So, whoever made the decision to do this, please comment:

You obviously knew that some people were going to dislike putting polls in the front page. (People have already brought up multiple valid reasons why it's a bad idea in this thread.) Making it possible to exclude polls from the front page should be trivial -- most obviously, just create a new "poll" topic and then existing options can be used to exclude those from my news feed. So why didn't you do that?

Every time there's a controversial decision in regards to Slashdot, the editors are always quick to claim that they're trying to do what's best for the users. But decisions like this make it obvious that you're not. If you actually were considering what your readers want, you would never have made this change without at least providing an option to turn it off.

Be thankful for adblockers, at least ... for the moment we can get rid of them.

30 years ago = 80s, so yes we agree. Prior to that, not so much. And http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... helped bring attention to the sport in the U.S. Certainly, as we become more Latin, we'll see much more. But, the best thing FIFA could do for itself financially would be to bring the games to the U.S. Thus far, their marketing of it here pales in comparison to that of other sports.

Sheesh...no sense of humor today. Get over yourselves mods.

He says dashingly. And, don't even try to claim that was on porpoise.

As an American who's spent a not insignificant portion of his life in the great white north (I also have family there), I don't understand why it is that only Canadians seem to bring this up. Americans have no interest in Canada ever becoming a state. You're our best trading partner, and have a long history of being one of our best allies. Many of us have even accepted hockey, but we draw the line at curling.

Lack of attendance by the others doesn't make it less "universal".

Oh, you've seen all the evidence? Where can the rest of us see it? Clue: You can't and won't yet.

Just my $.02...as another American, I'd have agreed with you about 30 years ago. But then along came soccer moms, and their kids have grown up, and another generation of kids playing have taken their place. I believe we're now at about 98.5%.

Yank here...1) We don't give a fuck 2) See 1.

The anti-beta crowd essentially managed to make the comment threads unusable for a couple days before Slashdot finally relented. I think that was more a matter of them realizing that by the time they rolled out the beta, all the normal readers would have already been driven away.

By the way, thanks for posting this, Soulskill.

Frankly, the excuse of why it took so long is pretty lame -- we're supposed to believe that it's just a coincidence that the story critical of a /. sister site is the only one that got delayed for several days? -- but at least now it's been acknowledged.

The original announcement for when Sourceforge added the "feature" of injecting malware into installers said that the money earned would be shared with the developers. So I have to wonder: did they send the GIMP a check? Have the GIMP developers demanded that Sourceforge do so?

On the assumption that Sourceforge did not, it seems like they've just burned a bridge that they shouldn't have. They killed any trust that users would have had for SF projects a long time ago, but developers who were willing to sell out have stuck around. But now that developers know that SF is willing to just assume control of a project (and the associated profits), why would any developer continue to use SF.

I don't know, What Interesting Things Can I Power With an External USB Battery? comes pretty close.

But yes, this is pretty bad. And if you click through to the article, you'll find that it's every bit as moronic as the summary makes it sound.