Wouldn't most of the Slashdot membership and audience (also known as "nerds") consist of graduates of higher learning? Therefore the story falls under the "news for nerds" criteria

Isn't a trillion dollars fairly significant? Therefore the story falls under the "stuff that matters" criteria

If you're so concerned about slashdot, shouldn't you be in their parking lot protesting them? Note that I think that you expressing your outrage somewhat inappropriately is still pretty much okay, which is how I feel about OWS

And finally, there are many successful countries that directly fund higher education, in other words not forcing college grads to become slaves to loans. Just because America does a bad job of funding its own future does not mean that we have a good system, which is I believe the thrust of your "argument"

i agree with the spirit of what you're saying, what we have, loosely, is fascism

however, Romney does not have a good chance, his chances approach zero. if the economy is rebounding around election time, it'll be Obama. if we're in the middle of the double-dip of recession, it'll be President Rick Perry

unless one happens to be LGBT, or a billionaire, life will get worse at approximately the same rate under either option. not sure if it has any legs, but Perry has been blathering about the "injustice" that half of Americans pay no income tax (due to the fact that their income falls below some minimum, roughly 12K i believe). gotta frakking love that

you see, the problem with poor people is they have it too easy. i see all that blubber walking around and i'm thinking "cheap alternative fuels" on the hoof. our soylent crackers may not come from poor people but soon our electricity will. yee hah!

Unfortunately it is more complicated than that. There is a cartel that controls distribution for movies. The cartel takes the largest share of any revenues. Giving money to the cartel perpetuates the cartel.

My personal take is that I am loathe to give money to the cartel. Sony, for example, stands between me and the people who really made the movie. I can't give the actual creators any money, as much as I appreciate their work, I can only give Sony money and then some insignificant sliver of that goes to the creative types who are really just Sony employees. Should I care that Sony pretends to be the creator and pretends to be hurt by my actions? I don't care about Sony's rights, I'm appalled anyone would think Sony has any rights.

Note that I consider first-runs in theaters to be fair game. They can charge what they want, keep it in the theaters for as long as they want, etcetera. Movie sales as it is currently situated is what I find so appalling. If I pay for a disc I should own it. Even better, I should pay for a file download and own that, as we now have for music.

Contrast the current movie situation with books. If a book is new and I want it, I pay for it. I do this because I appreciate an author's work and my money pays them for that work and encourages them to do more. A fair percentage of what I give Amazon will really get to the author, so I feel like my actions matter in this case. I'm also fairly persuaded that money for music is more fairly distributed and the "product" is now no longer crippled with DRM. I'd be thrilled if they ever did that for books, it's really the only sticky point for giving money to Amazon.

If the movie cartel would pretend to care about the current social contract and renegotiate it with me and every other consumer, I'd play along. What's a fair price to own a movie? Let's find out. Let's have a market and see what happens. And if I knew there was percentage of my money going to writers, directors, perhaps even actors, I'd be more willing to part with cash. If I owned the "product" I was paying for I'd be happier. What the cartel is actually doing is what cartels always do: thump chests, hurt random people with lawsuits, pay for governments (especially USA) to strong-arm anyone they consider a threat, etcetera.

Fuck them.

I hope with this version the garden wall is a lot higher; I'm tired of the riffraff poking their noses over the wall and complaining about the wall, the garden, the garden's occupants, their own wallet, their holey pants, etcetera

Shouldn't that be "paint African-American roofs white?"

You'd think our first black president would know better

That's a retcon for a saying from the future. This Netflix price increase is so heinous that it will be remembered for a thousand years, so that in the year 3011 when Gilbex says to Nanfred "GlarbCorp just Netflix-raised the price of nanobutter" it'll be make perfect sense when Nanfred replies "GlarbCorp're smegging smegged-up smeggers!"

Meh, not so much. Last time I looked every profession was under attack. Labor in general is under attack. Any task that cannot be performed by a machine, for whatever reason, is being redefined, outsourced, minimalized, etcetera. Even real professions, like doctors, engineers, teachers, lawyers. And I bet you just thought "wait, teaching isn't a profession" which goes to show how much that profession has been destroyed.

Who in management thinks of coders as being in some sort of profession? The coders are overpriced employees who are a constant drain on profit; they must be minimalized or eliminated somehow, that's the mindset. Sure I'm generalizing but not many of us get to work for enlightened management, most of us have a mortgage to pay and when the person who can easily replace us asks us to adopt a particular goal, we do.

obviously you lean right. did you not get the memo that right-thinking, right-leaning people should only head to "nytimes.com" to bitch at Krugman? to suggest that a "real American" would ever be in the NY Times audience shows your commitment to the cause must be flagging or flaccid. the left still has its Mojo, just ask Mr. Weiner. no flaccid problems there!

is that what the Fox legal team said? why would you repeat corporate rubbish? at least put a smiley face on that noise or you might confuse the less evolved

Enemy, shmenemy.

Microsoft was a bland bureaucracy that produced the worst sort of bloated corporate junkware. They were monopolistic pigs with contemptible table manners (think Ballmer here). At times I frakking hated them.

Google however has been a meritocracy that creates stuff that is often pretty cool. Google has an appetite like any other corporate beast but so far they've been more refined which I appreciate. So far I have little cause to fear or hate them.

So Microsoft took my money and gave me junkware. Google takes whatever data I give them and gives me ads and fairly useful tools.

I like Google's proposition better and I don't believe that is particularly sad at all.

• 1) find out which Comcast execs use their own service
• 2) hack in with malice aforethought
• 3) ???
• 4) profit!

Comcast Exec: [logs into service] hmm, why does my home thermostat read 666?

Hubbard was a hateful, psychotic douchebag. Surely a closer comparison to Hubbard is Ellison at Oracle, versus Jobs at Apple.

I get the controlling, the secrecy, the clique -- all true for both Scientology and Appledom. But to compare the virility of the "illness" I say Apple is like a cold sore caught from a kiss (costs something, but worth it), Oracle is like herpes (one pays for life and there is no cure) and Scientology is like ebola (one bleeds [cash] til one dies)

Nice story "Chips & Dips"
Slashdot (really just a rebranded "Chips & Dips") can't resist pulling an acronym out of the mists of time
Seriously, not that hard to say "Russia's Federal Security Service (aka FSB) wants..."
The 1980's called and said they wanted their Cold War propaganda back

This is not a bad strategy for Microsoft but I don't think the stated reason makes any sense.

I guess Mr. Mundie can't say "Microsoft is a flat-flippered, bloated, beached, dead whale of an organization and we cannot expect to catch our more nimble competitors." At least he can't say that and keep his job.

Instead of Microsoft trying to be "cool" - which they are genetically incapable of - they should go after a market where a hugely overpriced competitor could be undercut. I'm thinking Oracle business applications could be undercut without too much effort. Microsoft sort of has their own server software stack - they just need to cobble together some business junkware that runs on it then sell it at a tenth the cost of Oracle's junkware. Then it's "Hello Mister Massive Sales! W00t!"

MS already has a lot of the pieces, they just need to bundle it altogether, call it a "solution" and run it in the cloud :)

Never attribute to competence that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. [ Krugman's Razor ]