I'd guess there's a disparity between the number of Horde and Alliance players (Blizzard just hasn't done much to try and balance them out). Perhaps merged^Wcoalesced realms might help with that somewhat if they choose the right ones to join.

That, or Alliance just bots more.

That sounds a lot like the timer coalescing added in Windows 7, and it did have notable improvements in power usage over XP. So while the idea isn't new or innovative on the part of Apple, it does help them maintain their lead over Windows when it comes to lower power consumption.

I've always wondered why there's so little real public outcry at the perpetual extension of copyrights and their increasing overreach. But now, after reading the comments on that story, it's no wonder corporations have yet again been able to run roughshod over the public, and it's the same reason as usual -- the public is willingly bending over for them:

Apparently this person forgot the reasons behind the Video Game Crash as well...

Here's a crux of the issue and what republicorps rely on for the public's support -- "When I am rich and famous some day, I want these laws around to protect me!"

Ignoring, I suppose, the fact that he doesn't own any copyright -- Nintendo does.

Wow.

Haha -- not only that, but in order to "decrypt" the ciphertext, you need to supply the original plaintext as the key!

Very nicely put. There's a big difference between Slashdot and a news site or even your average news aggregator, both in audience size and professional makeup, and that's what has made the site so successful for so long. You did a great job expressing that -- now hopefully a corporate suit somewhere will read this and (more importantly) understand it.

I'm not hopeful :(

Exactly. And how does the new design reflect this?

On the new design it looks like you cannot link to a specific comment or thread. Check out your user page and look at your comment history. No links to comments, no comment scores.

I suppose comments are simply an unsightly appendage in their new "modern" design (they must clash with all the bullshit social media icons everywhere). Just think of all the "old cruft" they could get rid of if there were no comments: threaded layout, moderation, meta-moderation, karma, all users with a UID less than 7 digits, etc. Replace all that with a flat "top 20" comments listing and a little "Like this on Facebook!" button and it'll be nirvana.

I hope to hell someone with a say in the matter reads this and understands what it really means. I'll give you a hint:

If you make this change, you will kill Slashdot.

I'm not exaggerating even slightly. Many people spend time here to read and participate in the commentary. By shoehorning the comments into that tiny space beneath the article you're saying "comments aren't important", something which will in all likelihood be soon followed by "comments are a liability" and then "comments now require moderation before being posted". People tolerate the Slash-Bi(sexual) crap now because it takes a second seat to the real meat of the articles and commentary. By reversing those roles you're telling 85% of the active userbase that they're no longer welcome.

Whatever site is left after this change takes effect -- maybe it will make enough advertisement and tracking money to satisfy Dice, but it won't be Slashdot and it won't last a year. Remember what happened to Digg? Yeah, I didn't think so.

By the way, if anyone hasn't gone and looked at the comments section on an article, go look now and then tell me I'm wrong.

As someone not interested in learning Ruby I actually enjoyed reading Why's Guide. It's very creative and clever and fun. Why clearly has a talent for creative writing (and for drawing cute little foxes).

That said, would I use it as a way to really learn how to program in Ruby? Absolutely not. I'd much rather have something closer to an O'Reilly animal book, or Learn Python the Hard Way.

Lua's reference guide is great, but I prefer a bit more than just a language's grammar since part of learning a new language is understanding its "why" and "how" as well as the "what" (for me, at least).

Good news everyone! There's finally a machine that can run a Minecraft server without throwing a java.lang.OutOfMemoryError!