Los Alamos Missing Disks Never Existed

Hal9000_sn3 writes "Turns out that the investigations carried out at Los Angeles National Laboratory over a matter of stolen research were flawed...because the missing disks never existed. Kind of hard to defend against having lost something you allegedly had access to, if the thing never existed." From the article: "Eventually, four were fired for security breaches, one chose to resign under the threat of termination and seven others received various formal reprimands."

Comments

Re:Did the fired workers make a mistake?

[Urkki]

• Yes, I'll admit that this was funny, but why would you mod it so? It was equally (if not more so) insightfull. By modding it as 'funny' you've actually deprived the OP of total karma. I wish more /. mods would realize that +1 FUNNY actually detracts from total Karma.

And why would anybody care? There's a karma cap you know, and just writing "normally" makes pretty sure you'll reach that cap pretty soon, so a few points here and there makes *no* difference...

Re:The obvious comparison

[PsiPsiStar]

In 1996 there were some... I think it was nerve gass.
In fact, Reagan gave Saddam WMDs and this is a matter of historical record, but we asked Saddam to detroy the stuff after he invaded Kuwait and we thought he might be dangerous. He kept some in reserve and Clinton bombed the reserves, but it was hard to verify whether or not this was successful. Of course, there was never any evidence that Saddam restarted his nuclear program as claimed.

Your use of 'before' is overly broad.

Re:Did the fired workers make a mistake?

[JeremyALogan]

I'm not saying that karma is worth caring about but, the fact remains that needlessly diluting someone's karma pool *DOES* do 'damage'.

Re:Did the fired workers make a mistake?

[HeghmoH]

By modding it as 'funny' you've actually deprived the OP of total karma. I wish more /. mods would realize that +1 FUNNY actually detracts from total Karma.

To be blunt: who gives a shit?

Moderation isn't about karma. Moderation is about letting people like me filter and sort comments. If I decide that I really hate "funny" posts, I can filter them into the ground. If I like them, I can elevate them more than other posts. Your strategy would prevent me from doing that.

Karma is just a side effect, a system that tries to detect people who consistently produce worthwhile comments or people who consistently produce trash. If the slashdot team decided that Funny shouldn't influence karma, so be it. If your correct moderation costs the poster a bit of karma, who cares? For 50 karma and five dollar, you can get a coffee at Starbucks.