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California claims that approximately 61% of the school budget is spent on "classroom instruction", a catchall category that seems to include some items not directly related as well as other items that seem logically connected to classroom instruction. Even using this generous figure there is almost $110,000.00 per year, per classroom, per year left over after the cost of classroom instruction.

I live in CA, which should stand as a dire warning to the rest of the country: They limit their property taxes, their schools go underfunded...

Bullshit. There's a lot wrong with California public education, but underfunding isn't one of them. California public schools spent $9,267.00 per student for the education of its kindergarten through high school. That's a LOT of money per kid (you can send your kid to a top flight private school for about half), and most of it is pissed away by the bureaucracy. You don't cure a shopaholic by giving them more money, and you don't solve the education funding "problem" by giving them more money either.

Certainly numbers are interesting and relevant, but positions of principle are important in an issue like this. I personally think of the 2nd amendment as saying that people have a right to protect themselves (a right they basically lack in England), and I think of that right as important and fundamental.

Reason Magazine is also a libertarian vehicle, but they recently had a piece on the effects of gun control in England. Consider this when you consider more stringent gun control in the USA.

Rates of violent crimes in the United Kingdom have been steadily rising for years, while rates in the United States have been steadily falling. There is a considerable argument to be made that gun control is to blame for an increase in violence in Britain.

The logic is simple: criminals will always find ways to get guns, whether legally or not. If the average civilian cannot own a gun for self-defense, the chances that a criminal will use a gun against a civilian become much higher.

Reason did a very good article on this a little while ago: Gun Control's Twisted Outcome.

What I want to know is, could this Information Awareness Office have possibly chosen a worse logo for discounting the paranoid fears of conspiracy theorists?

Gun Control is hitting the bullseye

As far as the rest of the developing world is concerned, shouldn't the UN be more concerned with basic staples of life (i.e. medical care, sanitation, ect.) than bringing technology?

Ah, a republican AC troll. So pleased you guys still take the time to respond "personally." You're an audacious liar, so much so that it's obvious to me you wont benefit from attention to your little fantasies, so I will keep my responses brief...

Reaganites were notorious cost cutters

Like saying Nazis were notorious for their hygiene. Actually they were notorious deficit spenders; oh yeah, and the Iran/Contra affair was rather notorious too... The only costs they ever cut were in civil rights enforcement. MILSPEC was one way they tried to cover the procurement corruption, laughable, really. The kickbacks, and who profited, even made the news (the "Ill Wind"). Oh yeah, you drink that water, don't you.

The president has no recollection...

Electric utilites were not privatized, they were degregulated

Actually, you're wrong again, moron; even your own propoaganda machine doesn't split that hair... You're really funny - I love that you guys are still trying to find cover on this one - you shut off the lights in California with a fake shortage - and the fact got covered on CNN! Well, the show must go on, I guess. Please, read a summary of a rational position on Calif/Enron. You know, the utility privatization scam is widely documented enough now that almost everyone knows about it... you might want to find another dodge, or just pretend you missed it altogether rather than respond with this drivel.

NorthPoint goes out of business and this is proof that Michael Powell is "notoriosly corrupt".

Yep; since you're obviously ignorant, or hoping we are, I'll give you the executive summary: to the RBOCs, Northpoint was a "competitor" and a "client" at the same time. Like most CLEC's, it was brutally abused via service sabotage, but the deathblow was some clever Verizon fraud. Then the bells made a huge show of pulling the plug on 12 hours notice, creating the most widespread, massive and prolonged (months?) downtime in the history of the commercial internet; millions nationwide were affected, including MSN's customers. The message was loud and clear: Don't deal with CLEC's. You might get shut off. Federal regulators? Off somewhere sending faxes from the beach, approving massive RBOC mergers while counting their bribe money.

You know, Verizon settled Northpoint's fraud claim for 175 million dollars...

So if beef prices rise

Slow down there cowboy. Telecom is regulated; the RBOC's prices and service quality aren't based on how well they wrastle their cows, they're based on how good their oversight is. But of course, you knew that, since your whole point here is just to make disingenuous comments that sound like arguments. I don't have to convince anyone Verizon is outrageously overpriced or offers abysmal service - any professional whose dealt with them knows that... Now that he's overseen the final days of behind the scenes sabotage of TA96, Powell has actually gone on record opposing the CLEC concept... backpedaling on the entire idea of competition in the industry. As I say, notoriously corrupt.

So you seem to believe that the proper role of government officials to pick winners and losers in the marketplace.

Thank you - I could have just accused you of having no idea either what I was saying or how the post-TA96 telecom industry works, but you've made my point better than I ever could.

You don't have any specific allegations of wrongdoing.

Thank you - I could have just accused you of either being senile or blatantly ignoring parts of your screen, but you've made my point better than I ever could.

just gratifying his own political bias

This is conservative dogma 101: Any attack is a partisan attack. Any criticism is a political bias. Unfortunately the facts dramatically point to Satanism. But I'll settle for cronyism and nepotism. And to your ignoring all the evidence in a goofy attempt to paint these clear and egregious failures as something other than grounds for criticism... poitical bias? You're gunning to have your headshot next to the definition, aren't you?

I'm sure you were out there dumping offal on dems and their appointees, too. At least there we have some common ground. It's not that dems wouldn't deserve your hypocritical contempt, just that you usually want to have some better reason for your arguments than drooling-fanboy-sports-team-loyalty.

I am not trying to shut down criticism of Bush

Yeah, right, AC Troll, you're just a freelance righter of wrongs, who gets 100% of their facts wrong and has no idea what they're talking about on any of the issues, but sure is fired up "bigtime" that someone may have disrespected your president and his friends.

Hail to the chief. Hit another one for the gipper, ACTroll! I'm waiting! And you can add why you don't log in - modded down too often?

Penn: You know, it's funny because Penn & Teller, although we tend to be political in our private lives-- political is a bit strong, I guess, but certainly we try to be aware of what' s going on in the world around us--we aren't very publicly political. We aren't people who believe that just because we're performers our opinions on everything need to be known. As far as I'm concerned, we did not move into politics; Janet Reno moved into art. One of the things that Teller and I are obsessed with, one of the reasons that we're in magic, is the difference between fantasy and reality. That is the subject that, if you have a brain in your head, is always dealt with in magic. The smarter the tricks you're doing, the more that' s an important thing. -- Penn Jillette -- Reason Magazine Interview

As far as I'm concerned, "geeks" did not develop some political mono-culture, politicians (and cartels) started to make a political movement out of restricting the activity of computer programmers and other technically minded people. Of course there are going to be technically minded people who sell out to the enemies of progress, that's inevitable. Those people will end up being sacrificed as soon as it is convienient to those in power.

The reason why technically minded people agree that things like Microsoft or DRM are bad is because they have had a bad experience with them, and they understand the cause of the problem. My sister did not understand it when she tried to hook her new DVD player up to a TV with no RCA jacks and the picture wouldn't work. She ended up buying a TV with RCA jacks to replace her old TV. I'm sure average people who use computers on which MS has deliberately broken some application they don't like don't necessarily blame MS any more than they do if their modem burns out in a thunderstorm.

Geeks have their eyes open, and they can't pretend un-learn things just because they are inconvienient to the **AA. The philosophy of the cartels and MS is often similar, and it boils down to, "Yes, we made that broke on purpose and if you want to fix it, we'll sick the law on you."

Oh, and plenty of geeks draw distinctions between illegal and legal uses for stuff like P2P. In fact, I'm sure that some originally thought, "Copying songs and ripping off the publisher is wrong, but that doesn't mean there aren't legitimate uses for this cool technology," but gave up that stance when they realized that the cartels might want to shut down P2P if it offered a competing business that was not illegal even more than they would shut down the illegal uses of P2P. Look at the history, the movie industry versus television, the movie industry versus the VCR and portions of the movie industry against DVD (and favoring Divx).

If you love technolgy, you will fight people who think the status quo is fine and want to destroy anything that shakes things up, even if robbing society of some knew technology will harm society as a whole.

If you don't love technology, then you are probably the kind of geek who eats broken glass or bites the heads off of chickens at a carnival blow-off and not a geek in the sense the author is. If you do love technology, then you will passionately hate attempts to restrict or suppress it. That's where a political "monoculture" comes from.

It's ok to publicize flaws in computer networks, you just can't demonstate the flaw if doing so is breaking the law. In this case, it seems like he got permission,

First, because this looks so much like one, let me state emphatically that this is not a troll.

My response is good, let it die.

Video games can teach strategy, creative thinking, teamwork, etc. At least they're interactive, require input, feedback. I've no problem at all with those. Television is nothing more than thought-control on a large scale. Let's see, what's on CNN today...

Murder of two girls (affects two families).
A snip about earth summit protestors (what they're protesting will be a foregone conclusion in a year).
Scientist blasts Ashcroft (non-issue).
Franks backs Afghan Probe (hey, we're doing something! No, nothing will come of it. I'll take bets if someone is offering.)
Priestly was released from the hospital.

By UN estimates, 1,500,000 million kids have died due to our embargo on Iraq -- which hasn't even so much as scratched our target, Saddaam -- and Dubya is quite eager to provide us with Part Deux at a cost of 80 billion. Oh, right, almost forgot -- defense budget for 2003 is 773 billion even without this added expense, while eduction is only slated for 50B.

And that's just my rant about the news and it's capacity to turn us into the most hated, docile pricks on the planet. So what about prime-time TV, sitcoms, et al? For that, I can only point to televisions well-documented narcotic-like effects. Wake, work, watch, consume, die. No thanks. Besides, I'd like to live my life instead of living some voyeuristic jackoff existence watching someone else's idea of what it should be like.

The end of TV as we know it? Good. It doesn't help us, it doesn't teach us, it doesn't make us better, it's damaging. There are few things I would want more than to have every television go blank, permanently. So the idea of the biggies losing their revenue stream? Doesn't phase me. You'd be amazed at the looks I get when I tell people I haven't watched since 1994. Some think I'm nuts. Others will actually tell me I'm nuts. So take the thing, bring it someplace safe, and light the !@#$ing thing on fire.

The fact that you won't is the lynchpin in my argument.

Serious question: What if the first time you see a gun outside a museum and not in the possession of police/security is when you are looking down the barrel of one in the hand of a criminal? Do you think you'd wish your country had more gun control (which obviously didn't keep this gun away from a criminal) or less (so that you could have your own for self-defense)?

Hypothetical, but compelling.

• Gun crimes soaring despite ban brought in following Dunblane
• A world without guns is not a pretty picture
• Gun-toting Swiss see fewer crimes
• Too many guns?
• Handgun Ban Fails to Quell Surge in Gun Crimes Across Britain
• When guns are banned in England
• Ivy League research says Anti-gun Crackdown Didn't Lower Crime

I have more, but that's probably enough.

-ChristTrekker

He suggests that maybe, just maybe, humans and technology are Gaia's attempts at preventing another catestrophic impact.

His article is a good read at Reason Online.

What's truly funny is that the I Am Canadian guy has since up and moved to Los Angeles.

Wackernagel's research which this is all based on doesn't take into consideration the rate of increase in effeciency that technology has and continues to create in production and utilization of resources.

For an in depth look, read this rebuttal at Reason Online.

I find it more than ironic that this forum misses the fact that technology is the enabling factor that makes this argument specious.

I really don't think that civil disobedience is going to do the trick. The RIAA's argument is that its listeners are outlaws, and locking up a few of them for not paying their royalties would only reinforce that argument--never mind that the argument is utterly specious.

Besides which, if you believe Lawrence Lessig, it'll just result in a whole lot of felony convictions:

Reason: Some of them would argue that they're active in the form of civil disobedience.

Lessig: In a world where civil disobedience was treated with toleration, that might be a good strategy. But we're in a world where disobedience is treated with felony convictions. The idea that you are going to get lots of civil disobedience against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is just crazy. You're going to get lots of prosecutions and people going away to jail. The cost of disobedience has become too high, and I'm not sure it's a viable strategy anymore.

There's some basic cultural differences here. Many of the people who have great ideas in the Slashdot context about the way to run the world .. if you put them in Washington, they just don't fit.

(excerpted from an interview with Reason magazine)

I really don't think that civil disobedience is going to do the trick. The RIAA's argument is that its listeners are outlaws, and locking up a few of them for not paying their royalties would only reinforce that argument--never mind that the argument is utterly specious.

Besides which, if you believe Lawrence Lessig, it'll just result in a whole lot of felony convictions:

Reason: Some of them would argue that they're active in the form of civil disobedience.

Lessig: In a world where civil disobedience was treated with toleration, that might be a good strategy. But we're in a world where disobedience is treated with felony convictions. The idea that you are going to get lots of civil disobedience against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is just crazy. You're going to get lots of prosecutions and people going away to jail. The cost of disobedience has become too high, and I'm not sure it's a viable strategy anymore.

There's some basic cultural differences here. Many of the people who have great ideas in the Slashdot context about the way to run the world .. if you put them in Washington, they just don't fit.

(excerpted from an interview with Reason magazine)

Here's some more info about corporate personhood and the corporate death penalty .

Basically, the idea is since corporations are deemed persons, incorporated under the laws of a particular jurisdiction, that their charter to conduct business be revoked if they committed grievous crimes.

the U.S.tends to avoid killing its own citizens? Thank you for being so generous.

One of the big lies lefties like to spout is "the 5000 dead Iraqi children because of the U.S led sanctions" line.

If you want know the real situation, read this devastating critique of the lies being spouted. To put the blame on anyone else but Saddam is being ridiculous.

When discussing political systems, you can't really argue which one is the best..it's which one is the least bad. Of this, communism wouldn't doesn't have a leg to stand up, seeing the results of the last century.

The annual budget of the National Institutes of Health, the major government grant-giving institution for medical research, was $17.8 billion in 2000 and is expected to rise to $20.5 billion this year. Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical companies' R&D budgets totaled $26.4 billion last year -- almost 50 percent more than the 2000 NIH budget. (Industry R&D expenditures equal more than 20 percent of what pharmaceutical companies make in total sales, making the industry the most research-intensive business in the world.) What roles do government and private-sector research actually play in the drug discovery and development process?

"Government-supported research gets you to the 20-yard line," explains Duke's Grabowski. "Biotech companies get you to the 50-yard line and [the big pharmaceutical companies] take you the rest of the way to the goal line. By and large, government labs don't do any drug development. The real originator of 90 percent of prescription drugs is private industry. It has never been demonstrated that government labs can take the initiative all the way" to drug-store shelves.

George Whitesides, a distinguished professor of biochemistry at Harvard University, similarly appreciates the role of often-government-funded research labs at universities in the early stages of drug development. But he stresses that "pure" research rarely translates into usable products. "The U.S. is the only country in the world that has a system for transmitting science efficiently into new technologies," he argues. That system includes research universities that produce a lot of basic science and get a lot of government money. In turn, startup companies take that lab science and develop it further. "Startups take 50 percent of the risk out of a product by taking it up to clinical trials," explains Whitesides. "Industry has an acute sense of what the problems are that need addressing." Without private industry to mine the insights of university researchers, taxpayers would have paid for a lot of top-notch scientific papers, but few if any medicines.

Frank Lichtenberg, the Columbia economist, has a slightly different take on the question of whether patients are paying twice for drugs. He cites the example of Xalatan, a glaucoma drug developed by Pharmacia & Upjohn. Last April, The New York Times ran a news story suggesting that although some of the original research on Xalatan was backed by a $4 million NIH grant in 1982, the "taxpayers have reaped no financial reward on their investment." Not so fast, says Lichtenberg. In 1999, Xalatan represented 7 percent of sales for Pharmacia & Upjohn, so Lichtenberg reasonably assumes that 7 percent of the company's $344 million in corporate income tax payments that year can be attributed to Xalatan. Thus Pharmacia & Upjohn paid about $24 million in income taxes on its 1999 sales of Xalatan. Just counting that one year of increased taxes as if it were the only return ever for a 17-year-old investment, Lichtenberg calculates that this yields a very respectable 11 percent return on the taxpayers' money. In fact, future sales are very likely to be higher, "so the return on the taxpayers' investment is likely to be considerably greater."

