We're still stick in the old world, even with all the nice shiny technology around us. NBC is in a world where they wish everyone watched Johnny Carson every night. Where politicians can't go on stage without flashing their wedding rings. Where they can, with impunity broadcast laughable stories from the Olympics. They're still stuck in that world. And if you love the Olympics, so are we too.

Just came back here for sh*ts and giggles after approx 8 years. Checked out the beta site. Immediately my whole being relaxed. I could finally read the stories, enjoy the comments. Its so much cleaner and clearer and than before. I'd say to the current owners of Slashdot. Make the change. Quickly. Some of the neck-beards here would like you to run an ad-free site that looks like a circa 1985 newsgroup, while you keep taking fistfuls of money out of your wallet to run the servers and pay the employees forever without hope of any return. Not sustainable. Not matter how we would want it like that.

Look, 2 people "really like" the product.

You don't even know if it will be saleable. See, this is the thing that annoys the crap out of me. Right now, your product has zero value, because you have not started to sell it as yet. Absolutely zero.

Sell the darned thing first, see if people like it, if they do, then at least you have some stake in the marketplace and in any proceedings. You would have had the product out there, people may buy it, and you will have first mover advantage.

Right now, all you have is the possibility that someone "may" sue you, and thats just in your fevered imagination. Get coding boyo!

While it would be nice to have more competition in the space, the fact is that we trust Amazon with our bits now. There are other players we could trust, but none with the sheer power of Amazon. Sure they go down once or twice a year, but hey, who among us can claim that nothing in our entire infrastructures never ever goes down? Why would the submitter think that any other current player can keep their service growing and have the same reasonable uptimes that Amazon does? Here in the real world, we don't mind paying for crap that works. That's what makes economies run.

The days of getting slashdotted are over! Slashdot does not have enough traffic to do that anymore :-)