One of the main factors that cause cable television bills to increase is Channel Providers raising costs on cable companies. ESPN has been notorious for raising rates over the years. If the cable company gets bigger it has better negotiating power to maintain current rates (what broadcaster is going to loose 3 million subscribers by pissing off the cable company in negotiations). I doubt that the current rates will decrease, but it could stabilize costs some. This is not to mention that Time Warner actually has worse consumer reviews than Comcast. Time Warner customers would likely see an improvement.
That's a problem the cable companies created for themselves by not allowing ala carte cable packages or allowing customers to choose exactly which channels they want, and pay just for those. ESPN raises the price of their channel by $2/month? That's fine, that will get passed along transparently to the customer. Then ESPN would have to deal with the repercussions, if any.
And no, I wouldn't buy any argument that this system would be too difficult or there are too many technological boundaries. Given the amount of money that has been thrown at the cable companies, they could easily solve this... if they wanted to. But they don't want to.
Comcast was allowed to 'close the loop' by purchasing NBC (content provider + cable company/ISP)... I fail to see why our regulatory bodies would even pretend to do their jobs and block something like this.
That was the unholy act, a merger of Comcast and TWC is tame, peanuts compared to allowing content provider to merge with a cable/ISP monopoly.
Remember these tards say that "its got to get colder to get warmer...." (the Warmists of course who Im talking about)
You realize the reason why the east is going through record low temperatures and precipitation is because the west is going through record dry spells and heat waves, yes?
All those storms that were supposed to hit the west coast got pushed into the Arctic instead, gaining power and losing heat.
You can't just look up and say "weather here is fine." There's a larger picture you have to see.
It's the same look I get when I complain to my store managers in Florida about it being oppressively hot in Boston when it's 'only' 96 degrees in August
Yeah, but is it a dry or humid heat? Where I like 96 degrees is hot, but it wouldn't be unbearably hot (except to seniors I suppose), but we don't deal with the humidity like the east and southeast gets.
So because a communist likes an idea, it must automatically be bad and we should oppose it on principle, because communists are bad and evil in every way?
So, where does this mushroom come from? It comes from Europe, meaning it is NOT invasive there.
Not by the typical definition of invasive, as species are not evenly spread throughout the whole continent. A species can be both native to one part of a continent, and invasive in another part.
But you're right, it's time to move on, which is why I'm asking: "Are there any tech sites athat aren't so USA focused?"
You greatly exaggerate the USA-focus of the site. Out of the 15 stories currently on the front page, four have any sort of US focus, and two of those ("Bing Censoring Chinese Language Search Results For Users In the US" and "ICANN's Cozy Relationship With the US Must End, Says EU") are of great international importance and could hardly be called "US stories." One of the others ("Iconic Predator-Prey Study In Peril") is more science-in-general related even though it takes place in the USA, and the last ("Majority of Young American Adults Think Astrology Is a Science") is the only story that has a solely-US angle.
There already is a gender neutral pronoun. It's called "they".
That is only appropriate in the plural though. When you are talking about an unspecified individual, they is incorrect. And it is impersonal, implying the man or woman is an inanimate object unworthy of a gender.
Problem is, a decent amount of the chronic homeless population fall within two categories. The people who actually want to remain homeless (yes, it's true), and the people who have various mental conditions that make it unlikely to be able to get a job, much less stay in real housing. We can't force people to take meds, as a society we seem to have decided not to forcibly institutionalize crazy people either. So they become homeless, pretty much forever.
I remember one time I jumped the Fruitvale BART turnstyle right in front of a cop, made eye contact, and kept walking. He didn't feel I was unethical enough to write a ticket.
You got damned lucky, BART police, especially in Oakland, love to jump on people. Gate-jumping is not something I recommend most people do.
Isn't it strange, that every anti-beta post is now modded -1, even when the majority of the users is against beta? And off-topic is wrong, anti-beta is on-topic, because this is a slashdot article, and it will be displayed in the beta website, if slashdot decides to abandon the classic one.
I don't think it's strange at all. Most users don't like the beta, but they also don't like each and every discussion about anything on Slashdot being hijacked by the anti-betas. So your average user might see an actual story, think "wonder what other people think about it?" and scroll to the comments.. oh, it's the same anti-beta stuff as the day before, and the day before that. After awhile, you get sick of it.
