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22% Voted 'Is Sometimes Useful' for 'Firefox's Awesome Bar...'
Slashdot's Disagree MailComments:489
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thu Aug 14, 2008 03:11 PM
from the read-what-we-read dept.
from the read-what-we-read dept.
I am responsible for reading most of the help requests sent to Slashdot.
Most of the mail I get in a day is what you would expect, comments and concerns about postings, user accounts and Slashdot itself. There are a very special group however that get passed around the office due to the inordinate level of anger, lack of understanding and just plain weirdness they possess. Through the years I've collected many and still get such gems on a regular basis. We thought it would be fun to share some of our favorite rants, ramblings and ruminations with the rest of you. I give to you the first of many installments of Slashdot's disagree mail. The names have been changed to protect the idiot — hit the link below to drink it in.
Our first entry starts off by explaining:
"Every time I try to login it tells me that my password is bad! I know I'm using the right password why won't you let me in? My account is *******"
I'm sorry but I don't see an account with the name *******. I also don't find an account with the email address you're using associated with it. Do you happen to know what your uid is?
"Try lookin harder cause I was using AOL a few days ago just fine but now I can't! I'm mailing you from the library right now cause you won't let me on the internet!"
AOL? Can you not log into Slashdot or is the problem that you can't get online at home?
"Whats Slashdot why am I given you guys money for internet if I cant use it?!"
Slashdot is the website you are writing to. If you were banned here for some reason I might be able to help you but I'm not in charge of the whole internet, at least not yet. It sounds like you need to get a hold of AOL tech support and hopefully they can solve your problem.
"If you can't help me why are you on google when I type in help with the internet? If you don't want to help people when they need it maybe you shouldn't be on google!"
Our last email this week demonstrates something, but I'm not exactly sure what it is:
from ***************
to banned@slashdot.org
date Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 6:46 PM
subject stop sending me mail
"If your so fucking smart that you created the great and awesome slashdot why can't you figure out that I don't want your stupid bulshit mail! Everyone here acts like they are so much smarter than everyone else and that a teenager can't know what is right because he isn't fat enough from sitting around eating twinkys and playing games on the computer. You never even had a girlfriend I bet because you're to busy being smarter than everyone else. Fuck you stop sending mail just because you can't handle me!
P.S. Sorry I didn't write that my little brother did but I really don't want to get mail from you anymore can you help me please?"
Comments
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It is most munificent of you, (Score:5, Insightful)
... good sir, to expend your precious electro-bits so as to share those TWO WHOLE EMAILS with your loyal readers. I look forward to future installments of these tomes.
Now, wtf do you expect us to discuss?
Re:It is most munificent of you, (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe we can discuss how obnoxious the white-on-green text is? Please?
Re:It is most munificent of you, (Score:5, Funny)
Send complaint to: banned@slashdot.org
Re:It is most munificent of you, (Score:5, Funny)
Make sure it is a good rant.
By the way, thanks for making the comment box about 2 inches by 2 inches large. I guess it is a form of text compression.
Re:It is most munificent of you, (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, if you are using an iphone, 2 inches by 2 inches is like almost all of the screen estate ... so, why are you complaining ? ;)
True or not, one of my favorites... (Score:5, Funny)
The story behind the letter below is that there is this nutball in
Newport, RI, named Scott Williams who digs things out of his backyard
and sends the stuff he finds to the Smithsonian Institute, labeling
them with scientific names, insisting that they are actual archaeological finds.
This guy really exists and does this in his spare time!
Here's the actual response from the Smithsonian Institute. Bear this
in mind next time you think you are challenged in your duty to respond
to a difficult situation in writing.
Smithsonian Institution
207 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20078
Dear Mr. Williams: .Hominid
Thank you for your latest submission to the Institute, labeled
"93211-D, layer seven, next to the clothesline post . .
skull". We have given this specimen a careful and detailed
examination, and regret to inform you that we disagree with your theory that it represents
conclusive proof of the presence of Early Man in Charleston County two
million years ago.
Rather, it appears that what you have found is the head of a Barbie
Doll, of the variety that one of our staff, who has small children,
believes to be "Malibu Barbie". It is evident that you have given a
great deal of thought to the analysis of this specimen, and you may be quite certain
that those of us who are familiar with your prior work in the field
were loathe to come to contradiction with your findings. However, we
do feel there are a number of physical attributes of the specimen
which might have tipped you off to its modern origin:
1. The material is molded plastic. Ancient hominid remains are
typically fossilized bone.
2. The cranial capacity of the specimen is approximately 9 cubic
centimeters, well below the threshold of even the earliest identified
proto-homonids.
