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Hrm, seems like they could just stop pumping it full of SJW propaganda and sales would come back

There's a good chance they've fucked themselves over for good.

Sure looks like the NFL has, too, with the way they're allowing anti-US protests during the national anthem. Guess what? The NBA and other major sports leagues already have rules in place - athletes WILL stand for the anthem, and NOT be disrespectful.

And it is anti-US:

"I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color." Colin Kaepernick

Yeah, you so oppressed - you get paid millions of dollars to play a fucking game. You SOOO oppressed, no black man will ever be President of the US.

And before you wail about how Kaepernick is being blackballed because of his protests - read this.

JULY 2015

"This [past] year, Harbaugh allowed Kaepernick to get exposed a little by trying to have him be the centerpiece of the offense instead of what he does naturally: running," a pro personnel director says. "He had him pressing to throw the ball. It showed his arm strength but also his inaccuracy as a thrower. That is not going to get better. ...

Kaepernick only had success for a season and a half, under one coach who has won big wherever he coached. Kaepernick isn't being blackballed - he's not very good as an NFL quarterback - and he's got an out-of-control SJW whack-job of a wife who called Ray Lewis the Ravens owner's "house n*****" when the Ravens were about to sign him as their backup QB. Calling probably the greatest player (and yeah, Lewis probably literally got away with murder...) the owner's "house n*****" is going to go over really well for an entertainment enterprise.

Yet the NFL is willing to go down the tubes for anti-US movement this loudmouthed jackass started?

Good riddence. May more and more fans come disguised as empty seats again this year.

Yes, and as a result, the NFL no longer has to disclose the ridiculous salary they pay Roger Goodell. His salary is in rhe tens of millions each year, despite probably being the worst commissioner of any of th four major sports.

Interesting you say that, when just today ESPN wrote an article on exactly that topic. His base salary is single digit millions per year, plus a boatload of bonuses that the owners must approve based on his performance.

They could fill 10,000 seats for $25 a ticket or sell 50,000 streams for $5, either way they are $250k richer.

You are missing an important economic element here, unfortunately, because the NFL is not a single entity and the "they" in your statement above is different in the two cases you suggest. The money that the NFL makes from TV or streaming rights is split equally among all teams. (Hello, Buffalo Bills business model!) The money made from ticket sales is kept by the home team (split with the visiting team) and not distributed among the league's teams equally.

So if you have a popular/successful team that spends the money to put a winner on the field and create a good fan experience to fill up the stadium, you damn well want to keep that money and not see it shared equally with the loser franchises who put out a mediocre product and live off the TV/streaming rights. So there is a definite economic interest for some big market/successful teams to drive fans into their Enorm-o-dome and to not make streaming easy to subsidize the other teams who are in effect riding their revenue coattails.

Now, if teams were paid based off TV revenue based on how much particular games were watched, you'd have a more equitable model. But you'd also have no LA Chargers, Jacksonville Jaguars, Cincinnati Bengals or Indianapolis Colts. Then again, maybe that's not such a bad thing.

Perhaps when they stop paying football and basketball coaches obscene salaries and pay professors and grads what they are actually worth the quality at universities will improve.

How do you gauge what is obscene and what people are actually worth? For instance, back in 2010, it was estimated that Tom Izzo was paid $3 million, but the basketball program generated roughly $11 million for the university. So do you think the professors and grads should be paid 27% of the revenue they generate for universities? How do you calculate that? What if they don't generate any revenue? Do you pay them nothing?

The index included this reference:

Electronic Equipment on Field—3.14(b)

However, the current PDF available from mlb.mlb.com, actually doesn't include any text for Rule 3.14 (b) other than:

"The use of any markers on the field that create a tangible reference system on the
field is prohibited."

This is Deep Baseball. If there is a game rule prohibiting using electronic devices on the field or in the dugout, but it isn't, as of today, visible nor published.

The iPad deal seems to be a corporate MLB deal, so we may be seeing a corporate rule process where MLB imposes additional rules on the game which are not specified in the Official Baseball Rules. And this 'rule must be an MLB agreement to prevent the use of *unapproved* 'electronic devices' in the dugout or on the field.

But stealing signs has been a 'problem' since the beginning of Major League Baseball. From this story in 2011, "Stealing signs is as old as signal-calling itself. In 1876, the very first year of the National League, opponents of the Hartford Dark Blues claimed the club was somehow using a shack hung off a telegraph pole outside its home park to relay signals."

