They used to sell a service where you could subscribe to Slashdot [slashdot.org] for some nominal fee per 1,000 page loads. The fact that they quit selling this service is their own problem, the scaffolding is all there. It just needs to be turned back on and made worth the investment.

I subscribed to Slashdot right up until their subscription system broke.

My second official act as the new owner of Slashdot (after tearing out the videos and replacing them with fish tanks) will be making sure that goddamn subscription system works again. It was easy as pie and occasionally I would even pick some insightful commenter and gift him 5000 page loads.

When Slashdot started refusing my subscription requests, I figured it was only a matter of time until they'd get sold. Fortunately, I had sufficient bottle caps, pre-war money and Legion Denarius to purchase the site. Once the sale goes through, things are gonna be different around here, lemme tell you.

What everybody is unhappy about is that the government wants to force people who DON'T want to try programming to do it.

what the fuck are you talking about? where do you morons come from?

CEOs don't purport to represent me.

I believe in quality over quantity, and /. doesn't have the intelligent conversations with knowledgeable people that it once did. They've nearly all fled.

I learned a huge amount from submitting stories to Soylent and Pipedot, and comparing them to the crud was on Slashdot at the time... Namely, /. likes to publish a completely inaccurate and twisted stories any idiot knows is slanted and wrong, and then 99% of the comments are made-up of people correcting (and ranting about) the bad story. If you don't publish such crap, you can have informative discussions with 1% of the audience...

In addition, it's the very few, high-quality commentors that make the site, not the rest of the horde. You can have a very small community, as long as it contains a few very smart people, and have just as much insightful conversation. I saw it working wonderfully back in the early days of /. but there's nothing of value left here, now. If Pipedot can continue to maintain the high signal-to-noise ratio as it grows, it *could* be better than /. ever was. But who knows what the future may hold...

Headache inducing? Let's not forget people who are subject to epileptic seizures. I remember some of those pages that stabbed into my brain painfully. If I were an epileptic, I'm sure that some of them would have triggered a seizure. Think of MySpace as a prime example of the crap I'm talking about.

One thing about advertising - all of my efforts to block advertising still allow some ads to come through. I do see an occassional advertisement.

Every single advertisement that I DO SEE is hosted on the server which is serving up the content that I am looking at. If you are hosting your own blog, on your own hardware, and you serve up an advertisement with each page, I WILL SEE that advertisement. I may or may not LOOK AT the ad, but it will load, and I will see it, at least peripherally.

"But, it is an accepted social structure"

Accepted by whom?

I'm not even going to attempt to guess what percentage of us refuse to accept it. But, there are those of us who simply DO NOT accept that we must watch meaningless advertisements before we can get to the page contents.

If the advertisers COULD successfully target my interests, I might actually look at an ad now and then - before I did a search for that product, to compare it to other similar products. Then, when I've compared them, I often go to Ebay to see if the item is available at some huge markdown. I'm in the market for a megger, for instance. I don't SEE advertisements for meggers, despite the fact that I've already done a number of searches. Let's SUPPOSE that an advertiser were shrewd enough to catch on to my megger searches. He starts serving up megger advertisements, starting with Fluke. The prices in the ads start at over $1000, because the vendors who pay for advertising need to recoup their advertising costs. More reasonable prices are available directly from Fluke and Fluke approved vendors around $500 to $600. But, suppose that I don't NEED new and/or calibrated equipment - I just need a semi-reliable meter. I can go to those vendors who aren't advertising, and sell the same equipment at less than $500. If I'm willing to settle for a used piece of equipment, I can find my fluke megger multi-meter for AS LITTLE AS $200.

Keep in mind that I've researched and purchased a number of meters over the past few years. Not one time have I ever seen an advertisement for electric/electronic testing equipment anywhere other than Ebay, and a very select number of industrial sales sites.

In short - the advertisers are utter failures. Despite all their attempts at "targeted advertising", they have completely FAILED to identify my interests and needs. Utter failures.

Now - why should I tolerate their in-your-face advertising bullshit, when they so completely fail to offer things that I actually need?

