Just a week ago, two regional news stations serving the Northwest aired segments where they talked about how wonderful Pokemon is for their children. They claimed it was a wonderful, non-violent way for their children to gain social skills. These were parents and teachers making these statements.
Trading cards are hardly devices for gambling. No more so than collecting comic-books, action-figures, or porcelain dolls. And even if they were gambling devices, I see an addictive vice such as gambling much more understandable than the lack of ethics and personal responsibility that is displayed by those who bring blatantly ludicrous and frivolous lawsuits to court.
Besides, what irresponsible parent is out there letting Nintendo raise their children in the first place? These are the same idiots who gladly have their children fingerprinted, bar-coded and processed. --- icq:2057699 seumas.com
This morning, I noticed a post of mine that was moderated up to a +5 and then ticked down to a +4.
When it was at +5, I had 18 karma points. After it was ticked down to +4, I had +19.
I suppose it is always possible that someone came along, dropped it to +4, then another came along and dropped it to +3 and then yet another came along and boosted it to a +4 again (thus the increase to +19), but it could also be that decreasing a number which is already a 1 or greater still gives the poster positive increases in karma.
One thing I am curious about is whether being ticked down from a positive number to another positive number effects your karma negatively? In other words, do you lose a karma point for going from +2 to +1? My personal opinion is that you should only lose a karma point of you are reduced from any positive number to a 0 or less. --- icq:2057699 seumas.com
I thought of skipping this article all together and not posting to it. Sometimes one more opinion is one opinion too many. But I love Slashdot. It's my morning coffee. It's something I look forward to throughout the work day and it is a wonderful source of current events and professional insight. Even at its worst, it deserves more respect than 95% of your typical media-slop and geek-pages.
Unfortunately, Slashdot regresses at times. It grows a square jaw and furry, burrowed eye-sockets. It loses stature and walks in a hunched over lurch. In these times, it can not articulate its thoughts and resorts to grunting and pointing. And each time, even though it manages to return to its typically evolved state, a lot of us worry just a little that it may get stuck in that regressed period one of these days.
Many of us saw Slashdot regressing again this weekend. The entire Stevens article was appalling. What should have been a brief chance for people to thank the man and talk about his achievements and contributions became a free-for-all where civility evaporated from most of the posting souls and floated into the ether.
I would never have imagined that the people who frequent Slashdot would ever have conducted themselves so astonishingly and with such a lapse of sympathy. I thought that most of us were professionals. Professionals would not walk into the office and, upon the news of a co-worker's death, start bad-mouthing them and standing on their operating system / programming language / philosophical soap-box.
That article seemed to be the Columbine of Slashdot. The call to action, if you will. Now everyone at Slashdot seems to be frantically looking for a solution to allow us to moderate ourselves when we can't conduct ourselves in a tolerable manner on an individual basis. (I can only imagine what the people at Andover.net must have been thinking of this whole drama.)
But moderation alone is not the answer. We're familiar with the cliché that "absolute power corrupts, absolutely", but whatever degree of power is given to a person can be equally corrupted to that same degree. There are always going to be people who will use their small chance to have power to get a laugh or wreak a little havoc. Even something as simple as ticking the score of a post up and down on Slashdot can't be trusted to some people.
After reading the Moderator FAQ the last time I wielded moderator privileges, I was of the understanding that the pool of posters was plucked from the group of Slashdoters who were in the median range. That is, they made the average number of posts, visited Slashdot the average number of times and did not have a history of heavily negatively-moderated posts of their own.
Which means that the people who abused that chance were the same people who had been treated fairly in the past by having their posts moderated appropriately.
So the answer Rob has devised is to moderate the moderators. This strikes me as a parallel to fixing a government problem with another government program (making government larger).
I actually agree with this idea, though. The average Slashdot reader is probably a rather agreeable sort who isn't going to misuse his or her points. So when the occasional misuse occurs, the chances that one of the other moderators will correct the misuse is pretty high.
A typical scenario that I've seen is the following, which occurred to me (I'm using myself as an example, but I have seen others have the same experience):
Out of four or five posts I made in the last 24 hours, two of them were marked as flamebait -- without cause, I feel. Yet, two of the other posts were moderated to a +2 and a +3. None of the posts were written with the intent to disrupt, inflame, anger, disturb, insult or offend anyone. All were intended to share one person's view-point and eventually, disappear into the Chasm of Old Slashdot Posts.
One of my posts seemed to be moderated strictly out of bias or maliciousness. While the post had been ticked to flamebait, it simultaneously drew a half-dozen emails from fellow Slashdotter's who agreed with what I said and thanked me for voicing it. A couple even went so far as to say that they intended to make a donation to W. Stevens' favorite charity (which was discussed in an earlier post) after reading my comments.
My comments were not particularly insightful. In fact, most of my comments are not particularly insightful or funny, even when moderated with such notation. But being moderated down as a result of a moderator's misuse of the system is aggravating and frustrating. Especially when it reduces a post that, at least, had some heart and thought put into it to the same section of Slashdot as the "I'm jizzing in my pants" and "first post" comments.
I hope that when people receive their moderator-moderating points, they do not just skip them to move on to moderating un-moderated articles, but take the time to browse the previously moderated ones, too.
