this guy should be modded up. Many of us feel as he does. There's a difference between "geek" and "juvenile" and the log was not interesting. Note that there are very few quotes from the log in this discussion other than he-said/she-said sorts of stuff.
Furthermore, somebody here posted a link to the transcript of the Sig11/Taco "flameout" and it was a big snooze too. (I'm glad it was posted and I'm glad I read this later one, but my take-away is that not much interesting gets said on IRC. Some guy kept saying, "this is a keeper!" about the discussion, but that simply seems based on the fact that there was an argument with a Slashdot celebrity taking place... BO-RING!
Personally I feel like I waste too much time on Slashdot, but I feel better now because I can see how much worse it could be.
And by the way, moderators, my comments here have some negative quality and so does the guy I'm backing up, but that should not disqualify us from getting modded up. These opinions are every bit as valid as the gushing fan club comments.
I feel like the kid in the Emperor's New Clothes, or Gallileo on the way out of the Inquisition:
"...but, karma does matter.
beyond that it really matters for the +1 bonus or the right to moderate, it's nice to have people say "good job". Did you ever have an employee? You need to reward them for doing good work. Did you ever have a girl or boy friend? You need to say nice things to them. I'm not taking Siggy's side, but Hemos and Cmdr Taco are Pure-D wrong:
Karma is fun to get and worth striving for. Karma matters.
How do you feel about all of the tired anti-Microsoft comments that blame that company for everything up
to but not including the plague, even if it is COMPLETELY irrelevant to the topic? I don't particularly like
Microsoft, but geez, a little tolerance here.
I see your point, but there is not the complete equivalency that you are suggesting. Someone being inane/redundant/thoughtless is irritating, and someone who is not but is wrong is irritating. Someone who is inane/redundant/thoughtless and wrong is doubly irritating. Slashdot is an "open source/open standards" and "unix" site, to sum it up in a nutshell. Microsoft is the opposite. It is worth having some Microsofties come around and repitch the arguments periodically to tighten up our own arguments, but to suggest that Slashdot is a tabula rasa with complete equivalency between the two camps is not accurate, nor would such a situation be desirable. That's for the ZDNets of the world.
Re:are copyrights necessary?
on
RIAA CEO Speaks
·
· Score: 1
If there were no copyrights, there would be fewer artists, and we all lose. (Yeah,
you can argue that one,
Yeah, I do argue that one. If there were no copyrights, there'd be fewer record and movie companies. I claim there'd not only be as many artists, there'd be more of them because if you couldn't own them, there'd be no motive to create a small number of lip-synching "superstars" pumping out the same song to everybody in the world at the same time. If one song didn't have to please the most people, there'd be more variety.
Artists keep telling us how they are artists because they can't do anything else. Great: time to put their money where their mouths are.
The part where you threaten to become a troll if people don't say what you want to hear. If you don't like the way you are treated here, go away. I've been pissed off at being unfairly moderated, but I recognize the urge for revenge as immature. You should too.
I like your idea. A bit of extension to it makes for a fine overall proposal: the moderation points should be separated from the labels.
Moderators should be able to add or subtract a point, and
separately moderators should be able to label.
Then, the reader should be able to apply points to the labels.
"Funny" is a good example of a label that should be applied without necessarily increasing the value, and "offtopic" "funny" is different than "funny and on-topic". I like also like your "emotional" flag, and in a nonjudgemental way. Some days (most?) I'm very serious and I'd like to see emotion quashed on either side of the debate. Others may feel differently so this is a good idea for a "reader" point value, not a moderator.
The slashdot authors do have unlimited mod points (as of a fairly recent code change)
which helps in the occasional spam outbreaks
Actually, you might consider giving unlimited "Spam" moderation to all moderators. They'll get picked up in metamod if they abuse it, right? When I mod, I'm never sure if I should mod down the obvious offtopic spam because the rules say "favor modding up". But, I'm right there and I've identified AC spam, it would be easy to help out and punch it down, but I'm not sure if I'm "supposed" to do that with the measly 5 points.
most people who defend microsoft here do it dishonestly, that is, they're
purposefully trolling.
and they way they get around the moderation reaper is by saying, "this will surely get modded down as troll..." which seems to make them immune. If a person is posting and the word "troll" pops into their head, Freud would say they're probably trolling:)
This is already done, to a point. Go click on any users info page, and you can read all the comments that they
posted over the past couple weeks, along with thier scores.
well, yeah, but that makes the burden of moderating even greater. My goal would be to make moderating a higher-value-added activity.
