"What the hell is Nethack? Damn editors..."

Why does DSL in the US seemingly mean crappy speed?

I know that distance to the DSLAM makes a huge difference, so perhaps the commenters just don't happen to be pretty close to one. (I also find it a but funny in some American software and games, where DSL ranges from maybe 256kbps to 8Mbps, and above 8Mbps is called Cable. I've been using a 10/1 Mbps ADSL connection for several years, and not only is the speed exactly as good as advertised, I also don't remember more than one outage, so it's quite reliable for its intended ie. consumer use. I know a few people with theoretical 24/2 Mbps connections, although they all max out at around 20-22 Mbps downstream.

Anyway, around 20 Mbps downstream and an acceptable 2 Mbps upstream doesn't seem that bad to me. Unless of course you're used to a 100/100 Mbps connection :)

I haven't been following very closely, but wasn't the malware distribution related to Freedom Hosting which hosted child porn forums?

You are just reading way too much into it. Low id means one thing only, which is that he registered quite some time ago. So he's been around a long time, and the beta will finally drive him away.

Forgot to add that whether it's bad or not, or if you see any issues with it is obviously subjective, but in case the comments are wider (relative to window size) on your system I'd be very interested to find out why (and how to fix it on mine as well.)

That is not zoomed in nor out. And I don't know why you would think it was zoomed, the ratios would still be the same; only about half of the window's width is actual content, ie. comment text.

If you aren't currently blocking ads on /. maybe doing that on the beta site could help getting the message through. Hit them where it hurts, sort of :)

Thumbs down for narrow comment boxes!

I just had the displeasure of trying the beta for the first time because of the comments here. I don't like it either (and I like even Windows 8, so come on!); the worst part is that the comments are in a VERY narrow box, and all the useless framing takes up a significant chunk of space.

Also it seems to require Javascript, but I know that even on this site I'm in the minority with that particular dislike.

The integration features certainly don't seem intrusive in any way, because I have no idea how to access them. There is nothing in the main menu about social media integration, nor in the options dialog. Which is nice.

Isn't ChromeOS a Linux distro at its core? Installing a different distro should be fairly simple, I hope. This thing is cheap enough, I'm considering getting one as a toy.

Could you elaborate on your future vision? In what situation would for example my future granddaughter need to whip up a mobile app?

I think that the fact that you had to point out the double slashes shows why replacing the dots with slashes is a bad idea.

I think I'd prefer (there are probably issues that haven't occurred to me) if there were no generic top-level domains at all, only country codes. I realize why they exist, I just find them redundant and also slightly confusing especially outside the US; .com/.net/.org and several others are world-wide but .edu/.mil/.gov are US-only AFAIK. The distinction between .com, .net, and .org doesn't seem very clear either, if there even is one nowadays apart from aesthetics.

On the other hand, the current system works Good Enough so it probably won't and maybe shouldn't change.

The back button rarely works on modern Javascript-heavy sites, so that's not a problem.