Your argument is based on the assumption someone will only learn what is in the program, which is not necessarily the case. Students are free to go beyond what is given to them. For instance, decades ago when I was in school there was no programming classes, nevertheless I learned it by myself.

... the beta flaming improved the number of posts on Sunday.

Hopefully your kids are going to take the same stance (ignoring the issue) when you start dying of cancer. Then after you die, they can find another dad.

Right now there are still 2h until the first time zones reach 2014-02-10. But yeah, the boycott is coming. I wonder what it will do to my productivity. I guess not much, I'll probably probe alternatives, getting ready to the probable /. extinction.

As if marketing don't exploit your brain. Ever hear of "supernormal stimuli"? This post has some interesting info for you: http://ciotti.quora.com/Was-Yo...

Whenever I can, I take the opportunity to raise awareness to the initiative to limit the influence of money in politics: http://www.wolf-pac.com/
As a foreigner (from an American point of view) that's what I'm able to do. You US citizens should go at least one step further, and contact your representatives, or at least sign the petition, or support the movement with money.

So I partly agree with you. Regular politics impact your everyday in a thousand ways, but usually the complexity of the issues hinder choosing a course of action, and frequently requires investing a lot of time. But complaining about beta is much more clear cut... what's being proposed does not offer any value, on the contrary. And it doesn't take much time to voice your opinion here. In an analogous, political case, take the Keystone Pipeline... it seems pretty much everybody sees that it has a lot of corruption and environmental risk (risk? I would say most certain negative impact, given the other pipeline already in use), but how can you make your voice be heard in order to stop the thing?

But yes, you should take action in both cases.

As I said in a post above, if you come for the comments, you should worry they'll mostly disappear after the beta becomes the only available version. I will certainly not use slashdot anymore in that case, and a lot of folks have been expressing the same intention.

Ok, so one off-topic comment about your sig: if you expect the relevant, informative, on-topic comments you regularly read here on slashdot, join in against the new beta. If they decide to just ignore our requests, be sure this place will drastically reduce the quality of the comments. Unless you come here to read the "nigga this", "faggot that", "goatse" trolls that are all too common. Then by all means, support beta.

Even more interesting is how all posts criticizing slashdot beta are being modded down. So many mod points. None in my possession. Wow.

Shitting on the community is time and time again proven to have the worst outcome... why don't people learn?

If I had mod points I would mod you up.

Indeed, someone has to pay for gram-negative antibiotics research urgently. Gee, I wonder why no big-pharma company is researching it.[/sarcasm]

I love how pointing out greed can be interpreted as communism. Gotta admire Faux News & co. brainwashing efficiency.

The reason is pretty clear, it is about Imaginary Property (IP). The same pixie dust that makes copyright, trademarks, and patents.

And they're bullying a poor country like "hey, all these medicines that we were not going to sell because you can't afford, you are not allowed to make them yourselves; tell your population to just die." Yeah, pretty nice.

Oh, I see. You should have phrased as "let's not comment" instead of "let no one comment". I hope it was not a Freudian slip... ;)

You're talking about system authentication, which uses symmetric crypto. The GP was talking about asymmetric / a.k.a. public key crypto, which is an entirely different beast. If you could break it, your targets would be much more valuable than mere cell phones.