Manning & Snowden were both charged under the Espionage Act.
You also mis-inderstand the signing bit. That's not a requirement for legal jeopardy, it just makes any transgression unequivocally "knowing" should prosecutors need to make such a case in the future.
The UK can't legally extradite someone to a place where they might reasonably face execution, such as (to pick a totally random example) handing a person accused of espionage over to the United States.
Not only does Sweden have no such rule, but it has a history of accommodating "extraordinary rendition" operations by the US.
Whether he was right about it or not, Assange (and the Ecuadorians) certainly believed that to be the reason for the conspicuous escalation of his criminal investigation by the Swedes.
Even taking a laudable I-believe-the-accusers posture there despite counter-intelligence operations against Assange being a thing, I can only wish that we lived in a world where date-rape investigations were pursued so vigorously against people who haven't antagonized a superpower.
Yeah, the problems they had with PowerPC only arose as IBM and Motorola left them in a lurch. Motorola never delivered a 64-bit chip to Apple, and IBM never delivered a 3GHz PPC 970 suitable for mass deployment (they ran so hot at that speed that the cooling would've sounded like a blow-dryer). This made the G5 the dead-end of mass-market desktop/laptop PowerPC parts. (If I were still single and had a room full of oddball computers, I'd get an Amiga-One X-5000 though.)
PowerPC still had legs as an architecture in other market segments, obviously, but at that time, neither IBM nor Moto/Freescale were both willing and able to give Apple what they needed.
Used to be the case moreso than it is now. I've happily paid more for "Just Works" several times over the years, but they don't seem to be selling that any longer.
In retrospect, needing to buy a 3rd party app to print from my iPad to the laser printer my iMac is sharing on the network was the first sign of trouble.
Replacing bottleneck-points in Python with C (and lately Rust or even Go) extensions has been well understood to be the Goldilocks approach for many years.
You optimize for power only in parts of the project where the trade off in simplicity and ease of maintenance is justified, and enjoy the benefits of Python the rest of the time.
Much of Europe would be surprised to hear that their Democratic Socialism is leading them to Communism or Authoritarianism.
Really, Authoritarianism, whether in Capitalist or Communist drag, is the real bad -ism. That's the difference in practice between Socialism in Venezuela and Socialism in places like Sweden.
(The fact that we don't try to subvert Sweden's political system to benefit our oil companies every ten years or so is part of how that shakes out as well.)
Even highly commercial places like Germany and the UK Socialize essential things like public health and education. Even here in the US, Socialist policies like the New Deal, Rural Electrification, public Fire Departments, the Interstate Highway System, Social Security, the Army Corps of Engineers, Medicare, and so on have been (even when imperfect) great successes and enablers of overall economic prosperity.
For casual computing by non-experts, GUI is the way to go. Experts and enthusiasts benefit from the programmatic capabilities that CLI provides, but the learning curve to attain that power is steeper, and returns little benefit to casual users.
Short term, put them on separate projects. Long term, start preparing for the eventual replacement for asshole-rockstar, because if you let that sort of thing go on forever, the only people who stick around will be assholes.
Further, if you let your development process become inextricably dependent on a single unprofessional asshole's output, you're setting yourself up for a major fall when he either leaves in a lurch, demands to be brought in as a, partner or similar.
It's quite possible to say: "This approach is a bad idea, and here's why...." followed by cogent reasoning, examples, performance profiling, etc. - without including any insults, name-calling, profanity, etc. Fostering an environment where a posture of mature professionalism is the norm does not mean settling for sub-par code. It means not settling for the best code produced by people who are willing to tolerate immature and unprofessional behavior. It also means not settling for a code-base that prioritizes the contributions of the stubborn, loud, and abrasive over those they drown out or drive away.
I can tell you right now, If I had a proper Basic Income guarantee along with healthcare, I would work part-time to afford luxuries & travel, and split the remaining free time making music & art, doing things with my friends & family, and volunteering.
This is the kind of life people could have if the productivity gains of recent decades had been shared, rather than hoarded.
There are significant advantages in the studio to tracking to tape, even knowing full well that the material is going to be digitized during mixing, mastering, or manufactureing.
The logarithmic diminishing returns of +inputsignal:+recordedsignal as the metal oxides below spun by the the write head's magnetic field exceed 80% of available produces a naturally responsive dynamic range compression that is more pleasing to the ear than that produced by most stand-alone dynamic processors.
