The problem with first strike against nuclear silos is you don't know where all the silos are. It's impossible to know if your knowledge is complete if you can't examine all possible factors--the whole Russian terrain, all of Russian's documents, the first ten miles of the entire earth's surface, and the entire ocean for underwater bases and secret nuclear missile carrying submarines.
A concerted attack against the nuclear silos can be construed as intent to prevent nuclear counter-strike, and can thus be considered a nuclear first strike. This justifies nuclear counterstrike under the same logic as a nuclear explosion in your country justifying a nuclear counterstrike.
The problem is more that the coating reflects 95% of the energy for 1/100 of 1 second, not for the entire duration until hull penetration is achieved. It would heat up and become non-reflective pretty much immediately, without 20x the energy input.
You aren't moving demographics; you're keeping with the evolution of your demographic. You need to remain palatable to the existing user base, and to the new user base. This isn't revolutionary, but it is your project's business case.
Your major stakeholders here include the group of end users of your site. In advertising-supported services, your end users are your product; this does not apply here because this project is targeted toward that product. The site is provided as a product to the end users; the business plan is that you exchange this working product with your end users as payment for your end users to be the product to be exchanged to advertisers for money. So in this context, the site is your product and we are your customers.
I think--this is an unqualified guess--that the large backlash is because of a major mishandling of the fine requirements. The major goal was "make the site current", or "Keep up with trends". The fine requirements will be a list of features, visual design concepts, and workflows for your site's users. Beta Slashdot looks very similar to a lot of other modern things which current users dislike--silly tabloid news blogs like BoingBoing that publish loads of bullshit and look like nothing more than a facefull of text in different sizes. It's as if the requirements say "Make the site follow current trends" and someone said "Well this is what BoingBoing looks like, let's make Slashdot into BoingBoing." Similarly, look at FailBlog--it looks like shit; I stopped going there because I just can't derive pleasure from the site, since I can't break it down visually into discrete repeated elements and thus have to put in a lot of effort searching for the bits of entertainment that were rather easy to just grab as I went before.
You're doing the same as FailBlog: making such a radical change that the Basal Ganglia can no longer freely navigate the site without plenty of work going on in the Prefrontal Cortex (hence the huge emotional backlash), and simply basing your site on flawed modern sites in a "ME TOO!" fashion. Both of these things are, for many reasons, conflicting with deeply-seated beliefs and mannerisms stuffed inside the heads of your audience. In effect, you're targeting the Miley Syrus/Justin Bieber crowd, and the people who are in your target audience do not mesh well with the same visual layouts and style that appeals to that demographic. That gains you a lot of rejection on top of the basic fact of trying to implement change.
I strongly suspect that somebody decided to just "make it look like BoingBoing" without actually bothering to consider the user base. They're following, not leading; and the trends don't work for Slashdot's audience base, so Slashdot has to lead if it's going to do this.
You're missing the point. The sharper and harder the boundaries, the more difficult it is to break them. When the Constitution is sloppy and can be excepted and worked around in some places on a whim, it becomes relatively easy for a government to work around the rigid parts, too.
The sum of your life experiences are stored in the basal ganglia, the "reptilian brain", inside your head. When a teenager learns to drive, it is an exhausting experience because the vast majority of effort--everything outside basic motor skills--occurs in the prefrontal cortex. After a few months of experience, much of that is moved into the basal ganglia; years down the line it becomes possible to drive for twelve hours, coming out tired but not completely destroyed, because the basal ganglia requires very little energy to run.
When a legislative body has restricted powers, people initially learn--at the beginning of its life--that said body simply cannot do certain things. The Federal Government, in 1776, could not regulate the cotton industry or slavery because neither was a matter of interstate commerce; the Commerce Clause would allow them to pass laws restricting the movement of cotton and slaves across state boundaries, but otherwise nothing. "Regulate" in language was even taken to mean 'Facilitate", which is why the Federal Government couldn't ban the transport of slaves--people simply wouldn't have it, it wasn't a power the Government had.
Eventually, the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, and the Doctrine of Incorporation was used as justification for why the Federal Government can now meddle in internal State affairs. This would have gotten backlash ages ago, but it was a gentle process and people eventually accepted--gradual movement over time re-programming the facts stored in their basal ganglia--that the Federal Government had those powers.
Similarly, the DOI is used to directly justify that the Bill of Rights applies to the states, instead of just to the Federal Government; this has created all kinds of strange things, including a mythical "Separation of Church and State". Early on, schools would distribute bibles to children--there is nothing illegal in this, and in fact there was at the time nothing illegal about Georgia declaring Christianity the state religion and holding daily worship in schools by law. The DOI is used to justify now that states cannot pass such laws because, well, the Federal Government can't.
