Mysterious MilkyWay Warp Finally Explained?

* * Beatles-Beatles writes to tell us Space.com is reporting that scientists think that a collision between mysterious 'dark matter' and two of the Milky Way's nearby neighbors may be causing our galaxy to warp 'like a vinyl record left out in the hot Sun.' From the article: 'The warp is most clearly visible in a thin disk of hydrogen gas that extends across the entire 200,000-light-year diameter of the Milky Way. Viewed sideways, one half of the hydrogen disk appears to stick up above our galaxy's plane of stars and gas, while the other half dips below the plane for a bit and then rises upward again farther away from the galaxy's center.'"

Comments

At it again...

[Chris Bradshaw]

Wow, how about that... **Beatles-Beatles and ScuttleMonkey at it again. What a team! Coincidence? I don't think so... The real question is this: What the hell do the beatles and science have in common?

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/2 6/2059256 - Posted By: ScuttleMonkey http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/2 0/0351202 - Posted By: ScuttleMonkey http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/12/055 7249 - Posted By: ScuttleMonkey http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/1 2/0620251 - Posted By: ScuttleMonkey http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/12/033822 6 - Posted By: ScuttleMonkey

Re:At it again...

[Anonymous Coward]

Roland is on a bender, long weekend.

If ** Beatles Beatles would only omit the pagerank whoring link (or change it to JUST HIS EMAIL ADDRESS) I'd shut up about this completely.

Re:At it again...

[node 3]

Wow, how about that... **Beatles-Beatles and ScuttleMonkey at it again. What a team! Coincidence? I don't think so...

No, I'm pretty sure he and his monkey got nothing to hide.

Re:At it again...

[MLopat]

Ok, tell me what I'm missing here. The guy has a tribute site to George Harrison, with no advertising, including no google ads. The page itself has a Google PageRank of 5, so that's not such a big deal. And when I was on it, it said I was the only current visitor? So what's the big deal?

Re:At it again...

[abertoll]

Two of those stories were submitted anonymously.

Re:At it again...

[Chris Bradshaw]

Your kidding right? Look again...

http://science.slashdot.org/~*%20*%20Beatles-Beatl es

Re:At it again...

[Overly Critical Guy]

There's a bigger question--why are you subscribed to this place? Is this spam really worth your money?

Re:At it again...

[Darby]

No, I'm pretty sure he and his monkey got nothing to hide.

Then why is he spanking the monkey if there's nothing to hide?

Re:At it again...

[dbolger]

Take it easy, take it easy. The deeper you troll the higher you fly. In google pagerank, that is ;)

BTW, I dont fully understand how search engine indexing works, but wouldn't everybody in this thread constantly mentioning "Beatles" and referencing their songs (even while complaining about Scuttlemonkey and spamming) increase the relevance that google attaches to this guy's link in relation to the Beatles, and rise his page up through the ranks?

Mod Story -1 Spam

[Anonymous Coward]

* * Beatles-Beatles writes to tell us Space.com is reporting that scientists think that a collision between mysterious 'dark matter' and two of the Milky Way's nearby neighbors may be causing our galaxy to warp 'like a vinyl record left out in the hot Sun.'

Wow. A Slashdotter, a Slashdot "author" AND a space website conspiring to spam us...*sigh*

Re:Mod Story -1 Spam

[lantenon]

I can't believe I didn't notice that until now. I've been reading through all of these comments, figuring that maybe, just maybe, there is still a shred of accountability in the Slashdot.org editors, and **Beatles-Beatles was submitting all his stories directly to Scuttlemonkey or something (which would explain the posting history.) But then, the submission isn't quoted, leading me to believe SM wrote it ... and now it's including the phrase "vinyl record". I gotta say this is lending a whole lot of credibility to the belief that SM and BB are in cahoots to raise his pagerank.

**Beatles (thread to be bitchslapped in 3..2..)

[zerocool^]

Preliminary reply, so that the moderators can go ahead and bitchslap (mod to -23829) this entire thread. I guess I have the karma to sacrifice for the sake of the arguement.

It's yet another post by * * Beatles Beatles, gone live via ScuttleMonkey.

Blah Blah BeatlesBeatles uses Slashdot's pagerank to get his stupid George Harrison page higher ranked in Google. We all know this, and we all know it's despicable. If you're curious, hover your mouse over his name - it goes to george-harrison.info - I'm not hot linking it, if you want to go there, cut and paste into a new browser window.

Anyway, the fact that the page is nothing but a link farm and that it has quite possibly the worst CSS stylesheet on the planet seems to overshadow the fact that this person's website has nothing to do with technology of any sort, which is why, admins, that we wonder what it's doing on the front page of slashdot day after day.

But, ALL THAT ASIDE, there's still something more disturbing.

