Slashdot Mirror
Designer Seeds Thought To Be Latest Target By Chinese
An anonymous reader writes "Economic espionage is nothing new but one of the biggest areas being targeted now is agriculture. Here's a story about a FBI investigation to track down theft of seeds from research farms. 'The case of the missing corn seeds first broke in May 2011 when a manager at a DuPont research farm in east-central Iowa noticed a man on his knees, digging up the field. When confronted, the man, Mo Hailong, who was with his colleague Wang Lei, appeared flushed. Mr. Mo told the manager that he worked for the University of Iowa and was traveling to a conference nearby. When the manager paused to answered his cellphone, the two men sped off in a car, racing through a ditch to get away, federal authorities said.'"
It's really hard to feel all that much pity for DuPont. They have a long history of being enormous pricks.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I propose that we boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta.
Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta
Commentors - only discuss Beta
Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.
Captcha: fuckbeta
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Who is this "we" you're talking about and why should the rest of us care where you're going?
Good bye.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The Chinese have had an open field day stealing tech and killing of Western businesses since our beloved Bill Clinton opened the doors to them. Those roks are now coming in to roost, USA is over and screwed by its own doing. Manchurian Candidate - for real.
In other news, slashdot beta sucks. More at 11.
Those Chinese spies could steal the slashdot beta code!
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Serious question: Did the same people who developed the Beta Digg that destroyed that site develop Slashdot Beta? Because it reminds me of the exact same site-destroying arc. And when Slashdot goes down, where will I get my daily hyperbolic Bitcoin article?
Slashdot Beta = Unity desktop. 'nuff said.
Threats are one thing. Action is another Is it possible for a website redesign to be so bad that people actually stop reading it?
Yes. I used to read Yahoo Sports every day. The latest redesign was so bad that it was just unreadable. I no longer bother with it.
Slashdot is heading down the same path.
Slashdot refuses to let my other account post anymore FUCK BETAs today. So I logged into this account I created 10+ years ago (May 08, 2003 was my last post with it).
A major war between modern powers could be more effectively "won" with biological weapons than nuclear ones. Come up with something that will decimate the primary crop of the enemy nation (or even specific variations on that crop which might be planted en masse by Monsanto) and you severely weaken the country.
Which begs the question, what fuckwad insisted on doing so?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
*I* am Sparticus.
Fork Slashdot to a new site, move on and leave the dregs to remember the good old days and salt the ground with their bitter tears.
Oh wait, we've already done that...
There are many of us who have been providing *constructive* criticism for *many months* only to have it fall on deaf ears. Now that the beta is being forced on users in a graduated rollout you're going to be hearing these complaints more and more often until either:
1. The Slashdot admins capitulate and concede the beta was a giant mistake.
2. Slashdot Beta has functionality and usability parity with the standard site.
3. Those of us who absolutely hate the new site leave and never come back.
4. Comments complaining are stifled and silenced.
I'm thinking #3 is the most likely possibility.
I, for one, am looking forward to the inevitable
I agree... I prefer this layout but possibly I'm just being stubborn. Still, I don't like being forced to change. I like to change because I want to change not because someone tells me to change.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I see it more akin to Microsoft Bob.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Buck Feta
but the lowest common denomenator isn't interested in slashdot anyway so they are dumping real users for uninterested hypothetical users
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
1. Way too much vertical white space, which is more precious than dehydrated unicorn testciles thanks to 16:9 screens.
2. A More Button. WTF! The bandwidth for text is cheap. Give me the whole converstaion.
3. Coonversation context is lost because I can't see summarised comments nested under modded up comments.
4. Thick borders. 1 pixel is enough.
46137
Every comment I've seen on the new design is negative. Every single one... that just never happens, it's mind blowing. There should be a few people taking the opposite side, just for the sake of taking the opposite side, but this thing is so wretched that nobody wants to defend it, not even anonymously. Is this part of some shady corporate ploy to destroy Slashdot, sell off the ping-pong tables and take a tax write-off? Or are the new managers just not very bright?
Beta must die a horrible death. Delete it from the hard drives, degauss the drives, run the drives through a shredder, throw the scrap into a smelting furnace, cast into ingots, and then store the ingots with the waste from Fukushima.
Every comment I've seen on the new design is negative. Every single one... that just never happens, it's mind blowing. There should be a few people taking the opposite side, just for the sake of taking the opposite side, but this thing is so wretched that nobody wants to defend it, not even anonymously.
Well, I personally think that the much needed face lift's lower contrast text makes the content blend in much more nicely with the background. The larger font also keeps too much information from being displayed at once. Less stories per page will make dupes less noticeable too. Personally, I can't find a single thing not wrong with it.
It's particularly curious given that 'don't pay for any web devs, coast along in bare-minimum maintenance mode, and ride it as long as it lasts' is always an available strategy, unless you have somebody breathing down your neck and demanding magic ROI levels.
Honestly, that's what surprises me more than anything when I see some web property being churned without obvious reason. Unless the backend is utterly fucked (in which case churning the frontend is Not where you should be spending your time) letting it coast along on commodified and encheapened 'cloud' VMs from one vendor or another is cheap, and can be drawn down at almost a moment's notice without having to hold a firesale on your datacenter gear. Given that, watching somebody who appears to have no clue what they want to accomplish voluntarily paying additional dev and/or designer salaries when they could just let the property coast always makes me wonder about that person or organization's sanity.
This site has been something special to a number of readers and posters here, and seeing the place go down in flames like Digg did when they ignored their users' feedback is a highly suboptimal emotional experience.
Saying that turns the place into the kindergarten you wanted to avoid.
