I am detecting a significantly elevated level of story quality and of course, beta changes, in the last week or so. I guess you guys really did listen...eventually.
Brilliant, so let's say the inventor starts his or her own company. MegaCorp sees the idea, likes it, and uses its massive financial and market power to create their own version which is better, faster and shinier. MegaCorp gets a 3% rise in stock prices, the inventor gets nothing.
OK. So let's say a chef starts his or her own restaurant. MegaCorp sees the menu, likes it, and uses its massive financial and market power to create their own version which is better, faster and tastier. MegaCorp gets a 3% rise in stock prices, the chef gets nothing.
Explain the difference to me? Explain why inventors get monopoly protections from competition and other entrepreneurs and workers don't?
The inventor has another brilliant idea, but this time he or she keeps it under their hat and the whole of society suffers as a result
I would liken this to a cook at home with a secret recipe which they don't even serve to guests. The resulting "suffering" of society does not bother me.
What value has this man added to a single piece of equipment sold in the last 40 years? What part of these machines relied on his effort or ingenuity? If his patent had never been filed, are we to seriously believe that progress would have been held back by so much as an hour.
Let drop this passive-aggressive geek myth of the vital "small-guy" inventor and the civilization changing ideas which supposedly emerge from his superior brain. It is far, far easier, and far, far better for society as a whole to simply regard all patent holders as parasites, and simply stop issuing them. Inventors can start their own companies or get a job like everyone else.
Reward belongs to those who add value. To those who produce things; produce wealth. it does not belong to the people who "thought" of doing so, or who had some "bright idea" sometimes in the 1970s. It belongs to the three generations of people since who put their -- unpatented -- ideas into action and made them a reality. To the people who competed based on the merits of their results, and not the entitlement they felt their intellects deserved.
It's time to put patents away. All patents. Our society will make better progress without them. Inventors are not worth the price being paid to parasites.
I actually sorted a large stack of numbered papers using quicksort. I chose it because it seemed to work well in the case of slow to move/compare paper.
You pick the pivot, initially at random but with re-selections based on the knowledge of the total set. After that, you can step through the whole stack in a fairly automatic way, paper by paper, easily putting papers into the left/right stacks by just shifting them left and right. No slow paper by paper insertions or other checks. Just a paper by paper step through to divide the pile (hopefully) into two; lower-lower-greater-lower-greater-etc-etc
I repeated the operation on the sub-stacks until they were at about ~5-10 papers. At this point I'd like to say I insertion sorted, but really I just shuffled them into position. And at the end, once all substacks are sorted, you just place them on top of one another and you're done.
The biggest problem I had was moving the substacks around and finding space for them once their numbers started getting larger. I would consider this the biggest bottleneck in the method.
Overall the operation seemed to work well considering the additional difficulty of actually physically moving the paper around by hand. But if someone reckons there was a better method I for one would be interested in hearing it.
With every new NSA/GCHQ revelation, I am finding it increasingly difficult to tell the difference between these agencies, and an outright criminal internet hacker trolling group.
Devices and sites are being broken into en-masse, security systems at companies foreign and domestic are being compromised, social engineering is being used to torpedo national standards and progress, internet forums are being saturated with disruptive trolls, people are being targeted/retaliated/gaslighted in their jobs and homes, and now, yes here it is, people's webcams are being hacked into en-masse to take pictures of women in their bedrooms -- sorry I mean for national security whatevers.
My mental image of the NSA/GCHQ at this point is a building saturated with passive-aggressive computer geeks with a grudge against the world and a multi-billion dollar budget with which to indulge it. Ethics, maturity and responsibility are to be checked at the door.
I cannot tell where the NSA ends and anonymous/lulsec begins. And at this point I am waiting for the press release which reveals that 90+% of the chans are in fact hosted at Maryland, and that GCHQ is the principal distributor of 95% of all fetish pornography in the United Kingdom.
And I'm willing to take odds right now, that the mother and father of all illegal TV/Film torrent servers are situated in the T1 connected basements of Maryland and Cheltenam respectively.
Colleges don't teach software suites, they teach theories. Programming and information technology should be taught as vocations... high-paying, of course.
I can't teach your employees how to work in your company. I don't work in your industry or with your tools.
Universities are not outsourced training programs for private companies. They are places of education. If you want trained employees, train them yourself you cheapskate. The most we can do is make them more trainable.