You see, single-issue crusaders are inherently annoying to the average person; the people who think THEIR cause is so incredibly important that nothing else could be considered important. Nothing else could be considered worthy of time. If you're not spending all your energy on their cause, then you're part of the problem, you just don't "get it."
Tactics are important. How you are seen is important. Focus -too- much on your issue and you'll start to get backlash from people who are perhaps not as committed as you. The Occupy Movement (a few chapters of them anyway) found this out to their sorrow. Protest in front of BofA about bank bailouts and foreclosures? Sure, most people are fine with that. Shit on the lawn of the park and make it unusable for others? Break a few windows of local businesses who had nothing to do with Wall Street? Make sure no one else can use the public space 24/7? That's when many others' patience starts to wear thin.
Saying "have you heard the beta sucks?" "Beta beta beta" while interrupting other conversations will garner you a bit of backlash, not from site staff but from regular users who want to have tech-related conversations who don't need or want to be told about the shitty beta for the 10th time that day. The rest of the world doesn't stop while Slashdot has its beta.
After all, who the hell are you to complain about the beta when kids are dying of AIDS in Africa! Hell, people are probably dying of AIDS in your town! Shouldn't you be turning the computer off and volunteering to help them? Do you not realize that it's the most important thing ever? How could you be so insensitive? Now imagine that on every story comments area. Page after page of it. The relevancy to the site doesn't matter, it's the repetition for every person who has already gotten the message which grates over time.
People come here for user-generated content, and the beta eviscerates that function pretty cleanly. Even the official dev feedback notes that the user comment feature is an afterthought.
Yet many I know are having a bit of a pro-anonymity backlash, and are preferring to pay for everything with cash now. As someone who buys almost all his food fresh from the local open-air market (yes, even when it's -15C, that's what hats and coats are for), anything apart from cash simply isn't even an option.
Only a fool discounts any method of payment. Only the most foolish of fools restricts themselves to one method.
Maybe. But the other hand, not everyone can or should come up with a credit card paying system. If you're a farmer and someone buys a tomato for $0.40, credit card transaction fees very quickly add up and make no sense.
Luddites were those who opposed new technology because they were afraid they would lose their jobs if the technology was put into place. That clearly does not apply to people who oppose a new design for a website.
Beta-hates are those who oppose the new website because they are afraid they'd lose their website if the technology was put into place. I think it's an apt comparison; sometimes there's a good reason to be opposed to a technical change.
It's 'don't give us a pro-forma pat on the head while going full steam ahead'. I've yet to see anyone clearly articulate why there's a need for a sweeping upgrade.
The best I could find was Soulskill's explanation, paraphrased, that people hate it when sites don't change appreciably over time. That if you look at the BBC website five years ago and now... vastly different. He said Slashdot classic was probably fine for now, but in five years it would look embarrassingly outdated. I didn't really buy that, and he also mentioned something about how UX research is transforming lots of websites and interfaces, which led to 10 people pouncing on that pointing out that "UX" is the new buzzword and fad and has led to many horrible horrible user interfaces of late.
The mentioned thread starts here. I may have missed a few others, but this is the only time I've seen a developer (granted, not a designer of the beta site) try to interact in a discussion with the users who are up in arms. You have a few FuckBeta users, but also a number of people who were trying to have a quality debate.
They have voiced it already and the engineer team is working on the fixes.
It needs a lot more than fixes. At the moment there's nothing worth salvaging from the current beta, as point for point it's inferior to the current site. I'm willing to give them more time and see what they come up, but at the moment there's no reason to think it's going to get appreciably better, just as none of the major problems have been fixed since the beta's unveiling several months ago. Most of the people who hate the beta just want the site to be left alone, since they can see it only going downhill.
That might be so, but as someone who has been here almost since the beginning -- Slashdot community has always had a vocal negative reaction to change.
That's probably because so many here have seen so many projects destroyed or greatly damaged by change for change's sake, seeing so many applications inflicted with the "let's just change" meme and end up being far less usable than the previous version. Gnome 3, Windows 8, almost any version of MS office after 2003. Now we get Slashdot Beta, which has no advantages and many many critical disadvantages over the current Slashdot system.
Others have pointed out the "when XP came we really hated it" as being false. Sure, a few people might have said "man, I just want to stick with ME," but most people, Slashdotters included, saw it as a great improvement. Same with the transition from Vista to 7. Same with the mobile phones -- that wasn't greatly panned either.
