I'm not crazy about polls but this one was so bad I had to add my agreement. I can't even vote because it doesn't make sense!

THIS!! Somebody bump this up!!!

Ok that makes more sense. Thanks.

I don't get it. "News for Nerds" is polling to find out where we were during Katrina? Huh?? Every natural disaster has an impact on infrasctructure, and I'm sure lots of data centers got hammered or destroyed, and that would be a much more interesting discussion.

Coming up we have other breaking news. The earth has mass, and studies show that people sometimes do and say things they wish they hadn't. Wait a moment, this just in: Barbara Streisand sues photographer Kenneth Adelman for violation of privacy, because his aerial photography to track coastal erosion included her Malibu home in one of his 12,000 photographs. Before Streisand filed her lawsuit, the image was viewed on the photographer's web site six times, two of which were by Streisand's attorneys, and within one month of the suit, more than 420,000 people had seen the image. We'll have more on these breaking stories when we come back.

This is the guy who spent his time and mostly his own money to document the quickly-fading memory of Bulletin Board Systems in a documentary. I know because he came all the way to California and interviewed me and many others who were sysops back in the day. My board was very minor but he was gracious enough to travel to the small town where I now live to interview me. I have a great deal of respect for him and his efforts at preservation. Some day someone will be asked to preserve Jason's life and legacy and I hope they can apply the same zeal he brings to his efforts to their own. He's not curing cancer or landing a man on the moon, but somebody who takes the time to preserve the slightly less critical aspects of our tech history deserves support and credit. Good for him.

I have come to really despise the iAds for companies who pay Apple to insert them into the web pages I'm viewing in Safari on my iPhone. I'm enough of a consumer to know that advertising pays for stuff, but does every page you view, every time you view it, have to have one or more ads right in the middle? On the small phone screen it's very obnoxious. Apple is hacking the flow of information on my browser screen and injecting an ad right in the middle of the page. It really is making me crazy, and provides a great incentive for jailbreaking.

Now, Apple is crowing about their new ad blocking features in the next release of iOS, but they will not be blocking iAds. This great new feature merely blocks ads for companies that have not paid Apple to advertise. Once you pay Apple for the privilege, Apple will guarantee that the user will not be able to block the ad. Since this whole advertising scheme is built into the OS and not Safari, it will be very difficult to defeat. I am growing to regret my purchase of an iPhone 6.

Google "adaptive headlights" and you'll see that this has been going on since the dawn of the headlight, or at least since the 1930's. There have been systems that were mechanically linked to the steering wheel, like the famous middle headlight on the Tucker, as well as automatic dimmers. In the late 60's my father bought a 1956 Lincoln Continental Mk II which was the first Lincoln to offer such a system. It was very unreliable and I think he disabled it somehow. Typically, in an effort to protect us all from crazy automakers making headlights ... um... dangerously adaptive (??? my words, but really, WTF?) created a standard definition of exactly how the lights had to work, and anything else is illegal. To keep us safe. Of course.

As long as you can use it without it flying off your lap, (we are talking about a laptop, right?) or desk, and the rest of the specs are what you're looking for, why wouldn't you want it to be as light as possible? As long as the "bottom" where the keyboard is weighs enough so the screen doesn't tip it over backwards, I say the lighter the better! Why would you intentionally want something to be heavy? Screw all the conversations around it being preceived as being cheap because it's light. The only people that would think that are people who know NOTHING about what it takes to MAKE things light in the first place! If it weren't for durability factors and little things like flashpoints, I would say make everything out of magnesium honeycomb! Or whatever is next, of course. (Spiderweb anyone?)

Just check out bmc.com and look at their IT Asset Management page. BMC IT Asset Management

Nobody really cares that deeply about polls. They are a LITTLE BIT entertaining. Burying them in the news stories... who cares? The only people who feel so strongly about this just can't stand change of any kind. I mean, really, you're going to get all hot and bothered about shifting the poll from where it belongs, outside of the news feed, to now it's inline with the news? Meh. Stupid move, but who really cares that much? It has no effect on the rest of the site usage. If you're going to leave it there, just make it easier to see the total results without taking me to another page. I will just say that Polls are NOT news, no matter what Faux News would have you believe, so why put them into the news "feed"? Dumb. But I don't really care. I'm mainly responding to try and put a LITTLE bit of balance into the usual over-the-top reaction to minor changes around here. I did not like the old "beta" site at all, and I'm glad you scrapped it. That had a direct effect on the news presentation. This one... I'll quote Bruce Willis from "The Kid": "Waah! Waah! Waah! Somebody call the waa-mbulance!!" Sheesh.

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but rather, 'hmm... that's funny...'" - Isaac Asimov

I think his point was that the majority of new hams no longer construct their own radios from scratch. They buy them commercially made, and the new radios are no more serviceable than your cellphone or any other modern surface-mounted-components electronic device. I don't think he meant commercial as in, commercial band radios. But I could be wrong.

Since you posted as AC I'll say this. You must be an older Ham who got his ticket "back in the day" when you had to know morse code and had to design a radio circuit from scratch during your examan, and now you resent the ease with which an Amateur Radio license can be obtained. There have always been jerks in every endeavor. Why, you may not believe this, but there are even a few here on Slashdot! The FCC continues to cut funding for enforcement, so more and more we hams have to police ourselves. So, do that. If you have a couple of hams in your neighborhood who are violating rules, report them.

As far as getting all sanctimonious, when was the last time you really heard anything about what Hams did in a crisis, other than on vary narrowly focused outlets like Slashdot or Amateur Radio Newsline? It's not like we're parading in the streets crowing about our accomplisments. Just a little acknowledgement is all we want, and then only because Amateur Radio is largely invisible so people think it's dying. It's not. There are more licensed operators world wide now then ever before.

Get a grip, and get real. Seriously.