3. The dentition pattern evident on the skull is more consistent
with the common domesticated dog than it is with the ravenous
man-eating Pliocene clams you speculate roamed the wetlands during that time.
This latter finding is certainly one of the most intriguing hypotheses
you have submitted in your history with this institution, but the
evidence seems to weigh rather heavily against it. Without going into too much
detail, let us say that:
A. The specimen looks like the head of a Barbie doll that a dog
has chewed on.
B. Clams don't have teeth.
It is with feelings tinged with melancholy that we must deny your
request to have the specimen carbon-dated. This is partially due to
the heavy load our lab must bear in its normal operation, and partly
due to carbon-dating's notorious inaccuracy in fossils of recent geologic
record.
To the best of our knowledge, no Barbie dolls were produced prior to
1956 AD, and carbon-dating is likely to produce wildly inaccurate
results.
Sadly, we must also deny your request that we approach the National
Science Foundation Phylogeny Department with the concept of assigning
your specimen the scientific name Australopithecus spiff-arino. Speaking
personally, I, for one, fought tenaciously for the acceptance of your
proposed taxonomy, but was ultimately voted down because the species
name you selected
Re:It is most munificent of you, (Score:5, Informative)
javascript:for(var a=document.getElementsByTagName("textarea"),i=0;i<a.length;i++){a[i].style.width="100%";a[i].style.height="300px";}void(0);
There ya go.
Re:It is most munificent of you, (Score:5, Informative)
Or just use Safari and resize on the fly :p
(I hate Safari but had to throw it out there)
Re:It is most munificent of you, (Score:5, Funny)
I pasted this into my address bar, thinking "why the hell not"
The fact that it actually worked is just plain scary...
What's next? Address bar pong?
Re:It is most munificent of you, (Score:5, Informative)
*cough* @namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain(slashdot.org) {
.inline_comment .generalbody {
.inline_comment .generalbody textarea {
padding-right: 30px !important;
}
width: 100% !important;
}
} *cough*
Whew, gotta do something about that cough. You know it's getting bad when you cough up Stylish sheets.
I should probably write another one to fix the lack of proper line spacing in the preview when using <p>s...
Re:It is most munificent of you, (Score:5, Funny)
I am going to have to agree with you. Really bad web design etiquette if you ask me. I mean I have always loved slashdot because they do a great job having a really clean website.
Re:It is most munificent of you, (Score:5, Funny)
Back in my day, we had green-on-black text. If you were really lucky, you had AMBER on black. Now, those were the days.
Now where were we? Oh yeah--the important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.
Re:It is most munificent of you, (Score:5, Funny)
When was that, nineteen dickety two?
Re:It is most munificent of you, (Score:4, Interesting)
Or how about yellow on blue?
Re:It is most munificent of you, (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It is most munificent of you, (Score:5, Funny)
You should see someone about that
Re:It is most munificent of you, (Score:5, Funny)
Now, wtf do you expect us to discuss?
How about the unholy heinousness that is idle's design? It looks like hammered shit. No, I take that back. It makes hammered shit look good.
Re:It is most munificent of you, (Score:5, Funny)
Looks like I'm not the only one who used to hammer shit as a kid.
Re:It is most munificent of you, (Score:4, Interesting)
Well seeing as there really isn't anything to discuss here ( unless they expected other website owners, sysadmins, etc. to write in with their user experiences)....
Maybe I would like Backslash... back.
Rehashing popular topics, picking some of the top comments, etc. is a vastly more interesting thing to do than reaching into the hatemail grab-bag.
For the curious:
http://backslash.slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org]
For the curious as to why it's seemingly-dead:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=588277&cid=23846333 [slashdot.org]
( summary: Tim got too busy )
Dear Slashdot, (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks,
Thelasko
P.S. Worst article ever!
Re:Dear Slashdot, (Score:5, Informative)
Go to the Firehose. [slashdot.org]
I'm sorry, (Score:5, Insightful)
Horrible stylesheet (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm about to send an email complaining about the horrible stylesheet that idle.slashdot.org uses.
Re:Horrible stylesheet (Score:5, Funny)
Style sheet? I though Someone swallowed the blue and yellow Playdough and threw up on my monitor.
Years worth of emails (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Years worth of emails (Score:5, Funny)
There are only 10 hilarious emails he's ever gotten.
And he posted them both.
Re:Years worth of emails (Score:5, Funny)
There are only 10 types of people in the world --
those who understand binary, and those who get laid.
Re:Years worth of emails (Score:5, Funny)
but.. how do you classify the people who fit in BOTH groups?