I've been a member of the slashdot community for years now - I forget when I signed up, but it was either late 1999 or early 2000, so it's at least 5 years at this point. Over the years, I've submitted something like 10 or 15 links, and not yet had one posted. And I only submit things I actually find interesting, like AMD sues Intel. BeatlesBeatles has had 20 submissions greenlit in the past 3 months. That's about one a week. And they've all been posted by Scuttle Monkey.

Every time someone points this out, our fearless trolleader Jamie comes out in support of ScuttleMonkey and BeatlesBeatles saying there's nothing funny going on, it's just journalism. Well, Admins: This is what gets us riled up - Here's a clue. YOUR READERS ARE NOT DUMB. IF THEY READ SLASHDOT REGULARLY, THEY'RE NOT STUPID.

Looking at the facts, most of us draw the obvious conclusion.
1.) I've been a member of slashdot for a LONG TIME. My userid is 112121.
2.) Beatles-Beatles has been a member of slashdot for about 3 months. His UID is 909211.
3.) Beatles-Beatles has had 20 greenlit submissions, most of which regurgitate an article, offering no origional insight, and read like press releases.
4.) I have had no greenlit submissions, and I consider mine to have been at least moderately clever.
5.) Beatles-Beatles is profiting in a very tangible, dollars-in-the-pocket way from having his site linked from Slashdot.
6.) All of Beatles-Beatles submissions have been greenlit by ScuttleMonkey.

To look at these facts and not come to the same conclusion as the rest of us is ignorance. Furthermore, to dismiss these facts as pure coincidence is simply implying that your readers are stupid.

This is why we bitch. All we want is for someone to admit it. "ScuttleMonkey and Beatles-Beatles are friends - when BB submits a story, he sends an IM to ScuttleMonkey, and if it's moderately interesting, SM posts it to help a friend out". That's all we're looking for.

But, this thread will be bitchslapped, and I'll probably lose my (Meta)mod privs. Oh well. Maybe some day we'll get an honest answer out of the admins.

Here's hoping.

~Will

Re:**Beatles (thread to be bitchslapped in 3..2..)

[zerocool^]

see my comment here in this thread.

I'm not asking much. I don't even know if Taco knows this is going on. All I want is integrity.

Re:**Beatles (thread to be bitchslapped in 3..2..)

[UserGoogol]

You make some good points, but I think you make some assumptions.

You said you've only submitted ten or fifteen articles to Slashdot in your entire lifetime. To contrast, I wouldn't be surprised if Beatles Beatles submits at least fifteen articles every week. (He makes money off of it, so it's worth it for him to spend a couple hours every week trolling the Internet for stories.) If that is the case, his success in getting articles submitted would be perfectly sensible.

That said, the fact that the person who posts his articles is consistantly ScuttleMonkey is intensely suspicious. It is possible that there are other reasons, but we are right to be suspicious.

That said, I'm not sure if we are right to care. It's not a big deal. Beatles beatles's articles are generally neat little links.

The sole function of editors at Slashdot is to prevent stuff like Goatse from getting posted. In the years I've been here (less than yours, admittingly) editors have never done anything vaguely editorial. All they do is look in the editor's queue, and post whatever catches their eye. They do not edit the posts for grammar, or check if the article has been posted before, or check if the article is true or not. They are not journalists, they are merely a rudimentary filter. Thus, until Beatles Beatles posts Goatse, ScuttleMonkey is performing his job perfectly.

Re:**Beatles (thread to be bitchslapped in 3..2..)

[bonch]

I've been here longer, and have never gotten a single mod point, thanks to having questioned authority and posted in The Thread (the first major bitchslapping that pissed off the readership).

I've watched this once-fun tech site descend into a hilarious public wank-off session (think I'm trolling? Those are Linus Torvalds' words to describe this place, from the LKML) with a completely broken moderation system that STILL isn't fixed (I've been modbombed multiple times...one time lasted over three months, day after day...I was told by others that people use bots to monitor user pages and use karma-whored accounts to automatically mod comments down).

You used to come here and get technically informed, but now the news has gotten generic and flamebaity.

BUT IT WON'T CHANGE A THING. The editors will ignore you, the sun will rise tomorrow morning, and everything will continue to be exactly the same. And all the users will continue to reload and visit the site, giving pageviews to Slashdot's advertisers. Remember that, as opposed to a community "open source" site like Digg, Slashdot is a closed-system piece of property owned by a corporation called OSTG, run by editors who choose stories that generate high viewerships so they can charge high advertising rates. It's all about ad revenues.

Don't even bother emailing Rob Malda. His responses are usually sarcastic and jerky. Just accept that this site is way past its prime, running on an ancient crufty Perl codebase, only recently making the big ol' switch to freakin' HTML4 with CSS. In 2005. God.

Re:**Beatles (thread to be bitchslapped in 3..2..)

[Wheely]

I'm trying not to think of it

Re:**Beatles (thread to be bitchslapped in 3..2..)

