Didn't someone work up numbers comparing the amount in a typical vaccine or whatever, to the amount of mercury you'd get from, say, a can of tuna or a serving of any ocean fish? I seem to recall the edible had many times the amount of mercury, and of course you're far more likely to repeat-dose that tuna sandwich.
No, I was just pointing out that contrary to popular belief, ag water is not free either -- in fact it's a serious expense. As to costs relative to other uses, well -- which do we need most -- food, oil, or urban lawns?
I wonder about that "alliance of Native American groups".... considering how the protest industry works (most protesters nowadays are pros who will protest anything for a paycheck).
And it goes directly against observed reality, which is that the tribes are more than happy to have the income: Witness the coal coming out of the reservations in eastern Montana. And it's stripmined at that.
But the managers are the ones who spent the money, and by damn they need to justify that expense. If it's backed away from, that means it was a bad purchase, and we all know what happens to managers who make bad decisions like that.
. . . . ....they go on to ruin some other company.
You're aware that water isn't free to farmers either? They either pay for irrigation rights, or pay to pump it. Neither is exactly cheap. Since the cost of diesel got so high, I've seen figures as high as $200,000/acre to irrigate row crops. Do you think they might seek to minimize that expense??
My well guy told me of a golf course water system (deep wells with electric pumps) he repaired that the manager wanted to test RIGHT NOW, despite still being during Edison's prime time rates. My well guy warned him, don't do it, wait til your normal graveyard schedule, but noooo, it had to be tested NOW. So it got tested, for 15 minutes. When the bill came, it was $15,000 higher than normal. To run a relatively small-scale (compared to farms) irrigation system for FIFTEEN MINUTES.
"The main thing we want is a site that doesn't look old and stale, because that will slowly drive readers and contributors away. Or keep new users from giving it a shot. "
Erm... that doesn't wash given the userbase, both historic and current. The number of registered users has skyrocketed, mostly in the last 3 or 4 years, and if it's slowed down at all lately it's probably because the new generation of internet users are doing Facebook and text messaging instead of forums, and are nearly not so interested in geek news as we who thought PCs were a great replacement for Erector Sets.
If the interface was keeping new users away, there wouldn't be over two million registered users. If it was driving away old hands, there wouldn't be so many low-digit IDs still here, nor would there be so many long-term regulars. If the quality of the comments were poor, the average discussion would have 30 or maybe 3 comments, not 300+. If it were a pain to comment, I certainly wouldn't have almost 16,000 comments (14,600 officially, but the system lost over 1000 of my comments during one of the previous upgrades).
The users, new and old, obviously don't CARE if the interface is "old and stale", or we wouldn't still BE here. We care if it's usable and non-annoying. We prefer functional if primitive DOS to where-the-fuck-did-they-put-my-stuff Win8.
And as many have pointed out, and you would do well to remember: Slashdot is NOT the stories, nor the interface. It is the community and the discussions. Lose us, and you're just another blogroll.
Myself and others have noted that Slashdot was the replacement for Usenet, back when it kinda went to hell. And I believe a great deal of why Slashdot has been so viable for so long (far more so than other discussion sites) is because it kept some of the best usability features of Usenet, plus made it easier to find good discussions and good comments.
That first comment over on the linked Reddit page says it all.
Seriously, I don't care how ugly Slashdot is (I run it with colors off and no scripts and enlarged fonts, so what I see is even uglier). I care that it's fast, functional in any damn browser, and doesn't annoy me or my aging eyes.
Slashdot is what Usenet used to be. Change it, and in due course it'll be just as has-been as Usenet.
And this long-time subscriber (12 or 13 years as a paid sub) won't re-up that subscription.
The other says, "This is new, and therefore better."
Full rant over in the appropriate discussion.
SLASHDOT BETA SUCKS.
Anyone else remember the Delphi Forums, or Google Groups, or Yahoo Groups, before their Powers That Be "modernized" 'em?? No? that's because after the change, they became shadows of their former selves, the province of n00bs and spammers.
"We not only need sunset into bills, we need to require an ever increasing majority to re-authorize these laws"
That's a really good point. It's hardly worth the bother if reauthorizing is trivially easy. If the law has really earned its keep, then that ever-increasing majority should see its value and vote for it, eh? And if not... well, maybe it wasn't such a good idea after all.
I don't care if Slashdot is ugly. I don't care if it looks like 1995. All I care about is that it's easy and quick to use. The reason I've been a daily reader since 1998 is not just the content. It's because the interface Just Works, with any damned browser and any settings I care to use. It doesn't ANNOY me into leaving.
Conversely, no other news-and-comments site has kept me for long, because I have to pay as much attention to the interface as to the content.
