One of the nice things about metamoderation is you get to see some stuff you missed before, that come up for you when you metamoderate. here's one:

My faith...
by - on Thursday February 07, @03:17PM (#22337950)
I'm an American Muslim who was born and raised here. While I choose to reserve my opinion over the images of the Prophet I do find a lot of the comments on Slashdot to be disappointing. I've been a part of this community since its very inception and have done my best to contribute my expertise to relevant topics. However, its troubling to see that whenever anything Islam-related is posted, there are endless tirades painting my faith with a broad brush of extremism and ignorance.

As I've seen in the past, this sort of post always garners responses such as: "well if you're so level-headed then why aren't you changing the Muslim world?" Unfortunately, all 1+ billion of us are treated as if we're one big happy family. I have no more power to change the world of Islam than I do my own country's domestic and foreign policy beyond the established routes (i.e. voting, debates, etc). We make small but significant gains in our own ways but none of possess earth shattering abilities to make miracles happen. If we--as westerners--are really bastions of knowledge and free thinking then I'd do far more to educated the masses about my religion instead of having it hijacked by both non-Muslim Islamophobes and international extremists.

I will say that discussions littered with such ignorance and hate don't help people like me when we try to open up dialog with members of our religion. As much as people here may call the anti-portraitists relics of the past its very difficult to defend enlightenment and modernism when its laced with veiled Islamophobia [1]. Its even more difficult when people outside of the religion have the audacity to tell Muslims what is and isn't antiquated or kosher. Defining our religion for us wreaks of orientalism and causes even the most moderate to stop listening. I certainly hope I don't get modded or flamed into oblivion because this discussion needs to start somewhere.

[1]: Lets not beat around the bush and call it what it is when 15 century old stereotypes are thrown back in our collective faces even though they may have been debunked already. It even offends me.
Original Discussion: Muslim Groups Attempt to Censor Wikipedia
Rating: Insightful.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

Of course, by the time one metamoderates a moderation, the discussion is often or even usually archived. Yesterday I metamoderated a moderation of a comment for which my comment was the grandparent comment, which I found kind of weird.

Some thoughts on the above comment:

its troubling to see that whenever anything Islam-related is posted, there are endless tirades painting my faith with a broad brush of extremism and ignorance.

Be glad! They're as extremist and ignorant about ALL faiths; most of them anyway, it seems. Any mention of religion at all and the athiests attack. Often no mention of religion is needed for them to flame and troll.

Yes, troll. A troll is NOT "an unpopular opion" as some here seem to think (I get modded "troll" all the time, especially if I'm too blunt about an opinion). A troll, according to wikipedia, is "someone who posts controversial and usually irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the intention of baiting other users into an emotional response[1] or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.[2]" (emphasis mine).

The Muslim gentleman quoted above is in the monority, but so are Christians and Jews. Slashdotters generally worship science (or what they percieve to be science, and they're generally as wrong about science as most Christians are about Christianity) and Americans worship nothing but money.

Tolerance goes both ways. Athiests need to tolerate, too. If you substitute "gay" for "muslim" in you anti-Muslim rant and it sounds homophobic, perhaps you might need a little self-reflection.

Pluto was the Roman god of the underworld, the counterpart of the Greek Hades.

The widely accepted myth about Hades and Persephone was also told of Pluto and Proserpina in Roman myth. Pluto and Proserpina are almost exact replicas of their Greek equivalents, as the Romans' ideas about the spirits of the underworld were very vague before adopting Greek mythology. Venus, in order to bring love to Pluto, sent her son Amor, also known as Cupid, to hit Pluto with one of his arrows. Proserpina was in Sicily, at the fountain of Arethusa near Enna, where she was playing with some nymphs and collecting flowers, when Pluto came out from the volcano Etna with four black horses. He abducted her in order to marry her and live with her in Hades, the Greco-Roman Underworld. She is therefore Queen of the Underworld. Notably, Pluto was also her uncle, being the brother of her parents, Jupiter and Ceres.

In Greek mythology, Plouto or Pluto was a nymph.

Plutocracy is rule by the wealthy, or power provided by wealth. In a plutocracy, the degree of economic inequality is high while the level of social mobility is low. This can apply to a multitude of government systems, as the key elements of plutocracy transcend and often occur concurrently with the features of those systems. The word plutocracy (Modern Greek: - ploutokratia) is derived from the ancient Greek root ploutos, meaning wealth and kratein, meaning to rule or to govern.

Wage slavery is a term first coined by the Lowell Mill Girls in 1836,[1] though articulated as a concept at least as early as Cicero[2] and elaborated by subsequent thinkers, particularly with the advent of the industrial revolution.[3] It refers to the similarities between buying and renting a person, and denotes a hierarchical social condition in which a person chooses a job only within a coerced set of choices (primarily working for a boss under threat of starvation, poverty or status diminution),[4][5][6][7] which make that "person dependent on wages or a salary for a livelihood,"[8] "esp[ecially] with total and immediate dependency on the income derived from...[wage] labor".[9] Wage slavery, in the libertarian socialist and anarchist usage of the term, is often understood as the absence of:

• A democratic or anti-authoritarian society, especially with nonhierarchical worker's control of the workplace and the economy as a whole,[10][11][12]
• Unconditional access to non-exploitative property and a fair share of the basic necessities of life,[13][14] and
• The ability of persons to have say over economic decisions in proportion to the degree they are affected by those decisions.[15]

In terminology used by some critics of capitalism, statism and various authoritarian systems, wage slavery is the condition under which a person must sell his or her labor power, submitting to the authority of an employer in order to prosper or merely to subsist.[16][17][18]

List of minimum wages by country

Living wage is a term used to describe the minimum hourly wage necessary for a person to achieve some specific standard of living. In the context of developed countries such as the United Kingdom or Switzerland, this standard generally means that a person working forty hours a week, with no additional income, should be able to afford a specified quality or quantity of housing, food, utilities, transport, health care, and recreation.

This concept differs from the minimum wage in that the latter is set by law and may fail to meet the requirements of a living wage. It differs somewhat from basic needs in that the basic needs model usually measures a minimum level of consumption, without regard for the source of the income.

Fascism is a term used to describe authoritarian nationalist political ideologies or mass movements that are concerned with notions of cultural decline or decadence and seek to achieve a millenarian national rebirth by exalting the nation or race, and promoting cults of unity, strength and purity.[1][2][3][4][5]

Fascists promote a type of national unity that is usually based on (but not limited to) ethnic, cultural, national, racial, and/or religious attributes. Various scholars attribute different characteristics to fascism, but the following elements are usually seen as among its integral parts: nationalism, militarism, anti-communism, totalitarianism, statism, dictatorship, economic planning (including corporatism and autarky), populism, collectivism, autocracy and opposition to classic political and economic liberalism.[6][7][8][9][10][11][12]

Godwin's Law (also known as Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies)[1] is an adage formulated by Mike Godwin in 1990. The law states:[2][3]

"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

The above text comes from Wikipedia.

I, for one, do NOT welcome my plutocratic overlords, who certainly create hades for their wage slaves. Their heaven on earth depends on my hellish life's wage slavery to create the wealth they control.

Contrary to popular opinion, one does not become wealthy through intelligence, hard work, perseverance, or creativity. Although in many cases these attributes (and more) are necessary, especially for someone not lucky enough to be born into wealth, none of them nor evem all of them are gurantors of wealth.

The one necessary ingredient to obtaining wealth is dumb luck.

It has been noted that there is a correlation between intelligence and wealth, but when you consider that some of the results of wealth's lack, such as poor nutrition, disease, living in a dangerous environment, etc can cause or contribute to brain damage, is it any wonder that poor people are often lacking in brain power? Rich kids don't eat lead paint or live by the interstate highway.

And rich kids' parents can afford decent education, unlike the children of wage slaves who are educated by the government-run schools.

"There but for the Grace..."

ELCOMWA OTA
ELBERSFA OMFRA
IKEMA EBBIEDA
NDAA ACHELRA

Felber's, as well as about every other bar, has a programmable light-box text display. The above message is on it at the moment.

I was amused. "Did you know," I told Tami, who was incredibly uninterested and acted as if even if she had been interested she wouldn't have believed me, "that it's a felony under Federal law to figure out that the sign is really pig Latin and figure out what it says?"

"Yeah?" she yawned. "Bullshit. What law? That's stupid!"

"No shit," I insisted. "It's called the Digital Millineum Copyright Act."

"So are we getting another beer, or are we going to Ralph's? I want to give those baby clothes to Linda."

It seems one must be a nerd to give a shit about the DMCA. Of course, most people have even less respect for the government and the laws it writes than I do. Only half of eligible voters even show up to the polls. The fact that the thoroughly ridiculous DMCA passed with a unanimous vote is the reason why voters won't vote. Lets see, the Democrats are for the DMCA and the Republicans are for the DMCA and if I vote Green or Libertarian the newspapers say I've wasted my vote, why even bother?

Speaking of newspapers, some Stoner wrecked her car.

Woman uninjured in crash

A 20-year-old Tennessee woman was involved in a single-vehicle accident at Illinois 108 and Interstate 55 in Montgomery County Wednesday afternoon.

Ashley N. Stoner of Ashley City, Tenn., was heading east on 108 about 12:30 p.m. and attempted to head south onto the interstate, according to Illinois State Police. As she was making a right-hand turn onto the entry ramp, her 2000 Chevrolet Cavalier hit some loose gravel, slid off the ramp and rolled onto its roof.

Stoner was able to climb out of the overturned car uninjured.

No citations were issued.

Even though this is Springfield, where Gail Simpson is one of our less cartoonish aldermen, I still had to look twice to make sure I was looking at the State Journal-Register instead of The Onion.

I let Tami use my car this morning, and she picked me up for lunch and we ate some fat's food at McDeadCow. She's as much a readaholic as I am, maybe even worse, so of course she had the newspaper. The main front page headline in about seventy two point type screamed:

Longtime Cards fan switches sides

The text sounded like an Onion story, too:

As a credit card-carrying member of Cardinal Nation, taunting Chicago Cubs fans is part of an unspoken oath Jamie Toland took when he pledged his allegiance to St. Louis' baseball team.

"I felt that it was sort of my duty to dislike the Cubs because of the rivalry," Toland said. "I was ruthless and vindictive. I've been to Wrigley Field lots of times, but it was to root against the Cubs."

I've never seen such looser losers as the Cubs. Even in World War Two when they played the World Series against cripples (bacause the able bodied men of the "best generation" were in Asia and Europe shooting at each other) they STILL lost.

Tami's a Cubs fan. People stare when we walk into a bar together and she's wearing her Cubs hat and I'm wearing the Cardinals t-shirt she bought me.

The Cubs do have the best fans of all sports teams. My daughter Patty says it's cheap to go see a Reds game, because the stadium is always empty. If the Cardinals did half as bad as the Cubs, their fans would burn the brewery down.

Oh, by the way, speaking of beer, I sincerely hope you didn't decipher this journal's subject, you damned criminal!

Slashdot has covered the case of Megan Meier, a teenager who was stricken with clinical depression who hung herself after a grown woman, Lori Drew, created a MySpace account and pretended to be a teenaged boy, then after gaining the teenager's affection, wrote to her "The world would be a better place without you".

What I hadn't seen here or elsewhere until this morning when I looked at the St Louis Post Dispatch is that the adult, Lori Drew. is going on trial for "conspiracy" and even more disturbing, "illegally accessing MySpace computers."

How is it that a law designed to outlaw "cracking" can be used against someone whose technical "expertise" is limited to creating a MySpace account?

How can someone be charged with "conspiracy" when the activity they are conspiring to do is not illegal? Clearly, I am no more "sm62704" than Lori Drew is "Josh Evans". Am I breaking the laws against "illegally accessing slashdot computers" by not using my real name? If I used my real name I would likely be sued by a disk jockey/comedian in Colorado whose parents unwisely gave him the same moniker as mine when I was about ten.

