Pirates are like ants pouring into the cracked seams of an edifice.
They are slowly chipping away at the value (not the utility, but the value) of MS products.
Once the products have no value, they won't be donated to charity by most people, because most people count on tax deductions when stuff's donated to charity.
Tax deductions are based on value, not utility.
This will hurt charities, who won't have the use of the software.
You can say that charities should use Linux, but it's rather elitist to force an overworked nonprofit staff to attempt the rathers steep learning curve of Linux in order to get their work done.
Now multiply this process by ten for computer related charities, which use donated computers to teach kids valuable skills.
You pirates can generally afford the new software, but you're hurting people who are really disadvantaged by the digital divide.
Your weblog is neither a celebrity weblog nor a purely geek weblog, but is rahter a postmodern meta-commentary on many phenomena, including celebrity and technology.
How has having this weblog changed 1) your daily life, 2) your views of technology, and 3) your views of celebrity?
Adequacy is a good thing. It's well-read, controversial, funny, and infuriating. I am glad people have strong opinions about it. I'm damn lucky to be working with a brilliant group of people who...
should finish
...create content that stands out from the thousands of other weblogs out there.
Thanks for the free publicity
on
Battle Over Blocks
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Every time one of you Geekizoid cunt rags flames adequacy.org, you give us free publicity.
Everybody keeps calling me anti-free-market because I'm a socialist, but you're the one wishing you could prevent me from offering a choice to people (the purpose of advertising).
I'm not spamming. I post here because it's fun! Like thousands of other slashdotters I put my site in my sig. I rarely link to the site in a post.
Adequacy is a good thing. It's well-read, controversial, funny, and infuriating. I am glad people have strong opinions about it. I'm damn lucky to be working with a brilliant group of people who
Re. using my talents for something else? I'm sending out 12-24 resumes a week. I'll let you know when I find something.
And, yes, go wank off to this post, you have trolled the troll. Because I will freely admit right now:
Legos, as they were originally designed, are obsolete.
Hence, the Lego company, attempting to make money, made the Lego platform into a complex robot related thing and Web phenomenon.
This got them money from rich geeks, but made the product even less pleasant and fun for average, non-technological kids.
Kids who want to build with blocks was the original Lego audience. Legos were blocks that wouldnt fall down at the slightest touch from one's sister or dog.
Now, they are a boutique item.
A similar thing happened with Etch a Sketch.
Most of the Lego kids grow up fragging on computers anyway, so it's not a big deal.
I am a socialist, and I love the Constitution and I despise everything about the Soviet Union.
I say what I think in every way I can. I don't break the law, but I'll be damned if anybody will call my speech a national security threat.
I will continue to speak, write, and peacefully march in the street when necessary. And if you, or your like, pull any quasi-legal crap on me, you'll hear about it on the Net, in the press, and in the courtroom.
McCarthy did some fucked-up stuff, besides going after those who could be connected with Communism in some way.
If you opposed some despotic statute which was designed to get the Communists, you were "soft on Communism."
Consider what would happen if a new, digitally savvy McCarthy used the fears of terrorism, which are amplified by our wartime action, to push through legislation such as SSSCA.
Any legislator who opposes such a figure could be labeled "soft on terrorism."
The law is swayed by politics, and war is a juggernaut in politics. Maintain your own security, privacy and anonymity, regardless of these laws; whether they are passed or not, there are always people waiting for the excuse to tighten surveillance.
Of course, protecting airports is only one aspect of homeland security: a terrorist could be lurking on any corner in America. In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, Howard Safir, the former New York police commissioner, recommended the installation of 100 biometric surveillance cameras in Times Square to scan the faces of pedestrians and compare them with a database of suspected terrorists. Atick told me that since the attacks he has been approached by local and federal authorities from across the country about the possibility of installing biometric surveillance cameras in stadiums and subway systems and near national monuments. ''The Office of Homeland Security might be the overall umbrella that will coordinate with local police forces'' to install cameras linked to a biometric network throughout American cities, Atick told me. ''How can we be alerted when someone is entering the subway? How can we be sure when someone is entering Madison Square Garden? How can we protect monuments? We need to create an invisible fence, an invisible shield.''
Most of the criminals are mostly low tech.
Even the terrorists were pretty low tech, with their box cutters and library Internet use.
If we want high tech criminals we should do something like this.
Then we will have an onslaught of mask wearing in public streets, and disguises will become common.