Likewise, people extend this out (with no per se legal standing--there actually isn't any written law to support this) to the idea that no form of government can have any showing of religion at all--that the Federal government, the States, Municipalities, the Courts, and so on cannot talk about God, cannot have crosses, and cannot distribute bibles in schools due to some written law that doesn't actually exist anywhere except in peoples' minds. At some time this was understood by many to not be a feature of law; what changed wasn't law, but rather that many people had come to this understanding and filed it away in the core of their brains. When you tell them it isn't true... they don't take it very well.
You see, the Basal Ganglia takes less energy to operate than the Prefrontal Cortex. Likewise, some assumption of informational integrity is required: if you can't rely on your deeply-held beliefs and established facts to be accurate, you'd have to heavily utilize your prefrontal cortex every time you encountered conflicting information. If I told you the sky is purple, you would have to recognize that you thought it was blue, then go outside and look at the sky, then perform a lot of mental analysis on however it is you interpret color--I have no difficulty seeing blue and green as different, yet also as two forms of the same color (aoi), while they are absolutely not similar to red or orange--and conclude that, no, in fact, like the last several thousand times you did this, it turns out the sky is not purple. Instead, it's easier to immediately reje
Soulskill, I'm actually curious. Can you dig in the organization and find out why there's a redesign at this point? What marketing problem are you trying to address with the change? What technical problems? Can the technical problems be addressed with the same look, feel, and feature set?
I'm curious as to why the Beta site is what it is. From the outside, it appears as though a redesign was someone's pet project: Rather than a little new CSS and some minor tweaks to fit a new style, as well as a few new features, somebody decided to go full potato and write a whole new front-end platform. Why? What's wrong with current Slashdot?
It seems to me what you have is a combination of "We feel old, can we do something?" and peoples' pet projects. Slashdot doesn't seem to be market re-targetting--we get the same articles, unlike Trove where I actually get Project Management news--and a site re-design isn't the first step to bringing in new visitors. A site re-design most effectively eliminates current user base, with the trade-off that more of the churn should stay--this is something you do when a lot of people come to your site briefly, but lose interest in one or two visits.
Maybe this project was just initiated wrong. Maybe it should have been something wholly different, like an incremental improvement in features rather than a complete facelift. If you lopped the top title bar off Beta and stuck it on Classic, I would find that interesting: Beta has some new features, or at least makes features I've never explored visible to me. Completely reworking the site is huge shock, and has alienated some users. Comparing these, the former is just an incremental step--an addition of functionality without disrupting the existing site layout--while the latter is disruptive and risky.
I just don't see the business case for the latter--what problem are you trying to solve?
The parts that aren't quite clear are glaring; and we've gotten sort of a way with understanding that large and annoying things are okay in the name of some interest elsewhere in the Constitution. A lot of stuff that's terrible is actually considered constitutionally valid, like unending copyright laws or interpreting laws in 7 different conflicting ways depending on who you want to cart off to jail.
Soulskill, your stakeholder management is poor. Up on the front page there is a big "We are shoving this down your throat soon" message thrown at your customers--executive stakeholders, low power, high interest, low influence. You've largely shuttered them out, rather than keeping them informed; you've solicited comment and not informed them at large that their comments are heard and being discussed actively. This is producing customer backlash.
You should change the primary message in everyone's face to reflect what's been said here, and to notate that you are considering further changes and delays before moving to a full public release. Make prominent also that you have decided on the short-term availability of Slashdot Classic after launch as yet another metric. Provide a larger update page describing how this will handle--more discussion, more sampling, surveying, and then when and how you will launch. Maybe detail a launch process where everyone is set to New Slashdot by default, with a Slashdot Classic option that resets once per month at most, after major changes, so that the metric of who immediately runs back to Slashdot Classic can be re-sampled after major changes.
I suggest Tres Roeder's book "Managing Project Stakeholders" particularly for your review. The other book (A Sixth Sense for Project Management) is more useful in closed quarters, but I can recommend both.
Uh, if you spend $600 on an XBox and two $50 games come out on it that are worth playing, you got burned. Should have spent $250 on a Wii and got Mario, Zelda, Metroid, plenty of VC games, some third-party stuff, and another pile. It's not $150,000 burned, but it's burned.
And my point is that we have everybody in the fucking world building consoles now, selling consoles now, it looks like we're going to have a big 15 instead of a big 3 soon. That's a mindset that people are going to rush out and buy consoles like crazy, it's a big market, get in on the bubble. But at the same time, profits are floundering: the console makers are seeing reduced profits, the market as a whole is dying off, yet consumers are still buying into it. The replacement market--tablet games--is sucking sales away from consoles, handhelds, and PC games, but not making anyone any money. Everyone's jumping in on this WHILE IT'S COLLAPSING!
In this case, the investors aren't consumers who bought a console that produced only shit and thus was a wasted half-a-grand; the investments here are ventures into the console and gaming market, both into building a new console and into producing shittons of Android and iOS apps. And all those investors are going to get burned. And American consumers are probably going to gobble up some of it as it fails, then get stuck with useless machines that they can't play any good games on.