The Post Dispatch says

The indictments were handed down after months of rumors that the U.S. Attorney's office in Los Angeles was taking a look at a case that had been rejected by local and federal prosecutors here.

O'Brien filed charges there because MySpace and its computer servers are located in the Los Angeles area.

Dean Steward, one of Drew's attorneys, has vowed to try to get the case thrown out by challenging both the venue and prosecutors' interpretation of the statutes used to charge Drew.

Steward has called the charges "creative." He's also said that Drew didn't type any of the messages, although she knew about Josh's MySpace page.

If convicted, Drew could face five years in prison for each charge. Steward has said that more than a year total would be unlikely, however.

Are the people in LA (home of the RIAA, MPAA and DMCA) all insane? Are they all evil? What's wrong with these bozos?

Why haven't Missouri's child protection agencies gone after Megan's parents for not getting her depression treated? There are a lot of effective drugs and other therapies these days, after all.

Are all these people heartless, stupid grandstanders or am I the one lacking in common sense here?

Could you be the next one to face prison for something that is clearly not against the law?

"I saw your letter", Tami said.

"What letter?" I asked.

"The one in the Illinois Times. Boy, you really gave it to that guy!"

"I haven't seen it", I said. I'd written in response to another letter that they had run May 28 titled Has Medicine really advanced? that ignorantly tried, like some slashdot troll might, to equate 21st century medicine with Lincoln's time.

"I want to show it to Jennifer" she said. She's staying with Jennifer and John while my daughter's in town.

The weekend was pleasant - mostly. She'd called me Saturday offering to buy me breakfast at DJ's, so I picked her up and we ate at DJ's before I dropped her off at the library, where she was doing volunmteer work at a book sale. Friday she'd worked there and come home with a big sack of books and movies, inclucing some Japanese anime for Leila and Star Wars episodes IV, V and VI on VHS for me.

I was excited about the tapes - earlier tapes were the original version where Guido doesn't shoot at all, let alone first, and doesn't have the stupid scene with Jabba the Hut. I watched it with my daughter, who had seen it a million times but hadn't realized Harrison Ford was in it. "He's so young in Star wars!" she exclaimed.

"Well YEAH" I said. "That movie's thirty years old, you know." Sadly, Guido shot first.

Sunday morning, Father's day, I woke up early. I went to McDonald's and was disgusted with the biscuit and gravy and skillet burrito - apparently my body's starting to reject my Supersize Me diet. All it seems to be doing is giving me a beer gut, and my gut's the very last place I need to gain weight.

I went to Felber's (the redneck bar in the ghetto whose motto on their t-shirts is "got guts?") while Patty went to get her sister Leila, whose name isn't spelled illiterately like her cartoon namesake and who has two eyes, neither one of which is in the middle of her forehead. I told her to meet me at Felber's, where I was getting a pizza.

I talked with the bartender about a recent rash of bar robberies here in Springfield. To steal a phrase from Mister T, I pity the poor fool who tries to rob Felber's. My guess is if there's ten people in the bar, two of them are probably armed.

While I was there half a dozen people told me my left rear tire was flat.

Leila and Patty came in. "Dad, you have a flat tire!"

They went and got some fix-a-flat. And season two of My Name is Earl, with the episode with Cops! After airing up the tire we went home and watched it.

The phone rang. In fact the damned thing wouldn't stop ringing all day. Tami had called a few times, Linda called, and now it was Amy. "Hey, I'm in town, me and Connor are fighting".

Yes, Amy's boyfriend is named Connnor and I'm a cyborg. Linda had broken up with her BF, a thieving asshole who had just been released from prison for Grand Theft Auto and is now on parole. Although he's probably not going to be on parole for long, as he'd just been arrested for drunken jet skiing on Lake Springfield last week. Linda had come up with five hundred dollars bail for his drunken jetskiing arrest right before finding out about the ex that wasn't so ex - in fact the ex thought she was current and didn't know about Linda.

So I'd taken Linda to JW's and shot a few games of pool with her, and drank a couple pitchers of beer Saturday.

"Sorry, Amy, you picked a bad time. I'm spending Father's Day with my daughters."

"Boy, dad, "Patty said, "you sure are popular!"

Amy tried again later, with the same response. I wound up using all but three minutes on my phone and shut it off before going to bed.

I looked in the Springfield State Journal-Wrapafish and saw that there were some hookers busted right on my block. One gave an address on my block as her home address, and I didn't even know her!

I'll have to ask some of the hookers I do know if they know the one that lives on my block.

A: Crystal or crack?

Q: What are our corporopolitical leaders smoking?

Is Wal Mart evil? No. At least, they're a damned sight less evil than any other God damned corporation.

I bank at Town and Country bank - for now. I won't for long.

I was at the Evil American company Shell (oh wait, that multinational is a Dutch company, ain't it? And with a multinational company does it matter?) and picked up a jug of windshield solvent when I paid for my incredibly expensive gasoline, none of the expense of which goes to health care like it does in civilized countries.

I left it on the counter. "Three fucking dollars? Are you people out of your tiny little skulls? This shit was seventy nine cents last time I bought it!"

"It's that price everywhere" the middle aged poverty-stricken minimum wage worker behind the counter who certainly feeds his children with food stamps because Shell, with record profits, is allowed to pay its workers starvation wages said. "I just use water in my squirters".

I threw Lucy Furr out again. She had been nice to me. "Lucy's" real name is Tami; the "Lucifer" is a joke between us. I've been letting the 42 year old fat woman stay at my house while the 28 year old alien she's married to is in basic training for the Illinois National Guard. Her "Stimulus check" came and she spent quite a bit of it on me. "I owe you so much," she said, "there's no way I could possibly repay you for all that you've done for me."

Meanwhile I don't know how I could have gotten through the vitrectomy without her. And she's been cooking and cleaning and washing my clothes, and she's come up with a shitload of food. My pantry is full and I haven't bought much food at all.

But my youngest daughter is visiting from Cincinnati (holy shit, mcgrew spelled "Cincinnati" right) for her sister's birthday and Father's Day and she needs her bedroom back while she's visiting,

Plus she doesn't like Tami at all.

So Tami's at some other friends' house while Patty is here. She filled my car and bought some household items like toothpaste and toilet paper right before she went. She'll be back, as the termination machine said. Her belongings are all in my basement, where I'm likely to be tonight if we have tornados.

She had been waiting with bated breath (if you're waiting with baited breath, go brush your teeth) for that check. She had gotten a letter from Uncle Sam saying to expect it last Friday, and it didn't come. Her mail is forwarded to my house, so it got there Tuesday.

I'd let her use the car, and an hour before quitting time she excitedly came to my work with her check signed over to me, and one of my deposit slips filled out and ready for me to sign. I signed it for her and she drove off.

She was back at quitting time, and she was PISSED OFF. My bank woiuldn't accept the check. "They said the policy was that both people on the check had to be there", she said. "They said I had to talk to a manager but they were all in meetings the rest of the day".

"Don't worry" I said. "We'll go tomorrow on my lunch hour and straighten it out."

The next day at lunch I drove home and picked Tami up and went to the bank. The manager was at lunch.

We ate some fats food at Mcdonalds and I took her home, telling her I'd take off at two. And no, that wasn't a typo.

For quite a while I've wondered why they call it "fast food" since it's never fast and it's barely food. I can go to Top Cat's (or could if it wasn't so far from where I work) or Track Shack, sit at a table, have my order taken and my food in front of me faster than I can wait in line at McDonald's, even if I use the drive through. Fast? Huh?

But then it hit me: the whole purpose of this type of food is for underweight people like me who are trying to gain weight. It tastes so bad because it lacks nutrients; but lacking certain nutrients will cause you to think you're hungry when you're really full. The taste of this food is an undesirable side affect of its purpose. It isn't fast food nor does it claim to be. "Fast" is the typo. It's really fats food.

Unfotunately I'm having to go off my "supersize me" diet because it's affecting my health. I had a really bad case of the runs the night before last and yesterday, followed by gas and constipation.

At two I left work and got Tami, and went back to the bank. The unpatriotic manager of the unpatriotic bank understood that there was no way for the man in basic traing to be there to cash his stimulus check but unfortunately it was bank policy.

Leila's DVD player had Leilashe doesn't have one eye in the middle of her forehead and "Leela" is the illiterate spelling of "Leila" rather than the other way around; leila has been alive a lot longer then Futurama. Otherwise Futurama got her right. I cashed a check at the bank where the manager had pissed me off by refusing to take a government check that there was no chance of bouncing.

"You only have eighteen dollars in your account", the teller said.

"I just deposited fifty from my savings this morning" I protested.

"Oh," she said, "here it is" and gave me my cash.

Traveling down Macarthur from the bank there at Ash, Tami said to stop by the gas station, where she bought beer and sixty dollars worth of gasoline. Then she wanted to go by Ralph's, because she'd owed him thirty dollars for a very long time. She gave the elderly WWII vet forty, and we left for WalMart.

I headed to the electronics section while she headed to Customer Service. I bought a DVD, and she walked up as I was leaving the checkout.

"They cashed my stimulus check for me!" she said.

WalMart served as a better bank than my bank. "I want to get a few things" she said, and bought cat food and cat litter for Patty's cats, and a jug of windshield washer fluid.

Ninety four cents for the washer fluid that Ayerco and Shell wanted three fucking dollars for.

This morning is Thursday, and a new Illinois Times is out. That's the free Springfield weekly newspaper, a left-leaning independantly owned rag that kind of balances the right leaning corporate State Journal-Register.

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Forget Hollywood - the true story of a fabled relic, and its owners, is weirder than fiction

I went by Shell, where gas had been $3.95 the day before yesterday, because I'd picked up a nail this week and they're the only ones with a real air pump - you know the ones, the old fashioned kind that you don't put quarters in that actually work and will, unlike the ones that cost seventy five cents, fill my 45 psi tires. I was going to put another twenty dollars in just for having the air, but gas had shot up to $4.14. I put five in.

The minimum wage guy wasn't there; the fellow behind the counter looked like an owner or manager.

"Five bucks on pump, um, the one on the end. Oh, and Walmart has your three dollar washer fluid for ninety four cents."

"I don't have WalMart's supply chain. I can't sell it that cheap."

"You could sell it for a buck and a half."

"I can't buy it for a buck and a half".

"Buy it at Wal Mart" I told the fucking moron.

I'm so damned sick of these brainless so-called "businessmen" these days I could scream. I wish these morons would go into rehab and give up the crystal. Or is it crack they're smoking? Greed and stupidity are side effects of cocaine, after all. Crystal as well, I think.

Slow down, cowboy

Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.

It's been 3 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment

Chances are, you're behind a firewall or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form. Please try again. If the problem persists, and all other options have been tried, contact the site administrator.

Wow now that's really intelligent. I have 22 "messages" but I have to wait five minutes to answer any of them. And some are dated yesterday on stories athat are long off the front page and unlikely to get any comments except from "teh slashdot message center".

Relationship Change

Hmm, either I impressed somebody, or pissed them off. So I click, and damned if my head didn't asplode.

Slashdot Message for sm62704
Message Preferences List Messages Relationship Change
sent by Slashdot Message System on Wednesday June 11, @12:05AM

sm627O4 (1305237) has made you their friend.

If you'd like to, view or edit your friends and foes.

After finding a funnel and putting my brains back inside my head I realized what had happened.

I have a Doppelgänger.

I had one of these back in my days at K5 too- someone there (I always suspected my underaged nemesis "nigga", who was eventually banned from the site) of registering "mcgrevv".

I suspect that it's the same AC who replies to every comment I make that has an on-topic link to these journals with "wank wank" or some variation thereof.

And I thought I had no life! Of course, I said something similar back in '03 in loser+.5 when I said "If so, I must be a loser among losers." A character named "bunny vomit" replied

Oh please! You actually *go out*. :P

Offtopic, but today's featured article at uncyclopedia is the Turing Duck Test, an assay developed by Alan Turing to determine whether a subject is a human or a duck. As one of the very, very few slashdotters who think that the idea that computers may become sentient is laughable, I was of course amused.

