I had to sell something once, so I needed it. For buying, I just use paypal and anonymous access. I hadn't logged into the account for 2 years.
As per my usual, my eBay account has all fake information and a throw-away password. eBay often tells me to make it stronger, but it's ironic, because had I of actually used a strong "normal" password (one of my strong ones I can remember), it would now have been possibly compromised.
I think this might be an argument for using crap usernames/passwords for sites you don't trust (which is most of them), because chances are, they're going to leak your information at some point.
I'm surprised this isn't the norm already? What kind of shitty environments/code are people working with?
At all the companies I've worked at (all Visual Studio), if you got source from TFS, it was guaranteed just pressing 'start' would compile and run it, regardless of whether it was WinForms, ASP.NET, Silverlight, etc. That's just expected, and if I ever started a job and the code didn't just run, I'd assume people there didn't know what they were doing.
It's not like they can't monetize this site, they just don't know what they're doing.
The way to monetize Slashdot isn't to drive out the existing and very knowledgeable users/contributers by bringing in a site that caters to the masses.. no, it's to use this crowd's high level of technical expertise/knowledge to make profit. How? Charge for ask Slashdot! Have a technical problem and need assistance, and stackoverflow isn't cutting it? Well shit, pay Slashdot and get an article posted and bam, your problem will be answered by a slew of very intelligent people.
The other thing is jobs. I know Slashdot has a few job listings or whatever, but they aren't doing it right. They have a massive pool of people, some of whom are unemployed (if you read the comments). Why not hook up contractors/head hunters with these people through the site, for a price? Why not open up the subscriber base with an OPT-IN (by default opt-out) option where potential employers can contact us, and even post jobs (properly)?
These are two very simple ways they could monetize, and I don't have an MBA. I'm sure there's many more. Sometimes it's not about straight up ad-click and growing page views, it's about being intelligent, and working with the extremely valuable resource you have: very smart people who give articles and discussions for free!
Math is like love -- a simple idea but it can get complicated. -- R. Drabek