In his latest journal entry, CmdrTaco talks about how hard it is to pick a winner in the new /. t-shirt contest. Discuss?

UPDATE about something else: Slash won't let me write Hebrew in UTF-8 anymore! It saves it all right, but mangles the output when you try to view the journal (seems that it strips all the high ASCII chars). How nice of you.

In his recent journal entry, CmdrTaco talked about.. uhhmm.. some exhibition, a laptop that didn't work, a TV program and infrastructural changes in Slash. Anyone wants to discuss that?

Sorry for posting so late. I've been busy.
CmdrTaco posted 4 articles that want to get reponses:
This journal entry welcomes a new slashdot employee called Tim Vroom who replaces krow. (I want to work in slashdot too. Is that a good work place? Do you get doughnuts?)
That journal entry is the place where Taco shares us his ponders about expanding M2 so you can know if someone wasted all his mod points on the same user (I did that on Vlad once, when he was still a friend of me)
Here Taco tells us about another weird slashdot user who got tech problems.
And here Taco discusses moderation messages consolidation, The Hulk and some cons.

Come and discuss! So far, the only person who used this channel was Big_Ass_Spork. Wouldn't it be nice if other people discussed it too?

In his recent journal entry, CmdrTaco gives advices on how to ask for help and stuff.
Discuss.

CmdrTaco has been criticized many times for not letting people comment in his journal. Unlike Rusty, CmdrTaco triggers a lot of attention, both positive and negative, wherever he goes, so it's hard for him.

So he enabled comments in his journal for his friends of friends, which is a pretty exclusive list of 146 people (weird that Sllort and Vladinator are there, and the beautiful Daoine too). But it's not enough, and many other people may want to comment, too.

So allow me to bring the solution. I represent the most famous (and infamous) CmdrTaco mispelling (mostly due to actions done by the previous account owner), so I'm the natural choice for providing a comment space for CmdrTaco's journal entries. Each time Taco writes a journal, I will post a journal of my own with a similar subject, and you'll be able to pour your heart in it. Don't let the friends and friends of friends only sign despair you!

I will not post a new journal if Taco posts a journal which is all about himself, since it'd be a bit rude (yes, I'm a good person remember?), so if he posts another journal about what comics and games he bought, you'll have to find a different place to comment in.

So, let's begin
_________________________________

In his recent journal entry, CmdrTaco spoke about users discussing with themselves using multiple accounts, what to do with them, an upcoming IRC forum and also about emails with restricting signature (not necessarily in this order).
Discuss.

ש×oe×× ×--×z×××(TM)×
×× ×(TM) ש×× × ××××

×× ×(TM) ×oe× ×(TM)××"× ×oe×z×" ×× ×(TM) ×z×'×-×'×- ×× ×"×-×z×Y ×'×z××× ×"××ש×(TM) ×oe×"×--××(TM)×" ×"×-×", ××'×oe ×× ×(TM) ×z×"-×-×" ×z××'×(TM)×(TM)ש ××oe ×צ×z×(TM) ש×× ×(TM) ××ש×" ×× ×-×"

×-×" ×"××oe. ×××"×" ×ש×oe××.

Update: This used to be Hebrew in UTF-8. Now it's gibberish because slash strips the high bit or something from the journal. This is so evil!

Good news everyone!
Google is once again breaking the search engine limits by offering a new feature: regular expression search. Using this thing you can finally search things exactly the way you want, starting from specifying what should come first and what should come last, and finishing with wild wildcard searches, like "give me all the words on the internet that contain 2 letters which repeat themselves twice".

Ofcourse, since this search is so powerful, it won't be given for free. To get it, you need either to pay 100$/month to google, or you can sleep with Google's CFO if you look good enough (gender doesn't matter).

Why nobody answers what I'm writing here, ha? It pisses me off that I write all that trolling stuff from my heart, and yet it gets no reply!

So start answering me or either I start kicking ass or just die here, like I did in Geekizoid.

PS: I am so disappointed. I saw that I have a new fan called Mirell and I thought it's a girl (feminine nick and he got anime girls on his homepage) but he's not!

"The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!"

