Slashdot Mirror
Email (and Filters) for all Australian schools
Tom Davies writes: "Every student and teacher in the state of New South Wales will have an email address and web access by March. And porn filtering to go with it, according to this article in the Sydney Morning Herald."
tally ho what what
As you may well know, Slashdot has been experiencing technical difficulties tonight. The result of this has been the page being inaccessible for awhile. This happens from time to time for whatever reason, and every effort is made to restore service as soon as possible.
As you may also know, we are a Linux and open source site. This company is part of the OSDN, which supports the open source movement. We are also owned by VA Linux^H^H^H^H^HSoftware, formerly a company using Linux as core to its business. While there may be indeed legitimate criticisms to the Linux operating system and to the model of open source. It's a matter of what you think is best and not everyone is a Richard Stallman. It's very much understandable.
You have free speech on the internet most likely. Some countries limit it, but it's usually about extremist views about racism. If you're reading this, you almost certainly have the opportunity to disseminate your views on the subjects at hand.
We here at Slashdot, however, have a business to run. These views are not welcome here. They destroy our business and we're on a tight enough budget already. This means we don't need more cutbacks here. We use free software that's often littered with bugs, already. There's not much else to do without starting to dismiss people.
In short, this site reflects on us and on VA as a whole. It's as popular as any site on the OSDN and it's great publicity for VA to own a site such as Slashdot. In order to maintain this benefit from this site, it's sometimes necessary to force users to conform to minimal standards.
These standards mean we can't allow posts that point out problems with Linux or open source. These destroy the good image we seek to promote here. Furthermore, we are in competition with Microsoft in some ways. Posts that are pro-Microsoft are also unacceptable.
We don't like to delete comments that have replies to them. So to stop possible replies, we tend to cause an outage and delete the comments during that time. It may be slightly disruptive to whoever is reading at those times, but we won't censor legitimate discussion. We also won't want to delete replies to those posts in question reminding them of what this site is about. Most of the readership gets it. They will correct these few who are outspoken. We don't want to delete their comments and penalize them for correcting the few who don't get what this site is about.
In effect, we caused the outage tonight. It was relatively brief and done with good reason. I'm sure you, the readers of this site, will understand the need for these posts to be deleted. We apologize to an legitimate users whom the downtime might have inconvenienced. Thank you for your understanding.
You stupid fuck - that was hillarious, but completely off topic - you wasted the first post being moderated -1.
I haven't posted in so long, my sig is out of date.