This article from Reason comes to mind:

All environmental problems occur in open-access commons -- areas like rivers, airsheds,
and fisheries -- that no one owns and no one has a responsibility to protect. Political
management has generally been the way we have tried to handle the problems caused by
the institution of open-access commons. The CPC is pointing to how private property can
effectively deal with environmental problems. "An owner who neglects or harms what he
owns is soon out of business and is replaced by somebody better," noted Smith.

Power is going the same way, as can be evidenced by the collapse of the California power grid. How long will the state pay for the power companies to stay solvent until the state becomes the primary power-provider? Phone will go too, IMHO.

Power went haywire in Calif. not because of de-regulation in general, but California's "de-regulation" specifically.

I love proof by single (usually simplified and incorrect) example.

Soon after Sept 11, senior people in the military were quoted as saying that they wanted the entire Afghanistan/Middle East region to "glow with radiation."

So, no, I'm not surprised that the US wants to use nukes. Particularly against that axis of evil -- if you can't nuke them, who can you nuke? And if you can't nuke anyone, what are those nukes for?

This is version 0.6 of a troll HOWTO, sort of a companion piece to jsm's excellent troll FAQ. As a draft, comments and criticism are always welcome, if not appreciated :)

Section 1 - Trolling techniques

There are techniques used by successful trolls to elicit the maximum amount of responses from unthinking /.ers. This section is dedicated to explaining how to use these in the course of your trolls. Remember though, a great troll can break any or all of these and still be successful...

• Timing

  Because you're posting as an AC, your troll will generally be ignored in favour of posters using their accounts, and so getting in early is essential. A good guideline is to get into the first 20 posts, so that people reading the article will see the troll before it is swamped out. One way of increasing the speed with which you get your troll into play is to prepare them beforehand, and then quickly customise them for the current article. This is easier than it sounds since /. typically repeats stories with small variations and runs lots of similar stories.

  Note that this is why Jon Katz stories are pretty worthless as trolling material - by the time you've found the article and prepared a troll there's already 50+ posts on it, most of them flaming Jon Katz anyway :)

• Exposure

  Once you've got your troll in, you need people to actually read it. You also want replies - /.ers are more likely to read your troll if it starts a large thread. You also want to remember that some people have set their comment thresholds to values higher than 0 - to get the attention of these you either want to get your post moderated up (see Style, below) or get a reply which gets moderated up to 4 or 5, in which case your troll becomes visible to all.

• Accounts

  An alternative to the time-honoured tradition of AC trolling is that of creating a "troll" account. This gives you the advantage of posting at 1 rather than 0, and slashbots are more likely to take you seriously, especially if you at least sound reasonable. If you do this, try to avoid posting stuff where it is obvious you're a troll under the account - post it anoymously instead - some slightly more canny readers actually check your user info before they reply. Not many though :)

  The ultimate goal of the troll account is to secure the +1 bonus, which is currently received once you hit 26 points of Karma. To get there, employ the techniques of karma whoring that we see every day on /. and watch the karma roll in. And of course once you get the +1 bonus, the world is your oyster in terms of /. Posts made at a default of 2 hit even those people with the threshold of 2, are more likely to get moderated up even further if they are at all coherent, and people tend to lose their critical thinking abilities in the face of the +1 bonus. Milk it for all it's worth.

• Layout

  To get people reading it a troll needs to be easily readable. Make sure you break it down into easily digestible paragraphs, use HTML tags where appropriate (but always make sure you close them properly) and use whitespace appropriately.

• Size

  Generally a troll shouldn't be too short, otherwise it'll get lost in the crowd. A workable minimum is a couple of medium paragraphs. Conversely, it shouldn't be too long, or no-one will bother to read it. Keep it to a happy medium.

• Spelling

  Whilst spelling is important if you want the troll to be taken "seriously", key spelling mistakes can draw out the spelling zealots, especially if you mis-spell the name of a venerated /. hero, like Linus Torveldes or Richard Strawlman (thanks dmg). Related to this is the use of the wrong word, explaining an acronym as being something it isn't or making a word into an acronym even when it isn't.

• Subject

  The subject line needs to draw attention to your post without making it obvious that it is a troll. A simple statement of the main point of your argument can work here.

  Style

  Once you realise that most moderators don't bother to read past the first paragraph or two, you can use this fact to craft trolls that can be moderated up as "Insightful" (note that I mean this in the /. sense rather than the real-world sense). Start off fairly reasonable, making statements that are /. friendly and not being too controversial. As the troll goes on, make it more and more controversial, building it up for the coup de grace in the final paragraph.

• Linking

  As we all know, a post with links is considered "informative" by the /. crowd. Moderators love it, and they rarely check the links, so be sure to include as many as possible. And make them wrong - a link to the Perl website should instead point to the Python website instead, and vice versa. The other alternative to incorrect links is "useful" links to places like www.linux.org and i.e. places /.ers could never have found on their own :)

• Feeding

  The ideal troll requires no feeding - it runs on its own, generating flamewars between clueless /.ers for your amusement. But often a troll requires some help and so you should consider feeding it. Feeding is best reserved for people making either completely clueless responses, people making responses with holes in, or those wonderful people who write a 2000-word point-by-point rebuttal of your troll.

• Know your audience

  Always keep in mind the kind of things advocated on /. so that you can play on and against them. This is why anti-Linux, creationist, gun-loving, pro-corporation trolls work well - the vast majority of /.ers hold the opposite viewpoints. And if a few people agree with you, so much the better - it merely validates your viewpoint in the eyes of readers.

• Arrogance

  Be arrogant. You, as a troll, know that you're right. No other explanation could exist. The wronger the "fact", the more assertively you should state it. Make it clear that you are better than everyone else - you know the truth and they are just too stupid to realise it. Use plenty of sarcasm, and use "quotes" to show it to people too dumb to realise.

• Offensiveness

  Being offensive in your initial troll can be counter-productive - it causes moderators to mark you down as flamebait in general. But if you're feeding, then you can get away with calling /.ers all kinds of things. Make broad generalisations about /. readers - call them "long-haired Linux zealots", "socialist open-source bigots" or whatever. Stereotyping is encouraged - people always want to think that they're an individual, and will point this out to you given half a chance.

• Indifference

  Great for articles with a political or social bent, this kind of troll expresses complete indifference to the topic at hand, wondering who on Earth cares about it. An alternative method is to say that the topic only concerns a certain group of people - criminals, idiots, hackers (always use this instead of crackers) or whatever group you want to offend.

• Sympathy

  Appear to take the same stance as the people you're trying to troll - claim you're as much a fan of Linux as the next man, but... This way you can make all kinds of claims in the sure knowledge that you actually know what you're talking about. A great phrase to use here is "In my experience". Remember to act like all the things you're pointing out are unfortunate but true.

• The common touch

  Always accuse /.ers of being elitist. This is an easy thing to do seeing as a lot of them are. Claim that is their grandmother couldn't use it, then they are just into it to feel better than Joe Sixpack rather than "doing it for the average user". This is always great for working into anti-Linux trolls - attack command-line tools and poorly designed desktops.

• The 31337 touch

  The opposite of the above. Claim that technology or whatever is only for the elite of society and that any attempt to open it up for everyone is wrong, an attack on intellectualism and possibly even dangerous. If people were meant to understand these things then they would, and it's their fault if they're too stupid to learn.

• Contradiction

  Never be afraid to contradict yourself, even in the space of a single sentence. The phrases "I am a top programmer who codes in VB" or "I am a supporter of open source who uses NT at work and 95 at home" will be sure to get a response from some weenie smugly pointing out the contradiction. Confuse the issue more by engaging in contradiction when you are feeding - this will confuse /.ers who will then make even more stupid replies, leaving them even more wide open for response.

  Clues

  If you're feeling brave, give the reader clues that this is an obvious troll. The classic example here is dmg's stock phrase "I am often accused of trolling (whatever that is)", but also feel free to use phrases like "I have not read the article, and I don't know much about XYZ but I feel I must comment". If anyone responds to a troll with these kinds of clues in it, feel free to bask in the glow of knee-jerk /. responses.

• Denial

  If you're unlucky someone will accuse you of being a troll (surely not!) and try and ruin it for you. If you don't want it all to end there, then be sure to counter it by accusing them of being small-minded and petty, saying that it's easier for them to say it's a troll than to accept that people have different opinions. Be sure to say this in the subject line, especially if their subject was the infamous "YHBT. YHL. HAND."

• Claiming credit

  Given that /. has its community of regular trolls (hi guys!), it's only polite to publish your troll on one of the so-called "hidden" forums for all to see and admire. This way, you get to bask in the praise of other trolls, they get to contribute to your's if they want to, and you get an easy way to find the troll later on when you want to check on its progress :)

  As for when to post it, that's a matter of opinion really. You can either post it straight away or leave it will after people start biting. Remember that the troll forum is also frequented by non-trolls, and sometimes you may get a self-declared "troll-buster" try and expose you. But remember, /.ers always post before thinking, and often it doesn't matter at all.

  There is no real current forum at the moment thanks to various spammers hitting the sids, but try trolltalk, the original troll sid started by 80md and osm way back in the day. Generally all postings are done there as an AC, with your name at the end of the post. Include a link to the troll somewhere in the text, which ideally will be directly to the post and its replies - click on the #XX link in the thread to get there.

• Ending the troll

  Sometimes you just get bored with a troll, or people start posting genuinely thoughtful stuff in reply (it does happen). When this happens it might be time to own up to the troll with a helpful "YHBT. YHL. HAND." post. Sometimes people will carry on a discussion of the issue, and if you're really lucky (and it was a great troll) they will completely fail to believe you and carry on arguing. If that happens, pat yourself on the back for writing a great troll :)

• The cheap $3 crack

  Finally, when all else fails and your troll gets moderated down to (-1, Troll) within ten seconds of you posting it, the only honourable thing to do is to accuse the moderators of smoking the cheap $3 crack (again) and give up :(

Section 2 - Types of troll

1. The Maniac

   Probably the most popular kind of troll, the Maniac holds an opinion on something, and won't budge from that opinion no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented. If challenged, the Maniac will simply get more and more agitated and abusive, deriding his opponents as "idiots", "wrong-thinking", "dangerous" and "subversive". Generally the Maniac takes a position that opposes the prevalent /. beliefs, but a similar effect can be achieved by taking a typical /. viewpoint and pushing it to ridiculous extremes.

   Maniacs can be crafted for practically every article /. posts, although some are more obvious targets than others. Civil liberty articles, especially on things like censorship, DMCA, UCITA that really get /.ers riled up, are usually extremely fruitful grounds for a well-crafted maniac. The other obvious type of article is anything which could possibly involve religion, especially evolution :)

   Here are some fruitful avenues to explore:

   • The right-wing

     Always popular, the right-wing maniac (RWM) is a God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving American, and proud of it. They don't care about the rest of the world, unless it's to "prove" that America is better than everything else, and they cannot stand liberal whining over civil rights. They hate the moral decay of America and want it to revert into a nation of heterosexual, Christian whites like it was meant to be. Woe betide anyone that dares to suggest otherwise.

   • Religion

     There are two ways to approach this kind of maniac. The harder to pull off is the militant atheist, but this is quite common amongst /. posters and you would have to be very offensive to get this to work. Of course with religion trolls, the argument can go on for ever once it's started... The more common approach is the Christian fundamentalist. They are ignorant, intolerant and bigoted in the extreme. For them the Bible is the inerrant word of God revealed to man - it contains no flaws and no contradictions. Thus they are strict Creationists - mentions of evolution or cosmology will set them off on vitriolic rants. Flaming denunciations of anyone daring to contradict the "Word of God" are the way to go, and any kind of proof can always be ignored by appealing to "secular humanist brainwashing". And let's not forget, the USA is the greatest nation on Earth because it has the righteous power of Jesus Christ behind it.

   • Ideology

     Pick a philosophy, any philosophy. This troll is a troll with a cause - they have found some kind of ideological truth, and are out to expose every other philosophy as a sham. Whether it be libertarianism, objectivism, communism or capitalism, this troll will point out the obvious "flaws" in any other philosophies, whilst spouting dogma about their own. And the best thing is - you don't even need to know that much about what you're spouting - making doctrinaire mistakes will get both sides of the argument flaming you, adding to the fun.

   • Software

     This is an old favourite and crops up in many forms, covering the gamut from OS maniacs (Linux zealots, MS-apologists or embittered BSD fanatics), language maniacs (Pascal vs. C, C vs. C++, C++ vs. Java, Perl vs. Python, VB vs. everything), application maniacs(GIMP vs. Photoshop, Netscape vs. IE, vi vs. emacs) and also includes people who complain about how technology should only be for the 31337 hackers.Guns

     Americans love their guns, and will always fight passionately for their Constitutionally guarenteed rights to bear arms and shoot people. Even the slightest hint of criticism of this will bring down the wrath of a thousand and one enraged gun-owners on you, so it's always a great point to work into a troll :)

2. The Expert

   The Expert is someone who is "savvy" in their particular field, and is perfectly willing to give their opinion on any topic even vauguely related to their field. The Expert is most likely to be from a field which /.ers as a rule despise - the classic example is dumb marketing guy, but try consultants, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, executives, journalists (just think Jon Katz). With this kind of troll sweeping statements with little content are the norm, along wire dire portents of future catastrophe and dark hints of "insider knowledge".

   Some possible angles to exploit:

   • Industry knowledge

     The expert knows the computing industry from the inside - as a long-term pro, they can dispense knowledge knowing that they can "speak for the industry". Their smug self-satisfaction is bound to annoy, as is any suggestion that things aren't the way that /.ers would like it - saying "Linux requires the rock-solid guarantee of a trusted company like Microsoft" or "Apache cannot be trusted for mission-critical enterprise platforms" is guaranteed to get you denials explaining exactly why you're wrong, in excruciating detail.

   • Helpful hints

     With their tech-savvy (or law-savvy or whatever) experience, the expert is obviously the best person to point out what's wrong with things or to give out useful "factual" information. In fact this probably works best with lawyer trolls - for all that /.ers protest "IANAL", they certainly seem to think they could be, and any mistakes you make will send them rushing to prove themselves by correcting you.

3. Offtopic Trolls

   Not really a "troll" in the strict Jargon File sense of the word, but they certainly should be included here :) This category includes parodies, offtopic weirdness any all kinds of amusing stuff. Not really my area of expertise, this stuff is mainly done by gnarphlager and opensourceman. Thanks to gnarphlager for this section.

   Offtopic trolls, like any other, come in almost as many colours as an iMac, but generally not as cute. But then again, a good offtopic "troll" can affect more people than a repulsive little gumdrop on your desk, because you need to have someone SEE your desk before they can react. Simple? Moreso than even my overblown prose could indicate. Some basic examples:

   1. The serial troll

      Write a story. Keep expanding it. It doesn't matter what article you post it under, so long as it's high up. If you want people to recognize you, pick a couple themes or symbols, and carry them on throughout the story. Other alternatives include back linking or including the entire story, but adding more each time. Be funny if you want. Or if you don't feel like being funny, just be really weird. Someone will react.

   2. The random troll

      This has nothing to do with anything. Be it a stream of consciousness rant, or a description of the corner of your desk. Another favorite is a monologue, read as if spoken from any one given entity to another. The more outlandish, the better (a pair of socks talking to a mousepad, for example). If you really wanted to be artsy, work in an actual metaphor or legitimate meaning behind it, but it's not necessary.

