I remember that shortly after the Dice takeover, there was concern amongst the community of what was going to happen to Slashdot. Someone (Timothy?) made a special post clearly stating that Dice had no intention whatsoever of messing with the community. It allowed everyone a sigh of relief, but I — and probably many others — knew in the back of our minds that it was only a matter of time. It looks like the time has finally come after ... how long has it even been?

Unfortunately, I can't remember which story it was, as it was not the original "Dice Buys Slashdot" post but was some time after that. I also can't remember the exact topic of the story — only that they gave us that very clear assurance. This isn't the first time a corporation has blatantly lied, of course. They'd probably "justify" it by saying "Yeah ... at the time we had absolutely no intention, but we did have the intention of having the intention in the future.".

I'll be watching threads like this in the months to come to see where the community plans to go so that I can hopefully continue to read through the same levels of insightful discussion day in and day out.

Personally, I find it somewhat sad that individual groups of people are all trying to accomplish the same thing or things which have been accomplished by humanity previously. What I'm saying is that I wish, rather, that the entire world would unite efforts in furthering human space-exploration technologies instead of countries keeping these "secrets" to themselves and ultimately slowing everything down from what they could be if we had one major, united world effort.

I suppose a lot of that behavior originates from from exactly what you point out in your post — though I do not understand said behavior.

There is a video, but it says "A plugin is needed to display this content." for me, so I didn't watch the video...

They often get paid by "dollars per barrel per day". Thus, having lots of barrels set out for a long time increases their revenues.

You know, I'm not sure this way of looking at it actually makes sense. I might need to think about this a little more. Still, why not open a bank account and forego the fees?

Consider it this way:

Say you get a $250 check each week, which you take to Walmart to have cashed. If they take out $6, then they are removing 2.4% of your paycheck. If you get a paycheck each week, then you will get 52 paychecks in a year.

With a simple compounding-interest formula, they are making [ ( 1 + 0.024 ) ^ 52 = 3.43 ] or 343% interest on your paychecks.

I tend to agree with your conjecture that this is an effort to drive more people to G+. My Google account is old enough that I do not belong to G+. I actually opted in, saw it was something I wouldn't care to use, and then promptly opted out (later on they stopped the whole opt-out thing and now they bug me about signing up at every opportunity). So, anyway, my point is that I don't really know much about it, as I never use it.

What I'm getting at is, if they're trying to move people over the G+ by closing Reader, then does this mean that G+ has a promising replacement for Reader? If it does AND some of the listed alternatives do not live up to expectations, then perhaps G+ may be worth considering even if I use it for nothing but a feed reader... But I'm not about to sign up until I can confirm it has what I would want.

Immediately after seeing the original post from the Google Reader blog, I started looking for a solution. It seems that practically every RSS program or service out there actually uses Google Reader as a centralized syncing platform.

I read news through RSS feeds at different computers throughout the day and on different OSes. The ability for a service to synchronize between all the places I access the feeds is paramount in a replacement. Thus, all those services which use Google Reader for syncing purposes will break once Google shuts down Reader, so, sadly, they are not a viable option as things stand right now.

I do like some of the alternatives posted by other commenters; I'll check out some of them when I have the time. I also signed the petition in one of the first comments above — it may have no effect, but it's worth trying, I suppose.

I *did* say "if many people did this regularly", but I was not trying to imply that I would do so. I'd do it one time at said store --- the first time I find out about it. After that, I'd either go to another store or probably use cash/check. I am not poor, but I *am* cheap. If a store is going to conditionally hit me with a fee, then I will do what I can to avoid it while wasting the least amount of time.

My own opinion on this change is that it is in the store's benefit to encourage people to use cards. It seems that most cases of armed robbery are cash-related offenses. Minimizing the amount of cash in the store should thereby reduce the damage from such occurrences. I realize that much of the cash should be locked up in a safe at most times, so perhaps this particular thing is a non-issue.

I also know that people do not like seeing extra fees on their bills. I have seen quite a few instances in the news where a small fee shows up on some bill (phone bill, bank accounts, etc.) and many customers "revolt". I believe continuing to keep the fee "hidden" within the prices of all their products would be better for keeping their customers' anger at bay and also — as the summary suggests — moving towards a cashless society.

I like using credit cards for the cash back, but as soon as it no longer pays to use a card, I'll stop using it. I have no allegiance to the credit card companies, and this extra fee may even be good at reducing their power and influence — which I'd say isn't necessarily a bad thing.

You are entitled to your opinion, but do you have an actual logical argument to support it? If not, then I'm not really sure why I should listen to what you say.

I plan to account for this possible trend in the following way:

In businesses where I buy merchandise (grocery stores, department stores, etc.), I plan to pay with credit card after the cashier rings it up. If I notice they have tacked on a credit-card fee, then I will go over to customer service, have them refund every item to my card, and then have them ring everything up again. At this point, I will proceed to pay with cash or check.

I would think that if many people did this regularly, that would eat up a lot of their labor resources (namely customer service desk) and may convince them to revert any changes. What else would they do? Make every item non-refundable? It may also be annoying for them if they have to constantly break 100-dollar bills for people who now must carry cash around with them everywhere.

I really want to use Fedora, but I type in the Colemak keyboard layout, and I can't figure out how to change the system default to Colemak (to work both at the login screen and after logging in).

Isn't the find kind of irrelevant to the chances that life exists elsewhere? It's like saying that, if I lose two socks and find one 3 years later, then I therefore have an increased chance of finding the second sock sooner rather than later. The first has nothing to do with the second. The existence of life in one place on Earth has little to do with chances of finding life elsewhere, since they're two independent events.

Earthquakes.

Earthquakes create different types of waves, and different types of waves behave differently through different types of objects. Pressure waves travel through solids and liquids, though at different speeds, depending on density. Shear waves do not travel through liquid, but they do travel through solid. Using complex geometry, mathematical models, knowledge of substances, and recording many points recording waves produced by earthquakes, we can map what the earth looks like below ground.