The animosity is the usual Slashdot hatred for JavaScript. It was just as bad when they moved to what people are now calling "classic" from the previous version.

It's probably also not so much a matter of flexibility as a matter of cost. Maintaining two UI's has a cost associated with it and that cost is probably 90% of why they're moving to the new UI in the first place(to make it more like the mobile version), given that they're building the new UI to avoid having to support two UI's I doubt they'd ever consider keeping the old in one in play.

I think that having courses like that available is an excellent thing, I think staff pointing students who might be interested in such courses into them is also great. I think that actually teaching the concepts you're talking about to every student is a great way to get a whole mess of students even less interested in schools.

Just because we love doing it doesn't mean everyone does, and there's a reason why computer programming teams tend to have more than their fair share of people with autism spectrum disorders.

You're not far off, but it's more accurate to say cash is a representation of value.

The problem with traditional barter is that it becomes difficult if not impossible unless both parties have goods of roughly equivalent value that they both want to exchange. I'm not going to trade my house for a haircut, but the hairdresser still needs a house. Instead of going through a few dozen trades to convert what people traded for hair cuts into something worth enough to trade for my house that I actually want, we use cash to represent the value of those haircuts.

The cash in and of itself is worthless, but it represents the value of the thousands of haircuts the hairdresser performed to accumulate that money. This was true even when we had actual metal currency. The small amount of copper in most coins was worthless to your average person. Even gold coins which few of us would see in such a system are useless.

But lots of idiots thought exactly that which is the point. The money launderers knew better off course, but folks like Sheen quite obviously didn't follow the laws and were perfectly happy to facilitate crime even knowingly. This isn't about the legal status of bit coin it's about why there is so much illegal use of bit coin. The answer to that is pseudo anonymity and poor reporting practices at the exchanges combined with high volatility to hide gains. It was easy and low risk to launder through bitcoin.

Certainly a questionable case, though without witnesses it was always going to be a difficult case to prove. Schizophrenics can be extremely violent and unpredictable. More importantly its actually a counterargument to you assertion. The police officers involved had charges laid against them, those charges were upheld several times through appeal, they were acquitted yes, but by a jury.

What do you mean what am I talking about? Have you not noticed how similar the beta is to the new mobile interface? Did it not dawn on you that piecemeal comment loading is for bandwidth limited applications? Why do you think they're doing this in the first place?

Most big name coders also seem to think this idea of trying to teach coding to non coders is rather idiotic. There are better ways to teach the basic skills and the detailed skills are all going to be silly.

You can dislike Javascript interfaces, but the war to stop them was lost more than a decade ago. When you bitch about them now, you just look old and resistant to change. Javascript performance on a PC is a non issue for anything as simple as this site and the current UI doesn't work for shit on mobile anyway, so what's there to lose.

The UI designers are making the decision that Dice doesn't want to maintain a mobile interface which supports touch and an outdated PC version which doesn't so they're upgrading the main site to something touch compatible so they can have everything work the same. It reduces code rework, makes testing and security easier and has a whole mess of other benefits. Whatever you or I might think, they're not going to back down from that, and realistically they probably shouldn't.

Javascript is fine, there's liabilities in terms of allowing arbitrary javascript to execute, but Slashdot doesn't and never has allowed that, adding some javascript onto the site is perfectly fine. It's only really a problem when you're allowing XSS and since slashdot doesn't allow javascript in comments you're pretty safe from that unless the site itself gets hacked in which case you're done anyway(you can do anything you could do with javascript on the server side. Heck Slashdot already has plenty of javascript.

The reason the current UI has to go is that it's shit on mobile. They've built a new mobile interface, but it's so vastly different from the dated crap they've got currently coded that they have to maintain two entirely different interfaces which to be honest, costs them more money than the anti-javascript brigade will cost them if/when it leaves. Hell, the current UI is fairly crap on a regular PC.

Even if you believe that Javascript spells a massive change(which it doesn't) a security vulnerability(which it doesn't), or some other horrible violation of your rights, the constant bitching about the new beta is doing more damage the "quality comments' whatever those might be when they're at home than the new UI could even it didn't allow for posting at all, which it does.

Just because the news stories stop after "administrative leave" doesn't mean they don't get punished later.
Cops get a lot of leeway because they make split second decisions on inadequate information as part of their job, but usually in cases like this the homeless man either wasn't actually all that innocent or the cops actually do get punished.

As a non currency a Bitcoin exchange would have been legally liable to report any purchases of Bitcoins over $10,000, but unless they got caught under some sort of investment legislation that would have been it. Regardless of what they should or shouldn't have been doing no one was doing anything about it so whether it was legislated de jure, de facto it wasn't.

Well the thing is there are two different issues with it. The first is that the newest version of the beta performed shockingly under load. I couldn't even get it to load replies, that's unacceptable and needs to get fixed. A few things like playing videos I could give a crap about, but that sort of stuff should be fixed too.

The "it uses too much javascript" which is the essence of most of the complaints, isn't a flaw. I have no real beef with the actual layout or design, just want it to actually function as it said on the tin.

Please, stop now, a new interface is coming, hopefully it will work better than the beta and I can't stand to hear any more bitching about it.

That could be because we're all sick to tears of every single thread being nothing but bitching about the new beta interface instead of discussing the actual topic.

We get it, the beta is seriously buggy and shouldn't have been release. We get it, Slashdotters have an irrational fear of any kind of UI change whatsoever, even to try and make the site actually usable on a mobile or capable of doing anything interesting. In particular they have an absolutely irrational hatred of all things Javascript even though that battle was, for better or worse, lost on the web more than a decade ago.

I'm ok with people criticizing the beta, but FFS I wish all the idiots who just scream that they'll quit over the new UI would just quit already, it's been physically impossible to have a decent conversation on Slashdot lately and it's not because the beta doesn't work well, it's because of the idiots the admins are rightfully banishing to the pits of hell where they belong.

That's sort of a bit open to interpretation. A bitcoin exchange only looks and smells like a bank if you consider bitcoin to be a currency and it was unclear whether the government saw it that way. You can buy and sell WoW gold for cash for instance but that most certainly isn't considered a currency and Blizzard isn't a bank. Exchanges probably should have been doing this stuff, but they weren't and no one was being or has been charged for activities prior to the announcement.

In any event no one was reporting and no one was looking, and you could hide a lot of income through the fluctuations.