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Total Commercialization Awareness 126

Posted by michael from the it's-for-your-own-good,-consumer dept.
jjohnston writes "Salon just posted its technology and business predictions for 2003: Total Commercialization Awareness. Includes: Al-Qaida online, Slashdot sells out, and pets: the new white meat. Cute ..." That's so 1999.
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Total Commercialization Awareness More

Total Commercialization Awareness

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  • Slashdot sells out to Al Qauida?? OMG!!

  • Judging by that headline... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02, 2003 @09:13AM (#4998151)
    JonKatz must be back.

  • What would have been interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by somebaudy ( 594704 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @09:14AM (#4998158) Homepage
    They don't make predictions about Salon's fate in 2003.
    Will they sell out?
    Will they bite the dust and go 404?
    I've read so much about their financial problems that I'm surprised to hera they're still around.
    • I've read their site and I am suprised they're still around.

      This article was poor. The jokes weren't funny to geeks, incomprehensible to non-geeks. Is this MCSE humor?? The Pets for Food section would have been poor humor on Joe Nobody's Blog, and just plain insulting when the writer was paid by the word for it.

      Linking to "wierd" websites and then making lame jokes about them is what Bloggers do best. Let the Bloggers keep on doing it. Seriously, if this had been posted somewhere other than Salon would it even bear mentioning??

      ~Hammy
      Good? Bad? I'm the guy with the gun.

  • Wake up call! (Score:5, Funny)

    by saintan ( 608939 ) <kristopher.stsauveur@verizon.net> on Thursday January 02, 2003 @09:14AM (#4998161) Homepage
    Is it me or is that picture of Jack Nicholson a bit disturbing for first thing in the morning?

  • One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by limekiller4 ( 451497 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @09:14AM (#4998162) Homepage
    michael writes:
    jjohnston writes "Salon just posted its technology and business predictions for 2003: Total Commercialization Awareness. Includes: Al-Qaida online, Slashdot sells out, and pets: the new white meat. Cute ..." That's so 1999.

    The "that's so 1999" Slash article you linked to [slashdot.org] is about Slash going IPO. The Salon blub [salon.com] reads:

    The popular discussion site for fans of open source software will disclose that it's perilously close to bankruptcy and needs to make all Slash code proprietary in order to survive. Slashdot regulars will rebel, and some will attempt to set up alternative discussion sites -- but Slashdot's founder, Rob Malda, will sue under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to prevent any copycat sites. When readers accuse the site of "monopolizing" all the vital discussions of the various ways of cooling your computer with liquid nitrogen, Justice Department officials will threaten prosecution of Sherman antitrust violations. But Slashdot will prevail, after hiring David Boies, litigator to the stars.

    Which, while satire, is quite a bit different, don't you think?

    • Ummm (Score:3, Informative)

      by tswinzig ( 210999 )
      I do believe Michael was making the joke that Slashdot already "sold out."
    • Unlike what VA thinks of the SourceForge software (that it has value as a comercial product, yeah right) They should be aware that the /. sourcode isn't really worth anything. I mean, there's lots of blog+comment sofware out there, and a lot of it's better too.

      The only thing closing the slash sorce would do would be to antagonize the userbase. Not they seem to mind doing that, but I doubt they would do it for no value.

      Anyway, the value in /. is the userbase, and nothing more.
      • I thought you were going to say the only thing slash has over other blog software is the user-antagonizing features...

        (lameness filter, etc.)

  • Pets - the new white meat? (Score:3, Funny)

    by BeatlesForum.com ( 545967 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @09:15AM (#4998168)
    So does Fluffy really taste like chicken?

  • Come on Slashdot! (Score:5, Funny)

    by gpinzone ( 531794 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @09:16AM (#4998170) Homepage Journal
    Nice try putting this in the "It's Funny, Laugh" section! Salon uncovers your scheme and you guys try to play it off as a farce!

  • Snooze (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bildstorm ( 129924 ) <(if.hhs) (ta) (yhcub.retep)> on Thursday January 02, 2003 @09:16AM (#4998176) Homepage Journal

    Mildly amusing, but even with over 300 mg of caffeine in my system, it's still not that interesting.

    I much preferred Dave Barry's recap of 2002.

  • Slashdot Timeline (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    2002. CmdrTaco married.

    2003. Slashdot publishes 1,000,000th rumor passed off as actual story. The story generates 480 comments, 263 of which agree with the article, and 107 of which point out it's a rumor and are modded down as redundant. The remaining comments are all "first posts."

    2003. Slashdot parent corporation VA Research^W Linux^W Software stock worth 35 cents. Rumors that AOL, Microsoft, or even Jimmy the hobo who lives under the Longfellow Bridge may buy it. 2004. VA Software bought by Microsoft for a cup of coffee and a donut. All Microsoft-critical articles mysteriously disappear from Slashdot. Bill Gates as Borg logo replaced with Bill Gates as God.

    2004. CmdrTaco loses virginity.

    2004. The WIPO Troll returns again, showering Slashdot in 45,000 copies of the same post: "Lick my crotch hairs." Slashdot, despite running on 18 redundant IIS/8.0 servers, buckles under the load. The term "Slashdotted" is replaced with "WIPO-Trolled."

