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The Slashdot subculture is a mixture of insightful and informative comments, juvenilia, sarcasm, deliberately bad jokes, intellectual arrogance and highly developed and artistic attempts to provoke outraged responses from other forum users, amuse them, or challenge their thinking on the popular Slashdot technology website. Many of these are older phenomena which originated in common slang culture, later migrating to Usenet and eventually Slashdot.

Slashdot user stereotypes

Nerd stereotypes are extremely common on Slashdot. The most common stereotypes are:

  • That Slashdotters are male
  • That Slashdotters are single
  • That male Slashdotters have poor social skills, particularly in relating to women
  • That female Slashdotters are rare, unattractive, non-existent, or in reality males hiding behind a feminine name
  • That Slashdotters spend inordinate amounts of time in front of computers
  • That Slashdotters use the GNU/Linux operating system on their computers
  • That Slashdotters have poor hygiene
  • That most Slashdotters usually live with their parents (often expressed as "living in their mothers' basements")
  • That Slashdotters are obsessed with pornography and/or masturbation (example: "500GB hard drive? How am I going to fit all my pr0n in that?!")

Complaints that the "typical Slashdot reader" would not understand a subject because of nerd stereotypes are common. The response may be "Why do people persist in using analogies so incomprehensible to the average Slashdotter?" when referring to one of the above points. This kind of self-deprecating humor is frequently used on Slashdot.

If someone questions an action or concept which appears ridiculous but is well-established on Slashdot, a wit may reply with "You must be new here!", indicating that only a newbie would not accept that ridiculous proposition as reasonable. It can also refer to the opposite - a practice that appears reasonable, but does not meet Slashdot standards. For example, it is common for people to post messages about an article without actually reading the article. This will sometimes receive a reply starting "Don't you people even read the article?" or similar. "You must be new here" is a common follow-up.

Another Slashdot user stereotype is based on the pecking order created by the site's user ID system. Slashdot assigns a numeric ID, increasing over time, to users who create a username and password in order to post comments without being labeled an Anonymous Coward. Thus, users with a low (one- to four-digit) numeric ID, who began visiting Slashdot in its early days, sometimes are viewed as more elite than the masses of five- to seven-digit ID-bearing newcomer newbs. ("Newb," or more frequently "n00b" is online slang for someone who is naïve or clueless, typically used in referring to newbies. It is taken originally from 1940s slang.) Indeed, a comment may sometimes receive greater respect from readers because the poster carries a low numeric ID, thus allowing some of the old Slashdot trolls to be rather effective. Low user IDs are also a source of humor. The above-mentioned "You must be new here" is sometimes used sarcastically when a low-ID user says something insightful but contrary to seemingly prevailing opinion. Sometimes threads which joke about low user IDs get replied by low-ID users, which in turn get replied by even lower-ID users, and so forth.

Slashdot articles

RTFA

A common recurring theme is the notion that most people do not read the featured article, and that many posts are therefore uninformed. Someone posting an incorrect reference to a linked article might be responded to by one or more comments urging the original poster to "RTFA", or Read The Fucking Article (adapted from RTFM) or possibly euphemised as Read The Fine Article or Read The Full Article (often in humour or the workplace). It is fairly common to refer to a linked article as "TFA" in reference to this.

Duplicate "dupe" posts and poor editing

A common "feature" on Slashdot is the prevalence of duplicate news posts, an often-made mistake by the Slashdot editors. Comments complaining about the duplication of current and past posts and even polls are common. Misspellings by the Slashdot editors are also very common. There are often posts making fun of this and indeed this is yet another recurring theme.

The publication of some articles three times led to the mocking term "tripe" for these events.

"Slashvertisements"

Slashdot comments frequently speculate (or accuse) that Slashdot's editors have accepted payment for placing stories on the front page which offer a problematic or unbalanced product review.

Verbal assaults

Personal verbal assaults on the Slashdot editors are extremely common. These are often expressed as trolls that accuse the Slashdot editors (for example Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda), open-source celebrities, etc. of being either homosexual, incompetent, or hopeless nerds. They are sometimes expressed as senryus. In the most extreme form, textual porn taken from random internet sites is rewritten to incorporate Slashdot editors. CmdrTaco's wife, Kathleen Malda, more commonly known by her maiden name of Fent, is a frequent target of these remarks.

