrates, I don't know, but I thought I'd share it with you.

btw. if you were the one trying to steal my account, leave me a message. I've no hard feelings. :-)

Submitted this one yesterday, but since it's still pending, here it is:

Did I just entirely miss this, or are others also surprised to find that Excite dropped their email account? On their site they say: 'Please note that Excite has been under new management since December, 2001. If you did not come back to Excite to give us permission to migrate your account, it is no longer part of our database of users'. For some reason I was totally unaware of this, so I'm glad no-one else registered mine in the meantime.

Update: it seems that Rob has started a discussion on the issue. I think he deserves some credit,- look at what they have to deal with. For every reasonable comment there's about 10 trolls... Anyways, I've lost my interest in the subject.

Original journal entry:
I was thinking of posting this under the 'Slashdot' Topic, but Censorship seems more appropriate.

A couple of days back, presumably someone in the /. staff decided to moderate down an entire thread. Cost me some Karma, even though my post could be considered in favor of /.

But that's not why I'm mad. It's the general principle of people abusing their power to silence others. I was under the impression that /. was all about freedom of speech, so it's hard to believe that this actually did happen. However, the evidence is not in favor of /.: a couple of hundred comments where moderated down to -1 Off-topic in a _very_ short time,- I was there, I saw it. Several posts dropped from at least +2 to -1 in this period. Practically _every_ post was modded Off-topic,- normally you would expect quite a variety of reasons. Check any thread with trolls and you will see.

I certainly hope this is not what it seems like. I have great respect for all the hard work these guys have put in /. and I consider it a one-time incident.

Some smart-ass decided to start a new thread to collect posts from people who disagreed with this incident. Unfortunately this seems to be back-firing since it's almost entirely filled with bullshit. Not the kind of sensible discussion that deserves any attention...

I submitted this one, but it got rejected. This software (Image Analogies) is just amazing. Provided with two images, one original and one filtered, it 'learns' the filter. After that you can apply that filter to other images. The samples are mind-blowingly kewl,- for example the photo-realistic terrain generated from a map. There's an MPEG that's almost hilarious. Of course Open Source. :-)

2006: sad to say that it looks like these guys lost their domain name. I really enjoyed their site, I wonder what happened. I've removed the link so you don't accidentally click on the link to what now appears to be a bunch of scumbags.
---

Stumbled across sweetcode.org, a site dedicated to kewl software. They have links to some pretty excellent shit.

Got an other story rejected so I decided to start a Journal and post them here. We'll see how it goes.