Having participated here for more than a decade, I don't visit that regularly - but when I do, I tend to stay on for many days, remembering the intelligent conversations found scattered in the comment sections. Visiting today, my Karma still says "excellent". But for some reason, I have a handful of past submissions marked in big red letters as SPAM! When I saw that one of the articles was actually posted by Slashdot administrators several hours AFTER it was marked as SPAM!, I contacted Slashdot (as I'd done with Timothy or CmdrTaco in years past) to ask what gives? I type up and link to an article, and my submission is SPAM?! but the same article is, the next morning, submitted by the Administrator? To be fair, the administrator did respond within an hour or two, and explained that an automated SPAM! detection routine was out of whack, and said they'd restore my Karma. A month later, the red SPAM! was still there on my submissions, so I politely asked if it was being worked on. Again, I was told Slashdot would get around to it. But every time I've logged in since, during several months now, I'm ashamed that my login page (about me) is covered in red. As a businessperson, I try not to ever appear to think a customer or client is unimportant (even if they aren't really so, I try to keep up the appearance).

I have used slashdot for many years and have seen some changes in it. And I'm still actually learning things about it.

One of the things I discovered recently is that I have a "foe" list, or rather three "freaks". It would not have occurred to me to single out another slashdot user and "follow them" as "friend or foe". So I'm wondering how that works. It would be most useful if it's Slashdot that observes someone is statistically modding down someone else repeatedly - thereby calculating them to be a "foe or freak", and calculating that someone is a "friend or fan" based on a habit of modding the user up. That would make sense. If on the other hand, someone is logging in and finding another user and clicking that they are a "foe", that might be behind what I observe to be increasing levels of Anonymous Posts.

Huh, I found I had 15 moderator points today. I used one, fine. But some of the comments show no moderation field, and others, when I try to select the mod,, display a message "You do not have the permission required to access this resource"... and then offer a "tweet, facebook like, google plus" thingy to click.

Vermont environmentalists were torn when Agency of Natural Resources began a crackdown on "e-waste" reuse, recycling, and repair company in Middlebury. Japanese robot Manio-Go was seized and impounded as hazardous waste, under actual new Vermont laws classifying electronic devices with less than 80% battery levels as "hazardous". A petition was released to get Governor Peter Schumlin to commute the sentence of recycling-by-shredder, to Free Manio-Go. This is partly April Fools, but sadly not April Fools enough http://tinyurl.com/saveManoi

Ten years ago this week, I was inspired to attempt to establish "fair trade recycling" exports of the much maligned "e-waste" (which is one of the most misleading and misunderstood terms ever coined). It was based on my experience in Africa, watching entrepreneurs and small businesspeople who "tinkered" and repaired goods, which I recognized was the way Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and Signapore emerged. The opposite of the "resource curse", repair and refubishment is so vital to economic development that one could even argue that it was worth the price of "waste"... but I also believe that proper recycling, the best recycling, is done with hand-disassembly.

[Read more about my fair trade recycling philosophy, and how it guides my own company, at www.retroworks.blogspot.com ]

Like Fair Trade Coffee (which emerged in response to a horrible "coffee boycott" idea to help coffee farmers), the result of fairly traded used electronics can result in proper recycling infrastructures within the developing world, which has its own "ewaste" to manage. More importantly, it can result in Egyptian revolutions... the 3 billion people in the world who earn about $3 thousand per year have gotten online at ten times the rate of growth of the developed world, and they are not doing it with brand new PCs. http://retroworks.blogspot.com/2011/01/to-our-recycling-friends-in-egypt.html

A program which submits random browser data can effectively complicate investigative work by 3rd party data collectors. It would take a lot of camouflage users to pollute Google or NSA's historic record base, but only take a few pieces of bad data to "poison the well" of information (e.g. he visited a gay website) used in court. I would like an option which is not completely random, which does not submit false terrorist or pedofile site data for example.

This would not be very effective against cookies (except when presence of cookies was to be used as evidence in a courtroom) but would effectively cloud any suspicions with doubt at the level of a large database such as a search engine.