   3. The vaguely related troll

      Start out with a comment about the article. Have a definite opinion of it. Then, after a little while, disintegrate into randomness. All roads eventually can eventually lead to cheese (yum), Natalie Portman, cannibalism, toasters, squirrels, futons, you name it. All it takes is a little bit of creativity. Oh, and feel free to use other trolls' motifs. Open source and all that ;-)

   General tips:

   • If it's funny for a fleeting moment, then it's worth posting.
   • Puns. Puns are only less vile than mimes, but it's hard to mime on /. So feel free/obligated to litter your offtopic and random bits with puns. Hurt the bastards. And if they're sick enough to laugh at them, then they'll eventually end up here ;-)
   • Obscure cultural references and injokes are always good. SOMEONE will get them eventually.
   • Several drafts of a serial or random post are common, but true elegance is being able to come up with something on the spot that still makes the top 40 posts (on a post-heavy article)

Section 3 - Useful trolling links

The following links contain background information useful for trolls needing quick quotes and "expert" opinions to include.

1. General purpose links
   • ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/trollfaq.html - How to deal with USENET trolls - learn your enemy :)
   • www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html - A List Of Fallacious Arguments - Learn them and use them liberally
   • www.altairiv.demon.co.uk/troll/trollfaq.html - USENET troll HOWTO
   • www.baiting.org - Baiting.org
   • www.fieldingtravel.com/df/index.htm - Fielding's DangerFinder - A guide to what and where's dangerous
   
   
2. Religious links
   • www.godhatesamerica.com/ - God Hates America
   • www.chalcedon.edu/creed.html - The Creed of Christian Reconstruction
   • www.demonbuster.com - How to cast out your demons and do spiritual warfare
   • riceinfo.rice.edu/armadillo/Sciacademy/riggins/thi ngs.htm - Things Creationists hate
   • www.icr.org/ - Institute for Creation Research
   • www.xenu.net - Operation Clambake - The fight against Scientology on the net
   • www.hom.net/~angels/ - Citizens for the Ten Commandments
   • www.bju.edu/rcnbc.html - The difference between Catholics and Christians
   • www.geocities.com/prazske00/biblequotes.html - Bible quotes by category
   
   
3. Political/economy links
   • www.aynrand.org - The Ayn Rand Institute
   • www.reason.com - Libertarian site
   • www.freerepublic.com - Right-wing stuff
   • www.jbs.org - Excellent site for all kinds of right-wingery
   • www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html - Web economy bullshit generator
   
   
4. Crackpot science links
   • www.fixedearth.com - The Earth Is Not Moving
   • www.jir.com/index.htm - The Journal of Irreproducible Results
   
   

This is version 0.6 of a troll HOWTO, sort of a companion piece to jsm's excellent troll FAQ. As a draft, comments and criticism are always welcome, if not appreciated :)

Section 1 - Trolling techniques

There are techniques used by successful trolls to elicit the maximum amount of responses from unthinking /.ers. This section is dedicated to explaining how to use these in the course of your trolls. Remember though, a great troll can break any or all of these and still be successful...

• Timing

  Because you're posting as an AC, your troll will generally be ignored in favour of posters using their accounts, and so getting in early is essential. A good guideline is to get into the first 20 posts, so that people reading the article will see the troll before it is swamped out. One way of increasing the speed with which you get your troll into play is to prepare them beforehand, and then quickly customise them for the current article. This is easier than it sounds since /. typically repeats stories with small variations and runs lots of similar stories.

  Note that this is why Jon Katz stories are pretty worthless as trolling material - by the time you've found the article and prepared a troll there's already 50+ posts on it, most of them flaming Jon Katz anyway :)

• Exposure

  Once you've got your troll in, you need people to actually read it. You also want replies - /.ers are more likely to read your troll if it starts a large thread. You also want to remember that some people have set their comment thresholds to values higher than 0 - to get the attention of these you either want to get your post moderated up (see Style, below) or get a reply which gets moderated up to 4 or 5, in which case your troll becomes visible to all.

• Accounts

  An alternative to the time-honoured tradition of AC trolling is that of creating a "troll" account. This gives you the advantage of posting at 1 rather than 0, and slashbots are more likely to take you seriously, especially if you at least sound reasonable. If you do this, try to avoid posting stuff where it is obvious you're a troll under the account - post it anoymously instead - some slightly more canny readers actually check your user info before they reply. Not many though :)

  The ultimate goal of the troll account is to secure the +1 bonus, which is currently received once you hit 26 points of Karma. To get there, employ the techniques of karma whoring that we see every day on /. and watch the karma roll in. And of course once you get the +1 bonus, the world is your oyster in terms of /. Posts made at a default of 2 hit even those people with the threshold of 2, are more likely to get moderated up even further if they are at all coherent, and people tend to lose their critical thinking abilities in the face of the +1 bonus. Milk it for all it's worth.

• Layout

  To get people reading it a troll needs to be easily readable. Make sure you break it down into easily digestible paragraphs, use HTML tags where appropriate (but always make sure you close them properly) and use whitespace appropriately.

• Size

  Generally a troll shouldn't be too short, otherwise it'll get lost in the crowd. A workable minimum is a couple of medium paragraphs. Conversely, it shouldn't be too long, or no-one will bother to read it. Keep it to a happy medium.

• Spelling

  Whilst spelling is important if you want the troll to be taken "seriously", key spelling mistakes can draw out the spelling zealots, especially if you mis-spell the name of a venerated /. hero, like Linus Torveldes or Richard Strawlman (thanks dmg). Related to this is the use of the wrong word, explaining an acronym as being something it isn't or making a word into an acronym even when it isn't.

• Subject

  The subject line needs to draw attention to your post without making it obvious that it is a troll. A simple statement of the main point of your argument can work here.

  Style

  Once you realise that most moderators don't bother to read past the first paragraph or two, you can use this fact to craft trolls that can be moderated up as "Insightful" (note that I mean this in the /. sense rather than the real-world sense). Start off fairly reasonable, making statements that are /. friendly and not being too controversial. As the troll goes on, make it more and more controversial, building it up for the coup de grace in the final paragraph.

• Linking

  As we all know, a post with links is considered "informative" by the /. crowd. Moderators love it, and they rarely check the links, so be sure to include as many as possible. And make them wrong - a link to the Perl website should instead point to the Python website instead, and vice versa. The other alternative to incorrect links is "useful" links to places like www.linux.org and i.e. places /.ers could never have found on their own :)

• Feeding

  The ideal troll requires no feeding - it runs on its own, generating flamewars between clueless /.ers for your amusement. But often a troll requires some help and so you should consider feeding it. Feeding is best reserved for people making either completely clueless responses, people making responses with holes in, or those wonderful people who write a 2000-word point-by-point rebuttal of your troll.

• Know your audience

  Always keep in mind the kind of things advocated on /. so that you can play on and against them. This is why anti-Linux, creationist, gun-loving, pro-corporation trolls work well - the vast majority of /.ers hold the opposite viewpoints. And if a few people agree with you, so much the better - it merely validates your viewpoint in the eyes of readers.

• Arrogance

  Be arrogant. You, as a troll, know that you're right. No other explanation could exist. The wronger the "fact", the more assertively you should state it. Make it clear that you are better than everyone else - you know the truth and they are just too stupid to realise it. Use plenty of sarcasm, and use "quotes" to show it to people too dumb to realise.

• Offensiveness

  Being offensive in your initial troll can be counter-productive - it causes moderators to mark you down as flamebait in general. But if you're feeding, then you can get away with calling /.ers all kinds of things. Make broad generalisations about /. readers - call them "long-haired Linux zealots", "socialist open-source bigots" or whatever. Stereotyping is encouraged - people always want to think that they're an individual, and will point this out to you given half a chance.

• Indifference

  Great for articles with a political or social bent, this kind of troll expresses complete indifference to the topic at hand, wondering who on Earth cares about it. An alternative method is to say that the topic only concerns a certain group of people - criminals, idiots, hackers (always use this instead of crackers) or whatever group you want to offend.

• Sympathy

  Appear to take the same stance as the people you're trying to troll - claim you're as much a fan of Linux as the next man, but... This way you can make all kinds of claims in the sure knowledge that you actually know what you're talking about. A great phrase to use here is "In my experience". Remember to act like all the things you're pointing out are unfortunate but true.

• The common touch

  Always accuse /.ers of being elitist. This is an easy thing to do seeing as a lot of them are. Claim that is their grandmother couldn't use it, then they are just into it to feel better than Joe Sixpack rather than "doing it for the average user". This is always great for working into anti-Linux trolls - attack command-line tools and poorly designed desktops.

• The 31337 touch

  The opposite of the above. Claim that technology or whatever is only for the elite of society and that any attempt to open it up for everyone is wrong, an attack on intellectualism and possibly even dangerous. If people were meant to understand these things then they would, and it's their fault if they're too stupid to learn.

• Contradiction

  Never be afraid to contradict yourself, even in the space of a single sentence. The phrases "I am a top programmer who codes in VB" or "I am a supporter of open source who uses NT at work and 95 at home" will be sure to get a response from some weenie smugly pointing out the contradiction. Confuse the issue more by engaging in contradiction when you are feeding - this will confuse /.ers who will then make even more stupid replies, leaving them even more wide open for response.

  Clues

  If you're feeling brave, give the reader clues that this is an obvious troll. The classic example here is dmg's stock phrase "I am often accused of trolling (whatever that is)", but also feel free to use phrases like "I have not read the article, and I don't know much about XYZ but I feel I must comment". If anyone responds to a troll with these kinds of clues in it, feel free to bask in the glow of knee-jerk /. responses.

• Denial

  If you're unlucky someone will accuse you of being a troll (surely not!) and try and ruin it for you. If you don't want it all to end there, then be sure to counter it by accusing them of being small-minded and petty, saying that it's easier for them to say it's a troll than to accept that people have different opinions. Be sure to say this in the subject line, especially if their subject was the infamous "YHBT. YHL. HAND."

• Claiming credit

  Given that /. has its community of regular trolls (hi guys!), it's only polite to publish your troll on one of the so-called "hidden" forums for all to see and admire. This way, you get to bask in the praise of other trolls, they get to contribute to your's if they want to, and you get an easy way to find the troll later on when you want to check on its progress :)

  As for when to post it, that's a matter of opinion really. You can either post it straight away or leave it will after people start biting. Remember that the troll forum is also frequented by non-trolls, and sometimes you may get a self-declared "troll-buster" try and expose you. But remember, /.ers always post before thinking, and often it doesn't matter at all.

  There is no real current forum at the moment thanks to various spammers hitting the sids, but try trolltalk, the original troll sid started by 80md and osm way back in the day. Generally all postings are done there as an AC, with your name at the end of the post. Include a link to the troll somewhere in the text, which ideally will be directly to the post and its replies - click on the #XX link in the thread to get there.

• Ending the troll

  Sometimes you just get bored with a troll, or people start posting genuinely thoughtful stuff in reply (it does happen). When this happens it might be time to own up to the troll with a helpful "YHBT. YHL. HAND." post. Sometimes people will carry on a discussion of the issue, and if you're really lucky (and it was a great troll) they will completely fail to believe you and carry on arguing. If that happens, pat yourself on the back for writing a great troll :)

• The cheap $3 crack

  Finally, when all else fails and your troll gets moderated down to (-1, Troll) within ten seconds of you posting it, the only honourable thing to do is to accuse the moderators of smoking the cheap $3 crack (again) and give up :(

Section 2 - Types of troll

1. The Maniac

   Probably the most popular kind of troll, the Maniac holds an opinion on something, and won't budge from that opinion no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented. If challenged, the Maniac will simply get more and more agitated and abusive, deriding his opponents as "idiots", "wrong-thinking", "dangerous" and "subversive". Generally the Maniac takes a position that opposes the prevalent /. beliefs, but a similar effect can be achieved by taking a typical /. viewpoint and pushing it to ridiculous extremes.

   Maniacs can be crafted for practically every article /. posts, although some are more obvious targets than others. Civil liberty articles, especially on things like censorship, DMCA, UCITA that really get /.ers riled up, are usually extremely fruitful grounds for a well-crafted maniac. The other obvious type of article is anything which could possibly involve religion, especially evolution :)

   Here are some fruitful avenues to explore:

   • The right-wing

     Always popular, the right-wing maniac (RWM) is a God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving American, and proud of it. They don't care about the rest of the world, unless it's to "prove" that America is better than everything else, and they cannot stand liberal whining over civil rights. They hate the moral decay of America and want it to revert into a nation of heterosexual, Christian whites like it was meant to be. Woe betide anyone that dares to suggest otherwise.

   • Religion

     There are two ways to approach this kind of maniac. The harder to pull off is the militant atheist, but this is quite common amongst /. posters and you would have to be very offensive to get this to work. Of course with religion trolls, the argument can go on for ever once it's started... The more common approach is the Christian fundamentalist. They are ignorant, intolerant and bigoted in the extreme. For them the Bible is the inerrant word of God revealed to man - it contains no flaws and no contradictions. Thus they are strict Creationists - mentions of evolution or cosmology will set them off on vitriolic rants. Flaming denunciations of anyone daring to contradict the "Word of God" are the way to go, and any kind of proof can always be ignored by appealing to "secular humanist brainwashing". And let's not forget, the USA is the greatest nation on Earth because it has the righteous power of Jesus Christ behind it.

   • Ideology

     Pick a philosophy, any philosophy. This troll is a troll with a cause - they have found some kind of ideological truth, and are out to expose every other philosophy as a sham. Whether it be libertarianism, objectivism, communism or capitalism, this troll will point out the obvious "flaws" in any other philosophies, whilst spouting dogma about their own. And the best thing is - you don't even need to know that much about what you're spouting - making doctrinaire mistakes will get both sides of the argument flaming you, adding to the fun.

   • Software

     This is an old favourite and crops up in many forms, covering the gamut from OS maniacs (Linux zealots, MS-apologists or embittered BSD fanatics), language maniacs (Pascal vs. C, C vs. C++, C++ vs. Java, Perl vs. Python, VB vs. everything), application maniacs(GIMP vs. Photoshop, Netscape vs. IE, vi vs. emacs) and also includes people who complain about how technology should only be for the 31337 hackers.Guns

     Americans love their guns, and will always fight passionately for their Constitutionally guarenteed rights to bear arms and shoot people. Even the slightest hint of criticism of this will bring down the wrath of a thousand and one enraged gun-owners on you, so it's always a great point to work into a troll :)

2. The Expert

   The Expert is someone who is "savvy" in their particular field, and is perfectly willing to give their opinion on any topic even vauguely related to their field. The Expert is most likely to be from a field which /.ers as a rule despise - the classic example is dumb marketing guy, but try consultants, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, executives, journalists (just think Jon Katz). With this kind of troll sweeping statements with little content are the norm, along wire dire portents of future catastrophe and dark hints of "insider knowledge".

   Some possible angles to exploit:

   • Industry knowledge

     The expert knows the computing industry from the inside - as a long-term pro, they can dispense knowledge knowing that they can "speak for the industry". Their smug self-satisfaction is bound to annoy, as is any suggestion that things aren't the way that /.ers would like it - saying "Linux requires the rock-solid guarantee of a trusted company like Microsoft" or "Apache cannot be trusted for mission-critical enterprise platforms" is guaranteed to get you denials explaining exactly why you're wrong, in excruciating detail.

   • Helpful hints

     With their tech-savvy (or law-savvy or whatever) experience, the expert is obviously the best person to point out what's wrong with things or to give out useful "factual" information. In fact this probably works best with lawyer trolls - for all that /.ers protest "IANAL", they certainly seem to think they could be, and any mistakes you make will send them rushing to prove themselves by correcting you.

   Offtopic Trolls

   Not really a "troll" in the strict Jargon File sense of the word, but they certainly should be included here :) This category includes parodies, offtopic weirdness any all kinds of amusing stuff. Not really my area of expertise, this stuff is mainly done by gnarphlager and opensourceman. Thanks to gnarphlager for this section.

