As far as I can tell, the Slashdot discussion styles always run about a year or two ahead of what happens in the more mainstream political areas. As a result, the political section being added was a symptom, not a cause.

Before 2004 it wasn't political? Seriously, that only means that you started watching politics around that time and are a republican. Slashdot had ALWAYS been political. In 2001, it was full of rah rah go US, US sucks and Bush sucks sentiments. Before that, political flamefests were less regular, but that's because the political scene in the US was less political.

That's like suing the contractor that built a freeway because the freeway was used to transport drugs. Even if, by some absurd chance, you win, there are a thousand other torrent sites out there and your movie was on them within hours. Knocking out a couple of those sites will have absolutely no effect on piracy. If you want to stop leaks go after the leaker. If you've got any sense at all, each of your DVD screeners has unique watermarks and can be traced to the person to whom it was issued. Fire that person, sue that person, and blacklist them. That at least would have a chance of reducing future leaks.

I remember the first time an employer realized that I had access to everything . She froze for a few seconds while she processed the idea, shrugged, and went on with her request.

You're going to learn things you don't want to know and see things people don't expect you to see. My least favorite experience was someone who had an email stuck in their outbox. "Subject Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: My widdle wuvvy bear From: Not His Wife" And thank you so much, preview line, for confirming the content. So, with a straight face and chipper tone, "Next time a message gets stuck, you can just select it and hit delete." I didn't add, "And you, of all people, should know better than to use company email to conduct that sort of activity because we archive everything. I just did an archive search for you last month."

My most favorite was when I was helping someone with some simple thing and minimized her browser to discover that her desktop wallpaper was a picture of her frolicking in a bikini. Again, just go on like it's nothing out of the ordinary. Heck, if I looked like that, I'd want to look at me all day, too. Oh, and there was an intern who, when she finished her assignment, cleared everything off her desktop except a topless pic of herself.

If I'd seen evidence of blatant criminal activity or harassment, I would have reported it to the person's manager and my boss and let them deal with it. But politics and gossip and salaciousness were ignored. I was employed to keep the equipment running, not be the morality police.

I'd like to be able to skip the whole "check in" thing. If I'm on some long-haul road trip, the last thing I want to do at 11pm is be depressed by interacting with someone who's life has led them to working the swing shift at the Super8 at some crossroads in BFE. It'd be great if I could get a Moons Over My Hammy at Dennys while I figure out which room is most isolated and book it. Drive across the street to the hotel, go straight to my room, crash for 8-9 hours, shower, $5 tip for the maid, back in the car, on my way having never had to interact with anyone at the motel.

In fact, to heck with Dennys. Bring back the automat. With self-service gas stations, hotels, and food, I could cross the country without ever interacting with a single person. Bliss. For me and everyone else.

[sigh]

*gives up trying to reason. There's none so blind as those who don't want to see...

I think you're proving my point about the black-and-white nature of how people regard free speech in the USA. See, I'm very much in favour of free speech, it's been a fundamental right of UK society now for longer than the USA has existed in its current form, and pretty much any UK citizen would be equally for it.

Where we differ is in nuance. The UK approach is a shades-of-gray one, where the right to speak whatever you want, no matter how hurtful to others, is actually counter-balanced by how much what you say hurts the target of your invective; and this in turn is counter-balanced by the importance of what it is that you're saying to society as a whole. There's a whole spectrum of things to consider when making a judgement, which is why the UK position is that if a free-speech issue comes up, it ought to be decided by a judge rather than a black/white hard-and-fast rule.

Now does this matter, in day-to-day life ? No. People say and do pretty much the same thing on both sides of the pond; but when a big issue comes up and a judgement has to be rendered, the courts take a more reasoned view than "Is this free speech ? Yes ? Ok then, feel free to ".

I'll ignore the idiotic purposeful misreading of the Fire thing...

This is a very US-typical way of thinking.

In the UK, it's more of a "where is the harm" approach. If there is more perceived harm in the exercise of said speech than in allowing it, it won't be allowed. This is more difficult to administer (it means someone, usually a judge) has to make a decision about this rather than it just being black and white. It does make life more pleasant for more people.

Having lived in the UK and the US for over a decade each, I have some perspective on this, and personally I think it's worth it, worshipping at the altar of "Free Speech At All Costs[*]" is an absolute, and I tend to distrust absolutes.

Simon.

[*] It's not a real absolute in the USA, you can't shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre in the US either, for example, but it's a massively more common mindset of US people compared to UK people in my experience.

I just looked up my receipts out of curiosity. Bought the parts in July of 2012. I built pretty close to the edge so it still kicks ass today. Plays current games on triple 2560x1440 monitors. It's not going to get a bump until I can do three 4k displays reasonably.

But we are at Dice, sir:

[Querying whois.publicinterestregistry.net]
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Sponsoring Registrar:Tucows Inc. (R11-LROR)
Sponsoring Registrar IANA ID: 69
WHOIS Server:

Referral URL:
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Registrant Organization:Dice Holdings, Inc.
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Registrant Email:hostmaster@slashdotmedia.com

Pros: Today's article has more content than the usual Dice front page linkage. Great article if you're not a programmer but feel stymied by the wide assortment of languages out there. Although instead of hemming and hawing before making your first project you're better off listening to Winston Churchill and sticking your feet in the mud: "The maxim 'Nothing avails but perfection' may be spelt shorter -- 'Paralysis."

Cons: It barely scratches the surface of an incredibly deep topic with unlimited facets. And when one is considering investing potential technical debt into a technology, this probably wouldn't even suffice as an introduction let alone table of contents. Words spent on anecdotes ("In 2004, a coworker of mine referred to it as a 'toy language.'" like, lol no way bro!) could have been better spent on things like Lambdas in Java 8. Most interesting on the list is Erlang? Seems to be more of a random addition that could just as easily been Scala, Ruby, Groovy, Clojure, Dart -- whatever the cool hip thing it is we're playing with today but doesn't seem to quite pan out on a massive scale ...