First off, the new site looks terrible and I'm not likely to read it. When I first browsed over that way I thought it was April 1st and they had sent me to The Onion or CNN; the layout looked that similar.

That being said there are a lot of comments on here about how Slashdot has declined, and I disagree. There _are_ more stories each day which makes the geeky news seem less prominent, but you're always free to skip the articles you don't like! But the real reason I still read /. is because of the comments. The comments have _always_ been the greatest strength of the site. I often learn far more and see more alternate viewpoints about the topic being discussed in the comments than are covered in any article. As long as I keep getting that, I'll still be a /. reader.

Finally, the new site is obviously aimed at non-geeks. Look at the new site as a possible new interface to educate people who aren't geeky but would like to be. SlashBi: The gateway drug to the tech world.

tl;dr comments are Slashdot's real content, the news stories just point the way. Also the new site is ugly and probably not aimed at us.

It's not quite an alias, but about 3 months back I switched to hosting my own mail (moving away from gmail). The one big upside was using postifx + mysql, which allows me to create a new alias email every time I do something online. Generally I create a "retail_xxxxxxx" account for buying things online which does two things: 1) makes it easy to filter email into personal and paperwork categories, and 2) allows me to see who's selling my email addresses. It's not as many as you'd think, and it's generally the smaller shops that do it. The one other big upside is that I can redirect a specific email to /dev/null unless I actually want to get the emails; a sort of email mute button.

Very carefully, though, they still keep your xbox live account active and charge you the subscription fee.

For those who want to cancel, check out http://www.xbox.com/accounts, change your subscription by clicking the link after subscription renewal (the link says "ON"). Then continue to click through the 5 or 6 pages detailing all the reasons you should stay. Click "Next" through all of that, and you're set.

Yeah, I'm surprised the summary didn't include the reasons for the decision.

From the article:

In Texas, the problem lies in getting power from the proposed site in the Panhandle to a distribution system, Pickens said in an interview with The Associated Press in New York. He'd hoped to build his own transmission lines but he said there were technical problems.

Locking your blackberry doesn't prevent you from accidentally making emergency calls, especially if you don't use the holster.

The way to avoid this is to press and hold the mute button on the top of the blackberry. It will put the bb into standby mode, where it will still receive emails, SMS's, and phone calls like normal, but with better keyboard/input locking.

vim is one of those tools that does way more than you'd ever reasonably expect. It's crazy the stuff that's out there. Here are some useful ones I can't live without.

Tabbed Editing

You can edit multiple files in tabs with vim. 'vim -p file1 file2' will open the listed files in tabs. While in vim ":tabe filename" will open the given file in a new tab. I have [ and ] mapped to :tabp (previous) and :tabn (next) for moving around.

Folds

I like folds for cleaning up my source code visually. Just add a comment that has {{{ in it at the beginning of the block and another comment with }}} in it at the end of the block. Press zc somewhere inside the block and presto! You've got a line instead of blocks of code. You can put a summary of the block of code in the fold marker comment at the beginning of the block which will show up when folded.

Word completion
Pressing control-n while typing will have vim pop up a list of options. For common languages it's smart enough to offer suggestions for function and variable names, as well as library functions.

Printing a section of code
I always work with line numbers enabled (:set no), because there are a lot of line oriented commands. e.g. :10,100!sort (sort lines 10 through 100). One of these commands is :10,100hardcopy, which will print just those lines. :hardcopy by itself will print the entire file.

So many more. You can have integrated spell checking (:set spelllang=en_us , :set spell , z= will offer suggestions for misspelled words). Bookmarks, :g//, :v//, and that's just the core. There are hundreds of great plugins (and themes) out there.