We have the code... A new slashdot clone could be created but would lose the audience. A few important problems with a replacement site:

1) All current content locked up and owned by dice. The new site could point to the old articles and discussions allowing them to be viewed in archived form. Dice could shut this down legally or play cat and mouse at obfuscating the links.

2) user iDs would be lost. Here's a solution. New site starts ID numbers at 2,000,000 or whatever. Older names and IDs are reserved and can only be re-registered thus: Login with prior slashdot ID, use a random number or string to verify. Enter this code in the user journal, new site verifies matching code and opens up old username on new site. This is a problem for those who've lost their passwords but they couldn't recover on classic slashdot anyways.

3) Who runs the site and selects articles? If enough old timers get together and agree on management the new site (let's call it "backdot" for now) enough momentum could be built to drive over a large part of the community. This could splinter however. It needs enough prominent user support to work.

It's possible to move much of the user base somewhere else but would require a lot of cooperation. Herding cats comes to mind.

Not Scott. Great minds think alike.

Fondly recalling the time I hooked up a speaker to a frequency generator in electronics class and experimented on the rest of the classroom. *evil laugh!*

It really doesn't take very long for people to start weirding out and having strange sensations. The instructor found out and made me stop.

I was unable to prove the existence of the brown note. :_(

Oh the other hand! Maybe I can volunteer to DJ for the next class reunion!! *much grinning and skipping about!*

I suppose if bits and bytes are more important to you than people that makes a lot of sense. Classic literature is classic because it's timeless in a way. People go through the same situations as their ancestors, run into the same kinds of societal limitations and attitudes.

Every one of our lives is like part of a giant brute-force attempt to run things through every possible scenario with every temperament and mindset. So much of what we face is just a repeat of what everyone else has already gone through.

So yes there's a lot to learn about today's world that you will clearly see when looking at yesterday's world.

It takes that many cards to hold all the debt an average American family has

http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog...

O_o
That's crazy high!

So how many people lost their jobs or retirement over this?

Just 20 years before that making a typo meant retyping the whole document. Businesses had secretary pools for duplicating letters.

Cutting and Pasting were how you designed business art and I'm not even sure if white-out and corrective typing ribbons existed yet.

So yeah cleanly erasing something with a single pass WAS amazing. Fixing mistakes with no smudges or seams! WOW

Everybody knows Paris is in Texas.

He's still an idiot though.

Nobody wants to stay in a hotel to sit in a movie theatre with yellow brown dirt everywhere. Depending on the size and wattage the laser idea could quickly disinfect rooms without leaving a mess. Or a portable one could run through once a week or so.

Just shoot it behind a powerful laser blast.

True in the child abuse example I gave, they have to report. But what about when the same false positive or alternate infection scenario is ignored and "Sorry but he cheated on you, that's the facts" breaks up a marriage?

It's too easy for a health care provider to make snap judgements like that which can ruin lives. Nothing you can say will convince them otherwise since "patients lie". That's true.. 99% of the time.

I admit I'm sensitive to it. Our health experts told my wife I cheated on her and refused to discuss it with me. Fortunately my wife knows me better than that. (And I know she didn't cheat either) Good luck convincing anyone though. That's a 1% thing that is so much easier to believe is a lie even though their diagnostic methods have known weaknesses to them.

But I agree most people lie a lot.

And sometimes doctors assume the patient is lying when their moral judgement of the person conflicts with what they're being told by them.

Such as the non-sexual transition of chlamydia. But no let's take kids away for their parents and throw the pervs in jail, it's statistically not likely they're telling the truth so they must be lying.

Historically hardware manufacturers make terrible software. It's just a throw away to get you to buy the plastic in the box.

Digital Camera software.
Scanner Software.
Printer Drivers with Photo Editing software.
Harddrive "drivers" and software.
Wifi cards.

Once you buy it you're on your own.

When these functions get absorbed by the OS it's usually a pretty good basic experience for everyone with the rare actually useful optional download from the maker for more knobs to turn.

So iOS, Windows, Linux or Android... usually the built-in stuff is better than the crap you would have gotten, but there still needs to be a way to use the occasional gem from hardware makers that actually care.

If it's not our imaginations it would mean the signal power is raised or lowered depending on content. I don't have the tools to verify that nor the time to build up statistics on signal loss. It's quite a claim so would need more people to notice before it's substantial.

Curious if I'm the only one who has noticed this. The shows I record OTA often have flaky reception as I don't have a direct line of sight to the towers.

Funny thing is, the commercials never skip or drop out but the shows themselves do. I'm thinking, that doesn't make sense as the video would all come out with the same signal strength regardless of the source.

It's probably just my imagination but... these days is there anything they WON'T do to screw customers? I refuse to pay Comcast a monthly fee to unscramble the OTA signal they've scrambled.