Trolling

Trolling is very common on Slashdot, and there are a number of repeating trolls that are seen on the site. Similar to trolling is flamebaiting, which is also highly prevalent. The most common flamebaits on Slashdot are references to the Microsoft vs. Linux controversy and ad hominem attacks on posters with bad grammar and spelling by grammar and spelling Nazis. See Slashdot trolling phenomena.

Moderation

The Moderation system is an integral part of Slashdot, and has spawned a few common cliches on its own. Complaints about the moderators, or "mods" are common, and discussions about the fairness of certain moderations are often spawned as a result.

Karma whoring is a derogatory term for the posting of comments that do not add to the discussion but that are still likely to be modded up, doing so specifically to increase one's karma score. Like the term troll, karma whore can refer to the comment in question, the act of posting the comment, or the user responsible. While not malicious or deliberately disruptive, karma whoring is considered trolling because it distracts from more meaningful and informative comments.

The practice is a side effect of the karma system, and is similar to the concept of "tactical voting" as that term is used concerning elections. Users earn karma when one of their comments is modded up. Users with a high karma score enjoy a higher status within the community and a default bonus to their comments' scores, resulting in higher comment visibility. Karma is designed to be a measure of the user's meaningful contributions to the discussion, since in theory it is meaningful comments that are modded up. In practice, some moderators will mod up comments simply because they agree with their opinion, and a user can sometimes collect karma points simply by stating an opinion that the majority of slashdotters agree with, without developing a full comment that would actually bring any new insight to the discussion. Many users consider this cheating, hence the derogatory term implying that the user would do anything, even whore themselves out, for karma.

Other comments marked as karma whores are those in which a user pastes a verbatim copy of the featured article into a comment because the site that hosts the article is unavailable (usually due to the Slashdot effect). These comments are almost always modded up because they are genuinely helpful, but they are still derided as karma whores because any user could have created them, making it seem unfair that the karma boost should go to the particular user that did it first. This practice of pasting unavailable articles into comments has given rise to the article text alteration troll. To avoid being labeled as a karma whore, some users paste text of the article as an Anonymous Coward (thus not earning karma).

Because of the specialized nature of Slashdot (it's owned by the Open Source Technology Group), moderation often leads to Groupthink, where any opinion that is in disagreement with the website's established principles (no matter how sound or well-phrased) will very likely be "modded down" and censored, leading to the perpetuation of the groupthink mentality. This is often confused with trolling.

Orwellian and other political themes

Orwellian fears of totalitarianism are a recurring theme. Slashdotters are very concerned with privacy issues, and in fact, references to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four are often seen. These types of posts are most often found in the "Your Rights Online" section of Slashdot.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt

The Slashdot community has a love/hate relationship with certain technology corporations. Much of this is directly related to the (presumed) popularity of GNU/Linux within Slashdot. Some claim that browser statistics show that a majority of Slashdot posters in fact don't run Linux but instead Microsoft operating systems.

The phrase "Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt", often shortened to FUD, is often used to ascribe a propaganda-like character to actions or statements by corporations. Most often, this is used when describing either Microsoft Corporation or The SCO Group. This has more recently been applied to the ADTI.

Microsoft is a long-standing target of Slashdotter criticism. Common criticisms include that Microsoft's products are unstable, have poor security, or have Big Brother-like attributes.

The SCO Group is often targeted for criticism as a result of its claim that "Linux is, in material part, an unauthorized derivative of UNIX" (SCO letter to its Linux customers, 12 May 2003). SCO has asserted broad rights to the intellectual property of Unix, and thus also claims rights over Linux. SCO is attempting to enforce and defend its alleged rights through a series of lawsuits, including ongoing litigation with IBM. SCO brought on the wrath of Slashdotters for, among other things, attempting to charge a fee of $699 for "authorized" copies of Linux. As a result, replies to Linux articles will often contain the semi-serious joke that the poster owes SCO some amount of money. (See SCO v. IBM.)

The Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (ADTI) has recently become the target of jokes since its president Kenneth Brown published a report entitled Samizdat which claimed that Linus Torvalds was not the original creator of Linux, but rather that Linux is a derivative of Minix, a claim which is disputed by many, including Andrew S. Tanenbaum, the creator of Minix.

Tinfoil Hat

Often, a poster will refer to his or her "tinfoil hat", referring to someone who is overly concerned with privacy issues, or is a conspiracy theorist. For instance, in response to an article about putting GPS transponders in cell phones, a poster might say "Excuse me while I put on my tinfoil hat, but I don't want the government to track my every move!" The actual act of wearing a tinfoil hat historically refers to the paranoid belief that it will prevent one's mind from being read by (or controlled by) governmental surveillance technology.

Welcoming Our New Overlords

Main article: Overlord meme

This catchphrase is based on a quote from the newscaster character Kent Brockman of The Simpsons. In the episode Deep Space Homer, Brockman watches a video broadcast from a space capsule, within which a number of ants have accidentally been released. The ants appear huge because they float directly in front of the broadcast camera and close to the lens. He mistakenly assumes that alien insects are invading Earth and attempts to ingratiate himself to them by broadcasting propaganda: "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords." (See Made-up words in The Simpsons)

Subsequent to this Simpsons episode, variants of the phrase came into common use in 2002-2003, generally used to suggest that whatever party referred to as the new overlords is engaging in Orwellian behavior. For example, in a hypothetical post referring to Deep Blue and its variants, one might post, "I, for one, welcome our new chess-playing robotic overlords."

The first known use of this sycophant catchphrase in a Slashdot post can be viewed here.

In Soviet Russia

The original "in Soviet Russia" joke, by comedian Yakov Smirnoff is, "In America, you can always find party. In Soviet Russia, Party can always find you!"

The implication of Smirnoff's joke is that the latter use of the noun "party" implies the Communist Party, and refers to pervasiveness of the Communist party in Soviet Russia. Whether the members of Slashdot's audience who make these jokes have direct familiarity with Smirnoff's comedy act (which includes much observational humor about the Soviet Union, only some of which fits the word-reversal pattern) is doubtful, since this particular faction of the Slashdot community probably recalls the Cold War as only a childhood memory.

The most likely origin of the meme, which started not too long after it aired, is an episode of Family Guy in which Peter uses a GPS car navigation system that has a Yakov Smirnoff voice mode that states, "In Soviet Russia, car drives YOU!"

It has become a custom to fit this joke into topics being discussed in as clever a way as possible.

In these posts, trolls usually begin their comments with the subject "IN SOVIET RUSSIA" (all capitals) and typically proceed to reverse the order of words in that story's headline, usually changing the verb slightly to maintain subject/verb agreement and changing the object of the sentence to the second-person "YOU!". Thus, '' usually becomes 'IN SOVIET RUSSIA, YOU!' The nature of the joke, when done correctly, is such that the noun contains a different and repressive meaning in the latter part of the joke than in the former.

One Slashdot article announcing that Russian Deputy Communications Minister Andrei Korotkov had turned the tables on spammers by flooding their telephone system with a recorded telephone message inspired a number of Soviet Russia jokes, mainly because the article was about an incident that took place in Russia that involved an ironic reversal, the very meaning of the Soviet Russia joke.

One variation that is becoming increasingly common is the phrase "In Soviet America." This is usually seen in response to things perceived as a violation of privacy by the poster. e.g. "In Soviet America, you sue MPAA."

Modern slashdot Soviet Russia-jokes do not always explicitly mention the tell-tale line anymore, but still retain the typical reversal and 'you' statement at the end. This may be due to it becoming so well entrenched in Slashdot culture, to the point of seemingly wanting to try to avoid it. (Giant Squid).

Won't somebody please think of the children?

This sentence is often added sarcastically to a comment to make fun of (often socially conservative) policies which are sometimes justified with similar statements.

This line is famous for being delivered by Mrs. Lovejoy of The Simpsons and is used by the writers to point out the over-obsession of protecting children in modern-day America. More specifically, the target of the line is the practice of introducing laws to prevent children from doing something by removing/restricting the freedom of all to do it.

One current example of such practice is the Child Online Protection Act. The law would require all commercial distributors of "material harmful to minors" to protect their sites from access by minors.

Recurring jokes

Reflecting the speed of contemporary pop culture in general and Internet phenomena in particular, many of Slashdot's recurring jokes enjoy brief shelf-lives. Some posters, aware of Slashdot's trolling subculture, often deliberately set out to create and propagate new memes, hoping to make a new joke catch on.

A poster will sometimes combine several well-known jokes, including many of those listed below, into one "super-cliche." A successful attempt produces a post that is either quite funny or incredibly annoying, depending on a reader's perspective, and is almost always nonsensical outside the immediate context. Example here.