I also hope that there is a way to allot karma to moderators. Those who use their moderation points wisely could, perhaps, get an extra point or two. Those who squander them and are constantly over-moderated by other moderators who come along and clean their mess should lose a couple karma points (in the very obvious and malicious instances).
Moderation seems to be a very fickle thing around here. Sometimes it lifts a hum-drum comment far above the level most would agree it belongs at and other times it kicks a well-deserving comment under the rug to be ignored.
Nobody knows the absolute and correct answer to the whole problem, but unless moderation is done wisely, fairly and reliably, a lot of people are going to be discouraged from participating. --- icq:2057699 seumas.com
Teki wrote: "The system is made to filter out nearly all of the laws proposed, and if something like that is passes, it's because people apparently want it (who doesn't want their kid safe, eh?"
It doesn't filter out nearly enough, though.
I see the problem, as many do, in the thoughtless way people allow themselves to be manipulated into things for the sake of the children. While parents are worried their children are being brain-washed by Mortal-Kombat, the Internet and homosexual teachers, they're letting themselves be brain-washed by politicians and advocacy groups.
We have advocacy groups lobbying for legislation to renovate the construction of plastic five-gallon buckets so that children won't drown in them. Do we really need legislation? Anything used the wrong way could lead to a death or injury (drink all the ink out of a box of Bic's and see how you feel). Now, if the advocacy group wants to lead a campaign to inform parents that if they leave big buckets of water around, their small children could fall in and die, fine. But don't force a change in the bucket design because a few parents can't excersize the handful of neurons that their parents (who's maiden-names are usually the same!) bread into them.
And for christ's sake, if we are going to legislate stupidity, than can't we at least punish it, too?
No, instead, we'll just propose a law to prevent people from doing dumb things. To get the law passed, we'll tell everyone it's for the sake of the children.
Please, do away with campaign contributions! -- It's for the children!.
There are many families where offing dear old mom and dad would be the best thing for the children, but when was the last time Gloria Steiner or Tipper Gore jumped on the bandwagon to for that? Never. Those are sure votes when it comes time to pump campaign money into flashy commercials.
I'm not at all for anarchy, but I am for a simplistic government. I don't need two-hundred laws regarding the construction of the card-board roll that my toilet-paper is wound around -- just make sure that I can wipe my bum without being gashed by shards of glass.
Since when are we moderating based on degree of agreement? If the parent of this post is flamebait, I'm a Snork.
Maybe this is an unusual example of the pitfalls of online-voting?
Sorry to make this second post, but I put a good deal of time into backing up my statements, providing links to my sources and illustrating my points in that post and to have it ticked-down to 'flamebait' is insulting.
I'm no Jon Katz, Alan Cox, or Rob Malda, but I have a damned good record of comments being marked-up since moderation began and if I have to worry that some trigger-happy-kid with five moderation points to squander is going to paint my post with white-out without cause, then I may think two or three times before bothering to participate in discussions here.
Save your moderation points for me too, first post and what does this have to do with Unix posts and real flamebait/trolls. --- icq:2057699 seumas.com
Government solves our problems by educating our children however they see fit, enforcing savings plans (Social Security), deliver our mail, buy our medications -- they even help us pay for therapy from the trauma of being told "Hey, nice ass" at work!
The problem is that people would rather have government do for them poorly than do for themselves.
Some of us wake up in the morning (or stay up all night) and thing "I can make it big. I have big fucking ideas and I'm going to do something about them!" -- other people wake up in the morning and think "How can I get more? Who is going to help me today? Who is going to tell me what to do and how to think? Who's going to feed me and take care of my self-image?"
Our government, on paper, is pretty damned cool, but is interpreted and carried out ineffectively. Everyone wants to make a law now. If your child rides his bike into the middle of the highway, his mother starts a national campaign and lobbies legislation to make highways safer for stupid kids riding their HotWheels bike into them.
Stupid is a state of mind, and we're brought up to live in that state from the day we're born and lead to believe it's a masked nirvana. --- icq:2057699 seumas.com
The argument against Internet voting is often that it is unreliable and can be fudged.
My arguement against voting, period, is that it can be unreliable and fudged.
For example, there was recently a big problem when thousands of voter ballots were found thrown out behind some building and after investigating, they apparently found that they were never even counted! On the Internet, if I vote -- some spooge can't just throw my ballot in the garbage and some geezer with four-inch-thick glasses can't lose count as she's thumbing threw the stacks.
In the three years I've been able to vote, I've not done so, unless the issue was directly regarding First, Second or Fourth Amendments. Partially because of inconvenience as I do not drive and spending and hour or two on a bus just to spend an hour or two in a voting-line is rediculous after a hard day's work.
The other reason, aside from the fact that I'm skeptical of all politicians and have never known someone I wanted to vote for, is that I'm not going out of my way to vote on some obscure measure that I've never heard of and have little knowledge of.
If one could just log-in to some government site and register their votes, a larger number of people would vote on a larger number of issues -- and probably be better educated on them, too.
Every year, voter turn-out is lower and lower in this state. If going on-line can encourage more people to participate, then by god why aren't we doing it? This seems the best example of what the Internet is supposed to offer in the first place!
