The site should default to classic. One of the things I love about /. is that it is generally pretty light, even with the stuff that came with the last update a few years back. Keep it light by default. Remember: you're audience are power users; treat us accordingly.

Another major annoyance of mine these days is that for many programs, these options for customization are disappearing. Especially in the mobile world. The "Settings" menus in Android often only allow a very few things to be changed.

I don't know about you, but this was easier for me back in the days when the UI didn't change based on what you had selected. Buttons and menus that were unavailable for whatever was selected were grayed out they weren't hidden like they are now. Drives me nuts. It all makes me feel that UI designers are forced to do this kind of stuff to justify their jobs. I cannot imagine that (most) people actually find it easier to use.

Was he in any way associated with MIT? If so, you have a point. If not, I think you're trying awfully hard to justify something that is pretty clearly illegal. I'm not saying that the response by the prosecutor is in anyway proportional to what he did, but the GP makes a valid point.

You're blissfully unaware of the regulations involved in getting a mine up and running. Especially in California. It takes years to get through permitting. And Molycorp's environmental record is far from pristine, which throws more regulatory junk in their way. link. I work in mining, and for an expansion of a mine I worked at that was 100% on private property, there were something like 30 permits, each with its own lengthy process, that we needed to clear before going forward. And that was in a state far more friendly to the industry

It's true that rare earths aren't rare, geologically speaking. But big deposits that have the mineralogy to give them high concentrations amenable to processing are quite rare. They're out there, but they're not common. And China can extract and process them for a lot less than we can here in the rest of the world.

Not really. they priced other operations out of the market, i.e., Mountain Pass with all its costs related to labor and environmental snafus. Now the price is getting back up to where laying out the capital (tens to hundreds of millions of dollars) is again worth looking into.

Well, not really. According to TFA, the goals of the studies are to:

post to undo errant mod

Yeah. . . I think I'm going to need to see some reputable sources for those claims.

I fully agree. They have even screwed up the key aspects of what makes /. great - the comments. It doesn't look like the discussion is moderated, instead you can "Like" a comment. I am not aware of any site where this leads to good, informative/insightful discussion. If you're going to use the "Slash" there, it really, really ought to behave, if not look like, Slashdot. Otherwise, why bother?

I kind of get the feeling that this sort of shift has been in the works for a while. The tag line "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters" has been missing from the banner at the top of the page since early last year. Yeah, it still shows up at the top of your browser on the main page, but if you're using Chrome, like many, many people do these days, you don't get to see that; you don't see the mission statement of the site for most of the past 15 years. I think that's telling.

As you say, they're going in the wrong direction, and I get the feeling they don't think that's a bad thing.

And that name is just awful!

That site should have nothing to do with the /. name. The community of (more or less) like minded people is what has made this site special since its inception. "News For Nerds". That important little slogan disappeared from the banner at the top of the page early last year. Now this business improvement blog is aimed at helping executives make important decisions. It says so right in that poorly done video. That doesn't sound like /. to me.

I, like many others who post here have noticed the decline in the quality of both stories and comments over the last 8 or so years I've been coming here. Most of this hasn't been the site's fault. But with /.TV (which has a HUGE icon up on the top line, ever noticed?) and this B.I. site, the discussion appears to be less important. I don't even see an obvious way to join a discussion on the TV site.

I guess this is a long way of saying that I think this is a bad idea. You're changing the mission of the site, maybe in order to broaden your audience, but I think it will just end up alienating the loyal audience that has been around for a long time.

It's not just prestige, it's promotion. In many cases their career and their wallet benefit more from those two papers in the high impact journal than the five in a lower impact one. There are some (sort of) legitimate reasons for this, but on the whole it's BS.