   Offtopic trolls, like any other, come in almost as many colours as an iMac, but generally not as cute. But then again, a good offtopic "troll" can affect more people than a repulsive little gumdrop on your desk, because you need to have someone SEE your desk before they can react. Simple? Moreso than even my overblown prose could indicate. Some basic examples:

   1. The serial troll

      Write a story. Keep expanding it. It doesn't matter what article you post it under, so long as it's high up. If you want people to recognize you, pick a couple themes or symbols, and carry them on throughout the story. Other alternatives include back linking or including the entire story, but adding more each time. Be funny if you want. Or if you don't feel like being funny, just be really weird. Someone will react.

   2. The random troll

      This has nothing to do with anything. Be it a stream of consciousness rant, or a description of the corner of your desk. Another favorite is a monologue, read as if spoken from any one given entity to another. The more outlandish, the better (a pair of socks talking to a mousepad, for example). If you really wanted to be artsy, work in an actual metaphor or legitimate meaning behind it, but it's not necessary.

   3. The vaguely related troll

      Start out with a comment about the article. Have a definite opinion of it. Then, after a little while, disintegrate into randomness. All roads eventually can eventually lead to cheese (yum), Natalie Portman, cannibalism, toasters, squirrels, futons, you name it. All it takes is a little bit of creativity. Oh, and feel free to use other trolls' motifs. Open source and all that ;-)

   General tips:

   • If it's funny for a fleeting moment, then it's worth posting.
   • Puns. Puns are only less vile than mimes, but it's hard to mime on /. So feel free/obligated to litter your offtopic and random bits with puns. Hurt the bastards. And if they're sick enough to laugh at them, then they'll eventually end up here ;-)
   • Obscure cultural references and injokes are always good. SOMEONE will get them eventually.
   • Several drafts of a serial or random post are common, but true elegance is being able to come up with something on the spot that still makes the top 40 posts (on a post-heavy article)

Section 3 - Useful trolling links

The following links contain background information useful for trolls needing quick quotes and "expert" opinions to include.

1. General purpose links
   • ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/trollfaq.html - How to deal with USENET trolls - learn your enemy :)
   • www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html - A List Of Fallacious Arguments - Learn them and use them liberally
   • www.altairiv.demon.co.uk/troll/trollfaq.html - USENET troll HOWTO
   • www.baiting.org - Baiting.org
   • www.fieldingtravel.com/df/index.htm - Fielding's DangerFinder - A guide to what and where's dangerous
   
   
2. Religious links
   • www.godhatesamerica.com/ - God Hates America
   • www.chalcedon.edu/creed.html - The Creed of Christian Reconstruction
   • www.demonbuster.com - How to cast out your demons and do spiritual warfare
   • riceinfo.rice.edu/armadillo/Sciacademy/riggins/thi ngs.htm - Things Creationists hate
   • www.icr.org/ - Institute for Creation Research
   • www.xenu.net - Operation Clambake - The fight against Scientology on the net
   • www.hom.net/~angels/ - Citizens for the Ten Commandments
   • www.bju.edu/rcnbc.html - The difference between Catholics and Christians
   • www.geocities.com/prazske00/biblequotes.html - Bible quotes by category
   
   
3. Political/economy links
   • www.aynrand.org - The Ayn Rand Institute
   • www.reason.com - Libertarian site
   • www.freerepublic.com - Right-wing stuff
   • www.jbs.org - Excellent site for all kinds of right-wingery
   • www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html - Web economy bullshit generator
   
   
4. Crackpot science links
   • www.fixedearth.com - The Earth Is Not Moving
   • www.jir.com/index.htm - The Journal of Irreproducible Results
   
   

Section 1 - Trolling techniques

There are techniques used by successful trolls to elicit the maximum amount of responses from unthinking /.ers. This section is dedicated to explaining how to use these in the course of your trolls. Remember though, a great troll can break any or all of these and still be successful...

• Timing

  Because you're posting as an AC, your troll will generally be ignored in favour of posters using their accounts, and so getting in early is essential. A good guideline is to get into the first 20 posts, so that people reading the article will see the troll before it is swamped out. One way of increasing the speed with which you get your troll into play is to prepare them beforehand, and then quickly customise them for the current article. This is easier than it sounds since /. typically repeats stories with small variations and runs lots of similar stories.

  Note that this is why Jon Katz stories are pretty worthless as trolling material - by the time you've found the article and prepared a troll there's already 50+ posts on it, most of them flaming Jon Katz anyway :)

• Exposure

  Once you've got your troll in, you need people to actually read it. You also want replies - /.ers are more likely to read your troll if it starts a large thread. You also want to remember that some people have set their comment thresholds to values higher than 0 - to get the attention of these you either want to get your post moderated up (see Style, below) or get a reply which gets moderated up to 4 or 5, in which case your troll becomes visible to all.

• Accounts

  An alternative to the time-honoured tradition of AC trolling is that of creating a "troll" account. This gives you the advantage of posting at 1 rather than 0, and slashbots are more likely to take you seriously, especially if you at least sound reasonable. If you do this, try to avoid posting stuff where it is obvious you're a troll under the account - post it anoymously instead - some slightly more canny readers actually check your user info before they reply. Not many though :)

  The ultimate goal of the troll account is to secure the +1 bonus, which is currently received once you hit 26 points of Karma. To get there, employ the techniques of karma whoring that we see every day on /. and watch the karma roll in. And of course once you get the +1 bonus, the world is your oyster in terms of /. Posts made at a default of 2 hit even those people with the threshold of 2, are more likely to get moderated up even further if they are at all coherent, and people tend to lose their critical thinking abilities in the face of the +1 bonus. Milk it for all it's worth.

• Layout

  To get people reading it a troll needs to be easily readable. Make sure you break it down into easily digestible paragraphs, use HTML tags where appropriate (but always make sure you close them properly) and use whitespace appropriately.

• Size

  Generally a troll shouldn't be too short, otherwise it'll get lost in the crowd. A workable minimum is a couple of medium paragraphs. Conversely, it shouldn't be too long, or no-one will bother to read it. Keep it to a happy medium.

• Spelling

  Whilst spelling is important if you want the troll to be taken "seriously", key spelling mistakes can draw out the spelling zealots, especially if you mis-spell the name of a venerated /. hero, like Linus Torveldes or Richard Strawlman (thanks dmg). Related to this is the use of the wrong word, explaining an acronym as being something it isn't or making a word into an acronym even when it isn't.

• Subject

  The subject line needs to draw attention to your post without making it obvious that it is a troll. A simple statement of the main point of your argument can work here.

• Style

  Once you realise that most moderators don't bother to read past the first paragraph or two, you can use this fact to craft trolls that can be moderated up as "Insightful" (note that I mean this in the /. sense rather than the real-world sense). Start off fairly reasonable, making statements that are /. friendly and not being too controversial. As the troll goes on, make it more and more controversial, building it up for the coup de grace in the final paragraph.

• Linking

  As we all know, a post with links is considered "informative" by the /. crowd. Moderators love it, and they rarely check the links, so be sure to include as many as possible. And make them wrong - a link to the Perl website should instead point to the Python website instead, and vice versa. The other alternative to incorrect links is "useful" links to places like www.linux.org and www.microsoft.com i.e. places /.ers could never have found on their own :)

• Feeding

  The ideal troll requires no feeding - it runs on its own, generating flamewars between clueless /.ers for your amusement. But often a troll requires some help and so you should consider feeding it. Feeding is best reserved for people making either completely clueless responses, people making responses with holes in, or those wonderful people who write a 2000-word point-by-point rebuttal of your troll.

• Know your audience

  Always keep in mind the kind of things advocated on /. so that you can play on and against them. This is why anti-Linux, creationist, gun-loving, pro-corporation trolls work well - the vast majority of /.ers hold the opposite viewpoints. And if a few people agree with you, so much the better - it merely validates your viewpoint in the eyes of readers.

• Arrogance

  Be arrogant. You, as a troll, know that you're right. No other explanation could exist. The wronger the "fact", the more assertively you should state it. Make it clear that you are better than everyone else - you know the truth and they are just too stupid to realise it. Use plenty of sarcasm, and use "quotes" to show it to people too dumb to realise.

• Offensiveness

  Being offensive in your initial troll can be counter-productive - it causes moderators to mark you down as flamebait in general. But if you're feeding, then you can get away with calling /.ers all kinds of things. Make broad generalisations about /. readers - call them "long-haired Linux zealots", "socialist open-source bigots" or whatever. Stereotyping is encouraged - people always want to think that they're an individual, and will point this out to you given half a chance.

• Indifference

  Great for articles with a political or social bent, this kind of troll expresses complete indifference to the topic at hand, wondering who on Earth cares about it. An alternative method is to say that the topic only concerns a certain group of people - criminals, idiots, hackers (always use this instead of crackers) or whatever group you want to offend.

• Sympathy

  Appear to take the same stance as the people you're trying to troll - claim you're as much a fan of Linux as the next man, but... This way you can make all kinds of claims in the sure knowledge that you actually know what you're talking about. A great phrase to use here is "In my experience". Remember to act like all the things you're pointing out are unfortunate but true.

• The common touch

  Always accuse /.ers of being elitist. This is an easy thing to do seeing as a lot of them are. Claim that is their grandmother couldn't use it, then they are just into it to feel better than Joe Sixpack rather than "doing it for the average user". This is always great for working into anti-Linux trolls - attack command-line tools and poorly designed desktops.

• The 31337 touch

  The opposite of the above. Claim that technology or whatever is only for the elite of society and that any attempt to open it up for everyone is wrong, an attack on intellectualism and possibly even dangerous. If people were meant to understand these things then they would, and it's their fault if they're too stupid to learn.

• Contradiction

  Never be afraid to contradict yourself, even in the space of a single sentence. The phrases "I am a top programmer who codes in VB" or "I am a supporter of open source who uses NT at work and 95 at home" will be sure to get a response from some weenie smugly pointing out the contradiction. Confuse the issue more by engaging in contradiction when you are feeding - this will confuse /.ers who will then make even more stupid replies, leaving them even more wide open for response.

  Clues

  If you're feeling brave, give the reader clues that this is an obvious troll. The classic example here is dmg's stock phrase "I am often accused of trolling (whatever that is)", but also feel free to use phrases like "I have not read the article, and I don't know much about XYZ but I feel I must comment". If anyone responds to a troll with these kinds of clues in it, feel free to bask in the glow of knee-jerk /. responses.

• Denial

  If you're unlucky someone will accuse you of being a troll (surely not!) and try and ruin it for you. If you don't want it all to end there, then be sure to counter it by accusing them of being small-minded and petty, saying that it's easier for them to say it's a troll than to accept that people have different opinions. Be sure to say this in the subject line, especially if their subject was the infamous "YHBT. YHL. HAND."

• Claiming credit

  Given that /. has its community of regular trolls (hi guys!), it's only polite to publish your troll on one of the so-called "hidden" forums for all to see and admire. This way, you get to bask in the praise of other trolls, they get to contribute to your's if they want to, and you get an easy way to find the troll later on when you want to check on its progress :)

  As for when to post it, that's a matter of opinion really. You can either post it straight away or leave it will after people start biting. Remember that the troll forum is also frequented by non-trolls, and sometimes you may get a self-declared "troll-buster" try and expose you. But remember, /.ers always post before thinking, and often it doesn't matter at all.

  There is no real current forum at the moment thanks to various spammers hitting the sids, but try trolltalk, the original troll sid started by 80md and osm way back in the day. Generally all postings are done there as an AC, with your name at the end of the post. Include a link to the troll somewhere in the text, which ideally will be directly to the post and its replies - click on the #XX link in the thread to get there.

• Ending the troll

  Sometimes you just get bored with a troll, or people start posting genuinely thoughtful stuff in reply (it does happen). When this happens it might be time to own up to the troll with a helpful "YHBT. YHL. HAND." post. Sometimes people will carry on a discussion of the issue, and if you're really lucky (and it was a great troll) they will completely fail to believe you and carry on arguing. If that happens, pat yourself on the back for writing a great troll :)

• The cheap $3 crack

  Finally, when all else fails and your troll gets moderated down to (-1, Troll) within ten seconds of you posting it, the only honourable thing to do is to accuse the moderators of smoking the cheap $3 crack (again) and give up :(

Section 2 - Types of troll

1. The Maniac

   Probably the most popular kind of troll, the Maniac holds an opinion on something, and won't budge from that opinion no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented. If challenged, the Maniac will simply get more and more agitated and abusive, deriding his opponents as "idiots", "wrong-thinking", "dangerous" and "subversive". Generally the Maniac takes a position that opposes the prevalent /. beliefs, but a similar effect can be achieved by taking a typical /. viewpoint and pushing it to ridiculous extremes.

   Maniacs can be crafted for practically every article /. posts, although some are more obvious targets than others. Civil liberty articles, especially on things like censorship, DMCA, UCITA that really get /.ers riled up, are usually extremely fruitful grounds for a well-crafted maniac. The other obvious type of article is anything which could possibly involve religion, especially evolution :)

   Here are some fruitful avenues to explore:

   • The right-wing

     Always popular, the right-wing maniac (RWM) is a God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving American, and proud of it. They don't care about the rest of the world, unless it's to "prove" that America is better than everything else, and they cannot stand liberal whining over civil rights. They hate the moral decay of America and want it to revert into a nation of heterosexual, Christian whites like it was meant to be. Woe betide anyone that dares to suggest otherwise.

   • Religion

     There are two ways to approach this kind of maniac. The harder to pull off is the militant atheist, but this is quite common amongst /. posters and you would have to be very offensive to get this to work. Of course with religion trolls, the argument can go on for ever once it's started... The more common approach is the Christian fundamentalist. They are ignorant, intolerant and bigoted in the extreme. For them the Bible is the inerrant word of God revealed to man - it contains no flaws and no contradictions. Thus they are strict Creationists - mentions of evolution or cosmology will set them off on vitriolic rants. Flaming denunciations of anyone daring to contradict the "Word of God" are the way to go, and any kind of proof can always be ignored by appealing to "secular humanist brainwashing". And let's not forget, the USA is the greatest nation on Earth because it has the righteous power of Jesus Christ behind it.

   • Ideology

     Pick a philosophy, any philosophy. This troll is a troll with a cause - they have found some kind of ideological truth, and are out to expose every other philosophy as a sham. Whether it be libertarianism, objectivism, communism or capitalism, this troll will point out the obvious "flaws" in any other philosophies, whilst spouting dogma about their own. And the best thing is - you don't even need to know that much about what you're spouting - making doctrinaire mistakes will get both sides of the argument flaming you, adding to the fun.

   • Software

     This is an old favourite and crops up in many forms, covering the gamut from OS maniacs (Linux zealots, MS-apologists or embittered BSD fanatics), language maniacs (Pascal vs. C, C vs. C++, C++ vs. Java, Perl vs. Python, VB vs. everything), application maniacs(GIMP vs. Photoshop, Netscape vs. IE, vi vs. emacs) and also includes people who complain about how technology should only be for the 31337 hackers.

   • Guns

     Americans love their guns, and will always fight passionately for their Constitutionally guarenteed rights to bear arms and shoot people. Even the slightest hint of criticism of this will bring down the wrath of a thousand and one enraged gun-owners on you, so it's always a great point to work into a troll :)

2. The Expert

   The Expert is someone who is "savvy" in their particular field, and is perfectly willing to give their opinion on any topic even vauguely related to their field. The Expert is most likely to be from a field which /.ers as a rule despise - the classic example is dumb marketing guy, but try consultants, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, executives, journalists (just think Jon Katz). With this kind of troll sweeping statements with little content are the norm, along wire dire portents of future catastrophe and dark hints of "insider knowledge".

   Some possible angles to exploit:

   • Industry knowledge

     The expert knows the computing industry from the inside - as a long-term pro, they can dispense knowledge knowing that they can "speak for the industry". Their smug self-satisfaction is bound to annoy, as is any suggestion that things aren't the way that /.ers would like it - saying "Linux requires the rock-solid guarantee of a trusted company like Microsoft" or "Apache cannot be trusted for mission-critical enterprise platforms" is guaranteed to get you denials explaining exactly why you're wrong, in excruciating detail.

