Except there are no girls on Slashdot.

I'm not Catholic, so I can't say I paid particular attention to the Pope's Encyclical. But I am also not particularly interested in what some atomic scientist has to say about the encyclical, or Catholicism, or climate change for that matter.

I am reasonably certain you are exactly correct.

It will depend how it's implemented. Amazon's current system is better than nothing, but some of their recent policy changes make it harder to find unbiased information - and this latest change could take it further down the rabbit hole, depending on the details.

I always look at the reviews before purchasing, and lately I've seen a LOT of reviews flagged as "Verified Purchase" - always at the very top of the list - which state, more or less, "I received this product at a discount in exchange for agreeing to write a review, but I'm not letting that discount bias my opinion". I make it a point to flag those as "unhelpful" and then go hunting for the reviews from people who actually purchased the product the same way I will be, should I purchase the product - at full price.

I'm at UW. There have been several recent occasions where we've ended up firewalling blocks of Chinese IP addresses from accessing our department's servers. It will be interesting to see what happens if we run into a new bad actor who's on the same network as one of these new collaborators from over there.

We're getting all worked until over a summary that doesn't actually explain what's going on.

This is specific to Amazon's subscription services (e.g. Kindle Unlimited), and only affects how Amazon divvies up the fixed pool of money Amazon already allocates to reimburse authors whose works are being read as well art of those subscription systems. It used to be per-book; now it's per-page.

You must be new her... oh.

Not only that, but even though they've added a new numeric post count inside of a little speech bubble... if you click on that, you don't get taken to the comments! You still get taken to the top of the page, and have to scroll down to get to the comments.

I realize Taco and the others are long gone, but doesn't anyone on the Slashdot staff even bother to look at the pages after a design change has been made?

That's silly. There's no reason for it. Let's just sit down and come up with a new standardized method that covers all of these use cases.

What, was his MySpace account unavailable or something?

Sadly, this joke would've worked better last season... says this guy here in Seattle.

It's rather ironic that you posted this on Slashdot.

No, in reality it is the NSA's formerly-hidden behavior that has hurt these businesses.

If you are stealing from your employer, and I provide documentation of that fact which results in your getting fired - I'm not to blame for the loss of your job, you are.

It's still an open question how much we should trust companies like Google and Apple... with regards to their internal motivation and plans. However (anecdotally, at least) it seems pretty obvious these companies learned from Snowden's leaked documents just how much the government was screwing them, and they've seen how it's hit their bottom line - any trust that might've previously existed is gone.

Remember the (anecdotal) reaction of the Google engineers when they heard how the NSA was tapping their unencrypted intra-datacenter communications?

... or if your station wagon gets stuck behind a slow-moving white Ford Bronco.