Reminds me of this strip from Bloom County. http://www.louielouie.net/pix-... Whenever I read about George Bush Sr. now, the first thing I think about is always "meaner stinks meat bake it cone."

I always misheard that song's lyrics, too: "I'm up all night to get stoned, she's up all night to get boned..."

I think you missed the part where he said "I went and had a blood test done which gave the same results as my sister."

I think at this short time-scale it will remind those who use government services (e.g., WIP) a lot that government matters (which we can assume they knew already), but others who benefit less directly will probably feel little to no change, at least in the short term. I can't say the shutdown has any noticeable impact on my day-to-day existence, except that I feel angry thinking about it. While I'm with you that government is important, I frankly don't want to wait until we start noticing the effects of, say, EPA/FDA regulations not being enforced...

(I realize people will always hate change at first, and this may be influencing my reaction, but...)

I check Slashdot for news 1) to read the comments on topics that are interesting and controversial (at least, after someone has helpfully filtered out the trolls) and 2) because I find it relaxing not to be bombarded with irrelevant images and animations on the home page. The new design undermines both those strengths. Where's the comment filter slider or its equivalent? And why, for an article about Samsung artificially boosting tablet performance stats, do we have to look at an old-timey painting of ladies playing cards?

The (supposed) target audience for this site, I suspect, is not afraid of actually reading a page of text to get the information they want. So why the need to make Slashdot look like every other tawdry news site?

(Someone should have modded me "flamebait," I guess!) My experience with trying to make simple typo/grammar fixes on wikipedia and repeatedly getting directed to the sandbox made me give up trying about 5 years ago, so I unfortunately can't find the diffs for you. For what it's worth, I was working as a copyeditor at the time, so it wasn't that I was making nonsensical corrections. But maybe I'll try again someday if the opportunity arises.

Only in theory. In practice, they'll reverse your edits if you're anonymous.

Errol Morris used almost exactly that setup to interview Robert McNamara in The Fog of War: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663105/errol-morriss-secret-weapon-for-unsettling-interviews-the-interrotron

They're spying, too (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-07/11/blackberry-india)--they just want to be the only ones.

Yes. Just as currency has value because people collectively agree it does, words have meanings because people collectively agree on them. Most people think hacker = bad. So if you want them to see you as working for good, don't use the term to refer to yourself.