   • Helpful hints

     With their tech-savvy (or law-savvy or whatever) experience, the expert is obviously the best person to point out what's wrong with things or to give out useful "factual" information. In fact this probably works best with lawyer trolls - for all that /.ers protest "IANAL", they certainly seem to think they could be, and any mistakes you make will send them rushing to prove themselves by correcting you.

3. Offtopic Trolls

   Not really a "troll" in the strict Jargon File sense of the word, but they certainly should be included here :) This category includes parodies, offtopic weirdness any all kinds of amusing stuff. Not really my area of expertise, this stuff is mainly done by gnarphlager and opensourceman. Thanks to gnarphlager for this section.

   Offtopic trolls, like any other, come in almost as many colours as an iMac, but generally not as cute. But then again, a good offtopic "troll" can affect more people than a repulsive little gumdrop on your desk, because you need to have someone SEE your desk before they can react. Simple? Moreso than even my overblown prose could indicate. Some basic examples:

   1. The serial troll

      Write a story. Keep expanding it. It doesn't matter what article you post it under, so long as it's high up. If you want people to recognize you, pick a couple themes or symbols, and carry them on throughout the story. Other alternatives include back linking or including the entire story, but adding more each time. Be funny if you want. Or if you don't feel like being funny, just be really weird. Someone will react.

   2. The random troll

      This has nothing to do with anything. Be it a stream of consciousness rant, or a description of the corner of your desk. Another favorite is a monologue, read as if spoken from any one given entity to another. The more outlandish, the better (a pair of socks talking to a mousepad, for example). If you really wanted to be artsy, work in an actual metaphor or legitimate meaning behind it, but it's not necessary.

   3. The vaguely related troll

      Start out with a comment about the article. Have a definite opinion of it. Then, after a little while, disintegrate into randomness. All roads eventually can eventually lead to cheese (yum), Natalie Portman, cannibalism, toasters, squirrels, futons, you name it. All it takes is a little bit of creativity. Oh, and feel free to use other trolls' motifs. Open source and all that ;-)

   General tips:

   • If it's funny for a fleeting moment, then it's worth posting.
   • Puns. Puns are only less vile than mimes, but it's hard to mime on /. So feel free/obligated to litter your offtopic and random bits with puns. Hurt the bastards. And if they're sick enough to laugh at them, then they'll eventually end up here ;-)
   • Obscure cultural references and injokes are always good. SOMEONE will get them eventually.
   • Several drafts of a serial or random post are common, but true elegance is being able to come up with something on the spot that still makes the top 40 posts (on a post-heavy article)

Section 3 - Useful trolling links

The following links contain background information useful for trolls needing quick quotes and "expert" opinions to include.

1. General purpose links
   • ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/trollfaq.html - How to deal with USENET trolls - learn your enemy :)
   • www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html - A List Of Fallacious Arguments - Learn them and use them liberally
   • www.altairiv.demon.co.uk/troll/trollfaq.html - USENET troll HOWTO
   • www.baiting.org - Baiting.org
   • www.fieldingtravel.com/df/index.htm - Fielding's DangerFinder - A guide to what and where's dangerous
   
   
2. Religious links
   • www.godhatesamerica.com/ - God Hates America
   • www.chalcedon.edu/creed.html - The Creed of Christian Reconstruction
   • www.demonbuster.com - How to cast out your demons and do spiritual warfare
   • riceinfo.rice.edu/armadillo/Sciacademy/riggins/thi ngs.htm - Things Creationists hate
   • www.icr.org/ - Institute for Creation Research
   • www.xenu.net - Operation Clambake - The fight against Scientology on the net
   • www.hom.net/~angels/ - Citizens for the Ten Commandments
   • www.bju.edu/rcnbc.html - The difference between Catholics and Christians
   • www.geocities.com/prazske00/biblequotes.html - Bible quotes by category
   
   
3. Political/economy links
   • www.aynrand.org - The Ayn Rand Institute
   • www.reason.com - Libertarian site
   • www.freerepublic.com - Right-wing stuff
   • www.jbs.org - Excellent site for all kinds of right-wingery
   • www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html - Web economy bullshit generator
   
   
4. Crackpot science links
   • www.fixedearth.com - The Earth Is Not Moving
   • www.jir.com/index.htm - The Journal of Irreproducible Results
   
   

I would start with The Antitrust Terrible 10: Why the Most Reviled "Anti-competitive" Business Practices Can Benefit Consumers in the New Economy and The Government's War on Mergers: The Fatal Conceit of Antitrust Policy, because it is a common misconception that antitrust is even needed. More analysis is found here, here, and these two links. In short, antitrust and monopoly-busting tactics do more damage than good.

Finally, someone realizes why Libertarians are they way they are, because they are smarter. For God's sake, Toyota had here working as a paint inspector. A paint inspector!!! If that wasn't a union job, it would be some between flipping burgers and airport security. If that isn't some kind of acommadation I don't know what is. And that wasn't good enough because she had to swab the cars to highlight the flaws. What the hell should Toyota do to accomadate her? Make her a professional seat warmer?

At some point, if you can't do your job, your going to have to find a new one. Since when does one's inability to do a job not preclude them from having that job? Raise your hand if you've ever hired a C programmer who can't even turn on a computer, much write a Hello World program.

The ADA is an execllent example of the road the hell being paved with good intentions. I'm all for reasonable accomadations for diabilites, but at some point, your gonna have to be the asshole and say enough.

This is version 0.6 of a troll HOWTO, sort of a companion piece to jsm's excellent troll FAQ. As a draft, comments and criticism are always welcome, if not appreciated :)

There are techniques used by successful trolls to elicit the maximum amount of responses from unthinking /.ers. This section is dedicated to explaining how to use these in the course of your trolls. Remember though, a great troll can break any or all of these and still be successful...

• Timing

  Because you're posting as an AC, your troll will generally be ignored in favour of posters using their accounts, and so getting in early is essential. A good guideline is to get into the first 20 posts, so that people reading the article will see the troll before it is swamped out. One way of increasing the speed with which you get your troll into play is to prepare them beforehand, and then quickly customise them for the current article. This is easier than it sounds since /. typically repeats stories with small variations and runs lots of similar stories.

  Note that this is why Jon Katz stories are pretty worthless as trolling material - by the time you've found the article and prepared a troll there's already 50+ posts on it, most of them flaming Jon Katz anyway :)

• Exposure

  Once you've got your troll in, you need people to actually read it. You also want replies - /.ers are more likely to read your troll if it starts a large thread. You also want to remember that some people have set their comment thresholds to values higher than 0 - to get the attention of these you either want to get your post moderated up (see Style, below) or get a reply which gets moderated up to 4 or 5, in which case your troll becomes visible to all.

• Accounts

  An alternative to the time-honoured tradition of AC trolling is that of creating a "troll" account. This gives you the advantage of posting at 1 rather than 0, and slashbots are more likely to take you seriously, especially if you at least sound reasonable. If you do this, try to avoid posting stuff where it is obvious you're a troll under the account - post it anoymously instead - some slightly more canny readers actually check your user info before they reply. Not many though :)

  The ultimate goal of the troll account is to secure the +1 bonus, which is currently received once you hit 26 points of Karma. To get there, employ the techniques of karma whoring that we see every day on /. and watch the karma roll in. And of course once you get the +1 bonus, the world is your oyster in terms of /. Posts made at a default of 2 hit even those people with the threshold of 2, are more likely to get moderated up even further if they are at all coherent, and people tend to lose their critical thinking abilities in the face of the +1 bonus. Milk it for all it's worth.

• Layout

  To get people reading it a troll needs to be easily readable. Make sure you break it down into easily digestible paragraphs, use HTML tags where appropriate (but always make sure you close them properly) and use whitespace appropriately.

• Size

  Generally a troll shouldn't be too short, otherwise it'll get lost in the crowd. A workable minimum is a couple of medium paragraphs. Conversely, it shouldn't be too long, or no-one will bother to read it. Keep it to a happy medium.

• Spelling

  Whilst spelling is important if you want the troll to be taken "seriously", key spelling mistakes can draw out the spelling zealots, especially if you mis-spell the name of a venerated /. hero, like Linus Torveldes or Richard Strawlman (thanks dmg). Related to this is the use of the wrong word, explaining an acronym as being something it isn't or making a word into an acronym even when it isn't.

• Subject

  The subject line needs to draw attention to your post without making it obvious that it is a troll. A simple statement of the main point of your argument can work here.

• Style

  Once you realise that most moderators don't bother to read past the first paragraph or two, you can use this fact to craft trolls that can be moderated up as "Insightful" (note that I mean this in the /. sense rather than the real-world sense). Start off fairly reasonable, making statements that are /. friendly and not being too controversial. As the troll goes on, make it more and more controversial, building it up for the coup de grace in the final paragraph.

• Linking

  As we all know, a post with links is considered "informative" by the /. crowd. Moderators love it, and they rarely check the links, so be sure to include as many as possible. And make them wrong - a link to the Perl website should instead point to the Python website instead, and vice versa. The other alternative to incorrect links is "useful" links to places like www.linux.org and www.microsoft.com i.e. places /.ers could never have found on their own :)

• Feeding

  The ideal troll requires no feeding - it runs on its own, generating flamewars between clueless /.ers for your amusement. But often a troll requires some help and so you should consider feeding it. Feeding is best reserved for people making either completely clueless responses, people making responses with holes in, or those wonderful people who write a 2000-word point-by-point rebuttal of your troll.

• Know your audience

  Always keep in mind the kind of things advocated on /. so that you can play on and against them. This is why anti-Linux, creationist, gun-loving, pro-corporation trolls work well - the vast majority of /.ers hold the opposite viewpoints. And if a few people agree with you, so much the better - it merely validates your viewpoint in the eyes of readers.

• Arrogance

  Be arrogant. You, as a troll, know that you're right. No other explanation could exist. The wronger the "fact", the more assertively you should state it. Make it clear that you are better than everyone else - you know the truth and they are just too stupid to realise it. Use plenty of sarcasm, and use "quotes" to show it to people too dumb to realise.

• Offensiveness

  Being offensive in your initial troll can be counter-productive - it causes moderators to mark you down as flamebait in general. But if you're feeding, then you can get away with calling /.ers all kinds of things. Make broad generalisations about /. readers - call them "long-haired Linux zealots", "socialist open-source bigots" or whatever. Stereotyping is encouraged - people always want to think that they're an individual, and will point this out to you given half a chance.

• Indifference

  Great for articles with a political or social bent, this kind of troll expresses complete indifference to the topic at hand, wondering who on Earth cares about it. An alternative method is to say that the topic only concerns a certain group of people - criminals, idiots, hackers (always use this instead of crackers) or whatever group you want to offend.

• Sympathy

  Appear to take the same stance as the people you're trying to troll - claim you're as much a fan of Linux as the next man, but... This way you can make all kinds of claims in the sure knowledge that you actually know what you're talking about. A great phrase to use here is "In my experience". Remember to act like all the things you're pointing out are unfortunate but true.

• The common touch

  Always accuse /.ers of being elitist. This is an easy thing to do seeing as a lot of them are. Claim that is their grandmother couldn't use it, then they are just into it to feel better than Joe Sixpack rather than "doing it for the average user". This is always great for working into anti-Linux trolls - attack command-line tools and poorly designed desktops.

• The 31337 touch

  The opposite of the above. Claim that technology or whatever is only for the elite of society and that any attempt to open it up for everyone is wrong, an attack on intellectualism and possibly even dangerous. If people were meant to understand these things then they would, and it's their fault if they're too stupid to learn.

• Contradiction

  Never be afraid to contradict yourself, even in the space of a single sentence. The phrases "I am a top programmer who codes in VB" or "I am a supporter of open source who uses NT at work and 95 at home" will be sure to get a response from some weenie smugly pointing out the contradiction. Confuse the issue more by engaging in contradiction when you are feeding - this will confuse /.ers who will then make even more stupid replies, leaving them even more wide open for response.

  Clues

  If you're feeling brave, give the reader clues that this is an obvious troll. The classic example here is dmg's stock phrase "I am often accused of trolling (whatever that is)", but also feel free to use phrases like "I have not read the article, and I don't know much about XYZ but I feel I must comment". If anyone responds to a troll with these kinds of clues in it, feel free to bask in the glow of knee-jerk /. responses.

• Denial

  If you're unlucky someone will accuse you of being a troll (surely not!) and try and ruin it for you. If you don't want it all to end there, then be sure to counter it by accusing them of being small-minded and petty, saying that it's easier for them to say it's a troll than to accept that people have different opinions. Be sure to say this in the subject line, especially if their subject was the infamous "YHBT. YHL. HAND."

• Claiming credit

  Given that /. has its community of regular trolls (hi guys!), it's only polite to publish your troll on one of the so-called "hidden" forums for all to see and admire. This way, you get to bask in the praise of other trolls, they get to contribute to your's if they want to, and you get an easy way to find the troll later on when you want to check on its progress :)

  As for when to post it, that's a matter of opinion really. You can either post it straight away or leave it will after people start biting. Remember that the troll forum is also frequented by non-trolls, and sometimes you may get a self-declared "troll-buster" try and expose you. But remember, /.ers always post before thinking, and often it doesn't matter at all.

  There is no real current forum at the moment thanks to various spammers hitting the sids, but try trolltalk, the original troll sid started by 80md and osm way back in the day. Generally all postings are done there as an AC, with your name at the end of the post. Include a link to the troll somewhere in the text, which ideally will be directly to the post and its replies - click on the #XX link in the thread to get there.

• Ending the troll

  Sometimes you just get bored with a troll, or people start posting genuinely thoughtful stuff in reply (it does happen). When this happens it might be time to own up to the troll with a helpful "YHBT. YHL. HAND." post. Sometimes people will carry on a discussion of the issue, and if you're really lucky (and it was a great troll) they will completely fail to believe you and carry on arguing. If that happens, pat yourself on the back for writing a great troll :)

• The cheap $3 crack

  Finally, when all else fails and your troll gets moderated down to (-1, Troll) within ten seconds of you posting it, the only honourable thing to do is to accuse the moderators of smoking the cheap $3 crack (again) and give up :(

1. The Maniac

   Probably the most popular kind of troll, the Maniac holds an opinion on something, and won't budge from that opinion no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented. If challenged, the Maniac will simply get more and more agitated and abusive, deriding his opponents as "idiots", "wrong-thinking", "dangerous" and "subversive". Generally the Maniac takes a position that opposes the prevalent /. beliefs, but a similar effect can be achieved by taking a typical /. viewpoint and pushing it to ridiculous extremes.

   Maniacs can be crafted for practically every article /. posts, although some are more obvious targets than others. Civil liberty articles, especially on things like censorship, DMCA, UCITA that really get /.ers riled up, are usually extremely fruitful grounds for a well-crafted maniac. The other obvious type of article is anything which could possibly involve religion, especially evolution :)

   Here are some fruitful avenues to explore:

   • The Right-Wing Maniac

     Always popular, the right-wing maniac (RWM) is a God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving American, and proud of it. They don't care about the rest of the world, unless it's to "prove" that America is better than everything else, and they cannot stand liberal whining over civil rights. They hate the moral decay of America and want it to revert into a nation of heterosexual, Christian whites like it was meant to be. Woe betide anyone that dares to suggest otherwise.

   • Religion

     There are two ways to approach this kind of maniac. The harder to pull off is the militant atheist, but this is quite common amongst /. posters and you would have to be very offensive to get this to work. Of course with religion trolls, the argument can go on for ever once it's started... The more common approach is the Christian fundamentalist. They are ignorant, intolerant and bigoted in the extreme. For them the Bible is the inerrant word of God revealed to man - it contains no flaws and no contradictions. Thus they are strict Creationists - mentions of evolution or cosmology will set them off on vitriolic rants. Flaming denunciations of anyone daring to contradict the "Word of God" are the way to go, and any kind of proof can always be ignored by appealing to "secular humanist brainwashing". And let's not forget, the USA is the greatest nation on Earth because it has the righteous power of Jesus Christ behind it.

