I had the itch, and actually worked on one last night.

Ignore it. Ignore that itch. It's not worth it.

You're right, they use the word "concerned," not "feared," and that is entirely and totally different. Or something. But my point is that "global cooling" came first.

It doesn't say in the 1960s and 1970s we feared global cooling?

It wasn't global warming first. That wasn't until the 90's. It was global cooling. But we'd like to ignore that fact, as it introduces a whole lot of doubt and makes it harder to buy into the premise at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

Sign up for a linux-based VPS. (I use digitalocean. There's lots of options.)

If you're using OSX or Linux, open terminal and
ssh -N -D 8080 your.vps.ip.or.domain -f
(N is for "no command", -D specifies port, 8080 is your port, hostname, and -f keeps it running in background)

Then in your browser or system, open your proxy configuration and type localhost as the server/host and 8080 as the port. Or whatever number you like. 8080 is just ingrained in my mind.

If you're using PuTTY and Windows, it'll make you type more. Check http://www.virtualroadside.com... . Use 8080 or whatever when they say "X". Use same number for local and remote port, so that you don't have to remember which is which.

Have a local ISP who pipe through Time Warner. Around the end of December, Netflix connections went to crap. Complained and ISP threw Netflix under the bus, saying they've over-saturated their bandwidth. Tried a SOCKS proxy via VPS and magic, works fine. Told ISP and they seemed genuinely amazed.

Comcast is still the devil- but VPS is a very viable workaround.

Exactly. Boosting your productivity is great. But hiding what "it" is doing is not. I started developing with QBasic and soon after Visual Basic, and it took years to understand how you'd develop without a GUI builder. The IDE hid too much complexity, set me up with bad assumptions, and it took a long time to learn what it was doing underneath. Knowing now, I'd have a much better grasp of how to organize code sooner, and I'd be a better developer for it.

TL;DR = Use them for the productivity boost, not to avoid learning or thinking.

So, SO much this.

I really don't believe the people using Beta have really used Classic. On an MBA's bullet point list, it's all there. But in real life, they're not even similar.

You've a lower UID than me and I'm sitting at 13y. I've provided feedback, months ago when this was alpha and again yesterday when they made this announcement.

Beta is def better than alpha was. Commenting is infinitely better on Beta than Alpha. But it's STILL incredibly backward compared to Classic. Slashdot is literally the only site (besides dedicated forums) where comments are worth doing. I suspect what's happening is Alpha was shit, developers feel like they've addressed the problems in Beta but people are still complaining and so developers and/or management have gone standoff-ish. I can only suspect no one at Dice REALLY interacts with commenting. Reading comments isn't the same thing.

(Of course I still miss the old table-based /. of yore. It was the best. If you want a change, bring back classic /. Classic.)

Haven't ordered for four YEARS. not Reasons.

Haven't ordered from Newegg for four reasons. My last order also ended with a chargeback. I had ordered RAM, and worked in a 9-story building with many other companies. RAM was marked delivered but it didn't come to me. I checked with numerous other people, trying to track down if it'd been wrongly delivered to someone else and no one confessed to seeing it. (And it was a semi common problem; people tended to be honest.) So I turned to customer support and they said I'd waited too long, and there was nothing they could do. It'd been about three days. Explained the trying to check from my end and it changed nothing. A couple days longer and I filed a charge back. A couple days later it appeared- whether a delivery error or they mailed another, I do not know, but I cancelled the chargeback and haven't ordered from them again since.

I picked Cuba, because, what with their meager resources, it's validation of mattering. It'd almost be an honor to be monitored by them. Plus, you know, interrogations on the Caribbean beach. I'm sure that it's JUST like that.

I would love to spend my money there. But with vendor lock-in, they won't sell books in the format I want. So what I would like to buy from them is knowledge. But they won't sell it, they give it away.

So I can buy Amazon Kindle books there, then?

Oh.

Guess it is the business model.