Somewhat surprisingly, given its land area and population, China has total shit for arable land. Obviously more than zero; and a long history of intensive, relatively high-yield agriculture; but huge parts of the country are unsuitable in various ways (and various incidents of pollution, desertification, aquifer overdraw, and other mismanagement haven't helped).
Given that, along with the nigh-universal tendency of people to eat more meat (far less efficient per calorie than stuff lower on the food chain) if they get wealthier, and to rise up in revolution like they have nothing to lose (because they don't) if food supplies are dangerously constrained, doing absolutely everything they possibly can to keep agricultural yields high, and preferably rising, is probably about the sanest policy the Chinese government could be pursuing.
Sure, hypersonic missiles and supercavitating torpedoes and fancy fighter planes and stuff are good for dick waving, keeping Americans at a distance while rattling the sabre at Taiwan, and general jingoism; but it's not as though anybody outside of China wants to start a land war in Asia and directly slug it out with the PLA on Chinese soil, so all that stuff is really pretty secondary.
1.2 billion people (including the ones who you've provided with guns, and their families and friends) who are starting to see more and more of the weekly grocery list slipping beyond their buying power? Now that is what has any sensible leader (whether of a despotism, a monarchy, a republic, a democracy, doesn't matter) wake up screaming and drenched in cold sweat night after night.
There is FUtility in spamming the news until you get your way.
The usual Beta-feedback page will be posted a few times, and mods will happen. If you don't like it after that, who are you blaming? We've been here so many times...
The new managers don't use Slashdot themselves, hence probably don't understand the reason for all the disdain. The best thing they could do right now is write off the beta exercise as a failure and stick with the classic version. Showing that they're actually listening to the (remaining) Slashdot faithful would be a good sign.
Account abandoned. I can't fucking spell for shit and Slashdot doesn't even allow time-limited edits of posts. Plus you'
Just looked at this article in /. beta. After comments are nested in a few levels, the text column is so narrow there is only one word per line! Like this:
And
that's
an
excuse
for
this
rampant
idiocy?
Because
last
I
heard
the
mature
approach
would
be
to
provide
constructive
criticism,
Holy Crap! I just tried Beta. It's pretty bad. I wouldn't call it as horrifying as some, but it is really quite bad from a design perspective.
But here's my main complaint: You can't read comments without Javascript enabled. Javascript is really cool, it's great for creating dynamic web pages. Things like OpenStreetMap have made my life fundamentally better when doing dynamic content perusal.
But there's a gap there; reading a comment tree is not dynamic content perusal. I click my desired mod level, then read the entire tree without any changes. Occasionally I pop open a new tab to reply to an existing comment, but that is rare enough that it can be done with static pages.
I don't enable Javascript by default, and I don't enable it on sites that don't need it. It's a security thing, like not leaving services running that you don't need. It's also about not chewing up memory and CPU for dancing baloney.
The value of Slashdot is the community comments. That is why I come here. It is why I spend so much time carefully crafting and editing comments that I hope will add to the experience for others (and often censoring my more bile-laden knee-jerk responses that would make it a more combustible environment).
Like so many members of the Slashdot community, I put a lot into making this a place that people like to visit. And I am happy for Dice to make a profit selling ad space on the comments that my community creates, in exchange for playing host. That's a pretty good trade all around. Don't fuck it up.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Please take us with you. Serious. Give us an alternative site and many shall follow.
Here is Dice's "Contact Us" page. Everybody be sure to call them tomorrow using whatever numbers from that page you can get to ring. Tell every darn receptionist in every darn one of Dice's holdings, along with anyone you can get them to connect you to, that the Slashdot beta is terrible and you won't shut up until it goes away. Fax them a well-illustrated complaint or two or three. Send them a choice letter via snail mail, along with whatever memorabilia you wish.
They keep soliciting our feedback, they can get our feedback, right where it counts.
Spread the word by mentioning this in every article's comments.
The most obvious contact points are:
Dice Holdings Inc.
1040 Avenue of the Americas, 8th Floor
New York, NY 10018
T: 212-725-6550
F: 212-725-6559
Slashdot
594 Howard St Suite 300
San Francisco, CA 94105
Tel: +1-877-433-5638
www.slashdot.com
I just got the "hey go check out beta" alert. I figured it would be the same with with different underhood. WOW this is shit. And sure enough, I had to enable scripting. Bro, it's fucking COMMENTS. It doesn't need java, or script, or javafuckingscript.
This could be the death of this site. Sad. Been browsing this since early college.
A person directed the Slashdot redesign.
Who is he?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
There is FUtility in spamming the news until you get your way.
The usual Beta-feedback page will be posted a few times, and mods will happen. If you don't like it after that, who are you blaming? We've been here so many times...
the community has been trying to give positive feed back and they just push forward a bad design anyway. This is a move that will hurt the slashdot brand and community.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Ditto! Slashdot went to hell when it was sold. Let's make a new site with a similar moderation process and start porting across. Is anyone interested in setting up a kickstarter to fund the infrastructure?
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
I'm going to skip writing them as others can more eloquently say what the problems are than I can. I certainly hope you're right.
If you do write them again, perhaps you can add this: I think they're biggest mistake was saying that they were going to force us onto the beta without rolling out all the major features first. Only after good feedback of all major features should they say that they are going to force us onto the beta... and then they should give us time to adapt. There are too many things wrong or not implemented to give the premature news that we're going to move whether we like it or not.
For the time being, I'm going to still boycott just to drive my point home.
-- Common Joe
Slashdot Valentines Day Massacre: Boycott Slashdot because "Fuck Beta!": February 10 - 17
And Support Okian Warrior's Alternate Slashdot Idea!