   • Ideology

     Pick a philosophy, any philosophy. This troll is a troll with a cause - they have found some kind of ideological truth, and are out to expose every other philosophy as a sham. Whether it be libertarianism, objectivism, communism or capitalism, this troll will point out the obvious "flaws" in any other philosophies, whilst spouting dogma about their own. And the best thing is - you don't even need to know that much about what you're spouting - making doctrinaire mistakes will get both sides of the argument flaming you, adding to the fun.

   • Software

     This is an old favourite and crops up in many forms, covering the gamut from OS maniacs (Linux zealots, MS-apologists or embittered BSD fanatics), language maniacs (Pascal vs. C, C vs. C++, C++ vs. Java, Perl vs. Python, VB vs. everything), application maniacs(GIMP vs. Photoshop, Netscape vs. IE, vi vs. emacs) and also includes people who complain about how technology should only be for the 31337 hackers.

   • Guns

     Americans love their guns, and will always fight passionately for their Constitutionally guarenteed rights to bear arms and shoot people. Even the slightest hint of criticism of this will bring down the wrath of a thousand and one enraged gun-owners on you, so it's always a great point to work into a troll :)

2. The Expert

   The Expert is someone who is "savvy" in their particular field, and is perfectly willing to give their opinion on any topic even vauguely related to their field. The Expert is most likely to be from a field which /.ers as a rule despise - the classic example is dumb marketing guy, but try consultants, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, executives, journalists (just think Jon Katz). With this kind of troll sweeping statements with little content are the norm, along wire dire portents of future catastrophe and dark hints of "insider knowledge".

   Some possible angles to exploit:

   • Industry knowledge

     The expert knows the computing industry from the inside - as a long-term pro, they can dispense knowledge knowing that they can "speak for the industry". Their smug self-satisfaction is bound to annoy, as is any suggestion that things aren't the way that /.ers would like it - saying "Linux requires the rock-solid guarantee of a trusted company like Microsoft" or "Apache cannot be trusted for mission-critical enterprise platforms" is guaranteed to get you denials explaining exactly why you're wrong, in excruciating detail.

   • Helpful hints

     With their tech-savvy (or law-savvy or whatever) experience, the expert is obviously the best person to point out what's wrong with things or to give out useful "factual" information. In fact this probably works best with lawyer trolls - for all that /.ers protest "IANAL", they certainly seem to think they could be, and any mistakes you make will send them rushing to prove themselves by correcting you.

3. Offtopic Trolls

   Not really a "troll" in the strict Jargon File sense of the word, but they certainly should be included here :) This category includes parodies, offtopic weirdness any all kinds of amusing stuff. Not really my area of expertise, this stuff is mainly done by gnarphlager and opensourceman. Thanks to gnarphlager for this section.

   Offtopic trolls, like any other, come in almost as many colours as an iMac, but generally not as cute. But then again, a good offtopic "troll" can affect more people than a repulsive little gumdrop on your desk, because you need to have someone SEE your desk before they can react. Simple? Moreso than even my overblown prose could indicate. Some basic examples:

   1. The serial troll

      Write a story. Keep expanding it. It doesn't matter what article you post it under, so long as it's high up. If you want people to recognize you, pick a couple themes or symbols, and carry them on throughout the story. Other alternatives include back linking or including the entire story, but adding more each time. Be funny if you want. Or if you don't feel like being funny, just be really weird. Someone will react.

   2. The random troll

      This has nothing to do with anything. Be it a stream of consciousness rant, or a description of the corner of your desk. Another favorite is a monologue, read as if spoken from any one given entity to another. The more outlandish, the better (a pair of socks talking to a mousepad, for example). If you really wanted to be artsy, work in an actual metaphor or legitimate meaning behind it, but it's not necessary.

   3. The vaguely related troll

      Start out with a comment about the article. Have a definite opinion of it. Then, after a little while, disintegrate into randomness. All roads eventually can eventually lead to cheese (yum), Natalie Portman, cannibalism, toasters, squirrels, futons, you name it. All it takes is a little bit of creativity. Oh, and feel free to use other trolls' motifs. Open source and all that ;-)

   General tips:

   • If it's funny for a fleeting moment, then it's worth posting.
   • Puns. Puns are only less vile than mimes, but it's hard to mime on /. So feel free/obligated to litter your offtopic and random bits with puns. Hurt the bastards. And if they're sick enough to laugh at them, then they'll eventually end up here ;-)
   • Obscure cultural references and injokes are always good. SOMEONE will get them eventually.
   • Several drafts of a serial or random post are common, but true elegance is being able to come up with something on the spot that still makes the top 40 posts (on a post-heavy article)

The following links contain background information useful for trolls needing quick quotes and "expert" opinions to include.

1. General purpose links
   • ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/trollfaq.html - How to deal with USENET trolls - learn your enemy :)
   • www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html - A List Of Fallacious Arguments - Learn them and use them liberally
   • www.altairiv.demon.co.uk/troll/trollfaq.html - USENET troll HOWTO
   • www.baiting.org - Baiting.org
   • www.fieldingtravel.com/df/index.htm - Fielding's DangerFinder - A guide to what and where's dangerous
   
   
2. Religious links
   • www.godhatesamerica.com/ - God Hates America
   • www.chalcedon.edu/creed.html - The Creed of Christian Reconstruction
   • www.demonbuster.com - How to cast out your demons and do spiritual warfare
   • riceinfo.rice.edu/armadillo/Sciacademy/riggins/thi ngs.htm - Things Creationists hate
   • www.icr.org/ - Institute for Creation Research
   • www.xenu.net - Operation Clambake - The fight against Scientology on the net
   • www.hom.net/~angels/ - Citizens for the Ten Commandments
   • www.bju.edu/rcnbc.html - The difference between Catholics and Christians
   • www.geocities.com/prazske00/biblequotes.html - Bible quotes by category
   
   
3. Political/economy links
   • www.aynrand.org - The Ayn Rand Institute
   • www.reason.com - Libertarian site
   • www.freerepublic.com - Right-wing stuff
   • www.jbs.org - Excellent site for all kinds of right-wingery
   • www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html - Web economy bullshit generator
   
   
4. Crackpot science links
   • www.fixedearth.com - The Earth Is Not Moving
   • www.jir.com/index.htm - The Journal of Irreproducible Results

© spiralx, I did not write this ;)

This is version 0.6 of a troll HOWTO, sort of a companion piece to jsm's excellent troll FAQ. As a draft, comments and criticism are always welcome, if not appreciated :)

There are techniques used by successful trolls to elicit the maximum amount of responses from unthinking /.ers. This section is dedicated to explaining how to use these in the course of your trolls. Remember though, a great troll can break any or all of these and still be successful...

• Timing

  Because you're posting as an AC, your troll will generally be ignored in favour of posters using their accounts, and so getting in early is essential. A good guideline is to get into the first 20 posts, so that people reading the article will see the troll before it is swamped out. One way of increasing the speed with which you get your troll into play is to prepare them beforehand, and then quickly customise them for the current article. This is easier than it sounds since /. typically repeats stories with small variations and runs lots of similar stories.

  Note that this is why Jon Katz stories are pretty worthless as trolling material - by the time you've found the article and prepared a troll there's already 50+ posts on it, most of them flaming Jon Katz anyway :)

• Exposure

  Once you've got your troll in, you need people to actually read it. You also want replies - /.ers are more likely to read your troll if it starts a large thread. You also want to remember that some people have set their comment thresholds to values higher than 0 - to get the attention of these you either want to get your post moderated up (see Style, below) or get a reply which gets moderated up to 4 or 5, in which case your troll becomes visible to all.

• Accounts

  An alternative to the time-honoured tradition of AC trolling is that of creating a "troll" account. This gives you the advantage of posting at 1 rather than 0, and slashbots are more likely to take you seriously, especially if you at least sound reasonable. If you do this, try to avoid posting stuff where it is obvious you're a troll under the account - post it anoymously instead - some slightly more canny readers actually check your user info before they reply. Not many though :)

  The ultimate goal of the troll account is to secure the +1 bonus, which is currently received once you hit 26 points of Karma. To get there, employ the techniques of karma whoring that we see every day on /. and watch the karma roll in. And of course once you get the +1 bonus, the world is your oyster in terms of /. Posts made at a default of 2 hit even those people with the threshold of 2, are more likely to get moderated up even further if they are at all coherent, and people tend to lose their critical thinking abilities in the face of the +1 bonus. Milk it for all it's worth.

• Layout

  To get people reading it a troll needs to be easily readable. Make sure you break it down into easily digestible paragraphs, use HTML tags where appropriate (but always make sure you close them properly) and use whitespace appropriately.

• Size

  Generally a troll shouldn't be too short, otherwise it'll get lost in the crowd. A workable minimum is a couple of medium paragraphs. Conversely, it shouldn't be too long, or no-one will bother to read it. Keep it to a happy medium.

• Spelling

  Whilst spelling is important if you want the troll to be taken "seriously", key spelling mistakes can draw out the spelling zealots, especially if you mis-spell the name of a venerated /. hero, like Linus Torveldes or Richard Strawlman (thanks dmg). Related to this is the use of the wrong word, explaining an acronym as being something it isn't or making a word into an acronym even when it isn't.

• Subject

  The subject line needs to draw attention to your post without making it obvious that it is a troll. A simple statement of the main point of your argument can work here.

• Style

  Once you realise that most moderators don't bother to read past the first paragraph or two, you can use this fact to craft trolls that can be moderated up as "Insightful" (note that I mean this in the /. sense rather than the real-world sense). Start off fairly reasonable, making statements that are /. friendly and not being too controversial. As the troll goes on, make it more and more controversial, building it up for the coup de grace in the final paragraph.

• Linking

  As we all know, a post with links is considered "informative" by the /. crowd. Moderators love it, and they rarely check the links, so be sure to include as many as possible. And make them wrong - a link to the Perl website should instead point to the Python website instead, and vice versa. The other alternative to incorrect links is "useful" links to places like www.linux.org and www.microsoft.com i.e. places /.ers could never have found on their own :)

• Feeding

  The ideal troll requires no feeding - it runs on its own, generating flamewars between clueless /.ers for your amusement. But often a troll requires some help and so you should consider feeding it. Feeding is best reserved for people making either completely clueless responses, people making responses with holes in, or those wonderful people who write a 2000-word point-by-point rebuttal of your troll.

• Know your audience

  Always keep in mind the kind of things advocated on /. so that you can play on and against them. This is why anti-Linux, creationist, gun-loving, pro-corporation trolls work well - the vast majority of /.ers hold the opposite viewpoints. And if a few people agree with you, so much the better - it merely validates your viewpoint in the eyes of readers.

• Arrogance

  Be arrogant. You, as a troll, know that you're right. No other explanation could exist. The wronger the "fact", the more assertively you should state it. Make it clear that you are better than everyone else - you know the truth and they are just too stupid to realise it. Use plenty of sarcasm, and use "quotes" to show it to people too dumb to realise.

• Offensiveness

  Being offensive in your initial troll can be counter-productive - it causes moderators to mark you down as flamebait in general. But if you're feeding, then you can get away with calling /.ers all kinds of things. Make broad generalisations about /. readers - call them "long-haired Linux zealots", "socialist open-source bigots" or whatever. Stereotyping is encouraged - people always want to think that they're an individual, and will point this out to you given half a chance.

• Indifference

  Great for articles with a political or social bent, this kind of troll expresses complete indifference to the topic at hand, wondering who on Earth cares about it. An alternative method is to say that the topic only concerns a certain group of people - criminals, idiots, hackers (always use this instead of crackers) or whatever group you want to offend.

• Sympathy

  Appear to take the same stance as the people you're trying to troll - claim you're as much a fan of Linux as the next man, but... This way you can make all kinds of claims in the sure knowledge that you actually know what you're talking about. A great phrase to use here is "In my experience". Remember to act like all the things you're pointing out are unfortunate but true.

• The common touch

  Always accuse /.ers of being elitist. This is an easy thing to do seeing as a lot of them are. Claim that is their grandmother couldn't use it, then they are just into it to feel better than Joe Sixpack rather than "doing it for the average user". This is always great for working into anti-Linux trolls - attack command-line tools and poorly designed desktops.

• The 31337 touch

  The opposite of the above. Claim that technology or whatever is only for the elite of society and that any attempt to open it up for everyone is wrong, an attack on intellectualism and possibly even dangerous. If people were meant to understand these things then they would, and it's their fault if they're too stupid to learn.

• Contradiction

  Never be afraid to contradict yourself, even in the space of a single sentence. The phrases "I am a top programmer who codes in VB" or "I am a supporter of open source who uses NT at work and 95 at home" will be sure to get a response from some weenie smugly pointing out the contradiction. Confuse the issue more by engaging in contradiction when you are feeding - this will confuse /.ers who will then make even more stupid replies, leaving them even more wide open for response.

  Clues

  If you're feeling brave, give the reader clues that this is an obvious troll. The classic example here is dmg's stock phrase "I am often accused of trolling (whatever that is)", but also feel free to use phrases like "I have not read the article, and I don't know much about XYZ but I feel I must comment". If anyone responds to a troll with these kinds of clues in it, feel free to bask in the glow of knee-jerk /. responses.

• Denial

  If you're unlucky someone will accuse you of being a troll (surely not!) and try and ruin it for you. If you don't want it all to end there, then be sure to counter it by accusing them of being small-minded and petty, saying that it's easier for them to say it's a troll than to accept that people have different opinions. Be sure to say this in the subject line, especially if their subject was the infamous "YHBT. YHL. HAND."

• Claiming credit

  Given that /. has its community of regular trolls (hi guys!), it's only polite to publish your troll on one of the so-called "hidden" forums for all to see and admire. This way, you get to bask in the praise of other trolls, they get to contribute to your's if they want to, and you get an easy way to find the troll later on when you want to check on its progress :)

  As for when to post it, that's a matter of opinion really. You can either post it straight away or leave it will after people start biting. Remember that the troll forum is also frequented by non-trolls, and sometimes you may get a self-declared "troll-buster" try and expose you. But remember, /.ers always post before thinking, and often it doesn't matter at all.

  There is no real current forum at the moment thanks to various spammers hitting the sids, but try trolltalk, the original troll sid started by 80md and osm way back in the day. Generally all postings are done there as an AC, with your name at the end of the post. Include a link to the troll somewhere in the text, which ideally will be directly to the post and its replies - click on the #XX link in the thread to get there.

• Ending the troll

  Sometimes you just get bored with a troll, or people start posting genuinely thoughtful stuff in reply (it does happen). When this happens it might be time to own up to the troll with a helpful "YHBT. YHL. HAND." post. Sometimes people will carry on a discussion of the issue, and if you're really lucky (and it was a great troll) they will completely fail to believe you and carry on arguing. If that happens, pat yourself on the back for writing a great troll :)

• The cheap $3 crack

  Finally, when all else fails and your troll gets moderated down to (-1, Troll) within ten seconds of you posting it, the only honourable thing to do is to accuse the moderators of smoking the cheap $3 crack (again) and give up :(

1. The Maniac

   Probably the most popular kind of troll, the Maniac holds an opinion on something, and won't budge from that opinion no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented. If challenged, the Maniac will simply get more and more agitated and abusive, deriding his opponents as "idiots", "wrong-thinking", "dangerous" and "subversive". Generally the Maniac takes a position that opposes the prevalent /. beliefs, but a similar effect can be achieved by taking a typical /. viewpoint and pushing it to ridiculous extremes.

