For those not interested in helping useless middle-man ad farms, here's the original source on the National Archives website (including the YouTube video):

How Computers Changed the Tax Game

Oh, derp. Make that 1000 Gbit per square inch. Worst part of no edit on Slashdot is all the simple math mistakes irrevocably left for posterity :)

That caught my eye as well. Assuming 1000 bits per square inch, we're talking about:

6 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 * 8 / 1000 = 48,000,000,000 square inches to store 6TB at 1000 bits per in^2.

1 Mbit per square inch makes a lot more sense, putting it at 48 square inches, or about 8 square inches per platter.

No-IP is dishonest and doesn't deserve your support.

Way back in mid 2004 I spent about $20 to buy No-IP's "Lifetime" dynamic DNS service which gave me (IIRC) 5 of their "enhanced" subdomains which would never expire and never cost me additional money. I was very happy with them and recommended them to several people.

Then suddenly in 2008 I got an email saying my service was about to expire. When I emailed them about it, they said:

Date: Mar 10, 2008 (1:18am PDT)
From: No-IP Support

3 months after you had completed this purchase, this service was changed to a yearly service. As a courtesy to existing users, we provided them with 3 years of service. I'm sorry for any confusion this caused with the renewal of your service.

I don't really care what sneaky leagalese was in their TOS that justifies them legally. They explicitly sold this service as "lifetime", and I feel this was a completely underhanded move. I've had nothing to do with No-IP ever since and I discourage everyone else from supporting that kind of dishonestly.

Are you on Windows 7 with IE 10 installed? Or Windows 8.1?

It boggles my mind that they released the browser with this bug unresolved. Almost 500 comments on the Bugzilla entry and the end result was "ship it!" I mean, look at some of these screenshots:

https://bug812695.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=682682
https://bug812695.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=735090
https://bug812695.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=797936
https://bug812695.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=720401

Who gives a damn if a large number of users can't even read the text on a page because, OMG!, we've just gotta have an HTML5 volume control! Someone probably should mention to Mozilla that just ripping off Chrome's look and release cycle doesn't really work if you don't also have Google's engineering and QA teams.

I don't think we need any more evidence that nobody is left steering the Firefox ship these days besides the cabin boy "designers".

Slashdot interviews for Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, and now Theo, all in the last week?

What happened? Did someone at Dice push Slashdot management to try and "reclaim technical roots"? Is someone a little worried about http://soylentnews.org/? Or maybe this is part of a last-ditch effort to increase revenue^W^W reclaim reader loyalty?

source.

Perhaps not, but really, you guys are still trying way too hard now. I'd have thought you realized by now that successfully running a site like this is a marathon, not a sprint. Throwing up a few half-baked interviews with prominent open source figures isn't the answer.

There's more truth to this than you might think :)

But I agree with the OP; FTL is a lot of fun, especially if you enjoy space + rougelikes.

As an aside, how about you fix simple 2-year old bugs in this site's CSS so that things like lists work?

That's not very helpful.

It's hard to feel comfortable with the drastic changes being proposed (or shoved down our throats) when the old new site still doesn't render correctly.

I think this is one of the biggest reasons you are getting such negative pushback. A very large part of the active and vocal Slashdot audience (the "community") probably share a similar viewpoint when it comes to change. Change for change's sake is bad, and if you want to change something that works just fine then you'd better be able to give me a good, objective reason. So far that just isn't something we've seen. What I see is a site that's been redesigned with two goals in mind:

• Jump on the current web design bandwagon. For example: poor text contrast, gradients and transparency that slows things down, etc.
• Water down and weaken the commenting system. The original beta made it clear that the drivers of this change felt that the Slashdot comment system was too complex and should be "simplified". Taking it to a flatter model with less information about posts and their relationships, in addition to "lazy" loading comments just says that your target audience must feel like "comments are hard, let's go shopping!"

