not correlation. Your standard for causation is unreasonably high. Using your standard, we'd have to conclude that it's mere correlation that when we suspend a ball above the ground and then release it, gravity pulls it down. You would have us looking at the million plus tests of a ball falling to earth and decline to call that causation because we don't know how it works. (And we still don't know why matter has mass, which is what the whole hunt for the Higgs Boson is all about--see related articles).
I'm gonna go out on a limb and posit that researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health know about the scientific method and the difference between correlation and causation, and that they wouldn't make a wild claim, unsupported by solid empirical data, that would harm their careers.
Do you dispute their results? OK, great. Then you go out and repeat the study and try to recreate the results. That's what science is supposed to be about: testable conclusions.
Guys, let's stop thinking like Surrender Monkeys when it comes to SOPA and the government. Congressmen are just politicians and almost without exception very stupid people. They make knee-jerk decisions based on how many drinks lobbyists bought them at the bar the night before. But they are most definitely very susceptible to the prospect of pitchfork-waving crowds, eager to nail their hides to the barn door.
Look at what happened with the last SOPA showdown. The backlash was so severe and massive that Congress was practically pissing itself to run away from that bill. We, by their standards, melted their phone lines and crashed their Blackberries.
Last time we had Google and Wikipedia and other high-traffic sites leading the charge, but we can't count on them doing it again next time or to not make a deal with Hollywood/the RIAA.
We can create the perception of a groundswell preemptively. We can give them a taste of their own medicine preemptively, the very same medicine they would foist on us. If they want to subject us to crap like this, let's hijack their individual Blackberries and let them feel what it's like to have this done to them by anonymous strangers.
Honestly when I read sentiments like, "Oh well, the government is going to screw us no matter what we do so let's give up now," it reminds me of that scene from Swingers
Trent: You know what you are? You're like a big bear with claws and with fangs... Sue:...big fucking teeth, man. Trent: Yeah... big fuckin' teeth on ya'. And she's just like this little bunny, who's just kinda cowering in the corner. Sue: Shivering. Trent: Yeah, man just kinda... you know, you got these claws and you're staring at these claws and your thinking to yourself, and with these claws you're thinking, "How am I supposed to kill this bunny, how am I supposed to kill this bunny?" Sue: And you're poking at it, you're poking at it... Trent: Yeah, you're not hurting it. You're just kinda gently batting the bunny around, you know what I mean? And the bunny's scared Mike, the bunny's scared of you, shivering. Sue: And you got these fucking claws and these fangs... Trent: And you got these fucking claws and these fangs, man! And you're looking at your claws and you're looking at your fangs. And you're thinking to yourself, you don't know what to do, man. "I don't know how to kill the bunny." With *this* you don't know how to kill the bunny, do you know what I mean?
For pete's sake, people, we're the people who run the central nervous system of the world. How is it that we psych ourselves out over stuff like this? We should be able to mold the government like putty. And it would help that every time we send them a message we put a common tagline like "Free America!" so that they understand it's a spontaneous expression from the electorate that they're fucking up and better straighten up and fly right.
If wifi does hit this density, does it make ad-hoc mesh networks a reasonable alternative using a protocol like B.A.T.M.A.N.? The throughput would be nowhere near the fat pipes of big fiber, and the latency would be killer, but it would be extremely difficult for the government to shutdown.
Ever since Somalia piracy began to rise I've been thinking this could be an opportunity for India to break out and become a great power. They've been making such strides in so many areas, but in geopolitical terms are still defined by their regional spats with Pakistan and China. Directing their navy (yes, it's still small) to take down the Somalian pirates would be a way for them to change that perception. It was, after all, a similar move by the United States to take down the Barbary pirates that debuted its role as a global player.
This is not meant as a "we're better than you are" comment, because America is not better than the UK. Certainly not anymore.
But enshrining aristocratic fops in the House of Lords makes me gakh! Isn't it time for Britain to cast off such bizarre anachronisms like the aristocracy and monarchy?
Shedding such things is one good thing America did do. Yes, the Jamie Dimons and Lloyd Blankfeins and their 1% ilk are trying to fashion themselves into functionally the same thing as an aristocracy, which we will shortly deal with, but we do have a history of deposing them.
I dunno, watching an otherwise modern country like Britain wear the trappings of a monarchic past is like encountering a sysadmin that communicates with the rest of the company via paper memo typed on a typewriter.
