Remember when they actually believed in their whole First Amendment thing? Yeah, that hasn't been the case since Nixon apparently.

That hasn't been the case since Adams. The 1st Amendment has always been toothless. But notice you don't necessarily need an Internet to make yourself heard. It certainly isn't helping much now.

A big hardy "FUCK YOU!"

You have to go https://slashdot.org/users.pl

I don't know how much longer it will last. They're really messing up the site bad. Search is completely belly up. Can't access my (or anybody else's) journal list anymore. The old edit page is gone. You have to click on a "pretty widget". Christ! How infantile can they get?

See if sending a complaint to http://slashdot.org/~PerlJedi/journal/ gets any results (I can think of a hundred "alternative" names for him right now. "Jedi" isn't one of them). I highly doubt it, but it's a place for me to vent.

I'm more inclined to believe it is written by the new Slashdot programmers. But good ol' Seamonkey is still the best browser going. A complete all in one package, and now hardly any bigger than Firefox..

Was it any better than last year's atrocity?

You completely broke "Search". I am under the assumption you just want us to use Google from now on.

...the page renders differently on each machine I use...

Even on the same machine with different browsers. On IE8 or 9, the button for the preference page isn't there. I have to kill all the cookies. For some reason that 'fixes' it. The only way for uncensored search is to run your own crawler. All the others have been compromised by the authorities and the advertisers.

I know of no other place with the permanence of Slashdot. It's the only site I am aware of that etches the comments in stone, the way it should be. If/when that goes, there's no reason to hang anymore.

...are they trying to run us all off?

Sure looks like it. When you see crap like, "just click pretty widgets to kill time." You know the dumbing down has begun in earnest. And the 'fortunes' at the bottom of the page! My god!...

It seems that they're after a different audience these days.. a bunch of youngins who want nothing but bling. This is the path of Internet 2.0 for the general public. Keep 'em stupid and horny, so they don't rebel.

Get a bunch of people together in a room to count the paper ballots.

Yeah, I just went and fired off a comment about it... These new kids, they know nothing. I wish they'd just go work somewhere else... but not before restoring the old site

You took away a lot of functions and actually made things much worse. Adding and editing journals is a bigger pain than it ever was. I can't see the list of journals without spending half the day clicking more, more, more... I used to be able to see all of everybody's journals and edit/delete all of mine with a simple http://slashdot.org/journal.pl?op=list&uid=2406408 (or any user ID), but you killed it.. Why? Why doesn't http://slashdot.org/users.pl work any more? I guarantee you that this is not 'better service'. It certainly isn't slowing down the spammers any. I can only hope you won't start allowing comments to be edited/deleted. Believe me, this isn't helping at all.

Slashdot has no political agenda whatsoever. The only agenda here is to appease the advertisers.