The thing that is most frustrating to me is that is seems that many of the complaints brought up when the Beta first went public persist. Looking back at the feedback in that comment section, there are a lot of specific criticisms of the site. It wasn't general complaining, but pointing out stuff that should be fixed. Lots of that went ignored.

I wrote an email back in October with some feedback, and I wrote another today. The company has had five months to fix some pretty basic things and listen to feedback. It didn't.

It might be time to move on.

You must be new here.

The site should default to classic. One of the things I love about /. is that it is generally pretty light, even with the stuff that came with the last update a few years back. Keep it light by default. Remember: you're audience are power users; treat us accordingly.

Another major annoyance of mine these days is that for many programs, these options for customization are disappearing. Especially in the mobile world. The "Settings" menus in Android often only allow a very few things to be changed.

I don't know about you, but this was easier for me back in the days when the UI didn't change based on what you had selected. Buttons and menus that were unavailable for whatever was selected were grayed out they weren't hidden like they are now. Drives me nuts. It all makes me feel that UI designers are forced to do this kind of stuff to justify their jobs. I cannot imagine that (most) people actually find it easier to use.

Was he in any way associated with MIT? If so, you have a point. If not, I think you're trying awfully hard to justify something that is pretty clearly illegal. I'm not saying that the response by the prosecutor is in anyway proportional to what he did, but the GP makes a valid point.

You're blissfully unaware of the regulations involved in getting a mine up and running. Especially in California. It takes years to get through permitting. And Molycorp's environmental record is far from pristine, which throws more regulatory junk in their way. link. I work in mining, and for an expansion of a mine I worked at that was 100% on private property, there were something like 30 permits, each with its own lengthy process, that we needed to clear before going forward. And that was in a state far more friendly to the industry

It's true that rare earths aren't rare, geologically speaking. But big deposits that have the mineralogy to give them high concentrations amenable to processing are quite rare. They're out there, but they're not common. And China can extract and process them for a lot less than we can here in the rest of the world.

Not really. they priced other operations out of the market, i.e., Mountain Pass with all its costs related to labor and environmental snafus. Now the price is getting back up to where laying out the capital (tens to hundreds of millions of dollars) is again worth looking into.