I can't believe that I'm actually reading an April Fools Day thread, much less commenting on one, but here goes....

The difference between a terrorist and another type of combatant isn't history or what the group is fighting for. It is whether they target civilian populations or not and use terror as a tactic. The term terrorist has been rendered meaningless in recent times. Now we see "terrorist attack on army base". Targeting a military force is not terrorism, regardless of the group who does it.

We all went to Soylent News - the stories are more like the slashdot of old.

I use classic mode and perhaps have some setting that preserves some older layout. The thing that I like about the older layout is that I can get a real sense of the conversation that is taking place by seeing the hierarchy of comments. I may only be primarily reading +4 and +5 comments, but I can instantly see where they fit in the conversation. Perhaps someone posted a +5, was replied to for two levels, and then someone posted a +4. Showing the hierarchy allows me to instantly understand where the +4 was in relation to the +5, and if I wish, I can quickly open one of the intermediate parents in a new tab, allowing me to view its siblings as well.

This works well for how I read slashdot - I scan down the page for interesting comments, and then open some of the summarized lower level children in a new tab and read through them. If someone posted an interesting point, it is easy for me to view all of the replies.

Admittedly, I have not used the beta much, but I have not been able to figure out how to read in my style. Say that I am reading at the +4 comment level. I have no way of discerning if a particular child comment is replying to the +4/5 parent above it, or if there are several intermediate posts. I have no way to see all of the replies to a particular post.

My experience with classic mode is that I'm reading a conversation, and I have a choice of where I want to dig in further to the conversation. My experience with beta mode is that I'm just reading a bunch of random comments with no good understanding of their relation to each other.

Why would an anti-American committee give the prize to the president of the United States?

tl;dr new platform starting with 0% marketshare has market share growing faster than established company.

Crap, now the NSA will have a backdoor into the government!

In other words, think long and hard about having Steve Dickson make purchasing decisions for your company in the future....

I wear almost nothing but jeans and jean shorts most days.........But to say it doesn't fit in "regular" pants I just don't think is accurate. You most definitely do not need a fanny pack or anything like that.

Believe me, jean shorts are the pants equivalent of a fanny pack.

Weird that this is the only comment so far that even mentions this part of the story. Can you imagine if Apple put this restriction in place with the next iPhone?

I wonder how long it will take for Comcast to suddenly decide to offer a very similar service in Provo.

Even if they provide equal or better, they've lost me. When you have absolute control and abuse your customers, why would they even entertain sticking with you when the playing field becomes level? You've already proven your customer service at that point.

Couldn't a god create a unicorn that is both invisible and pink? Are you saying that the power of a god is limited?

So, to return to the GP's example, do you think that agnostics would say: "Invisible pink unicorns have not yet been proven to exist, therefore I will act under the working assumption that they do not exist."

I see this atheism/agnosticism argument all the time and it really just seems to come down to semantics. An atheist is comfortable saying that they don't believe in something, whereas an agnostic (for some reason only in the case of a god argument) has to be super literal and state that anything (living teapots on Saturn) could exist. Face it, you don't believe that invisible pink unicorns exist. You don't believe that there are living teapots on Saturn.

Yes, which is why Google is testing the concept on slashdot...

That would be a very good point if the CPU was the only resource that had contention on the system. On that Win 7 box, how much RAM is being used?