So anybody have any before vs after pics?

In particular, I'm wondering if we're going from 1-2 in-line ads and 1-2 sidebar ads to 3-7 in-line ads. (In other words, is this "cleaning" just an excuse to put more ads in-line with the search results? Let's not forget this is Google, who won market-share in part by way of putting ads on a noticeable yellow background. Anybody noticed the background colour for ads these days? :)

Heh, speling and grammar my is bad. Also apparently I didn't quote correctly. Oops, I suck.

Please don't feed the trolls :)

(Down that way lies bitterness and poor decision-making :)

So $1 a week is doable. I'd be willing to pay $4/mo for any number of high-quality sites (Wired, Ars, NYT, etc. - the biggies). On the other hand, I'd also like to echo many other people in this tread: the problem isn't ads, it's the third-party ads delivered via ad networks via HTML/JS/Flash/etc..

I might still pay the $4/mo to get rid of the ads, but I'd also be fine whitelisting Wired if they served ads first-party that were vetted by Wired staff (like they used to do with print ads). Right now, I'll simply not patronize any site that disallows ad blockers. That's crazy talk, and dangerous to boot.

If you guys are serious about turning Slashdot around I wish you all the luck, and if there's anything the community can do to help, please don't hesitate to ask us. That might include asking us to change our behaviour (both to improve things from first principles, and if we need to change our behaviour to adapt to a change to the system).

I've been reading (and rarely contributing to :) Slashdot for a long time, and over the past year I've been looking for alternatives. I still haven't found any that were better; I'd even considered starting a new one. I will be very pleased if it turns out competent people acting in good faith have taken the helm.

<quote>Would anyone be interested in the option to see the most popular stories from the firehose on the front page? They'd have to hit a very high popularity threshold and also would be marked/color-coded as such.</quote>

Yep, this seems like a change worth trialling.

The basics:

* Continue making posts about good content worthy of discussion
* Avoid the trolling and pandering that's been too obvious in too many posts/stories
* Avoid the Slashvertisements (and if you have to do them, tell us about it and why you're doing it - even if you just want to make more money to gilt your monocles)

If there's anything you can do about the obvious astroturfing that happens in the comments that would be nice, but I think that's playing with fire. The moderation system seems to work reasonably well most of the time, maybe just tweak the weights a bit (so anybody who positively moderated an obviously astroturfing or trolling comment has less karma).

Feel free to change the UI some, but don't try to differentiate via the UI. And please nothing 'flat' :)

I wonder if it was something as embarrassing as an imperial/metric conversion gone wrong? :)

Hah, I just read the article. Not even the article is sensationalistic - just the headline. The article clearly states that these people haven't been brought in for clinical tests yet, so they can't possibly know whether the subjects missing one of the genes in question are healthy or not.

What if, for instance, you find that that "perfectly functional" person has a rare modification to another gene that allows them to get by without the missing gene?

What if, for instance, that gene is only required when you've been exposed to some common element or set of circumstances that the "perfectly functional" person just happened to avoid, by chance?

What if, for instance, that "perfectly functional" individual isn't, in fact, perfectly functional? What if, for instance, any complications simply haven't yet become apparent?

The headlines and any articles that say we could do without a given gene are almost certainly sensational. I will give the benefit of the doubt and assume the original paper doesn't make any such ridiculous claims.

Or alternatively, people with these attributes (which may actually be positive in any other context) are prone to religion.

Some negative comments might actually be pretty reasonable. That they "only just figured this out" means some combination of the following three things:

1. Nobody tested this until just now, meaning our understanding of the Casimir effect was sufficiently incomplete that nobody should have been writing on the topic with any confidence or authority. A real scientist familiar with the topic probably wouldn't have been; but "real scientists" are sufficiently thin on the ground that you could likely have gone through a doctorate in science and not met one. Teachers in particular, at all levels, seem pretty prone to talking and acting like they're hot shit.

2. Nobody thought to test this until just now, which means that some pretty dumb assumptions were made (they're dumb because they were assumptions and incorrect).

3. Nobody thought to test this until just now, and it's a pretty _obvious_ test too, so either nobody spent any time on it or they were extremely myopic. (Something I've seen in many "scientists"' publications these days; overspecialization to the point of virtual uselessness. They're competent to gather data but not design interesting tests.) I'm only vaguely familiar with our knowledge of the Casimir effect (which is sometimes good!), and I would certainly test all sorts of patterns - on each surface - to figure out how that affects the effect.

Of course this discussion is based on the assumption that what the summary talks about is in the article, which I haven't checked, and that the article faithfully summarizes what's in the paper, which I haven't checked, and that the paper purports that this is new knowledge, which I haven't checked. It's quite possible that what's published in the paper is already well-known.

(BTW, I also know you're either not obese or you're obese and you've never successfully stuck to a very low-calorie diet for any length of time. Almost certainly the former, since the idea that somebody can eat 1,200kcal/day and not lose weight is so utterly foreign to you. That means that you're likely eating 2500kcal+/day. Probably the former For five years I maintained a ~1000kcal/day diet - average, never going over 1500kcal in a given day - and managed to gain 50bs of fat over that time. Yes it is possible for people to subsist off a piece of bread and an egg for breakfast, a can of tuna for lunch, and a small dinner. It's just very, very unpleasant.)

You are incorrect. Though people eating so little usually suffer from severe lethargy and a host of neurological/psychological problems, they don't necessarily lose weight. (Let me state again: you're simply incorrect. You aren't aware of all the variables.)

People are commenting that some people eat 500/1200/etc. calories and still not loosing weight. Can someone explain this to me?

Yes. They're deluding themselves about how much they're actually eating.

Or you're wrong about what causes obesity.