It will also become common not to trust your fellow man. The "lawful" person has many reasons to wish to hide from the eye of public surveillance.
We may not catch many terrorists, but we will catch petty criminals and philanderers (in some countries) using this technology.
It will "blow-back" us to Kingdom Come. Do we really want to walk around distrusting our fellow citizens, every second of the day?
I would applaud this but would only suggest that open source developers not gravitate too closely to the governments of the world for cues and support in development of new security software.
They will order code they can understand and code they can master, and will want multiple accesses to encryption (such as back-doors) that truly render it useless in an intelligence capacity.
Give the government strong crypto controled by a single trusted admin. Distributing information and accesses simply opens the door to moles. The US government has seen several, such as Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames.
If an agent is communicating with a handler far away via encrypted email, not even the handler's supervisors should be able to override the encryption. Especially them.
Is there any application for this kind of astronomy?
If I were a director of federal astronomy I would enthusiastically fund near-galactic research that searched for wormholes, civilizations, planets that could support life, etc -- any kind of knowledge we need for a feasible star economy.
Basic science is nice, but erstwhile star captains probably wouldn't find the universe's origins very relevant.
The government Agents in the first Matrix are opposed, at least nominally, to stopping the rebels from slamming a helicopter into a building.
I do not particularly like the idea of an aircraft as a metaphor for shattering a hostile reality anymore, since the people in the building turn out to be very real.
The fact that the infrastructure has gotten so big and so few of the truly UN-connected (i.e. non western countries, disadvantaged schools) have gotten connected in the meantime makes me relegate this infrastructure expansion to the trash bin with the dutch tulip craze.
An investment craze, a gold rush, call it whatever you want. What it means is that people have expanded infrastructure in a way that does not prove sustainable in the long run because it doesn't reach everybody.
Cars have penetrated nearly everywhere. Even cities whejre most people don't have cars gain benefits from cars and a car infrastructure. The same thing cannot be said for the Internet infrastructure.
Until the Bruce Sterling world exists and we have a self maintained system of multiple Nets and self-made, semi disposable computers for nearly everybody (including the poor and nomadic people in the world), then we won't have a useful Internet that will last beyond its gold rush period.
It has to become like the car. People said the car wouldn't penetrate certain levels of society either you know.
He can't understand how a name that he has used, has been identified with him, been exposed worldwide, how someone can come along and simply take that," he said. "We're wanting to preserve his right to use the name Yahoo."
Chrysiliou said his client, who changed his name by deed poll in 1980, was widely known and had been extensively publicised as Yahoo.
What this article isn't mentioning is that, now that Serious has gotten Yahoo! involved in litigation as a publicity stunt, he IS violating their copyright by using Yahoo!'s fame to get his own name in the newspaper.
I wouldn't be surprised if Yahoo! seized royalties from this guy's sales of previous and future work.
Consider the fact that most liberal arts grads have to get additional schooling in order to get a professional level job.
Everybody else in liberal arts is trying to pay off their hefty debt with shit jobs.
Liberal arts was designed for an independent thinker and learner; it was a training for a common culture, for a workplace where understanding the classics was important in order to gain entry into more rarefied levels of society.
Today, nobody would invest such a huge amount of money into literature or learning for its own sake. That's why liberal arts programs are suffering all over the country. It's not worth it!
College is a place where students learn to conform to the expectations of others and, most importantly, get saddled with debt.
Unattached young people are threatening to nearly every society. So, our society's solution is to force them to get college degrees in order to get a decent job, saddling them with debt to keep them engaged in the main stream of capitalist society.
The most dangerous students, the ones who went to school for learning instead of career training, tend to come out with a liberal arts degree. They are doubly crippled - they have the same debt every CS major leaves school with, but without the earning power.
This is fucked up. We need to pay for everyone's education like European countries do, in order to reclaim education's power.
PayPal provides services like a bank, and can operate offshore accounts and stuff (all you need is a credit card and a paypal account in Moscow or wherever you are) and should be regulated like a bank before it goes all IPOing on our ass.
Then there were pop up ads, pop-under ads, and ads that pop up when you close the browser.
Then new filters were devised for these as well.
Now we have jumpthrough ads.
What we have is a continuing battle, geek against geek, for control of the eyes of the content-hungry Netizen.
Of course, all arms races are a bad thing. Eventually, this one will lead to more and more intrusive advertising and more and more destructive anti-advertising.
