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Exxon's Brute Squad Hacks the Yes Men
tom_evil notes a story up on Infoshop.org about a parody site and the lack of a sense of humor in a large multinational. "One day after the Yes Men made a joke announcement of ExxonMobil's plans to turn billions of climate-change victims into a brand-new fuel called Vivoleum, the Yes Men's upstream internet service provider shut down Vivoleum.com and cut off the Yes Men's email service, in reaction to a complaint whose source they will not identify. 'Since parody is protected under US law, Exxon must think that people seeing the site will think Vivoleum's a real Exxon product, not just a parody,' said Yes Man Mike Bonanno. Exxon's policies do already contribute to 150,000 climate-change related deaths each year,' added Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum. 'So maybe it really is credible. What a resource!'"
yeah, welcome to /. moderators: They think "Troll" is the same as "person who I disagree with."
Trolling is generally defined as saying something assholish to get replies ("why the fuck would anyone use vi?" or "why the fuck would anyone use emacs" for examples). While flamebait is trying to instigate a flamewar, like: "vi is clearly better than emacs because it has a simpler interface" or "emacs is better because it has more features." Off-topic -- well, if you can't figure that one out, you ought not be moderating, or even on slashdot. The closest to "-1 I disagree" is Overrated.
This works both ways; there are also moderations in the UPWARD direction that make no sense. This article has a few already. Generally, saying bad things about corporations (unless you're twitter) or Bush can get you moderated up unless you have zero tact. (Seriously, we all know Bush is a fucking moron. Just a year and a half left, and he's gone.)
Sometimes saying *good* things about people we *really hate*, like the RIAA, gets you moderated up. I think this is because mods just get so shocked their brains cease to function correctly.
Also, there are six billion people on this planet. 150,000 people die about every twenty-four hours. It's not going to affect us. Human beings like to reproduce. We're in no danger of dying off with such a small number of deaths. You want to impress me? Add three zeroes to that number. Then I'll concede we're in trouble. Maybe I'm just jaded, but people die every day for stupid reasons. People have been dying since there were people. All this hand wringing and fretting isn't doing any good -- either work to solve problems, or shut up. But don't be an asshole about it. Besides, if you want to be really cynical, eventually, the universe will reach maximum entropy (if you believe the Heat Death theory).
That's purely conjecture at this point.
"Broadview did restore both IPs on Wednesday, after the Vivoleum.com
website was completely disabled and all mention of Exxon was removed
from TheYesMen.org."