Bringing more and more anger and division to our pop culture is only hastening a very ugly future...
Agree 100%. But I saw Captain Marvel this morning and, unlike the remake of Ghostbusters or countless other examples, this movie doesn't have an agenda. I was worried from the early news that it might. But Marvel, in this case, did just what I hoped they'd do: Told an origin story that was fun, told us more about the world some of my favorite characters inhabit, and threw in a little 90's nostalgia without being overbearing or stupid. If you're looking for "wokeness," it's not here.
I don't understand why this isn't getting modded up; I'd do it if I had points.
Marketing MBA and data analytics guy here. Completely putting aside any privacy or security implications from hacking, no way in hell am I putting one of these listening devices into my home, to give marketers (like me, admittedly) one more avenue into ways to segment and profile me.
Perhaps, in our hyper sensitive, over victimized culture, people are tired of changes made solely in the name of "equality".
But the second comic book iteration of Captain Marvel was a different woman, Monica Rambeau. She first appeared in 1982 and held the Captain Marvel title 'til 1996, appearing again in other forms. (Source: http://comicbookdb.com/charact...)
I'm no fan of change for change's sake, but let's not pretend that the character has always been a white guy. I've got no reason to complain about Carol Danvers as Captain Marvel, and I'm looking forward to at least seeing the movie when it comes out, before I judge it too harshly.
I wondered how long it was going to take for me to lose all faith and give up on this site. And now, in the new/. regime, I have to wade past a story about why we don't have BONES IN OUR DICKS to get to the actual technology news that's the only reason I ever kept coming here.
I'm done. Someone find me a tech news site that will treat me like I have a gorram brain, without clickbait bullshit. I'll support it. But I'm done here.
... is this "news for nerds"? Pun intended, but still. This pisses me off more than any other story I've seen posted here since the new regime took over.
Slashdot editors, I know you have to pay the bills. I know the temptation is there to post clickbait headlines. I know the Taboola ads are easy money for a lot of sites and if it helps keep the servers running, fine, I can ignore them. But this is enough already. This is pandering. This is such a blatant effort to prop up your ad impressions that it's laughable. What really pisses me off that a site that's supposed to be a forum for tech news — which is why I came here, and why (despite my better judgment) I've stuck around all these years — can't even make an effort to pander while staying on the technology theme of a gorram technology site. This is the worst yet.
Posting this story to/. is guaranteed to get the flamers and trolls in a tizzy — and I'm sure I'll get modded down to the very depths of frozen Dis for calling a spade a spade, along with the "Stuff that Matters" apologists who'll jump in to point out the second half of what was always this site's slogan. And I'm generally fine with non-tech news when it's actually breaking news, like the "10 dead at Oregon community college" headline that the algorithm seems to think is "relevant" to half the stories on the site. But this is not news on tech. This is not really even news. It's a big, juicy bone for the trolls to fight over, just in time for the weekend. And it's fucking sad. If I wanted to see people get in pissing contests about religion, I'd go hang out on Reddit or, I dunno, the Catholic Answers forums. But that's not why I come to Slashdot, and if this keeps up, I'm going to have less and less reason to come back.
Am I the only person not seeing the moderation tags next to comment scores (i.e. "Insightful," "Troll " etc.)?
If something's broken in the moderation system, hopefully it'll get fixed soon. If not - if it's an experiment Whipslash et al. are running - then I hope this change gets undone quickly. It's not an improvement.
Want to end democracy in America once and for all? Then sure, go ahead and move all voting to electronic systems.
Doing so, you eliminate any real citizen oversight — you don't need all those election observers and volunteer pollsters anymore, so that's thousands of people who no longer count ballots, or supervise the machines that scan paper ballots now. Less oversight makes it easier to rig the system — something that's much less plausible now, because we have so many people involved.