Slashdot's basic interface hasn't changed much in all these years. Don't you realise that this is a major reason for its ongoing success?
Conversely, I tried the beta -- and nope, I ain't dealing with this. It's marginally usable if I turn off CSS, but why should I have to suffer that nuisance? It's like Windows 8. Why 'upgrade' to something I don't like?
Slashdot isn't so important that I can't live without it. But it's CONVENIENT because as it stands, it Just Works. So I come here instead of hunting news elsewhere. Change that, and -- why would I bother? I don't come here to look at pretty widgets or admire someone's scripting prowess.
In every case where a radical change of interface has been inflicted on a vibrant existing community, that community has withered and eventually died. If you can't see the lesson in that, I don't know what else to say.
But once a critical mass of regulars fling up their hands and leave for greener pastures, there'll be no reason for the rest of us to come here.
Yeah, I know by now you feel obligated because you've put in all that work and by-damn you're gonna get some benefit out of it. But it doesn't work that way. You're not here to gratify your coding ego or to look good in the Pretty Website Olympics. You're here to keep us here. You'll keep us here by leaving well enough alone. How else do you think Slashdot got to the level of over 2 million registered users and probably the highest percentage of persistent regular posters of any discussion site since the heyday of Usenet?
Or on a busy freeway, where traffic *routinely* goes bumper-to-bumper, at high speed, and with many rapid lane changes -- the system (never mind the driver!) is liable to be overwhelmed with data from adjacent cars.
The trouble is, most people have busy enough lives already. They have their own careers and families and whatnot. Being busy people (and people whose fields of expertise lies somewhere other than ferreting out firsthand information), we delegate our political research to journalists. The problem is, we have no way of ensuring that the data these journalists gather and provide to the rest of us doesn't err through slant, omission, or outright fabrication.
The problem is that as soon as they stop generating a reasonable monetary return, instead of entering the public domain (as was the original intent of copyright law), they enter the company vaults, never to see the light of day again.
Yeah, you should have a chance (not a right) to make a reasonable return on your investment (here meaning time to create whatever). But what about when it stops making money -- is it right to lock it away forever? Because that IS what's happening with older works, and as a result, some (like old films) are being lost to the ravages of time and poor storage conditions. I'd hazard a great many books have been similarly lost as well, once they went out of print.
That's why I think the proportional copyright fee someone put forth is fair and just: let copyright be very cheap for the first 7 or 14 years, then double the fee every 7 years thereafter, and if the fee isn't paid, the work enters the public domain. If it's still making you money, it'll be worth paying the fee (which for the first 2 or 3 renewals would still be trivial for a commercially-viable work). But hoarding it for 50 or 100 years wouldn't make financial sense even for Disney -- at some point the fee would exceed the commercial value of the work, and that's when it's time to let it go into the public domain.
At which point it might experience a revival, and if it does, the original owner could publish it again to fill the new demand just as well as could anyone else (better, if you do a little value-added that no other publisher could provide, like authentic signed copies, deleted footage, and the like).
After all, specialty presses that largely handle public domain works wouldn't be in business otherwise. Frex:
Correct so far as it goes. But the plea bargain system itself is broken. Per stats I've seen, Los Angeles County has a 96% conviction rate, and Federal offenses have a 97% conviction rate with only 1% having gone to trial. Do you really believe such a high percentage of accusations are correct??
Public urination should be in the same class with littering, meriting at most a fine.
Tho that's gotten out of hand, too. The max fine for littering in Oregon is (are you sitting down?)... $6,250. Yes, that's right. Over six thousand dollars. For littering.
For comparison, in Calif the max penalty for assault is $1000 ($5000 for assault on a police officer).
"Tough on crime" has produced numerous such egregious examples, especially where it can serve as a revenue conduit.
Greenhouses sometimes *add* CO2 to their confined air, because it makes for better yields.
All life on Earth is largely made up of carbon compounds, and either uses or exhales CO2. I guess what folks who think CO2 is bad really want is to sterilize the planet down to bare rock.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't someone work up numbers comparing the amount in a typical vaccine or whatever, to the amount of mercury you'd get from, say, a can of tuna or a serving of any ocean fish? I seem to recall the edible had many times the amount of mercury, and of course you're far more likely to repeat-dose that tuna sandwich.
No, I was just pointing out that contrary to popular belief, ag water is not free either -- in fact it's a serious expense. As to costs relative to other uses, well -- which do we need most -- food, oil, or urban lawns?
"Impairment of goodwill and intangible assets"
Methinks they're gonna have to increase that line item.
Today's beta wisdom from the bottom of the page:
Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some damn fool discovers something which either abolishes the system or expands it beyond recognition.