You don't even need high tensile strength material. You can just increase the thickness of the cable as you ascend to account for the increasing weight it must carry. The cables increase as you go upwards, in inverse analogy to rocket boosters on the ground. I think Arthur C. Clarke wrote an article about this.
That said, I personally am very skeptical on the basis that the counterweight dynamics do not seam obvious/feasible to me. Admittedly a space elevator would eventually be of huge benefit, but in order to construct and use one, you need to develop efficient rocketry first to accomplish the very same thing.
Symmetries in physics are tied with conserved quantities. Whatever your feelings on the matter, being able to point to a conserved quantity with which you can construct equations is beautiful in my book.
The symmetries themselves however -- personally I've seen better looking mathematics.
Real banks, the ones with experience not losing all of your money or that are regulated and insured by the U.S. gov't, by comparison, are stable, secure, and at least reliable enough for an economy to run on.
And if by "stable, secure, and reliable" you mean de-facto bankrupt, system held together by sticking plaster, and saturated with the most duplicious and thieving employees in the known universe, then yes I suppose that statement would be correct.
The "Internet" is more and more used for entertainment, it is normal that those who wants entertainment pay for what they want, instead of free-riding on the back of those who don't want it.
They did pay for it. They paid for their ISP to ship that data to them. No-one was free riding on anything here, Netflix included.
Netflix paid THEIR ISP1 to send their data out. Customers pay THEIR ISP2 to ship the data in. Now ISP2 wants Netflix to pay them in addition to ISP1. Why shouldn't ISP1 charge the customers of ISP2 for all the data it has to ship out to them? Oh that's right, that would be too difficult. So let's just extort the largest target instead then.
My point exactly, I pay for more than I need and this is terribly unfair. See my above hauling truck example. What you call "Internet access" is truly bandwidth and latency. I do not need to be able to stream Netflix 1080p all day long, as such, why should I pay for a pipe capable of doing so ?
You are confusing the the speed at which data is downloaded, with the ability to download all data at the same speed.
Absolutely you can pay for a slower connection -- and all traffic will be slower for you. You can pay for a faster connection -- and all traffic will be faster for you.
But if you pay for a connection, regardless of its speed, your ISP should send packets to you -- from anywhere -- as fast as your connection allows. There are no balkanised internet subscription packages -- yet. You pay for a 10m/bps connection, you should be able to connect to your email and Netflix both at that speed. Your ISP should not be selectively slowing or denying you access to certain traffic destinations.
The current system is utterly UNFAIR to the customer. I want to be able to have a basic access if I WANT TO. When I have no money, I WANT a cheap basic access, if I have more money and can afford better content, then I am free of doing so.
What are you talking about? The cost or speed of your internet connection has nothing to do with what's going on here. You pay for a connection to The Internet. You don't pay for a connection which gets you to Google quickly, but then only gets you to Netflix slowly or not at all. You pay for the carrier to get your packets to and from any destination on the Network as quickly as it is able to do so.
The net we knew is truly dying. It goes beyond the death of Net Neutrality and the resulting birth of Net Extortion exemplified by this deal. More and more we see people moving away from rich client browsers and other programs into simpler, disconnected, atomic apps, connecting to restricted, walled garden, internet services. Such services can more easily transition into a pay per-view web, whereas free-visit-traffic websites with no method of charging/locking-in users will find the going difficult. Many are already consciously damaging the usability of their own websites in an attempt to transition them toward a restricted "app"-like format-- the new Slashdot Beta being a prime example.
The internet could be moving towards an earlier proposed vision of it, from the 1980s, when it was proposed that people be nickel and dimed for each additional service they required. Every new service would require -- not a website-- but a new client program, which could naturally be regulated and charged on an individual basis. Somehow,, this outdated model the past is slowly becoming the future of our Internet.
This didn't have to happen. No technological development lead us to this point. This outcome was decided most firmly in the realm of the Law, by the Court system, and with not one pip of say-so from the programming or engineering community which actually runs and maintains the web.
If the internet genie is put back in the box, it will be the result of entirely socially/legally constructed forces.
You seem to have me confused with other posters. I was trying to get across some of the wider aspects of the redesign controversy/debacle/corporate-zeitgeist.
