Sadly almost all of us live in the lower atmosphere, you insensitive clod.

Did you ever meet a black person with a college degree?

Here you go off the rails with respect to your argument. When you are talking about subcultures, you're not talking individuals, you're talking statistics. And the statistics here are pretty awful - 8% enrollment gap for black males, 18% for Hispanic males. Female gaps are worse, as are those for college graduation. But appealing to anecdotal evidence (i.e., "Did you ever meet a black person with a college degree?") is not a valid argument when talking about an entire subculture, just as assuming that an entire subculture is deficient based on one metric (in this case, academic achievement) is pretty specious. In fact, did either of you know that, after compensating for socioeconomic status, the racial gap disappears?

Of course, neither of you know this and God knows it doesn't fit in with either of your world views, so it doesn't register in either of your discourses, both of which are based on emotion and specious arguments. If you want to really acknowledge the issue, it's socioeconomic status - class, in short. Liberals (even when they pay lip service to this notion) are too chickenshit to actually do anything about it; Conservatives won't even acknowledge it. Both are useless. Just like arguments on Slashdot.

This doesn't end well.

"Oh, come, come, my good sir! Surely you jest. Of course it ends well! Just think logically... Since we in the upper class hold all means of governance, manufacturing, communications, energy and food production, provisioning of service - in short, all meaningful economic activity - the basic necessities of life, only a fool, no matter how mistreated, would ever rise up against us. And, if he did, he and whoever he might conspire with would be tracked, caught, convicted, and confined, his friends and family persecuted and ruined. And now, for the sake of jest, let us propose that somehow, by some fortuitous fluke, enough of these malcontents band together to become even a minor annoyance to us. Our mercenaries will track, find, infiltrate, and neutralize them. If necessary, our superior technology shall target and kill them. Because that's the final trump, my good fellow - our superiority in bringing death to those who oppose us.

"It is the way of evolution, my dear man. And it will not be stopped. And atop this shining edifice? Striding across the globe, confidently able to command and reap the benefits of our leadership? Why us, my boy! Us! That is, if we don't falter. If we don't lose our nerve...

"And, well...

"Yes?"

"Well, there's always a chance the bloody wogs might find some way of rising up before we're ready. Hire some more mercenaries, up the amount of infiltration, and get started on that wholesale bringing death thing, will you? Economic ruin, leading to deprivation, starvation, and illness should get most of them, while our prisons, bombs, and bullets will get the rest. Cary on, Maxwell... Oh, and send in Hansen..."

"Yes, sir!"

And you've taken away the I-tag again! I don't know why I'm still coming back here...

Apple, of course, invented their UI all by themselves, right? Never took any ideas from Xerox. Nope.

Nope. They bought the rights from Xerox. Different thing entirely. Micorsoft and the movie industry, though - they wer another matter and have the lawsuits (and subsequent settlement in the case of Microsoft) to prove it.

I wish the Apple-haters around here would at least get their history straight. I'm not an Apple fanboy. However, I am a computer history fanboy and I wish the amateurs would at least not keep spreading misinformation.

I'd have an easier time believing in "equality of opportunity" again if economic power were more evenly distributed. Unless you're telling me a lower-class kid from the ghetto, a middle-class kid from the 'burbs, and an upper-class kid from whatever upper-class enclave you wish to name all have the same "equality of opportunity". From my vantage point, the first has opportunity of jail or long-term unemployment and welfare, the second lifelong debt and wage slavery (until about age 50, where they slide down into the lower-class), and the third gets the opportunity to have just about anything he or she wants. And the statistics about outcomes and class mobility seem to bear this out. The only way to win a rigged game is to change the game.

First, make sure that code that must be secure is transparent. That means little (or no) optimizations, standard calls to OS functions, and clearly structured. It's clear that the OpenSSL developers made their code more opaque than was prudent and the many eyes of open source land could not see through the murk. Yes, clearer code would mean that it ran more slowly and some folks would need to run a few more servers, but the security problem might have been uncovered sooner (or not have happened) if someone hadn't thought that performance was a reason to make the code more complex.

Second, formal independent review would have helped. Most code (especially in volunteer-based open source projects) is only vetted by people directly on the development team. Any piece of software as ubiquitous and critical to the operation of today's internet as OpenSSL cannot have verification and validation mainly by its own developers. For software like this, where security is critical, you should have external review. Start an independent project that vets these things, folks.