The solution is to de-escalate the arms race.
How do you do that?
Well, stop filtering the ads. Read them and click the ones that you are interested in as compared to the other ads.
Even if you are not interested in any of them, click the least offensive.
This will, eventually, lower the overall offensiveness level of advertising while helping to provide ad revenue to some of your computer-industry brethren out there.
Remember, advertising is a legitimate industry. Let's minimize the amount of social control it has over our lives by treating it as such.
Well, I have said for a long time that the computer medium was just as "real" in a philosophical sense as any other territory. The people who wage battles on this territory need to decide why they use their skills to make political statements in "hacktivism."
Do they want to criticize the system which establishes the Internet on which they operate? To reform it?
Or do they want to transform it?
Hacktivism may involve what I call "Matrix" tactics soon - like the people in the Matrix, people who want freedom on the internet will have to evade universal identification and tracking systems that are put there by a central, all-encompassing authority in whose name the internet itself is maintained and operated.
That means, instead of throwing up a banner with some poorly written political prose, they will have to maintain entire alternate networks of communication to maintain their own freedom.
I fear that many people, seeing the true weaponry and force of the enforcement authorities arrayed against them (and ready to name them "terrorist") will drop into Uncle Sam's ranks.
I hope that more people will stick their foot in the door of technological freedom before it slams shut, and will keep it there for free communication.
The truth is, that even if we had known about the WTC attack we could not have prevented it without causing an economic loss of millions of dollars in the city of New York that our current hero-mayor -- Rudy Giuliani -- would have prevented, to the accolades of his fellow citizens if an attack had not come.
You have to do so much alteration to the medium which you are trying to keep free of bad stuff, be it Internet porn or our daily lives, that the medium itself is changed beyond recognition. It's not worth it.
Unlike a specific cryptographic algorithm, steganography is a group of methods that take advantage of the huge volume of information that passes over the internet.
Unless you want to dramatically slow down the transfer of all information, making sure the file looks the same at each gateway it passes through, there is very little you can do to catch people who disguise information in this way.
ObL is a modern terrorist, using modern methods to operate and communicate. He want us to be afraid of our own modern trappings and conveniences in our lives; if we try to make it impossible for him to communicate, we give up far too much ourselves.
We must allow full encryption freedom, full steganography freedom, and all otehr lifestyle freedoms in the US and around the world.
Traditional deterrence methods, such as massive military response, should be used to stop terrorists; we need to stop them after their attacks, and instill fear in others who would attack through a terrifying military response, unfortunately against the innocent as well as the guilty.
Important Stuff: (added to defeat lameness filter)
Please try to keep posts on topic.
Try to reply to other people comments instead of starting new threads.
Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.
Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)
This is an understandable response to the horror and its effect on slashdot. It is an attempt to create a common culture among geeks.
Well I think everyone should look at the debates on the Slashdot site about the WTC bombing, and look at all the different perspectives, and you will see that we all come from very differenet cultures and these cultures determine our views on important questions. We cannot really create a common culture with Nerf, Athlon, Linux, Monty Python, or Star Wars.
I think that the slashdot editors are posting stories like this in order to bring back together a community which could easily fracture over the WTC retaliation arguments and arguments about safety, liberty and security.
It is far more important to work through these arguments than to distract readers from them. This site has a constituency with the most chance of any to shed light on all perspectives of security and freedom questions, at least w/r/t technology.
Although slashdot editors might not like >1K comments in a story, those threads will be more useful, and the conclusions from them more lasting, if we post these stories instead of Monty Python crap. Let the front page have space for these debates, and sideline Monty and Legos into the humor section.
This will make virtual participative pornography worthwhile. The 2-d aspects of pornography limit its utility for people who want something more realistic.
Of course, this will also enable more accurate virtual depictions of terrains which are susceptible to terrorist attack, so perhaps the NSA should ban it or bug it?
Slashdot Mirror
Pirates are like ants pouring into the cracked seams of an edifice.
They are slowly chipping away at the value (not the utility, but the value) of MS products.
Once the products have no value, they won't be donated to charity by most people, because most people count on tax deductions when stuff's donated to charity.
Tax deductions are based on value, not utility.
This will hurt charities, who won't have the use of the software.
You can say that charities should use Linux, but it's rather elitist to force an overworked nonprofit staff to attempt the rathers steep learning curve of Linux in order to get their work done.