Overall, this state actually has more active voters than the National average, which shows that in 1996, only 49% of all Americans over the age of 18 bothered to vote (compare this to the 73 percent in 1960!). That means that 51% of the country's adults did not give a damn. Less than 96-million voters out of a country that has some 300-million residents.
I suppose you can't blame people and where they've gone in the last three decades, though. When the leading candidate has $40-million in campaign contributions a year and a half before the election even begins and you know that your vote is as influential as pissing into a lake considering the whole "Electoral College", it's easy for someone who really wants their vote to matter to be overwhelmed by.
Of course, that's why we have MTV and the combined intellect of Hollywood stars to tell us how to align ourselves, politically.
In the 18 months that I've read Slashdot, I have never seen such disheartening cruelty and heartlessness as displayed in the article about Richard Stevens' death. Pompous zealots lacking complete humanity oozed into every thread, including one as simple as my post suggesting that anyone who has ever read, barrowed, purchased or dog-eared any of his work donate a few bucks in his name to Habitat to Humanity.
What was the response by one such person hiding behind an AC shield? "Don't send flowers or donate to a charity in the bigot's name. If you want to help humanity -- code a GTK IRC client".
I'm astonished that the same community that so fiercely argues for freedom and fairness also witnessed a strong chorus of "But what has he done for [insert your favorite cause] lately?"
I'm as jaded, disenchanted and cynical as the next person. Probably more. But the death of a good man who is remembered fondly by his colleagues and readers is a time to keep your mouth shut about some gripe you have with his philosophy. Each of us feel pain and fear death. Underneath our beliefs, causes and actions, we all share those two primal aspects of life. If we can not sympathize and feel compassion for someone who is suffering great pain or has died, then we can never feel compassion. Compassion isn't an honorable thing. It is a basic trait of mankind that separates us from gorillas and slugs.
I'd like to think that the shallow comments made in Slashdot were by those of us who have spent our entire lives in front of our monitors and in our bedrooms or dens hidden away from society, because anyone who has a healthy composition of civility, humanity, and sociable skills could not possibly be so thoughtless. There is a time for personal opinion and debate and a time to practice the art of knowing when to shut up and be a graceful man.
Real men fight on level playing fields -- they don't kick someone while they're down.
Thankfully, the same person who tought me Perl and has his own chunk of shelf-space next to my desk also gave some depth to the man so many articles of harpooned. I encourage everyone who displayed their ignorance and carelessness to re-read Tom's post and then visit Richard's website.
Yesterday it was Postel. Today it was Stevens. Tomorrow, it could be your favorite geek. --- icq:2057699 seumas.com
And no right to life, free-speech or work for anti-anti-perl-bigot-bigots either, while we're at it?
There's a reason you're hiding being an Anonymous Coward shield.
Being an elitist zealot may impress your mad-hacker-script-kiddie friends on IRC, but a point comes at which you have to realize a person for their humanity and not their superfluous opinions on technology.
The guy wasn't fond of Perl -- it wasn't like he was encouraging slave-labor in Indonesia or funding slave-trading and supplying nuclear arms to third-world nations.
The open-source movement, if nothing else, is an effort to recognize the value of differing opinions, needs, thoughts, and the strength of humanity -- so show some. --- icq:2057699 seumas.com
If we GPL him, we can continue to build a sleeker and better Linus and he can live on into many derivative versions well past the sunset of his years.
Or perhaps, if Bill Gates finds success with his bio-engineering investments, Linus will finally indeed be assimilated by the Borg of Redmond. --- icq:2057699 seumas.com
As per his obituary, I think a very fitting farewell would be if everyone who read, bought, barrowed or dog-eared his books (or even if you haven't) made a small donation (a buck or five) to his requested charity.
Habitat for Humanity, 2950 E. 22nd Street, Tucson, AZ 85713
You have to love this comment, "Please wear colorful clothing to the service; Richard loved colors." --- icq:2057699 seumas.com
"While we're at it, we would also like you to sign this affidavite swearing that you will not drive over the speed limit, drive while drunk, or kill anyone. It would also be really keen if you don't think mean or hateful thoughts or swear. Thank you Citizen 1138."
Having the government censoring what you read, see and say is bad enough. Making you censor yourself according to their ideals is simply rubbing your nose in the stinky pile after you've done your business.
Next session of congress, I assure you that we'll see a host of idiots citing Australia as a role-model for net-censorship the way they idolized the Canadian health-care system a few years ago.
As soon as they start requiring us to fill out a diary and turn it into our assigned personal-government-counselors, these laws will be passe. You can just tell them when you've done something bad, read a dirty word, seen a naked woman, or gone down on your boyfriend in the back of your car and await 'personality alteration'. Orwell and his crystal ball . .. --- icq:2057699 seumas.com
I can't recall where I heard that figure used, but you can bet your sweet ass it wasn't the USPS!
Actually, it was several years ago that I heard it stated in a documentary segment by 60 Minutes or 20/20 regarding the USPS. According the them, some 20% of all mail never reaches it's intended destination.