[philovivero]

With the disclaimer that I work at Digg, what makes you think Digg lacks what Slashdot gives you? At first I lamented the fact that Digg, although cool for its front-page articles, has really crappy comments.

But lately, when I go to a Dugg story with a lot of comments, and read at +1, I get a couple of nice gems.

Plus, Digg gives me a lot more variety. As a many-year Slashdot reader, I'm actually starting to di-- uh, like the website.

Again, I know it's kinda hard to swallow since I'm supposed to be all biased and stuff, but I swear I'm not. It took me several weeks of using Digg before I finally decided I could actually eat my own dogfood.

Re:**Beatles (thread to be bitchslapped in 3..2..)

[pkphilip]

Hi there Rob! been a while. You doing ok?

Re:**Beatles (thread to be bitchslapped in 3..2..)

[m50d]

Dumb question: everyone says that, so why doesn't digg just run slashcode?

Re:**Beatles (thread to be bitchslapped in 3..2..)

[Black Parrot]

> When did this bullshit start anyway?

When they sold themselves to a corporate pwner, back in the .goldrush

Re:**Beatles (thread to be bitchslapped in 3..2..)

[pjotrb123]

ScuttleMonkey and Beatles-Beatles are friends

Worse yet: I believe they are the same person.
I think he simply accepts his own submissions.
He's trying to lay low/cut back, but can't resist.

Re:**Beatles (thread to be bitchslapped in 3..2..)

[Alberic]

What surprises me the most is this :

• You can be read if your posts were "good" (Karma validation)
• You can moderate if your views on moderation is coherent with the community (metamoderation validation)

But, as far as I'm able to guess there is no such validation for higher ranks of administration. Why is that readers are subjject to so much redundant checks whie the one with the most powers are left unattended ?

Who whatches the watcher ?

Re:**Beatles (thread to be bitchslapped in 3..2..)

[slavemowgli]

I think there's an underlying problem to 1), too, though, and that is that Taco himself does not have the same level of integrity that many Slashdot readers have and that every self-respecting journalist *should* have. He has made it clear in the past that he considers Slashdot to be of a personal blog than anything else (see the "Blizzard froze my account" "editorial" he posted a while ago), and while it of course is NOT his personal blog anymore (at the very latest, it stopped being that when Slashdot sold out to OSTG), it does illustrate a certain mindset - namely, that it's perfectly OK for him (and, by corollary, for any Slashdot editor) to violate basic journalistic principles. So that's what he does (and what the other editors do).

I'm not sure if this can be changed anymore, either; the only "stuff that matters" that Slashdot is still about is money, and since Slashdot sold out, it's not even Taco's money anymore, either - at least not directly (I assume he still gets a nice salary for maintaining ad revenue, though).

Pretty much all of Slashdot's problems can be explained in this light - if you wonder why things are the way they are (dupes, slashvertisement, troll stories etc.), just consider ad revenue; everything that generates lots of page views (for example, by stirring up controversy) is good for ad revenue, so it'll happen. In other words, Slashdot is really a tabloid of the worst kind - the only one difference is that it's one that caters to a technical audience rather than the general unwashed masses.

And as such, the only things that really could make a difference are those that lead to a decrease in ad revenue, too. As long as that doesn't happen, we can complain all we want - we'll be ignored. So the only options seem to be writing to Slashdot's advertisers and asking them to demand a higher quality of the site - or to leave Slashdot. The only thing that Slashdot has going for itself, in my eyes, is the sheer amount of comments it generates, many of which actually *are* interesting/insightful/informative, but that's about it.

Incidentally, BTW, this also explains why you lose your mod powers for good when you moderate people down: the Slashdot owners *want* as many highly-moderated comments as possible, because those will either be well-received (in which case it's obvious why they're considered a good thing) or badly-received, in which case they'll stir up controversy, spawn more comments, and - ultimately - lead to more page hits and thus more ad revenue. Negative moderation, even that of genuine troll/flamebait posts, is a threat to ad revenue - that's why you get punished for doing it.

(Interestingly enough, BTW, I myself already seem to have been forced to post at +1 again since a few months ago, despite still having Excellent karma and having posted at +2 for a long time. Considering that this isn't the first Slashdot-critical comment I've posted, I kinda wonder whether someone slapped an extra -1 on me there - maybe I'm just paranoid, but I certainly wouldn't put it above Taco to do that.)

THAT'S what I don't get!

[Overly Critical Guy]

It's one thing if he was posted evenly amongst the other editors. Okay, fine, they're all getting scammed by him.

But, with the exception of a CmdrTaco article, every other submission from this guy is posted by ScuttleMonkey. Why is that? It's proof they just don't care anymore at this site.