And, "Decades after the Giants stormed back to win the memorable 1951 NL pennant race, backup catcher Sal Yvars revealed that the team had deployed a clubhouse telescope, an electrician and a buzzer to pass stolen signs to its batters."

Also, "Just last year (2010), after the Rockies spotted a Phillies bullpen coach using binoculars, Colorado accused Philadelphia of stealing signs. Bud Selig downplayed the controversy, saying, "Stealing signs has been around for 100 years," before letting the Phillies off with a reprimand.""

This should be interesting, because the Yankee hate is so palpable, and they are pretty annoyed in New York that they cannot somehow beat the Red Sox. Yay team.

From ESPN.com

http://www.espn.com/blog/ombud...

Jim Brady, Public Editor Dec 1, 2016

The 2016 presidential election season has been one most of us will never forget. The tone has been ugly, the controversies endless, the coverage unrelenting. Our social media feeds are full of politically charged statements, and what dialogue does exist between differing sides more often resembles a WWE match than nuanced debate.

Thankfully, I get to write about ESPN, where the focus on sports means I never have to deal with politics.

Ah, if only that were true.

As it turns out, ESPN is far from immune from the political fever that has afflicted so much of the country over the past year. Internally, there’s a feeling among many staffers -- both liberal and conservative -- that the company’s perceived move leftward has had a stifling effect on discourse inside the company and has affected its public-facing products. Consumers have sensed that same leftward movement, alienating some.

Before digging in, one quick clarification: I’m not here to advocate that ESPN take any particular political position or lean a certain way. It’s not my place to make that recommendation, and no one would listen anyway. This is more about the impact that taking a more identifiable political stance -- which I do believe ESPN has done -- is having on the company.

For most of its history, ESPN was viewed relatively apolitically. Its core focus was -- and remains today, of course -- sports. Although the nature of sports meant an occasional detour into politics and culture was inevitable, there wasn’t much chatter about an overall perceived political bias. If there was any tension internally, it didn’t manifest itself publicly.

That has changed in the past few years, and ESPN staffers cite several factors. One is the rise of social media, which has led to more direct political commentary by ESPN employees, even if not delivered via the network’s broadcast or digital pipes. Another is ESPN's increase in debate-themed shows, which encourage strong opinions that are increasingly focusing on the overlap between sports and politics.

There have also been concrete actions that have created a perception that ESPN has chosen a political side, such as awarding Caitlyn Jenner the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the 2015 ESPYS despite her not having competed athletically for decades, the company’s decision to move a golf tournament away from a club owned by presidential candidate Donald Trump and a perceived inequity in how punishments for controversial statements were meted out.

Many ESPN employees I talked to -- including liberals and conservatives, most of whom preferred to speak on background -- worry that the company’s politics have become a little too obvious, empowering those who feel as if they’re in line with the company’s position and driving underground those who don’t.

  But, in talking to people in the course of reporting this piece, it is clear that ESPN has a challenge in front of it. I don’t think the answer is to try to stifle those with strong viewpoints; rather, it’s to make sure a broader range of voices are heard.

Why, some might ask? Because, at heart, ESPN is a business. And based on a Gallup survey on political affiliation from mid-September, 44 percent of the country identifies itself as either “Republican” or “leans Republican.” That’s less than the 49 percent that identifies itself as “Democrat” or “leans Democrat,” but not by much.

Pacman Jones can make it rain for a lot less money and accomplish about the same thing.

http://www.espn.com/espys/2015...

Hope she gets treated better than Ted Williams.

http://www.espn.com/boston/mlb...

I subscribe to SlingTV so I can watch college football. Orange package ($20 mo.), Blue package ($20 mo.), and Sports package ($5 mo.) totaling $45. I could probably get by with the Orange and Sports. Sports gets you ESPN{,2,3,U} and SEC Network. You can watch from a desktop or any tablet or phone. You can watch stations in the Blue package on three devices at the same time.

You can also watch games at ESPN Watch. When you sign in, SlingTV is in the dropdown box.

I'm going to guess that those who complain about them don't (or even can't) distinguish crashes or freezes from connectivity issues. This isn't really a new story, as these sorts of glitches have been happening on occasion since being introduced. Given that these things obviously rely on wireless info feeds, and (as you indicated) that such wireless or communication systems fail in stadiums on occasion, I'm not sure I'd be so quick to blame the hardware or software.

I've seen that, as an MMO developer, whenever an ISP has a problem, people immediately blame the developer for whatever lag or disconnectivity they're experiencing. I think it's human nature to blame the software or hardware sitting in front of them rather than some invisible infrastructure sitting in-between.