I doubt they pulled that number out of a hat. And from my personal experience over the last year, it seems more and more legitimate. --- seumas.com
So if it's time-critical, you can use FedEX. If it's not time-critical but it is critical that it eventually arrive and not fall into the back of some mail carriers truck or in some stranger's mailbox, then you're out of luck? --- seumas.com
There are no guarantees with the USPS. In my experience, they are the most unreliable, unfriendly, understaffed, expensive communications service in existance. I can't begin to count the number of times my mail has been stolen, delivered to the wrong address, never delivered, damaged, or opened while in their care.
I'd rather hand a letter to a stranger on the street and ask them to deliver it for me. It's just as likely to get there as with the USPS.
On another note, isn't the USPS actually a company? It's just like Amtrak, from what I understand. They are a business, but have the backing of the government to remain a monopoly on standard mail deliver. As such, how can the government back a business in levying a tax to support said monopolistic business for a service not even provided by them? --- seumas.com
What in the hell is the government thinking? What do they have to do with my email and my methods of communication? What if I write a message on a piece of paper and put it on my co-workers desk? Will they decide to tax *that* because I'm now taking away their tax-revenue from email?
There are so many points you could argue on this one, but they're all moot unless someone can explain what authority the government has to try to do this. This is like Microsoft coming into Real Networks and saying "Hey, we aren't making enough money for ourselves so we're going to start charging you everytime someone plays one of your media files with your Real Player."
Seriously, I can't even begin to understand how they can just move in on something and say "Oh, hey -- let's tax this". What's next, taxing me evertime I read a book? Even though they didn't publish it, shelve it, write it, read it, sell it, or anything else?
What if I use a SMTP server that is located outside of the country? What if I send an 'email' as a file via ICQ instead? How about Usenet? How about charging me evertime I download a post from there? How about charging me everytime I make my own post? Maybe even charging me for every data-packet transmitted while playing Quake or KingPin?
How about students? What if you send a personal email from work? How are they going to charge you? What if you don't have a credit card or checking account to pay from? How am I going to contact administrators regarding spammers who are hitting my accounts? What if you don't use an actual SMTP server directly and you use Hotmail or some other form of web-based email?
I send approximately 20 emails per day. That's 600 per month. The average message is around 3k. So I'm transfering less than 1.5MB's per month in email. If they charge me a penny per messag, I'm paying 6 bucks to send 1.5MB's of data?
What's next -- do they want to take over all of the email servers and have one central post-office run by the USPS? (The same people who fail to deliver some 20% of all letters!)
What about FEDEX? Do they want to start taxing me for using that service? Sure FEDEX is more reliable, friendlier, and professional, but it takes away from Uncle Sam's almighty dollar (seeing how Uncle Sam is becoming one big fat corporation). --- seumas.com
I think the exhibition of live penguins was an appealing and novel idea that was not thought through very well.
There are bigger problems to worry about than whether a penguin was nervous in front of a crowd or carried in a small cage. Christ, I work in a small cage. We call them cubes . . . Maybe you're heard of them? Where are the People for the Ethical Treatment of Tech's (PETT)?
Besides, there's nothing like starting the morning with a nice can of Mountain Dew and a plate of batter-dipped fried penguin! --- seumas.com
Does this count for DARE, too?
on
New Cyberlaws
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· Score: 1
I'm not sure how you could possibly pass a law saying information is illegal. Sure, it's been done before in special circumstances -- but nothing like this.
What I find insulting is that it will be illegal for me to link to a drug-related site (apparently, even if the site isn't located in the US), yet it's acceptable for a police officer to come into my sixth-grade class and tell us that drugs are bad, but then proceed to tell us how to do them safely. And on top of that show us what a crack-pipe and bong look like, not to mention photos of tar-heroine, marijuana, etc.
Finally, how can they make linking to information (or providing that information directly) illegal when I can go downtown to two of the most popular music stores in Portland and see them selling pipes, lighters, paper-rolls, etc -- right from the display cases next to the tee-shirts and collars?
What's next? Criminalizing talking about it? Or even criminalizing talking about criminalizing it?
[paranoia] One sure thing is that the best way to prevent change is by preventing discussion. Just imagine what it will be like when they silence discussing politics and sharing political information? [/paranoia] --- seumas.com
Cat's are actually starting to show some hope for usefulness.
What I would like to see is an alteration of the eye-replacement which would allow a cat to have not only perfect nigh-vision, but have some type of tracking device. I'd also like to see better leg enhancments to increase the animal's speed and power, as well as stealth. (we're talking real pussy power, here).
I'd like to see a feline with a mini-rack so that I could run Linux from it and play MP3's from my kitty. (Nothing like a fast, night-vision-enabled cat with built-in targetting playing Cannible Corpse while closing in on a rat . . . or the neighbor's dog).
On a serious note, I wonder how they plan to build the arachnid cat. They have an example of a robotic carrier with many legs and a cat's head attached. How does the cat stay alive? Would it's skin and tissue not die? We can hardly transplant animal heads, let alone keep them alive indeffinately, totally detached from the body! --- seumas.com
If the government is going to monitor everything like the Russian STASI's during the Cold-War (see earlier article regarding FIDNET), then why do they care to censor the material we read and see? They'll know who, when, where and what horrible free-thinking we've been exercising.
If we're going to censor everything to fix the world, then why do we also need to monitor everything with something like FIDNET?