Anyway, go look at streetlawyer: he gets moderated up all the time, but he says himself that he's just trolling and he does openly participate in some noisy discussions with other trolls like shoeboy. I'd just like to see that information not get lost: someone says "i'm a troll" and there should be a way to flag that.
Another interesting case to look at is Seth Finkelstein. He hasn't posted lately, but when he used to post, he invariably got modded up to 5. He is a serious poster so it was not a hugely egregious problem, but I suspect something dishonest and fishy because not everything anybody says is that good.
This also has the benefit of the user being able to regain a rep if he desires, and not having the "karma
whore" tag applied to him forever, since only the past couple weeks are shown.
Yeah, but I don't have a big problem with a sort of "weak" death penalty: go create a new account and earn your way back up if you've tainted yourself.
I've meta-moderated a small bit over the past few months. It's unrewarding. It undoubtedly works to "catch" evil moderators, those who moderate up garbage or down good stuff. But it does nothing to help the real problem that Slashdot faces: creeping banality. The meta-mod question is something along the lines of, is this "Informative" rating Fair, or Unfair? And, in most of the cases I've seen, 1 informative point should have been awarded. But, I'm equally sure that 4 informative points should not have been awarded, and that question does not get asked. The moderation system is also very negative toward negative comments, but rationally negative should be treated just like positive. Earnestness by ingenuous newbies is treated very kindly, but it is often completely uninteresting to those with some knowledge of an area. However, meta-mod would surely punish those who tried to push back against these tides.
In terms of plain old moderation, I've a few suggestions for improvement. How about revealing to the moderator some historical information about the poster? For example, streetlawyer is an admitted troll, and he has some talent for posting "interesting" points of view that get him some mod points, but he uses those points for evil. Couldn't some rating be added to give a hint that he should be treated with skepticism unless it is clear that his posts are not karma whoring?
Then there's the problem of the increasing number of moderators who think Micros~1 gets treated unfairly. It is a theoretically valid point of view, OK, but I'm completely fed up with the amount of Windows and Microsoft in my life. I know more about the company than 99% of posters here, and it is no longer an open question to me; I'm simply not interested in hearing people defend Microsoft. Others may have similar/opposite feelings about other issues. How about letting each user moderate the moderators. I don't want to see the moderation that comes from certain moderators. Over time I could indicate that by simply clicking "personally overrated" on posts that I see getting too high. Yes, the straightforward implementation would be computationally prohibitive. But, perhaps there are aggregate statistics that would show large clumps of Slashdot users in various "camps" and they could better see what they are interested in.
Finally, in terms of plain old moderation, I don't much enjoy doing it either. There tends to be too much "grade inflation" as hinted previously, so I rarely see something that needs more points, just things that wish for fewer. (Sometimes I see strong evidence there is a hidden moderation system taking place: Slashdot editors with unlimited points hammering things into rough shape on the fly and letting the public system tweak the results.)
Finally (I guess these are just random thoughts), how about an "offtopic" rating that is not negative. Sometimes I want to shut off all the "noise" in a discussion, but sometimes it's funny and adds color. It would be nice if moderators could rate topicality without devaluing.
GCC won't cut the mustard due to buggy sparc-64
bit support (incomplete target floating point implementation on host
side) and the recent stability problems with 2.95+ have gotten people
here a little nervous.... [Note to GCC
manics - I use it and I think it's great, but we have reached the limits
of its capabilities..]
did you ever think of actually fixing it? You've got an itch, scratch it.
I stoppd reading when I got to "because the ShowStopper uses MacroVision copy protection, you can't daisy chain your DVD
through the ShowStopper and then to the TV". I hate this kind of restriction because it makes the simplest kinds of hoopup impossible.
I just use the basic cable package at home because it lets me use the normal remote control from my cable ready TV. It's nice and simple, just one with no clunky cable remote and no klugy programmable remote. Since I have no interest in copying, storing, and hoarding (my video library consists of zero, including purchases) it's too bad I need to put up with the various schemes which serve to stop my components from doing what the obviously should.
here is absolutely no excuse for not using
renewable energies in significant quantities - wind power is a good example of a technology that
doesn't ever run out, is completely free to harness, doesn't pollute (other than noise pollution), and
is generally a good idea.
the natural amount of wind is a part of the environment. "harnessing" it reduces the amount of wind energy. That has to be bad for plants that thrive with the wind. Compare that to burning fossil fuels: by burning fossil fuels, we are returning carbon that was in the atmosphere, back into the atmosphere where it was before the plants took it out. The Earth is constantly changing, and the lives of humans too. We used to die of plagues and famine, and now we don't. Just enjoy your life and let the future worry about the future.