I can't help but think of 1984. Steam Console, Pandora, iPhone and Android phones and tablets--phones are probably safe--all over the place, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, and now Amazon? Another video game bubble, gearing up for another video game crash? With Nintendo floundering, Microsoft and Sony being all talk, and iPhone and Android developers being essentially Gateway prospectors, I'm wondering if the collapse isn't already starting.
Is that the new modus operandi? American consumers are so fucking stupid that the bubble is already collapsing while it's just starting to grow, and people keep getting on the dumbshit bandwagon because there are still idiots to soak while others are falling off the wagon having lost the spotlight and gotten caught in the crash? It's like if the housing bubble popped in 2005, house prices started to drop, and people kept buying houses like crazy because "they're gonna be worth a ton of money!" right up to 2009--buying demand that should fuel a bubble, right in the middle of an ongoing burst, because they're too stupid to see that the sky really is falling all around them.
Law and judiciary and justice are all fuzzy concepts. As for the constitution, I've been saying for ages it needs to be burned. We need to either dissolve the union (best option, least likely) or draft a new constitution that's more robust (control lawmakers, make laws more clear, mitigate some social/economic problems like ever-extending patent terms, etc.).
The problem is a new constitution needs to be drafted by God's Benevolent Angels--it needs to somehow be created from an unbiased but completely knowledgeable source which can neither play favoritism nor fail to interpret the current culture, economic forces, and direction of the world. Given that patent and copyright laws are already getting stronger and stronger in direct opposition to anything we would like to surmise the founding fathers would have thought just, and that the government is playing to remove all those privileges the constitution establishes for us, who exactly is going to draft this wholly unbiased document?
50 sovereign states gives us 50 chances at random to have better governments, and 1/50 chance of having a bad government. Yes, it's 50 times as many black swans like 9/11--it would take smaller disruption to have the Peoples' Republic of New York become the Tyranny of America--but it's also fair isolation from such damage, political pressure from neighbor states where your citizens keep moving to get away from your tyranny, and 50 chances for some state to get something so right it becomes a sweeping global political ideal that neighboring states and eventually most of the continent implements.
Consider that Gary Johnson is running New Mexico, and Ron Paul would be El Presidente somewhere, and so would Al Gore and Jeb Bush and Ahnald. We would quickly learn what works and what doesn't, and have many a safe haven to run to when our particular state passes some unilateral clusterfuck like the PATRIOT act. Isn't that better than trying to rewrite the constitution to fix all the flaws we've found so far, to try to reign in the corporations and politicians doing an end-run around the damn thing?
Currently you cannot swing conspiracy under free speech: Planning (talking about) a crime is assumed to indicate that you intend to commit a crime, and the will to commit a crime is thus a crime in this context. It's called "conspiracy", and often is applied after the fact; but occasionally when i.e. someone discusses with a hitman (or pretend-hitman) the price of killing another person, they are nailed for conspiracy to commit murder.
Similarly, the free expression of sexual thoughts to a minor over the Internet and the expression of intent to meet with them--expressing that they should come to your city--as well as the free expression of pictures of your genetallia being orally manipulated by a medium-sized canine to said child are abridged by piles of laws, from child sexual deviancy to corruption of a minor to bare obscenity. Is child pornography not, at its heart, free expression?
Similarly, lying to the police--speaking, but perhaps speaking a string of words that does not compute into a collection of facts matched correctly with your subjective reality--is a crime. Lying in court is called "perjury". Is not lying speech?
Broadcasting state secrets, discussing ongoing court proceedings with jurymen, and engaging in a calculated strategic campaign to defame someone with false information planted by pattern not obvious to the rational man are all examples of crimes. Are these not all free speech?
Judges can and have been incorrect, and have overturned things before. In this case, a new judge could easily rule that this is criminal informant behavior and, not accounting for the discussion above, decide that since it's not "Free Speech" and impedes law enforcement it is thus an illegal and criminal activity. As I have explained above, this is ludicrous from a practical standpoint.
Remember: Free speech has loads of exemptions. You cannot make damaging speech. If you do make damaging speech, you must have a damn good reason. Libel and slander are illegal because they are false; if you speak and damage a person's reputation with only the unadulterated truth, there is no case against you. In the same manner, public figures have a higher barrier for entry: a lot of damaging things will be said about them, and are taken as noise; targeted smear campaigns can quickly cross an invisible line.
It's difficult to argue that public knowledge of a police speed trap is damaging when the speed trap by nature is public knowledge for the simple reason that it's plainly visible to the public. That is the entire issue. Claiming that it's "Free Speech because it's spoken or otherwise expressed" is flimsy and stupid.
No, it is not "Free Speech". It is criminal informant behavior. The issue here is what is the stretch of what is and is not reasonable to slap state secrecy on.
For example, warning others that the guy walking down the street in the rain is a police officer posing as one of the dozens of people who pass by an hour as a walking wire (i.e. there's always 8 or 10 people in this 10 meter stretch; 1 or 2 of them is an undercover cop, and they're using listening devices to pick up the narcotics sale going on at an outside dining table) should be a crime. Why? Direct interference with a covert operation.
