.. or the beating and civil wiretapping lawsuit for the cameras.

My small city of around 200K just had one big wireless player (who also happened to be the cable company) announce they are leaving the market (and selling the spectrum licenses to one of the big guys) and the other three I know of buy their bandwidth from.. well, that same cable company and/or the local telephone company. There's no other place to ultimately buy bandwidth: there are three companies that transport and transit: the big regional telephone company, the local cable company, and Facebook. Everybody else is buying and selling Internet from the big guys.

I can't talk about the health of the small wireless ISPs here, but if you sit down and do the math, they are likely just barely making a profit. This may be why the local cable company has exited the wireless ISP market. (I live in an area with a small urban center surrounded by miles of farms and ranches, the cable company's strategy was to use the wireless to extend their range to these rural subscribers and infill in the few areas their cable network didn't cover). And this small cable company had the first LTE network on in the state, so they had a hell of a head start.

That's pretty much the picture in most places: the little guys are very little and increasingly getting smaller, and the big guys are only getting bigger.

> Indeed, no culture in the history of humanity has done so

[citation needed].

Many tribal cultures in the Americas and Africa not only acknowledged the possibility of non-child-bearing unions, many Tribal American cultures even had words for describing people in it.

.. and that's still a pretty accurate description of the contents.

" We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site that still speaks to the interests and habits of our current audience, but that is, at the same time, more accessible and shareable by a wider audience. "

Have you considered that those two points might be in conflict? That the precise reason for Slashdot's success might be that it speaks to the interests and habits of a fairly specific and narrow audience?

I will not repeat what others have said about the design itself: I really have nothing to add. I hate it: it's wasteful of screen real-estate and makes the actual content more difficult to navigate.

I will only say this: Slashdot needs to ask who's driving this change. Slashdot was historically supposed to be about the USERS, and if the USERS didn't ask for this change, why are you changing it? Does the Dice "Product Team" just need to justify their existence so they created a new UI for a venerable website?

As far as I can tell, we (the users.. and even some of the editors of Slashdot, if some of the comments on the main site are to be believed) didn't ask for this change and we don't want it. That's enough reason to stop this project dead in its tracks before even more permanent damage to Slashdot's reputation is done.

The fact that's buried in the Slashdot Blog and not prominently featured in either the "you're gonna get beta whether you like it or not!" popup and/or a sticky on the Slashdot front page tells this long-time Slashdot user that your "Product Team" isn't really interested in our honest feedback.

Beta sucks, period. It's a design change the users haven't asked for and don't want.

The argument can (and should) be made that I shouldn't have to use browser tools like NoScript to make a site "readable." And few people will:

This "new look" for Slashdot pretty much guarantees Slashdot continues down the path of irrelevancy, as another wave of people decide the downsides of (say) Reddit now aren't nearly as bad as the Microsoft Windows 8-inspired Slashdot.

FWIW, while I'm sure Linus is living quite comfortably, and may in fact be a millionaire (which really isn't that much money these days: my parents were paper millionaires and they were a postal carrier and a government clerk.. they only were "millionaires" because the Southern California house they owned wound up being worth $600,000, plus another $400,000 combined in retirement assets), but he's not exactly living the life of a 1%er. From what I understand, he earns a respectable salary from the Linux Foundation, but not anything out-of-line for a talented software engineer in Portland.

He's not exactly shuttling around the West Hills in a limo. Unless you consider TriMet MAX (Portland's light-rail system) a limo.

Nagios can be built and designed in such a way that there are no false criticals and few spurious alerts. but it requires dedication, documentation, and attention to detail. Most Nagios installations I've run across are built and maintained by people who often lack one (or more) of these three traits, or are a single-man IT operation that can never devote the time or resources to doing it properly.

I have seen systems of Nagios and Zenoss (and a few others) that are devastatingly precise, accurate, and timely. However, they were typically set up by a highly dediated TEAM of sysadmins who's entire job for the organizations they work for is managing the tactical systems. It's a full-time job in and of itself, and not one that many organizations really devote the manpower to do "right." They do it just "good enough", which is why you are used to seeing the installations you are seeing.

Google's exactly the kind of organization that has the man- and brain-power to do it right. And it's not really that hard, it's mostly just simple attention to detail. And that's a trait I've found is lacking in a lot of the current crop of junior system administrators I've run across.

While I agree that Microsoft will likely never "go away", to a large degree the statement that "the next generation .. will not be dominated by Microsoft" has already come true. The vast majority of new "screens" that people are viewing content on, surfing the Internet on, and generally "using" in their day-to-day life are smartphones and tablets. And Microsoft is being pummeled by Android and Apple. People are looking at what they used to buy laptops for and deciding "hey, I can do 90% of this with an iPad/GalaxyTab, and the 10% that I need to use a keyboard for my old laptop works just fine."

Behind the scenes HP (and the other manufacturers) would respond to Microsoft by saying "look, Samsung is killing us. Apple is killing us. Let us sell Windows 7 or our next new product is a laptop that runs Android."

Actually, if the sales numbers are to be believed, people just aren't buying new PCs at all.

No, but spammers and scammers do use automated bots to CALL all the people in the phone book.

Let me make sure I understand this.

Congress is waging war over $2 billion in budget cuts. In a budget that is around $3 trillion. The deficit alone is $680 billion.

Let's frame this in context. This is arguing over a 2 cent line item on a $300 bill.

And we wonder why our government is the laughing stock of the free world.

They're still getting valuable data. As I understand it, part of what they're doing is using your physical location in the store triangulated from your phone. While using a VPN does limit SOME of the information they're gathering, it doesn't eliminate all of it.