What it really comes down to is that it does not matter. Uncle Sam and his inbred minions will simply subvert any legal opposition to these infringements by doing it underground. The Russian's had nearly every citizen spying on every other citizen at one time and they were about as free as a chained mutt. Does anyone really think they need our permission or public 'okay' to proceed with these things?
I hate thinking this way, but it seems like a lost cause. All of this 'Constitution' stuff is useless. It's time to stick those tracking chips in us, give us those Smart-Cards, harvest our DNA, urine, finger-prints, and walk right into THX-1138, Fahrenheit 451 or 1984 and stop all this fucking individualist stuff. It's obvious that we can't handle freedom and it is best portioned out when, how, and to whom the fat career politicians and goodie-two-shoe religious types see fit.
C'mon... You know you're tired of all this working and thinking and self-expression. Wouldn't your life be much simpler if Mother [insert country here] took care of all your needs and addressed all your ills? --- seumas.com
Steve Jobs was on MSNBC within the last couple hours, talking about this very thing. After praising it's 'innovative nature', he basically spent the last four or five minutes of the interview repeating the Apple-Mantra of "We only want to make the best computers in the world and the best software for our customers. We don't think about the money". --- seumas.com
Slashdot Mirror
Trading cards are hardly devices for gambling. No more so than collecting comic-books, action-figures, or porcelain dolls. And even if they were gambling devices, I see an addictive vice such as gambling much more understandable than the lack of ethics and personal responsibility that is displayed by those who bring blatantly ludicrous and frivolous lawsuits to court.
Besides, what irresponsible parent is out there letting Nintendo raise their children in the first place? These are the same idiots who gladly have their children fingerprinted, bar-coded and processed.
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icq:2057699
seumas.com
When it was at +5, I had 18 karma points. After it was ticked down to +4, I had +19.
I suppose it is always possible that someone came along, dropped it to +4, then another came along and dropped it to +3 and then yet another came along and boosted it to a +4 again (thus the increase to +19), but it could also be that decreasing a number which is already a 1 or greater still gives the poster positive increases in karma.
One thing I am curious about is whether being ticked down from a positive number to another positive number effects your karma negatively? In other words, do you lose a karma point for going from +2 to +1? My personal opinion is that you should only lose a karma point of you are reduced from any positive number to a 0 or less.
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icq:2057699
seumas.com
Unfortunately, Slashdot regresses at times. It grows a square jaw and furry, burrowed eye-sockets. It loses stature and walks in a hunched over lurch. In these times, it can not articulate its thoughts and resorts to grunting and pointing. And each time, even though it manages to return to its typically evolved state, a lot of us worry just a little that it may get stuck in that regressed period one of these days.
Many of us saw Slashdot regressing again this weekend. The entire Stevens article was appalling. What should have been a brief chance for people to thank the man and talk about his achievements and contributions became a free-for-all where civility evaporated from most of the posting souls and floated into the ether.
I would never have imagined that the people who frequent Slashdot would ever have conducted themselves so astonishingly and with such a lapse of sympathy. I thought that most of us were professionals. Professionals would not walk into the office and, upon the news of a co-worker's death, start bad-mouthing them and standing on their operating system / programming language / philosophical soap-box.
That article seemed to be the Columbine of Slashdot. The call to action, if you will. Now everyone at Slashdot seems to be frantically looking for a solution to allow us to moderate ourselves when we can't conduct ourselves in a tolerable manner on an individual basis. (I can only imagine what the people at Andover.net must have been thinking of this whole drama.)
But moderation alone is not the answer. We're familiar with the cliché that "absolute power corrupts, absolutely", but whatever degree of power is given to a person can be equally corrupted to that same degree. There are always going to be people who will use their small chance to have power to get a laugh or wreak a little havoc. Even something as simple as ticking the score of a post up and down on Slashdot can't be trusted to some people.
After reading the Moderator FAQ the last time I wielded moderator privileges, I was of the understanding that the pool of posters was plucked from the group of Slashdoters who were in the median range. That is, they made the average number of posts, visited Slashdot the average number of times and did not have a history of heavily negatively-moderated posts of their own.
Which means that the people who abused that chance were the same people who had been treated fairly in the past by having their posts moderated appropriately.
So the answer Rob has devised is to moderate the moderators. This strikes me as a parallel to fixing a government problem with another government program (making government larger).
I actually agree with this idea, though. The average Slashdot reader is probably a rather agreeable sort who isn't going to misuse his or her points. So when the occasional misuse occurs, the chances that one of the other moderators will correct the misuse is pretty high.
A typical scenario that I've seen is the following, which occurred to me (I'm using myself as an example, but I have seen others have the same experience):
Out of four or five posts I made in the last 24 hours, two of them were marked as flamebait -- without cause, I feel. Yet, two of the other posts were moderated to a +2 and a +3. None of the posts were written with the intent to disrupt, inflame, anger, disturb, insult or offend anyone. All were intended to share one person's view-point and eventually, disappear into the Chasm of Old Slashdot Posts.
One of my posts seemed to be moderated strictly out of bias or maliciousness. While the post had been ticked to flamebait, it simultaneously drew a half-dozen emails from fellow Slashdotter's who agreed with what I said and thanked me for voicing it. A couple even went so far as to say that they intended to make a donation to W. Stevens' favorite charity (which was discussed in an earlier post) after reading my comments.
