... when Slashdot posted nothing but joke stories all day on April 1; it was the best way to catch all of them. Maybe they decided they couldn't top themselves after OMG PONIES!!!!! (which I missed), but just sticking in one joke stories amongst a bunch of uninteresting real ones is lame. There isn't even an article on the Google prank!

After all the 70's-era metric indoctrination I received (including weekly showings of "The Metric System" on PBS), I happily recognize that there are legitimate reasons in science and trade for the use of SI. However, beyond that, the fact is that there is no actual advantage in daily life between US standard and metric units. There's no functional difference between km and miles, and the decimalization of km doesn't mean a whole lot when you really think about how often you need to use the fact that there's 1760 yards in a mile (i.e., yes, it's easier to convert, but how often do you need to convert?) For scientific use the 100 degrees between the freezing and boiling points of water in Celsius makes sense, but Fahrenheit serves its intended purpose admirably: the range 0 to 100 is a reasonable coverage of the weather in the temperate zones of the world. There's no overwhelming advantage to making the switch, particularly in the USA where "because the rest of the world does it that way" is typically considered a misfeature.

Specifically, he died in Stavro Mueller Beta. I should know; I'm a white mouse.

They smell like... Tacos. Duplicate posts make even Slashdot Beta seem like home.

Flipper? As in "SEX BOMB MAMA, YEAH!" (Of course, I'm old enough to have voted for Reagan, so I'm outside your sample and I'm also in the "really don't care about music" category to boot.) But Sex Bomb is the only song I know by them, and I thought it was one of the most awful pieces of dreck I'd ever heard.

If you're putting washout classes in a Community College curriculum, you're doing it wrong.

Why? 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.

The problem with that is that many of the current audience are here because the site lacks that "wider audence". Slashdot is (was?) a place where people could discuss and argue the benefits of various Linux desktops, or the importance of the changes Lucas made to the 1990's rerelease of the Star Wars trilogy, or whether The Glorious MEEPT! ever got laid, and not have to worry about being interrupted or looked down upon by people who didn't "get it." As the tagline said: "News for Nerds." The clearest example in the archives would have to be the Jon Katz post-Columbine stories; Katz was the archetype of the "wider audience" member you're looking for, and the comments clearly showed the disparity between his outlook and that of the Slashdot "community members" (quotes because I don't think those of us who were there considered it a "community" with a "membership" at the time). You're trying to de-nerdify a nerd site; that's as close as one can get to literally killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.

While we're talking nerd stuff: where's the source code for this beta? Is it even still written in Perl?

Are they actually deleting comments, or are they just bumping them down to -1? Because while the latter is nasty, the former would completely betray the principles of the site Rob founded.

Damn, I wish I had mod points.

If the issue in their lives is that they have (or will) become boring and overly predictable, the traditional fixes are to either have children or open a restaurant on the side. Either one will consume most if not all of their available time and money, as well as solving the "boring and predictable" problem; one will probably make their respective parents happy as well.

* sigh *. The only hopeful spin I can put on that is that this was inevitable once the throngs of Linux fanboys and hardcore gamers that formed the site's audience back in the 90's grew up and became VP's. ("Unprofessional"? Really? Since when was anything about /. professional?)

Does anyone else miss the old BillG-as-a-borg icon? Using the former corporate logo is so... corporate.

The initial flaw in that statement was that the quality control and insight were being provided by CmdrTaco.

Who owns the telephone poles, and who gets to decide which companies have permission to use the telephone poles? Can anybody put their cables on the telephone poles? Obviously the telephone poles themselves are a limited public resource (along with the land below to access them), and their use needs to be managed/regulated by the government.

Where I live, a business usually needs an easement from the municipality to run wires in a public ROW (i.e., the telephone pole is across the street from your house so a wire has to cross over). However, the poles themselves are usually owned by either the electric or telephone company, and I believe they collect rent for the space from the Cable TV or other providers who need to be on them.

It's good for not making Skype, p2p programs, online games, FTP and IM file transfers break

Making those break sounds like a decent raison d'etre for a corporate network in the first place.