Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot:Mark 2
I, like all of you, am really sad to see the closing of
several of my favorite sites today. User Friendly
was a regular place for me, and Bedope often provided me
with a good laugh. So
I've decided to convert Slashdot to a pure humor site in
their abscense.
This is firstly because so many readers wrote in to flame me
about the lack of integrity in several of the stories
we've posted today. But mostly its just because Segfault
always stunk. Wesley Crusher. Bah. Rest in Peace.
Please have a sense of humor people. I can't
believe I'm actually getting flame over April Fools Day!
Some people just have no sense of humor.
We would all be better off if our citizenry were equipped with functioning bullshit detectors. Celebrating AFD is a great way to install them. :-)
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Holy hijinks people! Lighten up, get into the spirit of things and start the annual flogging of the slashdot/segfault/uf/bedope teams!
Naa, but really. This ties in with ESR's recent writing "Understand-my-job-please". We need to find a organised and calm way to discuss matters rather than "HOLY SH|T F#@&* MICROSOFT and INTEL IS TAKING DOWN MY HAPPY WEB SITES." Ok? Lighten up. Go pull a prank somewhere. Dont break the law. Lets all just get along.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
I hope all this UF stuff isn't a coordinated joke - it's kind of the equivalent of someone telling you they're dying from cancer for a few days, fishing for sympathy, and then telling you they were just kidding. If this is a joke, UF has exhausted a good part of their support from its fans. If this were a joke, it would abuse all UFies' trust and concern.
-lx
Nifty prank, Rob, but we can all tell it's you because things are misspelled. :)
Just like the Katz column posted earlier on the "demise" of slashdot's probably neither his nor yours: There are no spelling problems.
Mr. Bill, you suggest that many of us may be mad about the UF April Fool's Day prank because we couldn't see through it. I didn't see through it until today, because until today all the data suggested that we were looking at a genuine Legal Problem.
:)
:)
Microsoft taking legal action against UF, while braindead and destined to backfire, is not inconceivable. The joke took so long to play out that I'm afraid I can't find much humor in it now that I know it for what it is. All I feel is a profound sense of relief that we aren't going to have to beat down Microsoft after all to get our cartoons back.
Sorry to rain on anyone's parade. For the most part I've enjoyed the 1Apr posts--the Katz parody had me rolling. I have no problem with news sites playing along with April Fools'--my only caveat is that it should be clear to anyone reading with half an eye open that they're being had.
Is a practical joke a tearse gag? Is it a lame cut-down or silly "Funniest Video's" kick in the crotch? Or is it something that is so terrifyingly real you're glad it's over?
;- ). So I thought, "hey wait a minute" checked the properties and found out that the author was my friend and the title was "April FOOL".
;->.
Practical jokes (no really they are "practical" aren't they?) have to be believable don't they? What is more real than getting your pants sued off for trademark infingement? (or whatever else this cockamame society has cooked up and called a crime)
Sometimes the funniest jokes are those that hurt like hell, but then in retrospect make you chuckle allong even if you are the victim!
Case in point, this morning I recieved from a friend an e-mail message "here's the document you asked for... don't show it to anyone" sent to myself and 49 others. I instantly freaked and replied to all warning about the "melissa virus" (this was on my work machine, which runs winblows
I chuckled allong and explained to him the available resources for smurfing someone's computer off the net (including his IP ripped from the header), just to give him something to chuckle about
Needless to say I got over it... and well that's the point of April Fools Day: some harmless practical joke, that you should be expecting anyways!
And I'll be bemoaning the fact that the efforts I was making to safeguard free speech, back in the 20th century, came to naught.
For all I know, you may be doing the same, so this is not aimed at you personally. But while planning what you'll do when civil liberties fall has its constructive uses, it's no substitute for actively working to prevent that fall from ever occurring. I hope everyone here who's commented that "free speech is not a laughing matter" is doing things to defend it. Even just sending some money to the ACLU or your equivalent organization in your country of residence is a great start.
Personally, I'm a card-carrying member of the ACLU (and proudly broadcasting that fact is another thing I do -- raising respect for the ACLU and its mission is something I think this country really needs, especially after Dukakis' sellout in the 1988 election!). I think freedom of speech is crucially important.
But I also think that when we designate something as "too important to joke about", that's also going too far. While it chilled me to the bone, this prank also made me chuckle, and it made me impressed with the amount of planning and coordination that had gone into it.
Kai MacTane: Web developer for hire in San Francisco
I'll admit, I was taken in as well. When I realized this morning that is was a hoax, I was relieved. But I had a smile on my face.
:)
The whole point of April fools is to 'fool' someone into believing something is real. When you find out that you were had, and look back, you realize that all the evidence was there in front of your face all the time. That is when you have to laugh at yourself for not reading between the lines.
Here are some of the things that I remember reading in the last while that should have told me (and anyone else) that this was a hoax:
- Why won't they tell us who it is
- These sort of things are public information, so the documents should be on record
- Parody is not illegal
- The negative publicity from this would be hell on MS or whoever else may have been behind it.
- UF is in Canada and Segfault is in UK (I think?)
