Haven't been here in a while. I'll try to keep better tabs on this place.
We now abbreviate journals in the firehose... so they are more like slashdot stories with a Read More link to the full text.
The big user facing change this week was structural: historically we had 2 different "skeletons" on Slashdot, but with this refresh we unified to a single one. This change simplifies maintenance for us quite a bit (maintaining the idle section and the firehose views of the same data was a royal pain).
You also will see some changes to the firehose.pl layout. We're playing with the tab layout a bit, moving some menus around and better integrating the core functions into the site chrome. It's a bit buggy atm, so feel free to email me if you see something wonky. We're extinguishing a few minor brush fires but there's no forest fires that we're aware of.
I'm not qualified to have an informed opinion on the bailout bill, and I certainly understand the skepticism and hostility towards it. But I get the feeling that this was a huge missed opportunity to avoid disaster...
Anyway, Shanah Tovah to all Jewish readers!
Solutions are obvious if one only has the optical power to observe them over the horizon. -- K.A. Arsdall