Voting needs to happen on paper. Technology can improve our lives the other 363 or so days out of the year, but when it's an election at stake, I want a paper ballot for each and every person who votes. I want a tangible record, no matter how expensive it might be. A paper ballot is not entirely flawless and there are other kinds of fraud that can happen. But I'd prefer the startlingly low incidence of those kinds of issues because this is the only way we can be sure that other, more pernicious, less obvious or even provable types of fraud cannot and are not happening. Electronic voting should be illegal.
... but I'll wager that canceling an order placed by mistake still requires logging on to the website — and if the Marketing and consumer behavior experts have anything to say about it, you can expect that process to eventually grow longer and more tedious, to help encourage people not to cancel: "That would take so long, and it's only fifteen bucks..."
In any case, stand by for the inevitable headline about someone whose kid plays around and orders $10k worth of toys on Amazon without the parent even realizing it...
Ever since our newest Slashdot Overlords (Whipslash et al.) took over, things have been improving. With today's dupe, however, this is the day it really, really feels like home.
On topic: This is a story I'm OK with reading twice, because even though it's in the early stages, it shows promise for our ability to use science and technology to overcome the damage our tech-fueled overconsumption has caused during the past two centuries. (And I'm using "tech" here in a broad sense of the term to cover many technologies, from the Industrial Revolution onward.) I'd like to see more investment in this to see if it's really viable at scale.
Whipslash, et. al, I like a lot of what you've done with the site since you took over, but can we please have less political news that is not directly connected to technology? If I wanted political discussions, I'd go elsewhere. I come to/. for "news for nerds," and too much that isn't tech news is highly likely to drive away readers.
I second those who don't want to see/. go any further toward being a Reddit clone.
Take a look at the Adore Me site. It advertises "advantages of membership" right on the first page, making the subscription model as obvious as Columbia House.
Yeah, and if you'd read TFA, you'd also know that only recently has the company changed its website extensively to emphasize that fact, after a flood of consumer complaints and the potential for state attorneys general to get involved.
I've already gotten used to muting any ad that doesn't have a "Skip" button. Since 95% of my video browsing happens on a tablet, it's nothing to put the ads and set the tablet down for 15 to 30 seconds.
I'd be much more inclined not to skip ads if: (A) more of them were local and relevant, and (B) the same ads didn't repeat 3-4 times within 90 mins of viewing short videos.
Can we please stop with the clickbait headlines? News that's more than one hour old did not "just" happen. Unless you're live-blogging on Twitter, whatever you're posting about is going to sound instantly dated. Moreover, it "just" sounds unprofessional — in terms of journalistic "voice," your news now lacks authority and sounds as if it's being delivered by a teenager.
I worked in journalism for 12 years, full-time and freelance. The dumbing-down of journalism and the rise of clickbait-style reporting are driving away readers, not attracting them. That's especially true for sites like/. where people do actually, sometimes, expect informative and accurate stories...
For most of my lifetime, if a U.S. retailer accepted checks, one of two things happened: You wrote your check and went on your way with your goods, and either the check cleared within a few days, or the check did not clear. If your check didn't clear due to insufficient funds, the merchant could go after you for the amount of the check plus a "returned check" service fee. If you wrote a "worthless check" intentionally, you could be charged with a crime.
Major retailers had their own solutions. I remember Gold Circle (predecessor of the Target store chain) having a check approval counter where you had to get your checks OKed — presumably to make sure you weren't a habitual writer of bad checks. At smaller businesses, it wasn't uncommon to see photocopies of people's bad checks pinned to the wall behind the cash register, or a sign boldly telling staff (and customers) not to accept checks from the below-named people. (There was an episode of "Seinfeld" that involved this, IIRC.)
After 9/11, using the delays caused by the attack as a stated reason, the government and banking system changed it so that now, at most major retailers, writing a check is handled as an electronic debit of your bank account. Many retailers don't even keep the paper check — they print transaction information on it and hand it right back. This caused a little consternation among people who used to "float" a check, writing it a day or two before the money actually made it to the bank and betting the check would arrive after their pay did.
And that's your history lesson. Hope it was worth the read.:-)
I don't know if there's more backstory, but perhaps users have been slow to adopt because "Classic" sounds like what you'd call an older and (in the usual context) more limited option?