Lines and phrases

  • When a new product is reviewed on Slashdot, some posters may respond by asking a question irrelevant to the product in question, such as whether a new toaster model runs Linux (more recently, Mac OS X v10.4) or supports Ogg media. This is a play on the stereotype that some Slashdotters are so passionate about a particular technology -- an operating system or file type, for example -- that they will overlook the positive features of a new development simply because it doesn't involve that technology. The first use of this phrase is in this comment in reference to a "$1000 supercomputer". This comment is actually not a joke but an honest question, thereby defining the typical slashdotter before Slashdot had become "mainstream".
  • In some discussions, especially those concerning hardware, some users post humorous "When I was your age" type complaints, parodying such statements with extreme hyperbole. The original poster might write, "When I was your age we didn't have X11. We did everything through the console." Several successive replies might be posted, each more unpleasant and exaggerated than the last: posters complaining that they had only punch cards, toggle switches or even an abacus, echoing the Four Yorkshiremen sketch. A common addendum is the phrase "uphill both ways," which has its origins in Bill Cosby's Himself monologue. (A great example can be found here). Often the assertion is added that they liked it as well; this is generally a reference to Dana Carvey's Grumpy Old Man character, widely known from SNL.
  • When a post reflects an apparent lack of geek-ness -- for instance, confusing Star Trek with Star Wars -- subsequent posts will inform the errant commenter that his or her "geek license" is "revoked" and must be turned in. A user will often have his "geek license revoked" when a post implies or states that he has a girlfriend.
  • When someone suggests using a network for something unsavory, other users often suggest "setting the evil bit", as defined in RFC 3514 ("The Security Flag in the IPv4 Header"). This RFC became notorious on April Fools' Day 2003, when an article about it was posted dozens of times in response to persistent complaints about duplicate stories.
  • More recently (2005), the problem of duplicate stories posted by Slashdot editors has given rise to the "dupe" joke. Example: "Why has no one noticed this article? Because it hasn't been posted three times yet!" Or: "There's a typo/misspelling/grammatical error in the summary." "Don't worry, it will be corrected in the dupe!"
  • Discussion of a triplicate story invariably contains the suggestion that as "duplicate" is shortened to "dupe", "triplicate" obviously reduces to "tripe" (an idiom for something useless or nonsensical).
  • A poster, often an Anonymous Coward, will preface a comment about a given news story with, "In Korea only old people use ... ." The joke appeared in late 2004 after a South Korean newspaper quoted 22-year-old office worker "Kim" saying that e-mail was a communications medium for the elderly.
  • Haiku poems relating to a discussion are occasionally written.
  • "Obviously, the dog is on fire" was a short-lived phenomenon, making incongruous appearances in a variety of posts in late 2004 and early 2005. It was spawned by the response to a brain-teaser about spotting a black dog from a car without headlights on an unlit street.(Original brain-teaser and answer )
  • "Except in Nebraska" is a humor meme derived from a memorable video alleged to be Microsoft's Steve Ballmer promoting Windows 1.0 with an intensity matched only by used-car salesmen. After spending the better part of a minute screaming about the amazing features of Windows 1.0 ("all this and Reversi!"), he ends with an abrupt "...except in Nebraska!" The January 2005 thread in which this video is shown and the meme is introduced can be found here.
  • "You forgot Poland" is a response indicating that one has nothing noteworthy left to write and thus can offer only an irrelevant or incorrect comment. Derived from a remark by George W. Bush during the 2004 U.S. presidential debates, the line was often deployed in threads about a European Union software patents initiative blocked by Poland.
  • "In the post 9/11 world" is a recurring joke that surfaced in 2005 after a police spokesman used the phrase while justifying the arrest of a man who paid a Best Buy invoice with $2 bills. The concept of terrorists threatening national security with $2 bills prompted the meme, and it is beginning to be used mostly by ACs in recent postings .