So anyway, I was asked to metamoderate like I am almost every day and of course I did like I usually do, and one of the comments that I was asked to metamoderate was

Re:Skews will always be wrong... (Score:0, Troll)
by PC and Sony Fanboy (1248258) on Monday April 14, @12:55PM (#23065728)
AHHH!! modded down by an angry conservative!

This was modded "troll" as was its parent comment, which I'll get to later.

It was rightfully modded down, but it was not a troll. It was OFFTOPIC. because if that I declined to metamoderate the moderation. I may not always do this; if you catch me on a bad day I may smite thee.

I was not asked to metamoderate the parent.

Skews will always be wrong... (Score:-1, Troll)
by PC and Sony Fanboy (1248258) on Monday April 14, @10:17AM (#23062996)
According to some sources (fox news) the wild wild 'net is full of left wing liberal tree huggers. Which means that the sample of the population which is 'skewing' things will be taken from the net, and not representative. For example, senator 'the internet is a series of tubes'. Old people generally don't understand and don't use the internet.. and old people also tend to be conservative.

Most people would agree that the internet is a place that many old people avoid (although there are some who embrace it, but they are not the norm) and the majority of web sites target people under 30... (or people looking for porn)- basically, the internet is liberal in composition, so how does skews bring anything to the table? It looks to me like a big self affirmation party.

The comment was a heaping, steaming pile of poorly written, completely unthought out uninformed bullshit, but it wasn't a troll.

However, the commenter's name "Sony Fanboy" is itself a troll. Anybody who was victimized by Sony's rootkit has every right to kick the living shit out of the little punk bastard if they see him, and with my blessing. Come to think of it, maybe "troll" in this case is deserved even if the idiot asswipe somehow manages to make an informed, interesting, insightful, witty comment.

"Overrated" (even as it stands at -1) would be a more accurate mod for this. But a stupid comment like this boy's (who is obviously too young to be at any site that my journals are in) needs not moderation, but rebuttal.

Hell, the rebuttal wouldn't even need to actually say anything as long as it was coherent.

Re:Skews will always be wrong... (Score:1)
by Actually, I do RTFA (1058596) on Monday April 14, @01:25PM (#23066236)

the majority of web sites target people under 30.
The majority of tv/movies/music/internet sites/advertising campaigns (which drives the previous) either target people under thirty (nice amounts of disposible income) or people over thirty (by telling them they can be hip again, by doing what 30-year-olds do).

--
Your ad here. Ask me how!

And ladies, THAT AIN'T IT! People over 30 don't give a rat's ass about what's hip, and people under 30 for the most part don't have any money. What money they do have they mostly waste on vainly trying to be hip.

I should probably not metamoderate on Mondays. I'm on Monday like Arthur is on Thursdays. I'm sitting here now scratching my head; that journal I made about Obama had a lot of comments. I'd write an equally scathing one about McCain, but as he's not my Senator I'm a bit more ignorant about him than I am about Obama.

But anyway, I digressed this time before I even got started. I went to Columbia Saturday and picked up some Columbian. "Columbian" as in "killer bud".

But not the Columbia in South America. This was the Columbia in Southern Illinois. Well, actually the weed wasn't exactly FROM Columbia; the farmer lives in a different town near Columbia. Columbia was where I smoked it - or rather, come to think of it he's not actally IN Columbia or he'd have been in trouble when he was raising pigs, goats, chickens, turkeys, dogs, and snotnosed children (they're his stepdaughter's kids; she and her husband have drug problems and the family welfare folks took the kids away and saddled poor Mike with them). He's right outside town, up on the bluffs. At Mike's you'd swear you were in Kentunky.

The pot farmer lives fifteen or twenty miles from Mike.

So Friday night had found Tami and me at Felber's drinkiing one last pitcher, and I found myself sleeping far later than I'd wanted to Saturday morning. I called Mike and told him I'd be down in a few hours.

Tami said she wasn't going, apparently she had whatever I'd had all last week. Plus the fat woman was looking to get her stimulus check so she could blow it on alcohol and junk food.

Mike had wanted me to have another look at his damned Dell, which he'd paid some asshat ninety dollars to fix. Its video output had been seemingly stuck in "power reserve" mode and I hadn't been down there in quite a few months.

I drove by the bank and withdrew the king's ransom it would take to drive the two hundred mile round trip, then to the gas station for fuel, check the oil, check the tires (two were low) and hit the road.

Traffic had it in for me. Every green light had people waiting for it to turn yellow so they could go. I'm going to wear my damned horn out waking up these damned people who drive with Dr. McCoy's sleep inducers on their heads. You know the inducers I'm talking about, they look like cell phones and people use them to catch a few ZZs at the intersections.

I got as far as Stevenson where the speed limit (the legal limit, not the REAL limit the traffic lights impose) goes up to 45 so I set the cruise at fifty, and left it there until I got to Litchfield, where I ate some ground cow before continuing my 55 mph journey.

Doing fifty is a wonderful way to travel, so long as youre not in a hurry. At 65mph, the speed limit, it takes an hour and a half, traffic and road construction permitting. At fifty it takes two hours, and traffic and road construction don't come into play.

It's amazing how people drive in herds, like cows and sheep. It's even more amazing when you put a predator (like the State Police) in the mix; Animal Planet ain't got nuthin on I-55! Speaking of the highway that takes you from Wrigley to Busch, it is the sole reason that a Sammy Hagar song isn't obsolete. That song was a protest against the "universal 55 mph speed limit" which was rescended two decades ago.

Now it's a protest againt highway 55 (parts of which are also Route 66) in Illinois.

I actually cheered a cop. He had a semi pulled over! Poor fool will probably lose his badge over it, or at least have to write "I will not fuck with monetary commerce in Illinois" a hundred times on the State Police blackboard.

The herds of SUVs and luxury cars bleated past at high rates of spped, far exceeding the 65 mph speed limit, riding literally inches from my back bumper as they waited to get over to pass.

Well, most of them. Some sit inches from your bumper for miles on end, as if they're going to bully me onto speeding up or as if they're afraid it's against the law to change lanes.

I eventually went on I-255, and exited at 157 in Cahokia. I hadn't seen Jeff in ages; he doesn't have a phone so I can't call to tell him I'm coming, and the last three or four times I've been down there I hadn't caught him home.

I grew up there. It used to be a nice town until they tore East Saint Louis down to build I55, I-64, and I-255. All the hoodlems and gangsters that used to live in E. St. Louis had to move somewhere, so they moved two miles south to Cahokia.

The Cahokia Mounds aren't in Cahokia. They're in Collinsville. The Cahokia Downs racetrack (is it still there even?) isn't in Cahokia either.

The oldest courthouse in or west of the Missippi valley is, however.

I pulled on to 157 (kids, don't try this at night. Not unless you're heavily armed like everyone else there or, like me, incredibly stupid) Jeff was home; Glenna (a bipolat crazy bitch that reminds me of Jeff's late brother Jim's first wife) must be back on her meds because she's really gotten fat. Jeff smoked a bowl with me. "You should have been here a couple of weeks ago," he said, "there was some opium around."

Glenna said "you shouldn't smoke opium, it leads to harder drugs."

I laughed. "That's like saying Whiskey leads to harder alcohol!"

I didn't stay long, as I had a computer to look at. I got back on the highway to Columbia. Mike greeted me with a beer, and went to the barbecue pit and spread the hot cooals. No starter fluid for him; he uses tinder to get his charcoal lit. He's not an ecofreak, he just doesn't like the way charcoal lighter makes your meat taste. I'm in agreement, especially when so many dumbasses think they have to use half a can and put the meat on before the fluid all burns off.

I went in to look at the computer. It wouldn't recognize the DVD or CD burners. At all.

I rebooted it and went into the BIOS. It, too, was completely ignorant. The BIOS knew there were drives, but it scratched its head and said "well, by crackey;" it's an old computer - "I thinks there's some CDs or sumpthin' thar but I'll be durned ifen I kin figger 'em out."

Hard to load the drivers from CD when the CD player won't work.

I finally gave up; next time I'm down I'll open it and put a CD ROM from another computer in and load the drivers from there, with my fingers crossed that nobody has fuX0red up the BIOS.

Mike brought out a small container of pot and had me roll. Half a joint later and I was ready to fall off of my chair.

The killer was back. It was a different farmer growing this, so I'm of course not going to say his name as he's and old friend and I wouldn't want him to get caught even if he was a bitter enemy.

Of course, after smoking THAT it was time to eat. And eat. And eat.

And smoke some more.

We wound up driving fifteen or twenty miles to the farmer's house, where he's using the Dawson-Fairy method of hemp hydroponics, named after Jeff Dawson and John Fairy, who pioneered its use before giving up pot farming. John doesn't even smoke any more; it's been a few years since this still unknown reefer-growing method was invented.

The reason you haven't heard of it is because it's a new method, very energy efficient and the cops can't tell you're growing by a change of electric bills or a heat signature. And aside from this hint you won't hear it from me, either. Although in a few years I magine the secret will come out and everyone will be doing it this way.

I just smile when the kids talk of smoking "hydro". It isn't that hydroponics makes pot more potent, it's that hydroponics makes growing faster, at least when the plants are first cloned.

The cloning is the reason for the killer high. You find the best plant you can find, and keep cloning. If it's genetically superior it's going to get you wasted, asuming you know when to harvest and how to time your lights. If it's cloned it's most likely grown inside, where it's not going to be polluted by pollen and produce seeds.

We drank a beer with the farmer (well, I drank a beer, Mike drank four) and I took Mike home, then drove the hundred miles back to Springpatch.

At sixty seven mph. I got there about 11:00. Tami was asleep on the couch.

---

FredFrederickson made a 1 rated comment that really should be seen. Here it is. It concerns the cops giving a young man a hard time for two reasons: because he's young, and because they can.

Update 6/10/8
I corrected a few typos and made some other minor edits. I also ran across a related story in the Chicago Tribune that was originally in the LA Times, U.S. in huff over Legal Weed. The Tribune version is linked (sorry) because I couldn't find the original.

For the Times and Tribune editors, one does NOT huff weed. One huffs kittens.

WEED, Calif. - This town is in a tempest over a bottle top.

The federal government is telling the owner of a small brewery here that the pun he's placed on caps of his Weed Ales crosses a line.

"Try Legal Weed," the caps joke.

The U.S. Treasury Department's Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau says those three little words allude to marijuana use.

The bureau's bureaucrats have told Dillmann he needs to stop using the "Try Legal Weed" bottle caps. If he doesn't, he could risk fines or sanctions. His worst fear: being forced out of business.

Your tax dollars at work.

Or as one slashdotter's sig says, "oh look, my tax dollars at work coming to arrest me."

Yet another Update 6/10/8
This update concerns the FredFrederickson comment. At least he wasn't tasered twice and taken to jail like the guy in the linked article, who is now suing Officer Quimby and Springfield. But then again, this IS a cartoon city.

I've chastised folks for blindly following tired cliches ("money doesn't grow on trees"? Tell that to an orchard owner) but here are two I'm going to trot out here, neither one as universal as any of the others.

"Birds of a feather flock together"

"You are judged by the company you keep."

Well, the first holds true for birds; different species usually don't fly in formation. But it doesn't always hold true for humans, all of whom ARE the same species (except perhaps for my ex-wife, Evil-X, who I suspect was spawned in the depths of hell itself)

But you are indeed judged by the company you keep, even if those judgements may be unfair.

I've had misgivings about Barack Obama since he first ran for Senate. His campaign headquarters was right next door to recycled Records on Adams street downtown here in Springfield. When I walked by his headquarters, I never saw anyone in there except black people.

I've walked past Republican HQs, even when they were running some redneck, and saw people of all races. I thought at the time Obama was racist, but after finding out his mother is white I decided that he must be pandering, like all politicians do.