Exposing crimes against humanity is every human's duty. Systematic torture is a war crime and covering it up makes you equally culpable. That's what the whole deal was with the Nuremburg Trials, remember?
The Nazis claimed they were just following orders, but that didn't spare them from the gallows. Every member of the American government who helped perpetrate this atrocity or who looked away should be locked up or face capital punishment according to their proximity and complicity.
It does look like at this point that the greater part of the American government was complicit, including almost all of Congress, the entirety of the Executive Branch, and the Judiciary, so we'd have to expunge nearly all of Washington DC with extreme prejudice.
There ought to be a way for longer term community members or those who consistently are ahead of the curve with the news cycle to accrue a greater chance of having their article submissions accepted. Even better would be a way for community members to give each other props in that regard, as in "I'd like to hear more from Joe, he always has insightful things to say on the subject of artificial DNA."
Perhaps I'm wrong, but neither karma nor consistently high mods appear to be linked to submissions chances that way. Of course there is the potential for abuse from shills, but you the editors ought to be able to quickly check out the bona fides of a userID's contributions and vet the validity of the acclaim.
I would appreciate being able to block an annoying user within a threaded discussion. Just, a "please be invisible right now because you post way too much" button. I've tried switching my relationship to those folks and it does nothing.
Over the years since Slashdot started I have often read articles and insightful comments that I have later tried to find again, but to no avail. Google provides some relief, but searching through Slashdot's own system is a lost cause.
I have always wanted two things to change that:
1. A better archiving system, perhaps tab based or somesuch so that I can easily zip back through everything on, say, SCO.
2. The ability to flag or save interesting articles or even comments on articles such that I have a personal folder where I can save an article on Copyleft and then fold the comments such that Lawrence Lessig's insightful one remains visible underneath the article summary. Slashdot would be an even better geek touchstone then than it already is.
This may not apply to the newcomers who read the site in AJAX mode. I prefer the classic mode (yes, I'm that old).
When reading comments I would appreciate a toggle to "expand all comments" so that I can see comments ranked below my default viewing threshhold. It mostly applies when I'm moderating and would love to be able to browse at 0 or -1 to catch the good comments that were late to the first post party; given that you can only see "Re: [parent post title" instead of the body of the comment, you tend to not bother clicking on them to avoid an endless dance of "click, hit -Back" to see what they wrote.
There are also occasionally discussions where I would be interested to see the back-and-forth between others because they seem particularly well-informed or even funny but their subsequent replies aren't modded as highly as their originals, so you have to enter the "click, hit -Back" game again if you want to see the whole thing.
I still love Slashdot, but having that "expand all comments" option would improve my experience.
As an android user there are three issues I've noticed when visiting the site.
The first is that when you tap the link "Many More" at the bottom of the page and then read one of the article it exposes, when you go back you're not back where you started but at the beginning again and have to click "Many More" again. That's not so bad when you only previously clicked it once, but when it was 2-3 times to get to what you wanted to read, and given the delay for "Many More" to work, it tends to break the mobile experience.
The second is when you do click "Many More" the presentation of the oldest previous articles thus exposed gets shown first, so that it appears that no new articles have been posted since the last time you visited the site. You have to persevere clicking "Many More" to get to the actual new articles. That triggers the aforementioned first issue;-)
Third is that the CSS needs a little help adjusting page widths. You can't read threaded comments in normal letter mode, so you have to tilt your phone to landscape orientation to make it legible. But the page width on the site doesn't always automatically adjust.
So right now reading the site on a regular laptop is a much better experience, in terms of usability. The mobile issues I mentioned are sub-optimal, but I am still grateful to be able to get a Slashdot fix on the go.
Most adults know you editors don't work for free, just as we don't work for free, and that the bills have to be paid somehow to keep Slashdot running; and we know that advertising is one of those ways. So please ignore all those ragging on you for the presence of advertising. You provide real value to the world so don't let the haters distract you from that fact.
Then come up with a way to privilege user submissions from people have been contributing a long time or who have been deemed experts by acclamation of their peers! Or figure out how to give submitters points for submissions on subjects that you initially rejected and then later accepted from someone else, so that next time the original submitter has a better chance of getting chosen.
I have been a member of the/. community for, what, 12-13 years and feel proud when one of my posts gets modded to a 5, but I stopped trying to submit articles a long time ago because they were never chosen and it felt like a waste of my time.