This quality allows the recording engineer to safely use the more of the available dynamic range than when tracking digitally, which sounds harsh ( sudden square-wave-ish clipping) when pushed too hard. In contrast, the distortion that occurs when pushing tape both subtly fades in and out with the signal and also leans more towards triangle-wave shapes rather than square-wave shapes, making it more pleasing to the ear.
Tape also exhibits a gradual fall of in reproduction signal strength as frequencies climb. This can also be pleasing to the ear, both by taking the edge off of super-trebley sources like crash cymbals or some kinds of guitar distortion effects without the noise & distortion introduced by many (finite impulse response) EQ processes - and also by passing less signal into the ugly-responding cut-off range of the anti-aliasing filter when the material is digitized downstream. Moving the cut-off of the AA-filter farther away from our range of hearing and allowing gentler knees (and thus less distortion as input signal approaches the cut-off frequency) on the filters as they approach the now solidly-ultrasonic Nyquist limit is actual the primary benefit of 88.2/96kHz audio).
Those factors combined lead to the feel of "warmth" people describe. Many of those things can be accomplished similarly in the digital realm with the right tools, practices, & knowhow; but with tape, they just happen naturally.
I like that ghost peppers can be smoked/dried/roasted and still have substantial heat left. I don't use them fresh. Habaneros are about the hottest thing I'll use fresh, and even then I more often go for seranos, as you've got more control.
They did like to appropriate Socialist language when attempting to market themselves as being a "workers party," "of the people," and so on, as a way to paint themselves themselves as the middle road between the old-gaurd Nationalists upon whom they placed blame for the country's failures and the Communists who they saw as their main rivals to replace the Nationalists. Despite the marketing/rhetoric, nothing they did from a policy or governance standpoint stands out as more Socialist than any other European state of that era. They lied,
all the time, whenever they thought it would benefit them. This was no different.
There are many different flavors of Socialism in the world today, mainstream European Social Democrats, Berners who want to import that model to the U.S., Syndicalists in labor movements, Anarcho-Socialists and Autonomists who end up having a lot in common with Libertarians, and so on. While there are a few State Socialist/Leninist/Maoist hold-outs like Cuba or Vietnam, many countries successfully apply Socialist principles to certain national industries and infrastructure segments where market forces have historically produced bad outcomes, but leave things more or less to individuals/the-market otherwise.
No one before or after has ever used "Socialism" with the same context or connotations as the NSDAP, except people wanting to disingenuously tar Social-Democrats with Nazi associations as an ad-hominem rather than engaging with their ideas.
I wonder what they could do with their structures as far as encouraging coral growth or providing spawning shelters? Clean energy is obviously the primary goal of the project, but anything building on the seafloor should hopefully take a look at the whole picture.
I'm trying to say something intelligent involving homomorphic encryption with random seeds and salt that doesn't trigger the Beavis & Butthead reflex, but I just can't make it happen.
The clouds around here were kind enough to break earlier. Hopefully that holds. It's been a pleasure to watch the ISS fly over from my back yard several times, and it's wet my appetite for more.
This site used to be great. Even in its latter days, it's been good. That is poised to change. Before long, it will be mediocre, and ordinary.
I didn't see a problem when Dice Holdings initially bought Slashdot. I figured there would be efforts to drive nerd traffic towards their job listings and such. That was fine. We all need jobs.
Things have changed now. Beyond the shifts in story choices, the slashvertisements, and so on, something fundamental has changed: Slashdot's owners do not appreciate it.
Their recent financials show that they have written its value as an asset down to zero. They have legally claimed it to be worthless. That is at the root of what is happening now. They want to fundamentally change the nature of this site in order to remake it into something with big growth potential.
Beta is just the latest symptom of this disease. It will not be the last. In striving to make it into a site that will bring them a growing user base and growing revenue per user, they have shown a willingness to dumb down the interface in the name of making it more accessible to newcomers, to cast aside essential elements of decade-spanning community culture, and to plow ahead with changes in the face of overwhelmingly negative user feedback.
This is not going to change. This will not go away. I will not support it.
I will be gone for this entire week, in protest. While away, I will work to create a new community where things can be run with quality user discussions as the paramount objective.
This site used to be great. Even in it's latter days, it's been good. That is poised to change. Before long, it will be mediocre, and ordinary.
I didn't see a problem when Dice Holdings initially bought Slashdot. I figured there would be efforts to drive nerd traffic towards their job listings and such. That was fine. We all need jobs.
Things have changed now. Beyond the shifts in story choices, the slashvertisements, and so on, something fundamental has changed: Slashdot's owners do not appreciate it.