But then I logged on to his church's web site. It was an "unashamedly black church" and it had the most racist, anti-American rant I'd ever seen.

The post was long gone before the so-called "Christian" pastor with his "unashamedly black church" hit the news. The first thing that struck me was that Christians don't go to black churches, and Christians don't go to white churches. Christians go to Christians churches.

Obama then quit the church he had gone to for twenty years, with its racist, white-hating preacher who had been Obama's close personal friend for political expediency. Score more negative points for him in my book.

Now another of his close personal friends is headed to prison.

Yes, I've known three people who went to prison, one a close personal friend and another the brother of an even closer persoanl friend, as well as my cousin who I haven't seen since I was a kid... no, make that four, Mike's cousin is in a Misouri prison for DUI (what George Bush paid a hundred dollar fine for).

But I'm not running for President, now am I? I'm just posting journals about drinking and hookers (and Obama and other nefarious things and people) on slashdot.

But I think there's little to fear that Illinois will lose its Senator. The nature of Republican politics makes it a near certainty that both the first black President and the first woman President (unless Bush and Cheney both die before January) will be Republican.

Neither Democratic front runners had a chance. I just hope McCain won't be as bad a President as I fear he will be.

I'm voting for Bob Barr, and I thank God he doesn't have a snowball in hell's chance of winning.

From the Chicago Tribune:

Sen. Barack Obama, calling the saga of convicted Chicago power broker Tony Rezko "a sad story,'' suggests that he has had plenty to say already about any support that he had drawn from Rezko in the past and is focused on the presidential campaign ahead.

"Obviously, he was a friend, he was a supporter, he raised money for my campaigns,'' Obama said in an interview with Tom Negovan of WGN in Chicago. "Now, he's a sad story of somebody who clearly crossed the line.''

Rezko, whose friendship and fundraising benefited the careers of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, Obama and others, was convicted Wednesday of using political clout to orchestrate millions of dollars in kickbacks. A federal jury found Rezko guilty on 16 of 24 counts in a trial that exposed an ingrained culture of corruption in Illinois government.

God help our nation whichever one of these corporate-owned power hungry men win.

"I'm gonna die!" Tami exclaimed Sunday morning when she finally got up.

"No you won't", I replied. "You're not that lucky. You're just gonna suffer."

I'd been up since eight thirty, drinking coffee and reading The Restaraunt at the End of the Universe. Zaphod and Ford had just sobered up in the sobering up machine after several Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters (the drink that's like having your brain smashed by a slice of lemon wrapped around a solid gold brick) and had gotten Marvin to open Hotblack's black star cruiser for them so they could steal it. I know what happens next, having read the books before. I envy those who haven't read them.

As Tami slept, I'd turned on the TV. It's odd that we still say "turn on" when we refer to turning something on, as there's nothing to turn. The only knobs left are on the stove and car radio, and the cheapest of boom boxes. But even though the radio part of my cheap boom box is analog and has volume and tuning knobs, the on-off switch isn't part of the volume knob the way they used to design things.

The science fiction writers were right about one facet of 21st century life - everything is push buttons. If language evolves, then why don't we say "push on the TV set"? No longer do you turn anything to make it come on like you did with the black and white 20th century TVs you had to get out of your chair and turn a knob to change channels on.

I don't miss the TV's knobs one bit. I don't miss the incredibly stupid and dangerous car volume buttons one bit either. Someone's sig says "poop is a one word argument against intelligent design", but the same could be said about the intelligence of automotive engineers and carbon monoxide. Poop is, after all, useful. Bullshit is a very good fertilizer, without which the bulls would starve, but carbon monoxide and the other poisons spewing from your car's ass are not only useless, but destructive. The late 20th century car stereo volume buttons are a good argument against the intelligence of engineers too, who all think they're so damned smart.

I contemplated this as I idly flipped between the six channels on my TV. There are "only" six because I neither have nor want cable. I had cable when my kids were little, back when the Discovery channel had science shows instead of "Trick my truck for truckstop tricks" and other useless noncompos crap like that.

Wikipedia doesn't give credit for the coining of the word noncompos so I won't link it. "Noncompos" was a word coined by an Isaac Asimov character in a short story about an assburger nerd who saves a spaceship's crew with his encyclopediac knowledge. By "noncompos" he referred to normal people of normal intelligence, who all hated him as much as he hated them. I wanted Wikipedia to tell me the name of the story and its character, but I might as well have tried to look it up on the Uncyclopedia.

The last time I tried to edit Wikipedia the edit was removed within an hour. Several months later it was re-edited by someone else to say pretty much what I had put there, so fuck it. I'm done wiki-fiddling. If I want to edit an encyclopedia I'll edit the Uncyclopedia, which is a whole lot funnier than Wikipedia anyway.

One channel was talking about Obama quitting his church after the latest un-Christian preacher from Trinity's unChristian outburst. In my opinion it's a little late; Obama has been a member of the Trinity Church of Hateful Preaching for twenty years. If my preacher had such hate filled sermons I sure as hell wouldn't have attended that church for twenty more years.

With preachers like "Assassinate the President of a foreign country" Pat Robertson (who has converted more Christians to Athiesm than all the slashdot athiests combined), The "God damn America" pastor of Obama's Trinity United Church of Hate, and now another guest preacher of that church, Rev. Michael Pfleger, who yahoo news gives credit for Obama's quitting attendance at that church, Satan has her work cut out for her.

What struck me about Pfleger wasn't his making fun of Hillary Clinton crying, a very un-Christian thing to do in itself, but the man can be forgiven for that. Forgiveness is what Christianity is all about anyway, although we seem to hear little forgivness from today's preachers.

No, what struck me about this mammon-worshiping asshat who pretends to be a Christian was this passage from a Chicago Tribune story dated June 1. "Because he had received more than 3,000 e-mails of 'hate, threats and name-calling,' he said, the security guards who often flank Pfleger even kept parishioners at a distance as an extra show of caution."

A Christian doesn't need security guards. If a someone wants to punch a Christian, a Christian lets himself be punched and offers the attacker to do it again. "If a man smite thee, turn the other cheek". If someone wants to shoot a Christian, the Christian dies and goes to heaven, or God keeps him from being hit, or if not then keeps from dying. The Christian leaves it up to God and knows that if it's his time to die he'll die, and if it's not then no bullet can stop him.

The last Catholic Pope took a bullet and that never stopped him. He forgave the shooter. It isn't to his credit that he rode the bulletproof popemobile, but pain smarts; and by "smarts" I mean "teaches". Once bitten, twice shy. But the new Pope should forego the bulletproof car. Of course, my opinion is meaningless on the subject, as I'm not a Catholic.

Tami, now on her second marriage, is. Or was. Or something. Hell, I don't know.

I shouldn't talk, I haven't even been inside a church since last June, and there's a church two houses down from where I live. The church is right across the street from a dope house. I never was in the dope house, but some of the whores I know have. I used to go there almost every Sunday. The church, I mean, not the dope house. They pass a microphone around for folks to praise God for this and that, so the last Sunday I was there I took the microphone and praised God for giving me a surgeon and circumstances that my incredibly bad eyesight could be cured in one eye making it better than 20/20.

By nightfall that evening the eye I'd praised God for restoring was completely blind. I guess God doesn't like my praising Him so I think I'll try to stop stop doing that. Or maybe he was just giving me another sign of his existance, knowing I come here to Athiest Central. Do virri believe in humans? Would you scorn the praise of a virus?

The eye had gone completely black from being filled with blood, which eventually cleared up. Of course, it repeatedly did this until the retina detached, causing me to have to suffer a vitrectomy. I woudn't even wish a vitrectomy on an oil company executive.

I flipped the channel some more. There's another archaic word; the picture looked like it flipped when you changed channels on the old TV sets, but even though the transition is now seamless we still say "flip the channel" and even though there's no knob we still say "turn it to channel seventeen". But "gay" no longer means "happy and carefree" so that Deck the Halls is now a song about transvestites, "gay" refers to a group of people of whom half attempt suicide, and "hacker" no longer means someone who writes quick and dirty code or modifies hardware, but now means "cyber-burglar".

Fox had a political talk thing on so I watched for a while. Astoundingly one of the commentors (I still refuse to use the ugly and ignorant word "commentator", geezer attack anyone?) mentioned not only the Libertarian Party but its Presidential candidate Bob Barr! Not astoundingly at all they didn't say jack shit about the Green Party candidate, whoever he is. I say "not astoundingly" because the Libertarians' biggest glaring fault is that they are illogically pro-corporation. The Fox corporation must have discovered that salient detail. Or maybe they're been lurking at slashdot.

The un-American multinational corporations like Shell and Sony and Zenith and Ford and Fox and the God damned rich sons of bitches (some of whom are native born unpatriotic American traitoirs) who run them are ruining our once great nation. Locally owned businesses are for the most part reasonable in their prices. For example, I can get a haircut at Martha's Magic Comb for five dollars, Fred the Barber next to Felber's charges only six. Go to one of the multinationally owned chains at the mall and you'll pay thirty five, if you're fucktardedly stupid enough to go there in the first place (and many do). They want three dollars for windshield washing fluid these days, what the fuck? Last summer it was seventy nine cents! I'm just going to use water and the hell with it.

I'm conflicted about the Libbies. On one hand they want to legalize reefer and hookers, on the other hand they want to further decriminalize the corporate rape of the American people. I wonder what the Green party's stance on drugs, gambling, and prostitution is?

I actually feel sorry for the evil rich. There is a world-wide economic depression on the way and the pendelum will swing. We haven't had a depression since Hirohito stupidly pissed off America by bombing Pearl Harbor. In the 1930s no mansion or Cadillac was safe from vandalism, and a banker who was spat on felt lucky he hadn't been shot. The average man on the street cheered bank robbers. "Bastards get what they deserve," the average Joe who'd lost his house grumbled. Thank God the oil men will be out of the White House next January, eight years ago gasoline was four times less expensive. Why hasn't the minimum wage gone up 400% to match everything else? And where's MY pay raise???

When the Fox show was over there was another political show on chennel 20. When that was over there were nothing but half-hour long commercials on that fine Sabbath, so I turned the TV off, despite the fact that TVs no longer have anything to turn.

"Don't touch that dial!"

"Mom, what's a 'dial"?

"I don't know, honey, it's just something they say."

We still dial the phone even though the phone no longer has a dial either.

Earlier in the week I'd been in the bar (of course) and had gotten an invitation to a birthday party Saturday, which was (mostly) the cause of Tami's great distress on Sunday. Saturday morning she'd woke me up being noisy, which was a good thing because I needed to get to the bank before it closed, and we needed to buy ingredients for a dish to take to the party, and beer, and other less necessary things like food and toilet paper. Tami and I had had a tornado party in the basement Friday night when the new tornado sirens you can't hear went off. Why do they say "went off" when they come on? The old tornado sirens were loud, unless there was a tornado, in which case the power went off and they stopped working. We drank beer and vodka in the basement and listened to the inane ramblings of the dufuses on the radio.

We went to Felbers for a pitcher of beer (still reasonably priced, but it's a private-owned bar) Saturday morning while her cheese ball cooled. Then to the party for lots of food and beer, and reminscence of the old war with other service veterans. The birthday girl Kathy, who turned 47 but looks older than me, gave Tami a big box of hardcover books including five Tolkein tomes, one of which was The Hobbit and another was Lord of the Rings with all three volumes between its covers. It was a fat book indeed; at least as fat as the Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide my daughter got me for Christmas that I've been savoring a chapter at a time.

We went home for a nap. After the nap we drank the Merlot I'd spied at the grocery store; 2005 must have been a very good year because the bottle was only five bucks. As I sat on the toilet I heard the doorbell ring.

I couldn't believe that Tami had let the that thieving crack whore in the house. Fuck.

It was Bighead, who we've been referring to as "Snake". For one things she's WAY too skinny. I never met a skinnier human being. She's like a skeleton with skin stretched over it, and has no breasts at all. Nipples, but no breasts. It's a wonder her kid didn't starve when it was a baby; before infant formula it would have needed a wet nurse. I've mentioned that sex with her was like fucking a snake.