   Maniacs can be crafted for practically every article /. posts, although some are more obvious targets than others. Civil liberty articles, especially on things like censorship, DMCA, UCITA that really get /.ers riled up, are usually extremely fruitful grounds for a well-crafted maniac. The other obvious type of article is anything which could possibly involve religion, especially evolution :)

   Here are some fruitful avenues to explore:

   • The Right-Wing Maniac

     Always popular, the right-wing maniac (RWM) is a God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving American, and proud of it. They don't care about the rest of the world, unless it's to "prove" that America is better than everything else, and they cannot stand liberal whining over civil rights. They hate the moral decay of America and want it to revert into a nation of heterosexual, Christian whites like it was meant to be. Woe betide anyone that dares to suggest otherwise.

   • Religion

     There are two ways to approach this kind of maniac. The harder to pull off is the militant atheist, but this is quite common amongst /. posters and you would have to be very offensive to get this to work. Of course with religion trolls, the argument can go on for ever once it's started... The more common approach is the Christian fundamentalist. They are ignorant, intolerant and bigoted in the extreme. For them the Bible is the inerrant word of God revealed to man - it contains no flaws and no contradictions. Thus they are strict Creationists - mentions of evolution or cosmology will set them off on vitriolic rants. Flaming denunciations of anyone daring to contradict the "Word of God" are the way to go, and any kind of proof can always be ignored by appealing to "secular humanist brainwashing". And let's not forget, the USA is the greatest nation on Earth because it has the righteous power of Jesus Christ behind it.

   • Ideology

     Pick a philosophy, any philosophy. This troll is a troll with a cause - they have found some kind of ideological truth, and are out to expose every other philosophy as a sham. Whether it be libertarianism, objectivism, communism or capitalism, this troll will point out the obvious "flaws" in any other philosophies, whilst spouting dogma about their own. And the best thing is - you don't even need to know that much about what you're spouting - making doctrinaire mistakes will get both sides of the argument flaming you, adding to the fun.

   • Software

     This is an old favourite and crops up in many forms, covering the gamut from OS maniacs (Linux zealots, MS-apologists or embittered BSD fanatics), language maniacs (Pascal vs. C, C vs. C++, C++ vs. Java, Perl vs. Python, VB vs. everything), application maniacs(GIMP vs. Photoshop, Netscape vs. IE, vi vs. emacs) and also includes people who complain about how technology should only be for the 31337 hackers.

   • Guns

     Americans love their guns, and will always fight passionately for their Constitutionally guarenteed rights to bear arms and shoot people. Even the slightest hint of criticism of this will bring down the wrath of a thousand and one enraged gun-owners on you, so it's always a great point to work into a troll :)

2. The Expert

   The Expert is someone who is "savvy" in their particular field, and is perfectly willing to give their opinion on any topic even vauguely related to their field. The Expert is most likely to be from a field which /.ers as a rule despise - the classic example is dumb marketing guy, but try consultants, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, executives, journalists (just think Jon Katz). With this kind of troll sweeping statements with little content are the norm, along wire dire portents of future catastrophe and dark hints of "insider knowledge".

   Some possible angles to exploit:

   • Industry knowledge

     The expert knows the computing industry from the inside - as a long-term pro, they can dispense knowledge knowing that they can "speak for the industry". Their smug self-satisfaction is bound to annoy, as is any suggestion that things aren't the way that /.ers would like it - saying "Linux requires the rock-solid guarantee of a trusted company like Microsoft" or "Apache cannot be trusted for mission-critical enterprise platforms" is guaranteed to get you denials explaining exactly why you're wrong, in excruciating detail.

   • Helpful hints

     With their tech-savvy (or law-savvy or whatever) experience, the expert is obviously the best person to point out what's wrong with things or to give out useful "factual" information. In fact this probably works best with lawyer trolls - for all that /.ers protest "IANAL", they certainly seem to think they could be, and any mistakes you make will send them rushing to prove themselves by correcting you.

3. Offtopic Trolls

   Not really a "troll" in the strict Jargon File sense of the word, but they certainly should be included here :) This category includes parodies, offtopic weirdness any all kinds of amusing stuff. Not really my area of expertise, this stuff is mainly done by gnarphlager and opensourceman. Thanks to gnarphlager for this section.

   Offtopic trolls, like any other, come in almost as many colours as an iMac, but generally not as cute. But then again, a good offtopic "troll" can affect more people than a repulsive little gumdrop on your desk, because you need to have someone SEE your desk before they can react. Simple? Moreso than even my overblown prose could indicate. Some basic examples:

   1. The serial troll

      Write a story. Keep expanding it. It doesn't matter what article you post it under, so long as it's high up. If you want people to recognize you, pick a couple themes or symbols, and carry them on throughout the story. Other alternatives include back linking or including the entire story, but adding more each time. Be funny if you want. Or if you don't feel like being funny, just be really weird. Someone will react.

   2. The random troll

      This has nothing to do with anything. Be it a stream of consciousness rant, or a description of the corner of your desk. Another favorite is a monologue, read as if spoken from any one given entity to another. The more outlandish, the better (a pair of socks talking to a mousepad, for example). If you really wanted to be artsy, work in an actual metaphor or legitimate meaning behind it, but it's not necessary.

   3. The vaguely related troll

      Start out with a comment about the article. Have a definite opinion of it. Then, after a little while, disintegrate into randomness. All roads eventually can eventually lead to cheese (yum), Natalie Portman, cannibalism, toasters, squirrels, futons, you name it. All it takes is a little bit of creativity. Oh, and feel free to use other trolls' motifs. Open source and all that ;-)

   General tips:

   • If it's funny for a fleeting moment, then it's worth posting.
   • Puns. Puns are only less vile than mimes, but it's hard to mime on /. So feel free/obligated to litter your offtopic and random bits with puns. Hurt the bastards. And if they're sick enough to laugh at them, then they'll eventually end up here ;-)
   • Obscure cultural references and injokes are always good. SOMEONE will get them eventually.
   • Several drafts of a serial or random post are common, but true elegance is being able to come up with something on the spot that still makes the top 40 posts (on a post-heavy article)

The following links contain background information useful for trolls needing quick quotes and "expert" opinions to include.

1. General purpose links
   • ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/trollfaq.html - How to deal with USENET trolls - learn your enemy :)
   • www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html - A List Of Fallacious Arguments - Learn them and use them liberally
   • www.altairiv.demon.co.uk/troll/trollfaq.html - USENET troll HOWTO
   • www.baiting.org - Baiting.org
   • www.fieldingtravel.com/df/index.htm - Fielding's DangerFinder - A guide to what and where's dangerous
   
   
2. Religious links
   • www.godhatesamerica.com/ - God Hates America
   • www.chalcedon.edu/creed.html - The Creed of Christian Reconstruction
   • www.demonbuster.com - How to cast out your demons and do spiritual warfare
   • riceinfo.rice.edu/armadillo/Sciacademy/riggins/thi ngs.htm - Things Creationists hate
   • www.icr.org/ - Institute for Creation Research
   • www.xenu.net - Operation Clambake - The fight against Scientology on the net
   • www.hom.net/~angels/ - Citizens for the Ten Commandments
   • www.bju.edu/rcnbc.html - The difference between Catholics and Christians
   • www.geocities.com/prazske00/biblequotes.html - Bible quotes by category
   
   
3. Political/economy links
   • www.aynrand.org - The Ayn Rand Institute
   • www.reason.com - Libertarian site
   • www.freerepublic.com - Right-wing stuff
   • www.jbs.org - Excellent site for all kinds of right-wingery
   • www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html - Web economy bullshit generator
   
   
4. Crackpot science links
   • www.fixedearth.com - The Earth Is Not Moving
   • www.jir.com/index.htm - The Journal of Irreproducible Results

© spiralx, I did not write this ;)

This is version 0.6 of a troll HOWTO, sort of a companion piece to jsm's excellent troll FAQ. As a draft, comments and criticism are always welcome, if not appreciated :)

There are techniques used by successful trolls to elicit the maximum amount of responses from unthinking /.ers. This section is dedicated to explaining how to use these in the course of your trolls. Remember though, a great troll can break any or all of these and still be successful...

• Timing

  Because you're posting as an AC, your troll will generally be ignored in favour of posters using their accounts, and so getting in early is essential. A good guideline is to get into the first 20 posts, so that people reading the article will see the troll before it is swamped out. One way of increasing the speed with which you get your troll into play is to prepare them beforehand, and then quickly customise them for the current article. This is easier than it sounds since /. typically repeats stories with small variations and runs lots of similar stories.

  Note that this is why Jon Katz stories are pretty worthless as trolling material - by the time you've found the article and prepared a troll there's already 50+ posts on it, most of them flaming Jon Katz anyway :)

• Exposure

  Once you've got your troll in, you need people to actually read it. You also want replies - /.ers are more likely to read your troll if it starts a large thread. You also want to remember that some people have set their comment thresholds to values higher than 0 - to get the attention of these you either want to get your post moderated up (see Style, below) or get a reply which gets moderated up to 4 or 5, in which case your troll becomes visible to all.

• Accounts

  An alternative to the time-honoured tradition of AC trolling is that of creating a "troll" account. This gives you the advantage of posting at 1 rather than 0, and slashbots are more likely to take you seriously, especially if you at least sound reasonable. If you do this, try to avoid posting stuff where it is obvious you're a troll under the account - post it anoymously instead - some slightly more canny readers actually check your user info before they reply. Not many though :)

  The ultimate goal of the troll account is to secure the +1 bonus, which is currently received once you hit 26 points of Karma. To get there, employ the techniques of karma whoring that we see every day on /. and watch the karma roll in. And of course once you get the +1 bonus, the world is your oyster in terms of /. Posts made at a default of 2 hit even those people with the threshold of 2, are more likely to get moderated up even further if they are at all coherent, and people tend to lose their critical thinking abilities in the face of the +1 bonus. Milk it for all it's worth.

• Layout

  To get people reading it a troll needs to be easily readable. Make sure you break it down into easily digestible paragraphs, use HTML tags where appropriate (but always make sure you close them properly) and use whitespace appropriately.

• Size

  Generally a troll shouldn't be too short, otherwise it'll get lost in the crowd. A workable minimum is a couple of medium paragraphs. Conversely, it shouldn't be too long, or no-one will bother to read it. Keep it to a happy medium.

• Spelling

  Whilst spelling is important if you want the troll to be taken "seriously", key spelling mistakes can draw out the spelling zealots, especially if you mis-spell the name of a venerated /. hero, like Linus Torveldes or Richard Strawlman (thanks dmg). Related to this is the use of the wrong word, explaining an acronym as being something it isn't or making a word into an acronym even when it isn't.

• Subject

  The subject line needs to draw attention to your post without making it obvious that it is a troll. A simple statement of the main point of your argument can work here.

• Style

  Once you realise that most moderators don't bother to read past the first paragraph or two, you can use this fact to craft trolls that can be moderated up as "Insightful" (note that I mean this in the /. sense rather than the real-world sense). Start off fairly reasonable, making statements that are /. friendly and not being too controversial. As the troll goes on, make it more and more controversial, building it up for the coup de grace in the final paragraph.

• Linking

  As we all know, a post with links is considered "informative" by the /. crowd. Moderators love it, and they rarely check the links, so be sure to include as many as possible. And make them wrong - a link to the Perl website should instead point to the Python website instead, and vice versa. The other alternative to incorrect links is "useful" links to places like www.linux.org and www.microsoft.com i.e. places /.ers could never have found on their own :)

• Feeding

  The ideal troll requires no feeding - it runs on its own, generating flamewars between clueless /.ers for your amusement. But often a troll requires some help and so you should consider feeding it. Feeding is best reserved for people making either completely clueless responses, people making responses with holes in, or those wonderful people who write a 2000-word point-by-point rebuttal of your troll.

• Know your audience

  Always keep in mind the kind of things advocated on /. so that you can play on and against them. This is why anti-Linux, creationist, gun-loving, pro-corporation trolls work well - the vast majority of /.ers hold the opposite viewpoints. And if a few people agree with you, so much the better - it merely validates your viewpoint in the eyes of readers.

• Arrogance

  Be arrogant. You, as a troll, know that you're right. No other explanation could exist. The wronger the "fact", the more assertively you should state it. Make it clear that you are better than everyone else - you know the truth and they are just too stupid to realise it. Use plenty of sarcasm, and use "quotes" to show it to people too dumb to realise.

• Offensiveness

  Being offensive in your initial troll can be counter-productive - it causes moderators to mark you down as flamebait in general. But if you're feeding, then you can get away with calling /.ers all kinds of things. Make broad generalisations about /. readers - call them "long-haired Linux zealots", "socialist open-source bigots" or whatever. Stereotyping is encouraged - people always want to think that they're an individual, and will point this out to you given half a chance.

• Indifference

  Great for articles with a political or social bent, this kind of troll expresses complete indifference to the topic at hand, wondering who on Earth cares about it. An alternative method is to say that the topic only concerns a certain group of people - criminals, idiots, hackers (always use this instead of crackers) or whatever group you want to offend.

• Sympathy

  Appear to take the same stance as the people you're trying to troll - claim you're as much a fan of Linux as the next man, but... This way you can make all kinds of claims in the sure knowledge that you actually know what you're talking about. A great phrase to use here is "In my experience". Remember to act like all the things you're pointing out are unfortunate but true.

• The common touch

  Always accuse /.ers of being elitist. This is an easy thing to do seeing as a lot of them are. Claim that is their grandmother couldn't use it, then they are just into it to feel better than Joe Sixpack rather than "doing it for the average user". This is always great for working into anti-Linux trolls - attack command-line tools and poorly designed desktops.

• The 31337 touch

  The opposite of the above. Claim that technology or whatever is only for the elite of society and that any attempt to open it up for everyone is wrong, an attack on intellectualism and possibly even dangerous. If people were meant to understand these things then they would, and it's their fault if they're too stupid to learn.

• Contradiction

  Never be afraid to contradict yourself, even in the space of a single sentence. The phrases "I am a top programmer who codes in VB" or "I am a supporter of open source who uses NT at work and 95 at home" will be sure to get a response from some weenie smugly pointing out the contradiction. Confuse the issue more by engaging in contradiction when you are feeding - this will confuse /.ers who will then make even more stupid replies, leaving them even more wide open for response.

  Clues

  If you're feeling brave, give the reader clues that this is an obvious troll. The classic example here is dmg's stock phrase "I am often accused of trolling (whatever that is)", but also feel free to use phrases like "I have not read the article, and I don't know much about XYZ but I feel I must comment". If anyone responds to a troll with these kinds of clues in it, feel free to bask in the glow of knee-jerk /. responses.

• Denial

  If you're unlucky someone will accuse you of being a troll (surely not!) and try and ruin it for you. If you don't want it all to end there, then be sure to counter it by accusing them of being small-minded and petty, saying that it's easier for them to say it's a troll than to accept that people have different opinions. Be sure to say this in the subject line, especially if their subject was the infamous "YHBT. YHL. HAND."

• Claiming credit

  Given that /. has its community of regular trolls (hi guys!), it's only polite to publish your troll on one of the so-called "hidden" forums for all to see and admire. This way, you get to bask in the praise of other trolls, they get to contribute to your's if they want to, and you get an easy way to find the troll later on when you want to check on its progress :)

  As for when to post it, that's a matter of opinion really. You can either post it straight away or leave it will after people start biting. Remember that the troll forum is also frequented by non-trolls, and sometimes you may get a self-declared "troll-buster" try and expose you. But remember, /.ers always post before thinking, and often it doesn't matter at all.

  There is no real current forum at the moment thanks to various spammers hitting the sids, but try trolltalk, the original troll sid started by 80md and osm way back in the day. Generally all postings are done there as an AC, with your name at the end of the post. Include a link to the troll somewhere in the text, which ideally will be directly to the post and its replies - click on the #XX link in the thread to get there.

