They closed the comments or I would have left my favourite word for that particular piece of anatomy, so I thought I'd send an email instead. Sure, it's nothing on the scale of things, but it really exemplifies the decline of our society. Newspapers - once infulential, once worth reading - reduced to this 'social media' bullshit. And a guy involved in this worthless pursuit contributes just a bit more intolerance to a culture full of it. So depressing...

Anyway, here's the mail:

Hello,

I am from Perth, Australia, the other side of the world to you. I am just so disturbed by your actions in tracing some guy and calling his workplace just for using a word that offended you (I assume) that I had to write and tell you that I consider you much lower as a human being than that guy ever could be. In fact, his joke was slightly amusing. But you, with your intolerance of something so slightly off colour, are a real non-entity. It's people like you - not just you, but all of you in the millions - that are dragging down our liberal western societies. Small minded, mean spirited, and easily offended.

I may have wasted my time sending you this email, but it's less than the amount of time it would have taken you to take out your pathetic vengeance on that poster. Not to mention that you'll be wasting yet more time writing further moronic blog posts - after all it's your job! Actually think of the irony of a guy like you, who basically adds nothing to the world (I mean those ridiculous blogs are available at every newspaper's website in the world, same tired old topics recycled every day) getting a teacher fired. A teacher, someone who actually helps people, who contributes to society. I mean, you're not alone, the vast majority of us basically toil on nothings, it's just a shame that you took out one of the few who actually does do something. Over nothing.

Well, that's about it. Thanks for making me lose yet further faith in society...

Jacques.

p.s. if you want to call my workplace go ahead. I'll make your snooping a little easier: it's an IT consultancy in Australia. Now go!

Fuck, I was wondering where the equivocation would come from and there it is. After being *stunned* by the defense of Apple's crippling their software to damage Palm yesterday I knew it wouldn't take long. The Apple fanboys on Slashdot are so out of control that they can even control the discussion on issues that go to the heart of Slashdot's focus like this IP issue or the crippleware Apple is peddling to hurt their competition.

And for the apologists: I don't have any antipathy toward Apple (except for stunts like this) and recommend their laptops to many people. I also don't have any love for Palm (never even *used* their products). Actually I don't have an emotional connection with *any* company...they're companies...they manufacture products. That's it. Sometimes they do really well, and sometimes their IP or marketing or other departments do really terrible things that are unethical. It's pretty pathetic to actually fall for the marketing and think a company is part of you, I don't care how good the product is.

Actually of all news sites I find Slashdot loads the best. I'm using a Nokia with a fairly small screen, not an iPhone sized one, and it manages to get the column of stories the right width so I don't have to scroll around (well, other than down), and the same with comments. It could be a lot smaller bandwidth wise of course, and I'd love an m.slashdot.org. But compared to mainstream news sites it is magnificent.

And what the FUCK is with mainstream news sites' mobile version being so pathetic? m.theage.com.au is just about worthless - it shows about 6-10 stories in a few categories. Why not show the whole paper like the regular site? If I'm on a long train journey I get through the interesting stories (if any) in about 5 minutes...

My feelings pretty much exactly. Just add my being able to 'deal' with the last 6 months of pain from various breakages with 8.10 (which I was very excited to install.) I don't know what's going on over a Kubuntu, it's like they've lost the feel for what makes a release good to users, i.e. lack of insane bugs (as opposed to normal workaroundable bugs, which everything has.)

Actually this decision appears to disapprove of the phone book case (Desktop Marketing), though as they say IceTV didn't dispute the copyright of the TV schedule, they just disputed that they had infringed it, so the court didn't consider the question in depth here. But maybe it'll be overturned in the future.