It's the damn auto-refresh on the main page. It was bad enough when it used AJAX to load new content - any new story would push down the one I was reading the summary of, causing me to lose my place. But for a while now it's been reloading the whole page (http://slashdot.org/?source=autorefresh), which is even worse. I've found no way to disable this "feature".

A crippled cipher can be used to read your private data. A crippled hash function can be used to substitute bad data for good.

You'd cheat someone if you could with a fraudulent sale

Actually that part was humor. You might want to look that up.

For any given model, these uncertainties can be calculated in a Bayesian sense.

My feeling, as a non-cosmologist, is that we don't even know the correct model. What was the nature of the inflationary epoch, for example?

...is known to 3 significant figures, I'll sell you a bridge.

You are correct. Even though in infinite time the bubble would expand to infinite volume, this would only affect a volume that was initially finite, if very large. The "edges" (cosmological horizon) of the affected volume would always outpace the bubble's expansion. (This is assuming the expansion of the universe continues. Its apparent acceleration might be just an artifact) However, there doesn't have to be just one bubble, nor does it have to arise in "billions of years". Nowhere and nowhen is safe... unless the Many-Worlds Interpretation is true. (to see why the MWI helps, see quantum suicide and quantum immortality)

not to sue / prosecute you - if they conclude that your disclosure respects and meets all their guidelines. Oh and the program is "subject to change or to cancellation at any point without notice".

that doesn't disclose how much it pays. All it says is

Would you trust Paypal to reward you fairly?

I'd love to know what operating system you were using on home computers 20 years ago that supported limited user accounts and was usable by "computer-illiterate parents".

APANA isn't an ISP, and only offers broadband internet service through commercial ISPs (at no discount to those ISP's standard rates).

In fact, all plugins should be click to play with a white list of auto play sites that the user can configure.

That's exactly what Chrome does for me since I enabled it. Go to chrome://flags/ and enable Click to play, then go to chrome://settings/content and set Plug-ins to Click to Play. There's also a blacklist / whitelist you can configure. Why this option is "experimental" I have no idea.

The people doing the searching probably know from experience that they will get more results for an English search term than for its local translation. Also, searching for images, they are less likely to care what language the accompanying text is in.

Every time I use Thunderbird to access fastmail via IMAP I get an annoying warning dialog:

Security Error: Domain Name Mismatch

You have attempted to establish a connection with "imap.fastmail.fm". However, the security certificate presented belongs to [long list of hosts ending in .messagingengine.com]...

If you suspect the certificate shown does not belong to "imap.fastmail.fm", please cancel the connection and notify the site administrator.

...which I haven't done - it seems more productive to bitch about it on slashdot. (over the years I've put quite a lot of effort into bug reports for various products and the rate of response is pretty discouraging)

Never mind Star Trek, this reminds me of the Emergents' "Focus" mental enslavement technology from Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. From wikipedia:

An active MRI-type device triggers changes [...] manipulating the brain in this way, Emergent managers induce obsession with a single idea or specialty, which they call Focus, essentially turning them into brilliant [information] appliances.

24 hours (or even 24 seconds!) to render 20k of HTML should be considered a bug. Did you submit it to bugzilla? Does it still take a long time on a current version of Firefox?