Continue reading. The good stuff comes after the first half of fluff. It actually has some interesting content in it.

Ah yes, Obama, our weak totalitarian king community organizer who is controlled by nazi tree-hugging muslim pastors.

Did I get everything that's wrong with Obama? Or am I missing the fear du jour?

The problem is that ATT uses its position as both a Tier 1 provider and as a consumer ISP to play both sides of the argument: on the one hand, they're arguing that Netflix sends too much traffic their way to get peering agreements hashed out, and on the other hand, they artificially constrain their upstream data by restricting how much and what customers can upload.

Because of this, there is no way for anyone to peer properly with ATT: they can always create traffic conditions that will suit whatever argument they want.

What everybody seems to forget is that Nate Silver did only two things: he assumed that polls were actually somewhere between properly done and improperly done, and weighted them according to his own assessment of the polls' gathering process. Then he crunched the numbers according to basic statistics. Also, people forget that until the day before voting actually took place, he had one state incorrect - I believe it was North Carolina. It was such a close toss-up though that whatever numbers they were crunching and putting up on the site very slowly moved it over into the correct column.

As a result, I'm highly skeptical both of his new venture, which goes far beyond a straightforward data set and proper statistical analysis, and everybody's sudden belief that anything can be predicted, if you just use the right data set. A couple of decades ago, one of the SI sportswriters (Zimmerman) fully predicted the NFL playoffs at the start of the season. He never managed it again, even if he did better than most others. Keep that in mind anytime someone tells you that they have figured out how to predict human nature with statistics.

You might be a little young to remember, but there was an Iraq War I. I can understand the confusion, since a Bush and Hussein were both at the helm of the first one.

You also forget rule #1 of international Army: it's only as valid as the guns supporting it.

Some citations are worse than no citations. Or do you think linking to timecube guy is somehow respectable when discussing the failings of the current physics models? Any of the major news agencies are better than a site affiliated with a particular party.

Also, you make a claim, you better back it up. Not up to us to do your research for you.

A representative democracy is a subset of all democracies, which are a subset of all republics. What the Federalist Papers talks about is the danger of a Direct Democracy. Seriously, read it sometimes. Don't take the word of others for what's in them.

So yes, we have a democracy. We also have a republic. Sometimes, I suspect that this right-wing talking point was created because some Republicans were tired of Democrats sounding like they're the only ones for a democracy, since their name is so close.

Representatives handing out cash in return for elections is pretty much exactly what is happening now. No different than people directly voting for more money for them.

The fiscally conservative side of the voting block is very concerned that a numb

Sadly, I'm quite sure you're right. That said, I'm willing to give them a chance. I'm also willing to make a point out of Alice Hill's resume essentially lying about her relaunch capabilities.

We'll see where this goes.

To pile on the reasons why beta sucks:
1) The images are almost entirely, but not completely unrelated to the story. It's like someone has access to photostock and scripted an automatic photofinder that adds the first result from the query containing all the tags.
2) The discussions are automatically expanded, which wastes a lot of space. No, I don't want to see only "interesting", or only "intelligent". All that the ratings basically are is "I agree" or "I disagree", with a few lone exceptions for obvious trolling material. Give me the highlights, and let me easily expand and collapse threads. You know, like it does right now.

I have a strong feeling that a lot of the design was cribbed from Ars Technica, but you missed pretty much everything what makes their design work:
1) They have actual editors, including photo editors. That means that the images are frequently awesome creations that add commentary to the headline, and headlines and summaries are actually useful. At Slashdot, the summaries are frequently nothing more than the first paragraph of the article.
2) It's easy to quote people, directly link to comments, and be notified of and find new comments. Beta does neither.

So, for the TLDR crowd (yes, that means you, managers and executives):
No one cares about the front page of Slashdot, because editors have on average sucked since the beginning.
The only thing people care about is the article and the discussion. Make either hard to get to or hard to use, and everyone will leave. I'm sure you noticed that your SlashBI stuff is failing pretty miserably. The same thing will happen to Slashdot if you don't fix the useful information issue of beta.

I love this part of her resume:
"Proven track record innovating and improving iconic websites (CNET.com, Dice.com, Slashdot.org, Sourceforge.net) while protecting their voice and brand integrity; extensive board level and governance experience especially with non-profit volunteer communities, open source developers, and local chapters and projects worldwide. "

ROFL. Fortunately for her, none of the people who would interview her are techies. Otherwise, that little blurb would get her laughed out of the room.

I don't think you understand what inflation actually means. Here, let me help you with inflation for dummies:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation

You might understand algebra, but your knowledge of even the most basic economic terms seem to be scarily absent.... You don't vote, do you? Please don't.

Republicans have discovered another way to shut down the government: just prevent it from collecting any data required to do its job.

Regulatory agency needs to collect data on credit cards to determine whether credit card providers are up to illegal shenanigans, or what kind of regulations are too little, just right, or overkill? Tell them that they're like the NSA, need to be shut down and the bureaucrats strung up high.

I'm wondering when they will apply this to healthcare and the IRS. What better way from preventing them from operating than to deny them access to any data? Bonuspoint: Republicans get to point out how ineffective the Federal Government is, and how it should all just be dismantled.

No promise is more self-fulfilling than that of a government official who insists that government is bad. It's the only position where doing a horrible job actually gets you a promotion. And I don't mean that in the cynical, "the-sheep-don't-know-who-they're-voting" way, I mean that quite literally: some Republicans go into office to demonstrate how bad government is, do all kinds of things that destroys the ability of the government to do anything (hello government shutdown...), and then go back to their constituents and say "See how bad government is? I was right! Vote for me!"

You do realize that none of what you wrote contradicts what Chua and Rubenfeld said, right? In fact, they have nothing to do with what they said. You are pointing out specific communities that are successful and what they do. They are pointing out traits that seem to be common in all those groups, and which drive why these communities do what they do.

For what it's worth, I agree with them. Without the belief that you can succeed, you will not. Without the belief that you have to succeed (because otherwise bad things happen to you), there's a high chance you'll fall into the category of unrealized potential. And finally, impulse control has now repeatedly been shown to be one of, if not the primary indicator of adult success.

That triple package has nothing to do with government corruption. It's just a package of character traits that correlate very strongly with success, for known psychological reasons.

But what is the solution here? Move it to the private sector? You said yourself that the private sector has no experience with that kind of stuff. It's easy to scream .gov sucks, but the private sector will face far bigger problems - including dealing with corporate failure. Will everyone go without insurance just because a corporation failed?

So when a government agency does something good, it's because it outsourced some work to the private sector. If it does something bad, it is because it is a government agency. Did I get that right? For some reason , I smell a variation of the "privatize profits, socialize losses" mantra.