The Lake St. light rail station in Minneapolis is one of the few with an indoor area (an enclosed escalator) and heat. In the winter, the students from nearby schools tend to congregate in the stairwells and escalators, smoking (which is illegal, of course). The music works because it drives them outdoors, helping passengers feel safer because they don't have to push through a crowd of high school students. Of course, whether or not people should feel unsafe because of a crowd of kids smoking is a different issue, but I'd guess most of the adult travelers coming through the station prefer the loud music to the loitering teens.

I'm rather surprised that so many Slashdot users complain about the default settings in FF4. Yes, they changed the toolbar, statusbar, tab location etc.... But every single one of those things can be changed with in-browser settings or extensions. In my mind, those aren't problems - that's exactly what makes Firefox a great browser. Isn't this a site for nerds?

I'll bite - please tell me what is so awful about the Awesome Bar. When used for search, it will quickly identify sites I've already bookmarked/tagged with the terms I'm searching for. It ranks my bookmarks higher than just my history, so I almost always see those historic sites first. Plus, I can use keywords to quickly load pages I use frequently. I no longer waste time sorting my bookmarks into hierarchical folders because that requires a lot of wasted mouse clicks when I can just start typing terms/tags/keywords into the bar. And this is bad because?

ACORN has been exonerated of every single false charge brought against it. http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/06/15-7

The whole affair was a whirlwind media circus trial orchestrated by conservatives who didn't think poor people had a right to fight back against the banking industry.

Democrats may have their own skeletons, but ACORN isn't one of them.

*air ball*

You can opt out for each specific App: http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2010/06/ars-reviews-ios-4-whats-new-and-notable.ars/7

This old rule was for the age of competition. There is no real competition in wireless. You can have coverage, customer service, or fair prices. Pick any ONE.

This taxpayer is usually also saying "cut my taxes, they are too high." The connection escapes them.

Nicotine-based neonicotinoids, a broad class of pesticides. A ban on them in Italy restored bee populations.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/05/nicotine-bees-population-restored-with-neonicotinoids-ban.php?campaign=th_rss_science

Are you kidding? I only clicked on the story in hopes of finding that someone had posted it.

you left out:
7. Slashdot polls

...to code.google.com.

You are correct, of course, on the details, but I would say that you're wrong on the principle. You have two meaningful choices on your presidential ballot (e.g. candidates who can win). It's like getting search choices of Yahoo, Google, and then a bunch of other sites like Altavista.

It's good enough for a presidential election...

Indeed. This would be a great xkcd cartoon.

Slashdot nerd: "The sex detection part is some fairly trivial signal processing. You need a band pass filter with a passband of about 0.5-3 Hz (at a guess; better numbers exist, but I haven't tried googling them). Then you need to detect extended signal within that band; there are a variety of options for this, any of which are likely to work."

Normal person: "obviously this is a big joke, since he doesn't have to prove to anyone that he's done anything more than set up a Twitter account."