Slashdot Mirror
Big Brother To Watch Judges?
One week from today, the U.S. Judicial Conference will decide whether judges and their staff can handle grown-up responsibilities like ... using the internet. No, you did not click onto The Onion by mistake: after heated
disagreement
earlier this year, the issue is coming to a head. Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has
a great Wall Street Journal opinion piece, today only. (It wants your email; try
me@privacy.net.)
Jeffrey Rosen's
analysis in TNR
is another good take on it. If you don't think the men and women who hold people's lives in their hands need daddy and mommy looking over their shoulder, you might take a moment to fire off a quick, polite email
per the EFF's suggestion.
If surveillance can invade a judge's workplace, it's for damnsure
there's nothing keeping it out of yours.
Good point... NOT!!!
first reply to first post
Who cares if Federal Judges are surfing the Stileproject to look at kitty cats being stir fried? (yumm, General Tsao Kitty) I am more concerned with the conversations Federal Judges are having in the backrooms. I want their private deals to be made public. Who the heck knows what they are doing and how it affects our freedom. Are we to trust these people with our liberty when they feel they are above the standards of ordinary Federal employees? At least with the other two branches of government, citizens have the ability to directly remove the corrupt. Its almost impossible to remove a seated Federal judge.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
fuck you taco...that wasn't offtopic!!! that was a blatant troll!!! you dirty cocksucking ass-whore!!! go and wipe Hemos's cum off your face with some worthless VA Linux stock certificates.
What does YIAAL stand for? Yo, I'm An Ass Licker?
who peed on slashdot?
Don't forget to check out our big url (web address) giveaway promotion, at ScaredCity(?tm?).
What better way to rekindle the "failed" fairytail "economy", than to have a url that matches what you (& MANY others) may be doing, with a year's free hosting on one of our secure gnu/linux servers? have you heard? fud is dead. have you seen these guise?
You guys look like that killer. You're pathetically uncharismatic, you're outclassed and you're in the wrong. I love watching you squeal and moan.
And you, I suppose, look like Clint Eastwood with a big, big gun.
Sheesh, there goes the neighborhood.
I looked into the abyss, and the abyss looked into me--and we both winked.
Ever wonder why he was called "big brother"?
Pretty clever. You should post that from an account with a +2 bonus sometime.
Q: What is this all about?
Despite the fact that the Slashdot FAQ [slashdot.org] claims the editors "never" delete comments, proof exists that they have deleted comments on occasion:
Notice the first comment in the cached version of the story is an ASCII graphic, which had been modded up to +1 at the last minute before the story was archived. That comment is now gone. As you can see, the comment was posted by this user [slashdot.org]. Notice the user info page now says the account has posted zero comments. All comments posted by that account, regardless of moderation score, have been wiped.
Q: Didn't the comment just get modded down?
No, the comment is gone. It is nowhere to be found in the current version of the story. One must go to the Google cache to view it.
Q: Maybe it got modded down just before the story was archived, and is now gone because comments at 0 and below don't get archived?
No, the story had already been frozen into Slashdot's static HTML archive. Look at that Google cached copy again. It clearly says:
That also means no more moderation could take place. The comment did not get modded down, it was deleted.
Q: So? It's their site, they can delete comments if they want to!
True. But it's also true that I can criticize them for being liars. Here is what the Slashdot FAQ says [slashdot.org] about the deletion of comments:
As you can see from the Google cache, the comment displayed just fine in a standard browser. It was not deleted because it contained malformed HTML. It was deleted for no reason, save that they didn't like it. That is in direct conflict with the statements in the FAQ.
Q: Yeah well, that comment was an ASCII representation of goatse.cx [goatse.cx], which is disgusting. I'm glad it's gone.
Odd that you find the human body "disgusting". Do you take showers with your eyes closed so you won't have to look at it?
Q: Look, that comment was posted by a troll; it was modded up by trolls, and therefore it was invalid!
I once again redirect your attention to the Slashdot FAQ. Slashdot brags about being user-moderated. The comment was posted and moderated up by users. How is that invalid?
Q: Because! I said it's a troll! Didn't you hear me?!
Whatever.
Q: Well, why are you posting this? What do you want them to do about it? What are you trying to prove?
The point of all this is that Slashdot's model of anonymous posting, never deleting comments, and purely user-based moderation doesn't work. They are, in fact, aware of this -- hence the deletion of comments (not to mention the vast number of comments modded down by editors rather than users).
There is nothing wrong with the administrator of a message board taking steps, even ruthless ones, to eliminate crap. In fact, most successful message boards on the web are run in this manner. However, since the Slashdot editors refuse to acknowledge this, and still publicly maintain their fantasy of a working user-regulated system, I think it's pretty funny to go around pointing out their hypocrisy and dishonesty.
Q: Don't you have better things to do?
Yeah, but I'm not doing them right now, am I?
Note: This FAQ is public domain. Copy-and-paste it to your heart's content. It is not released under the GPL.
Even though I am logged on, Bug Reporting does not recognize that I am. It asks me to log on again. When I try to do so, it fails to recognize my User ID / Password.
"SourceForge Site Login
Invalid Password or User Name
Internet Explorer users need to upgrade to IE 5.01 or higher, preferably with 128-bit SSL or use Netscape 4.7 or higher
Cookies must be enabled past this point."
I am currently on a machine running IE.5.5 with cookies enabled (company policy).
Morris
of poop
The [url.com] indicators are programming at its finest: slap a false sense of security on it and call it a day.
There's plenty more URL redirectors where that one came from...