Unfair moderation

Journal sm62704's Journal: Unfair moderation 9

Journal by sm62704 on Friday May 30, 2008 @10:19AM

In Inside the mind of a Slashdot Meta Moderator I exposed my metamoderation, but it wasn't a good example. I didn't run across any bad moderations.

Today's moderations I was asked to metamoderate did. So I guess you can consider thais part 2. As in the previous journal, the page was copied and pasted. Items in italics are my comments, and the moderation itself (fair/unfair) is bolded.

A couple of people may have gotten their asses handed to them. I say "may have" because when I hit the "metamoderate" button, the page that asks if I want to go home or to my user page timed out. I don't know if the data were sent to the slashdot server or not.

Slashdot got slashdotted again.

Meta Moderation
PLEASE READ THE DIRECTIONS CAREFULLY BEFORE EMAILING US!
What follows are random moderations performed on comments in the last few weeks on Slashdot. You are asked to honestly evaluate the actions of the moderator of each comment. Moderators who are ranked poorly will cease to be eligible for moderator access in the future.

If you are confused about the context of a particular comment, just link back to the comment page through the parent link, or the #XXX cid link.
If you are unsure, feel free to leave it unchanged.
Please read the Moderator Guidelines and try to be impartial and fair. You are not moderating to make your opinions heard, you are trying to help promote a rational discussion. Play fairly and help make Slashdot a little better for everyone.
Scores and information identifying the posters of these comments have been removed to help prevent bias in meta moderation. If you really need to know, you can click through and see the original message, but we encourage you not to do this unless you need more context to fairly meta moderate.

Today, you have 10 moderations to meta-moderate.
Re:This is just bad, Slashdot!
by - on Saturday January 12, @01:07PM (#22015562)
Nope, I don't think the story is wrong:

US Dept of State

He is a member of the Intel Corporation NGO Advisory Board and writes for several publications specializing on the role of technology in development.
Original Discussion: Intel Employee Caught Running OLPC News Site
Rating: Informative.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

That one speaks for itself, I think. Some mods can be judged fairly quickly.

Re:Raytracing scales up far better...
by - on Friday January 18, @01:55PM (#22096546)
Disclaimer: I work for NVIDIA. I speak not for them.

People keep saying this, that raytracing scales up better than rasterization. It's simply not true. Both of them have aspects that scale linearly and logarithmically. They do scale differently, but in a related sort of wy.

Raytracing is O(resolution), and O(ln(triangles)), assuming you already have your acceleration structures built. But guess what? It takes significant time to built your acceleration structures in the first place. And they change from frame to frame.

Rasterization is O(ln(resolution)), and O(triangles). Basically, in a rasterizer, we only draw places that we have triangles. Places that don't have triangles have no work done. But the thing is, we've highly pipelined our ability to handle triangles. When people talk about impacting the framerate, I want to be clear what we're talking about here: adding hundreds, thousands, or even a million triangles is not going to tank the processing power of a modern GPU. The 8800 Ultra can process in the neighborhood of 300M triangles per second. At 100 FPS, that'd be (not suprisingly) 3M triangles per frame.

Modern scenes typically run in the 100-500K triangles per frame, so we've still got some headroom in this regard.

Cheers.
--
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
Original Discussion: Ray Tracing for Gaming Explored
Rating: Insightful.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

I would have modded it "informative", but at slashdot there's little difference between "informative" and "Insightful". I'm not going to mod someone down over something picayune.

Probably off-topic but what the hell...
by - on Sunday March 09, @05:55AM (#22691504)
A friend of my father-in-law's owned for many years a hotel in France called 'Hotel d'Olympique'. He still owns the hotel but it is no longer called that as he was sent a 'cease and desist'-type letter by the IOC.

FWIW I am not interested in the Beijing Olympics. Any lingering interest in the event has been soured by the appalling way that Chinese citizens have been treated by their government and, by extension, the IOC. No sports event in the world is worth evicting, beating, imprisoning and killing your own citizens for.
Original Discussion: Olympic Web Site Features Pirated Content
Rating: Offtopic.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

Some mods give their moderations no thought whatever. I've noticed in my or others' comments, if a suggestion is made, the lazy moderator will mod it as such. Say "I found it interesting that..." and these dumb asshats will automatically moderate it "interesting" even though the comment not only doesn't add anything to the discussion, it mey even not be on topic.

In this case the topic was the Chinese Olympics. I have no idea why the commenter suggested it may be offtopic - perhaps he was using reverse psychology?

But at any rate, whoever modded that as "offtopic" doesn't have to worry about being burdened with mod points any more.

Re:Got a labor shortage?
by - on Monday March 10, @03:17PM (#22706078)
Your response bothers me. It's what happens when people put ideology ahead of common sense and facts.

Abusing foreign workers is the POINT of the whole thing. Those who are lucky enough to get an H1-B visa are then owned by their sponsor.

This is not a free market. If it were, we would just throw the doors open and invite any foreign IT worker to "come on down". We set up the rules so they have to have a sponsor or go home.

In general, they are paid less than a US Citizen - and there is not a lot of incentive to give them fair raises. They can't quit and look for a new job unless they can find a new sponsor.

This is a generality. Like most generalities it does not apply to every foreign worker. And it's part of a larger employment situation where IT workers in their twenties are preferred. If you do not yet have a life you don't mind 14 hour days.

