They did apologize for it. A few times. They've been showing DA:I around before it was officially announced, and they specifically called out "No more cookie-cutter levels".

Wouldn't it be a simple "Fix" to set up port forwarding to redirect traffic directed to port 32768 to a "dead" address. Then the port would already be allocated, and when the "Knock" arrives, the port is already in use, and data goes nowhere.

As linked in TFA: Have a link to a list of devices (Not necessarily complete).

Perhaps they're thinking of a Gyrocopter (or Autogyro). That has the advantage of small size (No need for large fixed wings) without the complication of dealing with a collective stick system.

Personally, I was always interested in the "Land Shark" project (Archive.org link, as the original has since disappeared). The idea was to have a tadpole-style trike that, when on water, would use it's turbine-shaped rear wheel hub to propel it as it hydroplaned on the front wheel's lowered mudguards. Simple, and effective, but unfortunately it never got off the ground. A shame, really.

Okay, here's the deal. You want a phone, so you buy a base unit (that probably has the screen). Once you've done that, you choose what CPU (Single-core? Dual-core? Quad-core? Octa-core?) you want, how much RAM (512MB? 1GB? 2GB?), how much storage (16GB? 32GB? 64GB?), what kind of camera (None, 2MP, 4MP, 16MP with telescopic zoom lens?), Location system (Cell Tower Only? A-GPS? GLONASS + GPS + Compass?), Radios (Bluetooth? Wifi (a? n?), cellular radio (None? CDMA? GSM/Edge? UMTS? LTE?), card reader, and battery you want.

Want to update at a later time? Not a problem! Swap out that tired old dual-core ARMv7 for the latest dohexa-core 64-bit ARMv11! Running out of RAM too often? Throw another 2GB in there. Find you're taking more pictures than you thought? Swap out the basic 4MP shooter for a 28MP beast! Want to do work with 3D mapping? Add a second camera!

The idea is to make phones as modular as (or even more so than) a home PC.

Yes, you have to put back together any sections that came off, and replace any parts that too catastrophic damage and broke. Unlike the current method, where you have to replace the whole damned thing.

Doesn't much matter. 1,000 threads hammering an account that will only accept an attempt every second will take just as long as 10,000 threads, or even 1. It's tied to the account, not the IP.

I believe one of the goals of the AROS project is to have a drop-in replacement for workbench/kickstart ROMs for m68k systems. So you could use their ROM on UAE and have a compatible system built entirely from open-source software. If that's your thing...

Yes. Linux prevents it. Right. And what software do these routers run as their firmware? That's right, a customized version of Linux.

Speaking purely from a look perspective, there are a mess of problems.

• Huge amounts of whitespace on either side. This is 2014, and there are a million tutorials on how to make a fluid design.
• Complete lack of contrast. I have no problem with the text contrast, but there's so little difference between comments, and between stories, no delineation or separation.
• Basic problems - Some fonts in the CSS are defined as "Helvetica sans-serif". There needs to be a comma in there, Chris!
• In slashdot comments, there are 3 levels of display: Open, summarized and hidden. In the new beta, there are again 3 options: Open, closed and hidden. "Closed" is not as versatile as "summarized".
• Using JQuery to get the comments I have little-to-no problem with. But slashdot's main point is the long list of comments. The current AJAX system is limiting, at the very least (only grabbing 100 comments), and while it does have some options, it seems that none of those are available here. I had some issues with sorting this out with pure CSS (the Javascript was interfering with it), but I believe it is possible to implement this comment folding properly.

I've done a fair amount with pure CSS (Userstyle for Stylish here), including fixing the acres-of-whitespace width issue (Though I could do more if the source was in a better order), and bringing back the nicely contrasting bars to comments. I'm sure there is more that could also be done, and I'm seriously considering playing with GreaseMonkey to sort out some of the more egregious Javascript problems, but that's going to remain something on the back burner for now. This is obviously a beta site, and a work-in-progress, and I'm only doing this as a personal amusement in my spare time. I'll gladly answer any questions on this, and I'm certainly more than willing to lend a hand to make one of my favourite sites better.

There is much potential here. Unfortunately, a cannonball at the top of the Eiffel Tower also has much potential. Only time will tell how this is going to work out. But for the moment, it seems, SlashDot Beta is not ready for prime time. Heck, at this stage I'd barely call it a beta.

No, you're not missing anything. What I can do (with CSS) is make it so that items that are "Removed" by the filter are instead collapsed down to their titles. I might be able to do even more than that, but that's all I've come up with so far. I'll let you know if I manage any more.

If the stock images have a common server (or url start) then you could. Or you could use an ad blocker for this.

No, I'm afraid not. But if you wanted to do such a thing, you could configure yourself a squid proxy to do that kind of thing.

No, those are Javascript events, and CSS can't touch them. However, if this (and the second request above) is the kind of thing you want to do, you can use GreaseMonkey to inject your own custom Javascript, which could do all those funky things you want.

Doing some supplemental testing, I'm not sure what your beef is. On my machine (Running current FireFox Nightly), When you set your preferred threshold (using the dropdown above the comments), the value you specify gets set in a cookie, which then gets re-loaded on each subsequent page view. So I'm not sure where these issues are coming from. The code is there (and working) to do it.

No, because it's just CSS. However, I'm thinking this could be solved with a little greasemonkey tweaking.

Again, no. It's just CSS.

I believe it will work without Javascript enabled. Of course, you won't HAVE any comments then, as they're loaded with Javascript. But these days, a vast majority of the web requires Javascript to function.

Again, no. But I'm spotting a theme here...

So, your problem seems to be that the new site isn't using your saved preference for what comments to display. This is something that is (at the moment) beyond the capabilities of my little stylesheet tweaks.

Got Stylish for FireFox or Chrome? Have a userstyle that does it's best to fix most of the problems with Slashdot beta. I haven't got everything the same, but I'm doing what I can. Making the web a better place, one stylesheet at a time...