D****
It's "Dread..." isn't it?
Do I win a prize?
Reg reader achieves bronze badge, goes directly to jail
Those of you who've been knocking around the El Reg forums for a while will know that we have a badge system designed to honour invaluable Reg reader contributions to the site, or at least acknowledge a certain degree of commitment to giving forth. To get a foot on the first step on the ladder of glory - the bronze badge - you …
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Wednesday 18th November 2015 03:44 GMT Danny 2
Re: D****
@ Ken Moorhouse
So close. "Danny and Dusty" did a brilliant cover of Knocking on Heavens Door, but they (Sid Griffin) wrote an even more apt one, "The Word is out on Me"
"It's like a little village, man!
I was feeling very sad and so low, I went looking for some liquid sympathy
Went and found some bums down at the depot and those commentards went and called the cops on me
...
Seems like lately I've been paying for things I used to get for free
Don't you know I hear the music playin', whoah I know the word is out on me"
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Tuesday 17th November 2015 16:50 GMT Greg J Preece
Re: Holy shit!
Silver gets you on the Special Watch List as a Subversive Element.
Ohhhhhhhhhh fuck.
On the upside, no chance of me getting upgraded to gold. There's no way I'm considered a net positive, given how much of a greenie I was when I joined.
For Silver, a copy of Windows 10.
Even though I only really use Windows for gaming, there's no way I'm putting that spyware on my gorgeous Plasma 5 box.
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Wednesday 18th November 2015 04:42 GMT Danny 2
Re: You can get badges?
"
Who is is wearing badges, Who is making love
Who is receiving from up above
talking in a whisper, yeah speaking in tongues
talking of the devil yeah here he comes
badges, badges, we don't need no steenkin' bajees
Walks up to me, makes the sign of the cross,
says Julian H. Cope, you're a real dead loss
"
Okay, the old ones are not necessarily the best, but at least give me a wee bit of credit for getting the Doctor into this spamalot. 'I wanna be the pappa of this whole darn thread'. Ah the fun of drinking songs with friends, worth it even if I won't see your replies or downvotes and I lose my badge.
"Well, I woke up next morning feeling like my head was gone
And like my thick old tongue was licking something sick and wrong
And I told that man I'd sell my soul for something wet and cold as that old cell"
~Voltaire, Candide
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Tuesday 17th November 2015 11:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I've been around here for ages
>Upvotes are easy.
Just say how wonderful Linux is or how crap windows is. In any article about PC World say how you belittled one of the sales people with your superior knowledge even though you only went in to get out of the rain and wouldn't ever dream of buying anything from them. Deriding Apple products/users also used to be a sure fire winner but that seems to be 50/50 recently.
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Tuesday 17th November 2015 12:16 GMT Gotno iShit Wantno iShit
Re: I've been around here for ages
You presumably need to maintain >100 posts in the past year, drop below that and you temporarily lose the badge.
I got close and chased it for a while but struggled finding two articles per week that satisfy all of; a) A subject I am knowledgeable upon, b) I have a thought upon that hasn't already been expressed, c) I give a crap about enough to post. Usually someone writes what I'm thinking expressed better than I would have and faster. So do I post lots of shite and/or 'Here, have an upvote' noise. Or do I STFU and remain badgeless?
The system seems to encourage inane chatter to me. X upvotes or net X in the past 12 months would be a more beneficial metric.
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Tuesday 17th November 2015 17:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I've been around here for ages
"2/. Respond with "Here, have an upvote/downvote.""
4/. Correctly label sarcasm as sarcasm, it helps the Americans
5/. Correctly label trolling as trolling, if helps the Americans
6/. Poke fun at the Americans but then explain you are making fun, or explain anything actually, you know why.
I was joking, it's British humour.
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Tuesday 17th November 2015 16:30 GMT Shadow Systems
@AC re Victorian times.
My son & I used to have "You're so old" contests in the same way one would engage in a "Your mom's so fat" juvenile amusement.
