Sincerely,
An Advertising Network Employee

Everybody probalby thought 1200 users was a lot for the site back then. :) Once past 10,000 someone started saying how there are too many people and /. had lost its edge or wasn't cool anymore. Then around 90,000 people started registering for the low uids. Obviously I'm not a joiner. ;)

What's your explanation for private companies running airline travel as a matter of national security? If the airlines can't keep bombs off their planes, then they go out of business and/or prosecuted for the actions of the terrorists they let through. How about life in prison for the entire board of directors of American Airlines?

It provides source material to investigators. Think of it as a division of labor.

The military establishment seeks to control the behavior of civilians by telling them what words they can use to describe different kinds of soldiers. "Ex-Marine" has a specific negative connotation to insiders, kind of like the word "hipster" does to Skrillex fans. The military subculture tells them, "once a Marine, always a Marine," so you have to have done something terrible to have your Marine-ness taken away.

I find it difficult to believe that he made such an absurd statement -- and even more preposterous that he thinks it's a reasonable, realistic expectation.

Nathan Myrhvold is a sophist.

You're saying "well it doesn't have to be like that," and gstrickler is saying, "it is like that." You're talking past him.

They're just emulating US Police.

http://www.theagitator.com/?s=puppycide

Nah, it's only the lower classes who get such checkups, sometimes middle-class'ers. Sandwich makers get drug tested, bus drivers get FBI background checks, it totally makes sense in a certain light.

This is exactly it. The FBI aren't the ones responsible for reinstalling the machine into the rack. They took it on themselves for some reason, and avoiding attention was evidently part of it.

It charges no money for its services.

It most certainly does charge for job and/or real estate ads in many cities.

Comments are throttled to fight spammers and trolls.

No kidding. I think that was the state of the art around 2004, i.e. before this redesign.

Considering how user-hostile the design is, only a fool would be so conceited as to think their comments hold any weight.

Here's a beginner's list, though: http://meta.slashdot.org/story/11/01/25/163257/slashdot-launches-re-design

If Slashdot is only at the "let's see if we can get a simple text field to display properly" level of development, I'm definitely pissing in the wind about any other usability issues. Sad.

And who decided that Slashdot has so many comments that they need to be throttled so severely, even from logged-in users? SRSLY.

And you know what? Screw your passive engineering with "hey, send an email!" UI/UX isn't just an email away. It's not enough to "look great," when the site is 5x harder to use than any other. Did the designer previously work for GoDaddy?