In December 2014, CEO Scott Flanders hinted that nudity could vanish completely from the Playboy brand.
In a bid to make itself more relevant, Playboy magazine has officially announced they're no longer running photos of fully nude women:
Playboy officials have declared that they've won a culture war, so they're moving on. "You're now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it's just passé at this juncture," said Scott Flanders, Playboy's CEO, in an interview with the [New York] Times. He also said: "That battle has been fought and won."
[Ed. note: I was unsure as to whether this story was germane to our site. But then I stepped back to look at the bigger picture. At one time, Playboy pretty much *owned* its category, though with time other publications later rose up to challenge it. Times have changed. Just how relevant are print publications these days? What other storied publications have disappeared? Which are next? What will the publishing landscape look like in ten or twenty years?]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday October 17 2015, @01:07PM
I posted this tally [soylentnews.org] a couple days ago of the stuff I submitted over last weekend. SN's spam filters perceived it as such and sank it to -1, but the numbers are there. Depending on how you rule on Science & Technology policy (topics like Net Neutrality or the Right to Privacy in the EU), my story submission mix was either 64% (pure science) or 87% (pure science + science & technology policy). General news + social science "BS" was 13%. The average comment count for "pure" science was 20.75, the average for science & technology policy + social science was 33.33.
Of course you may quibble about the categorization of these articles, but you must keep in mind that these are stories that are generally freely available to view on the web. The more "hard" science sources like Nature and journals like that where scientists tend to publish their research are inaccessible behind hard paywalls. Also keep in mind that even if we could access and post summaries about those articles for the community, how much discussion could realistically be generated by "Mitochondrial Drift in Freshwater Bivalves?" That's an invented title, of course, but that's not too far off from how specific those academic papers can be. And it bears considering that the value of a community like Soylent is the discussion, with people from all technical walks of life putting their two cents in. If all you wanted were "hard" science articles, then you'd be better served with an RSS feed or a pricey subscription to one of the aforementioned articles.
Lastly, I'll repeat the point that others have made here and on Slashdot repeatedly over the years, that even if a topic itself is not necessarily a technical one, prima facie, the technical-minded readers in the community usually bring a much different, more interesting, and more informed perspective to it than you would get in nearly every forum. That is, the value of all this is in YOU, and US, not necessarily in the article itself.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Sunday October 18 2015, @03:12AM
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams