Speaking purely from a look perspective, there are a mess of problems.
I've done a fair amount with pure CSS (Userstyle for Stylish here), including fixing the acres-of-whitespace width issue (Though I could do more if the source was in a better order), and bringing back the nicely contrasting bars to comments. I'm sure there is more that could also be done, and I'm seriously considering playing with GreaseMonkey to sort out some of the more egregious Javascript problems, but that's going to remain something on the back burner for now. This is obviously a beta site, and a work-in-progress, and I'm only doing this as a personal amusement in my spare time. I'll gladly answer any questions on this, and I'm certainly more than willing to lend a hand to make one of my favourite sites better.
There is much potential here. Unfortunately, a cannonball at the top of the Eiffel Tower also has much potential. Only time will tell how this is going to work out. But for the moment, it seems, SlashDot Beta is not ready for prime time. Heck, at this stage I'd barely call it a beta.
Block images from stock image servers? They're annoying on all news sources/blogs, not just slashdot beta.
If the stock images have a common server (or url start) then you could. Or you could use an ad blocker for this.
Replace each stock image with the top result from a google image search for "stick figure" and the ALT text? Might as well have fun with it.
No, I'm afraid not. But if you wanted to do such a thing, you could configure yourself a squid proxy to do that kind of thing.
Replace "on hover" and "on mouseover" with "on click"? Just because I ran my pointer over a menu bar as opposed to navigating around it does not mean my desire was to spend the next 10 seconds trying to get the resulting popup menu to go away.
No, those are Javascript events, and CSS can't touch them. However, if this (and the second request above) is the kind of thing you want to do, you can use GreaseMonkey to inject your own custom Javascript, which could do all those funky things you want.
Does it make the site remember your saved comment threshold preference and only send you the comments above the threshold you have in your profile?
Does it avoid having to use the slider on every page to specify the slider?
This is my main beef with beta, the rest I can work around or live with.
Doing some supplemental testing, I'm not sure what your beef is. On my machine (Running current FireFox Nightly), When you set your preferred threshold (using the dropdown above the comments), the value you specify gets set in a cookie, which then gets re-loaded on each subsequent page view. So I'm not sure where these issues are coming from. The code is there (and working) to do it.
Does it make the site remember your saved comment threshold preference and only send you the comments above the threshold you have in your profile?
No, because it's just CSS. However, I'm thinking this could be solved with a little greasemonkey tweaking.
Does it avoid having to use the slider on every page to specify the slider?
Again, no. It's just CSS.
Does it avoid the need to have Javascript enabled for the domain?
I believe it will work without Javascript enabled. Of course, you won't HAVE any comments then, as they're loaded with Javascript. But these days, a vast majority of the web requires Javascript to function.
Does it use your computer resources to hide thresholds you are not interested in?
Again, no. But I'm spotting a theme here...
This is my main beef with beta, the rest I can work around or live with.
So, your problem seems to be that the new site isn't using your saved preference for what comments to display. This is something that is (at the moment) beyond the capabilities of my little stylesheet tweaks.
There's so many things wrong here, so I tried to fix it. My fixes are published in a Userstyle for Stylish and Chrome here
If the side rail was in the source code before the main content, I could float it properly so the article and comments expand to use the empty space underneath. Unfortunately, it's not, so you'll have to make do with the dead space. Sorry.
If you want to contact me about this fix, feel free to do so. I should be contactable through here, or you can find my e-mail address in the linked userstyle.
So why is everyone acting so surprised when they keep following this trend?
I'm sorry. You were complaining about a news (Yes, news) story about a talk from CCC (Which is highly popular with, and immensely relevant for, nerds), posted on Phoronix (A website that devotes itself almost entirely to information, news and reviews on hardware and software from a Linux-based perspective), about a lot (120+) of security holes (Things that matter) in the X11/X.org servers (Which are the basis for (almost) all GUI-driven applications in Linux, *BSD and some of OSX).
By my count, that makes this story "News", "For Nerds", and "Stuff that matters". Oh, and the irony in posting that Phoronix is a "Link Farm" on
How on earth did this get +2 "Interesting"? The ravings of a madman (Really! No mixed-fibre clothing! No shellfish! No shaving of any part of the head! And Heathens are perfectly fine to buy as slaves. And let's not forget "An eye for an eye") whose ideas of morality and correctness were way out of line when the "Good Book" was written (4-legged insects are unclean! As is pretty much everything else, ever!) has precisely what bearing on our lives?
If you want to live by the rules Leviticus (and most of the rest of the Old Testament) dictates, do feel free. I'm sure such draconian dictates will ensure you die an early death as you struggle to deal with impossible to live up to standards, "Original Sin", and pre-medieval healthcare (Really! Even Obamacare is better than the crap in Leviticus for dealing with illness!).
Of course, there is always the possibility that you are merely trying to force your ideals down everyone else's throat, and grabbing the very first passage from the very worst parts of John's Book of Ravings that enables you to take a supposedly pious and "Enlightened" stance on something that has been socially acceptable since at least 800BC.
Or you're a troll, using a quasi-religious stance to get a rise out of the
It's later than you think, the joint Russian-American space mission has already begun.