If I'm developing a new technology with potentially millions of $USD riding on its availability and adoption, I'm not going to call it "Classic." "NextGen," or "Enhanced," or even "CC" for Corrected Chain? This sounds less like the free market and more like terrible marketing.
I'd mod wvmarle's post up if I had points. Whoever's modding his/her post "Troll" is denying common sense.
And frankly, anyone who'd argue that "Watch your own damn kids" is the right answer neither has kids nor clearly recalls what it was like to have been a kid. A 10-year-old can be smart enough to click "YES, I AM 18+" and not be mature enough to deal with pornography. So, to me, "Watch your own damn kids" means "I don't care what happens to those kids - let someone else fix it." Which requires common sense.
On a related note, I've noticed that, for the most part, the quality and amount of interesting news has gone up since the new regime took over. Keep it up, Whipslash et al. So far, so good.
What Rei said. We spend so much time (and by "we" I mean "people in the so-called First World but especially the U.S.") complaining about what we don't have, we forget how much we DO have, and what we HAVE accomplished — "we" in this case being "humanity." There's a lot to appreciate, which is why I like hearing about these advances.
I really, really hope this is good news. I miss the actual "News for nerds" ethos that brought me here, and I've waded through a lot of sponsored "posts" and clickbait to sift out the kernels of actual news that remain.
New/. overlords? Get this site back to "News for nerds" and news that matters, and you'll keep me here.
This. All the studies that I've seen boasting about the enormous time advantages of self-driving cars ignore the fact that most human drivers tend to cruise from 5 to 15 MPH over the posted speed limit on many interstates and highways. I can't imagine a self-driving car being designed so as to operate above the posted speed limit in self-driving mode. Unless a second set of roads or a second set of rules is created for autonomous vehicles, you're going to have a difficult time convincing people of the advantage of being slower than anyone else on your morning commute.
I bought a Thinkpad W540 in January, and I love it. Hasn't crashed once, battery life is ample. My biggest problem is lack of HDD light (I want to see drive status, but can't) and the fact that the plastic bezel around the monitor pops loose occasionally (annoying, but doesn't stop me from using it, and not a big enough deal for me to act on it). They've got a winning idea here -- appeal to a sense of nostalgia among a demographic that won't mind paying a little extra for something "collectable" that's also functional.
While this clearly does "matter," in the grand scheme of things - we need to debate whether governments should kill people for crimes, and which crimes are worthy of death, and all of the issues that pertain to this subject...
This is not what I come to Slashdot to read about. I come to Slashdot for tech industry news. For intellectual property news. For news about trends in programming, hardware, etc.
And I, for one, as a person who's been reading/. for years, am getting sick of seeing it turning slowly but surely into just another news aggregator.
Stories like this one, with the added flamebait about "4 percent of people on death row are likely innocent" -- even if it's true, we know why it's being put there -- it's flamebait -- make me want to stop coming here.
Look at how many people here -- intelligent people, educated people, privileged people -- who would never condone bullying someone on account of their race, culture, sexuality, or nationality... are happy to do so to people's religious beliefs.
I'm just saying, if we're really against double standards, we need to be honest with ourselves, and more accepting of people of religious faith.
It's for all these reasons you mentioned that at least having an alternative to get you "Home" is an excellent idea. That one button is both important and fragile.
I bought a 1st gen. iPod Touch about five months after they came out. In using it, I regularly double-tapped the "Home" button to get at the audio controls without having to fully unlock the device. Result? The "Home" button stopped working a month after the warranty ran out. And since I wasn't "responsible" enough to have bought the AppleCare plan, Apple wasn't interested in doing anything but shrugging and offering me a laughably small discount (something like 10 percent, IIRC) if I traded in the "broken" one.
Do a search and you'll find a lot of people with perfectly good iPods, iPhones, and now iPads that are almost impossible to use normally because one button died.
As for "hoping for the best," the touch screen != a mouse. You can still use a PC without the mouse. But touch screen or "Home" button, the story is the same -- if one dies on you, the device is just about worthless. Say what you want, but I think this would be an excellent design change.