And in the mean time, very few have noticed that one of Microsoft's published future plans is to dumb down IT to the point where any idiot can do it with the right software support. This may or may not be a major threat, but once they figure out how to build an operating system that actually works, you had better watch out.

When you are dancing with wolves, never limp
Original Discussion: IT Labor Shortage Is Just a Myth
Rating: Insightful.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

Not only insightful but interesting as well.

Re:Very cool!
by - on Friday March 28, @09:57PM (#22901788)
Heh I did it for a few months for a "respectable" company (Sears) selling extended warranties - sorry - "maintenance agreements". We could call Sears customers that were in the database and the computer spotted that their warranty on their fridge/lawnmower/whatever was about to expire. It wasn't as bad as cold calling since they WERE customers and we were told to initially inquire if they were happy with their product - but then when it came time to offer them the extended warranty (usually at around half the original purchase price) most people balked and some even became hostile.

Of course we were on minimum wage + commission based on closed sales, but it was NON-STOP work - every time you clicked off a call you immediately were put through to another customer - and often had to wait for the computer to look up the customer's information (Hello Mr.................. Jameson, I'm calling from Sears about your....). Of course I quit that job, especially after the manager thought it would be a great idea to keep calling people until 9pm.

Original Discussion: Geist Creates His Own Do-Not-Call List
Rating: Informative.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

And insightful as well.

Re:From the horse's mouth
by - on Thursday April 10, @06:16AM (#23022320)
What's with people like you who feel the need to deem everyone to be sheep or brainwashed if they're fine with something that you, for whatever reason, don't agree with? Is it self-esteem?
--
This 120 character limit on sigs doesn't affect me. No, seriously. It doesn't.
Original Discussion: eBay Australia Makes PayPal Mandatory
Rating: Troll.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

I almost modded this one "unfair", but looking at the parent comment it was very obvious that this guy's comment fit the wikipedia definition of troll to a T. The parent comment made no mantion of people being brainwashed sheep, and this comment was offtopic flamebait.

I didn't investigate far enough to see if anyone bit.

Re:Would you buy a Metallica online album...?
by - on Sunday April 27, @12:21PM (#23214736)

One is an artist, the other is a rock star.

I'll never understand these strange semantic games people like to play. The distinction is really a value judgement, and nothing else. If you want to care about that kind of thing, that's fine. The only thing I really care about is what each actually does, which is produce music.

Are you really trying to argue that Metallica is an "artist", and their former napster suing behavior is in violation of their "artist nature"? If that's your argument, I give up. We might as well be arguing whether chocolate ice cream is better, or strawberry.
--
Whenever I hear the word activist, I reach for my revolver.
Original Discussion: Metallica May Follow In Footsteps of Radiohead, NIN
Rating: Interesting.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

"I'll never understand these strange semantic games people like to play because the concept of humor is completely foreign to me."

Interesting, my ass. Pedantry is never interesting. Occasionally informative, but never interesting.

If you're correcting someones misuse of an apostrophe, link one of the "Bob" cartoons about apostrophes (I've seen two). Or say something hilarious; a mod of "funny" on your comment gains no karma, but loses none either.

department head?
by - on Wednesday April 30, @09:44AM (#23249940)
what is a "department head", exactly, in this context?

--
Why stick up for big business?
Original Discussion: Patent Appeals System Under Constitutional Attack
Rating: Redundant.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

The commenter simply asked that a term in the summary be clarified; the law says "heads of departments" in the summary. Clear to me but not the commenter. It should have been left unmoderated, or at the worst modded "overrated".

Had the comment been left alone it might have triggered someone working for government to post something interesting. But the moderator ruined the chance.

Yup...
by - on Wednesday May 07, @03:18PM (#23328218)
Data recovery has come a long way, keep this in mind when not using proper deletion techniques! Would have been nice to see a picture of the HDD though, to get a full understanding of the recovery.
Original Discussion: Data Recovered From Space Shuttle Columbia HDD
Rating: Insightful.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

To comment on the subject here rather than the moderation, if you have data on a floppy you need to be disappeared, take it our of its shell and burn it. If the data are on a hard drive, disassemble the drive and sand all the oxide off the platters.

If the incriminating data are on paper, be aware that a shredder won't do, as the late Ken Lay found our when the government unshredded the shredded documents. Burn them, then stir the ashes. The mix with more paper, dump gasoline and saltpeter on it, and burn it again.

But be aware that the procedure is dangerous. Saltpeter is an oxydant; sprinkle saltpeter on warm ioly rags and they will burst into flames. Mix it with sugar and it will melt concrete. I've never put it in gasoline but suspect that it would result in an explosion, with no spark necessary.

We were allowed to do LOTS of stuff when I was a kid that would result in today's kids being incarcerated!

Re:And people
by - on Wednesday May 28, @04:41AM (#23567887)
An example of the knowledge of the masses: When I commented to my mother that I spent the day watching flash cartoons, she thought I meant animated porn.
Original Discussion: Adobe Flash Zero-Day Attack Underway
Rating: Funny.
This comment is Unfunny Funny | See Context

Sorry dude, I didn't get it. Perhaps there is a cultural context from a different culture than mine, but even if "flash" means "naughty" to a Brit or an Aussie, the joke stull sucks.

And it's Friday, Monday's when I'm usually in a bad mood. Tough room.

Search Kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray.

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