  • In popular culture, a filk is a musical adaptation created by reworking a familiar song with new lyrics. At Slashdot, the device is used only occasionally; a song about the SCO Group Linux lawsuit conflict, for instance, spurred some users to produce variations on Eminem's song "The Real Slim Shady", titled "The Real UNIX Owner".
  • Also common are inside jokes that allude to recent articles. For instance, to grasp the humor in an April 2005 comment about exoskeletons with mounted guns , a reader would have needed familiarity with a story the previous day about the deployment of robots in the Korean Demilitarized Zone. In some cases a link is provided to serve as a joke's explanation. Another example is this one where it says "that ain't gonna work; you forgot to offer chocolate for it" which at first seems nonsensical as an answer to "Please fill in you credit card number, social security number, date of birth, mother's maiden name and your password to all you most important information below." (about offshored identity theft), until one realises it's a reference to a former article of the previous day, which dealt with the fact most people are willing to give away their passwords for a bar of chocolate.
  • When a familiar Slashdot joke turns out to make sense in the context of a discussion, an "Oh, wait, never mind" comment is obligatory. A thread about a new handheld device that runs Linux, for example, might include a wink-and-nod post that reads, "But does it run Linux? Oh, wait... ."
  • "Nothing for you to see here. Please move along." From the traditional police officer's admonishment. This is an error message sometimes produced by the Slashdot server software, when the user tries to read a page when they don't have the necessary permissions for it. Most often this is a glitch occurring when reading an article that has just been published; subscribers can read the article, but other users can't. This is particularly funny in case of articles about Internet censorship or sites shut down. The phrase is also frequently used as an in-joke when trying to say that the article topic isn't a new idea even when it's tried to be passed off as such.
  • A newer joke comes from Adult Swim's Robot Chicken. A skit shows a guy watching TV. His friends ask him if he wants to go to a bar, to which he replies "Why don't you take your bar and shove it up your ass! I'm watching TiVo!" This phrase has been used in Slashdot comments where a user will replace the word 'bar' with a noun that deals with the article.
  • Another common phrase, often recited when dealing with either a disturbing or seemingly harmful image or product is, "The goggles, they do nothing!" A misquote from The Simpsons episode "Radioactive Man" where Rainier Wolfcastle, starring as Radioactive Man, is overcome by a tidal wave of acid having been given only a pair of goggles for "protection". The actual line is, "My eyes! The goggles do nothing!"
  • Another recent joke involves chairs being thrown, in a reference to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who reportedly threw a chair upon hearing that Google had hired one of the chief Microsoft developers. It usually refers to an IT-related upset and ends something like 'I hope no one got hurt by flying chairs'.
  • In the same incident, Ballmer was quoted as vowing to "fucking kill" Google. This phrase is reused both to allude to his notable enthusiasm and, more generally, to comment on Microsoft's renownedly competitive attitude to its competitors.
  • The adjective of "fsck" refers to the widespread curse and file systems checker fsck. It is applied to express emotions of impatience and frustration -- commonly experienced when corrupted file systems are being checked and corrected, e.g. after a severe system crash.
  • An infrequent meme is of a mundane or usual sounding phrase being ended with "...in Japan!", under the pretense that anything in Japan is futuristic and cool. This started up around late 2004 and died fairly quickly.
  • You misspelled (something ironic) as (something) is a joke originated by replies from grammar nazis whose corrections can meander needlessly from the posted article's topic . Sometimes it is simplified to "You misspelled (something ironic)" when the subject of the satire is obvious.
  • "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." Refers to Rob Malda's (CmdrTaco) initial reaction to the iPod when it was released and announced in a Slashdot article available here. An example of this joke in reference to a slashdot article about a wireless music player is available here.
  • "The answer is 42." (a famous quote from the book "hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams)

