You forgot to mention (if I'm not mistaken) how the court practically invited the FCC simply to invoke common carrier regulation as the legally proper way to achieve it's Net Neutrality anti-discrimination rules. While the "FCC tried", the FCC also _has not tried_ to reinstate Net Neutrality via its legal authority to regulate common carriers that way (vs 'information services'). The FCC, also, after a year and a lot of press, has never given me a single sentence of analysis of my 53 page Net Neutrality complaint I filed with them, via the Kansas Attorney General's Office, over GoogleFiber's (terms of service) blocking of residential servers. (after my cause inspired some protesters in Utah, Google backed down and narrowed the blockage to 'commercial servers', whatever that means. I.e. a Quake3 server is a commercial server making money for Id Software. Somehow that is OK, but god forbid any innovator in their own home makes a profit)

I'm not sure you understood my point. My point was that without Network Neutrality, and with throttling, the Establishment can keep them from growing in the first place. Or did you understand that? If so, please clarify your point.

Sure, one extremely popular destination on the internet is safe, because throngs of angry users will raise a stink. But what about all the small players who get throttled into oblivion before their innovations get a chance to have the kind of army of defensive consumers that Netflix has?

This is an information warfare[1] campaign where the Establishment is trying to make sure they stay there indefinitely, safe from all new comers.

[1] http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4766259&cid=46193879

I agree that the F.B. information warfare[1] campaign here has been juvenile. But an on topic instance of the decreased beta features is this- I recently made this comment, which the pre-beta interface allows me to direct link[2] to for convenience-

"
> Overloading a system by running it as hard as ...

Not that I'm accusing Lennart Poettering of cyberwarfare, but a highly relevant anecdote is that when pulseaudio was first thrust upon me in fedora, I and many(?) others discovered that it was only software that was preventing our PC's audio out from being overdriven to the point of health and property risk. I discovered this as my volume, due to bug, instantaneously jumped to 400% as I had my sony earbuds in listening to music. The result was excruciating ear pain for the duration of time (about half a second) it took my body to react and rip the earbuds out of my ears. I wonder (not enough to experiment) what would have happened if my speakers had been connected. It would have certainly taken me more than half a second to cause things to stop, and I'm guessing permanent damange to my speakers may have occurred.

Of course, I'm not sure how expensive it would have been for sony to have put a safety in the earbuds. Still, quite the educational experience that was precisely illustrative of what you described, but in a more personal non-industrial sort of way.
"

[1] http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3156485&cid=41530745
[2] http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4741383&cid=46132559
[3] http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4766259&cid=46193879

I'm not the GP, but I'll answer with the 2 most critical points for me personally.

1) the fresh user experience involves by default full expansion of 0 and -1 comments. This is pure poison. Much as I laud the side of the debate that paints us commenters as *contributors* rather than just 'audience', the fact is that there are as many poisonous comments as golden ones. Exposing new users to the site to all of those instead of hiding score:0/-1 by default and 1-lining score:1/2 will simply leave new visitors with the wrong impression of the site (IMHO)

2) for me, the ability to direct link to comments is critical. This seems missing, and as yet I've seen no promise to implement it in beta or keep its aspect of classic around permanently. For instance, I like to share specific comment subthreads, like this one, between myself and active duty US Navy Information Warfare Officer Dave Schroeder from 8 months prior to the Snowden revelations-

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3156485&cid=41530745

snippets of context include-

"
That's one problem with cyber (Score:5, Insightful)
Attribution.

Disclaimer: I am a Navy Information Warfare Officer.

First, it's important to note that the White House didn't confirm the suspected source. It was anonymous officials who said this appeared to originate "from China" -- take that as you will.
" ...

"
A couple of things:

1. I thought your Google manifesto was very good (I know it's a work in progress).
2. I think you're reading WAY too much into certain things. ... ... ...

Back to the other issues. I'm a little disappointed you called so many of my responses straw men; they're not in any respect.