That said, while I'm no UX expert (and before anyone asks, no, I wasn't one of the designers of the Beta site), I do think all websites, even sites like Slashdot, need to evolve. You may disagree on the particulars -- and clearly, a lot of people do -- but I'm surprised so many attribute that to malice.
I think people are turning to explanations of malice because nothing else is making sense to them. You will hear a few refrains over and over again from the users of Slashdot here. First, that Slashdot users are not the audience, they are the content creators. Slashdot can not survive by duplicating Reddit, Digg, et all. It survives because no other site on the Internet has the sort of discussion and moderation support that Slashdot has. This could be a bitter pill for Slashdot editors to swallow, as they might be coming in with the misunderstanding that it's the links and editor comments that bring people in. I'm sorry, but it's the fellow users that matter here.
It's for that reason that you shouldn't be looking at the interface of CNN, or the BBC, or these other web 2.0 portals that Dice seems to be trying to create. Slashdot has different needs, and when users see things like 25% of the userbase being shoved into a beta where the comment system isn't finished, it makes us think the developers don't understand their users. They don't understand what is actually making the site great. The comment system, moderation... things like that are the first that should be finished, they have to be perfect.
I think I disagree about the UX comments. First, I think "UX" is a suspect field full of land mines, and has led to absolute disasters of interfaces recently -- Windows 8, Gnome 3, most of the relaunched redesigned websites out there. Change to make something better is fine. Change just to change is terrible. Change that makes a site worse, with the hope that then the incremental improvements will bring the site back up to what it once was... that is a recipe for losing your subscriber base. When Slashdot goes through a major change, it has to be better than the previous version. Right now, the beta is very clearly different, ok. But it's also very clearly worse and a major step back. The reasons people feel this to be the case are well-documented, whether it's excessive whitespace or how every comment is expanded out, to the "load more" nonsense. I actually don't have a big problem with Classic Slashdot's user interface. It's clean and unobtrusive and uncluttered and has a lightweight visual which should be what websites should aim to be. In five years, will I think Wikipedia's interface looks dated and ugly? Google's? Absolutely not. THOSE are the "user experiences" that are worth chasing. Yahoo's? In five years everyone WILL say "what were they thinking?" Same goes for the BBC. Slashdot Beta. I might even say the current NY Times website. Despite being a (current) Good product, Youtube will need another redesign. What do all these bad sites have in common? They aren't good -now-, and it's because they're chasing the latest UX fad (Hey, that floating bar at the top of the screen: another UX fad that no end users like, but it sure pleases the company higher-ups!). Sometimes they look flashy and slick, but that is a very very short term gain. Flashy and slick just become an annoyance if the site is harder to make actual use of than before. If it's slower, if it takes more clicks to do what you used to before, if options are missing that you once had, if the wrong content is emphasized.
Slashdot doesn't need to change just to change. Users hate that FAR more than "this website looks the same way it did five years ago."
I know the comment section is what it's all about, but seriously though, you are given a channel to provide your feedback. no need to go postal on them. the fact that they are actually redoing the website and providing feedback channels indicates that they are well aware of the need for readers. it's in their interest to do what you want. but you don't have to throw a fucking fit about it.
I think it's worth considering that if Slashdot users hadn't started a revolt and boycott, they wouldn't have been listen to, as all the feedback that the users had gotten from the administration so far was that the beta was going forward, maybe with a minor tweak or two. That was unacceptable, it would have killed the site deader than Digg, so extreme measures were justified. For the first time, we're hearing the first rumblings of "maybe the site requires more than a bugfix before we go live." Is that a total coincidence?
Crappy? I think the current Slashdot site works really, really well (on regular browsers anyway. I hear mobile browsing is unpleasant), and this ajax implementation is great. It certainly works much better than it did 5, 8, 10 years ago. It's sortof the reason why I don't see the point of the beta -- the site isn't broken.
I think the "story" tag was supposed to have a use at one point, when Slashdot hired Jon Katz and others to create original non-story editorials. But now even book and movie reviews are links to other sites, so everything is a third-party story now.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Only young free men were allowed to compete (i.e. no women, no old people and no slaves)
2. Only people from Greece and greek colonies competed
3. The men competed nude
I'd be ok with those rules for the new Olympics.
4. Women were forbidden to watch the games under penalty of death.
Oh now that's just a dirty tease!