A cop sitting just over a hill with a radar gun is not covert. A fixed speed camera--even hidden--is also not a covert operation because it can be readily discovered. A cop sitting at the next dining table in plain clothes will be gone before pattern behavior identifies him as a cop: you need advanced knowledge--i.e. that that particular person is a police officer, as well as the knowledge that a covert operation is in progress--to discover that you're being eaves dropped upon. A fixed camera can and will be discovered eventually just out of course, as will a police cruiser hanging out at the edge of a parking lot facing traffic.
In these case, you are discussing--through flickering headlights, conveying such information--public, visible, open police activities. These are not secret things; they are not likely to force criminals deep into hiding or set back a major drug cartel bust by months or years, and they certainly aren't going to get anyone killed. They're open, public activities. That means they're open for public discussion, at all times.
This is not a "free speech" issue--we have free speech, and besides it doesn't cover shouting out that a cop in the alley carrying out a cocaine sting is wearing a wire. This is a matter of discussing police operations. As the operations are public, non-secret operations, there is no standing to take any action against anyone who relays this publicly-accessible information.
Think about it as if the government had chosen not to publish the existence or operations of Area 51, but ran a public road through it. Having, with no clearance, thousands of people per day passing through, they could not claim state secret for talking about anything seen while driving through Area 51. It would be legally unenforceable. Same thing.
Dissent. On the right side, I see a pile of results from online stores. The first line result is from Google Froogle. Now you're going to mix them so I have to do some mental work to pick apart the two? I can't just blindly click "that's what I want, let's see who sells it" versus "that's what I want... at Sears.com eh?"
Because with my new service, Newsify Professional, you get access to high-quality propaganda instead of tabloid news about Miley and Obama sucking dicks together in a tree! Newsify Professional gives you access to an entire library from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Scientific American, Physics Magazine, and other high-quality news sources that, while potentially vacuous and attuned to outmoded culture, are nonetheless relevant, informative, and on the whole a fine display of integrity in journalism.
Why pay $10 per month on 150 different news sites for access to hundreds of thousands of articles, of which you're only going to read maybe a dozen, and then only once? For $19.95 per month, you could have access to those same 150 news sites all in one roll, as much or as little as you like; for $29.95 we'll even throw in Archives from Eternity, full access to all archives since forever!
Kiai provides power and stamina. Research has shown shouting and especially cursing provides additional stamina, strength, and pain tolerance; I even kiai when doing sit-ups because I can pull off 30% more that way, but god damn does it hurt for the next few minutes.
If 10,000 Web sites are served from one server using Apache, and 100 Web sites are served from 100 servers using IIS, it would be reasonable to interpret that Apache is the more common choice for serving Web sites. It would be reasonable--not necessarily accurate, but in a vacuum decision there is a great chance of validity--to assume that Apache is the better choice for hosting Web sites in most cases, as it has been selected for more often. It would be very reasonable to assume that Apache is, in most cases, at least adequate--a satisfiser would find this palatable--while making no assumptions on whether it is more or less optimal than IIS.
It's silly to assume that the number of servers has any real meaning, unless it can reflect resource use--at our resolution we can't even do that (are these 100 IIS servers run from Raspberry Pi, or 100 IIS servers run from ginormous Dell R620s? How much load?). Even then, that doesn't reflect all the other decisions put into it. On the other hand, there are very real questions like "Does my ASP.NET site run better on Apache?" and the answer is no; or like, "Does my Python/cherrypi site run better through WSGI/Apache or WSGI/IIS?" and the answer is no again.
The raw number of Web sites run on Apache reflects a lot more than the number of discrete servers. But then you have questions like: are these Perl/PHP/Python,.NET, etc.? Essentially: are they Apache/IIS sites because of Apache/IIS, or because of the system that provides facilities for the site best also providing Apache/IIS support best?
Tres Roeder: A Sixth Sense for Project Management. Tres Roeder: Stakeholder Management. Read them, then get back to me. You can down Sixth Sense on your kindle in a little over an hour if you're sober.
That is the point though. Why do you need a quantum computer? What business case does this solve? What engineering problem? If the answer is "it's like 10% faster than using a regular computer," you don't need a quantum computer. If the answer is "we can't physically solve this problem on a regular computer--you must brute force through every possible answer and validate, which takes longer than the universe will continue to exist,", then you need a quantum computer. If the answer is "we can do this, but it's exponentially slower as the problem gets bigger; it's linear or polynomial on a quantum computer", you need a quantum computer for sufficiently large individual problems (if you have many small problems, you only need to scale linearly).
If you don't know if you have a quantum computer, then obviously a quantum computer isn't that important. I mean if your problem isn't solved remarkably easier with a given tool, YOU DON'T NEED THAT TOOL! If it IS solved remarkably easier with that tool, then YOU DEFINITELY KNOW IF WHAT YOU'RE HOLDING IS THE CORRECT TOOL!
