trybywrench, on Tech's 10 Worst Entry-Level Jobs.

Winner of "Questions I No Longer Bother To Ask" is DaveV1.0, wondering why Rob posted a story that he himself notes is awful.

Anonymous Coward, on Blender 2.46.

Anonymous Coward on hobbyist electrical power. jmauro wins the Insightful crown on that story, though.

The process to reorganize the standard libraries for Python 3.0 has been announced, in keeping with Guido van Rossum's dictate to remove "silly old stuff". Deprecated and platform-specific modules make up most of the ones on the chopping block; others had poorly-chosen names, have been made obsolete or just never caught on. Proposals to remove tkinter were shot down.

Reddit commenter larholm's apt description of Debian Bug #477454: Insulting source code

Admittedly, "Severity: serious" may be a bit excessive.

So as we've been migrating the system from the tired old D1 to the exciting and awesome new D2 a number of complaints have come up. I'm going to talk about a couple of them here because I'm really looking for feedback on THESE issues. Please only talk about these points or I will mod you offtopic or troll or something.

The issue is about the use of Flat/Threaded/Nested modes. D2 cleanly replaces both threaded and nested modes- you effectively get nested mode by bringing the 2 sliders together. And threaded mode is vastly more flexible because you can choose the level at which comments are abbreviated or displayed in full text. So users of those modes should be set (obviously there are other reasons not to use D2, I'm just talking about the layouts here tho)

What's left is flat mode, which has a number of sort options. Now flat mode is used by roughly 4% of our active population. When i think about flat mode, I think about 2 reasons you would have to use it:

1. I hate indenting and whitespace. I want a big vertical column now this isn't my bag, but I can understand it and even consider supporting it in D2. I think you sacrifice legibility, but this is a personal preference. It also would be easy to support in D2. Hell, you could probably do it in a greasemonkey script no problem.
2. It's easier to remember your place in flat mode This to me is the only reason to use flat mode- you can reload your page an hour later, find the last comment you read, and pick up where you left off.

Now I Would think that the only reason to use flat mode is #2... except that only a couple hundred Slashdot readers have the 'ignore threads' sort order enabled. So either they don't understand what they are doing, or #1 above is the real reason that they use flat mode.

So in a nutshell, the question I am asking in this journal is 'Why do you use flatmode?' Is it cosmetic? To more easily keep your place in a discussion? Something I'm just missing? We have plans to implement a read/unread state retention for discussions, so maybe would you migrate to a threaded view if that function exists? Or is it purely aesthetic... an irrational hatred of scrollbars and whitespace? :)

The reason this matters is that simply formatting the page flatly is easy. Probably a simple greasemonkey hack or maybe a few lines of CSS. But re-implementing the alternate sort is gonna take some work. And I'm ok with that... except that the logs say that nobody actually USES that sort... they ONLY are using flat mode for the cosmetic reasons.

Speak out! Stay on-topic or you WILL be moderated down.

Here's one you don't see every day -- Passover-themed Scientology spam in Hebrew! It's mostly not displayable here except for:

© 2008 The Association for Prosperity and Security in the Middle East. All rights reserved. The Way to Happiness and the "Road & Sun" design are trademarks owned by L. Ron Hubbard Library in the USA and in other countries (trademark registration issued and other registrations pending) and is used with permission

Yes, yes yes! It has finally happened. According to slashfilm, Uwe Boll has mentioned that if an online petition gets to 1,000,000 votes he'll stop making movies. For all of humanity, please go sign this petition! Last I saw, it was only to 96,543... we need more signatures!

How dumb would I have to be to go for this one?!?

FROM: - THE CHAIRMEN AND RANKING MEMBERS OF THE SENATE COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS, THE SENATE COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS, THE HOUSE COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS, AND THE HOUSE COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS.

Approved and Witnessed by - Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wisconsin Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisconsin White House and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Illinois, Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wisconsin, Senate filibuster. Senate Majority Leader Sen. Reid of Nevada.

ATTN: Subject Matter - Request for Patriots Act on international fund transfer in your favor

After very long meetings held by the above mentioned officials and the Minister of state for finance including the Board of Directors of the World Bank, the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund, to see to the release of long term debt owed to many foreigners around the globe who have been denied of their funds, the United States Senate has been authorized to handle the urgent release of all funds owed by any of the financial institutions or Government that is a member of the United Nations, this is based on the loans and disbursement agreement signed between the US Government and Governments of these debtor nations, the release of your fund will be supervised by the World Bank representatives in Nigeria to ensure immediate payment in your favor and avoid delay.

From the records of outstanding claims due for payment submitted by the United Nations, your name is next on the list of the outstanding bills to be settled, I wish to inform you that your payment is being processed and will be released to you as soon as you respond to this letter.

Kindly re-confirm the following information to SENATOR JEREMY WILLIAMS the US SENATE REPRESENTATIVE AND HEAD OF THE PAYMENT CENTER IN NIGERIA for final verification of your details so that the funds will be transferred in your favour, please contact SENATOR JEREMY WILLIAMS via email : senate_usgov@keromail.com

1) Your full name 2) Phone number ( mobile should be included) . 3) The claim amount 4) Your complete Banking details to avoid mistakes

As soon as the above information is received, your payment will be made to you without further delay. Note that the senate officials in NIGERIA have been authorised to handle this payment to keep a clean slate of foriegn debt settlement because some Government officials and individuals have tried to transfer this fund to you but failed due to dishonesty and unneccesary demand for fees,You are hereby advised to stop any further communications with any one else or any other financial institution and comply to this to avoid any further delay.

Please note that the United Nations and Government of the debtor country will not be interested in any complaint from you if you fail to receive your fund via this programme or fail to abide by this instruction.

Your urgent attention is expected

Sen. Reid of Nevada Senate Majority Leader

In-Place Posting is now live for all logged in users. Hopefully there are no surprises. We've found a number of very tiny bugs, but nothing show stopping. We'll leave the link up to the 'classic' reply form for a few weeks. Next week anonymous coward will get the new posting form... hopefully there are no surprises with that.

A few new keybindings aren't documented yet... v (end) t (top) [] change upper threshold and ,. change bottom threshold. Also 'r' opens the new reply box, m opens the mod total thingee.

The only major complaint so far is that the design changes consume a lot more whitespace. I have mixed feelings on the subject, but am aiming to strike a balance. We noticed 2 very clear places where the whitespace is excessive and hopefully that will be fixed RSN. But on the other hand, making deep threads visually clear, and drawing some attention to the 'reply' buttons is beneficial to everyone, so bare with us as we work to strike some sort of balance.

Trigun, on A Practical Guide to Ubuntu.

Epiphany, the web browser of the GNOME desktop, announced that future versions will be based solely around WebKit, instead of the current default use of Gecko. Concerns about the release cycle and API changes at Mozilla were blamed. Making this announcement on April 1 caused some confusion, but they seem to be sticking to the story.

Religious tensions in the UK were ratcheted up a notch when the founder of the Jedi Church, which shows a considerable membership in the country's census, was assaulted by a neighbor dressed as Darth Vader. Jedi Master Jonba Hehol (aka hairdresser Barney Jones) was filming an interview in his back yard when his Sith adversary jumped the fence, wearing a helmet and a black garbage bag, and beat Hehol/Jones with a crutch. Police believe alcohol may have been involved.

Curse that declining dollar!!! Nafsika Island would be reasonably priced otherwise! (Assuming there's no Cyclops or Sirens to deal with...)

Galaga88, and ensuing thread, on photon hyper-entanglement.