DICE: Pass me a cuban timmy.
TIMOTHY: A Habanos or a Cubatabaco sir?
DICE: Timmy my boy. You don't get to sit in the big chair without getting a fidel.
TIMOTHY: A fidel sir?
DICE: Yes, finest cuban a man could ever have. Rolled by Fidel Castro himself; In fact I'm suprised the man didn't hand deliver it.
TIMOTHY: You sound kind of... powerful sir.
DICE: Timy you have no idea of my power. I'm going squash all those /.ers 'till bitcoins start popping out their asses.
TIMOTHY: How sir?
DICE: Beta. Haven't you seen it Timy. It's brilliant. I've had the finest MBA's from Harvard & Princeton working day and night on this. I pulled a lot a favours to get this level of talent and I'll be **ucked if some geratric old world BBS has beens are stopping me. Timmy, it's the future. Web 2.0 is yesterdays news. Its a new paradigm. Young people can't think more than a 160 characters so why should beta. Big fonts Timmy.. and pictures. People don't like reading Timmy. The chineese had it right all along. Picture words. Its the future timmy. Ride my coat tails Son. Well be Rich.. Rich I say...

DICE: timothy, this is exactly what we need, fresh meat, web 2.0, it's all the rage
TIMOTHY: Thank you sir. btw, I hope you don't mind me saying, I love the new beta.
DICE: Why thank you timothy. I hear the feedback has been voluminous. A loyal liutenant like you deserves a promotion, a big future I say.
TIMOTHY: 'blush'
DICE: In fact son, your management material, CEO even.
TIMOTHY: 'evil grin'
DICE: In fact, after all the abuse those asshole /. users have heaped on you, you should be CEO.
TIMOTHY: 'bigger evil grin'
DICE: **uk them. All those /.ers about to go to a retirement village anyway. I'm suprised if anyof them can read anything under a 16 point font. **uck I should have been putting an text to speech on beta but the &*kers are probabbly deaf too. Cut em off Timy. Beta is the new black. We'll be rich together. Rich I say......

:) Made my day AC

Soul skill. I've managed a company for 20 years. I have two jobs. Manage problems and add value. If a customer or employee comes with a problem, the first thing I do is acknowledge the problem (whether I agree or not) by restating the problem in my own words. This 1. Helps me understand the problem 2. Defuses the initial emotion from complainant. /. Management has always been opaque, but in this case lack of communication has caused the biggest protest I have ever seen here. Yet this is the first grain of acknowlegment from a stakeholder and in a forum post rather than a banner announcement.
DICE needs to man up and have the empowered decision maker communicate directly by acknowledging the problem; being the beta site significantly reduces the community experience by using too much whitespace, reducing information density, and breaking below threshold comment summarisation; then detail a course of action. Even if management is bloody minded enough to continue with beta, at least have enough fortitude and character to tell the community. If you are having tough internal debates, make us a part of the debate so it can bring clarity to your conversation.
Silence is the the worst way to deal with crisis.

Maybe microsoft secretly bought dice and pland to emrace, extend and extinguish /.
Better to boil the frog and have the users disperse than shock them into making a competing site.

1. Way too much vertical white space, which is more precious than dehydrated unicorn testciles thanks to 16:9 screens.
2. A More Button. WTF! The bandwidth for text is cheap. Give me the whole converstaion.
3. Coonversation context is lost because I can't see summarised comments nested under modded up comments.
4. Thick borders. 1 pixel is enough.

This +
Way way way too much vertical whitespace. With the crap 16:9 ratios, vertical space is more precious than gold, yet beta wastes tons of it with empty pixels meaning it is much harder to understand context.
And whats this load more crap. Load the whole conversation. Don't mke me click for another 20 comments. Its 2014, text bandwidth is cheap.

Here Here. Slashdotters like data density. We extract lots of information very quickly. eg. Having a UID next to a user name infers how long they have been in the community.
It is like pixel density in monitors which has gone backwards in the last 10 years, and now is only just starting to progress again with 4k displays. I want more data density, less white space.

Hmmm, thats probably more an American cultural thing of not being able to read compound sentances.
I have found when writing to americans ( I know, gross generalisation) that I need to bullet point my points, with the bullet point not exceeding 20 words.

And you have just descibed why Evolution can't work!

Just last month, a friends kids class had 8 become infected with measles, but they were all vaccinated.

Rubbish. The reality is it costs too much.
A full FTP roll out will cost $100B (given how poorly NBN has performed). The takeup will be 25% (Currently only 15% takeup rate)
With 10M connections at 25% takeup is $40k cost of capital per premises.
For a 8% return cost of capital + 5% Interest + 3% operation/maintainence, you are looking at $6400 per annum per household.

Bottom line is, given Australias' low density, we can't afford a gold plated fibre to the home roll out.

Tulip mania is essence what Bitcoins are experiencing.

Money supply should be able to expand and contract depending on the number of users and the value provided. Bit coins have a fixed number that can be created thus make poor measure of value as the user base changes.

I'd like to add to Toms comments.

Micro finance is a system of loaning small amounts (avg $130) to the very poor, who use it as capital to start a business. eg They might buy a Pig, or Sowing machine. The lender usually forms a group of about 15 people who meet weekly and co-guarentee their loans. The weekly meeting allows mentoring and accountability. Women make up >90% of the loan applicants (because 3rd world men can be lazy pricks) and have defaults of less than 2 percent. Microfinance really lifts people out of poverty by increasing productivity of the community.
It requires the lender to love their client in a way no commercial bank would/could, thus it is predominantly executed by Christian (and Muslim) organisations who have an accountable humanitarian desire.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_International

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grameen_Bank