This is worthless.
It's a copy and paste of this question on Stack Exchange: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/155488/ive-in... but with broken formatting, and nothing else.
It's a copy and paste of this question on Stack Exchange: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/155488/ive-in... but with broken formatting, and nothing else.
If you want to argue that increased visibility is reason enough for its existence, then you're arguing in favor of every single copy and paste job on the internet. If so, that's your opinion - there are definite benefits for increasing quantity. But I wholeheartedly disagree that it is good.
To be painfully specific why, it's making a static copy of something from a site which was built because static answers were deemed bad, and it's splitting the feedback for little or no gain (note how there are more possibly-valuable responses in Ars' comments, but they're not on SE).
That it was apparently done by Stack Exchange is even weirder - they're willfully contributing to data-rot, when one of their major reasons for existence is to prevent it. It has already fallen behind the original answer, which has some significant edits since this was posted.
edit: unless you meant something like them having a SE 'user' to categorize posts? I think all Q&As are under CC, so they're legally capable of doing that, but it certainly looks to me like it's SE doing the posting, since that's how they display authors too.
I think the spreading of good SE Q&As is great. There are problems with it that essentially can't be resolved (stale data), but it does spread good information to people who may not have seen it otherwise. But this is sheer laziness, and ends up with something significantly less valuable than if they had just embedded the question in an iframe.
source: http://meta.photo.stackexchange.com/questions/2195/ars-techn.... (I couldn't find an official post specifically about their arrangement.)
Is Ars Technica in trouble these days that they are just copying content?
edit: I have made the mistake of using an analogy on the internet. I realize it's not exactly the same, ok?
If you think it's worthless, complain to them.