Their recent financials show that they have written its value as an asset down to zero. They have legally claimed it to be worthless. That is at the root of what is happening now. They want to fundamentally change the nature of this site in order to remake it into something with big growth potential.
Beta is just the latest symptom of this disease. It will not be the last. In striving to make it into a site that will bring them a growing user base and growing revenue per user, they have shown a willingness to dumb down the interface in the name of making it more accessible to newcomers, to cast aside essential elements of decade-spanning community culture, and to plow ahead with changes in the face of overwhelmingly negative user feedback.
This is not going to change. This will not go away. I will not support it.
I will be gone for this entire week, in protest. While away, I will work to create a new community where things can be run with quality user discussions as the paramount objective.
This site used to be great. Even in it's latter days, it's been good. That is poised to change. Before long, it will be mediocre, and ordinary.
I didn't see a problem when Dice Holdings initially bought Slashdot. I figured there would be efforts to drive nerd traffic towards their job listings and such. That was fine. We all need jobs.
Things have changed now. Beyond the shifts in story choices, the slashvertisements, and so on, something fundamental has changed: Slashdot's owners do not appreciate it.
Their recent financials show that they have written its value as an asset down to zero. They have legally claimed it to be worthless. That is at the root of what is happening now. They want to fundamentally change the nature of this site in order to remake it into something with big growth potential.
Beta is just the latest symptom of this disease. It will not be the last. In striving to make it into a site that will bring them a growing user base and growing revenue per user, they have shown a willingness to dumb down the interface in the name of making it more accessible to newcomers, to cast aside essential elements of decade-spanning community culture, and to plow ahead with changes in the face of overwhelmingly negative user feedback.
This is not going to change. This will not go away. I will not support it.
I will be gone for this entire week, in protest. While away, I will work to create a new community where things can be run with quality user discussions as the paramount objective.
This site used to be great. Even in it's latter days, it's been good. That is poised to change. Before long, it will be mediocre, and ordinary.
I didn't see a problem when Dice Holdings initially bought Slashdot. I figured there would be efforts to drive nerd traffic towards their job listings and such. That was fine. We all need jobs.
Things have changed now. Beyond the shifts in story choices, the slashvertisements, and so on, something fundamental has changed: Slashdot's owners do not appreciate it.
Their recent financials show that they have written its value as an asset down to zero. They have legally claimed it to be worthless. That is at the root of what is happening now. They want to fundamentally change the nature of this site in order to remake it into something with big growth potential.
Beta is just the latest symptom of this disease. It will not be the last. In striving to make it into a site that will bring them a growing user base and growing revenue per user, they have shown a willingness to dumb down the interface in the name of making it more accessible to newcomers, to cast aside essential elements of decade-spanning community culture, and to plow ahead with changes in the face of overwhelmingly negative user feedback.
This is not going to change. This will not go away. I will not support it.
I will be gone for this entire week, in protest. While away, I will work to create a new community where things can be run with quality user discussions as the paramount objective.
This site used to be great. Even in it's latter days, it's been good. That is poised to change. Before long, it will be mediocre, and ordinary.
I didn't see a problem when Dice Holdings initially bought Slashdot. I figured there would be efforts to drive nerd traffic towards their job listings and such. That was fine. We all need jobs.
Things have changed now. Beyond the shifts in story choices, the slashvertisements, and so on, something fundamental has changed: Slashdot's owners do not appreciate it.
Their recent financials show that they have written its value as an asset down to zero. They have legally claimed it to be worthless. That is at the root of what is happening now. They want to fundamentally change the nature of this site in order to remake it into something with big growth potential.
Beta is just the latest symptom of this disease. It will not be the last. In striving to make it into a site that will bring them a growing user base and growing revenue per user, they have shown a willingness to dumb down the interface in the name of making it more accessible to newcomers, to cast aside essential elements of decade-spanning community culture, and to plow ahead with changes in the face of overwhelmingly negative user feedback.
This is not going to change. This will not go away. I will not support it.
I will be gone for this entire week, in protest. While away, I will work to create a new community where things can be run with quality user discussions as the paramount objective.
Slashdot Mirror
Manning & Snowden were both charged under the Espionage Act.
You also mis-inderstand the signing bit. That's not a requirement for legal jeopardy, it just makes any transgression unequivocally "knowing" should prosecutors need to make such a case in the future.
The UK can't legally extradite someone to a place where they might reasonably face execution, such as (to pick a totally random example) handing a person accused of espionage over to the United States.