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with first strike against nuclear silos is you don't know where all the silos are. It's impossible to know if your knowledge is complete if you can't examine all possible factors--the whole Russian terrain, all of Russian's documents, the first ten miles of the entire earth's surface, and the entire ocean for underwater bases and secret nuclear missile carrying submarines.
A concerted attack against the nuclear silos can be construed as intent to prevent nuclear counter-strike, and can thus be considered a nuclear first strike. This justifies nuclear counterstrike under the same logic as a nuclear explosion in your country justifying a nuclear counterstrike.
The problem is more that the coating reflects 95% of the energy for 1/100 of 1 second, not for the entire duration until hull penetration is achieved. It would heat up and become non-reflective pretty much immediately, without 20x the energy input.
And that's your business case.
You aren't moving demographics; you're keeping with the evolution of your demographic. You need to remain palatable to the existing user base, and to the new user base. This isn't revolutionary, but it is your project's business case.
Your major stakeholders here include the group of end users of your site. In advertising-supported services, your end users are your product; this does not apply here because this project is targeted toward that product. The site is provided as a product to the end users; the business plan is that you exchange this working product with your end users as payment for your end users to be the product to be exchanged to advertisers for money. So in this context, the site is your product and we are your customers.
I think--this is an unqualified guess--that the large backlash is because of a major mishandling of the fine requirements. The major goal was "make the site current", or "Keep up with trends". The fine requirements will be a list of features, visual design concepts, and workflows for your site's users. Beta Slashdot looks very similar to a lot of other modern things which current users dislike--silly tabloid news blogs like BoingBoing that publish loads of bullshit and look like nothing more than a facefull of text in different sizes. It's as if the requirements say "Make the site follow current trends" and someone said "Well this is what BoingBoing looks like, let's make Slashdot into BoingBoing." Similarly, look at FailBlog--it looks like shit; I stopped going there because I just can't derive pleasure from the site, since I can't break it down visually into discrete repeated elements and thus have to put in a lot of effort searching for the bits of entertainment that were rather easy to just grab as I went before.
You're doing the same as FailBlog: making such a radical change that the Basal Ganglia can no longer freely navigate the site without plenty of work going on in the Prefrontal Cortex (hence the huge emotional backlash), and simply basing your site on flawed modern sites in a "ME TOO!" fashion. Both of these things are, for many reasons, conflicting with deeply-seated beliefs and mannerisms stuffed inside the heads of your audience. In effect, you're targeting the Miley Syrus/Justin Bieber crowd, and the people who are in your target audience do not mesh well with the same visual layouts and style that appeals to that demographic. That gains you a lot of rejection on top of the basic fact of trying to implement change.
I strongly suspect that somebody decided to just "make it look like BoingBoing" without actually bothering to consider the user base. They're following, not leading; and the trends don't work for Slashdot's audience base, so Slashdot has to lead if it's going to do this.
You're missing the point. The sharper and harder the boundaries, the more difficult it is to break them. When the Constitution is sloppy and can be excepted and worked around in some places on a whim, it becomes relatively easy for a government to work around the rigid parts, too.
The sum of your life experiences are stored in the basal ganglia, the "reptilian brain", inside your head. When a teenager learns to drive, it is an exhausting experience because the vast majority of effort--everything outside basic motor skills--occurs in the prefrontal cortex. After a few months of experience, much of that is moved into the basal ganglia; years down the line it becomes possible to drive for twelve hours, coming out tired but not completely destroyed, because the basal ganglia requires very little energy to run.
When a legislative body has restricted powers, people initially learn--at the beginning of its life--that said body simply cannot do certain things. The Federal Government, in 1776, could not regulate the cotton industry or slavery because neither was a matter of interstate commerce; the Commerce Clause would allow them to pass laws restricting the movement of cotton and slaves across state boundaries, but otherwise nothing. "Regulate" in language was even taken to mean 'Facilitate", which is why the Federal Government couldn't ban the transport of slaves--people simply wouldn't have it, it wasn't a power the Government had.
Eventually, the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, and the Doctrine of Incorporation was used as justification for why the Federal Government can now meddle in internal State affairs. This would have gotten backlash ages ago, but it was a gentle process and people eventually accepted--gradual movement over time re-programming the facts stored in their basal ganglia--that the Federal Government had those powers.
Similarly, the DOI is used to directly justify that the Bill of Rights applies to the states, instead of just to the Federal Government; this has created all kinds of strange things, including a mythical "Separation of Church and State". Early on, schools would distribute bibles to children--there is nothing illegal in this, and in fact there was at the time nothing illegal about Georgia declaring Christianity the state religion and holding daily worship in schools by law. The DOI is used to justify now that states cannot pass such laws because, well, the Federal Government can't.