LAID 1+0?
Re:Years worth of emails (Score:5, Funny)
There are two bits. Turn them both on. I.e, this one goes to 11.
Re:Years worth of emails (Score:5, Funny)
There are only 10 types of people in the world -- those who understand binary, and those who get laid.
What about the other 8 types?
This is the sort of thing that belongs on TDWTF... (Score:4, Insightful)
Typical Slashdotter even if he doesn't know it (Score:5, Funny)
Everyone here acts like they are so much smarter than everyone else and that a teenager can't know what is right because he isn't fat enough from sitting around eating twinkys and playing games on the computer. You never even had a girlfriend I bet because you're to busy being smarter than everyone else.
Despite a complete lack of clue he sounds just like any other Slashdotter.
Scratch that, he does sound just like any other Slashdotter.
Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
WTF? Is that it?! 2 emails? Where's the rest of it? What do I pay you for? WHat are you doing on the internet if you can't share more than 2 emails? Grrr! I'm so angry!!!
Drink it in? Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Come on guys... Its just 2 emails.. thats more of a droplet of morning mist as it condensates on the leaf of a dandelion and not worthy of even remotely referring it to as a taste..
D'oh (Score:5, Funny)
You know, I was going to post a whole rant about how you got me all excited to read about some really funny emails from a bunch of idiot readers only to find you only posted two of them, and only the first one was kinda funny.
But then I realized maybe the whole point of setting us up for nothing was to see how many irate people would sent you hate mail and post rants about the pointlessness of this article, thus bringing the whole thing full circle:
10 Get irate email
20 post lame article about it
30 goto 10
The ladies (Score:5, Funny)
But you don't. You clearly posted these support emails thinking they would be good for a laugh, but, instead, they were just really boring.
Priceless (Score:5, Funny)
Oh man, those were priceless! Of course, so are grass clippings.
And they still haven't (Score:5, Funny)
I hope you know I called Google and told them to remove you from the search list for "fixing the internet"
I swear you guys are like the Maytag Repair man of the internet.
Tagging Beta (Score:4, Informative)
Do they speak English in What? (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, "Slashdot's Disagree Mail"? Do you people speak and/or understand English on any kind of working basis?
(Feel free to file this message with the "disagree mail".)
Re:Do they speak English in What? (Score:5, Insightful)
First one is actually a useful lesson... (Score:4, Interesting)
Many, many users have the problem that the first writer had, namely, they have no idea where the "internal boundaries" are between various entities available on their computer. From their point of view, the modern GUI desktop is an undifferentiated sea of icons and buttons and text boxes. Users know what sequences to use to achieve a desired effect, but as far as how it works or even what the components are, or which ones are local and which ones are remote, they may not know, and the interface doesn't always tell them.
I recently had this experience doing tech-support for my father, who was visiting me. His e-mail stopped working, because his local POP/SMTP mail client will only talk to his ISP's servers when connecting from within the ISP's domain. At home, he's on the ISP's cable modem, and it works. I have a different ISP, so it doesn't work at my house. I switched him to the web client, which he was able to adapt to, but I'm not sure he ever really understood why he had to do that.
I can easily imagine that the guy in the first example normally had his browser default to open to his ISP's portal page, and it might have even had an e-mail link that send messages to the ISP's support team. So he goes to another computer and does what he thinks is the same thing -- opens a browser, fusses with it until a page comes up with something that looks like an e-mail link, clicks on it and asks for help. He's at the library, maybe some joker has set the default home page to slashdot, maybe it autocompleted it out of the history, who knows.
Ignorant, yes. Stupid? Only if it persists...
Re:First one is actually a useful lesson... (Score:5, Funny)
Damn, my ex-wife hangs out on Slashdot.
Disillusioned (Score:5, Funny)
I've always pictured the life of a Slashdot editor as a glamorous one. Partying with hot supermodels like Hugh Heffner, flying around the world in the Slashdot Learjet, racing Ferraris against CowboyNeal, pouring hot grits on Natalie Portman... that sort of thing.
After reading this article and discovering that the above emails were "very special" "gems" that brightened the editors' day, I think I may have to lower my image of them a bit.
Re:Disillusioned (Score:5, Funny)
Hugh Heffner is not a hot supermodel.
more needed (Score:5, Funny)
More stupid people and IT pros (Score:5, Informative)
Oh crap (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry for that, I just saw the option in the Index > Section preferences.
Sorry...
Re:Oh crap (Score:5, Funny)
The rest were ok (Score:5, Funny)
But I didn't care for the last one or the first one.