I wonder about that "alliance of Native American groups".... considering how the protest industry works (most protesters nowadays are pros who will protest anything for a paycheck).
And it goes directly against observed reality, which is that the tribes are more than happy to have the income: Witness the coal coming out of the reservations in eastern Montana. And it's stripmined at that.
But the managers are the ones who spent the money, and by damn they need to justify that expense. If it's backed away from, that means it was a bad purchase, and we all know what happens to managers who make bad decisions like that.
. ...they go on to ruin some other company.
.
.
.
.
CNET??? so THAT's what happened to it. It used to have good content, easy to find. Not anymore. :(
DOS4. Mainly because it had file corruption issues.
The Slashdot beta is like DOS4. It corrupts discussions, and no one uses it.
You're aware that water isn't free to farmers either? They either pay for irrigation rights, or pay to pump it. Neither is exactly cheap. Since the cost of diesel got so high, I've seen figures as high as $200,000/acre to irrigate row crops. Do you think they might seek to minimize that expense??
My well guy told me of a golf course water system (deep wells with electric pumps) he repaired that the manager wanted to test RIGHT NOW, despite still being during Edison's prime time rates. My well guy warned him, don't do it, wait til your normal graveyard schedule, but noooo, it had to be tested NOW. So it got tested, for 15 minutes. When the bill came, it was $15,000 higher than normal. To run a relatively small-scale (compared to farms) irrigation system for FIFTEEN MINUTES.
"The main thing we want is a site that doesn't look old and stale, because that will slowly drive readers and contributors away. Or keep new users from giving it a shot. "
Erm... that doesn't wash given the userbase, both historic and current. The number of registered users has skyrocketed, mostly in the last 3 or 4 years, and if it's slowed down at all lately it's probably because the new generation of internet users are doing Facebook and text messaging instead of forums, and are nearly not so interested in geek news as we who thought PCs were a great replacement for Erector Sets.
If the interface was keeping new users away, there wouldn't be over two million registered users. If it was driving away old hands, there wouldn't be so many low-digit IDs still here, nor would there be so many long-term regulars. If the quality of the comments were poor, the average discussion would have 30 or maybe 3 comments, not 300+. If it were a pain to comment, I certainly wouldn't have almost 16,000 comments (14,600 officially, but the system lost over 1000 of my comments during one of the previous upgrades).
The users, new and old, obviously don't CARE if the interface is "old and stale", or we wouldn't still BE here. We care if it's usable and non-annoying. We prefer functional if primitive DOS to where-the-fuck-did-they-put-my-stuff Win8.
And as many have pointed out, and you would do well to remember: Slashdot is NOT the stories, nor the interface. It is the community and the discussions. Lose us, and you're just another blogroll.
Myself and others have noted that Slashdot was the replacement for Usenet, back when it kinda went to hell. And I believe a great deal of why Slashdot has been so viable for so long (far more so than other discussion sites) is because it kept some of the best usability features of Usenet, plus made it easier to find good discussions and good comments.
That first comment over on the linked Reddit page says it all.
Seriously, I don't care how ugly Slashdot is (I run it with colors off and no scripts and enlarged fonts, so what I see is even uglier). I care that it's fast, functional in any damn browser, and doesn't annoy me or my aging eyes.
Slashdot is what Usenet used to be. Change it, and in due course it'll be just as has-been as Usenet.
And this long-time subscriber (12 or 13 years as a paid sub) won't re-up that subscription.
Maybe I should check out Reddit for a change.
There are two kinds of fools:
One says, "This is old, and therefore good.
The other says, "This is new, and therefore better."
Full rant over in the appropriate discussion.
SLASHDOT BETA SUCKS.
Anyone else remember the Delphi Forums, or Google Groups, or Yahoo Groups, before their Powers That Be "modernized" 'em?? No? that's because after the change, they became shadows of their former selves, the province of n00bs and spammers.
SLASHDOT BETA SUCKS.
Oh, and so do VIAO computers. Good riddance.
Repeating for emphasis, not comic effect:
SLASHDOT BETA SUCKS.
"We not only need sunset into bills, we need to require an ever increasing majority to re-authorize these laws"
That's a really good point. It's hardly worth the bother if reauthorizing is trivially easy. If the law has really earned its keep, then that ever-increasing majority should see its value and vote for it, eh? And if not... well, maybe it wasn't such a good idea after all.
At least, not if you want to get re-elected.
...could give new meaning to 'planned obsolescence'.
I don't care if Slashdot is ugly. I don't care if it looks like 1995. All I care about is that it's easy and quick to use. The reason I've been a daily reader since 1998 is not just the content. It's because the interface Just Works, with any damned browser and any settings I care to use. It doesn't ANNOY me into leaving.