I have not seen any serious calls for "backdoors" in secure protocols. You're completely misunderstanding what even the FBI wants: you're imagining a scenario where "the Man" has a secret backdoor to any running system, encryption, or secure protocol, anywhere. That is not only false, it actually would be gravely detrimental to our own security: we -- individuals, the civilian sector, the government, the military -- rely on the security of these protocols. It's similar to the belief among some that NSA has a "secret backdoor" ...
"

OMG Poniez!!! I succumbed to temptation. After an hour or so, I've got some answers you may be interested in. Short story- slrn. Next, I find it somewhat hilarious that it was RocketRabbit's post that got me to post to usenet for the first time in probably over a decade. It was only about a week ago I discovered RR on /. and had to call him out for (mild as far as I bothered to research) anti-semitism (see my comment history). That said, posting to usenet for the first time in many years is the most fun I've had in a long time. I can help you with the rusty memory if you happen to be similar. I'm on CentOS 6. I got slrn 1.0.1 from sourceforge. Had to yum install slang-devel, then configure --with-slanglib=/usr/lib64 (and maybe --with-slanginc=/usr/include/slang --prefix=/opt/slrn).

also did

cp /opt/slrn/share/doc/slrn/slrn.rc ~/.slrnrc
(then edit it, after going to eternal-september.org and registering to get user/pass then changing password)
then something like
NNTPSERVER='news.eternal-september.org' /opt/slrn/bin/slrn -f ~/.jnewsrc --create

then I posted to eternal-september.test , got a nice bounce even

had to remember/use-help for things like 'a' (author search) 'h' hide message 't' toggle headers (to see timestamps)

i feel young again

(no I have no illusions that it will actually be useful in the short term, but I've had a quixotic desire to see usenet ressurrected as a viable alternative to things like facebook/twitter/slashdot for a long time now, and ... it's still there. I think there are even moderation/score features these days that I've never used)

I get it. But I don't think you've seriously considered it. You have to weigh the benefits of the work vs the cost. The comments all day today, should illustrate an estimate of the value gained by that maintenance cost. Likewise, you aren't honestly suggesting that server cost is a real issue are you? One server can serve multiple code paths. And the bandwidth and server resources are proportional to the number of visitors accessing that service. And by the time you imagine that many people would choose the classic over the new, to the point that there is real server and bandwidth cost, you pretty much have to admit that the value is justified by that many people who clearly prefer the classic over the new.

I'm guessing, and it is just a guess and no offence intended, that you were not alive for the 'new coke' fiasco. Businesswise, it became very clear, very soon (smells analagous to today on slashdot), that it was a wise business decision for coca cola to maintain the production facilities and infrastructure for the "classic coke" product. In fact, some months, maybe a couple years after coca cola realized it was a wise business practice to maintain that infrastructure, their consumers voted so consistently, that now 'classic coke' is just plain 'coke'. And the 'new coke' that was marketed as 'coke' is now a distant memory. It tasted bad. It was not as good. That seems to be the message of the majority of slashdot contributors/consumers today about the new 'beta'.

THIS. I don't know why I haven't seen more complaints about this, perhaps another issue only for people that don't log in or set cookies or something. But this is the most horrible thing. Much as I like the side of this debate that paints us CONTRIBUTORS as valuable, we must also admit that at least half of the comments are beyond crap. Setting asside the occasional max-modded (5 funny) comment about someone's mother being raped by a splintered stick (happened to be on the slashdot article about one of my cause-de-jur of the last few years), there are often such comments that get appropriately modded to 0 and -1. I consider those sorts of things an assault on my eyes. The value of slashdot is in it's self-policing nature. Expanding by default every 0 or -1 flamebait or troll and subjecting every new user to the site to those comments is practically suicidal from a business standpoint. Having sane defaults for viewing the conversation, i.e. 0/-1 not displayed, 1/2 abbreviated, and 3/4/5 expanded, is what makes slashdot discussions so impressive.