Slashdot Mirror
Bringing more and more anger and division to our pop culture is only hastening a very ugly future...
Agree 100%. But I saw Captain Marvel this morning and, unlike the remake of Ghostbusters or countless other examples, this movie doesn't have an agenda. I was worried from the early news that it might. But Marvel, in this case, did just what I hoped they'd do: Told an origin story that was fun, told us more about the world some of my favorite characters inhabit, and threw in a little 90's nostalgia without being overbearing or stupid. If you're looking for "wokeness," it's not here.
Marketing MBA and data analytics guy here. Completely putting aside any privacy or security implications from hacking, no way in hell am I putting one of these listening devices into my home, to give marketers (like me, admittedly) one more avenue into ways to segment and profile me.
Perhaps, in our hyper sensitive, over victimized culture, people are tired of changes made solely in the name of "equality".
But the second comic book iteration of Captain Marvel was a different woman, Monica Rambeau. She first appeared in 1982 and held the Captain Marvel title 'til 1996, appearing again in other forms. (Source: http://comicbookdb.com/charact...)
I'm no fan of change for change's sake, but let's not pretend that the character has always been a white guy. I've got no reason to complain about Carol Danvers as Captain Marvel, and I'm looking forward to at least seeing the movie when it comes out, before I judge it too harshly.
I wondered how long it was going to take for me to lose all faith and give up on this site. And now, in the new /. regime, I have to wade past a story about why we don't have BONES IN OUR DICKS to get to the actual technology news that's the only reason I ever kept coming here.
I'm done. Someone find me a tech news site that will treat me like I have a gorram brain, without clickbait bullshit. I'll support it. But I'm done here.
... is this "news for nerds"? Pun intended, but still. This pisses me off more than any other story I've seen posted here since the new regime took over.
Slashdot editors, I know you have to pay the bills. I know the temptation is there to post clickbait headlines. I know the Taboola ads are easy money for a lot of sites and if it helps keep the servers running, fine, I can ignore them. But this is enough already. This is pandering. This is such a blatant effort to prop up your ad impressions that it's laughable. What really pisses me off that a site that's supposed to be a forum for tech news — which is why I came here, and why (despite my better judgment) I've stuck around all these years — can't even make an effort to pander while staying on the technology theme of a gorram technology site. This is the worst yet.
Posting this story to /. is guaranteed to get the flamers and trolls in a tizzy — and I'm sure I'll get modded down to the very depths of frozen Dis for calling a spade a spade, along with the "Stuff that Matters" apologists who'll jump in to point out the second half of what was always this site's slogan. And I'm generally fine with non-tech news when it's actually breaking news, like the "10 dead at Oregon community college" headline that the algorithm seems to think is "relevant" to half the stories on the site. But this is not news on tech. This is not really even news. It's a big, juicy bone for the trolls to fight over, just in time for the weekend. And it's fucking sad. If I wanted to see people get in pissing contests about religion, I'd go hang out on Reddit or, I dunno, the Catholic Answers forums. But that's not why I come to Slashdot, and if this keeps up, I'm going to have less and less reason to come back.
Am I the only person not seeing the moderation tags next to comment scores (i.e. "Insightful," "Troll " etc.)?
If something's broken in the moderation system, hopefully it'll get fixed soon. If not - if it's an experiment Whipslash et al. are running - then I hope this change gets undone quickly. It's not an improvement.
Want to end democracy in America once and for all? Then sure, go ahead and move all voting to electronic systems.
Doing so, you eliminate any real citizen oversight — you don't need all those election observers and volunteer pollsters anymore, so that's thousands of people who no longer count ballots, or supervise the machines that scan paper ballots now. Less oversight makes it easier to rig the system — something that's much less plausible now, because we have so many people involved.