And she does this thing with her tounge when she's high on cocaine that looks like a snake's tongue.

And she's a thief. I hadn't had anything to do with her for quite some time; I know I journaled the morning there was no woman living at my house that I wouldn't let her in, telling her she's sold the best friend she never had for fifteen dollars. Now, I hear your brain cells rubbing together - "That damned mcgrew's a hypocrite, preaching forgiveness while he won't forgive the theiving crack whore." But I forgive her, I'm just doing my best to keep her from stealing from me again.

I'm having a harder time forgiving the thieving bastards who run the multinational corporations. But I'm trying.

I can't find the journal where I wouldn't let Bighead in. I'll edit this sentence out and add a link if I do.

The snake walked into the bathroom as if nothing had happend. I put my hand up her shirt, grabbed the ultraflat nontitties and said "hi". Then I put my other hand up her shorts and fingered her. I wouldn't let her talk me out of any money, telling her she would have to talk to "my agent", meaning Tami.

Did I mention that Tami doesn't like snakes?

When I got back in the other room, the snake was gone, and so was the wine, although the bottle was still there. I must have had a Paxil flashback, because I could have sworn I saw steam coming from Tami's ears. "I'm going to have him" the snake had told Tami before Tami physically threw her out.

I wanted to go back to the party, as I'd been promised that there would be reefer smoke. After being thoroughly pissed off by the snake, Lucy Furr (Tami) wanted stronger drink than the beer that was at the party, and I wound up getting corralled downtown to Farley's to buy her a cheap shot of rotgut and a minipitcher. As I was waiting for the bartender, Tami was talking to a woman on the other side of her, and all of a sudden I realized who she was and was immediately embarrassed that I hadn't recognized her. She'd lost a lot more weight and wasn't wearing her glasses.

"Robyn!" Robyn was the last real girlfriend I had, the last lover I didn't have to pay, even though I was supporting her while she lived with me. She'd been with me when I'd moved out of the apartment. I walked over and gave the very drunk woman a hug. "How are you? You've lost a lot of weight!"

"I'm dying," she said. "I have cirrhosis." I felt like crying.

There was a fat young androgyne on Robyn's other side who had been obviously hitting on Robyn when Tami and I had walked in. "Don't you recognise me?" it said. I hadn't - not until she spoke.

It was Odie, the whore I'd let stay in my house for a week when she'd lost everything and wanted to get off crack. The whore who had stolen my car! The car that I'd only made one payment on. She'd traded it for crack, and the woman who she traded it for had used it as a murder weapon and tried to kill her parents with it, running over her mother and breaking both her legs.

Odie had gained weight - a lot of weight. She'd also gotten some new wire rim glasses to replace the plastic ones I'd nerdily fixed for her with a piece of wire from a diode before she stole my car, and she'd dyed her hair blonde. She looked a lot better fat than skinny.

I gave her a hug and talked for a while.

Wink's a pretty good bartender, especially for Farleys', but they were really busy as it was a Saturday night and the "crazy checks" as Tami called the SSI checks the mentally ill get had come out. I bought a small pitcher and a couple of shots of Captain Morgan, not wanting to stomach the rotgut.

Some time later after drinking with these three women, all of whom had stayed in my house at one time or another, the two of us got back to the party. We were too late for the reefer; there were only four or five people and not much beer left. I drank two bottles, Tami drank a six pack.

The next morning after proclaiming she wasn't going to drink, she went with me to Felbers for pizza "and I have to have a Pepsi" she said. She then proceeded to nurse her hangover with a Bloody Mary.

Then another one. And another one. I'd drank a beer, and finally bought a pitcher to share with her.

In Inside the mind of a Slashdot Meta Moderator I exposed my metamoderation, but it wasn't a good example. I didn't run across any bad moderations.

Today's moderations I was asked to metamoderate did. So I guess you can consider thais part 2. As in the previous journal, the page was copied and pasted. Items in italics are my comments, and the moderation itself (fair/unfair) is bolded.

A couple of people may have gotten their asses handed to them. I say "may have" because when I hit the "metamoderate" button, the page that asks if I want to go home or to my user page timed out. I don't know if the data were sent to the slashdot server or not.

Slashdot got slashdotted again.

Meta Moderation
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Re:This is just bad, Slashdot!
by - on Saturday January 12, @01:07PM (#22015562)
Nope, I don't think the story is wrong:

US Dept of State

He is a member of the Intel Corporation NGO Advisory Board and writes for several publications specializing on the role of technology in development.
Original Discussion: Intel Employee Caught Running OLPC News Site
Rating: Informative.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

That one speaks for itself, I think. Some mods can be judged fairly quickly.

Re:Raytracing scales up far better...
by - on Friday January 18, @01:55PM (#22096546)
Disclaimer: I work for NVIDIA. I speak not for them.

People keep saying this, that raytracing scales up better than rasterization. It's simply not true. Both of them have aspects that scale linearly and logarithmically. They do scale differently, but in a related sort of wy.

Raytracing is O(resolution), and O(ln(triangles)), assuming you already have your acceleration structures built. But guess what? It takes significant time to built your acceleration structures in the first place. And they change from frame to frame.

Rasterization is O(ln(resolution)), and O(triangles). Basically, in a rasterizer, we only draw places that we have triangles. Places that don't have triangles have no work done. But the thing is, we've highly pipelined our ability to handle triangles. When people talk about impacting the framerate, I want to be clear what we're talking about here: adding hundreds, thousands, or even a million triangles is not going to tank the processing power of a modern GPU. The 8800 Ultra can process in the neighborhood of 300M triangles per second. At 100 FPS, that'd be (not suprisingly) 3M triangles per frame.

Modern scenes typically run in the 100-500K triangles per frame, so we've still got some headroom in this regard.

Cheers.
--
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
Original Discussion: Ray Tracing for Gaming Explored
Rating: Insightful.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

I would have modded it "informative", but at slashdot there's little difference between "informative" and "Insightful". I'm not going to mod someone down over something picayune.

Probably off-topic but what the hell...
by - on Sunday March 09, @05:55AM (#22691504)
A friend of my father-in-law's owned for many years a hotel in France called 'Hotel d'Olympique'. He still owns the hotel but it is no longer called that as he was sent a 'cease and desist'-type letter by the IOC.

FWIW I am not interested in the Beijing Olympics. Any lingering interest in the event has been soured by the appalling way that Chinese citizens have been treated by their government and, by extension, the IOC. No sports event in the world is worth evicting, beating, imprisoning and killing your own citizens for.
Original Discussion: Olympic Web Site Features Pirated Content
Rating: Offtopic.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

Some mods give their moderations no thought whatever. I've noticed in my or others' comments, if a suggestion is made, the lazy moderator will mod it as such. Say "I found it interesting that..." and these dumb asshats will automatically moderate it "interesting" even though the comment not only doesn't add anything to the discussion, it mey even not be on topic.

In this case the topic was the Chinese Olympics. I have no idea why the commenter suggested it may be offtopic - perhaps he was using reverse psychology?

But at any rate, whoever modded that as "offtopic" doesn't have to worry about being burdened with mod points any more.

Re:Got a labor shortage?
by - on Monday March 10, @03:17PM (#22706078)
Your response bothers me. It's what happens when people put ideology ahead of common sense and facts.

Abusing foreign workers is the POINT of the whole thing. Those who are lucky enough to get an H1-B visa are then owned by their sponsor.

This is not a free market. If it were, we would just throw the doors open and invite any foreign IT worker to "come on down". We set up the rules so they have to have a sponsor or go home.

In general, they are paid less than a US Citizen - and there is not a lot of incentive to give them fair raises. They can't quit and look for a new job unless they can find a new sponsor.

This is a generality. Like most generalities it does not apply to every foreign worker. And it's part of a larger employment situation where IT workers in their twenties are preferred. If you do not yet have a life you don't mind 14 hour days.

And in the mean time, very few have noticed that one of Microsoft's published future plans is to dumb down IT to the point where any idiot can do it with the right software support. This may or may not be a major threat, but once they figure out how to build an operating system that actually works, you had better watch out.

--

When you are dancing with wolves, never limp
Original Discussion: IT Labor Shortage Is Just a Myth
Rating: Insightful.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

Not only insightful but interesting as well.

Re:Very cool!
by - on Friday March 28, @09:57PM (#22901788)
Heh I did it for a few months for a "respectable" company (Sears) selling extended warranties - sorry - "maintenance agreements". We could call Sears customers that were in the database and the computer spotted that their warranty on their fridge/lawnmower/whatever was about to expire. It wasn't as bad as cold calling since they WERE customers and we were told to initially inquire if they were happy with their product - but then when it came time to offer them the extended warranty (usually at around half the original purchase price) most people balked and some even became hostile.

            Of course we were on minimum wage + commission based on closed sales, but it was NON-STOP work - every time you clicked off a call you immediately were put through to another customer - and often had to wait for the computer to look up the customer's information (Hello Mr.................. Jameson, I'm calling from Sears about your....). Of course I quit that job, especially after the manager thought it would be a great idea to keep calling people until 9pm.

Original Discussion: Geist Creates His Own Do-Not-Call List
Rating: Informative.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

And insightful as well.

Re:From the horse's mouth
by - on Thursday April 10, @06:16AM (#23022320)
What's with people like you who feel the need to deem everyone to be sheep or brainwashed if they're fine with something that you, for whatever reason, don't agree with? Is it self-esteem?
--
This 120 character limit on sigs doesn't affect me. No, seriously. It doesn't.
Original Discussion: eBay Australia Makes PayPal Mandatory
Rating: Troll.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

I almost modded this one "unfair", but looking at the parent comment it was very obvious that this guy's comment fit the wikipedia definition of troll to a T. The parent comment made no mantion of people being brainwashed sheep, and this comment was offtopic flamebait.

I didn't investigate far enough to see if anyone bit.

Re:Would you buy a Metallica online album...?
by - on Sunday April 27, @12:21PM (#23214736)

One is an artist, the other is a rock star.

I'll never understand these strange semantic games people like to play. The distinction is really a value judgement, and nothing else. If you want to care about that kind of thing, that's fine. The only thing I really care about is what each actually does, which is produce music.

Are you really trying to argue that Metallica is an "artist", and their former napster suing behavior is in violation of their "artist nature"? If that's your argument, I give up. We might as well be arguing whether chocolate ice cream is better, or strawberry.
--
Whenever I hear the word activist, I reach for my revolver.
Original Discussion: Metallica May Follow In Footsteps of Radiohead, NIN
Rating: Interesting.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

"I'll never understand these strange semantic games people like to play because the concept of humor is completely foreign to me."

Interesting, my ass. Pedantry is never interesting. Occasionally informative, but never interesting.

If you're correcting someones misuse of an apostrophe, link one of the "Bob" cartoons about apostrophes (I've seen two). Or say something hilarious; a mod of "funny" on your comment gains no karma, but loses none either.

department head?
by - on Wednesday April 30, @09:44AM (#23249940)
what is a "department head", exactly, in this context?

--
Why stick up for big business?
Original Discussion: Patent Appeals System Under Constitutional Attack
Rating: Redundant.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

The commenter simply asked that a term in the summary be clarified; the law says "heads of departments" in the summary. Clear to me but not the commenter. It should have been left unmoderated, or at the worst modded "overrated".

Had the comment been left alone it might have triggered someone working for government to post something interesting. But the moderator ruined the chance.

Yup...
by - on Wednesday May 07, @03:18PM (#23328218)
Data recovery has come a long way, keep this in mind when not using proper deletion techniques! Would have been nice to see a picture of the HDD though, to get a full understanding of the recovery.
Original Discussion: Data Recovered From Space Shuttle Columbia HDD
Rating: Insightful.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

To comment on the subject here rather than the moderation, if you have data on a floppy you need to be disappeared, take it our of its shell and burn it. If the data are on a hard drive, disassemble the drive and sand all the oxide off the platters.