Now multiply this process by ten for computer related charities, which use donated computers to teach kids valuable skills.
You pirates can generally afford the new software, but you're hurting people who are really disadvantaged by the digital divide.
Your weblog is neither a celebrity weblog nor a purely geek weblog, but is rahter a postmodern meta-commentary on many phenomena, including celebrity and technology.
How has having this weblog changed 1) your daily life, 2) your views of technology, and 3) your views of celebrity?
Adequacy is a good thing. It's well-read, controversial, funny, and infuriating. I am glad people have strong opinions about it. I'm damn lucky to be working with a brilliant group of people who...
...create content that stands out from the thousands of other weblogs out there.
should finish
Every time one of you Geekizoid cunt rags flames adequacy.org, you give us free publicity.
Everybody keeps calling me anti-free-market because I'm a socialist, but you're the one wishing you could prevent me from offering a choice to people (the purpose of advertising).
I'm not spamming. I post here because it's fun! Like thousands of other slashdotters I put my site in my sig. I rarely link to the site in a post.
Adequacy is a good thing. It's well-read, controversial, funny, and infuriating. I am glad people have strong opinions about it. I'm damn lucky to be working with a brilliant group of people who
Re. using my talents for something else? I'm sending out 12-24 resumes a week. I'll let you know when I find something.
And, yes, go wank off to this post, you have trolled the troll. Because I will freely admit right now:
IHBT.
Legos, as they were originally designed, are obsolete.
Hence, the Lego company, attempting to make money, made the Lego platform into a complex robot related thing and Web phenomenon.
This got them money from rich geeks, but made the product even less pleasant and fun for average, non-technological kids.
Kids who want to build with blocks was the original Lego audience. Legos were blocks that wouldnt fall down at the slightest touch from one's sister or dog.
Now, they are a boutique item.
A similar thing happened with Etch a Sketch.
Most of the Lego kids grow up fragging on computers anyway, so it's not a big deal.
I am a socialist, and I love the Constitution and I despise everything about the Soviet Union.
I say what I think in every way I can. I don't break the law, but I'll be damned if anybody will call my speech a national security threat.
I will continue to speak, write, and peacefully march in the street when necessary. And if you, or your like, pull any quasi-legal crap on me, you'll hear about it on the Net, in the press, and in the courtroom.
McCarthy did some fucked-up stuff, besides going after those who could be connected with Communism in some way.
If you opposed some despotic statute which was designed to get the Communists, you were "soft on Communism."
Consider what would happen if a new, digitally savvy McCarthy used the fears of terrorism, which are amplified by our wartime action, to push through legislation such as SSSCA.
Any legislator who opposes such a figure could be labeled "soft on terrorism."
The law is swayed by politics, and war is a juggernaut in politics. Maintain your own security, privacy and anonymity, regardless of these laws; whether they are passed or not, there are always people waiting for the excuse to tighten surveillance.
Of course, protecting airports is only one aspect of homeland security: a terrorist could be lurking on any corner in America. In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, Howard Safir, the former New York police commissioner, recommended the installation of 100 biometric surveillance cameras in Times Square to scan the faces of pedestrians and compare them with a database of suspected terrorists. Atick told me that since the attacks he has been approached by local and federal authorities from across the country about the possibility of installing biometric surveillance cameras in stadiums and subway systems and near national monuments. ''The Office of Homeland Security might be the overall umbrella that will coordinate with local police forces'' to install cameras linked to a biometric network throughout American cities, Atick told me. ''How can we be alerted when someone is entering the subway? How can we be sure when someone is entering Madison Square Garden? How can we protect monuments? We need to create an invisible fence, an invisible shield.''
Most of the criminals are mostly low tech.
Even the terrorists were pretty low tech, with their box cutters and library Internet use.
If we want high tech criminals we should do something like this.
Then we will have an onslaught of mask wearing in public streets, and disguises will become common.
It will also become common not to trust your fellow man. The "lawful" person has many reasons to wish to hide from the eye of public surveillance.
We may not catch many terrorists, but we will catch petty criminals and philanderers (in some countries) using this technology.
It will "blow-back" us to Kingdom Come. Do we really want to walk around distrusting our fellow citizens, every second of the day?
Oh, wait.. we already do.
This story is a bit unclear.. please don't just post user menus as exposition, thanks.