Voting needs to happen on paper. Technology can improve our lives the other 363 or so days out of the year, but when it's an election at stake, I want a paper ballot for each and every person who votes. I want a tangible record, no matter how expensive it might be. A paper ballot is not entirely flawless and there are other kinds of fraud that can happen. But I'd prefer the startlingly low incidence of those kinds of issues because this is the only way we can be sure that other, more pernicious, less obvious or even provable types of fraud cannot and are not happening. Electronic voting should be illegal.
... but I'll wager that canceling an order placed by mistake still requires logging on to the website — and if the Marketing and consumer behavior experts have anything to say about it, you can expect that process to eventually grow longer and more tedious, to help encourage people not to cancel: "That would take so long, and it's only fifteen bucks ..."
In any case, stand by for the inevitable headline about someone whose kid plays around and orders $10k worth of toys on Amazon without the parent even realizing it ...
Ever since our newest Slashdot Overlords (Whipslash et al.) took over, things have been improving. With today's dupe, however, this is the day it really, really feels like home.
On topic: This is a story I'm OK with reading twice, because even though it's in the early stages, it shows promise for our ability to use science and technology to overcome the damage our tech-fueled overconsumption has caused during the past two centuries. (And I'm using "tech" here in a broad sense of the term to cover many technologies, from the Industrial Revolution onward.) I'd like to see more investment in this to see if it's really viable at scale.
How is this news for nerds, stuff that matters?
Short answer: It isn't.
Whipslash, et. al, I like a lot of what you've done with the site since you took over, but can we please have less political news that is not directly connected to technology? If I wanted political discussions, I'd go elsewhere. I come to /. for "news for nerds," and too much that isn't tech news is highly likely to drive away readers.
I second those who don't want to see /. go any further toward being a Reddit clone.
Mod parent up. Can we please have less of this and more of what /. ought to be — i.e. "News for nerds"?
Take a look at the Adore Me site. It advertises "advantages of membership" right on the first page, making the subscription model as obvious as Columbia House.
Yeah, and if you'd read TFA, you'd also know that only recently has the company changed its website extensively to emphasize that fact, after a flood of consumer complaints and the potential for state attorneys general to get involved.
Nice pun, anyway.
I've already gotten used to muting any ad that doesn't have a "Skip" button. Since 95% of my video browsing happens on a tablet, it's nothing to put the ads and set the tablet down for 15 to 30 seconds.
I'd be much more inclined not to skip ads if: (A) more of them were local and relevant, and (B) the same ads didn't repeat 3-4 times within 90 mins of viewing short videos.
Can we please stop with the clickbait headlines? News that's more than one hour old did not "just" happen. Unless you're live-blogging on Twitter, whatever you're posting about is going to sound instantly dated. Moreover, it "just" sounds unprofessional — in terms of journalistic "voice," your news now lacks authority and sounds as if it's being delivered by a teenager.
I worked in journalism for 12 years, full-time and freelance. The dumbing-down of journalism and the rise of clickbait-style reporting are driving away readers, not attracting them. That's especially true for sites like /. where people do actually, sometimes, expect informative and accurate stories ...
For most of my lifetime, if a U.S. retailer accepted checks, one of two things happened: You wrote your check and went on your way with your goods, and either the check cleared within a few days, or the check did not clear. If your check didn't clear due to insufficient funds, the merchant could go after you for the amount of the check plus a "returned check" service fee. If you wrote a "worthless check" intentionally, you could be charged with a crime.
Major retailers had their own solutions. I remember Gold Circle (predecessor of the Target store chain) having a check approval counter where you had to get your checks OKed — presumably to make sure you weren't a habitual writer of bad checks. At smaller businesses, it wasn't uncommon to see photocopies of people's bad checks pinned to the wall behind the cash register, or a sign boldly telling staff (and customers) not to accept checks from the below-named people. (There was an episode of "Seinfeld" that involved this, IIRC.)
After 9/11, using the delays caused by the attack as a stated reason, the government and banking system changed it so that now, at most major retailers, writing a check is handled as an electronic debit of your bank account. Many retailers don't even keep the paper check — they print transaction information on it and hand it right back. This caused a little consternation among people who used to "float" a check, writing it a day or two before the money actually made it to the bank and betting the check would arrive after their pay did.
