My post has nothing to do with an assumption that everyone shares my dislike.

My point is that Roblimo has absolutely no proof that thousands of people like these videos. Neither do you, unless you've got a stash of private communication from people that like them. You're making a leap that there is some silent majority that enjoys them, but doesn't talk about them, because otherwise you'd expect more negative comments.

You could be right. I think that's doubtful, given the reasons I've outlined already -- the total of your evidence seems to be that I should "rest assured" that you're right -- but short of taking a poll I can't prove it.

Or alternatively -- and just as reasonable a guess -- only the people who have an extreme dislike for the videos post complaining about them, and the far more who do not post on the subject just don't feel strongly enough about it to complain. I fall into that category; I haven't complained about the video, but I think that a video interview is an extremely poor medium for conveying information.

People come to Slashdot for the comment section. Presumably, if there actually existed a large number (thousands) of people that like these videos, then they would respond to some of the negative comments. That rarely happens.

The complainers have had a positive effect, by the way. Originally there were rarely transcripts of the videos, which made them useless to anyone who has better things to do with their lives than watch them. I doubt we would have ended up getting transcripts for most videos if it wasn't for the complaints.

I think you mean that it must be the world capital of bad murderers. I mean, the drivers aren't even trying.

I don't have a problem with linking to a video as long as you have a transcript, but the fact that "thousands" of people watched them without complaining doesn't prove anything about whether they liked them. In fact, every single comment I've seen about the sort of "webcam interview" videos which are nothing but somebody talking is negative, which leads me to believe that very few people actually like them.

This is as opposed to videos that actually show something graphically that you're not going to get from a simple transcript -- people seem to be mostly OK with those.

It will apparently also be filled with fact-free posts by conspiracy nuts who think that everyone who disagrees with them must have been paid off.

There's a difference between not looking past the next quarterly report, and not worrying about a completely unrealistic scenario -- in this case, that my software will still be running 50,000 years from now when there actually is a disagreement in date between UTC and another standard.

Introducing pointless complexity to try to "catch" poor software or hardware is a bad idea. Engineering is a hard enough job without purposefully making it harder.

There have been 25 leap seconds since 1972. At that rate, it will take around 6000 years for UTC to be even an hour different from TAI. Leap seconds don't have any appreciable impact on the sun always being up during the day.

I don't think anyone really cares about whether we use UTC or some other system, though. The problem is that software/hardware vendors have all been using the wrong time standard -- nobody but astronomers actually has a reason to want UTC. We just need to get developers to use a different standard that doesn't have the stupid leap second problem.

I liked how they characterized it as "a short-run test of third-party offers on five of the mirrored projects." Do they really think that anyone is dumb enough to believe that this was intended to just be temporary trial?

I still buy CDs. They're (currently) the best way that I know of, to get music. Better ways are possible but aren't yet widespread.

Tell ya what: go to some live music bars tonight, and if you're lucky, you might find a band you never heard of that you really like. Tell me how you listen to their music the next day. Assuming you succeed (it's reasonably likely but far from guaranteed) I bet you will come up with an inferior approach to buying their CD from them. But maybe not: go on, teach me about a better approach.

But the new design saves so much screen real estate!

Oh, wait. Because of that stupid "share" button sitting all by itself that nobody is going to use, you haven't saved any space at all.

Isn't one of the tenets of good website design that it's better make the links obvious so that people can find them? Old users are annoyed by the change because it breaks their expectations. New users are much less likely to find the comment section of Slashdot because there's no clearly-marked link to get to them -- you have to figure out to click on some cryptic icon that just looks like a decoration. You're not saving any screen space, and the "share" button sitting all alone like that just looks silly.

I don't mind an interface change if there's a good reason for doing so, but this one is all downside.

Didn't you hear? Slashdot is trying this cutting-edge "Agile Development" thing. The idea is that instead of testing your changes, you just make them directly on your production site and see what happens. It's the wave of the future!

We have a name for a video that you passively watch of fictitious or staged events. It's called a "movie," and I'm pretty sure that they've been used to train people for various scenarios roughly since the technology has existed.

I do the same thing.

If you want a real easy way to waste their time without wasting your own, just talk to them long enough to get them to ask you for your credit card number, and then tell them "oh, I better get my wallet" and put down the phone. It often takes them 5-10 minutes for them to realize that I'm not coming back.

If the phone system was sanely designed, the calls would have a "real" number that could not be changed as well as a "callback" number that could be. A big company could use the same callback number for all calls, but not spoof the "real" number that the call came from.

There are tons of things that could be done to reduce the number of fraudulent calls, but the reality is that the phone companies make loads of money off of having lax rules that allow companies to do whatever they want.

Maybe because some people prefer C# to Java? They aren't exactly the same, after all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_C_Sharp_and_Java.