One of the main factors that cause cable television bills to increase is Channel Providers raising costs on cable companies. ESPN has been notorious for raising rates over the years. If the cable company gets bigger it has better negotiating power to maintain current rates (what broadcaster is going to loose 3 million subscribers by pissing off the cable company in negotiations). I doubt that the current rates will decrease, but it could stabilize costs some. This is not to mention that Time Warner actually has worse consumer reviews than Comcast. Time Warner customers would likely see an improvement.
That's a problem the cable companies created for themselves by not allowing ala carte cable packages or allowing customers to choose exactly which channels they want, and pay just for those. ESPN raises the price of their channel by $2/month? That's fine, that will get passed along transparently to the customer. Then ESPN would have to deal with the repercussions, if any.
And no, I wouldn't buy any argument that this system would be too difficult or there are too many technological boundaries. Given the amount of money that has been thrown at the cable companies, they could easily solve this... if they wanted to. But they don't want to.
Comcast was allowed to 'close the loop' by purchasing NBC (content provider + cable company/ISP)... I fail to see why our regulatory bodies would even pretend to do their jobs and block something like this.
That was the unholy act, a merger of Comcast and TWC is tame, peanuts compared to allowing content provider to merge with a cable/ISP monopoly.
Remember these tards say that "its got to get colder to get warmer...." (the Warmists of course who Im talking about)
You realize the reason why the east is going through record low temperatures and precipitation is because the west is going through record dry spells and heat waves, yes?
All those storms that were supposed to hit the west coast got pushed into the Arctic instead, gaining power and losing heat.
You can't just look up and say "weather here is fine." There's a larger picture you have to see.
Yes it is, just like almost anything else you'll hear on Art Bell's comedy show.
It's the same look I get when I complain to my store managers in Florida about it being oppressively hot in Boston when it's 'only' 96 degrees in August
Yeah, but is it a dry or humid heat? Where I like 96 degrees is hot, but it wouldn't be unbearably hot (except to seniors I suppose), but we don't deal with the humidity like the east and southeast gets.
So because a communist likes an idea, it must automatically be bad and we should oppose it on principle, because communists are bad and evil in every way?
We cant upset his family teaching that the world was not created in 3 days and is only 400 years old...
Man, this world gets younger every day!
So, where does this mushroom come from? It comes from Europe, meaning it is NOT invasive there.
Not by the typical definition of invasive, as species are not evenly spread throughout the whole continent. A species can be both native to one part of a continent, and invasive in another part.
so why are you here?
Inertia.
Slashdot has become really dull lately.
But you're right, it's time to move on, which is why I'm asking: "Are there any tech sites athat aren't so USA focused?"
You greatly exaggerate the USA-focus of the site. Out of the 15 stories currently on the front page, four have any sort of US focus, and two of those ("Bing Censoring Chinese Language Search Results For Users In the US" and "ICANN's Cozy Relationship With the US Must End, Says EU") are of great international importance and could hardly be called "US stories." One of the others ("Iconic Predator-Prey Study In Peril") is more science-in-general related even though it takes place in the USA, and the last ("Majority of Young American Adults Think Astrology Is a Science") is the only story that has a solely-US angle.
There already is a gender neutral pronoun.
It's called "they".
That is only appropriate in the plural though. When you are talking about an unspecified individual, they is incorrect.
And it is impersonal, implying the man or woman is an inanimate object unworthy of a gender.
Just address your damn homelessness problem,
Hahahaha...
Oh, if only it were that easy.
Problem is, a decent amount of the chronic homeless population fall within two categories. The people who actually want to remain homeless (yes, it's true), and the people who have various mental conditions that make it unlikely to be able to get a job, much less stay in real housing. We can't force people to take meds, as a society we seem to have decided not to forcibly institutionalize crazy people either. So they become homeless, pretty much forever.
I remember one time I jumped the Fruitvale BART turnstyle right in front of a cop, made eye contact, and kept walking. He didn't feel I was unethical enough to write a ticket.
You got damned lucky, BART police, especially in Oakland, love to jump on people. Gate-jumping is not something I recommend most people do.
You must not be a black man, I guess.
Isn't it strange, that every anti-beta post is now modded -1, even when the majority of the users is against beta?
And off-topic is wrong, anti-beta is on-topic, because this is a slashdot article, and it will be displayed in the beta website, if slashdot decides to abandon the classic one.