And that's your history lesson. Hope it was worth the read. :-)
I don't know if there's more backstory, but perhaps users have been slow to adopt because "Classic" sounds like what you'd call an older and (in the usual context) more limited option?
If I'm developing a new technology with potentially millions of $USD riding on its availability and adoption, I'm not going to call it "Classic." "NextGen," or "Enhanced," or even "CC" for Corrected Chain? This sounds less like the free market and more like terrible marketing.
I'd mod wvmarle's post up if I had points. Whoever's modding his/her post "Troll" is denying common sense.
And frankly, anyone who'd argue that "Watch your own damn kids" is the right answer neither has kids nor clearly recalls what it was like to have been a kid. A 10-year-old can be smart enough to click "YES, I AM 18+" and not be mature enough to deal with pornography. So, to me, "Watch your own damn kids" means "I don't care what happens to those kids - let someone else fix it." Which requires common sense.
Well said.
On a related note, I've noticed that, for the most part, the quality and amount of interesting news has gone up since the new regime took over. Keep it up, Whipslash et al. So far, so good.
What Rei said. We spend so much time (and by "we" I mean "people in the so-called First World but especially the U.S.") complaining about what we don't have, we forget how much we DO have, and what we HAVE accomplished — "we" in this case being "humanity." There's a lot to appreciate, which is why I like hearing about these advances.
New /. overlords? Get this site back to "News for nerds" and news that matters, and you'll keep me here.
This. All the studies that I've seen boasting about the enormous time advantages of self-driving cars ignore the fact that most human drivers tend to cruise from 5 to 15 MPH over the posted speed limit on many interstates and highways. I can't imagine a self-driving car being designed so as to operate above the posted speed limit in self-driving mode. Unless a second set of roads or a second set of rules is created for autonomous vehicles, you're going to have a difficult time convincing people of the advantage of being slower than anyone else on your morning commute.
I bought a Thinkpad W540 in January, and I love it. Hasn't crashed once, battery life is ample. My biggest problem is lack of HDD light (I want to see drive status, but can't) and the fact that the plastic bezel around the monitor pops loose occasionally (annoying, but doesn't stop me from using it, and not a big enough deal for me to act on it). They've got a winning idea here -- appeal to a sense of nostalgia among a demographic that won't mind paying a little extra for something "collectable" that's also functional.
This is not what I come to Slashdot to read about. I come to Slashdot for tech industry news. For intellectual property news. For news about trends in programming, hardware, etc.
And I, for one, as a person who's been reading /. for years, am getting sick of seeing it turning slowly but surely into just another news aggregator.
Stories like this one, with the added flamebait about "4 percent of people on death row are likely innocent" -- even if it's true, we know why it's being put there -- it's flamebait -- make me want to stop coming here.
Look at how many people here -- intelligent people, educated people, privileged people -- who would never condone bullying someone on account of their race, culture, sexuality, or nationality ... are happy to do so to people's religious beliefs.
I'm just saying, if we're really against double standards, we need to be honest with ourselves, and more accepting of people of religious faith.
It's for all these reasons you mentioned that at least having an alternative to get you "Home" is an excellent idea. That one button is both important and fragile.
I bought a 1st gen. iPod Touch about five months after they came out. In using it, I regularly double-tapped the "Home" button to get at the audio controls without having to fully unlock the device. Result? The "Home" button stopped working a month after the warranty ran out. And since I wasn't "responsible" enough to have bought the AppleCare plan, Apple wasn't interested in doing anything but shrugging and offering me a laughably small discount (something like 10 percent, IIRC) if I traded in the "broken" one.
Do a search and you'll find a lot of people with perfectly good iPods, iPhones, and now iPads that are almost impossible to use normally because one button died.
As for "hoping for the best," the touch screen != a mouse. You can still use a PC without the mouse. But touch screen or "Home" button, the story is the same -- if one dies on you, the device is just about worthless. Say what you want, but I think this would be an excellent design change.