Slashdot's archive policy used to be much longer. I think it was at least 6 months. I'm not sure why they changed it. It may be for the sake of managing comment spam posts. It looks like they're removing them now. At least I haven't noticed posts for knockoff merchandise lately. I still read at -1, since people still downvote perfectly good comments.

Even on Facebook, we sometimes have running conversations for weeks. There, it's all in who your friends are. The ones I friend can usually keep a conversation going. Sometimes well beyond when it should just die.

Well ... I worked for a company who dealt with lots of PII (like, info on *every* person in the US). We put together a system to monitor what TOR nodes existed, and compared attacks to TOR nodes. It was significantly used as an attack vector, not only because of the anonymity, but because the attacker could change IPs frequently. Not a single legitimate user used TOR.

We decided it was worth protecting our users, and the PII of everyone in the US, to refuse any traffic from TOR.

Banks doing the same thing does seem like it's in the best interest of the customers.

If you are a legitimate user, and some 3rd party logs into your account and transfers money out, would you prefer the bank to say "Sorry, it was some random person, and we have no way to find or prosecute them. They will likely do it again." or "The intruder was found and prosecuted."

Depending on the theft, you may or may not get your funds back. If someone goes in and transfers funds as you, some banks aren't willing to refund the transaction. Transfers aren't handled like credit card transactions, which are easily refunded.

Even if your bank does give you the stolen money back, that means they've absorbed the cost. So your loss ($1 or $1M) and refund, is now added to the fees, because the bank's operating expenses are higher.

I'd prefer the "inconvenience" of not being allowed to use TOR and other anonymous relays, and not have the bank have a huge and expensive fee schedule to make up for losses that are impossible to recoup from the thieves.

Well, I do still log in occasionally, and comment. I gave up on submitting stories a long time ago, since I've had all of one published ever, and countless other good ones ignored.

Conversations on any story dry up pretty quickly. There's usually a 3 day lifespan at best. So after today, I doubt there will be many (if any) more comments.

I can accept that conclusion. :)

It's pointy-clicky-approve, rather than investigation of the story.

Then again, this is a glorified blog, not a real news site. They don't have the staff, nor the need, to do research. They are also linking other sources, so it is up to them to do their fact checking.

People have frequently overestimated what Slashdot is for, and then they complain about it. It's not like the format has changed. It's been like this since I started reading it years ago.

It's just less interesting now, and regulars are no longer regulars. I still check in occasionally, hoping it has improved, but it hasn't.

It's a good thing we haven't invented any sort of robotics.

When would it be ok for them to stop looking? A year and $182.5M later? 10 years and $1,825M later? An infinitely ongoing mission, searching every square foot of the bottom of the Indian Ocean, Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea, and Pacific Ocean? MH370's maximum range covers an awful lot of area, including a lot of land.

AMD is completely out of the game and the thrust of their current design work seems to have entirely ceded low power x86 to Intel in favor of better performing hybrid CPU/GPU products.

So 264 days later, and still no answer. If your cost estimate is right, that's $132 million to find nothing. It is ok to just say "we couldn't find it". They did their due diligence and then some.

I presented it as a not-so-plausible scenario. It could be possible to have landed in one piece, so no debris was found. Consider this aircraft which landed itself after the pilot ejected. It's a very doubtful scenario, but not totally impossible.

As others have said, there was likely an electrical fire. It's possible everyone onboard were incapacitated or dead when it hit the water. So they'd be looking for a crash with no loose debris, so nothing to float ashore.

Still, the ocean is a really big place, so they may not ever find anything, even if it did break up when it hit. If debris did wash ashore in Australia, that's still a *huge* area to find relatively little wreckage.

At some point they have to give up search, rescue, and recovery operations.

No, I was just trying to say that they've been searching for months. The chances of finding it are growing slimmer constantly. They should stop now, until further tangible evidence shows up. Like part of the plane washes up on a beach.

Airlines have insurance, which should be enough to carry out reasonable search and rescue (well, recovery at this point) efforts. The reasonable period has long since passed.

Don't misunderstand me, I agree. There should be continued search efforts, funded by the airline that lost it. No government is responsible for the loss of those lives. They aren't responsible for notifying the families of the passengers. It is totally up to Malaysia airlines to fund the continued search. Some financial backing can come from governments that represent the passengers, but it shouldn't be a continuing national effort.

As someone else mentioned, Australia is looking for 239 people, while more than that die domestically every day. Even his perception is wrong. There were 6 citizens of Australia on that flight. By passenger count, China should have the largest interest, with 152 citizens lost. As the airline is based in Malaysia, they could be financially responsible for the continuing search.

I believe it's to the point where it's "lost", and until further evidence shows up (washes ashore), it can safely be left marked as in the "lost at sea". That does happen sometimes. Searching could continue when there is new reliable evidence. Otherwise at this time it is a waste of manpower and resources.

They want closure. They're not likely to get it soon though.

They may not even be looking for floating debris. If the pilot was still in control, he may have made a controlled landing. Like the landing on the Hudson. So it may be a intact aircraft at the bottom of the ocean.

It's doubtful that they'd make a landing like that in open seas, but it's (remotely) possible.

But they are really looking for a really small needle in a fucking huge wet moving haystack.

I just created an account for myself. Apparently men can't see what the competition is like (males interested in women can't search for other males). I picked a few people (friends) who haven't used the site, and they aren't present. I don't see anything on the site that shows how old my account is, but it only has the very basic information that I just provided, so I'd say they hadn't previously auto-created my account from Facebook.

When I "created" mine just now, I did the lost password search using the same email address that I use with Facebook. Apparently they let you create an account that way, if you didn't have one already.

I did notice that they have a one-click account creation, so she could have clicked it in the past to log in, and forgot about it.

So much for a perfectly crappy conspiracy.

The way to make them was shown at Defcon years ago, and there is plenty of information online on how to make a femtocell.

You could make one and use it, but unless you're only intercepting your own phone, you'll likely get some unwelcome attention from law enforcement.