It's like an unpaid internship, but forever!

Also I can't see anyone's userid# damnit

Definitely a priority-1 critical problem!

It's a sad reality that even a community as big and stable as Slashdot (generating constant ad revenue) is still too small/niche to satisfy their money-lost.

Kind of a pitfall of the corporate ownership structure I guess. It's interesting to compare Kuro5hin, which once had considerable community overlap with Slashdot, but more or less withered until the point where good new content completely stopped appearing. Yet oddly from a purely formal perspective the site actually works, its archives are readable, and it will probably continue to work for a while. It makes enough ad revenue to pay for its upkeep, and since it's owned by just one guy who doesn't need to send quarterly reports to shareholders, there's no particular reason to kill even a modest revenue source that's on autopilot. Meanwhile a more successful site seems desperate to revamp itself...

There's also a link in the footer (for now) to "classic" Slashdot.

My guess is it's a combination of:

1. Belief that the current Slashdot will provide declining and not that meaningful revenue in the future; and

2. Gamble that the "Slashdot brand" can be resurrected as a vaguely tech-oriented blog/news site positioned as something more like Valleywag or Gawker.

The problem seems to be that category #2 is making a ton more money than Slashdot at the moment, so a redesign to look like those shitty sites, even if a gamble, might have positive expected returns. Even if it alienates the existing community, if the existing community just isn't making them much money, some bean-counters might not care about razing it and just repurposing the Slashdot brand for something else.

...works published between 1923 and 1963 had to file copyright renewals after 28 years to receive an extended copyright, and it's estimated that Michael Lesk, the Stanford Library, and a transcription effort by Project Gutenberg volunteers.

Dammit, this got garbled because Slashdot barfed on a less-than sign. What this should have said:

...works published between 1923 and 1963 had to file copyright renewals after 28 years to receive an extended copyright, and it's estimated that less-than 10% of books had their copyrights renewed. Until recently, this was difficult to take advantage of, since you had to tediously go through paper volumes of the copyright-renewal records to try to hunt for a renewal. So in practice people treated 1923-63 books as in copyright, even though more than 90% aren't, because it was impractical to determine with certainty whether a particular book was. However, thanks to work by Michael Lesk, the Stanford Library, and a transcription effort by Project Gutenberg volunteers, the complete book renewal records are now indexed in machine-readable / searchable form...

As far as I can determine, the content should be in the public domain.

First, on the book itself. As a 1932 book, it isn't automatically public domain, since only books published before 1923 are old enough to automatically be public domain due to age. However, works published between 1923 and 1963 had to file copyright renewals after 28 years to receive an extended copyright, and it's estimated that Michael Lesk, the Stanford Library, and a transcription effort by Project Gutenberg volunteers, the complete book renewal records are now indexed in machine-readable / searchable form, so you can pretty reliably determine whether a book from 1923-1963 (assuming the U.S. was the original place of publication) is out of copyright. And this one does not appear to have had its copyright renewed.

Having determined that the original book is out of copyright, any scans of it are probably also out of copyright, since a scan of a work doesn't constitute a new creative work, merely a reproduction of the original, so a new copyright doesn't attach. The leading U.S. case there that's generally followed is Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel , which held that Corel wasn't violating Bridgeman Art Library's copyright by copying their JPGs of paintings from a CD-ROM, because JPGs of public-domain paintings don't get a new copyright. Though it isn't a Supreme Court case and isn't binding on all courts, it seems to be generally followed.

The city center yes, but large parts of Rome are early-to-mid-20th-century monstrosities that suffer for the opposite reason: they were built with the expectation of people driving everywhere, and have poor transit or walkability. Big roads that endanger pedestrians and bicyclists, and encourage people to drive into the city rather than taking another option. The EUR area is particularly bad.

One solution, which Copenhagen has adopted, is to reduce how necessary it is to park anywhere at all. If you live in the center, of course you have no need for a car: you can bike, bus, walk, or metro anywhere you need to go. If you live out of the center, you also have no need for a car, because you can bike, bus, or walk to the nearest S-train stop, which by design will not be far away, and take that right into the city.

As a result of that, plus high taxes on car ownership to further disincentivize it, Copenhagen has 20 cars per 100 residents, less than 1/3 the ratio that Rome suffers.

I get that the State Department is involved because the proposed pipeline is transnational, and therefore impacts foreign policy, but does the State Department really have in-house expertise on environmental affairs? Afaik they are mostly diplomats, geopolitics experts, security experts, etc., while the environmental expertise is mostly in the EPA, and a few other departments like Interior.

It's a pretty big part of what MS does. Measured as a percentage of GSP (the state-level version of GDP), Mississippi is the 4th-largest net recipient of transfers from other states, which equal about 20% of the state's economy. The only three larger are South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida (a whopping 50% of Florida's economy consists of net transfers).

That's certainly an option. However around here, we got an email in December asking us to please not have all our Christmas shopping sent to the office address. No real enforcement, just "hey don't ship everything to the office pls". My guess is that this will become more common if more people start doing it: right now the people ordering from prime regularly to their work address at most workplaces are a pretty small proportion of employees, so it's not a big deal to accommodate them.

Also, natural gas: was around $6.50 per million BTU in 2003, now it's $2.25.

Have 'em shipped to work to avoid the whole randomness of where packages get left thing.

This is getting common enough that some companies are starting to complain, though. If a few people do it occasionally it's no big deal, but if 500 employees are each receiving multiple packages a week, it starts becoming a significant added burden on the corporate mailroom.

Depends on where you live and what your costs are. Real-estate prices are down in some places and up in others. Oil prices are up considerably from the '90s, though roughly flat for the past few years. Natural-gas prices are up in Europe, but way down in the U.S. due to the shale-gas boom. Food prices are relatively stable overall, though specific food items have gone up or down. Amortized cost of car ownership has gone down, due to a mixture of cheaper initial-sales prices and longer average lifespans. Amortized cost of ownership of a family computer suitable for basic email/web has gone way down, due to advances in technology. Airfare has gone down in Europe (due to competition from low-cost airlines), but up in the U.S. and internationally (due to increased oil prices, plus maybe related to airline consolidation). Etc., etc.

So, if you live in Pittsburgh, use a lot of natural-gas for heating, drive a basic car relatively short distances, and have a home computer, your overall cost of living has probably declined over the past 20 years. On the other hand, if you live in Boston, take frequent roadtrips or plane trips, and heat you apartment with fuel oil, your cost of living has probably increased over the past 20 years.

Of all these, rent/housing costs are typically the dominating factor in most CoL equations.