He's smart enough to accept money for a minor bit of marketing.

Look at it this way. Computer Science Principles is the tough class, much tougher than simplistic programming. Thus girls take the hard classes and boys take the easy ones.

It flows to the bay not to most of the reservoirs, and not to the Sierras where most of the snowpack provides water for the summer, and not to replenish the ground water (which has been being sucked out for the last century).

I always created my best APL programs with write only memory.

Naw, move up to Bel Aire. Not much traffic, the houses are bigger, and the grocery stores have better food. I honestly don't understand why all poor people don't move there, it's as if they like the slums or something.

They don't even have to be more successful all the time. Those could have been the underdog not so well suited to the environment, but there was a famine or flood or other event. The niches open up for whatever can move in like squatters. Either the local competiton dies off and the previous underdog is left alone there, or the underdog migrates to a less desirable environment that the competition doesn't like.

You see similar things today. We tend to think of very select niches for some species, such as a bird who only eats one type of insect. But we find species willing to adapt to sudden changes in the environment, not necessarily whole sale but a subset of them figure out that they can survive on a different type of insect even if it's not as yummy as the previous kind.

People get macro evolution wrong because they're stuck thinking that evolution is about solving an optimization problem: ie, more evolution means better creatures. Except that evolution is about adaptability into the environment, into particular niches, and so forth. There are no higher or lower organisms, they just are. No in between stages, they just are. Sure, there are things between dinosaurs and birds, but then perhaps the bird itself is just an in-between stage between pre-birds and post-birds. Humans in that sense also are just an in-between stage as well, so clumsy and awkward that we can't even adapt without building tools. Defining things as a beginning, in-between, and end is the wrong way to look at things.

As for butterflies, all insects have a larval stage and later an adult stage, most of those adult stages have wings even if vestigial. Butterflies are not at all special in this regard. Once you've got some insects that have wings then most of the evolution that occurs is about separating the insects into a huge variety of species, some who adapted to use wings to escape from predators, while other have brightly colored wings that move them about slowly so that they're a bigger target, and so on.

The "in-between" stages absolutely are useful in some regard, even if the layman's view of evolution doesn't like it. Maybe there was a mutation that seemed pointless and harmful (probably was harmful) but as a side effect it may have made living in a particular environment easier even if they birds ended up eating more of them than the ones without the mutation. Maybe they went for eons with the mutation sticking around in some individuals and not others, until something changed in the environment which gave those with the mutation a very tiny advantage. There may be a big catastrophe wiping out many species and leaving the awkward subspecies of one just barely hanging on but able to exploit all those newly available niches.

I hate to give any answers when Bennett has already provided several pages of answers to his own question, but...

It failed because success has nothing whatsoever to do with the business model, or economics, or novelty, or any of the things that people traditionally tell you matter. It failed because someone else had a similar product but with better marketing. The hype drove that industry, not issues of economics or convenience. Once Uber become the fashion then everything else was destined to lose.

I get all this from the RSS feed, no link to click on. There is no hint whatsoever that it's a Bennett posting until after the article has shown up.

A tedious ill-informed windbag who hasn't heard of blogs.

But it's still the wrong word. Droll means amusing.

I don't get a "read more" link. How can I get that so that I don't have to page down many times before I can see the comments. The only other things on slashdot this long as the in depth movie and book reports, which I also wish were just links to another website.

I didn't care about Hasselton that much before, but recently he's been showing up with terrible regularity.

Some of this is frustration over the bait-and-switch I think. We see what looks like an interesting subject in the RSS feed, then when we look at the article then its disappointing. Similar to the disappointment of being sent to a paywalled site, or a click-bait site, etc. It's a continuing reminder of the decline and fall of Slashdot.

And then there's the question of how this guys sneaks past the moderators and editors. Does he have blackmail material on them, is he a part of the inner circle of friends that run the place, or what?

No one abuses slashdot as much as he does though. No one else turns slashdot into their private blog service.

Every other poster typically has a short summary (as this article does) which is then followed by a link to a longer article on some other site. However in this case the short summary is followed by an extremely long article in-line. Why is Hasselton exempt from the editing that other posters are given?

And people do not know in advance if they're getting rickrolled by Hasselton or not. We don't see the author's name in the RSS feed, only the subject.

We have specialized web sites devoted to publishing a bloggers rambling stream of consciousness posts. Slashdot has never been about being a blogging site but instead a site that presented news followed by responses and commentary from readers. Whether you like Hasselton or hate him, he is definitely abusing the Slashdot service.

Aren't there web sites other than slashdot that lets someone post their blogs rather than having to run their own servers? If not, someone should create one, and call it something like "the spot for blogs" or "blogspot.com" for short. Then we can isolate blogs in their own niche of the internet separate and distinct from the news part of the internet.

Cleaning up after the previous group is normal, even if the previous group was good. Commercial software always has unreasonable deadlines, which is more important than quality. There is never time later to go and clean stuff up. So open source, in many cases but not all, tends to be a bit better because more time can be taken. Though open source can be bad too, since it's a part time hobby.