What exactly is it about the current site that makes it inaccessible? Which audience are you trying to reach? I'm quite serious -- knowing this may make it easier for people to accept change (assuming that the audiences you're reaching out to aren't "advertisers" and "market analytics"). Just going based on what you've said it sounds like you want to make Slashdot Yet Another generic news aggregator. Don't you remember Digg? That sad story should have taught you a few lessons about the value of a generic news aggregator and the results of alienating a community.

Will the new site finally support (even a small subset of) Unicode? Just adding support for that would probably make Slashdot accessible to more people than this absurd proposed redesign. No, I'm not kidding.

Interestingly enough, they've also removed all/most of the fuckbeta tags that had been put on 20+ stories earlier. It looks like most other variations such as "betasucks" have also been removed.

Remember when tags used to be an open and fun way for the community to micro-comment on a story? 90% of readers here realized that Slashdot's tags were completely and utterly useless (they still haven't dumped the pointless story tag**), so using them as a platform for humor or community feedback was both clever and fun. Oh, yeah, all that was before abortion that is Dicedot.

Fuck beta.

** Wow, that page is screwed up. Not only did it take almost a minute to load for me (what the hell are you guys running these newage bullshit pages on, Ruby?), but after all that it only displayed about 50 links, and most of them are duplicates (dupes, on MY Slashdot!? Inconceivable!!).

An interesting side effect of Google's fiber offering is the sudden competition it's putting in some places where it hardly existed before, and allowing us to examine the results.

I have a friend who lives in Provo (about 10 miles south of me) and will be eligible for Google Fiber when they open it up in his area this March. He has had Comcast Internet service for a couple of years now and is planning on switching to Google when he can. However, about a month ago a Comcast representative came directly to his home, unscheduled, to talk about a "new and improved" service level he was now eligible for.

This Comcast rep told my friend that, effective immediately (all he had to do was call Comcast), he could change his current ISP service to a package that offered 250 Mbps down / 150 Mbps up, no bandwidth cap, for $25 / month. To compare, he was currently getting 25 Mbps down and paying $75 / month. A couple of weeks ago he made the switch and has been very happy with the order of magnitude speed increase and 66% price drop.

I understand the concept behind competition and the magical invisible hand, but this sort of behavior sickens me. If Comcast can drop their prices and increase their service offerings so quickly in response to new competition, it just goes to show how badly they are screwing over most of their other customers. And, of course, when I called them to inquire about this amazing new Internet service they were offering, I was told it was a "not available" in my area and that different "geographical regions" have different prices.

There's a real argument here for municipal/state owned and funded fiber networks being leased out to various commercial (or otherwise) ISPs. If Google and Comcast can both offer this kind of bandwidth for these prices, the current state of affairs in most of the rest of the country is completely unjustified. I'm sick and tired of a few "elite" corporations getting an effective monopoly on Internet service offerings in vast areas, able to charge anything they please because people have no other option.

Was that a Murlock, or the venerable President Nixon? :)

I'd guess there's a disparity between the number of Horde and Alliance players (Blizzard just hasn't done much to try and balance them out). Perhaps merged^Wcoalesced realms might help with that somewhat if they choose the right ones to join.

That, or Alliance just bots more.

That sounds a lot like the timer coalescing added in Windows 7, and it did have notable improvements in power usage over XP. So while the idea isn't new or innovative on the part of Apple, it does help them maintain their lead over Windows when it comes to lower power consumption.

I've always wondered why there's so little real public outcry at the perpetual extension of copyrights and their increasing overreach. But now, after reading the comments on that story, it's no wonder corporations have yet again been able to run roughshod over the public, and it's the same reason as usual -- the public is willingly bending over for them:

Apparently this person forgot the reasons behind the Video Game Crash as well...

Here's a crux of the issue and what republicorps rely on for the public's support -- "When I am rich and famous some day, I want these laws around to protect me!"

Ignoring, I suppose, the fact that he doesn't own any copyright -- Nintendo does.

Wow.