You're mischaracterizing the issue. Narrow columns work just fine - get any paperback book and see how many characters there are per line. Compare that to the current layout on a modern wide screen. Long lines are unreadable. That doesn't mean that there should be just one column of content, though. Someone with brains can surely come up with a way of laying out a discussion in multiple columns. Sure it may not be a trivial algorithm, but that's, supposedly, what the professionals are for. Why can't slashdot innovate? Why can they only copy all the bad things others do?

Why won't you hire actual, you know, people who do usability professionally, and have them tell the designer folks what should be the constraints for design? Unfortunately, most designers demonstrably suck in the usability department. They simply don't have the training nor understanding necessary to do it right, in spite of the correct examples glaring at them from stuff that has been around for very, very long before they were born...

Widening it is actually the wrong thing to do. There are two orthogonal issues: 1. Use of the screen real estate. 2. Keeping the line lengths reasonable. The solution has been found a couple hundred years ago, just look in a newspaper. Slashdot really needs a multi-column layout.

The bigger problem is that the widescreens make a lot of web content unreadable. Long lines are horribly hard to read. If an entire paragraph takes two lines of a couple hundred characters each, filling a wide screen, then that's a problem.

Slashdot needs to switch to two-column mode on wide screens. There's a reason why books are formatted for pages that are longer in vertical direction than horizontal.

The commercial interests, big commercial interests are negatively affected by this spying. It's going to hit some bottom lines big time pretty soon. If we're to believe in the strong arm of lobbying, domestic spying should end any day now, right? Riiight :)

As flayzernax said: swap them for some prostitutes. Keeps the number incarcerated locally constant :)

Let me know when there's a way to pull a few selected files out of a git repo, change them, and then push them back. Until then, shut up, mmkay?

Where the heck did you get the idea that I think git stores diffs? All I'm saying is that Git's merge support is useless for binary files, because it doesn't know anything about them. It'd be great if I could have git show visual differences in STEP files, but it doesn't do that, so merging is at the file-level, not content-level, so it becomes no better than what subversion has.

Now pray tell how much will I pay and how long will I wait when I want to check out 20 megabytes worth of drawings at customer's site, running through a 3G wireless modem - a common scenario for me. The repo is a couple gigs large in the current revision, and has the overall size of about 100G.

git is not the end-all, be-all. Where you don't need massive distribution or you work with binary files (say, a CAD repository), git and mercurial just get in the way. They still doesn't have sparse/partial clones where you could just download selected subdirectories. That's the make-or-break feature of SVN in some of my projects. Our CAD repository is over a gigabyte. When I work on a project, I only need our parts library and the project folder. git and mercurial are great for software, but software is not the only thing version control systems are used for.

Good luck trying to get a chargeback on your card if you use it for a donation. When the word "donation" is heard by the rep, they'll end the conversation right there. Donations with credit cards are like Western Union money transfers. Once you pay, the money is gone.

Note that a kickstarter contribution is not a donation, it's a payment for service, and you can certainly ask your credit card company for a chargeback if your backed project doesn't deliver.

And what's so different between gpg in javascript vs. gpg in machine code?

Why would you care? It's trivial to get it fixed with your credit card company.

Donations are not a service and are not subject to chargeback. End of story.

Paypal does not really work internationally. I've tried. You can't use a credit card in an account that's not in the same country as the card's issuing bank. If you have got credit cards in banks in ten countries, you need 10 different paypal accounts. It's insane.

Even worse: eBay somehow, by default, blocks foreign PayPal accounts from paying for purchases even if the seller ships internationally. I've tried to buy an iPad 2 for my sister living in Europe, using her credit card on her paypal account. 30 different eBay sellers would refuse to accept the payment.

Pray tell how could a donation be subject to a chargeback? I've donated once and wanted to withdraw my donation upon learning of some new policies of the nonprofit I donated to. It was impossible.