Upon loading the site just now, I found I've been moved back to the classic slashdot system. I'd like to thank the admin responsible. It's nice to be able to read posts again.

P.S.

Timothy and other Slashdot Editors,

I am afraid that I must post an addendum to my previous call for assistance. The difficulty of the interface appears to be more considerable than I had initially realised.

Unfortunately, the interface does not load all comments on the page. In fact, only one comment is loaded on any given page, and the "load more comments" area / button provided, when pressed, does not in fact load anything. As such I am unable to determine whether my previous comment has been replied to, or indeed whether it has been posted at all. In short I can no longer see or read comments.

In the hope that this message will be seen, I will periodically attempt to post messages of aid in a scattering of stories. Whether these "post in a bottle" will reach you, or float at all, is something I can only hope for at this point.

In the meantime I shall see if the pieces of flat design driftwood can be lash togther into a makeshift civilisation of sorts. However this island appears quite desolate. The floating header follows whereever I go. Perhaps I will try to converse with it.

In any case I remain your hopeful servant,

A poster trapped in Beta

Timothy and other Slashdot Editors,

I regret making such an offtopic post, but I am afraid that I have found myself trapped on the "new" new Slashdot Beta site and I cannot seem to leave it.

The site features an extremely modern "flat" design. So modern in fact that there do not appear to be any visible links, menus, navigation bars, page divisions, or icons at all. A "slide out" option to move back to Slashdot classic pops up from time to time, only to disappear as I try to click it. I believe I may need to use a "charm" type gesture or spell in order to properly summon such advanced features, but I am not privy to the precise incantations.

As such I am currently stuck on the new Slashdot Beta with no way of returning to a more usable interface. I find this most unsatisfactory, somewhat frustrating, and feel I have little other option but to send this call for assistance.

I possess an advanced STEM degree and over 25 years expierience with technology, software and the web. I feel I can positively contribute to discussion on this site, but this new interface is making the site too difficult to use.

Yours

A user trapped on Beta

NSA officials were unable to find any evidence Snowden ever had.

This is essentially the "I do not recall" equivalent of paperwork investigations.

The essential question here is whether the NSA can conclusively deny that Snowden never raised concerns at the agency. Since if he did raise concerns, he probably would have raised them to people personally, a document search is not nessesarily going to uncover whether he did.

What will uncover this conclusively is a simple interview of NSA and affiliate company employees and especially supervisors who worked with Snowden. But since such a set of interviews would either a) reveal that he did raise concerns, b) involve people having to sign their names to untruths, or most unlikely c) reveal he really raised nothing, then I think it's easier for the NSA to just pretend that a half-assed email server word search constitutes an appropriate investigation.

First Person Shooter players do not represent the entire gaming community. This stereotype is being used to label Pokemon and Super Mario players as misogynists and bigots. All gamers are being tarred with a toxic brush.

This kind of labelling is wrong and morally bankrupt. The gaming community is being forced to defend itself against these kinds of disgraceful libels, by people who are genuinely ethical bankrupts. Simply browse the #Gamergate and #NotYourShield twitter hashtags to get a sense of where these accusations are coming from, and exactly who is in denial.

Question, why do you (generally speaking) feel the need to lump all the people who disagree with you together into one group, give that group a sarcastic name,

I call the people involved in this scandal "Social Justice Warriors (SJWs)" principally because I refuse to insult the feminist or progressive movements by calling these people with feminists or progressives. Genuine second-wave feminists have publicly criticised their behaviour.

If you want to understand the difference, look up the #Gamergate and #NotYourShield hashtags on twitter. The Social Justice Warriors are hateful, disingenuous, at times sociopathic bigots. They are adult, internet-empowered versions of the bullies and tormentors which many gamers remember from secondary school.

Gamers are the victims here. The modus-operandi of the SJWs is to cast themselves in the cloth of underprivileged groups -- most SJWs are in fact white, upper middle class, college aged -- then proceed to level accusations of privilege, bigotry, and misogyny against just about anyone involved in gaming for even the slightest perceived infractions. A climate of fear has developed, first in the indie and later wider gaming industry as a result of the "social justice" witchhunts which these people regularly engage in. Worse, this has resulted in SJW-aligned developers and journalists rising to positions of power and being first in line for awards and increasingly development funding, with cronyism trumping competence.

For Gaming, so often a hobby of last resort for the excluded and isolated in society, this is an awful and tragic outcome. For gamers, male, female, straight, gay or trans, it is a frightening development. Their hobby, their refuge, is being taken over by bullies.

Because their rhetoric and especially actions come across as so farcically disingenuous, I don't believe for a second that SJWs actually believe in or support the causes of homosexuals or transgender people in video games. Their support for women is also largely forced, and disturbingly biased towards the conservative view of women as a weaker sex who must be protected/defended (A view consistently challenged by the games industry over the years).