I'm a programmer type, not a lawyer. But I did a bunch of work for a company whose business is intellectual property. There were many IP experts including lawyers working there. They definitely believe that the process is somewhat corruptible. Patent clerks leave and go to work at law firms,
and lawyers and paralegals leave firms to go work at the PTO.
No, there is no direct bribery. However, when applications come in, some people's names get recognized and other people's don't. Some applications have all the right fields in triplicate, and others don't. It definitely can make exactly the difference between granting and rejecting.
Is this goign to become another O.J. Simpson trial?
I hope so! It would be cool to see live chase of Bill Gates in a white Bronco driving around for hours threatening suicide. Then, after the trial is over he could devote himself to finding "the real monopolist". If
Could we stop moderating knee-jerk anti-slashdot, anti-linux commentary to the top? Especially one that doesn't even construct a valid argument:
Why do I suspect that if Linus was ranked higher than Gates, Slashdot would be holding a rallying cry and citing it as a sign that Linux really is the greatest achievement in the history of the world?
Entirely apart from the fact that one can't "hold a rallying cry", Slashdot collectively speaking already believes Linux to be the greatest achievement of the past decade. It is on that basis that the cluefulness of that top ten list was evaluated.
actually, you've come up with an explanation: it was not an error. If Slashdot appears right behind print Wired in order of speed one could say, "Wired moves slower, then us."
Limiting on IP
address doesn't work, because many are behind firewalls and hence multiple users can legitimately
be on one IP.
this is not a proof that limiting by IP does not work. I think limiting by IP would work fine. If one guy in a company is ruining it for everyone in that company, let those local users solve the problem. If one guy at AOL ruins it for everyone at AOL, who cares? If there are 1000 trolls who've chracked 10 machines each, that's 10,000 IP addresss read-only, with 100s of millions more posting good stuff.
Yes, openbsd does a good job in that respect. But I think there are other workable models. OpenBSD makes the tradeoff in favor of security over everything including convenience. If every linux distro came with a firewall that blocked incoming connections, the average user could play around with a fun, fully loaded box and not be at risk.
Yes, there'd still be room to make mistakes, but only by doing something rather than by not doing something.
But recall that the value of what's in a bank is a lot less than the value of what's on Slashdot. Everybody who is shouting hash the passwords should also be shouting "hash the user names too" but they are not. This leads me to believe that they aren't thinking too hard about the problem.
yes, I thought of that only after pressing send. Of course, I meant by getting "in", getting in from the outside, not the console.
I use a slightly more convenient technique than the one you describe, and I think it's pretty secure. After all, it's not like I'm guarding Fort Knox. What I do is install just about everything I want or might want right away. But, before I plug into a network, I put up a really comprehensive ipchains firewall blocking access to everything coming in. Then, I add/etc/hosts.deny for good measure. I can open a sliver of a hole here or there, and only to trusted peers, as I need them.
The problem with installing packages only as you need them is that you need to learn so much about them to understand what the security issues are, but that's difficult without experimenting, so I like to have them walled of right from the start.
Sorry, you are being too picky. He said, and I quote, The moral? Our biggest mistake was not changing the
default data on the test site, and I'm sure that we'll patch
the next version of Slashcode to require new
administrators to change their passwords during
installation. That's what I was responding too. I quoted that other line to say that he thinks he didn't know a few years ago and I think he doesn't know today. There should be no default password.
To the point that you and everyone else on this site keeps obsessing about, I wrote an entirely separate post about the fallacy of the importance of hashing passwords.
Moderators, you may want to go moderate my other post down: it makes a serious, knowledgeable and accurate point just like this one did. Why should the post I made here be moderated down and not that other one? How can Slashdot continue its plummet if you don't moderate down all people who question the received wisdom of a pack of junior engineers, or not even engineers, who follow each other lemming-like off a cliff. This security breach had nothing to do with hashing. I used a password for Slashdot that I don't care about with an email address that's "phony": I couldn't care less if somebody steals my account. All those to whom this compromise represents a problem: I don't think you are smart enough to lecture Slashdot on the subject of security.
I just want to make sure
that readers understand that your issue wasn't "we didn't keep the hackers out" (no one can) but
instead "we left your valuables where the hackers could get them".