I don't think it's strange at all. Most users don't like the beta, but they also don't like each and every discussion about anything on Slashdot being hijacked by the anti-betas. So your average user might see an actual story, think "wonder what other people think about it?" and scroll to the comments.. oh, it's the same anti-beta stuff as the day before, and the day before that. After awhile, you get sick of it.
You see, single-issue crusaders are inherently annoying to the average person; the people who think THEIR cause is so incredibly important that nothing else could be considered important. Nothing else could be considered worthy of time. If you're not spending all your energy on their cause, then you're part of the problem, you just don't "get it."
Tactics are important. How you are seen is important. Focus -too- much on your issue and you'll start to get backlash from people who are perhaps not as committed as you. The Occupy Movement (a few chapters of them anyway) found this out to their sorrow. Protest in front of BofA about bank bailouts and foreclosures? Sure, most people are fine with that. Shit on the lawn of the park and make it unusable for others? Break a few windows of local businesses who had nothing to do with Wall Street? Make sure no one else can use the public space 24/7? That's when many others' patience starts to wear thin.
Saying "have you heard the beta sucks?" "Beta beta beta" while interrupting other conversations will garner you a bit of backlash, not from site staff but from regular users who want to have tech-related conversations who don't need or want to be told about the shitty beta for the 10th time that day. The rest of the world doesn't stop while Slashdot has its beta.
After all, who the hell are you to complain about the beta when kids are dying of AIDS in Africa! Hell, people are probably dying of AIDS in your town! Shouldn't you be turning the computer off and volunteering to help them? Do you not realize that it's the most important thing ever? How could you be so insensitive? Now imagine that on every story comments area. Page after page of it. The relevancy to the site doesn't matter, it's the repetition for every person who has already gotten the message which grates over time.
People come here for user-generated content, and the beta eviscerates that function pretty cleanly. Even the official dev feedback notes that the user comment feature is an afterthought.
Yet many I know are having a bit of a pro-anonymity backlash, and are preferring to pay for everything with cash now. As someone who buys almost all his food fresh from the local open-air market (yes, even when it's -15C, that's what hats and coats are for), anything apart from cash simply isn't even an option.
Only a fool discounts any method of payment. Only the most foolish of fools restricts themselves to one method.
Maybe. But the other hand, not everyone can or should come up with a credit card paying system. If you're a farmer and someone buys a tomato for $0.40, credit card transaction fees very quickly add up and make no sense.
Luddites were those who opposed new technology because they were afraid they would lose their jobs if the technology was put into place. That clearly does not apply to people who oppose a new design for a website.
Beta-hates are those who oppose the new website because they are afraid they'd lose their website if the technology was put into place. I think it's an apt comparison; sometimes there's a good reason to be opposed to a technical change.
It's 'don't give us a pro-forma pat on the head while going full steam ahead'. I've yet to see anyone clearly articulate why there's a need for a sweeping upgrade.
The best I could find was Soulskill's explanation, paraphrased, that people hate it when sites don't change appreciably over time. That if you look at the BBC website five years ago and now... vastly different. He said Slashdot classic was probably fine for now, but in five years it would look embarrassingly outdated. I didn't really buy that, and he also mentioned something about how UX research is transforming lots of websites and interfaces, which led to 10 people pouncing on that pointing out that "UX" is the new buzzword and fad and has led to many horrible horrible user interfaces of late.
The mentioned thread starts here. I may have missed a few others, but this is the only time I've seen a developer (granted, not a designer of the beta site) try to interact in a discussion with the users who are up in arms. You have a few FuckBeta users, but also a number of people who were trying to have a quality debate.
They have voiced it already and the engineer team is working on the fixes.
It needs a lot more than fixes. At the moment there's nothing worth salvaging from the current beta, as point for point it's inferior to the current site. I'm willing to give them more time and see what they come up, but at the moment there's no reason to think it's going to get appreciably better, just as none of the major problems have been fixed since the beta's unveiling several months ago. Most of the people who hate the beta just want the site to be left alone, since they can see it only going downhill.
That might be so, but as someone who has been here almost since the beginning -- Slashdot community has always had a vocal negative reaction to change.
That's probably because so many here have seen so many projects destroyed or greatly damaged by change for change's sake, seeing so many applications inflicted with the "let's just change" meme and end up being far less usable than the previous version. Gnome 3, Windows 8, almost any version of MS office after 2003. Now we get Slashdot Beta, which has no advantages and many many critical disadvantages over the current Slashdot system.
