The trend towards cashless troubles me because it takes a transaction between two parties and adds a third party - the bank. As we've seen in the past few decades, they're not exactly trustworthy or competent.
Retailers are already charged for every transaction made by card, which is fine for Walmart but not expensive for small traders, further biasing the market towards already huge entities. It adds a monetary cost as well as a knowledge barrier to small traders, flea market stall holders and self employed tradespeople.
Furthermore, every purchase becomes a public act with a permanent record. If there is information on you, you can bet your ass someone will pay for it - social media has made it a business model to collect it. The panopticon wasn't built around government, but advertising. This is not a hypothetical future but instead our reality, today.
Do you really wish to give up more privacy? As America lurches and burps and farts its way towards authoritarianism with King Baby at the helm, don't you think the Intelligence Services will be delighted to pour through your purchase records for signs of being an Enemy of the People?
Simply, it's another centralising trend at a time when people should be keeping well away from it. In a way, its a sign of how centralised we have become - the lie of the tech utopians was that we would rid ourselves of middle men. Instead, the middle men have become ubiquitous.
But has the entire species run out of ideas? Like fuck. People have been making that argument for centuries. They look at the world around them and don't have the imagination to think it could ever change.
I don't doubt that there's some truth in the article though. I don't have a link, but I remember reading an article suggesting a similar trend to semiconductor development occurring in medical R&D - the amount of money invested produces fewer finds year on year.
My personal opinion is that there's a few contributing factors to this too such as an obsession with next-quarter short termism in the corporate world and a chronic underfunding of public sector research in universities and at agencies like NASA.
Perhaps this is something wider. Every civilisation declines, and the western world will be no different. When it does, the malaise will be uniform. It might be that it can be restarted by a revolution of political or economic thought, or it might not. Perhaps we are living through such times, and we're hamstrung by simply being unable to imagine a radically different world.
One of the absolute core tenets of Slashdot has always been that they don't delete things (unless someone sues them for a billion dollars, and even then, only once). It's important to be able to prove it if it happens.
Indeed, which is why talk of post deletions is so important to verify. Has it really become that kind of site? Just another barely concealed attempt to exploit an actual community into providing advertising impressions?
Deleting posts would be the death knell for me. The way we use the site is important, but the ethos of it is moreso. A Slashdot that arbitrarily deletes things it deems unwanted isn't one I'd like to contribute to.
But this doesn't actually concede anything, does it?
Main points in this statement:
1: One in four users are still being redirected to the new beta.
2: The current Slashdot layout is still disappearing, to be replaced by the beta.
3: The beta needs development.
So what's so groundbreaking about this announcement? Where's the concession? I'm supposed to be happy about this, I suppose?
This is the part that bothers me:
We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site that still speaks to the interests and habits of our current audience, but that is, at the same time, more accessible and shareable by a wider audience.
So Dice wants the best of both worlds; the tech oriented, intelligent userbase contributions, and a wide audience to monetise those contributions to? It isn't going to work.
This is very true. Please keep the feedback coming. The more constructive, the better.
I admire you actually coming out and posting, but I'd point out that there has been a plethora of constructive, detailed feedback on the beta already, seemingly to no avail.
Since Slashdot without comments is more or less pointless, we actually are paying, it just isn't with money.
If a website is a commodity, then our user generated content and comments are likewise a commodity. On some sites this contribution is pretty marginal, but on Slashdot it's the basis of the entire business model.
Since Slashdot profits from the userbase contributions, that means those contributions have a value.
So yes, I pay, though the contributions are probably not worth a lot;)
Open up a story for all of this. There's been dozens of red marked stories in the firehose, and you're all going on like nothing is happening. It's your job, I can appreciate that, but as site staff you need to address this at some point.
If Dice are wanting to turn/. into another me-too Cloud/Biz/TV news aggregation garbage, it's your jobs that are on the line too. The slashdot you know will get eaten alive.
Ask yourselves, what will the site have left if nobody contributes?
It's all so unnecessary. They don't have to ditch classic at all and plenty of other sites carry a legacy mode. That'd be all I'd ask - that way I wouldn't need javascript just to load comments, or put up with the sidebar taking up half of my screen width.