I would applaud this but would only suggest that open source developers not gravitate too closely to the governments of the world for cues and support in development of new security software.
They will order code they can understand and code they can master, and will want multiple accesses to encryption (such as back-doors) that truly render it useless in an intelligence capacity.
Give the government strong crypto controled by a single trusted admin. Distributing information and accesses simply opens the door to moles. The US government has seen several, such as Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames.
If an agent is communicating with a handler far away via encrypted email, not even the handler's supervisors should be able to override the encryption. Especially them.
Is there any application for this kind of astronomy?
If I were a director of federal astronomy I would enthusiastically fund near-galactic research that searched for wormholes, civilizations, planets that could support life, etc -- any kind of knowledge we need for a feasible star economy.
Basic science is nice, but erstwhile star captains probably wouldn't find the universe's origins very relevant.
The government Agents in the first Matrix are opposed, at least nominally, to stopping the rebels from slamming a helicopter into a building.
I do not particularly like the idea of an aircraft as a metaphor for shattering a hostile reality anymore, since the people in the building turn out to be very real.
The fact that the infrastructure has gotten so big and so few of the truly UN-connected (i.e. non western countries, disadvantaged schools) have gotten connected in the meantime makes me relegate this infrastructure expansion to the trash bin with the dutch tulip craze.
An investment craze, a gold rush, call it whatever you want. What it means is that people have expanded infrastructure in a way that does not prove sustainable in the long run because it doesn't reach everybody.
Cars have penetrated nearly everywhere. Even cities whejre most people don't have cars gain benefits from cars and a car infrastructure. The same thing cannot be said for the Internet infrastructure.
Until the Bruce Sterling world exists and we have a self maintained system of multiple Nets and self-made, semi disposable computers for nearly everybody (including the poor and nomadic people in the world), then we won't have a useful Internet that will last beyond its gold rush period.
It has to become like the car. People said the car wouldn't penetrate certain levels of society either you know.
He can't understand how a name that he has used, has been identified with him, been exposed worldwide, how someone can come along and simply take that," he said. "We're wanting to preserve his right to use the name Yahoo."
Chrysiliou said his client, who changed his name by deed poll in 1980, was widely known and had been extensively publicised as Yahoo.
What this article isn't mentioning is that, now that Serious has gotten Yahoo! involved in litigation as a publicity stunt, he IS violating their copyright by using Yahoo!'s fame to get his own name in the newspaper.
I wouldn't be surprised if Yahoo! seized royalties from this guy's sales of previous and future work.
Don't poke the lion, boy.
Slashdot prefers not to cover uncomfortable topics close to home.
It is run by snotty nerds just like us, who have no journalistic training what soever.
This is not to say that "journalists" won't do the same thing.
Are you still doing the Naked Nerd Girl by the way?
for our culture.
Consider the fact that most liberal arts grads have to get additional schooling in order to get a professional level job.
Everybody else in liberal arts is trying to pay off their hefty debt with shit jobs.
Liberal arts was designed for an independent thinker and learner; it was a training for a common culture, for a workplace where understanding the classics was important in order to gain entry into more rarefied levels of society.
Today, nobody would invest such a huge amount of money into literature or learning for its own sake. That's why liberal arts programs are suffering all over the country. It's not worth it!
College is a place where students learn to conform to the expectations of others and, most importantly, get saddled with debt.
Unattached young people are threatening to nearly every society. So, our society's solution is to force them to get college degrees in order to get a decent job, saddling them with debt to keep them engaged in the main stream of capitalist society.
The most dangerous students, the ones who went to school for learning instead of career training, tend to come out with a liberal arts degree. They are doubly crippled - they have the same debt every CS major leaves school with, but without the earning power.
This is fucked up. We need to pay for everyone's education like European countries do, in order to reclaim education's power.
Insert conspiracy theories here.
PayPal provides services like a bank, and can operate offshore accounts and stuff (all you need is a credit card and a paypal account in Moscow or wherever you are) and should be regulated like a bank before it goes all IPOing on our ass.
see here.
we need to figure out what kind of business it is before we buy shares of it.
There were ads.
Then there were filters.
Then there were pop up ads, pop-under ads, and ads that pop up when you close the browser.
Then new filters were devised for these as well.
Now we have jumpthrough ads.
What we have is a continuing battle, geek against geek, for control of the eyes of the content-hungry Netizen.