If you make new users visually scan over all 0 and -1 comments, they are going to think this site's "audience" are psychotic idiots, and never come back. This seems like a formulaic way of literally sabotaging and destroying the community discussion nature of this site, which as mentioned about a thousand times today, is the *core value of slashdot*. What were you thinking? Were you thinking that the 'flag as innapropriate' facility would replace that? No, because almost as often, intelligent, witty, insightful and funny people respond to those crap comments in very entertaining and enlightening, and heartening ways. That sort of interplay, built on the beautful AND UGLY foundation of freedom of expression, is what makes slashdot discussions often valuable. It seems like today we are witnessing a 'cyberwar' between the people who have enjoyed that sort of interplay for years, and a standard large business that wants to do away with it, and replace it with something much more sanitized and productized. I still wouldn't dare to bet which side wins. But face up to the facts- default expanding 0 and -1 comments for new visitors to the site IS NOT A GOOD IDEA.

Why are you so inflexible on the idea of keeping classic slashdot *forever*. Think of it as a protected historical landmark in the internet space. To help future generations understand where this 'blogging' thing really came from? Computers are good like that, keep classic.slashdot.org FOREVER and your audience^H^H^H CONTRIBUTORS might stop rallying against you.

Seriously, wasn't slashdot the website that _defined_ the term 'blog'. Why is it I feel that we need some sort of historical landmark style legal protection for slashdot in this regard?

If you completely redesign slashdot, make it look completely different from what it originally was, how will the future generations get the right idea about where the global information superhighway that is a fundamental part of their existence came from? Yes, I'm being a bit overzealous, but if I were holding onto the reigns of something so profoundly historical (in internet history terms), I would feel an obligation to maintain the old interfaces. Surely there are no *technical* or *financial* reasons why the old interfaces cannot be kept around? Computers are good like that.

This. Mod parent up. I hope someone (or several someones) other than the NSA have been mirroring the comment database. At the bottom of every slashdot page has (always?) been this-

"Comments owned by the poster."

And those comments have always been obviously public. Sounds like a slashdot clone with a scraped comment database for preservation purposes is entirely fair use to me.

Also, reading all of this beta flamefest and considering recent TLD issues- maybe slashdot should be kicked out of .org. Let them go to .com which is clearly what they are primarily interested in.

Really? Computers are awesome at repetitive tasks.

and public. Sounds like fair use to me.

This. Right here.

And That, Right there. Except the situation is even worse than that in the Neo-Stasi U.S. Not only must surveillance be "kept to yourselves", but also not acted upon in any way. Which is impossible, and why this is a true perversion of justice. When you have secret societies with access to such privacy invading databases (read: NSA agents with access to LOVINT on the entire populace), you end up with a lower class of citizens subject to the political manipulations of the elite LOVINT hoarders. Academic debates on public forums with so many spies privy to Stasi-files, that the under-class becomes oppressed for lack of equal status in the public forums. I for one do not trust at all that there aren't other slashdot commenters (and deconfliction units watching over them) that have illegal access to my private records that the NSA has hoovered up. Even if this isn't true, the system obviously presents the situation where people like me believe it anyway. I don't know how else to combat that sort of political manipulation other than putting a gun to my head and ending the psychological torture of living under the modern NSA (I'm not saying it wouldn't be worse if I were a minority 20 years ago amongst the likes of the Rodney King style police force, but in a nice colorblind sort of way, it feels like these days we are all fucked, unless we want to relegate ourselves to the role of little brothers who know our place in the world and don't expect more privacy than that (like the amount we were taught in school we had an 'inalienable right' to)

Yup, more latency as you mentioned, and also likely to accompany it- worse audio quality as more calls are put through the same amount of bandwidth. Ain't progress grand? 30 years ago when I was a child, you could flip cable channels with maybe 0.25s latency for the picture to stabalize, now you can stare at a black screen for a few seconds. (not that my ability to waste my life channel surfing is defensible, but it's the same basic issue. And yes, DVR features do outweigh the degradation of channel change latency, but again, I'm just highlighting that tradeoffs are being made, and it isn't always a net win on user experience)

$185,000 is Raqueteering.