It's a shame. The editing is sometimes sketchy and occasionally completely incorrect, the stories can be hysterical or just plain rubbish, but it doesn't matter. The point is that/. often has brilliant contributions from people involved in a wide range of fields. Driving those contributions away will be the death of this site.
I'm certainly not of their caliber, but I feel that if enough of us simply stopped posting Dice might reconsider.
Or mention the problem people have with the Canonical CLA in the first place, which according to TFA is the requirement that contributers sign an agreement that gives Canonical the right to relicense their contribution under a proprietary licence.
It's amusing that advertisers are talking of ethics, as if they're some sort of moral guardian. Remember, these people want to sell you things. They don't give a shit whether you can afford it, or whether it might harm you, or whether it causes damage or loss somewhere down the line. Going back to Edward Bernays, advertisers have used psychology to essentially manipulate the customer into buying their goods.
Look at the lengths that advertising platforms have gone to in order to make their ads relevant. Facebook, Google and the like have all gone to extraordinary lengths to maximise their ad revenues, often to the detriment of user privacy. Mining emails and messages for keywords to use in advertising isn't ethical in my opinion. Nor is tracking me with third party cookies, or with Google's new adID system.
I'm not saying they're all that bad, or even that I object to minimal, low overhead text based advertising. If an advertising agency was launched that only served simple text ads without incessant tracking I would unblock them quite readily. I understand that sites need revenue. However, suggesting I have an ethical obligation to expose myself to such an unethical industry in exchange for content doesn't wash with me.
Introduce advertising with a better ethical compass, and I will respond in kind by viewing it. Until then, the adblockers stay.
It's not stupidity that motivates them to show off AK's, pounds of weed and fuckloads of money. It's linked strongly to status, ego and hierarchy.
These are gangs remember. Their image is absolutely vital to their status. No-one is going to fear or respect you if you don't show off. If there's three or four big street gangs in a major city, you need to stand out and show yourself to be higher in the pack than the others.
Think of old school pimps and their massive chrome encrusted Impalas. Looking in from the outside, you might be tempted to say "you're fucking stupid, drawing attention to yourself like that". But that's the entire point. It's showing you, not someone else, is top dog around here. That you can protect your posessions, that you have enough status to drive such an outrageous car in a neighbourhood where it sticks out. Others don't touch it because they know who you are, you're that fucking important. No one is going to believe that you're shit if you drive a fifteen year old Saturn.
It's like a celebrity lifestyle in so much that it isn't enough just to be rich, you have to *show* that you are. Same with street gangs, it isn't enough to be bad ass, you have to demonstrate it. Gangs don't just work by their acts, they work by the way people percieve them.
They might be uneducated, but I wouldn't call them stupid.
The summary and some of the replies seem a little misguided. I've probably got it wrong as well, but here goes.
Essentially, the City of London (the borough, not Londinium itself) emailed or wrote to domain registrars asking that they suspend the domain of what they alleged to be copyright infringing sites. This was a request, not an order. As we know a lot of domain registrars really don't give a toss and suspended the domains, probably without investigating whether the takedown request was accurate at all. EasyDNS, as reported before, didn't take down or suspend the domains.
Said suspended domain owners wished to take their business from their old registrars to EasyDNS, but their old registrars wouldn't transfer the domains. EasyDNS wasn't happy and petitioned ICANN, who ruled that the registrars were against policy for refusing to transfer them unless a court order was involved.
It sounds more sinister than it is. Anyone can submit a takedown request like that for a perceived TOS violation.
I imagine for most people in the future, the point of crypto currency is not to speculate or profit from mining, but to facilitate a sort of cash analogue online. Having a load of different currencies might introduce an element of stability which is lacking in Bitcoin.
It might be interesting to see these new currencies made completely fiat. Mining seems to just waste energy, since the scarcity (unlike say, gold) doesn't actually stabilise the price, as Bitcoin has demonstated.
I imagine the problem then is converting the myriad of cryptocurrencies back into "hard" money.