Friends, Hunters, Peasants and Countrymen, give me your money!

We are in a deep trouble, my sons. We need more money or else we're going to die! Yes, I had a talk with Mr. Big Boss from OSDN and he told me that if we don't get a lot of money, then all of us are going to get the sack!

You see, we are in a tough times now. The revenues from ads has steadily dropped during the last months, and no matter how much we increase their size, they still didn't help us to receive our paycheck. You see, nowadays sites can't operate on advertisements alone in most cases. Sites need to get money from the users themselves. And we need money from you, guys.

If they had micropayments by now we wouldn't have had any problems. Everyone accessing /. would pay one agora per day and it could make all of us happy. But what, the internet evolves as fast as the snail I stepped on yesterday, and we are sad, so sad.

Do you want slashdot to die, my sons? I know many of you consider this place to be a huge faceless site which lacks a personal touch. But it is still your life. Try imagining how would your life look like if we die. You'll lose all your journal entries, friends, fans and karma!

You need us. Everyone does: From the typical karma whores who enjoy getting the "comment moderation" messages after writing a ten-feet comment, through the normal people who just read the articles in the front page (yea right), to the evil nasty trolls, who hate this place but need it in order to exist.

Pay us. Make our bank account happy and we'll try to make you as happy as well.

Hi folks!

Hear a sad story.. we paid a lot to our design company for the OSDN logo, and we used that logo for a long time, even that it's not too pleasant, but today we realized a very sad thing:

The O in in the OSDN logo has a dot in it. That dot usually means that it's not a letter, but a digit (zero), and we don't want that the first character in our logo will have such an horrible implication.

So, I'm anouncing an OSDN logo contest. Post your links to logos here (or even post them in ASCII format if you can get past the lameness filter), we will choose the winning logo and the chosen one will win a romantic dinner with the Perl Mistress Heidi Wall

Wondered what you get when you subscribe? since haven't seen anyone doing this list before, and the list in the faq is incomplete, I, out of purely altruistic reasons, will make this list myself.

See stories before they get posted to the public (Plum of the future): In reality you don't get to see a lot of the "red stories", and when you see them, you can't post to them nor know when will they go to the front page.

See the entire comment history of everyone (Plum of the past): The feature I like most. Shows you the "more comments" link so you can see ALL the comments (not all of them, actually, since until a certain version, the comments below 1 were not archived).

Limit journal comments: Subscribed users can determine who will post in their journals: Everyone, Friends, Friends of friends, No foes and No foes of friends. Nice feature but incomplete.

Determine the order of the slashboxes. Remember once you had those up and down arrows on the slashboxes so you could set where each box will be? Well.. now you have to pay for them. (I think that can also you see those arrows if you have excellent karma)

Make more friends: Normal users can make 200 friends. Subscribed users can make 400.

Relationship changes: Subscribed users has another combo box in their message section, which notifies them when someone makes them their friend or their foe.

Access slashdot with HTTPS instead of HTTP - and why would you do that? Because it may work when other parts of slashdot don't work, like now! (April 19 2003 16:40 IST) Right now you can't click "read more" with HTTP, but with HTTPS you can! Anyway it would have been more useful if you had webmail too.

Supress ads: Well duh.

You can flame slashdot and stuff, but remember that technically, slashdot without subscription gives you much more than K5 with subscription.

As you remember, I recommended on using your ISP proxy, so people won't be able to find your IP and abuse it and stuff.

So today I created a new account for myself (wanted to make a fresh new start) And look what was in the email I received from slashdot:

In case you get multiple emails you didn't request,
the requester's IP was [my proxy address].
Its User-Agent was "Mozilla/5.0 (bla bla bla)"
(not that you should trust that value, but it might be interesting).
In case that's a properly-configured proxy,
the value of its X-Forwarded-For header was "X.X.X.X" (MY address!) --
but don't trust that value unless you know a reason to (we don't).

Notice the X.X.X.X. It contained MY IP! The proxy, which I trusted so much, appears to happily surrender my IP address.

So.. it means that you can't trust proxies. I guess that I'll need to install some firewall now..

