If you look at revenues, they're sideways over the past years. So OK, she didn't turn the company around. But she took a has-been company with little really going for it and... well, kept it from going bankrupt. Given that the market cap is currently $50 billion, I think $186 million is not excessive for keeping a sinking ship afloat. Hell, who could have done it? Sure, Jobs did an amazing job turning around Apple when he came back, but it had a strong niche in OS and hardware design, and Yahoo never really had anything like that once they passed their peak. And while I'm not some sort of hard-core feminist, I think there's a bit of hypocrisy that she's taking flak for making money off mediocre performance running a mediocre, has-been company. Any number of male CEOs have had been highly compensated for driving good companies into the ground, to the point that it's hardly even news. It's just sort of expected.

I've been a reader of Slashdot since before they even had user accounts, and if I had felt like making my first comment with an account sooner, would have easily landed a 4-digit UID. I have a couple thousand comments to my name (though not many over the past couple of years), excellent karma, and a long history on this site. I've always been impressed with the commenting/moderation system, which I think remains the site's biggest innovation/strength, and one that I wish more websites would use to get control of their comment sections.

But over the years, I've watched Slashdot become less and less interesting as the quality of stories has gotten lower and lower. But this is the last straw.

Rarely have I seen the commentariat completely united in pointing out that this story was a bad idea:
- It's purely political with zero tech content.
- It's a direct repost from PRNewsWire
- It's all about a pathetic self-selected internet survey
- It comes from a group so political, it might as well be called "Doctors Against Filthy Liberals"

The comments section of Slashdot can be lively and interesting, but only if the editors pick something other than pathetic troll-bait to get the discussion going, and they've fallen down on that job horribly. Rob & co. knew how to get a discussion going; the latest bunch alternate between click-bait and the most abstruse and boring tech stories they can find.

After nearly 20 years with Slashdot, I'm done. I'm deleting the Slashdot feed from my RSS reader, and I guess it'll go on (or not) without me.

Google has a great number of money-losing products and services. Google Maps is one of them (especially without these ads.) Compared with how much it costs to collect and maintain the mapping data (not to mention the development and infrastructure cost for the application), they most certainly lose money on it. (Google tracks and uses your location to serve you search ads with or without the use of Google Maps if you have an Android phone or use any Google product or browse to any site serving Google ads on your computer.)

Google is making precisely bupkis on self-driving cars, Google Voice, Google Docs (at least the non-commercial version), etc.

You didn't pay for Google Maps (either on a one-time basis or an ongoing charge.) Yep, you bought an Android phone, but navigation is hardly a core part of Android.

If you want the ability to re-sell an electronic copy of a work, then you have to accept DRM (and consequences for cracking it.) A physical book (say, a 500-page novel), has built-in "copy protection" in that it is tedious, at best, to make a copy to keep for yourself prior to sale. (And if you do make a complete copy for yourself, it is uncontroversial that this could, in theory, get you in trouble.)

If a publisher can be reasonably assured that the user will not sell a copy while keeping the one they have, then it is reasonable for them to let said sale take place. But without solid DRM, no such assurance exists. I can't blame a publisher for being more than a but upset over an easy market for cheap "used" e-books if there's no DRM.

Paraphrasing: "Because kids can't code an OS from scratch after playing around with a computer for an hour, we are teaching them 'all wrong'." Seriously?

Yes, the general public frequently confuses the writing of code with Computer Science, but that does not mean that schools are doing anything "wrong" by starting out with some simple toyboxes for kids to play with.

How dare Google try and make a profit off this product that they provide to the public without charge. The nerve!

>Do you believe rehabilitation is impossible or do you want revenge?

I don't believe that someone who commits mass murder can be rehabilitated, no. It isn't about revenge; it's about public safety.

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

This is precisely why I lost all interest in Oculus the instant I heard that it had been acquired by Facebook.

What if they had ordered 200k of the things, and they found a defect that escaped test? Starting off with a smaller run is not a horrible choice. It sucks that the devices are late, but it's hardly an outrage,.

Color me skeptical, but these "battery breakthrough" stories are the new "laptop fuel cell" stories, which have appeared here since about the first month Slashdot has existed, and always been shipping just a little bit in the future.

When they put them in a shipping product, then I'll pay attention.

Well, the thing is, even if we HAD a "DNA Beautifier", which we do not, even neat, organized, DNA is about as useful as handing that Google.com code over to my 96-year-old Grandmother and asking her to interpret exactly, with perfect precision, what even part of it does. We simply do not know enough about protein synthesis for the source code to be of much use at all, and there aren't any obvious efforts on the horizon for great leaps forward in that respect.

Not in five years, maybe not in fifty; this is so absurdly over-optimistic, it's not even funny.

http://xkcd.com/1605/

We know SO LITTLE about how genes actually function to produce, well, you, the idea that we can, within five years, figure out which genes are "responsible" for aging and turn them off/around is ridiculous. The amount of feedback looping going on, even if we knew which genes produced which raw proteins, is so twisted that even figuring out the protein synthesis process itself requires super-computers, much less figuring out how all those proteins interact with your body.

We heard all this very same talk when the first Human Genome Project results were released. Please tell me what grand advances that has brought us, other than a few diagnostic tests, and some treatments for a couple rare diseases.

The patent office has some pretty strict limits as to when they can actually reject a patent. As in, there are specific laws they must follow for something to qualify as "prior art" for a patent rejection, and only specific places the law authorizes them to go. As in, with the silly "Point a Laser Pointer at a Cat" patent... any idiot knows there are approx. 1B videos on YouTube about this. But internet videos aren't on the list. Nor are websites in general, unless said websites have an actual printed publication behind them.

Certainly Internet-based prior art can be used as an effective DEFENSE to a patent lawsuit, and can lead to the patent being revoked, but they cannot be used by the patent examiners in the initial evaluation.