In my career so far I have been at the epicenter of geek operations with wide ranging implications that I am sure would interest the/. community, such as the use of crowd-sourcing platforms to find & rescue earthquake survivors in Haiti, but I never bothered to submit that because, again, submitting articles to/. feels like a waste of time.
The world is a better place for Slashdot's being in it.
Asking for feedback always brings out the haters. I hope you recognize that for what it is and don't take it personally. There have been a lot of good suggestions, though, and I hope you're able to follow up on them.
There are videos that I watch for entertainment, and videos I watch for information. Mentos and coke is entertainment, how to build a DIY aquaponics set-up is information. I can easily see how a lot of geek subjects would avail themselves to the former.
For instance, I can almost never go to Comdex or most Cons. I like watching the videos where people go around and show you the atmosphere and what the cool things are they've seen. I would happily watch Timothy do that because I can't go, and I trust him.
>Actually, thinking about it, you could stage debates and make it a very big deal. Like invite people from Canonical, GNOME team, and some XFCE zealots to fight it out. That sort of stuff video is great because there's a lot of passion and controversy. And I'm sure people here would give you lots of other great ideas for topics if you did a poll.
There used to be a show on PBS called "Truth on Trial: Ethics in America." They had a panel of exceptionally smart people from different fields who debated the aspects of an ethical dilemma from religious, military, legal, moral, etc perspectives. It was riveting and the only television I have ever watched that truly made me feel smarter for having watched it.
I would love to see Slashdot capture that sort of dynamic in its video by hosting panel discussion on geek issues with participants from different corners of the geek/tech/engineering/scientific universe. Of course, it takes a lot of practice and skill to moderate those effectively but it would be so worth it.
I am always grateful to read comments written by experts in the/. community who are directly involved in the work a post is talking about, or who can provide informed insight into a field different from my own. That is, when reading a post about, say, the mars robots and someone who works for JPL chimes in, it makes me feel grateful to be part of a community where that can happen.
So my suggestion is to approach those community members to do interviews or to comment on geek current events and cultivate them the way that news organizations cultivate experts to provide perspective on issues (but do it in a genuine geek way, not empty-headed fluff faux-journalist way). I know I would benefit from that, and the experts might as well because it will raise their professional profiles and might help their careers. It also bolsters the/. community by adding in a bit of aspirational value to its members: craft intelligent, insightful (or even funny) posts here and it might lead to other good things.
There was the one that Timothy did with the hoody or something. I can see why many thought it was an advertisement, but I didn't mind it because I too have many gadgets and am interested in smart clothing or items with great storage.
But to follow up on the suggestion, structuring the reviews of several products/gadgets around a theme I would appreciate. Why yes, I do have to travel for business next month and would like to see suggestions for geek apparel that would make that process less annoying at the airport. Or, Ubuntu's switch to Unity has really ticked me off, so what other distros or desktop environments can you tell me about that I can explore? (And, if you evaluate them according to a common rating system, ie. "Affordability: 4 stars | Ease-of-use: 3.5 stars" you'll get extra geek points)
Anyway I hope the Slashdot editors persevere. I've been interested to see video on the site as a logical next step for a venerable, solid community. I'd love to see you guys set the standard for online video geek journalism the way you did it for a geek site.
But exclaiming you're ditching Slashdot because it sucks now in a post from the editors soliciting community input on the use of video is, well, a bit much. Does Digg ask you how they should run their site? Nah, didn't think so.
I've been a/. reader since almost the beginning. My first userID was 4 digits, but lost the login during a rootless period of my youth--long story. And I would say that the quality of the site has stayed about the same or even improved a little, since the moderation system has been refined and the Jon Katz's of the world, whom I personally didn't mind too much but whom everyone else seemed to loathe, are no longer given a soapbox.
A good friend of mine is an executive at Starz channel. He tells me he has to scramble every day to keep from sliding backward. On-demand viewing (aka Hulu and Netflix) and pay-per-view was the first reason he cited. The second thing he said was he hoped original content like Pillars of the Earth and Spartacus would revive their fortunes, which implies that the other content that's out there now isn't filling the bill.