My honest opinion of SJWs is that they are privileged Neo-liberals, who adopt a forced social justice persona both to project their own (increasingly obvious) bigotry onto others, and ultimately to benefit themselves socially and financially. They are disingenuous, extremist bullies, and the gaming community is under co-ordinated PR attack, and has been almost completely censored on gaming websites.

The Social Justice Warriors are right about one thing though; this is a historical moment. Whether they win or lose, the GamerGate scandal will be seen as a watershed moment in the history of online-communities, and who controls them. Two weeks ago, I would never have believed that a clique so small could all but take-over a community so large, but it is becoming clear that this is precisely what (almost?) happened to gaming. There are lessons to be learned here, unrelated to the immediate issues, and I only hope the right people will take note and heed them.

Is it possible that some of the entertaining, amiable geeks that I spar with, party with, code with and blow things up with turn feral and run in packs when I'm not around?

It is unlikely. If you read further into this scandal and its surrounding issues, you will find that it is the gaming community which has been libelled by a clique of disingenuous bullies. These people will routinely label their opponents as bigots while displaying shocking levels of bigotry and hatred themselves. You can see ample evidence of this behaviour in these very comments.

For a better understanding of where the real "Ugly incidents" in this scadal are coming from, simply look up the #GamerGate and especially #Notyourshield twitter hashtags. The vitriol, hatred, and misrepresentations in this debate are coming from Social Justice Warriors (I refuse to apply the terms feminist or progressive to these frauds.)

This isn't about Zoe Quinn. This is about Gamers being bullied and their hobby being culturally colonised by corrupt hypocrites.

Gamers are the victims here. The people crying misogyny are the real bigots. Look up the harshtags #Gamergate and especially #notyourshield on twitter to get a real feel for what is going on here.

Well it does solve some problems, just not problems many server administrators largely cared about while creating problems some systems administrators really do care about.

Well, if the project really is an NSA backed obfuscation of Linux a la SELinux, then confusing sysadmins and hampering their ability to control their own systems would be less of a bug and more of a feature.

Why replace pam.d, crond, init, and add complexities like dbus in a single package that runs at PID1 when it doesn't need to?

Because confident young men in a hurry to make their own mark on the world have little time for learning the tools or the lessons of the past.

It's possible to be a lucrative demographic without having PR money. Case in point: Alcoholics.

I think the wholesale failure of web 2.0 sites to facilitate any discussion of these issues over the last few weeks proves just how shallow their promise of a brave new web is. The scope and scale of the censorship seen around this issue is to my knowledge unprecedented.

Slashdot had the right ethics and mores all along, Anonymous Cowards and all. The community can mod them down, but even they should be free to speak.

I think a poster on the escapist forums but it most succinctly: "The gaming community is being bullied for profit".

The gaming community is being singled out for being misogynist, over the film/tv industry, over the music business, over religious groups, because they are a relatively easy target who won't put up as much of a fight. While it's almost certain that Sarkeesian has received threats, let's be honest, they do not carry anywhere near the same weight as those which would come from, say, a religious group who was called out for being conservative. Gamers also lack the PR money to respond, which would be readily available to entertainment companies. Overall, it's a fairly safe group to criticize.

I'm sure that misogyny exists in video games, but no more (and I would argue to a lesser extent) than that seen in general society and other forms of entertainment. Yet Sarkeesian and her backers have launched what amounts to an internet crusade against the most counter-cultural -- and I would argue visibly progressive -- media industries.

Her videos present selectively chosen examples from several video games, purporting to show that games are actually hateful towards women. Many of us have played several of these titles, and can judge how exaggerated such claims are. Indeed, using Sarkeesian's techniques, it would be perfectly possible to go through these games and more, and selectively picks clips and examples "proving" that games and the gaming industry promote animal cruelty.

Yet no-one makes the animal cruelty argument about video games. And the reason is I think obvious -- The misogynist argument makes more money. Sarkeesian has been backed to the tune of $150,000 to makes these videos. Sites like Kotaku generate huge ad-revenue from the inevitable click-bait headlines which follow from these exaggerated claims. The more games who take the bait, who defend their hobby from these accusations, the more revenue goes to the people making and promoting them.

This does not represent a genuine feminist movement. This represents a business model. Gamers are being singled out and bullied -- over religious conservatives, over music video directors, over corporate policies towards women -- because gamers are an easier and more lucrative target. Gamers are "hate-baited" with very, very ugly accusations painting them as haters of women, so that their predictable responses can be farmed out to ad-servers and marketing firms. Bullied; for profit.

I've played video games since 1990; I do not hate women; My hobby does not hate women; The vast majority of people who play video games do not hate women. Please, Sarkeesian's of the world, turn your attentions to the people who do.

But if you don't puff up your offspring with enough praise early one, how will they have the iron-cast confidence to windbag their way to the top in todays bullshit world? Again, what use is true intelligence if you don't have the bellicosity to shout down all gainsayers?

It's obviously, The Big O.