If the incriminating data are on paper, be aware that a shredder won't do, as the late Ken Lay found our when the government unshredded the shredded documents. Burn them, then stir the ashes. The mix with more paper, dump gasoline and saltpeter on it, and burn it again.

But be aware that the procedure is dangerous. Saltpeter is an oxydant; sprinkle saltpeter on warm ioly rags and they will burst into flames. Mix it with sugar and it will melt concrete. I've never put it in gasoline but suspect that it would result in an explosion, with no spark necessary.

We were allowed to do LOTS of stuff when I was a kid that would result in today's kids being incarcerated!

Re:And people
by - on Wednesday May 28, @04:41AM (#23567887)
An example of the knowledge of the masses: When I commented to my mother that I spent the day watching flash cartoons, she thought I meant animated porn.
Original Discussion: Adobe Flash Zero-Day Attack Underway
Rating: Funny.
This comment is Unfunny Funny | See Context

Sorry dude, I didn't get it. Perhaps there is a cultural context from a different culture than mine, but even if "flash" means "naughty" to a Brit or an Aussie, the joke stull sucks.

And it's Friday, Monday's when I'm usually in a bad mood. Tough room.

Search Kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray.

Biters Anonymous

Hi, my name's mcgrew and I'm a biter.

Biters Anonymous is a crowd of losers who share their experience, roflcopters and lolerskates with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from the ravages of biting.

The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop biting.

There are no dues or fees for BA membership; we are self-supporting through our own contributions. BA is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization or institution or endorses nor opposes any causes.

Our primary purpose is to stay troll-free and help other Biters to achieve bitelessness.

Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over biting - that our bites had become unmanageable

Step 2: Came to believe that a poster greater than ourselves could return our lollerskates

Step 3: Made a decision to turn our comments and our journals over to the care of Cmdr Taco and His moderators

Step 4: Use the <li> operator or risk being called a lamer by trolls, tempting you to bite

Step 5: We must never ever be at all honest with anybody evar.

Step 6: I am not a step, I am a free man!

Step 7: Craps

Step 8: Stop giving a shit.

Step 9: Step 9: Step 9: Step 9:

Step 10: You still didn't follow step 4 yet, lamer

Step 11: Mind your own damned business

Step 12: Shut off the fucking computer and go outside for God's sake!

Originally posted at K5 on Fri Apr 22, 2005 at 12:38:29 PM CDST and edited for slashdot. This version has been modified to fit your screen, time constraints, censored for vulgarity, and to allow us to place more commercials in it.

If you google "biters anonymous", no quotes necessary, and hit "I'm feeling lucky" that diary still comes up.

HAND

I got up fairly early Monday.

Sunday had seen Tami and me at Felber's, where they had a potluck and pig roast. We got there early because she was afraid of not getting a seat, and I was ready to pass out after six pitchers of beer but before the meat was done. Everyone had chowed down on side dishes and deserts all day. We went home, took naps, and then polished off the brandy a friend had left the previous night.

"Do you mind if I watch my soap opera? They're going to wrap up a lot of loose ends, it's the season finale." she asked sweetly Monday when I got done watching the noon news on TV.

"Sure," I said, thinking she was going to be disappointed because there would be a cliffhanger. After all, she was talking about a soap opera. "I'll go down to Felber's and get a beer."

I figured two beers would keep me gone until the soap was over and I'd come back and reread some more Restaraunt at the End of the Universe. I hadn't read the five volume trilogy in ten years or more, but my daughter bought me an omnibus edition at Christmas and I've been slowly savoring it ever since.

I got the quote in my sig wrong. But then again I haven't been wearing the contact lens in my non-cybernetic eye, either. So I guess I'm not three eyes right now, anyway. Maybe I should change my sig.

You will be assimilated. resistance is futile.

Actually when the time comes you won't resist, you will beg to become one of us.

I walked to Felber's and ordered a beer as the bartender was putting a pizza in the oven. Despite the fact that I'd already had three eggs and toast for breakfast, then chicken, beans, corn, and french fries for lunch not long before walking to Felber's, the smell made me hungry again so I ordered a pizza too, and a pitcher of beer to go with it.

I decided to go home and have Tami help me finish the pitcher. I asked the bartender to put it in the 'fridge', then trudged back home. There's a dalmation, a really friendly dog, that's been hanging around there; someone owns him, as he's wearing a collar. He walked with me as far as 12th street, then he turned left.

"Damn them," Tami said after I got home, "They had a rerun!"

I'm going to miss her if her husband ever takes her back.

We drove back to the bar. I bought another pizza.

It seemed like Sunday, but in fact they were having their drawing. On Mondays they give you a ticket with every purchase, and have a drawing every half hour. The drawing's winners go into a pot for yet another drawing on July 4th, America's Independance Day. That winner gets a thirty six inch flat screen TV. I already have a forty two inch flat screen TV, but it's a standard resolution CRT. Presumably the thirty six incher is high def and lightweight, unlike my 215 pound behemouth that's hard for a burglar to steal and trade for crack.

That's my wedding anniversary plus one. July fourth, I mean. We were going to get married on the nation's bicentineal, but we couldn't get a judge or a preacher that day. So we got married the day before. So we always had a two day celebration, with fireworks.

Not once in my 27 years of marriage did I forget my wedding anniversary. Now that I'm divorced I wish I could.

For the first time ever, the Felbers bartender picked my number. I bought another pitcher. They picked my number again.

We finally went home and took naps. I got back up later, and as I was in the bathroom the doorbell rang. I got in the living room and asked Tami who it was.

"Somebody wanting to cut the grass. He said he got our address from the city."

Bullshit - I'd just cut the grass the previous weekend. This asshole was trying to use scare tactics to drum up business.

"God damned motherfuckers" I said as I stormed out the door.

"HEY! YOU, YOU SON OF BITCH, YOU SAID YOU WORK FOR THE CITY?"

The black man walking toward his elderly pickup truck with its brand new John Deere on a trailer behind it, stopped and looked at me."

"I'M CALLING THE MAYOR TOMORROW YOU COCKSUCKING MOTHERFUCKER! NOW GET YOUR ASS OUT OF MY NEIGHBORHOOD BEFORE I CALL THE COPS, DAMN YOU!"

Tami yelled at me for yelling at the asshole. I stormed out and went back to Felber's.

In Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement an anonymoust coward, obviously smoking some crack he'd traded someone's burgled TV for, commented (with the subject line "Fuck This"), "I can't wait for the baby boomers to die so we can take our damn country back and start thinking logically about copyright law."

He was modded 3, insightful, rather than the flamebait he deserved.

EmbeddedJanitor wrote (and garnered a pretty well deserved "flamebait" mod)

I'm guessing you're a member of "Generation-Me".... everything is about you and what you want.

Don't like your life? Get off your ass and do something for yourself and maybe others too. Don't like the government? Vote.

Your damn country is largely a result of what baby boomers built. If the baby boomers had been little whining generation-me types like you then there would be nothing for you to want.

Kids... learn to say please and thank you!

In response, A cowardly anonymous punk kid wrote, (and was given a score of five and his troll ignorantly modded "insightful")

The baby boomers built the country? Please! They were sitting around protesting, free-loving, and smoking dope while their parents and grandparents actually built what we have today. No one on this planet has the same entitlement mentality as United States baby boomers. No one.

I thought that WE had little respect for our elders, but you punks take the cake (and eat it too). We didn't "sit around protesting", we marched around protesting. And what we protested was what the previous generations had fucked up.

We didn't build the world; Slartibartfast and his co-workers did. He got an award for Norway. Ok, kidding, Much of it was already built. Every generation has added both good and bad.

We were being drafted to be cannon fodder for a useless war. Some of us volunteered for that useless war out of patriotism (I did). The protests finally eneded that war. Meanwhile you little whiners are too busy chasing filthy lucre and getting your nipples pierced and foreheads tattood to care that an oil man became President and started a useless war for the sole purpose of enriching himself. At least my dad's generation's rich people who started the Vietnam war thought (perhaps correctly) that they were fighting communism, a laudible goal to them.

My generation's protests stopped the war and made the President resign. Where are your protests of the Iraq war? Your stupid generation doesn't even have to be drafted!

Some of us protested the rape of the environment. We got the Clean Air act and the Clean Water act passed. We got CFCs banned. What are you gutless wimps doing about global warmning? Buying SUVs!

My generation built and is still building houses, like the one you live in. The parts of the electrical grid my dad didn't build were built by those who followed him. My generation designed and built all your cell phone towers.

My dad's oldest brother's generation invented computers, but my generation put those giant building sized machines on your desktop. My generation put VCRs and CDs and DVDs on the market. My generation made the entire cell phone infrastructure.

My dad's generation smoked cigarettes. My generation smoked pot. Your generation smokes crack.

Your generation uses my generation's music in their fucktardedly stupid commercials. Neither my nor my dad's generation did that.

My generation was pretty ignorant of history, but we were pikers when it comes to your generation.

What has your generation done, except invent internet trolling?

bsDaemon ignorantly opined

The baby boomers are (were?) a bunch of dope-smoking draft dodgers that have run this country into the ground while their parents wonder why exactly it is that they fought World War II, since they just ended up living under authoritarianism anyway.

You have to have a draft in order to dodge that draft. Fifty thosand boomers DIDN'T dodge the draft and died in that godforsaken jungle for absolutely nothing. Unless you have served in the military (and yes, I did, during Vietnam, despite the fact that I was in no danger of being drafted) you have no right to criticise anyone for dodging the draft.

A generation didn't run the country into the ground, a class did. Your class (if you are rich) ran it into the ground with your selfish grubbing for money, with your exploitation of my friends my age and younger who do the actual work building roads, bridges, houses, cell phone towers, and everything else for you. The rich sent the jobs overseas, not the people who do the actual work. My generation isn't taking rights away, the rich of all adult generations who run things are.

Get your enemies straight, son. While you're fighting me, your masters are laughing at you. I'm not taking away any of your rights, I'm fighting to preserve them. You employer is fighting tooth and nail to get as much of everything as he can, including YOUR RIGHTS. And you dumbass kids do your damndest to help him!

World War Two was started by the same generation that fought World War One. People seem to forget that Hitler and Mussolini were of the same generation as Eisenhower and Truman and Patton. They wouldn't have had to fight that war if they hadn't tried to take over the world. What is your generation doing to fight authoritarianism? Mine got a war ended, protesting in person (and some dying in those protests) while yours bitches anonymously or semi-anonymously on messageboards. "The best generation?" IMO my friend Ralph's generation (Ralph served in the Navy during WWII; I met many of my hooker friends through Ralph) was the WORST generation, not the greatest. They brought the world nuclear warfare, my generation brought it the World Wide Web.

If you could have seen what the world was like in the 1950s when I was a child, you would appreciate what my generation has done for you.

The one thing my generation did badly was raise you ignorant, hateful crackheads. I sincerely hope your generation does a better job of raising the next generation than mine did, because we really sucked at raising you asshats.

"The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect to their elders.... They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and are tyrants over their teachers."
-Socrates

I was in a better mood when I got home. So was Tami.

Last night after work I went home to find her laying on the couch. She'd had an earache for a week but refused to see a doctor, and had taken some Tylenol Sinus, which had her so she could barely sit up.

So I want to Felber's without her, to spend my last five dollars.

I got an invitation to a birthday party and was allowed to start a tab. I broght pizza and a forty ounce bottle of beer home.

The slashdot message center informs me that servognome replied to this comment (along with a bunch of other folks) with "The bits used for online banking are also free... you're confusing the value of data with the medium." I replied

The bits used for online banking are also free... you're confusing the value of data with the medium

In your example, the bits aren't the money, they merely count it. They have no value whatever to anyone but the banker. In a music CD, the bits are supposed to BE the money, completely unlike the data that flows between banks.

