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.

The "barter system" doesn't scare anyone because on a macro scale it doesn't work and never has. The fact that it doesn't work is entirely why currency was invented in the first place, nothing to do with taxes, taxes existed just fine in pre-currency economies, they just required your labour or the fruits thereof rather than cash.

Leaving that aside, Bitcoin isn't a barter system, it's a currency just like US dollars. It's a deflationary currency with huge privacy and security issues, but it's still a currency. Barter is the direct exchange of value for value (goods for other goods or services).

Essentially up until fairly recently Bitcoin wasn't considered a "real" thing of value by the US government, which means that bitcoin exchanges weren't required to submit any of the kind of documentation that a bank or forex market would be required to. Specifically in relation to this case, suspicious activity reports. The drastic fluctuations in pricing also made it particularly easy to hide ill gotten gains. Essentially it was under regulated and vastly unstable which made it perfect in a lot of ways for money laundering.

Now of course you won't be able to move more than 10 grand in Bitcoins through any US exchange without them notifying the feds, and other countries will probably follow suit, China has essentially shut down the Bitcoin market there. You're going to have to house exchanges in seriously dodgy places to be able to do anything anonymously and the risk just probably won't be worth it.

It means that the federal government is serious about treating bitcoins as a real currency. Which means that if you're an exchange you better file suspicious activity reports and comply with all the legislation and if you're an individual you better pay taxes on whatever you own. It's going to be incredibly difficult to convert bitcoins from anything like silk road into US dollars because you're going to get reported to the government at some point along the way.

It also means that pretty soon that anyone doing legitimate business in Bitcoin is going to be identifiable in the transaction history, which is going to be kind of interesting and make the feds wet themselves with glee. Bitcoin is not anonymous, it was only anonymous because the exchanges weren't following the law.

If all you're doing is short cutting the ajax call (which has actually been reduced to one line now anyway) the don't add a large third party dependency.
Hell, if you are building an application which will only ever run on a single platform, don't use JQuery, most of the ugly calls have been reduced dramatically in length anyway.

Given that something like Axial Exchange can't actually work regardless of the technologies in place, they're either insane or fishing for a VC buyout or large government grants. There's a crap load of money to be made in failing to solve eHealth.

If it were really a community of developers who want their software to be "free" they'd release everything public domain. That's not what they want. They want software which will remain "free" which requires enforcement of the terms they place on it. Without copyright it is impossible to keep software free as in speech in any meaningful way. Anyone can modify it, keep those modifications private and contribute nothing back.

It came about because of activity you weren't smart enough to hide the evidence of. Yes you might never have gotten caught, but you also might have. I'm perfectly happy to have a discussion about whether this sort of thing is good or bad, but you'll get nowhere fast trying to pretend it's unconstitutional because it violates your right to face your accuser. Two centuries of case law indicate that whether the actual interception of your communication is lawful or not(which is a separate issue), parallel construction is perfectly constitutional. It's no different than when a police officer is just convinced you did it and goes searching for evidence, so long as they don't violate your constitutional rights while doing so you've not got a leg to stand on.

You get to face your accusers, anyone else who might want to accuse you can't and so you don't have to face them. I realise you're either a pro freedom nut job or possibly a pro drug nut job, but please, for your sake, stop trying to live by constitutional rights you don't have.

True, but beside the point, this isn't fruit of the poisoned tree, it's parallel construction.

This is where you have no admissible evidence against a person, but you know they did it, so you send a police officer to follow them(which is legal in public) or you make a routine traffic stop in states where there is no probable cause requirement for such a thing. You can't get a warrant so you can't search their home or for the most part their car, but you can sure as heck tail them around. It's identical to any case you might encounter but instead of "having a deep suspicion" that someone is guilty, they actually know they are. In the end though if they can't come up with other evidence you walk, just like any other crime.

EXCEPT YOUR RIGHT TO FACE YOUR ACCUSERS DOESN'T APPLY HERE.

You get to face your accuser for the crime for which you are facing prosecution, not any crimes you may have committed for which you are not being charged and not non exculpatory evidence which the prosecution chooses not to use in court. In this case that accuser is the law enforcement officer who caught you red handed with your stash of drugs. You might not like that, but stop pretending you have rights you don't.

Just because the ability for someone to run a FOSS environment is largely because of work done by Linus, doesn't mean he's actually a FOSS advocate. He's always used the best tool for the job be that open source or otherwise. Usually he'll eventually write some alternative that fits his needs better (see Git), but I doubt he plans on writing a social networking tool.

Your citations include a single internist who has no scientific research to back up his claims and is widely regarded as a quack and a website which stuck "As seen on CNN" on it's home page, both of which are trying to sell weight loss solutions. Then you have an opinion piece by a computer programmer. A very clever computer programmer, but none the less someone with absolutely zero qualifications in the area they are asserting. Again, I know it's popular to claim that with willpower everything could be solved, because then we don't actually have to fix anything.

As to your comments on women, you're cherry picking statistics and reading articles which also do so. In addition to Dutch women(who do work by the way, just not on average full time) being happier than American women, so are women in most of the rest of Europe including countries where women often do work full time even after being married or having kids, and for that matter a whole mess of countries where women don't work. The men in these countries are often happier(though the correlation isn't quite as clear) as well. This includes a whole mess of former Soviet Block countries which would appear to be barely functioning. These countries have a social safety net supporting women and families where the US most definitively does not. Oddly enough from what I remember the UK, despite having something of a safety net, is actually more generally miserable than the rest of Europe both among men and women, read into that what you will.

In terms of the 60's vs today. No one said freedom made you happy, but that doesn't necessarily make it a bad thing. On top of that women in the early 60's were expected to be happy with their lives whether they were or not and the people conducting the survey also expected and wanted them to be happy in their lives, take the results with a grain of salt.

I'm not suggesting we be inactive, I'm suggesting that pretending that if we just regulate something or if people would just try harder the problem will go away is idiotic and unhelpful action. Your evidence for there even being a "pleasure trap" let alone one that is easily "wrestled with" or "escaped" is thin at best. It's virtually impossible to effectively regulate food because all the things that you're trying to regulate are also things that people need to live, you can't just ban sugar, fat, and salt, so you need to somehow regulate the level of consumption of those things, which is impossible without some seriously draconian legislation.