Dear Dicedot, I have been visiting Slashdot on a daily basis for at least 14 years. I moderate regularly. If you continue to push this destructive redesign, I will leave. You may not care, but I don't think I will be the only long-time user leaving. Maybe you will attract new readers to replace us, but it won't be Slashdot any more. From now on, I will spend all my mod points promoting "Beta sucks" comments.

If a car company builds a car and sells it to a customer then they drive it do we fault them? How about if the car blows up when it is hit from the rear? Do we blame them? How about if they know about it and drive it anyway (though they didn't know when the bought it)? How many of them would know about it and know how to find out about the fact that the car blows up when hit from behind? Does the family of the first incident tell everyone in the world personally? Do we expect everyone to go out and find every defect in the car that might potentially cause the car to fail resulting in a tragic death?

The point here is pretty damn clear and you should know well enough, period. NO, not everyone is nor will be expected to know about the issues with their computer. They buy it as they would any other device, such as a camera and use it as it was intended, as it was designed.

Microsoft designed the OS this way and thus these are the faults of Microsoft. One has to at least contemplate that the EULA was written primarily to cover them on this one issue alone.

When the iPhones began to overheat and some stated that it cause them to explode next to their head is everyone supposed to stop using the iPhone? How about all those Powerbooks that caught fire? Or how about the idea that all the use of cell phones could potentially cause the consumer to suffer brain cancer tumors?

We can't expect every consumer to know about these things. Even for a technical person knowing what is the cause is difficult. Which site did they visit? How are updates done? How about the size of the updates? How about making their computer worse by installing those things that are supposed to protect them (slow downs, incompatibilities, etc).

I find it difficult to believe that anyone would blame the average user for this stuff. Shift the blame back where it belongs--squarely in the software developer's lap.

Caution: Science being done badly. Whats new? Science is meant to be pristine and perfect? If climate scientists have to cook the books to get politicians to do something then it says two things. Our understanding of climate is inadequate for the questions we need to answer. That we have major major problems at a politicial level, perhaps even to the demise of civilisation.

We've dumped a metric assload of carbon into the atmosphere and we can measure it (we have actually boosted greenhouse gases about 40% from the level pre-industrial era). there is no way this could be anything but very very bad.

If the world isn't observably warming up, or not over the last decade, but that is purely by a stroke of luck, and buys us time to actually do something. What the denalists can't show is that the aforementioned empirical asston of greenhouse gases we've spewed out is completely harmless, because simple reliable science say it can't be, and indeed hasn't been in prehistory.

Does Godwin's Law allow for amendments?

Maybe, just maybe, Microsoft manages to implement the feature that is in all other systems for at least 40 years: That you can delete/read/write an open file.

But I think Windows users need to wait until Windows 11 for that

No, what you need to do now is control the rate of overall climate change to minimize the rate of ecosystems and thermohaline cycle collapse. If the latter goes, Europe will return to their glacial situation of 12,000 years ago.

I think that's how we ended up with the entire language, actually. I don't recall a Divine Dictionary in the Garden of Eden... or one assembled from DNA.

Oh, so foreigner == invader? Read my post again. I di not mention illegal immigrants, you're the one who made that assumption...

So .. explain how impacting the lives of 90% of the population for 10% is about 'the general welfare'. The government has full power to regulate the medical profession and insurance industry. This bill does NOTHING to reduce health care costs. How do I know this?? Show me any part of it where it requires the medical profession to change any of their habits, or places any limits on their costs.

High insurance costs are a direct reflection of high medical costs. And it's higher today than 20 years for one reason .. it's better. I broke my foot in a motorcycle accident in February, and the associated doctor bills were $70,000US. This was for a SIMPLE fracture of the fibula, no bones sticking through the skin or multiple breaks. Fifty years ago they would have slapped a cast on me and sent me home. Now I stay in the hospital for 3 days, they put a plate in, and no cast. The care is far better, I had no cast or the associated discomfort, the break is healing well through the physical therapy.

So the next time someone whines about the cost of medical care, remind them of how many people survive cancer, or severe burns, or quadruple bypass surgery. All treatments that didn't exist 50 years ago and are very, very expensive today.

Of which this POS bit of legislation doesn't address at all. Treatments we all have the right to have access to.

But it should be the responsibility of the INDIVIDUAL to figure out how to pay for it, not the government. Take up a collection, setup a payment plan, beg. I don't care. It's not my problem that someone I don't know can't take care of themselves. I help my friends, their friends can help them.

I am interested in learning more about why Quebec is a separate interconnection, and I have little reason to disagree with your explanation. But I must point out that the first phase of the Quebec-New England HVDC system was finished in 1986, suggesting that the grids were asynchronous before 1990. Can you provide more information?

As we all should know by now, impenetrable security doesn't exist.

Totally impenetrable physical security doesn't exist, but totally impenetrable electronic security most certainly does. It's quite simple to make something completely immune to hacker attacks over the internet: disconnect it from the internet!

Why the nation's power grid control absolutely needs to be tied into the internet, I have no idea. Maybe someone in the field can enlighten me. But if this is a big concern, it seems like it'd be pretty to eliminate the security threat by not having any control over the power grid exposed to the internet. If someone needs to exercise some control over the system, they have to get in their car and drive to the power plant.

Of course, this wouldn't prevent someone from sneaking in somehow, but that's a far more remote danger than some hacker on the internet (who could be anywhere in the world, and probably not anywhere near your power plant) gaining access.

The digital TV standard allows for providing up to 16 days of guide data. However, the FCC only mandates that a station provide 12 hours of guide data, and many stations only provide the minimum. In many cases the station is just going with the default settings and can be convinced to change them; however, the most guide data I've seen, at least in the Denver area, is 7 days of guide data.

Canvas is definitely a step in the right direction, but it's nowhere near a full replacement. Canvas won't really help either unless people *use it*. The only way to replace Flash is to make its use so rare that there's no need to even have the plugin installed.