With the scary switchover fast approaching, L has expressed interest in replacing our 15yo tube. We are not big TV watchers, somewhere about halfway between typical well-educated suburbanites and annoying no-TV guy. We only buy limited basic cable, and mainly use the TV for DVDs and Wii (which I luckily scored on eBay).

My requirements:

• 1080p - we plan to keep this set a long while, eventually need the rez
• 40+" - so it provides as much SD visual area as our old 32"
• decent contrast & speed - for DVDs & Wii respectively
• well under $1k - we're not trying to build a stadium theater with popcorn holders

This one looks promising, but I wonder if I should just ignore it and wait for big sales later in the year. Perhaps Black Friday? Suggestions would be appreciated.

p.s. Just a funny thing I ran across while researching HDTV.

After a few years of halted attempts, I am finally at the halfway point of Stephenson's trilogy and progressing steadily. I hope more will be revealed about the nature and plans of Enoch Root, but currently I'm more interested in the side characters and their real-world timelines. For example, Duc d'Arcachon. Did he really exist? When and how did he die? etc? So far both Google and Wikipedia have only pointed me to Stephenson-related pages.

This is just silly. The system has been out for nearly TWO years and it's still out of stock everywhere. WTF?

Where can one buy (and actually receive within 2 weeks) a vanilla Wii, with no bundle (except possibly DDR & pads), for approximately MSRP?

Update: I scored one on Ebay. Bought local so I could pick up in person and inspect. All good.

This won't significantly affect most of you, but we have been working on some meta mod changes. The most user visible change is that the UI we used to use was thrown out, and instead we are using one based on the firehose. Subscribers will see it when they go to the old metamod link although users can see it by going to this version of those hose

The first real change is that we've changed the meanings of the UI around. The old system is 'Fair' and 'Unfair' and the new system is '+' and '-'. The meanings are subtly different. You are no longer rating individual 'Insightful' or 'Troll' or whatever... you are now stating basically "Is this comment good or bad for you". Personally, since I find very few Score:5 funny comments to be actually really funny (and not just cliche memes) I '-' most of them. You are encouraged to be harsh if you don't actually think something is insightful or funny, call it such. The system encourages more of what you + and less of what you -.

You are also welcome now to do more than 10 m2 per day... however we internally have diminishing returns after 10, so you can do more, but they start to matter less and less.

There will undoubtedly be bugs so feel free to email me or vroom at slashdot if you find them. Probably next week or so we'll move this out to everyone, so your assistance is appreciated.

Dear Putin,
Chechnya.
STFU bitch.

Not that it would matter, but still, it ought to be said, loudly.

Meanwhile, Putin must be thanking God for speaking to Bush 9 years ago. He has had so much freedom to oppress, thanks to the relative moral vacuum generated by us.

Weird, I just received the 2006 Grassroots Survey of Democratic Leaders from Howard Dean, and it's formatted almost identically to the multiple redundant Republican surveys I've received, right down to the same dollar choices in the contribution checkboxes. BTW, I haven't heard from the Repugs in a while; perhaps they finally flagged me in the database. And they still haven't cashed the various $0.02 checks I sent them.

However, there is a HUGE difference in the tone of questions and answers. The Republican surveys generally sounded like this:

Do you support President Bush's plan to protect American freedom with surveillance cameras in your bedroom?
( ) Yes, I love America.
( ) No, I want the terrorists to win.

Whereas the Democratic survey has (gasp!) two or more plausible answers for each question, like this one (verbatim):

When decisions about Social Security's future are being made what do you think is most important?
( ) Keeping Social Security as a program with a guaranteed monthly benefit.
( ) Allowing younger workers to decide for themselves how their Social Security contributions are invested.
( ) Both guaranteed benefits and investments are important.

Of course, the answers are still confined to the single axis defined by the duopoly. My preferred policy (in this example, reduce the COLA and allow Social Security to gradually fade away) doesn't even cross their minds.

Eh. I guess that's why I'm not a real "Democratic Leader" (or a registered Democrat at all, for that matter). Maybe I'll send a $2 check or something; they're probably easier to buy than the GOP is.

Nearly 2/3rds of all US voters would like to see most members of Congress removed from office and replaced with new blood. Sounds like a strong national mandate for CHANGE , doesn't it?

Well, it might, except for the second question in the survey: Do you think YOUR OWN LOCAL members of Congress should get the axe? As you have already guessed, nearly as large a majority responded no. You see, their guys are the ONLY honest and good politicians in all of Washington.

Once again, the Onion remains a prophetic voice in the wilderness.

Although Squiggy is right that the one is identifiably better than the other, in my opinion he is not ENOUGH better to be worth a large personal effort on my part. So although I continue to stand against some of the obvious smears, I will not be campaigning for him in Virginia. His 180 on FISA indicates that he is a full member of The Invertebracy.

Meanwhile, although McCain has done his best to disguise himself, he is in fact Not Bush. Therefore, the difference between the two does not exceed epsilon for my purposes.

Well, for subscribers only this week at least. We have a half dozen minor bugs left in the TODO list, but if you are a paying subscriber you can test it out. It works best if you are using the keybindings to navigate. Pressing 'f' takes you to the next unread comment respecting thread order... so you can press that over and over again.

We also added a thing to 'collapse comments after reading' which I think I might turn of as a default setting soon. This is only usable for subscribers atm as well. But basically, as you navigate through a discussion, it collapses the comments you've read after you move on. This makes it really easy to navigate large discussions without having to scroll over 150 comments you've already read.

we're aware of a number of annoying bugs, but hopefully most of them will be squashed by Pudge for this weeks code refresh. If things are stable, we hope to roll this out for everyone rsn.

also my baby cut his first tooth yesterday. My furniture will never be ungnawed upon again.

