Not anymore! Now, when you click on a headline, you'll get taken to a page with just that story. At the bottom of every story are "Digg this!", "Reddit!", "Tweet this!", "Like!", and "StumbleUpon" buttons, and on either side of the story are skyscraper Google ads, which will hopefully make me enough money to win that sweet, sweet black 1960 Les Paul that NIN just put up for auction. That last sentence has no basis in reality and is in no way a factual representation of what the permalink page has on it.
Through some javascript magic, old-style permalinks out in the wild will actually forward to the story they were supposed to link to (I know, magic everywhere in this bitch) instead of just pointing to the front page. I know that this isn't terribly exciting, but it may come in handy once the we get hit with the inevitable deluge of news about all that stuff Trent was recording earlier this year.