I don't agree with Mitt Romney that "corporations are people too, my friend," but they do have First Amendment rights
That means you do agree with him, since you're saying that corporations have constitutional rights - It reads "We the people" not "We the people and acceptable business structures".
Considering that uploading to FB grants them a transferable and royalty free worldwide licence, the amount of control the end user has over their likeness or any other content they upload is very limited indeed.
With that in mind, FB can use your content in any way it pleases unless (and perhaps not even then) you delete the content. In the instance of the class action suit, California considered it an endorsement (or would have, if FB didn't settle). Other states or countries might not. What is to stop them expanding the scheme across the entire site in those jurisdictions?
Is it a commercial endorsement? I would say probably yes. The interesting question under the surface would then be, considering that companies try and persuade users into "liking" on a frequent basis, are they guilty of profiting from an unfairly acquired endorsement?
Seriously, his story is almost the same as "Robotics and Automation" is stealing all our jobs. But then they forgot the support industry for these new technologies.
There's quite a lot of evidence that job creation has ground to a halt in the US.
During the Clinton administration, the average annual increase in jobs created was over 2.5% per year. With a couple of exceptions, the figure has always been over 1% at least.
Since 2000, that figure dropped to 0% and 0.21% during GWB's two terms. Obama's first term was also 0.21%. There's not much indication that his second term will create many more.
Once you factor in population growth, job growth has actually been negative for over a decade. I don't have the US figures to hand but here in the UK, there are 5 unemployed per job vacancy.
Slashdot Mirror
Or in other words, automate yourself out of your own job and get replaced by someone cheaper, using your scripts. Never make your job look easy.
The trend towards cashless troubles me because it takes a transaction between two parties and adds a third party - the bank. As we've seen in the past few decades, they're not exactly trustworthy or competent.
Retailers are already charged for every transaction made by card, which is fine for Walmart but not expensive for small traders, further biasing the market towards already huge entities. It adds a monetary cost as well as a knowledge barrier to small traders, flea market stall holders and self employed tradespeople.
Furthermore, every purchase becomes a public act with a permanent record. If there is information on you, you can bet your ass someone will pay for it - social media has made it a business model to collect it. The panopticon wasn't built around government, but advertising. This is not a hypothetical future but instead our reality, today.
Do you really wish to give up more privacy? As America lurches and burps and farts its way towards authoritarianism with King Baby at the helm, don't you think the Intelligence Services will be delighted to pour through your purchase records for signs of being an Enemy of the People?
Simply, it's another centralising trend at a time when people should be keeping well away from it. In a way, its a sign of how centralised we have become - the lie of the tech utopians was that we would rid ourselves of middle men. Instead, the middle men have become ubiquitous.
But has the entire species run out of ideas? Like fuck. People have been making that argument for centuries. They look at the world around them and don't have the imagination to think it could ever change.
I don't doubt that there's some truth in the article though. I don't have a link, but I remember reading an article suggesting a similar trend to semiconductor development occurring in medical R&D - the amount of money invested produces fewer finds year on year.
My personal opinion is that there's a few contributing factors to this too such as an obsession with next-quarter short termism in the corporate world and a chronic underfunding of public sector research in universities and at agencies like NASA.
Perhaps this is something wider. Every civilisation declines, and the western world will be no different. When it does, the malaise will be uniform. It might be that it can be restarted by a revolution of political or economic thought, or it might not. Perhaps we are living through such times, and we're hamstrung by simply being unable to imagine a radically different world.
When a child is behind their piers by a year or two it becomes almost impossible to catch up.
They end up completely out at sea.
One of the absolute core tenets of Slashdot has always been that they don't delete things (unless someone sues them for a billion dollars, and even then, only once). It's important to be able to prove it if it happens.
Indeed, which is why talk of post deletions is so important to verify. Has it really become that kind of site? Just another barely concealed attempt to exploit an actual community into providing advertising impressions?
Deleting posts would be the death knell for me. The way we use the site is important, but the ethos of it is moreso. A Slashdot that arbitrarily deletes things it deems unwanted isn't one I'd like to contribute to.
I'm sure we'll find out, one way of another.
But this doesn't actually concede anything, does it?
Main points in this statement:
1: One in four users are still being redirected to the new beta.