This crap is why people are flocking to Digg.com. Even though the discussions there suck because of no threading (yet), it's not really different from here, and when people are scamming the front page, everyone gangs together and undiggs it to remove it!

Re:THAT'S what I don't get!

[macshit]

This crap is why people are flocking to Digg.com. Even though the discussions there suck because of no threading (yet), it's not really different from here, and when people are scamming the front page, everyone gangs together and undiggs it to remove it!

Um, it is different from here because the comments on digg are a cesspool of uninformed, uninteresting, crap, and digg readers appear to be a pretty dim lot. Slashdot's comments are infinitely better.

Since I (like the majority of readers, apparently) read for the comments, not for the articles, digg is hardly an attractive alternative; indeed, there seems little to distinguish it from the other 7 bazillion lame web-forums out there.

Re:THAT'S what I don't get!

[pmc]

Slightly sceptical of this, I thought I'd check slashdot.org via google:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22Beatles-Beatle s+writes%22+site:slashdot.org&hl=en&lr=&start=10&s a=N - "Beatles-Beatles writes"

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=%22Beatles- Beatles+writes%22+site%3Aslashdot.org+scuttlemonke y&meta= - as above but with ScuttleMonkey in the page

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=%22Beatles- Beatles+writes%22+site%3Aslashdot.org+-scuttlemonk ey&meta= - as first but without ScuttleMonkey in the page.

First - 126 hits: Second 125 hits: Third - 1 hit. Things that make you go "hmmmmmm....."

You missed the point of the story

[Overly Critical Guy]

...which was to spam Beatles' site again, thanks to ScuttleMonkey, who exclusively delivers his submissions to the loyal Slashdot readership. But yeah, there's nothing sneaky going on! Promise!!

The truth about * *Beatles-Beatles

[dorkygeek]

Looks like ScuttleMoney^H^Hkey still doesn't get it, as well as other Slashdotters. So, let me repost this for the thousandst time.

Interesting thing is, ScuttleMonkey seems to use some standard template for * *Beatles-Beatles submissions, since ALL of them start by: "* * Beatles-Beatles writes to tell us...".

So, let me repost some earlier post of mine:

Ok, let's have a look at his george-harrison.info website. Aha, maybe the links at the bottom of the page? Yes, I see: http://george-harrison.info/reciprocal-links.html.

Sooo, what may be on that page? Quoting:

Our reciprocal links page. These links are useful for website promotion, link trades, and generating traffic to your site. There are many sites with useful products, services, programs, business opportunities, information, and free stuff.

All reciprocal links have been manually screened before getting on this page. Webmasters that post links on this page, also promote this Links Page on their site too. If you want to add your link and become a member of this reciprocal links page, just click on the top link for details. It's free to join.

Looking at the link list (just a small excerpt):

Guaranteed Dropship Wholesalers business directory source

Good Vibrations for Singles - Free Dating, Love, Romance, and Friendship

Collection Agency - Williams, Cohen & Gray

Trade Links - Link Swap Page

Personals Dating Affiliate Program - Instant Sign-Up

ProfitsRup2U For Successful Internet Marketing

Trade links page - reciprocal links page

What do we learn? * * Beatles-Beatles is an ugly link spammer who uses Slashdot to increase the PageRank of his own site, on which he hosts a link farm.

HTH!

Re:The truth about * *Beatles-Beatles

[Z0mb1eman]

What do we learn? * * Beatles-Beatles is an ugly link spammer who uses Slashdot to increase the PageRank of his own site, on which he hosts a link farm.

SO WHAT???

Every time a story by him gets posted, cue the predictable, righteous, and frankly a bit hysteric posts from all kinds of people frothing at the mouth because of the huge injustice that was just done (to them personally, you'd think).

Oh no, Beatles-beatles got another story posted. Oh, no, they all start with the same few words by the editor!! Oh No, they're all approved by the same editor!! OH NO, he has a link to his site under his name!!! OH NO, HIS SITE HAS OTHER LINKS ON IT!!! THE SKY IS FALLING!! WOE IS US!!

Again, tell me exactly WHY I should care he's doing this. BFD - he puts in the effort to find and submit interesting articles. If he makes some money from it, more power to him (and honestly, get a grip on yourselves... how much money CAN he pull from this? $5 a month? $10? Is it coming out of your pocket?) Slashdot exists only because of user content - both the articles and the comments. UNOBTRUSIVELY promoting one's site in return for the content they provide seems fair enough. So many people - including myself - have their site URL in their profile and sig, and no one seems to care much about that. The only promotion I have problems with are the blatant slashvertisments (bob@somecompany tells us that SomeCompany has just released product X).

If you don't like it, start looking for interesting stuff and submit so many articles that beatles-beatles' stuff won't make it through. Stop posting your inane troll post - we get it, and WE DON'T CARE.

HTH.

Re:It won't matter much longer

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod Parent Up!

Someone is abusing their Mod Points!