Well folks, that's it, the beginning of the end. Instead of making sure the site stays attractive to hardcore geeks, the people who are managing slashdot are diluting its value by doing some blatant marketing pushes.

I've been reading slashdot daily for what, 8 years now? Between the stupid "vlog" and all the latest attempts at being something it should not be, I think I'm going to be done with this site soon.

Slashdot has always done only a few things, but these core qualities were done extremely well, making this site interesting for people like me.

1. Keep the signal to noise ratio high. The moderation system has worked well to keep the SN ratio relatively high. Browsing at +2, when not moderating, keeps the discussion fairly clean and interesting. It's degraded a bit over the years, but I feel this is still slashdot's strongest point. Compared to sites like digg and reddit, slashdot discussions are mostly sane, polite and flame-free.

2. By the virtue of point 1 above and being a site targeted at hardcore geeks, you often get to speak with people involved in the stories first-hand. Over the years, I read and participated in threads with some very smart, interesting people. On stories about solar powered car competitions, we had the participants pitch in. On stories about new wireless chips, we sometimes had the engineers who designed it comment. On stories about Star Trek, you had Wil Wheaton giving behind-the-scenes stories. This was possible because slashdot was a site where geeks felt comfortable having discussions. Over the last few years, slashdot has been slowly losing this quality.

3. Clean, clutter-free interface that doesn't attempt to be anything else than a good place to discuss news stories of interest to geeks. Geeks like function over fluff and slashdot delivers. It doesn't need to be ugly, just functional and not distracting. All the crap you've been adding to the site of late is detracting from this. Things like the stupid videos or the "pulse" poll; blatant advertising barely disguised as something else.

This is just one geek's opinion, but slashdot is slowly going in the wrong direction. I know that if you keep this up you're going to lose me as a reader, and I have the feeling I'm far from the only one.

Don't bother, the rest of the books are tainted by Card's religious zealotry. They are preachy, arrogant and generally terrible. Ender's Shadow, a retelling of Ender's Game through Bean's point of view is the best of the bunch, but it's still nowhere near as good as Ender's Game.

Having read them, I wish I had spent those hours reading something else instead. If you want to go with Tor, You have amazing series like Game of Thrones, or the Wheel of Time series.

That's because, ironically, you have to be online to enable offline mode. So it won't help you if you want to play a game but suddenly realize that your ISP is having connectivity issues. This has actually happened to me once, and I used my iPhone's network connection to enable offline mode and after that it was fine. I admit though, that if I hadn't had that option I would have been quite mad.

Not from my experience. Steam offline mode lasts forever, and it never bugs you to go online. I've had steam running offline on my laptop for well over 6 months (I hate it when it disconnects my desktop) and it never asked me to go online to play any game I've tried, and I have about 200 games in my collection.

Steam offline mode is just that, offline mode. The only check is done when you go offline, after that you can use it forever (or in my case, until there's a new game I want to play on my laptop that I have to download).

I think people are confusing arbitrary throttling with priority queues. What Rogers and Bell are doing is arbitrarily limiting the rate of p2p traffic to 25KB/s. This is just rate limiting. If, on the other hand, they would treat VOIP traffic as higher priority and process those packets first, possibly dropping the lower p2p traffic if the link is congested, that would be perfectly fine. Just don't rate limit p2p to 5% of advertised bandwidth for no good reason.

Not to be pedantic, but there are some carriers for which this is true. For example, in Canada, if you're with Bell Canada or Telus, if you turn off 3G you do lose the ability to make phone calls. This is because their network is CDMA and not GSM, and they only support LTE (so no Edge or even standard non-data GSM). I think there is now a CDMA version of the iPhone, but I have a 3GS phone with Telus that can't receive or place calls if I turn off 3G.

I've worked with an organization providing care to the homeless a few years ago, and while being HIV+ is not a short-term death sentence anymore, it is nowhere near as easy to treat as you make it. Most patients can expect to spend about 3 to 7 years using drugs with only moderate side-effects, but after that, most start needing to use some stronger drugs. These can have very serious side effects, including vomiting several times a day, constant headaches, extreme dizziness, lack of appetite so bad that they have to force themselves to eat every meal, sexual dysfunction, etc.

I'm not a medical professional but from what I understand there are also strains of HIV that need the "strong" treatment right away, and people can even get multiple strains (I saw a few of those). Even with the medication being free in Canada, where I live, I spoke with people in their late 30s who stopped taking the meds because they'd rather have a few more years of relatively good life than living with the drugs' side effects.

We've made a lot of progress, but HIV is still a death sentence, just longer term. And you'll feel miserable for the better part of your remaining life. Not something to take lightly.

This doesn't give root, it just allows you to run a command within the context of the installed app. The app launches the web browser to pass data to and from a middleware server. So if the app itself doesn't have any specific access (including network access) it can still transfer data through launching a browser session.

It's more of a conscious decision by the android team. If you allow an application to launch an URL, then of course it can transfer data through the http session. However not allowing apps to launch a simple URL link would be very limiting, so they chose not to do that. I'm not sure there's a fix really, as this is a classic security / convenience problem.

Maybe once a year, I see a post like this. It makes me wonder how someone can be literate enough to compose it and, at the same time, unable to grasp its sheer insanity.

Hum, I think people are confusing letters here. The K in 4K refers to the Kilo prefix, as in 4 thousands. The P in 1080p refers to "Progressive" (full scan) compare to say, 1080i "Interleaved", which is really just 540 pixels resolution.

Like a previous poster said, they used the horizontal number because it's higher, but please don't start bringing in P or other things to muddle up the issue even more.