"We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site that still speaks to the interests and habits of our current audience, but that is, at the same time, more accessible and shareable by a wider audience."

You think we are that dumb? "Wider Audience????"

  Really?

So why not just come out and say you want to turn Slashdot into something other than Slashdot because you need to monetize the investment.

Does telling the truth to your users hurt your sales and marketing training that much? Go ahead... tell us we're fu... ^H^H^H.... going to have to find another web site to replace you. Just be truthful.

How many times have you been screwed and been told "we're doing this for your own good?' Never? You must be a newbie.

It is obvious that you are going to give us an unusable site with a "pretty" Metro-style UI because... well because... you've already been given your marching orders.

Alas. Slashdot.

I once had the opportunity to witness a night time test firing of an Atlas rocket engine set [three engines] at the Rocketdyne Santa Susanna Field Test Lab. We were put in an observation area at a distance of 3/4 of a mile away from the test stand. The test was about thirty seconds long. The sound pressure from the engines compressed the diaphragm enough to make breathing difficult or impossible.

Imagine trying to take a breath and you find you are unable to do so all the while you are hearing an impossibly loud roaring and the flashing brightness of the engines bathing the hills with yellow-white light.

It was the nearest I ever got to an actual ride into space... it was impressive and I found myself wanting "to go on that ride again" but never had the opportunity.

^H ^H ^H ^H ... on Wall Street.... for a political party... as an HR Director... as IT management at a financial institution.... As head of the NSA [I hear they are looking]...

There, fixed that for ya!

Hybrid.... hmmmm....

The Mass storage system for the original IBM PC had a hybrid option.

The original IBM "True Blue" [bare bones, five slot] PC did not come by default with a hard drive [the original 5 Mb drive was insanely priced]. An optional second 5 1/4 inch floppy drive cost several hundred dollars.... IBM trying to widen their market decided to give 'low end' [i.e. read: poor engineers, hobbyists, techno-working class, and students] users an option for mass storage, IBM designed and included a "cassette interface' which used a 5 pin DIN connector and sold a cable that allowed a user to use a low-cost 'off the shelf' audio cassette recorder. The cassette could be controlled by programs written with the embedded "PC Basic" which was in ROM on the motherboard. I had occasion to use the cassette interface until a bit of research in a local dumpster behind a floppy drive manufacturing "start up" turned up a fully functional disk drive. DOS 1.1A... those were the days!

Um...
"The bind function associates a local address with a socket."

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-u...

OneDrive to Rule them all and in the Darkness bind them.

Is that you John Titor?

You forgot a few:

  everyone believes in:
"Science" and his prophet Darwin or "God" and his prophet [fill in religious leader],
reason or emotion ,
starched or tie-died,
rational or magical,
whistle-blowers or politicians,
capitalist or communists.
Christian nation or Deist nation,
Monotheist or Trinitarian,
Libertarian or Rational,
Successful or Failed
talent or no talent,
monochrome or multichrome.

See? Fixed that for ya!

the BSoD stack dump...

Who knew?

*Very Nuanced*

I worked for Rocketdyne, the SSME main contractor, through the 80's in the quality organization... the "way things worked" then was NASA gave delivery / target launch dates. If the corporate contractor delivered early or the launch went ahead of schedule, the contractor got a bonus.

When NASA down-sized all of its Engineering talent after the Apollo program, it became dependent upon the corporate contractor's for 'assistance' in making the engineering decisions . The ultimate decisions were made by the Bosses of the Engineers because the bosses saw dollar signs rather than safety and science... and NASA went along.

Morton-Thiokol was the main contractor for the SRBs modules which stacked together and held together with "O" rings and interface pins. The ring materials becomes brittle in "low temperatures" [below freezing as it was that morning]. Their engineers did not want to launch in the cold since it was far colder that the SRB had been designed for. Management at Morton-Thiokol knowing a bonus depended on the launch told NASA "go" and so they launched. I still cannot look at those pictures without getting upset. I could not event look at the full set of these.

Just so its clear-- the problem is with NASA isn't that its run by the government. The problem is that it is run by a bunch of ex-aerospace revolving-door [public-private] rubber-stamp management administrators and not run by true engineers... if NASA had then had a real engineering staff for the Shuttle program rather than playing for money and politics, things would have been different...

