Slashdot Mirror
Record-Setting Astronaut Retires from NASA (space.com)
Record-setting NASA astronaut Scott Kelly retired from NASA on Friday, after spending more than 520 days in outer space, spread across four space missions -- two space shuttle flights and two recent missions on the orbiting International Space Station. The 52-year-old astronaut's last visit to the space station lasted more than a year, "a profound challenge for all involved," Kelly says, "and it gave me a unique perspective and a lot of time to reflect on what my next step should be on our continued journey to help further our capabilities in space and on Earth." Kelly's time in space started with a 1999 mission on the space shuttle to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and he's since spent more time in space than any other American. According to Space.com, NASA and Kelly have both said that his long-duration visits are the first baby steps towards a manned missions to Mars.
The lack of Unicode support is a good thing. Look at other sites that support Unicode. All it means is spam in Chinese and Russian, plus a bunch of stupid Japanese-style kaomoji and emoji. Slashdot doesn't need stupidity like that. Anything worth expressing here can be done using the ISO-8859-1 characters.
There are much bigger problems to deal with first. One is how Slashdot still makes causes HTTP requests to be made to "Taboola" and "ScoreCoard Research" and "Janrain" and "ntv.io". I don't know what any of them are, but they sure as fuck sound like attempts to track us! Over a month ago whipslash said something about cleaning up those trackers, but they still seem to be present! It shouldn't be that hard to remove them!
Another huge problem is the bad moderation. It's routine to see perfectly good comments modded down for no good reason. This happens so often that it's necessary to browse Slashdot at -1 just to see all of the good comments that were wrongly modded down! That, of course, means that the whole moderation system becomes useless. The metamod system clearly isn't helping, because this problem continues to happen, and may even be getting worse.
The posting limits are out of hand, too. At at time when Slashdot's community is dwindling in number and discussion is needed more than ever before, the stupid posting limits actually prevent anything resembling meaningful discussion! If you do attempt to engage in meaningful discussion, which necessarily involves some back-and-forth commenting, you'll quickly hit the posting limits and be forced to wait. Once that happens one or both parties will lose interest and move on to something else, likely not involving Slashdot.
Instead of adding more useless functionality like Unicode support, I'd like to see them start stripping away the crap. Get rid of the ad trackers. Get rid of the broken moderation system. Get rid of the even more broken metamoderation system. Get rid of the stupid posting limits.