(Background music: "Let me see" by Morcheeba)

Who can you trust when you need to?
Why do we rust when we heed you?

Once upon a time there was a man named William Scott Lockwood, the 3rd, who used to write under the nick of Vladinator and many others. He was branded a troll, and since he wrote a lot, it happened to annoy some other people who didn't like him, and they decided that they want him away, so they found his phone number by doing a whois on his domain, geekizoid.com.

They managed to harrass him for a while, until that phone stopped being functional, or something like that. But the bad people, who called themselves "The midnight phone boys" or "The anti-vlad triad", still searched for ways to force him to stop writing on slashdot and kuro5hin.

Do you ever think in bubbles?
Do you ever shake up troubles?
Falling apart right from the start
Crawling 'round

After some months (march 2002, to be precise), our friend Vladinator moved to another appartment, so he sent an email to his friends with his new phone number and the phone number of his mother-in-law, so they can notify him in case there are troubles with his weblog.

But what, one or more of the people he regarded as friends weren't really friends of him, and they passed his phone numbers to the harassers, who gladly looked for ways to abuse it. First they posted that number anywhere they could, but since people weren't too glad to call Vladinator, the harassers gave the numbers to Nigerian scammers (you know of them, right?) and told them to call those numbers at 2:00am.

Since that involved Vladinator's mother in law, he was forced to give in to them and he promised he'd stop writing in slashdot and kuro5hin. For some reason that deal didn't hold up and Vladinator is writing in slashdot once again, but that's above the scope of our story.

He wasn't the only one to get harassed. There was a girl who ran that controversial site called Adequacy which looked like a news site but in fact was meant to troll people and cause them to post angry responses. Like Vlad, a similar thing happened to her, probably more because she's a girl and a troll, which is a rare combination. The problem with her is that people could find her real name by searching for her nick, so people somehow found her details, like her phone number, and posted it for some reason.

Show us how to stand up, strong
Waiting, for you takes so long
Shadows leave us standing naked
We can't fake it

So what am I saying? I'm not saying that you can't trust anyone, but I'm saying that you should think twice before sparing information about yourself, especially if you are a troll, or you're intending to act in a very controversial way or annoy a lot of people. Or if you are a girl. Girls are scarce and they raise more attention than boys.

So what should you do?

• If you intend to act controversially, invent a new nick instead of using a nick you used in other websites - especially if it may help people to associate your real name to that nick.
• Don't send your details to several people at once, especially if you don't know them personally. If you want to provide a way for people to send you notices, create some email-to-SMS gateway which will enable people to send you pager/phone messages without letting them know your number.
• Don't put your real phone and address when you register a domain. Invent some funny text instead (like "Reva Altamira" or "Trollaxor De maligne"). Yes, it might cause you problems when doing a domain transfer, but you can easily do a domain transfer by changing the administrative contact.
• Also, the computer security measures mentioned in this semi-humoristic journal entry apply too.

There are so many accidents with trucks, at least here. There was a big scandal some years ago about drivers who just bought their license. But that's not all. Many truck accidents happen when the drivers are tired and drive overtime, or when they drive too fast, or just don't keep distance.

But nevermind to that. Truck driving is a tedious job, and humans shouldn't do that at all. Just being on the road all day? It's awful. Robots should do that instead.

Just think about it. Instead of a tired human who might lose his concentration after several hours, a robot could drive 24h, and the robot will be programmed to follow all safety rules. The robot won't be tempted to overspeed or to ignore safe distance for a while.

The only problem might be with the existing truck drivers, so my solution will be to gradually replace the human drivers with the robotic ones. Existing drivers will not be fired, but no new human drivers will be accepted, and humans will know that they shouldn't take truck driving lessons anymore, unless they want to work as truck diagnosticians.

What do you think? (heh, that could be a great Adequacy article)

• Search within comment body
• Choose your own icons for the journal (and post pictures in your journal, too)
• Post under AC with the +1 bonus (this will cost some credits). Also, get reply notifications even when you're posting under AC.
• Increase your karma by burning credits (but you'd still won't be able to see the numeric value of it. Remember! Karma doesn't matter)

Got more? Write them here and they'll be added to the list!