Pop culture references

  • Duke Nukem Forever (DNF) is a game whose release date has changed for years. Slashdotters often compare a timeline to the timeline of DNF. For example, in an article about a product that appears to be vaporware, someone might post a "But will it come out before DNF?" or "It will come bundled with DNF." Often, DNF is referred to as "Duke Nukem Whenever" or "Duke Nukem If Ever." (However, DNF may be released in late 2006.)

Predictions by posters or sources in news stories about the pending release of an application are often greeted with the rhetorical question: "Can they also tell us when Duke Nukem Forever will be released?"

  • The phrase "All your base are belong to us" was an Internet phenomenon in 2000-2001. Drawn from a clumsy English translation of the Japanese video game Zero Wing, it was often seen on Slashdot in such variations as, "All your (topic of article) are belong to (a relevant group)." Current use of "all your base" and other phrases from the video game, such as "for great justice," implicitly acknowledge the outdated humor.
  • "How about a nice game of chess?" sometimes appears in comments about talking robots or large computers. It is a quote from the 1983 movie WarGames. A typical response, also drawn from the film, is: "Why chess? Let's play global thermonuclear war."
  • "But can it find Sarah Connor?" is sometimes brought up when discussing robotics. The Terminator is an American motion picture involving a cyborg that has been sent back through time to "terminate" (kill) a woman before she can give birth to her son, who will lead humanity against the ruling machines in the future.
  1. Collect underpants
  2. ???
  3. Profit!

None of the gnomes knows the second step, and each assumes that someone else in the organization does. This pokes fun at the general lack of sensible business plans by companies of the dot-com era, which often generated interesting ideas but failed to build profitable enterprises. In response to stories about individuals or organizations alleged to have acted questionably, jesting Slashdotters often propose a fake business plan based on this template, with the questionable action as step one.

  • The animated show Futurama is also a commonly cited reference. Catch phrases from the main cast such as "Good news everyone" and "Bite my shiny metal ass" are often used or modified to fit the context.
  • The Star Wars film series is perhaps the most frequently cited pop-culture source at Slashdot.

Posters often quote Alec Guinness' line "That's no moon... that's a space station" (from the movie Star Wars, referring to the Death Star) when a discussion involves a moon or space station, particularly Saturn's moon Mimas, which has a distinct crater.

Another frequently quoted line is "I find your lack of faith disturbing" (uttered by Darth Vader in Star Wars). It is applicable as a reply to critical opinions of Star Wars, and is sometimes used in response to a poster questioning whether the Slashdot effect can bring down a given Web site.

Common jokes in movie discussions include "revealing" that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father and replies of mock astonishment to this well-known spoiler.

Since the release of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, the Darth Vader "NOOO" at the end of the film is commonly played on.

Some posters enjoy noting the mysterious Jedi ability to convince others to act (Jedi mind trick) in reference to other seemingly magical events that happen among businesses, people and technology. People often quote and deliberately misquote Obi-Wan Kenobi using this skill at the Mos Eisley space port to hide his droids. The original phrase "These aren't the droids you are looking for" is often altered to fit the discussion topic, with the word "droids" replaced by "files," "servers," "kiwis" and so on.

Also common are variations of Admiral Ackbar's famous utterance, "It's a trap!" (also a frequent Fark cliche) and Obi-Wan's line, "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if a million souls cried out in torment and were silenced at once" (example: "As if a million sysadmins cried out in torment and were silenced at once" in reference to a Windows XP Service Pack release). It is also notable that in this instance Obi-Wan is quoted incorrectly.

  • "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." is one of Inigo Montoya's lines from The Princess Bride.
  • A line from Soylent Green, "Soylent Green is people!" where Soylent Green is substituted with an appropriate noun.

Technical humor

As Slashdot is a gathering ground for those interested in things technical, it is inevitable that a highly advanced sense of technical humor has arisen. Often, this humor is a reference to a past event in geek history, and is often inane and obscure.

Beowulf cluster

Whenever a story mentioning a new gadget (possibly one with networking capabilities) is posted on Slashdot, it will often be proposed that the power of a Beowulf cluster of the new gadgets would be incredible. Under the concept of absurdist humor, this can be applied to non-networkable items as well. Such comments are generally prefaced with "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things!" This type of troll actually began as a parody of sincere posts frequently made in stories about new computers back when the concept of Beowulf clusters first entered the technological mainstream.

Terminal humor

There is a small body of humor on Slashdot revolving around the idiosyncrasies of older text-based terminals, often requiring knowledge of these arcane or archaic systems.

"NO CARRIER" is a response printed by a modem if it loses its connection. It is usually used to truncate a sentence, implying that some disaster has befallen the author or their computer. This joke goes back to the early days of BBSs. This is used most often in the context of a user accidentally severing his connection, the authorities, or the "SysOp" (system operator) silencing someone during an online exchange or his computer being crashed by something.

The full sequence, for full effect, is 

  +++ATH
  NO CARRIER

a memorial to one of the first really intrusive software patents. This use is technically incorrect, as "+++" is typed by the user to then allow them to enter modem commands, such as ATH (hangup), and is usually not visible on screen.