I posted some more thoughts on this on reddit(I feel funny), but basically I'm getting the impression that neither Taco, the Slashdot editors, or especially Dice every care very much for the Slashdot commenters. It would explain quite a few things over the years I guess. I honestly feel like the (original) Internet is being put back in a box these days. Get off my lawn, etc, etc.
P.S. Is Slashdot deleting posts about the Beta? Didn't this site used to not delete posts?
Therefore, $7.2 million of intangible assets and $6.3 million of goodwill related to Slashdot Media were reduced to zero.
At a 10% interest rate (to say nothing of our current cheap credit rates) if you can't make make enough money to cover those investments off one of the most recognizable tech sites on the internet, then you are not competent to be running an internet web business.
This isn't rocket science. If you can't make money running Slashdot.org, then there is no hope for your business.
For example, fire up the Wayback Machine and look at some popular sites from a decade ago. Many of them look radically different. Can you honestly say they wouldn't look out of place alongside modern sites?
Point taken. Sites do need periodic updates.
But I will add to this that the contemporary "square-cut"/"whitespace" designs of the BBC, digg, and beta, with back-groundless headers and unclear divisions between page content, are confusing, sterile, and extremely off-putting. It feels like my content is being served up on an anti-septic tray; there's no warmth (Even metro had the wit to add colour).
Geeks come to slashdot to be bathed in its soothing green light". You need to show that image(that version) to the design team, so that they get a better understanding of what kinds of feelings people have when they come to this site.
And then you need take them down to a traditional, wood lined bar; smelling of beer and comfort foods, worn-in fabric, filled with govial conversation -- (and not a polished cafe, smelling of coffee and plastic, laminated leather seats and people trying to sound they're on a television show). Slashdot is a place people go to let their hair down, and to post their feelings into the conversation.
Well, those few needed tweaks never stop piling up. On top of that, UX research and (more importantly) user expectations continue to evolve.
You know that part about user expectation is true. For instance, many of us would like to see fresher, better summaries, Unicode euro signs in comments, and just possibly a better comment search option than google. These and many other features were ways the site could have been legitimately improved.
But users also like _consistency_. User expect consistency, usability, an emphasis on content(in this case the commentary). Most people don't willingly want to spend mental effort re-learning how to read their favorite websites, particularly if the new interface is inferior(A superior/inferior interface in 2014 will still be so in 2018 or 2118 for that matter). If users are forced into something they don't like, can't use, and feel is inferior, most will simply move on. If this happens to Slashdot it will remembered as an infamous scandal in the history of the internet.
The Beta redesign was radical, bold, a risk -- And the gamble has not paid off. Risky, fad driven redesigns are always risky, especially on large, high quality content driven website. Slashdot was always going to need a gradual, feedback driven redesign and backend code rewrite and the management team need to come to terms with this.
P.S.
I for one legitimately respect and appreciate that you have actually taken the time to come down into the comments to talk about this. It took guts to walk out into this crowd and the fact that you did gives me hope our views will get back to the people who can turn this around.
The comment system isn't finished yet, that's for sure --
Then why is anyone being migrated to beta? It sounds to me like the beta is still in alpha.
There are some very basic, fundamental mistakes being made here which lead me to question whether anyone is actually in charge of or still care about the site anymore.
a) Don't call it technocrat.net. "Technocrat" (for us in the EU at least) has essentially come to mean a centrally appointed civil career bureaucrat responsible for perpetuating injustices.
b) The Slashdot comment system is a good system to emulate, but one aspect of slashdot which alway needed improvement was the story submission system. Basically, there needs to be a way of rewarding the effort of quality submitters, and downgrading the story spammers.
I know the comment section is what it's all about, but seriously though, you are given a channel to provide your feedback. no need to go postal on them.
We are being given a blow-off valve, to vent our discontent harmlessly off into/dev/null.
In this, we are not dissimilar from most people nowadays, whose frustrations are constantly muffled with mendacious PR-releases and other goose-speak, our tomentors assurring us of their concerns and sympathies, and giving loose promises of future actions addressing our concerns.
Nothing ever comes of it; and the beasts gnaw on, crocodile tears glistening.
There's also the historical perspective, today we still have one of the 12 colossus computers built during WW2, but only because Churchill's order to destroy them was not fully carried out. Slashdot is a significant part of internet history, if they are going to significantly alter that then at least donate the existing site and comment archive to someone who would care for it (eg: Smithsonian, national archives, etc)
I would go further. Slashdot is a public house of the internet, and in effect a civic institution of internet. This is a place where IT workers go to learn and remain educated in the wider fields which affect their specific work. Dice is toying with the unstated and officially unrecognised forces which have shaped the internet since its inception: Geeks at their desks and in their bedrooms, writing, reading, and talking about computers.