There's no difference between failing to keep the hackers out and leaving stuff where the hackers can get to it. But more, I totally disagree with your "theory" about passwords. Slash, please keep our passwords in plaintext, or keep it as an option for users who want it.
First, think of your bank account. It's real numbers stored in a computer, numbers that other people shouldn't be able to see or change. So, these numbers need to be protected. You can't effectively encrypt them (without leaving the keys sitting there: the computer needs to get to them) so the issue is purely one of protecting them.
Give a computer scientist the task of protecting some vital data and she will set about designing a secure system. It's a fun problem to solve. Well, that's all passwords are: data that needs protecting.
Yes, there are scenarios where hashed passwords allow for a neat trick: knowing the hash lets you authenticate but does not grant you access. But that trick depends on certain elements that are not necessary to guard a website. Think of it this way: if someone gains root access to a website, they don't need an insignificant user's password.
The convenience of Slashdot being able to email a password if someone forgets it is a benefit that far outweighs the difficulty of the task of protecting them.
I understand the bit about "I wrote it a few years ago and didn't know". That's fine. But FYI, the mistake was not that you failed to change the default admin password. The problem is that you have a default password. There just shouldn't be one. That's the change you should make, and the problem will never be repeated.
Too much of linux and opensource have this idea that boxes should be "locked down" and "hardened" after installation. Really smart people say that, but it's totally wrong. Boxes should start out without known ways of getting in. Any access should be "opened" or "unlocked" or even "softened" if that's what you want to say.
Nice attempt at recursion, but if you go back and read the thread you'll see I need no excuses. I explicitly said that I did not know the veracity of the statement, but that I didn't find his excuse particularly convincing. Read the thread, then you won't have to try to put words in my mouth in order to make your pointless point.
The problem with you children I'm arguing with is that if you disagree with someone, you get all hot under the collar and start spouting nonsense. You could say, "I disagree" without throwing a hissy fit.
Slashdot Mirror
Furthermore, somebody here posted a link to the transcript of the Sig11/Taco "flameout" and it was a big snooze too. (I'm glad it was posted and I'm glad I read this later one, but my take-away is that not much interesting gets said on IRC. Some guy kept saying, "this is a keeper!" about the discussion, but that simply seems based on the fact that there was an argument with a Slashdot celebrity taking place... BO-RING!
Personally I feel like I waste too much time on Slashdot, but I feel better now because I can see how much worse it could be.
And by the way, moderators, my comments here have some negative quality and so does the guy I'm backing up, but that should not disqualify us from getting modded up. These opinions are every bit as valid as the gushing fan club comments.
I feel like the kid in the Emperor's New Clothes, or Gallileo on the way out of the Inquisition:
"...but, karma does matter.
beyond that it really matters for the +1 bonus or the right to moderate, it's nice to have people say "good job". Did you ever have an employee? You need to reward them for doing good work. Did you ever have a girl or boy friend? You need to say nice things to them. I'm not taking Siggy's side, but Hemos and Cmdr Taco are Pure-D wrong:
Karma is fun to get and worth striving for. Karma matters.
I see your point, but there is not the complete equivalency that you are suggesting. Someone being inane/redundant/thoughtless is irritating, and someone who is not but is wrong is irritating. Someone who is inane/redundant/thoughtless and wrong is doubly irritating. Slashdot is an "open source/open standards" and "unix" site, to sum it up in a nutshell. Microsoft is the opposite. It is worth having some Microsofties come around and repitch the arguments periodically to tighten up our own arguments, but to suggest that Slashdot is a tabula rasa with complete equivalency between the two camps is not accurate, nor would such a situation be desirable. That's for the ZDNets of the world.
Yeah, I do argue that one. If there were no copyrights, there'd be fewer record and movie companies. I claim there'd not only be as many artists, there'd be more of them because if you couldn't own them, there'd be no motive to create a small number of lip-synching "superstars" pumping out the same song to everybody in the world at the same time. If one song didn't have to please the most people, there'd be more variety.
Artists keep telling us how they are artists because they can't do anything else. Great: time to put their money where their mouths are.
The part where you threaten to become a troll if people don't say what you want to hear. If you don't like the way you are treated here, go away. I've been pissed off at being unfairly moderated, but I recognize the urge for revenge as immature. You should too.