- the fact that these sites deal with HUMOUR
There were probably many other tidbits of info that would have pointed to this being a hoax.
Anyway, I don't believe that Iliad or Rob (and everyone else involved) intended any malice in this prank. It's just that you have to be very devious to 'fool' a bunch of intelligent geeks that question everything they read (not that I consider myself an intelligent geek.) This is the only prank that had me fooled. The other ones that appeared on SlashDot were obvious (yet still funny) pranks.
I saw the reference to UF being shutdown on
Either way, it didn't occur to me that it was a joke given the kind of thing that's been happening to Dave's Classics and others lately.
The fact that I did not immediately dismiss this story as a hoax because of it obviously being totally against the laws and traditions in this country only demonstrated to me how jaded I've become to the erosion of those rights. I didn't think, "Holy Cow! That could never happen, we have free speech in the U.S", but rather "Yet another example of speech not really being free, especially when expensive lawyers or bureaucrats are around."
Far from being a silly and pointless prank, I saw the UF shutdown hoax as a grim reminder of how out of control some things are in this country.
On the other hand, the cold fusion story was hilarious.
Rick
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Oh foo! Go to CNN if you can't take one day of senseless siliness! Then come back tomorrow, for crying out loud. I fully expected not to read anything credible today on anything but CNN or Reuters.
All you who are crying foul at a pile of steaming AFD stories are too thin-skinned, or you take things too-seriously (which is rather the whole point, eh?)
So go get a coke, read the paper or get back to work. Maybe ponder a little why a few prank stories upset you so much. Gaze at your navel for a while and maybe you will finally get this whole thing.
Or don't - see if I care. Rob, don't change a thing, its great!
Those who haven't done it yet, please take a look at the slashdot entries in your cookies file.
:)
I don't think news sites should celebrate April fools day, because it makes even real news suspect for a day. Though I've really gotten a kick out of some of today's articles, I'm seriously concerned about User Friendly (who was (supposedly?) experiencing the leading edge of legal troubles before today happened to hit, and now this). I hope the UF stuff is just an incredibly well perpetrated coordinated joke, but there's really been no indication to me that it is. I hope you guys enjoy your AFD stunts, because those of us who are legitimately interested in unbruised information are certainly already displeased with how this news site is handling the holiday. Think about what would happen if CNN suddenly announced that they had a source that reported that we had started dropping nuclear missiles on Serbia in response to the three missing Americans.
Lest you all think I'm just a spoil sport, be assured that I'm celebrating AFD like crazy, but not with respect to news. There's a difference between practical jokes, and practicing improper journalism.
If all these site "shutdowns" are an April Fool's Day joke, it's in poor taste. I've got as much of a sense of humor as the next guy, but, come on! Some people don't take matters like freedom of speech as a joking matter. I'm all for freedom of speech on the internet as well as our day-to-day lives. But this kind of thing is _almost_ like the radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds." I nearly freaked when I hit my Daily Static bookmark, and there was nothing there but a legal statement. I was angry as hell. A good practical joke does not make people angry or scared about their own freedom! Granted, free speech allows really bad practical jokes, but if this is what Illiad and the other webmasters find funny.... Well, I'd be very disappointed. And /. is now a portal/news/communtiy/HUMOR site? heheh Methinks not. Rob's idea of funny is "Duckpins."
--- --- --- Don't just do something! Sit there!
Come on people, I can't believe there are this many tight-asses around... There were enough hints today (and in the last week) that this UF thing was a hoax. A joke is a joke, and this was a rather well-organized one. I think you guys are just mad because you couldn't see though this one.
And comparing a silly little cartoon disappearing with dropping nuclear bombs on a country is a little harsh don't you think. UF disappearing wouldn't be the end of the world you know (pun intended)
And anyway, it is up to Rob (and the other 'post'ers) to decide what appears on SlashDot. If I get sufficiently annoyed with what I see here, I will probably start up my own site (and anyone else here can do the same thing)
...is that it allows us to calibrate our bogometers.
A well-calibrated bogometer helps us get through life. People throw bogons at you day-in and day-out, and you have to separate the wheat from the chaff. Can you trust the news today? Can you even take Slashdot for gospel? IMHO, anyone who takes an uncorroborated report from a hacker bboard gets exactly what they deserve.
Then, one day a year, many of us take an opportunity to crank up their own personal bogosity, all for the sake of fun. Some think it's fun, others don't.
But we all come out of it wiser.
If you don't like AFD as a big set of jokes, think of it as a one-day challenge to your ability to separate fact from fiction. It'll help you out when the talking head on the 6:00 News is jawing off about our latest military endeavour or somesuch...
--The basis of all love is respect
Gang,
/. is even nice enough to let you filter out the topics you don't like. Web sites are like the people behind them, and you choose who (or where) you hang out with (at). Personally, I think it's one of the best info sites on the web.
Any source of information is filtered by the people that run it. CNN doesn't care about InstallFests, and CmdrTaco doesn't care about how much money went into 401(k)s nationwide last month. You, the reader, get to pick which sources you like, or make up your own if you wish. If you don't like how someone does their thing, don't read it. And
-- Spring: Forces, coiled again!