I'd agree though, that this is something that Microsoft should have considered. It was risky to push something like this when there was a chance for very public and visible failures like that, even if it's not necessarily Microsoft's fault. Moreover, I really dislike the NFL pushing tools like this on the teams. They should have an opportunity to use their choice of technology when it comes to tools used in course of the game (within reasonable limits, of course). This is nothing like "official coffee of the NFL". This is a tool that can actually make an impact on the game if it succeeds or fails.

I don't know for sure, but I'll cite my source for making that statement:

http://www.espn.com/olympics/story/_/id/17190109/study-rio-de-janeiro-waterways-filthy-teeming-dangerous-viruses-bacteria

The crux of the issue lies in the different types of testing used to determine the health and safety of recreational waters.

Bacterial tests measure levels of coliforms -- different types of bacteria that tend not to cause illnesses themselves but are indicators of potentially harmful sewage-borne pathogens such as other bacteria, viruses and protozoa that can cause cholera, dysentery, hepatitis A and typhoid, among other diseases. Bacterial tests are the worldwide standard because they're cheap and easy.

But there's a growing consensus that bacterial tests are not ideal for all climates; bacteria break down quickly in tropical weather and salty marine waters. In contrast, viruses have been shown to survive for weeks, months or even years -- meaning that in tropical Rio, low bacterial markers can be completely out of step with high virus levels.

That disparity was borne out in the AP's testing. For instance, in June 2016, the levels of fecal coliforms in water samples from Copacabana and Ipanema beaches were extremely low, with just 31 and 85 fecal coliforms per 100 milliliters, respectively. But still, both had alarming readings for rotavirus, the main cause of gastroenteritis, with 7.22 million rotaviruses per liter detected in the waters of Copacabana; 32.7 million rotaviruses per liter were found in the waters of Ipanema Beach.

Afaik, testing for a hunting license consists of buying one at Wal-Mart.

A Powered Parachute, which I'm currently very interested in, requires one or two days training and no pilot's license.

The flaw in your solution lies in the fact that testing and licensing create artificial barriers to entry that the enterprising poor will circumvent by making low grade drugs or reusing needles or popping the first pill they're handed...

Hell, i've been poor enough to smoke butts from ashtrays to curb hunger.

I could follow up with a statement like "if crackheads could afford high quality drugs and a team of healthcare professionals to monitor their use, they'd choose to be safer in their use" but that will never be true.

The human condition will always allow people to drop, to isolate and to self abuse.. There will always be a low and, like has been mentioned here previously, there will always be a hideous new bottom.

Some of us should just just plain never be aware of those extremes... No need to be aware, we don't question, we're content, we'll never encounter it.. just.. a boundary we don't need to cross.

Some of us should use them as cautionary tales.. To make us aware of the path we're on and where it leads us. Of course, chances are that this class's primary concern is not education about the dangers of the methods we choose to escape. More likely we just... don't.. care... ..And some of us should use them as learning tools to council and support.. to get some grasp of what the people we deal with are capable of.

but..

In the end, the entire issue is rooted in a lost cause.. I have to think people that live in this realm are statistically written off... MAYBE there might be a success story or two.. a tale of faith for the other lost souls to latch on to.. the way the middle class uses those tales of that one kid from the neighborhood that became rich or famous and broke out. Most of us that get here will stay here. Most of us that start that road will die on it...

We need to see root causes.. isolated teens unable to relate to their peers looking to escape their anxiety.. abused kids unable to cope with their pain, battered wives desperate to keep their children safe in an abusive environment.. bored rich kids looking behind the wrong doors simple because they can..

Eh.. as with every argument/comment.. the answer is always "balance".. balance of helping ourselves enough so that we can help others, balance of managing our pain with experiencing joy..

Shock stories wake us up for brief moments, but at the end of the day we still livehere

yeah yeah.. preachy.. but any society that makes idols of people that play games for 12 year olds.. that builds their economy on them..

My soul hurts now... someone please pick up the argument and continue by explaining the correlation between prioritizing sports and abusing alcohol, why the latter fuels the salaries of the former, and how it only serves to exacerbate the problem of substance abuse.. how its far more "part of the problem" than it could ever be "part of the cure"

(Tangent: I use Yarssr [for *nix/GNOME] to organize my feeds. Lives in the GNOME panel notification area as a pop-up menu.)