Notice that I'm not even really bitching here that the items advertised are to high. That's just a peripheral consideration to the fact that they've not merely missed the target. The damned fools aren't even hitting the range! They are standing at the east end of the range, the targets are on the west end, but their bullets are flying out north, east, south, and west.

We should reward such gross incompetence? Why?

And, no, meg testers are not the only items I've needed, and searched for. Try it yourself - do a search for industrial grade fuse pullers. There are a small number of different brands on the market, with Ideal being the standard. Do several searches over a few days, and sit back to see how many advertisements you get. I have Ideal fuse pullers in three different sizes in my toolboxes. A couple years ago, I purchased a lot-sale off of Ebay, and got 18 of the smallest for a couple dollars each. I gave them to my work-mates for Christmas. Despite the fact that I have an established history of searching for, and purchasing these things, I've NEVER SEEN AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR THEM!

Sample ebay sale, currently priced around ten bucks: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Ideal-...

I think that it works both ways: the campaign gets face time and spending money from assorted big names in tech because of the hope that it will make programmers cheaper; but it gets buy-in from educators and parents and politicians looking for feel-good photo ops because of the hope that somehow every kid can be a well paid knowledge worker.

Compare to H1-Bs. Those are similarly favored as a way to drive labor costs down; but are more or less politically toxic; so they have none of the popular chatter. The major tech employers are in favor of both; but only one has the buzz in the other direction as well.

can we stop with this nonsense please? it is similar to idiots who oppose teaching all kids programming

restricting access to developing a skillset which just builds on abstract reasoning is a joke, nothing more. it's as if lots of people making lots of programs somehow hurts good programs and good programmers. how? can someone define me how that works? there has to be a formal logical fallacy for what this low iq idea suggests. it's like saying gays getting married somehow hurts heterosexual marriage. and we see how well that mental diarrhea has persuaded

lots of people trying programming only hurts mediocre programmers. the only kind of people who take this nonissue seriously. it's popularity on slashdot therefore does not bode very well for the readership of this website

meanwhile, i welcome anyone who wants to try programming and i wish them well. it can be fun, it can be infuriating. and if in your quest you wind up being more skilled and hired to replaced than the kind of weak mouth breather who wants to somehow magically limit the pursuit of programming to some of kind of bullshit guild, this a surefire win

And - how does that differ from life in the US? Most people . . . niche talents . . . few doing nothing but leading. Especially now that young adults find it necessary to work two or more part time jobs to support themselves, most people do spend most of their time working their niche talents.

These 'zOMG, everyone should STEM up and become an app entrepreneur!!!' stories aren't really about the desirability of everyone having a career in software development. They are more a reflection of the fact that plucky optimists looking for what kids should do to be successful when they grow up are...not exactly...swimming in options. Yes, they are also letting the fascination with shiny trendy things distort their perception of the options, hence the fascination with who will make the next Social Twitfriend app, rather than who will write unbelievably dull line of business stuff; but in broader strokes they aren't pushing this because it's a good idea, they are pushing it because it's an idea, and they don't have another one.

The pronouncement that 'software is eating the world' may have been a bit hyperbolic; but it sure isn't doing the life chances of people without advanced qualifications any favors. "Everyone writing apps" sounds slightly better than "Everyone selling each other securitized bullshit", so it gets more face time.

never heard of glide slope, eh?

Baro measurements are accurate to about 5' at these altitudes. A $0.20 chip and $2000 for the lawyers to haggle over the language you have to click through when you set it up in the plane.

I fly to 6000' with rockets and you know who the idiots are? The pilots. We put out a NOTAM with our coordinates and recovery space, notify all local FAA towers and get legal waivers for all flights. And in the middle of nowhere, where we fly, we get no less than 4 light aircraft fly right overhead at less than 1000' - some even doing multiple passes - just to see what we're doing.

I can see it now:

"Slashdot: Bad Hair for Billionaires; Stuff that still does not matter."

No, no you don't. And you sure as hell have nothing to do with what's going on at 200, let alone 400 feet.