In my personal opinion, slashdot need to be bought out from Dice by a Kickstarter type fund and run by a non-profit. This goes beyond commerce and business. It is in the (inter)national interest that Slashdot be preserved as a place of general technology congress.
I actually couldn't initially believe it when timothy described the commenters as "an audience".I mean, I could have genuinely accepted "peanut gallery", but audience is really just too much considering how most of the performance is actually made down here in the comments.
Then again, such an attitude would explain a lot of the editorial decisions over the years. Have the slash editors really been looking at the site as a news blog first, and a commenting system second? For all these years?
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, it could be defeated completely by wearing the crocodile mask.
I am detecting a significantly elevated level of story quality and of course, beta changes, in the last week or so. I guess you guys really did listen...eventually.
OK. So let's say a chef starts his or her own restaurant. MegaCorp sees the menu, likes it, and uses its massive financial and market power to create their own version which is better, faster and tastier. MegaCorp gets a 3% rise in stock prices, the chef gets nothing.
Explain the difference to me? Explain why inventors get monopoly protections from competition and other entrepreneurs and workers don't?
I would liken this to a cook at home with a secret recipe which they don't even serve to guests. The resulting "suffering" of society does not bother me.
What value has this man added to a single piece of equipment sold in the last 40 years? What part of these machines relied on his effort or ingenuity? If his patent had never been filed, are we to seriously believe that progress would have been held back by so much as an hour.
Let drop this passive-aggressive geek myth of the vital "small-guy" inventor and the civilization changing ideas which supposedly emerge from his superior brain. It is far, far easier, and far, far better for society as a whole to simply regard all patent holders as parasites, and simply stop issuing them. Inventors can start their own companies or get a job like everyone else.
Reward belongs to those who add value. To those who produce things; produce wealth. it does not belong to the people who "thought" of doing so, or who had some "bright idea" sometimes in the 1970s. It belongs to the three generations of people since who put their -- unpatented -- ideas into action and made them a reality. To the people who competed based on the merits of their results, and not the entitlement they felt their intellects deserved.
It's time to put patents away. All patents. Our society will make better progress without them. Inventors are not worth the price being paid to parasites.
I actually sorted a large stack of numbered papers using quicksort. I chose it because it seemed to work well in the case of slow to move/compare paper.
You pick the pivot, initially at random but with re-selections based on the knowledge of the total set. After that, you can step through the whole stack in a fairly automatic way, paper by paper, easily putting papers into the left/right stacks by just shifting them left and right. No slow paper by paper insertions or other checks. Just a paper by paper step through to divide the pile (hopefully) into two; lower-lower-greater-lower-greater-etc-etc
I repeated the operation on the sub-stacks until they were at about ~5-10 papers. At this point I'd like to say I insertion sorted, but really I just shuffled them into position. And at the end, once all substacks are sorted, you just place them on top of one another and you're done.
The biggest problem I had was moving the substacks around and finding space for them once their numbers started getting larger. I would consider this the biggest bottleneck in the method.
Overall the operation seemed to work well considering the additional difficulty of actually physically moving the paper around by hand. But if someone reckons there was a better method I for one would be interested in hearing it.
With every new NSA/GCHQ revelation, I am finding it increasingly difficult to tell the difference between these agencies, and an outright criminal internet hacker trolling group.
Devices and sites are being broken into en-masse, security systems at companies foreign and domestic are being compromised, social engineering is being used to torpedo national standards and progress, internet forums are being saturated with disruptive trolls, people are being targeted/retaliated/gaslighted in their jobs and homes, and now, yes here it is, people's webcams are being hacked into en-masse to take pictures of women in their bedrooms -- sorry I mean for national security whatevers.
My mental image of the NSA/GCHQ at this point is a building saturated with passive-aggressive computer geeks with a grudge against the world and a multi-billion dollar budget with which to indulge it. Ethics, maturity and responsibility are to be checked at the door.
I cannot tell where the NSA ends and anonymous/lulsec begins. And at this point I am waiting for the press release which reveals that 90+% of the chans are in fact hosted at Maryland, and that GCHQ is the principal distributor of 95% of all fetish pornography in the United Kingdom.