Slashdot
Various Associated Press news wires
BBC News
CNN
Daily Kos
Several local news feeds from my local newspaper
Multiple single-topic feeds from ESPN
The International Herald Tribune
A custom feed from Careerbuilder
The Top Stories and In Depth feeds from Reuters
My regional surf reports from Surfline
Politics coverage from The Hill

And yet, http://www.espn.com/ always works on NIPR.

http://www.espn.com/ (Bill Simmons' column, NBA, MLB NFL section in that order)
http://www.foxsports.com/ (MLB, NBA, NFL)
http://slashdot.org/ (duh...)
http://www.anandtech.com/ (although I just check the RSS feed lately...)
http://www.cnn.com/
http://www.inq7.net/ (Philippine news)

From there I usually branch out into different sites. I do keep a lot of RSS feeds that mainly get linked from those sites (Truehoop, Deadspin, Wages of wins, Extremetech, etc.). It's really easier and more efficient to just check RSS feeds on most sites.

So from those sites, you can see I'm pretty much a sports fan. I also browse through some Philippine computer retailers' websites to check up on prices if I'm in the hunt for something (like right now, I'm in the hunt for a decent LCD). Of course, if I still have time, pr0n gets to be part of that rotation :)

Here are several URLs to illustrate Opera weaknesses: (1) this IMDB poll "all previous polls" link makes Opera suck wind, due to its length, size or mass I guess, (2) ESPN (the flash "select stories under the main story" thing does not work in v9 but did in v8), (3) Any youtube.com video -- I currently just load IE to see these, but I heard earlier today that VideoDL.org will convert GooTube URLs so I guess that is a solution.

Note: I would be happy if there is just some config thing I can do to make visiting these URLs better. Thanks.

I totally agree. If you're designing for a customer base (not a business base), you should NOT have html pages that are over ~50-75KB. I am not sure about the % of homes with broadband, but I don't think that it's over 30%. I think it was noted by somebody that the average user will spend 8 seconds waiting for a page to load. Even if a 56kbps user has a GREAT connection speed of 6KB/s, a 75KB page will take about 12 seconds to load.

All too often I see sites that make me wait, even when I'm on a fast connection. ESPN is a good example. They have a nice-looking and supposedly standards-compliant site, but sometimes it takes extremely long time (in a broadband sense) to load. If the site is bogged down and is slow to respond, I'll go check out another sports news site.

A good site for checking that your site is optimized is the Web Page Analyzer. The tool goes into great detail that may seem a tad too strict, but you can take the information with a grain of salt.

I've had a Treo 600 for a year and half, and have built a library of PDA friendly sites. Most of the big sites offer an alternative view through either a mobile. prefix on the domain or a /pda suffix to the main site.
Here are my most used sites from my phone:
http://www.mapquest.com/pda/maps.adp
http://wap.espn.com/
http://wap.oa.yahoo.com/
http://mobile.wunderground.com/

NHL stands for the National Hockey League.

Madden 2005 is a NFL branded football game.

Microsoft hasn't released a game recreating either sport with the '05 moniker and will not.

You should spend more time reading ESPN.com and IGN.com instead of /.

Ok, just in case some poor soul decides to ask what ESPN is.

Fine and pretty and nice as they are (and i mean no disrespect to the authors) those are simple sites.(not large scale corp sites) and yes i know of fastcompany.com.

AOL, Wired, ESPN not large enough?

These same people also think NASCAR is the greatest thing on earth, work their 9-to-5 blue collar jobs every day, and watch football every weekend. What's your point? News for nerds, and if that doesn't equal stuff that matters to you, then you clearly are wasting your time surfing the wrong site. Maybe you should try this one.

In 2003, ESPN.com was redesigned to be web standards-compliant. It rendered perfectly on browsers other than IE. Now they've ditched clean code and returned to the stone age.

I remember a friend complaining that he was forced to rewrite his company's website in non-compliant MSHTML after Microsoft acquired a sizeable stake in his firm. The end result was a crappy, non-scaling site that would break browsers other than IE. Wonder if Microsoft had something to do with ESPN's downfall? [note how espn.com redirects to msn.espn.go.com].

Here's two

ESPN.com
Wired.com

ESPN - not big enough or commercial enough for you?

Wired News

PGA.com

ESPN.com

A quick browsing of Web Standards Awards should also show you that it's possible to have nice looking and comptatible CSS designs.

ESPN.com is a big commercial site that comes to mind. They do not use any tables for layout.

There isn't any kind of evidence there ever was life on Mars.

