Apparently, it buys you some nice paintings. I'm not one to usually propagate tabloid gossip, but this is a bit too amusing, really. And, of course, it is about the most overpaid athlete in the history of sport - who of course is a repeat steroid user.

Lately the journal entry spam:nonspam ratio has been a bit higher than usual. A while ago I even noticed one that was " ABC service" in "(town near where I grew up)" and looked to see if I could figure out who was behind it*.

Then today I was looking at new JEs (mostly spam, as usual) and thought I'd try the search function here on slashdot. Rather unsurprisingly, that didn't work, at all. Search for whatever you want, nothing will ever be returned from the journals.

Well done, guys. I guess you accidentally made it more difficult for spammers to find customers on slashdot, but not by much.

*the return was, surprisingly, mostly non-obfuscated. That said, it was not relevant, either. Registration was to some guy in Ft. Lauderdale FL (not even within 2,000 miles of where I grew up) with a hotmail address. Hardly even worth the bother. I also liked how the "mailing address" on the web page itself (not in the WHOIS, but rather displayed on the site itself) was itself bogus.

Earlier this morning there was a FP story here about a negative number screwing up the Swedish Stock Exchange (broken linky here). That story is now, nowhere to be found. Clicking the provided broken link gives a slashdot error.

Also interesting is that when it was up I wrote a comment for it which is also now gone. I'm not sure I've seen this before - I figured it would be like a JE where the post can be deleted but the discussion cannot, though that appears to not be the case here.

So what happened? Where did the story go? I've never seen this happen before...

Least Influential People of 2012.

No surprise that Romney is #1 on this list. I'm actually surprised that facebook boy isn't on there, considering how much his company's stock has tanked (I would bet money this list would have made the front page here if he had). Naturally, our dear Rob Malda - who was on a list of "people who don't matter" back in 2006 - is not influential enough to make this list of un-influential people.

I will hereby make a prediction that next year's iteration of this list will include Grover Norquist.

I recall back in the day there was at least one game for the 8-bit NES that required more than one cartridge to play. Likely it asked for the second one at some point along the way, you swapped, and continued on. I don't recall the name or objective of this game. Does anyone else? I tried searching google for it and instead the results kept directing me to various cartridges that had multiple games on them.

Perhaps one of the Nobunaga's Ambition titles? It seems like it would lend itself better to a game with highly linear play.

any questions?

I've generally been leaving this guy alone lately as I have better things to do than watch him shouting in his echo chamber, but I figured he'd give us something amusing on election day, and he did not fail. A few key quotes from him, with my responses that he won't reply to:

Wow, so very insightful. Can you elaborate further?

You forgot to mention which subset it should be. I presume you mean only people with a certain level of income or property owned? Since you favor the re-establishment of slavery, I presume owning people would count towards owning property?

It's been a while, but tonight I stumbled on this fascinating bit of literature.

Go ahead, count the memes. Then read it again and count 'em a second time :)

Maybe, if we're really lucky, this is an indication of better trolling to come in the future? I'm tired of the half-assed trolling we've been seeing here in the past year or two.

it, will, of course, just be buried by the "liberal media" to the point where nobody says anything of it.

UAW Files Charges Against Romney on his Auto Bail-Out Profiteering.

After all, what's several million dollars between friends?

This story was news yesterday afternoon. I understand that what I submit is not allowed to make the front page, ever, but I'm not the only person to mention it.

Or does the message in Star Wars not properly jive with the conservative bend that slashdot wants on their front page? After all, love, hope, and freedom don't exactly fit well with the ambitions of Ron Paul and the "every (white, Christian, wealthy) man for himself" mentality.

Someone else provided this link last week:

US Presidential Election 2012

So why then will I vote for Obama, knowing that indeed he is barely any less conservative than Romney? Well, in my case a President Romney could be immediately catastrophic for my profession. An extension of President Obama, however, would be bad but not catastrophic. Hence, this vote is simply for self-preservation at this point. Hopefully some other time we will see a third (really, second) party candidate who is viable to win the seat and change something.

It is also interesting that on the libertarian - authoritarian axis there is not a single candidate from the left who scores above zero. Meanwhile most of the candidates on the right are authoritarian or score zero.

I just got foe'd by someone named 'ScienceFail'. Found it quite curious as I haven't posted anything even remotely close to controversial in quite a while and this guy has zero posts. My best guess is he is an alternate account for someone. I wish there were some mechanism for letting someone know why you foe'd them (or friended them). Just curious.

Hadn't seen this before:

Of course, you can't be someone's friend and foe simultaneously. Looks like he accidentally hit the former wanting the latter, then corrected it. So really, I just gained a freak.

I suspect it relates to the fact that I recently pointed out that Ron Paul is full of self-righteous shit and doesn't give a fuck about the rest of the world. Not sure, but just a guess...

First, I laughed that anyone would think they could pull off such an absurd stunt. Then, I cried when I realized that tragically some people mistook it for being connected to reality.

I'm referring to the "documentary" Dreams from my real father, which claims that Barack Hussein Obama Jr is the son of Frank Marshall Davis, who they allege to be a leader of the American Communist Party. To make it even more exciting, the film claims that Obama's mom and "dad" met while the latter was filming a porno starring the former.

So to get this straight, the documentary - which is today the 14th most-popular instant title on netflix - alleges:

• Obama's mom was a porno actress
• Obama's real dad was a communist
• Obama's name and official identity are lies - right down to the birth certificate that lists him as "Barack Hussein Obama Jr".

I'm just waiting to find someone who subscribes to both this crackpot "theory" and the birther movement, since the two can obviously not both be true. Of course, birthers won't let something like reality or logic get in their way...

I am one of a very large number of people who received the obviously bogus text message yesterday telling me that I had won a raffle for a $1,000 Best Buy gift card. The text message directed me to the domain

With a "secret code". I had a few minutes to kill, so I went there from a browser on my linux system and entered a completely different code (turns out, much as expected, you can enter whatever you want into the "secret code" box). This directed me then to

Rather unsurprisingly, these two domains are both less than a year old (the latter being the older, at around 3 months, the former was registered yesterday), and both registered through namecheap.com .

I contacted namecheap.com via their abuse address, and they have so far played every stupid run-around trick they could think of to avoid doing anything. In other words, they know they are aiding in a criminal act and they don't give a shit as long as they get paid.

Not that this is new, many registrars before them have gone down the same path.

Romney is already incapable of winning this election, but that won't stop dedicated activists from trying to steal it for him anyways . We should recall the massive voter suppression efforts the Bush administration and their friends executed in 2004 in Ohio, by intentionally under-supplying voting machines in economically disadvantaged precincts which cause some people to wait several hours to vote while voters in more affluent areas voted in 10 minutes or less.

Now, the Tea Party is targeting likely democratic voters to get them dropped from the rolls for eligible voters.

Whether this is about race or not, this does show one thing. The GOP is indeed united in one thing above all else - their hatred of Obama. They don't care what they have to do to get him out, what laws they have to break, what kind of underhanded tricks they have to pull. Of course this shouldn't surprise anyone after what happened in 2000. And 2004. And 2008. And the midterms in 2006 and 2010.