I would argue that that's not really what happened. When CmdrTaco left, the tone of /. was possibly more political than it is now. CmdrTaco did a lot to try to bring /. back to its roots, but the users kept on pushing the content in a more political direction. I don't blame CmdrTaco or the mods, though I agree that some more strict moderation would help the situation as it stands.

I would say that it was two factors:
1) Heavy internet use became mainstream.
2) 9/11

On the first point. Slashdot started in the heat of the first dotcom boom. People wanted to know what was going on in tech. The audience was a self-selecting group made up of developers, open-source users and devs, and entrepreneurs. As time went on, more entrepreneurs and people seeking to get rich (think RedHat IPO) came to Slashdot, and diluted the audience. Now, there's nothing wrong with being one of these people, but they're not the sort who are going to post comments that are deeply embedded in an interest in tech.

Fast-forward a little, and you've got quite a few sites that basically coopted Slashdot's model that popped up. K5 was an early one, but you've got reddit.com, digg.com, fark.com, and now the comments section on cnn.com, all the way to college newspapers like the Yale Daily News website. Link aggregation, or simply sticking a comments section on every single thing posted to the internet became mainstream.

Activity like that diluted what you can get out of a purely democratized content model. True, Slashdot has always had moderation, but a lot of the mod activity is from users, and Slashdot has always taken a gentle hand in these matters. If we're to compare to another website, reddit.com is also heavily driven by user-submitted content. It's, despite what the average redditor would claim, primarily a website about politics, atheism, and pictures, with a little science and tech sprinkled in. That said, the truly aggressively-moderated subreddits are the ones that stay on-topic.

The second factor is 9/11. I'd say that things were basically under control prior to that. On 9/11, the attacks were the big news of the day. I couldn't find the reference, but I think that that is still the most actively commented on story of all time. It pulled in a big crowd of people who wanted to discuss the attacks in real-time, and then they stayed. This was an instant dilution of Slashdot's content, and it stayed that way. For years to come, you'd see political commenters who, for the most part, only wanted to discuss politics. If you'd ask them to stay on-topic, they would give you an excuse along the lines of, "More important stuff is going on than science and technology." These people really seemed to want for the world to grind to a halt until they were happy with the political situation. They're still around.

Measure's were taken. CmdrTaco made several posts both requesting community input and suggesting measures and solutions to the problem. Eventually he stepped down.

In short, Slashdot's problem, if you're looking for a site to discuss science and technology, where people are passionate about these matters, is an audience problem. Folks like us are in the minority now. We always have been, but the internet grew, and is no longer a place where "early adopters" congregate. It is very difficult to have a site like what Slashdot was these days, because a self-selecting audience will include a majority of people who aren't all that invested in either science or technology.

Even with heavy moderation, you would have a difficult time curating the site, to be honest. If you look over recent top stories, the question of, "at what point is moderation fair?" would be kind of difficult to answer. Undoubtedly a new space mission makes the cut, right? Okay, what about discussion of the NSA's activities? Given the volume of communication that is performed online, one could make an argument that every story about their activity is relevant, but it's political material. Of course, there are some clear "rejects." The story that we're all commenting on hasn't got anything to do with technology.

I can shed some light on this.

This course is an introductory course for non-majors. That's why it's not like "Intro to Computer Science."

The big deal with Harvard's CS50 course isn't that everyone wants to enroll in computer science, but that it is being taught in a very unorthodox way. Students have the option of attending lectures or watching video lectures online. There is a great deal of supplementary online material. They have all night coding sessions with food and games which are sponsored by businesses such as Microsoft and Google.

More info can be found here: https://cs50.harvard.edu/

Where did you go that theory *wasn't* part of your core?

Also worth noting is that the reason that we teach so much programming is because that's the job associated with the degree. If you don't plan on programming with your degree in computer science, then you'd probably better plan on some graduate school. I suppose you could treat it as an, "I just needed a degree" subject, but it's a lot of work if all you're after is the ability to say that you finished your BS.

California already has number of big, powerful companies headquartered there. They've got a number of great universities. Why pull out all of the stops to get Tesla to set up shop in-state? The US is a big country, and a few other states might want a share of the wealth that a company like Telsa could bring in.

Really? You're shooting an AR-15 from the hip at a range where a trackpoint system would be helpful?

Just a quick note. You probably won't make much on the proceeds for a sale for parts. Used tablet parts don't fetch very much on the open market. If the tablet is non-working, there is no guarantee which parts work and which don't. Taking tablets apart is difficult and time-consuming, so there is a lot of labor involved. Also, due to the ways that tablets tend to be assembled (lots of epoxies and thin plastics), it is very easy to damage the parts during disassembly.

Interesting, though, when one cites a Fuller Dome, people generally expect a geodesic dome, the design for which Buckminster Fuller is better known: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic_dome These DDUs are an entirely different design.

They *did* invest in the Kinect 2. The Kinect 2 has also been a major success.

This is actually the opposite of something that's wrong with a company. They used the money that they had in order to fund research in order to produce a better product, and somewhat simply to do new and interesting research. I can't see why you would think that this is a bad thing.

People cite the "nimble" bit when they mean that a company is stuck in its ways or unable to adapt to change. Doing major research and development is the opposite of that. It's where people who are experts in a field use their talents to really thoroughly explore new ideas.

Moreover, your assertion lies on the idea that, somehow, this research isn't paying off. The consequence of that would be that they somehow fail to make money on the XBox One. It's a little early to be calling the XBox One a commercial failure, given that it won't be.