This discussion has brought up an interesting point, mass-monk psychology. It wasn't obvious to me that many people would downvote a node to find out its rep, but this appears to be a real phenomanon. Personally, I would like to see the following information added to the Voting Guidelines (or 'How should I spend my votes?') FAQ entry:

<nbsp>

Downvoting for the purpose of finding the node's reputation rating is strongly discouraged, because it is unfair to the poster and tends to penalize nodes that would otherwise have neutral reputations.

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-DA
> perl -MPOSIX -le '$ENV{TZ}="EST";print ctime(1000000000)'
Sat Sep  8 20:46:40 2001
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