Slashdot Mirror
Engineers Make Good Terrorists?
An anonymous reader writes "Engineers' focus and attention to details, along with their perceived lack of social skills, make them ideal targets to be recruited as terrorists, according to EETimes. Planning skills make engineers good 'field operatives' was written up by Raphael Perl, who heads the Action against Terrorism Unit of Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He offers that 'Engineers ideally make excellent strategic planners, and they make excellent field operatives. They think differently from how other people think.' That may sound like a stereotype, but Perl claims that 'because of those traits, terrorist groups actively recruit engineers.' He says that Al-Qaeda has widely acknowledged that a significant number of the group's top leadership had engineering backgrounds." This is the second time in just a few months that engineers have been likened to terrorists.
Since Slashdot isn't going to open a thread to discuss the new display system I must post to this thread about some of the issues. First and foremost, the "I am willing to help test Slashdot's New Discussion System" checkbox does not completely revert the older version so my critiques are not solely about voluntarily beta testing the new system. Here are the issues:
*The keymapping on '/' (to move the thread toolbar) is the same as the quick search in Firefox. Any quick search will move the toolbar around in an annoying fashion.
*The margins are too wide except for those who have wide screen monitors*
*The 'more' functionality is fundamentally broken. It loads new entries by date instead of the logical position in a thread. Individual threads should be fully populated or at least have a 'click here for more entries' option. For old stories you shouldn't have to search the page again from top to bottom for the more darkly shaded newer comments after you click on more.*
*The in page reply makes me want to cry. This isn't Digg or YouTube!*
*The parent and reply buttons are wasting huge amounts of bandwidth. For example, for one entry we have 479 bytes wasted:
<span id="reply_link_22953942" class="nbutton"><p><b><a href="//mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=510232&op=Reply&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=22953942" onclick="replyTo(22953942); return false;" >Reply to This</a></b></p></span> <span class="nbutton"><p><b><a href="//mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=510232&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=22953696" onclick="return selectParent(22953696)">Parent</a></b></p></span>
Now I know people are always going to complain about any change in the system. That is to be expected. But these changes are too much and since the system doesn't revert back to a safer format, they are extremely disruptive. I recommend that this update is rolled back completely until it is implemented better. Especially the damn '/' issue. That is killing me!
PS: are the <ul> and <li> tags now broken?
Just wanted to say that I'm glad you like my sig.