2: The current Slashdot layout is still disappearing, to be replaced by the beta.
3: The beta needs development.
So what's so groundbreaking about this announcement? Where's the concession? I'm supposed to be happy about this, I suppose?
This is the part that bothers me:
We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site that still speaks to the interests and habits of our current audience, but that is, at the same time, more accessible and shareable by a wider audience.
So Dice wants the best of both worlds; the tech oriented, intelligent userbase contributions, and a wide audience to monetise those contributions to? It isn't going to work.
This is very true. Please keep the feedback coming. The more constructive, the better.
I admire you actually coming out and posting, but I'd point out that there has been a plethora of constructive, detailed feedback on the beta already, seemingly to no avail.
But since you asked, I'd recommend:
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Since Slashdot without comments is more or less pointless, we actually are paying, it just isn't with money.
If a website is a commodity, then our user generated content and comments are likewise a commodity. On some sites this contribution is pretty marginal, but on Slashdot it's the basis of the entire business model.
Since Slashdot profits from the userbase contributions, that means those contributions have a value.
So yes, I pay, though the contributions are probably not worth a lot ;)
Open up a story for all of this. There's been dozens of red marked stories in the firehose, and you're all going on like nothing is happening. It's your job, I can appreciate that, but as site staff you need to address this at some point.
If Dice are wanting to turn /. into another me-too Cloud/Biz/TV news aggregation garbage, it's your jobs that are on the line too. The slashdot you know will get eaten alive.
Ask yourselves, what will the site have left if nobody contributes?
Looks absolutely dreadful on a Sony Vaio.
It's funny, but since yesterday and the javascript popup, I find myself unable to type any comment that isn't directly about the beta.
I'll stop posting, but not stop visiting.
It's all so unnecessary. They don't have to ditch classic at all and plenty of other sites carry a legacy mode. That'd be all I'd ask - that way I wouldn't need javascript just to load comments, or put up with the sidebar taking up half of my screen width.
It's a shame. The editing is sometimes sketchy and occasionally completely incorrect, the stories can be hysterical or just plain rubbish, but it doesn't matter. The point is that /. often has brilliant contributions from people involved in a wide range of fields. Driving those contributions away will be the death of this site.
I'm certainly not of their caliber, but I feel that if enough of us simply stopped posting Dice might reconsider.
Slashdot combines editor quality control and insight with crowd-sourced harvesting to cover the 'News for Nerds' space.
God, I wish the editors were like that here ;)
Or mention the problem people have with the Canonical CLA in the first place, which according to TFA is the requirement that contributers sign an agreement that gives Canonical the right to relicense their contribution under a proprietary licence.
Your move, bitches.
It's amusing that advertisers are talking of ethics, as if they're some sort of moral guardian. Remember, these people want to sell you things. They don't give a shit whether you can afford it, or whether it might harm you, or whether it causes damage or loss somewhere down the line. Going back to Edward Bernays, advertisers have used psychology to essentially manipulate the customer into buying their goods.
Look at the lengths that advertising platforms have gone to in order to make their ads relevant. Facebook, Google and the like have all gone to extraordinary lengths to maximise their ad revenues, often to the detriment of user privacy. Mining emails and messages for keywords to use in advertising isn't ethical in my opinion. Nor is tracking me with third party cookies, or with Google's new adID system.
I'm not saying they're all that bad, or even that I object to minimal, low overhead text based advertising. If an advertising agency was launched that only served simple text ads without incessant tracking I would unblock them quite readily. I understand that sites need revenue. However, suggesting I have an ethical obligation to expose myself to such an unethical industry in exchange for content doesn't wash with me.
Introduce advertising with a better ethical compass, and I will respond in kind by viewing it. Until then, the adblockers stay.
Removes malicious software, that just happens to use Tor.
Come on /., you can do better than this.
This FLAC plugin works for me with Winamp 5.24 (admittedly an old release), though I can't vouch for 24/192 files.
It's not stupidity that motivates them to show off AK's, pounds of weed and fuckloads of money. It's linked strongly to status, ego and hierarchy.