Conversely, no other news-and-comments site has kept me for long, because I have to pay as much attention to the interface as to the content.
Slashdot's basic interface hasn't changed much in all these years. Don't you realise that this is a major reason for its ongoing success?
Conversely, I tried the beta -- and nope, I ain't dealing with this. It's marginally usable if I turn off CSS, but why should I have to suffer that nuisance? It's like Windows 8. Why 'upgrade' to something I don't like?
Slashdot isn't so important that I can't live without it. But it's CONVENIENT because as it stands, it Just Works. So I come here instead of hunting news elsewhere. Change that, and -- why would I bother? I don't come here to look at pretty widgets or admire someone's scripting prowess.
In every case where a radical change of interface has been inflicted on a vibrant existing community, that community has withered and eventually died. If you can't see the lesson in that, I don't know what else to say.
But once a critical mass of regulars fling up their hands and leave for greener pastures, there'll be no reason for the rest of us to come here.
Yeah, I know by now you feel obligated because you've put in all that work and by-damn you're gonna get some benefit out of it. But it doesn't work that way. You're not here to gratify your coding ego or to look good in the Pretty Website Olympics. You're here to keep us here. You'll keep us here by leaving well enough alone. How else do you think Slashdot got to the level of over 2 million registered users and probably the highest percentage of persistent regular posters of any discussion site since the heyday of Usenet?
Don't fuck with it. Seriously. Just don't.
PS:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
Or on a busy freeway, where traffic *routinely* goes bumper-to-bumper, at high speed, and with many rapid lane changes -- the system (never mind the driver!) is liable to be overwhelmed with data from adjacent cars.
U.S. Code, Title 18, Sections 241 and 242.
Text of the law:
http://www.lneilsmith.org/18us...
In layman's terms:
https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/i...
The trouble is, most people have busy enough lives already. They have their own careers and families and whatnot. Being busy people (and people whose fields of expertise lies somewhere other than ferreting out firsthand information), we delegate our political research to journalists. The problem is, we have no way of ensuring that the data these journalists gather and provide to the rest of us doesn't err through slant, omission, or outright fabrication.
The problem is that as soon as they stop generating a reasonable monetary return, instead of entering the public domain (as was the original intent of copyright law), they enter the company vaults, never to see the light of day again.
Yeah, you should have a chance (not a right) to make a reasonable return on your investment (here meaning time to create whatever). But what about when it stops making money -- is it right to lock it away forever? Because that IS what's happening with older works, and as a result, some (like old films) are being lost to the ravages of time and poor storage conditions. I'd hazard a great many books have been similarly lost as well, once they went out of print.
That's why I think the proportional copyright fee someone put forth is fair and just: let copyright be very cheap for the first 7 or 14 years, then double the fee every 7 years thereafter, and if the fee isn't paid, the work enters the public domain. If it's still making you money, it'll be worth paying the fee (which for the first 2 or 3 renewals would still be trivial for a commercially-viable work). But hoarding it for 50 or 100 years wouldn't make financial sense even for Disney -- at some point the fee would exceed the commercial value of the work, and that's when it's time to let it go into the public domain.
At which point it might experience a revival, and if it does, the original owner could publish it again to fill the new demand just as well as could anyone else (better, if you do a little value-added that no other publisher could provide, like authentic signed copies, deleted footage, and the like).
After all, specialty presses that largely handle public domain works wouldn't be in business otherwise. Frex:
https://peganapress.com/about....
Correct so far as it goes. But the plea bargain system itself is broken. Per stats I've seen, Los Angeles County has a 96% conviction rate, and Federal offenses have a 97% conviction rate with only 1% having gone to trial. Do you really believe such a high percentage of accusations are correct??
Public urination should be in the same class with littering, meriting at most a fine.
Tho that's gotten out of hand, too. The max fine for littering in Oregon is (are you sitting down?) ... $6,250. Yes, that's right. Over six thousand dollars. For littering.
For comparison, in Calif the max penalty for assault is $1000 ($5000 for assault on a police officer).
"Tough on crime" has produced numerous such egregious examples, especially where it can serve as a revenue conduit.
I can only think of a handful of legit .info and .biz but have seen tons of 'em as scammer domains.
As to all these other oddballs -- how are we supposed to remember them all? .com .net and .org strain our ability to recall who's who as it is.
Greenhouses sometimes *add* CO2 to their confined air, because it makes for better yields.
All life on Earth is largely made up of carbon compounds, and either uses or exhales CO2. I guess what folks who think CO2 is bad really want is to sterilize the planet down to bare rock.