The people that made those decisions should have been "hung out to dry" for both of those shuttle "accidents". They should have been criminally charged for the deaths... with the corporations financially liable to the victims and to the government for the losses. But as the recent financial crisis has demonstrated yet again-- the corporations squeal, the politicians make "oratory", and then the government [you and me] pay for those corporate mistakes. Then after a while everyone forgets how they were robbed... of lives, money, and honor by greedy types that only see term profits as good....

The Shuttle program was about science -- or at least it was supposed to be... but what it became was "Aerospace Corporate Welfare"... [just as the various subsidies paid to various industries by the Government are corporate welfare...]

You should not play politics with science... or at least be aware you do it at your peril -- go ahead play politics with the laws of gravity [or "O" rings] and see how far it gets you. You can do science or you can do greed but not both. In this case seven people were killed because someone wanted a bonus.

Nice idea but flawed...

Until we outlaw the NSA-Military-Corporate-Industrial Government's ability to do their "Big Data Spying" in the name of "security" no application / service will elude the rooms where they scrape your data & mail before it hits your application.

No mention of that in the article... but then you would not expect real reporting from a paper owned by Rupert Murdoch

No we did not have a holocaust in the US. For all of the talk on the part of the free speech and free guns crowd, it is from among their number that are more likely to espouse a new holocaust. I cannot think of a single liberal Democrat that would cry "Death to the Jews!" while the fringe wingnuts get fed snippets of hate from that "fair and balanced" Fox News.

No body has been rounded up en masse in the United States because their were considered "evil outcasts" of the government in power. No one was stripped of all of their earthy possessions and sent to their death in as many ways as could be found or given over to be a lab test animal until they died. Yes the government did send Japanese citizens to camps during WWII... but it did not turn them into mountains of bones dumped into unmarked graves. What happened to Americans during WWII was shameful but what the German government did was unadulterated evil.

But in your tiny little child-like mind you want to be able to say whatever you want to say and like most "games" that you play there should be no consequences for speaking lashon hara in real life.. On the contrary, TANSTAAFL applies. There Ain't No Such Thing as A Free Lunch--- the same must be said of speech... So speech should be limited for bullies, pug-uglies, wayward inarticulate children [you sound like one] or anyone else that tends to want to put the blame on someone else for the results of their own actions. You cannot compare President Bush or President Obama or any other President of the last 70 years to the horrors Fuehrer Hitler ordered.

Hate speech can and does lead to further hatefulness regardless of the source. The "sticks and stones can break bones, but name never hurt me." is a fallacy repeatedly disproved by every hate monger that has sprung up through history. Words can and have incited riots, lynch mobs, and mass murder. Better to limit the incitement by requiring the hateful to either remain silent or pay a price for breaking the peace and social cohesion.

There is a story told of a Jew who hated his Rabbi for some imagined slight so he said evil things about the Rabbi. Eventually, the man realized he had made a mistake in saying the things he did. So he went to the Rabbi and asked what he could do for penance for having spoken evil words. The Rabbi asked the the man to go and purchase two feather pillows and return with them. So the man bought the pillows and returned. It was a fine gusty day. The Rabbi instructed the man to tear open the pillows and when he did the wind caught the feathers and spread them far and wide. "Now," said the Rabbi. "You must go and pick up every feather, put them back into the pillow cases, a then return here. Then I will consider you have completed your penance." "But Rabbi that is impossible!" Said the man. "How can I pick up every feather? The wind has taken them every where." "And so it is with evil speech." Replied the Rabbi. "Once spoken evil speech cannot be returned to its source."

Evil speech led to the murder of 15 million outcasts [Decadent, Gay, Romany, Mentally and physically handicapped, and Jewish] by the German government during WWII. Six million were Jewish or of Jewish descent. Is it any wonder we do not like hate speech of any kind?

Think before you speak. The price of lashon hara is your humanity.

