If you use a plugin like Stylish (available for Chrome & Firefox) you can add a stylesheet for slashdot.org with the following rule:

article#firehose-000 {
        display: none;
}

This will collapse the element containing the videos. I've also heard of people using their Adblock plugins to do the same thing by telling it to treat that element as an ad and collapse it.

An (untested) rule to hide the polls would be:

article.fhitem-poll {
        display: none;
}

PuTTy is already an incompatible mess all of it's own. It even has it's own special format for keys, so we get the joy of running every ssh key generated on a *nix system through puttygen.exe just to spit out some fugly PPK file. Oh, you need me to add your public key to authorized_keys? What's that you say? You used puttygen? Well fuck me, time to look up the command to convert that stupid shit again. Wonderful!

Not to mention the fractured disorganization of the configuration, the crap profile system and all the other reasons why PuTTy is a pain in the ass.

The fact that Microsoft is talking about using OpenSSH means at the very least the key files will be compatible. I have no idea why no one bothered porting OpenSSH to Windows before, but it's about damn time! I'm looking forward to a version of PuTTy (or KiTTy, actually) that uses the native OpenSSH instead of the existing legacy PuTTy implementation of SSH. I'd love to delete all those PPK files and never see another one again as long as I live.

Exactly! It's so much better to have to pipe the output to something just to print to the console! Hurrah for objects! /s

FTFY.

Haven't you heard? Shiny is out, flat is in. Shiny is so old school ugly skeuomorphism bro. The new flatness is like, clean and modern. Like some wise old designer dude said, "A design is good once you've taken everything away; it's perfect." So true man, like less is more and stuff!

It's not ugly! It's modern and elegant!

You know, unlike all those other UI designs that were modern and elegant. They're all old and busted now. UI design has more to do with fashion trends than any sort of objective basis in usability.

Doesn't matter if they sell personal data or not, they're still going to use it to try and best position their ad delivery services. The only benefit you can get from Google is relevant ad placement. Oh boy, what a gift to humanity that is!

China doesn't need to control things on the device level, they control the entirety of the Chinese internet. So I guess you could say that China is more efficient at controlling free speech, while the US struggles to keep pace. I'm sure the NSA would love to have the absolute power that the Chinese government has over the Chinese internet, it would make catching "terrorists" so much easier, especially if they didn't have to deal with Congress trying to take away their toys every now and again.

But your zx81 wasn't a "modern self-hosting ad platform" which "delivers relevant ads to consumers based on their consumption patterns, derived from the shit loads of data we gobbled up from our other shitty platforms"

The Internet of Things is nothing more than an obvious ploy to stick more ads onto more eyeballs. If Google has taught us anything, it's that they will stop at nothing to embiggen their capacity to deliver advertisements while shutting down services that fail to deliver the appropriate number of users. Consumer benefit is an afterthought, eyeballs are paramount.

Let's not forget that so far the existing IoT-type devices have considered security an afterthought, and we can easily imagine a future where your son pisses off some shithead on Call of Duty 54 who then hacks your oven to catch on fire. I look forward to the glorious future where we have to worry each and every day whether some far away hacker is going to make our lives miserable because our appliance vendor considered security a useless afterthought.

I can't fucking wait.

The device IS the spyware. That's the whole point of the IoT fad. Reading your GMail isn't enough, they want to know every last possible detail about your day to day existence. All to provide "useful services" of course, nothing to do with leveraging their ad platform, that would be nonsense.

The biggest problem with the "Internet of Things" is that it doesn't have any real use cases other than collecting more data to feed the voracious apatite of advertisement companies. Add to that the ever decreasing cost of display technology and you've got a wide open space of possible ad sales. Get your foot in the door on this IoT thing and you can sell advertisers on how many ad impressions they'll get on refrigerators, coffee makers, toasters, and any other common kitchen appliance they feel like slapping a SoC and LCD display on.

I'm sure there are legitimate use cases for these network connected household devices, but don't fool yourself: Silicon Valley is full of fly-by-night scumbags who would jump at the opportunity to sell ad space and intrude on consumers personal space in every way possible.

They need all that CPU power to run their ad platform. What, you didn't think you'd get an internet connected toaster without advertisements did you?

"This toast has been brought to you by Preparation-H, soothing your asshole since 1926. If you've got a pain in your ass, try Preparation-H!"

That's easy. How closely does the source match with your own preconceived notions on the topic at hand? The closer it does so, the truer it is.