But he also said that they're getting pinched on both ends of the demographic curve because the Baby Boomers are fading from the scene and younger people are not watching TV at any where near the rates they used to. That means the average age of the television viewer keeps creeping up and up. But advertisers want to reach males between 18-35, which is the most desirable demographic, so they're shifting their media dollars elsewhere.
And, to boot, he said recently a raft of new competitors have entered the cable business and are squeezing margins further.
It doesn't sound like there is much margin left in TV, and that a decline is inevitable. It will probably be gradual, but then again yet another innovation might come along in a year or two that makes the decline catastrophic.
Modern society is quite interdependent. We rely heavily on centralized systems, big infrastructures. There is inherent vulnerability in that. If those systems break down anywhere along the way, the chain reaction brings everything down. Look at what the blackout in the Northeast US a few years back did.
But there's a countervailing trend now toward self reliance. We're not talking about neo-primitive cave dwelling, but technological self-sufficiency. As more people are able to supply their own energy needs with solar, wind, etc, that's a host of dependencies that go away. If 3D printers become widespread then fabrication of items for personal use becomes a lot more possible. If wifi nodes continue to multiply and we swith to a mesh network protocol, then communication's covered too.
So, the decline of the centralized society and the rise of decentralized society taken together, the former will collapse one way or another, but the latter may save the day. Either way we're in for a heck of a paradigm shift.
Those Ontario farmers are nuts. How else can you add $2-3,000 dollars/mo. to your income without precluding your primary activity, farming? The physical footprint of a wind turbine is incidental. Not like a solar array at all. Or strip mining for coal, which is another popular option in Canada.
You know but hey, knock yourselves out, intrepid farmers. Show the oil and coal industries you're still their bitches.
Economic Theory tells us that it's better to be a monopolist than to compete in a free market. The only thing better than a monopolist is to be able to exercise price discrimination. That means you can charge lower prices for the same goods to capture more revenue. Video game companies are among the few who can do that. They charge more for pre-release, full-price at release, and then scale it down afterward depending on the sales volume and time from release. In mathematical terms, they capture more of the demand curve, and thus, higher profits.
So they're already sitting in the catbird seat, yet still grasping for more.
No, not at all. I was in New York on 9/11. I saw the towers fall. I felt the ground shake. The smoke columns blew right over our heads and bits of burning paper landed everywhere.
But even after all that I adamantly opposed the creation of the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security. "Homeland?" What the hell is a "Homeland?" Certainly has nothing to do with America. Homeland sounds like Fatherland or Motherland, neither of which we want to be associated with. America was, is, and only ever shall be the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.
Motion sensors, a laser sight, and servos attached to the gun along with an intimidating voice requesting authorization to shoot ought to do the trick.
Slashdot Mirror
not correlation. Your standard for causation is unreasonably high. Using your standard, we'd have to conclude that it's mere correlation that when we suspend a ball above the ground and then release it, gravity pulls it down. You would have us looking at the million plus tests of a ball falling to earth and decline to call that causation because we don't know how it works. (And we still don't know why matter has mass, which is what the whole hunt for the Higgs Boson is all about--see related articles).
I'm gonna go out on a limb and posit that researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health know about the scientific method and the difference between correlation and causation, and that they wouldn't make a wild claim, unsupported by solid empirical data, that would harm their careers.
Do you dispute their results? OK, great. Then you go out and repeat the study and try to recreate the results. That's what science is supposed to be about: testable conclusions.
Guys, let's stop thinking like Surrender Monkeys when it comes to SOPA and the government. Congressmen are just politicians and almost without exception very stupid people. They make knee-jerk decisions based on how many drinks lobbyists bought them at the bar the night before. But they are most definitely very susceptible to the prospect of pitchfork-waving crowds, eager to nail their hides to the barn door.
Look at what happened with the last SOPA showdown. The backlash was so severe and massive that Congress was practically pissing itself to run away from that bill. We, by their standards, melted their phone lines and crashed their Blackberries.
Last time we had Google and Wikipedia and other high-traffic sites leading the charge, but we can't count on them doing it again next time or to not make a deal with Hollywood/the RIAA.
We can create the perception of a groundswell preemptively. We can give them a taste of their own medicine preemptively, the very same medicine they would foist on us. If they want to subject us to crap like this, let's hijack their individual Blackberries and let them feel what it's like to have this done to them by anonymous strangers.
