Well, given the diversity of Slashdot audience and their nonexistent ability to organize, a boycott is unlikely to effect any real change.

On the other hand, Alice Hill - President at Slashdot Media or some of her bosses from Dice Holdings, like Michael P. Durney - President and CEO or Klavs Miller - Senior Vice President, Technology can be quite effective in stopping this madness and idiotic destruction of value, if they care to understand the problem at hand.

I don't think all of this would happen if they realized that Slashdot's value doesn't stem from it as a news site (of which there are thousands), but as a news discussion site.

Messing with the comment, moderation and social functionalities and their design over here is playing with fire.

I don't think these folks understand that people don't come to Slashdot to read carefully selected news (which are not, BTW) in a pretty-glossy presentation, but to participate in or consume/read the discussion. And the new Beta demolishes that.

If someone else better skilled in writing would make a petition on http://www.petitiononline.com/ and direct it at those guys, that would be so much more effective than ranting here in comments, which these people probably had never looked at, or trying to organize boycotts among a disorganized crowd.

Well, a receptionist is really unlikely to effect any real change.

On the other hand, Alice Hill - President at Slashdot Media or some of her bosses from Dice Holdings, like Michael P. Durney - President and CEO or Klavs Miller - Senior Vice President, Technology can be quite effective in stopping this madness and idiotic destruction of value, if they care to undersand the problem at hand.

I don't think all of this would happen if they realized that Slashdot's value doesn't stem from it as a news site (of which there are thousands), but as a news discussion site.

Messing with the comment, moderation and social functionalities and their design over here is playing with fire.

I don't think these folks understand that people don't come to Slashdot to read carefully selected news (which are not, BTW) in a pretty-glossy presentation, but to participate in or consume/read the discussion. And the new Beta demolishes that.

If someone else better skilled in writing would make a petition on http://www.petitiononline.com/ and direct it at those guys, that would be so much more effective than ranting here in comments, which these people probably had never looked at, or harassing random rank-and-file Dice employees.

If you really want this madness stopped, petition the boss of Dice Holdings, Michael P. Durney - President and CEO or possibly Klavs Miller - Senior Vice President, Technology.

If someone else better skilled in writing would make a petition on http://www.petitiononline.com/ and direct it at those guys, that would be so much more effective than ranting here in comments, which these people probably had never looked at.

After reading through other linked profles from her Google Plus profile, especially the CrunchBase one, I'm getting pretty confident that I've nailed it:

Hill was named Managing Director of Dice.com in November 2010. She is responsible for the development and direction of all activities for Dice.com, with particular emphasis on product development and innovation, building and maintaining industry presence, and managing large account sales. Dice.com, a Dice Holdings company, is the leading career website for technology and engineering professionals, and the companies that seek to employ them. NYSE: DHX

in 2012 Hill was appointed President of Slashdot Media - running the SF and NY-based company and its three media properties, SourceForge, Slashdot and FreeCode. Slashdot Media is owned by parent Company Dice Holdings, Inc.

Who else would have the power to force through such a profound destruction of value, stretched through such a long time period without any checks?

BTW, she has a handle here on Slashdot (no activity since 2004, though - talk about eating one's own dogfood... I mean, it's almost 10 years of no activity) - you can try asking her directly...

Although, Her Twitter seems a more promising contact channel. Still active.

I think that either SHE (Alice Hill - President at Slashdot Media) did or she knows exactly who did. Quoting from her experience:

"10+ years experience managing large-scale consumer Web properties from conceptualization and staffing, to product innovation, large-scale redesigns and platform overhauls, mobile versions, multi-lingual content creation/production, international engineering team management, and next-stage product growth/roadmap development.".

Her or her subordinates' actions currently directly undermine the business of HER (Joyce Goh, Director, Ad Operations at Slashdot Media (Dice Holdings, Inc.)).

Of course, I might be wrong, but that's what I came up with after 30 seconds of Googling (which, apparently, noone else in this thread bothered to do).

I think that now we can see clearly, where ~BadAnalogyGuy has gone to...

How do you propose to practically achieve this "burned" ID?

How can you prevent the attacker from obtaining cards from a different manufacturer who doesn't do this "burning in" and lets the users to set any value in any stored field?