Third, understand the limits of testing vs. design. More unit tests would not have caught this. Simple designs lead to simple and correct implementations. Complex designs (or no designs) lead to seas of unit tests that simply tells you the ways that the code happens not to be broken at the moment. Code like that in OpenSSL ideally should be simple enough to be formally proved correct.

I think we've known about why these sorts of things happen ever since I entered he field thirty years ago. We have ways to prevent them, but they usually take time, money, or lowered performance. That they are still happening because of performance zealotry, bad process, and "teh web-speed is everything" mentality is a black mark on our profession.

So Slashdot's beta is addictive? I don't think so...

I am not a shill for the drug companies by any means. That being said, I think the third world's energies would be better spent dealing with their quality issues before they got butt hurt over this move by big pharma's lobby. In reality, drugs sourced from India and/or China are a crap shoot. Read Derek Lowe's blog "In the Pipeline" for information on this industry and pharmacological chemistry.

Yes, India may be getting unfairly punished for it's ability to manufacture drugs inexpensively, but unfair things go on all the time - just look at Slashdot beta!

Text is more dense than graphics. Graphics, depending on how it's laid out can provide better or worse documentation than the code itself. Debuggers run on text, not pictures. Text can be edited with a variety of tools; any graphical notation will have its own editor, which will probably suck. Big diagrams are too tangled, while small diagrams provide too little context or require enough off-page connectors to make any intent opaque. No good way to connect to globals without use of (again) said off-page connectors. Need I go on?

People have been trying out and discarding graphical programming interfaces since the early 1970's (at least). Nobody keeps using them. Get the clue.

Plus, fuck beta.

... a lot of these posts imply that 'a technological solution that can render the essential features of the device inoperable ... must be a kill switch.

Either that or a beta.

Fuck beta!

Any organization that has a "Senior VP of People and Places" needs to rethink what the hell they are doing. Stupid titles are a sign of stupid management. I bet Slashdot has a "Senior VP of Beta:".

Damn it! I did it again. Sorry...

Oh well... Fuck beta!

You can see Detroit as another example. Slashdot beta - the Detroit of web sites.

Fuck beta!

But I see Dice is convinced that piling on to sunk costs for a broken project is a great strategy for success. Tells you all you need to know about the company. Web gazillion.0 idiots at their best! Arrogance and idiocy all rolled into a big steamer delivered fresh to your browser every day!

Fuck beta!

Given that and web design that sacrifices half the screen real estate for a sea of white is seriously broken, together with the fact that it's been that way since beta first came out in October, been complained about, and not fixed tells most people all they need to know about how much Slashdot cares about "user experience" and the feedback of the community.

I think that what Slashdot needs to do is simple: First, stop the beta NOW. It's sunk cost with a VERY bad outcome. Stop throwing good money after bad. Next, set up a discussion forum where users can give feedback on what they think is necessary - not on what you think is necessary. Focus the beta on that. Note that this is not to say that the designers at Dice should have no say - they should put forth their arguments as to how they think the site should change to attract new users (which is supposedly what they want and ALSO what we want, given that the community also wants a vibrant user base to interact with). After that, start making an updated site that is optional for users to use and, then, only after the initial usability gotchas are taken care of, start transferring folks over. Finally, always leave the old way for a backup for at least two major upgrades - I know that's old school and very non-Web gazillion.0, but it does help laggards transition.

If Slashdot had done this, I doubt there would have been this kerfuffle. And I know it would take longer and cost a bit more. However, if you actually believe in using feedback from your users when designing "user" experience (something that a lot of "user" experience designers don't seem to get), that's what you'll do. In any case, when what you're doing isn't working, you have to be an idiot to keep doing it. Alienating your current customer base is not a way to build an improved, vibrant site - Slashdot, you've had your Target moment. Right now you suck and we're going to boycott you next week to make sure you don't forget this. Show us how you're not going to suck in the future. That's really all you'e got left, unless you're going to start deleting accounts.

Fuck Beta.

You open the mailbox. Peering inside you see a Post-It (TM) note stuck to the back of the mailbox, which you must reach in to remove. Scrawled in blood on the Post-It (TM) note are the words "Welcome to Slashdot Beta! Love, Dice Holdings, Inc. P.S. Enjoy your stay."

You close the mailbox and stagger off. You are eaten by a grue.