My comments were not particularly insightful. In fact, most of my comments are not particularly insightful or funny, even when moderated with such notation. But being moderated down as a result of a moderator's misuse of the system is aggravating and frustrating. Especially when it reduces a post that, at least, had some heart and thought put into it to the same section of Slashdot as the "I'm jizzing in my pants" and "first post" comments.
I hope that when people receive their moderator-moderating points, they do not just skip them to move on to moderating un-moderated articles, but take the time to browse the previously moderated ones, too.
I also hope that there is a way to allot karma to moderators. Those who use their moderation points wisely could, perhaps, get an extra point or two. Those who squander them and are constantly over-moderated by other moderators who come along and clean their mess should lose a couple karma points (in the very obvious and malicious instances).
Moderation seems to be a very fickle thing around here. Sometimes it lifts a hum-drum comment far above the level most would agree it belongs at and other times it kicks a well-deserving comment under the rug to be ignored.
Nobody knows the absolute and correct answer to the whole problem, but unless moderation is done wisely, fairly and reliably, a lot of people are going to be discouraged from participating.
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icq:2057699
seumas.com
It doesn't filter out nearly enough, though.
I see the problem, as many do, in the thoughtless way people allow themselves to be manipulated into things for the sake of the children. While parents are worried their children are being brain-washed by Mortal-Kombat, the Internet and homosexual teachers, they're letting themselves be brain-washed by politicians and advocacy groups.
We have advocacy groups lobbying for legislation to renovate the construction of plastic five-gallon buckets so that children won't drown in them. Do we really need legislation? Anything used the wrong way could lead to a death or injury (drink all the ink out of a box of Bic's and see how you feel). Now, if the advocacy group wants to lead a campaign to inform parents that if they leave big buckets of water around, their small children could fall in and die, fine. But don't force a change in the bucket design because a few parents can't excersize the handful of neurons that their parents (who's maiden-names are usually the same!) bread into them.
And for christ's sake, if we are going to legislate stupidity, than can't we at least punish it, too?
No, instead, we'll just propose a law to prevent people from doing dumb things. To get the law passed, we'll tell everyone it's for the sake of the children.
Please, do away with campaign contributions! -- It's for the children!.
There are many families where offing dear old mom and dad would be the best thing for the children, but when was the last time Gloria Steiner or Tipper Gore jumped on the bandwagon to for that? Never. Those are sure votes when it comes time to pump campaign money into flashy commercials.
I'm not at all for anarchy, but I am for a simplistic government. I don't need two-hundred laws regarding the construction of the card-board roll that my toilet-paper is wound around -- just make sure that I can wipe my bum without being gashed by shards of glass.
Resources:
Consumer Product Safety Comission's RFC For Safer Buckets
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icq:2057699
seumas.com
Maybe this is an unusual example of the pitfalls of online-voting?
Sorry to make this second post, but I put a good deal of time into backing up my statements, providing links to my sources and illustrating my points in that post and to have it ticked-down to 'flamebait' is insulting.
I'm no Jon Katz, Alan Cox, or Rob Malda, but I have a damned good record of comments being marked-up since moderation began and if I have to worry that some trigger-happy-kid with five moderation points to squander is going to paint my post with white-out without cause, then I may think two or three times before bothering to participate in discussions here.
Save your moderation points for me too, first post and what does this have to do with Unix posts and real flamebait/trolls.
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icq:2057699
seumas.com
Government solves our problems by educating our children however they see fit, enforcing savings plans (Social Security), deliver our mail, buy our medications -- they even help us pay for therapy from the trauma of being told "Hey, nice ass" at work!
The problem is that people would rather have government do for them poorly than do for themselves.
Some of us wake up in the morning (or stay up all night) and thing "I can make it big. I have big fucking ideas and I'm going to do something about them!" -- other people wake up in the morning and think "How can I get more? Who is going to help me today? Who is going to tell me what to do and how to think? Who's going to feed me and take care of my self-image?"
Our government, on paper, is pretty damned cool, but is interpreted and carried out ineffectively. Everyone wants to make a law now. If your child rides his bike into the middle of the highway, his mother starts a national campaign and lobbies legislation to make highways safer for stupid kids riding their HotWheels bike into them.
Stupid is a state of mind, and we're brought up to live in that state from the day we're born and lead to believe it's a masked nirvana.
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icq:2057699
seumas.com
My arguement against voting, period, is that it can be unreliable and fudged.
For example, there was recently a big problem when thousands of voter ballots were found thrown out behind some building and after investigating, they apparently found that they were never even counted! On the Internet, if I vote -- some spooge can't just throw my ballot in the garbage and some geezer with four-inch-thick glasses can't lose count as she's thumbing threw the stacks.
In the three years I've been able to vote, I've not done so, unless the issue was directly regarding First, Second or Fourth Amendments. Partially because of inconvenience as I do not drive and spending and hour or two on a bus just to spend an hour or two in a voting-line is rediculous after a hard day's work.
The other reason, aside from the fact that I'm skeptical of all politicians and have never known someone I wanted to vote for, is that I'm not going out of my way to vote on some obscure measure that I've never heard of and have little knowledge of.