Others have pointed out the "when XP came we really hated it" as being false. Sure, a few people might have said "man, I just want to stick with ME," but most people, Slashdotters included, saw it as a great improvement. Same with the transition from Vista to 7. Same with the mobile phones -- that wasn't greatly panned either.
That said, while I'm no UX expert (and before anyone asks, no, I wasn't one of the designers of the Beta site), I do think all websites, even sites like Slashdot, need to evolve. You may disagree on the particulars -- and clearly, a lot of people do -- but I'm surprised so many attribute that to malice.
I think people are turning to explanations of malice because nothing else is making sense to them.
You will hear a few refrains over and over again from the users of Slashdot here. First, that Slashdot users are not the audience, they are the content creators. Slashdot can not survive by duplicating Reddit, Digg, et all. It survives because no other site on the Internet has the sort of discussion and moderation support that Slashdot has. This could be a bitter pill for Slashdot editors to swallow, as they might be coming in with the misunderstanding that it's the links and editor comments that bring people in. I'm sorry, but it's the fellow users that matter here.
It's for that reason that you shouldn't be looking at the interface of CNN, or the BBC, or these other web 2.0 portals that Dice seems to be trying to create. Slashdot has different needs, and when users see things like 25% of the userbase being shoved into a beta where the comment system isn't finished, it makes us think the developers don't understand their users. They don't understand what is actually making the site great. The comment system, moderation... things like that are the first that should be finished, they have to be perfect.
I think I disagree about the UX comments. First, I think "UX" is a suspect field full of land mines, and has led to absolute disasters of interfaces recently -- Windows 8, Gnome 3, most of the relaunched redesigned websites out there. Change to make something better is fine. Change just to change is terrible. Change that makes a site worse, with the hope that then the incremental improvements will bring the site back up to what it once was... that is a recipe for losing your subscriber base. When Slashdot goes through a major change, it has to be better than the previous version. Right now, the beta is very clearly different, ok. But it's also very clearly worse and a major step back. The reasons people feel this to be the case are well-documented, whether it's excessive whitespace or how every comment is expanded out, to the "load more" nonsense. I actually don't have a big problem with Classic Slashdot's user interface. It's clean and unobtrusive and uncluttered and has a lightweight visual which should be what websites should aim to be. In five years, will I think Wikipedia's interface looks dated and ugly? Google's? Absolutely not. THOSE are the "user experiences" that are worth chasing. Yahoo's? In five years everyone WILL say "what were they thinking?" Same goes for the BBC. Slashdot Beta. I might even say the current NY Times website. Despite being a (current) Good product, Youtube will need another redesign. What do all these bad sites have in common? They aren't good -now-, and it's because they're chasing the latest UX fad (Hey, that floating bar at the top of the screen: another UX fad that no end users like, but it sure pleases the company higher-ups!). Sometimes they look flashy and slick, but that is a very very short term gain. Flashy and slick just become an annoyance if the site is harder to make actual use of than before. If it's slower, if it takes more clicks to do what you used to before, if options are missing that you once had, if the wrong content is emphasized.
Slashdot doesn't need to change just to change. Users hate that FAR more than "this website looks the same way it did five years ago."
I know the comment section is what it's all about, but seriously though, you are given a channel to provide your feedback. no need to go postal on them. the fact that they are actually redoing the website and providing feedback channels indicates that they are well aware of the need for readers. it's in their interest to do what you want. but you don't have to throw a fucking fit about it.
I think it's worth considering that if Slashdot users hadn't started a revolt and boycott, they wouldn't have been listen to, as all the feedback that the users had gotten from the administration so far was that the beta was going forward, maybe with a minor tweak or two. That was unacceptable, it would have killed the site deader than Digg, so extreme measures were justified. For the first time, we're hearing the first rumblings of "maybe the site requires more than a bugfix before we go live." Is that a total coincidence?
Crappy? I think the current Slashdot site works really, really well (on regular browsers anyway. I hear mobile browsing is unpleasant), and this ajax implementation is great. It certainly works much better than it did 5, 8, 10 years ago. It's sortof the reason why I don't see the point of the beta -- the site isn't broken.
Because the minute hand is merely an offset. Don't be thick.
I suppose.... it could be, but that's not how analog clocks with hands have worked in the past. All hands move slowly and evenly.
I think the "story" tag was supposed to have a use at one point, when Slashdot hired Jon Katz and others to create original non-story editorials. But now even book and movie reviews are links to other sites, so everything is a third-party story now.