After playing the electrical college game at 270toWin, I have come to the conclusion that whoever wins Virginia in November will be the next President. Please note that I predicted the same about Ohio in 2004. Suppose I should do some voter registration there this summer. Anybody want to join me?

So as we've been migrating the system from the tired old D1 to the exciting and awesome new D2 a number of complaints have come up. I'm going to talk about a couple of them here because I'm really looking for feedback on THESE issues. Please only talk about these points or I will mod you offtopic or troll or something.

The issue is about the use of Flat/Threaded/Nested modes. D2 cleanly replaces both threaded and nested modes- you effectively get nested mode by bringing the 2 sliders together. And threaded mode is vastly more flexible because you can choose the level at which comments are abbreviated or displayed in full text. So users of those modes should be set (obviously there are other reasons not to use D2, I'm just talking about the layouts here tho)

What's left is flat mode, which has a number of sort options. Now flat mode is used by roughly 4% of our active population. When i think about flat mode, I think about 2 reasons you would have to use it:

1. I hate indenting and whitespace. I want a big vertical column now this isn't my bag, but I can understand it and even consider supporting it in D2. I think you sacrifice legibility, but this is a personal preference. It also would be easy to support in D2. Hell, you could probably do it in a greasemonkey script no problem.
2. It's easier to remember your place in flat mode This to me is the only reason to use flat mode- you can reload your page an hour later, find the last comment you read, and pick up where you left off.

Now I Would think that the only reason to use flat mode is #2... except that only a couple hundred Slashdot readers have the 'ignore threads' sort order enabled. So either they don't understand what they are doing, or #1 above is the real reason that they use flat mode.

So in a nutshell, the question I am asking in this journal is 'Why do you use flatmode?' Is it cosmetic? To more easily keep your place in a discussion? Something I'm just missing? We have plans to implement a read/unread state retention for discussions, so maybe would you migrate to a threaded view if that function exists? Or is it purely aesthetic... an irrational hatred of scrollbars and whitespace? :)

The reason this matters is that simply formatting the page flatly is easy. Probably a simple greasemonkey hack or maybe a few lines of CSS. But re-implementing the alternate sort is gonna take some work. And I'm ok with that... except that the logs say that nobody actually USES that sort... they ONLY are using flat mode for the cosmetic reasons.

Speak out! Stay on-topic or you WILL be moderated down.

1. "FREE" stuff (in exchange for "participating in member offers")
2. QuizRocket (jumping Jebus on a pogo stick, QuizRocket is evil)
3. GlobalWarmingHeartland and other "climate facts" sites
4. Expelled (Ben Stein's pro-creationism movie)
5. snitch on your company to the BSA

Someone needs to pay the ISP bills for the websites that I like to use. I'm much happier knowing that it's those folks.

In-Place Posting is now live for all logged in users. Hopefully there are no surprises. We've found a number of very tiny bugs, but nothing show stopping. We'll leave the link up to the 'classic' reply form for a few weeks. Next week anonymous coward will get the new posting form... hopefully there are no surprises with that.

A few new keybindings aren't documented yet... v (end) t (top) [] change upper threshold and ,. change bottom threshold. Also 'r' opens the new reply box, m opens the mod total thingee.

The only major complaint so far is that the design changes consume a lot more whitespace. I have mixed feelings on the subject, but am aiming to strike a balance. We noticed 2 very clear places where the whitespace is excessive and hopefully that will be fixed RSN. But on the other hand, making deep threads visually clear, and drawing some attention to the 'reply' buttons is beneficial to everyone, so bare with us as we work to strike some sort of balance.

Today I spent a few minutes in blogsearch about Mike Gravel switching to Libertarian. One of the blogs I pseudo-randomly browsed was "That's Right Nate". His views on Gravel were similar to mine (assuming he was being sarcastic about the New Deal being Libertarian), so I decided to read on. That's when I came to this:

Re-read that last sentence a few times. Nate prayed about these two opposing narratives before picking one to believe. He apparently continued to believe Rove's version right up to this week. The notion that one could find objective truth to support one story or the other never even crossed his mind.

I had always assumed this sort of behavior was (other than perhaps GWB himself) just a caricature. To see an ordinary person honestly making political decisions from his gut^H^H^HGod was appalling. It brought my opinion of the average US citizen to a new low.

I definitely need to rent Idiocracy ASAP.

Discussion2 rolls on... the most recent addition to the system is in-place comment posting. Essentially, little dynamic ajaxy slideout boxes to post directly within the thread, without going to a stand-alone page. This is great because you don't have to lose your place within the thread to post.

this functionality is currently only available to paid subscribers, and several hundred of them have tested it out already. We still need to make it look pretty and add a few minor things (like the CAPTCHA for anonymous posting) but it's almost done.

Also worth noting is that logged in users can click on the 'Score' field of comments to view the moderation information on the comment. This information was previously not visible within D2, unless you navigated outside the d2 system (opening a comment in a new window did it). I doubt most people really care about this info, but it's available.

We also have one (perhaps minor) thing to get in... right now if you visit a comment directly via a CID link you can navigate within that thread, but navigating 'up' the comment hierarchy results in a new page, and a new discussion... this makes context a pain to maintain. So pudge is going to change that page to display the parent posts in an abbreviated format. This will mean that you can climb back up the thread easily, even if you entered the forum via a link deep into a thread.

A few minor items left on the todo list (keybindings for threshold changes... maybe press 'r' to open the reply slideout from the current comment, and a bunch of small design issues to make the threads a little more visually clear and easily navigatable) and we're ready to call D2 finished.

We have no plans to remove D1, so those of you who hate D2 are welcome to stay on the old system, but obviously new moderation tools and whatever else we think of will be attached to D2, not D1, so you've been warned ;)