And I'm willing to take odds right now, that the mother and father of all illegal TV/Film torrent servers are situated in the T1 connected basements of Maryland and Cheltenam respectively.
I can't teach your employees how to work in your company. I don't work in your industry or with your tools.
Universities are not outsourced training programs for private companies. They are places of education. If you want trained employees, train them yourself you cheapskate. The most we can do is make them more trainable.
You don't even need high tensile strength material. You can just increase the thickness of the cable as you ascend to account for the increasing weight it must carry. The cables increase as you go upwards, in inverse analogy to rocket boosters on the ground. I think Arthur C. Clarke wrote an article about this.
That said, I personally am very skeptical on the basis that the counterweight dynamics do not seam obvious/feasible to me. Admittedly a space elevator would eventually be of huge benefit, but in order to construct and use one, you need to develop efficient rocketry first to accomplish the very same thing.
Symmetries in physics are tied with conserved quantities. Whatever your feelings on the matter, being able to point to a conserved quantity with which you can construct equations is beautiful in my book.
The symmetries themselves however -- personally I've seen better looking mathematics.
This is in fact true for almost any $bank in the world right now.
What is actually happening is "good press"/propaganda is being used to convince everyone that $bank IS NOT bankrupt. It's working -- so far.
And if by "stable, secure, and reliable" you mean de-facto bankrupt, system held together by sticking plaster, and saturated with the most duplicious and thieving employees in the known universe, then yes I suppose that statement would be correct.
They did pay for it. They paid for their ISP to ship that data to them. No-one was free riding on anything here, Netflix included.
Netflix paid THEIR ISP1 to send their data out. Customers pay THEIR ISP2 to ship the data in. Now ISP2 wants Netflix to pay them in addition to ISP1. Why shouldn't ISP1 charge the customers of ISP2 for all the data it has to ship out to them? Oh that's right, that would be too difficult. So let's just extort the largest target instead then.
You are confusing the the speed at which data is downloaded, with the ability to download all data at the same speed.
Absolutely you can pay for a slower connection -- and all traffic will be slower for you. You can pay for a faster connection -- and all traffic will be faster for you.
But if you pay for a connection, regardless of its speed, your ISP should send packets to you -- from anywhere -- as fast as your connection allows. There are no balkanised internet subscription packages -- yet. You pay for a 10m/bps connection, you should be able to connect to your email and Netflix both at that speed. Your ISP should not be selectively slowing or denying you access to certain traffic destinations.
What are you talking about? The cost or speed of your internet connection has nothing to do with what's going on here. You pay for a connection to The Internet. You don't pay for a connection which gets you to Google quickly, but then only gets you to Netflix slowly or not at all. You pay for the carrier to get your packets to and from any destination on the Network as quickly as it is able to do so.
Unless your on Comcast of course.
All too true.
The net we knew is truly dying. It goes beyond the death of Net Neutrality and the resulting birth of Net Extortion exemplified by this deal. More and more we see people moving away from rich client browsers and other programs into simpler, disconnected, atomic apps, connecting to restricted, walled garden, internet services. Such services can more easily transition into a pay per-view web, whereas free-visit-traffic websites with no method of charging/locking-in users will find the going difficult. Many are already consciously damaging the usability of their own websites in an attempt to transition them toward a restricted "app"-like format-- the new Slashdot Beta being a prime example.
The internet could be moving towards an earlier proposed vision of it, from the 1980s, when it was proposed that people be nickel and dimed for each additional service they required. Every new service would require -- not a website-- but a new client program, which could naturally be regulated and charged on an individual basis. Somehow,, this outdated model the past is slowly becoming the future of our Internet.
This didn't have to happen. No technological development lead us to this point. This outcome was decided most firmly in the realm of the Law, by the Court system, and with not one pip of say-so from the programming or engineering community which actually runs and maintains the web.
If the internet genie is put back in the box, it will be the result of entirely socially/legally constructed forces.
You seem to have me confused with other posters. I was trying to get across some of the wider aspects of the redesign controversy/debacle/corporate-zeitgeist.
The Washington Post interviewed Taco about the Beta. Apparently he's not very sympathetic.