Not only does Sweden have no such rule, but it has a history of accommodating "extraordinary rendition" operations by the US.
Whether he was right about it or not, Assange (and the Ecuadorians) certainly believed that to be the reason for the conspicuous escalation of his criminal investigation by the Swedes.
Even taking a laudable I-believe-the-accusers posture there despite counter-intelligence operations against Assange being a thing, I can only wish that we lived in a world where date-rape investigations were pursued so vigorously against people who haven't antagonized a superpower.
What's next, Minesweeper?
Yeah, the problems they had with PowerPC only arose as IBM and Motorola left them in a lurch. Motorola never delivered a 64-bit chip to Apple, and IBM never delivered a 3GHz PPC 970 suitable for mass deployment (they ran so hot at that speed that the cooling would've sounded like a blow-dryer). This made the G5 the dead-end of mass-market desktop/laptop PowerPC parts. (If I were still single and had a room full of oddball computers, I'd get an Amiga-One X-5000 though.)
PowerPC still had legs as an architecture in other market segments, obviously, but at that time, neither IBM nor Moto/Freescale were both willing and able to give Apple what they needed.
Used to be the case moreso than it is now. I've happily paid more for "Just Works" several times over the years, but they don't seem to be selling that any longer.
In retrospect, needing to buy a 3rd party app to print from my iPad to the laser printer my iMac is sharing on the network was the first sign of trouble.
Replacing bottleneck-points in Python with C (and lately Rust or even Go) extensions has been well understood to be the Goldilocks approach for many years.
You optimize for power only in parts of the project where the trade off in simplicity and ease of maintenance is justified, and enjoy the benefits of Python the rest of the time.
Much of Europe would be surprised to hear that their Democratic Socialism is leading them to Communism or Authoritarianism.
Really, Authoritarianism, whether in Capitalist or Communist drag, is the real bad -ism. That's the difference in practice between Socialism in Venezuela and Socialism in places like Sweden.
(The fact that we don't try to subvert Sweden's political system to benefit our oil companies every ten years or so is part of how that shakes out as well.)
Even highly commercial places like Germany and the UK Socialize essential things like public health and education. Even here in the US, Socialist policies like the New Deal, Rural Electrification, public Fire Departments, the Interstate Highway System, Social Security, the Army Corps of Engineers, Medicare, and so on have been (even when imperfect) great successes and enablers of overall economic prosperity.
For casual computing by non-experts, GUI is the way to go. Experts and enthusiasts benefit from the programmatic capabilities that CLI provides, but the learning curve to attain that power is steeper, and returns little benefit to casual users.
Short term, put them on separate projects. Long term, start preparing for the eventual replacement for asshole-rockstar, because if you let that sort of thing go on forever, the only people who stick around will be assholes.
Further, if you let your development process become inextricably dependent on a single unprofessional asshole's output, you're setting yourself up for a major fall when he either leaves in a lurch, demands to be brought in as a, partner or similar.
It's quite possible to say: "This approach is a bad idea, and here's why...." followed by cogent reasoning, examples, performance profiling, etc. - without including any insults, name-calling, profanity, etc. Fostering an environment where a posture of mature professionalism is the norm does not mean settling for sub-par code. It means not settling for the best code produced by people who are willing to tolerate immature and unprofessional behavior. It also means not settling for a code-base that prioritizes the contributions of the stubborn, loud, and abrasive over those they drown out or drive away.
I can tell you right now, If I had a proper Basic Income guarantee along with healthcare, I would work part-time to afford luxuries & travel, and split the remaining free time making music & art, doing things with my friends & family, and volunteering.
This is the kind of life people could have if the productivity gains of recent decades had been shared, rather than hoarded.
There are significant advantages in the studio to tracking to tape, even knowing full well that the material is going to be digitized during mixing, mastering, or manufactureing.
The logarithmic diminishing returns of +inputsignal:+recordedsignal as the metal oxides below spun by the the write head's magnetic field exceed 80% of available produces a naturally responsive dynamic range compression that is more pleasing to the ear than that produced by most stand-alone dynamic processors.
This quality allows the recording engineer to safely use the more of the available dynamic range than when tracking digitally, which sounds harsh ( sudden square-wave-ish clipping) when pushed too hard. In contrast, the distortion that occurs when pushing tape both subtly fades in and out with the signal and also leans more towards triangle-wave shapes rather than square-wave shapes, making it more pleasing to the ear.