Likewise, people extend this out (with no per se legal standing--there actually isn't any written law to support this) to the idea that no form of government can have any showing of religion at all--that the Federal government, the States, Municipalities, the Courts, and so on cannot talk about God, cannot have crosses, and cannot distribute bibles in schools due to some written law that doesn't actually exist anywhere except in peoples' minds. At some time this was understood by many to not be a feature of law; what changed wasn't law, but rather that many people had come to this understanding and filed it away in the core of their brains. When you tell them it isn't true... they don't take it very well.
You see, the Basal Ganglia takes less energy to operate than the Prefrontal Cortex. Likewise, some assumption of informational integrity is required: if you can't rely on your deeply-held beliefs and established facts to be accurate, you'd have to heavily utilize your prefrontal cortex every time you encountered conflicting information. If I told you the sky is purple, you would have to recognize that you thought it was blue, then go outside and look at the sky, then perform a lot of mental analysis on however it is you interpret color--I have no difficulty seeing blue and green as different, yet also as two forms of the same color (aoi), while they are absolutely not similar to red or orange--and conclude that, no, in fact, like the last several thousand times you did this, it turns out the sky is not purple. Instead, it's easier to immediately reje
Check out Tres Roeder's book on Stakeholder Management. The keeping quiet thing becomes blindingly obvious.
Soulskill, I'm actually curious. Can you dig in the organization and find out why there's a redesign at this point? What marketing problem are you trying to address with the change? What technical problems? Can the technical problems be addressed with the same look, feel, and feature set?
I'm curious as to why the Beta site is what it is. From the outside, it appears as though a redesign was someone's pet project: Rather than a little new CSS and some minor tweaks to fit a new style, as well as a few new features, somebody decided to go full potato and write a whole new front-end platform. Why? What's wrong with current Slashdot?
It seems to me what you have is a combination of "We feel old, can we do something?" and peoples' pet projects. Slashdot doesn't seem to be market re-targetting--we get the same articles, unlike Trove where I actually get Project Management news--and a site re-design isn't the first step to bringing in new visitors. A site re-design most effectively eliminates current user base, with the trade-off that more of the churn should stay--this is something you do when a lot of people come to your site briefly, but lose interest in one or two visits.
Maybe this project was just initiated wrong. Maybe it should have been something wholly different, like an incremental improvement in features rather than a complete facelift. If you lopped the top title bar off Beta and stuck it on Classic, I would find that interesting: Beta has some new features, or at least makes features I've never explored visible to me. Completely reworking the site is huge shock, and has alienated some users. Comparing these, the former is just an incremental step--an addition of functionality without disrupting the existing site layout--while the latter is disruptive and risky.
I just don't see the business case for the latter--what problem are you trying to solve?
The parts that aren't quite clear are glaring; and we've gotten sort of a way with understanding that large and annoying things are okay in the name of some interest elsewhere in the Constitution. A lot of stuff that's terrible is actually considered constitutionally valid, like unending copyright laws or interpreting laws in 7 different conflicting ways depending on who you want to cart off to jail.
Soulskill, your stakeholder management is poor. Up on the front page there is a big "We are shoving this down your throat soon" message thrown at your customers--executive stakeholders, low power, high interest, low influence. You've largely shuttered them out, rather than keeping them informed; you've solicited comment and not informed them at large that their comments are heard and being discussed actively. This is producing customer backlash.
You should change the primary message in everyone's face to reflect what's been said here, and to notate that you are considering further changes and delays before moving to a full public release. Make prominent also that you have decided on the short-term availability of Slashdot Classic after launch as yet another metric. Provide a larger update page describing how this will handle--more discussion, more sampling, surveying, and then when and how you will launch. Maybe detail a launch process where everyone is set to New Slashdot by default, with a Slashdot Classic option that resets once per month at most, after major changes, so that the metric of who immediately runs back to Slashdot Classic can be re-sampled after major changes.
I suggest Tres Roeder's book "Managing Project Stakeholders" particularly for your review. The other book (A Sixth Sense for Project Management) is more useful in closed quarters, but I can recommend both.
Uh, if you spend $600 on an XBox and two $50 games come out on it that are worth playing, you got burned. Should have spent $250 on a Wii and got Mario, Zelda, Metroid, plenty of VC games, some third-party stuff, and another pile. It's not $150,000 burned, but it's burned.
And my point is that we have everybody in the fucking world building consoles now, selling consoles now, it looks like we're going to have a big 15 instead of a big 3 soon. That's a mindset that people are going to rush out and buy consoles like crazy, it's a big market, get in on the bubble. But at the same time, profits are floundering: the console makers are seeing reduced profits, the market as a whole is dying off, yet consumers are still buying into it. The replacement market--tablet games--is sucking sales away from consoles, handhelds, and PC games, but not making anyone any money. Everyone's jumping in on this WHILE IT'S COLLAPSING!
In this case, the investors aren't consumers who bought a console that produced only shit and thus was a wasted half-a-grand; the investments here are ventures into the console and gaming market, both into building a new console and into producing shittons of Android and iOS apps. And all those investors are going to get burned. And American consumers are probably going to gobble up some of it as it fails, then get stuck with useless machines that they can't play any good games on.