If one could just log-in to some government site and register their votes, a larger number of people would vote on a larger number of issues -- and probably be better educated on them, too.
Every year, voter turn-out is lower and lower in this state. If going on-line can encourage more people to participate, then by god why aren't we doing it? This seems the best example of what the Internet is supposed to offer in the first place!
Overall, this state actually has more active voters than the National average, which shows that in 1996, only 49% of all Americans over the age of 18 bothered to vote (compare this to the 73 percent in 1960!). That means that 51% of the country's adults did not give a damn. Less than 96-million voters out of a country that has some 300-million residents.
I suppose you can't blame people and where they've gone in the last three decades, though. When the leading candidate has $40-million in campaign contributions a year and a half before the election even begins and you know that your vote is as influential as pissing into a lake considering the whole "Electoral College", it's easy for someone who really wants their vote to matter to be overwhelmed by.
Of course, that's why we have MTV and the combined intellect of Hollywood stars to tell us how to align ourselves, politically.
Resources:
Voter Registration and Turnout - 1996
International Voter Participation Figures
2000 Elections Candidate Financial Reports
Electoral vs. Popular Voting History
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icq:2057699
seumas.com
What was the response by one such person hiding behind an AC shield? "Don't send flowers or donate to a charity in the bigot's name. If you want to help humanity -- code a GTK IRC client".
I'm astonished that the same community that so fiercely argues for freedom and fairness also witnessed a strong chorus of "But what has he done for [insert your favorite cause] lately?"
I'm as jaded, disenchanted and cynical as the next person. Probably more. But the death of a good man who is remembered fondly by his colleagues and readers is a time to keep your mouth shut about some gripe you have with his philosophy. Each of us feel pain and fear death. Underneath our beliefs, causes and actions, we all share those two primal aspects of life. If we can not sympathize and feel compassion for someone who is suffering great pain or has died, then we can never feel compassion. Compassion isn't an honorable thing. It is a basic trait of mankind that separates us from gorillas and slugs.
I'd like to think that the shallow comments made in Slashdot were by those of us who have spent our entire lives in front of our monitors and in our bedrooms or dens hidden away from society, because anyone who has a healthy composition of civility, humanity, and sociable skills could not possibly be so thoughtless. There is a time for personal opinion and debate and a time to practice the art of knowing when to shut up and be a graceful man.
Real men fight on level playing fields -- they don't kick someone while they're down.
Thankfully, the same person who tought me Perl and has his own chunk of shelf-space next to my desk also gave some depth to the man so many articles of harpooned. I encourage everyone who displayed their ignorance and carelessness to re-read Tom's post and then visit Richard's website.
Yesterday it was Postel. Today it was Stevens. Tomorrow, it could be your favorite geek.
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icq:2057699
seumas.com
There's a reason you're hiding being an Anonymous Coward shield.
Being an elitist zealot may impress your mad-hacker-script-kiddie friends on IRC, but a point comes at which you have to realize a person for their humanity and not their superfluous opinions on technology.
The guy wasn't fond of Perl -- it wasn't like he was encouraging slave-labor in Indonesia or funding slave-trading and supplying nuclear arms to third-world nations.
The open-source movement, if nothing else, is an effort to recognize the value of differing opinions, needs, thoughts, and the strength of humanity -- so show some.
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seumas.com
Or perhaps, if Bill Gates finds success with his bio-engineering investments, Linus will finally indeed be assimilated by the Borg of Redmond.
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seumas.com
Habitat for Humanity, 2950 E. 22nd Street, Tucson, AZ 85713
You have to love this comment, "Please wear colorful clothing to the service; Richard loved colors."
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icq:2057699
seumas.com
Having the government censoring what you read, see and say is bad enough. Making you censor yourself according to their ideals is simply rubbing your nose in the stinky pile after you've done your business.
Next session of congress, I assure you that we'll see a host of idiots citing Australia as a role-model for net-censorship the way they idolized the Canadian health-care system a few years ago.
As soon as they start requiring us to fill out a diary and turn it into our assigned personal-government-counselors, these laws will be passe. You can just tell them when you've done something bad, read a dirty word, seen a naked woman, or gone down on your boyfriend in the back of your car and await 'personality alteration'. Orwell and his crystal ball . . .
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icq:2057699
seumas.com
Actually, it was several years ago that I heard it stated in a documentary segment by 60 Minutes or 20/20 regarding the USPS. According the them, some 20% of all mail never reaches it's intended destination.
I doubt they pulled that number out of a hat. And from my personal experience over the last year, it seems more and more legitimate.
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seumas.com
So if it's time-critical, you can use FedEX. If it's not time-critical but it is critical that it eventually arrive and not fall into the back of some mail carriers truck or in some stranger's mailbox, then you're out of luck?
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seumas.com
I'd rather hand a letter to a stranger on the street and ask them to deliver it for me. It's just as likely to get there as with the USPS.
On another note, isn't the USPS actually a company? It's just like Amtrak, from what I understand. They are a business, but have the backing of the government to remain a monopoly on standard mail deliver. As such, how can the government back a business in levying a tax to support said monopolistic business for a service not even provided by them?
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seumas.com
There are so many points you could argue on this one, but they're all moot unless someone can explain what authority the government has to try to do this. This is like Microsoft coming into Real Networks and saying "Hey, we aren't making enough money for ourselves so we're going to start charging you everytime someone plays one of your media files with your Real Player."