We had to stop when I nearly crashed my car from laughing so hard when my son cried from his booster chair in the back seat: "Dad, you're so old you farted like a tuba & we know it as The Big Bang!"
I declared him the winner, then got even by buying a metric fekton of refried bean & cheese microwave burritos for supper that night.
Teach the little monster to make fun of my gas. Bah!
=-)p
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Tuesday 17th November 2015 14:04 GMT tony72
Re: I've been around here for ages
The system seems to encourage inane chatter to me. X upvotes or net X in the past 12 months would be a more beneficial metric.
I agree about the inane chatter, any forum that has awards for making a certain number of posts ends up with lots of "me too" posts from people just trying to get their post count up. But no system is perfect; your suggestion of rewarding upvotes instead would just encourage groupthink and karma-whoring, not the kind of critically minded discussion I'd like to see in the El Reg forums.
Fortunately I don't think enough Reg readers are bothered enough about the badges to actually chase them for the sake of it, so it probably doesn't matter much.
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Tuesday 17th November 2015 14:58 GMT 9Rune5
Re: I've been around here for ages
"I don't think enough Reg readers are bothered enough about the badges to actually chase them for the sake of it"
Yes...and no... I would gladly kill to be able to use the blockquote html tag.
...which is probably what d***** (strange nick, but who am I to judge?) did.
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Tuesday 17th November 2015 21:10 GMT Teiwaz
Re: I've been around here for ages (sega)
a) A subject I am knowledgeable upon,
b) I have a thought upon that hasn't already been expressed,
c) I give a crap about enough to post.
a) When has a) ever been a reason for someone Not to post on the Internet???
b) Hasn't stopped many people either.
c) Bored now....
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Saturday 30th January 2016 09:43 GMT AbortRetryFail
Re: I've been around here for ages
Yes, I also briefly had a bronze badge when the system started and then it disappeared again after a while.
Can't say I'm that bothered about the badges though. Although the extra formatting would be nice - maybe El Reg could alter it so that those rights could stay enabled once granted even if the badge goes away again, please?
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Tuesday 17th November 2015 12:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I've been around here for ages
It took me ages, but a few months ago I finally made it to bronze! But sometimes it seems to disappear and reappear, I don't understand the logic. And the fuzz haven't turned up yet....
Ah, but there are two options for Bronze. Jail or suffering the <blink> tag. It starts with your badge :)
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Tuesday 17th November 2015 13:29 GMT GrumpenKraut
Re: Actually I think there should be some form of quality control
I find the comments at El Reg usually OK, sometimes great. Best if quality control is not needed, i.e., commentards sort it out by themselves.
And then Eadon got kicked, to the tune of very many very small violins, I am sure.
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Tuesday 17th November 2015 14:21 GMT Steven Roper
Re: Actually I think there should be some form of quality control
"And then Eadon got kicked, to the tune of very many very small violins, I am sure."
That was a truly sad day for the El Reg community. Eadon's shitposting was pure Reg gold; I had to replace a container's worth of keyboards because of him. Only Webster Phreaky ever surpassed him, but he seemed to have vanished before Eadon took over. Perhaps they were one and the same entity, and perhaps his ghost haunts the El Reg comments threads even to this day...
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Tuesday 17th November 2015 15:16 GMT Frumious Bandersnatch
Re: Actually I think there should be some form of quality control
To avoid random spamming by the desperate.
I've often thought of exactly the opposite. I should get off my arse(*) one of these days and set up "bewildering-upvotes.com" (**) where each week members vote on the most boring/anodyne post on their favourite site and then everyone goes and gives it a thumbs up. Perfect for sad gits everywhere who fancy themselves as anarchists, but who are too polite to do anything naughty.
* and probably sit back down again if I want to do web coding
** motto: "Dada's not dead; it just smells a little funny" perhaps?
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Wednesday 18th November 2015 03:20 GMT Danny 2
Re: Huzzah. Badges!
That's why I love you folk. You at your worst remind me of me at my best.
