I am provisionally opening comments back up. Regulars may recall that I went to restricting them to people who had registered. Unfortunately, Blogger limits that to Open ID or people with Blogger accounts. I had hoped to be switched over to Wordpress an eternity ago, which allows for much more user friendly ways of registering, but that is on hold for now.
Please use a handle of some sort. And no nastiness, otherwise we go back to status quo ante, pronto.
ndk says: Now we all finally have an alternative to Yahoo when the vitriol gets too thick there! Just kidding.
I personally favor this change, as I like wide open discussion of all participants, even with a guise of anonymity. I say that even being one of the targets of earlier hostility; the speakeasy just has a certain vibrancy and ample supply of interesting commentary to it.
My day job is work on authentication mechanisms (including OpenID, where I sit on the security committee). Time and time again I've wondered at how every new social technology that was very successful had very weak authentication and authorization. At this point, I think that's not so much accident as consequence.
I think this is a good move.
VacantHomes says: I'm OK with the change, although really, you could have left out the Anonymous option and just added the Name/URL option, which is every bit as quick and convenient (and weakly authenticated), but it's a bit nicer if you force people to at least make up a pseudonym on the spot so you don't have to preface replies with "To Anon at 10:36am …". Sometimes complete anonymity is overrated. 
Also, I notice that this Reader Notice was posted today (Tuesday), but it's already "below the fold" on the Recent Items list at the top. Time to expand that list to 7 or 8? And if there's any way to fix the Recent Items so that there's not a delay in its rendering, that would be wonderful. (It appears to be some kind of AJAX foolishness or something. Maybe ndk or another software person familiar with Blogger/Wordpress would have a suggestion.)
Hillary says: Thank you. I had one comment I wanted to post recently, but the impulse to comment didn't outweigh the work of creating a new login.
This continues to be one of my favorite blogs and comment sections.
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woohoo bring back the bubble too