These are gangs remember. Their image is absolutely vital to their status. No-one is going to fear or respect you if you don't show off. If there's three or four big street gangs in a major city, you need to stand out and show yourself to be higher in the pack than the others.
Think of old school pimps and their massive chrome encrusted Impalas. Looking in from the outside, you might be tempted to say "you're fucking stupid, drawing attention to yourself like that". But that's the entire point. It's showing you, not someone else, is top dog around here. That you can protect your posessions, that you have enough status to drive such an outrageous car in a neighbourhood where it sticks out. Others don't touch it because they know who you are, you're that fucking important. No one is going to believe that you're shit if you drive a fifteen year old Saturn.
It's like a celebrity lifestyle in so much that it isn't enough just to be rich, you have to *show* that you are. Same with street gangs, it isn't enough to be bad ass, you have to demonstrate it. Gangs don't just work by their acts, they work by the way people percieve them.
They might be uneducated, but I wouldn't call them stupid.
The summary and some of the replies seem a little misguided. I've probably got it wrong as well, but here goes.
Essentially, the City of London (the borough, not Londinium itself) emailed or wrote to domain registrars asking that they suspend the domain of what they alleged to be copyright infringing sites. This was a request, not an order. As we know a lot of domain registrars really don't give a toss and suspended the domains, probably without investigating whether the takedown request was accurate at all. EasyDNS, as reported before, didn't take down or suspend the domains.
Said suspended domain owners wished to take their business from their old registrars to EasyDNS, but their old registrars wouldn't transfer the domains. EasyDNS wasn't happy and petitioned ICANN, who ruled that the registrars were against policy for refusing to transfer them unless a court order was involved.
It sounds more sinister than it is. Anyone can submit a takedown request like that for a perceived TOS violation.
Captcha: Debunk. I hope so!
..same buttons as their gold fetish and it doesn't look like a "Fiat currency".
Libertarians are certainly know for their disdain for currencies issued by car manufacturers.
The big boxy thing? That's the PSU!
I imagine for most people in the future, the point of crypto currency is not to speculate or profit from mining, but to facilitate a sort of cash analogue online. Having a load of different currencies might introduce an element of stability which is lacking in Bitcoin.
It might be interesting to see these new currencies made completely fiat. Mining seems to just waste energy, since the scarcity (unlike say, gold) doesn't actually stabilise the price, as Bitcoin has demonstated.
I imagine the problem then is converting the myriad of cryptocurrencies back into "hard" money.
I don't agree with Mitt Romney that "corporations are people too, my friend," but they do have First Amendment rights
That means you do agree with him, since you're saying that corporations have constitutional rights - It reads "We the people" not "We the people and acceptable business structures".
Considering that uploading to FB grants them a transferable and royalty free worldwide licence, the amount of control the end user has over their likeness or any other content they upload is very limited indeed.
With that in mind, FB can use your content in any way it pleases unless (and perhaps not even then) you delete the content. In the instance of the class action suit, California considered it an endorsement (or would have, if FB didn't settle). Other states or countries might not. What is to stop them expanding the scheme across the entire site in those jurisdictions?
Is it a commercial endorsement? I would say probably yes. The interesting question under the surface would then be, considering that companies try and persuade users into "liking" on a frequent basis, are they guilty of profiting from an unfairly acquired endorsement?
Seriously, his story is almost the same as "Robotics and Automation" is stealing all our jobs. But then they forgot the support industry for these new technologies.
There's quite a lot of evidence that job creation has ground to a halt in the US.
During the Clinton administration, the average annual increase in jobs created was over 2.5% per year. With a couple of exceptions, the figure has always been over 1% at least.
Since 2000, that figure dropped to 0% and 0.21% during GWB's two terms. Obama's first term was also 0.21%. There's not much indication that his second term will create many more.
Once you factor in population growth, job growth has actually been negative for over a decade. I don't have the US figures to hand but here in the UK, there are 5 unemployed per job vacancy.
It is a problem that is largely being ignored.
Are the two mutually exclusive? Call me naive, but would it be possible to protect national security within the law?
Actually, don't answer that. They should just change it again to "our primary function is to get more funding" and have done with it.