I was working at a high tech, let's leave it nameless for now, Cisco-kid, and some younger coder was joking away about $ rm -rf and how disastrous it can be. And because he was chatting about it, he did it, took down his own machine, and then groaned and admitted it. My first thought was naturally, 'how stupid can you anyone be?'
And then I typed it in too because, well, stupidity is recursive and infectious. I'd answered my own unspoken question and took the focus off him.
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Tuesday 17th November 2015 21:19 GMT Danny 2
Re: Pot money
What a nice thought, but no donations necessary. It was enough to see this unsolicited thread as the first headline I read after coming out of a mad day in court, as I now know I'm able to survive a heart-attack event.
ProtonMail being down didn't lose my emails, just delayed things. My lawyer has unspammed me, although I doubt he'll ever be my Facebook friend now. My anger has effervesced into utter bemusement. This anecdote will be funny 'in time' but right now the jokes on me - I mean, how does anyone manage to get thrown out of their own trial without being able to get arrested? I was expecting Porridge but this is a legal version of Fawlty Towers, unfortunately with me as Manuel.
At various points over the past 11 months I've been asked about my mental health, I assumed out of concern, now I realise they were just checking if they'd done enough yet.
Unless you actually meant money for cannabis, in which case I'd say yes, that might help. I am afraid I don't know any dealers (yet, I guess I'll meet some inside) except the complainant. And bail restrictions forbid me from approaching them.
Beer Icon, because that's what I spent my last bus-fare on.
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Tuesday 17th November 2015 16:02 GMT Pompous Git
Chokey
I got asked what it was like in prison once. Said I didn't know and the interlocutor said: "Well that's funny. Isn't that where you've been the last couple of years?"
Apparently there had been a picture of me robbing a bank on the front page of one of the Melbourne papers. Except it wasn't me.
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Tuesday 17th November 2015 14:32 GMT James O'Shea
Well, I'm still here. Even though I've taken to answering telemarketer calls with "You have reached the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office Anti-Fraud Task Force. Please hold." Somehow I suspect that Sheriff Rick "An M16 in every squadcar" Bradshaw (yes, he actually said that...)o won't be too happy to find out that he has a task force which might look into what he perpetuated in the last election.
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Wednesday 18th November 2015 12:32 GMT Christopher Lane
Like I'm worried...it's a bootnotes article. Now were it a serious piece of journalism about Crypto4/SAN all flash arrays/Net neutrality etc I could understand the "humour removed at birth" individual above. However I shall accept my downvotes with joy, join them together in a daisy chain about my head and poke a flower down each of your barrels...peace out brothers and sisters!
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Tuesday 17th November 2015 16:29 GMT speedbird007
HMP Elreg
Apart from the last 12 posts (trying too hard lads) this thread has been most entertaing today.
Prefer Badgers to badges/badgelets btw.
If the commentard called D***** has really gone on holiday at her Majesty's expense I expect a postcard to be displayed on El Reg sometime soon.
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Tuesday 17th November 2015 18:12 GMT Danny 2
un Wanted Man
It's me. I got thrown out my own trial and I can't even get arrested now.
I was told by my lawyer, court appointed against my wishes, to expect a prison sentence - the actual 'crime' is a bit tech related and a bit funny but I'll save that story for my release.
The trial though is after 11 months of 'intermediate diets' that started off daft but have descended into farce. I got ejected from the court today for wearing my jacket 'disrespectfully' (back to front, I was freezing) and told to wait in the corridor. The Sheriff hadn't even arrived, he always turns up late. Then a court official from the next court ejected me from the corridor, even though I had my jacket on the right way. I went to the PF office and go told to wait in the corridor and my lawyer would sort it out, was ejected again so I asked a cop in the cafe to arrest me - which they refused to do without a warrant.
I'm all psyched up for prison but this is doing my head in, so I go for a long walk. I don't want to waste police time so I go back at 4pm, the court is meant to run until 5pm but they've obviously ejected all the criminals and finished early. I ask at the PF office if a warrant has been issued for me, yes there has. Good, can I turn myself in now then? Well, the paper-works not been done yet, the PF may invite you in or send out officers to look for you. I'm difficult to contact, can I just go to the police station and ask to be arrested? You can ask.