"Funny" is a good example of a label that should be applied without necessarily increasing the value, and "offtopic" "funny" is different than "funny and on-topic". I like also like your "emotional" flag, and in a nonjudgemental way. Some days (most?) I'm very serious and I'd like to see emotion quashed on either side of the debate. Others may feel differently so this is a good idea for a "reader" point value, not a moderator.
Actually, you might consider giving unlimited "Spam" moderation to all moderators. They'll get picked up in metamod if they abuse it, right? When I mod, I'm never sure if I should mod down the obvious offtopic spam because the rules say "favor modding up". But, I'm right there and I've identified AC spam, it would be easy to help out and punch it down, but I'm not sure if I'm "supposed" to do that with the measly 5 points.
most people who defend microsoft here do it dishonestly, that is, they're purposefully trolling.
and they way they get around the moderation reaper is by saying, "this will surely get modded down as troll..." which seems to make them immune. If a person is posting and the word "troll" pops into their head, Freud would say they're probably trolling :)
well, yeah, but that makes the burden of moderating even greater. My goal would be to make moderating a higher-value-added activity. Anyway, go look at streetlawyer: he gets moderated up all the time, but he says himself that he's just trolling and he does openly participate in some noisy discussions with other trolls like shoeboy. I'd just like to see that information not get lost: someone says "i'm a troll" and there should be a way to flag that.
Another interesting case to look at is Seth Finkelstein. He hasn't posted lately, but when he used to post, he invariably got modded up to 5. He is a serious poster so it was not a hugely egregious problem, but I suspect something dishonest and fishy because not everything anybody says is that good.
This also has the benefit of the user being able to regain a rep if he desires, and not having the "karma whore" tag applied to him forever, since only the past couple weeks are shown.
Yeah, but I don't have a big problem with a sort of "weak" death penalty: go create a new account and earn your way back up if you've tainted yourself.
In terms of plain old moderation, I've a few suggestions for improvement. How about revealing to the moderator some historical information about the poster? For example, streetlawyer is an admitted troll, and he has some talent for posting "interesting" points of view that get him some mod points, but he uses those points for evil. Couldn't some rating be added to give a hint that he should be treated with skepticism unless it is clear that his posts are not karma whoring?
Then there's the problem of the increasing number of moderators who think Micros~1 gets treated unfairly. It is a theoretically valid point of view, OK, but I'm completely fed up with the amount of Windows and Microsoft in my life. I know more about the company than 99% of posters here, and it is no longer an open question to me; I'm simply not interested in hearing people defend Microsoft. Others may have similar/opposite feelings about other issues. How about letting each user moderate the moderators. I don't want to see the moderation that comes from certain moderators. Over time I could indicate that by simply clicking "personally overrated" on posts that I see getting too high. Yes, the straightforward implementation would be computationally prohibitive. But, perhaps there are aggregate statistics that would show large clumps of Slashdot users in various "camps" and they could better see what they are interested in.
Finally, in terms of plain old moderation, I don't much enjoy doing it either. There tends to be too much "grade inflation" as hinted previously, so I rarely see something that needs more points, just things that wish for fewer. (Sometimes I see strong evidence there is a hidden moderation system taking place: Slashdot editors with unlimited points hammering things into rough shape on the fly and letting the public system tweak the results.)
Finally (I guess these are just random thoughts), how about an "offtopic" rating that is not negative. Sometimes I want to shut off all the "noise" in a discussion, but sometimes it's funny and adds color. It would be nice if moderators could rate topicality without devaluing.
and what if we put on the table 22 little plastic men, 11 each from two opposing football squads... oh yeah.
did you ever think of actually fixing it? You've got an itch, scratch it.
Oh, and you did say,
Any suggestions greatfully received!
just a suggestion.
I just use the basic cable package at home because it lets me use the normal remote control from my cable ready TV. It's nice and simple, just one with no clunky cable remote and no klugy programmable remote. Since I have no interest in copying, storing, and hoarding (my video library consists of zero, including purchases) it's too bad I need to put up with the various schemes which serve to stop my components from doing what the obviously should.
the natural amount of wind is a part of the environment. "harnessing" it reduces the amount of wind energy. That has to be bad for plants that thrive with the wind. Compare that to burning fossil fuels: by burning fossil fuels, we are returning carbon that was in the atmosphere, back into the atmosphere where it was before the plants took it out. The Earth is constantly changing, and the lives of humans too. We used to die of plagues and famine, and now we don't. Just enjoy your life and let the future worry about the future.
No, there is no direct bribery. However, when applications come in, some people's names get recognized and other people's don't. Some applications have all the right fields in triplicate, and others don't. It definitely can make exactly the difference between granting and rejecting.