    2004. Slashdot officially shut down. Millions of screaming, unwashed geeks invade Redmond campus and lynch Bill Gates.

    2005. Linus Torvalds and Anal Cox found dead along with six penguins, a tub of crisco and several used condoms.

    2005. CmdrTaco rumored to have had sex again.

    2006. CowboiKneel found dead in hotel room with 56 pizza boxes covering his bloated corpse. Three suffocated gay prostitutes are extracted from beneath his body as police remove it with a backhoe.

    2007. CmdrTaco actually has sex again. With a woman.

    2007. BSD is still officially "dying." No word on when its demise will take place.

    2007. CmdrTaco starts new weblog to replace Slashdot, creatively named Dotslash. Remainder of Linux users flock to the site and immediate WIPO-Troll it out of existence.

    2008. CmdrTaco has sex with his wife for the first time.

  • What a joke. (Score:5, Funny)

    by TheViffer ( 128272 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @09:22AM (#4998197)
    The only reason slashdot was mentioned in the article was so it WOULD get posted here knowing full well that it would get dismissed as drivel.

    Katharine Mieszkowski: "No one is going to read this crap."

    Farhad Manjoo: "You know your right. But how can we get more publicity from it?"

    Katharine Mieszkowski: "I know, lets metion slashdot!"

    Farhad Manjoo: "Hey, and I know. Go grabs Salon's 2003 plan and replace all mentions of Salon with Slashdot."

    Katharine Mieszkowski: "We are going to be famous!"

    • Re:What a joke. (Score:2, Informative)

      by SunPin ( 596554 )
      Exactly my sentiments. Slashdot should have rejected this submission solely on the grounds that Salon--a magazine that people allegedly read more than,say, New Scientist--was trolling for traffic.

      I consider this piece of garbage to be irrefutable evidence that Salon is already dead.

      • yeah, and damn that new york times, putting headlines out there that troll for buyers.
        • Your analogy doesn't work.

          Trolling for traffic--as opposed to writing a great article that appeals to /. readers--and trolling for buyers are entirely different things.

          First of all, editors are not the cause of "trolling for buyers", advertisers are. Publications offer advertisers the ability to troll at a certain price.

          This is a case of an allegedly big magazine purposely putting /. in their predictions and essentially substituting their own name with /. to describe things that they will do (have done.)

          But perhaps I'm giving Salon too much credit.

          They needed 5 ideas. They needed traffic. They had only four thoughts that barely qualify as ideas. They have no traffic.

          Add a dash of /. to give your site a momentary rise in traffic... Yay!

  • We'll always fnd a way around it!!! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mustangdavis ( 583344 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @09:24AM (#4998209) Homepage Journal
    For every 20 minutes on the Web, "viewers" will be required to download three minutes of ads


    Who ever wrote this was smoking crack!

    People will find a way around this! They will either find some tech way around it, or they will simply stop visiting sites that make you do that.

    I run a web site that rely's on ad revenue, but if these annoying forms of advertising don't come to an end, it could be the end of the Internet for everyone except big business. I know that there are VERY few sites that I would tolorate if they had annoying ads that "made" me do something.

    Honestly, I think that the person that wrote this was just looking to get a rise out of people. (He got one out of me) Hopefully he will wake people up about this BEFORE this kind of thing becomes reality. What happened to simple, NON-POP-UP banners? Yes, they didn't work well, but they got sites exposure! I make it a point NOT to visit sites with annoying ads .... and the people that play the games I run seem to do the same thing. Of all the clicks we get, 10% go to the traditional, non-pop-up ads, 89.99% to the skyscraper banners, and 0.01% go to pop-up ads. NO ONE clicks on our pop-up ads because they are annoyng ... and the people want them to go away! Now if only everyone else would be smart enough to follow suite of a few thousand MPOG players ...

  • Salon just posted its technology and business predictions for 2003...Slashdot sells out

    Are you sure these were predictions for 2003, and not some sort of recap ?

    *ducks*

  • Slashdot may sell out but ... (Score:4, Funny)

    by beanerspace ( 443710 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @09:28AM (#4998232) Homepage
    The author of the article got it wrong. It should read The popular discussion site for fans of open source software will disclose that it's perilously close to bankruptcy and will rewrite and abstract SlashCode [slashcode.com] into .NET components using Visual Basic [microsoft.com] which it will license [microsoft.com] and monitor through Microsoft Passort [znep.com] ...

  • Bah. (Score:5, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Thursday January 02, 2003 @09:30AM (#4998242) Homepage Journal

    Where's my goddamn Flying Car that I was promised in 2000?

  • Prediction #1 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by NitsujTPU ( 19263 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @09:33AM (#4998256)
    Total Information Awareness, the Defense Department's system to record and monitor everything Americans do, will fail to detect coming attacks on the United States -- but TIA will find new life as an invaluable opposition-research tool for political campaigns. For example, Democrats will aim the system at Trent Lott in an effort to discover "patterns" of Republicans with questionable histories on race relations -- and TIA will attempt to predict the next time one of them will make a racist gaffe. This will cause Republicans to call for TIA to be immediately dismantled, but Democrats will accuse them of being soft on terrorism.