Which I did, and no they wouldn't. I'll try again tomorrow. The relative sanity of a police cell is increasingly inviting just now but seemingly they are hard to break into. Je suis agitée par les vagues, et ne sombre pas.
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Wednesday 18th November 2015 03:19 GMT Martin Budden
@Michael Thibault
I'll repeat the joke, as it may not be well known outside Australia:
When Sir Winton Turnbull (a rural MP) was rambling on in Parliament and said: "I am a Country member" the Prime Minister Gough Whitlam interjected "I remember". Sir Winton could not understand why, for the first time in all the years he had been speaking in the House, there was instant and loud applause from both sides.
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Wednesday 18th November 2015 03:12 GMT Danny 2
Re: badges and prison
Getting married counts, and all that sort of love-and-children type success. I often feel jealous of my best friend for that very reason, and although his eldest son is my god-son that is vicarious.
But his wife doesn't like James Spader so he doesn't get to watch 'The Black List', and I do. And his kids love 'Impractical Jokers' so he has to watch that, and I don't.
Swings and roundabouts I guess.
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Wednesday 18th November 2015 06:01 GMT JWG
And I'm supposed to care - why? To be honest, most of my comments wouldn't make it past the foul language censors (I've been in IT since prehistoric times, the 1970s when I was a COBOL and RPG III guru (God, I'm old). Starting in the early '80's, moved into infrastructure (which didn't exist as a title for another 20 years). I am one of the Original Bastards in America, though my real name is unknown, being I'm an autistic and didn't remain long enough at any company to be known to anyone. Never could find that one spot I could have survived in. I, however, as a contractor, did many projects at Microsoft, Intel, Xerox, Symantec, and more than a few contract companies that have gone away over the years. Lots of great experience: CPU Debug Engineer, Software Test Engineer, Senior Technical Project Manager, Senior Customer Service Engineer (Third tier). There were odds and ends as fill-in BOFH, App Dev, etc. Oh, you were talking about Bronze Badges - We ain't got no stinkin' badges...
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Wednesday 18th November 2015 06:56 GMT Danny 2
"This post has been deleted by a moderator"
That was me, that was, and why should you care, when you are a bit older, and more talented and experienced, and maybe, just maybe more autistic, and you crack the same 'stinkin badges' quote already played to death a dozen times on this thread...
Well maybe to give you hope, if a loser like me can make it to these giddy heights of Bronze Star, surely the most precious metal, and monopolise a thread, maybe you will aim for something better to do with your last night of freedom. I recommend prostitutes and cocaine if you can afford them, they sound nice. Unfortunately I have no beer left and only you. Or fortunately, maybe.
Hints: don't drop all your boasts in the one post; for example, in my last salaried role my first call for MS tech support was an MS VP.
Hints: and then immediately follow through with true self-depreciation; I was too intimidated by his wealth ever to call him for help.
I get a lot of up-votes not because I'm informative, up-to-date, or knowledgeable. I get a lot of up-votes because I'm a loser, I know it and revel in it, my idiocy amuses some of you and make you think how lucky you are you aren't me. It's funny because it's true. More than that though, I assume a handful of people here admire my sheer resilience so far - 'if that loser can keep joking here on his last night of freedom, maybe what I fear is survivable'. Fluctuat nec mergitur, tossed by the waves and not sunk yet, soon to be tossed by other prisoners though and not looking forward to that.
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Wednesday 18th November 2015 08:32 GMT allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
And I'm supposed to care - why?
You're not 'supposed' to - it's your decision whether you care or not. You choose to post a comment of +170 words. Looks to me like you do care after all. ('Caring' goes both ways.)
On a related note:
Allison: Professor King is a nobel laureate and noted astrophysicist.
Jack: Wow. Um, well, I'm captain of my division softball team.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