Honestly when I read sentiments like, "Oh well, the government is going to screw us no matter what we do so let's give up now," it reminds me of that scene from Swingers
For pete's sake, people, we're the people who run the central nervous system of the world. How is it that we psych ourselves out over stuff like this? We should be able to mold the government like putty. And it would help that every time we send them a message we put a common tagline like "Free America!" so that they understand it's a spontaneous expression from the electorate that they're fucking up and better straighten up and fly right.
If wifi does hit this density, does it make ad-hoc mesh networks a reasonable alternative using a protocol like B.A.T.M.A.N.? The throughput would be nowhere near the fat pipes of big fiber, and the latency would be killer, but it would be extremely difficult for the government to shutdown.
Ever since Somalia piracy began to rise I've been thinking this could be an opportunity for India to break out and become a great power. They've been making such strides in so many areas, but in geopolitical terms are still defined by their regional spats with Pakistan and China. Directing their navy (yes, it's still small) to take down the Somalian pirates would be a way for them to change that perception. It was, after all, a similar move by the United States to take down the Barbary pirates that debuted its role as a global player.
This is not meant as a "we're better than you are" comment, because America is not better than the UK. Certainly not anymore.
But enshrining aristocratic fops in the House of Lords makes me gakh! Isn't it time for Britain to cast off such bizarre anachronisms like the aristocracy and monarchy?
Shedding such things is one good thing America did do. Yes, the Jamie Dimons and Lloyd Blankfeins and their 1% ilk are trying to fashion themselves into functionally the same thing as an aristocracy, which we will shortly deal with, but we do have a history of deposing them.
I dunno, watching an otherwise modern country like Britain wear the trappings of a monarchic past is like encountering a sysadmin that communicates with the rest of the company via paper memo typed on a typewriter.
That's what this guy should get.
Exposing crimes against humanity is every human's duty. Systematic torture is a war crime and covering it up makes you equally culpable. That's what the whole deal was with the Nuremburg Trials, remember?
The Nazis claimed they were just following orders, but that didn't spare them from the gallows. Every member of the American government who helped perpetrate this atrocity or who looked away should be locked up or face capital punishment according to their proximity and complicity.
It does look like at this point that the greater part of the American government was complicit, including almost all of Congress, the entirety of the Executive Branch, and the Judiciary, so we'd have to expunge nearly all of Washington DC with extreme prejudice.
And you know what? I'm really OK with that.
There ought to be a way for longer term community members or those who consistently are ahead of the curve with the news cycle to accrue a greater chance of having their article submissions accepted. Even better would be a way for community members to give each other props in that regard, as in "I'd like to hear more from Joe, he always has insightful things to say on the subject of artificial DNA."
Perhaps I'm wrong, but neither karma nor consistently high mods appear to be linked to submissions chances that way. Of course there is the potential for abuse from shills, but you the editors ought to be able to quickly check out the bona fides of a userID's contributions and vet the validity of the acclaim.
I would appreciate being able to block an annoying user within a threaded discussion. Just, a "please be invisible right now because you post way too much" button. I've tried switching my relationship to those folks and it does nothing.
Over the years since Slashdot started I have often read articles and insightful comments that I have later tried to find again, but to no avail. Google provides some relief, but searching through Slashdot's own system is a lost cause.
I have always wanted two things to change that:
1. A better archiving system, perhaps tab based or somesuch so that I can easily zip back through everything on, say, SCO.
2. The ability to flag or save interesting articles or even comments on articles such that I have a personal folder where I can save an article on Copyleft and then fold the comments such that Lawrence Lessig's insightful one remains visible underneath the article summary. Slashdot would be an even better geek touchstone then than it already is.
This may not apply to the newcomers who read the site in AJAX mode. I prefer the classic mode (yes, I'm that old).
When reading comments I would appreciate a toggle to "expand all comments" so that I can see comments ranked below my default viewing threshhold. It mostly applies when I'm moderating and would love to be able to browse at 0 or -1 to catch the good comments that were late to the first post party; given that you can only see "Re: [parent post title" instead of the body of the comment, you tend to not bother clicking on them to avoid an endless dance of "click, hit -Back" to see what they wrote.
There are also occasionally discussions where I would be interested to see the back-and-forth between others because they seem particularly well-informed or even funny but their subsequent replies aren't modded as highly as their originals, so you have to enter the "click, hit -Back" game again if you want to see the whole thing.
I still love Slashdot, but having that "expand all comments" option would improve my experience.