    Ok, so, I can buy the democrats using the Republicans' own tool against them, but HONESTLY, you think that they'll really use REPUBLICAN party cries that we should have more big brother monitoring, more warfare, more so forth? For them to make that statement would require a change in platform that is distinctly toward the right. They'll use the tool, they'll maybe make predictions, they won't dare tell their constituents that we need more wiretaps... if they did that they might as well change their party mascot to the elephant ;-)

    • Parody or reality? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sphealey ( 2855 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @09:39AM (#4998293)
      The Salon article is clearly meant to be a parody of year end predictions, but the scary thing is I see no reason why Prediction #1 won't actually occur. Should the TIA database be created as advertised, the temptation to use it for politial ends will be tremendous. And we all know how stong politicians are at resisting temptation.

      sPh

    • Oh (Score:2, Funny)

      by NitsujTPU ( 19263 )
      Duh, it's humor

    • Re:Prediction #1 (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by gilroy ( 155262 )
      Blockquoth the poster:

      if they did that they might as well change their party mascot to the elephant ;-)

      There are those that would say that the Democrats ought to do just that. And there are those -- like myself, a lifelong Dem -- who would say they already have.
  • But they can't search for duplicate articles from a week ago? :-D

  • 8. Slashdot sells out (TRANSLATION) (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ignatzMouse ( 447031 ) <[moc.xobop] [ta] [esuomztangi]> on Thursday January 02, 2003 @09:56AM (#4998372) Homepage
    Attacking /. gives Salon much needed banner hits.

  • I found this article to be informative (Score:4, Informative)

    by teamhasnoi ( 554944 ) <teamhasnoi@yahoo.cLIONom minus cat> on Thursday January 02, 2003 @10:11AM (#4998438) Journal
    at least about the AAA [betterworldclub.com]. Once again, I learn something [newdream.org] every day. Though the BWC [betterworldclub.com] needs a better server.

    • Damn straight about Salon's prediction #4. I wish I'd known the AAA was a pro-sprawl lobbyist [google.com] before I renewed last fall. Bastards, spending my money to promote SUVs.

      If I kept a blog I'd definitely publish this. I'm going to investigate getting a pro-rated refund, and I'll definitely hit them for a couple dozen maps the day before my membership expires.

      • Well, some of the biggest promoters of SUVs are the advocates of more choking Federal regulation of the auto industry. People would be buying Station Wagons and other vehicles with lower emissions than overgrown passenger trucks to haul their families around. But the Auto industry was forced to adopt average emissions standards for their fleet of automobiles. SUVs are the result, trucks that people use as passenger vehicles but which aren't calculated into the emissions average as passenger vehicles.

        Yes, the SUV explosion is another example of paternalistic government regulations gone bad.
        • SUV explosion is another example of paternalistic government regulations gone bad.

          No, SUVs are the result of lobbyists convincing the government to keep a crippling loophole in what could have been a very good patriotic [google.com] regulation. There have been many attempts to remove the light truck exemption, but all were shot down by big oil (claiming to protect the soccer moms)

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • too bad you can't mod Salon (Score:3, Funny)

    by josephgrossberg ( 67732 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @10:16AM (#4998462) Homepage Journal
    They'd get a Score: -1, Troll
  • .. after reading this extremely funny article.

    Good job Katharine Mieszkowski and Farhad Manjoo!

    -Mark
  • So James Watt is making a comeback?
  • Al Qaeda already has a website. Since I'm an American I'm not allowed to link to it.

  • And #11 (Score:2, Funny)

    by aufecht ( 163961 )
    People actually start forking over money to read the drivel we puke up here at Salon!

  • Pretty sad (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sanity ( 1431 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:42AM (#4998959) Homepage Journal
    The slashdot mention seems like a pretty transparent attempt by Salon to get slashdotted. This article isn't particularly amuzing or funny, so I guess they needed some kind of gimmick to boost their hit-rate.
  • Slashdot counter attacks by hosing them down with thousands of connections using ad blocker features. Good move, slashdot.
  • Actually, it was Disney World, and last month, so I got my prognostications about the future taken care of early instead of my usual procrastination.
    Must...obey....Big.....Mouse......
  • Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. There are many examples
    of outsiders who eventually overthrew entrenched scientific orthodoxies,
    but they prevailed with irrefutable data. More often, egregious findings
    that contradict well-established research turn out to be artifacts. I have
    argued that accepting psychic powers, reincarnation, "cosmic conciousness,"
    and the like, would entail fundamental revisions of the foundations of
    neuroscience. Before abandoning materialist theories of mind that have paid
    handsome dividends, we should insist on better evidence for psi phenomena
    than presently exists, especially when neurology and psychology themselves
    offer more plausible alternatives.
    -- Barry L. Beyerstein, "The Brain and Conciousness:
    Implications for Psi Phenomena".

    - this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...

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