The whole aim of having the cards being "smart" is that they can be equipped with a protected private key that they don't allow to be read from the outside world and that these cards perform cryptographic signing internally, without letting any secret information about performed cryptography out.

That's also why there's so much effort put into making smart cards tamper-evident (see Design principles for Tamper-Resistant Smartcard Processors (1999)) and withstand electromagnetic eavesdropping (see ElectroMagnetic Analysis (EMA): Measures and Counter-measures for Smart Cards) - so that you can't just put a receiver close to them when a transaction is being performed and steal their private key.

As far as I understand, the flaws in various public transit card systems are mostly due to weak implementations of cryptography. Your proposed solution, on the other hand, is completely wide open to attacks, so it's much worse.

Do you really think it's that simple? If it was, there would be no problem.

Your proposed non-smart card solution (as any stored value one) is inherently susceptible to cloning. Anybody with a RFID/NFC reader can pass close to you just once, then produce a card that's an identical copy (from the perspective of the system) of yours. He can then have a few rides at your cost and discard the cloned card or load another individual's captured data onto it so that he can avoid using a particular person's card for too long.

The transport company could see symptoms of duplication (rides by the same customer at the same time observed in different areas), but good luck with distinguishing between the original user and the clone! They'd have to employ careful analysis of riding patterns to isolate the individual who uses cloned cards (assuming that his transport usage patterns are uniform).

For cell towers, there alredy exists such a database:

OpenCellID.org

There are numerous client apps for Android (e.g. Tower Collector) that allow you collect logs of GPS coordinates+visible tower cell IDs and submit these logs to OpenCellID.

It seems that in this case, indeed, Helium would be the byproduct. More specifically, Helium-4 according to the list of important fusion reactions on Wikipedia.

But as you can see from this list, there are several fusion reactions theoretically available for terrestrial use - most produce Helium, but there are also ones that produce isotopes of Beryllium, Tritium, Lithium and even an aneutronic one that produces Carbon.

Nonetheless, the high energy yield of fusion reactions means that, although we'd get immense amounts of energy from them, the amount of Helium created as a byproduct would be negligible, so it would be unlikely to solve our helium shortage problems. Much more likely is that availability of cheap, safe and clean energy from fusion would make it feasible to establish permanent mining colonies on the moon to extract helium from its soil and deliver it to Earth.

Some flaws with your argument and proposal:

1. 1) Windows 8 install will not overwrite the *whole* contents of your disk, only the parts that will be written to during the installation process - that's only as much as the OS needs for its system files. The rest of the disk content will remain untouched.
2. 2) You can always configure your disk wipe tool so that the last passes over the disk will write non random content - e.g. only zeros or ones, and random writes will only be used with preceding intermediate passes. So the disk will end up guaranteed holding non-random, non-incriminating content.
3. 3) The probability of random data creating incriminating stuff you refer to is so negligible that you suffer from larger risk of being hit and killed by a meteorite falling from the sky during the next minute. That is considering that there has only been a single recorded case in human history of a person being killed by a meteorite, and, coming from a 1677 italian manuscript, it cannot be considered a verified fact. In other words, you have much more probable risks to worry about than that.

Statistically speaking, you almost certainly lost more of your lifetime only by thinking about that risk just now, than lost to the actual risk. Please, read this article so that you're more rational about thinking about your risks.

Did you secure the machine against passive electromagnetic emissions eavesdropping when it is powered on? That would require making a full faraday cage out of your CA machine's server room, with a fully self-contained power source (possibly a fossil-fueled powered generator?) within and no communication wires whatsoever crossing the cage's boundary.

Are the private keys of your VPN nodes stored in secure, physically tamper-proof hardware security module devices both resitant to electromagnetic eavesdropping and trusted to not have NSA backdoors, or are they on disks or other non protected memory?

Depending on answers to those questions, your precautions against NSA spying may not be effective at all.

I've tried feedly, and it integrates on-line with Google authentication, asking access to my Reader data:

Then it has seamlessly and practically instantly imported all my feeds, categorized, and all starred items.

If "the cloud" (the whole of it) is gone someday, there also won't be any RSS/ATOM feeds left for you to use your desktop app with.

My point is, "the cloud" being gone isn't very probable - some services like Google Reader may disappear, but if they are popular, others will immediately spot the opportunity to take their place (like presently feedly.com, netvibes.com or newsblur.com), possibly even improving upon these on their way out.