As an android user there are three issues I've noticed when visiting the site.
The first is that when you tap the link "Many More" at the bottom of the page and then read one of the article it exposes, when you go back you're not back where you started but at the beginning again and have to click "Many More" again. That's not so bad when you only previously clicked it once, but when it was 2-3 times to get to what you wanted to read, and given the delay for "Many More" to work, it tends to break the mobile experience.
The second is when you do click "Many More" the presentation of the oldest previous articles thus exposed gets shown first, so that it appears that no new articles have been posted since the last time you visited the site. You have to persevere clicking "Many More" to get to the actual new articles. That triggers the aforementioned first issue ;-)
Third is that the CSS needs a little help adjusting page widths. You can't read threaded comments in normal letter mode, so you have to tilt your phone to landscape orientation to make it legible. But the page width on the site doesn't always automatically adjust.
So right now reading the site on a regular laptop is a much better experience, in terms of usability. The mobile issues I mentioned are sub-optimal, but I am still grateful to be able to get a Slashdot fix on the go.
Most adults know you editors don't work for free, just as we don't work for free, and that the bills have to be paid somehow to keep Slashdot running; and we know that advertising is one of those ways. So please ignore all those ragging on you for the presence of advertising. You provide real value to the world so don't let the haters distract you from that fact.
And to all the haters doing the hating: grow up.
Then come up with a way to privilege user submissions from people have been contributing a long time or who have been deemed experts by acclamation of their peers! Or figure out how to give submitters points for submissions on subjects that you initially rejected and then later accepted from someone else, so that next time the original submitter has a better chance of getting chosen.
I have been a member of the /. community for, what, 12-13 years and feel proud when one of my posts gets modded to a 5, but I stopped trying to submit articles a long time ago because they were never chosen and it felt like a waste of my time.
In my career so far I have been at the epicenter of geek operations with wide ranging implications that I am sure would interest the /. community, such as the use of crowd-sourcing platforms to find & rescue earthquake survivors in Haiti, but I never bothered to submit that because, again, submitting articles to /. feels like a waste of time.
The world is a better place for Slashdot's being in it.
Asking for feedback always brings out the haters. I hope you recognize that for what it is and don't take it personally. There have been a lot of good suggestions, though, and I hope you're able to follow up on them.
There are videos that I watch for entertainment, and videos I watch for information. Mentos and coke is entertainment, how to build a DIY aquaponics set-up is information. I can easily see how a lot of geek subjects would avail themselves to the former.
For instance, I can almost never go to Comdex or most Cons. I like watching the videos where people go around and show you the atmosphere and what the cool things are they've seen. I would happily watch Timothy do that because I can't go, and I trust him.
>Actually, thinking about it, you could stage debates and make it a very big deal. Like invite people from Canonical, GNOME team, and some XFCE zealots to fight it out. That sort of stuff video is great because there's a lot of passion and controversy. And I'm sure people here would give you lots of other great ideas for topics if you did a poll.
There used to be a show on PBS called "Truth on Trial: Ethics in America." They had a panel of exceptionally smart people from different fields who debated the aspects of an ethical dilemma from religious, military, legal, moral, etc perspectives. It was riveting and the only television I have ever watched that truly made me feel smarter for having watched it.
I would love to see Slashdot capture that sort of dynamic in its video by hosting panel discussion on geek issues with participants from different corners of the geek/tech/engineering/scientific universe. Of course, it takes a lot of practice and skill to moderate those effectively but it would be so worth it.
I am always grateful to read comments written by experts in the /. community who are directly involved in the work a post is talking about, or who can provide informed insight into a field different from my own. That is, when reading a post about, say, the mars robots and someone who works for JPL chimes in, it makes me feel grateful to be part of a community where that can happen.
So my suggestion is to approach those community members to do interviews or to comment on geek current events and cultivate them the way that news organizations cultivate experts to provide perspective on issues (but do it in a genuine geek way, not empty-headed fluff faux-journalist way). I know I would benefit from that, and the experts might as well because it will raise their professional profiles and might help their careers. It also bolsters the /. community by adding in a bit of aspirational value to its members: craft intelligent, insightful (or even funny) posts here and it might lead to other good things.
There was the one that Timothy did with the hoody or something. I can see why many thought it was an advertisement, but I didn't mind it because I too have many gadgets and am interested in smart clothing or items with great storage.