One of the strangest things I've often heard repeated concerning the book is it is "glorified fascist fantasy"... which shows a lack of understanding of what Heinlein was trying to communicate. A better understanding of Heinlein's views might be take from his character Prof. Bernardo dela Paz in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".-- which is to say Heinlein appears to have been a "rational anarchist"... perfectly happy to obey [or not] any rules you happen to set... The pill that chokes the critics of this book appears to be that Heinlein proposes that having a government made up of people that have proved their willingness to put themselves in harms way to protect humanity by serving it for 20 or 30 years might be better than the usual way Democracy does things.

If you follow the chain of logic of Starship Troopers story the society and government of his earth is exceedingly rational... Heinlein pointed out how our current "military-industrial complex" is hopelessly bogged in bureaucracy... The "Mobile Infantry" is built so everybody works & everybody fights... unlike our current military. For Heinlein's other "send up" of the military and "politics as usual" read Glory Road.

Even being the spine-less Liberal that I am, I can read the book and understand how / why someone might believe things should be arranged this way... On the other hand I am not so trusting of modern jingoist "rugged individualist" folks that call themselves libertarian [when in fact they are more often than not whiney self-centered babies who believe that a souless corporation is better than a gunked up bureaucracy... Which only proves they are the kind of ignorant that Heinlein would have hated.]. Heinlein graduated from Annapolis and he did serve this country. Where did Verhoeven serve?

As for the movie... If it is a satire it is not of Heinlein or the book he wrote, since the only thing that they have in common is the name.

There were no female troopers in the book.
While Heinlein has been called anti-feminist and a patristic SOB, the reason he only had males fighting is he believed [right or wrong] that males and females have certain roles... females make better pilots and males better warriors [we're not talkin' equal rights agit-prop here, just biology]. Females are the future of humankind and deserve to be protected [see the Notebooks of Lazerus Long about the true purpose of laws] Heinlein believed that a man will fight better if the last thing he hears before he drops is a female voice wishing him luck... Is it true? Who knows? -- we've never tried it. It appears that the Heinlein that is held up by liberal critics is actually a "straw man".

There were no jump troopers in the movie.
The purpose of the mobile infantry is being "the most effective fighting organization in history"... What we see in the movie is the equivalent of the old Saturday Matinee B Monster movies... Heroes or monster fodder... either or... which only shows a failure to understand Heinlein's chain of reasoning.

So if the movie is a satire, then it must be a satire of someone trying to satirize a book with which they disagree and do not have the wit or the art to craft a movie to accurately depict both the right and the wrong of the author's thesis and how the author chose to resolve the conflict... if it is a an actual satire of Heinlein then it is a FAIL -- and even a liberal like me can see that...

As for Card's "Ender's Game"... Here is a story written by homophobic writer telling a story about how someone exploits a child into murdering another race by playing the equivalent of a video game... Um... yeah... Better title: "Molested by the Military"...

I think the exploitation of Ender and Card's homophobia are probably related... Yet the difference between Ender and Card is that Ender actually has some kind compassion for people that are not like him... while Card has proven how really small he is as a person and that he is apparently incapable of compassion for people that are not like him [i.e. if you are not straight & Mormon then you should have no right to be happy]

Heinlein never doubted that in the race to survive Humankind should fight tooth and nail to survive and not lose sleep over dead enemies... As an old saying puts it: "The best revenge is to outlive your enemies." Yet even as we look to survive we might some time stop and ask as Rabbi Hillel did: "If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?”

No Heinlein is not perfect and for those who don't want to think through the hard parts it's easy to say he was a jingo-ist and goose step fascist... I have not seen a "liberal SF writer" address the issues or ideas that Heinlein did and offer "alternate solutions." Where are Doctorow, Sterling, Gibson, or Stephenson's equivalent stories and solutions? I may not completely agree with Heinlein's politics but I'm smart enough to respect his ruminations on the subject...

Google may be a CIA project for all I know... but they are not trying to make a profit by recommending you buy a book about how to write a eulogy for a relative who's body has barely cooled-- That my friend *IS* creepy.

Do I like the fact that Eric Schmidt thinks we all live in glass houses and thinks there is no such thing a a right to privacy? That's a crass elitist talking... but believe me he would change his tune if some one started posting his "private life" or the private lives of his loved ones...

But Amazon? Mr. Bezos built his profit platform without a thought to "loving kindness" or ethical standards... which is why they are willing to make creepy recommendations...