Seriously, I can't even begin to understand how they can just move in on something and say "Oh, hey -- let's tax this". What's next, taxing me evertime I read a book? Even though they didn't publish it, shelve it, write it, read it, sell it, or anything else?
What if I use a SMTP server that is located outside of the country? What if I send an 'email' as a file via ICQ instead? How about Usenet? How about charging me evertime I download a post from there? How about charging me everytime I make my own post? Maybe even charging me for every data-packet transmitted while playing Quake or KingPin?
How about students? What if you send a personal email from work? How are they going to charge you? What if you don't have a credit card or checking account to pay from? How am I going to contact administrators regarding spammers who are hitting my accounts? What if you don't use an actual SMTP server directly and you use Hotmail or some other form of web-based email?
I send approximately 20 emails per day. That's 600 per month. The average message is around 3k. So I'm transfering less than 1.5MB's per month in email. If they charge me a penny per messag, I'm paying 6 bucks to send 1.5MB's of data?
What's next -- do they want to take over all of the email servers and have one central post-office run by the USPS? (The same people who fail to deliver some 20% of all letters!)
What about FEDEX? Do they want to start taxing me for using that service? Sure FEDEX is more reliable, friendlier, and professional, but it takes away from Uncle Sam's almighty dollar (seeing how Uncle Sam is becoming one big fat corporation).
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seumas.com
There are bigger problems to worry about than whether a penguin was nervous in front of a crowd or carried in a small cage. Christ, I work in a small cage. We call them cubes . . . Maybe you're heard of them? Where are the People for the Ethical Treatment of Tech's (PETT)?
Besides, there's nothing like starting the morning with a nice can of Mountain Dew and a plate of batter-dipped fried penguin!
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seumas.com
What I find insulting is that it will be illegal for me to link to a drug-related site (apparently, even if the site isn't located in the US), yet it's acceptable for a police officer to come into my sixth-grade class and tell us that drugs are bad, but then proceed to tell us how to do them safely. And on top of that show us what a crack-pipe and bong look like, not to mention photos of tar-heroine, marijuana, etc.
Finally, how can they make linking to information (or providing that information directly) illegal when I can go downtown to two of the most popular music stores in Portland and see them selling pipes, lighters, paper-rolls, etc -- right from the display cases next to the tee-shirts and collars?
What's next? Criminalizing talking about it? Or even criminalizing talking about criminalizing it?
[paranoia] One sure thing is that the best way to prevent change is by preventing discussion. Just imagine what it will be like when they silence discussing politics and sharing political information? [/paranoia]
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seumas.com
Oh, wait . . . Much like that robot when vaccumming, cat's also tend to entangle themselves in strings, thread, and power cords . . .
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seumas.com
What I would like to see is an alteration of the eye-replacement which would allow a cat to have not only perfect nigh-vision, but have some type of tracking device. I'd also like to see better leg enhancments to increase the animal's speed and power, as well as stealth. (we're talking real pussy power, here).
I'd like to see a feline with a mini-rack so that I could run Linux from it and play MP3's from my kitty. (Nothing like a fast, night-vision-enabled cat with built-in targetting playing Cannible Corpse while closing in on a rat . . . or the neighbor's dog).
On a serious note, I wonder how they plan to build the arachnid cat. They have an example of a robotic carrier with many legs and a cat's head attached. How does the cat stay alive? Would it's skin and tissue not die? We can hardly transplant animal heads, let alone keep them alive indeffinately, totally detached from the body!
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seumas.com
See what happens when you're only paying half-attention to the Discovery channel while you're online?
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seumas.com
But I could never work at a company that didn't allow me my hourly shot of Slashdot.
ass kiss, ass kiss, ass kiss, ass kiss, ass kiss, ass kiss
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seumas.com
If we're going to censor everything to fix the world, then why do we also need to monitor everything with something like FIDNET?
What it really comes down to is that it does not matter. Uncle Sam and his inbred minions will simply subvert any legal opposition to these infringements by doing it underground. The Russian's had nearly every citizen spying on every other citizen at one time and they were about as free as a chained mutt. Does anyone really think they need our permission or public 'okay' to proceed with these things?
I hate thinking this way, but it seems like a lost cause. All of this 'Constitution' stuff is useless. It's time to stick those tracking chips in us, give us those Smart-Cards, harvest our DNA, urine, finger-prints, and walk right into THX-1138, Fahrenheit 451 or 1984 and stop all this fucking individualist stuff. It's obvious that we can't handle freedom and it is best portioned out when, how, and to whom the fat career politicians and goodie-two-shoe religious types see fit.
C'mon... You know you're tired of all this working and thinking and self-expression. Wouldn't your life be much simpler if Mother [insert country here] took care of all your needs and addressed all your ills?
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seumas.com
Steve Jobs was on MSNBC within the last couple hours, talking about this very thing. After praising it's 'innovative nature', he basically spent the last four or five minutes of the interview repeating the Apple-Mantra of "We only want to make the best computers in the world and the best software for our customers. We don't think about the money".
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seumas.com
The fact that it's being used to crack RC5.
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seumas.com