I posted some more thoughts on this on reddit(I feel funny), but basically I'm getting the impression that neither Taco, the Slashdot editors, or especially Dice every care very much for the Slashdot commenters. It would explain quite a few things over the years I guess. I honestly feel like the (original) Internet is being put back in a box these days. Get off my lawn, etc, etc.
P.S.
Is Slashdot deleting posts about the Beta? Didn't this site used to not delete posts?
At a 10% interest rate (to say nothing of our current cheap credit rates) if you can't make make enough money to cover those investments off one of the most recognizable tech sites on the internet, then you are not competent to be running an internet web business.
This isn't rocket science. If you can't make money running Slashdot.org, then there is no hope for your business.
Point taken. Sites do need periodic updates.
But I will add to this that the contemporary "square-cut"/"whitespace" designs of the BBC, digg, and beta, with back-groundless headers and unclear divisions between page content, are confusing, sterile, and extremely off-putting. It feels like my content is being served up on an anti-septic tray; there's no warmth (Even metro had the wit to add colour).
Geeks come to slashdot to be bathed in its soothing green light". You need to show that image(that version) to the design team, so that they get a better understanding of what kinds of feelings people have when they come to this site.
And then you need take them down to a traditional, wood lined bar; smelling of beer and comfort foods, worn-in fabric, filled with govial conversation -- (and not a polished cafe, smelling of coffee and plastic, laminated leather seats and people trying to sound they're on a television show). Slashdot is a place people go to let their hair down, and to post their feelings into the conversation.
You know that part about user expectation is true. For instance, many of us would like to see fresher, better summaries, Unicode euro signs in comments, and just possibly a better comment search option than google. These and many other features were ways the site could have been legitimately improved.
But users also like _consistency_. User expect consistency, usability, an emphasis on content(in this case the commentary). Most people don't willingly want to spend mental effort re-learning how to read their favorite websites, particularly if the new interface is inferior(A superior/inferior interface in 2014 will still be so in 2018 or 2118 for that matter). If users are forced into something they don't like, can't use, and feel is inferior, most will simply move on. If this happens to Slashdot it will remembered as an infamous scandal in the history of the internet.
The Beta redesign was radical, bold, a risk -- And the gamble has not paid off. Risky, fad driven redesigns are always risky, especially on large, high quality content driven website. Slashdot was always going to need a gradual, feedback driven redesign and backend code rewrite and the management team need to come to terms with this.
P.S.
I for one legitimately respect and appreciate that you have actually taken the time to come down into the comments to talk about this. It took guts to walk out into this crowd and the fact that you did gives me hope our views will get back to the people who can turn this around.
Then why is anyone being migrated to beta? It sounds to me like the beta is still in alpha.
There are some very basic, fundamental mistakes being made here which lead me to question whether anyone is actually in charge of or still care about the site anymore.
Two suggestions
a) Don't call it technocrat.net. "Technocrat" (for us in the EU at least) has essentially come to mean a centrally appointed civil career bureaucrat responsible for perpetuating injustices.
b) The Slashdot comment system is a good system to emulate, but one aspect of slashdot which alway needed improvement was the story submission system. Basically, there needs to be a way of rewarding the effort of quality submitters, and downgrading the story spammers.
We are being given a blow-off valve, to vent our discontent harmlessly off into /dev/null.
In this, we are not dissimilar from most people nowadays, whose frustrations are constantly muffled with mendacious PR-releases and other goose-speak, our tomentors assurring us of their concerns and sympathies, and giving loose promises of future actions addressing our concerns.
Nothing ever comes of it; and the beasts gnaw on, crocodile tears glistening.
I would go further. Slashdot is a public house of the internet, and in effect a civic institution of internet. This is a place where IT workers go to learn and remain educated in the wider fields which affect their specific work. Dice is toying with the unstated and officially unrecognised forces which have shaped the internet since its inception: Geeks at their desks and in their bedrooms, writing, reading, and talking about computers.
In my personal opinion, slashdot need to be bought out from Dice by a Kickstarter type fund and run by a non-profit. This goes beyond commerce and business. It is in the (inter)national interest that Slashdot be preserved as a place of general technology congress.
I actually couldn't initially believe it when timothy described the commenters as "an audience".I mean, I could have genuinely accepted "peanut gallery", but audience is really just too much considering how most of the performance is actually made down here in the comments.
Then again, such an attitude would explain a lot of the editorial decisions over the years. Have the slash editors really been looking at the site as a news blog first, and a commenting system second? For all these years?