A popular alternative is to insert gibberish characters before the message 

  %^%@13#^$3@#$*^&^NO CARRIER

in an attempt to represent the jumble of nonsense characters read by older modems, especially before good error-correction, due to line noise, such as that caused by a regular telephone extension being lifted on the same line at either end of the connection. Noise often caused modems to lose track of the carrier signal, severing the connection and causing the NO CARRIER text to appear.

^H^H^H^H

^H represents the key combination control-h, which on Linux/UNIX systems types a backspace. On a misconfigured terminal, the backspace key will sometimes actually print ^H instead of deleting a character. This can lead to embarrassing admissions when a word a user means to delete is left in a message followed by a series of ^H's. Jokes are often made on Slashdot in reference to this bug^H^H^Hfeature. These jokes provide a funny way for users to reveal their true thoughts and to make subtle comments. The convention is described by the Jargon file as "writing under erasure"; it is akin to using the <del> tag in HTML.

A more concise alternative sometimes seen is ^W, which is the shortcut to delete the previous word in the Berkeley Unix terminal line discipline. One ^W can replace a whole string of ^H's. This shortcut has also made it into Emacs and Vi text editors. For really embarrassing blunders, ^U (kill line) can outdo a whole line of ^W.

A recent variant is to prefix a word with $sys$, as a reference to the 2005 Sony CD copy protection controversy.

Older teletypes did not have a backspace and used # for erase, and @ for kill line.

MS-DOS uses H and W as hotkeys for many of its terminal programs, ^ (meaning CTRL) and H for a letter, or W for a word.

Buffering

"Buffering" is a response to any topic related to streaming media, particularly RealPlayer. The post features a sentence or paragraph broken by "...BUFFERING...", or an an incomplete paragraph ended by this string, imitating the frequent pauses common while playing streaming media.

Search and Replace

Sometimes, a post or quote from an article can be written vaguely enough that it could easily refer to something else. While the target of the article is explicitly stated elsewhere, some Slashdotters use search and replacement syntax to describe the switching of one concept to another, usually to make the original article more amusing.

"Just s/WMD/DNF/ and maybe they'll come up with something!"

These types of expressions are also used in a follow-up comment as a way to fix a typo or other minor mistake in the users previous comment. For instance, if the user writes:

"Go check gttp://www.wikipedia.org"

The user may reply with:

"s/gttp/http/"

It is also common to see variations that are commonly used in Vi, such as "s/gttp/http/g" which means to search and replace multiple occurrences.

Windows Vista System Requirements

Frequently (as of early 2006), when a computer or component is announced or released that is above a standard PC component, power-wise, it is asked: "Yeah, but can it run Vista?" This is intended to ridicule Windows Vista's extreme system requirements for running several new features, such as the revised GUI, as well as allude to the "Does it run Linux?" running gag.

Slashdot Poll

The non-scientific Slashdot poll is usually updated a few times a month and polls Slashdotters on an array of technical and non-technical questions. On occasions when the poll goes for an extended time without an update snide remarks are sometimes posted about the need for a new poll.

The CowboyNeal option

Jon Pater, known in Slashdot by the handle CowboyNeal, is the frequent target of jokes. Until recently nearly all Slashdot polls contained what is called a "CowboyNeal" option, where one of the poll options is either "CowboyNeal" or some variant. See CowboyNeal.

You insensitive clod!

A common usage of this is in polls where a poll option accuses the person who framed the poll for giving an inadequate set of options. For example a poll on favorite genres of music might have as the last option, "I'm deaf, you insensitive clod."

The phrase appeared in the 7 May 2000 Simpsons episode Last Tap Dance in Springfield. In the episode, the phrase is used when Professor Frink makes a pair of self-tap-dancing shoes for Lisa. After she dances, he points out that they were really in the "off" position, and that she had tap-danced by herself. Homer replies, "What are you talking about, Professor Frink? They're clearly in the 'on' position. See? 'On'." Professor Frink then says, "I was merely trying to spare the girl's feelings, you insensitive clod."

A much earlier example of the phrase appeared in the Calvin and Hobbes comic on February 14, 1986. This is documented in the LinuxQuestions.org Wiki. The earliest usage of the phrase on Usenet occurs in January 1991.

This phrase was also frequently used in MAD Magazine.

However, the earliest known use of the expression is in Eugene O'Neill's Pulitzer-winning 1928 play, Strange Interlude, in which Edmund Darrell describes his son as "an insensitive clod".

Example posts

External links

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