I can't help but think of 1984. Steam Console, Pandora, iPhone and Android phones and tablets--phones are probably safe--all over the place, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, and now Amazon? Another video game bubble, gearing up for another video game crash? With Nintendo floundering, Microsoft and Sony being all talk, and iPhone and Android developers being essentially Gateway prospectors, I'm wondering if the collapse isn't already starting.
Is that the new modus operandi? American consumers are so fucking stupid that the bubble is already collapsing while it's just starting to grow, and people keep getting on the dumbshit bandwagon because there are still idiots to soak while others are falling off the wagon having lost the spotlight and gotten caught in the crash? It's like if the housing bubble popped in 2005, house prices started to drop, and people kept buying houses like crazy because "they're gonna be worth a ton of money!" right up to 2009--buying demand that should fuel a bubble, right in the middle of an ongoing burst, because they're too stupid to see that the sky really is falling all around them.
Law and judiciary and justice are all fuzzy concepts. As for the constitution, I've been saying for ages it needs to be burned. We need to either dissolve the union (best option, least likely) or draft a new constitution that's more robust (control lawmakers, make laws more clear, mitigate some social/economic problems like ever-extending patent terms, etc.).
The problem is a new constitution needs to be drafted by God's Benevolent Angels--it needs to somehow be created from an unbiased but completely knowledgeable source which can neither play favoritism nor fail to interpret the current culture, economic forces, and direction of the world. Given that patent and copyright laws are already getting stronger and stronger in direct opposition to anything we would like to surmise the founding fathers would have thought just, and that the government is playing to remove all those privileges the constitution establishes for us, who exactly is going to draft this wholly unbiased document?
50 sovereign states gives us 50 chances at random to have better governments, and 1/50 chance of having a bad government. Yes, it's 50 times as many black swans like 9/11--it would take smaller disruption to have the Peoples' Republic of New York become the Tyranny of America--but it's also fair isolation from such damage, political pressure from neighbor states where your citizens keep moving to get away from your tyranny, and 50 chances for some state to get something so right it becomes a sweeping global political ideal that neighboring states and eventually most of the continent implements.
Consider that Gary Johnson is running New Mexico, and Ron Paul would be El Presidente somewhere, and so would Al Gore and Jeb Bush and Ahnald. We would quickly learn what works and what doesn't, and have many a safe haven to run to when our particular state passes some unilateral clusterfuck like the PATRIOT act. Isn't that better than trying to rewrite the constitution to fix all the flaws we've found so far, to try to reign in the corporations and politicians doing an end-run around the damn thing?
Currently you cannot swing conspiracy under free speech: Planning (talking about) a crime is assumed to indicate that you intend to commit a crime, and the will to commit a crime is thus a crime in this context. It's called "conspiracy", and often is applied after the fact; but occasionally when i.e. someone discusses with a hitman (or pretend-hitman) the price of killing another person, they are nailed for conspiracy to commit murder.
Similarly, the free expression of sexual thoughts to a minor over the Internet and the expression of intent to meet with them--expressing that they should come to your city--as well as the free expression of pictures of your genetallia being orally manipulated by a medium-sized canine to said child are abridged by piles of laws, from child sexual deviancy to corruption of a minor to bare obscenity. Is child pornography not, at its heart, free expression?
Similarly, lying to the police--speaking, but perhaps speaking a string of words that does not compute into a collection of facts matched correctly with your subjective reality--is a crime. Lying in court is called "perjury". Is not lying speech?
Broadcasting state secrets, discussing ongoing court proceedings with jurymen, and engaging in a calculated strategic campaign to defame someone with false information planted by pattern not obvious to the rational man are all examples of crimes. Are these not all free speech?
Judges can and have been incorrect, and have overturned things before. In this case, a new judge could easily rule that this is criminal informant behavior and, not accounting for the discussion above, decide that since it's not "Free Speech" and impedes law enforcement it is thus an illegal and criminal activity. As I have explained above, this is ludicrous from a practical standpoint.
Remember: Free speech has loads of exemptions. You cannot make damaging speech. If you do make damaging speech, you must have a damn good reason. Libel and slander are illegal because they are false; if you speak and damage a person's reputation with only the unadulterated truth, there is no case against you. In the same manner, public figures have a higher barrier for entry: a lot of damaging things will be said about them, and are taken as noise; targeted smear campaigns can quickly cross an invisible line.
It's difficult to argue that public knowledge of a police speed trap is damaging when the speed trap by nature is public knowledge for the simple reason that it's plainly visible to the public. That is the entire issue. Claiming that it's "Free Speech because it's spoken or otherwise expressed" is flimsy and stupid.
No, it is not "Free Speech". It is criminal informant behavior. The issue here is what is the stretch of what is and is not reasonable to slap state secrecy on.