Of course, all arms races are a bad thing. Eventually, this one will lead to more and more intrusive advertising and more and more destructive anti-advertising.
The solution is to de-escalate the arms race.
How do you do that?
Well, stop filtering the ads. Read them and click the ones that you are interested in as compared to the other ads.
Even if you are not interested in any of them, click the least offensive.
This will, eventually, lower the overall offensiveness level of advertising while helping to provide ad revenue to some of your computer-industry brethren out there.
Remember, advertising is a legitimate industry. Let's minimize the amount of social control it has over our lives by treating it as such.
Well, I have said for a long time that the computer medium was just as "real" in a philosophical sense as any other territory. The people who wage battles on this territory need to decide why they use their skills to make political statements in "hacktivism."
Do they want to criticize the system which establishes the Internet on which they operate? To reform it?
Or do they want to transform it?
Hacktivism may involve what I call "Matrix" tactics soon - like the people in the Matrix, people who want freedom on the internet will have to evade universal identification and tracking systems that are put there by a central, all-encompassing authority in whose name the internet itself is maintained and operated.
That means, instead of throwing up a banner with some poorly written political prose, they will have to maintain entire alternate networks of communication to maintain their own freedom.
I fear that many people, seeing the true weaponry and force of the enforcement authorities arrayed against them (and ready to name them "terrorist") will drop into Uncle Sam's ranks.
I hope that more people will stick their foot in the door of technological freedom before it slams shut, and will keep it there for free communication.
is like trying to prevent a germ warfare attack.
The truth is, that even if we had known about the WTC attack we could not have prevented it without causing an economic loss of millions of dollars in the city of New York that our current hero-mayor -- Rudy Giuliani -- would have prevented, to the accolades of his fellow citizens if an attack had not come.
You have to do so much alteration to the medium which you are trying to keep free of bad stuff, be it Internet porn or our daily lives, that the medium itself is changed beyond recognition. It's not worth it.
Unlike a specific cryptographic algorithm, steganography is a group of methods that take advantage of the huge volume of information that passes over the internet.
Unless you want to dramatically slow down the transfer of all information, making sure the file looks the same at each gateway it passes through, there is very little you can do to catch people who disguise information in this way.
ObL is a modern terrorist, using modern methods to operate and communicate. He want us to be afraid of our own modern trappings and conveniences in our lives; if we try to make it impossible for him to communicate, we give up far too much ourselves.
We must allow full encryption freedom, full steganography freedom, and all otehr lifestyle freedoms in the US and around the world.
Traditional deterrence methods, such as massive military response, should be used to stop terrorists; we need to stop them after their attacks, and instill fear in others who would attack through a terrifying military response, unfortunately against the innocent as well as the guilty.
I don't see how we would define anime for such a channel.. japanese origins only? What makes anime anime?
I would want a toonami with Aeon Flux and without any $MON {Poke, Digi, etc} shit on it for instance.
Anime is a cultural distinction within animation, sort of like the one drawn between cinema and movies.
Like the latter distinction, "anime" is purely subjective.
(nt)
Important Stuff: (added to defeat lameness filter)
Please try to keep posts on topic.
Try to reply to other people comments instead of starting new threads.
Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.
Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)
Anybody else sick of Lego and Python?
This is an understandable response to the horror and its effect on slashdot. It is an attempt to create a common culture among geeks.
Well I think everyone should look at the debates on the Slashdot site about the WTC bombing, and look at all the different perspectives, and you will see that we all come from very differenet cultures and these cultures determine our views on important questions. We cannot really create a common culture with Nerf, Athlon, Linux, Monty Python, or Star Wars.
I think that the slashdot editors are posting stories like this in order to bring back together a community which could easily fracture over the WTC retaliation arguments and arguments about safety, liberty and security.
It is far more important to work through these arguments than to distract readers from them. This site has a constituency with the most chance of any to shed light on all perspectives of security and freedom questions, at least w/r/t technology.
Although slashdot editors might not like >1K comments in a story, those threads will be more useful, and the conclusions from them more lasting, if we post these stories instead of Monty Python crap. Let the front page have space for these debates, and sideline Monty and Legos into the humor section.
This will make virtual participative pornography worthwhile. The 2-d aspects of pornography limit its utility for people who want something more realistic.
Of course, this will also enable more accurate virtual depictions of terrains which are susceptible to terrorist attack, so perhaps the NSA should ban it or bug it?