Slashdot Mirror
The Privacy Candidate
Alsee writes "Wired News reports 'electronic civil libertarians' hearts are a-twitter' over US Presidential hopeful Senator Hillary Clinton's bold stance on the right to privacy. Wired quotes Clinton: 'At all levels, the privacy protections for ordinary citizens are broken, inadequate and out of date.' Clinton gave a speech last June to the American Constitution Society (text, WMF) in which she addressed electronic surveillance, consumer opt-in vs. opt-out, cyber-security, commercial and government handling of personal data, data offshoring, data leaks, and even genetic discrimination." Would you consider a candidate's stand on privacy important enough to sway your vote?
http://www.ronpaul.org/
This is the libertarian that actually has a chance... because he's running as a Republican!
Hey mods, consider the above remark; Bush *has* made plenty of pseudo law with his signing statements. That post was pretty damned factual, and the flamebait mod is both unfair and innapropriate.
Someone should fix the mod - this is one of slashdot's biggest problems, that people use mods to express counter opinions -- by suppressing the other opinion -- rather than actually looking for flamebait. It's why I have to browse at -1; because there are no limits on abusive moderation and perfectly good posts are likely to be buried by idiots like the ass-clown who modded that post flamebait.
And of course, feel free to off-topic me. :/
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The opposite is also true, you know - using the mod system to say "I agree" is just as abusive and just as rampant. Your parent post is off-topic in this discussion, it just takes advantage of Slashdot's well known bias against Bush (and currently sits at +5 for it).
Don't be hypocritical just because you happen to agree with something.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
First of all, the post I replied to was a counter point to something I posted. Second, the goal of moderation is to raise posts up that are (a) on-topic, (b) contain remarks, information, or pointers to same, which are of high quality (as opposed to posts which say, "yeah, me too" or "GNAA.... blah blah)
Moderating well requires that you stand back from your position, presuming you have one, and reward both sides of the discussion. No more than that. When you do more, you've become partisan, and as slashdot's defaults, used by many people, will promptly hide posts that drop below the user's reading threshold, this is tantamount to suppressing opinion - which IMHO ought to disqualify a moderator forever, frankly.
You can read more about my thoughts on slashdot's problems with moderation here if you're curious.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.