Tape also exhibits a gradual fall of in reproduction signal strength as frequencies climb. This can also be pleasing to the ear, both by taking the edge off of super-trebley sources like crash cymbals or some kinds of guitar distortion effects without the noise & distortion introduced by many (finite impulse response) EQ processes - and also by passing less signal into the ugly-responding cut-off range of the anti-aliasing filter when the material is digitized downstream. Moving the cut-off of the AA-filter farther away from our range of hearing and allowing gentler knees (and thus less distortion as input signal approaches the cut-off frequency) on the filters as they approach the now solidly-ultrasonic Nyquist limit is actual the primary benefit of 88.2/96kHz audio).
Those factors combined lead to the feel of "warmth" people describe. Many of those things can be accomplished similarly in the digital realm with the right tools, practices, & knowhow; but with tape, they just happen naturally.
I like that ghost peppers can be smoked/dried/roasted and still have substantial heat left. I don't use them fresh. Habaneros are about the hottest thing I'll use fresh, and even then I more often go for seranos, as you've got more control.
They did like to appropriate Socialist language when attempting to market themselves as being a "workers party," "of the people," and so on, as a way to paint themselves themselves as the middle road between the old-gaurd Nationalists upon whom they placed blame for the country's failures and the Communists who they saw as their main rivals to replace the Nationalists. Despite the marketing/rhetoric, nothing they did from a policy or governance standpoint stands out as more Socialist than any other European state of that era. They lied,
all the time, whenever they thought it would benefit them. This was no different.
There are many different flavors of Socialism in the world today, mainstream European Social Democrats, Berners who want to import that model to the U.S., Syndicalists in labor movements, Anarcho-Socialists and Autonomists who end up having a lot in common with Libertarians, and so on. While there are a few State Socialist/Leninist/Maoist hold-outs like Cuba or Vietnam, many countries successfully apply Socialist principles to certain national industries and infrastructure segments where market forces have historically produced bad outcomes, but leave things more or less to individuals/the-market otherwise.
No one before or after has ever used "Socialism" with the same context or connotations as the NSDAP, except people wanting to disingenuously tar Social-Democrats with Nazi associations as an ad-hominem rather than engaging with their ideas.
Grew up in Silicon Valley at exactly the right time.
Marketed Steve Wozniak's brilliance, repeatedly.
Figured out that how people interact with a machine is as important as the capabilities of the machine itself.
I wonder what they could do with their structures as far as encouraging coral growth or providing spawning shelters? Clean energy is obviously the primary goal of the project, but anything building on the seafloor should hopefully take a look at the whole picture.
The last place I worked had five DATs. At any given time, four of them were in a safe-deposit box at the bank branch across the street.
At the end of every evening, one of the partners walked across the street and swapped today's tape for tomorrow's, and brought it back.
The tapes themselves were replaced once a year.
I'm trying to say something intelligent involving homomorphic encryption with random seeds and salt that doesn't trigger the Beavis & Butthead reflex, but I just can't make it happen.
The clouds around here were kind enough to break earlier. Hopefully that holds. It's been a pleasure to watch the ISS fly over from my back yard several times, and it's wet my appetite for more.
Wohoo, two minutes left, I can reply.
http://www.soylentnews.org/wik...
www.soylentnews.org/Forum/
http://webchat.freenode.net/ channel ##altslashdot.
Out.
This site used to be great. Even in its latter days, it's been good. That is poised to change. Before long, it will be mediocre, and ordinary.
I didn't see a problem when Dice Holdings initially bought Slashdot. I figured there would be efforts to drive nerd traffic towards their job listings and such. That was fine. We all need jobs.
Things have changed now. Beyond the shifts in story choices, the slashvertisements, and so on, something fundamental has changed: Slashdot's owners do not appreciate it.
Their recent financials show that they have written its value as an asset down to zero. They have legally claimed it to be worthless. That is at the root of what is happening now. They want to fundamentally change the nature of this site in order to remake it into something with big growth potential.
Beta is just the latest symptom of this disease. It will not be the last. In striving to make it into a site that will bring them a growing user base and growing revenue per user, they have shown a willingness to dumb down the interface in the name of making it more accessible to newcomers, to cast aside essential elements of decade-spanning community culture, and to plow ahead with changes in the face of overwhelmingly negative user feedback.
This is not going to change. This will not go away. I will not support it.
I will be gone for this entire week, in protest. While away, I will work to create a new community where things can be run with quality user discussions as the paramount objective.
Be seeing you.
This site used to be great. Even in it's latter days, it's been good. That is poised to change. Before long, it will be mediocre, and ordinary.