Actually their [the Golgafrinchans'] actions were quite rational, like farmers destroying crops to keep prices up.

There's nothing rational about destroying food when there are people starving. That's just self-serving evil. The kind of self-serving evil that mammon worshipers support. I do not subscribe to your religion.

The nature of the digital world leads to a tragedy of the commons, there is no loss to inviduals copying, but the net result of their actions unchecked is a degradation of the market to the point where the goods they download will no longer be made.

I want music to be neither "goods" nor a "market". Music will continue to not only be made, but be recorded. The indies put their music on the internet for free. When the RIAA dies there will still be music. When the "music industry" dies there will still be music.

The same goes for films. The cost of recording music has dropped to the point that anyone with the most modest budget can record music, yet industry continues to charge as if recordings were expensive to make and distribute.

The cost of making movies is likewise dropping. You can download an amateur-made movie that has better acting, directing, and special effects than many Hollywood films. There have been some real stinkers come out of the "industry", as anyone who has ever sat through a "B movie" knows.

For the US to base its future economic growth on movies and music is past insanity, even past stupidity. If we don't get rid of the bought and paid for politicians and get some statesmen, we as a society are doomed.

As to your "tragedy of the commons", the commons sustained itself for hundreds of years. "The tragedy of the commons" was a fiction put forth by landowners to grab the common lands for their own benefit. The true tragedy of the commons was that the commons were privatized, further impoverishing the commoners who had used those commons.

Comment Moderation

What about the other candidates?, posted to McCain vs. Obama on Tech Issues, has been moderated Funny (+1).

It is currently scored Funny (2).

(Score:1, Troll)
I'm not voting for Obama and I'm not voting for McCain. Despite the hot air coming from both their mouths to the contrary, they are both deeply in the corporate pockets. They have taken their corporate bribes and the corporations own them.

Obama and McCain want to put potsmokers in prison. A vote for someone who wants you in prison isn't just a wasted vote, it's a stupid vote. "Vote for me, I want you incarcerated! A gambler in every prison, a pothead in every institution, a hooker or a john in every cell!"

I want to know what the Green and Libertarian candidates stances are on tech issues. Why these two parties are not mentioned in the corporate-owned media is obvious; the question is why they are being ignored by slashdot?

What about the other candidates?, posted to McCain vs. Obama on Tech Issues, has been moderated Interesting (+1).

It is currently scored Interesting (3).

What about the other candidates?, posted to McCain vs. Obama on Tech Issues, has been moderated Troll (-1).

It is currently scored Interesting (2).

What about the other candidates?, posted to McCain vs. Obama on Tech Issues, has been moderated Overrated (-1).

It is currently scored Interesting (1).

What about the other candidates?, posted to McCain vs. Obama on Tech Issues, has been moderated Interesting (+1).

It is currently scored Interesting (2).

Re:You mean the country that the baby boomers buil (Score:0, Flamebait)

--
Don't try to outweird me, three eyes" -Zaphod [slashdot.org]

Please pardon the ranting flamefest that is coming the way of those of you who choose to keep reading.

I ran out of gas yesterday. Or rather, Tami did, in my car.

I had a buck forty in my pocket, and walked to the gas station and put it in the gas can at four sixteen a gallon.

When I first went to college (before temporarily dropping out to join the military), a dollar would give me a quarter tank of gas and get me from Cahokia to Edwardsville and back.

Yesterday a dollar forty wasn't even enough to get the damned thing started.

I walked back to work, bummed a ride to the bank and gas station and filled the can for $4.40. I emptied it into the car, drove back to the gas station and put another twenty dollars in it.

It almost gave me a quarter tank.

My journal the other day made passing reference to the Oil Baron Traitors who live in the White House. Whether or not looks are deceiving, it seems as if these two incredibly dishonest men clawed their way there by hook and by crook, disguising their criminal pasts, simply to enrich themselves and their oil buddies at the expense of the very people who voted them into office.

Before you break the keys on your keyboard screaming "WAHT TEH FCUK DO YUO MEAN CRIMINAL YOU TINFOIL HAT-WEARING DEMOCRAT????!!!111OneOneOne!!!1!", first, Bush and Cheney ARE criminals. Both have been conviced of drunken driving. My friend Mike's cousin is in a Missouri state prison as I type this for the exact same crime that Bush paid a hundred dollar fine for. Prisons are for criminals.

Bush and Cheney are not only criminals, but they kept their criminal records secret until the day before the 2000 election.

How did they do that? If I were ever to get arrested, let alone convicted of drunk driving or anything else, and ran for public office the fact would be in the newspaper before the ink was dry on the candidacy paperwork.

I'm no Democrat. I've voted Republican in more Presidential elections than Democrat, so this isn't some partisan ass-waving (donkey-waving). Until Bush took office I thought I'd never see a worse President than Carter.

But here we have an oil man as President, and another oil man as Vice President, and the price of gasoline has more than quadrupled since they took office. I lived through the gas crisises in the 1970s, and the first Arab oil embargo was a shock, because I was in uniform in Southeast Asia when it hit. All I knew of it was the mutterings of the taxi drivers and bhat bus drivers. I had no idea it was a worldwide occurrance; I didn't speak Thai very well.

When I left the US to drag aerospace ground equipment to B-52s, U2s, and other military aircraft in support of a senseless, useless war that I had stupidly and sinfully volunteered for, gasoline was thirty cents per gallon in both Deleware where I had been previously stationed, and St Louis where I'd grown up.

When I reached Alaska on my way home, the headlines screamed "Nixon Resigns!" The first President I had ever cast a vote for had resigned in disgrace. Of course it was over the Watergate scandal, not oil or gas, but when I got home gasoline was seventy five cents a gallon.

It was quite a shock. So was the fact that the President of the United States had never been voted for in any national election at all - Nixon's original Vice President had been indicted, tried, and convicted (Wikipedia says he pleaded "no Contest") of the same crimes that former Illinois Governor George Ryan is in prison for today.

Of course, Agnew's criminal acts didn't kill anybody like Ryan's criminal acts did. It is a supreme irony that the man whose criminal actions killed children by burning them to death was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But I'm getting a bit off-topic here.

Nixon had appointed Ford. Ford was the only President in US history to not have been elected to the post of President or Vice President. He then gave a Presidential pardon to the "not a" crook who had appointed him President!

And you young folks wonder why we geezers are so cynical. We've lived through some God damned sleazy politics. If only I could have the idealism I had in my youth! Or maybe, if only I could have never been idealistic at all and been spared the disillusionment.

The price of gasoline dropped slowly down somewhat. Nonetheless, this doubling of gas prices caused a severe recession, and it was a historical first - previous recessions and depressions had seen either stable prices of goods and services, or deflation. Never before had recession come at the same time as inflation. The word "stagflation", an ugly mashup of stagnation and inflation, was coined.

Rather than blaming the meteoric rise in prices on the price of oil, the media blamed labor, despite the fact that the Federal government had instituted "wage-price controls" which kept working people's incomes steady while allowing the incomes of those whose incomes were derived from sitting on their asses collecting profits to rise meteorically. You may not have been able to raise the prices in your store, but you could open new stores. Your hard-earned wages could go up not more than a certain percentage, but the rich's dividend income had no such controls.

The wealthy got richer and the poor got hungrier.

It happened again in 1979. I had just taken a required college course, with the textbook being Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday (the link is to the text of the entire book). Read it today and be afraid, be very afraid.

Gas prices nearly doubled from sixty five cents per gallon up to a dollar. The Iranians (more Arabs) put the final nail in the coffin of the Carter Presidency by kidnaping some Americans right before the Presidential elections. Ironically, the Iranians helped us, their sworn enemies, by ensuring that Carter's Presidency was finished.

This record high price of gasoline is touted by the media and parroted by neocons as the metric by which today's gas prices should be measured "after inflation".

But the inflation was a direct result of oil and gas prices! Those giant machines today's farmers use gulp incredible amounts. Plastic is mostly made of oil, and nearly everything is made of plastic. And everything must be transported, and the trucks and trains need deisel.

Or rather, 1980 oil was the metric neocons used when Hurricane Katrina made the price of gasoline shoot up to three dollars a gallon, less than three short years ago. Even still, compared to the wage a minimum wage worker makes rather than the false metric of "after inflation", a falsehood because of the fact that oil caused, rather than was a result of, inflation, that three dollar a gallon gasoline was far more expensive for the minimum wage worker than it was for a minimum wage worker in 1980.

It is argued that "only teenagers make minimum wage", but have you ever been to a McDonalds? My acquaintence Terri, who drinks at Farley's, makes French fries there. I'm not sure how old she is but she looks to be in her late forties. Brian made minimum wage at Subway's before going into drug rehab. I seldom see anyone working at any fast food restaraunt that looks younger than twenty - most of these folks have children.

As I sat down one evening
'Twas in small cafe
A forty year old waitress
To me these words did say:
"Well, I see that you are a logger,
and not just a common bum
'cause nobody but a logger
stirs his coffee with his thumb!"

-From James Steven's American folk song The Frozen Logger

Wait staff make minimum wage after tips!

The people I see on the streets, in the bars, in the stores, and especially in the gas stations all grumble loudly about the fucktardedly high price of gas. Everyone is complaining, except three groups of people, and these three groups all make excuses.

The first group, understandably, is those in the oil and gas industry. The second group is the necons, who against all logic and reason blame environmentalists for the record high prices, despite the record high profits of the oil industry.

The third group is the mainstream media. Where is the outrage? Isn't it supposed to be their job to question the status quo?

No, I guess it's their job to make excuses for the excesses of the rich (who after all own the various media outlets) and inform us of the incredibly important drug problems and custoidy battles of useless celbrities.

And they wonder why their circulation continues to dwindle!

Historically, slashdot has wisely limited the number of posts that a reader who isn't logged in can make in a certain time period. Allowing unlimited anonymous posts invites spam and trolling (link to the wiki included because a lot of slashdotters, even slashdot moderators, have funny ideas of what "trolls" are).

Slashdot has recently tried to become a "MySpace for nerds", with its friends, foes, fans, freaks, etc. This is to be applauded IMO; true nerds are not in the mainstream, although oddly to this old nerd there are now nerd wannabes. This seems a huge irony to me, as "nerd" used to be a grave high school insult.

But very recently slashdot has extended this limit on the number of posts in a certain time period to logged in users.

A site for nerds is penalizing the hyperlex. I'm not referring to wikipedia's definition of the hyperlex; I refer to people who are the opposite of someone with dyslexia, people who read very fast with a high degree of comprehension of reading matter, who become completely immersed in well written prose to the extent that they are harder to awaken from their reading than normal people are from sleep. I'm sure many if not most slashdotters fall into this category. John F Kenendy was said to be one.

Not only are logged in users penalized for the ability to read and/or type fast, logged in users with excellent karma are as well. This poses grave problems for the hyperlex, but moreso for slashdot's seeming want to become a social network for nerds.

Here is the problem with that - the hyperlexic nerd (and "hyperlexic nerd" may well be a redundant phrase) logs on to slashdot after a long day of coding or engineering or studying hubble photos or whatever possibly non-nerdy occupation he or she may earn money from and spends two or three hours on slashdot, commenting on stories he or (less usually, of course) she is interested in, has expertise in, or finds humorous.

Then they eat dinner, rebuild the dog and debug the computer (need more flea spray) and wonder why they can't find a mate. Ok, that's enough of the "mom's basement" jokes. I promise. Well, in this thread anyway.

The next day they come home from work to find that the three or four comments they posted have been highly rated, and "slashdot's message center" says they have forty two "messages" (in reality 42 comments commenting on their comments). With slashdot's new five minute delay between posting comments, that's three and a half hours spent merely responding to "messages", assuming said nerd answers all forty two.

"Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment."

But the poster is given this roadblock the next day, commenting on a story that is for all intents and purposed dead and buried, and he or she is trying to answer people who have written responses to the poster's comments.

So here are a few small suggestion to slashdot's site coders.

