This site was established as a personal blog for whatever shit Rob Malda (CmdrTaco) found interesting or relevant. The fact that it's mostly technology stuff is purely because Rob Malda is a nerd, like most of the rest of us. But that doesn't mean it all has to be technical stuff.

Whatever Rob Malda's intentions were when he started this site nearly 14 years ago is of little relevance now. Rob doesn't own the site. Geek.net is the owner and it is managed by these people. Since Geek.net is a public company we can see exactly what they think Slashdot's purpose is. I quote from their latest annual report filing:

Slashdot serves technology professionals and technology enthusiasts with timely, peer-produced and peer-moderated technology news and discussion. Slashdot's lively and robust on-line conversations and interactions leverage its innovative comment and moderation system. Slashdot served 3.8 million unique visitors in December 2009.

That is what the owners and managers of Slashdot say the purpose of Slashdot is.

Legal stupidity is interesting and relevant to all of us, because you never know when this brain rot is going to affect you directly, through no fault of your own. Just because it's not a case involving computers doesn't mean a thing.

I know what you are saying, but there is enough legal craziness to fill a web site all on its own. I think it's important that we pick the stories that would be relevant to us, not just those that are sensationalist. For example, look at the original story. It gives a broad overview and that's it. There's no investigation and no discussion of the judges decision or why he or she might have ruled they way that they did. It's just newspaper filler.

Where a site like Slashdot could easily add value is to look up the case in PACER, preferably using a tool like RECAP for Firefox so that the public documents are then automatically uploaded to the Internet Archive. That would make the court documents available to everyone for free enabling all of us to read the judge's decision and rational as well as see what case law was cited for the decision.

The discussions on Slashdot are one of the site's strengths. Having this little extra bit of information would allow us to examine the real story behind this case and have a meaningful discussion about it. There are several practicing lawyers that post on Slashdot and they may be able to offer insight into the case. Instead, we can only argue about it from a position of ignorance and supposition. I don't get much value out of that, and so I and others complain. We complain because we care. We like Slashdot and want to see it improve. If the Slashdot team were willing to add this extra value then it's something I would gladly pay for.

Slashdot also doesn't revolve around general news. This is a site for technology and science news. This general interest story involves neither. I don't think it's offtopic or unfair to ask that Slashdot stories stay on-topic for the purposes for which this site was established.

I don't understand what you are talking about, probably because you don't understand what I am talking about. Web developers with a clue and a desire for future compatibility have said for years how important it is to follow web standards and avoid writing code specific to a single browser. Many other developers and PHBs ignored this advice and targeted a single browser (IE6). Now they are paying the price, literally, because it's costing them time and money to either fix their code or engineer and maintain a workaround.

The situation reminds me of the quote: "There's never enough time to do it right, but there's always enough time to do it over."

Let this be a lesson to those companies who said it was too expensive to follow web standards when developing web sites and applications.

Mmmm. Lindsay Wagner in slow mo. Those were the days. Now I feel old.

You don't even need HTTPS. HTTP already supports authentication mechanisms. If we'd use digest authentication for logins then we wouldn't have to bother with cookies at all. Unfortunately, there's no way to make a pretty login page for digest (or plain) authentication. The browser pops up a username/password dialog instead. Therefore, web sites avoid it and opt instead for the mess of cookies and all their security issues.

Then those people should learn the meaning of words and use them correctly so that others know what they are talking about.

Dammit Slashdot, fix your comment system, I had to type the entire URL because for some reason I'm not allowed to paste...

I have no problem pasting into the text area. Maybe something is wrong with your web browser.

"Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology."

Online is retail.

It's a good thing IPv4's address space is 32-bit. Without that limitation we'd never move to IPv6 and get all of the other benefits that it offers.

Please seed!

Yes, exactly. It's also in nearly the same place in Excel.

Tools -> Autocorrect Options -> Auto Format As You Type -> Internet and network paths with hyperlinks

IMO, the grandparent doesn't deserve the +5 score since it's not informative nor insightful. Both tools have the same issue and it's equally easy to disable in both. This is more a case of careysub complaining because he or she does not want to learn their tools.

Having worked on Adobe Acrobat (and Reader) for the last 8 or so years (my name is in a good chunk of all the release credits since version 5 or 6)

Aha! So you are to blame! Get him, boys!

Furthermore, I have found Excel to be a nightmare in its insistence on being "clever" and knowing better than me what is or should be in my document: insistently turning text that it thinks looks like email and web addresses into live links (something I have never wanted in my life)

To be fair, OpenOffice does this as well. Two weeks ago I was creating a spreadsheet of contact information. Every time I entered an email address, Calc would turn the email address into a link, change the background color to grey, and then would not let me edit the address in the formula field. Don't believe me? Open Calc and enter "address@example.com" in a field, then hit return. The "lightbulb" helper (OO's Clippy) appears in the bottom right to tell me that "An URL has been detected and a hyperlink attribute has been set".