But to follow up on the suggestion, structuring the reviews of several products/gadgets around a theme I would appreciate. Why yes, I do have to travel for business next month and would like to see suggestions for geek apparel that would make that process less annoying at the airport. Or, Ubuntu's switch to Unity has really ticked me off, so what other distros or desktop environments can you tell me about that I can explore? (And, if you evaluate them according to a common rating system, ie. "Affordability: 4 stars | Ease-of-use: 3.5 stars" you'll get extra geek points)
Anyway I hope the Slashdot editors persevere. I've been interested to see video on the site as a logical next step for a venerable, solid community. I'd love to see you guys set the standard for online video geek journalism the way you did it for a geek site.
You make good suggestions, and I second them.
But exclaiming you're ditching Slashdot because it sucks now in a post from the editors soliciting community input on the use of video is, well, a bit much. Does Digg ask you how they should run their site? Nah, didn't think so.
I've been a /. reader since almost the beginning. My first userID was 4 digits, but lost the login during a rootless period of my youth--long story. And I would say that the quality of the site has stayed about the same or even improved a little, since the moderation system has been refined and the Jon Katz's of the world, whom I personally didn't mind too much but whom everyone else seemed to loathe, are no longer given a soapbox.
A good friend of mine is an executive at Starz channel. He tells me he has to scramble every day to keep from sliding backward. On-demand viewing (aka Hulu and Netflix) and pay-per-view was the first reason he cited. The second thing he said was he hoped original content like Pillars of the Earth and Spartacus would revive their fortunes, which implies that the other content that's out there now isn't filling the bill.
But he also said that they're getting pinched on both ends of the demographic curve because the Baby Boomers are fading from the scene and younger people are not watching TV at any where near the rates they used to. That means the average age of the television viewer keeps creeping up and up. But advertisers want to reach males between 18-35, which is the most desirable demographic, so they're shifting their media dollars elsewhere.
And, to boot, he said recently a raft of new competitors have entered the cable business and are squeezing margins further.
It doesn't sound like there is much margin left in TV, and that a decline is inevitable. It will probably be gradual, but then again yet another innovation might come along in a year or two that makes the decline catastrophic.
Modern society is quite interdependent. We rely heavily on centralized systems, big infrastructures. There is inherent vulnerability in that. If those systems break down anywhere along the way, the chain reaction brings everything down. Look at what the blackout in the Northeast US a few years back did.
But there's a countervailing trend now toward self reliance. We're not talking about neo-primitive cave dwelling, but technological self-sufficiency. As more people are able to supply their own energy needs with solar, wind, etc, that's a host of dependencies that go away. If 3D printers become widespread then fabrication of items for personal use becomes a lot more possible. If wifi nodes continue to multiply and we swith to a mesh network protocol, then communication's covered too.
So, the decline of the centralized society and the rise of decentralized society taken together, the former will collapse one way or another, but the latter may save the day. Either way we're in for a heck of a paradigm shift.
Those Ontario farmers are nuts. How else can you add $2-3,000 dollars/mo. to your income without precluding your primary activity, farming? The physical footprint of a wind turbine is incidental. Not like a solar array at all. Or strip mining for coal, which is another popular option in Canada.
You know but hey, knock yourselves out, intrepid farmers. Show the oil and coal industries you're still their bitches.
Economic Theory tells us that it's better to be a monopolist than to compete in a free market. The only thing better than a monopolist is to be able to exercise price discrimination. That means you can charge lower prices for the same goods to capture more revenue. Video game companies are among the few who can do that. They charge more for pre-release, full-price at release, and then scale it down afterward depending on the sales volume and time from release. In mathematical terms, they capture more of the demand curve, and thus, higher profits.
So they're already sitting in the catbird seat, yet still grasping for more.
Greed knows no limits.
No, not at all. I was in New York on 9/11. I saw the towers fall. I felt the ground shake. The smoke columns blew right over our heads and bits of burning paper landed everywhere.
But even after all that I adamantly opposed the creation of the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security. "Homeland?" What the hell is a "Homeland?" Certainly has nothing to do with America. Homeland sounds like Fatherland or Motherland, neither of which we want to be associated with. America was, is, and only ever shall be the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.
Motion sensors, a laser sight, and servos attached to the gun along with an intimidating voice requesting authorization to shoot ought to do the trick.