• Ending the troll

  Sometimes you just get bored with a troll, or people start posting genuinely thoughtful stuff in reply (it does happen). When this happens it might be time to own up to the troll with a helpful "YHBT. YHL. HAND." post. Sometimes people will carry on a discussion of the issue, and if you're really lucky (and it was a great troll) they will completely fail to believe you and carry on arguing. If that happens, pat yourself on the back for writing a great troll :)

• The cheap $3 crack

  Finally, when all else fails and your troll gets moderated down to (-1, Troll) within ten seconds of you posting it, the only honourable thing to do is to accuse the moderators of smoking the cheap $3 crack (again) and give up :(

1. The Maniac

   Probably the most popular kind of troll, the Maniac holds an opinion on something, and won't budge from that opinion no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented. If challenged, the Maniac will simply get more and more agitated and abusive, deriding his opponents as "idiots", "wrong-thinking", "dangerous" and "subversive". Generally the Maniac takes a position that opposes the prevalent /. beliefs, but a similar effect can be achieved by taking a typical /. viewpoint and pushing it to ridiculous extremes.

   Maniacs can be crafted for practically every article /. posts, although some are more obvious targets than others. Civil liberty articles, especially on things like censorship, DMCA, UCITA that really get /.ers riled up, are usually extremely fruitful grounds for a well-crafted maniac. The other obvious type of article is anything which could possibly involve religion, especially evolution :)

   Here are some fruitful avenues to explore:

   • The Right-Wing Maniac

     Always popular, the right-wing maniac (RWM) is a God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving American, and proud of it. They don't care about the rest of the world, unless it's to "prove" that America is better than everything else, and they cannot stand liberal whining over civil rights. They hate the moral decay of America and want it to revert into a nation of heterosexual, Christian whites like it was meant to be. Woe betide anyone that dares to suggest otherwise.

   • Religion

     There are two ways to approach this kind of maniac. The harder to pull off is the militant atheist, but this is quite common amongst /. posters and you would have to be very offensive to get this to work. Of course with religion trolls, the argument can go on for ever once it's started... The more common approach is the Christian fundamentalist. They are ignorant, intolerant and bigoted in the extreme. For them the Bible is the inerrant word of God revealed to man - it contains no flaws and no contradictions. Thus they are strict Creationists - mentions of evolution or cosmology will set them off on vitriolic rants. Flaming denunciations of anyone daring to contradict the "Word of God" are the way to go, and any kind of proof can always be ignored by appealing to "secular humanist brainwashing". And let's not forget, the USA is the greatest nation on Earth because it has the righteous power of Jesus Christ behind it.

   • Ideology

     Pick a philosophy, any philosophy. This troll is a troll with a cause - they have found some kind of ideological truth, and are out to expose every other philosophy as a sham. Whether it be libertarianism, objectivism, communism or capitalism, this troll will point out the obvious "flaws" in any other philosophies, whilst spouting dogma about their own. And the best thing is - you don't even need to know that much about what you're spouting - making doctrinaire mistakes will get both sides of the argument flaming you, adding to the fun.

   • Software

     This is an old favourite and crops up in many forms, covering the gamut from OS maniacs (Linux zealots, MS-apologists or embittered BSD fanatics), language maniacs (Pascal vs. C, C vs. C++, C++ vs. Java, Perl vs. Python, VB vs. everything), application maniacs(GIMP vs. Photoshop, Netscape vs. IE, vi vs. emacs) and also includes people who complain about how technology should only be for the 31337 hackers.

   • Guns

     Americans love their guns, and will always fight passionately for their Constitutionally guarenteed rights to bear arms and shoot people. Even the slightest hint of criticism of this will bring down the wrath of a thousand and one enraged gun-owners on you, so it's always a great point to work into a troll :)

2. The Expert

   The Expert is someone who is "savvy" in their particular field, and is perfectly willing to give their opinion on any topic even vauguely related to their field. The Expert is most likely to be from a field which /.ers as a rule despise - the classic example is dumb marketing guy, but try consultants, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, executives, journalists (just think Jon Katz). With this kind of troll sweeping statements with little content are the norm, along wire dire portents of future catastrophe and dark hints of "insider knowledge".

   Some possible angles to exploit:

   • Industry knowledge

     The expert knows the computing industry from the inside - as a long-term pro, they can dispense knowledge knowing that they can "speak for the industry". Their smug self-satisfaction is bound to annoy, as is any suggestion that things aren't the way that /.ers would like it - saying "Linux requires the rock-solid guarantee of a trusted company like Microsoft" or "Apache cannot be trusted for mission-critical enterprise platforms" is guaranteed to get you denials explaining exactly why you're wrong, in excruciating detail.

   • Helpful hints

     With their tech-savvy (or law-savvy or whatever) experience, the expert is obviously the best person to point out what's wrong with things or to give out useful "factual" information. In fact this probably works best with lawyer trolls - for all that /.ers protest "IANAL", they certainly seem to think they could be, and any mistakes you make will send them rushing to prove themselves by correcting you.

3. Offtopic Trolls

   Not really a "troll" in the strict Jargon File sense of the word, but they certainly should be included here :) This category includes parodies, offtopic weirdness any all kinds of amusing stuff. Not really my area of expertise, this stuff is mainly done by gnarphlager and opensourceman. Thanks to gnarphlager for this section.

   Offtopic trolls, like any other, come in almost as many colours as an iMac, but generally not as cute. But then again, a good offtopic "troll" can affect more people than a repulsive little gumdrop on your desk, because you need to have someone SEE your desk before they can react. Simple? Moreso than even my overblown prose could indicate. Some basic examples:

   1. The serial troll

      Write a story. Keep expanding it. It doesn't matter what article you post it under, so long as it's high up. If you want people to recognize you, pick a couple themes or symbols, and carry them on throughout the story. Other alternatives include back linking or including the entire story, but adding more each time. Be funny if you want. Or if you don't feel like being funny, just be really weird. Someone will react.

   2. The random troll

      This has nothing to do with anything. Be it a stream of consciousness rant, or a description of the corner of your desk. Another favorite is a monologue, read as if spoken from any one given entity to another. The more outlandish, the better (a pair of socks talking to a mousepad, for example). If you really wanted to be artsy, work in an actual metaphor or legitimate meaning behind it, but it's not necessary.

   3. The vaguely related troll

      Start out with a comment about the article. Have a definite opinion of it. Then, after a little while, disintegrate into randomness. All roads eventually can eventually lead to cheese (yum), Natalie Portman, cannibalism, toasters, squirrels, futons, you name it. All it takes is a little bit of creativity. Oh, and feel free to use other trolls' motifs. Open source and all that ;-)

   General tips:

   • If it's funny for a fleeting moment, then it's worth posting.
   • Puns. Puns are only less vile than mimes, but it's hard to mime on /. So feel free/obligated to litter your offtopic and random bits with puns. Hurt the bastards. And if they're sick enough to laugh at them, then they'll eventually end up here ;-)
   • Obscure cultural references and injokes are always good. SOMEONE will get them eventually.
   • Several drafts of a serial or random post are common, but true elegance is being able to come up with something on the spot that still makes the top 40 posts (on a post-heavy article)

The following links contain background information useful for trolls needing quick quotes and "expert" opinions to include.

1. General purpose links
   • ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/trollfaq.html - How to deal with USENET trolls - learn your enemy :)
   • www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html - A List Of Fallacious Arguments - Learn them and use them liberally
   • www.altairiv.demon.co.uk/troll/trollfaq.html - USENET troll HOWTO
   • www.baiting.org - Baiting.org
   • www.fieldingtravel.com/df/index.htm - Fielding's DangerFinder - A guide to what and where's dangerous
   
   
2. Religious links
   • www.godhatesamerica.com/ - God Hates America
   • www.chalcedon.edu/creed.html - The Creed of Christian Reconstruction
   • www.demonbuster.com - How to cast out your demons and do spiritual warfare
   • riceinfo.rice.edu/armadillo/Sciacademy/riggins/thi ngs.htm - Things Creationists hate
   • www.icr.org/ - Institute for Creation Research
   • www.xenu.net - Operation Clambake - The fight against Scientology on the net
   • www.hom.net/~angels/ - Citizens for the Ten Commandments
   • www.bju.edu/rcnbc.html - The difference between Catholics and Christians
   • www.geocities.com/prazske00/biblequotes.html - Bible quotes by category
   
   
3. Political/economy links
   • www.aynrand.org - The Ayn Rand Institute
   • www.reason.com - Libertarian site
   • www.freerepublic.com - Right-wing stuff
   • www.jbs.org - Excellent site for all kinds of right-wingery
   • www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html - Web economy bullshit generator
   
   
4. Crackpot science links
   • www.fixedearth.com - The Earth Is Not Moving
   • www.jir.com/index.htm - The Journal of Irreproducible Results

© spiralx, I did not write this ;)

Here's an interesting article on Reason on antitrust workings through the ages. It gives me sort of a different perspective on MS's antitrust woes.

I think the solution to the MS problem is to regulate their real problem behavior. Don't let them do illegal things. Don't let them sign crazy exclusive deals. Don't let them control (down to a single icon) exactly what's installed on a machine.

Making MS release Office for Linux is a step down the wrong road. And what do you do when it's crappy? Force them to make it better?

"SELFNESS" by Gregory Benford

There you hit the nail on the head. They look good, never mind whether this will have any effect, let alone a salubrious one.

This is necessary first to calm the unthinkingly nervous, and second to cover their asses in the incredibly unlikely event that a terrorist does try to do harm.

This won't do much to calm the thinking nervous; a little thought will suggest that terrorists have upped their planning horizon far beyond the spur-of-the-moment 60's -- style ``carry in some guns and wing a few people and take some hostages and fly to Libya'' stuff that this would help with.

This policy wouldn't have hindered Timothy McVeigh, nor the unibomber, nor the September 11 hijackers, nor the next group of terrorists. What will discourage terrorists is swift, destructive retaliation against their cause, so that every terrorist act clearly sets back their cause.

I think that most of the domestic response to the recent events have been nothing but c.y.a. window dressing, with the same sort of logic and effectivness as gun control: none. See here and here and here and here among other references, for some ideas about that.

Treating honest folks like criminals only aids the criminals in the long run; it gives us the illusion that we are on the same side as them, because we and the criminals have a common enemy in the government. Take a look here for some discussion of how governments can go very wrong indeed.

> If there is an OS out there that is actually > better than XP, let it fight it out in the > marketplace. This is the USA after all. Just like the DVORAK keyboard has won out over the QWERTY keyboard.

This has already happened. Some folks in New London, CT, are getting their houses seized just so Pfizer can have bigger digs. The town government justifies the seizure as "public use" because they'll get more tax revenue out of Pfizer than Grandma. Great rationale, huh? Since they define revenue generation as a public use, it basically justifies any whoring of themselves they can come up with. I seem to recall another town in New York state doing the same for a shopping center.

Love Canal was no problem while it was privately owned. Then the local government got their hands on it and built on the property, despite vociferous warnings by Occidental (formerly Hooker Chemicals and Plastics) about the dangers of doing so. The fault is the government's, not the company's. There were also no reported illnesses due to toxic waste before a reporter exposed the existance of the site, and even afterwards all illnesses attributed to the toxic waste were well within national illness rates, so it's doubtful the waste contributed much if at all to them.

Check out this article.

Also, the Bhopal incident was an accident that was the fault of a company already following government safety measures, who are voluntarily taking additional measures--as are other companies--to make sure that such an accident never happens again.

You seriously need to educate yourself on who the real villains are.

Two interesting articles to add to discussion. Is there a 'gun problem' in America? Firearm Injuries and Deaths Down Do Guns Save Lives?

Good point. There's a good introduction to "the last mile problem" and how it relates to the Telecom Act of 1996 at
http://www.reason.com/tcs/022001.html
http://www.reason.com/tcs/020501.html

Good point. There's a good introduction to "the last mile problem" and how it relates to the Telecom Act of 1996 at
http://www.reason.com/tcs/022001.html
http://www.reason.com/tcs/020501.html

Try some of the publications that dedicate themselves to exposing poor reporting, or at least making a living doing good reporting that the other ones miss: Salon Magazine might just pick this /. story up on their own... Romenesko's Media News... Brill's Content... Reason Online... USC's Online Journalism Review... FAIR

Try THIS link.

Why does everyone here start with the assumption that global warming is even real? There is *very* credible evidence that there is no such effect, and a number of scientists have stated as much, but they're not getting the big megaphone from the UN and radical "environmental" groups.

Radical leftist "scientists" and their computer models have been known to intentionally lie to us before: witness the laughable computer predictions of the original 1970 Earth Day and the Club of Rome "Limits to Growth" fiasco which assured us with certainty that we would be completely out of oil, gas, copper, zinc, gold, and tin by now. Oh, and the pollution was supposed to be killing us off in the midst of the massive famines that have never happened. In fact, we now have more of all the resources listed above at our disposal than we had then, pollution is sharply down, and food production is at all-time record levels.

A few links that point this out the fallacy of global warming:

A good BBC article with coverage of some reasonable scientific dissent

A good overview of this from Reason magazine

Another article exposing the political as opposes to scientific basis of the IPCC report.

http://www.globalwarming.org is the source of these and other links exposing the truth about global warming, which is quite simply that there's no credible evidence that it even exists, and that the global warming crowd employs some of the worst science ever seen so long as it fits their political agenda.

It never ceases to amaze me that the numerous self-proclaimed libertarians on Slashdot are so willing to cede their liberty to a politically motivated cabal far more dangerous to our society than the RIAA or the MPAA could ever be. Wake up and pay attention to the things that really matter, and will impact your real freedoms in the future in ways that are truly Orwellian...

Yes, there are some issues with patents that are getting in the way, but that has more to do with European bureaucracy than "profit hungry capitalists" (who happy to have food hungry mouths to feed themselves, so of course they want to make money).

Ever notice how Katz always posts statistics and studies that "aren't published yet".

As some have pointed out, individuals make the decision to buy a nicer car, TV set, PS2, stereo, cellphone, shoes endorsed by big jocks.... instead of computers. The slight differences in computer ownership that exist today are the result of those choices.

What we as The Community can do is encourage our employers to take the old hardware being replaced in upgrades, and donate it to inner-city schools, churches, community centers, etc... and then bring our LUGs along to do installfests, and train up some new members while we're at it.

[the "deregulation" law] prohibited buyers and sellers from agreeing to individual contracts and mandated that everyone pay the same -- and highest -- price offered on any given day. So that's how the "market" price for power would be set for the utilities. Here's another catch: Regulators would set the price the utilities could charge energy consumers.

Now this scheme may be many things, but a deregulated market it certainly isn?t.

In posting the above message, when I tried to include a few paragraphs from the Reason article on technological fixes to global warming, Slashdot aborted the posting due to "lameness filter encountered". How does one avoid triggering the lameness filter? In my own humble opinion, deleting the blockquoted portion made the posting MORE, not less, lame. Any suggestions?

That approach, invented and pioneered by scientist John Martin, definitely shows promise.

Here is a critique of California's "deregulation" of the power industry.

I was going to write a scathing attack on this comment but after reviewing the comments that follow it I can see that there is enough good wisdom left on this board to actually overcome the tyranny of the weak (minds).

If anyone knows of a decent word to use instead of capitalism then I would like to hear it, because there are too many kids who have read too much half-baked socialist propaganda while never taking the time to actually read, oh I don't know, Adam-freaking-Smith to actually understand what the term capitalism means historically, poilitically, and personally.

Corporations are socialist. Each corporation is defined by a corporate charter which is granted as sanction by the government, to act under a 'publicly' sanctioned purpose with special rights that don't naturally apply to groups of individuals. This is a command economy. Once the government sanctions the commerce that occurs in a nation, we have no truly free market, only the outside threat of one.

Taxation of blank media is the government abusing its monoploy on force for the interests of one segment of society over another, a segment that percieves a need which it asks to be subsidized. This is coercion, and in reality there is no objective difference between the 'need' of the RIAA and the 'need' of a lesbian artist applying for a grant.

When intelligent people talk about freedom, they mean freedom from coercion, not freedom to coerce - which incidentaly is what the original poster accuses corporations of doing but seeks to do himself.

Ugh, I'm obviously too tired and pissed off to go on. try to think before you moderate .