Well, looking back in our history as a species, it seems to be eventually the only thing that eventually leads to change. Anything else has been tried and failed.

But don't start it too early. First, you need the army on your side. Without, using force is decidedly not a good idea, if history is any indicator.

If you can teach me to play the guitar (and trust me on this one, I've tried EVERYTHING), I'll believe you.

For the better part of the past 5 years I've been trying to learn this instrument. And I don't mean "pick it up every once in a while", I mean learn. Daily. Mostly because I'm not the kind of person that gives something up when I really, and I mean REALLY, want it.

But slowly I think I have to admit defeat. My fingers just don't want to stretch across bars. It takes me half an eternity to put my fingers down on the strings in such a way that they actually "ring". And we better not start with bar chords.

Until I insisted in learning to play the guitar, I would have believed you. Because I eventually learned to do anything. But this seems to be my limit.

You're forgetting who you're dealing with: MBAs. From the old "the knave thinks others are like him" they extrapolate that if anyone can learn what's necessary to push pencils and fill Excel sheets, anyone can learn anything.

Yes, and when did that start? Before or after Intel finally had a competitor for the CPU market (well, one where the CPUs weren't just kinda-sorta-pretty-much-but-not-quite compatible)?

Name ONE SINGLE instance where you can't immediately trace it to stiff competition. Ram and storage are both dirt cheap, due to a lot of suppliers. Even SSDs are rather cheap, despite being the latest and greatest development in the area. In the CPU market you only have two suppliers, and you will notice that the prices reflect that. GPUs you have nVidia as the leader with ATI doing its best to keep up, and the prices show it.

But maybe you could explain to me the price development of de-facto standard software in various areas. You might notice that these prices actually went up with time rather than down. And that there is more often than not no sensible competitor in sight. Or who'd you suggest is a viable competitor to Adobe (be it Acrobat, Flash or Photoshop)?

But everyone and their dog is already rushing for BA degrees. How many more miscreants do you need?

I think it's time we teach our kids valuable skills they'll need in the future. How to hold and use a rifle. How to tie a hangman's knot. How to spot a manager trying to blend into the crowd...

By that time he's had his stay, pumped the stock value and received his golden parachute. Why should he give a fuck about anything you mentioned?

So we no longer have to pay engineers like they produce anything meaningful. Just because it takes brains to do that job doesn't mean they have to earn more than burger flippers, ya know?

Huh? What ivory tower do you live in?

Production cost only affect one part of the decision process: Whether or not a product gets produced. If the production cost is higher than the possible sales revenue, it will not be produced.

The price of a product is entirely dependent on the spot where it's possible to maximize revenue. Price never has, and never will, be affected by production cost, unless cost pushes against the price to the point where profit becomes zero. Then, and only then, cost will push the price upwards or the product is discontinued due to being unprofitable (in its most literal sense, being unable to profit).

Dropping costs have never caused prices to drop. Never. All lower costs ever did was increasing the profit margin until someone came along and decided to make do with a lower profit margin. Then, and only then, prices dropped. Competition is what drives prices down. Lower costs only mean more profit.

You mean destroy more jobs.

Cheap labor is what we need!

1) Money
2) Money
3) Because you don't own politicians
4) Money

5) The "Ellen fanclub" page in your favorites file gave it the impression.

First of all, there were web pages before the onset of ads. There are still big pages that can exist without ads. Some would perish, but I doubt that something we deem valuable would be unavailable for long. I could currently not think of a single page that I would honestly miss dearly should it perish due to a lack of ad revenue.

Blocking ads is a rather recent development, and mostly due to increasingly obnoxious ads. Of course you had the hardcore anti-ad people who would block ads on principle, who went out of their way to block them, rewriting DNS entries in their servers and even developing their own page-manipulating plugins. But they were few. They existed for a long time and they hardly mattered.

When it started to matter was when "normal" people started reaching for ad blockers, and they would not have done it if ads hadn't evolved into something that is SO obnoxious that people who accept ads in their TV shows. Can you remotely imagine how much you have to piss someone off to go out of his way to find a remedy who is used to having his TV series interrupted every 10 minutes for a 2 minute commercial break? How much you have to piss someone off who puts up with THIS?

But the genie is out of the bottle now. The ad industry slaughtered the goose that lays the golden eggs. People are not going to uninstall their adblockers, even if the ads went back to a saner form.

So... we let the 99% suffer so we can live in luxury?

But hey, I'm an immoral, antisocial anti-ad person, what would I know about fairness?

Well, I've been here the past 10 or so years. And allow me to tell you what made /. so relevant, interesting, insightful and informative. It was not that anything here was "breaking news". C'mon. /. was something like the Reader's Digest of the tech world. That it was devoid of obnoxious ads was certainly a bonus. As was the "old school look". I think we still remember the backlash when you tried to "modernize" it (aka "Beta").

What made this site great was two things: Interesting, thought provoking articles and, even more so, the awesome, insightful comments from various experts in various fields of IT. That was basically what drove /. and what made it an interesting place to stop by and catch up on IT topics. You'd get a quick overview of what's going on, and more important you'd get valuable information from different people who actually know what they're talking about. With a moderation system to boot that managed to keep the quality standard pretty high.

Now, let's take a look at the current "headlines", shall we?

Men's Rights Activists Call For Boycott of Mad Max: Fury Road
Harvard Hit With Racial Bias Complaint
Report: Google To Add 'Buy' Buttons To Mobile Search Results
The Economic Consequences of Self-Driving Trucks
How MMO Design Has Improved Bar Trivia
A Look At GTA V PC Performance and Image Quality At 4K
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Gets Death Penalty In Boston Marathon Bombing
Mechanical 'Clicky' Keyboards Still Have Followers (Video)

News for nerds? Stuff that matters? Really? What I see here is PC bullshit mixed with politics, an opinion piece or two, general news I could get anywhere and stuff of such insignificance that I can only wonder why the FUCK it is on the front page in the first place.

And it's amazing that there's neither astroturfing going on, nor some shamless plug for someone's blog or some new product on there. But I'm pretty sure we'll get plenty thereof again come Fall, it's time for some campaigning!

If you're looking for the reason why /.'s goodwill is in free fall, I think looking at ad blockers might be looking the wrong way. Just saying.