As someone who has been reading /. for over 15 years, and who rarely posts but always moderates when I get points, I wholeheartedly agree with this. I come here to see interesting and informative discussion about tech-related (broadly speaking) topics, and sometimes to get a tech point of view about other issues (like politics, though this is where /. discussions and moderation becomes least functional, which isn't surprising when comparing to similar discussions elsewhere on the internet). To me, the good of the current moderation system outweighs the bad. On the margins, there are changes to be made, but a complete overhaul is unnecessary.

Moderation doesn't have to be perfect. It's about generating a rough ranking of the comments on the question of "does this comment add to the discussion?". Back in the heyday of /., if I was busy, I could browse certain discussions at +4 or even +5 and get the highlights of the discussion. Now, I feel that there are fewer comments and less moderation, so there's more noise; I generally browse at +2. But the basic idea is to roughly separate the best from the worst comments. We don't need more than a -1 to +5 range to make those distinctions, and I don't think moderation abuse is so great that we need to significantly overhaul how it's done. If there are enough people commenting and enough people moderating, things tend to settle out. And that's why I come here -- the signal to noise ratio in the comments is still better than anywhere else.

If you want to "fix" Slashdot, you don't need to change the bones. I think there are two classes of changes to be made. First, attract people back with better content: more interesting stories rather than product placement and random editorials; fewer dupes; better and more clearly edited articles. Second, make it easier to comment and use Slashdot: fix the unicode and JS issues, clean up the UI, and so on. I think the /. herd has been on point so far.

Seriously? Even if you're right, posting "a few [atypical] immature soldiers" to guard someone who is arguably the highest value target in Iraq is a massive failure on the part of the Marine commanders, and they fact that they allowed these things to happen under their watch is a massive failure of the chain of command. And isn't that what the military is all about after all? Chain of command?

Oh come now. A natural monopoly is a well-defined economic term. It arises in when there is a product that has a high cost of entry, but low or near-zero marginal cost (such that the cost of serving each additional consumer is de minimis). Thus, once a firm has entered the market, no other firm will enter to compete because it can never make up its up-front costs (because the original firm can always undercut the competing firm). This allows the firm in the market to charge monopoly rents without worry about competition.

We can disagree on whether Bell was a natural monopoly or not. (Though I would argue that any last-mile system, in the absence of new technologies that make it cheaper for multiple firms to fill in the last mile, are natural monopolies.) But you can't seriously argue that natural monopolies don't exist in even the most ideal market. Even Chicago school economists recognize the possibility of natural monopolies.