I didn't see a problem when Dice Holdings initially bought Slashdot. I figured there would be efforts to drive nerd traffic towards their job listings and such. That was fine. We all need jobs.
Things have changed now. Beyond the shifts in story choices, the slashvertisements, and so on, something fundamental has changed: Slashdot's owners do not appreciate it.
Their recent financials show that they have written its value as an asset down to zero. They have legally claimed it to be worthless. That is at the root of what is happening now. They want to fundamentally change the nature of this site in order to remake it into something with big growth potential.
Beta is just the latest symptom of this disease. It will not be the last. In striving to make it into a site that will bring them a growing user base and growing revenue per user, they have shown a willingness to dumb down the interface in the name of making it more accessible to newcomers, to cast aside essential elements of decade-spanning community culture, and to plow ahead with changes in the face of overwhelmingly negative user feedback.
This is not going to change. This will not go away. I will not support it.
I will be gone for this entire week, in protest. While away, I will work to create a new community where things can be run with quality user discussions as the paramount objective.
Be seeing you.
This site used to be great. Even in it's latter days, it's been good. That is poised to change. Before long, it will be mediocre, and ordinary.
I didn't see a problem when Dice Holdings initially bought Slashdot. I figured there would be efforts to drive nerd traffic towards their job listings and such. That was fine. We all need jobs.
Things have changed now. Beyond the shifts in story choices, the slashvertisements, and so on, something fundamental has changed: Slashdot's owners do not appreciate it.
Their recent financials show that they have written its value as an asset down to zero. They have legally claimed it to be worthless. That is at the root of what is happening now. They want to fundamentally change the nature of this site in order to remake it into something with big growth potential.
Beta is just the latest symptom of this disease. It will not be the last. In striving to make it into a site that will bring them a growing user base and growing revenue per user, they have shown a willingness to dumb down the interface in the name of making it more accessible to newcomers, to cast aside essential elements of decade-spanning community culture, and to plow ahead with changes in the face of overwhelmingly negative user feedback.
This is not going to change. This will not go away. I will not support it.
I will be gone for this entire week, in protest. While away, I will work to create a new community where things can be run with quality user discussions as the paramount objective.
Be seeing you.
This site used to be great. Even in it's latter days, it's been good. That is poised to change. Before long, it will be mediocre, and ordinary.
I didn't see a problem when Dice Holdings initially bought Slashdot. I figured there would be efforts to drive nerd traffic towards their job listings and such. That was fine. We all need jobs.
Things have changed now. Beyond the shifts in story choices, the slashvertisements, and so on, something fundamental has changed: Slashdot's owners do not appreciate it.
Their recent financials show that they have written its value as an asset down to zero. They have legally claimed it to be worthless. That is at the root of what is happening now. They want to fundamentally change the nature of this site in order to remake it into something with big growth potential.
Beta is just the latest symptom of this disease. It will not be the last. In striving to make it into a site that will bring them a growing user base and growing revenue per user, they have shown a willingness to dumb down the interface in the name of making it more accessible to newcomers, to cast aside essential elements of decade-spanning community culture, and to plow ahead with changes in the face of overwhelmingly negative user feedback.
This is not going to change. This will not go away. I will not support it.
I will be gone for this entire week, in protest. While away, I will work to create a new community where things can be run with quality user discussions as the paramount objective.
Be seeing you.
This site used to be great. Even in it's latter days, it's been good. That is poised to change. Before long, it will be mediocre, and ordinary.
I didn't see a problem when Dice Holdings initially bought Slashdot. I figured there would be efforts to drive nerd traffic towards their job listings and such. That was fine. We all need jobs.
Things have changed now. Beyond the shifts in story choices, the slashvertisements, and so on, something fundamental has changed: Slashdot's owners do not appreciate it.
Their recent financials show that they have written its value as an asset down to zero. They have legally claimed it to be worthless. That is at the root of what is happening now. They want to fundamentally change the nature of this site in order to remake it into something with big growth potential.
Beta is just the latest symptom of this disease. It will not be the last. In striving to make it into a site that will bring them a growing user base and growing revenue per user, they have shown a willingness to dumb down the interface in the name of making it more accessible to newcomers, to cast aside essential elements of decade-spanning community culture, and to plow ahead with changes in the face of overwhelmingly negative user feedback.
This is not going to change. This will not go away. I will not support it.
I will be gone for this entire week, in protest. While away, I will work to create a new community where things can be run with quality user discussions as the paramount objective.
Be seeing you.