I'm afraid I can't answer this, since I'm not part of the design team. I will ask them to share their thoughts on design choices, but I can't promise anything.

You are here. They are not (which is a major part of the problem, IMO). Be convincing, please.

LET US KNOW WHY YOU ARE DOING WHAT YOU ARE DOING.

Not quite.

Try this, instead:

LET US KNOW WHY YOU ARE DOING WHAT YOU ARE DOING BEFORE YOU START DOING IT!

And please, post any responses IN BAND. That is, on the front page. NOT on the Slashdot beta blog. For the type of communication you need to have with Slashdot users if you want the beta to be a success, that communication needs to be in a place where it's right in front of us, rather than being hidden behind a link.

Alas, yes, and that's been the case for 20+ years. ISTR getting contacts from military recruiters back in the early '90s when I'd never expressed any kind of interest in the US military.

That would be why I have the "Google Searches Exactly What You Type" and "gooverbatim" Greasemonkey scripts. They mitigate a lot of the general crappiness of Google search these days. (I started using them after I tried searching for a way to convert from a WPF Visual to a Windows Metafile, and Google kept insisting that I must mean to be searching for 'wmf' and 'metafile' instead of 'wpf' and 'metafile'.)

What makes you think that? I work for a company that could not only make the screws for you, but also the bits to remove them for someone else.

(Okay, it'd be a heck of a lot more expensive than some of the other solutions, but...)

Nah. 0xDECAFBAD.

I'd like to see all sections added to the "Exclusions" preferences – TV in particular.

Response to bug reports in a reasonable amount of time would also be nice, particularly if you're going to be adding new features.

How much do you want to bet that sometime in the very near future, under Tools | Options (yes, I still use the menus, f*** off), under Advanced, the Update tab will vanish, and all meaningful ability to control Firefox updates will vanish?

If Firefox had had some actual innovative ideas recently, I wouldn't (necessarily) have a problem, but they seem to have been copying Opera and especially Chrome, without actually thinking about WHY Opera and Chrome did what they did. Cargo cult, anyone?

Me. (I'm 37 years old.)

I had a friend (now 42) who showed me how to make interesting things that explode with it. :)

42.3261 N, 83.039 W, or thereabouts. Enough to get my attention, but not enough to seriously alarm anyone. Some of my cow-orkers didn't even notice. We didn't even get anything over the RenCen intercom.

The speech writer was a bit off their game that day from the sounds of it. There are way to many writers currently confusing message with medium, and gadgets with tools. If the user is focussed or disciplined, it all becomes much more about what they are trying to do. So no, Obama, our brains are not rotting from too much ibox. Maybe if the Obama administration made some proactive legislation around data privacy, rights to anonymity, restrictions on advertising in public commons, rather than slinging mud around about simple living, just because the wifey gardens.

So what you're saying is that this guy would get elected because he had an enormous majority of voter support... ... and the problem is?

The problem, fuckbrain, is that in a lot of constituencies a large number of voters are effectively disenfranchised, and that overall the two main parties end up with an unrealistically high percentage of seats compared with their overall share of the vote.

Also, if you are the MP for a constituency with a large labour or tory majority, you don't have to worry about being a good MP, and the notion of local accountability becomes laughable.

because there's more people not being paid to circumvent protection than there is people being paid to protect. or because every possible method of protection has a possible method of circumvention, and there is no ultimate method of protection. same goes for war, build the best armour you can, and someone will make a better bullet.

1 - They don't have to let you spend some time alone with the box as part of the voting process.
2 - It's harder to tamper with the box in a way that makes it impossible to detect until after the elections are over.