Oblig. Penny Aracde brought to you, appropriately enough, by Space Devil.

Not only is it equally applicable to both sexes in british english (although it's generally far more common to see terms "acting like a cunt" applied predominantly to males), but in certain contexts it's used as an honorific or even as a term of affection as well, much like the endlessly versatile "fuck". I thought this was common parlance in all commonwealth streams of english (although I've only really been exposed to UK, kiwi and ozzie flavours myself), do the canadians not do the same thing or is "cunt" just as verboten there as it is in the US?

To decry someone solely because of their idiomatic use of a word is a wonderful exercise in self-fulfilling hypocrisy.

As an aside, and speaking as a luddite who still uses a Nokia E6 because it's got an amazing QWERTY keyboard, does windows phone mandate signing up for account, or is it optional?

It seems that both the iphone and android are both nearly useless without signing up for an account (although you can have an android ROM without the gapps loaded, it will apparently severely restrict what you can run on your phone) and I'm of the opinion that any device that requires an account in order to function essentially has unfettered almost-always-on access to your phone as well as trying to lock you in to some service or other (having all your personal data held ransom by a third party is a great bargaining chip).

Looking for information on whether devices require accounts or not seems moot too, since most people don't consider it to be a problem. I couldn't even find out if a Jolla has a compulsory account or not...

At this rate I'll need to build my own phone out of toothpicks and silk-wrapped wire.

I have javascript enabled for /. even though I use the classic discussion system, but here's one reason I utterly, utterly despite the javascript-based system in the beta (and indeed most javascript-based/AJAX UIs):

In the comment threads, tangents, or arguments you might want to browse at -1, frequently develop. I'll open those in a new tab for later perusal so my reading of the on-topic discussion isn't interrupted. As far I can tell, in beta there's absolutely no way to do this - one discussion means you should have only one page open apparently, no matter how many facets it may contain. If you want to cross-reference between two different tangents in the same story, you have to open another tab and then click click scroll click click expand more click click scroll scroll scroll click to find the other one instead of just doing a middle-click or right-click new-tab.

The designers seem to have been drinking the kool-aid labelled "everyone uses a single fullscreen window, no-one uses tabs, there's no such thing as middle-click or right-click but everyone loves endless scrolling and jabbing the 'would you like to know more?' button". I'd wager the average slashdotter drinks from the kool-aid labelled "fuck beta".

That's one of my more minor complaints, of which I've submitted to the official feedback /dev/null^W channels. Reading between the lines, the official response is going to be "tough shit".

"I come not to praise Slashdot, but to bury it".

Dice have no reason to keep the comment system - commenters don't make them any money. Large click-through rates on huge adverts and paid placements/slashvertisements make money, and those are things that the current user base are extremely sensitive and hostile to. So the easiest solution is to gut slashdot from the inside out by destroying the thing we come here for - then all of us pesky marketing-resistant geeks will fuck off someplace else, leaving the site free for either a) an eternal september's worth of users from elsewhere or b) strip-mining of the /. assets.

Either way, given the way this beta has been foisted upon everyone with next to no feedback being listened to, I think dice has decided that /. as we know it is dead. Businesses rarely recognise sacred cows.

The AC above me http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... pointed this out but I'd like to add a "me too".

In my opinion, dice have taken a look at the amount of ad revenue they get from /. and decided it's not worth it. A very sizeable percentage of people here will run adblockers and the click-through rates of the ones that don't are almost certainly minuscule, and the community here has been traditionally very wary of paid placements masquerading as news, shills and all the rest of it. People come here for the discussion, yes, but that doesn't make dice any money.

So the decision was undertaken to alienate the existing community into leaving, and once they're gone expect heavy cross-promotion from other dice sites to get those users here as well. The comments will remain a meaningless mess but that doesn't matter since the beta seems expressly designed to make having a conversation as frustrating as possible.

This all probably sounds a bit crazy conspiracy nut to be honest, but given the continuing beta, ignoring of all feedback and no response from the admins themselves about the beta's many, many issues, it appears to be a fait accompli.

Sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence.