Like I said, I don't have much evidence anymore that editors even read the site, other than whipslash's occasional community engagement. Certainly not enough to handle something of this frequency.

I'm fine with the mod-up/mod-down system for the most part. I do think that one account shouldn't have so much power to affect another account, especially through the karma system which is easily exploited by someone with no life. That one account can karma-bomb another into useless oblivion is a design flaw that couldn't possibly be what the coders had in mind, and that's the flaw that should get fixed.

It's not usually -1 Troll or Flamebait either, it's usually Off-Topic or Redundant that gets used. Things someone could individually look at and think "Well, that's a subjective opinion. I wouldn't have gone that far myself, but maybe you could make the case for it." Something that might look innocent in isolation, but when you gather all the posts and look at them as a group, it's pretty clear what's going on.

Like I said, I posted almost 20 years on the account without a problem, and now that account is trashed. Slashdot operates on a completely "hands-off" approach to administration, with no way to settle harassment, and that only works as long as you have the perfect system. As we've seen elsewhere, if you have no approach to handling harassment, harassers win. I've had a lot of my preconceptions about communication on the Internet challenged over the last year. I used to hold Slashdot up as a gold standard of discussion, but this site has definitely taken it's lumps of late.

This will encourage competitors to use different packaging not subject to the tax, thereby allowing them to undercut the ones still using high-tax packaging.

Because in the United States, we are obsessed with lowering the costs of (some) things. Americans will have a hard time doing these jobs because we don't want to pay the workers a living wage. We got used to lowering prices in the US by having goods manufactured in countries where the workers could survive on a fraction of what Americans could survive on. Have the prices on those goods dropped? Yes! They have, and they're far more affordable now than they were then. A decent quality stereo color television cost $659 in 1983, $1600+ in today's dollars. I can get a decent 50" Ultra HD 4k from Costco for $429.

Many goods are cheaper now compared to the past.. but not all things. Food is not that cheap. If anything, housing costs have gone way up in the last 30 years. So the cost of living is still pretty high compared to many other countries. If we had to employ people to sift through recycling, they would need to be paid at a certain minimum level where they can still live, and that level may be too high than people want to pay to have someone sort recycling.

Amazon has been trying to change that, in part by trying to pressure manufacturers to cut down on the size of packages that are not going to a retail store.

This was the only part of the scene that I liked, taking advantage of the artificial gravity every ship, large or small, has. The bombing bays have gravity, so all you need is to the bombing bay facing where you want the bombs to go, drop the bombs, and they keep their momentum.

Granted, the whole idea of this bombing run was dumb dumb dumb, but I thought that was interesting.

You're right. Why wouldn't they do that? Why didn't they do that in the past? This is something that has never made sense, not in the originals, not in the prequels, not in the new movies. It SHOULD be something that has always been usable, ever since Han warned us in episode 4 about the dangers of hitting things if you're not careful with FTL jumps. The only reason why we accepted it is that we just never asked the question. Well, The Last Jedi opens Pandora's Box. You're not stuffing everything back in that box now that the question has been brought up. Unfortunately, it immediately brings up some OTHER plot holes that are hard to explain, like why the First Order ships couldn't just FTL jump a slight distance ahead to cut off retreat. Ugh. I liked the 'chase of attrition,' but it didn't make any logical sense.

I call AAA, because that's why I have the service in the first place, and no matter what it's going to require a real change with a real tire. I don't have any sort of tire wrench in my car, and.... you know, the emergency tire that comes in the car is NOT for long distance use. It's just strong enough to get your car to a shop to get a real replacement. I have no idea if that was the case 30 years ago, but the emergency tire that comes with cars these days is weak and will not last long.

I strongly recommend How Star Wars was saved in the edit. It even shows some of the Star Wars rough cut that was so poorly received before reediting. It shows a number of the editing tricks used to tighten things and how to even rewrite parts of the movie.

I'll just say... Marcia Lucas was a fucking genius. That's why she won an Academy Award for Best Editing on Star Wars.

Me? I mean, sure, I could probably do it if given instructions, but I sure don't carry the tools around with me, nor am I interested in doing so and spending the afternoon getting proficient. I just have better things to do with my time.

You sound like a guy who has a ridiculous amount of time on his hands!

I'm not really sure why not, considering the vast majority of people, including just about everyone who doesn't know what they're doing, already don't know how to just install something from anywhere. That's a feature that has to be unlocked in the developer options, otherwise it's just going to go through the play store and not allow side loading. It's not like we've reached this situation where average every day users are just loading apps from random websites. That's not happening. It's a solution that is in search of a problem, which makes me think the aim of all of this is not exactly what is being presented to us.