It's way too soon for this. We're just not there yet. Consider the example in the original post; Australia spends $3 billion on its "CentreLink welfare system" (which I assume is what they spend on welfare). That works out to $130 per person per year, if everything was just distributed out as basic income. If we try it before when we're _obviously_ not ready for it, it'll just fail and it might even discredit the idea. (I wonder if that's a contributing factor to the really rather sudden appearance of these trials.)

Or, maybe, Europe has had its fill of radical fascist ring-wing asshats and the problems they cause (read: death, destruction, war, poverty, etc.), and this is one of the tools they use to keep a lid on it.

Some of us are tolerant of opposing opinions, when they're not outrageously harmful. Hopefully most of us are intolerant of misinformation and FUD, and I hope most of us aren't even tolerant of opposing opinions when they're both clearly wrong and actively harmful. At this point it's fairly apparent that anybody touting anti-global-warming "opposing views" are either pathologically misinformed, or astroturfing.

This kind of thing is why Slashdot can be awesome. (All credit to the author of course :)

"service that is another letter on top of that time syncing protocol"?

So anybody have any before vs after pics?

In particular, I'm wondering if we're going from 1-2 in-line ads and 1-2 sidebar ads to 3-7 in-line ads. (In other words, is this "cleaning" just an excuse to put more ads in-line with the search results? Let's not forget this is Google, who won market-share in part by way of putting ads on a noticeable yellow background. Anybody noticed the background colour for ads these days? :)

Heh, speling and grammar my is bad. Also apparently I didn't quote correctly. Oops, I suck.

Please don't feed the trolls :)

(Down that way lies bitterness and poor decision-making :)

So $1 a week is doable. I'd be willing to pay $4/mo for any number of high-quality sites (Wired, Ars, NYT, etc. - the biggies). On the other hand, I'd also like to echo many other people in this tread: the problem isn't ads, it's the third-party ads delivered via ad networks via HTML/JS/Flash/etc..

I might still pay the $4/mo to get rid of the ads, but I'd also be fine whitelisting Wired if they served ads first-party that were vetted by Wired staff (like they used to do with print ads). Right now, I'll simply not patronize any site that disallows ad blockers. That's crazy talk, and dangerous to boot.

If you guys are serious about turning Slashdot around I wish you all the luck, and if there's anything the community can do to help, please don't hesitate to ask us. That might include asking us to change our behaviour (both to improve things from first principles, and if we need to change our behaviour to adapt to a change to the system).

I've been reading (and rarely contributing to :) Slashdot for a long time, and over the past year I've been looking for alternatives. I still haven't found any that were better; I'd even considered starting a new one. I will be very pleased if it turns out competent people acting in good faith have taken the helm.

<quote>Would anyone be interested in the option to see the most popular stories from the firehose on the front page? They'd have to hit a very high popularity threshold and also would be marked/color-coded as such.</quote>

Yep, this seems like a change worth trialling.

The basics:

* Continue making posts about good content worthy of discussion
* Avoid the trolling and pandering that's been too obvious in too many posts/stories
* Avoid the Slashvertisements (and if you have to do them, tell us about it and why you're doing it - even if you just want to make more money to gilt your monocles)

If there's anything you can do about the obvious astroturfing that happens in the comments that would be nice, but I think that's playing with fire. The moderation system seems to work reasonably well most of the time, maybe just tweak the weights a bit (so anybody who positively moderated an obviously astroturfing or trolling comment has less karma).

Feel free to change the UI some, but don't try to differentiate via the UI. And please nothing 'flat' :)

I wonder if it was something as embarrassing as an imperial/metric conversion gone wrong? :)

Hah, I just read the article. Not even the article is sensationalistic - just the headline. The article clearly states that these people haven't been brought in for clinical tests yet, so they can't possibly know whether the subjects missing one of the genes in question are healthy or not.