This article raises the speculation that life from Mars survived a high temp impact, ejection through the harsh radiation and temperatures of space and "cross-polinated" earth?

This is not supported by any facts and is pure speculation.

the world's best primer on Mars

Yeah, and we all know MS has no media aspirations at all

Well, both Wired and ESPN have re-designed with pure CSS, tableless layouts. Those are pretty big names, and there are more big sites starting to follow the CSS path to.

Sports? You do realize where you are, correct? Click this and don't ever come back here.

Sounds like they got slashdotted! :)

It is all over comedy central too. I watch that channel more than any other (by far) and Impostor is being promoed to death on that channel as well.

I would have thought comedy central, sci-fi, and dimension (film distributor) was all owned by the same company, but that is not the case, so actual money did change in promoting this movie.

Sci-Fi is owned by USA Networks (which was just bought by Universal/Vivendi, the same company that owns mp3.com)

Comedy Central is owned by Viacom, says this site.

Dimension is owned by Miramax, which is owned by Disney -- says this site and this site.

I don't watch too much tv, but you would think that Disney would plug the movie on ABC and ESPN, which it also owns, especially since they are hurting for cash right now. Why not promote in house?

How is this related to Impostor? Only tangentially. But be aware of the Big Six media companies. Three are involved in this film. It's more than six, but the other companies are AOL/TimeWarner, Sony, NewsCorp, and Bertelsmann (of Napster fame).

Others would add GE to the list, because they own NBC.

In any case, the entirety of our information and entertainment world comes nearly exclusively through those 8 companies.

I found this out a few days ago in K-Meleon when I would get 'Page not Found' errors on ESPN.com. I had the UserAgent Setting set to Mozilla 5.0, so I switched it to Internet Explorer 6 and the pages loaded perfectly. Don't know if you can switch it in Mozilla, but K-Meleon is faster and more responsive anyway so it's worth trying out.

...and then hit some site like espn.com.

You'll find that IE doesn't do so well at 640x480 or with larger or smaller fonts. Now, while that's the fault of the HTML work at the site (I've seen sloppier- but not by much...) they're not getting it to look like a Word document. There's TONS of sites out there that don't work right with IE or Netscape- Mozilla, possibly, but it's a huge honking monster that eats memory and HD space like candy (Does it work well? Yes. Do I use it, sometimes. I use Konqeror and Galeon mostly...).

I don't use HOTMAIL. Anyone concerned with their privacy shouldn't use it based on MS' terms of service for that and all their other online services. They lay claim to rights for all of what you put or recieve on their servers.

I live out in Boston, and miss catching Pistons game. I used to be able to listen to them over real audio, from links that were available on ESPN's web site. It was a nice, you could get either teams' radio broad cast. That was around 1996 or 1997. The next year, that feature was gone, and you had to sign up some NBA subscription. I didn't bother. It is sad to see MLB following in the foot steps of the NBA.

This is slightly offtopic, but I'm curious about something. The other day, I went to ESPN's website and noticed that I got redirected to espn.go.com. Now unless I'm wrong, ESPN is owned and operated by Ted Turner's company, and Ted is heavily involved with AOL/Time-Warner. Go.com, on the otherhand, is owned by Disney. Does anyone else find it odd that these two monopolistic companies would be working together?

Name three in the top fifty.

Alrighty then:

Google
Excite
AltaVista
CNN
ESPN
Go.com
ABC News

These all use CSS.

Your term of 'Significant use' is subjective and thus irrelevant. CSS is used on these sites and used well with the exception of ESPN which is obviously developed and targeted for IE (the site uses CSS Positioning)

These are all high-traffic sites but I don't know who's on your Top50 list.

I help run a set of sports ezines. We've always been fairly up-front with our readers -- we do this for fun, not for profit. We don't resell email addresses (despite the offers . . . the money's been nice, but no!). We don't gather funky data. We don't even use cookies, although we've considered it for reasons.

Now we're in a bind -- we're working on going "big time" and we need to back everything up. It helps that our Publisher's brother is a lawyuh.

One thing we are considering doing is open-sourcing our content management system. What we've got right now works, in a way, but to go where we want to, we've got to have a better engine under the hood. In fact, we've stopped adding another ezine or two at this point because of that fact. [Hint: Sports-minded geeks encouraged to contact me about helping out with the programming.]

We do have privacy and usage statements up there, but I think we snitched those from ESPN in large part -- I expect a lawsuit on copyright infringement any day now.

Peace to my homies If you don't like it you can suck it.