I hope so! It would be cool to see live chase of Bill Gates in a white Bronco driving around for hours threatening suicide. Then, after the trial is over he could devote himself to finding "the real monopolist". If
Why do I suspect that if Linus was ranked higher than Gates, Slashdot would be holding a rallying cry and citing it as a sign that Linux really is the greatest achievement in the history of the world?
Entirely apart from the fact that one can't "hold a rallying cry", Slashdot collectively speaking already believes Linux to be the greatest achievement of the past decade. It is on that basis that the cluefulness of that top ten list was evaluated.
actually, you've come up with an explanation: it was not an error. If Slashdot appears right behind print Wired in order of speed one could say, "Wired moves slower, then us."
this is not a proof that limiting by IP does not work. I think limiting by IP would work fine. If one guy in a company is ruining it for everyone in that company, let those local users solve the problem. If one guy at AOL ruins it for everyone at AOL, who cares? If there are 1000 trolls who've chracked 10 machines each, that's 10,000 IP addresss read-only, with 100s of millions more posting good stuff.
sounds like a plan, to me.
Yes, openbsd does a good job in that respect. But I think there are other workable models. OpenBSD makes the tradeoff in favor of security over everything including convenience. If every linux distro came with a firewall that blocked incoming connections, the average user could play around with a fun, fully loaded box and not be at risk. Yes, there'd still be room to make mistakes, but only by doing something rather than by not doing something.
But recall that the value of what's in a bank is a lot less than the value of what's on Slashdot. Everybody who is shouting hash the passwords should also be shouting "hash the user names too" but they are not. This leads me to believe that they aren't thinking too hard about the problem.
yes, I thought of that only after pressing send. Of course, I meant by getting "in", getting in from the outside, not the console.
I use a slightly more convenient technique than the one you describe, and I think it's pretty secure. After all, it's not like I'm guarding Fort Knox. What I do is install just about everything I want or might want right away. But, before I plug into a network, I put up a really comprehensive ipchains firewall blocking access to everything coming in. Then, I add /etc/hosts.deny for good measure. I can open a sliver of a hole here or there, and only to trusted peers, as I need them.
The problem with installing packages only as you need them is that you need to learn so much about them to understand what the security issues are, but that's difficult without experimenting, so I like to have them walled of right from the start.
To the point that you and everyone else on this site keeps obsessing about, I wrote an entirely separate post about the fallacy of the importance of hashing passwords.
Moderators, you may want to go moderate my other post down: it makes a serious, knowledgeable and accurate point just like this one did. Why should the post I made here be moderated down and not that other one? How can Slashdot continue its plummet if you don't moderate down all people who question the received wisdom of a pack of junior engineers, or not even engineers, who follow each other lemming-like off a cliff. This security breach had nothing to do with hashing. I used a password for Slashdot that I don't care about with an email address that's "phony": I couldn't care less if somebody steals my account. All those to whom this compromise represents a problem: I don't think you are smart enough to lecture Slashdot on the subject of security.
There's no difference between failing to keep the hackers out and leaving stuff where the hackers can get to it. But more, I totally disagree with your "theory" about passwords. Slash, please keep our passwords in plaintext, or keep it as an option for users who want it.
First, think of your bank account. It's real numbers stored in a computer, numbers that other people shouldn't be able to see or change. So, these numbers need to be protected. You can't effectively encrypt them (without leaving the keys sitting there: the computer needs to get to them) so the issue is purely one of protecting them. Give a computer scientist the task of protecting some vital data and she will set about designing a secure system. It's a fun problem to solve. Well, that's all passwords are: data that needs protecting.
Yes, there are scenarios where hashed passwords allow for a neat trick: knowing the hash lets you authenticate but does not grant you access. But that trick depends on certain elements that are not necessary to guard a website. Think of it this way: if someone gains root access to a website, they don't need an insignificant user's password.
The convenience of Slashdot being able to email a password if someone forgets it is a benefit that far outweighs the difficulty of the task of protecting them.
Too much of linux and opensource have this idea that boxes should be "locked down" and "hardened" after installation. Really smart people say that, but it's totally wrong. Boxes should start out without known ways of getting in. Any access should be "opened" or "unlocked" or even "softened" if that's what you want to say.
The problem with you children I'm arguing with is that if you disagree with someone, you get all hot under the collar and start spouting nonsense. You could say, "I disagree" without throwing a hissy fit.