For example, warning others that the guy walking down the street in the rain is a police officer posing as one of the dozens of people who pass by an hour as a walking wire (i.e. there's always 8 or 10 people in this 10 meter stretch; 1 or 2 of them is an undercover cop, and they're using listening devices to pick up the narcotics sale going on at an outside dining table) should be a crime. Why? Direct interference with a covert operation.
A cop sitting just over a hill with a radar gun is not covert. A fixed speed camera--even hidden--is also not a covert operation because it can be readily discovered. A cop sitting at the next dining table in plain clothes will be gone before pattern behavior identifies him as a cop: you need advanced knowledge--i.e. that that particular person is a police officer, as well as the knowledge that a covert operation is in progress--to discover that you're being eaves dropped upon. A fixed camera can and will be discovered eventually just out of course, as will a police cruiser hanging out at the edge of a parking lot facing traffic.
In these case, you are discussing--through flickering headlights, conveying such information--public, visible, open police activities. These are not secret things; they are not likely to force criminals deep into hiding or set back a major drug cartel bust by months or years, and they certainly aren't going to get anyone killed. They're open, public activities. That means they're open for public discussion, at all times.
This is not a "free speech" issue--we have free speech, and besides it doesn't cover shouting out that a cop in the alley carrying out a cocaine sting is wearing a wire. This is a matter of discussing police operations. As the operations are public, non-secret operations, there is no standing to take any action against anyone who relays this publicly-accessible information.
Think about it as if the government had chosen not to publish the existence or operations of Area 51, but ran a public road through it. Having, with no clearance, thousands of people per day passing through, they could not claim state secret for talking about anything seen while driving through Area 51. It would be legally unenforceable. Same thing.
A gem would be incredibly easy to find in a pool filled with shit.
Dissent. On the right side, I see a pile of results from online stores. The first line result is from Google Froogle. Now you're going to mix them so I have to do some mental work to pick apart the two? I can't just blindly click "that's what I want, let's see who sells it" versus "that's what I want... at Sears.com eh?"
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He's angered people who enjoy their view of the game more than they enjoy his money.
Kiai provides power and stamina. Research has shown shouting and especially cursing provides additional stamina, strength, and pain tolerance; I even kiai when doing sit-ups because I can pull off 30% more that way, but god damn does it hurt for the next few minutes.
HaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA*A*A*A*A*A*A*A*A*A*A*A*A*!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! /goku
1% of the budgetable price to get a 100% guaranteed working device.
I built this Web server. My old company should pay me salary until I die, because they use my Web server.
If 10,000 Web sites are served from one server using Apache, and 100 Web sites are served from 100 servers using IIS, it would be reasonable to interpret that Apache is the more common choice for serving Web sites. It would be reasonable--not necessarily accurate, but in a vacuum decision there is a great chance of validity--to assume that Apache is the better choice for hosting Web sites in most cases, as it has been selected for more often. It would be very reasonable to assume that Apache is, in most cases, at least adequate--a satisfiser would find this palatable--while making no assumptions on whether it is more or less optimal than IIS.
It's silly to assume that the number of servers has any real meaning, unless it can reflect resource use--at our resolution we can't even do that (are these 100 IIS servers run from Raspberry Pi, or 100 IIS servers run from ginormous Dell R620s? How much load?). Even then, that doesn't reflect all the other decisions put into it. On the other hand, there are very real questions like "Does my ASP.NET site run better on Apache?" and the answer is no; or like, "Does my Python/cherrypi site run better through WSGI/Apache or WSGI/IIS?" and the answer is no again.
The raw number of Web sites run on Apache reflects a lot more than the number of discrete servers. But then you have questions like: are these Perl/PHP/Python, .NET, etc.? Essentially: are they Apache/IIS sites because of Apache/IIS, or because of the system that provides facilities for the site best also providing Apache/IIS support best?
Froyo is old, get a better phone.
Tres Roeder: A Sixth Sense for Project Management. Tres Roeder: Stakeholder Management. Read them, then get back to me. You can down Sixth Sense on your kindle in a little over an hour if you're sober.
That is the point though. Why do you need a quantum computer? What business case does this solve? What engineering problem? If the answer is "it's like 10% faster than using a regular computer," you don't need a quantum computer. If the answer is "we can't physically solve this problem on a regular computer--you must brute force through every possible answer and validate, which takes longer than the universe will continue to exist,", then you need a quantum computer. If the answer is "we can do this, but it's exponentially slower as the problem gets bigger; it's linear or polynomial on a quantum computer", you need a quantum computer for sufficiently large individual problems (if you have many small problems, you only need to scale linearly).
If you don't know if you have a quantum computer, then obviously a quantum computer isn't that important. I mean if your problem isn't solved remarkably easier with a given tool, YOU DON'T NEED THAT TOOL! If it IS solved remarkably easier with that tool, then YOU DEFINITELY KNOW IF WHAT YOU'RE HOLDING IS THE CORRECT TOOL!