Well it certainly looks more modern and pretty.
But the part where 70% of my monitor is blank white space sure isn't a step forward.
And not being able to see any comment info on the home page is another step backwards.
 
But it doesn't look antiquated. That's sure a plus. It looks like the default wordpress theme.
 
Hey it's like a hot sorority chick! Sexy as hell for an hour. Then frustrating and mostly empty. But hey it shows real well at homecoming.

beta.slashdot.org redirects to slashdot.org.

Perfect. The new beta site is going to be just as popular as ever!

Heck when I turn 75 I think I might try heroin, start smoking cigarettes again, and have unprotected sex with 28 year old hookers. Why the hell not?

The Republicans shut down the government; the government did not shut itself down. Only one Republican voted "no".

They want the President neutralized. His only "victory", passing Bob Dole's idea of national health care (insurance by private companies in fenced markets), is baneful and hurts their very souls to behold. They will kill people to negate that minor win.

This isn't a government malfunctioning. This is a coup. The second one in six years. This, ladies and germs, is a test of national memory. Can we remember what happened only a couple of years back, at least, if we can't remember Gingrich doing this in the 90s?

As for Jon Stewart and all the other False Equivalency pundits: NO, this is not a failure of "Congress". Congress is furious, except for the representatives of the Confederacy still trying to win the Civil War.

The problem is the story line, with respect to Episodes I-III and VII-IX isn't about the frontier. Episodes IV-VI could be about the frontier, because that was the story line- the time after a civil war, when nobody could afford anything new, and all the good guys had to hide from the big bad evil empire.

Unless they blow up Coruscant in Episode VII, they're going to be stuck with having to incorporate urban planets into the New Republic.

Yeah, right now I have one Windows computer that I use solely for games, and I'm really only playing steam games. The problem is, those Steam games aren't available on Linux, at least not yet. If Valve gets enough of the games I'm interested in running on Linux, I'll reformat and switch to SteamOS (or Ubuntu, or whatever is convenient at the time).

Both the Death Star and the Cloud City seem, to my mind, are outside the usual milieu for Star Wars action and development. The Death Star was hyper-polished and space-age minimalist, unlike the maximally baroque surfaces of the Millennium Falcon or the claptrap hulls of the rebel alliance X-Wings. In a sense, the Death Star was the home of the Other, the mirror world of the Empire that (arguably) was one part of a two-chambered narrative setting that was "A New Hope".

The Cloud City seemed even more a "respite" from the action of the Star Wars narrative. It was a political and environmental paradise and the Star Wars narrative resumed the moment Calrissian revealed he had purchased the safety and sovereignty of his city by selling Jabba Solo.

tl;dr: The Death Star and the Cloud City in some ways are exceptions that prove the rule that Star Wars "happens" on the frontier.

...on my PowerPC 620...

That room full of insightful, creative people gets their money from venture capitalists/angel investors. The only role the stock market has is making it easier for venture capitalists to exit from successful investments. Without the stock market, there could still be investment made in early stage companies, but investors would have be more discerning about what they invest in because they'd have to make their money back through company stock buy backs, dividends or acquisitions.

The way that investment happens would most certainly change but, in some ways, it would change for the better. There would be far fewer photo-sharing apps and other such nonsense that really doesn't need to exist. And I'm still not convinced that tying our retirement savings accounts (401(k), IRA, etc) to the stock market is such a good thing. The stock market continues to go up and up, in part, because of the millions that flow into it each month from workers saving for retirement. This has a Ponzi-ish feel to it...in the same way that Social Security will run into problems when the baby boomers retire, the market will also start to decline as withdrawals from retirement accounts outpace contributions. The whole thing feels like a Social Security that Wall St gets to skim large amounts of money off of.

The stock market is A mechanism for investment. It's not the ONLY mechanism. We should be able to separate stock market criticisms from the ad absurdum argument against all investment.

IANAL, but I don't think possession of 'pirated' content is illegal. Commonly and traditionally, copyright law has been concerned with the copying and distribution of copyrighted material, and not possession.

Well really you have two different issues contained in just your first argument: (a) People should be able to enjoy art for free; and (b) Artists should be able to receive compensation for their contributions to society.

Those are two different things, and they may both be true. But you know, maybe we need to make concessions on both sides. It may be that we can't get everything completely free whenever we want, but it may also be that we can't have copyrights be too restrictive or abusive. You can say that people aren't *entitled* to free art, but you can also say that artists are not *entitled* to make money for their work. There has to be some give and take.

And when you get down to it, copyrights are a relatively new invention that were designed to sway things in favor of the artist. It's an experiment that has had many many problems in its short history, enough that it can't be considered an unconditional success. It's time that we reevaluate.