Make the time between posts karma-dependant. A certain, long time value for anonymous posts (even if the post is anonymous by checking the "post anonymously" box, regardless of the poster's karma). A bit longer than that for users with bad karma, less for new users who haven't recieved downmods, with increasingly short posting times as a user's karma increases. After all, the theory karma's based on is that users who post insightful, witty, interesting, etc. posts are likely to continue doing so and that those who troll and flame are likewise likely to continue to do so.

People come to slashdot for three reasons: to find stories in other sites they may seldom if ever visit that would interest them, but mostly for the funny, insightful, informative, interesting comments.

Some just come to troll, of course.

The "cowboy time" should be dependant on how long it has been since the story one is comenting on is posted. Why must I "allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment" on a story that isn't even on the front page any more and has already had 420 comments? Stories older than 24 hours shouldn't have any "cowboy time" at all!

Likewise, if slashdot wants to be the "MySpace for nerds" it seems to want to become, then there should be no cowboy time whatever when posting from the "slashdot message center", except perhaps when the summary itself is less than a certain time old.

To those of you who wonder why I'm not responding to your comments, particularly if you're asking a question, blame Cowboy Neal. Contrary to popular opinion I can't spend all my time at slashdot. I have to go to the bars and get rejected by women so I have something to write about in my journals.

No, reading my journals isn't a reason people come to slashdot. But it's especially annoying to have to wait five minutes to respond to someone's comment in my "own" journal!

Update: I just discovered today (and it didn't seem like this was the case yesterday) that the more comments I made in a story, the longer the cowboy time. Which makes sense to me.

If you're a slashdot coder and just implimented that, kudos! I endorse the idea!

Almost daily I'm asked to metamoderate. It's probably got to do with my karma; I get complaints all the time from guys complaining about being sick of seeing my comments. One poor youngster keeps repeating "wank wank wank" in reply to my comments, especially comments where I reference one of these journals.

Thinking perhaps that some of you folks might have never moderated, let alone metamoderated, I thought you might want a peek into the brain of a frequent metamoderator.

I copied and pasted the metamoderation page here, sans formatting. There are radio boxes for "fair" and "unfair" with a default center box that says nothing. My moderation of the moderators is bolded. Italic text is what I added.

Those of you who post to other messageboards with "I have slashdot mod points! What will you give me to rate your comments up?" might want to take heed, if you ever want mod points again.

PLEASE READ THE DIRECTIONS CAREFULLY BEFORE EMAILING US!
What follows are random moderations performed on comments in the last few weeks on Slashdot. You are asked to honestly evaluate the actions of the moderator of each comment. Moderators who are ranked poorly will cease to be eligible for moderator access in the future.

If you are confused about the context of a particular comment, just link back to the comment page through the parent link, or the #XXX cid link.
If you are unsure, feel free to leave it unchanged.
Please read the Moderator Guidelines and try to be impartial and fair. You are not moderating to make your opinions heard, you are trying to help promote a rational discussion. Play fairly and help make Slashdot a little better for everyone.
Scores and information identifying the posters of these comments have been removed to help prevent bias in meta moderation. If you really need to know, you can click through and see the original message, but we encourage you not to do this unless you need more context to fairly meta moderate.

Today, you have 10 moderations to meta-moderate.
Re:Typical!
by - on Monday February 04, @10:54AM (#22290830)

so you are pretty much completely pissing into the wind
This great little phrase is best enjoyed when you take the time to actually envision it.
--
"A lot of people are like rabbits in the headlights: They're terrified they're going to lose their jobs."
Original Discussion: Best Presidential Candidate, Republicans
Rating: Funny.
This comment is Unfunny Funny | See Context

Left unmoderated; if I was stoned I might think it was funny. "Funny" gains no karma.

Oh noes!!!
by - on Thursday February 07, @09:49AM (#22332628)
Please, please, tell me they are not getting their batteries from Sony!

"50 cars caught fire on I-4 today."
--
"Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare. Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth." -- St
Original Discussion: Li-Ion Batteries Hit Final R&D Phase for Plug-in Cars
Rating: Funny.
This comment is Unfunny Funny | See Context

Ok, it's not Monty Python and I didn't ROTFL but it was humorous.

Lamplighters, Mantles, and the Grand Scheme
by - on Thursday March 20, @08:05PM (#22813824)
Back in the long ago, streetlamps were powered by gas. Every evening, a person called a lamplighter would come and light the streetlight. (The bars sticking sideways out of lampposts were not decorative. They were there so a lamplighter could lean his ladder against them so he could climb the pole.) Every morning he would go around and extinguish the streetlights.

Gas lights did not use an open flame for lighting (well, they did, but not for long). They used a special cloth "wick" called a mantle. This mantle glowed brightly when heated by the gas flame. Over time, the mantles would disintegrate, and new ones would have to be installed.

Now there were two once vibrant sectors of the lighting industry that have been virtually eliminated by progress. Sure, a few thousand people lost jobs. There were better, cheaper, safer alternatives, so people used them. The same thing will happen with the incandescent bulb makers, and the fluorescent bulb makers. LEDs are a better, cheaper, safer alternative. A few thousand people will be put out of work, and once vibrant sectors of the lighting industry will fade away. Sure, a few companies will hang on, doing specialty work, but count on GE, Sylvania, Philips, and their ilk closing a lot of bulb factories in the future.
--
Eyes sore and red from reading Slashdot long into the night?
There's a Visine for that.
Original Discussion: Questions Arising On Mercury In Compact Fluorescents
Rating: Insightful.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

The context showed that he was responding to someone who in essense said (and this is not a direct quote by any means) "Oh noes! Peoples is gonna loose they're jobs!"

Adobe Online Productivity Office
by - on Thursday March 27, @05:51PM (#22886958)
Adobe's Online Office Productivity Suite:

Photoshop Express (Photo Editor)
https://www.photoshop.com/express

Buzzword (Word Processor)
http://www.buzzword.com/

Sliderocket (Presentation Software)
http://www.sliderocket.com/

Blist (Spreadsheet)
http://www.blist.com/

***

Did you buy stock? I did a while ago... :)
Original Discussion: Adobe Puts Free Photoshop Online
Rating: Informative.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

I almost modded this "unfair", since it wasn't in fact, informative. The first link was the same as the link in the summary (redundant) and the rest also not only linked to Adobe, but to login pages. Apparently the moderators (multiple since it garnered a +5) didn't bother to click the links, relying instead on slashdot's very good habit of listing the domain name after the link. Honest mistake I didn't want to penalize.

Bullshit
by - on Sunday March 30, @01:11AM (#22909640)
You'd have to have a very cheap and very power inefficient server to come even remotely close to their claims of half of the cost of the server on power. An elbaso HP Dl360G5 costs $1600. It will use about 300W at typical load, but lets call it 250W to make the numbers easier. Double this for inefficient cooling and power conversion in the UPS (this is overly costly but makes up for underestimating power usage) so 500W. There are 8,760 hours in a year so 4,380 KwH, you'd have to pay $.20 per KwH to reach their figure, this is over twice the US national average. Prices where you'd want to put a datacenter are closer to $.06-$.08 per KwH. My average server cost closer to $7,000 with battery backed RAID card, dual fast drives, dual CPU's, 4GB memory, 3 year 6 hour repair contract, etc. Even powering that kind of servers off diesel generators fulltime it would have to draw ridiculous amounts of power to cost half it's purchase price in electricity every year.
--
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Original Discussion: Iceland Woos Data Centers As Power Costs Soar
Rating: Insightful.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

Re:nVidia next?
by - on Tuesday April 08, @06:23PM (#23006216)

then ATI announced they were going strong on releasing their hardware specs and stuff like that opening the door for completely OSS drivers for ATI hardware. (I haven't seen anything yet, but I haven't been watching since I switched to nVidia.)
Released:
2D specs for R300-R500, R600
3D specs for R300-R500
Not released:
3D specs for R600
TCore (graphics card simulation)
Might be released:
Low-end code from the fglrx driver

In short, they still haven't released the specs on their latest generation and R700 is expected sometime this year. Yes, it's a promising development but if you want the latest and greatest, it's closed source whether you go with ATI or nVidia...
--
1. Create Paranoia on Slashdot
2. Make and Sell Tinfoil Hats
3. Profit
Original Discussion: VIA Announces Open Source Driver Initiative
Rating: Informative.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

Re:Uh..
by - on Friday April 18, @10:55AM (#23117400)
"Conspiracy to Stop China From Being Successful."

It struck me as I read that that I've heard this line before in another sphere.

It's exactly what (some, mainly republican) Americans say about the rest of the world's concerns about pollution and global warming.
It's a conspiracy to stop the US being succesful, driven by jealousy of what they are achieving.

In both cases it's ludicrous.
Original Discussion: Chinese Blogs, Netizens React To the Tibet Issue
Rating: Insightful.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

No moderation; I'm not well informed enough to judge the submitter's insight. I hadn't heard the ""Conspiracy to Stop [country] From Being Successful" before.

Google is your friend
by - on Thursday May 08, @02:30PM (#23341002)
Using Google, I fouund the solution. It appears that this guy can do the conversion for you and return your data in hours. Cost would not be prohibitive and would support the Amstrad addiction.

He seems to have a pretty good handle on all the conversion problems, too. His page is a fun read just for that.
Original Discussion: Retrieving Data From Old Amstrad Floppies?
Rating: Informative.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

I went to the supplied link and it did indeed answer the GP's question, even if the page itself and its all-centered text was butt-ugly.

Algorithm training
by - on Thursday May 08, @09:47PM (#23345510)
Hank showed me MATRIX just a few short weeks after the 9/11 attacks. Using law enforcement data and commercial data, all of the commercial data available in the public domain, Asher's query produced Atta's photo -- and about 80 others, many of them fellow 9/11 hijackers, many of them associates of the 9/11 hijackers.

Without additional information it's impossible to say if this is impressive, or just a stupid algorithm trick. With many mining algos, you can easily train them pull certain needles out of the haystack. The question is, will your training situation look anything like the future situations? Training the algo only with the 9/11 terrorists, would it pull out the trade center bombers, or Timothy McVeigh? Will future predictions be right or will it pull out groups of Arabic student pilots who had the misfortune of buying the same shampoo most preferred by 9 out of 10 terrorists. Especially with rare events, I think you mostly get into a hyper complicated version of correlation != causation.

Original Discussion: Data Mining In Law Enforcement
Rating: Informative.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

I would have modded it "interesting" or "insightful", but it was indeed informative.

the three stooges?
by - on Monday May 19, @01:04PM (#23464212)
"I dunno, I could think of a few people who I wouldn't have issue hearing were being beaten, jailed, etc."

Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld?

Original Discussion: Google Assists In Arrest Of Indian Man
Rating: Funny.
This comment is Unfunny Funny | See Context

This was posted the day before yesterday, I laughed out loud (but not rolling on the floor). Your mileage may very

well be less than mine.

Google Search "At least they're ___________EXPERIENCED incompetents"

I wish I could have moderated the wisdom at the bottom of every slashdot page.

If you mod someone "troll" you might want to look up the Wikipedia definition: "An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who posts controversial and usually irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the intention of baiting other users into an emotional response[1] or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.[2]"

If it doesn't fit this definition of "troll" and is marked "troll", I mod the mod down. If someone responds to a troll in anger and is modded "flamebait", I mod the moderator down regardless of name calling or vulgarity of the so-called "flamebait". Flames are not necessarily flamebait. If you mod a comment "offtopic" there had damned well not be anything in the entire comment that is on topic for either the comment it is responding to, the slashdot summary, or TFA or again, your mod will be downmodded.

If you moderate a comment by mistake (say, call it a troll and then realise it was funny), just comment in the thread anywhere and your moderation will be undone.

After clicking the "metamoderate" button at the bottom of the metamoderation page, you are presented with

Thanks for meta-moderating some of Slashdot's many moderations. This gives our moderators feedback and helps the whole system work!
You probably want to go home now, or maybe to your user page.